TITLE: Set Out Running (But I Take My Time)
AUTHOR: Kita
RATING: R for violence, imagery, hetsex, and Wincest
PAIRING: Sam/Dean Sam/Jess, Sam/Madison, Sam/Ellen, Sam/Ruby
AUTHOR NOTES: If Sam gets home before daylight, he just might get some sleep tonight.
Title, summary and apologies to the Grateful Dead, for their song “Friend of the Devil”, lyrics here.

Set Out Running (But I Take My Time)

*

When Sam was very small, after the fire but before words, he would dream of his mother.

In these dreams Mary was sunshine and milk; gold hair, gold medallion at her throat, warm white skin, and soft, round breasts.

He would blink up at her, and she would whisper to him all the secrets he needed to know.

In these dreams, she would whisper his name.

*

“Sam!”

“In here!” Sam shouts. He is seven, playing with a toy fire truck in his bedroom. The window is open, and he can hear his father outside in the yard. He’s whispering to Dean: muffled, hurried words that Sam doesn’t understand.

“We’ll be a couple minutes,” Dean says from the other side of the screen, “You okay?”

“Fine,” Sam tells them. He turns the little truck around so it scrapes the wooden floor, making the dust motes beneath its wheels leap like ghosts.

Sam rubs his forehead. The house is hot in the summer time; there’s no air conditioning.

When the weather turns warm, Sam starts counting the days on his calendar. Other children scratch through the boxes of fall and winter, but Sam can’t wait for summer to end. School is simple and predictable, and Sam has learned he is good at it. School has no older brothers who run faster and shoot straighter, no fathers who look at him with a flat mouth and worried, disappointed eyes.

“I’m sorry your Daddy doesn’t love you the way he ought to,” Sam’s mother says.

He looks up. She’s sitting cross-legged on Dean’s Star Wars comforter. Sam and Dean share the room now, it helps keep Sam’s nightmares away. Sometimes.

She shifts inside the puddle of noon-day light, and he can see right through her gown; the ruddy pink of her nipples, the map of puckered, silver scars across her chest. She runs a hand over her belly where the blood still flows. It won’t leave a mark on the sheets.

“It’s okay,” he says, “you do.”

One side of her face stays wax doll frozen when she smiles.

“Does it hurt?” he’d asked her once, running his fat baby fingers over the blur between neck and chin, where the skin had melted like glue and felt now like the outside of a peach.

“Not anymore,” she said.

And he’d smiled at her because she was his mommy, a beautiful princess only he could see, with the palest hair and cat yellow eyes.

“I do love you,” she tells him, coming to sit beside him on the floor. The smell of her is familiar, blood and comfort. He licks his lips. “But you know they don’t want me here, baby.”

“I didn’t tell, I swear!” Sam flings himself at his mother in panic, wrapping both arms around her waist.

She’s only recently been solid enough to touch, and he can’t seem to get enough; he misses her even when she is here. Sam buries his face in the hem of her skirt, his throat hot with smoke and tears, the sour taste of sulfur.

“I know,” she says, smoothing back his hair. “It’s not your fault they’re going to make me go away. It’s never your fault.”

“Sam!”

His father’s voice again, and now all Sam can taste is the magic. Herbs, incense, anger. John’s gunpowder.

“They’re going to try to make you forget me, forget who you are. But you won’t, Sammy, I know you won’t. One day, you’ll remember. You’ll know everything.” His mother holds him, whispers to him, and it sounds like a lullaby he never got to hear, like a memory he shouldn’t have, but somehow does.

And Sam cries, because he wants to promise her he’ll remember, promise her anything if it will make her stay, but his father’s voice is louder than hers and the room is shifting and he thinks he’s falling but he must just be falling asleep.

When he wakes the next morning in his bed, Dean is standing over him.

“You okay, Sammy?”

Sam nods, even though he isn’t. He feels sad. Small, alone. He doesn’t know why. The feeling stays with him while he gets dressed, then shuffles into the bathroom to pee.

Eventually, all little boys forget that once upon a time they wanted to be firefighters. They forget that they ever had friends who were dragons. By the time Sam starts to brush his teeth, he doesn’t remember to be sad. He eats his pop tarts with a smile. His father even smiles back.

Sam won’t have another nightmare for thirteen years.

*

Sam meets Jess in an 8 AM anthropology class. The desks are too narrow for his shoulders, so he sprawls out, legs in front of him in the aisle, back against the concrete wall. He’s on his second cup of coffee already, because his body can’t remember when he last went to bed before 8AM, and two weeks into normal-people time, this getting up early routine is still kicking his ass.

There’s laughter and the scrape of metal against the wood floor, then someone jostles his chair, sloshing black hot coffee all over his lap. He jumps, scalded and pissed off, muttering swear words in the way only Dean cords them together. Strange, the things Sam misses about his brother.

A blonde girl with a smile sharp as moonshine tips her chin up at him. “Fuck you too, Sam Winchester,” she says.

“Shit. Sorry, sorry- I – hey, how did you-?”

“Your name’s on all your notebooks there, big guy. Afraid of losing your lunch box at sleep away camp?”

There’s a dimple on just one side of her smile, and he gets the crazy urge to touch it.

Instead he laughs for the first time since he walked out of his father’s house without closing the door.

He doesn’t hear a word the professor says.

They go for breakfast afterwards. Sam is still wearing the uncomfortably wet pants; she giggles about it, and he misses all his afternoon classes.

She loves old movies and jazz music, and her breasts fit perfectly in the palms of his hands. He’s happy in a quiet, stupid kind of way that his brother would totally make fun of. He wishes he could tell Dean about it anyhow.

One day, he overhears Jess telling her friends that Sam is the most attentive boyfriend she’s ever had. If she notices that all of his listening means he never has to say much about himself, then she never lets on.

He never let himself imagine it would be this easy to slip inside of her regular life, to slip inside of her. She’s proud of him; for being smart, for being stubborn, for being Sam. She doesn’t know or care that he has the obscure folklore of forty-eight states memorized, but he never could learn how to shoot a crossbow worth a damn.

Sam was never going to tell her about any of that. Some things you forget on purpose.

*

Sam and Jess have been sleeping together for nine months when the dreams start.

It’s mid-summer. He’s in bed with Jess, and his mother stares down at them from the ceiling. She’s being eaten by the fire, skin to bone; her stomach is torn open, he can see her insides as they begin to fall out. There’s so little left of her that she shouldn’t be alive, but somehow she is. She’s trying to tell Sam something, something important. He tries to listen, only she is whispering and someone else is screaming, and he can’t hear what she says.

His mother reaches out for him, spreading her arms wide as wings. Then she starts to cry. Blood and tears spill over Sam’s forehead like a hot rain, like a baptism.

He wakes up with the stink of the burning dead in his lungs. He’s the one screaming.

“Hey, hey, Sam, are you okay? What is it?” Jess’ hands are light in his hair. He’s soaked in sweat.

Sam swallows hard, and thinks about lying, but the words are already out. “It was my mom, she was...in trouble.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Jess says, softly. “It was just a dream. Hey- do you want to call her maybe?”

Sam feels a part of his chest crack open, spill out sticky and thick inside of him, rushing to fill all the empty spaces. It takes him a minute to name it as grief. To realize he’s never felt it this way before.

“Yeah,” he says. “But I can’t.”

He tells Jess the truth, My mother died in a house fire when I was a baby, and I don’t remember her much at all. I don’t talk about it with anyone.

She wraps her arms around him. “I’m sorry,” is all she says.

The next day, Sam starts looking at engagement rings.

They move in together; the dreams continue. Sometimes it’s Jess on the ceiling instead of his mother. He doesn’t tell her that. When he wakes up, crying or screaming or in cold dead silence, Jess is there. She presses him into the pillows and she kisses his mouth. She climbs over him, heated and urgent and alive.

“I love you,” she says.

And when the sun comes up, Sam forgets.

He will only remember again when it’s not a dream: the way Jess’ skin smelled as it burned away, the way her eyes were round and open and looking right at him.

This time, over the sound of his own screaming, he thinks he hears her whisper his name.

He dreams of her murder for three months straight. He wakes up in some motel room with moldy carpet and uncomfortable beds, Dean pressed tight against his back, his body hard and unbreakable.

Sometimes Sam lets himself cry. Then it’s Dean’s hands and Dean’s arms, carrying his brother away from fire and smoke and death, like a memory Sam shouldn’t have, but still does.

The morning after, neither of them will mention it.

*

Just outside of Texas, through a haze of black (demons’ blood and mother’s milk) Sam looks down at his brother.

Dean, on his knees with his mouth open; Sam has one fist curled in his hair, the other curled around his own dick. He holds it inches from Dean’s face, a threat. A weapon.

“Your mouth is so pink, Dean,” he says, rubbing the head of his dick across Dean’s parted lips. “Pink and pretty. Just like a cunt.”

There’s a flutter of dark lashes as Dean moans and sucks him down. Sam shoves on the back of Dean’s head, waiting for him to choke. He does, finally; coughing and sputtering, a thin spider web of spit running from his swollen lip to Sam’s swollen cock.

“You’re such a stupid whore,” Sam says. The voice that comes out of him isn’t his, but he knows it as well as the back of his own hand, connecting with a crack across Dean’s face. “Why would you let me do this to you?”

Dean looks up at Sam and shrugs, eyes round and bright. Already there’s a purple bruise blooming on his cheek, in the shape of Sam’s long fingers.

“I love you, Sammy,” he says.

“Stop.” Fist to the nose, and Dean is flat on his back on the stinking carpet, Sam kneeling over his shoulders. He shoves his own jeans down past his hips, presses the heel of his palm into Dean’s chest, leaves new fingerprints over his heart.

“Stop it,” Sam says again, even as he shoves his dick into all that warm wet heat.

Dean doesn’t struggle, and that makes Sam angrier, makes him wrap his hand around his brother’s throat, makes him squeeze. Makes him fuck Dean’s mouth (harderfastertakeitbitch) even as Dean suffocates under the weight of him.

(“Stop,” Sam says, because Dean never will.)

Sam looms over him, shadow distorted in the late afternoon sun. He stares down at Dean, torn open and bleeding out, and he comes so godamned hard he

Wakes up.

Dean rubs a palm over his face, yawning, blinking in the darkness. It’s been a long time- almost a year- since Sam’s had a nightmare that wakes them both.

“You okay, man?” Dean asks, voice rough and sleep worn.

Sam doesn’t answer. Just climbs into bed with his brother, wraps his arms around him and presses him down to the mattress.

When Dean opens his mouth to ask what the hell, Sam crawls down his body, urgent and alive. Takes Dean’s cock in his mouth, swallows it down like pride. By the time Sam’s done with him, Dean forgets what he wanted to know.

*

The first time Sam sees Madison, he knows he’s going to sleep with her. No visions or premonitions, just his dick telling him what he wants from a pretty girl, for the first time since Jess.


She rides him while the fire crackles, sticks her fingers in his mouth, makes him suck, makes him ask for more.

Sam fucks her hard, until her short, sharp gasps cut into the space between them, like the pointed ends of stars just out of reach. Holds her ass high in the air, spreads her wide with fingers and dick. Gets her off threefourfive times, marking his skin with her insides.

She lays next to him, then, slippery and hot, panting into the pillows, already half asleep. He tosses the blankets off, and sees that she’s bleeding, dark red stains trickling across clean white sheets.

His stomach turns. “Shit, I’m sorry.”

Madison opens her legs. Looks down at the blood as if it isn’t hers, and shrugs. “It’s ok, I didn’t even realize it,” she tells him, resting her head on his chest. “It didn’t hurt at all.”

That’s what she tells him in his dreams now too, when she comes to him. Dressed only in a filmy lace gown; he can see the roundness of her breasts, the moon pale curve of her hips, the dark curls of her cunt. Her brains leak out from the hole he put between her eyes, but her mouth is pink and wet.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she tells him, over and over, reaching for him, as he tries to crawl away, “It doesn’t hurt.”

Sam wakes up shivering and sweating, curved into the crook of Dean’s body like a comma, a breath of respite and reprieve he has no right to.

He doesn’t wake Dean up.

*

Dying was like dreaming, and Sam can’t remember any pain. He can’t remember anything, really, other than Dean holding him while his life slipped out and Dean holding him after his life was stuffed back in.

There is nothing at all of where he might have gone, during the in-between. But Sam still believes.

Because John sold his soul to Hell for Dean, and Dean sold his soul to Hell for Sam- and if Hell is real, then Heaven has to be real too, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?

*

When the weather turns warm, Sam stops counting the days on his calendar.

It’s mid-summer, another motel with another broken air conditioner, and Sam wakes to find Ellen next to him in the bed. His head rests on her shoulder. He’s cupping her naked breast with one hand, and running his index finger across the scar on her belly with the other. There’s an intimacy between them that should feel strange, but somehow doesn’t, like there’s more to this than the ache in his dick telling him they’ve been at it for a while.

“C-section,” she says, grabbing at his fingers. “Jo was stubborn, even then.”

Sam nods. He slithers down the length of her, holds her open and buries his face in the scent of heat and sex and woman. Drinks her in until he’s full, until she’s tugging his hair and calling his name.

He follows her strong hands, lifting his head to look down at her. Her cheeks are flushed, pink and pretty, but she continues their earlier conversation as if nothing had happened in between.

“I was asleep when they took her out,” she is saying, “I don’t remember anything. It didn’t hurt. I wonder now if that was the problem.”

“What do you mean?” He runs a thumb over her bottom lip, then bends down to kiss her again.

Ruby kisses him back, lying beneath him where Ellen was a moment ago, just as naked, just as wet. His hands go round her waist, and he notices for the first time how tiny she really is. He thinks he could break her, if he wanted to. He leaves his mark on skin so pale, he can almost see her insides.

“It has to hurt, Sam,” she tells him, wrapping soft legs around his thighs. She is shaking, and he can nearly believe she is sorry. “It’s not love if it doesn’t hurt.”

On the other bed, Dean is asleep, arms flung wide. His mouth is curved up in a smile. His lips are blue.

Sam tries to call out to him, but his throat closes around the sound, and this is just a dream.

“He loves you,” someone says. It’s a woman’s voice, it’s always a woman’s voice, even if Sam can’t be sure anymore who it belongs to. “Everyone always loves you –

-Sam!”

Sam opens his eyes, and (everyone) Ruby is gone. There’s only Dean lying beside him, mouth and arms open, open.

Sam hears himself whisper Dean’s name.

Dean doesn’t wake up.


-End




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