Fic: Like Luggage of Some Departed Traveller; Six
Master Post
Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six
The pain pills leave a sour taste in Sam's mouth. He washes them down with the bitter chemical sting of their treated water supply. It was easy to con Dean and Jess into encouraging him to raid their treasured medication stash - if Sam mentions back pain they get scared and solicitous, without fail. The pills are the light but good stuff, full of nice hazy Codeine, and Sam had thought maybe they'd chill him out a little.
Sam's plan seems to have backfired. His muscles are now lax and unreliable but his mind continues to race, only now with a sloppy disorderliness that makes Sam feel exposed, like it would be too easy for someone to put one over on him. Like he's drunk at the pool table with a sneaking suspicion that he's getting played for a fool. Something has been not quite right since he came back, and he doesn't know what it is. The not-knowing gnaws on his brain little-by-little like a sly rat in a pantry.
The sky darkens quickly. Sam slumps back against a bank of concrete, legs loose in front of him. His bad posture compresses his ribs uncomfortably, but moving would take effort.
The abandoned construction site consists only of the poured-concrete foundation and the wooden studs, giving the half-built house an embarrassed, naked look. Everyone can see its bones. The workers must've left here in a hurry - lunchboxes full of rotting food still scatter the site.
Since Sam's ostensibly suffering from back pain, Dean and Jess have deposited him by the tent for some 'peace and quiet' while they wait for dinner to cook. He's meant to be sleeping but he can't stop watching them. His eyes narrow naturally, like they're not even taking orders from his brain.
Jess sits on a stack of plywood, cleaning the guns neatly and methodically. She didn't know how to do that when Sam was snatched by the demon, and he certainly didn't teach her. She already knew what she was doing when Sam stumbled upon them in the forest.
Well. Not so much stumbled upon as deliberately followed through multiple states, a flood, an earthquake, a pack of feral dogs, a stretch of days without any food, and a nasty cold that made him sneeze and wish for juice, all on the strength of that pull, that subconscious nudge of go this way. At the time, Sam had clung - in denial, he understands now - to the sentimental notion that he could feel Dean and Jess from across the country because they were a part of him, because he'd left a part of himself with them.
Sam knows now that it was just his own tainted blood singing out to him. That's all he left with them - his own shameful sickness. If it were just him he could handle it, maybe, control it. But now Sam's gone and spread his wrongness and he's endangered the people he loves the most. Infected their lives.
Jess sets aside the guns and wipes her hands clean on a cloth. Sam's briefly warmed by the memory of wrapping his arms around her and spending hours teaching her to shoot, patient with her complete inability to aim. The warmth cools quickly, though - she doesn't need Sam's teaching any more. She's a fantastic shot, because Dean is a fucking amazing teacher who taught Sam everything he knows.
Sam's hands clasp around air and he wishes he had something to grab onto.
A clang draws his attention to the far side of the site. Dean's kneeling next to the frame of a staircase, sorting through a red toolbox. Those tools he deems useful are reverently set to the side, and the useless tossed carelessly back over Dean's shoulder. Dean talks to himself quietly as he works. "Nah," Sam hears him say. Dean discards a Phillips-head. It goes clattering across the cement.
"Would you fucking keep it down?" Sam feels the curl of his lip without really intending it to be there.
Dean's face snaps to him with a startled, I'm-such-a-doe-eyed-woodland-creature-don't-you-want-to-pet-me look. "Sorry," he says.
Dean thinks he's so fucking pretty. A sick tight knot of nausea forms in Sam's stomach. Watching Dean sort tools with deliberate quiet care only feeds the burn under his skin. Sam feels fevered. Pretty Dean, freckled Dean, golden boy Dean with the shining eyes, Dean the perfect hunter, Dean the perfect son, Dean who talks casually to Jess's pregnant belly like he and the baby are on familiar terms. Sam watches closely as Dean bends to retrieve the Phillips-head, even cleaning up because Sam snapped at him, and Dean's shirt rides up in back, reveals just a tease of the muscles in Dean's back.
Sam shuts his eyes and lets his heavy head roll away from the sight.
He fixes his gaze on Jess's abdomen instead. He watches the care with which she moves around the campsite, slow graceful movements supporting this foreign weight that's now tied to her. Sam knows there's still time left but she looks like she's ready to pop, and then they'll all have to deal with whatever comes out. The world will have to deal with it.
Maybe the baby will come out obviously wrong and Dean and Jess will look at him and know what he is. Maybe it'll come out normal and grow up inconspicuously, just trying to live its own life but sowing a path of death and destruction wherever it goes - no matter what it does, no matter how hard it tries, no matter how good its intentions - because the sickness will be in its blood. Maybe it'll seem so normal that they'll all love it, that Sam will give in to the aching tug he feels toward it, and they'll teach it to protect itself, help it grow up big and strong. If Sam loves it. If he -
You're tough, you're smart. You're well-trained, thanks to your daddy. Sam. Sammy. You're my favorite.
Sam lets his eyelids drop shut and thinks that with the Yellow-Eyed Demon and Dad dead, there's no one left who knows the truth. It'd be safer for Dean and Jess if they knew who - or perhaps what - he was, he knows that. But Sam still has his brother and he still has his wife and that's a lot left to lose.
Sam perches on a concrete pillar to spoon listlessly at his soup at dinnertime. He squints down at the map Dean spreads out. It wavers in his vision.
"The downside is that it's adding at least a week onto our trip," Dean's saying. "But it'll give us a good twenty-mile radius around the hardest-hit hemoemesis areas." Dean's fingertip circles a cluster of towns on the map.
"We can't afford the extra time," Sam says around his spoon. "Gotta go through." He swishes the soup in his mouth, too salty and greasy to swallow.
Dean's eyebrows rise high. "It's a fucking horror movie in there, man. You know better."
"Dean's right," Jess says, and Sam mouths the words Dean's right to himself. "It's worth the time."
"Oh, really?" Sam bites his lip. "It's worth the time?" He points at her belly. "You want to give birth to that thing out here?" A rat scampers along a ceiling beam. He gestures to it. "Maybe with them watching?" If this creature with his blood gets Jess hurt because she's stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, he doesn't know what he'll do.
Jess's mouth falls a little open. "What's going on with you?"
"He's just being a little bitch 'cause his back hurts." Dean turns his back to Sam and keeps eating, like Sam's a little kid throwing a tantrum who Dean can just ignore.
Sam wavers on the pillar, balance shot. "You know, ever since I came back, all you two have done is gang up on me," he says loudly.
The fire's crackle rises, fills in all the quiet space between their voices.
"That's ridiculous," Dean says, face still turned away.
"Look, it's just a detour," Jess says, reaching for Sam. "We'll make it work."
Sam drops his soup bowl with a clatter when he stands, unsteady on his feet. He shrugs Jess's hand off his shoulder and gestures to her prominent belly. "Well, maybe if you hadn't let this happen, none of this would be a problem."
The fire whispers and snaps.
Sam replays his words in his own mind and his stomach lurches. He reaches for Jess.
"Fuck you," Jess says. Her voice is hoarse but her eyes are dry. "Don't touch me. Don't talk to me." She walks slowly to the other side of the construction site, too pregnant to even storm off properly.
Dean advances on Sam and slowly, carefully curls a fist in Sam's shirtfront. "Who the fuck are you?" Dean's eyes flicker over Sam's face. He thumps his other hand against Sam's chest with a flat palm. "And why are you being such an asshole to Jess?"
"This isn't a good idea," Sam confides. "I'm the last person who should be bringing a baby into the world."
Dean lets go of Sam, throws up his hands. "This isn't you. You are not that guy." Dean shakes his head. "The asshole who gets cold feet at the last second, tries to ditch his responsibilities, his own kid just because he's scared, and punishes his wife for it. Like it's her fault he's acting like a spoiled child." Dean looks at Jess far across the site, perched alone on an enormous spool of wire, and looks back at Sam. Dean pokes him hard in the chest. "This is not my brother, and I don't know what fucking changed." Dean steps away with a humorless laugh. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were possessed."
Possessed, said with disgust, with loathing. Sam suddenly finds his sea legs and stops swaying. "You sack of shit," he says, enunciating clearly. He's not even sure what, exactly, he's accusing Dean of. The pantry rat nibbles at Sam's brain. "You back-stabbing son of a bitch, I needed you on my side."
Dean's mouth opens a little, then closes. He wipes a hand over his mouth. When he speaks again, his voice is unsteady, all the confidence drained out of it. "What are you really mad about, Sam?"
"You're supposed to be my brother," Sam says.
"What are you mad about?" Dean stays a cautious distance away and Sam knows that look on Dean's face, that's not anger, that's fear.
That's not right. Dean should never be scared of him. Sam can almost hear the air hissing out of his righteous fury as it deflates. He doesn't need to scare Dean, he needs Dean's help.
Sam says, "I have demon blood in me," at the same moment that Dean says, "If you know, then just tell me."
A rat runs brazenly between them, nails skittering on the cement.
"Demon blood?"
"If I know what?"
"You say something like that, you gotta explain it."
"If I know what, Dean?"
Sam listens to the dry wooden creak of the not-a-house. He narrows his eyes and studies every freckle on Dean's face.
Dean backs away a step. He spreads his hands wide. "You find me when you feel like acting like a human being again," he tells Sam. Dean turns his back and walks into the darkness on the other side of the skeleton-house. Dean turns before he can see Sam's flinch.
The pills knock Sam out as soon as his body hits the sleeping bag. Sam dozes restlessly, slipping in and out of dreams where he's locked in a wooden cage. On the other side of the bars, Dean and Jess pull wisps of sugar from the same cotton candy. They point and stare at Sam like he's an exhibit in the zoo. Sam pounds a fist against the bars, and everything smells like spun sugar and popcorn.
Sam wakes up in stages as the smell of woodsmoke takes over. He tugs at the zippered tent door and peers out, blinking blearily. The fire's burned down low and orange. It just barely illuminates Dean and Jess standing some distance away. Dean rests his hands on Jess's shoulders and ducks his head to speak to her. He lifts her chin with a finger and says something that makes her smile. Sam wakes up, sobers up, and finds that he can see some things distinctly even in the ember-light.
Sam has always liked math. He has no natural talent for it, but his brain works in logical ways. If he stares at a thorny equation for long enough, chewing on his pencil, eventually he'll reach a tipping point when his mind catches up to his eyes. He'll stare at the same jumble of letters and numbers but see the connections between them, the internal logic. The answer's been right in front of him, staring him in the face.
An odd, meditative feeling sweeps over Sam, and he feels the lines on his brow ease away. Answers calm Sam, they always have.
Sam crosses the naked frame of the house on bare feet, quietly. He looks at the back of Dean's neck and thinks I know you so well. Sam plants himself right next to Dean and Jess, and only then do they notice him. Dean jumps a little. Sam can't help but smile a little at that.
Sam stands solidly on his feet, hands at his sides, and asks politely, "Dean, are you having an affair with my wife?"
Dean switches his expression to bemusement quickly, but he's gotta know it's not quick enough for Sam, who's spent a hell of a lot of time watching Dean's face. I know you too well, Sam revises. "You're high, man," Dean says. He claps a hand on Sam's shoulder. "Sleep it off."
Sam picks Dean's hand up off his shoulder like it's a dead animal. He drops it. Dean's arm swings back to his side and hangs there.
"I asked you if you're fucking my wife." Sam smiles and spreads his hands. It's a simple question.
Dean's got the lie in his eyes, and as he opens his mouth Sam readies himself for the denial that's going to spew out, but Jess's words burst out first. "It wasn't like that!"
Sam swivels on his feet and keeps the smile on his face till his back's turned to them. Tonight's soup rises in his throat but won't quite come up. He swallows around it, a quiet guh sound, and tries to gasp a breath past the barrier. The salty simmer of it lurks at the back of his mouth. Sam couldn't get a word out if he wanted to.
Jess's soft touch curves over his shoulder. Lurching away from it, Sam folds forward, catches himself on two wooden struts. He lets go of the soup in a small puddle. When he's done spitting, he turns to face them and wipes his mouth slowly.
"Is it mine? The baby?" Sam asks, not sure if he's afraid that it isn't or afraid that it is.
"Jesus, Sam, of course it fucking is," Jess says, and Sam's heart flutters with a feeling he can't identify. "You were gone," she says. "You were dead."
"Only for a day and a half!" Sam steadies himself between the two wooden struts, standing straight.
"Yeah, well it was a lot longer for us," Dean bursts out. He steps toward Sam and tries to touch his face, catch his jaw. Sam dodges. "Do you have any idea what it was like without you?"
"Yeah." Sam looks at Dean, then at Jess. "I'm getting a pretty vivid picture, actually." The images run in pornographic Technicolor under all his thoughts - the man he never got to have with the woman he thought he did.
Dean drops his hands with a growl of frustration and paces to the other side of the concrete foundation. Jess stands with hands clasped, her knuckles white.
"So, what," Sam says. Maybe if he keeps his voice steady they won't notice his hands are shaking. "Are you leaving me?"
"No," Jess says. "Fuck, Sam, no."
Sam snorts, shakes his head with a knot in his throat.
"Hey," Jess says forcefully, "I love you." Moments tick by, measured only by the metronome of Dean's pacing boots. "But I love him, too."
Dean's footsteps still and Sam hears a quiet cough. Dean's scratching the back of his neck, and Sam just knows that if he were close enough to see, Dean's face would be going pink. And it's that, Dean's awkward embarrassment, that lays Sam out like a sucker punch.
The concrete jars Sam's tailbone. He leans against the house's frame and it creaks. His breaths come quick and short and when he tries to get more air it doesn't work.
When Sam looks up, Dean and Jess are crowding around him and the rafters are doubling, then tripling in number. No. Sam refuses to do this. He ducks his head between his knees and breathes, swatting Dean and Jess's hands away when he has to.
"Okay," Sam says finally, and breathes out steadily. They're safer if they know, and now Sam's got nothing left to lose. Face still tipped to the floor, he catches Dean's sleeve. "The demon blood is in me, " he says. Sam staggers to his feet. He looks at Jess's belly and what really scares him is that at the same time that he wants to throw up, he wants to fall to his knees and apologize; he wants protect that bump with his last breath. Selfishly, he wants to love it. "Which means now it's in her."
Somehow Sam finds his bedding again and gravity flattens him out the moment he stops trying. The lights go out on the whole world and Sam breathes a sigh of relief as his thoughts shrivel up like autumn leaves and blow away.
"Hang a left," Dean says. Sam, at the head of the pack, takes the left fork in the road.
"Pass the hot water," Sam says at dinnertime, and Jess passes him the water.
Sam grunts to shove past Dean when they're setting up the tent, and he tells Jess Gesundheit when she sneezes.
On a scorching, humid day Jess checks the thermometer and says, "Ninety-four." Sam hmms in acknowledgment and Dean says, "Hot."
It's all very civil.
Jess snaps halfway through inventorying their remaining food supplies. "What?" she asks.
Sam snaps out of staring at her. He rubs a hand over his mouth. "I love you." He gets up from the stump and brushes the moss and bark from his pants. "A lot."
He's been sleeping outside the tent and tonight he sets up on the far side of the fire, puts the smoke between them.
Sam dreams about Dean wrapping him up in a bone-crushing bear hug and whispering fiercely that he'll gut anyone who hurts Sam, skin them alive. Embarrassingly grateful for his big brother, Sam lets his own legs go out. He leans on Dean hard and lets Dean take his weight. "What happened to my life?" he asks dream-Dean, and Dean says, "Hey now, it ain't over till it's over."
He wakes up to the sound of slick slicing. Dean's sitting on a downed tree trunk, skinning a rabbit. He glances over at the rustle of Sam sitting up. Sam looks away before he does something stupid like hug his brother.
The briny fresh-water air tingles in Sam's throat when he chokes in a gulp of it. He contorts and gets the Croat, a dowdy woman with broken-lensed glasses, in front of him.
The Croat's neck breaks with an efficient twist of Sam's hooked arm. The kitchen knife slips from her hand and buries itself in the grass. Sam lets her drop and rounds his shoulders, grimacing, hand to his chest.
Dean shouts with effort behind him, and Sam turns quickly enough to admire the precision with which Dean's machete slices into the jugular of a distinguished-looking Croat with a receding hairline and a very nice suit, a banker in another lifetime.
The momentum of the Croat's fall carries it right into Sam's open arms, thunking the breath right out of him. Gouts of liquid warmth spurt against his chin, and he feels it spatter on his nose. A bead of red gathers slowly at the tip of a wet curl of Sam's hair, fattening impossibly, waiting, waiting, but not falling. With a small sound, Sam withdraws his arms and lets the Croat fall from this involuntary embrace.
"Sorry about that," Dean's saying sheepishly, his voice strangely distant like he's speaking to Sam from the end of a long tunnel.
Sam sits down hard in the grass. "Oh," he says.
Dean drops to his knees. "Sam?"
Sam lowers his arm away from the long, shallow gash the kitchen knife carved across his chest. It drips with someone's blood, his or the banker's. Sam supposes it doesn't really matter. "Sucks," Sam says, which he thinks is a good concise summation.
"No, no, no," Dean says. He hooks his arms under Sam's and heaves him to his feet. "Don't. Stop it."
Jess's rifle rests at her hip, her eyes still scanning the perimeter of the playfield. She has a smear of blood on her chin and Sam wants to wipe it off for her, but looking at his dripping hands he doesn't think that would be a good idea. "Guys?" she says hesitantly.
Sam can hear the motion of water, even if he can't see the lake. They reached the first of the Great Lakes last night and slept in an elementary school playground, surrounded by jungle gyms, 'cause the fence seemed secure. Sam slept separately beneath the monkey bars, while Jess bedded down in the tent next to the slides and Dean laid his sleeping bag out in the sandbox.
Sam clasps his hand loosely around the barrel of Jess's rifle. "Sorry," he says. He looks down at his chest. "Wow, I really didn't see this coming."
A seagull shrieks from its perch on the chain link fence. It flaps its wings.
The chains on the swing set groan when Sam pushes Jess down onto the rubber sling of the seat for the third time. She keeps trying to follow them across the street.
Sam kneels in front of her. He wants to take her hands but he can't risk it, not with the blood. She's clean and safe and that's how it should be. Sam regards the baby bump with furrowed brow. I'm a fucking idiot, he thinks. He wants to press his face against her stomach, maybe feel a farewell flutter from the baby - Jesus, his baby - but again, can't. He's contaminated for real now, and the feeling of it is miles away from his brooding preoccupation with the demon's words. "I'm a fucking idiot," he says out loud.
Jess says, "There could be more of them. It's not safe out here. Don't leave."
Sam smiles with real warmth and taps a finger against her rifle. "Yeah, right. I know you got it covered." He stands and looks down at his feet. "Um." He gives up and shrugs one shoulder. The right words aren't going to come to him and the clock is ticking. Sometimes they turn fast, sometimes slow. "Hey, you're gonna be great," he says, meeting her eyes. "Really. I'm psychic. I know things. You're gonna be an amazing mom."
He doesn't look back at her as he crosses the playfield and ducks through the damnable, person-sized hole in the chain link fence. With a gun in one hand and a camping lantern in the other, Dean follows him across the street to the shipyard. Sam picks a red shipping container for the visual symmetry. He needs Dean's help to swing the massive, groaning doors shut and latch them, and he notices that Dean puts down the lantern but not the gun.
Sam hears clicking in the darkness and the lantern comes to life, its soft battery-powered glow illuminating the inside of the shipping container with a cozy yellow light. "Well, this is awkward," Sam says.
They stand on opposite sides of the lantern. Dean's passing his gun from hand to hand. It's the 1911 with the ivory grip, Sam's favorite of Dean's guns, and Sam finds that oddly comforting. He wishes he had something to do with his own hands, and puts them in his pockets.
"So." Sam coughs. "Look, we're square. We're good. "
Dean's head snaps up sharply. "Sam, so help me, if you try to forgive me right now I'm gonna kick your ass."
"That seems kind of premature, don't you think?" Sam scuffs a foot along the metal and the sound echoes around the enclosed space. His mouth twists unhappily thinking of how audible the gunshot's gonna be, even across the street on the playground.
Dean takes a while to respond. "Do you get what a dick move it is to try and make this funny? You think I'm gonna look back at today and say, 'Damn, what that situation could've used is a little levity?'"
Sam sighs. "Yeah, well. Last time I died I didn't really have time to think about it. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing." He kicks a boot against the floor and it rumbles like a deep gong. "I'd ask you to take care of Jess and the baby, but I already know you will."
"And the baby?" Dean asks.
Sam shrugs with some combination of embarrassment and disappointment in himself. "I think this is what they call perspective." He folds then, breathing hard as it hits him. "Dean, I want to meet my kid." He tries to get a handhold on the metal wall. "Fuck, I want to see Jess again. I don't want you to have to do this." His feet slide on the floor. A worse thought occurs to him, later than it should have, and his head snaps up. "Jesus, Dean, it's gonna need me. If something's wrong with it, I. Someone's got to help it not turn out like me. That's my fucking job, I'm its father."
Dean watches him for a long moment, then tucks the 1911 into his waistband and begins crossing the claustrophobic space.
"What are you doing? Dean, stop."
Dean wraps his arms around Sam's shoulders and crushes him. Sam's hands are right there within reaching distance of Dean's gun and he wriggles out of Dean's arms and wedges himself into a far corner of the container. "I'm stronger than you," Dean says, following him. "You won't get the gun away from me. You can't hurt me."
Sam scoffs. "Stronger than me, huh?" He edges along the wall away from Dean.
"I really am," Dean says, and he grabs Sam's wrists. He slams them into the metal wall above Sam's head with a deafening clang. He drops his head against Sam's shoulder, face on his neck, and Sam stiffens.
"Dean, what are you doing?"
Dean opens his mouth against Sam's skin just so, little enough that you could argue he's just resting there breathing. "I'm fighting with you."
Sam pushes his wrists against Dean's hands halfheartedly. He licks his lips and says something he knows Dean won't have forgotten. "Well, I hate to tell you this, but you're doing it wrong."
Dean pulls away from Sam's neck with a grumble and starts checking him over, pulling at his shirt, lowering his wrists and examining them.
"What're you doing?" Sam asks.
"You've got blood all over," Dean says. He tugs at the waistband of Sam's jeans.
"Whoa, Dean - " Dean snarls with impatience and yanks the zipper down. He pushes the waistband of Sam's boxers down an inch and drops to his knees. Sam thunks his head against the container wall and curls his toes when he feels Dean's mouth again, just - not quite where he expected. "What the -?"
He looks down. Dean's sucking at the patch of bare, blood-free skin next to Sam's hipbone. Sam's eyes roll back in his head.
"If you're doing this to mess with me," Sam gasps, "To give the dying man what he wants, I swear to God, Dean - "
Dean stands and scratches a thumbnail across the orbit of Sam's eye, over his forehead and down his cheekbone. "I'm not the one who walked away. I'm not the one who had regrets."
Sam stills under the sharp pressure around his eye. "I wasn't sorry that it happened. I was sorry 'cause I was leaving." A stray eyelash needles at the corner of his eye. "I was already leaving."
Dean presses his forehead against Sam's.
"Come to think of it," Sam says, so close to Dean's mouth, "I think this just confirms that you've got the worst timing of anyone I've ever met." I'm so sorry, he wants to add. I don't want to go. Not now.
Dean drags him down to sitting, cross-legged next to the lantern with the gun in Dean's lap, and they wait.
And wait.
Sam wakes up confused and in darkness. He casts a glance around and sees a thin, I-shaped crack of light far to his left. He scrambles to get up and hits something solid only inches away. It grunts.
"Sammy?"
Sam shakes Dean's shoulder. "Dean, wake up."
"Wazzit?" Dean asks.
"Three things," Sam replies. "The lantern needs batteries. We fell asleep. And I think it's tomorrow already." The I-shape of sunlight shining through the doors leaves an imprint on Sam's retina, flashing different colors in the darkness wherever he looks.
There's a groan and clamor of metal as Dean scrambles to sit up. "It's been a day."
"I think."
"Are you a flesh-eating killer yet?"
"I don't think they actually eat flesh, Dean."
"No, then." Sam hears Dean fumble at the lantern, click it on and off, and curse. "Batteries kicked it."
"I just told you that."
"You're too annoying to be a Croat."
Sam walks to the doors and presses his hands against them. "Will you help me get these open?"
"Got a question first," Dean says.
"Yeah?"
"You remember door number three?"
Sam's glad it's too dark to see his face when he realizes Dean remembered. Happy endings, he thinks. A choice. Door number three. He hasn't thought about that in a while. "Yeah," Sam says. "I remember."
"Well, why don't you fucking walk through it?"
Sam nods invisibly in the darkness.
Sam's going to walk back out of this box, and that isn't something he'd planned for. He doesn't know what happens now. Dean lends a shoulder and they heave against the heavy doors.
The door shuts with a quiet click. That's the thing about Dad - he won't storm out and slam the door because he won't make a scene. Even when he's falling-down drunk, if Dad knocks over a bag of rock salt he'll stop to sweep the grains together with clumsy fingers. He's always in control, even when he's not.
"College is expensive." Dean picks at the crack in the Formica tabletop. He's been slowly, absent-mindedly widening it since they moved in. This is why landlords hate renting places out furnished - the kind of drifters who rent a place like this will always trash it. They don't care, they have no investment - they'll be moving on soon enough.
"I kind of thought of that," Sam says. He goes to the closet and fishes in the dark for his duffel. He hadn't started packing, hadn't thought he'd need to. "I've got a scholarship."
"They won't let you keep a gun in the dorms."
"I'm good at hiding things." Sam throws shirts into the bag. He tosses in his spare pair of jeans and frowns at the navy-blue suit - good for working hunts sometimes - with the too-short sleeves. He leaves it on its bent wire hanger.
Dean slips off the table. "You really think you're gonna do this? Think you're gonna make it all the way to California? Let me tell you, Sam, you're not. You'll take off sprinting back home at the first rest stop." Dean gets into Sam's personal space. Dean smells like salt and fake popcorn butter and Sam hates that. Sam knows he harasses Dean too much at work, but he just wants to get him out that overheated shack. There's nothing Sam hates more in the world than seeing Dean pouring syrup into a Sno-Cone and wiping his hands on the white apron they make him wear. It's like seeing a tiger curled on a cushion. Sam tries to cross to the kitchen and Dean blocks the door frame with an arm.
"Get out of my way." Dean doesn't. Sam ducks under the arm and goes to the kitchen, where he starts opening cupboards, picking out food. He knows Dean won't stop him, won't say no.
Dean comes at him, unexpected as a hunk of satellite debris falling from the sky and nailing you on the head, and just as violent. His hips slam Sam's against the kitchen counter and Sam bends over it to catch himself. "What about this, huh?" He reaches around, grabs Sam's lip between thumb and forefinger. "What about this?"
Sam jerks his head away. "Don't think about that."
"Don't tell me what to think," Dean says, and he reaches between Sam's legs.
Sam presses his forehead to the cabinets and chokes. Dean's hand is rough, and maybe Sam should worry for the safety of his balls as Dean closes a fist and grabs at Sam through his jeans. A whine, high and involuntary and humiliating, escapes from Sam's throat. "What are you doing, Dean?"
"I'm fighting with you, asshole."
"Well, you're fucking doing it wrong." Sam jabs an elbow into Dean's ribs and Dean falls back a few steps. Sam grabs a jar of peanut butter, puts it in his duffel, and zips it up. "I didn't ask you to go changing everything."
"You eat too much peanut butter," Dean says. "It's all fat."
The apartment's spartan, shelves empty. There's nothing Sam's forgetting. He lists to the side under the weight of his duffel and feels like a sinking ship.
"It's cold out." It's Mississippi. "Wait till morning. Don't do this."
Sam sags with a hand on the door frame. "It's already done," Sam says. "Has been for months." He clenches his fingers around the splintering wood. "God damn it, Dean. Why'd you have to go and ruin everything?"
Sam falls asleep on the Greyhound. When he wakes with a full bladder he gets up and makes his way, swaying and grabbing the seats, to the tiny stall of a bathroom in the back. The door smiles a green "unoccupied" at him, so he swings it open. A man with a long beard and a denim vest snores lightly on the toilet with his pants around his ankles. He has a boil on his thigh and that's as far as Sam's eyes get before he's backing out and shutting the door.
The greatest hits of soft rock croon gently in the front of the bus. "Excuse me, how long till we stop?" he asks the driver.
"Just had the first rest stop, honey," she says. "Guess you snoozed right through it." She smiles. "Don't worry, there'll be another."
Sam picks door-splinters out of his hand to take his mind off his impending bodily-function disaster.
When they pull in to the second truck stop, Sam hobbles awkwardly to the bathroom and pees like it's a religious fucking experience. He braces a hand against the wall above the urinal. His shoulders shake.
Headlights blind him when he comes out of the bathroom and his heart leaps for a moment. The throaty-rumbling engine dies and the lights flick off. It's a dusky blue Chevelle with fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror.
Sam sleeps his way through most of the bus ride, only catching glimpses of corn fields and cacti. The next time he opens his eyes for real, he's in a bus depot in San Jose and his fellow passengers are bumping him with their bags as they walk down the aisle. End of the line.
As blinding as the light was inside the container, it's an overcast day outside. Gulls swoop overhead, and Sam kicks his feet through dew when they hit the grass.
He stops a good dozen paces away from Jess, who's still, somehow, sitting upright on the swing set. She must have heard them coming but she hasn't turned around. "Don't move," he says.
Very, very slowly, Jess turns to look over her shoulder at him. She licks her lips. "Why not?"
"'Cause I need to wash all this blood off before I touch you. Don't even move."
Dean helps him track down all the stray spots of blood, scrubbing roughly at Sam's neck and behind his ears in exactly the same way he did when he was five.
Jess's knuckles are white on the chains of the swing when Sam drops to his knees in front of her again. The first thing he does is press his face to her middle. "Hi," he says, and kisses the bump. Sam holds there for a long moment. "Sorry." He surges up to kiss Jess, and they nearly overbalance and tip off the swing.
"What the hell?" Jess whispers when he pulls back. Sam becomes aware of Dean leaning against the leg of the swing set, seemingly untroubled by their make-out session.
"Yeah," Sam says. He scratches the back of his neck. "Still here." He allows a sunny grin to grow on his face because really, what else can he do? "You believe I've got demon blood now?"
Dean socks him in the arm.
It turns out they're out of batteries entirely, so they leave the camping lantern on the jungle gym and that night, when they're all piled into the tent together, the only light is from the moon.
Ferns have already grown up in all the cracks in the courtyard. A duck has claimed the fountain. Birds nest in the crook where the dead security camera meets the wall. It must have been an expensive place to live, once.
Dean's got his feet propped up on the edge of the fountain, head near Sam's ribs, and Jess curls close against Sam's other side. Sam's dozing, but he rouses a little when Jess sits up. "Babe?
Without a word, Jess swings a leg over Sam's body and sits across his hips. Pressing a hand over his heart, she leans down and kisses him.
Sam hasn't been with Jess since he found out about her and Dean, and as much as he wants this, he wouldn't do that to Dean. Sam can already feel Dean shifting, noticing that something is happening. He hears Dean's sharp intake of breath, and that's it, he can't do this. Sam makes a muffled noise against Jess's mouth and tries to sit up. She pushes him down, grabs his hand, and leads his arm to the side. She presses Sam's hand against Dean's and when Sam doesn't move, she carefully spreads his fingers herself and interlaces them with Dean's.
Sam's hand tightens involuntarily. He says against her mouth, "Jess, are you -"
"You're a smart boy, Sam," Jess says. "You know what this is." She applies her mouth to his neck and sucks a sore spot into it while Sam's eyes flick over to Dean.
Dean's rolled onto his side now, watching intently. He hasn't let go of Sam's hand.
Sam breathes harshly as Jess rolls her hips against him. This is big; this could be huge and scary and very delicate, and it requires a lot of forethought and -
Dean squeezes Sam's hand. Sam looks back at him. Dean shakes his head. "Don't overthink, dude." He drops Sam's hand, reaches for the hem of his own shirt and pulls it over his head. Dean swings to straddle Sam's legs behind Jess, and when Dean kisses her shoulder, his hand is on Sam's knee.
Pinned, Sam writhes. Between the two of them they've got the lower half of his body completely under their control, and the rest of him compensates. His arms fly up to grasp Jess's thighs and position her more exactly, and when he gets her just so he tries to sit up, abs burning, to kiss her. Sam tangles a hand in her hair and pulls, exposes her neck so he can lick it. She gasps.
Dean laughs. "You little brat, you learned that move from me." He reaches past Jess and curves a palm over Sam's scalp. It rests there for a second, warm and still, and then Dean's fingers clench abruptly. The hint of pain sends Sam bucking against their combined weight, panting against Jess's neck.
The lazy ripples on the surface of the fountain cast wavering light-shadows against Jess's naked skin when she climbs back on top of Sam. Dean sits on Sam's knees, and Sam can feel Dean's eyes on them when she sinks slowly onto Sam's dick. When she's all the way down, resting in Sam's lap, Dean takes her hips in his hands and, supporting her weight with his own body, tips the angle of her pelvis ever so slightly. Sam slides deeper and shudders.
At first Dean seems content to ride the twitches of Sam's legs, running his hands over Jess's breasts, kissing her neck, and dipping a curious finger down to feel where Sam's sliding in her wetness. Sam instinctively wants to knock Dean down and choke him out for licking Jess's ear, for brushing lightly over a nipple till she squeaks, but whenever the urge gets too strong he reaches out for a handful of Dean's bare skin and it subsides. Once Jess has rocked herself to gasping completion on Sam's dick, Dean drops to an elbow at Sam's side.
With Dean's breath on his face, Sam holds his own and just lets his lungs burn. Dean leans in and by the time Dean's satisfied himself with his slow, thorough ownership of Sam's mouth, Sam's reeling, seeing black spots. When Dean tucks his thumb shallowly into Sam's navel, Sam surges up into Jess and the shivering fountain-shadows on the courtyard walls detonate into riots of light.
Jess gets Dean off with her mouth, slow and dirty, and the hand tangled in her hair, guiding the bobbing of her head, is Sam's.
Given the potential to catch something life-threatening, the three of them don't spend a whole lot of time around other people. This is another reason why.
"Okay, no harm done, right?" The guy with the ponytail smiles, as if him groping Jess when she went to fill up a bottle at the reservoir was just a misunderstanding between friends. "So who's Papa Bear?"
Dean casts Sam a thoughtful look. "Gosh, I don't know. Sam, which one of us is Papa Bear today?"
Sam nods with grave concern. "I don't know, Dean. Maybe we should let him pick which one of us he'd rather take on."
Sam straightens to his full height. Dean shakes his shoulders out, cracks his knuckles. "We usually work better as a double-team," Dean says regretfully, "but I guess we could make an exception."
Sam grins. "See what he did there? He's the funny one."
"I'm the funny one," Dean agrees.
"If you're not going to pick," Sam tells the man with the wandering hands, "We're going to have to pick for you."
When they make it back to the old stone silo where Jess has set up the tent, they're glued to each other's sides, hip-checking and shoving and throwing fake punches.
Jess pauses in sharpening the Bowie knife and raises an eyebrow at their bruised knuckles. "What did you two do now?"
"We …" Sam leans on Dean, arm around his shoulders. "We taught a free seminar on etiquette."
"Very hands on."
"We're kinetic learners," Sam explains.
"I swear to God it's like having a couple of Rottweiler puppies," Jess says. "If you beat up every guy who looks at me we're going to have a problem when we get to the end of the road. I ought to put leashes on you two."
"Aww, come on." Sam sits down behind her, gets a leg on either side of her and brushes his nose in her hair. He pushes his finger against the edge on the knife - it can go sharper. "We just scared him a little."
"For the record," Dean says, "I have no objection to leashes." He takes the knife from Jess and flips it once, showing off. "I got this. Go make out or something, you're sickening. Go."
Sam and Jess have a long, slow make-out session against the outside of the silo as the sky darkens. Dean shouts color commentary from inside every time one of them makes a little too much noise.
Jess precedes Sam into the shelter, and Sam hangs back, slapping away mosquitoes absently. Dean's got a little fire going inside and its glow lights up the silo, shining out the doorway in a skewed rectangle, peeking from every crack in the stone like it can hardly be contained.
"Herbert."
"No."
"Uh … Jedediah."
"No."
"Eustace."
"No, Dean."
"Alfred Harold Walter Richard - "
Sam stops in the middle of the trail and hefts his pack to a better position on his shoulders. "You're not naming our kid Richard, you know all the other kids would call him Dick. Dick Winchester."
Dean sighs. "I'm not the one who wanted a traditional name. George?"
"George sounds like someone with jowls."
"What about Georgia for a girl?"
"Better," Sam says.
"Iphigenia?"
"Why do you hate our child?"
"You know, this would all be solved if you'd just stick with Sam."
"You can't name the kid after me when I'm not dead, everyone'll think I'm a total narcissist."
"Not if we name 'em Samantha."
"What if it's a boy?"
"It'll be like A Boy Named Sue! He'll be the most badass kid around!"
"'Cause he had to learn to defend himself so he wouldn't get swirlied to death in middle school."
"Aww, still bitter, Cupcake?"
Jess interrupts with a hand on each of their shoulders. "If the Winchester Comedy Hour can go to commercial break for a minute, I've got something to show you guys."
Looking down from the crest of the hill, Sam takes in the serpentine series of switchbacks into which they're about to descend. "Yeah, I could take a break." He mops off with the bandana tied to his shoulder strap, a habit Sam picked up while he was traveling on his own that Dean has brutally mocked ever since.
Dean pulls out a bag of peanut M&Ms as they settle on a nurse log dotted with ferns and moss. Sam wonders where the hell he got them and steals a handful. "I kicked a puppy for those," Dean says. "You better enjoy them."
Jess pulls a long, thin envelope from her pack. It's shriveled and seems to have gotten wet at some point, with a mud stain in the corner. She taps it in her hands, all nervous motion. "You want to find out if we're looking at a Eustace or an Iphigenia?"
Sam presses closer. He wipes sweaty palms on his pants. "I'm in. I want to know. Are you -"
Dean and Jess both nod. Jess tugs a finger along the envelope and carefully unfolds the printout of the sonogram that's inside, with all the relevant body parts circled and labeled.
Dean pops a yellow candy in his mouth and crunches around a growing grin. "Poor little Dick Winchester it is."
The downhills are murder on Sam's knees, and after hours of zigzagging Jess sits down right there on a narrow switchback and declares them done for the day, but that's okay, 'cause Sam has a son.
Sam's so out of his head for the rest of the day that he accidentally smiles and nods when Dean asks if he can take the flavor packet from Sam's ramen. Dean cackles, and Sam slurps a mouthful of plain noodles.
Nearly every store in the country has been ransacked for food, money, and sharp objects in the last year but not, as it turns out, mattress stores.
Sam lounges back in a stack of pillows and watches as Jess clamps her knees tight to Dean's ears. She reaches out blindly till she gets both hands on the back of Dean's head and presses him closer, coarse and rude and brazen. Shuddering, she responds almost violently to something Dean's doing, a sort of enthusiastic lapping that seems very athletic and has Dean grabbing her thighs, serving her up at just the right angle. Sam tries to imagine himself asking Dean how to do whatever he's doing, and then he succeeds in imagining exactly how Dean would go about teaching him.
When Jess comes she nudges Dean away with her legs. She's always done it to Sam, as well, too sensitive right after. She squirms to the foot of the king-size, presses both hands between her legs, and more or less passes out.
Dean collapses onto his side, mouth shining wet.
Tentatively, awkward on all fours, Sam crawls over the mattress. He bends over Dean's face and begins to methodically lick it clean. Dean's hand fumbles up and between Sam's legs, finding a home for itself pressing gently against the root of Sam's cock and his balls, a fingertip slowly teasing back and forth over Sam's perineum. When Sam's cleaned Dean's face, he explores the stubble on Dean's jaw and neck in greater detail, and mostly it makes him think about waking up with Dean's beard-shadow scratching at his skin. That could happen now. It could.
When Sam begins to lose the steadiness in his legs and falters, Dean presses him down with a careful hand on the small of his back.
By the time Jess wakes up, Dean's got Sam laid out flat on his front, voicing wordless noises into the mattress while Dean pumps him from behind, Sam's legs spread wantonly. Sam blushes hot to be seen like this, and when Dean presses a hand against the back of Sam's neck, furthering his subjection, Sam shudders against the mattress.
A loon calls plaintively on the lake, and a wooden dinghy thunks rhythmically against the pier in front of them.
The island sits dark and still.
"Maybe it's the wrong island," Jess says. "We could go a little further."
"It's the right one," Sam says, pack weighing heavier on his shoulders. He drops it to sit on a blackened pillar that reeks of creosote and hides his face behind his palm. "Crap."
"So we'll deal," Dean says. "We knew we might get here and find nothing."
Sam had just been so sure. Between the iron and the water it's still a defensible space, but he doesn't relish the idea of cleaning out the researchers' bodies first - civilians who were just trying to help, trying to end this virus. "Yeah, I know, but - "
A light flickers like a will o' the wisp in the trees. Sam narrows his eyes and looks back over his shoulder. A beam of light extends from the island, shifting back and forth. The spotlight flickers and glows, like someone's holding a lantern up to a mirror. Sam stands suddenly. "Hello?"
A pause passes filled only by the lamenting loons and the lap of water at the shore, and then a voice echoes across the water. "Marco," it says.
"Who's Marco?" Dean whispers.
Sam licks his lips and tests a theory. "Polo?"
Another pause. "Yeah, okay," the voice says from across the water. "You looking for somewhere to stay?" Jess grabs his hand.
"Pretty much," Sam yells, louder than he needs to, and it bounces between the trees and water. "You one of the scientists?"
"Man, I am The Scientist," the voice returns, and Sam can hear the capital letters clearly. "Use the dinghy," the voice instructs. "Swear to God it's sea-worthy."
Dean turns to Sam looking shell-shocked. "Holy fuck." He looks back at the island like it might disappear. "That's - holy fuck."
Sam kisses the shit out of him, then does the same to Jess.
Dean rows them the span of the still gray water with strong, measured strokes of the oars. Sam watches the lines of Dean's arms. Dean calls over his shoulder. "Marco Polo's your security system?"
"Croats have no sense of humor," echoes back.
The diminutive figure on the island pier leans down to grab the dinghy's rope. He ties it down with accurate, efficient knots and sticks out a hand. "Hey." He adjusts his glasses. "I'm Hal."
"You the welcoming committee?" Dean asks.
"I'm the brawn," Hal says. "Wow, you're really pregnant."
Jess nods, amused. "Yeah, I am."
"You guys together?" He nods to Jess's arm, linked with Sam's.
Sam hooks an arm around Dean's shoulders, smiles to encompass the three of them. "Yeah, we are."
Hal leads the way to the researchers' dormitory, apparently packed to the windowsills with refugees like themselves. "But there's always room for one more. Three more. I mean four more."
The further the path winds into the pine-shadowed interior of the island, intermittently torch-lit, the fainter the calls of the loons become, till Sam can't hear them at all.
end.
Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six
The pain pills leave a sour taste in Sam's mouth. He washes them down with the bitter chemical sting of their treated water supply. It was easy to con Dean and Jess into encouraging him to raid their treasured medication stash - if Sam mentions back pain they get scared and solicitous, without fail. The pills are the light but good stuff, full of nice hazy Codeine, and Sam had thought maybe they'd chill him out a little.
Sam's plan seems to have backfired. His muscles are now lax and unreliable but his mind continues to race, only now with a sloppy disorderliness that makes Sam feel exposed, like it would be too easy for someone to put one over on him. Like he's drunk at the pool table with a sneaking suspicion that he's getting played for a fool. Something has been not quite right since he came back, and he doesn't know what it is. The not-knowing gnaws on his brain little-by-little like a sly rat in a pantry.
The sky darkens quickly. Sam slumps back against a bank of concrete, legs loose in front of him. His bad posture compresses his ribs uncomfortably, but moving would take effort.
The abandoned construction site consists only of the poured-concrete foundation and the wooden studs, giving the half-built house an embarrassed, naked look. Everyone can see its bones. The workers must've left here in a hurry - lunchboxes full of rotting food still scatter the site.
Since Sam's ostensibly suffering from back pain, Dean and Jess have deposited him by the tent for some 'peace and quiet' while they wait for dinner to cook. He's meant to be sleeping but he can't stop watching them. His eyes narrow naturally, like they're not even taking orders from his brain.
Jess sits on a stack of plywood, cleaning the guns neatly and methodically. She didn't know how to do that when Sam was snatched by the demon, and he certainly didn't teach her. She already knew what she was doing when Sam stumbled upon them in the forest.
Well. Not so much stumbled upon as deliberately followed through multiple states, a flood, an earthquake, a pack of feral dogs, a stretch of days without any food, and a nasty cold that made him sneeze and wish for juice, all on the strength of that pull, that subconscious nudge of go this way. At the time, Sam had clung - in denial, he understands now - to the sentimental notion that he could feel Dean and Jess from across the country because they were a part of him, because he'd left a part of himself with them.
Sam knows now that it was just his own tainted blood singing out to him. That's all he left with them - his own shameful sickness. If it were just him he could handle it, maybe, control it. But now Sam's gone and spread his wrongness and he's endangered the people he loves the most. Infected their lives.
Jess sets aside the guns and wipes her hands clean on a cloth. Sam's briefly warmed by the memory of wrapping his arms around her and spending hours teaching her to shoot, patient with her complete inability to aim. The warmth cools quickly, though - she doesn't need Sam's teaching any more. She's a fantastic shot, because Dean is a fucking amazing teacher who taught Sam everything he knows.
Sam's hands clasp around air and he wishes he had something to grab onto.
A clang draws his attention to the far side of the site. Dean's kneeling next to the frame of a staircase, sorting through a red toolbox. Those tools he deems useful are reverently set to the side, and the useless tossed carelessly back over Dean's shoulder. Dean talks to himself quietly as he works. "Nah," Sam hears him say. Dean discards a Phillips-head. It goes clattering across the cement.
"Would you fucking keep it down?" Sam feels the curl of his lip without really intending it to be there.
Dean's face snaps to him with a startled, I'm-such-a-doe-eyed-woodland-creature-don't-you-want-to-pet-me look. "Sorry," he says.
Dean thinks he's so fucking pretty. A sick tight knot of nausea forms in Sam's stomach. Watching Dean sort tools with deliberate quiet care only feeds the burn under his skin. Sam feels fevered. Pretty Dean, freckled Dean, golden boy Dean with the shining eyes, Dean the perfect hunter, Dean the perfect son, Dean who talks casually to Jess's pregnant belly like he and the baby are on familiar terms. Sam watches closely as Dean bends to retrieve the Phillips-head, even cleaning up because Sam snapped at him, and Dean's shirt rides up in back, reveals just a tease of the muscles in Dean's back.
Sam shuts his eyes and lets his heavy head roll away from the sight.
He fixes his gaze on Jess's abdomen instead. He watches the care with which she moves around the campsite, slow graceful movements supporting this foreign weight that's now tied to her. Sam knows there's still time left but she looks like she's ready to pop, and then they'll all have to deal with whatever comes out. The world will have to deal with it.
Maybe the baby will come out obviously wrong and Dean and Jess will look at him and know what he is. Maybe it'll come out normal and grow up inconspicuously, just trying to live its own life but sowing a path of death and destruction wherever it goes - no matter what it does, no matter how hard it tries, no matter how good its intentions - because the sickness will be in its blood. Maybe it'll seem so normal that they'll all love it, that Sam will give in to the aching tug he feels toward it, and they'll teach it to protect itself, help it grow up big and strong. If Sam loves it. If he -
You're tough, you're smart. You're well-trained, thanks to your daddy. Sam. Sammy. You're my favorite.
Sam lets his eyelids drop shut and thinks that with the Yellow-Eyed Demon and Dad dead, there's no one left who knows the truth. It'd be safer for Dean and Jess if they knew who - or perhaps what - he was, he knows that. But Sam still has his brother and he still has his wife and that's a lot left to lose.
Sam perches on a concrete pillar to spoon listlessly at his soup at dinnertime. He squints down at the map Dean spreads out. It wavers in his vision.
"The downside is that it's adding at least a week onto our trip," Dean's saying. "But it'll give us a good twenty-mile radius around the hardest-hit hemoemesis areas." Dean's fingertip circles a cluster of towns on the map.
"We can't afford the extra time," Sam says around his spoon. "Gotta go through." He swishes the soup in his mouth, too salty and greasy to swallow.
Dean's eyebrows rise high. "It's a fucking horror movie in there, man. You know better."
"Dean's right," Jess says, and Sam mouths the words Dean's right to himself. "It's worth the time."
"Oh, really?" Sam bites his lip. "It's worth the time?" He points at her belly. "You want to give birth to that thing out here?" A rat scampers along a ceiling beam. He gestures to it. "Maybe with them watching?" If this creature with his blood gets Jess hurt because she's stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, he doesn't know what he'll do.
Jess's mouth falls a little open. "What's going on with you?"
"He's just being a little bitch 'cause his back hurts." Dean turns his back to Sam and keeps eating, like Sam's a little kid throwing a tantrum who Dean can just ignore.
Sam wavers on the pillar, balance shot. "You know, ever since I came back, all you two have done is gang up on me," he says loudly.
The fire's crackle rises, fills in all the quiet space between their voices.
"That's ridiculous," Dean says, face still turned away.
"Look, it's just a detour," Jess says, reaching for Sam. "We'll make it work."
Sam drops his soup bowl with a clatter when he stands, unsteady on his feet. He shrugs Jess's hand off his shoulder and gestures to her prominent belly. "Well, maybe if you hadn't let this happen, none of this would be a problem."
The fire whispers and snaps.
Sam replays his words in his own mind and his stomach lurches. He reaches for Jess.
"Fuck you," Jess says. Her voice is hoarse but her eyes are dry. "Don't touch me. Don't talk to me." She walks slowly to the other side of the construction site, too pregnant to even storm off properly.
Dean advances on Sam and slowly, carefully curls a fist in Sam's shirtfront. "Who the fuck are you?" Dean's eyes flicker over Sam's face. He thumps his other hand against Sam's chest with a flat palm. "And why are you being such an asshole to Jess?"
"This isn't a good idea," Sam confides. "I'm the last person who should be bringing a baby into the world."
Dean lets go of Sam, throws up his hands. "This isn't you. You are not that guy." Dean shakes his head. "The asshole who gets cold feet at the last second, tries to ditch his responsibilities, his own kid just because he's scared, and punishes his wife for it. Like it's her fault he's acting like a spoiled child." Dean looks at Jess far across the site, perched alone on an enormous spool of wire, and looks back at Sam. Dean pokes him hard in the chest. "This is not my brother, and I don't know what fucking changed." Dean steps away with a humorless laugh. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were possessed."
Possessed, said with disgust, with loathing. Sam suddenly finds his sea legs and stops swaying. "You sack of shit," he says, enunciating clearly. He's not even sure what, exactly, he's accusing Dean of. The pantry rat nibbles at Sam's brain. "You back-stabbing son of a bitch, I needed you on my side."
Dean's mouth opens a little, then closes. He wipes a hand over his mouth. When he speaks again, his voice is unsteady, all the confidence drained out of it. "What are you really mad about, Sam?"
"You're supposed to be my brother," Sam says.
"What are you mad about?" Dean stays a cautious distance away and Sam knows that look on Dean's face, that's not anger, that's fear.
That's not right. Dean should never be scared of him. Sam can almost hear the air hissing out of his righteous fury as it deflates. He doesn't need to scare Dean, he needs Dean's help.
Sam says, "I have demon blood in me," at the same moment that Dean says, "If you know, then just tell me."
A rat runs brazenly between them, nails skittering on the cement.
"Demon blood?"
"If I know what?"
"You say something like that, you gotta explain it."
"If I know what, Dean?"
Sam listens to the dry wooden creak of the not-a-house. He narrows his eyes and studies every freckle on Dean's face.
Dean backs away a step. He spreads his hands wide. "You find me when you feel like acting like a human being again," he tells Sam. Dean turns his back and walks into the darkness on the other side of the skeleton-house. Dean turns before he can see Sam's flinch.
The pills knock Sam out as soon as his body hits the sleeping bag. Sam dozes restlessly, slipping in and out of dreams where he's locked in a wooden cage. On the other side of the bars, Dean and Jess pull wisps of sugar from the same cotton candy. They point and stare at Sam like he's an exhibit in the zoo. Sam pounds a fist against the bars, and everything smells like spun sugar and popcorn.
Sam wakes up in stages as the smell of woodsmoke takes over. He tugs at the zippered tent door and peers out, blinking blearily. The fire's burned down low and orange. It just barely illuminates Dean and Jess standing some distance away. Dean rests his hands on Jess's shoulders and ducks his head to speak to her. He lifts her chin with a finger and says something that makes her smile. Sam wakes up, sobers up, and finds that he can see some things distinctly even in the ember-light.
Sam has always liked math. He has no natural talent for it, but his brain works in logical ways. If he stares at a thorny equation for long enough, chewing on his pencil, eventually he'll reach a tipping point when his mind catches up to his eyes. He'll stare at the same jumble of letters and numbers but see the connections between them, the internal logic. The answer's been right in front of him, staring him in the face.
An odd, meditative feeling sweeps over Sam, and he feels the lines on his brow ease away. Answers calm Sam, they always have.
Sam crosses the naked frame of the house on bare feet, quietly. He looks at the back of Dean's neck and thinks I know you so well. Sam plants himself right next to Dean and Jess, and only then do they notice him. Dean jumps a little. Sam can't help but smile a little at that.
Sam stands solidly on his feet, hands at his sides, and asks politely, "Dean, are you having an affair with my wife?"
Dean switches his expression to bemusement quickly, but he's gotta know it's not quick enough for Sam, who's spent a hell of a lot of time watching Dean's face. I know you too well, Sam revises. "You're high, man," Dean says. He claps a hand on Sam's shoulder. "Sleep it off."
Sam picks Dean's hand up off his shoulder like it's a dead animal. He drops it. Dean's arm swings back to his side and hangs there.
"I asked you if you're fucking my wife." Sam smiles and spreads his hands. It's a simple question.
Dean's got the lie in his eyes, and as he opens his mouth Sam readies himself for the denial that's going to spew out, but Jess's words burst out first. "It wasn't like that!"
Sam swivels on his feet and keeps the smile on his face till his back's turned to them. Tonight's soup rises in his throat but won't quite come up. He swallows around it, a quiet guh sound, and tries to gasp a breath past the barrier. The salty simmer of it lurks at the back of his mouth. Sam couldn't get a word out if he wanted to.
Jess's soft touch curves over his shoulder. Lurching away from it, Sam folds forward, catches himself on two wooden struts. He lets go of the soup in a small puddle. When he's done spitting, he turns to face them and wipes his mouth slowly.
"Is it mine? The baby?" Sam asks, not sure if he's afraid that it isn't or afraid that it is.
"Jesus, Sam, of course it fucking is," Jess says, and Sam's heart flutters with a feeling he can't identify. "You were gone," she says. "You were dead."
"Only for a day and a half!" Sam steadies himself between the two wooden struts, standing straight.
"Yeah, well it was a lot longer for us," Dean bursts out. He steps toward Sam and tries to touch his face, catch his jaw. Sam dodges. "Do you have any idea what it was like without you?"
"Yeah." Sam looks at Dean, then at Jess. "I'm getting a pretty vivid picture, actually." The images run in pornographic Technicolor under all his thoughts - the man he never got to have with the woman he thought he did.
Dean drops his hands with a growl of frustration and paces to the other side of the concrete foundation. Jess stands with hands clasped, her knuckles white.
"So, what," Sam says. Maybe if he keeps his voice steady they won't notice his hands are shaking. "Are you leaving me?"
"No," Jess says. "Fuck, Sam, no."
Sam snorts, shakes his head with a knot in his throat.
"Hey," Jess says forcefully, "I love you." Moments tick by, measured only by the metronome of Dean's pacing boots. "But I love him, too."
Dean's footsteps still and Sam hears a quiet cough. Dean's scratching the back of his neck, and Sam just knows that if he were close enough to see, Dean's face would be going pink. And it's that, Dean's awkward embarrassment, that lays Sam out like a sucker punch.
The concrete jars Sam's tailbone. He leans against the house's frame and it creaks. His breaths come quick and short and when he tries to get more air it doesn't work.
When Sam looks up, Dean and Jess are crowding around him and the rafters are doubling, then tripling in number. No. Sam refuses to do this. He ducks his head between his knees and breathes, swatting Dean and Jess's hands away when he has to.
"Okay," Sam says finally, and breathes out steadily. They're safer if they know, and now Sam's got nothing left to lose. Face still tipped to the floor, he catches Dean's sleeve. "The demon blood is in me, " he says. Sam staggers to his feet. He looks at Jess's belly and what really scares him is that at the same time that he wants to throw up, he wants to fall to his knees and apologize; he wants protect that bump with his last breath. Selfishly, he wants to love it. "Which means now it's in her."
Somehow Sam finds his bedding again and gravity flattens him out the moment he stops trying. The lights go out on the whole world and Sam breathes a sigh of relief as his thoughts shrivel up like autumn leaves and blow away.
"Hang a left," Dean says. Sam, at the head of the pack, takes the left fork in the road.
"Pass the hot water," Sam says at dinnertime, and Jess passes him the water.
Sam grunts to shove past Dean when they're setting up the tent, and he tells Jess Gesundheit when she sneezes.
On a scorching, humid day Jess checks the thermometer and says, "Ninety-four." Sam hmms in acknowledgment and Dean says, "Hot."
It's all very civil.
Jess snaps halfway through inventorying their remaining food supplies. "What?" she asks.
Sam snaps out of staring at her. He rubs a hand over his mouth. "I love you." He gets up from the stump and brushes the moss and bark from his pants. "A lot."
He's been sleeping outside the tent and tonight he sets up on the far side of the fire, puts the smoke between them.
Sam dreams about Dean wrapping him up in a bone-crushing bear hug and whispering fiercely that he'll gut anyone who hurts Sam, skin them alive. Embarrassingly grateful for his big brother, Sam lets his own legs go out. He leans on Dean hard and lets Dean take his weight. "What happened to my life?" he asks dream-Dean, and Dean says, "Hey now, it ain't over till it's over."
He wakes up to the sound of slick slicing. Dean's sitting on a downed tree trunk, skinning a rabbit. He glances over at the rustle of Sam sitting up. Sam looks away before he does something stupid like hug his brother.
The briny fresh-water air tingles in Sam's throat when he chokes in a gulp of it. He contorts and gets the Croat, a dowdy woman with broken-lensed glasses, in front of him.
The Croat's neck breaks with an efficient twist of Sam's hooked arm. The kitchen knife slips from her hand and buries itself in the grass. Sam lets her drop and rounds his shoulders, grimacing, hand to his chest.
Dean shouts with effort behind him, and Sam turns quickly enough to admire the precision with which Dean's machete slices into the jugular of a distinguished-looking Croat with a receding hairline and a very nice suit, a banker in another lifetime.
The momentum of the Croat's fall carries it right into Sam's open arms, thunking the breath right out of him. Gouts of liquid warmth spurt against his chin, and he feels it spatter on his nose. A bead of red gathers slowly at the tip of a wet curl of Sam's hair, fattening impossibly, waiting, waiting, but not falling. With a small sound, Sam withdraws his arms and lets the Croat fall from this involuntary embrace.
"Sorry about that," Dean's saying sheepishly, his voice strangely distant like he's speaking to Sam from the end of a long tunnel.
Sam sits down hard in the grass. "Oh," he says.
Dean drops to his knees. "Sam?"
Sam lowers his arm away from the long, shallow gash the kitchen knife carved across his chest. It drips with someone's blood, his or the banker's. Sam supposes it doesn't really matter. "Sucks," Sam says, which he thinks is a good concise summation.
"No, no, no," Dean says. He hooks his arms under Sam's and heaves him to his feet. "Don't. Stop it."
Jess's rifle rests at her hip, her eyes still scanning the perimeter of the playfield. She has a smear of blood on her chin and Sam wants to wipe it off for her, but looking at his dripping hands he doesn't think that would be a good idea. "Guys?" she says hesitantly.
Sam can hear the motion of water, even if he can't see the lake. They reached the first of the Great Lakes last night and slept in an elementary school playground, surrounded by jungle gyms, 'cause the fence seemed secure. Sam slept separately beneath the monkey bars, while Jess bedded down in the tent next to the slides and Dean laid his sleeping bag out in the sandbox.
Sam clasps his hand loosely around the barrel of Jess's rifle. "Sorry," he says. He looks down at his chest. "Wow, I really didn't see this coming."
A seagull shrieks from its perch on the chain link fence. It flaps its wings.
The chains on the swing set groan when Sam pushes Jess down onto the rubber sling of the seat for the third time. She keeps trying to follow them across the street.
Sam kneels in front of her. He wants to take her hands but he can't risk it, not with the blood. She's clean and safe and that's how it should be. Sam regards the baby bump with furrowed brow. I'm a fucking idiot, he thinks. He wants to press his face against her stomach, maybe feel a farewell flutter from the baby - Jesus, his baby - but again, can't. He's contaminated for real now, and the feeling of it is miles away from his brooding preoccupation with the demon's words. "I'm a fucking idiot," he says out loud.
Jess says, "There could be more of them. It's not safe out here. Don't leave."
Sam smiles with real warmth and taps a finger against her rifle. "Yeah, right. I know you got it covered." He stands and looks down at his feet. "Um." He gives up and shrugs one shoulder. The right words aren't going to come to him and the clock is ticking. Sometimes they turn fast, sometimes slow. "Hey, you're gonna be great," he says, meeting her eyes. "Really. I'm psychic. I know things. You're gonna be an amazing mom."
He doesn't look back at her as he crosses the playfield and ducks through the damnable, person-sized hole in the chain link fence. With a gun in one hand and a camping lantern in the other, Dean follows him across the street to the shipyard. Sam picks a red shipping container for the visual symmetry. He needs Dean's help to swing the massive, groaning doors shut and latch them, and he notices that Dean puts down the lantern but not the gun.
Sam hears clicking in the darkness and the lantern comes to life, its soft battery-powered glow illuminating the inside of the shipping container with a cozy yellow light. "Well, this is awkward," Sam says.
They stand on opposite sides of the lantern. Dean's passing his gun from hand to hand. It's the 1911 with the ivory grip, Sam's favorite of Dean's guns, and Sam finds that oddly comforting. He wishes he had something to do with his own hands, and puts them in his pockets.
"So." Sam coughs. "Look, we're square. We're good. "
Dean's head snaps up sharply. "Sam, so help me, if you try to forgive me right now I'm gonna kick your ass."
"That seems kind of premature, don't you think?" Sam scuffs a foot along the metal and the sound echoes around the enclosed space. His mouth twists unhappily thinking of how audible the gunshot's gonna be, even across the street on the playground.
Dean takes a while to respond. "Do you get what a dick move it is to try and make this funny? You think I'm gonna look back at today and say, 'Damn, what that situation could've used is a little levity?'"
Sam sighs. "Yeah, well. Last time I died I didn't really have time to think about it. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing." He kicks a boot against the floor and it rumbles like a deep gong. "I'd ask you to take care of Jess and the baby, but I already know you will."
"And the baby?" Dean asks.
Sam shrugs with some combination of embarrassment and disappointment in himself. "I think this is what they call perspective." He folds then, breathing hard as it hits him. "Dean, I want to meet my kid." He tries to get a handhold on the metal wall. "Fuck, I want to see Jess again. I don't want you to have to do this." His feet slide on the floor. A worse thought occurs to him, later than it should have, and his head snaps up. "Jesus, Dean, it's gonna need me. If something's wrong with it, I. Someone's got to help it not turn out like me. That's my fucking job, I'm its father."
Dean watches him for a long moment, then tucks the 1911 into his waistband and begins crossing the claustrophobic space.
"What are you doing? Dean, stop."
Dean wraps his arms around Sam's shoulders and crushes him. Sam's hands are right there within reaching distance of Dean's gun and he wriggles out of Dean's arms and wedges himself into a far corner of the container. "I'm stronger than you," Dean says, following him. "You won't get the gun away from me. You can't hurt me."
Sam scoffs. "Stronger than me, huh?" He edges along the wall away from Dean.
"I really am," Dean says, and he grabs Sam's wrists. He slams them into the metal wall above Sam's head with a deafening clang. He drops his head against Sam's shoulder, face on his neck, and Sam stiffens.
"Dean, what are you doing?"
Dean opens his mouth against Sam's skin just so, little enough that you could argue he's just resting there breathing. "I'm fighting with you."
Sam pushes his wrists against Dean's hands halfheartedly. He licks his lips and says something he knows Dean won't have forgotten. "Well, I hate to tell you this, but you're doing it wrong."
Dean pulls away from Sam's neck with a grumble and starts checking him over, pulling at his shirt, lowering his wrists and examining them.
"What're you doing?" Sam asks.
"You've got blood all over," Dean says. He tugs at the waistband of Sam's jeans.
"Whoa, Dean - " Dean snarls with impatience and yanks the zipper down. He pushes the waistband of Sam's boxers down an inch and drops to his knees. Sam thunks his head against the container wall and curls his toes when he feels Dean's mouth again, just - not quite where he expected. "What the -?"
He looks down. Dean's sucking at the patch of bare, blood-free skin next to Sam's hipbone. Sam's eyes roll back in his head.
"If you're doing this to mess with me," Sam gasps, "To give the dying man what he wants, I swear to God, Dean - "
Dean stands and scratches a thumbnail across the orbit of Sam's eye, over his forehead and down his cheekbone. "I'm not the one who walked away. I'm not the one who had regrets."
Sam stills under the sharp pressure around his eye. "I wasn't sorry that it happened. I was sorry 'cause I was leaving." A stray eyelash needles at the corner of his eye. "I was already leaving."
Dean presses his forehead against Sam's.
"Come to think of it," Sam says, so close to Dean's mouth, "I think this just confirms that you've got the worst timing of anyone I've ever met." I'm so sorry, he wants to add. I don't want to go. Not now.
Dean drags him down to sitting, cross-legged next to the lantern with the gun in Dean's lap, and they wait.
And wait.
Sam wakes up confused and in darkness. He casts a glance around and sees a thin, I-shaped crack of light far to his left. He scrambles to get up and hits something solid only inches away. It grunts.
"Sammy?"
Sam shakes Dean's shoulder. "Dean, wake up."
"Wazzit?" Dean asks.
"Three things," Sam replies. "The lantern needs batteries. We fell asleep. And I think it's tomorrow already." The I-shape of sunlight shining through the doors leaves an imprint on Sam's retina, flashing different colors in the darkness wherever he looks.
There's a groan and clamor of metal as Dean scrambles to sit up. "It's been a day."
"I think."
"Are you a flesh-eating killer yet?"
"I don't think they actually eat flesh, Dean."
"No, then." Sam hears Dean fumble at the lantern, click it on and off, and curse. "Batteries kicked it."
"I just told you that."
"You're too annoying to be a Croat."
Sam walks to the doors and presses his hands against them. "Will you help me get these open?"
"Got a question first," Dean says.
"Yeah?"
"You remember door number three?"
Sam's glad it's too dark to see his face when he realizes Dean remembered. Happy endings, he thinks. A choice. Door number three. He hasn't thought about that in a while. "Yeah," Sam says. "I remember."
"Well, why don't you fucking walk through it?"
Sam nods invisibly in the darkness.
Sam's going to walk back out of this box, and that isn't something he'd planned for. He doesn't know what happens now. Dean lends a shoulder and they heave against the heavy doors.
The door shuts with a quiet click. That's the thing about Dad - he won't storm out and slam the door because he won't make a scene. Even when he's falling-down drunk, if Dad knocks over a bag of rock salt he'll stop to sweep the grains together with clumsy fingers. He's always in control, even when he's not.
"College is expensive." Dean picks at the crack in the Formica tabletop. He's been slowly, absent-mindedly widening it since they moved in. This is why landlords hate renting places out furnished - the kind of drifters who rent a place like this will always trash it. They don't care, they have no investment - they'll be moving on soon enough.
"I kind of thought of that," Sam says. He goes to the closet and fishes in the dark for his duffel. He hadn't started packing, hadn't thought he'd need to. "I've got a scholarship."
"They won't let you keep a gun in the dorms."
"I'm good at hiding things." Sam throws shirts into the bag. He tosses in his spare pair of jeans and frowns at the navy-blue suit - good for working hunts sometimes - with the too-short sleeves. He leaves it on its bent wire hanger.
Dean slips off the table. "You really think you're gonna do this? Think you're gonna make it all the way to California? Let me tell you, Sam, you're not. You'll take off sprinting back home at the first rest stop." Dean gets into Sam's personal space. Dean smells like salt and fake popcorn butter and Sam hates that. Sam knows he harasses Dean too much at work, but he just wants to get him out that overheated shack. There's nothing Sam hates more in the world than seeing Dean pouring syrup into a Sno-Cone and wiping his hands on the white apron they make him wear. It's like seeing a tiger curled on a cushion. Sam tries to cross to the kitchen and Dean blocks the door frame with an arm.
"Get out of my way." Dean doesn't. Sam ducks under the arm and goes to the kitchen, where he starts opening cupboards, picking out food. He knows Dean won't stop him, won't say no.
Dean comes at him, unexpected as a hunk of satellite debris falling from the sky and nailing you on the head, and just as violent. His hips slam Sam's against the kitchen counter and Sam bends over it to catch himself. "What about this, huh?" He reaches around, grabs Sam's lip between thumb and forefinger. "What about this?"
Sam jerks his head away. "Don't think about that."
"Don't tell me what to think," Dean says, and he reaches between Sam's legs.
Sam presses his forehead to the cabinets and chokes. Dean's hand is rough, and maybe Sam should worry for the safety of his balls as Dean closes a fist and grabs at Sam through his jeans. A whine, high and involuntary and humiliating, escapes from Sam's throat. "What are you doing, Dean?"
"I'm fighting with you, asshole."
"Well, you're fucking doing it wrong." Sam jabs an elbow into Dean's ribs and Dean falls back a few steps. Sam grabs a jar of peanut butter, puts it in his duffel, and zips it up. "I didn't ask you to go changing everything."
"You eat too much peanut butter," Dean says. "It's all fat."
The apartment's spartan, shelves empty. There's nothing Sam's forgetting. He lists to the side under the weight of his duffel and feels like a sinking ship.
"It's cold out." It's Mississippi. "Wait till morning. Don't do this."
Sam sags with a hand on the door frame. "It's already done," Sam says. "Has been for months." He clenches his fingers around the splintering wood. "God damn it, Dean. Why'd you have to go and ruin everything?"
Sam falls asleep on the Greyhound. When he wakes with a full bladder he gets up and makes his way, swaying and grabbing the seats, to the tiny stall of a bathroom in the back. The door smiles a green "unoccupied" at him, so he swings it open. A man with a long beard and a denim vest snores lightly on the toilet with his pants around his ankles. He has a boil on his thigh and that's as far as Sam's eyes get before he's backing out and shutting the door.
The greatest hits of soft rock croon gently in the front of the bus. "Excuse me, how long till we stop?" he asks the driver.
"Just had the first rest stop, honey," she says. "Guess you snoozed right through it." She smiles. "Don't worry, there'll be another."
Sam picks door-splinters out of his hand to take his mind off his impending bodily-function disaster.
When they pull in to the second truck stop, Sam hobbles awkwardly to the bathroom and pees like it's a religious fucking experience. He braces a hand against the wall above the urinal. His shoulders shake.
Headlights blind him when he comes out of the bathroom and his heart leaps for a moment. The throaty-rumbling engine dies and the lights flick off. It's a dusky blue Chevelle with fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror.
Sam sleeps his way through most of the bus ride, only catching glimpses of corn fields and cacti. The next time he opens his eyes for real, he's in a bus depot in San Jose and his fellow passengers are bumping him with their bags as they walk down the aisle. End of the line.
As blinding as the light was inside the container, it's an overcast day outside. Gulls swoop overhead, and Sam kicks his feet through dew when they hit the grass.
He stops a good dozen paces away from Jess, who's still, somehow, sitting upright on the swing set. She must have heard them coming but she hasn't turned around. "Don't move," he says.
Very, very slowly, Jess turns to look over her shoulder at him. She licks her lips. "Why not?"
"'Cause I need to wash all this blood off before I touch you. Don't even move."
Dean helps him track down all the stray spots of blood, scrubbing roughly at Sam's neck and behind his ears in exactly the same way he did when he was five.
Jess's knuckles are white on the chains of the swing when Sam drops to his knees in front of her again. The first thing he does is press his face to her middle. "Hi," he says, and kisses the bump. Sam holds there for a long moment. "Sorry." He surges up to kiss Jess, and they nearly overbalance and tip off the swing.
"What the hell?" Jess whispers when he pulls back. Sam becomes aware of Dean leaning against the leg of the swing set, seemingly untroubled by their make-out session.
"Yeah," Sam says. He scratches the back of his neck. "Still here." He allows a sunny grin to grow on his face because really, what else can he do? "You believe I've got demon blood now?"
Dean socks him in the arm.
It turns out they're out of batteries entirely, so they leave the camping lantern on the jungle gym and that night, when they're all piled into the tent together, the only light is from the moon.
Ferns have already grown up in all the cracks in the courtyard. A duck has claimed the fountain. Birds nest in the crook where the dead security camera meets the wall. It must have been an expensive place to live, once.
Dean's got his feet propped up on the edge of the fountain, head near Sam's ribs, and Jess curls close against Sam's other side. Sam's dozing, but he rouses a little when Jess sits up. "Babe?
Without a word, Jess swings a leg over Sam's body and sits across his hips. Pressing a hand over his heart, she leans down and kisses him.
Sam hasn't been with Jess since he found out about her and Dean, and as much as he wants this, he wouldn't do that to Dean. Sam can already feel Dean shifting, noticing that something is happening. He hears Dean's sharp intake of breath, and that's it, he can't do this. Sam makes a muffled noise against Jess's mouth and tries to sit up. She pushes him down, grabs his hand, and leads his arm to the side. She presses Sam's hand against Dean's and when Sam doesn't move, she carefully spreads his fingers herself and interlaces them with Dean's.
Sam's hand tightens involuntarily. He says against her mouth, "Jess, are you -"
"You're a smart boy, Sam," Jess says. "You know what this is." She applies her mouth to his neck and sucks a sore spot into it while Sam's eyes flick over to Dean.
Dean's rolled onto his side now, watching intently. He hasn't let go of Sam's hand.
Sam breathes harshly as Jess rolls her hips against him. This is big; this could be huge and scary and very delicate, and it requires a lot of forethought and -
Dean squeezes Sam's hand. Sam looks back at him. Dean shakes his head. "Don't overthink, dude." He drops Sam's hand, reaches for the hem of his own shirt and pulls it over his head. Dean swings to straddle Sam's legs behind Jess, and when Dean kisses her shoulder, his hand is on Sam's knee.
Pinned, Sam writhes. Between the two of them they've got the lower half of his body completely under their control, and the rest of him compensates. His arms fly up to grasp Jess's thighs and position her more exactly, and when he gets her just so he tries to sit up, abs burning, to kiss her. Sam tangles a hand in her hair and pulls, exposes her neck so he can lick it. She gasps.
Dean laughs. "You little brat, you learned that move from me." He reaches past Jess and curves a palm over Sam's scalp. It rests there for a second, warm and still, and then Dean's fingers clench abruptly. The hint of pain sends Sam bucking against their combined weight, panting against Jess's neck.
The lazy ripples on the surface of the fountain cast wavering light-shadows against Jess's naked skin when she climbs back on top of Sam. Dean sits on Sam's knees, and Sam can feel Dean's eyes on them when she sinks slowly onto Sam's dick. When she's all the way down, resting in Sam's lap, Dean takes her hips in his hands and, supporting her weight with his own body, tips the angle of her pelvis ever so slightly. Sam slides deeper and shudders.
At first Dean seems content to ride the twitches of Sam's legs, running his hands over Jess's breasts, kissing her neck, and dipping a curious finger down to feel where Sam's sliding in her wetness. Sam instinctively wants to knock Dean down and choke him out for licking Jess's ear, for brushing lightly over a nipple till she squeaks, but whenever the urge gets too strong he reaches out for a handful of Dean's bare skin and it subsides. Once Jess has rocked herself to gasping completion on Sam's dick, Dean drops to an elbow at Sam's side.
With Dean's breath on his face, Sam holds his own and just lets his lungs burn. Dean leans in and by the time Dean's satisfied himself with his slow, thorough ownership of Sam's mouth, Sam's reeling, seeing black spots. When Dean tucks his thumb shallowly into Sam's navel, Sam surges up into Jess and the shivering fountain-shadows on the courtyard walls detonate into riots of light.
Jess gets Dean off with her mouth, slow and dirty, and the hand tangled in her hair, guiding the bobbing of her head, is Sam's.
Given the potential to catch something life-threatening, the three of them don't spend a whole lot of time around other people. This is another reason why.
"Okay, no harm done, right?" The guy with the ponytail smiles, as if him groping Jess when she went to fill up a bottle at the reservoir was just a misunderstanding between friends. "So who's Papa Bear?"
Dean casts Sam a thoughtful look. "Gosh, I don't know. Sam, which one of us is Papa Bear today?"
Sam nods with grave concern. "I don't know, Dean. Maybe we should let him pick which one of us he'd rather take on."
Sam straightens to his full height. Dean shakes his shoulders out, cracks his knuckles. "We usually work better as a double-team," Dean says regretfully, "but I guess we could make an exception."
Sam grins. "See what he did there? He's the funny one."
"I'm the funny one," Dean agrees.
"If you're not going to pick," Sam tells the man with the wandering hands, "We're going to have to pick for you."
When they make it back to the old stone silo where Jess has set up the tent, they're glued to each other's sides, hip-checking and shoving and throwing fake punches.
Jess pauses in sharpening the Bowie knife and raises an eyebrow at their bruised knuckles. "What did you two do now?"
"We …" Sam leans on Dean, arm around his shoulders. "We taught a free seminar on etiquette."
"Very hands on."
"We're kinetic learners," Sam explains.
"I swear to God it's like having a couple of Rottweiler puppies," Jess says. "If you beat up every guy who looks at me we're going to have a problem when we get to the end of the road. I ought to put leashes on you two."
"Aww, come on." Sam sits down behind her, gets a leg on either side of her and brushes his nose in her hair. He pushes his finger against the edge on the knife - it can go sharper. "We just scared him a little."
"For the record," Dean says, "I have no objection to leashes." He takes the knife from Jess and flips it once, showing off. "I got this. Go make out or something, you're sickening. Go."
Sam and Jess have a long, slow make-out session against the outside of the silo as the sky darkens. Dean shouts color commentary from inside every time one of them makes a little too much noise.
Jess precedes Sam into the shelter, and Sam hangs back, slapping away mosquitoes absently. Dean's got a little fire going inside and its glow lights up the silo, shining out the doorway in a skewed rectangle, peeking from every crack in the stone like it can hardly be contained.
"Herbert."
"No."
"Uh … Jedediah."
"No."
"Eustace."
"No, Dean."
"Alfred Harold Walter Richard - "
Sam stops in the middle of the trail and hefts his pack to a better position on his shoulders. "You're not naming our kid Richard, you know all the other kids would call him Dick. Dick Winchester."
Dean sighs. "I'm not the one who wanted a traditional name. George?"
"George sounds like someone with jowls."
"What about Georgia for a girl?"
"Better," Sam says.
"Iphigenia?"
"Why do you hate our child?"
"You know, this would all be solved if you'd just stick with Sam."
"You can't name the kid after me when I'm not dead, everyone'll think I'm a total narcissist."
"Not if we name 'em Samantha."
"What if it's a boy?"
"It'll be like A Boy Named Sue! He'll be the most badass kid around!"
"'Cause he had to learn to defend himself so he wouldn't get swirlied to death in middle school."
"Aww, still bitter, Cupcake?"
Jess interrupts with a hand on each of their shoulders. "If the Winchester Comedy Hour can go to commercial break for a minute, I've got something to show you guys."
Looking down from the crest of the hill, Sam takes in the serpentine series of switchbacks into which they're about to descend. "Yeah, I could take a break." He mops off with the bandana tied to his shoulder strap, a habit Sam picked up while he was traveling on his own that Dean has brutally mocked ever since.
Dean pulls out a bag of peanut M&Ms as they settle on a nurse log dotted with ferns and moss. Sam wonders where the hell he got them and steals a handful. "I kicked a puppy for those," Dean says. "You better enjoy them."
Jess pulls a long, thin envelope from her pack. It's shriveled and seems to have gotten wet at some point, with a mud stain in the corner. She taps it in her hands, all nervous motion. "You want to find out if we're looking at a Eustace or an Iphigenia?"
Sam presses closer. He wipes sweaty palms on his pants. "I'm in. I want to know. Are you -"
Dean and Jess both nod. Jess tugs a finger along the envelope and carefully unfolds the printout of the sonogram that's inside, with all the relevant body parts circled and labeled.
Dean pops a yellow candy in his mouth and crunches around a growing grin. "Poor little Dick Winchester it is."
The downhills are murder on Sam's knees, and after hours of zigzagging Jess sits down right there on a narrow switchback and declares them done for the day, but that's okay, 'cause Sam has a son.
Sam's so out of his head for the rest of the day that he accidentally smiles and nods when Dean asks if he can take the flavor packet from Sam's ramen. Dean cackles, and Sam slurps a mouthful of plain noodles.
Nearly every store in the country has been ransacked for food, money, and sharp objects in the last year but not, as it turns out, mattress stores.
Sam lounges back in a stack of pillows and watches as Jess clamps her knees tight to Dean's ears. She reaches out blindly till she gets both hands on the back of Dean's head and presses him closer, coarse and rude and brazen. Shuddering, she responds almost violently to something Dean's doing, a sort of enthusiastic lapping that seems very athletic and has Dean grabbing her thighs, serving her up at just the right angle. Sam tries to imagine himself asking Dean how to do whatever he's doing, and then he succeeds in imagining exactly how Dean would go about teaching him.
When Jess comes she nudges Dean away with her legs. She's always done it to Sam, as well, too sensitive right after. She squirms to the foot of the king-size, presses both hands between her legs, and more or less passes out.
Dean collapses onto his side, mouth shining wet.
Tentatively, awkward on all fours, Sam crawls over the mattress. He bends over Dean's face and begins to methodically lick it clean. Dean's hand fumbles up and between Sam's legs, finding a home for itself pressing gently against the root of Sam's cock and his balls, a fingertip slowly teasing back and forth over Sam's perineum. When Sam's cleaned Dean's face, he explores the stubble on Dean's jaw and neck in greater detail, and mostly it makes him think about waking up with Dean's beard-shadow scratching at his skin. That could happen now. It could.
When Sam begins to lose the steadiness in his legs and falters, Dean presses him down with a careful hand on the small of his back.
By the time Jess wakes up, Dean's got Sam laid out flat on his front, voicing wordless noises into the mattress while Dean pumps him from behind, Sam's legs spread wantonly. Sam blushes hot to be seen like this, and when Dean presses a hand against the back of Sam's neck, furthering his subjection, Sam shudders against the mattress.
A loon calls plaintively on the lake, and a wooden dinghy thunks rhythmically against the pier in front of them.
The island sits dark and still.
"Maybe it's the wrong island," Jess says. "We could go a little further."
"It's the right one," Sam says, pack weighing heavier on his shoulders. He drops it to sit on a blackened pillar that reeks of creosote and hides his face behind his palm. "Crap."
"So we'll deal," Dean says. "We knew we might get here and find nothing."
Sam had just been so sure. Between the iron and the water it's still a defensible space, but he doesn't relish the idea of cleaning out the researchers' bodies first - civilians who were just trying to help, trying to end this virus. "Yeah, I know, but - "
A light flickers like a will o' the wisp in the trees. Sam narrows his eyes and looks back over his shoulder. A beam of light extends from the island, shifting back and forth. The spotlight flickers and glows, like someone's holding a lantern up to a mirror. Sam stands suddenly. "Hello?"
A pause passes filled only by the lamenting loons and the lap of water at the shore, and then a voice echoes across the water. "Marco," it says.
"Who's Marco?" Dean whispers.
Sam licks his lips and tests a theory. "Polo?"
Another pause. "Yeah, okay," the voice says from across the water. "You looking for somewhere to stay?" Jess grabs his hand.
"Pretty much," Sam yells, louder than he needs to, and it bounces between the trees and water. "You one of the scientists?"
"Man, I am The Scientist," the voice returns, and Sam can hear the capital letters clearly. "Use the dinghy," the voice instructs. "Swear to God it's sea-worthy."
Dean turns to Sam looking shell-shocked. "Holy fuck." He looks back at the island like it might disappear. "That's - holy fuck."
Sam kisses the shit out of him, then does the same to Jess.
Dean rows them the span of the still gray water with strong, measured strokes of the oars. Sam watches the lines of Dean's arms. Dean calls over his shoulder. "Marco Polo's your security system?"
"Croats have no sense of humor," echoes back.
The diminutive figure on the island pier leans down to grab the dinghy's rope. He ties it down with accurate, efficient knots and sticks out a hand. "Hey." He adjusts his glasses. "I'm Hal."
"You the welcoming committee?" Dean asks.
"I'm the brawn," Hal says. "Wow, you're really pregnant."
Jess nods, amused. "Yeah, I am."
"You guys together?" He nods to Jess's arm, linked with Sam's.
Sam hooks an arm around Dean's shoulders, smiles to encompass the three of them. "Yeah, we are."
Hal leads the way to the researchers' dormitory, apparently packed to the windowsills with refugees like themselves. "But there's always room for one more. Three more. I mean four more."
The further the path winds into the pine-shadowed interior of the island, intermittently torch-lit, the fainter the calls of the loons become, till Sam can't hear them at all.
end.