Title: De Profundis

Disclaimer: All fun, no profit.

Summary: Sam/Dean Wincest, AU future fic. Sequel to One Year, Four Months and Stay True to Your Nomad Skies. Sam tries to see, even when he can’t. Oneshot. Complete.

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...out of the depths...

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Cold blade against his throat, warmed slowly by the blood moving under his skin. Sam barely dares to swallow. He doesn’t dare. To breathe. He becomes immobilized with the certainty that outside of the darkness, outside of the shape that is a thicker kind of black than the rest, Dean is there.

Only it’s not Dean at all, because Sam has feared his brother, but not like this.

He has been scared for Dean before, spent most of his life like that. He’s never been afraid that he’s going to die by his brother’s blade.

“Relax,” Dean moves the scissors away, not snipping off one more hair, “I’m not gonna cut you. Ya think a year downstairs messed up my depth perception? Reflexes? Ha. I’m quick as a bullet. Want to test me?”

Sam swallows quickly and takes a breath. “My hair’s fine.” He is hoarse and worried that Dean is going to do something bad and he won’t regret it. Dean doesn’t seem able to connect to the idea of regret any longer.

“Are you auditioning for Tarzan? No? Then you need a haircut.”

He would rather die with Dean, at Dean’s hand, than alone. Sam forces himself to relax and lets Dean cut away more of his hair, the scissors brushing his earlobe in a display of carelessness that Sam finds he doesn’t believe.

Dean is gentle with him in their waking hours. Like Handle With Care is stamped all over his body. As if Dean can see it in his searching, aimless eyes.

They don’t need vows, not like their parents did. It’s a different generation, a different world, but the same bloodline. They don’t need houses, but they do need homes. They need road signs to find the way to nowhere and Dean needs music he finds on the radio like Sam needs silence he finds inside himself. They need pink morning roads and indigo splattered night time roads. Dean describes every colour to Sam except his own – he doesn’t say what exactly has happened to him. He doesn’t even walk around the issue. He acts as if it isn’t there at all.

“It’s that part of the night,” Dean says, “when it’s really dark. Thick outside. Tarry. No stars. Like just before it gets light again. It’s gonna get light real soon.” His voice is like all the music he used to listen to, except it’s the wrong way around. Not loud with a melody hiding out of reach. No. Dean is soft spoken and there is all this wild noise underneath. Shaking the breath out of Sam’s chest. About to come alive.

Just before Sam drops off, on the fortuitous days or nights when Dean has found them a motel he deems suitable, he is shivered back awake by the feeling of Dean’s lips on his eyelids, shut against the swirling universe that doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. He lets his brother kiss his eyes through frail skin like he can heal them. Like he can’t keep away.

“I can see your bones,” Dean says when he thinks Sam’s asleep. All Sam can hear is I can see I can see. Punching him inside like a spare fist. Dean soothes the heart that has been lonely without him with his warm, rough hands.

He brings Sam home every night, every day, by breathing, by having a heartbeat and a presence outside of Sam’s head. And he doesn’t leave.

There are different kinds of dark. There is the shadow of confusing movement that is Dean when he’s unconscious, Dean clawing at Sam’s flesh like he’s trying to tear it off. He routinely fails to mention the scratches that Sam knows must adorn his skin, the marks that Sam touches with his fingers, the ones that make him sigh because even if Dean is brutal, he is always Dean.

It doesn’t matter what charred depths he disappeared down into for a year, where he has come back from, and Sam tries so hard not to mention it, any of it. As if everything is the same. Why worry about what has changed? Neither of them wants to talk about the year they spent apart. If they can go back... act like they can go back to the before time. He wants that. Not this life, but what this life can be if they both try hard enough to forget what is and remember what was. How sweet it tasted, how comforting it used to be. Sam tries to keep on loving his life and everything it contains, tries to own it all.

Highways and rest stops, bedrooms and fuel. The warmth of Dean’s hand on his thigh, on his arm, the liquor of Dean’s voice drawing out the infection that runs between their common bloodstream, a love story. Sam closes his eyes and pretends when he opens them the world will be whole.

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End

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