Lar ||| Supernatural

i hope neil young will remember
by Lar

EMAIL: HERE
RATING: PG
PAIRING: Dean/Sam
DISCLAIMER: Kripke, you magnificent bastard, they're all yours.
SUMMARY: I've been in my mind, it's such a fine line // That keeps me searching for a heart of gold
A/N: written for wesleysgirl who provided the prompt I used as my summary.

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It’s a hard realization to make, understanding that you’ve spent your life being in love with one person and never really known it until they were leaving you.

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Sam spends hours every day hunched over the laptop or with his face buried in John’s journal. He has worn down countless pencils, written the ink out of a hundred pens picked up in hotel rooms and diners. He’s filled pads of paper with notes, doodles, drawings, scribbles. There is a rainbow of post-its on everything, including the laptop itself.

Dean sleeps every night bathed in the blue-white glow of the computer’s screen, his face pressed into the pillow, his hip snugged up to Sam’s thigh. Every night Sam looks for the key. Every night he feels the slip of another day gone.

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Watching Dean is his other obsession. Sam drinks his brother in the way his lungs take in oxygen – it’s done without conscious thought to the process. Sam’s eyes are open, therefore he’s watching his brother, or looking for a way to save him. There are moments in between, but the thought of Dean walking out to get beer or pizza or a bag of peanut M&M’s and not coming back again is enough to send Sam into a cold sweat of panic.

"Dude, personal bubble," Dean mutters when Sam walks up the back of his heel in the checkout line.

Sam flushes, flips Dean off casually and below the line of sight of the cashier, goes back to scanning the trashy magazines set up in a row for impulse buys. This is the level of his desperation – he is actually looking for something he can latch onto and spin out into research he hasn't already been over a hundred times. He is looking at "Weekly World News" as a resource.

He has never felt so helpless in his life.

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Sometimes when he is lying in the dark, one arm under the pillow or beneath Dean's head, the other resting on the small of Dean's back or on his hip, Sam wonders what moment it was that made him realize that he was in too deep to ever be free of it. Not just the messy tangle of total fuck up that is this thing between him and his brother, but the painful realization that he will not be able to go on breathing if he can't break the contract.

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Sam remembers the first sloppy kiss he gave Dean, drunk on one can of beer and terrified that Dean will not just kick his ass six ways to Sunday but that Sam will lose that easy grin that Dean gives him when he's feeling generous and big brotherly towards him. Scared out of his wits, heart pounding hard enough to echo in his own ears, he snuck into Dean's bed, wriggled up under the arm flung out over the covers and pressed his mouth, wet with beer-tinged saliva, onto Dean's.

The reaction was almost anti-climatic really. Dean had opened his eyes, stared back at Sam when he drew back and rubbed his hand over his mouth.

"Less spit, more tongue," Dean told him with a huff and turned over in the bed, making room for Sam to lie down with him the way they hardly ever did anymore. Sam spooned up against Dean's sleep-warm body, long arms clutching too tight as he waited for something else to be said. There was nothing though, just the slow and even sound of Dean's breathing turning into snores as he dropped deeper into sleep.

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If Dean's aware of what Sam's doing now, he doesn't let on. There's the odd comment here and there when Sam gets so close that they damn near trip over each other's feet, or when Sam drops off to sleep in the middle of some bar because he spent the night up at the laptop and Dean has to practically carry him out to the car. But mostly Dean just lets Sam follow him around like a big puppy everywhere he goes, drawing the line only at the public bathroom in some of the rougher bars. That's probably a good idea, even Sam will admit that. Getting them in some stupid bar fight when they're trying to fly under the radar is more important that then 45 heart-stopping seconds it takes for Dean to go take a piss all by himself.

Sam's not sure if he's grateful for Dean's shiny new sense of propriety about this neediness or not. Before everything that happened with the demon and the deal, he knows that Dean would have tolerated about five minutes of that kind of behavior before he lost his temper and flipped out. But everything about Dean is slightly different now and it makes Sam ache to think that he's missed so much time. That he could have made a difference sooner.

That he could lose the heavy dip in the mattress, the sound of soft snoring, the heat of the body that his own curves around and against, the reason he manages to go on. It can't happen. He won't let it.

-end


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