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The truth is Dean kind of hates the bunker sometimes. He was so into it at first, loved having a room to decorate, a fridge to fill up and a kitchen to show off in, a garage for Baby to stay safe from dust storms and hail. A place for Sam to come home to him.
At first.
Lately, though, it’s just been this constant reminder of how much they’ve lost. Not the people, they always lose people, it sucks, it’s heartbreaking, but it’s not new. What is new is when he and Sam lose each other, not literally, as much as that still happens, but emotionally; that now they can storm off into their separate corners and fume, whether the fight is little shit or giant drag outs. That now, when they’re well and truly red haze pissed off at each other, they can make a sandwich for themselves without caving in after four hours, there’s no worry about what the other is going to eat because the pantry is overflowing and neither is being the douche that’s eating a combo meal while their brother’s stomach growls from his bed across the room. They just don’t have to work it out as quickly as they used to.
Things have been better the past few months, they laugh more, they hang out more, but Dean is hiding stuff about Amara, not everything, he shares enough to stay on the honest side of liar, but definitely enough to make him feel like an asshole when he’s in his own room with only his breathing and his heartbeat. He never realized how annoying those sounds are when they’re echoing throughout his body, seeping out and bouncing off his room walls looking for the matching set to sync up with. Failing in silence.
He spends a lot of time with his headphones on.
He spends a lot of time thinking of different excuses to go knocking on Sam’s door and comes up with very few. He tries to think of excuses to crawl into Sam’s bed, to curl up behind him, to walk his hand into Sam’s boxers and mouth at the back of his neck. He has less success with that, jerks off to the memories of times when he didn’t need excuses. Most of the time he finds himself uselessly hanging around Sam’s doorway with reasons to talk that are so thin he may as well be asking for a cup of sugar for all the sense he makes. Asking Sam the stupidest questions; does he know where Dean left his socket wrench, does he need Dean to pick up anything special from the store next week.
“Hey, do you want oven fried chicken or burgers for dinner?”
Things that don’t matter at all.
Things that are likely annoying Sam, who barely looks up to answer, “Whichever, man, both are good with me, just make a salad on the side this time,” while researching almost as hard as he was last year when Sam thought Dean would forget who he was and become what the Mark wanted him to be, or worse, that one of them would get careless, be a beat too late and he’d die again, become a demon again, become someone who didn’t love Sam at all again. Sam never got what Dean had tried to literally hammer into his skull, that what Dean ran from as a demon was how much he still needed Sam. How much he had consumed his every thought so much so that he’d tried to drink and fuck Sam out of his system more than he ever had as human. How often Dean thought about breaking back into his own home, sneaking in and bleeding into his sleeping brother’s mouth, about getting Sam so strung out on him the he’d never want to walk away again no matter how much Dean hurt him, lied to him, held on to too tightly to him, because Sam would crave him the way Dean had always craved Sam.
Sometimes, he thinks about telling Sam everything, telling him that nothing would make Sam be anything less than the most important thing in Dean’s life. Telling him the dark, twisted thoughts he’d had as a demon, telling Sam that he wanted them tied to each other in ways that even death and soullessness and lies and death again couldn't undo. He’s afraid of how much he’d scare Sam if he told him he tried to kill him so he could hopefully stop loving him. He’s more afraid at how pathetic Sam might think he was, is, if he knew that even as a demon all he’d wanted was for Sam to want him back as much as he wanted Sam, how he’d spent almost every moment of being a demon thinking of how amazing Sam, who had been destined to lead a demon army, would be as his second in command. A knight and his general, the general and his knight. It was worse than doodling “Mr. and Mr. Winchester” inside a Lisa Frank notebook, being a demon so defective that you love someone to the point where the only thing you hate is yourself.
“You busy?” Sam says, strolling into his room. He stops at the end of Dean’s bed and cracks his neck from side to side. Dean thinks about times when Sam would’ve just plopped onto the bed and pointed to his shoulders, the unspoken sign for ‘I’ve been reading for hours you lazy oaf, massage me while I tell you what I found out’. Dean’s hands itch, he rubs them down his thighs, feels the friction warmth of denim under his palms.
“Nah. Just looking for some decent free porn,” he replies, shoving his laptop away, “I’m not burning a credit card on bad dye jobs and fake orgasms. If a guy can’t fuck a girl right he has no business doing it, let alone getting paid for it.” He wasn’t though. He was stuck in his head while half reading a post on his favorite classic car forum; he tries to keep up with that group, parts are getting harder and harder to come by and it helps to be in the loop.
“All porn orgasms are fake, Dean,” he laughs, dimples and teeth flashing.
“No way, man, you should see the way some of them twitch after they come,” he smirks at his brother, all teeth and smarm, “you can’t fake that. Believe me, I’ve seen it for myself.”
Sam folds himself down to the floor, twists and wiggles until his back is against the wood of Dean’s bed. “Yeah, you think you know, but really those poor girls just wanted to make you feel better about yourself.”
“Not what you said last night, bitch.” Dean cringes as soon as he says it, it was a joke of course, it’d been too long for it too be anything else, but it was too familiar. They haven’t joked like that since before Gadreel, haven’t touched like that in even longer.
Sam’s shoulders tense and he hears Sam wince softly as his muscles bunch up. It’s quiet for a too long moment and Dean thinks that’s it, months of working so hard to get close to Sam again down the fucking shitter. To his surprise, Sam’s shoulders relax and his brother does’t make a break for it. “Dude, no one has stroked your fragile ego more than I have,” Sam snarks and even from behind him Dean can see that he actually has his tongue in his cheek he’s so proud of himself.
Dean is floored, it’s been so long so long since they’ve joked like this, innuendo laced banter that can honestly only happen between them. Between siblings who have slept with each other. Dean has spent most of his life avoiding the word “incest”, probably because it gets him off harder than anything else does because it’s Sam, his brother, his best friend, his whole world. He covers up how stunned he is by Sam’s playfulness by crawling to the foot of his bed and resting his hands on Sam’s shoulders. “Is this okay?” he asks, flexing them a bit. Sam just hums and Dean digs his fingers deeper, working the bunches of tension out his brother’s muscles. It’s strange, they don’t touch like this anymore; they hug when one of them is dying or not dead anymore, they stitch each other up, hell, they even casually bump shoulders in the hall like regular brothers, but this, something so comforting and intimate when no one is mortal danger, they don’t do this anymore. Dean lets go of the breath he was holding and takes another one in.
Out, in, out, in.
“I’ve missed that sound,” Sam says, “you breathing. Hard to sleep sometimes without it. Too fucking quiet sometimes without you wheezing in bed next to me.”
“You mean, ‘in the bed next to yours’, right?”
“Well, that wasn’t bitter sounding at all, dear,” Sam chuckles lowly, his back shaking slightly under Dean’s hands. He’s right, though, Dean is bitter. He’s bitter and lonely and so damn sorry about how much he’s screwed everything up and Sam’s laughing at him. Dean pushes his thumbs into the meat of Sam’s shoulders before shoving him forward. Shoving Sam away. “Ow! What the hell? That hurt.” Sam brings his hand up to his neck, rubbing. He turns himself around and looks up at Dean from the floor, all shocked eyes and soft frown. “What’d you do that for, you ass?”
Dean’s mad, but not that righteous hot kind of mad, the deflated kind that makes him feel exhausted, makes him let his guard down enough to lay his cards on the table. “Don’t make fun of me. I know I fucked us up,” he laughs darkly, “well, fucked us up more than we were by actually fucking, but don’t use it to mock me and then play the victim, dude. It’s just cruel and you’re not a cruel person, Sam.”
Sam looks genuinely taken back at that and Dean wonders if it’s from the shock of Dean talking about his feelings without being badgered and bribed or if it’s because Dean actually called him out. “I… I wasn’t making fun of you, Dean, I swear. It’s just that I meant it. Sometimes I can’t even sleep because it’s so goddamn still in my room. It’s just me in there, y’know? All I can hear is my own fucking breathing and you aren’t there matching me breath for breath anymore like you used to be and I know you love having your own room that you don’t have to share with me, I get it, man, I do, you’ve never had a space of your own, I’ve always been underfoot, but I just…” Sam trails off and he looks so pitiful, so lost, and Dean, Dean is such an asshole because he laughs. Full on guffaws in Sam’s face.
Sam looks like he may cry and that shuts Dean up fast. “Sammy, I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing at us.”
He wants to tell Sam how hilariously pathetic it is that they’re rooms apart silently bitching to about the quiet when the simplest answer was right down the hall. He wants to tell Sam that he was missing him the same way, but he takes too long to pull his balls up and say it. “I am part of ‘us’,” Sam interrupts, “I told you, way back when we were after Yellow Eyes that you’d have to let me go one day and you were willing then. You didn’t like it, but you were willing. And then you took that away.”
Dean is blown away that Sam can think smiling and nodding along to him wanting to run away back to Stanford, as if there was anything left for him there, was in the same stratosphere as letting him die. “I sold my literal goddamned soul for you, you don’t get to decide when to cash in on my investment.”
“It’s my soul, too, Dean.”
It’s like a punch to the gut. “I never touched your soul, Sammy, I would never.”
Sam sighs. “No, you idiot, I mean your soul, it’s mine. You had no right to sell it because it belongs to me. I own it; then, now, always, and you just keep tossing it away like it doesn’t matter, like it doesn’t rip half of me away each time. You think you’re the only one scared to go first? To be the one alone picking up the pieces? I’ve had to do it more than you ever have. I watched you die over and over and over, I couldn’t save you even though I had a new chance every morning. I’ve had to clean blood off your dead body more times than I can count. I’ve had to bury you so many times, sometimes for a night, sometimes for months. I don’t want to do it again. I can’t.”
Sam is crying. His head is down and the tears are rolling down the perfect point of his nose and Dean can’t watch that, can’t be the reason Sam is so broken. He reaches his hand out and wipes at his brother’s face with his thumb. Sam leans into Dean’s palm and Dean wishes he had better circulation, wishes his hand was more of a comfort, knows it’s cold and rough and dry against the warm softness of Sam’s cheek. Sam turns his head and kisses Dean’s palm while staring him straight in the eyes. He keeps his head there and breathes. In, out, in, out. It’s innocent.
And then it isn’t. Sam’s tongue licks against the lines of Dean’s hand, not slobbery like a child trying to gross someone out, but steady and slow, tracing Dean’s lifeline and Dean gets hard so fast that he gets lightheaded, feels sluggish and stoned as he stares into Sam’s deliberate eyes. “Sammy, are you sure? Because if you’re messing with me, if you are, stop. No hard feelings, but stop.”
Sam’s eyes sparkle as he grins against Dean’s hand. “Definitely hard feelings,” Sam mumbles into Dean’s skin as he takes his brother’s other hand and lays it on the bulge in his track pants.
Dean presses his palm down and rubs, firm and sure the way he knows Sam likes, the way girls are always so afraid to do because they think Sam is some gentle giant. They don’t know Sam will push them against the wall and fuck them until they claw at the cheap motel wallpaper.
Maybe Sam only does that to him, Dean doesn’t know, doesn’t fucking care.
He wants to kiss Sam and it’s fucking insane that he’s rubbing at Sam’s hard on while Sam wetly bites at the fleshy part of Dean’s palm but Dean’s still too afraid to try to kiss him. “Sam, I want…” Dean licks his lips and he watches as Sam’s eyes bounce between his mouth and the hard line of his dick in his boxer briefs. Sam nods fast, hair flying around his face and it’s so stupidly endearing, so beautiful that Dean yanks his hand from Sam’s face and catches his mouth in a kiss that feels like it’s the first. Maybe it is, because the way Sam is kissing back it sure isn’t the last. Something cracks between them, all the walls fissure and crumble and Sam is on him gracelessly, a pile of bricks falling right down onto him and Dean goes with it, lets Sam lay them down on the cold floor, one thigh jammed up against Dean’s cock, grinding his own into the give of Dean’s belly. They breathe into each other’s mouths, sharing air, out, in, in out and Dean can hear their heartbeats pound in discord right before they sync up to beat in harmony and that’s it, Dean comes all over himself, messy and hot.
Sam is less than a second behind him.
And then Sam laughs. Rich, full, and bright. Happy. His hair is falling over his eyes and his dimples are so deep that Dean wants to poke them with his tongue. So he does. Sam laughs impossibly harder and licks a line across Dean’s face from cheek to cheek. “Connect the dots,” Sam drawls lazily, “my favorite game.”
“I remember,” Dean says.
“I won’t forget,” Sam answers.