![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
runedgirlAuthor: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
runedgirl
Artist:leyla_lovely
Rating: NC17
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Warnings: minor Dean/OFC, Dean/OMC, Sam/OFC, violence
Word Count: 34,000 (entire)
Note: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
spn_j2_bigbang
Link to incredible Art: Art Master Post
“Did you find him?”
Sam’s been gone a week; the night is slightly warmer than the last time he climbed up on the roof to look out at the stars. Holly perches on her customary A and taps her foot impatiently when Sam stays silent.
“You did.”
“Don’t really feel like talking about it, if you don’t mind.” Not like she’d understand; fuck, Sam doesn’t even understand.
She kicks him in the shin, hard enough to hurt.
“You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?” Sam rubs his leg, scowling.
Holly smirks. If she wasn’t a girl, she’d be as annoying as his brother.
“Is he dead?”
He turns away from her to stare at the horizon, at the blood red moon still rising. “Probably.”
It hurts more than he expected to say it; to think it.
“Shit, sorry.” Holly actually sounds like she means it.
“Whatever, he was human, wasn’t like he was gonna live forever. Not like I cared or anything, I just…..wanted to see for myself, is all.”
Holly matches his gaze, both of them enjoying the second-best glow of the almost full moon.
“Liar,” she says.
* * *
For the first few weeks after Sam’s encounter with his brother, he’s edgier than he’s been since the night he lost his own humanity, like being confronted with Dean’s reminded him of all the things better left buried. He’s hypervigilant, expecting every human they hunt to be Dean. Expecting to be awakened in the middle of the day to find his brother leaning over him, taunting him. I found you, he’d say.
Sometimes he expects Dean to show up swinging a bloody machete, ready to put Sam out of his misery. Sam thinks that would be a decent way to go, that he probably wouldn’t fight. Who better to trust to do it clean and quick and easy? The last thing he’d see would be Dean’s face, the swirl of emotions he knows would be there in the green eyes.
He thinks morbid thoughts, the kind of things that haven’t crossed his mind in years. Imagines Dean’s tenderness and tears as he burns Sam’s body, wiping the soot and smoke out of his eyes and grieving the brother who really died a year ago behind that warehouse. Maybe Dean would lay down beside him and go too, the two of them finally together again like some fucked up version of Romeo and Juliet.
He shouldn’t have gone back to Red, shouldn’t have allowed himself to taste his brother – take his brother. The want is stronger now, more focused. The near-dead and dying and deserve-to-be aren’t enough anymore. Sam wants.
When he can’t stand it anymore, Sam finds himself seeking out young men with short spiky hair and green eyes and full lips, or boys in leather jackets, or ones who listen to vintage rock and roll while they’re driving (even though they’re never driving anything older than they are). He’s taken some ribbing from the vamps he’s run with over not sating his other appetites with humans, usually killing fast and drinking faster. Now he plays it out a bit with the boys that stir more than his hunger for blood, takes his time watching them, pretending that they’re a challenge. Hunting. It makes his dead heart beat faster to stalk them while they drink their beer, flirt with girls, drive their cars. To walk a dozen yards behind and watch the way their muscular bodies move in the dark, that peculiar human version of grace, so unlike the vampire’s way of moving. So slow, so casual, even when Sam can start to smell the fear on them. They saunter, and the display of manufactured bravado kicks up Sam’s lust even more, gets him breathing heavy long before he finally corners them and takes what he wants.
They don’t struggle much once he’s bitten them, the thrall upon them quickly if he drinks slowly enough, and the feel of their strong bodies going lax in his arms, submitting, makes the need for sex almost as strong as the need for blood. Sam’s shuddering with it by the time he lets himself get their clothes pushed and pulled and ripped aside, gets his hard cock out and then gets it in. They always seize up at first, flashes of pain cutting through the haze of pleasure from his draining them, but it passes quickly and they’re moaning then, rutting up against Sam’s abs as he fucks into them, turning their heads to the side to offer up more of their succulent flesh for his teeth. Sam gets good at making it last, sucking the life out of them drop by drop so he can savor the bittersweet taste of their orgasm before he lets his own overwhelm him. He’s learned not to look at their faces once he lets their lifeless bodies drop to the pavement; they never look like he wants them to.
He goes back to Red once, about three weeks after his last visit there. The bartender sets him up with heavy vodka without a word.
“He been here again?” Sam asks, eyes scanning the room, heart beating too fast.
The bartender shakes her head. “Not since that night.”
Sam downs the vodka in three gulps, ignoring the burn of the alcohol, the satisfying jolt of the blood. So it’s pretty much official, then. Dean hasn’t come after Sam, and he hasn’t come back to Red.
His brother’s dead.
The sense of defeat is unexpected; not like Sam really believed his impromptu challenge would inspire Dean to cold-turkey the bloodslutting and make finding Sam his life’s work. That Dean Winchester died the night Sam did, it was clear in the deadness in his eyes, the surrender in every movement, every gesture. Dean gave up that night, and the man who would have done anything to save his baby brother is gone.
Sam snorts, slams his glass down and waits for the refill. What the fuck is wrong with him, thinking about things like that? What difference would it make anyway? Sam’s far beyond saving.
* * *
So Sam tries his best to forget again. Forget the brother who’s gone; forget he lost himself that night in New Orleans and made promises he never would have been able to keep anyway.
Outside Flagstaff, they spend a Saturday night knocking over a liquor store, replenishing their supply of the only other liquid worth swallowing. The previous night’s libation was a drifter, and the night before Jake insisted on a drunken and clueless tourist, so the nest is well fed and as close to wanting to party as the vampires ever get, helping themselves to top shelf and private label and whatever else strikes their fancy. Sam’s the tallest, so he’s dispatched to the back room to see if they’ve missed anything. He’s clearing out what’s literally the top shelf when he catches a scent that freezes him instantly. The window is cracked open, no more than an inch, but it’s enough to let in the smell of cheap aftershave and old leather, something that fires off dormant neurons that scream family and brother and mine. Sam gets so distracted, he drops a bottle of Jake’s favorite, which somehow manages to trip the alarm system. Instead of taking their time and enjoying their shopping spree, that means they have to hurry, grabbing bottles haphazardly before taking off. Jake curses Sam halfway back to the abandoned house they’re squatting in. Sam looks over his shoulder twice, sure they’re being followed, but each time there’s no one there.
Fucking Dean. Sam wouldn’t put it past his brother to haunt his ass, and wouldn’t that just be a fitting ending for them both? He wonders if ghostly Dean would look the same, would still say the same stupid shit and make the same stupid cocky expressions and be the same kind of stupid exasperating over-protective asshole. Probably, he thinks, and isn’t sure he’d mind the distraction. It’s cold here, without Dean in the world.
The vampires head East to the Jersey coast when the weather gets warm, settling into the unused wing of an old hotel, built back when Atlantic City was the ‘Jewel of the Atlantic’. Long before the glittering garish casinos lined the boardwalk, the elegant old hotels welcomed wealthy Philadelphians and New Yorkers looking to escape the heat of the city. The Magnolia was one of the first and the largest, avoiding the wrecking ball until just last year, when the casino next door appropriated most of it and began the renovations that would leave it unrecognizable. The wing that hasn’t been touched yet is slated for demolition, but for now, it’s simply boarded up. Inside it’s dark and cool and quiet, with twenty odd rooms still partly furnished.
Sam takes one of the larger ones. It’s rare for them to have any privacy. Most of the places they hide are warehouses or barns or abandoned commercial buildings – sometimes houses, but rarely one with twenty bedrooms. This is a luxury, and Sam intends to take advantage. Hotels feel right to him, their transient nature familiar.
The double bed still has a mostly intact quilt; the window has thick curtains and shades with decorative beading on their scalloped edges. A sliver of daylight spills through the crack in the middle when dawn comes, reflecting off the mirror above the double dresser. Somebody took the television and anything else worth fencing long ago, but the heavy wood furniture is still there. Sam lays his duffle on the dusty top surface, then flops down on the bed to wait for sleep. Sometimes he still expects Dean’s duffle to be sitting there next to his own, expects Dean to throw himself down on the bed next to Sam and put his dirty booted feet on top of the comforter, grinning when Sam calls him a heathen. He rolls to his side and stretches an arm over the empty space beside him on the bed.
They wake at sundown and duck under the famous boardwalk, high enough for a grown man of Sam’s height to stand up underneath. The fine white sand is cool under their bare feet, prickling with bits of dune grass and discarded cigarette butts and pieces of broken shell, and Sam remembers a time they came here when he and Dean were kids, the two of them hiding under the boardwalk while Dad argued with a man above them. They could see John’s boots shift in the cracks between the boards, hear the creak of the wood when he stomped off in anger. They’d snuck back in the early morning, the sand still cold between their toes and the sun just rising over the ocean, walked under the boardwalk and onto the long stretch of beach, and Dean had held his hand as they waded into the chilly Atlantic and watched the seagulls swoop up and down, catching breakfast.
When they’ve been there two weeks, they find a young kid sleeping in the lobby, probably a runaway, not even out of his teens. He’s got on a pair of threadbare jeans, the edges torn and unraveling, and a filthy tee shirt. Spots of grease and mud obliterate much of what time hasn’t already faded, but Sam can still read Metallica on the back of it, and his stomach gives an unexpected flip.
“Hey!” Jake yells, poking the kid in the side.
The expression on Jake’s face is lascivious as he watches the kid startle awake. His eyes go wide as he sees the menacing group encircling him, and he scrambles to his feet, eyes darting around the room looking for the most direct route to the door. One of the vampires blocks his way long before he gets to it.
“Leaving so soon?” Jake drawls, and the vampire gives the kid a shove that sends him crashing to the floor. He skids on his side for a few seconds, dazed.
“C’mon Jake, he’s just a kid,” Sam says, putting himself between the two of them.
“Please,” the kid says, and he sounds so young, “Just lemme go.”
Jake grins, casually showing off his fangs, and the kid’s eyes go wide. The gesture is as much for Sam as it is for the human.
“I think you should stick around for a while,” Jake insists, advancing like a panther stalking his prey. “It’s dinner time.”
He brushes by Sam, still smirking.
“Ohgod, no, please,” says the kid, trying to crawl away. Jake grabs him by one leg, pulls him back, and laughs. He hauls the kid to his feet with both hands fisted in his tee shirt, like he weighs nothing. The ancient fabric rips down the middle, and Sam tries one more time, making a grab for the kid to pull him away.
Jake’s faster, or maybe he was just waiting for Sam to make his move – the second Sam tries to pull the kid toward him, Jake has him by the head, hands over his ears, one-two-twist, and the kid drops like a puppet with his strings cut. All that’s left in Sam’s hand is half a worn tee shirt, ‘Metal’ clearly visible on the back.
Sam doesn’t eat that night.
Holly finds him at the surf’s edge later when the moon is high, staring at the hypnotic ebb and flow of the waves, bare feet buried in the cooling sand.
“You’re really pissing him off, you know.”
Sam snorts, shoving his hands in his jeans pockets and wiggling his toes. “Jake? He’s an ass.”
“Well yeah, he’s an ass, sure – but he’s also the closest thing we have to a boss around here, and he doesn’t like you much.”
“I don’t even like me,” Sam sighs, shuffles further into the wet sand and waits for the chill of the ocean to catch him. The remnant of a wave swirls around his ankles, sends a shiver up his spine.
Holly wades out to join him, arms waving when the water hits her bare feet, and cursing at the cold.
“Were you always this hard on yourself?”
Sam huffs a laugh. “No, that was Dean’s thing, not mine.” He stops suddenly, wondering where that came from.
“Your brother,” Holly says, dancing backwards from the next wave. “You’ve been thinking about him.”
“Have not,” Sam retorts, then shakes his head when he sees Holly’s skeptical cocked eyebrow. Also, he just sounded like a two year old, not a potentially immortal grown man.
“Right,” she says, and kicks a spray of wet sand and sea water at him.
“Cut it out, you jerk!” he yells without thinking, and Holly laughs as she retreats to relatively dry sand, Sam splashing after her. “What the hell is your problem?”
She plops down on the sand and wraps her arms around her knees, gesturing for Sam to sit beside her. “I guess you are. And I guess Dean is yours.”
Sam sighs and stretches his long legs in front of him, splotches of wet sand and seaweed clinging to his knees. “He’s dead, what’s the point?”
Holly laughs, and for a change there’s bitterness in it. “If only it were that easy.”
They sit until the tide rolls in and starts to tease at their toes, until the horizon begins to glow pink and orange, and the gulls begin to cluster overhead, waiting for enough light to dive for breakfast.
Holly’s right about Jake. It’s bad enough that Sam challenged him in front of the rest of the gang once, but it happens again a few weeks later. This time it’s a young girl, even younger than the runaway boy.
“Someone’s gonna come looking for her,” Sam insists. It’s just stupid to take a kid, asking for trouble.
Jake’s got the eight year old in his arms, ignoring the frantic kicking and flailing limbs and her screams for help that are falling on only preternatural ears. He found her under the boardwalk, apparently lost, a little while after sundown. Told her he knew where her parents were waiting.
“But ain’t nobody gonna find her,” Jake yells back, gripping the child so tightly she gasps and falls silent, sobbing. Sam’s heard plenty of humans make that sound over the past year, but this time it crawls up his spine, makes his stomach twist and turn as violently as the girl’s struggling.
“Don’t do this,” Sam snarls, rage spiraling through him. This is reckless. Stupid.
Jake laughs as he breaks her neck, his slate grey eyes holding Sam’s the whole time, daring him to try to stop it.
Nobody bothers to close the child’s eyes while they drink her dry. They’re green.
* * *
Sam’s never been a good little soldier, not like his brother was. Not for Dad, not for Lucifer, not for Castiel or any of the other angels. He chafes under Jake’s version of leadership, and Jake knows it. Keeps pushing, doing stupid shit just to get Sam to yell about it, getting up in his face, making sure the rest of the gang are gathered around to back him up.
By the time the summer crowds have left the beaches and the crispness of fall is in the night air, Jake’s become an expert at getting under Sam’s skin. Holly keeps saying don’t let on that you give a damn, just ignore him, but Jake makes it hard to do. Everyone’s a little afraid of him, with the exception of Sam, who’s just too stubborn and uncaring to bother being fearful. Rumor is Jake’s put down more than one vampire who didn’t agree with him – there’s a bloody sword hanging in his room to remind them all that beheading is quick and easy if you know where to cut. Jake knows.
Of course, Sam knows too. A lifetime of hunting gave him skills the rest of them don’t have, so fuck it, he’s not gonna turn tail and run now. That means the rest of the vampires are giving them a wide berth tonight, most of them wandering back to their respective rooms and leaving the lobby to Sam and Jake. Sam’s in the middle of a screaming match with Jake over a baby – a fucking baby, how stupid is that? – that’s currently doing a lot of screaming of its own on the floor between them.
One second Jake’s calling Sam a lily-livered crazy-ass motherfucker, the next there’s a silver blade slicing straight through his neck from behind, and blood splashing in Sam’s face, down his chest. Jake’s mouth hangs open for another protracted moment, as though he’s just about to finish his insult, and then his head tips precariously to one side and falls clean off, landing on the floor right next to the wailing infant.
Sam’s mouth hangs open just as theatrically, blood splattered up one side of his cheek and into his hair, rendered profoundly wordless. Because behind where Jake was standing a second ago – is Dean.
Dean with a blood-drenched machete in hand, green eyes narrowed with determination, and his steely gaze fixed on Sam. He’s not the pale, waifish boy Sam found on the mattress in the backroom of Red five months ago. Ten pounds more, easy, muscle bunched in his bicep and corded down his forearm where he grips the knife, bow legs splayed in worn jeans that hug the solid breadth of his strong thighs. He’s as dangerous as any hunter they’ve encountered; more. He’s Dean motherfucking Winchester.
“What the hell’s going on in here?” Two vampires appear at the lobby entrance, stopping short when they see Jake’s head on the floor – and the human standing over his body.
“Hunter!” one of them yells, and Sam can hear the sounds of more of them coming, heavy footfalls down the corridors, coming. Coming for Dean. He doesn’t even think, just scoops up the squalling infant and shoves it into Dean’s arms.
“Run,” Sam orders, “Now.”
Dean juggles baby and machete for a split second, then the weapon clatters to the floor and Dean’s turning on his heel, out the front door and onto the boardwalk, as full of determination as he was nearly thirty years ago when John put a squalling infant in his arms and gave the same order.
Sam holds the other vampires up just long enough for Dean to disappear into the casino next door, partly by kicking Jake’s head into their midst.
“So your brother’s not dead,” Holly says later, as Sam’s packing his things.
“Guess not.”
“You know you could stay, they’ll all follow you now,” she says, sounding as close to hopeful as a vampire is likely to get.
Sam shakes his head, zipping up his duffel. “He won’t give up. I’ll be putting you all in danger. In fact, you should all get out of here. He’ll come back tonight to finish the job.”
Holly pauses at that, and it’s clear she’s not buying it. “He that good a hunter?”
The look Sam gives her leaves no room for doubt, and he can see her expression change when she sees it.
“Yeah. He is.” There’s a note of pride in his voice when he says it.
Sam doesn’t stay long enough to be sure the rest of them took his advice. Knowing how lost they are without Jake’s annoyingly controlling version of leadership, though, he’s pretty sure they would have dispersed quickly anyway.
Instead Sam follows the still-lingering scent of his brother. It’s surprisingly easy, even with some humans still milling about on the boardwalk, comparing stories of slot machine winnings and drowning their inevitable losses in drink. The distinctive smell of Dean is threaded between the cacophony of other human scents. Every block or so Sam catches it again, and every time he does it makes his fangs tingle and his belly tighten with want. He thinks of the rage in Dean’s eyes when he cut Jake down, the steely determination he could see there. The strength with which he swung the machete, the lust for revenge that Sam could smell on him at that moment, the need to do something, to make things right. Sam remembers that feeling, remembers standing beside Dean and letting it sweep them both into danger again and again. Remembers the rush of adrenaline when they fought side by side, and the care with which they stitched each other back together again afterwards, Dean’s hands capable and tender and stained with Sam’s blood.
He shakes his head and scents the air again, temporarily losing his brother’s trail and fighting the rush of anxiety and need that sends coursing through him. Then he catches it, just a subtle change in the breeze, and he’s turning off the boardwalk and following it, stronger now, more recent. Sam moves faster, closing the distance, nostrils flared to drink in the heady aroma of family, brother, lover. Dean smells like – tastes like – all those things now, and god, Sam wants him.
He stops with effort when he finally sights his brother up ahead. Dean has stopped outside a tiny bungalow on a residential side street, a remnant of the time when Atlantic City was a quiet seashore town dotted with clapboard houses with more front porch than inside area, clustered as close to the ocean as you could build with only the narrowest of alleys between them to pack in as many as possible. Most of the houses on the street are dark, but this one has every light on, like if they make it bright enough it will be a beacon calling their missing child home.
Dean’s across the street, the baby sleeping peacefully in his arms. Weighing his options, Sam realizes.
Sam hangs back a few houses away, ducking behind some scrubby beach pines, watching as Dean strides across the street, his pace quick and sure despite the lingering hint of a limp. He lays the infant on the porch mat, tucks the blanket around the sleeping baby, and reaches for the bell. Sam can see the muscles in his thighs tense in readiness before he pushes the button, the way he scopes out his escape route to ensure he’ll be out of sight before the door opens. His scent changes; mix of fear and exhilaration, the heavy tang of adrenaline. Sam nearly groans with it, it’s so strong. Familiar.
Dean sprints across the street, the sound of his boots on the asphalt shockingly loud in the quiet of the late night, ducking behind a neighbor’s shed and flattening himself to the side of it, watching. From where he’s also hidden, Sam can hear the pounding of his brother’s heart, rapid-fire fight-or-flight.
The door opens slowly, the house’s occupants probably expecting the police with their stereotypical bad news delivery. There’s a long moment where the man standing there just stares at the floor, jaw gaping and eyes wide, frozen. Then the baby lets out a surprisingly loud wail that splits the night silence, and the man screams just as loudly, scooping up the baby and yelling “Emma, Emma, ohmygod – it’s Emma!”
The family leaves the door hanging wide open in their incredulity and celebration, and Sam can hear their sobs and screams and prayers of thanks. Across the street, Dean sags against the side of the shed and lets out the breath he’s been holding, wipes an arm over his face. Sam can smell the salty-sweet of his tears from where he stands, hear the shaky sigh.
After a few minutes, the door to the little house closes, and Dean squares his shoulders and looks out into the night, back the way they came from.
“Sammy,” he whispers, as though he knows Sam’s out there, listening.
Sam heads out in the opposite direction, still hungry.
* * *
Knowing Dean is out there, hunting – hunting him -- is the first thing Sam thinks about when he opens his eyes in the evening now, and the last when he closes them as the sun rises. He’s surprised to find that changes everything.
Not necessarily in a good way at first, or maybe that depends on how you look at it. Sam has always been one of the cautious ones. Vamps haven’t survived for this many centuries by being reckless, Jake’s demise just one more bit of evidence for the utility of that particular norm. But knowing Dean’s looking for him is the first thing Sam’s cared about since he was turned, and being careful and low-key isn’t going to bring Dean to him. So when Sam kills now, he’s careless of the trail of bodies he leaves behind him. He circles back sometimes to catch Dean’s reaction, waiting until his brother finds the carnage. Dean will kneel down and turn the victim’s head, run a finger over the neat little puncture wounds Sam always leaves in the same spot. Right beneath the ear, in the tender stretch of pale throat there where the skin is soft and sensitive. It’s the place he bit Dean, and Dean knows it.
He’ll sigh then, and shake his head, and sometimes he’ll say “Sammy,” like he’s hoping Sam can hear him. There’s disappointment in Dean’s voice – in Sam, of course, but there’s always some there for Dean himself too. Sam can remember hearing that same tone when he stayed after school to play a game of baseball instead of being packed up and ready to go after John had given the oh-three-hundred hours order. Dean had to walk out on the field and grab Sam by an elbow, muttering “Goddammit Sammy,” all the way to the Impala, like Sam had let him down. And like somehow it was all Dean’s fault anyway.
Sam hunts on his own now, avoiding other vamps. Crisscrossing the country on foot with his brother following in the big black car. It’s just the two of them again, like it was meant to be. Sometimes Sam forgets they’re on opposite sides now, wants to slow down just to let Dean catch him. He doesn’t kill often, but when he does, he makes sure Dean finds the body.
He runs into Holly once in Fort Worth. At first Sam assumes it’s Dean trying to sneak up on him; that’s always his assumption, though he can’t catch the scent he’s constantly sniffing for. He’s left a trail for his brother to follow, but he makes it subtle now. Dean’s getting better, body and mind back to razor sharp and deadly strong, and he doesn’t need obvious anymore. Sam likes to challenge him, likes to see how hard Dean will try and how fast and far he’ll go to find Sam.
There’s a flash of disappointment that catches Sam by surprise when the footsteps he heard a block away turn out to be another vampire, and he’s already slinking around the corner when he hears her call out to him.
“Sam, wait!”
He pauses to let Holly catch up. She’s got a short skirt and cowgirl boots on, dirty blonde hair up in a ponytail.
“It is you,” she says when she rounds the corner. “Nobody’s seen you in like forever, Sam. Word is you’ve been pretty messy though.”
He shrugs. “So?”
“Same old Sam,” Holly grins, reaching out to punch him in the shoulder. “Never givin’ nothing away without a fight. But seriously, why the trail of carnage?”
“In a rush, I guess.” Sam doesn’t meet her eyes, but he knows there will be disbelief there. And that she’ll call him on it.
“Oh for fucksake, this is me you’re talking to.” Holly grabs his arm, rolling her eyes. “C’mon, let’s go catch up properly. Stop being the most antisocial of antisocial creatures and talk to me.”
He sighs, already knowing he’ll give in. “You’re just like him sometimes,” he mutters as she leads him down a side street.
Holly slides her arm through his, like they’re two tourists playing at being Texans, strolling through the historic stockyards at almost midnight. “Must be why you can’t say no to me.”
They wander past curious bovines and oblivious humans, in and out of stores that sell fake sheriff badges and tiny fake license plates and cactus-decorated magnets, all of them available in both Sam and Dean, which for some reason makes Sam want to pocket a few. Shoplifting is pathetically easy when you’re a vampire, since you can move too quickly for anyone to see you. Not much of a challenge, though.
“C’mon,” Holly nudges, tugging him up the back stairs of the only three-story building in the complex, one that has a slightly sloping roof and enough height to give them a view of the flattened landscape and the panorama of stars over the prairie.
Sam lets her pull him down, both of them wrapping arms around knees and sharing the view. The air is thick with the smell of cow dung and humans, and the sweet aroma of whatever sort of flowers still cling to these dusty parts.
“So tell me,” she says. “What are you doing?”
“You won’t leave me alone until I spill, will you?”
He knows she’s grinning that evil grin of hers. “Nope.”
Sam sighs. “Just….. What all of us do. Killing people, hunting things. The family business.” He smiles ruefully at the joke she won’t get.
“But you’re doing it differently.”
“Maybe I just lost my appetite for hanging out with anyone else after Jake turned out to be such an asshole.”
Holly nods. “Well, your brother took care of that little problem.”
Sam snorts. “Fuck yeah.”
“You sound kinda proud of that,” Holly says, still looking out over the prairie.
“It’s what he does. He’s a hunter.”
Sam can feel her eyes on him a moment later. “Like you were.”
“A million years ago,” he answers, still looking away.
“And now?”
Sam finally half turns to meet her eyes, is surprised at the serious expression there.
“Now he’s the hunter – and I’m the hunted.”
Holly cocks an eyebrow and tilts her head, assessing. “And you want him to find you.”
“Yeah,” Sam admits, wrapping his arms tighter around his knees and turning back to the horizon. “I guess I do.”
It’s rare for Sam to fuck another of his own kind; he doesn’t much like vampires, himself included. But Holly’s always gotten under his skin, so when she pushes his knees down and climbs into his lap, pushing her panties aside beneath her skirt, Sam goes with it. She’s the only one who’s ever heard him say Dean’s name, and it bonds him to her, makes him think of Dean while she’s riding his cock and biting his nipple, the pain as her fangs pierce his skin just amping up the pleasure of being buried inside her. Her flesh warms as she feeds, inside and outside, and Sam relishes the strength in her legs wrapped around his hips, the way her hands fist in his long hair and tug on it roughly.
“Yeah, c’mon,” he growls, leaning back on his elbows so he can thrust his hips up and meet her halfway. Her mouth is dripping with his blood, slick and red, and her eyes are glittering green in the moonlight, the color of broken bottles, the color of Dean’s. He comes just before she does, without even biting back, remembering the look on Dean’s face when Sam’s cock was inside him, the taste of him as he came and came and came. Holly rides him through it, grinds against him until her thighs clench tight around his hips and she cries out, biting her bottom lip bloody all over again.
Sam kisses her after, sharing the taste of both of them, letting the tingly sensation of their tainted blood make him full and lazy and sated.
“What will he do when he finds you?” she asks, straightening her cowgirl skirt and tugging her panties back into place.
Sam zips his jeans and thinks about how much he doesn’t care about anything past the ‘when he finds you.’
“Kill me most likely. But he’d do it clean. Mercifully.”
Holly scoffs. “Oh well, that makes it okay.”
Strangely, Sam thinks it probably does.
“Forgive me for not hanging around waiting for the almighty hunter to appear and mercifully behead me,” she says as she tightens her ponytail. She turns just before she opens the door to the stairwell and looks back at him. “Good luck, Sam. I hope you get what you want.”
“You too,” he says, though he doesn’t think Holly even knows. It’s not the way you think when you’re a vampire, not past flesh and blood and a little amusement every now and then. Sam wonders when he started wanting more, thinks it was probably all Dean’s fault.
* * *
It turns out Holly’s not the only one who’s noticed that Dean is once again a hunter to be reckoned with. In fact, his goal of saving people, hunting things, seems to be modified to hunting vampire things, and the vamps know it. Sam may be number one on Dean’s list, but Dean is now at the top of the vampires’ most wanted.
The combination soon comes close to getting Dean killed.
Sam’s holed up in a little town in Pennsylvania, built in the 1950s for the thousands of workers who were employed by the helicopter factory there – first of its kind, top of the line technology, a mini boom to a blue collar area that had seen hard times and would see them again. The plant shut down a decade ago, and now a third of the cookie cutter houses surrounding it are boarded up and empty. It’s late October, so the weather isn’t ideal, but the train tracks run through the little house’s backyard and Sam has grown to like jumping the rails sometimes. It never fails to throw Dean off the track (Sam chuckles) and give Sam a week or two to anticipate when he’ll catch his brother’s scent again. He tries not to want it; he mostly fails.
He’s been in Ridley’s Corner for almost a week when, instead of Dean, four vampires join him in the local bar where Sam’s been drinking every night. He recognizes one of them from a month he spent in Toledo shortly after he was turned. The guy had gotten in Sam’s face about being a hunter, tried to get the others to gang up on him and put him down, like who Sam was before should change the fact that he was now a monster like the rest of them
They make small talk for a few minutes, who’s been where, how about that thunderstorm last night, stupid shit like Sam doesn’t know all they’re thinking about is the way the bartender’s heart is pounding away, the way the blood rushes through the artery in his throat. Like Sam doesn’t know they know exactly who he is and who’s probably coming for him.
Dean turns up two days later, following Sam’s trail unerringly straight to Ridley’s Corner and the Hole in the Wall Pub. He saunters across the crowded room to the bar, gaze darting around the room, sweeping the perimeter. Instead of Sam, he finds four fangs eager to put down a hunter tonight. To his credit, he takes out two of them with a knife dipped in dead man’s blood and manages to mostly behead another before the fourth overpowers him, lifting him by the neck and slamming him up against the brick wall behind the bar. His fists grapple at the vampire’s back and his boots dangle a foot above the asphalt as he kicks desperately, face turning red from lack of oxygen.
“Your choice, hunter,” the vamp growls. “Death or join your little brother in being a monster. What’ll it be?”
Dean’s eyes roll up and his body goes limp before he can answer, but a second later the vampire holding him up has a knife at his throat from behind.
“Neither,” Sam answers. “Let him go. Now.”
The vampire lets Dean’s unconscious body slump to the street and waits for Sam to let go.
“You’re fucked up, you know that?” he spits at Sam, thumbing at the bleeding nick on his neck from Sam’s blade. “You can’t care about some filthy human.”
Sam heaves his brother’s limp body over his shoulder. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he growls as he walks away.
Dean wakes up to the bright light of morning streaming through the window of the Granite Farms Motel. There’s a necklace of finger-shaped bruises ringing his throat, and a note taped to the mirror above the dresser.
“Doesn’t count if I find you – S.”
* * *
Predictably, the goading note inspires Dean to redouble his efforts. Sam may be the vampire, but Dean’s still the big brother. He comes close to surprising Sam at a rest stop on the New Jersey turnpike. So close he unknowingly saves the life of an exhausted motorist who’s passed out on a bench in the lobby next to the rows of vending machines. The guy wakes up to a find a crazy man with a machete standing over him, and runs out of there so quickly he leaves his coat behind. Dean hangs it over the back of the bench, takes a leak and heads back outside.
“Goddammit, Sam.” He sounds tired, Sam can hear it in his voice from where he’s hidden in the stand of evergreens across the parking lot. He scans the outskirts of the building, narrows his eyes to peer into the trees, but Sam knows he won’t be seen. Not unless he wants to be. Dean pauses for a long time, though, staring close to where Sam’s pressed up against a tree trunk. He scowls finally, scrubs an arm over his face and stalks back to his baby, still grumbling.
Sam watches the red taillights disappear, bobbing up and down as the Impala clears the entrance ramp and heads back onto the highway, away from Sam. He should be relieved at the close call; instead he thinks about the way Dean sighed. Wonders if his brother will give up on him soon. It should be a sign of victory, but it only makes Sam feel deader than ever.
So oddly, it feels more like relief than defeat when Sam wakes up four days later in a secluded no-tell motel feeling like he just went ten rounds with Lucifer – and like something’s just stabbed him in the heart. He sits up and lashes out simultaneously, working on instinct, and instantly knows there’s something very wrong.
“Don’t bother,” a gruff voice says from across the room, and Sam’s heart trips a beat. He opens his eyes and manages to dislodge the small knife from his chest and toss it to the floor, but that’s about all he can do.
“Deadman’s blood,” says Dean matter-of-factly, but the way he smells belies the studied calm. Sam can hear the frantic pounding of his heart; smell the adrenaline in his sweat and blood.
“Dean,” he slurs, his tongue sluggish and feeling swollen. He remembers that feeling from the time Dean took him to the dentist when he was seven, and the novacaine put his tongue and half his mouth to sleep. Dean kept poking at him afterwards, driving him insane. Can ya feel this, Sammy? How ‘bout this?
It figures he’d be thinking about Dean anyway when his big brother’s about to kill him.
“You gonna lie still while I get you tied up?” Dean asks, and his voice comes in waves, like it’s floating across the room, and fuck, Sam feels sick.
“Nnggghhh,” Sam mumbles around his gigantic tongue. It’s a good thing he doesn’t really need to breathe.
He closes his eyes to try to stop the room from spinning, but he can feel Dean closer now, the familiar leather and sweat scent of him, the radiating warmth of his living body, his pulsing blood. “Deannnn,” Sam groans, and it comes out needy and desperate.
It’s probably the last thing Dean was expecting. His hands stutter on Sam’s wrists as he draws them together and snaps thick cuffs around them. Sam’s dimly aware that he’s fastening them to the headboard, that his feet are being similarly trussed to the footboard. If he didn’t feel so sick, his dick would definitely find this kinky. Of course, that will only hold him while the deadman’s blood is in his system; after that, cuffs will be childsplay.
“Dean,” he tries again when Dean takes his hands off him. He can feel the mattress shift as Dean sits on the side of the bed. “Make it quick, Dean, okay?”
“Make what quick?”
“Didn’t haveta drug me,” Sam says, trying to articulate with a leaden tongue, “Wouldn’ta fought you.”
Dean huffs a laugh, more bitter than amused. “Yeah, well, forgive me if I don’t entirely trust you. My leg still aches like a sonovabitch when it rains.”
“Sorry.” Sam hasn’t thought about that day in a long time, what it did to Dean. It accomplished his purpose, and he’d decided a long time ago that’s all that mattered. Now he’s not so sure.
“Are you?” Dean asks, shifting on the mattress to meet Sam’s gaze.
Sam tries to focus, taking in the bright green of his brother’s eyes, the two-day stubble on his neck and chin. He’s more tanned than he was before, freckles darkened and fine lines crinkling at the edges of his eyes. Sam nods slowly, his head feeling like stuffed cotton, his neck like jelly.
“Are you even capable of feeling sorry?” Dean goes on, and Sam realizes dully that Dean’s lifted up his shirt and is inspecting the wound he left in Sam’s chest. The gesture is so familiar, the touch of Dean’s roughened fingers on his skin like a million times before, and Sam’s gasping before he can stifle it, jerking against the ropes.
“Sorry,” Dean says, and his apology is without doubt, genuine. Sam feels it in his gut, wishes he could feel the same.
Dean gets up and wets a washcloth, wipes the remnants of the deadman’s blood and Sam’s own from the wound.
“Why are you bothering with that?”
Sam’s able to keep his eyes open now, and his mouth seems to be working a little better. “I mean, you’re gonna salt and burn my bones once you’ve sliced off my head, so who cares if there’s still some extra blood on me?”
Dean raises his eyebrows in that familiar incredulous stare that made Sam want to hit him a million times when they were teenagers. “You think I went to all this trouble just to gank you?”
Sam raises his eyebrows back, the way Dean taught him. “Well, yeah?”
And just like that, Dean goes from incredulous to furious, his eyes sparking fire and his hands balled into fists at his side. “So what, you didn’t mean what you said? What you fucking promised? Because if you were lying to me, Sam, I swear to god, I’ll cut your lying fucking head off right the fuck now!”
He sounds so much like Dean, so much like Sam’s big brother, that Sam can’t help the grin that inexplicably spreads across his half-numb face. He thinks he probably looks insane, but Dean shuts up and stops cursing at him anyway, and some of the rage drains from his expression.
“Sam?” he says cautiously. He’s probably wondering if Sam’s about to go totally darkside and break free to bite him into tiny bits.
“I’m – shit, I’m – you mean you really?” Sam splutters out a laugh, trying to compose himself enough to answer. “You really did this because I dared you to?”
The color comes up on Dean’s cheeks instantly, blushing red with rage, the blood pumping hot, and fuck, Sam can almost taste it. He’s distracted by it for a moment, and Dean starts to turn away, his entire body stiff with anger and already bowing with despair.
“No, Dean, wait – I didn’t mean – I just – fuck, I never thought you’d really do it. But I – I’m not saying I won’t try.”
Dean’s at the door, already grabbing his leather jacket from the dresser where he must have hung it earlier.
“Dean!” Sam’s suddenly panicked, the emotion startling after over a year of being afraid of nothing, thrashing against the ropes but still too weak to free himself. “Don’t go, please – I’ll try, I swear it.”
Dean stands frozen for a long time, his hand hovering over the doorknob. Finally his shoulders drop and he puts the jacket back on the dresser and turns around.
Sam lets out a breath, swallows hard as Dean walks slowly back to the bed. “Will you, Sam?”
Dean’s eyes are luminous, brimming wet. He leans over Sam, and Sam runs his gaze greedily over his brother’s handsome face, the strong slope of his nose, the curve of his stubbled jaw. The dark lashes too long for a man, too thick and curling. His gaze drops to Dean’s mouth then, full and lush and dark like his blood. Sam’s mouth waters, fangs tingling and aching. Ohgod, he wants to taste. Wants to drink Dean down, swallow his blood, his come, his cock.
“Dean,” he groans, his head spinning with his brother’s scent, mad with longing.
Dean runs a hand down the side of Sam’s face, his fingers tender, caressing. Sam turns into it with a sob, the touch not enough, the affection there something unfamiliar, almost forgotten.
“Sammy,” he whispers, pushing a few locks of Sam’s hair behind his ear. The touch raises gooseflesh down Sam’s neck, makes his breath quicken. Dean’s fingers linger there, stroking over the soft skin, and then he pulls away. Sam feels the loss like a physical thing, struggles against the ropes to get it back.
“Miss you so much,” Dean’s saying, and when he leans down to kiss Sam’s forehead, Sam nearly swoons. So close, he could just arch up and get his mouth on Dean’s tender throat, could sink his fangs in and feast on his brother’s blood. Dean moves down to kiss his cheek, and Sam’s shaking now with the effort it takes not to give in to what he wants. He holds himself still, trembling, as Dean kisses his jaw, the corner of his mouth. He knows Dean can see his fangs, can feel them just under the give of his upper lip, but Dean doesn’t stop. His mouth presses down on Sam’s, quick but firm, unafraid. Sam groans, but doesn’t pull away. He’s never felt such desire before, almost overwhelming in its agony. The seam of his lips closes, his protesting fangs aching inside. Dean presses another chaste kiss there, then sits up.
Sam opens his eyes, still shaking. Dean’s smiling down at him. He’s looking at Sam the way he used to when he came to Sam’s fourth grade play and clapped every time Sam came onstage dressed as an oak tree. Or the time he hit a home run in sixth grade and Dean nearly fell out of the stands cheering.
“Keep your promise, Sammy,” he says, and puts a piece of paper on the dresser. There’s an address scribbled there, in Dean’s familiar capital lettered scrawl, and a name. Lenore.
“She says she’ll help you, but nobody can do this for you.”
He gets up and puts on the leather jacket, gathers up the few things he brought into his duffle.
“W-where are you going?”
“Can’t do this with me around,” he says, smirking. “Lenore says you’ll have to be more than ready before you can be trusted around me. Apparently she thinks I’d be too distracting.”
“Jerk,” Sam argues, trying to loosen the ropes around his ankles so he can wipe that smirk off Dean’s face.
“Bitch,” Dean returns, and the grin just gets wider.
It takes Sam almost four hours to get out of the goddamned cuffs and stop throwing up deadman’s blood. His brother’s a bastard.
* * *
Part Four
runedgirlArtist:
leyla_lovelyRating: NC17
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Warnings: minor Dean/OFC, Dean/OMC, Sam/OFC, violence
Word Count: 34,000 (entire)
Note: Written for
spn_j2_bigbangLink to incredible Art: Art Master Post
“Did you find him?”
Sam’s been gone a week; the night is slightly warmer than the last time he climbed up on the roof to look out at the stars. Holly perches on her customary A and taps her foot impatiently when Sam stays silent.
“You did.”
“Don’t really feel like talking about it, if you don’t mind.” Not like she’d understand; fuck, Sam doesn’t even understand.
She kicks him in the shin, hard enough to hurt.
“You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?” Sam rubs his leg, scowling.
Holly smirks. If she wasn’t a girl, she’d be as annoying as his brother.
“Is he dead?”
He turns away from her to stare at the horizon, at the blood red moon still rising. “Probably.”
It hurts more than he expected to say it; to think it.
“Shit, sorry.” Holly actually sounds like she means it.
“Whatever, he was human, wasn’t like he was gonna live forever. Not like I cared or anything, I just…..wanted to see for myself, is all.”
Holly matches his gaze, both of them enjoying the second-best glow of the almost full moon.
“Liar,” she says.
* * *
For the first few weeks after Sam’s encounter with his brother, he’s edgier than he’s been since the night he lost his own humanity, like being confronted with Dean’s reminded him of all the things better left buried. He’s hypervigilant, expecting every human they hunt to be Dean. Expecting to be awakened in the middle of the day to find his brother leaning over him, taunting him. I found you, he’d say.
Sometimes he expects Dean to show up swinging a bloody machete, ready to put Sam out of his misery. Sam thinks that would be a decent way to go, that he probably wouldn’t fight. Who better to trust to do it clean and quick and easy? The last thing he’d see would be Dean’s face, the swirl of emotions he knows would be there in the green eyes.
He thinks morbid thoughts, the kind of things that haven’t crossed his mind in years. Imagines Dean’s tenderness and tears as he burns Sam’s body, wiping the soot and smoke out of his eyes and grieving the brother who really died a year ago behind that warehouse. Maybe Dean would lay down beside him and go too, the two of them finally together again like some fucked up version of Romeo and Juliet.
He shouldn’t have gone back to Red, shouldn’t have allowed himself to taste his brother – take his brother. The want is stronger now, more focused. The near-dead and dying and deserve-to-be aren’t enough anymore. Sam wants.
When he can’t stand it anymore, Sam finds himself seeking out young men with short spiky hair and green eyes and full lips, or boys in leather jackets, or ones who listen to vintage rock and roll while they’re driving (even though they’re never driving anything older than they are). He’s taken some ribbing from the vamps he’s run with over not sating his other appetites with humans, usually killing fast and drinking faster. Now he plays it out a bit with the boys that stir more than his hunger for blood, takes his time watching them, pretending that they’re a challenge. Hunting. It makes his dead heart beat faster to stalk them while they drink their beer, flirt with girls, drive their cars. To walk a dozen yards behind and watch the way their muscular bodies move in the dark, that peculiar human version of grace, so unlike the vampire’s way of moving. So slow, so casual, even when Sam can start to smell the fear on them. They saunter, and the display of manufactured bravado kicks up Sam’s lust even more, gets him breathing heavy long before he finally corners them and takes what he wants.
They don’t struggle much once he’s bitten them, the thrall upon them quickly if he drinks slowly enough, and the feel of their strong bodies going lax in his arms, submitting, makes the need for sex almost as strong as the need for blood. Sam’s shuddering with it by the time he lets himself get their clothes pushed and pulled and ripped aside, gets his hard cock out and then gets it in. They always seize up at first, flashes of pain cutting through the haze of pleasure from his draining them, but it passes quickly and they’re moaning then, rutting up against Sam’s abs as he fucks into them, turning their heads to the side to offer up more of their succulent flesh for his teeth. Sam gets good at making it last, sucking the life out of them drop by drop so he can savor the bittersweet taste of their orgasm before he lets his own overwhelm him. He’s learned not to look at their faces once he lets their lifeless bodies drop to the pavement; they never look like he wants them to.
He goes back to Red once, about three weeks after his last visit there. The bartender sets him up with heavy vodka without a word.
“He been here again?” Sam asks, eyes scanning the room, heart beating too fast.
The bartender shakes her head. “Not since that night.”
Sam downs the vodka in three gulps, ignoring the burn of the alcohol, the satisfying jolt of the blood. So it’s pretty much official, then. Dean hasn’t come after Sam, and he hasn’t come back to Red.
His brother’s dead.
The sense of defeat is unexpected; not like Sam really believed his impromptu challenge would inspire Dean to cold-turkey the bloodslutting and make finding Sam his life’s work. That Dean Winchester died the night Sam did, it was clear in the deadness in his eyes, the surrender in every movement, every gesture. Dean gave up that night, and the man who would have done anything to save his baby brother is gone.
Sam snorts, slams his glass down and waits for the refill. What the fuck is wrong with him, thinking about things like that? What difference would it make anyway? Sam’s far beyond saving.
* * *
So Sam tries his best to forget again. Forget the brother who’s gone; forget he lost himself that night in New Orleans and made promises he never would have been able to keep anyway.
Outside Flagstaff, they spend a Saturday night knocking over a liquor store, replenishing their supply of the only other liquid worth swallowing. The previous night’s libation was a drifter, and the night before Jake insisted on a drunken and clueless tourist, so the nest is well fed and as close to wanting to party as the vampires ever get, helping themselves to top shelf and private label and whatever else strikes their fancy. Sam’s the tallest, so he’s dispatched to the back room to see if they’ve missed anything. He’s clearing out what’s literally the top shelf when he catches a scent that freezes him instantly. The window is cracked open, no more than an inch, but it’s enough to let in the smell of cheap aftershave and old leather, something that fires off dormant neurons that scream family and brother and mine. Sam gets so distracted, he drops a bottle of Jake’s favorite, which somehow manages to trip the alarm system. Instead of taking their time and enjoying their shopping spree, that means they have to hurry, grabbing bottles haphazardly before taking off. Jake curses Sam halfway back to the abandoned house they’re squatting in. Sam looks over his shoulder twice, sure they’re being followed, but each time there’s no one there.
Fucking Dean. Sam wouldn’t put it past his brother to haunt his ass, and wouldn’t that just be a fitting ending for them both? He wonders if ghostly Dean would look the same, would still say the same stupid shit and make the same stupid cocky expressions and be the same kind of stupid exasperating over-protective asshole. Probably, he thinks, and isn’t sure he’d mind the distraction. It’s cold here, without Dean in the world.
The vampires head East to the Jersey coast when the weather gets warm, settling into the unused wing of an old hotel, built back when Atlantic City was the ‘Jewel of the Atlantic’. Long before the glittering garish casinos lined the boardwalk, the elegant old hotels welcomed wealthy Philadelphians and New Yorkers looking to escape the heat of the city. The Magnolia was one of the first and the largest, avoiding the wrecking ball until just last year, when the casino next door appropriated most of it and began the renovations that would leave it unrecognizable. The wing that hasn’t been touched yet is slated for demolition, but for now, it’s simply boarded up. Inside it’s dark and cool and quiet, with twenty odd rooms still partly furnished.
Sam takes one of the larger ones. It’s rare for them to have any privacy. Most of the places they hide are warehouses or barns or abandoned commercial buildings – sometimes houses, but rarely one with twenty bedrooms. This is a luxury, and Sam intends to take advantage. Hotels feel right to him, their transient nature familiar.
The double bed still has a mostly intact quilt; the window has thick curtains and shades with decorative beading on their scalloped edges. A sliver of daylight spills through the crack in the middle when dawn comes, reflecting off the mirror above the double dresser. Somebody took the television and anything else worth fencing long ago, but the heavy wood furniture is still there. Sam lays his duffle on the dusty top surface, then flops down on the bed to wait for sleep. Sometimes he still expects Dean’s duffle to be sitting there next to his own, expects Dean to throw himself down on the bed next to Sam and put his dirty booted feet on top of the comforter, grinning when Sam calls him a heathen. He rolls to his side and stretches an arm over the empty space beside him on the bed.
They wake at sundown and duck under the famous boardwalk, high enough for a grown man of Sam’s height to stand up underneath. The fine white sand is cool under their bare feet, prickling with bits of dune grass and discarded cigarette butts and pieces of broken shell, and Sam remembers a time they came here when he and Dean were kids, the two of them hiding under the boardwalk while Dad argued with a man above them. They could see John’s boots shift in the cracks between the boards, hear the creak of the wood when he stomped off in anger. They’d snuck back in the early morning, the sand still cold between their toes and the sun just rising over the ocean, walked under the boardwalk and onto the long stretch of beach, and Dean had held his hand as they waded into the chilly Atlantic and watched the seagulls swoop up and down, catching breakfast.
When they’ve been there two weeks, they find a young kid sleeping in the lobby, probably a runaway, not even out of his teens. He’s got on a pair of threadbare jeans, the edges torn and unraveling, and a filthy tee shirt. Spots of grease and mud obliterate much of what time hasn’t already faded, but Sam can still read Metallica on the back of it, and his stomach gives an unexpected flip.
“Hey!” Jake yells, poking the kid in the side.
The expression on Jake’s face is lascivious as he watches the kid startle awake. His eyes go wide as he sees the menacing group encircling him, and he scrambles to his feet, eyes darting around the room looking for the most direct route to the door. One of the vampires blocks his way long before he gets to it.
“Leaving so soon?” Jake drawls, and the vampire gives the kid a shove that sends him crashing to the floor. He skids on his side for a few seconds, dazed.
“C’mon Jake, he’s just a kid,” Sam says, putting himself between the two of them.
“Please,” the kid says, and he sounds so young, “Just lemme go.”
Jake grins, casually showing off his fangs, and the kid’s eyes go wide. The gesture is as much for Sam as it is for the human.
“I think you should stick around for a while,” Jake insists, advancing like a panther stalking his prey. “It’s dinner time.”
He brushes by Sam, still smirking.
“Ohgod, no, please,” says the kid, trying to crawl away. Jake grabs him by one leg, pulls him back, and laughs. He hauls the kid to his feet with both hands fisted in his tee shirt, like he weighs nothing. The ancient fabric rips down the middle, and Sam tries one more time, making a grab for the kid to pull him away.
Jake’s faster, or maybe he was just waiting for Sam to make his move – the second Sam tries to pull the kid toward him, Jake has him by the head, hands over his ears, one-two-twist, and the kid drops like a puppet with his strings cut. All that’s left in Sam’s hand is half a worn tee shirt, ‘Metal’ clearly visible on the back.
Sam doesn’t eat that night.
Holly finds him at the surf’s edge later when the moon is high, staring at the hypnotic ebb and flow of the waves, bare feet buried in the cooling sand.
“You’re really pissing him off, you know.”
Sam snorts, shoving his hands in his jeans pockets and wiggling his toes. “Jake? He’s an ass.”
“Well yeah, he’s an ass, sure – but he’s also the closest thing we have to a boss around here, and he doesn’t like you much.”
“I don’t even like me,” Sam sighs, shuffles further into the wet sand and waits for the chill of the ocean to catch him. The remnant of a wave swirls around his ankles, sends a shiver up his spine.
Holly wades out to join him, arms waving when the water hits her bare feet, and cursing at the cold.
“Were you always this hard on yourself?”
Sam huffs a laugh. “No, that was Dean’s thing, not mine.” He stops suddenly, wondering where that came from.
“Your brother,” Holly says, dancing backwards from the next wave. “You’ve been thinking about him.”
“Have not,” Sam retorts, then shakes his head when he sees Holly’s skeptical cocked eyebrow. Also, he just sounded like a two year old, not a potentially immortal grown man.
“Right,” she says, and kicks a spray of wet sand and sea water at him.
“Cut it out, you jerk!” he yells without thinking, and Holly laughs as she retreats to relatively dry sand, Sam splashing after her. “What the hell is your problem?”
She plops down on the sand and wraps her arms around her knees, gesturing for Sam to sit beside her. “I guess you are. And I guess Dean is yours.”
Sam sighs and stretches his long legs in front of him, splotches of wet sand and seaweed clinging to his knees. “He’s dead, what’s the point?”
Holly laughs, and for a change there’s bitterness in it. “If only it were that easy.”
They sit until the tide rolls in and starts to tease at their toes, until the horizon begins to glow pink and orange, and the gulls begin to cluster overhead, waiting for enough light to dive for breakfast.
Holly’s right about Jake. It’s bad enough that Sam challenged him in front of the rest of the gang once, but it happens again a few weeks later. This time it’s a young girl, even younger than the runaway boy.
“Someone’s gonna come looking for her,” Sam insists. It’s just stupid to take a kid, asking for trouble.
Jake’s got the eight year old in his arms, ignoring the frantic kicking and flailing limbs and her screams for help that are falling on only preternatural ears. He found her under the boardwalk, apparently lost, a little while after sundown. Told her he knew where her parents were waiting.
“But ain’t nobody gonna find her,” Jake yells back, gripping the child so tightly she gasps and falls silent, sobbing. Sam’s heard plenty of humans make that sound over the past year, but this time it crawls up his spine, makes his stomach twist and turn as violently as the girl’s struggling.
“Don’t do this,” Sam snarls, rage spiraling through him. This is reckless. Stupid.
Jake laughs as he breaks her neck, his slate grey eyes holding Sam’s the whole time, daring him to try to stop it.
Nobody bothers to close the child’s eyes while they drink her dry. They’re green.
* * *
Sam’s never been a good little soldier, not like his brother was. Not for Dad, not for Lucifer, not for Castiel or any of the other angels. He chafes under Jake’s version of leadership, and Jake knows it. Keeps pushing, doing stupid shit just to get Sam to yell about it, getting up in his face, making sure the rest of the gang are gathered around to back him up.
By the time the summer crowds have left the beaches and the crispness of fall is in the night air, Jake’s become an expert at getting under Sam’s skin. Holly keeps saying don’t let on that you give a damn, just ignore him, but Jake makes it hard to do. Everyone’s a little afraid of him, with the exception of Sam, who’s just too stubborn and uncaring to bother being fearful. Rumor is Jake’s put down more than one vampire who didn’t agree with him – there’s a bloody sword hanging in his room to remind them all that beheading is quick and easy if you know where to cut. Jake knows.
Of course, Sam knows too. A lifetime of hunting gave him skills the rest of them don’t have, so fuck it, he’s not gonna turn tail and run now. That means the rest of the vampires are giving them a wide berth tonight, most of them wandering back to their respective rooms and leaving the lobby to Sam and Jake. Sam’s in the middle of a screaming match with Jake over a baby – a fucking baby, how stupid is that? – that’s currently doing a lot of screaming of its own on the floor between them.
One second Jake’s calling Sam a lily-livered crazy-ass motherfucker, the next there’s a silver blade slicing straight through his neck from behind, and blood splashing in Sam’s face, down his chest. Jake’s mouth hangs open for another protracted moment, as though he’s just about to finish his insult, and then his head tips precariously to one side and falls clean off, landing on the floor right next to the wailing infant.
Sam’s mouth hangs open just as theatrically, blood splattered up one side of his cheek and into his hair, rendered profoundly wordless. Because behind where Jake was standing a second ago – is Dean.
Dean with a blood-drenched machete in hand, green eyes narrowed with determination, and his steely gaze fixed on Sam. He’s not the pale, waifish boy Sam found on the mattress in the backroom of Red five months ago. Ten pounds more, easy, muscle bunched in his bicep and corded down his forearm where he grips the knife, bow legs splayed in worn jeans that hug the solid breadth of his strong thighs. He’s as dangerous as any hunter they’ve encountered; more. He’s Dean motherfucking Winchester.
“What the hell’s going on in here?” Two vampires appear at the lobby entrance, stopping short when they see Jake’s head on the floor – and the human standing over his body.
“Hunter!” one of them yells, and Sam can hear the sounds of more of them coming, heavy footfalls down the corridors, coming. Coming for Dean. He doesn’t even think, just scoops up the squalling infant and shoves it into Dean’s arms.
“Run,” Sam orders, “Now.”
Dean juggles baby and machete for a split second, then the weapon clatters to the floor and Dean’s turning on his heel, out the front door and onto the boardwalk, as full of determination as he was nearly thirty years ago when John put a squalling infant in his arms and gave the same order.
Sam holds the other vampires up just long enough for Dean to disappear into the casino next door, partly by kicking Jake’s head into their midst.
“So your brother’s not dead,” Holly says later, as Sam’s packing his things.
“Guess not.”
“You know you could stay, they’ll all follow you now,” she says, sounding as close to hopeful as a vampire is likely to get.
Sam shakes his head, zipping up his duffel. “He won’t give up. I’ll be putting you all in danger. In fact, you should all get out of here. He’ll come back tonight to finish the job.”
Holly pauses at that, and it’s clear she’s not buying it. “He that good a hunter?”
The look Sam gives her leaves no room for doubt, and he can see her expression change when she sees it.
“Yeah. He is.” There’s a note of pride in his voice when he says it.
Sam doesn’t stay long enough to be sure the rest of them took his advice. Knowing how lost they are without Jake’s annoyingly controlling version of leadership, though, he’s pretty sure they would have dispersed quickly anyway.
Instead Sam follows the still-lingering scent of his brother. It’s surprisingly easy, even with some humans still milling about on the boardwalk, comparing stories of slot machine winnings and drowning their inevitable losses in drink. The distinctive smell of Dean is threaded between the cacophony of other human scents. Every block or so Sam catches it again, and every time he does it makes his fangs tingle and his belly tighten with want. He thinks of the rage in Dean’s eyes when he cut Jake down, the steely determination he could see there. The strength with which he swung the machete, the lust for revenge that Sam could smell on him at that moment, the need to do something, to make things right. Sam remembers that feeling, remembers standing beside Dean and letting it sweep them both into danger again and again. Remembers the rush of adrenaline when they fought side by side, and the care with which they stitched each other back together again afterwards, Dean’s hands capable and tender and stained with Sam’s blood.
He shakes his head and scents the air again, temporarily losing his brother’s trail and fighting the rush of anxiety and need that sends coursing through him. Then he catches it, just a subtle change in the breeze, and he’s turning off the boardwalk and following it, stronger now, more recent. Sam moves faster, closing the distance, nostrils flared to drink in the heady aroma of family, brother, lover. Dean smells like – tastes like – all those things now, and god, Sam wants him.
He stops with effort when he finally sights his brother up ahead. Dean has stopped outside a tiny bungalow on a residential side street, a remnant of the time when Atlantic City was a quiet seashore town dotted with clapboard houses with more front porch than inside area, clustered as close to the ocean as you could build with only the narrowest of alleys between them to pack in as many as possible. Most of the houses on the street are dark, but this one has every light on, like if they make it bright enough it will be a beacon calling their missing child home.
Dean’s across the street, the baby sleeping peacefully in his arms. Weighing his options, Sam realizes.
Sam hangs back a few houses away, ducking behind some scrubby beach pines, watching as Dean strides across the street, his pace quick and sure despite the lingering hint of a limp. He lays the infant on the porch mat, tucks the blanket around the sleeping baby, and reaches for the bell. Sam can see the muscles in his thighs tense in readiness before he pushes the button, the way he scopes out his escape route to ensure he’ll be out of sight before the door opens. His scent changes; mix of fear and exhilaration, the heavy tang of adrenaline. Sam nearly groans with it, it’s so strong. Familiar.
Dean sprints across the street, the sound of his boots on the asphalt shockingly loud in the quiet of the late night, ducking behind a neighbor’s shed and flattening himself to the side of it, watching. From where he’s also hidden, Sam can hear the pounding of his brother’s heart, rapid-fire fight-or-flight.
The door opens slowly, the house’s occupants probably expecting the police with their stereotypical bad news delivery. There’s a long moment where the man standing there just stares at the floor, jaw gaping and eyes wide, frozen. Then the baby lets out a surprisingly loud wail that splits the night silence, and the man screams just as loudly, scooping up the baby and yelling “Emma, Emma, ohmygod – it’s Emma!”
The family leaves the door hanging wide open in their incredulity and celebration, and Sam can hear their sobs and screams and prayers of thanks. Across the street, Dean sags against the side of the shed and lets out the breath he’s been holding, wipes an arm over his face. Sam can smell the salty-sweet of his tears from where he stands, hear the shaky sigh.
After a few minutes, the door to the little house closes, and Dean squares his shoulders and looks out into the night, back the way they came from.
“Sammy,” he whispers, as though he knows Sam’s out there, listening.
Sam heads out in the opposite direction, still hungry.
* * *
Knowing Dean is out there, hunting – hunting him -- is the first thing Sam thinks about when he opens his eyes in the evening now, and the last when he closes them as the sun rises. He’s surprised to find that changes everything.
Not necessarily in a good way at first, or maybe that depends on how you look at it. Sam has always been one of the cautious ones. Vamps haven’t survived for this many centuries by being reckless, Jake’s demise just one more bit of evidence for the utility of that particular norm. But knowing Dean’s looking for him is the first thing Sam’s cared about since he was turned, and being careful and low-key isn’t going to bring Dean to him. So when Sam kills now, he’s careless of the trail of bodies he leaves behind him. He circles back sometimes to catch Dean’s reaction, waiting until his brother finds the carnage. Dean will kneel down and turn the victim’s head, run a finger over the neat little puncture wounds Sam always leaves in the same spot. Right beneath the ear, in the tender stretch of pale throat there where the skin is soft and sensitive. It’s the place he bit Dean, and Dean knows it.
He’ll sigh then, and shake his head, and sometimes he’ll say “Sammy,” like he’s hoping Sam can hear him. There’s disappointment in Dean’s voice – in Sam, of course, but there’s always some there for Dean himself too. Sam can remember hearing that same tone when he stayed after school to play a game of baseball instead of being packed up and ready to go after John had given the oh-three-hundred hours order. Dean had to walk out on the field and grab Sam by an elbow, muttering “Goddammit Sammy,” all the way to the Impala, like Sam had let him down. And like somehow it was all Dean’s fault anyway.
Sam hunts on his own now, avoiding other vamps. Crisscrossing the country on foot with his brother following in the big black car. It’s just the two of them again, like it was meant to be. Sometimes Sam forgets they’re on opposite sides now, wants to slow down just to let Dean catch him. He doesn’t kill often, but when he does, he makes sure Dean finds the body.
He runs into Holly once in Fort Worth. At first Sam assumes it’s Dean trying to sneak up on him; that’s always his assumption, though he can’t catch the scent he’s constantly sniffing for. He’s left a trail for his brother to follow, but he makes it subtle now. Dean’s getting better, body and mind back to razor sharp and deadly strong, and he doesn’t need obvious anymore. Sam likes to challenge him, likes to see how hard Dean will try and how fast and far he’ll go to find Sam.
There’s a flash of disappointment that catches Sam by surprise when the footsteps he heard a block away turn out to be another vampire, and he’s already slinking around the corner when he hears her call out to him.
“Sam, wait!”
He pauses to let Holly catch up. She’s got a short skirt and cowgirl boots on, dirty blonde hair up in a ponytail.
“It is you,” she says when she rounds the corner. “Nobody’s seen you in like forever, Sam. Word is you’ve been pretty messy though.”
He shrugs. “So?”
“Same old Sam,” Holly grins, reaching out to punch him in the shoulder. “Never givin’ nothing away without a fight. But seriously, why the trail of carnage?”
“In a rush, I guess.” Sam doesn’t meet her eyes, but he knows there will be disbelief there. And that she’ll call him on it.
“Oh for fucksake, this is me you’re talking to.” Holly grabs his arm, rolling her eyes. “C’mon, let’s go catch up properly. Stop being the most antisocial of antisocial creatures and talk to me.”
He sighs, already knowing he’ll give in. “You’re just like him sometimes,” he mutters as she leads him down a side street.
Holly slides her arm through his, like they’re two tourists playing at being Texans, strolling through the historic stockyards at almost midnight. “Must be why you can’t say no to me.”
They wander past curious bovines and oblivious humans, in and out of stores that sell fake sheriff badges and tiny fake license plates and cactus-decorated magnets, all of them available in both Sam and Dean, which for some reason makes Sam want to pocket a few. Shoplifting is pathetically easy when you’re a vampire, since you can move too quickly for anyone to see you. Not much of a challenge, though.
“C’mon,” Holly nudges, tugging him up the back stairs of the only three-story building in the complex, one that has a slightly sloping roof and enough height to give them a view of the flattened landscape and the panorama of stars over the prairie.
Sam lets her pull him down, both of them wrapping arms around knees and sharing the view. The air is thick with the smell of cow dung and humans, and the sweet aroma of whatever sort of flowers still cling to these dusty parts.
“So tell me,” she says. “What are you doing?”
“You won’t leave me alone until I spill, will you?”
He knows she’s grinning that evil grin of hers. “Nope.”
Sam sighs. “Just….. What all of us do. Killing people, hunting things. The family business.” He smiles ruefully at the joke she won’t get.
“But you’re doing it differently.”
“Maybe I just lost my appetite for hanging out with anyone else after Jake turned out to be such an asshole.”
Holly nods. “Well, your brother took care of that little problem.”
Sam snorts. “Fuck yeah.”
“You sound kinda proud of that,” Holly says, still looking out over the prairie.
“It’s what he does. He’s a hunter.”
Sam can feel her eyes on him a moment later. “Like you were.”
“A million years ago,” he answers, still looking away.
“And now?”
Sam finally half turns to meet her eyes, is surprised at the serious expression there.
“Now he’s the hunter – and I’m the hunted.”
Holly cocks an eyebrow and tilts her head, assessing. “And you want him to find you.”
“Yeah,” Sam admits, wrapping his arms tighter around his knees and turning back to the horizon. “I guess I do.”
It’s rare for Sam to fuck another of his own kind; he doesn’t much like vampires, himself included. But Holly’s always gotten under his skin, so when she pushes his knees down and climbs into his lap, pushing her panties aside beneath her skirt, Sam goes with it. She’s the only one who’s ever heard him say Dean’s name, and it bonds him to her, makes him think of Dean while she’s riding his cock and biting his nipple, the pain as her fangs pierce his skin just amping up the pleasure of being buried inside her. Her flesh warms as she feeds, inside and outside, and Sam relishes the strength in her legs wrapped around his hips, the way her hands fist in his long hair and tug on it roughly.
“Yeah, c’mon,” he growls, leaning back on his elbows so he can thrust his hips up and meet her halfway. Her mouth is dripping with his blood, slick and red, and her eyes are glittering green in the moonlight, the color of broken bottles, the color of Dean’s. He comes just before she does, without even biting back, remembering the look on Dean’s face when Sam’s cock was inside him, the taste of him as he came and came and came. Holly rides him through it, grinds against him until her thighs clench tight around his hips and she cries out, biting her bottom lip bloody all over again.
Sam kisses her after, sharing the taste of both of them, letting the tingly sensation of their tainted blood make him full and lazy and sated.
“What will he do when he finds you?” she asks, straightening her cowgirl skirt and tugging her panties back into place.
Sam zips his jeans and thinks about how much he doesn’t care about anything past the ‘when he finds you.’
“Kill me most likely. But he’d do it clean. Mercifully.”
Holly scoffs. “Oh well, that makes it okay.”
Strangely, Sam thinks it probably does.
“Forgive me for not hanging around waiting for the almighty hunter to appear and mercifully behead me,” she says as she tightens her ponytail. She turns just before she opens the door to the stairwell and looks back at him. “Good luck, Sam. I hope you get what you want.”
“You too,” he says, though he doesn’t think Holly even knows. It’s not the way you think when you’re a vampire, not past flesh and blood and a little amusement every now and then. Sam wonders when he started wanting more, thinks it was probably all Dean’s fault.
* * *
It turns out Holly’s not the only one who’s noticed that Dean is once again a hunter to be reckoned with. In fact, his goal of saving people, hunting things, seems to be modified to hunting vampire things, and the vamps know it. Sam may be number one on Dean’s list, but Dean is now at the top of the vampires’ most wanted.
The combination soon comes close to getting Dean killed.
Sam’s holed up in a little town in Pennsylvania, built in the 1950s for the thousands of workers who were employed by the helicopter factory there – first of its kind, top of the line technology, a mini boom to a blue collar area that had seen hard times and would see them again. The plant shut down a decade ago, and now a third of the cookie cutter houses surrounding it are boarded up and empty. It’s late October, so the weather isn’t ideal, but the train tracks run through the little house’s backyard and Sam has grown to like jumping the rails sometimes. It never fails to throw Dean off the track (Sam chuckles) and give Sam a week or two to anticipate when he’ll catch his brother’s scent again. He tries not to want it; he mostly fails.
He’s been in Ridley’s Corner for almost a week when, instead of Dean, four vampires join him in the local bar where Sam’s been drinking every night. He recognizes one of them from a month he spent in Toledo shortly after he was turned. The guy had gotten in Sam’s face about being a hunter, tried to get the others to gang up on him and put him down, like who Sam was before should change the fact that he was now a monster like the rest of them
They make small talk for a few minutes, who’s been where, how about that thunderstorm last night, stupid shit like Sam doesn’t know all they’re thinking about is the way the bartender’s heart is pounding away, the way the blood rushes through the artery in his throat. Like Sam doesn’t know they know exactly who he is and who’s probably coming for him.
Dean turns up two days later, following Sam’s trail unerringly straight to Ridley’s Corner and the Hole in the Wall Pub. He saunters across the crowded room to the bar, gaze darting around the room, sweeping the perimeter. Instead of Sam, he finds four fangs eager to put down a hunter tonight. To his credit, he takes out two of them with a knife dipped in dead man’s blood and manages to mostly behead another before the fourth overpowers him, lifting him by the neck and slamming him up against the brick wall behind the bar. His fists grapple at the vampire’s back and his boots dangle a foot above the asphalt as he kicks desperately, face turning red from lack of oxygen.
“Your choice, hunter,” the vamp growls. “Death or join your little brother in being a monster. What’ll it be?”
Dean’s eyes roll up and his body goes limp before he can answer, but a second later the vampire holding him up has a knife at his throat from behind.
“Neither,” Sam answers. “Let him go. Now.”
The vampire lets Dean’s unconscious body slump to the street and waits for Sam to let go.
“You’re fucked up, you know that?” he spits at Sam, thumbing at the bleeding nick on his neck from Sam’s blade. “You can’t care about some filthy human.”
Sam heaves his brother’s limp body over his shoulder. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he growls as he walks away.
Dean wakes up to the bright light of morning streaming through the window of the Granite Farms Motel. There’s a necklace of finger-shaped bruises ringing his throat, and a note taped to the mirror above the dresser.
“Doesn’t count if I find you – S.”
* * *
Predictably, the goading note inspires Dean to redouble his efforts. Sam may be the vampire, but Dean’s still the big brother. He comes close to surprising Sam at a rest stop on the New Jersey turnpike. So close he unknowingly saves the life of an exhausted motorist who’s passed out on a bench in the lobby next to the rows of vending machines. The guy wakes up to a find a crazy man with a machete standing over him, and runs out of there so quickly he leaves his coat behind. Dean hangs it over the back of the bench, takes a leak and heads back outside.
“Goddammit, Sam.” He sounds tired, Sam can hear it in his voice from where he’s hidden in the stand of evergreens across the parking lot. He scans the outskirts of the building, narrows his eyes to peer into the trees, but Sam knows he won’t be seen. Not unless he wants to be. Dean pauses for a long time, though, staring close to where Sam’s pressed up against a tree trunk. He scowls finally, scrubs an arm over his face and stalks back to his baby, still grumbling.
Sam watches the red taillights disappear, bobbing up and down as the Impala clears the entrance ramp and heads back onto the highway, away from Sam. He should be relieved at the close call; instead he thinks about the way Dean sighed. Wonders if his brother will give up on him soon. It should be a sign of victory, but it only makes Sam feel deader than ever.
So oddly, it feels more like relief than defeat when Sam wakes up four days later in a secluded no-tell motel feeling like he just went ten rounds with Lucifer – and like something’s just stabbed him in the heart. He sits up and lashes out simultaneously, working on instinct, and instantly knows there’s something very wrong.
“Don’t bother,” a gruff voice says from across the room, and Sam’s heart trips a beat. He opens his eyes and manages to dislodge the small knife from his chest and toss it to the floor, but that’s about all he can do.
“Deadman’s blood,” says Dean matter-of-factly, but the way he smells belies the studied calm. Sam can hear the frantic pounding of his heart; smell the adrenaline in his sweat and blood.
“Dean,” he slurs, his tongue sluggish and feeling swollen. He remembers that feeling from the time Dean took him to the dentist when he was seven, and the novacaine put his tongue and half his mouth to sleep. Dean kept poking at him afterwards, driving him insane. Can ya feel this, Sammy? How ‘bout this?
It figures he’d be thinking about Dean anyway when his big brother’s about to kill him.
“You gonna lie still while I get you tied up?” Dean asks, and his voice comes in waves, like it’s floating across the room, and fuck, Sam feels sick.
“Nnggghhh,” Sam mumbles around his gigantic tongue. It’s a good thing he doesn’t really need to breathe.
He closes his eyes to try to stop the room from spinning, but he can feel Dean closer now, the familiar leather and sweat scent of him, the radiating warmth of his living body, his pulsing blood. “Deannnn,” Sam groans, and it comes out needy and desperate.
It’s probably the last thing Dean was expecting. His hands stutter on Sam’s wrists as he draws them together and snaps thick cuffs around them. Sam’s dimly aware that he’s fastening them to the headboard, that his feet are being similarly trussed to the footboard. If he didn’t feel so sick, his dick would definitely find this kinky. Of course, that will only hold him while the deadman’s blood is in his system; after that, cuffs will be childsplay.
“Dean,” he tries again when Dean takes his hands off him. He can feel the mattress shift as Dean sits on the side of the bed. “Make it quick, Dean, okay?”
“Make what quick?”
“Didn’t haveta drug me,” Sam says, trying to articulate with a leaden tongue, “Wouldn’ta fought you.”
Dean huffs a laugh, more bitter than amused. “Yeah, well, forgive me if I don’t entirely trust you. My leg still aches like a sonovabitch when it rains.”
“Sorry.” Sam hasn’t thought about that day in a long time, what it did to Dean. It accomplished his purpose, and he’d decided a long time ago that’s all that mattered. Now he’s not so sure.
“Are you?” Dean asks, shifting on the mattress to meet Sam’s gaze.
Sam tries to focus, taking in the bright green of his brother’s eyes, the two-day stubble on his neck and chin. He’s more tanned than he was before, freckles darkened and fine lines crinkling at the edges of his eyes. Sam nods slowly, his head feeling like stuffed cotton, his neck like jelly.
“Are you even capable of feeling sorry?” Dean goes on, and Sam realizes dully that Dean’s lifted up his shirt and is inspecting the wound he left in Sam’s chest. The gesture is so familiar, the touch of Dean’s roughened fingers on his skin like a million times before, and Sam’s gasping before he can stifle it, jerking against the ropes.
“Sorry,” Dean says, and his apology is without doubt, genuine. Sam feels it in his gut, wishes he could feel the same.
Dean gets up and wets a washcloth, wipes the remnants of the deadman’s blood and Sam’s own from the wound.
“Why are you bothering with that?”
Sam’s able to keep his eyes open now, and his mouth seems to be working a little better. “I mean, you’re gonna salt and burn my bones once you’ve sliced off my head, so who cares if there’s still some extra blood on me?”
Dean raises his eyebrows in that familiar incredulous stare that made Sam want to hit him a million times when they were teenagers. “You think I went to all this trouble just to gank you?”
Sam raises his eyebrows back, the way Dean taught him. “Well, yeah?”
And just like that, Dean goes from incredulous to furious, his eyes sparking fire and his hands balled into fists at his side. “So what, you didn’t mean what you said? What you fucking promised? Because if you were lying to me, Sam, I swear to god, I’ll cut your lying fucking head off right the fuck now!”
He sounds so much like Dean, so much like Sam’s big brother, that Sam can’t help the grin that inexplicably spreads across his half-numb face. He thinks he probably looks insane, but Dean shuts up and stops cursing at him anyway, and some of the rage drains from his expression.
“Sam?” he says cautiously. He’s probably wondering if Sam’s about to go totally darkside and break free to bite him into tiny bits.
“I’m – shit, I’m – you mean you really?” Sam splutters out a laugh, trying to compose himself enough to answer. “You really did this because I dared you to?”
The color comes up on Dean’s cheeks instantly, blushing red with rage, the blood pumping hot, and fuck, Sam can almost taste it. He’s distracted by it for a moment, and Dean starts to turn away, his entire body stiff with anger and already bowing with despair.
“No, Dean, wait – I didn’t mean – I just – fuck, I never thought you’d really do it. But I – I’m not saying I won’t try.”
Dean’s at the door, already grabbing his leather jacket from the dresser where he must have hung it earlier.
“Dean!” Sam’s suddenly panicked, the emotion startling after over a year of being afraid of nothing, thrashing against the ropes but still too weak to free himself. “Don’t go, please – I’ll try, I swear it.”
Dean stands frozen for a long time, his hand hovering over the doorknob. Finally his shoulders drop and he puts the jacket back on the dresser and turns around.
Sam lets out a breath, swallows hard as Dean walks slowly back to the bed. “Will you, Sam?”
Dean’s eyes are luminous, brimming wet. He leans over Sam, and Sam runs his gaze greedily over his brother’s handsome face, the strong slope of his nose, the curve of his stubbled jaw. The dark lashes too long for a man, too thick and curling. His gaze drops to Dean’s mouth then, full and lush and dark like his blood. Sam’s mouth waters, fangs tingling and aching. Ohgod, he wants to taste. Wants to drink Dean down, swallow his blood, his come, his cock.
“Dean,” he groans, his head spinning with his brother’s scent, mad with longing.
Dean runs a hand down the side of Sam’s face, his fingers tender, caressing. Sam turns into it with a sob, the touch not enough, the affection there something unfamiliar, almost forgotten.
“Sammy,” he whispers, pushing a few locks of Sam’s hair behind his ear. The touch raises gooseflesh down Sam’s neck, makes his breath quicken. Dean’s fingers linger there, stroking over the soft skin, and then he pulls away. Sam feels the loss like a physical thing, struggles against the ropes to get it back.
“Miss you so much,” Dean’s saying, and when he leans down to kiss Sam’s forehead, Sam nearly swoons. So close, he could just arch up and get his mouth on Dean’s tender throat, could sink his fangs in and feast on his brother’s blood. Dean moves down to kiss his cheek, and Sam’s shaking now with the effort it takes not to give in to what he wants. He holds himself still, trembling, as Dean kisses his jaw, the corner of his mouth. He knows Dean can see his fangs, can feel them just under the give of his upper lip, but Dean doesn’t stop. His mouth presses down on Sam’s, quick but firm, unafraid. Sam groans, but doesn’t pull away. He’s never felt such desire before, almost overwhelming in its agony. The seam of his lips closes, his protesting fangs aching inside. Dean presses another chaste kiss there, then sits up.
Sam opens his eyes, still shaking. Dean’s smiling down at him. He’s looking at Sam the way he used to when he came to Sam’s fourth grade play and clapped every time Sam came onstage dressed as an oak tree. Or the time he hit a home run in sixth grade and Dean nearly fell out of the stands cheering.
“Keep your promise, Sammy,” he says, and puts a piece of paper on the dresser. There’s an address scribbled there, in Dean’s familiar capital lettered scrawl, and a name. Lenore.
“She says she’ll help you, but nobody can do this for you.”
He gets up and puts on the leather jacket, gathers up the few things he brought into his duffle.
“W-where are you going?”
“Can’t do this with me around,” he says, smirking. “Lenore says you’ll have to be more than ready before you can be trusted around me. Apparently she thinks I’d be too distracting.”
“Jerk,” Sam argues, trying to loosen the ropes around his ankles so he can wipe that smirk off Dean’s face.
“Bitch,” Dean returns, and the grin just gets wider.
It takes Sam almost four hours to get out of the goddamned cuffs and stop throwing up deadman’s blood. His brother’s a bastard.
* * *
Part Four
