Chapter Text
A girl showed up while Dean was still working on the car and waited around for him to be done, letting her bare shoulders fry in the late afternoon sun while he rooted around elbow-deep under the hood. Sam could see the two of them talking from where he watched from a second storey window of the run-down house they were squatting in—or that she was talking; Dean was buried in the car—but he couldn't make out what they were saying. He sat on the bare plywood floor of the bedroom that was finally his and not shared with Dean, and ostensibly he was doing his algebra homework but mostly he was just watching Dean, with only the top half of his face visible over the sill so Dean wouldn't spot him.
When Dean finally emerged from the car, it put his face in perfect profile to Sam, his skin bright and glowy in the sun against the black of the raised hood and obscenely freckled in the dead of summer. He wiped his hands on a rag—didn’t actually go inside to wash off any of the gunk, just half-assedly scrubbed at them with an already dirty rag—slammed the hood shut and took the girl into the back seat, right there in the driveway, even though Dad didn’t say when he’d be home and it could be any time.
Sam watched through the windshield as Dean pulled his shirt over his head and kissed the tall blonde girl whom Sam recognized from school but couldn’t name. Sam knew what that car smelled like in the heat and with the stink of Dean’s sweat, the oil and lubricant on his hands, and it was almost like he was in there instead of watching from his bedroom like a pervert. Sam knew the girl couldn’t really appreciate what it meant to be with Dean, in that car, because half the fun of doing anything with Dean was knowing what he’d given up to be there.
Dean and the girl moved in the back seat and Sam could see mostly Dean, because he had her on her back, and his shoulders heaved in the shiny polygon of the windshield, rolling beautifully as he drove into her; sometimes the flash of her bare thigh as Dean lifted up her leg, or her hands as they stroked his hair. Sam made it a few minutes before starting to jerk off. He pulled the front of his basketball shorts down and put the hem of his T-shirt in his mouth to keep it out of the way. He sucked on his shirt absentmindedly as he worked his dick in his hand, watching the car, and he lasted longer than usual because he couldn’t hear Dean or see the shapes his face was making, the way he could when he watched from the next bed pretending to be asleep. He still came a minute before Dean, into one of his crew socks—he’d taken it off first, at least. He rested his forehead on the wooden window sill afterwards to catch his breath. The exposed drywall smelled dusty and earthy and old.
He got up to clean off, going all the way downstairs to the only sink in the half-built-then-abandoned home that was still plumbed for water. He wasn’t sure if funding fell through or what, but there was a whole row of houses like this, all nearly built and then left to rot for who knows how long. The start of a suburb that could have been.
He peeked through the window next to the door that had a view of the driveway, and Dean and the girl were still in the back seat, but they weren’t moving anymore. Dean was still leaning over her and her arms were hooked around his neck. There was slight movement, maybe talking, or kissing.
Sam went back upstairs to finish his homework, only half paying attention. Eventually the car door slammed and he watched as the girl clipped her sandals back on and walked down the long dirt driveway. Dean was back under the hood before she’d made it to the road. His shirt was off and there were red marks from her fingernails up at the tops of his golden shoulders. Sam rested his chin on the window sill and watched, drowsy with the heat.
Dean was just staring into the guts of the car, his hands still, as if surveying his work. After a moment, he turned and looked up at Sam’s bedroom window. He was squinting against the sun and it screwed up his face. Sam tipped his temple against the window frame and looked back, unafraid.
Dean turned back around, slammed the hood shut and went inside. Sam listened to his footsteps echo through the bones of the house as he made his way up the stairs and down the hall. He briefly detoured to his own room. When he appeared in Sam’s doorway, Sam was still leaning on the window, and he turned his head to look at Dean without getting up.
Dean had a clean gray shirt in his hands and he pulled it over his head in Sam’s doorway; Sam watched the shift in muscles in his flat stomach, the way his pecs moved together, the amulet—Sam’s amulet—tucked under the shirt until Dean pulled it out to rest on top the way he always did. A new shirt, but he still hadn’t washed his hands. Sam could see the black under his nails even from across the room. He wondered if he’d fingered the girl with them.
Dean said, “Get up. Dad wants us to get new tanks.”
The house had no electricity or appliances, so they’d been cooking on a propane camp stove on the back porch, using one metal pot from the dollar store and one plastic spatula for every meal.
Sam thought about arguing just for the hell of it, but he liked doing the gas station thing. He followed Dean downstairs—still just in one sock, which, if Dean had noticed, he hadn’t mentioned—and out the front door, pausing to shove his feet into his beat-up sneakers. In a couple quick steps he caught up to Dean on the driveway and fell in stride. They wordlessly passed the car; it was too distinct and easy to trace, so they always walked. The streets in the unfinished suburb didn’t have sidewalks and it was so hot the asphalt was almost rubbery under their feet. Sam swished a hand through the spindly grasses that grew knee-high in the gravelly pits between the concrete foundation of each home, and over the distant sound of the interstate, bugs chirruped and clicked and whirred at the intrusion. They didn’t talk, not for any reason other than not having anything to say. Sam watched Dean’s shirt go dark under his arms and in the valley of his shoulder blades.
The gas station was on the border of where the abandoned suburb met the rest of the neighbourhood, maybe aspirational at one point but now just as run down as everything else; the tall metal frame of a sign with no sign in it, weeds growing through the cracked asphalt between the pumps, windows of the store blocked out by taped-up butcher paper. There were no vehicles parked or at the pumps. The cage with the propane tanks in it was around the left side of the building, near the washrooms. Dean headed that way and Sam went inside.
The place was freezing with the A/C and musty like recycled air, and empty save for the clerk behind the counter, a girl probably about Dean’s age with long, dyed red hair and acne on her chin. Sam smiled at her when he went in and took note of the kind of deer-in-headlights look she gave him as he headed for the back of the store. That was lucky. He went past the dusty bottles of generic painkillers and bags of pancake mix towards the fridges at the back, and then past that to the slushy machine.
He glanced over the top of the aisle at the cashier, but she'd gone back to watching the small TV that sat on the back counter. Sam slid his hand along the side of the cup dispenser, flipped the latch that opened the top, and pulled out the entire stack of large cups. He reached back and dropped them down behind the slushy machine where they fell out of sight, then put the dispenser back together and went up to the girl at the front.
“You’re out of large cups, do you mind?”
She seemed flustered. “Oh! Yeah, no problem. One sec.”
She hurried out from behind the desk and towards the employee door at the back of the store. As the door swung open, Sam caught a glimpse of a red-faced old man sitting at a desk surrounded by boxes of stock. He was staring at a computer screen, but while the door was still open, he met Sam’s eyes and frowned. The door banged shut.
Sam hauled his upper body over the top of the cash desk and looked upside down at the cubbies and drawers underneath the other side. He spotted a ring of keys with bright plastic tabs, grabbed them and slid back over to the other side. He’d just pocketed them when the girl came out holding a giant plastic sleeve of cups.
“Here you go.”
She handed Sam a cup, filled the dispenser and went back to her post. Two of the four flavours were out of order, but Sam picked grape and brought it up to the front. He paid with a crumpled dollar bill and lingered for a second when the girl handed him his change. He'd been seeing that, recently, the way women and girls looked at him. He knew he'd been growing a lot lately and that that was something, but—girls had started to look at him the way he always saw them look at Dean. He wasn't used to it. He'd stare at himself in the mirror and see nothing but a gawky kid, but this cashier saw… something. Dean had been different to him lately, too. It was all new and weird.
He was blinded by the sun when he stepped back outside, his arms going goosebumped in the transition from the store's frigid air to the heat of the day. He went around the side of the building, fingering the keys in his pocket.
Dean was leaning against the hot wall of the gas station. He frowned when he saw Sam.
"You hate grape."
Sam tossed him the keys. Dean caught them and started trying keys in the lock on the cage that held the propane tanks.
Sam said, "Take it, then."
He set the cup on top of the cage while Dean tried more keys. Sam walked a few steps back and forth and made clicking noises with his tongue. He kept his eyes on the road and the pumps for cars.
He said, "This'd be easier if Dad didn't take the picks."
"So what? He needed them."
Sam was going to say that John didn't even tell them what his hunt was about, so Dean had no way of knowing whether he needed lock picks, but the collar of Dean's shirt was soaked with sweat and Sam could smell it and suddenly their dad's negligence seemed less pressing.
Sam got right up behind Dean. His height was so new that the feel of tipping his face down to put it against Dean's nape was still foreign. Sucking the collar of Dean's shirt was also foreign but, admittedly, less so.
The jingling of the keys stopped. Dean sighed, exasperated. Exasperated, but not mad. Not surprised.
"Sammy."
"Hm?"
Sam slid his mouth up the back of Dean's neck, scraping with his teeth. He smelled like summer. His sides were sticky when Sam put his hands up under his shirt.
Dean sighed again and bowed his head a little. It gave Sam better access.
"Not now."
Bowing his head wasn't not now. Sam just hummed against his skin, nuzzling at him.
Dean said, "I told you. We're too old for this shit."
He'd been saying that a lot lately. Sam knew what he meant—old enough to know better, twice over—but it hadn't made much of a difference in what they did or didn't do to each other. Sam was starting to think that the important thing was the saying it.
Sam pressed his chest against Dean's back and his hips to his ass. His shorts did nothing to hide his boner, but he wanted Dean to know. He slid a hand over Dean's stomach; Sam's hands always felt big and gawky, lurching forwards too quick in adolescence, but when they did this, he always knew where to put them.
Dean braced a hand against the cage. The keys clattered loudly to the ground.
"We've gotta get you a girlfriend, man."
It sounded like a plea. Sam had heard that before, too. Dean wasn't wearing a belt with his jeans and Sam popped his button free and pulled down his fly, both arms around him now.
Dean said, "Take mine," his voice going kind of soft. "You'd like her. She's— you'd like her."
Sam turned him around. He squinted when the sun hit his face, so bright that the light going through his ears made them glow cherry red. Sam put his mouth on one, just quick, to see if it was hot. It was. By now Sam's breath was coming kind of fast, vibrating with the nerves he always got when he went for it, multiplied by the risky timing, and he knew Dean could hear him but he couldn't slow down. He was never cool when they did this. Dean, during this only, never seemed to care if Sam was being cool.
"I don't want a girlfriend," Sam said, his cheek against Dean’s. "You know what I want."
Dean shifted against him like he might push him off. "Don't say shit like that."
"Don't like it so much, then."
Sam slid his hand down the front of Dean's jeans with his palm turned in, shoulder cocked. He wasn't wearing boxers. He was already hard. He clunked his head against the cage behind him and screwed his mouth up, eyes shut—not unlike the face he made when he was about to cry—and grabbed Sam's arm. His skin was a thousand degrees. Sam liked when he grabbed him, and even better when he was a little pissed off about it.
"Just hurry up," Dean said, and pushed Sam down.
He didn't need to. Sam got easily to his knees on the baking concrete and got Dean's dick out; Dean held up his jeans with one hand and hooked the other around the back of Sam's neck. Sam was always too sloppy at first, too eager and jacked up to reign it in until Dean took his face in a hand and soothed, slowed him down, got him going into something more manageable. Sam could smell the grease on his hands, and pussy. His dick tasted like her too, faintly metallic, like she’d start her period soon. Sam made a noise that he knew was too loud right after he made it, too hungry. It made Dean fist a hand in his hair.
Their whole thing started as harmlessly as something world-endingly devastating could, although it was long enough ago that Sam was fuzzy on the exact details. They fell into it so easily that some days, Sam had to remind himself that it wasn’t normal, wasn’t good, but lately, Dean had been doing more than enough reminding for the both of them, anything to get Sam to stop—pushing him away when he tried to get something going, being a dick, fucking girls in the driveway and calling them his girlfriend. But state after state and year after year, Sam knew better than to let go of the one constant he had in his life. He got the grape slushy because they only had cash for one, and Dean wanted it and would never ask. Sam didn’t take no for an answer because he wanted Dean, and would never really ask.
Dean’s clammy hand stroked Sam’s hair back from his face, “Sammy,” tumbling brokenly out of his mouth.
Sam’s knees ached on the concrete, but he didn’t stop. His dick was so hard there was no way it wasn’t leaving a wet spot on the front of his shorts, but there wasn’t time and Dean would get him back later, on the camp chairs they’d set up in the living room with both their dicks in his hand and Dean looking up at him like he was the fucking sun. Whatever they had was a network of stolen moments exactly like that, like Dean down Sam's throat outside a gas station with no sign, on a Wednesday in summer, for no reason other than because they could, and because they wanted to, and if Sam never got any better than that, it was something he could live with.
"Hey!"
Sam shot back at the bark of sound, coughing hard. He still had tears in his eyes when Dean yanked him to his feet and shoved at him, before he even had his jeans up, go, go, go!
The red-faced old guy from the back room stood down at the end of the building, shouting wetly and charging towards them. Dean was laughing so loud it hurt Sam's ears and Sam was running before his mind could catch up, out into the overgrown empty lot next to the gas station, cackling and running until his lungs burned, until he flew.