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Part 1
Ellen Harvelle was awesome. Just scary enough that Dean didn’t put the moves on her outright, even though it had been almost a month since he’d gotten any (not counting that handjob at the service station in Ohio, which Dean didn’t since he wasn’t sixteen any more). But more than being terrifying, she knew at least as much about the supernatural as Sam and Adam did, and she wasn’t family, so he could actually ask some of his more delicate questions.
Like: what’s up with the demons hanging around Sam? Did Adam deserve to go to Hell? He’d heard the Winchester version of events, but that was kind of like reading USA Today when he needed a college textbook instead. And of course Sam fucked off before the bar even closed, doing whatever it was that Sam did when he disappeared, leaving an increasingly antsy Adam to alternate between frowning into his beer and half-heartedly hitting on Jo.
Finally, Ellen tossed the stragglers out, sent Jo to get a couple of books out of storage, and set Adam up with a leather-bound book the size of his torso that supposedly told the truth about angels. Then she took Dean back out to the bar “to get acquainted; I already know your problems, boy” (the look on Adam’s face when she said that to him was priceless). There, she confirmed enough of the basic facts to reassure Dean that, though everything else was crap, Sam and Adam hadn’t full-on lied to him the way they lied to the normal people they encountered on a case.
Not that Dean didn’t respect a good lie. He wasn’t exactly an upstanding citizen, even before Mom died. He could keep a legit job for a while, especially one that involved customer service, especially one with a slightly older female clientele, but he always found some way to screw it up for himself. He’d get drunk and then show up, visibly lit; he’d skip out for three days straight and blow all his money at some casino; he’d screw the owner’s teenage kid (they were always legal, though, since he was eighteen—no way was he going to end up in jail over a fuck). He knew he’d been a disappointment to his mom. Hunting was the first time in his life that the things he could do well outweighed the things he was a fuck-up at, and it felt good.
“So,” he said, when Ellen had finished explaining how she saw the whole Hell-Lilith-Lucifer-heavenly host struggle, “you gonna tell me to get out and live my life as long as I can, ‘cause this isn’t my job?”
Ellen poured another shot of whiskey and pounded it down, wiping her mouth off with the back of her hand in a move that had Dean shifting on his stool. “It shouldn’t oughta be anybody’s job,” she said plainly. “But it is. You seem like a grown man—” she put a hand up before Dean could take advantage of that line—“and honestly, those boys need all the help they can get. Without their daddy, they’ve been tugging in different directions so long I don’t think either of them knows how to stop.”
Dean rolled his own shotglass between his palms, watching the overhead lights refract through the thick glass onto the scratched wood of the bar. “I just don’t know what an ordinary person can do. Hell, I’ve seen what a hunter can do to a ghost, or a vampire, and I believe there’s ways to hunt all these things I didn’t believe in three months ago. But angels? Demons from out of the Bible? I don’t know if there is a pay grade for that.”
“Only one way to find out,” Ellen said, not unsympathetically.
Dean chuckled. “Guess so,” he said, and went to see whether Adam had learned anything from the Big Book of Angels.
****
The night’s motel was only a couple of blocks away from a Wal-Mart (or a Wal-Mart parking lot, anyway), and Dean used the opportunity to shop for actual groceries.
“Get me a medium knife,” Dean ordered when he had various green and brown things laid out on the tiny kitchenette counter. “And grab one for yourself, while you’re at it.”
“You’re seriously going to cook with our knives?” Adam said, saving Sam the trouble.
Dean turned and gave them a huge, shiteating grin, the kind that crinkled his eyes up and made Sam want to hunch his shoulders and look away before he did something dumb, like blushing or forgetting his own name. “Dude, you clean those knives like you’re about to perform surgery with them.” And occasionally have, Sam didn’t add. It was a good point, and Adam didn’t have another argument in reserve, so (after an impromptu wrestling match from which Sam emerged righteously triumphant) Adam went and got the knives. But somehow Sam ended up the sous-chef, and worse than that, Dean seemed to think that calling him ‘Sammy’ was fully justified despite or maybe because of how annoying the nickname was. Sam kept resolving not to respond to it, and then realizing that he’d just complied with yet another instruction, like the world’s worst Simon Says player.
He didn’t really mind. Dean made a huge salad, with creamy chunks of avocado and onions he’d fried himself, along with sweet peppers and spinach and sunflower seeds. He made a roast, explaining the process as he went as if making sure Sam could do it for himself next time. By the time he got it out of the oven, Sam was about ready to eat Dean’s arm—but the roast was a hell of a lot better, and the salad was so good that Adam only bitched for a minute about having to eat his serving before getting more meat.
In fact, Adam ate two plates full. Then he went outside to sit on the hood of the Impala, which seemed like the least damaging brooding he could do, so Sam didn’t attempt to fight it.
The whole process seemed so exotic to Sam: being able to take a bunch of raw ingredients and turn them into actual food. Even in college, he’d lived out of the dining hall, which while more nutritious and abundant than the food he’d scrounged on the road was still prepared for him. He’d never managed to do more than heat up soup out of cans for Adam.
“Did your mom teach you how to cook?” he asked while Dean was using a roll to mop up the last of the juices.
Dean stiffened for a moment, then smiled, soft and remembering. “Kind of. She got me halfway, and then when I moved out, I watched a lot of cooking shows. When I’d visit, I’d bring her scalloped potatoes or spinach with raisins and pine nuts or something like that. No matter how it turned out, she always said she loved it.”
“The spinach sounds delicious,” Sam said, wistful. Adam would laugh and laugh, but he’d eat it up if he got the chance, Sam bet. At least, if he was eating anything that day instead of just drinking his calories.
“Maybe I’ll make it for you some time,” Dean said, with that same distant hopefulness, like they were talking about winning the lottery. Sam didn’t like that Dean was starting to see how dead-end their lives were. But he couldn’t change that.
So he did what he could: “I could eat ten pounds of this, it’s so good,” he said, and swallowed another forkful. Dean smiled, proud of himself. Right then, Sam didn’t need to worry about that night’s appointment with Ruby or the next seal or what Lilith was planning to throw at them. He’d been hungry, and now he was fed; Adam was nearby; and Dean was sitting across from him, safe and sound.
I could live this life, he thought.
Then his cell buzzed, letting him know Ruby had arrived, and he made his excuses, trying not to notice how Dean’s face fell and telling himself it was only because he’d been a jerk and stuck Dean with the dishes.
****
Adam woke from one of his nightmares insisting that Dean needed an anti-possession tattoo, right the fuck now. Dean saw his point, even woozy in the middle of the night, but he was grateful to Sam for talking Adam into waiting until daylight.
When they actually went to the tattoo shop, Adam declined to watch Dean get inked—we watch each other bleed enough at our day job, he’d told Sam—and went instead to drink and/or hang out with Castiel. “I’m not sure which one I want the intervention for,” Sam said morosely after explaining why Adam wasn’t going to be joining them.
“Is it really that bad? Castiel seems pretty serious about protecting Adam,” Dean said. ‘Protecting’ was one word for it, but Dean wasn’t going to say the others to Sam, who was already possessive. Not that Dean had the high ground there. He was finding that he didn’t like having Sam out of his sight either, since being a hero and getting your ass kicked on a regular basis seemed to be overlapping experiences.
Sam looked at the flash decorating the walls as if searching for an answer. “Castiel treats Adam like he wasn’t ever in Hell,” he said at last. “He expects too much.”
Dean was at a disadvantage here, never having known Adam before Hell (so very fucking weird). From what he’d seen, Adam could pull it together when a fight was at hand, even though he did spend a lot of time pickling his bad memories. Measuring by the ability to save innocent lives, Adam was way ahead of Dean, so being technically the older brother didn’t give Dean enough credibility to tell him to shape up.
He was grateful when the tattoo artist showed up, because he didn’t have to think about how he was failing to carry his weight on the team. “First tattoo?” the girl asked incuriously, looking at his bared chest with a clinical eye (though she did melt a little when he broke out the I-think-you’re-super-cute smile; he still had it).
Dean nodded, and she leaned forward a bit, letting him look at the edges of the elaborate Japanese-style scene that showed over her tank top. “It hits people differently. If you’re gonna throw up, let me know. Otherwise, just keep your mouth shut.”
That puzzled him a bit, until she finished the ticklish business of placing the design and began the real needlework. It hurt, bone-deep, and he had to stay still for it, and before she’d finished the first point of the star the pain had become something very different.
Sam was watching him, watching the blood bead up on his skin, flinching with him every time the girl wiped some away, her gloved hands confident as she pushed the ink so far into him it couldn’t be removed. Dean tried to control his breathing, or at least not to make sex noises, but Sam was watching him like he was the main attraction at a strip joint and he’d just gotten rid of his G-string.
He was joining them. Now they’d all have the same sign, almost better than sharing the same name. The tattoo was like a secret sheriff’s star: a vow to protect the innocent.
God, the pain was good, a low buzz that filled him up, like she was putting the needle into every inch of his skin at the same time. He gripped the armrests with all his strength and concentrated on not humping the air, just letting it happen.
Sam’s eyes were dark, giving nothing away as he focused on the tattooist’s work. Dean wasn’t sure he was blinking. Dean himself was sweating, his bones like lead inside him.
The pain varied as she moved over his flesh, alternately hot and cool as the waves of sensation flowed through him. Sam’s hands were clenched on his knees, the veins on the backs of his hands standing out with tension, as if he was feeling the echoes from when he’d gotten his own tattoo. His expression had the same concentration as when he was tracking down a scrap of information about Lilith.
“Not much longer,” the girl said, and Dean nearly wrenched himself out of the chair; he’d forgotten she was there, and not just a line of fire moving across his skin. Sam took a deep breath and leaned forward, as if he was worried that she might get the last bit wrong if he wasn’t standing guard.
Dean was sure Sam must approve of how good he was being, not moving or crying out. He’d spent the first part of his life getting wasted and running from any kind of responsibility, but that was done now. And when Dean jerked off, later, with the tattoo carefully covered with plastic wrap and tape, he thought only about the buzz of the needle and the pressure on his skin.
****
Sam had a lot of time to review how he got here, sitting in the hospital chair Castiel had vacated next to his brother’s bruised, weary body.
The memories were blurred together in his mind: the yellow-eyed man forcing him to drink from his wrist, the shock of fire as his mother screamed, the weight of Adam as Sam carried him out of the house, all starting a nightmare that had lasted twenty years. He’d left for Stanford never having told Adam about the blood. Dad’s rages when he’d mentioned it, before he’d learned better, had been epic. Adam had always known about the nightmares, though; how could he not, when Sam woke him up half the time? But it had taken Sam months after Jess died to admit even to himself that the dreams with her face had been premonitions. Telling Adam about his visions had been the hardest thing he’d done to that point, worse than disowning Dad and leaving.
The only thing that he’d had that wasn’t freaky psychic powers and a knife collection was being Adam’s brother. The one who always knew more and got there first. Admitting his willful blindness and his freakshow nature to Adam had been almost unmanning.
And look what good it had done: Adam convinced that it was his turn to take care of Sam, combining the toxic brew of his depression over Dad’s death with his determination to prove himself as hunter, protector, savior. Sam had sent Adam to that crossroads, Sam had failed to keep him out of Hell, and Sam hadn’t told the angels to fuck themselves when they came for his brother.
The soft knock at the door brought him away from thoughts that circled darkly around ‘stayed dead.’ Dean’s expression was apologetic, but he held out one of the cups he was carrying.
The coffee turned out to be half milk and another quarter sugar, and Sam was guessing that it was decaf, but it still felt good. There was a jackhammer pounding away at his right temple, but despite the fact that Alastair had been a major demon, the pain was no worse than it had been with the last few regular ones he’d pulled.
Dean pulled up another chair beside him, close enough that they were knee to knee. In his drugged, catheterized sleep, Adam looked like an overstressed college student, too thin and too pale but no real signs of the deeper suffering.
“I should’ve told him not to do it,” Dean said, after a while.
Sam snorted. “Yeah, Castiel would’ve loved that.”
“Would he really smite me? I’m—” he cut off what was probably going to be something like ‘a real human,’ and though that was probably out of respect for Sam it only highlighted that Sam was different. Dean didn’t look at him like he was a monster, though. Dean didn’t even look at him like Adam did: loved but not trusted, like Adam’s trip through Hell and conversations with angels meant that Adam was better than he was. Dean looked at Sam like he was just as confused at how they’d ended up here as Sam was. He’d followed Sam into that torture chamber without question, when Sam said he needed to help Adam. Dean had believed in him, and not just because he wanted something like Ruby did.
Dean shifted in his chair, his beat-up jacket crunching a little (Sam had the uncomfortable suspicion that it was still covered with demon blood, but he already knew that the stuff lost its power dried up). “Some days I feel like I’m the only one who sees how nuts this all is. An angel needs a torturer? A demon wants to save the world? I keep thinking we should just … dump it all. Take you and Adam and—go fishing.”
“Like you did with Dad,” Sam said, knowing it was just the wrong thing even as it came out of his mouth. Shit, he needed Ruby. Just a few minutes, not even a fuck afterwards, just to get his head clear.
Dean flicked a glance at him, then seemed to decide that Sam wasn’t really interested in a fight. “Dad never really knew what questions to ask when he came around,” he said, staring down at his hands. “We could—get a cabin, hole up there and learn all the stuff that most brothers know already.”
“What makes you think Lilith and the angels would let us go?” Sam asked out of idle curiosity. Dean was new to vengeance, and the ghouls who’d killed his mother were dead besides. He didn’t burn for payback like Sam did.
Dean hesitated, then reached out for Adam’s slack hand, like it would somehow give him strength. “If they didn’t need humans, they wouldn’t be after you so hard. Angels need consent, and it sure seems like the demons must need something like that, or you’d be dead five times over—and not coming back,” he added quickly before Sam could interrupt with a recap. “So, I say fuck ‘em. Quit. I can’t see how we win, playing their game.”
For some reason, Sam’s mind went to his nearly empty flask. “It’s too late for that,” Sam said.
Dean looked like he wanted to say more. His eyes were on Adam. “I always wanted brothers. I just didn’t know … how much it would hurt, when you got hurt. I feel like, I should be taking the hits. But I can’t, and I hate it.”
Sam swallowed against the heaviness in his chest. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “it means a lot that you want to.” Maybe he didn’t really believe that right now—there was too much rage in his head, too many exorcisms undone—but he knew Dean deserved to hear it.
****
Astonishingly, things got worse after the angels fucked Adam over —whose bright idea was it to take a torturer whose experience was on not-really-real, Hell-resurrected bodies and have him try it out on a possessed human, anyway?—and Adam and Sam had another knock-down fight, this one not about any particular aspect of their situation so much as it was about everything.
Dean had been thinking that Sam’s distrust of Castiel was mostly weird envy (of Adam’s divided attention, of Castiel’s success getting Adam out of Hell when Sam failed, of Heaven’s apparent favoritism for Sam’s little brother when Sam was stuck palling around with demons just because of something that happened when he was a toddler). But he’d started to share Sam’s suspicions. For one thing, anyone with a brain, much less four wings and the face of a lion, could tell that just giving Sam orders without any reasons why was the fastest way to get him to head in the opposite direction, especially when that direction was towards some hot chick promising him that he could be a hero. Dean also found it hard to believe that Sam’s demon fuckbuddy wanted to save the world. So, if the angels didn’t want an apocalypse, they had an awfully funny way of showing it.
And then they brought a little girl into the whole mess. Castiel took her—consent was a joke when it came to a girl missing her father, and Dean ought to know—and used her. Just as a side note, they found out that Sam wasn’t just getting demon strange, he was drinking demon blood, because they didn’t have nearly enough shit to wade through already.
Sam was too out of it to notice when they locked him in Bobby Singer’s panic room, but Dean was pretty sure Adam thought this was worse than Hell. He’d looked better lying in his hospital bed after Alastair’s beatdown.
Dean hadn’t ever felt as strong a tug towards Adam as to Sam—and what that said about him, more in tune with a demon blood junkie than with Heaven’s chosen warrior, he didn’t want to think about—but that didn’t mean he was okay with his half-brother suffering. Bobby took the bottle of Jack away from Adam before the kid got more than a quarter of the way through, but then scrutinized the both of them and disappeared, as if telling Dean: this is your family business, you fix it.
As clueless as Dean felt, there was something kind of nice about the idea that their shared blood gave Sam and Adam an obligation to listen to him. He was the oldest, after all, and the least fucked-up (even if you only went by police records, those couple of drunk and disorderlies notwithstanding).
“I can’t say I have any clue what’s gonna happen,” he settled on at last. “And I know I’m not the same as Sam. You two, what you’ve been through, I can’t pretend to understand it. But I’m here. I’m your family and I’m here.”
Adam blinked at him a couple of times. “Dad shoulda told us,” he said thickly. “I probably woulda dragged you into this shitshow, just like I dragged Sam back in, but—I wish I’d known.”
“Yeah,” Dean said, and then Adam slumped back into Bobby’s couch. After a couple of minutes of silence, Dean dared to cross the room and shake out a blanket over Adam’s dazed body. Dean himself thought about checking on Sam, but he was guessing he’d be even less welcome there. So he went into the spare room Bobby’d shown him earlier and tried to get some shut-eye.
And then Sam was gone, and Adam hared off after him without even waiting for Dean, and Dean realized why Sam said he couldn’t quit: because waiting for the world to end was worse than losing the fight to save it.
****
Sam told himself that Adam couldn’t get the job done, that it didn’t matter what happened to him, because Dean was there for Adam now. Sam told himself that there was always going to be collateral damage, and that it was the fault of the demon for possessing the nurse and not his own. Adam said that he was a monster, and Adam would know. But that was a price he’d already decided to pay.
Lilith had to die, and Sam was the one to do it.
Only it didn’t work out that way, and all of a sudden he was on a plane with Adam, fleeing from the thing he’d done.
****
Dean watched from a distance as the two of them talked across a picnic table, both slump-shouldered. Adam offered Sam the keys to the Impala. Sam shook his head. Sam looked over at Dean and his face changed, another small collapse.
“I’m leaving,” he said as soon as he reached Dean. “You can’t trust me, and neither can I.”
“Don’t go,” burst out before Dean could think about it, but Sam just shook his head. “Sammy—” Dean tried, about to offer to come with him and hold his hand through the shakes.
“I need you to take care of Adam,” Sam interrupted, edging closer, his fingers twisting in the strap of his pack.
“Who’s going to take care of you?” Dean asked, leaning in further himself.
Sam shrugged. “I can’t hunt, and he can’t stop. Please, Dean.”
Sam’s eyes were so—Dean wanted to look away, and he wanted to stay here forever. I’m going to kiss him, he thought distantly, and felt himself moving towards Sam like every cell in him was magnetized.
Somehow, Sam turned Dean’s lunge into a hug. Dean’s arms came up automatically, and he hid his face in Sam’s shoulder, shaking with terrible and epically mistimed want.
Sam’s breath was hot and wet along his neck. “Promise me, please.” His voice was unsteady, and if he had an equal yearning, maybe that was worse. Lucifer walked the earth and Sam was a demon blood addict. What Dean wanted, however bad, was irrelevant.
“Okay, Sam,” Dean made himself say, and then made himself loosen his grip, which felt more like peeling his skin off. He turned to see Adam staring at the two of them, and wondered how much of that had shown.
When he turned back, Sam was already halfway to the road. Wait, he wanted to call out. How can this be a good idea? But if he stayed around Sam, he didn’t know if he’d be able to control himself, and Sam had made him give his word.
“You coming?” Adam called, and Dean followed him.
****
Sam quitting being a Winchester didn’t mean that being a Winchester quit him. Lucifer’s tender ministrations—not to mention the hunters who wanted to get him high and somehow use that to gank Lucifer—made it crystal clear that Sam didn’t get to leave the game in the fourth quarter, the way maybe he could’ve done if he’d listened to Dean not too long ago.
He wouldn’t say he was pathetically grateful that Adam called and wanted him back. Manageably grateful, okay. And he could deal with whatever was going on between him and Dean. At least it made a distraction from Lucifer wanting his body.
Of course, being back together didn’t mean being in perfect harmony, any more than it ever had. “Your plan sucks,” Dean said flatly as they discussed what to do with the newly reacquired Colt. “You think we’re just gonna walk right up to Lucifer and put a bullet through his brain?”
“We know where he’s gonna be, and we’ve got as big a team as we’re likely to get,” Sam argued right back.
Dean was proved disastrously right when they arrived in Carthage. How the fuck Meg and her hellhounds were on Lucifer’s side if Lucifer planned to exterminate all the demons was a puzzle, but not one they had any time to figure out. Jo got clawed up bad saving Dean, who’d never faced hellhounds before and couldn’t seem to figure out where to aim.
“She needs a hospital,” Dean said when they’d gotten to momentary safety in an abandoned hardware store. The rest of them knew that she didn’t have much of a chance even if they’d had a medivac right there, but nobody told Dean.
There were enough supplies in the hardware store to build a bomb that would put even a hellhounds down. They just needed someone to keep the hellhounds focused on the building. “You go,” Jo told the Winchesters. “I’m not getting out of this, so I’ll stay here and distract the hounds.”
Sam hated it, but her sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain.
“Fuck that noise,” Dean said. “How about we let the guy who can run trigger the thing, after Ellen’s gotten Jo into the car. I’ll cover them. You guys build the damn bomb while we’re at it.”
Ellen and Sam shared a long moment. Ellen’s eyes said everything that needed saying: if there was any chance at all, she was taking it, and the bomb was only a two-man job. “Fine,” Sam decided.
Sam didn’t see Dean use his newfound knowledge of how hellhounds looked when they moved, but he did hear the car start, and Dean made it back inside only bleeding in a couple of places.
“You’ll have ten seconds, max,” Sam warned, and hoped it would be that much—amateur bomb-making was a dicey proposition at the best of times, which this was not.
Dean nodded, and Sam and Adam headed out to confront Lucifer.
****
So the Colt was a huge disappointment, more to Sam and Adam than to Dean since Dean had never seen it work its magic. Dean thought that watching it kill the yellow-eyed demon who’d fucked up their family had probably made it seem invincible. Yes, he was bummed too: Lucifer, wholesale slaughter of humanity, and so on.
But Dean hadn’t blown himself up, which had sure seemed like the most likely outcome when he’d been holding that patched-together trigger. And Ellen had good news, or what counted as good news for them: Jo nearly bled out on the way to the hospital, and her heart stopped twice during emergency surgery. She was down to one kidney and would need months of rehab. But she was going to be okay. “Surgeon came in talking about plastic surgery so the scar wouldn’t be so ugly,” Ellen said on the phone, the pride radiating across state lines, “and she said no man who was afraid of who she was deserved a moment of her time.”
“Tell her I’m sorry,” Dean said. If he’d known what he was doing, she wouldn’t have had to come rescue him in the first place. She’d been doing fine until she’d gotten distracted saving his ass.
“Shut your mouth,” Ellen told him. “A friend’s in trouble, you go help ‘em. Jo was raised right, and so were you.”
It wasn’t absolution. Dean still owed Jo, and he was going to fight twice as hard so that he wouldn’t get someone else hurt again. But knowing that Ellen didn’t judge him harshly was a huge relief. “Thanks,” he said.
Ellen made an exasperated sound. “Didn’t I say to shut your mouth? Now you go find those two boys and make sure they haven’t drunk themselves blind.” She hung up without saying goodbye.
Dean suspected that, had he been there in person to proposition Ellen right then, she might’ve taken him up on the offer. What a night that would’ve been. It was probably for the best that she was a hundred miles away, though. The last thing he needed was another complicated relationship.
****
When they’d found out that they’d been created to host Lucifer and Michael, like matching socks, Sam hadn’t even been very surprised. Of course they’d have jobs to do, assigned to them like Dad giving each of them a list of chores. God’s assignment just had one item for each of them, but it was a doozy. The extra information, though—Heaven’s role in breaking up Dad and Dean’s mom—that was not a good reveal.
“Your mom and dad were a real coup,” the cupid said. It—he—was proud. Dean’s fists clenched.
“So they weren’t really in love?” Adam asked, sounding lost, like this of all the shit that had happened to them was too much.
“Oh no, not at all,” the cupid said. “What we do is real. Absolutely real. It’s just not chosen, but then what love ever is? In John Winchester’s case, there was some other woman he loved, so that was a fiddly bit, but overall it was extremely well executed. And you certainly turned out well!”
Which was when Dean punched him.
As it turned out, the cupid wasn’t even the problem: it was Famine. Sam understood why they locked him up, even if it turned out to be a dumb idea when that left him trussed up for the demons.
He’d just finished drinking the last one when Dean burst back into the motel room.
“Where’s Adam?” Sam demanded.
Dean shook his head. “Still waiting for Cas to take care of business in between burgers. I—I had to see you.” He moved closer, not reacting to the blood on Sam’s chin. His eyes were gleaming, his skin flushed. He looked like he’d been working himself up to an important confession.
He’s infected, Sam realized.
Dean put his hand on Sam’s arm. Sam could feel the heat of him even through his jacket and shirt. Blood always made him horny, now. Ruby had trained him to expect it, like a dog hearing Pavlov’s dinner bell. That was the best explanation he could offer for how his heart rate was speeding and his dick was starting to thicken.
Dean took a deep breath, his ridiculous lashes dipping. He was sweating, nervous, and Sam wanted to tell him it was okay despite everything. “If I could just—maybe just once, you know?”
Sam knew there was no ‘just once’ with this, even without Famine’s interference. The demon blood had dulled the current he felt running between them, the sense that they were just a few steps away from snapping into perfect alignment. But with Dean’s hand on him, it was hard to remember what they were supposed to be to each other. Without meaning to, he’d drifted closer, so that Dean’s head was now tilted back, looking up into Sam’s eyes. Almost perfectly positioned to be kissed.
He was covered in blood. He was drinking demon blood, and he was about to get it all over Dean, who deserved so much better than this—who was under a compulsion.
Ignoring the pounding heat that wanted to drive him forward, Sam put his hand on Dean’s chest—it felt like Dean’s heartbeat was his own—and pushed, hard enough that Dean took a blessed, awful step back.
“First, we have to make sure Famine’s been taken care of.”
Dean pouted, but he wasn’t so far gone that he ignored Sam. Or maybe, Sam thought and quashed the idea immediately, what he really wanted was Sam’s willingness.
After Sam exorcised all the demons inside Famine, Dean didn’t bring up what had happened, and Sam wasn’t planning to either. Especially since Adam was apparently dead inside (even Castiel’s skewed and slightly distracted report couldn’t skip over that part of their encounter with Famine before Sam arrived), and they still had the other Horsemen to track down. Yes, it would be nice if he had the time to freak out over his apparently shared attraction to his half-brother, but he just wasn’t seeing where it fit on the schedule.
****
Dean didn’t know how to think about the cupid’s revelations. He’d always thought he was a jerk—a con artist and a love-‘em-and-leave-‘em type—because of his dad. His dad who abandoned him and his mom, when his mom was way too young to be alone with a kid to support. He’d grown up thinking John Winchester was just an asshole sperm donor. Finding out that John might not have had much choice when he walked out the door was going to require a radical rethinking of his own life. Could people even fight cupids? Was it like being possessed, no choice at all? From what Sam and Adam had said, his father had raised them to think their mom had been some kind of saint, even if he hadn’t been a monk after her death. And was what John had felt different from real love, if that even existed?
These were all perfectly sucky questions, and the information wasn’t exactly important to their present clusterfuck.
So he shoved his uncertainties aside, only for things to get exponentially weirder when they were ripped out of reality and through a bunch of tired television plots. Dean wasn’t even resentful that he was the sidekick/lab tech/nurse in most of them, though being Sam’s serious-but-supportive partner in the herpes ad was, he thought, really unfair. As was having to read questions in Japanese before Sam got punched in the balls.
When the ratty little Trickster—apparently he was also some sort of angel, but given how he’d just put them through TVLand hell, Dean was fine sticking with ‘Trickster’—showed up in person, he started off by ignoring Dean and lecturing Sam and Adam about their destinies. But after a couple of minutes of boring ranting, he slowed, eyes flicking over to Dean again and again, and then stopped entirely in favor of staring at Dean like he wanted to cut him into bite-sized pieces.
“Well, you are a puzzle,” the Trickster said while Sam demanded to know what was going on. “You shouldn’t be here at all. And I should know—I do this for a living, after all.”
“What do you mean?” Adam shouldered in front of Sam, murder in his eyes. “Is this another one of your sick jokes? Maybe we don’t really have a brother at all.”
Dean sneered a little at that—Adam wished—but Dean himself wasn’t a hundred percent on what he wanted to be the truth of his existence at this point.
“Oh, he’s your brother all right,” the Trickster said. “It’s just wrong. And, honestly, I’m not sure I’d tell you the details if I knew them. You clowns are already too focused on your narcissistic personalities. You should be thinking about stepping into your assigned roles and saving the world, not about Daddy’s wild oats.”
“Second verse, same as the first,” Adam snarked. The Trickster snapped his fingers and Adam was wearing a ball gag, which Dean probably shouldn’t have found as funny as he did.
“Clock’s running down, boys,” the Trickster said. “Bow to your partners and get in line, or it’s gonna get a whole lot worse.”
Personally, Dean thought that when all the supernatural folks spent so much time telling Sam and Adam that they were destined to play specific roles, that was pretty good evidence that there was some free will involved. Not that free will would necessarily help while there were so many ways to hurt the Winchesters and use them against each other. But, as far as Dean could tell, people didn’t usually spend a lot of time denouncing stuff that couldn’t happen. And given how badly they’d seen angels and demons behave, Dean was thinking that they were enough like people to justify the same conclusion: resistance was possible.
Of course, Sam and Adam said the same, when they could be made to talk about the situation at all. But some days, like the ones following the Trickster’s illustrated lecture, Dean thought he might be the only one who really believed.
****
Sam wondered what it would have been like to be the little brother instead. Maybe what he felt for Dean was the desire for security: Not to have to be in charge, responsible for the apocalypse and all his other screwups along the way, from Ruby to Jess to leaving Adam with Dad for four more years of indoctrination into how he was never good enough.
Now that Dean knew Sam’s worst secrets, he was easy to talk to. Sam told him about Jess, and it wasn’t fraught the way it had been with Adam, both of them resentful and afraid. Sam told him about Ruby, a rawer wound, but Dean listened and offered a few inappropriate stories about his own sexual misadventures that, while funny enough to make Sam’s stomach ache from laughter, really didn’t compare to fucking a demon and letting Lucifer out of his cage. But that probably wasn’t the point.
They didn’t talk about Dean’s almost-advance under Famine’s influence. Sam knew better than anyone how wires could get crossed in someone’s head when the pressure was too great. Combine mortal danger and total secrecy and of course boundaries were going to blur.
“I get it, you fucked up,” Dean said, one night when Adam was finally passed out on the bed nearest the door and Dean himself was listing pretty severely, sitting on the floor but propped up by the other bed. “You don’t have to keep telling me. I’m not saying you should forget about it, but there’s a lot more to you than your worst day.”
Sam, who was very carefully positioned so that getting to Dean would require more coordination than he possessed at this particular stage of drunkenness, shrugged. “I want to make amends,” he explained, his lips numb. There was nothing he could do for the nurse he’d killed, and ‘don’t say yes to Lucifer’ seemed like a low bar for redemption. It was a puzzle.
Dean didn’t seem to have any better ideas. He took another pull from his bottle and wiped his mouth. It was distracting, his mouth. The promise of sin, but nothing really bad. Naughty boy, Sam thought.
“If we get the rings,” Sam said, wanting a change of topic from Dean’s pretty, drunk-open face, “I gotta be the one to open the door, you know that, right? I’m the only one who can lure Lucifer close enough.”
Dean was too drunk to raise one eyebrow, so he made do with both. “Much as he wants your fine ass, I think he’s gonna notice a swirling door to Hell right next to you.”
Adam moaned in his sleep, turning over so that he was on his stomach. He used to sleep like that when he was a kid, Sam remembered, but even more exaggeratedly—his butt pointing straight at the ceiling as he curled in on himself. It was the cutest fucking thing imaginable. He felt a pulsing warmth in his chest, a protective love for both of them. He’d gotten Lucifer’s party started, and it was his job to stop it.
“You’re right,” he told Dean. “We’ll figure out a way to hide it.”
Or, maybe, a way to give Lucifer what he thought he wanted, then spring the trap. Whatever it takes, he thought, watching Dean’s slightly open mouth as Dean contemplated the room with soused intensity. Whatever it takes.
****
Not too long after they started meeting Horsemen, Dean got a literal taste of Heaven. It tasted like his mom’s buttered toast and hot cocoa, the kind she made after he’d been playing outside in the snow. Sitting at her kitchen table, watching her putter around, was the best he’d felt in—he couldn’t remember. Even knowing that she was dead—that they were dead, thanks to Adam’s psycho hunter friends—he still felt warm and cocooned, safe in a way that he knew life didn’t really offer.
When Sam showed up, the first thing he thought was, now he can have a mom too. It just seemed so natural that his mom would love Sam in just the same way. Maybe in the real world it would matter that Sam was the son of the woman who’d stolen her man away (not on purpose, but nobody would expect her to be particularly understanding about cupidity), but here Dean thought that Mom’s only concern would be how good Dean felt when he was with Sam.
But Sam had a different agenda—they needed to get through Heaven and find Adam. This turned out to be more difficult than just moving through happy memories (and they skedaddled fast out of the night Dean lost his virginity, since at his age perving on sixteen-year-olds in their underwear was pedo territory).
“Why are these all my memories?” Dean asked, and then realized that it was an awkward question. Happiness and Sam hadn’t often gone together, it seemed. When Sam’s dead friend who’d hacked Heaven showed up, that was a relief. Except that he said something about soulmates that implied … well, Dean wasn’t really prepared to consider what it implied about Sam’s ability to show up in Dean’s Heaven without Ash’s special dimension-hopping skills. Then there was the pure creepy of a million Heavens each with only one real person inside, endlessly masturbating with ghosts of the rest of the world.
Ash got them to Adam’s Heaven, and it was full of graveyards. Apparently Adam had been happiest laying ghosts. Nice, simple work, with standard dangers and respectable payoffs. Dean got why Adam would’ve liked that, though the thought that these were his top memories was pretty depressing.
Fighting their way through to Joshua’s garden while Zachariah searched for them was plenty distracting, but his thoughts kept circling the idea Ash had put into his head.
Yes, God was cruel, a petty prankster who must’ve gotten tired with pulling the wings off of flies and graduated to putting pins in humans just to see them squirm. But soulmates? Doomed to each other the way Dad had been yanked out of his life to be with Mary Winchester? It made his balls want to crawl up into his belly and spat on every good feeling he’d ever had about Sam.
He wasn’t going to let himself be led around by someone else’s plan.
Except that Sam had thought the same thing, and all it had gotten him was more disappointment when he did exactly what they’d tricked him into doing.
Finally, he understood why two guys who knew exactly what lurked in the dark were so good at denial when it came to everything else. Fighting for their lives against angels and devils was easier than fixing what was wrong in their heads.
And when God’s gardener rejected their pleas for help, Dean couldn’t pretend to be surprised. Deep inside, where Dean had spent a lifetime feeling hollow, the space that he thought hunting with his brothers might fill was changing. Filling with a thick red rage. Angels, demons, God: they were all shit. Free will, they said, and then blamed humanity for the hand it had been dealt—told Sam he was an abomination, when that was a better description of them. Somebody needed to deal out some justice to all the supernatural assholes who thought they were above judgment.
Part 3
Ellen Harvelle was awesome. Just scary enough that Dean didn’t put the moves on her outright, even though it had been almost a month since he’d gotten any (not counting that handjob at the service station in Ohio, which Dean didn’t since he wasn’t sixteen any more). But more than being terrifying, she knew at least as much about the supernatural as Sam and Adam did, and she wasn’t family, so he could actually ask some of his more delicate questions.
Like: what’s up with the demons hanging around Sam? Did Adam deserve to go to Hell? He’d heard the Winchester version of events, but that was kind of like reading USA Today when he needed a college textbook instead. And of course Sam fucked off before the bar even closed, doing whatever it was that Sam did when he disappeared, leaving an increasingly antsy Adam to alternate between frowning into his beer and half-heartedly hitting on Jo.
Finally, Ellen tossed the stragglers out, sent Jo to get a couple of books out of storage, and set Adam up with a leather-bound book the size of his torso that supposedly told the truth about angels. Then she took Dean back out to the bar “to get acquainted; I already know your problems, boy” (the look on Adam’s face when she said that to him was priceless). There, she confirmed enough of the basic facts to reassure Dean that, though everything else was crap, Sam and Adam hadn’t full-on lied to him the way they lied to the normal people they encountered on a case.
Not that Dean didn’t respect a good lie. He wasn’t exactly an upstanding citizen, even before Mom died. He could keep a legit job for a while, especially one that involved customer service, especially one with a slightly older female clientele, but he always found some way to screw it up for himself. He’d get drunk and then show up, visibly lit; he’d skip out for three days straight and blow all his money at some casino; he’d screw the owner’s teenage kid (they were always legal, though, since he was eighteen—no way was he going to end up in jail over a fuck). He knew he’d been a disappointment to his mom. Hunting was the first time in his life that the things he could do well outweighed the things he was a fuck-up at, and it felt good.
“So,” he said, when Ellen had finished explaining how she saw the whole Hell-Lilith-Lucifer-heavenly host struggle, “you gonna tell me to get out and live my life as long as I can, ‘cause this isn’t my job?”
Ellen poured another shot of whiskey and pounded it down, wiping her mouth off with the back of her hand in a move that had Dean shifting on his stool. “It shouldn’t oughta be anybody’s job,” she said plainly. “But it is. You seem like a grown man—” she put a hand up before Dean could take advantage of that line—“and honestly, those boys need all the help they can get. Without their daddy, they’ve been tugging in different directions so long I don’t think either of them knows how to stop.”
Dean rolled his own shotglass between his palms, watching the overhead lights refract through the thick glass onto the scratched wood of the bar. “I just don’t know what an ordinary person can do. Hell, I’ve seen what a hunter can do to a ghost, or a vampire, and I believe there’s ways to hunt all these things I didn’t believe in three months ago. But angels? Demons from out of the Bible? I don’t know if there is a pay grade for that.”
“Only one way to find out,” Ellen said, not unsympathetically.
Dean chuckled. “Guess so,” he said, and went to see whether Adam had learned anything from the Big Book of Angels.
****
The night’s motel was only a couple of blocks away from a Wal-Mart (or a Wal-Mart parking lot, anyway), and Dean used the opportunity to shop for actual groceries.
“Get me a medium knife,” Dean ordered when he had various green and brown things laid out on the tiny kitchenette counter. “And grab one for yourself, while you’re at it.”
“You’re seriously going to cook with our knives?” Adam said, saving Sam the trouble.
Dean turned and gave them a huge, shiteating grin, the kind that crinkled his eyes up and made Sam want to hunch his shoulders and look away before he did something dumb, like blushing or forgetting his own name. “Dude, you clean those knives like you’re about to perform surgery with them.” And occasionally have, Sam didn’t add. It was a good point, and Adam didn’t have another argument in reserve, so (after an impromptu wrestling match from which Sam emerged righteously triumphant) Adam went and got the knives. But somehow Sam ended up the sous-chef, and worse than that, Dean seemed to think that calling him ‘Sammy’ was fully justified despite or maybe because of how annoying the nickname was. Sam kept resolving not to respond to it, and then realizing that he’d just complied with yet another instruction, like the world’s worst Simon Says player.
He didn’t really mind. Dean made a huge salad, with creamy chunks of avocado and onions he’d fried himself, along with sweet peppers and spinach and sunflower seeds. He made a roast, explaining the process as he went as if making sure Sam could do it for himself next time. By the time he got it out of the oven, Sam was about ready to eat Dean’s arm—but the roast was a hell of a lot better, and the salad was so good that Adam only bitched for a minute about having to eat his serving before getting more meat.
In fact, Adam ate two plates full. Then he went outside to sit on the hood of the Impala, which seemed like the least damaging brooding he could do, so Sam didn’t attempt to fight it.
The whole process seemed so exotic to Sam: being able to take a bunch of raw ingredients and turn them into actual food. Even in college, he’d lived out of the dining hall, which while more nutritious and abundant than the food he’d scrounged on the road was still prepared for him. He’d never managed to do more than heat up soup out of cans for Adam.
“Did your mom teach you how to cook?” he asked while Dean was using a roll to mop up the last of the juices.
Dean stiffened for a moment, then smiled, soft and remembering. “Kind of. She got me halfway, and then when I moved out, I watched a lot of cooking shows. When I’d visit, I’d bring her scalloped potatoes or spinach with raisins and pine nuts or something like that. No matter how it turned out, she always said she loved it.”
“The spinach sounds delicious,” Sam said, wistful. Adam would laugh and laugh, but he’d eat it up if he got the chance, Sam bet. At least, if he was eating anything that day instead of just drinking his calories.
“Maybe I’ll make it for you some time,” Dean said, with that same distant hopefulness, like they were talking about winning the lottery. Sam didn’t like that Dean was starting to see how dead-end their lives were. But he couldn’t change that.
So he did what he could: “I could eat ten pounds of this, it’s so good,” he said, and swallowed another forkful. Dean smiled, proud of himself. Right then, Sam didn’t need to worry about that night’s appointment with Ruby or the next seal or what Lilith was planning to throw at them. He’d been hungry, and now he was fed; Adam was nearby; and Dean was sitting across from him, safe and sound.
I could live this life, he thought.
Then his cell buzzed, letting him know Ruby had arrived, and he made his excuses, trying not to notice how Dean’s face fell and telling himself it was only because he’d been a jerk and stuck Dean with the dishes.
****
Adam woke from one of his nightmares insisting that Dean needed an anti-possession tattoo, right the fuck now. Dean saw his point, even woozy in the middle of the night, but he was grateful to Sam for talking Adam into waiting until daylight.
When they actually went to the tattoo shop, Adam declined to watch Dean get inked—we watch each other bleed enough at our day job, he’d told Sam—and went instead to drink and/or hang out with Castiel. “I’m not sure which one I want the intervention for,” Sam said morosely after explaining why Adam wasn’t going to be joining them.
“Is it really that bad? Castiel seems pretty serious about protecting Adam,” Dean said. ‘Protecting’ was one word for it, but Dean wasn’t going to say the others to Sam, who was already possessive. Not that Dean had the high ground there. He was finding that he didn’t like having Sam out of his sight either, since being a hero and getting your ass kicked on a regular basis seemed to be overlapping experiences.
Sam looked at the flash decorating the walls as if searching for an answer. “Castiel treats Adam like he wasn’t ever in Hell,” he said at last. “He expects too much.”
Dean was at a disadvantage here, never having known Adam before Hell (so very fucking weird). From what he’d seen, Adam could pull it together when a fight was at hand, even though he did spend a lot of time pickling his bad memories. Measuring by the ability to save innocent lives, Adam was way ahead of Dean, so being technically the older brother didn’t give Dean enough credibility to tell him to shape up.
He was grateful when the tattoo artist showed up, because he didn’t have to think about how he was failing to carry his weight on the team. “First tattoo?” the girl asked incuriously, looking at his bared chest with a clinical eye (though she did melt a little when he broke out the I-think-you’re-super-cute smile; he still had it).
Dean nodded, and she leaned forward a bit, letting him look at the edges of the elaborate Japanese-style scene that showed over her tank top. “It hits people differently. If you’re gonna throw up, let me know. Otherwise, just keep your mouth shut.”
That puzzled him a bit, until she finished the ticklish business of placing the design and began the real needlework. It hurt, bone-deep, and he had to stay still for it, and before she’d finished the first point of the star the pain had become something very different.
Sam was watching him, watching the blood bead up on his skin, flinching with him every time the girl wiped some away, her gloved hands confident as she pushed the ink so far into him it couldn’t be removed. Dean tried to control his breathing, or at least not to make sex noises, but Sam was watching him like he was the main attraction at a strip joint and he’d just gotten rid of his G-string.
He was joining them. Now they’d all have the same sign, almost better than sharing the same name. The tattoo was like a secret sheriff’s star: a vow to protect the innocent.
God, the pain was good, a low buzz that filled him up, like she was putting the needle into every inch of his skin at the same time. He gripped the armrests with all his strength and concentrated on not humping the air, just letting it happen.
Sam’s eyes were dark, giving nothing away as he focused on the tattooist’s work. Dean wasn’t sure he was blinking. Dean himself was sweating, his bones like lead inside him.
The pain varied as she moved over his flesh, alternately hot and cool as the waves of sensation flowed through him. Sam’s hands were clenched on his knees, the veins on the backs of his hands standing out with tension, as if he was feeling the echoes from when he’d gotten his own tattoo. His expression had the same concentration as when he was tracking down a scrap of information about Lilith.
“Not much longer,” the girl said, and Dean nearly wrenched himself out of the chair; he’d forgotten she was there, and not just a line of fire moving across his skin. Sam took a deep breath and leaned forward, as if he was worried that she might get the last bit wrong if he wasn’t standing guard.
Dean was sure Sam must approve of how good he was being, not moving or crying out. He’d spent the first part of his life getting wasted and running from any kind of responsibility, but that was done now. And when Dean jerked off, later, with the tattoo carefully covered with plastic wrap and tape, he thought only about the buzz of the needle and the pressure on his skin.
****
Sam had a lot of time to review how he got here, sitting in the hospital chair Castiel had vacated next to his brother’s bruised, weary body.
The memories were blurred together in his mind: the yellow-eyed man forcing him to drink from his wrist, the shock of fire as his mother screamed, the weight of Adam as Sam carried him out of the house, all starting a nightmare that had lasted twenty years. He’d left for Stanford never having told Adam about the blood. Dad’s rages when he’d mentioned it, before he’d learned better, had been epic. Adam had always known about the nightmares, though; how could he not, when Sam woke him up half the time? But it had taken Sam months after Jess died to admit even to himself that the dreams with her face had been premonitions. Telling Adam about his visions had been the hardest thing he’d done to that point, worse than disowning Dad and leaving.
The only thing that he’d had that wasn’t freaky psychic powers and a knife collection was being Adam’s brother. The one who always knew more and got there first. Admitting his willful blindness and his freakshow nature to Adam had been almost unmanning.
And look what good it had done: Adam convinced that it was his turn to take care of Sam, combining the toxic brew of his depression over Dad’s death with his determination to prove himself as hunter, protector, savior. Sam had sent Adam to that crossroads, Sam had failed to keep him out of Hell, and Sam hadn’t told the angels to fuck themselves when they came for his brother.
The soft knock at the door brought him away from thoughts that circled darkly around ‘stayed dead.’ Dean’s expression was apologetic, but he held out one of the cups he was carrying.
The coffee turned out to be half milk and another quarter sugar, and Sam was guessing that it was decaf, but it still felt good. There was a jackhammer pounding away at his right temple, but despite the fact that Alastair had been a major demon, the pain was no worse than it had been with the last few regular ones he’d pulled.
Dean pulled up another chair beside him, close enough that they were knee to knee. In his drugged, catheterized sleep, Adam looked like an overstressed college student, too thin and too pale but no real signs of the deeper suffering.
“I should’ve told him not to do it,” Dean said, after a while.
Sam snorted. “Yeah, Castiel would’ve loved that.”
“Would he really smite me? I’m—” he cut off what was probably going to be something like ‘a real human,’ and though that was probably out of respect for Sam it only highlighted that Sam was different. Dean didn’t look at him like he was a monster, though. Dean didn’t even look at him like Adam did: loved but not trusted, like Adam’s trip through Hell and conversations with angels meant that Adam was better than he was. Dean looked at Sam like he was just as confused at how they’d ended up here as Sam was. He’d followed Sam into that torture chamber without question, when Sam said he needed to help Adam. Dean had believed in him, and not just because he wanted something like Ruby did.
Dean shifted in his chair, his beat-up jacket crunching a little (Sam had the uncomfortable suspicion that it was still covered with demon blood, but he already knew that the stuff lost its power dried up). “Some days I feel like I’m the only one who sees how nuts this all is. An angel needs a torturer? A demon wants to save the world? I keep thinking we should just … dump it all. Take you and Adam and—go fishing.”
“Like you did with Dad,” Sam said, knowing it was just the wrong thing even as it came out of his mouth. Shit, he needed Ruby. Just a few minutes, not even a fuck afterwards, just to get his head clear.
Dean flicked a glance at him, then seemed to decide that Sam wasn’t really interested in a fight. “Dad never really knew what questions to ask when he came around,” he said, staring down at his hands. “We could—get a cabin, hole up there and learn all the stuff that most brothers know already.”
“What makes you think Lilith and the angels would let us go?” Sam asked out of idle curiosity. Dean was new to vengeance, and the ghouls who’d killed his mother were dead besides. He didn’t burn for payback like Sam did.
Dean hesitated, then reached out for Adam’s slack hand, like it would somehow give him strength. “If they didn’t need humans, they wouldn’t be after you so hard. Angels need consent, and it sure seems like the demons must need something like that, or you’d be dead five times over—and not coming back,” he added quickly before Sam could interrupt with a recap. “So, I say fuck ‘em. Quit. I can’t see how we win, playing their game.”
For some reason, Sam’s mind went to his nearly empty flask. “It’s too late for that,” Sam said.
Dean looked like he wanted to say more. His eyes were on Adam. “I always wanted brothers. I just didn’t know … how much it would hurt, when you got hurt. I feel like, I should be taking the hits. But I can’t, and I hate it.”
Sam swallowed against the heaviness in his chest. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “it means a lot that you want to.” Maybe he didn’t really believe that right now—there was too much rage in his head, too many exorcisms undone—but he knew Dean deserved to hear it.
****
Astonishingly, things got worse after the angels fucked Adam over —whose bright idea was it to take a torturer whose experience was on not-really-real, Hell-resurrected bodies and have him try it out on a possessed human, anyway?—and Adam and Sam had another knock-down fight, this one not about any particular aspect of their situation so much as it was about everything.
Dean had been thinking that Sam’s distrust of Castiel was mostly weird envy (of Adam’s divided attention, of Castiel’s success getting Adam out of Hell when Sam failed, of Heaven’s apparent favoritism for Sam’s little brother when Sam was stuck palling around with demons just because of something that happened when he was a toddler). But he’d started to share Sam’s suspicions. For one thing, anyone with a brain, much less four wings and the face of a lion, could tell that just giving Sam orders without any reasons why was the fastest way to get him to head in the opposite direction, especially when that direction was towards some hot chick promising him that he could be a hero. Dean also found it hard to believe that Sam’s demon fuckbuddy wanted to save the world. So, if the angels didn’t want an apocalypse, they had an awfully funny way of showing it.
And then they brought a little girl into the whole mess. Castiel took her—consent was a joke when it came to a girl missing her father, and Dean ought to know—and used her. Just as a side note, they found out that Sam wasn’t just getting demon strange, he was drinking demon blood, because they didn’t have nearly enough shit to wade through already.
Sam was too out of it to notice when they locked him in Bobby Singer’s panic room, but Dean was pretty sure Adam thought this was worse than Hell. He’d looked better lying in his hospital bed after Alastair’s beatdown.
Dean hadn’t ever felt as strong a tug towards Adam as to Sam—and what that said about him, more in tune with a demon blood junkie than with Heaven’s chosen warrior, he didn’t want to think about—but that didn’t mean he was okay with his half-brother suffering. Bobby took the bottle of Jack away from Adam before the kid got more than a quarter of the way through, but then scrutinized the both of them and disappeared, as if telling Dean: this is your family business, you fix it.
As clueless as Dean felt, there was something kind of nice about the idea that their shared blood gave Sam and Adam an obligation to listen to him. He was the oldest, after all, and the least fucked-up (even if you only went by police records, those couple of drunk and disorderlies notwithstanding).
“I can’t say I have any clue what’s gonna happen,” he settled on at last. “And I know I’m not the same as Sam. You two, what you’ve been through, I can’t pretend to understand it. But I’m here. I’m your family and I’m here.”
Adam blinked at him a couple of times. “Dad shoulda told us,” he said thickly. “I probably woulda dragged you into this shitshow, just like I dragged Sam back in, but—I wish I’d known.”
“Yeah,” Dean said, and then Adam slumped back into Bobby’s couch. After a couple of minutes of silence, Dean dared to cross the room and shake out a blanket over Adam’s dazed body. Dean himself thought about checking on Sam, but he was guessing he’d be even less welcome there. So he went into the spare room Bobby’d shown him earlier and tried to get some shut-eye.
And then Sam was gone, and Adam hared off after him without even waiting for Dean, and Dean realized why Sam said he couldn’t quit: because waiting for the world to end was worse than losing the fight to save it.
****
Sam told himself that Adam couldn’t get the job done, that it didn’t matter what happened to him, because Dean was there for Adam now. Sam told himself that there was always going to be collateral damage, and that it was the fault of the demon for possessing the nurse and not his own. Adam said that he was a monster, and Adam would know. But that was a price he’d already decided to pay.
Lilith had to die, and Sam was the one to do it.
Only it didn’t work out that way, and all of a sudden he was on a plane with Adam, fleeing from the thing he’d done.
****
Dean watched from a distance as the two of them talked across a picnic table, both slump-shouldered. Adam offered Sam the keys to the Impala. Sam shook his head. Sam looked over at Dean and his face changed, another small collapse.
“I’m leaving,” he said as soon as he reached Dean. “You can’t trust me, and neither can I.”
“Don’t go,” burst out before Dean could think about it, but Sam just shook his head. “Sammy—” Dean tried, about to offer to come with him and hold his hand through the shakes.
“I need you to take care of Adam,” Sam interrupted, edging closer, his fingers twisting in the strap of his pack.
“Who’s going to take care of you?” Dean asked, leaning in further himself.
Sam shrugged. “I can’t hunt, and he can’t stop. Please, Dean.”
Sam’s eyes were so—Dean wanted to look away, and he wanted to stay here forever. I’m going to kiss him, he thought distantly, and felt himself moving towards Sam like every cell in him was magnetized.
Somehow, Sam turned Dean’s lunge into a hug. Dean’s arms came up automatically, and he hid his face in Sam’s shoulder, shaking with terrible and epically mistimed want.
Sam’s breath was hot and wet along his neck. “Promise me, please.” His voice was unsteady, and if he had an equal yearning, maybe that was worse. Lucifer walked the earth and Sam was a demon blood addict. What Dean wanted, however bad, was irrelevant.
“Okay, Sam,” Dean made himself say, and then made himself loosen his grip, which felt more like peeling his skin off. He turned to see Adam staring at the two of them, and wondered how much of that had shown.
When he turned back, Sam was already halfway to the road. Wait, he wanted to call out. How can this be a good idea? But if he stayed around Sam, he didn’t know if he’d be able to control himself, and Sam had made him give his word.
“You coming?” Adam called, and Dean followed him.
****
Sam quitting being a Winchester didn’t mean that being a Winchester quit him. Lucifer’s tender ministrations—not to mention the hunters who wanted to get him high and somehow use that to gank Lucifer—made it crystal clear that Sam didn’t get to leave the game in the fourth quarter, the way maybe he could’ve done if he’d listened to Dean not too long ago.
He wouldn’t say he was pathetically grateful that Adam called and wanted him back. Manageably grateful, okay. And he could deal with whatever was going on between him and Dean. At least it made a distraction from Lucifer wanting his body.
Of course, being back together didn’t mean being in perfect harmony, any more than it ever had. “Your plan sucks,” Dean said flatly as they discussed what to do with the newly reacquired Colt. “You think we’re just gonna walk right up to Lucifer and put a bullet through his brain?”
“We know where he’s gonna be, and we’ve got as big a team as we’re likely to get,” Sam argued right back.
Dean was proved disastrously right when they arrived in Carthage. How the fuck Meg and her hellhounds were on Lucifer’s side if Lucifer planned to exterminate all the demons was a puzzle, but not one they had any time to figure out. Jo got clawed up bad saving Dean, who’d never faced hellhounds before and couldn’t seem to figure out where to aim.
“She needs a hospital,” Dean said when they’d gotten to momentary safety in an abandoned hardware store. The rest of them knew that she didn’t have much of a chance even if they’d had a medivac right there, but nobody told Dean.
There were enough supplies in the hardware store to build a bomb that would put even a hellhounds down. They just needed someone to keep the hellhounds focused on the building. “You go,” Jo told the Winchesters. “I’m not getting out of this, so I’ll stay here and distract the hounds.”
Sam hated it, but her sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain.
“Fuck that noise,” Dean said. “How about we let the guy who can run trigger the thing, after Ellen’s gotten Jo into the car. I’ll cover them. You guys build the damn bomb while we’re at it.”
Ellen and Sam shared a long moment. Ellen’s eyes said everything that needed saying: if there was any chance at all, she was taking it, and the bomb was only a two-man job. “Fine,” Sam decided.
Sam didn’t see Dean use his newfound knowledge of how hellhounds looked when they moved, but he did hear the car start, and Dean made it back inside only bleeding in a couple of places.
“You’ll have ten seconds, max,” Sam warned, and hoped it would be that much—amateur bomb-making was a dicey proposition at the best of times, which this was not.
Dean nodded, and Sam and Adam headed out to confront Lucifer.
****
So the Colt was a huge disappointment, more to Sam and Adam than to Dean since Dean had never seen it work its magic. Dean thought that watching it kill the yellow-eyed demon who’d fucked up their family had probably made it seem invincible. Yes, he was bummed too: Lucifer, wholesale slaughter of humanity, and so on.
But Dean hadn’t blown himself up, which had sure seemed like the most likely outcome when he’d been holding that patched-together trigger. And Ellen had good news, or what counted as good news for them: Jo nearly bled out on the way to the hospital, and her heart stopped twice during emergency surgery. She was down to one kidney and would need months of rehab. But she was going to be okay. “Surgeon came in talking about plastic surgery so the scar wouldn’t be so ugly,” Ellen said on the phone, the pride radiating across state lines, “and she said no man who was afraid of who she was deserved a moment of her time.”
“Tell her I’m sorry,” Dean said. If he’d known what he was doing, she wouldn’t have had to come rescue him in the first place. She’d been doing fine until she’d gotten distracted saving his ass.
“Shut your mouth,” Ellen told him. “A friend’s in trouble, you go help ‘em. Jo was raised right, and so were you.”
It wasn’t absolution. Dean still owed Jo, and he was going to fight twice as hard so that he wouldn’t get someone else hurt again. But knowing that Ellen didn’t judge him harshly was a huge relief. “Thanks,” he said.
Ellen made an exasperated sound. “Didn’t I say to shut your mouth? Now you go find those two boys and make sure they haven’t drunk themselves blind.” She hung up without saying goodbye.
Dean suspected that, had he been there in person to proposition Ellen right then, she might’ve taken him up on the offer. What a night that would’ve been. It was probably for the best that she was a hundred miles away, though. The last thing he needed was another complicated relationship.
****
When they’d found out that they’d been created to host Lucifer and Michael, like matching socks, Sam hadn’t even been very surprised. Of course they’d have jobs to do, assigned to them like Dad giving each of them a list of chores. God’s assignment just had one item for each of them, but it was a doozy. The extra information, though—Heaven’s role in breaking up Dad and Dean’s mom—that was not a good reveal.
“Your mom and dad were a real coup,” the cupid said. It—he—was proud. Dean’s fists clenched.
“So they weren’t really in love?” Adam asked, sounding lost, like this of all the shit that had happened to them was too much.
“Oh no, not at all,” the cupid said. “What we do is real. Absolutely real. It’s just not chosen, but then what love ever is? In John Winchester’s case, there was some other woman he loved, so that was a fiddly bit, but overall it was extremely well executed. And you certainly turned out well!”
Which was when Dean punched him.
As it turned out, the cupid wasn’t even the problem: it was Famine. Sam understood why they locked him up, even if it turned out to be a dumb idea when that left him trussed up for the demons.
He’d just finished drinking the last one when Dean burst back into the motel room.
“Where’s Adam?” Sam demanded.
Dean shook his head. “Still waiting for Cas to take care of business in between burgers. I—I had to see you.” He moved closer, not reacting to the blood on Sam’s chin. His eyes were gleaming, his skin flushed. He looked like he’d been working himself up to an important confession.
He’s infected, Sam realized.
Dean put his hand on Sam’s arm. Sam could feel the heat of him even through his jacket and shirt. Blood always made him horny, now. Ruby had trained him to expect it, like a dog hearing Pavlov’s dinner bell. That was the best explanation he could offer for how his heart rate was speeding and his dick was starting to thicken.
Dean took a deep breath, his ridiculous lashes dipping. He was sweating, nervous, and Sam wanted to tell him it was okay despite everything. “If I could just—maybe just once, you know?”
Sam knew there was no ‘just once’ with this, even without Famine’s interference. The demon blood had dulled the current he felt running between them, the sense that they were just a few steps away from snapping into perfect alignment. But with Dean’s hand on him, it was hard to remember what they were supposed to be to each other. Without meaning to, he’d drifted closer, so that Dean’s head was now tilted back, looking up into Sam’s eyes. Almost perfectly positioned to be kissed.
He was covered in blood. He was drinking demon blood, and he was about to get it all over Dean, who deserved so much better than this—who was under a compulsion.
Ignoring the pounding heat that wanted to drive him forward, Sam put his hand on Dean’s chest—it felt like Dean’s heartbeat was his own—and pushed, hard enough that Dean took a blessed, awful step back.
“First, we have to make sure Famine’s been taken care of.”
Dean pouted, but he wasn’t so far gone that he ignored Sam. Or maybe, Sam thought and quashed the idea immediately, what he really wanted was Sam’s willingness.
After Sam exorcised all the demons inside Famine, Dean didn’t bring up what had happened, and Sam wasn’t planning to either. Especially since Adam was apparently dead inside (even Castiel’s skewed and slightly distracted report couldn’t skip over that part of their encounter with Famine before Sam arrived), and they still had the other Horsemen to track down. Yes, it would be nice if he had the time to freak out over his apparently shared attraction to his half-brother, but he just wasn’t seeing where it fit on the schedule.
****
Dean didn’t know how to think about the cupid’s revelations. He’d always thought he was a jerk—a con artist and a love-‘em-and-leave-‘em type—because of his dad. His dad who abandoned him and his mom, when his mom was way too young to be alone with a kid to support. He’d grown up thinking John Winchester was just an asshole sperm donor. Finding out that John might not have had much choice when he walked out the door was going to require a radical rethinking of his own life. Could people even fight cupids? Was it like being possessed, no choice at all? From what Sam and Adam had said, his father had raised them to think their mom had been some kind of saint, even if he hadn’t been a monk after her death. And was what John had felt different from real love, if that even existed?
These were all perfectly sucky questions, and the information wasn’t exactly important to their present clusterfuck.
So he shoved his uncertainties aside, only for things to get exponentially weirder when they were ripped out of reality and through a bunch of tired television plots. Dean wasn’t even resentful that he was the sidekick/lab tech/nurse in most of them, though being Sam’s serious-but-supportive partner in the herpes ad was, he thought, really unfair. As was having to read questions in Japanese before Sam got punched in the balls.
When the ratty little Trickster—apparently he was also some sort of angel, but given how he’d just put them through TVLand hell, Dean was fine sticking with ‘Trickster’—showed up in person, he started off by ignoring Dean and lecturing Sam and Adam about their destinies. But after a couple of minutes of boring ranting, he slowed, eyes flicking over to Dean again and again, and then stopped entirely in favor of staring at Dean like he wanted to cut him into bite-sized pieces.
“Well, you are a puzzle,” the Trickster said while Sam demanded to know what was going on. “You shouldn’t be here at all. And I should know—I do this for a living, after all.”
“What do you mean?” Adam shouldered in front of Sam, murder in his eyes. “Is this another one of your sick jokes? Maybe we don’t really have a brother at all.”
Dean sneered a little at that—Adam wished—but Dean himself wasn’t a hundred percent on what he wanted to be the truth of his existence at this point.
“Oh, he’s your brother all right,” the Trickster said. “It’s just wrong. And, honestly, I’m not sure I’d tell you the details if I knew them. You clowns are already too focused on your narcissistic personalities. You should be thinking about stepping into your assigned roles and saving the world, not about Daddy’s wild oats.”
“Second verse, same as the first,” Adam snarked. The Trickster snapped his fingers and Adam was wearing a ball gag, which Dean probably shouldn’t have found as funny as he did.
“Clock’s running down, boys,” the Trickster said. “Bow to your partners and get in line, or it’s gonna get a whole lot worse.”
Personally, Dean thought that when all the supernatural folks spent so much time telling Sam and Adam that they were destined to play specific roles, that was pretty good evidence that there was some free will involved. Not that free will would necessarily help while there were so many ways to hurt the Winchesters and use them against each other. But, as far as Dean could tell, people didn’t usually spend a lot of time denouncing stuff that couldn’t happen. And given how badly they’d seen angels and demons behave, Dean was thinking that they were enough like people to justify the same conclusion: resistance was possible.
Of course, Sam and Adam said the same, when they could be made to talk about the situation at all. But some days, like the ones following the Trickster’s illustrated lecture, Dean thought he might be the only one who really believed.
****
Sam wondered what it would have been like to be the little brother instead. Maybe what he felt for Dean was the desire for security: Not to have to be in charge, responsible for the apocalypse and all his other screwups along the way, from Ruby to Jess to leaving Adam with Dad for four more years of indoctrination into how he was never good enough.
Now that Dean knew Sam’s worst secrets, he was easy to talk to. Sam told him about Jess, and it wasn’t fraught the way it had been with Adam, both of them resentful and afraid. Sam told him about Ruby, a rawer wound, but Dean listened and offered a few inappropriate stories about his own sexual misadventures that, while funny enough to make Sam’s stomach ache from laughter, really didn’t compare to fucking a demon and letting Lucifer out of his cage. But that probably wasn’t the point.
They didn’t talk about Dean’s almost-advance under Famine’s influence. Sam knew better than anyone how wires could get crossed in someone’s head when the pressure was too great. Combine mortal danger and total secrecy and of course boundaries were going to blur.
“I get it, you fucked up,” Dean said, one night when Adam was finally passed out on the bed nearest the door and Dean himself was listing pretty severely, sitting on the floor but propped up by the other bed. “You don’t have to keep telling me. I’m not saying you should forget about it, but there’s a lot more to you than your worst day.”
Sam, who was very carefully positioned so that getting to Dean would require more coordination than he possessed at this particular stage of drunkenness, shrugged. “I want to make amends,” he explained, his lips numb. There was nothing he could do for the nurse he’d killed, and ‘don’t say yes to Lucifer’ seemed like a low bar for redemption. It was a puzzle.
Dean didn’t seem to have any better ideas. He took another pull from his bottle and wiped his mouth. It was distracting, his mouth. The promise of sin, but nothing really bad. Naughty boy, Sam thought.
“If we get the rings,” Sam said, wanting a change of topic from Dean’s pretty, drunk-open face, “I gotta be the one to open the door, you know that, right? I’m the only one who can lure Lucifer close enough.”
Dean was too drunk to raise one eyebrow, so he made do with both. “Much as he wants your fine ass, I think he’s gonna notice a swirling door to Hell right next to you.”
Adam moaned in his sleep, turning over so that he was on his stomach. He used to sleep like that when he was a kid, Sam remembered, but even more exaggeratedly—his butt pointing straight at the ceiling as he curled in on himself. It was the cutest fucking thing imaginable. He felt a pulsing warmth in his chest, a protective love for both of them. He’d gotten Lucifer’s party started, and it was his job to stop it.
“You’re right,” he told Dean. “We’ll figure out a way to hide it.”
Or, maybe, a way to give Lucifer what he thought he wanted, then spring the trap. Whatever it takes, he thought, watching Dean’s slightly open mouth as Dean contemplated the room with soused intensity. Whatever it takes.
****
Not too long after they started meeting Horsemen, Dean got a literal taste of Heaven. It tasted like his mom’s buttered toast and hot cocoa, the kind she made after he’d been playing outside in the snow. Sitting at her kitchen table, watching her putter around, was the best he’d felt in—he couldn’t remember. Even knowing that she was dead—that they were dead, thanks to Adam’s psycho hunter friends—he still felt warm and cocooned, safe in a way that he knew life didn’t really offer.
When Sam showed up, the first thing he thought was, now he can have a mom too. It just seemed so natural that his mom would love Sam in just the same way. Maybe in the real world it would matter that Sam was the son of the woman who’d stolen her man away (not on purpose, but nobody would expect her to be particularly understanding about cupidity), but here Dean thought that Mom’s only concern would be how good Dean felt when he was with Sam.
But Sam had a different agenda—they needed to get through Heaven and find Adam. This turned out to be more difficult than just moving through happy memories (and they skedaddled fast out of the night Dean lost his virginity, since at his age perving on sixteen-year-olds in their underwear was pedo territory).
“Why are these all my memories?” Dean asked, and then realized that it was an awkward question. Happiness and Sam hadn’t often gone together, it seemed. When Sam’s dead friend who’d hacked Heaven showed up, that was a relief. Except that he said something about soulmates that implied … well, Dean wasn’t really prepared to consider what it implied about Sam’s ability to show up in Dean’s Heaven without Ash’s special dimension-hopping skills. Then there was the pure creepy of a million Heavens each with only one real person inside, endlessly masturbating with ghosts of the rest of the world.
Ash got them to Adam’s Heaven, and it was full of graveyards. Apparently Adam had been happiest laying ghosts. Nice, simple work, with standard dangers and respectable payoffs. Dean got why Adam would’ve liked that, though the thought that these were his top memories was pretty depressing.
Fighting their way through to Joshua’s garden while Zachariah searched for them was plenty distracting, but his thoughts kept circling the idea Ash had put into his head.
Yes, God was cruel, a petty prankster who must’ve gotten tired with pulling the wings off of flies and graduated to putting pins in humans just to see them squirm. But soulmates? Doomed to each other the way Dad had been yanked out of his life to be with Mary Winchester? It made his balls want to crawl up into his belly and spat on every good feeling he’d ever had about Sam.
He wasn’t going to let himself be led around by someone else’s plan.
Except that Sam had thought the same thing, and all it had gotten him was more disappointment when he did exactly what they’d tricked him into doing.
Finally, he understood why two guys who knew exactly what lurked in the dark were so good at denial when it came to everything else. Fighting for their lives against angels and devils was easier than fixing what was wrong in their heads.
And when God’s gardener rejected their pleas for help, Dean couldn’t pretend to be surprised. Deep inside, where Dean had spent a lifetime feeling hollow, the space that he thought hunting with his brothers might fill was changing. Filling with a thick red rage. Angels, demons, God: they were all shit. Free will, they said, and then blamed humanity for the hand it had been dealt—told Sam he was an abomination, when that was a better description of them. Somebody needed to deal out some justice to all the supernatural assholes who thought they were above judgment.
Part 3
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