rivkat | SPN: The Glamorous Life 7/7

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Or read the whole thing here.

They drove out of Michigan slowly, stopping at first every couple of hours for Dean to ‘stretch his legs,’ by which he—shockingly—didn’t mean ‘ogle girls’ but actually ‘strike up conversations with random people.’ Sam got it, he did, but he was still grateful that stage wore off pretty quick. Once Dean was certain he could have a conversation with a civilian, he remembered that he hadn’t ever much cared for that kind of thing.

Dean insisted on swinging by Bobby’s, and although there was some discussion about shotguns and Sam’s powerful resemblance to his daddy, they called truce for Dean’s sake. They loaded the box of money in the trunk despite Sam’s fervent desire to set it all on fire. “Try to be less stupid,” Bobby said when they were on their way out, and Dean just grinned up at him, so Sam shrugged uncomfortably and relaxed when Dean hit the gas.

Massachusetts was still summer-hot. They checked into a motel (Dean bitched that they were paying a week’s worth of cash for a night’s worth of stay, but he knew the big-city drill as well as Sam did; it was just Dean getting back into the groove) and Sam spent a full day walking around Cambridge, looking at apartments.

Dean met him at a Mexican café not far from the law school and Sam gave him the rundown. There were a couple of places that would be fine, if Dean approved them.

“Hey, whatever you like, ‘s cool,” Dean said, then stuffed about half of his burrito into his mouth. “Thought they had dorms, anyway.”

Sam blinked at him. “Uh, student-only dorms. If you’re prepared to be my domestic partner, we can try to get university housing.” Sam hadn’t suggested that because—well, the reasons hardly needed elaboration. This was their happy ending. He had no right to want more, but he had no desire to pretend to the rest of the world that he had what he wanted.

Dean busied himself chewing and swallowing.

Sam fiddled with his napkin and thought about ordering another beer. “You know,” he said, “the gym was advertising for self-defense instructors. You’d be awesome, plus, college girls.”

Dean froze. Then, carefully, he tipped his beer up and drank the whole thing in one long pull, oblivious to Sam’s eyes down the line of his throat, Sam’s fingers itching to feel the burn of his stubble. He clanked the bottle down on the table and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Gotta move the car ‘fore I get a ticket,” he said, and was gone before Sam could figure out what he’d said wrong.

****

Dean slid into the driver’s seat and instantly felt better. Nice to know he was still a simple guy, taking the good stuff where he found it.

He closed the door and flexed his fingers on the steering wheel, staring at the back of the Volvo in front of them.

Sam was talking like they were just going to play out one of his homemaker stories.
His fantasy life, the one that Sam had encouraged him to have and that Dean had allowed because, stupidly, stupidly, he’d thought it couldn’t hurt—all those fairy tales assumed that Dean wouldn’t be able to hunt, that it would be okay if he stayed with Sam. That wasn’t true any more.

For a thousand dollars, what’s ‘things Dean has no business wanting,’ Alex?

This time they’d call each other, Dean from some roadside joint and Sam from his cute little dorm. Eventually the frequency would drop off, Dean drunk and tired and figuring it wouldn’t hurt more to skip a day, Sam busy and eager to join his friends for dinner or study group or whatever. They’d pull apart and Dean would go on, because there still wouldn’t be any choice.

The passenger-side door opened. “Dean?” Sam settled into his seat, and Dean couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like when that didn’t happen any more.

Dean closed his eyes and took a long breath, keeping it even and controlled. “I’m not going to teach a self-defense class, Sam.”

“Okay,” Sam said, drawing it out.

“Soon as you find a place, I’m hitting the road.” There. He’d said it, and it hadn’t killed him. It wouldn’t kill him.

“What?”

Dean couldn’t work up the energy to say it again. Sam was a smart kid, anyhow. Which was, he guessed, kind of the whole problem (selfish again, wanting what wasn’t best for his brother). He clenched his jaw against the sound that wanted to come out.

Sam was quiet for a while, long enough that Dean thought maybe they weren’t going to say more about it. Then: “If this is because of—I would never. I swear, the domestic partner thing was a joke, you don’t have to worry.”

And oh shit, Sam was clearly going somewhere very different in his head, which meant Dean had to fix this. “The fuck, Sam?”

“I’m not going to molest you again,” Sam said, each word clear as ice, like a punch to Dean’s heart.

“I know that,” he said, and hoped that Sam heard the wistfulness as confusion.

“Then why?” Sam demanded. “You said we’d be together. You said—”

“Yeah, but that was—”

“That was another lie, you mean?” Sam yelled, smacking the dash with both hands. Dean looked at him helplessly. “I don’t want you to leave.” The words seemed to fill the car, Sam as always brave enough to say the things neither Dad nor Dean could ever manage. Which just went to prove that Sam was made for something different.

“I don’t want to go,” Dean admitted, sounding like a kid in his own ears.

“Then why are you?” Sam asked, just as wide-eyed and uncomprehending as when he’d asked the same thing about Dad.

“You know why,” Dean told him. “God’s not taking his messages. The angels packed up and left. We’re all there is. And evil’s still in the game.” He didn’t think he’d ever earn his way out of being Hellbound, but there was always the Colt if he got a chance to plan it, plus you never knew. Anyway, that wasn’t the point. Sam had always said Dean didn’t know who he was if he wasn’t hunting, but Dean knew exactly who he’d be. He just refused to be that guy, regardless of how much the life sucked.

Sam growled, and Dean fought off the stab of fear and the deeper twinge of concern. “No.”

Of all the things he could have said, Dean hadn’t expected that. “Excuse me?” Sam did think he was Dad in a lot of ways, but that didn’t mean Dean took his orders.

“Fuck you, no! You don’t get to say ‘we’ and then take off!” Sam’s hand shot out, like he’d just remembered he could touch again, and grabbed Dean’s collar, jerking him roughly towards the center of the seat. “You don’t get to promise me a life and then run away from it.”

“Sam—” Dean scrabbled to keep from falling into Sam’s lap and managed to stabilize himself, one hand far too close to Sam’s thigh.

Sam shook his head, his fingerips hot where they brushed against Dean’s neck. “No. I want us to have that, what we talked about. We can do hunts, if they’re near, like Bobby does. You can join the volunteer fire department if you need to be saving even more people.” He sighed. “If you really can’t stand to live in one place, we’ll get back on the road. But I want to be here, so I want you to do what you said and make a home. Stay. Stay with me.” Somewhere during his speech, his hand had loosened and slid down so that he was gripping Dean’s shoulder.

Dean felt like he was down about three pints of blood and a couple of shots to the head besides. It couldn’t be that simple—but then there always were a ton of hunts in New England, more than you could shake an iron poker at. His stomach lurched so bad he thought he might throw up, but he couldn’t help thinking that he could try it Sam’s way. Sam would eventually find another girl with a bright future, get sick of him and show him the door, but he couldn’t imagine that feeling worse than he did now.

“Really?” he asked, hating the way his voice shook.

Sam’s smile mostly made up for Dean’s discomfort. “Yeah,” he said, and Dean thought that he might even be blushing, unless that was just a trick of the yellow light coming from the streetlamps. Dean felt himself swaying, still not entirely balanced, like he could just eliminate the distance between their mouths and—

He straightened himself so fast that he got a little dizzy. Sam jumped in reaction, and then they both stared out the windshield until Dean started the car and drove them back to the motel.

He turned off the engine but didn’t get out, needing the safety of his girl for a little while longer. “Sam,” he said, and the words stalled out in his throat. Sam twisted in his seat expectantly, waiting him out. Dean swallowed past the prickly feeling and forced himself to speak. “You were right. I gave up, and I shouldn’t’ve. You saved me when I didn’t think it could happen. I—thank you.”

Sam’s eyes glossed with tears. “Back at you,” he said, smiling all wobbly. It was almost impossibly hard for Dean to open his door instead of leaning across to grab him. Even when Dean did get out, standing in the muggy darkness, he could feel Sam’s closeness. He closed his eyes and tried to store the moment deep inside, borrowing Sam’s strength for his own.

****

It wasn’t easy, and wouldn’t have been even if Dean hadn’t factored into the equation at all. Sam got them into university housing despite the late date by smiling and begging. He met his classmates and took his notes and tried to think about school like Dean had always pitched Dad’s training when he was a kid—not useless, just useful on a longer timeframe. He checked Dean’s research and read casebooks with a flashlight in the passenger seat when they drove to the site of some haunting, ignoring Dean’s frown that said Dean wasn’t sure he should be bringing Sam along. Once, right before they pulled into that night’s cemetery, he came across a footnote that made him laugh out loud. Dean purported not to believe him until Sam showed him, right on the page, that there was a tort specifically directed at the desecration of a corpse, so they could get sued by angry relatives as well as arrested.

“‘Negligent or wrongful,’” Dean read out, working it through. “Okay, say we proved that the ghost was hurting people—how could it be ‘wrongful’ to torch the bones?”

Sam wished, as powerfully as he’d ever wished for a normal life, that Dean would take his own intelligence as seriously as he took his weapons. But Dean wouldn’t appreciate Sam’s commentary, so he shook his head and played along. “Assuming we didn’t get committed, I’d argue that public policy should favor the living, so, yeah. Can you imagine what acknowledging the supernatural would do to the law? Murder trials would be completely different—you could do a séance, call up the dead guy to testify.”

“Some of ‘em might not be able to swear on God’s name,” Dean pointed out.

Sam wasn’t going to think about how humans might transform in Hell, because it wasn’t relevant. “Plus any murderer with a brain would salt and burn.”

Dean snorted and opened his door. “They’d have to add a whole new flavor of Law & Order, anyhow.”

He followed Dean, speculating back and forth about how a paranormal CSI would work, and he was happy even with his shoulders aching from gravedigging all the next day.

After a couple of months, he convinced Dean to come meet his study group, promising beer and a widescreen TV at Jan’s apartment. Sam arrived before Dean, holding up the Sam Adams as his admission ticket, and Jan ushered him in.

“I don’t know if I believe this Dean guy actually exists,” Tom told him, handing him a cold beer. Sam grinned, and he was the only one who knew how fake it felt, because Dean was so real and so excluded from the rest of the world—officially dead, for fuck’s sake, and living under Mom’s name so Sam could claim him as a domestic partner.

Did Dean actually exist? Even living together, Sam sometimes felt like Dean was telescoping away from him, just waiting for Sam to come to his senses and tell Dean that, actually, this whole hunting thing was cramping his style. Or maybe Dean thought that Sam was going to get tired of the make-believe gay relationship part. Sam knew that it wasn’t doing him any good, Dean too close to get past and too far away to touch, and maybe in a couple of years he’d figure out what to do about that, but right now he was just treading water and the only thing he needed was Dean swimming alongside him.

Not that Tom cared about any of that. Tom cared mostly about Sam’s contribution to the outline. Which was totally fine by Sam.

He sat on the arm of a couch and listened to his classmates debate which of their professors was going to give the hardest exams and who’d be first to win Gunner Bingo in the section. “Gunner Bingo?” he asked, since this was the first time he’d heard about it. Jan, unable to look him in the eye, explained that it was a way of tracking people who participated a lot, by which she plainly meant ‘jerks who make the rest of us look bad.’ Apparently Sam was a valuable square, and everyone expected him to be offended, when all he wanted to do was laugh until he cried. He shook his head and wondered if maybe he ought to be the one begging Dean to pack up and get out of this place. But then he remembered Bobby’s legit business and all its benefits, and knew he owed it to Dean to make a place for them that didn’t involve endless scams, broken-down motel rooms, and indifferent ER docs.

Every time the doorbell rang, Sam jumped up—Troy called him a big labrador retriever and everyone laughed—and finally, it was Dean, shuffling his feet and hesitating to enter until Sam came up behind Jan and grinned his relief.

“Hey,” he said as Jan took Dean’s additional alcoholic offering over to the fridge. Dean still looked like he was expecting to get yelled at for breaking something, even though Jan’s apartment was furnished in Early Grad Student, so Sam took his arm and propelled him towards the living room. Dean’s leather jacket was warm under his fingers, and Dean smelled, inexplicably, like sawdust. Sam hoped to hear the funny story about that later.

“Everybody, this is Dean,” he announced, aware that he practically had a flashing sign over his head reading ‘He’s with me!’ Hopefully Dean would interpret it as acting.

Dean shook hands all around, smiling more widely at Susan and Renee (of course). “What do you do, Dean?” Susan asked.

Dean’s smile didn’t falter. “I sell sporting goods,” he said, as if he hadn’t made fun of the phrase for ten days straight after he’d gotten the job. He could have just said ‘guns,’ even though that wasn’t strictly accurate, since he’d had to learn how to pretend to know what he was talking about for fishing and camping too. He glanced over at Sam, and Sam realized that he was probably trying not to freak out Sam’s friends. Sam nodded reassuringly, touched that Dean wasn’t trying his usual fuck-with-the-civilians tricks—like he was really thinking that they could have this life together.

Pretty soon Dean was explaining that no, the store didn’t carry tennis gear, and ‘sporting’ was more like ‘shooting, plus stuff you need to go shooting out in the woods, or kayaking and putting hooks in fish if that’s your thing.’ Sam drank his beer and thought that Dean was better at fitting in than either of them were fully prepared to admit.

“So, you’re gorgeous and you do manly things all day,” Susan said, leaning towards him. “Tell the truth, Sam just pays you to be his arm candy. How much does a guy like you cost?”

Dean’s grin didn’t budge, but it was like the light in the room had been cut in half. Sam was on his feet before he knew he’d moved, pulling Dean up until they were shoulder to shoulder. Susan was already looking alarmed, and Sam knew he was making things exponentially worse, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t—

Dean managed to spin out some excuse for them and when Sam could manage more than half a thought again he was being shoved into the car, Dean bitching about how he was losing the miraculous parking space he’d found after only fifteen minutes. Dean drove them home without looking once at Sam. When he pulled into the lot, Sam knew he had to talk before Dean’s certainty that Sam was ashamed of him hardened into cement.

“It kills me to think about you there,” Sam said. “I had no idea, I thought you were safe and getting better. You lied to me over and over.”

Dean snorted. “Yeah, and if I’d told you, you wouldn’t have freaked out or anything.”

“Of course I would have freaked out!” He fisted his hands and forced himself calm. “I just don’t get why—none of them knew you.”

“That’s kind of the point,” Dean said, almost gently.

“Was it—was I that bad?” He’d never meant to ask, but he had to know.

Dean jolted in his seat. “What?” As if he’d misheard somehow, not wanting to admit that his baby brother was basically confessing how much he’d enjoyed the mandatory fucking imposed by the incubus curse.

Sam felt like he had a mouthful of razorblades, but he almost welcomed the anticipated shock of the cuts. He could keep secrets from Dean for maybe four months, at the outside, and he’d run out the clock on this one. “I can’t stand the thought of them getting to have what I should have been able to keep for myself.”

Dean’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times, like one of the fish he was always saying was too stupid to live. He cleared his throat. “Work with me here, Sam. You’re saying you—liked it, with me?”

And really, Sam would be justified in giving him the full-on disgusted expression, but he was a little too terrified of pissing Dean off right now. “Uh, yeah.”

Dean shook his head. “Wanted it, sure. That’s not the same thing.”

Funny how they could think so differently and still get each other, once in a while. “Like it, want it, think about you all the time, the whole package.”

“Hunh,” Dean said, and then nothing. After a minute Sam wanted to scream, and after five Sam wanted to storm out of the car and do something dramatic, like quitting school to become a monk. Dean would probably just follow him, though, and the thought of letting Dean loose on an unsuspecting monastery was a tad too cruel for Sam’s imagination.

“So,” Dean said at last, shifting nervously in his seat, “if I said that maybe I—if you want to, I mean.”

Winchesters were demonstrably stupid, deal-making, not-so-much-family-drama-as-family-horror-show types, but usually possessed of enough cunning to get the job done. “Yes,” Sam said, with deep conviction. Maybe he ought to hire skydivers to say it. Maybe he ought to spraypaint it on the hood of the car. Except that would get him killed, and not in the fun way. Fuck, he was losing it—

“Well?” Dean opened his door and slid out. Sam stared at him, hypnotized. Dean’s eyes dipped, lashes like veils. “I’m goin’ upstairs. To our one-bedroom apartment, where we live. Together.”

“Oh,” Sam said, so happy he thought he might melt into air. But, even better, he didn’t; he followed Dean, buzzing with too much energy to touch him, six inches apart the whole way, aching all over.

Stumbling into their tiny, spartan living room, Dean turned at last. Sam grinned to see him, that face unmatched by angels (this Sam knew for certainty), but Dean’s expression was serious, concerned. Sam froze, because Dean might still say no. As hard as he’d worked to allow that to happen, he thought that rejection might burn him out like a lightning strike, smoking black crater that walked like a man.

“You gotta be sure,” Dean said, and Sam gaped again like an innocent seeing his first ghost. Dean glared back, the familiar irritation that Sam could be so smart and so dumb at once. “It might not be what you think.” Dean was rosy pink all across his cheeks and the tips of his ears, so bright Sam wanted to touch his skin just to feel the heat. “I’m good, but I’m not that good, you know?”

He actually got Dean’s point. Sex was a big deal even without the various complications of their situation. If it didn’t work between them because Sam expected it to be magical, the way the incubus infection had ensured before, it could be such a disaster that they’d never recover.

On the other hand, you might think they’d never recover from (a) death, (b) soul-selling, (c) demon blood-drinking, (d) apocalypse, (e) et cetera.

“So prove it,” he said. Dean’s eyes widened. “Prove how you don’t need a boost from Hell to make me scream.”

He could see the challenge working on Dean, even as Dean’s eyes flashed with a second’s worth of anger in the certain knowledge that he was being manipulated. It was for a good cause, and anyway Sam was morally obligated to use Dean’s pride against him, so Sam just smirked until Dean cursed and grabbed him and reshaped his mouth into a kiss.

Sam had done this so many times out of his mind with lust that kissing Dean still felt new. He had so much to learn, and he pulled Dean bruisingly tight against his chest to start the project as he licked across Dean’s teeth.

Dean pushed at Sam’s shoulders and leaned back just enough to break the kiss. Sam went as soon as he realized that Dean might be having second thoughts, but Dean was smiling goofily and Sam couldn’t do anything but stare down at him.

“Let me drive, ‘kay?” Dean whispered. Ordinarily, Sam would have struggled just to make a point, but that seemed idiotically counterproductive here, so he relaxed, let Dean take over the kiss. Dean’s hands cupped his face, his thumbs stroking over Sam’s jawline, calluses slowly rasping against Sam’s stubble. He kissed soft and wet, slow sweeps of tongue giving way to little nibbles, testing Sam out.

So maybe they were going to take the scenic route. Sam smiled into Dean’s mouth, bringing his hands up to cover Dean’s, their fingers overlapping.

Thank you, he thought as Dean walked them backwards towards the bedroom. He wasn’t sure whom he was addressing—the obvious supernatural candidates were either evil or likely to be displeased with the very aspects of Sam’s situation that were working so well for him—but maybe it didn’t matter.

“You’re still gonna let me fuck you, right?” he asked Dean as they pulled each other’s shirts off, because it was a pretty important question.

Dean snorted and pushed him down onto the bed, straddling him before starting to work on his belt, his fingers tickling Sam’s stomach. “Depends on how pretty you beg,” he said. Sam’s eyes closed involuntarily and he arched off the bed, loving Dean’s self-satisfied chuckle too much to be irritated by it.

Oh yeah, this was going to work just fine.

****

A couple of nights after Sam made Dean the luckiest bastard in creation, they went out to a bar near campus. Even though Dean was probably the oldest person there except for the owner, he was also the hottest and accompanied by the second-hottest, and the eyes on them as they made their way through the crowds agreed.

Halfway to the bar, Dean remembered how it had been when everyone he saw looked at him like that, when he couldn’t tell them ‘no thanks,’ and somehow Sam picked up on his stupid hesitation. Sam stopped flat, right in the middle of everything, tuned out the rest of the world and brought their foreheads together. His voice turned the crowd noise into the murmur of the sea. “We can leave if you want.”

Dean gave his best ‘are you damaged?’ eyeroll, but Sam only smiled indulgently, which Dean guessed was better than most of the alternatives.

“Fine,” Sam said. “Drinks?”

They bellied up to the bar, shoulder to shoulder with other laughing patrons. Now that Dean had gotten past the flash of memory, he felt a lot better. The place was packed with rich kids just begging to be fleeced, and maybe in a bit he’d teach a couple of lessons about the difference between physics and pool, but right now he was happy just to get his beer and lean into Sam’s side.

Some of the girls and a couple of the guys were still checking him out even after he and Sam had put away their first drinks nearly in tandem. Dean grinned and tilted his head at the prettiest, but only in a friendly way.

Sam looked around, kind of obviously imagining Dean rethinking his choices now that he could see all the alternatives, some of them with really nice racks. Sam returned to his drink and rolled the bottle between his palms, staring at the countertop. “You don’t have to, just because I—I know you could find someone else.” He snorted. “You could find a busload of someone elses. I know it’s wrong, and I won’t ask you to—”

Dean shoved him, not gently. “You know what? Fuck right and wrong. The only guy who had a right to tell me what to do died saving my ass, and yours.” He looked around, remembered that they were in gay liberal heaven, and grabbed Sam’s chin, turning it so that he could reach Sam’s mouth. He took a while, bringing his A game. “This is all me,” he said when he pulled back. “This is all of me.”

There was a brunette watching, thrilled, on the next seat over. She caught his eyes while Sam was still blinking. “Want company?” she asked, leaning forward to show off her extremely well-fitting V-neck, her hand moving up and down on her beer bottle.

Dean grinned at her and pushed his weight into Sam’s shoulder, rebuking his frown. “Nah,” he said, happier than he remembered ever being. “Maybe tomorrow night.”

END

Notes: So, part of this comes from a great suggestion

astolat had about Filthy Mind: Wouldn’t it be interesting if Dean had no objections to the sex in itself? I’m always fascinated by characters who have double standards for themselves and for others in terms of consent. Extra thanks to my fellow very valuable square for correcting me with the proper name for bingo at Harvard.

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