spn_springfling | we are all somebody's monster by last

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Title: we are all somebody’s monster
Pairing: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Rating: Teen (15+)
Warnings: Mentions of torture memories; instances of light/implied sadism and masochism

Dean was never much for a confessional, never much for prayer before it meant something tangible like an angel’s personal extension. Once that had been because he didn’t believe that there was anyone to confess to; now it was that he couldn’t be sure who would be listening.

He was never much for asking—for answers, for reasons, for favors, for forgiveness—and never much for faith in absolution. What was done was done; he’d (probably) done it and that was all there was to it.

He’d been to Hell, paid off some of those debts already.

Dean wasn’t much for divinity, for worship and devotion. Six days out of the week, he was more likely to go down punching a holy jaw than not; he’d had to bite back the urge to snap at God’s delicate little human-suit more than a few times while he was loafing around their bunker.

He wasn’t much for higher powers or master plans or the grand designs of the universe. This world was a crapshoot—always had been—and if that’s how things were meant to be then everyone had been following some fairly shitty blueprints from the start.

Besides, he was on a first-name basis with both The Beginning and The End and he still wasn’t ready to vouch for them one-hundred percent.

Dean had never been much for destiny or the meant to be. No, he’d built himself as a believer in blood and pain as a truth he could trust—the sting and burn of it was his cold, solid proof.

The slice of a blade running thin over flesh, the tear of claws into muscle, the crack of bone against metal bone against glass bone against grit-crusted concrete. The licks of heat off the smoldering corpse of a victim, a friend, a part of the family. The gaping, jagged pieces of his heart cut out—over slammed doors and wide, wet eyes and words spat out like scalpels—and never quiet sewn back in right. Those were all objective, quantifiable, real.

Dean wasn’t much for glasses half full, for hope as a game plan or best-case scenarios. It just didn’t make sense, and he had lived enough lives to know that everything goes sour eventually. No use in pretending otherwise, in acting like dear diary-ing to the big empty spaces would change any of that.

---
Sam tended to die on Wednesdays. Dean kept track—how could he not keep track—and after the whole near-miss of an apocalypse (not a near-miss for Dean; how could it be?) he’d had a lot of time to think. Review. Consider all the other options they hadn’t been able to take. Dean would consider himself in circles during the quiet pauses between Ben and Lisa and it always came back to Wednesday.

Dean didn’t confess, didn’t pray. But he wondered: if there weren’t any Wednesdays, would Sam still be alive? Still be with him?

Some days, he wondered pretty goddamn hard about that.

---
Dean had known pain—visceral, pure, impossible pain and there weren’t enough syllables in his language to even begin to describe it—but Sam had burned. Fires had been set in his soul that suffocated down to embers before being fanned again. He’d burned (twice) from the inside out; his cells had to be scorched earth by now. Scars healed but ashes didn’t regrow and Dean didn’t know how Sam managed to root himself again, time after time. But he knew what toolkit he’d passed down to his (baby, broken) brother to help keep Sam’s anchors from unhinging.

Dean gave him pain—slick and bloody—to hold back the flames.

He dug sharp into Sam’s fresh hunting wounds, shoved him against rough seams in the wall so his head snapped back with the force of it, caught him in headlocks and leaned just a little too heavy against his windpipe.

He hated it—hated the ease of it, how his hands could relearn so quickly, how his body could be repurposed so smoothly. How it was against Sam when all Dean had ever wanted was to be for him.

“More—” Sam choked out with Dean’s hands around his neck.

And Dean hated how Sam’s voice, a fluttery crackle through clenched teeth, made him feel.
Like the bottomless gut-drop, the vine-creep of unclean pleasure when a soul was searing in just the right kind of agony.

He hated that the most.

---
Dean was a hunter of monsters: the world’s, his own, and Sam’s. Purgatory had proven a point that didn’t need to be made—Dean was built for the fight.

But Sam—Sam whose tissues and cartilage had been molded for the containment of evil—Sam was made for pain. Sam was wired to withstand things that Dean thought, if the tables were turned, might have been enough to break him.

Dean was built for the fight of keeping Sam alive, keeping all his loose ends bundled up, keeping him grounded and tethered—to life, to sanity. To Dean.

That’s what he told himself as he kissed away his soul, as he bartered for his brother with an angelic stranger, as he strapped Sam to a chair and watched Cas and Crowley drill around in all the parts of him that Dean couldn’t reach.

That’s what he told himself and he almost—almost—believed it.

---
When they were young—holed up in a motel double or some friend-of-a-friend-of-Dad’s hunting cabin, nothing to do but kick around and poke at each other—they watched old movies. Dean had snuck midnight viewings of all the things Dad had told him he couldn’t see while Sammy was still young enough to fall asleep buried under two sets of blankets without asking a lot of questions. When Sam started getting up—wandering over to the TV and rubbing his eyes, a small voice in the hazy dark wondering what Dean was doing—he began changing the channel. He kept it black and white, with people in funny suits and cars that had to be even older than their Impala, and cleared a space on the sofa next to him. And Sammy, he’d ignore it and crawl into Dean’s lap instead, nestling himself against Dean’s chest right under his chin.

Dean started growing while Sam stayed small and the snug fit became wide and loose. Then Dean slowed down and Sam sprouted in all directions—long limbs and shaggy hair and courseless, bitter rage—and Sam’s spot (on the sofa, in Dean’s life) began to shift.

A woman they’d worked a job for down in the Oklahoma panhandle, the wife of a hunter who’d gone missing a few years back on a ghoul run, had taken Dean on as a confidante while their dad and Sam hit the lore. Poured him tea spiked with top-shelf whiskey, offered him a place on the love seat, squeezed her hand just above his knee as she talked.

“You got anyone special out there kid, waitin’ for you to come home?” Her fingers had been warm and firm and in any other situation Dean would’ve guessed that she was fishing for a ride on something just this side of legal and pretty.

“Nah.” And it wasn’t a full lie because home came with him nowadays, shoulders hunched and gangly arms crossed tight in the backseat.

She’d smiled, low and sad, and had told him that someday he’d meet someone who’d be everything. Who’d make him feel things he couldn’t imagine now, and he’d understand.

As he stood on the porch of that condemned safehouse and tracked the lines and shadows of Sam’s back, etched it into his brain as it moved farther and farther down the road towards the horizon, he remembered the tips of her fingers digging welts above his kneecap.

He’d known, but that was the first time he understood—he would never feel about anyone the way he felt about Sam.

---
Of all the surprises Dean’d had in his life, this was the one he was never ready for: Sam always came back. Kicking, screaming, guilted, tricked, begging and pleading but he always came back and he always stayed. Not without hiccups but he was still here, wasn’t he?

Which was something (which was everything) because if Sam wasn’t here then Dean wouldn’t be here. It was as simple as that, always had been.

Dean gave him what he needed, gave him pain to recalibrate and conflict to struggle against. Gave him rough touch and half-expressed feeling and just enough truth to keep him in the room for another day. No use thinking farther ahead than that.

But Dean did think farther ahead, couldn’t stop himself, didn’t catch it until he was already there. A week, a month, a year. Five, ten, twenty, a lifetime and Sam was there every time. The only constants for him were Sammy and monsters, in that order.

And he knew that the only thing that could slice them down the spine was each other. The only weapons that had any lasting effectiveness against the legendary Winchester brothers were themselves and the monsters were starting to get with the program. Learning to tip them a degree too far one way or the other and let the self-destructive heavy lifting fall back onto Sam and Dean.

No one—no thing—needed Dean’s help with tearing them to shreds. Didn’t need annotations for the things that Sam—shirt cut open or jeans split up the seams, bubbles of red-black soaking into the fabric, breath ragged and staccato—did to him. Didn’t need a behind the scenes tour of the way Dean’s mouth went dry and his heart punched through his ribcage and his eardrums buzzed static and his skin flared hot.

Didn’t need a map to the brain centers that shorted out when Sam swallowed down groans, gnawed at his lips and challenged Dean to push a little harder. Apply a fraction more pressure and Sam’s cloudy, swamp-dark eyes held his gaze without blinking.

I can take it.

Dean knew Sam could take it; he wasn’t so sure about himself.

And his lockbox collection of memories—moments of gentleness stretched gummy like taffy between them, times when Sam had let him linger too close for too long and they’d never talked about it but it was there, had always been there.

Nothing, no one, needed the revelation that those finite, fleeting exceptions to the rules of their lives were the purest rounds of torture Dean ever had to endure.

---
It was a Wednesday in the backwoods of the Oregon-Idaho border when the werewolf that Dean was supposed to be taking care of picked up Sam’s gun and shot him with it.

Sam was dying—Dean knew it, could feel it in the stitching that held him together at his core. But he’d told himself that he would know it, feel it, if Sam died. He’d felt it before in the rain and mud at Cold Oak, on his knees in the dead grass at Stull Cemetery. Something had fundamentally changed, not just in him but in the world, and there was no repair no return no recovery. There was only the frantic grasping at any option, any chance that might bring Sam back and—failing that—the countdown to when Dean could find his place next to his brother again.

There’d been a few close calls, sure, and a few reality-loops that took them to death and back but it had always felt different. So Dean trusted his gut, trusted his instincts and the fact that Sam was sewn into his soul, when he left their two rescued hikers with him in the easement cabin. Five minutes to grab some branches for a litter; five minutes and Sam would be fine.

He came back and he hadn’t felt it, so it couldn’t be true. But Sam was silent and still and a chill trickled out from under his four layers (But Dean, he’d complained. You know it’s gonna get cold up in those mountains.) and what hurt worse than all that was realizing that he hadn’t known, that the world hadn’t crumbled like it was supposed to the second Sam stopped being a part of it.

Sam being alive, Sam staying alive was always as close to a miracle as Dean got. As close to the idea of being bound by fate and destiny as he was comfortable getting. But this time was skewed, shattered; everything was more and Dean couldn’t say why.

“What did you do?” Sam asked and Dean could pluck the notes of pain in his voice like a symphony. “When you thought I was dead?”

“I knew you weren’t dead.” But he hadn’t.

“I knew.”

---
Dean watched Sam sleep in the dark, lights out and there was nothing but the faint outline of a back that he’d engraved in his heart years ago, knowing he’d follow it wherever it went. Sam’d let him check the hospital stitches and it was a privilege, a gift, a thank you.

But Dean didn’t need to be thanked, didn’t want it.

He wanted—

“You’re gonna mess your whole body up sleeping in that chair.” There was a waver in Sam’s voice, but it wasn’t pain. He shifted onto his side and left half the mattress empty. “It’s okay, Dean.”

No, it’s not. But he was already edging his way under the covers, already reaching to pull Sam against his chest, already tucking Sam’s head under his chin. His hands itched under shirt seams and ghosted along the corners of sterile bandages and he pressed but not hard.

“More.” Sam groaned, pushed out towards Dean’s fingers but Dean held him firm. “Please, Dean, more—”

“Okay, Sammy. Okay.” Dean pulled his hands back from the wound. Curled his arms high around Sam’s chest, tangled their fingers together, and kissed at his pulse. Tasted Sam’s heartbeat under his lips, licked at the salt in his sweat. Ran his teeth along the edges of Sam’s ear and whispered that Sam didn’t need to be quiet. Not for him.

And Sam was made for pain—was a monument to what suffering could be under the right (the wrong) hands—but he deserved so much more. Deserved things that Dean could give him (god Dean needed to give him) if he wanted them. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow—but hearing Sam’s soft-cracked whimpers and tight-hitched breaths, Dean knew that he could wait.

So no, Dean was never much for religion. Never much for idols or altars or Sunday service, back before Dad had stopped making them go. Never much for faith that bread and wine and weekly blessings would keep any of them safe.

But now Sam was folded in his arms—unruly hair tickling the line of Dean’s jaw as he arched and burrowed and the air was thick with reverence between them.

And when Dean closed his eyes the world was Sam, like it was supposed to be, and for a heavy half-moment he could almost believe in a sanctuary for them both.