Chapter 2

"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 looks–

"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 up–"

"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 I–"

"You died," Sam says. "You fucking died?"

Dean shrugs. "And we looped."

"You're not allowed to–" 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 I–" His eyes rake over Sam's body as he crosses the room, and Sam's chest is crusted with something–did 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 who–if they passed out naked and covered in puke the night before–should 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 scratch–not 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, same–"

"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 have–"

"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 help–" 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 all–

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 it–

I don't suppose you'd give me a blowjob

–images 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, smirking–Sam's not that cocky, not that slick, that's not Sam–his hand on the back of Dean's head, pulling him down, making Dean choke as he shoves Dean onto his cock–that'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 response–not if you were the last man on earth–and 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 here–"

"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 figure–"

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 teary–

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 room–

"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 him–

"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 moved–"

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 he– "No," he says. "I never–"

"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 say–"

"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 just–"

"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.