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For chemm80, remix of Drown Me in Your Reign. Takes place shortly after episode 6.22. Prompt: Sam/Dean and “Shelter from the storm.”
Sam/Dean, explicit; Sam's got a messed-up head.
The weather is revolting.
The weather is obeying, that is, but not obeying Sam, and so he finds it revolting. Which makes him just like Marie Antoinette and her apocryphal peasants. Ha ha, Sam thinks, knowing that Dean wouldn’t get the joke, and that if he sniggers out loud it will just be crazy Sam again. He’s pretty sure that he would’ve found the thought just as funny even before the Wall came down (Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!—and okay, that one’s not that funny, and if Dean even knows there’s a difference between Russia and the Soviet Union Sam’s never seen any evidence of that fact, so Sam’s definitely not sharing this particular mental rambling).
Point being: the thunder and the lightning are fighting for dominance all across the country and, from what Sam can tell from the few snippets of news that aren’t about the homeland, pretty much the world. Castiel has apparently left some chunks of South America undisturbed, for reasons known only to him.
Known only to Him, Sam corrects himself. He’s not sure if Castiel could tell the difference even out loud, much less in Sam’s head, and he’s not sure if Castiel is even listening to W-SAM any more, but it doesn’t hurt Sam to be careful. And since there’s not much Sam can say doesn’t hurt at this point, he’s going with Castiel as the One.
Sam thinks he’s probably shivering. He can feel his clothes clinging to him, heavy with cold rainwater. He can feel his hair plastered to his skull and the runnels of water that stream down the back of his neck and over his chest.
It’s just that he can’t feel anything on the inside. And he’s more than a little afraid of what will happen when he starts again.
The thunder is like his heartbeat, irregular and startling. The lightning is like his memory, present and absent in terrifying strikes. He wishes they would both leave him alone.
No – he only wants calm weather, much as it hurts to want something he will never have.
This is so unfair--Sam is so unfair to Dean. Dean doesn’t need any more burdens. Sam doesn’t either, truth be known, but he’s given up on that long ago. Sam unleashed Lucifer on the world and also killed a bunch of people; his memories of Hell aren’t exactly payback because that would imply some equivalence there, but he accepts them as part of himself. Dean’s never going to admit that Sam isn’t the man Dean always wanted him to be, and Sam can’t be what he was, either: Dean’s partner, Dean’s support, Dean’s everything.
“Sammy!”
Dean’s frantic. He’s also half-naked, jeans unbuttoned and revealing he’s commando underneath, which would be more interesting if they weren’t standing out in a parking lot in the middle of a storm.
“Dean?” Sam asks, trying for reassurance. He feels a spike of gratitude that they’ve kept this, the ability to have a conversation just with each other’s names. Sam knows from Dean’s tone that it’s not the first time Dean’s called his name, but it’s not the tenth either.
Dean grabs Sam’s arm and starts dragging him back towards their room. “Fuck, Sam,” he mutters. “You could get hit, standing out here like a fucking tree.”
“Are you admitting I’m tall?” Sam teases.
Dean’s mouth twitches, but he doesn’t say ‘I’m admitting you’re a freak of nature,’ for all the obvious reasons. Still, reassuring Dean that he’s back among the presently functional is good enough for Sam. Dean leads him back inside; Sam notices that his boots aren’t even tied. His shoulders are pale and blocky when the crash-flash of the storm illuminates them, and his naked back is largely unscarred, thanks to the lingering effects of Castiel’s resurrection. (Sam’s never going to be able to hate Castiel, at least not until he’s too crazy to be Sam any more.) Dean’s broadened in the past few years, lost some of his youthful litheness. He’s still entirely beautiful.
The room is a shock of heat, and that’s when Sam starts to shiver in earnest. Dean hesitates a few seconds, then resolutely starts unbuttoning Sam’s sodden shirt. Sam could fight for control, but Dean is here in front of him, brows lowered in concentration, and it’s nice to see Dean waging a battle he’s going to win eventually as his rain-pruned and chilled fingers pop the buttons one by one.
Sam helps Dean pull his T-shirt off, and manages his pajama pants himself despite the way they cling to him like a second skin, and then despite the way he flashes back to having his actual skin peeled off in sheets that felt very much like this, only with more blood and heat. But Sam’s got his reactions under control, which he knows because Dean’s level of freaked out doesn’t ratchet up any further, so he lets Dean turn on the shower and test the water as the tiny bathroom starts to fill with steam.
The water is nothing like drowning. Sam could choose to get out at any time; he can close his mouth and eyes when he steps under the showerhead and tilts his face up, so he doesn’t have to try to breathe. There is no one here to supervise his choking and puking. It’s just a shower.
Sam’s not terribly surprised when, various smacking noises and crashes later, the bathroom door clunks open and then closed, and Dean blunders like a drunken elephant into the already-small bathtub space, instantly bringing the temperature down twenty degrees with his chilly skin.
“You’re freezing,” he complains, because Dean will expect him to. Or, Dean would expect Functional Sam to complain, and it’s easy to give Dean that right now so Sam’s taking advantage of the opportunity.
“Yeah,” Dean says, “some dickwad decided to go out into a lightning storm, and I had to haul his motionless ass back inside.”
But Dean’s hand on Sam’s hip is gentle as he reaches for the soap, and without further conversation he proceeds to soap up Sam’s back, working with greater thoroughness than a simple walk in the rain necessarily justifies. Sam’s reaction to Dean’s hands is as predictable as his reaction to Dean’s bad jokes, if a lot more pleasant. Sam braces his arms on the tile wall, slick-hot from the water, and bends forward to let Dean work, widening his stance as far as he can while he’s at it.
Dean makes a pleased little sound and his hands move more freely, skimming over the curve of Sam’s ass and lingering on Sam’s biceps. Dean doesn’t think he should enjoy Sam’s body as much as he does, because gay incest is okay, but gay incest where you really get off on feeling up your brother’s arms is apparently a bridge too far. Anyway, Dean tends to use things like washing up as an excuse to grope. This is, in general, okay by Sam. In their position, he can feel the greedy nudge of Dean’s cock up against the back of his thigh.
After Dean’s had his chance to get Sam good and clean, Sam pushes off the wall, moving slowly so as not to make Dean trip and bash his head open on the faucet. Not that this has ever happened to them, of course. Every scar on their bodies, even the erased ones, was earned in a legitimate hunt. There’s no one alive who’d testify otherwise, anyhow.
Regardless, Sam turns and crowds Dean up against the wall, nosing around his ear and his stubble-spiky jaw for a bit before capturing his mouth. Because Sam is awesomely coordinated, more like an Olympic gymnast than an ordinary citizen really, he also reaches out and turns off the water before the hint of lukewarmess creeping in can become a full-on cold shower. They’ll be warm enough with the steam from the shower and their own body heat, at least for a while.
Dean’s kisses are Sam’s only home. They’re almost never desperate; even when they’ve narrowly escaped death, Dean kisses like they have an infinity of time, like each kiss is a link in a chain that stretches on unbroken into the unseen future. Sam’s wondered if this is another illusion of security Dean creates for them, but it’s real even if it’s pretend. He wishes he could soak Dean into himself like the rainstorm, even if he wouldn’t really want Dean to have to share anything that’s under his skin. He wishes a lot of things, but when Dean is kissing him there’s limited room for regret.
Dean, of course, wouldn’t initiate even the slightest contact with intimate intent after Sam’s resouling. For a while Sam had worried that he didn’t want it any more after months spent with Sam’s conscienceless body, and they’d danced around each other like ex-spouses with joint custody (Sam guessed that would have to be the Impala as the kid in this metaphor, which was disturbingly close to the truth). Then one night Dean had gotten drunk enough to mumble something about how he missed Sam’s fucking hands, and that had been all the excuse Sam had needed to jump him.
Sam cups Dean’s face in his hands; Dean shudders and rubs against him, eager and undeniable. “Turn around,” Sam suggests, reaching for the complimentary conditioner.
Dean’s no longer as painfully tight as he was when Sam returned topside. As frustrating as Sam had found the requisite thirty minutes of prep—Dean was fully capable not just of stopping the action midway but also of punching Sam in the face if he thought Sam was selfishly ignoring Dean’s own needs—he’d been possessively pleased by the thought that Dean’s body was just for him. Then when he’d found out about his soulless self wandering around, Sam had been extra grateful that Dean hadn’t been fucking him. He’s 110% certain there’s a story about that, and he’s torn between hoping that Dean eventually drunk-reveals it and accepting that there are some things that no man returned from Hell should ever have to know about the precise nature of his incest hiatus. Regardless, at this point Dean’s body opens to him as easily as it had in the days before Dean’s deal, before Ruby, before any of the bullshit that had torn them up and apart.
“You gonna fuck me or just enjoy the view?” Dean grumps.
Sam rolls his eyes—Dean will know—and says mildly, “Thinking about doing both.”
Sam’s wanted Dean since before he knew what wanting was. He didn’t stop even when he was fucking Ruby, and he certainly didn’t stop after his return from the Pit. Sam knows it wasn’t the same for Dean after his own sojourn Downstairs; Dean didn’t want it for a long time after, and Sam’s got his guesses about why. Rape isn’t the worst thing on his list. But it hadn’t been like that for Sam. There was a reason Lucifer had outsourced his plans to demons who knew what it had been like to be human; Lucifer didn’t have the world’s strongest grasp on what would truly degrade a person. On the other (defleshed) hand, he made up for it with a real focus on inflicting nerve damage, so.
Dean’s fingers clench prettily on the wall when Sam pulls his fingers out. His eyes are closed, droplets of water still hanging off the lashes, mouth half-opened. He groans when Sam pushes his cock inside, pinning Dean’s hips with his hands to give Dean the slow inexorable slide Dean likes best. Dean is the only fixed place, nothing like the storm outside. His body pulls Sam in and stills the frantic cacophony of Sam’s thoughts, like ants drowning in honey.
Sam’s foot slips and they both lurch a bit, but it’s okay; Sam just braces himself better and starts to give it to Dean in earnest before someone’s back gives out. He bats Dean’s hand away from where it’s searching out his dick, and Dean curses and smacks the wall with his open palm as Sam speeds up the rhythm. Dean’s skin is still shower-moist, his dick perfectly shaped for Sam’s fingers, the skin bunching and sliding as Sam swipes the pad of his thumb over the head.
He hadn’t missed this in the Cage. He couldn’t, because the Cage was so far different from the world in which this pleasure was possible that Sam couldn’t even remember what it had been like. He wants to tell Dean how good it is, but he already knows that talking during sex just leads to tears—tears of ecstasy, tears of disbelief at how he gets to have this again, but they make Dean uncomfortable, so he bites his lip instead and concentrates on how amazing it is to be here, now, exactly where he wants to be.
Dean clenches around him, dick pulsing hot spatters over Sam’s hand, and Sam takes that as permission to haul Dean into a better position, one hand on Dean’s back to bend him over, trusting Dean to keep them both upright. “Fuck, Sam,” Dean groans, and Sam loves how Dean loves to do this for him, saying with his body what he can only rarely and drunkenly force into words. Dean is all his, Dean is taking everything Sam has, and Sam comes with a crash of white as powerful as any lightning.
Later, when they’re both dried and dressed in enough clothes to sleep in—Sam only had to threaten Dean with broken fingers twice before Dean let him put on his own shorts himself—Dean swallows and asks: “Am I gonna wake up and find you gone again?”
“I’m fine for now,” he says.
Dean scowls, hating the precision of that statement as much as Sam needs it. Sam blinks apologetically; he doesn’t wish he were the kind of person who could lie to Dean the way Dean tries to lie to him—it’s okay, just a flesh wound, nothing to see here—and he refuses to engage in ridiculous counterfactuals where Sam’s brain didn’t have the consistency of tapioca. But he can still regret the situation.
“Make sure you stay that way,” Dean says, pissed, like he’s ordering Sam to make sure to get premium instead of regular for the car. Sam’s a veteran of Dean’s misplaced anger, so he takes it as it’s meant: Dean is epically mad at Castiel, who is not here to be yelled at. It’s not the whole ‘I am a jealous God’ act, because Dean’s not that interested in the fate of the world. It’s not even the lies Castiel told him. Sam knows it’s about him. As Dean would say (if he were in a better mood anyway), nobody puts Sammy in a corner.
Sam’s selfish enough to be comforted by Dean’s outrage.
Also, he’s sleepy, so he nods instead of arguing. Wall issues and associated quasi-sleepwalking in storms have left him exhausted. Either that or he’s just getting old. Nah, that’s crazy talk. Anyway, he’s certain that tonight sleep will come quickly, just this once.
Sam gets into bed and waits, but Dean delays joining him like the fretful bitch he is. “Dean,” Sam cautions, and Dean sighs like he’s the one doing Sam the favor, which Sam is willing to tolerate because, let’s be honest, his personality flaws do not precisely make him top partner material either, at least not for anyone but Dean. Dean grumbles and somehow manages to shift the sheets around loudly, and at least he’s sharing the same mattress with Sam now.
The thing is: Dean has trouble getting to sleep. He pretends it’s Sam’s problem, and it kind of is too—insomnia isn’t a problem that diminishes by being shared, not that Sam has much experience with a problem that does—but Dean basically sleeps as well as possible, which is not well, when he has at least two weapons close at hand and Sam at his side. So despite the fact that it ensures sweaty sheets, disgusting morning breath as his wake-up call, and quite possibly a sleepy demand for morning sex that Dean doesn’t even mean half the time (because he’s a cocktease, it’s not just the lips), Sam snuggles up against him.
“I’m okay,” he tells Dean.
“Uh hunh,” Dean says, with absolutely no inflection.
Dean believes him a little and mostly doesn’t. That’s fine. Sam’s brain will be broken no matter what Dean does or thinks. What Sam needs him to do is be here. It’s a big ask, given the state of Sam’s head, but if there’s anything Sam knows it’s that Dean won’t give up on this particular lost cause.
For chemm80, remix of Drown Me in Your Reign. Takes place shortly after episode 6.22. Prompt: Sam/Dean and “Shelter from the storm.”
Sam/Dean, explicit; Sam's got a messed-up head.
The weather is revolting.
The weather is obeying, that is, but not obeying Sam, and so he finds it revolting. Which makes him just like Marie Antoinette and her apocryphal peasants. Ha ha, Sam thinks, knowing that Dean wouldn’t get the joke, and that if he sniggers out loud it will just be crazy Sam again. He’s pretty sure that he would’ve found the thought just as funny even before the Wall came down (Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!—and okay, that one’s not that funny, and if Dean even knows there’s a difference between Russia and the Soviet Union Sam’s never seen any evidence of that fact, so Sam’s definitely not sharing this particular mental rambling).
Point being: the thunder and the lightning are fighting for dominance all across the country and, from what Sam can tell from the few snippets of news that aren’t about the homeland, pretty much the world. Castiel has apparently left some chunks of South America undisturbed, for reasons known only to him.
Known only to Him, Sam corrects himself. He’s not sure if Castiel could tell the difference even out loud, much less in Sam’s head, and he’s not sure if Castiel is even listening to W-SAM any more, but it doesn’t hurt Sam to be careful. And since there’s not much Sam can say doesn’t hurt at this point, he’s going with Castiel as the One.
Sam thinks he’s probably shivering. He can feel his clothes clinging to him, heavy with cold rainwater. He can feel his hair plastered to his skull and the runnels of water that stream down the back of his neck and over his chest.
It’s just that he can’t feel anything on the inside. And he’s more than a little afraid of what will happen when he starts again.
The thunder is like his heartbeat, irregular and startling. The lightning is like his memory, present and absent in terrifying strikes. He wishes they would both leave him alone.
No – he only wants calm weather, much as it hurts to want something he will never have.
This is so unfair--Sam is so unfair to Dean. Dean doesn’t need any more burdens. Sam doesn’t either, truth be known, but he’s given up on that long ago. Sam unleashed Lucifer on the world and also killed a bunch of people; his memories of Hell aren’t exactly payback because that would imply some equivalence there, but he accepts them as part of himself. Dean’s never going to admit that Sam isn’t the man Dean always wanted him to be, and Sam can’t be what he was, either: Dean’s partner, Dean’s support, Dean’s everything.
“Sammy!”
Dean’s frantic. He’s also half-naked, jeans unbuttoned and revealing he’s commando underneath, which would be more interesting if they weren’t standing out in a parking lot in the middle of a storm.
“Dean?” Sam asks, trying for reassurance. He feels a spike of gratitude that they’ve kept this, the ability to have a conversation just with each other’s names. Sam knows from Dean’s tone that it’s not the first time Dean’s called his name, but it’s not the tenth either.
Dean grabs Sam’s arm and starts dragging him back towards their room. “Fuck, Sam,” he mutters. “You could get hit, standing out here like a fucking tree.”
“Are you admitting I’m tall?” Sam teases.
Dean’s mouth twitches, but he doesn’t say ‘I’m admitting you’re a freak of nature,’ for all the obvious reasons. Still, reassuring Dean that he’s back among the presently functional is good enough for Sam. Dean leads him back inside; Sam notices that his boots aren’t even tied. His shoulders are pale and blocky when the crash-flash of the storm illuminates them, and his naked back is largely unscarred, thanks to the lingering effects of Castiel’s resurrection. (Sam’s never going to be able to hate Castiel, at least not until he’s too crazy to be Sam any more.) Dean’s broadened in the past few years, lost some of his youthful litheness. He’s still entirely beautiful.
The room is a shock of heat, and that’s when Sam starts to shiver in earnest. Dean hesitates a few seconds, then resolutely starts unbuttoning Sam’s sodden shirt. Sam could fight for control, but Dean is here in front of him, brows lowered in concentration, and it’s nice to see Dean waging a battle he’s going to win eventually as his rain-pruned and chilled fingers pop the buttons one by one.
Sam helps Dean pull his T-shirt off, and manages his pajama pants himself despite the way they cling to him like a second skin, and then despite the way he flashes back to having his actual skin peeled off in sheets that felt very much like this, only with more blood and heat. But Sam’s got his reactions under control, which he knows because Dean’s level of freaked out doesn’t ratchet up any further, so he lets Dean turn on the shower and test the water as the tiny bathroom starts to fill with steam.
The water is nothing like drowning. Sam could choose to get out at any time; he can close his mouth and eyes when he steps under the showerhead and tilts his face up, so he doesn’t have to try to breathe. There is no one here to supervise his choking and puking. It’s just a shower.
Sam’s not terribly surprised when, various smacking noises and crashes later, the bathroom door clunks open and then closed, and Dean blunders like a drunken elephant into the already-small bathtub space, instantly bringing the temperature down twenty degrees with his chilly skin.
“You’re freezing,” he complains, because Dean will expect him to. Or, Dean would expect Functional Sam to complain, and it’s easy to give Dean that right now so Sam’s taking advantage of the opportunity.
“Yeah,” Dean says, “some dickwad decided to go out into a lightning storm, and I had to haul his motionless ass back inside.”
But Dean’s hand on Sam’s hip is gentle as he reaches for the soap, and without further conversation he proceeds to soap up Sam’s back, working with greater thoroughness than a simple walk in the rain necessarily justifies. Sam’s reaction to Dean’s hands is as predictable as his reaction to Dean’s bad jokes, if a lot more pleasant. Sam braces his arms on the tile wall, slick-hot from the water, and bends forward to let Dean work, widening his stance as far as he can while he’s at it.
Dean makes a pleased little sound and his hands move more freely, skimming over the curve of Sam’s ass and lingering on Sam’s biceps. Dean doesn’t think he should enjoy Sam’s body as much as he does, because gay incest is okay, but gay incest where you really get off on feeling up your brother’s arms is apparently a bridge too far. Anyway, Dean tends to use things like washing up as an excuse to grope. This is, in general, okay by Sam. In their position, he can feel the greedy nudge of Dean’s cock up against the back of his thigh.
After Dean’s had his chance to get Sam good and clean, Sam pushes off the wall, moving slowly so as not to make Dean trip and bash his head open on the faucet. Not that this has ever happened to them, of course. Every scar on their bodies, even the erased ones, was earned in a legitimate hunt. There’s no one alive who’d testify otherwise, anyhow.
Regardless, Sam turns and crowds Dean up against the wall, nosing around his ear and his stubble-spiky jaw for a bit before capturing his mouth. Because Sam is awesomely coordinated, more like an Olympic gymnast than an ordinary citizen really, he also reaches out and turns off the water before the hint of lukewarmess creeping in can become a full-on cold shower. They’ll be warm enough with the steam from the shower and their own body heat, at least for a while.
Dean’s kisses are Sam’s only home. They’re almost never desperate; even when they’ve narrowly escaped death, Dean kisses like they have an infinity of time, like each kiss is a link in a chain that stretches on unbroken into the unseen future. Sam’s wondered if this is another illusion of security Dean creates for them, but it’s real even if it’s pretend. He wishes he could soak Dean into himself like the rainstorm, even if he wouldn’t really want Dean to have to share anything that’s under his skin. He wishes a lot of things, but when Dean is kissing him there’s limited room for regret.
Dean, of course, wouldn’t initiate even the slightest contact with intimate intent after Sam’s resouling. For a while Sam had worried that he didn’t want it any more after months spent with Sam’s conscienceless body, and they’d danced around each other like ex-spouses with joint custody (Sam guessed that would have to be the Impala as the kid in this metaphor, which was disturbingly close to the truth). Then one night Dean had gotten drunk enough to mumble something about how he missed Sam’s fucking hands, and that had been all the excuse Sam had needed to jump him.
Sam cups Dean’s face in his hands; Dean shudders and rubs against him, eager and undeniable. “Turn around,” Sam suggests, reaching for the complimentary conditioner.
Dean’s no longer as painfully tight as he was when Sam returned topside. As frustrating as Sam had found the requisite thirty minutes of prep—Dean was fully capable not just of stopping the action midway but also of punching Sam in the face if he thought Sam was selfishly ignoring Dean’s own needs—he’d been possessively pleased by the thought that Dean’s body was just for him. Then when he’d found out about his soulless self wandering around, Sam had been extra grateful that Dean hadn’t been fucking him. He’s 110% certain there’s a story about that, and he’s torn between hoping that Dean eventually drunk-reveals it and accepting that there are some things that no man returned from Hell should ever have to know about the precise nature of his incest hiatus. Regardless, at this point Dean’s body opens to him as easily as it had in the days before Dean’s deal, before Ruby, before any of the bullshit that had torn them up and apart.
“You gonna fuck me or just enjoy the view?” Dean grumps.
Sam rolls his eyes—Dean will know—and says mildly, “Thinking about doing both.”
Sam’s wanted Dean since before he knew what wanting was. He didn’t stop even when he was fucking Ruby, and he certainly didn’t stop after his return from the Pit. Sam knows it wasn’t the same for Dean after his own sojourn Downstairs; Dean didn’t want it for a long time after, and Sam’s got his guesses about why. Rape isn’t the worst thing on his list. But it hadn’t been like that for Sam. There was a reason Lucifer had outsourced his plans to demons who knew what it had been like to be human; Lucifer didn’t have the world’s strongest grasp on what would truly degrade a person. On the other (defleshed) hand, he made up for it with a real focus on inflicting nerve damage, so.
Dean’s fingers clench prettily on the wall when Sam pulls his fingers out. His eyes are closed, droplets of water still hanging off the lashes, mouth half-opened. He groans when Sam pushes his cock inside, pinning Dean’s hips with his hands to give Dean the slow inexorable slide Dean likes best. Dean is the only fixed place, nothing like the storm outside. His body pulls Sam in and stills the frantic cacophony of Sam’s thoughts, like ants drowning in honey.
Sam’s foot slips and they both lurch a bit, but it’s okay; Sam just braces himself better and starts to give it to Dean in earnest before someone’s back gives out. He bats Dean’s hand away from where it’s searching out his dick, and Dean curses and smacks the wall with his open palm as Sam speeds up the rhythm. Dean’s skin is still shower-moist, his dick perfectly shaped for Sam’s fingers, the skin bunching and sliding as Sam swipes the pad of his thumb over the head.
He hadn’t missed this in the Cage. He couldn’t, because the Cage was so far different from the world in which this pleasure was possible that Sam couldn’t even remember what it had been like. He wants to tell Dean how good it is, but he already knows that talking during sex just leads to tears—tears of ecstasy, tears of disbelief at how he gets to have this again, but they make Dean uncomfortable, so he bites his lip instead and concentrates on how amazing it is to be here, now, exactly where he wants to be.
Dean clenches around him, dick pulsing hot spatters over Sam’s hand, and Sam takes that as permission to haul Dean into a better position, one hand on Dean’s back to bend him over, trusting Dean to keep them both upright. “Fuck, Sam,” Dean groans, and Sam loves how Dean loves to do this for him, saying with his body what he can only rarely and drunkenly force into words. Dean is all his, Dean is taking everything Sam has, and Sam comes with a crash of white as powerful as any lightning.
Later, when they’re both dried and dressed in enough clothes to sleep in—Sam only had to threaten Dean with broken fingers twice before Dean let him put on his own shorts himself—Dean swallows and asks: “Am I gonna wake up and find you gone again?”
“I’m fine for now,” he says.
Dean scowls, hating the precision of that statement as much as Sam needs it. Sam blinks apologetically; he doesn’t wish he were the kind of person who could lie to Dean the way Dean tries to lie to him—it’s okay, just a flesh wound, nothing to see here—and he refuses to engage in ridiculous counterfactuals where Sam’s brain didn’t have the consistency of tapioca. But he can still regret the situation.
“Make sure you stay that way,” Dean says, pissed, like he’s ordering Sam to make sure to get premium instead of regular for the car. Sam’s a veteran of Dean’s misplaced anger, so he takes it as it’s meant: Dean is epically mad at Castiel, who is not here to be yelled at. It’s not the whole ‘I am a jealous God’ act, because Dean’s not that interested in the fate of the world. It’s not even the lies Castiel told him. Sam knows it’s about him. As Dean would say (if he were in a better mood anyway), nobody puts Sammy in a corner.
Sam’s selfish enough to be comforted by Dean’s outrage.
Also, he’s sleepy, so he nods instead of arguing. Wall issues and associated quasi-sleepwalking in storms have left him exhausted. Either that or he’s just getting old. Nah, that’s crazy talk. Anyway, he’s certain that tonight sleep will come quickly, just this once.
Sam gets into bed and waits, but Dean delays joining him like the fretful bitch he is. “Dean,” Sam cautions, and Dean sighs like he’s the one doing Sam the favor, which Sam is willing to tolerate because, let’s be honest, his personality flaws do not precisely make him top partner material either, at least not for anyone but Dean. Dean grumbles and somehow manages to shift the sheets around loudly, and at least he’s sharing the same mattress with Sam now.
The thing is: Dean has trouble getting to sleep. He pretends it’s Sam’s problem, and it kind of is too—insomnia isn’t a problem that diminishes by being shared, not that Sam has much experience with a problem that does—but Dean basically sleeps as well as possible, which is not well, when he has at least two weapons close at hand and Sam at his side. So despite the fact that it ensures sweaty sheets, disgusting morning breath as his wake-up call, and quite possibly a sleepy demand for morning sex that Dean doesn’t even mean half the time (because he’s a cocktease, it’s not just the lips), Sam snuggles up against him.
“I’m okay,” he tells Dean.
“Uh hunh,” Dean says, with absolutely no inflection.
Dean believes him a little and mostly doesn’t. That’s fine. Sam’s brain will be broken no matter what Dean does or thinks. What Sam needs him to do is be here. It’s a big ask, given the state of Sam’s head, but if there’s anything Sam knows it’s that Dean won’t give up on this particular lost cause.
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