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Title: We Can Live in Sin ( In a Cheap Motel Room)
Pairing: Sam/Dean; preseries
Rating: PG-13
Words: 1595
Summary: He says it won't kill him when Sammy leaves. He lies.
A/n: All your Sam and Dean are belong to Kripke.


Its been there for as long as Dean can remember, scratching at the surface like the dull itch of dead skin. My brother, my Sammy. Too close, too attached and dependent and scared of being left alone. Its there and they both know it and they both pretend that they don't. Flinching at soft hands and softer words, pulling away, pushing back. If John notices the tension so strong between his boys it pops and crackles like static electricity, then he's doing some pretending of his own.

Dean finds the manila envelope and the applications so crisp and bright and foreign, neatly layered inside, and slams Sam against the motel room wall, putting a crack in the drywall above his head. The grin twisting across his mouth is as dark and bitter, like the coffee Sam brought him. "You're leaving, huh?" Sam flinches at the acid rolling off his tongue, lashing across Sam's skin, burning him. "Going to punk out like a little bitch, Sammy?"

"I just want a normal life." He struggles to say. He can't think straight with Dean's eyes and hands pinning him against the wall.

"God, you're so fucking selfish. All you ever think about - all you've ever thought about is yourself." Dean's fingers curl around Sam's arms, digging into muscle and bone. "You make me sick."

"I want you to come with me," Sam mutters under his breath, closing his eyes. "I don't want to leave, Dean." I don't want to leave you. "I want you to come too. I just can't - I can't stay here and watch you die."

"I'm not dying, Sammy. What-"

"No, you are. Last week. Last month. Three days from now. You're always an inch away from leaving me, Dean. Don't you get it?" His eyes are wet and Dean does get it. He gets it every time he sees blood trailed across Sam's skin, every time he hears Sam cry out in the middle of a hunt and can't do anything about it, because if he stops what he's doing, he'll get them all killed.

Dean's not sure exactly what he's doing when he reaches out and threads his fingers through Sam's hair, pulling him close and touching their foreheads together, feeling Sam's hot, wet tears on his face, but it feels right. He lets Sam cry and at some point slides his arm around him, flattening his palm across his brother's back, rubbing in slow, soothing motions. Sam twists his fingers in Dean's flannel and pulls him closer, burying his face in the crook of Dean's neck. Its quiet and wet and weird, and when Dean feels Sam's lips on his skin, pressing into the side of his neck, he pretends it was just an accident. It makes it easier.



+++


A pissed off spirit hurls a drawer full of knives at Dean in Molly Church's house in Maine. He manages to miss them all as Sam and John find the bones and salt them, except for the chef knife, which stabs him right in the gut, and he blacks out before they get back to the house.

Sam holds Dean's head in his lap as John stitches him up, giving him Tequila as a make-do anesthesia when it gets to be too much. His skin is pale and chalky and Sam's hands and shirt are covered in Dean's blood from where he tried to hold Dean together on the way back to the motel in the backseat and keep as much blood inside of him as he could.

Sam says, "You're so stupid," as Dean screams through the pain. Says, "You're such an idiot, Dean. Should've waited. Idiot."

He thinks, I hate you, I hate you. You're always leaving me. But its not true and he knows it. He knows it so bad it hurts for days.



+++


Dean pretends like Sam's graduation isn't a big deal, just like he pretends he doesn't catch Sam studying things that aren't Latin and urban legends and Salting and Burning For Dummies. He pretends he's not dying inside a little each day, like big x's in magic marker across his heart. He says it won't kill him when Sammy leaves. He lies.


+++



A possessed woman in Jersey whacks Sam over the head with a shovel two days after his eighteenth birthday and John's afraid he has a concussion, so he tells Dean to stay home and watch him while he goes back to do the exorcism with Jim.

"Sammy. Sam." Dean slaps him on the face lightly. "You can't sleep yet. Talk to me."

Sam grumbles, but he knows Dean's right, so he scoots up against the headboard, his shoulder squished up against Dean's. "What should I talk about?"

"Anything." Dean flips through the thirteen channels they have. "Tell me about school."

"Dean."

"Fine. How do you kill a werewolf?"

"Silver bullet to the heart."

"Vampire."

"Cut its head off, only way to be sure."

"Shape shifter?"

"Silver bullet, just like a werewolf." He chews on his bottom lips as Dean pauses on Jerry Springer, trying to think of another question to keep Sam awake. "I love you, Dean."

"Jesus," Dean groans, his head thunking against the headboard behind them.

"I'm asking you," Sam's voice is soft, but pleading, his fingers laying across Dean's forearm. "Just, come with me, Dean."

Dean clears his throat and turns his head, catching Sam's eyes briefly. "Sam," he says, and it comes out all wrong, too raw and exposed, needy. "I can't leave Dad. He needs my help."

"But I need you," Sam says, letting his fingers slip between Dean's. Dean looks down at their hands, fingers laced together, and Sam watches the dramatic rise and fall of his adam's apple beneath his skin right before Dean tears his hand away like Sam's skin had burned him.

"I'm not leaving," Dean mutters, grabbing his jacket before heading for the door. Sam doesn't miss the fact that he won't look him in the eyes. "I don't need a normal life. I've got everything I need here."

He wonders how long that will be true.


+++


"Are you going to tell Dad?" Sam asks in a truck stop bathroom in Iowa.

"Tell him what?" Dean asks as he zips up, avoiding Sam's eyes in the mirror as he washes his hands.

He hopes that if he pretends it long enough, it'll come true.


+++


Sam tells John he's leaving at four o'clock on July thirty-first for the bus station. John makes sure he's off on a job that entire week.


+++


Dean says, "Sam, Sammy," when Sam kisses him in the car in the parking lot, tries to fight, tries to be sick over it, but he's already losing himself a little. Sam touches their foreheads together and Dean cries silently against his face and Sam tastes the warm saltiness on his lips before he goes.

"Come with me," He says.

"I can't," Dean chokes.

He leans against the Impala and watches Sam's bus disappear, stares at the neon sign that will forever be burned into his brain, and fucks a hooker in the backseat before he leaves the parking lot. She pretends that he's not crying like some broken, pathetic son of a bitch and he thanks her with the two hundred and six bucks in his wallet.


+++


First its one day at a time, then before Dean realizes it, weeks have passed; months, years. Still, there's this hole inside of him that nothing else - whiskey, girls, killing - can fill. He knows exactly what will, just like he knows he can't ever have it.


+++


For two years Dean went through the motions: hunt, fuck, kill, and now Sam's riding shotgun, sitting right next to him like he hasn't been pretending to be someone else for the last seven hundred and forty-two days. His hair is different, he's taller, and he's using a different cologne; different because its not Dean's. It should help, he thinks, having Sam back again, but it only makes the aching, empty pain flare up where he'd been comfortably numb before.

Sometimes, Sam will laugh or accidentally touch him, or say "Dean," and its like having fresh stitches ripped right out of his gut.

Dean can't think about what it was like before, everything between them so close and confined it was like suffocating. Nothing's been like that since Sam left. At first, he went crazy from all the wide open space, everything so cold and vacant, but now Sam's walking beside him, brush of skin, bump of knees under the table, in the car, and its starting to wear on his sanity again.

They stay in a cheap motel room for the night and Dean can hear the sound of Sam breathing only a couple of feet away. His clothes are everywhere and there's two extra duffel bags, and the car feels too small with them both in it, fighting over the radio, and Dean's starting to remember how it used to feel, gasping for air, suffocating with Sam, Sam, Sammy. It pushes him over the edge, of sanity, of reason, of right and wrong, and in the middle of Sam rattling on about the lady in white and evp, Dean snaps and says, "Did you miss me at all?"

Then Sam's kissing him, covering Dean's mouth and stealing his breath, like that's all he's been waiting on.



+++


Jessica's dead and Sam looks like he wants to be and Dean, Dean hasn't felt so whole and put together in two fucking years.

He can't even pretend anymore.

Date: 2008-11-26 10:27 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sir-yessir.livejournal.com
Owwww. That was beautiful. :(

Date: 2008-11-27 04:11 am (UTC)
ext_30154: (Default)
From: [identity profile] oh-mcgee.livejournal.com
It kinda sucks that really beautiful things are usually really fucked up things. lol. Thank you, bb.

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