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"What are you doing?"
Dean startles and the needle slips from between his fingers, breaks the flesh of his left forefinger and leaves a blossoming blob of red blood in its wake.
"You son of a bitch," Dean says. Benny stills, rigid and wanting, his glee at catching Dean by surprise forgotten under the steady pump of Dean’s heart, each beat so loud it drowns the scream of the seagulls outside. Benny rocks slowly back and forth when a soft wave hits the side of the boathouse. He breathes, looks at the back of Dean’s head where hair marks the contour of the soft flesh of his neck.
Dean sucks on his finger and goes back to his work, and he never turns and he never looks up, but the rigid line of his back betrays his awareness. Benny licks his fangs as they retreat inside his gums and unlocks his muscles and looks at his hands, dirty with sawdust but not blood.
"What are you doing here, Dean?" A lift of one shoulder, a deep breath as if maybe Dean’s decided that this time he’s going to answer, but he doesn’t. Benny has asked a couple of times already and got elaborate diversions in return.
There are holes in Benny’s coat, and Dean’s fixing them with tiny invisible stitches and black thread he's produced from a leather toiletry bag.
"I obviously came for the great vista and the five stars accommodation."
Benny shakes his head and mutters asshole under his breath loud enough that he’s sure Dean’s heard him. He sits on the broken rocking chair and goes back to his own work and listens to the gentle lapping of the riverwater against the houseboat. The houseboat cost Benny a handful of bucks and it’s not worth even that. It smells of rotten wood and desperation and there’s only a mattress to sleep on and two chairs. Benny’s going to fix it and he’s not going to question how hopeful the move of buying it has been, or this new plan for the future. Or how long until another hunter will come knocking at his door, armed with pitchforks.
"You’re pretty good with that." Dean points with his chin at the piece of wood in Benny’s hands. Benny has sanded it until it’s as smooth as a woman’s skin. It doesn’t need any more work but the sanding is soothing and Benny finds it easier to think when his hands are occupied.
It's a piece from the pantry, one of the few parts that he can reuse and restore; the rest he'll have to rebuild from scratch.
"No more than you are with a needle, you pretty housewife."
Dean glares but keeps up with his work, tongue poking out once in a while and hands firm. He weaves neat stitches along the broken seams and darns a couple of tiny holes with a complicate texture of a sturdy-looking black thread.
When he's done, he hooks the needles on the spool, twirls the extra thread around it neatly, then puts them both back inside the toiletry bag. He stares at his work, eyebrow raised while he inspects all the stitches with thumb and forefinger. "Never been good at stitching up skin, that was always Sam's province. But man, I could make a pair of socks last an entire season." Too low to be directed at Benny, but Benny hears it.
The job passes Dean's inspections because he finally nods to himself and stands, throws the coat into Benny’s lap.
"At least you won’t look like a hobo anymore."
Benny puts the coat on the back of his chair and shakes his head and starts sanding again. For a while the only noise inside the cabin is the scratch of sandpaper over wood and the cracks in the wood whining under the waves. Dean looks outside, gives Benny his back. If Benny didn’t know him as well as he does, he’d say something about not being so obvious, but Benny knows Dean makes his points with his body rather than his words.
"You haven’t told me yet how you tracked me."
Dean turns and leans back against the windowsill, a raised eyebrow and that cocky smile of his that makes Benny want to wipe it out with a punch or with a kiss. He follows the long line of his body instead, from head to feet. Benny appreciates fine things because he’s only known ugly for one lifetime or two and Dean isn’t exactly hard on the eyes. Not as lean and wolfish as when he’d found him the first time in Purgatory, covered in dirt and blood-thirst. That edge is muted now, tamed, though Benny can still sense it pulsing under Dean’s skin. He knows what's under those layers of clothes, hard planes of muscles and long legs. He knows and remembers how strong Dean held him between them. It'd felt natural in Purgatory, and right, to fall into each other, to use each other's body to get off: an illusory sense of warmth.
"Secrets of the trade, man," Dean says. "I thought I’d come to check in case you were drowning in your tears."
If Dean's noticed Benny's heated stare, he's decided not to react to it. It hasn't happened topside. Lack of time, lack of want, lack of opportunity. Dean back to hunting, hightailing as fast as he could the moment he freed Benny from his arm like promised - and that's an experience Benny's still trying not to think about.
Benny puts the wood and the sandpaper aside and stands. Fog rises from the water in spires and it looks so eerily empty out there that for a moment reality shifts and Benny forgets he’s alive and back on earth, and he's transported back where there are only monsters around and he’s one of them. A pang of hunger brings him back, back to Dean’s intent stare, to his understanding.
He thought of going back so many times, especially since Elizabeth, since that dimwit hunter cut her and he felt the rage and the hunger grow out of control and he wondered if he’d made a ridiculous mistake in wanting out, and if he should have known that he'd mess things up again. He thought about going back that same morning, right before the noise of Dean’s car trailed through the trees and Dean walked to the boathouse, unarmed.
There are bruises on Dean’s face, like he’s been in a fist fight, and a small limp on his left leg that he's tried to hide. He hates Dean a little bit right now: he makes it all so much harder and much more complicated for the simple offering of friendship and trust. When the fuck has disappointing a hunter become Benny's raison d'etre?
"Lizzie said you make a wicked gumbo." A raised eyebrow. "What? I'm starved and you owe me big time for fixing your ugly coat."
It's stupid how fast Benny's thinking whether he can get all the ingredients to cook for Dean. It's even stupider to think how much easier it'd be to get used to Dean's presence. He has no right to ask, but fuck if he wants to.
He leaves Dean and runs to town for groceries. When he comes back it's sunset somewhere behind the clouds and the fog and Dean's sitting in Benny's rocking chair reading a leather-bound journal to the light of an oil lamp.
"Tell me again why I'm feeding you?"
Dean barely raises his head from his reading. "Because you love me with your whole undead heart."
Benny can't even argue with that.
For the next two hours the cabin fills with the smell of Tabasco and roux and crawfish, smells that Benny had forgotten, sensory memories of people whose faces are hazy and belong to a past long gone. Lizzie reminded him of his grandma, though. Tall as she'd been and scaring him more than facing a horde of were-gorillas - and when the hell has he started talking like Dean? - because Benny found that he loved her as much as he'd loved her ancestor the moment he laid eyes on her face. Andrea had been a memory burning hot like revenge inside his brain for long, long years, but Lizzie was the future, a legacy that he wasn't expecting, and a tie to his past more tender than he could bear.
When he goes back to the living room, it's completely dark outside and Dean is asleep on the rocking chair, arms curled around his middle and snuggling inside his jacket. Benny shakes a blanket from the dust and tucks him in, and stays like that for a while looking at Dean's face, the frown etched between his eyebrows even in sleep, the bruises darker shadows than the scruff he hasn't bothered to shave. When he starts feeling like a creep, he lights one of the brand new candles he bought in town and lies on the mattress and thinks that yes, he could get used to this.
*
Sleep comes with the usual scary blankness; a black hole, blessed forgetfulness. A sharp noise wakes him up. Benny identifies it with his eyes still closed: a hammer hitting rotten wood. There's coffee still warm on the single stove, tar-black and bitter. Benny drinks it out of habit, even if the taste lingers like ash on his tongue. The river's a bit unrest today, slapping the sides of the boathouse and rocking it. He fills a second cup and steps onto the bow. The sky's grey and heavy, fog still hovers on the banks hiding the trees halfway.
He follows the noise to the back and finds Dean amidst a small mountain of rubble, sad remains of the engine van. He's wearing only a long-sleeved shirt, stained wet with sweat at the armpits and at the neck despite the chill in the air. He turns, though, most likely claimed by the smell of coffee.
Dean stretches an arm and grabs it. "I can fix this piece of crappy engine. But I'll need some parts." Said with half his face hidden into the cup and a final grimace while he swallows that tells Benny exactly what he thinks of the lukewarm coffee.
Benny ignores him and finds a place to sit, gets two splinters under in his palm for his trouble. It's always startling not to see the blood pour, not to feel the pain, especially when the setting is so mundane like now, and he forgets that he can't hear his own heart beating but goddamn if he can hear Dean's loud and clear and his lifeblood flushing strong and alive inside his veins.
He licks the points of his fangs and wills them down. "Is it because of me?" The tiny wounds on his palms are already healing.
"What?" The picture of innocent bullshitting. It's an expression Benny has learned to recognize on Dean's face early on and one of the easiest to identify.
"What are you doing here, Dean? You show up out of nowhere and put yourself at ease. Why aren't you out there taking care of your family business?" Why aren't you with your brother? The latter is left unsaid, but Benny knows Dean's heard the question.
"Whatever happened with your brother because of me? Not worth the hassle, man. It's water under the bridge."
Dean takes a long sip from his coffee and throws the rest away into the river, then puts the cup down. A couple of false starts, lips moving and no words; finally his face hardens then smooths in rapid succession, settles on a grimace, like a sour memory.
"I really, really rather not talk about Sam. But what is going on between us has nothing to do with you. It's... complicated, between us. Always has been."
Benny nods, believes him and Dean finally sits, loose and deflated; arms hanging between his spread legs, he stares at the point of his dusty boots. "I can be outta your hair if you want."
And fuck, it's not about that; it'll never be about that. But Benny has to ask because he can't bear to be cause of more trouble for Dean, especially after all that Dean's already done for him. Benny told Dean once that he's the only one keeping him afloat, the only one left now that Lizzie is beyond his reach. Dean can't possibly think that Benny wouldn't trade anything to have him by his side. And yet there's enough doubt on Dean's face, in the kicked-dog-vulnerability in his eyes to really believe Benny would send him away.
Benny doesn't know what drives his arm to move, to reach out to Dean's face, but it feels right and so he does. Dean's cheek is rough with scruff, the skin warm underneath, the bruises yellow already at the edges. His eyes widen large and surprised but it's okay because Benny's as surprised himself. Dean does lean into Benny's palm though, lips clamped shut to whatever he was objecting or thinking of sassing back. Benny ends the caress with a furtive touch of Dean's mouth. It's soft and reddened for the cold air, the split in the corner darker in the unforgiving light. Benny longs to taste it again, see if the physicality of earth makes the sensation different than in Purgatory.
But he'll leave that choice to Dean if he wants to make it.
He leans back, and it's hard but Benny's becoming a master in the art of denying himself. He puts his own hands in his laps, fingers twined tightly together. "You're always welcome to stay as long as you want, brother."
*
They fuck that night and it's Dean's offer and Dean's choice and Benny doesn't want to question himself more on what he's doing or why. If he has a right to this, to take Dean and whatever piece of himself he's willing to share and for how long he's going to. He's too lost in Dean's warm body as he shivers in the chilly cabin and under Benny's cold touch. He's lost in the deafening noise his heartbeat makes and the running blood so close right there under the skin. Dean's sweaty after the day he's spent working on the engine, and his stomach is full with yesterday's re-heated Gumbo and his smell is sharper, clearer somehow. The mattress Benny's thrown onto the floor is so thin, the planks of the floor-bed press hard against his knees when Benny thrusts up to Dean's cock. He catches Dean's nipple between his teeth and bites and he doesn't break the skin and he doesn't taste Dean's blood, not even for a moment he thinks of doing it. Blind,eyes closed, he finds more bruises on Dean's side and pushes hard with his fingers and listens to the noises Dean makes and files each one of them away for the dry times.
Dean's desperate and demanding and pliant and alive.
*
"Where did you get this?"
The light of the oil lamp hides the ugliness of the cabin and turns the world softer and the skin of Dean's chest to glow a golden and warm hue. It reveals thin lines of scars, too, like ripple on a calm sea. Not just lines, but all kind of shapes, rounded and oblong and some so weird Benny can't imagine what caused them. The one Benny's pointing at is positioned just above Dean's left hipbone, like a crescent half-moon, large a couple of inches and long less than one. Benny measures it with his thumb, then spreads his palm over it and down to Dean's navel clenching when he bows to look at it.
"Oh that one. Fell on broken glass, I think. Sam and I were hunting a deranged haggis. Nasty fucker, ate three children before we stopped it."
They fall into silence after, but Benny doesn't keep his hands to himself and Dean allows it. It's the starting kind of intimacy neither had foreseen or looked for, and it's the more natural because of it.
"Have you ever thought of giving up hunting?"
Dean relaxes back onto the mattress, an arm lazily spread toward Benny, close enough he can touch, the other arm under his head. Benny keeps up his exploration and finds more scars and imagines more stories and thinks that in the end they may be all the same: hunting accidents, wounds gotten while Dean hunted Benny's kind.
When he talks, Dean's voice is hushed and faraway. Like it got sometime when they were in Purgatory and they talked the night away, each of them sleepless and bone weary. They talked so much back then, but mostly they shared dream-like plans for when they got out, each more outrageous and big and impossible. There was a lot of junk food in Dean's, and that memory brings a strong wave of fondness for Dean that must be showing on his face.
"You wouldn't believe me, but I did once."
Benny looks up. Dean's eyes are closed, his fist clenched. Benny lays his hand on one of Dean's leg.
"Got a home and a legit job, and a woman. Even a kid. And the most awesome thing is: they wanted me. They really did. I don't know why or how it happened but they did."
Benny regrets asking. He knows how this story ends: people like them don't get to have a home and don't get to have a family. At most they can share a few days in a rotting houseboat, in the dankest part of the riverbank.
"I'm sorry, man."
"I tried, you know? I tried so damn hard to do good by them, to be what they needed. I didn't want to fuck it up. I--" A sigh, long and tremulous. Benny puts a closed-mouthed kiss on the juncture of Dean's hipbone and Dean relaxes some even as he shivers.
"You know how it goes, Benny. Andrea. Lizzie. You put them at risk for the simple fact that you love them. Simply for living, you put them at risk. I was sick of seeing people I love dying, and I wanted them, god if I wanted to keep it all, but in the end I lost them. Or they lost me, more precisely. Which is how it had to go. They should have run away the first time they saw me." Then so low, barely above a whisper. "Sam's right too at wanting to run.
"Yeah, Benny. I thought about stopping and it was nice but I was only kidding myself. This is what I am, man, and I'm okay with it. Finally, I know what I'm supposed to do. I'm good at slicing throat and hacking limbs." Quieter, still. "I'm good at being covered in blood."
There's finality in Dean's words and Benny would love to have words himself to tell Dean that he's good at least at something else beside that. A good friend, to start with, and someone worth holding on for. Loyal too, beyond reason maybe. It was the first thing he learned about Dean during the long months they looked for that angel. The single-minded, stubborn determination that drove Dean to find him had scared and awed Benny in equal measure. Now, months later, he got the experience of it on his own skin, and it's a source of warmth he's finding hard to give up.
It's not agreement with Dean's assessment that drives Benny to take a hold, with both his hands, of Dean's soft cock. It's still a bit sticky from before and musky scented and it hardens slow and steady at the friction. But it's anger that makes Benny's touch harder than necessary, anger and that overwhelming sense of impotence and doom that's taken residence inside Benny's heart since he was born again. He flicks his hand on the crown of Dean's cock with a violent movement that has Dean's body responding immediately. Then, he thumbs the slit and rubs the wetness all over the tip.
He jacks off Dean fast until he's hard and the big vein is pulsing and Dean's melting into the mattress, naked and spread-legged.
"You're so cold, Benny," Dean says on a moan.
Benny doesn't break his tempo. "I'm a monster, Dean," he says.
Fuck all to hell. But he's not dead. He isn't, and neither is Dean. They deserve another chance, or two, or ten.
*
Two days later, the engine coughs a cloud of black smoke and hacks a few times before it settles into a rhythmic, and stinky, thunk thunk. With his face blackened by smoke and striped with grease, Dean's all-teeth grin is blinding. For a few minutes, he and Dean stay like that, still and listening to the obnoxious noise and breathing the fumes of gasoline, before Dean breaks the moment with a request for food.
This time, Benny cooks red beans and rice in a large casserole. While Dean worked on the engine, Benny's stripped the kitchen and the cabin of all the broken, wooden parts and the two rooms look now larger and airier and smell strongly of the turpentine Benny used as solvent.
Later, they eat and then fuck on the floor and Dean falls asleep naked and cocooned inside Benny's only blanket.
Benny doesn't dream because his sleep is as void as death but if he still did, he's sure he would see his houseboat sailing, slow and steady, on the quiet waters of the river. It's really true, he thinks before he closes his eyes, what they say about happiness being an unrepentant pleasure.
*
It ends in the morning, like a broken spell, or a perfect sailing wind. Dean takes the car for a drive for the first time since he came four days before, comes back an hour later with a stack of newspapers and a bottle wrapped in a paper bag.
He spends all the morning, reading and taking notes, while checking his cell phone every five minutes and even going as far as to thumb the keys a couple of times, thought he doesn't dial. Benny leaves him to his restlessness while he keeps himself busy around the houseboat and ponders why he keeps desiring all the things that in the end will destroy him. An ancient love, family. And a hunter. Of all people, a hunter.
When Dean appears with his duffle hitched high on his shoulder, Benny's not surprised, but he can't account for the pang of disappointment that hits him low in the gut.
Dean's brought the bottle and two glasses on the deck and they share the whiskey sitting on the bow, facing the first sunset with actual, golden and orange sun-rays in the last two weeks.
"Got wind of something near Wichita," Dean says.
Benny nods and drinks more of the surprisingly excellent whiskey Dean bought.
"Are you going to unmoor it?" Dean asks finally.
"Maybe. I don't know. There's a lot of work to do."
"You have a project then."
"Yeah," Benny says.
"And maybe a better bed for the next time. My knees will thank you."
The lack of shame on Dean's face breaks a startled laugh out of Benny and somehow everything slots into its rightful place.
Dean smiles and stands and pats Benny's back and leaves the hand there to linger, heavy and hot for a few seconds. "Thanks for letting me stay, Benny." He flails with his arm at the boat and at the river, then coughs twice to clear his voice. "Stay safe, okay? And out of trouble."
"You too, brother."
"And don't turn off the phone. Or I won't be able to track you again."
The last image Benny gets of Dean's face before he walks away to his car, is a cocky, self satisfied smile that Benny wants to wipe out with a punch or with a kiss. He'll decide what to do the next time.
--