
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/694566.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M, M/M
  Fandom:
      Supernatural
  Relationship:
      Dean_Winchester/Sam_Winchester, Rhonda_Hurley/Dean_Winchester
  Character:
      Dean_Winchester, Sam_Winchester, Rhonda_Hurley, John_Winchester
  Additional Tags:
      Underage_Sex, Weechesters, Sibling_Incest, Masturbation, Angst, Pining,
      Flagstaff, Fix-It
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-02-22 Chapters: 1/2 Words: 4696
****** How Bad I Want This Scandal ******
by BewareTheIdes15
Summary
     Dad doesn’t stop the car until they’re on the other side of
     Albuquerque, like Sam’s going to teleport right back to Flagstaff if
     they don’t get far enough away.
Notes
     *ALL WARNINGS WILL BE UPDATED FOR PART 2*
     Once upon a time, peepingdru bought my services in a charity auction.
     There are no words for how late I am on actually coming through for
     her (ok, there are, mostly things like ‘year’ and ‘failboat’), but
     suffice to say I am unworthy of her generosity and patience,
     particularly since this is only part one.
     Props to deirdre_c for the original idea for Flagstaff fix-it fic and
     helping nudge me in the right direction.
     I can’t explain why I have struggled so much with this fic, but
     hopefully you all will enjoy it and I’ll at last be motivated to fill
     in the gaps of part two. Title from "In The Next Room" by Neon Trees
Dad doesn’t stop the car until they’re on the other side of Albuquerque, like
Sam’s going to teleport right back to Flagstaff if they don’t get far enough
away. Doesn’t say a word even then, just pulls up to the front office of greasy
little motel and stomps inside to talk to the guy at the counter. It might bug
Sam if he wasn’t too busy slowly suffocating under the weight of Dean ignoring
him.


Pink neon blares L_s Lunas Sup__ 8 into the night next to a flickering,
electric blue crescent moon. It’s obvious even through the curtains of the room
somebody else’s credit card is buying for them, tinting the stain-brown carpet
sunset purple and drawing funhouse shadows on the wall. No worse than Sam’s
been living for the past two weeks, but not all that much better either.


The same dry air as Arizona sucks the water out of his lips no matter how many
times he licks them wet. He’s making it worse, knows it, gets the science
behind it and can’t stop anyway. Keeps worrying at a spot on the right side
where the skin has cracked, tasting the salt tang of his own blood and
imagining it’s a split lip from the right hook Dean's eyes had been promising
when he’d busted into Sam’s last motel room.


At the time he’d been knee-jerk glad that Bones had freaked out and started
barking because Dean had that look on his face like when he’s just going to
wail on something until his fist bleeds and Bones had pulled him up short. Now,
though, he’s thinking maybe it would have been better if Dean had laid into him
and gotten it out of the way. Maybe then there wouldn’t be this million ants
tension marching up the column of his spine.


His stomach clenches sharply at the thought of Bones. Two weeks with some
stupid stray he’d pulled in out of the rain and now he’s got a knot the size of
a fist in his throat over that dumb mutt. Doesn’t even know what happened to
him, didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye before Dad was yanking him up off
the couch and practically throwing him into the car, swearing and cursing and
“If you ever,” and “What were you,” and “So help me God,”ing. Poor little guy's
probably out wandering the street again, cold and alone, not even knowing why
Sam isn’t there to take care of him.


Fuck, he’s not a little kid anymore, he’s not going to cry over a dog. His dog.
50% of everything in the world that’s ever been his alone.


Surreptitiously, Sam scrubs at his eyes with the heel of his palm, hoping it’ll
come across as sleepy if his father or Dean decide they feel like looking at
him instead of acting like there's a Sam-shaped void in the room.


Aint it grand? They get so pissed off over him walking away from them that they
won't even look at him. His family makes all kinds of sense.


Sam doesn’t bother to do more than toe out of his shoes and shuck his jeans
before he crawls under the flimsy, mesa-printed comforter, leaving his clothes
in a wad on the floor right where he stood. Could use a shower, really - he
hadn’t been spending too much time on personal hygiene between TV and junk food
runs lately – but Dean had followed him into the bathroom to ‘wash his hands’
while Sam brushed his teeth, so he kinda doubts he’ll be getting a lot of
privacy in rooms with windows big enough for him to fit through in the
foreseeable future.


There’s a lamp still shining from the desk by the door and his hours have been
off enough to fuck his sleeping patterns all to hell, but the faded wallpaper
is preferable company to the Invisible Man treatment, so he rolls over onto his
side and plays at unconsciousness.


Dean follows him a couple of minutes later, early by their standards. Manages
to knock painfully into Sam a half dozen times before he settles down, every
inch of space between them like a physical thing. Sam can count on both hands
the number of times he’s shared a bed with his brother and hasn’t fallen asleep
with their backs pressed together or their legs tangled up, some kind of
contact. The closest Dean gets to the concept of personal space is that space
exists and it's all his, personally.


From the other side of the room the bathroom sink squeaks like crickets in the
silence, Dad puttering through his nightly routine.


“Why?” Dean says it almost too soft for Sam to make out, intense enough he
can’t miss it. He’s always had their father’s knack of cramming a diatribe into
one gruff syllable.


Just the thought of Dean’s eyes boring into the back of his neck raises his
hackles, but he hasn’t got anything to say to it that’s not another brand new,
perfectly valid reason to want to run all over again, so he tries to will the
wallpaper to peel with his mind instead and pretends he doesn’t know that Dean
knows he’s still awake.


There’s a clatter as Dad drops something in the bathroom, a muffled rumble of
curses that make it wordlessly to Sam’s ears. Dean huffs, as good or better
than the whatever he’s not going to let himself say that Sam can feel vibrating
on the air. If they were by themselves Sam would probably be pushing now,
goading and nagging until Dean came out with it. Or, more likely, decked him
for it. It might be better that way and it might not; Dean's a crapshoot in a
leather jacket on any given day.


He’s not sure what he’s expecting, but, “I told the desk clerk about the dog,”
isn't it. “Promised she’d take care of him. Said you were a sweet kid.”


Right off the bat, Sam knows which clerk Dean means – Camille. She’d been the
one who checked him in, pretended to buy his lame ‘my dad works odd hours’
excuse days and days after it had to have become obvious that nobody but Sam
was living in the room. He’d been pretty sure she knew about Bones too, but
she’d never mentioned it, never called the cops on the dumb runaway kid in room
9. Knowing she’s taking care of Bones loosens one of the knots in his stomach.
Doesn’t do anything for the one that develops from thinking about Dean laying
on the charm to get her to take care of Sam’s dog while Sam was getting bitched
out in the car.


It’s thoughts like that that got Sam into this mess in the first place, though,
so he throttles it as best he can. Feels it start to do the zombie-creep back
to life with the sound of Dean shifting on the bed next to him.


His, “Thanks,” leaks out tight enough Dean probably reads it as mad.


The huff Dean gives him back could mean any one of a handful of things, but
Dad's flicking the bathroom light out, rustling papers as he settles down at
the tiny kitchenette table to look for a new case, so Sam doesn't ask.


                                  ===THEN===



There’s no time of year when being a Winchester is anything close to normal,
but summer is when things are the most and the least messed up. Dad will pack
them up in the car drive for weeks, barely a stop for the night to relive the
fatigue of quickie-case after quickie-case. Then something will shift in the
air as the tension of being around them both non-stop starts to crawl into
Dad's shoulders. Sam watches it like the needle on a pressure gauge, sees him
weigh the desire for backup with the ever-present need to get the hell away
from his vestigial family.


Mid-June, Sam and Dean are unpacking their stuff in a week-to-week duplex with
the sound of the Impala retreating into the distance. It's nothing special on
either end of the quality spectrum; full length of the building eaten up by a
living room that bleeds into the open-plan kitchen, a blip of a hallway letting
onto a perfunctory bathroom and a bedroom just big enough for the two doubles
crammed inside it. The furniture was out of style before Sam was born and the
muted silver flecks in the yellowed countertops have almost been scraped to
non-existence through years of wear on the plastic, but for a while it’ll be
home and, if for no other reason than that, Sam’s fond of it.


It never takes them long to settle in anywhere, too much practice to draw the
process out. The beds are equidistant to the door, so Dean takes the one on the
right. Old springs creak with the weight of his duffle, a feeble cloud of dust
motes rising to dance lazily in the slip of afternoon sunlight streaming
through the undersized window.


“Not bad,” Dean says, sprawling out on his back on the naked mattress. His arms
make a pillow, behind his head, ankles crossing to mirror them, leaving a faint
track of rubber-grime from the heel of Dean’s boot.


Sam grunts for lack of a response that wouldn’t make him sound happy to be here
or get him bitched at about his ‘attitude’.


It’s a perverse impulse that’s been cropping up more and more the past couple
of years, this need to make sure that Dad and Dean know he’s miserable, that
their life, that they are the reason he can’t be like everybody else. To never
give them the satisfaction of thinking for one second that they can make it
better. He doesn’t really understand it, wants to beat the shit out of himself
half the time for doing it and can’t stop anyway.


He sees the way they look at him when he does it, disappointment from Dad, hurt
and frustration from Dean, both of them wishing that he could just go back in
time and be the kid who was content to play car games for hours and got excited
by the prospect of every new town they set up in. Back before another town was
just another place he was going to be looking at in a rearview mirror and a lot
of things he’d never had the chance to do left behind. Before he started
resenting all of those normal, white-picket-fence things for not being enough
to bury the sick need inside of him.


The thing is, Sam wishes he could go back to that time too. However messed up
he may be, feeling like a string pulled too tight every second of every day is
not something Sam particularly relishes either.


“Hey, what’s up?”


Dean’s sitting up, feet planted on the floor when Sam turns around and realizes
he has no idea how long he just spent staring at the wall.


And this is the part that kills him the most. Because Dad gets it – not all of
it, of course, or at least Sam hopes to God he doesn’t – that Sam’s not that
kid anymore. He stopped looking for the little boy he probably loved under
Sam’s skin a long while ago. Sam could walk out on Dad right now and they'd
both be just fine. But Dean, for all the misery Sam deals him with a
disinterest so feigned it physically hurts sometimes, Dean still looks at him
with ‘Sammy’ in his eyes, promising he could fix everything if Sam would only
tell him what’s wrong.


It’s the one thing he can never do, and the one he feels written in every
breath and look and motion he makes, a wound that will never seal carved into
his flesh by that look on Dean’s face.


“Nothing,” he shrugs and turns back to the bed to start unpacking.


Dean doesn’t call him on it, but Sam can feel green eyes digging holes into his
back as he starts shuffling the mound of stuff he turns out onto his bed into
organized piles. Just in case, he makes a big deal out of arranging his books
underneath the bed by the Dewey decimal system until Dean gets bored and starts
going through his own stuff.


It isn’t until Dean’s busy hanging up shirts on the handful of abused wire
hangers in the closet that Sam fishes out the dog-eared manila file folder from
two states back and sandwiches it inconspicuously between his dictionary and a
literature anthology he’d stolen from Gruber High last year. Feels the weight
of its presence settle over the room like a dark cloud Dean’ll never notice.


                                   ===NOW===



Dean’s got his right arm propped up on the window of the booth. Won’t say so,
but Sam knows he’s trying to even it out the tan from his left hanging out the
window when he drives.


Dad’s back at the room, having a phone conversation with somebody about ‘the
mission’ which is his way of saying ‘none of your business’. It’s such
bullshit. Sam could join the friggin’ CIA and he still couldn’t get away with
having a damn private thought.


The waitress ambles past, fills up Dean’s coffee and barely bothers to flirt.
Sam knows why.


For a long time, it didn’t matter, Dean was all grown up and cool and Steve
fucking McQueen and Sam was just the little squirt tagging along behind him.
Nobody questioned what they were to each other, because why the hell would Dean
waste his time on a nothing like Sam unless he had to? But then all of a sudden
Sam wasn’t just a punk kid hanging on Dean’s shirttails. He grew up and out and
up some more, just for good measure. His face started slimming and developing
angles and he grew out of muddy-blonde into warm-brown almost overnight. He
stopped looking like Dean’s baby brother and started looking like a guy who
might not be related to Dean at all.


The first time he noticed it was about a year ago, fourteen and made of all the
scraps that were left over after his parents had Dean. An extra inch of height
but no muscle to go with it, all the weird ducktail-prone curl that got left
out of Dean’s ‘scrub a hand through it and it’s fine’ hair, moles in place of
freckles. Basically, life sucked, but it was the kind of suck that Sam was used
to.


He’d been up at the register of a roadside shack not nearly different enough
form the one they’re in now to not give him weird flashbacks. The sign had
named the place Lois’ even though the ancient counter waitress kept yelling
orders out to ‘Julio’ in the back while Dean gulped down the last of a peanut
butter and chocolate milkshake. In the car later he’d bitched about brainfreeze
and cottonmouth.


Sam would give anything not to remember it this well.


He’d handed their ticket over at the register, fished out the twenty he had
left over from his split of the money the last time Dad had left them. The old
lady rang him up just fine, but Sam had more than enough experience being
looked at crossways that it was hard to miss something being off in her eyes.
He’d gone for a smile, soft and kiddish, the kind that Dean couldn’t pull off
even when he was a kid. That sort of thing usually worked on the post-
menopausal set but it didn’t do much good then. He spent the rest of the time
she took rattling out his change counting up the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny
tray.


On the way out of the door Dean had slung an arm around Sam’s neck, headlocked
him to kiss the top of his head because Dean always had issues with appropriate
levels of physical contact. When Sam got free again he stuck a hand back
through his hair, knowing full-well it wasn’t going to do any good. In the
process he caught the old woman looking at them again.


No, not looking, glaring. And it was really weird. He got that they were two
young guys, rough enough around the edges to make the occasional convenience
store clerk nervous, but they’d been pretty well behaved – Dean knocking at his
feet under the table, picking at him like they were both still six, but nothing
out of the ordinary – and they were already in the parking lot, pretty
obviously not about to start something. So he didn’t understand the stinkeye
and Sam had never been very good at letting go of things he didn’t understand.


It wasn’t until later that night with the chorus of his father and Dean snoring
settling him in to sleep, his brother using him as a couple extra inches of
mattress, when the tumblers in his head finally clicked into place.


Gay. She thought they were gay. Together.


Sam knows he thought about it before then. A lot before then. One way or
another it feels like the ideas of himself and Dean have been tangled up like
brambles in his head from the day he was born. He’d done research, child
psychology and the development of love maps and all of that. That was the first
time it really gelled though. That it wasn’t just him being weird or needy or
having some kind of attachment disorder. That other people looked at him and
Dean and saw more.


This kind of thing probably doesn’t really have a start, but that’s where it
started for Sam.


“Sam!” Dean snags Sam’s attention with a terse syllable and a waved hand.
“Still with me?”


Sam hums before he’s all the way back in reality, then mumbles, “Yeah. Yeah,
gotta hit the head,” for an excuse to get some breathing room.


He can’t say he’s completely shocked to hear the clatter of loose change on the
table top and the heavy tread of boots following behind him.


Sweat prickles to life the moment he shoulders his way out the back door, mid-
day heat radiating off the oil-spotted parking lot in a haze. The diner’s a
standard roadside joint playing at being a truckstop, including the little
bathroom out back. Must have been added on to the main building some time in
the ‘70s, going by the chipped sienna tile running three-quarters of the way up
the wall. It’s muggy inside, an unsavory combination of lemon-scented cleanser
and stale urine that doesn’t dissipate in the extended rush of air when the
door thunks against Dean’s palm, sun pouring in around the black shape of him
at the threshold.


“There’s not even a window!” Sam gripes, holding his arms out as far as he can
without actually touching the walls. “I’m not going anywhere!”


Not all that surprisingly, Dean holds his ground. From this position Sam can’t
make out his expression all that well, but he’s got his forearms braced on
either side of the doorjamb, hips cocked and stance loose like he’s settling
in. Like a challenge.


“You wanna hold it for me?” Sam snaps, because it feels good to vent about
something. Because that weird tension is riding high in the hairs on the back
of his neck when Dean just keeps staring at him.
It's not like Sam's shy or anything. His life is a freaking roadtrip movie with
all the fun part cut out and spliced in with horror scenes. He's pissed on the
side of most of the major US highways; in woods, and behind buildings, and in
bottles in the back of the car in every one of the 48 contiguous states. He can
handle his stupid big brother friggin' looming at him while he uses a damn
urinal.


It'd help if he actually had to pee, though.


Jumpy with scrutiny, Sam grates the zipper down and tries not to think about
anything at all as he pulls himself out of his shorts. Definitely not Dean
watching him, looking at Sam with his hand on his dick, seeing it twitch as he
tries to make something happen. Or how his thumb has that rough patch along the
side from the hammer of a revolver that he likes to rub right across the slit
sometimes when he’s jacking off and how he knows Dean’s thumb is just the same,
would feel just the same.


Fuck, don’t get hard. Really, do not get hard.


It takes a minute, but Sam finally manages to squeeze out a few drops. Shakes
off, cleans up, even though the pump bottle of soap looks dirtier than his
hands could ever hope to be. Not quite as dirty as his mind, but that’s
yesterday's news.


Dean just sticks there in the doorway, refusing to move even when Sam's
standing right there in front of him. Wet handprints are already starting to
dry on his thighs where the air just sucks the water up like a sponge. And
Dean's still staring.


"Enjoy the show?" Sam asks, trying to twist it into something weapon-sharp.


He's never been very good with silence and Dean sucks at it unless there's
something serious going down. If there's something serious going down Sam would
really love to be let in on it.


For another handful of seconds Dean still doesn't do anything. His fingers rub
together with the soft shuff of dry skin. He licks his lips, leans forward, and
Sam's brain fries like an egg on the sidewalk right at the same moment that
Dean turns the motion into a roll and he's stepping backward out of the
doorway, one arm extended all 'after you'.


Despite the heat, Sam shivers as he brushes past, shoving his hands in his
pockets the same way he's trying to shove his heart back down out of his
throat.


What the fuck?


                                  ===THEN===



The other half of the duplex is being rented out by a woman named Rhonda. She’s
got a nice smile and a nicer rack. He’d take a guess that she’s not quite ten
years older than Dean underneath the makeup, but definitely more than five. She
wears cut-off denim shorts and brings them over a bowl of Velveeta dip to
introduce herself the day after they move in.


Naturally, Dean is fucking her inside of a week.


It’s all so predictable Sam kind of wants to cry, except crying about it would
be maybe even more pathetic than the reasons he wants to, so he tells himself
to shut up and ignores that hornets’ nest that starts writhing in his gut every
time he knows Dean’s falling into bed with somebody. He’s had plenty of
practice.


Just not quite enough to ignore the wall-muted thump of two bodies moving a bed
across the floor the hard way.


Rhonda’s place is a mirror of theirs, as near as Sam can figure, which puts her
bedroom right on the other side of the wall from Dean’s bed. ‘Wall’ being a
very generous term for something that must have started life as a phonebook
page. He’s basically got a loudspeaker hooked up to Rhonda’s sex life. Rhonda
and Dean’s sex life, and that’s the part that really messing Sam up.


All transcripts to the contrary, times like this Sam’s convinced that he’s got
to be the dumbest sonofabitch alive. Because really, who does this? Who
tortures themselves listening to the person they spend 90% of their lives
wanting to lick bump uglies with somebody else? It’s got to be some kind of
derangement or imbalance, and ha! Isn’t that the understatement of the century?
Sam’s whole sexuality is a disorder.


The squeak of springs is like nails on a chalkboard and a hand on his dick at
the same time, the dull huff of a grunt washing heat through him like that
breath is breaking over his own skin. The words that come out of Dean’s mouth
get lost in transit, but the tone is crystal clear – rough and deep, barely-
controlled. It’s the same as he sounds during a hunt, exactly the way he
sounded after that poltergeist threw Sam through the wall a couple of weeks
ago, all of that feeling curled around the three letters of Sam’s name. It had
been worry then, but the inflection’s not that different, really, not so hard
to imagine it all twisted around; if Dad hadn’t been there, and if the world
worked like the seediest neighborhoods of Sam’s brain.


Sam would have sat up, coughing plaster dust and picking splinters out of his
hair and Dean would have shoved him, sent him sprawling onto the grimy remnants
of what used to be a high-dollar rug. Then Dean would have followed, drawn in
by Sam’s gravity, all roar and rush as their teeth clacked together and their
lips bruised around the shape of mumbled curses.


Dean’s hands are big, but that’s not too hard to fake now that Sam’s developed
palms that could measure a frying pan. It feels like that’s exactly what
they’ve been doing when he pushes them up under a t-shirt that gets passed back
and forth so often it doesn't really belong to him or Dean, skin-soft cloth and
scalding hot fingers that are scratchy in just the right places to make the
fantasy work.


Dean would have felt up his ribs, his chest, the tender spots where wiry
muscles join, like he doesn’t trust Sam to stay put together the same way
unless somebody’s keeping tabs on it. Would have rubbed his palms flat over
Sam’s nipples, played with them because he’s used to girls. Scraped down his
stomach with blunt nails to make a mark, to punish Sam for getting himself hurt
again. Slid his hand down into Sam’s boxers and jacked him hard, weird angle,
everything as messy and hungry and imperfect as the stunted noises Dean
would’ve made against his lips.


A sick, dizzy thrill punches through Sam, leaves him tingling as come coats his
fingers and oozes down into the webbing. Gasped breath shunts back at him where
he’s got half of his face buried in a spine-broken copy of 1984, dollar-bin
sheets sticking to the small of his back where his shirt’s pulled up.
Distantly, almost distracted, he lays in his own bed and listens to the sounds
from the next room escalate, break down into a stutter until Dean groans loud
and long and all the important parts are over.


Sooty-black guilt films up his insides like the smoke off of an oil-fire. Every
single time.


He snags a worn shirt from the dirty pile on the floor to clean himself up
with, a sudden, intense need to have the evidence off his skin warring with the
urge to stay right where he is and let Dean see. Debates opening a window to
let out some of the stale air and the stench of spunk - it’s not like Sam
hasn’t been stuck in plenty of rooms perfumed by Dean’s conquests – and changes
his mind about it four times before he actually hauls himself up and flips the
paint-gummed latch.


The night air is as sticky as Sam’s skin but at least it’s cooler pouring in
through the screen. Cicadas are screaming in the trees outside, loud enough
that Sam’s not as much a party to whatever it is Dean and Rhonda get up to
after. Whatever sweet, empty things his brother might whisper to her in the
dark won’t really matter in the long run, but still it’s too much, too real.


Sam’s not especially good at real nowadays.


Like casting a thought in their general direction might have made them get up
and wander out from under the bed, Sam casts a glance at the stack of books
piled there, the infinitesimal shadow where the college brochures are still
safely hidden.


The voice that’s been pawing at the back of Sam’s head for months now, ignored,
pipes up again. It’s the only way.


From the other side of the wall, Rhonda’s laugh, bright and easy, sears a hole
in Sam’s chest like a blowtorch. 
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