spn_springfling | Lay Waste the Sky by stripytights for <user site="livejournal.c

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Title: Lay Waste the Sky
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Warnings: unacted on underage feelings

This is how it goes. Nothing changes.

When Sam was two, he cried without stopping for hours, red and shaking, no words in his mouth to explain that he could see Dean bursting into flames. Nothing comforted him except his six year old brother holding him until Dean’s arms got tired, and John bedded them both down, Sam hanging onto Dean’s finger still. Sam didn’t remember it, not then and not three years later when Dean first manifested. Sam’s own powers were dormant, slumbering still, tangled deep with demon blood, perverted by the touch, corrupted by the alienness of the pollutant.

Dean’s power was simple and violent on the surface, complex and strange beneath, but their father saw only the first half of that - that his son, who even as a child John relied on, his soldier, his first born, could hold flames in his hands that came from nothing at all. His son was not so different perhaps, from anything John Winchester might hunt. Dean knew for as much of his life as he could remember, that his father killed the things in the dark, and Dean had thought he might be one of them. John Winchester told them both, that what Dean was, wasn’t bad. What he might do, could be though. He told Sam as well, though at almost five Sam didn’t understand, except the Dean isn’t bad. Things go on mostly the same, except for the doubt in John’s eyes.

“You could be a superhero,” Sam said one time, in the dark. He hadn’t known about the evil out there long, Christmas was only a few months ago, the weight of the amulet was heavy and new around Dean’s throat, he’d not yet grown accustomed to the bump of it against his skinny chest.

There was a ridiculous swell of pleasure in Dean’s chest when Sammy said that and Dean stepped on it firmly, crushed it. It wasn’t a superpower, it was a mutation, and he hated it because it made his father look at him with measurement in his eyes. He had to be twice as good at everything that was needed from him, because Dean has already failed twice, failed to protect Sam from the shtriga - he can remember standing there willing the flames to come, to be useful just this once - failed at the one thing John had told him, the one task he’d given him. Failed at being the son John wants. “I already am,” he said instead. “I’m Batman remember?”

Sam made a sleepy noise of disagreement because he was a jerk. “There’s comics about people like you,” he said.

The feeling in Dean’s chest was unpleasant now. People like him. There were no people like him. The only ones he’d ever heard about are monsters. Witches maybe. “Go to sleep,” he said roughly, and closed his own eyes tight.

“Sorry,” Sam whispered. He was a jerk like only little brothers can be jerks, but he was also the only thing Dean had, all of his own, and Dean can’t hold a grudge.

Dean bottled up the fire so deep that sometimes he could forget what crawled under his skin, the warm lingering fire that still eddied in gusts and flames over his hands and arms - puberty played merry hell with it. He grew up like that, took it for granted, and Sam was the curious one who poked and prodded, asked and examined, in the chase they’ve always led. Dean says yes, and Sam says why, and somehow they always arrived at the same place.

Neither of them thought Sam might be like him. From the age he was old enough to understand what normal was, Sam wanted it, pretended it, acted it. Sam turned sixteen, then he was angry all the time and in a different way. He’d fight John on anything and everything. Dean who had grown up obedient from necessity, if not from impulse watched them, felt his own alienness again, envied Sam his indisputable bravery, the secureness of his position.

They seemed unable to come to an accord except in how they both lashed out at Dean if he told them to stop, and there was a whole long month where he gave up on them both and let them fight it out, kept his head down and ignored it, had to listen to his brother ask why he never took Sam’s side, and his father’s complaining about why Dean couldn’t talk some sense into his brother, felt isolated from them both, the uneasy surge of his power inside him rising in the darkness of the summer heat.

When it got like that, when he couldn’t ignore it any longer, he had to do something, get it out of him in some way. They were in the countryside, John on the trail of something he wouldn’t talk about, and the air was thick and crackling with the heaviness before a storm. Dean sat on a fence and stared out at endless fields of ripened yellow corn close to ready for the harvest, imagined lighting it up, how it’d spread on the sunbaked lands. He kept his hands tight to his side because he had the same feeling he got if he leant too close to a cliff edge, the unexplainable urge to throw himself off.

Instead he sat inside the old stone outhouse attached to the rundown building they were renting for the duration of this hunt, and threw fire at the walls from the seemingly endless store of it inside himself. There was nothing much in there to burn except himself and he’s never managed to do that, although other fire can harm him just fine.

Sam was waiting for him when he exited, sweating through his t-shirt, long and tall and thin, bent in half as he perched on the same fence Dean had sat on. “You can’t go inside like that,” he said mildly. Dean smelled like fire, carried the sweet stink of it with him, and they both knew what that did to their father.

“You going to stop being a little bitch any time soon?” Dean said, resolution to keep his mouth shut broken, now that he was emptied of the pressure of pent up fire.

Sam didn’t respond or fight back, lifted his shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. “I’ll stop being a little bitch when he realizes he can’t tell us what to do forever.”

There’s no reply to that and no end in sight.

The next day the rain came. Dean waded out of the house - John was long gone for the day, and squinted up at the sky, let the rain soak through his shirt as he waited for Sam to come back. When Sam landed, half defiant, half relieved that Dean didn’t shout at him, they squelched inside together in silence. Dean couldn’t shake the sudden tremor of longing in himself, couldn’t untangle if it was Sam or the way he flew.

Sam told Dean what Dean had guessed for the last few months, and what their father never does. It’s not the visions, those come later and they’re tainted by the blood drip fed down Sam’s throat. It’s not the telekinesis either or the other things that pile higgledy piggledy on top of one another, fighting for enough room in Sam’s giant skull, the question always there about how much of it is him, how much inflicted on him. This one’s cleaner, simpler. Sam can fly.

It went some way to explaining why things had got so much worse. They spent their time in a car, crushed up together, tempers rubbed red and raw. There had always been something in Sam that needed to be free, how much worse could it get than to be able to be, to be alone out in the spread of big blue, but unable to seize the chance. When Sam mixed that up with his silent outrage at the impossibility of normality, it was a seething mess that John couldn’t be bothered not to tread on, gunpowder dry and ready. Dean could do nothing to calm it down, too caught in his own nightmare of sudden unlocked wanting.

Sam was the third person Dean had ever met like him. He knew himself and he once saw a woman, only because he thinks, she wanted to be seen, sing a crystal bird out of nothing, like the clear sharpness of her voice bent the world to her whim. He wanted that clarity, that simpleness.

It was the one thing Dean didn’t tell John. He’d never begrudged Sam his position as John’s favorite, knew it might’ve been the only thing holding their family together sometimes, that grudging bemused affection John had for his youngest, the pride he has in him that he can hold his head up and argue back. Dean wasn’t sure if it would survive the second blow of a second twisted son.

It didn’t matter anyway, because Sam left. Smashed a hole in their family that Dean and John looked at each other silently through, as they quietly drifted apart. He tried to move on, left Sam to college, his father to the bottle. Choked back his flames and swallowed them. Tried not to think if Sam ever flew in Stanford, if on stormy days he ever risked it, or if he kept to his eyes to the ground. Picked the things to be glad of out of the whole mess, the tinge of unreasoning pride he felt in Sam. The knowledge that the choice had been taken out of his hands to ever make the mistake that would have driven them apart more thoroughly than distance ever could.

When he came back to get Sam, to drag him back into the life, the powers returned as well. They never went away, not really, but they receded into the background, useful for a spark to ignite the salt and gas, but not much more. It was Sam who’d told him all those years before, when between them they’d tested the limits of what Dean could do - Sam had lost his eyebrows on one occasion - that it seemed like Dean drew from something inside himself, and if only to himself, Dean acknowledged that truth. Now he got to touch Sam again, even if not in the way his darkest dreams wanted, got to laugh at Sam’s expressions, had all of Sam that he could want, a glut of it. Back with Sam again, everything seemed brighter, the flames hotter, as though there was more of him for them to feed on. He didn’t ask if Sam flew better, but the way Sam looked at him made hope twist in his chest, chased by guilt at the thought.

He was burning a corpse with a flick of his fingers instead of his lighter when the cops turned up at the graveyard, some routine patrol, and Sam slammed into his chest, and flew them both before they could be seen in the light of the grave. Dean was winded from Sam’s elbow, held onto him in a way that would give Sam endless material for the rest of their lives to make jokes about Lois Lane. It was the first time he’d flown - that disastrous plane ride didn’t count - and Sam’s grip was tight. Dean still wanted to be sick from it, swallowed it back and dug his fingers into Sam’s arm to let him know that stopping any time now would be great.

When they land, awkwardly, ungracefully on wet damp earth, Sam kissed him. Pressed close, soaked up the unwavering heat of Dean’s body, and kissed him as though he’d been waiting for this for years. There were protests on the tip of Dean’s tongue, every one of the arguments that he’d formulated over the years, on sick, sad drunken nights when he’d pretended to himself that this conversation could ever happen, every objection he’d ever put into Sam’s mouth springing to his own, as Sam’s mouth destroyed his replies.

“Dean,” Sam said against his mouth. “Dean,” pull of the word lost in the damp press of his lips, and Dean didn’t know how long that longing had been there. Thought of sullen brutal summer days and Sam flying for him, impossible potential in every line of him, pulled Sam in close. There was selfishness in it, but he was tired of denying it.

“Yes,” he said, and rolled them over until Sam was on top of him, Dean between him and the ground, felt the heavy thickness of Sam’s dick through his jeans, and bucked up in response. Sam’s fingers tightened on his wrists for a second as Sam fucked his tongue into Dean’s mouth, desperate and sloppy as though he still thought Dean might say no or pull away. They thrust together in a way that only brushed on what they needed, and Dean wanted to groan in frustration, in the desperation of wanting more as Sam sucked a mark on his neck, brushed fingers over the exposed expanse of his belly.

“You’re so warm,” Sam said, awe in his voice, and Dean grinned. He’d always been warm, some function of his power, wrapped his arms around Sam, hugged him closer, shared the warmth of himself between them, felt Sam shiver against him. Dean thrust a hand up the back of his shirt, drew heat down Sam’s spine, chased the goosebumps away with a brush of his hand. Sam arched into the touch, rush of air as he exhaled, dick grinding against Dean’s, as he raised his shoulders. Dean obliged, spread both hands across his skin, and Sam’s eyes opened, heat matching Dean’s hands. “I’ve thought about this for years,” he said, hurried rush of words as though to excuse, to mitigate, the inexcusable.

Then his fingers were at Dean’s belt buckle, yanking at the metal, tugging at the damp material, until Dean helped push them down just a little, brushed his fingers over Sam’s neck as Sam swallowed him down, choked himself wet and messy on Dean’s dick as though this was the first time he’d done this. Dean shuddered under his mouth, under the strong grip of Sam’s hands, couldn’t resist touching the curve of Sam’s cheek, watching the way he leant into the warmth, sucked strong and hard, as though insistent on dragging Dean’s orgasm from him, no teasing or denial, and sooner than he’d have liked, Dean came, emptied himself into Sam’s mouth, his own turn to shake and shiver, as Sam pressed his head to his thigh in silence. As he stroked his hand through Sam’s hair, Dean realized they were in the town park.

“Come on,” he said quietly, tugged Sam up, wanted to return the favour there and then, but aware now of where they were, he decided to wait until they were home. “Fly us back.”

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From:

skeletncloset.livejournal.com

Boys with powers! And you tied it so well into cannon. This was a wonderful and thoughtful read. Makes me pine for the early seasons. It's sensual, imaginative, and everything I never knew I wanted.

From:

Lay Waste the Sky by stripytights for <user site="livejournal.c

Lay Waste the Sky by stripytights for <user site="livejournal.c

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