Fic: A Town Called Rhoda (Sam/Dean, NC-17) Part 2 of 7

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Sam and Dean walked back to the cabin, bumping hips and shoulders just like they used to, falling into step naturally like no time at all had passed. The familiarity of it gave Dean’s heart a little squeeze that made him almost stumble. Sam caught his elbow and paused.

“You okay?” Sam asked, briefly squeezing his arm and then letting go. Their hands brushed together and Dean felt a shock of recognition, of what he’d been missing.

“Yeah, mostly, still a shock that you’re here,” Dean said, continuing to walk back towards the cabin.

“You’re glad though, right?” Sam asked from behind him, he hadn’t started walking again. Dean flashed his light towards Sam and saw that his head was down and his shoulders were drooping.

“Of course I am, it’s just a shock that you’re back, it’s gonna take time to really realize you’re not a smoking nuclear corpse,” Dean said.

“Okay, okay, sorry. I knew it was going to be a surprise me just showing up here, I’m sorry,” Sam said.

“You really need to stop saying you’re sorry. I’m sorry that you were thinking I wasn’t happy that you’re alive and here and all,” Dean said.

“You’re right, no battle of the sorries is necessary here. You got anything to drink inside?” Sam asked, walking past Dean and striding the rest of the way to the cabin. His boots clunked on the porch, echoing in the silence of the night.

Dean looked up at the stars for a moment, asking them to give him strength, to keep the peace, to keep his heart in one piece. He got the cabin door open and waved Sam in with his flashlight. He lit the gas lantern on the kitchen counter and pulled out two small glasses and a nearly full bottle of whisky.

“You still have whisky left? I’m actually surprised,” Sam said.

“I’d just stocked up, there was a big sale on cases at BevMo in Arcata the week before…you know, Boom-Day,” Dean said, pouring them each a double slug in the glasses. He slid one over to Sam across the counter.

“Is that what we’re officially calling it?” Sam sat on the barstool and raised his glass. “To surviving Boom-Day.”

Dean raised his own and clinked glasses with Sam. They both watched each other finish off their glass. Dean couldn’t help but notice the whole Adam’s apple thing on Sam much as he tried not to, it was such a visceral reminder of how Sam looked when they—not going there, he reminded himself. “Why, what did other people call it the places where you were?”

“A bunch of different things, but there wasn’t one that stuck with me, mostly people were just trying to make it to the next day.”

“Same here really, we’re still trying to figure out if nuclear winter is a thing that’s going to happen or not.”

“It most likely has started already, based on what I picked up in Reno. There was a big initial response of nukes from our side, and then China and some from India and Pakistan went off too. There were rumors about Russia and Israel too. Basically the whole world got in on the fun.”

“Shit, so it wasn’t just us on the West Coast then,” Dean said. “I was kinda hoping there was still a rest of the world going on out there without us as usual somewhere.”

“Sorry,” Sam said, looking down into the depths of his empty glass

Dean poured them both another slug and grimaced as he downed his. He noticed Sam’s eyes were on him, flicking down to his own Adam’s apple. At least it wasn’t just him, but this was going to make it even harder.

“I’m glad to be out of the cities, the descent of humanity when the power goes off is not pretty.”

“What happened, Sammy?”

“There were…uh, slave camps being established. All the workers for the non-functioning casinos had been rounded up. They tried to put me in one since I wasn’t a Nevadan. Let’s just say they really have it in for people from California. I never understood it, but they blamed us for the whole nuke thing happening.”

“But you got away, I mean…obviously since you’re here now,” Dean said.

“Yeah, I did, but I had to do some shit I don’t really want to talk about,” Sam said, looking down at the counter where his hands clenched over and over as if remembering a lot of fighting.

Dean put one hand on top of Sam’s clenched fists. “That’s okay, you tell me when you’re ready. You did what you had to do to get to me, and I’m glad for it, alright?”

Sam looked up at him finally, eyes wet with unshed tears. Sam’s hands unclenched and wound themselves together with Dean’s. “Thanks, Dean.”

Dean nodded and didn’t say anything, couldn’t over the lump in his throat. It must have been really really bad out there. He honestly wasn’t sure he wanted to know all the details.

“I didn’t want to leave things how they were between us, I was a real jerk the last time we talked and I didn’t want you to think that of me, on top of thinking I was dead too. It just didn’t seem right, you know?”

“I get it, I do. But was it really worth it to get here, all the shit you just told me?” Dean asked.

Sam just raised his eyebrows and didn’t answer, kept holding Dean’s hand entwined with his.

Dean knew he shouldn’t have asked such a dumb question. “What was it about how we left things that you wanted to change?” Dean asked.

“Pretty much everything,” Sam said.

Dean laughed, and pulled his hand out of Sam’s grip. He was hurting so much inside that it was the only thing he could do to try and hide it. “You made yourself pretty damn clear, Sammy. I didn’t fit in your shiny new life.”

“Well, I was wrong, so wrong, you have no idea. Turned out that my shiny new life sucked, mostly because you weren’t in it,” Sam said. “And I was just about to come up here and tell you. I had decided when I was at the school thing in LA that I’d had enough of staying apart from you. It wasn’t working.”

“What wasn’t working?”

“Everything, none of it made sense without you. I was trying so hard to force it to, and it just wasn’t possible,” Sam said.

“You should have stayed in LA, would’ve been better for you,” Dean said.

“You don’t really mean that,” Sam said. “Not after what I just told you I did to get here.”

“Sam, I appreciate all of that, I really do. And I’m really glad that you’re alive. But you made it damn clear before that you didn’t want me in your life. And I rearranged my head for that, you know? It wasn’t easy, but I did it.”

“And how about your heart? Are you able to rearrange that too?” Sam asked.

“You don’t have to be such a dick about it,” Dean snarled.

“I’m not…I didn’t mean,” Sam said, holding up his hands. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed you’d want—well, anything to do with me like that again.”

“It’s not that, I’m just…there’s—I’m with someone now,” Dean said.

“Who, I mean where, they’re here, right now?” Sam asked, looking around the room to find the hidden person.

“No, they’re not here right now. They live here in Rhoda, and we’ve been seeing each other for just like a few months now,” Dean said.

“I see, okay, so you moved on, that’s…unexpected, but it’s good. I’m glad for you, Dean. I don’t want to mess things up for you. That’s not why I came. Is there a place I can stay, just for a little while?”

“Yeah, I got the second cabin on the property all fixed up, I was going to try and Airbnb it next summer. Guess that’s not really a thing anymore, so you’re more than welcome to it. I’m not using it at all.”

“Thanks, I swear this is…it’s only going to be temporary. I’ll move on once I figure out what to do next. Don’t want to cramp your style or whatever,” Sam said with a grimace, gone all prickly again.

“Don’t be like that, c’mon, it’s not my fault. I thought you were dead, Sammy. And for what, a few months before that, I thought, no I knew that you didn’t want me. I believed you when you told me that. You told me to move on, and I did the best I could.”

“I…I know I did, and I was trying to mean it then, I really did, I thought it was the best thing for you. It wasn’t fair to jerk you around while I made up my mind. But then all this happened, and the whole time I was trying to get to you, I built it all up in my imagination. That you’d be here waiting for me, still hoping I’d come back to you somehow, and then we’d just…be together. It’s dumb I know, really dumb to believe in any happily ever after bullshit, but it’s what got me through all of it, just the hoping.”

Dean couldn’t really say anything to all that. Like Sam said, it was dumb, happily ever after bullshit, at least they both knew it. “C’mon, let’s get you situated for the night. I need to get up early tomorrow.”

Dean led the way out of the kitchen to his bedroom, grabbed some sleep gear out of his dresser and tossed it to Sam who followed close behind. He got a few blankets out of the hall closet and arranged them on the comfy couch in front of the banked fire in the hearth, all with Sam close on his heels.

“We’ll work on getting the other cabin set up for you tomorrow when I come back from town,” Dean said. “But for tonight, this should be okay, the couch is almost long enough for you, gigantor.”

Sam elbowed him for the gigantor comment. “Where are you going tomorrow?” Sam asked, looking like a little kid clutching the sleep clothes in his hands.

“Weekly barter meet-up down in town, got to go trade for my supper,” Dean said.

“Can I come with you?” Sam asked.

“No, better not, this meeting was already going to be dicey because supplies are running so low. A new person showing up in the town all of a sudden will unbalance everything, one more mouth to feed and all that. I need to take the temperature and see how to handle things.”

“And the person you’re seeing, they’ll be there?” Sam asked, carefully using a gender-neutral term since Dean hadn’t specified yet.

“Yeah, they will,” Dean said, meeting Sam’s eyes as steady and steely as he could manage.

“Are you going to tell them about me showing up, introduce me or whatever?” Sam asked, emphasis on the them.

“Eventually, yeah of course,” Dean said. “I’m sure Blair will be real glad to meet you.”

“Good, I’ll be happy to meet them. Thanks for letting me crash on your couch,” Sam said.

“Sammy, thanks for not being dead and for getting your butt here to show me that,” Dean said, grabbing Sam in for another hug. This time it was a long one, a welcome-back-from-the-dead hug, they’d unfortunately had a little too much practice with this type. It was a full body thing where they wrapped themselves around each other and held on so tightly it left a physical mark. One of those marks you could check on to make sure it was really real. He knew he would need that in the morning, and so would Sam.

“Thanks for still being here so I could find you, Dean,” Sam said, whispering the words into the skin of Dean’s neck, lips and tongue and breath so hot and wet and perfect.

Dean held in the groan of desire that almost escaped him and unwound himself from Sam. It wasn’t happening, he couldn’t let it happen. “Night, Sammy,” Dean said, making a quick exit to his bedroom. He shut the door and leaned against it, listening to the sounds of Sam settling in for a night on his old and quite lumpy couch. He spread himself out on the old brass bed slowly, hoping it wouldn’t squeal and squeak, and briefly imagined how it would protest if Sam were in here too. No—not happening, not this time, not ever again.

He had a hard time falling asleep, even with all the whisky, he was so wound up with the shock and excitement of Sam’s arrival. There was so much to think about and plan and worry about. He let it all circle around a few times and finally gave up on solving anything, slowly drifting off into a sleep where he had a dream where he was carrying Sam on his back up the mountain trail on his property, to show him the way to Blair’s house. The whole time Sam was on his back, he got lighter and lighter until he was maybe a six year old, tousled hair and mischievous grin back on his face. Not worrying about nuclear winter or Boom-Day or anything but being a little brother fully focused on hero worshipping his big brother.

~**~*~*~*~

Dean woke up at first light, as usual, and watched Sam sleeping on the couch for a while. He really was still here, it wasn’t a dream.  Dean made them some breakfast as quietly as he could manage, but it was all kind of one room. Sam woke up slowly, stretching and groaning on the couch.

“What’s that I’m smelling?” Sam croaked from the couch.

“Breakfast, get your ass in here if you want it warm. Don’t have the juice for the microwave so I got rid of the thing.”

Sam stood up and stretched, and Dean couldn’t believe how he felt seeing Sam dressed in his clothes. It was familiar and possessive and he almost let himself go the usual route of letting himself get turned on. But it had to be different between them, it was the only way he was going to survive.

Sam perched on one of the barstools next to Dean and ate the steaming bowl of oatmeal Dean had given him. The wild berries he’d collected the other day from the brushy part of his property went really well with oatmeal.

“You even have coffee, how?” Sam asked.

“I was buying in bulk so I had a bunch on hand when it all went down. But there’s not much of my stash left, better enjoy it,” Dean said.

“Hard to imagine a world without coffee, isn’t it?”

“Hard to imagine a lot of things, yeah. It’s gonna suck,” Dean said.

“Wonder if you could grow tea up here? At least you’d get the caffeine fix that way.”

“Yeah it does grow here, actually it does really well. Blair’s mom already had a few plants in her garden. She’s going to give me some cuttings and I’m going to try to propagate it. Since there’s so much cleared-out land up here on my land, it makes sense. Tea plants like a lot of sun apparently.”

“Hard to imagine you turning into a tea drinker, much less a tea grower,” Sam said with a laugh.

“Dark times call for growth, Sammy,” Dean said, joining him in laughing. It felt good to get to laugh out loud with him, it had been too long. He couldn’t remember the last time Sam and he had laughed together before Boom-Day, there’d been so much tenseness and squabbling, not a lot of opportunities for joy, much less laughter.

“I already got a shower, but there should still be hot water,” Dean said.

“You have hot water, no way!” Sam said, possibly more excited than he should be, but then who knew how long it’d been for him.

“There is, thanks to the solar panel installation I put in last summer,” Dean said.

“I had no idea you’d gone solar. You were a hell of a lot more ready for this off-grid living than me.”

“City boy, go on, get yourself cleaned up,” Dean says, picking up both of their bowls and turning to the sink.

Sam’s hands were suddenly on his waist, Dean wanted more than anything to lean back into his brother’s body and rest there. He didn’t respond, kept washing the bowls and waited to see what Sam would do.

“This city boy is very thankful for you,” Sam said in a husky voice, his hands moved up to encircle Dean and give him a hug from behind.

Dean let himself enjoy the brief hug, but he didn’t really respond, much less turn and embrace Sam like he really wanted to.

Sam stepped away and Dean eventually heard the shower start up. His heart started beating right again and he took a deep breath, gazing out the window at the open pasture. This was going to be hard work to keep himself from just falling into Sam and giving himself up to him again, no matter the consequences. But he had to do it, he owed it to Blair, and to his own sanity.

Dean got packed up with what he needed for the meeting in town, saddlebags packed on his electric motorcycle with all the stuff he could trade. Excess tools from the workshop, clothing that Eleanor had left behind in her closet and some of the last of his coffee stash.

“So this is your vehicle of choice now?” Sam asked, walking in long strides from the cabin.

Dean looked up and watched him approach, sun rising behind him, his crazy hair slicked back from the shower, beard trimmed to less of a mountain-man bush. He looked like a supermodel on a shoot for Ralph Lauren or something, it was nuts how beautiful Sam was, even after everything he’d probably gone through just to get there.

Sam’s lips quirked up in a smile, and Dean knew he’d shown too much. He looked back down at his saddlebags and readjusted them even though they were perfectly fine.

“Yeah, a bunch of us in town got into this early last summer. We had a group project where we figured out the best way to convert the gas engines over and modify everything. It was a hoot, sawzalling up the engines, soldering shit back together, working out the gearing and everything. But it’s a sweet ride, quiet, and easy to re-charge on my solar.”

“My brother the prepper, who knew?”

“Oh you love it, city boy. Listen, I gotta get going soon, but c’mon, I’ll show you the cabin first. And you can let Poppy out into the pasture too,” Dean waited while Sam brought Poppy out of the garage.

“How’d she do out here last night?” Dean asked.

“Seems fine, at least there were no dents in your car,” Sam reported.

Dean led the way towards the other cabin, grabbing up a bucket and some treats for the chickens. Poppy and Sam followed, on their way they passed the chicken coop. Dean let his flock out, where they milled around their feet, grumbling and pecking at Dean until he threw out some feed.

“Meet my girls, this aggressive one is Cersei, her sidekick is of course, Sansa. Galadriel, Arwen, Daenerys, and Arya usually stick together. Oh and here’s the stragglers, Anna Nicole and Lucy.”

“They’re beautiful, so black and shiny, almost like the Impala,” Sam said, grinning from ear to ear.

The small flock with their glossy black plumage gleaming in the morning sunshine milled around Sam’s legs. It made a nice picture, especially with Sam’s genuine amusement.

“I love how the black is almost green too, and their combs are so red. Never thought of chickens as being beautiful.”

Dean barely stopped himself from commenting on what else was beautiful out here this morning. He was glad he didn’t get teased about the chicken names, Blair had already given him enough shit for a lifetime on that subject.

“Go ahead, you get the eggs while I’m feeding them,” Dean said, pointing at the side of the coop and handing him the bucket. Sam dropped Poppy’s lead. Dean figured she’d stick around without being tied up to anything. She seemed interested in the chickens swarming around her legs. He watched as Sam lifted up the clever door on the back of the coop and reached inside, slowly filling the bottom of the bucket with eight eggs.

“Eight eggs,” Sam said. “So, it’s one a day from each of them?”

“Not usually, I can count on five most mornings. But they’re still pretty young.”

“What kind are they?”

“Black Australorps, goofy breed name, huh?”

“They’re beautiful and I think they like Poppy,” Sam said, pointing at two of the chickens who were rubbing their heads on the top of Poppy’s hooves and around her ankles.

“Let’s put her out here in the pasture, where the grass is the highest. I think the fence is solid all the way around. Maybe you should check it though while I’m gone.”

Sam unhooked Poppy’s lead from her halter and patted her. “I’ll check it out, sure. You go on and have a good breakfast, girl.” He shut the gate behind him.

***

To Part 3