Sam had the Impala in his sights when he heard muffled laughter behind him. If Sam didn’t know better, he’d think it was just another group of kids talking amongst themselves, but he wasn’t so gullible anymore. His grip tightened on his backpack strap and every muscle in his body tensed. While he kept walking, he prepared himself to be forcibly stopped.
Sam was just within the Impala’s blind spot when he was pulled back by his backpack and surrounded by three boys. He didn’t need to see their faces to know who they were — Derek, Adam, and Alex, all whom just so happened to share a majority of his classes. Their freshman class was small, but they all shared a total of six classes and Sam didn’t get a break even during lunch. He wasn’t going to ask to rearrange his schedule to avoid them, however, it wasn’t worth the effort on someone who was going to be leaving the school in two months max.
So, he had to endure, and endure he did. He looked past their shoulders as they started in on their harassment, trying to tune them out until they got bored or left him an opening to run to the car.
“Fucking look at me, Winchester!” Derek sprayed, which Sam winced at but made no move to mop away. If he raised his hand for any reason, they would take it as an attempt to defend himself, which always led to shoving, kicking, and eventually punching. Sam still had bruises from the last time they trapped him like this, just starting to turn greenish-yellow. His cheek was still deeply bruised and his lip was scabbing now.
Sam met his gaze with no expression on his face, knowing better than to try anything.
“You set off my fag-dar in history today.” He shoved Sam hard, sending his shoulder flying back into Alex’s chest. “It’s like you’re asking for it, Winchester.”
Alex shoved him into Derek, and he and Adam started cackling.
“Look, he’s hitting on you!” They could have said in unison, their voices were exact matches for each other.
Derek punched him in the stomach, a heavy blow that felt like it could have rearranged his organs. He dropped to his knees and grabbed his aching middle. Sam winced at the wave of pain shooting out from the point of impact, ignoring the kicks that were landing on his legs and back. Sam heaved a few breaths and tried to quell the churning in his stomach without much success. Bile stung the back of his throat.
He was so fixated on keeping his stomach acid down that he didn’t notice them stop taunting and kicking. Sam saw their feet move away from him to a patch of dry grass next to the sidewalk, suddenly joined by a fourth pair of feet that seemed familiar. Scuffed brown boots, the hard rubber sole of the left starting to detach.
Sam shot up, more surprised than he should have been to see Dean standing in front of the group, arms crossed over his chest. All he could hear was blood rushing in his ears and his own rattling breaths, but he could see that Dean wasn’t buying whatever they were telling him. The smile on his face was the one he gave to liars who he immediately “caught in their bullshit,” as he would say. He watched the boys, unable to read their lips but knowing that they must have been brushing what they did off as a joke.
All attention suddenly turned to Sam, when Dean knelt down onto one knee to look him in the eye. In spite of his calm exterior, his hands were shaking and his pupils were blown. His voice flooded into Sam’s ears, gruff but gentle.
“You know these guys, Sammy?”
He nodded once, his head sloshing on his neck.
“And I take it they aren’t your friends, are they?” Dean glanced over at the boys who still seemed to be under the impression that they’d won. That at worst Dean would tell them off for being bullies and threaten to get the principal involved.
Sam felt bile rising in the back of his throat.
“No, we’re totally Fagchester’s friends. We’re all butt buddies!” Derek looked pleased with himself, very clever indeed, and Dean’s smile turned to a scowl.
Sam didn’t see what went down, he only came to when Dean was standing alone, no longer surrounded. The boys ran off, faces bloodied and tears streaking their cheeks, leaving Sam and Dean on the sidewalk only a few paces from the Impala. He breathed hard and staggered to keep himself upright, straightening once he saw Sam was looking. Dean walked to stand at Sam’s side and placed his hand on his shoulder, clasping and unclasping his hand like he was a human-sized stress ball.
“Are you okay?” Sam asked, his eyes fixed on Dean’s busted lip and the blood dribbling down his chin. He could only guess who’d gotten a few blows in on him.
He nodded, and once he was satisfied that the boys weren’t going to come back, he turned his gaze to Sam. “I’m fine. Dad’s done worse.”
That answer wasn’t satisfying, but Sam bit his tongue.
“They’re gonna want to get me back for that,” he said as they walked to the car, mopping away the blood spray he could taste on his lips.
“Screw ‘em.” Dean spat a bloodied loogie onto the ground and met Sam’s gaze with a hardness he only saw when he was training with Dad. “They say shit about you again and I’ll beat their asses, Sammy.”
Sam furrowed his brow and slid into the passenger seat, looking down at the tear in the knee of his jeans. It wasn’t like he could fight back, but he wished it wasn’t Dean who had to take a beating to get Sam’s bullies off his back. It didn’t feel good watching his brother nurse wounds that weren’t his to begin with.
—
Dean cleaned the pan he used to make mac and cheese while Sam tried to focus on his homework. All he could think about was the bruise on Dean’s cheek and the cut on his lip that he had to eat around during dinner. It was hard to care about pre-calc when he still felt where Dean’s blood had sprayed across his face. He’d washed his face in the sink after they got back to the room, but no amount of scrubbing washed away the pinpricking sensation on his mouth and cheeks. Sam worried he might feel it forever, a shame he couldn’t live down.
The images started to come to him the longer he sat with the knowledge of what his brother had done for him — he could see Dean punching the boys, getting slugged in the mouth by Derek, Alex doubling over and whining after Dean had used his stomach like a meatbag. It was upsetting to remember it all even in still bursts, but he forced himself to refocus on his homework, sequestering those images off to a dark corner where he would only see them again in his nightmares.
He looked over his shoulder at Dean, glancing at the TV as he scrubbed powdered cheese, milk, and margarine residue from the inside of the pan. While his lip was swollen and his eye was starting to blacken from the nearby trauma to his cheek, he seemed to not care at all about his injury. In fact, Dean looked over at Sam and his expression didn’t falter — mildly amused, slightly tired, a little smug. Dean was still Dean.
Sam hunched over his homework and started scribbling down answers in a hand scratchier than his teachers were used to. He was sure his brother would tell him to try and play that up for sympathy, saying his brother got in a fight and he was too emotionally distraught to finish his work. Dean was the expert at homework slacking, though his excuses seemed to matter less and less as the years went by and teachers realized that he just wasn’t going to do the work. Bad grades be damned, Dean kept a rigid line between school and home. Sam couldn’t imagine getting homework assignments and just letting them rot in the back of his mind or the bottom of his backpack. Expectations were too great and he was sure he’d be sick if he tried to tell a teacher he wasn’t able to finish one of his assignments even in the most severe circumstances. Dean would tell him that was pussy shit and he deserved a break every once in a while, but it was more comforting to maintain some kind of routine when the rest of his life was ever-changing.
Dean had forgotten the pan in the sink when the commercials ended and the movie they’d been watching continued: a guy and a girl running through the woods trying to escape a masked murderer. Sam didn’t feel the same feelings that Dean did when he watched those kinds of scary movies, and he was certain that even after puberty his thoughts wouldn’t change. It was easy to turn his attention back to expanding sums when all he was missing was boobs and corn syrup blood. Dean, on the other hand, was transfixed and would tell Sam off if he tried to change the channel to something else.
Sam heard Dean mumbling under his breath to himself, catching words like “sweet” and “whoa” in a sea of incoherent whispering.
“No way homework’s more interesting than huge racks, Sammy,” Dean sounded baffled that Sam really had no interest in the girl. “I beg you, be a normal kid for once and look!”
Sam practically got a faceful of boob when he gave in to Dean’s pleading, unsure at what point during the chase she would have had her shirt slashed open. He watched for what felt like another five minutes of the girl squeezing the front of her shirt shut as she navigated around a dark cabin. Sam could feel Dean’s agitation growing, and he wondered if he really only watched these kinds of movies to see topless girls. Dad got him a fake ID for his birthday, he could’ve rented porno or bought nudie mags if that was what he wanted.
They watched the rest of the movie in near-silence, the guy getting killed in a very convenient way so the girl could be the one to defeat the sometimes-lumbering, faceless killer. Sam could acknowledge, in the back of his mind, that Dean likely had gotten horny watching the movie, and he was pretty sure that he’d hear him jerking off in the bathroom later despite how hard he tried to stay quiet. Close quarters, Sam wasn’t traumatized by any of that anymore. But he couldn’t take his mind off of the thought, it lingered even as he finished his homework, brushed his teeth, changed out of his blood and spit-spattered clothes and lied down to sleep.
The TV was off, the only sound in their room coming from the sink running in the bathroom. Still, that thought permeated and Sam wondered if Dean was managing to hide the sound of him masturbating underneath the water’s stream. He must have hit his head, Alex must not have pushed him down by his back, there had to be some explanation for why his eyes lingered on Dean’s lips, his mind lingered on the idea of his brother touching himself. Though, maybe idea wasn’t the right word. He was starting to think it was more a hope than anything else. Something was wrong with Sam, deeply wrong.
That was when the idea came into his head: the way for him to thank Dean for saving his ass. His eyes went wide as the words started to take shape into his head, to form concepts that became visuals that became stimuli that Sam wanted desperately to ignore the impact of. He propped his hands up behind his head and stared at the popcorn ceiling like that might cleanse the thought from his mind.
A minute. Two minutes. Five. Ten. The thought only grew legs and started to run wild, ending with a fantasy that left Sam’s face bright red. He spread his legs apart and attempted not to put any more friction on himself when Dean stepped out of the bathroom, the underside of his lower lip fitted with a butterfly bandage that Sam knew would fall off in ten minutes flat. Dean wasn’t going to be able to stop himself from yelling, laughing, smiling, anything.
Sam had to bring his thighs back together to give Dean space to lie down, too old to still be sharing the same bed but knowing how Dad could get when he slept on a couch. He could see flashes of his fantasy as Dean settled in beside him, lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling just like him. The silence was tolerable for a moment, even as his mind raced and his heart started pounding into his ribcage. His throat was dry and his head was throbbing, but he was able to focus on the ugly pattern in the ceiling rather than the stirring in his pants and the images he could only blame on himself.
“You okay?”
Dean broke him out of his trance. He turned his attention back to the Real Dean, seeing his blown pupils and his twitching fingers. Sam could think of a few things he wanted those fingers to do to him. He turned onto his side and tried to ease the sudden pressure put on him by his shifting posture.
He nodded once. His throat was painfully dry. “Yeah. I, uhm, I wanted to thank you for earlier. So, thanks.”
Dean seemed to notice that something was getting to him, but he didn’t immediately prod.
“It was no problem, Sammy. That’s what big brothers are for.” Dean smiled easily even with his twitching, swollen lip.
Sam furrowed his eyebrows, guilt twisting up inside him. He didn’t even have a good reason to be upset when Dean was so happy to defend him, whatever the cost. Still, Sam couldn’t let that guilt fester.
“I don’t like seeing you get hurt because of me.”
Dean’s eyebrows raised. He turned onto his side to face Sam and tucked one hand underneath his pillow like he anticipated this would take a while. It wasn’t like he was wrong, but it did still feel like a callout of some kind. Sam kept his hands wrapped around himself, squeezing tighter as he tried to force back the nausea creeping over him.
“Well, I don’t like seeing you get hurt because people are dicks. There’s no way I’m not stepping in and getting those dicks off your back.” He paused for a second before adding: “Forget I said ‘dicks’ that many times, okay?”
Sam smiled faintly, dicks forgotten.
“Can I just give you something? To thank you for defending my honor, even if I don’t think you should ever do it again.” He was serious, but Dean seemed to be ignoring that as always. Probably dismissing it as Sam being prissy.
Dean nodded, sitting up like he was preparing to be given a box. Sam began to second-guess himself—which was a lie, he had been second-guessing himself since the idea popped into his head—and he hesitated to get up, watching Dean to gauge how he’d react. If he didn’t like his gift, Sam would never do it again, but if Sam didn’t do it he’d be thinking about it for the rest of his life.
He sat up to meet Dean, his head suddenly feeling weightless. He was going to do it. Sam’s throat was bone dry and he grabbed onto the first thing his trembling fingers could reach, knotting and unknotting his fingers in the sheets.
“Everything okay, Sammy?”
He only caught a glimpse of Dean’s face, contorted with worry, pulling at the bandaid that was doing nothing to keep his split lip together. Sam had to do it now.
Dean was, thankfully, still as Sam leaned in and placed a shy kiss on his lips. He tried not to overthink it anymore, focusing on how Dean’s hot, swollen lip felt between Sam’s. Dean’s hands stayed at his sides and Sam couldn’t free his fingers from the sheets, but he didn’t know what he’d do with his hands if he had them free. It was only a few seconds of silence, but with how fast Sam’s heart was beating it felt closer to a minute.
Sam practically jumped away when he opened his eyes and found Dean staring at him. His eyes were wide, but the look on his face didn’t immediately set off warning signs in Sam’s mind. He should have felt worried, he shouldn’t have done it at all, yet he was too fascinated not to try. Even as doubt and regret started creeping up in the back of his mind, he still struggled to acknowledge what he’d really just done — rejection crept up his spine like a bone-deep chill.
He opened his mouth to apologize, but never managed to get any words out.
Dean scooped Sam up in his arms, bringing him down onto the bed and kissing him roughly. It was like a fire had been lit inside him the way he groped at Sam and crushed their mouths together. He felt Dean’s erection brushing against the inside of his thigh, and once again his mind was drifting off and imagining what it would be like to lose his virginity to Dean. One idea at a time, he reminded himself, forcing himself back into the moment so he could really enjoy kissing Dean.
Which he did, there was no mistaking it. He was getting wet at the force he was using, the way he pressed Sam down into the mattress and tangled their bodies together. Dean’s hand moved down his back until he was groping at Sam’s ass and bringing him up into the tented front of his jeans. Sam slotted against him perfectly, or Dean slotted against Sam perfectly, their bodies seemingly made for each other and each other alone.
Really, the only thing that wasn’t perfect about it was the lingering Kraft cheese taste in Dean’s mouth. Sam had anticipated his first kiss to not taste like a cheap box of mac and cheese, but at the same time, it felt right. It felt real, even if he wasn’t sure he enjoyed the grumbling, fluttering mess his stomach became.
Dean moved a hand down to Sam’s crotch, grabbing at him and making him gasp in surprise. He’d never even touched himself like that before, he wasn’t prepared for how it would feel to be groped that way by someone else — Sam would need to change again when Dean was finished with him. He was breaking out in chills that rushed over him irregularly when Dean touched him, bit his lower lip, rubbed his erection against Sam’s thigh, but it only served to excite him further.
“What do you want me to do to you?” Dean breathed raggedly against Sam’s mouth, like he was possessed by something. Sam supposed that lust could be a demon, especially when it came to Dean.
“Just keep kissing me, please,” Sam almost begged, clashing his mouth against Dean’s happily.
There was no grace or rhythm or skill to anything they were doing and Sam was more than pleased. While he’d meant it as a gift to Dean, some part of him knew that if he reciprocated, Sam would be greatly rewarded for what he’d done to his brother. He now knew what Dean’s erection felt like scratching against his thigh, trying to dig out of his jeans and find the part of Sam he was so eagerly touching. So close, thoughts spiraling in his mind about if anything would change if Dean took his virginity right then and there. If he’d go to school tomorrow and someone would be able to tell that Sam wasn’t who he had been yesterday. He was sure that nobody would, but that didn’t mean he didn’t still get a rise out of thinking about it.
It was like there was something watching them and deciding when they’d had enough. Just when Dean snaked his hand underneath the elastic waistband of Sam’s pajama shorts, a noise.
The door’s lock clicked and both brothers jumped away from each other like this was a routine they had down pat. Sam felt the cold absence of Dean’s body against his own, only realizing in that moment that these feelings couldn’t be blamed on non-existent head trauma. Or, if they could, something was very wrong and he’d need something more than a trip to the ER. His heart drummed against his ribs and he scrambled underneath the covers, Dean leaning against the headboard like he was waiting up for Dad. He crossed his legs and Sam feigned sleep.
Dad came in a few moments later, not bothering to kick his boots off at the door as Sam didn’t hear them clatter against the wall. He wasn’t drunk, either, he heard no stumbling, just their dad shutting the door behind him and trudging over to the couch before collapsing onto it with a heavy thud. He was out before his head even hit the arm, he’d started snoring mid-fall. It was nerve-wracking, but a small wave of comfort came over Sam knowing that he hadn’t even gotten a chance to properly see them before he passed out. Still, Sam pretended to sleep a little longer until he felt Dean shifting in the bed beside him. He couldn’t be too careful.
Sam and Dean stared at each other, wordlessly acknowledging that there was yet another secret that they’d take to their graves. Grave if they weren’t discreet enough. But Sam considered that fact, he turned it around in his head a couple of times, before deciding that he could trust Dean to keep their secret. That he could trust Dean to not say anything when they did this again, because he certainly wasn’t.