Chapter Text
June 2024
‘Remind me why the fuck I agreed to do this, again?’ Dean demanded, swerving to avoid what had to be the seventeenth squirrel that had tried to suicide under the Impala’s wheels since they’d left Ithaca. ‘Seriously. I’ve forgotten. Did you promise to pay me? In pie? Will there be boxes of pie, Sam?’
‘I promised you a blowjob on the hood this evening,’ Sam replied, distractedly, looking at the directions on his phone. He pointed up ahead. ‘There. Turn left onto that road.'
There wasn’t so much a road, in Dean’s considered opinion, as it was a tiny gravel path that was gonna pinge the hell out of the undercarriage, but he turned, all the same. The road-that-wasn’t hung a sharp right maybe a half mile on, and then it was opening up onto a pretty estate hidden from the road by the line of towering trees: a three-storied house, rambling and old, half-covered in ivy, with several cars parked in its circular drive. Dean eased Baby gently in behind a midget of a Prius, let his head drop forward against the wheel. ‘Sammy,’ he whined, ‘seriously, man, we could be home with a beer watchin’ a freakin’ ballgame—’
‘Dean, it’s half an hour,’ Sam said, unfolding his long body from the car. Dean glowered at him across the roof as he climbed out on the driver’s side. ‘Thirty minutes, okay? I need thirty minutes to make sure there’s not a freakin’ occult library about to be sold off to random civilians. Can you handle thirty minutes? ‘Cause I'm really sorry, but I think I left the wooden blocks and coloring books at home.’
‘Oh, fuck you very much.’
‘Just . . . ’ Sam flapped a hand, helplessly. ‘Go look at the antiques or something, okay?’
‘Oh, antiques. Awesome. Yeah. Sure. I’ll just go look at the antiques,’ he said, following him toward the house. ‘Where are we, Connecticut? Are we back at that stupid haunted inn in Connecticut, Sam? I am not a freakin’ antiquer.’
Sam paused at that, turned, and let his eyes skim down Dean’s body and back up in a slow, easy slide that raised a prickly flush to Dean’s skin. His little brother grinned at him, lazy and slow. ‘You kinda are, man.’
Fucker. ‘Shut up,’ Dean growled, stomping past him toward the door, and Sam’s sweet, open laugh followed him inside.
***
Aaron had called them two nights ago to give them a heads-up on the estate sale. Three-quarters asleep, Dean had heard only Sam’s half of the conversation, which had involved a lot of words he didn’t understand and Sam scribbling in Hebrew on the inside cover of the Tom Clancy book Dean had left by the bed. The Cliffs Notes version he'd gotten after Sammy hung up was that there was possibly some dangerous shit in the dead woman’s personal library that someone should take a look at before civilians accidentally got hold of it. Dean failed to see how it was their problem, really—scrubbing a library was a milk run, and Dean was content these days to leave the milk runs of the world to the younger hunters, poor dumb kids that they were—but Sam had been all earnest and insistent, and why-haul-someone-else-up-here-when-we’re-right-around-the-corner-Dean, and Dean had been too sleepy and fucked out at the time to realize that the kid was probably just angling for an excuse to go geek out over old wallpaper or something. Still, as it turned out, the whole thing wasn’t half bad—though it’s not like he was gonna tell anyone that, least of all Sam. But the collection of vinyl in the basement was kind of epic, and he had fun looking through the tools, and yeah, okay, maybe he didn’t need an original Stanley No. 12 veneer scraping plane, but he figured it couldn’t hurt to have one. Besides, Sam had roughly eight hundred books piled up beside him by the time Dean found him upstairs in the library, so he was totally allowed.
There were a bunch of people milling around at the other end of the hall, but the library was quiet for the moment, and empty save for him and Sam. Books were set out in neat, organized piles on the big tables, interspersed with a variety of other stuff for sale: china, goblets, what looked like a full collection of silver, general knick-knacks, a brass sextant. The telescope beside it was not nearly as impressive as the one in the bunker, but it was still a telescope, and so automatically awesome, and Dean kinda wanted to get the taxidermied possum just for the sheer delight of hiding it in Sam’s sock drawer on occasion. He tucked it under his arm and moseyed over toward where his brother was inspecting something in the far corner.
‘Hey,’ he said, when he was a few feet away. Sam startled, badly, and spun, and Dean felt his eyebrows shoot up toward his hairline. ‘Dude.’
‘Oh, hey. I, uh.’ Sam swallowed. ‘Sorry. I didn’t hear anyone come in.’
‘Yeah, I got that, Slick,’ he said. He waved the possum at Sam’s face and tried to peer around him. ‘Found you a friend. What are you lookin’ at?’
‘Huh? Oh. Nothing. I just, uh—we gotta take these books, okay?’ he said, patting the stack beside him. ‘Everything else in here looks clean. You ready to go?’
Dean tilted his head a little and looked at him for a long moment. ‘Well, I was,’ he said, a slow grin tugging at his mouth. ‘Not so sure now. The hell were you lookin’ at, kiddo?’
‘Nothing. It’s just some old jewelry. Do you—’
‘Yeah-huh. Sure. Move it, Sasquatch.’
‘Dean,’ Sam said, helplessly, as Dean gave him a shove to get him moving.
He'd been expecting vintage porn, or possibly an antique dildo, but the only thing at Sam’s back really was just jewelry: a heavy brooch and a strand of pearls and a bunch of other random sparkly shit laid out on a pretty splash of burgundy velvet, all with tiny little white price tags attached to them. Utterly befuddled, Dean had his mouth open to ask whether Sam had finally decided to embrace his inner princess and look for a tiara when he saw the rings, two of them, made of old gold, dark and worn, lying where Sam had dropped them.
Oh.
He looked over at his little brother, who at six-foot-five and forty-one years old was doing a very good impression of himself at eleven: flush-faced, soft hair in his eyes, picking at the cuffs of his shirt with restless fingers. ‘I was just looking,’ he confided to his shoes, quietly. ‘I don’t—Dean, I don’t—I don’t need it, okay? Really. I know you’ve never—I just—’
Setting down the dead possum, Dean picked up both rings instead, fisted a hand in Sam’s shirt, and towed him along as he wandered over to the big window to get a better look in the sunlight. The rings were a little battered, but he liked the weight of them, liked the feel of them in his hand, the metal cool and smooth and imperfect against his palm. There was an identical inscription on the inside of both, in a tiny, tiny script that it took him a moment to recognize as Greek: ΠΙΣΤΟΣ ΤΕ ΤΟΛΜΩΝ ΤΕ ΦΙΛΤΑΤΟΣ ΚΑΙ ΕΜΟΣ
He looked over at his brother, who was watching him quietly, a pretty flush on his cheeks and his heart in his eyes. ‘What’s it say?’ he asked.
Sam said nothing for a moment, then: ‘Faithful,’ he said, as softly, ‘and brave, and best beloved, and mine.’
Dean felt his mouth quirk. ‘Well,’ he replied. ‘That about covers it, huh?’
‘Dean, you don’t—’
Dean pulled a pocketknife from the back pocket of his jeans, carefully cut the string looped through both rings, tucked the price tag and knife both back into his pocket. Looked back at his brother. His face was showing too much, and he knew it, and for once he didn’t really give a damn. ‘Give me your hand, dumbass,’ he said, gently.
‘I—’
‘Shut up.’ Dean slid one of the rings onto the fourth finger of his brother’s scarred left hand, slid the other onto his own. It was a little loose, but it was warming almost immediately against his skin, and he hooked his hand around Sam’s neck and tugged him down into a warm, firm kiss, nipped gently at his brother’s lower lip before he pulled back, just a little, to tip their foreheads together. ‘Dude,’ he said, quietly. ‘All you ever had to do was say.’
Dean was forty-five years old, and he’d been from one end of the country to the other more times than even he could remember. His little brother’s dimpled smile was still the most beautiful thing he knew.