More Flicker!

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Flicker, pt 3/?

Dean leans over to dial in a number from a magnet on the fridge—and then pulls the door open to snatch a beer. He puts the phone between his shoulder and his ear and pops the top on a counter, and Sam wants to scold him for that, but he doesn’t know if he does that here—if that’s a brother thing or a whatever the hell this is thing, but Dean just gives Sam a preemptive don’t shit bricks about it look Sam would know from any version of Dean.

“Yeah, hey, delivery please?” Dean says, and passes Sam his beer, digging around his pocket with his free hand.

Sam takes the bottle in numb fingers, feels the slick glass against the pads of his fingers, and thinks that Dean will keep his wallet in his back left pocket no matter where he goes, or who he is, or who they are to one another. Sam used to steal Dean’s beers all the time, partly because dealing with his brother long-term occasionally required alcohol abuse, but mostly because he could feel the lingering warmth of Dean’s mouth that way.

Sam remembers feeling bad about it, guilty, like he was taking advantage—but Sam thinks that back then, wherever he was, taking advantage was all he could ever take.

But that’s not true now, Sam thinks, and sets the bottle down, reaches over and threads his fingers—they aren’t shaking, they’ve always known this geography—through the hair at the back of Dean’s neck and draws him in. And Dean’s eyes are wide and amused but kisses Sam anyway, with the tinny sound of the pizza guy in the background confirming their order and the metal frames of his glasses cool on Sam’s cheek.

And Sam kisses—first—the corners of Dean’s mouth, and then the bow of his upper lip, scrapes his teeth on the soft sweet flesh on the inside of Dean’s pout. He licks his way into Dean’s mouth, sliding across teeth and tongue: Dean tastes like hops and Coke and still a little bit like the toothpaste Sam found on the bathroom counter, he tastes exactly like Sam has always imagined.

And it’s that thought the triggers the rush of desperation, of want like a chemical burn under his skin. Sam has been in a haze all this time, still dreaming, but the way Dean’s fingers are digging bruises into his hip is real, and so is the slight chip in one of Dean’s molars—and Sam’s suddenly knotting his fists in the fabric of Dean’s shirt, trying to climb inside.

“Okay,” Dean says when he pushes away for air. “We’ve totally just scandalized Papa Johns.”

“Don’t care,” Sam tells him and leans over to bite at the line of Dean’s chin.

“But they give us pizza,” Dean protests, but Sam decides not to be annoyed because Dean’s sliding his hands into the back pockets of Sam’s jeans. “It’s not like you can cook.”

Sam nips Dean harder for that. “I microwave.”

Dean hisses, and without a trace of irony in his tone, says, “God, you’re hot when you talk about cooking.”

Sam never thought that if he got this he’d get laughter, too, and he’s still laughing when Dean knocks them over onto the sofa and insinuates a thigh between Sam’s knees, slides his hands up Sam’s sides and down again, fingers intoxicating and warm and rough-heavy through the t-shirt—close enough to burn. He feels like after 43 years in the desert, he’s just tripped headfirst into a river, and he doesn’t know what to feel first in the rush of water on his skin.

Dean reaches up, thumb and fingers on the rims of his glasses, pulls them off and sets them on an end table—and it’s so easy and ordinary Sam can’t help but blurt out, “I never thought I’d get this—you.”

Dean stares at him for a long moment, braced over Sam on his elbows, before he says, “What the hell are you talking about? I’m easy. You picked me up at Fenway. And I paid for that beer I was waving around when I met you—I got myself drunk so you could pick me up at Fenway.”

Sam can’t really do anything but stare up at Dean, astonished, because that’s so easy—that’s just plane tickets and being in Boston and forcing himself to watch the Red Sox play. All Sam’s abstract plans to get here before meant selling off parts of himself, trading in pieces he doesn’t think he can lose—but more importantly, trading in pieces of Dean.

He slides a hand round Dean’s side, rests a loose fist at the small of Dean’s back. It takes a while before Sam can swallow down the sob thats lodged in his chest, but he does it, and keeps it down long enough to say, “Still—lucky me.”

*

A day later, Sam spends half an hour digging around his—expensive leather—briefcase trying to figure out where he works while Dean sprawls out asleep, face down on his side of the bed. It’s hard to make himself to when he could just take his pants back off and crawl back under the covers, but when Sam actually picks up the phone to call in sick to wherever the hell he works, Dean—unmoving—mumbles into his pillow:

“If you do not get the fuck out of this house and let me get some God damn writing done, Sammy, I swear to God. I will kill you and find some other hot, young piece to keep as my sexual plaything.”

Sam glares down at him. “Fine,” he says. “But your last book had three typos in it.”

He’s already halfway down the hall by the time hears Dean thud out of the bed, shouting, “What? Where? Son of a bitch!”

It’s Monday and Sam steps out onto the steamy morning street feeling like he can do anything, like he can have anything—and when he hears the sash of the third floor window being thrown open and Dean shouting down at him, “You motherfucker!” Sam thinks, nevermind, nevermind, because he already has it, everything that matters.

*

It turns out Sam works at Ropes & Gray, which is only less terrifying than being told he’s about to go have coffee with Satan—and only because Sam’s not entirely convinced he doesn’t still owe the Prince of Darkness anything for the many and sundry things he did to Dean over the weekend.

And then, once he gets over his panic attack and goes through security, the guy at the metal detector only says, “Morning, Mr. Winchester,” and doesn’t tackle him and call him a fraud or anything. Sam knows that if anything’s screaming, “I JUST PASSED MY LSATS, THAT’S ALL!” at the top of its lungs, it’s not the revoltingly expensive Armani he found in his closet and put on this morning. (He spent part of this morning’s traffic snarl depressed he’s apparently kind of a stereotypical gay man.)

Sam gives himself a mental slap and says, “Morning—” he checks the guard’s nametag “—Curtis.”

Curtis cocks a brow at him and hands Sam back his security tag. “Still can’t remember my name,” he says disapprovingly. “Kids these days.”

Sam flushes. “I’m sorry—I’m just having one of those mornings.”

Curtis waves him through, rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah—for the last six years.”

Elevator’s not much better, there’re two women having whispered arguments into the bluetooth earpieces and at one point Sam’s seriously concerned that they’re arguing with each other from different ends of the elevator. Nobody says hello to him, but it’s still the sleepy part of the morning, when everyone’s letting the coffee seep in—but by the time he reaches his floor there’re women in businesslike heels and men with their sleeves rolled up saying, “Morning, Sam,” and “Hey, Sam, have a nice weekend?”

Sam doesn’t have a corner office, he finds, but he has a window and a potted plant, and a half dozen photographs of he and Dean on his desk—a coffee mug with highlighters in it. He closes the door and sits in his Herman Miller desk chair and stares out across the Boston skyline for a long, long time, soaking in it until ten past eight somebody knocks on his door and says, “Sam? Sam? Hey, we need to go over those S-8s Hellerman’s filing tomorrow.”

*