They've always been the each other's worst vice.
Word count: 2391
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Spoilers: Nothing specific
Warnings: Abuse, violence, psychological harm, etc.
Corrupt Touch
One evening, Sam and Dean took to sparring. This would soon prove to be a damaging idea, but it even sooner became entirely involuntary on the boys behalf and thus couldn't be helped, even if they wanted it be.
Which, for the record, they didn't. Not at first.
Thick, meaty uppercuts, solid punctures to abdomens. No padding or blocks of any sort. Grunts that barely had a chance to stretch in the night before being replaced with another. Slit eyes and hot fists and the harsh gnashing of bared teeth. It was the kind of brawling that left neither brother a winner, not emotionally or physically, and the kind that didn't help with anything of any relevance in any manner.
It rapidly became routine; find a motel, get a room, find a decent back ally when the days evaporated into dusk, and beat the holy living hell out of each other.
The first night it happened was also incidentally the first night Sam mashed his mouth against Dean's and they jerked each other off inside their jeans, crushed up on a crumbling concrete wall with the world blacked out and buzzing around them. It was a crystallite blur of blistering breath on necks and metal taste on their tongues and blood mingling, sizzling and smearing on their skin.
It wasn't as though it was the pain getting them off, but it did have a hand in things; for Dean, making out with his kid brother equalled a shattered wrist bone; for Sam, falling apart against Dean's body was equivalent to his bicep sinews being ripped out and skewered. Obviously, they despised what they did. It was connected, but not vital. Just abrupt action-reaction that left both of them seething and delirious.
Perhaps the reason for this was what had happened to them was too much. After all, killing monsters can only cure so much inside a person's soul; can only wipe so much black clean from the slate. Some stains were permanent, and the abhorrent loathing in the air between the brothers was a living, breathing thing.
Sam would get in a vicious hook across Dean's mouth and blood would spurt, his lips would be a fleshly mess tomorrow, and something messy would disintegrate inside Sam. Left him feeling a tiny bit lighter and like having his mouth down way low and open on the indent of Dean's hip.
Dean would feint left and go right and play dirty and pummel into Sam. Grind him into the asphalt in a rib-shattering tackle, and then be tempted to laugh, to curl his fingers around Sam's soap-smooth neck and lap at his collarbone. Bite. Smirk.
Dean's fist would find its mark on Sam's right cheek thrice, pulpy mess of Dean's ring imprinted there and Sam would snap at it until something caught, teeth tearing into a finger and coming away bloody. He'd spray red up at his brother and grin a horrifying grin, roll them over, slam his elbow into Dean's stomach until both surfaces were torn and bloodied, and then Dean would ram his forehead into Sam's nose until it cracked. They drank blood and they screamed and they created their own survivable realm of hell, because reality was unbearable.
And God, did they hate each other.
For the Winchester's, hate had always been tightly wound with love; loss the dirty side of the coin also containing gain; and victory so insufferably merged with failure. Sam and Dean, although not becoming numb to the difference between each, began failing to take notice.
They killed something that was killing people and there was no celebration. Sam locked himself inside the bathroom for thirteen hours and showered until his skin was raw and red, and Dean drove somewhere secluded and screamed. Screamed until he couldn't think, screamed until he couldn't breathe and when he was on the brink of passing out, vision spotted black and grey and a series of firecrackers being let loose in his chest, he would suck in a lungful of air and scream again, until his throat shredded. Sam refused to eat and methodically broke every glass object within a twenty metre radius; Dean shot at the Impala with three different guns and then fixed her right back up again.
And then that night they'd ditch the weapons, go out back a dodgy store and try to kill the darkness they felt residing in each other. Sometimes they would be at it for hours, seeing how much skin they could rupture and blood they could spill before a bone split. Other times it only took Dean ten minutes to break Sammy, only took Sam two more to have Dean shattering. Then Sam would knuckle into Dean's bruises and make him moan in a whole other way, and Dean's expert hands would just ruin Sam.
Afterward they'd go back indoors and deal to themselves.
Gashes would be stitched up and dosed hatefully with alcohol, bones would be hazardously set, lost joints shoved mercilessly back into place, all without a brother laying one hand on the other. Should they have attempted to help each other, they simply would have gone at it again. They both held – cherished and detested, really – this sort of belief that maybe, if they were shattered and fixed up again enough times, if they kept trying and trying and fucking around after they fucked around and snarling at the world but most of all each other, perhaps their pieces would be put together correctly. Perhaps they would be fixed once and for all.
So if soothing ensued their fighting, cuddling tainted their fucking, it would defeat the whole purpose of being destroyed. Until that puzzle-piece-in-the-right-place moment came, the boys would continue how they always did.
Most nights, after all the blood-letting and horror films and malicious injuries, and then the soft noises and rough hands and uncovered acres of moonlight skin, Sam and Dean clambered into separate beds, grunting in pain as they did so because neither believed in painkillers anymore, faced separate ways, closed their throbbing eyes…
And talked.
"Dean?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm sorry, man."
"Yeah. Yeah, me too, Sammy."
"It sucks, huh?"
"Like a three dollar whore." And then Sam screamed, for a little bit, until his voice sliced off at the end.
"We can't keep doing this Sam."
"I don't care." His voice was vicious, horrible, a little boy left outside in the rain.
"… Me either."
"Why is it like this Dean?"
"Life?"
"Hurting you. Why does it feel okay and like I'm mutilating myself at the same time? Why do I keep doing it if I hate it for all moments except when it's happening?"
"So you mean why are we like this."
"Why are we like this?"
Dean ripped open a fresh row of stitches across his stomach. Released a noise like serrated glass crunching underfoot. "Maybe it's encouraging."
"How do you mean?"
"Seeing someone so ruined almost every week at our own hands. And then we recover."
"So?"
"So we kill everything and everyone. Except each other."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"Well there are a lot healthier ways of reminding each other we're alive, Dean."
"Like what? Like flowers and hugs and bedtime stories?"
"I don't know. Maybe?"
"Give me a break Sam."
"I can't."
That shut Dean up for a few minutes.
"Are we killing each other, Sammy?"
"If we are we're just speeding up the inevitable."
"You know I hate your big words."
"It's going to happen no matter what," Sam clarified and then paused. "You hate me."
Dean didn't deny it. "Do you hate me?"
"Probably not as much as I need you."
"God. Yeah."
And then Dean shifted very directly into uncharted territory and rolled over. His eyes met Sam's and he wondered why he hadn't heard Sam turn over too, wondered if biting Sam's lip until he moaned, brief and foggy, was also a grey area.
Wondered how in the world either man in this room was supposed to survive the chaotic cataclysm of contradiction and desperation and hate that was their lives.
"You're bleeding," Sam said, eyes on Dean's stomach.
"We're all bleeding. I don't think I can keep doing this Sam."
"So what do you want to do about it?"
"Nothing." Dean tensed, released for a moment, tensed again. "I want to hit you every day for the rest of our lives and then I want to scream and save you. From me. From yourself. Whatever."
"That doesn't sound very healthy," Sam noted.
"Healthy got kicked off the agenda twenty years ago."
"Yeah. So what then? Suicide pact?"
"Too close to martyrdom."
"Suicide bombing? Go out with a bang, take some monsters with us?"
"That's kinda Al Qaeda-ry, don't you think? We could just give up."
"And be killed? Bobby would be livid."
"Bobby's just an old man."
"Will we ever be old men, Dean?" Sam blinked, his eyes black in the night.
Dean bit back an enraged snarl – cornered animal instinct; scouring for a way out and perennially bubbling beneath the surface. "I don't have the answers you want to hear, alright, but honestly? No. We're going to die young and bloody and alone, without any successors or children or family except each other."
"Well that doesn't sound very nice at all."
"Is this very nice?" Dean's eyebrows rose, chin jutted at the area in between their beds. Sam looked legitimately contemplative and it was unbearable.
"It's kinda lonely," he said after a while and Dean shut his eyes.
"I fucking hate you, Sam."
Tiniest intake of breath. "I know."
Dean squeezed his eyes closed tighter. "I'm so sorry Sammy. I'm so fucking sorry."
"Shut up Dean. Just shut the fuck up." And Sam rolled back over onto his other side.
The next day a miracle occurred, and it took the very simple form of touch; an underrated sense, taken for granted.
The brothers caught wind of a lone vampire two states over and drove through the day to get there, all muted sunlight and skinned eyes and bittersweet cajoles, hunted it down during the evening, sliced its head off quick and smooth at night. The action went down amid snapped commands and buried sentences, and the whole time Dean felt like shoving his hands underneath Sam's shirt and ripping where the buttons conjoined, Sam felt like pushing Dean onto the nearest surface and bribing that devastatingly ruined expression from him. Or, if that failed, forcibly taking it.
Then they looked at each other and Dean sneered at the loathing in Sam's eyes as he found the nearest back road.
After the fight – a swift one this time, just seventeen different jabs and a feral bite – Sam sat at their motel kitchen table, crying. He was silent and immobile, blood oozing steadily from at least five places on his body, stitches from the last few weeks ruptured back open, tears tracking down his filthy face. He had been using one of their knives to cut out pages of a phone book, one after the other, shredding them into tiny fragments before starting on the next. But he had dropped the knife, clattered landing at his feet, and failed to pick it back up again. That's when he had started crying.
Dean was, amazingly, still in the building. By now he normally would have been across the town and back, throat raw, mind an exploded mesh of blood and bones and suffering. Instead here he was, standing up and crossing the room and hovering behind his little brother, hand raised. He wasn't sure what he was going to do.
Dean's palm came into contact with Sam's left shoulder at the same moment Sam turned around and buried his face into Dean's torso. It hurt, of course, what with both of them being more bruised and battered than the weakest prison inmate – but the intention wasn't to hurt. And that made all the difference. It was also the first contact they'd had for the better part of two years that didn't involve sex or hatred or both.
Miraculously, they stayed like that, holding each other and hurting without meaning to hurt and Dean acknowledged that his face had grown wet and his shirt was getting damp where Sam pressed into it. They didn't say anything, for they both feared that speech would ruin whatever was happening, would smudge the very tender line they had drawn and spiral them into a beating to rival all others. So they clung to each other and it was delicate and it was gentle and it was progress.
Sam and Dean were undoubtedly their own – and each other's – demise, and Dean touching Sam without the urge to fuck him or hurt him was a bright shiny spot in his brain, blinking and distracting, and Sam having his hands and face on Dean's stomach without the urge to open his mouth or tear into wounds was terrifying.
"Fuck," Sam spat out.
"Fuck," Dean agreed.
So even though the next day Sam cracked three of Dean's ribs on the left side, and Dean left Sam with a laceration that would scar tremendously, all pucker and shine on his collarbone, it was progress. Because it didn't take them six hours of silence and the blanketing quiet of darkness to talk. It was in the car, on the way to the hospital (another first), that Sam screamed and Dean cried, and they both apologised profusely.
Sam beat the dashboard with his fists and Dean numbly felt tears on his face until they reached the emergency room, covered in a month's worth of pain and grief and grime, much to the shock and horror of nurses on shift. They were fussed over carted away immediately for medical attention, and both brothers threw an almighty fit when they lost sight of each other, caused such a panicked and calamitous commotion that they were assessed together, treated together and then left in a white-wash room smelling vaguely of paint and acid alone together. Dean spread his hands wide over Sam's rib cage through the hospital gown and Sam shuddered, hooked an arm over Dean's hip.
They curled into each other on one bed and fell asleep that way and it was progress. And even if it all ended how Dean felt sure it would, perhaps that was all they needed.
THE END