Title: Polaris
Author: James Parker Lombard
Rating M: Language, Wincest-ish? (Dean/Sam)
Spoilers/Set: Season 3 Ep.16 "No Rest for the Wicked" to Season 4 Ep. 1 "Lazarus Rising"
Characters: Dean and Sam Winchester (Chapter Seven; Dean POV)
Word Count: 4,645
Summary: Dean dropped his hand and flexed his fingers at his sides, grasping nothing. Sam stood mere feet away; he could see the mass of him, dark in a sea of dark…if a shit hotel room could be a sea of anything. Death was making him romantic or something, fucking up his filter.

For TwinchesterAngel and Paperstorm with love—I didn't forget. One more to go, girls.

Polaris

"Son, brother, father, lover, friend. There is room in the heart for all the affections, as there is room in heaven for all the stars."-Victor Hugo, from Postscript of my Life.

Dean tried to sound confident, in-control, though his heart was pounding so loudly in the dark room that Sam had to have heard it. His hands were shaking like a fucking twelve year old girl at her first spin the bottle when he built up enough courage to say six simple words.

"So, how does this start Sam?"

There's a catch in Sam's voice, "What are you talking about?"

"This. How does this start?"

He hears Sam shuffling away from him in the dark. "It doesn't. Don't do this to me. Don't do this for me. You…"

A strange sort of laughter started to bubble in his chest. Sam refusing him without even knowing the offer? Too fucking funny. Too fucking tragic. As if this would be for Sam?

"Relax, pigtails, I just want to talk." Is that what he wanted, really? Who fucking knew anymore? Not Dean. It wasn't what he had intended when he walked through the door. He wasn't sure what he had intended? To throw Sam down and lick his way into his mouth? Ridiculous. To peel the shirt, smelling of bar and car, from his back, to peel Sam's away as well, and feel skin against skin? The thought was as disturbing as it was enticing. He felt skin hunger, some sort of molasses-sweet desire to smooth his tongue against someone else's skin…well, not someone…one-one's. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. All this syrupy ache was wrong, fucking wrong-wrong. And directed towards the person it should least be directed towards. Who knew? He wasn't sure what had his head screwed up, and what he wanted from Sam at all. Comfort? No. There was enough comfort of a sort in the deal he had made—his life for Sam's? Not an issue, not a problem. Eternal torment was a fucking bummer, but …anything for Sam.

"In the dark?" Sam's voice sounded suspicious; more than that, it sounded childish again, unsure. It sounded right on the verge of panic.

"If need be."

The night had been what? Routine? Yeah. And that had been exactly what Dean wanted: beers in a dive bar, a swirl of smoke around his head, no rushing headlong towards the inevitable. He could almost pretend the sky wasn't falling down, that flames weren't tickling his feet, that he wasn't being squeezed by forces he had willingly called down in fair trade.

A heartfelt conversation wasn't his forte, but the whisky and beer had steeled his spine, just as it softened every other thing.

Touch? Did he want touch? Yes. That was a yes, but not a wrong yes, just the solidity of Sam within arm's reach, exactly the way they had lain last night, fingers linked. Sam may have started it, but it was Dean who found he could not let go. He had lain still, listening to Sam's breathing in the otherwise stillness of their room in Joliet. In. Out. A steady rhythm synchronizing with his own breath. In. Out. How easy it would have been to turn and hold Sam closer. How easy to wrap his arms and press his mouth. No.

The surface of their skin felt like a heartbreaking barrier. Too much, too much. Dean wanted to peel it back, press their wet bodies together muscle to muscle, blood to blood, not knowing where one began, the other ended, clinging to the one good thing holding him here, the one good thing that kept him just this side of dying for so long, instead of jumping full-force over the breach. The insistence of the thought petrified him. He cried silently that night as Sam slept, holding tight to Sam's hand and stilling himself so as not to wake his brother from this rare, peace-filled sleep. All the while tears pooled in his ears, overflowed, slid onto the cheap hotel pillows and soaked them.

He still wasn't sure what had happened. The moment and those regrets associated with it ran a loop in his brain that he tried to analyze from all angles, but… His response to Sam's panic had been instantaneous, unfaltering. But, that's the way he did things, right? Sure: flying by the seat of his pants, dealing with the immediate. The immediate had been Sam, full-fucking breakdown, near hyperventilating until he broke this latest spell with another unfortunate kiss. Like a motherfucking prince charming again. Weird. The whole thing was weird. But, that was an understatement, they lived in the weird 24/7…this was beyond that. Or was it?

Dean lifted his hand to his mouth, pressed the tips of his fingers against his lips and a quick jolt of love and pain ran a frisson through him. Someone walking on my grave, he thought, and almost laughed aloud. He would get no grave. He would burn to ash in an unmarked field like his father. And Sam, feeling obligated, would watch until the embers cooled. He knew. He would have saved Sam from that if he could, but things being what they were...

He dropped his hand and flexed his fingers at his sides, grasping nothing. Sam stood mere feet away; he could see the mass of him, dark in a sea of dark…if a shit hotel room could be a sea of anything. Death was making him romantic or something, fucking up his filter.

Three steps and he could be there—could grab hold of Sam's shoulders, could crush them together until they were one, one, one. Mine, he thought. Maybe that's what it was? A need to stake some final, irrefutable claim? He had bought Sam from the other side with flesh and blood and years shaved from a life that was already piss-poor to begin with, and the bill was due. That's all. His year of credit was up; his life was money in the bank for Lilith herself, if Bela was to be believed. He had bought Sam, paid. So, then, Sam was his. Sam was always his. Fuck the world if it didn't think so.

Although Dean had been young, and safe in a home with a mother and father, a safety that was cut short too soon, he remembered things. Quick snatches of moments: his ear to his mother's belly, his mouth "kissing the baby" who grew there, the impatience of want. When Sam was born they had lain him carefully in Dean's lap. Dean remembered his face: unformed, looking in a way like all babies looked. He remembered the baby smell of him and the pitter-pitter of his heart. My brother. My. The unfocused eyes seeing him.

When he ran from the burning house, Sam bundled in his arms, he had made Sam cry. He held too tightly in a small boy's relief as he stared in mute horror at the flames that had changed their lives, the same flames that plunged them wholly into a new world filled with darkness. At four he had become a shield against that darkness, and the baby in his arms, his baby, his brother, his Sam, his responsibility, became the central light. Everything was dimmer without him. Those years apart were all shade and no brightness—indistinct nothing years. Without Sam that gulf that kept him from death, grew narrower and narrower, and less and less important.

In some ways Dean felt like his whole life was a version of the old Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons. In his version he was a coyote, starving and mangy, exhausted and driven by compulsion and obligation…the only things he knew. He'd throw himself into traps he had created. Accidentally, or on purpose? Who fucking knew anymore? He'd run headlong into walls, not caring that the painted tunnels were illusion, or that the approaching train was real. What he was chasing was death, what he hungered for was unnamable. He had fallen so many times, and like the Coyote, sharpist-toothist, had survived despite the odds. Until now.

He was on the edge of a cliff, looking down at a plate full of bird seed, hungrier than any animal should be, and diving towards the brink with wild abandon, coyote feet spinning in mid-air. It was a shitty metaphor, reducing his brother to birdseed? Yeah, it didn't exactly make sense. So, what? Nothing made sense anymore. He needed to know how this started; Dean knew that he really meant "the end." How did they begin the end of them?

He swallowed hard. His mouth tasted like cheap cigarettes. He was tingling with nicotine, slowed with liquor. But he couldn't blame his fucked-up feelings on those things because deep down those feelings had always been there: baby smell to severed spine. Mine. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.

Sam was three steps away. Sam was his. He took a step back and then walked towards the bed, thunking down hard enough to make the frame squeak in protest. Sam didn't move. He hadn't said a word.

"Dammit, Sammy, get your mind out of the gutter." He joked. "Just…"

"Talk."

"Yeah. Talk."

"I don't wanna talk, Dean."

Well, that was a fucking miracle, but an annoying one. No, he supposed Sam didn't want to talk. Or eat. Or sleep.

"Fine, I'll talk."

"Don't." Sam's voice quavered. He was on the verge of crying or puking. Dean had come to know the signs. "I don't wanna listen either." Sam swallowed audibly. "I thought…"

"What?"

"I thought we were just going to pretend. 'Just be us,' you said."

"Are you so good at pretending, then?" Dean tried not to make his voice bitter. He had wanted to pretend, and for a while it had worked. For a while in the bar, joking with the locals, fending off handsy cougars, it had been any other night in the history of nights. There was no sword of Damocles hanging over his head, no cup of trembling. But when the doors opened, and his feet hit the concrete, and his head hit the night air, and his hand splayed of its own accord across the center of Sam's back, touching that place where the knife had ripped Sam's life from his own regrettable life…the temporary spell of "a normal night" disappeared and another of those threads staying that sword unraveled, and that the cup shook against the lip that held it. Any minute: ker-thunk, ker-plooey—dead coyote.

Dean had been trying to put things in perspective—but ever since the dream, things had been…fucking bizarre. And he couldn't blame anyone but himself, after all hadn't he been the one to instigate things? Entering the dream. Kissing Sam in the dreamt room to knock them both out of that hell-hole of inappropriateness. Then the bar in February; he had reached out first, and then run from the single scariest thing in his terrifying ass life. Those feelings he had squelched so well, that even he didn't know were there…nah, that was a lie. A lie in a string of lies he told himself, things like: they were heroes, there was some reason for everything, that it would all somehow work out just fine. Life was chaos, and he was a boy hardened by loss, but a boy nonetheless, still frightened, still feeling the flames and clutching the one real thing he could: Sam.

Those feelings, unearthed by a kiss, had him dumbfounded. He didn't even know what to call them. Fucking love? Dean loved his car. Loved his father. Loved Cassie, years ago. Loved pie and one night stands and girls who smelled like dollar-store shampoo, warm and coco-nutty and flowery. He loved Sam. Fine. So be it. Fine.

Sam hadn't moved. Hadn't answered. Dean patted the bed, "Just, come here. Sam. Come here."

But there was no movement from the tall, dark shape. "Motherfucker, I just want to talk. We need to go over things, we need to…figure out how things will be from here on out." Still nothing. "Sam, don't make me beg here, come here, talk to me." He laughed at the stupidity of it, and the begging quality softening his voice: pain closing his throat, squeezing it. "Look it, me wanting to talk? Goddamn it, I'm falling to pieces."

He hardly got the last "s" of "pieces" out when Sam bolted out the door, running top speed. The hollow, wood door smacked and bumped against the wall, and Dean followed after him in a graceless stumble. Too late, no sign.

People were filing into the bar next door, music pumping into the night, some Patsy Cline maybe. Off key, anyway. No Sam there. No Sam in the parking lot. He walked to the berm of the road, looked east and west: nothing. But he couldn't have gone far. The stars were dim in the overcast sky, the moon fuzzy and indistinct, less real than the soft glow and stutter of the sunglassed smiling sun that was the Janco Motel's marquis.

Like a good hunter, he listened. At the end of the long, weather-beaten hotel, a low noise he had come to recognize too well.

Even before turning the corner he knew how he'd find Sam, hunched and dry heaving over a puddle of whatever he'd managed to down at the bar. He hadn't expected the blood though. Sam's knuckles, skinned clean on the rough stucco of the hotel, had smeared bright swaths across his cheeks and dripped onto his bare forearms.

"Jesus, Sam."

Sam winced at Dean's voice. He looked like a scared animal: feverish eyes big as moons, focusing on nothing. Sam took a step back and turned his foot, ready to bolt into the narrow gap between the motel and a chain link fence dividing the motel property from a few run-down looking homes.

Dean's arm shot out and grabbed his wrist. "Don't."

Even in the shadow of the building Sam's teeth shone: a white line against his lip, gripping. He would break skin soon. Dean knew what it meant to want the clean pain of something physical, to dominate the blurry pain of emotion and bury it beneath something tangible.

"I said don't." Dean sighed and shook his head pulling Sam towards him. "Don't fucking hurt yourself. Just don't." Dean felt wrung out. The only thing that kept him going was Sam. Sam who had beat his hands bloody, wrenched himself out, over and over, with loss. "Sam."

Sam's shoulders hunched forward made him look small, although it seemed impossible for such a big man to look tiny. Dean wanted to be able to scoop Sam into his arms the way he used to: rocking him as he cried, head nestled against Dean's collarbone, drool and snot smearing against his neck. Dean never cared. He'd just rock, petting Sam's fine baby hair, sometimes for hours until the gasping sobs stilled and Sam went slack. Dean reached out his hand to ruffle Sam's hair the way he used to; he wondered if it would feel as baby fine still.

Sam flinched, looked anywhere but at Dean.

"Sam, come on. Let's go back inside. We don't have to talk. We don't have to say a single thing." Dean lifted Sam's wrist towards him, surveyed the damage there. "Fuck, you've made a mess of your knuckles, baby boy. Let me get those fixed up. Let's get you some water, okay? Let's just get back inside. We can…"

Sam's body hit him hard enough to knock the air out. "Uff. You're crushing me, Sam."

Sam's arms threaded around Dean's waist beneath his jacket, and Dean's shoulder blades dug into the wall beneath the weight of him. Sam's cheek was hard against Dean's collarbone when Sam began to cry, his body shaking against Dean's in rhythmic convulsions reminding (again) Dean of Sam as a child. The Sam in the dreamed field, thirteen maybe fourteen years old, had done the same, and Dean had reacted instantly. Shelter, protect, love, stave off what dark may come: these were his duties, these his obligations accepted gladly or as long as he could keep them.

Dean's brain was a booby-trap lately. He could usually turn off the doubt, the memories that reared up, good or bad, out of order to torment him. But lately they wouldn't let him be. A familiar gesture, the movement of Sam's hand cleaning guns, the color of a bedspread, a thread-thin crack in the door-handle of the Impala he had run his fingertip over a thousand times: each thing a spell to conjure ghosts.

Dean lifted his hand to stroke Sam's hair as the sobs became louder, punctuated by huge gulping breaths. Sam. Awkward, teenaged Sam, defiant Sam, fragile Sam as a child with terrified eyes and quivering lip, infant Sam in his own small arms, Sam the hunter, tall and strong and smart: all of them his, all of them overlapping indistinguishable in that moment. Dean closed his eyes, inhaled, felt his chest rise against Sam's, felt the weight of his brother, so familiar, and tried to memorize it.

Sam with his camera had been doing the same: capturing moments, stealing bits of time that could be carried through his life, nothing lost. But, Dean could carry nothing with him where he was going, except what he held inside. This moment now added to the bulk of his days to carry him through whatever may come. They seemed too few, these good moments of oneness.

He opened his eyes, hoping for stars. Above him the sky was overcast. Not a thing to guide them as they bumbled through their last days. Their last days. Soon they'd head to Bobby's. Already Bobby was calling anxious, fighting his own battle against Dean's deal. Dean didn't know what would happen to them under Bobby's observant gaze. Whatever was confused between them now could be chalked up to desperation, maybe. Soldiers sometimes turned to each other for comfort, and weren't they soldiers? How were they not?

He decided then that he didn't care. Nothing would change at Bobby's. They'd pile their grown bodies into a single bed, the way they did as children, huddled against the dark and waiting for their father to arrive again while Bobby played surrogate, kinder and infinitely more patient than their own father, who had closed himself tightly against them.

"Sam. Sam. Sam. Shhhh. Let's go in." He rocked as well as he could with the weight of Sam's body against him. Behind the chain link a porch light flipped on, bathing the area in a pale golden glow. "You know people live back there. Let's get inside. Please?"

Sam made a choked noise and nodded into Dean's shoulder.

The back of Sam's neck was warm beneath the curve of Dean's palm as he led his giant little brother back to door #5. He fished in his pocket for the plastic key fob, grateful he had shoved it into his coat pocket rather than tossing it on the nearest surface in the darkened room. The door creaked open. Another temporary home for another break down, Dean thought. Sam's grip on the sleeve of Dean's jacket reminded him of his father, though he couldn't place why. Had he ever held onto his father's coat this way? Had Sam? No. He would have clung to Dean this way. That's it.

They spent so many days alone. Strange places. New beds. Their father gone for weeks on end, chasing leads they wouldn't learn of until later. Sammy, small and shy, barely talked. Didn't need to really, because Dean had understood every gesture, anticipated everything. Sam did not cling to his father's jacket; he never had.

Dean led the way like a mother hen, and Sammy gripped tight to his sleeve. Dean had felt guilty then for the way Sammy had shied away from their Dad at times, but how could it be helped? Their father was a ghost long before he was dead. They were orphans to circumstance and vengeance. It had cost them their childhood, and any chance at a normal life.

Sam had grown, and in growing grew angry, grew distant, left them both. Dean remembered the sharp pain that came when Sam left, and the bittersweet joy he felt watching Sam from a distance without his knowing. It should have stayed that way, with Dean watching from afar: Sam marrying Jessica, Sam as a father, Sam growing old. Jessica had not been wrong in Sam's dream. Dean could admit that. Had Dean not sought him out he could have maybe gone on living that small, sweet life.

The deal Dean made was a chance to return part of that life to Sam. Jessica was gone, but the rest could still be claimed. He could go. He'd meet some other girl and settle down, have three kids and a fucking cherry life. Without Dean, Sam would have a chance to reclaim what was taken.

Dean hadn't realized how tight Sam would grip in his sorrow.

The key turned in the lock and Dean led the way.

When there was a task to be done, he moved on auto-pilot, focusing on small steps. One: sit Sam down. Two: flip on the light. Three: two fingers of cheap whiskey in a plastic cup. Four: a bottle of water from the mini-fridge. Five: wipe the blood from Sam's cheeks. Six: wipe away the tears. He was on his knees, dabbing at Sam's busted knuckles with a worn-thin washcloth and an ice bucket full of warm, soapy water when Sam stopped crying long enough to speak.

"Dean?" Dean looked up at Sam's face fringed in shadow, his lips bitten and raw looking, "Remember when you said as long as you were around nothing bad would happen to me?"

"Yes." Of course Dean remembered. He had said it over and over his whole life.

"You won't be around."

It happened just like that. This is how it started. The it wasn't sex, it wasn't a crossed line they couldn't uncross: it was the end. And it happened in the goddamn Janco motel, of all places. Dean broke.

Twenty seconds later, shamelessly, desperately, Sam was rocking him on the dirty floor, smoothing his hair while Dean's chest filled with desperate dread, while Dean babbled out apologies for his life. Sam whispering, "I will save you. I will save you, or I will tear you out of hell myself. You will not leave me. Nothing will take you from me. I will save you." Over and over. Sam pressing kisses to Dean's face: his eyelids, his cheeks, his temples, his lips. Sam maneuvering them onto the bed like Dean weighed nothing. Sam maneuvered him without resistance, peeling off the layers of their clothes while Dean sobbed.

Sam saying, "Nothing between us. Nothing," as their limbs tangled. Dean felt drunk, twisted, frantic. His hand covering the tattoo on Sam's chest. Sam's mouth pressed to the tattoo on Dean's. The tears wouldn't stop. Sam crying too now as their bodies pressed together, skin to skin, naked as the day they were born.

"You are mine," Sam whispered into Dean's ear. "Say it."

"Yours."

"I am yours. Say it."

"You are mine. Sam you are mine."

Ownership.

Their mouths met with a clash of teeth on teeth, so hard Dean saw stars. Time pulled like taffy. How long since I breathed? Dean thought, with his thumb resting on Sam's hipbone, his fingers splayed wide across the small of Sam's back. He moved he moved his hand up, felt for the scar, that slick, pale, purpled, starburst of skin that had cost them each so much. He desperately wanted to taste it. He wanted to drag his tongue along it tracing its borders. He wondered if it would taste like metal. He wondered if it would taste like tears. He wondered if it would taste like the skin of Sam's shoulder, where his mouth now moved carelessly. Would it taste of Sam's knuckles: sharp, salt, blood?

Then, Sam's tongue in his mouth again. Sam's hands on his biceps hard enough to bruise. Let them. He'd walk through his last days with his brother's handprints on his body. He'd be dragged into hell marked up with love.

"I love you. I love you. I love you." Sam's voice between frantic kisses repeated over and over again. Dean's head was swimming with love, swimming with sorrow. He hadn't wanted this. He didn't know what he wanted. Sam.

"Sam." His name a prayer. He was worth dying for. Dean would die over and over, he knew. This could carry him through years. This moment. "I love you. Sam. I love you."

"I love you. I love you."

And just like that, they fell apart again, sobbing wildly in one another's arms.

In the morning Dean woke, with Sam's body pressed against him, a sheen of sleep-sweat over the two of them. He clicked his teeth together and stared down at Sam's face, slack against his chest. They had to get to Bobby's. They had to fix this.

Dean's dreams had been filled with terror for weeks, but last night there was only love. Sam a bright light, a star, a fire, a flame calling him back to this world. They could stop it. They could do anything.

Sam shifted and stretched his body against Dean's, and Dean reached out to stroke his hair once more. For a second he felt a wave of embarrassment rise up, a wave of shame, but it passed quickly. He pressed the palm of his hand flat against the scar where Jake's blade had ripped, momentarily, his life from his life.

No fucking rest for the wicked, Dean thought. They'd have to rise soon. He'd shake Sam awake, tenderly. They'd gather their things and head out, in near silence, still clinging to insubstantial hopes.

Hugo, Victor. Postscript of my Life. Trans. Lorenzo O'Rourke. London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1907.

Supernatural. CW. WNUV, Baltimore. 2005-2011.