Chapter Text
– heat of the moment, telling me what my heart meant!
At the sudden blare of the alarm clock radio, Sam Winchester's eyes snap open and he shoots upright in the creaky bed.
Fuck! is the first thing that shoves into his mind. It's followed closely by: What the actual fuck? It’s the same as every other morning, but the adrenaline rush still hits him hard, pitting his stomach with a wave of nausea. Motherfucking fuck!
Sam didn’t used to be big on swearing.
Of course, that was before they came to Broward County. While the place is exactly, maddeningly the same as when they first arrived, it has changed Sam forever. And not for the better either. Rationally, he thinks that being stuck in an interminable time loop, doomed to watch the person you love most in the world die over and over (and over) again, would fuck with most people. But deeper down, in the muddy riverbed of his mind, lives the knowledge that this is just another symptom of his disease, of the black sludge his soul is made of.
The kicker is that, even though his mind already expects this morning to be identical to every other time he’s woken up in this shitty motel, to his ignorant nervous system it's all new. That's why each and every godforsaken morning he has the distinct displeasure of being jarred awake by the same-but-new beepity-boppity, eighties keytars.
Every morning, the same plastic jingle.
Every morning, the same pounding heart.
Every morning, the same dearly departed hope.
It doesn't help matters either that it happens an eyeblink after he witnessed his only brother’s latest death…
“Rise and shine, Sammy!” Dean greets him from the other bed (yet again), all cocksure cheer (as always).
Blithely unaware of his rinse-and-repeat resurrections, he doesn't know that he's Sam's own private, modern-day, all-American messiah. Unlike the famous Nazarene, however, Dean’s clothes are perma-cleaned; all that blood neatly squeegeed back into his ziplocked veins, and not even so much as a dirty-rag relic left over for Sam’s sanity to cling to.
Dean’s wounds are gone too, so it’s a good thing Sam’s no doubting Thomas.
Nevertheless, the messed-up thought creeps in: Wouldn’t mind getting just one finger in him, though…
Sam evicts the dirty thought with a canine shake of his head. Stop it! Too goddamn early for that shit.
Still, he can’t help but sigh when he looks over at Dean. At his miraculous body and his porcelain skin all sealed back up and perfect. (So goddamn perfect… Ugh, I said stop it, you fucking freak!)
The point is, for Dean, it's just a normal Tuesday. He has no bloody right to smile so smugly each time he nods at the radio. “Dude. Asia.”
And maybe it’s because of the self-satisfied smirk on Dean’s ever-clueless fucking mug, or maybe it’s because they’re the shittiest supergroup of all time, or maybe it's because of a motherfucking iron deficiency, who the hell knows? But before his brother can joke about how much Sam ‘loves’ this song or turn up the volume for the umpteenth time or even finish tying his stupid bootlaces, Sam pummels the radio until it falls satisfyingly silent.
“The fuck, Sam?” Dean asks. He drops his foot down to the floor with a thud.
Sam responds by yanking what’s left of the appliance from the wall and lobbing it across the room.
Dean considers its dusty guts spewed over the floor before he says: “Jeez, aren't you grumpy?”
But Sam doesn’t bother answering this time either. Flopping back onto the bed, he turns away from Dean and curls up in the fetal position.
“All hail the drama queen,” Dean mutters under his breath as he gets up.
Sam ignores the obvious bait. Instead he savors the throbbing pain in his right hand; at least it’s something new.
“So, you gonna tell me what's crawled up your keister?” Dean calls out from the bathroom. “Or we hafta play twenty questions?”
Maybe if I just keep quiet, it won’t happen, Sam thinks to himself.
Nope; too late. As if Dean's words summoned it, the memory of last night starts to seep into Sam’s consciousness. But he won’t – can’t! – let it.
Still, even though he manages to stifle the recall, his dumb body warms and fills with seething blood, remembering all on its own. Lust, that ancient serpent, uncoils itself at the base of his spine. And his dick, the treacherous creature, responds to its beckoning by stirring itself awake in his too-loose pajama pants.
Depraved; I really am a depraved fucking freak! Can't even blame this on the demon blood.
He clenches his injured fist between his thighs and decides to fan the flames of his irritation instead; anything not to think about the sweet aching in his groin or how long it's been since he got off. For one thing, he curses their paranoid habit of leaving the curtains open whenever they check into a new motel. The sunlight streaming in through the window is as absurd as it’s abrupt. The whole bright morning – always the same bright morning – is a mockery of the natural order of things. No changing of the seasons here. It also mocks the black night that they were plucked from mere minutes ago. It was the kind of night that the too-old-for-his-years Sam Winchester knows changes forever the very fabric a person is woven from. The kind of night that shows a man his own impenetrable shadow. And instead of dispelling it, the giddy glare of the morning throws its tarry depths into an even starker contrast.
Sam tries to shut his eyes against the bright perversion of time, but it haunts his interior. A spectre glowing through the skin of his eyelids, it goes trailer-park pink, as if the unnatural flamboyance of tacky flamingos painted on the walls are invading his brain. He feels violated.
He hates that he can’t stop his ears from Dean's interminable, fluoride-fresh gargling either.
Because that's all it takes. Indomitable like the sunlight, it rushes at Sam: the death rattle that burbled from Dean's mouth mere minutes ago. The sound is warm and wet in Sam’s ears still. The shudder is beyond his control as the spray of his brother’s blood and spittle hits again his forearms, his neck, his face. The sensation compels him to rub his brow over the pillow, but the cheap cotton blend comes away deceptively clean and dry.
From a murky corner at the very back of his mind, he hears the dry whisper of something like truth: So this is what it's like to go mad.
He wants so badly to brush the thought aside, but a part of him is nodding along stoically, yes.
Back in the always here and now (which is also somehow the past), at least there’s the flimsy consolation prize of one more new sensation: Dean’s prodding the small of Sam's back with his knee.
“Time for breakfast, lazy bones. Get the lead out, will ya?”
Sam doesn't open his eyes as he answers: “Not hungry.”
“Ha! He speaks!” Dean says bitingly. “But don’t tell me you ain’t starving, man. We haven’t had a proper meal since Jackson-freakin’-ville. Not that I consider the rabbit food you had ‘a proper meal’, mind you.” He punctuates the evaluation with an extra hard prod.
Despite its snarky camouflage, Sam recognizes his brother’s ever-present care. Dean's hard-coded to look out for his little Sammy. He’d probably be empathetic again if Sam told him what was going on; he has been all the other times, once Sam got him to understand what was going on.
It's just that it would drain him so terribly to explain again; Sam coils himself into a tighter ball.
But Dean being Dean, he persists. He plops himself down on the narrow bed and his thigh grazes along Sam's back. His neediness comes through as whining now. “C'mon, dude,” he says, slapping Sam’s leg with the back of his hand, landing dangerously close to Sam's butt.
“I don't wanna eat alone.” Dean knows all too well that normally Sam caves when he plays on his emotions.
And yeah, okay, sure, under normal circumstances, Sam would be up and begrudgingly getting dressed by now. But today is anything but normal. And it's not because today is the hundredth Tuesday in a row either.
“No,” Sam says again, twisting away from Dean until a bedspring pokes at his hip.
Today is different, because out of all the times Dean’s died – ninety-fucking-nine in total – last night marked the first time Sam killed him with his own two hands. Sliced through his beloved with an ax. And it was much too easy.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the reset wasn’t instantaneous either: it took three whole minutes to come. While his brother’s blood was drying sticky between his fingers, the doubts reached a screeching crescendo: What if taking down the Mystery Spot really was the answer? What if this time he'd broken the loop? And now Dean was gone forever? He could hardly stand thinking about it, needing to focus on Dean's gorgeous face instead, which he knew better than his own. And that was when it happened. That was when Sam –
No, don’t even fucking go there! Especially not with Dean alive again and right fucking here! What the ever-fucking-fuck is wrong with me?
Sam gets his brain back to the general dreadfulness of it all, which is as automatic as breathing by now. It doesn't stop the tight heat from growing between his hips though, and Sam wishes Dean would just piss off already.
“I just –” Sam says with a tight throat, “I just can't today. ’Kay?” It’s the best explanation he can muster.
But Dean, blissfully ignorant of it all, switches to nagging: “You ‘can’t’? What’s that supposed to mean? Sure, you can; it's not like you have to eat anything.” He reaches under the bedcover for Sam's arm and tugs it out from between his thighs. “You can just sit there, showing off your resting bitch face to all the fine folks.”
Peevish though Sam is about the obvious dig, the touch surprises him. His eyes open to the sorbet yellows.
How long has it been since someone – anyone! – has touched me? Never mind Dean touching me.
“C'mon, Sammy…”
Tug, tug, tug.
Dean's fingers are comforting.
Warm. Responsive.
Alive.
Sam lets his wrist dangle in his brother’s grip, lets himself feel the warmth radiating from his body, and lets his overwrought soul soak up the threadbare comfort.
Something is softening inside him. Sweetening. His eyes burn and blink.
But then Dean angles his hand upward and exclaims: “Hey, you're bleeding!”
Sam clamps his eyes shut again. He yanks his wrist away – like he yanked the ax away from Dean last night – and shoves it under the pillow without looking at – like the ax sliced unseeingly through Dean's torso.
“Doesn't matter,” Sam hisses.
“Like hell! You can’t go around bleeding all over the place, Samantha – it ain’t even your period yet!”
Sam knows that switching to his ‘you’re such a girl’ tactic is a sign of Dean’s desperation more than anything else.
But he says nothing.
Does nothing.
Sees nothing but cheap flamingo pink.
“Sammy…?” Dean says after a minute. His voice has dropped low, laced with concern, and he rests his hand on the knob of Sam's shoulder.
But, no, there’s no way Sam can handle it – any of it! – today. Rather than betraying his unsteady voice, he grabs the second pillow out from under his neck and jams it over his head.
“God!” Dean’s voice is extra loud as Sam feels his weight catapulting off the bed. “You can be such a fucking child, you know that?!”
Through the sad, polyester excuse of a pillow, he hears Dean stomp away and slam the motel door shut with a deftly careless hand.