A/N: Written for anactoria's wish #5: Anything that focuses on Dean being a clean freak. Because apparently I'm currently obsessed with that. at the hoodie_time Summer Wishlist Meme. Happy birthday, my friend!
Unbetaed, apologies for any mistakes.
A Clean Slice of Life
Dean shouldn't be allowed to do this, dammit.
Sam frowned at the beer in his hands. It was weirdly pathetic how much it unsettled him whenever Dean, the one constant in his life (and yeah, there was something weirdly pathetic about that too), decided to show Sam a new side of himself.
He'd done it before.
Sam remembered the pangs of uneasy surprise low in his gut which swallowed up even the dry, stale thump of grief that consumed him shortly after he reunited with Dean at Stanford. He'd sat in the Impala, rolling his eyes at how Dean sang along to the same tape for hours. He'd sat across Dean in diners, watching him shovel greasy cholesterol bombs into his mouth. Sometimes Sam been amused, but usually he'd found himself annoyed and disgusted at his brother's predictable antics. So he'd sat there, cringing and shaking his head, all the while thinking he knew everything there was to know about his brother – and that it didn't add up to much. (Of that thought he was still ashamed even now.) Only then Dean suddenly started bonding with little kids and talking back at Dad, and Sam had to realize that he knew jack squat and needed to relearn his brother all over again.
The same dismay and confusion ravaged him when he woke up at Bobby's after walking around without a soul for over a year. A year which Dean had spent with Lisa and Ben, right until Sam's soulless self came along and ruined that for him, and it had left Dean soft and hurt and cynical in ways Sam didn't understand. No matter how fervently he'd made Dean promise to quit hunting and live the apple-pie life with Lisa, he'd never quite believed Dean could. He'd certainly never expected Dean to be good at it. And to miss it so much.
Sam scratched at the label of his bottle with a thumbnail.
In a couple months he would turn thirty and yet Dean still wasn't done with surprising him.
For the very first time in their lives – or in his life at least – they had a place to stay for real. Not a dingy motel room, not the cramped backseat of the car, not the creaky old guest bedroom at Bobby's house, no, a perfect hunter's home base which was theirs for the taking. It was pretty cool and incredibly useful, Sam had to admit that.
But Dean was decorating his room. Cooking real and astonishingly edible food. Doing the washing up, whistling Smoke on the Water to himself. Cleaning the kitchen floor until it sparkled enough to hurt Sam's eyes.
Christ.
Apparently his brother was a neat freak and a desperate housewife and Sam had never noticed.
He'd never thought Dean was messy, not per se. He knew that when Dean got pizza crumbs over the covers of Sam's bed at the motel or left his dirty laundry lying around, it was mostly to rile him up. Dean had always been neat enough about the Impala. In fact, considering how they practically lived in the car, it was honestly amazing how she was always in such a spotless shape –
Huh.
He took a swig from his bottle, let the cool liquid slosh down his throat, and tried to figure out what it all meant.
o0o
After they returned from their latest hunt Sam flung his jacket and duffel onto one of the tables in the library and stretched his sore limbs. These days, his body felt closer to eighty than to thirty. He wasn't ready yet to contemplate why.
Beside him Dean winced.
"What?" Sam asked him.
Dean's jaw clenched unhappily. "Nothing."
"Come on, tell me," Sam said, and maybe because he was too exhausted from the pack of skinwalkers they'd just taken down to fight him, Dean did.
"It's just… this place means something, you know."
Sam didn't know, not really. He and Amelia had lived out of boxes for months, only started unpacking when her father announced he was coming for a visit. Sure, they had a house, a top-notch house in suburbia paradise where sunlight flooded the kitchen each morning when they had breakfast. But it was just that, a house. And even that proved too much for them cope with.
Yet now he and Dean had holed up quite literally somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in a fucking bunker where the sun never shone, and Dean treated the place with the reverence a kid might have for Disneyland.
Sam couldn't wrap his mind around it.
But he picked up his things and hung them up in his room, because unlike Dean he didn't actually get a kick out of antagonizing his brother.
Later he found Dean puttering around in the kitchen, fixing up spaghetti bolognese for dinner. It smelt delicious and Sam's stomach growled appreciatively.
Sitting down at the table, his mouth watering, it struck him that maybe just because he didn't get something didn't mean it was actually a bad thing.
Then the coughs started up again.
o0o
"I'm not touching that!" Dean protested.
Briefly, Sam wondered if he'd missed something, zoned out again somehow. He'd been doing that more and more lately, flashes of his life just passing by unnoticed, until he suddenly came to somewhere and didn't remember how he got there.
But no, he was still where he'd been a moment ago, lying on the dirty basement of the haunted house they'd checked out, Dean two feet away from him, glaring at the cursed bell jar that had led them here as though it had insulted Zep, Styx and the Impala in one go.
"Why?" he asked. It might be quite sensible not to touch a cursed object without some kind of protection, but it wasn't like Dean to be so sensible. Sam still got a queasy feeling in his stomach every time he recalled Dean eating the ham he'd roasted with a joy buzzer that turned out to be the real deal, well before they found out it was the harmless side effect of an unsuspecting antichrist-child's bedtime stories.
"It's covered in monster goo."
"Dude, you're covered in monster goo!"
"Exactly," Dean said, as though that explained anything.
Instead of trying to puzzle out why Dean put everything in his mouth without second thought but somehow got squeamish when it came to touching things with his hands, Sam just rolled his eyes, shrugged off his soiled coat and wrapped up the cursed object inside it, ignoring the way Dean's face twisted in revulsion.
The next thing he knew, they entered the bunker's library, and he was too busy freaking out about how the hell they got back here so fast to give a fuck about Dean's bizarre anal tendencies.
o0o
When Cas and he returned to the bunker Sam felt drained. Empty.
His eyes fell on one of the tables in the library. Not long ago he'd been sitting there, solving a case about ghouls and cheerleaders of all things, and he'd been so goddamn happy. It felt like a lifetime ago now. It had never been real. It had been a lie. All of it had been a lie.
One of the pretty art nouveau lamps was missing.
He let his eyes wander, picked up on the gleaming floor, the way their research papers were meticulously organized on one end of the table.
Everything was flawless, save for the missing lamp.
And for Sam.
He traced his fingers over the surface where the lamp had stood. With no small amount of bitterness he wondered how a neat freak like Dean could always mess him up so badly.
o0o
"This thing is filthy," Sam said, his grip tight on the grimy wheel.
"It's just a car, Sam," came the careless reply from the backseat. In the rearview mirror, Sam saw that Dean was smiling, the same lax and charming smile he'd taunted Sam with all day. At least he hadn't called him Sammy this time.
"It's just a … car. Wow. You really have gone dark."
After grieving and searching for Dean for weeks, Sam was finally no more than two feet away from him, sharing the same confined old space with his brother he had all his life. He'd never missed him more fiercely.
"You have no idea." Dean sounded pleased. Maybe.
Sam didn't know yet how to read this version of his brother.
Didn't want to.
o0o
Dean wasn't in his room when Sam checked in on him again. By the time he found him in the bunker's garage, Sam was almost beside himself with anger and worry.
"Dude, I looked for you everywh–"
The words died on his lips as he took in the wet sprinkles on Dean's t-shirt, the bucket beside his feet, the rag in his hands.
"You're… cleaning," he said unnecessarily.
"Yeah." Dean shrugged, eyes awkwardly trailing up to Sam's face and then quickly away again, a green streak of shame. He still hadn't looked properly at Sam, not since that moment when he'd stared up, bewildered, and Sam said, Welcome back, Dean, his lungs and cheeks expanding enough with happiness and relief to burst.
"You're cleaning the car."
"Stop grinning at me," Dean said and shoved him lightly.
The cleaning rag dribbled onto Sam's unbroken arm, a dark-brown mix of Borax, water, dust and whatever else Dean had been wiping up over the dashboard. It was more than a little disgusting, but it was the first time Dean had touched him since he'd tried to bash in Sam's head with a hammer and it was an infinite improvement from that, so Sam didn't really mind.
o0o
They left on a vacation the next day. A fishing trip.
It had been Dean's idea, strangely enough. Sam didn't peg his brother for the type who'd enjoy sitting around quietly for hours at the waterside waiting for something to take the bait – he'd watched Dean in bars often enough to know what Dean's typical hook up strategy looked like: fast, loud and obvious.
"I dream about it sometimes," Dean had mumbled, though. And then immediately added, "Shut up," leaving Sam to gawp and gulp at him in a picture-perfect replication of the fish they might catch over the next couple days.
So fishing they went.
The ride was mostly silent and tense. Several times Dean started singing along to their tape, but he quickly caught himself each time and shut his mouth with a click and a furtive glance at Sam. It was so annoyingly polite Sam wanted to weep.
After three hours of this torture Sam wondered if they should just call it off. No matter how much they both longed to move past everything that had happened, it clearly wasn't working. The fingers of his good hand shook with frustration when he opened a bag of Skittles and he ended up spilling them all over the upholstery –
Dean bitched at him for ten minutes straight.
Sam ducked his head so Dean wouldn't see him smile as he tossed a couple of Skittles sticking to his sling back into the torn bag.
They were going to be okay.
Thanks for reading.