Looping
bloodwritesThey don't get a whole lot of down time with this job, especially since Chuck went vengeful god on their asses, so Dean takes the opportunity when it presents itself and sleeps in till ten.
When he does get up, he finds Sam in the library, looking like he's been up for hours, surrounded by stacks of books.
"Morning," Dean says, slumping into a chair. "What are you doing?"
"I dug into the archives. I'm trying to find somethingâanythingâuseful. You?"
Dean lifts his coffee cup. "Caffeinating."
"And the rest of your day?" Sam asks. "What's left of it, anyway." He smirks.
"Bacon. Then Netflix. More Netflix. Finish the day with a couple of beers. Crash."
"We're out of bacon," Sam says, turning the page of some ancient tome that reeks of mildew and dust.
"Goddammit," Dean says, and gets up and heads to the kitchen in search of toast.
Sam spends the day in the library, surrounded by books. Dean only sees him when he goes out on a run for beer and bacon, and when he passes the library for bathroom breaks.
Throughout the day, Sam looks increasingly frustrated. Surely, after all these years, between the two of them they've read everything in the bunker. They'd already know if they had something they could use against Chuck.
Dean shakes his head and heads back to his room and his laptop.
Late afternoon, Sam appears in Dean's doorway. "Jody called," he says. "Vetala."
"Did you tell herâ?"
"They hunt in pairs," Sam says. "Yep."
"She need help?"
Sam shakes his head. "She's got Donna with her. And the girls. Says they're good."
Dean shrugs. Jody and Donna are two of the most capable hunters Dean knows. "Okay then."
"Find anything?" Dean asks, when Sam joins him in his room later. He's brought beer, so Dean scoots over to give Sam room to stretch out.
"Nothing," Sam says. "What are we watching?"
"Big Bang Theory," Dean says. "Bunch of nerds doing nerd stuff. You'll like it."
Sam huffs and pops the cap off a bottle, passes it to Dean, then takes one for himself. "You like it. I could hear you laughing."
"Laughing at nerds," Dean says, offended. "Fuck you."
Sam chuckles.
Dean sleeps through his alarm the next morning.
He's pretty sure he slept through it. He definitely set the damn thing to wake him at seven, but it's past nine when Dean opens his eyes and picks up his phone.
He's barely hauled himself out of bed when Sam appears in the open doorway. "We've got a problem," he says, wide-eyed and staring. "It's yesterday."
Dean shoves his toothbrush into his mouth. "What was yesterday?" he mumbles. "Jody okay? Something go south with the vetala thing?"
"Not was, Dean," Sam says. "Is. Present tense. It's yesterday. Today. Is yesterday. We're looping."
Sam drags Dean into the library. He left a mess in here last night, books and papers and a whiskey glass on the table. Dean knows, because he came out to get more beer while they were watching TV and cursed Sam for not clearing up after himself.
"You clean up in here?" Dean asks.
Sam shakes his head. "Nope. Everything reset to the way it was the night before last. The night before last was last night."
"No," Dean says. "Last night we drank beer and watched Big Bang and you left a fucking mess in the library."
"Last night was Monday, Dean. Today is Tuesday. Again. It's Tuesday. Tuesday. I can't do this again, Dean." Sam's voice rises in panic. "I can't watch you die again, over and over andâ"
Dean grabs hold of Sam by the shoulders. "Stop. Sammy, I'm not dead. I didn't die last night. This ain't a Mystery Spot thing. Is it?"
"It's Tuesday," Sam says, still freaked. "What else could it be?"
"Gabriel's dead," Dean says. "Like, really dead, this time. I didn't die. And I remember. I remember yesterdayâgot up late, drank beer, watched TV. You were doing research, then we sat on my bed and we got drunk and laughed at nerds doing nerd stuff. You fell asleep on my bed and I kicked you out. I went to sleep, Sammy. I didn't die."
"It's Tuesday," Sam breathes.
Dean sighs. The PTSD kicks Sam's ass, every time. "One repeat doesn't make it Groundhog Day, okay? How 'bout we save the panic till we know it's not just a weird glitch in the time-space continuum, huh? I'm hungry. Let's get something to eat."
Dean opens the fridge and swears. "I bought bacon," he says. "I fucking bought bacon so I could have bacon this morning and there's no fucking bacon here. Where's my fucking bacon?"
"Reset," Sam says, tossing yesterday'sâMonday'sâcoffee filter and replacing it. "Nothing we did yesterday happened."
"Bullshit," Dean says. "I watched two seasons of Big Bang. I remember that."
"And I remember combing the archives for anything we could use against Chuck. There's nothing. We remember. We keep our memories, but nothing else. Nothing physical, and as far as we know, we're the only ones who know yesterday is repeating."
Dean looks up from the toaster. "Call Jody."
It's just them. They spent most of the morning on the phone, calling anyone and everyone in their contacts. The rest of the day on the internet, searching for evidence anyone else in the world is experiencing the reset of a single day.
Nothing. For everyone else in the world, it's Tuesday, and yesterday was Monday, and Jody wanted to know how Sam and Dean knew they were hunting vetala when she hadn't even figured it out herself yet.
There are books piled up in the library again, and this time, they're both researching, for anything related to time, days repeating, full on Groundhog situations.
"Angels," Sam says, after they've been at it for hours. "It's all angels. The only evidence of time travel or time rewinding is angels."
"What about Henry?" Dean asks. "That travel through time and burst out of the closet thing?"
"The spell was Enochian," Sam says. "Still Angels."
"But someone who knew what they were doing?" Dean says. "The right Enochian spell and zip, we're back to Tuesday."
"There's nothing here." Sam slams a book closed in frustration. "It's gotta be Chuck. One more way to mess with us."
Dean reaches for the whiskey bottle on the table. It's the same bottle Sam inched his way through yesterday, but today it's almost empty. Dean drains it. "Fuck," he says.
It's late. "I'm going to bed." Dean pushes himself to his feet and collects their glasses from the table.
Sam stops him. "Leave it. If it's still here in the morningâ"
Dean sighs and puts the glasses back where they were. "Here's hoping for Wednesday."
Sam appears before Dean's even hauled himself out of bed the next morning. "It's still Tuesday," he says, obviously stricken.
He's showered, though. His hair is still damp. He waited to shower before letting Dean know it was still happening, and it strikes Dean as weird, but there are more pressing things to take care of.
Dean climbs out of bed and follows Sam to the library. It's as clean and tidy as they left it on Monday night, no evidence of the research or drinking they did yesterday. "Fuck this," he says. "I'm calling Cas." He starts dialing.
"We couldn't get him yesterday," Sam says. "What makes you think he'll answer today?"
Cas's phone rings and rings. Doesn't even go to the message, and that's weird. Dean pulls back his arm and throws his phone across the room without bothering to end the call. It hits the wall hard, tiny slivers of glass catching the light as it breaks. "Shit," Dean says.
Sam looks terrified.
Dean sighs. "It's not Mystery Spot," he says. "Yeah, we're looping, but I'm not dead. That's not what's triggering the loop. If this is Chuck fucking with us, there's gotta be something he wants, something we're not giving him."
"You know what he wants," Sam says.
"Yeah," Dean says. He doesn't need to say it out loud. Chuck wants Cain and Abel. Brother killing brother. "That's not gonna happen. Ever. If that's what he wants, he's gonna have to keep us here for eternity." Dean's stomach growls. "Which I'm not doing without bacon." Dean gropes for his keys, but he's still wearing the t-shirt and pants he slept in. He turns on one bare foot and heads for the door. "I'm doing a run."
"I'm coming," Sam says, and it's not hard to guess that he doesn't want to let Dean out of his sight.
Ten minutes later, they're in the car and driving up and out of the garage, but the moment they cross out of the bunker, everything goes white.
"It was a glitch," Dean says, back in his t-shirt and sleep pants, but this time he's got his keys. He found Sam in the corridor, still towel-drying his hair on the way back to his room from the showers, because apparently it's more important to Sam to be clean than to figure out what the fuck is going on. "We're going again."
This time, Dean takes it slow as he drives the Impala out of the garage, instead of tearing out like he usually would.
As they break into the morning sun, everything goes white again, and Dean wakes up, again, in his own bed.
Dean dives out of bed, grabbing his keys on the way out the door. Forget Sam, let him enjoy his shower on repeat, because maybe at least one of them has to remain in the bunker at all times.
It's worth a try.
Dean rips out of the bunker as though if he goes fast enough, he can break the barrier.
It doesn't make a difference.
"Dean."
Dean opens his eyes. He's been awake for a while, but refused to acknowledge the fact, because what the hell else is he supposed to do?
Sam's standing in the doorway. His hair is damp. "You left without me," he accuses.
"Just trying something different." Dean throws his arm over his face. "We're fucking prisoners," he mumbles. "We can't leave the bunker." He drops his arm and clambers out of bed. "We gotta fix this, Sam. I can't go eternity without bacon."
Sam looks helpless. He shrugs. "I don't know what to do."
Dean pushes past him and heads for the library. "Pull all the books with Enochian shit in them," he says. "We're gonna figure this out if it kills us."
Neither of them read Enochian, so it's long, and slow, cross-referencing translations, making notes that'll disappear overnight.
They get through half the bottle of whiskey. It's the same bottle they've drunk twice already, and Dean figures it doesn't matter how much or how often he drinks, because every day, his liver gets reset to the same state it was in on Monday night.
Nothing he does on Tuesday is gonna matter until they fix this.
Sam's phone rings, and Dean glances at his watch. 3.45pm.
Sam looks tired when he answers. "Hey Jody," he says, and without a pause to let her speak, "You're hunting a vetala, but they hunt in pairs. There's two of them." This time he's silent for a few moments. "Lucky guess... Yeah... We're fine... Okay, bye." He shoots a quick, resigned glance at Dean as he puts down the phone, and lets out a heavy breath.
Dean fills both their glasses, then looks back down at his books.
This moment is all too familiar.
Dean spends most of his time in his room now. He makes one trip every morning, grabs a bottle of whiskey from the library, and then sits on his bed, legs stretched out, back propped against his pillows, and he works his way through it.
He's watched all of Netflix, and rewatched most of it. He's watched all the porn the internet has to offer. Even some of the freaky stuff. He hasn't showered in weeks, which isn't as bad as it sounds, considering he showered Monday night, even though Monday night feels like a million years ago.
He looks at his watch. "Three," he says. "Two. One." He looks up at the door.
Sam appears.
"Jody called," Dean says. "Vetala. I know. You're getting very predictable, Sammy."
Sam shrugs. He leans against the door frame, and he looks tired. "In case you've forgotten what's happening here. There are better ways to spend the time other than getting blind drunk every day."
Dean leans forward. "You think I don't know we're looping? You think I've forgotten?" He waves the bottle in his hand. "Same goddamn shit, every fucking day, Sammy. Same bottle of boozeâ" He throws it, and it hits the doorframe, smashing into a thousand shining shards of glass and a spray of whiskey.
Sam leans out of the way with perfect timing, because it's happened before, like everything else here. "Come out, Dean. Eat something."
He hasn't eaten in a while. Days, probably.
Dean's too drunk to fry, and he waits in the library while Sam makes grilled cheese. He accepts the sandwich with a nod of thanks when his brother returns from the kitchen.
Sam gives Dean a pinched look when he sees the new bottle of whiskey in his hand.
"Doesn't matter how much I drink," Dean says. "Liver gets reset every day and I never wake up with a hangover. What the hell is this shit?"
He's looking at pages of notes, and these aren't old notes, made by the Men of Letters decades ago. These are fresh, on crisp lined paper, and the ballpoint Sam used is lying on top where Sam carelessly dropped it, probably when the phone rang.
"Cuneiform," Sam says.
"Looks like tablet talk and chicken scratch."
"Yeah," Sam says. "There's books here we had no chance of reading before. I figured I've got the time, I might as well learn this stuff. Some of it talks about angels, and it might point me in the right direction."
"And?"
"I'm getting there."
Dean eats the sandwich and empties the bottle and watches Sam as he scribbles down page after page of weird symbols and tiny sets of lines like he's marking off days and wonders why Sam bothers, because those meticulous notes won't exist after today.
Tuesday doesn't reset at midnight. This isn't the first time they've tried to see it through till (hopefully) Wednesday, it's happened before.
Sometimes they sit up in the library, reading, learning, researching. Sometimes they watch TV on Dean's laptop, sitting on his bed and drinking beer.
This time, because they've watched everything already and Dean's room is covered in broken glass and sticky alcohol, they spend the night in Sam's room, passing a bottle of whiskey between them and watching the time tick away in silence.
Most of the time they pass out before it happens. Every single time, Dean hopes he's going to wake up where he fell asleep, with Sam beside him, head slumped on the table, or stretched out on a bed.
It's not often they make it till dawn, but when they do, it's the white light they saw when they tried to leave the bunker, and then they each wake up in their own beds.
This time, they watch the seconds tick away until dawn, because why not.
"I hate waking up," Sam says, drunk and unprompted.
30 seconds. 29. 28. "Why?" Dean asks. "Every morning I wake up thinking I've slept through my alarm, wasted the day. Then I remember and wish I could sleep longer."
"If I'd known," Sam says, maudlin and drunk. "I'd have made different choices Monday night. I'm sick of the mess."
5. 4. 3.
"Mess?" Dean's confused. Their messes always clean themselves up, and it must drive Sam mad to have to retrieve the same resources from deep in the archives every single day.
Everything goes white.
Dean wakes up clear-headed, but still with that same question in his mindâwhat mess?
He climbs out of bed and heads for Sam's room, but when he gets there, Sam's gone, and his bed is neatly made, like he never slept in there at all.
"I wake up before you," Sam says, from behind Dean. He's showered, and he's towel-drying his hair.
"You didn't go to bed Monday night," Dean accuses. "What, you didn't make it? Did you get drunk and pass out in the hall? Chuck all over yourself? God, you're a lightweight."
Sam rolls his eyes and pushes past Dean and into his room. He drops the towel on the floor, and that drives Dean nuts, even now, even knowing that it'll sit there for a day and then disappear.
Dean turns on the ball of his foot and leaves, heading straight for the library, because that's the first place he goes every morning, to grab the same bottle of whiskey and drink until he doesn't care anymore.
"Dean."
Dean wakes to Sam's shout from his bedroom door. He opens his eyes and sits bolt upright, because he's trained, both to wake ready for a fight, and to respond to Sam's voice. "What. What?"
Sam's in the doorway, naked but for his boxer briefs. His hair is a mess, and he looksâ
"What the hell did you do, Dean?" Sam demands. "What did you do?"
Dean's hand goes to his head, because it should hurt. There should be blood.
"One minute I'm translating a Babylonian spellbook," Sam says, wide-eyed and manic. "The next I'm waking upâ"
"Naked?" Dean says. "Hung over?"
"I'm not hung over," Sam says, his lips stretched in a tight line and eyes shifty. "What happened?"
Again, Dean puts his hand to his head, looks at his palm, but there's no blood. "Slipped in the shower," he says. "I think maybe Iâ"
"You died," Sam says. "You fucking died?"
Dean shrugs. "And we looped."
"You're not allowed toâ" Sam's voice rises in pitch, and his face twists. "You can't die, Dean. I can't watch you die every day, not again."
"Hey," Dean says, and climbs out of bed. "It was stupid. I was drunk, and Iâ" His eyes rake over Sam's body as he crosses the room, and Sam's chest is crusted with somethingâdid he actually vomit on himself Monday night? Dean doesn't remember Sam even drinking, let alone getting drunk.
Sam's eyes follow Dean's. He jerks back with something like panic, then turns, and stalks down the hallway and back toward his room.
"I'll lay off the booze," Dean says, walking into the library.
Sam looks up from his books and his papers. He's showered, and he looks clean, and remarkably clear-eyed for someone whoâif they passed out naked and covered in puke the night beforeâshould be hung over as hell.
"I was drunk, slipped, cracked my head open on the tiles. I'm sorry, Sammy. I won't do that to you again."
Sam nods and looks back down at his books.
"So," Dean says, slipping into a chair opposite his brother. "Just how drunk were you Monday night?"
"Leave it," Sam says.
Dean loses count of the loops again after a while. He's true to his word, cuts out the heavy drinking, and even without the booze, the days all blend into one another.
He watches as Sam becomes fluent in Enochian, a hell of an achievement, and even picks up a few words himself. He learns to read the chicken scratchânot as well as Sam, but enough to get by.
Tuesdays pass, looping over and over. They eat the same thing every day, at the same time every day, get the same phone call from Jody every afternoon.
"It's kinda like being in that government place," Dean says one evening. "Same food every day, same walls, sameâ"
"It's nothing like that," Sam says, lifting his head. "We're together, Dean."
Sam's right. It's still fucking boring as hell, though.
The day the kitchen catches fire is like any other until they hear the crackling from the library.
They both run towards it, and Dean can feel the heat before he sees the flames. The entire kitchen is engulfed, and the fire licks at the open door frame.
The extinguisher is in there. Dean looks at Sam, and Sam looks horrified. Dean knows the feeling.
They can't stop it.
"We gotta get outta here," he says, grabbing at Sam's shoulder, and he heads for the stairs, Sam close on his heels.
They make it outside and everything goes white.
"You must have left the stove on," Sam says. His hair is still damp from the shower and he's already surrounded by books by the time Dean gets up and heads for the library.
"I didn't cook anything," Dean says. "You must haveâ"
"I didn't go near it," Sam says, thoughtful. "But it caught fire, when it hasn't done that even when we have cooked, in a hundred loops before."
"Something changed," Dean says. "But we looped."
"I'm getting close," Sam says. "The Babylonian spellbook. I must be getting close."
"You think that was a distraction?"
"Yeah," Sam says, reaching for the book. "Come on. You gotta helpâ" Sam stops, cocking his head to the side. "Goddamn it. Hear that?"
The kitchen's on fire again.
The kitchen catches fire every day for a while, and then, when they move the books to the kitchen to catch it before it starts, the library burns.
Then the archives burn.
Then, the entire bunker goes up, and Dean can still feel the fire melting his skin when he wakes the next morning.
That's when Sam stops getting out of bed.
Dean finds him there when he can't find him anywhere else, and apparently he didn't pass out in the hall Monday night.
There's a distinctive scent in the room, too, but Dean isn't going to mention that right now.
"I'm done," Sam says, covers pulled right up to his chin. "Chuck doesn't want me reading, I won't."
Dean decides to give Sam the day. Gives him the next day, too. And the next.
He dives back into a bottle, and it passes the time, and he loses track of how many days it's been since the fires, since Sam's gotten out of bed.
Then Sam gets out of bed.
"Get up, Dean."
Dean sits bolt upright. Something's different. "Sammy?"
Sam's smirking at him from the doorway. Showered, dressed, hair still a little damp. "We got work to do."
"Sam?"
"Stop gaping, Dean. I'm good. Something tells me Chuck isn't gonna burn the place down again. I was close, and if we want this shit to end, we gotta get to work."
Out of habit, Dean grabs a bottle and starts chugging from it as Sam collects his books and settles in the library again.
Dean gets drunk and watches Sam translate from a book that looks like it's about a million years old, and just as Dean's finishing the bottle, Sam closes his books and stretches out in his chair, kicking away from the table.
His shirt pulls away from the top of his jeans as he extends his arms above his head, exposing a band of bare skin stretched over carved muscle, and Dean's eyes are drawn there.
"I don't suppose you'd give me a blowjob," Sam says.
Dean's head jerks up. "What the fuck did you just say?" He's drunk, really drunk, and maybe he's finally just started hallucinating.
"You heard me," Sam says. He drops his arms and shrugs. "I lost count after two hundred, but I figure it's gotta be almost a year we've been looping. You know how annoying it is to go that long without sex? Especially when I wake up every morning with freshly cleaned pipes."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"You've gotta have figured out by now what I was doing Monday night."
Yeah. After a bunch of loops where Dean tried to get Sam out of bed, it's pretty clear that Sam jerked off Monday night, and passed out before he could clean up. "It's not something I like to dwell on about my brother."
Sam's phone rings. It's 3:45pm. It's Jody.
The phone keeps ringing.
"Aren't you gonna get that?" Dean asks.
Sam shrugs.
Dean grabs for it. "Heya Jody. It's a vetala...no, it's not a vamp, it's called a vetala, they hunt in pairs...yes, I am very drunk, but I gotta go, cos my brother has lost his mind."
Dean puts the phone down.
"I'm not crazy," Sam says. "I haven't had a breakdown. It's the complete opposite. Everything is very clear. And I'd really like to have sex. In case you hadn't noticed, you're the only one here."
Dean keeps his eyes on Sam as he gets up from the table and backs away. He stumbles, bumps into things, and then, when he reaches the hall, turns and hugs the wall as he heads for his room and safety.
But not before he sees the laughter on Sam's face.
What the fuck was that?
Dean slumps against the inside of his closed bedroom door and slides to the floor, breathing hard. He looks at the bottle in his hand, and then he carefully sets it aside.
Too much booze. He's gotta be hallucinating. Maybe Sam's still tucked up in his bed like every other day since the fires, checked out and given up. That's gotta be it. Sam wasn't in the library, Dean imagined it allâ
Imagined being propositioned by his baby brother? What the hell does that say about him?
He's too goddamn drunk to be introspecting right now, but he can't help it, because ever since Sam said itâ
I don't suppose you'd give me a blowjob
âimages flash through his mind, images he can't block out.
Dean on his knees. He can feel the hard wooden floor through his jeans. Sam's flies unzipped, his belt hanging, his jeans open. Sam leans back in his chair, smirkingâSam's not that cocky, not that slick, that's not Samâhis hand on the back of Dean's head, pulling him down, making Dean choke as he shoves Dean onto his cockâthat's not Sam.
Dean shakes his head to loose the images. It doesn't work, but he's sure of something now.
That wasn't Sam. It was a figment of Dean's sick sick mind.
"I'm done with the booze," he says, out loud, to an empty room. "Once you start thinking about banging your brother, that's a sign."
He staggers to his feet, and he picks up the bottle, and he pours what's left down the sink and dumps the empty bottle in the trash.
Then he falls, face down on his bed, and he passes out.
Dean wakes to Sam at his bedroom door looking just like he did yesterday. He throws his arm over his eyes.
"Fuck off," he says. "You're a figment of my sick mind."
Sam snorts. "Is that what you think?" His footsteps cross the room, and Dean feels Sam take hold of the blankets.
Dean tries to grab on, but they're wrenched out of his grip as Sam yanks them, blankets, sheets, everything, off the bed, and he's suddenly cold.
"Fuck off," Dean says. "Fine, you're real. Which means I haven't lost my mind, you've lost yours."
Sam drops the sheets and blankets and steps over them, sitting down on the edge of Dean's bed. He looks Dean over, and there's something dangerously predatory about his gaze that makes Dean want to curl up and cover himself.
"You really trying to tell me that you're okay with going eternity without getting laid, Dean?"
Dean sits up, scooching back away from his brother, and hugs his knees to his chest. He completely passes over the obvious responseânot if you were the last man on earthâand reaches for the next. "You said you were close. That's why the fires. That's what you were doing yesterday."
Sam sighs. "It's a long shot. I think we can summon an angel hereâ"
"Cas?"
Sam shakes his head. "We don't get to pick. We get whoever is closest, far as I can tell."
Dean relaxes a little. "That's risky. Most angels hate our guts, Sammy."
"Told you it was a long shot. But we get an angel here, maybe it can kick us out of the loop."
There's a pause, a kind of zing in the air, and Dean almost expects everything to go white again, but it doesn't. "If we're so close, how come Chuck isn't exploding the bunker, or setting our pants on fire or whatever."
"It's not something we're gonna get done in the next five minutes. We might not even have all the ingredients for the spell here. We've got some scrounging to do." Sam reaches out, and he puts his hand on Dean's ankle, sliding his fingers quickly up the leg of Dean's sleep pants. "It'll take time, so I figureâ"
Dean jerks out of Sam's grip and scrambles off the bed. "Those fires fucked you up, Sammy. They broke you. The looping broke you and you've lost it. You don't want to fuck me."
"And if all it broke was the need to hide the fact I've always wanted to fuck you, Dean? Maybe the looping fixed me. Made me realize exactly what we have, what we've always had?"
Dean watches Sam's face. That's not Sam. Sam is emotion, he lets it all out, there's no fucking way Sam would be talking about their relationship without getting all emotional and even tearyâ
Dean dives for weapons, finds a silver blade and a flask of holy water tucked behind a stack of DVD cases on his nightstand, and he backs away. "You're not Sam," he says. "What did you do with my brother?"
Sam rolls his eyes and advances on Dean. He holds his hand out. "Give me the knife."
Instead, Dean slashes at Sam, catches him across the palm. No smoke. He drops the knife behind him and screws the cap off the flask, and jerks it toward Sam's face.
Sam wipes holy water off his face. "Not a shapeshifter. Not a demon."
Dean glances toward the door, and his muscles spring to run, because there's borax in the laundry roomâ
"I'm not a leviathan, either," Sam says, exasperated. "Are you really that stupid that you haven't figured it out yet?"
What's left? Dean searches his mind, discounts angel possession, because he's pretty sure an angel wouldn't try to fuck himâ
"Your soul," Dean says. How could he have been so stupid as to miss the cold intensity of Sam without a soul? "You don't have a soul, and when you didn't have a soul last time, you'd bang anything that movedâ"
Sam rolls his eyes. "That's what you take from it? Okay, sure. So that makes me without a soul, oh, you."
"I don't want to fuck my brother," Dean spits.
"Don't you?" Sam lifts an eyebrow. "Could've fooled me."
Dean jerks backward, horrified. Because what the hell has he ever done to make Sam think that heâ "No," he says. "I neverâ"
"We're not normal Dean. This thing, between us? We might as well be married. The only thing missing is the sex."
Dean shakes his head. "You're not Sam. You're not my brother. Sam would never sayâ"
"No, he wouldn't," Sam says. "But he knows it's true." Sam drags his hand over his face and sighs. "Fuck this shit. I don't know about you, but I still want to stop looping. So can we justâ"
"I'm not helping you," Dean says. "We can keep looping for all I care. I'm not making a move until my brother's soul is back. Now get the fuck out of my room."
"Fine." Sam shoots a nasty look at Dean and walks out the door. "I'll do it myself."
Dean spends the day in his room, hoping like hell that Sam doesn't find the things he needs for the spell, because all he has to hope for at this point is another loop.
When Dean wakes up, he's different. Figures. Sam without a soul didn't work. Sam without his soul still wanted to stop looping. Taking Sam's soul away just got him out of bed and back to work.
The joke is on Chuck, though, because Dean still wants to get out of the loop, and he needs Sam to do it.
He looks for Sam in the library. Sam's not there, so Dean looks for Sam in his room.
Sam's still in bed.
"Leave me alone," Sam says.
"Your soul's back," Dean says. He doesn't bother trying to hide the disappointment in his voice. He wants that cold, indifferent Sam. That Sam gets a lot more done. He'd probably be more fun, too. "Get your ass out of bed, Sammy. We got work to do."
"The things I saidâ"
"You wanna fuck me, whatever." Hell, if Dean didn't want to get the hell out of this loop as he is now, he might even explore that a little, but they don't have the time. "You didn't have a soul, now you do, you can go back to keeping it to yourself, if that's what you want. But we got to get this angel summoned. Where's the list?"
Sam slowly pushes back the blankets and sits up. He's bare-chested, and there are the telltale signs of what he was doing on Monday night crusted in the hair below his belly button. Dean stares, and he smirks.
"You were thinking about me, weren't you?"
"Dean," Sam gasps, yanking up the blankets. He looks horrified.
Dean shakes his head, grinning. "Get your ass in the shower. Wash away the evidence of your filthy incestuous thoughts. I'll meet you in the library."
Sam watches Dean with wary eyes when he finally appears in the library. He's showered, hair still damp and dripping down the back of his shirt, and he's tense, on edge.
"List," Dean says.
Sam fetches pen and paper, and starts writing.
It's a long list. There's the usual things, holy water and lamb's blood, plant matter and bones. Then there's some more arcane stuff, the things they usually have Cas fetch for them, because it's on the other side of the world, or deep in the ocean, or hasn't existed for thousands of years and someone has to go back in time for it.
"Fuck," Dean says. "How the hell are we supposed to get this shit?"
"There's a section of the archives for relics. We might find some there. There's a Micheal Stone, I know that much. There could be more."
There's no way Dean's gonna be able to pick through a dusty old box of holy relics. "You hit the archives," Dean says, and this time he makes an effort to seem nonchalant. "You know what you're looking for. I'll get the other stuff."
Sam seems eager to get away. Dean watches him go, and then heads off with the list in his hand to get the easy stuff.
They've got a drawer in the kitchen full of various spell ingredients. Dean picks through it with the tip of a blade, pulls things out with the cuff of his shirt, because half of this stuff will burn his skin.
He brings it back to the library, and he lays it all out, and he waits for Sam to return.
He's three glasses of whiskey into a bottle before Sam gets back with a wooden bowl full of crap.
"You got it all?" Dean asks.
"I think so, yeah. We got stones and bones and hair and all sorts of stuff. I wonder if the Vatican knows the Men of Letters ended up with the Holy Prepuce."
Dean pulls a face. "The spell needs Jesus' foreskin? What the hell?"
Sam smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes. "No. But it's there."
"Weird," Dean says, then waves his hands over the collected spell ingredients. "Okay, go. Summon us an angel. Let's get this show on the road."
Dean watches, ready, as Sam follows the recipe, dropping ingredient after ingredient into the bowl. He speaks the spell, in perfect Enochianâleast as far as Dean can tell. It sounds good, anyway.
Sam picks up a blade. "It needs our blood," he says, and pulls the blade through his palm, hissing as it cuts into the flesh and releases a coppery scent into the air.
Sam wipes the blade on his jeans, then holds it out. "Your turn."
Fuck. It's iron. Was that part of the spell? Dean wasn't paying attention.
He takes it from Sam. The hilt is bone, no problem there, but the blade...
Dean pulls it through his closed fist, and adds his blood to the bowl, and then it doesn't matter that his palm hurts like a bitch and there's smoke rising from the wound, because there's smoke rising from the bowl, too.
All that shit, holy water, holy oil, consecrated objects and holy relics, and it's fizzing, and it's smoking, and Dean doesn't care that he's outed himself, because there's an angel coming, and Dean's got a blade.
He pulls the angel blade from his coat, and he turns to the room, waiting for the angel to show up, because he's got a plan.
The angel kicks them out of the loop, or the angel dies.
Sam doesn't concern him anymore. Sam isn't important. Sam is something he'll toy with later, perhaps on Wednesday, after the loop ends. He's not paying attention to Sam when Sam comes up beside him and snaps a pair of binding cuffs around his wrists.
Dean drops the blade and roars, but he's stuck. "I'm gonna kill you," he spits, letting go of the ruse, of the mask of humanity he's been wearing since he woke up that morning, doesn't care that his eyes are black and his lips are drawn back from teeth that want to sink into the meaty parts of Sam Winchester. "This time, I'm going to fucking kill you."
"It worries me, Dean," Sam says, dragging Dean out of the library and down the corridor, heading in the direction of the dungeon. "Like it really concerns me that you think I'm that stupid. You thought you could fool me into thinking you were human? Human Dean is a jerk, but you dialed it way up, like you didn't even care."
"Either I get out of this fucking nightmare via angel, or I rip your guts out and paint the walls with them," Dean hisses. "Either way, I win."
"Also," Sam continues, like Dean didn't even speak. "It was the next logical step after Chuck gave up on me without a soul. If he wants one of us to kill the other, if he wants Cain and Abel, then he just has to look at the closest we ever came. When you were a demon."
"Yeah," Dean says. "Fuck the angel." He shakes the cuffs. "Let me outta these things and I'll finish it. Give him what he wants. I'll even make it quick."
Sam shoves Dean into the devil's trap painted on the floor and steps back. "Now, why don't I believe you?"
Dean paces the floor, looking for a crack, a scratch, in the trap that's been on the floor for years. They've been walking over it all this time, chairs scuffing the paint, rubber soles wearing down the marksâ
The place smells like fresh paint, and there are no cracks. "You weren't searching for relics down here. You were fixing the place up."
"I wanted it to look nice for you, Dean."
"That wasn't even the spell, was it?"
"No," Sam says. He's backing away, disappearing into the shadows of the stacks. "Some trinkets. A bit of holy water so your blood would sizzle. It's all the proof I needed."
The doors slam shut behind him, and Dean's alone.
It's gonna be a long day.
Dean wakes up cuffed to his bed. "Sam," he growls, and then louder, "Sam."
"I wake up before you," Sam says, when he finally appears in the open door. "I always wake up before you."
"I'll get free," Dean spits, jerking on the cuffs until the bed frame creaks. "And when I do, I'm gonna gut you like a pig."
"Good luck with that," Sam says, and glances up at the ceiling.
There's a devils trap above the bed, but it's not paint, and it's not chalk, and there's no way Sam got up there without waking Dean. "What theâ"
"Projector," Sam says, his eyes flicking to where it's sitting on Dean's dresser. "Connected wirelessly from my computer in the library. Even if you shake the bed apart, you'll still be cuffed and you'll still be stuck, so don't waste your energy."
Dean roars and pulls at the cuffs, violence and rage his only outlet as Sam walks away.
Dean wakes up cuffed to his bed. There's a devil's trap on the ceiling. He screams himself hoarse and thrashes until the headboard breaks.
Dean wakes cuffed to the bed with a devil's trap above him on the ceiling. "Fuck," he says, to an empty room.
Dean loses count of the times he's woken up cuffed to his own bed, and he's fed up with it, fatigued, done.
"Sam," he calls. "Come on, Sammy. I just wanna talk."
When Sam appears, wearing his best bitchy expression, Dean sighs.
"I'm done," he says. "Kill me, or summon your damn angel. Either way we get out of here, and if I'm still breathing, I'm gone. You'll never see me again."
"I can't do that, Dean," Sam says.
"That's bullshit," Dean shouts. "The whole can't live without you crap? It's twisted, Sam. You gotta know that. Hell, I'm a demon, and even I know it's fucked up. The best thing for us both is for me to split, for me to be what I am, because you know it's the only way I'll let you go."
"You're right," Sam says. "It is the only way you'd leave. But I'd never stop looking for you, never stop trying to cure you."
Dean slumps, drops his head back down to the pillow. "I like you better when you don't have a soul. Chuck had any sense, he'd take that away again."
"I'm gonna cure you, Dean."
Dean pulls himself up to sitting. "No, you're not. If you were going to do that you'd have done it already."
"I had other priorities. Every morning, I make sure you can't get into trouble, then I find the things I need for the spell. I'm almost there. I'm going to cure you, tomorrow, and then we'll do the spell and get the hell out of here."
"No," Dean says. "Don't do it, Sammy."
"I have to," Sam says, and walks away.
Dean starts working the headboard. He's done this enough times now that he knows where the weak spots are, he knows where it'll break.
This is his last chance.
The headboard comes apart. Dean's still stuck on the bed, but he pulls the pillowcase off the pillow and winds it, like a dishtowel.
It's awkward, trying to flick it above his head with his wrists still cuffed together, but he does it, and finallyâfinallyâhe hits the right spot in the air that it breaks just enough of the projected image for just long enough, and Dean rolls off the bed.
He's free. Still cuffed, but free.
He slips out the door on silent feet.
Dean finds Sam in the archives. He's flicking through boxes, muttering to himself.
Mnemonics, or something. Figures. Sam can't pull the things he needs and have them waiting, ready, because every single morning, they'd just be back here, hidden.
But he's distracted. Day after day of Dean stuck in that room and he's gotten complacent, and it's almost too easy for Dean to slip up behind him and wrap the chain of the cuffs around Sam's neck.
"Heya, Sammy," Dean says, holding tight as Sam flails and chokes. The box Sam was checking out comes tumbling off the shelf, and scatters papers and objects on the floor at their feet. "I'm sorry. I know I promised to gut you like a pig, but I think I'm gonna have to strangle you now. Or, I dunno. Think I could take your head clean off with these?"
Sam fights, thrashing, shoving off the floor with his feet, kicking out, hitting the stacks with such force that the shelves tip away and start to fall, in slow motion, as Dean goes flying back and hits the shelf behind.
Ancient books and cardboard file boxes shake and rattle and throw up dust. Some fall, scattering more detritus at their feet, and Dean fights to keep his footing, fights to keep hold of his prize.
His prize, his brother, who fights for air as Dean pulls the cuffs tighter, even as they cut into his own flesh, and Dean's blood runs, making everything slick and slippery. Dean growls as he pulls tighter, roars past his own pain because he has to do this. All he's gotta do is kill Sam, and this will all be over.
Sam just won't fucking give up, though. It's no less than Dean expected, hell, he knows Sam better than Sam knows himself, and he's not the slightest bit surprised that even as Sam's eyes roll back in his head he somehow gets his fingers under the chain and pulls, sucking in a great gasp of air.
With that shot of oxygen, he starts fighting again, shoving Dean back, back, against the stacks, until that shelf, too, starts to tip and fall, and Dean goes with it.
He lands on his back, winded, with Sam on top of him. This time Sam's got both hands under the chain, and as dust rises around them, he levers Dean's arms up, and over his head.
The dust settles. Sam's face is so close to Dean's, his whole body holding Dean down, a solid weight that Dean can't shift, not with his arms pinned above his head.
Dean's blood is smeared across Sam's cheek. Sam's eyes are bright and feverish, and his tongue comes out and licks a drop of Dean's blood into his mouth.
"Still a junkie," Dean says, because all he's got now, all he can do, is fuck with Sam's mind. "Bet that's all you could think about, huh? Me locked up, no one to stop you. All you had to do was take. All the demon blood you could drink on tap, and the pantry restocked every single morning."
"Shut up," Sam says, the first words he's spoken since Dean wrapped the chain around his neck. "Shut the fuck up." He gets to his feet, and he pulls Dean by his wrists.
Dean stays limp. No point in making this easy for Sam, and the more he bleeds, the better. His body slides easily over piles of scattered books, and he grits his teeth when he hits the bare floor and Sam tugs him toward the devil's trap.
Still smells like fresh paint down here. Jesus. Sam has quite the routine, repainting every single day as well as locking Dean up in his room.
Dean can still end this.
The moment Sam releases Dean's wrists, Dean springs to his feet, and he grabs Sam by the back of the shirt just before he's about to step over the threshold of the trap, and he's got a plan, throw him to the ground and stomp on his face until Sam's brains paint the floor and this is all over.
But Sam's ready, and he swings, and his fist hits Dean's cheek with an almighty crack
Dean goes down, and the floor does as much damage as Sam's fist. Dean's mouth fills with blood.
"Stop," Sam says, backing away to the edge of the trap and stepping over. "Just stop."
Dean pulls himself to his feet, and he steps up to the edge. He can't pass that threshold, but Sam is so close, they're eye to eye, only inches apart.
Dean gathers the blood in his mouth, and he spits, right in Sam's face.
Sam looks so shocked, with his face covered in blood, Dean's blood, demon blood. It coats his lips and gets into his mouth, and Dean laughs, full and hearty.
"You can't cure me," Dean says. "My blood is in your veins now. You're not pure, Sammy. You'll never be good enough, no amount of confessions will make your blood clean."
Sam stumbles back, wiping the blood from his face with the sleeve of his shirt, but Dean sees the brief flicker of Sam's tongue as it scoops a little into his mouth.
Dean's blood, and Dean's spit.
"What will it take?" Dean asks. "For you to come down into the dirt with me? The things we could do... I'd give it up to you, you know? All the blood you could ever need. And more. We'd be unstoppable."
There's a look of horror on Sam's face, but not disgust. It's fear, not revulsion, and there's Dean's way in.
Sam's afraid of what he's capable of, because he is capable. It's been written into them since creation itself. Sam and Dean Winchester, destined to become monsters if only the chips would fall the right way.
Which won't be happening today, because Sam turns and heads for the door, leaving Dean alone again.
Dean wakes up with his wrists cuffed together, but he's not attached to the bed this time, and there's no devil's trap on the ceiling above him.
There's no need for it, because there's a devil's trap painted on the floor of the open doorway.
Dean paces his room, and wonders exactly how much force would be required to bust right through the wall.
"Sam," he calls, when he's bored enough. "Sammy? Come on, man. Can't help but feel like you've given up on me, here. What happened to your big plans for a cure?"
There's only one reason Sam would let Dean roam free in his room. He's got no intention whatsoever of crossing the threshold.
"You summoning that angel? Without me?"
"No," Sam says, appearing on the other side of the devil's trap. "I'm taking the day off."
Sam looks like shit. He's showered, at least, but his hair is uncombed, and his eyes are bloodshot.
"You drunk?" Dean asks.
"Not nearly drunk enough," Sam says, and turns to walk away.
"You're jonesing," Dean realizes. "You had a little taste, and you want more, don't you?"
Sam stops, but he doesn't turn around.
"Plenty where that came from," Dean says. "I meant what I said." Dean might be able to tolerate Sam, if he was on demon blood. The potential there was untapped, and, together, they could do wonderful, terrible things.
Dean could control Sam, if Sam was reliant on Dean for his blood.
"You don't have to come in," Dean says. "Just give me a knife, a bowl. I'll bleed for you, Sammy."
Dean's not ready. He doesn't expect Sam to do anything but walk away, not really, so he's caught by surprise when Sam turns and comes at him.
Dean tries to lift his arms to block, but Sam's quicker, and no, he's not nearly drunk enough, because he's got Dean by the throat and he throws Dean back and pins him to the bed.
Dean can't breathe. He doesn't really need to breathe, but it's uncomfortable, and it induces a kind of panic and helplessness. Sam's larger body, and his momentum, has Dean stuck, like a goddamn butterfly under glass.
Dean watched Sam rip the throat out of a demon once, years ago, and that's what flashes through his mind. It fucking terrifies him, but it excites him, too.
"Do it," Dean rasps, turning his head as much as he can under Sam's grip to expose his throat. "Do it."
Sam makes a sound deep in his throat like he's choking, and then he releases Dean, stumbling back from the bed with a look of horror on his face.
Dean stretches his neck, takes a great gulp of air, but he doesn't bother getting up from the bed. He watches Sam, as Sam stares back at him, still with that look on his face.
"We're stuck," Sam finally says. "You were right. I can't cure you. My blood will never be good enough, it'll never be clean."
"You won't see me complaining," Dean says.
"We're stuck."
"Don't have to be. We still got options."
"I'm not letting you out of here. We can keep looping forever, I don't care. I'm not letting you out."
Dean rolls his eyes and sits up on the edge of his bed. "I've still got options. I kill you, Chuck gets what he wants, and I stop looping. You'll make a mistake, Sammy, and I'll kill you." Dean gazes up at Sam from beneath his eyelashes. "Look where you're standing."
Sam looks down, then glances back at the devil's trap in the doorway behind him.
In that moment, Dean bolts up off the bed, and he shoves Sam back against the wall.
To his surprise, Sam lets him.
Dean has no intention of killing Sam, not right now, anyway. But Sam doesn't know that, and it's like he doesn't even care.
Or maybe he does know, somehow. Because the way he looks down at Dean, there's no fear in his expression, and he doesn't try to push Dean away, even though he could.
Dean lifts his arms. Slowly, because he doesn't want to spook Sam. He's curious, needs to know what's going on here. He raises his arms, high above his head, and then slowly drops them around Sam's neck.
Dean's still in sleep pants and the threadbare t-shirt he wore to bed Monday night. The sleeve of his t-shirt pulls up to expose the smooth pale flesh of the underside of his arm, and he turns it toward Sam.
"Got a blade?" Dean asks, softly. "You can just have a taste. I know you want it."
Sam's eyes flutter closed. "That's not what I want."
It's gotta be. There's fucking heat flowing between them, tension that's building moment by moment, the excitement that Dean felt with Sam heavy on top of himâ
Oh.
Yeah. Sometimes bloodlust and plain old lust gets a little mixed up and Dean can't tell the difference.
"I see," Dean says, and he wets his lower lip with his tongue. He shifts his body, his arms, and he pulls himself closer to Sam, rubbing up on him to connect, physically, and all the nerves in his body seem to wake up hungry. "Yeah," Dean says. "I can think of worse ways to spend eternity in a loop."
Sam's face crumples. It twists into an expression of pain, of crumbling restraint.
"Come on, Sammy," Dean says, his lips brushing against the corner of Sam's mouth as he speaks. He rocks his hips, and Sam's hard, holy shit, a solid, thick pressure against Dean's body. "You know, I gotta tell you something. Remember that hammer? You know I been dreaming about putting that through your skull, but it might be more fun to put my cock in you instead."
Sam grunts, and he turns his head, and his lips are open against Dean's, and he's breathing hard, but they're not kissing, not yet.
"On your knees," Dean breathes, exerting downward pressure with his arms on Sam's shoulders. "Join me in the dirt, Sammy."
He can feel Sam going, feel Sam's knees bend, buckle. Sam's head slips through the loop of Dean's arms, and Dean's looking forward to the warmth of a wet mouth around his cock, because it's been a fucking long time.
But Sam twists away, twists out of Dean's grasp, then he's out the door and gone, leaving Dean hard and aching and high and dry.
"Fucks sake, Sam," Dean bitches.
Dean wakes with his wrists cuffed to the bed.
He opens his eyes. There's the smell of fresh paint in his room and an overwhelming sense of relief, because it's been a fucking long time since he's been himself.
"Sam," he calls. "Sammy? It's over."
It's a while before Sam appears. He's disheveled and wide-eyed and he looksâunderstandablyâlike he's been through the wringer.
"Holy water," Dean says. "Test me, Sammy. I'm back."
Sam disappears, and this time, he's back in a flash, and he's pouring holy water from a flask over Dean's head.
Nothing happens. Sam's face crumples in relief and there are tears in his eyes when he unlocks the cuffs.
For the first time in months and months, Dean's arms are free, and he throws them around Sam and hugs him tight.
Sam's whole body is stiff. It's not surprising. Dean put Sam through hell these last hundred loops, but Dean holds on, until Sam softens in his arms, relaxes into Dean's embrace.
"I guess we should probably talk."
"You were a demon," Sam says. "You're not to blame for what you did."
Dean smiles, but there's no humor in it. "Well, yeah," he says. "But that's not what I'm talking about, Sammy.
"See, Chuck yanked your soul. I was a demon. When morality doesn't matter, when our sense of right and wrong isn't there... Seems an awful lot like we want to bone each other."
Sam stiffens. "Cabin fever," he says. "It doesn't mean anything."
"Yeah," Dean says. "Yeah, that's probably it." Dean's not convinced. He remembers what he was thinking, what he was feeling, and it's still there. Less of the violence and more of the desire to touch Sam, to be close to Sam, to be more intimate with Sam than they've ever been before.
But neither of them have seen another living person in, jesus, it's probably been years now. And they're facing eternity of the same, and they'll go crazy in here, and that morality, that sense of wrong, will just disappear, fade away. It'll be gone.
Dean knows, deep down, that the only thing that'll stop him wanting it is getting out of here.
"So," Dean says, and then clears his throat because there's something thick stuck in there. "That angel spell still on the table?"
While Dean spent weeks cuffed to his bed, Sam was working. He's got the entire spell committed to memory, and he darts around the bunker, collecting obscure ingredientsâand makeshift ones, where necessaryâfor the spell to summon an angel, and, hopefully, entreat it to kick them out of the loop.
All Dean can do is watch.
"That's not Enochian," Dean says, when Sam starts speaking a language Dean doesn't recognize.
"It's Babylonian," Sam says, and then starts again from the beginning.
"When did you learn Babylonian?"
Sam gives Dean a sharp look for interrupting him again. "Do you have any idea how many years we've been stuck here?"
Dean shuts up, and waves his hand to give Sam the space to carry on.
Sam starts again, from the beginning, and this time, Dean doesn't interrupt.
Sam throws the last ingredient into the bowl as the final words of the spell fade away, and flames burst upward, silver and blue, and both of them look back at the sigil painted in white on the floor behind them.
There's a burst of fire that mirrors the one in the bowl, and it dies down, leaving a figure standing there.
The angel looks like a regular Joe, no one they've seen beforeâat least not in this vessel. Jeans and white t-shirt and a crisp black ball cap.
"Hi," Sam says as he approaches, palms exposed in the universal sign for 'I'm unarmed'. "We need your help."
The angel sneers. "Winchesters," he says, and pulls an angel blade. "How dare youâ"
"We're stuck in a time loop," Sam says, taking another step forward. "We need you to break us out of it."
"Oh, yeah, sure," the angel says, moving toward Sam. "Call an angel to fix all your mistakes." He takes one more step, and Dean sees his intent a split second before he strikes, but too late for him to do anything about it.
The blade sinks into Sam's belly, and Sam gasps in shock, and Dean looks on in horror as the blade slides upward.
He sees the moment when the blade pierces Sam's heart and the light goes out in his brother's eyes.
"Sam," Dean cries, and moves forward without thinking, catching Sam's body before he falls, wrenching the blade out of the angel's hand, falling to the ground with Sam's body in his arms. He looks up. "Why?" he accuses. "He asked for your help."
The angel's hand comes down on Dean's forehead, and he screams as he burns from the inside.
For the first time in as long as he can remember, when Dean wakes he's not restrained in any way.
The first thing he becomes aware of, is his brother.
Sam's on the floor beside the bed. Sitting up, with his back against the edge of the mattress, and his knees drawn up. He hugs his legs to himself.
"It's over," Sam says. "We're never getting out of here."
Dean pulls himself up. "We'll do it again," he says. "One thing we got going for us is unlimited do-overs."
Sam shakes his head. Dean can't see Sam's face, but he can feel it in the air. Sam's given up.
"It won't work," Sam mutters. "The definition of insanityâ"
"Is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Dean sighs. "But that's what we're doing here. Slowly going nuts. If that's Chuck's endgameâ"
"That's not what he wants," Sam says. "He wants Cain and Abel."
"He wants us to kill each other. Right. Well, he's not getting it. If he couldn't make us do it when I was a demon, or when you had no soul, he sure won't be getting it when we're ourselves."
Sam is suspiciously silent for long moments. Then, finally, he speaks. "I can't do it," he says. "I can't keep waking up every morningâ"
"Sammy, shut up." Dean climbs off the bed, and he sinks down to his knees beside his brother. "You'll do it. Because there's no other option. Can you shoot me? Can you watch me die? Cos I figure, if you could have, you would have done it already. Jesus, Sam. I was a demon. I tried to kill you, and I would have. But you never gave up, even though you should have."
"I can't do it," Sam says. His eyes are bloodshot, red-rimmed. He's always been an ugly crier, poor kid. "I can't watch you die."
"Then it's settled," Dean says, and rises to his feet. He grabs Sam by the hand and pulls him up.
"You have to kill me," Sam says.
Sam won't get out of bed. Loop after loop, there's nothing Dean can do to make him. Pleading, bargaining, threatening, nothing works.
Dean drags him out of bed, damn near naked and filthy, and Sam lies where he fell.
If this is Chuck's endgame, the bastard likes to relive it, because day after day after day after day, it repeats.
"I'll do it," Dean says, finally, because he can't bear it any longer. "If it's what you want, if it'll end your suffering, I'll do it."
For the first time in countless loops, Dean sees just a little light in Sam's eyes.
With the promise of oblivion, Dean gets Sam up and into the shower.
Sam's almost catatonic. Dean has to strip him, push him under the spray, and Dean's clothes get soaked as he washes Sam down, removing all the evidence of what he was doing Monday night.
The last time Dean did this, Sam was dead. They weren't in the shower, they were in a ghost town in South Dakota, and Dean stripped Sam down and washed him before running off to do something very very stupid, but which he'll never regret.
Dean takes his time. He's grieving just as hard, even though Sam's not dead yet. Dean doesn't want to do what he has to do, but the endless march of days has broken Sam, and this is humane.
"Thank you," Sam rasps, as Dean dries him off and dresses him in clean clothes, and they are the first words Sam's spoken in weeks.
"Not here," Sam says, as Dean guides him into his own room.
"Yes," Dean says. "Here." It doesn't matter where in the bunker they do it, because however this goes, Dean's never coming back here.
Dean's things don't matter. His collections, his space, his memory foam mattress. If he does what Sam wants him to do, he never wants to see any of it, ever again.
Dean pushes Sam down onto the bed. Sam sits, with his hands folded in his lap, staring down at the floor. Dean retrieves his gun from the weapons bag under the bed, same place it was on Monday night.
He loads it. Two bullets.
Sam comes alive. "No," he cries, grabbing for the gun, wrenching it out of Dean's hands. "It won't work. We'll come back. He'll bring us back."
Dean fights Sam for the gun. "You think I'm gonna stick around without you, Sammy?" He jerks the gun from Sam's grip, and he tucks it into the back of his jeans as he sits down beside his brother. He holds both of Sam's hands in his, and Sam continues to struggle.
"I got a plan," Dean says. "I want this over as much as you do. When you're gone, I'll wait. Long enough that I know we've stopped looping. Then I'm coming with, and wherever we end up, I'll find you. I'll find you, Sammy."
Sam stops struggling. He looks up, into Dean's eyes, and there's a kind of calm there. Peace. Relief.
Dean reaches back for the gun. He grips it in his hand, and he flicks off the safety. His eyes are still locked to Sam's.
"Thank you," Sam says, and he leans forward.
Dean knows Sam's going to kiss him. He sees it, and he does nothing to avoid it. And that's gotta say something about him, that he wants it, it wasn't just something the demon version of him said to fuck with Sam's head.
Sam closes his eyes, and he presses his mouth to Dean's lips. It's dry, and chaste, and Sam sobs and parts his lips on a sigh.
It wasn't just something Sam without a soul said, either.
Dean cups the back of Sam's head with his left hand, and he kisses Sam back. And it's not chaste, and it's wet, as Dean dips his tongue in to taste, to get as much of Sam as he can get before it's over.
They want this. Here, at the end, past caring about right or wrong, they can finally admit it.
Sam's the one to end it. "I'm ready," he says as he pulls away.
Dean pushes him down onto the pillow. "I love you, Sammy," he says, and then he blows his brother's brains out.
Before, when one of them checked out, or tried to leave the bunker, the loop was almost immediate.
Dean expects it, at first. He sits there on his bed beside his brother's body, the pillow stained with blood, the wall covered in Sam's brains, for hours.
Hours.
Sam's phone rings. Dean answers it, because if this is the last Tuesday, Jody needs the information they have.
Time ticks away. Past midnight, past the early hours of the morning, past dawn.
Then Dean puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger.
Dean wakes to noise. He leaps out of bed and follows the sound of crashing and cries of pain and when he reaches Sam's room, he understands.
Sam presents like a wounded animal. His teeth are bared and he's almost naked and he picks up his desk and throws it across the room as he cries out in pain and frustration.
Dean ducks as bits of broken wood hit the doorframe, then he runs through, and he wraps his arms around his brother, because Sam's alive. Dean sat beside his dead body for hours and hours, but Sam's alive.
This is never going to end. "I'm sorry," Dean says, holding on as Sam struggles and sobs in his arms. "I'm so sorry."
Chuck wants a fight. Chuck wants them to hate each other, and he wants them to fight, and he wants to watch one brother kill the other.
"I won't," Sam says.
"I know."
"I can't."
"I know, Sammy," Dean says. "It's okay."
"You have a reason," Sam says.
After Dean calmed Sam down, got him to stop throwing furniture, he got Sam into the shower. And if there's one good thing that's come out of this, it's that Sam's talking. He's making decisions. He's showering his own damn self because after that last loop, Dean didn't want to know where his mind was going to go if he had to get in there with his brother again.
"No, I don't," Dean says.
"Yeah." Sam stares down at his slowly cooling cup of coffee. It's all Dean could convince him to take after he pulled him into the kitchen, offered to cook him an omelet, toast, anything he wanted. Even his cardboard cereal couldn't tempt him. "You do."
"I don't hate you, Sammy."
"You should. I'm sick."
"Anyone would be, after all these loops. Hell, I'm barely hanging on by my fingernails."
Sam's head jerks up. "I kissed you, Dean. You're my brother. That should make you want to hunt me down andâ"
Dean sighs and rolls his eyes. "You fucking idiot," he says, and immediately regrets it. "I mean, shut up." He remembers that kiss. Vividly. And he knows that if it hadn't been for Sam's desperate need for this all to be over, and Dean's promise to him, he would have taken it further. Let it go further. "Don't know if you noticed, but I kissed you back."
Sam looks uncertain, hesitant. He shakes his head. "No."
"Yes," Dean says. "We talked about this, remember? You propositioned me when Chuck took your soul. He turned me into a demon and I absolutely would have boned my brother. Take away the morality issues and we're into each other."
Sam shakes his head, but there's no hesitation now. "It's wrong. It's sick. We were monsters. I'm still a monster."
"Then so am I," Dean says. "But what good is right or wrong when we're facing an eternity of Tuesdays?"
Later that same day, Sam finds Dean in his room.
"Heya, Sammy," Dean says. "Jody call?"
Sam doesn't answer. Instead, he pulls a gun and points it at Dean. "Get your gun." Sam's hand is shaking. "Get your goddamn gun, Dean."
Dean shows the palms of his hands, and he swings his legs over the edge of the bed and stands. "Give me the gun, Sammy."
"Get your own," Sam growls.
Dean gets closer. "You can't make me shoot you."
"Then I'll kill you, Dean. Either way, this ends."
"You think that's gonna work? You think that'll be good enough for Chuck? Then shoot me." Dean takes a final step, until the barrel of Sam's gun is pressed against Dean's forehead. "Shoot me, Sam."
Dean closes his eyes. The gun in Sam's hand is shaking, and Dean expects it to go off at any moment, and he almost welcomes it. Oblivion. The end. Hope flares in his chest.
Then the gun is gone. Dean opens his eyes.
The gun is pressed against Sam's temple, and as Dean reaches for it, Sam pulls the trigger.
The last thing Dean sees is his brother's body falling and his brains splattered across the walls.
Dean storms into Sam's room, furious.
Sam's showered. Dressed. He's changed the sheets and the scent that Dean's gotten used to over the loops has mostly dissipated, but there's still a hint of it, barely there, ensuring that Dean will never forget what Sam was doing Monday night.
And yeah, maybe Sam's got more reason than Dean to go nuts when every single morning he wakes up to filthy sheets and dried spunk crusted on his belly, but that doesn't mean Dean doesn't have a right to be royally pissed.
"How dare you," Dean spits, twisting his fist into the front of Sam's shirt and jerking him up off the bed. "How dare you blow your brains out in front of me. How dare you make me watch you die like that."
Dean wants to throw a punch. His fist aches to slam into Sam's cheek, to draw blood, to beat some sense into him.
But there's only surrender in Sam's eyes. It would be fruitless, pointless. Sam's never going to fight back, he'll take every punch, every kick, and probably wants Dean to beat him to death.
Dean unclenches his fist. He releases the grip he has on his brother, and instead of violence, he pulls Sam into a hug, puts all his energy and frustration into holding Sam close instead of beating the crap out of him.
"We've gotta stop this," Dean says. "We're stuck here. We've gotta accept it."
"I can't," Sam says, clinging desperately to Dean. "I can't bear it."
Dean pushes Sam away, just enough to get a look at his face. "You have to, Sammy. You've got no choice. There's nothing we can do about it."
The expression on Sam's face is utter helplessness. Despair. Past desperation, past any hope. And that's when it hits Dean: there really is no way they're ever getting out of the loop.
All those days Dean woke up as a demon, all those days Dean drank himself into oblivion, Sam spent working. Researching everything the Men of Letters had to offer, and everything available on the internet as well.
Sam found nothing. Nothing but that Babylonian angel summoning. That was their only hope, and it tanked, and Sam has every right to fall apart.
Something lets go in Dean's chest. Maybe it's his last ray of hope, his last bit of fight. With it goes his ability to stand, and he takes Sam to the floor with him, both of them sinking to their knees, each of them clutching at the other with desperate fingers.
"I can't do it," Sam whispers, a last desperate plea for it all to end. "I can't do it any more."
"Shh," Dean says. He needs Sam to stop speaking, to stop hoping for an out because it's never coming. Sam's mouth opens again, and Dean does the one thing he can think of to make his brother silent.
He kisses him.
Dean kisses Sam softly, on the mouth. Just enough, at first, to shock him into silence. Then, it doesn't seem enough, and it quickly turns from a way to quiet Sam, into something Dean needs.
A dam bursts. All of Dean's frustration, all of his desperation, it all floods out and dissipates, replaced by a sudden, physical need. Not just for a warm body, but for Sam.
They fall to the floor, connected by lips and tongues and saliva, hands pulling at each others clothes. Threads break and buttons come free and belt buckles rattle and zippers come apart.
Sam cries out, deep and mournful, as Dean closes his hand around the both of them.
"I got you," Dean whispers, sliding his fingers through precome, tightening his grip, rocking his hips to fuck his cock against Sam's. "I got you, Sammy."
They come together, in a pile on the floor beside Sam's bed. They gasp for air and cling to each other, and it's okay, because this is all they have.
This is all they'll ever have.
Things got awkward after they untangled themselves from each other and climbed up off of Sam's floor. Dean muttered something about getting cleaned up and they each went in different directions.
It makes sense to Dean, what they did. A loss of all hope, on both sides. That desperation, coupled with the stuff the monstrous parts of them brought out into the open, the stuff they maybeâcertainly Deanâdidn't even know they wanted, that had been shoved down deep for so long, and something was bound to happen eventually.
Give a monkey a typewriter, and all that.
In the afternoon, Sam appears in Dean's doorway. "Jody called," he says. "Vetala."
At some point, they'll stop answering the phone. Time's never going anywhere. Nothing outside these walls exists, will ever exist for them again. The universe has shrunk to the size of the bunker, and that's all that will ever be.
Dean'll never have bacon again, but he'll have Sam.
Dean climbs off the bed, and he crosses the room. There's a love bite on Sam's neck, right at the curve of his shoulder, and Dean reaches out, and he traces it with his thumb. "I bit you."
"Doesn't hurt," Sam says.
Dean smirks. "I'll do better next time."
Sam's eyes go dark, and the pulse under Dean's thumb jumps, races.
Dean slides his hand down Sam's arm, takes him by the hand. "If we're stuck here," he says, pulling Sam into the room and toward the bed. "For all eternity? I can think of worse ways to spend the time."
"Fuck," Sam says. Dean pushes him down onto the bed, and climbs over to straddle Sam's hips. "Fuck, Dean. Oh fuck."
"We'll get there," Dean says, leaning forward to kiss his brother. "Play your cards right."
And, god, it's so easy to pull delicious sounds from deep in Sam's throat, moans that vibrate through Sam's chest when Dean kisses him hard and wet and filthy, desperate gasps as Dean grinds his ass against his brother's thick cock, soft whimpers as Dean bites down hard and sucks at the same bruise he left that morning, ensuring it'll hurt, this time.
And then it'll be gone, when they loop, and Dean can bite Sam all over again.
For the first time, the thought of looping excites Dean. The knowledge that they can do this, over and over, and never get tired, or old, or broken...
Dean pushes himself up, and he looks down at his brother. Sam's wide-eyed, fevered, and there's a flush spreading over his skin, down his throat, and Dean needs to see how far it goes.
He tears Sam's shirt open. Buttons go flying and fabric tears. "Want you," he says, stumbling over his words. "Need, fuck, Sammy, need you, get it off."
Sam moves fast, almost a blur. Dean falls backward, doesn't care, rolls off the bed and starts tearing at his clothes, and when he's done, he falls on his brother, yanking off boots that make no sense when they're trapped like they are, pulling Sam's jeans off his legs.
Dean goes for the nightstand next. Lube. There are no condoms here, Dean doesn't bring hookups to the bunker, but condoms don't matter, not in the situation they're in, and Dean's had sex with men, but he's neverâneverâdone it bareback before, but goddamn if he isn't looking forward to it.
"You're so beautiful," Sam says, when Dean climbs back onto the bed. "Is this real?"
"It's real," Dean says. He straddles Sam's thighs, and he slicks up his hand, uses it to slick Sam's cock. "And I want you inside me."
Sam's eyes roll back in his head and he arches up off the bed and moans. Goddamn but Dean's brother is sexy. So fucking hot, so thick and hard and pulsing in his hand and maybe, maybe, Dean's been in love with Sam his whole life, but he didn't know it because he never had another brother, he didn't know this wasn't what he was supposed to feel for his brother.
He can't wait. Dean lines himself up over Sam's cock, and he sinks down.
Fuck. Everything burns. His skin is on fire, sparking, licking, spreading over his bare flesh and leaving sweat beading in its wake.
Sam grabs Dean by the hips, and he's shaking, fingers squeezing bruises that Dean'll savor until they're gone in the morning and they can do this all over again.
"Fuck you, Chuck," Dean says, as his ass meets Sam's thighs, his brother's cock as deep inside him as it can go, and he stills, shivering, quaking, as his body adjusts to being so filled, more full than it's ever been before. "You're never getting what you want."
"I needâ" Sam moans. "Need toâ" His hips jerk, thrusting up into Dean's body. "Move."
"Yeah," Dean says, rocking his hips and watching his brother's mouth go slack and his eyes roll up. "I got you, Sammy."
Slow, at first, gradually upping the speed, until he's riding Sam's cock like a mechanical bull, fucking himself on his brother's cock like a feral animal, till there's sweat pouring off both of them, till it's stinging Dean's eyes, till Sam goes stiff and rigid beneath him, and only then does Dean still, so he can feel the jerk of his brother's cock as it pulses and fills his ass with come.
Dean wraps his hand around his cock, and then he's coming with his brother, spilling out over Sam's belly, making a mess they won't need to clean up because it'll be gone in the morning.
Dean's warm. A little itchy. And he's naked.
There's movement. Warm flesh, naked flesh, brushing against Dean's own. Strong arms wrapped around Dean from behind.
Sam.
Dean rolls onto his back. "Sammy, you awake?" Maybe, if they get cleaned up, they can go againâ
Sam sits up with a gasp, taking the blankets with him. A cool blast of air washes over Deans bare skin and he shivers.
"It's okay," Dean says. "It's okay, Sammy." He reaches out for his brother, but he doesn't want to open his eyes, not yet. He pulls Sam back down and close, rolling to push his face into the curve of Sam's throat, where the skin is warmer, where it's bruised, marked, where Dean sank his teeth and sucked hard, where he plans to mark Sam every day for eternity. "It's late," he mutters. "Go back to sleep."
Sam doesn't relax. He lies stiff, barely breathing, and Dean worries.
Maybe Sam regrets it. Maybe he doesn't want it, doesn't want Deanâ
"It's not late," Sam says, his voice thin and reedy. "Open your eyes, Dean. Look."
Dean lifts his head. He opens his eyes, and it's dim, only the light from the hall, and it's the same night and day here in the bunker, because they're underground.
The only light in the room comes from Sam's phone. There's a red light blinking, because it needs chargingâfigures Sam doesn't bother some days, Dean hasn't had to charge his own phone in years. "What is it, Sammy? What's wrong?"
Sam breathes, harsh and shaking. He turns his head to look at Dean, and at the same time he turns the phone and switches on the screen.
The air between them illuminates, casting a dim glow. The time is marked out in smooth characters, bright white against the dark wallpaper.
The time is 7.13am.
It's past dawn. Long past dawn, but Dean can't parse it, it doesn't make sense. Sam should be back in his own bed, Dean should be alone, and he shouldn't be covered in dried come and still lying in soiled sheets after riding his brothers cock the night before.
He can still feel it, too. The throbbing ache Sam left inside him, the pain Dean didn't want to miraculously fade overnight but knew it wold.
Without a single ounce of doubt, Dean knew it would be gone by morning, but it's still there.
"What does that mean?" Dean asks. "Sammyâwhat does that mean?"
"Wednesday," Sam breathes. "Dean. It's Wednesday."
"If I'd known that boning my brother would kick us outta the loop," Dean says, as they sit in the kitchen, nursing hot cups of coffee in their hands, "I would have done it a long time ago. I'm pretty sure that's not what Chuck wanted from us. What do you think, Sammy? He cut us loose cos he was so disgusted? All we had to do was gross him out enough with a little incest?"
Sam's lips curve into a smile, like he's trying to hide it, but he can't. "You said it, Dean," he says, reaching out, and peeling Dean's fingers off his cup to link their hands together. "Last night. You said it. You told him he was never getting what he wanted from us."
Dean remembers. Sam's cock was deep inside him at the time, and Dean can still feel it. "Yeah," he sighs, closing his eyes and squeezing Sam's hand. "Yeah, I did."
"You got us out," Sam says. "But what now? Do we just... Go back? To our lives? Like nothing happened?"
Dean can't see it. It's been years, and they've both been through so much. They've died before, a lot, and they've experienced trauma, and eventually, they always get back to a kind of normal, but this time it's different.
"Do you want to pretend nothing happened?" Dean's eyes are on their joined hands, and he's ready for Sam to pull away, he's not going to force him to stay if he doesn't want this.
"I can't," Sam says. "It's changed us too much. And that's probably not good, Dean. It's just been you and me for so long, we're gonna let people get hurtâ"
"It's always been like that, Sammy." Dean brought Sam back from the brink when they could have slammed the gates of hell. Sam let the Darkness out, and chaos followed. "We always put each other first. We've known that for a long time. That hasn't changed."
Sam nods, and, with his eyes on their linked hands, he brushes his thumbs over Dean's knuckles. "I don't want to go back to normal." He lifts his eyes, and there's a plea in his gaze. He squeezes Dean's hand. "I don't want to lose this."
"Yeah," Dean says. "Fuck that. Most of the loops were torture, but they made me realize just how much I love you. It saved us, Sammy. I ain't going back."
All the tension falls away from Sam, and with it, Dean feels his own flow away as well. In unison, they push away their coffee cups, and lean across the table, and their lips meet in a kiss that's sweet, and feels like an expression of joy, relief, desire, and home, all at the same time.
fin
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