Chapter Text
Sam wakes with a confused start. He has no idea why he woke so suddenly, and the fact that Dean is stirring in his arms isn’t helping any. Not when his brother is shifting against him and making sleepy, protesting noises, and all of Sam’s blood is being redirected down to his cock instead of to his brain where he needs it.
Then there’s a loud thud on the door and a very familiar—and very pissed off—voice shouting, “Dean!”
Sam’s eyes widen in comprehension, and Dean jerks upright beside him, pulling free of Sam's arms. Dean stares at the door with an expression not just of shock but of horror: mouth open and skin pale. Sam is too surprised to figure out how he feels about Dad being here (how the hell did the man even know where to find them?), but he knows exactly how he feels about seeing that look on his brother's face. Sitting up himself, he reaches out to rest a comforting hand between Dean's shoulder blades.
“Dean,” he starts, and his brother flinches away from the first brush of contact so violently that he falls off the side of the bed.
“Open the fucking door!” Dad shouts, pounding again.
The speed with which Dean pops up would be comical if he weren’t so clearly terrified. If he hadn’t just flinched away from Sam’s touch like Sam were some sort of leper.
Sam isn’t thrilled with their father’s tone of voice either (it leaves his stomach clenched in the instinctive, childish dread of punishment), but he doesn’t understand why his brother is so upset. He’s also completely unprepared for the way Dean suddenly dives back onto the bed, scrambles over him (kneeing Sam in the stomach on the way) and off the other side.
Sam curls in on himself, grimacing and trying to catch his breath. It takes him a couple tries, but when he’s sure that he isn’t going to pass out from oxygen deprivation he rolls over onto his other side. He intends to tell Dean to stop acting like a freak, but then he sees what his brother is doing and comprehension makes the words congeal in his mouth.
All of their stuff has been shoved off of the other bed and onto the floor, and now Dean is yanking back the covers and shaking them and punching the pillows and generally doing his best to make the bed look slept in. He mutters under his breath as he works: letting forth a steady stream of swears in a shaky, low voice.
“Shit shit shit. Fucking fuck. Fuck.”
Funny how it never occurred to Sam that there was anything wrong with Dad walking in to find them sharing a bed. Or maybe it did occur to him and he just didn’t give a shit how the man would react.
“Now, Dean!” Dad bellows again, and Dean shoots a glance over his shoulder at Sam and stops swearing long enough to hiss, “Get off your ass and help me!”
It’s too goddamned early for this—not even a hint of dawn outside the curtained window—and now that Sam is starting to wake up enough to consciously take in their father’s presence instead of just relying on instinct, he has a few things he wants to say to the man. Ignoring his brother’s demand, he tosses back the covers and gets out of the bed, heading for the door.
Dean catches his arm before he’s more than halfway there. When Sam stops and turns his face back toward his brother, Dean looks even wilder than before.
“You can’t tell him,” he insists.
It isn’t a conversation they’ve had before. They haven’t needed to have it. From the moment Sam figured out what happened to Dean—what put that scar on his forehead—he knew that his brother wouldn’t want anyone else to know what happened to him. Especially not Dad.
Sam has done enough research over the past few months to know where the urge to hide the attack is coming from—it’s a normal response for trauma victims: a stage of secretive shame that has to be conquered before any real healing can begin. He has also done enough research to know that he can’t push Dean past the shame, that outing him at this point would do far more damage to his brother than good. He knows all of this—more, he understands—but the knowledge of Hanson’s escape is too close, and Sam’s frustrated, futile rage needs some kind of target. He needs someone he can get his hands on—someone he can bleed.
If that someone is Dad—who is, after Hanson and Sam himself, the person most responsible for Dean’s rape—then so much the better.
So instead of backing down, Sam replies, “He needs to know what he did,” and starts to pull his arm free.
Before he can manage it, there’s a whoosh of air as the floor rushes up to meet his back. Sam grunts at the impact—grunts again when Dean’s knee lands on his stomach. Dean’s face swings into view between Sam and the ceiling and Dean’s hand pushes down on Sam’s chest, pinning him in place. The whole thing happens quickly enough that Sam isn’t even sure exactly which Judo move his brother used to take him down.
Dean has always been good at hand to hand combat—likes to get up close and personal with his opponent—but ever since Sam came back from Stanford he’s been a nigh unstoppable force. As he looks up into his brother’s panicked eyes, for the first time Sam wonders whether there’s a more sinister reason than fighting preference for Dean’s improvement. He wonders whether Dean’s subconscious remembered enough of what happened in that bathroom to drive him to this in an attempt to make sure it never happened again.
The possibility, which feels more and more certain with every beat of Sam’s heart, leaves Sam’s chest tight with a mixture of rage and sorrow. He’s a heartbeat away from crying when Dad pounds on the door again while yelling, “Don’t make me break it down, boy!”
The sound of their father’s voice brings the anger back twofold and, eyes narrowing, Sam pushes up against his brother’s hold.
“No!” Dean insists, straining to keep him in place. “You don’t get to fucking decide who knows.”
Dean looks angry as well as afraid now: eyes sharp and brow furrowed. It’s the anger that does it—that glimpse of the unflinching resolution at Dean’s center that reminds Sam that he’s behaving like a prick and that his brother is right.
Sam doesn’t get to decide, not about this.
Much as he’d like to.
“Fine,” he bites out. “But I’m not taking any of his shit.”
Dean gives Sam an exasperated, angry look like he wants to smack Sam around the room until he falls in line, but then he glances at the door (how it isn’t buckling under the force of Dad’s blows, Sam has no idea) and his face smoothes out into weary resignation.
“Get the door,” he says, shoving to his feet (and not being too fussy how much his knee digs into Sam’s stomach in the process, either) and heading back toward the beds.
Sam pushes up to his elbows and cranes his neck around to watch as his brother climbs into the unused bed and pulls the sheets up to his waist. Dean’s posture makes the whole thing look ridiculously staged, and even in the dim room Sam can see that there are clearly two separate indentations on the pillows of the other bed—the one they actually slept in. Then again, for all that Dad has a hawk’s meticulous eye for details, he’s also good at ignoring things he doesn’t want to see.
The fact that his two sons spent the night in the same bed is probably going to fall right into that category.
“Last chance!” Dad thunders.
“Sam,” Dean hisses, making an imperious, frantic gesture toward the door.
Sam doesn’t know whether it’s going to make a difference at this point whether he opens the door or whether they wait for their father to pick the lock or break it down, but he’s eager enough for a confrontation that he pushes up and heads over anyway.
Maybe he isn’t allowed to tell Dad about Dean’s rape or bring up the movie, but that still leaves him with more than enough room to maneuver the man into the fight he’s been longing for. Muscles vibrating with anticipation, Sam flips the overhead light on and then reaches out and unlocks the door.
Before he even has a chance to get his hand on the knob, Dad is shoving his way inside the room. The man casts a single, dark look in Sam’s direction as he strides forward and then dismisses him, focusing his attention on Dean.
“Why the hell aren’t you in Harrisberg?” he demands.
It’s clear from the way that Dean is blinking up at their father that he has no clue what he’s talking about, but Sam is suddenly a whole lot less curious about why Dad showed up on their doorstep than he was a moment ago. He hasn’t thought about it in a few days, but now the coordinates, and his furious reply, and Dean’s subsequently ditched phone are front and center in his mind. If Dad wants to chew someone out for blatant disrespect or for not following orders, then he’s yelling at the wrong son.
Just like always.
Sam’s rage flares higher and he takes a step after their father, pushing the door shut behind him as he does so. This is the perfect excuse for the fight Sam wants: the perfect chance to turn Dad’s anger in the right direction and meet the man blow for blow. Then Dean shifts on the bed, awkward in his confusion. The motion catches Sam’s eyes and attention, and he hesitates.
Dad doesn’t know what happened to Dean’s phone, but then again neither does Dean. And it wouldn’t take a psychic to figure out that Dean isn’t going to react well to the confession Sam wants to make. No, Dean is going to be pissed, and he’s going to feel betrayed, and he’s going to shut Sam out right when he needs him the most.
Dean's just starting to learn how to lean on Sam the way he so obviously needs to. Taking that support away when he's so off balance and wounded (and let’s not forget whose fault that is, who ripped those wounds wide open again) would be disastrous.
Sam doesn’t think that his brother is the suicidal type, but he doesn’t want to find out. Not now, not fucking ever. So, as much as the unfairness of it burns in his gut—as much as his rage is heating his skin and making it difficult to think—he keeps his mouth shut.
“Harrisberg?” Dean says. His forehead crinkles as he tries to connect the dots—futilely, of course, because Sam is the one holding the pencil.
“I sent you coordinates almost a week ago,” Dad shouts. “And now I find you lounging around in Vegas? Get up when I’m talking to you.”
Dean doesn’t even hesitate before sliding out of the bed and standing. He looks so young in his boxers and worn t-shirt and tousled hair and sleep-creased face. At this moment, there is nothing of Dad in him, nothing of the hunter. Sam’s memories of his mother’s ghost are already hazy, but he can see her in Dean now, sees her reflection, and he wonders if that might explain the way Dad is always pushing Dean, and shoving at him, and trying to slice every last bit of softness away until there’s nothing but stone left.
He wonders if Dad is trying to tilt Dean’s mirror far enough from Mary to stop reflecting his own shattered heart.
“I haven’t—”
“People are dying, Dean,” Dad barks, and the way Dean flinches instantly kills any pity Sam might have had for their father. “They’re dying because you disobeyed a direct order, do you understand that?”
Dad stops then, clearly expecting some kind of answer, and Sam waits for his brother to set the man straight by telling him about the lost phone.
But Dean doesn’t. Dean looks shaken and shamed, like he actually believes that he’s guilty as charged, and now his eyes fall a little as he says, “Yes, sir.”
Sam wants to believe that his brother is just saying that because he knows it’s what Dad wants to hear, but he knows better. Dean isn’t lying. He isn’t trying to placate the man.
He honestly believes that this is his fault.
Stunned by his brother’s acquiescence, Sam gropes after comprehension. It takes him a few moments—sometimes trying to follow Dean’s thought process is a little like piecing together a puzzle while wearing a blindfold—but then, painfully, everything snaps into place.
Dean believes he’s guilty as charged because, despite how distracted he has been by his own life—by coming back to Vegas, by searching out his rapist—he thinks that he should have remembered to check his messages. They had Sam’s phone, after all. They could have used it to call Dean’s voicemail.
It’s a ridiculous bit of logic, twisted round on itself like a rabbit warren, and it’s so goddamned Dean that Sam wants to scream.
His hands were already curled into fists, but now they tighten until the healing skin on his knuckles goes tight and his bones ache. Then Dad’s words start to filter in again—“even begin to cover how goddamned disrespectful you were with that text”—and Dean fucking knows that part isn’t his fault, but he’s still standing there taking it like a beaten dog and Sam can’t take it anymore.
“He lost it.”
Dad turns slightly at the sound of Sam’s voice, and while it’s clear that most of his attention is still on Dean, he’s at least giving Sam his profile now. “Excuse me?”
Behind their father, Dean shoots Sam a look that’s part concern (at how thin Sam’s voice sounds, probably), part warning not to interfere. Sam ignores him. Dean lost the right to handle this when he decided to accept guilt that isn’t his to bear.
Standing up straighter, he says, “Dean lost his phone. It isn’t his fault that he hasn’t gotten any of your messages. Sir.”
Dad turns further at that final, insolent word, and Sam can see that he finally has their father’s full attention. The man’s eyes are glittering: his jaw is set in a tight, hard line.
For a long moment in which Sam knows and doesn’t care that the furious jumble of his emotions is obvious on his face, they regard each other soberly. Then Dad’s eyes narrow into a shuttered, dark expression that he can’t read.
Sam expects their father to start chewing him out now—for interfering, for his tone of voice—but instead Dad turns back to Dean and asks, “That true?”
“Yeah,” Dean answers, still looking at Sam with that terse warning in his eyes.
Sam wonders how long it will take his brother to stop expecting a betrayal every time he opens his mouth around their father. He wonders how long it will be before not making that betrayal is natural and effortless for him: how long it will take to bury Dean’s secret in the darkness of his unrelenting anger.
“You still should have checked your messages,” Dad says almost immediately. “I trained you better than that, Dean.”
“I know,” Dean says, and of course he does: his twisted, self-loathing psyche got him there miles ahead of everyone else. “I forgot.”
“I need to know you have my back. I have to know that I can send a job your way and have it taken care of. People are counting on us, we can’t—”
“You could have called me.”
Dean and Dad look over at the sound of Sam’s voice, both of them wearing the same expression of surprise. It’s annoying and, despite his anger, a little painful. Black sheep or not, Sam is a member of this family, damn it. The looks that he’s getting right now, though, are coming from two interlocking halves of a partnership that he doesn’t fit into.
It sends him back to the way things were before Stanford, when Dean and Dad moved like two people sharing the same heartbeat: Dad leading the way and Dean just a breath behind, constant and competent and faithful. They had their own language back then—a coded system of glances and words that Sam was never quite able to crack.
Sam has told his brother more than once that he wasn’t the reason Sam left, but he realizes now that he wasn’t being entirely truthful.
Dad drove him away. His own subconscious desires drove him away. Their suffocating, unsafe life drove him away.
But this played its part in his flight as well—this alienated, lonely feeling. In the end, after all of the accusations and the recriminations and the verbal abuse, the real reason that Sam couldn’t let his brother broker another cease fire was that he just couldn’t stomach having his nose rubbed into how well Dean and Dad fit together anymore. He couldn’t handle the way that everything else became eclipsed for Dean whenever Dad was around—the way that Sam himself seemed to fade away, unwanted, when his brother and father sat down to talk strategy or went out back to train. He was sick and tired of constantly competing for Dean’s affection and finishing in second place.
As Sam continues to look from his brother’s face to their father’s, though, he realizes that he was wrong: they aren’t wearing the same expression. They’re both surprised, yes, but in Dean’s eyes that surprise is tempered by realization and understanding. Dad's just startled that Sam interrupted his brother’s dressing down for a second time.
It’s a tiny difference, but at the same time it’s earth shattering because it tells Sam, firmly and with no room for doubt, whose Dean is now.
Mine, Sam thinks with a little pulse of warmth. You had him when we were growing up, but you threw him away, you son of a bitch, and he’s mine now. And I’m not giving him back.
“You could have called me when Dean didn’t answer,” Sam repeats, clarifying for their father’s sake, and now, belatedly, sees understanding seep in. He wouldn’t have picked up even if the man had called, so it’s irrational to feel so slighted by how easily their father dismissed him, but that doesn’t make it sting any less.
Dad didn’t even try. Like asking Sam for help wasn’t even up for consideration.
“Why didn’t you call Sammy?” Dean asks, shifting his eyes from Sam to their father.
Dad blinks, glances over his shoulder at Dean, and then looks back at Sam. There’s a wry twist to his lips and more knowledge in his eyes than Sam was prepared to see there. The combination makes him shift uneasily.
“Because Sam made it pretty clear how he felt about me. I knew he wouldn’t pick up.”
“All due respect, Dad, but that’s crap.”
Odd, that sounded like Dean’s voice.
When Sam tears his eyes from their father to check, he’s certain that he’ll find Dean looking back with that hurt, exasperated expression that he always wears when Sam steps too far out of line. He’s certain that his mind is playing tricks on him, that the dark knowledge in Dad’s eyes unsettled him enough that he spoke without knowing. He knows, although he heard his brother’s gravel-rough tone rather than the mellower timber of his own voice, that the words were his and not Dean’s.
But Dean isn’t looking at him. Dean is staring at Dad with his face set into defiant, almost angry lines, and now he opens his mouth and adds, “I know you two don’t get along, but Sam isn’t gonna let people die just because he’s angry with you.”
If Sam weren’t too stunned to move, the unflinching faith in his brother’s voice would make him wince. Because Sam may be feeling slightly guilty that people have died while he and Dean were rooting around in Vegas, but he isn’t going to lose sleep over it. He honestly doesn’t know what he would have done if Dad had called: if he had sent a text or e-mailed over the fresh obituaries. He’d like to think that he at least would have passed the information on to Bobby, but he can’t be sure. After all, he could have sent Bobby the coordinates after that first text and he didn’t. He didn’t even think about it.
When Dean is hurting, he just ... he loses sight of everything else.
Which, he supposes, makes him just as single-minded as their father. After all, is what Dad is doing for Mary any different from what Sam is so desperate to do for Dean?
But almost as soon as he has asked himself the question, the answer comes back. Yes. Yes of course it’s different. Dean’s still alive: he can still be saved, there’s still something to gain from vengeance—a more valid goal than just Sam’s own peace of mind.
If Sam has to burn everything between him and his brother’s happiness, then he will. He’ll do it gladly and consequences be damned.
Dad sighs, bringing Sam’s attention back to the present. Their father wipes a rough hand over his face and his shoulders sag with a weary slump. For the first time, Dad looks mortal. He looks old—if not defeated, then at least in retreat. Although never quite the god that he was for Dean, Dad was still an imposing, dominant force on Sam’s childhood and, despite his anger, Sam feels a little saddened by the revelation.
“What’s done is done,” Dad says finally, his voice heavy with exhaustion.
The open defiance on Dean’s face shifts into something more conciliatory as he offers, “We could leave now, if you need—”
“No,” Dad answers, shaking his head. “I called Caleb. He’s handling it.”
He turns and walks over to the bed that Sam shared with his brother last night. Then, heaving his breath out in a sigh, he lowers himself down to sit on the edge of the mattress. If he could remember how, Sam would laugh at the horrified look their father's choice of seats puts on Dean's face.
“I could use some coffee,” Dad says, and looks up at Dean, who quickly schools his expression. “Maybe some breakfast.”
There’s an undercurrent of command in the words, which makes Sam bristle, but Dean is already grabbing a pair of jeans off the floor and saying, “Sure, Sam and I can—”
“Sam stays here. He and I need to talk.”
Dean stills at that, and his hands clench nervously around his jeans. The look he shoots Sam is a wretched mix of worry and pleading and expectation, like he wants Sam to fix this. And there’s a part of Sam that wants to fix it—a part of him that wants to tell their father that anything he wants to say to Sam, Dean can hear as well. But his anger hasn’t subsided at all—may actually have gotten worse, what with the way Dad was just talking to his brother—and there are things that Sam wants to say to their father that he doesn’t want Dean to hear.
Besides, Dad never had a problem chewing Sam out in front of Dean before. If he’s asking for privacy now, then he’s probably doing it out of the same instinct to protect Dean that’s driving Sam. It’s too little too late, as far as Sam is concerned, but he can’t deny that he feels a tiny pulse of gratitude that they’re on the same page in at least one respect.
Looking coolly back at his brother, he says, “I think I saw a McDonalds a couple of blocks away.”
Dean’s mouth goes thin at that, and his eyes go wounded and hurt. But he doesn’t resist any further. He just turns away, finishes gathering his clothes, and takes himself to the bathroom to change. Sam wants to take his brother’s arm as Dean brushes past, say something to soften what Dean must view as a betrayal, but his brother might see that as a crack in Sam’s resolve when it isn’t anything of the sort.
It’s for his own good, he reminds himself, and then flinches as Dean slams the door shut behind him. After a few moments of awkward silence, he crosses to sit down on the newly-rumpled bed across from Dad.
They wait without speaking—without looking at each other, really, and never mind that they’re face-to-face and less than two feet apart. It’s the kind of situation that should get awkward fast, should leave Sam fidgeting and restless, but now that the moment of confrontation has come, he’s calm beneath his anger.
Dean looks pissed off when he comes out of the bathroom several minutes later, but Sam knows that the anger is just a mask to cover up the fear beneath. He tries to communicate with his eyes that he isn’t going to spill any secrets, but it’s difficult to get the message through when his brother refuses to look at him.
“Have fun with your secret powwow,” Dean mutters, grabbing his keys off the table. “And try not to kill each other.”
“Dean,” Dad calls as Dean pulls the door open.
Dean pauses but doesn’t turn around.
“Take your time.”
If the way Dean slams the door shut behind him doesn’t wake up their neighbors, then the way he peels out of the parking lot definitely does. Good thing this is the kind of establishment where the inhabitants know how to mind their own business.
Dad waits until the painful sound of the Impala’s tires has faded into the distance and then says, “You can be pissed at me all you want, Sam, but don’t you ever fuck around with your brother’s phone again. There are lives at stake. And you ever have something you want to say to me, you say it to my face like a man and don’t hide behind voice mail and text messages.”
Sam is surprised by the excellent grasp their father has on just how Dean’s phone was ‘lost’, but his anger is stronger and so he ignores the questions flashing through his head to say, “That’s fucking rich, coming from you.”
“Watch your fucking mouth,” Dad warns, and Sam has had it with the man’s double standards.
Softly and clearly, he says, “Fuck you.”
Dad’s eyes flash as he pushes to his feet. “What was that?” he asks in a low, threatening voice.
Dad never hit Sam before, never hit either of them when they weren’t training. Even during those last, turbulent months before Stanford, Dad never even came close to crossing that line. Sam can tell that he’s thinking about it now, though.
He has no way of knowing whether that’s because all of his jabs over the last five months have been enough to push the man over the edge, or whether Dad is stressed out by other matters, and he doesn’t care. All he knows is that their father is rapidly losing what little control over his temper he used to have.
Good. Fucking excellent.
“You heard me.”
Dad reaches down, grabbing hold of Sam’s t-shirt and using it to haul him to his feet. This close to the man, Sam realizes that they’re more evenly matched than they used to be. Dad is still more heavily built, more experienced, but Sam is taller, has reach and youth on his side.
“Any particular reason you’re trying to piss me off right now?” Dad asks, his voice a low growl.
“You gonna take a swing or are you just going to grand stand all day?” Sam shoots back, jutting his chin out and offering a target.
Dad’s hand tightens on his shirt and Sam is certain that the man is going to do it. He’s going to punch Sam the way Sam wants him to and then Sam will be able to tell Dean, in all honesty, that Dad started it. You can’t ever prepare to be struck, not really, but Sam braces himself anyway.
And Dad releases him with a muttered curse and walks away.
“I don’t understand why the hell you’re so difficult,” Dad says as he goes. “Your brother was never this disrespectful, not even when he was a teenager.”
“That’s the problem,” Sam announces, squaring his shoulders and taking a step after their father. “He should have been. He should have told you to go to hell. Then he wouldn’t—”
He shuts his mouth on it at the last second, but Dad turns around again anyway, eyes sharp. Like a hound on a blood trail.
“Then he wouldn’t what?”
Sam glares back at their father silently.
“Is that what this is about? Dean? You got a bee in your bonnet over the fact that your brother knows how to follow orders?” He pauses for a fraction of a heartbeat and then adds, “Or are you still pissed about the movie?”
Shock washes through Sam, freezing, and is swept away again by a torrent of fury. He suspected—was almost certain—but hearing it out loud. Hearing Dad admit it is just ... it ...
“You did know,” he breathes finally. “You son of a bitch. How the fuck could you let him do that?”
“I didn’t ‘let’ him do anything. Your brother’s a grown man. It was his own decision, and he knew what he was getting into. If you want to be mad at someone, you put the blame where it belongs.”
“Oh, cut the crap,” Sam spits. “Dean did it for you and you know it! You’ve got him so brainwashed he’d put a fucking bullet in himself if you asked him to. Spreading his legs and letting someone fuck him was never even a question!”
“Your brother took that job of his own free will,” Dad shoots back. “I didn’t ask him to do anything.”
Sam can’t believe that the man is trying to hide behind that excuse. He lets his scorn show on his face as he says, “You didn’t have to. Dean knows what’s expected of him. You drilled it into him often enough when he was a kid.”
“What do you want me to do, Sam?” Dad demands, spreading his arms wide. “Am I thrilled with the choice he made? No, of course not. But it happened. It’s over. There’s no point in drudging up the past. It won’t change anything and it’s just going to make Dean uncomfortable.”
“Make him—” Sam repeats, and the rest of it gets caught in his throat. He makes an absurd, wild noise to clear it and then finishes, “Do you have any idea how much that messed him up?”
It isn’t the movie that’s the problem of course, not really. But then again it is. Because if Dean had never done the movie, Hanson never would have clapped eyes on him. Never would have even dreamed of touching him.
Making the movie made Dean accessible.
“He seems to be handling himself just fine,” Dad returns. “You’re the one with the problem. Hell, Sammy, you’re acting like a jealous lover instead of his brother.”
The words are pointed, like an accusation, and even in the midst of Sam’s rage they bring him up short. He pushes his emotions aside to look at their father—really look at him—and Dad is studying him with an odd, measuring expression. The man’s body is tense and still as he stands there. His eyes flicker with apprehension—apprehension and something that looks horribly like disgust.
That wasn’t an idle taunt.
Sam’s stomach tightens. He feels caught out—exposed in a way he never expected to be, not by Dad. Looks like the man is a little less willfully blind than Sam thought. He wonders how long this suspicion has been growing in their father’s mind—before Stanford or only since, when Sam’s proprietary, resentful attitude must have tipped him off? He resists the urge to glance guiltily back at the bed.
And that is guilt he’s feeling, and shame, and maybe he isn’t quite so blasé about his feelings for Dean as he thought he was. His newfound uncertainty digs at him, makes him want to take a step back and drop his eyes. But Dean is the best-goddamned thing that ever happened to him, and hell if Sam is going to let their father make him feel bad about it.
He clings to his determination, letting it fan his anger, and says, “Why don’t you just come out and ask what you want to. Go ahead and ask if we’re fucking.”
“Are you?” Dad’s voice is quiet and deadly serious.
Sam dared him, but he didn’t believe their father would actually take him up on it. Didn’t think he’d have the guts. Now that the question has been asked, he wants to say ‘yes’. He wants to throw all of those kisses and the frail, stolen moments he’s had with his brother into their father’s face: wants to make Dad turn tail and run from his sons’ sickening, incestuous relationship.
But Dean. God, Dean would be wrecked if he did that. He’d be devastated and lost in the face of their father’s disgust.
“No,” Sam says finally. His voice is choked with emotion, though, and Dad doesn’t look convinced. Dad is going to worry at this like a dog with a bone unless Sam can wrest this conversation back onto safer paths.
Seizing his anger like a shield, Sam steps forward and continues, “You want to know why I care so much, John? I care because Dean’s my brother and he’s hurting. He isn’t ‘fine’. He isn’t even close. Jesus Christ, do you have any idea what he went through?”
There are still questions in Dad’s eyes, but they don’t seem quite as penetrating or immediate and he allows himself to be diverted. “I saw the movie, yes.”
Sam’s stomach jerks and he isn’t sure whether it’s anger or disgust or horror or jealousy. Dad, of all people, had no goddamned right to see Dean like that. To see him stripped and spread open and fucked out.
But maybe Sam is hearing the man wrong. Maybe he only means that he watched enough of the beginning to recognize his son.
“The whole thing?” he asks, checking.
Dad looks him steadily in the eyes and says, “Yes.”
The wretched confusion in Sam’s stomach bubbles over into his chest: hot and maddening. He imagines Dad sitting in some ratty motel armchair watching Dean shudder and shake: listening to Dean’s moans. Dad saw it, saw how goddamned exposed Dean was, should have known how badly that would fuck with Dean’s head even if he didn’t—couldn’t—have known about the rape, and he’s still denying responsibility. Sam swallows twice and the boiling rage beneath his skin comes out in a sharp nod, in the rapid tapping his right fist against his thigh.
“Did you jerk off to it?” he demands. He isn’t serious—Dad’s an asshole but in this way, at least, he’s a decent father—but he needs to wound and the words are closest weapons to hand.
Sam expects their father to be appalled by the accusation, or at least angered, but the man just lifts his head a little higher and replies, “Did you?”
And just like that, Sam is back in his Stanford apartment with his dick in his hand and alcohol in his blood and his brother’s voice in his ear and Jesus, he did that. He did what he accused Dad of—did worse, because he didn’t just ignore his brother’s pain, he got off on it. He got off on Dean being stuffed full with two cocks, which were both prelude to and unknowing preparation for his second, more ruinous violation.
In that moment, Sam aches with how much he hates himself. The hate runs too deep to be borne, is too intense, and it has to go somewhere or he’s going to explode. He struggles with himself for a moment, fighting to breathe, and then a circuit in his chest overloads and everything flips over from self-loathing to rage.
Dad is still watching him, still cataloguing Sam’s response, still testing him, and so Sam does the only logical thing and punches the man. He feels a little more centered after, watching their father split blood out onto the carpet. Feels like he’s managed to put this confrontation back onto the road where it belongs.
“That what you’ve been bucking for, Sammy?” Dad asks. He’s smiling slightly to himself. It isn’t a nice expression. “You want to take this outside?”
“Yes, sir,” Sam answers instantly.
Dad nods, shrugging out of his jacket and dropping it on the floor. Then, without so much as a second's hesitation, he turns and heads for the door. The long-barreled pistol tucked down the back of his pants bunches his t-shirt as he moves.
“Get some pants on. I’ll be waiting.”