The Flower Gleams

[sweetprince]

Title: The Flower Gleams
Disclaimer: I am taking SPN on this truly twisty road. I'm sure Kripke would not approve. But since I'm not making money off of it, or claiming to be him, he'll just have to deal.
Summary: Sam isn't the only one with powers. Unfortunately for Dean, his mystical ability to grow flowers doesn't have the same awe-inspiring effect.
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Chapters: 1/1
Rating: NC-17
Notes: This story all started with a jokey conversation between me and torturemysoul. Somehow it ended up getting written. Possibly because IMs involving all caps were involved. Thanks to memphis86 for the wonderful last minute beta. Title taken from "Hodie Aperuit."



This fic is for Erica, just because she's Erica, which is pretty damn awesome.

***

It started like this: Dean was pissed off because the ghoul they’d been hunting had spit in his eye, and then thrown him into a wall. Sam had to come scrambling to his rescue. When they stepped outside the rickety old house the ghoul had retreated into, every lawn on the block had turned a brackish dead brown. Sam couldn’t believe it. There were sprinklers going and it was early May, absolutely no reason for the grass not to be lush and green and perhaps slightly over-watered.

Dean made noise about ghouls getting upgrades, and Sam took a careful sample of the soil. They had it analyzed at the next college town they stopped in. The results were completely weird. There was enough oxygen and nitrogen in the soil, no toxins, no sulfur, no acid, no paint thinner. The soil was a veritable dream—ideal for plants. But unless grass was supposed to be dried and coarse where only seconds before it had been a soft dewy emerald, it was pretty damn dead.

Dean didn’t waste much thought on it. Typical.

But then Sam and Dean got into a fight at a diner two weeks later, and all the ubiquitous diner carnations suddenly bent on their stems and dropped to the tables. Dean poked at the one next to his plate a bit and silently went back to his pancake. Sam stared at the drooping white bloom and sighed. Something strange was going on.

And then even Dean couldn’t ignore it any longer. He got tossed into a jail cell again, and when Sam came to bail out one “George Romero,” the cherry tree outside the station—overflowing with pink blossoms—suddenly dropped its petals like the leaves had already come in.

Only they hadn’t.

“Sam, you gotta stop killing things!” Dean snapped as he slid into the passenger side. Sam just glared at him, but didn’t say anything. He was pretty sure it wasn’t him. When he moved things, when he heard things, when he saw things, he could always feel himself doing it. Now he was just a casual observer.

They went to a botanist who specialized in tropical flowers when they saw her orchids in a stall in a local farmer’s market. It was a stretch, but maybe she knew something. Dean was grumbling the entire way. He wanted sleep. He wanted food. He absolutely did not want to play with the flowers.

It was fruitless. How did Sam tell her that wherever they went, plants started dying? And usually only when Dean was pissed off. They didn’t. Unfortunately, Dean’s frustration killing an entire crop of crucifix orchids spoke rather loudly for them. Turned out she was religious and started wailing about demons and blight upon the holy orchids. They got out of their right quick.

“Dean, just so you don’t continue to blame me for all the strange plant deaths,” Sam started as they drove down the highway, “It’s you, man.”

“It is not,” Dean growled. Then all the grass that lined the highway started browning.

Sam shot him a pointed look. “Is so.”

*

They tried again with the University sort when they were two states and half a dozen fried lawns, shrubberies, and elm trees away. Sam decided to go with the hippie professor who taught a class on the symbolism of greenery in literature. Her office had a poster of The Grateful Dead, right next to a bookcase overflowing with books in various languages. Dean looked mildly sick, and Sam tried not to be skeptical.

“He’s got the mark of the Hesperides,” she said when they sat down.

Dean sat up straight in his chair. “What?”

“The Hesperides, three nymphs who tended a sacred garden estimated to be off the coast of Iberia. They had more than a way with plants.”

Dean gnashed his teeth together. Sam tried not to look as amused as he felt. “How can you tell?”

“And how do you make it go away?” Dean muttered.

She ignored Dean and leaned forward on her desk, chin propped on her fist. “I can feel it on you. It doesn’t go away. You were born with it.”

Dean grumbled something about marijuana use and new age crap. She looked over towards the window startled, and then chucked a pencil at him.

“Hey, mind my heliotrope!” she got up and furiously started watering the withering purple plant. Dean had the good grace to look chagrinned. She sighed when it seemed to revive itself. “You can grow things as well you know—it is a rare gift for a man to be graced with such fertility.”

Dean looked ready to vomit, and Sam couldn’t hold the laughter in any more. His brother smacked him on the back of the head and bitched the entire way about how Sammy got to have cool powers, and he got freakish plant shit. Sam figured it was karma.

*

Dean had to learn to control his temper and his angst, to stop affecting the growing things around him. He had an added interest. He could no longer hide being upset around Sam, every time he tried diner flowers dropping dead totally gave him away. And then Sam just wanted to talk more. Dean hated talking. It wasn’t like anything that was bothering him went away just because he and Sam yammered on about it.

Sam closeted himself in the first library they came to. He read text after text about Dean’s newfound abilities. They were at loose ends, without a case, and Dean had nothing to do besides read old issues of Sports Illustrated. He was bored out of his skull.

"Someday,” Sam said, finger holding his place in a book, “When you’ve got control, you should be able to grow something even in a towering rage."

“I can’t wait,” he replied with a dark look. Sam just smiled again and went back to his research. He didn’t mind at all that the plant thing was forcing Dean to deal with his issues.

The thing that really sucked was that killing plants was in no way useful. It didn’t help in a hunt, and it left behind a trail. Sooner or later those dumb shits at the FBI would pick up on it, and then they could add it to his rap sheet. Dean Winchester, grave robber, serial killer, and plant slaughterer. How fun.

Sam was starting to get desperately worried, especially as hours after demolishing the plants in an area, Dean would often keel over from sudden debilitating exhaustion.

It was weeks later when he was completely distracted that he actually encouraged something to grow. They were both crouching behind a huge potted hotel plant to eavesdrop on a suspect’s conversation, and Dean absently fingered a leaf frond. It was halfway to the ceiling before Sam cottoned on and dragged him out of there.

“Progress,” Sam told him and bought him a black coffee. Shyeah, right.

After that it was like the flood gates opened. He stopped killing things and started forcing things into bloom—reviving plants from bad frosts or neglectful owners, growing things in places the soil just wouldn’t support it, and half the time Dean had no clue what it was they were looking at when he was done.

“White ball flowers,” he said after Sam asked him what it was he’d grown in an inner city children’s park. The neat rows of flowers cheered up the battered play ground immensely.

“White ball flowers?” Sam blinked a few times and shook his head. “Oh you have got to be kidding me.”

Sam disappeared for a few hours after that and came back with voluminous tomes on flowers from the gardening section at the local bookstore. Dean wanted to die, and he refused to read them. Sam jammed his radio with his brain for an entire car trip before Dean finally gave in.

Sam was a stern task master, poking and prodding at Dean until he actually read the contents rather than just stare and daydream about Claudia Schiffer. Dean wound up taking the flower books inside diners and coffee shops, studying them while they ate. Sam didn’t mind. He started reading novels again, everything from deep impenetrable philosophy that he’d had no time for when he was younger to Sue Grafton mystery novels. Dean kinda liked it. His only literary material for the last ten years had been newspapers and automotive magazines. He thought maybe he’d read one of Sam’s books, but the only one he could find was Noam Chomsky’s Profit Over People. Anything with Neoliberalism written on the cover was the last thing he was interested in.

They walked past a nursery, small and empty, in some blip on the map in Washington State a few weeks after he’d finished the last of the books Sam had bought for him. The flowers out front were vibrant, but ignored by those on the street.

“Jess loved those,” Sam pointed at a black tub filled with red and orange and yellow flowers that looked like fireworks on short thick stems.

“Dahlias?” Dean offered.

Sam smiled and bent down over the blooms.

“They don’t smell,” Dean told him and leaned over a pink shock of Freesia, their scent almost head-achey in its potency. “Try these.”

“What are those?” Sam asked, genuinely curious at the small shockingly bright trumpets of pink. Dean told him, and Sam waded through until he found a good bundle to buy. He picked them out, the stems dripping all over his shoes and inhaled. Dean looked away at the slightly blissful expression on Sam’s face. That was private.

He asked Dean about a cluster in a black tub. Dean answered, feeling only slightly like his balls had been cut off, “Tiger lilies.”

Sam gestured at another bunch, deep purple, long-stemmed, with thin curling leaves. “Bearded Iris.”

They went through everything in the bins. Daisies. Orchids—Calypso, to be exact. Gladiolus. Delfinium. Foxglove.

“That doesn’t look like a Fox’s glove,” Sam said with a laugh. Dean had figured out early on that the British names for flowers only rare seemed to make sense.

He shrugged at Sam. They were suffering a little in the weather and he couldn’t help bending down and giving them a little help. “It’s also called digitalis, they use it for people with heart problems.” When he stood back up Sam was staring at him with a soft look, and he cleared his throat and started naming off the rest.

Snapdragons. Gardenias. Paper Whites—a type of Daffodil, the usual yellow ones were Jonquils. Tulips. Lilies again, this time brilliant yellow like uncooked egg yolk. Hyacinth, dusky purple and drooping. Balls of hydrangea or hortensia, depending on whether you asked a 50-year-old or an 80-year-old spinster, Dean clarified. Sam rolled his eyes.

“There are male botanists, Dean.”

Dean made a derisive noise in the back of his throat. “They probably specialize in cacti and bromeliads, not this girly shit.”

They went inside to look at the potted plants. Dean named off every one his brother pointed to. Begonias and Geraniums were vivid in their color, even through the gloom of the shop. African Violets with velvety-soft leaves, and fuzzy noxious-smelling Salvia.

Sam inspected a plant that used to grow in pink and white clusters all over in front of the apartment he and Jess shared.

“Camellia,” Dean told him, “They were in your yard, you should know.” In spite of his derision, Dean was glad that Sam could look back and remember with fondness rather than regret. As they circled around the shop, he realized he could identify everything in the room, from the bright bloody red Amaryllis, his marginal favorite, to the gigantic hybrid tea roses, past their blooming but still magnificent. He felt utterly useless and girly and stupid, he couldn’t shoot or fight or track with the knowledge, but there was still a strange pride welling up in him in the knowing of it.

*

They stopped off at Bobby’s when they needed a rest. Dean couldn’t help getting twitchy and irritable once the summer heat set in. People everywhere forgot to water their plants or protect them from snails and other pestilential insects.

Sam nearly died of laughter when he heard Dean say that. “Pestilential insects, Dean?”

It hadn’t stopped being a joke to him, and often enough Dean wished he could’ve had some other lame power, at least with x-ray vision he could scope out girls. He was surprised when Sam suggested a break, and then remembered that Sam understood how his abilities made the daily flow of their life difficult.

Bobby didn’t find it nearly as hilarious as Sam did, in fact. If anything, he found it even more so. Dean just blew out a breath and stomped into the house, setting up shop in their usual bedroom. Bobby told Sam that he’d never heard of anything like it, and Sam raised his hands in supplication. It seemed like the Winchester family had some pretty strange DNA floating around. Sam thought of the look on Dad’s face at the idea of Dean tending roses and snorted.

Soon the dust and dryness of the junkyard drove Dean insane. He was used to sinking his fingers into the ground and feeling life in it. Sam didn’t know how to help. They didn’t have the money or the security to take a real vacation. Dean improvised. He started looking into plants with protective properties.

He grew small rowans around the house on the day that Bobby went into town, not tall enough to give it afternoon shade, but enough for protection. He thought very carefully about the order they should be organized around the house and settled on a circle to double the strength. A circle had no beginning, no breaking point and the fey and the spirit folk were both repelled by rowans. Cold iron wasn’t the only thing that could form a boundary.

Bobby was somewhat scandalized with the small microcosm Dean cultured around his house. He circled his place, eyeing the fully grown rowans like they were graffiti Dean had sprayed on the walls. Another job called him away before he could say anything.

“Hard to take a bachelor with a junkyard serious if you got this kinda crap growin’ around it!” He said, after hauling parts back to the yard from a big accident on the interstate. Dean shrugged and said he could uproot them, but Bobby sighed and told him to leave it be. You didn't spit in the face of protection even if it made him feel like he was hiding his junk yard in some mock-up of Little House on the Prairie.

Sam seemed to have more of an attachment to his green things than Dean did. He sat in the scrubby grass Dean had forced to grow in the shade of the young trees, eyes off in the distance and mind equally far away. Dean watched Sam watching the world, felt his lungs breathing in air, and breathing out the carbon dioxide so vital to his plants. He couldn’t even tell when he’d started thinking like that.

They got back on the road again. Dean used medicinal herbs these days to ease the wounds they received in the field in tandem with the ordinary first-aid they knew as well as they knew their names. He gave Sam chrysanthemum tea when he got sunstroke out on the planes. Sam’s headaches and fever dropped in an hour. Dean was amazed that it worked.

When they got horrible slashes from a werecat, Dean applied a poultice of vervain to stop the bleeding. It staunched the blood flow of even the worst of Dean’s gashes, and when he peeled it of Sam’s shoulder a few hours later, he was staring at clean new skin.

“The holy herb,” Sam said softly as Dean traced reverential fingers over his uninjured back. “Vervain was applied to the wounds of Christ.”

When Sam went for their stash of Ativan when the nightmares hit again after a brutal case involving a girl slashed to bits, Dean suggested Valerian and chamomile. He’d been reading all the information on Lorazepam, the active ingredient in Ativan, and frankly it scared him.

Sam started calling him Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman. Dean refused to speak to him for a whole week. In retaliation, he started slipping experimental herbal aphrodisiacs in Sam’s food. It was nearly three days before he hit upon one that actually worked, an extract of Damiana and Ginseng.

Sam fiddled about at his computer trying to figure out the correlation between a series of disappearances. His face started to flush across the bridge of his nose, and Dean watched with tightly-reigned amusement as Sam absently started undoing the buttons on his shirt.

“God, it’s hot in here.” He shucked the stripey button-down he was wearing. Sam hated showing his skin, he never did it even in the hottest weather, and it was a rare moment indeed that you could get him into anything that wasn’t two sizes too large. Dean was staring at his brother in the wife-beater he always wore under button-downs. He looked away quickly.

Sam let out a noise suddenly, and dropped his head to the table. Dean looked back at him.

“I can’t concentrate,” His brother moaned, face pressed against the cool wood of the table.

Dean finally allowed himself to laugh. “Yeah, good luck with that!”

Sam propped his head up on his fist, eyes narrowed. “What’d you do?”

Dean looked down at his hands and cackled. “Just some experimentation with all natural viagra.”

His laughter abruptly ended when Sam threw him back on the bed with his telekinesis and pinioned him there. Dean struggled against his bonds.

Sam glared at him, his mouth tight. “Yeah, good luck with that.” He scooped up the keys to the Impala and his jacket and left. Research and button-down forgotten. Dean figured the bonds would dissolve when Sam got far enough away, but Sam must’ve really been thinking about them, because he still couldn’t move by the time Sam came back drunk and smelling of perfume. He figured it was worth it for getting Sammy laid.

“I should kill you,” Sam said, throwing his jacket aside. There was a long lipstick smear on his collarbone. The pressure on Dean eased and he was finally able to sit up.

“Then you would never get any.” He scratched the back of his head and stretched his legs.

Sam continued to glare at him for a long moment before breaking into laughter. It was a move so completely uncharacteristic, Dean couldn’t help but gape.

“You made it yourself didn’t you?” Sam said as he pulled his wife-beater off and fell back on the bed, long limbs everywhere. “Still a medicine woman.”

Dean growled and dove for his little brother, they wrestled playfully on the creaky hotel mattress, grunting and laughing. The bed wasn’t the best place for leverage, and it slammed back against the wall with every move. Dean finally came out on top and he held Sam’s hands down next to his head.

“Better be careful, little brother, I know a few things that could ruin your pretty skin.” He was breathless and triumphant. Sam snorted, forced his hips up and to the side, and rolled himself back on top.

“Damn it,” Dean mumbled without heat. Sam chuckled.

“You better not slip me anything else, unless you like being stuck to the bed.”

“Kinky.” It was out of his mouth before he seriously considered their positions. Sam blushed and rolled right off him, over-judging the distance and landing on the floor. Dean cleared his throat. They didn’t speak of it again.

*

Dean didn’t eat vegetables any more often than he used to. Sam tried to force carrots or green beans or peas, any of the more mild forms of vegetables on his brother, but it was like prying teeth.

Dean claimed that now that he had an affinity with plants he’d never be able to eat them again. But then Sam looked ready to shove a tube down his throat and dump wheat grass into it, so he refrained from using that line of argument ever again. Figured eating a few bites of iceberg lettuce the next time they arrived as a garnish wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Sam loved vegetables and fruits. A whole life of fast food and good home style American cuisine had fostered that love in him. Dean was the exact opposite. Sam couldn’t get him to eat Indian or Thai or sushi without the promise of some great reward—beer all night or the cover charge at a club or an original pressing of AC/DC’s “High Voltage”. After four years of fresh produce and farmers markets and Whole Foods in downtown Palo Alto, Sam was not about to go back to a constant staple of simple carbs and protein.

They got a hotel with a little kitchenette and Sam told Dean he’d make a salad even he would enjoy. Dean refused to believe it, but he pointed out which red-leaf lettuce was the healthiest and the freshest in the grocery store anyway. He could grow his own, but Dean had so far avoided growing things that weren’t functional. He was not Grandma with a vegetable patch. Sure, he helped the dying dogwood tree in Connecticut, but he’d be damned if he forced one on his own.

“For a rebel you have a lot of issues with how people see you,” Sam pointed out when they got back to the room.

“I have an image to uphold, flowers are not very badass.”

Sam started chopping vegetables up with noisy no-nonsense thwocks and Dean backed off to the other half of the room to watch Nip/Tuck re-runs. Sam thought the show was awful, but Dean knew he was pausing in his dinner preparations to watch Sean and Christian talk quietly over cake-tasting.

The episode finished just as Sam called him over to the dingy blond wood table. He’d set the table and everything, albeit with plastic knives and forks because they didn’t have any silverware of their own.

“Aww, Sammy, no candles?” he asked as he sat down heavily in the chair with the best view of the door. Sam rolled his eyes and refused to be bated.

Dean thought the concoction that Sam set before him was truly frightening. Strawberries, penne pasta, chicken, parmesan, nuts, cucumbers, onions, and lettuce all mixed together? It looked like a horrifying idea. Sam sat there, eyes hard and fingers tented, his own plate untouched until Dean took a bite. It nearly killed him to admit how good it was.

“Where the hell did you get this idea?”

Sam smiled and dug into his own salad. “My friend in school made it, she was a year ahead of me.”

Needless to say, Dean weeded out all the chicken and the pasta from what was remaining in the bowl, and he only ate a little of his lettuce. Sam sighed and decided it was progress. Watching Dean suck the leftover strawberries into his mouth was also highly distracting.

*

Dean later blamed the flowers. They were totally sucking his brain dry or something. Sam just thought it was hilarious. They were at Target to pick up some supplies, Dean was off in the home improvement section for bone meal as a source of phosphorus, and Sam was trying to find shampoo that wouldn’t irritate his scalp.

Sam grabbed the first bottle of Garnier he found because he really liked the way it smelled. He went off to find Dean just as a song by Savage Garden came on. He remembered it being a hit when he was a senior in high school.

Dean was standing looking intent, his hands in his pockets, amidst bags of soil, peat, and other garden additives.

“Lift you up and fly away with you into the night,
If you need to fall apart—”

Sam’s mouth dropped open. Was Dean singing along? He so was. Sam wanted to pull out his cell phone and record it. Dean had a good voice, a sweet one actually, when he wasn’t wailing along to Zeppelin or Bon Scott. But Sam really couldn’t get over the fact that it was Savage Garden. Hadn’t Dean gone on insane rants about how those two had been insanely gay whenever Sam watched MTV?

“—I can mend a broken heart
If you need to crash then crash and burn
You’re not alone.”

Dean looked up and caught sight of him, and turned bright red. Sam’s face was contorted into the oddest expression, desperately attempting to keep from guffawing and scaring everybody in Target. The last few months had been some of the most laughter-filled of his life. Sam had embraced Dean’s powers, even if Dean couldn’t and wouldn’t.

“All of this soil has lye in it, I don’t know how they expect anything to grow,” Dean started, looking away from his brother.

“Oh you are so not going to pretend that you weren’t just singing Savage Garden!” Sam put his hands on his hips, his face split with a grin.

“Anyway, it’s completely useless, whoever puts this in their yard will be killing the—”

Sam picked up a smallish bag of bone meal. They just needed it for a job. Who cared if it had toxic heavy metals or whatever else in it? He grabbed Dean by the collar of his jacket and dragged him towards the cash register. Sam picked up a copy of The Economist as they waited in line, Dean cracked the gum he was chewing and glanced at a Heidi Klum ad spread on the cover of InStyle. Sam turned the page to an article on Toyota and the electric car and it caught Dean’s attention. He rested his chin on Sam’s shoulder to look down at it, he had to stand on the balls of his feet to do it. Sam’s hair smelled good, sweet but not cloying. He was using that green Garnier Fructis stuff again—“Fruit Cactus” Dean called it.

Their stuff finally started rolling down the conveyor belt.

“You boys are darling,” the cashier said as Dean swiped a credit card in Sam Raimi’s name down the strip. Sam thought he was going through a zombie movie phase. Dean looked up and smiled. He was always one for compliments.

Sam put the magazine back in its little rack.

“How long have you been together?” she asked as she handed Dean a receipt to sign. They both sighed. Shoulda seen that coming. Sam walked out of the store humming Savage Garden, and Dean whapped him hard on the shoulder.

“Don’t, that’s totally what makes people think we’re gay, dude.” He unlocked the trunk and dumped their bags inside.

Sam shot Dean a dry look. “Savage Garden? Dean, people have thought we were a couple since I was fifteen, independent of the powers of pop bands.”

“Not my fault you act all faggy,” Dean replied offhand as he climbed into the driver’s side.

Sam rolled his eyes. “Dean, I know you have.”

“Have what?” Dean asked as he stepped on the accelerator and peeled out of the parking lot.

Sam shook his head and ran a hand through his hair. “Slept with guys.”

Dean’s knuckles tightened on the wheel, but he didn’t deny it. “So have you.”

“Yeah, Dean,” Sam replied. “So why does it matter if people think you’re gay?”

“It’s just—it’s just—you’re my brother!” Dean burst out.

Sam looked down at his hands. Yeah, he knew that. It didn’t stop him from dreaming of Dean entwined with roses, expression otherworldly, and palms open in offering.

*

Sam nearly had his head cut off by a Sluagh in the decrepit house of a struggling family in South Dakota. The youngest daughter was dying slowly, and the Atwaters couldn’t afford her medicine. The Sluagh had tried repeatedly to take her soul to join the ranks of the undead, and it was putting up a worthy fight against the two Winchester boys.

Sam was distracted, it felt like his scaphoid was broken—his fingers didn’t have the strength to tighten on the trigger of his gun. That’s when the Sluagh attacked again. Sam had only just hurled himself out of the way when the branch of a cedar tree struck through the roof and speared the phantasm through the chest. He died and it was done with. Sam turned to Dean to find him collapsed and pale on the ground, his breathing harsh and his eyes glassy.

He’d used too much controlling that tree, he was dimly aware of lying on the floor in an empty house, Sam talking to him. But it felt like he’d pushed past the plane of his own consciousness, and was slowly merging with the Earth. He felt himself in the blades of grass, in the manicured azaleas that lined the streets. The water that rushed up the Douglas firs was his blood. The xylem and phloem pumped the beat of his heart. He was everywhere, thousands of places at once, and he was losing himself fast.

Sam was shouting now, grip on his shoulders painful. Dean was too far away and he didn’t want to come back. Sam could go on without him. But then he was being jolted back into his body, Sam’s mouth on his and his hand buried in Dean’s hair.

Dean half-rose out of Sam’s lap, pursuing the kiss. He didn’t know what he was doing really, he was beyond most coherent thought. He reached up with his hand, running it across Sam’s chest. No wound, no blood, only warm uninjured flesh beneath the cloth.
He imagined peeling Sam’s clothes off, inspecting him for injuries with strong capable hands, licking a line along Sam’s collarbone, and absorbing the clean hewn grace of his brother’s body.

Sam moaned into his mouth, and then pulled back. “Welcome to the world of the living, Sleeping Beauty.”

“Fuck no, you are not Prince Phillip!”

*

It didn’t happen again, they didn’t even discuss it, although that wasn’t their way. Sam didn’t appear to angst on it at all, nor did he seem in the least likely to initiate anything, but Sam touched him more often. A hand on his wrist to still him when a word would have sufficed. Dean could’ve lied and said he didn’t like it, done his whole ‘get off me’ routine. But Sam probably would’ve laughed his ass off, and then pointed out the way Dean was leaning against him, the way his knee was brushing his, so he didn’t bother.

Even if more people thought they were gay as a result. Way more people. Like everybody.

They were in a tiny little Huck Finn’s diner in Chicago at four in the morning, and Dean was eating really good chocolate-chip pancakes.

“Sam, hey!” a voice cried from behind their booth, Sam turned around in his seat and Dean tried not to let his stomach twist at the sight of a small dark girl with short hair and a smile to rival Sam’s own. Sam got to his feet when he saw her and dragged her in close for a hug.

“I’m graduating soon, Sam,” she told him when they pulled apart. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

Dean coughed into his fist. Sam turned and looked at him, his eyes twinkling. “Dean, this is Kira, I mentored her when she was a freshman.”

“Nice to meet you, oh my god, you guys are really adorable together,” Kira shook his hand. “I noticed you when I walked in the door, and I just thought to myself ‘those two are perfect for each other.’”

Dean blushed and muttered a curse under his breath. Even the people who knew Sam in a hetero relationship thought he was gay. Sam reached up and scratched the back of his neck, slightly embarrassed. Dean shoved a chocolaty piece of pancake in his mouth and waited to see Sam correct her.

Sam didn’t.

“Well, I got to get back to my family, we just flew in from Guadalajara and we’re all dead, so were getting some sustenance and then crashing. Just thought I’d come say hi.” She hugged Sam again, eyes a little worshipful.

“Bye, Kira.” Sam waved, already going to sit back down.

She smiled again. “Bye, Sam! And nice to meet you, Dean. You be good to him now, he deserves it!”

Then she was off.

“She didn’t look dead,” Dean said and went back to his pancakes, his freckles standing out underneath his blush. Sam watched as his brother squirted lemon juice furiously on his breakfast. Dean would never admit it, but he was eating more and more plant products.

“What?” Sam asked, going back to his own fruit salad and omelet.

“She said they were all dead, but that girl looked like she had enough energy to power a village.”

Sam sighed and chuckled, eyes far away as he thought back. “Believe me, I know.”

They ate in silence and then left. Kira waved again on their way out. Sam was quiet, probably going all nostalgic on Dean. He probably could’ve played “The Razor’s Edge” on the tape deck and Sam would’ve only sat and stared rather than attempt to smother himself like he usually did. Dean felt merciful.

They went into Hyde Park later in the day, checking out a lead and they stopped at a park just adjacent to Lakeshore Drive. It had been Earth day only a few weeks before, and bunch of young saplings stood planted along the edge, no doubt by little kids and their enthusiastic parents.

“Do you want to go back?” Dean asked.

Sam took a deep breath and didn’t bother to ask what Dean meant. “Sometimes, life was easier then, and I can’t deny that.”

Dean looked down at the grass, the heat hadn’t set in yet, and it was still dewy. He could feel Sam watching him.

“But mostly no, I want my degree, because I worked so hard for it, but—”

Dean swallowed. “Then you should do it, go back.”

“I can’t, I can’t go back anymore,” Sam said softly, voice slightly wistful, but nevertheless strong. “But I have enough credits to graduate, and I’m almost finished with my senior thesis.”

Dean’s head snapped up. “What?”

Sam smiled and shrugged. “I started writing it when we met up with Dad and I—I stopped for awhile when he—”

“But that’s months, Sam, I thought when we found him you were gonna be done with hunting and it was only him—you know, that changed your mind.”

Sam looked sheepish for a moment, like he was trying to best explain himself but couldn’t think of the words. He looked at Dean in silence for a moment that seemed to go on forever, and then bent down in front of the whip-thin stripling trees.

“Apple trees,” Dean told him without being asked.

Sam pulled his knife out and popped the blade out with a soft snick. Dean watched as he nicked off the bark of one side of branch revealing the pale green inside, he did the same for the tree next to it and then carefully braided the flexible branches together.

He gestured at his handiwork like that explained anything as he got to his feet and dusted off his pant legs, but Dean understood, they were pretty tangled together, and the knots were gradually becoming more fancy and more complicated.

Dean could feel his power being sucked out of him and the two saplings were growing and straining upwards towards the sun. His breath rushed out in a whoosh, and the next thing he knew Sam was shouting in surprise and he was staring up at two apple trees from the ground. He smiled, even as he could feel his pulse beat a painful staccato rhythm in his skull. Anybody would swear the two trees were at least a hundred years old if they bothered to count the rings. Two branches formed a bridge between them.

“Whoa, did not mean for that to happen,” he coughed and got to his feet, only to trip into his brother. Sam steadied him, and they stood silent for a long moment in the presence of the trees and the cars whizzing by on Lakeshore.

*

Sam really, really wanted something to happen. However, he wasn’t sure if Dean meant for this to be a lifelong “I shall forever pine over you from afar” type of deal or if he actually had a plan of action, and was waiting for the right moment.

Well, Dean was still flirting with girls in bars, still lining up shots, still going on as if nothing had changed. So maybe it was just nothing, and Sam had read everything between them wrong. But Sam knew his brother, and unless Dean was sending out signals to fuck with him, he meant something was going on.

A job took them through the woods in Rome, Maine, out on Blueberry Hill, and Dean had cracked at least a half a dozen dirty jokes before they’d walked more than forty feet. The blueberries were just ripe, and Dean kept popping them into his mouth. The moon was out and shining out on the lakes below, Long Pond on one side, Great Pond on the other, and the wind was blowing ever so gently.

They sat out on a large flat plane of rock, waiting for anything to show up, but after two hours had gone by and nothing had happened even Sam was beginning to get impatient.

“Think maybe this time it really all was a rumor?” Dean said, lying back on the rock and looking up at the sky. There was almost no light pollution, and the night was full to bursting with little pinpricks of light.

“Yup,” Sam replied, resting his elbows on bent knees. Dean pushed himself into a sitting position and Sam looked over at him.

“Nothing scary about this place,” Dean whispered and then kissed him, tongue wickedly tracing Sam’s lower lip. They made out for long slow minutes under the moon, with the crickets buzzing and the whispering branches of the trees, Sam cradled between Dean’s thighs and Dean’s hands buried in his hair.

He learned everything that he knew so well by sight again by touch alone, watched as Dean’s eyes fell shut and his hips rose off the cool stone beneath them to meet Sam’s own. Dean practically clawed the shirt off his back, going on about needing to see and feel Sam against him. It was his brother, and he was shy, suddenly. He had to close his eyes against the way Dean drank him in, blushing ever hotter.

Dean chuckled, smooth as brandy over ice, and told him to stop hiding, drawing Sam into the warmth of his touch. His nails and callused fingers marked Sam everywhere, slow sweeps over the ridge of his collarbone, and scrapes over his shoulder blades. Dean’s mouth followed the path his hands mapped out, and gradually more and more clothing was shed.

Sam pushed careful fingers inside his brother, aided by the tube of lube Dean had thrust upon him, seemingly embarrassed for the first time. A plan of action indeed. Sam’s shirt was under Dean’s hips, the rest of their clothing discarded at the side of the rock, and he realized that they were visible to anybody who thought to come looking, but couldn’t bring himself to stop. Dean arched under his ministrations, lips bitten bloody trying to keep all the sounds he wanted to make inside.

“There’s no one to hear you, but me,” Sam told him as he pushed against Dean’s prostate, but Dean thrashed his head, fingers scraping ineffectually over the rock.

When Sam finally pushed inside, he thought he would die from it. Dean’s thighs clamped around him and his arms tightened around Sam’s middle like he’d never let go. Sam could see every change on Dean’s face through the light of the moon, everything that made his mouth open in a soundless scream, everything that made his shoulders arch up off the ground, everything that made Dean’s eyelashes flutter. He wondered what Dean saw, if everything on his face was as clear to his brother as Dean’s was to him.

It was only after he came, when he could finally tear his eyes away from Dean’s parted lips and half-lidded eyes, that he saw the deep red roses blooming all over the rock, roots pushing out through newly created fissures in the mountainside.

Dean breathed deep, eyes still closed and still coming back to himself. Sam rolled off of him, but couldn’t bring himself to cut off all contact with his brother, and he traced gentle fingers over the lines of Dean’s muscles.

Dean finally opened his eyes and turned his head looking at the roses that had creeped up over the rock, nearly blanketing it in deep bloody blooms.

“Hey cool, I wonder if I could make a black one.”

Sam snorted and buried his head in Dean’s shoulder as he laughed.

*

Eventually it was Dean who insisted they put down roots of their own. Sam had received his BA a long time ago, but he’d relegated law school to some dusty corner of his mind. It didn’t hold much appeal anymore. He’d begun to write everything down, logs of all that happened, spinning them into tales that were darkly satirical and dotted all over with Dean’s humor. The first time he got published he’d made Dean open the letter, and then told him to stop lying about the amount written on the check.

Dean nearly hit him with a book to shut him up.

Sam thought Dean should start up a nursery when they finally settled in Santa Cruz, California. He got a job at a specialty auto-shop for classic cars. They lived in a large white clapboard house with a widow’s walk a ways out from the downtown and the other residential areas, because they were the only people willing to take a place so obviously haunted.

Even after people stopped complaining of strange events happening near the house, they rarely came to visit. Dean and Sam liked it that way. There was often weird enough stuff going on that they didn’t want people to see, stuff that couldn’t be explained by that whole “oh you know, modern landscaping” line. Sam designed Dean a greenhouse, because Dean would never do it himself. Dean didn’t garden, which totally explained why he spent all his time elbows deep in flower beds. Like the round tower library on the third floor was Sam’s, it became Dean’s space. Well that and the garage, which Sam wasn’t allowed to enter on pain of death.

When Bobby stopped by for a visit he nearly face planted at the tall oaks ringing the house, branches grafted together in an unbroken circle. He found many other such protections laid in and around the house, but he did wonder as he watched Dean commune with a tree, whether some of it was for aesthetic purposes as well. He snorted with Sam over it, but feigned severity when Dean threatened to rearrange his face.

They lived quietly at the house, when they weren’t biting each other’s heads off and then making up with marathon sex, but they rarely tied themselves down to the old Victorian. Hunting may not have always been their wish or their duty, but it was their calling, and they didn’t ignore it. They never stopped being brothers, but they did start being lovers. Dean stopped getting upset at hotels when they made a snap judgment, but only after Sam threatened to withhold sex if Dean was unable to admit what they were.

Dean never stopped experimenting with the herbs and Sam stopped trying to pretend disapproval when Dean started growing marijuana in their own backyard.

*

And it is finished