1.

The Winchesters spent Sam's thirteenth summer one side or another of the border, holed up in fly-specked shanty towns dead as dry riverbeds. Dad wouldn't let Sam go on hunts, and neither he nor Dean would say why. Dean got crazy wild toward the end, fighting local boys half the nights and sweet-talking local girls into bed the other half, hey pretty hey sweetheart ay linda. The old women would shake their heads at his bruised face, his reckless grin: Slow down, boy, or you ain't never gonna make old bones.

Sam finds the story out by accident nine years later, on the way to Nebraska. Dean's drowsing in the passenger seat, rambling on autopilot, and Sam almost misses it, most of his attention on the road. "Like fucking Arizona," Dean says, yawning, "you remember, Sammy? All those kids in the desert, kids and women. Dad pretending to be a reporter, calling in for the daily stats from Border Patrol." Dean has to pause for breath more often than usual. "Laying kids to rest, that's the worst. Fucking Arizona."

"Fucking Arizona," Sam says, when he's sure he can keep his voice steady.

"But we got the kids out this time," Dean mumbles on the edge of sleep, "got them out alive," and then his breathing slows. Dean's so easily tired out now, by talking, by limping out of the car at rest stops, by nothing at all.

Sam glances sideways, a compulsive check. Dean is slumped against the car door in a position that's going to give him a hell of a crick when he wakes up, and the exposed line of his throat is so vulnerable it hurts to look at it. Seventeen, he was seventeen that summer, a year younger than Sam was when he left for Stanford. Dad already thought Dean was perfect, and sometimes, though he'd never have admitted it, Sam thought so, too.

Never gonna make old bones.

Sam hits the gas. The sooner they get to this LeGrange guy, the better.

2.

It's unseasonably warm for fall and Bobby doesn't have central air, but the kitchen's got windows on three different sides. Sam sits at the kitchen table with all of the windows open and reads his father's journals until his head aches. He pours himself a cup of coffee in the morning and reads until he realizes he's sipping at coffee gone lukewarm; then he replaces the coffee with a sweating glass of ice water, and reads until some time after the ice has melted. Late afternoon he'll slap together a couple of sandwiches and go get his brother from the yard; he learned real fast to have the sandwiches done already, because if he leaves it a question Dean'll just say he's not hungry.

The first three days Sam left Dad's papers out, but Dean just stacked them together and moved them someplace away from the food.

They eat in silence. Sometimes Bobby joins them and then Dean and Bobby talk cars.

3.

He's playing poker with Dean and his dad. The bare bulb glares harsh on the worn cards, but Sam can hardly make out the design on their backs, the devil's trap fading black into a dark blue background. The wind rattling the cabin windows sounds like someone he doesn't know calling his name.

"Raise or fold, Sam," says Dad. He may be impatient, may not: Sam never could make out his father's tells.

Sam's got a shit hand, but that's not important. "I think I forgot to salt the windows," he says, confused, but he didn't, he can see the thick white line by the windows from here. "Maybe the door?"

"Saw you salt the door myself," Dad says. "Stop stalling, boy, raise or fold."

Dean's silent in his chair, his hands limp on face-down cards. Sam can smell the blood on his chest and mouth from here, and his eyes are dark as bruises in his colorless face.

"Fold," Sam says. The light bulb flickers, once, twice, and his father lays down his hand: a royal flush. Kings and queens blink yellow eyes and smile like demons.

On the backs of Dean's cards, the devils' traps unknit their geometries and rise up, swaying, like snakes' tongues testing the air. They trap Dean's hands and slither up his arms and around his throat, budding thorns, tightening like tripwires, and Dean stares through Sam like he can't even see him and makes the most awful sound Sam has ever heard, the smallest, softest choking sound, not a word, not even a gasp.

"Dean," Sam shouts, "Dean," and wakes up with a jerk, his mouth full of blanket and his heart pounding so hard he can't hear anything else. He rolls over and up fast, fighting pose, ready, ready, ready.

Moonlight slotted by blinds lays stripes across his brother's shoulder, his bent arm, his empty hand. Sam sits down, hard, and listens to Dean breathe. In the hospital, over their father's body, Dean had leaned on Sam for a moment, not even leaned, brushed up against him, shoulder dipping to meet shoulder; and Sam had borne a fraction of his weight for a moment, just a moment, before Dean moved away.

4.

This morning I realized that Dean hasn't spoken since Mary died.

For a while Sam can't lift his hand from the page to read the words he's covering. He never used to miss his mother, not really, not before Lawrence. He missed having a mother, but all he'd ever had were Dean's stories and Dad's. Pictures of his dad and an unrecognizable kid and some woman smiling; Dean could have told him they were strangers, the family of Dad's first marriage, gone somehow before Sam was ever born, and he would have believed it.

I didn't realize it myself, to tell the truth; Kate had to tell me. He's been doing whatever I tell him without argument and I just didn't notice he never answered back. I guess I haven't been talking much myself.

A few days later: Kate's been nagging at the boy to speak, but I told her let him be. He'll talk when he's ready. She made noises about a doctor, but another stranger prodding at him isn't what he needs.

The next page is a different kind of paper, a different color ink: Ways to detect a kitsune. His father had listed five and crossed one out later with a note dated 1992: apocryphal, disproven.

5.

Sam spent most of that last night in the hospital pacing by his brother's bedside and trying not to put his fist through a wall. It was the rawhead all over again, Dad gone Sam didn't even care where anymore. Dean had hoped for a call for weeks after he got healed, weeks, like he'd hoped for a call after Lawrence; Sam couldn't always tell when Dean was going to call Dad, but he could damn sure tell when he'd called. And now here was Dad's perfect little soldier, sacrificed to Dad's never-ending little war, and the general couldn't even show up for the funeral rites.

"Don't do this," Sam said, pleaded, "don't die on me, don't do this." Roundabout 2 a.m., he passed from pleading to threatening, like threats had ever worked on Dean. "Don't do this. Don't make me--don't make me do something crazy, Dean. I can find SueAnn's book, I can find that spell, I will, don't you make me do that, don't you die on me before I can do that, don't you dare, Dean." He gripped his brother's hand tight enough to grind the bones together. "Don't you dare, Dean."

He tried to ignore the sick conviction that it was already too late. For the past few hours, ever since he'd put down Dad's journal, he hadn't felt Dean's presence once.

They'd burned SueAnn LeGrange's grimoire. Sam had wanted to keep it for study, but Dean had insisted. They hadn't even needed to douse it with gasoline; paper and ink burn so much better than bone.

Dean poked at the ashes with a steel-toed boot. He didn't need to say anything: Sam could read the set of his shoulders, the line of his mouth.

We didn't know, Dean, Sam said very gently. There's nothing we could've done.

Yeah, Dean said, smearing the ash into a line, then knocking his heel against the ground twice to shake the residue off. Nothing we could do.

Sam met his questioning gaze with absolute steadfastness. He didn't even need to lie, although he would have. He wasn't thirteen anymore, listening to small-town grannies cluck their tongues over his big brother's foolhardiness; he wasn't young enough to still think his brother's life was romantic, or stupid enough to think there was nothing worse than living to grow old. Dean had been a sacrifice to Dad's quest his entire life, but damned if Sam was going to let him die that way.

When Dean woke up, the first time, the second time, it felt like someone had grabbed hold of Sam's heart and squeezed. He couldn't stop grinning, not even when Dean was brusque and short-spoken the first time, or openly worried the second. Grinning, hell--he was so full up with happiness he could hardly stop himself from laughing. For once, for just this once, everything was going to be okay.

6.

It takes five days to get through the journal, and then Sam tackles the voice mail; his father didn't list any passwords in the journal, but Sam brainstormed a list of the usual ones and if none of those work, well, he'll see. He gets as far as looking up the plan and model online, making the first call, pressing pound for the mailbox. But before you can press the pass code, you have to wait for at least part of the message to play. Sam can hear the intake of breath before the first word.

"This is John Winchester. I can't be reached. If this is an emergency, call my son Dean--"

Well, I've been trying, Dad, but right now Dean isn't picking up the phone.

He lets the message run through, then listens to the system static until the phone hangs up on him.