Chapter 9

Dean sits on Sam's bed, back against the wall. He's naked to the waist.

Sam sits on the edge of the bed beside him. There's a bandage in his left hand, and he tears tape off a roll with his teeth before he slaps the bandage over the perfectly circular hole that runs right through Dean's heart. "You don't need to come, Dean. We need someone here going through Terry's journals. We've been reading for close to a week, and we're only half way through. We can't spare the both of us for a job right now."

"Bullshit." Dean stares down as Sam smooths his fingers carefully over the tape. Every time Sam's skin touches his, there's a tingle of fire in it's wake. It's any wonder why he doesn't combust every night, with so much of Sam's skin touching his. "You don't want me there because it's a poltergeist. You're afraid I'm going to go nuts if I see it in action. Like, I'm going to think, hey, that looks like fun, I'm going to give it a go."

"That's not it," Sam says. His fingers still, and he presses his palms flat to Dean's chest. He bends his head, leaning in, and it'll never not be weird, but it's a little less strange when they kiss now. Sam's lips are a flare of heat over Dean's mouth, quick, and then gone again. "Mom took out a poltergeist, remember? She did it to protect us, and destroyed herself in the process. You'd do the same for me, if it came down to it, Dean, you know you would."

He can't deny it. Can't lie to Sam, not anymore, not to his face, anyway. So he says nothing.

"I thought so," Sam whispers. He leans in again, this time wraps his hand around the back of Dean's neck, tips his head back. There's just a little bit more heat in the kiss this time, a different kind of heat.

It makes Dean want to grab on and never let go, to press his body close, to wrap himself around Sam just to feel. "I'm coming," he says, pulling away. "What happens if you don't come back? I'd be stuck down here forever. I'd have to watch my body rot while I wait for you for the next hundred years."

"I'm coming back," Sam smiles. "I can handle this, I swear. You don't have to worry about me. I'll be gone, two days, tops."

Dean shrugs. "Two days. I could go crazy in two days. You'll come back and I'll be off my rocker. Hell, I might go into the dispossession room just for kicks, sit in there and look at my body outside in the corridor, and see how long it takes to bloat up and—"

"Fine," Sam spits. "God, sometimes I hate you, Dean."

"No you don't," Dean grins. "You love me."

He almost regrets it, as soon as the word is out of his mouth. It's true, he knows that, and it goes both ways, but they don't say it. Things are too complicated now, because neither of them ever knows just what that means anymore.

"Yeah," Sam says. He goes very serious, very quickly. This time, when he kisses Dean, it's not soft, it's not fleeting. It's hard, and desperate, the closest they've come to the first time.

Dean's hips twitch involuntarily and he twists his fingers into the bedsheets to stop himself from clutching at Sam in a desperation that he can't control.

"Promise me," Sam says, breaking the kiss only to come back harder, hotter. "You're not going to do what Mom did, Dean. Promise me."

"You'd do the same," Dean says, gasping against Sam's cheek. "Sammy, you'd do the same thing."

Sam pants in Dean's ear. His hands on Dean's chest clench and release. "I need you, Dean. You do that, I can't follow you and I need to be able to follow you."

Sam's words punch all the air out of Dean's chest. "Fuck, Sammy." Dean lets go of the sheets, and he grabs on, needing all the contact he can get. He twists the fingers of one hand in the front of Sam's shirt, wraps the other around Sam's neck, pulls him closer. "It's wrong," he says, and it's the understatement of the century. "Everything about this is wrong."

"It's too late for that." Sam sits back, stares down at Dean. His chest rises and falls with rapid, harsh breaths. His eyes track from Dean's face, slowly down his body, settle on his hips. Sam bites his lip.

Dean feels exposed. He should cover himself, grab a pillow for his lap. The urge is there to hide, to be ashamed of how his body reacts to being kissed by his brother.

Sam's eyes flick back to his face. "Pandora's box," he says. "We've opened it. It's not something you can close. It's not going to go away when this is over. You're what I want."

Dean shakes his head, always shakes his head when Sam skirts too close to the natural progression of things. Dean's come to terms with kissing his brother, with kissing his brother with the kind of heat that makes him hard and aching. He's not ready to even consider the next step. "No, Sammy."

Sam licks his lips. "Sure, Dean," he says. "Sure."

---

There's a stack of Terence's journals in the back seat. Dean's going to read all night, nothing Sam says is going to stop him.

Sam's asleep in the passenger seat. Another six hour drive, half way across the country. This is normal, always moving, always looking for the next fight.

Dean glances over at Sam. When he's sleeping, he looks younger than he is. All the battles, all the loss, and pain, and death, melts away from his face. He's fucking beautiful, and that's a fact, but the way Dean looks at him, it's not something a brother should notice, or think too hard about.

All the wrong in their lives doesn't give them the right to ignore this, but Sammy wants to. And Dean could put his own sick thoughts down to being dead, to being trapped on earth while he's supposed to have gone straight to hell, but Sammy...

Dean blinks. He yanks a flask of holy water from under the seat, sprinkles a few drops on Sam's hand where it lies on his thigh. Sam twitches in his sleep, but nothing happens. And the demons are all gone, but it would have somehow felt better to pin it on them.

There's a lot of monsters still in the world. But Dean would feel it if it wasn't Sam. He'd know.

Still, he reaches back and grabs a silver knife, holds the blade to Sam's bare skin. Nothing.

"What the hell, Dean?" Sam groans as he rubs his hand over his face. "What are you doing?"

"Just checking," Dean says, and stows the knife with his eyes on the road.

"You think I'm possessed." Sam pulls himself up into a sitting position, wipes the back of his hand on his pants. "I'm not possessed."

"I know," Dean says. "Now."

Sam stares out the window. "You're just as messed up as I am, Dean, you're just more uptight. You can't let yourself have something good—"

"It's not good, Sam. It's not."

"It could be." Sam turns away from the window, and his gaze makes the hairs on the back of Dean's neck rise. "We don't get white picket fences, Dean. We don't get the wife and the two point four kids. We don't get nine to fives or a steady pay check. This is all we get. We get to chase the next monster. We get to survive. But we've got each other. And that's all the love we're going to get." He leans back against the window, but his eyes are still on Dean. "That's all the comfort we're going to get."

Dean stares straight ahead, and his foot gets just a little heavier. Damn Sam for making sense of chaos. They've gone a few miles before Dean takes a breath, sucking air in through his nostrils. "I hear you, Sammy." Another breath, sucked way down deep before he has the courage to say his next words. "Well, if you're desperate enough to hit a corpse, then I guess—" He turns his head, hint of a smile already on his lips as he attempts to lighten the mood.

But Sam's asleep.

---

Dean can see it. He's pretty sure Sam can't, but Dean can. He watches the twisted thing that might have been a living human being once, vanish under a barrage of rock salt, and the missiles flying around the room fall to the floor in a rain of silverware. "Look out," he shouts, as a knife comes perilously close to Sam's foot. He yanks a fork out of the muscle of his upper arm, throws it to the ground.

"You okay?" Sam asks, head thrown back over his shoulder as he pauses in his task of peeling back linoleum from the kitchen floor of a hotel restaurant.

"Don't you worry about me, Sammy," Dean says, eyes tracking around the room, because this fucker is resilient. A little salt doesn't put him out of the game for long. "You just get that hole dug."

From the corner of his eye, he catches the flash of steel, snatches a meat cleaver, spinning end over end, out of the air before he reaches its target. How messy that might have been, how heartbreaking—Dean can see his greatest fear, Sam's head split open like a melon. He raises his sawed-off, points it at the shadowy humanoid shape by the ovens. It's glitching, fading in and out in ways that hurts Dean's eyes to look at, darting up and down the narrow aisle. "Stand still, fucker," he says, and then he hears the muffled cracking of old wood.

"Almost there," Sam says. There's a box of salt on the floor beside him, and while he cuts at the floorboards with the axe in his right hand, he fishes in his pocket for a lighter with his left.

Dean fires, but misses as the poltergeist rushes him. Instinctively, he steps out of its way, but Sam's right behind him, and he's the one disturbing the ghosts grave.

Dean moves as fast as he can, drops the gun, and just grabs on. There's no logic to it, he shouldn't have come up with anything in his arms, but there's a struggling form within his solid grip. It starts screaming in his head, starts flinging fallen cutlery at him. A soup spoon hits him in the temple, but he holds on because Sam's almost there.

Sam salts the bones, then looks back, wide eyed, at what must seem to be Dean, struggling with thin air.

"Do it, Sammy," Dean growls. "Burn the bastard."

And Sam does. His eyes are still on Dean when he strikes the flint and holds a twist of paper napkin to the flame. He throws it in, and Dean can feel the fire inside the circle of his arms. The screaming gets louder, till he thinks his brain will explode, and then it cuts out, leaving his arms empty and his ears ringing.

He collapses to the floor, legs suddenly so weak he can't hold himself up. "Holy shit," he says.