Work Text:
He's not totally sure this is the place - Dean only brought them here the once, in the small hours after a Holiday Tour house show, shower-damp hair stuffed under stocking caps to ward off Ohio's December air - though he thinks he recognizes the cartoon dog on the sign. He's looking at the surrounding businesses, trying to recall the Korean grocery, the pawn shop, the payday loan joint, when his eyes catch on the orange firefly glowing from part-way down the narrow brick alley.
"You have me micro-chipped when I wasn't lookin'?" Dean rasps. Roman can't quite pick the shape of him out of the shadows, but he can read his gestures and fidgets in the way the ember of the cigarette cuts through the dark.
"Maybe," he calls, stepping into the mouth of the alley and picking a path through the discarded empties that line the walls until he's standing right in front of Dean, trying to read his expression in the sickly light of the bulb over the bar's kitchen door. "Or maybe you're just not as unpredictable as you think?"
"Yeah," Dean chuckles and takes another drag. "Think that's part of the problem."
He doesn't know quite what to say to that; the part of Dean that high-tailed it from the arena after that main event will just as easily strike out and run away from the wrong words here, and he doesn't want that. It's a two-way street they're on, knowing each others' playbooks by heart, so he figures Dean gets that he's not really pissed about eating Dirty Deeds. Still, his brother doesn't seem to understand that he doesn't have to leave before he gets left anymore, that he's too deep in Roman's heart now to be able to push him away even if that were what he really wanted. Roman doesn't know how to tell him that - not in a way that Dean'll hear, anyway - except just by being here.
He settles on, "Only problem I got right now is that you were supposed to cut that shit out." He points at the remnants of the cigarette.
"I did," Dean protests. "It just didn't quite take. 'Least I brought it outside?" he offers with a smirk. "Bein' a good boy. Followin' all the rules."
"Just for a change?"
"What can I say? It's a New Day!" he says, picking up volume and adding syllables on the final words.
Dean's shout and his own laughter echo around them in the close space. All he wants to do is haul Dean into his arms and keep him there for as long as he'll stay. Pegs that at about ten seconds tonight, so instead, he just says, "Put that thing out, and let's get a pitcher."
"They got the best shitty nachos in town," Dean says around one final puff. "We need some of those, too."
"If you say so."
Dean stubs the cigarette out against the bricks behind him and adds the butt to the deep drift of wasted filters and dead matches that looks like it's been forming against the wall since the smoking ban went into effect, if not since the place was built. "C'mere," he says, and takes a step forward and reaches up to curve a hand around the back of Roman's head.
He tips forward with the light pressure and feels the dry press of Dean's lips against his forehead, in the same spot where it met the canvas an hour ago. It's not sorry, but he thinks it might be thank you.