Title: The Mirror of Erised
Author: frozen_delight
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Warnings: Mild incest.
Word count: ~ 4500
Beta: Many, many thanks to the lovely misplaced_ad for giving me all the right pointers and being generally invaluable. All remaining mistakes are mine of course.
Summary: The boys encounter a cursed mirror and Sam learns that his brother's been keeping secrets from him – and the fact that he's also read the Harry Potter books is just one of them.
Set in S2 sometime after Playthings, ergo in January 2007*, before The Deathly Hallows was published.
A/N: For my dear friend stardust_made. Merry Christmas!
The Mirror of Erised
Margaret Roosevelt folded her hands in her lap and looked at them with a grave expression. "I'm so relieved that you've come."
Sam could feel Dean fidgeting uncomfortably beside him on the sofa and lightly kicked his ankle. He didn't need to be any more aware of his brother than he already was, and all the wriggling and squirming right at his side was making him antsy.
"How do you know Bobby?" Dean asked their host, a note of suspicion creeping into his voice. Sam kicked him again, earning himself a light glare. One day he would get through to his brother's thick noggin that treating everyone they met during their cases like possible murder suspects or worse wasn't the wisest course of action, but today clearly wasn't that day.
Fortunately, Mrs. Roosevelt appeared unperturbed by Dean's obvious display of distrust. "Mr. Singer helped me out when an antique vase I'd sold ended up killing its new owner. Well, not the vase itself, but the ghost that haunted it."
"Bobby told us you collect and sell valuable artifacts?" Sam asked and she nodded. "So has something similar happened again – did you sell something and your client ended up dead?"
"Not exactly. I recently purchased a very ancient object from a contact in Eastern Europe. A mirror. I haven't sold it yet. But –"
"But what?" Dean demanded, sitting up straighter.
"Mr. Singer told me on the phone that in all likelihood it's a cursed object. It's certainly not –" She stopped short and ran her hands uneasily over her skirt. "There's something not natural about it."
Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw Dean open his mouth again, no doubt to fire out another brusque question, so he hastily stepped down on his brother's foot. Dean bit back a yelp and scowled. Sam ignored him. "What do you mean?" he asked her to clarify in the soothing voice he reserved for interviewing witnesses.
Their host glanced up at the paneled ceiling, a frown on her face. "It doesn't do what a mirror normally does – it doesn't show you your face when you look into it."
"Can you tell us what you saw?"
"I saw my dead husband."
Sam exchanged a quick glance with his brother. This sounded more like a haunting than a cursed object.
"Mrs. Roosevelt… it is possible that the ghost of your husband is haunting the mirror," Sam said carefully, leaning forward. "I understand that this is a difficult and conflicted situation for you… but we need to put his spirit to rest. For good."
She shook her head. "Don't worry, I've made my peace with my husband's death. But I don't think it's his ghost. Because everyone who's looked into the mirror so far has seen someone different."
"Oh," Sam murmured, honestly surprised.
"I'm still waiting for the punchline," Dean mumbled somewhat impatiently beside him. Sam tried to step on his foot again, but apparently his brother had anticipated the move this time, so that Sam hit his heel hard against the lower edge of the sofa. Despite his best attempts he could not suppress a pitiful whimper. Dean simply smirked at him.
Mrs. Roosevelt blinked. "One of my assistants died."
"Now we're getting there," Dean drawled and Sam wondered if maybe first strangling his brother and then salting and burning some bones wasn't the best way to handle this case. "What happened?" he asked.
"We all looked into the mirror when we were trying to insure its authenticity and assess its value, but only Laura died. She was affected by it more than the rest of us. She kept going back to it and standing in front of it for hours on end. Ultimately, we couldn't even drag her away from it by force. It was almost as if she were rooted to the spot. And then she just sort of withered and collapsed on herself."
Sam shot his brother a questioning look, but Dean appeared just as stumped as he was. No creature or ghost they'd encountered so far sounded anything like this – a spirit that could change its shape and was only deadly to some. "How long from the moment she first looked into the mirror to the moment she died?" he asked.
"Five days, I think."
"And do you have any idea who she saw?"
Margaret Roosevelt sighed. "White lady. She said she saw a white lady."
oo0oo
In the middle of the spacious, oak-wood-paneled room they'd been led into stood a tall, ancient-looking mirror with a gilded Gothic frame.
Dean froze in the doorway and groaned. "No way we're getting that monstrosity into a curse box!"
"If we're lucky, it's just a haunting and we won't have to worry about that," Sam quipped back and shouldered his way past his brother. After he'd taken a couple of steps further into the room, he could make out the inscription that was carved around the top of the frame. It read: Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi. "I don't believe it," Sam whispered in awe, staring at the mirror.
Behind him, Dean whined, "The mirror from the Sorcerer's Stone – what's next? You-Know-Who's real too and we have to start salting and burning Horcruxes?"
Sam spun around to gape at his brother. "You've actually read Harry Potter?"
He remembered the release of The Goblet of Fire back in 2000. Dad had dragged them through the country as was his custom, and since he saw zero chance of lining up in front of a bookshop for hours to purchase his heart's desire, Sam had pre-ordered his copy, regularly updated the delivery address to the nearest PO box and then snuck out to get it first thing in the morning on the release date. Dean had mocked him for days.
"I can read," Dean answered defensively, glowering at him.
Sam snorted, biting back a comment how all he'd ever seen Dean read was Dad's journal and Busty Asian Beauties. "But Harry Potter? Dude, I'm surprised your manliness survived intact."
Dean scowled at him. "I broke my ankle. It was either that or watch Days of Our Lives with Bobby."
Clumsily, Sam grabbed his brother's arm. His chest felt uncomfortably tight all of a sudden. "When did you break your ankle?"
As soon as he saw the panic that must have been written all over Sam's face, Dean's expression softened. "Relax, Tarzan," he said, shrugging off Sam's hand. "It was in summer '04, okay, and I stayed with Bobby, and it was fine."
There were a thousand questions Sam wanted to ask. What happened? Was it a hunting accident? Was it Dad's fault? Did it happen when you were on your own? But what came out instead was, "I… Why didn't you call me?"
Dean gave him an unfathomable look. Sam expected him to shake off the question with a joke about Sam being too much of a girl and Dean being a grown man and not needing a nanny and God knows what. But even though he'd grown up with Dean and knew him better than anyone else in the entire world, he wasn't prepared for Dean to meet his question with one of his own. "Would you have come?"
Sam stared at him. He'd spent the summer of 2004 with Jess and her parents. He tried to picture himself as he'd been back then, lying at the pool, spreading sunscreen over Jess's warm, sweet-smelling skin, with the difference that his phone suddenly started vibrating in his pocket. He imagined himself checking the caller ID, seeing his brother's name for the first time in a year. The thought alone made his heart beat faster.
Hastily, he looked away. "Yeah, Dean. Of course I would've."
oo0oo
Before they had the chance to inspect the mirror in greater detail, a pretty brunette joined them and introduced herself as Stacy, one of Mrs. Roosevelt's research assistants. She gave them all the information on the mirror and its history that she'd been able to collect.
"So the first known owner was a Russian merchant in the 17th century by the name of Grigory Grigoryevich Ourumov," said Dean as he bent over the files together with Sam, his chest hot against Sam's back, and took great care to pronounce the name as if it were the most ridiculous thing in the universe. "He died relatively young – you think that was the mirror, James Bond or just cheap prostitutes?"
"Dude, get your mind out of the gutter," Sam sighed next to him and jerked his head away when his brother's hair once again brushed against his neck. It tickled and was annoying. That was all.
"Hey, it says here that he never married and lived together with his brother and his wife. So unless you're telling me he died a virgin –" Dean trailed off, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively.
"We don't even know if the information is entirely legit," Sam insisted, quickly glancing up at Stacy.
"Sorry if I couldn't verify it all," she said apologetically, "I'm an Assyriologist, usually, not an expert on Old Church Slavonic."
"Wow!" Dean exclaimed, sounding honestly impressed, and Stacy smiled.
"So who did you see in the mirror?" Dean asked her with a flirtatious grin. Sam refocused his attention on the files in his hands.
After a moment of silence, which was probably filled with heated gazes and grins full of promise, Stacy's confused voice made him look up again. "I didn't see anyone. I saw those delicious chocolate éclairs they make at the coffee shop down the street."
oo0oo
"So it's not just a shapeshifter ghost that looks like a lost loved one to everyone who gazes into the mirror and kills the few people who see its real shape?" Dean wondered aloud once Stacy had left them alone.
Sam nodded. "Sounds more like the real Harry Potter deal – your heart's desire, whatever that is." He fixed Dean with a serious expression. "There's only one way to find out."
Dean shook his head, violently. "No way. Are you crazy? We could be dead in five days."
"Most people who looked didn't die."
Dean blinked. "Well then let me take a look," he said, and Sam just wanted to hit him. Even more annoying than his refusal to get on with normal people unless he considered them fuckable was Dean's ever present need to sacrifice himself and throw himself face first at danger. It was stupid, it was patronizing, it was unbearably sad. And it robbed Sam of the honest chance to change his destiny and become a good man in spite of everything.
"No, Dean, didn't you hear? Everyone sees something different," he tried to reason with his brother, thinking that logic would probably do more than righteous anger and younger brother whining. "We've both got to look if we want to have something sound to work on."
For a moment, Dean looked like he wanted to argue, but then he just nodded in the slightly resigned way he'd given in to all of Sam's requests since their argument by the riverside. "Okay, let's do this."
Together, they stepped in front of the mirror – and gasped simultaneously.
No matter how hung-over he'd felt the next day, Sam recalled everything that had happened that night in Cornwall, Connecticut. Not just Dean promising to kill Sam if he had to. But also the feel of Dean's face under his hands. And apparently one fleeting moment of getting his hands on his brother uninhibited was enough to break down whatever working agreement he'd had with himself ever since he'd discovered at the age of fifteen that his older brother was beautiful. Why else would he now look into a mirror and see himself, holding Dean's face, kissing him, something he'd never fully dared to imagine before?
It took all of Sam's willpower to look away. Dean also tore himself away from the mirror, his eyes wide.
"What did you see?" Sam asked him and cringed at how high and breathless his voice came out.
Dean swallowed, then laughed. "A dozen cheerleaders, man. Hot cheerleaders. And one of them did this incredible thing with her tongue –" In a tantalizing motion, his tongue darted out and slid over his lips, the same plush lips that Sam had seen himself lick in the mirror, and it was maddening, distracting and deeply unfair.
"Thanks, I don't really want to know," Sam cut him off. Even to his own ears his voice sounded rather gruff.
"What's got your panties into a twist, Rapunzel?"
Sam briefly closed his eyes and thought back to the Harry Potter books. What had the characters seen there? Anything other than incestuous kissing would do just fine. The first thing he remembered was Ron, because Ron had always been his favorite character and he'd never really been able to identify with Harry. Ron had seen himself as head boy and Quidditch champion –
He opened his eyes again and looked straight at Dean, because one of the many useful things his big brother had taught him was how to sell a good lie. "I was a lawyer," he recounted, his voice at least a little steadier, "I had a Stanford law degree, and I had Jess…" He trailed off, not sure what to add to make the picture more convincing.
Going by the heartbroken look his brother sent him before his face shuttered, he'd been convincing enough. "Right," Dean said shortly, not looking at him, and bent over his duffel bag.
Sam stared at his brother's rigid shoulders and almost hated himself for not owing up to his sick fantasies instead.
oo0oo
They tried smashing the mirror, but it wouldn't break.
They tried torching the mirror, but it wouldn't burn.
"Dammit!" Sam exclaimed angrily. He was feeling more and more agitated. The mirror was close and even though he tried hard to avoid standing right in front of it, he found himself in the position several times, without quite knowing how he'd got there, each time receiving a good glimpse of his brother's stupid, precious face, mashed against his, kissing. Each time it became harder to tear himself away.
"Let's send an owl to Dumbledore," Dean, the real Dean, the Dean who wasn't kissing him suggested behind him. Turning around to face him, Sam noticed that Dean was looking stubbornly at anything but the mirror. It was almost as if he knew what Sam had seen in it – but he couldn't know that, he just couldn't, Sam decided over his pounding heart. "Magical mirror gone rogue, please return to Room of Requirement immediately. Oh wait – he's dead."
Sam chuckled despite himself. "So that leaves just you and me, then. And since we can neither secure nor destroy the mirror, we'll have to find out more about it."
Dean sighed comically. "Research. Great. My favorite."
oo0oo
Two hours later Dean wasn't the only one moaning with frustration.
"There's nothing on white lady spirits in Slavic mythology which suggests she's tied to a mirror," Sam complained over the rim of his laptop, "and I couldn't find any useful connections between Wilkie Collins and Rowling either –"
"Wilkie Collins?"
"The Woman in White? It's a classic, Dean."
"Whatever you say, Rory Gilmore."
"And there's no lore on the Mirror of Erised. I just keep on hitting one Harry Potter forum after the next. I did come across this really interesting theory on the Horcruxes, though – so what if Voldemort –"
Dean groaned and hid his face behind the file he was perusing. "My God, you're a freak."
A couple of hours ago, Sam would probably still have hit and teased Dean until he admitted that he was just as keen to find out what would happen to Harry and his friends, but that had been before he'd seen himself kissing his brother, so Sam merely shrugged and turned his attention back to his laptop. Somewhat reluctantly, he closed the tab where he'd stumbled across what he considered seriously amazing speculation about the final book of the series, and googled Grigory Grigoryevich Ourumov. He squinted at the search results and grit his teeth to keep his mind from wandering back to what he'd seen in the mirror every other second. He could only hope he'd soon pick up on something that would help them solve this case as easily as the one with Constance Welch. Otherwise someone else would die soon, and Sam's dick would fall off from blood congestion.
On the other side of the table, Dean suddenly started whistling. "Dude, get this: Laura was pregnant."
"So?"
"What if – what if she wasn't talking about a white lady-lady?" Sam stared at him nonplussed. "What if it's not about a spirit, but spirits?" Dean continued and winked conspicuously, looking pleased with himself as though he'd made a brilliant pun.
"You're not making any sense," Sam spluttered, doing his best to ignore how his crotch took a lively interest even in Dean's cheapest jokes.
"White Lady. The cocktail, asshat."
Sam blinked and connected the dots. "You're saying that… she craved alcohol because she wasn't allowed to drink?"
Dean smirked.
"Hey," Sam cried out, glancing at the few details on Grigory Grigoryevich Ourumov that his search had yielded, "the Russian dude – the first known owner of the mirror – what if he never married and stayed with his brother because he was in love with his sister-in-law?" He blinked again, thinking fast, and then the remaining details slotted into place. "So what if he didn't?" he asked quietly.
"What? Bang her?"
"Exactly. What if that's why he died – because he didn't?"
Dean shuddered. "I always knew you could die of too little action."
Sam ignored him and carried on, "So Rowling heard of the legend of the Mirror of Erised somewhere, but she got part of it wrong –"
"Not the only thing she got wrong," Dean muttered darkly. "The whole Harry-Ginny-thing… just gross, man."
"And I'm the freak here," Sam scoffed with raised eyebrows. Dean glared at him. Sam rolled his eyes and turned the conversation back to the case. "So Erised – it's desire, but backwards, and not just a fancy play of words to make the mirror seem more mystical. It's literally backwards. A desire that turns on itself. That offers no escape. That turns into a curse."
"Didn't know you were a poet, Sammy. Cute."
"I'm serious, Dean," Sam insisted.
"You mean the mirror only kills the people who don't give in to their heart's desire," Dean asked him slowly and then looked away, "because it's forbidden for some reason or other?"
Having Dean spell it out so clearly suddenly brought home to Sam what a dilemma he'd landed himself in. Fuck. "Jackpot," he heard himself say distantly, and then for a while he registered nothing, feeling too queasy and dizzy, until his vision cleared a little and he saw that Dean had closed the file, pushed back his chair and was reaching for his jacket.
"Where are you going?" Sam asked him, panic thrumming inside him. He hadn't given himself away, right? Right? "Murderous mirror out there, remember?"
Dean tilted his head in that peculiar way of his that announced he was going to be a particularly obnoxious dick. "While you were geeking out over Horcruxes, I managed to make a breakthrough in our case, so I deserve a break. Why don't you do some more research, princess, and try to find out what can break the curse, while I go and have a little fun with Stacy?"
"Stacy?" Sam repeated blindly.
"Mrs. Roosevelt's assistant," Dean said, brandishing a scrap of paper with a phone number scrawled over it. Sam felt an irrational impulse to snatch it away from his brother.
"Whatever," he grumbled, and turned back to his laptop. Unseeingly, he stared at the screen in front of him. He was well and truly screwed.
oo0oo
When Dean came back a couple of hours later, he smelt faintly of liquor and carried a bag of burgers and two cans of soda. The total absence of loose-limbed afterglow swagger made Sam look up at him in concern.
"How was Stacy?" he asked softly.
"Dunno," Dean replied shortly and handed him a burger. "Didn't feel like calling her."
"Oh," Sam said, and wasn't sure if he managed to suppress a pleased smile entirely. He suddenly felt considerably more at ease. Dean's presence and the warm burger soothed him, washing away the anxiousness he'd experienced previously, when he'd waited for his brother's return and couldn't stop thinking about that accursed mirror.
However, as soon as they'd both finished their burgers, Dean proceeded to ask with an urgency that surprised Sam, "Sammy, tell me you've found something."
"The lore is pretty clear on the point that a curse associated with taboos can only be broken by breaking taboos," Sam explained. His throat felt dry.
Dean eyed him a little warily. "So what, we go back to the mirror and smoke weed in front of it?" he asked.
"Dean, I don't think a bit of weed is going to cut it. I mean, it's not like you and I have never gotten high before."
"So what is it you're saying?"
Sam swallowed hard. This might ruin his relationship with his brother forever, but at least no one else would end up dead. "Can you just – come with me and trust me?"
"What? Why?"
"Just – please?" Sam pleaded with him.
Dean stared at him for a moment, then shook his head, looking slightly defeated. "Okay, Sammy," he said, "let's go."
oo0oo
"What now?" Dean whispered when they stood back in front of the mirror. He sounded more terrified than Sam had ever heard him. Or maybe that was just Sam projecting.
Instead of an answer, Sam reached for his brother's face with trembling fingers and a pounding heart, and quickly pressed a kiss on his lips. Dean was warm and frozen beneath him. He tasted of bacon, Chapstick and Velveeta cheese.
The moment their lips touched, the mirror emitted a beam of bright blue light. They sprung apart and stared. The blue ray grew brighter and bigger, until it enveloped every inch of the mirror. For an instant, it seemed as though the entire mirror were lit from within. Then the blue flame flared up green and disappeared, and when Sam glanced at the mirror again, all he could see was the reflection of their stunned faces.
"We broke the curse, Dean," he exclaimed, lightheaded with relief, and extended a hand to clap it on his brother's shoulder. But then he recalled just how it had happened and was no longer sure if his touch would be welcome, so he let his hand drop listlessly halfway.
"Yeah," Dean ground out, his voice gravelly. He glanced at Sam, then quickly looked down again. "How did you know?" he asked, his eyes trained on his shoes. "Was it your psychic crap?"
The uncertainty and guilt in his brother's voice stopped Sam short. "Know what?" he repeated.
"What I saw," Dean mumbled, still looking resolutely at his own feet.
"What you – Christ!" Sam cried out and cupped his brother's face in both hands. "Look at me, Dean." Dean had never been good at denying him when Sam put that particular pleading note in his voice, and Sam was ready to use that shamelessly to his advantage. Dean's eyes were murky, wrecked orbs of green, like moss that had been exposed to the sun too long. "I don't know what you saw," Sam said earnestly, realizing with a disturbing sense of clarity that for once he'd have to be brave and mature enough for both of them, "but I'll tell you what I saw: I saw myself, kissing you." Dean stared at him. "And if there's any chance that you saw the same…" he swallowed forcefully, "I'd like to do it again."
Sam felt part of the tension bleed out of his brother's shoulders.
"Sammy," Dean said softly, a fresh kind of panic and sadness flitting over his face, "we shouldn't." But he didn't move away.
"We already have," Sam said, his thumb caressing the soft hollow behind his brother's ear.
"We shouldn't," Dean said again. "You don't even – you don't want this."
"You don't know what I want, Dean," Sam said firmly and lightly squeezed his hands where they were locked around his brother's jaw. "I don't want a Stanford diploma. I don't want a brilliant law career. I don't want a blonde model girlfriend. But I've wanted you since I was fifteen, Dean, and I've tried to ignore it and I've tried to get away from you, and it's not going away, not ever, and I'm fine with that."
Dean gave him a lopsided smile. "Fifteen, huh?" he asked, his attempt at humor only slightly ruined by his paper-thin voice. "You always were a weird kid."
Sam huffed out a soundless laugh. "Better weird than short," he returned.
Dean kicked him in the shin. "Shut your face, Sasquatch."
"Make me," Sam teased him, leaning right into his brother's space.
Dean sucked in a sharp breath. "Sam," he said warningly, but he didn't try to jerk his head away.
"Dean," Sam implored. "Please."
Dean nodded, mostly to himself, and placed his own hands over Sam's, pulling them away from his face in a careful, unhurried motion. He bit his lip, looking like he wanted to say ten different things at the same time, before he settled for a simple, "Let's just go back to the motel, okay, Sammy." He squeezed Sam's hands, once, and let them go.
"Okay," Sam said gently. Dean hadn't tried to shut down the conversation once and for all, and that was more than Sam had dared to hope for. He could work with that.
Sam turned away from the Mirror of Erised, now just an ordinary mirror with a fancy frame, and made his way towards the exit, where Dean was waiting for him, leaning against the doorframe with an almost shy smile.
oo0oo
"Hey Sammy," Dean called from where he was sitting at the rickety motel desk, "check this out."
Grudgingly, Sam threw back the covers, climbed out of the bed and lined himself up behind his brother, nestling his head into the crook of his neck. Sighing contentedly, Dean rubbed his cheek against Sam's hair, not that he'd ever admit to such a girly touch of affection, and pointed at the screen in front of him.
There Sam read the following:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be published on Saturday 21st July 2007 at 00:01 BST in the UK and at 00:01 in the USA. It will also be released at 00:01 BST on Saturday 21st July in other English speaking countries around the world.
"I preordered you a copy," Dean murmured into his hair. "Just so you don't have to worry your pansy ass off about what happens with Snape."
"You just want to read it yourself," Sam teased him. Then he tilted his brother's head and swallowed his impending bitchy retort in a kiss. Because Dean's comebacks tended to be crappy anyway. And because he could.
Thanks for reading and happy Christmas.