Title: Stay True to Your Nomad Skies

Disclaimer: All fun, no profit.

Summary: Sam/Dean Wincest, AU future fic. Sequel to One Year, Four Months. Dean is trying to adjust to how he lives now and both of them are keeping secrets. Oneshot. Complete.

“What’s Hell like?”

The question startles him out of his reverie. He has been wondering how Sam came to be here, and he is perplexed by the simple question of how Sam has been living all these months alone. The last thing he wants to do is answer any questions about the nature of his own personal torment. “What do you mean, what’s Hell like? It’s Hell. That’s a pretty big giveaway.”

Sam sighs, turning his face into the sun. “Yeah, but what happened there?”

“Nothing I want to talk about.” Dean watches him carefully. Sam feels for all the things he can’t see. He mostly has one hand on Dean at all times, but right now he’s enjoying the heat of the morning rays soaking into his skin.

“Dean, quit protecting me.”

“I’m not protecting you.” I’m protecting myself. “Sammy, I’m here. That’s enough.”

“Not for me. I want to know.”

“You want to know?” What does he want to know? He wants Dean to go into detail about his smashed bones and how much blood he’s shed? Dean could say a hundred things and they would all destroy Sam; they would all break him apart with guilt.

Sam is the only person he has any feelings for that aren’t rage. Dean wants to tear everyone who isn’t Sam into tiny pieces. He thinks that would be nice. Maybe it would calm him down. Stop him from having to look over his shoulder even though he has been confined to this depressing motel room for the past twenty four hours.

Twenty four hours. Is that how long it’s been since he found his Sammy? It seems impossible. Too easily he has settled into this new version of life. Some cheap promise of how things will be. He walks over to where Sam stands by the window and almost reaches out to touch him.

“Yeah,” Sam says before he can, his voice clogged, “that’s what I said.”

Dean looks at his brother, at his eyes which flicker and move too fast, unseeing. Blank eyes in Sam’s earnest, innocent face. He’s still innocent. Even after everything, Sammy is his little brother, and he will always be tender. “I can’t talk about it.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

He’s this close to smashing his fist into the wall, but he knows that would just scare Sam. That is the last thing he wants. If he alienates Sam then what does he have left? He doesn’t have a soul, he’s pretty sure he’s a demon and he’s also pretty sure he’s a murderer. Everything that meant anything in his life before – his car, his jacket, his music, his amulet... it’s all gone. All he has is his brother. And that’s all that matters. Sam is the one thing he can’t let go. That’s why he’s here in the first place, like this. “Drop it, for Christ’s sake.”

Sam falls into silence and lowers his face so that the sun balances on the top of his head. It may fall and shatter and it will be all Dean’s fault. If they lose the happiness they could have, he will only have himself to blame.

“I want to know what changed you,” Sam finally says, “what made you different.”

Dean wonders if Sam can tell how close he is. Within touching distance. He makes his voice as natural as it will go. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.” He has covered miles and miles to be here. He has covered the span of a human soul. What he’s worth.

“It’s not just that.”

“Sam. Seriously.”

This time when Sam stops talking, he really stops. He shuts his mouth and leans back into the sun, sighing.

Is this all he’s been doing? Somehow shifting from motel to motel, trying to keep breathing? The thought almost flattens Dean. He can’t stand it. How could he have left his brother for so long? Alright, so he was suffering, too, but is that an excuse? Dad always told him to take care of Sammy. What kind of job has he done?

If he could just pause for three seconds and think, look before he leaps. But he’s never had that ability and the likelihood is he isn’t going to change now.

Nothing has changed about him. Nothing that he can share with Sam. For once he is in a position where Sam can’t read every expression in his eyes, although he would give anything for the chance to be seen. He would give his soul all over again. Anything. Anything to have Sammy know what he is just by looking.

He leans against the wall and watches Sam feeling the outside world through his pores. “Want to go for a walk or something?”

Sam shakes his head.

“Food? You gotta be hungry.” He isn’t. There is no endless space to fill. Or he is just ignoring it nowadays. Sure, he eats. Eats to keep going. But the pleasure is gone. Most of Dean’s pleasure has been taken away.

Another head shake, all long hair hiding stubble cheeked sadness.

“Sammy. I didn’t mean to yell at you. You just... you gotta quit asking me. I don’t want to talk about anything. I just want to be with you.”

Sam turns to face Dean. Oh. So he does know where Dean is. He reaches out and his fumbling fingers find Dean’s mouth, then his cheek. He smiles faintly. “I don’t want to fight.”

“Neither do I.”

“Will you tell me? One day?”

Dean looks down at the floor, at his feet. They are scarred from walking barefoot until he managed to find shoes that fit. He cannot promise that he’ll ever want to tell Sam what happened to him. If he so much as reflects on it all he wants to do is curl on the floor. There is no protection inside his own head. No way he can hide from the pain, the memory of it.

“Yes,” he says and he thinks that Sam will be able to hear how much the words ache.

“Okay.”

He lifts his eyes and watches Sam’s cracked lips, how he presses them together to control his curiosity. Dean needs to get him some fresh water to drink and a good meal. He’s too skinny for his frame, and if he’s anything like Dean, he is too hurt to feel hunger anymore.

The first week they barely speak at all, and Dean pretends to be entirely insensitive to Sam’s less basic needs. He finds an old cell phone in his brother’s stained duffel bag and a takeout pizza menu in the drawer, smudged with greasy fingerprints. He charges the phone and orders them pizza day after day.

The motel manager knocks on the door and when he sees Dean he says, “You have to pay for two if you’re staying the night.”

Dean glares at him and wills his eyes to stay normal. “Do I give a fuck?”

“Dean,” Sam says. Warning but warm. Like he has missed Dean’s random aggression. Like he knows that no one should threaten their peace.

“You have to pay,” the guy says the words with the edge of someone who spends their life talking slow to cokeheads and, rather than snapping his neck, Dean obliges and pays up, flashing a credit card Sam’s been using with apparently patchy success.

Neither of them leaves the room except for that brief excursion which leaves them both slightly short of breath. Sam ignores the presence of an outside world and other people make Dean want to break faces.

Dean’s pride dies in a murmur and he lets Sam cling to him. He wakes up during the night, sweating and trembling, unable to breathe.

“I’m here,” Sam murmurs, stroking his hair, all the scarred parts of his flesh, “it’s okay. I won’t hurt you.”

And Dean doesn’t try to speak because he doesn’t want to reveal that he’s forgotten how, that his tongue shivers and convulses, shies away from speech in fear of punishment.

Dark moments. He pretends to choose this, these mute, frightened midnights. Where the only way they can communicate is through touch.

Sam tells him, “I have you.” Holding him steady.

And Dean thinks: No, you don’t.

They don’t talk about the night Dean died. It’s a glass roadblock and it doesn’t go away, but it won’t get any easier if they speak about it. Instead they touch each other in ways they shouldn’t, their hands everywhere for want of a better way to know their way around their hearts. How does one traverse the deadly valleys of the heart?

The soul?

Dean wonders if his eyes are empty, but in the mirror he appears the same. He still has a reflection, still casts a shadow, can still dream. What he would give to lose that ability. He still loves. He loves like something broken does, with complete, terrifying need.

And he hates. He hates the universe for doing this to him. For letting him out of Hell only to bring him here, where he should be happy again.

Looking at Sam, happiness becomes impossible and he blames his absent soul.

“You don’t look at me when you talk,” Sam points out, halfway through the first week.

Dean is sitting on the floor and Sam is lying on the bed. Hunched over his father’s journal – of all the things Sam still possesses, this is the most bizarre – he doesn’t bother to turn around. “You notice shit like that?”

“I’m blind, Dean. I’m not completely insensate. I can hear when you’re talking through the back of your head.”

“Right.”

“Will you face me, please?”

Dean turns and looks at Sam. Truth is, it’s a pain in his chest and all over his skin, having to look at how Sam can’t see him. “Better?””

“Thank you.”

“Can I go back to reading now?”

Sam is quiet for a moment, he opens his mouth and takes a breath like he’s going to ask a question, closes it again. Dean looks at the way his hair almost covers his eyes and he wants to reach out and brush it away, but he knows, if he does, then he’ll have to face it. The way Sammy’s eyes slide around, the way he smiles and can’t focus. There is no reason to focus. After a second hesitation, Sam asks slowly, “What are you reading?”

“Chekhov.”

This catches Sam off guard. “You know who Chekhov is?”

“Wrote a funny story about caskets, right?”

“Um... yeah... among other things.”

“I studied it in high school.” He pauses, thinks this might be a cruel thing to do. Even joking about reading with someone who can’t see, especially when that someone is his brother who almost made a career of being so damn book smart. “It’s Dad’s journal.”

“I guessed. What are you looking for?”

What isn’t he looking for would be a better question.

“Nothing in particular.” How to heal someone. How to stop nightmares. How to live a regular life as a demon. How to feel remorse.

Dean doesn’t need his father’s findings. He needs a fucking How To manual. A library of them.

“You’re just... browsing,” Sam says. There is an odd tremor in his tone. How his voice sounded just before he kissed Dean in the Impala. Low and close.

“Yep.” Dean closes the journal with as loud a noise as he can make. So Sam hears it. Then he climbs up on the bed next to Sam and curls his body to fit the space Sam’s flesh leaves especially for him.

Sam leans back against him, his hair in Dean’s face, all pizza grease and ocean air from the polluted tourist beach three miles down the road and a million years away. Some days Dean opens the windows and lets the gritty breeze in. Others, Sam begs him to keep it closed.

The world hasn’t held Sam delicately like Dean does. It hasn’t taken care of him. Dean resents the world with a burning urge for destruction.

“Want to know something stupid?” Sam asks sleepily.

Dean nuzzles his hair. “Sure.”

“I miss reading.”

“Jesus, Sammy.”

“What?”

Way to break my heart, kid. Dean can’t say that. In the place of the words he’s thinking, he says, “We can get books. I can read to you.”

“You’d do that?”

The incredulity in Sam’s tone cuts him through. Glass propelled by stormy winds.

“Any time.”

By the second week, Sam’s need to talk becomes overwhelming, the silence crippling, and they get kicked out of the motel.

“People have been complaining,” the bored manager informs him.

“’Cause of the roaches, huh?” Dean asks, leaning against the door, blocking the guy’s view of his Sammy. His. No one else’s.

“Because one of you screams all night.”

“We’ll leave.” He can hear Sam shifting off the bed, his big, bare feet against the ratty old carpet. His little brother deserves so much more than this, more than Dean can give him. He always has.

Dean scratches his forehead to try and make himself think. “Sammy, sit down. Listen,” he tries to make the guy feel his presence, his full presence, what he is, “we ain’t leaving. Not right now. Couple of weeks, maybe...”

“You’ll leave now.”

Next thing Dean knows he has the guy by the neck and he’s squeezing.

“Dean? Dean!” Sam’s voice becomes a mess of fright and he puts his hand on Dean’s shoulder. “Dean, what’s that noise? What’re you doing?”

“Nothing.” He’s surprised by the flat calm of his voice. And by how calm he feels. If he keeps on strangling this man, nothing huge will change. He’ll still be like this and Sam will still be blind and all that will happen is there’ll be a corpse on the floor.

None of that makes him want to stop. Once the blood vessels go in the eyes, that’s when he’ll know he’s drifted way past who he was.

Or possibly not. He has always done anything to protect Sam.

It’s Sam who makes him stop. “Dean,” his hand trails up Dean’s arm inquisitively and Dean wills him to quit it. He doesn’t. A trembling little brother says, “Please don’t. Dean.”

Dean lets go because Sam says his name as if he’s scared.

And momentarily, Dean actually fears himself.

He hotwires an ugly, nondescript car with a bunch of trash that gathers around his feet on the floor – it’s nothing like his baby, but it will do and all that really matters is that he puts as much distance between this place and them as possible.

Them. Sam and Dean. Forever.

“Sorry about the Impala,” Sam says, leaning against him and staring blankly out of the window. It’s dark out.

“Can you see the lights, Sammy?”

“The lights?”

“The streetlights.”

“Kind of. The darkness changes shape sometimes.”

Dean takes his own eyes off the road and turns his head a little, kisses Sam’s hair. “That’s okay.” He’s talking about the car.

Sam knows. He seems to have a heart wide open for knowledge. Their blood and bone history. “I tried to find it.”

“You lost it?”

“After you... died. After you died I just stayed there for a long time waiting to see again. Someone passed by a few hours later, found me, couldn’t figure out how I’d gotten out there. Took me to hospital.”

“Hospital?”

“I couldn’t say anything.” Sam talks like he’s telling the story of a close friend who he has somehow lost contact with. “And by the time I was really me again I’d lost track of everything except what they gave me outta the trunk.”

“Right. All the weaponry?” Dean deadpans.

“Bobby came and got me once I got someone to find me a phone. I didn’t have to deal with it. They just handed me my duffel and acted like I scared them.”

“Wait. Bobby came to get you?”

“Sure.”

Dean draws away from Sam. “Then why didn’t you stay with him?”

Sam doesn’t answer, just keeps his eyes up and on the road in front of them, leaning into the nonexistent warmth of the streetlights.

“Sam, I asked you a question.”

“I heard you.”

“Well?”

He sighs. “Dean, there’s some things I don’t want to talk about. Lay off.”

“Lay off?” Dean’s disbelief fills the space between them. Yet more crap blocking any progress. His voice falls into a mutter. “Lay off. Fine.”

He drives all night and Sam sleeps silently, without moving so much as an inch. Dean curses not having his car, not having anything. It gives him something to think about aside from Sam’s secrets. He wants it all back, his last life, the one where he knew where the lines were. The lines between him and Sam, the lines between darkness and light.

Everything is so blurred now.

The frenetic burst of sunrise wakes Sam early the next day. “Mm,” he attempts to stretch, but there isn’t much give room, and Dean watches as he curls back in on himself.

Dean envisions the words walking through his head before he says them. “Gonna be a good day. Warm.”

Sam nods. “I feel that. We been going all night?”

“Uh huh.”

“Aren’t you tired?”

Yes. Yes he’s tired. He’s so tired that he is beginning to understand why he gave up his soul so easily in the first place. It wasn’t as big a decision as it should have been because of this. Because just when things look good, everything slips into shit again and he flounders.

He should be in control.

But all of that belongs to Sam, who keeps his own secrets close to his chest and holds them in his hopelessly searching eyes. If Dean looks long enough he’ll be able to find them.

He has no desire to know how his brother has coped without him. The answer is fine and not very well at all. It’s a tapestry of tears, near identical blood that has been shed for someone else’s life. And the details are too painful to unstitch.

“You’re going to say no,” Sam says casually once they’ve holed up in another fleapit motel where Dean wants to decapitate the manager for making a snide comment about their choice of a king sized bed, “but I think you should see a doctor.”

He nearly laughs but hates the brutal sound it makes. “You’re right. No.”

“Listen to me.” There it is. Pleading.

“I’ll humour you,” he concedes.

Dean sits back on the floor, opposite his brother. They’re eating delivered fast food again – something Mexican this time thanks to a wider choice of menus in the drawer – because Sam still doesn’t want to go anywhere. It was all Dean could do to get him from the car and into this new room.

With an old, predictable feeling, Dean has the strongest desire to dismember whoever has made Sam so afraid of living. He’s scared that he is the answer to his own question.

“Thanks,” some of Sam’s sarcasm slips into his tone, but not enough to fool Dean, “I can tell you’re angry all the time. You almost killed that guy.”

Dean shrugs for no one’s benefit but his own. “Big loss that would’ve been.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“Then make it already.”

Sam sighs like it’s taking him apart. “I just don’t want what happened to you to... ruin things. Dean, I know you wouldn’t ever hurt anyone like that. Not if you hadn’t...” he reaches over and touches Dean messily on his thigh. “You can’t get like that. So mad you lose it.” He makes a small circle with his thumb and Dean thinks that everything might come out now, their secrets. What they aren’t saying to protect each other.

It doesn’t. It stays there. Remains inside.

“I don’t want to lose you,” Sam says.

“You can’t lose me,” Dean tells him, “can’t you tell? It’s impossible.”

This, at least, feels true.

All the wandering reminds him of being with Sam before and it also brings to mind being completely alone. After a month of going everywhere and never getting anywhere, he realizes that they have nowhere to go. Backwards isn’t an option, and forwards is obscure and frightening.

It all becomes easier after that. Accepting that he is freefalling without a mission. He doesn’t buy newspapers, Sam’s laptop is long gone, and if when he’s in bed at night he hears screaming in the street, he tells himself it’s all in his head.

The worst part is his dreams. Hell doesn’t fade, but it changes form and suddenly he’s face to face with Bela. Of all people. She sits in front of a mirror, brushing her hair. The gesture, the sound of the brush ripping through her hair, makes Dean think of nuclear war and cowards and scared little girls.

“Ain’t you meant to be in Hell?”

Bela grimaces at him in the glass. “I could ask you the same question.” She turns, places the hairbrush down carefully with her shiny hair still clinging to its bristles, regards him as if he’s a hunk of scrap metal, something she has no time for. Ugly and ineffectual. “I’m an entrepreneur, Dean. Business is what I do.”

“Ah. So you screwed someone over to save your own ass.”

“You’re incredibly coarse. The question is, how did you avoid the pit?”

Dean sneers at her. “I didn’t. I paid my dues.”

That catches her. Her surprise is barely a flick of her eyelashes, but he sees it. “Occasionally I can almost believe you’re not as dumb as you look. Unfortunately for you, this is not the case. You constantly disappoint me.”

He scowls. “You think insulting me is the best way to go?”

“We never pay our dues, you stupid boy,” she glares back at him and he couldn’t give a crap about her cold eyes, “you think you’re clever because you did something dirty and got out of Hell? No. You’re here because someone wants you here. They don’t just let you out because your baby brother is in a spot of bother.”

And Dean is working so hard on not letting his emotions best him, he really is. But right now he could tear her throat out and not care. He could rip her to pieces and decorate the room with her entrails. See all the black, rotten shit that must be festering inside her. “You’re a nasty bitch and you don’t know who you’re talking to.”

Bela raises one of her eyebrows high. ““Ah-ah-ah. What’s that old saying about glass houses, Dean?”

He thinks of Sammy in a sleazy motel room, stuck and pacing, hands out in front of him, a wounded animal. Not knowing that Dean is the very worst kind of creature. That’s when Dean realizes he’s dreaming, but that doesn’t make it any easier to snap out of it.

She stands with a smile that is almost shy, except that there is nothing shy about her. “I know what you are.”

Dean smirks defiantly. “Back at you, sweetheart.”

“Oh, do you now?”

There is something in how she says it that makes him doubt that she’s a figment of his cracked imagination.

He wakes up next to Sam, the noise of his screams dying close to his teeth, drowned out by the comforting words of someone who doesn’t really know him at all.

“What did you dream about?” Sam asks him later.

He swallows and contemplates lying. She’s not worth it. Even if she is just a stab in the guts from his vengeful, soulless subconscious. “Bela,” he says.

The sudden stiffness in Sam’s spine tells Dean something he isn’t ready to hear.

There are beautiful parts to the world and Dean surprises himself by still being able to see them. He dumps the car in one place and the license plates in another and steals a new one, one without trash on the floor, with more leg room for Sam.

Mostly he drives. He keeps them away from other people as much as he possibly can, and accepts it when Sam says he doesn’t want to go out anywhere. Dean makes brief stops to pick them up better food, but his little brother continues to lose weight. When they hold each other, Dean can count his ribs from touch alone.

He loathes all this tangible evidence that even though he’s here, things aren’t whole.

Yet Sam smiles.

That’s what keeps him from crumbling. Sam smiles and he’s still happy that they’re together. It still gives him pleasure to feel Dean’s skin brushing against his.

Of all the things they aren’t talking about, Sam kissing him is possibly the least important and yet it’s what he thinks of the most. He wonders if it was a mistake that Sam is trying to make good on. But there is depth to their touches. He knows there is.

When it rains, Sam opens the car window and lets it fall on his face. When it gets heavy and stormy his mouth turns down and he closes the window again.

“What?” Dean asks.

“It’s really loud.”

It isn’t that loud, but Dean guesses his ears aren’t overcompensating for his lack of sight. The noise is just normal to him. It is even comforting. “Your face is wet,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

Sam smiles in his direction, as if he likes it when Dean states the obvious. He wipes his face with his sleeve and asks, “Better?”

Dean doesn’t reply.

They make a habit of pulling over mid-afternoon when the weather’s good and just sitting out under the sun in the middle of nowhere. Sam will only agree to this when he’s sure they’re really out in the boonies. Dean brings them beer for old time’s sake and they sit around a lot, shooting the shit about nothing that means anything.

Old habits. They never go away.

“One day you’re going to have to be honest with me,” Sam tells him confidentially, “about all this.”

“And you.”

“And me, what?”

Dean makes his voice patient. “You’re gonna have to tell me...” A thousand things. A million. All he wants to know. Sam’s new history. He can’t find the questions. “Why you kissed me,” he says lamely. Because, in all his shallow heart’s honesty, this is what he wants to know the most.

Sam raises his face and looks almost at Dean through a curtain of hair. His face is turned a little too much to the left to give Dean any illusions. “Because you asked me to.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Your exact words were ‘Surprise me’. Where the hell else would that go?”

It makes Dean laugh in a way that doesn’t sound cruel or raw, to hear Sam say that like it’s rational and ordinary. He looks up at the gold-tinged trees over their heads, drippy with fresh rain. The sky is wet, open blue and the deserted road is at least five minutes’ walk away. This could be the end of the world, except that it isn’t – not as far as he knows.

He kind of wishes it was.

He regards his little brother and wonders if he’s thinking the same thing. “You never got a last request. Before you... y’know.”

Sam smiles at him fully. Beautifully. “You being the last thing I saw? C’mon, man. I got my wish pretty much down. You came back. But if you want, you can always surprise me,” Sam says, the shine of unexpected happiness colouring his words, “just not too much.”

“Okay,” Dean moves closer across the damp dirt, pushes Sam’s long hair away from his eyes and looks into them as if he expects to be seen if he focuses long enough. He stares. All that happens is that he sees his own reflection, shrunk down tiny into the rolling black of Sam’s wide pupils. He sees himself as he is in his brother’s gaze. “I’ll try.”

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End

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