take residence | dean/benny for ashley
~2,000 words, pg-13, i'm a sucker for smoking/drinking together. set post 8.09
dean fits himself into benny's life and finds there could be peace in a safe journey.
“It’s kind of hilarious,” Dean says as he and Benny sit by the front of the boat late in the evening. Benny’s got a blood bag in his hand but he isn’t drinking it and Dean’s chewing on a ham sandwich that had been at the bottom of the cooler he had brought along.
It’s - different.
“What’s so funny?” Benny asks slowly, and he finally takes a sip from the blood bag. Dean watches him for a moment, trying to be inconspicuous and failing. Benny grins and him and licks his lips in a sort of obscene way before rubbing his beard with thick, calloused fingers.
Dean tries not to think too hard about those fingers.
“Well, I’m in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, God knows where, really, with a former pirate…who is also a vampire.”
Benny shrugs and gulps more deeply from the blood bag. Dean fails at not staring as Benny’s throat constricts with each swallow.
“I’ve seen stranger things. Like an angel in purgatory.”
“I didn’t say strange. Funny.”
Benny shrugs and then grins. “Your sandwich good?” he asks and Dean takes another self-conscious bite.
“Very.”
-
The boat is bigger than Dean could have imagined, nooks and crannies everywhere that allow for more storage and more movement than he had originally expected. They share a small room, though only Dean sleeps there, and he only sleeps a few hours. The cots aren’t the most comfortable but they do what they’re meant to, and it rarely rains, let alone gets stormy. There’s comfort in the room under the ocean, small and cozy. It belongs to them, more than anything.
They kiss in all sorts of different places, pressed against walls and locked together on low-level benches. They crack a mirror in the small bedroom when Benny pushes Dean by his chest into the wall, but there are no notable injuries.
So they kiss anyway, and there’s something about the rough copper taste of Benny’s tongue that sends a drilling shiver coursing through Dean’s entire body like a drug. When he feels it, he kisses even harder.
-
“You need to shave,” Benny whispers against Dean’s mouth early one morning, before the sun arrives on the horizon. “Look at that stubble.”
“You always have a beard,” Dean murmurs lazily, closing his eyes as Benny runs his thumb slowly over Dean’s bottom lip and then cups his jaw. “What’s wrong with it on me?”
“Nothin’, nothin’,” Benny whispers, leaning down and sucking on Dean’s throat. The erotic value beats just about anything Dean’s ever experienced before, and blood rushes hot to his face. By the way Benny’s fingers clamp around Dean’s wrist, Benny feels the movement too.
But all he leaves are soft bruises that fade before the next sunrise or sunset, and that drives Dean wild, more than anything Benny does with their bodies.
“Just…” Benny trails off as he shifts backwards and plays his fingers over Dean’s cheekbones and down to his chest. He rubs his thumb over Dean’s collar and then moves back up to his shoulder before tracing his hand down Dean’s arm, thumbing over his knuckles as a last bit. “I like you better clean shaven.”
Dean chuckles and raises his hand to knot his fingers in Benny’s hair. “You do, huh?” he mumbles and they grin at each other. “Well, you gotta knife, yeah? How about you fix me up?”
Benny gives Dean a sharp look - like he’s cautious.
“C’mon, I know I don’t have anything to worry about with you. You wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Hands slip Dean. Mistakes happen.”
Dean raises an eyebrow. “That’s not the point. You’re careful. You always have been. And you have more self-control than I’ve ever seen.”
Benny smiles and sits back. Dean slumps his shoulders and frowns. “I can’t make you, I guess.”
“I’ll do it. If only so you won’t fuck it up yourself.”
Dean smiles to himself.
-
Dean hefts himself up onto the sink like Benny asks, hands on the cracked counters.
“You’re not going to make me take off my clothes, are you?”
Benny gives him a straight glare and Dean grins.
“Still got that sense of humor, huh?” Benny murmurs darkly, pulling his knife from his pocket and slipping it open. It’s a straight razor, the kind that Dean’s seen Benny use before when he’s watched him shave. Benny sets the razor down near the end of the counter and picks up the shave soap from beside the sink and wets it and his hands. Dean scoots over to make a little more room before Benny rubs the soap over Dean’s growing beard, getting his face covered.
“This feels weird.”
“Shut up.”
Benny works slowly and meticulously, holding Dean’s face steady with one hand as he glides the razor down Dean’s cheek. Most of the tiny hairs end up on the counter because Dean is craning his neck, but some get stuck on the collar of his shirt and his pants. He doesn’t complain though yet - Benny’s still got a sharp razor in his hands.
The sensation is weird too, the slow movement of the blade over his face different than the way he’s ever done it. Shaving himself had always been for the sake of feeling well groomed, and no one else had ever done it for him. It had always been quick and he usually didn’t do a very good job. It had never been something he’d given much thought to.
And now there’s Benny, and Benny’s careful hands and careful breaths and his focused eyes. Dean’s afraid to breathe for fear of messing Benny up, and Benny treats Dean’s face like it’s a work of art or a sculpture. The attention is precise, and Benny’s eyes are trained to Dean’s jaw and cheeks in a way that would be unsettling if it didn’t also make Dean feel strangely good about himself.
Benny’s left hand fingers glide down Dean’s neck and then settle on his shoulder, holding him steady. Benny is meticulous with the razor, pausing every so often as if to check over his work and make sure he’s done everything as neatly as possible. There’s something about the way Benny focuses his attention so particularly that makes Dean want to shiver - he resists though, not wanting Benny to make any mistakes.
“There you go.”
Dean straightens himself out and rubs his hands over his cheeks. His face isn’t as smooth as an electric razor might work but it’s damn close - he grins a little and slaps Benny on the shoulder.
“Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
Benny’s voice is deep and throaty.
Dean could get used to it.
-
They end up reaching a port somewhere on the edge of New York. Benny tells Dean there’s nothing for them to worry about as he leads Dean down a mostly empty street until they reach the hotel room where Benny claims he has ‘contacts’. Dean starts to realize that he doesn’t know all that much about Benny - not really - and that he wants to know more.
In the yellow light of a cheap motel room lamp, Dean straddles Benny’s lap and pushes him down against the sheets, fingers tight against the nape of his neck.
Benny doesn’t complain.
-
If they’re running, they’re running quite leisurely. Sometimes Dean sits and watches Benny write in a journal, watches him organize, watches him sip at whiskey. All they do is move - from city to town to village to new city - but there’s something much calmer about what they’re doing. Benny says Dean deserves a break, but Dean isn’t so sure he’d call it that.
It’s exciting.
It’s also dead terrifying.
He wonders, vaguely, and sometimes outright and out loud when it hits him like terror, if Sam is still all right.
(He hasn’t been getting text messages anymore. The voicemails have stopped, too. And he hasn’t called back.)
Benny’s hand is warm comfort against his back, and he always says something reassuring like “He’ll forgive you,” or “He’ll be fine,” or “Everything’s gonna be okay,” and in that thick drawl, Dean can only believe him. Benny plays the part of an anchor, keeping Dean’s feet buried in the earth so he doesn’t disappear into the sky. There’s not much that keeps Dean grounded like this, but sharing shots in dirty bars and laughing and driving only at night works.
-
Occasionally, Dean forgets that Benny’s a vampire. That is until he watches Benny sipping from a blood bag casually leaning against the Impala, or rolling over and away from the sun if Dean accidentally pulls open a curtain to look outside during the daytime. Dean just adjusts to Benny’s habits, make them his own. He sleeps during the day, sometimes next to Benny and sometimes not, and at night they drive, they eat, they exist.
Benny nicks Dean during a shave. It had become a sort of ritual to sit Dean on the sink countertop and then to use a thin, sharp straight razor against his jaw and lower cheeks to get rid of whatever stubble grew there. It was something they shared and Dean had gotten used to it as another form of comfort.
“Ouch,” Dean hisses when the blade cuts him. It was a pretty good run, nonetheless - after all the times they had done this, Dean had only gotten nicked once. “Sorry man, sorry…”
Benny stares at him for a moment and his pupils get blown in a way that makes something in Dean churn nervously, but he doesn’t move. He just ducks out of the bathroom and Dean listens as he opens the motel door and walks out.
That time, Dean just sighs and finishes the job himself. By the time he’s done, the tiny little cut has already scabbed over, and he flushes the slightly bloodied pieces of toilet paper down the drain.
“It’s okay, you know,” Dean says after he steps out of the motel room, looking down the row of rooms and seeing Benny leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know I didn’t,” Benny scoffs. He inhales, and Dean breathes deeply.
“Since when do you smoke?”
“You’ve seen me smoke before.”
Yeah, Dean supposes he has. A few times, though. Never more than once in a day. Rarely even more than once in a week. He wonders where Benny picked up the casual habit.
“You’re different, Dean. And I didn’t spend much time with humans before you, anyway.”
“You were in Purgatory.”
“And Purgatory was different. That’s all I have to say. I’m still…getting used to it. Getting used to the control portions. It’s hard not to get…intense.”
Dean shrugs and leans against the bricks next to Benny. “But you’re good at it. You are.”
Benny imitates him, shrugging as well. “You don’t know me half as well as you’d like to think you do, Dean.”
The words strike a chord in Dean’s chest and he swallows, staring down.
“I’d like to. You know, I’d like to keep doing this. To spend time with you and…” He isn’t sure how to say it in a way that won’t ruin the atmosphere, although really, it’s already collapsing around him. “I want to just keep going.”
“You have a little brother back there.”
“I have a lot of things. But fuck that. This isn’t about that.”
Benny holds the cigarette out to Dean. “Take it if you mean it.”
