Conversational Winchester
by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
laurificus, Sam/Dean, PG, 2749 words
"I spent three months getting your soul back. It was supposed to make you better company."
Written for the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
silverbullets lightning challenge, for the prompt affectionate threats/insults. Thank you to mollyamory for looking it over.
***
Conversational Winchester
Sam was a pissy little bastard. Dean knew this, like he knew U2 sucked and the Cowboys were evil. It was just something that was, unchangeable as his terrible hair and his unforgivable height, the kind of thing hell and an almost apocalypse and a year long stretch of soullessness couldn't redress.
Sure, he'd managed penitent for about three hours after Cas's RoboSam revelations. Dean got pie and first shower and control of the remote out of it; Sam got mopey and droopy and generally guilt-ridden. It was kinda nice, Dean figured, that Sam beating himself up was on the table again, but he was done with that, had been for a long time.
"I spent three months getting your soul back," he said, smacking him on the shoulder on his way to bed. "It was supposed to make you better company."
Sam gave up his apparently intense study of the ducks on the wallpaper, and looked at Dean, instead. His eyes were a little wide, his mouth pinched in surprise, like he was seeing Dean for the first time. Dean could get that. Everything else aside, he'd lost a year and a half, and his last memory had been jumping into hell with no expectation of getting out. Dean stroked his thumb along the sharp jut of Sam's collarbone, his grip maybe tighter than it had to be. There wasn't much he could do about some of what was going on in Sam's head, not yet, but he could make a start on what T1000 had done.
"Seriously," he said, loading his voice with all the big brother authority he'd ever had. "Let it go."
Maybe not the best pep talk ever, but he was a little out of practice. RoboSam hadn't needed much in the way of confidence boosting, after all. That made him grin, wide and possibly stupidly. Sam didn't grin back, but his expression had gone thoughtful, his forehead wrinkled up and his brows drawn together, that lost, haunted look in his eyes replaced by something infinitely sharper. Not inclined to talk about his feelings, apparently, judging from the way he was just staring at Dean, but Dean would take what he could get. Well, at least for now.
In the morning, he'd buy Sam a girly coffee, and maybe even let him drive, and that would be a better speech by far. He squeezed Sam's shoulder, and then climbed under the covers, the bed frame creaking elaborately as he settled. For a while, he felt Sam watching him, and then he heard Sam moving around the room, getting into his own bed. Sam was out almost instantly, a year and some of not getting any sleep at all still catching up with him, and that was about nine kinds of soporific for Dean. He fell asleep half forming a plan: all the things they could do now, all the ways the world had opened up for them again.
But in the morning, penitent Sam had apparently been killed in his sleep by cranky Sam, or at the very least severely injured. He was already marching in from a coffee run when Dean woke up, just like he had been almost every other day in the last six months. The motel door slammed behind him, and Dean's stomach lurched unpleasantly at the irrational thought that Sam's soul had snuck out again when dean's back was turned, because that was exactly the kind of thing Sam might do. The idea lasted right until Sam shoved the steaming plastic cup in his face, his jaw stuck out mulishly, the thin, disapproving line of his mouth doing all the talking Sam wasn't. His nose and ears ruined the whole effect, though, magnificently red from the cold as they were. Dean tried to hide his smile behind his coffee cup, but Sam glared at him, anyway.
"Sleep good?" Dean asked, innocent as he knew how to be.
"Of course not," Sam said, as if he didn't fall into comas every chance he got these days. "There are people three states over who couldn't sleep through your snoring." He got an impressive thunk out of his Styrofoam cup as he set it down on the precariously balanced nightstand between their beds. The stand wobbled, and then it teetered alarmingly, and then it settled, probably realising Sam wasn't going to pay it any attention even if it did topple over. Sam was too busy packing up, movements sharp and jerky like his clothes had committed some great injustice against him, and he went on bitching all the while. "I thought of about twenty-six ways to kill you only using things commonly found in motel rooms. And not just the obvious ones like smothering you with your pillow."
Dean hmmed thoughtfully. "Twenty-six doesn't sound like all that many to me," he said. He drained the rest of his coffee, looking out the window at the cars beyond, the bright, random patterns of ice on their roofs. There wasn't snow here yet, but there would be soon; the sky was heavy and pressing with the promise of it. Time to move now or wait it out. The room wasn't so bad--fading blue carpet and lumpy mattresses, sure, but the place was clean, and the blankets were thick; there was a vending machine in reception and a diner across the street. Most importantly, there was a TV with more than two working channels.
"Game day," Dean said, to the rigid line of Sam's back. "You wanna stay here for one?"
Sam didn't turn around, just went on shoving stuff into his bad. "Bobby's got a case for us," he said. He did turn, then, his hands big on the straps of his duffle. "Ghost in a well, if you can believe that." He was actually smiling, though only a little, like he was doing it against his better judgment. Dean still returned it, fleeting disappointment ignored. Dean had had a year of grief and loss and thinking one more day of it would kill him, but he'd had a year of construction work and golf and Sunday football, too, of family dinners and Ben's homework, of realising bit by bit that the world wasn't ending anymore. Wasn't fair for Dean to expect Sam to be right there with him yet, but Dean could give him the time to get there, because they had that now.
"You're totally Lassie in this scenario," Dean said, cracking his back ostentatiously as he stood. He got another frown in return, and then the story of kids being lured to the well, and then they were leaving, and Sam didn't look nearly impressed enough when Dean handed over the keys. Dean was willing to cut him all kinds of slack for all kinds of things, but still, there were lines.
"There are lines," he said darkly as Sam slipped into the driver's seat beside him. Sam looked at him blankly, but Dean had caught the quick, furtive pat Sam had given the wheel, so he could afford to be magnanimous. "Drive already," he said, and maybe rested his hand on Sam's neck for just a second. Just because he could. Sam shook him off, irritated, and Dean sighed.
"Soulless you was actually pretty friendly," he said, and he was reasonably sure Sam didn't put too much on the throttle only because he new better. He glared at Dean, instead, all genuine outrage, and Dean gave him the finger. Then he slumped against the window, and closed his eyes, because Sam wasn't the only one who hadn't slept a lot recently. Sam would be in a better mood when he woke up, probably; a long drive and time to think in peace normally did wonders.
Only Sam wasn't, not that day or the one after. Dean supposed maybe it was for the best. Would've been too good to be true otherwise, the sort of thing Dean couldn't have believed in. As it was, even with Sam refusing to watch the Star Wars marathon with him, or to play pool against him in the local bar, it still felt like that. Like some djinn wish-fulfilment, Sam back from hell and not the train reck Cas had promised he would be. Sam yelling at Dean for using his toothbrush; Sam sleep-stupid and confused in the middle of the night when the motel room phone rang for no reason. Too good to be true, except that even a djinn couldn't create a Sam this annoying.
The families they interviewed got Sam's concerned voice and his freakishly sympathetic smiles. Dean got glares and half-formed sentences, irritation and all the bitchiness Sam was capable of. Which was a lot. Sam had had twenty-nine years to perfect it, and Dean was becoming increasingly less sure that he hadn't kept practicing in hell.
The job, at least, was nothing, a salt and burn as simple as anything they'd ever done. It could've been something from another life: easy research and an easy solution, finished off with Sam by his side at the grave, bitching about the cold, yawning so wide Dean kept expecting him to break some vital part of his face.
"You didn't used to be such a wuss, Sammy," Dean said, absently, just for conversation. He was leaning on his own shovel and watching his breath mist and disappear in the air. The cold seemed to cling to him, like it wanted to make itself at home in him, and Dean was thinking their next hunt would be somewhere in Florida, Georgia--anywhere but one of these fucking states where winter grabbed hold and wouldn't let go.
Then Sam derailed him by sending a spray of dirt high into the air,spattering himself as much as Dean. "Like you would know," he said, which didn't even make any goddamn sense.
"Like I wouldn't," he said, anyway, because it seemed like the thing to say.
He flicked a spadeful of dirt at Sam for the principle of it, and tried to get a good look at him and failed. The moonlight kept carving his face up into weird shadows and lines, nothing Dean could get a read on. Sam went on digging, oblivious to Dean's staring, or at least pretending to be.
"You're kind of an ass, you know that," Dean said. Sam grunted, noncommittally, and they finished the job in silence. Sam was still at his back when Dean threw fuel on the bones, though, and he stayed close, protective and watchful, until there was nothing but a pile of ash at the bottom of the old, rotting coffin.
That counted for a lot. Enough that Dean might've let it go, but for how he sliced his cheek open swinging the shovel into the trunk, and Sam didn't even laugh. Didn't make fun of him at all, didn't find six or seven ways to call him stupid. He just applied butterfly bandages back at the motel, in stubborn, persistent irritated quiet. If Dean was done with Sam being guilty and morose and beaten down, it was nothing to how done he was with silences and words that never got said.
He grabbed Sam's arm before Sam could get out of the uncomfortably small bathroom, held him fast, and did a little glaring of his own. "Talk," he said. "Right now, or we'll find out just how many ways there actually are to kill someone with motel room weapons."
Sam shifted his weight some, but he didn't pull away. "I think you'd only have to kill me once," he said.
Dean huffed out a breath. He moved his hands up Sam's arms, settled them a little more firmly on Sam's shoulders, feeling the warmth of the skin beneath his fingers and through Sam's t-shirt. He wasn't sorry to have Sam under his hands like that, finally, but he wasn't gonna be sidetracked, either. "Our track record? I'm not sure killing you 27 times would do it." He shook Sam--or tried to, anyway. Sam had been pretty unshakable even before he lost his soul and developed a fitness regimen. "Talk," he said again. "I mean it."
Sam played with the hem of his t-shirt, looked at the floor, like the cracked and stained linoleum was the most interesting thing in the world. "It's nothing," he said. "Not a big deal."
"The fuck it isn't," Dean said. "You think I don't know when--"
Sam's nostrils actually flared, and he jerked his head up so suddenly Dean almost took an involuntary step back. His eyes flashed, anger or defiance or hurt, Dean wasn't sure, but there was no mistaking the tension that rocketed through his body. Dean might as well have been holding on to reinforced steel now.
"You didn't," Sam said, all accusation and unhappiness. "Three months. Three months and that's how long it took you to figure out I didn't have a soul. A year I let you think I was dead, and you thought I was just--you know. Sam. I guess I should be glad turning you into a vampire seemed a bit weird."
Dean said, "That's what--" And then he said, "Jesus Christ, this is what happens when you get your version of events from angels," and then he laughed, maybe a little bit--something about the familiarly aggrieved look on Sam's face, something about the fact that they could have this conversation at all like it was normal. Maybe just that sense again that this reality couldn't be his, couldn't line up with all the shit that had gone before. Whatever the reason, it was a mistake. Sam very nearly got away from him, hurt plain on his face now. Dean hung on, dragged him back and moved forward, so Sam wound up closer than before.
"You fucking moron," he said. He risked letting go with one hand, touched his fingers to a streak of dirt below Sam's eye. "Of course I knew there was something wrong. But who the fuck leaps to soullessness as their first conclusion? You'd been to hell, in case you've forgotten. I wasn't exactly the poster child for put together when I came back, remember?"
Sam nodded, slowly, stubble rasping against Dean's palm as he did. "I remember that," he said, with the very clear suggestion that Dean was an idiot for thinking Sam might've forgotten. Then his voice got soft, all the bite just sliding right out of it. "Scared the shit out of me."
"Yeah, well," Dean said. "I know the feeling."
Some of the tension left Sam at that, and a little bit of fondness crept into his eyes. He leant in towards Dean, stood very still, nearly but not quite pressed up against him. Dean hadn't taken his hand away from Sam's face, didn't much want to, now that Sam wasn't fighting him. He curved it around his jaw, held him there like that, and took a breath. He'd wanted honesty from Sam; only fair he pay it back, too.
"And I--I was just so. I thought I'd lost you. I didn't much care what new and interesting personality defects you'd come back with. Not at first."
He wanted not to look at Sam when he was done, but he figured maybe it was important that he did. For a second, Sam didn't do anything, didn't move, just stood and stared right back at Dean. His expression had gone soft as Dean talked, and it was lit up now with something Dean hadn't seen in years, had gotten used to thinking he'd never see again. Dean was more than a little nervous about seeing it head on; it seemed all too likely he'd scare it off. Beneath it, though, there was still that streak of pissiness, that stubborn set to Sam's mouth. He reached out, knotted his fingers in Dean's shirt. "I might buy that," he said. "But the year before that. I wouldn't have stayed away, Dean. You haven't got one functioning braincell in your stupid head if you don't get that."
Dean swallowed. He shifted his gaze down, focused o Sam's long fingers, where they were locked tight in his shirt, knuckles grazing his ribs. They looked pale, somehow vulnerable against the black of the material. "So if you don't announce you're back from the dead for a year, I'll assume you're soul-impaired," he said. "Duly noted." His voice sounded small, though, in a way that was almost certainly embarrassing.
Not that Sam was in any position to judge. He slid his free hand under Dean's chin, didn't seem to care that the amount of face-touching had definitely crossed the line into excessive. "Now who's the ass?" he asked, and when he leaned into kiss him, Dean was right there, opening up to let Sam in.
***
by
laurificus, Sam/Dean, PG, 2749 words"I spent three months getting your soul back. It was supposed to make you better company."
Written for the
silverbullets lightning challenge, for the prompt affectionate threats/insults. Thank you to mollyamory for looking it over.***
Conversational Winchester
Sam was a pissy little bastard. Dean knew this, like he knew U2 sucked and the Cowboys were evil. It was just something that was, unchangeable as his terrible hair and his unforgivable height, the kind of thing hell and an almost apocalypse and a year long stretch of soullessness couldn't redress.
Sure, he'd managed penitent for about three hours after Cas's RoboSam revelations. Dean got pie and first shower and control of the remote out of it; Sam got mopey and droopy and generally guilt-ridden. It was kinda nice, Dean figured, that Sam beating himself up was on the table again, but he was done with that, had been for a long time.
"I spent three months getting your soul back," he said, smacking him on the shoulder on his way to bed. "It was supposed to make you better company."
Sam gave up his apparently intense study of the ducks on the wallpaper, and looked at Dean, instead. His eyes were a little wide, his mouth pinched in surprise, like he was seeing Dean for the first time. Dean could get that. Everything else aside, he'd lost a year and a half, and his last memory had been jumping into hell with no expectation of getting out. Dean stroked his thumb along the sharp jut of Sam's collarbone, his grip maybe tighter than it had to be. There wasn't much he could do about some of what was going on in Sam's head, not yet, but he could make a start on what T1000 had done.
"Seriously," he said, loading his voice with all the big brother authority he'd ever had. "Let it go."
Maybe not the best pep talk ever, but he was a little out of practice. RoboSam hadn't needed much in the way of confidence boosting, after all. That made him grin, wide and possibly stupidly. Sam didn't grin back, but his expression had gone thoughtful, his forehead wrinkled up and his brows drawn together, that lost, haunted look in his eyes replaced by something infinitely sharper. Not inclined to talk about his feelings, apparently, judging from the way he was just staring at Dean, but Dean would take what he could get. Well, at least for now.
In the morning, he'd buy Sam a girly coffee, and maybe even let him drive, and that would be a better speech by far. He squeezed Sam's shoulder, and then climbed under the covers, the bed frame creaking elaborately as he settled. For a while, he felt Sam watching him, and then he heard Sam moving around the room, getting into his own bed. Sam was out almost instantly, a year and some of not getting any sleep at all still catching up with him, and that was about nine kinds of soporific for Dean. He fell asleep half forming a plan: all the things they could do now, all the ways the world had opened up for them again.
But in the morning, penitent Sam had apparently been killed in his sleep by cranky Sam, or at the very least severely injured. He was already marching in from a coffee run when Dean woke up, just like he had been almost every other day in the last six months. The motel door slammed behind him, and Dean's stomach lurched unpleasantly at the irrational thought that Sam's soul had snuck out again when dean's back was turned, because that was exactly the kind of thing Sam might do. The idea lasted right until Sam shoved the steaming plastic cup in his face, his jaw stuck out mulishly, the thin, disapproving line of his mouth doing all the talking Sam wasn't. His nose and ears ruined the whole effect, though, magnificently red from the cold as they were. Dean tried to hide his smile behind his coffee cup, but Sam glared at him, anyway.
"Sleep good?" Dean asked, innocent as he knew how to be.
"Of course not," Sam said, as if he didn't fall into comas every chance he got these days. "There are people three states over who couldn't sleep through your snoring." He got an impressive thunk out of his Styrofoam cup as he set it down on the precariously balanced nightstand between their beds. The stand wobbled, and then it teetered alarmingly, and then it settled, probably realising Sam wasn't going to pay it any attention even if it did topple over. Sam was too busy packing up, movements sharp and jerky like his clothes had committed some great injustice against him, and he went on bitching all the while. "I thought of about twenty-six ways to kill you only using things commonly found in motel rooms. And not just the obvious ones like smothering you with your pillow."
Dean hmmed thoughtfully. "Twenty-six doesn't sound like all that many to me," he said. He drained the rest of his coffee, looking out the window at the cars beyond, the bright, random patterns of ice on their roofs. There wasn't snow here yet, but there would be soon; the sky was heavy and pressing with the promise of it. Time to move now or wait it out. The room wasn't so bad--fading blue carpet and lumpy mattresses, sure, but the place was clean, and the blankets were thick; there was a vending machine in reception and a diner across the street. Most importantly, there was a TV with more than two working channels.
"Game day," Dean said, to the rigid line of Sam's back. "You wanna stay here for one?"
Sam didn't turn around, just went on shoving stuff into his bad. "Bobby's got a case for us," he said. He did turn, then, his hands big on the straps of his duffle. "Ghost in a well, if you can believe that." He was actually smiling, though only a little, like he was doing it against his better judgment. Dean still returned it, fleeting disappointment ignored. Dean had had a year of grief and loss and thinking one more day of it would kill him, but he'd had a year of construction work and golf and Sunday football, too, of family dinners and Ben's homework, of realising bit by bit that the world wasn't ending anymore. Wasn't fair for Dean to expect Sam to be right there with him yet, but Dean could give him the time to get there, because they had that now.
"You're totally Lassie in this scenario," Dean said, cracking his back ostentatiously as he stood. He got another frown in return, and then the story of kids being lured to the well, and then they were leaving, and Sam didn't look nearly impressed enough when Dean handed over the keys. Dean was willing to cut him all kinds of slack for all kinds of things, but still, there were lines.
"There are lines," he said darkly as Sam slipped into the driver's seat beside him. Sam looked at him blankly, but Dean had caught the quick, furtive pat Sam had given the wheel, so he could afford to be magnanimous. "Drive already," he said, and maybe rested his hand on Sam's neck for just a second. Just because he could. Sam shook him off, irritated, and Dean sighed.
"Soulless you was actually pretty friendly," he said, and he was reasonably sure Sam didn't put too much on the throttle only because he new better. He glared at Dean, instead, all genuine outrage, and Dean gave him the finger. Then he slumped against the window, and closed his eyes, because Sam wasn't the only one who hadn't slept a lot recently. Sam would be in a better mood when he woke up, probably; a long drive and time to think in peace normally did wonders.
Only Sam wasn't, not that day or the one after. Dean supposed maybe it was for the best. Would've been too good to be true otherwise, the sort of thing Dean couldn't have believed in. As it was, even with Sam refusing to watch the Star Wars marathon with him, or to play pool against him in the local bar, it still felt like that. Like some djinn wish-fulfilment, Sam back from hell and not the train reck Cas had promised he would be. Sam yelling at Dean for using his toothbrush; Sam sleep-stupid and confused in the middle of the night when the motel room phone rang for no reason. Too good to be true, except that even a djinn couldn't create a Sam this annoying.
The families they interviewed got Sam's concerned voice and his freakishly sympathetic smiles. Dean got glares and half-formed sentences, irritation and all the bitchiness Sam was capable of. Which was a lot. Sam had had twenty-nine years to perfect it, and Dean was becoming increasingly less sure that he hadn't kept practicing in hell.
The job, at least, was nothing, a salt and burn as simple as anything they'd ever done. It could've been something from another life: easy research and an easy solution, finished off with Sam by his side at the grave, bitching about the cold, yawning so wide Dean kept expecting him to break some vital part of his face.
"You didn't used to be such a wuss, Sammy," Dean said, absently, just for conversation. He was leaning on his own shovel and watching his breath mist and disappear in the air. The cold seemed to cling to him, like it wanted to make itself at home in him, and Dean was thinking their next hunt would be somewhere in Florida, Georgia--anywhere but one of these fucking states where winter grabbed hold and wouldn't let go.
Then Sam derailed him by sending a spray of dirt high into the air,spattering himself as much as Dean. "Like you would know," he said, which didn't even make any goddamn sense.
"Like I wouldn't," he said, anyway, because it seemed like the thing to say.
He flicked a spadeful of dirt at Sam for the principle of it, and tried to get a good look at him and failed. The moonlight kept carving his face up into weird shadows and lines, nothing Dean could get a read on. Sam went on digging, oblivious to Dean's staring, or at least pretending to be.
"You're kind of an ass, you know that," Dean said. Sam grunted, noncommittally, and they finished the job in silence. Sam was still at his back when Dean threw fuel on the bones, though, and he stayed close, protective and watchful, until there was nothing but a pile of ash at the bottom of the old, rotting coffin.
That counted for a lot. Enough that Dean might've let it go, but for how he sliced his cheek open swinging the shovel into the trunk, and Sam didn't even laugh. Didn't make fun of him at all, didn't find six or seven ways to call him stupid. He just applied butterfly bandages back at the motel, in stubborn, persistent irritated quiet. If Dean was done with Sam being guilty and morose and beaten down, it was nothing to how done he was with silences and words that never got said.
He grabbed Sam's arm before Sam could get out of the uncomfortably small bathroom, held him fast, and did a little glaring of his own. "Talk," he said. "Right now, or we'll find out just how many ways there actually are to kill someone with motel room weapons."
Sam shifted his weight some, but he didn't pull away. "I think you'd only have to kill me once," he said.
Dean huffed out a breath. He moved his hands up Sam's arms, settled them a little more firmly on Sam's shoulders, feeling the warmth of the skin beneath his fingers and through Sam's t-shirt. He wasn't sorry to have Sam under his hands like that, finally, but he wasn't gonna be sidetracked, either. "Our track record? I'm not sure killing you 27 times would do it." He shook Sam--or tried to, anyway. Sam had been pretty unshakable even before he lost his soul and developed a fitness regimen. "Talk," he said again. "I mean it."
Sam played with the hem of his t-shirt, looked at the floor, like the cracked and stained linoleum was the most interesting thing in the world. "It's nothing," he said. "Not a big deal."
"The fuck it isn't," Dean said. "You think I don't know when--"
Sam's nostrils actually flared, and he jerked his head up so suddenly Dean almost took an involuntary step back. His eyes flashed, anger or defiance or hurt, Dean wasn't sure, but there was no mistaking the tension that rocketed through his body. Dean might as well have been holding on to reinforced steel now.
"You didn't," Sam said, all accusation and unhappiness. "Three months. Three months and that's how long it took you to figure out I didn't have a soul. A year I let you think I was dead, and you thought I was just--you know. Sam. I guess I should be glad turning you into a vampire seemed a bit weird."
Dean said, "That's what--" And then he said, "Jesus Christ, this is what happens when you get your version of events from angels," and then he laughed, maybe a little bit--something about the familiarly aggrieved look on Sam's face, something about the fact that they could have this conversation at all like it was normal. Maybe just that sense again that this reality couldn't be his, couldn't line up with all the shit that had gone before. Whatever the reason, it was a mistake. Sam very nearly got away from him, hurt plain on his face now. Dean hung on, dragged him back and moved forward, so Sam wound up closer than before.
"You fucking moron," he said. He risked letting go with one hand, touched his fingers to a streak of dirt below Sam's eye. "Of course I knew there was something wrong. But who the fuck leaps to soullessness as their first conclusion? You'd been to hell, in case you've forgotten. I wasn't exactly the poster child for put together when I came back, remember?"
Sam nodded, slowly, stubble rasping against Dean's palm as he did. "I remember that," he said, with the very clear suggestion that Dean was an idiot for thinking Sam might've forgotten. Then his voice got soft, all the bite just sliding right out of it. "Scared the shit out of me."
"Yeah, well," Dean said. "I know the feeling."
Some of the tension left Sam at that, and a little bit of fondness crept into his eyes. He leant in towards Dean, stood very still, nearly but not quite pressed up against him. Dean hadn't taken his hand away from Sam's face, didn't much want to, now that Sam wasn't fighting him. He curved it around his jaw, held him there like that, and took a breath. He'd wanted honesty from Sam; only fair he pay it back, too.
"And I--I was just so. I thought I'd lost you. I didn't much care what new and interesting personality defects you'd come back with. Not at first."
He wanted not to look at Sam when he was done, but he figured maybe it was important that he did. For a second, Sam didn't do anything, didn't move, just stood and stared right back at Dean. His expression had gone soft as Dean talked, and it was lit up now with something Dean hadn't seen in years, had gotten used to thinking he'd never see again. Dean was more than a little nervous about seeing it head on; it seemed all too likely he'd scare it off. Beneath it, though, there was still that streak of pissiness, that stubborn set to Sam's mouth. He reached out, knotted his fingers in Dean's shirt. "I might buy that," he said. "But the year before that. I wouldn't have stayed away, Dean. You haven't got one functioning braincell in your stupid head if you don't get that."
Dean swallowed. He shifted his gaze down, focused o Sam's long fingers, where they were locked tight in his shirt, knuckles grazing his ribs. They looked pale, somehow vulnerable against the black of the material. "So if you don't announce you're back from the dead for a year, I'll assume you're soul-impaired," he said. "Duly noted." His voice sounded small, though, in a way that was almost certainly embarrassing.
Not that Sam was in any position to judge. He slid his free hand under Dean's chin, didn't seem to care that the amount of face-touching had definitely crossed the line into excessive. "Now who's the ass?" he asked, and when he leaned into kiss him, Dean was right there, opening up to let Sam in.
***
sleepy