Destiny Interrupted

Supernatural. Sam/Dean. NC-17. 12500 words.

He can feel the bible in the drawer beside him like another person in the room, but there have never been any answers in there for this.

Something Invisible is Gone

It’s crash-stop-bang and the world moves in reverse.

Sam’s heart squeezes in panic, turns into a feeble twitching lump. Moments that add up to memories slip through his hands like tiny, slick-skinned fish. His universe becomes a Pollock spray of places and people that look the same and feel no different. He scrabbles through it, smearing the fragments together as he tries to save even the smallest of scraps.

The chaos proves impossible to control and Sam finds himself grasping threads too thin to hold. In a blink he remembers a motel room bed, blankets piled into a fort, Beefaroni straight from the can and the first Superman movie playing on a television that wouldn’t stop fizzing out. Dean had made up the dialogue they missed, and with the love of superheroes that young boys possess, they’d jumped back and forth between the beds for hours with cheap, scratchy towels tied around their necks.

A glow blossoms in Sam’s stomach, and wherever his body exists, the muscles of his face try to pull his mouth into a smile. But nostalgic warmth withers in on itself as precious seconds peel away like paint from greying wood. The moment drifts out of reach, lost, and Sam forgets why he cared. All he knows is that time’s a funny thing when it flows the wrong way.

When he watches the ceiling swim with flames, everything goes black.

*

The world goes from dark to light as Sam’s eyes fly open. His ribs feel about to shatter, heart slamming against them in double-time. Seconds crawl by before he realises Dean’s hands are what keep his shoulders pinned to the bed. Information filters through his senses piece by piece: the hiss of traffic outside on the rain-slicked road; the quiet mumble of the evening news from the television in the next room over; the smell of leftover Chinese takeout floating over from the writing desk; the strong, steady pressure of Dean’s thumbs near his collarbones.

“Dude, you awake now? You hear me?”

I hear you, Sam struggles to say, but the words are jammed so tight in his throat he chokes on them. He coughs hard enough that his eyes water.

Dean eases up to allow Sam to curl onto his side, and Sam makes a valiant attempt at keeping his lungs from evacuating his body.

“Scared me, man.”

“Sorry,” Sam rasps when he catches his breath. “Sorry, I didn’t—” Apologies aren’t necessary he reminds himself, and bites off the words before he can fill the air with them.

The mattress creaks as Dean scoots away. He stands up and shifts his weight to keep the light of the lamp between the beds from slicing into his eyes. Slowly, and with one wary eye on Sam, he undoes his watch. “Thought those dreams of yours were long gone.”

Sam sits up and rubs a hand across his face. A few days worth of stubble tickles his palms. He’d thought things had gone back to normal too. His arms tingle and he scratches at them, the cynic in him asking when anything has ever been normal. “This was different.”

Dean’s head jerks up at that, the watch dangling frozen in his fingers instead of tossed onto the nightstand. Chiselled shadows hone the angles of his cheeks, trace the quick flare of his nostrils. “Different how?

“Different, how, Sammy?” he repeats, and curls a fist into Sam’s shirt, jerks him forward like it’ll pull an answer right out of him.

A shake of his head doesn’t get Dean backing down so Sam shoves Dean’s hand away. He draws in a relieved breath when Dean doesn’t turn it into a point of contention, and smooths away the wrinkles stretched into the last clean t-shirt he has left. Laundry gets added to the long list of things they need to do between this town and the next. “I’m not sure.”

Dean’s not satisfied with that and it doesn’t take the crease forming deep between his brows for Sam to know it. “Look, it just isn’t,” Sam says, and throws aside the blankets to slide out of bed, intent on splashing some water on his face and rinsing away the lingering feel of a vision that’s left echoing footprints behind.

The carpet hardly crushes under his weight, the countless times it’s been crossed by cowboy boots and vacuum cleaners has worn it down to the bone. The familiarity of the surroundings helps knock a few levels off Sam’s unease, but his shoulders itch until the flimsy bathroom door is a blank brown slate, shut and locked. Dean’s worry has dug into his spine like a nettle’s sting. A year ago maybe he’d resent the look in Dean’s eyes, but right now he only regrets not having a better answer.

He ducks his head under the faucet turned high and gets slammed with the memory of a plush hotel room, Jess pulling him in with a hand in each of his, her smile beaming. Not much of a vacation, but you never come up to the city. I thought you’d like to get away from the dorms for once. She’d leaned in, scraped a slow bite at his jaw, her lips silken, and she didn’t notice the way he forced down the part of him that said complimentary shampoo meant Winchester life as much as graveyards did. And just like he’d pushed aside that bitter inner voice, he pushes aside the memory, refuses to face it when it comes so sharp, crisp as a digital snapshot.

The water weighs down his hair, slicks it to his skull, runs as cool relief down his neck to stain his collar wet. Sam’s eyes slide closed and he tracks the drops as they trickle under his shirt. He can remember the paths they’ve traced and more, grainy images flickering in his mind like film run through a cheap projector. He follows the thread of memory back and water rushes up into the faucet, his hand turns the chipped porcelain handle, the door swings open, Dean’s eyes fall on him, heavy with concern, asking the same question that plagues Sam now: What the hell is going on?

*

Sam’s always had a good memory, not quite eidetic, but close. This though, this is ridiculous. His head feels like the shelves at Bobby’s, straining with the weight of knowledge arcane, mundane, and a good measure of everything between. For each moment he recalls, there are another dozen offering themselves up, most of them the random junk you’d take in, process, and dump as unimportant without any conscious effort. The rare others though aren’t quite memories; they’re a lot more like his old visions than he’s comfortable with—hints of things that could happen woven into being, their fibres resonating with an eerie sense that the odds weighed equally in their favour.

“So, you’ve got TiVo in your skull on top of all the useless junk facts that you’ve managed to pick up over the years,” Dean says. He dumps another cream into his coffee and stirs it until the smoky wisps of white disappear. “Sounds cool to me. And maybe since you had the better line of sight, you lucky dog, you can tell me-”

“Black with pink trim,” Sam answers, and it isn’t until Dean’s voice is winding down on, “What colour panties that little redhead waitress flashed us,” that he realises that the question ringing cocksure in his head doesn’t quite match in tone to the one dying in the air.

Dean doesn’t bat an eye, just tongues at the inside of his lower lip like he’s got a poppy seed stuck in his teeth, and says, “Huh.”

Sam flicks a plastic wrapped toothpick to him. “Could you maybe?”

“Yeah, maybe I could,” Dean says, and resorts to picking at his teeth with a fingernail. Sam glances away before Dean can show him whatever bit of food it was.

“Use a napkin. Please.” It’s stuff like this which has made Sam want to melt into a hundred different upholstered seats since he was old enough to understand what manners were. He hears Dean suck the tip of his finger clean and glances back in time to find Dean leaning back, his arm stretching out comfortably over the top of the booth. Of course Dean is taking this in stride, he’s not the one whose head is about to explode.

Dean presses his lips together. His index finger rubs absently against a crack in the shiny red vinyl. “Could be less like TiVo and more like you’re finally turning into some kind of mind-probing, spoon-bending wonderboy.”

“It’s not—” Sam rolls his eyes as Dean snags the spoon from his coffee and balances it on his finger. “I heard you say it. Or heard how you were going to say it, before I jumped the gun.” Saying it aloud makes it seem so stupid, so improbable, and Sam wonders if he’d imagined everything. It isn’t a stretch given how well he knows his brother that he’d unconsciously respond to Dean still being stuck on their waitress’s choice of undergarments.

Dean looks at him funny. Sam stares back. Finally, Dean screws his mouth to the side to squeeze out a whispered: “What am I thinking?”

Sam throws his hands up, because the alternative is dropping his head into them. “I have no idea. Dean, c’mon.”

“I’m just fucking with ya, man.”

“Well, could you stop?”

“Yeah, maybe I could,” Dean says, but this time the tone of his voice has softened, and Sam’s thankful for it, ’cause that means he’s serious.

*

The Impala charges through the rain and the world slips by in fits of drumming and hissing. Sam can hear each shift of the weather through the double-thick improvised muffler he has wrapped around his head to cover both his eyes and his ears.

“I’m going crazy,” he says.

Dean shifts in the driver’s seat. “What?”

Sam pulls down the scarf and repeats himself. Everything outside the car is flat and black beyond the scope of the headlights.

“Getting worse?”

“That would be a bit of an understatement.”

Dean’s mouth goes tight. He fumbles through the jacket crumpled on the seat next to him for his phone and starts jabbing at numbers with his thumb.

“Who are you calling?”

“You watched me dial, didn’t you? Is your mutant brain power failing you already?”

Despite the pervasive headache that’s been plaguing Sam all day, he rises to the bait and shuts his eyes. A kaleidoscope of dim, geometric shapes waltz across the back of his eyelids. They blur and fade to static as Sam focuses on recalling the rhythm of Dean’s thumb as it flicked across the keypad.

A miniscule amount of effort has the image which envelopes his senses slowing down. As it does, he finds the flow of Dean’s strong-jointed thumb mesmerising. The tendons in Dean’s wrist shift faintly beneath thin blue veins that look too delicate to belong to an arm nicked with a dozen scars. Sam watches the shift of skin over the jutting bone of Dean’s thumb so intently that he completely misses the numbers dialled. The replay of the memory has advanced to Dean lifting his arm to put the phone near his ear, and Sam squeezes his eyes tighter, holds on to the moment so hard that the time in his vision grinds to a stop.

Dean lashes are swept down, frozen at the peak of a blink. Those too, Sam thinks, seem out of place when he’s so accustomed to the general idea of who Dean is and how Dean looks. It’s startling to realise that he hardly ever really looks at his brother. Dean is poised to press the button to start the call. His lips are pursed slightly, and the freckles on his skin are far less faint than Sam remembers them to be. When he gets to them, the numbers seem huge on the phone’s softly glowing screen.

Wildly, Sam wonders if he opens his eyes if everything outside will be hanging stalled, too.

But he’s too afraid to find out, and then he’s listening to Dean leave a message on Missouri’s machine, the sound of Dean’s voice somehow enough to block out the rest of the world until Sam can catch his breath.

*

A week later they’re in the barrio of a border town and Sam can’t keep still. Places like this make him nervous, not because the streets are webbed with cracks and they’re the only white faces in a six block radius, but because of Dean. Thick-armed tough guys with shaved heads and short tempers are the same everywhere; he and Dean might get some slack for rolling up in the Impala, but the car only holds the attention of men like that to a point. And right now, they’re busy eyeballing Dean as he’s busy eyeballing the curvy girls hanging around sucking down juice popsicles in front of the little carneceria across the street.

“Dean, we’re here for a reason.”

“Right,” Dean says, and squints up at the blaze of the sun before shoving his keys into his pocket and pointing towards the stairs tucked between a dollar store and a beauty salon. He takes the steps two at a time, the wooden railing rattling and losing flakes of paint in his wake. On the landing, a cluster of gutted candles in glass holders and small picture frames tied with coloured ribbons vie for space. Dean gestures between them and the dark face of the numberless door. “You sure you want to do this? We’re two steps away from drinking chicken blood.”

“Missouri said she’s the one, right?”

“Still your call, Uri.”

The door opens before they knock and Dean’s expression does a 180 faster than a weathervane in a tornado. “Hi there,” Dean says, and amps up the wattage on his smile. Sam isn’t the least bit surprised to discover the face peering out at them belongs to an attractive girl roughly their age.

“I’m Dean, this is my brother Sam. We’re looking for Ysenia.”

When he’d been too restless to study and sick of sweater-vest laden suburbia, Sam had spent enough time stretching his legs along the streets east of the 101 to wince a little as Dean butchers the pronunciation. He smiles over Dean’s shoulder anyway. “Missouri sent us.”

“I know,” the girl says, “she and I share some of the same gifts. It’s why she sent you, remember?” Her gaze flicks to Sam but stays mostly on Dean, who smiles a little broader at the way she hangs on the door and chews on her lip. Her dark hair curls thick over her bare shoulders, and she toys with the strings of a thin cotton halter-top patterned with tiny flowers. Sam tries not to notice how enough light filters through to silhouette her body beneath it. “Did you bring the cord and the piece of liver?”

“Right here, darling,” Dean says, pulling the small butcher’s packet from his jacket pocket. “Sam’s got the string.”

She smiles as she plucks the package out of his hands and then shoves him aside with remarkable ease. She crooks a manicured finger at Sam. “You, inside. Your brother waits out here.”

Sam can’t help but cock an eyebrow and smirk at Dean’s sulking as he inches past. He hands her the length of white satin cord. She loops it around her wrist next to a beaded rosary.

“Is it necessary, I mean, that Dean wait outside?” Sam asks once the door is shut. He tries to be discreet as he takes in the décor. Every surface is stacked with candles and cups, the walls plastered with gilt-framed pictures of saints, martyrs, and creepy, red-robed skeletons.

Ysenia unwraps the liver and crouches, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “His belief in God is not as strong as yours,” she says absently, and croons when a nappy little dog comes skittering around the corner from what Sam guesses to be the kitchen.

“The liver was for the dog?”

“Even for Missouri’s friends, I don’t work gratis,” she says, leaving the meat unwrapped on the floor. She rises and sets her hands firmly on Sam’s shoulders. “Now, is it the past that you see, or things yet to come?”

“Both,” Sam says, then immediately shakes his head. “Sorry, not exactly, this is hard to explain.” He wishes he could sit down, wrap his hands over his knees or something to keep away the awkward want to fidget under her scrutiny. “I used to have visions, things that might happen, but they were specific, tied to people that were…like me.” He swallows, stalls for a second to figure out how much to say. “But that hasn’t happened since—for a while. Now it’s like I’ve got some kind of window to the past, and sometimes a few seconds ahead.”

“You touched the other side and it was not the Lord Jesus that called you back,” Ysenia says, her hands moving to stroke Sam’s face, rest there lightly. The rosary wound around her wrist like a bracelet clicks, the cross swaying in the edge of his field of vision. Sam’s skin tingles. “Did you think the price of your brother’s selfishness would rest entirely upon his shoulders?”

On the floor beside them, Ysenia’s dog snuffles and licks at the waxed butcher paper, whines when there’s nothing more to be had.

Sam swallows down the bitterness that rises in his throat. “What can I do?”

“Not much, I’m afraid,” she answers quietly.

The cord at her wrist loosens, writhes and thickens as Sam watches, the sheen of it turning to the gleam of scales. A thin albino snake hisses at him, and he draws back as Ysenia’s slender fingers clamp around his wrist and hold him firm. The snake wriggles forward, moves from her hand to his, its belly warm as it slides over his fingers. It nudges under his cuff to wind around his forearm, and Ysenia catches his chin with her other hand, forces his gaze to meet her own. Her deep brown eyes widen to white around the edges before they roll back, blossom red, veins bursting as blood leaks like tears down the contours of her face.

She blinks and Sam’s head buzzes with a dozen different ways this could have gone, most of them poorly for one or the both of them. He staggers back a step, his arm aching with the sting of phantom fangs, but he can’t look away from the trap of Ysenia’s eyes, normal again. She wipes her face, raises up on her toes, and he leans in reflexively.

She kisses him, not on the mouth but on the rise of his cheek, and she hesitates for a heartbeat before easing down. “Know your sins, Samuel Winchester, and perhaps God will forgive you, perhaps the Blessed Virgin will help you learn your gifts.”

Ysenia releases him, and when Sam looks down, a raised white scar stretches from his wrist to his elbow.

“Now get out of my house and never return.”

*

“What happened in there?” Dean asks when Sam drops into the car and slams the door shut. Dean keys the ignition, smiles at the answering growl, and glances over while putting the car into gear.

“Honestly, I have no idea.” Sam tugs his shirtsleeve down over his wrist, then thinks better of it and peels it back, showing off his forearm to Dean.

Dean hits the brake halfway into the street. A pick-up truck swerves around them, honking. “The hell is that?”

Sam gestures at the road before Dean’s protective hackles can raise up and he goes and does something stupid like charging back up the stairs. “It’s supposed to help.”

Dean’s hands flex as he shifts his grip on the wheel. His gaze flicks past Sam, but pulls back, and then he’s easing into the sparse traffic like there hadn’t been bloody murder in his eyes. “It better. We passed up two minor hauntings to get here fast enough for that girl to see you.”

“I know.” Sam cranks down the window, lets his knees splay and props his elbow on the door. “Back to Nevada then?”

Dean jams a cassette into the player and even if Sam can close his eyes and call up what had been his peripheral vision to figure out precisely how many were passed up before Dean settled on Deep Purple, things feel like they should again. “That spirit stalking that hotel isn’t going to off itself,” Dean says, and slides on his sunglasses before adding, “again.”

Whatever had happened, Sam’s shoulders feel looser, his world making a slow roll back towards something he could call normal. He hides a smile behind his fingers and looks forward to when they’re on the open road again, hedged between fields that stretch for miles and miles and that skim by too fast for the details to stick.

*
The poltergeist turns out to be almost as dusty as the casino it haunts, but that doesn’t mean it makes their job easy. By the end of day two, both Sam and Dean earned themselves their fair share of nicks and bruises, but the silver lining is that management of the Nomad is one of the rare believers. Sam supposes that with the average mortality rate of a hotel it shouldn’t be as surprising as it first had seemed. For toasting the pest, they earn themselves a week on the house which includes, much to Dean’s gluttonous delight, free reign of the buffet.

“So, ghostie number two is lurking in a mineshaft just over a couple hours away. With any luck we’ll have its bones smoked in time to get back for dinner theatre.”

Sam watches horrified as Dean scoops a few forkfuls of macaroni and cheese onto a fat slice of prime rib and folds the mess up like a taco.

“Something here isn’t right.”

“You say that, but you haven’t even tasted it,” Dean says, leaning forward so his overflowing plate will catch anything that falls. His fingers glisten with au jus in the warm light.

“I don’t need to, but that’s not what I meant.” The job isn’t done and Sam can feel it, knows in the marrow of his bones that during the hunt he saw a piece to a bigger puzzle. There’s still something nasty lurking in this place and it isn’t just the design on the static-hoarding carpets. His memories are like the casino floor though, too much to sift through, a labyrinthine jumble that threatens to trap him in the chaos and noise the deeper he goes.

Dean eyes him thoughtfully, wipes sauce from the corner of his mouth with his thumb. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Dean’s head dips in a nod. He’s smiling when he looks up at Sam again. His eyes gleam, wicked like a piece of broken glass, and something in Sam’s stomach flips as Dean licks his fingers clean.

“Well then,” he says, wiping his hand dry and tucking his napkin under the edge of his plate, “I’ll start nosing around the regulars at the bar, and you can start up again with the staff.”

*

By ten o’clock, Sam’s gone through the cleaning staff, the security staff, and the kitchen staff. Not a soul on any of the shifts has noticed anything new, and the ones who know he’s responsible for the lack of flying silverware end up spending all their time thanking him instead of giving him any fresh leads. The accolades would be welcome if he wasn’t so sure that things weren’t peachy keen like everyone believes. What really makes Sam grind his teeth though is not having anything to go on but a persistent, nagging feeling at the back of his brain.

His arm throbs, the raised white scar a line of heat under his shirtsleeve. Whatever the thing does it’s been helping, otherwise Sam’s pretty sure being in this place—226 slot machines, 3 elevators currently at floors 8, 5, and 16 — would drive him crazy.

In his head, he hears Dean’s voice say, “Chill out, Rain Man, and stop worrying. If there’s something to find, we’ll find it.” The real Dean however is probably dying to tell him to hit the poker tables and put his skills to good use. After all, they’ve only got six days left on their free ride.

Sam smiles to himself. A throng of old ladies in loud patterned blouses and big glasses shuffle out of the elevators to crowd the hallway and he slows down to edge past them. Usually the elderly seem to pack it in early, but what did he know, maybe it was grannies night out. Maybe he’s overthinking things too, the days upon days of being bombarded with an excess of stimulation leaving him trying to fill in the gaps when those gaps are supposed to be there.

Finally free of the permed and perfumed mob, Sam beelines for the bar. For a second-rate casino, the place tries hard to put on the nightlife. Music slams out past a cluster of ceiling-height tropical plants and ends up in a fight to the death with the cacophony of the slots. Sam wrinkles his nose as the mishmash of sound swarms around him. He manages to put on a smile for the bouncer lurking in the entryway foliage and slips inside to where drunken chatter and the clink of glasses takes up the job of vying for supremacy with the speakers.

This isn’t their usual scene, not by a long shot, but Dean is making the most of it. He’s smack dab in the middle of a group of girls with lipstick as shiny as their high-heeled shoes. There’s no other word than undulating for the way the scatter of dancers are moving, and the one in the glittery dress who has her arms around Dean’s neck stays plastered against his front like her life depends on it.

Sam rubs his temples, but this is a familiar headache, the sort that comes from a fresh reminder that Dean frequently gets to live it up while he’s the one who ends up inching past a snail-paced herd of blue-haired churchgoers.

He sighs and tries to catch Dean’s attention, but it’s firmly fixed on his partner’s cleavage. Sam follows Dean’s gaze, can’t help but appreciate the sight too, but then he’s backtracking, jumping up to the column of Dean’s neck, pale against the dark of his tee. The girl must have just got him to agree to dance, there’s no sheen of sweat on his skin, his hands practically chaste in their grip high on her waist. But he’s moving with the girl in a way that’s anything but pure and innocent, his hips rolling wavelike like a rodeo rider caught in slow motion, and Sam feels the pressure in his skull spike before the crash-stop-bang—

He can see it: how he could slide his arm between Dean and the girl, curl his hand over Dean’s shoulder to take all of Dean’s focus. A pair of tits distracts Dean easily enough, but Sam can turn up the gravity, pull Dean to him. Pull him away, pull him close, get those hips aligned to his own and feel that roll with the whole of his body. They’d slide together, move as one, hearts pounding harder than the bass, and bright eyes would go from startled to competitive until they faded into the heaviness of lust.

The scar burns like a warning and Sam clutches his forearm. This, this will be his sin.

This has always been his sin.

Sam moans, sick to his soul from a want he thought he’d packed down hard enough to forget, that he’d ignored like a phantom limb through all the miles between here and Stanford.

He slips into the crowd, winds through the push of bodies without pause, his body in synch with his mind, knowing instinctively where to go to avoid being slowed down. Sam heads for them, towards the sinuous push of their bodies. Curve of muscle, curve of lip, hard and soft, sharp and sweet, and that was just Dean. All Dean.

His arm goes between them. The pull of futures Sam shouldn’t know claw at him, hungry to know life. They hook into his very being as he leans down, and stubble scrapes beneath his lips as his mouth grazes Dean’s cheek.

“I’m going upstairs,” Sam chokes out, when what he really wants to say is, Leave the girl. I want you. You look good enough to fuck.

It isn’t until the elevator counts up the floors into double digits that he feels the thread of that potential moment slip away, too far gone now to resurrect, to go back and tug it—tug Dean—into place, too thin to follow towards crumpled sheets and kiss-bruised lips.

Staring at his reflection, Sam knows the shape of regret as it carves his mouth into its form.

*

Cold showers never work like they’re supposed to. Sam lays shivering in the air conditioned room, his mind humming electric-current alive. He can feel the bible in the drawer beside him like another person in the room, but there have never been any answers in there for this. None he could stomach, anyway. Sorry Gideon, maybe next time.

Behind his eyelids he can see the shape of Dean’s body, the movement of his spine as he had leaned back, let that girl press harder against him with the grind and push of exhibitionistic foreplay.

Sam was eleven the first time Dean brought a girl home. He’d woken up, old enough by that point to start cluing in why they had to be so careful all the time and what really lurked out there in the darkness. He’d woken up and trudged towards the living room with fear choking his heart and there was Dean, kissing some girl like people kissed in the movies, faces smooshed up together only more wet.

Sam still doesn’t know why he hadn’t said anything, just stood there and watched Dean talk her into taking off her shirt. Her tits were peeking out of her bra when she spotted him, clutching at his crotch even though he didn’t know a thing yet about jerking off.

Dean had been so pissed when she got embarrassed and left…

“She was going to let me touch her pussy. Maybe even do it.” Dean whirlwinds past, leather jacket snapping as he throws the keys to Dad’s car onto the dresser. It’s a little girl’s dresser, painted white with purple trim, but they’re so used to staying in places with rooms that they don’t fit in that this time Dean had just made a face instead of complaining about it.

“I’m sorry, Dean. I’m sorry.”

“Damn right you’re sorry.” Apologies don’t mean much when Dean is angry like this, it has to burn out of his system, same as Dad.

“You can kiss me if you want. I’d do it with you.”

Dean’s eyes turn into saucers. He steps back, like Sam’s grown vampire fangs or something, and his heel hits the dresser. The keys to the car fall to the floor. Neither of them really notice.

“Promise I won’t tell.” Sam says, and Dean doesn’t react. It’s just enough for Sam to figure out that telling isn’t really the problem.

“You turn into a fag on my watch and Dad’ll kill me.”

It’s something wrong with him.

*

Sam hadn’t really fallen asleep, but a memory that old felt remarkably like a dream, the flurry of stirred-up emotions belonging to someone other than himself. He isn’t that boy anymore, uncertain and worried about his big brother rejecting him. That boy had grown up, nearly lived his dream of normalcy, and survived the pain of having it all ripped away.

That boy had toughened up trial by fire. Hidden in the darkness, Sam pulls his mouth into a tight smile, and wonders how narrow Dean’s worldview remains. How much of that macho bullshit is tied up with the worry that someone will find out he used to moan like a slut with a cock in his mouth. And his brother’s at that.

Sam’s eyes focus on a point somewhere beyond the ceiling, and in the hush of the room he can feel Dean’s future flaking to ash as each grain disappears from the glass of his lifespan. Their future in all permutations vanishes just as swiftly.

The thing in his arm lashes its tail.

In the next room over, a baby wails. A part of Sam wonders what kind of person would bring a baby to a casino. A man like their father would, in theory, but he’d hated any place that had more than twenty rooms to rent. Crowds mean anonymity, but crowds also meant danger, collateral damage. Roadside motels that might’ve been the cream of the crop thirty odd years ago were often too eager for customers to ask questions.

That’s ingrained in him deep enough that he still doesn’t feel right laying here.

“…you never come up to the city.”

Sam’s hand creeps down his belly. His fingers pause at the waist of his shorts, edge of elastic softly zipzipping under the scraping edge of his thumbnail. Jess had looked so beautiful standing in the middle of that hotel room, her hair swept back into a loose tail and tiny scraps of lacy black fabric clinging to her curves. If he tried, he could relive that moment too, breathe in her scent again like she’d never died.

But Sam isn’t that boy anymore either. And his dreams of marriage then had been as hollow as when he’d still been clinging to Dean’s shirttails.

“I’d marry Cindy Crawford in a heartbeat.”

“That’s lame.”

“Oh yeah, well who do you want to marry when you grow up?”

“I want to marry you.”

“Shut up before Dad hears you talk like that.”

Unfolding his arms from behind his head, Sam sits up, arranging himself cross-legged on the bed. He can’t do this anymore, dredge up old memories vividly enough to live them all over again. They’d been hard enough to try and forget the first time around.

And it’d be so easy, too easy, to give in to devilish whispers and use his ability to lead Dean down that path again. To turn him. Dean, so easy to use, buttons laid out in a neat row ready to push.

Like TiVo, Dean had said, and Sam steels himself to search for what he needs to know. In a flash, the last few days rewind, going faster and faster until the minutes are images spinning by like cards in a Rolodex.

He pauses too late: highway rest stop, Dean coming out of the bathroom with water dripping down his face, lifting his shirt to wipe it away. There’s irritation, overstimulus, but the filter Ysenia had given him clears things up, and there, under it all, Sam can feel the undercurrent. Ripple of want, curl of desire.

He groans miserably, tries again, and then he has it: rickety stairs creaking under their weight, Dean his usual warm pillar of strength nearby, and then skip-flash-blink: Ysenia, her eyes turning to blood but her mouth still moving.

This memory doesn’t stay easily, and he fights to keep the swelling darkness at bay and hold the fragments in place.

“Not thoughts that you read, Sam Winchester, it is probabilities. You are neither medium nor oracle, you are a catalyst.

“God may help you, but until He shows you the way, there is this.” Her grip hardens, nails carving into his skin. Her head whips to look at him, bloodied eyes seeming to cross the span of time to see him as he is, a passenger in his own mind. “It eats some of what plagues you, but it will starve on scraps. Feed to it that what you wish to forget.”

The swim back to the present leaves Sam drained, his body trembling with exhaustion. Sweat dampens his hair, curled strands sticking to his cheeks. The devourer in his arm writhes, the scar twisting along his flesh. Its hunger spreads like poison in his blood.

On the surface his arm resembles a suicide gone wrong. And that’s what it is, Sam thinks, running his fingers from wrist to elbow. He’s held on to his sins for so long he’s been killing himself for them. He only has glimpses of what could be, not what could have been, but the questions are there. Would Jess have lived? Dad? Would Dean be whole if he hadn’t selfishly run off for greener pastures? If he’d not pressed and pressed until his own brother had given in to his sick wants? Gorge rises in his throat.

Know your sins.

He has too many to count.

Shaking and fevered Sam closes his eyes and opens his mind, pours everything he wishes he wasn’t into that hungry mouth hidden beneath his skin.

He’s losing moments, dozens of them, but the cost of keeping them feels too dear.

*

Sam knows focus, knows relief, knows for the first time how heavy the burden of guilt had been. There’s no wildfire flash of jealousy to go with the embarrassment when Dean stumbles in at a quarter past three smelling like sex and booze.

And if something in him triggers when Dean shucks off his pants and stands silhouetted in the light of the bathroom, well, he doesn’t need to hold onto that.

*

The next day over coffee, Sam has it all figured out.

“Don’t you think this place is a little crowded?” he asks, peeling his hand off his just freshened cup to gesture around the cafe.

Dean tears his attention away from the keno numbers popping up on the mounted television and twists around to take a rough headcount. They’re seated near the railing, nudged up against what should be a quieter part of the casino floor. Busy slots or a bustling breakfast crowd at this hour makes sense, but overflowing card tables with tired-eyed dealers fires off a few flags.

“Maybe there’s a convention in the building or something,” Dean says in the tone he uses when he’s trying to convince himself that nothing’s out of the ordinary.

It doesn’t take a freak memory for Sam to expect that tone. “I checked on that. The only big draw isn’t until next week, and there’s nothing going on in a forty mile radius that should have this place packed. It’s not overflow, either,” he says. He slides his coffee to the edge of the table and spins the laptop around. “Look at these booking stats. This is the only place at more than thirty percent capacity, and let’s face it, they hadn’t been doing so hot before we cleaned that poltergeist out of the halls. Little quick for a turnaround don’t you think?”

Settling back into his seat, Dean puts on his thinking face. “So what gives. You think it’s that ugly mask in the lobby that’s pulling people in?”

“It wasn’t here when we arrived, and it wasn’t until yesterday that the staff suddenly had to work overtime.” Sam feels a tiny hint of relief that his fears hadn’t been unfounded and that his second round of interrogation hadn’t actually sent him away with nothing. Few things felt worse than coming up empty handed while Dean-

“You were saying?”

“Huh?” Sam looked up. He’d been trying to remember something.

“You had that ‘I’m going to yap for a while’ thing going there, geek boy, but then you left me hanging.”

“Oh, sorry,” Sam frowned and picked up the trail of his thoughts where he’d left them. Easy enough to go back and call that up again. “There’s something weird about that mask.”

“Besides it looking like the ass end of a monkey.”

“Besides that.”

“Summoning spell tied to it?” Dean suggests.

“That’s what we have to find out.”

*

For how often Sam feels like he ends up doing most of the research, Dean really does pull his own weight.

“Check this,” Dean says, landing on the foot of the bed. “Linda at the front desk-”

“Linda?” It didn’t take long for Dean to be on a first name basis with her. It occurs to Sam only after he’s smoothing his expression that she probably has a nametag like every employee.

“You forget her of all people? Aw, man,” Dean’s hands frame the air, sidling down invisible curves. “You know, that Linda.” He coughs, and his hands drop back into his lap. “Anyway, she says the mask is only part of the deal. Guess they got a two for one on monkey patooties. There was supposed to be a second package from the import company.”

“Delayed for any particular reason?”

Dean’s smile beams wide. “An accident during handling,” he says, and reaches out to smack Sam on the knee.

A spark lights in Sam’s mind and fizzles out on something hollow, a gap that stops his thoughts short like a path run straight to a cliff. It’s intentional, he knows, like other gaps he’s recently encountered, the abruptness making it obvious that the instances aren’t just neural pathways eroded over time or by his gift, but missing bridges that he’d been the one to set fire to.

“Great, well, we’ll start there.”

*

If a hunt doesn’t require dusty newspaper archives and graveyards, it inevitably lands them waist deep in a pile of paperwork. Sam holds his flashlight with his elbow to flip over the page. In the columnar sea of numbers and hand-written notation, he catches something worth a second look.

“Here,” he says, urging Dean over with the sheaf of papers, “tell me if this sounds like it might be our mysterious missing piece.”

Sam nudges his hip onto the desk to make room for Dean to crowd close. Dean hesitates for some reason, turning it into a jostling half-step before sidling in close enough for an awkward lean to allow him to peer at the spotlighted entry.

“Ceremonial dagger, Incan, circa 1300,” Dean reads aloud. “Huh. Guess there really is money in headmasks. You think it’s a sign that we ought to switch vocations and become proper villains?”

“Get over it, there are only two of us. And this isn’t the Bellagio.”

“Well if knocking over a casino is out of the question, and if this little squiggly mark is the updated delivery schedule, we’re looking at having to snatch this baby by tomorrow morning.”

“That’s not much time,” Sam says.

“With your miracle memory, it probably won’t be tough to figure who needs avoiding or bribing,” Dean points out. “You got us past the cameras easily enough.”

Sam finds himself smiling as he returns the file to the cabinet. “True.”

“That’s m’boy,” Dean grins, and claps him on the arm. His hand lingers on Sam’s sleeve for a moment.

Sam’s brows knit together. The landscape of his inner self is nothing but gaping voids, time scooped out and thrown away with nothing to remind him of what was there.

“Dude, you okay?” Dean asks. His hand returns, grip strong just above Sam’s elbow.

Sam stares at it, blinks. “Yeah, fine, just thinking.”

“When aren’t you,” Dean scoffs. He nods towards the exit. “We got what we came for. Let’s blow this popsicle stand. You need to fire up that freakishly large brain of yours and come up with a game plan.”

Sam files the paperwork back in the cabinet and follows Dean out. The trip back up to their room passes in a blur, Sam’s thoughts whirling as they navigate a maze of hallways that might as well have been rubber-stamped for all their originality.

Planning goes by equally fast, Dean only having to prompt him once or twice when he’s distracted by another chunk of something integral inside him that’s missing.

Sam has had his crisis of faith more than once, and come out of each one with strength, a deep well of resolve that lasted until a few years worth of hunting threatened to drain it dry. But this is almost more than he can bear.

He flexes his hand, muscles in his arm straining. The snake is quescient.

He’d been feeding it and feeding it. What had he given away? How much?

He can’t talk to Dean about this, a pithy song lyric from twenty-five years ago isn’t going to bandage the gaping existential wound growing in Sam’s self.

Once they have a timetable laid out, Dean announces he’s going to hit the poker tables. There’s a sense of expectation there, little things in Dean’s posture that says he wants company and thinks Sam could probably chill out and relax before they need to get the ball rolling, but Sam shakes his head.

“I’m going to do a bit more research.”

“If that’s your idea of fun.”

Sam waves him out, and forces a weak smile over the lurch in his guts when Dean’s slanted grin dumps him on a precarious island in the middle of a void of missing memory.

*

The bottom of the laptop is burning hot on his thighs when Sam finally sets it aside. He rubs at his jeans as he stands. The thought of getting a glass of water is pushed aside when in seconds, he’s pacing the room. Before it had felt like he had too much in his head and now it’s like he’s missing something in equal measure. He’d found bits and pieces of folklore about the devourer in his arm, but witches of any culture were notoriously tight-lipped about their practices.

Sam can’t deny his giving part of himself away was voluntary though, he remembered that. “You don’t want these memories,” he’d told himself, and the flat hurt in his voice had been sincere.

But what if he changed his mind? What could be so horrible? What is it about Dean that he’s given away? Does he somehow carry more guilt than the part in Dean’s deal that he knows he played? Is the scar more than what Ysenia gave him? He remembers the pierce of a blade into his back, but what if that hadn’t killed him. His memory of the days surrounding his resurrection is full of holes. Had his sin been suicide?

Dean walks in right after he’s dropped the bible back in the drawer and slammed it shut.

“Given up on any higher answers have you, Sammy?”

Something in the way he says “No,” sets Dean aback, and Sam gets a brusque shrug before Dean’s stripping off his coat and pulling a wad of cash from the front pocket of his jeans.

“Cleaned up down there,” he says. He flashes the cash before tucking it into the hidden pocket in his duffel.

“I see that. Did you get the cards?”

Dean produces a pair of security badges. “Doubting me, Sammy? You ready to go?”

Sam tongues at the inside of his lip. He looks Dean straight in the eye and flinches when Dean casts his gaze aside, uses checking his gun and strapping on his knife as an excuse to avoid Sam’s scrutiny.

“Ready,” Sam says.

Sam scans the map of the floor on the hotel room door as they leave. “This way,” he says, leading them towards the stairwell. “Pay attention to the turns.”

Dean hustles along beside him muttering, “You might be going all Jason Bourne on me, but I can read a map too, you know.”

“Two lefts, a right, six doors down and then another right,” Sam says. “You’re going to the garage level in case they bring it in with the rest of the loading and unloading.”

“Bitch.”

“If anything goes wrong-”

“Right, right…” Dean pats the coat pocket he keeps his phone in and turns the corner.

Sam feels guilty about lying to Dean for approximately three minutes. After that, he’s too busy sneaking past security to bother with anything else.

*

The package on the bed seems to suck the light from every corner of the hotel room, but the digital readout on the clock is bright enough when Sam looks directly at it. He’s got at least a half hour before Dean checks in.

That pang of guilt hits him again. It never has felt right doing things behind Dean’s back. Even leaving for California had-

Sam chokes on the void and turns away from the wrapped dagger. It’s malice throbs like a drumbeat, steadily ramps up the darkness in his own blood. As soon as Sam had relieved it from its courier he’d felt it. There’s no doubt that it’d been used for sacrifice; little surprise that it had been twinned with an object that summoned.

With slow deliberation Sam goes into the bathroom. He leaves the door open as he strips his clothes off, folding hem neatly and placing them on the countertop. Turning on the taps, he’s still not accustomed to the instant rush of hot water. Rituals are important, he reminds himself and steps into the spray.

“Whatever my sins, I don’t want your forgiveness,” he says. His voice bounces on the tile, echoes in his ears. He cleans himself from head to toe, water close to scalding. Turning the spray off, he lets the silence surround him.

Sam steps into the blinding light of the row of bulbs above the mirror. His reflection stares back sombre. Towelling off, he’s nearly dry before he knows it, only his hair sending fresh drops to skid down his chest. He looks up to meet his own eyes again, doesn’t raise his eyes higher. For the first time, he isn’t looking for an answer.

“I want your blessing,” Sam says.

The beast in his arm slithers. It turns over on itself and burns a warning as he heads towards the bed, but with his skin steaming from the heat of the shower, Sam hardly feels the phantom blistering.

The dagger is made of stone and inlaid with gold, and it’s one of the nastiest artifacts Sam has ever touched with his bare hands, but if he needs one devourer to destroy another, it’s a means to an end.

The thing living in his arm screams as the stone point breaks his flesh. The dagger’s thirst sends shockwaves up to his elbow. Sam holds steady, widens the cut, and digs the point of the blade under the wriggling maggot-pale body of the snake. Blood flows down his wrist, slicks up his hand, and a wave of dizziness slams into Sam. He swallows hard, pushes the dagger in further, no time to worry whether or not he’s sliced a vein as he catches the snake’s head between his thumb and the blade.

It hits the carpet and thrashes there, sightless head twisting and turning, toothless mouth gaping wide.

Dizzied, Sam crumples to his knees. Dagger clutched in both of his hands as he drives the point into the centre of the creature’s skull.

Memory floods back into him as a river unchecked. He is, in a gut-wrenching, heart-stop instant, reunited with his greatest sin.

“No forgiveness,” he says, body falling limp, blood continuing to pour from his arm.

*

The world goes from dark to light.

“Bout time, Sleeping Beauty,” Dean says. By the sound of it, he’s puttering around with their gear. “How’s the arm?”

“You stitched me up,” Sam says. He looks down at his arm like the appendage had suddenly grown into being.

“Someone had to.”

Sam sits up. He slowly closes his hand into a fist and feels nothing but the pull of the stitches and a dull, healing ache. “The dagger?”

“Took care of that, and the mask too.” Dean doesn’t look straight at him, and Sam recognises that they’re in familiar surroundings with the requisite flat carpet, bad wallpaper and kitsch.

A dozen questions get distilled into a simple, “How did you?” and Sam is treated to the sight of a blush creeping up Dean’s neck. Sam finds his footing surprisingly stable as he rises. “Don’t tell me you got lost.”

“I didn’t get lost, not exactly. It was weird,” Dean says. A visible shiver goes down his back. He makes a face and quits with the weapons to start on the laundry. “Doesn’t matter, does it? Came back right in time to find you face down trying to bleed out a big enough puddle to swim in. And dude, that piece of string? I burned it with the ceremonial stuff. Smelled like puke, I nearly gagged to death.”

“Thanks,” Sam says. Embarrassingly, his eyes sting a little.

If Dean notices, he doesn’t mention it when Sam heads into the bathroom to take care of what must be a couple days worth of hygiene needs.

Sam feels a lot more alive when he comes back out again, a fresh bandage over the mess he’d turned his arm into. He’ll carry a different scar there.

“Dean-”

“We don’t need to talk about it,” Dean says, cutting him off. He shakes out another pair of pants and starts matching up the legs.

“Yes, we do.” Sam takes a step forward. “We need to talk about a lot of things.”

Dean shoots him a dismissive smirk and keeps folding.

“I’ve made a mistake.” Sam wrings his hands together. There’s a knotting in his chest that swells by the second, and with it comes his gift, hazy threads of potential swirling around him like the ends of tiny, fragile spiderwebs.

“Yeah, number one being you putting on your panties. Stop with the heart to heart before you make me throw up a little in my mouth.”

Dean, I’m serious- Dean, I’m not fooling around- Dean, I want you-

“Missouri’s friend told me everything I needed to know at the time, I just didn’t see it.” Sam runs his fingers over the bandaged surface of his inner arm and watches as Dean’s eyes track the motion. “You brought me back different, Dean, but it doesn’t matter. None of it. Because I also came back the same. If I find acceptance in myself, then God will forgive me.”

Dean’s eyes bug out like he thinks Sam’s gone stark raving mad, and Sam doesn’t know how else to say what he needs to without shattering the fragile balance that swirls around him.

I love you.

The warp and weft of the universe is glowing and beautiful.

“I need you.”

“Sammy, look-”

“No, Dean, listen to me. I’ve lost you before, but I’ve never lost what you are to me. What you were.” Sam steps forward and a swathe of fate strains to the point of breaking. He stops his hand before he reaches out, almost tasting the kiss a push in the right direction would earn him. “We used to have a hard time keeping our hands off one another.”

Dean’s, Yeah, but you left, doesn’t even need to be said for the words to buffet against Sam like a hot wind.

“And your point is?”

“My point, Dean, is that I want to touch you like that again.”

“So some bruja,” Dean starts, and Sam automatically correct him with, “Curandera.” Dean flips him a scowl. “Whatever, you go see a witchwoman, she sticks a magic snake up your arm which three weeks later you had to fucking carve out and suddenly you think it’s a good idea that we, that’s you and I, do what, exactly? Have relations, in, and I’m using this term Sammy with all the irony it can muster, the biblical way?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, praise the Lord, ’cause for a minute there I was thinking you’d gone off the deep—”

Sam peels his mouth away from Dean’s. “Maybe I have.”

Dean has turned to stone in front of him. It’s not the stillness of waiting for a nightmare to come around the corner, or the zen calm of firing a dozen rounds and hitting no more than a two-inch spread. The muscles in Dean’s arms are corded so tight they’re faintly quivering

“Dean, listen to me, I know what you want.” Sam licks his lips, the right words to say impossible to find when his blood is roaring beneath every inch of his skin.

“What are you talking about?”

“You and me, you still want this, right?” Sam shakes his head a little. He almost wants to laugh at how obvious Dean’s been from the start. “The way you look at me sometimes, Dean, it’s like-”

“We were kids. Shit, you went to college, you could probably write a book about why stuff like that happens.” A flush creeps up Dean’s neck, and he breaks out of Sam’s grasp, returns to the task of folding his clothes like nothing happened. ” Doesn’t take a genius to know—a family like ours, I mean.” He shuts himself up and stares at the rolled shirt in his hands, its perfect pill shape. He throws it down on the floor with a growl, his posture stiffening, fingers tightening into fists.

“I’m not blaming you, Dean. Hell, I’m not even blaming Dad.”

There’s blood in Sam’s mouth and a split stinging his lip before he can blink. He readies himself for the next hit, but Dean’s always fought dirty, vicious, when he means it, and Sam doesn’t quite block the jab to his side before Dean takes him down. Sam thrusts an arm out, intends to return the favour, but Dean isn’t playing to win, he’s moving out of reach, grabbing his duffel, stomping away. Futures split, fray, unravel into nothingness.

“Dean, wait.” Sam picks himself up, and has just enough time to think that he’s always loved the sound of rain pouring off eaves before the squeal of the Impala’s driver’s side door shreds his insides.

*

Time hiccups, spits him back fifteen seconds and there’s Dean, rolled up t-shirt in his hand, staring at the lump of it like he doesn’t know how it got there in that shape. Sam could tell him; he’d had to force himself to unlearn the habit when he found himself with friends and roommates who asked questions as often as they poked fun.

“I’m not blaming you, Dean. Hell, I’m not even blaming Dad.” The words had fallen out of Sam’s mouth strangely, the sentence well underway before things clicked back into focus. He feels them push through the air like ripples from a stone never cast. He doesn’t want to think about what having a second chance like this means, and there’s no time, besides.

Sam blocks Dean’s fist before it can loosen his teeth. “But you must be as blind as I was because I look at you, too,” Sam says, crowding close and barrelling on before the heat creeping up his own neck makes it to his face. Dean doesn’t throw a second punch, but he puts a hand to Sam’s chest, fingertips hard on Sam’s breastbone. “I think about you, off and on, all the time. It’s not like we ever talked about what happened though, or if it might happen again.” Sam swallows thickly, nearly chokes on his own spit. “But, I guess, how do you even start the I still get off on wanting to fuck my brother conversation?”

The muscles in Dean’s jaw shift and bulge. “You don’t, Sammy, that’s the point.”

“But I do,” Sam says, and Dean shrinks back. Sam won’t let him go, not this time, and it’s nothing at all like when he was fourteen and it’d been partly hormones and partly teenaged rebellion that had him testing boundaries and what he could get away with when he’d first begged for Dean to suck him off.

“Sam—”

“No, listen,” Sam says, and Dean groans, a miserable sound that Sam can’t bear to hear. “I love you, Dean. I want you. And maybe I shouldn’t, but I do.”

“You know what I’m going to say.”

“No, I don’t,” Sam steps back. “I just know that you could say yes.” Threads of fate pluck at him from all sides, vibrating white-hot where probabilities align. He ignores them all, even what he knows will win Dean over without a doubt.

“It’s fucked up.”

“I don’t care.” Sam extends a hand, a gesture that earns him—them—a fifty-fifty chance, evens the odds.

“Jesus.”

Sam closes his eyes, millions of futures a hurricane around him. He waits in the centre where time has slowed, the ache of waiting dulled by the shifting patterns of everything that might be.

His arm wavers, drops an inch, and Dean catches it, grip strong on his arm.

“Jesus, Sam,” Dean says, and then there are shaky hands on Sam’s waist, palms pressing flat to his abdomen to push him back and Dean’s mouth grazing the point of his chin. “This is so fucked up.”

“Does it matter?” Sam asks.

The kiss guarantees Dean can’t answer, tips like an overladen scale what that answer would’ve been to the other end of the spectrum, and the storm of futures fades into the background because nothing is more important than the way Dean responds to the touch of his hands. Or the way it feels shoving up against him. The edge of the bed appears out of nowhere and it turns into a race to see who can rip their clothing off faster.

Sam wins, his shirts flung off somewhere to land on the other side of the room. He tears greedily at the waist of Dean’s jeans. Dean’s cock is an obvious bulge, straining near the zip. A shiver radiates through Sam’s belly when his fingers spread over the heat of it.

“Fuck, Dean, you feel so good.” Sam drags a kiss over the nearest bit of Dean’s skin, the hairs of his arm tickling Sam’s lips before Sam bites at a spot just above the subtle roughness of Dean’s elbow.

Dean pushes at him insistently, and it’s almost like he’s the one that can see moments ahead because he seems to know exactly what to do to make Sam gasp and shudder. Dean stretches out on top of him, legs tangling with his, and Sam lifts up into another kiss. He bites at Dean’s mouth, sucks at the fullness of lip and the hot, firm slide of Dean’s tongue, so fucking eager to learn how Dean kisses all over again.

“Slow down,” Dean hisses, and Sam moans an incredulous sound.

“Are you kidding me?” Sam says, hands roaming down Dean’s spine and trying to get him to move a little to left and grind.

“Yeah, well, these days I ain’t so hard up for it. Unlike you, I get laid at least once a week.”

It shows, Sam thinks as Dean slithers down and mouths at his cock. Fuck, does it show.

His cock leaps as Dean’s fingers wrap tight, and Dean’s not at all shy about handling him. He isn’t sloppy either, the way he’d been at nineteen with scraping teeth and nervous, fumbling hands. It’s the most perfect thing Sam’s ever known when Dean’s head sinks down, soft mouth taking him in and swallowing him.

“You’ve done this before,” Sam gasps, a lightning crack moment drilling it into him that no one ramps up their cocksucking skills this much without sucking a lot of cock. “I mean, not just with me.”

Dean’s lashes raise and Sam nearly comes at the sight. He shudders, squeezing his eyes tight when Dean lifts his head and his cock slips free, saliva stringing, glistening until the pink flash of Dean’s tongue appears.

“It’s commonly considered bad form to bring up old flames at a time like this.”

Sam opens his eyes and his dick fucking throbs. Dean has it angled up, mouth hovering close. Precome pushes out the slit, drips down over the knuckle of Dean’s thumb, and Sam shivers as he waits to see if Dean will choose to lick it up or wipe it back into his skin.

“I didn’t mean it that way, I just didn’t know that…you know,” Sam says, genuine surprise tingling inside him for the first time in weeks. He shivers and drops his head back, grabbing a fistful of scratchy sheets when Dean’s mouth closes over him again, tongue lapping up the leaking mess of his precome. “How many?”

“Sam, really!” Dean rolls to the side, weight propping on one arm. “So I like some dick alongside the endless parade of pussy, big deal. I’m a horny guy, deal with it.”

“I wasn’t asking because I was jealous,” Sam says, twisting towards him. “I was asking because it’s kind of hot.”

Dean’s brow forms a crease. “Oh,” he says, and things are a little awkward until he rolls back, tongue flicking at the jut of Sam’s hip. God, but he likes to use his tongue. Sam’s mind explodes with all the ways that could work to his advantage. “Hot, huh? What else gets you hot? You like your balls sucked on?”

And with that, all of Sam’s thoughts shatter into glittering dust. Just hearing Dean ask a question like that makes his internal temperature skyrocket. He moans and Dean takes it for a yes, fingers pushing between his legs to take a handful of his balls, squeeze them and then suck one straight into his mouth.

“Fuck!” Sam’s legs jerk, knees drawing together reflexively. Dean grabs his thigh and shoves it back, holds Sam’s leg down until he’s sure Sam’s not going to move. It’s all pressure and the ticklish push of Dean’s tongue and Sam can hardly think as Dean’s hand creeps back up to tug at his dick.

Spit runs down the insides of his thighs, and Dean pulls his mouth away to lick it up, wipe up the traces with a strong swipe of his thumb. All the nerve endings in Sam’s body are fired up, even the slightest brush of breath over the fine hairs on his belly sends little electric shocks right into his spine. Dean’s hands and mouth are all over him, thorough instead of hurried, moving in long sweeps and lingering at the hollows between his muscles, or on the faint blush of fading bruises.

Sam twists, impatient and unsure what to do with his hands. They used to do things fast, fuelled by the fear of getting caught and the rush of teenaged lust. The pace Dean sets is disarming, and Sam’s not accustomed to being this out of control. No matter how aggressive his lovers have been, he’s always been physically stronger than them, figured out quickly enough that most girls liked that, but Dean’s not exactly being aggressive so much as confident, he certainly isn’t a girl, and he can hold his own on most any level.

Sam had thought too, that Dean would be the one laying back, spread open and gritting his teeth at the push of fingers between his legs. He’d seen it, felt dozens of shivering echoes of what Dean would ask for with soft noises, the way he’d moan when Sam held him down, sucked marks bright and damning, begging to be fucked open. Do it, Sam, c’mon, I can take it.

Sam gasps, focuses on Dean’s face as it is, the concentration there all about making sure that anything he does feels nothing but good. Dean’s eyes are soft, lashes resting lightly as his mouth glides over Sam’s cock. He seems almost lost in his task, reacting to a flood of signals Sam doesn’t read but that are clearly coming from his own body, because Dean slows at just the right times for the rising pressure to ebb enough that the next swell will be that much closer to maddening.

Dean flicks a questioning glance upwards as Sam touches his shoulder. When Sam has nothing for him but a heavy sound, Dean’s mouth tugs into a lazy smile and he sucks wet kisses down the length of Sam’s dick. This is the other fork in the path, Sam realises, Dean’s need to please demonstrated by learning every inch of Sam’s body, piggy-backing on the drive to make sure this is real. To know Sam, inside and out.

“Such a fucking girl half the time, but you’re still not wet like one,” Dean says, muffled as his face rubs against the inside of Sam’s thigh. He sinks down, and Sam shoves up on his elbow, his body tingling.

Tongue trailing the crease of his thigh, Dean’s hands holding him spread open, lick and suck and a wet, wriggling stab of tongue pushing inside him. Rush of hot breath, rush of come, and Dean sucking that up, too. Hungry for everything he has to give.

“Dean, wait,” Sam forces up onto his wrists, body dragging away from Dean’s face poised between his legs.

“Wait for what?” Impatience laces Dean’s voice, and he stands, his cock flushed dark and bobbling slightly to the beat of his pulse. He tips his head back to look down at Sam. “Don’t even tell me you need to dump out. You haven’t eaten for two days, and you took a long enough shower to wash everywhere twice.”

“Dean!” Sam’s cheeks burn cherry red.

“Hey, you wanted to be all open with the communication. If the dirty details of assfucking bothers you, that’s your problem.”

Sam can’t deny that, but it’s never been this way. Never. Maybe it shows on his face, because the future crashes in on him again: Dean climbing onto the bed and straddling his legs, spitting into his palm and reaching down to wipe it on himself, grab Sam’s dick and just settle back. Easy, so fucking easy, like taking it up the ass is like breathing. Riding him with that same cowboy roll to his hips, sweat a thin sheen on his skin. Moaning his name, over and over. Sammy, oh God, Sam. Sam.

Dean’s knee presses at the edge of the mattress, the strain of the sheets pulling away from where Sam’s weight traps them.

“Next time,” Sam says. His throat bobs as he swallows.

Dean’s eyes seem to glow in the warm light of the lamp. Slide and grind, his cock rubbing between them when he leans forward, makes soft pleading sounds into Sam’s mouth. “Next time,” Dean repeats.

Sam holds Dean’s gaze. “Promise. You’ve uh, got something in your bags, don’t you? That we can use, I mean.”

“Yeah, I got plenty.” Dean’s mouth stretches into wickedness and he turns to grab the bag he keeps his favourite knives in. The muscles of his back flex as he bends down to drag the pack over and Sam swallows again, his throat dry and his tongue too wet. Futures align, trickle together into a pool and Sam feels the first brush of Dean’s touch, slippery and cool, before Dean’s even opened the right zippered pocket.

He closes his eyes, time ticking by until reality catches up with him. It’s a thousandfold more intense, his stomach clenching in spasms that seem to vibrate like harpstrings. Breathing shallow through his nose, Sam drops his knees wider and tries to relax into the gentle push of Dean’s fingers. Fresh colour stings his face when he has the pause to really feel what Dean is doing, the slow slide of a single digit accompanied with a bitten-back moan and the spread of Dean’s other hand grasping at his leg.

Dean is getting turned on watching, and Sam reacts, body clenching, triggering a chain-reaction that ends in Dean surging up over him, mouth searching until Sam rises up for a kiss. Dean’s tongue pushes deep while his fingers curl inside Sam’s body. They curve and press harder, slide in and then out until the tips catch on a desperate clutch of muscle.

“You really want this, Sammy?” Dean asks, and it’s dirtier somehow to have Dean call him that when he’s naked and trembling and hanging at Dean’s fingertips.

He catches Dean’s face for another kiss, offers everything without words.

It’s not how he would have engineered things, but it doesn’t matter, not in the least. The moment is perfect as it is. Instances occur when time blurs, past-present-future, and sometimes it feels as if there are a dozen hands on him instead of just two. Sam can’t tear his eyes away from Dean, from the way his mouth goes slack when he pulls out and slides back in slow inches to the haze in his eyes after a kiss. He lets Dean set the pace when he starts feeling lost, and it’s more than enough. Dean’s always been enough. Dean’s hand envelops him and the rutting force of Dean’s thrusts has Sam tipping closer and closer to the edge. He holds fast, head tucked into Dean’s shoulder as Dean steadily fucks into him, loves him.

Before-after-during he’s surrounded, filled, overwhelmed and Dean is everywhere and everything that matters to him.

“Come in me, Dean, please,” Sam whispers, and folds his arms around Dean.

He holds onto Dean desperately, certain that when the universe fragments, when time no longer has meaning and Hellfire rages, Dean will be there to hold him where he belongs.

*

The world burns and Sam stands in a crossroads with a cool smile. The colt is a heavy weight in his hand, Dean a solid warmth at his side. He closes his eyes and opens his mind. Darkness swirls hungrily, and most of the paths he sees are choked with misery. But there are bright spots, feeble and flickering, little candle flames in the distance that grow stronger as he feeds their probabilities.

Sam cocks the hammer and knows just where he’ll aim when the bastards come calling. His smile turns toothy.

*

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

*

End