Well, thanks for the reviews guys : ) Don't worry, I have not gone over to the side of Wincest, but this story is still calling to me. And, writing this for the lovely BHJ really, really improved my night.
Sam covers all the bases.
Once Dean has fumbled the cuffs undone, and passed out, face down on the bed. Sam sets to work cleaning up the room. The cuffs go back in his duffle, the sheets are stuffed into a laundry cart in the tiny utility room, and Sam gets fresh ones from the sloe eyes receptionist. He flings them over Dean, hoping that his brother will think, in his freshly hung-over state, that he'd torn them off in a fit of dreaming.
Then he drags Dean's pants off, removing his shoes and socks as he does so. The shirt and underwear he leaves in place.
Lastly, Sam takes a thorough, lukewarm shower, and opens a window to let the room air out, before getting into the unused bed and clicking off the lamp.
He doesn't sleep much, and every few seconds he feels a twinge of residual desire, followed by a stab of guilt.
Or perhaps it's the other way around.
Either way, the next morning, neither Sam nor Dean feels like talking. Sam is grey faced and tired, Dean is red eyed and hung-over. They get up, get dressed, and Dean doesn't even mention his unusual state of half nakedness, just shoves on some clean pants under yesterdays shirt and lies back down until Sam tells him it's time to go.
They don't stop for breakfast, neither of them is hungry.
Dean is nipping from Bobby's flask before they're even in the car, and Sam takes the wheel, as has become habit these days. What does Dean care? It's just a car, someone else's baby.
Sam thinks a lot while he's driving. He's got plenty of time, Dean isn't exactly champing at the bit to start a conversation, and the road's as straight as an arrow all the way to the horizon. Sam makes his own entertainment, as Dean had told him he had to on long drives, so long ago.
He tortures himself.
Sam goes over and over every gesture Dean has made, every word, every half-heard grunt, since they'd woken at the hotel. Trying to find some hint, some trace of repressed knowledge. Does Dean remember last night? Does he regret it? Is he angry? Bitter? Numb? Does he hate himself? Sam? Both of them? Is he thinking about times before, when they still had Dad? Or is he beating himself up about Dick Roman again? Taking last night in his stride, a good soldier, focused on the mission at hand.
Maybe he didn't remember a thing, and somehow, that eats at Sam more than anything else, the fact that Dean might have forgotten him as easily as he'd forgotten countless others.
He should have known better.
(-*-)
Five weeks.
That's how long it takes.
They're the five longest weeks of Sam's life. They work three cases, two are strings of disappearances, that turn out to be a murderous spirit and a ghoul respectively. The third is a little more complex, and ends in a waiting game, himself and Dean in a basement of an abandoned building, guns trained on a man who's handcuffed to the remains of some piping.
They're waiting to see if the spirit, if it is a spirit, is being controlled by him, and if so, how he's doing it.
It's a slow night, and cold. The guy won't stop talking, alternatively pleading and cursing at them. Dean is drinking, sitting on an upturned crate, and Sam is leaning against the wall, trying not to look at his brother, and doing a terrible job of it.
One thought keeps turning in his head, and that thought is – Dean had flinched when Sam pulled out the handcuffs.
So he remembered.
He'd known, for five whole weeks, and he hadn't said a word.
Sam had been going crazy. For over a month he'd been struggling with this...feeling in his gut. The feeling that, this was it. This was the end. There would be no last minute salvation, no deals with demons, no angel up their sleeve. They were going to die. And somehow...a kind of vertigo had spun up inside of him, looking over the edge into all the blackness of an eternity of being dead...nothing to lose. Everything to play for.
And then there was Dean, his bed only two feet away every night, and Sam lying awake, looking at the empty mattress, wondering where the hell his brother was, and why it bothered him so much when he finally came back, drunk, tired and alone, and crawled into the bed.
As opposed to Sam's.
He knew it was wrong, it wasn't a question of that. He knew. But...wrong was relative. They'd done so much wrong, so much hurt over the years. Good too, but all the same...and sometimes the wrong thing was what kept you going over the edge. What kept you sane. It was the drink you took before a kill, to woman you went home with afterwards, the lie you told to save face, the fake smile. Wrong could save you, when right tried to take away everything you had.
Bobby had done the right thing, tried to, and he was dead.
Castiel had done the wrong thing, whatever the reason, and he was dead.
Right and wrong were gone now, there was only the steadily advancing plague of leviathans, and the knowledge that...smoke 'em if you got 'em, was the only rule left in the book that still made sense.
He thinks all this with a gun in his hand, looking at a man who might be innocent, or who might be a killer.
What he says is, "Dean, we need to talk."
The look Dean gives him is the one he gets on his face when Sam mentions Dad, or Lisa, or lately, Cas and Bobby. The look that says, If you make me talk about this, I cannot be responsible for what I do afterwards.
What Dean actually says is, "Don't."
Sam glances at their captive. So far, no ghost.
"Dean, please just talk to me...I know you remember."
Dean clenches his jaw and glares at the handcuffed man like this is all his fault somehow.
Sam wets his lips, furrowing his brow fretfully. "I've been going crazy for over a month...just...tell me that we're ok."
"We're fine." Dean practically yells.
"Yeah, this is fine."
"I'm trying, ok? Why the hell do we have to talk about it?"
"Because, it happened and...I can't stop thinking about it."
There's a deathly silence.
Dean is the one who breaks it. "And I really wish I could take it back, make you forget, anything...but I'm fresh out of mind-mojo, and time travel's been off the menu for a while now." He grits out. "You know, up till now I was actually grateful you hadn't tried to talk about it."
"Well...sorry if I ruined the tense silence." Sam mutters.
Dean surprises him by throwing down the beer bottle he's been holding onto for the last half hour. It doesn't break, just rolls across the cement floor.
"I'm sorry, ok, is that what you want to hear?" Dean swallows, dredging up words from the black space that sucks down all the hurt the world can throw at him. The place full of unmarked graves and lost mementos. The place where four years of a normal childhood is entombed with the scent of their mother, and memories of Dad laughing.
"I'm sorry for what happened, I'm sorry I can't stop drinking, I'm sorry I let Bobby die, sorry I couldn't stop this whole purgatory thing from happening. I'm sorry for letting you go to hell, for not finding you sooner, and I'm sorry for dragging you back into this mess just when you'd gotten out." Dean takes a breath, and Sam thinks for a moment that he sees his brother's eyes shining wetly, before Dean blinks and the sight is lost."I should never have come to get you from Stanford." He says darkly. "And, if I'm taking stuff back...it wouldn't be the last five weeks, that night...It'd be the last ten years."
"Dean..." Sam can actually feel the words like broken ribs inside of him. "You...you didn't do...any of this. Our lives...all this crap...it wasn't you. You've never done anything to me..."
Dean sounds like he's choking, but Sam thinks it's supposed to be a laugh.
"I raped you, Sam." Dean spits, and Sam could swear he can see Dean's heart breaking. "How could I do worse than that?"
And, he's got it so wrong that Sam wants to laugh and punch him at the same time.
"Dean..." he starts, and that's when his breath comes out in a white cloud, and he finally hears the soft chanting in the air around them.
And everything goes to hell in a heartbeat.