Chapter Text
June 1997
They were just outside of Boothbay, and at the edge of a burning grave, the first time he looked at Sammy and saw a young man looking back at him, slim and beautiful, instead of his skinny and sweet-faced baby brother. He didn’t think much of it at the time, just chalked it up to the head wound from which he was still, y’know, bleeding, and to the leaping shadows all around them. Concussions were tricky sons of bitches, and it had been years since Dean had trusted anything he’d seen in the dark.
***
It happened the second time three weeks later in a crap motel room on the south edge of Raleigh, after Dean had spent a night hustling in a bar with smoky blues and easy marks. He came swimming back toward consciousness around 9:00 the next morning, to the blessed and desperately welcome scent of coffee in the air. Still half-asleep, he rolled onto his back, yawning, to find his father on the laptop and Sam shuffling around their crappy little kitchenette, rumple-haired and dressed only in a pair of battered jeans that had belonged to Dean three years and seventeen states ago. They were worn thin in the crotch and hanging loose off the sharp slender bones of his hips, and the white-hot jolt of needwantlustloveSammy that hit Dean hard and sweet behind the ribs shocked him all the way awake.
‘Hey,’ Sam said, entirely oblivious to the fact that the world had clearly just tilted off its fucking axis. He held up a chipped mug. ‘You want coffee?’
After a minute Dean un-swallowed his tongue and sat up. ‘ . . . yeah,’ he managed, and then scrubbed a hand across his face and blew out a shaky breath. He took the mug with a muttered thanks and without looking when his brother brought it over to him. He was just hung over, he decided. Clearly. He was just really, really hung over; actually, he was probably still drunk. Everything would be fine once he sobered the hell up. He’d just, you know, he’d just sit here, quietly, and avoid opening his eyes again until then.
And Jesus, he was never chasing whiskey shots with tequila again.
***
By the sixth time it happened, there was no head wound or hangover to blame (nor was there the adrenaline kick after a hunt, the adrenaline kick after a bar fight, or a bad porno in the background, which Dean had blamed for the third, fourth, and fifth times, respectively). There was just Sam—God help him, but there was just Sam—stretching like a cat as he climbed out of the back of the Impala at a crappy gas station at dawn near Tallahassee, tee shirt damp with sweat along his broadening shoulders and down the sweet, vulnerable line of his spine. His hair was dirty and his clothes two days from clean, and there was an ugly red seam along his left cheek from where a harpy’s claw mark was healing, but Dean could no more have avoided the whip-crack of helpless wanting that lashed across his bones than he could have stopped the goddamned sun from rising.
Flushed and yawning and drowsy, Sam looked over at him across the roof of the car, their father still dozing in the front. ‘Want coffee?’ he asked, voice gritty with sleep.
Wordless, Dean pulled his wallet from his back pocket and tossed it to his brother; Sam caught it, still yawning, and shuffled off toward the minimart across the cracked, weedy lot— slim and shambling and graceful, jeans loose and low, his tee riding up a little over his hips and the warm bare hollow of his back. Dean braced his hands on the edge of the trunk and let his head drop down, just a little, eyes closed against the early, early light.
Jesus, he was fucked.