Mint and apricots

6. I will take care of you

The journey to the boulevard of immaculate detached houses where Sam had moved two months earlier seemed interminable both to Dean and his tense muscles.

During the car ride, he had lost Sam. A minute earlier his brother was stammering something on the phone, a few words just to keep in touch, and the following moment the line had gone dead, freezing Dean's heart before it started beating madly again. In that instant, the plea he had addressed to his husband had accomplished an unparalleled miracle and Castiel had accelerated to reach nearly sixty miles per hour in a residential area. Hadn't he been busy remembering how to take air into his lungs, Dean would have made a note to himself to make sure to rub his face into it for the rest of his irreproachable citizen's life.

When Cas braked and stopped a few meters away from Luc Benson's house, Dean felt he was about to explode. He had kept his eyes fixed on the sidewalk to his right all the way from Myrtle Lane, but there was no sign of Sam. Without waiting for his husband – and without Cas doing anything to stop him –, he rushed out of the Impala and ran towards the driveway of number 66 on Fairview Avenue, following a simple impulse until he found the courage to look up. Then he found himself stifling a groan.

The front door of the elegant detached house was wide open and the landing was illuminated by the warm light of the corridor that Dean remembered walking before a dinner he hadn't digested. A little further down, at street level, just before the three steps leading to the entrance, Sam was trudging behind Luc. The blond was holding him firmly by the arm and it could have been said that he was dragging him by force, if only Sam's tall figure had not appeared so resigned and submissive. The road was empty at that hour of the night and Dean took a few more steps to be able to distinguish the voices of the two over their fast breathing and the drum that was beating in his temples.

"This is the last thing you do to me, baby doll. Yet I had warned you, hadn't I? I had told you that provoking me was not a good idea."

"Luc... please, Luc..."

Luc's voice was as irritating as usual, but Sam's made Dean react. The thirty-year-old hadn't heard that pleading tone for several years. And if in his mind that sound was a constant of his childhood, because at a very young age Sam had been a capricious child, the memory of the last time he had heard that triggered Dean's instinct as the eldest brother.

It was a memory that belonged to three and a half years earlier, when Sam had come back home from university after learning of John Winchester's death. When recalling it, Dean still managed to grasp every detail of the hug with which he had tried to console Sam in his despair. The scent of his little brother's aftershave lotion, the warmth of his cheek on his shoulder, his voice broken by tears. The broken voice with which he had asked Dean to tell him that it was not true, that he was not going to see his father in a coffin, not before having had the opportunity to talk it out with him for all those years of fights and mutual disappointments. That was the voice Sam was pleading his rat boyfriend with, who in response pulled him mercilessly into the house, making him disappear from Dean and Castiel's the sight.

"Benson!"

Dean's roar in the still air of the night made his target turn around immediately. Standing in the doorway, Luc Benson leaned against the threshold with one shoulder, holding the door with his left hand and giving a heinous smile to Dean and his husband behind him. Only in that instant, when he was already on the first of the steps of the landing, did the thirty-year-old realize that Cas had joined him.

"Look who's back. The wrecker and his dear wifey in tow" the thirty-one-year-old welcomed them. "To what do I owe this pain in my ass?"

Loyal to the disgust he had always felt towards Sam's boyfriend and his manners, Dean wasted no time in holding back.