or; you dedicate yourself to the study of dean's back
⊱ warnings / tags: gn!reader, pre-established relationship, back kisses, vulnerable dean, tooth-rotting intimacy, fluff, faint allusions to smut
He can’t get a hold of himself. He’s sure of it, because it should be easy to roll sideways and let you fall onto the mattress, and when you gawk, to flash you a smile and say he can’t have you crushing one of his best assets. He’ll get an unimpressed look, but you’ll move to sit beside him and pick up the conversation in a preferably more normal way.
But what’s left of his will seems to be limp, dissolving away with the rest of his body.
You’re talking. One of your theories for the case. The only remaining tether he has to the real world, which is taking him his darndest to parse through and conjure up answers to so you’ll keep going. If you stop, his senses will take over, and they’re already clamoring for him to just let go and feel this. He frowns into the pillow as another soft quake races down the pathway of his spine, trailing after careful fingers until your palm is just inches from his waistband. The chill of your skin brings down the burn of the sun to a gentler warmth. You say something about secondary locations that slips right past him.
He’s gone loony. You’re just theorizing, and he’s dying, hyperconscious of the sound of your breathing, the way your weight is pressing on top of his ass, your thighs caging him in. Your hands; mixing in with his warmth, switching between flat presses and featherlight traces – ever so gentle.
"--y’s and a good old stake, shouldn’t be too hard for us," is the only bit he hears when your voice comes back, and his eyes fly open in alarm.
“Huh? Uh– yeah,” he clears his throat. Totally listening. He shouldn’t have taken off his shirt. “‘Course it won’t. We’ve ganked worse bastards.”
"Well, yeah. But these things can be a little sly."
“Mmh,” he grunts. “Nothin’ we can’t handle.”
He’s back to merging with his pillow, but he can sense the smile on your face. You’ve sat back up to simply rest your palms against the dips of his waist, eyes mapping out each plane, bruise, scar, and freckle into some little constellation of its own.
It’s pretty, and sort of a representative picture of Dean. Not the first time you’re graced with the sight, but not like this – hands poring over his every mark of skin, which you’ve always longed to do but deemed a long shot. Not that he’s shy – this is Dean, but you knew it was simply a sort of territory he tended to leave uncharted, and you were the last thing from a pushover. Not with him, and not when it took so much to even get here.
He seems to be letting you have it right now, though.
You’d draw it; if you could ask as such without pushing your luck. You’re still half-expecting Dean to clamber out of your grip any second, so while he’s not actively wrestling for an out, you could commit this to memory.
You’re being awfully quiet.
Dean has half the mind to turn over and figure out why the hell that is, but that position would make you slip off of him just as he’s starting to warm up to his newfound fate, and he doesn’t think he can manage a redo.
He lets out a muffled grumble of your name, and you hum, thumb tapping against him.
You blink, having at some point surmised his acceptance as exhaustion. Guess you’ll have to scratch that.
“Oh,” you murmur, suppressing a smile. “Okay. Um..”
You look back down and pause over a particularly jagged line near his left shoulder blade – a knife wound from a ghoul attack you helped patch up. That was the very first time he’d given in to your aid. Your lips twitch, gently pressing it.
"Yeah," he said, angling his face sideways. "Got that in Nebraska. Stung like a bitch.”
You can’t help but sneer as you trace the scar. “Sam had to give up his new flannel,” you remind him – just because you know Sam still gives him shit for it – and it pulls a frown out of him. “And you still bled onto the carseats. Funny that you seemed pretty convinced you could’ve stitched it yourself.”
Dean scoffs, no matter that it had taken him a full hour just to get the needle through. Still. How many people can say the same?
“Because I could. I think I know what I can and can’t do, sweetheart, and that was on–”
His eyes shoot open, and he cranes his neck enough to be met with your smug smile. He returns it with a sardonic one. “Hilarious,” he mutters before plopping back down – not his fault, your free hand started stroking his hip. “I could’ve. Only reason I let you do it was ‘cause you and Sammy wouldn’t stop pestering me ‘bout it.”
Dean’s rebuttals die at the tip of his tongue when you press a kiss over the old wound – immediately stiffening under you – and you freeze, hands flying to your sides in an instant. “Shit– uh.” Great. Good going, idiot. Of all the times you’ve been able to hold back, this is the one you can’t manage?
You must be hearing things.
The surprise is palpable as your gaze snaps down to him, and Dean swallows.
“....Do that again,” he says the words quietly. A mumble against cotton, looking almost bashful.
You remember then that this is much tougher for him than you. It should’ve scared him off. You’ve got a dozen reasons why. None of which supported the plausibility that he’d be willing to try. But here you are.
Your mouth snaps shut into a smile. Dean’s fingers twitch, about to ask why you’ve gone so silent again when he feels a peck on the same scar from earlier.
He feels you shift your weight before pressing another tentative kiss to its left.
Only then do you continue. His eyes flutter shut as you pepper more upon his shoulders. Across, along, then moving down. You don’t skip a thing: old burns, scratches, cuts. Every freckle, mole, and sunspot.
At some point, Dean lets himself go.
It’s difficult not to. Not when you’re taking your sweet sweet time, particularly with the scars. When a whine isn’t jumping to his throat, he makes sure to get a breath in on the intervals you place before every kiss – at times with a run of your thumb – as if recalling the memories associated with it, and wondering at the ones you hadn’t been there for.
This doesn’t mean it was easy.
He’s spent the past hour doing the opposite, after all, afraid of what it would do if he gave in – because this is a tenderness he’s longed for all his life, rushing over him on a random Thursday afternoon with no warning.
“Jesus,” he breathes out, gripping the sheets beneath him when you find your way back to his spine – languid, lingering kisses along where it curved. You had to crawl down – chest now propped on the back of his thighs, so the hand resting on his loin becomes his new tether. This time, he feels your smile when it curls up against him.
He doesn’t get why you’re like that with him. Gentle, in your quieter moments together. Eager, even with the most mundane, tedious shit he could possibly think of. Stakeouts, beer runs, waiting for Sam, sitting on the sink when he shits. His friggin back.
Well. You do like him. That’s why he’s here. That’s why you’re here, but sometimes he doesn’t get that part either. Because you seem to almost savor Dean. And he’s still learning how to take without knocking anything over.
His last spot a little further below, except this one wasn’t exactly battle-bourne. He feels you kiss where he’s pretty sure your teeth bared into him a couple nights ago.
You pat it with a contented hum, sounding way too pleased with yourself. “Still holding up.”
“‘m still gonna get you back for that.”
A snort. “And I’m still waiting,” you say, moving back up to lay atop his slack figure and rest your cheek close to his shoulder. Which part he’s groaning about, you’re not sure. Both of you seem too content to care.
“Do you really still think you could’ve sutured yourself that day?”
“What, the Nebraska thing?” he huffs, pulling at the bedsheets. “Yeah. I told ya, I was halfway through m’first stitch when y’an Sam came barreling in.”
You smirk. “You were flailing around like a highschooler with gum on his back.”
“At least gum’d be easier to get off my back.”
“And yet you didn’t when you had the exact, literal chance.”
The headboard receives his unimpressed glower.
You know something’s wrong when he doesn’t jab back, but then Dean moves. You’re tossed to the mattress with a yelp, smugness wiped clean off your face, mirrored instead on the face of a towering Dean.
He raises a brow as you catch your breath. “Looks like you spoke too soon, huh?”
“Not really. That was a reactive decision, kind of a little late for it to pr–”
Because you’ll drag this into a debate for your own cruel fun, Dean stops you with a kiss. You melt into it all the same, even if your grin refuses to cease – thankfully, it spurs him on.
“You’re a fucking pain,” he says into your mouth, pulling away only to press a kiss to your temple. “You know that?”
“I revel in that fact, actually.”
Your grin only widens when he scoffs.
One of these days, he’ll muck up the nerve to tell you to at least warn a man before you do things like that, or say that he doesn’t revel in that fact.
For now, he’ll let his face slip into the crook of your neck and let your hands lull him to sleep.
｡𓃉 a/n: i. (crawling through the dirt) fi..nally .. (wheeze of agony) got it done . dean's back is so smooth and clean in the show and to that i holler in objection. likely for the same understandable reason they didn't end up giving him tattoos but. still. enjoy the sprinkles of sub!dean.
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