Citizenship & Raspberry Jam

for spn_30snapshots
Pairing:  Sam/Dean
Rating: Adult
Prompt:  02. tell
Author's note: as Dean is in high school, Sam is underage.  Do with that knowledge what you will.
word count: 1,803 (yeah, yeah, it's over specs...)


Hey, Teach. Admit it: this is a torture device thought up by one of you 50 some-odd years ago and you all just keep recycling it like some white-elephant gift.  Seriously, how many times can you read about someone going to Disneyland or the Grand Canyon, or some lame family reunion?  My bet is that you don't even read these things, you just look for a page count, scan the words for egregious spelling errors and toddle on off to the next one.  Am I right?  I'm pretty sure I am.  Let's test my hypothesis, shall we?

This summer I sucked my kid brother's dick for the first time.  There.  How was that?  That get your ticker going?  That rev your motor at all?  Betcha don't get that in every essay.  If you actually read that, then I can see your hand moving towards the phone, wanting to call the counselor that handles kids, last name "T" through "Z." But you can relax.  For my family?  That's nothing.

I can regale you with stories of zombies, ghosts, selkies, jinn, poltergeist and just-plain-human that will make you run screaming into the night, but you're gonna freak over one little incident of incest?  Where's your intestinal fortitude?  Where's your sense of right and wrong?  It got all worked up by one little incident of moral degradation?  When you've seen a man ripped to shreds by his formerly loving wife, who then feasts on said shreds, then you can get back to me on the whole right vs wrong issue.

But I can see that you're hung up on the words I strung together to make a syntactically acceptable sentence up there.  What if I put them in a different order, would that make a difference to you?  Dick sucked first kid time this I summer my brother's for time.  How's that?  Not so threatening now is it?  Not so horrifying.  And that's exactly how you should view it.  Innocuous, innocent, but...illicit.  I don't mean to brag, but have you seen me?  This mouth was made for sin.  

I can't remember what it was that toppled us over the edge and into the abyss.  We'd been dancing on top of that fence for so long that our feet had worn the pickets flat.  Sam's always looked up to me, I've known that, but there was something different about this summer.  

You ever notice how one second you look at someone and they're the same as they've always been?  Familiar face, familiar clothes, familiar smell, familiar walk, familiar...everything, and then...something shifts.  It's nothing big.  Nothing you can quite put your finger on, but it's enough for you to notice that something isn't the same as it was.

That happened this summer with Sam.  He's always been my nerd of a little brother, kinda pudgy, prone to sudden squalls of emotion, always dogging my step.  And it was the same this summer...until it wasn't.

We moved from North Platte to this lovely little helltown and did our usual routine of settling in: finding the closest dime-store that has a good stock of shotgun shells, rock salt and candles; hitting the goodwill for furniture that's seen it's better days, but will fit our little squatter just fine; and stocking up on canned, frozen and ready-to-eat rationsthat'll keep an ex-marine and two teenagers full-up with the least amount of effort.  I'm not going to explain everything for you here.  If I do it now, what will I have to talk about when it comes time to do my mini-autobiography assignment, or my family history project?  Oh yeah, I've got you teachers and your lessons down pretty pat now.  I didn't go through 17 different high schools in four years without learning a thing or two along the way.

Anyway,  somewhere around mid-June, Sammy started shooting up.  I don't mean heroin, I mean his bones started stretching something crazy and his baby-fat spread out to cover those bones.  Swear to God, he grew 4 inches in a month.  We're not much for fashion, my family, so we only get clothes when they've been too bloodied, torn or eaten away to be salvageable, so Sam spent most of that month in boxers and undershirts. Was too hot for much else anyway.  Clearly that's not the small shift--that was a goddamn huge one--but it probably directly contributed to the smaller shift.  Once I got used to seeing my brother as this tall, lanky,gangly kid, things pretty much settled back to normal.

Then he got a friend.  We're not much on the socializing, us Winchesters, we don't really knit up with normal people often.  Sure, I get my rocks off where I can, and Dad gets pretty well known around the bar scene, but we're not the sort of people you bring home to your family, and we rarely bring anyone home to ours--and this is especially true for Sam.  He's always longed to fit in, be normal, have the picket fence, the nuclear family and the newsletter at Christmas, but he's never been particularly good at it.  He's too damn genuine, running around with his heart on his sleeve and his soul in his eyes--he's more likely to get hurt than he is to bond with anyone.

But one afternoon he brought Dan home.  Dan was alright.  He fit right into our little pre-apocalyptic family.  That should have been the blinking neon sign right there.  Nobody fits in with us--unless they're Hunters too, and even then we're always twitchy around one another.  But Dan, Dan blended into the worn brocade on the living room recliner like he'd been a part of it when we picked it up at Goodwill. He was a lot like Sam--probably why they got along so well--smart, studious, a little bit squidgy around the edges; but he could play a kick-ass game of pool and he didn't so much as twitch an eyelid when Sam and I trained in the afternoons; matter of fact, after a week or two he joined us.  Little fart was scrappier than he looked; took Sam down every time they wrestled and even gave me a run for my money.

It went on for a handful of weeks--got to be so if you saw Sam, you saw Dan.  Dad even got used to him being around and when Memorial Day weekend rolled around he asked Sam if Dan wanted to come with us on our camping trip to Yosemite.

We don't go camping as a rule--our regular lives are too close to living 'off the lean of the land' as it is for us to enjoy it.  But our 'vacation' in Yosemite is different.  Dad's got an old friend who has a cabin up there that we use for that one weekend a year.  And this isn't just some run-down, blow-the-dust-off, shoo-out-the-mice, and stuff-the-gaps-with-straw 'cabin'--this is a millionaire's wet dream of a log home.  It's got it ALL.  It's the swankiest place I've ever been in my entire life, and will probably be the fanciest place I ever lay my head and wander around naked in EVER.  You'd pretty much have to go to Dubai or be a Sultan in India to top this place.  So it was a bigfriggin' deal for all of us, and letting Sam invite Dan?  Huge.

And it was fantastic--as always, forgetting our slag of a regular life and pretending, just for a time, that we actually belonged in a place like that.  Until...

We didn't know that the lycans had moved into our territory until it was too late.  Dan got bit and it was end-of-fucking-story.  Dad pieced together a story to tell Dan's mom, and got his buddy to get the police to corroborate--but our time at the cabin was over with for good, just like Dan.

It was after that that I started seeing Sam...differently.  Mostly because he was different after that. And he's my brother so he doesn't take anything easy, but this was worse than usual.  He didn't eat.  He slept all the damn time.  He rarely had two words to rub together for me, let alone my father.  And he stopped reading.  I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said that seeing him like that tore my heart out.

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and I told him to snap out of it and start acting like a human instead of one of the walking dead, or I'd shoot him in the ass just like I'd shoot them.
So he did as I commanded--he snapped.

"What would you know about it Dean? You've never had a best friend!"

See that's where Sam was wrong.  I've had a best friend.  I've had the same best friend for 12 years.  And so that's what I told him.  And he closed his mouth and sat down and looked down at the floor, then looked up at me with that hangdog expression he's so good at and whispered, "I know.  But I don't want you to be my friend, Dean."

That's when I sat down.  Because it felt like a horse with iron shoes had reared back and kicked me full bore.  The silence seemed to stretch out between us like fresh elastic--springy and taut, too new to reach a breaking point--and then Sammy splintered it by sitting next to me on the ragged couch, taking my face in his hands and kissing me.

Brothers kiss.  Family kisses.  Friends kiss.  Everyone kisses.  But family doesn't kiss like my brother kissed me.  Sam kissed me the way I had only ever thought to kiss a girl.  Soft, tender, with just a hint of want.  Brothers definitely don't kiss like that. So I jerked away, walked away and left him sitting there.  Alone.

We didn't talk about it.  Until I recognized the shift.  And it wasn't in Sam.  It was in me.

We still didn't talk about it.  I just dropped to my knees one morning when he was getting out of the shower; he was still sluicing the water from his hair when I took him in my mouth. I knew it was going to be okay, that everything was going to be a damn sight better in fact, when his hand dropped to my scalp and he whispered my name.

So that's my summer vacation.  Yosemite?  Check.  Camping?  Check.  Summer love?  Check. 

You still with me, Teach?  If you are, if you've read this whole drawn out saga, then you might understand that I'm not just like every other kid in your class.  And that this?  Isn't about who needs therapy, or who's being taken advantage of, or what's right and what's wrong.  It's nothing so simple as that.  My summer was about everything being different, and everything staying the same, and being okay with that. 

The end.