Chapter Text
For a time, Dean lives in the strange space between sleep and waking. On several occasions, he thinks that he does wake, because the shitty motel rooms and the morgues and the diners fade into the golden cocoon of his bed.
Sam is inevitably there: body twined around Dean’s and mouth already at work on his skin. Sam’s power is coiled around his mind, leaving his thoughts too heavy and unorganized to make any kind of rational response, and he always ends up breathing shallowly while Sam’s lips and tongue and teeth mark possessive paths over his neck and chest and stomach. While Sam’s hands drag across his hips and ass and back, flooding him with memories of other, saner times.
“Love you,” Sam tells him in a low, honeyed voice. “So fucking beautiful, baby.”
Dean’s mouth drops open in a pant, he hears himself whine, and then the dreams pull him under again.
Things are more lucid there. He can sense his brother’s power all around him in a latticed cage, but it isn’t close enough to fuck with his thoughts. Drifting, he moves from motel to motel with his brother at his side. He and Sam sit in wayside diners while women who look like Jess, or Mom, or sometimes Cassie, bring them burgers and chili fries. Sam eats like he has never seen food before: with delicate, curious care. He watches Dean with ice blue, sorrowful eyes. When Dean tries to reminisce about some stupid, childish prank or another, Sam just tilts his head and blinks in confusion.
Eventually, he can’t ignore the truth anymore and the question spills out.
“Who are you really?”
They’re sitting in the Impala at the time, speeding along a dark highway toward no destination in particular. The radio is blaring out a garbled mix of Zeppelin and Metallica, like Dean’s subconscious can’t figure out what he wants to listen to.
“I’m here to help you,” Sam answers. His hands are meticulously placed on top of his thighs, his posture stiff. Almost like a puppet version of the real thing.
Dean tightens his grip on the wheel. “Not what I asked.”
Sam—or whatever is wearing Dean’s memory of his brother—regards him silently.
“Let me guess,” Dean says, once it has become clear Sam isn’t going to answer. “You’d tell me, but then you’d have to kill me?”
Sam doesn’t look like he gets the joke.
“The knowledge is not safe for you,” he says instead, and then the Impala disintegrates and they’re sitting on a beach.
Dean can’t see Sam anymore—isn’t looking into those unsettling, blue eyes—because his brother is sitting directly behind him, broad chest supporting Dean’s back. His arms are looped low around Dean’s stomach, keeping him close, but for the first time in a long time, there’s no restraining tension in the gesture. Before Dean, the ocean stretches out: splashed with gold by the first rays of the rising sun.
“I’ve never been here before,” Dean points out. He isn’t sure what that means, but it feels important because this is the first time in a seemingly endless succession of locales that he’s been somewhere unfamiliar. The beach doesn’t feel any less real than his memories, though. When he shifts his weight, the sand is a thick, shifting texture against his ass and the soles of his feet. He can taste salt on the air, hear the cry of gulls.
“I thought you would enjoy seeing this.” As the brisk ocean wind rises to ruffle Dean’s hair, Sam adds, “I thought you would enjoy being outside.”
The reminder makes Dean’s chest ache—God, how long has it been since he felt a genuine breeze on his face instead of one that is power-born?—and his eyes sting. But he’s never been an outdoorsy kind of a guy, and it’s a stupid thing to cry over, so he grits his teeth and says, “I’d enjoy it a hell of a lot more if there were a couple of beach bunnies running around. Maybe some Mai Tais?”
The knowing silence from behind him makes the joke fall flat. It strips Dean’s words bare and leaves the fear and the grief and the pain shivering and naked between them. Dean’s fine, though. He’s fine until Sam drops his head forward and rests their cheeks together. Loving. Chaste. Innocent.
“You don’t have to hide from me,” Sam whispers.
Dean doesn’t know what to say to that. He can’t talk past the painful lump in his throat, anyway. Staring out past the breaking waves at the blinding disc of the sun, which is slowly rising above the curve of the horizon, he blinks tears from his eyes. It doesn’t count as crying. Not if Sam’s behind him and can’t see.
“You have to be strong, Dean,” Sam tells him. “Help is coming.”
Dean can’t help but laugh at that: a harsh and bitter sound like a seagull’s cry. Help can come all it wants. It might even get to the front porch. Then Sam will open the door and slit its throat, or burn it to ash, or rip its heart from its chest.
Even if Help somehow managed to get past Sam, it still wouldn’t matter because Dean is tainted. He has been infected with Sam’s mark, and the yellow-eyed demon’s power, and his own limping, pathetic love. There isn’t any cure for that. There’s no saving him from himself.
As if his thoughts have summoned it back into being, Dean feels the tattoo unfold across his skin again. The bracelets melt into place around his wrists. Gold pulses at the corner of his vision—not from the sun, but from his brother’s power: confining and bright.
“Don’t think of him,” Sam urges.
“How the fuck am I supposed to manage that, huh?” Dean mutters. He wipes at his eyes with the back of one hand, as though that will stop the tears. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m going to wake up eventually, and he—he’s winning. Sooner or later, I’m just gonna …” He trails off, unable to say it.
Not that he needs to say it. The words echo through the air around them, painfully obvious. He can taste his own surrender coating the inside of his mouth. It’s a hot, thick sensation—carries the mingled flavors of tears and blood and come.
“No,” Sam says. His voice is uncharacteristically rough: almost violent. “I won’t let that happen, Dean.”
Dean laughs again, bowing his head and covering his face with both hands. “You can’t stop it.”
Sam is silent for a moment as the gulls wheel overhead and the waves break against the shore and then he asks, “Do you remember Burke Falls, Montana? You were hunting a revenant and Sam became lost in the mines.”
The half-formed memory of an interlocking cave network, twisted in on itself and chasm-pocked, flutters through Dean’s mind. Those dark flares are almost enough for him to drop his hands and open his eyes again, hungry for the light.
“He fell,” he whispers into his palms instead. “In the dark, he was—you were screaming for me, and I. I couldn’t find you.”
Dean’s throat locks up on him for a moment—remembered fear and adrenaline and panic: stench of rotting flesh everywhere, and drifting coal dust, and where the fuck was Sammy—and then he wrenches his mind away from his own turbulent emotions and fixes on a bearded, glowering face. His throat loosens and he says, with false levity, “Dad was going fucking nuts.”
Sam strokes a hand through Dean’s hair and Dean can tell from the reassuring quality to the touch that he isn’t fooling anyone.
“You found him, though,” Sam says. “You found him and you carried him up out of the darkness.”
“Nearly got choked to death doing it, too,” Dean mutters, but he remembers that he didn’t mind at the time. There was too much relief flooding his system for Sam’s panicked arm around his throat and cutting off his air to really register. And if Sam was choking him—if Sam was clinging to him and shaking—then Sam wasn’t dead.
Sam’s hand shifts down, easing Dean’s hands away from his face and tilting his head to the side. Dean keeps his eyes shut as his brother’s breath warms his lips, chest tightening in anticipation of the kiss sure to follow, but nothing happens. Their lips are brushing—just barely—but for some reason Sam isn’t finishing it.
Finally, cautiously, Dean opens his eyes. He’s gotten used to ignoring the yellow in Sam’s gaze, but the blue is still too startling and new for that. The gentle, knowing sorrow in this Sam’s gaze is just as unsettling as the heat in the real Sam’s—is maybe a little worse. Dean quickly shuts his eyes again and breathes in—salt air, Sam, something else that smells a little like warm, polished wood. Church smell.
“You are lost now,” Sam whispers. “But I promise I will find you and raise you from the darkness.”
Now it will happen. Now Sam will move that final centimeter forward and kiss him.
But Sam doesn’t. His fingertips continue to trace across Dean’s cheek in light, reverent patterns, brushing his eyelashes and wiping away his tears. The air they share feels warm and spiced: the briny, coppery taste of surrender washing away. The waves seem miles distant, fading further with each beat of Dean’s heart.
“Are you real?” he chokes out suddenly. “Are you—are you him, or am I dreaming this? Because you can’t, you can’t do this to me, man, I—”
“Dean,” Sam murmurs, soothing, and then, finally, they’re kissing.
Dean isn’t sure which of them took that final step, and he isn’t sure that it matters. After so many months with Sam’s bruising lips and claiming tongue, the gentleness of his mouth now makes Dean feel uncomfortable in his own skin. Part of him wants to take control of the kiss, turn it into something wet and hard, but he can’t figure out how. He can only meet his brother’s tenderness with a mirroring, languid rhythm.
There’s nothing sexual in the gesture, but Dean can feel it reverberating all the way down into his bones anyway—reaching deeper, even: into his soul. Sam’s mouth on his (slight hint of tongue now, tracing over Dean’s parted lips) feels like worship, like sunlight, like clean water spilling over him and washing the filth and contamination of months away. It’s only a dream—only a fleeting illusion—but Dean is so pathetically grateful for it that he’s crying again.
I’m sorry, a compassionate, sorrowing voice—a stranger’s voice, neither masculine nor feminine—murmurs in his head. I should have been here sooner. I should have stopped him.
Something in that voice, or maybe in the way Sam is tentatively pushing his tongue past Dean’s lips, makes Dean press closer. Twisting in his brother’s arms, Dean brings his arms up and grabs onto him with the desperation of a drowning man. He deepens the kiss, mouth open wide like he can breathe Sam in and keep him there.
There’s no warning.
One second, Sam’s lips are moist against Dean’s. His hair is soft beneath Dean’s fingers, and there’s a warm, unfolding feeling in Dean’s chest. The next, Dean is jerking away and screaming as pleasure-pain rips through his back.
Dean. It’s Sam’s voice: Sam’s real voice reverberating through the dream and his body and turning everything to molten gold. Time to wake up.
Hands clasp Dean’s arms and he cracks his eyes open to see his brother (eyes all over blue—like ice, like sorrow, like regret) leaning over him.
“Have faith,” Sam tells him, and then something sharp and barbed hooks into Dean’s back and yanks him down through the sand and earth and into waking.
He opens his eyes with a gasp, writhing against silk sheets. His back burns, leaving him breathless and slicked with sweat, but somewhere along the way the pain signal must be getting lost because his cock is hard and full between his legs. It’s Sam’s power, he realizes—Sam’s power filling him up and moving within him and turning everything molten and thick.
Sam is inside him—everywhere—and the sensation is so invasive and overwhelming that it takes Dean a second to realize that his brother’s hands are on his arms, bruisingly tight. Sam’s body is blanketing his, bare chest to bare chest, and Sam’s tongue is in his mouth.
Dean jerks his head to the side, freeing his mouth, and lets out a hurt, shocked noise halfway between a gasp and a moan. The flood of power within him damps down instantly, going from a torrent to a trickle. It’s still stroking through Dean’s insides and along his back in licking drags like a giant cat’s tongue, but it’s more bearable.
Smiling, Sam releases one of Dean’s arms to pet his damp hair. “That’s it,” he murmurs. “You’re okay now. You’re here.”
Dean blinks up at his brother, trying to focus. His body is awash with conflicting reverberations—pain and pleasure all tumbled together so that he can’t tell whether he’s hurt or horny—and his mind feels like it’s been packed in cotton.
As Sam continues to stroke his hair, Dean focuses well enough to track the arousal to the lingering influence of his brother’s power. The muzziness and the aches in his muscles are his own, though: a familiar combination. This is what a hangover feels like. From either too much booze or drugs or sleep. Dean doesn’t remember drinking and there’s no reason for Sam to have dosed him with anything, not when he can fuck Dean’s body and mind up with a stray thought, which leaves only one option.
“How long was I out?” he asks. His voice comes out harsh and graveled from disuse, which tells him a little something already.
“Couple of weeks,” Sam answers—casually, like they do this all the time. Dean stares up at him, too stunned by the sudden loss of time to actually say anything, and after a beat Sam explains, “I needed some time to clean up.”
Dean swallows with difficulty, freeing his tongue from the roof of his mouth, and manages, “So you whammied me into a coma?”
“I helped you sleep,” Sam corrects. There’s no hint apology in the words: no regret in his golden gaze. “You needed it.”
Dean tries to feel violated—or at least upset—but after having spent so long in close quarters with his brother doing whatever he wants to Dean’s body (short of fucking him, and Dean still doesn’t get the whys of that particular logic), he can’t work up the proper emotions. After all, being put to sleep isn’t any worse than the daily games and manipulations he has to suffer through. At least in his sleep, Dean found a little escape…
“What were you dreaming about?” Sam prods. The words are empty, toneless. Which is enough of a warning for the lie to roll right off Dean’s tongue.
“Chili dog with all the trimmings. Extra oni—” He breaks off into a gasp as Sam’s power sharpens inside him, twisting. It feels so good it hurts, shooting past arousal and into agony, and Dean arches his back off the bed while grasping futilely at the sheets. Then the flood of power is gone, as suddenly as it came. Dean’s cock pulses, painfully hard and needy, and he moves to cup it.
Sam’s body is in the way, and when he feels Dean moving beneath him, Sam catches his wrist. The tension in his fingers is a warning.
“What were you dreaming?” he repeats.
Dean’s lizard brain is screaming at him to be smart and tell the truth, but his more rational mind understands that doing that would be a very bad idea. Gritting his teeth, he forces out, “That I won the Publisher’s Clearing House.”
Sam looks at him for a moment, blankly, and then says, “I can rip the answer out of your head or you can tell me. Your choice.”
“What the fuck do you care?” Dean demands. His heart is pounding in his chest, but he ignores the fear and pulls his wrist free. Pushing at his brother’s chest, he tries to move out from under him and then freezes when Sam shoves one arm between Dean’s back and the mattress and pulls them closer together instead.
“I was calling you,” Sam says as he nuzzles Dean’s neck. “For almost ten minutes. You weren’t waking up.” His teeth scrape over the sensitive skin of Dean’s throat, making Dean’s pulse skip. “So I want to know,” Sam continues. “I want to know what was so fucking fascinating that I had to tear you from your own mind.”
Even if he were oblivious enough to miss the seething jealousy in his brother’s words, there would be no way for Dean to miss the way that Sam’s mouth fastens on him suddenly. He hisses, instinctively trying to pull away again, and Sam’s free hand grips Dean’s hair and holds him still. The pressure of his mouth increases, working in a way that Dean is more than familiar with from before. Marking him.
Tell me, Sam’s voice commands, echoing inside Dean’s head. His looming presence threatens to spill into Dean’s thoughts—to devour them—and Dean can’t remember exactly why right now, but that can’t happen. Bad Things will occur if it does.
“Y-you,” he spits out. “I was—fuck—I was dreaming about you.”
He prays that the half-truth will be good enough to satisfy his brother. If it isn’t, and Sam insists on the entire story, then this conversation isn’t going to end well: whether the blue-eyed version of Sam was real or just a figment of Dean’s imagination, it wasn’t this Sam, and that’s all he’s going to care about.
Dean swears softly as his brother’s teeth sink into the bruise, worrying at it for a moment, and then withdraw. Sam’s weight lifts as he rolls off of Dean and lies beside him, propped up on one elbow and watching as Dean brings a hand up to his throat and gingerly touches the mark with a wince. He’s surprised when there’s no trace of blood slicking his fingertips.
“You were dreaming about me,” Sam repeats, reaching out to trail his fingers up and down Dean’s chest. The mingled doubt and hope in his brother’s voice make Dean’s stomach move uneasily.
“Yeah,” he breathes.
“But not about me now,” Sam continues, sounding more certain. “You were remembering, weren’t you? You were dreaming about before.”
Sam’s power trickles along Dean’s back with the words, almost playfully, and now he’s remembering all right. He remembers kissing Sam, remembers the tattoo changing. He remembers Sam’s power slipping into him so gently and deftly that he didn’t really notice it happening—so that he hasn’t been able to understand what his brother was doing to him until now.
Hindsight is fifty-fifty, though, just like always, and from this vantage point Dean recognizes that the lazy, contented exhaustion that made him so pliant just before he drifted off was artificial. It was an invention of the insidious, soothing strokes of Sam’s power. Sam used that power to lull Dean into a false sense of security and warmth. He used it to make Dean obedient and submissive so that he could strip off his shirt and turn him over onto his stomach.
“You son of a bitch,” Dean whispers.
Now the feelings of violation come, strong and nauseating. He noticed before that he was shirtless—probably pantless too, judging from the way the sheets are rubbing against his cock and thighs—but he didn’t feel exposed until this moment of realization. His chest twists with the desire to tug the sheet up from where it’s pooled around his waist and use it to cover his body up to the neck.
As though his brother hasn’t spent the last two weeks getting as much of an eyeful as he wanted.
Sam’s mouth twitches into a smile, like he’s having no trouble tracing the abrupt shift of Dean’s mood to its source, and a moment later he confirms it by saying, “I wanted to see. You were being a stubborn asshole.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to fuck with my head!” Dean shouts. His muscles tense with the urge to thrash his way out of bed—away from Sam, as far as he can get in this prison—but he’s been here long enough by now to know better than to give in to that particular impulse.
Sam regards him with an amused, humoring expression, not bothering to respond, and it only twists the point home further—only makes Dean conscious of how fucking stupid that complaint is, when it’s all Sam ever does. When his entire purpose these days seems to be tweaking Dean’s thoughts until they come more in line with what Sam wants from him. Of course, knowing it’s a stupid complaint doesn’t mean he isn’t still going to protest.
“You were—you fucking drugged me.”
“Oh please,” Sam scoffs. He tilts his head, circling the fingers on Dean’s chest in toward one nipple. “So I gave you the psychic equivalent of a Zanax. So fucking what.”
Pushing Sam away isn’t just stupid—it’s pointless—but Dean does it again and, surprisingly, Sam lets him. Emboldened by the small success, Dean shakes his head and says, “That wasn’t Zanax; that was a fucking roofie, or a lobotomy or something.”
“I mellowed you out, Dean. That’s it. The rest was all you.”
No. That can’t be true. Because if it is … if it is, then Dean’s even further gone than he thought.
I’m not, he tries to reassure himself. I’m fine. But he can’t deny that he kissed Sam before his two-week long nap. He kissed his little brother of his own free will; he, in some small measure, accepted this ruined, soul-dead version of Sammy. He accepted this life, this reality, and that acceptance went deep enough to trigger a change in whatever possessive spell Sam has inked into his skin.
That bitter taste of surrender—the one that was so close in his dreams—surges in his mouth and the room starts to slip sideways. Why the fuck is Dean even bothering to fight, when the final outcome is as inevitable as sunset? Why shouldn’t he make it easier on himself—give in, give up, let Sam’s numbing, erotic pull draw him in and consume him? He can feel himself hovering on the brink of offering that—feels the tattoo prickle in warning on his back, signaling a new change—and then ice blue eyes flash through his mind, cold and shocking.
Help is coming, that Sam said—no, promised. Dean isn’t sure if he believes the dream, but he doesn’t quite disbelieve it enough to toss in the towel.
Not yet.
He swallows thickly, giving his head a shake, and announces, “You aren’t getting any more of me.”
Sam just smiles at him fondly. Like he’s being cute.
“I mean it, Sam.”
Chuckling, Sam drops a brief kiss on Dean’s cheek and then rolls away toward the far side of the bed. “Get dressed,” he says, and then lifts up the curtain and is gone.
Dean lies where he is and stares at the fabric, debating ignoring the command and staying where he is. In the end, though, it doesn’t seem worth fighting over—especially not when Dean actually wants to get some more layers between himself and his brother.
His cock hasn’t quite settled back down yet from the over stimulation he woke up to, which is shaming and embarrassing, but there’s no point in trying to hide his erection. After all, Sam already knows how it makes Dean feel to have all that power moving inside of him. Dean’s just going to have to move quickly: get the clothing on as rapidly as possible. Leaving the sheets where they are, he sits up and scoots over to the edge of the bed.
The room is still a mess when Dean moves the curtain aside—floor cracked and walls runneled as though they’re made of melted wax instead of plaster and concrete. There are red stains everywhere, reminders of Sam’s torture spree, but at least there’s no actual meat embedded in the walls or ceiling anymore. The gaping hole in the outer wall has been covered with a black, plastic tarp that moves with an unseen wind. The lights overhead have been fitted with new bulbs.
Sam is already dressed and sitting in an oversized armchair that Dean recognizes from his brother’s study. There’s a book in his lap—something old and demony, probably—and he continues to page through it as Dean tentatively gets to his feet.
“Love what you’ve done with the place,” Dean mutters, earning himself an amused glance. The glance catches on his body and heats, Sam’s eyes flicking from his thighs to his chest and then back down to his cock. Dean turns away immediately, flushing and berating himself for opening his mouth. He wonders if he’s ever going to learn to keep his trap shut.
Probably not.
Now that Dean has called attention to himself, Sam’s eyes follow him over to the wardrobe—the same one as before, judging by the warped wood. The regard makes Dean even more eager to get some clothing on and his palms are covered with a light sheen of sweat as he tugs the door open. He starts to reach in as soon as there’s room to do so and then, as the door swings wider and he gets a look at what he’s groping for, stops and stares.
For a long moment, he doesn’t move. Sam’s eyes are still crawling over him from behind, but Dean’s too stunned to care. He starts to turn around with a question on his lips, then stops, rethinking the impulse. After a few more moments of hesitation, he grabs a pair of sweats from one of the shelves. A baggy hoodie follows—sleeves long enough that Dean has to push them halfway up his arms to keep his hands free.
When he’s finally dressed, and feeling more protected than he has in a long time, he frowns down at himself. There’s a catch here somewhere. He just can’t see it.
Sam is still watching him when he turns around, the book forgotten in his lap.
“What are you doing?” Dean demands.
Sam rests his head against the high back of the chair and tilts it slightly, getting comfortable. “Looking at you.”
“That’s not—” Dean clenches his jaw, because of course that isn’t what he means: Sam knows that, he doesn’t have to point it out for his brother. “The clothes are gone,” he says instead. “All the suits, and the jeans, and the shirts. You swapped out fucking Armani for Big and Tall’s athletic department!” He picks at the front of the hoodie, even more agitated by the realization that there’s a part of him that’s abjectly uncomfortable in the baggy clothing. “What is this, Sam?”
“You didn’t like the old clothes,” Sam replies. His tone is filled with innocent confusion, but the smile playing around the corners of his lips is more than enough to tell Dean that he’s being toyed with.
“You never cared about that before,” he shoots back. “So what the fuck are you doing?”
Sam studies him for a long moment, amusement slowly seeping from his face. Dean’s sure the new expression isn’t an improvement. Finally, with casual bluntness, Sam says, “I don’t want anyone else looking at what’s mine.”
“You don’t—” It’s probably the last thing Dean expected to hear, leaving him too startled to swallow his disbelieving laugh. “I’m trapped in the fucking suite, Sam: who the hell is gonna look at me?”
“I had some people shipped in to fix everything,” Sam answers calmly. “They’ll be starting today.”
Dean’s thoughts stumble to a disorganized stop.
Finally, after several minutes of numb shock, he gets his mouth working again and says, “People? You mean, like, human people? Without demons riding around inside of them?”
One corner of Sam’s mouth twitches up. “Human people,” he confirms. “Demons don’t exactly spend their time studying home repair books.”
“Well, chalk one up for the meat suits.” Dean’s grinning, chest going light and excited as the shock wears off. It’s pathetic to be so thrilled about rubbing elbows with a couple of average Joes he doesn’t even know, but—but God, he can’t remember ever being so relieved.
“Unfortunately,” Sam says, reclaiming Dean’s attention, “I can’t move you. And I can’t stay here with you, either. I have things to do.”
Dean’s smile slips a little beneath Sam’s solemn regard. His heart, which was racing with hopeful anticipation, trips. His stomach hollows with knowing dread.
“That’s okay,” he says, trying to keep whatever’s coming at bay for just a little longer. “I’ll amuse myself somehow.”
“The clothes are a start,” his brother continues, as though Dean never said anything. “But I need to be sure you’re safe.”
Dean’s mouth has gone dry. The hopeful flurry of activity in his chest has damped and gone dark. “And how are you going to do that?” he rasps.
Sam’s eyes cut to the side, toward the place where Dean knows the coffee table is. Dean’s view is blocked by the back of the couch from this angle, but he already knows that he isn’t going to like whatever is there. There’s a retarded, endlessly optimistic part of his head that’s telling him that if he doesn’t move—if he doesn’t see—he won’t have to deal with it. But that’s the worst kind of hope-bearing lie, and Dean ignores it as he steps forward with a dragging weight in his stomach. The edge of the table comes into view first—thick, congealed smears of blood marring the polished surface, but that can’t be what Sam’s ... Oh. Oh fuck.
“No,” he says, freezing in place. “No fucking way.”
“It’s only while I’m away,” Sam tells him, sitting forward in the chair again. “I’ll take it off when I come home.” He’s looking at Dean earnestly, like he actually expects that to help, and anger licks through Dean’s horror just enough to get him moving again.
“I’m not a fucking dog!” he yells, taking several skittish steps back. He doesn’t know where he thinks he’s going, can’t run anywhere, but the nervous energy thrumming through him leaves him desperate to try.
“No, you aren’t,” Sam agrees. “But you are mine, Dean, and I need to make sure they know that. I need to keep you safe.”
Dean stares at his brother for a long moment while conflicting thoughts and emotions twist inside of him and send out panicked orders to run or fight. As though either attempt will end with him anything but even more fucked than he already is.
Finally, he opens his mouth and says it.
“I’m not wearing a collar.”
“It doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s just a symbol.” Sam’s voice is gentle; his face calm. Like this really isn’t anything to him—just another day in the Winchester household.
“Why the fuck don’t you just have ‘Property of Sam Winchester’ tattooed on my forehead and get it over with?” Dean snaps, voice harsh with mingled anger and fear. His stomach is leaden with shame at the thought of letting this happen—of letting Sam treat him like some kind of pet, like a fucking piece of property.
Sam just smiles at him placidly.
Shaking a little with the violence of his emotions, Dean growls, “You want to put that fucking thing around my neck, and you’re gonna have to do it yourself, Sam. And I swear to God I will fight you every step of the way.”
“We could do that,” Sam agrees, nodding and folding his hands in his lap. “But as much as you like to believe otherwise, I don’t actually like forcing you into things.”
Sam’s right, Dean doesn’t believe him. He lets out an incredulous little snort, tensing his muscles in preparation of fighting his brother—of making Sam work for this new exercise in humiliation.
“So you have a choice here,” Sam continues. “We can do it your way, or …”
Dean wants to keep his mouth shut and wait Sam out—doesn’t want to give the bastard the satisfaction of asking—but his brother keeps looking at him, expectant. And now that Sam has showed his hand, Dean can’t deny that he desperately wants to know what’s behind door number two. It can’t possibly be worse than door number one.
“Or what?” he bites out finally.
“Or, you can convince me that you don’t need the collar.”
Dean opens his mouth to demand just how he’s supposed to do that and then shuts it again. He doesn’t have to ask. He can read the answer in his brother’s gaze. In the smug, self-satisfied way that Sam is smiling.
He knows that he should throw that offer right back in Sam’s face—and there’s a large part of him that wants to. Not just because the thought of doing what Sam wants makes him cringe, but because he can tell from his brother’s expression that Sam has deliberately set him up—Sam fucking knows Dean isn’t ever going to chose being treated like a dog over a little heavy petting—and he doesn’t want to let the son of a bitch get away with it. Distasteful as the prospect is, Dean knows what his response should be: denial, defiance, resistance.
The correct choice is the collar.
But instead, he asks, “How much?”
Sam’s smile widens, which makes Dean’s hands clench in futile anger. If he had any doubts before that he was playing right into his brother’s hands, they’re gone now.
“Just a kiss,” Sam tells him.
Dean cuts his eyes away: can’t meet his brother’s gaze anymore. He’s too angry, and too shamed, and too confused. Because there’s a part of him that’s already on its knees and halfway across the room on its way to Sam. There’s a part of him that’s going warm and flushed with gratitude at having been given this out—the excuse of necessity to cover up the fact that he wants, badly, to give what Sam is demanding.
And Sam, the smug bastard, knows it.
“Your choice, Dean.”
“Can’t you just … I don’t know, lock me in the study or something?” God, Dean can’t believe he’s making suggestions.
“I could,” Sam agrees. “But I thought you wanted to see some people. Hear a few human voices.”
Fucker. Dean shudders a little with the sick swell of rage inside his chest. It’s ingenious, really: how well Sam has him caught. How perfectly he laid out all the breadcrumbs and how stupidly Dean followed along.
Throat working around the thick lump of emotion clogging his airway, Dean considers the prospect of saying no. He imagines how the collar will feel around his neck: smooth, heavy metal. It’ll be tight, of course: tight enough that he’ll feel it every time he swallows. Tight enough to remind him with every breath just whom he belongs to. And Sam is going to hold Dean down while he puts it on, and then he’s going take what he wants from Dean anyway: is going to hold him still and kiss him until Dean doesn’t know what’s up or down any longer and starts to respond.
Or.
Or Dean can accept the fact that he has been outmaneuvered (again) and go over there of his own free will and kiss his brother. One kiss. Nothing that he hasn’t already done.
Yeah, and what’s it gonna do to you this time? he asks himself, muscles in his back twitching in remembrance of the last kiss he initiated. But the question doesn’t ring true, and he dismisses it in the next instant.
Somehow, he knows that another kiss isn’t going to be enough to tip whatever mystical scales he’s balancing on. It isn’t the act that’s the problem, he senses, but the intent. The tattoo isn’t waiting for him to rack up kisses like free throws from the sidelines: it’s looking for shifts in thinking. It’s waiting for his thoughts to fall in line, one by one. As far as the tattoo goes, proving himself to Sam the way his brother wants him to is harmless enough.
That still doesn’t mean he should do it.
“One more minute, Dean,” Sam says, interrupting his thoughts. “Then you’re wearing the collar whether you want to or not.”
Dean’s mouth floods with bitter iron as he steps forward. He can’t look at his brother as he approaches—if he looks he’s going to run instead, useless as it would be—so he stares at the floor instead. He watches the maroon and black stains left by Sam’s last tantrum move past: a map of death and pain. Then Sam’s long, jean-clad legs come into view and Dean freezes, heart rattling out a sharp, staccato beat and throat closing up on him.
Oh God, he can’t fucking do this.
“Dean,” Sam murmurs. “Look at me.”
Dean’s head gives a curt shake without his permission and he clenches his hands into fists. Sam might know just how cowed he is, but that doesn’t mean Dean has to give his brother the satisfaction of seeing him act like some terrified, submissive chick. Taking a shaky breath, he raises his head and meets his brother’s gaze. The unashamed heat he finds there makes his stomach cramp with nausea, but Dean can live with that. His tattered pride can live with that.
Dean meets his brother’s eyes while he hesitates, uncertain of how to proceed. After a moment, he starts to bend forward and then straightens again. He can’t kiss Sam from this angle. Not “convincingly”. He waits for Sam to take pity on him and stand up, but Sam doesn’t move.
“I don’t,” Dean starts, and then grimaces, annoyed at having to say it aloud. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“If you don’t know, then you aren’t ready,” Sam replies, which is a bunch of cryptic bullshit and only frustrates Dean more. “You can wear the collar today, and we’ll try this again tomorrow.”
He stretches his hand out for the collar, which obediently starts to slide across the coffee table toward him, and Dean panics. He moves without thinking—letting instinct ride him, letting his body do what feels natural—and ends up in the chair with Sam, straddling his brother’s lap. Distantly, past the deafening pound of his own heartbeat, he can hear Sam’s startled gasp and the low hum of power his brother was using to move the collar cuts off.
“Maybe you are ready,” Sam murmurs, sliding one hand up underneath the hoodie to brush along Dean’s side.
Dean stiffens for a moment—mind screaming at him to pull away from the touch, from his brother—and then forces his muscles to relax. As he sinks down more solidly, the edges in his chest shift, tainting the nervousness and turning it to something resembling anticipation.
It’s an awkward position—his knees are digging into the seatback, wedged in between the arms on either side of his brother’s hips—but Sam makes an appreciative noise and puts his other hand on Dean’s upper thigh. Sliding a little lower in the chair, Sam gives Dean’s knees more room and slots their bodies more firmly together.
Suddenly, Sam's cock is wedged up against Dean’s ass, noticeable even through the layers of cotton and denim, and the pressure reminds Dean of other times he’s straddled his brother’s body. Memories of sinking down onto Sam’s cock—of riding him until they were both sore and sweat-soaked—flutter through Dean’s mind and his own cock swells where it’s pushing against Sam’s stomach.
Maybe he should have chosen the collar after all.
“Mmm,” Sam purrs appreciatively as he nuzzles at Dean’s throat. “That’s nice, isn’t it?” His left hand slides up and down Dean’s thigh, stroking through the cotton, while his right moves from Dean’s side to his back, setting off flickers of memory inside his head.
Sam playing with a stolen ball by a rusting chain-link fence.
Sam blowing bubbles in his milk until it froths over the side of the glass and runs down onto the table.
Sam sliding into bed with him—I had a nightmare, Dean, I’m scared—and curling around him like a snake.
Sam Sam Sam SamSamSamSamSam
“Now,” Sam breathes, his voice brushing warmly against Dean’s cheek. “Convince me.”
Yes.
Dean jerks his head to the side and catches his brother’s lips. For once, Sam isn’t demanding. He’s almost passive, his lips slightly parted but otherwise making Dean work for it. Asking Dean to convince him. But Dean isn’t thinking about the collar as he uses his lips and tongue to force his brother’s mouth open wider and then licks his way inside.
Sam moans around Dean's tongue, hands tightening convulsively on his body. He thrusts up once, hard, riding the crease of Dean’s ass through the layers of clothing, and the insinuation floods Dean’s groin with heat. He gasps, hands coming up to tangle in Sam’s hair and hold him still while he surges forward, deepening the kiss.
When Sam thrusts up again, Dean thoughtlessly rocks down against him before rubbing his own cock forward against his brother’s stomach. Sam adjusts his hold on Dean’s body, pushing against the small of his back and helping him get the angle he needs, and Dean moans softly into his brother’s mouth.
He doesn’t actually know what he’s doing anymore, or why, but he knows that it feels good. It feels right. And the steady press of Sam’s hand on his back is filling him with so many memories: so much duty and trust and above all else love.
Awash with both memory and sensation, it takes Dean a while to realize that something is off. Sam’s mouth is hotter than it should be, and it tastes like honey and roses. It tastes golden.
The memory of his fateful kiss with Lilith rises briefly in Dean’s mind, only to be washed away in a flood of SamSamSam as his brother’s left hand joins his right on the bare skin of Dean’s back. He still knows that something is wrong—that this has gone way past a simple kiss and he’s done now, he can stop and he doesn’t have to wear the collar—but he can’t bring himself to back off.
Truth be told, he doesn’t really want to stop because Sam is kissing him back now, and both of Sam’s hands are on the tattoo, and Sam’s cock is a hot bulge against his ass, and Dean has the perfect angle for rutting his own erection against Sam’s stomach, and he wants, he wants more, wants everything.
Sam moves suddenly, pushing forward and standing up, and Dean wraps his legs around his brother’s waist without a second thought. Sam’s hands leave the tattoo to cup his ass, supporting Dean as he carries him across the room. There’s a ripping sound and a flutter of cloth—the canopy coming down—and then Sam is lowering Dean down onto the bed and following, using his weight to press Dean down onto the mattress.
They’re still kissing, mouths all but welded together, and Dean laps more eagerly at that taste—that sweet, sweet taste that fills his mouth and runs down his throat like fire. He thrusts up against Sam, mindlessly, and groans into the kiss as Sam shifts so that their cocks are rubbing together in all the right ways.
More, Dean thinks, and I want, and then Sam is pulling away, damn him, and Dean makes a protesting little sound in the back of his throat.
Or he tries to, anyway.
He comes out of the lustful haze immediately, flooded with cold everywhere but his throat, where all of the warmth he drank down from Sam is coiled. Gripping his throat with one hand, he stares up at his smiling brother.
Sam, Dean tries to say, straining after the word, and there’s still nothing. Nothing but that warmth, and a taste like honey and roses, and Sam can’t fucking do this to him. He can’t take away Dean’s only remaining weapon.
Panicked, Dean thrashes out, trying to get away, only to still almost immediately as Sam’s power enfolds him. Breathing hard, Dean watches while Sam leans in to nose at his cheek. A moment later, there’s a soft brush of lips as Sam kisses him before whispering, “I told you: I need you to be safe. Even from yourself.”
You son of bitch! Dean rails silently, trying to project the words so that Sam will hear them. Fucking asshole!
Sam must be listening, because he chuckles. “Oh, come on, Dean. You’re smarter than that. Deep down, you knew it couldn’t be that easy. You just pretended it was so you had an excuse.”
The echo of his earlier thoughts comes as a slap. It hurts, humiliating, and Dean’s eyes burn with tears he refuses to shed.
“Shh, baby,” Sam soothes. Gripping Dean’s hip with one hand, he uses the other to tilt Dean’s head back and begins to press open-mouthed, wet kisses along Dean’s jaw and down to his throat. His hips roll, grinding their cocks together and driving all of the breath from Dean’s lungs in a soundless grunt.
Dean has been at Sam’s mercy ever since that night in the graveyard, but he’s never felt quite so powerless before. Sam's always respected his wishes, more or less. He's stopped when Dean told him to. But now Sam has stolen his voice, and all of Dean’s ‘no’s are stuck in his chest. He’s grown accustomed to being unable to resist Sam’s advances, but he didn’t know until this moment how much he was relying on being able to protest them.
“I didn’t want to do this to you,” Sam murmurs as he kisses his way across Dean’s throat. “But we both know that you can’t keep that lovely mouth of yours shut, and I couldn’t have you spreading nasty rumors about me.”
Even through the burning humiliation and fear and anger, Dean senses the truth behind his brother’s words. Sam doesn’t have anything to be worried about, as far as Dean can tell, but for some reason he still doesn’t want Dean sending messages to the outside world. Particularly, Dean guesses, Sam doesn’t want him talking to Bobby and the others, who are locked only a few floors away and are probably far less isolated than Dean is.
But that isn’t the whole picture, or even most of it. It isn’t the driving force behind Sam’s decision to muzzle Dean like this. No, that lies in the way Sam is holding him so close, and marking his throat up so thoroughly.
Taking Dean’s voice is just one more way to own him: to keep him from reaching out and connecting with anyone who isn’t Sam.
“I’ll be back tonight,” Sam promises, moving up from Dean’s throat finally and cradling Dean’s face in both hands. “Then you can give me another kiss and take your voice back.”
He kisses Dean one last time—on the mouth this time, hungry and deep—and then gets up. The restraining power lifts as he gets off the bed, leaving Dean free to scramble up into a sitting position. He freezes before he’s gotten more than halfway up on one elbow, cock tenting his sweats and face flushed, and shuts his eyes. When he opens them again a moment later, nothing has changed.
The door to the suite stands open. The demon who was bringing Sam his victims during his little torture spree two weeks ago is standing just inside the room, and seven men—heavy collars around their necks, and tool belts around their waists—stand behind her.
The men aren’t looking at Dean with such painful obviousness that he knows they were watching a moment before. The only remaining question is just how long they’ve been there—how much they’ve seen. But Dean guesses that he knows the answer to that one as well, because he would have heard the door opening if they’d come in after Sam put a stop to their impromptu make-out session.
Which means they saw him kissing Sam willingly. Saw him needy and gasping for it like bitch in heat—legs wrapped around his brother’s waist and hands tangled in Sam’s hair, keeping him close.
Oh God.
“Have them start with the window,” Sam orders, straightening his shirt and adjusting his cock in his pants.
The dark-haired demon nods. “Should I have dinner waiting when you come back?”
“No,” Sam answers with a curt shake of his head. “I won’t be hungry. Get my brother anything he wants, though.”
Dean’s stomach lurches with shamed embarrassment, but the men don’t react to Sam’s words. Maybe they haven’t connected ‘brother’ with the guy Sam was making out with a moment ago. Or maybe incest doesn’t rate quite so high on the atrocity scale these days.
Dean flinches, startled, as Sam’s hand brushes his face. It isn’t more than an attention-getting gesture, but Dean’s had enough of Sam touching him for now and jerks away, crawling up to the head of the bed to put some distance between them. Sam’s eyes soften for a moment, hurt, but the emotion is quickly hidden as he glances over at the workmen.
“Any of you touch him and I promise you’ll live more than long enough to regret it,” he announces, voice cold. “Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, master.” It’s a dull, lifeless response, spoken in eerie unison, and the submissiveness makes Dean shiver.
“Good,” Sam says dismissively, turning back to Dean.
He just looks for a moment, expressionless, and then there’s a flicker of darker gold in his eyes. It’s just enough warning for Dean to begin to tense before his brother’s power enfolds him, slick and warm on his skin like scented oil. He turns his face to the side, resting his cheek against the headboard and squeezing his eyes shut as he presses one hand against his aching cock.
Sam chuckles warmly where he’s standing at the foot of the bed and then Dean grimaces as a phantom pair of lips push against his. It’s gentle, chaste and loving, but Dean’s far too aware of their audience to feel anything but shame. Finally, after far too long a moment, the illusion fades and Sam’s power releases him.
“Be back soon, baby,” his brother says. His voice sounds soft and a little sad, but Dean refuses to acknowledge the farewell, keeping his eyes closed and his face turned away.
After a few silent minutes, he hears Sam move away. There’s more shuffling as the men move out of Sam’s path, and then the quiet click of the door shutting, and Sam is gone.
His silent, hurt departure probably shouldn’t make Dean feel so much like running after him to apologize, but it does anyway.