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With a low fire crackling in the hearth, the interior of their cabin in the middle of the woods is tinged orange, light flickering across the wood paneling and dozens of picture frames hung along the walls. Sam never looks at them too closely, at the strangers whose houses they're squatting in, or their families and friends or the picture-worthy fish they caught in the little lake five minutes further south. He and Dean had gone on a walk there yesterday, stomped through the underbrush until they found the clearing, and just sat there, quiet, listening to the birds chirp and watching the snow fall gently before it melted again. He would have liked to take a picture of that and hung it on his own wall.
Instead he looks at his brother's profile next to him, bathed in shadows along the strong line of his nose, the plush lips, the cheekbones. Part of Sam envies his stupidly clear skin. Another wants to sink his teeth into it, right around his jaw where it's speckled with stubble and the flush of a fading two weeks-old bruise. They're watching a movie and Sam can barely remember which one it is. Dean turns, and Sam doesn't look away quick enough so he stays right there, staring.
"What's going through that big melon, huh, Sammy?" Dean asks, mirth in his voice— but the thin line between his eyebrows betrays his put-on demeanor like it always does. Briefly, Sam thinks that at nearly twenty he's beginning to look a bit like their father. He quickly pushes the thought away.
"Shut up," he grumbles, but allows an easy smile to spread on his lips. He expects another retort but his brother remains silent, lips only twisting in that way they do when Dean is chewing on the inside of his cheek. A skip of Sam's heart, then; it's a nervous habit, broken after Dad's relentless reminders, so why is he—
Dean's eyes flick from Sam's down along his face to his lips, and maybe that's when Sam's heart simply stops. They've been— dancing around this, and maybe—
Too aware of his rapid breathing, Sam moves a trembling hand from his own thigh to above Dean's knee, barely resting there, barely anything, but it seems to shake something loose. Dean leans forward, eyes searching and roaming across Sam's face, from his surely red cheeks to his wide-open eyes and his parted lips, and there's only about an inch of space between their faces when a bright flash of lightning illuminates the trees, and then the following crack of thunder sounds like a gunshot, a violent reminder that there's a world outside the one they've been hiding in for days.
Sam freezes, and Dean jumps across the couch to the other end, fingers digging into the cushion of the armrest. Sam's hand falls away, suddenly cold.
Dean nibbles at the almost-healed cut on his lip, reopens it and sucks at the blood that wells up from below the broken skin. Sam watches. The movie keeps playing.