Fic: A Town Called Rhoda (Sam/Dean, NC-17) Part 4 of 7

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Back to Part 3

****

After a few weeks, Blair was great, doing great, yup. At least that’s what they usually tell themselves. That’s what they always answer when their mom asked after the initial explanation about Sam.

Blair is the best. Or so Dean always tells them, just about any chance he gets, even with Sam right there raising his eyebrows in surprise.

Blair knows that they got Dean through what they both were certain was the loss of his brother. And as Dean was always telling them, he will never be able to thank Blair enough for taking away his pearl-handled Colt until he was back on board the mostly-trying-to-stay-alive train. The stricken look on Sam’s face when he heard that one was cold comfort.

Like they always tell mom, Blair is great, just great with having to witness the reunion of two halves of a whole. The brothers never should have been apart, it was so painfully obvious to Blair when they saw their reunion happening like one of those slow-motion car wrecks you can’t possibly turn away from. The crash in the end was both inevitable and still somehow a surprise. Mom’s understanding in advance was irritatingly supportive.

But just like Lisa had before them, Blair quickly came to realize that there was no getting between these two men. Dean had told them everything, the top-secret part about Sam being both Dean’s brother and former lover, and how their job had been driving around the country fighting monsters and saving the world. All the while trying (and failing) to have relationships with people besides their brother. The brothers, Blair quickly came to realize—they were just meant to be in some cosmic way that was inescapable once you were in a room with them for more than five minutes. They’re drawn to each other, even when they’re angrier than you’ve ever seen a person. Even though they’re brothers who had broken apart, Blair knew exactly what was going to happen way before Dean did.

Somehow when Dean had talked about Sam the last few months, he’d left out the part about not really being over him, before he’d been nuked. And now Blair was feeling kinda nuked really, well no, that wasn’t quite right, they were feeling unprepared. Not like you could really prep for this sort of thing, but their mom raised them with an almost-prepper mentality. They’ve been trying to maintain an even keel since meeting the giant man that was somehow Dean’s returned-from-the-dead brother. Blair didn’t want to think of Sam as a rival, but that’s just facts baby. Sam might be a nice guy, but Blair could tell that the dude’s a closer. Sam’s not going anywhere without Dean anytime soon. So Blair’s working on preparing their heart to be broken through and through. Luckily, Mama did teach them practicality too.

***

At first, Sam had thought that Dean was just fucking with him, not assigning a gender to Blair, but then once he’d met them, he’d immediately figured out that Blair just happened to be a non-binary person, assigned male at birth (aka AMAB.)

He brought it up when he was alone with Blair the first time, wanting to know the right pronouns and so on. He’d had some sensitivity training at school and he didn’t want to screw up and insult someone who was so important in his brother’s life.

“So, I noticed Dean uses they and them pronouns when he talks about you. I uh…just want to check that those are your preferred pronouns.”

Blair looked up from the sink full of breakfast dishes with a surprised smile. “That’s just about the nicest thing anyone’s ever asked me, Sam. Yeah, uh that’s what I like to go by.”

“You’re non-binary then?”

“Yep, finally figured it out a few years ago, right at the end of high school. Being AMAB here in Rhoda isn’t ideal as you can probably imagine. I don’t fit into the usual categories for people, so there’s been some friction. This is a teeny tiny town, with a lot of conservative people who haven’t had much exposure to the idea.”

“That must have been rough,” Sam said.

“Yeah, it was hard to be so different. But I didn’t want to move away, I love living here in the redwoods and my family’s been very accepting. I started working in our feed store and interacting with people on the daily and they started to get used to me. It was almost enough. That’s how Dean and I met. He came in looking for chicks, and advice on how to raise them.”

“Not the usual for Dean picking up chicks in my experience,” Sam said with a chuckle.

Blair burst out laughing, wiping their eyes with the back of one sudsy hand. “He was pretty  funny about it, made a similar joke actually. He played at being incompetent about the whole thing so I’d come out here and help him get the coop set up right.”

“He’s a smooth operator, no doubt,” Sam said.

Blair started singing the chorus from the Sade song, and Sam joined in. They didn’t notice Dean standing in the kitchen doorway grinning at them.

***

They were working on the garden today, all three of them, hands in the dirt, sweaty and invigorated at just being outside in the sunny morning. Dean left at one point to go start on lunch and Blair and Sam kept working, turning over the small plot of land by hand.

“We’re going to have to figure out a plow for next year, this is bullshit,” Blair said, throwing down their shovel and flopping down next to it.

“Dean mentioned knowing someone who did blacksmith work, I wonder if they’d have the tools or knowhow to make one. Or I guess we could head down to the Central Valley to all the farms, but we’d have to trade for it and haul it back up here.”

“Think Poppy would be up for pulling a plow?” Blair asked, gesturing over at where Poppy and her chicken buddies were grazing against the fence line.

“She’s definitely strong enough for it, I mean she hauled my ass all the way here, right?”

“That must have been quite a journey,” Blair said, leaving it open ended, hoping to hear more about the outside world from someone who’d actually been there recently.

Sam flopped down next to them, letting go of the shovel and flexing his enormous hands. “It really was kind of epic. Getting from one end of the state to the other during the nuclear armageddon no one was prepared for, yeah it was a laugh and a half.”

“Dean said you were down in LA or something, when Boom Day came,” Blair said.

“Yeah, I was there for a law educators conference, and we lucked out that the bomb that hit the closest to us didn’t work. The other ones that hit other parts of LA did though. I got myself to the airport with a friend and he had a private plane, so we were able to take off. We were really lucky there wasn’t an EMP that was close to the airport so that the plane and radar and stuff still worked.”

“That must have been scary,” Blair said, obviously hoping for more of the story.

“Yeah it was, I was glad I was with him, he was a guy I’d been seeing off and on for months. His name was Lee, he wanted me to just stay with him, and he didn’t understand why I’d want to come up here to find Dean.”

“I’m betting he didn’t know the whole story,” Blair said, glad that Dean had told them at least.

“You got me there, I hadn’t told him, because I wasn’t sure he was ready to hear it, or that I really wanted to be with him that badly to take the risk.”

“I understand, I mean…when Dean told me about y’all, I’ll be honest, it took me a bit to wrap my head around it, the monsters were harder than the you and him part.”

“I wasn’t ever planning on telling Lee about the monsters, that was always our family thing to not tell civilians the whole truth. But now that I think about it, I was the only one that really followed that rule. Dean had a relationship with someone while I was at Stanford, and he told her about the things that go bump in the night, and she broke up with him. Back then, I was about to ask a woman to marry me and I had no intention of ever telling her.”

“Hard to believe anyone would ever break up with Dean,” Blair said, not mentioning the woman Sam was going to marry. Dean had told them that sad story about the college girlfriend burning on the ceiling. He hadn’t told them the part about Sam almost being engaged and Blair wondered if Dean knew.

“You’re talking to someone who’s tried a couple times,” Sam said with a snort. “Kinda hard to do when he’s your brother and work partner too."

“True, true. So what happened after you took off in the plane from LA, where’d you guys go?”

“Well, the pilot had a hard time getting any radio connections, there was some kind of interference from the nukes as we went north back towards home in the Bay Area, so we headed east instead and ended up landing in Las Vegas when we were getting low on fuel.”

“I’ve never been there, is it really as crazy as it looks in the movies and stuff?”

“It’s pretty crazy…yeah, Dean and I used to go every year for a week. It was our one solid week of vacation we’d let ourselves take. But when I was there with Lee, it was even worse, mostly because of all the post-nuke panic. Being in a big city in a disaster like this was, well it went from bad to worse pretty quickly. Lee had friends there that owned one of the smaller casinos, so they set us up with a bungalow on the grounds. It was fine the first couple of nights, but then the roving gangs swept through and they took him.”

“They took Lee, why, I mean, what for?”

“They were like a vigilante mob, out for blood, making examples of people who were too rich and hoarding supplies. Not that Lee was even doing that, we were just staying in this place where there happened to be storage cabinets full of food supplies for the casino near the bungalow we were staying. They dragged him out of our bed, naked and strung him up from the streetlamp in front of his friend’s casino. I fought to try to stop them, and they beat me up so badly, I was blacking out for days. When I came to, his body was gone, and all the supplies were too.”

“Shit, that’s crazy, I’m so sorry that happened to your friend, Sam,” Blair said.

Sam stared off into the distance, eyes gone hazy with remembering. “He could be a stuck-up bourgeois pig sometimes, but he was a good guy. He sure as hell didn’t deserve that kind of ending. I really wish that was the worst thing that happened.”

“What do you mean? Seeing your friend get lynched by a mob seems like a worst case scenario.”

“Well, it happened on the way from Vegas to Reno, I was on this bus that was running on some of the last diesel that was available. It had cost me everything just to get on it, and it turned out they were delivering us to a prison, instead of taking us all the way up to Reno like they’d promised. In the middle of the night, we turned off of highway 395 and went off on a bumpy dirt road. Luckily it woke me up and I managed to get off the bus before it got inside the prison fence. It had been over a month at that point, since Boom Day. At first I thought they’d officially taken over a federal prison, and were bussing in people just to get them out of the crowded city. But then I saw what happened.”

“What happened?” Blair asked, worried about how still Sam had gone.

“The bus stopped and the passengers were just let out in the prison yard. I watched from outside the fence as they all got attacked by the prisoners, a lot of them were raped or killed right there. I had some foolish idea I was going to get my fellow bus passengers out of the place somehow. But then I smelled it, they—they were barbecuing,” Sam’s voice faded off on the last word.

“You mean, the people, the prisoners were eating them?”

Sam nodded.

“I never even thought of that, of course prisons would be one of the easiest things to just not take care of after the bombs fell. God, that’s awful, Sam, I’m so so glad you didn’t…you know,” Blair said.

“At first I thought the people who did it were some kind of organized, government thing, you know to at least keep the prisoners fed. But I think it was something else. There were demons there, Blair, they found me when I was running away from the fence. And they knew me, and wanted me to tell them what to do next.”

“What?”

“It’s a long story, don’t know how much of it you’ve heard from Dean. Basically there was this high level demon who had this plan where I was supposed to be the ruler of Hell. So sometimes we would run across demons who would pretty much bow down to me. It made them easier to kill back then, and in Nevada too. Thank goodness I still had the demon killing knife with me. If I hadn’t gone down to LA on my friend’s plane, I wouldn’t have had it on me.”

“Dean told me about your knife, but not about the other part, your majesty,” Blair said, trying to kid.

“Please don’t, it’s really not funny, not at all,” Sam said.

“I’m sorry, I was just—no that was just plain shitty of me, I apologize. Please, tell me more, I mean—only if you want to,” Blair said.

Sam looked off into the distance for a bit and then nodded to himself, like he was deciding to continue his tale. “I killed those demons, and I took their truck which was luckily full of gas and drove about four hundred miles, straight up to Reno. And then it got so much worse.”

“Wait, how could it be worse than demons and a prison full of cannibals?”

“Yeah, the uh…people guarding the Reno outskirts, well they weren’t too happy about someone just all of a sudden driving into their city. It was all on lock down, under martial law, all that. I was rounded up since I wasn’t a Nevadan, and put into a place that was basically a slave camp. It wasn’t demons this time though, just people, but they were just as bad. It was worse really, because they were people, but they had gone wrong with the power or whatever. I had to do some stuff I don’t want to talk about, and then I got out. I hiked my way over to Red Bluff and worked for a while until I could buy Poppy. The ride here was awful, I was lucky I had her because the roads are filled with abandoned cars, and there are fires all over because there’s no one left to put them out.”

“That’s okay if you don’t tell me the whole story about what happened in Reno, you don’t owe me or anyone else an explanation. I’m just glad you got here, Sam. You have no idea how much Dean’s been grieving you.”

“I’m glad he had you, Blair. I just wish it hadn’t taken me so damn long to get here,” Sam said.

“Well, you’re here now, and I think we better go check on Dean, he better be done with lunch, but if he’s taking a god-damned nap while we’ve been out here digging, I’ll kill him,” Blair said.

“Thanks for listening, Blair,” Sam said.

“I’m glad you told me all that. It’s even more of a miracle that you made it here,” Blair said.

****

Sam was confused at first. He didn’t know whether Dean was really in love with Blair, or if Blair was just someone who happened to be there when he thought Sam was dead. Blair was awesome and Sam could see why Dean might be in love with them. He could see why Dean might choose to be with Blair instead of him.

The more he watched Dean with Blair the more confused he got. It seemed like Dean was trying too hard, like he was trying to prove it to Sam (or to himself) that Blair was the person he wanted to be with. It hurt though, it hurt a lot. After all those months, Sam had been counting on Dean taking him back, or at least to still be wanting him. He got flashes of the yearning almost lustful looks that he’d sometimes catch Dean throwing his way, especially when they were doing physical labor and he’d had to take his shirt off. Or the times they’d gone fishing down in the river and they’d skinny dipped like the old days. Sam had been sure that Dean was going to make a move, the way he was ravaging him with his eyes, it didn’t seem possible that he would be able to resist. But he did, the stubborn bastard.

The more Sam got to know Blair, he could see what Dean saw in them, they were great, and they seemed to really love Dean. He should have been happy for Dean, for both of them. But he couldn’t be. The jealousy colored everything, he wished he could turn it off, stuff it down, but it didn’t work any better than it had when he’d been trying to ignore how he felt back when Dean had tried that last time to get them back together. Sam had thought about that night so often he could replay all the stupid dialogue in his head, how stupid he’d been to let Dean leave that night. Saying all those horrible things, that he didn’t really mean, he could never undo it. Now it seemed pretty clear that he’d finally broken them up for good.

****

To keep his feelings hidden as he sorted everything out, Sam spent more time in town getting to know people. That was how he came to have his first job in Rhoda. Frank, from one of the pot growing families asked Sam to come to his house to tutor his eight year old. His wife had run off with some of the younger folks that had left Rhoda for the promise of jobs in Arcata. She had been handling all of the homeschooling duties and he needed to concentrate on shifting his farming production from pot to the produce that the community really was counting on him for.

He wasn’t able to pay Sam, at first he offered bricks of pot that he’d stored away from the last harvest, but Sam turned him down after accepting one of them for the first month of his services. How much pot did he really need? But what he did end up taking in payment the next month was one of the new puppies Frank’s labrador had just had with one of the neighbor’s annoying as shit basset hounds. The puppies were the cutest things Sam had seen in a very long time, and he’d always always wanted a dog. Now he had a good reason to have one. They could use a good watch dog around Dean’s property, and maybe they’d be good for hunting too.

Frank was happy to give him his pick of the litter when they were old enough to be away from their mama. The little pup was given the name Rufus, in honor of their old friend. The way he always looked so intensely at you reminded Sam of the man. Having a bassador (mix of labrador and basset hound) was a trip, the dog was goofy, and noisy and Poppy loved him. He didn’t chase the chickens around too much, and as long as Sam kept him out of the barn and away from Baby, Dean didn’t seem to mind having him around too much. In fact, Sam had seen Dean saving the good bits off of his dinner plate to feed Rufus under the table.

Having a dog to talk to, sleep with at night, and spend time on training took up a lot of Sam’s time, and that was a good thing. He needed all of it to get over having lost his chance with Dean. Rufus wasn’t enough to fill up the hole in his heart of course, but he helped Sam plaster over it well enough to keep going.

****

After a month of dancing back and forth about it in his mind, Sam finally got up the nerve and asked. The three of them had finished a nice dinner of fresh-caught trout and potatoes that Sam had prepared. They’d eaten out on the deck of Sam’s cabin since he’d offered to do the cooking. Blair was inside doing up the dishes and Sam decided it was finally time to ask Dean.

“Uh, so…Dean, I wanted to ask you something,” Sam said, wishing he didn’t sound so unsure.

Dean flicked his eyes away from the horizon over to Sam and then raised his eyebrows at what he must have seen on Sam’s face. “Yeah, what’s up, Sammy?”

“I think it’s time to ask you this. I uh…need to know if I should move out, move on or whatever. I heard there were going to be some teaching jobs up in Arcata soon,” Sam said. He didn’t come right out and say that it would give Dean and Blair a chance. And he really should have. Because in an instant, Dean answered.

“No, you can’t—I think you should stay, it’s all good. It’s going good, right? I mean unless you want to leave,” Dean said, looking confused and alarmed.

Blair made a noise at the screen door. Blair didn’t say anything, just looked back and forth between the two of them. Blair’s face clearly showing that they really knew for sure what the underlying question Sam had really been asking.

“What do you think, Blair? Sam’s asking if he should move out,” Dean said, obviously expecting Blair to have something to say on the subject.

“It’s not up to me, Dean,” Blair said, still behind the screen door. “This is your place and so this is between you two.”

“It’s really not though, you’re in this too. So, c’mon out here and let’s figure it out,” Dean said.

“Nah, I gotta get to bed early tonight, forgot I promised mom I’d be there at the store. She has customers from out of town coming in early tomorrow morning,” Blair said. They finally stepped through the screen and joined them on the deck. Blair leaned down and briefly kissed Dean on the cheek, which was not how Sam had observed they usually said goodbye to each other. Blair obviously felt uncomfortable with Sam sitting right there, because of what he’d asked Dean to decide.

“What do you think though,” Dean asked one last time, before he let them go.

“I think you have no freaking idea what Sam went through to get his ass here, just to get back to you. You maybe oughta ask him some time, probably should figure into your decision on whether he stays or goes,” Blair said, twisting out of Dean’s hold. “Night, Sam.”

Sam waved and tried to smile at them as they disappeared back into the house. The door didn’t slam, so hopefully they weren’t mad.

“Not sure what’s up with them,” Dean said.

“Look at it from Blair’s point of view, it’s probably threatening, they know our history,” Sam said.

Dean didn’t answer, just sat in his chair, finishing his drink, obviously deep in thought. After a silent ten minutes where Sam wondered if this was the last time they’d have like this to spend together.

****

The walk through the night from Sam’s cabin to Dean’s was enough time to have dried their tears which they’d thankfully been able to hold back until they’d gotten on the pathway. It would have been hella embarrassing to break down in front of the two of them.

Blair knew this was it, the end. They knew that they wouldn’t be coming back here anytime soon, it was going to be a hard thing to get used to, but they knew it was over with Dean. Blair went through the dresser drawer Dean had set aside for them to use and swept everything up into their backpack, cramming it all, yanking on the compression straps until one of them broke. They started crying again, at breaking something so useful for such a dumb reason. This was just a heartbreak, their first real one, they’d get over it someday. That just made them cry even harder.

They kicked their boots off and curled up in Dean’s bed one last time, trying to get the tears over with before they had to make the drive home. Because this sure as hell wasn’t their home, it hadn’t ever been, they’d just been pretending, playing at houses with Dean. Blair had been a placeholder, a stand-in, and now that the real deal, Sam was here, there wasn’t much of a point for Blair to stick around. It would be easier on everyone if they left. It would all be good.

****

But of course it was not all good, Sam could tell that Dean probably knew, but didn’t want to admit it to himself.

“I thought it was going okay,” Dean said after Blair had disappeared into the darkness, just the beam of their headlight bobbing along the path back to Dean’s cabin.

“It’s been an adjustment though, for everyone,” Sam said.

“Yeah, of course it has, but I guess I thought me and Blair, that we could deal, after everything else we’d gone through,” Dean said.

“I don’t want to—I didn’t intend to mess things up for you, or Blair. They’re good for you, and you deserve that, Dean, you really do,” Sam said, trying his best to mean what he said.

“I better go talk to them,” Dean said, standing up abruptly.

“‘kay, good luck,” Sam said, trying to actually make that wish for his brother.

Sam watched as Dean’s flashlight bounced along the path. He could hear the door of Dean’s cabin slam shut. He sighed, knowing that he’d probably be leaving tomorrow, if not tonight. He headed inside to start getting his things together to make it easier to get on the road. He needed to take Rufus out for his night time constitutional before bed. The leash was on the hook by the door, Rufus danced around his feet while he tried to get it attached. Finally they were walking in the night air, the stars above and Sam’s heart heavier than it had ever felt.

****
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