eachdraidhean (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eachdraidhean) wrote2013-12-25 09:38 am
eachdraidhean) wrote2013-12-25 09:38 am
Entry tags:
Ignorance Would be Bliss - A Gift for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sonofabiscuit77
Title: Ignorance Would be Bliss
Pairing/character: Kevin, Sam, Dean
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2881
Warnings: Implied Wincest. Slightly AU from the beginning of season 9 as in Sam heals without angelic intervention and there is no Ezekiel.
Disclaimer: Sadly, they aren't mine, I'm just playing with them for a while.
Notes: Written for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
spn_j2_xmas exchange for sonofabiscuit77 who asked for a fic from Kevin’s POV where he knows about Sam and Dean’s relationship, and isn’t entirely okay with it. I hope this works for you! (There are more notes at the end of the fic.)
Summary: Kevin knows more than he wants to about Sam and Dean, and he really wishes he didn’t.
Kevin knows more than he wants to.
He’s an only child, so when it comes to siblings, his frame of reference is limited to the observation of his friends and cousins and media portrayal which is tempered by the moral code that his parents, and then his mother on her own, instilled in him. The siblings that he’s known before, some of them were close, some of them weren’t, but none of them were as close as the Winchesters. He understands familial bonds , but they take it to a level he’s not entirely comfortable with. If he was writing a paper on the closeness of brothers, he’s sure that Sam and Dean would be the anomaly in his control group.
Kevin’s sitting at the table in the bunker’s kitchen, tucking into his share of Chinese takeout and watching the brothers moving around the kitchen. They grab beers from the fridge and hunt down the large bottle of soy sauce Sam picked up the last time they’d all done a supply run and they’d ended up at Wholefoods. Dean squawked at the prices, but had given in with an indulgent eyeroll when Sam had gone into raptures at the salad bar, and they’d left with a cart piled high.
There’s a fluidity to the way Sam and Dean move around each other, something that at first Kevin thought must have come with all those years of living in motel rooms, sharing small spaces. But it’s more than that. The first time he’d realized what it was, he’d almost choked on the pizza they were eating, and Sam had slapped him on the back until he’d coughed up the cheesy dough.
It’s like watching his parents in the way they flow around and with each other, even when doing simple things like putting breakfast together. There’s the small touches, the glances, the non-verbal communications that pass between them as sure as if they’d been spoken out loud, a coherence that carries over into the way they work as a team when something evil needs to be taken out, and narrows down again to the way that Dean’s hand lingers on the small of Sam’s back or Sam’s hand brushes Dean’s hip. Sometimes when they glance at each other, Kevin can feel his cheeks flaming at the heat that sizzles between them.
Now, Kevin knows how much they’ve both given up to save the world, more than once, even if the gates to Hell remain open. He can grudgingly forgive that. Sam and Dean have lost even more than he has, and he gets how Dean couldn’t let Sam complete the last trial. And he appreciates that in all the time that Kevin’s been living in the bunker, they’ve never laid an openly unbrotherly hand on one another while he’s been around.
But Kevin knows all the same, and no matter how much he likes them, he’s finding it hard to accept.
~*~*~*~*~*~
His first weeks in the bunker had been fraught, with tablets to translate, and then no word from anyone. He’d been on the verge of leaving when the whole place had lit up, alarms blaring and lights flashing all over the ancient consoles. By the time Dean comes back, Kevin is strung out, nerves raw and ragged. Dean’s speech about family chokes him up. It reminds him of his Mom, and how he really doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
Kevin gets how serious Sam’s been hurt through the trials when Dean tell him that he’s in a hospital. Anything less than life threatening, and Kevin knows Dean would have brought him straight back to the bunker. He almost freaks out when Dean brings in their ‘mystery guest’. Crowley goes too quietly to the dungeon, guided by Dean who doesn’t remove the hood from the former king of Hell’s head. Kevin stands watch with the demon killing blade while Dean secures him, even then leaving the hood on.
“I’m not feeding him.” Kevin hates the way his voice wavers as he stands his ground.
“I wouldn’t expect you to, short stop.” Dean pats his shoulder, his eyes full of understanding and Kevin takes the nickname in the spirit it’s meant. It’s Dean’s way of being affectionate, and Kevin takes comfort from that.
Then Dean’s gone, and Kevin doesn’t see him for days, not until he brings Sam home. Sam’s tired, but happy to see him, and as soon as he’s up and about, he makes sure Kevin’s settled into a better room than the one he fell into on his first night and kept going back to when he needed to sleep. His new room is at the far end of what Dean calls the East Wing.
“Must have been the married quarters, it’s bigger than the other rooms,” Sam tells him. “Our rooms are in the other wing. I thought you might appreciate the space.”
Kevin’s grateful for the concern, even later, after he begins to suspect that it isn’t the only reason their rooms are so far apart. As Sam shows Kevin around, he hand-waves at one door, then another, on the way down the hallway of the West Wing.
“That’s my room, and that’s Dean’s.”
Kevin mentally files away the information in case he has to find them in a hurry in the middle of the night, and thinks nothing more about it until he’s woken up at four one morning with a nagging thought about the tablet that he decides to run by Sam. He pads down the corridor and knocks lightly on Sam’s door, not wanting to wake Dean asleep next door. When there isn’t a reply, he opens the door a crack, and whispers Sam’s name, sticking his head around the door when he doesn’t get a reply, to find the room empty and the bed not slept in.
Kevin pauses, then pulls the door shut. He turns, intending to knock on Dean’s door, when he hears the bed creaking, and a muffled sigh. Kevin stops in his tracks. The sigh, it sounds more like Sam than Dean, and if they’re both in there … several things go through Kevin’s mind. Early morning case conference, Sam worrying about the angel problem, Dean worrying about Sam, so he backs off, pads silently to the kitchen and puts the coffee on.
An hour later, while Kevin is still sitting at the table, drinking his third cup, Sam and Dean appear. Sam’s hair is messy, and as they come through the door, Dean’s hand is on his shoulder, and they are smirking at each other. Kevin does a double take, then looks away. He could have sworn that Dean just looked at Sam with the same heated glance that he uses when he sees attractive women.
Kevin’s mug stops halfway to his mouth, and he stares at the screen of his laptop as if he’s engrossed by what turned out to be yet another useless lead for translating the tablet.
“Morning. Coffee’s ready,” he tells them, letting them have a moment before he glances up.
By the time he does, Sam’s sitting down at the table with his own mug of coffee while Dean makes toast for both of them. Kevin and Sam talk over the concerns with the tablet translation that woke him earlier, and he forgets the uneasy feeling that there’s something going on he doesn’t want to know about.
~*~*~*~*~*~
A few weeks later, Kevin Is almost stir crazy being stuck in the bunker making little progress. Dean sets him up in a well warded motel room for a few days, and when Garth calls by to see if he can help work out a translation for a case, he jumps at the chance for a break. Garth offers to give him a ride back to the bunker, and the two calls he leaves for Dean on the way go straight to voice mail. It’s late when Garth drops him off, waiting until Kevin is through the door before heading off to meet up with his special lady. Kevin notices that the Impala is parked up outside and he wonders how long Sam and Dean have been back. He waves to Garth as he pulls away, and slams the heavy door closed behind him. It’s only eleven, so he’s sure the Winchesters will still be hanging out in the war room, or maybe watching a movie.
“Hey, I’m back!”
There’s no answer, and neither man is in the main part of the bunker as Kevin wanders to his room and takes off his jacket. He considers going straight to bed, but heads back towards the kitchen, planning on making a mug of hot chocolate. It’s a throwback to his old life, the one that came before hunters and prophets, tablets and angels. It had been their tradition, his Mom’s and his, back when he had timetables to stick to and she was busy with work. They’d meet up in the kitchen and have hot chocolate together just before bed time and spend half an hour hanging out and catching up. Kevin’s heart clenches in his chest. He’s almost certain she’s dead, enough to not be climbing the walls trying to find her, and he misses her.
As he rounds the corner into the war room, hands pushed down in his pockets and too much on his mind to be paying attention, Dean enters from the right, from the corridor that leads into the maze that is the rest of the Men of Letters sanctuary. Dean almost skids to a halt, he’s moving so fast, his cheeks flushed and his fingers tugging at the front of his shirt, smoothing it down.
“Hey Kevin!” Dean’s welcome is overly enthusiastic, and Kevin does a double take.
Dean’s grinning, eyes wide, and Kevin notices that his lips are, well, puffy. Kevin wonders if Dean’s smuggled a girl into his room, even opens his mouth to rib him about it before it hits him that Sam isn’t anywhere to be seen, and Dean’s never brought anyone back to the secret bunker.
“Hey Dean. I was going to make hot chocolate. Want some?”
“Er, yeah … no … rain check?”
Kevin’s never seen Dean this flustered and it’s enough to concern him. The bunker is warded well, but what if it’s something that the Men of Letters didn’t know about?
“Where’s Sam?” he asks.
“Sam is … researching,” Dean nods, but when Kevin looks at him, his cheeks light up, and that’s when Kevin gets it.
He really doesn’t want to know where Sam is. Really, really doesn’t.
“We didn’t expect you back before tomorrow.”
Not that he expects Dean to elaborate, but that’s all the explanation Kevin needs. They didn’t expect him back until tomorrow, so they … Kevin forcibly stops his mind from completing that thought.
“Garth gave me a ride back,” Kevin shrugs. “So I’m going to make hot chocolate and head to bed. I’ll see you guys in the morning.”
“Okay. we’ll take you up on that hot chocolate tomorrow night.”
Dean smiles back and pats Kevin on the shoulder before he turns to go. Now, Kevin’s not vastly experienced when to comes to sex, but he catches the slightest scent of come and sweat on Dean. It could be self inflicted, but he doubts it, given Dean’s appearance and the way he hurries back into the depths of the bunker. As Kevin makes hot chocolate, he tries not to think about exactly where Sam might be. And he really doesn’t want to think about dungeons with shackles and cuffs.
”Is this a sex torture dungeon?”
The memory of how innocent he was when he asked that question makes him long for the days of cello practice and school timetables. He takes his hot chocolate back to his room, and curls up with his kindle. Reading “Wool”, a story about living in close quarters in a silo, seems fitting, given his new home.
~*~*~*~*~*~
After a run in with a well organized group of angels, Sam takes a beating. By the time Dean gets him back to the bunker, Sam’s still weak, and Dean yells for Kevin to help him with Sam, but when they get to the East Wing, they go past the door to Sam’s room, and into Dean’s instead.
“Memory foam is better than that piece of crap mattress on his bed.”
Dean’s explanation is gruff and final and Kevin’s reminded of the morning he went looking for Sam and he wasn’t in his own room.
Sam lies back on the bed, too tired to object, and as his eyelids get heavier, he gazes up at Dean with an adoration that takes Kevin’s breath away. When Dean reaches down and touches the side of Sam’s face Kevin knows he’s been forgotten about. This isn’t meant for him, it’s so much, too much, and something that shouldn’t be. He leaves the room and closes the door behind himself without looking at them again.
Kevin busies himself in cataloguing each alert and cross referencing it with anything he can find on the newsfeeds. It’s much later when he heads to the kitchen to make his hot chocolate, and this time it’s Sam who finds him.
“You making hot chocolate?”
Kevin adds more milk to the pan and nods, avoiding Sam’s eyes. The display he saw earlier has left him feeling uncomfortable, and he needs a moment to straighten things out in his head, so he’s not thinking about what may have happened after he left when he looks at Sam. While Kevin works, Sam sits quietly and smiles at him when Kevin puts a steaming mug down in front of him.
“Shouldn’t you still be resting?” Kevin asks.
“I’m fine, I slept all the way back.” Sam takes a sip of the hot, sweet liquid. “Dean was exhausted, though he wouldn’t admit it. I left him sleeping.” The fond look on Sam’s face says more than he probably wanted it to, and when he glances up at Kevin, Kevin can’t help the way he eyes Sam.
There’s a pause, and Kevin knows what’s coming next. He tries to think of something to say that will stop it, but he’s all out of ways to plead ‘please don’t tell me about your incestuous relationship with your brother’ without actually saying the words. He’s happy to find that he doesn’t have to.
“Me and Dean,” Sam starts. “It is what it is, and it’s between us. We good?”
Kevin gives him points for getting straight to the point. Sam’s not interested in giving explanations or making excuses, and Kevin’s glad because he can’t think of anything Sam, or Dean, could say that would make him think it’s okay for brothers to be more than that. He respects them both as people, as hunters, and despite living in the same place as them for months, he can count on the fingers of one hand the times he’s come close to stumbling on them doing something that would mentally scar him for life. So he can give them this. He can’t approve, and would really rather not know, but he can give them this.
“Yeah, we’re good.”
They sit and drink in silence for a few minutes, but it’s a comfortable silence, and Kevin looks up when Sam breaks it.
“I would never have guessed you were a hot chocolate man.”
Kevin shrugs and tells him about the tradition he had with his Mom.
Sam smiles and nods, and they talk more about the angels falling and what it could mean for the world until Kevin yawns. Sam shoos Kevin off to bed as he picks up their empty mugs and rinses them out.
The next night, they’re all up and working when midnight crawls around. Earlier, Sam spent some time in the dungeon with Crowley while Dean paced around until Kevin gave him something to do. His eyes still kept glancing towards the dungeon, but he seemed glad of the distraction.
So now they’re all sitting around the table in the kitchen, sipping hot chocolate that Dean made. It’s got an edge of heat to it, which Kevin really likes, but Dean smugly refuses to divulge his recipe when Kevin asks him what he added to it.
The next time, it’s Sam who makes it, scattering colorful mini marshmallows over the top. Dean rolls his eyes, but slurps it down anyway.
After a few weeks, Kevin realizes two things. That the three of them now have a tradition of their own, and that he’s not seen anything that would indicate what goes on behind closed doors between Sam and Dean.
They work together, roll their eyes at each other, argue over ridiculous things and try to get Kevin to take sides. They still flow around each other like two people who wouldn’t be able to exist without the other, and now they make sure that whoever is in the bunker late at night gets together for hot chocolate round the kitchen table.
So yeah, Kevin knows more than he wants to, but he’s also learned that family doesn’t end with blood. And his new family might be dysfunctional in many ways, but it’s his family all the same.
Notes: This fic was written as soon as I received my assignment for the challenge, which was before the beginning of season 9. I knew that I’d probably have to tweak it to fit with whatever happened in the show, but the last episode left me wondering whether I should write another fic based on another prompt, given how the episode ended. But I really enjoyed writing from Kevin’s POV, so I decided to post it, no matter how bittersweet it now feels. The only way I felt it would work, was to place it in a universe where the trials left Sam in critical condition, but he healed on his own, and Ezekiel was never needed.
Pairing/character: Kevin, Sam, Dean
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2881
Warnings: Implied Wincest. Slightly AU from the beginning of season 9 as in Sam heals without angelic intervention and there is no Ezekiel.
Disclaimer: Sadly, they aren't mine, I'm just playing with them for a while.
Notes: Written for the
spn_j2_xmas exchange for sonofabiscuit77 who asked for a fic from Kevin’s POV where he knows about Sam and Dean’s relationship, and isn’t entirely okay with it. I hope this works for you! (There are more notes at the end of the fic.)Summary: Kevin knows more than he wants to about Sam and Dean, and he really wishes he didn’t.
Kevin knows more than he wants to.
He’s an only child, so when it comes to siblings, his frame of reference is limited to the observation of his friends and cousins and media portrayal which is tempered by the moral code that his parents, and then his mother on her own, instilled in him. The siblings that he’s known before, some of them were close, some of them weren’t, but none of them were as close as the Winchesters. He understands familial bonds , but they take it to a level he’s not entirely comfortable with. If he was writing a paper on the closeness of brothers, he’s sure that Sam and Dean would be the anomaly in his control group.
Kevin’s sitting at the table in the bunker’s kitchen, tucking into his share of Chinese takeout and watching the brothers moving around the kitchen. They grab beers from the fridge and hunt down the large bottle of soy sauce Sam picked up the last time they’d all done a supply run and they’d ended up at Wholefoods. Dean squawked at the prices, but had given in with an indulgent eyeroll when Sam had gone into raptures at the salad bar, and they’d left with a cart piled high.
There’s a fluidity to the way Sam and Dean move around each other, something that at first Kevin thought must have come with all those years of living in motel rooms, sharing small spaces. But it’s more than that. The first time he’d realized what it was, he’d almost choked on the pizza they were eating, and Sam had slapped him on the back until he’d coughed up the cheesy dough.
It’s like watching his parents in the way they flow around and with each other, even when doing simple things like putting breakfast together. There’s the small touches, the glances, the non-verbal communications that pass between them as sure as if they’d been spoken out loud, a coherence that carries over into the way they work as a team when something evil needs to be taken out, and narrows down again to the way that Dean’s hand lingers on the small of Sam’s back or Sam’s hand brushes Dean’s hip. Sometimes when they glance at each other, Kevin can feel his cheeks flaming at the heat that sizzles between them.
Now, Kevin knows how much they’ve both given up to save the world, more than once, even if the gates to Hell remain open. He can grudgingly forgive that. Sam and Dean have lost even more than he has, and he gets how Dean couldn’t let Sam complete the last trial. And he appreciates that in all the time that Kevin’s been living in the bunker, they’ve never laid an openly unbrotherly hand on one another while he’s been around.
But Kevin knows all the same, and no matter how much he likes them, he’s finding it hard to accept.
His first weeks in the bunker had been fraught, with tablets to translate, and then no word from anyone. He’d been on the verge of leaving when the whole place had lit up, alarms blaring and lights flashing all over the ancient consoles. By the time Dean comes back, Kevin is strung out, nerves raw and ragged. Dean’s speech about family chokes him up. It reminds him of his Mom, and how he really doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
Kevin gets how serious Sam’s been hurt through the trials when Dean tell him that he’s in a hospital. Anything less than life threatening, and Kevin knows Dean would have brought him straight back to the bunker. He almost freaks out when Dean brings in their ‘mystery guest’. Crowley goes too quietly to the dungeon, guided by Dean who doesn’t remove the hood from the former king of Hell’s head. Kevin stands watch with the demon killing blade while Dean secures him, even then leaving the hood on.
“I’m not feeding him.” Kevin hates the way his voice wavers as he stands his ground.
“I wouldn’t expect you to, short stop.” Dean pats his shoulder, his eyes full of understanding and Kevin takes the nickname in the spirit it’s meant. It’s Dean’s way of being affectionate, and Kevin takes comfort from that.
Then Dean’s gone, and Kevin doesn’t see him for days, not until he brings Sam home. Sam’s tired, but happy to see him, and as soon as he’s up and about, he makes sure Kevin’s settled into a better room than the one he fell into on his first night and kept going back to when he needed to sleep. His new room is at the far end of what Dean calls the East Wing.
“Must have been the married quarters, it’s bigger than the other rooms,” Sam tells him. “Our rooms are in the other wing. I thought you might appreciate the space.”
Kevin’s grateful for the concern, even later, after he begins to suspect that it isn’t the only reason their rooms are so far apart. As Sam shows Kevin around, he hand-waves at one door, then another, on the way down the hallway of the West Wing.
“That’s my room, and that’s Dean’s.”
Kevin mentally files away the information in case he has to find them in a hurry in the middle of the night, and thinks nothing more about it until he’s woken up at four one morning with a nagging thought about the tablet that he decides to run by Sam. He pads down the corridor and knocks lightly on Sam’s door, not wanting to wake Dean asleep next door. When there isn’t a reply, he opens the door a crack, and whispers Sam’s name, sticking his head around the door when he doesn’t get a reply, to find the room empty and the bed not slept in.
Kevin pauses, then pulls the door shut. He turns, intending to knock on Dean’s door, when he hears the bed creaking, and a muffled sigh. Kevin stops in his tracks. The sigh, it sounds more like Sam than Dean, and if they’re both in there … several things go through Kevin’s mind. Early morning case conference, Sam worrying about the angel problem, Dean worrying about Sam, so he backs off, pads silently to the kitchen and puts the coffee on.
An hour later, while Kevin is still sitting at the table, drinking his third cup, Sam and Dean appear. Sam’s hair is messy, and as they come through the door, Dean’s hand is on his shoulder, and they are smirking at each other. Kevin does a double take, then looks away. He could have sworn that Dean just looked at Sam with the same heated glance that he uses when he sees attractive women.
Kevin’s mug stops halfway to his mouth, and he stares at the screen of his laptop as if he’s engrossed by what turned out to be yet another useless lead for translating the tablet.
“Morning. Coffee’s ready,” he tells them, letting them have a moment before he glances up.
By the time he does, Sam’s sitting down at the table with his own mug of coffee while Dean makes toast for both of them. Kevin and Sam talk over the concerns with the tablet translation that woke him earlier, and he forgets the uneasy feeling that there’s something going on he doesn’t want to know about.
A few weeks later, Kevin Is almost stir crazy being stuck in the bunker making little progress. Dean sets him up in a well warded motel room for a few days, and when Garth calls by to see if he can help work out a translation for a case, he jumps at the chance for a break. Garth offers to give him a ride back to the bunker, and the two calls he leaves for Dean on the way go straight to voice mail. It’s late when Garth drops him off, waiting until Kevin is through the door before heading off to meet up with his special lady. Kevin notices that the Impala is parked up outside and he wonders how long Sam and Dean have been back. He waves to Garth as he pulls away, and slams the heavy door closed behind him. It’s only eleven, so he’s sure the Winchesters will still be hanging out in the war room, or maybe watching a movie.
“Hey, I’m back!”
There’s no answer, and neither man is in the main part of the bunker as Kevin wanders to his room and takes off his jacket. He considers going straight to bed, but heads back towards the kitchen, planning on making a mug of hot chocolate. It’s a throwback to his old life, the one that came before hunters and prophets, tablets and angels. It had been their tradition, his Mom’s and his, back when he had timetables to stick to and she was busy with work. They’d meet up in the kitchen and have hot chocolate together just before bed time and spend half an hour hanging out and catching up. Kevin’s heart clenches in his chest. He’s almost certain she’s dead, enough to not be climbing the walls trying to find her, and he misses her.
As he rounds the corner into the war room, hands pushed down in his pockets and too much on his mind to be paying attention, Dean enters from the right, from the corridor that leads into the maze that is the rest of the Men of Letters sanctuary. Dean almost skids to a halt, he’s moving so fast, his cheeks flushed and his fingers tugging at the front of his shirt, smoothing it down.
“Hey Kevin!” Dean’s welcome is overly enthusiastic, and Kevin does a double take.
Dean’s grinning, eyes wide, and Kevin notices that his lips are, well, puffy. Kevin wonders if Dean’s smuggled a girl into his room, even opens his mouth to rib him about it before it hits him that Sam isn’t anywhere to be seen, and Dean’s never brought anyone back to the secret bunker.
“Hey Dean. I was going to make hot chocolate. Want some?”
“Er, yeah … no … rain check?”
Kevin’s never seen Dean this flustered and it’s enough to concern him. The bunker is warded well, but what if it’s something that the Men of Letters didn’t know about?
“Where’s Sam?” he asks.
“Sam is … researching,” Dean nods, but when Kevin looks at him, his cheeks light up, and that’s when Kevin gets it.
He really doesn’t want to know where Sam is. Really, really doesn’t.
“We didn’t expect you back before tomorrow.”
Not that he expects Dean to elaborate, but that’s all the explanation Kevin needs. They didn’t expect him back until tomorrow, so they … Kevin forcibly stops his mind from completing that thought.
“Garth gave me a ride back,” Kevin shrugs. “So I’m going to make hot chocolate and head to bed. I’ll see you guys in the morning.”
“Okay. we’ll take you up on that hot chocolate tomorrow night.”
Dean smiles back and pats Kevin on the shoulder before he turns to go. Now, Kevin’s not vastly experienced when to comes to sex, but he catches the slightest scent of come and sweat on Dean. It could be self inflicted, but he doubts it, given Dean’s appearance and the way he hurries back into the depths of the bunker. As Kevin makes hot chocolate, he tries not to think about exactly where Sam might be. And he really doesn’t want to think about dungeons with shackles and cuffs.
”Is this a sex torture dungeon?”
The memory of how innocent he was when he asked that question makes him long for the days of cello practice and school timetables. He takes his hot chocolate back to his room, and curls up with his kindle. Reading “Wool”, a story about living in close quarters in a silo, seems fitting, given his new home.
After a run in with a well organized group of angels, Sam takes a beating. By the time Dean gets him back to the bunker, Sam’s still weak, and Dean yells for Kevin to help him with Sam, but when they get to the East Wing, they go past the door to Sam’s room, and into Dean’s instead.
“Memory foam is better than that piece of crap mattress on his bed.”
Dean’s explanation is gruff and final and Kevin’s reminded of the morning he went looking for Sam and he wasn’t in his own room.
Sam lies back on the bed, too tired to object, and as his eyelids get heavier, he gazes up at Dean with an adoration that takes Kevin’s breath away. When Dean reaches down and touches the side of Sam’s face Kevin knows he’s been forgotten about. This isn’t meant for him, it’s so much, too much, and something that shouldn’t be. He leaves the room and closes the door behind himself without looking at them again.
Kevin busies himself in cataloguing each alert and cross referencing it with anything he can find on the newsfeeds. It’s much later when he heads to the kitchen to make his hot chocolate, and this time it’s Sam who finds him.
“You making hot chocolate?”
Kevin adds more milk to the pan and nods, avoiding Sam’s eyes. The display he saw earlier has left him feeling uncomfortable, and he needs a moment to straighten things out in his head, so he’s not thinking about what may have happened after he left when he looks at Sam. While Kevin works, Sam sits quietly and smiles at him when Kevin puts a steaming mug down in front of him.
“Shouldn’t you still be resting?” Kevin asks.
“I’m fine, I slept all the way back.” Sam takes a sip of the hot, sweet liquid. “Dean was exhausted, though he wouldn’t admit it. I left him sleeping.” The fond look on Sam’s face says more than he probably wanted it to, and when he glances up at Kevin, Kevin can’t help the way he eyes Sam.
There’s a pause, and Kevin knows what’s coming next. He tries to think of something to say that will stop it, but he’s all out of ways to plead ‘please don’t tell me about your incestuous relationship with your brother’ without actually saying the words. He’s happy to find that he doesn’t have to.
“Me and Dean,” Sam starts. “It is what it is, and it’s between us. We good?”
Kevin gives him points for getting straight to the point. Sam’s not interested in giving explanations or making excuses, and Kevin’s glad because he can’t think of anything Sam, or Dean, could say that would make him think it’s okay for brothers to be more than that. He respects them both as people, as hunters, and despite living in the same place as them for months, he can count on the fingers of one hand the times he’s come close to stumbling on them doing something that would mentally scar him for life. So he can give them this. He can’t approve, and would really rather not know, but he can give them this.
“Yeah, we’re good.”
They sit and drink in silence for a few minutes, but it’s a comfortable silence, and Kevin looks up when Sam breaks it.
“I would never have guessed you were a hot chocolate man.”
Kevin shrugs and tells him about the tradition he had with his Mom.
Sam smiles and nods, and they talk more about the angels falling and what it could mean for the world until Kevin yawns. Sam shoos Kevin off to bed as he picks up their empty mugs and rinses them out.
The next night, they’re all up and working when midnight crawls around. Earlier, Sam spent some time in the dungeon with Crowley while Dean paced around until Kevin gave him something to do. His eyes still kept glancing towards the dungeon, but he seemed glad of the distraction.
So now they’re all sitting around the table in the kitchen, sipping hot chocolate that Dean made. It’s got an edge of heat to it, which Kevin really likes, but Dean smugly refuses to divulge his recipe when Kevin asks him what he added to it.
The next time, it’s Sam who makes it, scattering colorful mini marshmallows over the top. Dean rolls his eyes, but slurps it down anyway.
After a few weeks, Kevin realizes two things. That the three of them now have a tradition of their own, and that he’s not seen anything that would indicate what goes on behind closed doors between Sam and Dean.
They work together, roll their eyes at each other, argue over ridiculous things and try to get Kevin to take sides. They still flow around each other like two people who wouldn’t be able to exist without the other, and now they make sure that whoever is in the bunker late at night gets together for hot chocolate round the kitchen table.
So yeah, Kevin knows more than he wants to, but he’s also learned that family doesn’t end with blood. And his new family might be dysfunctional in many ways, but it’s his family all the same.
Notes: This fic was written as soon as I received my assignment for the challenge, which was before the beginning of season 9. I knew that I’d probably have to tweak it to fit with whatever happened in the show, but the last episode left me wondering whether I should write another fic based on another prompt, given how the episode ended. But I really enjoyed writing from Kevin’s POV, so I decided to post it, no matter how bittersweet it now feels. The only way I felt it would work, was to place it in a universe where the trials left Sam in critical condition, but he healed on his own, and Ezekiel was never needed.