Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/114838.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Supernatural
  Relationship:
      Sam/Dean
  Additional Tags:
      Wincest_-_Freeform, mentions_of_sexual_abuse, Mentions_of_Violence
  Stats:
      Published: 2010-09-15 Words: 1843
****** I'm in the Basement, You're in the Sky ******
by grammarglamour
Summary
     Something happened when Dean was younger, something even his father
     could not protect him from.
Dean didn't really remember anything. He always wondered: was it his mind,
forgetting and repressing? Or was he just too young? It came to him in flashes
throughout his adolescence: rough hands, grabbing him by the arms and shoving
him against a wall. The feel of his shirt being yanked and torn. Blood dripping
from his nose and tears from his eyes as he lay in a heap on the filthy floor
of a warehouse. The smell of engine grease.
Dad found him like that. Silent and stone-faced, he reminded Dean of a statue.
A statue that overlooked a graveyard, the observer of so much grief. He
gathered Dean up, took him back to whatever claptrap motel was their home at
the time, and got him in the shower. His eyes hardened and he looked at Dean
like he was a house damaged by a poltergeist, looked at the bruises and
assessed the damage, but carefully avoided Dean's eyes. Dean remembered that
part, but those hours when he was gone – nothing. In his mind it was black ink,
sewage, billowing black smoke like a pile of tires being burned. Through the
haze, the muck, he could see flashes. But ultimately, all he knew was that
something bad had happened. Something broke him that day, in those hours he
couldn't remember. Like a black hole, right there in his mind.
They stayed there for a week longer than they needed to, and it took years for
Dean to put two and two together and figure out why. One night, Dad went out
with nothing for a weapon but a handgun. His face was set so hard it looked
ready to crack. Dean had lain in bed with Sam and followed his father's every
move with his eyes. He nodded at Dean when he left.
It was still dark when he returned, a spatter of blood on his shirt. Dean awoke
when he heard the door and sat up, looking at Dad questioningly. His only
response was a rough hand on Dean's face and a murmur: "You're safe now."
He asked Dad about it more than a decade later. Wanted to know if he had said
anything that day when he found him, told him anything. Wanted to know where he
went that night a week later. Dad just said no in that gruff voice that let
Dean know the conversation was over and the next question out of his mouth had
better be about the hunt.
***
Sam didn't really remember anything. Just that one day, Dean went out for a
walk and Dad carried him back bloodied. Before the walk, Dean was almost happy.
Funny. Silly. He did anything he could to make Sam laugh when Sam felt sad, up
to and including spoons on his nose and funny faces. After the walk, he was mad
at everything. He took Sam's black and brown crayons and filled notebooks with
scribbles.
He tried to ask Dean, in the weeks after his walk, what had happened. Where he
went. Why he was mad. He tried to make his brother laugh, but Sam was always a
serious child. Not funny, like his brother. He tried to hug Dean, but Dean
shoved him back so hard that he fell onto the dresser and broke a lamp. They
cleaned it up, and when questioned, Sam just said he did it and he was sorry.
Dean sat in the corner and curled into a chair, gnawing at his thumbnail.
That was about the time when Sam began to resent having to share a bed with
Dean when they were on the road. Dean kept wetting the bed, and back then, all
Sam knew was that it was gross to wake up in the middle of the night soaked in
someone else's pee. After that, he asked Dad for a cot, but after one night and
the look of anguish on Dean's face, he didn't do it again.
***
What hurt the most was Sammy. Dean knew he had to push Sam away because he felt
like the blackness inside him would swallow his brother and Sam was so
innocent. Not dirty like Dean. But when Sam asked for a cot, Dean realized: he
needed his brother, needed his innocence. Maybe, he thought, instead of making
Sam dirty, Sam could make Dean pure again.
He couldn't. Dean tried to act like Sam, tried to be sensitive and sweet like
he was. Even, for one memorable week, tried to be a good student and read and
study. But nothing could take away the nagging darkness inside him that never
let him forget for one second that he was tainted.
After that – at age 11 – he threw himself into "work". He would clean Dad's
guns, sharpen the knives. Dad never let him go out on hunts, but he would help
Dean practice shooting. They were silent as they practiced.
***
A few years later, Sam turned twelve and the world of hormones opened before
him like an abyss. All of a sudden, he was tall and gangly with too much limb
for his adolescent brain to control. Overnight, his dick started to have a life
of its own: springing to attention while he stood in the lunch line at school,
twitching and erupting as he slept.
He had no idea what to do, so he talked to Dean about it. Dean smiled knowingly
– he was sixteen and still in the throes of a hormonal tsunami, but he'd been
treading the water for four years. Had Sam had another brother, he would have
gotten a purloined Playboy matte with fingerprints, and a jar of Vaseline. But
his brother was Dean.
"I'll show you what to do," Dean said, smiling like a jackal.
He ushered Sam into the bathroom and pushed him against the wall – not roughly
– and undid his jeans. Sam had a maelstrom of emotions swirling inside him. It
felt good and he was already hard, but it was Dean doing this to him, Dean his
brother. Sam knew from school – not what he was taught, but what he heard –
that guys were supposed to keep their hands off you at all costs unless they
were punching you. Same for relatives.
"Dean, dude –" Sam began, but then Dean spit into his hand and wrapped it
around his cock and oh god that was what it was supposed to feel like. Sam
thumped his head back on the wall and let it happen because more than feeling
wrong, it felt good.
When it was done, Dean turned around and washed his hands, the water turned to
hot and steam rising around his face. He kept his hands under the spray for an
eternity. Sam tucked his dick back into his jeans and stood awkwardly, frozen,
as his brother washed his hands over and over, all the while breathing like an
angry bull.
When he turned around, his cheeks were wet and Sam knew it wasn't from the
steam rising out of the sink.
"I shouldn't have done that, Sammy," he said, voice dangerously low.
Sam didn't know what to say, because of course he was right. He shouldn't have.
But it had still felt good, right or wrong, and Dean was still his brother and
more of his protector than even their dad could be.
He went over to him and curled his too-long fingers around Dean's hand. "Hey,
don't say that. I liked it. It felt good. It's okay." Lying – another
Winchester family specialty.
Dean turned, wresting his hand from Sam's, and grasped his face. He kissed Sam
ferociously, teeth gnawing at his soft lips and biting at his tongue. Tears
still skated down Dean's face, but he didn't make a sound. He broke the kiss
and rushed out of the room, leaving Sam standing at the sink with tiny ruby
droplets of blood on his cracked lips.
The door slammed in the other room and Sam didn't see Dean until late that
night. He climbed into Sam's bed and clung to him, shivering. He brought the
smell of cigarettes and dew with him and he felt as cold as he smelled.
* * *
Dean knew from then on that the darkness in him was so impenetrable that Sam's
light would never outshine it. It could only spread, never recede. He became
something of an actor, playing the part of a well-adjusted, hot-blooded
American man. He joked at inappropriate times and flirted with every woman he
came across. But there was only one person for him. In some warped way, he felt
like he was protecting Sam. Keeping him focused on him so he wouldn't stray,
wouldn't get hurt like Dean had.
After that time in the bathroom, they stole moments more often. Dean hated
himself more every time it happened, and yet it continued. He couldn't stop it
or himself any more than he could stop the snow in winter.
"We could stop," he said one night. They lay back on the bed, spent, when Dad
was out hunting a Chupacabra with friends.
"No we couldn't," Sam said. Dean hated the wisdom of it.
"Would you want to?"
Sam was silent. He moved his leg up and down, stroking Dean's leg with his own.
"No," he said after a long while, voice strong and sure.
Dean thought Good, but he didn't say it, just flung a hand across Sam's chest
and went to sleep.
***
Sam almost didn't leave because of Dean. He loved his brother, and he accepted
what they did because he knew it was their way of saving each other. Dean
protected him physically, but Sam knew that he protected Dean in an intangible
but equally important way. It never occurred to Sam that by drawing him into
that vicious cycle, Dean was doing anything but "protecting" him. For all his
mental aptitude, Sam had a blind spot when it came to Dean.
If Dean had tried it when Sam was older, he never would have accepted it. Would
have fought. But he had been so young and idolized his brother so much that it
had been like an honor. By the time he was old enough to realize how wrong it
was, it was too late. He was bound to Dean as surely as if they'd both had
ropes around their waists.
The night before he left, he asked Dean, "What happened to you?" He didn't have
to elaborate; Dean knew.
"I don't know."
"You do," Sam pressed, accusations burning in his throat.
"I really don't. You're the smart one – you figure it out."
"What did Dad do to him?"
That earned Sam a slam against the wall. "Whoever he was, whatever he did, he
was an evil son-of-a-bitch. And Dad did what he does to anything evil – he
killed it," Dean whispered, voice hoarse and spit misting Sam's face.
Sam nodded and disentangled himself. "I love you, Dean," he said, laying a
gentle hand on Dean's face. "Get help."
Those were the last words he uttered to his brother for four years.
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