Chapter 10

"You held onto it," Sam says. They're in a 5-star hotel suite, courtesy of the hotel manager, as thanks for getting rid of the ghost that's been terrorizing both staff and guests. "With your arms. You held it."

Dean shrugs. He takes the top bun off his burger, peels a rasher of bacon out of the filling, chews on the end in hopes that some time or another, something will have some taste. There's nothing. It turns to ash in his mouth, and he throws it down in disgust. "I guess ghosts can mess with other ghosts."

"How'd you know it wouldn't take you with it when it burned?" There's tension in Sam's voice, but Dean isn't in the mood for another argument.

"Didn't think of that."

Sam sits down across from him. "Maybe it would have, if you weren't bound to your body."

Dean looks up. "Maybe."

Sam offers him a tight smile. "That could be pretty useful, you know." He picks up the piece of discarded bacon, puts it in his mouth and chews. "Mmm. It's good."

Dean stares at Sam's mouth. There's a smear of grease at the corner, and something pulls him to try tasting it again, right from where it lies. He doesn't move, but when Sam reaches for pie, he speaks. "Try the cherry."

Sam puts down the apple pie, and goes for the other one. It's on a delicate plate, a shining silver fork to eat it with.

If he was in Sam's place, he'd ham it up. He'd tease, exaggerate every sound, he'd lick his lips. To Sam's credit, he doesn't, but he nods when he slides each morsel into his mouth, makes a soft sound of approval.

When cherry filling stains his lips, he wipes it away with the pad of his thumb, and when he sucks it clean there's nothing sexy about it.

But Dean's hard in his jeans. "Sam?" He glances at the bed. It's a king, the hotel manager doesn't know they're brothers, and when the usual assumption was made, neither of them corrected him.

Sam turns and follows his gaze. "Yeah, Dean?"

"I'm dead."

Sam's head jerks back around. "I know."

"I look dead."

Sam's face grows pained. "I don't care."

Dean sucks up his courage. "I should be worried about never having sex again, no one ever wanting a piece of this again. Two weeks, Sammy. I got two weeks left like this, and if we don't find this thing, that's all I'll ever have before I'm sucked into the veil, or sent up or down or wherever the hell I'm going. I should be worried about never having sex again. Instead, I'm more concerned about not being able to taste that pie."

"That's okay," Sam says. "I don't care about—"

"I do give a crap about you, Sam," Dean continues. "About not being here for you. Because I get it, I totally get it. How many times have I done almost exactly the same thing, because I was afraid of being alone?"

"Dean—"

"Shut up, Sammy," Dean says. "I'm not going to try to convince you to let me go. I'm doing everything I damn well can to stick around, because I know what you'll do if I don't. I don't want you to do that, even though I get it. I get why you'd do that, try to follow me. I might do the same thing, if there was no other way. I've tried it alone, and you can kid yourself for a while, but it always comes back to there being something missing. And that's you."

Sam doesn't try to speak this time. He reaches out, though, shoves the pie to the side, and wraps his hand around Dean's wrist. His thumb rubs circles over the bone.

"There's something wrong with us." Dean shakes his head. "Don't fucking argue with me, Sammy. You can't say it's not true. I think it's been there a long time. This isn't new. It's not because I died, it's not because my options are currently limited. It's always been there, just that recent events have meant that we've had to admit some things to ourselves."

"You didn't want to listen to yourself," Sam says.

Dean shakes his head. "Still don't, not really. Doesn't make it any less true. We need each other. Like air, maybe more than that."

"So, what do we do, Dean?"

Dean shrugs. "We find the goddamn cup of Jesus and we fix me up. Or we die trying."

Sam's lips curl into a smile. "And until then?"

Dean pushes the pie back in front of Sam. "Until then, you eat my pie and I try to figure out why a certain part of my anatomy still works when there's no blood left in my body and my heart isn't pumping even if there was."

Color flares across Sam's cheekbones and he looks down at the table.

"What?"

Sam looks up. "The spell I used to bind you to your body? It's an ancient form of the posthumous fatherhood thing. A woman's husband dies, she brings him back, and they have a month to conceive. Obviously, some things that wouldn't normally work after death, need to work."

"You brought me back with a dead baby daddy spell? Really, Sam?"

"I was running out of time," Sam says. "I took what I could get, bought us some time. Just don't assume you don't need to practice safe sex, just because you're dead." He grins, but there's a tightness to his smile.

"Right, Sammy. Because everyone wants a piece of this right now." Dean rolls his eyes.

Sam lifts an eyebrow.

Dean grimaces. "Here. Have a piece of this instead," he says, and pushes the pie under Sam's nose.

---

They're sitting opposite each other on the king sized bed, cross-legged with books spread out between and around them. There's more space here than on the table, and it's more comfortable than the floor. They read, mostly in silence, except for the moments when Dean passes Sam a book and asks a question, generally something like, "What in the hell does this mean?"

Dean's not tired, he doesn't get tired, not anymore, but there's a heavy fatigue setting in after he finishes scanning the third book and sets it aside. He doesn't open another one. Sam doesn't seem to notice, with his head down, eyes flicking back and forth down the page.

"Put the book down," Dean says. There's a little more heat to his voice than he intended, but he owns it, reaching out and pushing the journal out of Sam's hands. It falls to the floor when Sam looks up, and there's a question in his eyes, a little irritation, but it fades quick.

Fingers twisted into the front of Sam's shirt, Dean pulls him in. Something bursts inside him when he hears the noise Sam makes, a surprised gasp that's almost a whimper, and just a little too high pitched for his brother.

Sam's lips sear Dean's mouth with their heat. He dips into Sam's mouth with his tongue, wishes he could taste something, anything at all, but all he feels is hot and cold, hard and soft, wet and dry.

He makes the most of it. Sucks Sam's tongue into his mouth, licks at his lips. Starts tearing at the buttons of Sam's shirt to get to warm flesh.

They've been almost naked a lot of nights as Sam forces Dean to strip down and accept his warmth, and they've had heated kisses, all spit and teeth, but they've never had this.

Dean shoves Sam's shirt back over his shoulders and pushes him down onto his back. His eyes track down over hard muscle, warm, olive skin, follow sharply carved hip bones. He could strip Sam bare, touch him everywhere. Make him hard and find out what sounds he makes when he comes.

"Dean?"

Dean's eyes flick back to Sam's face. His eyes are wide, pupils big and black. His lips are pink and wet and kiss-swollen.

"Come on, Dean," he says, jaw set. He presses his shoulders back into the mattress, shifts his hips. "Come on."

Dean half-covers Sam with his body, tries to kiss the challenge off his lips. Leaves just enough space between them to let Sam tug at his shirt. Something tears, threads break as a seam rips open, and Dean lifts himself up just enough to drag his arms out of his sleeves and toss the shirt across the room.

He stares at the inside of his forearm. The skin is pale, almost gray. Bloodless and dead, and when his eyes track up his arm, there's a clean wound where the fork got him though he never bothered to clean it. He glances down at his chest, a neat square bandage over the bullet hole. If he gets his jeans off, if that's a thing that's about to happen, there's a clean bandage around his thigh, covering the wound that killed him. The wound that still looks as fresh as the day he died. "You're sleeping with a dead man," he says.

"It's okay." Sam's voice is rough, almost broken. He pulls Dean back down, and it's hot, bare, living flesh against him and strong hands on the back of his neck.

Dean's elbows dig into the mattress either side of Sam's head, and he slides a knee between Sam's thighs. Sam's hot all over, but there's a hot, thick, hard length against his hip, and when he grinds against it, Sam groans and arches his back off the bed.

Hot, quick kisses are mere punctuation. Most of the time they stare into each other's eyes. Sam's are almost black, huge and liquid, and pleading as he pants and gasps. Dean growls as he thrusts against Sam's thigh, and fuck normal and fuck wrong and fuck everything, because this is like nothing Dean's ever felt before. Maybe it's the thrill of the forbidden, maybe the fact that everything is new, but it's good.

He might not be able to taste, but he can still smell, and he gets lost in Sam, cherry pie and sweat, old paper and fresh ink, and, Jesus, he smells like dick, and it's not something Dean would have dreamed he'd find arousing before, but it's going to make him insane.

"Come on," Sam says, like those are the only two words he knows. He gets a hand between them, tugs at the button of Dean's jeans. "Come on, come on."

Dean bites his lip, bites it hard, because Sam's hand is too close to his dick and he's going to explode. "Fuck, Sammy," he spits, as Sam gets his fly open, gets his hand in there.

There's hot skin around his dick in a tight grip, the same around his wrist as Sam pulls it down, slides it into the front of his pants, and then hot, hard, pulsing flesh in his hand. "Holy fuck, Sam," he rasps, because he's got his brother's cock in his hand.

"Dean," Sam moans, thrusting into Dean's hand. "Dean."

Somehow, Dean gets his knees under him, just enough so that he's got the freedom to move, to rock his hips into his brother's grip, so he can move his arm. He twists his fist over the head of Sam's dick, sucks at Sam's lower lip as he throws his head back and groans like he's in pain. "Come on, little brother," he says, with a sick kind of thrill. "Let me hear you."

Sam jerks beneath him, hips coming off the mattress, shaking the bed when he comes back down. His body goes still, arching up, and the heat contained in Dean's hand seems to double. It pulses, pumps, spills out, and Dean's skin should blister and peel with the intense heat. He looks down between them, watches Sam paint stripes over his fingers, over his own belly. "It's fucking beautiful," he hisses from between clenched teeth, and then pleasure coils at the base of his spine, fuses his vertebrae, makes his eyes roll back in his head.

He sees flashes, gray-white stripes on Sam's hip bones, Sam's hand from a different angle, wiping his fingers clean on the tail of his shirt, Sam's face from above as he bends his head into a kiss then pulls back, a crease between his brows. He hears snatches out of place.

"—okay?"

Dean blinks. Shakes his head a little, reaches down to tuck himself back into his jeans. He looks up at the ceiling from where he's lying on his back. "Yeah."

Sam is up on his elbow, looking down. "You sure?"

Dean nods. Something's wrong. Something's missing. "Did we really just—?"

Sam bites his lip. He looks concerned, like he's waiting for bad news.

Dean shakes his head. "It's okay." He pulls himself up onto his elbows, looks around the room. "It's cool."

Sam still looks worried, so Dean reaches out, pulls him into a kiss, soft and slow, almost sleepy, clumsy and messy. "I'm good," he whispers, lips moving against Sam's jawline. "Just processing."

Sam drops his head, nuzzles into Dean's shoulder. "Yeah," he says. "I think I know what you mean." He pulls back, and he gives Dean a slow, lopsided smile, before he hauls himself up and swings his legs over the side of the bed.

Dean should probably say something about his missing moments. He stares at Sam's back, now bare, shirt gone somewhere, watches the muscles move.

Sees the moment Sam stiffens.

"What?" Dean says, suddenly alert.

Sam bends, picks up the book that fell when Dean pushed it away. It's open to a page with a pencil sketch of a hill with a tower on the top. "Oh my god," Sam says.

---

"It's meant to be bullshit," Sam says, this time crouched on the floor beside the bed, the book still open to Terence's pencil sketch. "Avalon. It's supposed to be a myth."

Dean pulls his shirt back on, starts on the buttons, because he feels strangely out of place. There's research, and there's sex with his brother, and those are two things that just don't fit together. Or shouldn't. "The holy grail is supposed to be a myth, Sammy. And we've been kind of counting on it being real. So why not Avalon, King Arthur, his knights and all that crap."

Sam turns his head to look up at Dean sitting on the edge of the bed. "That's the thing," he says, and he lifts the book so Dean can see the picture better. "This is where they found King Arthur's grave."

Dean closes his eyes, turns his head to the side. Maybe he heard wrong, because he never heard that before. "You're telling me they actually found a body? King Arthur? I thought that was just a story."

Sam laughs. "The holy grail is just a story, Dean. It's part of Arthurian Legend. If the grail exists, there's no reason Arthur didn't. And this," he says, shaking the book. "This is the Isle of Avalon."

"Shit," Dean says. If his heart could beat, he'd be able to hear it in his temples right now. There's a kind of nervous energy flowing through him, as if his body is still pumping adrenaline through his system. Maybe it is. "Hang about." He takes the book from Sam's hand, looks closer at the simple crosshatching of the sketch. It's a conical hill, with a tower on top, and at it's base, there are trees, and buildings. "I thought Avalon was a lake or something. Not a hill in the middle of the countryside. Something doesn't fit."

"According to the stories, Dean, the grail was hidden there two thousand years ago. That hill was surrounded by water then."

Dean shrugs. "Okay. So where's the grail now? It's not in the bunker, so where is it? If Terence figured out where it was, wouldn't he have brought it back?"

Sam takes the book back and flicks a few pages, to where he's tucked a sticky note in as a bookmark. "I am very disappointed," he reads. "Policy is to leave artifacts in the country of origin, when not located in the continental United States. If possible, in situ, and not to disturb them at all. I prepare to abandon my search, though I believe the Grail to be beneath the Glastonbury Tor, in Somerset, England, as it has been all along."

"Whoa," Dean says. "He left it there?"

Sam nods. His face seems about to split into a grin. "I think it's still there, Dean." His chest rises and falls rapidly in his excitement. "We know where it is. We just have to go and get it."

"One problem I can see," Dean says. "Since we're apparently going to England. How the hell do we get me on a plane? They're going to take one look at me and decide I'm Patient Zero, toss me out of there in case of zombie outbreak."