Sam Winchester x sister!reader
Dean Winchester x sister!reader
Summary: For Sam's birthday, you decided to take Sam camping. Real camping, not hunting camping.
Warnings: all fluff
Notes: Let's pretend I actually posted this on his birthday and not after...
You'd followed the instructions three times — actually read them, which was more than Dean had ever done with anything in his life — and still, the left pole listed sideways like it had given up on itself somewhere around step four. You squinted at it. It squinted back.
"It's fine," you decided.
"It is absolutely not fine." Dean appeared beside you, arms crossed, head tilted to match the angle of the pole. "It looks like it's had one too many."
"I'm just saying, if it collapses on us at two in the morning, I'm not taking responsibility."
You pointed at him. "You said that about the casserole too, and that turned out great."
He opened his mouth. Closed it. The casserole had, against all odds, turned out great. He turned away without another word, and you hid your grin behind the tent instructions.
It had taken three weeks of planning to pull this off. You'd picked a spot upstate — quiet, off-season, the kind of place where the only things moving after dark were owls and the occasional curious raccoon. No cases nearby. You'd checked twice.
Sam's birthday had a habit of getting swallowed by other things. A hunt running long. A lead that couldn't wait. The low, grinding exhaustion that came with your kind of life and made celebrations feel like something other people did. Last year you'd given him a book and a gas station cupcake with a candle shoved in it, lit in a motel parking lot at midnight, and he'd smiled like that was the best thing that had happened to him in months.
That had sat with you for a long time.
So: camping. Actual camping, with a cooler and a fire pit and enough marshmallows to make a dentist weep.
Sam came back from scouting the trailhead with his hands loose in his jacket pockets and that expression he got when he was working hard at not looking pleased — chin slightly down, mouth almost but not quite level, something warm moving behind his eyes that he hadn't fully decided to let out yet.
"There's a creek about a quarter mile east," he said, stopping beside you. "Signs at the trailhead say it runs through most of the park. There are also markers for a ridge trail that looks like it goes up maybe two miles before it loops back."
"Trout in the creek?" you asked, because you already knew. You'd read it on the park website three times.
The corner of his mouth moved. "Signs say so."
"Caught any with your bare hands yet?" Dean called. He was on the other side of the site, crouching beside the fire pit with the expression of a man doing something he considered entirely beneath him but was going to do correctly despite that.
Sam looked at you. You looked at Sam.
"I've been gone ten minutes, Dean."
"That's—" Sam exhaled through his nose in a way that wasn't quite a laugh. "Yeah. That's a no."
You passed him one end of the tent's rainfly. "Help me with this."
He caught it, clocked the angle of the left pole, and raised one eyebrow at you. It was a very specific eyebrow — the one that contained an entire sentence.
"I was going to ask if you'd secured the—"
He fixed it in under five minutes, efficiently and without commentary, though the smug energy radiating off of him for the next twenty minutes was almost physically tangible. You chose to let him have it. It was his birthday.
The fire, against mild odds, actually started.
Dean had insisted on building it himself, which you'd allowed partly because there was no stopping him and partly because watching Dean Winchester treat a campfire like a tactical problem was one of life's small pleasures. He'd arranged the kindling with focused precision, added the larger logs at specific angles based on some internal geometry that he hadn't explained and you hadn't asked about, and then crouched there with a box of long matches and a very serious expression until the flame caught and held.
He stood up, dusted his hands on his jeans, and looked at it with the particular satisfaction of a man who has done something well.
"That's a good fire," you said.
"Yeah it is," he agreed, no false modesty.
The three of you settled into the camp chairs around it — weathered fold-out things that had lived in Baby's trunk so long they were practically part of the car at this point, pulled out for exactly this kind of occasion and approximately nothing else in your lives. The sun had dipped below the tree line and taken most of its warmth with it, and the fire filled that space the way fires do, and the sky above the clearing deepened from pale grey-blue into something with more violet in it, and then the first stars came through.
The woods at dusk had their own sound. The birds that had been going all afternoon started to settle, their noise thinning and changing register. Something moved in the undergrowth beyond the tree line — something small, rustling and then gone. Branches shifted in a light wind you couldn't quite feel at ground level. It was the kind of quiet that required adjustment from people who were used to highway noise and motel HVAC systems and the constant low thrum of the world going badly somewhere.
You adjusted. It didn't take long.
Dean had acquired a roasting stick from somewhere — an actual one, long and metal-tipped, not a rogue twig — and was doing something deliberate and unhurried with it over the fire, getting the angle precisely where he wanted it before he even touched a marshmallow.
"You're treating this like a tactical operation," Sam observed from across the fire.
"There's a right way and a wrong way to roast a marshmallow."
"Dean. It's sugar and gelatin."
"There is a right way." He finally speared a marshmallow with the reverence of someone performing a task that mattered. "You want it golden, not black. Even heat distribution. You rotate — slowly — so the outside sets without burning before the inside has a chance to go soft. It's not complicated, it just requires patience, which I know is asking a lot."
"That last part was directed at me," you said.
"That last part was directed at both of you."
You were already eating your second s'more. You'd done yours the way you'd always done them — marshmallow directly into the flame until it was charred and a little dramatic, slapped onto a graham cracker with a piece of chocolate and flattened into structural compromise, no technique required. It was excellent. It was, you were not exaggerating, one of the best things you'd eaten in recent memory, and you said so.
Dean's expression was one of genuine, quiet suffering.
"You torched it. You just — you let it catch fire and then you ate it anyway."
"The outside caramelizes."
"That is genuinely not what that word means."
"It chars in a way that creates depth of flavor."
"You're eating a marshmallow, not writing a restaurant review." He pointed his roasting stick at you, then at Sam, who had somehow produced a perfectly golden marshmallow that he was assembling with the careful attention of someone constructing something important. "See. That's what you're going for."
Sam looked at his s'more and then at yours. He took a bite of his. He took a bite of yours when you offered it. He considered both.
"Hers is better," he said.
Dean threw a marshmallow at him. It bounced off his shoulder and disappeared into the dark.
"That's waste," Sam said.
You had your knees pulled up and your chin resting on them, and you were warm on the side facing the fire and cool on the side facing the trees, and above you the stars were getting serious about showing up, more of them than you usually saw through the light pollution of every city and interstate you spent most of your life passing through. You let yourself look at them for a while. Let yourself sit in the moment rather than moving through it.
Sam caught you looking up and tipped his head back too. You watched him find something to stare at.
"I forget how many there are," he said.
Dean glanced up briefly, then back at the fire, then up again for a second longer. "Still up there," he said, which was the closest he was going to get to agreeing that it was nice, and it was enough.
He'd gotten up to refresh his hot chocolate — actual hot chocolate, from a packet and a small camp-friendly kettle you'd packed specifically for this, which had earned you a look from Dean when he saw it being unpacked and then zero complaints once it was ready — and when he sat back down, he had that glint in his eye. The specific one. You'd seen it before research spirals and before he suggested something you were going to end up agreeing to.
"Scary stories," he said.
"Dean. You hunt actual monsters for a living."
"Which is exactly why I don't need to spend my time off thinking about them." He poked at the fire with a stick. "I get plenty of scared on the clock. Off the clock, I'm good."
"It's Sam's birthday," you said.
This was, in your experience, a fairly reliable override code. Dean looked at you. Looked at Sam. Did the jaw thing again.
"Fine," he said, with the energy of a man making a profound concession. "But I'm not going first. And if any of these are ones I've actually worked, I'm leaving."
He started with the vanishing hitchhiker — the classic version, framed carefully, the one that almost everyone knows but loses nothing from the retelling when the person telling it knows how to use silence. He paused in the right places. He let the moment where the girl was gone sit for a second too long before he moved on. Even Dean, who was staring deliberately into the fire with a neutral expression, didn't say anything.
Then the one about the hook. Then something that took a stranger turn — a story Sam said he'd come across while researching something else, about a small town in Oregon where, over the course of about three decades, people kept finding doors in the woods. Full doors, he said. Standing alone between the trees, unattached to any wall or structure. Old wood, most of them. Some with handles, some without. The stories about what happened varied depending on who you asked: some people said they'd found them and walked around them and gone home and been fine. Others said they'd opened them.
"What did they find?" you asked. You'd leaned forward without noticing.
Sam's mouth curved in a way that was doing something specific to the atmosphere around the fire. "That's the thing. Nobody could give the same account twice. Even the same person, asked on two different days, would describe something different. Some people said they'd seen a room. Some people said they'd seen outside — like the other side of the door was just more forest, except wrong somehow. Different light. Different trees. And some people said they hadn't seen anything at all. Just dark."
"Did they go through?" you asked.
"And they came back." He looked at you steadily. "But they weren't always great at explaining where they'd been."
Nobody talked for a few seconds. The fire popped. Something out in the trees made a single, short sound and then went quiet.
"Okay," Dean said, in a tone that was working hard at flatness. "That one's actually a little creepy."
Sam looked at him calmly. "Thank you."
Neither of them sounded fully committed to that position, which was your favorite possible outcome.
You went next. You started with the babysitter and the phone calls — the version you'd half-memorized from a book you'd found at a school book fair around age eight, which had absolutely wrecked you at the time and which you'd clearly never fully recovered from. Halfway through, you started adding things. A subplot that you invented on the spot about a neighbor who'd seen something in the yard two nights prior. A detail about a specific window. The ending that the book had given you had never felt satisfying, so you rewrote it, right there, out loud, and the new ending had two more turns than it needed and at least one plot hole that Dean identified immediately.
"Wait — if she'd already locked the back door, how did—"
"Atmosphere doesn't unlock doors—"
"I thought it worked," Sam said, which kicked off a spirited argument about narrative internal logic that somehow lasted twelve minutes and involved Dean using the word foreshadowing correctly in a sentence, which you were going to think about for a long time afterward.
He told his with studied flatness, like he was recounting something mildly inconvenient. No dramatic pauses, no lowered voice, no leaning forward. He just looked into the fire and talked. The story was about a man who dreamed every night of a face — not someone he knew, not someone he recognized, just a face, completely specific and consistent, same expression every time, same eyes, like a photograph he'd never taken. He saw this face for years. He got used to it the way you get used to a sound in the walls. And then one day he was walking down a street in a city he'd never been to before, and he passed someone on the sidewalk, and it was the face.
The man in the story stopped walking. He called out. The person with the face didn't stop — just kept moving through the crowd until they were gone.
Dean stopped talking. Poked the fire once.
"What happened to him after?"
Dean looked at you. "He never saw the face again. In his dreams or anywhere else. Just — gone. Like it had found what it was looking for." A pause. "Dad told me that one. He didn't say where he'd heard it."
The fire went about its business. An ember lifted and faded.
"Okay," you said, after a while. "That one was scary."
"It was a little scary," Sam agreed.
Dean's posture made a small adjustment that might have been satisfaction. "I said it wasn't even that scary."
"You said that," you agreed. "You were wrong."
"More hot chocolate," he said, standing up. "Who wants more hot chocolate."
Everybody wanted more hot chocolate.
The morning came in, and the sky was doing an extended meditation on whether or not it felt like raining. The light through the tent walls was the color of old paper, and when you unzipped the flap and stepped out, the air hit your face cold and sharp and clean, the way air barely ever managed to be.
Dean was already up. This was not surprising — he'd always had the soldier's habit of snapping awake at a particular hour whether or not circumstances required it, a reflex built from years of motel rooms and sleeping with one ear tuned to the door. He'd gotten the camp stove going and was standing over it with the single-minded attention he gave to anything he considered non-negotiable, watching a small pan of water heat up with his coffee cup already in hand.
He glanced over. "Eggs or oatmeal."
"It's an assessment of available options. Pick one."
He nodded. You sat down in one of the camp chairs, still warm from sleeping in your clothes, and pulled your sleeves down over your hands and watched the trees, which were very still. After a while Sam emerged from the tent, hair disordered, squinting slightly, carrying both of your sleeping bag liners for some reason that became clear when he draped one around your shoulders before sitting down. You pulled it tighter. He wrapped his around himself. Dean handed over coffees without being asked and went back to the eggs.
It was a good morning. Slow and undemanding. The birds were doing the thing they did at that hour, all high and clear and unhurried, and somewhere east of you the creek was doing whatever it had been doing all night without you.
"I want to find the creek," Sam said, to the middle distance, to nobody in particular, in the tone of a man stating a personal conviction.
"We will find the creek," you said.
"I know. I'm just saying."
Dean set a plate in front of each of you and didn't say anything, which was its own kind of warmth.
They argued good-naturedly about the fastest trail route for approximately four minutes before Sam won by being the one with the map, and then you were moving through the trees single file — Sam first, then you, then Dean, who had his hands in his jacket pockets and kept looking up into the canopy with an expression that wasn't quite relaxed but was trending that direction.
The woods in the morning were different. The horror-story quality that came with firelight and darkness was gone, replaced by something older and more indifferent, which was not better exactly but was somehow easier to be inside of. The ground was soft with old leaves and recent rain. The path was well-maintained enough to follow without effort, which left room to look at other things — the way the light came through at angles between the trunks, the shelf fungus on a fallen log like little orange shelves someone had installed for unclear reasons, the roots of an enormous old pine that had lifted clear of the ground and then grown back around the disruption over what must have been decades.
"Look at that," Sam said, stopping to crouch beside the roots.
"It's a red pine. Look at the root system — it's been growing like this for probably a hundred years minimum. See how it's redistributed the weight after something disrupted the soil here—" he pointed — "could have been another tree falling, could have been water erosion—"
"I'm just saying it's interesting."
"Everything has a history if you look at it long enough," Sam said, standing back up and brushing his hands on his jeans.
You looked at Dean. Dean looked at you. You both looked at Sam with the mutual understanding of people who had learned, over time, that this was simply how he was, and had found that it was a good way to be.
You came across a cluster of boulders a little ways off the path — someone had spray-painted symbols on them years ago, faded now and weathered, the paint beginning to flake. Sam climbed up to look at them before either of you could say anything, crouching on top of the largest one and examining them with the expression he normally reserved for manuscripts.
"No." He didn't sound entirely certain for about four seconds, and you and Dean both watched him carefully during those four seconds, and then he relaxed. "Just kids. Whoever painted this also painted a fairly detailed cartoon of a frog, which I think we can rule out as ceremonially significant."
You climbed up to look at the frog. It was excellent. Whoever had painted it had real affection for frogs.
The creek announced itself before you reached it — a sound that started as something you couldn't quite categorize and then resolved, as you came down a slight slope between two mossy banks, into the specific bright rushing sound of shallow water over rocks. It was wider than you'd expected, maybe fifteen feet across, running fast and clear over a bed of smooth stones in shades of brown and grey and the occasional pale white that caught the light when the water moved across it. The banks were muddy and root-threaded, leaning over the water with the gradual ambition of decades.
You stood on the bank for a moment and let it be what it was.
"There they are," Sam said quietly, and you followed his sight line to a pool on the far side of a midstream rock where the water slowed, and sure enough, the shadows moving below the surface were fish.
"We don't have gear," Dean said. His voice had gone thoughtful.
"I could try the bare hands thing," Sam said.
Dean was quiet for a moment. Then he handed his travel mug to you, crouched down at the bank, and began rolling up his sleeve with the specific energy of a man who has made a decision. "Alright. Show me your technique."
Sam's technique was, charitably, enthusiastic. He approached the pool in careful stages, moving slowly so as not to spook anything, got his hands in the water, went very still — and then lunged forward with what could only be described as optimism, and came up with nothing but creek water and an expression of genuine surprise.
"It was right there," he said.
"It was faster than you," Dean said.
"You did not almost have it."
"Contact is not the same as having it, Sam—"
Sam tried twice more with increasing inventiveness and zero success. Dean, who had been providing live commentary from a crouching position on the bank, eventually rolled up his own sleeve and attempted a method he described as superior and which produced results that were statistically identical. You filmed three seconds of his attempt on your phone before he noticed.
Sam slipped on a wet rock. It happened fast — his foot went sideways, he overcorrected, and then he was down on one knee in three inches of moving water with a look on his face that cycled through surprise, resignation, and then something helpless and reluctant that broke open into laughter before it had anywhere else to go. By the time he stood up, jeans soaked from the knee down, creek water sloshing in one boot, he was laughing fully, the kind that started somewhere deep and had no particular stopping mechanism.
Which set you off, because you'd been holding it for the better part of thirty seconds, and once you went Dean followed, the three of you standing at a creek in the middle of nowhere laughing at absolutely nothing and everything, and it occurred to you in a loose, uncomplicated way that this was what you'd been trying to give him. Not anything specific — not the creek or the fish or the story or the fire. Just this. Just the three of you with nothing requiring your immediate attention, with nowhere to be except here, with enough space and silence for something like this to happen.
Sam looked at you, still catching his breath, cheeks red from the cold and the laughing.
"Thanks," he said. Just that.
"Don't thank me yet," you said. "You have to walk back to camp in a wet boot."
"Worth it," he said, and he was still smiling.
The clearing with the ferns found you on the return trip — you came around a bend and there it was, a break in the tree cover that let the midmorning light fall straight down, and the ferns had caught it in a way that turned them gold and luminous, every frond lit from within like they were running on something other than sunlight. It was the kind of thing that only lasted a few minutes. The kind of thing that would be completely unremarkable in a photograph and was only what it was because you were standing in it.
Everyone stopped walking without discussing it.
Sam had his phone out after a moment. He took a few pictures of the ferns, and then turned to include you and Dean in the frame, and you noticed but didn't say anything until it was done.
He turned the phone around so you could see. You were standing side by side in the gold light, you and Dean, you squinting a little at whatever had caught your eye, Dean looking somewhere off to the left of the lens with his hands in his pockets — not posed, not performing anything. Just there.
"Send me that," you said.
"Me too," said Dean, and then seemed to register that he'd said it immediately and without hesitation, and added, "for, you know. Whatever."
"Yeah," Sam said. "For whatever."
The afternoon dissolved the way good afternoons do — gradually, without any single moment you could point to as the turn. You played cards at the picnic table outside the tent, an ongoing game of rummy that shifted rules by mutual agreement every few rounds until it had evolved into something that shared only a passing resemblance to rummy and mostly rewarded whoever was paying the most attention. Dean won, which he announced with more ceremony than was strictly necessary. Sam requested a rematch. You shuffled the cards and said nothing because some things were not worth getting in the middle of.
You went for a second, shorter walk in the late afternoon while the light was going golden, just around the perimeter of the campsite and along the first quarter mile of the ridge trail, far enough to feel the incline under your feet before you turned back. Dean found an impressive walking stick and kept it. Sam identified three different bird species by sound without seeing any of them, which you appreciated more than you let on.
Dinner was hot dogs, because Dean had lobbied for hot dogs with the quiet but absolute certainty of a man who had made up his mind, and you'd decided early on that the food decisions were his to make. He cooked them properly, rotating them over the fire until the skins split just slightly and the whole thing smelled incredible in the cold air. There were buns and mustard and a slightly battered bag of chips from the cooler, and the three of you ate without much conversation because there wasn't anything that needed saying and the hot dogs were genuinely very good.
"These are good," Sam said.
"Yeah they are," Dean said.
You ate two and felt completely justified about it.
The fire went down a little after dinner and Dean rebuilt it with the same careful attention as the night before, and the stars came back out the same as before but somehow easier this time, like you'd earned a longer look. You were all quieter tonight, the tired good kind, the kind that came from a full day spent doing nothing that mattered and everything that did.
"Happy birthday," you said.
It had been quiet for a while. Sam had been watching the fire, Dean had his head tipped back looking at the sky, and you'd been somewhere in between, letting your thoughts go soft and unspecific.
Sam looked over at you. "You already said that this morning."
"At, like, 7 AM when we were having coffee. That doesn't count."
"I'm saying it again. I'm allowed. There's no birthday rule against saying it twice."
He held your gaze for a moment. The firelight moved across his face, and he looked — not young exactly, because he'd never been quite that, but lighter. The things he carried were still there, they were always there, but they'd shifted back a little from the surface. He looked like he'd been given room to breathe.
"Thank you," he said. "Genuinely. This—" he gestured, small and encompassing "—all of this. I know it took some doing."
"It took a spreadsheet and some forward planning. Don't make me sound heroic."
"You made a spreadsheet?"
Dean had lowered his chin from his star-gazing and was watching the two of you. His expression was unreadable in the way it got when something had gotten somewhere past the usual defenses and he was quietly deciding what to do about that.
"Don't get mushy," he said, in the tone of a man who had already gotten a little mushy and was trying to preemptively manage this information.
"Your eyes did that thing at the ferns," Sam told him.
"I've already addressed the fern situation."
"There was smoke. From the fire."
"We were nowhere near the fire—"
"There is always, at any given time, smoke somewhere, Sam, the world is—"
"Okay," you said, and the word came out warm and soft and full of something you didn't name.
"We're here," you said. "That's enough. Can we just—" you looked at the fire, then up at the stars, then at both of them "—just be here for a minute?"
Dean looked at the fire. Turned his coffee cup slowly in his hands. "Yeah," he said. "Okay."
So you sat there, the three of you, in the dark and the light at the same time. The fire worked away at its own business. The trees stood where they'd been standing for longer than any of you would live. The creek moved east in the dark, making its small faithful sound, finding the route it had always found.
You thought about the spreadsheet, about the three weeks of careful planning, about a gas station cupcake in a parking lot and the way Sam had looked at it. You thought about all the birthdays that had gotten eaten by other things and all the ones that might yet, and decided, sitting there, not to spend any more time inside that thought than you had to.
You were here now. That was the thing you'd learned, and kept having to learn again, and kept managing to learn: now was the one you were inside of, and it was enough to be inside of it.
You fell asleep listening to the forest do its slow overnight work.
Dean was on your left, breath evening out in the gradual way of someone who slept like a soldier even when there was nothing to be a soldier about. Sam was on your right, longer than the sleeping bag was really designed for, one sock-footed ankle crossed over the other with the contentment of someone who had spent the day exactly right. The tent held its slight list, the rogue pole stubbornly committed to its own angle, and you'd decided somewhere around the second s'more that it was your favorite thing about the whole setup.
In the morning there would be a drive back. The world would be waiting with its usual collection of needs and urgencies, and you'd meet them the way you always did — together, imperfectly, making it work.
But the morning was the morning.
Happy birthday, you thought, into the dark, into the forest, at no one and everyone. We made it another one. That's something. That's really something.
And then you slept, and you didn't dream, and the night was long and quiet and good.
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