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ihearthings_ii“No. No. Dean, I know you want Sam back, but this is not the way to go about it. You idiots don’t need the help from all the demons in hell, you’re going to end the world yourselves, acting the way you do,” Bobby’s voice was tinny and distant in his ear, but he was deadly serious, and Dean could hear it.
“Bobby-“
“Boy, don’t even think about it!” Bobby thundered, and Dean closed his mouth.
“But. Bobby,” he said, and tried for meek, and Bobby harrumphed on the other end, muttered about goddamn stubborn idiot Winchesters who had less sense than god gave dogs. Dean would deal with it. If he opened the gates to hell once more and another million of demons stormed out, he would kill them all with his bare hands and send them straight back down to hell. He would do it; he would, if it meant getting his brother back.
He would do anything, if it meant getting his brother back, but Bobby, no matter how much of a father figure he was to Dean, and no matter how much he loved both Sam and Dean, and no matter how well he understood, more than understood, had witnessed, several times the length Winchesters were willing to go to for each other, he wasn’t one, wasn’t a Winchester, and really wasn’t crazy about this kind of grand, idiotic gestures.
“I know, kid, I know. But I can’t let you open those gates again. We did it once, and we let out more demons than we know what to do with. I know how much Sam means to you, you’ve more than proved that, but Dean.”
He could almost see Bobby’s headshake, and felt his stomach drop. He knew it was a long shot, and even if Bobby had said ‘sure let’s open the gates to hell so we can go get your brother back,’ they still didn’t have the Colt, and they probably couldn’t open the Devil’s Gate without it.
His fingers hovered over Bela’s name on his phone. Now that was a chick who was far more trouble than she was worth. He deleted her number.
God, what a bitch. But he guessed she was getting hers, though. And if she wasn’t, Dean would make sure she did once he was down there picking up Sam. He just had to find a way to get into hell, pick up his brother and then make like Meatloaf.
So he would take care of that first, and then, while he was down there, he would make sure she got the karmic ass-kicking she so rightfully deserved. Okay, so getting torn to shreds by hellhounds probably went a long way to leveling her karmic balance, but Dean still hadn’t forgiven her for
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and groaned. His knees were still sore as fuck. He had stumbled in the night before, fallen face first onto his bed and slept for ten hours. That morning he’d patched himself up as best as he could, but damn, that little girl had done a number on him, and a shotgun shell full of salt to the chest really hadn’t felt any better the second time around.
He sat down at the table, looked at the laptop, stared at the lame wallpaper Sam had on it, rubbed his hands over his face.
The Devil’s Gate couldn’t be the only entrance to hell, it just couldn’t be. There had to be at least one more and he had to find it, and then find a way to get in without anything else getting out, and then of course, he had to find a way to get back out again, when he had found Sam.
He opened the internet and pulled up Sam’s most popular bookmarks, and started reading.
&
He thought about how he they said, in missing persons cases, that for the family, sometimes it was a relief when a body turned up, because sometimes it was just better to have certainty in death than uncertainty, but he was kind of relived that there was no body for him to bury.
Now last time, the last time there had been a body for him to bury, to burn and bury, and he just hadn’t been able to deal. He has salted and burned more bodies than he could remember, fuck, he had salted and burned his dad but he was pretty sure that he would have lost it if he would have to do the same to his brother.
He wasn’t sure why that was, exactly. Even if he technically had known that his dad was someday going to die, and probably ahead of Dean, he hadn’t really believed it – he had held on to that part of the kid he had been, who had believed with every fiber of his being that his dad was a superhero, was indestructible and immortal.
And when he had died, and when it obviously hadn’t been of completely natural causes, it had broken that part of him, had forced him to leave one of the last pieces of his innocence in the dust, and it had almost done him in, but he had still been able to sneak his father’s cold dead body out of the morgue, had still been able to wrap him up and build a pyre, salt and burn him while remaining mostly stoic and stiff-upper-lipped.
But Sam. On his knees in the mud, with Sam’s blood slowly pumping out of his body and onto Dean’s hands, Sam’s still warm body slumped on him, convulsing and gagging on his own blood, those unseeing eyes turned towards him. That had almost made him lose his lunch, had made him want to do anything to undo it.
He remembered Sam, still and cold in that room, how his skin had remained clammy from the rain even hours later, and he thanked whoever was listening that this time, he didn’t have a body to bury or to burn.
&
As it turned out, hell was a lot harder getting into than Dean had ever thought.
First, there was the whole question of finding the damn place. Even when he’d been convinced it was where he was going to spend the rest of eternity (or at least until Sam got him out again) he hadn’t been completely sure--- well. Where he was going. It had taken a lot of research and a lot of hours spent at Bobby’s house and exiled in dusty library basements far away from the popular sections and okay, in front of Sam’s stupid laptop with gritty eyes hitting up Wikipedia (it wasn’t always wrong, so suck it, alright?), and god fuck but he hated doing this by himself.
For a damned man, with a damned soul, hell was proving to be fairly elusive, and what the shit was up with that anyway? When he had been trying to stay out of it, there had been all these stupid demons trying to get him there, but when he was actively trying to get in? He couldn’t even find the stupid place.
And yeah, the Underworld and all that, and it was supposed to be, you know. Down, somehow, but he doubted he could just grab a shovel and start digging and sooner or later hit jackpot.
Motherfuck.
Stupid fucking hell. And stupid fucking Sam. When he found him, he was going to give him the trashing of a lifetime.
&
And it was just typically Sam, this stunt.
To pull something like this, man, that was just exactly something Sam would do.
The best damn thing Dean had ever done was to make this deal, and Sam had to go and steal his thunder.
Dean had saved lives, he had. He had saved lives, and made lives better, and because of him, several lives that would have been lost weren’t, and still, the best thing he ever did was when he made that deal. The best thing he ever did in his stupid little life was to go to that crossroad, and to call up that demon. The best thing he ever did in his miserable existence was when he kissed that demon and sealed that deal, signed away eternity minus a year in hell, all just to make sure he had Sam, safe and sound and with him for that year.
And the little shit had the nerve to go behind his back and do something like that. He knew Bobby hadn’t known about this either, he was too surprised to have known. Bobby probably hadn’t even known something like that was possible. (Dean wondered if it actually was, or if it was because Sam and his ‘Boy King’ status, or if Sam had simply gone down to the gates of hell (and hey, how had *Sam* found them, anyway? Goddamn. Maybe he should have listened to when he rambled on, sometimes) and had stared at the ferry guy or the dog or whoever was guarding the gates of the underworld these days with those friggin’ eyes of his, until they had given up and carted him into hell. If maybe he had just started arguing with them, using lawyer talk and his infinite
But what the fuck.
Sam would have been more than worth an eternity in hell. Sam being happy and living his life would have been worth it. But now the fucker had gone and messed up Dean’s plan.
&
He drained the last dregs of cold coffee from the paper cup, and his fingers drummed idly on the table. His body was running on coffee, these days, coffee and fear and adrenaline.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten, fear bubbling sickly in his throat, and he couldn’t keep anything down – he was starting to understand how Sam got so skinny, so fast, if this had been how he felt for twelve months.
He couldn’t sleep, either. He went to bed with the laptop, passed out for about an hour and then woke up, choking on a nightmare that was all too real.
He had to find Sam.
&
He let himself think about it, but only when he was strung out on too much coffee and too little sleep that he could blame it on that.
It never should have happened in the first place, but goddamnit, Sam.
So okay, it wasn’t like had Sam forced him, not like that at all. It really wasn’t like he had been a completely unwilling participant. Wasn’t like he hadn’t thought about it himself a few times, but he’d always chalked it up to a lack of girls and too much fucking time around his geeky little brother who all of a sudden had shot up and up and up, and then had had these muscles, and Dean hadn’t been blind. Hadn’t been blind at all. Hadn’t been blind even when should have been.
Obviously, dad had never known anything about the ‘I sometimes have sex with guys’ thing, because--- because it hadn’t happened that often anyway, just when he had been hit by a particularly strong urge to feel large hands and hard bellies, strong, muscled thighs; because their family had always had a very firm don’t ask, don’t tell policy surrounding sex, and because--- well. That just wasn’t really something he had wanted to try and explain to his dad.
But yeah, Dean Winchester was open-minded and open for suggestions and open for fucking business (heh. Fucking business), and yeah, the way they’d grown up and the way they had lived didn’t exactly groom him to respect the rules of society, but that didn’t mean that he hadn’t known that his dad probably wouldn’t have thrown him a party if he had found of that Dean didn’t mind fucking around with guys sometimes, and of course he knew that just even the thought of doing the dirty with his kid brother was above and beyond wrong.
So he had kept his mouth shut, because he was better at that than anybody had ever really given him credit for, and he had mostly avoided thinking about it, but every once in a while, he had let himself think about how tall Sam was getting, about the promise held in the width of his shoulders, those long, long legs and he had palmed himself roughly, fast and dirty in a public restroom. (He had done it once in their motel bathroom and had come all over the sink, and had had to leave in pretense of getting a beer, later, when Sam’s long fingers had curled around the edge of the sink while brushing his teeth.)
Of course, he had never counted on the fact that Sam might have wanted the same thing. Of course he hadn’t, because --- because no, Sam was his more or less innocent kid brother, who had blushed when girls smiled at him when he sixteen, for chrissakes, sixteen, when Dean had been sleeping with this really hot mid-life crisis soccer mom, whose kid was in Sam’s English class. Sam who’d probably only slept with a handful of girls who weren’t Jess, Sam. No way his little brother would want--- incest.
Yeah, incest, because that was what it was, even if it didn’t feel like that, even if it didn’t totally feel like this big bad concept when he applied it to him and Sam.
But Sam did, and Sam had, and after Stanford and Jess, he had slowly started to make his intentions known to Dean.
Who had balked and turned Sam down, time and time again.
At first he had been afraid of doing that, of letting himself have that with Sam and then have Sam leave him in the dust when he took off for his bright, shiny future with the wife and kids and station car, because what the fuck was he supposed to do then?
Move on? Impossible.
He had also had moments of thinking that it had been a curse, maybe, a trickster playing a really unfunny joke on him, something supernatural.
After a while, he had figured out that Sam was actually, maybe staying around, but even if Sam had made it clear what he wanted, they had been brothers again, brothers like they had been before Sam went off to Stanford, quite possibly even better, and it had been so perfect to Dean.
The two of them, the car, the road; they had made a hell of a team, and Dean had enjoyed it far too much to jeopardize it for something he had wanted, sure, had wanted really, really bad, but something he hadn’t been completely sure would even work.
What if they did it, what if he had finally given into Sam and done everything, everything he had ever dreamed off, what if he had done that and Sam had freaked out and taken off? He couldn’t risk that.
And then.
Then he had only had a year left, and part of him had said, ‘well you’re going there anyway, might as well enjoy the ride’, but the other part of him had looked at Sam and known that his brother would be devastated when it happened, had known himself, what it had felt like to lose his brother. He hadn’t wanted think about what it would do to Sam to lose his best friend, his brother and his lover in one fell swoop.
He hadn’t been able to do that to Sam, and Sam had been so caught up in trying to find a loop whole, a way to save Dean that he hadn’t really pushed the issue the way he had used to. Only when Sam had been drunk, which rarely had happened anyway, had he tried to touch Dean, tried to creep into his bed, tried to kiss him, but when he had been that drunk, he had also been easy enough to fend off and pour into (his own) bed.
Sam had always been a tenacious bastard though, a trait he most definitely had inherited from their dad, and Dean was only a man.
Only one man.
Who had been dying, and soon, and after a successful hunt that had left them unharmed save for a few bruises and their bellies had been full from the home-cooked meal the thankful owner of a now spirit free house had dished up with, they’d gone to a bar, and Sam had plied him with enough alcohol to get him loose and content and with the 200 dollars he had scored in pool, the world had been just fucking perfect, and he’d been completely blindsided when Sam had crowded him against the door of the motel room and kissed him and kissed him and kissed him until Dean had stopped pushing him away, and started kissing back.
And really, when he had started kissing Sam back, he’d thought that well, he was going to hell anyway, he might as well let them both have this, but he’d fully intended to stop before it got any further than kissing.
Of course, it hadn’t.
He remembered, god, he remembered everything so clearly.
The endless ocean of Sam, the ripples and waves of his body, crests and swells, how he’d tasted, how he’d sounded, how he’d shivered and how the fine sun hairs on his arms had felt against Dean’s lips.
The dip and pinch of Sam’s spine had been a perfect place for Dean’s tongue and his thumbs and Sam had arched and popped his spine and sighed and trashed under him, and Dean had loved it, loved every single fucking minute of it.
Sam hadn’t said anything, hadn’t had to, Dean had known it was his first time with a guy because Sam was a romantic, that way. The implicit trust in his eyes had held an undercurrent of nerves, nerves that Dean had soothed as best as he could.
Sam, spread out underneath him, vast and endless and this look in his eyes, like at that moment, everything had been alright with the world.
Sam’s nerves had evaporated when Dean was inside him, though, and Dean closed his eyes, bit his lips at the thought of how tight Sam had been, how hot inside, hotter and better than anything before, and anything after would ever be.
Dean had come inside of Sam, a lot faster than was cool (but it was okay, because they’d gone again, longer and better, and fuck, even hotter) and Sam had gotten so worked up he’d come messily on Dean’s stomach, and it had felt like being branded, like Sam was putting his mark on him and Dean had wanted it.
Dean hadn’t known it then, but looking back, he knew that Sam had been saying goodbye.
