Title: Some Days

Disclaimer: Not mine, don’t sue.

Summary: Sam/Dean Wincest. Part of the Still Life ‘verse. Some days, things get so bad Sam has to remind himself why he’s here. Oneshot. Complete.

Feedback: Is love.

Before Stanford, Sam was normal. How ironic. He went somewhere with the intention of becoming a regular guy and it only served to corrupt him. Not that he felt corrupted while he was there, while he was there he had a girlfriend and was well on his way to being a real success, a success in a superficial world, as Dean might say if Dean had a good enough grasp of language.

You are a success, Dean used to breathe, running his tongue along Sam’s cold earlobe, in the real world.

Sam would turn his head and scowl at the stained wall of another motel room. This is the real world?
Hurt froze and shattered Dean’s voice. To me this is real. You got something to say about that?

Sam used to wake up every morning, brush his teeth and smile at his reflection. He walked out into the world, the superficial world, and felt like a stranger, acted like the curve of his brother’s ass didn’t make his heart pound. He only realized how much he loved Dean after he left college. After Jessica died. A life made up of after. An after life.

That’s the problem with the world, he decided, everyone is acting. Nobody’s real. If everyone knew each other, like really knew each other, they’d be sickened and they’d be hypocrites. As it is, their worst crime is lying constantly about who they are, where they come from and what they want.

I want to fuck my brother, Sam desperately yearned to shout. It rose up in his throat like a tic and he almost cracked a tooth clamping his mouth closed. Dean gave him funny looks and asked: You taken your medication today, nutso? For his sarcasm, Sam returned a slanted look of disrespect and went back to reading or eating or asking a few questions of some poor survivor of some horrible tragedy.

Greasy fries and the tang of blood from biting his tongue started to taste disturbingly similar. Being asleep and talking to shivering civilians both took on a sepia tone. Only Dean was in full colour. He smiled and set the world on fire.

Then the world burned down and everything changed.

And Sam is here with Dean. But it’s not his Dean, not Dean as he used to be. This Dean gets headaches that Sam can’t help him with; that Sam doesn’t even understand. He cries from the pressure, curls up and begs for Sam to make the pain stop: Go ’way, Sammy, hurts. This Dean cries. Watching tears trickle down his brave brother’s face is so hard sometimes. Most days, Sam can be happy with what they have, with how things are. He can accept everything and just be glad that he still has Dean, even though so much has happened, so much has changed.

But then there are these other days when Sam gets trapped in his own thoughts. Gets lost imagining what they might be doing if Dean wasn’t reduced to the intelligence of a small child.

The people at the hospital – Sam has trouble telling them all apart, they blend after so many months – offer all kinds of therapy for Dean. They help him with his balance, with his hand-eye coordination (which, Sam is beginning to realize, is never going to be what it was), his reading and writing and just basic everyday tasks. They help him to feed himself and to take himself to the bathroom. Sam is too inexperienced to handle teaching Dean everything it takes to live all over again. He isn’t prepared for all the times Dean insists on wearing jeans and can’t get them down in time, all the times Dean drops his dinner and mashes it into the carpet. Sam isn’t prepared for the full force of his brother’s frustration.

Some days, Dean gets into such a bad space he sobs and screams about every tiny thing that goes wrong. Once, when he’s been practicing drawing shapes for fifteen minutes, he hollers wordlessly and stabs the paper so hard that the lead of his pencil breaks.

“No, Dean,” Sam bends down, his fingers encircling Dean’s wrist, “that’s dangerous. Don’t do that.”

The colour is high in Dean’s cheeks and he looks miserably at the piece of paper with the savage hole ripped through it, then at his brother. “Bad.”

“You’re not bad...”

“No. Bad,” Dean pulls his hand away and shows Sam the paper. All the shapes are just random squiggly lines. “Bad. Bad. Bad Dean.”

Sam gets a different pencil – a coloured one this time, bright blue – and writes down on a fresh sheet of paper: Sammy loves Dean. He smiles to himself, not knowing why this makes him feel better, this childish act of reassuring himself why he’s doing this. Why he’s here and what it is he’s getting out of this apparently selfless act. It’s not selfless. Loving Dean has always been entirely selfish, entirely indulgent. It is the only thing that makes him clean, the one thing that he always thought made him twisted.

“Sammy...” Dean leans his head against Sam’s thigh, “what, Sammy?”

“It says,” Sam pretends like he needs to read it, as if the words aren’t scalded into his flesh, “it says: Sammy loves Dean.”

Dean smiles up trustingly. “Loves?”

Sam looks at him. “Every single day.”

End