#max banes
They’re in bed together that first night and it’s maybe two thirty in the morning. Max is asleep, mostly, dozing naked on top of the blankets, but the mattress shifts as Sam moves beside him and he cracks open an eyelid in anticipation of another round. He could definitely stand to go again.
“Hey,” says Sam quietly. They left the bedside lamp on when they fell asleep and the yellow light of it is illuminating his face, the high angle of his cheekbones and the sharp line of his jaw. The choppy hair around his face is hanging in his eyes, and if Max were even twenty percent less tired he’d reach up to brush it away. As it is, though, his limbs are still sex-sleepy, heavy and soft. He lets his eyes fall closed.
Sam moves again and the mattress dips and Max is gonna, he’s gonna open his eyes, but before he manages to get the signal to leave his brain, he feels Sam’s fingertips brushing careful down his side. They trace around the messy star of a scar gouged above his hipbone, legacy of a hodag that he hunted up near Marquette. Around, Sam’s fingers go, around and around, tracing the line where shiny scar tissue meets skin. Max floats behind the dark of his eyelids, appreciating the willing touch all the more for the fact that before today, Sam’s body language was so defensively self-contained. His sudden unfurling into somebody soft and affectionate feels like a privilege, a glimpse at a secret self.
Sam’s fingertips walk across Max’s abdomen, leaving a goosebump trail of footprints behind. They brush, now, over the winding ridge under his ribs where a vampire straight-up stabbed him in the guts. That was a nasty one (blood bubbling up into his mouth, Alicia screaming).
Max can anticipate where Sam’s hands will wander next: the patch of bleached, blistery skin across his shoulder that got hit with a dark witch’s curse that even his Mom couldn’t mend. The witch had died in the confrontation and that was it, Mom had told him, no living blood so no magic, no cure. It had been painful, the scar emerging through a slow burned corrosion that kept him sweating for three nights after, biting down on his pillow so as not to let on how it hurt. Sam’s touch when it comes is soft, and unexpected. Where Max was anticipating the dry skin of Sam’s open palm, he feels the warm damp imprint of his lips.
That does prompt him to open his eyes.
“You into the battle wounds?” he asks, and Sam lifts his head to look at him.
He smiles, embarrassed. “Yeah. No. I don’t know.” He kisses the smaller scar on Max’s forearm where a shifter got too happy with a knife. “Into you, mostly.”
Max rolls his shoulders against the mattress, slides his feet to shimmy his hips. “Of course. I’m irresistible.” Sam has Max’s hand between his, now, thumbs running across the hundred tiny scars that disfigure it. Max closes his eyes again, the better to feel the sensation.
Eyes closed also feels like the right condition under which to throw out the question that’s been on his mind. He’s been wondering, after all, since this evening when Sam stripped off - wonders now, really, if he should say it, but fuck. They’re in bed and Sam feels open in a way that he hasn’t. “You, uh, you don’t have many yourself,” he says.
Given that he’s a hunter and that he likes to have sex, it’s maybe surprising how few other hunters Max has slept with. They’re not his type, mostly, too macho and brash, too dumb. (That’s where they’ll even admit being into men.) Sam’s different. He has substance. He also has the clearest skin Max has ever seen on a hunter: not clear like, he drinks cucumber water for breakfast, clear like he doesn’t carry a trace of the job. You don’t have to fuck a hunter to notice their missing fingertips, or the scars over their cheekbones, the raw skin around their wrists. Sam has none of that. And Max has heard the legends; it isn’t from staying indoors.
Sam clears his throat, a tight anxious sound. “I,” he says. “I, uh.”
Max turns his hand to catch Sam’s fingers, rubs his own thumb over the mound of Sam’s. He keeps his eyes closed. He’s making space. “You don’t need to tell me,” he says.
“No, it’s fine,” says Sam, unconvincing. “I have, a, uh. Our friend Castiel. He’s got the, uh, the healing touch. So.”
“Nice,” says Max carefully, dragging out the sound. “Good as new, every time.” He cracks his eyelids to let in the light but he’s careful not to look at Sam.
“Yeah. I don’t know,” says Sam. His hand is still in Max’s but it’s tense, unmoving, and Max wonders if he’s fucked up, ruined the mood. After a long few minutes, Sam draws his hand away. Max is just cursing himself for an idiot when he feels Sam’s touch at his hip again, his fingertips circling the hodag scar. “This is you. It’s your life. It’s good to be able to touch that.”
Max lets himself look. Sam is gazing serious down at Max’s stomach, his profile outlined dark against the glow from the room behind. Sam’s nose is possibly the best nose Max has ever seen. Just the pointed tip of it is better than the whole of any other guy Max has banged in the last two years. Every bit of Sam’s body is attractive. It’s sad that he doesn’t seem to like it much.
Sam turns, then, catching his eye, and Max wonders what to say. He doesn’t want to intrude. Sam has boundaries, and he can respect that. But.
In the event, Sam solves the problem, shrugging off his serious mood. He flashes his dimples instead. “Could touch something else, if you like.”
“Go on, then,” Max says. “If you insist. Be nice and I might even let you hold it.”
(He thinks, one day we’re going to talk about this.)
Valentine’s 2018 ficlets: #1: Sam/Max
It’s not until Dean rolls up the stairs and out of the front door in a drift of cologne that Sam notices the date.
“Don’t wait up!” Dean yells. The door clangs shut.
Sam rolls his eyes and looks back down at the book in front of him. But his concentration’s broken. Valentine’s Day. It’s dumb, but he usually treats himself to something like the opposite of Dean’s night out; a bath, maybe a glass of whisky. A book that isn’t about lore.
Last year, he spent the evening having phone sex with Max. It had been the culmination of a lot of flirty texting that kicked off when they met in the November, and it had, Sam thought at the time, been an unexpectedly satisfying solution to the fuckton of issues that have kept him mostly celibate for the last five years. They’d followed it up with some more heavy flirting but then, two weeks later, had come that last disastrous meeting that had left Max with no mom, no sister and (quite justifiably) no wish to see Sam ever again, it seems. Sam messaged him a couple of times in the months right after, but wasn’t surprised by Max’s decision not to reply. Now, though, remembering how different things were twelve months ago, he feels a little twist of guilty responsibility. Sam knows how shit can get when you lose somebody you care about. Max is only a kid, really. Sam hopes that he’s doing okay.
He reaches for his phone, flips it a couple of times in his hand. Hey, man. Long time no text. I was just thinking about last year. How are things? If you ever want to talk, I’m here.
He almost doesn’t send the message, worried about intruding; worried about stirring a nasty nest of memories that Max, more than likely, has been working hard to forget. But after the whisky (and the whisky, and the whisky) it starts to feel like a better idea, and once he’s sent it there’s no going back.
Later that night, he’s startled out of a fuzzy, headachy doze by his phone buzzing loud over the wood of his bedside table. His first thought is that Dean’s managed to lock himself out, but it’s a message from Max. Four messages, actually. Sam must have slept through the rest.
They’re pictures; shirtless pictures, which is nothing new. Max’s skin is pale blue-green, flash-illuminated. There are people in the background, a club. In the first picture Max is gazing fiercely into the camera, shoulders jostling at the edge of the frame. By the fourth, he’s full on making-out with a curly-haired Latino guy, and there’s somebody else’s arm around his waist.
Sam’s stomach tightens, uncomfortable. He doesn’t go in for this kind of shit. He doesn’t find it sexy, or fun. He puts the phone back down on the table, tugs the blanket tight around his shoulders and tries to go back to sleep. It’s difficult.
After a while, maybe twenty minutes, the phone starts to ring. Max looks up at him from the screen. It’s eight minutes past three.
When Sam doesn’t answer, Max just rings back. Eventually, “Hey,” says Sam, sleep-hoarse.
There’s music, loud. Max is saying something, but Sam can’t hear him.
“What?” he says, “What?” and finally there’s a bang and the music muffles down to a beat in the background, oomf oomf oomf.
“Got your message,” Max says, slurred.
“Got yours. You’re having fun.” That’s not fair. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, I’m. No. Not really. I.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
There’s a long pause.
“I fucked up, Sam, I think I fucked up.”
“Okay. It’s okay.” Sam knows about that, about fucking up when you feel fucked-up. “We can—“
“Sam, no. I didn’t. I fucked up real bad.”
Okay. “Where are you? Do you want–”
The music sounds loud again, a door swung open.
“Hey,” says another voice, laughing. “Hey, Max’s friend.” Then Max again. “I gotta go. Don’t, uh. I’ll call you back.”
He hangs up.
Sam lies awake for the rest of the night. Dean gets in at 10 the next morning, dishevelled and happy, ribbing Sam about the wild night he spent alone with his own right hand.
Sam calls Max every day for the next week. Then he stops calling. He can take a hint.
(A coincidence, then, that three weeks later Dean walks into the library to find Sam gazing at his laptop, pale. Gas station security footage flickers onscreen. A black Jeep, fuelling up. And in the driver’s seat…
“Aw, man.” Dean says. “Shit.”
“Yeah.”
Max fucked up.)
