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Summary and warnings in part 1.
Part 3. No longer canon-compliant.
One thing about driving the Impala alone for four months: he could make it do tricks he’d previously thought reserved only to Dean. He was fifteen minutes away from the second trap. He made it in nine. The place was an out-of-business Hollywood Video location, the paint around the missing logo making its identity clear by absence. Stuck in the middle of an empty parking lot, most of the lights broken or burnt out, windows covered with opaque sheeting, it was a perfect stage for torture and pyrotechnics. Stood to reason that an economic collapse would be good for demons, but he’d never thought of the matter in terms of real estate before. Sam left the car in the darkness of the outer edges of the lot and headed to the back, where there was an employee entrance.
So Lilith had used patterns too large for him to see. Two could play at that game. He closed his eyes, imagining the ground beneath his feet. In the middle of a built-up area, it was shot through with metal of all kinds. All he had to do was wrench and crumple, forming a pentagram in a circle around the building, twisting pipes and cables out of true until they were proper sigils. He was probably cutting power to the surrounding six blocks, but that was just tough.
He only remembered to leave himself a space to step inside at the last second. Crossing felt like being stabbed in the chest, but it was over quickly. Closing the final line felt like chewing tinfoil. Pain zinged through his jaw and ears, stabbing like needles. Once the trap was closed, the air seemed to dry out, and his ears popped when he swallowed. Moving was like walking through cotton, not difficult but subtly wrong.
When he reached out with his inner eye again, he quickly found a knot of eight demons. They didn’t have anyone on guard, which was either overconfidence on their part or on his. He concentrated, readying himself to squeeze them out of their hosts—
Nothing; his powers bounced off of them like they were sealed in plastic eggs. Slick, featureless—he could sense them, but they were unreachable.
He remembered the binding rune Meg had used to fasten herself to his body. Unlike the ones at the high school, these demons didn’t want to be exorcised. They wanted to have time to work.
He’d have to go inside the building.
The back door was already open, which didn’t reassure him. He was in a hallway, cool and dusty with disuse. The strongest smell was the fake butter of microwave popcorn. Faint light spilled from the other end, where the main part of the store had been.
Experimentally, Sam reached out with his mind for a discarded DVD case propped up against the wall. It floated obediently into his hand. He hadn’t been sure the powers would work inside the Devil’s Trap. On balance, bad news, because that meant he was facing the full attentions of eight demons.
The Impala had provided him with a shotgun and two handguns. He figured headshots would be his best bet to take the hosts out of contention, at least for long enough to get Dean out.
A soft noise made him turn: Dee, already putting Ruby’s knife back in its sheath. Her eyes gleamed in the near-darkness, wide and worried. With hand signals, they agreed that they’d continue forward, to the open space of the store. That was not going to be the best place for knifework. There was too much opportunity for targets to retreat, and they couldn’t afford to lose their only sure killing weapon with a throw.
Plastic sheeting was heaped around the doorway at the end of the hall, and they moved even more carefully to minimize noise, crouching down and scouting around the edges.
Sam had been wrong about the cage.
This time, the demons had Dean bound to a good old-fashioned cross, made out of what looked like stray pieces of lumber. He wasn’t nailed, which made Sam sag for a moment in horrified relief, but his wrists and ankles were bound with wire, already dripping with blood where his skin had broken open under his own weight. They’d cut his shirt off and sliced across his stomach. A rag stuffed into his mouth forced his jaws apart, held there by the gag cutting deep into his skin.
One of the demons, wearing a redheaded young man in a baseball jersey, bent in front of Dean and licked a runnel of blood, following it down Dean’s skin until he reached the sodden waist of Dean’s jeans. Dean’s muscles fluttered with revulsion, but he didn’t struggle.
Sam raised the shotgun, but Dee’s hand clamped around his forearm. When the red haze cleared a little, he realized that he could see only six demons. Exposing their position now, without knowing the location of the other two, could be a fatal mistake, and he quickly discovered that he’d lost his ability to sense them. It didn’t matter whether that was exhaustion or some side effect of the Devil’s Trap, but he sincerely regretted the lack of any texts on demonic powers written from the demon’s perspective.
No time for brooding, Dee was saying with her eyes. At least he still had the ability to move objects. Which made him think: he looked up at the ceiling, which unfortunately was that soft spongy tile that fell apart at the first touch. The ceiling would have been better, less noticeable, but he could make do with the floor as well.
Slowly at first, and then faster as he got the hang of it, he cracked the concrete underneath the cheap dirt-brown carpet, creating a small Devil’s Trap right around Dean. Once the redheaded demon stepped back just a bit, he’d close it and then Dean would be safe.
Except that the demon refused to cooperate, twining itself around Dean, its hands curling around him in a parody of desire. It stuck two fingers into the largest slice on Dean’s stomach, then called out, “You’ve got to try this,” while Dean clenched his jaw and turned his face away.
Fuck it, Sam thought, and finished the circle. He could save that one for last.
He nodded at Dee and they jumped out, Sam firing as she rabbited towards the nearest demon. She was fast as an electric shock, and the first flare of demon-death was almost instantaneous. Another demon turned and began to raise its hand to her, and Sam blasted it back with the shotgun, then switched to his first handgun.
As it turned out, a headshot was insufficient, but head, knee and gut together were more persuasive.
“Stop!”
The yell came from the redheaded demon. Sam counted bodies—six down, which meant one more still at large. The demon with Dean had a knife up to Dean’s throat, and it hadn’t been careful about placement. Blood was already drooling down Dean’s chest.
“What’s your endgame?” Sam asked, stepping forward with the gun trained at its forehead. Dee would have to watch for the remaining demon. “You know you’re stuck. Throw the knife away and I’ll let you go.”
“Throw the gun away and I’ll let him live,” the demon countered.
“You know if I exorcise you it’s permanent death, right?”
There was a thud, behind and to the right of Sam. Dean’s eyes were too unfocused for his lack of reaction to be entirely reassuring. Sam chose to believe that Dee was the source of the noise, not the victim.
The demon blinked at Sam. Sam couldn’t tell much about the host, other that he was in his mid-thirties. “You mean it?” it asked.
Which was very far from what Sam had been expecting. But it stood to reason that the demons who fought so hard to escape Hell might not want to go back. Even Sam was more and more certain every day that he wanted death to be the real end, and he was at least hoping not to qualify for Hellfire.
“Yeah,” he said, and it came out soft. He didn’t let the gun waver. Dean was as still as a carved Jesus, breathing so shallowly that the knife didn’t draw any more blood.
“Your word,” the demon said.
“I swear by all powers, above and below,” Sam said evenly. “Step out of the Devil’s Trap and I’ll give you what you want.”
The demon thought for a moment, then nodded and tossed its knife away, lost in the darkness. Sam sent a ripple of force up through the floor behind them, bursting through the pentagram, and the demon inhaled.
Then it kicked out, and Sam went tumbling backwards, slamming full-length onto the floor. He saw blackness lashed with white, neurons firing randomly at the shock. “Sorry,” it said, “but Lilith’s given me a better deal.”
He couldn’t see—it could be killing Dean right then—he grabbed at every scrap of power left to him and shoved back as he pushed up onto his elbows.
Dean twitched on the cross and gave a terrible gurgle—alive, he was alive—and Sam struggled to his feet. By the time he had his balance, the demon was wriggling feebly on the floor, Dee straddling it with the knife digging into its shirt right above its heart.
Sam stalked over and looked down.
“Please,” it said. “Don’t send me back.”
Dee didn’t look away from the demon, but she flinched. All he could see of her face was the curve of her cheek and the fall of her hair. Her body was as stiff as a pile of knives. He didn’t check for how Dean was reacting.
“It’s your lucky night,” he said, and raised his hand, needing the physical focus.
As soon as the man started choking out demon goo, Dee was up and off him, running to hack at Dean’s bonds with Ruby’s knife, a serious waste of edge but not one Sam was going to complain about. Dean fought off her help before his ankles were free, and Sam had to come assist with untangling the wires. His feet weren’t as bad as his wrists, but they still looked ugly.
This was what Dee had avoided by being here instead of in her reality. He wondered if she’d realized yet that Lilith might still have gone after Samantha in the same way.
“Let’s head back,” he said, backing away from Dean when Dean looked ready to push. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
****
He caught up with Dee just before she could open the driver’s side door.
His usual constraints on hitting a woman were substantially inoperative, so he shoved her so hard that she slammed into the side of the car with an ‘oof’ as the breath left her lungs. Dean protested from behind them. Sam ignored him.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” he demanded. “You let them bleed him!”
Dee pushed off the car and stepped forward, her jaw clenched as she stared up at him. “I saw,” she gritted out.
“Then why didn’t you do something?” Sam could sense Dean’s approach, but he wasn’t intervening. Either Dean was even more badly injured than he’d let on, or he thought they needed to have this out.
She shook her head slightly. “Had to look out for you.”
Sam stared at her, because that wasn’t even close to an answer. Unless—“Why? Because I’m the one who can get you back to your Samantha?”
She closed her eyes, and he remembered the butterfly softness of her lashes against his fingertips from earlier. “Yeah, sure.”
So it was worse than that. He fell back a few steps, enough that he could see them both, tight jawlines and lowered brows, defiant and not at all guilty. The two of them had discussed the matter, agreed that Sam was more important than Dean, because Dee was practically Dean and Sam was practically Samantha. Of course she’d gone along with Dean.
Sam couldn’t think of a civil thing to say, so he just scowled as Dee opened the back door for Dean and eased him down so that he could stretch out and rest.
Sam drove.
****
The first thing he saw when they returned to the room was a little cornhusk angel, resting on the bed. He picked it up, cringing at the prickle of dry stalks. One of its wings scratched his index finger, drawing blood.
He read the demon’s note that had been wrapped around it, which said pretty much what Dean had reported about the high school and the video store. The angel had been a bonus taunt, a reminder that Dean wasn’t so much a person any more as he was a blunt instrument.
Forget saving the world. They weren’t going to survive the week if things continued like this. Even though he knew Dean was bound to misinterpret the gesture, he couldn’t stand to have the angel-poppet around. He soaked it in whiskey from one of the spare flasks and set it, along with the note, on fire, dropping it into an empty wastebasket and watching until it was nothing but stinking ash.
When he was able to pay attention again, he saw that Dee and Dean were waiting on the far bed, silent and watchful, their shoulders identically slumped. The bloody tissues piled between them suggested that Dee had taken care of Dean’s wounds. “We need some better security,” he told them.
He made them set every ward they’d ever heard of before he’d talk. “Here’s what we know: Dee isn’t here because Castiel brought her, and she doesn’t seem to have any connection to Lilith. Her angelic powers—” Dean and Dee winced identically—“don’t work here, but she’s immune to our demons. That implies that demons and angels are reality-specific. And that means that if we can figure out how to get me over to Dee’s reality, then I won’t—” He had to stop then to pull himself together.
Anyway, it was enough for them to fill in the blanks. If he went, there’d be no working Antichrist, no seal to break. He took a deep breath, then another when the first one shuddered to a gasping halt. He could make this work. “So this is what the fortune-teller meant. It’s my way out. If I’m one of the seals, then we take away the key to starting the apocalypse—”
“Satan’s left with nothing in the ignition,” Dee said, her face brightening at the thought.
“What’s this ‘I’ shit?” Dean didn’t look anywhere near as happy as Dee.
Sam stared at him, puzzled. Sam had brought him a way out: no need for anyone to die, much less everyone.
“I’m the problem,” he explained. It didn’t hurt as much as it used to. “You said it yourself, Dean.”
Dean swallowed, his face darkening. “Why are you so sure it’s Satan who wants the showdown, and not God?” he asked. “You’re the one who loves normal, Sammy. I never had much use for it. That’s not exactly the profile of somebody who saves the world.”
Sam knew that wasn’t entirely true, given that Dean spent his life trying to preserve normal for other people, but he could see how it was a crack that would let Castiel’s message of the end times work its way into Dean’s head.
“Castiel and Uriel told us,” Sam reminded him. They might have been dicks, but they were pretty clear on being anti-seal-breaking dicks. The important insight was that Dean could have a chance to have his own life. With Dee, if he wanted. “If I cross over into Dee’s world, I’d be okay. You’d be safe.”
“You asshole,” Dean said.
It took Sam a minute to translate that.
“Fine,” Sam conceded, his voice thick with the tears Dean didn’t want to know about. “I guess you can tag along.” Dean would do that, throw away his whole world, for Sam. It couldn’t be worse than going to Hell for him.
There had been a time when Sam had promised himself that Dean was done making sacrifices.
Dean grinned at him, the way he’d grin when Sam caught a tossed ammo clip or found just the right incantation for a spell. That smile reminded him of the way they’d been at their best, back before things got so much worse than he ever could have imagined.
“So now we tell my Sam to pack, so she’s ready to come here,” Dee said. Sam glanced at the time and realized that they’d almost missed check-in. At least he hadn’t managed to screw that up yet, but he had to act fast or Samantha would probably rip space-time open herself to see what had gone wrong.
He cut Dee’s other arm this time, and tried a little less blood. And he put the portal on the wall, so that nobody would have to experience vertigo.
Samantha was there, unharmed. Apparently with Dee missing, everyone’s plans were in shambles. Small favors.
No, Sam realized. Big favors. The whole point of this farce was that both of them were necessary to the last battle. As long as each reality was missing at least one of them, Lilith’s plans could be foiled. That gave him the flexibility he needed.
There was a lot of information to impart, but he found himself distracted by Samantha. She had her hair back in a ponytail, which made her face look even more angular, sort of like Sigourney Weaver: gorgeous but deadly, jawline sharp enough to cut glass. She looked like she hadn’t slept well. Sam remembered that, how the silence of his room had been enough to wake him twelve times a night.
Once Dee confirmed the events of the day, Samantha immediately saw the virtues of his plan, and they agreed on a division of research responsibilities. (There were elements he didn’t say out loud, but she either knew them or she didn’t, and either way he’d deal when the time came.) Then he and Dean went outside while Dee had a private word with her sister. Sam really, really didn’t want to know.
The night was clear and warm, the air soft against Sam’s face. The light pollution meant that there were barely any stars visible. Cars passed by, a steady pulse. Dean’s face was lit up in the harsh glare of headlights, then left to darkness.
At last, Dean stopped shifting his weight nervously. “So, uh. I guess I hurt you pretty bad earlier.”
So much had happened that Sam had to replay the day in his mind, and he only remembered that Dean had knocked him out with his angel-granted voice the second time through. “It was the right thing to do.”
“Sam.” Dean’s voice was thick. “I. When I used it, I saw—you looked. Different.”
Right before Dean had gone to Hell, he’d been able to see the true forms of demons underneath their hosts. Sam guessed that his true form was something like that. He wondered just how ugly it was.
When Sam didn’t react, Dean continued. “I wanted—right after I did it, when I saw you, I felt—I wanted you to fall.”
Sam nearly cringed but managed to keep rigidly still. Since they’d been kids, the command to look after Sam had been etched too deeply into Dean to admit any other priorities, but apparently Heaven had access to heavier acid, wiping Dean clean and starting again. He’d thought he was getting used to being different, not quite Dean’s brother any more, but it turned out that having Dean say it to him was far worse than thinking it to himself.
Dean had said earlier that he wanted to follow Sam, but that was while he was pretending that nothing had changed between them. Dean tended to grab onto the familiar when he was frightened. Given a real Winchester, one with untainted blood, to look after, he might do better.
“You really like her,” he said. “Dee.”
Dean scrunched up his face, that ‘Sam is weird’ look (if Sam were honest, it was ‘Sammy is weird,’ but he figured he got to name the look in his own mind). “Of course she’s awesome, she’s me with a rack. Think I might have to kill her if she doesn’t shut up about driving my car, though.”
“Dean, I’m serious.”
“Sam,” Dean imitated his tone but somehow injected a whine, “she’s—whatever, it doesn’t matter.”
Right, because nothing mattered but the mission.
“Do you talk to her about Hell?”
Dean inhaled sharply.
“She understands, right?” Sam demanded, not sure why he was pressing the matter.
“No, we don’t talk about it,” Dean grated, sounding like he was in the wrong gear. “It’s not like we went to the same high school. And for the record, Sam, the whole point—the reason I get up in the morning is so that you will never have to know what the Pit really is. You wanna do a sharing circle, fine. But keep it above ground.”
Under other circumstances, Sam might have mustered amusement at the thought that they were protecting each other to death. He didn’t entirely believe Dean’s rationale for his silence, or at least he thought that Dean had some other reasons he couldn’t make himself admit. Still, it was nice that Dean wanted to shield him, like their Dad instinctively throwing out his arm when he hit the brakes hard back when they were kids. Useless, a little irritating in its futility, but also a bit charming.
“You okay?” Dean asked after a minute passed. He was carefully staring out at the road.
Sam snorted. “Dean, I couldn’t find okay with a GPS.” Dean’s face contorted, fear and guilt and other things Sam didn’t want to sort through. “But I’d be crazy if I was okay, with everything that’s happened. The important thing is that I’m going to fix this, I promise.” He hadn’t been able to keep Dean out of Hell or rescue him, but keeping him out of Heaven’s clutches—yeah, Sam had no doubt that he’d pull it off somehow.
“If you don’t,” Dean began, and Sam shook his head. “Sam, it doesn’t—if anyone can, it’s you. But maybe it doesn’t shake out that way.” He stopped, and Sam could tell that he wanted to manage a grand, stupid claim, the kind that would ordinarily choke him with embarrassment but come out anyway. But Dean wasn’t that kind of a liar, to say that it was all worth it or that everything would be fine as long as they stuck together.
“I know,” Sam said, because he couldn’t reassure Dean either, and he loved him anyway too.
****
When they went back to their room, Dee was alone. He expected her to leave, probably dragging Dean with, but she didn’t, just sat at his laptop and surfed. Sam tried to concentrate on the task at hand, which was the matter of actually walking through into that other world. He was beginning to think that the fortune-teller had to have been some sort of demigod in her own right, because he simply couldn’t figure out how to do more than transmit information.
He kept waiting for one of them to stand up and announce that they were going to go fuck, but neither of them said a word.
If he didn’t know better, he’d think they were nervous.
He probably should have considered this beforehand (ideally, before he let the little head do the thinking), but he’d been deliberately ignoring the issue. He was a healthy young man with a definite need for stress release, and obviously neither Dean nor Dee had a problem with that. But to join them—and he’d be joining them, he had very little doubt on that score—implied a deliberation he wasn’t sure he wanted to accept.
He could have his nose pressed against the glass or he could walk away from the entire situation. No, that was untrue. He could choose his distance, but only within a very limited range.
Sam stood up and started unbuttoning his shirt. Dee pushed the mouse away and turned in her seat, watching. He felt his cheeks flush, but he kept going, not looking at either of them, tossing the shirt off towards the bag of dirty laundry against the wall.
Dee crossed the room, standing inches from him. “Need some help?” she offered, running her hand down the front of his T-shirt, then back up once she’d gotten below the hem, rippling the fabric as her fingers moved over his skin. He raised his arms, allowing her to pull it off. He heard Dean shift in his chair, imagined him leaning back, spreading his legs, his fingers moving over the neck of his bottle of beer.
Her breasts were soft and heavy in his hands. She smiled at him, never looking past him, as he helped her out of her borrowed shirt. She shook her head to resettle her hair, calculated and natural all at once, and he popped the clasp on her bra.
When they tumbled down to the bed, he put her on her hands and knees, keeping his eyes focused on the smooth golden skin of her back, the dusting of freckles across her shoulders. She had a farmer’s tan too, odder somehow on a girl, the skin darkest on her left bicep where her arm would rest in the sun when she was driving. He ignored Castiel’s handprint like he was ignoring everything else.
He shoved inside her as soon as possible, making her squeak, and bent over her so that he saw nothing but the muscles of her back and shoulders, smelled nothing but her hair (except it was Dean’s shampoo), tasted nothing but her skin (sharp and sweet, like green apples). She shuddered under him when he used his teeth, so he kept doing it, not quite hard enough to draw blood. He didn’t look up, even when he heard movement nearby.
When he reached around to stroke between her legs, she freed one of her own hands to guide him, faster and harder than he would have tried on his own. They were galloping together, and he had to fight himself to keep from coming before she did. As soon as she clenched around him and cried out, he jerked and crashed down, his head filled with light.
He rolled off, letting the day catch up with him, all the pain and fear and unexpected pleasure. He was nearly dreaming, listening to Dean tell her to stay right there, watching or imagining through nearly-closed eyes how Dean set his teeth right in the places Sam had just marked. Her soft choked-off noises were almost like a lullabye.
Dean hated sleep now. Sam chased it like an addict. He let it pour into his veins and pretended that all was well.
****
They were making out when he woke, thick liquid sounds of their mouths meeting and parting, slow shift of the bed, not quite enough to make Sam do anything more than turn on his side and blink. He was so warm, the bed heavy with the heat of their bodies bleeding across the few inches of sheet that separated them. Dean always ran hotter than Sam, and Sam felt sweat pop up on the back of his neck and in the creases behind his knees.
Dean’s cheeks were dark with stubble. Dee’s were flushed where he must have scraped against her. Their eyes were both half-closed, thick lashes fanning over flashes of green. He was half on top of her, on the other side of her from Sam. They moved together slowly, in perfect time, like it wasn’t the tenth time they’d fucked or even the hundredth. Like they weren’t fucking at all.
Dean stroked down Dee’s shoulder, over her breast, his hand tan and veined in contrast to the paler smoothness of her skin. His ring caught the hint of sunlight coming in through the edges of the blinds.
He looked up from where he was nuzzling Dee’s cheek, his eyes deep and dark as he examined Sam. “Hey,” he said softly. “Looks like somebody needs some attention.” He rolled off of Dee, who stifled a noise and folded herself down towards Sam’s cock, which was already more than interested. Her mouth was even hotter than he remembered.
Dean rearranged himself behind Dee, who was on her side, pulling her leg back to rest on top of his thigh as he pushed into her. His hand covered her hip, just like Dee was clutching at Sam’s hipbone, thumbing the hollow there.
“She’s takin’ good care of you, isn’t she?” Dean rumbled—almost closer to a croon, really.
He’s giving her to me, Sam thought muzzily, and couldn’t figure out whether that was horrible or wonderful. His orgasm was slow and golden and enough to put him back under for a long time.
****
After he finally got up, the day passed with the combination of agonizing slowness and lost time standard for any difficult research task. He gave Dean and Dee books of lore that he couldn’t imagine would help, just in case Dean had one of his occasional flashes of crazy-perfect lateral thinking, and also to keep them marginally more quiet.
Midmorning, the next seal nearly opened. He felt the direction now—somewhere to the distant west, maybe even as far as Japan. A wave of unreality passed through him, but then dissipated into nothingness like a demon falling apart. There was no power boost, which meant that the angels had fought off an attempt, but he could feel how close it had been. And he knew that they had to win every battle, while Lilith just needed one victory that would surely not be long in coming.
When he took a piss, he thought he smelled sulfur, which meant hiding in the bathroom long enough to force the tiny translucent window in the shower open and wait for the smell to dissipate. He did not spend any time staring into the mirror and waiting for his eyes to flash yellow. Dean noticed his absence after a while and threw out the standard gibes through the flimsy bathroom door. Sam told him to fuck off, and that seemed to satisfy him.
Dean snuck off with Dee for a quickie before lunch. Dee paused with her hand on the doorframe, but he just looked down, and after a moment she left. They had the grace not to make so much noise that he heard them through the wall.
Of course Dean would have shared; that wasn’t the problem. Or, it was, but not in the right way. There were too many Winchesters here. Dean was never going to know what he actually wanted while Sam was constantly needing his help.
Sam was tense through the afternoon, almost useless enough that he wished he’d gone with them.
****
“You were a real good kid,” Dean said while they were sharpening the knives. Sam had begun the task as a distraction from his fruitless searching and Dean had joined in for reasons of his own that he hadn’t bothered to explain. Dee had retreated to her room to shower and nap, so it almost felt normal again.
Sam examined him. “Where did that come from?” he asked cautiously.
“You didn’t complain about stuff,” Dean continued instead of answering.
Okay, so Sam had promised to try to understand, but so far he was comprehension-free. “Dean, I complained all the time.”
“Yeah, ‘cause you’re a whiny bitch,” Dean rejoined, then continued, before Sam’s confusion could spill out into words: “But not about stuff other kids would’ve. The whole summer you were fourteen, you wore that same pair of tennis shoes with the toes torn out. You said it was ‘cause you liked them. I really appreciated that, you know.”
Sam’s throat was full—of tears, words, something. He could only blink at Dean. “We’re going to make it,” he said. If Dean was putting this into words, then he must be rating their chances somewhere below those of penguins in Hawaii.
Dean looked up and raised his eyebrows. “Course we are, Sammy.”
****
As if needing time to decompress from that moment of emotional revelation, Dean volunteered to go get dinner, leaving Sam to continue his research and Dee to channel-surf, lying on her stomach with her socked feet all over the pillows of (naturally) Sam’s bed.
Sam couldn’t concentrate with Dean gone. He couldn’t help thinking that, if they went through to Dee’s world together, he’d still be more without Dean than with.
He’d seen it coming for so long, how the two of them had crossed paths and taken up the other’s burdens: Sam, stitched into the hunter’s life so thoroughly that even death hadn’t been able to remove him. Dean, hoping for something different, looking beyond his family at last even if it had taken an angel of the Lord to catch his eye. And now there was Dee as well, a human presence reminding Dean of how much life there was outside the endless roll of the wheels over asphalt.
Maybe Dee could be more than another threat. After all, he had to admit, she knew Dean better than anybody else.
“If we get out of this,” he began. Dee looked over at him warily, as if expecting another disquisition on danger and impossibility. He waited, and she clicked off the TV, acknowledging that she needed to pay attention. “When we get out of this. I’m afraid we won’t be able to—please tell me what he wants from me. I’ll do anything.”
She sucked in a breath, but her expression wasn’t surprised, and she took him seriously enough to think before she answered. “Not really, though.” He stared at her. She rolled over and sat on the side of the bed closest to him. “You didn’t give up Ruby. Not before Hell and not after. You’d do anything that you agreed to do. Not the same thing.”
He couldn’t sit still for this discussion. His joints creaked when he stood. Hunting was a good way to get an old man’s body, if not a good way to get old. The room was warm from hours of them breathing the same air. He crossed the floor, stopping a few feet away from her. “I—” He flailed for the right words, the ones that would do the job.
“You had your reasons,” she agreed. “Not saying you didn’t. But, Sam, God and Satan’ve been setting things up so we’re on opposite sides. That took a long time to do, and it won’t get fixed just ‘cause you jump through some magic mirror.”
“He’s all I’ve got left,” he said, letting everything into his voice and his expression.
Her face contorted in what he only realized was fury after he was reeling back from her punch. (Dean was right, she had an excellent roundhouse.) He blinked at her, tasting blood, his tongue flicking out to sting the new wound further. “How fucking flattering,” she sneered, shaking her hand out. “At least Castiel pretended to pick me. I’m not good, I’m not right, I’m just left.”
“That’s not—” Dee was already turning away, and Sam stopped. “You’re right,” he admitted, because that had been a terrible thing to say, and Dee could only have heard her sister saying it to her. Of course she wouldn’t want to be Samantha’s last resort. “But you’re wrong, too. If it weren’t for him, I’d—I wouldn’t care whose side I was on. Dean’s the best proof I’ve ever seen that God already got it right. He’s—he’s the one thing that never moves. He’s my place to stand. That’s why it’s all been so crazy since he got back, because when he’s not sure, how can I be?”
Her mouth was open just a little when he finished. Her eyes shone, green and clear. “That’s awful nice to hear,” she said slowly. “And if you were my Sam, I bet I wouldn’t notice how that’s not really me. That’s some idea you built in your head, and you did it real good because you’re smart like that, but me—Dean—we’re real, we use all the shampoo and leave the towels on the floor, we fart and we play the wrong music too loud, we embarrass you in front of strangers—”
She stepped back into his space, yanking her head up at a ridiculous angle to keep her eyes locked into his even as she grabbed his hand and put it at the join of her elbow, where the cut he’d given her last night was rough against his fingertips. “We bleed, Sam. You chase that Dean in your mind, you’ll always be lookin’ at the one next to you, wondering why he’s not right. Keeping secrets from him because you can’t be sure he’ll react the way he oughta.” They were both panting, ridiculously loud in the silent room. “We just want you to see.”
He couldn’t take another word, so he grabbed her head in both hands, tangling his fingers in her hair as he nearly smashed their faces together. She opened to him as smooth as a perfectly maintained switchblade, and he wasn’t surprised to taste blood—hers, his, theirs. He was stunned all over again by how good she smelled, how her shoulders fit into his hands, how when she hissed the sound curled into his brain and drove out all thought.
Sam kept his eyes open all the way through this time.
on to part 4b
Part 3. No longer canon-compliant.
One thing about driving the Impala alone for four months: he could make it do tricks he’d previously thought reserved only to Dean. He was fifteen minutes away from the second trap. He made it in nine. The place was an out-of-business Hollywood Video location, the paint around the missing logo making its identity clear by absence. Stuck in the middle of an empty parking lot, most of the lights broken or burnt out, windows covered with opaque sheeting, it was a perfect stage for torture and pyrotechnics. Stood to reason that an economic collapse would be good for demons, but he’d never thought of the matter in terms of real estate before. Sam left the car in the darkness of the outer edges of the lot and headed to the back, where there was an employee entrance.
So Lilith had used patterns too large for him to see. Two could play at that game. He closed his eyes, imagining the ground beneath his feet. In the middle of a built-up area, it was shot through with metal of all kinds. All he had to do was wrench and crumple, forming a pentagram in a circle around the building, twisting pipes and cables out of true until they were proper sigils. He was probably cutting power to the surrounding six blocks, but that was just tough.
He only remembered to leave himself a space to step inside at the last second. Crossing felt like being stabbed in the chest, but it was over quickly. Closing the final line felt like chewing tinfoil. Pain zinged through his jaw and ears, stabbing like needles. Once the trap was closed, the air seemed to dry out, and his ears popped when he swallowed. Moving was like walking through cotton, not difficult but subtly wrong.
When he reached out with his inner eye again, he quickly found a knot of eight demons. They didn’t have anyone on guard, which was either overconfidence on their part or on his. He concentrated, readying himself to squeeze them out of their hosts—
Nothing; his powers bounced off of them like they were sealed in plastic eggs. Slick, featureless—he could sense them, but they were unreachable.
He remembered the binding rune Meg had used to fasten herself to his body. Unlike the ones at the high school, these demons didn’t want to be exorcised. They wanted to have time to work.
He’d have to go inside the building.
The back door was already open, which didn’t reassure him. He was in a hallway, cool and dusty with disuse. The strongest smell was the fake butter of microwave popcorn. Faint light spilled from the other end, where the main part of the store had been.
Experimentally, Sam reached out with his mind for a discarded DVD case propped up against the wall. It floated obediently into his hand. He hadn’t been sure the powers would work inside the Devil’s Trap. On balance, bad news, because that meant he was facing the full attentions of eight demons.
The Impala had provided him with a shotgun and two handguns. He figured headshots would be his best bet to take the hosts out of contention, at least for long enough to get Dean out.
A soft noise made him turn: Dee, already putting Ruby’s knife back in its sheath. Her eyes gleamed in the near-darkness, wide and worried. With hand signals, they agreed that they’d continue forward, to the open space of the store. That was not going to be the best place for knifework. There was too much opportunity for targets to retreat, and they couldn’t afford to lose their only sure killing weapon with a throw.
Plastic sheeting was heaped around the doorway at the end of the hall, and they moved even more carefully to minimize noise, crouching down and scouting around the edges.
Sam had been wrong about the cage.
This time, the demons had Dean bound to a good old-fashioned cross, made out of what looked like stray pieces of lumber. He wasn’t nailed, which made Sam sag for a moment in horrified relief, but his wrists and ankles were bound with wire, already dripping with blood where his skin had broken open under his own weight. They’d cut his shirt off and sliced across his stomach. A rag stuffed into his mouth forced his jaws apart, held there by the gag cutting deep into his skin.
One of the demons, wearing a redheaded young man in a baseball jersey, bent in front of Dean and licked a runnel of blood, following it down Dean’s skin until he reached the sodden waist of Dean’s jeans. Dean’s muscles fluttered with revulsion, but he didn’t struggle.
Sam raised the shotgun, but Dee’s hand clamped around his forearm. When the red haze cleared a little, he realized that he could see only six demons. Exposing their position now, without knowing the location of the other two, could be a fatal mistake, and he quickly discovered that he’d lost his ability to sense them. It didn’t matter whether that was exhaustion or some side effect of the Devil’s Trap, but he sincerely regretted the lack of any texts on demonic powers written from the demon’s perspective.
No time for brooding, Dee was saying with her eyes. At least he still had the ability to move objects. Which made him think: he looked up at the ceiling, which unfortunately was that soft spongy tile that fell apart at the first touch. The ceiling would have been better, less noticeable, but he could make do with the floor as well.
Slowly at first, and then faster as he got the hang of it, he cracked the concrete underneath the cheap dirt-brown carpet, creating a small Devil’s Trap right around Dean. Once the redheaded demon stepped back just a bit, he’d close it and then Dean would be safe.
Except that the demon refused to cooperate, twining itself around Dean, its hands curling around him in a parody of desire. It stuck two fingers into the largest slice on Dean’s stomach, then called out, “You’ve got to try this,” while Dean clenched his jaw and turned his face away.
Fuck it, Sam thought, and finished the circle. He could save that one for last.
He nodded at Dee and they jumped out, Sam firing as she rabbited towards the nearest demon. She was fast as an electric shock, and the first flare of demon-death was almost instantaneous. Another demon turned and began to raise its hand to her, and Sam blasted it back with the shotgun, then switched to his first handgun.
As it turned out, a headshot was insufficient, but head, knee and gut together were more persuasive.
“Stop!”
The yell came from the redheaded demon. Sam counted bodies—six down, which meant one more still at large. The demon with Dean had a knife up to Dean’s throat, and it hadn’t been careful about placement. Blood was already drooling down Dean’s chest.
“What’s your endgame?” Sam asked, stepping forward with the gun trained at its forehead. Dee would have to watch for the remaining demon. “You know you’re stuck. Throw the knife away and I’ll let you go.”
“Throw the gun away and I’ll let him live,” the demon countered.
“You know if I exorcise you it’s permanent death, right?”
There was a thud, behind and to the right of Sam. Dean’s eyes were too unfocused for his lack of reaction to be entirely reassuring. Sam chose to believe that Dee was the source of the noise, not the victim.
The demon blinked at Sam. Sam couldn’t tell much about the host, other that he was in his mid-thirties. “You mean it?” it asked.
Which was very far from what Sam had been expecting. But it stood to reason that the demons who fought so hard to escape Hell might not want to go back. Even Sam was more and more certain every day that he wanted death to be the real end, and he was at least hoping not to qualify for Hellfire.
“Yeah,” he said, and it came out soft. He didn’t let the gun waver. Dean was as still as a carved Jesus, breathing so shallowly that the knife didn’t draw any more blood.
“Your word,” the demon said.
“I swear by all powers, above and below,” Sam said evenly. “Step out of the Devil’s Trap and I’ll give you what you want.”
The demon thought for a moment, then nodded and tossed its knife away, lost in the darkness. Sam sent a ripple of force up through the floor behind them, bursting through the pentagram, and the demon inhaled.
Then it kicked out, and Sam went tumbling backwards, slamming full-length onto the floor. He saw blackness lashed with white, neurons firing randomly at the shock. “Sorry,” it said, “but Lilith’s given me a better deal.”
He couldn’t see—it could be killing Dean right then—he grabbed at every scrap of power left to him and shoved back as he pushed up onto his elbows.
Dean twitched on the cross and gave a terrible gurgle—alive, he was alive—and Sam struggled to his feet. By the time he had his balance, the demon was wriggling feebly on the floor, Dee straddling it with the knife digging into its shirt right above its heart.
Sam stalked over and looked down.
“Please,” it said. “Don’t send me back.”
Dee didn’t look away from the demon, but she flinched. All he could see of her face was the curve of her cheek and the fall of her hair. Her body was as stiff as a pile of knives. He didn’t check for how Dean was reacting.
“It’s your lucky night,” he said, and raised his hand, needing the physical focus.
As soon as the man started choking out demon goo, Dee was up and off him, running to hack at Dean’s bonds with Ruby’s knife, a serious waste of edge but not one Sam was going to complain about. Dean fought off her help before his ankles were free, and Sam had to come assist with untangling the wires. His feet weren’t as bad as his wrists, but they still looked ugly.
This was what Dee had avoided by being here instead of in her reality. He wondered if she’d realized yet that Lilith might still have gone after Samantha in the same way.
“Let’s head back,” he said, backing away from Dean when Dean looked ready to push. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
****
He caught up with Dee just before she could open the driver’s side door.
His usual constraints on hitting a woman were substantially inoperative, so he shoved her so hard that she slammed into the side of the car with an ‘oof’ as the breath left her lungs. Dean protested from behind them. Sam ignored him.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” he demanded. “You let them bleed him!”
Dee pushed off the car and stepped forward, her jaw clenched as she stared up at him. “I saw,” she gritted out.
“Then why didn’t you do something?” Sam could sense Dean’s approach, but he wasn’t intervening. Either Dean was even more badly injured than he’d let on, or he thought they needed to have this out.
She shook her head slightly. “Had to look out for you.”
Sam stared at her, because that wasn’t even close to an answer. Unless—“Why? Because I’m the one who can get you back to your Samantha?”
She closed her eyes, and he remembered the butterfly softness of her lashes against his fingertips from earlier. “Yeah, sure.”
So it was worse than that. He fell back a few steps, enough that he could see them both, tight jawlines and lowered brows, defiant and not at all guilty. The two of them had discussed the matter, agreed that Sam was more important than Dean, because Dee was practically Dean and Sam was practically Samantha. Of course she’d gone along with Dean.
Sam couldn’t think of a civil thing to say, so he just scowled as Dee opened the back door for Dean and eased him down so that he could stretch out and rest.
Sam drove.
****
The first thing he saw when they returned to the room was a little cornhusk angel, resting on the bed. He picked it up, cringing at the prickle of dry stalks. One of its wings scratched his index finger, drawing blood.
He read the demon’s note that had been wrapped around it, which said pretty much what Dean had reported about the high school and the video store. The angel had been a bonus taunt, a reminder that Dean wasn’t so much a person any more as he was a blunt instrument.
Forget saving the world. They weren’t going to survive the week if things continued like this. Even though he knew Dean was bound to misinterpret the gesture, he couldn’t stand to have the angel-poppet around. He soaked it in whiskey from one of the spare flasks and set it, along with the note, on fire, dropping it into an empty wastebasket and watching until it was nothing but stinking ash.
When he was able to pay attention again, he saw that Dee and Dean were waiting on the far bed, silent and watchful, their shoulders identically slumped. The bloody tissues piled between them suggested that Dee had taken care of Dean’s wounds. “We need some better security,” he told them.
He made them set every ward they’d ever heard of before he’d talk. “Here’s what we know: Dee isn’t here because Castiel brought her, and she doesn’t seem to have any connection to Lilith. Her angelic powers—” Dean and Dee winced identically—“don’t work here, but she’s immune to our demons. That implies that demons and angels are reality-specific. And that means that if we can figure out how to get me over to Dee’s reality, then I won’t—” He had to stop then to pull himself together.
Anyway, it was enough for them to fill in the blanks. If he went, there’d be no working Antichrist, no seal to break. He took a deep breath, then another when the first one shuddered to a gasping halt. He could make this work. “So this is what the fortune-teller meant. It’s my way out. If I’m one of the seals, then we take away the key to starting the apocalypse—”
“Satan’s left with nothing in the ignition,” Dee said, her face brightening at the thought.
“What’s this ‘I’ shit?” Dean didn’t look anywhere near as happy as Dee.
Sam stared at him, puzzled. Sam had brought him a way out: no need for anyone to die, much less everyone.
“I’m the problem,” he explained. It didn’t hurt as much as it used to. “You said it yourself, Dean.”
Dean swallowed, his face darkening. “Why are you so sure it’s Satan who wants the showdown, and not God?” he asked. “You’re the one who loves normal, Sammy. I never had much use for it. That’s not exactly the profile of somebody who saves the world.”
Sam knew that wasn’t entirely true, given that Dean spent his life trying to preserve normal for other people, but he could see how it was a crack that would let Castiel’s message of the end times work its way into Dean’s head.
“Castiel and Uriel told us,” Sam reminded him. They might have been dicks, but they were pretty clear on being anti-seal-breaking dicks. The important insight was that Dean could have a chance to have his own life. With Dee, if he wanted. “If I cross over into Dee’s world, I’d be okay. You’d be safe.”
“You asshole,” Dean said.
It took Sam a minute to translate that.
“Fine,” Sam conceded, his voice thick with the tears Dean didn’t want to know about. “I guess you can tag along.” Dean would do that, throw away his whole world, for Sam. It couldn’t be worse than going to Hell for him.
There had been a time when Sam had promised himself that Dean was done making sacrifices.
Dean grinned at him, the way he’d grin when Sam caught a tossed ammo clip or found just the right incantation for a spell. That smile reminded him of the way they’d been at their best, back before things got so much worse than he ever could have imagined.
“So now we tell my Sam to pack, so she’s ready to come here,” Dee said. Sam glanced at the time and realized that they’d almost missed check-in. At least he hadn’t managed to screw that up yet, but he had to act fast or Samantha would probably rip space-time open herself to see what had gone wrong.
He cut Dee’s other arm this time, and tried a little less blood. And he put the portal on the wall, so that nobody would have to experience vertigo.
Samantha was there, unharmed. Apparently with Dee missing, everyone’s plans were in shambles. Small favors.
No, Sam realized. Big favors. The whole point of this farce was that both of them were necessary to the last battle. As long as each reality was missing at least one of them, Lilith’s plans could be foiled. That gave him the flexibility he needed.
There was a lot of information to impart, but he found himself distracted by Samantha. She had her hair back in a ponytail, which made her face look even more angular, sort of like Sigourney Weaver: gorgeous but deadly, jawline sharp enough to cut glass. She looked like she hadn’t slept well. Sam remembered that, how the silence of his room had been enough to wake him twelve times a night.
Once Dee confirmed the events of the day, Samantha immediately saw the virtues of his plan, and they agreed on a division of research responsibilities. (There were elements he didn’t say out loud, but she either knew them or she didn’t, and either way he’d deal when the time came.) Then he and Dean went outside while Dee had a private word with her sister. Sam really, really didn’t want to know.
The night was clear and warm, the air soft against Sam’s face. The light pollution meant that there were barely any stars visible. Cars passed by, a steady pulse. Dean’s face was lit up in the harsh glare of headlights, then left to darkness.
At last, Dean stopped shifting his weight nervously. “So, uh. I guess I hurt you pretty bad earlier.”
So much had happened that Sam had to replay the day in his mind, and he only remembered that Dean had knocked him out with his angel-granted voice the second time through. “It was the right thing to do.”
“Sam.” Dean’s voice was thick. “I. When I used it, I saw—you looked. Different.”
Right before Dean had gone to Hell, he’d been able to see the true forms of demons underneath their hosts. Sam guessed that his true form was something like that. He wondered just how ugly it was.
When Sam didn’t react, Dean continued. “I wanted—right after I did it, when I saw you, I felt—I wanted you to fall.”
Sam nearly cringed but managed to keep rigidly still. Since they’d been kids, the command to look after Sam had been etched too deeply into Dean to admit any other priorities, but apparently Heaven had access to heavier acid, wiping Dean clean and starting again. He’d thought he was getting used to being different, not quite Dean’s brother any more, but it turned out that having Dean say it to him was far worse than thinking it to himself.
Dean had said earlier that he wanted to follow Sam, but that was while he was pretending that nothing had changed between them. Dean tended to grab onto the familiar when he was frightened. Given a real Winchester, one with untainted blood, to look after, he might do better.
“You really like her,” he said. “Dee.”
Dean scrunched up his face, that ‘Sam is weird’ look (if Sam were honest, it was ‘Sammy is weird,’ but he figured he got to name the look in his own mind). “Of course she’s awesome, she’s me with a rack. Think I might have to kill her if she doesn’t shut up about driving my car, though.”
“Dean, I’m serious.”
“Sam,” Dean imitated his tone but somehow injected a whine, “she’s—whatever, it doesn’t matter.”
Right, because nothing mattered but the mission.
“Do you talk to her about Hell?”
Dean inhaled sharply.
“She understands, right?” Sam demanded, not sure why he was pressing the matter.
“No, we don’t talk about it,” Dean grated, sounding like he was in the wrong gear. “It’s not like we went to the same high school. And for the record, Sam, the whole point—the reason I get up in the morning is so that you will never have to know what the Pit really is. You wanna do a sharing circle, fine. But keep it above ground.”
Under other circumstances, Sam might have mustered amusement at the thought that they were protecting each other to death. He didn’t entirely believe Dean’s rationale for his silence, or at least he thought that Dean had some other reasons he couldn’t make himself admit. Still, it was nice that Dean wanted to shield him, like their Dad instinctively throwing out his arm when he hit the brakes hard back when they were kids. Useless, a little irritating in its futility, but also a bit charming.
“You okay?” Dean asked after a minute passed. He was carefully staring out at the road.
Sam snorted. “Dean, I couldn’t find okay with a GPS.” Dean’s face contorted, fear and guilt and other things Sam didn’t want to sort through. “But I’d be crazy if I was okay, with everything that’s happened. The important thing is that I’m going to fix this, I promise.” He hadn’t been able to keep Dean out of Hell or rescue him, but keeping him out of Heaven’s clutches—yeah, Sam had no doubt that he’d pull it off somehow.
“If you don’t,” Dean began, and Sam shook his head. “Sam, it doesn’t—if anyone can, it’s you. But maybe it doesn’t shake out that way.” He stopped, and Sam could tell that he wanted to manage a grand, stupid claim, the kind that would ordinarily choke him with embarrassment but come out anyway. But Dean wasn’t that kind of a liar, to say that it was all worth it or that everything would be fine as long as they stuck together.
“I know,” Sam said, because he couldn’t reassure Dean either, and he loved him anyway too.
****
When they went back to their room, Dee was alone. He expected her to leave, probably dragging Dean with, but she didn’t, just sat at his laptop and surfed. Sam tried to concentrate on the task at hand, which was the matter of actually walking through into that other world. He was beginning to think that the fortune-teller had to have been some sort of demigod in her own right, because he simply couldn’t figure out how to do more than transmit information.
He kept waiting for one of them to stand up and announce that they were going to go fuck, but neither of them said a word.
If he didn’t know better, he’d think they were nervous.
He probably should have considered this beforehand (ideally, before he let the little head do the thinking), but he’d been deliberately ignoring the issue. He was a healthy young man with a definite need for stress release, and obviously neither Dean nor Dee had a problem with that. But to join them—and he’d be joining them, he had very little doubt on that score—implied a deliberation he wasn’t sure he wanted to accept.
He could have his nose pressed against the glass or he could walk away from the entire situation. No, that was untrue. He could choose his distance, but only within a very limited range.
Sam stood up and started unbuttoning his shirt. Dee pushed the mouse away and turned in her seat, watching. He felt his cheeks flush, but he kept going, not looking at either of them, tossing the shirt off towards the bag of dirty laundry against the wall.
Dee crossed the room, standing inches from him. “Need some help?” she offered, running her hand down the front of his T-shirt, then back up once she’d gotten below the hem, rippling the fabric as her fingers moved over his skin. He raised his arms, allowing her to pull it off. He heard Dean shift in his chair, imagined him leaning back, spreading his legs, his fingers moving over the neck of his bottle of beer.
Her breasts were soft and heavy in his hands. She smiled at him, never looking past him, as he helped her out of her borrowed shirt. She shook her head to resettle her hair, calculated and natural all at once, and he popped the clasp on her bra.
When they tumbled down to the bed, he put her on her hands and knees, keeping his eyes focused on the smooth golden skin of her back, the dusting of freckles across her shoulders. She had a farmer’s tan too, odder somehow on a girl, the skin darkest on her left bicep where her arm would rest in the sun when she was driving. He ignored Castiel’s handprint like he was ignoring everything else.
He shoved inside her as soon as possible, making her squeak, and bent over her so that he saw nothing but the muscles of her back and shoulders, smelled nothing but her hair (except it was Dean’s shampoo), tasted nothing but her skin (sharp and sweet, like green apples). She shuddered under him when he used his teeth, so he kept doing it, not quite hard enough to draw blood. He didn’t look up, even when he heard movement nearby.
When he reached around to stroke between her legs, she freed one of her own hands to guide him, faster and harder than he would have tried on his own. They were galloping together, and he had to fight himself to keep from coming before she did. As soon as she clenched around him and cried out, he jerked and crashed down, his head filled with light.
He rolled off, letting the day catch up with him, all the pain and fear and unexpected pleasure. He was nearly dreaming, listening to Dean tell her to stay right there, watching or imagining through nearly-closed eyes how Dean set his teeth right in the places Sam had just marked. Her soft choked-off noises were almost like a lullabye.
Dean hated sleep now. Sam chased it like an addict. He let it pour into his veins and pretended that all was well.
****
They were making out when he woke, thick liquid sounds of their mouths meeting and parting, slow shift of the bed, not quite enough to make Sam do anything more than turn on his side and blink. He was so warm, the bed heavy with the heat of their bodies bleeding across the few inches of sheet that separated them. Dean always ran hotter than Sam, and Sam felt sweat pop up on the back of his neck and in the creases behind his knees.
Dean’s cheeks were dark with stubble. Dee’s were flushed where he must have scraped against her. Their eyes were both half-closed, thick lashes fanning over flashes of green. He was half on top of her, on the other side of her from Sam. They moved together slowly, in perfect time, like it wasn’t the tenth time they’d fucked or even the hundredth. Like they weren’t fucking at all.
Dean stroked down Dee’s shoulder, over her breast, his hand tan and veined in contrast to the paler smoothness of her skin. His ring caught the hint of sunlight coming in through the edges of the blinds.
He looked up from where he was nuzzling Dee’s cheek, his eyes deep and dark as he examined Sam. “Hey,” he said softly. “Looks like somebody needs some attention.” He rolled off of Dee, who stifled a noise and folded herself down towards Sam’s cock, which was already more than interested. Her mouth was even hotter than he remembered.
Dean rearranged himself behind Dee, who was on her side, pulling her leg back to rest on top of his thigh as he pushed into her. His hand covered her hip, just like Dee was clutching at Sam’s hipbone, thumbing the hollow there.
“She’s takin’ good care of you, isn’t she?” Dean rumbled—almost closer to a croon, really.
He’s giving her to me, Sam thought muzzily, and couldn’t figure out whether that was horrible or wonderful. His orgasm was slow and golden and enough to put him back under for a long time.
****
After he finally got up, the day passed with the combination of agonizing slowness and lost time standard for any difficult research task. He gave Dean and Dee books of lore that he couldn’t imagine would help, just in case Dean had one of his occasional flashes of crazy-perfect lateral thinking, and also to keep them marginally more quiet.
Midmorning, the next seal nearly opened. He felt the direction now—somewhere to the distant west, maybe even as far as Japan. A wave of unreality passed through him, but then dissipated into nothingness like a demon falling apart. There was no power boost, which meant that the angels had fought off an attempt, but he could feel how close it had been. And he knew that they had to win every battle, while Lilith just needed one victory that would surely not be long in coming.
When he took a piss, he thought he smelled sulfur, which meant hiding in the bathroom long enough to force the tiny translucent window in the shower open and wait for the smell to dissipate. He did not spend any time staring into the mirror and waiting for his eyes to flash yellow. Dean noticed his absence after a while and threw out the standard gibes through the flimsy bathroom door. Sam told him to fuck off, and that seemed to satisfy him.
Dean snuck off with Dee for a quickie before lunch. Dee paused with her hand on the doorframe, but he just looked down, and after a moment she left. They had the grace not to make so much noise that he heard them through the wall.
Of course Dean would have shared; that wasn’t the problem. Or, it was, but not in the right way. There were too many Winchesters here. Dean was never going to know what he actually wanted while Sam was constantly needing his help.
Sam was tense through the afternoon, almost useless enough that he wished he’d gone with them.
****
“You were a real good kid,” Dean said while they were sharpening the knives. Sam had begun the task as a distraction from his fruitless searching and Dean had joined in for reasons of his own that he hadn’t bothered to explain. Dee had retreated to her room to shower and nap, so it almost felt normal again.
Sam examined him. “Where did that come from?” he asked cautiously.
“You didn’t complain about stuff,” Dean continued instead of answering.
Okay, so Sam had promised to try to understand, but so far he was comprehension-free. “Dean, I complained all the time.”
“Yeah, ‘cause you’re a whiny bitch,” Dean rejoined, then continued, before Sam’s confusion could spill out into words: “But not about stuff other kids would’ve. The whole summer you were fourteen, you wore that same pair of tennis shoes with the toes torn out. You said it was ‘cause you liked them. I really appreciated that, you know.”
Sam’s throat was full—of tears, words, something. He could only blink at Dean. “We’re going to make it,” he said. If Dean was putting this into words, then he must be rating their chances somewhere below those of penguins in Hawaii.
Dean looked up and raised his eyebrows. “Course we are, Sammy.”
****
As if needing time to decompress from that moment of emotional revelation, Dean volunteered to go get dinner, leaving Sam to continue his research and Dee to channel-surf, lying on her stomach with her socked feet all over the pillows of (naturally) Sam’s bed.
Sam couldn’t concentrate with Dean gone. He couldn’t help thinking that, if they went through to Dee’s world together, he’d still be more without Dean than with.
He’d seen it coming for so long, how the two of them had crossed paths and taken up the other’s burdens: Sam, stitched into the hunter’s life so thoroughly that even death hadn’t been able to remove him. Dean, hoping for something different, looking beyond his family at last even if it had taken an angel of the Lord to catch his eye. And now there was Dee as well, a human presence reminding Dean of how much life there was outside the endless roll of the wheels over asphalt.
Maybe Dee could be more than another threat. After all, he had to admit, she knew Dean better than anybody else.
“If we get out of this,” he began. Dee looked over at him warily, as if expecting another disquisition on danger and impossibility. He waited, and she clicked off the TV, acknowledging that she needed to pay attention. “When we get out of this. I’m afraid we won’t be able to—please tell me what he wants from me. I’ll do anything.”
She sucked in a breath, but her expression wasn’t surprised, and she took him seriously enough to think before she answered. “Not really, though.” He stared at her. She rolled over and sat on the side of the bed closest to him. “You didn’t give up Ruby. Not before Hell and not after. You’d do anything that you agreed to do. Not the same thing.”
He couldn’t sit still for this discussion. His joints creaked when he stood. Hunting was a good way to get an old man’s body, if not a good way to get old. The room was warm from hours of them breathing the same air. He crossed the floor, stopping a few feet away from her. “I—” He flailed for the right words, the ones that would do the job.
“You had your reasons,” she agreed. “Not saying you didn’t. But, Sam, God and Satan’ve been setting things up so we’re on opposite sides. That took a long time to do, and it won’t get fixed just ‘cause you jump through some magic mirror.”
“He’s all I’ve got left,” he said, letting everything into his voice and his expression.
Her face contorted in what he only realized was fury after he was reeling back from her punch. (Dean was right, she had an excellent roundhouse.) He blinked at her, tasting blood, his tongue flicking out to sting the new wound further. “How fucking flattering,” she sneered, shaking her hand out. “At least Castiel pretended to pick me. I’m not good, I’m not right, I’m just left.”
“That’s not—” Dee was already turning away, and Sam stopped. “You’re right,” he admitted, because that had been a terrible thing to say, and Dee could only have heard her sister saying it to her. Of course she wouldn’t want to be Samantha’s last resort. “But you’re wrong, too. If it weren’t for him, I’d—I wouldn’t care whose side I was on. Dean’s the best proof I’ve ever seen that God already got it right. He’s—he’s the one thing that never moves. He’s my place to stand. That’s why it’s all been so crazy since he got back, because when he’s not sure, how can I be?”
Her mouth was open just a little when he finished. Her eyes shone, green and clear. “That’s awful nice to hear,” she said slowly. “And if you were my Sam, I bet I wouldn’t notice how that’s not really me. That’s some idea you built in your head, and you did it real good because you’re smart like that, but me—Dean—we’re real, we use all the shampoo and leave the towels on the floor, we fart and we play the wrong music too loud, we embarrass you in front of strangers—”
She stepped back into his space, yanking her head up at a ridiculous angle to keep her eyes locked into his even as she grabbed his hand and put it at the join of her elbow, where the cut he’d given her last night was rough against his fingertips. “We bleed, Sam. You chase that Dean in your mind, you’ll always be lookin’ at the one next to you, wondering why he’s not right. Keeping secrets from him because you can’t be sure he’ll react the way he oughta.” They were both panting, ridiculously loud in the silent room. “We just want you to see.”
He couldn’t take another word, so he grabbed her head in both hands, tangling his fingers in her hair as he nearly smashed their faces together. She opened to him as smooth as a perfectly maintained switchblade, and he wasn’t surprised to taste blood—hers, his, theirs. He was stunned all over again by how good she smelled, how her shoulders fit into his hands, how when she hissed the sound curled into his brain and drove out all thought.
Sam kept his eyes open all the way through this time.
on to part 4b
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