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Part 1
Part 2
The night manager promised them that their rooms were right across from one another. “You have the Aries,” he told Winchester, “and you have the Virgo.” Sam shuddered to think what those names symbolized.
“So how do you afford this life of luxury, anyway?” Winchester asked while they were heading down the dingy corridor towards their destinations.
Sam shrugged. “Money saved up from college, my dad. It’s running out, though.”
“We could share,” Winchester suggested.
“Really?” It was okay to sound eager, he thought. Sam Marshall was an innocent looking for a guide through this strange new underworld.
Winchester looked at him and smiled a little. “Yeah, really. I, uh, don’t exactly have a big travel budget myself. You play any games? Pool, poker?”
Sam let himself look shocked. “That’s how you get money?”
“Sometimes,” Winchester said. “My dad—” And then he shut down like a garage door slamming into concrete, the way he did every time the subject of paternal influences came up. “Anyway, you come over tonight, I’ll show you some tricks.”
Sam let himself fall a few paces behind so that he could control his expression. The man was a walking encyclopedia of hunter’s lore, and the weapon he couldn’t work hadn’t been invented, but Sam was pretty sure he had no fucking clue the kinds of bad checks he was writing to Sam’s libido with his sudden grins and his casual asides.
****
With the pistols, Winchester made him fire a couple of times “so you don’t freak out when you hear how it really sounds,” and then they both put in earplugs. This, of course, necessitated that any corrections to Sam’s stance be made hands-on.
Winchester wrapped his arms around Sam, moving him into place, sliding his hands down Sam’s right arm to make sure it was braced properly, his chest pressed up against Sam’s back. He had to be on tiptoe to do it, Sam was sure, hooking his chin over Sam’s shoulder so that he could see where Sam was aiming.
It was substantially more distracting than any attack Sam had yet experienced. He did notice that Winchester was careful to keep his groin from settling against Sam’s ass, which he chose to interpret as evidence that Winchester was no more immune to Sam’s charms than the reverse.
Even after weeks of practice, Winchester’s hands always stayed on Sam’s arms a few seconds too long when he was correcting Sam’s stance. But he always let go, and he didn’t cut Sam any slack even when Sam got bored and pulled his saddest eyes, trying to persuade him to cut the training short.
The whole thing was—it was just weird, being touched all the time with nothing behind it, or anyway nothing but the intent to show some move or another.
Everything was a test; Sam had known that since before he’d known his name. But Winchester didn’t seem to see it that way. Sure, he got competitive when Sam started hitting the targets with just about equal accuracy. But he seemed happiest when the contest was closest, and after the sparring match in which Sam finally, finally put him on his back and kept him there with a knee in his stomach, he stopped cursing after thirty seconds and then smiled like he’d just been served a huge steak dinner.
Sam pulled back and stood. There was a ball of barbed wire twisting inside his chest, squeezing the breath out of his lungs.
Winchester jumped easily back to his feet, clapping his hands together. “’kay then. Now we run.”
Sam watched him retreat for a few seconds, then launched himself after.
****
Domestically, things were also proceeding, in fits and starts. Winchester dressed in the bathroom, but he always watched when Sam came out of the shower with his towel knotted too low.
He tried not to tease Winchester too much, because he’d hate to get kicked out. Also, Winchester slept in boxer-briefs and tight T-shirts, so he still got plenty of eye candy, especially since Winchester tended to push the covers off of his bed while he was asleep.
It wasn’t all ogling and beer. Winchester was used to living with someone, but it was someone else.
“Hey, actually, I like my coffee straight,” Sam told him the fourth time he showed up with a cup that was already holding a year’s worth of Florida’s sugar output.
Winchester blinked at him a couple of times then gave him a stoic suffering face, which was unfairly good-looking on him. “Sorry,” he said and held out the other cup. “This one’s clean.”
Sam took it, because refusing wasn’t going to make Winchester feel any better. The strange feeling in his stomach was just annoyance at himself that he hadn’t spoken up earlier.
But the other side of Winchester’s home training was that, when Winchester pulled up at the laundromat, he took Sam’s bag as if it was obvious that they’d wash their clothes together. Sam wasn’t carrying anything that would disprove his story about being a college student jerked unwillingly into the underbelly of American monster society, so he didn’t resist.
It was kind of relaxing to sit with Winchester in the night-emptied space, the only soundtrack the slosh of their sudsy clothes, and listen to his stories about growing up on the road. Never about his father, of course, just about the towns and the schools and the jobs. But dear old Dad was there in the negative space, and Sam was getting a pretty good picture: obsessed with hunting, relying on Winchester to do the mundane tasks like cooking and washing the clothes, pulling him out of school on a moment’s notice when a hunt beckoned.
Winchester was proud of the fact that he’d gone on hunts with his father since before he was old enough to read. He could conjugate Latin like a Roman and make a shaped charge out of two pipe cleaners and the contents of a housekeeping cart, but he told Sam once that he hadn’t found the time—meaning his father hadn’t found the time—to get his GED.
Even Father had done better than that, though admittedly Father’s aims had been somewhat different. Sam’s Classics courses had been useful, and scattering everyone to colleges around the country for a few years had given them all some breathing space before the competition began. Sometimes Sam wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t jumped the gun and tracked Max and Andy down on their respective campuses, but given what Jake had done right after, he figured that it would have been much the same in the end. He’d learned well enough how to move through the human world, which was what was important.
Winchester had never been given that much freedom of movement. It was no wonder that he didn’t know how to deal with people he wasn’t questioning for purposes of a hunt. After losing his wife and baby son, Winchester’s father had kept a stranglehold on his remaining family.
Winchester had started to look better-rested as soon as they started sharing a room. Sam guessed that he hadn’t spent a night apart from his father until the man disappeared.
That also explained why he treated Winchester senior’s journal like a talisman. Sam suspected that he would have slept with it under his pillow if that wouldn’t have interfered with keeping a gun in the same place.
Which raised the question of the motivation for his father’s disappearance. Hypothesis: Father had something to do with it, because there was no way Sam could have gained Winchester’s trust with a control freak of that magnitude hovering around.
Why, why, why, that was the question.
****
After a while, Winchester actually started telling him when he was doing well on the exercises. At first he was hesitant, like he wasn’t sure he had any right to speak up, but it became just another part of the routine. Every time Sam hit his latest goal, Winchester would make the next day’s training that much harder, adding “civilian” targets to avoid or closing the book of protective runes and making Sam draw them from memory and then demanding ten more pushups.
The fall that Sam turned thirteen, Father had pulled him aside. “Samael,” he’d said, all seriousness, “you’re my favorite. It’s important that you know that. And it’s important that you keep this a secret, just between you and me.” Sam had been brimful of happiness, able to ignore almost all of the other kids’ attacks, for nearly a week before he’d spilled it to Ava after she got in a particularly good dig.
She’d laughed and laughed. “You are truly brain-damaged,” she’d chortled, her palms slapping the wall she’d fallen back against. “Didn’t you figure out he says that to all of us?”
At first, it was hard not to flinch when Winchester said “awesome” in that tone of unequivocal approval, but Sam learned to accept it. Okay, maybe he also started swaggering when Winchester praised him, but that was justified.
And then, after a good day, Winchester started calling Sam “Sammy.” Sam just gritted his teeth and replied “Sam” in his best fuck-you tone, which as far as he could tell only made Winchester grin.
****
“Just once, c’mon,” Sam wheedled as they drove towards the cemetary. He was pushing, he knew, but Winchester hadn’t seemed to mind so far.
“Dude,” Winchester said, trying for offended and not quite getting there, “I am not going to say ‘Just the facts, ma’am,’ so you can stop asking any time now.”
“Mrs. Gordon was trying to give me a chocolate chip cookie recipe. And where were you? Off laughing, that’s where.”
Winchester hadn’t been laughing, but he’d been fighting a smile when Mrs. Gordon took Sam’s friendly, sensitive detective act as an invitation to share every secret of her kitchen. She’d answered Winchester’s bored-sounding questions with ill grace, but Sam’s fluffy bangs and goofy rounded shoulders had turned her expansive and, once the digressions were conquered, reasonably helpful about the troubles that had been plaguing her husband at work before he’d died. Yes, Sam’s kidneys were floating from the gallon of oversweetened iced tea she’d served him, and he wanted that hour of his life back. Overall, though, he’d have to call the day’s work a positive.
He frowned to himself. Of course he didn’t care about the poltergeist that was threatening to drive a struggling bank out of business. But Winchester had been impressed. That was the success.
That night, after they returned to the motel from the job, they popped a couple of beers and relaxed on the curb next to the car. “’s good,” Winchester said, raising his bottle to his mouth and draining all but a mouthful. “Bein’ a team.”
Sam thought about wild animals and shifted himself a little, so that his knees were aimed at Winchester even though they weren’t touching. “To teamwork,” he said, tilting his bottle so that Winchester just had to close an inch’s distance to clink their beers together. When Winchester did, he raised his head, and Sam gave him the full treatment. Personally, Sam wasn’t fond of the way a wide smile flattened out his nose, but it made his dimples jump out, and you couldn’t really argue with success. Certainly Winchester seemed to appreciate the view, grinning back goofily, and at some point Sam stopped thinking about smiling and just did it.
****
The airplane crash hunt started badly. When Jerry Panowski said that he hadn’t ever expected to see Winchester without his father—“attached at the hip” was part of his narration—Winchester went whiter than the time that the ghost in Reston had managed to stab him through the shoulder. Even Jerry, who was roughly as sensitive as a bag of bricks, saw that he’d misspoken and hastily accepted Sam as Winchester’s new partner.
Things improved for a bit during the investigation. Winchester in a suit was a nice change of pace, at least after Sam redid the knot of the tie and pulled the shoulders until the jacket sat straight. And when Winchester confessed his terror of flying, Sam took a gamble and offered to do the job on his own. When Winchester refused and insisted on coming along despite the fact that he was actually shaking, Sam felt something click satisfyingly into place.
Winchester didn’t acknowledge that Sam reached out for his hand when the airplane was gaining altitude, but he gripped back just as tight.
Offhand, Sam couldn’t remember anyone ever leaning into his touch before, at least not when they weren’t in the middle of having sex.
The demon perked up as soon as it saw Sam. “Dean Winchester, you’ve picked up some interesting company,” it cooed. “Somebody’s slumming. Don’t you want to know why?” Winchester didn’t flinch, just continued the exorcism, the words spilling out of him as fast and smooth as a lifetime Catholic praying the rosary.
“Demons lie,” was all he’d say after, when they were holed up in their room and their minor scrapes and bruises had been treated. He sat at the little table in the kitchenette and didn’t meet Sam’s eyes.
“Was it a demon who killed your mom?” Sam asked, testing what he knew.
Winchester blew out a breath. “Yeah. My dad—my dad says he had yellow eyes, not black like that one, which is the usual.” Sam nodded, accepting the confirmation that the killer had been Father. “But there are different kinds of demons, and the one that started the fire, he was powerful. Stuck my mom on the ceiling somehow, made her watch while he killed my brother.”
They hadn’t talked about it since that first revelation; Sam had wanted Winchester to get used to him. But now that they’d actually exorcised a demon together, the topic was ripe. “And you think that’s what happened to my mom.”
“Yeah.” Winchester flicked his eyes over to Sam, then back to the scarred vinyl tabletop.
“Did your dad ever catch the demon?” Sam asked, knowing he was on tremorous ground.
Winchester pulled out his gun and began to disassemble it. He’d shown Sam how to do it, but Sam couldn’t get close to his speed and probably wouldn’t however many years he practiced, which would have been annoying if not for the utter irrelevance of the task to Sam’s future plans. The gun was in pieces before Winchester answered, still looking down.
“No. I think that’s why—I think he found its trail again. I keep waiting to hear—”
Carefully, Sam approached close enough to squeeze Winchester’s shoulder, and Winchester fell silent, his lips twitching in the echo of a grateful smile. Sam didn’t need to meet Daddy Winchester to dislike him. Regardless of what temptation Father had put in his path to induce him to leave his remaining family, it was his fault for succumbing. Winchester always got this bruised, shamed look on his face when Sam raised the subject of his father. Sam didn’t know what Papa Winchester had said on his way out, but it had been a shot to the heart.
Served the old man right, what Sam was going to do to Winchester. If you didn’t protect what was yours, you had to expect that someone was going to come along and find a better use for it.
****
“There’s a sign for the Starlite motel, L-I-T-E,” Sam said, pointing.
Winchester didn’t even look. “No.”
“How can you tell?” Sam wondered. “It’s not like the signs say, ‘Incredibly tacky themes here.’” Last night had been, unbelievably, trout. Sam would have sworn that it was impossible to get trout-patterned linens.
Winchester propped his arm against the window, tapping his fingers. “Just one of my many useful talents.”
“I think I like the marksmanship better,” Sam said. But that night, wrapping himself in a towel with a once-colorful floral arrangement printed on it, he looked around the room—gingham squares mostly, with ribbon rosettes at the corners, and little corncob dolls dressed in blue bonnets as knicknacks—and smiled.
****
He hadn’t meant to volunteer to draw Bloody Mary out. He still didn’t even know why he’d done it, other than knowing that his secrets would be more than tasty enough to attract her.
Now Winchester had the evidence, though: Sam had a secret involving a death. He could bring it up at any time.
Winchester bled too, at the end. Maybe they’d just agree on silence.
Regardless, the satisfied look on Winchester’s face when they’d saved the girl felt like a victory. Most of their poltergeist work didn’t give such direct results.
After, when they were back in their depressing little motel room (taxidermied birds; Sam imagined he could smell them), Winchester hovered like a—like no one in his life ever had, checking his eyes at least eight times, asking if he felt all right. Bringing him fucking orange juice, of all things.
“I’m okay,” he said when Winchester came back and knelt beside his bed for the thousandth time, sheepish but insistent. “Dean,” Sam said, and reached out to grab his wrist, “I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Dean said. But he didn’t pull away, and Sam didn’t let go for a while.
****
“Do you seriously think I’m going to need to draw a devil’s trap in pitch dark?” Sam asked. Protesting Dean’s lessons rarely did any good, but this had to be over the top. Sam’s knees were raw from kneeling too long on concrete, he could feel the back of his neck burning in the sun, and he needed a drink and a piss.
“Might,” Dean said. His voice was too high, not the usual calm confidence of these training sessions.
Ever since the airplane demon, Dean had been pushing exorcist lore on Sam like there was going to be a pop quiz any day. Sam was familiar with the theory. But Father had strongly discouraged the practice, in the sense of whipping anyone caught reciting the Rituale Romanum. The scars on Lily’s back had been a tangle of snakes, slick and white. He was a little nervous about what would happen if Father checked up on his recent studies, but he couldn’t very well decline Dean’s instruction on the topic.
He was beginning to think that some of the runes, combined with the salt lines, could actually keep Father out—which itself might trigger some punishment from Father. But it was part of winning Dean’s trust, so he hoped he’d get the leeway he needed.
In the short term, his problem was actually learning the proper rituals. Sam tugged his blindfold down and wiped at his sweaty forehead. He was in the middle of the world’s most lopsided pentacle—more of a square with a skin problem, really--mystical symbols scattered as randomly around him as if he’d dropped a handful of change. The midday heat gave them the basketball court to themselves, so at least they weren’t about to be arrested for Satanism, but he thought they might as well pick up the ball they’d brought as a decoy and start a little one-on-one.
“I don’t think this is working,” he admitted.
“Try again.”
“If I get caught without any light with a demon hunting me—”
“You wanna get dead?” Dean yelled, shoving himself to his feet and stalking away.
Sam waited for him to calm down.
Several minutes passed. Dean kept pacing and glaring.
“Dean,” Sam said carefully, putting down the chalk. “Give me some help here.”
Dean swiveled to face him, tearing at the buttons of his overshirt, then pulling it off in a tangle with his T-shirt. The scar stretched across his left shoulder, traveling over his collarbone, down into the pectoral muscle nearly to the nipple. It was as jagged as a lightning strike, and it was old, stretched with time.
That explained why Dean always kept a towel over that shoulder any time Sam insisted on barging into the bathroom. Sam had just assumed it was a weird shaving habit.
“That’s what you get when you fuck one of these up,” Dean said. “If you’re real lucky.”
Dean waited for some response, but Sam had nothing. “I was in charge of the devil’s trap,” Dean said, his face twisted with self-loathing. “But I wasn’t paying attention, I was listening to it … It grabbed my dad, got him good. Then it started in on me. If it hadn’t wanted to make him watch while it played with me, we’d both be dead. My dad nearly died saving my ass, and he couldn’t walk for two months.”
“Holy shit,” Sam said. “How old were you?”
Dean frowned. “Eleven, I guess? That’s why you gotta be able to do it right and do it fast, no matter what else is goin’ on.”
Sam thought that there were a number of things that a demon might have said to distract a kid who’d seen half his family burn to death.
“Dad looked at me different after that,” Dean said, soft and confessional. Then he shook his head and continued, more firmly. “Got busted back to supplies for a while. But you’re a natural at this shit, you aren’t gonna pull anything like that.”
‘Yes, because I’m not eleven,’ didn’t seem like a useful response under the circumstances. Sighing, Sam picked up the chalk, shifted himself to a blank patch of asphalt, and tugged the blindfold down again.
****
Sam’s aim with a pistol improved and he turned out to be what Dean called “a freaking wizard” with knives. When he threw a blade, it didn’t even need any mental boost to stay on target. This was an advantage that none of his siblings had. He could already see how to work it: get them in a psychic dead zone and then take it physical. Even Jake would have trouble with Sam now that Dean was playing drill sergeant with him.
It wasn’t what he’d planned, but it would still put him ahead of the game. He still needed to know what Father wanted with Dean. His best guess was that there must be some vital mystical object that no psychic or demon could touch, so you’d need a superb hunter to get it. But he couldn’t find any mention of an object like that in the books he had.
In the meantime, he’d largely stalled out on the fire records. The trail was so old that in lots of places around the country the relevant documents weren’t even computerized.
In the absence of new information, though, there were always hunts, and they felt pretty good.
After some spectacular early clusterfucks on the order of ‘Abbott and Costello Meet the Night of the Living Dead’ (Sam felt bad about the new scar on Dean’s shin, even if Dean should have given him more warning before jumping into the grave), they eased into a rhythm of salt-and-burns, sweeping through little towns like some kind of supernatural exhibition team. Every couple of weeks, they’d punctuate the ghost hunting with something that bled a little.
Dean’s knowledge of the minor supernatural beasts was comprehensive, and he wasn’t shabby on demon exclusion and exorcism. He seemed to think Sam required training in that as well, so he did his best to dig up useful texts. Sam absorbed them, or skimmed them depending on whether he was already familiar with the subject matter. There were plenty of details about non-demonic threats that Sam hadn’t known, as well as fascinating connections between the rituals Sam had learned from the inside and the hints that hunters had winkled out over the centuries.
Once Sam caught Dean on the phone, his shoulders hunched and his voice hesitant and respectful, asking somebody called Bobby to send a couple of books along. “They’re not for me,” he said. “Yeah, I guess. No, sir. No, sir. But I—Yes, sir.”
When he ended the call, he gave Sam an apologetic look. “Bobby’s the best for demon lore. But he’s kind of unfriendly with strangers. Maybe we’ll head out there, introduce you, when we get a chance.”
Sam nodded and made a mental note to avoid that unless he had no other option. From what he’d seen, hunters were more inventive and dangerous than he’d been raised to believe, and anyone Dean called the best might be more of a challenge than he wanted to undertake until he was sure of Dean’s commitment.
He scoured the internet, using all the clues Dean taught him to look for and a few tricks of his own, finding them new hunts. The poltergeist jobs were his favorites. He was there to catch the shotgun shells Dean tossed over to him, to do half the digging, to yell at Dean to duck when the spirit materialized behind him, and to drop when he saw the warning in Dean’s eyes. When he concentrated on the night’s hunt and let the rest of his life blur out of focus, he felt like a superhero. Maybe it was always like this working with a partner, but it made him bigger than himself, stronger. They moved in concert like a right hand and a left.
Sam guessed that he was the sinister one.
****
Dean corrected his posture, of all things, which had to be a holdover from his martinet father. “You think you’re fooling anyone that you’re not eight feet tall when you do that?” Dean asked him once. Sam just shrugged, because as a matter of fact people were a lot less intimidated when he played gentle giant. But he hated being poked in the back with a pencil, so he did have to show off his new combat skills the third time Dean did it while he was reading. He ended up with Dean pinned to the floor, his hands around Dean’s neck.
Dean blinked up at him, the creases around his eyes deeper than Sam expected. “Don’t do that,” he warned Dean. “You’re not my father.”
Dean swallowed, his Adam’s apple working against Sam’s fingers, and nodded a little. “Yeah, uh, sorry,” he said when he was standing again and Sam was halfway across the room.
He needed Dean off balance, but still committed to him. “Hey, it’s not a big deal. Just, you know, no more fucking pencils.” He smiled, even if it felt a little stiff, and Dean tried to smile back.
****
After a string of five clockwork-smooth de-ghostings in ten days, they had a close call. As it turned out, the dear undeparted had a companion, a second ghost whose bones lay elsewhere in the cemetary. If she hadn’t been interred in a crypt, they would have been roundly fucked, because they’d already dumped too much of their salt into the first grave to make a reliable circle around themselves with the remainder, and there would have been no way to dig her out of the ground before she got them.
Sam managed to match her translucent screaming face with a name and a picture from one of the newspaper reports he’d read, one of the girls the dead man had coached (and, apparently, diddled). Dean found the crypt and kicked in the door, and Sam broke open their last shotgun shells onto the corpse before setting it on fire. Dean was too busy being slammed into a stone sarcophagus to notice that Sam gave the fire just a bit of a psychic boost, allowing it to consume the girl-ghost before she had time to break Dean’s neck.
Afterwards, they were both sore. Sam wasn’t quite sure what had happened to his leg, but it involved both twisting and bruising, and Dean was walking with care that foretold cursing in the morning.
Sam was absolutely high with it. His blood had been replaced with champagne; his grin wouldn’t go away, no matter how much Dean scowled and talked about amateurs. The only time he’d ever come close to this feeling was when he’d dispatched Andy, and even that had faded quickly with the anxiety about whether the others would gang up on him in reaction and whether Father would kill him for taking the initiative to start the competition a little early.
Getting rid of the ghosts had no rebound. For some reason, the word that kept coming to mind was “righteous.”
“Come on,” he urged for the fiftieth time as they pulled into the motel parking lot. “We’ll just have a few beers.”
Dean’s speculative expression wavered, irresolute. He pulled into a parking space and turned off the engine, but didn’t move to open the door.
“There’ll be girls,” Sam wheedled, fixing Dean with his best pleading look.
Dean looked like he wanted to run away from this conversation, but also hungry. “I never know what to say to ‘em,” he admitted, which was a news flash on the order of the fact that there was a war in Iraq.
Sam wanted to say, ‘With your face? “Nice shoes, wanna fuck?” ought to cover it,’ but that was the type of statement that tended to freak Dean out. Dean knew he was pretty, he just didn’t know what to do with it, and hated to be reminded of both of those things.
However—
“I really want to get laid. Don’t you want to get laid?”
Dean huffed. Sam could see him working himself up to another confession about his aversion to the dating game.
“We could help each other out,” he suggested.
Dean tilted his head. Sam made an illustrative hand gesture. “You know, like buddies do.”
He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to get punched.
“Buddies?” Dean asked, his voice gravel-rough.
Sam nodded.
Except that when they’d stumbled back into the room, both of them walking funny, Dean seemed to think that buddies kissed, too. With their eyes open. Sam finally pinned Dean to the bed and lowered his mouth to Dean’s straining cock, but only because staring into Dean’s ocean-green eyes was starting to weird him out. Father did this trick where he’d rummage inside your body without moving a muscle of his own, and if you were lucky you’d just piss blood for a few days thereafter. This didn’t feel anything like that. It felt deeper.
****
Sam wasn’t one to believe in walking on water or loaves and fishes, but Dean was enough to make him reconsider his general stance on miracles. Now that they’d crossed the line, Dean was panting for it constantly. He fucked like he’d suddenly realized he needed to make some lifetime quota and he was ten years behind. He followed suggestions like they were orders from on high and he didn’t seem to know that “no” was a possibility. He’d even gone along when Sam had held up the handcuffs and asked, “You know what’d be hot?” The only time he’d balked was in the dark corner of a bar, and even then he’d given it up in the bathroom.
Sam had always had ready access to a fuck, either from a sibling-competitor or some unwitting normal who could be talked into a one-night (or one-hour) stand. Being able to get off at any time wasn’t unusual, but Dean was—“easy” was the obvious joke, and it was true, but there was more. He could mark Dean up without getting scratched and bitten in return, or he could put his hand on the back of Dean’s neck and press Dean’s mouth to his shoulder until Dean set his teeth there. He could rock their bodies together slow as melting tar, or shove Dean up against the door of the latest motel room and make him come while the car’s engine was still ticking cool ten feet away.
When he’d first gotten the telekinesis under control, he’d felt a little like this, for a few days at least: king of infinite space, all his choices good ones. Just waking up was enough to give him a warm little shiver of satisfaction in the knowledge that the day to come would be his. Then on the fourth morning, Ava had nearly blown his head off, and Jake had followed that up with a trick that had left him half-drowned in a stinking toilet bowl, and after that Sam had been more careful about gloating.
He wasn’t gloating now. But he was thinking that maybe, whatever Father’s plans were, he’d wait to go along with them until Dean’s glow faded some.
****
Sam considered the Hookman beneath their notice. There was nothing of interest in Iowa, and he had a dossier of (supposedly) dead children whose mothers had died in fires at the six-month mark to show Dean. He’d made some decent guesses about the origins of most of his siblings, though there was no record that matched his own vital statistics.
His idea was that they’d go talk to the surviving fathers. Sam was pretty sure he could peel Dean off and confront at least some of them in private, see if they’d made any deals or other mistakes that might have made them targets.
Dean, though, insisted that the jobs he found wouldn’t wait. “Those kids’ll still be dead in a day or two,” he said, shoving his clothes into his duffel. “These folks need us now.” He did agree that if Sam found other kids who’d lived, then they’d follow that lead.
Before Sam had a better idea of what he was looking for, there was little point in making his case. Whenever he tried to talk about what the fathers might know, Dean would just curl in on himself like a pillbug, brusque and skittish until Sam managed to coax him out of his sulk with blowjobs and once, to his mild embarrassment, a backrub (though that time did end with blowjobs).
It was frustrating, even if Sam understood why Dean wasn’t crazy about tracking down dozens of widowers. He thought about faking an investigation report to show that one of the kids had survived, maybe Andy, just to get one last little bit of use out of the twerp. But Dean was arguably a better investigator than Sam was; at least he was more familiar with the types of records confronting Sam, and the risk of triggering his suspicions was too high.
****
Andy hadn’t really been that much of a twerp. He was high-strung, like the rest of them, but he’d never gone out of his way to be nasty to Sam, or really to any of the others. Sam had picked him because—
Thinking back on it, his reasons were hard to reconstruct. Andy had been in the top third, powers-wise, and Sam had thought it was important to start out with a bang. Maybe it all went back to being fourteen, when Andy stopped hanging out with him and started following Claudia around. Sam had already known that it was important to reassess a person’s value on a regular basis, but he hadn’t much liked the experience of being downgraded.
Now, it all seemed a little childish. He and Dean didn’t waste any effort hunting anything that hadn’t already started hurting people. The results were concrete; power games didn’t come into it.
Father had always promised that one of them would make the world kneel. They’d grown up with the exploits of Alexander, Genghis Khan, Tamurlaine, Cortez, Napoleon, and Hitler, each with his own lesson to teach about empire. And yes, it would be awfully nice if people cheered them into town and circled them with garlands of flowers on the way out, but even without that, most normals were not so much in need of a whipping as he’d been raised to think. He’d never bothered to notice before, because he’d always needed to remember that anyone friendly might be a test from Father; he hadn’t been looking for people to help.
He wasn’t ruling out the idea of bringing the world to heel. But his priority was to get strong enough to defeat his siblings. Once that was taken care of, there would be plenty of time for other decisions.
****
Dean pulled his head back and looked up at Sam. His mouth was wet and swollen but he’d swallowed everything, not a smudge of white. “Jesus,” Sam said, glad he could use the word without pain, “it’s amazing nobody’s locked you in their basement and made you do that all day long.”
Dean flushed even darker and looked away. Sam grabbed his shoulders, urging him onto the bed, leaning back and pulling at him until he was stretched out over Sam, his cock pressing hard against Sam’s belly. Sam kissed Dean, searching out every last taste. Dean was thrusting shallowly, lost in his own need.
Sam broke the kiss long enough to grab the back of Dean’s neck and tug at him until he could whisper in Dean’s ear: “What if I picked out a girl, would you lick her while I watched? Use that pretty mouth to get her off?”
Dean’s eyes fluttered beneath their lids. “Yeah, Sammy,” he breathed, as if he were imagining it right then, his head framed by soft thighs, Sam just sitting back and watching.
Sam frowned. He put a careful hand between them and grabbed Dean’s cock, pressing at just the right place. Dean gasped, not all in pleasure. “Sam,” he warned.
Dean’s kiss-slick lips smacked together, then parted. Already, he knew better than to mouth off in the middle of sex. “Yeah, Sam,” he said, softer and deeper.
But it wasn’t enough. Sam let go, then wrapped his hands around Dean’s shoulders, pushing him downwards. “Get me hard again,” he said. “You’re gonna come just from my cock inside you. You’re going to come so hard you’ll give yourself a facial.”
****
In Oklahoma, Matt Pike was easy to play, because his resentments were so close to the surface. Maybe Sam was being a little harsh on the kid, since he hadn’t exactly been a locked safe as a teenager either, but if you didn’t learn to swallow your anger and fight back you were never going to get anywhere. Anyway, Matt turned out to be the key to the case, bizarre bug-fetish aside, so it was worth a little reminiscence about Father’s desire to control everything Sam ever did or thought.
Sam was impressed by the Oasis Plains curse. Insects were good, very atavistic. He’d have to remember the intimidating effect of an unbroken brown stream of creepy-crawlies.
“Is that why you don’t talk to your dad, because he doesn’t want you looking into this stuff,” Dean said, barely a hint of a question in his voice, as they rolled out of town.
“He doesn’t believe in ghosts and visions,” Sam said, letting his voice waver a little. “He tried to get me to go see a psychiatrist. Take these drugs that made me—he thinks I’m weak.”
After a second, Dean put his hand on Sam’s thigh, warm but not pressing down at all. “Hey,” he said. “People don’t want to believe this shit, that’s just natural. It doesn’t mean—it’s ‘cause he loves you.”
It was a great opportunity to work himself further into Dean’s psyche, unmissable really. But he felt like gravity had just tripled, the air sitting heavy on his chest, and it was a struggle to make his mouth open. “Yeah,” he said at last, watching Dean’s too-still face out of the corner of his eye. “He’s just disappointed in me.”
Dean didn’t say anything else until they were set for the night, and then he let Sam curl around him like a heavy winter coat. Sam went slowly, tonguing every inch of skin, until Dean broke down and begged for it. Sam let him babble for a while, then fucked him even more slowly, drawing it out so that Dean went hoarse and then wordless. After, he was so limp and pliant that Sam just pulled him into place like a body pillow. Sam swallowed, trying to get rid of the weight in his chest, but it followed him down into sleep.
****
Dean caught the Martian Death Flu in Lubbock, right after they took care of the werecoyote. Sam woke up on the morning they were supposed to get back on the road to the sound of Dean dry-heaving.
In general, when they were growing up, Father would ward someone who was sick enough to be vomiting. But only in general; it paid to test. For the sick person, that meant that you occasionally had to defend yourself even while you had your hands wrapped around the porcelain sides of the toilet bowl to keep yourself from falling in.
Being sick had been a matter of curling up, setting up any prepared defenses if you had them, and hoping to be left alone long enough to come staggering back to the group in a few days.
It took him a couple of hours to realize that he could go in to see Dean. By that time, Dean was barely conscious, slumped and sweating against the cold pink-and-green tile of the bathroom. (This motel’s theme, as near as Sam could tell, was Early Miami Vice.)
He’d planned on asking if Dean wanted anything, but Dean was well beyond answering. Sam left the bathroom door open as he searched the internet, then returned to wet a washcloth and put it on Dean’s forehead. Dean winced, pale except for his freckles, and twisted like each drop of water weighed a thousand pounds against his skin.
“I’ll be right back,” Sam promised.
The 7-11 five blocks away had saltines and Gatorade and Sprite. It didn’t have any chicken soup, but he figured that Dean wouldn’t be up to that today.
Dean hadn’t moved at all when he returned. His hair was heavy with sweat, beads of it thick and greasy at his hairline and over his upper lip, soaking his T-shirt and dampening the floor beneath him.
Eventually, Sam managed to coax him back to the bed, with a trashcan next to it as a mostly symbolic gesture, since Dean’s system had been empty for hours. When Dean retched now, he brought his hand up to his stomach in an involuntary attempt to control the pain of the overstressed muscles.
Sam gave Dean liquids in slow mouthfuls and watched him hold on to them for ten or fifteen minutes before bringing them back up.
He went back to the computer and checked. It was too soon for the hospital. Without health insurance, they’d just make Dean wait in an ER full of other sick people, and at least here he could lie down.
At one point, he thought Dean asked for his father, but Dean was largely unresponsive so there was no way to be sure.
Taking care of Dean was tiring and gross; even Dean didn’t look good throwing up, and he smelled bad enough to turn Sam’s stomach. Oddly, though, Dean’s total vulnerability didn’t disgust him as much as he would have thought. When he eased Dean back down after one last attempt with Gatorade, Dean pressed his cheek against Sam’s thigh, and he didn’t get off the bed as he’d planned. Instead, he rubbed Dean’s back and pressed a crown of kisses on Dean’s hair. They stayed like that until long after Sam’s own back had started to cramp.
Dean was better on the second day, and pretended that he was ready to travel, but he didn’t bother to hide his relief when Sam refused to share a car with him until he’d been vomit-free for twenty-four hours.
That night, Sam climbed into bed behind him, curling up to press his chest to Dean’s back.
Dean stiffened. Sam frowned; Dean had showered late in the afternoon, and as far as he knew the only problem left was weakness.
“Uh,” Dean said. “Is it okay if we don’t—I mean, I can—” He reached behind himself, fumbling in the general direction of Sam’s groin. “I’m kinda—”
Sam pulled away, realizing finally what Dean was trying to say. He’d slept in the other bed on the previous night, but that was solely to avoid the risk of getting spattered. Had they really not ever just—well, maybe not.
Dean was coffin-still; he’d pulled his hand back to hug his arms around himself. Sam let his hand fall heavily on Dean’s hip, squeezing carefully. “I think I’ll make it another day without exploding,” he said wryly.
Dean grunted noncommitally, but he allowed Sam to curl an arm around his waist, pulling him into the center of the bed.
Part 4.
Part 2
The night manager promised them that their rooms were right across from one another. “You have the Aries,” he told Winchester, “and you have the Virgo.” Sam shuddered to think what those names symbolized.
“So how do you afford this life of luxury, anyway?” Winchester asked while they were heading down the dingy corridor towards their destinations.
Sam shrugged. “Money saved up from college, my dad. It’s running out, though.”
“We could share,” Winchester suggested.
“Really?” It was okay to sound eager, he thought. Sam Marshall was an innocent looking for a guide through this strange new underworld.
Winchester looked at him and smiled a little. “Yeah, really. I, uh, don’t exactly have a big travel budget myself. You play any games? Pool, poker?”
Sam let himself look shocked. “That’s how you get money?”
“Sometimes,” Winchester said. “My dad—” And then he shut down like a garage door slamming into concrete, the way he did every time the subject of paternal influences came up. “Anyway, you come over tonight, I’ll show you some tricks.”
Sam let himself fall a few paces behind so that he could control his expression. The man was a walking encyclopedia of hunter’s lore, and the weapon he couldn’t work hadn’t been invented, but Sam was pretty sure he had no fucking clue the kinds of bad checks he was writing to Sam’s libido with his sudden grins and his casual asides.
****
With the pistols, Winchester made him fire a couple of times “so you don’t freak out when you hear how it really sounds,” and then they both put in earplugs. This, of course, necessitated that any corrections to Sam’s stance be made hands-on.
Winchester wrapped his arms around Sam, moving him into place, sliding his hands down Sam’s right arm to make sure it was braced properly, his chest pressed up against Sam’s back. He had to be on tiptoe to do it, Sam was sure, hooking his chin over Sam’s shoulder so that he could see where Sam was aiming.
It was substantially more distracting than any attack Sam had yet experienced. He did notice that Winchester was careful to keep his groin from settling against Sam’s ass, which he chose to interpret as evidence that Winchester was no more immune to Sam’s charms than the reverse.
Even after weeks of practice, Winchester’s hands always stayed on Sam’s arms a few seconds too long when he was correcting Sam’s stance. But he always let go, and he didn’t cut Sam any slack even when Sam got bored and pulled his saddest eyes, trying to persuade him to cut the training short.
The whole thing was—it was just weird, being touched all the time with nothing behind it, or anyway nothing but the intent to show some move or another.
Everything was a test; Sam had known that since before he’d known his name. But Winchester didn’t seem to see it that way. Sure, he got competitive when Sam started hitting the targets with just about equal accuracy. But he seemed happiest when the contest was closest, and after the sparring match in which Sam finally, finally put him on his back and kept him there with a knee in his stomach, he stopped cursing after thirty seconds and then smiled like he’d just been served a huge steak dinner.
Sam pulled back and stood. There was a ball of barbed wire twisting inside his chest, squeezing the breath out of his lungs.
Winchester jumped easily back to his feet, clapping his hands together. “’kay then. Now we run.”
Sam watched him retreat for a few seconds, then launched himself after.
****
Domestically, things were also proceeding, in fits and starts. Winchester dressed in the bathroom, but he always watched when Sam came out of the shower with his towel knotted too low.
He tried not to tease Winchester too much, because he’d hate to get kicked out. Also, Winchester slept in boxer-briefs and tight T-shirts, so he still got plenty of eye candy, especially since Winchester tended to push the covers off of his bed while he was asleep.
It wasn’t all ogling and beer. Winchester was used to living with someone, but it was someone else.
“Hey, actually, I like my coffee straight,” Sam told him the fourth time he showed up with a cup that was already holding a year’s worth of Florida’s sugar output.
Winchester blinked at him a couple of times then gave him a stoic suffering face, which was unfairly good-looking on him. “Sorry,” he said and held out the other cup. “This one’s clean.”
Sam took it, because refusing wasn’t going to make Winchester feel any better. The strange feeling in his stomach was just annoyance at himself that he hadn’t spoken up earlier.
But the other side of Winchester’s home training was that, when Winchester pulled up at the laundromat, he took Sam’s bag as if it was obvious that they’d wash their clothes together. Sam wasn’t carrying anything that would disprove his story about being a college student jerked unwillingly into the underbelly of American monster society, so he didn’t resist.
It was kind of relaxing to sit with Winchester in the night-emptied space, the only soundtrack the slosh of their sudsy clothes, and listen to his stories about growing up on the road. Never about his father, of course, just about the towns and the schools and the jobs. But dear old Dad was there in the negative space, and Sam was getting a pretty good picture: obsessed with hunting, relying on Winchester to do the mundane tasks like cooking and washing the clothes, pulling him out of school on a moment’s notice when a hunt beckoned.
Winchester was proud of the fact that he’d gone on hunts with his father since before he was old enough to read. He could conjugate Latin like a Roman and make a shaped charge out of two pipe cleaners and the contents of a housekeeping cart, but he told Sam once that he hadn’t found the time—meaning his father hadn’t found the time—to get his GED.
Even Father had done better than that, though admittedly Father’s aims had been somewhat different. Sam’s Classics courses had been useful, and scattering everyone to colleges around the country for a few years had given them all some breathing space before the competition began. Sometimes Sam wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t jumped the gun and tracked Max and Andy down on their respective campuses, but given what Jake had done right after, he figured that it would have been much the same in the end. He’d learned well enough how to move through the human world, which was what was important.
Winchester had never been given that much freedom of movement. It was no wonder that he didn’t know how to deal with people he wasn’t questioning for purposes of a hunt. After losing his wife and baby son, Winchester’s father had kept a stranglehold on his remaining family.
Winchester had started to look better-rested as soon as they started sharing a room. Sam guessed that he hadn’t spent a night apart from his father until the man disappeared.
That also explained why he treated Winchester senior’s journal like a talisman. Sam suspected that he would have slept with it under his pillow if that wouldn’t have interfered with keeping a gun in the same place.
Which raised the question of the motivation for his father’s disappearance. Hypothesis: Father had something to do with it, because there was no way Sam could have gained Winchester’s trust with a control freak of that magnitude hovering around.
Why, why, why, that was the question.
****
After a while, Winchester actually started telling him when he was doing well on the exercises. At first he was hesitant, like he wasn’t sure he had any right to speak up, but it became just another part of the routine. Every time Sam hit his latest goal, Winchester would make the next day’s training that much harder, adding “civilian” targets to avoid or closing the book of protective runes and making Sam draw them from memory and then demanding ten more pushups.
The fall that Sam turned thirteen, Father had pulled him aside. “Samael,” he’d said, all seriousness, “you’re my favorite. It’s important that you know that. And it’s important that you keep this a secret, just between you and me.” Sam had been brimful of happiness, able to ignore almost all of the other kids’ attacks, for nearly a week before he’d spilled it to Ava after she got in a particularly good dig.
She’d laughed and laughed. “You are truly brain-damaged,” she’d chortled, her palms slapping the wall she’d fallen back against. “Didn’t you figure out he says that to all of us?”
At first, it was hard not to flinch when Winchester said “awesome” in that tone of unequivocal approval, but Sam learned to accept it. Okay, maybe he also started swaggering when Winchester praised him, but that was justified.
And then, after a good day, Winchester started calling Sam “Sammy.” Sam just gritted his teeth and replied “Sam” in his best fuck-you tone, which as far as he could tell only made Winchester grin.
****
“Just once, c’mon,” Sam wheedled as they drove towards the cemetary. He was pushing, he knew, but Winchester hadn’t seemed to mind so far.
“Dude,” Winchester said, trying for offended and not quite getting there, “I am not going to say ‘Just the facts, ma’am,’ so you can stop asking any time now.”
“Mrs. Gordon was trying to give me a chocolate chip cookie recipe. And where were you? Off laughing, that’s where.”
Winchester hadn’t been laughing, but he’d been fighting a smile when Mrs. Gordon took Sam’s friendly, sensitive detective act as an invitation to share every secret of her kitchen. She’d answered Winchester’s bored-sounding questions with ill grace, but Sam’s fluffy bangs and goofy rounded shoulders had turned her expansive and, once the digressions were conquered, reasonably helpful about the troubles that had been plaguing her husband at work before he’d died. Yes, Sam’s kidneys were floating from the gallon of oversweetened iced tea she’d served him, and he wanted that hour of his life back. Overall, though, he’d have to call the day’s work a positive.
He frowned to himself. Of course he didn’t care about the poltergeist that was threatening to drive a struggling bank out of business. But Winchester had been impressed. That was the success.
That night, after they returned to the motel from the job, they popped a couple of beers and relaxed on the curb next to the car. “’s good,” Winchester said, raising his bottle to his mouth and draining all but a mouthful. “Bein’ a team.”
Sam thought about wild animals and shifted himself a little, so that his knees were aimed at Winchester even though they weren’t touching. “To teamwork,” he said, tilting his bottle so that Winchester just had to close an inch’s distance to clink their beers together. When Winchester did, he raised his head, and Sam gave him the full treatment. Personally, Sam wasn’t fond of the way a wide smile flattened out his nose, but it made his dimples jump out, and you couldn’t really argue with success. Certainly Winchester seemed to appreciate the view, grinning back goofily, and at some point Sam stopped thinking about smiling and just did it.
****
The airplane crash hunt started badly. When Jerry Panowski said that he hadn’t ever expected to see Winchester without his father—“attached at the hip” was part of his narration—Winchester went whiter than the time that the ghost in Reston had managed to stab him through the shoulder. Even Jerry, who was roughly as sensitive as a bag of bricks, saw that he’d misspoken and hastily accepted Sam as Winchester’s new partner.
Things improved for a bit during the investigation. Winchester in a suit was a nice change of pace, at least after Sam redid the knot of the tie and pulled the shoulders until the jacket sat straight. And when Winchester confessed his terror of flying, Sam took a gamble and offered to do the job on his own. When Winchester refused and insisted on coming along despite the fact that he was actually shaking, Sam felt something click satisfyingly into place.
Winchester didn’t acknowledge that Sam reached out for his hand when the airplane was gaining altitude, but he gripped back just as tight.
Offhand, Sam couldn’t remember anyone ever leaning into his touch before, at least not when they weren’t in the middle of having sex.
The demon perked up as soon as it saw Sam. “Dean Winchester, you’ve picked up some interesting company,” it cooed. “Somebody’s slumming. Don’t you want to know why?” Winchester didn’t flinch, just continued the exorcism, the words spilling out of him as fast and smooth as a lifetime Catholic praying the rosary.
“Demons lie,” was all he’d say after, when they were holed up in their room and their minor scrapes and bruises had been treated. He sat at the little table in the kitchenette and didn’t meet Sam’s eyes.
“Was it a demon who killed your mom?” Sam asked, testing what he knew.
Winchester blew out a breath. “Yeah. My dad—my dad says he had yellow eyes, not black like that one, which is the usual.” Sam nodded, accepting the confirmation that the killer had been Father. “But there are different kinds of demons, and the one that started the fire, he was powerful. Stuck my mom on the ceiling somehow, made her watch while he killed my brother.”
They hadn’t talked about it since that first revelation; Sam had wanted Winchester to get used to him. But now that they’d actually exorcised a demon together, the topic was ripe. “And you think that’s what happened to my mom.”
“Yeah.” Winchester flicked his eyes over to Sam, then back to the scarred vinyl tabletop.
“Did your dad ever catch the demon?” Sam asked, knowing he was on tremorous ground.
Winchester pulled out his gun and began to disassemble it. He’d shown Sam how to do it, but Sam couldn’t get close to his speed and probably wouldn’t however many years he practiced, which would have been annoying if not for the utter irrelevance of the task to Sam’s future plans. The gun was in pieces before Winchester answered, still looking down.
“No. I think that’s why—I think he found its trail again. I keep waiting to hear—”
Carefully, Sam approached close enough to squeeze Winchester’s shoulder, and Winchester fell silent, his lips twitching in the echo of a grateful smile. Sam didn’t need to meet Daddy Winchester to dislike him. Regardless of what temptation Father had put in his path to induce him to leave his remaining family, it was his fault for succumbing. Winchester always got this bruised, shamed look on his face when Sam raised the subject of his father. Sam didn’t know what Papa Winchester had said on his way out, but it had been a shot to the heart.
Served the old man right, what Sam was going to do to Winchester. If you didn’t protect what was yours, you had to expect that someone was going to come along and find a better use for it.
****
“There’s a sign for the Starlite motel, L-I-T-E,” Sam said, pointing.
Winchester didn’t even look. “No.”
“How can you tell?” Sam wondered. “It’s not like the signs say, ‘Incredibly tacky themes here.’” Last night had been, unbelievably, trout. Sam would have sworn that it was impossible to get trout-patterned linens.
Winchester propped his arm against the window, tapping his fingers. “Just one of my many useful talents.”
“I think I like the marksmanship better,” Sam said. But that night, wrapping himself in a towel with a once-colorful floral arrangement printed on it, he looked around the room—gingham squares mostly, with ribbon rosettes at the corners, and little corncob dolls dressed in blue bonnets as knicknacks—and smiled.
****
He hadn’t meant to volunteer to draw Bloody Mary out. He still didn’t even know why he’d done it, other than knowing that his secrets would be more than tasty enough to attract her.
Now Winchester had the evidence, though: Sam had a secret involving a death. He could bring it up at any time.
Winchester bled too, at the end. Maybe they’d just agree on silence.
Regardless, the satisfied look on Winchester’s face when they’d saved the girl felt like a victory. Most of their poltergeist work didn’t give such direct results.
After, when they were back in their depressing little motel room (taxidermied birds; Sam imagined he could smell them), Winchester hovered like a—like no one in his life ever had, checking his eyes at least eight times, asking if he felt all right. Bringing him fucking orange juice, of all things.
“I’m okay,” he said when Winchester came back and knelt beside his bed for the thousandth time, sheepish but insistent. “Dean,” Sam said, and reached out to grab his wrist, “I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Dean said. But he didn’t pull away, and Sam didn’t let go for a while.
****
“Do you seriously think I’m going to need to draw a devil’s trap in pitch dark?” Sam asked. Protesting Dean’s lessons rarely did any good, but this had to be over the top. Sam’s knees were raw from kneeling too long on concrete, he could feel the back of his neck burning in the sun, and he needed a drink and a piss.
“Might,” Dean said. His voice was too high, not the usual calm confidence of these training sessions.
Ever since the airplane demon, Dean had been pushing exorcist lore on Sam like there was going to be a pop quiz any day. Sam was familiar with the theory. But Father had strongly discouraged the practice, in the sense of whipping anyone caught reciting the Rituale Romanum. The scars on Lily’s back had been a tangle of snakes, slick and white. He was a little nervous about what would happen if Father checked up on his recent studies, but he couldn’t very well decline Dean’s instruction on the topic.
He was beginning to think that some of the runes, combined with the salt lines, could actually keep Father out—which itself might trigger some punishment from Father. But it was part of winning Dean’s trust, so he hoped he’d get the leeway he needed.
In the short term, his problem was actually learning the proper rituals. Sam tugged his blindfold down and wiped at his sweaty forehead. He was in the middle of the world’s most lopsided pentacle—more of a square with a skin problem, really--mystical symbols scattered as randomly around him as if he’d dropped a handful of change. The midday heat gave them the basketball court to themselves, so at least they weren’t about to be arrested for Satanism, but he thought they might as well pick up the ball they’d brought as a decoy and start a little one-on-one.
“I don’t think this is working,” he admitted.
“Try again.”
“If I get caught without any light with a demon hunting me—”
“You wanna get dead?” Dean yelled, shoving himself to his feet and stalking away.
Sam waited for him to calm down.
Several minutes passed. Dean kept pacing and glaring.
“Dean,” Sam said carefully, putting down the chalk. “Give me some help here.”
Dean swiveled to face him, tearing at the buttons of his overshirt, then pulling it off in a tangle with his T-shirt. The scar stretched across his left shoulder, traveling over his collarbone, down into the pectoral muscle nearly to the nipple. It was as jagged as a lightning strike, and it was old, stretched with time.
That explained why Dean always kept a towel over that shoulder any time Sam insisted on barging into the bathroom. Sam had just assumed it was a weird shaving habit.
“That’s what you get when you fuck one of these up,” Dean said. “If you’re real lucky.”
Dean waited for some response, but Sam had nothing. “I was in charge of the devil’s trap,” Dean said, his face twisted with self-loathing. “But I wasn’t paying attention, I was listening to it … It grabbed my dad, got him good. Then it started in on me. If it hadn’t wanted to make him watch while it played with me, we’d both be dead. My dad nearly died saving my ass, and he couldn’t walk for two months.”
“Holy shit,” Sam said. “How old were you?”
Dean frowned. “Eleven, I guess? That’s why you gotta be able to do it right and do it fast, no matter what else is goin’ on.”
Sam thought that there were a number of things that a demon might have said to distract a kid who’d seen half his family burn to death.
“Dad looked at me different after that,” Dean said, soft and confessional. Then he shook his head and continued, more firmly. “Got busted back to supplies for a while. But you’re a natural at this shit, you aren’t gonna pull anything like that.”
‘Yes, because I’m not eleven,’ didn’t seem like a useful response under the circumstances. Sighing, Sam picked up the chalk, shifted himself to a blank patch of asphalt, and tugged the blindfold down again.
****
Sam’s aim with a pistol improved and he turned out to be what Dean called “a freaking wizard” with knives. When he threw a blade, it didn’t even need any mental boost to stay on target. This was an advantage that none of his siblings had. He could already see how to work it: get them in a psychic dead zone and then take it physical. Even Jake would have trouble with Sam now that Dean was playing drill sergeant with him.
It wasn’t what he’d planned, but it would still put him ahead of the game. He still needed to know what Father wanted with Dean. His best guess was that there must be some vital mystical object that no psychic or demon could touch, so you’d need a superb hunter to get it. But he couldn’t find any mention of an object like that in the books he had.
In the meantime, he’d largely stalled out on the fire records. The trail was so old that in lots of places around the country the relevant documents weren’t even computerized.
In the absence of new information, though, there were always hunts, and they felt pretty good.
After some spectacular early clusterfucks on the order of ‘Abbott and Costello Meet the Night of the Living Dead’ (Sam felt bad about the new scar on Dean’s shin, even if Dean should have given him more warning before jumping into the grave), they eased into a rhythm of salt-and-burns, sweeping through little towns like some kind of supernatural exhibition team. Every couple of weeks, they’d punctuate the ghost hunting with something that bled a little.
Dean’s knowledge of the minor supernatural beasts was comprehensive, and he wasn’t shabby on demon exclusion and exorcism. He seemed to think Sam required training in that as well, so he did his best to dig up useful texts. Sam absorbed them, or skimmed them depending on whether he was already familiar with the subject matter. There were plenty of details about non-demonic threats that Sam hadn’t known, as well as fascinating connections between the rituals Sam had learned from the inside and the hints that hunters had winkled out over the centuries.
Once Sam caught Dean on the phone, his shoulders hunched and his voice hesitant and respectful, asking somebody called Bobby to send a couple of books along. “They’re not for me,” he said. “Yeah, I guess. No, sir. No, sir. But I—Yes, sir.”
When he ended the call, he gave Sam an apologetic look. “Bobby’s the best for demon lore. But he’s kind of unfriendly with strangers. Maybe we’ll head out there, introduce you, when we get a chance.”
Sam nodded and made a mental note to avoid that unless he had no other option. From what he’d seen, hunters were more inventive and dangerous than he’d been raised to believe, and anyone Dean called the best might be more of a challenge than he wanted to undertake until he was sure of Dean’s commitment.
He scoured the internet, using all the clues Dean taught him to look for and a few tricks of his own, finding them new hunts. The poltergeist jobs were his favorites. He was there to catch the shotgun shells Dean tossed over to him, to do half the digging, to yell at Dean to duck when the spirit materialized behind him, and to drop when he saw the warning in Dean’s eyes. When he concentrated on the night’s hunt and let the rest of his life blur out of focus, he felt like a superhero. Maybe it was always like this working with a partner, but it made him bigger than himself, stronger. They moved in concert like a right hand and a left.
Sam guessed that he was the sinister one.
****
Dean corrected his posture, of all things, which had to be a holdover from his martinet father. “You think you’re fooling anyone that you’re not eight feet tall when you do that?” Dean asked him once. Sam just shrugged, because as a matter of fact people were a lot less intimidated when he played gentle giant. But he hated being poked in the back with a pencil, so he did have to show off his new combat skills the third time Dean did it while he was reading. He ended up with Dean pinned to the floor, his hands around Dean’s neck.
Dean blinked up at him, the creases around his eyes deeper than Sam expected. “Don’t do that,” he warned Dean. “You’re not my father.”
Dean swallowed, his Adam’s apple working against Sam’s fingers, and nodded a little. “Yeah, uh, sorry,” he said when he was standing again and Sam was halfway across the room.
He needed Dean off balance, but still committed to him. “Hey, it’s not a big deal. Just, you know, no more fucking pencils.” He smiled, even if it felt a little stiff, and Dean tried to smile back.
****
After a string of five clockwork-smooth de-ghostings in ten days, they had a close call. As it turned out, the dear undeparted had a companion, a second ghost whose bones lay elsewhere in the cemetary. If she hadn’t been interred in a crypt, they would have been roundly fucked, because they’d already dumped too much of their salt into the first grave to make a reliable circle around themselves with the remainder, and there would have been no way to dig her out of the ground before she got them.
Sam managed to match her translucent screaming face with a name and a picture from one of the newspaper reports he’d read, one of the girls the dead man had coached (and, apparently, diddled). Dean found the crypt and kicked in the door, and Sam broke open their last shotgun shells onto the corpse before setting it on fire. Dean was too busy being slammed into a stone sarcophagus to notice that Sam gave the fire just a bit of a psychic boost, allowing it to consume the girl-ghost before she had time to break Dean’s neck.
Afterwards, they were both sore. Sam wasn’t quite sure what had happened to his leg, but it involved both twisting and bruising, and Dean was walking with care that foretold cursing in the morning.
Sam was absolutely high with it. His blood had been replaced with champagne; his grin wouldn’t go away, no matter how much Dean scowled and talked about amateurs. The only time he’d ever come close to this feeling was when he’d dispatched Andy, and even that had faded quickly with the anxiety about whether the others would gang up on him in reaction and whether Father would kill him for taking the initiative to start the competition a little early.
Getting rid of the ghosts had no rebound. For some reason, the word that kept coming to mind was “righteous.”
“Come on,” he urged for the fiftieth time as they pulled into the motel parking lot. “We’ll just have a few beers.”
Dean’s speculative expression wavered, irresolute. He pulled into a parking space and turned off the engine, but didn’t move to open the door.
“There’ll be girls,” Sam wheedled, fixing Dean with his best pleading look.
Dean looked like he wanted to run away from this conversation, but also hungry. “I never know what to say to ‘em,” he admitted, which was a news flash on the order of the fact that there was a war in Iraq.
Sam wanted to say, ‘With your face? “Nice shoes, wanna fuck?” ought to cover it,’ but that was the type of statement that tended to freak Dean out. Dean knew he was pretty, he just didn’t know what to do with it, and hated to be reminded of both of those things.
However—
“I really want to get laid. Don’t you want to get laid?”
Dean huffed. Sam could see him working himself up to another confession about his aversion to the dating game.
“We could help each other out,” he suggested.
Dean tilted his head. Sam made an illustrative hand gesture. “You know, like buddies do.”
He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to get punched.
“Buddies?” Dean asked, his voice gravel-rough.
Sam nodded.
Except that when they’d stumbled back into the room, both of them walking funny, Dean seemed to think that buddies kissed, too. With their eyes open. Sam finally pinned Dean to the bed and lowered his mouth to Dean’s straining cock, but only because staring into Dean’s ocean-green eyes was starting to weird him out. Father did this trick where he’d rummage inside your body without moving a muscle of his own, and if you were lucky you’d just piss blood for a few days thereafter. This didn’t feel anything like that. It felt deeper.
****
Sam wasn’t one to believe in walking on water or loaves and fishes, but Dean was enough to make him reconsider his general stance on miracles. Now that they’d crossed the line, Dean was panting for it constantly. He fucked like he’d suddenly realized he needed to make some lifetime quota and he was ten years behind. He followed suggestions like they were orders from on high and he didn’t seem to know that “no” was a possibility. He’d even gone along when Sam had held up the handcuffs and asked, “You know what’d be hot?” The only time he’d balked was in the dark corner of a bar, and even then he’d given it up in the bathroom.
Sam had always had ready access to a fuck, either from a sibling-competitor or some unwitting normal who could be talked into a one-night (or one-hour) stand. Being able to get off at any time wasn’t unusual, but Dean was—“easy” was the obvious joke, and it was true, but there was more. He could mark Dean up without getting scratched and bitten in return, or he could put his hand on the back of Dean’s neck and press Dean’s mouth to his shoulder until Dean set his teeth there. He could rock their bodies together slow as melting tar, or shove Dean up against the door of the latest motel room and make him come while the car’s engine was still ticking cool ten feet away.
When he’d first gotten the telekinesis under control, he’d felt a little like this, for a few days at least: king of infinite space, all his choices good ones. Just waking up was enough to give him a warm little shiver of satisfaction in the knowledge that the day to come would be his. Then on the fourth morning, Ava had nearly blown his head off, and Jake had followed that up with a trick that had left him half-drowned in a stinking toilet bowl, and after that Sam had been more careful about gloating.
He wasn’t gloating now. But he was thinking that maybe, whatever Father’s plans were, he’d wait to go along with them until Dean’s glow faded some.
****
Sam considered the Hookman beneath their notice. There was nothing of interest in Iowa, and he had a dossier of (supposedly) dead children whose mothers had died in fires at the six-month mark to show Dean. He’d made some decent guesses about the origins of most of his siblings, though there was no record that matched his own vital statistics.
His idea was that they’d go talk to the surviving fathers. Sam was pretty sure he could peel Dean off and confront at least some of them in private, see if they’d made any deals or other mistakes that might have made them targets.
Dean, though, insisted that the jobs he found wouldn’t wait. “Those kids’ll still be dead in a day or two,” he said, shoving his clothes into his duffel. “These folks need us now.” He did agree that if Sam found other kids who’d lived, then they’d follow that lead.
Before Sam had a better idea of what he was looking for, there was little point in making his case. Whenever he tried to talk about what the fathers might know, Dean would just curl in on himself like a pillbug, brusque and skittish until Sam managed to coax him out of his sulk with blowjobs and once, to his mild embarrassment, a backrub (though that time did end with blowjobs).
It was frustrating, even if Sam understood why Dean wasn’t crazy about tracking down dozens of widowers. He thought about faking an investigation report to show that one of the kids had survived, maybe Andy, just to get one last little bit of use out of the twerp. But Dean was arguably a better investigator than Sam was; at least he was more familiar with the types of records confronting Sam, and the risk of triggering his suspicions was too high.
****
Andy hadn’t really been that much of a twerp. He was high-strung, like the rest of them, but he’d never gone out of his way to be nasty to Sam, or really to any of the others. Sam had picked him because—
Thinking back on it, his reasons were hard to reconstruct. Andy had been in the top third, powers-wise, and Sam had thought it was important to start out with a bang. Maybe it all went back to being fourteen, when Andy stopped hanging out with him and started following Claudia around. Sam had already known that it was important to reassess a person’s value on a regular basis, but he hadn’t much liked the experience of being downgraded.
Now, it all seemed a little childish. He and Dean didn’t waste any effort hunting anything that hadn’t already started hurting people. The results were concrete; power games didn’t come into it.
Father had always promised that one of them would make the world kneel. They’d grown up with the exploits of Alexander, Genghis Khan, Tamurlaine, Cortez, Napoleon, and Hitler, each with his own lesson to teach about empire. And yes, it would be awfully nice if people cheered them into town and circled them with garlands of flowers on the way out, but even without that, most normals were not so much in need of a whipping as he’d been raised to think. He’d never bothered to notice before, because he’d always needed to remember that anyone friendly might be a test from Father; he hadn’t been looking for people to help.
He wasn’t ruling out the idea of bringing the world to heel. But his priority was to get strong enough to defeat his siblings. Once that was taken care of, there would be plenty of time for other decisions.
****
Dean pulled his head back and looked up at Sam. His mouth was wet and swollen but he’d swallowed everything, not a smudge of white. “Jesus,” Sam said, glad he could use the word without pain, “it’s amazing nobody’s locked you in their basement and made you do that all day long.”
Dean flushed even darker and looked away. Sam grabbed his shoulders, urging him onto the bed, leaning back and pulling at him until he was stretched out over Sam, his cock pressing hard against Sam’s belly. Sam kissed Dean, searching out every last taste. Dean was thrusting shallowly, lost in his own need.
Sam broke the kiss long enough to grab the back of Dean’s neck and tug at him until he could whisper in Dean’s ear: “What if I picked out a girl, would you lick her while I watched? Use that pretty mouth to get her off?”
Dean’s eyes fluttered beneath their lids. “Yeah, Sammy,” he breathed, as if he were imagining it right then, his head framed by soft thighs, Sam just sitting back and watching.
Sam frowned. He put a careful hand between them and grabbed Dean’s cock, pressing at just the right place. Dean gasped, not all in pleasure. “Sam,” he warned.
Dean’s kiss-slick lips smacked together, then parted. Already, he knew better than to mouth off in the middle of sex. “Yeah, Sam,” he said, softer and deeper.
But it wasn’t enough. Sam let go, then wrapped his hands around Dean’s shoulders, pushing him downwards. “Get me hard again,” he said. “You’re gonna come just from my cock inside you. You’re going to come so hard you’ll give yourself a facial.”
****
In Oklahoma, Matt Pike was easy to play, because his resentments were so close to the surface. Maybe Sam was being a little harsh on the kid, since he hadn’t exactly been a locked safe as a teenager either, but if you didn’t learn to swallow your anger and fight back you were never going to get anywhere. Anyway, Matt turned out to be the key to the case, bizarre bug-fetish aside, so it was worth a little reminiscence about Father’s desire to control everything Sam ever did or thought.
Sam was impressed by the Oasis Plains curse. Insects were good, very atavistic. He’d have to remember the intimidating effect of an unbroken brown stream of creepy-crawlies.
“Is that why you don’t talk to your dad, because he doesn’t want you looking into this stuff,” Dean said, barely a hint of a question in his voice, as they rolled out of town.
“He doesn’t believe in ghosts and visions,” Sam said, letting his voice waver a little. “He tried to get me to go see a psychiatrist. Take these drugs that made me—he thinks I’m weak.”
After a second, Dean put his hand on Sam’s thigh, warm but not pressing down at all. “Hey,” he said. “People don’t want to believe this shit, that’s just natural. It doesn’t mean—it’s ‘cause he loves you.”
It was a great opportunity to work himself further into Dean’s psyche, unmissable really. But he felt like gravity had just tripled, the air sitting heavy on his chest, and it was a struggle to make his mouth open. “Yeah,” he said at last, watching Dean’s too-still face out of the corner of his eye. “He’s just disappointed in me.”
Dean didn’t say anything else until they were set for the night, and then he let Sam curl around him like a heavy winter coat. Sam went slowly, tonguing every inch of skin, until Dean broke down and begged for it. Sam let him babble for a while, then fucked him even more slowly, drawing it out so that Dean went hoarse and then wordless. After, he was so limp and pliant that Sam just pulled him into place like a body pillow. Sam swallowed, trying to get rid of the weight in his chest, but it followed him down into sleep.
****
Dean caught the Martian Death Flu in Lubbock, right after they took care of the werecoyote. Sam woke up on the morning they were supposed to get back on the road to the sound of Dean dry-heaving.
In general, when they were growing up, Father would ward someone who was sick enough to be vomiting. But only in general; it paid to test. For the sick person, that meant that you occasionally had to defend yourself even while you had your hands wrapped around the porcelain sides of the toilet bowl to keep yourself from falling in.
Being sick had been a matter of curling up, setting up any prepared defenses if you had them, and hoping to be left alone long enough to come staggering back to the group in a few days.
It took him a couple of hours to realize that he could go in to see Dean. By that time, Dean was barely conscious, slumped and sweating against the cold pink-and-green tile of the bathroom. (This motel’s theme, as near as Sam could tell, was Early Miami Vice.)
He’d planned on asking if Dean wanted anything, but Dean was well beyond answering. Sam left the bathroom door open as he searched the internet, then returned to wet a washcloth and put it on Dean’s forehead. Dean winced, pale except for his freckles, and twisted like each drop of water weighed a thousand pounds against his skin.
“I’ll be right back,” Sam promised.
The 7-11 five blocks away had saltines and Gatorade and Sprite. It didn’t have any chicken soup, but he figured that Dean wouldn’t be up to that today.
Dean hadn’t moved at all when he returned. His hair was heavy with sweat, beads of it thick and greasy at his hairline and over his upper lip, soaking his T-shirt and dampening the floor beneath him.
Eventually, Sam managed to coax him back to the bed, with a trashcan next to it as a mostly symbolic gesture, since Dean’s system had been empty for hours. When Dean retched now, he brought his hand up to his stomach in an involuntary attempt to control the pain of the overstressed muscles.
Sam gave Dean liquids in slow mouthfuls and watched him hold on to them for ten or fifteen minutes before bringing them back up.
He went back to the computer and checked. It was too soon for the hospital. Without health insurance, they’d just make Dean wait in an ER full of other sick people, and at least here he could lie down.
At one point, he thought Dean asked for his father, but Dean was largely unresponsive so there was no way to be sure.
Taking care of Dean was tiring and gross; even Dean didn’t look good throwing up, and he smelled bad enough to turn Sam’s stomach. Oddly, though, Dean’s total vulnerability didn’t disgust him as much as he would have thought. When he eased Dean back down after one last attempt with Gatorade, Dean pressed his cheek against Sam’s thigh, and he didn’t get off the bed as he’d planned. Instead, he rubbed Dean’s back and pressed a crown of kisses on Dean’s hair. They stayed like that until long after Sam’s own back had started to cramp.
Dean was better on the second day, and pretended that he was ready to travel, but he didn’t bother to hide his relief when Sam refused to share a car with him until he’d been vomit-free for twenty-four hours.
That night, Sam climbed into bed behind him, curling up to press his chest to Dean’s back.
Dean stiffened. Sam frowned; Dean had showered late in the afternoon, and as far as he knew the only problem left was weakness.
“Uh,” Dean said. “Is it okay if we don’t—I mean, I can—” He reached behind himself, fumbling in the general direction of Sam’s groin. “I’m kinda—”
Sam pulled away, realizing finally what Dean was trying to say. He’d slept in the other bed on the previous night, but that was solely to avoid the risk of getting spattered. Had they really not ever just—well, maybe not.
Dean was coffin-still; he’d pulled his hand back to hug his arms around himself. Sam let his hand fall heavily on Dean’s hip, squeezing carefully. “I think I’ll make it another day without exploding,” he said wryly.
Dean grunted noncommitally, but he allowed Sam to curl an arm around his waist, pulling him into the center of the bed.
Part 4.
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Even Father had done better than that, though admittedly Father’s aims had been somewhat different. Sam’s Classics courses had been useful, and scattering everyone to colleges around the country for a few years had given them all some breathing space before the competition began. Sometimes Sam wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t jumped the gun and tracked Max and Andy down on their respective campuses, but given what Jake had done right after, he figured that it would have been much the same in the end. He’d learned well enough how to move through the human world, which was what was important.
I would love a show about competitive demon children. Like Survivor, but with spells and eviscerations. I would watch that every week.
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