Title: But If The Chance Came By
Author: modernsaints
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: R (language, mild sexual content)
Summary: A series of loosely connected anecdotes tracing the path of Sam and Dean's relationship, whatever it may happen to be. Featuring: NYU art students! Tequila! Sam secretly kind of likes lesbian chick music!
Notes: Set somewhere in S2, though no real spoilers. Title from "Iowa (Traveling III)" by Dar Williams. 3,800 words.


one.

They hate big-city jobs, hate the streetlights that illuminate them, the quick way people walk in the streets, women's heels clicking clicking against concrete like a thousand guns being cocked. New York is worst. Art students take photos of Sam with his head bent, silhouetted against trees; their waitress has a shaved head and gives Dean this look like she's going to spit into his hash browns. Dean tilts his chin up at her like I fucking dare you.

"Fuckin' bitch," Dean mutters, and then, digging through a pocket, "What if I spit on her tip? That poetic justice crap. You know."

"Just because she won't flirt with you?" Sam picks at a mealy wheatgerm pancake, thinking that it is probably more germ than wheat. He goes for the coffee instead. He was trying to let it cool just enough to not burn his tongue, but it's cooled too far, and it tastes bitter in the back of his mouth.

Dean snorts and takes a large, messy bite of French toast. There's powdered sugar on it, and it puffs out in a cloud, catching on the stubble from where he forgot to shave. Sam resists the urge to lick his fingertip and wipe it off. "Not really my type, Sammy."

"Yeah?"

If Sam leans back in his chair, he can just catch a glimpse inside the kitchen. Their waitress is slapping scoops of butter onto pancakes, slender arm working like a machine, and he hears a few choice words in Spanish as a busboy slams into her with an unwieldy tub of dishes. Then the busboy has butter all down his front, and the girl is smirking; Sam leans forward again, shaking his head with silent laughter, and tells Dean, "She's too much woman for you, anyway."

Dean makes a low noise - somewhere between a grunt and a sigh - and then nods his head towards a blonde walking in the doorway. "Now that's a woman. Sam, I think this might be the real problem, here - it's not that you can't get any, it's that you're going for the wrong team. If you know what I mean," and he punctuates it with one eyebrow cocked up a bit, that same goddamn smirk as always.

The blonde strolls through the place on four-inch heels, eyes scanning the room, and suddenly darts into the back corner. Sam watches her wiggle into a tiny booth across from a brunette and plant a kiss on the corner of the girl's mouth. He thinks he should say something, maybe, and mock Dean into the next three towns, but then the brunette tangles her fingers in the blonde's and the moment is so private and beautiful that he cannot say anything. The blonde's haircut is familiar (and Sam thinks, how many times did I put my own hands in your hair and comb it, sloppy, so that it tangled all over again.) He shakes his head and turns back to his mess of a plate of pancakes.


two.

They are in Central Park and one of the goddamn art students takes a goddamn photo of Sam, like he's a statue or some shit. Sam is sitting on the edge of a fountain, back hunched, focused on the laptop; Dean sits next to him and watches the girl frame the photo with her hands, measuring, cutting the laptop out. Posing Sam in her mind. Making him look all depressed and meaningful when really he's just flipping through news articles.

The girl manages to get a few shots in before Dean bounces to his feet and strolls towards her, hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket, all easy grin and relaxed shoulders. "Hey, there," he calls out. The girl's mouth opens a little. She's short and dark-haired, eyeliner messy in raccoon circles, making her eye sockets look sunken, her face thin and bony.

"Um. Hey."

"Look," he says, stopping just half an inch too close. "You wanna tell me what's going on?" And leans forward and Jesus, wow, he's like a fucking foot taller than she is. He can feel her heart pounding in her chest. He tries not to pick up girls in the middle of hunts, sometimes, because it gets like this: hears a girl's breath fluttery and slightly scared, and he loves it, wants to back her up into a wall with one leg shoved between hers, lifting her up until her face is right next to his. He rocks back a little. Hands still in his pockets.

"I'm sorry," she says, tripping over the syllables, and then faster - "I'm just, see, I'm at Tisch, at NYU, right, and my studio class this semester is a bitch and I totally let this project slide and I need, um, like a hundred thousand prints by like last Tuesday, and so I'm just taking like as many pictures as I can, right, so - please don't mind, I promise this is just for class, not, like, exhibition. Or anything."

Dean lets out a slow whistle, trying to keep the words he says neutral. They aren't. "Calm down," he tells her, softening the words with a hand on her shoulder. He finds himself slouching a little to get closer to her height. Jesus, Dean, you're in the middle of a job - back it off. "You're gonna be okay. So, uh, what's your project... about?" If Sam catches me fucking talking to an art chick, I swear to fucking Christ.

She smiles up at him, all sugar and hopefulness, and says, "Um, thank you so much - " and she gestures with the hand holding the camera, nearly smacking it into his arm. "I. My focus right now is, um, portraits, and specifically couples - like, I think that adds a whole new dimension. Like. You have to completely alter the way you frame it to fit both people - "

Dean feels his eyes pop out, comically, like a cartoon character. He tugs his arm away. Art Chick keeps talking, oblivious: " - and, like, how their relationship is - so, hey, are you at Tisch? I bet you are, where have you been hiding all this time - up in the dance studio, I bet - " and her eyes flicker over the shape of his torso, the length of his legs. For a moment, he thinks, that look is pretty fuckin' weird from the other end.

Then he mumbles out a farewell and turns on his heel, ambling as fast as he can, trying to maintain both I am so badass and I am motoring my ass the hell away from you, Art Chick. With a splash of oh jesus oh jesus what. No.

Fucking no, seriously.

When he sits back down on the fountain, Sam doesn't look up from the screen. "She shot you down?"

Dean makes a noncommittal noise. He wants to shove his head in the water and try to clean out his head. It's bad enough when just about, like, every fucking motel clerk on the planet thinks he's a flamer. Worse when they (get close to the truth) drag Sam into it. What the fuck, world.

"Let's go to North Dakota or some shit. I'm sick of cities."

"You and me both," Sam says, and pulls the hood of his jacket over his head.


three.

Sam falls asleep through half of Illinois. He wakes up an hour past the city and says, "Man, we are not nearly as far as we should be." Dean kind of shifts his eyes back and forth a little. Sam thinks about Dean's city thing, how much he hates even driving through them, slowing down to a crawl so that the Impala whines impatiently. He thinks, I bet you cut around the city instead of going through, and some muscle in his chest tightens. "Whatever. You hungry?"

They eat in a Denny's just off the highway. Sam gets some drink with strawberries and mangos and a really ridiculous name. Dean asks the waitress if she wants to find him a couple beers, and she laughs and flips her hair over her shoulder and sashays back to the kitchen. She is about fifty pounds overweight, hair tightly braided along her scalp. "Dude," Sam says, picking at a napkin. "Pity flirting?"

"Maybe I like a girl with meat on her bones." Dean does this weird thing where he kind of licks his lips, growling at the same time, and Sam is torn between laughter and nearly choking on a sip of Fruit-acular Something Or Other. "Island Fizz," Dean informs him later, "and also, you're kind of gay."

Sam bites back his instinctive retort: yeah, what tipped you off? Dean never meant it rudely. He is not a homophobe; when he was nineteen, Sam caught him with his hand shoved down some guy's pants in Savannah. But as Dean's put it so eloquently: "There's dudes that fuck other dudes, and then there's gay guys."

A thousand things that keep them apart - the visions and Jess and Dean's never-had-no-one-ever thing and drinking or not drinking and trusted-Dad versus never-called-Dad - and it makes him kind of sad, really. The one that hurts most, sometimes, is the most normal one. You're a big macho asshole who sometimes fucks other guys. And I'm a college-boy homo. It's a reasonable fight; it's an argument that's played out in normal families. The brother who has to be different. Who wears his hair too long and listens to shitty techno and talks about his feelings. It's normal as hell and it unnerves him, shakes him down to his bones every time it comes up, and he thinks, once again, I wish I could be a mindless clone of you and Dad. But I'm not.

He watches Dean gulp down black coffee. Stirs his own drink listlessly. He got it because he misses eating strawberries, feeding them to Jess, rolling them in sugar and feeling the grittiness on his teeth when he kissed her.

It doesn't taste a damn thing like strawberry.

He shoves his hair out of his eyes, and when Dean gets up to piss, Sam pours a heaping spoonful of sugar into his coffee. He doesn't stir it. The sugar sits as a gritty, granular heap at the bottom of the cup, and Sam runs his tongue over his teeth and imagines sugar, grinding into his mouth, rubbing his skin raw. He thinks about Jess: one in a million, he called her, and she laughed and kissed the tip of his nose. She didn't know how true it was. I have never loved another girl the way I loved you. You were my last chance for normal and now I'm doomed.

When Dean comes back, he drains his coffee down to the bottom, then spits half of it back into the cup. "Jesus that's nasty."

Sam runs his tongue back and forth over his teeth, feeling them too smooth, too painfully smooth.


four.

Sam is depressed all the time and it puts Dean on edge.

Except subtly, like this: Dean goes out to get coffee and he burns his tongue. When he comes back Sam is just looking out the window. The TV's on and the laptop's open next to him, and the whole thing is like movie scene that's just not right. Like someone replaced the actor with a dummy. Sam just leaning against the headboard. His eyes shadowy and when the door clicks open, he jumps a little and smiles and refocuses his eyes, but Dean's tongue hurts, and he doesn't drink the rest of his coffee because his mouth feels sour. That subtle.

They are eating breakfast and Sam gets up to piss, and Dean pours some holy water in his glass, just in case. The waitress gives him a dirty look. Dean thinks what a fucking wino I must look like and then he shrugs and gets out the other flask. Dean loves being drunk. Not sloppy-drunk, just buzzed and loose in his own skin, so that his bones aren't quite solid. When Sam comes back he smiles, and his mouth stretches just a little bit wider. Sam blurs a tiny bit. The curls of his hair merge with the light through the stained glass window, so that Sam is haloed, melting into the flowers. He drinks his water. He doesn't spit it out.

Fuck, Dean thinks, and depression is a hell of a lot harder to fix than demons. He wants to let Sam punch him in the stomach until Sam's exhausted, crying, finally fucking over it. You don't know how much I'd do for you. Which is maybe for the best. Which - no maybe about it - Sam is happier not knowing.

In a fit of guilt over it (what I'd do, Christ, Sammy) he tries to say, "Hey, remember Ellen's daughter - "

"Jo. Yeah."

"Think she was kinda into you, Sammy." Dean grins. An open suitcase lies at the bottom of the bed, and he kicks his feet against it, slamming it shut. "If we pass by there again..."

"Yeah, that's really sweet of you." Sam is facing away from him, running a towel back and forth over his head, his wet hair twisting into a mess of curls and knots. His voice is low and bitter. "That's what I really need. Another pretty, helpless blonde chick." Dean kicks the suitcase so hard it crashes to the floor, popping open again, clattering and spilling clothes and toiletries in a heap. Even he isn't sure whether it's an accident.


five.

All the time. When they're driving and Dean starts drumming on the steering wheel with some terrible Metallica song and gets this really focused, intense look on his face like the world has narrowed down to the place just before his headlights and the rhythm of his fingertips. When Sam is falling asleep and his head tips to the side and he suddenly catches the scent of leather and smoke and salt. When Dean's holding a gun. Especially when Dean is holding a gun and he extends his arm, the whole taut length of it, and Sam watches his skin shift in the moonlight.

All the time. When I was seventeen. When I wrote my application essay for Stanford and closed it the second you walked into my room, and you thought I'd been looking at porn.

Sometimes Sam wakes up in the middle of the night and he goes out to the car and sits in the passenger seat, listening to mix tapes he made, just thinking. He turns his hands over and over in his lap. He breathes the scent of the Impala. All the time I love you. He loved Jess because she was different: he could put his hands on her shoulders and feel her tiny, engulfed by him, pick her up and hold her against a wall and rock his hips gentle into hers so that she lay her head on his shoulder and nearly cried. He liked her hair. He told her to never cut it, to grow it out so she could be Rapunzel for next year's Halloween party. A list of ways she was different. Not what he'd spent years daydreaming about, face flushed red with shame. Different.

There's a mix tape she made him. He keeps it shoved in a hidden pocket in his bag. He doesn't listen to it very often - a lot of girls with acoustic guitars, an awful lot of lesbians. Sometimes when it's too much, though, and the idea of a strip of skin along Dean's back, criscrossed with scar tissue, is enough to make him sick with want. Sometimes. He lies down in the backseat and listens to this woman sing about hills and driveways.

It never works, and he gets himself off silent, biting his own mouth until he bleeds and thinks about old wounds crossing Dean's knuckles, about tasting the skin of Dean's fingers. One hand shoved down his jeans, the other clenched on itself so tightly that the next morning, he finds crescent marks in his palm. He is careful not to make a mess on the Impala's upholstery.

He sleeps better that night, and for a couple weeks, even, until he can nearly believe it's gone for good. Until it isn't.


six.

Some asshole in Fort Lauderdale makes a motherfucking golem and they spend a week trying to get close enough to the damn thing to deactivate it.

It only takes an hour for Dean to scare the kid senseless, though. Which is encouraging. He straightens his collar, smirking at Sam. "See," he says, "your puppy-dog crap is great, and all, but there's really just no substitute for - "

" - for messing with a sixteen-year-old?"

Sam rolls his eyes. He slams the door to the Impala, and Dean mutters, "Careful!" Sam shrugs. "This is a man's job, Sammy, you gotta remember that." And - because Dean has honed obnoxiousness down to an art - he gives Sam a slap on the shoulder, shaking him a bit. He is almost tempted to call him buddy but that might be pushing it. Sam purses his lips and stares out the window.

Twenty miles later, Dean gives into the urge. "Look," he says, "sorry if I insulted your manliness, or whatever." Sam makes a noncommittal noise. Dean bites his lip, doing the best he can to restrain a ridiculous belly laugh. "I mean," he manages, "I'm sure your dick is totally huge, really - "

"Please do not talk about my dick ever again." Sam nearly chokes on the words, face buried in his palms; Dean waits a couple beats before glancing over. Sure enough, Sam is shaking with silent laughter. Dean laughs too, and the road rolls away beneath them, and Dean thinks the world is pretty fucking fantastic. He slings his arm out the open window, feels the wind on his bare wrist and palm. Something zips through the back of his mind - man, if I could just pull over right now and - but he shoves it out and enjoys the wind, the sunshine, for what it is. Nothing more. He really couldn't ask for anything.


seven.

They go by the Gulf of Mexico. "Let's go to fuckin' Tijuana," Dean says, inspired; Sam shrugs and stares out the window. Tequila has gotten kind of played out.

They spend one night in a motel ten minutes from the beach. Sam can smell salt and brine; he tastes olives just thinking about it. "We could go to Mexico City," he says. The window's open. He leans out, forearms crossed on the sill. Dean is suddenly standing right behind him and it startles him, and he presses his hips in closer to the wall. Hiding. "Puerto Vallarta. Cancún. Guadalajara." He remembers all the blonde, tan girls he'd overheard talking in bars while he was in California. The names rolled off their tongue and made him think of swaying hips. He says them now, awkward, fumbling, and it strikes him again: Latin is more familiar than Spanish, what the fuck is wrong with me and he touches his forehead to his hands.

Dean's hand is warm and heavy on his shoulder. "José Cuervo. That's Spanish, right?" He chuckles, and Sam looks out into the evening and laughs, too.

"Okay," he says. "Yeah. That works for me."


eight.

Dean is so happy.

"Fuck, yeah," he says, and tries to pour himself another shot. It spills on his hand. He stares at it for a good twenty seconds, shrugs, salts it, and licks it off. His hand is sticky now. He coughs and repeats, "Fuck, what was I - yeah - anyway, Sammy, anyway - let's do it. Fuck. Yeah."

Sam's mouth is wet and shiny and his eyes are going in and out of focus like fish swimming. Dean snorts.

"Yeah," he finally says. "Okay. No."

"No? C'mon!" Dean attempts the pouring thing again. No dice.

"I don't - I mean - " Sam doesn't seem to move, except suddenly he's fumbling forward, across the space between the two beds, face shoved into the scratchy blankets next to Dean's knee. "Okay," he mutters. "That's why." One hand flails about in the air like a lost animal. Dean laughs so hard tears leak out of the corners of his eyes. There's a sticky spot on the nightstand. And the bottom of the bottle. And in the webbing between his fingers.

"C'mon," he says again, feeling his own laughter low and rough in his throat. Sam wobbles back to his knees. "I'm not gonna say please, Sammy, so - just - hey - "

Sam's hair is tangled up across his eyes. "No," he mumbles, clears his throat, nearly tips backwards, "I'm not goin' to fucking Ti - Tijuana - or buyin' you a fuckin' stripper - "

" - why not?"

Sam's eyelashes cast long, stretched-out shadows over his face, and Dean thinks oh shit, and then Sam's hand is wrapped tight around the back of his neck and Sam's pretty wet mouth is on his and the taste of salt is in both their mouths, bitter, and Dean licks his tongue out for more.


nine.

Sam has to press both fists to the mattress to keep himself upright. He doesn't want to - can't -

Dean shifts and moves his legs apart so that Sam can nudge himself closer. Twist his fingers into the sheets and move, crawling on his knees, and he doesn't even have to tilt his head up to reach Dean's. Maybe because he's tall. Maybe because Dean's got his head tipped down, shoulders hunched, eyes wrenched shut as if he can unsee what is before him, as if by not seeing, he will change the fact that he's holding Sam up by the collar of his shirt and biting his neck.

Maybe.


ten.

Both of them are too drunk to even try for belt buckles or zippers. Dean kind of regrets that because he knows, this is the last time, the only time.

"No," Sam whispers. Dean isn't sure whether he said anything aloud. Maybe. Maybe not. Sam repeats: "no," and then "hey, listen, I just - you're not blonde. Or a chick. Or helpless. So."

"It's still not - "

Sam shakes his head. "It's everything," he says, and then he is kissing Dean again, their mouths slipping past each other - too drunk to coordinate it quite right - but Dean can't. And he doesn't. And he tugs his mouth back to say one more time, because if he lets Sam again that'll be it, and then he sees Sam's eyes wet too, and he thinks. Fuck it.


eleven.

Dean's voice is so low and gravel-rough, and Sam always thought the right words from you, and I'd come, just hearing, just thinking. He didn't realize -

"Okay," Dean says, and Sam's entire mind comes apart.

Okay. Yes.