Archive of Our Own

That first night, Dean drives like the devil is chasing them, white knuckling it out of Palo Alto, out of Santa Clara county, as if he needed to clear the entire state. 

“Are you sure?” Dean asks, before he sets off, watching Sam’s profile, looking for cracks. “We can get a hotel in the area.” 

“Just drive.”

He hates it, seeing Sam like this: Sam’s face is painted dark with soot and grief, and there’s not a damn thing Dean can do about it. Dean knows that look almost better than the back of his own hand. Dean has seen that look on his father’s face his whole life—there it is again, on his baby brother. 

Somewhere outside of Daly City, Sam asks him to pull over. Sam, who has said almost nothing since he said let’s get to work —Dean would never voice it aloud, but Sam scares him right now. He would almost prefer Sam to be weeping and crying, red rimmed eyes, sobbing in a ball, than this hollowed out, quiet shell, who only communicates in grunts and nods. He obeys the request. 

Dean pulls off to the side on a bland, nondescript California road, the edges lined with flowering bushes. Sam leans over and heaves, throwing up. Then silence, the sound of breathing, heavy and gasping. Dean doesn’t even want to turn the radio on. 

“She made me cookies, you know,” Sam says, after a long stretch of quiet. 

“I’m sorry, man,” Dean says, squirming uncomfortably. 

The sympathy in his voice is real, as sincere as it gets, but for all they’ve encountered and comforted victims throughout their lives, this is brand new. Sam was too young to ever mourn their mother; it was something that always felt like both a blessing and a curse, desperately unfair. Sam has never lost like him or their father, and now that he has, he’s not sure what to do with this new version of his brother. He’s not sure what he wants from him, and he’s scared he can’t provide it. 

“Just drive.”

*

Dean ends up blowing Sam when they get to the hotel. 

He can’t explain how it happens. He thinks if he asked Sam, he wouldn’t be able to either, just that it does. Just that they’re like this. He’s all messed up and broken on the inside, his wiring frayed. 

Dean checks them in, at some seaside motel, the parking lot full of empty spaces—liminal, in between roads, in between civilization, an out of way space north of Palo Alto. It was close enough to return once the sun was high in the sky, and far away enough so the bright lights of the city were nothing but a twinkle. The sign they passed a while back said Corte Bay, but the bay just looked like black sea in this darkness. The motel sat oceanside, not beach side—there was sand and rocky terrain, strange green plants that looked like alien flora in the darkness. Nowhere to walk and roll their toes between the sand, just rocks lining the coastline. This was not a place for surfers, only observing the ocean and the crashing waves at a distance. 

Sam always loved the ocean—oceans and deserts growing up, that was his thing; they both hated snow, but Sam liked the extremes in weather, tropical or arid climates, like it was some vacation from their lives. He got a book in the third grade about desert plants and they drove through Arizona and New Mexico with Sam rattling off a whole lists of them, like some nerd version of I spy. 

Mojave Yucca. Stinging Nettles. Night blooming Cereus. 

Right now, Dean doesn’t think Sam cares where they are. He could have taken them to Narnia and he wouldn’t give a shit. 

“Hey,” Dean says, opening the passenger door, tossing the key at Sam. “We’re in 3A,” he tells him. 

The key hits Sam’s thigh, then bounces gently onto the footwell, and his brother barely reacts. For a moment, he thinks Sam may just refuse to move. Dean starts to mentally debate whether or not he should just carry Sam to their room (he used to be able to do that, but he’s so big now, in ways Dean will never admit to liking), when Sam finally glances at him, his eyes dark and red rimmed, a far-away stare he’d seen on his father so many times, it makes Dean’s insides clench up. 

Everything he does, Dean can’t help, but feel like he’s fucking it up, like he’s doing something wrong. He drove Sam away, and now he’s driven his father away. He may as well burned Jess on the ceiling himself. 

Sam must hate him, wouldn’t he? How could he not?

Without a word, Sam gets out of the car and heads to their room, brushing past Dean. 

Dean kicks off his shoes and gets ready for bed, trying so hard to think of something to say, but nothing is adequate. I’m sorry, he said back in front of the burnt down apartment, it wasn’t your fault, you know that right ?

There is no band-aid for this. 

Dean’s about to crawl into bed, but Sam doesn’t do any of their bedtime rituals that Dean got so used to growing up. It makes him feel like he’s tripped over his own feet, it’s so startling. He flops on the bed in the hoodie. He still has soot on his face and Dean wants to clean him up, wash him off, take care of him the way he’s always had, but he doesn’t even know if he’s allowed to look at him. 

Sam just sits there, staring at the ceiling. Dean wonders if he can still see Jess. 

The thought of his brother still reliving Jess’ death upsets Dean so much that he doesn’t even offer to help—he just does it. He can’t count the amount of times he’s cleaned Sam up, the amount of times he’s dressed his wounds or patched him up. The first thing he does is pull off his shoes, letting them hit the ground with a soft plop, then he takes off Sam’s hoodie, unzipping it off his body. 

“Lift up,” he says, and Sam follows his commands without a thought, falling back into an easy, smooth rhythm, back when he was five and he let Dean take care of him. He doesn’t have any other clothes for Sam to wear, so he’s just going to have to let him sleep in his underwear. 

He waits for Sam to tell him to stop, but he doesn’t. He tugs his t-shirt off him, and Sam doesn’t tell him to stop. He unzips his jeans and starts the slow drag of them off his body, and Sam doesn’t tell him to stop. 

Dean doesn’t look away from Sam’s underwear, but he doesn’t look directly at it either, trains his eyes to just not see it as he roves over it, not thinking of Sam nearly naked in front of him. His voice catches in his throat—he doesn’t think about Sam and his bare thighs, and his black boxer briefs, or how snug they look on him. Dean’s about to fold Sam’s jeans, when his brother finally reaches for him, grabbing his wrist, tugging him close. 

“Dean,” Sam rasps. His voice sounds strangled in the darkness and with no light between them, it’s all Dean has to anchor him. “Dean, can you?” he asks. His legs shift, first sign of deliberate movement, of thought behind actions beyond rote routine. The motion draws Dean’s eyes to his crotch. 

Dean doesn’t wait for Sam to finish his sentence. He doesn’t force Sam to blurt it out. 

“Yeah,” he says and he climbs up on the bed with his brother, leaning over Sam. He places one palm on Sam’s belly, feeling the light trail of hair there, leading down past his underwear. His skin is tan, all that California sun keeping him healthy and glowing. 

“Yeah,” he says, resisting the urge to kiss him, to take his mouth in his and lick his tears away, to touch Sam in the way he used to all the time. Instead, Dean presses his mouth against Sam’s belly, pressing a wide open mouth kiss to his body there. His skin is hot, his stomach fluttering with his touch. He’s so sure Sam is going to think better of this and push him away, but he doesn’t. Dean’s belly throbs with a desire he thought he’d extinguished out of himself over the years.

It’s just a habit—muscle memory, buried deep in the back of his skull where no one could excavate it. 

He doesn’t ask—he should ask, but when he reaches to pull down Sam’s underwear, hooking his fingers in the hem, his brother doesn’t say no. He watches, on his elbows, as Dean methodically pulls down his underwear, fabric scraping over his skin, until they’re down by his ankles. 

It’s easy to pull out his cock. It’s easy to lean down and wrap his lips around it, Sam’s cock fitting into his mouth like it belongs there. Sam’s hand goes into his hair, and this is the first thing that’s all wrong: Dean isn’t twenty-one anymore and his hair is cut regulation short, no longer giving it any length like he used to when he was a kid. Sam doesn’t have much to grip, to hold on to. Dean moans around his cock like it feels good for him, too, tongue lapping around the head, all hollowed out cheeks. The thick head of Sam stretches out his lips, but Dean’s good at this, relaxing his throat, settling and sinking into the feeling of Sam filling him up. 

He can’t bear to look up at him, can’t bear to see Sam’s face looking down at him. 

He sucks his brother off sloppy and slick. Dean forgets everything that’s good and decent about him, and he lets himself enjoy the hot pulse of Sam’s cock, the way it fills up his mouth, the hard press of Sam’s fingers against his skull that tell him Sam wants this, he needs this. There’s a longing in his movements and shaking caresses—his brother makes a gorgeous moan, low and throaty, whenever Dean sucks or licks under the head of his cock, a sound he savors and wants to drown in.

When Sam comes, hot and spurting down his throat, with a muffled groan above him, Dean finally glances up, raising his eyes. Sam has an arm on his face, pressing his forearm into his eyes, just so he doesn’t have to see what they’re doing. That hurts, stings, makes Dean’s insides clench into an ache. 

Dean can’t see his face. The curve of his mouth is sweet and pink-lipped, parted open mouth, tongue pressing against the dip of his bottom lip. His hair is just a halo around him, half covered and obscured—he’s beautiful, even here, with the halo of grief around him. 

Dean’s going to hell for that. He’s going to hell for a lot of things.  

After, his brother doesn’t say anything. Dean goes back to his bed. He half expects Sam to chase him down to reciprocate, the way they used to when they were kids, but Sam sort of just deflates on the bed, turns away from him, and falls asleep. Dean is glad for it. 

After, Dean feels like a monster. The taste of his brother’s come in his mouth, his own cock throbbing in his jeans for his little brother, and Jess isn’t even cold in the ground yet. 

*

They don’t talk about it in the morning.

Dean brushes his teeth and he reminds Sam to do the same, like he’s four years old again. Sam says nothing, eyes dead, but he walks to the bathroom on autopilot nonetheless. He uses Dean’s toothbrush, because neither of them thought to pick one up after all of Sam’s belongings went up in smoke.

It’s fine. It’s not the first time. 

“There’s going to be a funeral,” he says when he steps out of the bathroom, numbed out voice with no tenor, looking at Dean but looking through him, more like it. 

It’s almost like it didn’t happen. Maybe it didn’t. 

“Do you want to go?” Dean asks, then kicks himself. Stupid question. Of course he does. 

Sam doesn’t point this out. Sam stares at Dean like he can see all his ribs, his bones, through the skin. Like he can pick him apart, Dean’s skin crawling under the stare. It’s unsettling, the way the intensity of gaze doesn’t quite match the empty look in his eyes. 

“I was ring shopping,” he says. “I was going to—I wanted to.” Sam stops and starts his sentence over and over, like he’s trying to remember that Jess is a past tense now. “I was trying to find a nice ring I could afford, I wanted to do it after the interview, if it went well—”

“You were going to propose,” Dean says, trying to keep his breathing steady. Each word strips Dean open, just hearing it. Like his chest may cave in. 

You were going to propose, you were going to get married, Dean can’t picture it, he can’t see Sam— his baby brother, the boy he’s known forever, the kid who's knuckles he kissed, the cuts he stitched up, the kid he read bedtime stories to— as an adult, married, ring on his finger, respectable and civilized. 

This whole life he had planned with Jess—a spring bloom cherry blossom of a perfect life—with Dean cut away from it. 

He clenches his fingers on the ratty motel comforter, trying not to make a fist, ignoring the burning of his eyes. “I’m sorry, Sam,” he says. The words feel inadequate, hollow. 

He used to be better at this, comforting his brother. It came naturally as breathing, always there for Sammy. It’s like he’s forgotten a whole language they once shared. 

Sam doesn’t ask for comfort. He just crumples on the bed, stares up at the ceiling. “I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

*

After getting back with Dean, Sam starts watching his brother sleep again. 

It wasn’t on purpose. He hasn’t been sleeping well—his head is filled with smoke and ghosts and flames. At three am, he can still smell Jessica: the acrid scent of burning hair and roasted flesh, clinging to the back of his throat—then he’s awake and the room is a deep blue-dark and Dean is in the motel bed next to him. It’s such a relief, he feels like he’s being punched in the guts, like he’s a kid again, waking up from perpetual nightmares, the sight of his brother chasing all his head monsters away. 

Sam was never a very good sleeper. At Stanford, he had insomnia for three months before something in him finally settled in his bones, before his body accepted this is where he lives now. Jess never knew the insomniac Sam, except on days before finals, where it was cute how much he pushed his body to study. 

Sam lays there, head turned to the side, staring at his brother. Dean is stripped down to a shirt and boxer briefs that cling too snugly to the shape of his thighs. The blanket and comforter are pooled entirely on top of him, blocking most of Dean from view, but he can see his sleeping form gently rise and fall, confirming he’s still alive. He’s face down (ass up), head tilted to the side, sticking out from under the blankets. Sam can see the bridge of his nose, the slope of his cheekbones, the tops of his dark blonde hair, almost brown in the darkness. He has one arm snaked under a pillow, fingers no doubt clutching a knife or some sort of weapon—a new paranoid habit he picked up with Dad, one that didn’t exist before Sam left. His brother’s breathing is soft, but sounds loud to Sam’s ears, the only sound in the motel room.

Sam shifts, just a slight adjustment, and mattress creaks, but Dean does not respond to the noise, his body doesn’t stir. Sam keeps staring, finding comfort in the shape of his brother under the blankets. He’s different than he was when he last saw him—bigger, broader somehow, or maybe he just filled out more—but the sight of him still brings the same sense of safety that he always carried with him in childhood. 

He didn’t mean to pick up this habit again, of constantly watching Dean, but it’s like a muscle memory, some weird instinct that shouldn’t come so easy for him. 

He used to wake up with Dean next to him, and his own dick hard, Sam too sleepy to do anything about it, the shame and hot flush of embarrassment not hitting him until morning. Used to wake up with his cock pressed against his thigh and still Dean didn’t wake, even if the slightest movement made Sam shoot off on his brother, and Dean still didn’t wake. 

When he got too old to sleep in Dean’s arms, he’d wake up on the other side of the room, find Dean in the bed next to him and watch him until he was lulled back to sleep again. Each time, the feeling of certainty, of safety, stayed with him. 

He could set his heart to Dean’s circadian rhythm. Sam wonders, if they were girls, if their periods would sync, if they’d bleed the same time every month, if their hormones would align just right that way, cycles merging into one another. He likes that thought. 

Sometimes, he wonders if Dean would wake up if he touched him in the middle of the night—Sam has had fantasies for years about putting his mouth to his lips, running his hand down Dean’s chest, down his stomach, between his legs—what would be the breaking point? How far could he push his luck? The entire line of thought makes him feel like a monster, but he’s felt that way since he started to have sexual thoughts, since he hit puberty, his mind buzzing a mile a minute with the image of Dean asleep and naked never leaving him, the possibility always just hanging out of reach. 

He never told Dean that. 

There’s a lot of things he’s never told Dean. 

*

It's a closed casket. For obvious reasons. 

Dean doesn’t want to go to the funeral, but he doesn’t tell Sam that, so he goes, like a dutiful brother. He’s not entirely sure how to navigate all this grief: his father’s grief is different than Sam’s. Dad is an infected wound that never healed, a constantly aching scar, a phantom limb that would never go away, but you got used to it, or at least, Dean did. He got to know all the twinges and aches and bad dark days, the flare ups. 

Sam is on fire in his grief. Incandescent and completely shut down, like something in him died with Jess. 

Dean can’t stop thinking about Dad. About mom. About how unprepared he is for any of this. 

It’s a beautiful day when they bury Jess’ remains. She was a California native, but they still drive five hours to bury her at home in her Santa Barbara community. The funeral is filled with people he doesn’t know, people Sam all knows, some shaking his hand, some clasping him in an embrace. Dean tries not to clench his fist, tries not to make a thing about it—this isn’t about him, he knows, but it gnaws at him, to see the evidence of Sam’s life without him—people who support him, who knew Jess, who could mourn with him in a way Dean never could. 

It makes something clench up inside him, like someone wrapping a hand around his heart and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing—

Dean takes a breath. 

After the service ends, it’s time to lower the casket into the ground. Sam stays stoic the entire time, watching the proceedings, and Dean watching Sam. 

He disappears into a crowd of people afterwards, Dean struggling to catch up. 

“Sam,” Dean says behind him, a plea. 

“C’mon,” Sam counters, a demand. 

Sam is walking, moving forward and Dean follows as if there’s a line running between them, tying them together. Don’t leave me here with these people, Dean doesn’t say.

He’s not shy, he’s never been shy a day in his life, but he sort of can’t stand to be surrounded by the decaying remains of Sam’s old life. It’s selfish, to even think that, imagine how Sam feels, but standing here, he feels like the murderer of that life.

It occurs to Dean that he’s never been to a funeral for anyone he knows—at least, not like this. He doesn’t remember his mother’s funeral, and he didn’t know all that many other hunters growing up. Only a couple of times, he went with his father for a hunter’s funeral. That felt more honest and real than a production, truly laying someone to rest, ensuring they can’t return, that their form and spirit and body can’t be used for ill. 

Sam runs up to receive a hug from a woman—older, graying, short cropped hair that’s still a lighter shade of blonde. She’s as tall as Jess was, and it hits Dean then, that’s her mom, that’s Sam’s future mother-in-law that never was and never will be. She pushes her arms around him and holds him close for an appropriate amount of time, seconds passing before she lets go. She holds her hands in his and they speak in low tones, soft spoken, stuff Dean can’t understand, not meant for his ears. 

Dean feels a frisson of... something. A possessive thunderclap in his heart, quick and sudden and then gone almost immediately, but it’s there. 

You’re not his mom, he wants to protest, and then immediately he wants to run himself over for that thought. Something is crawling up his throat, sick and twisted. 

Dean needs a drink. 

“Who are you?” 

Dean is startled out of his reverie by an older man, approaching the three of them, taking his side by Jess’s mother. There’s an almost hostile quality to his voice, threading his words, the sound of a man not ready for anything else to intrude on his life. 

Jess’s father—balding, mid to late sixties, older than their dad, with a soft paunchy gut and gray hair lining his head—shoots Dean a glance like he’s something incomprehensible, stuck to the bottom of his shoes. 

(that’s not fair: his only child died—Dean’s seen parents after losses like that before, and they all range from wailing sobs to cold numbness)

Dean thinks he should say something— I’m sorry for your loss, I’m so sorry, it’s my fault, if I hadn’t come and dragged Sam away— but there’s nothing he can think of, nothing that feels right.

Here is where he gets stuck: Sam would have died with her. He was rusty, and not as practiced. If Dean hadn’t come back, Sam would be dead—so he can’t actually regret returning, without condemning Sam as well, and so he knows he’d do it again. He’d drag Sam out again and again, even if Jess dies every time. There’s no way of stopping it. 

“That’s my brother,” Sam answers, replying for him. 

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” the older woman says, her voice faint and distant. Dean tries not to respond to that—he doesn't think about how Sam’s new life didn’t include him at all, and he doesn’t think about how that’s his fault, too. “Well, I am glad you came, that Sam has someone…”she trails off. 

Sam is miserable—eyes splotchy, cheeks red, tear tracks on his face. He’s the picture of the grief, in all the ways this is supposed to go. He’s miserable, but he belongs here. 

Dean keeps his mouth shut. 

“Jess’ mom invited us over,” Sam says, as the two of them head back to the car. His words fall on dead silence, only the sound of rustling leaves and footsteps around them, Autumn is all around them, and will soon turn to winter. “She said we could stay over for a little while.” 

Dean’s throat is dry. He is thinking about how Sam was going to marry Jess, marry into that family. It’s all up in smoke now. 

“Do you want to go?” Dean asks once they get some distance. People are piling back into their cars. The preacher is wrapping up, packing up. People are dispersing. 

“No,” Sam says, and like that, it’s like flipping a switch. The sad college kid is gone and in its place is something harder, the edges filed down to points. “I’m done here.” 

They blow the funeral too quickly, but that’s fine by Dean. They’ve been in a single location for too long. 

Dean is sick of this goddamn state. 

*

It’s been weeks, and they’re no closer to finding Dad. Locations vary and change all the time—Blackwater Ridge, Lake Manitoc, Nazareth, investigating wendigos and demonic hijackers, following a trail of breadcrumbs, state to state—but no matter what, it’s all dead ends.

Dean is forced to conclude that their father doesn’t want to be found. 

“It’s almost your birthday,” Sam says beside him. He is staring at the window and his eyes are unfocused, dark circles growing under them. The nightmares have been getting worse lately, and Sam looks tired all the time. 

“Yeah,” Dean says, but he doesn’t feel good about it. “Don’t worry about it, you don’t have to get me anything. Take me to a strip club or something.” 

He expects Sam to protest, to make a snarky comment. Dean doesn’t anticipate what comes out of his mouth.

“It was Jess’ birthday, too,” Sam says, matter-of-fact. “You two shared the same day.” 

Dean doesn’t say anything, but the words hit a record scratch in his head, stopping his thoughts short. Dean’s not sure he likes sharing his day of birth with Sam’s tragically dead girlfriend, like an omen that will always hang over them both, but moreover—

Did you not think that was weird, Sam ? That your girl and I were born on the same day? Did that not strike you as fucked up ?

Dean can’t make himself ask.

*

There are ghosts everywhere, Sam knows. 

New England ghosts are plentiful, all over that set of states, in forests and graveyards and streets with bodies buried beneath. Entire brutal, bloody histories of towns and villages written in the old street corners and basements and cobblestones. The entire South is haunted, suffocatingly so, crimes and atrocities leaving handprints all over the countryside. The midwest is full of plains ghosts, farm houses and haunted corn stalks, ghosts lingering in the roadside liminal spaces that always drive through. California had a different set of haunts, coastal and desert alike. Smog and eucalyptus, phantom oceanside breezes, the taste of salt under his tongue. 

Every ghost is different. 

Dean never believed in all of that. A ghost is a ghost is a ghost. A little salt, a little acetone, a lot of fire—and poof, no more ghost: easy solution, for the most part. The first monster Sam ever took on was a ghost, with his brother holding his hand. Dean bragged to John about it, how Sammy’s first time went swimmingly. Good job, Sammy, John said, something approaching warmth in his voice, and Sam didn’t care about that—he wasn’t there, so why should it matter? It was Dean’s praise he lived for, and John’s snarled anger he ignited like a match to a forest. 

Dean called it cherry popping then, with a ruffle to his hair. Instead of feeling gross, it made warmth bloom in his chest, his twelve year old body buzzing at the glow in Dean’s eyes. 

The first time Sam sees Jess, in the corner of his eye, he thinks she might be a ghost, following him around, in the nightgown that she died in—his own personal resurrection Mary. He sees her first, at a gas station, waking up with a crick in his neck and his limbs aching from being folded up in the car, the sun not quite up, sky still dark blue. She’s standing under the neon sign, flickering for a brief moment in time, and then as soon as Sam notices her, she’s gone. 

He doesn’t tell Dean about her.

He sees her again when they drive by the Welcome to Utah sign, out of place by the lonely stretch of road, the terrain still red and rocky.

He lets Jess haunt him, showing up on street corners, at the edges of his vision, eyeing him not with hatred or anger, but just a sad look in her melancholy eyes, sorrow in her pale face: a specter of grief, the echo of inflicted evil. 

He keeps hoping she’ll do something. That he’d wake up with long scratches down his back, that he’d feel the flames that consumed her on his skin—at least that way, he’d could take it back in some way. He could make up for it, but Jess doesn’t seem interested in doling out punishment.

The thing Dean doesn’t get is that sometimes ghosts are just someone’s shadow, lingering, staying behind, and nothing more. They only show up for the violent, restless ones, when the problem gets too out of hand. 

The last time he sees Jess, it’s after the Bloody Mary haunt, just after both her and Dean’s birthday. She slips from his grasp, one last time, ripping open his sutures and playing with his wounds as she fades away.

*

"What are you going to do to me?" Sam asks the thing wearing his brother's skin. He is trying not to let his fear show, keep calm in the face of impending pain and torture. He’s trying to not act like the helpless victim, even though he's tied up, rope burning into the skin of his wrists and ankles, rough against his throat, leaving marks that will last for days—at the shapeshifter's mercy, just like all the other victims. 

It's not pain Sam fears. He can take pain. If the shapeshifter wants to cut him up, rip up his skin, take him to pieces—he can handle that. Pain is just the body's way of telling you you're still alive.

It's the unknown. The possibilities. The exposed vulnerabilities and nerve endings. It’s knowing the shapeshifter has seen inside Dean’s head, and thus, seen inside him, all the the intricate ways Dean’s skin is his skin, too.

The shapeshifter smiles with Dean's lips, as if he’s realized this as well. He twirls the knife in his hand, gleaming and threatening. He does a little spin gesture with it that Sam's seen Dean do before, showing off. He stalks over to Sam, towering over him, head cocked like a wolf as he examines Sam.  

"What I should do to you is everything Dean's been dreaming of since you left him,” he says, a menace in his voice that Dean reserves only for monsters, never directed at Sam. 

Because it’s not Dean. Sam knows this. Don't let it fool you. The shifter laughs at him, meeting his stare head on.

"Oh yeah, baby brother, I know about you and him—about us , really.” He leans down, gets on his knees in front of Sam, too close, and for a moment, Sam’s head goes haywire, alarm bells ringing, mind racing with horrible possibilities of what the shifter might do to him. He readies his muscles to kick at him, spring loaded, but the shifter puts a knife to his throat, sharp edge of the blade pressing under his jaw. “I know everything. You think I could ever forget it? You think I've moved on? No way, Sammy. You broke my fucking heart."

“Fuck you,” Sam spits. It’s not Dean, he reminds himself. It’s just something with his face. “It's Sam.” 

Dean saves him. Sam never doubted that. Dean always saves him. 

But now he’s legally dead, and a serial killer in the eyes of the law, and the thought makes Sam crazy. Sam knows he can go back to school, that he exists as a person outside of hunting, but Dean can’t ever have that.  Dean’s name is a black mark, and Sam can’t bring it up to Dean. He can’t stop thinking about how when they kill the demon, what is Dean supposed to go back to? 

It feels like falling off the edge of the earth. The worst part about it is that Dean's so damn casual about it, like it’s a joke. Like it never mattered. Like it was always going to be like this. 

*

Dean’s driving up the Utah part of I-70, past Devil’s Canyon and creepy little mormons—where the flats and the rock and rusty red-covered mountainside finally start to give way to civilization—when Sam abruptly jolts awake. 

Or not so abruptly. Sam’s always had nightmares, since he was a kid, since they told him monsters were real. His little brother carried around an anxious nervous energy that turned into a coltish springy drive, that further morphed into furious anger and secret keeping. Dean’s used to nightmares, but there’s something different about these ones—the little noises Sam makes, small and needy, the wild-eyed energy afterwards, like he’s about to fight and flight all at once. Dean’s entering Green River when Sam wakes up with a shuddering gasp, his arms flying out to grip the bottom of the seat, looking around. 

Sometimes Dean wonders if he’s not having a nightmare, but he’s dreaming about Jess, and being back at Stanford, and the nightmare is waking up and realizing that’s all gone now. 

“You alright, there, Sammy?” Dean asks, side-long glancing at Sam. He mastered how to look at Sam and keep his eyes on the road at the same time a while ago. He’s good at keeping Sam in his sight. 

Sam’s profile is gorgeous. The curve of his jaw, the slope of his nose. He’d never tell him this, but even though Dean used to give Sam shit for his haircut, he secretly likes Sam’s longer hair, the way it fell in his face, the dark strands he could reach over and run his fingers through. They halo out his features, make him look younger and boyish. 

Dean is trying hard not to think about it. 

“Peachy,” Sam grumbles. His voice is scratched raw, as if he’d been screaming. 

“Okay,” Dean starts, effacing. “You didn’t sound too peachy there, so—”

“I’m fine, ” Sam stresses, a note of hostility in his voice that, frankly, Dean didn’t think he deserved. “Where are we?”

“Getting closer to the Colorado border,” he says, and turns up Master of Puppets to drown out Sam’s bitchiness. 

The sun is starting to rise in full bloom, turning the sky bright and pink and purple with morning glow, as he pulls into a Love’s Truck Stop. It’s one of those places that’s just sitting alongside a stretch of highway, a speck of neon lights in the distance as he approaches, a lighthouse flickering at the end of a dock. There’s no hotel here—they’d have to go further for that—but there are trucks and truckers crawling all over the huge parking lot, a little restaurant diner across the street, Moe’s Curly Q beckoning. 

Dean liked these places as a kid. There's something homey about them, one in every corner of every state, like the same waitresses that call him hon in each diner, or the same bar fly in every dive they travel to, like a sign that never changes no matter how worn out it gets. Push pins in a map, steady and unchanging. 

“I’m getting gas,” Dean says, and leaves before Sam can say anything else, which is rude of him, he knows—he should wait to make sure Sam is okay, offer him food—but Sam clearly woke up on the wrong side of the car seat this morning and Dean doesn’t want to get bitched out for existing. 

Fifteen minutes later, and Sam has his large legs swung out of the Impala, the passenger seat opened wide enough that Dean worried some car was going to zoom past and take it off. Be more careful with Baby, Sam, Dean thinks, but Sam has his head in his hands, wide palms over his temples, rubbing his fingers into the vein there, as if trying to give his own head a massage.

“I brought you coffee,” Dean says, holding out the cheap gas station latte to Sam. He tosses him a granola bar that he bought and it lands on his knees haphazardly. “I mixed it with hot chocolate, how you used to do it,” he says. Sam pulls a face, pinched, nose wrinkling, and that’s about it for Dean. 

“I’m not a kid anymore, Dean,” he says, long suffering, holding the coffee cup like a burden forced on him. 

“Well, excuse me, princess,” Dean says in his best Saturday morning cartoon voice, “is your coffee not hot enough for you? Would you like whipped cream on that?”

“Fuck off,” Sam groans immediately. He stretches out, all limbs, arms outstretched in front of him as he somehow balances that coffee cup in his hand, his dangerously long legs stretching out in front of him, heels on the pavement. “Give me a fucking minute, okay.” 

He sets the coffee down on the floor, next to his feet, and presses his palm into his eyes, as if he’s trying to block out his vision. 

Dean exhales. He waits a moment, giving Sam a minute to cool off, then—

“I know you keep having nightmares,” he says. He’s careful how he says it, because one of the worst things about Sam getting older was just how much he hated it when Dean showed concern, so he keeps his voice even and steady. 

Sam shakes his head, not looking up at Dean, staring at the space between his feet on the ground. For a moment, he is a little kid again, and John has told Dean to go deal with Sam, Dean left with the task of having to dig into his brother and figure out what’s upsetting him, Sam acting like he’s being punished. 

“Yeah, but what else is new?” Sam sighs, blowing out a gust of air, making his bangs flutter. He takes a sip of his coffee, and looks, for all the world, the picture of stalwart misery. 

“You can talk to me, you know,” Dean says, the words bubbling in his throat, horribly awkward. No chick flick moments, he said and he still means it, but shit—it’s not as if he wants Sam to cram every horribly feeling inside himself now that Jess is dead. “Or hit me. If that’ll make you feel better.”

Sam glances up, eyes widening a fraction of an inch. “Why would I want to hit you?” 

Dean shrugs. That churning, unwelcome feeling of guilt rears its ugly head again, and he’s not sure how to explain it to Sam, in a way that wouldn’t feel like ripping off his own skin. I show up, and she dies, and somehow, this is his fault. 

No one has to say it, but he knows he did this. 

“You can talk about her, if you want.” He ends up saying instead, hedging his bets. He doesn’t say he’s a little scared to hear about Jess—to know her, like Sam knew her, even if it’s just the chalk outline of her, the faint whispered outer edges; there will never be a full interior 

Sam doesn’t answer for a long time, so much that Dean decides that’s an answer in of itself, and gets back in the car. 

“Not yet,” Sam says when Dean is driving off back down the highway, settling into the road as the sky turns into periwinkle blue. “I will, but not yet.” 

*

Sam can feel the heat at his skin, the flames licking at him, threatening to consume him, turning his apartment into a hot box. 

Jess above him bursts into blue flame. He smells her, that burnt human flesh, sizzling—it’s nauseatingly sweet, so thick and rich in the air. Sam can taste it in the back of his throat, coating its way down his esophagus, lodging in his nostrils. 

He can still feel Dean’s hands on him, dragging him out, heavy and strong and so fiercely protective, there were bruises on Sam’s body in the shape of his fingerprints. 

Wakefulness slams into him like a punch, like a fist at his throat, as he comes back to reality—but Jess’s death is real too, a solid living thing, and he’s just living in the aftermath. 

He’s in a hotel room. 

That’s not a surprise. He’s always in a hotel room, if he’s not waking up in the Impala. He's too used to four walls and the same bed every night, comfortable in stability, like a contented fat house cat. 

The generic alarm clock in every motel they go to reads 4:32. It’s past the witching hour, but it’s not quite the hour early birds rise, a liminal space between the hours of the day and night, dawn and dusk. This time of the night felt like no man’s land, a space in time he ascribed to pulling all nighters or late-night ragers. The motel is an eerie sort of quiet, with only the soft drag of cars passing outside the window as they drive past the highway every now and then, and the sound of Dean breathing—steady and even, ever keeping him company. That’s not new. 

Sam had a phase as a kid, right after Dean confessed what their father did for a living, when he couldn’t get to sleep unless the television was running, volume down to the single digits, tv switched on to the soothing meaningless noise of infomercials or the buzz and whirr of dead air. Sam found it calming in the empty loneliness of 2 star motels, even though it gave Dean the willies. 

Didn’t you see poltergeist? It’s more likely than you think. Don’t be MaryAnne. 

Sam thinks if he dies and goes to hell, it’ll be this: an endless stream of repetitive motel rooms, with shitty curtains and shitty overhead lights that give him headaches, a constant rotating set of outdated décor, the smell of decay and mold growing steadily over time. 

He’s in a hotel room, and Sam swore he’d never do this again. This blanket is too heavy on his legs. It feels oppressive, weighted, and he shoves it to the ground with a soft plop. Dean does not wake. The room is nearly pitch dark but there’s a neon sign outside malfunctioning, blinking in and out every third second. Sam isn’t sure he’ll get to sleep again. 

He turns his head in the other direction and Dean is sleeping like a baby. This time he’s on his back—as if he was caught mid-dream, mid-motion, fell asleep in the middle of tossing and turning—and the blanket is pulled down slightly, exposing his collarbones, the top of his chest, watching the gentle rise and fall of it. If he were shirtless, Sam could see his nipples. 

Sam blinks, closes his eyes to the image of his brother, and lets darkness swallow his vision until it erupts into blue flames again, glittering. 

In this light, Jess is almost beautiful as she’s pinned to the ceiling, blue and red, a cacophony of colors. 

He opens his eyes and it’s darkness again, empty. He’s not sure which is worse. 

Sam finds himself getting up, his feet touching the ground in soft wool clad socks. His brother lays still in front of him. Sam imagines Dean waking up, reaching over to him, a hand on the back of his neck, another lingering down his jaw, kissing him until Sam stops being Sam anymore, until Sam merges into Dean and becomes something, someone else. 

For a moment, Sam doesn’t think, just moves. As if sleepwalking, he finds his feet moving until he’s standing over his brother, watching him sleep, the rise and fall of his chest, the soft movements of his body. Sam can make out his features even in the darkness, the delicate curve of his nose, the lines of his jaw—he’s smoother this way, with nothing else playing behind his facial expression. 

Sam reaches out with his hand towards his brother, his fingertips hovering over the freckles on his face, just an inch away, close enough to just trace them in patterns, to play connect the dots on his brother’s face. 

That first night, he let Dean blow him. Sam’s guilt has been eating him alive, in an almost lurid, indulgent way, allowing a swarm of snakes to devour his insides, to take from him piece by piece. Guilt like a redeemer, like a benediction, you deserve this, you deserve this. Jess is dead because of you and you’re letting your brother blow you, you deserve this. 

All he wants is to get the taste of his dead girlfriend out of his mouth. 

He wants to run outside until he drops, run until the road ends and he falls off the face of the earth. He wants to take Dad’s journal and study it for clues until he drops dead, like his father should have long ago. He wants to crawl into bed with his brother, press himself against Dean, and rut into Dean until he finally wakes up—let the chips fall where they may. 

Instead he traps himself in the bathroom, leaving the light off, and crawls into the tub as if that could save him, as if he’s not haunted, followed around by his own grief. The back of his neck itches, longing for a phantom hand on him, but he’s not sure who, what he wants: if he wants to feel the soft warmth of his girlfriend’s arms around him just one more time, bury his face in her sweet, lavender scented skin, or if he wants Dean to just fucking touch him again, like he used to, like he always did, drag him into bed with him and wrap his arms around him and whisper in his ear that everything is going to be okay, even if they both know it never will be. 

It’s cold in here, goosebumps over his skin, and Sam shakes as he thinks of Jess and cries. 

*

Dean’s hands are warm on his face. 

Under the fluorescent flickering lights of a shoddy motel bathroom, Sam sits on the toilet, his brother towering over him as he carefully cleans up the blood running down Sam’s temple. He uses a warmed and wet hotel washcloth—for a shitty motel, the terry cloth felt nice against his skin, or maybe that was just the slow, steady way Dean dragged it, down his forehead, across his cheek. Sam lets out a sigh, tilting his head into it, almost nuzzling into Dean’s hand.

The terry cloth hand towel feels nice, but it’s Dean’s touch he longs for—brushing against his skin, washed clean, fingertips lingering just a little too long on the bones of his eye socket, his cheekbones.

“I don’t think you need stitches,” Dean says, relief entering his voice. He steps back, reaching for a bandage to apply to Sam’s temple. Sam feels the loss of his touch like an ache. It’s startling, how much he craves it now—he went years without even seeing Dean, without speaking to him, let alone touching him, and now that he's back, it’s like the withdrawal symptoms have started up again.

“You should be more careful,” Dean says, applying a gauze pad to the side of Sam’s forehead, where the ghost swiped at him hard. “I can’t always watch your back, you know.”

Sam chuckles. It’s familiar. Sam knows what Dean is doing, jokingly ribbing Sam, to cover up how worried he is for him. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

Multiple dead girls, found by the side of the road: faces torn up, bodies mangled. Sam wasn’t sure if it’s even really a monster at first, if it’s not some kind of serial killer, something precise about the ways the bodies were cut up. Sam’s seen dead bodies before, got up close and personal with them in high school when he was allowed to break into the morgue, and had nightmares for weeks after. It hardly affects him now—gouged out eyes, ripped out intestines, bisected human beings—there are so many ways a person can be killed, and he’s seen so many of them. 

“Thank you,” Sam says. He reaches for his brother’s hand, and gets his wrist instead, feeling the tendons and veins, all corded and stark. He likes the sensation of them under his fingers, like he could reach inside Dean’s skin and live there. 

Dean gasps when Sam touches him, and Sam doesn’t know why. It’s not surprising. They’re always in each other’s space now, like they never left. He nods. “Sure. It’s what I’m here for.” 

Turns out it was just a ghost, not a serial killer, tied to that stretch of road. Just a particularly violent one.

“What about you?” Sam asks. 

“I’m fine,” Dean says and starts to turn away, heading back into the main room, flipping on the television. “Just a couple bumps and scrapes.” 

There is blood caked on Dean’s skin, stuck in the crevices of his face. Sam thinks Dean should at least let him clean it off. 

“Dean,” he pleads, but then the words get stuck in his throat. He can’t ask. He can’t say it. There’s a whole wide gulf between them—some things are easy, some things feel like they never stopped being brothers, but some things get lodged inside him. The shapeshifter's voice haunts the back of his head. You broke my fucking heart. 

“Yeah?” Dean calls out from the bed. Sam isn’t sure how to say what he wants. 

There aren’t any words for him and Dean. People don’t tell stories about people like them. If Sam ever hears about them, it’s always tied up with words like abuse and molestation, and that’s never felt right. 

Sam wonders, sometimes, if he imagined the whole thing—him and Dean kissing, fooling around, the shape and size of Dean’s cock when he’s naked. If he made up that blowjob back in California, dreamed it up in his grief, the nature of their relationship existing only in some liminal space between the edges of the world. 

*

“Are we friends?” Sam asks, out of nowhere, startling Dean in the middle of his steak and eggs. Dean takes a moment to finish chewing (the steak is chewy and tough, not the rare he ordered—he will not be coming back here again). 

“We’re brothers ,” Dean says, emphasizing the word, as if Sam forgot what it meant. 

For a moment, a strange sort of quiet falls over them, and Dean goes back to his food. Sam has the newspaper out, scanning the obituaries. His fruit and yogurt parfait is all gone; it didn’t look remotely filling. Behind them rages the sounds of a greasy spoon diner: the clattering of spoons and forks on plates, the tip-tap of feet rushing on the ground, loud and hushed conversations creating a cacophony of sound. Dean can hear the waitress call behind! somewhere in the distance. 

“Yeah,” Sam says, idly running his fingers over a coffee mug. He taps his long fingers against cheap ceramic. “But are we friends? Would you hang out with me, if we didn’t grow up together? Would we spend time together?”

This feels like a trick, like there’s no correct way for Dean to answer. “What kind of a question is that?” 

Sam folds his hands together, steepled, deep in thought. “It’s a valid question.”

“It’s a stupid-ass question,” Dean shoots back. He can’t even begin to imagine an existence where he and Sam don’t grow up together. Call it a failure of imagination, but you may as well ask Dean what if he didn’t exist? What if John wasn’t his father? What if Mary Winchester never died and they grew up normal? It’s the same question. The possibilities are both endless and closed off to Dean. 

“Would you be friends with me if we didn’t grow up together?” 

“Why does this matter?” Dean nearly snaps. He reaches for the tabasco sauce, even though his eggs are almost all gone. He has a need to burn this conversation out of his headspace. 

“Humor me,” Sam hisses, a sharp whistling tone to his voice, jaw set in a firm line. Dean feels like he’s about to step on a landmine. 

“Shit,” Dean says, shrugging, shaking his head. “No, I wouldn’t be friends with you.”

“Why not?” 

“For fuck’s sake,” Dean breathes, placing his palm on his forehead. “I don’t know, because you’re boring.”

Sam balks, genuinely surprised—a twinge of guilt gnaws at Dean, but what else is new? He’s not even sure if he means it, but it doesn’t seem to matter if he means it, just that Sam felt like picking a fight. “What?”

“You’re boring,” Dean repeats, “and your idea of fun is research, and I only put up with the touchy-feely crap you do because you’re my little brother and I used to make you mac and cheese on the regular. If we were friends, you wouldn’t go radio silent for two years.” 

Sam says nothing. His jaw is set in a hard line. He doesn’t take a bite of his food, simply staring at Dean, as if he’s trying to read his mind. 

The last bit is a low blow, he knows. Dean swore he wouldn’t bring it up, tried to tell himself that it didn’t bother him. 

Dean finishes his meal and pays the bill. 

“You know what, you’re right,” Sam says in the Impala, as Dean starts to peel off eastward, and oh, that stings more than his own answer. There’s no underlying anger in Sam’s voice, just a quiet, careful resignation. 

I wouldn’t like you if I didn’t know you. 

Sam can join the club. There’s a long line. 

“Christ, did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed,” he says, and then cringes inwardly, because Sam’s nightmares have been worse lately, he knows that, but Sam talks like he didn’t hear him.

“If I wasn’t your little brother, well then—”

Don’t even say that, Dean thinks, panic seizing his throat, nearly driving the Impala off the road. He keeps his hands steady and his foot on the gas pedal but there’s a strange kind of clenching in his guts, as if trying to lock him down and keep from shouting. 

He can’t imagine a life without Sam, except he’s already lived it, and it’s miserable. 

“Well, I guess you and Dad would be very happy without me,” Sam says. The bitterness that leaks in his voice is enough to curdle milk, a quiet sort of snarling displeasure that surprises Dean when he hears it. 

“We weren’t,” Dean can’t resist adding. 

Sam scoffs, a bitter little sound, not even bothering to hide it. “Sure,” he says. “I’m not stupid, you know, it was always you and Dad seeing eye to eye, and I was… the Lily fucking Munster between you two, I get it.” 

There’s something nasty in Sam’s voice, a growing spike of jealousy that Dean finds laughable. He spares a glance at his brother, who is looking out the window, watching the road pass by between them, another white dash on the black asphalt, over and over. On the road, every house looks the same, no distinctions between towns. 

“We weren’t, Sam. Period.” He wants to add more, to explain—that Dad would take off and leave him for weeks, months at a time—like he always had, only now it was worse, without Sam there to provide a buffer. They were two kids in a foxhole, and by himself, Dean was worse off than ever. 

He wants to say that Dad was still Dad, with all that entailed: the drunken sobbing fits that Dean always had to stitch back together, the dead silent mornings afterwards, where he acted like nothing happened. How much harder it was, to be there for Dad, without Sam to slide in next to in the middle of the night, just to sleep. Just to feel some sort of comfort. 

“What does that mean?” Sam asks, his voice a steady arrow, ready to shoot into his heart. He keeps his tone even and low, goddamn reasonable. 

“Nothing,” Dean finds himself unexpectedly snarling out, anger bubbling in his throat, trying to claw its way out of his body. “It means what it means. Whatever image you have in your head about me and Dad as the perfect team without you, it’s fake.” 

It didn’t stop John from leaving. It didn’t change anything between them—even down to the way he’d look at Dean sometimes, face full of quiet simmering revulsion, the same way he’s been looking at Dean since the striga. 

Sam falls silent, but Dean can still feel his gaze plastered on him. They drive through the highway with Def Leppard blasting from his tape deck, and Sam’s eyes burn into his skin like a brand. 

*

The rest of the day crawls along at a snail’s pace. They drive. Dean plays Zeppelin, Metallica, Black Sabbath, cycling through his tape deck. They pull into Little River, Wyoming. The get a room, staying in The Covered Wagon Motel, with an absolutely atrocious color scheme—but that was part of the charm, or that’s what Dean always told his little brother when he complained.  

Sam spends the afternoon combing through the newspaper, scanning bylines on his laptop, looking for something to hunt. Dean lays his guns out on the bed spread, cleaning them until his mind settles. He has not brought up the morning conversation and Dean doesn’t want to think about it, slipping back into an easy routine. 

Dean doesn’t expect an apology but Sam says, soft spoken and sweet like cinnamon, “I didn’t want to stay gone, you know.” 

“Yeah,” Dean says, swallowing thickly, not wanting to drag this out. 

“I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me,” Sam goes on, like he didn’t hear him. Dean says nothing, focusing on the guns, the care and maintenance his father taught him.  “You know. After dad. I wasn’t trying to… go radio silent.” 

Dean bites back a sigh. There’s a horribly sincere lilt to Sam’s voice, a wetness to words that makes Dean squirm uncomfortable. 

“I’m not mad, Sam, it’s in the past,” he says, waving his hands. “I was just… saying shit.” 

“In my perfect fantasy of getting the Stanford acceptance letter,” Sam keeps talking. “I always thought, I’d… go to college. Come back for the holidays. Spend the summer hunting. Rinse, repeat. Until I graduate. I always wanted to come back.” 

Dean swallows around the lump in his throat. Instead, he laughs.

“I know,” Sam says. Dean glances up just to see his lips pull up into a self-effacing grin. “It was stupid.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Dean says. “I mean, it is stupid, but it’s sweet of you, that you think that could have worked out.”

That John wouldn't have reacted the way he did. There is no version of this story where John doesn’t blow a gasket at the thought of Sammy leaving. He can’t imagine it, not until the yellow-eyed demon is dead.  

The ghost of their father hangs over them, as always, but it’s an impending future that haunts Dean: he knows Sam never wanted this, never wanted to go back to this, and it’s only a matter of time before Sam slips through his grasp again, drifting back to the normal, civilian world and leaving Dean in the dust to do this alone. 

He didn’t blame him then, and he couldn’t blame him now. 

Dean thinks about telling Sam about the times he swung by Stanford, never looking up what classes, what dorm Sam would be in, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to burst in and clutch at his brother. He thinks about the time he stalked the quad, waiting for a glimpse of a floppy haired boy, a ghost of a boy he used to know. About how long he waited outside his apartment door, working up the courage to even break in, shit-himself-scared Sam would tell him to get gone and then he’d be truly alone in the world. 

He doesn’t. He’s had enough sincerity for one day today.

*

Dean blows a guy in a dirty, dimly lit single stall bar bathroom between hunts. It smells like old semen and vomit in here, on top of all the piss and shit smells of places like this. The guy is thick in his mouth, he grabs his hair without asking, and Dean shoves down the urge to bite his dick. 

Never let it be said he can’t finish the job. 

The guy pays him $300 for the blowjob, which Dean thinks is overcharging for ten minutes, but he’s not gonna sell himself short. He pockets the money and goes home to Sam happy, easy cash made and all it cost was getting on his knees for a little bit. 

This used to be harder when he was younger, when Sam was too young to know what Dean got up to, and the money John left them ran out. It got easier once he became legal, more sure with a knife and gun. 

It got easier once Sam left and Dean didn’t have to sneak around like this. Sam would ask questions, worry about where the money came from, but Dad never did. He never asked how Dean got the extra cash, just made a hrrm sound, grumpy but approving, glad for Dean doing whatever he needed to do. That’s the most acknowledgement he’s ever gotten, and he’s grateful for it. 

When he gets back, Sam is in bed, blanket pulled over him, lights off, posture stiff. He’s not asleep, Dean knows, years of growing up with Sam has given him a sixth sense for it. There’s a twitch at the back of his head, the way he gets around a ghost or a monster, that maybe Sam knows , a thought that makes him want to throw up, but he doesn’t ask. He never asks. 

*

Sometimes, Dean wakes up from the sounds of Sam’s pitiful moans, distressed noises as struggles with a nightmare. He is getting used to the sounds of Sam suffering, much as he hates it. Sam refuses any help. Insists he’s fine. 

This morning, Dean wakes up to find Sam watching him. He’s still in bed, laying down, his body turned upwards, as if he was staring at the ceiling in between staring at Dean, counting sheep, counting cracks in the ceiling. It’s too dark to make out the expression on his face, only that it’s staring at Dean, unblinking, unmoving. 

Somehow, Dean isn’t surprised, as if he could feel the weight of Sam’s gaze in his dreams, the heaviness of his stare weighing him down, like a physical hand on the back of his neck. 

“You okay?” Dean asks. His tongue feels cotton-heavy, thick in his mouth. Sam’s stare is unyielding. Dean almost feels threatened, like Sam is gonna pull apart his skin. “Something you want?” 

Sometimes it feels like Sam knows… knows a little too much, about everything. Things he shouldn’t know. Knows who Dean went home with for the night, that it wasn’t a woman this time. Knows and hates how Dean makes their money, even if neither of them are saying it out loud. 

Sam is holding secrets tight to his chest, and Dean can’t even fathom how to pull them out of him. 

“I’m fine,” Sam says tonelessly. “Just couldn’t sleep.” 

Dean blinks the sleep out of his eyes. He can feel a hangover starting to throb behind his eyes, head all filled up. He isn’t looking forward to the day.

“Do you want to come over here?” he offers. A return back to childhood. Overly intimate. Inappropriate. Stuff they’re not supposed to do anymore. Sammy outgrew him at age thirteen, starting insisting on sleeping all by his lonesome, and Dean agreed, because Dad thought it was inappropriate they were still sharing a bed, that they shared showers, telling Dean that Sam is getting older and he didn’t need that anymore.

Dad was right, of course. Sam was already outgrowing him, every step towards adulthood. It was always Dean who needed him more.

Sam says nothing, and Dean thinks he’s going to reject him, but Sam wordlessly gets up, and pads over across the small gap of space between them, slipping into bed with Dean. He’s heavy and there’s barely enough room for two of them on this queen sized bed, but Dean makes room for him. He always makes room for him. He lifts up the covers for Sam, expecting to wrap an arm around Sam and tuck him into his body, but Sam surprises him by pressing his front to Dean’s back, an arm around Dean’s chest, Sam’s heavy warm body against him.

“Thanks,” he mutters, and Dean doesn’t say anything, just savors the sensation of Sam breathing on his neck. 

*

Hell is repetition. 

Highways giving way to interstates, giving way to turnpikes. Back roads without a person in sight for seventy miles. Arizona desert, Colorado trees, Texas stretches of roads with oil rigs decorating the background. Street names that don’t mean anything, repeating in every town—Cherry, Oak, Hill, Chestnut—ending in drive, avenue, road. Driving to the part of the country where they don’t even name the roads, it’s all State Route 111, State Route 160, east to west, to south to north, all winding the way down. 

Hell is repetition. 

Sam is a little startled by how fast he falls into the rhythm of things again. Sure, Dean likes to joke that he’s rusty, but it’s like his hands never left the gun. It’s like he never forgot the weight of a knife in his hand, or the sharp edge of a blade. All-nighters drinking coffee trying to write a term paper fade away, turning into long drives with the road. His body molds itself into the passenger seat like he always belonged there, right at Dean’s side, even though that wasn’t always true—back in the old days, he used to lay across the back seat, Dean with a map sitting shotgun, holding a flashlight as he guided Dad down dusty backroads with no reception, and no one around for miles. He can’t remember how often he’d wake up, stretched out in the back, blinking his eyes as he could see Dean holding a flashlight, bathed in its gentle warm glow, telling Dad which back road to take. 

The impala navigates every road expertly, already familiar with each stretch of land. Dean is a wizard, he doesn’t even need a map anymore. He knows every back road, every corner and crevice. He grew up on lanes and highways and freeways, before the invention of GPS, has it all memorized with a single glance down at the map. If they were dropped anywhere in the lower 48, Dean would know how to get them back to civilization. Dean would protect them. 

It makes Sam feel a little crazy, driven mad by the familiarity of it all. He used to think he was free, that he got out, and here he is again, this is his life again. 

Hell is repetition. 

Back alley fights. Breaking into houses. Perfecting the art of being a private eye, an FBI agent, a park ranger, so many different hats to wear. Ghosts, poltergeists, red caps, black dogs. Cut open dead bodies, sliced open, torn apart, throats slit, eyes gouged out, or cut out. So many different ways for a human being to die—it used to give Sam nightmares, but lately, it’s hard to tell the difference between a nightmare and a dream. It all seems to be the same thing. 

Burnt black coffee, steak and eggs, gas station burritos that give Sam stomach poisoning. The every shifting brands that change per state. Lays. Fritos. Utz. Herrs. Takis. Zapp’s. Gas stations morphing from Love’s to T&A (Dean’s favorite) to Sunco to CitiGo. Sam is an unwilling connoisseur, a reluctant expert in all things Americana. 

Hell is repetition. 

They’ve gone past this sign three times now. They’ve had this argument before, already, the words familiar, the spat bitter. This open field goes on forever and ever. Sam misses the greenery of California, the fields of crops and strawberries and apple trees that would wrap around roads, the forest of trees tall enough to touch the sky in the north, and the warm sands and desert springs in the south. He misses them and can’t ever go back again because thinking about it just makes him taste Jess’ ashes in his throat. 

*

“Rack ‘em,” Dean says. 

In a dimly lit dive bar, Dean is leaning against a pool table, pretending to be drunk. It takes practice, effort, to act just the right amount of drunk, slurring, but clear enough. Movements loose and easy, eyes unfocused, but not so much it’s a caricature, that it’s obvious . Sam thinks maybe he should have done theater in high school. Dean’s a good actor. 

“You already lost a hundred, bro,” one buff, overly muscular man says. Dean is surrounded by a group of what looks like dumb frat guys, dressed in polos and drinking standard bud light beer, overly clean for the kind of bar they’re in, and easy prey for Dean. Sam is surprised they have cash on hand, they look more like the credit card type. The buff one’s button-up was stretched over his shoulders, in a way that indicated a growth spurt. He was squinting at Dean, as if he seemed to be concerned about him, not sure if he should take advantage of a drunk man. 

“C’mon,” Dean cajoles, leaning over the pool table, all but fluttering his eyelashes, in a way that made Sam uncomfortably squirm, the low light brightening Dean’s features. “Don’t tell me you’re chicken! Double or nothing.” 

Sam huffs a sigh and makes his way over, resenting the part he’s been cast in. 

“Hey, guys,” Sam says, pushing his voice down to soft spoken, more nervous than he actually feels. He puts hands on his brother, careful touches on his shoulder, as if to drag him away from all of this. “My buddy here is real drunk, he shouldn’t be playing like this.”

Buff guy’s eyes shoot over from Dean to Sam, gradually widening as he sees Sam’s height, takes in the breadth and width of him, an expression that makes Sam feel like his skin may be stretched on too tight, not used to it. It’s something Sam is starting to realize: he used to always be visibly younger than Dean, even when he was taller, skinny like a reed, but now next to Dean, he looks like his bodyguard, not his little brother. It’s a weird feeling, like he turned into someone else while away at Stanford. 

“The hell you say,” Dean fake slurs—or perhaps it’s a real slur, he can’t tell. That’s a real beer Dean is drinking for this. Somehow, it doesn’t impact his ability to win games. “I can play this perfectly fine, fuck off.” 

“Sal—” Sam says, using the fake name Sam knows Dean is sporting on his fake ID. 

“Fuck off, you’re not my mother,” Dean shrugs Sam’s hand away, and shoves him by the shoulder—lightly, not enough to actually hurt, not even playful, but it stings at something awful in Sam, and he pushes down the urge to just take a swing at him. 

Sam holds his hands up in surrender, and without a word, stalks off. He hears betting negotiations, excited whispering, now you’re talking from behind him, leaving Dean to his hustling. He takes a seat at a dark corner table and nurses his beer, and keeps a scattered eye on Dean, making sure no one beats him up if they ever catch on. It hasn’t happened yet. 

It’s not that he’s angry at Dean, it’s just that he’s getting tired of doing this. 

Can’t you do more honest work ? Sam asked, and Dean replied back with a shit-eating grin, fun, or easy? C’mon, Sammy. 

He didn’t wanna do this anymore—didn’t want the credit card scams, or the low, scummy ways of making money. He wanted to put it all behind him. 

Regression to the mean, everything goes back to normal again. 

In the corner of the bar, at a little table, bathed in golden light, Sam sits with a nasty-tasting beer, doodling random figures on an off-white napkin, and watches Dean seduce the men he’s playing pool with his fake incompetence. 

An hour later, there are three empty bottles behind him, and Sam is still watching Dean. 

The hustle is over, and Dean has moved on to flirting with some barfly—a blonde woman in an halter and heels, hair falling around her face in loose curls, and she’s exactly Dean’s type, looks like a young Farrah Fawcett, looks like the girls they grew up watching on television. Dean is leaning forward into her space, head canted low, eyes dark and hooded, and she’s falling for every bit of his charm attack, giggling and blushing. 

Sam’s mouth curls into a snarl, a hot flare of anger bursting in his chest. He doesn’t know why, but suddenly he feels like some stupid little kid again, watching his big brother outshine him in every way, watching the way everyone else got to have a piece of him. 

Dean is still hooking up with women they meet on the road, which is not something Sam ever expected to change, but it still makes him grind his teeth, being forced to bear witness to it. 

Frustrated, his pen goes clean off the napkin, drawing a black, thick line on the rickety, wooden table. Sam, for a moment, feels a slight twinge of guilt, that he should clean it up, but then he sees what he’d been drawing. Sam has doodled some unspeakable thing on the bar napkin—blood, gore, guts. Flames consuming a house. Flames, flames everywhere, all the content of Sam’s nightmares, past and present and future. 

In the last few months, he did this semi-regularly at Stanford. The dreams of Jess on the ceiling haunted him and followed him into the waking world, going to parties and class, doodling flames in the margin, a woman caught in them—as if his father’s survivalist anxiety had infected him, left him diseased.

It makes him feel a little like a serial killer, like there is something deeply wrong with him, the same thought that plagued him when he was growing up, when he’d look at his father talking about shooting shapeshifters, look at his brother gleefully wasting ghosts and never questioning their life, and wonder if he was the crazy one. He has at times, entertained the morbid notion that maybe he’s actually had a psychotic break. That none of this is real, that his father’s vengeance driven quest metastasized in his blood like cancer and he killed Jess in a fit. 

Sam stands up abruptly, so fast the blood rushes to his head too quickly, brain spiraling off in different directions, and he almost gets dizzy, the world spinning too fast. He leaves without saying goodbye to Dean, walking back to the motel. Dean tries to catch his eye as Sam drifts past him, but Sam ignores him. He doesn’t have anything to say to him, his head filled with awful, dark thoughts. 

There’s no point, anyway. Dean is going to go home with some girl, and leave Sam alone to his dreamscapes. 

Dean stumbles back in at two in the morning, and Sam is not asleep. He is lying in bed, blanket pulled over him, trying to force himself to rest, to steady his breathing, but rest will not come, his brain whirring and rushing too fast, the alcohol doing the opposite of dulling his senses, of acting as a depressant. Instead, it's more like it unbuckled every loose thought in his head and now won’t stop. 

He hears Dean move around the room, the quiet clasp of the door latch, the soft footfalls and rustle of fabric as he undresses, pulling off their father’s jacket, shrugging off his boots. He drifts to the bathroom, the soft buzz of the light coming on. 

Sam knows he must be imagining it, but he swears he can smell the sex wafting off Dean, the musky aftermath of whatever he did with the girl he picked up. He runs the images over in his head, Dean taking not-Farrah’s top off, Dean pressing his mouth on her tits, Dean’s head between her legs, under her skirt, tongue lapping at her clit. 

His face is hot. Dean moves to the bed. It takes a few minutes for all the sounds to cease. 

Sam pretends to be asleep, but he’s not. 

Dean knows he’s not. 

This is a very old routine. 

When Sam was twelve, he used to jerk himself off to the thought of Dean asleep in the next bed next to him. He used to wake up pressed against his brother, grinding his cock into his thigh, his back and before his higher brain functions could catch up with him, eager, excited, half-sick with the thrill of wrongness, before his brain came back online and he was just filled with utter horror. 

Sam doesn’t sleep. He is already unforgivably hard. 

*

They’re in Odessa, Texas, when Sam gets the flu. 

“Shut up,” Sam moans, in a truly pathetic voice, all shrunken, not fitting his huge size. 

Dean thinks it’s because Sam left his natural environment—the clean and vacuumed sealed air of Stanford campus—and started breathing in the germs from all sorts of states, his body no longer used to it, and now his body is going through some sort of shock. Didn’t you get a flu shot, bro? Please tell me you were taking care of yourself. 

Sam is splayed on the bed, buried under a mountain of blankets, stealing the ones from Dean’s bed as well. Dean isn’t sure why he wants to be cocooned, but it’s a Sam thing, that’s what he does, that’s what he’s done since he was little. Wrap himself in a little ball—it was cute when he was eight, walking around with a blanket around his shoulders like a cape and shivering, as Dean spoon fed him nyquil. It’s cute now, even when he’s grown bigger and taller than Dean. “I’m fine.”

His brother has been struck down by fever, overly warm, at 100.3—almost too warm, enough to turn Dean into a fretful nursemaid, not that he’d admit it—and stricken by rolling waves of nausea. Dean is using the motel trash can as a puke bucket.

“C’mon,” Dean says, urging his brother up from the blankets. He places a hand on his back to urge him up and out of bed. He can feel the shirt plastered to his skin, the overheated warmth of him, the heat sticking clear to his body. 

“Leave me alone,” he says miserably, and pushes his head into the pillow. Dean doesn’t know how he can breathe that way. 

“You need to eat something,” Dean says, “even if it’s saltines and broth. C’mon, get your giant body up, I can’t carry you anymore.”

That makes Sam bark into a laugh, a sickly rattling sound Dean feels in his rib cage, but he stops fighting Dean as he tugs him out of bed. Sam lets his brother walk him over to the little kitchenette table, leaning against Dean’s touch and the arm around his shoulders, even though he can no longer fit under it. His brother’s hair is sticking to forehead, slick with sweat. His skin had taken on a more sallow pallor and his eyes were sunken in, dark circles circling his eye sockets—but then again, that wasn’t new. Dean doesn’t think he’s slept well since Jess died. It seems like every third day, Dean wakes up to the distressing mid-sleep noises Sam makes in the middle of the night. 

The last time Sam was sick, he was still a teenager, half his size, half his current body weight for sure, but it’s old hat, tending to Sam. Getting him everything he needs, making sure he’s drinking plenty of fluids. He checked them into a slightly pricier than normal hotel room that “Norman Madison” is paying for, one with a kitchenette and a view (even if it was just the parking lot rather than a mountain or ocean), where Dean can make Sam soup once he’s more open to eating. 

Dean pours chicken broth he got at the store into a paper bowl from the store, sticks it in the microwave while he unwraps a package of saltines. “C’mon, you need to eat something. Don’t make me spoon feed you.”

Dean sets the wisps of food down on the table while Sam scoffs. “I bet you’d like that,” he mutters under his breath, lips curling. The words hold a twinge of frustration and belabored amusement. 

Dean, for a moment, wants to ask what the fuck does that mean? His stomach twisting and churning suddenly, a strange sort of chill falling over him—but he can’t quite make himself answer, make himself go there, and then Sam is finally eating the broth, the sounds of slurping—the moment passes, and then it’s just Sam, his gigantic little brother, hunched over into himself as he carefully drinks warmed up broth. 

He’s just glad his brother is eating, that’s good, right? 

Dean sits with Sam at the little table. There was no paper tablecloth, or anything fancy—just a small table, attached to the wall, sprouting from it, a little overhead lamp above them, the two of them at opposite sides. No natural light either—the curtains drawn shut, casting the room in an unnatural dark glow of one single fluorescent. The table was plastic, as far as he could tell, and adorned in a checkerboard pattern, to match the décor in the rest of this place. The carpet was a dull brown and the sheets just plain blue on white, but at least everything was clean. 

“This is stupid,” Sam grumbles miserably, spooning at the broth, cheap plastic spoon rubbing against the cheap disposable bowl in a scratch-scritch sound.  He squeezes his eyes shut in frustration, but he tentatively, with a shaking hand, reaches out to grab for the crackers. Sam delicately takes a couple of bites, as if he was afraid the saltines would bite him back.  

For a moment, Sam morphs into the teenage boy he was just a few years ago—skinny and too stretched out by his height, prone to fits and outbursts, hair falling in his eyes. He doesn’t look that different, but it’s like he just filled out more, like Sam was a premature rough draft sketch of a person and someone added in all the edges. 

“Not starving is not stupid,” Dean grumps.

“That’s not what I meant, Sam says, in that whisper soft tone, words dragged out in ragged consonants and vowels.

“What did you mean, then?” Dean says, perilously close to snapping at his brother. He can’t shake this feeling under his skin, something pulling and tugging, like somehow his brother with his big wide eyes is pulling him apart. 

“Nothing,” Sam says, looking at Dean, lifting his head from his soup. He doesn’t look any better, pasty-pale and red-rimmed eyes, the sallow tint of his skin giving him a haunted, nearly skeletal look. “I need a shower,” he says, and gets up almost too fast, chair scraping against the floor. 

“I’ll help,” Dean says, standing up to grab a towel from the bathroom, but Sam pushes past him, shoulders elbowing him out of the way. 

“I don’t need your help,” Sam says. He doesn’t raise his voice, out of strain, but Dean feels dismissed, pushed aside. 

“C’mon, Sam, the last thing either of us want is you passed out under a spray of hot water,” he says, placing a hand on his brother’s shoulder as he walks, to slow him down, to remind him he’s here, that they used to do this all the time. 

Sam spins around in a huff, hands up in the air, dislodging Dean’s touch from him in such a fast gesture, it’s like he recoiled away. “Dean,” Sam keeps his voice low, but Dean can hear the build up of frustration, anger, even in his sick-delirium. “I’m not a little kid anymore. You don’t need to give me a bath like I’m five!” 

Dean tries to say something else, but Sam shuts the bathroom door before he can get a word out, the sound of the slam deafening in the quiet room. When Dean tries to open it, he realizes he’s locked it, the handle jingling, Sam ignoring him. 

Outside the bathroom, he hears the running water, the spray hitting the tile, the change in pressure as Sam steps in.  Dean tries to listen for any changes, a shift in the noise, in Sam’s weight, hoping he doesn’t hit the ground from his fever running too high. It’s supposed to be cold, Sam, he thinks, but it’s not as if Sam wants to hear from him. 

Dean raises his hand, his fist on the door, knuckles against the cheap wood, before he stops himself. 

They used to do this all the time. Dean and Sam took baths together until Dean hit puberty and it was officially weird, but even then, Sam never minded Dean helping when he was sick. He’d stick Sam in the bathroom and wash his hair, and Sam would breathe in and out evenly, so relaxed he almost fell asleep there in the tub. Sam never complained about Dean bathing him.

Did he? 

Did he want him to stop? 

Dean feels like he’s been locked outside of the impala, left stranded on the side of the road, nowhere to go. 

Dean takes a breath. His feet feel unsteady, and he wonders if he’s getting Sam’s flu, a sick churning in his guts. He heads out instead. 

When he comes back, Sam is freshly out of the shower, and the steam from the bathroom has leaked into the main motel room. Sam is sprawled out on the bed, a towel wrapped loosely around his waist, but otherwise shirtless, naked, as if he exited the shower, semi-decent but collapsed into the bed right after. His hair was wet and messy, tangled in a messy rat nest on his head, not bothered to have combed it out after the shower. The towel wasn’t wrapped very well, covering only one upper thigh and his other leg sticking out, bare and glistening. 

Most of Sam was bare and glistening. 

Dean’s throat goes dry, suddenly forgetting everything he was going to say, forgetting that his brother was even sick—he’s suddenly thrust back into being nineteen, twenty, and staring at the ways Sam was growing and filling out, getting taller, getting bigger than Dean, making a swarm of horrifying emotions bubble up in Dean. He keeps staring at the definition of his chest, tightly packed, compact but muscled, even in his sickly state, he looked good. Dean battles the urge to place his hand on his chest, his belly, get a feel for all the bends and dips. Been working out, Sammy ? It almost made Dean feel self-conscious about his own body. 

“You’re getting water all over my bed,” he chastises, no heat in his voice. Sam’s assigned bed was a sprawl of blankets, so Dean’s bed was a well made empty space for Sam to occupy. 

“Leave me alone,” Sam grumbles, throwing an arm over his face and eyes, as if he couldn’t bear to look at Dean. 

“You’re such a cranky bitch when you’re sick,” Dean complains, then tosses a little container at Sam. It lands harmlessly on the comforter next to Sam. “I got you something. You’re welcome.” 

Dean wants to head to the bathroom, he desperately does want to leave Sam alone, and not keep looking at him. He blew Sam just a few months ago and sometimes Dean still misses the feel of him in his mouth, the way he stretches out his throat, and god he really needs to not think of that. But he watches Sam stretch out on the bed, arms and legs splayed, towel pushed to the limit, then reach for the container Dean tossed at him. 

“Vicks vapor rub?” Sam blinks at the container, tiny in his huge paw, then blinks back at Dean. 

“Bought it for ya,” Dean says. “With my dishonest money. It’ll help.” The comment is a low blow, but he can’t help it, Sam’s words still itching at him, peeling back his skin. 

Dean moves to the bathroom—though he has no particular need to piss. He just wants to be away from Sam. He needs to stop looking at him, needs to tear his eyes away and get his head right, but then Sam shifts on the bed, sitting up, hunched over himself. The towel down, covering more of thigh and leg, and then—

“Dean, can you put it on?” 

Dean didn’t even get a chance to look away. His eyes are raking over his brother’s form, a punch of guilt hits his veins. 

He rubs his hands over his face, as if he could shake it off. “Oh, now you want help?” he asks. 

“Please,” his brother says, holding out the container to Dean, as if it was a given he’d do this for him. 

( It was .)

Dean walks over to sit next to Sam. It helps that he’s already shirtless. Dean tries not to think about that, keeping a sliver of distance between him and his brother, trying not to let their shoulders brush. 

“Good thing you just showered,” Dean says, opening the little container, dipping his fingers into the sticky substance. “Can you…” he trails off, not sure what he’s asking for. 

Sam is staring at him, but the irritation is gone from his eyes and in its place is a wide, open stare, pupils blown and fixed on Dean.  

( he looks like he’s twelve again—maybe he’ll always be twelve to Dean, what does that make him? )

“Yeah,” he says, nodding. He leans back, palms braces flat on the comforter, chest out for Dean. 

Christ. 

Dean reminds himself that he’s Sam’s big brother, and not his boyfriend. He doesn’t say anything as he rubs the ointment on Sam’s chest. His skin is paler than normal, and feels hot as he touches it, whether from fever or the hot shower, spreading the gel out over the planes of his pectorals, along the breastbone. He can feel his heartbeat against his hand with each pass, each time he reaches down to slather more on his fingers and press skin to skin again, right close. He gingerly avoids his nipples, but he can’t help but stare at them—small dark brown nubs, the skin around them just a shade lighter. His skin is smooth under Dean’s hand, Sam seems to have never been able to grow chest hair, no matter how old he gets, still smooth as he was when he was seventeen. 

Fuck, that’s a bad thought he needs to stay away from. 

Sam lets out a shuddering sigh as a tremor goes through his body, shaking against Dean’s touch. 

“Is that okay?” Dean asks, his voice sounds like gravel in his ears, rough and low. “How does that feel?” 

Sam nods, his eyes sliding shut for a bit. Like he’s savoring it. His face is slack with contentment, smoothed out, and a flurry of pleasure runs through Dean, proud of himself— I did that, I did that to Sam. “Yeah. It’s just a lot. I can feel it in my sinuses.”

Sam inhales deeply, taking it all in as Dean drags his palm down his chest, to his belly, his abdomen, hard with muscle. There’s no reason to do that, except to feel the press of Sam’s body under his hand, except to feel Sam breathe from deep down in his guts.

Inhale. Exhale. In and out. 

Dean watches the flutter of Sam’s stomach against his hand, hypnotized by it, and Sam doesn’t say anything. He spreads his legs and the towel is still covering up all the important parts miraculously, but lets Dean see a peepshow between Sam’s legs, and there’s a visible tent in the terry cloth towel, a bulge at the center of mass, obvious what it was. 

Shit shit shit. 

Dean feels dizzy. 

His brain short circuits, all nerve endings fried and off the grid—he knows he needs to back off, but he can’t quite make his brain catch up, slowed down, struck dumb. We don’t do that anymore. 

His brother lets out a soft noise of contentment, deep in his throat, and leans his head against Dean’s shoulder. He can feel Sam’s breath on him, even through his jacket, the bristle of his hair against Dean’s body. If Dean were to lean down just right, his nose would collide with the top of his head, pressed against the warm rustle of hair. Sam smells clean now, strongly of soap and fancy flowery shampoo, and the mint sharp bite of the vapor rub. His cock gives a furtive twitch of excitement, chubbing up in his jeans and guilt-filled bile makes its way up his throat. 

Dean moves to pull away and Sam reaches out, quicker than he should be, wraps his fingers around Dean’s wrist, holding his hand to his chest, palm open, fingers splayed right over his heart. 

“Sam,” Dean says. A warning? A plea? He doesn’t know what his voice is doing. “I think that’s enough. We’re done. I gotta close this up.” 

“S’okay,” Sam says, voice thick, still not looking at him, his face and nose nuzzling against Dean’s shoulder as Sam tries to scoot impossibly closer. He can hear the sickness in his voice, the flu congesting him. This close together, it’s like they’re little kids again, hiding under a blanket, hiding from John and the world. Sam is so close, he’s his whole world, if Sam ever actually stopped being his world, even when he was halfway across the country. “It’s okay, I like it.”

“Sam,” Dean breathes out. Inhale exhale. He tries to shift, something like panic bubbling in his chest, even as arousal starts to spread down to his groin and thighs. Sam’s skin overheated next to his, it was going to spread to him like wildfire. 

“I like it when you touch me,” Sam says, and Dean feels his own cock start to throb, and he can feel heat rush to his face and chest. There’s a low hum of anticipation in the back of his head, a faint buzzing noise only he can hear, the impending pulse of doom. 

“Sam, c’mon, you’re all feverish, you’re delirious, man,” he says, laughing, trying to turn it into a joke—but it’s half right, he knows. It’d make Dean a monster to take advantage of Sam like this. It makes him worse than any of the things they hunt.  “I can’t touch your dick with vapor rub hands, it’d burn your junk off.” 

Sam doesn’t laugh at his joke. Ungrateful kid. 

“I’m not delirious,” Sam says, and his head rises up so fast, it almost collides with Dean, their skulls nearly bashing together, but instead, Sam’s hands grab his face, fingers on his cheekbones. Dean sucks in a breath. Sam’s hands are hot, sweaty on his skin, and there’s nothing sexy about it, but Dean can’t stop thinking about how huge his palms are, how large they feel on his face, how small he feels next to him—he’s always hated feeling small, but with Sam, it’s like he could just disappear into him, crawl in his skin, let himself be subsumed. 

The towel has shifted, the motion dislodging it and it no longer covers Sam perfectly—the towel parts just wide enough to see a glimpse of black pubic hair and Sam’s cock, the heavy red head of it framed by white terry cloth, the long shaft of it almost intimidating, the slick shine of it glistening as much as the rest of Sam’s shower-shine skin. There’s no hiding it now, no denying it—Dean searches for an excuse— it’s the fever, you’re not thinking straight —but all he thinks is Sam Sam Sam , his brother hard and waiting for him to touch him again. 

“Dean,” Sam breathes. His pupils are wide, the black swallowing the swirl of color in his eyes, the redness in the white concerning, like he’d been awake too long. Dean could drown in his eyes, fall right into them; he blames that on why he doesn’t pull away when Sam kisses him. 

Sam’s mouth tastes clean, vaguely of soup, even though he’d been coughing up phlegm earlier. There’s a faint menthol flavored afterburn of the Vicks lingering, mixing in with Sam’s scent. He’s not the best kisser, not right now, just presses his lips against Dean’s and tongues his teeth, but it makes Dean shiver down his bones. 

“Sam,” he groans, careful where he places his hands, and for a moment, kisses his brother back. 

They’ve done this before. They’ve done this many times before, but it’s been long enough ago that it felt like it was two different people kissing—the boy that kissed his little brother has grown up now, and so has Sam. 

“Sam, c’mon,” he says, tugging away, inching his head back. Sam’s hands fall from his face and land on his collarbone, lingering. Sam’s fingers on his collarbone leaves Dean aching for more. He can smell Sam’s cock—heavy musky scent full of pheromones—even under the menthol and acrid taste of sickness. 

“Dude, you’re gonna get me sick,” he protests. 

He was gonna catch the same thing—that’s always how it went, when they were kids. Sam got a cold, and it was Dean’s cold soon enough, spit swapping germs. 

“Dean,” Sam moans, voice wet. Head leaning forward until it collides with Dean’s, fever sweaty, eyes burning and hazy. 

Dean wants to kiss Sam so very badly, his lips are burning, tingling with the phantom sensation, but he forces himself to push Sam away, hands careful on his shoulder, pushing him back down on the bed. 

“You should get some sleep,” Dean says numbly, letting the words fall out of his mouth, rote, practiced. “You need it.” 

Sam doesn’t fight him, doesn’t push him away or protest. He lies back down on the bed, flat on his back, as if waiting for Dean to climb up on top of him. The towel fully dislodges, falling open, revealing heavy muscled thighs and a heavy thick cock draped on Sam’s thigh, like an open invitation. Dean feels the familiar urge to get his mouth on it, a warm cord of lust so strong, he nearly goes for it right there—there’s something wrong with him, there must be, that’s all he can think about while Sam is sick, getting Sam back in his mouth. 

You shouldn’t even be allowed to get hard while sick, Dean thinks. That’s so deeply unfair. 

“Stay with me,” Sam asks, voice slow like molasses, hazy, dream-like. Dean wishes this was a dream.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Dean reassured him— where else is there for him to go? 

“Stay,” Sam pleads again, reaching out for Dean, grabbing him by the hand and tugging him like a child again. He doesn’t have the strength right now to pull him down, but he could, if he tried hard enough. The thought of that made Dean’s insides twist in a not entirely unpleasant way. 

There’s no way he can resist that. 

“Alright,” Dean says—this is his bed after all. He wipes his hands on the dresser, leaving a faint pale smear of the ointment—something Sam would give him shit for, when he’s more lucid.  He shrugs off his jacket, then his first layer, leaving him clad in a t-shirt. He thinks about it for a second, then undoes his belt and jeans, so he’s down to his boxers. His own cock is half-stirring, but Dean is determined to ignore it, as much as he’s going to ignore Sam’s. 

“Alright, move,” he says. 

Sam does not move. He wiggles around the bed and Dean grabs the unmade blankets on the other bed, dragging it down on top of them both, folding them onto his brother’s shape. 

“I said move,” he says, nudging Sam until Sam finally ends up on his side, Dean with an arm across his chest, his head tucked into the back of his neck where he can taste sweat and fresh soap. 

He tries not to think about the towel pooling on the floor, and Sam’s bare ass against him, his arm slung over his chest, tugging his brother into his. He used to do this all the time, but Sam is so much bigger than him now and he’s reconsidering being the big spoon between them now when Sam’s got this many inches on him.

Sam tries to kick it off. “Too warm, Dean,” he says, as he expected his own feverish body heat to keep Dean warm. 

“If you want me to stay, I need to cover up. “ he says. 

Sam shifts around, pushing his body back into Dean, until Dean sucks in a breath as his ass rubs against his crotch. 

“Stop,” Dean demands, hoping the firmness of his voice gets the point across. “Get some rest,” he orders Sam. “Or I’m leaving.”

Sam whines like a little kid, lowering his head just a bit, and then he’s shifting all around, moving in fits and tosses of blankets and sheets, until he’s facing Dean. 

Dean tries really hard not to look at his dick. He thinks if Sam asked him to touch it, he would. He thinks if Sam grabbed his hand and moved it to his cock to jack him off, he would. He wants to. His throat is dry. He keeps his eyes on his brother’s fever-bright gaze, a stare that looks both straight through him and inside him. 

“Dean,” Sam breathes, his voice settling over Dean like a layer of heat. 

Dean dry swallows. “What, Sammy?” 

“Dean,” Sam says, hazy-eyed, knocked up on cold meds. “Do you remember? When I was little? Do you remember what we used to do?” 

A bright, photo-negative memory flashes behind his eyes, of hands, smaller hands on his cock, the taste of Sam’s come on his tongue, of limbs tangling with his, a smaller body fitting into him so perfectly, like it was made for him, or that’s how it felt—too good to be wrong. A bittersweet, bitten-off memory of Sam’s mouth and touch and kiss, lonely winters and long summer days with just the two of them, enclosed in their own little world, haunting his every step, living in Sam’s gaze and the shape of him by his side, like a ghost that never quite left him, that should have disappeared when Sam disappeared, but stayed plastered to his side. 

Sam’s hands are so big now, hardly seems like the same person. 

Sam doesn’t use the word, doesn’t name the act, but he almost doesn’t need to—Dean knows exactly what he means, and it’s just there aren’t any words for it that wouldn’t land him on a sex offender list. 

Dean wonders if he should make Sam spit it out. If that would be cruel. 

“Yeah, Sam, I remember,” he says. Under the blanket, his voice feels warm and gauzy soft, wrapped in plastic wrap. Sam is naked and bare, openly vulnerable—he looks like a roadmap of all the softest places on a body, an invitation to touch, unfettered temptation. He looks like a bad idea, and Dean wants to pull the blanket even tighter around them. 

“Why don’t we do that anymore?” Small, sweetly tinged like honeyed tea. 

Dean sighs. He doesn’t have the words for this. He doesn’t have the speech or ability to condense it all into words. It should be so simple. It should be plain as day. Sam used to bite him as a kid—put his mouth on him until he left teeth marks, until he drew blood, and Dean would never tell him to stop because he loved looking at those marks, running his hands over the indents of his skin, the scabbed over, poorly healed scars in the shape of Sam’s mouth.

Sam used to do a lot of things. 

“You left, Sam, remember?” 

Sam flinches, even under the blanket, and Dean is bitter and angry about it still, but that’s not what he meant. He’s not denying Sam anything, it’s just facts. You left. What else is there?

“Dean—”

“That was kid stuff,” he tells him, tucking a strand of hair behind Sam’s ears. It’s starting to grow. He needs a haircut again. Dean can cut it in the morning light when Sam’s all better. “You’re all grown up now.” 

Sam falls asleep shortly after, the flu taking him, and Dean thinks of getting up, leaving him there, going to Sam’s empty bed and falling asleep there, but he can’t quite make himself abandon his sick brother. He stays there until Sam wakes up.

His fever breaks in the morning. Sam doesn’t say anything about what happened. Dean wonders if he even remembers it. 

*

Sam can feel himself losing his mind. 

It’s a funny sensation, spinning out of control, watching his thoughts spill out from their confines, his own ability to keep them locked up. 

He sits in the dark motel room, tipping the chair back and forth like he’s eleven again, tempting fate. His insides feel fuzzy and there’s a growing pile of dark beer bottles piling up next to him like dead bodies. 

They’ve cleared the state line out of Kansas, out of Lawrence, Dean driving like he needed to get that whole rotten city off him. As soon as they found a place to lay low, they went out to a bar, killed a few hours playing darts until Dean took off, slipping past Sam.

Sam dragged himself back to the motel, already a little buzzed, and determined to get drunker. His brain was a swirl of bad thoughts, and his head hurt more than usual, his nightmares turning into visions turning into physical throbbing aches, draining the life from him. 

Sam’s not much of a drinker—his father’s alcoholism that dare not speak its name put him off it—but he feels like he’s gonna burst out of his skin, trying hard to keep something inside him, shaking himself apart. 

Dean took off not with some slender, bouncy-curled lady, but with a tall, lumberjack sized man—a thought that Sam could not parse. 

He keeps drinking in dead silence. 

He hears the rumbling purr of the Impala before he sees the headlights in the gauzy curtain, a brief starshine burst of light that dies down just as quickly, making spots appear in his eyes. His vision is still recovering when Dean bursts back in. 

“Jesus, what the fuck?” Dean says, as his eyes adjust, finding Sam in the darkness. He shrugs his jacket off—Dad’s jacket, but it smelled like Dean now, only Dean. “Thought you’d be asleep by now. Why are you sitting in the corner like a fucking stalker?”

“I’m not a little kid anymore, you know,” Sam growls out. He’s not angry. He’s not angry at Dean, really. He just doesn’t want to be in the dark anymore, and he can’t shake the fact there’s something here, bubbling under the surface. 

“Yeah, I know, you’re huge. You really ate your wheaties.” Dean jokes, setting down his keys on the bedside table next to Sam and Sam stands up, almost too abruptly, almost enough to make him collide into Dean. He leans, sways forward, catching himself before he falls, but he sways right into Dean’s orbit, drinking his scent in. 

He breathes in him. He can almost taste Dean in the back of his throat. He smells heavy and musky, and the sour tang of something else. He barely smells like alcohol. 

“You left with a guy,” Sam says. It’s not an accusation—at least, it’s not an angry one. It’s just Sam pulling at his insides, unspooling, unpeeling. 

Dean tries to take a step back. He backs right into the wall and pushes a hand out towards Sam, as if to ward him off, stay away, stay away, as if Sam is a demon being vanquished by the power of Christ. Christo. Whatever. 

“What the hell, Sam?”

“Don’t lie to me,” Sam steels his jaw. His vision is all off center, Dean tilted to the side to his eyes, no matter how close he tries to step to Dean. 

Dean slips away, ducks around Sam, heading to the bathroom, like he realized he needs to wash off, clean away the evidence. The light in the bathroom flips on, the brightness hurting Sam’s eyes when he tries to follow Dean. He ends up standing at the edge of the threshold, the line in the same where shitty carpet meets cheap tile. 

“I didn’t think you needed a babysitter anymore,” Dean growls out, the comment picking at Sam. Sam can tell his brother is getting angry, but he can’t figure out what to do about it—he’s just gotta let it happen. 

“Did you fuck him?” Sam asks, point blank. 

Dean stops mid-hand wash. The water is running. The soap is dripping. Dean glances up in the mirror, looking at Sam standing behind him. 

“What the fuck, Sam?” he spits. “Proximity to another man doesn’t mean I fucked him. You are drunk out of your gourd.” Angry now, maybe even spiteful, but Sam can’t stop. 

It’s too late, it’s always been too late, since the first time Dean touched him, since that first time Sam hid under the bed and listened to Dean fuck some girl, since Jess burned up on the ceiling and Dean became his whole entire world ( again ). 

He can’t stop. 

“I know,” Sam says, taking one wobbly step closer. Movements are hard, his head is still pounding, but his eyes fixated on Dean clearly, coming into sharp focus. “But did you fuck him?” 

Dean responds by pressing a palm to his own face, fingers over his mouth, index finger brushing the bridge of his nose. He lets out a long exhale of breath, exhausted. There is no answer Dean could give him that would prove him wrong. Sam knows, immediately, just by watching him. 

“You need to go to bed, Sam,” Dean says, staring down at the sink. 

“You did,” Sam says, the realization hitting him. He tries to remember the other guy that Dean left with, but it’s all turned into a messed up blur, blacked out, flotsam and jetsam, brain unable to hold on for images, all he remembers is he was big. Like Sam. “You did, you do, how often—”

Dean spins around, and starts walking towards Sam, until they collide. His hands reach out and grab for him and Sam lets him, craving his touch, but Dean doesn’t grab his face, just his elbows, steering him back into the main room by the bed—he doesn’t kiss him like Sam wishes he would. “You’re going to bed,” he orders, in his because I’m the oldest that’s why voice. 

“I thought,” Sam says, struggling with the words as he lets Dean guide him, fumbling through the mess in his brain, thoughts too strangled to push Dean away. It’s not a surprise, he thinks he’s always known, but hasn't ever wanted to pull on that thread. “I thought that I was just some fluke, and then the shifter said you still wanted me, you still think of me—”

“Jesus, and you believe that freak? You're smarter than that, Sam," Dean deflects.

"And I kept watching you wondering when? How? Do you still want to touch me?" 

“Sam—” Dean pleads. The patience in his voice is threadbare, hanging on by a string. There’s a hand on Sam’s shoulders, pushing him into the welcoming darkness of the room, and then he’s ass first on the bed, landing gracelessly on the uncomfortable mattress. “Go to sleep.”

A million thoughts run through his head.

“Did you miss it?” he says. 

“What?” Dean is above him now, peering at him in the dark. 

“When I was gone. All the fooling around we did as kids. Did you ever miss it? I want you to tell me.”

“Not sure what has to do with anything,” Dean says slowly. It’s not an answer. He doesn’t push Sam into bed. He doesn’t walk away. He waits for whatever Sam is going to say. It’s all the permission he needs. 

“I thought you never wanted to fuck me,” Sam shakes out, “because I wasn’t your type. Because I’m a guy.”

Dean flinches. 

“But if you’re out there fucking other guys—then, why not me?” 

“Because you’re my baby brother, and that’s sick,” Dean says, slow like Sam needed to be handheld through it. 

It should hurt, hearing that, but Sam can’t stop having nightmares about death and flames, and the smell of slow roasted burning flesh. He knows he’s a freak, no matter how much he tries to outrun it. 

They used to talk all the time about this. It used to be easy, like breathing. Crawling into Dean’s bed— touch me, touch me like that, please please— Sam was a gangly, skinny tree of a boy, and Dean kept touching him every time he asked, and he loved it. They used to talk about this all the time, whether it was a casual wanna jerk off or can I see your dick or can I kiss you, Dean? For practice?

He never could get out the words he wanted to say, throttled by his own choking fear. Never I love you, never please don’t leave. 

They can’t talk about it now. They’ve forgotten all the words for it. Four years of civilized living has worse than domesticated Sam—it’d be easier if he were normal now, unable to connect to his brother at all, purified, but he exists in some horrible in-between space, too damaged to exist anywhere, and too fucked up for his brother.

“Sam,” Dean reaches down, palm against his cheek, all soft and tender and sweet like when he was a kid. “Get some rest.” 

“Did you fuck anyone who looked like me?” he asks.

Dean stumbles back away from him, shoving Sam as he does so—not hard, not by a lot, he can’t even push Sam down on the bed from this angle.

“What the fuck, Sam?” 

“ Dean .” Sam feels like he might hyperventilate. Like he’s on the edge of some cliff, too high of an altitude, hard to breathe. “Dean, please.” 

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” 

He doesn’t know—he doesn’t fucking know. His mind is spiraling out of control, he can’t seem to grasp onto anything. 

“Dean, just tell me,” he asks. Or demands. It’s getting loose in his head, a little harder to figure out what he wants. “Did you ever fuck anyone who looked like me? Did anyone ever fuck you?” 

There’s a warm tang of fury on his lips at the thought—Dean with another man, Dean touching another man not him. Dean fucking other guys opens up a myriad of possibilities to him, but it also inflames the dark pit of his heart, the part of him that wants Dean’s attention all the time, the part he thought he left behind that night Dean drove him to the bus stop. 

It’s like he’s backsliding into something awful. 

Dean steps back away from him, shaking his head, his eyes flashing. 

“Sam, stop,” Dean hisses.

Sam sucks in a breath. His chest feels hot. He is both miserable and aroused, and he needs to stop, but he can’t—he’s a train track on a collision course. He’s going to die like this, running off a cliff. 

“Why? I just want to know,” he asks. 

“What right do you have to know?” Dean snaps, face twisted in a strange sort of anger. “I don’t know everything about you. I missed all those years at Stanford—”

Sam rolls his eyes.  “I didn’t ask you to,” he flings back, but Dean isn’t listening anymore. 

“I don’t go running around demanding you tell me everyone you ever fucked and touched and sucked.” 

“So that’s a yes?” Sam asks, then realizes it’s a statement. “That’s a yes.”  

“Fuck this,” Dean snarls, and he disappears back into the bathroom before Sam can say anything else. 

The shower turns on, the water running. Sam wonders how hot the water is. Sam thinks about Dean naked, the water pounding on his chest, in his hair, how it spikes up sometimes with the length of it. 

At last, he wraps himself in the blankets, pulling them above his head as he tries to fitfully fall asleep, trying not to think of his brother. 

A couple hours later, Sam wakes up in a dark room, his head pounding with the beginnings of a hangover, the remains of a nightmare filtering through his head. His mouth tastes of blood. The room is dark except for the warm glow of the old television, something like a western playing on it, on the old movie channel. Dean is still awake, in the queen bed next to him. His hair is damp and he’s shirtless, and his eyes are dark, lined with fatigue but his eyes are glued to the TV screen. He doesn’t look at Sam, and Sam worries he ruined something irrevocably between them. 

Sam squints at the TV. 

The Guns of Navarone . 

“I like this part,” he says, mouth dry, not stirring from the bed. He barely even raises his head, just peeking out from under the blankets. 

Dean doesn’t look at him but his mouth curves into a smile.  “Doesn’t everyone?” 

Sam falls asleep to the sound of gunfire and Dean’s breathing. 

*

On the way out of town, they don’t talk about it. 

*

Sam picks the rock salt out of Dean’s chest. 

Dean doesn’t want him to—he can tell. He holds himself ramrod still, his spine a steel line, unbending, unwavering. In the bathroom of their shitty motel, he sits on the edge of the tub, and doesn’t say a word as Sam picks out the rock crystals, one by one, bit by bit, using tweezers from their first aid kit. 

Some of the debris is just barely resting on Dean’s chest, his shirt caught a chunk, but some pieces are embedded at least an inch deep, bleeding. Dean winces as Sam removes one. 

“I’m sorry,” Sam says, but Dean cuts him off with a glare. 

“Don’t, Sam,” he says, and a hot flash of guilt fills his belly again, spreading all the way up to head. 

It wasn’t my fault, Sam tries to remind himself. Rock salt is non-lethal when aimed at humans from a certain distance, he tells himself, but he keeps thinking he could have easily shot Dean in the face. Gotten some in his eyes. Destroyed his vision, destroyed some vital organ or hit some artery that bleeds out too fast. 

His hands are shaking. He needs to calm down. 

“I don’t think that of you,” Sam says. “Dean, I swear—”

“ Sam, ” Dean sighs, exasperated. The tension leaks from his body, just for a moment, allowing his shoulders to shrug as he tilts his head skyward. “Sam, we’ve had this conversation, there is no new ground here. I know what a fucking curse does, okay, you don’t need to baby me.”

“I’m not—” Sam sucks in a breath, and then bites down on anything he wants to say. He tastes metal in his mouth, hot like iron. 

“I could have killed you,” he says softly. “You could have died.”

Dean doesn’t say anything. Sam feels the words strangle his throat, amazed he got any of them out at all. You could have died and I would have killed and I can’t lose you. 

Dean reaches for his hands. They’re covered in Dean’s blood, down to his fingernails and cuticles. Dean runs his fingers over Sam’s knuckles, tracing the outline of the bone there. He does that until Sam stops shaking. 

“Well, I didn’t, loser, I’m fine,” Dean says. He hands Sam the rubbing alcohol, the disinfectant and a gauze pad. “Now make it up to me.”

*

Dean isn’t surprised when Sam leaves. He and Sam were always living on borrowed time. Truthfully, having Sam back in his life was like a dream he knew he would eventually have to wake up from. He was lucky that it lasted this long 

He didn’t expect Sam to come back. 

Dean can’t wrap his brain around that, but every time he looks at Sam—at his side in the passenger seat, sitting shotgun, in the bed next to him, across from him at a diner. 

He keeps thinking: you came back. 

You came back to me. 

You and me, Sam said. We’re all that’s left.

*

Sam is a good brother. He does not try to cockblock Dean. As much as he dislikes the way he sleeps around, men and women alike, he does not try to stop him. It’s never been about that. He’s not a prude, as much as Dean likes to joke. 

As a kid, he was always sickly fascinated by Dean with girls, and he never could work up the nerve to ask if he could watch ( what girl would want someone’s kid brother to watch them fuck anyway? No one Sam would like ).

He is a good brother, and he reminds himself the next time they’re at a dive bar, and Dean is leaning a little too close to another man—this man is big and burly, and older than Dean, and something about the interaction—Dean smiling and laughing and drinking a beer—makes Sam’s skin crawl. He wants to beat the other man away from him with a stick, and that’s a sick, irrational thought he tries to shove to the back of his brain. 

It’s not a big deal, he tells himself, and tries to busy himself with the newspaper he brought, looking for a hunt, turning over in his head their missing dad and his last known location. 

Don’t make this about you, he reminds himself. 

Sam is stone cold sober today, so there’s no good reason for why he gets up and follows Dean into the bathroom, when he sneaks off with the guy.

He’s not thinking about being a good brother. He’s not thinking about growing up, about getting over this. He’s not even thinking about Dean being angry with him later for it. His body just moves on instinct, some primal drive guiding him. 

Hell is repetition. 

This is what Sam thinks as he flings open the single stall bathroom door. 

Dean nearly falls backwards, catching himself just barely—he’d been leaning against the door, letting the older guy push him against him and kiss him. It’d almost be funny if Sam weren’t so pissed off. Dean’s lips are all red and swollen, and the sight makes Sam see red, rage beginning to bubble under the surface. 

The other guy lets out a what the fuck, get the fuck out, snarling in Sam’s direction, but Sam does not care. The man is miniscule, just some stand-in of a stand-in to Sam, and his eyes are all on his brother, wearing his leather jacket, smelling like beer and some other man’s cologne. 

“Were you even going to lock it?” Sam blurts out. He balls his fists up, the urge to take a swing at something rising up. “Do you know how dangerous that is? This is fucking Minnesota. Anyone could have come in.” 

Dean’s eyes are wide, caught in headlights like some hapless deer. Sam doesn’t think he’s ever been caught so unawares. “What the fuck, Sam? I was about to fucking lock it,” he says. 

“Hey asshole,” the big burly man says, and oh, Sam immediately hates him. He doesn’t care about respecting Dean’s choices right now, he just hates this man and he wants to smash his face into the shitty porcelain sink. “We’re kinda in the middle of something, you can wait your turn.” 

Wait your turn makes Sam flinch—as if he was being clocked by some stranger, as if someone was taking apart his skin and looking under the hood— you’re not acting like a concerned brother, right now, but he can’t stop. 

“Sam,” Dean gasps. “Just get out.” 

“Who is this, your pimp?” The man asks, sneering not in Sam’s direction, but in Dean’s. There’s a look in his eyes that Sam doesn’t like, a twist in his lips that’s condescending, that doesn’t match the way they were both looking at each other in the public space of the bar. “Does he want the payment?” 

Sam watches Dean’s face go very pale. The color drains from his cheeks, turning his golden movie star good looks into something almost sickly, and sallow. 

Sam is smart. It takes a moment for things to click, but it’s not as if it’s hard to piece the pieces together. 

“Oh,” he says. 

“Fuck,” Dean says. 

The world slows to a crawl, as if someone turned down the volume around him, rendered the world around him muted and dimmed the lights. He remembers being a kid and Dean coming home multiple times with a wad full of cash, when he was too young to be any good at pool hustling, and Sam believed it, every time he said he got it pickpocketing it, or stealing it, or gambling, or whatever reason he came up with. Sam never questioned it.

He never wanted to question it. 

He feels sick. He can feel bile at the back of his throat. Dean is staring at him with a stricken look on his face, eyebrows drawn, waiting for the hammer to drop, for something awful to happen, and Sam doesn’t know what to say, what to do. 

Deep down he thinks he’s always known. 

The man sighs, pulls out a wallet. “I was about to pay him, don’t worry, I just—”

Sam watches himself as if he’s outside his own body, throwing a swing, relishing in the meaty crunch of skin against bone against flesh. The other man is bigger than him, but he’s not practiced, he doesn’t know how to fight and he hits the wall easily with a heavy thud against the tile. His eyes bypass shock, and turn dazed and confused, as if a piano fell on him, as if Sam was an act of God and not just one angry brother. 

He wants to start a fight. He wants to break someone’s bones. He wants to feel blood and flesh beneath his fingers. For a moment, a white hot surge of anger fills him to the brim, not seeing straight, not seeing anything but red.

“Sam, stop,” Dean hisses at him, palms on his chest. Sam didn’t realize it, but he was already stalking forward like a predator, ready to deal more damage. It’s like being back in the asylum all over again, a sickening horrific rage filling him with nowhere to go. “ Stop. Walk away. I’ll talk to you later.” 

Sam huffs and puffs like a bull. He draws himself to full height, but Dean is surprisingly a steel trap against him, pushing him back. “Not here, not fucking here, Sam—”

“It’s okay to blow some asshole here,” Sam hears himself hiss, and he’s not even looking at Dean—his brother exists at the periphery of his vision, while the target of his rage sputters on the floor. “Why not this, huh, why not this?”

“You’re gonna get us arrested, ” Dean sounds genuinely panicked and Sam laughs viciously at the thought of them being arrested. 

He wants to burn something down to the ground, the phantom taste of kerosene and gasoline on his tongue, he wants to watch flames tear this place down to foundations. 

It’s that thought that makes him go limp, or at least, eases out the tension in his shoulders enough for Dean to push him out of the bathroom. His brother herds him through the dive bar, a hand hot on the back of his neck, and Sam shakes him off with a violent shrug, recoiling from his touch, I’m not a baby I don’t fucking need this. 

He takes the initiative, runs out the door, not paying for anything—behind him, he hears Dean laugh it off, cheeky grin, performative smile, and Sam can’t stand it. There’s a flame burning in his lungs, like he’s choking on cigarette smoke. 

Outside, the pavement is wet, glistening darkly under the moonlight. The air tastes like ozone, like firecracker lightning, but the rain has stopped, and it’s clear dark skies with a half crescent moon. Sam strides until he reaches the Impala, until his legs crash into it and he can’t move anymore. He doesn’t quite collapse, but his knees buckle, and he plants his palms flat on the impala’s hood, the metal wet under his hands, fresh after rainfall.

He takes one sharp breath, then another, until his lungs hurt, chest feeling like it’s going to cave in onto itself. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t have anything to say, he can’t sort out what he’s feeling—everything is going to burst out of him, crawl out of his throat like a monster.

“Sam—” Dean places a hand on Sam’s shoulder, another on his chest, trying to stop him from moving, trying to hold him close, and steady. His touch is warm, and heavy; it feels plastered to his chest. 

“Get off me,” Sam hisses, spinning around hard enough to shake his brother off him. “Get off me, don’t touch me—”

Dean obeys immediately, hands up in the air, to show he’s unarmed, to show he’s not going to strike. Sam, for one brief sharp moment, just wants to shove his fist into Dean’s jaw. Again, he’s back in Rockford and Dean is just a nearby target, unlucky. 

He’s seized a sharp barrage of rage. He wants to feel bone crack, he wants to split Dean’s lip and taste the blood on his knuckles. He wants to see blood caked on his brother’s skin and he’s so close to just swinging, that he shoves himself at Dean, despite telling him to stop touching him, rushes him and rushes into him. Dean yelps, takes a step back and Sam grabs a hold of the lapels of his jacket, and before he knows it, he rushes forward and crushes their lips together. 

It’s not a good kiss. Dean gasps, too shocked to do anything, and Sam isn’t so much as kissing as excavating, trying to burrow himself under Dean’s skin. His tongue is warm, and despite the other man, he can’t taste him anywhere on Dean’s tongue. All he tastes is the tang of beer and Dean Dean Dean. 

It lasts for a minute before Dean pushes Sam away, and Sam allows it, but doesn’t let go of him. He’s staring Dean right in the face, and he’s cracked open, almost beautiful in how clearly distraught he is, in a way he never is—vulnerable, split open at the seams, coming apart. 

It’s what makes Sam say this next. 

“Why him?” he asks. 

“Come again?” Dean blinks, taking a slight step back, like Sam slapped him. 

“Why him?”

“Sam, I’m not… I’m not—I don’t know what you think you saw in there, but—”

“I know what you’re doing, Dean,” he says, pain twisting his voice into something sharp. The words are serrated edges in his mouth, cutting into his own skin. “I’ve known… for a long time Since I was like, god, fifteen.” He looks down at his feet, kicking at a small little puddle. The asphalt is cracked beneath his feet. Sam tries to remember older men surrounding Dean, but he can’t quite sort out that memory as much as the others. All he knows is that Dean always had money when they were on the verge of running out. 

Christ. Something like guilt lodges itself in his stomach, making him sick.  “I didn’t have a name for it, but I knew something.” 

Dean takes a step back from Sam, getting distance from him, his eyes raking over him. Under the streetlights, his vision sharpens, his gaze is dark, the green of his eyes unseeable. “You’re lying,” he says. “You didn’t know then, you don’t—”

“Don’t tell me what I do and don’t know,” Sam clenches his jaw.

“I kept it from you,” Dean says, all bravado and false surety.

Sam shakes his head. His hair falls into his eyes. 

“Can you even name it, then? Can you say it?” Dean challenges him, mouth curving into an ugly smile. 

“Prostitute,” Sam says easily, making it clear, laying it all out. “You sleep with people for money. Probably since you were too young to be having sex. Since I was a kid, really. There. Is that what you wanted me to say? Did I make a mistake?” 

Dean says nothing. He bites his lip. His eyes are hard to read, jaw clenching. Sam tries to talk, but it’s difficult to sort through all the memories rolling around in his head. He wants to ask how old, and then isn’t sure he wants to know. He wants to ask when, feeling frightened like a child of the answer. It’s almost too big. Too much. 

“Is that why you don’t want to touch me?” Sam asks, trying to verbalize everything in his chest, but there’s no words for it. There’s no words for them. No one else exists like them. “Do you even like it, or was I your pity case, or what—”

“Sam, what the fuck are you going on about?”

Sam’s eyes are drawn to his lips, the shape of them, the pull of them, thick and lush, made for kissing. He wants to kiss them again. 

“I hate it, you know,” he says. “That’d you’d rather be here, on your knees for some asshole with a fat wallet, than with me.”

Silence. The sound of cars rumbling as they drive past them, the gravel crunch of the parking lot. 

“Sam,” Dean says, voice sharp. “You think I do this for fun?”

“Dean—” he starts, and stutters. “I didn’t mean it like that, I just—”

He can’t finish his sentence. It doesn’t seem to matter what he feels—he doesn’t know how to explain, to ask for what he wants. 

“No, fuck you,” he says. “Get in the fucking car. I’m not talking about this here.” 

*

It turns out that Dean isn’t talking about this ever. 

But then, Dean gets electrocuted after, and Sam gets told that his heart will give out in a few months time, and then that’s all Sam can think about. 

Nothing else matters. 

*

“I don't fucking need a nurse maid,” Dean says, in a voice that would have more bite if he weren’t on death’s door, if he had the energy to add more push to what he’s saying. “I can take my own goddamn shower.” 

“Dean—”

“No. I mean it, Sam,” he protests. He’s fine, even if he feels a little out of breath. He has a heart condition. He’s not going to drop dead right away. The doctor gave him a few months, but Sam won’t let it go, acting like he’s gonna die any minute. “I’m not gonna die in the shower, if I need you, I’ll get Life Alert, okay, Sam—”

Sam slams a fist into the motel wall. It’s a loud, battering ram of a sound, the heavy thump, the crackle of solid plaster against flesh. Something rattles behind Dean’s vision. His brother breathes hard and heavy. Hair falls in his eyes and there are dark circles under Sam’s eyes, even though Dean is the dying one. Dean is ready for a fight, but when Sam looks at him, his eyes are glassy with tears. 

“Dean, please,” Sam says. “Let me help you.” 

“Fine,” Dean concedes. For Sam. Not for him. 

It’s easier, after that, once Dean stops struggling against his brother’s insistence. Dean gets undressed in the bathroom without any fanfare, clothes falling down to the ground, and Sam doesn’t make a single comment about it. His eyes don’t linger. A consummate professional. 

Dean turns around to see Sam start to undress, shirt coming off, his hands reaching for the buttons of his jeans, tugging at his belt. 

“Whoa, partner,” Dean says. “What are you doing?”

“Getting in with you,” Sam says, matter of fact. “Don’t argue with me.”

Dean does not have the energy to push a fight with Sam, who is more stubborn than a bull, a solid wall that won’t bend or budge. 

They used to do this, but Sam was always smaller than him, younger. Dean happily gave Sam baths until he outgrew them, until he was thirteen and demanding privacy, and Dean wondered what he’d done wrong. 

He should have known it then, but there’s always been something wrong with him, on some basic, fundamental level—he couldn’t see the boundary lines drawn up for brothers, until he crossed it beyond coming back from it. 

The shower steams up around them both. Sam stands behind him, looming large. It didn’t used to be like this. Dean used to be taller. They used to both be able to fit in a bath comfortably. So awkward, to be under his baby brother like this. Worse still that he finds it comforting, and Dean knows he doesn’t deserve it. 

Sam doesn’t wash his hair, the way Dean used to do with him, and Dean is a little grateful for that—it’d be humiliating if he couldn’t lift his own arms. 

Sam does scrub his back, rub soap all over his backside, and Dean hates how good it feels. It turns him boneless and limbless, wanting to just melt into Sam’s touch, and he finds himself wobbling with it. 

Sam immediately wraps an arm around his chest, pulling him close. He doesn’t move, then, doesn’t try to clean him, he just presses his nose against the nape of Dean’s neck and breathes him in, as if he could smell like anything but water and soap. 

“I’m fine,” he rasps, but Sam shushes him, holding him close, steady. Sam’s body feels flushed and hot against him. Dean tells himself it’s the heat from the shower, but it makes his brain go a little haywire and he’s not sure he can handle this, being so close to his brother, skin to skin, flesh on flesh. The back of his thigh brushes up against what must be Sam’s cock, half hard. 

For a moment, he considers it. He lets himself daydream about it, wanting to ask, right then and there: C’mon Sam, fuck me. Touch me touch me fuck me. Lets himself sway with the thought of his brother’s hands on him. One last request for a dying man. Sam couldn’t deny him. Would Sam even want to? 

It’d be selfish. The worst kind of selfish. But god, he thinks he deserves this much, maybe? One last parting gift. After everything he’s done. 

“I’m not letting you die,” Sam promises, whispering against his skin. He says it so softly, Dean isn’t sure he heard him right. 

“Come again?” He asks. 

“I’m not letting you die,” he repeats, then louder, over and over, “I’m not letting you die, I’m not, I’m not—”

“ Sammy ,” Dean cuts him off, his voice wet because he can’t stand to hear this. “Sam, c’mon, it’s—”

“You can’t leave me,” Sam mutters. His grip around him tightens.  “Not now. Not with Dad gone. Not after Jess.” 

Guilt suckerpunches him in the guts, like someone hooked him and just pulled his insides out. I’m not, I don’t want to, I’ll never leave you, he wants to promise, but he can’t. 

There’s nothing he can say to make this better. 

*

After the faith healer, and the reaper, Dean is happy to leave Roy Le Grange and Nebraska as far behind in the dust as he can. 

Guilt weighs heavy on his chest, thinking about Layla. Thinking about his own stolen life, and how little Sam seemed to care about the cost of it. It shouldn’t bother him—he’s not sure what he’d do if it were Sam’s life on the line like that, and he hopes he never finds out—but Sam seems to be carrying on easier than he’s been these last few months. He doesn’t say much as Dean blasts Pink Floyd over the tape deck, but his face is smoothed out, no hard edges, staring out the window in peaceful repose. 

Maybe this is good. Maybe the pain of Jess is finally fading away. Moving on is supposed to be good. 

But Dean can’t shake the guilt that gnaws at him when he looks at Sam: his crime was already dragging Sam back into this life at the cost of his girlfriend, but now he’s done worse than that—he’s changed something fundamental in his brother, some internal shift, turned him into a person who’d let an innocent man die as long as Dean stays alive. 

Dean’s not sure he deserves that.

But worse still, Dean’s not sure if it was a change at all, or if Sam’s always been like this, he just never cared to look close enough to see it. 

*

“You know, I could do it too,” Sam says softly. 

Dean has no idea what Sam is talking about. “What?” 

They’re at a bar, but tucked away from patrons, near a back end table, further away from the crowds. There’s a dart board Dean wants to try his hand at, and maybe he can flutter his eyes at Sam and convince him to con a few people.

“You know,” Sam says. His voice is quiet, it barely carries past Dean’s earshot. It’s loud in this bar, everyone chattering behind them. His cheeks are an inflamed shade of pink and Sam shyly glances down between his legs, then at his hands, then at Dean. “What you do? I can do it, too.” 

Dean blinks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Pool hustling?”

Sam hefts out a sigh. “Prostituting yourself,” Sam says, dropping the word like it’s an atom bomb. “I can do it, too.” He says the last part of that sentence slowly, enunciating each letter, and Dean doesn’t know what pisses him off more—Sam acting like he’s slow or Sam making such a brain dead suggestion. 

“What the fuck? No.”

“If we need the money—”

“ No, ” he insists. “That’s not your job.” 

Dean can’t even picture it. He doesn’t want to imagine any other man touching Sam, paying to touch Sam . Dean thinks he might kill someone. 

Sam reaches over across the table, places his hand over Dean’s, covering it almost entirely with his own. It’s a motion so surprising to Dean, he doesn’t know how to react. Sam’s hand is warm and huge, and the expression on Sam’s face has softened, lines smoothing out, eyebrows knitted in concern. 

“It’s not your job either.” 

Dean immediately opens his mouth to argue the point on instinct— of course it’s my job. It’s always been my job— but Sam’s grip tightens, holding his wrist, as if to anchor them together.

“I lived on my own for four years. You don’t need to provide for me. If you’re struggling, I can figure something out. You don’t have to do this. Don’t act like you’re doing this for me.”

Sam keeps talking, but Dean doesn’t hear it. It’s not your job either, repeats in his head, over and over.

Dad never asked where the extra money came from. That was fine with him. He could handle that. Sam looking at him with that strange, soft concern in his eyes makes Dean’s chest feel like it’s going to cave in. He can feel his face start to go hot, cheeks burning.  

Dean abruptly stands up so fast, he almost falls over, dizzy, shaking Sam’s hand off him like it’s a landmine. He is struck with a sudden urge to get away from his brother, away from his eyes

“Don’t wait up for me,” Dean says.

*

But Sam does wait up for him, stays up waiting back in their motel room at The Silver Queen Inn, a classy joint with a pool closed for renovations and a rustic, wooden interior, curtains a deep burgundy to match the comforters. 

Sam does the worst thing Dean could think of him doing. 

“How much?” Sam asks, when Dean walks through the front door of their motel room—in Sam’s hands, there’s a wad of bills he’s flipping through—a couple hundreds, fifty dollar bills. Dean doesn’t recognize them. He earns most of their money, when it’s not credit card scams, so he’s not sure where Sam got that pile of bills. 

“How much what?” Dean says.

Dean is sore all over. His body hurts from being thrown around. He wants a shower and a place to lay flat for a few hours. He doesn’t have the time, or the patience for whatever game Sam decided to play. 

“How much for a night with you?” Sam asks. When Dean doesn’t answer—because he’s still processing what the words coming out of Sam’s mouth even mean—Sam amends his question. “Or an hour? A couple of hours? How much?”

“What the fuck, Sam?” He feels his face twist into an angry snarl, but Sam doesn’t seem to care. He’s leaning back against a stack of pillows on the headboard, long legs all spread out, clad in his boxers and a purple dog t-shirt, like he was getting ready to go to bed, but just had to get a bug up his ass about this. “I don’t know what kind of point you’re trying to prove, but knock it off—”

“You gotta have some kind of rate,” Sam says, far too matter of fact. “Please tell me you know how to negotiate.”

“What? You’re gonna help me? Gonna be my pimp, Sam?” He makes the words sound as nasty as this line of questioning feels, spitting venom, spreading his arms as if inviting Sam to take a gander, to take a swing at him, to look at all the goods displayed on his body. “I’d offer you a cut, but I pay for half your shit anyway.” 

“I want to pay,” Sam says, standing up, long legs swinging over the bed. “So how much?” 

Dean’s belly goes cold, as he registers just what Sam wants to do. He goes still, freezing up, his throat closing up as he struggles to say something. Sam throwing money at him in exchange for sex makes him feel like peeling off his own skin, like he’s being stripped raw and torn apart—it’s somehow worse than anything anyone else has requested and he’s done because they paid for it and he wanted the cash. 

He can see the exact moment Sam regrets saying it, the lines across his face, the soft intake of breath, as if he just realized he crossed a line—and that’s it, that’s Dean’s last straw. That’s what pisses him off, not the request in of itself, but Sam wishing he could take it back. That he doesn’t have the balls to own it.

There are no take backs. 

Dean, then, does the worst thing he can think of.

( the two of them a match made in hell, a pair combustible chemicals making mustard gas when thrown together )

“Fine,” he says, leaning forward and snatching the bills from Sam’s hand and pocketing them. Sam doesn’t protest. “You have three hours,” he says, which is an arbitrary number that he just decided on. “What do you want to do to me?” 

Sam blinks.  “What?” 

Dean grins, teeth bared, calling his bluff. “You wanted me, you bought me, fair and square, now do you want to do , Sam?” Dean goes past him, throwing himself on the bed, spreading his legs for him, staring up at his brother with his eyelashes fluttering like he was a coquettish girl and not Sam’s big brother, making a show of being lewd and slutty, playing the part of the whore. 

He keeps expecting Sam to back off, or better yet, throw a swing. Dean would love for this to turn into a fight. He can feel adrenaline rushing to his veins, eager for all that energy to go somewhere. 

But Sam is calm, regarding him with a steady, even look. “I want to blow you,” he says, climbing on the bed on top of him. He gets on his knees, legs bracketing Dean’s shins and ankles, angled just right so he could lean down and be eye level with his crotch. 

“Come again?” Dean asks, not the answer he expected. “Most guys ask for me to blow them.” 

Sam laughs. It’s an ugly bitter sound. “Yeah. I can imagine,” he says, and with strong confident fingers, like he’s done this before, he undos Dean’s belt, then tugs off his pants and boxers just down to mid thigh, exposing him. 

Dean sucks in a breath. He’s not exactly hard, but Sam staring at his cock makes him thicken anyway. A dozen adolescent fantasies, each one guiltier than the last, fill his head, reminding him how much he used to love fooling around with Sam, how much he thought it’d last forever. 

“Sam,” Dean’s voice is raw. 

Sam reaches down and grabs his cock, strong long fingers wrapped around him—just that pressure, that sight, makes Dean’s cheeks go hot, shuddering. 

“Sam,” he cries out again. Despite Dean inviting this, he feels panic rush to his chest, up his cheeks, turning his insides weak. He wanted to psych Sam out, not this. “Sam, wait—you don’t have to do this.” 

He wants to back off. He wants to put a stop to this. 

“I want to,” Sam says, giving his cock a firm stroke, enough to draw a gasp from him. Dean can’t help, but stare at his cock between Sam’s fingers, the wet head peeking out as he strokes up and down. Sam has a hard, unforgiving grip. It’s different from all the other hand jobs they’ve shared. 

“You never let me do this. I want to do this. Dean, please, I want to do this.” 

“Sam—”

“Tell me you don’t want me,” Sam says, looking up from Dean’s cock, up at Dean, meeting his gaze. His eyes are shiny, like he’s about to cry and Dean is sick to his stomach. He needs to get off this ride. “Tell me you don’t think about me like that, and I swear to god, I’ll stop.”

The words should come easy. I don’t want you like that. He’s been working so hard to convince himself of that for years. Since Sam left. Longer, even. 

But he can’t make himself say anything, words dying on his tongue, then Dean’s brain goes completely dead as Sam leans down and sucks his cock into his mouth. 

“Fuck,” Dean cries out, straining his thighs and legs to keep from bucking up. Sam’s tongue is warm and wet, lapping almost delicately around the head, licking up all the fluid, and even that delicate pressure makes Dean like he might blow, a burst of pleasure under his skin and concentrated in his belly. 

Immediately, Dean knows Sam has never done this before. That if he had a college experimental sexy phase, it didn’t teach him anything about sucking cock. He plainly doesn’t know what he’s doing, almost tentatively suctioning around the head of his cock, tongue lightly lapping, barely making an effort to bob his head down. 

“Sammy,” he gasps, and Sam makes a noise around his dick, a noise that sends rumbling vibrations down his cock and makes Dean tilt his head back and groan. “Fuck,” he cries out, shuddering as Sam starts to figure out what he likes. He can’t look at Sam. He can’t look at Sam and he can’t not look at Sam, entranced by his little brother’s mouth around his cock. Somehow, the guilt choking him doesn’t do anything to pare down his hard-on, if anything it seems to enhance it, make him throb, all his wiring is wrong. 

Sam whines, and he tries to push down harder, lips going about half way down his shaft. Dean feels his cock twitch in Sam’s mouth. Sam’s teeth scrape the sides of the delicate skin there and he cries out at the sensation. 

“Sam,” Dean gasps, ragged, sharp around the edges. He’s going to come. He feels dizzy, spun out, high. “Sam, stop,” he says and reaches down to tug Sam up, wrapping his hand in Sam’s messy hair, urging him off. 

His warm mouth leaving his cock makes Dean want it right back, as soon as possible. His baby brother’s mouth is red and wide, his cheeks flushed, pupils blown wide like a drug addict.  

“I’m sorry,” Sam gasps, so raw and stretched thin, and Dean shushes him, it’s okay, it’s okay, he tells him with tugging hands. 

“C’mere,” he says, with a light tug on his hair, then outright reaching forward and hauling him up by the shoulders. Sam obeys easily, leaning into his touch, sliding his body on top of Dean’s until he’s straddling him for real now, bodies aligned, hips on hips, leaning down to kiss Dean.

Dean opens his mouth and accepts Sam inside, cupping his face in both hands, pulling him in—eager to devour and be devoured, to kiss Sam until he can’t breathe and can’t think anymore. He’s still wearing his jeans and Dean shoves down his boxers before Sam can stop him, his cock springing forward, fully hard and a little intimidating in its size. He wraps one hand around Sam’s cock, pressing it against his own, and keeps the other in Sam’s hair, savoring the sharp gasps and little whines his brother makes for him. 

Together, they rock and grind their way to orgasm, kiss breaking to moan into each other’s mouths, Sam crying out as he comes all over Dean’s belly, spurting upwards towards his chest and covering his hands, Dean following almost immediately. He’s covered in sticky fluid, on his hands, on his clothes, and he can’t figure out which is his and which came from Sam. 

A little while later, the money exchanged lays forgotten—it’s all part of the same pocket, both theirs, shared equally, like everything else. They are both lying side by side on the bed, shoulders touching, pressed close together in the cramped full-sized bed. Dean contemplates getting a king for them both next time, but that seems presumptuous, and too likely to get them noticed, an all around terrible idea, but he can dream.

“Why are we like this?” Sam asks finally, in the quiet dark. 

“You’re asking me?” Dean scoffs, staring up at the ceiling like there were any stars to count there, anything worth looking at besides the lumpy popcorn texture. “Aren’t you the college kid? With your fancy words and shit?”

In the corner of his eye, he sees Sam’s grin turn cheeky, full dimples on display. 

“Genetic sexual attraction,” he says. 

“What?”

“I learned it in psych class.”

“What the fuck are they teaching you at that fancy ass school?”

“Relatives who didn’t grow up together tend to be attracted to each other. Something about narcissism.”

Dean can see the smile grow on Sam’s face. 

“Okay, Sam, but that has nothing to do with us,” he says. 

Sam shrugs, his shoulder bumping into Dean’s. “Yeah, I know. It’s mostly debunked. The Westermarck effect is supposed to prevent people who grew up together from finding each other attractive.” He sighs and blows a strand of hair out of his face. “There’s no explanation for us.”

There are no people like us, Dean thinks. Not even other hunters. No one he's ever met. 

“Why did you leave?” Dean blurts out. He doesn’t know why he asks, maybe all the college talk rubbing salt in the wound. “I mean, I get it, you got into college, and Dad told you to stay gone. That wasn’t right,” he admits. “But why did you leave? I missed you.” His voice is choked up. 

This is the most they’ve ever spoken of that night. 

Dean feels like he’s pulling himself apart, bone by bone. 

For a long time, Sam doesn't say anything. Dean thinks he’s disrupted this careful, post-coital peace they’ve cultivated. Sam moves and shifts on the bed, until he’s laying on his shoulder on his side, staring at Dean. 

“I wanted you to come with me,” he says. 

“You never said that.” Dean’s eyes flicker to Sam, but looking at him is like looking at the sun. He’s going to blind himself. 

“I was too scared,” he says, and Dean does look then, head on. Sam’s eyes are bright with tears. “I was scared that if I did, you’d say no and I couldn’t handle that. I'd rather just leave than have you tell me no.”

“Sam, I—” 

“Can you honestly tell me you would have come with me?” He asks. “That you would have picked me over dad?” 

Dean doesn’t answer. He wants to say yes. But running through the events in his head, he runs into a John Winchester shaped wall, so scared to leave his father alone for too long, like he’d perish or disappear or turn to smoke, die alone on some hunt without Dean to rely on. Dean couldn’t live with that guilt, and for a moment, he hates their old man—it’s not a thought he ever allows himself, a crime against nature. 

“I don’t know,” Dean confesses. “I wanted to. I wanted to. Doesn’t that count for something?” 

Sam smiles. It’s a small, gentle thing. 

“I’ve never...” Sam trails off, his voice shrinking. He ducks down, something shy in his face, unfamiliar. Then, softly, a secret, shameful and dark: “I’ve never been with another man, but you.”

That’s not surprising, but it hits an old pang of familiar guilt inside Dean, the worry that he’s ruining something pure and good inside his baby brother, like pulling apart his insides, filling him up with something corrupted and ugly, an oil slick of darkness, too thick to wash away. 

“I really fucked you up,” he lets slips out, his voice sounds distant to him, far away, not fully here. 

Side to side, his brother shrugs against him. “Yeah,” Sam startles him by agreeing—he expected a protest, but he just nods, casual, easy, like talking about the weather, and not confirming Dean’s worst fears. “Yeah, you did.” 

Sam shifts again, bed squeaking beneath his weight, until he’s on his stomach now, leaning his head on Dean’s shoulder, closing the minimal distance. His skin is warm. His hair is baby soft. Dean wants to blanket himself all over Sam and never let go. It’s terrifying. He can’t breathe with how much he wants it. 

“I’m sorry,” Dean’s throat is raw, and Sam laughs at him, warmth gusting into his skin. Which is a little insulting, honestly. 

“I thought you’d be happy,” Sam says. “You ruined me for anyone else.” 

His brother raises his head up, his body moving with it as leans in over Dean, until he’s pressing his forehead against Dean’s temple. The urge to shove him flares up in him, not out of hatred or anger, but because Sam is too close, crossing a line and he’s gotta stop Sam from doing something he’ll regret, but he doesn’t, he sits still, letting Sam press his body tight against him. He can still remember the warmth of his mouth, hot and wet inside, and feels his cock twitch in a traitorous pulse. 

“I could never mess around with other guys,” Sam says, another confession, and Dean is his priest. “Even when I wanted to, the whole time I’d think, my brother’s hotter. I’d kiss someone and think, you did this better. I missed your mouth, I missed you .”

God, Dean can picture it, too clearly. Some asshole frat boy, or maybe some hot nerd, washboard abs and glasses, Sam trying to kiss him in the library and thinking about him the whole time. He does want to brag about this, but he can’t push the words out. 

“I only wanted you inside me, Dean. No one else. No one else could compare.”

*

The rain batters against the impala in a soothing drip-drip drip. Dean lies across the front seat, shoes off, because he would never let his dirty boots in the impala. 

There was a thunderstorm earlier, a late April shower roaring up above them. Loud crashes in the sky, crackling across the air, the smell of ozone breaking. The sound of it following them around as the rain battered harder and harder against the car, until finally Dean pulled over. 

It’s slowed down now, They could just get up and leave, but Dean didn’t move, and Sam didn’t push him to. It was dark outside, and the impala was dark with it, swallowing up the night sky and air into their little makeshift home.

It was a home, Sam thought—after all of this time, all the years away, the interior of the Impala is the closest thing to home Sam ever had, after Dean. 

He used to get maudlin about this. School assignments and English essay prompts asking: What’s your best childhood memory? Name a significant time in your life. Sam never liked the significant times, too large and unwieldy, he liked the quiet moments, when the rain fell outside and he could smell his brother’s breath. 

“We could just sleep here,” Sam says. His voice has that sleepy, drawn out cadence. Sam didn’t have an accent, and sometimes Sam had all the accents, his voice picking up bits and pieces of everywhere they’ve ever been, until he was just nondescript. Unidentifiable. 

Dean scoffs. “I’m too old for that,” Dean says. “My back wants a soft bed.”

Sam laughs to himself. Funny thing to think about, Dean getting old. He was still obscenely young. His face was still as beautiful as its ever been, if not moreso. 

“Remember that tornado,” Sam says, apropos of nothing.  

“Christ, Sammy.” A rolling chuckle in the back of Dean’s throat. Vibrating. Throaty. “Hell of a memory to pick apart.”

“Dad was there,” Sam said. “The sky turned green, Dean, and I thought—”

“You thought it was something supernatural,” Dean says, distant with the faintness of memory. “It was right after that—that Christmas, remember?”

That Christmas when Sam was no longer satisfied with lackluster answers and cover stories about spies and salesmen. Sam remembered it vividly, the way a kid remembers losing his first tooth, or his virginity, or his first shitty date. 

“It passed us,” Dean goes on, responding to Sam’s pensive silence. “But it was so loud. The air was screaming. We didn’t have a basement, we were staying in some foreclosed place and we hid in the closet and you just...you just curled right in my jacket, and didn’t let go. It was one of the few times you and Dad weren’t fighting.”

Sam laughs. “I was eight,” he says. He didn’t fight with John so aggressively until later, until his anger and resentment festered into something ugly and explosive, corroding their relationship. 

“It started hailing,” Dean says. 

“You were so mad at the hail,” Sam mentions. “So pissed off it was gonna damage the car. She wasn’t even yours yet. Dad kept saying it’d be fine.” 

“Baby deserves better than some freak storm,” Dean says, and Sam hears the appreciative thump he gives her, patting her lightly, the leather under his hands. 

There’s so many moments in time, where Sam remembers feeling warm and loved and protected, all with Dean. 

Dean begins to hum under his breath, some Metallica song that Sam recognizes as the lullaby Dean used to sing him to sleep. 

“What’s that?” Sam asks. 

“Enter Sandman ,” Dean says. He can hear the smirk in his voice. 

“Fucked up thing to sing to a baby,” Sam says dryly, repositioning himself on the back, the leather squeaking beneath him. 

“It worked, didn’t it?” 

They both laugh, out loud, Sam with his full chest. They fall silent after, and Sam thinks his brother may be falling asleep, his breathing evening out. There’s a buzzing in his head, almost like the distant call of a vision, but it doesn’t hurt. He doesn’t dread it. He’s just warm, on the inside. 

“Do you remember that fourth of July,” Sam says. “Not when I was eight, but older, that time with the fireworks?” He can taste it on his tongue. Fire and ash, gunpowder bright. A memory that kept him warm at Stanford, missing that sheer joy with his brother with a burning ache in his chest. 

“Sam,” Dean breathes. Full of light, just like a firework. “Yeah, of course I remember, we set the field on fire. Narrowly escaped getting arrested. Why?” 

The rain stops. It might have stopped some while ago. The sky above is starting to clear. There is no one around for hours. It’s just the vast sky and the dark woods, it’s just the Impala and them and the rest of the world swallowing them whole. 

It’s always been like that, really. Their whole lives. Sam’s whole life has always been this. 

Sam makes a choice. He lifts his head, scooting around in the back seat, until he can maneuver himself up. He peaks over the bench seat, staring down into Dean’s face. Dean’s eyes, big and green. His t-shirt rucked up, exposing a tantalizing bit of his belly, the rise and fall of his chest speeding up the slightest bit. He looked good. He looked edible. His skin was soft and creamy, peach ripe, and Sam feels his blood rush just looking at him. 

“Sam,” Dean breathes. 

“I wanna fuck you,” Sam confesses, breeching the silence. His voice had gone deep, throaty, words dragged out by the hair. 

Dean sucks in a breath. He can see, even in the dark, his pupils dilate, expand, the dark eating all the color. Can see his cheeks turn pink and count all the freckles. He can hear the hitch in Dean’s breath. In the darkness, his eyes seem to glow, cat-like. 

“Here?” Dean asks. His stomach flutters. Sam can’t take his eyes off him, entranced by his whole body. 

Sam laughs, because he’s never known Dean to be shy. 

“Here,” Sam says. “Outside. In a bed. In a shower. In a disgusting bathroom. By the side of the road. Over the Impala, all spread out like a goddamn pin-up poster.” 

Dean lets out a noise, a low groan, soft in the darkness, music to Sam’s ears. He’s heard this sound before, whenever he listened in when he shouldn’t have, whenever he caught Dean with someone else, and all the precious few stolen moments they had together as teenagers.  

“Jesus, Sam,” he says, eyes flickering. His hand slides down his belly, fingertips fanning out. The denim over his cock strains. 

“You want that?” Sam asks, in a rough-hewn voice. He’s not trying to be seductive—he’s too far past that. He’s just wanting , filled with desire, he can’t breathe with Dean so close pressed up against him. He’s just splaying himself open for his brother, cracking open his rib cage. “Do you want that too, Dean?” 

Dean’s answer is brusque and rough. He simply shoots up, rising up from his position on the bench seat, in one smooth swift graceful motion—then his hands reach out, grasp Sam by the collar of his shirt, bunching it up between his fingers and pulling Sam so close, their foreheads knocking together, nose bumping into each other as they kiss over the back of the front seat. 

Sam moans, breathing in his brother, trying to push into him for more, as Dean pushes back, like an unstoppable force and an immovable object. They lick into each other’s mouths, lips, and teeth colliding roughly. Dean’s mouth is sticky and warm, tastes faintly of beer, and cotton soft. Sam breathes him like it’s his last breath, like he won’t ever get this again, crushing Dean’s face to him, fingertips on the delicate press of Dean’s cheekbones, hooking around his jaw. 

He doesn’t know how long they kiss, but Dean pulls away to breathe, nudging his nose against Sam’s.

“Dean,” Sam says afterwards. It sounds like a prayer on his lips, soft, horribly intimate. 

“Yeah, Sam,” Dean says, answering that question. “I want that.” 

“Okay,” Sam says. “Get out of the car.” 

Sam leaves the Impala first, cracking the door open and stepping out, leaving Dean blinking at him in confusion. 

“I thought—”

“I want you on the Impala,” Sam says. He watches Dean swallow thickly, debating it over in his head, like he has to actually think about it. Sam starts to tug at his own shirt, lifting the hem over his head. It’s cold outside, but not cold enough to stop him, and he knows Dean is staring at the way his nipples pebble—he takes a perverse sort of glee at being under his gaze, Dean’s eyes wanting, thinking about how as a kid all he wanted was to be noticed by Dean. “Haven’t you ever done that?” 

“Oh Jesus, Sam,” Dean stumbles out from the Impala driver's side door, trying to walk and get his pants off at the same time, fumbling and jumping around. “I thought you were gonna be a prude about this—”

Sam doesn’t let him finish talking, he just pushes his brother around, slamming into him in a biting kiss as he shoves him down on the Impala’s hood. Dean makes a delicious little moan, his body arching up into Sam. His legs falling open, spreading for Sam without Sam even asking. When Sam pushes him down on the hard, damp metal, Dean goes willingly, without complaint. 

“I’m about to fuck my brother,” Sam says as he pulls away, only the slightest inch, enough to lean forward and nip Dean’s lip between his teeth. “Do I look like a prude to you?” 

“Jesus,” comes Dean’s reply. It’s off to the races afterwards, the rest of his clothes coming off, Dean tugging off his jacket and flannel and all his top layers off until Sam has him bare, cool wet metal under him. Sam pushes him back down on the Impala, his body blanketing him he pins Dean, his hands around Dean’s wrists. 

“Sam,” Dean breathes, voice shot, head tilted back to reveal an exposed neck. Sam’s eyes are drawn to everything Dean has on display. His voice catches in his throat—he’s seen Dean naked so many times, seen his cock, gotten his hands all over him, but he’s never really gotten a chance to truly look at him, to take in every inch and crevice. It’s dark enough out here that Sam wishes he had a spotlight, but it doesn’t matter, even in the gloom of moonlight, Dean still looks like a feast laid out for him. 

“God,” Sam says. 

“Yeah?” Dean asks, playfully pushing against his grip on his wrists, bucking his hips and rocking against Sam, but Sam doesn’t budge. “You’re gonna do anything because I’m getting a little antsy here, and my ass is cold… gonna start thinking you don’t know where to put it.”

His voice is full of bravado, but his cheeks are red, his skin burning hot, and Sam can’t stop looking. 

“You look good,” Sam says. “God, you look like a—”

A pin-up model. A dirty photograph. A dream. 

Sam’s had a crush on Dean every year of his life since he hit puberty. He wants to commit this to memory. Sketch it out in Dad’s journal, like a filthy confession. Look at what I’m doing to your son. He should be ashamed and he can’t find it in himself anymore, rooting around his insides, only this fixation, this desire for Dean remains. 

Look what the road has done to him. Stripped away that thin veneer of normalcy, and as always, it was just this underneath, like layers of chipped paint. 

“Christ, Sammy,” Dean says, squirming beneath him, cock brushing up against Sam’s. Sam loves the way his cock looks, curving and red and wet at the tip, just bouncing between his legs, jutted up and on display like the rest of his brother. “Do something if you’re going to.”

“Do you...” Sam asks, not being able to fully finish his sentence, fumbling for words. “Do you have lube?” 

Dean groans, not in a sexy way, his head leaning back against the dark of the impala. “Yeah, in the glove compartment. Go get it, tiger.” 

“I didn’t know we were gonna...” Sam trails off as he dashes off quickly to the Impala side door, rooting around the glove compartment. He finds it tucked under the registration, and Sam tries not to think about how Dean’s been using this in the past, banishing the thought. “I didn’t think that far ahead.” 

“Thought you were the college boy,” Dean says, when Sam returns. He doesn’t shove Dean down on the hood this time, unscrewing the cap of the little tube, then staring at it as if he was expecting it to do something. 

“Do I have to show you how to do it?” There’s a teasing lilt in his brother’s voice, a curve to his smile, a light dancing in his eyes. It’s intoxicating, looking at him. 

“I know how to do it.” Sam’s voice is dry, and his gaze unfocused, struck dumb by the sight of his brother on the Impala hood, laying himself back, outstretched. “I’m just,” Sam struggles, then drops the timbre of his voice low and throaty, the way he likes hearing it from Dean. “Spread your legs.” 

“Fuck,” Dean gasps, maybe perhaps a bit prematurely, but he does as Sam tells him, spreading his legs obscenely wide, heels of his feet up on the hood, knees bent, giving Sam a space to be welcomed in. Sam can see everything—the curves of his ass split open, the muscles of his thighs, the fine peachy hairs that dusted Dean’s body. “The fucking woodland creatures are gonna get a free peep show.”

“They’re gonna get a lot more than that,” Sam says. 

His heart is pounding against his ribcage, rapid fire as he squirts the slick fluid onto his fingers. He wants to run his hands all over Dean’s thighs, kiss his way down his body, take his slow sweet time with his brother, savor it, but he can’t waste any more time—a rapid urgency has overtaken him, as if the four years he missed is suddenly crashing into him like a train. 

“We can do this again, right?” Sam says, as he nudges a slicked up finger between his cheeks, sliding into Dean’s hole, a small, dark puckered thing. It welcomes Sam easily, his finger slipping inside him and for a moment, Sam can’t think, lost in the sight of Dean’s body just sucking him in. Wanting him.  

“Getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you?”  Dean says, breath coming in slow and steady gulps. 

“Dean, promise me, we can do this again?” Sam asks, voice plaintive. Already, he is going too fast, he knows, pushing another finger inside Dean next to that first one, addicted to the way Dean’s body just opens up for him, unfurling, like he knows Sam belongs here. He feels dizzy with lust, his cock throbbing, reaching down to squeeze the base of it before he shoots off entirely. 

“Yeah, yeah, fuck we can do it again, we can do it now, we can, Sam, it’s okay you can fuck me, you can fuck me—”

Sam knows he should wait to be sure, he should prepare Dean’s hole better than this before he fucks him, but it’s hard to be patient when Dean is begging so prettily, when Dean’s voice sounds just the kind of raw and wrecked for him that Sam had longed to always hear. 

He has a brief moment of worrying he'd break this car, somehow crush the Impala with their combined weight—then he’s pulling his fingers out and climbing properly on top of Dean, pushing inside Dean, lining up his thick cockhead and watching it breach his brother. He doesn’t know what feels better: the immediate pressure and heat on him, around him, or just simply watching a piece of himself disappear inside his brother. His head is spinning.

“Fuck, you’re big,” Dean lets out a shaky breath, lip between his teeth. “Look at that.” 

“Sorry,” Sam apologizes. He pushes in slow, so slow, the tip disappearing slowly inside his brother. Dean wraps his arms around Sam’s shoulders, clinging, and urges him further with his legs coming up to lock around Sam’s back, trying to pull Sam even closer. 

“It’s okay, you can just push in,” Dean says, granting permission. “It’s fine, I can take it.” 

Sam wants to go slow—he wants to savor every bit of this, every moment, every inch of Dean—but he feels like a clumsy teenager, like it’s his first time. 

“God,” Sam groans, sinking into his brother’s warm body until he bottoms out. His brother groans deep, eyes fluttering shut, and mouth parted open in an O of pleasure, his tongue pink and lips swollen, and red. Dean’s cock throbs and twitches on his belly, leaking all over himself. Sam can barely focus on him—he desperately wants to capture every moment of this, but he can’t think at all. “God, are you sure?” 

He’s obsessed. He’s never going to stop wanting this. He’s ruined forever. 

Dean doesn’t even answer. He just nods, and makes a strangled noise in his throat, and tries to arch his hips up, canting them into Sam’s cock. The position, his placement on the hood, isn’t the best for it. Dean keeps his hands on Sam’s shoulders, nails digging into the skin. Sam feels himself go impossibly deeper and a ragged frisson of pleasure shoots inside him. 

“Fuck,” he says, pulling out and then pushing back in on instinct, and they both feel it, that warm furl of pleasure, the build up of orgasm winding through their nerves. “God, I can’t believe you’re into this,” Sam says, and Dean whines under him, like a bolt of lightning is going through him. 

“Jesus, Sammy,” he moans, ragged in speech, razor’s edge sharp. 

“I don’t—I don’t mean that—I mean,” Sam says, but doesn’t know what he means. He’s burned for this for so long—longed, ached for, pined, craved, all the while thinking that Dean would never allow this, never wanted to be touched. 

“It’s good,” his brother sobs. The whole of his body is beautiful and Sam just wants to mark it up. Bite down. Leave purple, blue bruises that he can see and press down at any time and remind Dean that he was here. It’s a brutal desire and it frightens him a little, the way his thoughts run away with him, all the things he wants to do to Dean. 

“It’s good, you’re good at this, Sammy,” Dean groans. They fall into a kind of rhythm, Sam finding his footing, a rough in-and-out, push-pull, Dean encouraging and begging for more, lavishing him with praise.

It doesn’t take long for either of them to come—Sam can’t take it when he feels orgasm burst through him, up his spine, come spilling out his cock. The sensation seems to shock Dean, his eyes flying open, eyes dark and pupils wide. That’s all Sam gets to see of Dean’s orgasm, because he fucks Dean through it and collapses on top of him. Sam buries his mouth in his throat, moaning against his skin, and when he feels Dean’s cock twitch and spurt against his belly, he bites down on his neck, hard enough to leave his brother gasping. 

They lay there like that for a while, Sam still inside his brother, relaxing on top of him, listening to him breathe against him, the beating of his heart. Sam knows he’s left some kind of bruise, some kind of marking on Dean’s throat. Dean’s body is overheated, flushed and slick with sweat, but the cold is starting to get to them. 

They’re gonna have to get back in the car soon. 

“You’re heavy,” Dean groans, but he doesn't push him away. Dean just wraps his arms around Sam, sliding one hand into his hair and holds him there. 

It’s like coming home. 

*

When the sun rises, they get breakfast at a taco truck near the side of the road. 

Dean gets a breakfast burrito and Sam grabs a couple of tacos. Sam nudges Dean to buy horchata, which Dean’s never tried before, despite how often they go from state to state. The two of them sit and watch the cars go by, the ones that stop in and the ones that continue driving—slowly, a line starts to crowd around the truck. 

“Is it supposed to taste like cinnamon?” he asks. “I thought this was some kind of rice thing.” 

“Sometimes,” Sam says. “It depends. Different people make it differently. It’s all over California.” 

“Huh,” Dean says, face lighting up in pleasant surprise as he chugs it down with his burrito. Watching Dean eat can be disgusting sometimes, but there’s a warm glow of fondness in his chest, and he can’t shake the smile that stretches across his face. 

“You know,” Dean says, looking around, but aside from the men in the taco trunk, they’re the only ones here actually sitting and eating, not grabbing their food and moving on. No one to overhear them. “Not that I didn’t enjoy last night—”

Sam waits for the other shoe to drop, stopping mid bite. Waiting for Dean to say that they can’t do that again. That it’s kid’s stuff. 

“But I thought you wanted to be, well, normal.” Dean asks. “I don’t—” He pauses, clearly struggling with words, with any sort of emotional conversation. Dean’s not good at this, but it means something he’s trying. “I don’t want to be the one to take that from you. I never have.”

Sam lets the words settle in him. He takes a drink of his own horchata, and then laughs.  “I told you a million times. I didn’t want to be normal. I wanted to be safe. I didn’t want monsters hunting me all the damn time. I wanted some goddamn say in my own life.”

Dean shakes his head. “Sam, I—” 

That’s your whole goddamn problem, Sam thinks but he doesn’t want to start a fight now. 

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t want you,” Sam says softly, voice lowered, because any louder feels entirely too revealing, exposing his guts and leaving them out for Dean to poke through. He’s told Dean he’s loved him many times over. This is more than that. 

There’s a deep dark bruise on Dean’s throat and Sam’s belly does flip-flops when he sees it, trying not to grin to himself. He looks at Dean, and feels like he could do this forever—not the monster fighting and not the demon hunting, he wants that over and done with. But these moments with Dean, where it’s just the two of them in their little world together, where no one else seems to matter, not even Dad. 

“God, you’re so sappy,” Dean says, “I gotta get out of here before you turn me into a chick.” 

Sam grins. “Jerk.” 

“Bitch.”