as long as we have land to ride
first second third fourth
By the time they finally got to Bobby's place a couple weeks later, riding two horses that would never replace the ones they'd lost, Dean had almost forgot why they were going there in the first place. The Union-Pacific hunt Bobby had sent them on and the demon posse and that ungodly week they'd spent on the run, it had all faded back for him and become campfire stories he had heard someone else tell. It felt like it had been years since anything had tried to kill them.
That streak held right up until they came around the bend into sight of Bobby's ramshackle hermit's house, and a shotgun blast tore the sky open.
Sam and Dean flung themselves off and behind their horses, hands wrenched in the reins as the animals tried to buck and bolt. Dean looked for Sam and Sam was gaping back, badly spooked, and Dean peered over his horse's saddle.
Bobby was standing on his porch, chocking his shotgun. Dean snatched off his hat, waved it fiercely like a white flag.
"Bobby, it's me, it's Dean!" Dean shouted, then paused, added, "Winchester!"
"Dean Winchester is dead!" Bobby yelled back, and drew a bead on him again.
Dean ducked back behind the horse, exchanged a grasping look with his brother. Sam shook his head, unbuckling his newly-acquired gun belt and tossing it over his horse to clunk where Bobby could see it. Dean got his idea and took off his own, threw it over. The Colt was still tucked at the small of his back, but no one had to know about that.
They moved out from behind the horses slowly, empty hands raised above their heads. Bobby had his shotgun leveled and Dean stepped in front of Sam without thinking about it. He could feel the power in Sam thrumming, making the air shimmer slightly, banked in case he needed to jerk the gun out of Bobby's hand.
Bobby's face fell open as he got a better look at them, the shotgun barrel wavering and dipping before he brought it up steady again, locking his jaw.
"Christo," Bobby said on a hiss.
Without dropping their hands, Sam and Dean began in unison, just how Bobby had taught them, "Pater noster qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum; adveniat regnum tuum, fiat voluntas tua-" until Bobby cut them off, stammering:
"Stop, stop, that's enough,"
and then he cast his shotgun aside with a clatter, coming to grab them both in a hard hug. Dean banged his fist on Bobby's shoulder, eyes stinging at the dust raised.
Bobby pushed them back, one hand on each's shoulder and his disbelieving gaze tracking over them. Sam and Dean stood patiently for it, grinning kinda.
"Jesus everlovin' Christ. Where in seven hells have you boys been?"
"Wyoming," Dean told him, taking note of a new scar healing on Bobby's face, pink-white line breaking the scruff of his beard. "What the fuck were you on about, Dean Winchester's dead?"
Bobby shook his head, went to touch Dean's face like a father but it morphed into a weak knock to his jaw instead, Bobby's eyes narrowing and becoming shielded.
"Thought you were. Thought you both were. C'mon, let's get inside."
They strapped their gun belts back on and Bobby hustled them up to the porch while he took their horses to the half-barn round back. There was a pot of tea screeching from inside the house, so they went to take it off the heat.
Books on the butcher block table in Bobby's kitchen, and Sam immediately sat down and stuck his nose in one, hmm'ing a thanks as Dean put a cup of tea in front of him. Bobby came in dusting his hands, still looking at both of them with this tinge of astonishment.
"Jessup at the Holy Moses said you picked up my message almost a month ago, and then with what happened to the Flyer-"
"What happened to the Flyer?" Sam asked, book held open on the table and his eyes on Bobby's. "It was demons, you heard that?"
Bobby nodded, a harsh guilty look crossing his face. "Put the pieces together just a couple days after I left you that note. Thought the trains themselves were getting infested, but those fuckin' demons were just jumping from train crew to train crew." He squinted at them, looking like he already knew the answer as he asked, "They came after you?"
"Sure did," Dean said with a big phony grin, mean slice to it. "Ran us all the way to Idaho, took us for everything we had."
Bobby's eyebrows ticked up, dull-burning fear in his face. "Not the Colt?"
Dean shook his head, pulling out the gun and laying it on the table. Bobby breathed out, the tense planes of his expression giving, and nodded, "Thank god." He turned to fix himself a cup of tea, his hands shaking. Sam and Dean traded looks.
"Bobby," Sam said, shrewd tone in his voice. "Dean heard one of them say our name." Bobby's head jerked up, and Sam said, "And it's lookin' like a pretty fair bet that you know why."
Bobby pressed his lips together, eyes slate-colored and pained. Dean got a creeping nervous sensation in his stomach, wishing he were a boy again and could clap his hands over his ears, refuse to hear what Bobby said next.
"They know you have the Colt," Bobby said plainly. "They lost track of it after your granddaddy died because I guess they never figured on him passing it down to his daughter, but they've worked it out now. You boys have gotten a little too famous for your own good."
Dean sank into a chair without noticing what he was doing. His hand fell across the Colt and drew it to him, moving dreamily. He could see Sam's hand clenched in a fist on the table, knuckles brushing the clay teacup and making it rattle.
"They know," Sam said slowly, spelling it out because this was no time for miscommunication. "The demons know we have the only weapon this side of Perdition that can kill them."
Bobby looked at him, jaw rigid and a bad cast of helplessness across his features. He nodded briefly, glancing at Dean to share it with him. Dean had no memories of Bobby before his hair had gone gray, before his face had a map of the world etched on it, but the man had never really seemed old like he did in that moment.
Sam moved his leg into Dean's under the table, said hoarsely, "It's not over. It won't, it'll never be, it'll be the whole goddamn thing all over again."
Dean shook his head, hand clenched on the edge of the table, mind working hectically, throat bobbing as he swallowed. They couldn't do it again, driven to skin and bone side by side and forced to watch it happening, their hearts wouldn't hold out, nor their luck, no more forgiving cliffs.
"Look," Bobby was saying. "I'll take it for you, keep it buried up in the caves, ten-deep in protections."
Sam shook his head, sneering thoughtlessly. "What good'll that do, like they'd hold off killing us if we don't have what they want. You'd just be puttin' yourself next in their sights."
"Sam-" Dean said, throat closed up.
"No, man, that's it," Sam said, small hysterical trill in his voice. "Can't run from 'em, can't hide for long. The cliff threw them off but they gotta be back on the trail by now, probably already got to Clapp and Susannah, they're probably already on the way here-"
Dean grabbed a fistful of Sam's hair, yanked hard enough to make him cry out and crumple, sagging in the chair. The teacup shattered suddenly, just exploded right there on the table. Bobby startled and stepped forward, concerned and confused and Dean thrust his free hand into the air to hold him back. He dragged Sam's head close to his gently, hand opened and cradling.
"Take a breath, Sammy," Dean told him in a low voice. Their foreheads bumped, and Sam's chest hitched. Dean stroked at his hair a bit, not at all interested if Bobby thought it looked odd. "Never been a fix we haven't got out of, 'member?"
Sam shut his eyes tight, pressed his lips into a thread. Dean watched him willfully strip the panic away, his shoulders pulling up, the flush fading down his neck. He slid his hand down Sam's neck to clasp his shoulder, drawing back to a respectable distance.
Dean looked over at Bobby, who was eyeing the shards of the teacup with the same pinched leery expression he'd shown the few other times Sam had slipped up around him. Bobby wasn't one of the ones who thought Sam was evil, of course, but he'd always reserved his judgment on the things Sam could do.
"Got enough to feed us?" Dean asked, wanting to draw his attention. "Looks like we got us a plan needs hatching."
Bobby nodded, went out to his storehouse, placing a hand on Dean's shoulder as he passed. Dean waited until his shadow had crossed outside the window before pushing his hand back into Sam's hair.
"We'll think of something," he said quietly.
Sam nodded, angling his neck so that his hair tugged against Dean's fingers. He looked at Dean sideways, eyes a murky green color, his mouth bent sadly. Dean didn't like that look on Sam's face, and he put his fingers on Sam's lips, shaping a halfhearted smile. Sam glared at him, but then tilted forward and crashed a kiss on Dean's cheek, off-balance and too hard, and Dean put his face into Sam's shoulder, held them both still for a moment.
They ate and Bobby had some tobacco so they sat out on the porch smoking afterwards, talking about inconsequential things for a half hour or so, all that Sam would allow them. It was twilight, nightlife starting up out in the weave of the trees and Dean thought about how their dad used to play the harmonica for them in tune with the cicadas and whippoorwills, Sam and Dean stomping on wood floors to keep the beat.
Back inside, they sat around the big table in Bobby's main room, arguing and scratching for ideas, books and rolls of paper spread out on every available inch of space. Sam and Dean kicked at each other under the table, stomped toes and bruised shins, but there was no malice to it at all, just a vague recurrent desire to make physical contact in some way, the quickest and easiest path available.
Sometime in the small hours of the morning, Dean's eyes feeling dug out and coated in powdered glass before being shoved back into his skull, Sam threw a book down in disgust and said:
"This is a waste a time, we ain't gonna study up an answer for how to keep all of hell from gunning for us, nor how to fight them off."
Dean put down his book too, considerably relieved that Sam had finally arrived at that conclusion. Dean's head was about to split, his eyes feeling bright red and scratchy.
"Then it's running," he said, sitting back.
Sam rubbed at his face, took a few slurps of coffee from a blue metal cup. His mouth was all twisted in a grimace, forehead creased.
"Where can we run that they can't get?"
"It's more a question of, where can you run that they won't find. All kinds'a corners in this world," Bobby said, getting up to fetch a globe from a high shelf, the oceans the rich brown color of good leather and the land like parchment.
He set it down before them and the brothers gave it a long look, chary and reluctant. Dean could see Australia, all those strangely shaped islands clustered nearby, so many their names didn't fit. The other side of the world, and he'd never really got a good sense of that until now.
He looked at Sam, nudged him with his elbow. "Go 'head."
Sam glanced at him, gave the globe a spin. He let it go for a few seconds and then set his fingertip down to stop it. He hit water the first three times, and then landed in Siberia, the Yukon Territory, and Moscow, all rejected for reasons of cold, before Bobby suggested mildly that they might want to try the Southern Hemisphere instead.
Four more times the globe told them to run to the bottom of the sea, and then:
"Bolivia," Sam read carefully off the globe. "I'm pretty sure I knew that was a country."
"Puts you one up on me," Dean said, looking to Bobby for help.
Bobby was still on his feet, and went to rummage in one of his bookshelves, saying over his shoulder, "It's likely enough as any other place, I suppose. Silver, if I'm recollectin' right, lots of silver. Here we go."
He brought Sam another book, and Dean leaned to get a look at the title: Lands of South America. Sam flipped to the right page, and they both studied the cheap ink drawings, the skeletal plants that were supposed to be as tall as a man, the horrid-looking animals with their hooked claws and ringed eyes. There were mountains and jungles and tin and gold to go along with the silver Bobby had mentioned, and Dean sounded out Cochabamba and Guayaramerin, warping his mouth around the bulky names. Sam snickered at his terrible pronunciation, and Dean was tipped against his brother's shoulder, grinning at the regular sound of Sam's laugh and forgetting their predicament for a second.
"They got ghosts there, Bobby?" Dean asked. Bobby snorted, rolled his eyes.
"Ain't nowhere on earth doesn't have ghosts, boy."
"Good, I don't want to be gettin' homesick." Dean gave Sam a poke. "'s all right, Sam?"
"Yeah," Sam said with a sigh that wasn't quite sad, setting the book aside. "Guess it'll do."
Bobby went to the kitchen to get three cloudy glasses and bottle of whiskey. Dean sat back in his chair, flicking at the globe idly, keeping it spinning and trailing his finger over all those thousands of miles. They lifted their glasses, "Bolivia," and Dean hooked his ankle around his brother's, crossed his fingers for luck and drank to their brand-new future.
*
They stayed at Bobby's place for a few days, but Sam kept twitching and knocking things over with his mind, his mouth pinched and anxious. He still thought the demons might show, bugging Dean to get gone already.
Bobby went into town and got them outfitted with better supplies, but they would be traveling light, horseback to St. Louis because neither of them was getting anywhere near a train west of the Mississippi. The Union-Pacific Railroad had lost their business for good.
Sam spent his time reading up everything Bobby had on South American cultures and lore, learning random chunks of Spanish poetry that he rattled off for Dean while Dean cleaned weapons and made dinner and played solitaire. Sam told him that Incan ghosts were probably going to be easier to deal with than Aztecs would have been. Sam told him stories about angels with black wings and the heads of jaguars, and Dean had terrible dreams that night.
Dean didn't know what they were going to do when they got to Bolivia. He was trying not to worry too much about it, trying to have faith in everyday things like Sam wanted him to.
They were sailing out of New York City. Bobby unearthed a ship's advertisement with a colored drawing of the Statue of Liberty, brassy copper shine with the torch a perfect yellow wave of flame. Sam and Dean had never been east of Chicago, and Bobby told them outlandish yarns about the mammoth coastal cities, gadgets and automatons for the slightest task, vicious beasts living in the sewers, buildings too tall to see the tops of and colored solid black from the soot. He said that they could live their whole lives there and never make a dent on the population of restless spirits, the immigrant curses brought from every country in the world; Bobby said that it would take an army.
These were like nursery tales for Sam and Dean, the stuff they'd grown up on. Dean fell asleep curled up on the bear rug in front of the fireplace, Bobby's steady voice lulling him under, and woke up with Sam's feet planted on his back, Sam conked out in an overstuffed chair in an untidy sprawl.
Dean struggled to his feet, shook his brother awake. They soft-stepped through the creaking house to the spare bedroom where there was one cot and a nest of blankets on the floor. Dean wouldn't touch Sam because he didn't think he'd be able to stop, and Bobby was snoring just through the wall. Sam didn't care, pushed Dean back against the door and kissed him and kissed him and kissed him until his head spun and his skin hummed, whispering, "Goodnight, goodnight," into Dean's mouth.
The night before they left, Bobby broke out his good moonshine and they sat out on the porch until even the insects had been exhausted, breaking each other up with stupid jokes and crazy stories. Dean laughed so hard his head felt achy and disconnected from his body like a hot air balloon. Sam rolled off the porch and lolled about in the yard getting his clothes dusty, limbs gone loose and his grin messy, easy. Dean kept staring at him, thinking that he was going to find the thickest patch the Amazon had to offer, hammer together a little house under the dense green trees and hide Sam away from everybody else.
Sam and Dean both slept on the floor of the spare room that night, twined together still in their boots and shirts. Bobby kicked them awake in the morning, Dean's arm tossed over his brother's chest and Bobby didn't seem to think anything of it. They were all whipped by hangovers, grunting and restricting the emotional elements of their goodbyes to clapped hugs and long tight handshakes.
They rode off, looking back to see Bobby with his hand raised. Dean almost wondered aloud if they'd ever see him again, but then his brain caught up and he throttled the question, flung it back.
He had a very bad headache, jostled with every stride the horse took. He got sick an hour or so in, once the sun was high enough to batter down on him and fill his vision with spots. Sam crouched beside him as he threw up his breakfast into a ditch, wetting his hand with water from the canteen and pressing it to Dean's hot forehead, over his hair.
Dean sat back on his haunches carefully, gave a weak little laugh. "Off to a good start, ain't we?"
Sam smirked, his eyes ringed and bloodshot. "Nowhere to go but up."
They got into the rhythm of the road, winding down into Nebraska and Kansas where summer was already in full swing, the fields thrown out green and gold and the apples tumbling out of trees as they rode past. Sam went without his overshirt for the warmest few hours of each day, and the skin of his forearms tanned to the color of polished mahogany.
Zagging slightly off a crow's path, they touched on a few old haunts, their rare steadfast friends, just enough to put around the story that they were lighting out for California and good riddance. They went through Lawrence, where they'd both been born, visiting the graves of their mother and her family, and then headed straight east.
They rode as much as the horses could reasonably bear. Dean was still trying to quit torturing himself with pictures of his girl starving and tangibly dying beneath him, her slick black coat gone ashen and brittle. He wondered if anyone had found her, or maybe she was running free now. He asked Sam what he thought and Sam said he figured Dean had spoiled her well enough that she'd never do for anyone else again. Sam said she'd probably live another quarter-century and be the last wild horse the West would ever see, and Dean liked the sound of that.
The weather held out, a long unnerving stillness in the air, like counting down seconds after sparking the fuse on a stick of dynamite. Sometimes there was lightning but never rain.
They weren't staying in boarding houses or brothels, not having the money for it and anyway, it wasn't safe enough. Neither of them would have been able to sleep in a house full of possessable people. So every night they got off the main road and found a place to camp out in the nothingness all around, somewhere where a fire wouldn't give them away and they might be left to themselves.
No different than any other night from the past two decades, passing food to Sam over low-burning flames, hearing the clink of the tin cups and coffee pot, spreading out their blankets close to one another for warmth and security and a hundred other reasons. Dean could have been fifteen again, waking up in the middle of the night to find Sam squirmed out from under his blankets and obliging Dean to tug them straight again. Sam flopped over, rolled and kicked out his discontent. He'd always been able to sleep through pretty much anything Dean tried on him, endlessly frustrating considering that a feather dropped by an outsider could stir him otherwise.
Dean didn't want to watch him sleeping but he was awake now, and he didn't have anything else to look at, the millions of strewn-salt stars having long since lost their novelty. Sam had lines on his forehead and his mouth screwed in a knot because even in his sleep he had to think too much. Dean pushed at Sam's forehead with his thumb, trying to smooth him like clay but it didn't take.
All of this had happened so many times before, everything save the fifteen minutes earlier when Sam had snuck his hand under Dean's blanket and Dean had snuck his hand under Sam's and they'd stroked each other off lying side by side on their backs, gasping quietly up at the sky.
That had been Sam's idea. He'd pushed Dean's face away when Dean tried to kiss him, held his shoulder down and said, "Like if we were kids," in this torn-up voice that Dean couldn't refuse.
So they kept it simple, near-silent, like their father was right on the other side of the fire, and maybe Dean could kind of understand what Sam was after. There was no way to kiss Sam like a brother, but there was a way to jerk him off like one, like teenagers trapped in tiny rooms, het up with the maddening itch and no one else to turn to, a sin at once mortal and immediately absolved, something that must happen a thousand times a day, even if Sam and Dean never had, they could now.
It settled something in him, this idea that he could have Sam and have his brother still. Dean didn't trust the feeling, sensing that there was something wrong with the logic of it, but then a pleading groan came keening from Sam and Dean forgot to care.
They got to St. Louis and sold their horses, found a good-sized riverboat where they could get lost in the crowd, and tripled their take. Sam only had to rig the roulette wheel a couple of times, after Dean got pissed off at a pompous Texan who kept sneering at his boots and daring him on double shots, lost more than he could afford playing drunk and angry.
But that was why he had a brother with magical powers, Dean thought woozily, leaning on a slippery brass rail watching the white ball flicker and dance under Sam's steady eye. Any time Dean had a problem, Sam was his first idea for a fix. Sam was the net underneath him, and Dean stumbled over, put his arm around his brother's shoulders.
"'He flies through the air with the greatest of ease,'" Dean said in a lilting slur.
Sam smirked, his eyes on the ticking roulette wheel, his side flush with Dean's. "'That daring young man on the flying trapeze,'" he finished, and won ten dollars.
The train ride to New York City was draining, to say the least. Sam and Dean jerked every time a crew member approached, gazes baleful and ever-suspicious as the conductor made his rounds. They slept in jagged snatches in their seats, a couple hours at a time with one always keeping watch, and ate poorly, spoke only to each other. By the time the land filled in with houses and churches and the sky tinged gray, Dean was going out of his skin, dying to be anywhere else.
New York wasn't that much better, though, claustrophobic and sepia-toned by night when the men on stilts kindled the gaslights to smolder in straight lines. Everything was busier and dirtier than the range, civilization evident in the gentlemen's buttoned-up suits, the ladies with their elaborate hats erupting with lace and fake birds. Dean felt coarse and rough, stepping into the ordure and refuse of the gutters to let swells pass unobstructed. Sam kept doffing his hat at everyone they met.
There was almost a month before their ship was due to sail, and they were staying with some Chinamen that Bobby'd had some business with in the past, sleeping in hammocks in the back of an apothecary that reeked of herbs and medicines completely unfamiliar to them. Thick and spiced like smoke, the air seeped into them and they both had erratic visionary dreams, all thundering fire and bloody stucco.
Sam and Dean occupied themselves best they could, gambling and odd jobs around Chinatown, keeping a jittery distance between them because there were so many people, so many eyes. Maybe no one knew they were brothers this far east, the names Robert Parker and Harry Longabaugh printed in blurring ink on their steamship tickets, but that didn't stop Dean's hand from jerking away.
They took the trolley up to Coney Island one day and followed the clatter and holler down the wooden sidewalks to the Steeplechase, spreading out in a manic glitter like a little boy's dream. Dean killed a flock of clay pigeons and Sam ate spun sugar until his mouth was sparkling and sticky-pink. They stayed away from the treacherous racket of the rollercoasters and drank lemonade with a view of the beach, the pale folks squinting and laughing and splashing.
They weren't talking about Bolivia, the way they were fleeing everything they'd ever known and god only knew when they'd make it home. Dean kept trying to remind himself, we don't have a home.
A few days before they sailed, Sam and Dean walked all the way up through the park to the Polo Grounds, pushed through the turnstiles and the crowds. Way down the left field line they watched the Giants kick the holy hell out of Brooklyn, stamping and crow-calling and rising as one with fifteen hundred other people.
Walking back through the warm summer night, Dean said, "Baseball."
"What?"
"Something else we're gonna miss."
"Dean, that was the first professional game we've ever been to."
Dean waved that away. "Just sayin'. Lots'a stuff here you can't get anywhere else."
Sam didn't answer for a moment, and they walked a little farther. Dean caught himself listening for the ring of spurs behind them, shook that off.
"Don't take it so hard," Sam said eventually, features softened by the muddled light.
Dean scoffed. "Ain't."
"I know, I know. Just, try not to take it so hard."
That got Sam a scowl, an irritated breath. Dean shoved his hands in his pockets, thinking sourly that his brother wasn't always as smart as he made out. Sure, Dean was feeling off, harassed and unstrung from all this waiting around, this killing time, but he wasn't taking it hard. He didn't have any real connection to this country except for all the blood his family had spilled on her land.
The steamship was as long as a city block, and seemed from below as tall as the cliff Sam and Dean had jumped off. Sam whistled low at the sight of it, and Dean thought it was the single biggest thing he'd ever seen that didn't have a foundation.
Their two-berth room in third class was a different matter, so narrow Sam couldn't comfortably fit his shoulders and had to stand sideways. There were two miniscule bunks on one wall and a basin the size of a soup bowl opposite the door, a shaving mirror no bigger than Sam's hand nailed up over it. Both their feet stuck out the ends of the bunks.
Dean could barely breathe in there, and they spent most of their time on deck, searching the ocean for they didn't know what, finding no sign.
At night with the lamp doused, their room was a deeper black than Dean had ever known, something his eyes never adjusted to because there was no light at all. They were separated from the moon by dozens of layers of steel; the door was sealed watertight. It was easier for Dean like that. He and Sam crammed into one of the tiny bunks and rubbed off against each other slow because they didn't have room to do more, couldn't see their way even if they did.
The room was the same suffocating size in the dark, but somehow it didn't matter at all if Dean couldn't see it. Sam said that was normal, but it still felt like some kind of minor miracle.
They came into harbor in Rio de Janeiro at the hottest point of the summer. The train ride inland to Bolivia was a pretty good approximation of hell, pitiless days spent melting into their seats, hanging their heads out the window trying to get some kind of breeze and being rewarded with pelts of sooty black smoke. Sam was red-faced and glaze-eyed all the time and Dean thought he might be running a fever but he couldn't tell because everything felt at least a hundred degrees.
Dean was weary in his bones, in every fragmented inch, months of traveling behind them and he wanted to be done. He just wanted to stop, and he didn't think he cared where, but then the train left them at a station that was just a crumbling wall with arches set into it and the town's name painted on a swinging board, bleached away by the sun. The arches opened directly onto a scrubby dirt patch clustered with pigs and chickens and strange long-necked animals the size of donkeys with thick cream-colored coats. There were a few thatched-roof houses, but no people around, and the whole thing looked uninhabited for a dozen generations.
Sam and Dean stood next to each other, staring with dismay at the decrepit scene.
"This," Sam said slowly. "Is not quite what I was expecting." He glanced at Dean as his brother moved into the yard. "All of Bolivia can't look like this."
"How do you know?" Dean said from where he was wandering ankle-deep in piglets, gaping in disgust. "This might be the garden spot of the whole country. People may travel hundreds of miles just to get to this spot where we're standing now."
He stepped in something foul-smelling and cursed, kicking at the ground and swearing viciously. Chickens scattered away from him, squawking, and Dean looked up to find his brother smirking.
"Boy, a few dark clouds on your horizon and you just go all to pieces, don't ya?" Sam said.
Dean snatched up a piglet and threw it at him. Sam dodged, and the little pig landed skidding on its stomach, squealing and skittering away. He crossed his arms over his chest, gave Dean a look.
"Get a hold of yourself, would you. Remember why we're here."
"'Cause we had no choice!" Dean said, almost offended. Sam only rolled his eyes.
"'Cause we're hidin' out from demons, Dean. We want the middle of nowhere. We want godforsaken."
Dean shook his head but didn't argue. He came back over to his brother, stomped his boots on the stone to get the filth off, and served Sam a solid smack to the back of his head, just because. Sam's hat tumbled off and he caught it neatly in front of him, rolled it back onto his head.
"C'mon, man," Sam said. "Let's get lost."
*
They found their way to what passed for a city this far south, the buildings made of adobe and gray stone and stalls set up in the plazas selling fruits and vegetables and hard chunks of cheese, everything covered with a fine layer of dust. Sam tried out his new Spanish on a boy tending to some horses, and got snickered at for his accent, directed to a saloon.
Saloons were probably the same the world over, Dean thought as they settled in at a back table. There were men who looked like solid clots of dirt parked at the bar, spotted glasses full of amber beer, the hushed rattle of dice being thrown against the wall.
Sam leaned on his elbow on the table, his eyes working across the room, sizing up the men. No one was taking much notice of them, occupied in their inner lives, their drinks clutched as talismans against the constant oppression of the heat.
"All right, well, we're here," Dean said. "Now what?"
Sam side-eyed him. "How come I gotta say?"
"Sammy, we've been over this. I'm the face, you're the brains." Dean gave him a mock toast with his beer, a curling smirk. "You'll think of something. I got nothing but faith in you, little brother."
Sam snorted, scuffed his boot into Dean's under the table. "We're just gonna lay low. Make a little money gambling, then we'll see about a straight job."
Dean blanched. "Straight job? But we're outlaws." He'd thought that, if nothing else, was clear.
"Yeah, that doesn't work so well in a country where we don't know anybody. Can't turn to a life of crime, that's how you get your picture up in mail posts."
"We already got our pictures up in mail posts."
"Not down here," Sam said, tapping at the table. "We can kill whatever we come across, but we can't go looking for it. Couple of Yankees askin' around after vampires and chupacabras? People are gonna remember that."
"But, a straight job?" Dean asked again, his voice high with displeasure. "Haven't had one of those since . . . I've never had one of those. Huh."
Dean scratched at his rough chin, kinda surprised. It always felt temporary while it was happening: they had to hunt this creature before it killed again and he had to play faro for three hours so they'd have a place to sleep tonight and they had to cover four hundred miles of empty prairie before the end of the week. Everything seemed unique to itself, situations popping up unexpected to keep them moving. Somehow it added up to a whole life spent on the dodge, and Dean wasn't sure how he was supposed to feel about that.
Sam nudged at his boot again, knocked his knee into Dean's. He hit it just right, too-sensitive cluster of nerves that set Dean's whole leg to buzzing.
"You know all those normal people who never see one demon their whole life, never see one anything, just go about their business thinkin' the world is beautiful and safe like it seems, those people, they go home at the end of the day. You know what I mean?"
"What, what the hell are you even talking about?" Dean told him, half-aghast. "We can't live like those people, you can't just stop knowing it."
Sam shook his head, his mouth knotted, giant hand dwarfing the glass. "No, I didn't say that, man, shit. Or, not literally anyway. But we can get jobs that don't involve actively searching for evil when we're supposed to be actively hiding from it at the same time. We gotta fake it, at least."
"But," Dean said, not quite a whimper but the crook in Sam's eyebrow told him it was close. "Bobby said there'd be ghosts for me to kill."
Sam laughed, clapped Dean on the back. "C'mon, with our luck? You know we're still gonna stumble into that stuff all the time."
That made Dean feel a little bit better, and then Sam ordered them some whiskeys and that finished the job, and he was smiling again, dopey and heatstruck and slanted towards his brother like a tree reaching for water.
So they spent a couple of weeks getting the lay of the land, learning the choked passes through the Andes and the run of the rivers. The jungles were traversed by single paths cutting narrowly from town to town, acres and acres of overgrown plant life stretching out around, trees indistinguishable from each other and the soil rich black, almost completely untouched by the sun.
Dean thought it was an interesting place, sunken in green with birds colored like harlequins, splotches of red and lavender and egg-yellow, winging branch to branch. The towns were tiny and backwards and the people were nice, worn down to nubs a lot of the time, but pleasant and generally accepting.
Dean's hair lightened in the scorching tropical sun and little kids always wanted to pet the streaks of dusky blonde that had showed up, never having seen that color before. Dean always sighed extravagantly, dropped to one knee and said, "Vamos, rapído," head cocked for the kids to get at it, eyes rolling up to Sam with a smirk.
They camped above the valleys formed by foothills of different mountains, high on the slope of land with the muzzy lights of town down below them. One blanket under them, their arms folded under their heads, they stared up at the winter constellations in the summer sky.
"Hey Dean."
"Yeah Sam."
"It's not so bad here, huh?"
Dean huffed, not wanting to admit it because he liked complaining about things and getting Sam all riled up. But the grass was soft under the blanket and he wasn't hungry and it had been a long time since anyone had taken a shot at his brother. Dean felt alien and out of place in Bolivia, but it wasn't nearly as severe as he'd feared, really only a slight heightening of a feeling he'd always known but never positively identified until now. He'd always been like this. And anyway, he liked the sound of Spanish, the beat and rattling song of it. He liked seeing Orion in the middle of July.
"Ah, I guess it's okay," Dean allowed, grinning up at the sky.
Sam rolled over, half on Dean with his arm pushing across his chest and his chin propped on his brother's chest. He kicked Dean's boots apart so there was a space to wedge his leg. Dean took in a careful breath, feeling his body press up against Sam's.
"Got a line on a job," Sam said, his chin shifting faint.
"Real job or bullshit straight job," Dean asked. He was fighting sleep, so goddamn comfortable it made him stupid.
Sam pressed a smile into Dean's shirt. "Bullshit straight job. Fella over in Santa Cruz name a Garris. Word is he keeps an eye out for Americans."
Dean grunted, pulling one hand out from under his head to lay on the high slant of Sam's back, fingers twisting up into hair. He still had his eyes on the stars, heat gathering and thickening under his skin where Sam was up against him, spreading out all gradual and molten.
"Fair 'nough," he mumbled just because he hated loose ends. He felt no pressing urge to ask what type of work, trusting that Sam wouldn't have mentioned it if it was hauling rocks in a mine or some such.
They lay there for a long moment. The stony point of Sam's chin became his cheek laid flat, his breath rustling the split where Dean's shirt was unbuttoned. Dean had mostly come to terms with this thing between them, the conversion they'd made. They had come so far, and Sam was the only thing he knew by heart down here, the only one who knew his true name. It had taken crossing a continent and tacking on an ocean, but Dean knew now that this was the same as it ever was; only the geography had changed.
"Been thinkin'," Sam said, never a good sign. Dean wound his hand gently in his hair, made an inquisitive noise. "Long term. Just in case, you know, case we have to stay down here for longer than we planned. Maybe a ranch. Some place way aways from ever'body."
Dean hummed, forcibly keeping his eyelids from drooping past half-mast. "Ranchin's brutal work."
"We're pretty tough. Get our own spread, little house somewhere."
Dean could see it, flatland penned in by the blue mountains, four-room cabin they'd build for themselves with a porch like Bobby had, sigils and protections carved into every piece of wood. They could breed horses maybe, stunning black mares.
His eyes were closed. He was smiling again, half aware of it, saying, "Whatever you want, Sam."
Sam nosed into Dean's open collar, cold nose and warm breath, his lip pulling on Dean's skin and making him shudder. Sam murmured, "I hear Argentina's lovely," and Dean slid both hands fast into his hair, dragged him up into a kiss that felt like some kind of blood oath.
Sam's hands worked swift at Dean's buckle, breathing hard into his mouth. Dean arched his hips for his brother to tug his pants and smalls down, shirt rucked up and the blanket scratchy on his bare back. He was half-hard and made it the rest of the way three seconds after Sam covered him with one hand, holding his prick flat to his belly, thumb rubbing just under the head, and a crazy bit-off sound filled Dean's mouth. Sam grinned at him, sharp in the starlight, rolled him onto his side and notched in behind him, chest to back and his rough linen shirt at the edge of too harsh where it rubbed on Dean's skin.
"Fuck, Sam," Dean managed, shoving his arm under his face and setting his teeth to the meat of his biceps, shirt dry on his tongue. Sam had his forehead on Dean's temple, his hair stinging at Dean's eyes.
"Gettin' to it," Sam answered, drawling and distracted, little bites along the line of Dean's jaw. "Christ, you beautiful fuck, every goddamn day like this, please," and he was just muttering now, keeping his mouth running as he jerked his belt open, reached for the jar of slick they'd learned to lay in with the rest of their supplies. Dean had his eyes squeezed shut, the anticipation wrecking through him worse with every second, his skin drawn tight and shivers scampering up his spine.
Then Sam was easing in, mouth buried in his brother's throat, constant low moan that matched up to Dean's perfectly. Sam had an arm shoved up Dean's shirt and wrapped around his chest, clutching his shoulder. They were both still fully dressed, skin to skin only where Sam was fucking into him, and his arm holding Dean to him, and the flat place way low on Sam's stomach pressing to the small of Dean's back. Dean was gasping, fisting his hand into the ground so he could have leverage to thrust back against his brother.
And yes, yes, he thought in the splintering moments right before, however long Sam wanted to stay down here was just fine by him.
*
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