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He gives Sam three days. Three days of keeping him locked him up in the dungeon, jabbing needles into his arm, staring at him between tears of frustration and that sad kicked puppy look, and leaving him alone for hours on end with a camera flickering at him from the corner of the room.
Three days of the cure not working, of making him feeling like there’s something ticklish under his skin, of Dean knowing it wasn’t gonna work but feeling something in his rotten soul at the thought of Sam’s purified blood in his veins.
Three days until he breaks his wrist to get out of the cuffs, snaps off a chair leg to scrape through the devil’s trap paint lines, and set his wrist again.
Sam must be really tired, because by the time he wakes up and charges into the kitchen in pyjamas with the demon killing knife, Dean’s almost done making breakfast.
“Seriously?” Dean asks, sliding off scrambled eggs onto a plate. “Is there even anything in you besides booze and granola?”
He picks up the demon-binding handcuffs and tosses them in Sam’s direction. Sam catches them, then looks up like he expected Dean to rush him for the distraction.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking care of you,” he says, topping the plate with bacon, shutting off the stove and walking over to the kitchen table with it. Sam takes a step back, but all Dean does is put the food down. “Want a smoothie to go with that?”
Sam stammers, then just stares at him.
He looks like a wreck, hair slick to his face, bags under his eyes. He thinks, normally, humanly, he’d feel bad, tell him to take a shower, jeez, drape a blanket around his shoulder and get him to sleep.
He still feels all of that, but it’s got nothing to do with making Sam feel better.
“You look like shit,” he says plainly, and yeah, that sounds like something he’d say if he were human. “Now that I’ve proven I’m not gonna kill you in your sleep, can you please lay off the shots?”
“No?” Sam says, incredulous. “Dean, you’re a demon.”
“Oh really, I hadn’t noticed, only burned myself twice trying salt these damn eggs.”
“Why—” Sam searches for words and lands back on incredulity. “What do you want?”
“I want you to eat,” Dean says simply. “And then take a shower and go back to bed until you stop looking like that.”
“Why?”
Dean stares back. Sighs and runs a hand through his hair.
“Why do I ever do anything, Sammy? Because I love you.”
Sam straightens, breathing in so deeply Dean can see the rise of his shoulders. There we go.
“I mean it. And you know I mean it.”
“Demons lie. And mess with people. And—”
Dean gets up from the chair. Sam falls into a defensive stance, knife ready, but they both know it won’t kill him. Might not even hurt him all that much. He takes things slow, one step at a time, gauging for when Sam’s gonna freak and bolt out the door, or lunge forward and try and take him.
Sam doesn’t do either, if only because Dean freezes him in place first.
“Dean, don’t make me—”
“Aww, Sammy, you couldn’t hurt me even if you wanted to.”
He pries the knife from Sam’s fingers easily, and sets it aside. Sam’s straining, all tension, and up close Dean can really see that he’s freaked out exhausted, red in his eyes and black under the lids.
Dean brushes his hair behind his ear and Sam flinches.
“Come on, brush your teeth, take a shower, I’m not going anywhere.”
Sam breathes out heavy, shaking like he wouldn’t be able to hold himself up if it weren’t for Dean’s telekinesis. Dean stares at him, up at him, and smiles the way he remembers he used to. He lets Sam go and Sam nearly crumples like a puppet.
He feels so frail now, or maybe he‘s been like that for a while and Dean just hasn’t had the opportunity to touch him since the trials. He struggles, torn between shoving Dean away and pulling him closer, and Dean runs his hands through Sam’s hair and smiles, hauling him into his arms like he’s still his little brother.
Sam breathes in a sniffle, and but goes complacent in Dean’s hold, and that something rotten in Dean’s chest is delighted.
He ignores it, and rubs circles into Sam’s back.
“Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”
He remembers helping Sam bathe during the trials. He remembers when Sam first protested, insisted he’d be fine on his own, and then when he collapsed to the floor and nearly cracked his skull open on the tile. He remembers when Sam stopped having an opinion on it, because he was that delirious from the pain and painkillers. He remembers he hated the sight, and hated that Sam was hurting that much.
This Sam slams the bathroom door on him, which is all well and good because it’s not like the smartass remembered to bring a change of clothes with him. Dean lets him be, though, even though he’s probably hatching up some scheme to get Dean back in the dungeon so he can keep shooting Dean up with more of his blood.
(The ugly remnants of his soul doesn’t mind it. Except Sam would go right back to eating nothing but cereal and alcohol and not sleeping and Dean would barely get to touch him once a few hours.)
He reheats the eggs and bacon, eats the hardened toast himself, pops another two slices into the toaster, whips up a smoothie with some apples that haven’t rotten in their absence, and briefly wishes they could get food delivered to the super-secret bunker of a defunct cult society. Maybe then Sam would at least take care of himself.
Or he could always strap Sam down in the dungeon. That’s one way to make sure he stayed put and healthy and alive.
Sam comes out of the shower fifteen minutes later smelling like hot water and soap and it’s not until Dean’s already swooped in to hug him and bury his face in those damp locks that he remembers this is definitely not something he would do as a human because Sam starts shivering and doesn’t stop.
Or maybe it’s because he’s got nothing but a towel on. Because of the whole locking yourself in the bathroom without getting new clothes thing.
“Sorry,” he says, though he neglects to pull away just yet. “I always...” He pauses. Nah, explaining that he always wanted to curl up next to his brother after a shower would just weird him out even more. And Sam would never believe him.
He detaches himself, pats Sam on the shoulder, and heads back to the kitchen. Sam’s staring at him the whole way out, but human Dean shouldn’t know that.
Breakfast gets reheated again, just in case, and left in the war room with a glass of crushed apple and milk, where Dean reconnects his laptop and chills out with a plate of chips. Salt and vinegar, which kind of burns, but in a fun way. Huh, maybe that’s why Ruby liked salted fries. It’s kind of like spice.
“Well, don’t be a stranger, it’s your home.”
“This isn’t a home,” Sam says from the doorway, fully dressed, even if his hair’s still wet at the edges. Dean wants to comb it through and watch Sam’s face twist into that annoyed look, but for now he has to settle with Sam staring at him like he’s gonna snap at any moment and eat a puppy.
“Whatever,” he says, instead of ‘of course it is, you’re with me, you’re always home,’ because human him was reticent like that. “C’mon, eat something.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll stuff your face myself, bitch.”
Sam doesn’t respond with the usual exchange, but does finally sit down in front of edible food. He pokes at it.
“I didn’t poison it.”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees, “Poison isn’t a demon’s style.”
He’s struck with a memory of Sam as a kid, picky over his food, even as Sam sucks it up and takes a bite. It’s not the memory of Sam being a bitchy little kid (like every little kid), but that he sometimes really, really wanted to hit him. He doesn’t think, that as a kid, that it ever meant anything more than being a kid himself, saddled with too many feelings he didn’t have any way to deal with, when his dad just gave him a gun and all but told him the only they’d ever feel happy again is if they killed the thing that got their mother.
Now it’s different. If he tries, really hard, he can remember Hell, and he can remember what he did, and he can remember why he did it.
“Dean. Your eyes. Stop it.”
He blinks. Sam’s staring at him, apprehension on his face but worry behind all of that. A stew of conflicting emotions for a demon brother.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds foreign on his tongue, but not because he’s a demon. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Let me cure you,” Sam says, getting up, walking over, all pleading eyes and desperate thoughts. “Please, we can fix this.”
“You’ve been trying for days, it won’t work, we both know it won’t.”
“Well we won’t know for sure if you stop trying!”
Sam’s leaning, towering over him, but then his voice breaks and something in Dean snaps, reaches up and grabs his brother by the shirt collar and yanks him down so suddenly his knees give out.
Sam catches himself, elbows on Dean’s thighs, kneeling on the floor, looking up at Dean the way Dean’s missed for decades, and oh fuck. His grip tightens on the shirt, because if he lets go he’s going to find out how it feels to have his fingers fisted around Sam’s hair.
“No.”
His eyes are black, they have to be, because Sam’s looking up at him with that stunned look and slightly open mouth and Dean wants to eat him alive, wants to mold himself into his skin, wants to push Sam’s jaw open a little wider and find out exactly what his little brother’s mind-body-soul feels like.
Except Sam’s not pulling away in fear or anger. There are tears in his eyes, and so many emotions behind them that Dean can’t even figure out why until Sam wraps his hands around Dean’s wrists and begs:
“Just let me save you for once.”
Oh.
He hadn’t thought of it like that.
Tears overflow and roll down Sam’s cheeks, and that rotten mass in Dean’s chest that was once his soul seems to calm. He lets go of Sam’s shirt, but Sam doesn’t let go of his wrists until Dean reaches forwards and wipes aside a tear.
It should feel very wrong, how all of that angry possession vanishes in an instant. Like all he’s ever needed in his life was for Sam to get down on his knees and for Dean to be able to peer into his head and see just how much his baby brother thinks he owes him everything.
“Come here, Sammy.”
The chairs in the war room are not made for more than one person, but Dean pulls some psychic strings to cram Sam into his lap without toppling them both onto the floor. Sam stopped being small enough to be held like this decades ago, sat sideways on Dean’s legs, head ducking into Dean’s shoulder, but who gives a shit. He’s Dean’s brother.
“Please...”
“It’s okay,” Dean brushes back Sam’s hair. “I don’t want to be cured.”
It’s the wrong thing to say, because Sam snorts, ugly and snotty, and starts squirming to get out of Dean’s hold.
“Of course you’d say that,” he says, voice tight, like he’s not yet panicked by the fact that Dean won’t let him go.
Dean pets his hair and presses a kiss to his temple. Sam keeps fidgeting.
“Fine.”
Sam freezes. Dean nuzzles at his cheek.
“You can keep trying, but you’re not allowed to lock me up, and you have to eat everything I make for you.”
Sam doesn’t relax, but he grows a little less tense.
“What are you— Why are you—”
“‘Cause I wanna be. I told you—”
“Yeah, you love me, but not... like this.”
He catches a thought in Sam’s mind. Human him would be disgusted. Demon him just smiles.
“Not like that,” though he’s got his mouth dangerously close to Sam’s face, and if Sam’s thoughts were anything but deeply repulsed he would indulge in that particular love if it made Sam happy. “But you don’t mind, do you?”
Sam does. He really does, because human Dean isn’t this disinhibited, human Dean has walls upon walls upon walls, human Dean wouldn’t touch him unless one of them was actively dying.
But hey, Dean isn’t human right now, and demons are selfish bastards.
“What if I say no?”
He’d cut open Sam’s tattoo and force himself down his throat. Or ditch his ass and go on a murder spree until Sam chased him down and begged anything to make him stop. Slit his wrist over Sam’s mouth and thank old Yellow Eyes in the aftermath. Follow up on that chat with Crowley so he could keep Sam’s soul forever.
His eyes are black again, but Sam keeps staring at him, like he’s testing him, like he just wants to know.
Dean pushes Sam’s hair behind his ear. His brother breathes heavily, like he’s making up for the fact that Dean very well isn’t anymore.
“Nothing.” Dean says. “I wouldn’t do anything you don’t want me to do. Just don’t leave me.”
Sam’s eyes fill with tears again. He brings his arms around and hugs Dean this time, curling in, the side of his head pressing against Dean’s, so close Dean can feel the salty tears on his cheek. He smiles, runs his fingers through Sam’s hair and no longer feels the urge to pull and hold him there.
“You promise you‘ll listen to me?”
Sometimes Sam manages to sound so much like his little brother it’s painful.
Sometimes Dean wonders if he’ll ever find the reason to stop.
“It’s a deal.”
Sam tenses, and Dean has to laugh. Sam pulls away and he lets him, crawling out of his lap to stare in disbelief.
“I’m joking,” Dean says, leaning into the seat, already missing how close Sam was to him. “Unless you wanted it to be.”
“No, don’t even joke about that.” Sam shakes his head. “No.”
Dean pouts. “It doesn’t have to be for your soul.”
“Stop it.” Sam glares, but it’s different now. Bitchier.
That’s good.
“Not even if it kept me from killing people?”
Sam’s jaw clenches. “Do you even know how to form deals? You’ve only been a demon for three days.”
Dean shrugs and acquiesces. “I’m sure there’s a demon Wikihow somewhere.”
“Yeah, well, hopefully we won’t need it. Come on.”
Sam starts out for the hallway, but Dean gets up and physically redirects him back to the table.
“Food first, for you,” he says, shoving Sam back into the chair. “And then we need to buy groceries.”
“I’m not letting you out of this bunker.”
“You’re not leaving me alone either,” Dean says. “And not just because you promised me.”
“I didn’t promise you—”
“Blah blah blah, eat your bacon.”
Sam throws him a look that feels about normal. “We’re buying food I like, since you don’t have to eat anymore.”
“Sure,” Dean says, if just to see Sam give a double take. “But we’re picking up more of these,” he lifted the plate of chips.
Sam shuts his eyes, shaking his head in disbelief, until the gears in his head click into place and he goes back to eating again.
Dean stares at him. There’s a lot of stuff in Sam’s head, but he doesn’t get far into it before Sam scowls, grabs Dean’s laptop and focuses his attention onto it.
“Hey, what if we made like Garth and did hunts like this?”
“One thing at a time.”
They’re not quite there yet, Dean thinks. Sam’s still got his own walls up, even if Dean were still human.
Sam takes a sip of the red smoothie, then gets to typing something.
Dean smiles. It’s good enough.