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It’s the kind of rain that really comes down. Soaks through the front of Sam’s fed-slacks so they stick to his skin, polyester, fake, itchy. He’s holding a folded paper grocery bag over his head, but that’s soaked, too. Seems like a useless gesture, so he tosses it into a dumpster. Dean hasn’t said much all morning.
They’re stopping at Wal-Mart on the way to the police station, because the old umbrellas they keep in the trunk are broken. Sam tried to open one this morning and it got stuck halfway, twisted like some broken-wing bat, the thin aluminum bones of its insides rusted and crumpled in places. “Piece of shit,” Dean mumbles, then, “Five finger discount.”
Now they’re inside, wet and shining under florescent lights and their incessant insect humming. Dean’s sweet-taking the cashier nearest to the door, the fifteen items or fewer gal with her dark roots growing in under the bleach, the drawn on eyebrows and the layer of foundation, the crusted hole in her lip where she takes the ring out for work. Dean leans over the counter, lids lowered over his million dollar grin while Sam finds the surveillance blind spot (dummy cameras are always in soda aisles, where things are too big to pocket and too cheap to get creative on) and shoves two umbrellas between his dress shirt and suit jacket.
He leaves without tripping security, and Dean follows. “You get any candy?” Dean asks, testing out one of the new umbrellas, its crisp nylon hood smelling plasticy like kiddie pools Sam half-remembers from birthday parties. The rain rattles against the outside, sounding solid on solid.
“No,” he answers, glum as the rain bounces off the umbrella. The drops hitting the puddle-slick pavement just ricochet back up, colliding with Sam’s shins, knees. He’s too tall to stay dry under an something this size.
Dean shakes his head like Sam didn’t do his job. “Jeez, Sam. Isn’t that hard to throw some perks in with the necessities.”
Sam doesn’t say anything. They stomp through the rain to the reflective black of the car.
---
Sam interviews the deputy who was there last night while Dean jimmies the lock of the file cabinet in his office and takes the police reports, crime scene photo scans heavy with black because blood always looks black in copies. They leave side by side, exchange words and theories curtly once they’re out of earshot like they really are nothing but agents and partners. Sam sees a worm inching along the pavement, its body long and white as it shivers between puddles.
Stumbling so he doesn’t have to step on it, Sam winces, thinks of wet things he and Dean have killed before, long serpentine monsters with ivory skin an no eyes, stealing kids from summer camp when they sneak into the lake at night. He shudders, rubbing his hands up his arms. Dean’s got his things, rats and witches and whenever a corpse has its eyes eaten out by bugs by the time they get to it. He hates the way bodies look with bloody holes for eyes. Sam can stomach it, maybe he even prefers the yawning vacancy to eyes wide open and glassy in that obviously dead way. Unless he can see the maggots, flashes of milky white movement hidden in the dark, corrupt blood color. Then he gets that weak feeling, the feeling he gets when he imagines stepping on that earthworm he just tripped to avoid.
The blindness of the dead Sam doesn’t mind. But blind-alive things, so pale and swollen you can’t tell the head from the tail, so lost and unseeing, make his stomach flicker in reactionary disgust.
Now that Sam has noticed, he sees the earthworms everywhere, pink smudges against wet black. He looks at Dean so he doesn’t have to look down, and then he wishes he didn’t, because the ache is worse than any fleeting nausea. Sam thinks any normal person would lose their mind at the way Dean’s hand, white and full of sharp angles, looks clenched around the plastic umbrella handle, and Sam’s not normal.
The rain makes Dean’s hair darker, his eyes darker, like the storm is something inside him. All dark and light shoved together in stark contrast, his back straight and his tie knot right up against the column of his throat. The world sounds like it always does when its raining, tires crashing through puddles, and the click of Sam’s adam’s apple when he swallows. “What’re you looking at, Sammy,” Dean asks him gruffly, catching Sam because he’s staring.
“Nothing,” Sam tells him, looking down towards puddles and blind-alive things. “Just thought of something.”
---
Sam’s thought this before. That he’s crazy, and none of the things he remembers happening ever happened. That the reality he’s used to map his entire life by like constellation chart isn’t a reality at all, but some seeds of evil planted into him by the devil, by hell. That he’s invented this entire universe where his brother wants to fuck him, but really, he is sick and alone in wanting to fuck his brother. Sam shakes his head, rubs his palms over his cold, rough face while Dean drives them to the coroner's office so they can check out the body. He lets his eyes skitter over to Dean every once and awhile, those hands tight around the wheel, the steel-jawed face and eyes the color of an ocean. Dean never looks back at him.
His brother hasn’t touched him in a few weeks. Or, maybe he has. Usual touching, a hand on his lower back pushing him when he’s not walking fast enough, a clip on his shoulder from a thrown fist when he tells him be back in a few, gonna get food. Fists hauling him around by his shirt front when something is after him. But those are ways people touch when they’re not each other’s world. When they don’t spent every second together, when their planet doesn’t revolve around one, unchanging sun.
When Dean hasn’t touched him in a few weeks, Sam starts to wonder if Dean ever touched him the way he remembers. The way he longs for. The way Dean pushes more than skin-deep, desperate and angry thumbs hooked under the sharp line of Sam’s jaw, into the hollow made by his ribs, into anything he can reach. The way he kisses him so deep Sam forgets how to breath around so much tongue, under so many teeth. The way Dean closes his eyes, half moon smudge of lashes like soot on his cheek while Sam lays his whole weight across his brother’s back and comes inside him until he’s empty and Dean is full.
These things become improbable when they haven’t happened for awhile. Sam’s reality is shaky, he has hell under his skin and a wall in his head that’s made from sugar, sand, other things that can’t withstand the weight of black water raging on the other side of that dam. When Dean won’t meet his eyes, when Dean says shit like what’re you looking at, Sammy, when he seems curled and bunched like a steel cord taut for snapping in the drivers side while the world pours down around them, it occurs to Sam that maybe all of that never even happened. It’s just something the fucked up, codependent part of him wants, needs, imagines so vividly and desperately it seems like a memory.
Sam knows this is crazy. He has too many scars from Dean’s nails in his back for it to not be real. Hell, it was only weeks ago Dean put him up against the wall in a handicap shower in some motel in Jersey; Sam remembers his head cracking against the wall behind him, he remembers static beneath his eyelids and his breath coming short and fast, too dizzy trapped under the weight of his brother. He remembers shoving Dean off, saying, bed and stumbling out without a towel, dripping everywhere and not even making it that far, covering Dean and slamming into him until the carpet burnt under both of their palms. He remembers all of that, seared into him, a scar on his carotid artery.
Or do you? A voice asks. Half his own voice, half the voice of the devil. He flicks his eyes to his brother, and wonders if he thinks about these things, too.
---
They park a few blocks away from the coroners, because their car makes them look suspicious in how obviously it’s not government issue. Sam opens his umbrella and stands under it, waiting for Dean to finish struggling with his.
“Fuck,” Dean sputters, tossing the mess of folded metal and black plastic and nylon to the gutter. It lands with a defeated rustle. “If you’re gonna steal shit, Sam, at least steal good shit. You always get the cheap stuff. What’s the point of shoplifting if you’re gonna lift crap?” His voice snags.
Sam bends, picks up the sad, wet thing from the pavement so he can throw it away. “We were at Wal-Mart, Dean. Nothing but crap there. It wasn’t like I had much of a selection to choose from.”
“Just sick of this rain,” Dean says after a few moments of quiet passing between them, time filled with the rushing sound of tires on wet asphalt. “Lemme under yours,” he demands, bulling himself next to Sam so they can share the space under his umbrella.
Sam panics for a second, imagining Dean pressed up against him, imagining their skin touching in places and having to smell Dean’s deodorant, his toothpaste, his always-smell of ash and and car and salt and gunmetal. But they don’t have to touch, because Dean grabs the umbrella from him, and he minds getting wet less than he minds trying to share that tiny space. Dean walks ahead of him, and Sam’s hair-gel melts in the downpour. They run to the coroners, and leave puddles on the linoleum floor of the foyer.
After they flash badges, Sam zones out. He thinks about rain, about how much the oceans swell with it in big storms like this. He thinks about how this is a coastal town, imagines its shores getting swallowed in the color of Dean’s eyes. He doesn’t hear anything but this until Dean slaps his hand down on his shoulder and says “my partner here thinks..”
Instinctually, Sam shrugs his hand off, skin crawling. His mind turns noisy, full of static, because Dean shouldn’t touch him like that when he’s not expecting it. He shouldn’t touch him at all, he wouldn’t if he knew all the things Sam wants from him. Or, if he does know, if everything is real the way Sam remembers it, then he shouldn’t touch him like that if he’s not going to touch him every-way.
The corpse doesn’t have eyes. It has cotton stuck in the eye holes, its edges stained brown from blood. “That’s just wrong,” Dean says. Sam doesn’t say anything.
The snap of latex gloves on Dean’s wrists, and some prodding inside the body cavity to determine that the liver is missing. Then they’re gone, in the rain again with their eyes shut against its fine, horizontal assault. Sam is still going crazy from the burn of Dean’s fingers on his shoulder when they make it to the car.
---
In the parking lot of the motel, Sam’s umbrella breaks, too. Rain drops skitter down it’s bent-bone frame, and he stares at it stupidly.
Dean would laugh it were a different day. Instead, he makes a harsh noise, air through his teeth. “Serves you right.”
Another broken umbrella in the Impala’s trunk, and they’re both gonna be wet, now. It’s a good fifty feet from here to the door of their motel room, and at a sprint they could make it in a few seconds. But even a few seconds in rain like this is enough to get you soaked, and plus, they’re just standing there dumb, eyes locked on the piece of shit umbrella and its busted shape.
Sam prays for them to laugh. To realize how ridiculous it is that they’re standing in the rain wearing their fed suits, holding this cheap thing with wet hands when the warm, dry privacy of their motel room is just fifty feet away. If it were a different day, they would laugh. Dean would grin with just his eyes, first, the splitting of skin into an explosion of young-looking lines. Then his mouth would open and he’d bend at the waist and crack up, the white of his teeth making his skin look almost flushed in comparison.
Then, grudgingly, Sam would join in. He’s slower to laugh than Dean, always waiting for some catastrophic results to come from his mistakes because he started the apocalypse, once. But eventually, he’d lose himself to it. They’d laugh, hands braced against the cold, slick metal of the car, their clothes shellacked into their bodies with rain. They’d struggle out of them in the room, stumble, still chuckling and stomachs hard with how long it’s been since they laughed like this. Dean would get that heavy look in his eyes. Hey, Sammy he’d say with that broken mouth. Come over here. And Sam’s reality would be reaffirmed.
Instead, they stand here, getting soaked, while Sam wonders if the rain trickling from Dean’s hair tastes like tears because they’re so close to the ocean.
“Fuck,” Dean says, slamming his palm down onto the rim of the car’s door. “Next time, I steal us stuff.”
Sam holds his hands up. “Fine, Dean.”
They don’t even sprint to the room, just jog in squelching dress shoes, Sam’s hair a slick of black on his brow, his brother’s eyes still the color of storm. Sam’s bones ache with loss, though he’s not sure if it’s the loss of something he once had, or only imagines he did.
---
Dean bangs into the motel room ahead of Sam, loud and brash even though he’s not talking, taking up the whole fucking room like he always does, this huge thing which expands and expands until there is nothing left, pushing everything else out until this is all Sam is, and all he can see and hear is Dean.
He feels suffocated by the ache or being diminished, eyes locked on his brother kicking his shoes off, shrugging his suit jacket onto his elbows and eventually onto the floor, where it sits curled and heavy and sodden.
“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” Dean’s voice scrapse through the air, so harsh it seems like it would hurt to touch, if it was a touchable thing. Sam’s face is pinched, and Dean’s still taking things off, stripping his wet, clinging shirts in layers.
“Like what?” He asks. He realizes he’s still in all his clothes, stuck under their impossible weight. His eyes drop and he starts unbuttoning things with cold fingers, waiting for Dean’s answer.
“I don’t know,” he eventually says, less sure sounding, voice a notch softer.
Sam looks up through his hair, sees the vertical line carved between his brother’s brows, the way his naked chest glows in the grey light, so pale and cut he looks like something hewn from stone, cold and hard under Sam’s palms if he ever touches him again. He wants to make him warm, he wants to figure this out, but he’s cold, too.
“Like you’re pissed at me or something,” Dean adds, shrugging. “Something has you in some kind of mood today.”
It’s the rain Sam wants to say, because he can’t possible say, Are you real, or did I dream you up? He doesn’t say anything, just stares for awhile at the floor littered with black puddles of clothing, standing there in gooseflesh and boxers. He can feel Dean’s gaze on him like a branding iron, traveling the length of him. “I’m not pissed at you,” Sam says.
Dean scoffs. “Yeah. Okay. You tell me about it when you know what bug crawled up your ass and died.”
Sam sighs, cards his hands through his hair because he’s not gonna tell Dean about this.
“First shower,” Dean yells, and locks the bathroom door behind him.
---
Dean comes out and Sam gets choked on steam. He’s been bedded down into the covers of his bed, trying to get warm, thinking that even if he came up with some platonic excuse to get in the shower while Dean was in there (hypothermia, impending pneumonia) it doesn’t matter, because Dean locked the door. He sits up, watches his brother stand in middle of the room with a towel tucked around his waist, digging in his duffel bag for a shirt.
The lines of Dean’s face seem like they’ve softened, but this could be another thing Sam invented. Sam clears his throat and says, “Hey,” voice low.
“Hey Sammy,” Dean answers soft and rumbling, pushing his hand through the spiky mess of his newly washed hair, voice coming out one big sigh. Sam lays back down, hanging on the small, rustling sounds of Dean getting dressed. “Sam...” Dean says after awhile, and Sam almost misses it it’s so quiet.
“Yeah?” Sam asks.
There’s an intake of breath, the silence of Dean pausing. Sam digs his teeth into the skin of his inner lip, thinking, what?
“You know...sometimes I don’t know what you’re thinking,” is the non-answer with which Dean answer’s Sam’s mute plea.
“You’re not a mind reader,” Sam mumbles.
Dean coughs, then says “No, that’s not what I mean. I dunno what I mean, really.” He comes and sits on the edge of Sam’s bed,which bows under his weight, creaking. There’s another long stretch of quiet, but Sam can do this. He knows this is the way Dean talks, chopped up, fragmented, strung along with expanses of dead air between dropped bombs. He tries not to hold his breath, and waits.
“Sometimes, I feel like you forget stuff,” Dean finally tells him, voice rough and wet sounding.
Sam’s brow furrows. “What do you mean? Like, hunting stuff? Do you think I--”
“No, no,” Dean interrupts, face screwed up with incredulity, hand swiping though and air like he wants to diffuse Sam’s thought like a bad smell. “Stuff about us. Stuff we do. Sometimes I feel like you just plain forgot about it, like this stuff with your head, the wall and the cage and shit just...just blew it all away. And you don’t remember.”
Dean’s voice has got that rawness to it, the skinned, blood-weeping sound it gets when he’s scared of something. Sam’s not looking at his face but he knows what it looks like now, the ashen shadows under his eyes, the tilt to his brows and the quivering shape of his mouth like some cell ready to divide into two. The damp sheen and big pupils, the frantic wet of his tongue. Sam sits up, his heart thundering. He’s reminded of the sound cars make when they slam through the rain.
“I don’t remember what?” he asks, voice a tremor. He can feel his face twitching, his lips getting pulled tight, the skin of his brown flickering over the madness of nervous muscle underneath. It hurts, how much his body ripples and tenses this close to Dean.
“Sam,” Dean says, leaning forward, close enough Sam can see the flush of hot water on his throat, disappearing into the collar of this throat. He looks at Sam’s mouth, and Sam’s stomach drops into the bowl of his hips, becomes a liquid, molten thing. “You don’t know?”
Then Dean kisses him like it’s the first time he’s ever done it before, lips grazing against Sam’s, one big, warm palm cupped against his cheek. Sam can feel him about to pull away and look at him, scrutinize him to see if he’s acting like this is the first time, if he seems shocked, or if he’s coming home.
Sam doesn’t give him enough time to suspend in this uncertainty. He licks Dean’s lips, he forces his hands under the neck of Dean’s shirt so he can palm up his back, feel the rise of his spine between the two working planes of muscle that frame it, just like he imagined, just like he remembered. And the crashing relief of not being crazy, of not having invented this universe where he and Dean were even more fucked up than they already were knocks him over, sends him into a writhing, hissing mess under Dean’s palms.
“Fuck, Sammy, you’re so cold,” Dean mumbles into Sam’s neck, licking the flickering shadow of his pulse. “Shouldn’t have let you get like this,”
“Don’t care,” Sam tells Dean, head thrown back and hips mad and seeking, locking against his brother in angles he remembers, angles he’s longed for. Dean keeps smoothing his hair back from his brow, kissing the twitches and tics and gathered whorls of anxiety he finds there like he’s studied them. “God, Dean, I thought I made it all up,” Sam breathes.
“What’re you talking about,” Dean says and then kisses Sam. Sam surges into it. Dean’s hands under his boxers, Dean’s fingers slatting against his ribs and digging into the divots of soft tissue between muscle, Dean’s voice ripped over wordless, kiss-damp noises. Sam is a wreck, sucking on his brother’s tongue, holding him over his own body like he doesn’t know how to breathing without Dean’s weight crushing his lungs.
“I thought you forgot,” Dean says at some point, Sam’s knees over his shoulders, breath mouthing wetly over a scarred thigh. “Thought you didn’t remember this, Sammy.”
Sam brushes over Dean’s hair with a palm, back arching off rain-wet sheets, thinking distantly that he’s not as crazy as either of them think he is. They they’re both blind-alive, need the other to see, to pull cotton from sockets.
Dean swallows him, and Sam lashes his head back, lost to the same absolving rage of perfection he would have invented, if he knew how to invent his undoing. But Sam’s not an inventor.
He fucks his brother’s mouth, forces his eyes open so he can watch Dean’s used mouth stretched over him, his pupils blacking out the ocean with its vastness. Dean looks just how he remembers him.