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Dean hates to admit it, but he maybe understands the appeal.
California, on even its worst days, is sunny and beachy, beautiful women tanning everywhere, the smell of birria tacos tacos emanating from small food trucks on the street. Dean leaves his jacket behind in the Impala, letting the sunlight seep into his skin and the sweat makes his shirt stick to his skin.
Californian women are quite brazen, staring at him as they pass him by with men on their arms and Dean thinks that maybe he gets it. That maybe Sam was leaving was less about him and more about this. He gets tacos and soda and picks out the cilantro because he never liked the taste of soap on his tongue. The leather seats of the Impala are sweltering hot underneath him and he shifts uncomfortably, glances at the map where he has Stanford circled with a pencil.
There’s something for everyone in California. High-end luxury snooker rooms for rich businessmen cruising for barely legal girls to sleep with and seedy underground bars for men like Dean Winchester, who never desired the high life. The first girl he sleeps with in California has an apartment with a door that doesn’t lock and he spends most of his limited time there with a distinct fear running through his veins. Getting jumped during sex is nobody’s kink.
She can’t afford to get her locks fixed but she drinks sparkling water and has two cartons of eggs in her refrigerator. She sidles up next to him, their arms pressed against each other as she pulls up her laptop and scrolls through her friends’ pictures on Facebook. She starts to point out, oh, Sara’s gotten fat, Emily got married, Ben is a fucking homosexual, we all knew and Dean listens intently, maybe now he’ll understand the draw of a normal life.
He leans in. “Do you think you can look someone up for me?”
She blinks, pulling the laptop closer to her, fingers aimed at the keyboard. She’s still naked but Dean no longer cares about that. “Sure.”
Sam’s profile is exactly what Dean thought it would look like. Pictures of textbooks, his friends, a blonde girl who has her arm around his neck and her lips on his cheek. Sam’s smiling. Dean reads Sam’s status updates like a starving man who’s chanced upon a free buffet — stressed about finals, Jess won’t let me sleep, Brady has a stupid joke he wants to tell everyone with a video attached to it.
And on August 13ᵗʰ attached with a picture of the moon, there’s Sometimes I look at you and wonder if you're still as sure about me as I am about you.
“What, is he like your boyfriend or something?” She asks, as she pushes herself off the bed to go get another bottle of tangerine water. She hands him the laptop and Dean stares at the screen, unsure of what he’s supposed to say.
“No.” Dean says, calling after her. He’s worse. “He’s my brother.”
And Sam is his brother. No matter how hard Sam tries to scrub Dean and their father out of his life, the one thing Sam can’t change is Dean’s blood that’s running through his veins. He knows how much Sam must hate the thought of it — having something in common with his horrible, deadbeat, alcoholic brother and he knows how much Sam must wish that he could take it all back. All the whispered confessions and secret gazes and hugs that lingered for moments longer than they should have.
Dean shouldn’t be doing this. Sam made it abundantly clear before he left that he never wants to see either of them ever again. He wants his wife and three kids, white picket fence dream more than he wants Dean, but Dean needs this. An addict needs a hit once in a while.
He chases down a couple of girls in short skirts on campus, asks them for the location to the nearest bar and they ask him if he’s single. He politely says no. Pinocchio’s is crowded because it’s a Friday night and there’s nothing college students like more than getting raging drunk apparently. He weaves through the horde of law students, tired and aggressive with so much pent-up energy that Dean has felt less nervous in a demon’s nest as the bass cuts through the air, loud and pumping.
He makes his way to the bar and orders a whiskey coke, paying in cash because he’s going to get one glance at Sam and get the fuck out of here. He knows Sam’s feelings about him and everything else in general and he doesn’t ask for things he knows he cannot get. The alcohol leaves a trail of heat as it makes its way down his throat, ice cubes melting inside his glass as he runs his eyes rapidly over the crowd.
There’s two dudes making out in a corner, hands under their shirts while one guy tugs at the other’s belt and Dean isn’t drunk enough for this. He reaches for his switchblade in his jacket pocket, grasping it tightly for comfort before he lets go. As it turns out, you can pick Sam out of a crowd easily.
It has nothing to do with his height, though that is an important factor but it’s the crowd of people that surround him, all laughing, eyes wet with tears. There’s a beautiful blonde with Sam’s arm around her waist and from this far away, Dean can’t be sure if that’s her. The girl from Sam’s Facebook.
Sam looks like he hasn’t gotten a haircut in months, but his bangs are perfectly wispy, mop maintained just well enough that Dean suspects it’s the whole I don’t want to look like I care but I care routine. Dean takes a sip of his whiskey coke. Sam’s smiling, deep dimples sinking like crescents into his cheeks and his teeth are pearly white.
He’s been working out, Dean can tell. It may not be lifting weights and taking steroids, but there’s a method to the madness by which Sam’s clothes cling to his body, defined muscle rippling underneath the fabric. When the girl tries to wrap her hand around his bicep, she comes up short. Dean strongly suspects that if he were to lift up Sam’s shirt right now, he’d be greeted by the hard planes of Sam’s stomach.
It’s difficult to explain, but Dean isn’t attracted to his brother. Sam is, first and foremost, his brother, his scrawny, lanky, scrappy mess of a sibling who spent two weeks learning how to pick locks and just couldn’t get good at it. Dean taught him a trick, sat with him for hours as Sam learned how to pick the fucking lock before Dean taught him how to jack a ride — turns out he was a pretty quick study with everything else — and saved him ultimately from the unpleasant anger of their father, their drill sergeant before anything else.
Dean supposes it was inevitable. They only had each other. Dean was Sam’s everything, all inclusive in a pretty little package and Dean supposes it was meant to happen someday. Sam didn’t know any better, couldn’t have known any better because they didn’t let him get exposed to the world too much — always on guard, always hunting down Yellow Eyes — and that’s the only reason Sam did what he did in a dingy motel room in Alabama off 101 Tupelo Pike.
That’s the only reason.
Dean still blinks sometimes and sees Sam the way he was some years ago — tall enough to reach only Dean’s waist, always hungry, always cranky, always ready to question decisions made but never Dean’s. He thinks about when Sam grew his own brain, decided his brother wasn’t good enough and left with limbs that were his own, gone when Dean thought that he had just begun to understand Sam.
Sam was seventeen and Dean was twenty-one in an Alabama motel room, running dangerously low on supplies with one bed shared between the two of them.
Dean takes one sip, then another, then another. He’s gotten what he wants and he needs to leave before Sam sees him. He may not be afraid of confrontation but the unruly consequences could yield results like Sam’s potential return turning into a permanent exit. Dean knows he’s lost eighty percent of Sam but there’s always that twenty percent. Sam could come back.
Dean polishes off his alcohol and starts to leave. Sam is saying something to the girl now and they’re intensely engaged in conversation and Dean thinks it might’ve hurt less to see his brother have sex with her instead. Because Sam is the only one who could understand him, shouldn’t it only be fair that Dean should be Sam’s only one? Why does Sam get to have two? Maybe if Sam comes back one day, Dean could ask him.
Dean has a habit of checking his pockets to ensure he has everything with him, but he forgets to do so in the rush to leave this college behind. Dean is better off on the road, hunting things, saving people, doing what he thinks he was born to do. Let Sam have his white fucking picket fence. It’s just another thing Dean can’t give him. Add it to the list, he mutters to himself.
He needs a cheeseburger. A solid drink. A short-haired woman in the backseat of the Impala. Dean is about to be sick. He stands outside the bar, trying to get his bearings straight when a woman runs up to him, nervous and sweaty. “Are you Colin Wright?” She asks, and Dean blinks thrice before he nervously says yes. “Dude, you forgot your wallet in there.”
And he doesn’t believe in God, never has because the concept of it doesn’t sit right with him — but this has to be divine intervention. Dean could ditch the credit cards, but there’s a photo of him and Sam in the wallet that Dean wouldn’t leave behind even if he spontaneously burst into flames. He shouldn’t go back in there because he knows what’s going to happen. It’s the universe’s way of shoving a middle finger up his ass.
Dean has no choice.
He makes his way back in there, beelining for the bar. The bartender gives him the wallet back with a card that has her phone number on it and Dean lets himself think he’s escaped. He turns around and there he is. Samuel fucking Winchester in the flesh. God (haha, get it?), he looks fucking ethereal from up close.
Soft golden light bounces off the curve of Sam’s nose, shadowing his lips that are bitten red and the apples of Sam’s cheeks are pink. Or maybe Dean’s eyes are playing tricks on him. He looks sober enough to be pissed, but from down here, Dean can’t tell for sure. It looks more like Sam is blinking rapidly, trying to make sure that Dean isn’t a figment of his imagination. That’s flattering to think that Sam could think of him in any way, shape or form.
The time seems to slow, molasses seeping through as it fills their systems from the bottom up. “Dean?” Sam asks, and his name sounds foreign in Sam’s mouth, like the weight of it is unfamiliar on his tongue and he’s trying to get used to it.
“Sammy.” Dean says, and he wants to make some stupid joke but Sam’s speaking to him. Dean wants to kiss him. “You look good.”
“You shouldn’t be here.” Sam mutters and he’s slurring his words slightly. Dean’s earlier assumption was incorrect. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Okay, let’s not —“ Dean says, clearing his throat. Sam has to see these people again tomorrow and Dean doesn’t want to jeopardise that. God knows how Stanford law students feel about incest. Probably not too strongly. “Let’s get you out of here, yeah?”
They stumble out, but Sam is able to hold his own. His defences are still in place, but they’re brittle because Sam won’t speak to him anymore but he follows Dean to where the Impala stands a few blocks away. Sam gets into the passenger’s seat and the haze seems to have lifted. He turns to Dean, eyes blood-red with anger and says, “Dean, you shouldn’t be here.”
“I was just here for a case. Don’t worry. I’m leaving.”
“You shouldn’t have come here in the first place. I thought we had an agreement.”
“Dude, I did not know you would be here.”
“Right.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I just wanted a drink, okay?”
“Plenty of places away from Stanford that serve drinks.”
“Why were you thinking about me?” Dean asks, and Sam goes taut, like a rubberband about to snap.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You just said it.”
“I was drunk.”
“You aren’t anymore?”
“No,” Sam snaps and their eyes meet in the rearview mirror. Sam looks less angry and more weary, like he wanted this conversation to be over many, many moons ago. “Just go, Dean.”
Sam was seventeen and Dean was twenty-one in an Alabama motel room, when Sam grabbed his face and kissed him for the first time, the noise of their father’s engine fading as he drove away from the motel. Sam didn’t know what he was doing and he was pretty bad at it, but what he lacked in skill, he made up for it in passion and want and hunger and Dean couldn’t say no. Weak, weak, weak just like his father always said.
“Get out of the car and maybe I will.”
Sam doesn’t move. “Dean. We had an agreement.”
Dean’s hands grip the steering wheel tight. “That was between you and Dad.”
Sam stares at him, eyes flared. “You’re both a unit.”
“I never said that,” Dean says, and he turns halfway in his seat, keys in the ignition, but the car isn’t running. “Why were you thinking about me?”
Sam is agitated, Dean can tell. He closes his eyes and takes deep breaths, like he’s trying his damndest not to sock Dean in the face and when he opens them again, he says, “It just slipped out. I’m sorry.”
“I can tell when you’re lying to me.”
Dean reaches out, curls his fingers on the underside of Sam’s chin and pulls him close. Sam moves unconsciously, eyes hazy like his brain hasn’t caught up with his body’s movements. Sam’s eyes are rings of gold like molten stars and Dean wants to kiss him.
“Maybe we can just pretend this didn’t happen.” Dean says.
Sam isn’t breathing properly, he looks sad and vulnerable and nervous and Dean runs his thumb along Sam’s bottom lip.
“There was this poster. My roommate put it up on his wall.” Sam says, leaning into Dean’s touch. “I don’t know, I thought you might like it and —“ He sighs. “It pretty much got out of hand from there.”
Dean hums, interested in something else entirely. “You dating somebody?”
Sam cracks a smile, wiggles his eyebrows. “You jealous?”
Dean drops his hand, leans back in his seat. “I don’t remember saying anything like that, you jackass.”
“You’d like her.”
“Sure.”
“I swear. You would.”
“Maybe.” Dean mutters, but he knows the answer will always be no. He’ll never get along with the girl who’s screwing his brother.
“And you?” Sam asks, hesitant almost and Dean scoffs.
“Sure, if you count a quickie in some wannabe actress’ kitchen.”
It’s meant to be more of a joke, but Sam slowly blinks. “Oh. In Cali?”
“Yesterday,” Dean says.
“Oh.”
“You jealous?” Dean mockingly asks, but Sam turns to him and says, “Yes.”
In that moment, Dean sees Sam as his seventeen year old self all over again. Sam’s bangs fall over his eyes, slightly obscuring them, but Dean can feel the full force of his gaze on him and Dean might get crushed under the weight of it. He should say something, make a joke, undercut the tension that’s simmering underneath the surface but he doesn’t need to. Sam grabs the lapels of his jacket, hesitates for a moment like he’s checking if he feels differently about it or not and kisses him.
They’ve seen the worst parts of each other. Dean heard everything Sam said to their father before he left, not deeming Dean even slightly worthy of an apology. Sam has seen Dean fuck up routinely on hunts so bad that Dean would come back to the motel room and burst into tears. Dean kisses him back, he doesn’t know any better.
They’re going to see each other in a couple of months again and they won’t ever speak about this. It’s an exception to the rule, the one bit of their relationship that they don’t let themselves deny for longer than they need to. Sometimes you just need to let go. Sometimes all you need from the person you love more than anything in the world is mutual reassurance, his mouth on your neck and maybe it’s okay.
It’ll get better someday when he comes back.
✯