Sam-centric wincest ramblings, title courtesy of Richard Siken's poem by the same name. Spans pre-series til some point after season 8 because I'm a masochist and live for angsty Winchester siblings.
a primer for the small weird loves
On Sam's tenth birthday Dean is the knight in shining armour, arriving home from school via Walmart with a cake and the promise of dad's swift return. Sam remembers looking at his brother, hair flattened by rain but looking triumphant as he placed the store-bought chocolate sponge on the motel table, and feeling his chest swell. They don't have any candles, but Dean finds some matches and spikes them into the icing, Sam laughing as he tries to get them all extinguished before they burn down. It's another three days before dad gets back.
...
Sam is fourteen when he looks at Dean and sees him as everyone else sees him, all chiseled jaw and self-assured lazy grin. He tamps the fluttering feeling down and turns his gaze away and refuses to meet Dean's eye for three days straight.
...
Sam is fifteen when Casey asks him to the school dance and he wonders why his initial reaction is to feel slightly sick. He's been in town almost two months and Casey is a lovely girl but Sam's starting to think that maybe that's the problem. He says yes, and Dean laughs at him when he retells the story with a sense of dread.
...
When Sam is seventeen he stays over at a girl's house for the first time and has to shimmy movie-style down the climbing ivy at 2am. In hushed tones he'd called Dean, and he's relieved to find the Chevy waiting a couple houses down, Dean smirking at him over the steering wheel, looks like someone got lucky, Sammy boy. He gets into the passenger side and mumbles a thank you for the ride before staring resolutely out of the window, ignoring both Dean's jibes and the feeling of having committed the ultimate betrayal rising in his stomach.
...
At Stanford, he meets Jessica and things click into place. She's not like the girls he's been with in the past – she makes him feel real, makes him feel safe. She's strong and assertive and let's him know when he's being a jerk. She bakes pretty damn good cookies too, which only endears her to him more. Sam pretends not to notice that in these respects she's pretty similar to Dean, and Jess tries not to notice that whenever she asks about his family he changes the subject.
...
He's twenty-two when Dean falls back into his life, tangled limbs and hitching breath like they're fighting over the TV remote in a motel a lifetime ago. Dean and Stanford are two things that fail to compute in Sam's head; he can't quite reconcile the image of one within the other. They haven't spoken for two years. When he feels Dean's breath on his face in the dark apartment and his brother's hands braced against his shoulders he feels fourteen and scared again, and wishes like anything that Dean had stayed away and he'd stayed curled against Jess.
...
Jess has been dead three months when Sam finds himself sharing a bed with his brother like they're children again. Dean had claimed he'd heard him crying out in his sleep and Sam is too tired and too defeated to argue. To start with Dean is sat against the headboard absent-mindedly rubbing his shoulder and murmuring some regurgitated spiel about the grieving process and how things just run their course y'know Sammy this'll feel better you gotta trust me on that and then Sam is waking up with Dean's arm heavy across his ribs and his brother's sleep-breath against his neck and he thinks he either wants to never move again or to die right there.
...
The first time he kisses Dean it's almost nine months since Jessica's death and he's breathing out whiskey in clouds. He can't remember when he started drinking but he knows that when Dean hauled him up from the floor their faces were so close it hurt, accentuated by the buzzing in his head and the gaping hole in his chest where Jess used to be. Dean is speaking and pulling the empty bottle of Jack from his hand and Sam is gripping the front of his brother's shirt like it's the only thing keeping him standing. His hand finds its way to the back of Dean's neck, searching for purchase, and Sam isn't sure if the alcohol is to blame or if it's only allowing him to do what his self-loathing has kept him from doing before. Dean tastes like cheap coffee and home.
...
The first time Dean kisses him neither of them are drunk, but both are surprised. It's late and the road glints with rain in the streetlamps, the car pulled over on the side of the highway while Sam fumbles with a flashlight and an atlas. Dean has been quiet while the radio thrums out a fuzzy rendition of Springsteen's Born to Run and Sam has been thinking it's just too fucking fitting for the two of them, when Dean leans across and pulls him in by the lapel. Sam drops the flashlight.
...
After Dean goes to hell, Sam feels everything turn itself inside out and fall apart only to be stitched up again, coarse and wrong. He drives and he hunts, and he goes to bars and drinks himself into bed with strange men with sandy hair and leather jackets.
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Three weeks after Dean is yanked out of hell Sam finds himself curled around him in the latest motel, convinced if he lets him go he'll evaporate and Sam will be alone again. Dean wakes in the night, thrashing and sweating, and Sam holds him until the tremors leave his bones, whispering it's okay, it's okay Dean, it's okay into his hair. It takes Dean a long time to look at him the same way after he learns about the demon blood, and that almost hurts more than losing Dean completely.
...
Sam still feels the surge in his chest when he sees Dean since losing his soul, but it's almost like it's a separate entity. He knows it annoys his brother, but there's nothing he can do about it. Sometimes he catches Dean looking at him from across the room or out of the corner of his eye whilst driving, and it takes them both getting drunk for Sam to feel anything other than apathy towards him. The motel room is dark and the bed is too small for the both of them but Dean pushes them down anyway, and Sam thinks dimly that if this is how things are without his soul, then he can survive without it.
...
When the wall in his head starts to break down, Sam can't look at Dean without seeing Lucifer over his shoulder. Eventually even digging the trench in his palm until his vision blurs stops blocking out the other world and Dean is panicking without showing it. Lucifer doesn't let Sam sleep, so Dean buys more coffee and talks through the night about where they've been and hey Sammy do ya remember playing baseball in Bobby's yard when dad left us there one summer and Sammy you know we're gonna get through this you're gonna be okay and Sam lets himself be rocked.
...
Dean gets back from purgatory and Sam feels the rug pulled out from under him. The accusing looks when Dean asks if he looked for him, the tightening of fingers around his wrist when he refuses to meet his brother's eyes lest they pierce him through. For two days they don't talk more than is necessary and then Sam can't take it any more, can't take the hurt on Dean's face. They're heading into a roadside diner on the interstate when he pulls Dean into the shadows, shoves him back against the brick, kisses him hard. Dean grapples with him, what the fuck Sam what are you doing, before changing his mind and crushing him closer. Sam feels at home for the first time in a year.
...
They're sitting on the hood of the Impala, beers glowing amber through the glass in the waning sunlight. When Sam looks at Dean he sees the same disgruntled youth who pulled him out of a bar on his seventeenth birthday, the same boy who taught him to drive in the backroads of Wyoming while dad was on a job and Sam was growing restless in his fifteen year old self. They're both older, and there are soft lines spidering out from the corners of Dean's eyes when he smiles like he is now, and there are flecks of grey creeping in at his temples. Sam thinks he's still the most beautiful thing he's seen.