smalltrolven | Fic: Hatbox (Sam/Dean, NC-17) Part 2 of 3

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Walking the bunker’s halls in his snakeskin cowboy boots felt different somehow, and his hat actually brushed the top of a few of the lower doorways, but he still kept them on, even while he cooked them dinner. Maybe the special pan-fried steaks with herb butter potatoes he was making would coax Sam out of his bitchy attitude.

“You’re still wearing all that?” Sam asked from the kitchen doorway, obviously drawn in by the good smells from the steak and beans he had going on the stovetop.

“Sure as shootin’, it’s pretty durn comfortable,” Dean said with a grin. “I always wanted to be a pot rustler, ya know, Cookie always seemed to have the best time out of all of us out on the trail.”

Sam grimaced and didn’t say anything, he pulled a couple of beers out of the fridge and fiddled with opening them. He handed one to Dean and clinked their bottles together with something that almost looked like a smile.

Dean hoped that it was and hey at least Sam was here and handing him opened-up beers like he was supposed to be. He did notice that it tasted kind of watery at first sip. He took another swallow and felt his throat convulse almost bringing the beer back up.

“This beer tastes like prairie coal,” Dean said.

“Does prairie coal by any chance mean cow chips?” Sam asked after a moment of thought where he’d scrunched up his forehead in that cute way he had when he was thinking extra hard about something important.

“Yup, that’s the stuff,” Dean said, setting the bottle down on the counter between them.

“This makes a whole lot more sense now that I know for sure that you’re cursed, Dean,” Sam said with a relieved grin.

“Naw, I’m in apple pie order here,” Dean said, looking up at Sam, wondering what his brother was going on about now. It was always something with him, looking for the worst possible explanations for things.

“You’re really really not, and I know because of what I just put in your beer,” Sam said, that proud little-brother tone set Dean’s back teeth to grinding.

Dean turned off the flame under the pan that he had the steaks frying in and stalked out of the kitchen. Leave it to Sam to ruin a perfectly fine dinner. He wasn’t feeling hungry anyway, the horrible taste from whatever Sam had spiked his beer with was still coating the inside of his mouth and curdling his stomach. He flopped down on his bed, momentarily hesitating at the thought that he really ought to take the boots off before he got his comforter dirty. But that seemed silly, so thinking no more of it, Dean crossed his arms over his chest and under the cover of the cowboy hat closed his eyes.

He vaguely heard Sam rustling around in his room, but the darkness underneath the hat made it easier to ignore and stay in that near dreaming state, the ground flew under his horse’s feet as they raced across the prairie after another escaped calf. The sound of a lighter flint striking woke him up though, he sat up and watched in horror as the flames leapt up from the center of his beautiful leather hatbox. The long shoulder strap caught fire first, and then the fabric lining, finally the outer edge of the round shape was engulfed in flames that turned green then gold and back to green again.

“No! Don’t burn it!” Dean shouted, hearing how strange his voice sounded, almost like it was two voices at once. Where was that drawling accent coming from?

Sam flinched at the extra volume in Dean’s strange shout, the otherworldly tone still ringing in the room. He rattled off some words in Latin quickly, obviously some sort of spell and tossed something into the flames consuming the hatbox.

Dean tried to stop himself but the boots, the hat, even the belt, they all pulled him into the motion of throwing his body towards the flames. Sam caught him around the waist and threw him back onto the bed. He leapt up again and tried to get closer to put the raging flames out, to stop the fire consuming the hatbox, but Sam pushed him down onto his back.

“No! You can’t burn ME!” Dean shouted in a voice that he definitely knew wasn’t his own.

Sam covered Dean with his body, pinning him to the bed as Dean struggled beneath him. The boots, the hat, the belt buckle all began to burn hotter than hot. He felt a scream bubbling up that he had to let out.

“Nooooo!” Dean screamed in that strange voice. But then it left him. All the heat disappeared and the feeling that his voice was no longer his went with it.

“Sammy, what the fuck was that?” Dean asked in his own voice, thank Chuck or whoever, blessedly his own voice.

He could feel Sam’s body quaking with silent laughter on top of him. He pounded at his brother’s back to get him to stop because it wasn’t cool right then, what with whatever the hell had just happened to him.

Sam raised himself up from crushing Dean into the bed and looked at him with an amused smile. “Dude, you were cursed. The hatbox, it was a cursed object. Whatever time period of hat you put in there three times, it would make you talk that way forever, and you wouldn’t be able to take the hat off,” Sam said.

Dean didn’t know what to say, that sounded so crazy. It was just a nice roomy hatbox, that he’d found in the storage room, not something he’d taken off the cursed object shelves. There hadn’t been a Men of Letters file tag on it, nothing marking it as extraordinary.

“And let me guess, you put your cowboy boots and that hideous belt in there too?” Sam asked as he laid back down on top of Dean, pressing him into the bed, but not in that desperate I’m-saving-you way like he had been.

“Yep, sure as shootin’ I did,” Dean said in a drawl, just to see if he could freak Sam out.

Sam’s body went rigid on top of him, and he pushed up again to see Dean’s face. “You’re just fucking with me now, aren’t you, you dick!”

Dean laughed with glee, glad to have been released from the curse, he struggled to get his arms out from underneath Sam and flipped his hat off, throwing it across the room. “Lil’ darlin’, you’ve gone balmy on me.”

Sam started laughing and rolled off of Dean, body shaking with the relief that Dean shared.

Dean took that chance to undo the belt buckle and pull off his belt, he dropped it to the floor along with the boots. God it felt good to take all this shit off, it had been two days.

“I bet my hair looks a real sight,” Dean said, still drawling through the giggles that felt better than anything he’d felt in ages. Lying here post-curse with Sam, who’d saved him yet again.

“You cut that out now,” Sam said, all serious and forceful.

“Yes, sir,” Dean said, sketching out a sarcastic salute.

“If the curse had stayed on you for just a few more hours, it would have been permanent, Dean. It would have taken you over, stuck your mind in a world where you were a cowboy from that era. I would have lost you."

“But you fixed it, like you always do, Sam. I’m okay, really,” Dean said, just as serious.

“It was kind of cute at first,” Sam admitted. “I’m sorry it took me so long to figure it out, I just thought you were fooling around, like you do when you wear that stuff.”

“Cute, huh? Like callin’ you lil’ darlin’ and my pardner an’ all?” Dean asked with a slight drawl. Hopefully one that wouldn’t ruin the mood too much.

“Yeah, I guess,” Sam said, blushing in that way that always melted Dean’s heart.

“So if I call you things like that now and then, you won’t wake snakes about it?”

“Wake snakes, that’s one I can’t translate,” Sam said.

“It means to cause a ruckus, which is what you tend to do when you don’t like something, ‘specially somethin’ new like that. Hell, you’d probably think I was cursed again, start putting shit in my beer again,” Dean said.

“Oh is that right?”

“Yeah, it is, but I’ll do it if you want, pardner,” Dean said.

“You could say the non-cowboy version of that sometime, I’d be cool with it,” Sam said.

“What, partner?” Dean asked, surprised that Sam was being so direct about this relationship stuff that they usually both avoided putting a name to. He’d always felt it wasn’t something that could have one word sum it up.

“Yeah, I mean it’s a word that works in a lot of situations, like when we’re working, we’re always telling people that were are partners of some kind, and the rest of the time, well…”

“It works for that too, especially since I can’t introduce you as my little brother, which no one ever believes anyway, and then start macking on you at the bar or whatever.”

“Definitely better than some of the alternatives out there, no doubt,” Sam said.

“What like, lover or ‘whole kit and caboodle,'” Dean asked.

Sam burst out laughing which wasn’t the reaction Dean had been expecting at all.

“How about I introduce you as my beliked? No one will know what it means unless they’re cowboy experts.”

“What’s it mean?” Sam asked.

“That’s for me to know and for you to google later,” Dean said, pulling Sam into his arms, shutting off any further questions with a deep and searching kiss.

Sam got into it immediately, some of that I-just-almost-lost-you energy still there between them. It wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world, not like dying bad, but he wouldn’t have been him. And Sam wouldn’t have loved him like this.

Like this force of nature that his brother always had been, tornado powerful, spring rain soft and sweet as the first corn of the year. Internally he shook his head at himself for thinking of Sam like that, he’d never hear the end of the teasing if Sam only knew.

“If I only knew what?” Sam asked, breathless from the kiss.

“If you only knew how happy I am not to be stuck in those boots,” Dean said.

“Thought they were comfortable,” Sam said.

“Yeah for a few hours, but not for days, and not for driving,” Dean said.

“You need a foot rub?”

“You don’t want to get near them until I’ve had a shower, believe me, not after two straight days with the same socks,” Dean said.

Sam got up from the bed, so graceful for one so tall and so turned on from the view Dean had as his brother hesitated in the doorway.

“You comin’ or what?” Sam asked.

“If there’s a happy ending foot rub at the end, you couldn’t keep me away,” Dean said, joining Sam in a footrace down the hallway to the shower room.

~*~
Part 3