Morgue Files

After the djinn presses his calloused hand to Sam’s forehead things smear until it’s like looking at reality through Vaseline, and Sam opens and closes his mouth and tries to say something, anything, but all that comes out is the faint whistle of his breath until he’s sucked down, down down. And inside it—whatever it is—he dreams. He dreams—the way he dreams anything since he started getting the visions: in flashes and with physical jerks of pain or pleasure or fear—of the gold coast of California and the crash of waves, the stretch of American heartland spread at his feet like a patchwork of green and brown. He dreams about steam off of hot dog stands and the yellow and red and white umbrellas outside of Fenway Park and he thinks he sees Dean in the stands, on his feet and heckling, waving a beer. Sam dreams the flicker of sun burning on his skin, and in a split second he blinks and realizes that this isn’t a dream—this is memory, and he slips, and slides, and trips into black all over again.

*

Sam wakes up fast, brain rolling over like the engine of the Impala, and it takes him a few shuddery moments before he pushes himself up onto his elbows—before he blinks the white glaze of sun out of his eyes and sees pale green walls. The djinn is gone and in its place there are overflowing bookshelves instead, monochrome photographs of classic cars on the walls, in stark black frames with gleaming glass. It’s quiet, and Sam lets himself breathe—once, twice, three times, come on Sammy, focus—before he looks round again.

It’s still there, all of it: books double and triple-stacked, with volumes layered on top of other books, piles on the floor next to mountains of The Economist and Harvard Law Review, the bed with the pale linens with a high thread count—the king-sized bed. Sam rolls off of the mattress and lands silently, onto a pale woven rug, one hand on the dark wood bedside table, fingers grazing the edge of a hardback book, the metal edge of a Tiffany lamp. He’s alone, and it takes some prowling around the room before he finds his cell phone.

It’s charging in a cradle on a dresser scattered with keys and change and ballpoint pens, and Sam tries not to think about that when he plucks it out, dials Dean’s number from physical memory and listens to the ring on the other end.

The phone goes six times before somebody picks up.

“What the fuck?” Dean says.

Sam nearly cries in relief, and he covers his face with a shaking hand when he laughs, when he gasps out, “Dean—oh my God, Dean. Thank God.”

“Sam?” Dean asks, and his voice has dropped half an octave, gone rough at the edges and hard, and Sam knows automatically and in his heart, against reason, that when Dean’s voice goes like that everything will be all right. “Sam, are you okay? What’s going on?”

“The djinn is what happened!” Sam hisses, keeping close to the walls. “I went to the warehouse and the djinn was there and he was definitely real, Dean—and then he put his hand on my face and I woke up in this room with like a thousand books I keep tripping over.”

There’s a long silence before Dean says, “A djinn, huh.”

“Yes!” Sam snaps, scowling into the deserted hallway—there more pictures of cars on the walls, black and white stills of carnival lights and cityscape. “Look, I’m going to try to figure out where I am—you need to come get me.”

Dean says, “Are you drunk?”

“What?” Sam squawks. “No!”

“Because it’s like 8 a.m. in the morning, Sammy,” Dean says, fond.

Outside the hall window, Sam can hear morning traffic, car horns. It’s a normal street outside, there’re sidewalks and trees and people walking around and talking on their cell phones, hefting laptop bags and briefcases. If this is hell or heaven or the ever after Sam can’t help but be unimpressed. “I’m not drunk!”

“Sure you aren’t,” Dean says, and hangs up.

Sam stares at his phone in horror, standing barefoot in pajama pants and a STANFORD t-shirt in the hallway until he hears somebody coming—but even before he can look around for a weapon his fingers go numb and nerveless—

“Dean,” Sam says, and it comes out hoarse, scrape out of his throat.

Because it is Dean standing in front of him, holding a chipped coffee mug and wearing a Red Sox t-shirt and sweat pants and glasses and holding a cell phone.

“What, did you think I was out jogging or some yuppie shit?” Dean asks, still grinning. He sets the phone and coffee aside. “Nightmare?”

Sam shakes his head because he doesn’t know what else to do. This is real. This must be real, and Sam tamps down the voice in his head that says the djinn must have found this—that he must have dug down deep somewhere and pulled this secret out of him, without words, because Sam’s never given it a voice, but it doesn’t matter, because here it all is and—

“No,” Sam manages. “Not a nightmare.”

It’s Dean smirking when he takes the last few steps to close the space between them, saying, “Man, Sammy, you are not a morning person,” before he puts a hand on the back of Sam’s neck and presses his mouth against Sam’s—soft, and Sam tastes coffee and belonging and love and home, and it doesn’t occur to him for a single minute to push Dean away.

*

Dean kisses Sam until Sam feels boneless and docile and agreeable, with Dean murmuring things into the skin at the corners of Sam’s mouth, his smile sun sweet and burning like citrus against Sam’s tongue. Sam feels like a cat, purring, and when Dean finally does pull away, it’s to say “You okay?” and “I’m here, babe,” and “Mornin’, sunshine.” And so Sam lets Dean lead him by the hand down the hallway, into a sun-drenched living room with still more books, let’s Dean sit him down at a blond wood kitchen table and give him coffee, to brush a fond hand over the crown of Sam’s head.

It feels like Sunday mornings: slow, sunken in honey.

“What’s going on, Sam?” Dean says, tugging out a carton of eggs and peering at Sam over the top of his glasses. “You’re acting weird.”

Everythings wrong, Sam thinks. “I’m not acting weird,” he says.

Dean gives him The Look. “You called me—from the bedroom.”

Sam squares his shoulders, leans back in the kitchen chair. There’re a row of cookbooks on a shelf over the sink, and a dying basil plant by the window; this looks like a room Sam always wanted to have, and maybe he can have it now.

“I didn’t know where you were,” Sam says, too carefully, because he could still be wrong.

“I was a whole 100 yards down the hall getting coffee,” Dean shoots back, frowning—he comes closer, poking Sam in the chest with the long end of a spatula. “You sure you’re not having nightmares again?” he asks.

“No,” Sam retorts, picking up his steaming mug and taking a sip. It’s terrible, and Sam thinks, only Dean could make coffee this bad. “And I’m not drunk either.”

“Yeah, drink your joe,” Dean says, and cracks eggs into a bowl, searches round for a fork. Sam has seen the line of Dean’s back almost every day of his entire life, and he knows—the way he knows the edges of his own body—how Dean’s shoulders look when he beats an egg, when he wakes up, when Dean looks away, out a window, as they’re cruising down a rural highway in the middle of nowhere. Sam knows Dean.

He takes another sip of coffee and watches Dean scramble eggs, watches Dean make toast and microwave bacon and casually flick on the TV, humming something by God damn Kansas under his breath as the morning news announcer chirps, “It’s another beautiful Saturday in Boston—and we can anticipate highs in the lower 50s today and plenty of sun.”

*

Somewhere between eggs and bacon and coffee and lunch, Sam tells Dean that he dreamed he was being attacked by a djinn, which as stupid as it sounds is better than telling Dean he was attacked by a djinn.

“In no way do I want you to interpret this as me discouraging you from fawning over my stuff,” Dean says through a mouthful of toast, “but maybe you should quit reading my books right before bed.”

Sam forces himself to snap his jaw shut, so he doesn’t ask anything stupid like, “You write?” and “Books? You write books?” and thinks to himself, “Damn genies.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Sam finally manages, forcing down another mouthful of Dean’s coffee until the taste hits him full in the face like a semi and he snaps the mug down and says, “Okay, Dean—you are never allowed to make coffee again.”

Scowling, Dean snaps, “There’s nothing wrong with my coffee.”

“People in prison get better coffee than this,” Sam argues. They do. He knows for a fact.

“People in prison also get ass-shanked in the shower,” Dean ripostes.

Sam looks at him for a long time, torn. “I don’t even know what that is,” he admits finally. “Is that a threat? I don’t even know what that was supposed to mean.”

Dean gulps down the rest of his mug, as if to prove some sort of point. Sam’s seen Dean eat sandwiches he’s found in motels and chicken cordon bleu from roadside diners, so it doesn’t prove anything other than the fact that Dean’s stomach acids should be studied by the CDC for possible medicinal properties.

“That means I’m going to be late for my meeting with my editor, and that you,” Dean says, pushing himself up from the table and leaning close—close enough to press an absent kiss to the corner of Sam’s mouth, and it makes Sam murmur a little, babble quietly in tongues to feel that: the chapped skin of Dean’s mouth with intent, “are a bitch.”

“Jerk,” Sam answers, reflexive, but even before horror can sink in, Dean’s wandering down the hall back to the bedroom—to their bedroom, calling over his shoulder:

“You love it. Don’t lie.”

Sam stares into his coffee cup, thumbs on the rims. “Yeah,” he admits. “I guess I do.”

*

Dean disappears from the apartment in a clatter of footsteps and yelling, “I’ll be back by seven at the latest, so I better see dinner on the table,” and when Sam yells back, knee-jerk, “Make yourself dinner, ass,” he says, horrified, “Oh my God, we’re married.” He waits just long enough to see Dean heading down the street from the living room window before he runs back into the bedroom—starts rifling around the desk, the dresser.

He needs details, explanations, he wants to know how any of this ever happened and why and why are they in Boston and since when does Dean write books. But instead of a wallet or a neatly-summarized list provided by his friendly neighborhood djinn, Sam finds a book on what he guesses is his side of the bed—opened and face-down on pages 57 and 58—by Dean Winchester titled Carnival.

He flips back to the beginning—before all the dog-eared pages and after the Library of Congress information—and creases down page one—realizes it was already folded before. When I read it the first time, Sam thinks crazily.

It starts:

It was six hundred degrees in the metal box of the Impala and the leather upholstery was starting to feel like sexual harassment. Even the wind blowing in the opened windows felt like a wall of steam, and outside on either side of the highway only half-abandoned farm shacks interrupted the land, cracked in heat. Jake ran one sweaty palm over his forehead, his upper lip, prickly from a day without shaving.

“It is too God damned hot,” he said, mostly to himself.

So of course Sam answered, “Which could be fixed if we got a new car.”

“We are not getting a new car,” Jake said. He glared across the front seat. “This car is a classic. She and I have an understanding.”

Sam made Jake’s least favorite Bitch Face (TM). “Do you,” she said. “Then could you be good enough to pass a message to her and tell her to make the fucking AC work?”

Jake stroked a hand over the steering wheel comfortingly. “Don’t listen to her, baby,” he cooed. “She’s just jealous you got better curves than her.”

Sam turns the page with extreme prejudice. “Her,” he snarls. “I’ll kill him.”

*

Jake Winston and Samantha Holloway are driving away from a harrowing experience with faith healers when they come across a haunted carnival, and Sam spends most of the first 40 pages of the book cussing and freaking out because Dean is writing their God damned lives. Their other lives—in glowing technicolor, with sexual tension so deliberate and obvious it sparks neon off of the pages.

It’s the kind of airport paperback Sam used to read in between state-mandated sets of textbooks, between schools, curled up in the backseat of the Impala when he and his dad weren’t speaking to one another. It’s fast and furiously-paced and Dean obviously thinks the car is nearly as sexy as Samantha Holloway, and Sam can’t help but feel a little irrationally wronged about that—but in the grand scheme of things it’s so low on his list of things to worry about it barely registers.

Sam’s still reading—Jake and Samantha are having a fight Sam knows he and Dean had in Iowa once and also that he sounded nowhere near as gay as Dean has portrayed him—when he feels somebody drop a hand to the back of his neck.

“I thought I told you to stop reading that,” Dean murmurs.

When Sam blinks he realizes it’s late, that shadows have cast over the pages of the book and he’s reading by the light of the street lamps outside, faint orange—that the noise of cars and people drifting through the cracked-open window has harshened, the way sound at night gets sharper around the edges, echoing and jagged in the dark.

“What time is it,” Sam asks. He puts down the book—opened now at page 94—rubs his eyes.

“It’s like, 6:30, babe,” Dean says, fond, and runs his fingers through Sam’s hair, reaches over to flick on a lamp with his free hand. “You been reading all afternoon?”

If this were home—if this were the other them, Dean would ruffle his hair: irritating, affectionate, too many sharing bathrooms and hand-me-downs on the hot, unforgiving highways. Sam closes his eyes hard against that thought, because it was impossible there, but not here—Sam can’t help but think there aren’t impossibilities here.

“I guess,” Sam admits, and leans into Dean’s touch—his fingers kneading the tense muscles in Sam’s shoulders. “I got sucked in.”

“It’s because I’m a genius,” Dean assures him, laughing, and steps away, touch gone but still close, and Sam finds himself following like he’s trapped in Dean’s gravitational field—like he’s always been trapped in Dean’s orbit, helplessly drawn even when there was a continent between them.

“How was your meeting?” Sam asks, and he watches Dean make a grab for a cordless phone.

“It was good,” Dean says, glancing at Sam over his shoulder. “I’m ordering in—what are you in the mood for?”

Sam shrugs, leans against a counter. “I’m fine with anything.”

Dean leans over to dial in a number from a magnet on the fridge—and then pulls the door open to snatch a beer. He puts the phone between his shoulder and his ear and pops the top on a counter, and Sam wants to scold him for that, but he doesn’t know if he does that here—if that’s a brother thing or a whatever the hell this is thing, but Dean just gives Sam a preemptive don’t shit bricks about it look Sam would know from any version of Dean.

“Yeah, hey, delivery please?” Dean says, and passes Sam his beer, digging around his pocket with his free hand.

Sam takes the bottle in numb fingers, feels the slick glass against the pads of his fingers, and thinks that Dean will keep his wallet in his back left pocket no matter where he goes, or who he is, or who they are to one another. Sam used to steal Dean’s beers all the time, partly because dealing with his brother long-term occasionally required alcohol abuse, but mostly because he could feel the lingering warmth of Dean’s mouth that way.

Sam remembers feeling bad about it, guilty, like he was taking advantage—but Sam thinks that back then, wherever he was, taking advantage was all he could ever take.

But that’s not true now, Sam thinks, and sets the bottle down, reaches over and threads his fingers—they aren’t shaking, they’ve always known this geography—through the hair at the back of Dean’s neck and draws him in. And Dean’s eyes are wide and amused but kisses Sam anyway, with the tinny sound of the pizza guy in the background confirming their order and the metal frames of his glasses cool on Sam’s cheek.

And Sam kisses—first—the corners of Dean’s mouth, and then the bow of his upper lip, scrapes his teeth on the soft sweet flesh on the inside of Dean’s pout. He licks his way into Dean’s mouth, sliding across teeth and tongue: Dean tastes like hops and Coke and still a little bit like the toothpaste Sam found on the bathroom counter, he tastes exactly like Sam has always imagined.

And it’s that thought the triggers the rush of desperation, of want like a chemical burn under his skin. Sam has been in a haze all this time, still dreaming, but the way Dean’s fingers are digging bruises into his hip is real, and so is the slight chip in one of Dean’s molars—and Sam’s suddenly knotting his fists in the fabric of Dean’s shirt, trying to climb inside.

“Okay,” Dean says when he pushes away for air. “We’ve totally just scandalized Papa Johns.”

“Don’t care,” Sam tells him and leans over to bite at the line of Dean’s chin.

“But they give us pizza,” Dean protests, but Sam decides not to be annoyed because Dean’s sliding his hands into the back pockets of Sam’s jeans. “It’s not like you can cook.”

Sam nips Dean harder for that. “I microwave.”

Dean hisses, and without a trace of irony in his tone, says, “God, you’re hot when you talk about cooking.”

Sam never thought that if he got this he’d get laughter, too, and he’s still laughing when Dean knocks them over onto the sofa and insinuates a thigh between Sam’s knees, slides his hands up Sam’s sides and down again, fingers intoxicating and warm and rough-heavy through the t-shirt—close enough to burn. He feels like after 43 years in the desert, he’s just tripped headfirst into a river, and he doesn’t know what to feel first in the rush of water on his skin.

Dean reaches up, thumb and fingers on the rims of his glasses, pulls them off and sets them on an end table—and it’s so easy and ordinary Sam can’t help but blurt out, “I never thought I’d get this—you.”

Dean stares at him for a long moment, braced over Sam on his elbows, before he says, “What the hell are you talking about? I’m easy. You picked me up at Fenway. And I paid for that beer I was waving around when I met you—I got myself drunk so you could pick me up at Fenway.”

Sam can’t really do anything but stare up at Dean, astonished, because that’s so easy—that’s just plane tickets and being in Boston and forcing himself to watch the Red Sox play. All Sam’s abstract plans to get here before meant selling off parts of himself, trading in pieces he doesn’t think he can lose—but more importantly, trading in pieces of Dean.

He slides a hand round Dean’s side, rests a loose fist at the small of Dean’s back. It takes a while before Sam can swallow down the sob thats lodged in his chest, but he does it, and keeps it down long enough to say, “Still—lucky me.”

*

A day later, Sam spends half an hour digging around his—expensive leather—briefcase trying to figure out where he works while Dean sprawls out asleep, face down on his side of the bed. It’s hard to make himself to when he could just take his pants back off and crawl back under the covers, but when Sam actually picks up the phone to call in sick to wherever the hell he works, Dean—unmoving—mumbles into his pillow:

“If you do not get the fuck out of this house and let me get some God damn writing done, Sammy, I swear to God. I will kill you and find some other hot, young piece to keep as my sexual plaything.”

Sam glares down at him. “Fine,” he says. “But your last book had three typos in it.”

He’s already halfway down the hall by the time hears Dean thud out of the bed, shouting, “What? Where? Son of a bitch!”

It’s Monday and Sam steps out onto the steamy morning street feeling like he can do anything, like he can have anything—and when he hears the sash of the third floor window being thrown open and Dean shouting down at him, “You motherfucker!” Sam thinks, nevermind, nevermind, because he already has it, everything that matters.

*

It turns out Sam works at Ropes & Gray, which is only less terrifying than being told he’s about to go have coffee with Satan—and only because Sam’s not entirely convinced he doesn’t still owe the Prince of Darkness anything for the many and sundry things he did to Dean over the weekend.

And then, once he gets over his panic attack and goes through security, the guy at the metal detector only says, “Morning, Mr. Winchester,” and doesn’t tackle him and call him a fraud or anything. Sam knows that if anything’s screaming, “I JUST PASSED MY LSATS, THAT’S ALL!” at the top of its lungs, it’s not the revoltingly expensive Armani he found in his closet and put on this morning. (He spent part of this morning’s traffic snarl depressed he’s apparently kind of a stereotypical gay man.)

Sam gives himself a mental slap and says, “Morning—” he checks the guard’s nametag “—Curtis.”

Curtis cocks a brow at him and hands Sam back his security tag. “Still can’t remember my name,” he says disapprovingly. “Kids these days.”

Sam flushes. “I’m sorry—I’m just having one of those mornings.”

Curtis waves him through, rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah—for the last six years.”

Elevator’s not much better, there’re two women having whispered arguments into the bluetooth earpieces and at one point Sam’s seriously concerned that they’re arguing with each other from different ends of the elevator. Nobody says hello to him, but it’s still the sleepy part of the morning, when everyone’s letting the coffee seep in—but by the time he reaches his floor there’re women in businesslike heels and men with their sleeves rolled up saying, “Morning, Sam,” and “Hey, Sam, have a nice weekend?”

Sam doesn’t have a corner office, he finds, but he has a window and a potted plant, and a half dozen photographs of he and Dean on his desk—a coffee mug with highlighters in it. He closes the door and sits in his Herman Miller desk chair and stares out across the Boston skyline for a long, long time, soaking in it until ten past eight somebody knocks on his door and says, “Sam? Sam? Hey, we need to go over those S-8s Hellerman’s filing tomorrow.”

*

His harrowing first week at work ends up with one of the senior partners giving Sam fond, fatherly looks—precipitating in Sam's assistant Hannah kicking him out of the office on Friday afternoon, barely three o’clock.

Dean’s in on it, too, and meets Sam out front, steers him into Sam’s silver Jetta and drives them out to a junkyard, which Sam immediately pronounces as the worst date ever. But then Dean drives them to the garage he rents nearby, and when he lifts up the door and Sam sees the Impala again, finally—half built, still a little bit in pieces, but all there, just waiting for Dean’s hands like Sam has always been waiting for Dean’s hands—he realizes he’s missed her like he’s missed Dean’s God damn bestsellers on the fiction list being truth. He ends up tackling Dean into the Impala’s backseat, grinding down on him heavy and hot and graceless, rubbing Dean off through his jeans and wrapping Dean’s long fingers—cool with rings—around his own dick and begging, “Yeah—please, please, you gotta, you’ve gotta,” until he comes with a gasp and Dean starts worrying about the upholstery.

They bicker about who’s the bigger pussy all the way back to the apartment and end up turning in early, creeping off to bed before midnight, listening to Boston outside their window. And the next morning when sunlight is draped over their covers, Sam wakes up to Dean singing, husky and sleep-hoarse in his ear, “Sweeeeet Car-ro-line oh oh oh—” and has to smother him with a pillow to make him stop.

This is happiness, Sam thinks, framing Dean’s face with his hands, this is what it tastes like on his tongue.

*

On Tuesday Dean gets packed off against his will and sent via an American Airlines flight to New York. “For ultimate fighting with my publishers,” Dean says. “To work out a few lingering contractual issues regarding the next three books in the Supernatural series,” Dean’s agent says, and Sam figures it’s sex-related bias, but he totally believes Dean more. The idea of Dean trapped in a mahogany conference room hammering out sums and figures and dates of release is enough to salve the indignity of being a girl in all of Dean’s books.

Work drags more than usual, knowing Dean will be gone when he gets home, and it’s half past 6 when he gets an email that says, “The Oak Room—8 p.m., under your name.”