Pizza Grease Epiphanies

Dean's fingers, coated generously with residual oil and gripping onto a sizable piece of pepperoni pizza, are halfway to the trek from the greasy pizza box to his mouth when he gets smacked with an epiphany more startling than a shotgun blast to his knee and realizes that he and Sam are made for each other.

Dean lives a life of knocking on Death's door and then proceeding to initiate an impromptu game of hide and seek, winner takes all, on a weekly basis. He makes enemies and then kills the ones he can track down, while the rest are on the same quest with him as the target. He's bought more pairs of jeans than a teenage hipster and ruined every single pair with either irreparable rips or stains of blood that vaguely associated Dean with the label of sociopath and couldn't be written off as tomato sauce anymore. He has too many scars to count them all on his fingers and toes combined, and he knows what it's like to feel a bullet sink into his flesh. And yet, all that agony aside, he still cannot fathom anything being more painful than realizing that this, that him and Sam, his brother, his blood, is where he belongs.

He's not the biggest guy on epiphanies. He may live an erratic and unstable lifestyle, but when it comes to an unpredictable mindset and spontaneous realizations, he's not the best candidate for possessing such things.

He's not prone to freaking out. Sam says he has a process that may be subconscious but still always follows a very noticeable pattern that goes from silence, to straight out ignorance of the issue, to barely concealed agitation, to outright exasperation and shouting that he later writes off as something, that as the role of big brother, he is allowed to do.

But Dean doesn't think that falling in love with his brother is something he's allowed to do.

It's not a privilege he automatically gets free passes to because he's in ownership of the role of big brother. Being genetically connected to Sam is something that allows him to spike his coffee on his grouchy days because Sam is an extremely amusing drunk. Sharing blood lets him unscrew the bolts on the chair he knows Sam is about to carelessly sit himself into. Being on the same line in the Winchester family tree gives Dean the right to bandage him up and maybe even cry in front of him if he's the one who needs the nurse work. Being brothers, however, does not give Dean the right to love him too much to be healthy.

The politically incorrect side of this, along with the morally corrupt side, plays only a small role of guilt in Dean's mind. Perhaps this should worry him, and perhaps he's simply been around too many oddities in his life to worry about another unorthodox and socially wrong situation. Perhaps the fact that it is in fact so unethical in every sense of the word is what makes it so right. Perhaps it's because they share identical Winchester blood pumping through their veins and similar shades of eye color that makes this so perfect.

There's no one Dean knows better than Sam fucking Winchester. The guy is a nutcase. He sprinkles powder sugar over his cereal and folds his toilet paper before he uses it. He would rather buy scar cream than condoms because he so desperately wants to resemble an innocent boy whose worst injury consists of a shaving incident on his left cheek. He knows the formula for fabricating triangles off the top of his head and knows how to make a semi-decent sandwich. Even the personal things that no one wants anyone to know about even after moving ins and marriages and the third baby Dean knows about Sam. He's watched him grow up from a tiny lump of flesh into a crawling toddler into a lanky boy and a strong teenager. He's been on more roadtrips with Sam than most people ever want to endure a car with their family members ever have been. And the only reason Dean has ever been granted the luxury to learn all of these quirks and idiosyncrasies about his crazy, demented brother is because they're family. Dean can't imagine having a bond as tight as he does with Sam with anyone else, almost as if they're invisibly tied together by an unbreakable string that has kept their minds and souls entwined ever since Dean first pulled a crying boy who scraped his knee on the motel pavement to his chest and sang an out of tune lullaby into his hair.

When Sam was born, he wasn't born as a lawyer. He wasn't born queer as a three dollar bill. He wasn't born as a hunter, and he wasn't born as John's solider or Mary's carbon copy either. He was born as Dean's to keep. Dean's to watch over, Dean's to tease, and Dean's to love. And maybe it's wrong, and maybe it's creepy, and maybe he'll never be able to hold his hand at the grocery store, but it means more to Dean than knives and shotguns ever could.

He doesn't have a big set of shiny tits that catch the light just right and he doesn't have a soft, tiny waist. He doesn't have commercially flawless hair and he doesn't drench his face in eye shadow. He has hair that no comb could ever tame, legs that go on for miles, and a hard stomach that only something as absurd as John's training routine could result in. And he's perfect.

It's their blood, the thing that makes this so taboo, that makes Sam so very perfect for him. Dean may stuff his life full of destruction and death and malicious revenge much like his father does, but he loves more than he hates. And maybe that's why no matter how pretty or stunning a girl with glossy lips and gentle hands is, their touch isn't the same. Just like their motel rooms, short and cramped and stuffed with duffel bags, his heart and head were out of room to offer to girls who sidled up to him on a regular basis.

Sam's his brother; Sam's his soulmate. As far as Dean is concerned, they would always be synonymous with each other. He's seen The Notebook and Titantic and other epically amorous love stories of the century that make love out to be a world of kisses and clichés, and he knows that the rumors aren't true. But soulmates, he believes in. If souls were meant to mate and were made for the purpose of finding their stolen half, it belongs to Sam.

He remembers, a few years back, halfway in between second base and the foreplay that always leads into third with a girl that starting sobbing uncontrollably as if she was within a therapy session instead of the back of Dean's Impala. She had explained, most carefully and through wet hiccups that interrupted most of her sentences, that she was still hopelessly devoted to a boy whose clothes she wore but had not quite learned how to love yet, and how the boy was someone that even after days hip-to-hip with him and nothing but the sound of his voice and three containers of Oreo cookies to provide them true entertainment, she still managed to most happily tolerate. Dean had pulled his hand away from her thigh and said he understood, not because he was trying to mollify the weeping girl with smeared mascara and shaking shoulders, but because he understood. He doesn't only have to, but he gets to spend every waking moment with a boy who after no matter what happens, he will still give the last cookie to even if he pretends he wants it for himself.

Dean takes him for granted. He sees the letters that come in the mail that Sam believes he hides in his socks with flawless discretion from the Ivy League schools. He knows he writes back with what he can only assume is an unbelievably eager plea to be accepted. He knows that Sam doesn't have the ideal father-son dynamic or the family board game nights and he aches for the glittering American life the commercials teach him of. He knows that Sam is an ephemeral thing that one day, will expire like a batch of brownies that in an attempt to savor each and every one, ended up in spoiling them away to the point of no longer being edible. Sam is reaching his expiration of this life and Dean treats it like a joke. He likes to think that he's not the only one, that everyone has a comedy routine about something that eats at them from the insides because it's easier to smile instead of fall against the wall and break apart, because how ridiculous is that? It's silly.

He takes him for granted not because he's worth belittling, but rather because Dean is one hundred and two percent sure that Sam and him won't ever stay apart for long. There's a rope between them, stringy at best, but it'll bounce back every time Sam will wander off too far like a lost puppy roaming the roads. It's their blood, it's their teamwork, it's their brotherly connection and telepathic link that seems to have sprouted out of DNA that was made to work in tandem with another body and meant to pleasantly ache whenever Dean would squeeze his hand and push inside of him.

But at the end of the day, Dean needs Sam. He's codependent, devoted, attached, and entirely lost without his brother. At some point down the line, Sam and Dean because SamandDean, not two, but one entity that could no longer be separated. Even the syllables, Dean thinks, sound good together. Sam and Dean. The soft s at the beginning ending with the gentle n.

Dean doesn't have a lot of soul-clenching thoughts that he is very clearly sure of. But there is something incredibly right about the fact that Sam Winchester is meant to be with him.

The shiny pieces of pepperoni stare up at him imploringly. Dean's fingers are oily as they slip along the crust of his piece of pizza that's drooping sadly in his hand, cheese stretching and sauce dripping. He imagines Sam's upper lip, coated with shiny grease and curving into a smile directed straight at Dean, and heat coils in his toes.

It's an epiphany, and epiphanies aren't meant to be forgotten or dismissed. But that doesn't mean that Dean won't have the exact same realization, down to the reasoning and the supported logic behind it, years later and years again afterwards. History repeats itself, and even if Sam and Dean's names aren't imprinted in it, their story still is.

By the time that Dean will realize that Sam is not only made irrevocably and undoubtedly for him and that Sam knows it too, it will be too late. Sam will be catching a grimy bus full of hopeful runaways and wordless elders that smell of the senior homes that they have abandoned to California, and then some time later, Dean will be knocking at Lisa Braeden's door minus one very necessary brother. It might be minutes before one last bullet lodges itself into Dean's flesh, hard and heavy like a set of keys he might have swallowed years ago, without a deal with a Reaper to wrestle it back out of his chest, that he realizes once and for all that heaven is a place he only wants to share with Sam.

They're made for each other, and even the goddamn pizza knows it. Dean swallows it back with a few more swallows and there's nothing left but the grease stains in the box it came in. The cheese slithers down his throat and Dean pushes the box away.

Sam is the guy for him. It's an all new pot of wrong, would kick him out of every church on Earth's dirt, and would guarantee him bruises shades of color that any rainbow would be jealous of courtesy of John. And sometimes, there are moments when Dean stops and thinks what is he evening doing here? because he's in his twenties and living with his geeklord brother with nothing but weathered pants, a stack of porn, and shotguns he doesn't have the license to own. And after a few more moments, he starts thinking why and then he realizes he knows why. He does it because that one hour, in which the universe smiles down upon them and Dean gets to sit with his feet propped up on Sam's lap while they order the most unpronounceable Chinese meal on the delivery menu and catch reruns of sitcoms from the eighties, makes him think okay, that's why.

And that might just be why being made for each was the universe not dishing out bad karma and even worse luck, not playing a cosmic joke on the Winchesters, and not even making an erroneous mistake in judgment.