Fic: Beneath Our Blackened Hearts (Sam/Dean, NC-17) Part 2 of 4

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“Sammy, what’s wrong?” Dean asks as he runs into the room.

Sam is standing in front of one of the tables, his hands over his mouth and a look of horror on his face. He turns his bugged-out, terrified eyes to Dean and shakes his head.

“I…I thought I…that you were—fuck what the hell was that!” Sam yells as he paces around the library table looking under it from all sides.

Dean looks too, but all he sees is some food crumbs that should have been swept up when he did chores the other day. “I don’t see anything.”

“Yeah, me neither. So either I’m going crazy or I don’t even know what else it could be,” Sam sinks down into his chair and puts his head in his hands.

Dean walks over and sets a hand on his brother’s shoulder, squeezing it gently. He notices that Sam’s wearing a different shirt, actually two different shirts than the ones he had been wearing in the kitchen less than a minute ago. There wasn’t time for him to change—and his hair is now wet. “What did you see?”

“It was you, Dean, I thought it was you.”

“I wasn’t in here though, you know I was in the kitchen,”

“All I know is that I sat down at this table and I felt something flop over onto my foot, then it grabbed my ankle. It was all wet with blood, god the smell of it, that was when I screamed.”

“And then what?” Dean asks, still holding on to Sam’s shoulder. His brother is vibrating under his hand like he’s about to fly into a zillion pieces.

“I jumped up, and it was you, Dean. You were down there under the table, crumpled up on the floor. You were completely covered in blood, I don’t know how you were still alive. I could see that there were slashes all over your body.”

“Was I naked?” Dean asks, wiggling his eyebrows to try and get a laugh out of Sam.

“This isn’t funny, and yes you were. But the blood, the knife wounds, it was—“ Sam trails off to nothing.

“Well, it wasn’t me, obviously, because here I am, fully clothed, no knife wounds anywhere,” Dean says, gesturing at himself with the hand that isn’t holding onto Sam’s shoulder. He pulls up his shirt to show Sam when the terrified look on his face doesn’t go away.

“What if it’s my visions coming back somehow?” Sam asks, somehow sounding like a scared five year old.

Dean takes a deep breath to calm the approaching dread he feels at the very mention of  Sam’s visions. “After all this time, I really doubt it, and you mentioned smelling something. You didn’t have smell-o-vision back then, right? It was probably just a dream,” Dean says, remembering back all those years ago when Sam when get the horrible headaches after the visions assaulted him.

Sam sniffs loudly almost like he’s proving it to himself. “Wow, what smells so damn good?” Sam asks.

“It’s dinner, remember I told you it’d be ready in an hour? Well, less than that now,” Dean says, wondering if the shock of whatever dream his brother just experienced made him forget their very recent conversation about dinner. Well, a whole lot happened right after that. He blushes just thinking about it.

“Wait, why are you blushing?” Sam asks, looking up at him with a head-tilt and a squint of suspicious little-brother eyes. “Was this a trick you played on me somehow?”

“What? No, not a trick, how could I have even done anything? Dude, you know I was just in the kitchen.”

“No, Dean, I didn’t know. I thought you were still in your room, like you have been for a few days.”

Dean has definitely stopped blushing, this is unreal, it’s like nothing happened between them just a few minutes ago. No—it’s more like Sam’s trying to ignore what they did, hell he probably regrets it. “So we’re playing it that way, huh?” Instead of screaming like he wants to, Dean stalks off to his room and slams the door.

Fuck Sam and fuck the whole thing, he knew it couldn’t be that easy. Hell, who knew if it even had happened at all. The way his head has been since Michael got yanked out, maybe he just re-ran one of his favorite go-to daydreams. Unlocked one of those rooms in his head. He’s always had a thing for imagining Sam offering himself up unconditionally like that. And every guy daydreams about random awesome blowjobs, right?

He throws himself down on the bed and puts his headphones on, cranks up some music and shuts his eyes. He doesn’t want to think about this, or feel anything about it, but then the spot where Sam had bit him, right over his left hipbone throbs in time with his heartbeat. He stands up and stalks over to the mirror, pushes down his jeans and there it is. Evidence that it was all real, not some long-cherished daydream. Somehow that’s a million times worse. “Fuck!”

Dean knows that he must have fallen asleep, because this has to be one of the worst dreams he’s ever had in his life. It has to be a dream, right? But it’s so real, he can taste it on his tongue, the heavy copper of the blood, he can smell it, the stench of the guts, and even worse it’s happening right here on his bed.

No…it’s not just “happening”—he’s the one doing it.

He’s up to his elbows in someone—someone’s body. He’s pushing past various internal organs, slipping his hands past what has to be a liver. It’s so big and spongy, taking up so much space inside this person who was so recently alive. It’s all still so warm, and the copper smell is overwhelming, he can taste it on the back of his tongue and he hasn’t even had any of the blood or pieces in his mouth…yet.

But wait…why, why in the hell would he do this, the remaining rational part of his brain screams internally. The answer that comes in a terrifying voice that he recognizes as his own is worse than any monster he could imagine: I need it, I need to hold it in my hand.

Dean’s hands move of their own accord, pressing through the body cavity, searching for it, for what he needs most. What, what do you need, he asks himself in a desperate rush. What do I need so badly that I’d do this?

The answer comes right away, as soon as his hand holds the heart. I need to see if it’s as black as my own. He tugs at it, but it’s stubbornly attached.

“Don’t you want to know, Dean-o?” an almost familiar voice asks him.

He starts to shake with the fear that it’s not a dream, that this is real, because it’s a possibility, Michael just recently had him doing all kinds of things like this in the real world when he was riding him. Who knows what tricks or booby-traps Michael might have left behind. Dean wars with himself for a long few minutes just to look up and confirm who this body used to be. He already knows, of course he does, but he does.

                                                                                      not.

                                                                                                 want.

                                                                                                              to.

He forces himself to scan up the chest where the body is still whole, past the familiar tattoo that he shares on his own chest, past those impossibly broad shoulders, he can see the clear dark outline of where he’d sucked a hickey into this very same neck earlier today. He shakes his head, tears pouring freely down his cheeks, he’s sobbing, he doesn’t want to see, doesn’t want to know what he’s done. He has to though, for Sam, he has to do it, he has to at least look. He slides his eyes in one heroic pass over the face that he knows better than his own. Empty of life, Sam never looks right when he’s dead.

He tries to stop rummaging in Sam’s guts, because Sam wouldn’t want him to do this. Wouldn’t want him to be invasive and snoopy like he can’t help being all the time, especially inside his very own body. Sam will hate it that he did this, all because he needed to know if their hearts were in the same state. Why, why do I need to know this? Dean asks himself, like he needs to distract someone else to be able to get his own hands out of his own brother.

The answer comes in a terribly loud and emphatic voice that reminds him now of his father…shit. “So you don’t have to be guilty about screwing him, Dean-o.”

Asking the question makes it possible to try to get his hands out of Sam. The sound when he slips one of his hands out of Sam’s belly is a slow, slick, sucking sound. Just hearing it sets him off screaming. He keeps screaming because he can’t get his other hand out, because it’s holding something hard and almost ashy in his hand. It’s got to be Sam’s heart…it is Sam’s heart, just as black and dead as his own. He jerks back at the feel of the thing in his hand, but his wrists are ringed with intestines slipping and sliding out of Sam. The sound they make when they hit the floor remind him of Glythur’s tentacles flailing against the altar as they’d searched for a hold on him. Splatting with a sick and sticky sound, but then still moving, still slippery. He’d beaten Glythur and his fucking tentacles, and Sam had been there afterwards, holding him like this.

Like he is now.

Because Sam is here now and alive, at his side, all flailing limbs while he still holds Dean somehow and the hovering instantly starts. “Dean? You okay?”

Because of course Dean’s hands aren’t covered in his brother’s blood, his arms aren’t ringed with Sam’s intestines slipping and sliding. He can’t possibly explain it. There’s no dead brother in his bed, just a live and very worried one.

He wrings his hands together just to make sure there’s no slick blood still there. “Yeah, just a really bad dream,” Dean mumbles, hoping against hope that it’s enough to satisfy Sam for the moment. He can’t even look at him, doesn’t want to see the worry and fear, doesn’t want to remember how beautiful his face was—even in death (especially in death…oh don’t go there, Dean, nononono.)

“You’re shaking,” Sam says, and pulls one of Dean’s quilts around both of their shoulders, leaves his arm around him, pulls Dean in tight, close to his side, where he has no business being. It’s not right taking this from Sam, not after that dream, after what he’s done in real life to Sam that’s almost as bad.

What does it say about Dean that this is the best thing he’s felt all day, he wonders. Better than the fucking blow job, better than all the kissing, (the blood, that beautiful black heart in his hand). He fits right there under Sam’s arm perfectly, no slouching required. He leans his head over until his ear rests on Sam’s chest.

“So what was it? I mean…uh, you were really screaming, dude. Scared the shit out of me,” Sam says. Admitting that he was scared is a low blow, secret little-brother weapon of last resort.

“Sorry, yeah, it was a bad one. Maybe I just need some more rest,” Dean says.

“Is it Michael related?” Sam asks.

Dean shrugs his arm off and yanks the quilt over his head, flops on his back and doesn’t answer. He can’t answer, it’s all mixed-up in his mind and heart and soul and he needs to sort it out on his own.

“I really wish you’d just tell me,” Sam says. “Especially after what happened earlier.” Sam goes away angry, Dean thinks he’s still ignoring what happened in the kitchen and is referring to Sam’s screaming fit in the library. But that doesn’t make sense, because even though Sam had described what he’d seen, he sure as hell hadn’t told him what had made him so scared. Hell, he’d gotten distracted by the smell of dinner.

Dinner…shit, he’d left it in the oven all this time

Sam hears the same scuttling noises in the hallway on his way back to his room. But he’s too angry to stop and investigate. He’s got to focus on figuring this out, back in his room with the door closed, he keeps researching the vision he’d had in the library. What did it mean seeing Dean almost dead like that? Was he somehow cursed, or was it really possible that his powers were making a return? And now a new question occurs to him: does it have anything to do with what just happened with Dean screaming just now? Maybe if his powers were back, he’d projected something, made his brother see something just as awful as he’d seen? More likely that it’s probably just some leftover archangel bullshit. But Dean isn’t going to talk about that stuff any time soon now is he?

Dean comes in without knocking, interrupting Sam’s internal stream of questions. He’s changed his clothes and doesn’t look so freaked. But Dean stays silent, his eyes are dark with some emotion that Sam doesn’t recognize. He joins Sam on the bed without hesitation this time.

The dark emotion in Dean’s eyes is now more obvious, he needs it and wants it, but can’t ask. Sam can at least give him this, without making it difficult. He pulls Dean down to the bed, tangling their legs together, and pinning his arms above his head with one hand capturing Dean’s wrists. Sam grinds against Dean, right where it counts, where he can feel it, how much Dean wants him, how hard he is for him already. Sam crushes his mouth to Dean’s, sealing them together, tongue fucking him desperately as Dean responds with the same level of desperation. The smoky taste comes on more strongly, the deeper Sam licks into Dean’s mouth, but it doesn’t stop him from taking what he needs.

Sam is so besotted with this new version of Dean that is taking him apart and putting him back together with his teeth and tongue and lips. He doesn’t understand where Dean has the time or energy when he’s battling to put himself back together after Michael’s possession. Much less to cook that amazing lasagna dinner that Sam had taken out of the oven before it could burn.

But before he can think much more deeply than that, Dean’s naked and writhing under him and all thoughts of thinking deeply or about lasagna go right out the nonexistent window in his room. It’s just him and his brother and all the passion and love he’d hoped for but never expected. They don’t talk about it while it’s happening, or afterwards, not once. Sam finds that he can’t care too much that outside of the time he’s spent in Sam’s room, Dean acts just like they always have. It’s the most exhilarating and confusing day Sam has ever had in his whole life.

****

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