Work Text:
Dean eventually finds you at a run-down motel, a couple miles off the highway.
You know what’s going to happen as soon as you see the Impala. Sam clambers out of the front seat, does that little tip-toe stretch. You blink. Sam is gone. Dean’s eyes find yours through the window, and they look more gold than green under the shoddy yellow streetlamp.
You don’t get up to unlock the door. It takes a couple seconds and then Dean’s knocking twice, and you stay seated by the window, so the metallic sting of the lock follows and Dean’s in the doorway pocketing his Leatherman, staring you down with a little surprise. You turn back towards the Impala where Sam’s passed out in the passenger seat, and Dean drags the plastic chair on the other side of the table close enough that his knee rocks into yours and you can smell smoke.
“Your mom’s worried about you.”
Your mom’s off hunting. She probably doesn’t even know you’ve left. When you turn towards Dean you hope to God he doesn’t notice the faded tear tracks down your cheeks.
“How’d you find me?” You’d turned your phone’s GPS off and went analog. In response, Dean sticks a hand over your waist and thumbs up your sweater, fingering the hem of your camisole until he’s pushing upwards to accentuate the small, disc-shaped tracker tucked into the seam.
“It was Sam’s idea,” he says, which you know is a lie. Sam would’ve told you. Dean drops the fabric of your undershirt, rests his hand on the back of your chair, asks the million dollar question. “Why aren’t you in California, kid?”
You don’t know why you aren’t in California. You’d rung your aunt in San Francisco three days after Sam left, asking if you could stay for a while, and she said she’d put you up anytime. You’d started packing a bag that night, and found a sweater of Sam’s at the bottom of a drawer that still sort of smelled like him and left you so overcome you gave up and went to bed.
Dean continues. “I called him on the way to get you. He asked how you were doing. I told him you dragged me to that new Nicole Kidman movie and we had to leave halfway through ‘cause you got too scared.”
You are so unbearably mad at Dean for lying, so overwhelmingly relieved that Sam doesn’t know you’ve been a mess.
“He says you haven’t answered any of his calls. You’ve got him pretty worried.”
You wonder how much Dean knows. If Sam told him about how he’d said goodbye to you, how he climbed in through your window on that rainy night and kissed you to sleep in your bed. How he never actually said goodbye, how it was Dean breaking down your front door an hour later that told you, in a sudden burst of awful clarity, that Sam had left.
Dean’s thumb touches your shoulder and for a second you’re leaning into Sam’s side, fitting nicely under his arm. It’s even worse that he’s in this stupid green henley, one Sam used to live in. Your eyes sting as the tips of his fingers touch the skin of your neck, his hand covering you, and you wonder if Sam’s hands on your face in your bed was the last time you’d ever feel his touch and now Dean’s feel like a numbered thing, that the chance of him leaving this motel room and you never seeing either of them ever again becomes more and more palpable.
“I’m not going back with you,” you say quietly, cutting to the chase. Dean’s here to get you home before your mom and his dad get back from their hunting trip. As soon as you say it, though, you know it’s not true. Dean’s hand is warm on you, and you can smell something of Sam on him, shampoo or cologne or whatever, and thinking about Dean in the bathroom borrowing his little brother’s stuff makes you feel sick.
“Why aren’t you in California?”
Dean shrugs. “I’ll go eventually. Why, you wanna join?”
Selfishly, you’re not sure if you would be able to see Sam happy without you. If you could live with yourself feeling so jealous of him. You wonder if Dean feels the same, if he’s just better at hiding it.
“Why would you let Sam leave, but not me?” Why would you let Sam have a life, but not me?
“Kid, I don’t let Sam do anything. At least not anymore.” You look at Dean then, finally, right in the eyes. He’s got this loose little smile, almost like he’s joking, but the rest of him is set so strictly you know he’s not. “If I thought there was a chance in hell that I could pull him away from normal, you bet your ass I would be halfway to California right now instead of dragging you out of some shitty motel. If you were with him that would be one thing, but I’m not letting you die the second your boyfriend skips town.”
And that’s what really pisses you off. The thing that it all boils down to—that this isn’t about Sam, it’s not about your parents, it’s about Dean’s stupid misconception that you’re the same five year old girl he first met fourteen-odd years ago.
“Don’t pull that antiquated shit on me, Dean. I can handle my own.”
“Coulda fooled me.” The smile leaves. His hand goes to hold the back of your chair. “I’m not talking about things that go bump in the night. You’ve been unresponsive ever since he left, then I find you hitchhiking across state lines? Not picking up the phone? Door’s locked, and you’re not answering? C’mon, kid, I thought you’d be hanging from the ceiling fan when I showed up.”
Dean’s face is pale. You want to bite into the skin of his neck. “I’m not going to kill myself just because Sam left.”
Dean exhales, and you watch the fight leave him. His arm drops to the side. You think about the phone call he had with Sam on the way in, about how they probably didn’t talk about going to the movies and how fine you’re doing, about what Sam thinks happened.
You nudge Dean over and get up. Your legs feel shaky, from nerves and anger and abandonment, and cross the room to your bag slumped against the wall, dig through it until you reach your little flip phone, power it on. Texts roll in quick, a handful from Dean, several from Sam. Missed calls. Emails. You don’t open any of them, but Sam’s last message is short enough to fit in the preview: Please.
You look over your shoulder, and Dean’s typing away at something. Your phone buzzes with another text from Sam. You pocket it and go back to the table by the window.
“What’d you tell him?”
“That you’re alive.”
Sam’s ears must be burning. Your phone buzzes again.
“How is he?”
“I won’t act like I can read his mind, but he feels bad for leaving you. Bent out of shape about stealing some textbooks from the school store, too.”
“But he doesn’t miss it.”
You read between Dean’s lines. Dean reads between yours.
“He misses us. Misses you, kid. But he doesn’t miss the stuff that comes with us.”
The worst part of it is that you can’t blame him. You can be mad at him all day long, but you can’t bring yourself to blame him. He didn’t ask you to come with him because he knew you would say no, didn’t even tell you he’d gotten accepted because then you would have figured it out long before he skipped town. Sam knows you. You know Sam. For the first time in your life, it’s the worst feeling in the world.
You don’t even realize you’re crying until Dean is scrubbing at your tears, a few escapees falling wantonly into your lap.
“Sam’s great and all, but he’s nowhere near handsome enough to cry over.”
You sniff. “Funny, cause I’ve seen plenty of girls cry over you.”
Dean doesn’t respond, just cocks his head out and gestures plainly to his face.
A couple years ago, when you and the Winchesters were sharing a tiny duplex, a girl left Dean’s room crying to watch Jeopardy with you in the living room. You told her you were his little sister, she called him an ass, you concurred, and the look on Dean’s face when he left his room to take a leak only to see the two of you buddy buddy on the couch was almost more satisfying than when she slammed the door in his face on her way out.
“You’re an asshole,” you had said to Dean then. It repeats in the motel just as it has throughout the time you’ve known him, over and over, and you wonder which instance he’s thinking of.
“I know, kid. Let’s go home.”
You’d been warming to the idea, really and truly. But when Dean says it the first and only thing you think of is how Sam will not be there. And that’s not new—the times Sam hasn’t been in your home is equal to the amount of times he has, but now you know where he’s going to be the next day and week and month and it’s not with you. Dean tucks his thumb into the sleeve of the henley and it scratches at your cheeks. You feel petulant, stand up, crowd Dean out, drag yourself over to the bed and lay down with your feet dangling off the edge.
“It’s dark. Our parents aren’t going to be home for a while. Let’s just stay here for the night.”
Dean’s chair scratches over cheap carpet. The mattress shifts as he settles next to you, his leg touches yours. The bed’s not big. You stick your arm under your head and turn to the side where Dean’s looking at the ceiling, and you start trying to count his freckles until your eyes find the little sweep of his hair sticking over his neck.
It’s getting shaggy. An almost mullet, sort of curly at the ends. Once, when you were all much younger, you found Dean shoving Sam’s head under the faucet of your bathroom sink in something that looked more like torture than a haircut, and from then on you’d corral them to the bathroom every couple of months to fix them up—you liked giving Dean a Chad Michael Murray type thing, and Sam his cute little bangs. You think about your boys, one sitting on top of the toilet and one in the chair in front of you, the whir of the clippers and your hands in Sam’s hair, taking a washcloth to Dean’s freckled shoulders dotted in baby hairs. Absently, in the present, you reach a hand up to the back of his neck and twist one of those little waves between your fingers, and when you look back at Dean’s freckles his eyes are on yours and you think he’s in the same memory as you.
“Will you give me a trim when we get home? Need one.”
When we get home. Such a nice string of words. You’re starting to settle into the idea, resigning yourself to sleeping on the couch or floor or anywhere that’s not the bed where Sam left you.
Dean moves, then, a leg and arm moving over your body until he’s above you and all you can see, and something shifts.
Your first kiss with Sam had been in a motel room like this one, identical in every way that matters. You don’t remember it exactly because there were plenty similar that succeeded it, always with Sam’s flushed cheeks and his knee against your waist and your back to the headboard. You’ve wondered before if he told Dean about the first time. He had to know about some of the others—Sam’s beautiful and you’re something of a biter.
Sam had kissed you before he left. You keep thinking about it, gentle and chaste in your bedroom. When Dean kisses you it’s like he’s trying to consume you, leave nothing left, and you’re content in it.
His hands hook around the back of your thighs, hoist you onto the bed proper, body crowding yours. When you’re duly splayed out he climbs on top of you and kisses you again, hands cupping your jaw and meeting at the back of your head, the henley’s sleeves pressed up against your skin in just the right way for you to be able to feel the holes in the sleeves that Sam cut to stick his thumbs through. Hot tears come fast, meld your and Dean’s faces together like glue.
You don’t want to cry. Dean is kissing you, something that should never have happened but is, and that’s on top of the wrongness of kissing someone who isn’t Sam, but there’s also a twisted sort of familiarity in how Dean grips at your hair and breathes out a half-sigh in the middle of kissing that makes your skin bristle with Sam, and just thinking that is so wrong in of itself that everything all twists together and cancels each other out until you’re just kissing Dean on a motel bed, and nothing else will ever happen again.
Dean moves to your neck like he’s trying to eat you. Your nerves feel shot, skin unfamiliar with spit and tears and touch, and Sam’s henley still smells like him. Dean’s necklace is tucked underneath fabric and it pulses out towards you like a heartbeat, trapped under the floorboards. And Dean knew, he must have known, because he bites all of the spots on you that you would bite on Sam until he’s shifting further over you, bracing a hand on the back of your head and pushing you into his own pulse point and you want to try ripping out his arteries.
Carotid, the Dean of your past says, leaning over you in the library to stick his fingers in your anatomy textbook, and femoral’s in your leg, ‘cause of your femur, and the radial artery is in your wrist.
That’s only three. My study guide I have to have eight memorized.
Only need three to incapacitate a ne’er do well.
The feeling of wanting to hit Dean with your textbook is alive and well as you bite into his neck. This is for an anatomy test, stupid. Not a hunt.
Sammy’s the one you need, then.
You leave three bruises on Dean, watch them purple until he’s pressing your back onto the bed and kissing you again. His hands move differently than Sam’s, but find the same places, the same sickening spots made for boys to touch. Winchesters, in your case. For a while, you thought it would be just Sam.
You don’t know who stops kissing who first. You know you haven’t stopped crying, and your eyes are blurry and nose feels clogged, which must not be very pretty. It’s hard to pinpoint when Dean goes back to being your boyfriend’s older brother, the scumbag that calls you kid more than your own name and used to drive you to school, but it’s somewhere between his hand up your shirt and when he’s off the bed, grabbing your bag off the floor, rifling through his wallet for a room service tip, and hauling you to your feet.
The mattress buzzes. Sam’s name on the screen of your phone. Dean’s teeth starting to bring a sharp, clear pain to your neck. He’s left you in the motel room, and you only take a moment to exist in the middle of it until you’re heading for the Impala.
“Take the backseat and get some sleep,” Dean says, keeping the back driver seat open as he slides into the front. John’s car looks good on him. You miss the crappy old pickup, though, a little bit, remember falling in love with Sam when Dean was teaching him chivalry with a sharp clear of his throat that would make Sam would dart in front of you, open your door before hoisting himself ungracefully into the passenger seat.
You can hear the both of them in the front seat as you take your spot in the back, one louder than the other, tearing up the Beast of Burden bridge. Pret-ty pret-ty, such a pret-ty pret-ty pret-ty girl. Sam’s eyes meeting yours in the rear view.
Yours close, miss Dean trying to catch them. You settle in, put your back against the door, stretch your feet out, scuff the upholstery. The Impala hums under you. Dean turns the radio on. It’s not even music—some grainy, droning talk show.
The rest of the ride is silent.