TITLE: Cult Apologists
AUTHOR: Kita
RATING: It’d be pretty tame if they weren’t you know, *brothers*. NC-17 for incest.
PAIRING: Sam/Dean
AUTHOR NOTES: "Supernatural" Fandom

Cult Apologists

Jess used to listen to jazz. The notes worked their way into Sam’s dreams, jumpy and precise, lights sparking then dying over water. On Sunday mornings, Jess would swing her hips to it in a way that looked like sex, while she burned pancakes on Sam’s stovetop. Sam would wake to the smell of maple, the sound of Voodoo Funk Project, and the feel of a hard on inside his boxers.

Their bed faced east, because Jess said it was good feng shui. Blurred with sunlight, sweat gathered at the hollow of her throat when she rode him. Sunday mornings were always very warm.

Dean still listens to Heavy Metal. The drums knock like angry hammers and the lyrics are usually about blow jobs. Sam thinks it’s the kind of music kids used to listen to when they drove their parents’ cars too fast and drank too much cheap beer, bold with the lie of invincibility. He doubts Dean is aware of the irony.

Dean’s coat, boots, and car are shiny and black. Sometimes, he really is an idiot.


“Why are you doing this to us, Sammy?” Dean’s fingers wrapped around Sam’s slimmer wrist, steel cuffs and rabbit traps.

“You know why.”

Dean pulled him closer, his breath was sticky-sweet, tempting. (Licorice, caramel. Fly paper.) “You’re picking now to feel guilty?”

Sam said nothing.

“All the people we save, all the good we do,” Dean said. It was the first time Sam had ever heard his brother sound desperate. He couldn’t imagine what Dean was going to do, without him.

“All that. Who’s gonna judge us?”

Sam felt his heart beating in his throat. It tasted of stale candy.

“Me,” he said.

He didn’t realize that was why he chose Law School until Dean came for him, years later. By that time all his books were lost to the fire, along with Jess’ jazz collection.


“I’m not that boy anymore, Dean,” he said, while his brother washed soot and blood off his face with the hem of his own shirt.

Sam stared at the ceiling over the bed, the same spot he’d been looking at since they checked into the shitty motel just outside of Stanford, over six hours ago. Her shadow image echoed there, every time he blinked.

“Don’t tell me who you are,” Dean said, lying back next to Sam. He sounded tired, smug. He sounded like their father. “I know you. I’m the only one who does.”

They were so close together, there was only a single dip in the mattress. Sam wanted to punch Dean in the face. He knew damn well he could, years and pounds and the element of surprise were on Sam’s side. (He’s always been good at surprising Dean).

Sam rolled over and kissed him instead. Like a punch- hard, heavy, full of teeth. Because their father had told them over and over: family is all you will ever have, and one day you’ll have no one to trust but each other. Now Sam knew that was true, because he’d tried.

Dean left ash covered fingerprints on Sam’s chest and hipbones. Sam came down his brother’s throat, with his eyes wide open.


On their sixth date, Jess led Sam to bed.

He reached inside his wallet, for the condom hidden behind his Student ID card, untouched for over a year. His hands shook.

Jessica touched his wrist.

“I’m- I’ve never been with a girl before,” Sam said, looking up at her.

She smiled at him, round eyes and red cheeks, the kind of girl who could wear Smurf shorts to bed without irony. There was a bruise on her left shoulder, in the shape of his kiss.

Sam fell in love.

“It’s Ok,” Jess said. “I’m a virgin too.”

Of course, he didn’t bother to correct her.


Different town, different shitty motel, same damn dream.

Sam wakes to a dark, empty room, and the memory of his brother earlier that night, crossbow in his hand, killing a guhl.

The first time Sam held a crossbow, he was eight, and he nearly speared his father with it. Dean rolled his eyes, took the bow, and shot three arrows neatly into the scarecrow’s center chest.

“Nice shooting, Tex,” John said.

Sam wanted to cry, but he knew better. “I hate you,” he said to Dean instead.

Their father reloaded the crossbow without looking at Sam. “You don’t mean that.”

But he did.

Sam still hates his brother sometimes; when Dean goes out after a kill, and comes back stinking of celebratory wine and sex. Sam can’t look at pretty girls anymore without imagining them dead.

Dean creeps into the room just before sun-up, spirits and lipstick kisses on his tongue. He lies down behind his brother, his still-always hard dick poking Sam in the small of his back. Most nights, he won’t ask for anything, just reach inside Sam’s pants, jerk him slow and wet, until Sam cries into the pillow. It makes Sam feel dirty, and shameful. It makes him come harder than he has since he was thirteen.


“You could have died tonight,” Sam said. He hated the way his voice shook.

Dean shrugged. “Didn’t.”

“But you *could* have and it would have been my fault.” (And I’d be alone with Dad, and he would never forgive me.)

“You staked it, I survived it. Shut up and go to sleep,” Dean said, all sixteen years of older brother authority in his voice.

“It’s - I never want anything to happen to us. To you.”

“Now you’re just weirding me out, Sammy.”

And Sam really should remember (but he doesn’t) leaning in toward his brother and kissing him on the mouth. He remembers air displaced, Dean’s shock of breath, then his fist connecting with Sam’s lip. He remembers the taste of his own blood.

Twenty minutes later, Dean crept into Sam’s bedroom, full of apologies and warm hands. Sam was grateful, but not surprised. He laid Dean back on the Star Wars sheets, and did things to him that he’d only read about, in the magazines John kept under the bathroom sink. Dean stuffed his own fist into his mouth when he came. Sam humped the bed, and swallowed. For that single instant, sharp and silver as a hunting knife, they were safe.

The next morning, their father poured syrup on his pancakes, and Dean muttered about Sam hogging all the butter. Last night became just one more thing they would never talk about, like what really killed their mother, or the bottles of whiskey under the bathroom sink, next to John’s porno mags. Just another family secret. Just him, and Dean.


Jess’ blood was still warm when it dripped from the hole in her belly onto Sam’s forehead. And he can’t possibly remember (but he does) his mother’s blood was just as warm. It marked the same skin, an inch below his hairline.

Sam thinks Cain was marked there too, but he hasn’t actually read his bible in a long time. Crosses, holy water and holy texts sit alongside shotguns and double bladed axes in his duffle bag. Religion is only another weapon for him now.

He’s pretty sure Jess was Protestant. He didn’t go to her funeral.

Sometimes he sits up at night, thinking about fire and demons that swallow innocent women whole. About brothers and blood and the wages of sin. He knows Dean fancies himself a hero, after their father. And maybe he is; after all, there are no dead girls over Dean’s head.

Since Dean’s come back, Sam has decided he wouldn’t mind if he ended up in Hell. Maybe that’s where it took Jess. Maybe he can finally rescue her this time around.


One night in Spokane, Sam wakes to find Dean watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Dean shrugs. “She’s hot.”

“It’s stupid,” Sam says. “You have to hit a guy way harder than that with the stake for him to dust.”

(If you don’t, the vampire will be at your sixteen year old brother’s throat, drooling and trying to tear his neck out while you scream like a girl.)

Sam grabs the remote and turns the tv off.

It’s stupid to be angry, he realizes that. No one really knows how to kill vampires. No one in the world. Just him and Dean.


They drive south, to a town infested with Succubi. The car windows are down, and some metal song blasts from the speakers. Dean nods his head in time to the so-called beat, his bottom lip caught between his teeth.

Sam starts to sing along.

“Dude,” Dean says, and Sam can hear his smile, “how the hell do you know the lyrics to this?”

Sam wants to say: because they stopped making shit music like this when I was in elementary school, and you play it twenty hours a day, so there’s really only a finite amount of lyrics to learn.

“Some things just creep inside you,” he says instead, “and they stay there whether you want them to or not.”

And Sam knows that Dean must be looking at him funny, but he can’t see his brother’s face, because everything around them is dark.

-End



Feedback

Back to Kita's fic

-Almighty!GAH 6/05