Just wanted to express my appreciation for my newest hardworking editor, Xparrot. It's a thankless job, but thank you. -K
The B.M.
K Hanna Korossy
He was stumbling back to bed, half-asleep and grumbling to himself that he hadn't grabbed his slippers. The stone floor of the hallway was freezing, the tile of the bathroom where he'd just been even more so. They should think about carpeting, except with the amount of blood and other fluids they'd already shed there, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. He'd think about it in bed. Mmm, warm memory foam…
"…burned my mother, and it cursed my brother…"
Dean slammed to a halt and, suddenly a lot more awake, turned to stare at the closed door he was just passing. The soft, tinny music continued to play in Sam's room.
"Oh, the road so far, yeah the road—"
He didn't knock, just slammed the door open, hard enough that it swung back and hit the wall behind it.
Sam jumped guiltily on the bed, scrambling up like it was twenty years earlier and Dean was catching him looking at their few pictures of Mom.
That wasn't far wrong.
Dean zeroed in on Sam's laptop, where the final notes played of a song he'd heard far more than he wanted to those last few days. And sure enough, on the small screen, a cardboard Impala was just being pushed across the stage.
"Dude! You're kidding, right?"
Sam looked caught between sheepish and defiant, between the bed where the musical Supernatural continued to play and his irate brother still standing in the doorway. "What? Calliope had me in the basement—I didn't get to see half the play. Marie made me a copy."
"Marie made you… Why?"
"Dude, it's a musical. About our lives. Made by high-schoolers." Sam spread his hands like he was stating the obvious.
Which he was. "Exactly!" Dean shot back. "What about that makes you want to watch it?"
"Really? You're not even curious?"
Dean glared his answer.
Sam paused, cocking his head. "Dean…why does all this bother you so much?"
"Why doesn't it bother you?!" Dean gestured with full exasperation now.
"Yeah, okay," Sam crossed his arms, "so the deaths aren't exactly fun to watch, or Hell, and thank God they left Ruby out of it—"
"—because it's PG-rated," Dean said flatly.
Sam ignored that. "But, man, it's also about us killing Azazel. Saving people, saving the world…"
Behind Sam, the figures on stage were just lighting a funeral pyre. "…letting you die," Dean continued for him, "letting Dad die, starting the Apocalypse…"
Sam abruptly huffed a laugh. Even as Dean gave him a suspicious look, his brother nodded like he got something Dean didn't.
Dean never had liked that nod.
"It figures," Sam said ruefully.
Know-it-all, over-thinking little brothers. "What?"
"I look at this and see all the good we've done, all the things we've overcome. You look it at and see all your failures."
Dean flinched.
Sam stepped forward, one hand coming up. "That's not—" As Dean moved back, he stopped, arm dropping. "You're the one who thinks they're failures, Dean, not me."
Marie in her stupid Sam-wig was starting to sing that stupid "Single Man Tear" song. God save them from teenage girls. Including the one standing in front of him. "Whatever," Dean muttered, and turned toward the door.
Long fingers grabbed his arm. Anyone else grabbed him like that and Dean's body reacted in full-on fight mode. But Sam it knew.
And Sam knew him. "Did you see the second act?"
He half-turned. "With the robots and the aliens? No thanks." Cleaning up Calliope and calling in the found missing persons had been a good excuse for distraction. He'd only circled back at the end of the play. To the "B.M.," and Marie-Sam saying, "The two of us against the world," and Sam looking at him with a smile and, "What she said."
"Cas can only pull Sam's soul out of the Cage, not his body, so Dean and Bobby build him a robot to live in. Turns out some aliens want the robot, and Sam, for a war on their planet. Dean sends some ninjas with them instead. Then he tries to share his body with Sam's soul, but Dean ends up in a woman instead for a while, until Sam finally figures out a way to resurrect his own body. And then they go back to hunting again."
Dean's mouth moved in silent disbelief a minute. "Seriously?" he finally spluttered. "This is what you want to watch. Robots, and-and ninjas, and…and she said our story was bad fiction?" He was reaching for Sam's laptop before he even formed the idea of destroying the DVD.
Sam intercepted him with those stupidly long arms and soft eyes. "Dean, wait. Wait! Don't you get it?"
Dean jerked away from him, suddenly furious. "What, Sam! That our lives are just some…whackadoo stories people think they can mess around with? That it doesn't matter if Bobby was a real person who died bloody, or that Hell is there in our heads every freakin' second of every freakin' day, or that I raised you like you were my kid and the idea of jumping your bones makes me want to puke?"
Sam looked at him for a minute, all sad and knowing, and Dean was just…he was drained and didn't want to do this anymore. He turned back to the door.
"They envy us."
Sam's quiet words took a second to sink in, Dean already one foot in the hallway. He paused, nonplussed. "What?"
"The robot and the ninjas and-and the gender-swap, they're all about how badly Dean wants to save Sam. Like Sam wanted to save him from Hell."
The ache in his voice snagged at Dean like nothing else could. He didn't move, frozen in place as the character Cas sang something in the background.
"Demian and Barnes. Marie. Maeve—well, maybe not Maeve. But the fans, the people who want to watch the show and write the stories and put on plays? They're not doing it out of some twisted masochism, or to make fun of us, the losses and the bad times."
Dean turned his head to the side, watching Sam obliquely, the open hands, the pleading posture.
"They're drawn to us, our life, because they wish they had what we do. A purpose, a chance to save the world, yeah. But mostly? A brother who loves you so much, he'd do anything for you."
Dean grimaced. Marie had said that, too, that it was about family, but she was an orphan; of course she wanted loving siblings and heroic parents. But the guys at the Supernatural convention had said the same thing. And Chuck's publisher. And some of those fan stories they'd come across when they'd first searched, disbelievingly, for Chuck's fans. And, according to Sam, even freakin' Calliope.
And…Dean understood that. Because without Sam, none of this would've been possible, let alone survivable. He wouldn't even have wanted to try. And because of Sam, he would not have traded his life with anyone, not even those happy schmucks with homes and families and nice normal, safe lives.
Like all those people who wrote about them.
He cleared his throat. "That's 'cause I'm an awesome brother," he rasped, looking back at Sam.
Who was actually grinning at him, the little bitch. "Actually, I think Marie's a 'Sam-girl.'"
"You're a Sam-girl," Dean grumbled.
"You wanna watch the second act?" Sam offered, stepping back. Behind him on the screen, people screamed as the scarecrow exploded into purple goo. And then started to clap.
Dean glanced back out into the hallway toward his soft, cooling bed. Versus Sam's hard mattress and a tiny screen playing the surreal story of two guys named Sam and Dean.
"The aliens have tentacles," Sam coaxed, because the bastard had seen just enough of Dean's hentai.
"Shut up," Dean muttered, then shoved Sam to the far side of the bed to make room.
And, you know? Watching with his brother next to him to crack in-jokes with and make fun of for choking up when they got to the, okay, kinda moving reunion scene? Wasn't half bad.
The End
