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runedgirlTitle:Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Eyes (Ch 3/8)
Author: runedgirl (Lynsey)
Rating: NC17 overall
Pairing: Sam/Dean, Sam/demon!Dean
Word Count: 3500
Warning: violent content
Beta: My sexyboy![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pure_shite (Ashton). Thanks!!
Summary: Sam tried to thwart death in a desperate attempt to keep his brother human. Did it work or did heaven come between them the way hell never could? Sequel to the story Fade To Black - this one will make more sense if you read the original fic first.
AN: Not a WIP – story is finished with 8 chapters and will be posted regularly. Feedback is adored and promptly savored.
Previous chapters: Chapter One Chapter Two
Chapter Three
The first thing that comes back – just like the last time – is his hearing.
There’s a slashing sound, crack of something splitting wide open, the unmistakable groan of someone in pain.
“I told you, you idiot, it’s Sam – it’s Sam, your Sam, your brother, your –
The demon roars at that, his voice – Dean’s voice – shaking with rage, and Ruby screams again as Sam struggles to open his eyes, to unhinge his mouth.
Ruby sobs out a bitter laugh. “I told you he was alive, I fuckin’ told you, but he’s dead now all right, because you just fuckin’ killed him,” she says, the last words choked out around a gasp. “After I went all over the world looking for him, trying to bring him back to you – you FUCKER!”
There’s another crack, another stifled scream, and Sam finally finds his voice.
“Stop,” he says weakly, but it’s enough to bring the room to silence.
The demon freezes, then turns to where Sam’s lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood. He walks over slowly, a panther inspecting his felled prey, and crouches next to the body of the man he just stabbed to death, black eyes narrowed. His gaze skims over Sam’s face, darts jerkily from the long brown hair to the moles next to his mouth and cheekbone, and from this close Sam can see the slight tremble of his bottom lip as he stares.
It’s hard to move – his chest and stomach hurt like a bitch – but Sam manages to grasp the hem of his shirt and pull it up, pushing his jeans down a little and twisting enough to expose the faded ink that runs from hipbone to belly. The demon’s brow furrows and he reaches down to touch, and the second his fingers make contact with Sam’s skin they both gasp, fire skittering through Sam’s veins as the tattoo flares and burns.
The demon shoves his other hand beneath the waist of his own jeans to touch the matching ink there, and Sam can feel it grow even stronger, the current arcing between them like an electrical circuit. “Sam?” he whispers, the tentative voice incongruously human-sounding in the face of a demon slicked in blood who’s just killed two people and taken his rage out on the demon who gave birth to his children. His eyes drop to Sam’s chest, and his face crumples, his hands coming down to rip open Sam’s shirt and press the edges of the still gaping wound together clumsily. “Sam,” he says, like it’s the only word he remembers, “Sam, Sam.”
“Let me go, I told you it was him, you bastard,” Ruby yells from across the room where she’s still bolted to the iron cuffs the crime bosses helpfully set into one wall. “Let me see, maybe I can help.” Her clothes are in tatters, ribbons of cloth and ribbons of flesh bloodied together.
The demon gets up instantly, unlocks her hands and lets her slap him twice across the face, hard enough to make his lip bleed. “Fucker!” she says again, and knees him in the groin for good measure. He grunts and cups himself, hunched over, but lets her go. Ruby kneels beside Sam, her hands running over the two gashes in his chest and stomach, assessing.
The demon comes around to the other side and falls to his knees, one palm flat to the inked skin disappearing under Sam’s jeans. The warmth buzzing through Sam at the touch feels good, eases some of the pain still throbbing where the knife went in.
“Sam,” he says again, like he’s still not sure this is for real. His fingers tremble where they’re pressed to Sam’s hip.
Ruby sits back on her heels with a ‘huh’ when she’s finally satisfied that Sam’s not dead. “You said the broken bones you got when you fell healed by themselves?”
“Yeah,” Sam confirms, still struggling to breathe around the hole in his chest.
“Well, it looks like maybe this motherfuckingbastardidiot here got lucky when he decided to ignore me and stab you to death.” Ruby glares at the demon again.
He growls, but doesn’t move his hand from Sam’s hip or take his eyes off Sam’s face.
“You mean I’m gonna live?” Sam rasps, but he already knows the answer. The pain is still there, but he can breathe again, the pressure on his chest lessening. He can see clearly now too, the haze lifting little by little. Clearly enough to see the freckles scattered across the demon’s nose, the slight scruff roughening his chin, the long lashes that used to flutter when Sam fucked him long and hard and rough. Clearly enough to see how breathtakingly beautiful he is, his bottom lip split by Ruby’s slap, swollen and red and Sam just wants to kiss him there, taste the droplet of blood.
The demon’s staring back at him, tongue darting out to lick where Sam’s looking.
“How?” Sam finally asks, starting to sound a little more like himself again.
Ruby shrugs, running her hands again over the torn flesh on Sam’s stomach that’s already trying to knit back together. It’s happening even faster than her own body can repair itself, and Sam suddenly remembers the lengths she went to in order to save him – them. He lays a hand on her shoulder, feels her blood still wet on his fingers. “Thank you,” he says, voice cracking with emotion. “For finding me, for finding him – thank you.”
She scoffs, pushes his hand away and gets up. “Finding you, no problem. Finding him? Should have let the bastard stay here in his little den of iniquity.” She tries to pull her shredded shirt over the cuts riddling her breasts. “Bastard.”
The demon just growls, which seems to be his primary form of communication, but he quiets when Sam tries to get up too fast and falls back to the floor with a groan instead.
“You owe me,” Ruby says, slipping out of her torn jeans and heading for the room’s utilitarian shower to wash some of the blood away. “You both do.”
The bathroom door slams, and then it’s just the two of them, the demon still kneeling at Sam’s side, black eyes wide. He cocks his head when Sam looks back, brow furrowing with a painfully familiar look of concentration as he studies Sam closely, lips parting, and oh, that. That. Dean’s mouth, soft and full, and Sam remembers just how it feels against his own. He reaches up to touch his brother’s face, back of his hand running across the stubbled cheek with a tenderness Sam can’t repress even in the face of all he's just witnessed.
“So beautiful,” he says, eyes watering with the strength of too many emotions, and the demon leans into the touch with a rumbling growl, rubs his face against the back of Sam’s hand like a big cat wanting more petting. Sam can feel the tension in the muscled body as the demon sighs and curls over him, resting his head against Sam’s shoulder, the silky spikes of his hair tickling the exposed skin under his opened shirt. For a few seconds, it almost seems like they’re cuddling. Except the demon’s body is still strung tight as a wire, coiled like a spring just barely tethered.
“’s okay,” Sam soothes, trying for calming. He slips one hand around his brother’s body, runs his fingers over the warm skin at the small of his back. The demon shudders and nestles in closer, nosing behind Sam’s ear to scent him, sharp whuffing breaths like a big dog making sure of friend or foe, raising gooseflesh in their wake. Sam tries to stay as still as he can as the demon swipes a hot tongue over the throb of artery in Sam’s neck, tasting the salt and sweat and groaning deep in his chest. Sharp teeth scrape against the tender hollow of his throat, worry at his collarbone hard enough to hurt, and Sam struggles to keep the whimper of pain inside as his wounded body’s jostled back and forth beneath the demon's hands and mouth.
"Easy," he coaxes, rubbing between the bunched muscle of the demon's shoulders, trying to calm him down.
The demon arches up into the touch with a gravelly purr. “Sam,” he growls again, shaking his head like he’s got a rabbit in his jaws, violent and rough. Dean’s bowed mouth stretches into a feral snarl as he twists and mounts Sam in one smooth fluid movement, ignoring Sam’s grunt of protest. He straddles one of Sam’s legs and sinks down on his knees, low enough to rub his crotch against Sam’s thigh while his sharp teeth nip at the lobe of Sam’s ear. He’s excited. Hard.
There’s no way Sam is reciprocating, but it spreads a lazy heat through him anyway, all the desire he never could quite feel this past year for anyone else swelling with the surge of love for his brother. He should be disgusted after what he just saw, what the demon just did. But all Sam can feel is grateful, a ridiculous hope and a powerful desire the only emotions he seems capable of. This is Dean’s body, and he’s sure his brother’s in there somewhere. Has to be.
A flash of memory from the last of their time together hits him without warning, Dean just as young and strong as he is right now, his hands gentle on Sam’s body wasted with age, cherishing. The look in Dean’s eyes when Sam tried to hide, full of adoration, and Dean had whispered, “Beautiful, Sammy, always beautiful” until Sam had let the tears overflow, let Dean kiss them away with his soft mouth and hungry tongue.
So Sam swallows different tears now. He lets the demon hump his thigh, encourages him with a hand on his ass, gripping one muscled cheek as the demon ruts against him. The demon’s teeth aren’t gentle, scraping against Sam’s throat, biting a groove into his chin, his harsh breaths and snarled growls increasingly wild, desperate. There are no tender words, no whispered endearments, only raw need and a hard body thick with lust, but Sam remembers, won’t forget again.
“Yeah, s’okay, I’m here,” Sam says, “I’m here.”
The demon moans at Sam’s words, cants his hips and grinds his hard length into Sam’s leg, grunting with each thrust. It hurts every time the split flesh gets tugged, but god, Sam’s missed this -- the feel of Dean’s muscled body and silky soft hair and the heft of his dick, stiff and eager for Sam. He knows what Dean’s body likes, so Sam cups his brother’s ass from behind, spreads his big hands over the curved muscle and digs his fingers in hard, claiming, pressing against his hole through the denim. The demon yelps and stiffens, creaming his jeans just like that with his teeth fastened on Sam’s shoulder. He hisses and bucks against Sam through the last stabs of pleasure, then lies there panting for a moment before he seems to realize his weight on Sam isn’t the best thing for stab wounds and climbs off.
“You’re a piece of work,” Ruby says from the bathroom, wrapped in a fluffy towel with steam trailing her as she dries her hair. “First you stab him, then you fuck him before the blood’s even dried.”
Sam’s not sure whether to find that funny or upsetting. The demon isn’t Dean, that much Ruby was right about. Not the Dean who went to hell, not the Dean who eventually clawed his way back and raised a family with Sam. The past twelve months have been all about opening himself up to his violent side and repressing – maybe eliminating – the humanity Sam spent most of his natural life coaxing to the surface. If Ruby’s right, there might not be any of that left, but Sam can’t bring himself to stop hoping.
The demon snarls at her, adjusting himself in his sticky jeans.
Ruby drops the towel to pull her jeans and what’s left of her shirt back on, and Sam can’t suppress a gasp. The shower washed off most of the blood, but the lacerations the demon left all over her body are stark red lines, crisscrossing everywhere, deep and ugly. They won’t heal completely for days.
“Jesus,” he says, and catches the demon’s black eyes.
The demon scowls, then shrugs and turns away when Sam keeps staring.
“No more,” Sam tells him, hoping it shows on his face how serious he is. “No more hurting people.”
The obstinate look on the demon’s face argues more clearly than words that Ruby is, in fact, not a person.
“She’s the mother of our children!” Sam has no idea if the demon even remembers, but it’s fucking true, and he’s still shaken from seeing the evidence of the demon’s brutality all over her. He has no idea why he thinks the demon will listen to him either.
There’s suddenly a noise at the end of the hallway, and the demon leaps to his feet, ready to spring into action and get back to the killing.
“What the fuck’s going on in there?” a man’s voice yells from the far stairwell. Either the men they put out of commission have come to, or reinforcements have shown up. The demon turns toward the door, just as eager to rip apart his former colleagues as he was to do their dirty work, but Sam reaches out and grabs his wrist. The demon stills, body quivering with readiness and the effort it takes to stay there.
“No killing,” Sam says quietly, makes it an order.
There’s a span of seconds that seems to stretch out into hours, Sam hanging on and the demon crouched and twitching, every muscle tensed for fight and a murderous expression on his pretty face. Ruby watches unmoving, all of them waiting to find out how it’s gonna be.
The demon nods finally, jaw clenched and twitching.
Then the men are bursting through the shattered door, guns at the ready, and the demon yanks his wrist out of Sam’s grasp and takes two down at once, before they can even get a shot off, one flying so far across the room his body slams against the far wall and slumps to the floor. The other loses his gun and two of his fingers with it, crumples to the floor clutching his bleeding hand and screaming at the top of his lungs. The third man takes one look at the instant carnage and bolts. The demon throws the second guy’s gun at his retreating head, knocking him over so thoroughly he faceplants on the spot and stays down.
Sam struggles to his feet, Ruby supporting him when he still has to clutch at his stomach in pain. The demon frowns at them, his fingers red with guy number two’s blood and still looking scary as hell, but he snarls indignantly at Sam’s disgusted expression, pointing at the bleeding-but-still-breathing men.
It’s enough. It’s a start. Sam’s standards are pathetically low, but he’ll take what he can get. He didn’t put all this effort into coming back just to give up because the demon has rediscovered his propensity for violence in a big way. Even if that did mean taking a knife to the chest himself. Twice.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ruby prompts, cursing at the demon when he pushes her away from Sam and wraps his own arm around Sam’s waist to help him out the door. His grip is just this side of rough, possessive, and Sam’s a sick fuck because it makes his pulse race faster even as the wound in his belly still aches from the demon’s knife.
* * *
Ruby gets back behind the wheel of the car they stole two days ago without discussion, and Sam lets the demon pull him into the backseat. He’s trying to be gentle – at least Sam thinks he is -- but he sucks at it, so Sam ends up wincing and slapping his hands away as he tries to get comfortable with two mortal wounds still bleeding sluggishly.
“Stop touching me,” Sam complains, and the demon withdraws instantly, hands balled into fists to keep them busy and his whole body rigid. He looks down at the damage he inflicted, bites his lip before he glances up at Sam again, black eyes inscrutable.
Ruby steals them a med kit from the next 7-11 they pass while the demon draws the clerk’s attention with his less-than-subtle theft of the fifth of whiskey Sam asked for. They screech away with gunshots fired over the roof of the little green Civic, and Ruby laughs, sounding more like the demon Sam remembers.
The demon puts the whiskey on the floor and dumps a pile of granola bars in Sam’s lap. They’re his favorite kind.
“Ruby tell you to get these?”
The demon just shrugs, but Ruby catches Sam’s eyes in the rearview and shakes her head.
She pulls over at a gas station a few miles down the road, and between them they get Sam to the tiny rest room around back. Ruby closes the door behind her, says sternly “Don’t fuck this up,” before she leaves. But Sam doesn’t flinch, trusts his brother’s hands even now that they’ve done so many things Dean never would have.
The demon hands the whiskey to Sam without a word and threads the needle, waits expectantly for Sam to pull off his shirt and unfasten his jeans to bare his still-bleeding chest and stomach. His hands aren’t exactly gentle, not like Dean’s would have been, but they’re steady and determined. He hesitates for an extra second before he splashes the alcohol over the wounds, watching Sam’s face closely as he grimaces and curses.
“Go ahead,” Sam hisses when the pain has subsided enough for him to talk, and the demon bends to stitch the ragged edges of Sam’s flesh back together, his fingers working sure and steady to take back the damage he inflicted. When he’s done, he places the sterile bandages carefully, tapes the edges and smoothes them down. They both sigh when the job is finally finished, and then the demon puts the supplies back and turns away again, hands obediently at his sides but clenched right back into unhappy fists.
He’s still bare chested, splattered with blood and who knows what the hell else, but he looks just like Dean from the back, shirtless, broad shoulders tapered to slim waist. Sam reaches out to touch before he thinks about it. The demon freezes, muscles jumping under the skin, but he allows Sam to turn him slowly so they’re face to face.
“Let me clean you up a little, okay? You’re a mess.”
Black eyes regard him carefully for a minute, and Sam can’t tell if it’s with mistrust or something else. Finally the demon nods, and his fingers relax a little, one of them unconsciously brushing at his jeans like that will get the red stain off them.
Sam wets some paper towels and squirts a little liquid soap on them, wipes the dried blood from the round muscle of the demon’s shoulders, the tendon taut at the side of his neck. The familiarity of it grounds Sam, so many thousands of times he wiped Dean down after a hunt, cleaned him up, took care of him. He wants that again, wants it to be monster’s blood, not human.
The demon’s throat works when Sam cleans off his chest, scrubbing the wet paper towel over a puckered nipple until its redness is normal, not painted on. Sam has the sudden urge to pinch him there, feel the hardness, rub until it’s sore and sparking hot the way he knows Dean’s body likes. He doesn’t though, just keeps going, stopping every now and then to toss the used towels in the trash and wet some new ones. The demon’s like a statue, though his stomach trembles as Sam scrubs off the blood outlining the cut muscles of his abs, the flakes of it dried into his navel and caught in the line of wiry hair beneath. His cock is a hard bulge in his jeans, and Sam wants badly to touch it, feel the way he knows the demon’s hips will push into his hand eagerly.
He doesn’t. Instead, he wipes the worst of the splatters out of the demon’s short hair, off the slight stubble of his cheeks. There’s a spot of blood in the middle of one eyebrow, and the demon frowns when Sam dabs that off too, his patience for standing still waning.
“Fine, I’m done,” Sam answers to the unspoken grumble. Their eyes hold for a few seconds more, then the demon’s turning on his heel.
Ruby’s waiting with a worried expression on her face, but Sam gives her a nod and a half smile, buttoning his shirt over the bandages.
Warm with the whiskey, staring at the nape of Dean’s neck where Sam has brushed a teasing kiss so many millions of times, Sam lets himself believe for the first time that they might be okay as they walk back to the still-running car.
Sam’s always been stupid when it comes to Dean.
Chapter Four
Author: runedgirl (Lynsey)
Rating: NC17 overall
Pairing: Sam/Dean, Sam/demon!Dean
Word Count: 3500
Warning: violent content
Beta: My sexyboy
pure_shite (Ashton). Thanks!!Summary: Sam tried to thwart death in a desperate attempt to keep his brother human. Did it work or did heaven come between them the way hell never could? Sequel to the story Fade To Black - this one will make more sense if you read the original fic first.
AN: Not a WIP – story is finished with 8 chapters and will be posted regularly. Feedback is adored and promptly savored.
Previous chapters: Chapter One Chapter Two
Chapter Three
The first thing that comes back – just like the last time – is his hearing.
There’s a slashing sound, crack of something splitting wide open, the unmistakable groan of someone in pain.
“I told you, you idiot, it’s Sam – it’s Sam, your Sam, your brother, your –
The demon roars at that, his voice – Dean’s voice – shaking with rage, and Ruby screams again as Sam struggles to open his eyes, to unhinge his mouth.
Ruby sobs out a bitter laugh. “I told you he was alive, I fuckin’ told you, but he’s dead now all right, because you just fuckin’ killed him,” she says, the last words choked out around a gasp. “After I went all over the world looking for him, trying to bring him back to you – you FUCKER!”
There’s another crack, another stifled scream, and Sam finally finds his voice.
“Stop,” he says weakly, but it’s enough to bring the room to silence.
The demon freezes, then turns to where Sam’s lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood. He walks over slowly, a panther inspecting his felled prey, and crouches next to the body of the man he just stabbed to death, black eyes narrowed. His gaze skims over Sam’s face, darts jerkily from the long brown hair to the moles next to his mouth and cheekbone, and from this close Sam can see the slight tremble of his bottom lip as he stares.
It’s hard to move – his chest and stomach hurt like a bitch – but Sam manages to grasp the hem of his shirt and pull it up, pushing his jeans down a little and twisting enough to expose the faded ink that runs from hipbone to belly. The demon’s brow furrows and he reaches down to touch, and the second his fingers make contact with Sam’s skin they both gasp, fire skittering through Sam’s veins as the tattoo flares and burns.
The demon shoves his other hand beneath the waist of his own jeans to touch the matching ink there, and Sam can feel it grow even stronger, the current arcing between them like an electrical circuit. “Sam?” he whispers, the tentative voice incongruously human-sounding in the face of a demon slicked in blood who’s just killed two people and taken his rage out on the demon who gave birth to his children. His eyes drop to Sam’s chest, and his face crumples, his hands coming down to rip open Sam’s shirt and press the edges of the still gaping wound together clumsily. “Sam,” he says, like it’s the only word he remembers, “Sam, Sam.”
“Let me go, I told you it was him, you bastard,” Ruby yells from across the room where she’s still bolted to the iron cuffs the crime bosses helpfully set into one wall. “Let me see, maybe I can help.” Her clothes are in tatters, ribbons of cloth and ribbons of flesh bloodied together.
The demon gets up instantly, unlocks her hands and lets her slap him twice across the face, hard enough to make his lip bleed. “Fucker!” she says again, and knees him in the groin for good measure. He grunts and cups himself, hunched over, but lets her go. Ruby kneels beside Sam, her hands running over the two gashes in his chest and stomach, assessing.
The demon comes around to the other side and falls to his knees, one palm flat to the inked skin disappearing under Sam’s jeans. The warmth buzzing through Sam at the touch feels good, eases some of the pain still throbbing where the knife went in.
“Sam,” he says again, like he’s still not sure this is for real. His fingers tremble where they’re pressed to Sam’s hip.
Ruby sits back on her heels with a ‘huh’ when she’s finally satisfied that Sam’s not dead. “You said the broken bones you got when you fell healed by themselves?”
“Yeah,” Sam confirms, still struggling to breathe around the hole in his chest.
“Well, it looks like maybe this motherfuckingbastardidiot here got lucky when he decided to ignore me and stab you to death.” Ruby glares at the demon again.
He growls, but doesn’t move his hand from Sam’s hip or take his eyes off Sam’s face.
“You mean I’m gonna live?” Sam rasps, but he already knows the answer. The pain is still there, but he can breathe again, the pressure on his chest lessening. He can see clearly now too, the haze lifting little by little. Clearly enough to see the freckles scattered across the demon’s nose, the slight scruff roughening his chin, the long lashes that used to flutter when Sam fucked him long and hard and rough. Clearly enough to see how breathtakingly beautiful he is, his bottom lip split by Ruby’s slap, swollen and red and Sam just wants to kiss him there, taste the droplet of blood.
The demon’s staring back at him, tongue darting out to lick where Sam’s looking.
“How?” Sam finally asks, starting to sound a little more like himself again.
Ruby shrugs, running her hands again over the torn flesh on Sam’s stomach that’s already trying to knit back together. It’s happening even faster than her own body can repair itself, and Sam suddenly remembers the lengths she went to in order to save him – them. He lays a hand on her shoulder, feels her blood still wet on his fingers. “Thank you,” he says, voice cracking with emotion. “For finding me, for finding him – thank you.”
She scoffs, pushes his hand away and gets up. “Finding you, no problem. Finding him? Should have let the bastard stay here in his little den of iniquity.” She tries to pull her shredded shirt over the cuts riddling her breasts. “Bastard.”
The demon just growls, which seems to be his primary form of communication, but he quiets when Sam tries to get up too fast and falls back to the floor with a groan instead.
“You owe me,” Ruby says, slipping out of her torn jeans and heading for the room’s utilitarian shower to wash some of the blood away. “You both do.”
The bathroom door slams, and then it’s just the two of them, the demon still kneeling at Sam’s side, black eyes wide. He cocks his head when Sam looks back, brow furrowing with a painfully familiar look of concentration as he studies Sam closely, lips parting, and oh, that. That. Dean’s mouth, soft and full, and Sam remembers just how it feels against his own. He reaches up to touch his brother’s face, back of his hand running across the stubbled cheek with a tenderness Sam can’t repress even in the face of all he's just witnessed.
“So beautiful,” he says, eyes watering with the strength of too many emotions, and the demon leans into the touch with a rumbling growl, rubs his face against the back of Sam’s hand like a big cat wanting more petting. Sam can feel the tension in the muscled body as the demon sighs and curls over him, resting his head against Sam’s shoulder, the silky spikes of his hair tickling the exposed skin under his opened shirt. For a few seconds, it almost seems like they’re cuddling. Except the demon’s body is still strung tight as a wire, coiled like a spring just barely tethered.
“’s okay,” Sam soothes, trying for calming. He slips one hand around his brother’s body, runs his fingers over the warm skin at the small of his back. The demon shudders and nestles in closer, nosing behind Sam’s ear to scent him, sharp whuffing breaths like a big dog making sure of friend or foe, raising gooseflesh in their wake. Sam tries to stay as still as he can as the demon swipes a hot tongue over the throb of artery in Sam’s neck, tasting the salt and sweat and groaning deep in his chest. Sharp teeth scrape against the tender hollow of his throat, worry at his collarbone hard enough to hurt, and Sam struggles to keep the whimper of pain inside as his wounded body’s jostled back and forth beneath the demon's hands and mouth.
"Easy," he coaxes, rubbing between the bunched muscle of the demon's shoulders, trying to calm him down.
The demon arches up into the touch with a gravelly purr. “Sam,” he growls again, shaking his head like he’s got a rabbit in his jaws, violent and rough. Dean’s bowed mouth stretches into a feral snarl as he twists and mounts Sam in one smooth fluid movement, ignoring Sam’s grunt of protest. He straddles one of Sam’s legs and sinks down on his knees, low enough to rub his crotch against Sam’s thigh while his sharp teeth nip at the lobe of Sam’s ear. He’s excited. Hard.
There’s no way Sam is reciprocating, but it spreads a lazy heat through him anyway, all the desire he never could quite feel this past year for anyone else swelling with the surge of love for his brother. He should be disgusted after what he just saw, what the demon just did. But all Sam can feel is grateful, a ridiculous hope and a powerful desire the only emotions he seems capable of. This is Dean’s body, and he’s sure his brother’s in there somewhere. Has to be.
A flash of memory from the last of their time together hits him without warning, Dean just as young and strong as he is right now, his hands gentle on Sam’s body wasted with age, cherishing. The look in Dean’s eyes when Sam tried to hide, full of adoration, and Dean had whispered, “Beautiful, Sammy, always beautiful” until Sam had let the tears overflow, let Dean kiss them away with his soft mouth and hungry tongue.
So Sam swallows different tears now. He lets the demon hump his thigh, encourages him with a hand on his ass, gripping one muscled cheek as the demon ruts against him. The demon’s teeth aren’t gentle, scraping against Sam’s throat, biting a groove into his chin, his harsh breaths and snarled growls increasingly wild, desperate. There are no tender words, no whispered endearments, only raw need and a hard body thick with lust, but Sam remembers, won’t forget again.
“Yeah, s’okay, I’m here,” Sam says, “I’m here.”
The demon moans at Sam’s words, cants his hips and grinds his hard length into Sam’s leg, grunting with each thrust. It hurts every time the split flesh gets tugged, but god, Sam’s missed this -- the feel of Dean’s muscled body and silky soft hair and the heft of his dick, stiff and eager for Sam. He knows what Dean’s body likes, so Sam cups his brother’s ass from behind, spreads his big hands over the curved muscle and digs his fingers in hard, claiming, pressing against his hole through the denim. The demon yelps and stiffens, creaming his jeans just like that with his teeth fastened on Sam’s shoulder. He hisses and bucks against Sam through the last stabs of pleasure, then lies there panting for a moment before he seems to realize his weight on Sam isn’t the best thing for stab wounds and climbs off.
“You’re a piece of work,” Ruby says from the bathroom, wrapped in a fluffy towel with steam trailing her as she dries her hair. “First you stab him, then you fuck him before the blood’s even dried.”
Sam’s not sure whether to find that funny or upsetting. The demon isn’t Dean, that much Ruby was right about. Not the Dean who went to hell, not the Dean who eventually clawed his way back and raised a family with Sam. The past twelve months have been all about opening himself up to his violent side and repressing – maybe eliminating – the humanity Sam spent most of his natural life coaxing to the surface. If Ruby’s right, there might not be any of that left, but Sam can’t bring himself to stop hoping.
The demon snarls at her, adjusting himself in his sticky jeans.
Ruby drops the towel to pull her jeans and what’s left of her shirt back on, and Sam can’t suppress a gasp. The shower washed off most of the blood, but the lacerations the demon left all over her body are stark red lines, crisscrossing everywhere, deep and ugly. They won’t heal completely for days.
“Jesus,” he says, and catches the demon’s black eyes.
The demon scowls, then shrugs and turns away when Sam keeps staring.
“No more,” Sam tells him, hoping it shows on his face how serious he is. “No more hurting people.”
The obstinate look on the demon’s face argues more clearly than words that Ruby is, in fact, not a person.
“She’s the mother of our children!” Sam has no idea if the demon even remembers, but it’s fucking true, and he’s still shaken from seeing the evidence of the demon’s brutality all over her. He has no idea why he thinks the demon will listen to him either.
There’s suddenly a noise at the end of the hallway, and the demon leaps to his feet, ready to spring into action and get back to the killing.
“What the fuck’s going on in there?” a man’s voice yells from the far stairwell. Either the men they put out of commission have come to, or reinforcements have shown up. The demon turns toward the door, just as eager to rip apart his former colleagues as he was to do their dirty work, but Sam reaches out and grabs his wrist. The demon stills, body quivering with readiness and the effort it takes to stay there.
“No killing,” Sam says quietly, makes it an order.
There’s a span of seconds that seems to stretch out into hours, Sam hanging on and the demon crouched and twitching, every muscle tensed for fight and a murderous expression on his pretty face. Ruby watches unmoving, all of them waiting to find out how it’s gonna be.
The demon nods finally, jaw clenched and twitching.
Then the men are bursting through the shattered door, guns at the ready, and the demon yanks his wrist out of Sam’s grasp and takes two down at once, before they can even get a shot off, one flying so far across the room his body slams against the far wall and slumps to the floor. The other loses his gun and two of his fingers with it, crumples to the floor clutching his bleeding hand and screaming at the top of his lungs. The third man takes one look at the instant carnage and bolts. The demon throws the second guy’s gun at his retreating head, knocking him over so thoroughly he faceplants on the spot and stays down.
Sam struggles to his feet, Ruby supporting him when he still has to clutch at his stomach in pain. The demon frowns at them, his fingers red with guy number two’s blood and still looking scary as hell, but he snarls indignantly at Sam’s disgusted expression, pointing at the bleeding-but-still-breathing men.
It’s enough. It’s a start. Sam’s standards are pathetically low, but he’ll take what he can get. He didn’t put all this effort into coming back just to give up because the demon has rediscovered his propensity for violence in a big way. Even if that did mean taking a knife to the chest himself. Twice.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ruby prompts, cursing at the demon when he pushes her away from Sam and wraps his own arm around Sam’s waist to help him out the door. His grip is just this side of rough, possessive, and Sam’s a sick fuck because it makes his pulse race faster even as the wound in his belly still aches from the demon’s knife.
* * *
Ruby gets back behind the wheel of the car they stole two days ago without discussion, and Sam lets the demon pull him into the backseat. He’s trying to be gentle – at least Sam thinks he is -- but he sucks at it, so Sam ends up wincing and slapping his hands away as he tries to get comfortable with two mortal wounds still bleeding sluggishly.
“Stop touching me,” Sam complains, and the demon withdraws instantly, hands balled into fists to keep them busy and his whole body rigid. He looks down at the damage he inflicted, bites his lip before he glances up at Sam again, black eyes inscrutable.
Ruby steals them a med kit from the next 7-11 they pass while the demon draws the clerk’s attention with his less-than-subtle theft of the fifth of whiskey Sam asked for. They screech away with gunshots fired over the roof of the little green Civic, and Ruby laughs, sounding more like the demon Sam remembers.
The demon puts the whiskey on the floor and dumps a pile of granola bars in Sam’s lap. They’re his favorite kind.
“Ruby tell you to get these?”
The demon just shrugs, but Ruby catches Sam’s eyes in the rearview and shakes her head.
She pulls over at a gas station a few miles down the road, and between them they get Sam to the tiny rest room around back. Ruby closes the door behind her, says sternly “Don’t fuck this up,” before she leaves. But Sam doesn’t flinch, trusts his brother’s hands even now that they’ve done so many things Dean never would have.
The demon hands the whiskey to Sam without a word and threads the needle, waits expectantly for Sam to pull off his shirt and unfasten his jeans to bare his still-bleeding chest and stomach. His hands aren’t exactly gentle, not like Dean’s would have been, but they’re steady and determined. He hesitates for an extra second before he splashes the alcohol over the wounds, watching Sam’s face closely as he grimaces and curses.
“Go ahead,” Sam hisses when the pain has subsided enough for him to talk, and the demon bends to stitch the ragged edges of Sam’s flesh back together, his fingers working sure and steady to take back the damage he inflicted. When he’s done, he places the sterile bandages carefully, tapes the edges and smoothes them down. They both sigh when the job is finally finished, and then the demon puts the supplies back and turns away again, hands obediently at his sides but clenched right back into unhappy fists.
He’s still bare chested, splattered with blood and who knows what the hell else, but he looks just like Dean from the back, shirtless, broad shoulders tapered to slim waist. Sam reaches out to touch before he thinks about it. The demon freezes, muscles jumping under the skin, but he allows Sam to turn him slowly so they’re face to face.
“Let me clean you up a little, okay? You’re a mess.”
Black eyes regard him carefully for a minute, and Sam can’t tell if it’s with mistrust or something else. Finally the demon nods, and his fingers relax a little, one of them unconsciously brushing at his jeans like that will get the red stain off them.
Sam wets some paper towels and squirts a little liquid soap on them, wipes the dried blood from the round muscle of the demon’s shoulders, the tendon taut at the side of his neck. The familiarity of it grounds Sam, so many thousands of times he wiped Dean down after a hunt, cleaned him up, took care of him. He wants that again, wants it to be monster’s blood, not human.
The demon’s throat works when Sam cleans off his chest, scrubbing the wet paper towel over a puckered nipple until its redness is normal, not painted on. Sam has the sudden urge to pinch him there, feel the hardness, rub until it’s sore and sparking hot the way he knows Dean’s body likes. He doesn’t though, just keeps going, stopping every now and then to toss the used towels in the trash and wet some new ones. The demon’s like a statue, though his stomach trembles as Sam scrubs off the blood outlining the cut muscles of his abs, the flakes of it dried into his navel and caught in the line of wiry hair beneath. His cock is a hard bulge in his jeans, and Sam wants badly to touch it, feel the way he knows the demon’s hips will push into his hand eagerly.
He doesn’t. Instead, he wipes the worst of the splatters out of the demon’s short hair, off the slight stubble of his cheeks. There’s a spot of blood in the middle of one eyebrow, and the demon frowns when Sam dabs that off too, his patience for standing still waning.
“Fine, I’m done,” Sam answers to the unspoken grumble. Their eyes hold for a few seconds more, then the demon’s turning on his heel.
Ruby’s waiting with a worried expression on her face, but Sam gives her a nod and a half smile, buttoning his shirt over the bandages.
Warm with the whiskey, staring at the nape of Dean’s neck where Sam has brushed a teasing kiss so many millions of times, Sam lets himself believe for the first time that they might be okay as they walk back to the still-running car.
Sam’s always been stupid when it comes to Dean.
Chapter Four
