Fic: Kale or Nada (Sam/Dean, NC-17) Part 1 of 5

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Sam walked in from his garage with a spring in his step, even though it was somewhere well past two in the morning. He locked the garage door with a perfunctory wave over the bio-id wall unit. The stimulating conversations over the elegant ten-course dinner with his intellectual peers had kept him up and alert for the long drive home.

Finally he was in his fortress of solitude, that was what he called it, but only to himself, of course. Alone with only his thoughts, just the way he liked it. This was the way he had arranged his life, no partners, no families. Certainly no people who expected him to put up with their time-wasting issues. All of it had worked to make him happier and more productive than he’d ever been.

It was hard for him to even remember a time when it had been any different. Or to remember ever wanting his life to be set up any differently.

The movement sensitive lights automatically came on as he entered the enormous living room. In an instant, it was like there was a bright spotlight over the one comfortable chair in the space, because that chair was filled. And the person who was sitting there, shouldn’t be—couldn’t be. Because he was not part of Sam’s life. He hadn’t been for fourteen years.

“Heya, Sammy,” his brother drawled, cracking that familiar one-sided grin that hadn’t changed a bit in all these years. Probably expecting him to freak out or start yelling or both.

“It’s Sam,” was all he could manage to say, even thought it was obviously what Dean had wanted, given the broad grin he got in return. Had his brother’s grin ever been so real and true like this? He honestly couldn’t remember ever seeing Dean look actually happy like this.

“Came by to say thanks for springing me from the slammer. Just seemed like the least I could do, ya know,” Dean said, snuggling back into the leather chaise, looking like he belonged there, like he intended to stay there for a good long while.

Seeing him there in his favorite chair reminded Sam that Dean had always looked especially good in leather. The distressed brown leather of the chaise reminded Sam of their dad’s old jacket, the one Dean had insisted on wearing for years even though it had been several sizes too big. It may or may not have been why he’d bought that particular chair. He hadn’t given it a single thought until just this very moment.

Dean wasn’t wearing any jacket now though, leather or otherwise. He was dressed in a single layer, and now that Sam was looking more closely, it was definitely one of Sam’s own fine-gauge Italian wool cashmere sweaters. The sleeves were covering most of Dean’s hands, and the thought of his brother here, going through his drawers, choosing to wear one of his sweaters gave him a possessive thrill he hadn’t felt in many years. Had Dean taken a shower too? Sam sniffed and smelled his own sandalwood shampoo. The deep green color of the sweater seemed to be making his brother’s eyes seem an even more intense green than usual.

“You’re welcome. Seemed like the least I could do,” Sam said, trying to answer Dean’s grin with his own. He lowered himself into the second-most comfortable seat in the room across from Dean, choosing to remain well out of touching range. It seemed like the prudent thing to do at this point, at least until he figured out why the hell his brother had broken into his house. Besides taking a shower and stealing his damn sweater. Dean looked positively edible, Sam smiled again at the thought.

Dean’s eyes widened when he saw Sam’s smile.

“You don’t do that much anymore, smile like that. At least not on the internet, not that I’ve seen lately,” Dean said.

“You’ve been internet stalking me, like one of my creepy fans, huh?” Sam asked, hugging his arms around himself at the thought of them. He hated the attention of the fans, sure he loved the fame overall because of the money it brought in from all the speaking fees But not when it came down to one on one interruptions of his private life by those people. He didn’t want it, he couldn’t tolerate it because it wasn’t up to him, he couldn’t control when it happened.

“Nah, just keeping tabs on you, little bro, like any halfway decent big brother is supposed to. Whether you like it or not,” Dean said, adjusting his hips a little further back into the chaise.

It was mortifying how hypnotizing that small movement was.

“I don’t—I don’t like it, that you do that. You should know that by now,” Sam said, wishing he didn’t have to bring it up, spell it out like this. His stupid, stubborn brother, after all these years should just know.

“Hey, you’re the one that’s got his face plastered all over the internet, dude. You’re kinda hard to avoid these days.”

Dean was looking at him with this strange—god was his brother actually proud of him? It sure looked like it to Sam. All of a sudden he really didn’t know how he felt about that, he didn’t want anything from Dean, didn’t need anything, not even approval or this very odd, brotherly no…almost quasi-parental pride.

“Well, that’s one thing, but you’re the one keeping track of the exact type of smiling I do,” Sam said, trying to keep the smile off his face that Dean was talking about. But it was impossible, now that he knew, his brother had been watching out for the quality of his smiles, checking up on him the only way he could.

“Hard not to, with those dimples of yours. Did you know they have their own fan club and website?” Dean said with a teasing sparkle in his eyes.

“What are you, the founding president of said fan club?” Sam sneered, trying to ignore the way Dean was grinning at him like he was a two a.m. snack.

“Nah, I’m totally the one who started the ShrineToSamWinchester’sAss.com though, not gonna lie about that,” Dean said, bursting into uncontrolled laughter at Sam’s expression at his outlandish brag. At least Sam hoped it was a brag, Dean wouldn’t know how to start a website, right?

“Should have guessed that was yours. It was always hard to get away from the fact that my big brother was sort of ‘invested’ shall we say, in my ass.” Sam’s fingers made the air quotes on invested and suppressed the shiver of want that threatened at remembering how that had felt back then. To know that he was owned, heart, mind, soul, body and ass. Like an idiot, he’d thought it was forever. Until it wasn’t. He really hoped none of that showed on his face, he didn’t want to give Dean the wrong idea, that there was any hope of anything ever between them again. He wasn’t that person any more, he doubted Dean was either.

“What are you really doing here?” Sam asked, once Dean seemed to be done with his laughing fit.

“I just came by to say thank you. I was really in a jam with the Feds, I thought I was never going to see the outside again. But your dude came through. Got me right out of there with the surprise bonus of the Feds giving me a freaking apology. A god-damn apology, Sammy, it was freakin’ awesome.”

“He the one that told you who sent him to you?” Sam asked.

“Now don’t you go blaming Barry or anything. He totally deserves that bonus you gave him just for putting up with me getting the info out of him,” Dean said, sitting up a little straighter in the chair.

“You didn’t hurt him, did you, Dean?” Sam asked, heart in his throat as he worried for the lawyer he’d sent to help Dean in his efforts to get out of prison.

“You really think I’d—shit, Sammy. It’s like you don’t even know me,” Dean said with what sounded like real vehemence and a little disappointment too.

“It’s Sam, and I do know you, better than I know anyone. You’ll get violent with a human if you have to, especially if it’s something to do with me.”

“But Barry’s not strictly a human, which of course you already knew. I don’t see how there’d be much point beating the truth out of him. Doing business with a shifter, Sam, really?”

Sam ignored the poke about working with a ‘monster’, but Barry had gotten the job done, just like Sam had known he could. “He told me already, that you’d weaseled the info out of him. So I was half expecting you to turn up at some point. You know, he asked me if you were actually a succubus, not just a human, and I wasn’t sure what to answer.”

“Hmph…well, I didn’t expect him to tell you…everything,” Dean said, one hand going to the back of his neck in that self-protective gesture Sam didn’t know he’d missed seeing.

What did that mean though? Had more happened between them than Barry had told him? The crack about Dean being a succubus Barry had made, seemed like he’d been talking from recent personal experience (perhaps with Dean’s seductive charms). Had Dean fucked a monster that looked like him, and had Dean known it wasn’t him when he did it? He couldn’t ask the question, he just couldn’t. The answer meant too much.

“Maybe he didn’t tell me absolutely everything. I’m guessing he left something out because he promised you he would,” Sam finally said into the soft quiet that had spun up between them.

“He did come to me in prison dressed as you, Sammy,” Dean said with that familiar sound of possessive want coloring Sam’s old nickname.

Sam sighed and debated on whether to correct the nickname for the third time. Trying his hardest to ignore how his belly swooped at that possessive tone. He didn’t want to want to hear it. “How long did it take to figure out it wasn’t really me?”

“The second he walked in, I knew you wouldn’t have bothered to come yourself,” Dean said.

“Aww, poor poor Dean. Why, because you think I don’t care enough?” Sam teased, just because he could.

“No, because you have people to take care of the little unimportant things that don’t truly matter to you, that suck away all your energy.”

“Oh, so you’ve memorized my Ted Talk, huh?”

“I’ve seen it a time or two, sure. Good advice there, I’ve really taken it to heart, especially about the kale.”

“Hah! I’d like to see the mighty Dean Winchester actually eat some kale,” Sam scoffed and then chuckled a little to himself at the thought.

“If that’s what I’ve got to do to get you to return my phone calls, then point me to the nearest bowl of the stuff,” Dean said, all of sudden as serious as a heart attack.

“What is the point? We’ve said all we needed to,” Sam said.

“Sammy, I’m your only family, doesn’t that matter to you? Because it does to me. I was sitting there in prison, feeling ripped to pieces because I was never going to see your stupid face again—the real one.”

Sam looked up in surprise. “Thought you were fine with how things were.”

“How would you know what I’m fine with? You wouldn’t talk to me the last fourteen years,” Dean said, on the edge of shouting. There was so much emotion in his voice, he might as well have been screaming.

“If you’d really wanted to talk to me, you would have figured out a way, Dean,” Sam said, trying to keep that wall up, trying like hell to not let his brother’s emotions get to him this time.

“I was trying to give you the space you said you needed. What was it you said when you left? Oh yeah—you needed a space without me in it.” Dean leaned forward and hid his face in his hands. His shoulders started moving, shaking a little, he couldn’t possibly be crying, could he?

“That is not what I said. I never said anything like that,” Sam said, sitting forward in his chair, almost so that he could touch Dean.

“Well, that’s what I heard. When you left me,” Dean said into his hands.

“I did not leave you, Dean. I just left for school, like any other regular eighteen-year old does. You and Dad, you’re the ones who left me.”

“Regular eighteen-year-old, yeah right. He’s gone you know, twelve years now, and he never told me exactly what he said to you when you left for school.”

Sam had known that his father had died, a bit after the fact, a letter from Bobby had been forwarded to him. Back then he’d been a newbie lawyer in the middle of one of the largest corporate acquisitions in the tech industry, so he hadn’t had the bandwidth to even respond.

“He told me if I was leaving that meant, it was for good. He actually said the words to me: ‘If you leave, never come back, never contact either of us. You’ll be on your own’. And I never heard from you, Dean, not once in all those first few years, so I figured you agreed with him.”

“I didn’t know he could say something like that to you. Sammy, I didn’t know that he did. I wish I had,” Dean said in the quietest voice Sam had ever heard him use.

“You just assumed I never wanted to hear from you or see you again?” Sam asked.

“Before you left, you never talked to me, about your plans, about wanting to get out, get away from us, the life, whatever the reasons you had that made you leave. So I had to make up a story for myself. You weren’t there to ask.”

“You had my phone number, you could have called,” Sam said, picturing all those nights in his dorm the first year at Stanford, falling asleep holding his old cellphone like a jackass waiting for his long lost love to actually freaking call.

“Dad told me that you’d be better off if we left you alone for a while, let you get used to being on your own. So that’s what I did.”

Sam jumped to his feet, barely holding himself back from taking a swing at Dean. He clenched his hands into fists at his hips instead. “And you just believed him? Just like that?” Sam waited for an answer, and there wasn’t one coming, he could see it plainly written on Dean’s face. “Of course you did, stupid question, it was dad and when he said jump you always started jumping without asking a damn thing besides how high, sir yes sir.”

“Sammy, you left me, and I didn’t know what I’d done to make you want to just take off and go like that. What was I supposed to do?” Dean looked up at him then, face open and without guile. He looked so undone, so lost, so unlike the tough-as-nails brother he’d remembered. He really didn’t know?

Sam took a step towards Dean, halving the distance between them. He wanted to touch him so badly, but he couldn’t let himself, not yet. He decided it was time for the truth, and if Dean denied it, he’d have the answer to the question he’d always tortured himself with all these years.

“It wasn’t about you, Dean, it never was. Back then you owned me, body and soul, I was already yours. You knew that.”

Dean swallowed loudly, and slowly rose to his feet. He looked up into Sam’s face, meeting his eyes with the truth and conviction Sam needed to see. “I did. I did know that.”

Sam felt himself sway a little towards Dean after hearing his answer. He yelled at himself internally to cut out the damn swooning. He was no longer a swooner, right?

“Do you still—know that?” Sam asked.

“Should I?” Dean asked, still dead serious, no one-sided grin or eyebrow waggling to break the moment.

“Yeah, you should. But only if it’s a mutual thing, something you’re not going to let go of just because someone else tells you to. It’s got to be something you’ll actually fight for,” Sam said, struggling to keep his eyes from going liquid at the hope in Dean’s two-word question.

“It is mutual, it always was. And now there’s no one around anymore to tell me what to do or what to think. And if there was I’d tell them to fuck off if I thought I had chance to…” Dean trailed off, his eyes searching Sam’s face as if it held the rest of his sentence.

“A chance to do what, Dean? Let me hear you actually say it, then maybe I’ll believe you,” Sam said.

“To be with you again, to own you like you said. And for you to know that you own me too,” Dean said, taking a step forward so that he was almost touching Sam.

Sam held up a hand to stop Dean’s approach. He knew this was his last chance to make sure they really were on the same page. Once he let Dean touch him, all his resistance and discipline would go poof like so much vaporware. “If I make space for you in my life, it’s going to mean a lot of upset and changes for me. So I need to get clear on something first. Are you still going to hunt, or what?”

“No, I’m out—for good. I mean it. I am not going back out there after the whole FBI thing, and honestly, hunting without a partner is all kinds of shit show.”

“You’re really out? Because I am not getting pulled back into any of that. I just can’t do it,” Sam said, shaking his head at even entertaining the idea. It was one thing to deal with the occasional shifter non-human who happened to be a great lawyer, it was a whole other world to expect him to get out there and hunt again.

“Yeah, I really am. I think I finally get it, why you don’t want to hunt,” Dean said.

“You do? What caused that change?” Sam asked, repressing the urge to sit back down in surprise.

“After doing it for so many years, with partners or without, it’s just so endless, all the evil shit that’s out there. Most of the time I never felt like I was making even the smallest dent in it. Sure, I suppose I helped a bunch of people along the way, but there’s other hunters that will keep going and doing that. It doesn’t have to be me doing the job forever and ever until I die bloody.”

“That’s kind of amazing to hear, I never thought you’d come around to thinking that.”

“You know how Dad and me, we got the thing that killed Mom. That’s what took him out, and he was happy to go that way. At least I think he was, like it was a release or something,” Dean said, his voice almost breaking on the last bit of the sentence. It had been twelve years, but Sam imagined the loss still seemed very fresh to Dean. He watched the emotions play across his brother’s face, as he struggled to get himself back together.

Sam couldn’t hold back any longer from touching him. Dean’s whole body was leaning towards him, yearning, radiating the need to feel him too. He clasped one hand on Dean’s shoulder, the bare minimum to start. Dean leaned into the touch, so much that Sam had to re-plant his feet to take the additional weight.

“Yeah, Bobby told me the story in a letter he sent me back then,” Sam said.

“It’s probably the only close to happy way Dad could have gone out.”

“After that, I always thought I’d get another letter or call from Bobby telling me that you’d died too. And I was thankful everyday that I hadn’t heard from him,” Sam heard his own voice break on the last word and knew that Dean knew what it meant. He felt Dean’s hand on his own shoulder, the two points where their bodies touched seemed to sizzle with fiery electricity, it was almost hard to hold on, but he was dying to feel more of Dean.

“You were worrying about me dying out there?” Dean asked, looking up at him with big eyes full of genuine surprise.

Sam stared down into those eyes, the ones he’d missed seeing all these years, they were even more beautiful than he’d remembered. The depths to this man that he still loved to distraction, all on display in his eyes if he let you look deeply enough into them. “Of course I was, I’m not some sort of unfeeling monster even though I may play one on the internet.”

“Now about this making space for me in your life thing, is that still something you’re up for?” Dean asked, cocking one eyebrow up in question. He must have seen the answer before Sam said anything, because his arm snaked around Sam’s waist, pulling him in close, their lower halves aligned.

“If you’ll do the same, yeah,” Sam said, wrapping one arm around Dean’s shoulders, pulling him up onto his toes, the other hand tilting Dean’s face so that their lips could finally meet. All the years they’d missed just melted away as they relearned the way they’d always communicated best. Sam felt like the fourteen year old Sam still inside him was cheering him on as he bent Dean backwards in a slight dip, just because he could now.

Dean laughed a little at the sensation, pulling away from their increasingly desperate kisses, searching Sam’s face, no doubt remembering he’d been asked a question. He surged up and captured Sam’s heart all over again with the sigh of satisfaction he let out when Sam kissed him like he meant it. Because Sam did, oh god did he ever, and there could be no hiding that.

“Same, ditto, you got it, Sammy, nothing I’d rather do,” Dean murmured against Sam’s lips.

To Part Two