t h e . f i n e . p r i n t

The Fine Print
[by victoria p.]

Rating: adult

Summary: If Dean had read the fine print, this never would have happened.

Spoilers: for "All Hell Breaks Loose, part 1"

Notes: I would apologize for this, but it's all luzdeestrellas's fault. Except for any errors left after her beta. Those are all mine.

Word count: 3,455 words

Date: May 17, 2007

Dean doesn't look back as they climb the long dark stairs back up into the world. He isn't sure what's myth and what's truth, isn't even sure this place exists in the physical world, that he and Sam are actually climbing a staircase out of hell, but just in case, he's not going to fuck it all up by looking back and watching Sam disappear into a puff of smoke or a pillar of salt, or whatever the fuck happens to people who don't have the discipline to keep their eyes facing forward for however long it takes to march out of whatever this place actually is.

He spends some time--well, before he gets distracted wondering if there's such a thing as time in hell, and if there is, is it the same as time on earth or is there some kind of weird faster-than-light thing going on and when they get back, it'll be three hundred years in the future?--he spends some time trying to construct the place they're in, rock walls rising and curving outward like the ribs of some giant creature; rough, uneven stairs cut into black rock rising in a--yeah, in a spiral, he thinks, because, of course, hell would have a huge spiral staircase, like something out of KISS's stage show back in the '70s, and damn, Dean still thinks he was born twenty years too late, missed out on all the good shit when it was new and had to absorb it secondhand.

He starts humming "One" by Metallica, because he knows he's panicking, has been since the moment Sam collapsed in his arms, fear breaking over him in waves, and he's barely keeping his head above water. He lets his thoughts wander so he doesn't have to think about whether or not it's really Sam behind him, or if he's just been suckered by the devil like a rube in a blues song, and what he's going to do if that's the case.

He's been climbing for what feels like forever, but he's not winded. When he pauses, he can hear Sam behind him, soft breaths and muted shuffle of booted feet on stone. He hears Sam stumble, feels long fingers wrap around his ankle for a second, stumbles himself, and curses.

"I swear to God, Sam, if you tumble us back into the fiery pits of hell because you tripped over your own goddamn enormous feet, I will beat you to death with your own shoe."

There's a muffled sound that might be a laugh, or might be Sam choking to death on his own tongue. Dean won't turn around to look. He counts under his breath, and Sam's hand closes over his shoulder at five Mississippi.

Dean exhales in relief and starts climbing again, eager to get out.

Dean wakes up in the grass, the air cool and damp against his skin, and wonders if he dreamed the whole thing. He opens his eyes and sees Sam slumped next to him, bloodstain the size of Texas dark and sticky on his back.

Dean reaches out and pulls Sam close; he's lighter than he's been in years, easier to handle than the deadweight he'd been in Dean's arms earlier.

"Sam? Sammy?" He taps Sam's cheek lightly, ignoring the way the soft skin is stubble-free (Sam's always been baby-faced, didn't start shaving regularly until he was seventeen, and didn't really need to then, either), but Sam doesn't wake up. Dean can't even tell if he's breathing through all his freaking shirts, so he paws through the layers of clothing with shaking hands, thinking, breathe, dammit, breathe, and ignoring the soft new curves that have appeared beneath, too intent right now on making sure Sam's alive to worry about any freaky changes to his body. He rests his hand over Sam's heart, which beats steadily under his palm, and exhales in relief.

"Come on, Sam," he says, as close to praying as he ever gets, and Sam's eyes flutter open.

"Dean? What?" It sounds like Sam, well, like Sam at thirteen, before his voice changed, maybe. "Is this heaven?"

Dean laughs, because his eyes are stinging again. He'll say it's just the lingering scent of sulfur, nothing more, if Sam points it out. It's not like Sam's eyes aren't a little watery, too. "Dork. No, it's Kansas."

Sam grabs Dean's face, hands warm against his skin, and laughs in response, wild and amazed. "You're not dead."

"Nobody's dead, Sammy." Well, nobody who matters, anyway, though he does feel kind of bad that Andy bought it. Andy was cool. Instead of thinking about that, though, he pulls Sam into his arms, runs his hands up under his shirt to feel the smooth, unscarred skin of his back, then around front, fingers brushing the undersides of small, high breasts he really wants to cup, but that would be weird, wouldn't it? Weirder. He stops for a second, stunned, trying to decide whether it's weirder that Sam has breasts or that he wants to touch them, then pushes those thoughts away (because how can it be weird to want to touch breasts? Especially if they're Sam's?) and slides his hands down to rest on Sam's waist, spanning the soft flare of his hips like they belong there, though Sam's hips have never done that before.

Sam pulls back, as if he's suddenly done the inventory and come up with the same conclusion. His eyes go wide, and Dean notices that there's a delicate curl to his lashes that wasn't there before.

"Uh, Dean, not to be ungrateful, but I think there's been a mistake." His hands--long fingers ending in short, blunt nails with dirt underneath--clutch at Dean's shirt, fear in his voice sparking the same in Dean's blood, and he thinks, No, no, no, but tries to keep it out of his voice when he answers.

"Did the heat down there shrink you or something?" Dean knows he's panicking, that's why he's remembering the first time he'd done the laundry and shrunk all of Dad's jeans. Man, had Dad been pissed about that. He'd had extra PT for weeks. He gets up off the ground, wiping his dusty, bloody hands on his jeans, and then pulls Sam up with him. For the first time since Sam was sixteen and hit his never-ending growth spurt, Dean is taller than he is. "You're missing a couple inches."

"That's not all I'm missing, Dean." Sam's voice rises hysterically, one hand clutching at his crotch, and Dean can't ignore the changes in Sam anymore.

"Dude," he says, and his voice is maybe a little high-pitched, but nothing like the sounds Sam's making, "you're a girl."

"No shit, Sherlock. What the hell did you do?"

Dean scrubs a hand across his face, scratches the back of his head. "They wanted me to stop killing everything in sight, so they offered you back to me. I agreed. No more storming the gates of hell and slaughtering its minions. And then this demon led me to the stairs and told me that when we got to the top, we'd be free of hell. I didn't exactly stop to read the fine print, Sammy. I said yes and shagged ass out of there."

"And it didn't occur to you to maybe check and see that I was, you know, me?"

"Are you listening to yourself, Sammy? You are you. You're just you in different packaging." Sam shakes his head in disgust, and Dean feels guilty all over again. If he hadn't distracted Sam, if he'd gotten there quicker, Sam wouldn't have--his mind shies away from the word, jumps tracks. "Hey, I know the story as well as you do. There's no way I was turning around to check, and letting you disappear into a puff of smoke or a pillar of salt or whatever. Maybe you should have said something. It's not like we weren't climbing for-freakin'-ever."

"Climbing? What?"

"The stairs? That looked like something out of a KISS show? You practically groped me." Sam shakes his head again, still not cluing in. "If it wasn't you--Oh my God, I've been groped by demons." Again. He hopes they were hot chick demons, at least.

"As traumatic as that must have been for you, Dean," and there's the classic Sammy bitchface and tone, and man, as a girl it's even worse, "let's get back to the problem at hand, which is that I rose from the dead as a girl."

"Your true nature shining through, Sammy. At least you're a hot girl." He gives Sam a lingering once-over that makes him--her?--blush and duck his head, hiding behind the too long fall of his bangs. Dean wants to reach out and smooth them off his forehead, pull him close and pet him, and make him promise to never do that again. He shakes his head, clears his throat, and forces the words out past the tightness in his chest. "Maybe you should be focusing more on the rose from the dead part. Kind of a miracle, don't you think?" Sam opens his mouth, but Dean doesn't stop talking. "I'm still waiting for a thank you, by the way." Okay, maybe he should have stopped before he said that, because now Sam is looking all teary-eyed and earnest, and Dean sucks at dealing with crying women; he figures he knows what to do with a crying Sam, but he's not sure he can thwap a girl in the back of the head and tell her to suck it up, even if it is Sam. "It's okay," he says.

"It's really not." Sam's lower lip trembles, but he swallows hard, gets himself under control

"But it will be. We'll figure it out. Sam, I swear," he grabs Sam's shoulders, looks him right in the eye--and damn, it's been a long time since he could do that when they were both standing up--"we'll fix this." And if they don't, he thinks, they'll learn to live with it. That's what they've always done, and in Dean's book, Sam being a girl is a hell of a lot better than Sam being dead any day.

Sam sleeps through the ride out of Kansas, curled up next to Dean on the seat, so Dean can keep an arm around his shoulders and rest a hand on his chest, feel him breathe, his heart thumping a backbeat to the sound of the tires rolling over pavement as they leave death and hell behind.

Dean stops at a motel about forty miles out of Tulsa, exhaustion finally catching up with him.

He chivvies Sam into the room, dumps him onto the nearest bed and after pulling off Sam's boots and kicking off his own, collapses next to him.

When he wakes up, Sam is standing in the middle of the room wearing nothing but that stupid t-shirt with the dog on it. It hangs like an oversized dress on him, hitting him mid-thigh, even though he's really tall for a girl, with long and well-muscled (and hairy) legs, and a cute ass.

"I don't think I can do this," he says, holding his arms out wide, then bringing his hands in to cup his breasts.

"C'mere." Dean pats the bed and Sam drops down beside him like he's carrying the weight of the world, and Dean wraps an arm around his shoulder and pulls him close. Sam rests his head in the crook of Dean's neck, like when he was a little kid; his hair is wet and he smells like soap and shampoo. "I told you, we're gonna fix this."

"Dean, I have no dick."

"It's not like you were using it much anyway."

"Dean, be serious." Sam thumps him, and maybe Sam's a girl now, but he still punches like he means it.

"Ow!" Dean rubs at his chest with his free hand. "It's better than the alternative."

Sam stares at him for a long moment, his face unreadable in the darkness. "Is it?"

"Don't you even think that," Dean says furiously, gripping Sam's arms tightly and shaking him so he doesn't haul off and punch him for being stupid. "Of course it is. You were dead, Sam. Now you're alive. How is that not better?"

Sam's eyes shine bright in the darkness, his lower lip trembling again, and Dean knows he's about to say something dumb, so he leans in and kisses him.

Sam tastes like heat and toothpaste, like Sam, still, even though everything else has changed. Sam makes a soft, whimpering noise when Dean's tongue slides between his lips and he cups Dean's face, tries to take control of the kiss; Dean laughs breathlessly into his mouth, letting him. Sam leans into him, pushes him back against the flat motel pillows, hands tight on Dean's shoulders, and swings a leg over. He's not wearing any underwear, and Dean can feel the heat of his cunt--Jesus, Sam has a cunt--pressing against his dick.

"Okay," he says, sliding a hand between them to dip into the slick wet heat of it. He strokes over the folds, hair soft and rough against his fingers, then inside to find Sam's clit. Sam's breathing stutters and stops, then starts again, ragged and shocked.

"Dean--"

"Okay?" he says again, a question this time, punctuated with a flick of his thumb, and Sam nods, eyes closed and mouth open, like he's desperate for air, and Dean forces himself not to think about how long he'd been without it. "I gotcha, Sammy, don't worry."

"I know," Sam says, cupping his cheek, gentle in a way Dean would usually mock him for, but can't right now, not with everything still so close to the surface, threatening to break him apart if he thinks about it too long. "You always do."

Dean doesn't answer, not with words, anyway. He rolls them over so he can slide down the bed, pressing kisses over the soft skin of Sam's belly. "It's okay," he says, nipping at the rise of Sam's hip. "Nothing has to change." He kisses the insides of Sam's thighs, then licks at the salt-slick flesh of his cunt, wet and hot. He can feel Sam's pulse beating hummingbird-quick under his fingers, lets it overwrite the memory of the moments it faded and stopped; he can hear Sam gasping above him, choked syllables that might be yes or please or Dean, replacing the terrifying instant when he'd ceased breathing at all.

Sam's hands are smaller now, but his grip is just as tight when he threads his fingers through Dean's hair and pulls, coming with a low, hoarse moan that makes Dean's dick ache.

Dean moves away long enough to shuck his jeans and briefs, and roll on a condom. "Sam? Sammy? You good with this?" he asks as he spreads Sam's thighs, and settles between them.

"Yeah, Dean. Yeah. God."

Dean presses in slow, murmuring soft, trying not to spook him. "That's good, Sammy, relax, just like that. You're so tight. Fuck."

Sam grins up at him, eyes still hazy with satisfaction. "You okay?" He tightens around Dean and Dean swallows hard, stops moving for a second, trying to keep control.

"I'm great," he manages.

"Then stop treating me like I'm made of glass, Dean. I'm not going to break. I promise."

"You better not," Dean answers. Sam touches his face again, runs his thumb over Dean's lower lip before raising his head to kiss him soft and hot and slow, and Dean knows he understands.

It takes them a couple minutes longer than usual to find a rhythm that works for both of them, but they do, they always do, and they move together like the pistons on a two-stroke engine. Sam isn't shy in this new body either; he's still Sam, all hands and teeth--hands moving all over Dean's body like he can't stop touching him, teeth sharp against the skin of Dean's throat and jaw, followed by long swipes of his tongue to take away the sting--and ridiculous dirtyhot promises of deeper, harder, all night long and best you ever had that would make Dean laugh if they weren't one hundred percent true.

Sam laughs when he comes the second time, low and throaty and bright like silver, chasing darkness away, and hearing it unravels the pressure built up tight and sharp inside of Dean--it breaks and he comes in a rush of heat and pleasure, mouth pressed against Sam's throat, closest thing to heaven he's ever found.

"Okay?" Dean says when he's finally able to speak again.

Sam's asleep already, bogarting the covers and more than his fair share of the bed, especially since he's actually smaller now than he's been in years. Dean curls around him, pulling him back against his chest (and surreptitiously groping his tits), secretly pleased that Sam fits into his arms again, smaller and more easily protected. He falls asleep smiling, with his hand over Sam's heart.

Sam's bony elbow ramming into Dean's chest wakes Dean up earlier than he'd have liked. Sam is, well, he's Sam again, freakishly long arms and a million miles of legs, and too big for Dean to easily cradle against his chest.

"Dean," he says excitedly, "I have a dick again." He grabs Dean's hand and wraps it around his morning wood as proof.

Dean starts laughing. "Awesome."

Sam's eager to make sure everything's back the way it should be, and Dean's only too happy to help. They spend the morning in bed, putting Sam through his paces, until Dean's stomach reminds him he hasn't eaten in what feels like days.

They slide into the booth at the diner, which is empty between the breakfast and lunch rushes, and Dean says to the waitress, "We're gonna order breakfast, but first I need you to bring me some pie."

She cocks a hip, gives him an amused, indulgent smile. "Apple? Lemon meringue? Chocolate cream?"

"One of each, and some key lime, too, if you've got it."

"You're unbelievable," Sam says, shaking his head, but he's smiling.

"See if I share any of my pie with you, freak." But Sam ends up with the lemon meringue and a slice of coconut custard they didn't even ask for. Dean knows they'll end up splitting the chocolate cream, and he's halfway done with the slice of apple when a different waitress stops by to top off their mugs of coffee.

"Sammy," she says in an overly-friendly tone, eyes flashing black as the coffee she's pouring, "you're a boy again. That didn't take long at all."

"What do you know about it?" Sam says, as Dean tries to lunge at her and finds himself pinned to his seat like a bug. He wishes his fork were made of iron so he could stab the demon in the eye.

"There have always been rumors about you two, you know, being a little closer than brothers should be, but I never really believed them." She laughs, a little high-pitched titter that makes Dean twitch. "Guess I was wrong. Thanks to you perverts, I owe Baal a hundred bucks." She refills Sam's mug with a grin that's pointed as a needle. "I bet we'll be seeing you back in hell in no time." And then it's gone, black smoke disgorging itself from her body in a huge plume that darts out the front door, as the waitress falls to her knees.

"Fuck me," Dean mutters in shock, the tips of his ears burning with embarrassment and anger.

"Do we really want to give them more to gossip about?" Sam says, wicked grin smoothing away as he reaches out to help the waitress, who's staring at them with wide, frightened eyes, to her feet. She scurries away, casting scared glances at them back over her shoulder, and Dean sighs, knowing they're not getting any more refills.

"Let 'em talk," he says as dismissively as he can. "They're just jealous."

Sam laughs so hard he almost chokes on his coffee.

"Jesus, Sam, I didn't bring you back from the dead so you could choke to death on your coffee 'cause you haven't learned yet that you can't breathe and drink at the same time."

Sam kicks him in response, and they spend the rest of the meal engaged in a battle of shin-kicking and toe-stomping, laughing too hard to really care about how the waitstaff is avoiding them.

One day soon, Dean really is going to kill all those evil sons of bitches. Right now, he's got Sam and he's got pie, and the open road ahead. All in all, things are looking up.

end

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