Sam’s not jealous of Dean’s freckles or anything. He’s six years old and his brother is his hero and Sam dresses like Dean, walks like Dean, talks like Dean, eats like Dean, why doesn’t he have freckles like Dean?
He huffs petulantly and crosses his arms over his chest, hikes his shoulders up around his ears and sits criss-cross-applesauce in the middle of the motel floor and he is not going to cry about this; he’s not, he’s not, he’s not.
“I don’t get why you’re so upset, Sammy,” Dean says helplessly.
“How’d you get freckles?” Sam demands. “I want ‘em!”
“I don’t know!” Dean throws his hands up in the air and then scrubs his fingers through his hair, considering. “Mom used to say that they were angel kisses. Maybe that’s how you get ‘em.”
“Why didn’t the angels kiss me?” Sam asks desperately, so close so tears that he can taste them in the back of his throat.
“Hey, hey, wait, wait, don’t cry, Sammy, c’mon.” Dean’s on his knees next to him before the waterworks can really start, tugging on Sam’s elbow to get him to open up. He huffs out a wheeze of air when Sam throws himself into his chest, nearly knocking the both of them to the grungy carpet in the process.
“I don’t understand,” Sam admits into Dean’s stomach, burying his face and clinging so hard Dean’s afraid his spine going to crack under the pressure.
The frantic ‘make it better’ sense in the back of Dean’s head flares up like a star going supernova and he flaps his hands around wildly like it’s going to help him figure out how to fix this.
He yanks Sam out from the burrow he’s digging into his abdomen, plants a hand on each side of his face, screws his eyes shut, and smacks a big, fat kiss right onto the tip of Sam’s nose.
Sam so stunned he forgets to keep crying.
“Figure I’m angel enough to make it work,” Dean tosses out casually and shrugs, eyeing Sam all over to see if it’s working.
Sam sniffs, forearm scrubbing at his runny nose. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Sure.” Dean shrugs again. “Where do you want your freckles, Sam?”
Sam giggles and hops up. “Here!” He points to his elbow. “Here!” His cheek. “Here!” His knees. “Here! His tummy. “Everywhere!”
He collapses to the ground, laughing and wriggling, and Dean figures he’s got a lot of kissing to do.
When it had actually happened Sam would have sworn up and down that he was dying from severe ankle trauma. Clutching his leg and screaming as the mud from the wet field soaked into the back of his jersey he’d had the dull thought in the back of his head ‘You’ve killed a harpy without a damn scratch on you and you break your leg playing soccer, you pathetic shit.’
Colors had blurred and lights had smeared and the only thing that Sam could really understand was the sound of Dean’s voice shouting “Get the fuck outta my way!” and the indignant squawks of the people he was shoving out of the path between him and his writhing brother.
Not broken, though. Tripping over a soccer ball and into another player hadn’t been enough to fracture the bones in his ankle, just enough to hyper-extend his Achilles tendon.
He doesn’t bitch about it as much as he could; he doesn’t whine about how the rocking of the car irritates his ankle no matter how many pillows Dean steals from motels for him to prop it up on; he doesn’t complain about the imprint the ace bandage leaves in his swollen skin or how his toes get cold because he can’t wear his socks or the embarrassing way he has to hobble the short distance from the backseat of the car to the booth in the same old mom and pop diner they find in every town.
He grunts under his breath uncomfortably when he settles down into the stiff vinyl booth. The springs are worn to shit underneath him and there are a few tears that leak yellow foam like coagulant, and Sam wishes he could say it the shittiest place he’s ever been in.
“How you holding up, Sam?” John asks as he flips through the menu.
“Fine, sir,” Sam grits and shifts uncomfortably. There’s a dull throb of pain pooling in his ankle that doesn’t actually shift into outright agony unless he tries to move his foot in any way that isn’t ‘not at all’ and he’s having a tough time getting settled.
“You sure?” Dean asks from beside him, feeling him fidget and wriggle.
“I’m fine, Dean!” Sam snaps and reaches for his menu petulantly.
“Yeah, okay,” Dean scoffs and rolls his eyes and before Sam really has any idea what he’s planning Dean’s got one shoulder ducked under the table and Sam only has time to think ‘you have no idea what’s down there and I am not scraping the gum out of your jacket’ before a sharp shoot of pain flares up to his knee from Dean tugging on the cuff of his jeans hard enough to jostle his leg.
“Sorry,” Dean murmurs on reflex as Sam hisses but doesn’t stop tugging until Sam has to pivot in his seat and lean back against the window so Dean can drag his foot into his own lap. “Do you need me to get you some ice, too?” he asks as he rubs gently at the arch of Sam’s foot with the inner edge of his thumb and -yeah, yeah, okay, that doesn’t feel too bad.
Sam shakes his head ‘no’, but when the waitress passes by again Dean asks her if she’d be so kind.
Sam settles down into the booth and Dean keeps his left hand resting lightly up on Sam’s calf, occasionally rubbing soothing little circles whenever Sam winced or flinched, humming sympathetically in his throat until the tremor of pain exhausts itself.
John watches them over the top of his menu and settles just for coffee so his pocket can stretch all the way to the Walgreen’s down the street for some more pain killers.
Love is a tacky word, Sam thinks. It’s overused. Someone can love a song or a pair of shoes or a pet as much as they can love a person. Dean loves pie. Sam loves mattresses that don’t smell like mothballs. They both love coffee.
The waitress in the diner they just left loves red lipstick and the cook loves her, if the red stains all over his collar were anything to go by.
The man in the sedan they’re idling next to loves Don Mclean, and sincerely does not care who knows.
Love is just a word.
“I,” Sam starts, but his voice cracks and he has to clear his throat. Dean glances over at him.
It’s just a dumb, stupid, overused word and he can use it, he swears he can. He clenches his fist on his knee and tries to remember why he has to say it, why it’s so important that Dean knows.
But love is so simple.
Sam doesn’t love Dean.
This thing sitting in his chest, stewing and writhing and pacing the cage of his ribs restlessly hunted and killed love long ago, ran a hundred thousand miles on the energy love gave him and then kept going, gaining speed and momentum until Sam couldn’t control it.
“Sam?” Dean asks after a few moments of Sam picking at his jeans and staring at his lap and not saying anything.
Say it, Sam thinks. Just blurt it out.
“Hey,” Dean reaches across the seat like it’s not miles and miles of space and slides his hand up to the back of Sam’s neck. “You okay?”
Sam looks up and opens his mouth but the words on the back of his tongue aren’t ‘I love you’. They’re all ‘I can’t watch you die’ and ‘I won’t live without you’ and ‘There’s sunshine in your hair’ and ‘Your eyes are green’ and ‘You used to sing The Beatles to put me to sleep when I was a kid’.
The thing in his chest settles and croons under Dean’s touch instead of savaging him with it.
The nagging feeling that something’s off, something’s wrong, looms over Dean for the entire four hours it takes he and John to get back to Sam from the hunt in Brevard. He fidgets in his seat, scores another set of hot red lines into the back of his neck with his fingernails because he’s itchy but he’s not.
The hunt went fine, he thinks frantically in his search for the source of the worming discomfort seated low in his stomach. Just a vengeful spirit haunting an Inn. Dean has a couple of splinters from tearing up the floorboards to get to the body so John could douse and burn it, but other than that both he and his father are tip top. He talked to Sam earlier this morning on the motel’s phone and Sam’s fine, there wasn’t anything in his tone suggesting anything otherwise. They’d just talked about the hunt and the girl in Sam’s Algebra class that keeps making eyes at him for a couple of minutes and how Dean was going to be there in four hours so Sam’s dirty clothes better be off his damn bed.
All signs indicate that nothing is wrong.
Dean scratches at his neck again.
“Bug bite?” John tosses over from behind the steering wheel. “Don’t scratch at it.”
Dean puts his hands between his knees and squeezes his legs together.
The feeling that the universe is off center and steadily sinking under water doesn’t leave. Not even when the Impala comes to a rumbling stop on a gravel driveway. Not even when John tells him to help with the bags. Not even when he shoulders his way through the creaks screen door of the rental and sees Sam sitting at the kitchen table in a patch of sunlight doing his homework.
“You’re back!” Sam sits up straighter. His kicking feet sweep up the dust bunnies under the table where his toes don’t reach the floor quite yet, send flecks of it into the air to float in the sunlight around him.
“Hey, Sammy,” Dean forces a smile.
Sam grins back at him, bright and brilliant. His eyes track down, though, drawn to the bright welts Dean’s left all over his neck and then down, lower, to the center of his chest. His eyebrows twitch, crunch together slightly in a small stroke of helpless confusion before Sam reels it back in.
“I uh-,” he coughs, voice tense and thick like it wasn’t when he first greeted Dean. “I’ll be back later, I have to go and… yeah, okay.” He slips off the chair and ducks around Dean, out of the room.
Dean’s desperate, consuming confusion cranks up again and he can’t do anything but shift on his feet in the middle of the kitchen with the old yellow linoleum cracking and protesting underneath his boots. What the hell?
He’s scratching at his chest, he realizes, and stops himself by splaying his hand flat against his sternum. His heartbeat telegraphs through his ribs and into his palm steadily and he doesn’t get it, doesn’t get it, doesn’t get it until he does.
“Shit!” he shouts. “Shit! Dad! Dad! I need to borrow the car keys!”
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One time I gave myself a prompt about post Swap Meat AU where the demon calls Lucifer before they switch back Gary and Sam
and then I decided to write that instead of my essay on Enlightenment vs. Renaissance
“Say hi,” Mary coos as she lowers the wriggling bundle into Dean’s arms. “Say hi to your little brother, Dean.”
