FIC - What Now? 8/?
Nov. 4th, 2011 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verucasalt123
title: What Now? 8/?
pairing: Sam/Dean
rating: R/NC-17 eventually, there will be Wincest at some point
summary: Pre-series. Sam ends up with a baby, and copes as long as he can on his own. Additional chapters will be added as they show up in my brain.
A/N: Finally, some Dean POV, and settling in. Longest chapter yet.
Dean stood smiling as he leaned against the kitchen counter, reading Sam’s list as Jay played happily in his playpen. As if he thought Dean was unable to read, Sam repeated, “So, that’s the number to the construction office, the cell phone of one of the guys I work with, the clinic I showed you the other day, uh”
“911? Seriously? Felt like you needed to write that down for me?”
“Sorry, man, I know I’m being a little over the top, I just want to make sure you have everything you need in case anything happens. I’m sure you two will be fine.”
“Course we will, Sammy.” Dean was trying hard to stare at the list instead of at his brother’s arms. Sam had always been in good shape, but he hadn’t been built like this when he left for college, that was for damn sure, with well-defined and amazingly toned biceps and forearms sticking out from his t-shirt sleeves. He told himself he was going to have to shut that down if this arrangement was going to work. Dean was fairly certain that Sam’s invitation for him to stay would be rescinded if he found out he was being ogled by his older brother. “Just go on, we’ll have a fun day and we’ll even walk down to meet you at the bus stop, all right?”
Sam kissed Jay on the head, crossed back over to the front door and looked at Dean one last time, where Dean was dutifully tacking up the list onto the fridge with a magnet. “All right. I know. I’ll see you tonight, Dean.”
And just like that, he was gone and Dean was alone with his nephew. “All right, dude, I’m gonna have some breakfast. But then we have to plan our day. What do you think? Trip to the grocery store first? Or maybe the park?”
Jay answered by throwing one of his toys out of the playpen, and Dean just laughed and tossed it back in for him. After breakfast, he went to pick the baby up and oh, shit. Literally. The kid reeked. “Part of the job, I guess. Let’s go get your rank ass cleaned up, kid.”
It was the most amazing day Dean could remember having in a really, really long time. They played at the park, and he didn’t have to introduce himself to any of the single moms as Sam had offhandedly suggested before, because the ladies were all too interested in introducing themselves. Dean was polite, but he wasn’t there to collect phone numbers, so he just chatted and then spent the rest of the time swinging Jay in the baby-swing and letting him explore the grass. He figured at this point it wouldn’t be presumptuous for him to pick up groceries, so when they left they hit the grocery store and he loaded up as much as he could carry while still pushing the stroller. He was honestly surprised at the warm feeling that went along with putting away groceries, changing diapers, planning dinner, and almost had to smack himself in the head at the way he was counting down how much longer until he could take Jay down the block to meet Sam at the bus. Cooking dinner while Sam spent time with the baby, giving him a bath while Sam washed the dishes, settling back down to watch baseball after Jay was asleep in his crib – it was so satisfying, so comfortable. If someone had told him a week ago that this is what he’d be doing, he would have laughed in their face.
“So”, he started, during a commercial break in the game, “you think it’s too early for me to start looking for work? I want to keep hunting, at least part-time, but I’m a little worried about what kind of consequences that might have for you and Jay. Wouldn’t want to end up having some big ugly following me back here.”
“We both know how to prevent that kind of thing, and how to deal with it if it happens, Dean. I don’t want to stop you from hunting, we both know you’d be miserable. And if you’re going to stay here, I’d rather not deal with miserable you”, Sam smirked. “And no, I don’t think it’s too early. If you’re happy being here with us, I still want you to stay.”
Jay went back to daycare the next day, and Dean found a job at the local hospital as an orderly, with the help of a fake reference from their family friend Bobby Singer. The pay was crap and the work wasn’t exactly glamorous, but it was four ten-hour shifts a week, and three days off in a row. Perfect.
It didn’t take long for the three of them to settle into a routine. Dean was gone before Sam and Jay were up in the morning (it turned out the crib was apparently magic, because Jay had finally started sleeping through the night), but was already home and making dinner by the time they got home. Some weekends Dean would leave for a relatively local hunt on Thursday night or Friday morning. When there wasn’t one, Dean’s Fridays off saved Sam a few bucks on his daycare bill for the week because Jay would stay at home with him.
They stayed busy, but they had most evenings together, at least during the week. At the end of the second week, he told Sam to come down to the parking lot and help him get something from the car. When they got there, Sam moved toward the trunk and Dean said, “It’s not in there, dude. Look in the back seat.”
Sam stared. “Dean. You didn’t.” There was a carseat with a five-point harness properly installed in the back of the Impala. A car seat. In the Impala.
“I did”, Dean replied, beaming. “Now we can go out to a restaurant, or all go to the store together or whatever. They were having a sale at Target. I hope you don’t mind, I wanted to surprise you.”
“No, of course I don’t mind, that was – Jesus, Dean, I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, but it’s not for you, it’s for the kid. Well, I guess it’s kind of for all of us.” At first he was caught off guard, but it didn’t take more than a second to reciprocate when his brother threw his arms around him in a hug. The physical contact was more than they’d had in years and he thought he might have held on to Sam for a moment too long, but he couldn’t stop himself. They parted a little awkwardly, but Dean pulled himself together and just clapped Sam on the shoulder. “Let’s go back inside, you big girl”, he forced out, rewarded by Sam flipping him the bird but still smiling brightly. He pushed off the feeling that he’d started referring to in his head as that other thing and went back inside to spend a while helping Jay refine his belly-crawling skills and going around the living room on all fours like an idiot because he could just tell the kid was going to be crawling for real any time now.
At the end of the next weekend, getting back exhausted and filthy from a salt and burn two counties over, Dean found a surprise of his own. In place of the worn-out sofa, there was a futon with a black mattress. When he asked Sam where it had come from, he said one of the guys from work helped him get it upstairs and put it together. “It’s still a sofa, but you can fold it down at night and have twice as much room to sleep. Nothing fancy, but…”
“Sam, seriously, this is great! Thank you, it must have been a lot of work. Please tell me it wasn’t expensive, man.”
“Nah. And it was easy to put together. I just wanted to, uh, you know, do something, um, nice for you”, Sam said, looking down at the floor.
Dean couldn’t imagine why Sam would be acting like he was embarrassed about it, but figured he’d just let it go. He’d done a pretty damn good job at keeping his feelings under control, not staring (unless he was sure he wouldn’t get caught), and most importantly, not jumping Sam’s bones. But hell, Sam had hugged him before, so Dean figured it wouldn’t hurt anything, and pulled his brother into his arms. “I mean it, Sam, that was really, like, thoughtful and stuff.”
After the second hug in as many weeks, both men were clearing their throats and looking in opposite directions. Dean broke the silence by saying something ridiculous. “Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s break it in, dude!” Well, shit, that didn’t exactly come out the way he wanted it to, and for a minute he thought he’d freaked Sam out, because he was just staring at him with his eyes as big as dinner plates. “Uh, I mean, let’s get some beers, see if there’s a good movie on.”
“Yeah, of course, yeah, you get the beer, I’ll see what’s on.”
Shit, that had been a close call. Because Dean would have been thrilled to break in that futon mattress (or really any other surface of the apartment) in an entirely different way, but he thought he’d covered fairly well. By the time he’d popped open their beers, Sam had found a Rambo marathon on one of the local channels, and they settled in to one of their favorite movies since they’d been kids way too young to watch them.
A couple of hours later, Dean realized he’d fallen asleep. He went to stretch and froze. Yeah, he’d fallen asleep. On Sam. With his head on Sam’s chest, specifically. Which would have been easy to blow off if Sam was out too. But he wasn’t. He was – oh, this couldn’t be happening, no fucking way this could be – but it was. Sam had his left arm around Dean, lazily rubbing circles into his shoulder.
Dean knew he should move. He should say something, he should open his eyes, he should make a joke. But he didn’t do any of those things. Instead, he moved closer into the embrace, and Sam stopped moving his hand suddenly. Dean reconsidered his decision, but after a few seconds, Sam just pulled him closer into his chest and laid his head on top of Dean’s. Neither of them said anything. Dean fell back to sleep and Sam was in his bed with the door shut when Dean got up for his 6am shift at the hospital in the morning.
But that’s how it started. Dean cooking dinner, Sam washing dishes. Dean giving the baby a bath, Sam changing him into pajamas and tucking him into his crib for the night. Both of them watching television in the living room, moving closer to each other with each passing night until eventually they were basically cuddling for most of the evening, Dean falling asleep on Sam’s shoulder or chest with Sam’s strong arm around him, then waking up alone.
Sam hadn’t said anything about it, so Dean wasn’t about to bring it up for fear of losing it. But what did it mean? Did Sam have the same kind of feelings as Dean did? He’d thought it was impossible, but maybe it wasn’t as crazy as he’d first imagined. The only way to find out was to say something stupid like “Hey Sam, what’s with all the snuggling, you wanna have sex?”, or to actually make a move. Both options were terrifying, so he figured he’d give himself a little more time before trying to figure it out. He didn’t have a whole lot of time left, though, because the one thing he knew with absolute certainty was that his resolve was going to break, probably sooner rather than later.
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Date: 2011-11-04 05:40 am (UTC)I don't know why my comment posted the way it did? Go figure see above comment
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Date: 2011-11-04 05:50 am (UTC)Ha! It's ok. I'll have the next chapter up this weekend.
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