Part of my Deleted Scenes series. Full list of fics in reading order available on my profile page. They will make more sense if read in order. :)
"It sucks that we never knew about him," Sam says.
Neither of them have spoken a word to each other since they burned Adam's body, and that was hours ago. Dean found them a place to sleep like he always does after a hunt; always the provider even when he's as upset as he is right now. Not that he'd admit it, but Sam can tell. Since they've been here, Sam's showered and done a load of laundry in the room down the hall with the machines and cleaned four guns, and Dean's just been sitting at the small table in the corner and staring at his hands. Usually when something's bothering him, Dean can't seem to stop moving long enough to breathe, even if that means just pacing back and forth until the carpet wears out. He almost never sits in silence – too afraid of the thoughts that will surface in his own head, probably. So this time, Sam knows his brother really, really isn't okay.
Sam isn't exactly okay either. He's still dizzy from the blood-loss when the ghouls sliced his veins open, and he feels sick when he thinks about how Adam died. They never knew him, but he was still family. Sam really liked him, before he knew it was just a ghoul pretending. If the real Adam was anything like the fake one, Sam hates that they'll never get the chance to meet him. Having a younger brother to teach, to want to protect, made Sam feel a little bit of what Dean must always feel. And he liked it. He liked being looked up to. He liked Adam looking at him like he was someone important. God knows it's been forever since Dean looked at him like that.
"Hm?" Dean asks after way too long, glancing up at Sam with glassy, confused eyes.
"Adam," Sam continues, frowning at the blank, empty look he finds on Dean's face. "We had another brother, all these years. I wish Dad told us about him, I wish we'd gotten to know him."
"Oh." Dean nods and looks back at his hands. "Yeah."
Sam sits down in the chair across from him. "You wanna tell me what's goin' on?"
Dean rolls his eyes and leans back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest and looking more like himself than he has all day. "We just set our brother's corpse on fire. What d'you think."
"It's more than that," Sam says softly. "Ever since he called, you've been …"
"Yeah, 'cause this whole situation is fucked," Dean mutters. "I'm sick of losing friends and family members and feeling like there should've been something we could've done."
Sam nods. He's sick of that too. "I know."
"He was dead before we even got there. If we'd known about him years ago like we should have, maybe we could've helped him."
Sam nods again, and for a while, he doesn't say anything else. He doesn't want to push. Things between him and Dean have been balanced on a tightrope lately; the slightest gust of wind could knock them off and Sam's not sure there's a safety net underneath them anymore. There used to be. Even a year ago, no matter what happened, no matter how bad things got, Sam always knew the fact that they were brothers and the fact that they loved each other would get them through anything, even if they came out the other side with more bruises than when they started. But now? Sam doesn't feel like that security is still there. Too much has happened. Too many miles and months and misunderstandings between them that make the ground under their feet unsteady. He's worried if they get pushed down, they might not be able to get back up.
More than anything, Sam's worried about what will happen when Dean finds out the truth about what he's doing with Ruby. Dean isn't going to understand. He probably won't even try. And Sam still knows it's what he has to do, but he's terrified of losing Dean over it.
"You sure it's not something else?" Sam asks eventually. The last thing he wants is Dean to get mad at him and storm off. But he knows his brother. He knows there's no way Dean's okay about everything that happened; that the father Dean spent his whole life idolizing lied to them about something so important.
Dean sighs and folds his hands together, resting them on the table in front of him and staring intently at them. "Dad took him to a baseball game," he says quietly.
"Yeah," Sam agrees. "Sucks that he never did that for us."
"No, I … it's not like I'm jealous of the kid or something," Dean clarifies, even though Sam knows that isn't true for a second. "It's just … I mean, Dad was always going on and on about family. What we mean to each other, what we do for each other, all that crap. And then he just goes off and starts a new one? And doesn't even tell us about it?"
"I don't think he meant to."
"So?" Dean challenges, looking up at Sam with anger in his green eyes. "He took Adam fishing, Sam! We were stuck in shitty motel rooms our whole childhood, getting shuffled around from place to place and trained like soldiers and never getting to have a scrap of a normal life! We turned out completely screwed up because of it! And Adam got to go fishing?"
"He died getting ripped apart by a ghoul," Sam reasons, but Dean's eyes just flash and he spits back, "Yeah, and I went to Hell! Don't fucking talk to me about how much it sucks to die bloody! I wanna puke when I think about what happened to him, but that doesn't make this okay!"
He has a point, so Sam shuts up.
"If anyone ever found out about the way we were raised? We would've been put in foster care before the end of the day, and Dad would've been thrown in jail! And I always justified that by saying he had no choice, that he was doing it because it was the only way to protect us! But clearly that's not true! He could've given us a normal life, like the one Adam had, he just chose not to!"
"Dean," Sam starts softly, but he has no follow-up and Dean barrels on.
"I mean, what the hell were we? His practice family? The one he got to fuck up with so he knew what not to do the second time around?"
"I don't know," Sam answers truthfully. He knew Dean was upset about all this, and now he's regretting that he asked because he has no answers and no way of making Dean feel better.
"Why're you not pissed about this?" Dean demands. "You were always the one who hated him. You should be even more pissed about this than I am! Dad met the kid around the time you left us for Stanford! It's like he replaced you!"
"I never hated him, Dean," Sam says, trying to keep his voice steady even though the dig stings. "I spent a lot of years mad at him, for everything you're mad at him about right now. And then I realized that he wasn't just our Dad. He was a person. He made mistakes. Maybe he made a lot of them, but that's because he was human. He did the best he could in a really shitty situation."
Dean glares. "I told you that a million times when we were growing up, and you always ignored me!"
"Maybe it's something I had to figure out on my own."
Dean crosses his arms again and looks away, grumbling something under his breath that Sam doesn't catch. Sam just stares at him, willing Dean to look back and give Sam some sign that there's something he could say to make everything okay again, but instead Dean stands up and walks a few steps away. Sam squeezes his hands into fists and closes his eyes. He gets up too, following his brother and stopping him with a hand on his shoulder.
"What, Sam?" Dean asks, like he doesn't really want to know.
Sam turns him around and pulls him into a kiss. Dean kisses him back for half a second but then ducks his head to separate their lips.
"What're you doing?" he asks, and Sam hates that he doesn't know.
"I … it's all we have left," comes out of his mouth, in a small, pathetic whisper, and Dean huffs and removes himself from Sam's arms.
"M'goin' for a drive," he mumbles, not meeting Sam's eyes as he gets the car keys and walks slowly out of the room.
Sam blinks back tears as he watches Dean go, and then he clenches his jaw against a strong urge to pick the TV up and throw it across the room after Dean is gone. He calls Ruby, for the billionth time in two weeks, because he doesn't know what else to do. Predictably, he gets her voicemail again – she's either dead or avoiding him – and he leaves a growly, accusatory message for her to stop dicking around and call him back. She probably won't. She hasn't, for weeks now. All Sam has to say about it is that she better have a really fucking good excuse for leaving him stranded for so long. He could've been practicing all this time, getting stronger for the show-down against Lilith, instead of slowly running out of the blood she left him and getting twitchier and more agitated by the day.
Eventually Sam gives up waiting for his brother to come back and goes to bed. At this point, he's not even sure he wants Dean to come back tonight. It sucks when Dean isn't here, but at least if they're not together they can't fight.
Dean does come back, in the middle of the night long after Sam had fallen into a fitful sleep. He crawls into the bed with Sam and kisses him, pushing his tongue into Sam's mouth and his hand into Sam's sweats before Sam's even fully opened his eyes. Sam's groggy and confused but he doesn't have the strength to push Dean away or ask questions that might make Dean leave again. He pulls Dean into his arms and kisses him sloppily, his limbs heavy from sleep and his brain still foggy. Dean shoves at Sam's clothes while he licks around in Sam's mouth. He tastes like whiskey and cigarettes, and Sam's never seen Dean smoke in his life. It hurts too much to consider what that might mean, so Sam shoves the thought away.
Dean pushes lube-slicked fingers into Sam's body. He preps him quickly, pressing against the spot deep inside that makes Sam's muscles flutter and his heart race. He rocks against Dean's hand, desperate for more and still not completely awake. Dean pulls his hand away eventually and slides his cock into Sam, filling Sam up from the inside. He rolls his hips into Sam's, settling into the rhythm that's theirs and always stitches up every wound Sam's ever had, at least for the moment. They're double-edged and fleeting, moments like this, but Sam clings to them because he was right, before – it really is all they have left. And when Dean's on top of him, kissing him like he can't remember how to stop, for just a while everything is okay again.
He keeps Sam cradled in his arms when it's over, trailing his fingers through Sam's hair and his other hand slowly up and down Sam's back. Sam curls into his side, resting his head on his brother's shoulder and pretending he isn't too big to lie like this anymore. When he was younger, this was his favorite spot in the whole world. Nothing could ever be wrong in his big brother's arms.
"Were you with someone else tonight?" Sam hears himself ask in a tiny voice.
"No," Dean murmurs, kissing Sam's forehead. "Some drunk chick kissed me. And I let her for about twenty seconds and then I pushed her away and came back here."
Sam nods. He believes Dean, because he wants Dean to be telling the truth.
"M'sorry," Dean continues.
"For what?" Sam asks, frowning.
Dean shrugs a little. "Dunno. Everything, I guess. Blowing up at you. Leaving. Whatever else I did."
"It's alright," Sam whispers. He kisses the section of Dean's chest his lips can reach. It is alright, but only because on the list of things in their life that aren't right now, Dean getting mad and taking off for a few hours is so far towards the bottom it's barely worth mentioning. The idea grips Sam's chest so strongly he can't breathe for a minute. On instinct, he moves in closer to his brother and tries with everything he has in him to pretend it'll fix everything like it used to.