Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Winter, 2009. The radiator in their motel room was broken, but it was worth putting up with for the twenty-dollar discount on the room. Dean took a decadently long shower to warm up, and Sam slept with towels draped over his comforter.

They would only get a few hours’ rest, but it was better than they’d had lately, both of them hounded as they were by angels, and Sam by guilt and regret. The cold was bad enough that Sam looked over at the lumpy shape of Dean in the other bed and considered saying something about sharing body heat, but Dean would never let him live it down. Dean wasn’t even in the mood to share a meal with him lately, so he figured sharing a bed would be a stretch. He fell asleep thinking about Michael and Lucifer and how he hadn’t heard Dean sing in the car for weeks.

Sam woke up sweating.

It was disorienting, bright and screaming of wrongness. The bed wasn’t a bed anymore. He was somewhere else, hard ground under him and bright, outside-bright, brighter than South Dakota got on any winter morning.

He blinked awake with blurry eyes and pushed himself up, looked for the gun under his pillow and didn’t find it because the pillow was gone, the bed was gone, the whole damn room was gone, and it was dirt and rocks under his palm, not sheets.

He was about to shout for Dean when he saw Dean lying on the ground next to him.

“Dean.” He shook Dean’s shoulder and looked around, frantic. They were at the edge of a forest: deciduous trees, near midday by the position of the sun. The air was clean but burning hot and muggy.

He got up on his haunches and watched the bushes for movement. No bindings on Dean’s wrists or his own, and no marks that said any had been there. No phones either, no knives or guns, and he didn’t remember waking up during the move to wherever they were. There was nothing between his bed in the frigid motel room and here. They were still in the jeans and shirts they’d fallen asleep in.

“Dean.”

“Radiator kicked in, goddamn,” Dean mumbled. “Turn it off.”

Sam hissed, “You are on—the—ground.”

Dean snuffled into his folded arms and made a confused noise, lifted his head and turned over. Sam’s hand pulled him over faster.

Dean woke up all at once. “Shit.”

“Thank you.”

Sam watched impatiently as Dean went through the same frantic checklist he had, including patting an invisible pillow for his gun.

“Where the hell are we?” Dean said, sitting up.

“No idea. Here.” Sam picked up Dean’s hand and examined his wrist, his forearm. “Lemme check for marks.”

Dean watched him turn his arm over. “I didn’t wake up, not for a second. You?”

“I don’t think so. You feel groggy?”

“Nah.”

Sam didn’t either. He checked Dean’s veins, the inside of his arm and the side of his neck, pulse thumping hard under his fingers. No needle marks or signs of bindings.

“It could be worse?” he offered. He got to his feet and gave Dean a hand up. “Maybe they left us the car.”

Sam wiped the sweat from his face, looked at the sun’s position again, and tried and failed to see any kind of landmark through the trees. He picked a direction and went.

Dean asked, “Who’s they, you think?”

Sam thought about being held down by those guys in the bar when he tried to make his clean break from Dean, spitting blood.

“Rogue hunters pissed about the apocalypse, if I had to guess.”

That was only a few weeks ago, and it wasn’t impossible that those guys or other guys like them had escalated it, knocked him and Dean out and abandoned them in the wilderness to starve as some kind of street justice. He hadn’t told Dean about any of it. It felt too pathetic.

Dean just nodded at that. Sam tucked his hair behind his ear and glanced over at Dean walking next to him: sullen, black T-shirt sweating through, hair stuck up on one side from sleep.

Things hadn’t been great between them. Sam didn’t know how to fix it besides acting like a kicked dog and trying to pretend he wasn’t. They were better together, sure, but only because they didn’t know how to do anything else. Dean still didn’t totally trust him and Sam didn’t trust himself, they were just too fucked up to even consider going it alone, not with the angels circling the way they were. It was getting better, they were trying, but they were never fully in step. Maybe getting kidnapped would give them something to focus on together.

A child’s shout rang out through the trees. Sam twitched, but it wasn’t a scream of horror. It was joyous. Dean nodded towards the sound.

“Look alive. Civilization.”

Sam followed behind. There was a neat diamond of sweat between Dean’s shoulder blades; Sam always sweated worse than him, and he was drenched by comparison. It had been a long time since he’d felt this kind of heat, physical around them and thick in his lungs.

Dean parted wispy trees with his forearm and let them spring back, stepping through the spiky underbrush, silent. There was a clearing up ahead and Sam could make out a squat bungalow through the trees, its siding bleached by the sun. A kid yelped again and there were thumps, feet on grass, scuffling. Sam didn’t know if it was better or worse that they weren’t deeper in the woods—survival would have been a project, a trust exercise.

As they crept up to the edge of the clearing, he could make out the shapes of two kids in a dusty overgrown lot behind an equally overgrown cabin. At first, Sam thought they were fighting, but it quickly became clear that they weren’t.

They were boys in their early teens, one appallingly skinny and one normal skinny, one taller than the other, both white, about the same dusty brown hair colour. The short one shoved the tall one and tried to hook his ankle behind his leg to trip him. They grappled to the ground, pulling at shirts, pulling hair, vicious and violent, but with no ill intent, like they were wrestling.

Sam and Dean crouched in the bushes and watched them, vaguely embarrassed. It was a big clearing and the kids hadn’t noticed them. Dean leaned in, putting his head right near Sam’s.

“They won’t be alone. Wait.”

The kids looked kind of ragged, their sneakers scuffed and old, and it didn’t seem like much of a stretch that whatever family lived in the dilapidated bungalow could have been responsible for their sudden change of place. Either they were some backwater freaks with a stake in the apocalypse and Sam and Dean were right to hide from them, or these people were perfectly normal, and they could go up and ask for directions. There was no visible street past the house ringed with trees. Sam could see the edge of a car around the front, plus a decrepit old truck and the rusted frame of a station wagon. They waited.

A cackle from one of the boys, then:

“Ow. Ow! Fine, jeez, you win.”

They both flopped onto their backs in the grassy dirt and panted up at the sky. The taller one was grinning, the other looked sour.

“Two to one,” the grinning one said.

Sam listened for an accent to place them and couldn’t hear one—maybe some faint southern twang, but these trees didn’t match the region. It was arid. The heat seemed about right for the South, but where did it get so hot in November? How long were they out for to be taken somewhere so much hotter than the blizzard they’d fallen asleep in?

The bigger kid hinged at the waist and sat up. He was wearing a Zeppelin shirt. Dean used to have one like it, it had tour dates on the back, Sam spent his whole childhood looking at it. The kid’s face was covered in freckles, enough to be seen from a distance. His hair wasn’t blond and also wasn’t not blond, and it was cut short, almost military.

Sam’s hand shot out and twisted in Dean’s sleeve. Suddenly the heat was more than oppressive, it was choking him.

Dean’s sweaty hand covered his and tried to pry him off. “Ow, Sam, what—”

“He looks like you,” Sam said all in a rush, feeling stupid, feeling fucking insane. “Like, a lot like you. Can you see him?”

Dean’s hand was still on Sam’s, but it wasn’t moving. They both stared.

“I wasn’t that small,” Dean said eventually, “but—”

“You had that shirt, though, right?”

“Sammy—”

“It says ‘1971 WORLD TOUR,’ I can see it from here. That’s the same one. You—”

“Look at the other kid.”

The shorter one had sat up. He was younger, all bones, a soft little-kid face. His hair hung in his eyes and his ears stuck out.

“So?”

Dean’s fingers slowly closed around his own, still clenched in his sleeve, until it hurt.

“That’s you,” Dean said.

Sam’s heart went nuts.

“I didn’t look like that.”

“You fucking did. He looks just like you.”

“Not even close! But he”—Sam jabbed a finger at the kid in the Zeppelin shirt—“is one-hundred percent you.”

“That doesn’t look anything like me! The shirt’s messing you up, but that is totally you. Look at his nose! He’s—”

“Boys!”

A voice barked from the house. Both Sam and Dean, and the kids on the lawn, twitched with reflexive panic.

The screen door creaked open in the shadow of the cabin’s porch and a figure came out.

He hit the sun. It was John Winchester, shielding his eyes and squinting into the yard.

Dean’s fingers crushed Sam’s so hard he swore he felt something crack. He couldn’t bring himself to pull them away.

“C’mon,” John called to the kids. “You’re on your own for dinner, so bring a twenty. I’ll pick you up tonight.”

Even the gist of him was immediately recognizable across the distance; Sam could have recognized him by the back of one elbow. John was a concept more than a man, and God, he looked young. He was so broad. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt despite the heat. Sam’s thousand emotions all crammed into his chest together: grief, relief, joy, love, rage.

The boys scrambled to their feet and brushed dirt off their knees; one from his jeans, the other from skin. They said, nearly in unison: “Yessir.”

John went back inside and they jogged across the yard and followed him in. The shorter one tripped the other going up the stairs and got swatted for it. The shorter one. The— Sam stared at the back of his head.

Dean’s hand fell away from his once the boys were inside.

They stayed crouching in the bushes for a while longer, staring at the closed screen door and listening to the indistinct voices from within, loud in all the quiet.

Sam craned his neck to look at the car in the front yard again, like he really needed to check. As if he could have ever mistaken that tail light.

They waited until the Impala pulled out of the driveway and down the forested road before they went into the clearing. They didn’t say a word to each other the whole time.

Dean went to the spot in the dirt where they—they—had been wrestling, and stared down into the patch of flattened grass and the scuff marks left by their sneakers. Sam watched him from the porch and waited until he was done. Sweat poured down his face.

Dean joined him, wiping sweat from his brow with his forearm. The door was locked and they didn’t have their kit, so Sam peeled off his white V-neck, wrapped it around his fist and busted the glass door in above the handle. Using the shirt was half for safety and half for an excuse to take it off that Dean wouldn’t bully him for.

(But: Dean wasn’t joking with him lately, that part was stilted, too. It was almost politeness, no friendly jeers, and it made Sam’s skin crawl. Dean being polite to him felt like the end of all things.)

The house wasn’t much cooler inside. Opening the door scuffed the salt line and Sam made a mental note, watched Dean make it too. The place reeked of age in the heat, just three small and filthy rooms abandoned some time ago, but with evidence of recent habitation in clothes thrown over a tweed couch, a box of cereal on the cracked countertop, news clippings on the table. Sam ventured slowly in, hanging his shirt from the back pocket of his jeans.

Dean stood over the clippings. Sweat dripped off his nose and made a perfect dark circle on a square of newspaper.

“Oak Run.”

Sam had been staring at the cereal box. He hadn’t seen French Toast Crunch in years.

“What?”

“Oak Run, California. We squatted in a shitty little house by the highway during that heat wave.” Dean lifted his head and looked around. “Looked a helluva lot like this, didn’t it?”

Sam’s heart hadn’t stopped beating in his throat since they saw John. Not since he saw the Zeppelin shirt, really.

“Those newspapers got a date on them?”

“They sure do,” Dean said. Sam stared at him until he picked up a paper, stalled for a while, then read: “August 5th, 1996.”

The paper wasn’t dry or yellowed. Sam couldn’t find it in himself to be that surprised. Not really, not after everything.

He went up next to Dean and looked at the papers anyway. All the dates were late July and early August, 1996.

He turned and surveyed the room with fresh eyes. One of the shirts thrown over the back of the couch was a bright green John Deere promotional T-shirt he’d hated. Dean’s beloved walkman was sitting on the coffee table, its front plate cracked from when Sam threw it on the asphalt outside a diner during some fight.

“Dad was hunting that—that chimera. And we…”

Dean shook his head. “That wasn’t California.”

“Yeah, it was. It was right here.”

“Shit.” Dean ran his fingers over the clippings. “What sicko would bring us back here?”

There was a sound from outside the front of the house, a scuff of gravel. Just an animal maybe, but—

The front steps creaked.

Sam whirled towards Dean, panicked, marking the distance to the back door and coming up short. They didn’t hear, there was no time. The only thing Sam could think to do was yank Dean’s shirt out in his fist, grab the amulet and shove it down his collar and out of sight.

The front door banged open and John Winchester barreled in, aiming a shotgun at their heads. It was something neither of them had ever seen from the front.

“Hands up!” John barked. They both did it without thinking.

“Woah, hey, don’t shoot. Don’t—”

“The fuck are you doing watching my kids, you fuckin’ perverts?”

Over his shoulder, Sam saw Dean lingering in the doorway—Dean minus more than ten years.

Sam stared at him helplessly, aware that he wasn’t helping the situation at all, but he didn’t remember him looking like that. When he was a kid, it seemed like Dean had been born six feet tall with a five o’clock shadow, but the kid in front of him was so weird and slender and pretty in the face, big green eyes and long lashes, arms crossed defiantly over his chest. It was 1996, so he’d be—Sam tried to do the math quickly—in his late teens somewhere, not even twenty. Seventeen.

Obviously he’d seen or heard the two of them in the bushes; if they’d realized who he was, they would have known better.

John jabbed the barrel of his shotgun into Sam’s cheek. You didn’t stare at a guy’s kid, not one who looked like Dean. Sam remembered that well enough.

John snarled, “Eyes on me, freakshow.”

John was young too. Hardly forty, if that. His eyes were bright and clear and his face was lined, but he was young and firm and handsome, less grays than Sam ever remembered seeing on him and as close to clean-shaven as he ever got. Sam never realized how much John looked like Dean, but it was obvious then, with the years between them somewhat bridged.

Next to him, Dean waved a hand.

“Hey now, this is a misunderstanding. No perverts here, we weren’t—” Sam couldn’t see him but he heard the frantic edge to his voice. He wondered if he was also having a hard time keeping his eyes off the kid in the doorway, off him. “Definitely weren’t looking at your kids, man. It’s not like that.”

Sam remembered he still had his shirt off. Also not helpful. He felt sweat slip down his sides from his pits.

He glanced towards the young Dean again, who was looking back at him. That was better, he figured, than the kid looking too closely at Dean, even if his eyes skated over Sam’s bare chest with what looked like wary disapproval.

John turned the gun towards Dean.

“You’d better tell me what it’s like, then, ‘cause this ain’t looking too good for you.”

Sam prayed John wouldn’t recognize them. You didn’t meet a guy and think: Hey, you look how my son might look in ten or twenty years. John was perceptive enough, but time travel wasn’t in his wheelhouse. Not yet.

“We’re hunters,” Dean said quickly, and Sam watched the younger Dean’s eyebrows go up. “We—we heard you were after that chimera, right? Down in the canyon? The one that’s been eating hikers?”

“Says who?”

Sam could see the gears turning in Dean’s head, trying desperately to scrape together some memories.

“Uh, I don’t know, a guy we talked to back in Eugene. Kind of scruffy, wore a hat. Said you were headed down here.”

“And so what if I was?”

“So, we— we did a chimera last year, thought we oughta lend a hand. You can’t find much on ‘em, and it’s gotten, what, a dozen people?”

“So you figured you’d spy on my kids and break into our place? Can’t use a fuckin’ phone?”

Dean winced. “Yeah, not a great look, I’ll give you that. We’ve—we’ve had a rough go of it lately, with other hunters, you know? And this place is in the middle of nowhere, so, we just wanted to check it out. Sorry and all, but we’re just looking to help. Honest.” He put his hands up higher. “Just wanna say it again—not looking at your kids.”

The Dean in the doorway snorted a laugh. John’s gun lowered an inch. He looked at Sam and his eyes flicked down to his bare chest. Dean answered the unasked question.

“That’s my partner. Friend. Guy. He’s a sweaty son of a bitch.”

Sam’s hands were still raised. He brought one down to offer it to shake.

“Mark,” Sam said. Their most recent aliases. “He’s Tom.”

Dean gave a little wave. “Hi.”

He smiled at John and Sam got a spike of panic. He could pick out Dean’s dumb grin in any lineup, spot it at forty yards in fog and sleet, the way he put his tongue behind his teeth like that. Their dad might too.

If he did, he didn’t say anything. The gun went down.

“John,” he said, still scowling, but it was a win. He made no move to introduce the kid in the doorway. They wouldn’t be asked to babysit any time soon. “Put your damn hands down.”

They did. Sam looked at the younger Dean, who was still staring at him and chewing the inside of his lip. He looked away when Sam’s eyes met his.

John said, “Try not breaking into my house next time.”

Dean grimaced. “Yeah, uh. That one’s on us.”

John glanced back at the kid and jerked his head to the right, off elsewhere, maybe to wherever Sam was. Sam’s stomach gave a nervous lurch at the thought of seeing himself at—twelve? Thirteen? Looking into his own eyes while pretending to be a guy named ‘Mark.’

Teen Dean nodded and stepped out of sight. John shouldered his shotgun.

“I gotta drop the boys at the church, but meet me at the bar at four. We’ll talk chimera.”

Dean said, “Hey, bring ‘em along. The big one seems sharp.”

John glared at him. Sam smacked Dean on the shoulder a couple times, less amicable and more ‘shut up.’

Sam said, “Stop talking about your kids, got it. We’ll be there at four.”

After the Impala drove off, they walked down the hot, dusty highway to Oak Run’s only bar, which was attached to its only motel. Their wallets hadn’t made the extradimensional jump, but they managed to win a decent chunk of change from a couple of particularly cocky darts players. By half past three, they had enough to get a room for the night and a couple beers.

“This is fucked,” Dean said. It was the twentieth time he’d said it since they sat down.

Sam hummed in acknowledgement. The bar was musty and small and they were tucked away at a table in the back for the sake of privacy. A guy who may or may not have been the bartender wandered in from the kitchen a few minutes after they sat down, then left when they said they were waiting for someone; they only had enough cash for one beer each and wanted to ration it for when John showed up. The guys they beat at darts left, so the bar’s only other patron was an old lady nursing a watery, greenish cocktail and working her way through a stack of scratchers.

“It’s gotta be angels, right?” Sam plucked at his sweaty shirt. The bar wasn’t air conditioned. “No one else does this.”

“I guess, but why now? What do they want us to do? Dad’s chimera hunt wasn’t anything, he was just gone for three weeks. You remember.”

“Eeeeyeah,” Sam said slowly, stretching it out. He didn’t want to be the one to say it. “Mostly I remember what happened while Dad was on the chimera hunt.”

Dean clicked his tongue. It took him a while to answer. In the pause, he twisted off his ring and put it in his pocket; the amulet was still down the front of his shirt.

“Wasn’t sure if you were old enough.”

Sam rolled his eyes.

“I was forming memories by thirteen, but thanks. I also walked and talked and wiped my own ass.”

Dean smacked him in the back of the head. Sam smacked him back, and it unlocked something tight in his chest. For whatever it was worth, it seemed like Sam was right before: having a common goal was making it easier to be around each other. It replaced the apocalyptic stress with being forced to relive their first colossal failure as hunters, and somehow, that was better.

Dean said, “If you’re trying to lighten the mood, it’s working.”

“I know.” Sam looked towards the door again and waited, in an excited-horrified way, for his very young and very alive father to walk through it. “What do they want us to do about it, though? I don’t see why it matters to them if we fix something we screwed up when we were kids. If it’s Zachariah, or any of them.”

“If it’s him, and if he wants us to fix it. Maybe it’s something else. Hey, you’re the sci-fi nerd here—how worried should we be about messing with the space-time continuum or whatever? How come I don’t remember having two guys who looked just like us break into the cabin before Dad left on the hunt?”

“You’d think if we were going to mess something up, we’d already know it. You know? Rewriting it all at once.” Sam tried to leave it at that. It would break their brains if they tried to sort it out. “Maybe we can ask Dad. I’m sure he’d love the two thirty-year-old strangers talking about his teenage sons some more.”

Dean groaned and put his head down on the table. “Don’t remind me. At least I had my shirt on, genius.” He kept his head down and sighed. “This has gotta be a parallel universe or something, ‘cause I never looked like that.”

“Hate to break it to you, but you looked like that ‘til you were twenty, Bambi.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“If it helps, I also remember you being a lot bigger.”

Dean kicked him under the table. It was just a little too hard for Sam to know whether he meant it playfully or not.

The bar door swung open and Sam thought, huh, that guy looks like Dad, before he remembered.

John spotted them, nodded, and came over. Sam’s stomach twisted up in knots and he put his hands on his knees to keep from biting his nails. It was beyond weird, not just to see John back from the dead, but to be only ten years his junior, give or take. It didn’t feel real. For all they knew, it wasn’t.

Sam watched in agony as Dean went in for a hug, realized what he was doing, then turned it into a horrible, too-familiar pat on John’s shoulder. John looked similarly put off by it.

“Uh, Tom, right?” John asked.

“Yeah. Tom.”

“How about you go get us some beers, Tom?”

Sam laughed. Dean glared daggers at him and slunk off for the bar. John smiled and shook his head once he was gone.

“Funny friend you got there.”

“He’s harmless. You know how it gets on the road, he’s rusty with people.”

John whistled. “Don’t I know it.”

There was a not-quite-comfortable silence. Sam studied John’s face with what he hoped was more tact than Dean had, weird and tense and entranced nonetheless. He thought John was a hundred years old when he was a kid, older than all the parents in the podunk Christian towns they passed through who had their babies at eighteen. Later, after Stanford, in the face of all Sam’s rage and fear, he just seemed old and small. Looking at him now, forty seemed young. He looked tan and handsome and so much like Dean.

John caught him looking and frowned again. Sam was halfway through an ill-advised, involuntary sorry, sir when Dean saved him by coming back with beers.

“Nice ride out there,” Dean said, ignoring Sam’s pained look. It got a smile out of John.

“You like cars?”

“Yessir, we got the same one. Uh, same make, I mean. An old Impala. Not the same-same, that would be weird.”

John took a beer from Dean as he sat down. His eyes slid from Dean to Sam and back.

“You… share a car?” A meaningful pause. Sam realized too late what he was struggling with. “So you’re, uh…”

That classic Winchester tact. Two guys, one car. Sam’s ears got hot.

“No. No, no, not— not like that, we’re—not.”

John raised a hand. “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with—”

Sam stumbled into, “We’re not. We’re friends. Partners. Partners like, we hunt together. We’re childhood friends.”

Sam always felt the need to tack on ‘childhood friends’ when he could, because as embarrassing as it was to admit, nothing else short of brothers or lovers explained their level of familiarity. They learned it was better to give an explanation than have people choose their own adventure out of the other two options.

He glanced at Dean. ‘Mortified’ didn’t even begin to cover the look on his face.

“Sure,” John said, dubious. “My bad.”

Dean drank half his beer in one pull. Sam nursed his, moving his thumbs through the condensation on the side of the glass.

“So, the chimera,” he nudged, anything to get them somewhere else. “It’s in the canyon, right? The trails?”

John said, “Looks like. We just got into town the other day, I haven’t had a chance to check it out. You two take on something similar?”

Dean nodded into his beer, subtly meeting Sam’s eyes.

“Uh-huh. Around here, too.”

John squinted at him. “This is the first chimera in these parts for a long time, far as I could tell.”

Dean just nodded some more. “Well. It was a long time ago.”

Then Sam half-listened as Dean, with his encyclopedic fanboy knowledge of John’s hunterly exploits, even so many years later, told John about gaps in his research that John himself had told Dean thirteen years ago when he got back from the hunt: how the blade had to be silver, and turquoise in the hilt was a bonus; how cutting the snake tail would be bad news, and crushing it was best, or ideally he’d avoid it altogether; how saving the claws could earn you a pretty penny if you had low enough moral fibre to sell them to witches afterwards (and John did).

Sam wiped the sweat from his neck and thought about how John would be hunting that chimera for three weeks, until nearly September, and how his boys would be alone for all of it. Sam knew his chances of escaping another comment about John’s sons without a broken nose were slim, but a spark of his old, carefully buried resentment caught fire before he could stop it.

“How’s it being a hunter with kids?” he asked. He tried to keep his tone neutral and missed the mark badly. “Are you taking them to the canyon?”

John gave him an intimidating glare that Sam remembered him aiming at good samaritans, school counselors and social workers.

“No,” John said slowly, “they’re staying here. Chimeras are dangerous shit.”

“It’s gonna take you a while to track it, though. How long do you leave them on their own for?”

Dean kicked him under the table. Sam didn’t look at him.

John said, “It’s none of your fucking business what I do with my kids. They can handle it.”

Sam scoffed. “Yeah, I bet it takes longer than three weeks to die from eating nothing but Twinkies. But it’s better than bringing them on a hunt, right? Only a monster would do that.”

“You got a problem with how I live my life, kid? Sounds like you got something to say.”

Dean stood before Sam could, clapping his hand down on Sam’s shoulder and shoving him back into his seat.

“Nope. Nope, absolutely not, uh, sir. He’s— we had a few, before you got here, he’s just being a dick. I’m sure you’re doing what you think is right for your boys, the best you know how. I’m sure your boys get that.”

John was incensed and confused. He looked between the two of them like there was some bad joke he wasn’t getting.

Sam saw an opportunity. Maybe they were sent back to stop what happened when John left, and maybe he could fix it right here if tried. Whether John genuinely listened or took the kids with him to get them away from these weird strangers, it would work.

“Take them with you,” Sam said quickly. “On the hunt, to the canyon. Take your kids this time.”

Dean’s thumb dug into the back of Sam’s shoulder so hard he flinched away from it.

John leaned back in his seat. “Say that again?”

“Take your kids when you leave town. Don’t leave them here, not for three weeks, they’re not ready for that. Or they are, but not here, it’s not—”

Dean had enough. He grabbed the back of Sam’s shirt and pulled him to his feet.

“Ohh-kay, we’re headed out. Got work to do. It was nice chatting with you, man.” He pulled Sam around the table; he didn’t need to, Sam was going. “Good luck with the chimera. Remember what I said about the silver.”

John shook his head. “Holy fuck, you two got issues.”

Sam got halfway through, “Yeah, thanks for that!” before Dean shoved him out of the bar.

Dean pushed Sam into their room at the motel, still furiously rambling.

“We couldn’t just have a beer with our dead dad? You couldn’t let me have that?”

“He didn’t even know who you were!”

“It was still Dad! Fuck.”

Dean sat hard on the bed and put his head in his hands. Sam went to one end of the room and back, then perched tensely at the kitchenette, guilty and restless.

There was a quiet minute. Sam looked around the room and tried to calm down. It was dated and ugly, vaguely nature-themed, wallpaper peeling at the seams and carpeted in a way he hadn’t seen for a while. There was also only one king. The place didn’t have any doubles left; their luck was on another winning streak. It was far from the first time they shared a bed, but it would be awful in the heat.

Sam ran a hand through his hair. He was the one being a dick, and he hated it, but he had to apologize.

“Dean…”

“You were trying to fix it, right?” Dean lifted his head out of his hands. “Trying to freak him out enough to take us with him. Little-us.”

Yes and no, but Sam nodded.

“Seemed like a shortcut, if that’s why we’re even here. But I don’t…” Sam shrugged. “We’ve got nothing. We haven’t heard from Cas, no notes or clues, we’re just… on the cusp of this big, awful thing. What else could it be about?”

“Another moralizing angel lesson to get me to say yes, or get you dead?”

“Yeah, maybe. But maybe it’s a lesson about this.”

Someone banged on the door.

Dean rose to his feet. “Aggressive for housekeeping.”

The banging started up again as they went to the door. There was no peephole, so Dean opened the door a crack and it kicked in, almost catching him in the chin. They both leapt back. Barreling in, pointing guns at their faces, were them. Sam and Dean, thirteen years removed.

The younger Dean went in first and Sam watched in horror, everything going slow, as a smaller boy followed him in, clutching a pistol that looked huge in his two small hands.

It was sickening in an uncanny valley, brain-wrong kind of way to see his own face and recognize it, finally, close up. He was so fucking young. His hair hung in his eyes and curled at the back the same way it did now, tucked sloppily behind one ear, long enough to reach the collar of his shirt. He had a long, gawky neck and wore a giant T-shirt Sam didn’t remember, blue shorts and filthy white sneakers. He had the same mole next to his nose that Sam hoped the kid wouldn’t recognize on him.

“Move!” young Dean shouted, shoving Dean back with one hand while the other aimed his gun at his face. It wasn’t the engraved pistol—Dean wouldn’t get that for a few years yet. It was some cheap black thing. “Get back, hands up!”

Little Sam shoved big Sam, too, slightly less effective. Sam backed up until he bumped into Dean at the foot of the bed.

Dean said, “Hey, easy! They’re up.”

Dean was staring at himself, looking just as lost and stunned as Sam. Seeing the two Deans so close, face-to-face like that, made Sam’s brain go crazy. Despite the difference in age, they had nearly the same profile, the same eyes. He had no idea how they were going to lie about who they were. Fewer freckles and a slightly different haircut, but wouldn’t they know?

Little Sam kicked the door shut behind them, his gun still steadily raised.

“Take it easy,” Sam said slowly, placating, looking between the two boys. “I don’t know what your dad told you, but—”

“Shut up,” the young Dean barked. Sam caught a look from Dean: an impressed frown, eyebrows up. “He didn’t tell us shit. Why were you watching us?”

“We told him, we’re—”

“That’s bullshit. You were in the bushes for five and a half minutes, you’re not armed, you’ve been walking everywhere, and you got this room like an hour ago. Something’s up.”

Little Sam stepped up next to his brother, frowning.

“And there hasn’t been a chimera in the U.S. for like twenty years. Not one recorded.”

His voice. Sam wanted to die. Dean looked like he was having a heart attack.

Dean pressed his raised hands forwards, a kind of ‘calm down’ motion.

“We can explain,” he said slowly, “but you’re not gonna like it. It’s the truth, but it’s not an easy one.”

Sam tried to give him a look, but Dean’s eyes were fixed on his younger self. They had to be on the same page about not telling them who they were. There was no universe where that worked out.

“Put the guns down,” Sam tried, speaking to his younger self. “We’ll talk.”

The kid moved his mouth to one side, thinking. He looked up at his Dean.

“D?”

The older boy was still frowning. He looked between Sam and Dean one last time, then lowered his gun and flicked the hammer forwards.

“Sit,” he said, gesturing to the bed. “We’re listening.”

He steered little Sam into a chair, then leaned on the edge of the table next to him. Neither of them put their guns down. Sam and Dean sat on the end of the bed; it wasn’t big and their knees touched.

Sam saw the exact moment that the younger Dean noticed the single bed.

“Uh. You guys—”

Next to him, Dean put a hand over his face.

“Jesus, if I had a quarter— no. We’re not.” He scoffed. “Man, the stones on you.”

Nothing funnier or more embarrassing to teenage boys than the concept of two guys doing it. Sammy stifled a laugh. His brother shot him a look that very plainly said, dude, unprofessional.

Sam interrupted to get them back on track. “Okay, so— I’m Mark, and he’s Tom.” He glanced at Dean. “Right?”

Dean said, “Right. And we are hunters. You believe that part?”

Young Dean squinted at them. “Sure.”

“We know what a chimera is, and we’re wearing jeans in hundred-degree heat. I think you can trust us there.”

The kids nodded. Sam looked at Dean and waited for him to go on.

“But, yeah, sure, we lied about the chimera. We didn’t come here for that.” Dean looked at him again, and, unsure, Sam nodded. “We… we’re from the future. We know about the chimera because we were the ones who ganked it, in our ‘96. Not your dad.”

Sam kept quiet. It could work. Young Dean was still frowning.

“You expect us to believe that?”

“Dude, you believe in ghosts. You’ve seen shit most people never will. You think time travel’s outside the realm of possibility, but not some dead chick’s spirit possessing a clock?”

The boys shared a look. Sammy made a face that said: fair enough.

“Prove it,” the younger Dean said, his face stony. “You must have something on you.”

Sam and Dean patted their pockets for anything helpful that might have been left on them. Sam found a penny in the front pocket of his jeans—old, but still from 2002—and Dean scrounged up a crumpled parking ticket. They handed both to the kids and watched them turn away and huddle over them, mumbling to each other, looking at them from every angle. Young Dean bit the penny and young Sam made a horrified face at him.

Eventually, they grudgingly returned the penny and the ticket and sat down at the table, guns still in hand. Young Dean pointed with his.

“Let’s say we believe you. Why come back for Dad’s hunt. What’s gonna happen to him? Why do you care?”

Dean said, “It’s not about your dad’s hunt. You two are gonna get up to some shit while he’s gone, right? Something you’ve been working on?”

Both boys jolted in shock.

Sam smiled. “Bad poker faces.”

Young Dean quickly schooled his look into a scowl, but it didn’t have the desired effect. God, that face.

“How do you know about that?”

Sam said, “Because it goes badly.” He pointed at his younger self, who was staring at him with wide, horrified eyes. “He gets heat stroke. And you”—he pointed at the younger Dean—“make a series of bad decisions.”

“More importantly,” Dean cut in, clearly annoyed by the accusation, “it’s not a forest nymph. Your research is off, and you’re not prepared.”

“How do you know our research is off?”

Sam sighed. “Because it’s a demigod. You almost get yourselves killed.” He looked down at his hands. “People die.”

All four of them went silent. Sam was looking down at the scars over the backs of his knuckles, wondering how many scars the kid across the room already had. Nagging in the back of his head was the thought that they were very, very quickly getting in over their heads.

The Dean on the table was flicking the safety of his gun on and off, head bowed to look down at it.

“You’re telling me we fuck this up so badly that you know about it like ten years in the future? It’s so bad people talk?”

“No. We—” Sam looked at Dean, questioning, and Dean nodded. “We only know ‘cause we were there too, back in… well, now. We were up on the mountain with the demigod.”

Dean added, “If it helps, we didn’t want to come back. It wasn’t a ‘kill Hitler’ kind of time travel deal. You’re not that bad.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Dunno, we didn’t ask for it. But the timing lines up with your thing, and that’s all we can think of.”

Sammy asked, “So something sent you back?”

Sam gave Dean a sharp look that conveyed, emphatically, no angels. It broke Sam’s brain enough to learn about Heaven and angels and demons as an adult, he didn’t need it at thirteen.

“Something,” Dean agreed, leaning back on his hands. “So you’re stuck with us ‘til we figure that out.”

His younger self hopped off the table, brandishing the gun again. “Wait, ‘stuck with us’? Stuck with who? You’re not coming with.”

Dean scoffed. “What part of ‘you fuck this up so bad people die’ did you not get? We’re going, and you’re gonna stay here while we clean up your mess.”

They hadn’t talked about this. Sam tried to catch his eye and couldn’t.

“Fuck that,” young Dean said. “So what if it’s a demigod? We know now, we’ll just go back to—”

Dean held up a hand and started ticking things off on his fingers.

“You don’t have time to hit the books—we already know what she wants and what’s gonna happen—you’re not half as good at survivalist shit as you think you are—and we can walk faster than you.”

“Bullshit! We’ve been planning this for weeks, you can’t just—”

Sam held up a hand. “Hey. Come with us, then.”

The kid looked downright disgusted.

“You want us to go into the woods, for like a week, with two drifter freaks from the future? We’re gonna end up on a milk carton.”

“We’re not freaks,” Dean said flippantly. “For all you know, we become best friends after the demigod thing. Maybe we grow up together.”

Sammy leaned forwards in his chair. “Do we?”

Dean turned his thousand-watt smile on him. “That’s between me and future you.”

Sammy’s eyes were huge and interested. His brother turned around to look at him, already frowning.

“Sammy, it’s not— Sam— Sam, don’t look at me like that, it’s fucking stupid and you know it. Candy from strangers, dude!”

The younger Sam leaned forwards, gravely, meaningfully. “Time travel, D!”

Young Dean wiped a hand over his face, that familiar silver ring flashing. He turned to face them. “Come over tomorrow once our dad leaves. We’ll talk.”

Dean grinned at him. Again, Sam had no idea how they didn’t know. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror, same but different, the shape of his mouth and the line of his jaw.

“Not such a stubborn dick after all,” Dean said to his younger self.

The kid rolled his eyes and shoved his gun into the back of his jeans. He ushered Sammy to the door, but paused once he had it open and turned back. “You don’t wanna know our names?”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “Time travelers, dude. Keep up.”

Sam added, “You also already said them.”

The kid blushed. Sam hadn’t seen Dean do that for a very, very long time.

“Fuck off,” he grumbled, then shoved Sammy through the door and slammed it shut behind them.

The silence echoed for a moment after they left. Sam laughed, stood and shook his head.

“So, did I always have you by the balls, or did that start around ten or eleven?”

Dean kicked at him.

“It’s called being a good brother! Did you see how teeny you were? Making those big fuckin’ eyes over time travel, you dork. You haven’t changed a bit.” Dean scrubbed a hand over his jaw and looked around, thoughtful. “Were we always so annoying? Holy shit.”

“Probably.” Sam went to the window by the door to watch the kids leave, but they were already gone. “Are you serious about going with them?”

“Don’t see what else we’d do here. We might as well try our hand at fucking up the space-time continuum.”

“It could be bad.”

“The worst thing’ll be answering to ‘Tom’ for a week. I hate you.”

“Whatever, I panicked.” Sam turned around. Dean was laying spread out on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, pensive. “Hey. Sorry about Dad, by the way. For whatever it’s worth.”

Dean shrugged. “It’s cool.”

It wasn’t. Sam knew that spending time with John, even as some dork named Tom, would have meant a lot to Dean. He didn’t know what to say or why Dean wasn’t ripping into him for it.

He pulled his shirt away from his skin again with little relief. He remembered how bad the heat was from their first time through. He was gonna rot. The motel’s last room was, of course, not air conditioned.

“Dad might still be at the bar, if we head back. You wanna give it a shot?”

Dean looked up at the ceiling for a while. Sam watched his chest rise and fall with a huge breath.

“Yeah. Might as well.”

They went, and John wasn’t, but they made enough money at darts to get the gear they’d need for the hunt. Dean wasn’t sour, but he was quiet, and he kept one eye on the door.

Chapter Text

Sweltering, wet heat. Starchy motel pillowcase under his cheek, hair stuck to his neck. Soft all up his front. Sam told himself he was still asleep.

He burrowed down, tucking his face against the warmth in front of him. There was something soft-hard-cottony under his left hand and his fingers grasped at it aimlessly, sweat rolling down the crease of his nose. Soft all the way against his belly and the fronts of his thighs, hot to the touch, hand on a stove. Sleepy and comfortable and nice. Familiar. He turned his face in towards the dark, soft and sweat-wet.

A hand covered his own, fingers slotted between his and lifted. A voice, somewhere between tense and amused.

“Every time, dude.”

“Oh, God,” Sam said into the back of Dean’s neck.

He let Dean go and rolled onto his back, only half awake. The sheets were tangled between them, damp with sweat, and the room was like a furnace.

“Gotta get you a”—Dean made a chopping motion with his hand—“barrier. Sneeze guard.”

“Shut up.”

The few times their circumstances had forced them to share a bed in recent months—not often, but not never—Sam ended up pressed behind Dean in the morning.

Dean had gotten good at laughing it off. He rolled out of bed, wiping the back of his neck where Sam’s face had been.

“This dry spell shit’s gotta go, man.”

“It’s not that.”

“Well, you’re not doing it for warmth.”

It was almost more embarrassing that it had nothing to do with his dry spell. He hadn’t been with anyone since Ruby, but he hadn’t wanted to; sex felt like a distant memory, something that happened to other people. He didn’t know why they kept waking up spooning, but it was new enough to be novel. He used to end up half off the far side of the bed when he and Dean had to share. The phrase ‘touch-starved’ came to him and was quickly shoved away. At least he wasn’t hard.

Dean went into the bathroom and Sam got dressed in the same clothes as yesterday, the only ones he had, which were sour and unwashed. It was seven in the morning and the room was already hot, or still hot, even with the windows open. They would boil in the forest.

Sam remembered the details of the trip only vaguely from his first time in 1996: shitty lean-tos made of sticks, no real gear, Dean’s zippo and flint and banging rocks together. Sleeping on a bed of leaves and getting hives, getting heat stroke and dehydration worse than anything he’d ever felt, shirts torn up to make bandages for cuts and scrapes. And all of it had been rendered useless by the final, worthless end.

Whether the kids were annoying or not, he couldn’t let himself go through that again. At the same time, he worried that if this was real, he’d be someone different if that horrible couple of days on the mountain had gone differently. It gave the college fire some kindling, but it also, as much as any of his thirteen years before it, inextricably linked him to Dean. ‘You and me against the world’ found a big stronghold in Oak Run.

They left the motel and checked out, nothing to pack; Dean kept looking around for his duffel and remembering he didn’t have it. The money they made off the suckers at the bar last night was enough to afford them a couple coffees from the town’s one restaurant before they took the long, winding walk down the highway’s gravel shoulder towards the kids’ bungalow.

“Do you remember if Dad left us the car?” Dean asked.

Sam took a sip of his watery, bitter coffee as another car passed them on the highway.

“If he didn’t, we’re hopping the bus to Redding. You can’t get camping gear out here.”

Dean made an ugh sound. “The only thing worse than taking the bus is taking the bus with kids.”

“You make it sound like they’re—we’re—whatever. Like they’re five. They’re teenagers.”

“Yeah, that’s kids.” Dean shook his head. “We can’t give ourselves away. No knowing them, no mind-reading. They’ll put it together if they haven’t already.”

It was twenty minutes to the house. The yard appeared around a final curve of the road lost in the trees, the rusted-out station wagon marking the spot. As they got closer, they spotted the boys: Sam sitting in a plastic lawn chair, Dean in the grass a few feet away. Dean was leaned back on his hands, Sam was slumped down, and they were talking quietly. Both of them had wet hair. They didn’t acknowledge them, but Sam saw his younger self notice them approach and nudge Dean’s knee with his foot.

Sam and Dean went up to the edge of the property and stopped. Dean raised a hand at the boys in greeting.

“Morning.”

Young Dean turned around in the grass, still seated, and fixed them with an unimpressed look. He was wearing a different black shirt than yesterday, some image on the front that was too cracked and faded to make out, and the same jeans. Sam was in gym shorts again, and a giant white T-shirt that nearly covered them. His knobbly knees were scuffed up. Sam remembered always being mildly damaged at that age.

“H’lo,” the little Sam said first. Sammy. He waved them over, so they headed across the dead, weedy lawn.

Sam thought it was a bizarre thing to note, but he was an alright-looking kid. He’d felt like Gollum at the time: bony, hunched and pale. It didn’t help that Dean looked like a Tiger Beat centrefold. Even with the clarity of age, that part hadn’t changed, and Sam felt an involuntary, ancient stab of jealousy looking at seventeen-year-old Dean: bright, glassy skin, freckles, bone structure. That mouth. Sam wasn’t as ugly as he remembered being, but he still might as well have been from a different planet than Dean.

There was a long silence. What the hell did you say to two teenagers? To yourself?

Dean cleared his throat. “We, uh. Better go into town to get some gear, first. Water, tents.” His younger self opened his mouth and Dean pointed at him. “No, you can’t just make shelters out of logs. That shit doesn’t work. You’re bringing a pack.”

“We know how to do survivalist stuff. Our dad taught us.”

“I’m sure he did, but it’s gonna be a million degrees up there, and you need all the help you can get. It’s far, right? The town in crisis?”

The kid nodded. “Up in the mountains. No roads.”

“Right, so. We know how this goes. Again: heat stroke. Hives. You fuck it up.”

The kid scowled, clearly not fully believing him through the veil of his teenage hubris. “Whatever.”

Sam was looking at himself. Little-him was much less obstinate than little-Dean, listening carefully from the cracked plastic lawn chair, looking from him to Dean and back. Not to pump his own tires, but if anyone was going to catch them in their lie, Sam was pretty sure it would be him. He remembered what he was like back then with his obsessive watching, cataloging, listening, hungry for everything he could get his hands on.

“Hey,” Dean said—his Dean—breaking Sam’s reverie. “Your dad left the car.”

“Yeah, he took the truck.” Young Dean stood, brushing dead grass from his jeans. He had a knife at his belt that Sam hadn’t noticed before, a fixed blade, more ostentatious than the folding knife Dean carried now. “You wanna go into Redding?”

“Not a lotta other options.”

They headed for the car without locking up the house. Sam walked behind his younger self. The kid reached the top of his chest, maybe five-seven, tall for thirteen but all height, no mass. The younger Dean was five-ten, give or take, just under his chin. Seeing both Deans next to each other, the difference wasn’t so much about height as it was build, the younger’s boyish slenderness next to the older’s brawn. Their faces had already started to match, but only if you were looking for it. He hoped.

He was too caught up to notice his Dean going for the driver’s side door. He reached out to grab his arm, but not before the younger Dean stepped forwards and blocked him bodily from reaching the handle.

“Are you trying to drive my car?”

He said it like Dean had pulled a knife on him or vomited into his mouth, pure vitriol and disgust.

“Uh—”

“Get in the back,” he snapped. “Sammy—”

He jerked his head to the passenger seat. Sammy rolled his eyes and went around to the other side, but not before he gave both men a sorry about my brother look that Sam had never been on the receiving end of. His heart twisted up in his chest.

They didn’t talk on the drive. Walking with their teenage selves through a deserted sporting goods store in the middle of the morning on a weekday was even more awkward.

The kids walked in front of them, two by two, but the younger Dean kept turning around to look at them. The paranoia—which was pretty reasonable on its own, when two giant strangers told you they were time travelers—made him seem twitchy and jumpy, not at all the try-hard cool guy Sam remembered. Sam kept smiling at him without meaning to, which definitely didn’t help things.

The older Dean was pushing the cart. They’d gotten four backpacks, two tents and a compass, rations, water purifying and electrolyte tablets and other miscellany. They also got a set of walkie-talkies, on Dean’s giddy request. Dean’s giddiness increased when Sam put four jugs of kerosene into the cart.

“We get to burn it?”

Sam shrugged. “A boreal demigod? It’s the only way.”

The kids turned around, listening. The younger Dean said, “Sounds easy enough.”

“The trick is gonna be getting close enough. They’re nasty little things.”

They both nodded seriously and went up ahead again, talking quietly to each other as they browsed the aisles. After a while, the younger Sam dropped back to stand next to them when they stopped to look at medical supplies.

“What’s the future like?” he asked quietly. His eyes were on his brother, looking up at the shelves some paces away. “Dean doesn’t wanna ask. But.”

Dean said, “Pass. I’m not gonna be responsible for breaking your brain.”

He had a specific lilt to his voice that came out when he talked to kids, the scared sons and daughters of victims. Sam knew Dean liked kids, or at least was good with them, but it was still always weirdly touching to see it in action.

“It doesn’t have to be big,” Sammy tried.

At the end of the aisle, the younger Dean brandished an overstuffed vinyl med kit at him. “Sam!”

“I don’t care!” Sammy called back. “They’re from the future! Don’t you wanna know?”

“Keep your voice down, you sound like a nut job!” He lowered his own voice. “And! You’re gonna rip a hole in reality!”

“It doesn’t work like that!”

“Like you know how it works, bitch!”

Sam glanced at the older Dean and was completely unsurprised to see him affected. He watched the two kids with an amused tilt to his mouth, neck deep in nostalgia and so obviously fond.

The drive back was just as quiet. Once in a while, Sammy would turn around from the front seat to ask something, and they’d give him a half answer. Who’s president? Is it hotter all the time? What does gas cost? What do cars look like? They didn’t talk about much other than the future and Sam answered only the vaguest of questions.

Back at the house, the boys gathered some things into their packs and Sam took the opportunity to have one last shower before they headed out.

The water pressure was awful and he had to duck under the spray. He wasn’t eager to have time alone with his thoughts and lathered up quickly. This whole thing didn’t feel real, there was too much they didn’t know. He considered the possibility that it wasn’t real at all: computer, end simulation. He couldn’t think about what they left in 2009, whether time was continuing on there without them or if it had stopped, or if there were a parallel Sam and Dean who had taken their places.

It was either very good or very bad that he didn’t feel his memories being re-written as time went on: he still remembered it being just him and Dean in the forest when he was thirteen, no mysterious hunters to speak of. He didn’t know what that meant.

He rinsed, shut off the shower and dried off with a thin, scratchy towel. When he picked up his clothes to put them back on, he stopped and frowned at the smell. Dean was likely in the same boat, maybe they had time for laundry.

He wrapped the towel around his waist and stepped out into the hall. “Dean?”

He meant his Dean, not thinking, but it was the younger one who stepped out of a bedroom across the hall with a balled up sock in his hand.

The kid froze. His eyes skittered over Sam’s bare chest, lingering on the tattoo and then lower, his abs, and lower still, so quick Sam wouldn’t have noticed it if he didn’t stand there for a few excruciating seconds afterwards with his mouth open.

“Uh—”

It took Sam a second, because he knew what he looked like. He wasn’t full of himself, he just worked hard for his body and people noticed that. Sometimes teenagers noticed it, groups of girls tittering at diners or, more rarely, some young guy who let his eyes drift. It wasn’t a rare occurrence, easy to laugh off and maybe a little flattering.

Still. Given the circumstances, he fought the urge to fold an arm over his chest like a girl hiding her tits.

“Clothes,” he said quickly. “My stuff reeks, I thought you’d have something.”

The kid got his faculties back. He looked at Sam like he was stupid.

“You’re like, three sizes bigger than me.”

Sam winced. “Your dad?”

Dean rolled his eyes and disappeared into another bedroom, then came back with a faded olive T-shirt with ‘USMC’ printed small over one side of the chest that Sam remembered John wearing into the ground. It was less battered than when he last saw it. Dean handed it to him.

“You’re not getting underwear,” he added. “Freak.”

It was spoken without the fondness he was used to hearing in Dean’s jabs, but before he could process it, the kid was back in his bedroom. Sam retreated into the bathroom to change; the clean T-shirt was better than nothing, and it was only a little tight across the shoulders.

When he went out into the living room, he found the older Dean at the table, sharpening their new knives. He stood in the doorway and watched, either unnoticed or not worth looking up for, and wondered. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen Dean’s eyes wander, ever caught him looking at some guy when he thought he was alone. Recently, no, but he couldn’t say for sure about their childhood. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch.

All the more reason to keep who they were a secret. Teen Dean would be mortified if he found out.

The striking out was strangely unceremonious, probably because the boys didn’t know what they were getting into. All of them in the clothes they had on and backpacks of varying sizes, Sammy holding the map and compass, the sweltering late afternoon heat like a fifth presence surrounding them.

Dean remembered the trailhead without being told. The boys didn’t comment on it if they noticed.

They crunched through the hard-packed trail, falling into their natural two-by-two formation. If Sam remembered right, it started as a hiking trail for a while before it veered off into the darker stuff. The trees provided some blessed shade, cool for a moment as they passed under them and scorching when they didn’t.

Ahead of them, young Dean spoke up without turning around.

“Rule number one,” he started, holding up a finger, “neither of you are ever alone with Sam.”

Sammy punched him in the arm. “Shut up! You’re so awkward!”

“Don’t care.” Dean looked over his shoulder at the men behind him. “I don’t trust you, and we don’t know you, and I don’t believe you for a second about that single bed.”

Dean groaned. “I’m not listening to this.”

Young Dean ignored him. “Two: you have to tell us stuff about the future if it’s gonna get us killed or whatever. You said we fuck up, which, sure, whatever, but you’re not gonna let us fuck up again. Understand?”

“Sure,” Sam offered. The lack of resistance was an olive branch; the kid hadn’t so much as glanced at him since their bathroom moment.

The boys went quiet, sneakers crunching. One of the buckles on Sammy’s backpack had a squeak to it and it creaked as they walked. The younger Dean looked over at him.

“Anything else?”

Sammy looked back at them over his shoulder. “You also have to tell us about future stuff even if it’s not life or death. ‘Cause I wanna know.”

“Sammy—”

“It’s fair! We’re letting them in on the hunt, we get something back! I wanna know.”

Nobody argued with that. Sam gave Dean a look and got a wordless ‘sure’ in response, a flicker of the eyelids. It wouldn’t be easy to keep their story straight if the boys asked too many personal questions, but the kid didn’t seem interested in them as people. He wanted big picture stuff, future facts.

“Before that,” Sam interrupted, and Sammy’s mouth snapped shut around whatever he was going to launch into asking. “Remind me what you already know about the case. We’ve gotta get you up to speed.”

Sammy turned around to walk backwards so he could see them.

“There’s a weird place without a name up near that mountain right by here that you can’t get to by roads, and two weeks ago, a guy stumbled down to the highway insane and covered in boils and saying some crazy magic lady was taking over his town.”

He said it like he was recounting the plot of his favourite movie, all fast and excited and rambling. Sam glanced over at Dean and he was watching the kid, unbearably fond. Again, it was kind of touching.

“And,” Sammy went on, “Dad didn’t wanna go, so—”

“Dad couldn’t go,” his brother cut in, “it’s not like he didn’t want to. It’s a tiny settlement of Mormon freaks up there, and the chimera in the canyon’s on all the trails, it’s already mauled a dozen people. He can’t be everywhere.”

Sammy rolled his eyes. Sam knew the feeling well.

“Does your dad know you’re taking the case?” Sam asked, knowing the answer.

“No,” Sammy said slowly. “Not exactly. He called another guy, but the guy couldn’t make it.”

“So he just left?”

“He tried calling around, but nobody took it. He said he’d go up when he’s back. The chimera won’t take him more than a week.”

It would take three. He’d almost lose an arm.

“But you two thought you could take it on yourselves.”

Sammy looked embarrassed. “Well, it’s not a forest nymph, so I guess not.”

The younger Dean turned around to look at the two older men, scowling.

“If you two are so fucking smart, tell us why it’s a demigod and not a nymph, because a nymph fits the guy’s description pretty well. Some woodland bitch making everyone fuck and fight each other sounds like a nymph to me.”

“You’re not thinking big enough,” Sam explained. He held his hands out wider than his shoulders, mapping out a rough sphere. “Demigods have this area of effect. It changes as you go in, and it gets worse. We’re already in one. Can you tell?”

Sammy spun back around to walk forwards, hopping over a tree root. He ran up ahead, slowed and started walking backwards again.

“The weather?” he said finally. Sam smiled at him.

“Yeah, the heat. It’s hot here, but not like this. Oak Run’s in the orbit, and it’s gotten hotter since we set out, right?”

“I guess.”

“It has. The effects grow and get different as you go towards it.”

Young Dean turned around and started walking backwards next to Sammy. “Different how?”

“You said you thought it was a forest nymph, right? How’d the guy describe her?”

“Like a hot, bossy, stacked chick made out of wood.”

Dean snorted back a laugh. Sam ignored him.

“Okay, so. I’d be willing to bet she’s in a category of earth-based demigods, since ‘heat’ is the first area. And it’s ‘heat’ like the temperature, but also heat like… anger, I guess. Heated. Makes people on edge, easier to snap. And animals get weird.”

“Weird?” young Dean asked.

Sam hesitated. “Well. Heat.”

“Great. So on top of sweating our balls off, we gotta try not to get fucked by Yogi Bear.”

“So,” Sam cut in, ignoring him, “if heat’s the first circle, the second one’s gonna be… people call it ‘drought.’ You stop wanting to eat or drink.”

That was as far as he and Dean had gotten the first time through. The whole story was that he got heat stroke when they stopped wanting to hydrate, because they hadn’t known what to expect. Dean abandoned the hunt and carried him back down the mountain.

“What’s after that?” Sammy asked warily.

This part, Sam knew from research. They’d never taken on anything identical, but after they learned the truth about what got them as kids, Sam spent weeks reading about every demigod encounter in recorded history. He didn’t think it would ever come in handy, they were rare beings.

“Uh, the academic word for it is ‘desire.’ You…” He debated his word choice. They were teenagers; they knew what sex was. “It makes you horny. Apparently.”

Both kids looked mildly alarmed. Sam turned back around after a second and walked forwards, but Dean kept walking backwards to look at them. He slowed.

“Uh. Like a sex pollen?”

“No! No, not that bad, not, uh, rapey, just—”

“Okay, back up. Now you’re super not allowed to be alone with Sam.”

The younger Sam smacked his brother on the arm, clearly mortified. “D.”

Sam raised his hands. “It’s not like that! It’s not like I’m making this up.”

“Sure. You got a windowless van parked up here somewhere?”

“It’s a boreal demigod, look it up! You just get horny. You don’t do anything about it unless you want to, it’s just the feeling, not the compulsion. If you, like—”

Older Dean said, “You can stop talking.”

“Right. Okay.”

“It’s not that bad,” Dean added. “Forest gods want to party, it’s a party thing. The last one’s ‘intoxication,’ it’s like you’re high or drunk, kind of.”

Sam couldn’t decipher the look on the younger Dean’s face. It was a kind of hopeless distaste.

“And they probably stack, right?” he asked. “So wherever she is, people fuck and fight each other to death.”

“Yeah. While burning to a crisp,” Sam added.

“And being stoned,” Dean added.

Young Dean shook his head and turned back around. He was quiet for a while, but Sam didn’t miss the quick check-in nod he gave his brother, a wordless hey, we’ll talk. It hadn’t changed much in thirteen years.

“So you’re taking us to Bacchus’s fuck-town to fight an ancient MILF,” young Dean said.

Dean said, “No, you’re taking us. We’re just making sure you don’t die.”

The other Dean glanced at Sam again. “Did we die the first time?”

“No. But everyone else did.”

The settlement was only a dozen people, but it was still true: no other hunter made it up before everyone succumbed to frenzied heat exhaustion. It was easily one of their highest botched-hunt body counts to date, and certainly their first.

All four of them went quiet again. Sam tucked his hair behind his ears, sweating fiercely, feet already aching in his boots.

“Would’ve liked to know about all this shit before we said yes,” young Dean grumbled.

Dean asked, “Would it have changed your mind?”

After a beat, Sammy answered. “No.”

They walked all day, left the trail and crunched through the spiky, leafy underbrush, scuffed calves and aching feet, following little Sam’s map and compass. They stopped when dusk fell after finding a clearing big enough to camp in, up the bank from a trickling creek.

Sam took off his pack and stretched his arms over his head, bending to work out his shoulders. Relief poured through his body at the lifted weight and freedom of movement.

When he put his arms down, he caught teen Dean looking at him again from a few paces away. His big green eyes were fixed somewhere south of Sam’s face, and again, just like in the hallway back at the house, he looked away with thinly veiled panic the second he’d been caught.

Sam watched him for a while afterwards. The kid busied himself with going through his pack, standing up to get something and then turning around again, awkward. He looked so much like the Dean that Sam remembered, but in some ways he was unrecognizable through the lens of adulthood, so nervy and unsure. He’d never known Dean to be unsure, but he’d only ever seen Dean in a certain light. He wore a mask, and, Sam was realizing, Dean had always made sure that mask was perfect for him. So he couldn’t rule out the possibility that there was another Dean he didn’t know back then, one who actually got to be young sometimes. A kid who got shy over looking at grown-up men with big arms.

He looked over his shoulder at Dean, regular Dean, thirty and stubbled and scarred. It didn’t seem possible. When did he get over it? Had he?

Dean turned around and caught him looking. He didn’t seem to think anything of it; his eyes slid away, towards where the kids were getting their tent out.

“Hey. Go get firewood. We eat first.”

They both frowned at him. “We can just—”

“You’re not eating cold beans, it’s demoralizing. Rule three: hot meals while we’ve got ‘em, even if we’re tired.”

Young Dean rolled his eyes and threw his tent pegs down.

“You sound like our dad.”

“Well, your dad’s a smart guy.”

The kids grudgingly left their stuff and headed off into the woods, came back dragging a big dead tree together, then left to find kindling. Dean used one of the larger logs as a block to split up the tree with a cheap hatchet he kept strapped to his backpack.

Sam unfolded the canvas of their tent and kept one idle eye on Dean. With the sun going down it was finally halfway comfortable, minus the bugs that were loud in the air around them. Sam rarely got bitten, they didn’t like his blood. Dean got eaten alive.

“Still doesn’t feel real,” Sam said, low enough that the kids wouldn’t hear. “I keep forgetting who they are. And then I’ll remember, and just—”

“Yeah. It’s insane.” Dean chuckled. He brought the hatchet down and cracked a dry bough in two. “I forgot how much you talked. Fuckin’ chatterbox.”

“Whatever, you love it.”

Dean didn’t confirm or deny that. He added the wood to the split pile, then glanced over at Sam with another in his hand.

“Weird to see you in Dad’s shirt.”

“Yeah, sorry. I wanted a backup.”

“And you didn’t think I would?”

“My bad. We can share.”

“Pass. You sweat buckets.”

Sam shuffled around to lay out the canvas of their tent, a cheap, lightweight thing they could stuff into one of their bags. It was a garish orange and hardly big enough for two, but they’d slept in worse.

He looked down at his (John’s) faded USMC shirt, and remembered what happened back at the house. The way the kid’s eyes dropped to the front of his towel. The way the kid’s eyes were Dean’s eyes.

No sign of either of the boys, just the faint sounds of them talking somewhere far off, twigs snapping, leaves brushing. If he knew them, and he did, they were dicking around in the creek, shooting the shit and working things out, eager for the time away from grown-ups.

Sam cleared his throat. He sat back on his haunches in the dirt, flipping a tent peg around in his hands.

“So, hey.”

Dean cut him off. “Don’t even start.”

“Start what?”

“You get this tone when you’re gonna say something I won’t like. Say it or don’t, but get it over with.”

He’d forgotten, with how rocky things had been between them, that Dean still knew him better than anyone. Maybe it should have been annoying, but he found it almost sweet.

“Okay. Uh. Did you ever have a…” He smacked his lips, trying to find some tact. “Experimental phase?”

Dean turned around, slow and dramatic. He stuck the hatchet into the stump.

“What are you talking about?”

Now or never. Sam took a deep breath.

“He—by which I mean you—have been staring. At me. Kind of a lot.”

“Wow.” Dean laughed mirthlessly, shaking his head. “That’s real nice, Sam, thanks. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m just asking! It’s fine if you did! It’s not like he knows it’s me, you’re not—”

“He’s sizing you up! You’re like, twelve feet tall, he’s strategizing! It’s an alpha male thing!”

Sam thought about how quickly the kid had looked away, the flicker of fluttery guilt, how far up his eyes had to get before they got to his face. It wasn’t something you mistook.

“It’s not that kind of look,” he tried.

“Oh, and you’d know?”

“Yeah, pretty much! It happens!”

Dean scoffed and shook his head again. He yanked the hatchet out of the stump and set up another log.

“Wow. I liked you better when you were ninety pounds soaking wet, those pecs make you a narcissist.” He hefted the hatchet up and brought it down, splitting the log with a neat snick. “I didn’t, and he’s not. Okay?”

“You—”

Dean snapped, “Trust me—all he’s thinking about is keeping his brother safe from the two big, weird strangers. That’s it.”

“Alright, sorry! Cool! Fine!”

Dean focused on the last of his chopping with unwavering dedication while Sam assembled their tent without paying attention to it at all. He was watching Dean, who was still tense all over. His anger seemed to come out of nowhere. Sam would have bet money that Dean would laugh it off, or have some kind of over-the-top indignation at the thought of it, a haughty I don’t swing that way. But this seemed like genuine discomfort. Like the genuine discomfort that came from a struck chord. Or else it was just the heat: everything on edge, right up under the surface.

“It’s okay,” Sam said into the silence. “It wouldn’t be a big deal. If you… were into guys, back then. Or— yeah. I wouldn’t care.”

Dean jammed the hatchet into his splitting log again with more violence than last time. He turned around, and his face was tight with annoyance, but Sam thought he could see a sliver of his younger self’s blushy guilt. It was hard to tell: this guy was very thirty, had been to Hell, and was rarely charmed by Sam’s well-meaning wheedling.

“Glad I’ve got your blessing,” Dean bit out. “Are we done here?”

“Hey—”

“We’re done. Put up the fucking tent.”

Sam put up the fucking tent. The boys came back, scuffed calves and dirty jeans, and put up their own tent. Dean heated up beans in his small carbon steel pan, and they went to bed. Dean never fully de-tensed.

Sam slept fitfully in their hot, shitty tent, shoulders bumping Dean’s all night, and woke up alone. In an embarrassing, half-asleep flicker, he was disappointed that he hadn’t woken up pressed behind Dean again; having something to laugh about might have been a balm over yesterday’s spat. Dean’s bed roll and the thin jersey sheet they shared were still faintly warm, washed in bright orange from the garish glow of the canvas.

He heard movement outside and sat up. He was in his shirt and boxers; neither of them could bear to sleep in more than strictly necessary with this kind of heat, but they both kept their shirts on out of some mindless masculine habit in the close quarters. He wondered what the boys had slept in and if they fared any better with the heat.

He shuffled to the front of the tent and unzipped it. Everything was perfectly quiet in the early morning, a bit before true dawn, watery and blue-gray and still cool. He stuck his head out just in time to watch his younger self curl out of the other tent. He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, navy blue swishy gym shorts and a big shirt, and his hair was all stuck up on one side.

Sam watched him stand and look around, then spot Dean, the older one, crouched down washing his face by the creek. The sky was still pink where it peeked through the trees and the scene of it was beautiful: a rugged, shirtless guy down by the crystal stream, jeans slung low on his hips, washing up at dawn like something out of an old western.

Their camp was up on a small plateau, with the creek running a foot or so below. Little Sam went up to the edge of the ridge and looked down at Dean, who turned and gave him a surprisingly real smile. Sammy went down the slope to meet him and said some quiet good morning.

Dean turned as he spoke, away from the creek. They talked about something Sam couldn’t hear. Dean seemed more amicable than he was the day before, and Sam knew that had something to do with how the other Dean wasn’t there. There was no one to posture for, just an extra-little brother whom he loved. The kid he raised.

But, Dean had his shirt off. He’d been washing in the creek. From the tent, Sam spotted his amulet, laying so innocently in the centre of his chest.

Sam scrambled up and out of the tent, barefoot and clumsy and in his underwear. He watched the rest in slow motion.

Sammy spotted the amulet. He was pointing at it and Dean said something back, gesturing NO with his hands, but it was too late.

Sammy screamed, “DEAN!”

It was downright impressive how quickly the younger Dean rocketed out of that tent, and Sam couldn’t help but feel a pang of affection and weird gratitude watching it. The kid still slept in his jeans, no shoes, ankles and the hard dirty soles of his feet flashing as he sprinted. He got there before Sam did.

Sam skidded down the small embankment after him, already formulating desperate lies, none of which took a strong enough hold in his brain to feel true. All he heard was his younger self babble to his brother, amulet he’s got the pendant no one else does it’s not it’s not he couldn’t it’s yours what if it’s yours—

Young Dean had his fist around his own amulet, as if confirming that it was still physically there. Confirming that there were two of them. The older Dean held up his hands, palms out, moving slow.

“I can explain.”

Young and old Dean were identically pale from the biceps down, matching farmer’s tans, matching freckles beginning around the elbow. Matching amulets too, one missing a ring, one a decade plus too early for his tattoo.

Sam reached them and stood next to Dean. He said, “Take it easy,” and nobody looked at him.

Young Dean had an arm out across his little brother’s chest as if to shield him, but Sammy pushed it down.

“Bobby said there’s only one,” he said quickly, staring and furious, “when he gave it to me he said it’s handmade, there can’t be two—”

“Talk,” young Dean barked. He patted his hip for his gun or knife but he didn’t have either, so he settled for taking a step back. “If you’ve got that, then you know me. How?”

“I—”

“There’s no world where I give it to you.” Horror flashed over his face. “Wh— am I dead?”

“Not exactly,” Dean tried. Not the right thing to say; his younger self’s eyes got huge. “Look, it’s complicated. You’re gonna have to trust us.”

The kid shook his head. He took a step back into Sammy, one hand reaching out blindly to guide him back up the slope.

“No. If you’ve got that, something happened to me, ‘cause I wouldn’t give it to anyone. Sam gave me that.”

“I know he did. Would you just—”

“See! You know! There’s something you’re not—”

The younger Sam grabbed his brother’s arm. He was staring unblinking at the older Dean’s face, his eyes big and serious.

“Dean…”

Young Dean said, “Tell us who you are, right now. I’m serious. No more bullshit, no later, no—”

Sam, again, pulling on his arm. “Dean. Dean, look—”

Sam saw his younger self’s face, his eyes huge now, hand scrabbling against Dean’s arm and the way he was just babbling to say it, and he knew the jig was up.

“Look!” Sammy said again, almost breathless with excitement, “Dean, look at his face.”

They’d been moving all day yesterday, spread out and hiking, and they’d been talking, but the similarity was easily missed: the freckles, the shape of his nose, the leaf green eyes that Sam had never really seen on anyone else. Easy to miss until you looked for it, and the boys were looking now.

Sam watched as the younger Dean searched the older Dean’s face, scrunched, angry, frowning, and then— slack with shock as it all came together.

He swallowed loudly and shook his head.

“No way. That’s not— no. You’re not—”

Dean looked briefly at Sam, panicked, and Sam gave him a helpless shrug. Dean sighed. He held his hands up to the kids, then reached into the pocket of his jeans and took out the ring he’d hidden there the day before last. He held it up so they could see it, then put it on.

“Told you it was complicated,” he said, wiggling his fingers.

Nobody moved for a long beat. Sammy’s hand went soft on his brother’s arm. He said, almost reverently, “Oh, shit.”

Dean pressed his mouth into a line, awkward. He brought his hands down and spun his ring around his finger with his thumb. The younger Dean stared and stared and stared, mouth open.

“You’re kidding me,” he croaked.

“It’d be a pretty fucked-up joke.”

Sammy let go of one Dean and stepped up to the other, peering up into his face. “How are you here? Why didn’t you tell us?”

Dean had to tip his chin to his chest to look down at him. “Yeah, we, uh, thought it’d be easier to not do this, but. Life’s a bitch.”

We. Sam was still hovering next to them, unnoticed while they all stared at Dean. He waited for the other shoe to drop. Three, two, one—

The younger Dean’s eyes slid off his older self and onto Sam.

Sam gave him an apologetic grimace-smile and raised his hand in greeting. The kid practically cracked in two.

“No.”

His voice was hoarse, full of horror and awe. Young Sam gasped loudly.

“No fucking way!”

He stepped right into Sam’s space and stared up at him with this giddy, wild-eyed look. Sam had no idea what to say to him.

“Hi,” he tried. It was the only thing he could think of, so he pointed to the mole next to his nose, which was also on the other Sam. “See?”

It was an easy sell after Dean: who else would Dean be with, if not Sam? The kid touched his own face and looked all over Sam, mentally matching. A massive smile bloomed on his face.

“You’re big.”

Behind him, Dean made a choking noise—the younger Dean, who was already pretty well acquainted with how big Sam was. Sam looked up to find the kid’s eyes on him again, and he was so red. Sam tried to give him an ‘it’s okay’ look, but he was absolutely gone.

“How…”

The older Dean said, “Later. We can talk walking, alright? Let’s just pack up, we’re burning daylight.”

Young Dean just kept looking at Sam, helpless and horrified. Sam wanted to say something to make it better, later when they were alone, but if the kid was anything like Dean—and he had to be—he’d skin him alive if he tried to talk to him about it. He might physically burst into flames.

The younger Dean turned to leave with a hand on Sammy’s back to steer him along, but Sammy dug his heels in and spun around to face the older brothers.

“Wait, no! Tell us what’s going on! There’s no later, we’re not gonna—”

“Okay, okay.” Dean looked back at Sam, got a nod of agreement and ushered the kids up the slope to the camp. “We didn’t lie, before. We don’t know why we’re here, we just woke up in the woods behind your place.”

They went back up to the camp and started pulling stuff out of their tent, packing up. Sam listened to Dean tell the kids sparing details about what they knew, nothing about their lives, but enough about how they got there, and their beer with John. Nothing about the angels.

Sam went over his old memories again: setting out with Dean, alone, with nothing more than Dean’s backpack and a grocery bag full of snacks. The heat rash on the back of his hands and the delirious trek back down the mountain. He still remembered all that, but the kids in front of him wouldn’t. It was a split timeline he didn’t understand.

They set off for the day through the forest. They still walked in pairs, but now it was Sam with Sam in the front and Dean with Dean behind.

“This is crazy,” little Sam said for the fortieth time. He was staring up at big Sam, virtually unblinking. “When do we get tall?”

He’d slipped into ‘we’ remarkably easily. Sam laughed.

“I dunno. Twenty, I guess?”

“When do we get taller than Dean?”

“Sixteen.”

Both Deans, from behind: “Shut up!”

“Wow,” Sammy said, also for the fortieth time. “Wow. This is so sick.”

Teen Dean groaned. “Sammy, if I’ve gotta listen to this shit all day, I swear to God—”

Sammy walked backwards and gestured grandly at Sam.

“Look at me! I’m huge!”

“I’m aware,” little Dean said. Snippy.

He went to say something else, but big Dean cut him off.

“I’m ready to stop fawning over Mount Sam whenever you two are. Like, super ready.”

“It’s not—”

“Shut up. Now that you know who we are, I don’t have to be nice to you anymore. Shut up.” Dean chuckled. “Wow, that feels great. Who needs therapy now?”

Sam said, “Still definitely you.”

“I just— wow.” Sammy hadn’t stopped looking at him. “There’s so much I wanna ask you.”

“I told you, we can’t go there. We don’t know how this thing works, or why we’re here. I don’t know what telling you about your own future is gonna do.”

“Are you getting new memories as you change the past? Like, do you remember being us now, and seeing you? Or how the hunt goes?”

“No,” Sam said slowly. “Still the original memories.”

“That’s good!” Sammy insisted. “That means you’re not changing anything. That probably means you can tell us whatever you want, and it won’t mess anything up.”

He was walking noticeably closer to him. Sam veered away.

“It’s a bad idea.”

Sammy ignored him. “You’re still a hunter. You guys hunt together?”

“Look—”

“Where’s Dad? Do you hunt with Dad? Do you always hunt?”

From behind them, the younger Dean said, “Do you always share a bed?”

It was followed by a loud slap as he got smacked in the back of the head.

Dean said, “You’re only dunking on yourself. You grow up to be a thirty-year-old guy who sleeps with his brother, you proud of yourself?”

“Humiliated, actually. You look old as fuck, too, there’s no way you’re only thirty.”

“Stress is a bitch! Keep laughing, you’re gonna find out!”

“Knock it off,” Sam interrupted, louder. Their pace had slowed since they started arguing. “Water break.”

No one had been hungry for their breakfast rations, which wasn’t a good sign. Dean set an alarm on his watch after that to remind them to eat and drink, but Sam had them stopping more often than that.

“We’re getting into drought,” Sam said. “We eat and drink at regular intervals, no exceptions.”

Nobody argued. They were standing under a copse of pines, grateful for the shade, each drinking from his big metal water bottle with looks of displeasure, even though it was hot as hell.

Young Sam asked, “Did we bring enough water? We’ve got that extra jug, but…”

Sam said, “There’s a creek that goes up the mountain, we can refill there. We should be able to follow it all the way up.”

Young Dean was looking up at him again. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“So that was a cover, about you being in the mountain town. You’re us, and that’s why you know. What circle did you get to before turning back?”

Dean answered before Sam could.

“Just drought.” He said it kind of fast. “We didn’t notice about not drinking water. Sammy had this, this heat rash, all over his neck and hands. He passed out.”

“So you just abandoned the hunt.”

It wasn’t totally judgemental, but Dean snapped at him anyway.

“He wouldn’t wake up. When I got him back, he was on fluids at the hospital for days.” He looked at the young Sam. “Not your fault. We both fucked up.”

Sammy said, “I would have made it back down the mountain by myself. You could have left me behind.”

Both Deans made remarkably similar how dare you faces at him. The older one spoke first.

“Not an option.”

They stopped to rest during the hottest part of the day. The boys were sitting under a tree on a blanket, mumbling with their heads bent towards each other. Sam was under another tree some ways away. He leaned back on an elbow and rested his eyes, and every so often he’d catch one boy or the other looking at him; more often Dean, but sometimes Sam.

His Dean sat heavily next to him holding a hand-sized chunk of wood. Sam nodded at it.

“What’s that for?”

“Whittling.”

It made him smile. He liked to find small pleasures in a hunt, and this one felt like a dream—napping under a big tree in the California wilderness, the shk shk sound of Dean whittling next to him. No pressures, no apocalypse, no Lucifer rising. Dean was whittling.

“Whatcha making?” Sam asked.

“Dunno yet.”

Sam opened his eyes, not sure when he closed them. The boys had laid down on their blanket and were sleeping or resting, laying on their sides facing each other, all tangled up. Sam had his face in Dean’s chest and an arm thrown over his side. Dean had his arm folded around Sam’s neck and a hand on top of his head, kind of like a headlock. It was weird but sweet to see. John used to give them shit for it, but it was just a habit, one they eventually grew out of. Kind of.

Sam stuck out his foot and tapped Dean’s knee. “Hey.”

He nodded towards the boys. Dean scowled and called out to them.

“Hey, none of that! Leave room for Jesus.”

“Shh, they’re sleeping. It’s fine.”

Dean just stared at them. Little Sam turned his head to burrow further into Dean’s chest, twisting into the space between him and the blanket so only the back of his head was visible.

“We never slept like that,” Dean said eventually.

“We did too. You don’t remember?” Sam nudged him again, trying for playful. “You grew up sleeping in my crib, dude, it messed you up.”

“Me.”

“Okay, it messed me up, too.”

“Damn straight.” Dean was quiet for a long time. The sound of his whittling didn’t start up again. “We are… so weird.”

“That’s one way to put it. We still sleep like that.”

Dean kicked his ankle, just lightly, and grumbled, “It’s different. You’re behind me.”

“Whatever makes you feel better.”

“Shut up, you’re the one doing the spooning.”

“You’re the one letting me.”

That was the most they’d ever talked about it. Sam felt a little better about it, looking at the boys under the tree, because it made it feel more like a return to form. Not a thing he’d started doing in some pathetic, subconscious attempt to get closer to a brother that wanted to pull away from him, just par for the course.

Dean’s foot was still resting against his ankle after the kick. It felt like a peace offering.

Sam said, “Nap. You’re gonna regret staying up.”

Shk, shk. “I’m keeping watch.”

“For what?”

“Dunno yet.” Shk. “Go to sleep.”

Sam gave in and dozed off for a while with his head on his folded arm. He heard Dean get up to grab something, and when he sat back down later, he put his foot against Sam’s calf again.

Dean took over being a drill sergeant about drinking water. They forgot to bring sunscreen, which didn’t stop everyone but the younger Dean from taking their shirts off.

“We didn’t break the ozone layer ‘til 2000 at the earliest,” Dean argued. “This sun is a pansy.”

He was still the most burnt by midday, pink-red across his shoulders in a way Sam knew from historical data would fade to something of a tan, but would mostly just freckle.

The ground had gotten craggy and bouldered, trees coming sparser with the change in elevation. Sam was up front with young Dean, the other two behind.

Little Sam kicked the back of his brother’s knee as they walked and said, “I can smell your stink from here, weirdo, just take it off.”

The younger Dean’s black T-shirt was blacker with sweat and his hair was flat and wet. He glanced up at the older Sam, who was clearly listening.

“I don’t do shorts, and I don’t do… skins. This isn’t beach volleyball.”

“Do you wear jeans in the pool?” Sam teased.

“No. There are chicks at pools.”

Sammy kicked him from behind again. “You’re so stupid. Get over yourself.”

Sam glanced back at Sammy and his pale little chest, the wings of his collarbones like a couple of knives, and was vaguely proud of himself for taking his shirt off. He knew that kid didn’t like his body, but he also didn’t think much of it; he remembered not really looking in the mirror ever, and he didn’t pick his clothes or haircuts. At thirteen, ‘Sam’ was an idea. He was aware that he was skinny and young and probably not attractive, but it didn’t mean much because he’d never been attractive. Being attractive was a thing that happened to people in movies, and Dean.

Sam glanced down at the sweaty, shirted Dean next to him, and caught him looking at his bare chest. Again, his eyes snapped forwards the second he knew he’d been seen.

It was probably the fourth or fifth time they’d had that exact exchange since Sam took his shirt off. He thought about what Dean said: the alpha male thing, sizing him up. He wanted to push his buttons, and he wasn’t sure if it was good-natured or annoyed.

“What?” he asked the younger Dean.

“What?”

“You need something?”

The kid, predictably, looked mortified. He hid it by wiping sweat from his face.

“What? No. Whatever. Just.” Wipe, wipe. “What’s with the matching tattoos?”

Sam looked over his shoulder at Dean behind him. His chest was going pink, and red in welts under the straps of his giant backpack. He made a questioning face and Dean shrugged in response. Alright.

Sam said, “They’re… wards. Magic stuff.”

“Warding against what?”

Sam looked back at Dean again. Dean answered for him.

“Bad stuff. Stop asking questions.”

Young Dean turned around and looked at his older self, squinty and judgemental.

“Did you have to get them in the same spot?”

“That was a stylistic choice.”

Sam tried to remember the decision that went into putting them on their chests, matching like that. The only conversation was that they ruled out any limbs—’Incentive to cut them off,’ Dean said—and felt that the upper chest was a pretty regular place to get ink. If Sam considered getting it in a different spot than Dean, he didn’t remember it.

Young Dean went, “Huh,” and left it at that.

Sam knew he wasn’t actually interested in the tattoos, it was just an excuse to cover up his leering. The leering that his older self insisted he wasn’t doing, and was insulted by the sheer suggestion of.

It was uncomfortable, but also tense and clandestine in a way Sam didn’t know how to place, to have the two Deans not in agreement. He thought it would stop after he learned who he was, and that it hadn’t was— complicated. He only caught him doing it once more after that, which felt like a win. It was too hot to put his shirt back on.

They hiked the rest of the day up steeper and steeper terrain, baking in the sun, the slopes still scattered with enough trees that they could move from one stand to another to stay cool. They stopped and ate and drank when the alarm on Dean’s watch went off, but none of them actually felt like it. Dean gave Sammy his watch and he examined its features for twenty full minutes while they walked. Teen Dean went quiet. Sam was sweating too much to focus on anything else.

They kept walking until it started to get dark, to use the last of the light for setting up camp. Once they found a flat enough spot, covered in scrubby grasses and ringed with trees, they put up their tents, limbs like rubber after the exhausting day.

Dean was crouched by their packs with a flashlight in hand to embolden the last rays of sun, talking to the younger Sam about snare traps.

“You gotta go out and find the right sapling, though, trim it down. You got a knife?”

“Duh.”

“Take the cord, and—you know the knot? For a bait stick snare?”

“I… yes.”

They hadn’t caught, skinned and cleaned anything in a long while, and it wasn’t something you forgot, but it was a far cry from diner coffee and plastic-wrapped danishes. It would be a spectacle if they caught anything, and better than the shitty rations and canned goods they had so far.

Dean said, “You definitely know, Dad taught us on that— I don’t remember which hunt, but he did, and you know. Here, gimme that.”

Dean fell into ‘us’ the way little Sam fell into ‘we.’ Sam watched them together, so sweet and strange, bickering over their small shared task. Sam always felt like he was better with teenagers than younger kids because his gawky adolescence felt like it lasted a lifetime. Dean, on the other hand, went straight from four to forty. He was sweet with kids because he raised one. That specific one, in fact.

The younger Dean had been gone for a while. Sam wasn’t sure how long. The Dean here patted Sammy on the shoulder as they got to their feet.

“Atta boy. Don’t come back ‘til it’s set. Maybe we don’t feel hungry, but you’re gonna want a real breakfast.”

Little Sam ran off into the woods. Sam wandered towards Dean, as he bent to brush the dirt off his jeans.

“Where’s mini-you?”

Dean flipped the flashlight around and moved his mouth to one side.

“Jerking off?”

“What?”

“He’s got five free minutes, he’s probably jerking off somewhere.”

Dean rummaged around in his pack again. Sam stared down at him.

“We’re not in the ‘desire’ phase yet, right?”

“Nah. But he’s me, and he’s seventeen. I didn’t do much else.”

Sam watched Dean as he kept looking for something in his pack. He thought about the younger Dean’s constant stares and the twitchiness he didn’t notice his first time through their adolescence.

“Is he a virgin?” he asked.

Dean laughed. He came out of his pack with the block of wood he’d been whittling. One side had taken on a concave shape under the onslaught of his knife.

“You’re so weird, man. Uh.” Dean wiped sweat from his face. “Yeah, I think so. Sometime this year.”

Sam whistled. “Wow, an unsullied Dean. What a relic.”

“Yeah. No wonder he’s such a little bitch.”

“Seventeen seems late, for you.”

“Eh. I got a lot of head.” Dean went over to the centre of their small site and started kicking out a clear spot for a fire. He propped his flashlight up on a rock to try to light the space. “Dad put the fear of God into me about knocking some chick up, you don’t remember? I didn’t put it in ‘til I was almost eighteen.”

Sam hadn’t gotten the same talks, which he was vaguely insulted by in retrospect.

“Wow.”

“Hey, don’t feel too bad for me. I made up for lost time.”

Dean sat, took out his pocket knife and started whittling in slow, careful strokes, the curl of his fingers around the back of the wood, shk shk. A silent, polite signal of the end of a conversation.

Sam found his razor in his pack—their razor, there was no sense in being precious about it when they had to pack light—and a cheap, squeaky bar of soap. They’d been following the creek the whole way and by now it was just a pathetic trickle coming down from the mountain top, practically evaporating on the hot rocks as it passed by, but it was enough for a pit wash and a shave.

The dusk made everything look navy blue, no shadows, flat and indistinct. Sam sat next to the creek, wet his face and started to shave. He was far enough from their camp that he couldn’t hear Dean’s knife or the sounds of his younger self testing his snare trap, just the drip of the creek and the rasp of the straight razor against his cheek. He started under his cheekbone. It was only a few days’ growth, but with all the sweat and heat, he wanted to be clean-shaven. Dean was due, too, he’d seen him scratching at his growing scruff of stubble.

Speaking of which, a pair of dirty chucks appeared next to his knee. The wrong Dean, but a Dean regardless.

Sam didn’t look up, didn’t say anything. Dean crouched next to him and gathered water in his cupped hands, then splashed it on his face.

“Ugh. It’s not even cold.”

“Yeah, not really.”

He still took another handful of water and rubbed it over the back of his neck. Sam kept shaving and watched as the kid’s palm came away brown, and a clean, freckled swipe of skin appeared in its path. The line between his sunburnt nape and the skin below the collar of his shirt was sharp, pink and white.

Just to say something, Sam asked, “Do you shave yet?”

Dean shook his head. Insane thing to ask a kid. He stayed crouched by the creek for a while more as Sam kept shaving, careful and methodical. It was own brother and Sam still didn’t know what to say to the guy. He watched him out of the corner of his eye when he moved, as he cupped water in his hands, drank some and put some more on his face.

When Sam was nearly done shaving, Dean sat down next to him a few feet away on the rocky shore.

“Sorry for—”

He stopped, like he was re-thinking the apology altogether. It didn’t matter, Sam knew what he meant. He’d save him the anguish of saying ‘sorry for checking you out.’

“Don’t worry about it.”

He didn’t need to rub the kid’s nose in how messed up it was; it was hormones, a harmless byproduct of time-travel weirdness. So, maybe Dean liked guys. So what. The younger Dean might have been just as likely to make eyes at himself when they first met, it was just bad luck that it had been Sam. But, the older Dean nearly bit his head off when he brought it up, and he was thirty. A seventeen-year-old would straight up perish. Sam was surprised he was talking about it at all.

“It’s just… so, so weird,” Dean said, kind of hushed, like he was telling a secret. “You don’t look like Sam. Like my Sam, I mean. But you do, I can tell it’s you, it’s just insane. Totally fucking crazy. Like he got twice my age overnight.”

“I’m only twenty-six.” Sam carefully ran the razor down his cheek, following with his fingers. “But, yeah.”

It wasn’t a great shave with just soap and water, but it was far from his worst. He cleaned up a few missed spots, mostly to have something to do with his hands. Dean didn’t seem like he was done yet.

“I’m kind of an asshole,” Dean said finally. “Your me, I mean.”

Sam laughed. “He’s not. You’re not. You just, uh, have problems with… you. You know?”

“Great. Good to know I don’t get over that.”

There was tension crackling in the air and Sam didn’t know why. God, he wasn’t good with kids. He took a stab in the dark.

“You always do what you think is right. You’re not actually always right, but you try.” He paused. “You’re a good brother, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Dean didn’t say anything. Sam looked over at him and thought, you die for him. You go to Hell for him. God, you’re just a kid. It almost made him choke up. He tried to imagine how different his relationship with Dean would have been growing up if he knew Dean would sell his soul for him someday. It would have been harder to tie his shoelaces together and prank him with hex bags, if nothing else.

“So. You still hunt with me?” Dean asked.

His voice was so soft and tender that Sam looked away, like he needed privacy. He watched the pathetic creek instead. He wanted to tell him that he couldn’t say, it would be so much safer to keep a lid on it, but he sounded so hopeful.

“Pretty much,” he said.

“Is Dad with us?”

He hesitated. “Uh.”

Point blank, he couldn’t answer. God only knew what Dean made of that, but he was quiet for a while. He scuffed his sneakers in the dirt.

“Sammy’s been talking about school lately. Kind of a lot.”

Sam sighed. It was about the right age. He remembered Dean’s confused support back then, so torn between ‘you can be anything you want’ and ‘but you wanna be a hunter, right?’ It hadn’t been helpful. It ate him up inside, back then. It still did.

“Sounds about right,” he said.

Another long silence. That part of talking to Dean hadn’t changed, how long it took him to figure out what he wanted to say, and how to say it without saying anything at all.

Dean asked, “Do you go? At some point?”

“I shouldn’t tell you that.”

“That’s a ‘yes,’ isn’t it?”

Sam blew out a frustrated breath and leaned back on his hands. “You’re so annoying, dude.”

Dean laughed, but not like it was funny. “You sound just like him.”

“Well, I would.”

Dean dragged the heel of his sneaker back and forth in the sandy dirt, fidgeting. He seemed nervous, and Sam was willing to wait if he had something to say. Sam picked up a smooth stone from the ground near his hip and weighed it in his hands. It was warm from the sun.

Dean said, “But you still hunt with him. Me. Whatever. If you left, you came back.”

Sam couldn’t bring himself to tell the whole truth. He nodded slowly and turned the stone over in his fingers. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Dean was quiet for a long time after that, too close next to him to see his face. That was probably for the best. He had a feeling it would eviscerate him.

Pebbles skittered down into the creek from under them as Dean shifted. Sam thought he was going to get up, so he put his hands behind him to follow, but Dean wasn’t getting up.

A surprisingly soft hand touched Sam’s cheek, soft pressure to turn his face to the side. Full lips crushed against his. Dean kissed him.

Pure, unfiltered shock took Sam’s brain offline. His eyes were open and he could see Dean’s blurry, freckled cheek, his nose pressed along his own, long dark lashes, the boyish smell of his deodorant. Two long seconds passed and lips slid dry against his, taking a shallow, shaking breath, pressing in closer so carefully, shy—

Sam grabbed both his arms and wrenched him back.

Dean looked stunned, tense and frozen. His hand hung in the air where it had been on Sam’s face.

“What—” Sam’s tongue felt thick and useless in his mouth, stumbling, his heart was beating so hard it felt like a hammer. He was gripping Dean’s arms tighter than he should have. “What was that?”

“Sorry. Sorry, sorry, I thought—”

Sam gave him a forceful shake, his fingers dug all the way in.

“Look, fuck, I— I know this is insane, but you’ve gotta believe me, I’m Sam. I’m your brother, I’m Sam.”

Dean’s eyes were huge, his pupils were huge, his mouth was open and breathing. Sam noticed, too late, that he was looking at his mouth.

“I know,” Dean said, so fucking wrecked, and kissed him again.

His lips hit Sam’s and it was only the life-altering shock-horror-bad-wrong of it that made Sam freeze up, shock like a bomb going off in his head and screaming through his whole body.

Sam flung him to the ground. Dean fell back and caught himself with a hand, and he looked so small crumpled on the bank of the creek like that. Sam was scrambling to his feet just to—he didn’t know, get back, get away, just get.

Dean fumbled his way to standing, holding his hands out as if to show see, look, not gonna hurt you.

“I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, I just—”

“What are you doing?”

Sam knew there had to be some misunderstanding, he just had to ask and Dean would fix it, there had to be some explanation he couldn’t see.

Dean didn’t fix it. Dean looked crazy, panicky and sweaty and pale.

“I just— I can’t help it, I’ve been going nuts, I can’t handle this. You’re him, but you’re so— you look just like him but you’re older and I’m freaking the fuck out, I can’t— Fuck, I don’t want this—”

His voice cracked. It took Sam a second to wade through all that, and when he did, he took a giant step back.

“Oh, God.”

“I’m sorry,” Dean said again, a broken record. Sam had never heard him apologize so much in his life. “Sammy, I’m sorry.”

Sam played it back over and over again in his head (you’re him you’re older I can’t help it I don’t want this you’re him you’re older you’re him you’re older) and ran out of other explanations. Then, he just ran.

Chapter Text

Dean’s whittling project was going to be a dog. He didn’t know why, he wasn’t wild about dogs, but the shape of a dog was coming out. When Bobby taught him to whittle, Sam’s first summer in California, Dean spent a month at the salvage yard trying to—whatever. Bobby said the wood would tell him what it wanted to be. It usually did, on the rare occasions that Dean had found time to whittle since then.

Now, Sam had been gone for a while. Dean was being cool about it. There were no real threats this far out and they still had a while to go until anything got too tricky, so as long as Sam came back eventually so someone could remind him to eat, he could go on whatever kind of nature walk he wanted. In the dark. On a mountain. Without telling Dean where he was going.

Dean took another careful curl of wood off the chunk in his hand.

He’d been trying to trust Sam more, since everything happened. It was a work in progress. Every time Sam was out of his line of sight, Dean had a brief but intense flicker of rage and whacked out imaginings—he’s calling someone, who’s he with, he’s sucking blood again—and it took work to beat back the feeling. He thought about Ruby and he couldn’t keep it together. Sam had made a mistake and he regretted it, Dean knew he did, but he still did it, and it was taking some time for Dean to crest that hill. At least this whole fucked up situation they found themselves in had helped: a new world, a clean past, no demons to speak of. So Sam was going for a late night walk. It was fine.

The small fire Dean had gotten going was enough light to see by. Sam—the other one, the tiny one—was sitting on the other side of it, looking at the battered map book he never let out of arm’s reach.

Dean had been keeping an eye on him as best as he could, unable to keep from falling back into the Protect Sammy protocol that ran overtime in his teens and never quite left him. It was making his heart go crazy to see Sam so young again, but he thought he was doing a pretty good job of keeping a lid on it. That was his kid—shaggy hair, bony knees and all, pre-growth spurt. Dean had forgotten how smart and weird and snippy he was, and how small, holy hell. He could fit Sam in his pocket. So what if Dean was susceptible to nostalgia; he used to pack the kid’s lunches.

Crunching footsteps sounded from the edge of camp. He looked up, expecting Sam, and found his younger self instead. It hadn’t gotten any less jarring to see his own face all the time.

The kid was coming towards him and God, it was weird. He didn’t remember looking like that. His stint in Hell erased more childhood memories than he’d like to admit, but he would have known if he looked like that, with those big fucking eyes. But, then again, John never let him wander alone around truck stops as a kid, so maybe it checked out.

On closer inspection, the kid looked sweaty and panicked, and he came right up to where Dean was sitting. He had his fists clenched aimlessly in the front of his own shirt.

“We gotta talk. Now.”

Dean could count on one hand the number of one-on-one conversations he’d had with his younger self since they got here. They had a mutual understanding about how both of them were more interested in Sam than they were in each other.

“What? Why?”

Little Sam looked up at his brother. “You okay?”

“Fine, Sammy. I’ve gotta talk to… me. Him.”

Dean put his knife down. “Okay, so. Talk.”

The kid shook his head hard. He still had his hands clenched in his shirt. “Not here. Come on.”

Dean squinted at him, annoyed, until he flicked his eyes towards Sammy and raised his eyebrows, mouth pressed thin. Oh.

The second Dean got to his feet, the kid was charging off the opposite way he’d come, away from the creek. It was pitch black now and Dean set the beam of his flashlight in front of them, his younger self’s skinny legs silhouetted in the light as he crashed through shrubs.

As soon as they were away from the site, the kid was babbling.

“I fucked up. I really, really fucked up, it’s bad, it’s—”

Dean caught up with him and grabbed his arm. They had gone far enough to not be heard.

“Woah, woah, slow down. What did you do?”

The kid yanked his arm back. He closed his hand around his amulet, a nervous habit Dean recognized but had long since grown out of.

“Don’t kill me.”

He sounded scared. Dread crept up Dean’s spine like a chill. It suddenly seemed relevant that the older Sam hadn’t come back to camp yet.

“Don’t make a killable offense if you don’t wanna get killed. What did you do?”

The pause was the worst. Dean lived another lifetime in that pause, a worse lifetime.

Young Dean said, “I kissed him.”

Instantly, Dean’s blood pounded behind his eyes in a rush of fear and adrenaline so strong he could taste it. He wanted so badly to have misheard him. Considering the context he already had, he knew he didn’t.

He asked, “Mine?”

The kid’s face said it before his mouth.

“Yours.”

Dean could hardly stand. His stomach knotted up into something hard and cold and it was a good thing the kid was bracing for a hit with his face all scrunched up, because Dean wanted to hit him so bad.

“Tell me you’re messing with me.”

He obviously wasn’t. He winced with his whole body. “I told you it was bad.”

A stunned silence hung between them. Dean’s mouth was open in horrified shock as he stared at this fucking child who had the gall to ruin his life like it was his to ruin. For a split second, before the reality of it hit, he wanted to ask, was he into it? But that wasn’t the face of a guy who just got his tongue sucked.

Dean grabbed the kid’s face with his hand, hard. It was better than going for his throat.

“You stupid son of a bitch, what’s wrong with you?”

Bony, teenaged hands came up and tried to claw Dean’s hand off him.

“Ow! Fuck, back off!” His face was squished by Dean’s fingers, mottled red in anger and mortification. He snarled, “You can’t get mad at me! I’m going fucking insane, it’s not my fault, I had to—”

“What, give it a shot? You think he’d go for it?”

“No! Yes! I don’t know, I didn’t mean to!”

Dean threw him back and he stumbled and caught himself on a nearby broken stump of a tree. Dean paced and ran his hands through his hair, panicked, all damage control.

“Holy fuck, I don’t believe this. What did you do? Tell me exactly what you did.”

“We—we were by the creek, talking, and I just… kissed him.”

“Tell me that was it. You didn’t say anything?”

The kid was quiet for too long. Dean turned around slowly, horrified.

“Oh, God. What did you tell him?”

His younger self slid down the tree stump to sit on the ground.

“I don’t remember. I panicked. Something about him being…” Another pause, and Dean’s heart rate went up and up and up. “…older.”

Dean groaned and sat on a small rock across from him, hanging his head.

“Fucking great. Thank you. So he—”

“Probably knows. Yeah.”

“Jesus Christ.” Dean ran a hand over his mouth. He had a thousand questions, bubbling panic and nerves. “What did he do?”

“He said… ‘what are you doing,’ or something, and like, shoved me. Ran off.”

“He didn’t shout?”

“He just shoved me.”

Dean’s mind was going a mile a minute. He could talk around it if he really tried—there had to be something he could say to Sam to get out of it, he just couldn’t think of what it was yet. He couldn’t even wrap his head around it.

“I was careful,” he seethed, more to himself. “I’ve been so fucking careful.”

The kid sounded miserable. “Sorry.”

Not a single misstep, not for years, and now it was all over through no real fault of his own. It was also, literally, entirely his own fault.

He said, “You stupid little shit. You seriously thought he’d be into it.”

“No! Or— fuck, I dunno. It wasn’t a kiss kiss, I didn’t mean to. He was saying all this shit, and it just happened.” The younger Dean put his face in his hands and stayed there. “He’s so big.”

“Shut up,” Dean spat. “I have to deal with how big he is every goddamn day, you don’t see me kissing him. You couldn’t keep it in your pants for a week?”

“I tried! You don’t think I tried?”

“You didn’t even make it two days!” Dean put his face in his hands too. “Jesus, you know he fucking asked me about it? Before you knew it was us, he asked if I had an experimental phase, ‘cause you couldn’t stop eye-fucking him.”

Teen Dean groaned into his hands. “Oh my God.”

“Yeah, so, thanks for that. Now he knows I like dick. And he knows…” Dean shook his head. “Jesus Christ. I can’t believe this.”

Neither of them said anything for a full minute. Dean put his elbows on his knees, slid his hands up into his hair and stared down at his boots, waiting, mostly because Sam would probably be back at the camp by now and he wasn’t even close to ready to navigate that conversation. He couldn’t even think about it; it was white-hot, painful, glowing. Sam knew. It didn’t feel real.

The kid cleared his throat. “So, uh. You still…”

Dean snorted. “Take a wild guess.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Shit.”

Wanting Sam wasn’t the kind of wound that healed. He remembered thinking, back then, that it was a phase he might get over someday; he’d read about puberty and brain hormones, isolation, grief, depression and abuse, and he could put it down to a thousand different things, but none of them fit. Wanting Sam didn’t get any better, and it didn’t go away. It throbbed and festered the same way it always had, and he got better at living with it.

Young Dean asked, “Do you still, like… think about it much? Or is it…”

Dean closed his eyes. Sam’s miles of bare skin turning golden in the sun, shiny with sweat, the way the straps of his backpack pushed his pecs together, every exasperated smile and stupid little laugh, the way he tucked his hair behind his ears. Like dangling a tomahawk steak in front of a starving man.

“Not all the time. But when it hits you.” He whistled. “Like a fuckin’ knife in the gut.”

He felt like his head was full of flash cotton, burning it up, leaving it empty. Sam knew. It didn’t make any sense. Dean didn’t tell him, it wasn’t fair that he knew. He’d been so fucking careful.

The kid wrung his hands. “Does it get any better?”

Dean thought about every time in the past few months he’d woken up with Sam’s arm over his waist and Sam’s face pressed to the back of his neck, and how he’d lay there and pretend to be asleep for as long as he thought he could get away with, feeling better than he felt the other twenty-three hours of any given day. In those remaining hours, he hated himself so much for indulging in that one hour where Sam held him that he could hardly look at him.

“It gets way, way worse.”

When they got back to the camp, the younger Sam was alone at the fire. It had gotten properly dark and he’d put his map book away, and was instead drawing idly with a stick in the dirt between his legs. He looked up when the Deans came into the clearing.

“What was that?” he asked, skeptical.

The younger Dean waved a hand and sat next to him. “Don’t worry about it. Dean stuff.”

Sammy snorted. The older Dean looked around the clearing.

“Is Sam back?”

Sammy pointed at their orange tent. “He went to sleep.” He was keeping his voice down. He looked at his brother. “Did you have a fight? He was weird.”

Dean stared at the tent: silent and dark inside, no flashlight. “Weird how?”

Sammy just shrugged. Dean gave his younger self a look and got a wince in return, a subtle shrug of a shoulder. Dean sucked his teeth and sat down across from the boys at the fire, in a position where he could watch the tent if Sam came out. He didn’t.

Dean woke up the next morning and Sam was still asleep, firmly on his half of the tent, curled on his side with his back to Dean.

Dean propped himself up on an elbow. They shared a thin sheet, and it strung between his legs and the wall of Sam’s bare side next to him. He dragged his eyes over the muscles in Sam’s back, the scars, the way the bronze tan of the tops of his shoulders faded to paler lower down with the angle of the sun.

He shoved me back. Ran off.

Dean sighed. Two decades of idle wondering about ‘what if,’ and that answered that. It made his throat close up if he thought about it for more than a second or two, so he tried not to.

He crawled out of their tent as quietly as he could and zipped it shut behind him, kicked at the dead coals of the night’s fire and looked around. They were high enough up on the mountainside now that they looked out onto the valley below through the trees, just miles and miles of trees and the blip of Redding way off in the distance. The hazy blue-pink sky of dawn. He wasn’t in much of a position to appreciate it, but it was nice.

He went to the edge of their camp towards the creek and took a leak. He moved his jaw back and forth. The justifications and loophole-finding came easily: Sam pushed him off ‘cause he’s just a kid. It doesn’t mean he wouldn’t, with you. He was just freaked out. He didn’t lose his shit. Another guy would have lost his shit.

He knew it wasn’t true, but he couldn’t help it. The frustrating thing was, wanting to fuck Sam was hardly the worst part of how Dean felt about him. The ‘Sam’ section of his brain was so tangled and complicated, so pulsing and loud and all-consuming, that being attracted to him felt almost black-and-white by comparison. At seventeen, it was a festering wound, it made him want to put a bullet in his brain every time he thought of it, or to run and run until he got to a place where Sam would never find him. But at thirty, after selling his soul for him, after watching him do the unthinkable and figuring out how to forgive him for it, the significance of the sexual part had shrunk. Like, of course I want Sam to fuck me. I’d also give him a bath and let him spit in my mouth if he wanted me to. He learned to live with it, and himself, as best as he could.

Still, he wasn’t delusional. He knew Sam wasn’t in the same place, but there was a difference between knowing something and having it proven. He’d lived for a long time in that shadow of doubt. Sam would pass him a cup of coffee and their fingers would brush, and it would give Dean another day. He made it work. He was good at finding the loopholes.

He finished pissing and tucked his dick away. There was a voice somewhere ahead of him.

“Somehow I knew you’d miss the point. I should have spelled it out in crayons.”

Not a Sam, or himself. He whipped around.

Zachariah was standing in the trees a few yards away, smiling at him. His starched white shirt was the brightest, cleanest thing Dean had seen in days.

Dean looked back towards their camp and opened his mouth to call for Sam. In a blink, Zachariah was in front of him again.

“I wouldn’t call your brother if I were you. I don’t think you want him to hear what I’m about to say.”

Dean froze, heart beating in his throat. No angel blade, no defense to speak of. It made his blood boil to be held captive.

Zachariah started walking through the forest and flicked his fingers for Dean to follow, putting his back to him like he was nothing. Dean’s hands itched to throttle him.

“I knew it was you,” Dean bit out. “You dicks sent us back here to prove some point. What do you want?”

“Oh, now you care? You’re not too busy playing house with the incestuous little family you’ve put together here?”

Dean’s brain screeched to a halt. The worst thing he’d ever thought, his biggest secret, his Sam-thing, and he’d never heard anyone say it before. He’d never even heard the word ‘incest’ out loud, and now this asshole threw it at him like it was nothing.

“Fuck off,” he barked, impotent and too late, but he couldn’t not. Zachariah just tutted at him.

“Don’t say it if you don’t want people to know. That talk you had with the teen heartthrob last night? Downright touching. There’s nothing quite like telling a boy on the cusp of manhood that his inappropriate feelings for his kid brother are going to ruin the next decade of his life. It was like a Hallmark movie.”

It was so worthless to be embarrassed in front of this jackass, it was a worthless way to feel, but he couldn’t help it. It was humiliating to have the worst thing about him put on display. If Zachariah knew, there was no reason all the angels wouldn’t, and if they knew, they could tell anyone. Everyone. Sam. Dean was dizzy with regret.

“Tell me why we’re here, you feathery fuck,” he said through his teeth. “And if you say another word about me and Sam, I’m gonna—”

“Oh, please, you’ll what? Whittle me to death? Besides”—Zachariah hopped up on a rock and balanced on it—“this is about Sam.”

Pure terror. Things about Sam were rarely good. “How?”

Zachariah spread out his hands. “Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t put it together. What happened last time you were here?”

Dean carried Sam back down the mountain. Twelve people died.

“Sam got heat stroke,” Dean said slowly. “I took him back to town.”

“Yes, but?”

He couldn’t figure what he was getting at. Zachariah got there first.

“But, you might have kept going, and saved aaa-aaall those people, if you weren’t worried you were going to rape your little brother when that demigod juju hit you.”

The anger and shame was white-hot and loud, like the crack of a whip. Dean didn’t expect him to know.

“I wouldn’t.”

“Maybe not, but you didn’t know that.” Zachariah got down off the rock and went back to slowly moving through the trees. “Sorry, is ‘rape’ too strong a word for your delicate sensibilities? Would you rather I say ‘give him the bad touch’? ‘Touch him in his bathing suit area’? I mean, wow, he was only—”

Dean lunged at him, stupid and senseless, only wanting to break and snap and tear and destroy, anything that wasn’t just sitting there and letting him say that shit.

He felt a tree crack against his back before he registered being flung against it in a wash of pain.

Zachariah said, “God, you’re like a dog. Heel, boy.”

Dean slid to the ground, aching and seething.

He had been worried. He’d been seventeen and repressed and alone in the woods with Sam, and then suddenly horny for no reason he could understand. He broke. Sam was delirious with the heat and all Dean could think about was the smell of his sweat and the way his hair felt in his hands, and he was terrified that he was losing control of the thing he’d been so good at keeping dormant. So he bolted. If he’d known it wasn’t his fault, it might have been different. When they got back down the mountain and he learned it was part of the hunt, he’d never been so relieved. Anything was better than not being able to stop being horny for his sick, hurt brother. He’d never told Sam.

Zachariah smiled at him, but it was more like an animal baring its teeth.

“We’ve been sitting on this one for a while—your big, dirty secret, I mean. You should be thanking me for not telling Sam the second we met, but— the look on your face, now?” He kissed his fingers with a loud mwah. “Truly priceless. Worth the wait.”

“So why fuck with me now?” Dean spat. “You’re blackmailing me?”

Zachariah shook his head and chuckled.

“You’ve gotta think bigger here, Deano, the big picture. There’s the problem right there: you two have never thought about anything but each other.” He spoke slowly, like a placating school teacher. “I thought giving you another shot at your first colossal fuck-up might change your mind about this whole thing. A ghost of Christmas past, if you will. Even you’re not stupid enough to make the same mistake twice.”

“There’s no decision to make.” Dean struggled to his feet. “We know what this thing is, there’s not gonna be any choosing.”

Zachariah raised his eyebrows and smiled his wide, awful grin. “You sure about that?”

Dean blinked, and he was gone.

Sam was up when Dean made it back to camp, and the first thing Dean thought when he saw him through the trees was, oh, you’ve gotta be KIDDING me.

Sam had rinsed off in the creek and soaked his shirt. He was now standing in the golden morning sun wearing it, soaking wet and looking like some fucking Adonis. It was the white V-neck he had on him when they set out, and his tanned skin showed through where it clung to him at the tops of his pecs and across his shoulders, his pink-brown nipples like a spring break wet T-shirt contest. Dean’s beautiful, troubled, pain in the ass little brother. He looked better wet and dirty than most people looked in their Sunday best.

Dean took a deep breath, broke up every thought he had about Sam into neat, bite-sized pieces and shoved them down into the darkest, hardest to reach areas of his soul, the same way he’d done since he was seventeen.

Sam looked over when he heard him. That first second of recognition was teeth-gnashing agony and Dean kept his face perfectly blank, or tried to. It felt like the bones in his clenched hands were going to splinter through the skin. Sam knows. He felt sick.

He had one saving grace: Sam didn’t know that he knew about the kiss. If Sam cared about him at all, he’d keep his mouth shut. And anyway, Dean had news.

“Zachariah was here.”

Sam’s eyebrows went way up. He opened his mouth to say something when his younger self came out of the forest holding a dead rabbit by its feet. He was holding it away from his body like he didn’t want to be near it, but, to his credit, it looked like he’d snapped its neck.

“Got one.”

Dean skinned and prepared the rabbit while the others packed up the tents, and they cooked it over a fire and ate before leaving for the day. The meat was tough and unseasoned, but it would help them ration the other food they brought with them. The younger Dean chewed in sullen silence, staring down at his sneakers. The older Sam was quiet in a less obvious way. Nobody said much.

They set off again, baking in the sun. Sam’s shirt dried and Dean got some mental real estate back. Dean wished it was another day where the younger Sam babbled, asking about the future and the internet, but the boys walked ahead and talked quietly to each other instead. Sam, bugging his older brother about his mood, he could only imagine. Sam always tried to pull him out of it when he got quiet.

Dean stared at the back of his younger self’s head. He’d been such a sorry case back then. He didn’t deal with anything, head-down, stubborn and sad. He started getting looks from young guys at school and old guys on hunts, and it freaked him out, made him worry he had a tell. Sam started to grow up and he didn’t deal with it well, to say the absolute fucking least. He was a bundle of nerves glossed over by fake machismo mimicked from TV and John, and he wore it poorly.

In this kid’s defense, Dean thought, he could see how getting a version of Sam with one big taboo barrier removed would have driven him nuts. Surprise, now he’s older than you, so it’s at least kind of okay! He also has biceps as thick as your neck!

He imagined what that kiss must have been like. Were they standing or sitting? Did he have to pull Sam down to meet him? He said it wasn’t a real kiss, but how not real? Did their lips move? Did Sam kiss him back, even for a fraction of a second, just on pure reflex? It wasn’t gross to think about if he was the one who did it. Seventeen, sure, gross, but it was him. A version of Dean kissed a version of Sam, and if Dean didn’t get to actually experience it, he was at least allowed to think about it.

The morning burned on. The monotony and the heat of the hike were bad after a couple days of the same, but the Sam thing was worse. It was like a ripped-off scab, and what had been a dull ache yesterday was now bleeding all over the place. He couldn’t stop thinking about Sam, and about what he’d say if Sam asked. All Sam knew was that some past version of Dean had kissed him. That kid had been thrown off by time travel and removed from Dean’s current self by over a decade, but it was still Dean. And Dean knew Sam: he’d be thinking about all of this, hard. He’d be looking at it from every angle. One of those angles had to be that Dean had always been, and was still, in love with him. Sam knew Dean too, and it scared the shit out of him.

Sam said, “A choice.”

Dean almost jumped. It’s not, his mind supplied without context, if it was a choice, I’d stop.

He caught up a second later. “What?”

“You told me Zachariah said there’d be a choice. You think it’s like last time? Something’s gonna happen that makes it me or that town?”

Dean looked over at Sam. He always looked good outdoors. The glitzy late morning sun turned his hair golden and caught on his bright stubble, freshly though poorly shaven the night before. Dean rubbed reflexively at his own scruffy jaw.

“I’m not seeing how. We know better now, we’re not turning back ‘cause of heat stroke. We’re on top of the whole water and food thing, and the… other parts.”

The heat—both the sun and the hair-trigger temper Dean could feel tugging at him, making him want to snap and bark—wasn’t great. Drought was manageable. Desire and intoxication would be bad. They hadn’t talked about it much, not to each other or the kids.

“We won’t go back,” Sam said firmly. He scratched at his cheek; Dean watched the movement. His squarish nails were dirty underneath. “Whatever they think we’re walking into, we know, right? There’s no… drop to get.”

It still felt naive that they didn’t prepare more, but all things considered, they’d kind of just gotten dropped into this. They didn’t have time to do more than scrape together their childhood memories and head out. Dean couldn’t see why the angels would want them to swoop in and save the day, no lesson he could place. He tried to piece it together; destiny, roles, apocalypse, family. A doomed commune in the middle of nowhere and two ragged kids split into four. It didn’t add up.

“Maybe,” he said slowly. He craned his neck and looked up. The sky was hazy with the heat, white-blue. The leaves of the trees were cracked and dry. “You think Cas’ll find us?”

Sam hummed. “A 2009 Cas who knows us, or a 1996 Cas who doesn’t?”

“Shit, he’d better know us. He was a dick when he didn’t.”

“No kidding.”

They hiked, the day wore on and Dean itched. He wanted hunts to be quick and dirty, because even if they were brutal and didn’t go as planned, it was action, it was something, it wasn’t a Saturday morning hike in northern California. This was steep and grueling, but it wasn’t a fight, and he was going crazy with inaction. They were still days out from the town or commune or whatever it was, and he hadn’t unsheathed his shitty new combat knife for anything other than cleaning a rabbit carcass. He kept snapping at Sam, and he didn’t mean to. To add insult to injury: only the youngest Sam had his shirt off. Dean, Dean, and the other Sam had all put theirs back on. It was sticky, hot and humiliating.

The alarm on Dean’s watch started beeping, and even that was an exciting event. He whistled to the boys.

“Yo! Water break.”

They huddled under two spindly trees for shade and drank the warm, musty creek water from their bottles while nobody said much. It was worse than all the days before it, and Dean felt worst for thirteen-year-old Sam, who was the only one who didn’t know what was going on with the rest of them. Dean saw it in the way he kept looking between them all, skeptical and noticing the change in the air. His brother wouldn’t have told him anything, and the older Sam was a freak, but he wasn’t a psychopath. Not all the time.

Another kid might have asked about it point blank—why are you being so weird?—but Sam had been in enough fights with John, and had seen Dean’s obstinate refusal to fight with John, to know better than to stoke that fire. He watched.

Teen Dean hadn’t said a word to either of the older two all day and it was excruciatingly obvious. Dean watched his younger self, a few paces away with his back to them, from over the top of his water bottle. Dean tried to keep it at bay, but it kept bubbling up anyway—anger, betrayal and the crippling horror that Sam probably knew now, just like all his worst nightmares, because Dean was too stupid and horny when he was seventeen to keep his shit together. He had no one to blame but himself, literally.

He didn’t feel thirsty, so he didn’t know when to stop drinking. He stopped when Sam stopped, which he knew because he’d started watching him instead, because a trickle of water escaped the corner of his mouth and dripped off his chin. Dean bit the inside of his cheek and looked away. They wouldn’t be in the ‘desire’ zone of the demigod’s influence yet, not based off little Sam’s map and big Sam’s hazy knowledge about demigods, and Dean was grateful for every second he had left before they were. He had it bad enough on his own, with Sam all sweaty and glowing. Worse, he hadn’t jerked off in days.

They packed up and soldiered on again. The kids went up ahead. Dean let his mind go blank, zoned out—no Sam, no gods or angels, no otherworldly heat beating down on him, just one foot in front of the other. He made it about forty minutes that way before fucking up.

It was a simple thing, in the end. Step by step:

Sam tripped over a tree root.

Dean laughed, and once Sam righted himself, he said, “First time?” and reached out to slap him on the back.

To avoid another root, Sam moved to his right.

Instead of smacking his back, already in motion, Dean accidentally cupped the back of Sam’s upper arm instead.

Sam flinched.

In twenty-six years, Dean had rocked him to sleep, kissed his forehead, patched his wounds, showered with him, punched him, slapped him and hauled him around, and now he was so fucking deplorable that Sam would flinch away from his hand on his arm.

Dean stopped walking. Sam stopped and reared back. His face was something awful, awkward and apologetic, nothing Dean ever wanted to see aimed at him.

Does it get any better? The kid had asked. The fucking idiot. Dean could strangle him.

He charged ahead towards the two boys, dropping his pack in the dirt as he went.

“You!” he barked at his younger self. “Drop your shit, come here.”

He grabbed the kid by the backpack and hurled him down the path the way they came.

“Hey!”

“I need a word. Walk.”

He lifted his pack off him and dropped it next to his own. He ushered him past Sam, who stepped out of the way.

“What’s going on?”

“You two go on. We’ll catch up.”

Dean steered the other Dean back through the trees, ignoring his sputtered protests, and stopped once they were far enough from the Sams and down a ridge for some semblance of privacy, well out of earshot.

The kid rounded on him. “Would you cool it? What’s your—”

Dean pulled him in by his arm until they were close enough that he could hiss at him.

“Shut your mouth. You ruined everything, you have no idea what you did.”

The kid tried to push him back and couldn’t, but now he looked just as mortified as Dean felt.

“I know! Jesus, I said I was sorry!”

“Fuck your sorry. He’s hardly said two words to me, it’s—” Dean searched his face and he dredged up the experience of being a teenager from the very bottom of his soul, of being this teenager, and he tried to find some scrap of sympathy, but there was only rage and regret. “You wanna blow your brains out over it, but there’s still a part of you that seriously thinks—if you just told him”—his face was burning, he could never say it if he weren’t talking to himself—“that he’d be just as fucked up as you.”

He might as well have slapped the kid. He stopped fighting to get away and just sagged there, shocked into misery.

“I don’t—”

“You do. It’s only this tiny speck, but you do, and now we know he doesn’t want it.”

“We don’t for sure know. Maybe—”

“We know. I had my sad little fucked-up fantasy, and I was okay, I had it, but now I gotta—”

The kid’s eyes got wide and he started fighting again. He dug his fingers under Dean’s to try and make him let go.

“Dude, shut up—”

“You shut up,” Dean shouted, louder, “you talked, and now we—”

“Let him go.”

Sam’s voice behind him, his Sam, like ice water down his spine.

Dean and his younger self just looked at each other, horrified and still.

Quieter than anything, the younger one whispered, “He only heard the end.”

Dean let him go and turned around. Sam was a few yards away with the nail of his thumb between his teeth, his other arm folded awkward across his chest, frowning so that a little line appeared between his eyebrows. His eyes flicked from Dean to Dean and landed on the younger one.

“Catch up with your brother. We’ll be a sec.”

The kid took off, no surprise. He was up over the ridge before Dean started breathing again, just a black smudge at the edge of his tunnel vision.

There was no word for Sam’s face. Not mad, not upset, just endlessly, horribly tense, and something else. Nothing Dean had ever seen before, but he was pretty sure they’d never had a conversation like the one they were about to have.

“We need to talk,” Sam said finally, flat, betraying too little.

Dean set his teeth on edge. He still had some runway, he had all morning to plan his escape, and maybe he’d come up with something. He’d fight tooth and nail to get this under control, it was never too late. Sam would want to believe anything but the truth.

“It’s not what you think,” Dean said.

Sam was still biting his nail. “Okay. Then what is it?”

“He… told me what he did. I…”

Dean rubbed his face and breathed out hard. He couldn’t say it. He turned around and scrubbed both hands over his face hard, dirt and sweat under his nails. He tried to keep his breathing steady, get it back under control.

Dead leaves crackled under Sam’s boots as he came closer. “You—”

Dean had to get ahead of it, he had to talk first before Sam started dissecting him piece by piece. He spun back around.

“It wasn’t anything,” he said quickly, falling all over it. He made himself look at Sam like he believed what he was saying. “It wasn’t— I don’t even remember, man, it wasn’t a big thing. You’ve gotta believe me.”

Sam just stared at him, dubious. “It wasn’t.”

“No. It was nothing, it didn’t even register, I totally forgot ‘til— Back then, for him, now, I just broke up with that chick, Heather. You remember her? I was fucked up about it for a while, and it made everything… bad.”

There might have been a Heather, but more importantly, Sam wouldn’t know if there wasn’t.

Sam stopped biting his nail. It was harder to have to see his whole face when he took his hand down, the uncomfortable-skeptical downward twist of his mouth.

“Do you wanna say what ‘it’ is anytime soon, or are we just gonna…”

He trailed off, proving the point. He still had his arm folded across his chest and Dean knew the posture well, every awkward conversation with a vic, every bar he didn’t want to be at.

“Don’t. We both know what he did.”

“You,” Sam corrected. “You made a pass at me.”

“That little fucker isn’t me, that’s not fair.”

“He was you, though. He becomes you. You—” It was Sam’s turn to rub his eyes, awkward and stalling; they were both so bad at this. “Are we even talking about the same thing? He knew it was me. He said—‘you’re older.’ Do you—”

“Sam.”

“—have, like… feelings? For me?”

Dean’s face was burning. Suddenly it was him who was seventeen, awkward and humiliated, and it was just as bad as he remembered. He wanted to throw up.

“No! No no no, not—not like that, not—”

“He kissed me.”

“I mean, not now. Not anymore.”

That shut Sam up. His eyebrows were way up, with a hand hooked around his nape. Dean forced himself to go on.

“I was just… fucked up for a while. It wasn’t for long. I don’t even remember it, not after everything, it was a—a stupid, gross little-kid thing. I was having a rough time, and now we’re right in the middle of it, and I guess he’s not handling it well or whatever.” He opened his mouth, shut it, then made himself go for it. “It wasn’t about you. It was just, you know. Guys. You were just… around.”

It was the best he could do, a half secret given up to protect the whole. He rubbed a hand across his brow again, thumb digging hard into his sweat-slick temple for some momentary relief from the headache that pounded behind his eyes.

Sam said, “Seriously?”

He sounded hopeful. Dean didn’t want to think about what that meant.

“I swear. To him, the sky’s falling. To me, it was just a bad couple of weeks.”

Sam just stared at him. Dean looked away, like Sam would see right through him if he looked too long.

Finally, Sam said, “How’s that even possible?”

“I dunno. I’m not proud of it, Sam.” Dean rubbed a hand over his eyes again. “Fuck, I’m sorry, okay? Is that what you wanna hear? Now can we never talk about this again?”

Sam didn’t answer right away. The leaves crackled again as he shuffled his feet.

“So I’m just supposed to not think about it?”

“Pretty much, yeah! I don’t!”

“This is huge, Dean.”

“Are you even listening to me? It’s not! I can promise you, it’s not. It was— whatever, and I just didn’t deal with it right. Things were always screwed up back when we were kids, you know that, it was just a—a temporary thing. It’s not—”

“This is so far past ‘screwed up’ I don’t even know where to—”

Dean had to shut him up. He was barely holding it together as it was, and if he heard Sam say it, if he actually said it, he didn’t know what he’d do.

He crowded in close, grabbed him (bad idea; sweat, breath, skin-heat and Sam’s sweaty shirt in his fist, violence thrumming in his veins) and bared his teeth, speaking slow.

“It had nothing to do with how I feel—felt—about that kid. With what we are. Brothers.”

“Are you talking about him or me?”

“Both of you! You’re both you! Jesus, I told you, it’s not— if you’re trying to make this into some kind of…”

He couldn’t say it. Sam was tense and visibly holding back, but he didn’t put his hand over Dean’s where he pulled at the front of his shirt, and Dean tried not to think about how Sam didn’t want to touch him, how Sam would rather get pushed around than put one hand on his skin, now, after this.

Sam opened his mouth, then shut it with a click. “Let go.”

Anger was easy and familiar and Dean tumbled into it. He pulled harder on Sam’s shirt.

“No, come on, you got something to say to me?”

“I—”

“Say it, if you’re so fucking—”

“I was thirteen, man.”

Dean didn’t decide to punch him in the face so much as he realized he was already doing it when he felt Sam’s nose cartilage under his knuckles.

He wasn’t thinking about anything other than the way Sam said it, incredulous disdain and disgust so thick he could taste it. Sam’s head snapped back, he stumbled and Dean shoved him down so he fell heavy into the dirt. Sam swore and clutched his face.

Dean stood heaving over him, heart pounding. “Oh, shit.”

He hadn’t meant to. He panicked, and the heat made everything worse. He’d spent his whole life choking down this horrible, rotten thing, and he couldn’t start hearing it from Sam, too.

Blackish red blood sludged from Sam’s nose, and he was pissed but he wasn’t getting up, he just stared up at Dean like he was waiting for his next move. Sweat dripped into Dean’s eye.

‘Sorry’ would have gone miles. ‘Sorry’ opened up a whole can of worms Dean didn’t know how to handle, because sorry for which part? ‘Sorry’ meant standing with Sam in the burning sun while they fumbled their way through more excruciating admissions while blame got so heavy on Dean’s shoulders that he couldn’t stand, and he couldn’t do it. He’d get too close to the truth.

Dean swore under his breath, shook out his sore hand and climbed back up to where they left their packs.

Chapter Text

Sam sat there in the dirt holding the heel of his palm against his bleeding nose while Dean disappeared up over the ridge. Once he was gone, Sam struggled to his feet and headed after him, at a distance.

He knew he wasn’t being helpful when he said it, he knew it wasn’t kind, but it was gnawing at him and it was awful and he needed to say it just to hear it out loud. Getting punched for it was a fair enough price.

He watched from a distance as Dean stormed up to their packs. The younger Dean hadn’t tried to catch up with his brother and was hovering nervously by their fallen backpacks. Dean barked something at him as he grabbed his bag, then left him in the dust.

Young Dean looked up helplessly at Sam as he approached.

“What happened?”

Sam snorted back blood. He hauled his pack onto his shoulder without looking at him.

“You wanna fuck your brother, and somehow that’s my bad.”

He could practically hear the kid flinch. That wasn’t kind of Sam either, but he wasn’t feeling particularly kind. He didn’t stop to apologize before he pushed past him.

Then, Sam was alone, with Dean and the other Sam somewhere ahead of him, and the younger Dean somewhere behind, following, but not closely. No footsteps, just his own rushing breath and the whine of bugs and a weak breeze in the trees.

Sam wiped his throbbing nose on the back of his arm and left a clotted streak of blood. He felt wired and insane. He kept walking faster without thinking and had to slow down, because walking fast meant catching up with Dean, and he couldn’t look at Dean yet.

Dean, at some point in time, had wanted to put his mouth on him.

He’d all but admitted that. Dean liked guys, and somehow, at some point, however briefly, Dean liked him. Sam couldn’t think about anything else, not last night when he suspected it, or now, when he knew for sure.

He’d never seen Dean so cracked open and panicked, unless he counted his seventeen-year-old self stuttering through ‘sorry for kissing you,’ and he did count that, because they both had the same raw edge to their voices, the same desperate determination to be believed.

That kiss. Sam had spent all night thinking about it. He thought about the Dean he knew back when he was seventeen, so cocky and loud and weird, and tried to imagine him kissing some older guy so tenderly. Kissing him, period. It was humiliating and confusing, like there was some grift he wasn’t in on. And it was personal. Sam worried he’d led the kid on with his teasing. He should have stopped to talk to him, Sam wasn’t mad at him, it was fine, but he still couldn’t talk just then. The literal and metaphorical heat was making everything feel blistering and raw.

Dean didn’t need to tell him it wasn’t an ongoing thing. Sam thought about it all night and all morning and looked at it from every angle he could think of. He already decided that if, miraculously, this thing followed Dean out of adolescence—and it wasn’t just about the faceless concept of men, it was about him—it couldn’t have survived for long after that. Sam had made mistakes so bad that he wasn’t sure how the obligation of family survived them, let alone anything ad hoc on top of that.

Everything was running together. Horrified that Dean could keep anything this huge from him, because if Sam didn’t know this, what else might he not know? Pissed off that Dean had found yet another way to dig into his life and tangle the two of them up into something fucked-up and unrecognizable. And guilt. He couldn’t even begin to unpack how fucked up it was that not kissing Dean back felt like another way he was letting him down. Guilt, again: Sam learned this sick, vulnerable secret, and he instantly turned it on Dean.

He tried to cool down. Hiking alone helped. He tried to ignore the ache in his nose. The heat burned in his lungs like the thick air of a sauna. He should have broken down and bought shorts, but Dean made fun of him when he’d brought it up at the store.

It was frustrating that he couldn’t get away from Dean for even a second. It was this jagged, horrible thing that his brain kept skipping towards like an intrusive thought. Old, faded memories floated to the forefront: Dean, ropey and young, bandaging a gash in Sam’s calf with a nearly religious gravity while he sat on a closed toilet lid in some motel bathroom. Dean, manhandling him to sit with his back against his chest while they watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Dean, shoving him back onto his side of the car when he tried to sleep with his head in his lap on long drives. There was no pattern to it that Sam could tell.

Maybe he already knew Dean had a thing for him, somewhere subconscious. Maybe he just didn’t think to call it what it was because he was too close to it, he couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Less faded memories: Dean’s hand at the small of his back as he went through doorways, warm through the cheap jacket of a fed suit. Turning around all the time and finding Dean already looking back. It couldn’t be that.

The bugs were so loud he almost didn’t notice them, but he became aware of a new, indistinct noise around him, steady and low like a distant stream.

He slowed his pace and straightened up. There was no Dean behind him and no Dean in front, just this new, quiet rushing sound. They had strayed from the creek in the late morning, and even before, there wasn’t enough water to make much noise. Too far from the highway for cars.

He turned around again and the sound swiveled behind him. It was coming from his pack.

He heaved it off onto the ground, unclipped the straps and rooted around in it. He tried to rummage without taking anything out, moving by feel, but he couldn’t think of what could make a noise like that. It was just their tent and med kit, his second shirt, kerosene and some rations.

His hand closed around something cool and smooth: one of the walkie talkies. He forgot.

He dug it out with effort and it hissed static in his hand. He checked the plastic orange button on the side and it wasn’t pressed. He toggled it on and off, but the steady rush of static didn’t change.

He pressed the button and brought it up to his face.

“Dean?”

The static continued unbroken. Sam waited, crouched back on his haunches next to his pack. He turned up the volume and the static got louder, but even when he brought it to his ear, there was nothing under the rush of sound. No Sixth Sense whispers.

“Hello?” he tried again.

Someone screamed—in the forest, not through the walkie talkie.

Sam was on his feet instantly, whipping around, running towards the sound before he registered who it was or where it was coming from. Trees and shrubs snapped loudly some ways off, and he heard the hard, wet thump of a body hitting the ground. Sam’s boots pounded the ground, sprinting— sprinting back the way he came, he realized, late, towards a scream that sounded a little high to be the Dean he knew, but a Dean nonetheless.

Sam could finally see something through the trees, black and beige, movement, and then there was the deafening, echoing blast of two gunshots and some inhuman snarl.

He got there. Dean, the young one, was laying on his back in the dirt with blood all over him, heaving something huge and sleek and furry off him. It was— a cougar. Just a cougar. Not just.

As Sam ran up, Dean turned over to shove the cougar’s dead body off him and revealed bloody, deep gouges in his side, black and jagged, and bite marks in his forearm.

Sam had his gun in his hand but he didn’t remember getting it out. He threw it down and helped roll the thing off Dean. Dean dropped his pistol and it fell against Sam’s knee as he crouched next to him; it was still hot, there were two holes in the cougar’s chest.

“Shit,” Dean coughed, his face contorted with pain and shining with sweat. “The fuck—”

Sam put his hands to the wounds, unthinking, and Dean’s mouth twisted up worse.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know, it—it jumped on me—fuck, where’s Sam?”

Sam grabbed Dean’s hands and placed them over the wound he could reach, the biggest one going down his side.

“Put pressure on it. Stay here, I’ll get him, I’ll be right back, okay?”

Dean swore and let his head fall back to the ground, his whole body tense with pain.

Sam sprinted back to his bag, skidded to a stop, and snatched up the walkie talkie from where he’d left it. It had gone quiet. He pressed the button.

“If you can hear me, get back here now. Dean’s hurt.”

He dropped the walkie talkie, grabbed the med kit and ran back as fast as his legs would carry him. Dean was right where he left him, bleeding into the dirt. Sam slid down next to him.

“You okay? You good?”

The kid spoke through his teeth. “Do I look good?”

Sam snapped the kit open and tried to keep his hands steady as he got out rags and alcohol. He forgot water, he hoped Dean heard him over the walkie talkie and thought to bring his.

“Tell me what happened.”

“Where’s Sam?” Dean asked again.

“He’s coming, I think, they—they’re up ahead, I don’t—”

Dean groaned and thunked his head against the ground. His eyes were screwed shut, chin tipped up in agony.

“Shut up. Whatever. Fuck, this hurts.”

“You’ll be okay. It’s just a few cuts, we’ll clean them, it’s fine.”

Sam didn’t think he was lying. It was just an animal, no poison or magic or anything.

He helped Dean sit up and peeled off his shirt. Red, broken claw marks dragged down his right side, deep and oozing blood. Sam hissed.

“Shit. Okay. You’re okay.”

He had the rag pressed to his side when he heard the frantic pounding of feet from up ahead, unrelenting and fast. It was the younger Sam, running full tilt. He was sweaty and blotchy and Sam wondered how far ahead they were when he got the call.

He skidded to a stop when he saw the dead cougar and the blood everywhere, his face pale and drawn.

“Oh, God.”

He ran up and shoved the older Sam out of the way. Sam let him have the rags and sat back.

Dean said, “I’m okay, Sammy.”

“Holy fuck, shut up, you got mauled by a cougar?”

Little Sam started cleaning the wounds with an efficiency and level-headedness that was frightening to see in a thirteen-year-old, even to Sam, who had been that exact thirteen-year-old. He was glad they’d sprung for a fully stocked kit; he’d need a few stitches. Sammy would probably do that, too.

Dean seemed more relaxed with the other Sam’s hands on him. The thing came back to the front of Sam’s mind, watching them: that wasn’t just two brothers, it was something else. Dean, sitting right there, had to be thinking about the way his brother’s hands felt on him, even as blood gushed out of his side. Especially seeing them together, Sam couldn’t get his head around it. They were kids.

Sam thought of all the times he stitched Dean up, both pre-and-post age thirteen, and how the same must have been true then, too. He couldn’t tell if the way his stomach flipped meant he felt violated or just confused, the spark of energy up his spine like he was looking at some infuriating, unsolvable thing. How could Dean ever have wanted that from him? How the hell did he put it behind him when Sam couldn’t stop thinking about it long enough to accurately panic over blood loss?

Dean, adult Dean, crashed through the trees and ran up to their carnage with his gun in hand, dripping sweat. His face went slack with shock when he took it all in.

“A fucking cougar?”

Sam said, “I know.”

He scooted back from the two kids and got to his feet, brushing off his jeans and leaving a streak of Dean’s blood.

He managed to look at Dean, the older one. Sam’s sore nose throbbed angrily, as if remembering his punch, and he was grateful that they’d been given something else to focus on; not a good thing, but still. Dean stared down at the boys and not at Sam, as the younger Dean grunted quietly in pain, one hand fisted in the leg of his brother’s shorts.

Again, Sam asked the younger Dean, “What happened?”

Sammy shifted the rag he had pressed to Dean’s side to stop the bleeding and Dean made another wounded sound.

“It came right at me,” he said tightly. “I didn’t come up on it, it came up on me. Like it was tracking me.”

“What did you do?”

“Backed away, like you’re supposed to. Made myself big. It just jumped, it didn’t care. Went for my neck, but I—got in the way.”

The older Dean tucked his gun into his waistband and went slowly around to where the cougar’s giant body lay crumpled. It stunk of burnt flesh and hair and hot metallic blood. He crouched down by its face and reached out, did some things Sam couldn’t see from where he was standing.

“It seem normal otherwise?” Dean asked his younger self. It took him a second to answer.

“I guess. No—” A wince, grit teeth. “No weird shit. No glowing eyes or gunk or whatever.”

“Hm.”

Sammy said, “Hold this,” and Dean cocked his arm back to hold the rag to his side. Sammy took Dean’s wounded arm in his hand and pressed a rag to the puncture wounds from the cougar’s teeth. “You put your arm in its mouth?”

“Yeah. It was on top of me. Claws went down the side.”

“God, D.” Sammy paused and craned his neck up to look at Sam standing behind him. “Cougars don’t do this. Is it a demigod thing? Heat, or whatever?”

Sam had been wondering that. He frowned.

“It’s possible. More likely than anything else. Makes animals go nuts, frenzied…”

He trailed off. With all the worse effects a demigod could have, it seemed pathetic that their first real injury was caused by the fact that animals didn’t react to magic well. He tried to dig up what he learned from his demigod research, but it was so long ago. Animals reacted, that was all he remembered. Just bad luck.

Dean prodded at the dead cougar some more, feeling around its stomach and chest for abnormalities or clues.

“Hey,” Sam said. Dean looked up. “Were you messing with the walkie talkie earlier?”

Dean sat back on his heels and scrubbed sweat from his brow. It was the first time they’d really looked each other in the eyes, since.

“No. When?”

Sam said, “Just before this. I was up ahead, and it started making this static noise, like you had it pressed. Did you hear me calling?”

“Yeah, you said, ‘Get back here.’“

“No, before that. I pushed the button on and off and said some stuff.”

Dean frowned. “That didn’t go through.”

“Hm.”

They looked at each other, silent. Sam almost wasn’t thinking about the thing for two seconds, but then Dean’s eyes flicked off his and wandered over his face. It was quick and practiced, but Sam thought they lingered on his mouth a little too long.

They moved to a flatter, more shaded area for Dean to get his wounds stitched; it was the hottest part of the day and they were all grateful for the break. They drank water, any that wasn’t needed for cleaning the wounds, and ate sparingly. The trees were so desiccated this far up the mountain that they didn’t provide much shade except for right underneath. The younger Sam and Dean were under one tree, the others another a few yards away.

Sam watched his younger self sterilizing the suture needle with a detached kind of awe. He still had his shirt off and his ribcage showed through his back when he leaned over his brother, who lay turned on his side in front of him. He had one hand on Dean’s ribs, above the wound, his fingers spread wide against his bare skin; it reminded Sam of the way you touched a horse, firm and steadying so you didn’t spook it. He thought about seeing them napping together the other day, the way he buried his face in Dean’s chest. Sam didn’t realize how touchy they had been, but it stood out, looking from the outside. They’d always been like that. He didn’t remember what he thought of it back then, or if he thought about it at all. Forest, trees, etcetera.

He hadn’t spoken to the Dean next to him in twenty minutes. He was on the far side of the tree, so if Sam looked over he could just see the back of his sunburnt-pink arm and one jean-clad knee. He was whittling again. Shk shk.

Teen Dean yelped. “Ow, fuck! You did that on purpose!”

Teen Sam, quiet and full of mirth: “Don’t be a baby.”

Sam closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the tree. Every so often he’d hear a grunt of pain, a soft shh and the snap of medical scissors, and the glide of the Dean’s whittling knife. He drifted. He didn’t remember when Dean had learned to whittle, only that it showed up in his life at some point. He thought about the word ‘grooming.’ He wondered if you were supposed to be able to see that kind of thing, looking back. It didn’t feel like that’s what it was, but that was the whole point. No part of him felt like ascribing that kind of malice to Dean, but again: if it wasn’t Dean’s fault, whose fault was it? Sam’s? For all he knew, he’d been some weird, coquettish kid that led Dean on without knowing it, another facet of the rotten thing inside him that he’d been half aware of since he learned to talk.

“Could have been worse,” Dean said, from next to him. “With the cougar.”

Sam opened his eyes, gazing up into the trees. “Way worse.”

Shk shk. “You think it’s just the heat thing? Nothing fancy going on?”

“Yeah. Animals hate this level of magic. We haven’t seen any birds this whole time.”

“Huh.” Shhhhhk. “Kid caught a rabbit, though.”

“Yeah, and what are the odds of that, normally?”

“Huh,” Dean said again.

Sam was pretty sure the cougar was nothing to worry about beyond the wounds, but it was so hot and he was so tired and everything had gotten so fucked up. He couldn’t remember what he knew or didn’t know about cougars or demigods. He wanted a shower and a beer and a salad full of fruit and nuts and cheese served in a bowl as big as his head. He wanted 2009 and rain on the roof of the Impala and a motel with an ice machine.

Dean asked, “Your nose okay?”

Sam hadn’t thought about it in a while, overshadowed as it was by the cougar attack and the hypothetical incest. He prodded it and it was only mildly tender.

“Fine.”

Dean pushed back against the tree and got to his feet. The smell of his sweat moved with him, warm and dirty and human.

“Sorry,” he said. “For…”

Standing had put his hand near Sam’s face, holding his chunk of whittling wood that had started to look like a horse or something else four legged. Dean had thick fingers, nails full of dirt, calluses and wrinkled knuckles. Sam knew those hands as well as his own. His eyes drifted to the kid on the ground under the tree with his fine bones and smooth skin and freckled face, and he couldn’t put them together. All things considered, it was probably better that he couldn’t.

Sam didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure that Dean was looking for a response, anyway.

Young Dean got stitched up and bandaged, but it was slow going on the hike afterwards; he was dopey on pain meds and didn’t move very fast, and Dean was weighed down by carrying his pack for him. They hit a rock formation that stretched for miles in either direction and their only good option was to climb it, so they called it quits for the day and Sam left to scout the creek for more water.

He had his shirt off again, it was too hot for modesty or awkwardness or whatever the hell was going on between him and Dean. Both Deans. He was as tanned as he was going to get and had already started to peel across his shoulders. The air was eerily still even so high up, no breeze, just cracked dirt and scrubby bushes and nearly dead trees. It had started to feel more desert-like than forested.

He kept the walkie talkie hooked to his belt, just in case. It hadn’t made any noise since the static earlier.

He had all their water bottles with him, two in each hand. It was the strangest sensation to not be thirsty despite the heat, in the demigod’s other-worldly drought. He knew he should be, and he knew his mouth was dry, but it was like he didn’t care. It was the same thing with food—no growling stomach, no emptiness, although they hadn’t had a full meal in two days or maybe longer. Time was blurring already.

He found the creek after ten minutes of knee-aching downclimbing. It was a little healthier than when they’d last seen it, a thin but steady flow that actually resembled a creek and would be worth washing in once the sun went down, and good for Dean’s stitches. He filled their bottles and dropped in some much-needed electrolyte tablets, soaked the two rags the younger Sam sent with him, and headed back to where they were setting up camp.

The younger Dean was propped against a tree. He was shirtless and languid with the heat and painkillers, ropey arms folded loosely across his middle, which was wound with gauze. The bite marks in his right forearm had been bandaged with military precision. Sam set the wet rags down on the blanket next to him.

“Here.” Sam held his water bottle out to him. “Drink.”

It took Dean a second to look up, register the bottle and take it. Several yards away, out of earshot, the other two put up their respective tents. Sam watched them, distracted; Dean fumbled the snapping tent poles and they clattered loudly to the ground.

The younger Dean took a laboured breath and said, with a quiet, simmering anger, “I don’t wanna fuck him.”

It took Sam a second to remember what he’d said in the wake of Dean’s suckerpunch.

Semantics, he thought, then instantly felt bad about it. It was probably an important distinction to Dean.

“Okay,” he said, because that was safe. It was maybe the only safe thing to say.

Dean sighed noisily, frustrated. Sam didn’t remember what kind of pharmacy they’d stocked the med kit with but it was enough to make the kid sloppy, and okay with being outwardly annoyed. Dean twisted off the cap of his water bottle with a pissy flourish.

“Whatever. Whatever. I don’t have to—to justify myself to you. It’s not— I’m a freak, but I’m not a monster. It’s not like that.”

He wasn’t looking at Sam, thank God. He also wasn’t looking at his brother. Sam followed his gaze and he was staring at his older self, who was still struggling with the tent poles. Big and weathered, sunburnt, wearing each one of his thirty years and then some.

Sam knew he should leave it alone. He had nothing to say to this kid that was even a halfway good idea, and no answers he’d get by prying that he actually wanted to hear. He had water to hand out. But he looked down at him and the ragged rise and fall of his chest, and his voice had that same raw, broken sound it had before, and it was hard to swallow without a chaser.

“I shouldn’t have said it.” It was as olive a branch as Sam knew how to give just then. “It’s… whatever.”

“Okay.” Dean drank some water. “I’m sorry for, uh… yeah.”

Kissing you, twice, Sam figured. He hadn’t expected an apology. The kid must have really been fucked up over it.

Sam sighed. “It’s okay. I know you’re having a hard time. You just broke up with, what’s-her-name, right? Heather.”

Dean twisted his head to look up at him. “Who?”

Sam got a juddering sinking feeling, like the ground dipped under him. He looked away fast, his stomach swooping low.

“Never mind.”

He still wasn’t thirsty, but his dry throat was sticking. He walked to where the other Sam was putting together his tent with a teenager’s bored reluctance and set his water bottle by his pack, got a brief thanks in return, then went to the older Dean.

Dean won his battle with the tent poles and was slipping the tent on through its loops. Sam hadn’t seen him with his arms bare for longer than the occasional sweltering afternoon in years, and it made him look young. He looked up when he saw Sam and rolled his eyes.

“Nah, don’t worry, Sammy, I got this. Thanks for the offer.”

Sarcasm, as he continued the thankless work of erecting the tent. Sam nodded, dazed, and put his water bottle on the ground.

Ruby called him Sammy sometimes. More importantly, he let her. She teased him with it at least once, pressed up against him from behind, reached around and grabbed him and pitched her voice down all gravelly, Sammy, and it—

Sam sat down by their bags meaning to unpack the things they’d need for the night, but then he just sat. Sweat rolled down his spine. Dean got one of the tent poles through, then set to work on the other, and Sam watched, lightheaded. Dean’s big shoulders and narrow waist, black shirt tight around his arms. He was objectively beautiful. Sam stopped pretending he didn’t notice a long time ago.

On appearances alone, Dean could get anyone he wanted. It was his personality that narrowed the candidate pool, but it didn’t narrow it that much. The way you heard about this kind of thing, it was two maladjusted kids taking it out on each other, or finding some slice of solace in a messed up world. Maybe they fit that bill at some point in their lives, but not anymore. Sam went to Stanford. Dean got more pussy than he knew what to do with. They were fucked up, sure, but not like that.

Dean said it was in the past. He hardly remembered it, he said. It was two weeks, thirteen years ago. Sam had to believe him.

Without his clippers, Dean’s hair was getting long at the back, or longer than the near-to-skin buzz he normally kept it at. Sam brought his hand to his mouth and chewed the nail of his index finger, starting on one side. It was filthy underneath and dirt came up behind his teeth, salty with sweat. His heart was doing a lopsided thing that felt like heart palpitations. It was too fucking hot.

Sam walked. It was early evening, the heat was just starting to break, and he went back to the rocky ridge they turned around at earlier. It was about ten feet tall, easy to scale if they were all in working condition, and it would be easy enough to boost the injured Dean up tomorrow once he’d had a chance to rest.

He dug the toe of his boot in and pulled himself up, found a hand hold and pulled up again. The rock wasn’t good and a few of the holds flaked away under his fingers, but he got up easy enough. He pulled himself up to the top ledge, swung around and sat.

The view was better over the trees, the valley stretching endlessly below. He ran his hands through his hair and it was gritty with sandy dirt. It felt like they’d been there a lifetime, but how long had it been—two days? Three? He felt like he should have been more sure. He wondered how the same view would look in 2009, how the sprawl of the cities might have crept, the reduction in view from the worsening seasonal fires and air quality. Nothing could make him do this hike again when they got back, but he wondered. If they got back.

“Hey.”

He hadn’t heard anyone approach. He looked down between his swinging boots and saw his younger self. His floppy hair was greasy enough to stay pushed back and his ears were sunburnt. He looked pensive and drawn in a way that was incongruous on such a young face.

“Hey,” Sam said back.

“Can I come up?”

“It’s a free rock.”

Sammy took it for the invitation it was and started scaling the short rock face. Light and in possession of a child’s boundless energy, he was up in nothing flat. He sat heavily next to Sam and kicked his feet over the edge, swinging. He stunk the way they all did, sweat and skin and, faintly, the metallic smell of Dean’s blood stuck under his nails and in the cracks of his hands.

“How’s the patient?” Sam asked.

The kid huffed. “Cranky and stoned.”

“Sounds about right.”

He kicked his sneakers against the stone. Sam remembered those shoes, chunky New Balance runners that were white once; they were hand-me-downs from Dean, worn nearly through by the time they were ‘new’ to him, and still half a size too big. He had very little at that time that hadn’t been Dean’s first.

Just as Sam realized they’d been quiet for too long, the younger Sam sighed.

“Sorry we haven’t, like… talked much.”

Sam shrugged. “All good. I haven’t talked to you either.”

“It’s just— you’re me, what do I say? It’s weirdly awkward.”

“It’s cool.”

By definition, he could relate. It was hard to think of the kid as a real person, he was just this little creature that fell out of Sam’s head and was now alive and breathing next to him, like something out of a sci-fi novel. He didn’t like or dislike him any more than he did himself, and the jury was still out on that one.

The younger Sam asked, “Can I ask you a future-question?”

“If it’s about the internet, I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

“No, about you.”

Sam hesitated and scratched his fingers against the warm rock under them. The kid hadn’t asked much so far and it wasn’t a good idea to go there, but Sam knew him, and he couldn’t imagine saying no.

He said, “Give it a shot, but if it’s too much, I won’t say.”

“That’s fair. Uh.” Sammy took a moment to steel himself. “Do you… go to college? You’re a hunter, I guess, but… part time? Some kind of internet school?”

Sam tried not to let anything show on his face. It would have meant the world to him at thirteen to hear that he went to Stanford, and that he came close to not sleeping with a loaded gun in his bedroom. That he had a bedroom.

“Something like that,” he said instead. It was already too much.

Sammy breathed in sharp, encouraged. “Does Dean come?”

“What?”

He ducked his head. “I dunno. To school, or not-school. It wouldn’t be hard for him to get an apartment or something. Or stay with you, if you went to school, where your school is. If he wanted to hunt or get a job.” He looked towards Sam. “Does he get a job?”

Jesus, he forgot. He really used to think that Dean would give up the life for him. It was embarrassing to hear the naivety in retrospect, and kind of sweet. Sweet in a stupid way, like a dog chasing its own tail. He’d never been a stupid kid, but he could be idealistic to a fault, especially about Dean.

“I can’t say.”

It was unconvincing. Little Sam rolled his eyes. “Right.”

He doesn’t come with you, Sam wanted to say. He doesn’t stick up for you to Dad and he doesn’t visit or even call, and he makes it up to you later by trying to kiss you on the fucking mouth.

It wasn’t really fair to fault Dean for that kiss, he was just a messed up kid, but Sam still wanted to fault him. He had to blame someone, because if it was nobody’s fault, then his brother just wanted to kiss him and he had to accept that as a neutral fact, and he— he was going in circles with that. He touched his mouth, absent.

“What do you think of him?” he asked.

“Who, Dean?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean? You know. You’re me.”

“It’s different. I was you a long time ago, it’s not… It’s different now. With him.” Sam shook his head. “Do you even like him?”

“He’s my best friend.”

“You don’t really have much of a choice.”

Little Sam sighed. It was an old man sigh that sounded tired beyond his years.

“Well. I don’t know. He’s just… Dean.” He rubbed his mouth in a very Dean-like gesture. Sam never noticed it before. “It’s like, whenever he’s pissed off or mean to me, I think about… Okay, I dunno if you remember this, but last year in Fort Worth, there was this Brent kid who bullied the shit out of me. Like, really bullied me. Bad stuff.”

Sam remembered. He knew where the story was going, but he let him go on.

“So I came home all messed up, and Dean made me tell him who Brent was, and he found out who his parents were, and he, uh… went through this whole thing to make his mom think his dad cheated on her. So his parents split up, and Brent moved away. Do you remember that?”

It was horrific, obviously, but— Sam smiled, slowly. He sighed.

“Yeah, I remember.”

Sammy laughed, but not like it was funny.

“So, he’s so stupid, and he’s a freak sometimes, but… I think about the thing with Brent when he’s being a jerk, ‘cause he loves me, you know? In a Dean way.”

Sam rarely thought of whatever him and Dean had for each other as love. It was like calling the Titanic a boat: not wrong, but unspecific. Narrow.

“It scares you, too, though,” he said gently. “How much he loves you. It’s kind of fucking you up.”

He used to—and still did, to an extent—worry that he’d get someone killed by Dean, say something wrong or elaborate too much, and Dean would go too far in his mindless revenge. Dean’s love was heavy, and Sam had been holding it for a long time. This thing happening with him now was just a new weight.

Sammy didn’t confirm or deny that it was fucking him up, because he didn’t have to. He asked, “Does he still do stuff like that?”

Sam thought about threats spilling so easily from Dean’s mouth anytime someone so much as mildly inconvenienced Sam, a protective hand around his upper arm like a vice, not unlike the way a parent reached reflexively for their kid’s hand before crossing the street. Which Dean had also done when they were younger, and then still when they were way too old for it.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

Even after everything Sam had done—Stanford, Ruby—Dean was still around. Things were rarely perfect, not back home and not here either, but they were trying. That had to count for something. Dean’s love was fanatical and snarling and it never let up.

Sammy asked, “What are you mad at him for?”

Unexpected. “What?”

“You’re mad at him, right? I dunno if it’s yours or mine, but you’re mad at a Dean. One of them hit you, your nose was all fucked earlier.”

Sam didn’t know if he was mad. He wasn’t not mad, but it was something else. Something worse.

“Mine,” he admitted.

“Why?”

“Just stupid stuff. Maybe I deserve it.”

He looked down at the kid’s bony little knees and his small hands, and he didn’t feel like he deserved it. His stomach clenched, nervous. Thirteen was— he couldn’t imagine. He could have been more tactful, but it was hard to swallow. The brother part of the whole thing was bad enough on its own.

“What about my Dean?” Sammy asked, faux-casual again. “Is he mad at us?”

“Us?”

“Yeah. Or me, I dunno. He’s.” He picked at his nails, fidgeting. “He’s not— ugh. I was gonna say ‘don’t make fun of me,’ but you’re me, so— He’s not pushing me around, the way he does. I mean, like… before he got hurt.”

He’s not touching me, Sam heard. He remembered that much about Dean’s teenage mood swings, the way he’d flip between touchy-feely-shovey wrestling and get-off-me-grow-up. The new context for the shifts made Sam’s heart squeeze up, imagining Dean’s guilt and conscience kicking in in turns.

Sam came close to saying, it’s kind of nice, huh? The way he touches you? Just to say it to the one person he could be guaranteed would agree. He already knew how he felt about it at thirteen, anyway, not that he’d ever admit it: it was physicality and warmth with the only person in his life, with John being, in a huge way, less intimate with him than Dean was. It was more than nice. It made him feel human.

“He’s just in one of his moods,” Sam said instead. It wasn’t a total lie. “He’s not really handling this whole thing well. You know he’s sensitive.”

Sammy snorted a laugh and tucked his hair behind his ear. “Yeah, I know.”

They headed back to camp in the purplish twilight. It wasn’t cool, but it was less hot. Dean had gotten a small fire going and sat on the ground in front of it, leaned back on one hand. The younger Dean was absent, likely sleeping off his painkillers in his tent.

Sammy went into their tent to check on him. Sam went to the fire and sat across from Dean. Dean’s eyes flicked to his when he sat down, but he didn’t say anything. He was chewing on one of the shitty ration bars they brought, the only kind of food they had left. They were dry and tasteless, but it didn’t matter much when none of them had been hungry for a day and a half.

It was two weeks, thirteen years ago. That’s what Dean told him.

The more Sam thought about it—and he couldn’t stop thinking about it, hadn’t all day—he wasn’t sure if he believed him. There was no sure thing he could point at directly, just the feeling in his chest like someone was squeezing his heart in their fist. He knew Dean, or thought he did. It wasn’t impossible.

He watched Dean from across the fire without trying to hide it. He tried to understand what could possibly make someone want something like what Dean wanted, how many steps had to be misstepped between age four and thirty to end up where they currently were. He couldn’t get his head around it, so he stared: the shape of Dean’s broken-reset nose, the bow of his lips that always made Sam wonder which estranged ancestor gave them to him, his crow’s feet, his scruffy jaw. The shapes and shadows in the fire leapt over his face, dancing.

Dean’s love was heavy the way something solid and well-made had weight to it. Sam never really felt like he deserved it. He didn’t know what to do with it. Learning that it went even deeper than he ever could have thought—and that what he thought was already pretty bad—made him feel all hot and weird, like his skin was too small. He couldn’t imagine something as deeply held as that ever going away. When he really looked at it and turned it over, he didn’t hate it. He had the sinking, dangerous feeling that he should have hated it more. Dean’s love was fanatical and snarling. It never let up.

Sam took hours to fall asleep and had long, stressful dreams. He woke the next morning like surfacing from the bottom of a lake, pressure easing, breath coming into his lungs. The oppressive heat never got any easier and it was deadly then, the wet condensation from their breath on the inside of the tent, the orange glow from the canvas hot behind his closed eyelids.

Dean’s heat was all up his front. Dean’s side, the soft part between his ribs and hip, was hot under Sam’s fingers. Sam rolled his forehead against his sticky nape. The collar of his T-shirt was wet at the back with either sleep-sweat or Sam’s drool.

Sam tucked his knees behind Dean’s. His mind was empty, half asleep, and the tent was a cocoon, sweat and sleep breath and morning light. He could almost pretend it was a motel room if he only focused on Dean, a morning like any other. He moved his face against the back of Dean’s neck again. It felt like the thing to do.

He slid the hand on Dean’s side over his stomach. Up his chest, hard yet soft under his palm, damp shirt dragging with the motion. He didn’t know if Dean was asleep, or how long he’d stay asleep if he was. It didn’t seem important. Dean wasn’t moving.

Sam petted his hand down over Dean’s stomach again, slowly, flat and warm and rising gently with his breath. Over his abdomen and then back up. It was comforting, Sam didn’t know why. He liked feeling Dean breathe under his palm, feeling his heart beat through his back, the sound of his breathing, his life. Sweat prickled where their bare calves were slotted together under the thin sheet.

Sam felt like he was asleep. He let his mind go perfectly softly white, empty and smooth. Nothing existed outside the tent.

His hand brushed lower, over the front of Dean’s boxers. He was hard, and the first indication he gave that he was awake was the way his dick jumped against Sam’s fingers.

Sam cupped it just to feel it in his hand, hot through the cotton. It felt about as big as his; Sam knew everything else about Dean, so somehow, this didn’t seem like a stretch. If Dean wanted to push him off, he could. They’d bounced back from worse things than a little half-asleep dick-touching.

He just held him for a while, feeling him get thicker and harder in his hand. Sam took a snuffling breath against the back of Dean’s neck and moved his mouth, not a kiss, just feeling the sensation of skin on skin, the way his stubble caught. Dean was perfectly still and obviously awake now. Pouring sweat.

Sam tipped his head forward so his face was tucked into the hot dark between Dean’s nape and his pillow, away from the light. It felt like hiding. Safe. A blanket fort with motel sheets.

He started stroking him through his boxers. Dean’s thighs flexed against his, tension, pleasure, whatever. It felt good to feel Dean push back on him, the way his breathing picked up. Sam squeezed him tighter, his thumb skidding up over the crown, and felt him shift restlessly. Steady, slow pressure, the clasp of his fingers pulling the fabric tight, the faint sound of it and the movement of the sheet, shhf shhf shhf.

Dean’s hand closed around his wrist, tight enough to make him stop.

If Dean wanted him to stop, he would. They could still come back from this, he could roll over and go to sleep.

They spent a few moments there breathing in time. Then, slower than anything, Dean pulled Sam’s hand up, over his stomach and down again, this time into his boxers.

Sam sighed—not a groan, not moaning, just—tension—as his fingers closed around Dean’s dick, so hard now, burning hot and tacky with sweat. Not able to see, he mapped it out by feel, the plush veins, the thickness, the silky head. He curled into him from behind and started to stroke again and Dean kept holding his forearm like he might want him to stop, but otherwise he didn’t move, didn’t say a word, didn’t actually pull him away. Sam could feel every muscle in Dean’s body tense up, trying to hold still or maybe just hold it together. Sam pressed his face into the top of his back and worked his wrist, muggy in Dean’s boxers. Dean was dripping already and it slicked his grip.

Dean lifted his head—Sam thought with a world-ending spike of terror that he was trying to turn over—and grabbed Sam’s arm, the one under his pillow, and tugged it through. He took Sam’s hand and put it over his mouth.

Then Sam did make a noise, or it might have been Dean. Sam buried his face again, higher, shifting up so his mouth was against the soft bristles of Dean’s hair, so Dean was trapped between Sam’s hand over his mouth and his face behind him, so Dean could hear him breathing in his ear, so he could feel Dean breathing harsh through his nose.

Dean’s back went tight and his breathing got shallow, what breathing he could do. The hand on Sam’s arm restlessly clasped, letting go and grabbing again, and Sam kept jerking him, tight and slow and steady, unrelenting. He pulled his boxers down at the front so he could take him out. It was insane to feel Dean lose it and try not to, the way he couldn’t keep still and pushed back against him, like it felt so good he couldn’t stand it. Sam always liked giving pleasure more than he liked getting it, he never knew what to do with his hands. He knew what to do with them now, tugging with one, faster, the other pushing up to close Dean’s nose along with his mouth. That got him Dean’s first real, deep throated groan, too loud, and Dean started to shudder and pull in on himself. It had only been a minute.

Sam felt him try to breathe under his hand, stop and suck in again, desperate, another choked moan, and then he went still. His head tipped back and ground into Sam’s and he pulsed in Sam’s hand, thick spurts over his fingers into the sheets of their makeshift bed.

Dean grabbed Sam’s wrist so hard his bones ground together, straining and twisting, still spurting over his knuckles. Sam kept his hand over Dean’s mouth until he was done, to make it good for him, to feel the wet heat of his struggled breaths.

When Sam took his hand away and let it fall to the bed roll, Dean was breathing hard, loud in the enclosed tent. He hadn’t let go of Sam’s wrist, the hand that was still loosely holding his dick.

Sam was hard, he realized, fully hard and pushed up against the line of Dean’s thighs. He couldn’t even begin to think about doing anything with it. He had no idea what he’d do if Dean rolled over and tried.

Dean’s grip slowly loosened, but he let Sam keep his hand around his dick. The skin contact was soothing. A newborn against its mother’s chest. Sam fell back asleep without meaning to, his forehead pressed to the top of Dean’s spine.

Chapter Text

Dean was gone when Sam woke up a few hours later, which Sam pretty much figured would happen. He blinked down at the sheets and found the dried splatch where Dean’s come had been inexpertly wiped up using something that, Sam hoped, didn’t belong to him.

He rolled onto his back. The brightness of the tent hurt his eyes, the monochrome orange glow over everything. He fixated on it because it was easy and overwhelming. Straight forward. Not like. Well.

It had just felt like something they could do when they woke up together, horny and close. He wasn’t thinking, or he was, but. He couldn’t describe it—a latch fitting into place, a satisfying click. He hadn’t wanted to have sex in so long, and Dean let him. He wanted it. He put Sam’s hand over his mouth. Maybe Sam hadn’t thought about it before, but he didn’t realize it was an option. Now that he knew it was, he was thinking about it. Thinking and thinking and thinking.

He ran his hands up his thighs. He was hard, either again or still. He woke up hard all the time, but it was usually without the heat of intent behind it. Now, there was something. There was the fresh memory of Dean struggling to breathe under his hand. There was that closeness he wanted, just closer.

He couldn’t hear anything outside the tent. He pushed his shirt up and ran a flat hand over his stomach. His dick rose against his boxers, tenting out. He closed his eyes and inched his hand farther downward with each pass, like he’d done to Dean. He slid his hand over his dick and held it, like he’d done to Dean. His body woke up, piece by piece, remembering.

Dean’s bag was laying on its side by his head. He pulled himself up and patted the pockets, looking, wondering if he knew his brother as well as he thought he did, and bingo, in a tiny zippered side pocket he felt a shape like a tube. He pulled out a small bottle of lube.

Dean liked to jerk off with lube, one of the thousand facts Sam knew about him completely unwillingly. He spent his adolescence waking up to the quiet sounds of Dean getting himself off in the next bed, tp tp tp tp tp, only made bearable by the fact that he subjected Dean to the same thing often enough back then. He wasn’t totally surprised that Dean bought some when they stopped for toiletries. Like he said himself: whenever he had five free minutes. Sam admired his dedication to his craft.

Sam pulled down his boxers, listening for sounds outside. He took his dick in his hand, dripped lube on and stroked, teasing. It didn’t take much to get him going after so long without, and even just that made his toes curl.

The thing with Dean wasn’t about sex, or it was, but that wasn’t the end of it. Sam didn’t know why he wanted it, or what wanting even meant. Dean was Dean all the time because he didn’t know how to be anything else, not to Sam. He was familiar, he was home, Sam knew how he smelled and how he sounded and it was childish and pathetic but sometimes he wanted to bury his face in his chest like he was a little kid again. He’d also never gotten head from someone who died for him. Maybe he was curious.

Dean would do it, he was pretty sure. Dean had probably done it before, because if his teenage self’s devotional interest in Sam’s pecs was any indication, any macho denial he had around getting with dudes wouldn’t have lasted long. Sam hadn’t, but he thought about it. A little too drunk or a little too fucked up and he’d think about it, what it would be like to get on his knees in front of a guy. It was closer to empirical curiosity than lust, but it wasn’t not lust.

He knew Dean would lose his mind if he blew him, gasped affirmations and fingers pulling through his hair. Dean was needy, he’d be needy in bed. Sam could give him that. Sam could hold him down. That’s all it would be about, giving him what he needed, because that’s all they ever did with each other and there was no meaningful difference between licking wounds and licking everything else.

His hand sped up, wringing himself tighter. One of his knees drew up. It felt better than he remembered it being for a long time, relief from a tension he didn’t know he was carrying. Once he started thinking about it he couldn’t stop, and he pictured getting Dean on his stomach, looking down at his muscled back and following the curved line of his spine down to where he was splitting him in two. It hit him quick and kept coming: Dean would want him to. Dean did want him to. Since he was seventeen, apparently, Dean had wanted him to.

He came suddenly and hard, slamming up against the limit of what he could take. He tried not to make a mess and caught most of it in his hand, teeth grit, head tipped back.

His blood thundered in his ears, and when he opened his eyes his vision was blotchy and acid-etched. He reached up, found the roll of toilet paper they’d been carrying with them and wiped off his hand. He folded an arm across his eyes and lay there buzzing with pleasure, guilty, tired, churning.

Post-nut clarity was a bitch. Jerking off thinking about your brother was also a bitch. Jerking off your brother, period, was a whole level of worse.

He didn’t know what he was doing and it wasn’t worth pretending that he did. He’d… talk to Dean. He couldn’t think about it any more than that. He’d get up and find him, and it would be whatever it was going to be. A fight or something worse. Whatever it was, wherever they were going, Dean was there, too. You couldn’t back out of a handjob. Not even Dean could be so pig-headedly evasive.

He pulled on clothes—John’s USMC shirt, awful given the context, but it was the cleaner of his two—and uselessly tidied the tent to stall for time. Opening the flap and letting in fresh air was like his first real breath in hours; the air wasn’t cold like it should have been so early in the morning, but it was fresh and clean.

His knees protested as he stood. There was the boys’ tent across the clearing, closed and silent, the blackened coals of their fire, and stillness. He left the camp and headed aimlessly for the rock wall without thinking about it. His boots crunching on the dead pine needles underfoot was the loudest sound around. He walked along the rock face for a while, wondering if Dean might be there, and when he wasn’t, he went to the creek.

After a few minutes he saw the shape of Dean through the trees, a blur of skin in the dusty brown rock, and blue jeans.

His chest got tight. He breathed through it. He told himself: you can’t change the past. All you can control is how you deal with it. He wished he didn’t have to say that to himself so often.

Dean was shaving, sitting on the bank of the creek with his knees apart. He didn’t turn around, though Sam was sure he heard him. He had his shirt off and his smooth, sunburnt shoulders were speckled with freckles like an eggshell. He used to have a puckered scar on the back of his left shoulder before his return from Hell wiped his body clean. He got it while Sam was at school, and Sam never had occasion to ask him how when he still had it. Bringing it up after he lost it seemed stupid.

Sam stood behind him and picked at his nails. It was still just Dean, but the low, choked sound he made when he came bounced around in Sam’s ears like an echo. He could feel the phantom grip of Dean’s sweaty fingers around his wrist. He was hyper aware of his own dick, still spent and sensitive, in a way he didn’t appreciate. It was Dean, for fuck’s sake.

I guess I’m not mad anymore, he wanted to say. I don’t like it either, but I guess I got some of whatever you have.

Nothing between them had ever been easy, and deciding whether it was good or bad that they wanted to touch each other was no different. Sam knew they’d figure it out. They made it through everything else, and that had been worse than this.

Dean wet his face with a cupped palm of water, then slid his (their) razor over his cheek.

He made no move to turn around, so Sam said, “Hey.”

His stomach dropped the moment Dean didn’t stop shaving. He didn’t pause for even a second, let alone look at him.

Sam watched him dip the razor in the creek, lift it again and take another rasping stroke over his skin. Silent. Sam got a headache, instantly, creeping over his skull with mind-numbing dread.

“I—”

Dean cut him off. “It’s the demigod.”

Whiplash. “What?”

“Desire. The demigod’s area of effect. We’re in it.”

Dean’s voice was rough and curt. Sam stared at the back of his head, fingers pricking with adrenaline and disbelief. He’d woken up horny, sure, but that wasn’t it. For Dean to even try to—

“Are you kidding?”

Of course Dean would put it down to that. Of course Dean wouldn’t—Jesus, he wasn’t even looking at him.

“No,” Dean said, with another stroke of his razor. “Whatever. Just forget it.”

“You think I—”

“Forget it, Sam.”

Anger curled in Sam’s gut quicker than any of the other thousand things he felt all at once. He wanted to fucking shake Dean, come up behind him and boot him into the creek—I trusted you, you son of a bitch—if you don’t want it you shouldn’t have given it to me—it could have been so easy you fucking coward—

He didn’t know what he was doing, but he stupidly thought that Dean did. As if being mildly, magically horny could matter at all, as if every pair of brothers were one misplaced boner away from waking each other up with handjobs.

“Sure,” Sam bit out, dripping with acid.

Shake him and shake him and shake him and shake him.

Dean nodded, looking down into the creek.

“Okay then.”

Okay then. Sam stared at him, incensed and sick with regret, hands flexing. If Dean didn’t feel— Sam didn’t know what to call it. If he didn’t feel content and happy and safe like a stupid kid waking up together like that, not even for a second, not even enough to be worth talking about, then that was Dean’s fucking problem, not his. Except now it was really, really Sam’s problem, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He wet his lips.

“You are so—”

“Hey!” The younger Sam shouted from behind them and they heard the crunch of his sneakers pounding the dirt. “Hey! Your walkie talkie’s going off!”

He came running down the hill from the camp holding one of the walkie talkies. He skidded to a stop in front of Sam and Dean. A crackly, broken voice rang out.

“PRAY……… SHKKTK— CRRCCHH— ME…… TRAP—CRRRHHK— IT’S……… TO…… SHHHHHHHTTT… TRAP— IT’S— CHRRKK…… PRAY— ME— TRAP—”

Sammy was the first to speak. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“A…… SHHHK—TRAP…… TRAP……”

Sam looked up at Dean. Working the case eclipsed their sick little family drama. “Is that—”

It was Cas, unmistakably, even with the choppy static and the cutting out.

“Yup,” Dean said, flat. His face was waxy and tight. He’d put his shirt back on. Sam didn’t want to think about him at all.

The younger Sam looked up at him. “You know him? What’s he saying?”

Sam and Dean shared a look. Dean spoke first.

“He’s a friend of ours. From the future.” He scratched the back of his neck. “He’d be around now, too, but he wouldn’t know us back then. Uh, back now.”

Sammy took the walkie talkie from Sam and held it to his ear, squinting.

“Is that ‘prey’ like prey animal, or ‘pray’ like God?”

“Dunno,” Dean lied.

They all went quiet. The speaker kept babbling, cutting in and out. Sam took it from his younger self and brought it up to his mouth.

“Cas? Is that you?”

More crackling static, broken up even worse into syllables.

“SA— AY— AP— CHHHHRRRKK.”

It went dead.

They went back to camp in stunned, muddled silence, until Sam saw that the younger Dean wasn’t out of his tent.

“How’s he doing?” Sam asked his younger self, who frowned at the closed tent.

“I don’t think he slept much.”

That wasn’t good. They needed to cover ground today, and it would be slow going if he was hobbling. When they started out, Sam knew how quick they had to be at the mountain top before everyone was killed, but now it was getting away from him… Four? Five days? A week? They didn’t have long, regardless, and an eviscerated kid didn’t move fast.

“Let me know what you need,” he said anyway, but Sammy just nodded and disappeared into their tent.

Leaving Sam alone with Dean.

Sam could be mature about this. He could keep the pissy little fire he’d been stoking down to a simmer. And he wasn’t mad, he was— there wasn’t a word for it. Confused and pissed off and guilty all together, and nothing he felt like addressing. Dean was right. Forget it. Okay then.

They started packing up their tent in silence; Sam felt like all they did was put up and take down that fucking tent and it was already hot out, he was dripping sweat. Did anger make you run hotter? It seemed like it did. Not that Sam was mad.

Dean said, “Cas was telling us to pray to him.”

Focus on the case. Focus on how they were thirteen years in the past, boiling alive in California.

“Sounds like it,” Sam said, stuffing blankets into his bag. “And that there’s a trap.”

“Zachariah and co, you think?”

“Maybe.”

“If Cas wants us to pray, he means to the him that’s here. The one that wouldn’t know us yet. Right?”

“I guess. Unless angels are outside of time in a way we don’t know about. But then he wouldn’t need the praying, I guess, unless he doesn’t know where we are.”

Sam folded up the tarp. It was all wet on the inside from the condensation of their breath. Dean’s breath that morning, hot against his palm. He fumbled a tent pole and dropped it, distracted.

Dean said, “How’s he gonna find us? He took us off angel radar.”

Sam went still. “Then how did Zachariah find us?”

He looked up. Dean had put an absent hand to his ribs, staring off into middle distance.

“Huh.”

“Yeah. So either the branding’s gone, or—”

“They already knew where we were.”

“Yeah.”

The tent was packed up. They were done with their task and now they had to look at each other, and Dean did look at him, finally. He looked like shit, sweaty and tired and shifty. Sam wanted to spike a tent pole through his own eyeball into his brain.

He realized with a growing horror that Dean probably wasn’t wrong about them being in the circle of desire. It was hard to describe, but when he thought about it, there was an incongruous arousal somewhere in him, like a teenager’s vague and directionless horniness. Nothing to do with Dean or anything else. It didn’t change much, but it was there.

He said, “This is bad.”

He meant it about everything, but Dean could take it how he wanted. Dean made a kind of pained grimace.

“Yup.”

It was going to be a long couple of days.

Sammy came out of his tent wiping pinkish water from his hands like a surgeon leaving the operating room, and he looked about as grim. He answered Sam’s questioning look.

“It’s infected.”

Dean sighed. “Shit. You think?”

“Yeah. It’s all hot, and he’s got a fever.”

“Hotter than—”

“Hotter than normal, yeah.”

Their kit didn’t have antibiotics; Sam checked the night before when he started to plan out the worst case scenario, which was currently happening.

“We have to keep moving,” he said, as tactfully as he could manage. “We can help pack up your stuff. I’ll carry his bag. But—”

“I know.” Sammy rubbed his arm, looking back at the tent. “It won’t help to wait around. The sooner we get up there…”

“Yeah. Okay.”

The tent flap opened and young Dean hunched out. He looked worse than yesterday, visibly exhausted, and he was holding the arm on his wounded side weirdly.

“It’s a tent,” he grit out, “not Fort fucking Knox. I can hear you.”

“We weren’t whispering.” Sammy pretended to whip him in the side. Dean flinched, then smacked him in the head in retaliation. “You know you’re sick, idiot. It’s not a secret.”

“Whatever.” Dean looked down and hovered his hand over his side. “I’m fine to move. It’s just healing.”

“It looks like road kill.”

“Only ‘cause you’re a butcher with the stitches.”

Sammy snorted, “I’ll show you a butcher,” and pretended to jab at his ribs again. Dean twisted away, laughing. It was sweet, and the day before, it would have made nostalgia pull at Sam’s heart strings, but everything was fucked up now and it just looked like flirting. Keep that up, and in thirteen years, you’ll touch his dick. It wasn’t like that, but it was now, to him. It broke everything.

“Sam,” the older Dean said, clearly not for the first time. Sam’s eyes snapped into focus.

“Huh?”

“We’re packing up their shit.” The kids were somewhere else now. Sam felt like he’d been hit with a flashbang. Dean brushed past him to get to the tent, and when he did, he muttered, “Keep your head in the game.”

Sam nearly shoved him.

“You keep your head in the game,” he grumbled, but he didn’t mean it. He was the one who wasn’t keeping up.

They left camp with Sam way up ahead, the kids in the middle and Dean bringing up the rear, which put the two of them as far apart as possible while still technically traveling together, not that Sam was keeping score. They found the rock wall and traced the edge, searching for the lowest point to scale it. Sam had the walkie talkie on his belt, just in case.

They were quiet until Dean cleared his throat dramatically.

“We’re, uh, in a new demigod zone. Anyone notice?”

Young Dean: “Is it throbbing pain and pus? No? Just me?”

“Can it, smartass.” Dean sighed. Dramatically. “Alright, I’m just gonna say this once, and then we’re never gonna talk about it again, got it?”

Young Dean gurgled. “Oh, God. Not this.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do.” Dean took a deep breath. “Okay. So. You’re gonna get… urges.” A pause while his younger self made a gagging noise, immature. “And they’re not your fault. They’ve got nothing to do with you, the call’s not coming from inside the house.”

Sam looked over his shoulder. Dean was very pointedly not looking at him. Sam’s mouth was moving before he realized it was him talking.

“I mean. It could be.”

“It’s not,” Dean snapped. “You’re not in control of it.”

“You’re still you. You’re in control. Or, you’re not not in control.”

“Don’t listen to him, it’s not your fault. If you— yeah. Nobody’s gonna get mad, they’re just not actually your feelings. Whatever you’re feeling.”

“What if they are?” Sam pressed.

Young Dean looked ahead at Sam and then back at Dean, one after the other. “Are you having a stroke? What the fuck are you talking about?”

The two of them, in accidental unison: “Nothing.”

Sam winced. He was about to say something when young Dean cut him off.

“You already told us this when we started out: we’re gonna get horny, but it’s not sex pollen. Let’s just do whatever we’ve gotta do and not get on anybody’s case about it. Or ever talk about it again. Sound good?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Great. Good talk. Glad one of us is being a fucking adult about this.”

They walked in excruciating silence until Sammy said, “It’s not that bad.” His tone was indecipherable beyond ‘vaguely annoyed.’ “We’re not five.”

Guilt prickled at the back of Sam’s brain. If they didn’t tone it down, the kid would catch on quick, and— he wasn’t sure what would happen after that. Sam was too far removed from thirteen to know how he’d react if he found out Dean wanted him, and too burdened by their lives since then—and his growing present day horror-fascination-fixation at the idea of the whole thing—to be objective. For better or worse, ‘freaked out’ would probably cover it, and he didn’t want to freak the kid out.

Sam kept his eyes forwards, scanning the rock as much for some distraction as any real desire to get upwards and onwards. Focus on the case. Save the town, get home.

They came to a spot that was obviously best, a dip shorter than the rest by a foot with a neat ladder of rocks up an indent in the face. Sam stood at the base and looked up.

“As good a place as any.” The younger Sam came up next to him. “You wanna do the honours?”

Sammy set his bag down and climbed up easily. Once he was at the top, he disappeared from view.

“Huh,” he said, slow. “That’s not on the map.”

“What isn’t?” Sam called up, but he didn’t come back. “Hey! What do you see?”

Dean was already on the wall and halfway up in one reach. Sam looked to the younger Dean next to him.

“You want me to—”

“Just spot me,” he grumbled.

He put his hands on the rock, tested the holds and got one foot up, then the other. He made it another step before he reached up, grunted in pain and twitched hard enough that Sam put his hands out to catch him.

Dean scowled down at him. “I’m fine.”

Above, the older Dean had his hand out for him to take, but he was looking over his shoulder as he did it.

“What is it?” Sam called up. Dean didn’t look down.

“Some kind of house.”

Dean pulled the younger one up the rest of the way. Sam threw their packs up after him and got on the wall. He could hear them talking but couldn’t make out the words. He got a hand over the top and pulled, and the second he was up, he scanned the tree line.

Off in the distance, there was a dark shape like a house. The other three stood looking at it as Sam got to his feet, brushing dirt from his jeans.

“I didn’t think anyone lived up here outside the compound.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, faintly. His hand was on his gun. “We’ll scout it out. You-and-me we.” He pointed at the younger Dean. “Don’t get any ideas. Stay here.”

The kid just sneered at him. Dean nodded at Sam and started off towards the house, slow and careful between the trees. Dean had his gun out.

Sam mumbled, “Put it away, it’s just gonna be some homesteader freaks.”

Dean looked at him over his shoulder with an annoyed squint. He lowered his gun, but didn’t holster it. Sam put his hand on his own gun, but didn’t take it out.

They crept closer. The house was a small cabin made of massive, dark logs, half rotted and ancient, with a dilapidated porch and one cloudy window on the front.

“Abandoned?” Sam breathed. He caught a barely there nod from Dean, who still didn’t holster his gun.

Up close, the thing reeked of age and disrepair. Dean swung wide to go around the back. Sam followed. There was one more window along the side, too dark inside to see through. Out back stood a rusted metal pump next to an old bathtub plumbed to nothing and overgrown with weeds. Farther off, there were some jagged metal shapes that may have, at one point, been farm equipment, and half a bike. All of it looked like it had been there for a lifetime.

Sam sidled up to the back door, covered by a porch that matched the front. He nudged it, but it didn’t budge until he grabbed the rusted metal handle and shoved with his shoulder to make it swing in, scraping along the floor.

The cabin smelled like years of dust and shut-in air. Just enough light came through the doorway to make out the single room: a small wooden table, a wooden bed frame with a thin mattress, and an empty wooden counter along one side. Nothing even halfway modern in the whole place, like it had been missed by the passage of time.

The back porch creaked as Dean came up behind him. Sam could feel the heat blasting off his body.

“Freaky,” Dean said, breath on Sam’s neck, which had to be by accident. It was a small doorway. Sam pushed the door in to get some space. “Who puts a vacation shack three days’ hike from the highway?”

“No idea.”

He walked through the cabin, no more than a few strides long from back to front, and pulled the front door open so light spilled into the room in a neat column. He could see the two boys off by the cliff through the trees, just shapes with the sun behind them.

Sam looked a moment longer, squinted harder. They were moving weirdly, close together, and their voices were louder than conversational.

Dean was behind him again. “Can’t leave them alone for a second.”

Sam could smell his sweat and it made that out-of-nowhere lust rise in his throat again. He could turn around and walk Dean back into the cabin, cram into that shitty bed with him and see what happened. See how easy it was for him to ‘forget it’ then.

Sam took a thin, careful breath. He put it away and said nothing.

He made his way back to the boys and caught Sammy talking fast and frustrated. He was digging through one of their packs.

“—like some cat that hides that it’s sick ‘til it’s half dead, I’m gonna wake up one morning and you’re gonna be hiding under the porch—”

“It’s not that bad!”

The younger Dean was leaning against a tree, holding his shirt away from his side. The fabric glinted wetly.

Sam said, “Did you—”

“He opened his cuts,” Sammy snipped, still digging through the backpack, “because he’s too cool to get a friggin’ leg up from his brother—”

“He’s not my brother! You’re my brother!”

“We’re both your brother! What the hell is wrong with you? Holy fuck, where’s the—”

Sam nudged his younger self out of the way.

“Easy. It’s in mine. There’s no one in the cabin, you can fix him up there.”

They hauled their bags to the cabin and threw them inside. Sammy made a futile attempt to shake the dust off the comforter on the bed before making Dean lay down on it. Sam held the med kit out to him, but he was busy trying to yank Dean’s shirt over his head.

“—gotta wash this now, or what, you want another cougar following you around? ‘Cause of the blood smell?”

“Jesus, Sammy, it was an accident!”

Sammy snatched the med kit from Sam and tucked his hair behind his ears. Sam unconsciously did the same.

“Is there water?” Sammy asked him.

“Not in— Wait, there was a pump out back. One sec.”

He only realized it was cooler in the cabin once he was outside again and the sun hit his shoulders. He pulled at the weeds that were snarled around the metal pump until he could get at it, then put all his weight on the handle. It juddered and creaked and eased down a few squeaking inches, and when he pulled it back up, it did the same, over and over again until it was moving easier, but still dry. He could see the shape of Dean watching him from the doorway and he felt stupid; there was a limit to how long a person worked an old pump before giving up. He was soaked and his arms ached. They didn’t have much water left and hell if he’d go hunting for that creek again, it would be huge if he could get this thing working.

The pump made a horrible gurgling noise and let a brown stream of water gush out. Sam whooped in victory without meaning to. He kept working it until it ran clear, then called back to the house.

“Bring rags!”

The water was almost cool, which made it the only thing that wasn’t actively hot that Sam had touched in days. Dean brought him rags, he wet them, and they brought them back to the cabin and leaned on the edge of the table to watch the medical proceedings.

Young Dean had his forearm folded over his head to expose his side. His fingers flexed as his brother slipped the torn stitches free.

Sammy said, “It’s barely stopped bleeding. How is it infected and bleeding?”

“That famous Winchester luck,” Dean mumbled. “This blanket’s gross. Why’s there a cabin here? It’s old as hell.”

From the table, Dean said, “Hey, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Gift or not, it was unsettling. Sam looked around again for any signs of humanity, clothes or food or photos, but there was nothing. At the same time, the cabin had things in it: there were utensils in a drawer and a fire poker by the back door. The half-inch layer of dust on everything meant he wasn’t too worried that they’d be caught out if they squatted there.

He went out back and took a wary drink from the pump; it was metallic, but tasted fresh enough. To be sure, he put a purifying tablet in everyone’s water bottle before filling them, and if he dilly-dallied a bit, there was no one around to see it. He wasn’t sure if he was imagining the tense, heady atmosphere in the cabin or if it was all him, but the place reeked of hormones. Even with the heat, it was nice to be outside.

His younger self’s voice drifted out from the cabin behind him.

“Just a few hours, come on.”

Dean, the older one: “We don’t have time. He’ll make it.”

“The whole thing is puffy and fucked up, he needs to not sweat for a while. We’ve gotta keep it clean.”

A long pause, and then. “You could wait here.”

Sam turned and headed back to the house. The two of them were standing on the back porch, hovering awkwardly, Sammy with his arms crossed and Dean scratching idly at his cheek. They both looked up when Sam approached.

“We’re not splitting up,” Sam interrupted, sounding more authoritative than he felt. “We shouldn’t be far now. If we leave you, and something happens…” He met Dean’s eyes. “This is a new timeline, we never made it this far. We don’t know that you don’t die here.”

Sammy got a deeply stricken look on his face. “He’s not that bad, he just needs some rest. I gave him another one of those pills, it’ll be better in a few hours.”

Sam could hear the cajoling quality to his voice, desperate to sway them, so he figured Dean could, too. They shared a complicated look.

“How long do we have?” Dean asked eventually. Sam shook his head.

“I dunno.”

He looked past Dean’s shoulder into the dark cabin, where he could see the other Dean laying on his side facing away, the pale curved comma shape of his back with his arm folded under his head. The bandage was off and the claw marks looked awful, pink around the edges and red inside.

“Two days?” Dean tried.

“I don’t know,” Sam said again, annoyed. “I don’t remember, it’s not like I wrote it down. If we ever even knew. I mean, it was in the paper, but who knows when everyone actually died.” He ran a hand through his hair. It was so dirty it was slick and wet feeling. “I don’t know. We can spend a couple hours here. It’s fine.”

It was early enough in the day that the heat wasn’t at its peak yet, and it was probably stupid to stop, maybe really stupid, but the cabin had flat surfaces and a bed and water. Even without that, getting out of the sun for a few hours would have been tempting enough.

Dean didn’t say anything in agreement, but he was also looking forlornly into the cabin at the kid on the bed.

Dean left to gather firewood despite insistences from the other three that they didn’t need any. The kids argued about whether or not Dean was ‘good to go,’ which ended in a screaming match, which ended in Sammy leaving in a huff to set snare traps. Sam stayed in the cabin with the invalid Dean, because someone had to.

He looked around the room for anything to do—cards, backgammon, a notepad or pen—and came up empty. He sat in one of the dining chairs, made hand-shaped angels in the dust on the tabletop, and tried not to think about Dean.

It didn’t go well. It was haunting him, and the more he thought about it, the worse it got. He felt dirty. He’d started to second guess everything. He was fucking insane for what he did. Maybe Dean hadn’t been as eager as he thought, and that’s why he wasn’t talking about it now. His hand on Sam’s wrist could have been trying to pull him away and Sam misread it, the groan was agony and Dean was just too fucked up about him in a perfectly brotherly way to tell him no; the fact that he came was just biological, involuntary. It was bad no matter how Sam sliced it, but the thought that he’d violated Dean was the worst.

It was hell not knowing for sure. He wanted to go out and shout for Dean until he found him, tackle him and tie him down if he had to, whatever would make him talk. Pin him down, maybe get on top of him, fold an arm behind his back and—

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose as hard as he could. Breathe in for four, out for four. Stop thinking about your brother.

“Hey.” Young Dean, a groggy slur of sound from the bed. “Pass me my water.”

Sam got his bottle from the counter and handed it to him. When he took it, he rolled over onto his back and his eyebrows went up.

“Huh. I thought you were the other one. You sigh the same.”

Sam tried to smile. “That checks out.”

Now that he knew Dean was awake, it felt weird not to sit with him in such a small room. Sam pulled a chair up to the bed and sat down.

“This fucking sucks,” Dean said conversationally. He took a swig of water, clumsy with his reclined angle. “Just in case you’re wondering. This is one of the worst hunts of my life.”

Sam snorted. “Yeah? Which part?”

He didn’t mean to say it. Dean made the same derisive snort back. He set his water bottle on the floor and folded his arm over his eyes.

“Honestly, I dunno which is worse. Getting mauled by a cougar, or… you.”

It was hard to argue with, put so plainly. “Fair enough.”

They went quiet. Dean rearranged the under-stuffed pillow beneath his head, folding it in half so it propped him up higher. Sam watched him, worry creeping in again. He looked like shit, worse than the rest of them: bags under his eyes, and sweatier than even this otherworldly heat warranted—when he shifted, Sam could see the mattress under him was wet.

“Do you want me to go?” Sam asked. Dean shook his head weakly.

“Nah. Doesn’t make it any better.”

He closed his eyes and lay with his one arm out to the side to keep it away from his wounds, his other hand on his bare stomach. His eyelids looked reddish and bruised, or maybe it was just the low light.

Sam had to remind himself, for the millionth time: this was Dean. It was like he had to practice thinking about it the right way: this is your brother. The same one that’s outside, the same one you know.

The same one you touched. That floated in, too. The same one that kissed you.

Sam’s stomach flipped, nervous, squeamish. It was the first time he’d been alone with the younger Dean since any of it. He could start to fix things if he knew what Dean wanted, and this was a Dean as much as the other one was. He couldn’t ask point blank, but maybe he could know.

“What’s it like?” he asked, too fast.

Dean frowned, eyes still closed. “Like someone stabbed me with four knives. Thanks for asking.”

“No, uh. What’s it like… with you and Sam. You and me.”

Dean’s eyes flew open. His shoulders got tense.

“What’s it like?”

Sam felt exactly as stupid as he thought he would. He crossed his arms. “Yeah. I dunno. What are you… thinking? Are you okay?”

What do you think about how you want to fuck your brother? Do you like it? Do you feel good about yourself?

He had no idea what he expected Dean to say. He didn’t expect a wet, broken laugh. It made him jump.

“Holy fuck, you’re serious. Okay, cool, let’s do this.” Dean struggled to sit up higher, pushing his back against the headboard. “It’s a cosmic fucking joke. Is that what you wanna hear? It’s like if somebody invented the worst possible in thing in the world, in a lab, specifically to fuck with me.” He bit out each word, looking down at his hands and absolutely not at Sam. “It’s a nightmare. It’s taking this thing that I’m supposed to do, that’s supposed to be like, the only reason I’m even here, and making it fucked up and sick.”

It took Sam a second to realize he was talking about him. Being there for Sam was the thing he was supposed to do. When Dean went on, his voice was quieter, shaky.

“Man, I have looked for books. I’ve looked for brochures and shit, for those Jesus-freak places that’ll electrocute my brain or whatever, and make it go away, but it’s just— it’s not in the cards, I know that. It’s not like I can tell anyone.” He rubbed a hand over his mouth. The other dug into his own arm. “I almost told a counselor once, back in school. I thought I was being slick, but I must’ve said too much, ‘cause they told Dad about it. I talked my way out of it, I forget what I told him. Said it was about some chick. I hated myself so bad I didn’t talk to Sammy for a fucking month.”

Somehow, Sam remembered that. It was some spring month and Dean wouldn’t even be in the same room as him. He couldn’t figure out what he’d done to make him mad. He remembered that he kept trying to make it up to him—he tried to act older, be cooler, steal Dean cans of Coke from the corner store like a crow bringing him shiny things, anything to make him happy—but Dean would just push him away. He’d been so young. He was so young.

He didn’t realize he was biting the cuticle on his index finger until he tore it in a sharp stab of pain. He sucked at it for a second, but the taste of blood was too much and he let it well up in the corner of his filthy nail instead, then wiped it on his jeans.

Dean still had his head bowed, but he was red all the way up to his ears and forehead. It was heartbreaking. That’s what Sam landed on—this whole thing was fucked up and scary, and it was huge, but mostly it broke his fucking heart.

It was huge, Sam thought again, slower. Dean didn’t break easy. He didn’t let up.

“This is a big deal to you.” Sam tipped his head down, trying to catch Dean’s eyes. “This isn’t a passing thing.”

Dean coughed a rueful laugh.

“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.” All of a sudden, his head snapped up. “Wait. Is that what he told you? Your me?”

“Uh—”

He covered his face with his hands and groaned. “Shit, I’m fucking this up again. Don’t listen to me, forget I said that. I didn’t mean it. I feel like shit, I’m out of it.”

Sam just watched him. He didn’t need to say that he didn’t believe him, the important thing was that Dean had said it, as if there were some universal ledger noting it down. 12:42 PM PST, 08/10/96, let the record show, Dean Winchester stated that he does not, in fact, want electroshock therapy because of how he feels about his little brother.

Sam waited for one of the other brothers to come back in, but they didn’t. The doors were open and the block of sun from front to back remained unbroken on the floor, just dust dancing in its path. Crickets clicked outside. Sam thought about putting his mouth on Dean’s nape that morning, how soft his skin felt under his dry lips. He wondered how long Dean had been awake by the time he woke up. He remembered, in a way that suddenly seemed important, that Dean was already half hard when he touched him.

Dean turned his head to the side and kept one hand over his face, scrubbing hard across his forehead. His jaw ticked. He was still blushing.

He asked, “Do you hate me?”

His voice was small, the youngest Sam had ever heard him. Sam’s answer came easy.

“No.”

“Do you hate him?”

Harder, but no contest. He mostly hesitated to make sure his voice didn’t crack.

“Still no,” he said. His heart sounded like heavy bass in his ears. His face prickled hotly. It was going too far, but there was no world where he didn’t ask. The two of them must have talked about it, he saw the way Dean screamed at the kid the other day, you talked. He had to know. “He—the older you, I mean, did he… talk to you about this?”

Dean went very still, and tense.

“Kind of,” he said eventually, slow and wary. “Not really.”

“Okay. Uh. Did he say… whether he—still—”

He couldn’t get it out; how was he supposed to say it? Does he still want to fuck me? Kiss me? Want whatever it is you want from YOUR Sam? His heart was going nuts at the thought of it, dizzy and sickening.

Dean rolled all the way on his side, away from him.

“Why don’t you ask him?” He pulled in and tucked his arm under his head again the way it was earlier. “Leave me alone.”

His voice was muffled in his arm and hard as nails. Looking at the hunched curve of his spine, all Sam could think about was the way he fit his body around it that morning, thirteen years away, and how Dean let him stroke his chest and stomach before it became anything else. The closeness of it.

Sam stood up. The old chair under him groaned its protest. “I’ll be outside if you need anything.”

He couldn’t name the spiky weeds snarled around the old bathtub behind the cabin. They were dry and dead, sharp leaves and strange little seed husks. Sam tore at them with his bare hands, relishing in a strange way the pain of it, the feel of the vines snapping when he pulled. In a few minutes, he had the tub more or less cleared. It was the basin of a porcelain clawfoot tub with no feet and no plumbed drain, just sitting on the ground in its thatch of weeds. The finish was stained and cracked in places, but it had a yellowed rubber stopper in the drain that looked like it would hold.

He circled the cabin and found a grimy wooden bucket out by the side of the front porch, then used that to ferry water from the pump to the tub. The water was so cold it made his hands ache when he sloshed it in, or it felt that way compared to the heat, better than any icy creek they’d ever taken a pit stop at on long summer drives. It took ten buckets to get the thing even halfway full. He took off his sweat-soaked shirt after the first four buckets. Once there was enough water, he took off his jeans, then his socks, boots and boxers. Not much sense in modesty. They were family, after all.

He stepped into the clear, crystal water and tucked his legs in to sink down as far as the small tub would let him—he hadn’t met a bathtub that could handle him since he was sixteen, this was no exception—and it was heaven. He stuck his legs out, hooked the lip of the tub behind his knees and that let him get his face under the surface. It was like it cured his headache instantly, the cold clean of it. After days of being tired, dirty and sore, it felt too good to be true.

He reached over the side for their grubby bar of soap and lathered up as best as he could in the cold water, scrubbing at the grime with his hands in lieu of a cloth; his nail beds, between his fingers, in the crooks of his elbows, his dick. Between being alone and being clean, it was the best he’d felt since they set out.

Second best, maybe, to having face buried in the soft, dark space between Dean’s skin and his pillow, breathing there, waking up with the beat of a living body against his own.

He’d made it ten minutes without thinking about it. A new record.

He tipped his head back in the water, letting his hair fan out in waves. The sky was blue-white above, no trees in view, hazy. He scrubbed at his hair with the soap. He tried to ignore his dick, which was, the same way it had been all day, not hard but a close thing. It was ready to be hard if he didn’t keep himself in check, full and heavy under the water.

He craned his neck to look towards the cabin. The door was open, but it was quiet inside. He thought about touching himself to clear his head and get it over with, but he was out in the open. He wondered if the others were doing it. It was hard to ignore the persistent thrum of it, and of the four of them, he figured he was best equipped to deal with it, which made the others worse: two were teenagers, and one was Dean.

The only reason I’m even here, Dean had said. That was at seventeen. What could Dean possibly think of him now?

Sam knew this whole trip wasn’t real, or not normal, anyway. When they started out, he hoped the reprieve from their normal lives would bring them closer, and it was a reprieve. It was a hunt, but it wasn’t real life, which meant he didn’t know whether any of what he wanted from Dean—whatever it was that he wanted—would translate to a world outside this mountain, outside their tent. When they weren’t playing ‘my two dads’ to their younger selves. Whatever he wanted from Dean, it was fucking complicated, and they’d had enough complicated to last a lifetime.

Still.

He slid his legs up higher so he could dunk his head underwater. He kept his eyes loosely closed and the shadow of his hair floating over his face made the light drift in patterns over his eyelids. His calves prickled under the hot sun. He thought about Dean. It was so frustrating that he could spend his whole life within arm’s reach of someone and still not be able to read him when it really mattered. It felt selfish. He thought about Dean.

He surfaced once he ran out of breath, water pouring down his face. The sun was hot on the top of his head. He tucked his legs back in so his knees broached the water like dark islands and he wiggled his toes to work out the pins and needles. The water had gone cloudy with the muck he washed off himself and oily with their cheap soap, making a technicolour film on the surface that glinted in the light.

If Dean and the other Sam weren’t back yet, and if the other Dean was still in bed, he’d drain the tub and dry off baking in the sun, leaning on the edge or laying in the dry basin. Maybe even if they were around. It was a free cabin.

He stood and the water poured off him and splashed loudly into the tub. He knocked the ancient stopper out of the drain with his toes and the water gushed out into the dirt and weeds that surrounded the tub. The sound of it was enough that he didn’t hear the crackly footsteps of someone approaching through the forest until they were out in the open.

“Jesus, Sam.”

Dean, hardly more than a pained grunt.

Sam turned around, not thinking. Dean, the older one, was standing by the nearest of the nearly dead dry trees that ringed the cabin, holding an armful of splintery wood with his hatchet balanced on top. He wasn’t looking at Sam directly, his head was turned to the side and his face was red—blushing, or just sunburnt—but he also wasn’t going into the cabin. He’d stopped walking. Sam was standing naked and wet in an old bathtub, and Dean was… also there.

The way Dean wasn’t looking at him seemed dramatic and petty, but now that Sam thought about it, how often had Dean been a little weird about his nudity, specifically? Always happy enough to flaunt his own body, but just as likely to make himself awkwardly busy when Sam was the one getting changed with the door open. It never fit with the rest of how they were, Sam thought—they shared toothbrushes, stitched wounds and cleaned puke, and Dean’s selective prudishness never fit. But maybe it did, now.

Water plinked off Sam’s body into the draining tub. He slicked his hair back with both hands.

“Hey.” He cleared his throat. He thought he sounded pretty normal. “The bathtub works.”

He expected Dean to ignore him, storm off and head for the cabin, but slower than anything, like it hurt—Sam could see him work his jaw even from a few yards away, tense—Dean managed to look at him. He held his mouth weirdly, tight, and his eyes met Sam’s.

Dean said, “Cool,” about as quiet as it was possible to say.

Sam held his breath. Dean’s eyes didn’t stay on his for long. They dropped, obvious, and Sam’s heart raced in his chest. It had never been like this. Sam worked out because he didn’t know how to not, because it made him feel human, not because he thought the way his body looked would get him anything material—but it seemed helpful now, watching Dean’s eyes trace the shape of him. He felt vaguely proud. He felt good after hiking for days, if not a little lean, and tan. He didn’t want to look down to check, but he could feel his dick still hanging heavy, not obscenely hard, but noticeable. He watched Dean notice it.

It felt like they spent an hour staring at each other as Sam dried in the sun, but it couldn’t have been more than a handful of seconds. Dean was looking at him. Sam was watching him look. The thing he kept glimpsing out of the corner of his eye in hunches and half sentences was in the spotlight.

Dean’s face wasn’t easy to pin down. Awkward, tired, kind of wistful. Brow furrowed like he was thinking very, very hard.

“Look,” Sam croaked, breaking the silence. He swallowed and it felt like there was a knife in his throat. “If we’re on the same page, just tell me.”

Whatever Dean’s expression was before, it crumpled. His lips parted for a second, a flashing glint of mouth catching the sun, but he didn’t say anything. He was quiet for long enough that Sam ran out of whatever scraps of restraint he had left.

“Put that stuff down,” he said. It came out so soft. He meant for it to be an order, for Dean’s benefit. “Come here.”

He’d deal with what happened next if Dean actually listened to him. Sam’s hands were buzzing, flexing at his sides, all nerves. His face was numb.

When Dean didn’t move, he tried, “Dean,” and if it came out sort of wheedling, too little-brother, it wasn’t intentional.

It snapped Dean out of it, but not in the way Sam wanted. His eyes got big for a second and darted away, towards the cabin and then the forest, like he remembered where he was. He kicked into action, hefting the wood higher in his arms, and he headed for the cabin without saying anything. He dumped the pile of wood on the back porch and disappeared inside, kicking the door so it ground shut behind him.

From the tub, Sam could hear him barking something at his younger self, nothing helpful. Sam stared at the closed door for longer than he’d like to admit. He was mostly dry by the time he pulled his clothes back on.

Chapter Text

The younger Sam came back after setting three snare traps. Dean had set his watch alarm wrong and they realized they hadn’t eaten in half a day, so they passed around their quickly dwindling store of rations and Dean made them drink two full bottles of water each without stopping. Young Dean was fuzzy with painkillers again and young Sam was nervous and curt. It was smothering.

Sam walked for ten minutes out into the forest, found a curved rock structure to lean against, hip high, and jerked off. He pulled up his shirt and bit it between his teeth, half to keep it out of the way and half to keep his mouth occupied and quiet.

His thoughts were shapeless, not real actions or positions. Dean’s nails in his back. Dean’s open mouth. He tried to think about women, his face between their legs, trembling thighs around his head, but then it was Dean’s fingers spreading them open for him, Dean’s hand on his head, the low rumble of his laugh.

Sam stopped and gave a nervous look around. He was sweating in the column of his spine, dick still in his hand. He kept stroking and tried to steer his thoughts again—sucking tits, the pillowy slick as he pushed inside her, any her, but—again, he kept—he didn’t have the luxury of taking his time. So, Dean it was. Dean’s back against his chest. Dean’s hands on him. The weight of Dean’s dick in his hand, the glide of his skin, the way Dean shuddered as he came. What his face must have looked like. What he might have said if Sam’s hand hadn’t been over his mouth: panicked, desperate, Sammy.

Sam came almost reluctantly into his own hand, his teeth bared in a grimace. Pathetic. He couldn’t remember the last time he jerked off in the middle of the day, but these were extenuating circumstances for more reasons than one. He straightened his shirt, kicked dirt over his come on the ground and made his way back to camp. His heart was still beating hard, body still buzzing with pleasure. Breathe in for four, out for four. Stop thinking about your brother.

The cabin appeared between the trees. He spotted Dean right away, standing over the bathtub, water splashing. He had his shirt off and his sunburnt shoulders shone in the sun as he scrubbed at some sodden fabric in the tub basin. The water was vaguely soapy, but not lathered. Behind him, the forgotten coals of their afternoon fire smouldered.

Dean’s eyes flicked up as Sam approached, then moved in a pattern Sam had started to notice: they met his eyes, slid down to his mouth, his chest, back up to his eyes, then away. Dean gave him a nod in greeting and Sam did the same, a lift of his chin. Sam had his hands in his pockets, which felt stupid. Fake casual.

“The kid’s still sleeping?” he asked, for a stab at small talk.

“Mm.” Dean kept his head down. He was scrubbing a T-shirt against itself between his fists, either his or his younger self’s, they were both black. There were others in the tub, belonging to both Sams by the look of it. Boxers. “Fever’s not going down.”

“Shit.” Sam turned around and propped his hip against the tub; it was easier to have a normal conversation when he wasn’t looking at him. “Have you been praying to Cas?”

“Nah. We didn’t talk about it.” Scrub, splash. “You think it’s a good idea?”

“I think it’s the only idea we’ve got. He said it was a trap, so. Something’s not right.”

“You got any idea what that ‘something’ is?”

“Nothing worth talking about.” Sam tipped his head back and looked up at the sky. “Cas was a hard-ass when we first met him. This’ll be even worse. If he even shows.”

“Mm. But if Zachariah knows what’s going on, maybe Cas does, too.”

“Wait. Do you know if the Zachariah you talked to was the one from now, or the one we know?”

A long pause, more scrubbing.

“It was the one we know,” Dean said slowly. “That’s… huh.”

Angels could hop through time, they knew that. The angels’ relationship with time was vast and complex, and if they could get the right Cas here, there was a chance he could send them back, or at the very least, tell them what was going on. It was their best bet from where Sam was standing.

Sam said, “I’m gonna try calling Cas. I’m as good as you, this one won’t have a favourite yet.”

“Hey.”

He closed his eyes and crossed his arms. He tried to clear his mind—harder than it usually was—and focused on Cas, the idea of him, his shape.

Castiel. It’s Sam and Dean Winchester. You don’t know us yet, or. We haven’t met, yet.

He felt supremely stupid. It was like leaving a voicemail.

We think another angel, Zachariah, sent us here. We’re supposed to be in the year 2009. We—

He stopped. Now it felt like a resume, but this Cas didn’t know them. He had to give him a reason to show.

We play an important role in a war between Heaven and Hell. We need to get back to 2009. We don’t know what’s going on here, but we think we’re in danger. Please come see us.

Another pause. He frowned.

Amen.

From behind him, Dean said, “How’s it going?”

Sam sighed. “I used to be good at this.”

“It’s different when you know the guy.” There was a wet slap as Dean laid a shirt over the edge of the tub. “I’ll give it a shot. We can both keep trying. He’s a tough guy to get ahold of on a good day.”

“No kidding.”

Sam stood up straight and turned around. Dean was wet up to his elbows and held Sam’s white V-neck in his hands. His eyes went from Sam’s eyes to his mouth, chest, eyes, and back down to the shirt.

Sam opened his mouth. Closed it. One thing at a time.

“Did the kids wash up yet?”

“Nope. After.”

Dean didn’t look up, eyes still on his washing. It was awkward. Sam itched to say something, to ruin it or make it better or shake him and shake him until he finally did something about it. Anything would be better than this.

The feeling passed. Sam put it carefully away.

“I’ll check on them.”

He made it to the lip of the porch and hesitated when he heard the boys talking in hushed voices inside.

Sammy said, “Man up, you know it helps you sleep.”

Dean, with an ugh noise: “This is the polar opposite of ‘man up.’”

“Just shut up and nap. You’re hurt.”

“I’m fine.”

Shuffling, then silence. Sam nudged the door open and peered in. His younger self was sitting up in the bed with his back against the wall, eyes closed, and Dean lay with his head in his lap, dozing or trying to. Sammy had his hand resting on Dean’s head the way you might lounge with an old dog, except when Sam kept looking, he noticed the kid’s thumb stroking over the shell of Dean’s ear, over and over again.

Sam didn’t know if it was uncomfortable or sweet; his barometer for that kind of thing had oscillated wildly since the beginning of their trip, and what was nostalgic before now felt tensely inappropriate. But, he reminded himself: they’d always been way too close. That wasn’t new.

He shut the door without going inside. He leaned against one of the beams that held up the porch and watched Dean do laundry in the old tub, looked at his freckled shoulders and the curves of his arms, the softness to his belly that made Sam want to dig his fingers in, in this fucked up new frontier of theirs. Sam chewed the inside of his cheek. He thought about going into the forest again, but decided to be more productive.

Castiel, he tried. This is important. For you, not us. You’re going to need us in the future, we can’t die here. We need you, and you need us.

Dean slapped another clean T-shirt against the side of the tub. Sam thought they should put up a clothesline. They might have brought rope.

If you can’t find us—if we’re hidden—we’re on the south side of the mountain near Oak Run, California. Not far from the summit.

It felt pathetic, but Sam was briefly tempted to stay at this dinky cabin in the middle of nowhere. Laundry drying in the breeze, Dean whittling next to a fire pit, rabbit drying on stakes like some homesteader pioneer movie. They could become weird, reclusive hermits. No responsibilities, no vessels, no holy war. It would be an easier life, if a little empty.

Castiel, he thought again, no follow-up. Castiel. The angel Castiel.

He caught the fluttery breeze that indicated an angel’s appearance before he saw anyone. The shape of a person appeared in the corner of his eye, shadowed just off the far end of the porch, and he yelped in shock.

The figure in front of him wasn’t Castiel. She looked like the type of woman who might say yes to angelic possession: not attractive nor unattractive, short, white, with shoulder-length straight hair, wearing a mousey button-up and slacks. As always, the look on her face betrayed her as an angel: perfectly placid and vaguely disapproving. Inhuman.

“Dean,” Sam hissed. He kept his voice low to keep from waking the kids. Dean turned around.

“Wh— oh, shit.” The laundry went splat into the tub. “That you, Cas?”

Sam felt stupid for not thinking of it. Of course he wouldn’t be Jimmy Novak yet.

Cas remained perfectly still, looking from Sam to Dean. Sam had his hands up like he was surrendering; it was a reflex. Dean pulled on his wet shirt, then crept closer in a similar way, as if at gunpoint. He stopped at the edge of the porch next to Sam.

Cas said, “Why are you near this cabin?”

Sam blinked. Not what he thought would be most relevant.

“We… what?” When Cas offered no other context, he said, “Because it’s here, and we’ve been hiking for four days. Why?”

Cas took a step backwards. He—she—tipped her chin up and surveyed the cabin with her cold, dark eyes. They were miles away from Jimmy Novak’s crystal blue.

“It is outside of time. It isn’t real.”

“It’s not real?”

Cas took another look at the cabin, appraising, like a carpenter surveying a poorly made shelf with a disapproving eye.

“It has been placed here. It’s not… of this time, or this space. It’s not natural.” She squinted, and was suddenly much more Cas. “Nor human-made.”

“Is it dangerous?” Sam asked.

“No. It’s… unpleasant. That you can’t feel its unpleasantness is also unpleasant.” Cas turned around, face tipped skyward. “I assume you can’t feel the energy coming from the mountaintop.”

Sam’s eyes whipped to Dean and they shared an alarmed look.

“What kind of energy?”

Cas turned back to them slowly, frowning.

“You shouldn’t be here. You’re not of this time. You have no right giving angels orders.”

Sam held up his hands. “We know. We know we shouldn’t be here, we’re trying to get home. We were sent here, by— do you know Zachariah?”

If Cas recognized the name, she didn’t give it away.

“Why would an angel transport humans through time?”

“It’s complicated,” Sam tried, desperately wanting to hand-wave past it. “You’ll find out in a few years. If time works how we think it does, you seeing us now should… help, in the future. With getting us back home.”

“Hold up. What about the mountain?” Dean cut in. “What kind of energy are we talking about? You mean from the Mormon compound up top? That’s where we’re headed.”

Cas’ eyes snapped to him. “I would advise against that. It’s…” She looked up and back again, presumably in the direction they had to go. “It isn’t natural. It isn’t for humans.”

“Is it a demigod?” Sam asked.

Cas said nothing. Her eyes fell back on the brothers, cold and disapproving.

“You call me down here with vague threats of holy war, then expect me to help you. You tell me an angel sent you into the past, but no angel would interfere with human life in this way.”

“Cas—”

“Castiel. I don’t take orders from humans. Nor do my brothers and sisters. And I’ve been given no orders regarding you.”

“But you came,” Dean said quickly. “Right? You thought we might—”

“I came because of the massive outpouring of energy from this time and space. This irregularity, of which you are a part. I did not come because you called.”

The clock was ticking down, Sam realized. Cas wasn’t here because he knew them, and he wasn’t there to help. They got lucky, they didn’t have long.

“So, fine, don’t help us. But about the irregularity— you can tell we’re not supposed to be here, right? Me and him? You can tell that sort of thing?”

“You’re not of this time,” Cas said again. She looked over Sam’s shoulder, squinting. “You are also inside the cabin. Both of you. In separate instances.”

Sam caught a movement at the edge of his periphery and glanced back in time to see a blur in the crack of the cabin door. He couldn’t tell which kid it was.

“Right, so— you’ve got some idea of the passage of time, and how things are supposed to go, if you can tell we’re not supposed to be here.” He was over-explaining, he could see himself losing Cas. “We’ve got a hurt kid in there. It’s him.” He gestured at Dean. “I don’t know what you know, or feel, but he’s not supposed to die here, right? He lives longer?”

Cas’ eyes stayed fixed on the door. She tipped her head and frowned.

“He dies,” she said, placid, as Sam’s heart leapt into his throat. “But he also lives. It’s… incongruous.”

Sam’s mind spun quickly—Dean had died. Was that what she could sense, or was it a new death, here?

“So help him,” Sam blurted out. “Heal him. He’s supposed to live, we know that. Dean Winchester, ask anyone.”

He tried to think of a way to ask without talking about disrupting the spacetime-continuum, but no matter how he spun it, he couldn’t see Cas going for it. Maybe their Cas would, the one who was learning to tolerate, if not appreciate, humanity, and was disillusioned with Heaven, but not the creature they were talking to now.

Cas’ vessel wasn’t sweating, standing the way she was out in the sun. They never did. Sam, sweating even in the shade, envied that.

Cas looked at the cabin again and tipped her chin quizzically, and in the space of a breath, she disappeared.

Dean swore. “Shit.”

Sam went towards him unthinkingly, desperately coming up with explanations.

“It doesn’t mean he’s right. He said you live, too, so that means you… don’t die. Right?”

“But he dies. From a fucking infection.”

“We don’t know that Cas meant here. If he was going to die here, wouldn’t you already be dead or unmade or something? And you’re still here.”

There was a creak from the door. Sam spun around to find his younger self standing in the doorway, pale and stricken, one hand on the frame.

“Who was that?” His voice was nervous and thin. “Dean dies? Why does she know that?”

“Hey, we don’t know that. Take it easy.” Sam took a step towards him, hands out, and made his voice quiet. “Don’t tell him right now. We don’t know he’s—”

The younger Sam slapped his outstretched hand away. “Fuck off! Either you tell us what’s going on, or—or—”

“Or what?” Dean snapped from behind them. Sam turned; Dean was tense, furious. “This isn’t a democracy. You already fucked this up once, and we’re the ones keeping you alive. You don’t get a say.”

Sammy screamed, “I’m not gonna let him die!”

“I am him! He doesn’t die!”

“That lady says he dies! Who was she? Where’d she go?”

“None of your business!” Dean jabbed a finger at him. “I’m not gonna waste my time fighting with a fucking kid, Sammy, not even you. Sit down, shut up, and don’t get yourself killed.”

“You sound like Dad,” Sammy spat, managing to make ‘dad’ sound like a slur. Dean just sneered at him.

“Yeah, well, Dad’s right.”

Sammy made a snarling, frustrated noise and shoved Dean hard, which didn’t move him much. He stormed into the cabin. “You’re such an asshole.”

Some things don’t change, Sam didn’t say, as he watched the kid go. It was awkward to see himself fight with Dean, upsetting to remember how awful it felt to slam his impotent rage up against his seemingly immutable older brother. It had been bad enough with four years’ difference between them, to say nothing of nearly twenty. ‘Dad’s right’ never lost its sting of betrayal.

Sam had zoned out on the closed cabin door. When he turned, Dean was climbing the stairs down off the porch.

“Hey—”

Dean didn’t even turn around. “Check on him. I’m going out.”

Incredulous anger clawed up Sam’s throat. “You’re going out?”

Dean snatched up the hatchet from where it was resting at the end of the porch.

“Yeah. Out.”

“What’s your problem? We have to—”

“I said I’m going. Stay here.”

“Dean!”

Dean trudged off into the trees like a fucking coward with his hatchet clutched at his side. Sam knew he could have caught up in a few strides—grabbed the hatchet and brained him with it, or if nothing else, shouted at him some more—but he got stuck on the way Dean’s damp shirt clung to his back, and it wiped his brain clean like a shaken etch-a-sketch. He was still mad, but it was fuzzy in his ears, like he was mad in another room. He wondered if this was what Dean went through, and how he ever got anything done if it was. Wanting Dean sunk into Sam’s bones the way sweat soaked into the collar of shirt, warm and sick and spreading.

Dean disappeared farther into the forest until his black shirt was like a distant smudge of soot or a dark, horrible pit, and Sam watched him go.

Sam didn’t go into the house. He couldn’t hear the boys inside and sat sweating on the porch, wondering if they were laying in bed together, mumbling to each other, nervous and quiet and doomed. Maybe Sammy was cleaning Dean’s wounds again, trying to pretend he didn’t notice that they were getting worse, like he always did when Dean was hurt back then.

Sam sat on the edge of the porch, hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He could hear the distant thunk of Dean’s hatchet, he hadn’t gone far. Sam’s hair had dried quickly after his bath and it was still oily, but not as bad as it had been; he wished he had a hair tie to keep it back in the heat.

Another thunk from Dean’s hatchet, somewhere.

Sam didn’t know which was true: if Dean couldn’t die here because he hadn’t died in the future, or if this was some alternate timeline. They didn’t even know if it was real. The younger Dean’s wounds stunk last time Sam was in the cabin, and he was feverish and sick. Their memories weren’t being rewritten—Sam could still picture that first run when he closed his eyes, the heat rash on the backs of his hands, Dean’s shitty shelters and mounting panic—so it was possible that the younger Sam and Dean’s fates weren’t tied to theirs. Whatever that meant. Maybe the younger Dean could die here, not that they knew what that would mean.

Thunk.

Sam squeezed his eyes shut. His jaw hurt from clenching his teeth. If Cas wouldn’t help, they didn’t have many other options. Could a demigod cause the kind of energy outpouring that Cas was talking about, or was it something else? What if it wasn’t Cas on the walkie talkie earlier, and why hadn’t they heard from him since? Why wasn’t the cabin real? What were they doing here?

Thunk.

Things with Dean were worse than they’d been before. They weren’t a united front, they couldn’t even talk. This thing would kill them if they let it. The only thing worse than touching your brother was not touching your brother. They couldn’t afford to have it weighing on them on top of everything else.

Thunk.

Sam rocked onto his feet and stood. He was heading into the forest before he could think about it, numb and terrified. The sun was there and gone across his shoulders as he moved through the trees toward Dean’s sound, the brief hotness of it so strong it was like a hand on his back. He made out Dean’s shape through the trees, peachy pink skin and black shirt and blue jeans, the arc of his hatchet swing.

Dean was hacking up a big, dead tree that lay on the ground, with one foot up on the trunk. He lifted the hatchet all the way over his head with each swing with a fanatical fervor. Heeeeere’s Johnny!

Sam stopped a few yards away and leaned his shoulder against a tree for some play at relaxation, and he shoved his hands in his pockets even though they were swollen and hot. Dean had to have heard him, but he didn’t stop chopping at the tree. Sam watched. Waited. Tried to stop clenching his teeth.

Dean kept chopping. He wasn’t great at it. He needed an axe, not a hatchet, and he wasn’t hacking in at the sides so it could snap in the middle, he was creating a kind of ineffective trench in the centre of the trunk. Not correcting him made Sam’s head hurt. Dean’s shirt was drying in the sun over his shoulders, but stayed wet farther down. It clung to his lower back as he swung and exposed a strip of skin.

Sam swallowed loudly. He couldn’t keep standing there.

“We don’t need more wood.”

He said it mid-swing and Dean’s arms wobbled, only for a second. As soon as the hatchet struck, he heaved it overhead and did it again.

He said, “We can have a fire when it’s dark.”

“We should go before then.”

“What does it matter?”

Sam squinted at the back of Dean’s head. “The people in that commune. The demigod. Come on.”

More swings, harder and more frantic than before. He grunted quietly with the effort of it.

“You said it yourself, we”—swing, thunk—“don’t know the timeline. What’s an extra night?”

“Why are you so okay with taking that risk? The cabin’s not even real, which means something made it, maybe for us, specifically. And Cas said there’s a trap, you don’t think—”

“It’s a fucking cabin, Sam. Four walls and a roof. If you wanna check the perimeter for trap doors and spike pits, be my guest, but I’m tired.” Swing, thunk. “Mini-me’s side is swelling up like a balloon, and mini-you is ready to gank us. I’m sure you’re plenty relaxed after your little spa day, but I’ve been out here—” Another swing, a weak one, and a tandem grunt. “Whatever. Leave me alone.”

It was a misstep, awkward and fumbled, the way Dean said it. Your little spa day. It didn’t matter that Sam took a bath, Dean shouldn’t have been mad, but it meant he was still thinking about it, and that was… off. Telling.

Dean just kept attacking the stubborn trunk; ironic, Sam thought, that he’d be doing something so cartoonishly masculine as chopping wood during the conversation they were about to have.

“Can you stop that?”

Zero hesitation from Dean. “Nope.”

Sam watched, eyebrows tilted, and brought his hand up to his mouth again. He didn’t have any nail left to chew, they were all freshly bitten, sore and raw.

Some awful, childish part of him still had the knee-jerk thought: if I just tell Dean, he can fix it. Like this twisted desire was some flat tire Dean could replace, or a schoolyard bully he could beat into submission. Sam hadn’t depended on him like that for a long time, if ever, but something about this whole thing made him feel small. It was embarrassing and he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t wait for Dean to give up.

“It never went away, did it?”

His voice sounded hollow and far away in his own ears. Dean didn’t catch himself fast enough and Sam saw him flinch at the words. His hatchet bounced off the trunk.

Dean finally went still. He jabbed the cutting edge of the hatchet into the trunk and left it there, still holding the handle, and stared down at it.

Sam waited. Fear made his heart race, tripled by the fact that he couldn’t remember the last time he was scared of Dean. It felt ridiculous, it was Dean, and Dean had no right getting him so worked up. Dean, of bottle rockets and popsicles and sleazy winks, onion rings and the same three dad-rock albums, greasy and loud and needy and stubborn, was now also… this. Broad shoulders, parted lips, hands Sam wanted to— anything, at this point. He wanted to hold Dean down, he wanted to put his ear to his chest and hear the rasp of his breathing and make him lay with his head in his lap so he could trace the shell of his ear with his fingers like he did when they were kids, because it was Dean. He didn’t know what to call it. He wasn’t sure there were words for it, probably for good reason.

He couldn’t stand the silence. His heartbeat was so loud in his ears that he wasn’t sure he could hear anything else anyway.

“Do you just… live like this?” he asked. “All the time?”

Dean ducked his head, just briefly. He recovered and yanked the hatchet out of the tree, but he still didn’t look at Sam.

“Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

He lifted the hatchet again.

“Don’t,” Sam snapped. “Don’t fuck with me. We’re past that.”

Somehow, Dean stopped. He didn’t turn around, but he didn’t keep chopping.

“Fine,” he bit out, “then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why, because I haven’t been hiding it from you for thirteen years?”

Dean didn’t answer right away. When he spoke, his voice was newly quiet, cowed. “It’s not like that.”

“Then tell me what it’s like.” Sam took a wary step towards him, unsteady in the underbrush. “Look at me, at least.”

It took him a second, but Dean slowly turned around. He looked horrible, sweaty, his green eyes panicky and tense. Sam could see his jaw ticking.

Sam waited for him to go first, to tell him, but a handful of seconds passed and then another and he wasn’t moving, wasn’t speaking, and Sam ran out of rope. He took a deep breath.

“I—I feel like I’m watching this—this thing, happen between us—”

Dean slapped a hand over his face. “Oh, God.”

“—and I don’t know how to stop it, or fix it, but I know it’s not going away just because you want it to.”

“Sure it is. Watch this.”

He took a big step over a fallen log and tried to stomp past Sam, back towards the cabin. He made it two steps before Sam’s hand shot out and grabbed his arm.

“Don’t keep running.” Sam tightened the grip on his arm, slick with sweat. “I don’t like it either, but we’re gonna get ourselves killed like this. We’re in danger and I haven’t even been thinking about it. Not really. Because I’ve been”—thinking about you—“distracted. You’ve gotta talk to me.”

Against his better judgment, he let Dean go. Dean, somehow, didn’t leave. He rubbed his arm where Sam’s hand had been and stood there glaring at him, mouth pressed thin and obstinate. Sam wiped a nervous hand on his jeans.

“Fine, then listen.” Sam took another deep breath, and then it all came out in a rush. “If you’re pissed at me because of what I did this morning, and you didn’t want me to, and that’s why you’re not talking—I’m sorry, but we can’t just—”

Dean cut him off.

“I’m not talking because there’s nothing to say. You were messed up on fuck-juice. You— whatever. We’ve both done a hell of a lot worse. I’m not mad.”

Dean, getting him to put his hand over his mouth. Dean, blowing his load after sixty seconds of handjob like some kid. Staring at him wet and naked in that sunny clearing. That stuff didn’t go away.

“You were a little more than ‘not mad,’” Sam said carefully.

Dean sighed noisily, frustrated.

“What part of ‘not talking about this’ don’t you get? I’m giving you an out. Take it. Can I go now?”

Dean was so tense. He wouldn’t look right at Sam and his hands kept moving, touching his face, wiping sweat. Sam stepped in, ducking his head to put it closer to Dean’s.

“So, what, you’re saying it’s affecting me, but not you?”

“I… dunno.”

“And if it were affecting me, why would I jerk you off?”

“I—”

“And, despite the fact that we know it isn’t, you think it’s making me do this stuff?”

“Sam,” Dean barked, “just shut up, alright? I’m not talking about it. Let it go, for once in your fucking life.”

He tried to storm off again. Again, Sam grabbed him, this time by the shoulder, his fingers digging in. Dean yanked his arm back and stumbled, swinging around as he spat some choked-off curse. He took a step back and Sam followed, fisted his hand in Dean’s sleeve and pulled.

“I don’t know why I want it. Okay?” Sam’s voice was shaking. “We don’t have to know. I know it’s not—”

Dean’s hand covered his and tried to pry him off his shirt, nails clawing at his fingers.

“I don’t care. We’re not. You’re not. End of story. Let go, I’m not—”

“You can’t just—”

“Fuck, Sam, I’m begging you. Shut up. Now.”

Dean’s voice was broken and desperate again, the air was fucking crackling between them and Sam couldn’t take it. It was the closest they’d been all day and his mouth was dry and wanting and he didn’t have anything left to keep himself at bay. He wanted to make Dean snap, see sparks, do the stupid thing for no reason other than wanting it.

Sam brought his other hand up and shoved him, and Dean fell back and hit a coniferous tree as wide as his shoulders. Sam got right up in his space, standing between his feet, breathing the same breath, except Dean wasn’t breathing. Dean held his breath and stopped trying to get Sam’s hand off him. His hands flew out in nervous claws that were very conspicuously not touching Sam.

Sam uncurled the hand in Dean’s shirt until it cupped his shoulder, force just shy of threatening. Sam’s face was too close to his to see any more than a blur of eyelash and eyebrow with the few inches between their height, his mouth near Dean’s cheekbone.

He ran the backs of his knuckles down Dean’s stomach and dragged them through his still-wet shirt. Dean let him. Sam could feel his heartbeat, the summer heat of him, the solidity of his muscles. There was another real, human body right up against his, and it was the only body he knew as well as his own. Probably better.

“So if I do this, you’re gonna stop me?”

Sam’s voice didn’t sound like him. Before he could talk himself out of it, he started slipping Dean’s belt free, tugging it through the buckle with numb fingers. Dean had started breathing again, loud, and tipped his chin down to watch. Dean was, miraculously, not stopping him.

Sam said, “Come on, stop me.”

Dean’s mouth worked around nothing for a second. He wet his lips. His hands hovered over Sam’s, empty. Sam hooked his fingers in the waist of Dean’s jeans once he got his belt open.

“You don’t wanna talk about it, fine.” Sam ran his thumb nail along the button of Dean’s jeans. “Say no and I’ll stop.”

He rested his head next to Dean’s on the tree, close enough that his hair brushed Dean’s face. His heart was going a mile a minute, terror bitter in the back of his throat, explosive adrenaline and everything it took to stop his hands from shaking. This was Dean, awake and conscious and standing, and letting him. It was different. Sam wasn’t half as certain he sounded.

“If I don’t want it, and you don’t want it, we’d better not.” He got Dean’s jeans open. He slid his zipper down, tooth by excruciating tooth. “Right?”

Dean was already getting hard, Sam could feel the shape of his dick under his knuckles. He brushed against it as he pulled Dean’s fly down. Sam was hard too, he’d been hard the whole time.

He felt Dean tense up. Sam knew he was either about to get his nose broken, or—

Dean grabbed him by his shoulders, spun him around in a dizzying blur of tangled feet and slammed him back against the tree.

The air left his lungs in a rush. Dean’s palms slapped against his cheeks and held him so hard it hurt, crushing him, fingers dug into his hair. Sam grabbed Dean’s arms to wrench them down, bracing for a fight, but Dean didn’t claw in or swing. He just held him.

Sam brought their foreheads together. Dean was breathing hard and choppy now, all adrenaline, and Sam held onto his arms. They swayed unintentionally.

“It’s okay,” Sam said, fast, swallowing thickly. “Hey. It’s okay.”

He slid a hand up Dean’s arm to his shoulder and pulled him in, closer, so they were pressed together all the way down. Dean’s body was burning hot.

“It’s okay,” Sam said again, more to himself.

He ran his nose along Dean’s, not thinking, mouth open as they breathed into each other. Dean’s thumbs dug into his cheeks hard enough to hurt. Sam thought about this morning—how was it only this morning?—mouthing at the back of Dean’s neck. It was like that, but worse. His toes curled in his boots. Dean’s thigh was right between his and it was agony.

“It’s okay,” Sam said, his voice cracking, and gave Dean’s arms a shake between them. “I mean it.”

All at once, Dean let go. Sam’s hands came up again—grab him if he tried to run, hit him if he tried to fight—but Dean only fumbled with Sam’s belt, and then with his jeans. Sam got a head rush so dizzying his knees went weak.

He breathed, “Yeah,” so quiet it was barely a sound, and Dean dropped to his knees.

Sam sucked in a nervous breath. Dean mashed his face into Sam’s lower belly and pressed an open mouth kiss right above his bush, teeth scraping flat against his taut skin. Dean’s hands dragged Sam’s jeans and boxers down his thighs, nails leaving marks in their wake. He gripped Sam’s bare thighs and made a low, anguished sound, and rolled his face against Sam’s belly. Sam fisted his hands in Dean’s shirt over his shoulders just to hold onto something.

“Dean—”

Dean was breathing hard like he was hyperventilating and Sam’s dick was against his neck and cheek, iron-hard and there, so close the anticipation of it was like jumping off a fucking cliff, and Sam couldn’t think, couldn’t move. Dean spent a few more seconds crushed against Sam’s stomach before he leaned back, fisted Sam’s dick and took it in his mouth.

Sam tipped his head back and screwed his eyes shut, he couldn’t stand to look down, he wouldn’t survive; pleasure so sharp and sudden he wanted to cry, perfect, shattering. Dean’s mouth was warm and wet and he couldn’t take all of him but he tried and it was enough, and Jesus Christ, it was Dean. Ruby hadn’t given much head, she just wanted to get fucked and Sam had been more than happy to work with that, but he missed the luxurious indulgence of it. There was nothing like it. His jeans fell down around his thighs as Dean worked. Sam figured out how to breathe, carefully measured and shaky. There was a faint wet sucking sound and Sam whispered, “Shh,” not thinking, too soft. They weren’t far enough from the cabin to get away with much noise.

Dean used his hand on what he couldn’t fit in his mouth and his hand was so big, his grip was perfect, the bobbing pulse of his mouth and the way he moved his tongue, eager and sloppy—Sam knew Dean had done it before and he could picture it, bar bathrooms across the country with Dean on his knees and Sam probably waiting oblivious back at their table. He wondered if Dean ever came out with flushed cheeks and mussed hair and he never noticed. Maybe Dean wanted him to notice. Maybe Sam had gotten a beer from some bartender who just came down Dean’s throat, and the thought shouldn’t have gotten him so hot, but it did.

He wanted to hold Dean’s face to feel his jaw move as he took Sam deeper, but he couldn’t make himself do it, it was too much, too familiar. A pulse of heat rolled through him, sweat on his upper lip, in the pit of his throat. He couldn’t remember the last time he had sex, the actual last time, and it felt so good his hands shook. Dean’s hair might have been long enough to grab on top, but Sam still couldn’t do it. Dean’s mouth was so soft inside and eager, hungry, more than he ever thought possible. Sam’s brain went blank, needy and numb with disbelief and the shock that there was one more insane thing Dean was willing to do for him. Dean, taking care of him again, making all this sick shit in his brain go crazy. Perfect wet pressure and the pillowy give of his soft palate.

Sam brushed his hand against the side of Dean’s head, he couldn’t help it. He ran his thumb over the soft spot behind Dean’s ear, dug his fingers around the curve of his skull and felt him move. He pushed his hips up without meaning to and Dean’s throat convulsed around him in a gag. Sam had to shove his wrist in his mouth to keep quiet. Dean groaned and Sam felt it in his bones.

Dean pulled off to curl his tongue around the crown of Sam’s dick and kiss it wetly, and Sam’s hand flew to his shoulder and dug into the curve of muscle there, pulling his shirt. Dean took him back down and sucked, twisted his wrist on the upstroke and brought his mouth down to meet it, spit sucking, over and over again until Sam couldn’t take it. He covered his face with his hand and curled in and came so hard and sharp with nothing but a single, shaky intake of breath, emptying into his brother’s mouth, endless.

He thought Dean would swallow, but he didn’t. He gagged on it with an ugly wet sound and spat into the dirt. He kept jerking Sam through it, and it was loose and distracted but it was good, better than good, so draining Sam’s knees gave out and he braced his back against the tree. His fingers ached as he loosened his grip on Dean’s shoulder. His whole body was throbbing.

He opened his eyes, blinking up at the sun as the forest swam into view. He remembered, and looked nervously towards the cabin barely visible through the trees. No movement.

Dean was still on his knees. He was doing up his jeans and there was come on the ground between his legs, drippy white clinging to blades of dry grass. It wasn’t Sam’s, that was to his left where it had been spat.

Sam raised his eyebrows and stared and felt vague regret that he missed it, then immediately felt weird about it, as if that was the weirdest part about what they’d done. Hey, I’ll come in my brother’s mouth, but I draw the line at watching him jerk off to it.

Sam didn’t know what he’d been imagining, before: some messy bump and grind like a couple of repressed kids, or at most, another handjob. Getting blown somehow wasn’t in the realm of possibility.

He scraped together enough brain cells to remember to put his dick away; his hands were clumsy as he pulled up his jeans and boxers and smoothed his shirt down. It was soaked under the arms. It was also, he remembered with a stab of humiliation, John’s USMC shirt. Jesus.

Dean struggled to stand, pushing up on his knees. Sam, not sure what else to do, offered him a hand. It was ignored, but his shirt wasn’t, in a flick of Dean’s eyes and a briefly horrified expression. Dean stood up and Sam’s heart was rabbiting out of control, lost, a dog chasing his tail with no idea what to do when he caught it. Dean was red in the face and clearly panicking just as bad as he was, grim and awkward and wide-eyed.

“Don’t freak out,” Sam said all at once, way too close to saying sorry, too scratched-the-car.

Dean was already freaking out. Sam was freaking out, he was no better. He didn’t know if he wanted to grab him or run, but no matter what he did, it was the end of their previous lives and the start of something new. You couldn’t un-come in someone’s mouth.

“I”—Dean’s voice was rough, used—“shouldn’t have—”

“No,” Sam said quickly, “no, it’s—it was—”

Dean had come on his upper lip, smeared. Sam’s thoughts stopped short and his mouth flooded with spit.

He didn’t think. He reached out and cupped the side of Dean’s face, ignoring his sharp inhale. Dean’s skin was tacky-hot under his palm, and he swiped his thumb over Dean’s lip—it pulled back as he did it, showing teeth, which made a stab of fresh, hot arousal flare in Sam’s gut—and wiped him clean. Keeping his eyes on Dean’s, he brought his thumb to his own mouth and sucked the come off it.

Dean’s pupils were huge, watching. Sam rubbed his tongue over the pad of his thumb, tangy with salt and dirt, and let it go with a quiet pop.

He breathed out, shaky, and reached for Dean again.

His fingers just brushed his neck when there was a scream from the cabin.

“Dean!”

They both jolted like they’d been shocked and spun around, already moving into a run; there was something biologically terrifying about a child’s scream. Two figures came into view by the porch, Sammy’s big white T-shirt and something else.

The two of them burst into the clearing, Sam first with Dean on his heels. Cas’ new-old vessel stood near the steps to the porch. Her dour face turned slowly towards them.

“Hey!” Sam said, out of breath and disoriented. He thought to smooth his hair down and check for bark, too late, but his younger self was staring only at the angel. He hoped he and Dean had disappeared into the forest together often enough before this, to argue and whatever else, that the boys wouldn’t think anything of it. “You’re back!”

Cas narrowed her eyes. It was the only movement on her face.

“I was asked to return by my superiors.” Her gaze slid to the cabin. “I am to heal the boy.”

Dean caught up and walked in stride. “What’s the catch?”

Cas tipped her head to the side.

Sam clarified, “What do you want in return?”

“Nothing,” Cas said. “Only the natural progression of time.”

Sam sighed, and breathed a little easier.

“Great, thank you. He’s inside.”

“Do not thank me. It’s an order,” Cas said testily.

She climbed the steps and opened the rotted door easily. Sam met his younger self on the porch and returned his worried look with a smile.

“He—uh, she—is a friend, from our time. They can heal him.”

He ushered Sammy inside, then paused and looked back at Dean. He was standing at the foot of the porch with his hands in his pockets, looking guilty. No surprise there.

Sam had no idea what to call the thing he felt when he looked at Dean, terrified and horrified but also excited in a way he didn’t want to think too much about. Not unlike the time they broke into an outdoor pool when he was a kid, his skinny body in the blue glow of the deck lights, watching Dean and some neighbour girl and their long, bare legs under the water: in over his head and vaguely pleased about it.

“We’ll talk later,” he said, keeping his voice low.

Dean grimaced. “That a threat?”

The cabin reeked, stuffy and hot and sickly. Cas moved easily in the dark up to the bed where the younger Dean lay on his back with his arm over his face, only half awake. The wound on his side was hideous and the bandage around his forearm had soaked yellow through it. He slid his arm up over his head, blinked his bleary eyes at Cas and frowned.

“Who the fuck is this chick?”

Cas said nothing. She reached out, dodging the inexpertly swatted arm of a sick kid, and placed her hand on Dean’s forehead. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, the wound on his side was gone like it had never been there, even as the sweet smell of its rot still hung in the room. His colour was better, his skin bright.

His eyes flew open and he popped up on his elbows, touching a hand to the spot on his side that, Sam could only imagine, had instantly stopped hurting.

“What?” Another slap to his side, as he twisted his arm out of the way to look down at it. “What? How’d you—”

Cas turned around and fixed her dark eyes on the Sam and Dean hovering by the door, as the younger Sam bolted to the bed and joined his brother’s excited babbling. Sam thought again of how far this Cas was from the Cas they knew, not in appearance, but mannerisms: she lacked the tiny movements that Cas was learning in order to appear human, the fidgetiness of life on Earth. Cas was, still and once again, the first angel to speak to humans.

Cas said, “The emission of energy from the top of the mountain hasn’t ceased. It’s much like this cabin. Something has been artificed. I can’t tell you what.”

Dean asked, “Can’t, or won’t?”

“Can’t. It’s been recently warded.”

“Recently?”

“Yes. In the space of my absence on Earth.” She looked back at the kids on the bed, both of whom had gone still and stared back at her, listening. “I have been asked to return if you die again. Do not waste my time by dying again.”

“Wait—” Sam stepped closer. “We’re not done, are you gonna help us? Can you send us back? Now, or once we—”

Cas turned around. “I was not asked to move you through time.”

“What? But what about—”

She was gone. The boys on the bed unraveled Dean’s bandages with the glee of unwrapping presents on Christmas morning, revealing the smooth, new skin underneath.

Chapter Text

“Dude, knock it off with the puppy-dog eyes, I’m fine.”

“They’re not puppy-dog eyes! They’re… magic eyes.”

It was nearly dark. They packed up and left the cabin three hours ago, after a round of cold baths, water and rations. The boys took up the lead, continuing the hike. Sammy had been staring at his brother unceasingly since they left.

“We’ve been magic-healed before,” young Dean said, his voice betraying some slight unease. “There was that witchy chick in Omaha that one time, when Dad got poisoned by that snake-beast thing. She did a purifying spell on him.”

Sammy said, “Yeah, a spell. This wasn’t a spell, she just touched you! Instantly! How do you not know what it felt like?”

“Because it didn’t feel like anything! One second it hurt, and then it didn’t. I’m not a fucking doctor, Sammy, I dunno.”

The younger Sam turned around and walked backwards to face the two older men. Sam couldn’t see his face very well at the tail end of twilight, but there was a distinct frown.

“Are you seriously not gonna tell us what she was?”

“No,” Sam said. “It’s not important. She’s a friend.”

“From the future? Why didn’t she take you with her?”

“She’s not from the future, she’s from now.”

“But we’re you from now, and we don’t know her! What are you talking about?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s space-time continuum stuff.”

“She didn’t even like you! Why’d she heal Dean if she doesn’t like you? Is she even human? Okay, wait, what if I guess?”

The older Dean waved a hand at the younger Sam. “Walk forwards, you’re gonna trip.”

Sam didn’t look over at Dean, but the sound of his voice made him twitch. Since they set out, Sam’s internal monologue had been a loop of you came in his mouth, you came in his mouth, with the occasional sharp stab of he sucked your dick and he liked it. It wasn’t helpful. He couldn’t stop. He hadn’t looked Dean in the eye for more than a few consecutive seconds since it happened. Figuring out exactly how he felt about it would have required him to think about it clearly and calmly, which he hadn’t done yet.

Sam said, “Don’t guess. We won’t tell you.”

Sammy didn’t turn around. “Why not?”

“Okay, fine, she was a witch. Happy? A super powerful human witch, who we know from the future. Case closed.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“No, I don’t. Stop asking, it’ll break your brain.”

“But—”

Dean cut in. “Don’t make me turn this car around.”

Sam was on edge, not ‘on edge’ like angry, but… He subtly adjusted his dick in his jeans. He felt feral. He could still see Dean on his knees in front of him, the hacking sound he made when Sam pushed into his throat, Dean’s hot breath washing over his mouth when they were grabbing at each other like they’d die if they didn’t. Dean’s hands had been shaking. Nerves, maybe, but it felt more like holding back.

The younger Dean spoke up.

“Can we stop for the night? I’m gonna eat shit out here, I can’t see.”

Sam got his faculties back. “Not yet, we’re making up for lost time. Get your flashlight out.”

“Sammy can’t see his map.”

Sammy, spinning back around: “I can see fine!”

“You’re gonna wreck your eyes reading in the dark.”

“I read in the dark all the time, and I see better than you! It’s up this way—” He checked his compass, head bent over it. He pointed forwards, then arced his arm. “Then west once it gets steeper. Don’t be a wuss.”

Young Dean grumbled, “I liked you better when you thought I was dying,” and Sammy grabbed his backpack and pulled to stumble him off balance.

Sam smiled to himself. It was sweet.

You came in his mouth. You came in his mouth and YOU liked it. You fucking loved it.

Sam squeezed his eyes shut, then immediately tripped over a root. Next to him, Dean didn’t even chuckle at his expense.

For all Sam’s talk about getting it out in the open, he wasn’t handling it well. It turned out: the only thing worse than not touching your brother was touching your brother. So much for not being distracted. He was an idiot. He had to believe it would be fine.

“Okay.” He cleared his throat. “We should talk about the next area of influence before it gets too hard. Are you two, uh… handling this one okay?”

The terrain had gotten steeper and they fell into single file, so Dean was blissfully behind him and not in awkward-glancing range.

After a long beat, the younger Dean said, “No comment.”

Another silence, and then Sammy. “It’s weird. But it’s whatever.”

Easier for him than his brother, Sam figured, without the burden of attraction. It gave him a shameful twist in his gut. There was no world where it would help for him to talk to the younger Dean about the ‘desire,’ but he thought about telling Dean to. He doubted it would go much better, but being left to deal with it alone couldn’t be fun.

He’d been quiet too long. Young Dean said, “So, what’s the next one? Being drunk or something, you said?”

“Kind of,” Sam said slowly. “Intoxication. We’ve never experienced it first-hand, but reports say it’s this mild state of euphoria. Relaxation, disorientation, slow reaction time.”

Behind him, Dean asked his younger self, “You’ve smoked weed by now, right? Right.” He paused. “And Sam. Little Sam, I mean. You… have?”

Sammy said, “Kinda. I didn’t really feel anything.”

Sam vaguely remembered the first time he smoked, probably about thirteen. Dean came home from some party and offered to split the rest of a joint with him, and then they watched half a movie together in their motel room with the lights off. It felt clandestine and adult, one notable big-brother-bonding-moment of many.

“Rad,” young Dean said. “Free dope. Easy.”

“Not easy,” Sam snapped, annoyed. “We’re running out of food, we don’t know where we are, and whatever’s up there could get the drop on us at any second. We don’t want to be stoned.”

“I know. It’s just not the worst thing in the world.”

“No, but it’s not rad.”

He saw the shape of the younger Dean turn around to look back at him in the dark, gait slowing. Deciding whether he wanted to pick a fight. Sam couldn’t see well enough to make it worth glaring at him.

“Just don’t be stupid,” the older Dean said. “We’ll be fine.”

Sam wasn’t so sure. He hadn’t really smoked since college, but he remembered it well enough, and he wasn’t looking forward to it. It made him lax and complacent, and he needed to be anything but, both for the hunt, and for— he didn’t know what he was calling it. The Dean Thing. The Coming in Dean’s Mouth Thing. Maybe he was dwelling on it, sue him.

“Reports vary on how strong the effects are,” he added, trying to be helpful. “It might not be bad. We’re aware of it at least, we know what to expect. We’ll still be functioning.”

He didn’t say: like the demigod’s other effects, the intention was to put its enemies in a state of disoriented distraction. To cause problems. It wasn’t supposed to be easy.

Up ahead, the younger Dean snorted. “Functioning. That’s optimistic.”

They fell into a nervous, tired silence. Sammy caught up to Dean, but the older two stayed single file. Sam watched the kids’ faint silhouettes through the trees and tried to imagine how it would have gone if him and Dean were doing this back then, stolen minutes in fleabag motel rooms when John left them alone, and how twisted it would have gotten when John was gone for weeks at a time, when Dean was more like a father than a brother; Dean’s teenaged hand creeping across the top of a headboard to curl around his nape while they were stoned and watching Drunken Master. It was complicated enough now, and he wasn’t sure he’d wish it on them any earlier. He tried to think of what he would have done with it at thirteen, if he’d known. He came up empty.

Sam slept poorly that night, worse than even the usual poor sleep their sweltering tent had provided. He kept waking up with his ankle hooked over or under Dean’s calf or his knee against his thigh, unsure which of them had put what where and whether Dean was knowingly letting it stay. He tossed and turned all night.

When he woke up after his final short sleep and rolled over, the tent was empty and Dean’s bedroll was cool. There was a crackle from outside, some ways away. Silence, then another.

Sam waited a moment, eyes on the open tent flap and its slice of sky. He crept his hand out from under his pillow, dragged Dean’s pillow into his face and breathed in deep. It didn’t smell as much like him as normal, none of the product he used in his hair and no lingering smell of coffee, but it was still Dean. It was comforting.

Sam dropped it, flooded with belated shame. God.

He pulled on jeans and his white V-neck and shuffled out of the tent, hunching into another dry, hot morning. It wasn’t far past dawn, the light still dim and shadowless, and the kids’ tent was shut.

Dean was sitting on the ground between the two tents in front of a small fire, next to a pile of wood that hadn’t been there last night. Sam sighed to himself, only mildly exasperated by Dean’s emotional support fire.

Dean was whittling again. Sam watched him as he approached: Dean would take a slice off the wood in his hand with his pocket knife, examine it, then turn the piece slightly and do it again. There was a dusting of wood curls between his knees, so he’d been at it for a while.

Sam sat next to him without saying anything. Dean didn’t look up or pause in his whittling, which suited Sam fine. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen Dean whittling and dredged up a memory a couple years old: sitting in the car on a stakeout—he couldn’t remember what they were staking out, but it was a summer night parked on a suburban street somewhere in the South—while Dean stuck his arms into a shrub in someone’s front yard to find a stick that was the right shape for whittling. He came back with leaves stuck in the collar of his jacket and a scratch on his cheek. He succeeded in getting the bark sheared off the stick by the time they had to jump out of the car.

Sam kept watching him. It felt stupid to even try to pretend he wasn’t, all things considered. He let his eyes wander over Dean’s face; his cheekbones, his jaw, which had been shaven clean since the last time Sam saw him. Sam rubbed at his own jaw, conscious of his scraggly stubble. He remembered the rasp of it catching against Dean’s cheek the day before, in the forest, as Sam looked down at him between his lashes when he had Dean back against the tree.

Even beyond the dull, persistent horniness, when he looked at Dean, it had started to hold the starry-eyed, all-consuming obsession of a shiny new relationship, where he felt sick if their hands weren’t on each other and he couldn’t think about anything else for more than two minutes. He felt dumb and slow under the weight of it, incessant and single-minded. It was scaldingly new. Dean had always been Dean, but now he was a crush. Sam was fond over him in new, confusing ways. His brain didn’t know what to do with it. It didn’t fit anywhere.

He’d been staring at Dean’s hands for almost a full minute, but only then did he really take in what Dean was carving. He leaned forwards for a better look.

“Are you trying to make that look like my fat dog statue?” he asked.

Dean’s knife stilled. “Your what?”

“My fat dog statue. The little wooden thing I carried around in the bottom of my bag when I was a kid. Some motel tchotchke.”

It was one of the many pieces of ephemera they found on their travels, things a kid’s sticky fingers picked up and then discarded just as easily: kitsch that other motel guests left behind in drawers, things they found on park benches, mindless gifts from forgotten friends at a hundred different schools. The stuff sat in their bags or got kicked around the floorboard of the car until they were eventually forgotten somewhere for someone else to find, or else thrown out in gas station trash cans with little thought. Sam toted the poorly made wooden dog statue through twenty states in his mid-teens, along with a book of crosswords half-finished by some stranger who was very bad at crosswords, a sandwich baggie containing three candy hearts that had been misprinted with typos, and a pendant that was a little mariachi singer made of brightly coloured beads. He always thought of them as lucky.

He took the chunk of wood from Dean and ran his fingers over the dog’s back, thinking. Dean had gotten it surprisingly close to the way Sam remembered it: the barrel belly, the skinny legs and the flat, triangular ears. It looked basically done; he’d been working on carving out its paws from the cylindrical legs.

“I can’t believe you remember,” Sam mumbled, turning it over and back. “I haven’t thought about that thing in years.”

It took Dean a second to reply.

“You had a wooden dog?”

Sam looked over at him. Their shoulders were a foot apart, faces close enough that he could make out the smattering of freckles over Dean’s nose.

“Yeah. My luck-talisman-thing. The fat dog.” He held it out to Dean. “That’s not why you’re making it?”

Dean took the dog gingerly between two fingers. He turned it over the same way Sam had.

“No. I don’t remember yours.”

“Huh.” Their eyes met. Sam scrunched up his eyebrows. “That’s…”

There was something he meant to say after that, something important about the fabric of spacetime and his lucky fat dog, but Dean’s eyes left his and dropped to his mouth, then to his chest, then back up, and suddenly it seemed like they were sitting a lot closer than they had been.

“… Weird,” Dean finished for him.

Dean swallowed. They were so close Sam could hear it. He watched his throat move.

Slowly, so as not to be a threat, Sam reached out and closed his fingers gently around Dean’s arm above his wrist.

“You’re freckling,” Sam said quietly. He turned Dean’s hand over and pushed his thumb up the soft inside of his forearm, already sticky with sweat, where constellations of freckles had started to bloom. “In the sun. You never freckle anymore. I like it.”

It was the hand that was holding the knife. Dean’s fingers slackened around it.

“Yeah?”

His voice was just a rumble, so quiet Sam could barely hear it over the rush of blood in his ears.

Sam went, “Mhm.”

Dean was staring at him unblinking, and his ears were red. Sam was fucking feral. His heart leapt in his chest, snarling, pulling on its leash.

“Did you,” he started, and had to swallow. His mouth was dry. “Did you like my hand over your mouth?” He couldn’t look at Dean anymore and dropped his eyes. “In the tent.”

He kept rubbing his thumb over the inside of Dean’s arm, back and forth. In his peripheral, he saw Dean’s lips part like he was going to say something, but he didn’t.

Sam said, “You wanna go do it again?”

His vision was practically blurring, tunneling to his hand on Dean’s arm. It seemed so easy now, easy to the point of why haven’t we done this before, the way they could slip off into the forest and fool around like a couple of high schoolers. Maybe they’d always been this close to it: one fight that slid sideways into something else and it would have felt so good to choke Dean a little bit, watch him squirm. It did fit. He couldn’t believe he never saw how well it fit.

Without moving Sam’s hand off him, Dean slowly set his knife down on the ground. When he stood, Sam stood with him.

Dean was good with his hands, no surprise. Sam didn’t know what to do with his free one, or his mouth. They weren’t kissing, had never kissed, which—whatever—but that meant Sam didn’t put his mouth anywhere else either, didn’t lick and suck at the side of Dean’s neck, or bite him. But he thought about it, loudly.

They’d gone far enough from the camp for privacy. Sam had his back against a tree again, his legs apart so Dean could stand close, and they jerked each other off. Sam didn’t know what to do with the hand that wasn’t on Dean’s dick, but he was close enough to coming that he was about to stop caring.

Dean was quiet, just the occasional huffed breath against the top of Sam’s chest. He kept his head down so Sam couldn’t see his face, but it didn’t rest against him. Dean was relentless, apparently not as put off by the angle as Sam, and worked him tight and fast in his fist. He spat into his palm once. Their knuckles bumped. Sam was kind of glad Dean was looking down, because Sam was sure his face was all screwed up and stupid with pleasure and he didn’t need Dean seeing it.

Dean knew what he was doing. Sam could only hope Dean’s heavy breathing and the way one of his knees was resting on the inside of Sam’s, for stability, meant Sam was doing alright, too. He hadn’t worked up the courage to do whatever he was going to do with the choking thing—no idea how that was supposed to go when it was his brother, if Dean still wanted it, but—Sam also wanted it, it turned out. Even thinking about it was doing something for him. Dean, asking for this vulnerable, intimate thing, wanting him to—

He pulled on Dean’s arm, nudged him with his shoulder and turned him around. Dean struggled for a moment before he went willingly, hand slowing on Sam’s dick, breathing out hard as his back hit the tree where Sam’s had been. Sam hesitated, overthinking—he could use his forearm maybe, but that was too much like a fight and this wasn’t that, not in any way that mattered—before closing his hand around the front of Dean’s throat.

He stayed in close, turned his face down and nuzzled at Dean’s hairline, brushed his mouth against Dean’s temple, breathed him in. Dean made a soft sound of surprise, a struggled gasp, fuck, and it went straight to Sam’s dick. Sam’s pace had gotten screwy but he felt Dean pulse in his hand and he sped up, encouraged. He dug his fingers into the fleshy part of Dean’s neck, pressed into his throat with his palm and felt Dean’s windpipe flex, disgusting and beautiful. Sam squeezed Dean’s dick at the same time. He put a thumb over the vein that ran up the side of his neck.

Dean kept stroking him through it, their hands brushing. Dean shifted back against the tree, heels dragging in the dirt, one boot sliding up Sam’s ankle. His face had gone red. It was scaldingly intimate to have him pinned like that, bearing an overwhelming amount of trust and power. Dean, prickly and stubborn, was letting his little brother choke him out. He wanted him to.

Sam hissed through his teeth. He was close; he couldn’t remember the last time he came from a handjob. Dean’s free hand groped up his arm to hang onto his shoulder and the contact was its own kind of good, the closeness and heat of it was physical and hot and real. Sam groaned into Dean’s hair, eyes shut, body going tight.

Dean swore, a choked, hacking sound, and angled his hips away as he came first. Sam was too close to watch—somewhat put off to realize that he wanted to watch, he wanted to see Dean come—but he kept his hand moving as best as he could and felt Dean’s dick throb as he shot into the dirt.

Sam pressed closer without meaning to, their chests flush, his hand slackening on Dean’s neck. The amulet crushed between them, a sharp point that reminded him, Dean. Sam mouthed at Dean’s temple, tested his teeth against the soft skin there and came into Dean’s hand with a shaking sigh of release.

“Shit,” Dean swore again, a puff of breath Sam felt against his neck. “Asshole.”

Sam was still coming, eyes shut. He slid his hand off Dean’s neck and held his shoulder, mostly to keep his knees from giving out. Dean’s hand was no longer on his own shoulder.

He looked down between them and saw a streak of his come on Dean’s jeans at the outside of his hip, but he also saw Dean’s hand around his dick and vice versa. He hadn’t really looked before, and it was hypnotizing. They were strangely matching. His was bigger, but they were the same shade of flush, the same shape. Dean’s nails were dirty. His fingers were still right up under the crown of Sam’s dick, squeezing.

“Sorry,” Sam breathed, watching, entranced. He didn’t really mean it, but it came out.

He looked up, still so close that he could just see shapes, colours; the pink blur of Dean’s open mouth and the wet tongue inside, his red face. Sam let him go and watched as Dean rubbed at the hand-shaped mark on the front of his throat, fading quickly. Sam turned away as they did up their jeans, like privacy suddenly meant something.

His brain was buzzing and empty, no safe thoughts to land on. They hadn’t said anything as they went into the forest, there was just an unspoken understanding and glassy-eyed arousal leading them on. He hadn’t thought much more than good, okay, good, Dean’s into it, this is a good thing, let’s do it.

He assumed that talking might follow the fooling around. He realized now that he’d been stupidly optimistic (again) when Dean just stood there, wiping at the jizz on his hip with the heel of his hand. He succeeded in making it look slightly less like someone had come on him.

The only thing Sam could think to say was, “I… don’t, normally. This much.” As if the frequency of the thing was the embarrassing part.

Dean shrugged and said, “I know,” like that wasn’t a fucking insane thing to know about your brother.

“You know?”

“Yeah. You jerked off twice yesterday, before… yeah.” Before Sam could ask, he explained, “You get this glow after you nut.”

“A glow.”

“Yeah. Like a pregnant chick.” He pointed at Sam’s face. “Like that.”

Sam felt his face get hotter. It was embarrassing to be so known, but jerking off wasn’t the part of this he wanted to talk about.

“Well,” he tried, “not that that’s the only reason I’m doing… it. This. I’m not just— yeah.”

He could physically see Dean shut it down. It was something about how he held his mouth and jaw, the hard press of it. Dean started to head back towards the camp.

“Sure.”

Sam followed him. “Hey. I mean it.”

“I said sure.”

“Dean—”

“Look,” Dean barked, cutting him off with a wave of his hand and not turning around. “Don’t act like you’re not just as bad as me at this touchy-feely crap. You wanna talk about it so bad? Kick us off.”

Sam wasn’t prepared for the instant horror he felt over that. Why did anything happen? A bunch of tiny, insignificant events took place one after another, unnoticed until they weren’t. There was a line of cosmic dominoes somewhere that connected ‘you used to sleep in my crib’ with ‘I jerked you off yesterday,’ and it would take a lifetime for Sam to comb through everything that happened in between. Saying that he thought they could figure it out together seemed maudlin, but it was true. He knew he wanted to be closer. Outside of that, he was still working it out.

Dean said, “That’s what I thought.”

It was beyond annoying that Dean had called his bluff. Sam didn’t even think he was bluffing.

Dean wasn’t slowing down, and they were almost back at camp. Their orange tent blinked at them through the trees. Sam was running out of time, another mis-timed swing.

“We can’t just keep—”

“Fine, then don’t. I’m not making you do this shit. If you don’t wanna do it, don’t do it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

It was about as close as either of them had gotten to saying anything meaningful about it, and it was ‘I don’t not want you to keep touching my dick.’ Not exactly poignant. If Sam hadn’t been looking at Dean as he said it, he might have missed the way Dean twitched—he almost looked back at Sam, but he caught himself and didn’t.

Dean said, “Then shut up about it ‘til you’ve got something to say.”

Sam wanted to be the bigger man, he wanted to be brave. He wanted to shake Dean until he said one honest word about whatever the hell was happening between them. He was furious that he couldn’t just say it himself, but if Dean didn’t want to talk, it would be like throwing himself against a brick wall. That, and he was so nervous it felt like his heart was beating lopsided.

He had one last thought. He took a quick step to catch up to Dean, grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. Dean put up an arm like he was going to block a hit, but Sam knocked it out of the way and pulled him into a hug so hard Dean huffed a quiet oof into his ear.

Sam tucked his face against him with his cheek crushed against his ear. Dean’s hands were out, frozen, and Sam thought maybe they were in the middle of their first ever unreciprocated hug—it was finally too much, he’d gone too far and it was broken now, but—Dean melted. He folded his arms around Sam, body swaying in.

For a second, Sam thought he could smell the implacable scent of the Impala; recycled air, vinyl seats and Dean’s leather jacket. It was a fleeting sense memory replaced quickly by sweat and unwashed clothes, dirt and sap and skin.

“You don’t have to have all the answers, but don’t be a dick.” Sam turned his head and mumbled into Dean’s neck. “You know I like you, right?”

Dean breathed out long and slow and turned his face down against Sam’s shoulder, tension bleeding out. He was never great at talking, but he took a hug like nobody’s business. It was a hug like any of the other thousand hugs they shared when they were scared, stressed, lost or hurting. It was solid and familiar. Brotherly.

Dean eased him back, but only after a while. He did the thing he always did where he looked around furtively after a hug, as if making sure nobody had seen them. The coast was clear. He avoided Sam’s eyes and patted him on the shoulder, also very brotherly. Like a guy who definitely hadn’t been choked by said brother for sex reasons.

Dean coughed. “Okay, that’s… Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Dean also had a glow, now that Sam thought to look for it. Sam nodded at him, satisfied, and Dean gave him a guilty but not entirely unhappy look back. It counted as progress.

Back at the camp, the small fire had died down to coals. Sam ducked into their tent and grabbed their water bottles, then joined Dean by the fire’s remains. Sam dropped Dean’s water bottle into his hands as he sat next to him.

“Drink up, we’re due.”

Dean shook his head and scoffed. “Right, that’s why I feel like shit.”

He twisted the cap off his bottle and drank. Sam watched him, then looked down at his own bottle and shook it.

“I’m feeling kind of light. You?”

“Yeah.” Dean looked over his shoulder. “The creek’s… south? Which is…?” He pointed towards their tent behind them.

“I think so.” Sam followed his gaze. “I keep getting turned around. There’s something about this place.”

“Yeah, ‘something’ like dehydration and heat exhaustion.”

“Maybe.”

Sam felt gauzy and weird, but he was dehydrated. He also hadn’t slept well, he was under-fed, and he just came. His body was going in ten different directions at once and most of them weren’t good. If they’d gotten turned around, it wasn’t surprising.

He took a mouthful of water. Dean poked at the coals in the fire with his boot heel. It was as close to a companionable silence as Sam could have hoped for after getting each other off. It made him think of how it might be in the car with Dean, after, back home. If this was something they decided to do there. Cracking a beer at some scenic lookout after getting each other off in the back seat. Sam didn’t hate the idea of that. Sam, maybe, really didn’t hate the idea of that.

There were soft voices from the boys’ tent and the swishy sound of the tent walls moving. Sam swallowed some minor disappointment at the intrusion on their quiet morning.

“Hey,” he called to the kids, “bring out the map. We’ve gotta find the creek.”

There was more shuffling, and snatches of voice.

“What do you mean it’s—”

“—don’t know! It’s not—”

“Sam! The fuck—”

The younger Sam burst out of the tent, hauling his open backpack behind him. A tangle of paracord and a T-shirt were caught up in the pack’s straps and trailed after him. He threw the bag on the ground and started digging through it, tossing everything out.

“It’s here! It’s gotta be here, I always put it— D, get your friggin’ bag out!”

From the tent: “I’m coming! God.”

Young Dean appeared from the tent hole, hair flat on one side from sleep, looking considerably less awake than his brother. He dragged his pack out, also open and spilling its contents. He looked at the two brothers by the fire and said, deadpan, “Sam lost the map.”

“I didn’t lose it, I just can’t find it!”

“Then it’s lost, brainiac!”

“Shut up and help me look!”

Sam and Dean shared an alarmed look. They’d been following the map constantly, enough that it had gotten dirty and battered. If it wasn’t in Sammy’s hands, it was in his pocket.

“It’s not in your shorts?” Sam asked, rolling up onto his haunches and standing. He went over to where half of his younger self was buried inside his giant backpack, both arms all the way in.

“It’s not anywhere! I didn’t do anything, I swear, I— Dean, it’s not in your bag?”

The younger Dean had put his pack down and was taking everything out of it. “I wouldn’t take the map, dude. It’s your thing.”

They’d been tracing their path through the unmarked wilderness using the map’s topographic features; where it went up sharply or down, cliffs in the mountainside, that kind of thing, and Sammy had been marking their progress in spots with a pencil. With that gone, they just had the compass, which was of limited helpfulness without the map to orient them.

Dean was up and standing next to him. “You’ve still got the compass?”

“Yes!” young Sam snapped, testy. “I’m not stupid!”

“Hey, calm down. We’ll all look.”

They spent the better part of an hour turning their bags inside out looking for the map, and backtracking the way they came searching the ground, burning away the coolest hours of the day.

Young Sam had gotten increasingly panicky and guilty by the time he appeared back at the camp, flustered and sweaty, with twigs in his hair. Sam watched him wring his hands from where he was sitting in front of the contents of his pack, idly reading the label on his jug of kerosene for something to do.

“No dice?” Dean called out. He was sitting next to Sam, putting everything back into his bag.

The kid looked miserable. “Nothing.”

Sam frowned. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

They had a rough idea of where they needed to go—it was a mountain, they went up—and the compass would still help. It was a setback, but not dire. Finding the creek was another thing entirely, but he didn’t think they had more than a day left before they got to the top. They’d either find it on their way up or on the way back down.

The younger Dean caught Sammy on his way towards them and slung an arm around his neck in a playful headlock.

“C’mon, Sammy, don’t mope. You could find your way out of a labyrinth with a twig and some string. Don’t sweat it.”

He sounded almost believable, but something was off. Sammy frowned at his backpack and its contents still strewn over the ground. “Whatever.”

They put their packs back together and headed off, following the compass and their collective memory of where they needed to go. The boys went up ahead with young Sam sullenly dragging his feet. The heat was worse than ever, maybe intensifying as they approached the demigod or maybe just feeling magnified in comparison to their brief respite at the cabin the day before. The trees kept dwindling and the sun beat down hard. They were all wearing their shirts to avoid worse sunburns than they already had.

Sam walked in a daze, not thinking, just putting one foot in front of the other. He didn’t feel thirsty but he knew he was by the way his head was pounding. It wasn’t good.

Next to him, Dean absentmindedly rubbed his throat.

Sam hadn’t dug in hard enough to leave a mark, but he could picture it. He kept his eyes forward and tried to think about other things, the heat and danger and the way his boots were pinching the back of his heel, because hiking with a boner was uncomfortable.

The boys said something to one another, young Dean waving an arm, and then Sammy ran up ahead while Dean looked over his shoulder at the two men behind him. He dropped back to meet them as they walked.

“You good?” Dean asked him.

The younger Dean looked between them, lingering for longer on Sam. They hadn’t said much to one another since their talk in the cabin while the kid was wasting away on the bed and loopy with painkillers. Every time Sam looked at him, he heard him say he tried to find pamphlets on electroshock therapy, because of Sam, and guilt turned his stomach.

“It’s Sam,” young Dean said. He looked forwards again, scanning, and he kept his voice low. “I swear I don’t know when he lost the map.”

Dean said, “Dude, we’re not your dads. You’re not in trouble. It’s just, whatever.”

“No, man, I mean—I don’t know when he lost it. Like I seriously don’t know how he could have done it.”

Sam frowned down at him. “What do you mean?”

He held up his hands and made some motions as he spoke, folding and tucking some invisible thing.

“Every night, he takes off his shorts, takes the map out of his pocket, folds it up and tucks it into his bag before he lays down. Compass, then map, both outta the pockets. Every night.”

“Did he do it last night?”

“Yeah! That’s the thing. I saw him do it.”

Sam raised his eyebrows. He assumed it had been dropped the night before in the dark, that Sammy missed his pocket and hadn’t noticed.

“Then where’d it go?”

Young Dean glared up at him. “Right, ‘cause I know where it is, and I let us spend an hour grubbing through the dirt for shits and giggles. Thanks.”

“Hey, hey.” The older Dean put his hand on Sam’s arm. The kid was the one getting worked up, but he touched Sam anyway, and it made Sam break out in goosebumps. Dean looked down at his younger self. “Did you see him get up in the night?”

He shook his head and surveyed ahead again. “He wouldn’t lose it on purpose.”

Sam said, “Yeah, but did he get up?”

“No, okay?”

“You can’t be sure. Maybe you didn’t hear him.”

Young Dean sucked his teeth and looked away. He fussed with his backpack straps and the amulet. “He was…” He made another motion with his hands, more indistinct. “Laying on me. Kind of. I’d feel if he got up.”

A weird flush rolled down Sam’s spine as he tried to remember whether that was new for them at that age. Sure, they woke up close when they were kids, but that was on too-soft motel mattresses that sagged in the middle; they didn’t have a choice. Or on couches, or the back seat, or a foam mat on Pastor Jim’s floor. Sam would wake up with his head on Dean’s arm or his face in his pit, maybe Dean’s leg hooked over his or his arm thrown across his back, but that was normal stuff. Victims of circumstance.

He realized he’d been staring blankly at the younger Dean, who was now scowling at him. “What?”

Sam tried to shrug casually. He knew he looked stupid.

“Nothing.”

He glanced over at Dean. Dean was conveniently absorbed in getting dirt out from under his nails. Sam grimaced, at him and at all of them. Three guys (or two, depending on how you looked at it) dancing around the same thing that they all knew, but refused to share. High school drama, some decades removed.

“We’re super pathetic when he’s not around,” Sam said bleakly. He gave the younger Dean a gentle push forwards. “Go find your brother. We’ll catch up.”

He slouched off, seeming grateful to have the conversation over with. Sam rubbed his neck, aching and gritty with dirt and sweat, his mind spinning its wheels as he watched the kid go.

Dean asked, “Whatcha thinking?”

Sam was thinking: I have no idea where that map went. We should have done more planning before we left Oak Run. I can’t tell if it’s good or bad that you haven’t seen Zachariah again. I want to go down on you so bad it’s making me stupid. I can’t stop thinking about what it would be like.

“Not much,” Sam lied, trying not to look at him. “I don’t like the map being gone, but it is what it is. Maybe the intoxication’s hitting him early, or hitting him worse. I feel…” He rubbed his fingers together. “Fuzzy. So, maybe he’s worse. This is the kind of thing that’s gonna keep happening.”

Impossible to say whether he felt fuzzy because of the demigod or because of the heat radiating off Dean’s body next to him, or the memory of Dean’s dick in his hand, or, like they figured earlier, the dehydration and exhaustion that the demigod’s effects were minimizing perfectly. Since tearing down camp, Sam felt different: it was the first day he felt really, truly tired. His head pounded, his knees ached worse than any day before it and his feet were heavy and clumsy.

“That’s optimistic,” Dean said slowly. “Not feeling him get up in the night is…”

Sam snorted. “What, you wake up every time I get up to piss?”

“Dude, I wake up every time you roll over. I’m a hunter.”

“Try overbearing and sleep-deprived.” Sam leaned over and bumped their shoulders. “Freak.”

Dean huffed and Sam caught a bit of a smile as he turned away, a crinkled cheek. It would have been an inch towards normal if Sam didn’t experience an emotion several dozen notches away from brotherly. He stared at Dean’s mouth, thinking.

“You stoned yet?” Dean asked.

Sam rubbed his fingers together again, considering. Keeping his eyes off Dean was like resisting the pull of a magnet.

“Maybe.”

Dean whistled and shook his head. “This is gonna be one hell of a day.”

They moved up the mountain in a fugue state, endurance low, letting the hours tick by. Sam figured they were moving at half the speed they had been on the first few days, maybe even less. His skin felt cracked and dry and his headache pounded ceaseless between his eyes. Nobody else looked any better. With the best memory of their lost map, the younger Sam led their way, weaving through the pine trees with their peeling bark and rust-orange needles. Even calling what they went through a ‘forest’ didn’t feel accurate anymore. It was a wasteland.

“So,” young Dean called back, not turning around, “the kerosene. I guess we should talk about a plan, huh?”

Sam squinted at the back of his head. It was embarrassing to need to be told.

“Right. Yeah. I mean… We won’t know until we can scope the place out. All we know is that fire kills her, and she’s… up there.”

“You called it a ‘compound,’ before. What’s that mean?”

“That’s just what the news called it, a ‘mormon compound.’ I think it’s just a village or something. Maybe a farm.”

Young Dean looked over his shoulder. “You think. Maybe.”

Sam squinted up at him. “Hey, real quick, describe a grainy photo you saw in the paper thirteen years ago.”

Dean sneered at him and turned back around.

The older Dean called up ahead. “Shut up! You’re making us look bad.” To Sam: “We run kerosene around the perimeter and trap her. We start a grass fire. We turn our water bottles into Molotovs if we can’t get close. Don’t sweat it, we got options.”

“I guess.”

Sam didn’t like it. It was sloppy. They were going in blind the way they’d walked into a dozen traps in the past, and just like all those other times, they were going to ignore the sinking feeling in their guts because they were out of better options. He hated it.

“What about the walkie talkie?” Sam asked. “Cas said ‘trap.’ You heard that, right?”

Dean shrugged. “Knowing it’s a trap doesn’t do us much good on its own. Unless he feels like tuning back in—” He flicked the walkie talkie hooked to his belt for emphasis. “We’re shit out of luck.”

Sam sighed, frustrated, and tucked his hair behind his ear. Dean looked over at him when he did it, and Sam looked back.

They spent a second like that, looking. Dean’s eyes were acid green in the midday sun, freckles stark, nose burnt pink. The tan made him look older and weathered. It worked for him. The soft skin of his neck shone with sweat, and Sam stared.

It wasn’t about being horny—or it was, but—he wanted to stick Dean in a jar and tap on the glass, put him through some rigorous testing, stare at him until his eyes fell out of his head. What he was uncertain about the day before was now crystal clear: for whatever reason, Dean wanted him. Maybe Dean had always wanted him, and every day for probably pretty close to his full twenty-six years, Sam had missed it. He couldn’t understand how he missed it. He wanted to study Dean in a lab. When I tap on your knee with this tiny mallet, do you still want to fuck me?

Jesus, Sam was the one who needed to be studied in a lab. He couldn’t stop thinking about Dean from every angle, turning this whole thing over to find the cracks. In the absence of a lab and some truth serum, he made do with staring. Maybe, if he was lucky, he could steal a few minutes to drag Dean out into the forest again. See what he did about it.

They hiked. They hiked in one direction steadily for an hour, following a low, rocky ridge, and then the younger Sam abruptly changed directions and took them parallel to the initial direction. It was still roughly upwards, changing with the sloping ground. They were all too tired to talk much, and, Sam suspected, starting to feel vaguely high. Not high in a goofy, joyous way, but a thrumming sort of body high. Sam’s thoughts were vague and piecemeal, tough to focus on any one thing. Dean, kerosene, angels, blowjobs. One foot in front of the other, quads burning. They hiked.

After a few hours, Dean’s watch beeped. They’d set it on a longer cadence as they started to run low on water.

“Hey!” Sam shouted. The boys had been way up ahead for hours, barely in sight. “Water! C’mere!”

They dropped their packs and parked under the only nearby tree that was alive enough to provide any kind of shade. Dean leaned heavily on the tree while Sam sat on a rock by its roots. Sam pulled his shirt up over his face to scrub away dirt and sweat, and that brief moment of feeling clean before it was replaced by fresh dirt and sweat was glorious.

When he took his shirt down, he looked up and met Dean’s gaze. Dean was looking down at him, south of his eyes, with a kind of dopey look on his face. Unlike all the other times this had happened—and Sam, with his new lens on things between them, was ready to admit that it had happened before—Sam just let him look. He smiled at him and let his eyes wander over Dean in return, no judgment. He saw the surprise on Dean’s face as his impulse to look away was reluctantly fought.

Sam’s initial anger about this whole thing had faded to a guilty kind of awe. He thought about a seventeen-year-old Dean looking down at his hands and telling him, it’s a nightmare. He’d said something about Sam being the only reason he was even here. Even if Sam didn’t have something that felt like reciprocation bubbling up inside him, which he did, it would have been hard to be mad about it after that. It wasn’t something Dean chose, it was fucking tragic. It wasn’t flippant lust, it was a curse.

He watched as Dean looked away and worked the meat of his shoulder in one of his dirty hands. Sam had a few choice thoughts about just how ‘reciprocated’ it had started to feel, and let some ill-advised next steps bounce around in his head. All of them were more downstairs brain than upstairs brain. There was no upstairs-brain way to think about fooling around with your brother, in the woods, while babysitting.

The younger Sam and Dean appeared, looking about as haggard as the older two, soaked in sweat and bleary-eyed. They dropped their packs and unclipped their water bottles from the straps on the sides.

The younger Dean said, “You’re assuming we’ve got water left.”

Sam winced. “Whatever’s in there, just take a mouthful. Keep it in your mouth for as long as you can.”

“We had the same Dad-led survival class, but thanks.”

Sam just shook his head, too tired to fight. The younger Sam already had water in his mouth, waiting.

They’d have to slow down without water as their sweating dehydrated them even worse. Their muscles would seize up and cramp, and eating would only make it worse. They’d made it farther than their first time through, but it stung to have made the same mistake twice. They weren’t supposed to lose the creek.

Sam held water in his mouth, and it was warm and stale, but good. He stared down at his dusty boots and dirty jeans, swished the water around and let his thoughts spool loose. He came in Dean’s mouth about twenty-four hours ago. Dean spat it out, and it probably wasn’t nice to assume he’d swallow, Dean just had that kind of energy. Jizz had sugars and proteins in it, did those count as valuable nutrients if a person had run out of water? Maybe Sam could pitch that to him. It’s survivalist stuff, dude, I read it online. Man up and let me blow you. I want to know what you sound like.

The younger Dean said, “Should we be sucking on stuff?”

Sam nearly spat out his water. It fizzed in his nose, but he managed to cough it up and swallow.

“Sorry?” he croaked, blinking back tears.

The kid squinted down at him. “Like sucking on pebbles or something. I heard that helps for making saliva.”

Dean answered for him. “Nah, that’s a wives’ tale. It’s not like it gets you any more water. I mean, be my guest if you wanna suck on a rock, but it’s not, like, required.”

His younger self just made a face at him. He tipped the mouth of his water bottle up to the sun to look inside and sloshed it around; there was, luckily, some minor slosh left in it.

Sam noticed that the other Sam was sitting quietly on the ground at his brother’s feet, a mirror image of the older two. He still had some water in his mouth and stared down at his compass, pensive.

“Hey.” Sam stuck out his foot and tapped the kid’s sneaker. “You good?”

He seemed to think about it. After a moment, he swallowed his water.

“This isn’t going well, huh.”

God, what a blow. Sam tried his best to sound like he didn’t agree. “We’re okay. Don’t worry about water, we’ll find the creek soon.”

The kid just shook his head, still looking down at his hands. “What if she gets the jump on us when we get up there?”

“She won’t. We’ll wait it out.”

“What if she springs a trap? I’m smallest, it’s gonna be me. I’m always bait.”

The younger Dean looked appalled.

“Like hell you are, Sammy. You can’t tell me one time you were ever bait.”

“Right, only ‘cause you’re always bait. ‘Cause you’re hotter than me.”

Sammy said it so matter-of-fact, mild annoyance where there might have been playfulness, that the other three were stunned into silence.

It was awkward. Sam was horrified. He didn’t remember ever feeling like that as a kid. Dean was—well, Dean. Sam had never been mad over it. Dean couldn’t help looking the way he did, and in the grand scheme of things, Dean was never a dick about it. Dean being pretty was a fact of nature, like gravity or the phases of the moon. No sense in being pissed off over a waning gibbous.

Dean, the older one, spoke first. “We’re not gonna let anything happen to you.”

Best to direct him somewhere else and gloss over the whole thing. Sam twisted the cap back on his bottle and started to stand, conversation over, but the kid kept talking.

“But what if I really mess up? Are you still gonna protect me? You have to.” He pointed at the younger Dean, then the older one. “He doesn’t say no to me. I bet you don’t say no to him, either.”

Sam furrowed his brow. The kid was staring up at the older Dean, mouth turned down like he was puzzled. Sam didn’t know what to make of it. He picked fights back then, sure, but not with Dean, and sure as hell not about Dean. He’d been good on this hunt, this wasn’t like him.

The younger Dean recovered first, giving an awkward, reedy laugh. He tapped Sammy on the head with his water bottle.

“Shut up, Sammy. You’re so weird.”

Somehow, that set him off. He slapped the bottle away and got to his feet.

“I’m weird? You guys are the ones being weird! Why are you always talking without me?”

The younger Dean held up his hands. “Hey, we’re not! It’s just stuff about the hunt.”

“So why don’t I get to know? I’m part of the hunt, too! You think I can’t handle it?”

Young Dean’s eyes cut away to the older Sam for just a second. “It’s not that.”

“Then what, you don’t trust me? Why are you so obsessed with me if you don’t even trust me?”

Young Dean looked exceptionally hurt, shocked and sad and open as if he’d been slapped. His hand closed reflexively around his amulet.

“Sam…”

Sammy sighed and scrubbed his hands over his face. He looked so small with his dry, battered knuckles and his lank, unwashed hair. Sam remembered that impotent anger because it was his own, the white-hot ‘wish I was older’ that, at the time, he felt would solve everything. Poor kid. There was no way to tell him that time only made everything worse.

Sammy took his hands off his eyes, looking drained.

“Sorry. Sorry, I’m… I feel really weird. I don’t know. Can we keep going?”

Sam looked from one Dean to another, both of them wearing matching expressions of concern. The older Dean stepped in and clapped Sammy amicably on the shoulder, giving him a little shake.

“All good. We’ll take it easy.”

They didn’t have time to take it easy, but they were no good to anyone dead, passed out, or at each other’s throats. Sam pasted on his most reassuring smile, but from the face Dean made at him, it hugely missed the mark.

They got moving and the kids went up ahead again. They were close enough that Sam and Dean could keep an eye on them, but not anywhere near close enough to hear. Dean fell into step next to Sam.

“He’s just stoned,” Sam mumbled, before Dean could ask. He was sure of it. Either sure of it, or sure that he’d convinced himself.

Dean shook his head, eyes on the boys as they disappeared over a ridge. Even the motion of his head-shake seemed unconvinced.

“You’d better be right. That was brutal.”

Why are you so obsessed with me, he’d said. Not something Sam ever remembered throwing in Dean’s face, even if it had been true ever since Sam could remember. There were things you just never teased a person about.

Sam said, “He’s just tired and fucked up. What else could it be?”

“I got him with my ring back there,” Dean said, waggling his ringed finger, “to check. I dunno. Possession, a shifter, something else.”

“You’re thinking the demigod’s attracting other creatures?”

“Dunno, you’re the expert.” Dean craned his neck to try to spot the kids, but they were far off. “Just covering our bases. The kid’s been weird.”

Sam nodded, swallowed, his dry throat sticking. He couldn’t remember if that was part of it, other forms of otherworldly influence circling a demigod, but he couldn’t rule it out. It made animals act up, maybe other things went nuts, too.

He looked over at Dean. The sun bleached everything white and Sam could hardly see him, half his face washed out and gleaming. His features blinked into view when they passed under a tree, the sharp line of his nose and those big green eyes.

Sam thought about that morning again (he almost thought yesterday, days blurring) in the forest with Dean up against the tree, his face going red with Sam’s hand around his throat. The way his feet scrambled in the dirt, his choked-off whine. One beautiful second where his shell cracked and let something wet and real glint underneath.

Sam sighed out his nose, whistling and nervous. If they didn’t have this thing going on between them, he might have snuck off into the woods by himself and let off some steam, but all things considered—

Keeping his eyes forward, he brushed his knuckles down the back of Dean’s bare arm. He would have slid it over his lower back if not for the backpack. More disarming.

“Hey.” He could see that the kids were nearly out of sight, but they wouldn’t have a problem tracking after them once they needed to catch up. He didn’t plan on taking long. “Wanna take a break?”

Dean looked over at him, slowing. “What? We just—” He stopped entirely once he took in the look on Sam’s face. “Oh. Break, as in…”

“Yeah.”

Sam watched Dean’s eyes flick over him, brow drawn and calculating. Maybe unthinking, or maybe also calculating, he wet his lips. Sam stared.

“Not smart,” Dean said, but he also swayed in towards him, barely there if Sam hadn’t been looking for it. Sam uncurled his hand and slid it up Dean’s arm, around his bicep. Their skin stuck, with tacky sweat.

“Two minutes.” Sam pulled gently, suggesting. “One. You can be quick.”

Dean frowned. “Hey.”

“Come on.”

Sam snagged his fingers in Dean’s sleeve and led him away from the boys and the direction they’d been going in. Sam was amped, buzzing and fumbling-dumb in a way he knew was irresponsible, and he couldn’t find it in himself to care. He couldn’t keep two thoughts in his head at the same time, and right now, it was all Dean. He wanted a break from the worry and pressure and uncertainty, if only for a couple minutes. He wanted Dean, in every way he could have him.

After a few seconds, Dean didn’t need to be led and followed along. Sam looked for some semblance of privacy with the trees as thin as they were now, and found it in one of the low, rocky ridges that broke the mountain into seams; not good, but good enough. It put the way they’d come from behind them.

He dropped his backpack and heard Dean do the same behind him without a second of delay. He turned and Dean was right up behind him, and when Sam grabbed him and spun him around, he went, face slack with lust and staring.

Sam crowded him up against the rocky ledge, which hit Dean just under his thighs. Sam forgot to care about their earlier touch-and-go and Dean’s careful hands that never grabbed—one thought, just Dean, endlessly—and Sam pressed all the way up against him, hands digging into his back, taking him.

“Jesus,” Dean grunted.

Sam stooped down and put his open mouth on the side of Dean’s neck, sucking, teeth grazing. Dried sweat was gritty and sharp on his tongue and it was the first time Sam had ever really put his mouth on him and it felt unspeakably good—feeling Dean tense up under him, Dean’s breath in his hair, the way he turned his head to the side to let him do it—all of it burning through him like fire. It felt real.

Dean grabbed his arms, but didn’t push him off. He was a solid wall of brother up against him, grimy and hot and real, and Sam’s head was spinning. He bit at Dean’s neck, not hard enough to leave a mark, but the threat of it made Dean’s fingers flex against his arms all the same, and it was so good Sam was losing it a little. He imagined laying Dean out on a bed, nosing at his neck and messing with him until he got all pissed off and needy, he could see it as clearly as if he’d done it for real, but—they didn’t have time. He tipped his head against the front of Dean’s shoulder, hunched over, and started working on his belt.

Dean’s hands tightened on his arms, and when he turned his face down to watch, his mouth brushed Sam’s hair, but he didn’t say anything. He held himself perfectly still. Sam got a familiar, not totally welcome twinge of little-brother brattiness. Later, he’d say that that was what made him drop down to his knees, but it wasn’t. He just wanted it. He wanted to know.

Dean’s hands flew to the rock behind him and hung on like he’d fall if he didn’t. “You don’t—”

“I know I don’t have to.”

Sam got Dean’s jeans down and was weirdly gratified to find him already hard, like there was any doubt; Sam had been hard since he touched Dean’s arm, not that Dean needed to know that. He could see the shape of his dick through his boxers and he fit his hand against it, stroking lightly, feeling him thicken. His mouth flooded with spit and his slight stoned buzz made it feel even better.

“If I’m bad at it, shut up about it.” He ran his thumb over the crown of Dean’s dick, gentle through the fabric. “I’m, uh, new.”

He wasn’t too worried about it: he knew the basics, and he didn’t make a habit of being bad at things. He’d pick it up quick. And Dean, he’d pieced together from a lifetime of context clues, was easy enough to please.

But: Dean reared back, away from Sam’s hands.

“You—what?”

Sam looked up at him. “I’ve never…” He gestured between his face and Dean’s dick.

Dean looked appalled. “And, what, you think I have?”

Sam’s eyebrows went way up. “You haven’t?”

“No! Jesus, you think I go around sucking dick for sport?”

“I mean, yeah! Kind of!”

Sam realized only then that the story he’d made up about Dean was a story. This sudden new reality—where Dean had somehow gone from being a teenager who couldn’t stop staring to the battle-hardened, been-around guy he was at thirty without ever going for it—was unthinkable. Fascinating and tragic.

“What have I ever done to—” Dean broke off, sputtering and awkward. “Never mind. Shut up. And screw off, don’t bother.”

He was bluffing. When Sam slipped his fingers into the waist of Dean’s boxers and pulled them down, Dean didn’t put up a fight, and for all his indignation, he was still hard as a rock. That was as good a tell as Sam had ever seen.

Sam curled his hand around Dean’s dick, inches from his face. He wanted to—’savour it’ wasn’t right, but—they didn’t have time, not for second-guessing or savouring. He took him in his mouth, the salty taste of him blooming, and Dean breathed out when he did it, soft and almost shy. There weren’t a lot of ways to shut Dean up so effectively. It was a heady thrill.

Sam let his eyes fall shut, worked his hand and took him deeper with each suck, keeping a pace just quicker than easy. Dean smelled hot and strong and maybe it should have been gross, but it wasn’t. Sam liked the weight of him in his mouth, the stretch to get his lips around him, how silky his skin was on his tongue. He let Dean’s jeans fall down around his knees. He gripped the hard muscle of his bare thigh with his free hand, slid it up and rolled his balls, gentle, heavy and soft.

Dean huffed quietly. It was good that he was quiet, it was smart, Sam knew that, but he opened his eyes a slit and saw Dean’s right hand gripping the rock so hard his fingertips were white. Sam slurped noisily and watched Dean’s hand pull into a fist.

It was the same kind of satisfaction as going down on a girl and making her buck and squirm, but it was even better because it was Dean, and that meant it was also a competition. A thing that it was possible to win.

Sam picked up the pace, because not getting him there in two minutes after he made that stupid quip would be excruciating. He felt the muscles in Dean’s thighs pull up and tense. Sam twisted his wrist on the upstroke, took him deeper and swirled his tongue and Dean was still fucking silent, his hands were still clenched and Sam was sick of it. Dean Winchester wasn’t careful or quiet and Sam wanted some fucking heat out of him. He was going to win if it killed him.

He pulled back until just the head of Dean’s dick was in his mouth, and stoked it with his tongue. He grabbed Dean’s wrist and brought his hand to his hair.

Dean tried to twitch back. Sam held on. In one motion, Sam swallowed him down, slow and teasing, and he felt the fight leave Dean’s hand. Dean curled his palm against the curve of Sam’s skull. All five of his fingers dug in against Sam’s scalp, his dick brushed the back of Sam’s throat, and it was heaven. Sam groaned around him.

Sam let go of his wrist and Dean’s second hand flew up to join the first, at first in a painful crush that made panic flicker in Sam’s chest, like Dean might force him down, but the intensity was gone so quickly that he wasn’t even sure it had been there. Dean threaded his fingers in Sam’s hair and let him move. He was guiding Sam a little. His hands were warm and strong and Sam thought sickeningly of being a kid and wrestling with him over a TV remote, having Dean twist his arm behind his back to win a fight. It felt the same, having Dean’s hands in his hair. It was all passion and that same sticky-hard grip, all in, bar none, and something else, which Sam realized had always been desperation. That impulse to keep holding on one second longer. It was addictive.

Sam could hear Dean breathing with his mouth now and he listened, over the wet sound of his own mouth and the blood pounding in his ears, as Dean sighed, “Fuck, Sammy.”

Sam was so hard he could barely concentrate. It was slow getting his belt free and his jeans open with one hand, but he had to. He’d go off from nothing at all. Fly down, it hit him that if Dean hadn’t done this before—and if that meant he’d never been with guys, not for anything—then Sam would be his first, if he—if they—

He had to squeeze at the base of his dick to keep from coming, clamp all his muscles down on it. It was sickly and possessive but the thought of it echoed around in his head louder and louder, that he’d be the first guy Dean had been with if he wanted it, the first to be inside him, and Jesus, Sam wanted that, with a voraciousness that shocked him. This thing came out of left field and kept going, but now it was there and Sam was absolutely gone. It was all the worst parts of him bass boosted: the urge to take, push something right up to the breaking point, blood in his teeth.

On a kinder note: he felt alive for the first time in a long time. He was using his body for good, for pleasure and closeness. He forgot what it was like to want something that wouldn’t kill him, and to want it so badly that logic couldn’t get anywhere near him. Screaming down the highway doing forty over, windows down, teeth rattling.

Dean was lifting his hips up into the bob of Sam’s head, meeting him, making these choked off sounds that made Sam fist his own dick, competition no longer even close to the point. Dean shifted his feet restlessly, thighs apart, helpless and needy, and the ego trip was fucking staggering. Sam could get used to it.

Dean’s hand groped down to Sam’s jaw and shoved a thumb against his cheek, crude and hard, to feel himself inside Sam’s mouth. His dick throbbed, close. Dean was shaking when he hooked his hand around the back of Sam’s neck, and his other hand brushed Sam’s hair away from his face, so grossly maternal that it made Sam’s stomach flip with twisted, giddy nerves, bad-wrong, hot. Sam thought he heard Dean whisper something over the static rush in his ears, awe and reverence, ah, God.

The hand on his neck was suddenly pushing instead of pulling. Sam’s world churned and spun. Hands clawed into him and wrenched him back.

Dean’s strangled voice from above him: “Oh, fuck, get—”

The context switch had Sam’s cloudy brain screeching at him, lost and stuttering as one of his spit-wet hands hit the dirt followed by his half-bare ass, and through the bleary tears in his eyes as he coughed, he saw Dean furiously yanking up his jeans, and—movement behind him, in the sparse trees.

Adrenaline roared through every inch of Sam, floodgates open. He scrambled to his feet and saw over the ridge Dean had been leaning against: the younger Dean was coming right for them at a clip, his hands in agonized fists at his sides.

Sam backed up without thinking. “Did he—”

Without looking at him, Dean said, “Yup.”

Young Dean got close enough that it became clear that his face was a bright, brilliant red, like nothing Sam had ever seen on any version of Dean he’d ever known. Pissed off, maybe, but mostly he just looked all-purpose fucked. Sam couldn’t even begin to imagine what was going through his head.

As soon as he could be heard, young Dean hissed, “Get your pants on. Get your fucking pants back on, he’s—”

“Hey! D?”

Sammy appeared around the shape of the mountain, a blur of white T-shirt, calling out. Far, but too close.

Sam whipped around to get his jeans up. He concentrated on getting his shaking hands to work his belt, body still throbbing from being so close and losing it. His dick was going soft from the sheer horror of it all, but even the feel of it against his jeans was almost enough.

From behind him, he heard the younger Dean’s incensed hiss, “You lied, you fucking—”

Older Dean, audibly shaken: “Nono no, listen, it’s not—”

“Shut up. Shut up. Tell him you were fighting, don’t say a fucking word.”

Sammy reached them. “Thanks, jerk!” The plasticky flumph sound of a backpack hitting the ground. “What’d you run off for?”

Sam spun around, belt finally secure. Sammy had his backpack on and his brother’s bag at his feet, and he was frowning between the three of them. His face was flushed from his jog to catch up and it matched the rest of their mortified blushes.

Young Dean said, “I saw them bitching at each other, and, yeah. Didn’t wanna make it your problem.”

It was almost convincing. Sammy squinted at him, and then at the older Dean, who looked down abruptly. When it was Sam’s turn to be scrutinized, he just stared helplessly at the kid—thirteen more years, and he’d be here, lying to himself with the taste of his brother’s dick in his mouth. He nodded dumbly.

Young Dean’s jaw ticked as he clenched his teeth. He was looking at his older self, eyes wide and saying things Sam could only guess at.

Sammy asked, “What were you fighting about?”

“Nothing,” Dean said quickly, not taking his eyes off his younger self. “Just dumb bullshit.”

Sammy rolled his eyes. “Wow, cool, thanks. Can we go now?”

Dean gestured with an arm back the way they’d came. “After you.”

His younger self slapped a hand over his arm and pushed it down.

“Nope, we’re going up ahead. You and me.” He slung his pack over his shoulder. “Sammy, stick with Sam. We’ll meet up next time we need water.”

Sammy screwed up his face. “What? Why?”

Young Dean didn’t take his eyes off his older self. His face was totally blank. “Dean time. Don’t worry about it.” He tipped up his chin. “Right?”

Sam could see Dean sweating, worse than the normal sun-sweat. He had a faint, reddish bite mark on the side of his neck, easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. He smiled at his younger self and it looked like a scared dog baring its teeth.

“Lead the way.”

Chapter Text

Dean’s fight or flight hadn’t let up for one split second since he woke up to Sam’s hand on his chest in that tent. Since he dropped to his knees in front of Sam that first time, his heart had been beating so hard he felt sick. It didn’t let up and it didn’t get better. He tried to look like he was keeping it together but his mouth was dry and his head was spinning, and in the day since, he couldn’t think about anything else for longer than the time it took to take a step: left, Sam wants you, right, he doesn’t know what he’s asking for, left, four times now, he let you, he wanted you to, four times, FOUR TIMES right left right left, he’s fucked up and we’re not at home, it’s not the same, we’re not at home.

He didn’t know what ‘home’ meant. In their own time, if nothing else, him behind the wheel and Sam in the passenger seat, arguing about some stupid movie neither of them had seen in ten years. If the fifth time was there—road head, white-knuckling the wheel while his other hand sunk into Sam’s hair—maybe he’d start to buy it. Anything short of that was too big a risk, and the risk was already fucking astronomical.

Four times. Sam had started every one. Dean could still feel Sam’s thumb digging into his forearm while they sat by that fire, heard his goddamn voice: I like your freckles, like the sappiest fantasy out of Dean’s wettest dream. Wanna go do it again? And now, after Sam made him put his hands in his hair—he’d never recover. Sam had moaned around his dick and Dean was a broken man.

His younger self was charging ahead of him, mostly obscured by his giant backpack. Every time Dean tried to say something, the kid cut him off.

“We—”

“Shut up.”

“I—”

“Shut up, he can still hear us.”

Dean looked over his shoulder. The two Sams were so far behind them they were just shapes, matching white T-shirts in two very different sizes. Dean hurried a step to keep up with his younger self.

“They can’t—” He stopped reflexively, waiting to be cut off, and when he wasn’t, he went on. “It’s not what you think.”

“What, he was checking you for ticks? Fuck you!”

“I mean, it’s not—”

“You’re so goddamn lucky I saw you first. I thought—fuck, I thought he was tying your shoe or something, I almost— You’re so fucking lucky I ran ahead. We’re so lucky. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“It—”

“Shut up, not the point. I don’t know what you thought you’d get out of lying to me, but whatever spacetime-continuum shit it would fuck up, you should know it—fuck, man, you’re me, you know how much this would—”

“I—”

“And you didn’t have to go out of your way to say all that shit to me about wanting him if you had him, you fucking psychopath! Was that funny to you?”

Dean grabbed him by his backpack and hauled backwards as hard as he could. The kid’s dusty chucks left the ground completely, and it was only Dean’s grip on him that kept him from tumbling down the slope they’d just trudged up.

Dean shifted his grip to grab his narrow shoulders, both of them, and he shook him hard.

“Jesus Christ, stop. Shut up and let me talk.”

“Why, so you can—”

“It’s new.” Dean said it all at once so he couldn’t chicken out. It was just himself, and saying it out loud still made his stomach flip with nerves and shame. “I swear to God, it’s new. When I said all that shit to you, we weren’t…”

He couldn’t say it. He didn’t know what to call it, because ‘blowing each other’ didn’t account for the cacophony in his brain every time he thought about it, every time he caught Sam looking at him first and a geyser of lust and joy shot through him so hard it made his toes curl. Every time Sam put his hands on him, he thought he’d die from it. That wasn’t just swapping blowies, no matter what Sam thought.

His younger self’s face was embarrassingly open. He was staring up at him slack-jawed, hardly breathing. “You’re fucking with me.”

“Why the hell would I fuck with you about this? You think I— fuck, I’m losing it, man, look.”

He held out his hand, flat, palm down. It trembled like a leaf. They both stared at it.

“You’re serious,” the kid said slowly, still looking down at the raised hand. “How?”

Dean stuffed his hands into his pockets. He looked back at the two bright white slices between the trees, maintaining distance. “We gotta keep going, they’re gonna catch up.”

Young Dean looked like he wanted to fight it, but he gave up. He adjusted his pack and took off, not waiting for the other Dean. “How?” he asked again, with sharper edges.

‘How’ fucking indeed. Dean still had trouble putting the pieces together. The past day and a half felt like a mirage he kept expecting to blink away. When Sam started petting him in that tent, it took him until there was a hand down his shorts for Dean to believe he wasn’t dreaming. He still wasn’t totally sure.

“We just started doing it,” he said finally. “Day ago, a couple days. I dunno.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Again, no.”

“Who started it? Did you go for it?” An astounded pause at Dean’s silence. “Don’t tell me he went for it.”

Sam’s hand rubbing his stomach and up over his chest. Sam cupping him so gently through his boxers, like he was curious. Feeling Sam get hard pressed into the cleft of his ass. Dean still hadn’t recovered. Might never, he thought.

“Yeah,” he coughed, clearing his head. “He—I don’t know. We were in the tent, waking up, and it kind of got out of control.”

The younger Dean looked up at him, eyebrows raised as high as they would go, for so long that he stumbled over a rock.

“‘Out of control,’ like…”

Dean looked down, looked up, looked away and sighed. He made a jerk-off motion with his fist.

The kid’s eyes snapped forward. He seemed to think about that for a long time. Dean grappled with some unpleasant grossness in talking to a teenager about sex, but it was him, and he wasn’t giving him the gory details. But knowing him, he’d ask eventually.

“What started it?” the younger Dean asked finally. His earlier rage had gone soft and he was quiet now, awestruck. “You told him?”

Dean shook his head. He wanted to tell the kid to fuck off at the same time that he wanted to blubber like a bitch, anything to get it out, and the two factions warred inside him. Talking about it would require him to calm down and really think about what was going on with him and Sam, which he’d been very careful not to do since it happened. His soft bits were held together by a network of cheap band-aids, and he didn’t like what would happen if he started to peel them off. Still, he tried.

“This ain’t me giving you credit, but… after you planted one on him, he was acting weird. He tried to get me to talk about it, and I fed him some bullshit about it not being about him, but I guess he didn’t buy it. Or maybe he did, I don’t know. But he started…”

Sam had been practically vibrating with nerves after that first talk, giving Dean long, cryptic looks and watching him constantly. There was the thing in the bathtub by the cabin. Dean could still see it when he closed his eyes: Sam’s long, lean body golden in the sun, water sluicing off him, his dick hanging thick and full between his legs. Walking away was the hardest thing Dean had ever done, until he jerked Sam off the next day without putting his mouth on him. Kissing would have been the final band-aid ripped off by staggering intimacy, nothing left to keep it in, guts all over the place.

“He got weird,” Dean finished. “Good weird.”

They made it a ways in silence. It was too embarrassing to look at the kid so Dean kept his eyes ahead. He badly wanted to check on how close the Sams had gotten, but. Pillar of salt.

All of a sudden, the younger Dean said, “Hold up.” He tried to stop walking again, but Dean shoved him forwards. “You’re not happy. Why aren’t you happy? What did you do?”

“What makes you think I did something?”

“You’re with Sam, and you’re not bouncing off the walls. You’re all…” He gestured at him and curled his lip back in disapproval. “Grim.”

“I didn’t do anything, it’s not—”

“Yes, you did. That’s what we do, we fuck things up. Why aren’t you happy? And don’t tell me you broke up, I just saw you—”

Dean snorted angrily. He couldn’t keep it back anymore.

“Shit, listen to you. Broke up. You’re a fucking child.”

That seemed to genuinely baffle the kid. Dean tried to scowl at him, but looking at him was still excruciating. Christ, he was so young. He didn’t know anything.

Dean explained, “You can’t date your brother. We’re not… It’s not like that.”

“Not like what?”

Dean chose his words carefully. “Not… soft.”

When the kid was quiet for a while, Dean made the mistake of looking down at him. He looked broken. His eyes were huge and staring up at him.

“Why not?”

Dean sighed, frustrated and guilty. He chewed the inside of his cheek and focused on his steps. How did you explain this kind of thing to an idealistic kid with stars in his eyes? Remembering who he’d been at seventeen and the flowery things he’d felt for Sam, this would have been like a sick monkey paw wish. You get to fuck him, but he doesn’t like you. You don’t kiss or talk about it. It’s a chest-thumping locker-room type thing. Fucking heartbreaking.

“This isn’t real,” Dean said eventually. He looked up at the dead, burnt trees, the hazy blue sky and the acid-white sun. At the kid next to him. “All of this. It’s real for you, but it’s not real for us. We went to sleep in our beds and we woke up here, and everything since has been some Alice in Wonderland bullshit.” He chewed the inside of his cheek again. The tang of blood was the first thing he’d tasted all day and it was almost welcome. “He’s just fucking around. He’s horny ‘cause of the demigod. I got no illusions.”

After a moment, he risked a glance. He expected more of that childish, shattered look, but he got anger.

Young Dean said, “What the hell are you talking about? You think people fuck their brothers because they’re horny on vacation?”

“You don’t get it.”

“Do you? At some point between me and you, does Sam become a ‘fucking around’ kind of guy? The kid overthinks brushing his teeth! And Jesus, your Sam’s a—”

“Look, just shut up. You might know your Sam, but you don’t know mine, so don’t pretend you do. You’ve got no idea the kind of shit we’ve been through.”

“Whatever, he’s still Sam! Would you listen to yourself? You’re so fucked up, why don’t you want this?”

“Keep your voice down,” Dean hissed, flushing red. “I obviously fucking want him, I don’t need you—”

“Then what are you doing? Tell him! Have you seriously not told him?”

Dean ignored the question. “You’ve got no idea what it’s like for us, back home. It’s bad, alright?”

Maybe a couple years ago, it would have been different, but lately, Sam was changing faster than Dean could keep up. Things were getting better, and Dean felt guilty for even thinking it—Sam was his family, his person—but he couldn’t picture the Sam he saw with demon blood all over his face wanting to hold hands and exchange whispery confessions. Sam had a habit of leaving when the going got tough, and Dean couldn’t think of much tougher than falling in love.

Dean said, “He’s not into it, there. I promise you that.” He was picturing the blood in Sam’s teeth again.

“I saw him blowing you, dude, I’m pretty sure he’s into it.” Young Dean paused. “Holy fuck, I can’t believe it. Holy fuck.”

“You don’t get it. He’s not, not back home.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means it’s different. Stop asking questions.”

“But you’re still together, right? You’re hunting together, you’re still you.”

“Yeah, and that’s a long ways from fucking.”

“But you’re fucking now! What difference does it make?”

“I’m not gonna explain this shit to you.”

“Is it Dad? Dad doesn’t have to know! You’re thirty, dude, you can keep it on the downlow! This is bigger than—”

“Stop it.”

“Why, ‘cause I’m right? I can see it, you’re freaking out and ruining it! I— stop it, look at me.” The younger Dean smacked him in the chest to make him stop. He twisted a hand in the older Dean’s shirt to spin him around to face him. “I’m serious. Remember what it’s like to be me. Now imagine somebody tells you that you—you get Sam, someday. That you get a shot with him, and he wants you. Like, really fucking wants you. And all you’ve gotta do is take your head out of your ass for one single second.”

Dean just stared down at him, mouth pressed tight. He remembered. He could see it on the kid’s face, the jittery excitement bigger than anything else he’d ever known. The one thing he’d wanted for himself since before he could remember had been offered up on a platter, literally close enough to taste.

Young Dean threw up his hands, exasperated.

“You see how I’m struggling with this? Jesus Christ. Fuck you for ruining this for me.”

Dean squinted at him, infuriated and embarrassed by the entitled kid he’d been, looking up at him like the only issue at hand was that he was too much of a pussy to take what he wanted—no context for the horrors he and Sam had lived through, and failed to live through, and he thought he was so sure. The cocky little shit.

Dean sneered. “You wouldn’t go for it either. If there was even a tiny chance you were wrong about it, you wouldn’t. You’re not better than me.”

He had to make him understand. There had to be a way. He dug right to the core of the thing, the worst possible outcome, and figured out how to say it.

“Imagine being wrong.”

Doing something Sam didn’t want him to do, forcing himself on him. The way Sam would wear the shame and regret on his sleeve and Dean would have to see him handle it the way he had to handle every other problem in his life. That was what Dean saw every time he caught Sam staring at him since their morning in the tent: the look Sam would give him when his conscience finally caught up to him, as he realized that the one person he trusted in his life was now tainted. At best, it would be a bone-deep betrayal; at worst, a reason for Sam to go darkside. Life on planet earth chewed up and spit out, all because Dean couldn’t say no. He’d heard that one before.

He didn’t expect it, but: the kid got it. He’d gone back to looking totally gutted, but somehow, that was the better option.

Dean said, “See? Now you get it.” He looked back over his shoulder. “C’mon, haul ass.”

They kept hiking. Dean couldn’t keep his thoughts on any one thing, shouldering a surprising amount of guilt over breaking the spirit of a lovesick kid. Minutes ticked away in silence, just the crunch of their shoes on the rocks and scrubby weeds and the squeak of their backpacks. The kid seemed to know where he was going and moved confidently; him and Sammy must have shared notes.

Dean’s thoughts strayed as always to Sam. He tried not to flinch away from it and instead sunk in, let himself remember: Sam’s mouth on his neck, how fucking hungry he sounded. Four times, and Sam had started them all. Dean didn’t get it. He couldn’t let himself believe that he’d gotten it.

He sighed. He rubbed the back of his hair and his hand came away wet and gritty with sweat, which he wiped on his jeans.

“I want him in the car,” he said gently. “You know? A king instead of two queens. That’s what’s real.”

He caught the kid’s sullen nod. Whatever he said earlier, Dean knew he’d understand that. The car was hallowed ground.

Dean added, “I know it’s not what you want, but it’s what we got.”

Another nod. They kept on, and the kid played with the amulet around his neck. Dean fought the old urge to do the same. He spun his ring around his finger with his thumb instead, fidgety, though his hands were swollen with the heat. They’d slowed down a little at an unspoken understanding that the Sams were now allowed to catch up.

“Is he a good kisser?” the younger Dean asked.

Dean suppressed a grimace. He couldn’t even begin to explain to a teenager, and a virgin, the snarled-up web of vulnerable baggage and masculinity that led to getting blown by someone you hadn’t kissed. It would be less intimate for him to bend over and show Sam his asshole than it would be to kiss him on the mouth, but you couldn’t explain that to a seventeen-year-old. Kissing had no point, and it was unbearably tender. Dean hadn’t even put his hands on Sam, not really. He didn’t trust himself.

“Perfect,” he lied.

He was sure it was true, anyway. He allowed himself a few saccharine moments to imagine what kissing Sam would be like, a well-worn fantasy that hadn’t gotten any less tantalizing after he’d had Sam’s real-life dick in his mouth: Sam’s big hands cradling his head or digging into his shoulders. Stroking his fingers through Sam’s thick, soft hair, cupping his jaw, tracing the strong lines of his neck. Dean felt like a fucking princess, but the only person on the planet who knew what he was thinking had to be the kid next to him, who was also thinking it.

The kid, who was looking up at him again with those big, stupid eyes.

“What’s it like?” He was all hushed and reverent, like Dean had seen the face of God. At Dean’s annoyed look, he said, “Dude, you’ve had sex with Sam. You’ve gotta tell me.”

“I’m not giving you spank bank material, freak.”

“Not like that, just—ugh. Is it good? Is it…”

He trailed off, but Dean could figure well enough: is it like I’m imagining?

Dean sucked his teeth and looked away. He sighed without meaning to and it came out way too dreamy.

“What’s the line from that space movie? ‘They should’ve sent a poet’?”

Young Dean frowned. “Line from what?”

“Contact. Jodie Foster. You haven’t—? Right. Never mind.” He scratched his hair again. “It’s… better than how you think it’s gonna be. You’ve got no idea how good. To actually… yeah.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, wow. Like fucking magnets. Didn’t even have to ask him to do the choking thing, he was just into it. You can’t fake those kinda sparks.”

The kid looked horrified. “The what thing?”

Dean did some quick mental math.

“Right. Uh. Give it a few years.”

The Sams caught up shortly. Dean had to covertly hiss at his younger self to get him to stop staring at the two of them all glassy-eyed and awestruck. Other than a single embarrassed grimace that might have looked like a smile if Dean were slightly more delusional, Sam didn’t pay him much mind. Dean got the impression he was keeping an eye on his younger self, or else pointedly avoiding Dean’s.

Dean was now most definitely stoned, although he’d had a lifetime of practice at keeping it under wraps. It presented itself mostly in a persistent mental fuzziness and an absent-minded difficulty to remember what he’d been doing, but to be fair, he’d been struggling with that since the start of the whole Sam thing.

Dean’s shifting state of mind also made the fact that he kept thinking he saw Zachariah out of the corner of his eye troubling, but nothing more. It had only happened a few times in the past day and a half, but he was exhausted and stressed, so it seemed normal, or normal enough for them. He’d hallucinated a lot worse.

The sun started to dip. Dean realized they’d gone the better part of the day not speaking, or not saying anything he remembered. They fell back into what had become their regular formation, with the boys up ahead and Sam and Dean bringing up the rear. Sam’s hands rarely strayed from his backpack straps, but it didn’t stop Dean from feeling the phantom brush of his knuckles against his arm again. Several times.

When they stopped to take mouthfuls of their rapidly dwindling water supply, Sam and the younger Dean wandered off in opposite directions to take a leak, leaving Dean alone with the younger Sam. Dean was sitting on the ground and Sammy was leaning against a tree, slowly twisting the compass back and forth in his hands, watching the needle swivel. They’d been heading north for a while, after a short argument between the boys about which way they remembered the river curling.

Dean hadn’t figured out how to bring it up with Sam yet, but he thought they should just book it for the mountaintop and get the whole thing over with, rather than search for the creek. They could go a few days without water, and after it was all said and done, they could find the creek easily from the peak and fill up for the way back down. Dehydration would be a cake walk compared to some of the shit they’d been through.

Sammy’s nails had black dirt under them and they were too long. The kid was filthy all over and Dean’s stomach flipped with shame and failed duty, not unlike the very old but familiar feeling of sending him to school without lunch money.

Dean chewed the inside of his lip. It was hard to look at the younger Sam. He was more sure than ever that he was doing the right thing with the older Sam, or if not the right thing, then the best thing he knew how. The right thing would have been to rebuke Sam’s advances right off the bat, like a guy with morals might have. The best Dean had been able to do was try to scare him off by being a dick, and that hadn’t worked. Sam was a stubborn Adonis and Dean was only human.

But still, he looked at the kid in front of him, and he hated himself for not doing better. All he could think was, Jesus, if you hurt him, the same way he’d threatened hundreds of others in the past. It was unforgivable when aimed at himself.

There was a flicker of movement behind Sam and Dean almost leapt to his feet, but on second glance, it was just the other Sam starting to come back.

Dean settled back down. He wondered how many of the other things he caught out of the corner of his eye the past two days could be explained so easily; animals or falling leaves, never mind that they hadn’t seen another living thing since they left that cabin. It would have been nice to catch something to eat, roast meat over that fire they had in the morning. He wasn’t hungry, but he desperately missed the sensation of eating.

The morning. He had a thought. He unclipped the straps on his pack, opened it and started digging through it.

“Whatcha looking for?” Sammy asked.

Dean found it and pulled it out—his whittling project, or as Sam called it, his fat dog. It was very much a fat dog now that it was finished: little triangle ears, four legs that were almost the same length as one another and a tail that went straight out like an arrow. Far from Dean’s best work, but it was the first thing he’d actually completed in ages. He made a note to tell Bobby about it the next time he saw him.

He held the dog out to Sammy on the flat of his palm, just as Sam came back to stand next to him. “Do you recognize this?”

Sammy took it from him with careful hands and examined it. There was something satisfying about seeing someone else interact with it: a wooden creature that Dean brought into the world with nothing but a crummy outdoorsman’s knife and some time, now a real physical object in his little brother’s hand.

“Your carving thing,” Sammy said, turning the dog over. He was careful to mind its thin tail. “You’ve been working on it since… the whole time, basically.”

“Yeah, but before that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you seen a wooden dog like this before?”

Sammy frowned at him, then down at the dog. “Nobody’s ever given me a tiny whittled dog before, no.”

“Cool. Just checking.”

Sammy gave him a puzzled look that Dean chose to read as affectionate and returned the wooden dog.

Dean looked up at the older Sam standing next to him. His thoughts about spacetime and continuity errors—Sam said earlier that he had the dog when he was a kid, but when, and was it this dog? What did it mean if it was this dog?—were interrupted by the effect of looking up at Sam from the ground. Dean was turned on, instantly. When he blew Sam that first time, he was too freaked out to even consider looking up at him, but he wanted to see what Sam looked like when he came. Watching him lose it because of him would be an ego trip he’d never recover from.

Then, softer: he wanted Sam to reach down and scratch his fingers through his hair, behind his ear, like a dog.

Dean looked away and shook his head. Jesus, he was stoned. He didn’t always notice, but when he did, it was profound. He felt wobbly and sweet in a way that made his skin crawl. It made it too easy for him to fuck up and get a knife slipped into his soft spots. Tuck Sam’s hair behind his ear in a moment of weakness and bleed out for days.

“You two feeling… groovy?” he asked, instead of saying any of that.

It made Sammy smile, which settled something in Dean’s chest that had been knocked askew when the kid lost the map that morning, and worse during their weird talk at the first water break. Sammy was fine. He was struggling with the grueling endurance of a long, drawn-out hunt, but he was a good kid. Just tired, stressed and a little stoned.

“Yeah,” Sammy said, flexing his hands demonstratively. “Just kind of. It’s hard to… think about stuff straight.”

Dean nodded. There was a crunch of sneakers behind him as his younger self came back from the woods.

Young Dean said, “Hey, she can’t get us too stoned. We wouldn’t bitch at each other if we were feeling too good, and that’d wreck her whole thing.”

Sam said, “Yeah. It’s just enough to… I dunno. Lose our edge. My edge is, uh… pretty dull.”

Dean tucked the fat dog back into his backpack, cinched it and stood, brushing his hands off on his jeans. His head spun a little, pounding with dehydration.

Standing up put him close to Sam, which made his head spin worse. Their eyes met. Sam had his hair tucked behind his ears and it made Dean want to thumb at his sideburns. He could smell him, ripe and musky after a day of hiking. Dean thought again about kissing him, dwelling on the finer details: the way Sam’s pointy nose would feel pressed into his cheek, how he was absolutely sure that Sam would nip at his lips, maybe a little too hard. He’d be pushy. Sam was a ‘draw blood’ kind of guy.

By the time Dean got his shit together, the boys had hauled their backpacks on and started off again. Sam was just standing there, smiling at him with tilty, apologetic eyebrows. His nose was sunburnt and it made him look staggeringly young.

“You good?” Sam asked. “How was ‘Dean time’?”

Dean grimaced. He nodded his head in the direction the boys had left, and they started walking together after giving them a lead.

“Uh. Not great.”

There wasn’t much he could say without giving himself away. The back of his neck prickled with sweat. His younger self’s high, annoying voice echoed around in his head. Tell him! Have you seriously not told him?

He went on before Sam could say anything. “He doesn’t want his Sam to know. That was his main thing.”

This conversation was a minefield. Dean kept his face carefully blank, focused on his feet. Left. Right. What’s wrong with you? Have you seriously not told him?

“Huh,” Sam said. “So, what, was he, uh… surprised?”

Dean still wasn’t sure how convinced he had Sam on this whole thing. He didn’t know where they stood, but there was no universe where the kid wouldn’t have found it surprising, even if Dean had wanted Sam since he was a kid, which was still a truth he was desperately trying to avoid sharing.

“Yeah.” Anything was better than ‘no,’ he decided. “Surprised, pissed off. Same diff.”

Sam just nodded. They walked in silence for a while, bugs chirping around them, dead pine needles crunching under their boots. Dean was trying to decipher ‘surprised,’ like Sam meant something else. There was a trap there somewhere, he was sure of it. Sam knew too much. Dean could never lie to him when it actually mattered.

“I keep thinking,” Sam started, his voice low and almost tender, “what I’d think, if I knew now. Like, little me, I mean. If he knew.”

Dean’s heart picked up. He wiped his hands on his jeans. “What?”

“You know. Like… if I knew, back then, that we were…” Sam trailed off, and Dean could see out of the corner of his eye that Sam had looked over at him. Caught by the movement, Dean looked back, then swallowed so loudly it felt like the whole world could hear it. Sam’s eyes looked greener than normal; they always did when he was outdoors, all the leafy-coloured flecks in their depths reflected. Sam reached up and tucked his hair behind his ear. Dean thought about sucking on his fingers.

“Doing this,” Sam finished, but it had been so long Dean forgot the start of the sentence. It didn’t seem important.

Sam looked like he was waiting for an answer, so Dean tore his eyes away. He adjusted his jeans in a way he hoped was subtle.

The boys were way up ahead again, which he was eternally grateful for. They were twin smudges of black and white in the sea of brown and beige made by the dirt and dead trees.

After a minute, Sam said, “I was also thinking,” in that fucking tone of his that made Dean brace for impact, “was I older or younger than thirteen when we watched pay-per-view porn that one time?”

Dean choked on his spit. The ancient memory slammed back into the forefront, it had been so long he’d forgotten: Sam (older than thirteen, Jesus, Sam) with him in a pitch black motel room, under the covers in their separate beds, watching some woman twice their age who was hot from the neck down get railed by this young guy with giant arms who looked, now that Dean thought about it, a lot like Sam did today—but it wasn’t like that, it was brotherly, it didn’t even register, and if Dean payed more attention to the movement of Sam’s hand under the sheets than he did to the screen, it’s not like Sam noticed. For him to bring it up now out of the blue—absolutely and totally out of the blue—was—

Dean wiped sweat out of his eyes with the back of his hand. All of a sudden it was fucking scorching, worse than ever.

“I don’t know. Uh. Can you go up ahead?”

He saw Sam look over at him again, but he didn’t take the bait. Eyes on his own work.

Sam said, “What? No. Don’t talk about the porno thing, fine, but—”

“Not that. I just—I need some me time. I haven’t been alone in, what, like six days, now? Seven?”

“I—”

“We’re losing the kids.” Dean pointed up ahead. They’d fallen too far behind and the boys couldn’t be seen. “Go catch up. I’ll be right behind you, I swear. I just need a breather.”

Sam’s eyebrows said he didn’t believe him. Sam’s mouth said, “You sure you’re good?”

“Peachy. Go.”

Sam, however reluctantly, went on ahead, his long stride and half-jog widening the gap between them until he was gone. It helped that Dean stopped walking almost entirely to make sure of it.

Alone, Dean breathed easier. It was like being too high at a party and going outside for a smoke; quieter, darker and more still, it felt safe. He closed his eyes and the sun was still so bright at whatever time it was—the actual time of day had become meaningless, only the position of the sun was relevant in how soon it would become dark—that he saw cherry red behind his closed eyelids. He tipped up his face and tried to imagine he was at the beach, basking in it. He hoped it was still winter when (if) they got back to their own time. He missed layers, and feeling even slightly comfortable. He missed throwing an arm over Sam’s shoulders and feeling the soft, worn flannel against his skin. Everything here was dirty and sticky. He wanted to be swaddled.

It was easier to get his thoughts in order without having to worry about keeping them from showing on his face. He decided that his younger self only thought he was crazy for the way he was handling the Sam thing because he didn’t know any better. Kids reacted to things like kids, and Dean remembered being seventeen: he talked a smart talk, but in the next year, he’d get four speeding tickets while trying to impress college girls in his passenger seat. He was an idiot and a child. He had no idea how to handle something so excruciatingly nuanced as fucking his own brother.

Dean took the opportunity to set some ground rules: don’t think about Sam’s dick so much that you can’t focus on the hunt and then get everyone killed. Think about Sam’s dick just enough to keep yourself from saying something about how bad you want it on you, in you, and just generally around you. Have some shred of self-preservation and do not, under any circumstances, think about Sam’s big hands, or his soft hair, or how good it feels to make him laugh.

Easier said than done. Dean couldn’t stop thinking about kissing him. He moved his tongue around in his mouth and imagined it was Sam’s, like a preteen practicing kissing on his hand. It was more pathetic than he remembered being in years.

By his own estimation, he made it twenty respectable minutes before jerking off; he’d been on edge since getting seven-eighths of a blowjob and he couldn’t take it anymore. He parked himself behind a tree, got his jeans down and did it fast and quick, balls aching, chin down against his chest to watch. He’d seen Sam’s dick and it was easy enough to imagine now. He wasn’t mad that it was bigger than his, he’d known it would be. He was glad it was. He let himself go to his most humiliating category of fantasy, the forbiddenest fruit—what it would feel like to get filled up, stretched around a dick like he’d seen dozens of guys do in grainy videos when Sam was at least a county away and wouldn’t need his laptop until the cache had been blasted clean. Never having done it himself, Dean thought it seemed impossibly, terrifyingly good, how much those guys liked it—the shuddering ecstasy, that total relinquishing of control. If it were him… Sam would take care of him. He’d make it good.

Dean didn’t take long. He shot into the dirt, knees going weak, pushed back against the tree to keep himself up. He kept wringing his dick until it was just on the wrong side of too much, teeth grit, free hand clenched around his amulet so the cord stung where it pulled against the back of his neck.

The relief was good, but he was sweatier than ever afterwards. He pulled off his shirt and hung it from his backpack to dry before he got going again, body humming pleasantly with his post-nut euphoria; always too brief, longer when stoned. For a blissful couple of minutes, he was relaxed enough that he whistled to himself. He was hauling their bag to the beach, where Sam would be waiting for him. Sam was wearing those stupid blue swim trunks he had at the tail end of high school, too small, with the white stripe down the hip. The cooler was full of popsicles. Sam’s mouth was stained cherry red.

Something moved to Dean’s left in a smear of white.

Dean spun, hand groping too slow at his waist for his gun or knife, but they’d gotten sloppy and comfortable and both were in the side pocket of his bag.

Nothing; he turned again, spinning on his heel, pivoting back. He wrenched his arm back and slapped along the pack for his knife, grabbed it and pulled it out of its sheath.

He spun a whole circle. Nothing was there. Not even a bug.

Adrenaline had him panting, sweat dripping off his nose, bare chest going goosebumped. He scanned the trees for any sign of movement, but there was nothing.

It took him a minute to start moving. He kept the knife in his slippery grip and crept slowly, steady, silent.

After another minute, he walked normally.

In another, he’d sheathed his knife.

He wiped the sweat from his eyes and ground his fingers into his aching temples as he kept trudging along. He was losing it. He was stoned and come-drunk and wasting away, and it was starting to show.

It dawned on him slowly, as he kept hiking at a good pace, that they weren’t thinking about this hunt anywhere near enough. He had the feeling that this had dawned on him before now too, remembered and forgotten. In what other situation would they blunder into a big fight with so little preparation? It was suicide. If they weren’t so preoccupied with each other, they’d never be so stupid. All he could think about was Sam.

He resolved to get his shit together and keep it there. He started walking faster, almost a jog. He’d catch up to the others and they’d start talking strategy. They couldn’t be far from the top now, and it was time. They’d only get loopier and slower the longer they waited.

After charging around for a few minutes, Dean realized he wasn’t completely sure that he was still going the way the others had. He started looking for footprints in the dry ground and found some with freshly broken twigs underfoot in at least two varying sizes; not at his best, but he could still track. He followed them up the mountain.

The sun had turned golden and hung low in the sky. Dean was sure that he’d left Sam a half hour ago, tops, but he kept hiking and following their tracks and they didn’t appear up ahead through the trees. He sped up to close the gap. He entertained the idea that he was going the wrong way and dismissed it. He found a footprint that bore the telltale diamond pattern on the sole of his younger self’s chucks. He kept walking.

He kept glancing at the sun, following it as the shadows got long and warm around him. He was pretty sure that what he was following were footprints, but they were faint in the dry dirt and the longer he went without seeing anyone ahead of him, the more he started to doubt himself. He refused to let panic set in. He kept walking. Carrying his bag to a motel swimming pool, feet aching on the hot, wet concrete. Sam was waiting for him, his mouth stained red.

When he finally saw someone up ahead, he was so relieved that he thought it was a mirage. One figure, not three. A white shirt, but small. It was the younger Sam.

Dean jogged to meet Sammy as he came down the hill towards him. He skidded to a stop in front of the kid, who was, Dean confirmed, alone: nobody following up behind him, no one around at all. He wasn’t wearing his backpack.

“Hey, kiddo,” Dean panted, out of breath. “Man, am I glad to see you, shit. I thought I got turned around.” He unclipped his bag and heaved it to the ground to get the weight off his aching back. “Gimme a sec here and we can go.”

He sat on an old dead tree that lay on the ground, head hung, hands on his knees. Now that he knew he wasn’t lost, he let himself feel the real weight of believing that he was. They had to keep themselves in line, all of them—no more dipping out when it got weird, no more letting Sam pull him away to fool around. They had a job to do.

“You guys good?” Dean asked. “Where’s everyone else?”

No answer. Dean looked up.

Sammy was standing a few paces away, facing him. His face was strangely placid, grave and expressionless in a way that was unpleasant to see on a young kid.

“Sammy?” Dean tried.

Slowly, Sammy grabbed his shirt at the back of his neck, pulled it over his head and held it loosely in his hands. His body was skinny, sunburnt over the shoulders, tanned on the arms and pale everywhere else—unthinkably skinny, in that little-kid way before puberty took enough of a hold to fill him out; elbows like knives, ribs like a set of stairs.

Dean sat up, brow furrowed. “What’s up, you feeling okay?”

Sammy didn’t look overheated, he was hardly sweating. No marks or wounds that Dean could see. His face was still so serious, so blank he almost looked angry.

He took a step towards Dean, then another. He dropped his shirt on the ground and a cloud of dry dirt kicked up around his ankles. He reached Dean’s knees and Dean leaned back to get some space between them.

“Sam? C’mon, talk to me.”

Sammy tucked his hair behind his ears, almost coy. His eyes stayed unwavering on Dean’s, chin tipped down with the close proximity. Finally, he spoke.

“You’ll protect me from whatever’s up there, right? You’ll pick me?”

His voice was soft and uncharacteristically shy. Dean raised his eyebrows. It was uncomfortable.

“What’s this about? Let’s…”

Get moving, he was going to say, and he shifted his weight forward to stand, hoping Sammy would back up and give him some room. But before he could say it, and before he could stand, Sammy stepped to the outside of Dean’s knees and started to lower himself into his lap.

His bony little hands brushed Dean’s bare shoulders. Softly, his breath warm on Dean’s face, he said, “Just say yes.”

Dean shoved him hard. It was a reflex. Sammy toppled backwards off his legs and hit the ground full on his back, winded.

Sammy yelped, “Ow! Hey!”

Dean shot up, frantic and panicky. The only thought running through his brain was: HE KNOWS.

“What the fuck, man?”

Sammy got his hands under him and righted himself, sneakers dragging in the dirt.

“What’s your problem? What did I do?”

Somehow, Sammy knew. Maybe the younger Dean told him because he had a fucking death wish, but—that didn’t make sense. He’d die before he told him. Maybe Sammy saw him and Sam earlier when his brother ran up ahead, and he didn’t let on. Whatever it was, there had to be something.

Dean said, “Ever heard of personal space? What’s up with you today?”

Sammy was still sitting on the ground with his scuffed knees splayed. He frowned up at Dean, puzzled.

“What? I came to find you!”

He was more animated than before. He didn’t look embarrassed, not even a little.

“What?” Dean said back. “You…”

Dean trailed off. Sammy wasn’t embarrassed. His confusion was genuine. Even in some world where—God, it felt stupid to even consider it, but—where this kid learned what was going on between Dean and his older self, and he had some inclination to make a pass at Dean and test the waters—he wouldn’t just go for it, not like that. That wasn’t him. Christ, he was only thirteen. Dean was thirty. The way Sammy was looking at him, it was like he didn’t even care that he did it.

“You came to get me?” Dean asked, wary.

Sammy stood and brushed the dirt off his shorts. “Yeah, and you shoved me for it, jerk. I was looking for you. The other Sam thought you were dead.”

Dean squinted at him. “Then why’s your shirt off?”

Sammy looked down at his chest, then searched around until he found his T-shirt near Dean’s feet.

“Uh, same reason yours is? It’s hot out.” He shook the dirt off his shirt and tucked it into his pocket.

He seemed dazed before, and now he wasn’t. Dean’s head was pounding and he got himself turned around. He didn’t want to admit it, but it was possible that he was the one losing it. Maybe more than possible.

“Right. Right.” Dean scrubbed his hands over his stinging eyes. “All good, Sammy. My bad.”

When he took his hands down, Sammy was wearing Sam’s best concerned face. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Golden, kiddo. Let’s roll.”

Sammy snorted and looked away. He got the compass out of his pocket and spun it around. “Don’t call me ‘kiddo,’ you’re so lame. I’m not a kid.”

That was the Sammy Dean knew, with the snotty, lilting voice, who always had something to say. He was fine. He sounded fine. Dean slapped him on the back as they started off.

“Hate to break it to you, but I call you ‘kiddo’ when you’re in your twenties, too.”

“Gross,” Sammy laughed. He looked up at Dean for a moment as they walked. “You really are him, huh?”

Dean nodded. “In the flesh.”

Sammy kept looking at him, quiet for a while. “I mean, I know, but it’s funny. It’s weird to think about.”

“Super weird,” Dean agreed. The kid didn’t know the half of it.

Sammy led him up the mountain for about ten minutes, vaguely in the direction Dean had been heading. The sun had sunk down below the mountain and the sunset turned the sky a glorious, fiery red, striped with purple clouds. They were high enough up and the trees were sparse enough that the sky was largely unobstructed and the effect was fucking breathtaking. Dean had a brief moment of fondness for camping, if not in their current position, then something more elective: a fishing trip with Sam on some secluded lake, nobody around for miles, looking up at a sky like that while they passed a bottle back and forth. Heaven.

They half-scrambled up a plateau and Dean was surprised to see the flash of their orange tent as he crested the top. They were setting up camp. Sam was struggling to slot the tent poles together, hunched over the pile of orange canvas. When his younger self called out, “Look who I found!” and gestured grandly at Dean, Sam dropped the poles and shot up.

He breathed, “Dean,” in this husky, worried way that Dean didn’t want to let himself get used to.

Sam’s shock seemed unfounded, he thought. It hadn’t been that long. Even his younger self, wrist-deep in his own tent, popped up with this surprised look on his face.

Young Dean called out, “Sammy! Where the hell’d you go?”

“You’re welcome,” Sammy snipped.

Sam untangled himself from their tent and charged right up to Dean, seemed to stop himself short of a hug and clapped Dean on the shoulder instead.

“Did you get lost or what? Wow.” Another slap on the shoulder, a little softer in a way that made Dean want to tell him to do it again. “I didn’t know you got so far behind.”

Dean chuckled and brushed his hand off. “A guy can’t spend a half hour by himself? Who’s codependent now?”

Sam said, “Dude, it’s been an hour and a half.”

Dean reared back. No matter how he did the math, his estimate was nearly forty minutes off. He was never that wrong, his internal clock ran like—well, clockwork.

“No way.”

“Yeah way. Why didn’t you answer?” Sam unclipped his walkie talkie from his belt and wagged it at him.

Dean got his own out of the side pocket of his bag and examined it.

“It didn’t go off.”

“You sure?”

“One hundred percent. I didn’t put my pack down once.”

He did put it down once, to jerk off, but that couldn’t have been relevant. His bag was right next to him, he would have heard it. He checked the channel, pressed the button and spoke into it, testing, testing, and heard his voice echo out of the set in Sam’s hand.

“Cheap piece of shit,” Dean mumbled, clicking the button a few more times for good measure. He looked around at the spot where they were putting up the tents. “We’re stopping already?”

The other Sam nodded, looking back at the tent.

“Yeah. The boys are dead tired. Without water, it seemed…” He shrugged.

“And you’re not dead tired?” Dean asked.

Sam gave him an embarrassed sort of smile that made his gut twist up into his chest.

“I’m also dead tired.” Sam looked him up and down. The way he lingered on his bare chest gave Dean another nervous, excited twist. He felt like a kid. But then Sam said, “Uh, you kind of look like shit.”

Dean rolled his eyes and headed for their tent.

“I get it, I get it. We’re stopping. I ain’t arguing.”

He helped Sam put up the rest of the tent as the sun disappeared behind the trees and the sky went slate gray. Dean debated what he should tell him about his ill-fated alone time: the fact that he saw something—something or someone—or if not, that he thought he was seeing things. That Sam’s younger self took off his shirt and tried to sit in his lap. Mentioning either felt like an unnecessary complication. He’d say something sideways later, like, ‘keep an eye on the kid.’ No sense in rubbing anyone’s nose in being a little too stoned, including his own.

He watched the younger Sam while they finished with their tents, threw their bags inside and then sat on the ground between their tents; too early to turn in, too tired to make a fire. Sammy got the rough blanket he and the younger Dean had been sleeping with and spread it on the ground, shoes and socks kicked off, relaxing. Dean watched them and thought of when, days ago, the two of them curled up together on that blanket and napped under a tree. It made his palms sweat at the time, terrified that Sam would see it and know, but now he wondered if it had done him some good. Maybe it sparked something in Sam to see it.

Now, the younger Sam tipped his head sideways onto his brother’s shoulder, bleary-eyed and tired, both of them leaned back on their hands. Dean watched as his younger self raised his eyebrows, surprised, then risked a glance down at the crown of Sammy’s head. Then he looked up at Dean. It seemed like he was asking a question, so Dean gave him a nod.

At that, he seemed to relax. He looked down at the younger Sam again and shifted his bare feet on the blanket, anxious. Dean remembered that specific brand of anxiety like it was yesterday: overthinking every move Sam made, like it meant something. Craving that physical touch like an addiction and hating himself for it. Dean watched them, and knew—his younger self wanted to put his cheek on Sam’s head. He was thinking about tipping his face down and resting his head on his. He was thinking about the way his hair smelled. His thoughts were so loud Dean could practically hear them.

Dean realized he was staring and looked away, but all that did was give him Sam, his Sam, who was looking at him. After a lifetime of watching Sam so carefully when he could get away with it, he didn’t think he’d ever get used to seeing Sam looking back.

Dean knew, somewhere inside him, that it was irresponsible that he wasn’t telling Sam about how he was seeing things, and about the kid acting weird. But Sam smiled at him, gawky, shy and boyish, with those fucking dimples, and all the other stuff didn’t seem so important anymore.

“I’m turning in,” Sam said quietly. “You want a flashlight?”

With the sun down, but not yet full dark, Sam was painted in navy blues, no shadows, skin pale. He looked beautiful in the dark, even tired and gaunt. He looked beautiful in the sun, too. Dean shook his head instead of saying something stupid.

Sam heaved to his feet with a tired groan. As he walked behind Dean to get to the tent, he brushed his hand across the top of Dean’s back. Dean closed his eyes at the touch. He listened to Sam climb into their tent, and the swishy shuffling noise of its plasticky material as he moved inside.

Dean kept his eyes closed. He was wearing so, so thin. It was getting harder to say no to Sam and so sickeningly easy to sink into his new, fond touches. He had resolve when Sam wasn’t around, but the second he was, it was like fucking catnip. Dean was no better than he’d been at seventeen: he wanted to brush Sam’s hair and kiss him and fuck him until he couldn’t walk, and if he thought he could get it, given enough time, there was no consequence grave enough to keep him away. A few more moves and Sam would have him cornered.

He looked over his shoulder at their tent. It was glowing warmly from a flashlight within, their bags casting chunky shadows on the walls. Sam had gone still inside.

The younger Dean said, “Well, I’m beat. Sammy?”

Sammy mumbled sleepily. “Mmhm.”

“Alright, up.”

Dean watched as the boys stumbled to their feet and put on their shoes, rolled up their blanket. Sammy was dead on his feet and the younger Dean herded him around, eventually helping him duck into the tent with a quiet night to Dean, left alone sitting in the dark.

Dean looked back at his tent. No movement, flashlight still on, lighting the whole thing up like a beacon.

He considered sleeping outside. He considered taking off on his own, sprinting up the mountain to get this whole thing over with, get something productive like a fight or his own death to occupy his brain. Anything but Sam.

He stared at the tent for another minute. The flashlight didn’t go off. He stood and stifled a sigh, resigned to his fate. He went to the edge of camp and pissed on a tree—a horrible piss, Christ, he was dehydrated—then made his way back to the tent. He hesitated outside again, but he’d spent his entire life being alone with Sam. He couldn’t balk now. He unzipped the flap and ducked in.

Sam was laying on his back on his half of the tent, shirt off, with the sheet thrown over his waist. The flashlight was propped up on his bag and he was reading the instruction manual booklet for their walkie talkies.

When he saw Dean, he put the booklet down with a sheepish smile. “Gotta read something.”

Dean experienced a wave of affection for him so strong he didn’t know how he was still standing. He managed to say, “Nerd,” but it came out so soft it might as well have been ‘darling.’

Dean knelt his way inside. There wasn’t enough space for the both of them to sleep, so he set his bag outside and zipped the tent closed behind him, as they took turns doing. Sam tucked his legs in to give him room as he pulled off his boots, then his socks, and then he glanced up and carefully studied the sheet, to—yeah, alright, Sam was wearing boxers under there. Dean took off his jeans with an awkward shimmy in the tight space. Before he could overthink it, he peeled off his shirt, too. He shoved everything to the corner and sat down on his bedroll, feeling exposed.

Everything glowed warm and orange. Sam was propped up on one elbow now, laying there looking at him like every idle daydream Dean ever had. As always, he got a funny flicker of confusion when he saw Sam’s tattoo, a reflexive hey, give it back, that’s mine. He tried not to look, but he couldn’t help it: miles of bare skin, all of it looking soft and tan and fucking perfect, even the scars. Especially the scars.

“Hi,” Sam said, so quiet. It tore Dean to pieces.

“Hi,” Dean said back, as if it didn’t. He tried to steer things into safer territory, voice low to keep it out of earshot of the kids. “Man, we stink.”

Sam chuckled. “I’ve stopped noticing. I forget what it’s like to feel clean.”

“No kidding.”

There was an awkward lull. Dean was still sitting cross-legged at the end of his bedroll. Sam nodded at the empty spot next to him where Dean belonged.

“I don’t bite.”

I fucking doubt that, Dean thought, but he lay down next to him anyway, on his back with his arms folded across his middle. There were a few scant inches left between his arm and Sam, still leaning on one elbow next to him. The pose squished his pecs together, Dean could see it in his peripheral, right next to his head. He didn’t look over. He studied the tent seams overhead like it was his fucking job.

Sam said, “I’ve never seen you like this,” being all light about it, like it was funny. Dean scowled up at the tent ceiling.

“Don’t make a habit of being like this.”

He did everything he could to avoid being in the position he was now, awkward and vulnerable, on his back, trapped. It was no better in a tent than in every cellar, pit and cave he’d been bested in on hunts. But Sam and his big, stupid face, staring down at him with criminally soft eyes, was nicer to look at than some ghoul or ghost. Marginally.

“Sorry about earlier,” Sam said after a while. At Dean’s frown, he went on. “For making you, uh… take that break. It was stupid.”

“Oh.” Sorry for blowing you. Only Sam. Dean looked away. “Whatever.”

They went quiet again. Dean knew if he rolled over and went to sleep, Sam would let him, but, again—catnip. Dean wanted to talk about it. Like a kid with a crush, he wanted to hear Sam talk about him. If he made Sam talk enough, maybe he’d accidentally say something that made all of this okay.

Dean rolled his head on his pillow. Sam was still hanging above him, next to him, hair curling against his cheek. Only one side of his face was lit up by the flashlight.

“What made you so sure I’d done it before?” Dean asked.

Sam looked at his mouth for long enough that Dean wasn’t sure he knew he was doing it; he felt pride at that, somewhere in with all the shame. He had a fraught relationship with his mouth, something incurably soft on a face he was determined to make hard.

“If you wanted it when you were seventeen,” Sam said, his eyes moving back up to Dean’s, “it didn’t occur to me that you wouldn’t eventually get it.”

Dean didn’t really remember how he thought of it back then, freshly teenaged and grappling with what felt like a million pressing issues. Keeping his new affinity a secret from John was always the top priority; for years he’d have nightmares where John found out, screamed at him and took Sam away. Actually getting with a guy wasn’t on the table, back then. By the time it was, he’d forgotten how to want it.

“Never seemed that important,” Dean said, surprised to find that he meant it. Wanting guys always paled in comparison to wanting Sam specifically, which made the thought of being with any other guy feel like a store-brand replacement. The heat of a candle when he wanted a bonfire. “You?”

He’d never considered whether Sam was interested in guys before all this. Sam was straight and narrow—maybe rebellious, but in a way that always seemed, to Dean, staunchly hetero. At the most, maybe some grab-ass in college.

Sam tucked his hair behind his ears, brow furrowed like he was thinking about it. Dean forgot that he wasn’t supposed to be looking at him. His nails were dirty and his knuckles were dry and Dean so, so badly wanted to hear him say, I didn’t want it before you. You were my first.

Sam said, “I, uh, didn’t think about it a ton. Before this.”

A better man wouldn’t have gotten hard over being his little brother’s formative gay experience, but. Dean drew his leg up to hide it, obvious in just his boxer briefs.

“Ah.”

“Just, yeah. Never seemed important.” Sam cleared his throat. “Not like…”

Not like this, Dean heard, whether it was what Sam meant or not, and panic started to creep in. This was the opposite of what Dean was supposed to be doing; he should have been putting the brakes on, not having intimate, whispery conversations about their feelings, half naked in bed. He scraped together the pathetic bits of restraint he still had kicking around.

“This,” he said, gesturing between them and around them, “isn’t real, Sam. You know that.”

“How’s it not real?”

“Well, this”—greater emphasis on the two of them, a flicky motion of the hand—”whatever we’ve got going on, whatever you— There’s a reason it didn’t happen back home. It’s not…” He waved his hand again; he hand-talked when he was nervous. He folded his hands securely over one another and stared upwards. “You’re mixed up. You’re experimenting, or letting off steam or whatever. But whatever it is, it stays here. You’ve gotta know that.”

He was deeply proud of himself. He sounded so sure. He finally told Sam, you’re just playing around, like he always meant to. It sounded powerful. His heart was beating so hard he felt it in his eyeballs.

“You think I’m experimenting with you,” Sam said slowly. Audibly dubious.

“I’m… safe. I get that.”

Sam chuckled thinly. “You are, in no way, a safe choice. Trust me.” He shifted his legs and ended up closer. Dean tried not to flinch away, or worse, curl into him. “If I’m experimenting, what are you doing? You’ve never done it either.”

Dean could smell him now, the ripe scent of their unwashed bodies, boyish, hot and gross. It made him so fucking tender, too soft to speak—childhood summers with Sam trapped in the car on twelve-hour drives, windows down, reeking of armpit, hormones and cherry Coke. Waking up stuck together in sunny motel rooms, a thousand degrees, John snoring like a power saw in the next bed.

Sam said, “Do you think this is some kind of favour you’re doing me?”

Blind relief. Yes. “If you wanna think of it like that, sure. I’m helping you.”

“Helping.”

“Yeah. You’re all fucked up because of the demigod, and you, just, I dunno. I’m the only one here who isn’t jailbait.”

Sam snorted. “You’re sick.”

“Whatever, you know what I mean.”

“You seriously think that being slightly more horny than normal, because of magic, is bad enough that it’s making me fool around with my own brother? Despite the fact that you tell me I live like a monk every chance you get?”

“Pretty much, yeah. You’re repressed.”

“And you’re just, what? Being a good brother?”

“… Yeah.”

Dean risked a glance. They were so close now, Sam had shifted again, and his head was practically hanging over Dean’s. His features were blurry shapes in the stark shadows cast by the flashlight, white and black. Dean could hear his own breath too loud in the enclosed tent with all the silence of night.

“Pretty thin alibi, Winchester.” Sam’s voice was low and teasing. He tipped his head down to put his face closer to Dean’s. “You’re avoiding eye contact.” He picked up one of Dean’s hands where it lay over his stomach, held it in his and ran his thumb up his palm. “Your palms are sweating. Your heart’s going nuts.” He pressed his thumb to the soft inside of Dean’s wrist and kept it there. “I think you’re lying.”

Dean tried to make his traitorous fucking heart slow down. All he could think about was tilting his face up into Sam’s and finally kissing him, slow and deep, taking him in. Tangling their legs under the sheets and making out for hours like a couple of stupid kids, like he’d wanted since before he knew what sex was.

And maybe Sam wanted that, too. But if he didn’t, Dean would never get back any of what they had before this. He had to take what he could get. He was good at that.

He clenched his teeth to keep his jaw from trembling. He could feel Sam’s breath on his face. All he had to do was not look up. Keep Sam safe. Don’t look up.

He looked at his hand in Sam’s, which wasn’t much better. They looked good together. Sam’s hands were fucking huge. Dean spoke, with effort.

“I don’t get good things, Sam. So either this isn’t a good thing, or…”

He trailed off, but Sam got it.

“Or it’s not yours,” Sam finished. He paused for a long while. “You seriously believe that?”

Dean didn’t think he was supposed to answer that. Sam knew he did.

Sam set his hand back down and let him go. Dean laced his fingers together to keep them from doing something stupid. Sam made it easier by rolling onto his back, finally, so they were shoulder to shoulder. He mirrored Dean by folding his hands over his stomach, too.

The fact that they apparently weren’t going to fool around shook Dean to his core, terrified in ways he wasn’t allowing himself to think about. If it wasn’t just about sex, then— He couldn’t go down that path. He couldn’t let himself entertain the thought. It was a pipe dream.

After a moment, Sam turned off the flashlight. The darkness felt velvety and cool, physical around them, and Dean relaxed a little. He closed his eyes, even though he knew he wouldn’t fall asleep anytime soon.

“Hey,” Sam whispered (eight years old, whispering secrets before bed). “How come you never start it?”

Dean squeezed his eyes shut tighter. Because if I started it, you could tell me no. Because if I started it, I couldn’t stop.

“Because,” he said.

Sam shifted again, so their elbows just barely touched through the sheet.

“What if I want you to?” he whispered. “Not right now, but…”

Dean kept his eyes shut and said nothing. After a minute, his face started to ache, and he realized it was because he was clenching his jaw, like the howling in his head would become real words if he didn’t keep it in: Christ Sam don’t tell me that you’ve got no idea what you’re asking don’t do this to me don’t make me want this don’t do this to me don’t do this to me—

Sam’s breathing went soft and even next to him. Dean clung to it, listening until it lulled him to sleep.

Dean woke in the middle of the night to a sound outside the tent, somewhere close.

He sat up, taking a quick stock: Sam slept next to him, blissfully unharmed. The tent was intact, no light from outside, not the boys with their flashlight. But there was something.

He crept to his knife, still with his jeans, and brandished it. He unzipped the tent as quietly as he could. It was dark out, but light bled at the treeline; four in the morning, if he had to guess.

He set the knife down in the tent, because the noise was coming from his bag, resting in the dirt outside.

He dug through it for the walkie talkie, buried after they unpacked for the night. Static was rushing out of it, and some chunk of sound repeated over and over. The hair on the back of Dean’s neck stood up. His hand closed around the cool plastic of the walkie talkie and he pulled it out.

The static was louder, enough that he cupped his hand around it instinctively to keep it from waking Sam. Every few seconds, breaking up the static, a voice crackled through, full of pops and hisses like an old phonograph or an AM radio. It was a rough, deep voice he knew well.

“—SHSHHHTKKT……CHRRHCHHOLD—ON— SHHK—HOLD—ON… SHHHHHHHHTTTT HOLD ON… CHHKKT— HOLD— ON—”

Dean broke out in goosebumps over his bare arms and thighs. Cas’ voice kept repeating, broken by the static.

Dean clicked the button. “Cas?” he whispered fiercely, bringing it right up to his face. “Cas! Hey!”

No response, no change to the pattern at all. Then all at once, it stopped.

Something rustled behind him. He took a step out of the mouth of the tent, still crouched, and spun around.

Standing outside the boys’ tent, just barely visible in the first light of dawn, was Sammy. He was still, arms at his sides, facing Dean. Dean twitched hard with shock.

“Jesus, you scared the shit out of me.” He called out in a whisper just loud enough to be heard. “Taking a leak or what? You good?”

Sammy didn’t move. With his back to the east, Dean couldn’t even begin to see his face. If it weren’t for the shape of his hair and his big T-shirt, Dean couldn’t be sure it was him. He made no gestures, said nothing.

Dean whispered, “Go back to sleep, kiddo.”

He stayed crouched by his pack, walkie talkie forgotten. One hand inched towards his knife, laying just inside the open tent.

After a few moments, Sammy crouched down and got back into his tent. Dean heard his younger self mumble sleepily from within.

Dean folded himself back into his own tent and shut it behind him. He lay back down and listened to Sam breathing, but he didn’t fall back asleep.

Chapter Text

Sam woke, dragging a slow breath into his lungs. There was a big hand spread over his sternum, pressing firm but gentle, smoothing downwards. Something else, soft and wet. A prickly scrape. A mouth was kissing at the middle of his chest and moving downwards.

A second hand smoothed up his bare thigh. Sam took another breath, waking, eyes still closed. Dean’s amulet was a cool, heavy weight against his stomach, moving as Dean moved.

Sam mumbled, “Morning,” pleased and amused, still drugged by sleep. Dean hummed back at him, busy.

Sam wiggled his fingers and found them by his side, found Dean’s elbow and slid his fingers up his arm. His arm was hard, smooth and bare and Sam cupped the curve of it, his bicep, his round shoulder. Dean’s mouth moved down his ribs with a slippery graze of teeth. He was taking his time.

Waking up together made Sam stupidly sentimental. His whole life, all he ever did was wake up next to Dean; sleep sweat and brother-smell, always too hot or too cold, stolen sheets and elbows in his ribs, freezing toes on his calf. Having Dean kiss down his stomach didn’t feel so different from all that.

He opened his eyes to the blue-gray pre-dawn light filtering thinly through the tent. It was early, hardly hot yet. He looked down at the crown of Dean’s head, sandy hair in soft spikes messy from sleep, and his body curled beyond that. He was naked and hard, dick resting heavy on one of his big thighs; Sam wondered how long he’d been awake, watching him sleep or touching himself. Maybe both. Sam reeled at the thought, as thrilled as he was violated.

He sighed and closed his eyes, let his head tip back as Dean mouthed at his hip bone. “Why’d we argue about who’d get coffee when we could have been arguing about who did this?”

“Shh,” Dean whispered, lips on his skin. “Don’t wake the kids.”

Dean rubbed Sam’s thigh again, calluses rasping against his coarse hair. He went all the way up to the soft dip of Sam’s side, up to his ribs, then back down. Sam shuddered. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone went slow with him; the discomfort of being so seen made his skin crawl, but it was tempered by the giddy pleasure of having Dean’s undivided attention, no matter how many years he spent trying to convince himself that Dean’s attention wasn’t something he needed.

Dean hooked his fingers in the waist of Sam’s boxers and pulled them down inch by inch, following with his mouth, nuzzling at the crux of Sam’s hip as it was exposed, at his pubic hair, and finally at his dick as it sprang free. He slid Sam’s boxers down his legs the rest of the way; Sam got a brief flicker of memory, being undressed by Dean when he was too young to do it himself, having baths together. He cringed and tried to set it aside, but there was no separating the two fully even if he wanted to, and—with a sick flush of heat up his spine—he wasn’t sure he did want to. Dean was Dean.

Dean ran his mouth up the underside of Sam’s dick so softly he barely made contact. He mumbled, full of mirth: “Nice bush, by the way.”

Yeah, that was Sam’s brother.

Sam whispered back, “Shut up, we’re camping. I didn’t bring…” He couldn’t remember the word for the thing that made hair shorter. Dean kissed the head of his dick, which didn’t help. “Not all of us manscape.”

“Some of us should start.”

“Shut up, you love my musk.”

Dean hummed noncommittally. He took Sam’s dick in his hand, too gentle in the loop of his fingers, and he kept brushing his mouth over him and licking at him, and it took Sam a second to realize Dean was teasing him. It was a one-eighty from where they’d been yesterday—Dean couldn’t even look at him, Sam had to force him to put his hand in his hair while he blew him—and Sam’s dick throbbed just thinking about it. Something had changed. It was progress.

He smoothed his hand over the top of Dean’s back and up over the curve of his skull. He let his hand get heavy and imagined holding Dean down; it wasn’t out of the question that Dean would be into it, but they were supposed to be quiet, and making him gag wouldn’t be. Still, he tugged on him, suggesting.

“Come on.”

Dean shushed him again. “Shh.”

Sam said, “If you wait too long and the kids get up, and you make me blue-ball it up this mountain, I’m—”

“Shh.”

Dean only held out for a while longer. He licked up under the head of Sam’s dick, kissed him wetly and took him in his fist, squeezing tight. When he finally closed his mouth around him and sucked, spitty and wet, his tongue soft, Sam almost sobbed with relief. He settled for tugging on Dean’s hair, hard, earning an annoyed grunt in return.

It was different than the first time, achingly slow as Dean tried to be quiet. The tent swished loudly every time time Sam shifted—pushed his shoulders into the ground, arched his back—so he held himself desperately still. He tipped his head to the side and watched Dean work, kept his hand curled around the back of Dean’s neck, not pushing, just feeling him move.

“I didn’t watch, before. It was too…” Sam sighed and shuddered, watching Dean’s obscene mouth slide down his dick again. “You look good. Like, really good. Fuck.”

He couldn’t tell if Dean’s face went red or if it was the orange glow from the tent as the sun started to rise, but it looked good on him. Sam thumbed at the corner of his mouth where it stretched around his dick, and then his face was definitely red. He choked a little and it was Sam’s turn to go, “Shh,” stifling a laugh. Dean tugged on his balls for it.

Sam tipped his head back again, sweat prickling in the column of his spine. He drew up one of his knees (trying to hold still, trying not to give Dean the satisfaction of feeling him squirm) and accidentally brushed it against Dean’s arm, and God, it was good to be naked with him, the intimate beauty of skin on skin for the first time drove Sam nuts. He ran his hands over any part of Dean he could reach—the muscles in his back, shifting as he moved; his big arms, one holding himself up, the other flexing as he jerked Sam in his fist, tight and slow. After days of upright quickies in the forest where they shoved dirty clothes out of the way, laying together with acres of bare skin was unthinkably luxurious. He couldn’t reach Dean’s dick, which was dripping a sticky trail onto his thigh, but he couldn’t keep his hands off everything else.

It would be so easy to wrap his legs around Dean and pull him in, get every inch of Dean on every inch of Sam—worse, to spit in his hand and line Dean up—claw into his back, listen to the sounds he made as he lost his mind, pushed in—

Sam got close without meaning to and he was already almost there, with Dean still sucking slow, laving his tongue like that. Sam held himself so carefully, thighs shaking, eyes squeezed shut, trying to hold off with all the futile effort he had.

“Hey,” he rasped, warning, squeezing Dean’s shoulder, “swallow, don’t get it on the— shit—”

With girls, he asked first, to make sure they were okay with him coming in their mouth. With Dean, he didn’t think of it. Giving him a few seconds’ warning seemed plenty kind.

He managed to keep quiet as he came, just a shaky exhale and his nails dragging four red marks up the back of Dean’s arm. He hooked a leg around Dean’s back and dragged him in. Dean gagged, but quietly, and he swallowed.

Sam realized he was stroking Dean’s hair and wondered how long he’d been doing it, thrumming and dazed with pleasure as Dean sucked him gently through the aftershocks. It was heavenly.

Dean shook him off and shuffled himself up in a hurry. Sam opened his eyes and blinked to clear his head—it was a panicked kind of hurry, something was wrong—but Dean grabbed Sam’s face roughly in one hand, and he got it. Dean was jerking off, quick and frantic, and he swung a leg over Sam’s chest and straddled him. He hunched to keep his head from hitting the top of the tent. His fingers fumbled clumsily against Sam’s jaw.

“Open your mouth,” he mumbled, hardly a sound and definitely not a question.

A final shred of the little-brother obedience that Sam had spent the past decade carefully working out of his system made him open his mouth without thinking. His new, not at all brotherly thing made him grab Dean’s thighs with both hands, and then his ass, pulling him closer. Sam watched Dean’s face as he stroked his dick, flushed and glowing and looking down at him with stupid, slack-jawed lust. Sam brushed his lips against the head of his dick to be a brat.

Dean made a pained sound and the motions of his hand got jerky, his shoulders curled in and he started to come, his thighs clamped against Sam’s arms and trembling. One spurt of come hit Sam’s lip before Dean slid his dick into his mouth, and Sam caught the rest on his tongue. It was new, weird and bitter, but Sam liked the way Dean threaded a hand into the back of his hair and held him there until he was done; not something Sam would ever, ever admit.

Dean pulled back and numbly patted Sam’s cheek in thanks, then slid boneless down Sam’s body to lay next to him, on his side. He kept his hand on Sam’s chest and Sam slung an arm around his neck, neither of them thinking much about it. They tried to keep their breathing down to a dull roar. Sam had his eyes closed, basking in it.

Sam almost said what’s the occasion, but he remembered the raw discomfort that emanated off Dean in waves during their talk last night. Thin alibi, Winchester. Sam told Dean he wanted him to start something, and he did. That meant he wanted it. It wouldn’t do Sam any good to prod at it and scare him off.

He ended up saying, “Good morning to you too,” which was virtually the same thing. Lighter, he thought. Open-ended.

Dean laughed hoarsely, his breath warm on Sam’s cheek. Sam opened his eyes. Dean’s face was so close to his, flushed and blotchy, and pensive. He was watching him, lashes casting shadows on his cheeks. From so close, Sam could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes that leapt out when he smiled, and it made him unbearably tender.

Sam drew his arm back so he could rub his thumb over Dean’s nape where his normally prickly hair was long enough to be getting soft and flat. Dean reached up and scratched his fingers through Sam’s scraggly stubble in return, under his chin, and neither of them said anything.

Sam stared at Dean’s mouth, and more than anything, he wanted to kiss him. It made his face sweat just to think about it. He wanted to make Dean taste himself, roll him over and pin him like they were wrestling. Laugh into his mouth. Sex wasn’t enough anymore, he needed the harder stuff.

He tugged gently on Dean’s neck and tipped his face up. Asking. He let his lips part and watched Dean’s eyes drop to the movement. He waited, heart thumping hard.

Dean slumped forward until his face smushed against Sam’s chest, and he let out an exaggerated sigh.

“I miss coffee. And beer. And whiskey.” He squirmed around to tuck his face into Sam’s side, below his armpit, like the way they’d wake up when they were kids. It muffled his voice. “When we get back, we’re getting blackout drunk at the first bar we see.”

Sam closed his eyes, stung. He patted Dean’s shoulder amicably and ignored the hot, tight feeling in his chest. “Are mood-altering beverages the only things you miss?”

“I also miss long sleeves and hot showers, as long as you’re keeping score.”

“Yeah. Me too.” Sam patted Dean’s shoulder again and told himself it was enough. He started to sit up, instantly missing the skin-on-skin as Dean rolled away. “C’mon. Up and at ‘em.”

“—going around the perimeter alone, how are you gonna know if she gets me?” the younger Dean said.

“You’ve got a walkie talkie.” Sam pointed to the ‘Dean 2’ circle he’d drawn in the dirt using a stick. They were all squatting around his crude diagram as if it helped. “So if we can’t keep her distracted, we can let you know.”

“And if she does come for me?”

“Then you’ve got your Molotov water bottle.”

Young Dean stared down at Sam’s drawing, doubtful. He’d been sour since Sam dubbed him ‘Dean 2.’

“Ideally, most of this will just be buying time,” Sam went on. “We’ll take her down if we can, but we’re hoping our friend shows up. ‘Hold on’ sounds pretty straight-forward.”

He looked up at Dean, who nodded. Dean had told them about Cas’ voice coming through on the walkie talkie last night. Sam was still kicking himself for not waking up, but at least somebody did.

Sammy said, “Your superpowered friend from the future, who can time travel.”

Sam looked down at his drawing again. “Uh-huh.”

“Convenient.”

Dean said, “Hey, the guy comes through. He’s the best shot we’ve got at getting back to the future, and if he’s here to help with the boreal bitch from hell, that’s icing on the cake.”

Dean was convinced that Cas—their Cas, from 2009—would show up when they needed him. Sam wasn’t so sure. It had been five to seven days (he wasn’t totally sure on that, either) and Cas hadn’t been able to find them yet. Either he wasn’t looking, tied up or incapacitated in the present day, or something was preventing him from getting to them. Or, it was something even worse than either of those two things that Sam, loopy and exhausted as he was, couldn’t even conceive of.

Young Dean leaned back on his hands, stirring up dirt. “What do we actually know about what this thing is? She talks and moves around and everything?”

Sam nodded. “Yup. Reports have said they’re largely humanoid, but boreal ones look like trees. Bark-like skin. Woman-shaped. A more monster-like face, I guess.” He motioned to his mouth, made the shape of fangs. “But yeah, she talks. Same as all the areas of effect, she’ll try to twist things around. Throw you off, get you mad and distracted.”

“And horny,” Dean cut in, next to him. “Aren’t these things supposed to be hot?”

“Depends on your definition of hot, but, yeah. They lure victims with lust, same as the ‘desire’ ring, but don’t fall for it. Don’t get anywhere near her unless you’ve got a real chance of lighting her on fire, no matter what she says.”

Sammy nodded seriously. The younger Dean looked distracted, maybe trying to picture a hot chick that looked like a tree. Sam surveyed their worldly possessions, laid out on the ground to their left: four jugs of kerosene, four water bottles stuffed with a spare shirt of Sammy’s that had been torn into strips, four combat knives of varying quality, four handguns (also of varying quality), rope and one small box of ammo. It would have to be enough.

“Can’t be far now,” Sam said faintly, looking up at the curve of the mountain. The shape of it had changed like there wasn’t more ‘up’ to go, and they were so far from the valley below that the individual trees couldn’t be made out. “Ready to go?”

Both kids nodded seriously. There was an energy vibrating between the four of them that hadn’t been there yesterday, something anxious and grave. They packed up their bags without saying much and wore their knives and guns within reach, for all the good they would do against something non-human. Hope was a powerful drug.

Sammy wandered off ahead to get the bearing on his compass. Before they could fall into their usual two-by-two style, Dean snagged his younger self by the back of his shirt.

“Hey. Don’t let the kid out of your sight again, capisce? If you need me or Sam, you both come get us, don’t send him off. Something’s up with him, I’m serious.”

Young Dean looked nervously in the direction Sammy had gone. They could still see him, but they were keeping their voices low. “I know. I don’t know what’s going on, he’s—” He stopped and looked up at Dean. “Wait a sec. I didn’t let him go anywhere yesterday, he just disappeared.”

Dean stopped walking. “When he came to get me?”

“Yeah. We’d stopped to set up camp, and we turned around and he was gone.” Young Dean looked up at Sam, as if for support, and Sam nodded. To Dean, he asked, “What’d he tell you?”

“That he was looking for me. Made it sound like…” Dean trailed off. He chewed the inside of his cheek. “I don’t like this. Go catch up with him, and I mean it—stick to him like glue.”

Young Dean took off towards Sammy almost before Dean finished talking. The boys stayed close this time, ten or twenty feet ahead. Sam frowned at their backs as they followed, thinking, too slow.

Sam said, “He’s telling the truth. I don’t even know when he ran off, he was quiet.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Good that he found you, I guess.”

“I guess,” Dean echoed, sounding about as sure. “We don’t let either of them out of sight for a second today, alright? Not for—”

“I got it, thanks,” Sam interrupted, annoyed. He’d already apologized for getting distracted yesterday, and Dean hadn’t exactly put up a fight.

Dean was quiet next to him as they hiked, but Sam could feel something burning. He went over the past twelve hours, trying to figure out what exactly it was. The conversation in the tent last night had been tense, but it was good—Dean talked, and he was stunted and weird, but it was good. Maybe Sam had pushed him too hard, but, Jesus, waking up like that this morning, Dean didn’t seem awkward. It had been intimate; Sam was still all fluttery about it. It was the best they’d been since this whole thing started—you don’t want this, Dean had all but said, and Sam was pretty sure he conveyed, I do.

After a while, Dean shook his head. He rubbed a hand over his mouth and up his jaw, and spoke low enough for only Sam to hear.

“We wasted time this morning. It’s already hot as hell, we should’ve… whatever.”

Sam wasn’t good at shutting up. His whole body prickled with anger, instantly.

“Didn’t hear you complaining when you came in my mouth,” he mumbled, trying not to sound as pissed off as he was. Dean huffed angrily.

“That’s not the point. What was I supposed to do?”

Dean acting up helped Sam get his hair-trigger under control. He had to be the bigger man, they couldn’t blow up like this, not this far in.

“Hey, hey.” He reached out and brushed his fingers against Dean’s wrist. “It’s cool. I was joking. I’m just saying, y’know… calm down.” On an impulse he should’ve beaten down, Sam slid his fingers against Dean’s, hanging by his side; not holding his hand, but something very close to it. “I’d call it time well spent, is all.”

He expected Dean to blush. He hoped for it, even; getting Dean to do his new shy, flustered thing had, unfortunately, really been doing something for Sam. Dean would snort and mutter freak, hide his smile, and it would all be hugely endearing.

Dean slapped Sam’s hand away hard enough to sting.

“I’m not your fucking boyfriend, Sam. Back off.”

There was genuine vitriol in his voice. Sam reared back, hands up.

“Okay, woah. What the hell?” He stopped walking. When Dean didn’t, Sam grabbed him by the arm and yanked him back. “Stop. What’s your problem?”

Ahead of them, the kids had turned around. They could hear. Sam was looking only at Dean, whose face was twisted into an angry scowl.

Dean said, “My problem is you treating this like it’s some—”

Sam put his hand on Dean’s arm to stop him and looked pointedly at the kids. Dean trailed off, but Sam still waved his hand at the younger Dean, go ahead.

Young Dean hesitated before ushering Sammy off, leaving the two older men alone.

Dean opened his mouth like he was going to call after them, but Sam cut him off. He tried to keep his voice down.

“I’m not treating it like anything! I just— I thought we were good. Last night—”

“Shut up,” Dean snarled. “I’m sick of all your feel-good bullshit, this isn’t a game. You’ve got no fucking idea what this is like for me, and I don’t need you pretending.”

“I’m not! Jesus, where’s this coming from?” Sam tried to keep his cool, but he was spinning out. “I know I can’t get it, but I’m trying, okay? Can you just trust me for once?”

“I dunno, can I?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Dean scoffed and shook his head. He turned around and put some space between them.

“It means, you get these big ideas, you don’t think shit through, and then you drop it when you move onto the next thing. You’re not a ‘sticking around’ kind of guy.”

Sam’s temper flared. Dean could twist a knife. “Oh, fuck you! That’s not fair!”

“What? I’m not wrong!” Dean rounded on him. “How exactly do you see this going, Sam? When we’re back in the real world and you’re stuck in the car with me for twelve hours a day, you think you’re still gonna be in the mood?”

Sam’s stomach dropped. Dean could twist the hell out of a knife. Sam couldn’t stop grappling with the uncertainty around what it would be like when they got back home—fear that he wouldn’t want it and would let Dean down, the unknown of it all—and Dean throwing that in his face hurt worse than he thought it would. Sam fought to keep his voice level.

“All I’m saying is, I want to try. I don’t know, ‘cause I can’t know, but what I do know is—this has been—” Horrific, perfect, transcendent, life-altering. There were no good words, or none Dean would take. “Fuck, Dean, you know. You were there.”

Waking up to Dean’s mouth on him had felt natural and sweet, Sunday fucking morning. When he first confronted Dean in the forest, they clutched at each other like the world was ending while Sam shushed him, it’s okay, it’s okay, and Sam felt more than he’d felt all year. You couldn’t make up that kind of chemistry. He’d been changed irreparably.

Dean was shaking his head again. He looked away. “I’m gonna need more than ‘I don’t know’ on this one, Sammy.”

Sam hated how easy it was to get angry. Some days, he swore it was the only thing that came naturally to him. Dean’s entitlement pissed him off more than anything, expecting his obedient little brother to jump through his impossible fucking hoops—

Sam spat, “That’s not fair, I can’t know. I told you, I—”

Another annoyed huff from Dean. “Great. Fucking great, you don’t know.”

“Why are you mad at me for agreeing with you?”

“Because you’ve got no idea what you’re agreeing to!”

“So, maybe I want to find out!”

“Maybe? That’s what you’re giving me, a maybe?”

They were both shouting now; Sam had no idea how far the kids had gone, but he hoped it was far enough. He grabbed Dean by his sleeve and wrenched on it.

“Don’t you turn this around on me! First you say I can’t know what you’re going through, and now you’re mad about maybe? I think I’ve been pretty fucking good with this whole—”

Dean slapped his hand away. “Wow, you’ve been good about it, thanks, man! Hope that wasn’t too hard for you! This is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about, Sam, you can’t—”

“You should have told me!” Sam barked. He hadn’t meant to say it, but now it was all spilling out. He pointed at the direction the kids had gone and shouted, “Way back then, you should have fucking told me, and it wouldn’t have become this huge, insane thing!”

Dean froze. He only let it show on his face for a moment before he hid it away.

“Right,” he bit out, “and how exactly do you see that conversation going? Hiya, Sammy! I’ve been fucked up about you since before my balls dropped, wanna touch dicks sometime?”

And there it was. Sam knew, but now Dean had said it out loud beyond a shadow of a doubt: it wasn’t a phase. It wasn’t about his burgeoning adolescent sexuality, or being a good brother, or their fucked-up childhood spent growing into each other in a thousand lonely rooms—it was about Dean wanting Sam. It had always been about Dean wanting Sam.

Dean didn’t even seem to realize he’d said anything that Sam didn’t already know.

“I don’t know!” Sam blurted out, “but you springing this on me in the middle of a hunt isn’t—”

Dean threw his hands in the air. “I didn’t want this, Sam, fuck! You think this is how I wanted this to go? I would’ve died with it if it weren’t for that goddamn kid, you weren’t supposed to—”

“Yeah, well, now I do, and you’ve gotta deal with it.” Sam took a deep breath. He took a hesitant step towards Dean, palms out and imploring. “I’m trying, man, come on. I want…” You. “Look. I’m telling you, I wanna know. I wanna give this a shot. So I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like, fucking sue me. There’s no rulebook on… this.”

Dean wanted him. Sam let that wash over him, sting in his eyes and buzz down his spine. Whatever else Dean said, whatever he did to try to bury it, Dean wanted him. Dean was fucked up about him and that would always, always be true.

Sam forced his voice to go soft. Dean was only a few paces away.

“You always do this. You push people away, ‘cause if you say the mean thing first, it’s easier than letting—”

Dean cut him off. “What part of this has been easy, Sammy?”

Dean was looking down, fidgeting the way he did when he was nervous, but he wasn’t running away. He had a hand hooked around the back of his neck and Sam looked at his freckled elbow, and the sunburnt curve of the top of his forearm, and the will to fight dropped out of him.

Dean’s other hand was hanging by his side. Sam reached for it.

Dean jerked his hand away. He wouldn’t look up.

“Don’t,” he choked out. “Sam, I can’t.”

Sam stared at him, lost.

There was a polite cough to their right.

Sam whirled around. The younger Dean was standing a respectable distance away, looking vaguely annoyed and more than a little mortified.

Dean looked around; Sam was still frozen. “Wh— I told you not to leave him alone!”

Young Dean stalked closer and hissed, “You want him to hear you screaming about screwing each other? You’re fucking welcome! Get your shit together!”

“Where is he?”

“Just over there! He didn’t wanna—”

Dean muttered, “Jesus Christ, I gotta do everything around here.”

He shot Sam an absolutely indecipherable look as he left, a car crash of a look, angry and apologetic and pleading and God only knew what else. It wasn’t a good place to leave it. It took everything Sam had not to tackle him to the ground like a linebacker as he stormed off, but he was right. They couldn’t be leaving the kids alone.

Sam sighed hard and pinched the bridge of his nose. In for four, out for four. His muscles were rubbery with dissipating adrenaline after the fight, not sure whether he wanted to scream or cry, or both. Bury his face in a pillow and wail like he was a little kid again.

He could hear that the younger Dean hadn’t left. He spat, “Were you always this fucking macho, or does that happen between seventeen and thirty?”

It wasn’t fair to get the kid involved, but he was the only Dean available to use as a punching bag. Sam looked up and found him looking supremely awkward. He was rubbing his neck the same way Dean always did.

“Dunno,” young Dean said, because of course he didn’t know. “I didn’t hear much, but… yeah. You’re fighting?”

Sam sighed again, tried not to laugh, ran his hands through his hair. A thousand things at once.

“Yes. No. I don’t know. He has to make everything so fucking difficult, I thought— whatever. Fuck.”

He turned around; he didn’t want the kid to see his face. He put himself out there and Dean still wasn’t willing to give him a fucking inch, and entertain the thought that maybe, possibly, if they tried hard, this was something they could actually have. Something good. Fuck everyone else, fuck Dean’s metric ton of hangups, it was nobody’s business but theirs. It would have been good.

“Fuck,” Sam seethed, and then: “Sorry. Sorry. This isn’t your problem. Gimme a sec and we can go.”

He didn’t want to give up, but he also couldn’t keep trying if Dean wasn’t meeting him halfway. He’d cool it for now, and maybe when (if) they were back home, they could try again. If his skin itched constantly between now and then, and he couldn’t stop thinking about Dean kissing his thighs and burying his hands in his hair, then that was just another cross he’d have to bear. Add it to the fucking pile.

Young Dean said, “It kind of is my problem. Like, kind of totally my problem.”

Sam turned around. Dean’s eyebrows went up.

“Are you okay?” Dean asked.

Sam winced. He could only imagine how messed up he looked, blotchy and crazy and stupid.

“No,” Sam said, honestly. At least he could say it to one Dean.

The kid seemed to deflate. He shook his head and looked away, looked back, and seemed to be struggling with something. He covered his face and made an agh sound behind his hands, then dropped them with a flourish.

“Alright, fuck it. I can’t watch this anymore.”

Sam froze. “What?”

The kid took a deep breath. Again, he seemed to debate saying something, but he went for it.

“He’s being a dick ‘cause he’s in love with you.” A flush crept up his neck to his ears. “He’s scared shitless, and he’s fucking it up on purpose.”

It took Sam a second, because, again: ‘love’ wasn’t in their lexicon. Love was for Christmas cards and long weekends and it had nothing to do with selling your soul for someone, or digging their grave, or spending months of your life researching the blackest magic on earth just to see them again.

Sam worked his jaw, speechless. He watched the young Dean’s ears turn a brilliant red.

“He’s…”

“Yeah. Like, in love love with you. Movie love.” Dean spread his hands out in the air. “Big kiss as the credits roll.”

Sam didn’t know why this was different, but it was; the kid knew it, too, which is why he said it. What Sam had been doing with Dean thus far felt like a desperate, physical thing with claws, borne out of some twisted need to possess each other, not… Gone With the Wind. Sam didn’t think that was an option. The thought that Dean wanted it that way was mind-blowing. His mind spun an old reel; black and white film, him dipping Dean low and kissing him hard on the mouth.

“How do you know?” Sam asked, and when Dean looked away, humiliation intensifying, he got it. Obviously. “Oh.”

Dean shuffled his feet.

“Yeah. I don’t see it going away any time soon.” Deep breath. “Also, he told me.”

“He told you.”

“Basically. He didn’t have to spell it out.”

Movie love. Dean was… into this. Really, really into it, despite all his pig-headed avoidance, more than Sam ever could have thought, in a way that was softer than he ever could have believed. Dean waking him up with kisses wasn’t him trying harder because Sam asked him to, it was him not trying. Slipping up and accidentally showing his underbelly.

“What’s he scared of?” Sam asked, hoping to get a more specific answer than the one he already had.

Dean’s eyes cut down. He took a step back and leaned against a nearby tree, looking nervously in the direction his older self had gone, like he was worried he’d hear him snitch.

“He doesn’t trust it,” he said carefully.

Sam’s anger flared again, unhelpful and whip-crack quick. “He doesn’t trust me?”

“No, not you, he doesn’t trust the— Okay.” Dean bit the inside of his cheek, thinking. He spoke slowly. “You know on Looney Toons, Bugs would be fucking with Elmer Fudd or whoever. And there’d be this, like, beautiful cake or something sitting out in the middle of nowhere, on a pedestal, and Fudd goes to eat it, and it’s dynamite, and it explodes.” He made a boom motion with his hands and looked down at them for a moment before he managed to look back up at Sam. “You’d think eventually, Fudd would just not eat a cake lying around in the middle of nowhere.”

Sam tried to wrap his brain around the metaphor. He was a cake out in the middle of nowhere; forbidden fruit, too good to be true.

He said, “But I told him. I’ve been the one going for it, I can make my own decisions.”

Dean shrugged. “Yeah. But if you change your mind, he can’t take his thing back. You make a weird mistake for a couple weeks, and he… yeah. He’s fucked forever. And he hurts you.”

Sam wished that didn’t make a twisted kind of sense, in Dean’s labyrinthian, overprotective, guilt-bent brain. They weren’t on a level playing field, they couldn’t be, not with how long Dean had wanted this. It didn’t matter that Sam was suddenly on board, or how much he said he meant it.

“You wanna hear my take on it?” Dean asked.

Sam nodded. He watched the kid steel himself up, staring down at his wringing hands.

“I know I don’t know you—not you you, not this you, but—I know my Sam. And I think… even if things got fucked up between us, and he didn’t want the—the other stuff, anymore, I don’t see him blaming me. It’d be weird for a while, but we’d still be brothers.” He looked up. “Am I close?”

Sam’s chest got tight. Achingly sentimental. “You got it.”

The kid nodded solemnly, eyes downcast. Two guys, standing in the forest, trying not to tear up over how much they loved their brother. It was a while before Dean looked at him again.

“So. You actually… want it?”

“Yeah. Runs in the family, I guess.” Sam tried to laugh and it came out horribly. “Fuck, this is awkward.”

Dean laughed much more successfully. “Speak for yourself. This is the best moment of my life.”

“Seriously?”

“Come on. It’s you.”

That sentimentality rushed in too hard for Sam to ignore. Sam stepped in close without thinking and put his hand on Dean’s shoulder. His thumb was at the collar of Dean’s shirt and he brushed it against his neck. He was burning hot. Sam felt an overwhelming amount of affection for this sad, sweet seventeen-year-old boy who fell in love with the kid he’d been forced to raise.

Dean shrunk away from Sam’s hand, but not enough to actually shake him off.

“Don’t. I don’t want your pity.” Very reluctantly, he picked up Sam’s hand and took it off his shoulder. “If you’re gonna put the moves on me, I wanna earn it. He did.”

Sam hadn’t planned on putting the moves on him, but he got the sentiment. He took his hand back.

“You’ll earn it, too,” he said softly. The kid laughed, all shaky and weird.

“Ah, fuck. Don’t tell me that.”

“It’s true. You turn into him. And—whether you’re some other version of us, and you fork off somewhere else, I don’t…” He could at least return the favour. “I also don’t see it going away anytime soon.”

The kid was full-on red faced now, looking away, like he was trying not to smile and also to keep himself from crying. He cleared his throat.

“Uh. As long as we’re being all—whatever— can I ask—when you were his age, Sammy’s age, now. Did you…” He broke off with a frustrated sigh. “Was there anything?”

Sam had been trying to figure that out for days. Of course Dean would ask, there was probably nothing more important to him. He wasn’t talking to his Sam.

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “It was a long time ago. I know that’s probably not what you want to hear.”

“No, but it’s the truth, so it’s—whatever. Thanks.”

“It’s not no.”

“It’s not yes, either.”

“You never asked. Just ‘cause I didn’t think about it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t.” He broke off and shrugged. “I dunno. I’ve been trying to figure that out myself.”

It was like Dean said: weird at first, but ultimately, they trusted each other. Sam was starting to think he’d be okay with it. Their current situation was heavily colouring his view on their past, but maybe he’d be more than okay with it. It seemed omnipresent and inevitable.

He looked in the direction the older Dean had gone, heart fluttering like an idiot.

“Fuck. I’ve gotta…” He was already moving before he realized it. “Wait here for a minute. You can catch up…”

He trailed off as he broke into a jog. Dean couldn’t have gone far, Sam could hear the distant sound of his voice while he was talking to the younger Dean. His heart pounded in his throat. Running through the airport before she gets on the plane, orchestral music rising to a crescendo. He could fix this.

He spotted Dean up ahead, alone. Dean had taken off his pack and leaned against one of the only trees left around, half dead from the heat. He stood in a neat circle of rust-orange pine needles that ringed the tree, black T-shirt and filthy blue jeans, beautiful like nothing Sam had ever seen.

Dean looked over when he heard Sam coming. He looked exhausted and chagrined, trying to hold it together. He pushed himself away from the tree and took a step to meet Sam. The tree’s shadow cut his features in two.

“Where’s—”

Sam dropped his bag in the dirt. He charged up to Dean and, not breaking his stride, he took Dean’s face in his hands and kissed him.

The world spun slower. Sam held his breath. Dean’s lips were so soft crushed against his, half open in his aborted sentence. His stubble was prickly under Sam’s palms and against his upper lip, and he smelled like sweat and skin where Sam’s nose was pressed to his cheek. He was warm from the sun.

Dean didn’t move. His mouth shifted only in a barely there, involuntary reaction to being kissed.

It was just a handful of seconds. Sam pulled back and their lips made a soft sound on parting.

Dean’s eyes were huge. Sam still had his hands on his face. Dean’s hands were up, hovering empty. His lips shaped words that Sam barely heard over the thump of blood in his ears.

“What was that?”

Sam rubbed his thumbs over Dean’s cheeks, in the soft spots in front of his ears. He could feel his hands shaking, but he couldn’t stop it.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

Dean just stared, shell-shocked. “What?”

“Do you trust me?” Sam said again.

Dean frantically searched his face. Dean was breathing with his mouth, panicking, cracked-open and honest, and seeing it sparked something that made Sam want to break him down, suck the marrow out of his bones and put him back together again. Love, maybe.

Slowly, Dean brought his hands up and curled them into fists in the front of Sam’s shirt.

“Yeah,” Dean said, breathless, swallowing nervously. “Yes.”

Sam crushed their lips together before Dean got his last word out.

This time, Dean kissed him back. Dean opened for him, ravenous and shaking with it, yanking on Sam’s shirt to pull him closer. Their lips slid together soft at first and then more sure, teeth and tongues and shaking breath; Sam’s hands slid back to cradle Dean’s entire skull, to take him, climb inside him and live there. He groaned into Dean’s mouth, eased him back against the tree and pinned him there with his whole body, hands fumbling to his face, moving him how he wanted, reckless, hot and insane, everything he’d spent days thinking about. Dean buried his hands in Sam’s hair and pulled; Sam bit his lip, hard, and sucked on it; Dean slid his arms around Sam’s neck to clutch at his shoulders and arms like every end-of-the-world hug they’d ever had, desperate and hungry and never close enough.

Sam found Dean’s face with his fingers and eased him back, rested their foreheads together and got enough space between them to talk, both of them panting into each other’s mouths.

“I want you. Okay?” Sam’s voice cracked; he couldn’t care. “And I know you want me. Everything else, we’ll figure out. You’ve gotta trust me.” He kissed Dean’s slack, open mouth, twice, clumsy and breathing too hard. “You can trust me. I trust you.”

Dean put his hands on Sam’s face and stroked his hair back with some kind of wrecked, broken laugh. He said something Sam couldn’t place, too quiet, and pulled him into a kiss.

Dean kissed like he was made for it. Sam’s eyes fell shut and he sunk into it, the solid heat of Dean’s body and his full, wet mouth, his needy hands, all the perfect fucking sounds he made. For a minute, Sam forgot where they were. He tasted coppery blood in his mouth, either a shadow of fear or real blood from an errant bite. He wanted to pick Dean up just to see if he could, pin him back against the tree to see if he’d put his legs around him. He couldn’t stop. He slid a hand to Dean’s hip and grabbed him roughly, pulled him around like he wanted to fuck into him. It felt better than anything else. It felt like coming home.

Dean grunted, “Holy fuck, Sam—”

Sam licked into his mouth and sucked his tongue, took his mouth over and over again in days’ worth of fevered kisses given all at once. Sam dreamed of a bed, laying Dean out and kissing him as he sunk inside, feeling the grip of his body and all that tension letting go.

There was a loud, garbled noise behind them.

“Jesus,” young Dean choked out. “You’re giving me complexes they don’t even have names for.”

Sam wrenched himself back. It was a herculean task to let Dean go.

He spun around. The younger Dean stood several paces away by Sam’s fallen backpack, looking… not displeased. Sam felt his face get hot.

“Sorry,” he said.

Young Dean gave him a wry smile, awkward and pleased. “Don’t be.”

How gross, and wonderful. Sam allowed himself to bask in the moment, one thing finally gone right in a sea of recent wrong. Dean made an embarrassed kind of snort behind him, and it was sweet.

“Wait.” Dean stepped forwards and put his hand on Sam’s arm. “Where’s Sammy?”

Sirens started going off in Sam’s head. His body flushed cold with dread, excruciating whiplash after the glowy heat of all things Dean.

“He was with you,” Sam said quickly. “He stayed with me”—he pointed at the younger Dean—“and you went to—”

Dean said, “No no no, he was here, he went back to get you two. Fuck, why’d I let him go?” His eyes were wide and scared. He went up to his younger self. “He’s with you. He was with you, right?”

Sam had seen very little as upsetting as watching such intense horror and fear spread over the younger Dean’s face.

“I didn’t see him. He didn’t come this way. I thought…”

It was profound in the most horrible kind of way to watch in real time as a person’s worst fear came true: Dean—both Deans—had lost Sam.

Faintly, Dean said, “Oh, fuck.”

There was a blur of frenzied, panicked motion. Sam and Dean hauled their bags on and the younger Dean started shouting, SAM! SAMMY! SAM! and nothing but the chirp of bugs hummed back at him.

Sam whirled around, looking in every direction for any sign. His head was pounding, cloudy with panic and fear.

“Okay, where could he have— You were back that way, and we came from—”

“Look.”

Dean was standing with his back to them, pointing with his whole arm. Up the mountain, far enough away and nearly hidden by the shape of the land, was a smudge of bright, perfect white. Not rock, not anything natural: Sammy, or, the colour of his T-shirt.

“Sam!” young Dean shouted, breaking into a run. “Sammy! Wait!”

He took off sprinting and Dean swore and started after him, Sam following suit. His backpack made it hard to run, but the kerosene was in there. He fumbled his gun into his hand as he ran, like it would do much against a demigod.

“There’s something wrong with him,” young Dean shouted back at them, wrecked, “I knew there was something wrong with him and I still let him go, I can’t—”

“Keep your shit together, we’ll catch him!”

The three of them were sprinting now, as fast as they could. Sam’s legs felt weak and rubbery, either from the grueling effects of the hunt or the nervous adrenaline that poured through him. Hunch confirmed too late: the demigod had to be messing with the younger Sam, Sam thought, and maybe had been for a while—all the weird shit the kid said, acting so strange since yesterday, they should have taken it more seriously. The reality of another failure was bitter in the back of his throat.

Sammy was running as fast as the rest of them, purposefully, as if towards some destination unknown. Up the mountain, he scrambled up a gravelly slope instead of going around, and if the demigod had gotten to him, Sam realized, there was a chance his destination wasn’t unknown at all.

“He’s”—Sam panted, breath rushing too fast for him to get it out—“heading for the—”

The edge of a building appeared in their sight. It was jarring beyond belief to see the clean, straight lines of metal siding after days of seeing only dirt, scrubby underbrush and trees.

Breathless fear bubbled up in Sam’s throat, bursting forth after days—days that felt like weeks—of idle wondering, little preparation and not half enough focus on the thing they were actually there to do. A couple more buildings appeared in view as they ran closer (squat, metal siding, prefab utilitarian structures in beiges and whites) and Sam got the too familiar and very gutting feeling of stumbling into something dangerous totally half cocked. It never got easier and they never saw it coming. They’d been hunters their whole lives and they could still be so stupid when it mattered.

There was a tall chain link fence around the perimeter of the cluster of buildings, at the top of one final, gravel slope. The fence had a wheeled gate, but it was wide open.

A putrid, cloying stench hit Sam like a freight train.

It wasn’t easy to mistake the smell of a rotting corpse. It wasn’t like anything else.

Ahead of Sam, the younger Dean gagged.

“Oh, God,” he gurgled, pace slowing to a walk, “is that—”

Dean said, “Yup,” sounding strained. He had his gun in his hand too, both Deans did. “We’re too late.”

That smell coated the inside of Sam’s mouth and nose and he had to swallow to keep from gagging. It was stronger than it should have been, ‘bottom of a fresh grave’ strong.

They slowed to a careful approach as they neared the gate. Beyond the first buildings were a few more, all the same matching kind of plain, and a wide asphalt path leading into the compound bleached pale by the sun and cracked by tall, impudent weeds.

Just past the first building was—something. A lumpy shape that Sam was more familiar with than he’d like to be.

“There’s a body,” he said, quiet and breathless in his horror.

They got closer. The changing vantage point made it clear that it wasn’t just one body: there was a pile of them, rotting in the sun.

The urge to reach out and put his hand over the younger Dean’s eyes was so strong his arm twitched out to do it. He sated it by catching up to the older Dean and twisting a hand in the sleeve of his shirt, as much for some minor comfort as it was to keep him from running towards the danger.

Turns out, he’d kept the wrong Dean at bay. The younger Dean shot forward.

“Fuck. Is that—”

He threw off his backpack and sprinted for the gate, towards the pile of bodies.

“Wait!” Sam shouted after him, voice breaking desperately. “Stop! It’s not him!”

They had a plan, and it involved stealth. It involved kerosene and Molotovs and using the element of surprise to get some shred of an advantage against an ancient, godlike being that would want them dead when she learned they wanted to ruin her fun. They lost all of that if the younger Dean ran in, guns blazing.

Sam broke into a sprint to catch up with him, but he’d seen Dean get hysterical strength when his brother was in danger. The younger Dean was lighter without his backpack, but Sam couldn’t drop his because of the kerosene. Dean was light and quick and seventeen. Sam couldn’t catch up, and Dean reached the gate first.

He ran for the pile of bodies, shouting, Sammy, Sammy, but he pulled up short and skidded to a stop. He turned to his left, face twisting into a snarl, then brought up his gun and pulled back the hammer.

He shouted, “Let go of my brother!” his voice massive, booming, end-of-rope terrified. A scared, powerful man in a seventeen-year-old’s body.

Sam was still running, running, gaining on the older Dean and then passing him. He shouted at the younger Dean, out of breath and wheezing, “Don’t! You can’t shoot her!”

They were almost there. The ground shook as Sam and Dean ran, the fence approaching quick, the wheel mechanism at its gate nearly rusted through, the stench worse than anything, the sun baking their bare arms as they pumped, hot wind dragging—

The younger Dean called out to them.

“It’s not her, it’s—it’s some guy.”

Sam couldn’t have stopped running if he’d tried.

He was crashing past the gate before he could slow down, before he could make anything of the breathy, broken noise Dean made behind him. He bowled into the younger Dean, grappling for his shoulders, righting him to keep him standing after the collision. Sam followed the line of the kid’s raised pistol in his outstretched hands, held with certainty, pointed at his foe.

Zachariah stood twenty feet away on the asphalt between the cluster of brick-like buildings, smiling at them.

The younger Sam stood by his side, staring blankly in their direction. Zachariah had his hand on his shoulder in a sickeningly paternal gesture.

Dean skidded to a stop next to Sam, gravel flying. The three of them stood motionless, staring, lost.

Zachariah’s smile widened. He raised his hands in the air.

“Seven days, boys! Enough time to create the universe, and all you did was go on a little hike.”

His hand settled easily back on the younger Sam’s shoulder afterwards. Sammy just kept staring at them, unmoving, with his glassy eyes.

The younger Dean took a step forward.

“Hey!” he barked. “Take your ugly fucking hands off him, or I blow your brains out.”

Sam reached out and put his hand on young Dean’s forearm, lowering his gun. The only thing moving him was fear: Zachariah could blink and drain the kid of his blood or beat the shit out of him, either kid, and it was all over. But when a guy with a paunch and a cheap suit touched your brother, there was no choice to make. The kids didn’t know, they’d act recklessly.

“He’s not human,” Sam said, as quickly as he could. Fuck it, he thought, stumbling over it, “he’s an angel. He—”

“A what?”

“—he can do—anything—faster than you, stronger, don’t try anything, we can’t—”

A weight crushed Sam down, buckling his knees. The pain was unreal as his joints bent and gave way and his knees hit the pavement. The shock of being crushed left him speechless as the air rushed out of his lungs.

Zachariah said, “I never pegged you for such a defeatist, Sam. That’s more your brother’s game. At least let the kid think he’s got a shot of getting out of this as the victor.”

Both Deans made a move towards Sam, as if to help him up, but Sam watched as they crumpled to the ground next to him with matching grunts of pain.

“Oh, right.” Zachariah held up a hand, his fingers pressed together. “I’ve been doing you a favour, all this time. The whole ‘not feeling your bodies wasting away’ thing. Let’s bring that back for the finale, shall we?”

He snapped his fingers. The cramping in Sam’s legs was so intense he shouted in pain, hands flying clumsy and useless to his calves, his thighs, all burning with an indescribable agony. After a moment, he noticed the other changes: it was hot, but no longer oppressive. The dull, hazy film of intoxication pulled back, and only then did Sam realize how prominent it had been. He didn’t know how long it had been since he was thinking straight.

“Dehydration, first stages of starvation,” Zachariah listed off. “Being human’s a real bitch, I’ve heard. But that’s more of a you problem than a me problem.” His grin widened, all teeth. “I put on a pretty good show, eh? You’ve gotta give me that. I played the whole demigod thing to a tee, I should get my first Oscar for this.”

Dean, from next to Sam: “You son of a bitch. What part of it was real?”

Sam managed to turn his head. Dean was doubled over, teeth grit in pain, and between them, the younger Dean was about the same. The agony was clear on their faces, sweat pouring, flushed and straining.

Zachariah laughed. “Oh, Dean. Still defining things on such ephemeral, human terms as ‘real.’” He waved a hand in the air. “Maybe there was a demigod here at one point. Maybe this is what it was always going to be. It’s a space-time loop type situation, I don’t give a shit. I’ll ask Sagan next time I see him. All I know is: you’ve always ended up here, and it’s always been me. Those people?” He nodded at the pile of bodies by the gate. “I put them out of their misery days ago. Mormon freaks, making all those demands of God—never liked ‘em, personally. A small price to pay to get your attention.”

Dean tried to strain a hand forward and reach for his fallen gun, but he only got an inch. There was nothing in that gun that could kill an angel, and it was agonizing to see him try anyway.

Dean said, “Why kill them? You said it was about the greater good. I saw you, you said—”

“Eh. I just thought you’d wanna hear it. Those people never mattered. There’s no greater good, with you two. You only know one thing.” He pointed at both Sam and Dean one after the other. “Sam, Dean. And Dean, Sam. I can—hell, I have—threatened every other life on earth, and it didn’t matter to you symbiotic freaks. You’re so easy.”

The younger Dean bit out, “What’d you do to Sammy?”

Zachariah cackled. “Proving my point perfectly. Thanks, kid.” He jostled the younger Sam’s shoulder, and again, he didn’t move. He was out of it, somewhere else. “You don’t have much time left. Is that really what you want to ask?”

Sweat poured down Sam’s face. They needed to get out of this safe, all of them. That was the only priority.

“Why?” Sam snarled. “If it’s just a stupid trap, why bother—”

“Sending you back in time? Because it’s not just a stupid trap, it’s the perfect trap. I literally can’t lose.” Zachariah sighed a theatrical sigh. “Alright, fine, I’ll spell it out. You rubes take the artfulness out of everything.”

He ventured closer to where the three of them were kneeling in the dirt. Sammy walked easily ahead of him without being asked, with a slow, steady gait.

Zachariah said, “You two have been having, shall we say, a little tiff since the whole ‘freeing the devil’ thing. I mean, it’s no wonder, but it’s been a real shame to see. You used to be so close.”

Sam looked over at the younger Dean. His eyes were wide, mouth open, staring at Zachariah. Who kept talking.

“So, I figure: threatening the world didn’t work, so we’ll keep threatening the brother. Easy. But, I thought, let’s make it something Dean really can’t get out of. Something”—he made an explosion motion with his hands, fingers flying apart—“earth-shattering, you know? So, I send you here.”

He spread out his hands demonstratively.

“A vacation of sorts. Maybe you have a great time on this little trip, and you’re closer than ever. Reminds you why you fell in love in the first place.”

Sam’s hands tingled, numb and nervous. He curled them into fists in the dirt. Through the cramping in his legs and the sun beating down and the aching emptiness in his gut, dread crept in. But, Sammy’s face was still placid and empty, no reaction.

Zachariah snorted.

“Oh, please, don’t look so surprised. Isolation, filth and danger? Might as well be an aphrodisiac for you freaks. I even made you a nice little getaway cabin. This was a honeymoon.”

Dean spat, “Fuck you!”

Zachariah just smiled at him, wide and toady. He went on like Dean hadn’t spoken.

“So, if that’s the case, then I threaten our damsel in distress over here”—he gestured at the older Sam—“and Dean Sr. is more ready than ever to say yes, so bam, there’s our sword. And if you were fighting? Not in the mood to die for each other?”

He looked at the younger Dean, and his smile started to show teeth.

“Then, I’d make a version of you whose baby brother dies in front of him before he’s got hair on his chest. If we can keep you from slitting your wrists long enough to get you where we need you, that guy is gonna say yes.”

The younger Dean made some inhuman gurgle of anguish. He tried to get to his feet, inch forwards, anything, and succeeded only in grinding his knees against the ground and flexing his hands. Zachariah laughed at him.

“Yes, I mean you, my little plan B. Squirm all you want, but there’s one part of this that doesn’t change: Sam dies today. Pick a Sam, any Sam, doesn’t matter to me. I can’t lose.”

“You can,” the older Dean ground out, voice like gravel, “you will.”

“Blustery bravado even now! Impressive, really. Mostly sad. But don’t decide yet, let me savour this. You’ll get less fun when your fates start to change, all… sick and weird.” Zachariah tipped his head to the side. “How has it felt, having your old memories drip away? Side effects include dizziness and nausea, but you boys already don’t know where one of you ends and the other begins. This shouldn’t make a difference.”

Sam made sure to keep very still. He didn’t look over at either Dean, and prayed they didn’t look at him.

Their memories hadn’t been changing. Sam kept the image in his mind of the heat rash on the back of his hands, his first time through this, and it didn’t change. He still remembered being in the hospital on fluids afterwards, Dean sleeping sitting in the chair next to his bed, bent forwards so his face was planted in the baby-soft hospital blanket. Sam clung to that hospital and its cacophony of drips and beeps like a lifeline.

Zachariah said, “Okay, I lied, I’m too impatient. It’s time to choose. Which Sam will it be, Dean? You two wanna duke it out?” He twiddled his fingers between the older and younger Dean. “Have a meeting of the minds?”

Young Dean made a noise Sam didn’t recognize at first, and then, just as Sam looked over, young Dean spat at Zachariah. He hit him, too—a glob of spit dripped down the front of one pressed black pant leg.

“Fuck you,” young Dean snarled, all fire. “We don’t choose.”

Zachariah frowned down at his leg, eyes narrowed, and he was quiet for a moment.

Sam looked over at the older Dean and found him already looking back.

His face was waxy and pale, tight with pain, and his eyes were wide and panicked. It was all just stalling. They didn’t have anything on them that could take down an angel—nothing they could have gotten at a sporting goods store, but—if they’d thought of it first, they should have stopped John, gotten him to make some calls and find what they needed to at least hold their own—everyone here was already dead, dead for days, if they’d just known that—

A small, shaking voice: “D?”

Sammy had gone pale and his eyes were finally clear and focused, and terrified; his lax limbs had drawn up tight, his hands in fists. His left shoulder shrunk away from where Zachariah still held him, now with a much firmer grip.

The younger Dean stared at him with pure, adoring relief. “Sammy—”

Zachariah cut him off. “None of that tearful reunion crap, please. It’s like you people don’t even listen! I’m going to kill him! Get scared!”

Sammy’s face broke into something horrified, the first he was hearing of it. He tried to twist out from under Zachariah’s hand and make a break for the other three. He got far enough to leave Zachariah with just a fistful of his sweaty shirt, but Zachariah grabbed him easily by the upper arm and hauled him back in. The way Sammy’s mouth screwed up in pain said he didn’t do it nicely.

Zachariah said, “I liked you better when you were my puppet. You know it wasn’t even hard? Getting into your malleable little brain and wiggling around.”

Sam grit his teeth. “Posession.”

“We’ve got more than one tool in the kit, you know. No need for a sword when a butter knife will do.” Zachariah grabbed Sammy’s other arm and pulled him around to stand in front of him, closer to the other three. “It’s nothing personal, mind you—I mean, it’s personal for you, ‘cause these guys don’t trust you, and that made you an easy target.”

Young Dean tried to move again. “Don’t—”

“Hey, it’s the truth! You were flagging at the end there, I needed a way to make sure you kept coming up the mountain.” Zachariah shook Sammy by the arms in a faux-amiable kind of way. “I’ve been playing you for two days, and they didn’t even notice! How’s that make you feel?”

Sammy’s face said exactly how it made him feel. He wasn’t looking at either of the older men, only his brother. His bright eyes were shining. He was clearly trying to keep it together.

“Let him go,” the older Dean barked. “Your beef’s not with him, it’s with me, you son of a bitch. Let them go.”

Zachariah laughed again. “What, you’re mad about this? You couldn’t even tell! I had to give the kid something to do, it was painful to watch. You three leaving him all alone while you got caught up in your wet little soap opera drama.”

A hot flush of humiliation ran down Sam’s spine. He stared at his younger self and Zachariah in helpless agony, powerless to shut him up.

Zachariah leaned over Sammy’s shoulder so he could peer into his face.

“Oh? They didn’t tell you?”

The younger Dean started fighting again against the otherworldly pressure that crushed them down, anything to stop his world from unraveling with a few words. “Don’t—”

He made it about a foot in one desperate thrash before Zachariah’s eyes cut to him and he crumpled to the ground. He caught himself on an elbow and yelped in pain; Sammy twitched towards him and Zachariah hauled him back.

Zachariah said, “I guess it does ruin the whole ‘white knight’ thing you’ve got going on. Well, I don’t support lying to children. They’re our future.” He squeezed Sammy’s arms and smiled down at him with a placating, preschool kind of smile. “Your beloved brother-mother wants to stuff you like a Thanksgiving turkey, kid. Sorry.”

The younger Dean was shouting before Sam’s ears stopped ringing.

“—don’t! I don’t! Don’t listen to him, Sammy, I—”

Zachariah tried to talk, but young Dean’s shouts drowned him out. Zachariah frowned, annoyed, and waved a hand at him.

Blood flew out of the younger Dean’s open mouth and he made a wet choking sound. The blood bubbled out of his lips and dripped down his chin. He doubled over until his face was inches from the ground.

Zachariah said, “Yuck. You’re so earnest.” He looked back down at Sammy. “Anyway—you get it? Or would you prefer something more age appropriate? He wants to slip notes in your locker and touch you where your bathing suit goes. He’s in big, sweaty, totally-not-brotherly love with you, call it whatever you want.”

Sammy was staring up at Zachariah, and—Sam didn’t know what to call the look on his face. Nothing would be enough, not for that.

Zachariah jostled Sammy again. “Come on, kid, you knew. You’re supposed to be the brains of the operation. Why else would he hate himself like that? That doesn’t come naturally, you’ve gotta earn that kind of self-loathing.”

He gestured to where the younger Dean was crumpled over in the dirt. His back hid his face from Sam’s view, but his shoulders were shaking and Sam could see neat drips of deep red blood in the dirt below his face. He made a wet, gurgling noise that sounded a lot like Sammy.

On the kid’s other side, Dean grit his teeth and tried to move; he got close enough to his younger self to put a reassuring hand on his bent arm.

If Sam could move properly and get ten free seconds, he could grab his knife, cut his palm and make an angel-banishing sigil. Whatever happened after that, they could take it as it came. They needed to get Zachariah distracted, make him loosen his hold.

Zachariah said, “I mean, to be fair, I don’t feel that bad for you. You’re into it, after all.”

Humiliation rocketed through Sam’s skull, aching and ringing. Sammy’s face twisted into something flushed and awkward.

“What?”

Zachariah flapped his hand at the men on the ground.

“Well, not you you, but, you know—future you. That guy.” He pointed at Sam. “These two have been fucking and sucking since halfway up the mountain! Guess you didn’t know that, either. Every time you had your back turned, literally—going at it like rabbits.”

Nothing could’ve prepared Sam for the way his younger self looked at him. Not disgust—Sam managed to be surprised by that, distantly, but—it was just bone-shaking, life-rending shock on the kid’s face. Maybe a hint of betrayal, a secret let out.

“By the way, Dean!” Zachariah spoke in a theatrical stage whisper and winked at the older Dean. “Nice! You got him! Everything you ever wanted, right?”

Sam squeezed his eyes shut and hung his head. His whole face hurt. He couldn’t look at Dean, at any of them. Zachariah, of course, went on.

“Trust me, kid, I’ve seen your life. Getting you aborted wasn’t in the cards, but a mercy killing’s not so bad compared to the way you could end up. You know you cause the apocalypse? You, specifically. You were also born to serve the devil.” He tutted and patted Sammy on the arm. “I know. Life’s a bitch.”

Sam made himself look up, he had to. Sammy started to cry, quiet, tears pouring a neat path through the dirt on his cheeks. Sam could imagine pretty well the pain of hearing that, even without the context: hearing that the tiny kernel of wrongness he felt inside himself was founded all along, that he’d been right. Devil, apocalypse—those words would be unthinkable agony to a child who was ready to believe them, whether he knew what Zachariah was or not.

Sam croaked, “Don’t listen to him, it’s not—you’re not—”

There was a searing pain between his ribs, nothing he could properly place. It was bad enough that he had to stop talking and folded over, no longer able to hold himself up.

There was a disturbing quiet that Sam was half aware of through his pain. Nobody spoke. There was the sound of feet on gravel, somebody’s whimper.

Sam tried to move his hand back towards the knife at his belt. A finger’s width. Two.

Finally, Zachariah sighed. “Alright, boys, time’s up. I’m gonna go ahead and make the executive decision here.”

The younger Dean struggled to his feet.

Sam was elated, sweating relief, breaking into a smile when—

Young Dean went, “No,” almost a whisper. “No no nono no no.”

He wasn’t in control. He was fighting against a force that propelled him, taking one step and then another on shaking legs that kept him moving towards Zachariah and the younger Sam, who was still crying. Zachariah was smiling widely.

“We’ve gotta really seal the deal here if this is the version of you that becomes our vessel. It doesn’t work if it’s something therapy could iron out later. We want you low.”

In a sickening motion, jerky and inhuman, the younger Dean reached down and grabbed the hilt of the small fixed-blade knife he kept in a worn leather sheath at his hip. He turned his face down to watch his hand, and Sam recoiled; there was frothy blood dripping down his chin from some unseen wound inside him, and he was crying. Not sobbing, but the helpless, frustrated kind of tears Sam had seen pour down Dean’s cheeks countless times before. It never got any easier to see and Sam felt cracked open, broken and raw.

Zachariah looked at the older Dean, still crumpled on the ground next to Sam.

“You can see it now, can’t you? Wasting away in a series of pay-by-the-hour motel rooms. You’ll turn gaunt and pale any second now as that gets rewritten.” Zachariah petted the back of the younger Dean’s head, softly. “You’ll come to us. We’ll make your life mean something.”

The younger Dean pulled his knife free with an agonized whimper. Sammy was staring down at Dean’s hands, choking on tears.

“Dean—”

“It’s not me, Sammy, he’s making me—”

More blood slid out of Dean’s mouth. Sammy put his hands to his brother’s face, fingers sliding through the blood as if trying to push it back into him.

Zachariah looked at Sam over the tops of the boys’ heads.

“Not sure what happens to you once the kid goes, to be honest. I’ve never seen a human get unmade.”

His voice was as pleasantly placid as if he were talking about a recipe he’d tried recently. Sam watched in numb, empty horror, making no progress with getting his hand to his knife.

The younger Dean raised his own knife in both hands, with the point aimed at his little brother. Sammy tried to twist away, but Zachariah put his hands on his shoulders and Sammy folded up in pain.

Zachariah said, “Tragic, isn’t it? Doing it with that cute knife of yours?” The point of Dean’s knife was close enough to be touching Sam’s shirt now. “The blade you’ve used to protect little Sammy since you were old enough to walk—cut the crusts off his sandwiches—and now you’re gonna put it in his lung.”

Sam watched. Everything felt syrupy slow at times like this, with the helplessness of loss: watching Dean and the hellhounds, Dean on all those Tuesdays, and every other time Sam had failed to save him. Each one lasted its own lifetime. Sam watched.

Sammy said, “Dean,” full-on sobbing now; both boys were. He put both his hands around Dean’s wrist and tried to push the knife back, slipping.

Young Dean mumbled, barely loud enough to hear over the crying, “It’s okay, Sammy. Look at me, it’s okay.”

Holding it together, right until the end. Sammy wasn’t that much smaller than Dean, even at thirteen, but his hands looked so small then, both of them wrapped around Dean’s wrists and still powerless to stop the otherworldly force that made Dean hold the knife steady. Something changed, Sam saw it: the clarified resignation of someone who knew they were about to die. Last rites had a flavour to them, a way they crackled in the air.

Sammy, all snot and tears, looked up from the knife and into the younger Dean’s face, only a couple feet from his own.

“He said— do you—”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry—I’m sorry, Sammy, please—”

That wasn’t no. There was no sense in lying at the end, Sam knew that. He had a vague memory of his last night with Dean before Hell, formless and inconsistent with grief as it was, but they’d poured their guts out, talked about John and home and everything in between. Sam wondered now how close Dean had come to telling him how he felt about him, and the effort it would have taken for him to die with it. This version of Dean wasn’t dying with it. This Dean was looking his brother in the eyes and all but saying it, sorry, sorry, sorry.

A spot of red bloomed on the front of Sammy’s white T-shirt. His face scrunched up and he made a high, heart-rending sound in his throat.

The younger Dean gasped. Gasp wasn’t right—it was a tormented snarl of a noise, awful enough to hear that Sam broke out in a cold sweat all over his body. That sound chased his pain away and brought everything to the forefront in a shaking, crystal clarity.

“We’re not losing memories,” Sam said all at once, teeth bared, staring up at Zachariah. “You fucked up. Something happens.”

Zachariah’s face snapped to his, eyes wide, furious.

“What?”

In that moment of broken concentration, the younger Dean moved on his own. He brought his knife down in a sharp arc, anything to get it away from Sammy.

One of his hands slipped off the handle and the blade sliced down the inside of his forearm.

Both boys screamed. Next to Sam, the older Dean shouted. Sam was silent, mouth open, watching as blood sheeted out of the younger Dean’s arm and splattered in the dirt at his feet, on his jeans, on Sammy’s bare legs. Sam took in a few things immediately: the volume of blood that was pouring out of the wound, which was nearly a foot long, the slick glint of muscle as skin parted under the blade, the way his hand went limp. His tendons were cut.

It took Sam a second to realize he could move. Zachariah had let up his hold.

There was a sound, faint but perfect, clear and glorious as a ringing bell—the soft, breathy flutter of angel wings, and the flap of a trench coat.

In the space between one moment and the next, Cas was behind Zachariah. He wrenched Zachariah away from the boys and punched him in the face, hard, staggering him. He shook an angel blade out of his sleeve and it shone quicksilver bright in the sun.

The older Dean was up in an instant, scrambling in the dirt towards the two boys. Sammy clutched at the younger Dean and eased him to the ground, sobbing uncontrollably and babbling at him, oh Jesus Dean Dean Dean—

The kid hadn’t stopped bleeding. He wouldn’t, with that. Sammy’s hands were slippery with blood as he tried fruitlessly to hold the wound closed, but it was slit wrist to elbow, the worst Sam had ever seen. When the older Dean reached them, he tore his shirt over his head and wrapped it around his younger self’s arm to staunch the flow.

Cas and Zachariah were grappling, trading blows, feet kicking up the hot dust around them. Cas dove with his angel blade and Zachariah pivoted back, swung at him and missed. They were bickering unintelligibly.

Sam tore his knife from its sheath and gouged a deep cut into his palm. He used the blood to trace an angel-banishing sigil in the dirt as best as he could with his shaking hands, with the blood clumping up and sticking the way it was. The boys were crying. Dean barked something at them with a hitch in his voice, there were meaty thumps as punches landed and the swiff of a blade through the air. Sam spent a lifetime on that sigil.

When it was done, Sam whipped his head up. Zachariah had Cas on his back and he was trying to wrench the blade away from him. All Sam could see of the other three was Dean’s bare back hunched over his younger self and one of Sammy’s sneakers on the kid’s other side, the white leather splattered with brilliant red blood.

“Cas!” Sam shouted, voice booming. Cas’ dirt-streaked face turned towards him, his big blue eyes manic. “Go!”

It only took Cas a split second to put it together. He was gone before Sam could register, leaving Zachariah kneeling in the dirt alone.

Zachariah snarled at Sam, “Don’t you—”

Sam slammed his hand down onto the sigil. There was light and heat, Zachariah’s roar of rage and a hair-raising outpouring of energy that shocked the others into a moment of stunned silence. When it dissipated, Zachariah was gone.

The silence around them felt foreboding, the air empty save for the boys crying. Sam hadn’t realized how much he’d spent the entire trip feeling like someone was looking over his shoulder, until they weren’t. Now, they were completely alone. Horrifyingly so.

Sam struggled to his feet, lunging, his cut palm stinging as he slapped it against the ground for balance. He landed on his knees next to Dean, the older Dean, and dug his fingers into his shoulder without thinking; Dean was to be braced against for support, both literally or metaphorically.

“Oh, fuck,” Sam said, hollow.

Dean’s black shirt was soaked through to a deep, wet garnet where it was wrapped around his younger self’s forearm. Dean had a hand over it, and Sammy had both of his pressed there; blood leaked between their fingers anyway. Sammy was sobbing, ugly and unabashed and feral, harder than Sam remembered crying since—since the last time he watched Dean die.

Dean said, “Keep pressure on it,” but his voice was shaking.

Dean’s bent knee was next to Sam’s. Sam reached down, closed his hand over Dean’s thigh and squeezed hard.

Sam was sure that Cas had blinked away before he hit the banishing sigil. Before, not after. He got less sure with every passing second. He blinked profusely and stared down at the boys in front of him, speechless with grief. He was sure that Cas had left of his own accord. He’d be back any second.

Sammy was kneeling on the younger Dean’s other side, both hands still wrapped desperately around his sliced arm. He was bent over him and crying into his face. The younger Dean’s eyes were open, just barely, and focused on Sammy. He was shaking badly and his face was wet with sweat and tears, unclear whose. He brought up his good hand and brushed against the front of Sammy’s shirt.

“Are you—”

“I’m fine, you— you’re so—”

Sammy just cried harder. He could hardly breathe with the force of it, making horrible wrenched-up sounds from inside his chest. He bent down until his forehead rested against Dean’s and his dirty hair fell in a curtain around their faces. Dean laid his good hand over Sammy’s and it was slippery with blood.

“It’s okay,” he said, his voice soft and hoarse with tears. “It’s gonna be okay, Sammy.”

Sam realized he was crying. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been crying for, quietly to himself. He curled his hand into a fist where it rested on the older Dean’s leg. After a moment, Dean put a hand over his and held it.

Sam kept the image of that hospital room in his mind. The pinchy pain of the IV drip in his arm, the beep of the heart rate monitor. They hadn’t gone away. The knitted blanket on his bed was pale blue, like a baby’s blanket, and when Dean woke up it had left a weaved pattern on his cheek.

When Sam heard the rustle of feathers, his eyes shut involuntarily and he took a sharp breath in. The relief was that palpable.

Dean, next to him, made a similar noise.

“Oh, fuck, Cas—you—”

Cas said, “I know.”

Cas was behind the younger Sam, who hadn’t noticed him, still sobbing over his brother. Cas had to bodily ease him out of the way to get to Dean, and Sammy blinked up at him, lost.

“Who—”

Cas dropped down to one knee in the dirt, reached out and touched the younger Dean’s forehead. There was a pause—infinite—before Dean’s green eyes flew open, pupils shuttering to pinpricks as they hit the sun.

The older Dean tried to lift the sopping wet T-shirt from his younger self’s arm, but he was met with a teary whimper of resistance from Sammy.

“He’s okay,” Dean said, easing the kid’s hands back with his own, “look.”

He peeled the shirt away to reveal a pristine, unbroken forearm, wet with blood from a wound that didn’t exist anymore. Sammy pulled unthinking at the skin, checking.

Cas sat back on his heels. “I can’t heal your hunger or thirst, but I can mitigate their effects on your bodies for the time being.”

He leaned over the younger Dean’s prone body to touch each of them in turn. The pain in Sam’s chest, the cramping in his legs and the gnawing in his stomach, his headache and the prickle of his sunburn, all immediately dissipated.

Sammy stared up at Cas, slack-jawed, stars in his eyes.

“What are you?” he asked softly.

Cas smiled down at the younger Sam.

“Castiel,” he said. “A friend of yours.”

Sammy stared at him a moment longer, face open and awestruck, thinking. Then the younger Dean shifted next to him, propping up on an elbow, and Sammy looked down at him as if just remembering he was there.

Sammy lunged at him and hugged him so hard Sam heard the air knock out of his lungs in a shocked punch. Sam couldn’t see the younger Dean’s face, the way he had it buried in the crook of Sammy’s neck, but he saw his skinny arms come up and lock around Sammy’s shoulders, hands still slick with blood where they fisted in his shirt. They stayed like that, clutching each other, buried and hidden.

Sam realized he still had his hand on the older Dean’s leg. He took it back, eyes on Cas, but if Cas thought anything of it, it didn’t show. He was looking at the two boys with a faint expression that Sam placed as affection.

“Cas,” Dean croaked. “What the hell’s going on?”

The boys hadn’t let each other go. Wouldn’t for a while, maybe. Cas pivoted in the dirt and scooted along so he was sitting next to Sam and Dean, giving the boys some semblance of privacy. They could have gotten up and walked elsewhere, Sam knew, but he didn’t want to let the kids out of his sight. Tears were still drying crackly and salty on his face, heart still slowing from its staccato beat.

Cas said, “Zachariah constructed warding to make it nearly impossible to reach you through time. I’m sorry it took me so long.”

Sam managed a wobbly smile. “All good, Cas. Thanks.”

Cas nodded seriously. “When I found you missing, I assumed he was involved. I knew you would get taken back in time, but not when.”

“Because you always knew,” Dean said slowly. “Because you were that chick back at the cabin. You’ve known since 1996.”

“Correct.”

At that, the boys detangled from one another. The younger Dean managed to look embarrassed at having been seen hugging his brother, even after coming a hair’s width from death; his ears were bright red, and as soon as Sammy’s arms weren’t around him anymore, he tucked his hands against his body as if hiding the fact that he hadn’t kept them to himself.

Sammy sat up and rubbed his face on the back of his forearm. His eyes were puffy from crying. He had wide streaks of blood across the back of his white T-shirt where Dean’s hands had grabbed him and the effect was terrifying.

“Are you some kind of shifter?” he asked Cas.

Cas’ eyes flicked to Sam’s. Sam nodded shallowly. Not much sense in hiding anything now.

Cas said, “I’m an angel of the lord.” He hardly waited for Sammy to finish his sharp, thrilled inhale before he added, “But we don’t have time for that right now.”

The younger Dean wasn’t looking at the angel, he was looking at Sammy. He was looking at him like he’d never seen him before, like he hung the moon. Sam wondered if there had been some furtive whispering during that hug.

Dean said, “So, this whole time, you knew us before we knew you. When we met you, you’d already met us.”

Cas said, “Yes. When we met later in your timeline—our first meeting, by your perception—I was asked by my superiors not to share, and I didn’t. This”—he gestured to the space around them—“has always happened. Zachariah’s plan failing. Me being here.”

“And you can take us back?” Sam asked. His heart picked up at the sheer thought of it.

“Yes. But that window of time is rapidly closing. We have approximately ten minutes.”

Sam looked at the boys. Young Dean had sat up and pulled his legs in, and Sam saw for the first time that the younger Sam had put his hand over Dean’s in the dirt. Their fingers were curled together. They were holding hands.

Young Dean caught Sam’s eye. Sam wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the kind of restrained glee he currently saw on Dean’s face. Pure, unadulterated, terrified joy.

Sammy was watching Cas, but he was blushing, colour up high on his cheeks. His eyebrows were tilted anxiously, and Sam recognized a habit he’d never seen from the outside: he was biting the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.

Warmth bloomed in Sam’s chest, love and certainty, thrill. He’d wondered. Now he got to know.

“What about them?” Dean asked, motioning towards the kids. “Where do they go?”

Cas tipped his head to the side. “They’re you. They stay here and become you.”

Sam said, “But our memories are different than theirs. Zachariah said they’d change, but I still remember the first version of this. Our timeline, or whatever, where we didn’t meet ourselves.”

“Oh.” Cas straightened up. “I thought you understood.”

“Understood what?”

Cas looked at the kids. Sam watched his younger self’s hand twitch where it lay over his brother’s, but he didn’t pull it away. That one, Sam was sure Cas saw.

“There’s only one timeline,” Cas said, clearly choosing his words carefully. He kept his eyes on the younger two. “You did meet your older selves, in exactly this way. You just don’t remember it.”

Next to Sam, Dean huffed and looked down. He got it before Sam did.

“Shit. You wipe their memories.”

“The Sam and Dean from 1996, yes,” Cas clarified, “I will remove their memories and take them back to the start of all this. Then things will happen in the order of events as you, Sam and Dean from 2009, remember it. And you retain your memories from your time in 1996.”

Young Dean scowled. “So, what, all those people die either way?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Their deaths are a necessary constant. There is nothing you can do to save them.”

Sam was reeling. All of it, the past seven days, forgotten for those kids. He’d been that kid, he’d met his older self, and he didn’t remember. He’d—

Sammy spoke up.

“We forget?” His voice was tiny, young. After a beat, he hesitantly added, “Everything?”

“Everything,” Cas said.

He didn’t look at the boys’ joined hands when he said it. Sam did.

He glanced at the Dean next to him, the older one. Dread and loss was spelled out on his face as clearly as Sam knew it was on his own. Not losing their own memories of the past seven days was an endless relief, given everything, but still. He didn’t know what he’d expected, he never could wrap his mind around the two separate timelines, and for it to be like this felt… awful. A lot like grief.

“Shit,” Dean said, eloquently. “You sure, Cas?”

Cas nodded. “If you grew up knowing what they know now, your entire lives would change in a way that would damage fate and space-time. The only reason your memories haven’t changed already is because I do this. Because I have always done this.”

It sounded so final. Sam knew that it was. It felt like time was slipping through his fingers, less than ten minutes now to end things with… themselves. With these two kids that Sam had grown shockingly fond of over the past seven days. It wasn’t enough.

The boys were staring at the older two now, wearing the same kind of speechless resignation. Young Dean’s blood had started to dry brown and flaky on his arms, his face, on Sammy’s hands.

Cas rose slowly to his feet. “You have four minutes.”

He wandered politely away, over towards the edge of the clearing they were in, where the prefab metal buildings baked in the sun.

Sam watched as panic crept over the younger Dean’s features, and he looked quickly at Sammy.

“Uh. Can we—”

Dean saved him the trouble. “Go talk.”

Young Dean scrambled to his feet and Sammy followed. He looked around awkwardly, as if there were some perfect, convenient place to have a heart-to-heart with his brother, until Sammy grabbed his wrist and pulled him away, the opposite direction Cas had gone.

Sam sighed hard and scrubbed his hands over his face; they reeked of sweat and dirt, dried blood from the cut across his palm that Cas had healed.

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. This blows,” Dean said, with a flippantness that Sam found, despite everything, deeply charming.

Sam took his hands down and looked at Dean, really looked, for the first time since—shit, since they’d kissed. Since he held Dean’s face in his hands and said trust me, trust me, pressing their whole bodies together, trading end-of-the-world kisses. Dean looked good; dead fucking tired and harrowed beyond belief, but good, dirty and tan and bright-eyed, still shirtless, the amulet hanging between his pecs. Sam wanted him—still, always, despite everything.

Sam looked over his shoulder to where the boys were standing in the shadow of a building. He couldn’t hear them talking but could see that they were, standing close, heads bent towards one another. He couldn’t imagine what they were saying in the face of that horrible impending loss. If they’d figured something out—Sammy’s hand over Dean’s, their gawky smiles—it would be gone in three minutes, and they’d have to wait thirteen years to figure it out again. What could you say to that?

Sam looked down. His knee was only a few inches from Dean’s knee. In a feat of outstanding bravery, he closed the gap and let his knee rest against Dean’s.

Dean looked down at their knees, too, and neither of them spoke. The boys’ voices drifted over, indistinct.

Finally, Sam said, “I don’t know what to say.”

Dean laughed, kind of reedy. “Yeah.”

It wasn’t bad, just new. New, but, apparently, a long time coming. Sam’s heart felt like it swelled to bursting, nervous and thrilled. Humbled.

The kids came back. Sammy, at least, had been crying. It was anyone’s guess with Dean.

“Guess this is it,” he said, as the older two got to their feet.

Before they could fumble through awkward, masculine goodbyes, Sam grabbed the younger Dean by the arm and pulled him into a tight, vicious hug.

Young Dean balked for a second, tense, but then he gave in. He put his arms around Sam’s shoulders and hung on.

Behind him, the older Dean went, “Oh, shit, right,” and Sam heard him run off.

Sam kept hugging the younger Dean. He couldn’t believe how small he felt in his arms, still wracked with the slenderness of boyhood that would burn off in a few years. Sam nearly lifted him off his feet.

The younger Dean’s face was pressed to the front of his shoulder. Sam felt his mouth move as he mumbled, “Thanks, Sammy,” and patted his back.

Sam let him go. He was blushing again. Sam turned and scooped his younger self into a matching hug, crushing him in his arms. This time, his feet did leave the ground. The kid laughed, which was sweet, and hugged him back.

“Thanks for everything,” he said quietly.

Sam said, “Anytime.”

The older Dean returned at a jog, now wearing his spare shirt. Sam let his younger self go.

“Here,” Dean said to him. “This is yours.”

He held out his little whittling project on the flat of his palm. The fat dog.

“Oh!” The younger Sam took it carefully, turning it over in his hands. “This won’t mess anything up?”

Dean smiled softly. “Nah. I think you’ve always had it.”

Once it was clear that the kid was going to keep it, Dean knelt down and hugged him. He held him so carefully, like he might break. His eyes shut. Sammy hugged him back hard, his hands pulling into fists in Dean’s shirt.

When they parted, Dean ruffled his hair, as if trying to make it mean less, but his eyes were shining.

Dean and his younger self looked at each other for a silent moment. The younger Dean grimaced.

“Don’t you dare.”

Dean snorted a laugh, grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him into a hug. The younger Dean groaned, but Sam could see how tightly he hugged him back.

Sam heard the older Dean mutter, “Be good to him.”

Cas walked back to them with a nervous crease between his eyebrows.

“It’s time. I’m sorry.”

Dean let his younger self go. The boys looked at each other like they might cry again. Sam wasn’t so sure about himself, either. The childish urge to reach out and grab his brother’s hand for comfort was achingly strong.

Sammy looked up at Cas. “Does it hurt?”

Cas said, “No. You will be in your backyard in Oak Run, seven days ago. No time will have passed for you.” He looked up at the older two. “You will be at the Alpine Roadside Inn in North Dakota, in 2009.”

Sam swallowed painfully against the lump in his throat. “Thanks, Cas.”

Cas nodded seriously. Sam couldn’t stop himself from letting the backs of his knuckles brush against Dean’s wrist, and he felt Dean press back into the touch.

Cas moved, and then there was nothing. Goosebumps broke out over Sam’s arms. It was very, very cold.

Chapter Text

wake me up before I fall asleep
sing to me like we’re seventeen
love me like you never loved someone before

–seventeen, alien boy

Sam blinked awake into a pillowcase that smelled like bleach, his breath clouding in the cold air. Realization dawning, mounting, his eyes opened to a gray morning and a maroon bedspread, the starched white sheets of the far bed rumpled and—

And empty. Traffic sounds from outside filtered in, too loud, and Sam jolted upright still half asleep, to find the motel room door open, a slice of snowy parking lot visible between the door and jamb. The snow on the asphalt outside was disturbed by smeared footprints.

“Dean?” Sam called out. He threw back his comforter and swung out of bed—thick gray sweatpants, bare feet freezing, holy shit—and stumbled across the scratchy carpet towards the door. “Dean!”

Dean came back wrong, he didn’t come back at all, he was hurt, time had passed, it was 2043 and life as they knew it was over. Sam lived each of these realities in the space between his bed and the door.

He ran into the parking lot, his feet burning in the snow. It was still snowing and flakes stuck in his eyelashes and dotted on his cheeks. All the cars in the lot were covered in three inches of snow; it had been coming down for a while.

The Impala was parked two spots down. Dean had his hands spread on the hood, head hung as he hunched over it. He was wearing the track pants and hoodie that he slept in during the winter and his feet were bare like Sam’s, bright red with the cold.

“Dean,” Sam said again, breathless with relief. He couldn’t see Dean’s face as he approached and Dean didn’t move at the sound of his voice. The falling snow left dark speckles over Dean’s back and shoulders. Sam watched his back swell as he breathed. “Hey.”

He put his hand on Dean’s back and waited. Dean’s hands melted the snow on the hood and the shiny beetle-black showed through. His knuckles were pink and wrinkled and his nail beds were bluish. His fingertips bent against the metal, shifting. Sam smoothed a hand up his back; his hoodie was threadbare and thin under Sam’s palm.

“Let’s get another day,” Sam said gently. “We’ll stay in.”

Dean’s first shower was forty minutes long. He only came out when Sam shouted that it was his turn, and once Sam had taken his shower and the water heater had recovered, Dean went back in. The window at the front of their room was wet with condensation and steam billowed from the bathroom in thick clouds that smelled of mint and sweet peas, cheap motel soap.

They left the room briefly for food and liquor, then didn’t leave again. They stayed in their sweats and T-shirts, took off their watches and kept them together on the nightstand between their beds; Sam looked at them often without thinking about it, their two watches side by side like that. They were half cut by noon and full of grocery store hoagies, Chef Boyardee and bitter motel coffee. The radiator was still broken and neither of them considered asking for a different room. They sat under the covers on their respective beds and watched Judge Judy and Jerry Springer and Star Trek, each of them occasionally worming an arm out from under the blankets to grab their whiskey glass. Sam washed his hands twelve times and scrubbed hard at his nails, unable to believe they were actually clean—and they were. Their bodies were unmarred and healthy, no cuts or sunburns or grime. They each dozed off once or twice, never at the same time. They didn’t talk much, not about Cas or being home or getting fooled yet again, or the loss of the two boys that felt very, very real, even though they hadn’t gone anywhere.

Around three, Sam started to shift towards the left side of his bed. Around four, Dean came back from taking a piss and climbed into Sam’s bed instead of his own, muttering something about the cold. Sam passed him his whiskey glass from the nightstand, then grabbed the bottle and topped him up. Sam’s next nap was deeper, knowing Dean was next to him. He’d gotten surprisingly used to that tent.

The only available movie channel started an Evil Dead marathon. During the commercial break before Army of Darkness, Dean took another shower. Sam lay in bed in the dark of an early winter evening and listened to the water run, Dean’s feet squeaking as he moved.

Sam’s thoughts had been circular, overwhelmed and exhausted. He thought about the boys they’d never see again, and Zachariah, somewhere, waiting for his next chance, and Dean, Dean, Dean—both thirty and seventeen, weathered and stubbled, freckled and bright-eyed. The blood sluicing out of his limp arm, his eyes red from crying. The way his mouth moved when he kissed and how he nipped with his top teeth.

All day, Sam had thought about Dean. Every twenty-minute nap he woke up from pulled back another layer of gauze to reveal new clarity: they were home. All that was over, and they were home like it never happened, but it did. It had always happened. All that was left now was to figure out what they wanted to do about it.

The faucet shut off in the bathroom and a towel slid off the rack. Sam listened, half watching a car commercial. The sink ran for a while, punctuated by the metallic tap of a razor on the porcelain edge.

His thing with Dean—the thing they’d built awkwardly over a span of days, a network of stolen moments between the trees, thoughtlessly cruel and cripplingly earnest in turns—was so huge and still so fragile that Sam had no idea how to go about it the right way, now that it was time. What was there to say? What could possibly give it enough weight? He went over it again and again.

The faucet stopped and the bathroom door opened, revealing Dean in a gust of steam. The other times he’d showered, he came out afterwards already clothed, but this time, he was just wearing a towel.

Sam’s eyes tracked him as he moved across the room. His skin was newborn pink and tender-looking from the scalding water and scrubbing, his wet hair sticking up in tousled spikes. The motel towel was cheap and thin and Sam watched the curve of his ass as he moved. Dean went to his duffel and rummaged for clean clothes, and when he found some, he dropped his towel.

Sam’s eyebrows went up. He looked, unafraid—the planes of Dean’s body, no longer gaunt and sunburnt but soft and winter-pale, faint tan lines around his biceps from summers past. His dick was soft and unassuming; he pulled on boxers, tucking himself away. The casual nudity was staggeringly intimate and Sam felt impossibly tender, seeing it. Arousal licked faintly up his spine, but it wasn’t pressing. It was just Dean, letting him look, in the cold privacy of a motel room where they belonged.

Dean pulled on an old gray T-shirt and sat on the edge of Sam’s bed, on the side he’d claimed as his. He picked up the whiskey bottle, weighed it in his hands and poured himself another glass. When he motioned for Sam’s glass, Sam waved him off.

Dean shrugged, took Sam’s empty glass from him and set it on the nightstand. He took a pull of his own whiskey; Sam could smell it sweet and hot when he breathed out. He didn’t get back into bed. Sam tipped his head to the side and studied Dean’s face. Only the TV lit the room.

“You okay?” Sam asked. Dean looked ready to talk, or anyway, something had changed. There was a new layer to the pensive quiet they’d been cloaked in all day.

Dean took a deep breath and sighed it out. His face seemed to shift and change as the colours on the screen leapt over his features.

“I dunno,” he said finally. “It’s surreal.”

Dean didn’t move after that and Sam didn’t speak, just watching him. Dean could still surprise him, Sam thought: he contained depths, he felt deeply, and he hid it all so well. When Sam imagined their first day home when they were still on that mountain, he expected a raucous bacchanal with calls for hookers and blow, but they’d spent the day in what essentially amounted to a sleepover, watching daytime TV, eating shit food and getting slowly but thoroughly drunk. It was nice, but Dean wasn’t as good at hiding things as he thought.

Sam said, “You miss them, huh.”

It was grief, the thing that had been hanging over them all day. It felt exactly like grief.

Dean sneered down at his whiskey. “I don’t miss them.”

“It’s okay if you do.”

“I don’t. I can’t, dude, Christ. They’re not real. They were you, and me, and we’re right here.”

You’re not here, Sam didn’t say. You’re still back there.

Sam didn’t blame him: even with the better part of a day to adjust, Sam didn’t feel totally there either. Yesterday, it had been 105 in the sun, they hadn’t eaten in days and they were putting their hands all over each other every chance they got. Now it was sub zero, there was a cold, half-eaten pizza being ignored at the foot of the bed, and the closest they’d gotten all day was Dean cramming his freezing toes against Sam’s calf under the covers, unless you counted the very long, very heavy stares they traded every couple of hours. Of course it felt like a dream.

“They felt real,” Sam said instead, because it was true. “I miss them, too.”

Against all logic, the fact that they would never see the boys again made it feel like they’d died, to Sam: two more additions to the ever-growing list of loved ones they had to say goodbye to. It was only a week, but they’d made their impact. They would be missed.

Dean didn’t answer him. He took another sip of whiskey and Sam watched the muscles in his bare arm move as he lifted the glass. His skin looked butter-soft in a way that made Sam want to sink his teeth into him, right on the milky white curve of his bicep where it disappeared into his T-shirt.

The desire was still there, thrumming steadily in Sam’s veins like the buzz of power lines, and it was all his own. He wanted to ease Dean down to the mattress and explore his body like a starving anthropologist, and he’d wanted it all day. He was more relieved by that than he knew what to do with. Maybe ‘relieved’ wasn’t the right word, but it was close: they were alive, and they were together. For a while there, it was more than Sam thought they’d get (blood sheeting out of Dean’s arm, splattering in the dirt).

“Alright, that’s it.” Sam threw back the covers and swung out of bed. “They’d be pissed if they knew we were moping.”

Dean just sat there. “What are you talking about?”

Sam slapped him on the back as he marched past the bed. “Get up, we’re going out.”

“What? Why?”

Sam went to his boots by the door and shoved his feet into them, no socks.

“We’ve gotta wake up.”

Only when he snatched Dean’s keys off the table did Dean stand up.

“Hey!”

Sam jangled the keys, taunting, as he opened the door. A gust of wind and snow barreled in so hard it nearly knocked the door into his face.

“They’re not dead. We’re not dead. We’re going for a drive.”

Sam darted outside. The snow was coming down so hard he couldn’t see beyond the motel office. The Impala was covered in half a foot of snow and Sam ran to it, stumbling on the unshoveled sidewalk.

“Hey!” Dean shouted from behind him, just as Sam reached the driver’s side door. “Don’t drive my car!”

Dean was standing in the doorway of their room in his boxers, unlaced boots on his feet, no jacket. It was too dark and snowy for Sam to see his face, but he could guess.

“Watch me!” Sam shouted back.

He unlocked the door and swung into the driver’s seat. Dean ran up to the passenger side just as Sam unlocked it and he slammed his palms against the glass.

“Sam!” he shouted again, in a tone that Sam used to call Dean’s ‘dad voice’—overtly threatening and desperately authoritative. “Get out of the car!”

“You get in!”

Sam turned the key in the ignition and listened with unbelievable fondness as the engine roared to life, excruciatingly loud in the snowy quiet. The radio was blasting from the last time they were in the car and Sam turned it off. He got the wipers going and they struggled valiantly through the blanket of snow on the windshield. The steering wheel was so cold it burned his hands.

Dean wrenched the passenger door open and ducked his head in.

“Don’t drive my car. I haven’t driven her yet.”

“You can get in or not, but I’m going.”

“It’s fucking blizzarding, Sam, where are you—”

Sam started to back up the car. Dean made a frustrated, snarly noise, hesitated for a second, then climbed in while the car was still moving. He slammed the door shut behind him.

They were dug into the snow and the wheels spun for a second before getting traction. Dean winced with his whole body.

“Don’t burn out, Jesus, you gotta—”

“I know how to drive!”

“You can’t even see! Lemme clear off the windshield at least, you’re gonna—”

“I can see fine!”

The wipers had cleared a spot approximately two feet square for Sam to see out of, and the headlights were covered in snow. They were one of the only cars in the motel lot and Sam managed to pull out of the spot and make it down to the street without hitting anything. The motel was a seedy, faux-outdoorsy affair on a frontage road next to the highway that led out of a mid-sized nowhere town, and its neon ALPINE ROADSIDE INN sign lit up all the white in electric blue. With snow covering the car’s windows, it was abnormally dark inside, but the blue glow made its way in.

“Sam,” Dean said, sounding physically pained as Sam turned onto the frontage road. Sam thought he did a pretty good job of hiding the fact that he had zero traction; Dean winced, but not when the car actually drifted.

There were hardly any cars on the highway, which was only visible for a moment beyond the eight-foot-high wall of plow-snow; whenever it had last been plowed, the road had a foot of snow in it again, wet and heavy and compacted by tires.

Dean said, “Point made! I’m perky, alright? Now give me my car back.”

Sam picked up speed. The road wasn’t so bad, and Dean sprung for good winter tires. The blue alpine glow faded behind them.

Sam said, “It’s my car, too! Do you seriously think of it as your car?”

“Dad gave it to me!”

“We grew up in it! Together! It’s our car!”

“My name’s on the insurance!”

“You don’t have insurance!”

The frontage road was relatively straight, curving gently past an auto shop. The darkness and lack of other cars on the road because of the weather made it seem later than it was. Dean braced a hand against the ceiling, for comfort. He hadn’t put his seatbelt on and Sam chose to take that as a compliment, even though he couldn’t remember the last time he saw Dean wear a seatbelt.

Dean shouted, “You’re fucking drunk, Sam! We’ve been drinking since breakfast!”

“I haven’t had a drink in like an hour!”

“So? You want a medal?”

“You drive drunk all the time!”

“I’m good at it!”

“Nobody’s good at it!”

Sam got a weird feeling in his chest that it took him a second to realize was laughter, bubbling out all awkward and involuntary. He hadn’t laughed for days and this was so fucking stupid—him and Dean in the car they’d spent their entire lives in, Dean screaming at him over some innocuous shit. It was where he belonged. He’d do anything to keep this.

There was an intersection near a gas station up ahead. It was snowing so hard Sam saw it through the fog only as the vague yellow shapes of Shell. His plan was to turn widely in the intersection and go back the way they came. What actually happened was that when he started to turn the wheel, he lost traction on the packed ice and slid sideways, fast.

“Sam!”

Dean grabbed his shoulder (not helpful) as Sam wrenched at the wheel, trying to get it back under control. Everything blurred past outside—no cars, none he could see—the blue light of the motel spinning somewhere behind them and then in front. He pumped the brakes, too late, and the Impala slid nose first into a snowbank on the other side of the road.

There was no audible crunch, just the heavy slumph of an enormous amount of wet snow falling onto the hood. Both Sam and Dean lurched forward with the movement, hands on the dash. The car juddered to a stop, still running.

For a second, neither of them moved. Sam stared into the snow on the windshield and imagined with horror the damage to the front end—there was no crunch, no grinding, it couldn’t be that bad—and the matching damage Dean would do to him when he saw it.

Next to him, Dean said, very quietly: “You crashed my car.”

Sam kept staring into the snow.

“I bumped it gently into a snowbank.”

“You crashed my—”

“It was a bump! It’s not even—”

Dean kissed him. He leaned across the seat between them and crushed his mouth to Sam’s while he was still talking, lip catching his teeth.

It was quick. Dean leaned back, a hand braced on the back of the seat. Sam took one look at him—frantic, checking in, so close he could barely see him—and then he nudged Dean’s face with his and kissed him again, slower this time, deeper.

The seat squeaked as Dean clutched at it. Sam’s eyes fell shut. He brought his hand to Dean’s arm, stroked up to his shoulder, curled it around the back of his neck. His mouth tasted like whiskey and coffee, his tongue soft and shy against Sam’s. Sam dragged him closer across the bench seat and Dean went willingly, awkwardly shifting his feet around to get the most possible contact. It was perfect, down to the way Sam heard Dean’s boot clink against a discarded Coke can in the footwell. It was slow and measured, as if it were their first. Exploratory.

Sam pulled back first, mostly because he thought he should. He dragged Dean’s lower lip between his teeth and relished, bratty, in the way Dean followed his retreat. Sam bumped their foreheads together to keep him back. He didn’t realize how hard he was breathing until he heard it echoing around in the claustrophobic space with its snow-dark windows. Sam thought of ‘seven minutes in heaven’ back in high school, panting into some girl’s mouth surrounded by her family’s stale winter coats.

“I’ve wanted to do that all day,” Sam whispered, feeling young and bashful and stupid.

Dean’s fingers curled against Sam’s shirt. He shook his head, rolling his forehead against Sam’s.

“I’ve wanted to do that for fifteen years,” Dean said.

They stayed like that, breathing together in the freezing car, clinging to each other. Getting used to it. Sam had his hand around the back of Dean’s neck, fingertips dipping into the collar of his T-shirt. He could smell Dean’s deodorant and the vinyl seats and the lingering boyish body-smell of a car well used, and it shook him to his bones. What happened on the mountain was like a story they both read. This was real life.

Sam scrubbed his thumb through the neatly buzzed hair at Dean’s nape.

“What changed your mind?” Sam asked softly. “I remember hearing an… I can’t, back there.”

Dean laughed. He moved his face against Sam’s and Sam fought the urge to tip his chin down and kiss him again. Not doing it was a glorious kind of pain-pleasure now that he knew he’d get to do it again soon.

Dean mumbled, “I remembered how you’re the stubbornest son of a bitch I’ve ever met. I can’t get you to not crash my car just ‘cause I asked you to, let alone—whatever the fuck this is.” He ran his nose along Sam’s. Sam’s skin was greasy, whiskey-and-pizza sweaty, and Dean’s was clean and dry from his million showers. “You seriously want this.”

No hesitation, no question left that needed answering. Sam squeezed Dean’s nape in a way that he’d learned, over the past handful of days, made Dean melt. He spoke with his mouth right against Dean’s.

“Yeah. Yes. Really, really yes.”

Dean twisted his fingers in Sam’s shirt and kissed him, making a soft, hungry sound as their mouths crushed together. Sam pulled him in by his neck, not sure where he expected him to go—the car had never felt smaller, he wanted Dean on top of him but there was no room, not that that stopped him from grabbing at him like there was; he wanted Dean on him, in him, wherever he could get him. Dean had a hand on his face, his fingers pulling Sam’s jaw down to open his mouth wider, breathing hard, almost snarling.

Sam pulled on Dean’s hip until Dean swung a leg over one of his, knee slipping off the seat, thigh pressed between Sam’s. Sam’s worn-thin sweatpants and Dean’s boxers made it more intimate, nothing to hide, both of them already hard. Dean braced a hand on the seat by Sam’s shoulder and rolled his hips in; Sam sunk his teeth into Dean’s lip, put his arms around him, crushed them together.

Dean broke the kiss, fingers sliding unthinking over Sam’s lips.

“Fuck, this is—”

“I know.”

Sam kissed him again, so hard their teeth hit. Dean tried to keep him back and succeeded in getting just enough space to talk with their mouths right together.

“If we—”

“We won’t.”

Sam kissed him again, and again. Dean let him. His hand pulled into a fist on Sam’s shoulder, twisting at his shirt. Sam wanted it off, he wanted skin, he wanted to lay Dean down in the back seat and get every inch of them together, but the car was cold and cramped and he’d had enough of quick, he wanted it slow.

He held Dean back with both hands on his face. Dean felt strangely small, cradled between his palms like that. Precious. Something to be protected.

“I’m here. I’m with you. Okay?” Sam trailed his mouth along Dean’s cheek and down his jaw. “What do you want?” He kissed Dean’s neck, nosing up under his ear. “Anything. Anything you want.”

He noticed that Dean’s hand was pressed to his throat, with pressure that was a little more threatening than sexy. Dean smiled against his cheek.

“I want you to dig my car out of this snowbank before I bury your body in it so deep they won’t find you ‘til June.”

Sam laughed, loud and bright. He slumped down and put his face against Dean’s shoulder. He felt Dean laugh into his hair.

“I can do that.”

The drive back was slow, freezing and perilous, but Dean insisted on driving, so Sam got to stretch his arm across the seat and rest his hand on the back of Dean’s neck. That made it one of the best drives of Sam’s life, all two minutes of it.

Dean was staring intensely at the road, what road he could see through the snowy windshield. He was white-knuckling the wheel. Sam figured it was about more than just the road conditions.

“You holding up okay?” Sam asked.

He expected some non-answer and stroked at Dean’s neck, because he could. Dean’s eyes flickered, and he worked his jaw for a second before answering.

“You fuck me up worse with this”—he motioned to Sam’s hand on his neck—“than most chicks can with their whole bodies. It’s sick.”

He was blushing, Sam noticed, previously hidden until the lights of the motel hit them. It was very nearly the most Dean had ever said about this, about them, and it took Sam a second to think of what to say.

He shifted across the seat and curled an arm around Dean’s shoulders.

“I dunno,” Sam mumbled, putting his mouth to Dean’s neck, sucking gently. “I think it’s pretty cool.”

Dean was trying to park the car. He sighed labouriously. “You’re gonna be a fucking menace about this, aren’t you?”

Sam bit Dean’s earlobe. His hand had somehow made it to the very, very top of Dean’s thigh, up under the hem of his boxers.

“Careful what you wish for.”

They stumbled to the room attached at the mouth, dragging at each other, Dean mumbling freeze my nuts off you lunatic, crashed my fucking CAR while Sam fumbled for the door handle without letting him go.

The dark room was almost as cold as it was outside, the TV still on and playing for no one, so blissfully and unfamiliarly private that Sam’s heart picked up double time: nowhere to be, nobody to catch them and no secrets to hide, just the two of them finally alone with the thing they knew they wanted to do. Sam walked Dean backwards into the room and kicked the door shut behind them.

“I’ve got some”—Sam had to keep pausing to kiss him—“ideas, but—if you—”

“Whatever,” Dean panted. The backs of his knees hit Sam’s bed and he sat down, reaching up to drag Sam down with him. “Whatever you want, whatever— yeah. I’m—yeah.”

A hard mattress, a seedy motel room and a brother willing to flay himself alive. These were things Sam knew.

He let Dean pull him down, covered his body with his and planted a knee on the mattress edge by Dean’s hip. He grabbed Dean’s waist—fingers digging in, just enough give there to make his brain go nuts, never mind the way Dean sucked in a breath against his mouth—and he hauled Dean up the bed, kissing him messy and off-kilter because the other option was not kissing him, and Sam didn’t know how to do that.

He pushed Dean’s shirt up under his arms and ducked his head to his chest, kissing wetly at his tattoo, letting the amulet clack against his teeth.

“Light,” he mumbled, asking. When Dean didn’t immediately move, Sam flicked his hand at the bedside lamp.

Dean groaned. “God, you’re one of those.”

Still, he reached up and turned on the light. Sam raised his head and almost sighed with pleasure: his hand spread over Dean’s sternum, Dean’s soft, bare chest, his thighs spread around one of Sam’s legs. He was still just in boxers, flat black hiding too much.

Sam put his mouth back to his chest, let his thumbs dig into Dean’s ribs, tasted him.

“I wanna look at you,” he mumbled into the dip in the centre of Dean’s chest, moving down.

Dean grumbled, “You look at me all the time.”

“Yeah. Well. That’s the thing.” Sam bit at the curve of his lowest rib and felt it push up against him when Dean arched his back. “I look at you all day every day, and now you’re… this.”

He ran a hand down Dean’s thigh and back up, teasing. On the next pass, he brushed his palm over Dean’s cock through his boxers, already hard and pushing up. It wasn’t rough enough to be a stroke and Dean’s face screwed up, annoyed. Sam pretended he didn’t notice and went back to kissing Dean’s stomach.

Dean’s hands landed on his shoulders. “Sam.”

“Mm?”

Sam’s face was almost between Dean’s legs now. He could feel the heat blasting off him, the way his fingers dug in restlessly every time Sam’s hand went up his thigh but didn’t touch his dick. Dean had great thighs, Sam never noticed before. He carried weight in a way Sam never could, strong and full where Sam tended towards ropiness.

“Sam,” Dean said again.

Sam’s mouth was level with the waist of Dean’s boxers, kissing at the trail of soft hair that led downwards. His mouth hurt from smiling.

Sam said, “Take off your shirt,” groping a hand blindly up Dean’s chest, to help. Dean slapped at his hand.

“No! You’re wearing pants still, it’s not even!”

Sam propped himself up on his elbows between Dean’s legs. Dean looked so criminally soft after a week of being grimy and rough in the woods—his hair was wet, skin bright and flushed, and he was clean-shaven. Sam almost (almost) felt bad for teasing him.

Instead, he smiled. “Fine, I’ll stop.”

He pretended to get up. Dean grabbed his arm so hard it hurt.

After a moment of staring—Sam smiling pleasantly, Dean glaring daggers—Dean let him go and wrestled his shirt over his head, then threw it angrily to the side. Sam, satisfied, went back to teasing him.

“I keep thinking,” Sam said, casual, like his fingers weren’t dipping past the waist of Dean’s boxers, followed by his mouth, “about how I knew. That was us back there, thirteen years ago, and I knew you wanted me, and I forgot you told me. We both did.”

Dean’s hands were on Sam’s arms again. The way he squeezed them was distinctly appreciative. “Uh-huh.”

“And I wonder, like”—Sam pulled Dean’s boxers down another inch, almost to the base of his cock, and kept mumbling against his skin—“if there was some primordial knowledge in me that Cas couldn’t erase, you know? Some part of me that knew, between then and now, that you and me would do this.”

Sam rubbed his hand over Dean’s cock again, still through his boxers. The fabric was wet over the head. Sam looked up just in time to see Dean’s eyes close.

Dean said, “Do you always talk this much?”

He sounded pained. Sam stroked him again, lighter. Dean’s hips pressed up into his hand, so Sam held him down by spreading his other hand out over his pelvis, which Dean seemed to like (twisting away from the touch, squirming).

“During sex? No. But.” Sam kissed the head of Dean’s cock through his boxers. His lips came away sticky. “We didn’t get to talk before. You got somewhere better to be?”

Dean’s eyes shut tighter. Sam watched his face as he kissed his dick again, teasingly light, and the way Dean’s jaw ticked when he clenched his teeth. Sam squeezed his thigh to prompt him to answer.

“No,” Dean grit out.

Sam pulled Dean’s boxers down around his thighs so his cock finally sprang free, red and full and gorgeous. Dean’s hand groped up to Sam’s neck and held onto him, his entire body going tight with anticipation.

Teasing cut both ways, and Sam was so hard he thought he might die, but Dean didn’t have to know that. Sam wrapped his fingers around the base of Dean’s cock, too loose to feel good. His mouth was inches away from it.

He said, “I haven’t even really looked at your dick. I didn’t think I’d like it so much.” (Dean made a sound here that Sam would remember for years to come.) “It’s weird, I mean—I never really thought about being with a guy, but it’s you.” Sam spoke with his mouth so close to the head of Dean’s dick that he knew Dean could feel his breath, especially in the cold room. “And there’s the emotional side of it, like, do I want to be with you, which—we can talk about this later, but, yeah—and then there’s the physical side of it. So I guess part of me was worried I wouldn’t like your dick. That kind of thing. But—”

Dean fisted his hand in Sam’s hair and pulled so Sam looked up at him. Dean looked baffled.

“You’re fucking with me.”

Sam grinned. “You catch on quick.”

Sam took him into his mouth all at once and Dean curled around him, hands burying in Sam’s hair, knees drawing up to squeeze at his shoulders. He said something, likely rude, but Sam couldn’t hear him over the rush of blood in his ears. Sam jerked him hard, finally, and felt Dean's thighs shake where they pressed to his arms. He brought his fist up to meet his mouth, twisted his wrist, and did it again. Dean sighed and lay back, hands cradling Sam’s head and urging him down.

Sam let his cock fall out of his mouth with a quiet pop. Dean made a sound like he was dying.

Sam said, “I’ve been thinking about making you squirm all week,” still jerking him slowly. “Thanks for indulging.”

The hands in Sam’s hair tugged, not nicely. “I fucking hate you.”

“I bet.”

Sam took him back in his mouth, setting a slow, steady pace, working him right to the back of his throat, easier than last time, surprised by the clean taste of him. Dean’s hands wandered over his shoulders, pulling at his shirt like he wanted it off, squeezing when Sam did something he liked. He started to sweat. Sam learned to take it when Dean pushed his hips up, how to keep from gagging, how to make it good for him.

He pulled off again, as soon as it seemed like Dean was having fun.

“Talk to me.”

Another pained groan from Dean. “Holy fuck, do you want me to blow you? I’ll blow you, stop it, you’re off the job.”

He tried to get up. Sam braced his forearm over his hips and pinned him.

“D. Talk to me.”

Dean flopped back down and put his hands over his face. Sam stroked his thighs, his belly, anything but his cock.

After a moment: “What do you want me to say?”

Sam lapped at the head of his cock as a reward.

“Anything.”

Dean shifted his hips up, looking for more, and sighed noisily behind his hands. Sam sucked the head into his mouth and let it lay heavy on his tongue. He slid his fingers up the shaft, wet with spit. Dean’s heel slid up his back.

Dean said, “Okay, you… you know when you’re with a chick, and you— I’m talking, keep going.”

Fair enough. Sam gave him more, groaning softly around him without meaning to, but he liked it. His jaw ached a little, unpracticed, and he liked that, too. He liked the new stink of Dean’s sweat and Dean’s antsy feet kicking at his sides. He rutted slowly against the bed for his own relief.

“When you’re with a chick,” Dean went on, stuttery and distracted, “and you’re too drunk to, uh, focus?”

Too drunk to keep it up. Sam had, although he couldn’t remember exactly when, and he was sure it was with less frequency than whatever Dean was thinking.

Sam made an uh-huh sound on his dick, in the back of his throat. Dean’s hands made it into his hair again, and his lower back lifted off the bed. Sam petted his flexing thighs, obsessed.

“Right, so, uh”—a pause as Sam tried to let him into his throat and gagged, tried again—“when I, when that’s me, I always—think about you.”

He said the last part fast, thinkaboutyou, like he could sneak it past him. Sam almost stopped, surprised, but Dean rambled on after that.

“You’re what gets me there. Always have been. I try not to, ‘cause it’s fucking gross, sorry, but it’s like a—a cyanide tooth thing, only when I can’t—yeah. You.”

Sam pulled off, breathing hard. “What about me?”

He looked up. Dean was flushed red all the way down his chest, looking up and away from the light, like that would help.

“God. Uh.” He scrubbed a hand over his eyes. “Your arms, a lot. Your— what you’d look like when you jerk off. I don’t know, man, lots of stuff.”

He tapped on Sam’s head, asking. Sam ignored him.

“Do you think about”—a long lick, base to tip, followed by Sam’s hand—“other stuff?”

“Like?”

“Like”—sliding his slick fingers over the head, circling the crown, watching more precome blurt out and licking it up—“us doing stuff?”

Dean went still. “Stuff.”

“Yeah. Me, doing stuff. To you.” Sam slowed his hand. He just held him, tight, and watched Dean’s beautiful face become tinged with panic. “You know what I’m asking.”

Dean’s face said he did. Sam had spent the past few days thinking about getting Dean in any and every configuration possible, and as long as someone was in someone else, he’d be happy, but mostly, he wanted whatever Dean wanted. He wanted to watch his face while he got the thing he’d spent his whole life wanting.

Dean pulled on his shoulders and Sam got to his knees and crawled up Dean’s body, where Dean pulled him into a kiss, open and searing.

Sam got Dean’s boxers off and pulled his own shirt over his head with some frantic help from Dean, kissing through the neck hole. Dean surged up and wrestled Sam down to the bed; Sam pretended to fight him on it, but the weight of him was so hot, comforting, home. Sam stuck an arm out and shoved the old pizza box off the foot of the bed, along with two of Dean’s balled-up socks, found the remote and got Dean off his mouth long enough to finally turn off the TV. Dean’s hands roved over Sam’s newly bare chest, nails scraping, as he groaned a soft sound into Sam’s mouth. He put his thigh between Sam’s and rocked in, Sam dragged his hands down his back.

“I don’t care,” Sam panted, picking up their earlier thread, “seriously, whatever you—”

Dean kissed him until he was dizzy, until the salty taste of Dean was gone from Sam’s mouth. Sam grabbed him by the shoulder, pushed up and flipped them over again. He ground down into Dean’s hips, feeling Dean’s cock slip up his belly, leaking. The urge to just move against each other until someone came was nonsensically strong, but— Sam palmed the back of Dean’s thigh and lifted it so his bent knee was at his chest, and Dean made this ravening fucking noise into Sam’s mouth. Sam was pretty sure he had that answer.

He canted his hips in a facsimile of fucking, letting his cock ride the soft crease of Dean’s thigh. Sam’s cottony sweats were suddenly oppressive; Dean reached around and dug his fingers into the waistband, pulling them down around Sam’s ass.

“Fine,” Dean muttered, like it was some chore, even as he let Sam spread his legs wider and rut between them, “this time. But—”

“I know, I know.” Sam found his mouth, half just to shut him up and half for the other reason. “But none of that macho shit, I wanna hear you.”

They never stopped kissing for long; Sam couldn’t get enough, he felt sick letting go of Dean for anything, he hoped it wouldn’t be like this forever because they’d never get anything done ever again. He’d started to sweat, Dean’s hair was drying all fluffy and clean from his shower and Sam wanted, wanted, wanted. It had never been like this, not with Ruby or the blood or anyone.

Dean was still on his back, and Sam was between his legs, sweatpants half down his thighs but not off. Sam traced his fingers over the shell of Dean’s ear as they kissed, over his cheekbone, his hairline, re-learning the shape of him. Sam felt like a giddy kid, falling for the first time. He had no idea what time it was.

“So.” He pressed the pads of his fingers to Dean’s lips to move them off his own. “You’re, uh, taking this pretty well.”

Dean snorted. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I thought it’d be more… end of the world.”

Sam had pictured something like a fight, full of the denial and panic that had characterized their last week together. Wrestling each other down, blood and tears, but—this was slow.

Dean laughed, a sweet gust against Sam’s cheek. He stretched under him, testing the grip Sam had around one of his wrists.

“You’re making it easy. Still just feels like… you.”

Sam laughed back, heart wringing in his chest.

“Cool.” He kissed him and Dean’s raw, swollen lips parted for him automatically. “That’s the plan.”

More kissing, languid and slow. Sam kept trying to kick it up and get a rise out of Dean—bite his lip, fist a hand in his hair—but Dean kept pulling back. Sam’s own medicine was bitter. The anticipation wasn’t. He pulled Dean’s hair until his head tipped back.

“Where’s your—”

“Bag. Left side pocket.”

“And—”

“Same one.”

Sam climbed out of bed—that final second before no part of him was touching Dean was like ripping off a limb, he was fucked, he ran his hand all the way down Dean’s bare leg to keep the contact—and went to Dean’s bag on the other bed. He fished through the side pocket of Dean’s bag (mostly medical stuff, gauze squares and spare butterfly stitches and alcohol) until he found a small bottle of lube and a string of condoms.

He turned around with both in hand to find Dean watching him, propped up on one elbow. Naked and hard and lit by the warm lamplight, Dean would have looked the perfect picture of ease if not for the look on his face: eyes dilated, lips parted, jaw tight with tension. He was staring at Sam’s sweatpants, which were still just barely on.

“Off,” he said, voice low, not a question.

Something deadly went down Sam’s spine, eager and earnest and needy. He hooked a thumb in the waist of his sweats and tugged them down, so they fell around his ankles with a soft flumph; no boxers, no point when they spent the whole day laying around, his dick bobbed obscenely in the air when it was free.

Dean stared at him, eyes roving over his body. Sam tried not to squirm. He felt young and humbled and thought of the first time he was naked in front of a girl, seventeen and whip-thin, standing in her blue, chiffoned bedroom with his plaid boxers at his feet. He let Dean look, and watched the lust and want pour over his face as clear as anything. Sam knew what his body looked like, but a moment of stunned silence from Dean was worth more than the lascivious winks of a thousand strangers. Sam had never been looked at like that, with the weight of decades of wanting pressing down on him. He bore it, easily.

He went to the bed and dropped the lube and condoms in the sheets, his eyes unblinking on Dean’s. He looped his fingers around Dean’s bare ankle—all the tendons and little bones so close under the surface, human and breakable—and tugged, gently.

“C’mere.”

Dean shuffled to the edge of the bed, already reaching for Sam as Sam reached down for him. Sam tipped Dean’s head back in his hands and bent down to kiss him, soft at first and opening instantly. Something about the bed and the room made Sam think again of when they were kids, with a sickening, giddy swoop to his stomach—what it would have been like back then to learn each other’s bodies in so many empty motel rooms, skinny knees knocking together, mouths red from kissing, and Sam felt an indescribable sense of loss. They’d come so close and lost so much time. They could have had this for so long.

“Sam,” Dean breathed into his mouth, hand around the back of his neck, pulling him onto the bed. “Come on.”

Sam crawled up the bed, between Dean’s legs as he shifted back. He dug around in the sheets for the lube, grabbed a discarded pillow and shoved it behind Dean’s head (he fluffed it first, theatrically, earning an amused snort from Dean). Dean’s fingers wrapped around Sam’s dick, hard and neglected somewhere near his hip, and Sam spent a moment breathing into the crook of Dean’s neck as he stroked him. Dean breathed into his hair, Jesus, Sam, appreciative, free hand tangling into the hair at his nape.

Sam could have come just from that—wanted to, felt it building already from nothing—but he grabbed Dean’s wrist and held him off. He slid down Dean’s body a little, sat up and rubbed a big, warm hand over Dean’s stomach and down his thighs.

“Leave it. We’re doing you.”

Dean rolled his eyes at that, and wouldn’t look at him. He was on his back with his thighs spread, Sam laying next to him, and it was easy for Sam to hook one of Dean’s thighs over his to keep him open. Their faces were close—kissing distance, always, and it was— Sam’s brain provided the word romantic, strange in the context of Dean but true no matter how he sliced it.

Sam kissed Dean to keep him distracted while he slicked up his fingers. He hadn’t done this with a guy and neither had Dean, which leveled the field. He kissed Dean’s cheek and down his jaw.

“Say what you like. What’s not working. Whatever.” He bit at Dean’s ear just as he rubbed the pads of his fingers over Dean’s hole, slippery and hot, and felt Dean tense up everywhere. “You ever do it by yourself?”

Dean breathed shakily into Sam’s hair, turning his head towards him. He had an arm around Sam’s back and his hand locked onto his shoulder. Sam kept circling, pressing in gently. Lube dripped down Dean’s crack and Sam slid it back up, pressed in again.

“Not lately,” Dean said thinly. “Takes… time. You’re always around.”

Sam laughed. He tried to keep it together, but his heart was beating so hard he felt sick. He imagined Dean fingering himself alone in their room all spread out on his bed, Sam coming back blabbing about the case later and not noticing Dean’s flushed face. Or maybe Dean did it during one of his marathon showers, braced against the tiled wall with water running into his open mouth; Sam liked to jerk off when Dean was in the shower, maybe they’d done it at the same time.

Sam started working him open against the resistance, but it wasn’t so bad. He felt Dean try to relax, hips shifting, and God, he was so hot inside, so soft. Sam was losing it.

“Feels alright?” he asked.

“You’ll hear about it if it doesn’t.”

Pissy. Sam bit at the underside of Dean’s jaw to give his teeth something to do other than clack together nervously. It felt like his whole body was shaking and he didn’t know if it was him or Dean doing it.

Sam sat up to drip more lube on his fingers and then went back, arm crooked, kissing again at Dean’s neck. He got the tip of a second finger in, exceedingly careful. The thought of hurting Dean made him nauseous. Dean’s head tipped back, spine curving up.

“Sam—”

“Good?”

The hand on Sam’s shoulder squeezed and let go, restless, nails digging in. One of Dean’s heels dug into the mattress and his knees fell wider apart. Sam felt like a god. He curled his fingers and stroked, two of them now, a little faster. He kept at it. Dean kept shifting under him, next to him, sometimes bearing down and sometimes lifting away. Sam could smell his sweat, feel it against his skin.

“Ever come from this?” Sam asked, no borders between brothers. Dean snorted, almost a laugh, his mouth pressed to Sam’s hair.

“Kind of. I dunno. It just”—he put his chin to chest and lifted his dick with a thumb—“does this.”

Sam looked down, still working his fingers inside Dean. There was a steady, pearly drip pouring out of Dean’s slit and pooling on his belly. Sam was distracted by the way his arm looked disappearing between Dean’s legs, his tan next to the secret white of Dean’s thighs.

“Weird,” Sam said, honest, making Dean laugh again. “Does it feel like you could?”

He shifted down Dean’s body so he could kiss his chest and press his tongue to one of his nipples. Dean sighed and shifted some more. Being lower changed the angle of Sam’s hand, maybe for the better; he scrubbed inside him, up and in, not so different from fingering a girl. Maybe Sam had gotten his laptop out that morning while Dean was showering. Done a bit of research.

“Maybe. Yeah.” Dean’s hand dug into his arm again. His chest arched into Sam’s mouth. “Fuck, that’s—weird—”

“Jerk off.”

“What?”

“I wanna see you come. Touch yourself.”

Sam bit at Dean’s nipple and his whole body jolted and bucked.

“Ow, fuck—”

He started jerking off, his hand bumping Sam’s between his legs. Sam felt Dean’s body twist and tense, gorgeous, heels digging in. Sam worked his fingers in time with Dean’s hand and Dean tightened around him and bucked up; Sam panted against his chest, ears rushing with static. He mumbled, yeah, yeah, senseless with the taste of Dean’s sweat on his tongue.

He felt Dean get impossibly tight around his fingers when he started to come, and tipped his face down to watch. Dean’s fingers were right up under the head of his dick and working it in quick tugs, past trying to put on a show and too busy coming.

Dean choked out, “Shit. Shit—”

Dean’s other hand slipped off Sam’s shoulder and palmed the side of Sam's head, covering his ear so all Sam could hear was his own blood, like the ocean. He watched Dean’s come blurt out, dripping over his knuckles before spurting up his stomach in thick stripes. Dean’s mouth was mashed against Sam’s head, open and panting.

(It was a lot of come, and Sam couldn’t help but think of logistics even then: did the volume mean that their physical bodies hadn’t moved through time to 1996 and back? The Dean he’d spent the past seven days with had an orgasm that morning and a bunch of times in the days since. But if these were the physical bodies they’d had in 2009 originally, what happened to the bodies from 2009 that went back to 1996, that got gaunt and scratched and sunburnt, if they weren’t—)

“Sam,” Dean breathed, and Sam leaned up and kissed him.

Dean’s lips moved slowly against his. He stroked a hand over Sam’s hair all fumbly and boneless. Sam smiled against his mouth.

“Good?”

“Holy shit, dude.”

Sam drew out his fingers and Dean curled into him, winced, kept trading lazy kisses. Dean pushed up on his arms and rolled Sam onto his back, boxing him in with his arms. He rocked his thigh between Sam’s to give him something to grind against, and Sam did, out of his mind with want; he couldn’t remember the last time he wanted to fuck someone so badly, a week of buildup. He couldn’t imagine what Dean felt after a lifetime of it.

Sam ran his hands up Dean’s sides, over his shoulders and down his arms. He shook his sweaty hair out of his eyes and eased Dean back enough to look at him. Dean was glowing, eyes bright, his mouth red. Sam had never been looked at the way Dean was looking at him then, giddy and awestruck, like the eighth wonder of the world. Sam smiled up at him, heart soaring.

“You wanna be on your front or your back?”

Dean laughed and ducked down to rest his head against Sam’s shoulder, hiding his face. Sam kissed the crown of his head, held him, rode his thigh a little. It was driving Sam nuts.

“Front,” Dean decided. “Don’t need you looking at me with your fuckin’ puppy-dog eyes.”

Sam laughed. “Coward.”

Dean bit at him and Sam wrestled him onto his back, with Dean putting up just enough resistance to make it fun. Sam rolled him onto his belly and kissed down his gorgeous back, dug his teeth in, squeezed his ass, sucked hard at the back of his neck. Dean groaned into his folded arms.

Sam sat up, keeping one hand on Dean’s back, stay. He found the condom and lube in the sheets, then eased Dean’s thighs apart with his hands (another groan from Dean, this one distinctly annoyed). Sam spread his cheeks and slipped his fingers over where Dean was wet and open for him. He looked, for the first time. He had the sharp and intrusive thought, you’ll be sitting in Bobby’s kitchen someday next to Dean and you’re gonna think about what his asshole looks like after you’ve fingered it, deeply unwelcome. They’d have to keep their thing from Bobby, that much was obvious—Christ, they’d have to keep their hands off each other for days while they were visiting, making out whiskey-drunk every time Bobby left the room for a second—and from Cas, too, as much as they’d be able to after what he saw in ‘96. None of it would be easy or fun.

“Take a fucking picture,” Dean bit out, no heat other than embarrassment behind it. Sam pressed the tip of a finger inside him and he yelped, hugely undignified, and folded his arms over his head. “Bitch—”

“Relax,” Sam said, bending down to kiss his back again before pulling away. “You look good.”

Another grumble from Dean. Sam had to sit back to tear open the condom pack and roll it on, hands practically shaking as he did it. He couldn’t take his eyes off Dean, laying face down on the stark white sheets, his folded arms making the muscles in his back stand out obscenely. Sam felt very, very lucky, then realized he couldn’t remember the last time in his life that he’d felt that way about anything.

Sam got behind Dean. He stroked lube on his cock and worked Dean open again with his fingers. Dean was bearing down on his hand and huffing quietly, sweat shining in the curve of his lower back, so Sam figured he was as ready as he’d ever be.

“I oughta make you wait,” Dean said into his arms, shifting around in the sheets. “See how you like it.”

Sam slid the slick head of his cock down the cleft of Dean’s ass, brushing against his hole but not pressing in. It took everything he had to hold back, he already felt like he was on the verge of coming. If Dean made him stop, he’d cry. He didn’t tell him that.

The worst part of Sam wanted to draw it out more, wait until Dean was sobbing and begging for it. Every other part of him couldn’t believe he wasn’t sobbing and begging for it. He leaned all the way over Dean so his face was tucked into the soft, dark space at the crook of his neck, coffee and whiskey and floral motel soap. He kissed at any skin he could reach, pressed his palms to the hard cut of muscle over Dean’s hips and lined himself up.

“Yeah?” he asked. Careful.

Dean’s back swelled under Sam’s chest as he breathed in, out, measured and slow. “Yeah.”

Sam closed his eyes and started to ease in. His fingers slipped against Dean’s skin as he tried to grip his sides tighter—Jesus, he was tight, perfect—and Sam didn’t realize he was holding his breath until he was dizzy. He crushed his face against the back of Dean’s shoulder and groaned right into him, “Oh, God.”

Dean’s whole body drew up, his shoulders hunching forwards, one of his hands coming out from under his head to clutch at the sheets. He was choking on his breath, no words, as Sam pushed in inch by inch. Going slow was agony and Sam was shaking, digging gouges into Dean’s hips to keep himself from slamming in; he slapped a hand over Dean’s and locked their fingers together instead. Dean squeezed back so hard his bones ground.

“Are you—”

Okay, Sam wanted to ask, but Dean made this beautiful, fucked sound, muffled by the sheets, and Sam didn’t bother. He kissed the back of Dean’s shoulder instead, jaw shuddering with how good it felt to keep easing in. Slick and scalding, Dean’s body making space for him. It didn’t seem necessary when they’d always been part of each other, Sam’s delirious brain supplied. There was space in him that would always be for Dean and vice versa, primordial, blood. This wasn’t so different.

He was in, or as in as he was going to get. Dean said, sounding so perfectly, magnificently breathless, “Feels like you’re in my fucking guts—”

Sam rolled his hips and Dean broke off with a groan, stifled in his arms; Sam lay over him, chest plastered to Dean’s back, no real leverage but instead a crushing intimacy, like there was no end to either of them and Dean was inside him, too, no boundaries that mattered. Shallow thrusts, grinding inside Dean, into the perfect wet heat of his body, dizzy with how good it felt, sick with it. He sucked hard at the back of Dean’s neck, marking him up—nobody left to call them on it—and Dean made another sound, all good, his fingers clutching at Sam’s again.

Making Dean feel good was a head rush Sam could hardly stand, the trust inherent in having Dean laid out under him, showing him his back, prone. Sam reared back—spreading out his free hand across Dean’s back, Jesus, he liked how that looked, holding Dean down—and looking down Dean’s body to where Sam’s dick disappeared into him, moving easier now, still shallow. Not the first time he couldn’t fit it all in, he was used to it; Dean would learn to take him if he wanted to.

Sam slid his hand up Dean’s back and palmed the back of his head, ran his hand through Dean’s hair, soothing. Dean arched back into him and muffled low sounds in the sheets, his whole body rolling, beautiful, and Sam was panting open-mouth watching him, feeling his body undulate around him as he thrust slow and hard, the whole length of him. Giving Dean what he needed. The things Sam needed rarely lined up with what Dean needed, the constant push-and-pull of their lives that ended in so many fights, almost got them killed, but— finally, they were moving in lock step. Sam didn’t know how he’d gone so long without knowing he needed it. He bucked into Dean slow and tantric and filthy, watching their bodies move together. A little easier as Dean’s body opened for him and dragged him in.

“Sam,” Dean slurred, hardly a word except Sam knew exactly how his name sounded in Dean’s mouth, every variation, and this one was urgent.

Sam had to pull back and slow the quickening push of his hips to claw himself back from the edge, pleasure spiking right to the core of him, balls drawing up.

He leaned over Dean again and pressed them together, letting go of Dean’s hand to grip up his arm, down his side to where Dean’s hips were lifting off the mattress to fuck himself back on Sam’s cock. Sam bit the lobe of his ear and breathed hot and loud against him, his hair sticking sweaty to Dean’s cheek.

“Roll over.”

Sam pulled out quicker than he should have (a pained wince from Dean and Sam squeezing his hip, sorry) and flipped Dean over, the damp sheets under him blooming with the heady scent of his body, his sweat and come. Dean’s mouth was on Sam’s before Sam saw him move, his hands clawing into Sam’s face to drag him down. Sam all but sobbed into his mouth, incensed after whole minutes without kissing him; it was rougher now and unabashedly desperate for both of them, messy as Sam tried to line up without looking. He got to see Dean’s face for a split second—face wet, eyelashes stuck together, mouth open—before Dean kissed him again, biting into his mouth.

Sam eased back inside him and got to swallow Dean’s moan, shudder with pain and pleasure as Dean clawed into his back hard, as hard as he needed to stand it, no thought for spectacle or kindness. Dean’s head tipped back as his spine curved and Sam slid an arm into the space at the small of his back. He crushed Dean against his chest and fucked into him, rising up onto his knees for leverage, bending him back. Not an inch of space between them. Dean was hard, again or still, leaking against Sam’s stomach.

Dean swore against Sam’s mouth, voice breaking, teeth bared, and Sam’s thighs shook from holding back. He could feel himself losing it, stomach lurching, sweat pouring cold down the back of his neck. He grabbed the back of Dean’s thigh and bent his leg up, changing the angle so Sam drove down into him, faster, hips snapping. It felt so good to have Dean’s face against his, hear him panting and snarling into his ear as Sam fucked him past caring, past keeping quiet; Dean was taking him easier now, tense everywhere and just holding on.

Before it was even over, Sam was thinking about next time, and the time after that: getting patched up after a hunt, then letting Dean lay him out and take care of him all slow and sappy; fucking Dean standing up in a bar bathroom stall with a hand over his mouth; pulling onto gravel shoulders during a thirteen-hour drive to suck each other off as semis whizzed by. The possibilities were varied and endless and Sam wanted all of them, endlessly.

“Sammy,” Dean grunted, breaking something in Sam’s brain that could never be fixed, Sammy, pass the milk, Sammy, quit it, Sammy, fuck me, “come on, I can’t—”

Tapping out, Jesus, it was his first time, he couldn’t— Sam kissed him, messy, and freed up a hand to stroke his hair back, mumbling something unintelligible even to himself.

Sam pushed Dean’s knee up higher and hammered into him, and Dean slapped a hand against the headboard to keep from skidding up the bed, rode his hips into Sam’s, keeping time. He was flushed all the way down his throat and chest, soaked with sweat, and Sam kissed at his throat, his cheek, mindless, practically bending him in half.

Sam got his hand between their bodies, curled his fist around Dean’s cock and let him buck up into it. Dean all but shouted, oversensitive and twisting away, but his nails dug hard into Sam’s back again. He ground his face into the front of Sam’s shoulder.

“Oh, fuck, I’m—”

Dean got so tight Sam couldn’t breathe, just worked him in his fist and felt Dean draw up around him, one of his heels dug into Sam’s back—Sam tried to grind inside him, make it good—and the wild sounds he made almost got Sam there. When Sam felt Dean’s come start to spill over his fingers he buried himself inside Dean and held him, jerked him through it.

Dean’s hands slipped up Sam’s arms and dragged him closer, like there was any space left not already occupied by him.

“Come on,” Dean said again, a low rumble. “C’mon, I want you to.”

Sam nodded, dumb, beyond words. Dean’s body was still pulsing around him and he started to move again, his hips final-stretch rabbiting, desperate and chasing it. The caveman part of his ego got off on how pliant Dean was under him, exhausted and sated because of him, he did that, but— he kept pounding into him, sweat dripping off his nose, fingers dug into his thigh. It was hard to get there after holding back for so long but he was so close he could taste it, it felt like he was already coming, it felt like he’d never come, he wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything. His whole body ached.

Dean did something—a tilt of his hips, a sound, Sam wasn’t sure, it all ran together—and all of a sudden it was different, he was there. Liquid heat poured down his spine and curled tight in the core of him and he was finally coming, gasping against whatever part of Dean’s skin he had his face pressed to, riding into him, gone.

Dean hooked an arm around Sam’s neck and mumbled, “There you go,” pressing his mouth to Sam’s wet hair. “I got you.”

Sam emptied himself inside him like coming down off a shaky, blistering high. He hooked his arms between Dean and the bed and held him, shuddering, trying to breathe.

Dean kissed his temple. He spoke with his face right against Sam’s head and his voice was thick.

“Fuck, Sam—”

Sam crushed him in his arms. “I know. Me too.”

Sam had no idea how long they lay like that, plastered together, only that as their sweat cooled he became aware of how cold the room was, how cold it had always been past the furnace of their bodies. Dean was running his fingers through Sam’s hair, occasionally picking out a tangle. Sam felt Dean’s chest rise and fall shallow under his, and the hot metal of the amulet between them.

Sam never looked forward to the ‘afterwards’ part of sex; he never felt like he was good at it, he didn’t know what to say. This time, he didn’t worry. The urge to check in was powerful—ask, was that good, did you like it, did I hurt you—but it was too fresh. He didn’t entertain a single thought that wasn’t about how Dean’s body felt around him, everywhere.

“Hey,” Dean said softly, at some point. “Up, Sasquatch. You’re killing my back.”

Sam reluctantly drew back, letting cold air fill the space between them and make him break out in goosebumps. He pulled out so carefully and still winced at the drag; Dean was too proud to be anything but silent, but Sam could safely assume it hurt. He rolled to the side and peeled off the condom, then threw it into the trash next to the bed. He sat for a moment on the edge of the bed with his back to Dean.

This next part was new. They’d gotten good at putting away their dicks and hiking up their jeans, but this wasn’t that. They were at a fork in the road. To get as close as two people could and sob into each other’s skin, you didn’t—Sam didn’t want to—just forget about it. He wanted it to be real, and it would also be sticky and weird, but it was the only thing he wanted. No more games.

He turned around and got back into bed. Dean was still laying on his back, one hand on his knee working his leg in a circle. Sam smiled at him as he lay down next to him; Dean scowled, but only to hide a returning smile.

“I’m not a pretzel, dude. Watch it next time.”

Next time. Sam grinned.

“Next time, you’re pretzeling me.”

Dean seemed to like that (another hidden smile). He put his leg down, then just stared up at the ceiling afterwards with his hands folded over his stomach—like in the tent, Sam remembered, when the tension was so obvious on Dean’s face that Sam thought he was going to throw up.

Unlike then, Sam, feeling post-nut invincible, leaned over him and kissed him.

Dean made a quiet, surprised noise against Sam’s mouth. After a moment, he went soft, leaning up into the touch. Sam braced a hand on Dean’s other side and kept kissing him, a new flavour to it with the heat of need temporarily sated. This was all want. Dean brushed his hand against Sam’s neck, cupped his jaw and thumbed at a sideburn. Since this thing started, Sam had never really seen Dean in any mode other than panicked-hurried-last-minute-on-earth, and the distinction was palpable: now he was sweet and thorough and tender and it made Sam’s head spin. He would’ve lost a bet.

Dean pulled back first by ducking his chin. Sam chased him and kissed him again, and Dean laughed against his mouth.

“This is new,” Sam said.

Dean kept his chin down. Sam felt his cheek crinkle when he smiled.

“I’m trying this weird new thing where I trust you.”

Sam smoothed Dean’s hair back. He tried to keep the look on his face light and joking, but Dean’s was nowhere near, so he stopped trying.

He said, “Let me know how that goes.”

More kissing, for what felt like an hour. Sam fumbled around down below their waists to pull the top sheet out from under them, and the comforter, so they could slide under them. He turned onto his side and Dean shifted his pillow over so they could share it. They’d kiss, then stop and rest their heads together, dozing, hands lazily tracing each other’s arms and shoulders. Sam had no idea what time it was, the dark of winter afternoon bleeding seamlessly into the dark of winter night.

After a while, Dean sat up. Sam lay next to him and watched as he grabbed the forgotten whiskey bottle from the nightstand and filled both their glasses. Sam sat up enough to take his when Dean held it out, but he stayed stretched at Dean’s side. Dean finished his in a mouthful, then poured another. This glass he kept resting on his thigh as he leaned back against the headboard.

Sam sipped his whiskey, quiet, relishing the way it warmed his chest. He looked at a white, thin scar on Dean’s thigh and tried to remember how he got it. Sam traced it with his fingers once he realized he could do that now.

Dean looked down at him. Sam looked up. Dean held his gaze for a moment, then looked away and laughed kind of derisively and shook his head.

“Jesus,” Dean muttered. He was smiling, but Sam didn’t know what it meant.

“What?”

Dean looked down at him again, then away. He rested his free hand on Sam’s head near his hip.

“If you told me two weeks ago that I’d be…” He sifted Sam’s hair through his fingers demonstratively. “Fuck, man. I keep wanting to splash you with holy water.”

Sam stretched his neck out and kissed Dean’s thigh. He felt the shudder that went through Dean’s body.

“I’m me.”

“I know,” Dean said, taking another nervous swallow of whiskey. “I think.”

Sam sat back and took his own sip. His eyes roved over Dean’s face, lingering on a reddish bite mark on the side of his throat; pride, somewhere in there, and a foreign possessiveness that he didn’t totally hate.

Quietly, Sam said, “Sorry I didn’t know. I should’ve known.”

Dean shook his head, not looking at him. “I made sure you didn’t.”

Dean’s hand kept idly stroking Sam’s hair and Sam just stared up at him, heart swooping. His brain was re-writing every interaction they’d had for their entire lives, every shared moment up until the present day. During all of it, Dean had loved him.

“You hated every girl I had a crush on when we were kids,” Sam said. His heart was thudding hard and slow in his ears. “I thought you were just being a jerk. But…”

Dean nodded grimly. “But.”

The scope of this thing was still dawning on Sam, even now: Dean, age twenty, gnashing his teeth over the girls his teenage brother brought around and hating himself for it. Age seventeen, researching conversion therapy. Dean’s lifelong self-flagellation, Zachariah’s mocking tone, that kind of self-loathing doesn’t come natural.

“That must have been hard,” Sam said gently.

Understatement of the year. Dean frowned like he was mad, but Sam knew all his bluffs. He was just embarrassed.

“Yeah. It was.”

It would take time to repair and unwind all that. Years, maybe. But they had time.

(Sam tried not to think about how both of them had already died once. To any hunter, ‘time’ was relative.)

Speaking of repairing. Sam said, “I didn’t mean what I said, back there, about how… you should’ve told me. I know why you didn’t.”

Dean just nodded, jaw tight. Sam went on.

“It’s just insane, to have someone love you like that. It fucks me up. It always fucked me up.”

Dean sighed. “Sam—”

“I like it,” Sam said quickly. “I mean, I don’t know anything else, but. It’s you.”

Dean tossed back the rest of his drink. He went to grab the bottle again, but Sam put his hand on his arm.

“C’mere. Lie down.”

He finished his own drink and handed Dean his glass. Dean put both on the nightstand and lay down next to Sam, turned on his side towards him. There was a nervous crease between his eyebrows and a twist to his mouth and Sam hated it. He kissed him to try to make it go away.

Dean sighed against his mouth. He held back at first, stiff, but Sam nuzzled at him and mumbled, “D,” and tried again until he melted.

Sam kissed him deep and slow, slipping his hand up under the cord of the amulet, playing with it while they kissed. He tried to put everything into that kiss—this is real I’m real I want you I love you we can do this we can have this—and as Dean warmed up, slotted closer and curled Sam’s hair behind his ear, Sam thought it might be getting through.

Sam pulled back to rest his forehead against Dean’s. Exhaustion pulled at him after a day of doing nothing, the whiskey making it easier and so tantalizing to drop off to sleep. ‘Exhausted’ didn’t cover it; he felt like he hadn’t slept in a week. He was half hard again and thought, maybe, but, they had time. He thought about waking Dean up with his mouth, sun through the blinds laying in warm slats across Dean’s bare back.

Dean thumbed at his cheek. Frowning again. “You know this isn’t gonna be easy, Sam.”

Sam pulled back enough to look him in the eye and let the reality of it all settle in further: this was Dean, the same one he’d always known. Dean, in the bed closest to the door, in the driver’s seat, beautiful, troubled, his.

“Yeah, well.” Sam gave Dean a shake with the hand on his neck. He smiled. “Nothing good is ever easy.”

They woke up at ten, scraped the snow and ice off the Impala and drove through the nearby town until they found a greasy diner: just a handful of cracked vinyl booths, a metal counter and one bored waitress. They spread a newspaper over the table and pored over it for new cases, picking at breakfast and downing cup after cup of hot, bitter coffee. Their waitress got through two winks and a flirtatious arm-touch with Dean before she noticed the way his knuckles were brushing Sam’s in the middle of the table, conveniently obscured by his mug. She shrugged and poured their refills.

After breakfast, they gassed up, got a pack of beef jerky and two giant cups of gas station coffee and hit the road; a debrief at Bobby’s first, then on to what looked like a vamp nest south of Milwaukee. Sam had his arm stretched across the back of the bench seat, his fingers playing idly with the collar of Dean’s shirt. Dean sang along to the stereo for hours.

THE END