Chapter 3.1

Tread Softly Because You Tread on My Memories

"If you don't have the character and fortitude to walk with someone through their worst moments with compassion and understanding, you don't deserve their best moments."

~ Pandora ~

This chapter contains extremely difficult subject matter. Please read the Content Warning if needed before proceeding.

"We were friends who spoke like lovers, and that seemed enough for two people scared to love one another.”

~ Unknown ~

The trill of a heavy-duty zipper pulling closed a canvas duffle echoed loudly in the otherwise quiet library. Dress shoe soles clacked against marble tiles, then mahogany floorboards. The uneven cadence of the approaching sound belied injuries their wearer hadn’t yet healed from.

“Cas. We, uh… we gotta talk. You’re not gonna like it,” Dean said. Wearing a hard, somehow vulnerable expression, he turned toward the seraph standing in the doorway.

Castiel froze on the stairs, leaning on the rail, favouring his freshly bandaged foot. Panic seized him by the heart. He could feel the organ squirming in his chest, struggling to beat steadily. Much as he tried to carry on as if completely free of the Shadow’s cruelty, part of him couldn’t escape waiting for the other shoe
to fall—to discover this wasn’t happening anywhere other than in his mind. That Dean was dust in the wind, condemned to the Pit, and they’d never had a chance in Hell at having something extraordinary with each other.

“The last conversation we had that started like this ended with evicting me from here.”

“No!” Dean snapped, looking up from double-checking the contents of a side pocket. He had to take a breath to settle himself down. “No. You’re stayin’ right here. In fact, given the condition you’re in, do not leave, under any circumstances, short of the whole fuckin’ world coming to an end. Things have changed—a lot. It’s gnarly out there.” Dean started fidgeting with his bag, hesitating, leaning on his knuckles. There was nothing to do but come out and say it. “I, uh… Cas, I need some space. Some time on open roads to sort out what’s goin’ on in here. Away from Sam, Eileen… you. Everybody. Everything. You know, blue skies, fresh air… open roads.” Dean bowed his head, shuffling uneasily for a moment, then jabbed the fingertips of one shaking hand into the center of his chest. “I need to breathe.”

Castiel descended the steps, getting closer with every word Dean said. Stopping him from coming any closer with a raised hand, Dean reassured him. “Look, the moment I think I have a handle on things, or if there’s something I can’t straighten out without you, I’ll get your attention. That still works, right?”

By no means happy about what was happening, intent on remaining true to his promise he wouldn’t do anything to hurt Dean, Cas sighed, conceding, “Yes… it does.” Castiel backed away, seating himself on the table edge opposite where Dean was packing his kit, taking all weight off his sore foot. His hand ran across his lips unconsciously. Taking a long breath to keep from losing his head, Cas clenched his jaw tightly closed for a moment. “How long?”

Dean shrugged and faced Cas, seating himself on the heavy mahogany table’s edge. “A few days.” Leaning across the distance between them, reaching for the hand the angel had resting on his leg, Dean watched, crestfallen when Cas pulled his hand back. Frowning, Dean retracted the gesture. “You really want to leave things like this? I just take off?”

“No.” Cas’s expression wavered between despondency, doubt, hurt, and some sort of composure.

Sighing, Dean tapped his temple with a pair of fingers. “Cas, look. Go ahead. Am I tellin’ the truth?” he asked, his expression saddened. He liked seeing what this was doing to Cas as little as the angel liked facing it down, but he had to get out. If he didn’t, he would crawl right out of his own skin.

Castiel’s gaze suddenly snapped up to meet his. Dean held himself immobile, gaze locked to the angel’s, even as those piercing, unsettling eyes looked into him and unabashedly extracted what he wanted to know through his eyeballs. Cas blinked, looking away as though the effort hurt his eyes. His expression lost its edge. “Yes,” Cas answered, breathing easier and looking apologetic. Dean stood, walking over to Castiel, who remained seated precisely where he was, turning his head away. Dean left no space between them, his thighs leaning into the table's edge between Castiel’s legs. Cas gave a little. Sighing heavily, he bowed the side of his head into Dean’s chest. “I still don’t like this.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Cas said, a tinge of humour in his tone, looking unwaveringly up to Dean.

Laughing with a smirk on his face, Dean backed away, winking as he went. He picked up the duffle bag off the other table. “If I do, you’ll be the first to know.”

The angel bowed his head, chuckling quietly, his jaw clenching as Dean’s bootfalls sounded further and further away.

Raising his gaze, Castiel’s intense, knowing eyes watched Dean sling the duffle over his shoulder, skirt the map table, scale the stairway two steps at a time, and go.

See the stone set in your eyes,

See the thorn twist in your side.

I’ll wait for you.

Sleight of hand and twist of fate.

On a bed of nails, he makes me wait,

And I wait without you…

~ Adapted from U2’s “ With or Without You” ~

Tapping his palm against Baby’s premium leather-wrapped steering wheel, twanging out in his throat the last harmonica refrains of a Zepp tune he’d listened to more in the last few days than in ten years gone by. It was always one of his favourites, but it’d, uh… taken on new meaning. He ran appreciative hands over the steering wheel's arc, one over the other, as he rounded the corner at a T-junction. High-grade leather wrap—one of the few improvements he’d splurged on over the years. As much time as he spent with his hands on this ol’ girl’s—Lady’s, sorry, Lady’s—helm, it was a luxury he’d deemed justified long ago.

The next track’s smooth bass beats and strummed guitar strings met his ear, putting
a warm, fond smile on his face.

“I was walkin', by the river. I held my hand out, to feel the rain. Just a light rain…”

Bobby looked on as the boys in his charge played, bringing the mouth of his beer up to his lips, sipping only enough to ease the dryness in his mouth and throat. He settled down into leaning his elbows on the aluminum fold-out chair’s sun-bleached plastic armrests, finding a way to get comfortable on woven seat mesh accustomed to his backside from having been a faithful fishing companion for many years. Sunny summer afternoon. Hot but dry, and a cool breeze comin’ up off the water.

Out at the end of the pier, Dean cozied up behind his brother, no doubt with one of the tadpoles he’d caught and pocketed in the shallows, wriggling in hand. The smile on Bobby’s face grew as Dean executed his plan perfectly. A hand on Sam’s opposite shoulder to distract him, an imperceptible lift of the younger boy’s swim trunks' waistband and fwip! Dean slipped the little critter into his brother’s shorts. All while keeping up the ruse of marvelling over a fossil picked up from the riverbank on the walk here. A natural-born prankster if he ever saw one.

In seconds, Sam dropped his fishing pole, shot straight up, patting his swim trunks in panic and stumbled backward off the pier into chilly river water. He surfaced, pale and shivering with shock at the cold, swim trunks shucked off and in hand. After a thorough search of himself and the sopping wet shorts turned up nothing, Sam ducked under the water again and came back up with a handful of river mud destined for his cackling older brother’s arms, raised in half-hearted self-defence. Diving into the water over his brother’s head, Dean surfaced behind him, yanking Sammy into a noogie. He released his struggling sibling from it in the nick of time, before Sam would resent him for it. Dean backed away and ducked a couple more mudballs slung his way, sending a splash of water back at Sam for both of them.

Bobby chuckled, feeling the vicarious joy and mischief of watching over these two just being boys for an afternoon. Dean sat low in the water, ready to go under at a moment’s notice to avoid a projectile, taunting his younger brother with a pair of waggling eyebrows. He crept up on Sam, who was resisting the urge to smile, only to have his face shoved aside playfully as Sam broke away and went to retrieve the dropped fishing rod.

Dean, treading water, looked up at him, worried he might be in trouble, only to break out beaming when he found Bobby looking down on him fondly, no hint of reproach
in his expression.

This boy—a little piece of sunshine in his own right—looked up to him, like he was the sun itself. Perhaps, that was what it meant—what it felt like—to be a father. In that instant, an indelible feeling bloomed in his heart.

Bobby gave his head a chiding, encouraging nod Dean’s way, pointing his gaze toward Sam. Dean rolled his eyes, but dutifully went to help his brother recover and reset their fishing rod. Eyes starting to water, Bobby inhaled, keeping his breath under strict control to keep a sniffle quiet. He loved these boys.

Shifting in his chair, Bobby settled again as the radio by his side played a verse and seemingly spoke straight to his soul: “…There was rhythm. There was order. There was a balance; there was a flow. There was patience… indulgence. There was a power I could not know, and I felt it all made sense. Innocence. A permanence,…”

He thought he’d lost his chance at family when Karen died, but here were two boys, not his own, absent their father, looking to him for how and who to be in this
world—as a father—in ways Bobby thought he’d never get to know…

Sam walked the uneven dirt, root, and stone-laden path ahead of them, beach towel over his shoulder, their folded-up lawn chairs in hand, giddy about getting back to the house to fillet and cook their catch. He was rattling off things he knew about the fish caught today, lamenting not having encountered some of the species brochures said inhabited the river’s waters. Bobby chuckled to himself and smiled. Seven years old and already, Sam was a walking encyclopedia.

A trio of modestly sized carp in the five-gallon bucket Bobby carried would make for a hearty dinner on the heels of an afternoon spent expending their energies horsing around in the river, once enough to eat had been caught. Dean came up behind him, tackle box in hand. Out of nowhere, a boy-sized hand found his, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Surprised, Bobby smiled, not looking down. A tear he’d fought back earlier finally found its way out of his eye and down his cheek. Dean saw it and squeezed his hand. Nodding, Bobby smiled, laughed, squeezed back, and held on.

A lyric bubbled up in Bobby’s brain, refusing to leave the forefront of his mind without being heard.

"I took my young son to the river. I held his hand out…”

❗ The sun sat well above the high afternoon horizon. Cotton ball clouds cast small, undulating shadows on the grassy wildlands uphill from the creek and a swath of forest neighbouring the back of the wrecking yard property. The house was hot and stuffy. Cool air, shade, and solitude down by the creek made it the place Dean wanted to be—the solitude, in particular.

Under the shade of a maple tree, boots in the rich black dirt, one hand up under his shirt and latched over the opposite shoulder, belt, jeans, and briefs halfway down his thighs, Dean leaned his head back against the tree. Shifted his feet, propping himself up, his head lolled deliriously to one side, breathing desperate and uneven. It had started out as imagining that instead of heading down the roadhouse’s porch stairs that night with a friendly tip of his hat and heading home to his family, the rodeo wrangler had stayed and shared more than a cigarette…

“I guess so. Why d’you wanna know?” What Dean really wanted to say was, “You don’t know the half of it, partner.”

Cowboy boots had been stepping up on him all the while. They stopped, nearly toe to toe with his, challenging Dean to let him close the remaining space or call it off while there was a way out. Things suddenly felt quiet. Looking inside, over his shoulder, he saw the bar was unnaturally empty, the jukebox still playing Night Moves. Heh. The street light hummed. Crickets chirped off in the bramble and brush. Not a soul anywhere nearby but them. Safe.

The cowboy shrugged, nonchalant, staring at Dean sidelong, eyelids heavy, eyes shamelessly finding his lips, speaking the unspoken—the forbidden. “That’s the game. Only one of you is gonna win. If you want it to be you, you gotta sit down and play. I’m down tonight, but I’ll mop the floor with those wet-eared morons one day soon. Don’t worry your lil’ head about me. I win more than I lose. Still, can’t blame a guy for wanting to get in on that luck of yours.”

In reality, he’d leaned back against the off-kilter maple and with one hand, kept as good a hold on his cock as he could manage through jeans. Mimicking the weight of another cock beside his as well as he could with the side of his palm, drawing on a cigarette, Dean had his belt, waist button, and fly undone before his arse hit the railing in his mind’s eye. Brushing grit off his hand on his pant leg, he fumbled himself out, all the spit he could muster in his palm, and… sweet fuckin’ mercy.

His mind took them down off those steps when a “kiss for luck” became two, then three and four… a few more than that, and he wasn’t counting anymore. There was no point…

The truck door swung open; Dean got in and climbed into the back seat of the full-size cab, shoving his pants and skivvies down to his knees. The door shut. Then, there were two of them back there. Desperate kisses, each taking as much pleasure from the other as hard and fast as they could. Their kisses stopped. The rodeo man spat onto his hand and started jacking Dean harder. His jeans went down—commando underneath. Before Dean processed it, there was a well-muscled, toned, naked ass in his lap, and… this worked preeeeetty much the same, right?

There was a way in and inside it, fuckin’ hot, soft, slick flesh… when the cowboy couldn’t reach behind him anymore, Dean quickly took over, spit in his palm—there was nothing better on hand—and put as much of it on himself as he could before… fuck. Fuck, fuck… fuck! Tight as all fucking hell. A whole other person was writhing, tightening and throbbing around him, and this guy… he liked it. He really fucking liked it. The ass and thighs straddling him worked as though he could go for hours—like riding was his goddamned profession.

His neck having a hard time keeping his head up straight, Dean looked down and realized the blazing sun had found its way through the trees overhead. It was the scorching mid-afternoon sun on his stomach and dick that had suddenly made things feel so warm, almost hot. His kneading fingers rolled across a nerve, and one of his legs suddenly didn’t seem reliable. A little closer to the ground then; down on his knees. A little more spit for shining up his cockhead. There was this spot underneath, right up in the vee on the underside of his head. He rolled a finger over it, pressed down when he found it, jiggling the damn thing like he was trying to warble a guitar string, and… his breathing snagged. Fuuuuuck. Holy fucking fuck.

He was up off the tree behind him, bent over forward, braced against a boulder, holding his jerking his pelvis as far ahead as he could manage to keep cum off his clothes. The blunt sound of his seed splattering across leaf, root, and stone brought on smug satisfaction.

Life for your crops.

The last thing he needed was questions. Bent over, he tried his best to steady up his breathing and keep from making any sound. His cock and stomach still jumping and clenching, he started chuckling as he leaned back onto the tree trunk, happy, relieved and languidly stroking himself while the last of his flaming nerves fizzled out.

“Whoo. That had some extra kick to it,” Dean murmured. Blinking, clearing his throat and laughing contentedly, he squeezed the last drops of cum he could manage from his dick. Dusting off and using his cleaner hand, he tucked himself away. Zipping up, he found his feet, walking on legs somehow both spaghetti and stiff at the same time, down to the creek’s edge. He went down to one knee on a dry, smooth rock poking up out of the gently flowing water. Rinsing his hands, he brought some cool, clear water up to wash his face.

Man, that felt good. All of it. The… he’d gotten off to the idea of being inside a guy’s ass. How fucked up is that? Totally. Super-mega fucked up. Or, at least, that’s what Sam would think. Dad, too. Maybe not Bobby. He scratched the back of his head. Through thinking it would smell pretty funky for real, that the squishing noises were gross, that it probably felt fucking fantastic to jizz inside someone, no condom on, arms wrapped around them, then to just lay there on their heaving back, as they breathed together when it was done…

Start to finish, it felt like a good thing.

He closed his eyes, drifted, and let his body feel the memory of it one more time…

Hands buried in his pockets, he trudged back up toward the house. Shoulders hunched in, Dean came up on the backyard from behind Bobby’s corrugated metal tool shed. Laughter; first their Dad’s, then Bobby’s, met his ears. There was somethin’ off about Bobby’s laughter. It wasn’t quite… he didn’t really mean it. Dean let out a scoff. How his dad wasn’t picking up on that…

John wasn’t realizing it because he wasn’t paying attention. He was too caught up shootin’ the shit over God knows how many beers fireside by the pit made of one-third of a scrap steel fifty-five-gallon drum buried six inches deep in the ground. When they’d started showing up more often, Bobby had constructed a brick well around it. The stone would get hot, but nowhere near as deadly hot as the steel. Steel that hot didn’t burn; it sloughed your flesh off your body. Dean smiled at the thought. Bobby cared. He really cared. Thought about keeping them safe even when they weren’t around…

“…I looked the guy dead in the eyes and said, ‘Keep a closer eye on your soap, cockeye.’ You should have seen the look on his face!” John’s howling laughter put a bolt of fear straight through Dean’s heart. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what ‘cockeye’ meant. Creeping, Dean stalked up behind the shed quietly, rolling the soles of his feet to silence his step just like Bobby taught him. Peering around the corner with one eye, mouth hanging slightly open to hear better the way he’d been shown, the young boy watched, and he listened.

Bobby lounged there, right beside his father, chuckling away. Dean’s stomach sank way down into his boot heel. His eyes started to water.

He had no concrete grasp of why, but something in his gut had made him think maybe, just fuckin’ maybe, he could tell Bobby. Ask him about what he was thinking and feeling. Get an idea about why. Bobby knew more than anyone Dean had ever known. Probably more than anyone he ever would know. He’d know about this, too. What to do about it. How to help him grow out of it, or get rid of it.

No.

The assertion slapped him across the face. Dean frowned. Something in him held onto the memory of what he’d done by the creek for dear bloody life.

It made me feel good. I’m not giving that up.

His father’s voice intruded. “Buddy wasn’t getting’ the fuckin’ hint. So, we got him in his cot. Used his sheets to strap him down. Whipped out the dicks and duct tape and got to work…”

Apparently, the guy had been a little hairier than most. They’d covered his groin with duct tape. Wrapped his penis with it. So tight it would make his dick fall off if he didn’t get it off in time despite the pain of ripping out hair and peeling off skin. All while the lot of them gagged and tea-bagged the soldier. They flipped the guy over and muffled his screams with his pillow when the fight to turn him over pinched and tore his skin and ripped out his hair. John and his buddies labelled him in large, bold letters—the only kind duct tape can make: F-A-G. When the recruit ripped off the tape, it would leave those patches of bare skin behind. He’d wear the word on his back for weeks until the hair grew in again. That is, if he didn’t wise up and wash out first. Hell, if he even lived that long. Remembering the guy's sounds in his cot afterward, then as he limped to the head, made his Dad snicker.

Bobby subtly snapped his gaze toward the shed at the thunderous sound of buckling metal. It was the barest instant, but he’d caught it. The sun on a mop of sun-bleached golden-brown hair. Bobby’s expression slowly rearranged itself into a frown. Why would Dean hide from…? Oh no. Oh God, no. A boy like that on the road, day and night, with this man…

"What is it?” John demanded.

Bobby kept control of his expression, and every wavelength of every word he uttered, like a life only getting started, depended on winning this hand. He shrugged. “Nothin’. Probably a fuckin’ squirrel. I’ll check the traps later.”

He took a casual swig of beer. John took the bait, hook, line, and sinker.

Dean held himself an inch or so off his traitorous cover, frozen in fear. Fear the likes of which he’d never felt in his life, and he’d known his share. Wide-eyed, stiff as steel, eyes full of water and quivering, Dean fought the urge to run and never look back. Away from the hurt in his heart, the sickness in his stomach, the kind of fear that could drive a person mad. He’d starve to death, or something wild might get him, but it would be better that way. Quicker, less painful. His father wasn’t the person he’d hoped he was—that he needed him to be—and Bobby…?

He wanted to move his feet. He wasn’t safe here. His heart was jackhammering in his chest. He was gonna be sick. Every fibre in his body was screaming, “Get away! Now!” But something profound, beyond instinct kept him stone-still—kept him safe from doing anything stupid. He heard a sound like rustling leaves overhead, but there wasn’t a breath of wind in the trees.

Bobby’s voice cut through the sound of his heartbeat and panicked breathing. “What was that you were sayin’ about a rattle in the ol’ girl’s vents?”

John nodded emphatically. “Yeah. Weirdest thing. Noticed it a while back. Might’ve been happenin’ longer, but—”

“Wanna go have a look? See what we can find?” Bobby asked jovially, but just a bit too quickly. That is, if John had really been listening. Which, after this many beers, he wasn’t.

Belly-laughing, John shrugged, took another swallow of his beer, and got up out of his creaky, rickety lawn chair. “Sure!”

The old men strolled off toward the junkyard where Baby waited under shelter in a repair bay while they worked on changing oil. Dean took a small step to catch himself when he started feeling like he was about to pitch over forward. He let out his breath, relieved; he could move his feet again. The threat of emptying his stomach was much less immediate.

Listening for a few seconds to be sure Dad and Bobby’s footsteps kept getting further away, Dean nimbly crept to the other end of the shed—the one closest to the house. With no more than a second’s hesitation, he made a low dash for cover behind the shrubbery beside the back deck.

Staying crouched below the field of view from the ground floor windows, Dean slipped back in through the basement window he’d snuck out of.

He didn’t see Bobby sneak a furtive glance back over his shoulder and smile.

❗ Bobby walked over to the old, weathered wattle fence, handing Dean a beer. Anyone who could pull off a solo hunt was old enough to drink far as he was concerned. The kid was greased up to his elbows from working on his brand-new Baby-girl all afternoon. Well, brand new to him, anyhow. Somehow, it wasn’t a chore for the boy. He loved working on ‘er. Curious about everything. He’d had to stop Dean taking her apart any more than they needed to. There was no tellin’ when John might reappear and the ol’ girl needed to be back together quick-like if it happened.

Witcherville, Arkansas, was one sordid spirit down, and the truck was finally ready, out on the road with John. Dean might not look the age yet, but a forged license and borrowed social security number meant he could get behind the wheel. Once he was tall enough, he drove backcountry roads outside the law for a couple of years.

Dean took a long, cold, quenching drink. One thumbnail digging under the label on the beer bottle, he worked up the nerve to say, “I’ve been thinkin’, Bobby.”

"'Bout what?” Bobby asked with a lopsided smile on, clinking their beers necks together.

"Enlisting.” Bobby’s cheerful expression fell in a heartbeat. “Dean…”

The boy scoffed, disappointed. “You don’t sound… thrilled.”

Sombre as a storm cloud, Bobby replied, “It’s no walk in the park, kid. Look, huntin’ is one thing… You wanna know what it’s about? What huntin’s really about? Going out into the world and making it safer, better. It’s about putting a balance that’s outta whack, right again. Seeing to it that tortured souls rest the way they oughta be. Sometimes it means ending something that isn’t necessarily evil; it’s just being what it is, like any other predator.”

Dean just looked at him, taking in what he said, nodding.

"Enlisting… isn’t about balance or a safer world. It’s about signing up to kill or maim
other human beings for all kinds of reasons, most of which boil down to
something way above a grunt’s pay grade and having little or nothing to do with
what’s ‘right’ and ‘freedom’. It’s religion, power, influence, politics, and
resources. When you hunt something down, it’s clean… humane. Mostly.

“War is about winning. Taking and holding territory. Brutally. You tell yourself you’re shipping out to do good in the world. Then things start goin’ up in smoke… soon enough, you cain’t see the line between right an’ wrong anymore, and it's just about survivin’ long enough to get home, no matter what you have to do. Don’t get me wrong. Your Dad’s time in made him good at what he does, and it’s makin’ you even better, but…” Bobby reached over and patted the kid’s back, pursing his lips, and taking a firm hold of him by the shoulder for a few seconds.

“Anyway, goes on for a few minutes. These two are yellin’ every slur you can imagine at this poor kid at the top of their lungs, slappin’ him when he tries to protest, and Sarge… he was grindin’ himself into the kid’s backside. I’ve never been sure, but I think that Sergeant got into ‘im. These tics were happenin’ on his face, no matter how hard he tried to keep his expression blank. That fuckin’ dog was snappin’ and swipin’ his teeth at the kid a hair’s breadth away from his skin the whole time. Like some hound straight outta Hell.”

Dean watched Bobby recount the story with a look on that could’ve drilled through the aging hunter’s temple. “It’s a small miracle he didn’t come away from that shit missing a chunk of cheek or a piece of his nose. Or get something even more important bit right the fuck off. I’ve never seen anyone shake like that, except in the middle of absolutely harrowing shit. Cherry on top was the Sarge bustin’ a nut all over the kid’s face.” Bobby shifted like the memory sent a shiver down his spine—thirty-plus years on, it still did.

They were supposed to be brothers-in-arms, and how would that soldier ever trust someone who could do that kind of shit to him? Did he trust someone capable of doing that to another human being to give him orders worth following? No. Every time this kid would set foot out into the field, every second of every fuckin’ day, he wouldn’t just have to fight against people who were enemies of the good he was trying to fight for. He would look to his left, right, and behind him, keenly aware he was surrounded by enemies of who he is to his very core.

He already knew, if the shit hit the fan, his section mates wouldn’t have his back. If they couldn’t stand up to these men when there wasn’t a single bullet involved, they would be capable of no better when the lead and shrapnel started flying.

Not having taken so much as a sip of beer while Bobby told his story, Dean stayed unmoving, watchful, and silent as Bobby’s internal understanding of what had gone down that night played out on his face. Plain as the letters of a neon sign that read: this is the world you live in, son.

Dean kept his cards out of his expression and voice like a champion poker player when he asked, “Did ya join in on it?”

Scoffing, Bobby replied, “Hell no. I was tied up. Besides, you sign up to serve and give limb or life—or both—for a country that doesn’t give a shit about you the rest of the time, I couldn’t give a flyin’ fuck how you get your kicks, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the job. That night stuck with me, though. Not because of the crap they did to me and the other guys. The rest was playground, frat-boy shit. Makes me sick to my stomach that I didn’t have the nerve to help that poor kid. He washed out within the year. Never the same after that. Killed himself a decade or so later. Way too goddamn young. I don’t think he ever got over the shame. The why of his quittin’ probably followed him home.” Dean frowned as his blood ran cold, sending chills and gooseflesh across every inch of his skin. Bobby cared enough to look the guy up more than a decade after the fact. They had been friends.

"That's not on you. He couldn’t hack it,” Dean responded with disdain, thoroughly devoid of emotion, let alone empathy. Bobby looked on the boy, stunned. It was Dean’s—caring,
where-does-it-hurt, I’ll-raise-my-little-brother-if-you-won’t—Dean’s lips moving, but it was John-fuckin’-Winchester talking.

Bobby's eyes narrowed dangerously. “Isn’t it? An’ I hope to God you don’t mean that.”

Dean looked at Bobby out of the side of his eyes, face upturned like he was looking down on the man for showing weakness—vulnerability. “If I do?”

Bobby took a few small steps toward him, looking like he was ready to take a swing. Dean leaned away, staring at Bobby, boyishly wide-eyed and taken aback. “If you do, you’re no better than those rapists. Standing by and doing nothing to stop them was as despicable as what they did. You have a good, long think about that, boy.”

HOOONK!

Dean slammed on the brakes and released them a split second before he swerved back into his lane, out of oncoming traffic. The abrupt loss of speed gave him mere inches that turned a head-on crash into a near miss. He dialled back on his oversteering just before Baby’s wheels hit the warning strip marking the shoulder. Taking heaving breaths as he reoriented himself to the present moment, how close that had been sunk in. There was a small divot on the edge of his side-view mirror that hadn’t been there beforehand. The butt of a furious fist smacked itself down onto the ledge over the dash once and again.

“Shit! Sorry, Baby…! I’m sorry,” he said, forcing his fist to unclench.

Sure of being back in his lane and safely spaced out from other cars, Dean looked into his mirrors for any sign that the other party had pulled over. Nothing—they were truckin’ on their way along the road again. Son of a bitch. He soothingly smoothed out the spot on the dash where his fist had hit in anger before putting his hand firmly back on the wheel, keeping a laser focus on the road and surrounding traffic. Minutes later, he found a shoulder wide and flat enough to pull onto.

It was a long-ago memory, but he’d felt fifteen again so keenly he might as well have been standing there shootin’ the shit and drinkin’ beer exactly as he was now.

Bobby had known him better than he knew himself. Even then. He missed the salty old dog like he hadn’t for a long time. Blinking, a single tear fell from each eye. Dean wiped them both away hard with a knuckle. With that, he’d shed more tears for Bobby Singer than for his flesh-and-blood father. His blood pumping and pounding in his ears, hand finding Baby’s door handle, he opened the car door in front of upcoming traffic.

“Fuck!” Dean shouted, instinctively slamming the door closed again, disoriented, his heart hammering and breathing heavy. He was as dangerous to others as to himself, like this. Turning the keys back, he killed the engine, catching his breath. Climbing across the seat, Dean crawled out the passenger door. He went straight to the back for a water thermos in the cooler, pocketing his keys and letting the trunk drop closed again. Taking a long drink, he began to pace what little gravel there was before the shoulder dropped off into an overgrown, swampy, weeded ditch. His eyes wouldn’t stop trying to water, and it pissed him off.

He took in a levelling breath, his gaze turning skyward.

Clear blue sky. Blue eyes. Bright, clear, sky-blue eyes…

A burgeoning ache swelled in his chest. Dean blinked water out of his eyes and the intruding vision out of his sight. Slowing to a stop, standing on the gravel unmoving, his expression went vacant: gone into his memories again.

Bobby had seen him once.

He’d blatantly looked over one well-put-together hunter from behind in passing at a roadhouse without giving any thought whatsoever to keeping a handle on the expression on his face. Another pair of hunters saw it from across the barroom and decided he was easy prey. They’d come at him from behind and to the side. He had no idea they were closing in until Bobby stepped between them, growling at the pair, “Go back to makin’ love to your drinks, or I’ll bury you in the foothills.”

The beating they’d been angling for was suddenly not worth the trouble. One turned back to their table and took the other by the arm, half-dragging him away. The one being dragged fixed Dean with a stare that said, I know you, and one of these days, I will get you [RC1] , ya fuckin’ faggot, without saying a word. Bobby stood firm, staring down the miscreants and, soon enough, the rest of the bar when things went dead quiet.

Putting his arm ‘round him, Bobby rested a steady hand on his shoulder and pulled him in tight. The touch unmistakably told Dean he loved him, full-stop, but the regretful look on his face, on full display in the mirror behind the bar, said, Stow that shit, son. Ain’t good for nothin’ but trouble.

Damned near pulling him off his stool, Bobby walked them calmly out the door—nothin' to see here, folks. Bobby kept his head on swivel and a hand near the sidearm at his hip all the way to their beat-up jalopy. Sam was lying down in the back seat, flashlight in hand, his nose buried in a copy of Ender’s Game. Ordering Dean into the front seat, Bobby burned rubber on the way outta the parking lot. Lotta miles ended up behind them before they stopped again.

Their work here would have to stay unfinished. Sixteen and a few months to spare, half a head taller than most of the room, stacked for his age, and ballsy as fuck, Dean already stood out. He had the kind of face—the kind of smile—that people remembered, whether he wanted them to… or not.

Putting a hand over his eyes, Dean took a deep breath. His gaze fell to the ground. Evenly, calmly, Dean stepped backward out of a garter snake’s path as the little thing eyed possibly climbing over his boot. No doubt, looking to cross the busy highway and head for the river on the other side. He found a loose stick in roadside bramble and hooked it underneath the snake’s belly, gently, quickly, and smoothly putting the critter back into the water at the bottom of the ditch.

Digging his boot toe hard into the mud and grass, he scaled the step back up to gravel. Returning to the car, he opened the passenger side door, digging his hunter-annotated map book out of Baby’s glove box. He paused as he was leafing through to his location.

The morning sun sat low to the east in a cloudless sky. The vibrantly colored, blue, green, and winding river glittered, forcing him to squint to look at it. He was surrounded by stunningly beautiful mountain country. Hanging his head for a second, he looked to his side for no reason in particular. The persistent—if suicidal—garter snake was back on gravel. Dean chuckled a few times, shaking his head.

"Determined little fucker, aren’t ya?” he asked, sighing, of a creature that could give no answer other than continuing on its merry way. This little guy was gonna wind up a smear on the patchy, pothole-riddled asphalt. He moved calmly to dig his leather work gloves out of clutter obscuring the floor in the back seat. It was a little warier of the branch than it had first been. Nevertheless, he managed to snatch it back from the treads of this beast of a pick-up truck just in time. His steady hands smoothly formed a continuous path for the snake to explore as the seconds passed until there wasn’t a vehicle oncoming in either direction long enough to make it across the two-lane highway.

As he moved with greater effort, the snake became uneasier, moving slightly quicker across the supple leather he wore on his hands. “Somewhere you need to be right now?” he asked, laughing. He had to pick up his pace their last couple of steps. That got the little thing wanting out of his hands. “Okay, okay! Heh heh… there you go…” One last offering of support from the back of a hand saw the lively critter into the roadside grass beneath the guardrail. The sleek-bodied serpent slithered its winding way through the grass to the runoff from a nearby culvert—a tiny tributary into the massive, prey-rich river some yards away.

Dean smiled, sighing as he tucked his gloves into his back pocket, bracing himself on the guard rail and watching the plucky little fellow get on with his business. “Yeah… me too.”

Am I ever gonna show up at a pride parade wearing rainbows and behaving so flamboyantly I might as well have had a personality transplant? Hell no. Does just the thought of kissing, touching, and gettin’ inside Cas… whoo. Yep, Dean thought, whistling. He bowed his head, digging the toe of his boot into the gravel as he winced and took a stuttering breath to get clear of the headrush brought on by the fantasy.

A little you-scratch-my-back thinking in a world grappling with giving ghost stories, legends, myths, and religions more credence than ever before goes a long way. Still, he wasn’t deterred, yet.

Elbow digging into his thigh above the knee, he covered his eyes with his hand. Keeping light out, he kneaded into the pressure point on his temple with his thumb. The first good rest his eyes had all day. He’d been on the move since six-thirty this morning. It felt like he’d spent the day in a time warp—like he’d been driving for days. The faster he wanted time to pass, the slower it went. Fuck you, Time.

Dean flopped back on the bed, absent any urgent impetus to do anything else. His eyes closed.

Time…

“Clock’s ticking, John. I can’t say it any plainer than that,” Bobby stated, throwing his hands up.

“What are you talkin’ about?”

Bobby stared at John, agog. “What do you expect the kid to do with his life, John?” he asked, incredulous. “Have you even thought about it? You think he’s just
going to sit in grungy motel rooms, learning the trade, staring at boob tubes and nothing but four walls until you finally kill the guy that’s tryin’ to kill him? Has it occurred to you that he could easily become a grown man before that happens?”

"I'm close, Bobby. This time, I’ll get the bastard,” John insisted, his voice thick with over-the-top charm that belied what he said.

Bobby shook his head, rolling his eyes. He let out a sound that landed somewhere between a scoff and sigh. “Sure you will, Ahab.” The man standing before him wasn’t all the way gone, but he wasn’t perfectly sane either.

"All right. You know what, I don’t need this—”

Bobby stopped him before he could get out the word shit. “John, have you looked at your sons lately? Dean’s grown and way too damned fast. He’s not a kid anymore. Hasn’t been for a long fuckin’ time. You gotta ease up on ‘im. Let ‘im figure out how to be his own man.”

“He’s drivin’, huntin’ on his own, he’s doin’ a bang-up job of lookin’ after Sammy—” John countered, swinging his arm wide in the general direction of the house and Sam, nose glued to a dusty old tome, inside.

"That's not what I’m talkin’ about.” Bobby held John’s gaze, anger starting to overwhelm any restraint he had to work with. “That makes him your man, John. Not his own. You asked him lately what he wants from life? Does he even want to be doing this?”

It was John’s turn to scoff incredulously. “I taught him how to survive, Bobby. I taught him self-reliance. I never got on his case about shit that didn’t matter…”

Bobby stared at John blankly. He couldn’t believe he was listening to a grown-ass man. All that telling you to eat your veggies, wash behind your ears, and brush your teeth before bed is the kind of stuff you look back on and realize there was damned good reason for it.

John saw it the moment the look on Bobby’s face called out his bullshit. “Sam is still alive because I—!”

There it was—the proverbial straw. Bobby snapped. “Sam is smarter than the two of us put together! He read Ender’s Game six months ago, and you know what, John? He gets it. That book is mandatory reading in the Marine Corps, and your eleven-year-old son gets it. We’re not equipped to teach him everything he’s capable of learning. Dean’s…!” Bobby trailed off, taken by surprise at how forcefully every fibre of his being knew John shouldn’t know this about his son. A sudden chill seized him as the muscles of his face clamped his jaw shut before he could think to do it himself.

John's eyes narrowed. “Dean’s what?” he demanded, advancing on Bobby like he was ready to extract the truth from him forcibly if he had to.

Bobby desperately searched his mind for something to offer up in the stead of: Dean’s… he’s questioning himself… changing—growing—in ways I didn’t expect. “He’s had to raise his little brother, John, and either you never noticed, or you don’t care. An’ I don’t know which is worse.” It didn’t matter that he’d pulled out another potent, awful truth as a feint. He’d hesitated too long, and John was no idiot. Already calling his bluff, the look on John’s face telegraphed working out the truth despite Bobby’s best effort. The list of things Bobby wouldn’t want him to know was short.

"Sam wants to try for university. Law,” Bobby bluntly stated.

John rolled his eyes, shaking his head. “Kid’s eleven. He doesn’t know what he fuckin’ wants.”

Bobby held John’s gaze; held on hard. “Sam does.”

"How the fuck would you—” John began, a disdainful sneer drawing up one side of his lips.

Bobby planted his feet hard in the cracked dirt. “I know because he told me.”

"Why the fuck is he saying it to you, not his own father?” John demanded, suspicious. What the hell was going on with his kids and this man?

It was the derision in John’s voice when it produced the word you that did Bobby in. “John, why the fuck do you think you know so many people happy to look after these boys when you decide to disappear for a few weeks…?!”

Dean had himself lying down, head rested surprisingly comfortably, between where an off-shooting branch split into two just after emerging from the thick, undulating trunk of the maple tree. The curve of the branch and its outgrowths cradled him like the hand of a sleeping, swaying giant. Hands latched over his chest, Walkman clipped to his belt, Dean slept better here than in any bed or couch in any house he’d ever stayed in. Better, even, than on Baby’s seats.

Maybe it was because there wasn’t one instance where he remembered something bad happening to him in a tree. Or because it felt like this tree had custom-grown to hold him, with branches perfectly placed to cradle his arms and comfortably sling his legs over, letting them dangle from the knees down. A dip exactly where his arse needed it to be. The wind, the sun shining down warm through rustling leaves, some easy listening Zeppelin in his ears. Peaceful. Safe. A simple boy’s paradise.

He started awake violently at the sound of raised voices. One of them, Bobby, the other… Dad. Shit. No, no, no, no, no…!

Dean knew his way through the branches of this old maple as well as he knew his way around Baby’s engine. Silently monkeying his way to the ground, he outstretched his boots as far toward the ground as he could before letting his fingers slide off the tree branch. Landing with fluid grace, itchy bits of bark fell on the bare skin of his neck as he landed and crouched, one hand going down to silence the jangling Walkman making noise on his hip. Dean kept low to the ground and out of sight among the junkyard’s maze of rusting steel skeletons. He couldn’t get close enough to truly hear, not without being seen, even with wind gusts coming and going like this…

“You watch your goddamn mouth, Singer,” John warned him, pointing an angry finger in Bobby’s direction.

"Or what, Winchester?” Back to a last-name basis, then? Fuckin’ fine by him.

“They’re my sons! I’ll be the judge of what’s best for them and what isn’t!” John shouted, a dangerous edge to his tone.

"You're so wrapped up in revenge, you wouldn’t know what’s best for these boys if I wrote it down on a two-by-four and SMACKED YOU ACROSS THE FACE WITH IT!!” Bobby was bellowing from the depths of his chest by the time he finished the sentence. John swung at him with such speed and fury his fists almost landed. A lesser man on the receiving end would’ve been out cold on the ground. Bobby moved a hair sideways on his toes and deflected the blow like a champion boxer, coming back swinging with fists moving so quick they were hard to see. Each shot landed with what could only be trained, gifted precision.

Dean watched, utterly confused, as the man he thought no one and nothing could take down wound up on his back on the dry, rocky ground, clouds of tawny, powdery dirt rising into the air around them. It all happened so quickly Dean wasn’t even sure he’d seen the hit that did it. His dad’s nose was bleeding, his cheek and lip split, and his movements had turned limp. From the way John was blinking and held up a hand to ward off blows without knowing whether or not any were incoming, it was apparent he was disoriented and couldn’t see straight.

John looked up, uncomprehending, as the aging hunter-cum-mechanic towered over him, leaving him in shadow, a menacing, wild-eyed fury in his eyes.

“Now, get up, keep your shit together, go back to your truck, and wait for the boys by the road.” John surged up like he wasn’t done yet. Bobby drew the gun from under his belt beneath his plaid shirt in the small of his back. John froze, the cold gun barrel metal pressed against his forehead, square between his eyes.

He’d kept his cool through some pretty gnarly shit, but he’d never looked Death in the eye before. What felt like… breath colder than ice gave birth to a chill at the back of his neck that permeated his body from head to toe. He’d never been close enough to the end to have what he knew to be a Reaper breathing down his neck. That gentled him down, and had his lips quivering in fear.

The sight of his father on his knees before Bobby Singer with a gun to his face stayed with Dean for the rest of his life. He couldn’t hear what Bobby said next, but he knew his lips were moving. He wished he could read them.

“I swear to God Almighty, if either of those boys ever comes to harm because of you, I will track you down and take you apart so thoroughly you’ll beg for Hell long before I’m done. Get off my property.”

Unsteady, John struggled to his feet and moved around Bobby as though skirting a mountain. Bobby stood in place, unfazed by any potential threat John Winchester might’ve posed, relaxing the firearm’s hammer before John was out of arm’s reach. Bobby took a deep breath, collected himself, and stowed the handgun under his pants waist before heading off for the house to find Dean and Sam.

Dean snuck into the basement and made it upstairs to the room he shared with his brother without being detected. He didn’t want to risk the wrath of either of these old men for eavesdropping. Bobby, he knew, would never raise a hand to either him or Sam. John, on the other hand…

Knocking on the bedroom door before he walked into the room, Bobby told Dean to pack up everything he had in the house. Everything [RC1] . Dean’s expression fell, his eyes watered, and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop this or change it. Bobby watched it all play out on his face, never looking away. Never look away from suffering you’re responsible for. One of the first things Bobby Singer ever taught him. Despite knowing what was coming, actually hearing it from Bobby’s lips cut much deeper than Dean expected. He didn’t ask how much time he had. He just got up, got a grip on the emotions threatening to break his heart, and got to work collecting everything he could remember where it was and find.

Bobby watched as Dean took the hit and just kept on keepin’ on. One more hard knock in a young life already brimming with them.

Dean thanked Sam’s lucky stars when he got downstairs and discovered his little brother had been wearing his headphones while the shouting match transpired outside. Probably listening to instrumental music by some guy with a name Dean didn’t wanna even attempt to pronounce, who’d been dead for a good century at the very least. Bobby helped him pack. Dean occupied himself in the kitchen, fetching some food Bobby told him to take with them, pretending not to be looking when Bobby stopped Sam in the hallway, hugging his youngest son.

The fearful look on Sam’s face slowly rearranged itself as he learned in the moment to control his expression. He was so smart. Sam never once asked if they could go back to Bobby’s again. He knew they couldn’t. He just didn’t know why.

Dean had their belongings packed into Baby’s trunk with an efficiency that broke Bobby’s heart. He watched from the front porch as the sixteen-year-old put his baby brother in the back seat, handing Sam everything he wanted to have with him to entertain himself on the road and stowing the rest of his baggage away in the trunk. Dean opened the driver’s side door and stopped, turning to look back at Bobby.

Bobby raised a hand. No waving, no nothing. Simply raised it. He kept the expression on his face unchanged, hoping it would serve to hide the fact that he couldn’t see the boy clearly through the tears in his eyes. He blinked, and a pair of tears fell, but by that time, Dean had turned away and stuck one leg into the car. If Dean had tried subtly communicating anything in those last few seconds, he’d missed it.

Dean fixed his hardened gaze on John, standing leaning against the door of his truck by the road. Slowly shifting his feet, John looked like a predator that resented being unable to get at a meal it wanted a piece of because it instinctively knew it would come away from the scuffle injured and empty-handed.

Turning back to the house, Dean kept one hand on top of the car door. The Impala was parked near enough to the road that Bobby was a slightly indistinct figure, standing
still as a statue on the top step up to the front porch. Dean felt his expression twist in anger and sadness. Then Bobby raised a steady hand into the air and kept it there. Even now, the man was more concerned with giving him the strength to face the road ahead than keeping it for himself. He frowned as a peaceful, warm feeling appeared inside him.

I’ll see him again.

Giving Bobby a small, reassuring nod, he stepped up and ducked into the driver’s seat, swinging the door closed. The old girl’s door shut with a slight, high-pitched complaint. He’d have to wipe down the hinge and oil that at their next pit stop. Dean caught one last glimpse of the older man in the rear-view mirror as they pulled out of the driveway and followed John’s dusty trail down the road.

The look on young Sam’s face as he peered forlornly over Baby’s back seat at him as they pulled out of the driveway stayed with Bobby.

He remembered it with perfect clarity until the day he died.

Inhaling brokenly, Dean shifted on the bar stool to take pressure off a numbing spot on his backside. The muscles on his face worked as he fought to keep his expression from twisting and to stop his eyes watering. He neatly knocked back the remainder of the whiskey in the glass in hand. Not two weeks went by after that until the first time his father had told him to lure some hairy, stinking, burly werewolf trucker to somewhere out of the way and into a trap John had laid for it. His father’s words echoed in his ears, even now…

Dean looked down into his lap, at a loss, his mind racing. “How?” he asked, coming up short for any kind of idea as John stepped down off the truck’s foot rail, about to close the door behind him.

His father looked disdainfully back over his shoulder at him, out the corner of his eye. “If you can’t figure something out, don’t call yourself a hunter.”

John never insulted him over what he knew about him, but he never acknowledged it either. It was a piece of him his father treated like a scrap of meat to be tossed into whatever trap it could sweeten and wound up ripped into by whatever hungry, merciless creature found it appealing. Then, one day, he checked in with it and found it curled up, catatonic, cut up, bloodied, and slashed to ribbons in some deep, dark pit in the back of his mind, just like so many other pieces of him that’d dared to feel anything, that had risked attaching itself to someone.

He understood why his father did it. What—who—you care about can be used against you. John did it to make him stronger—like he was tempering a sword. So, he went along with it, let it happen, let himself be numbed—deadened—and sharpened, never thinking that one day he might want someone around in ways that meant he would need, more than anything, a part of himself he’d taken off life support long ago.

Dean emptied his replenished shot glass, sliding it back across the counter to the bartender.

Sam walked into the sitting room, off to one side of the main library, a glass of whiskey in each hand, one twice as full as the other. That one he offered to Cas. The angel hadn’t realized Sam was in the room to interact with him until the moment he did. He’d been noticeably unfocused since Dean left. Normally, Castiel was sharply aware someone was there before he ever looked your way. Usually knew precisely why you were there, too. More than once in the last day and some, Sam had walked up behind him, taking him by surprise. He’d felt awful about how badly it startled Cas. Now, he made a point of approaching the seraph from a direction where he could be seen coming.

"How you doing, Cas? You seem a little… off.”

Castiel scoffed gently and hopped up his eyebrows, taking a sip of the whiskey he’d been handed, letting the book he’d been reading fall to rest in his lap.

Sam allowed himself a bout of chuckles. Now that he’d stated the obvious, time for something a little less apparent. Biting his lip a second, he asked, “Keeping an eye on Dean?”

Cas laughed bitterly and smiled. “No. I’m not. He asked to be left to himself… so, that’s what I’m doing,” the angel replied uneasily. He sighed unhappily, looking down into his glass, taking another, longer drink.

Seating himself on a lounge chair opposite Castiel, Sam settled in with his glass in both hands between his knees. “Cas, when was the last time my brother asked for what was good for him?” Sam asked, his expression turned pointed but still playful. A smirk started curling up one side of his lips.

"It's been a while,” Cas said through his widening grin as he looked up to Sam.

Sam took a deep breath and sighed, relieved the angel seemed perked up. “Right. Look… I’m not saying ‘go sit on his shoulder’, just… maybe don’t be afraid to listen in a little closer. Probably take the edge off your nerves one Hell of a lot better than booze.”

Smiling, Castiel nodded gratefully. It was apparent by his expression alone he’d taken the advice on board. “Right.” Sam acknowledged him in return, stood up and walked over, landing a solid, reassuring clap on top of his shoulder, careful of the seraph’s wounds. Fixing his gaze on the bottom of his drink, Castiel
turned the glass about in hand, pensive. Sam sauntered out of the room with his
free hand in his jeans pocket, drinking down another swallow of the potent
liquor as he walked.

“Mellow is the man who knows what he’s been missing.”

~ Led Zeppelin’s “ Over the Hills and Far Away” ~

❗ Tonight, a rustling breeze turned the tree leaves and shrubbery in the garden plots outside the motel windows into wind instuments. Dean laid himself out on the bed, ankles crossed, stainless steel flask of whiskey on the night table, seeing in his waking gaze something other than the swirl-spackled ceiling above him.

Lee had to be one of the funniest people he’d ever met. Always had a story to tell…

"…So, I’ve got this girl set up on the John Deere—she’s never driven anything before in her life, mind you—and I throttle it up, give the thing some juice, and stand back. Off she goes down the lawn…” He shrugs. No big deal. “I head back to the back patio have a seat in the shade, havin’ a beer and watching her figure this thing out. As I’m watchin’… she gets comfortable and ups the throttle some. Does a lap and a little bit, nice and easy… and she pushes the throttle a bit further up. I’m just noddin’ thinking to myself, ‘All right—girl’s got a need for speed. I dig it.’” Dean took his shot on the pool table and sank it.

He wandered toward the cue ball as it slowly rolled to a stop. Unable to help admiring Lee for a few seconds, Dean decided on and lined up his next shot. He was far enough away Lee would never know the difference between assessing the table and checkin’ out what he was packin’—and he was indeed a built and packin’ fella.

“Next thing I know, my mom calls me into the house. I went back in for a minute; grabbed the cookies and lemonade she’d made for us to chow down after we were done with the lawn…”

CLACK. Miss. Dammit. Eyes on the pool balls, Dean. The pool balls. Shaking his head, Dean refocused his attention on Lee’s tale, chuckling. His friend moved himself into line with his shot as he continued the story with this incredible smile lighting up his face.

"I walk back out, beer in one hand, tray in the other, and when I come ‘round the corner of the house… this chick is flying [RC4] down the lawn towards me. You gotta understand, she was on the curvier side; tits like you’ve rarely ever seen, and she’s not even mowing the lawn anymore. The mower is bouncing along, leaving long patches in the grass behind her, and it’s a small fucking wonder these volleyballs haven’t knocked her out, bouncing around like that! Sky-eyed, fuckin’ beautiful wavy blonde hair, down to the middle of her back, all loose and flyin’ around…! I hear someone crackin’ up, coming from the window behind me, and it’s my mom! Howling her damned head off!”

Dean damn-near spat out his beer instantly when the image of this chick hanging onto the wheel of a John Deere mower for dear life, bounding down the lawn with glorious knockers bouncing along in front of her, crystallized in his mind, left him grinning and cackling like a madman.

Lee took his shot and scratched, but he didn’t give a shit. He should have, though. “This chick takes a turn on the lawn wide and waves at me like a mad fiend! She’s
havin’ the time of her fuckin’ life! I swear to you, what my balls did right then, never felt anything like it in all my goddamned years! I had to put the damn beer and tray down on the picnic table, or I was gonna drop the fucking things; I was laughing so hard. I’ve never seen anything like it! Not before or since…!”

Lee couldn’t continue his own story, he was laughing so hard. Hot damn, if seeing a handsome human being laughing that whole-heartedly didn’t do things [RC7] for Dean. He
set the cue ball up on the line, and the expression on Lee’s face fell. Dean smiled and laughed, meeting Lee’s resigned gaze as the guy shook his head. Dean stretched out his shoulders and settled down into position. Nice and smooth now…

THUNK.

The slower-moving cue ball sent his last solid down the side pocket at the perfect angle and neatly rolled to a stop, perfectly in line for an easy shot at the eight in the corner pocket.

Game over, and Lee knew it. He was sittin’ there nodding away, still genuinely smiling, drinking his beer. “Dude, don’t even bother. You win.”

"No! If I’m gonna take your money, I’m doin’ it honest. Ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” Dean said, knowing full well it was, but he’d never taken anyone’s money until the eight was sunk. He wasn’t about to start doing otherwise with a friend like Lee.

"You may be the only asshole on the planet I’ll never mind losing money to. Take your shot.” With finesse, Dean slid the cue forward, loosely cradling it on his fingers, giving the cue ball just enough juice to knock the eight and sink it but not enough to carry the ivory ball over the edge into the pocket behind it. Done deal. He reached over to shake Lee’s hand. The guy hit him with a handshake and a folded twenty between their hands. It meant Dean had to run his fingers into Lee’s palm to collect the bill. Something always made him wonder if Lee was doing that on purpose.

"Hey, what can I say…? Rack ‘em up again?” Dean asked, pocketing the money; three games won so far tonight. He and Sammy wouldn’t have to worry about food for a week or more when John disappeared next.

"Nah, My pocket’s light enough for tonight.”

Dean held his arms out to his sides, inviting. “C’mon. No money, man. Just play.”

Lee shrugged, shaking his head, but the rest of his body language was still saying ‘yes’. Dean grinned and started digging in his pocket for another coin to release the balls into the well. Least he could do was cover the game after winning sixty bucks. “Next round’s on me…” and maybe, just maybe, I can convince your body to say yes to a little more than pool. The way Lee looked at him then, head cocked to one side, pale, bright blue eyes assessing him intently, had Dean looking away right quick and swallowing the lump in his throat. “How about this? As a thank you, I’ll pull back the curtain and show you how I won.”

"That right there, man. That is why I like you. Do it. Rack ‘em.”

Dean froze. Either there was something in the way Lee said, I like you, or he was hearing what he wanted to hear.

Lee cocked his head to the side and gave him this look. “What?”

Dean shook himself out of it, smiling uneasily. “Nothin’. Here, grab us a couple drinks,” Dean insisted, handing over a fiver and change; enough to tip the bartender at an establishment like this.

Putting on a warm, cocky smile, Lee took Dean’s money, leaving his cue behind as he jogged down the stairs from the dais with a spring to his step, sauntering over to the bar and showing off his backside all the more for it. Dean checked himself; the peacocking behaviour was meant for the girls at the bar eyeing Lee, not him. Couldn’t be. He racked the billiard balls, perfectly arranged in an alternating solid-stripe pattern. Spaced in with his fingers nice and tight, rolling them into place to keep the balls exactly as they were once freed from the mould. He returned the rack to its slot in the table as Lee came back with drinks, moving much smoother on his feet on the way.

Dean smiled for no terribly good reason. Lee handed him a glass of whiskey ahead of the beers Dean paid for. “Cheers.” Their glasses clinked, and following a quick sip, cues got chalked. Dean offered up the cue ball to Lee.

His friend refused it. “You won. It’s your shot.”

“No stakes, so take the first shot. You notice anything about my breaks?”

Lee shook his head as he rolled his eyes and snatched the cue all out of Dean’s hand. “I haven’t seen anyone break like that before.”

“Get your cue as level to the table as you can. Put the ball down by the line and… three, maybe fourish inches away from the side of the table,” Dean instructed. Lee did. Where Dean was sitting, the shot pointed Lee’s ass squarely at him. What a coincidence.

Lee looked back over his shoulder. “No funny business.”

Dean put on his most charming smile as he put the glass of whiskey to his lips for a sip, professing false innocence with a shrug and wave of an open hand, chuckling. “Am I makin’ you nervous?”

Lee’s eyes narrowed, but his mouth smiled. “Asshole.”

Dean laughed and set his drink down, getting comfy on his stool. He didn’t intend to mess with Lee at all, but hey, let the guy squirm if he couldn’t get comfortable. Lee settled in and took the shot, allowing his cue to follow through but not to excess. CLACK. Dean watched the break play out intently. Solid down. It was a good shot. Lucky one, too. The eight rolled to a stop. “What d’you see?” Dean asked.

Lee shrugged. Then he saw it. “The fuckin’ eight.”

Dean nodded and smiled. It was perfectly positioned for an easy down. If it had rolled a little further, the game would’ve been won right then and there. “I’ve been trying for months to make that shot. Still no luck. Clear the balls on the table upwind of a clean shot at the eight, then go for the ones that’ll leave the cue in position for an easy down on the eight.” Lee frowned. When he thought back on their last three games, he saw the method to Dean’s seemingly random madness in choosing shots. Some of them were feints to disguise the system, ‘cause he knew he could afford to give him the extra shots.

Satisfied, Lee nodded, grinning. “Game on…”

Lee stared agog at the table as the niner snuck on past the pair of his balls in the path of Dean’s shot at the corner pocket. “What the ever-lovin'…! Fuckin’ leave it
to you to snipe your way through a tight hole.”

All false modesty, Dean shrugged, one hand in his back pocket. “I like a challenge.” He topped it off with a wink.

Laughing heartily like the cocky, charming ass he was, Lee let the innuendo slide off him like it was nothin’. Predictable tactic to use when trying to put someone off their game: get sexual. He walked around behind Dean, delivering an unexpected pat—not to the guy’s ass, to his stomach. Dean’s springs were so loaded at the prospect of Lee’s touch, his muscles reacted before his brain got any say in the matter. He jumped. Out-of-his-skin jumped. The up-sweep on Lee’s incoming hand had pulled up sharply at the last possible moment. Lee never intended for his hand to land on his crotch at any point in the time it took for the gesture to go down. Still, the possibility was so immediate, so real, for a split-fucking second that when Lee’s hand landed on his stomach instead—through the roof. It sent him through the goddamn roof.

Lee turned on his heel, instinctively keeping his eyes fixed on Dean as he stepped back, hands up in the air, hanging on to his cue in one hand with nothing more than a
thumb—an unspoken profession of innocence—giving Dean berth, but none too wide. Dean watched, looking and feeling like a deer in headlights, exposed and trembling,
as the expression on Lee’s face changed from, Whoa! Easy, pal, to, What the fuck was…? to a lower lip biting, Hunh…

Lee looked on as Dean secured his shit again, the fear in his eyes turning placid, his rigid body moving into feigned relaxation, as the guy chuckled nervously and took up a shooting position again. Nothing to see here. Thing is, in cases where that’s true, it never needs saying to begin with. Dean cleared his throat and took his shot—too soon. He hadn’t squared up properly, tried to use his arm at an awkward angle to adjust, and couldn’t follow through. The shot was a sure thing. It had been years since Lee had missed a shot like that himself, and Dean was better at this game than he was.

By the time Dean looked back up at him, he’d managed to switch back on that effortless, easygoing, fun-loving, and self-deprecating charm that made him so easy to be around. With a quick shrug, Dean laughed it off and smiled. “Ah, well, a guy can’t win ‘em all.” His mouth was smiling. His eyes weren’t.

“Dean…”

Still chuckling away, deflecting, Dean turned his back to him and went for a sip of
his whiskey on the table behind him, failing to effectively pretend that he
wasn’t potently aware of Lee’s attention laser-focused on him, and Lee… he
saw it.

Going silent, turning his gaze from Dean to the table, he took stock of the flubbed shot. The only balls disturbed had been the cue and eight. Lee walked around the table, smooth and serene like he was in the pen with a high-strung horse. He plucked up the eight, putting it almost, if not exactly, where it had been, slightly askance from the side pocket. Taking the cue ball in hand, he closed his circuit of the table. Dean was back tableside, propped up on both palms, watching him reset the shot.

Going around behind him, still moving slow and careful, Lee leaned a hip into the table close beside Dean. There was one reason, and only one, to be that close. His hand dropped down to rest on Dean’s ass, below the level of the table and out of sight of other patrons as Lee offered up the cueball. Dean stood straight up, by no means shaking it off, gritting his teeth, expression hardening as he surveyed the bar on high alert and considered his answer.

"Dude, I’m definitely not the kind who’ll beat the crap out of somebody for that sort of thing, but keep that shit on the down-low, or you’re gonna get us in
trouble.” Dean said it bluffing, like he wasn’t the same guy who’d been eyeballing a friend’s lips, dick, balls, and ass for a solid couple of hours now. Lee set down the cue ball, sliding back along the table’s edge. He settled into sitting, braced on his palms on either side of his hips, ankles crossed. The move did precisely nothing to diffuse the situation. How much solid muscle was responsible for the shape of his ass now blatantly apparent, his jeans plumping up at the crotch with no space left for it all between his legs.

"What d’you say we take it down-low, then?” Lee asked, barely loud enough to be heard but far from quiet enough to be misheard. Bluff called. Dean dropped the poker
face, looking his friend in the eye, wide-eyed in shock.

Dean took a deep breath. All right. No point in keeping up a front. He knew well enough the sort of guy Lee was—sleepin’ around wasn’t his style. “Dude, I’m not the sticking-around type. The family business? It’s important. I can’t…”

Lee put his hands up, taking things down a notch before Dean could say, start something up. He slid himself a little closer along the pool table’s side. Shoulder to shoulder, his back to the rest of the bar so no one could see the look on his face or read what he said, Lee put his bet down on the table. “No strings, nothin’ messy, just… whatever.”

Dean’s tongue wetting his lips was pure instinct by now. He brought up a thumb to the corner of his mouth, face forward but eyes cutting sharply down past his hand to get a
good look at Lee’s ass and well-muscled arms on display beside him. Lee didn’t miss a second of it, keenly aware of everything about Dean he could be. His smell—leather, cotton shirts, blue jeans, tobacco smoke, sweat, and a cologne that didn’t make the eyes water. Too expensive to have been purchased with anything other than the five-finger discount. The heat coming off him.

The moment he’d been angling for damned near all night. Dean was smack in the middle of it and backpedalling. “Man, are you—” sure…?

Lee started chuckling and cut him off, helping himself to a quick look at Dean’s ass before he met his friend’s sideways gaze. “Tell you what, I’ll clear the table and tab. You head out and get some air. If you’re still in the parking lot by the time I get out, cool. If not, I’ll head back to the motel and never say another word about it.”

The words damned near tripped over each other to be the first out of Dean’s mouth. “I’ll be there.”

Grinning and outright laughing in surprise, Lee nodded. “All right. Get the fuck outta here.”

Dean reached for Lee’s arm to run a hand down his forearm and over his hand, jerking it back when he realized what he was doing up on a dias in plain view of everyone at
the bar. He cleared his throat. “Yeah.” He took in a jerky breath, turned around, and downed the last of his whiskey, grabbing his coat and getting into it as he cleared off the dais like he had somewhere to be in a hurry.

Lee cleared the remaining balls off the table and brought their drink glasses back to the bar, having a jovial chat and smiling handsomely at the bartender as she took payment on their tab.

Turning up his collar against the chill in the air as he exited the sports bar, Lee shoved his hand into his jeans pockets. The back half of January meant downright bitter cold nights unless you were somewhere in a deep southern clime. Scanning the parking lot as he zipped up his jacket, he hunched in his shoulders, shivering the chill off his back. Roadside, in the streetlight’s cone of light, stood Dean. Impossible to miss. Lee smirked. He sidled up by Dean’s shoulder as Dean took a small swig from his flask, aware of Lee’s approach but not looking back, pensively focused on something a ways down the road. Hands-off was still wise, so they stayed stuffed down Lee’s pockets.

With only inches between them, Lee asked, “Where to?” It was a little too cold to disappear into the nearest wooded spot, but he didn’t want to invite himself into Baby’s back seat.

“I’m parked up the road,” Dean replied, the beginnings of a smile appearing as he started walking.

“Busy spot. Folks are bound to, uh… notice.”

Dean snickered at the thought.

“No. Seriously—” Lee said, worried, but too horny not pick up his pace and keep up. Long strides. Long legs. Tight, stacked, nicely round ass. He couldn’t help sniggering at himself. Give yourself permission to see it, and it’s real hard to unsee.

“There’s a dead-end street between where I’m parked and the motel. No houses after about halfway down the road.” Not only was Dean asking for it, he’d thought this through. Dean turned his way, and the look on his face…

Normally, Lee was the one doing the fucking, but goodness gracious, great balls on fire; Lee very suddenly wondered what tables would feel like turned. Peeling away from Dean’s side, Lee headed for the passenger-side door of Dean’s 1967 Chevy Impala, looking her over appreciateively. Black leather interior, black panels, black paint with chrome trim. Classy as fuck inside and out, even though the machine roared like a beast. Part of him kept coming around to thinking this wasn’t real. Then he looked across the car roof and found Dean smirking at him, chuckling softly, having caught on to his jittery shifting on his feet and rubbing sweaty hands on his pant legs.

Busted. Asshole. Rolling his eyes and smiling back, Lee swung open the car door, slipping smoothly into the front seat, not bothering with a seatbelt. Right behind him, Dean stuck the key in the ignition, turned ‘er over, and…

YEAAAHOO!

Dean started like a gun had gone off. Lee jumped because Dean had. Dean’s hand shot out to turn the radio volume down and off… but Lee reached out and held his hand in place, a full-on smile forming on his face at the contact as a trumpet line split the tension in the air. Dean dialled the stereo down a little, grinning, and switched on the heat. He wanted to hear if Lee had something to say, but the volume was still loud. Twanging guitar strings and a rich bassline filled the air, and Lee’s foot started tapping along. Dean could see his knee moving under the shadow of the dashboard. Shaking his hanging head, Dean smiled and cleared his throat, carefreely belting out the opening refrain of the song alongside his friend.

“Just two good ol’ boys! Never meanin’ no harm! Beats all y’ever saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they was born!”

Lee's smile turned into a full-on grin. No matter what happened tonight, they’d be alright. Dean seemed to give himself a little shake, and the way he sang changed almost completely for the next verse. “Strrraightnin’ the curves! Flattenin’ the hills! Someday, the mountain might get ‘em, but the law never will.” Dean’s voice near bottomed out on “never will’s” low note. Lee had slowly stopped singing, stunned speechless. The deep, full, melodic voice coming out of Dean’s skinny six-foot-plus frame seemed out of place. This boy could fucking sing. Shaking himself out of it, Lee picked up the tune again, singing with a new kind of richness in his tone.

Grinnin’ and laughin’ with each other, they belted out the song like they damn-well lived it, fancying themselves modern day Robin Hoods, as Dean skillfully extricated Baby from her parallel parking spot and put them on the road.

“You know my momma loves me! But she don’t understand, they keep showin’ mah hands but not muh face on TV…!”

The two kept goofing around with twanging out musical sounds to the beat long after the lyrics had ceased. Lee animatedly mimed riffing a guitar in the side seat, and Dean’s singing
broke down into laughter. The song's final bars died out as Lee whooped out an enthused “Whooooo-wee!” He looked Dean’s way, the smile on his face shining, boisterous laughter bubbling up out of him like a pot boiling over. Though he’d barely managed to catch his breath, Lee spoke. “Where in the seven hells did that come from?” Lee demanded, floored.

Dean chortled quietly. “Dunno, I… uh…” His gaze fell to his lap. He thanked his lucky stars he was wearing looser jeans. Looking back at Lee, the crooked smile and the dark bit of mischief in his friend’s eyes came across loud and clear.

“You don’t sing like that around your brother.”

Dean brushed it off with a wave of the hand Lee’s way. “That’s fun and games, man. I don’t want the kid to feel bad. He loves it.”

Lee cocked his head to one side, grinning and chuckling. “Are you tryin’ to impress me, Winchester?”

Shrugging, Dean’s eyebrows jumped up as he leaned toward Lee, wearing a smirk that spelled out trouble plain as day. “Might be.”

Grinning right back, Lee leaned in with his arm up on the seatback, locking eyes with Dean and then pointedly pointing his peepers toward the back seat, more teeth showing through in his smile with every passing second. Best get into it then. Dean nodded subtly, pulled his keys, and stepped out. To his surprise, Lee followed him out the driver’s side door. He turned around, and they were face-to-face.

Walking right up into him, Lee took hold of Dean, sliding pairs of fingers underneath his belt and hauling him in close at the hips, dick to dick, only to get him turned about like that and back him up against the rear door of the Impala. Dean let out a small grunt at the impact. There suddenly wasn’t quite enough air in his lungs. Lee’s mouth hovered inches from his, coming closer.

“Might wanna go easy until we get back inside,” Dean cautioned, still wary even though the street was deserted and dark.

Lee laughed, his hands finding their way onto Dean’s ass and tugging firmly. “Fucking miracle I kept my hands to myself this long,” he rumbled out, voice gravelly as hell, jaw working hard as he moved a half step back, closing the driver’s door.

Dean smiled, nodding and pinching the inside of his lower lip. He sidestepped out of being pinned, looking on surprised as Lee stepped up, opening the back door for him, acting the gentleman. “After you… and yes, I’m doing this ‘cause I want a good look at your ass on the way in.” Or not. Dean laughed as he ducked inside, fully aware that his jeans and briefs would be sitting down low when he bent over to climb in because he hadn’t pulled them up lately. Lee was in with the door closed behind him before Dean could sit down.

“You’re a goddamn tease, aren’t you?” Lee asked, sliding closer. He’d expected Dean to be all hands and all over him, but no. Here they were, and this guy, who walked what he talked like no one he’d ever known, had suddenly turned all shy. More than happy to entice, but Dean wasn’t coming after him for anything. Lee met his gaze, riveted, and asked, “Never done this before, have you?”

Dean laughed nervously, creeping backward a bit. Maybe this was a mistake. “No, I, uh… you have?”

Coy, Lee hopped up one eyebrow, a chuckle happening deep in his throat as he crept up on Dean until he had him almost entirely lying down on the seat. “What do you think…?” There was no more room to retreat. Lee’s lips met his. Lee wasn’t kissing him like a girl or trying to get one-up on him. It was firm, sure, and lusting. Lee cared, and he let it show. Dean went slack, exhaled heavily, relieved and feeling… nice, with Lee’s kiss still pressing down on him. The dam broke. Dean kissed back, pushed back, and took Lee by surprise. It gave
Dean enough room to pull back, shed his jacket, and yank his shirts off over his head.

Lee smiled as he watched it happen. For a few seconds there, he’d thought that Dean was curious but just not [RC21] into it when it came time to pull the trigger. He’d
been wrong. Holy Hera, had he been fucking wrong—and thank fuck for that. Lee shucked his shirt off pretty quick, but Dean? The guy’s hands were fucking smooth and fast. Dean was working on Lee’s belt, waist button, and fly before his shirt was off over his head, and somehow, Dean already had himself undone, and his jeans hiked down a bit.

Between friends, size didn’t matter, but there was no goddamn way. That thing was not goin’ up his ass tonight. If this was Dean’s first time—he definitely hadn’t come out tonight expecting to get fucked—there was no way to know what was waiting in there for him. So, yeah, nobody’s asshole was getting a cock tonight.

That didn’t deter them in the slightest, though. Lee realized it wasn’t just teasing—that was a big part of it, but not all. Dean was hesitant to have his dick out. So, that was where things got intimate for him. He leaned in and reached down for the waistband of Dean’s underwear; Dean crawled back some. Surprised, Lee held his hand away, the look on his face reassuring Dean that he got the message; he wasn’t gonna do anything unwanted. Lee sat back, hunched over a little ‘cause he was tall enough on his knees to bump into the roof of the car.

Working his jeans down below his ass, there was no disguising how hard he was anymore. Dean was antsy, but the only thing that betrayed it was the fact that he couldn’t seem to figure out where to look. Then Lee’s dick bobbed up out of the confines of his underwear and solved that problem for Dean—mostly. The guy looked torn; he couldn’t stop looking but kept glancing away.

“Dean… if you don’t wanna see me, just say it. This stops,” Lee said, crawling back to hovering over Dean on all fours, one hand beside his head, the other, his chest. He couldn’t help licking his lips. If this wasn’t a first—a timid one at that—he’d be eating the guy alive right now. Dean shiver-shook his head. Looked more like, No, that’s not it, than, No, I don’t want to, but better safe than sorry. “Can I see you? Take your skivvies off?” Dean looked paralyzed, failing to register the question. He was shaking and breathing fast like a tiny animal cornered and keen on skedaddling the fuck outta there. “Feel you, maybe?” This time, it was a nod. Lee smiled, chuckling under his breath. Running the back of his fingers and hand down Dean’s abs and stomach, he slipped under the elastic waist of Dean’s briefs.

Uncertain as Dean was, his body had come charging out of the gate—there was precum down there already; a little bit of slippery wetness on a soft, smooth head that topped off a cock on fire. He could feel the heat radiating from Dean, his chest propped up a whole foot above him. As Lee savoured the feeling of twitching, throbbing cocks in hand, Dean’s hips started to move, fucking into his grasp. He couldn’t keep his lips off Dean any longer. Sliding down onto his elbow, Lee sealed his mouth over Dean’s nipple, keeping a caressing hold of his shoulder. He started laughing as he worked on leaving a souvenir—the first of many if the night went the way he wanted. Nothing painful, but Dean’s body would remember him for the next few days if he had anything to say about it.

That, though, wasn’t what tickled Lee’s funny bone. It was the idea of anyone who got too nosy walking by getting an eye-full of his ass and taint through the window.

Without warning, Dean bucked his hips up hard enough to lift himself from the seat. All in one smooth, swift movement, his pants and underwear were down, leaving his penis and balls out in the open. Lee grinned, his face still pressed into the skin of Dean’s chest. This is more fucking like it! Dean’s hands came up, going around his head in a tight caress, and suddenly he was getting shoved back. It wasn’t, get the fuck away. Dean wanted something, and by the way he was pulling at his ass, coaxing him with hands on his thighs, he wanted it something fierce.

“Whoa! Dude, slow down! What’re you thinkin’…?”

“In my lap.”

Lee’s face went slack for a second in shock. “You mean…?”

“On your knees. Lean back over the front seat.”

His brain stuttered, unable to get past thinking there was no way Dean was telling him to square up and get his cock sucked, but sweet friggin’ Jesus, he was. Dean was kissing frantically at his stomach and pelvis, his hot, saliva-laden tongue and lips already on the underside of his dick before he’d managed to get himself in place, his pants and boxers down around his shins. Dean’s hand around the base of his cock pointed it at his lips, and fucking Hell… his penis slipped into Dean’s mouth and Dean… relaxed. The jittery rush evaporated, tension in him faded away, and Dean bobbed his head slow, smooth, and fucking incredible.

Lee sank as his knees spread, lying over the front seatback, breathing hard and erratic. Back arched, he hung there, shivering with pleasure and letting his hips thrust a little when they wanted, but not too far. He’d never been one to abuse a mouth giving any kind of head, let alone a blowjob like this. His legs couldn’t hold him up. There weren’t bones and muscles in them anymore. Or, at least, there weren’t any that would listen and Dean… Dean, his best friend, had his cock in his mouth, and no one—fucking no one—had ever loved it like that.

Lee didn’t know it then, but he’d never feel anything like it again.

Dean had a massaging hand in the small of his back, right above his ass, another on his balls, sometimes pressing with his thumb at, over, and around where the swell of his hard-on
went underground. Lee couldn’t help or stop his laugh, or the way he straightened up and jumped away from Dean’s fingers at a hot spike of pleasure Dean managed to accidentally knead out. He stared down at Dean as the guy pulled back for a couple seconds, catching his breath, stray precum already decorating his lips. The daring expression on his face needed no clarification: keep going?

“Yeah.” Nodding briefly, Lee collapsed again as Dean went back down for him. “Fuckin’ hell, yeah!” he breathed out euphorically.

He tried to hold out. Dean wanted him to, but there was no way, just no goddamned way.

“I can’t…!” Lee’s breath left his lungs when the first spasm of release rocked him. He tried to lock it down, but it was no use. “Cumming!” Dean took the warning and let his cock leave his mouth, his tongue taking the first small spurt of cum with him. Lee slid down against the front seat when the next release wave hit him, obliterating any restraint he had left. Through it, his hips kept bucking into the hand Dean had tightly wringing his dick, slow on the upstroke, quick on the down.

Knees split wide, he damned near attacked Dean, not giving two shits about the taste of his cock and semen on Dean’s lips. He kissed Dean, possessed of an abandon and madness he’d never felt before, as he thrust his still-cumming cock and balls against Dean’s stomach. This fuckin’ guy; he had his hand in there working on his cock, holding it against his skin, beside his dick, with the same firm but soft and deft surety he played his shots with.

When the chaos ruling over him subsided, Lee lay himself back against the front seat. He rested on Dean's knees, delirious, letting his head hang backward, throat, chest and belly presented. As time passed, he recovered enough of his breath and wits to look and find Dean reclined under him, looking him over, patiently massaging his thighs, ass, and sides like he’d never seen anything as captivating.

If Dean could’ve seen himself: cum running down his chest, all of it, with nipples that could cut glass still standing and casting shadows as the headlights of a passing car made the sweat on his skin shimmer, turning those gorgeous, luminescent eyes of his brilliant amber. Red, pouty lips hanging open as he breathed hard, his tongue and teeth unconsciously folding them back into his mouth, returning saliva’s sheen to them. To say nothing of the straining, twitching cock and high-and-tight, handsomely rounded sack laid bare at his crotch.

Lee took a good breath. Damned sure he’d heaved in enough air to say what he needed to, he rolled the dice. “Has anyone ever told you you’re the sweetest damned thing they’ll ever see?” He sighed out the rest of his breath, his jaw quivering. Every last letter of each word was the truth.

Dean got this look on his face. Like he believed every word he’d said, and realized the truth of them, taking it into his very soul for the first time. Lee found himself slackened by shock, again, and this time, breathless too. Dean… he didn’t have the slightest fuckin’ clue. That he was a goddamned vision too handsome to be real.

And tonight, you’re mine.

Before he knew what he was doing, Lee picked Dean up and laid him down, legs spread out on the back seat. If it could make Dean’s body feel good, Lee did it for him.

Kissed him, deep, crazy and messy.

Gave Dean’s other nipple something to remember him by.

Kept one hand, as often as he could, on the roots of his cock, his taint, behind his sack, one ball on either side of his shaft, massaging with a strength that made damned sure the feeling went deep and touched something Dean had never known was there before.

Little as Lee wanted any space between them, he needed some to get both their cocks in hand. He whispered in Dean’s ear, “I can’t get in there, but that doesn’t mean I can’t fuck you.”

Writhing and shivering underneath Lee like it was all too damned much, Dean found it in himself to look his friend in the eyes. The expression on Dean’s face, wiped clean of all but pleasure, the way his eyebrows went up, especially in the center, spoke louder than words. Yeah… okay.

Leaning against the back of the seat, Lee propped himself up, borrowed some of the cum he’d thrown down on Dean’s chest, put a little spit in hand and collected their cocks in one hand. He slowly started sliding his hand up and down the length of them, thrusting his hips for more of the sensations it gave them both. Rolling their heads together, he ran his corona into the cleft of Dean’s head, then Dean’s into his own in turn. The thrusts of Lee’s hips grazed some good nerves hard and shivered him, his body still riding the orgasm train.

Going on like this was a maddening feeling, but his semi-hard cock still loved it, teetering on the brink between torture and pleasure. He went limp for a few seconds, leaning his head into the black leather of the seatback, closing his eyes, and making no effort to disguise the fact that the feeling made him bobble-headed and slack-jawed.

Dean’s hand appeared on the side of his face, nudging him down to where lips of a hard-breathing mouth waited—if he wanted them. Dean’s tongue reached for his top lip and won the tug-of-war inside him. He chased that tongue down into the mouth from whence it came and hardly left it alone until Dean started shaking and convulsing under him, twitching and squirming as orgasm played havoc in his body.

Body language, faces, and voices can lie. The throbbing, cumming penis in hand beside his was incapable of guile. The warm, viscous cum on his hand, on their cocks and skin, was the truth. Dean was grinning.

Thank fuck for that.

Smiling and laughing himself, Lee gave him an unsubtle wink, kissed the boy, and crawled backward, sitting back with one leg up on the seat, his flaccid, satisfied cock rolling into its resting place against his thigh, his arm up on the rear seat’s backrest. He heaved in a breath that topped up his lungs, letting him return to breathing almost normally again. Watching as Dean started digging through clothing and boots on the floor, Lee reached down to where he knew his T-shirt was and tossed it to Dean. Dude was wearing his cum with a smile on his face. Least he could do.

Dean started wiping himself off, looking like he was working up the nerve to say something. As, uh… freakin’ adorable as this version of his badass best friend was, it could persist only so long before shit got awkward. “Spit it out, man. Ain’t nothin’ you can say that I can’t take,” Lee declared.

Chuffing, Dean nodded. “Were you like this with… uh—"

“You really want to ask me about other people right now?” Lee took hold of a little bit of skin inside his mouth with his teeth when the question was done coming out.

“Yeah…” Dean laughed, clearing the lump gravelling his voice out of his throat. Good point. “Uh, no… no. I don’t. Not really,” Dean said with a sweetheart smile, brief chuckling and a shrug.

Stretching his leg out, genuinely winding down, Lee let it come to rest against Dean’s, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of get-the-fuck-off-me-you-fairy in how Dean looked at him or the way his body jumped in surprise then relaxed back into him. Lee pulled his leg back to get just a bit more comfortable, and his heel hit something that clinked—sounded like glass—against the metal anchors of the front seat.

Lee bent down, searching blindly with his hand for a few seconds before coming back up with a one-third empty mickey of whiskey in hand. “Hmm. This calls for celebration. Got a shot glass lyin’ around somewhere?”

“Probably. Why?”

“‘Why?’” Lee repeated, mocking. “Because I’m not passing up this opportunity to have a little fun.”

Dean grinned, but it disappeared the moment a thought crossed his mind. “You’re not going to tell anybody, are you?”

Snickering, Lee replied, “Dude, no. Relax. I’m horny as fuck, not suicidal.”

“So… one and done?”

Lee shrugged. “Doesn’t have to be. You want anything else, you, or me, has got some work to do first. Can’t happen tonight. Or anytime soon, really. Takes practice. Just find the friggin’ shot glass, will ya?” Dean smiled a closed, impish smile when it occurred to him what Lee had in mind; Lee was grinning at the thought of what he wanted. It dumbfounded Dean
how disappointed he was one of their dicks wasn’t gonna end up inside the other tonight. Knowing now that a little solid pressure behind his balls felt that good, Dean figured getting at that from inside would be nothing short of incredible. Climbing halfway over the front seat, bare arse up in the air, Dean dug around in insurance papers, manuals, and Sam’s garbage candy wrappers for a few seconds before he found the buried glass. A playful smack and grab rolled into one landed on his butt cheek. Dean jumped at the contact.

“Ey…! Heh. Got it.” Dean retreated to the back seat, giving Lee’s leg a half-hearted shove as vengeance. Laughing, Lee lied down for Dean, beckoning him closer with both hands.

Dean ducked down, planting a sucking kiss on Lee’s stomach, a ways below his belly button, chin digging in just above his cock. Low enough it sent a shiver up river, and had his dick sitting up and paying attention like it had a mind of its own and remembered being inside that mouth and those lips.

“Damn, boy.” Lee sighed the words out. Dean looked up at him, smiling with one eyebrow hiked up. Lee collapsed, melting into the seat from the fresh memory of being blown alone. He reached down blindly, fingers moving carefully, finding Dean’s hair and combing through it. For a split second, Dean chose to rub into the hand on his head over leaving colourful souvenirs behind. Dean pulled back, out of his reach, and Lee dropped his hand to his side. He wasn’t going to get head twice tonight. Still, the thought layered on top of the liquor in his blood had him more than pleasantly buzzed.

Cold glass touched his navel, and his stomach twitched. His eyes shot open, his head up, and he cleared his throat. Dean was gazing down at him, wearing a look that read, Steady now.

Lee squirmed, settled, and nodded, the glass still standing on his belly. Dean poured the shot and capped the whiskey bottle, dropping it by their feet. Ducking down, Dean grabbed the glass in his mouth, lips tight around the glass. He took his breath through his nose before propping himself up on the front seatback and turning sideways, pointing his face toward the heavens, turning his whole body into a crescent that had their cocks pressed between them, side by side. Dean emptied the shot glass of its cargo, making damned sure to show off his working throat, subtly grinding their dicks together. As surprisingly as it started, Dean stopped, setting the glass back down on Lee’s stomach, a not-insignificant amount of liquor running down its outside.

A few quick lashes of his tongue cleaned the shot glass. Dean went back down for the stray drops on his skin. It became very apparent, very quickly, that Dean wasn’t just there for the liquor on his salt-lick skin. A kiss with lips and tongue suctioned onto his penis, right at the cleft, and Lee shot up and pulled back, one hand on Dean’s shoulder pushing him away, breathing hard. Dean stared at him, doe-eyed, maybe a little hurt and thoroughly confused.

Lee shook his head but couldn’t explain himself. If Dean kept at his dick like that, he would try to fuck him, which would end well for no one. Lee took in panicked, wavering breaths, meeting Dean’s gaze. The words slipped from his mouth. “Be careful what you wish for.”

Dean’s incoming grin washed uneasiness off his face as understanding came to him; it wasn’t rejection, it was protection. He winked, mischievous. “Your turn,” Dean said, offering up the shot glass, chuckling and rather pleased with himself over getting that rise out of Lee. Dean reclined comfortably on a pillow of clothing, one hand behind his head, the other sliding down his leg to rest in the fold where groin turned into inner thigh.

Shot glass in one hand, Lee’s other hand massagingly crawled up Dean’s side, on his way to position it on Dean’s belly… with his mouth. His friend didn’t do it on purpose, but when Lee’s fingers dug into skin over his ribcage, then dragged downward again, Dean let out a burst of laughter. He clapped his hand over his mouth to stop. Lee caught the glass on its way off the side of Dean’s stomach, laying his head to the side a bit and looking up at Dean from that skewed angle.

He now knew something and intended to make damned good use of it—later. He moved sinuously to find the bottle of whiskey and pour that shot so as not to give Dean any excuses to toss the thing overboard again. He ducked back down for the glass, hovering over it for a second as though waiting for Dean’s cock rather than a shot of liquor. Then, bottoms up!

Lee tried his best to steady the shot glass on Dean’s stomach, but the guy’s twitches and laughter made it impossible to keep the glass standing. Picking the glass up with two fingers before it wound up on the floor, he held on to Dean’s body with that hand’s spare fingers as he licked up spilled whiskey and sucked on Dean’s belly. If this guy could stop laughing long enough, he might be able to leave a little souvenir there.

“Easy there, jitterbug,” he said, digging his nose into the skin of Dean’s stomach, smoothing out the twitching muscles with a firm hand. The shot glass left his fingers. Lee looked up to see Dean cleaning the outside of it with his tongue. Two could play that game. He ducked down, and Dean damned near choked on the few drops of whiskey in the bottom of the shot glass when the first few inches of his dick were suddenly inside his best friend’s mouth. Dean’s breath stumbled out of him, bringing along sounds that were more jumbled letters than words.

It was a tease lasting seconds, but Lee wasn’t fucking around. His tongue went straight for and tickled the nerves in taut skin anchored in his cleft. He could feel the deep bass of pleased sounds in Lee’s throat reverberate in the flesh of his cock.

As Dean’s head left his mouth, he licked in and sucked up the drips of precum beginning to make an appearance again. Dean had been swelling in his mouth but not getting truly hard. Likely neither of them could get hard enough to go again so soon. A little reprieve, then.

Satisfied he’d given Dean enough shit for being a shit, he sat back and moved so his feet hung over the front seat and his upper body was cradled by the breadth of the back
seat. He closed his eyes for a second, discovering that was a bad idea. If he left them that way too long, there was genuine danger he would pass out and not wake up until morning. He looked sidelong at Dean, laid out on the seat beside him basking in the happy stupour of afteglow, one knee up, shin cozy against his shoulder, legs open wide, cock leisurely lying back on his stomach for the taking, one arm folded underneath and propping up his head, the other hand lazily tracing around his skin. He quickly figured out Lee’s eyes were following it and used that to his advantage.

Lee swallowed and turned away, looking hard at his knees, his expression inscrutable.

Dean moved, getting up onto his elbows. “Man, don’t look at me like that, then just say nothing.” Dean kept rearranging his body, mirroring how Lee had arranged himself almost perfectly, excepting that his legs stuck out over the front seat, crossed at the ankles.

Lee took an uneasy breath, considering his words carefully, looking at Dean sidelong as he spoke. “You gonna go squirrelly on me if I ask you for something?”

Shrugging, Dean quickly looked down. “No. I mean, I don’t think so.” He turned his gaze toward Lee, ready to receive. “What?”

Lee sighed. There was nothing for it… “Can we not go back to the motel?”

Dean's expression fell. “What are you talking about?”

Lee looked at him intently, knowing everything he wasn’t saying was written on his face. “Whatever,” he said evenly, shrugging one shoulder, his gaze unconsciously flicking down to Dean’s penis for a split second.

The hair on Dean’s body started to stand on end, gooseflesh and all. This was still a no-strings thing, but it wasn’t nothing [RC43] , either. He smiled, letting through a tenderness he’d kept under wraps. Dean swallowed nervously. They had cum for each other already. You can’t fake that shit—at least a guy can’t. Whatever this was, it was dangerous, but it wasn’t a trap—they were in it together. “All right… yeah.”

Lee started laughing, and unless Dean was mistaken, there was real joy in the sound. Lee came at him without giving him time to get laid out properly on the back seat again. Dean might have had a good four inches height on his friend, but Lee was cut and built by comparison. He could move a lanky, underfed, overworked guy like Dean to where he wanted him easily. Dean hadn’t been conscious of it before, but it crept up into his awareness now; it felt nice to be the one cared for—made to feel genuinely good—for once. He liked it. Really fucking liked it.

A hand kneaded at his breast, over his still-tender nipple, and Dean’s breath evacuated his chest like someone tripped the fire alarm. Lee pulled back and nearly stopped what they were doing, surprised by the intensity of the sound Dean made at the touch. Distractedly letting his hips grind their cocks between them according to their wont, Lee collected himself, bringing a hand up to his forehead and pulling it back through his hair.

With a touch that started out as anything but sure, Dean brought both his hands up and began massaging up from Lee’s stomach along his sides, onto his muscle-wrapped ribs. He hadn’t even hit his chest yet, and Lee had his head lolled back to one side, their dicks rolling against one another, quietly moaning, like an animal inviting him to do whatever feel-good thing he wanted to its vulnerable belly. Dean stared, transfixed by the body in his hands; its definition was shaped more by tensing, undulating muscle than bone. Sure, he’d seen plenty of bodies like this before, but he’d never touched or loved one.

His hands found Lee’s breast muscles, thumbs on his nipples, and stayed there, thumbs kneading down into and around the hard nubs of flesh. It was all Lee could take. He laid into Dean’s hands, head hanging, holding one of Dean’s hands against him. Letting him work, Lee didn’t care in the slightest about holding back the subtle moans and sighs Dean’s broad, plying, exploring hands provoked. It wasn’t just that. Every limb the guy could use for the purpose was stroking him somehow.

Fuck. Sliding a hand up into Dean’s hair, letting himself fall into holding their bodies tight together, he gave in and kissed Dean. In a way he shouldn’t have but couldn’t help, and he didn’t fuckin’ care.

When it was over, and Lee opened his eyes again, Dean looked at him, perplexed for a few seconds, but then… then, Dean kissed him back.

The shriek of the car door opening violently, over-extending the hinges, ripped the moment apart. Dean couldn’t see who or what it was, but Lee was on top of him, shielding him and fighting with everything he had against being pulled out of the car, legs-first. Then their attacker had him by his pants’ belt and waist. It was all over. One brutal heave, the sound of tearing jeans, and Lee was gone. His head hit the pavement hard and left him dazed.

“We’ve got our hands full playing whack-a-mole with Yellow Eyes’ thugs, and you’re out here fuckin’—!”

“Dad! Stop!” John stopped dead when he realized the dirty-blonde-haired boy in his grasp—the one he was about to clock some sense into—wasn’t his son. Lee did not like the look on John’s face when the man turned and ducked down, looking into the back seat to discover Dean shoving his erect penis back underneath his briefs and doing his jeans back up, no matter how uncomfortable it was. Dean got a T-shirt and both boots back on, laces still undone, so fast it floored Lee. The kid really was this perfectly trained little soldier.

Juxtaposed against his father like this, Dean was a kid again, no matter how awesome he was when he stepped out on his own. Dean shot out of the back seat with Lee’s clothing bundled up in hand, shoving it at him while trying to help him find his feet.

Not a moment later, John had his gorilla hand around his boy’s neck and shoved him back against the car, slamming his back into the Impala’s doorframe. Dean bit down on his painful cry. “What the fuck is going on here?”

“We… uh—” Dean couldn’t keep the shake out of his voice. John backhanded him savagely.

It suddenly occurred to Lee that not all the bruises Dean carried had come from hunts. The way he wouldn’t look his dad in the eye and challenge him, and Dean was hiding it pretty fuckin’ good, but when his dad’s hands moved near him even a bit too fast, he flinched. Cards-down, balls-out, give-’em-Hell Dean Winchester flinched—and you don’t get like that from one or two bad tussles with your dad. That shit runs deep, and long.

“Hey!” Lee shouted, enraged. “Lay off, asshole!!” Dean watched, horrified, as his friend lunged at his father, murder in his eyes, only to be stopped on a dime by a gun barrel pointed at the centre of his forehead. John wasn’t even looking. The look on John’s face told Dean he could shoot the boy dead and not lose a wink of sleep over it. Oh God, no. Please, no! Lee wasn’t backing down. Not at all. He stood there, leaning his forehead into the mouth of the barrel harder, daring John to shoot and then explain to his father back at the motel how his son died.

If the look in his eyes wasn’t burning holes through the back of his dad’s skull, nothing could. Dean couldn’t help the awed way he looked at Lee. No one ever stood up for him before, let alone this part of him, and with a gun to their head, no less.

John shoved the gun into Lee’s forehead hard enough to put him back on his heels. “Back off.”

That was his bluff called. As much as Lee wanted to see if he could rip John Winchester’s fucking head off then and there, he knew perfectly well there was nothing he could do against a loaded gun at close range wielded by an alcoholic ex-marine on a hair-trigger without running a very high risk of getting dead. Lee backed away in no hurry, gathered up his clothing, and skirted around John as he tried to tuck himself in and get his pants zipped up. He met Dean’s gaze as he did with a look that told him he cared way too much and why.

He'd never minded losing money to Dean, and he never would because he knew, the vast majority of the time, the guy didn’t go out and spend it boozing up chicks and gettin’ himself some. Lee knew every cent made sure Dean and his brother stayed fed and clothed, with a full gas tank. He’d have given Dean the money, but the guy wouldn’t take handouts. Dean stole—nimble hands like that don’t come out of nowhere—but he wouldn’t take charity. He believed he had to work for it, even if the work wasn’t honest. Little Sammy didn’t have any of the telltale tics Dean did. No doubt this guy had been his dad’s punching bag all his life. Always putting himself between his little brother and his Dad’s temper.

"The fuck are you doing?" John demanded of Dean viciously.

Then, something in Dean snapped. Dean wouldn’t look at Lee anymore, as though he didn’t matter. Like he didn’t exist.

"I don't know… it's nothing, Dad. Just… nothing. A bit of fun…" Dean cleared his throat so he could speak a little louder. Give Lee no reason to stick around. To try finding him. "It's my birthday tomorrow, and I wanted to have some fun—"

Something in Lee gave way. It was Dean’s birthday tomorrow. He hadn’t wanted to give his friend a proper lay before, but he sure as fuck did now…

The back of John's hand came down again, hard. "Fun—?"

"He's nothin' special to me. It didn't mean a damned thing." Dean kept control of his expression and the sound of his voice with help from a will he had no idea where it came from.

Dean’s look was downright frigid. Here he was, saying it didn’t mean nothin’; not a damned thing. Lee glared back at him, accusing. Yeah. It did. For a minute there, it fucking did. And you goddamned-well know it. But I can’t do a fucking thing against a military-trained psychopath with a gun.

"No, it didn't," John hissed menacingly into the side of Dean’s face. Dean cringed away from his father. Watching as confusion, hurt, then anger played out on Lee's face from around his father's shoulder, the look Dean wore in return was cold and distant. Cut him off. Keep him away from this. Safe. From Dad.

Dean didn’t have to say it. The look on his face said everything that needed to be. Lee felt one side of his mouth turn up in a snarl. All right, you know what? Fuck you, too. Getting his fly up made him drop one boot. Snatching it up off the ground, Lee booked it barefoot down the sidewalk toward the motel where both fathers and their sons were staying.

John started to breathe differently, deeper. The expression on his face relaxed, but in a way that turned the stomach. He took a step back, then another. A different breed of smile found its way onto his father's lips; it was dark and twisted with disdain. His tongue flicked out onto his lower lip like it was taking everything he had to keep from laying into him with the beating of his life then and there. Reaching into his pocket, John pulled out a battered, folded brown envelope, tossing it onto Baby's front seat. "A little something for your birthday. Meet back up with Sammy and me when it's done."

A hunt. Dean sighed. So much for doing anything special for his birthday. "Yes, sir."

Dean knelt and tied up his boots, then started walking toward the motel to pick up a few things he’d left in their room.

"Leave. Now." John’s tone stopped him in place.

"What?" John made him think better of what he wanted to say next with nothing more than a hard look. "Okay. I'll say goodbye to Sammy then git goin'."

John prowled closer with every few words he said. "Get in your fuckin' car and get the hell out of my sight. I've got better things to do than deal with this shit right now." Dean nodded and stepped back on his heels around John, giving him a wide berth. He knew better than to say another word. Sammy would think he'd taken off without caring whether he said goodbye or not.

What they did was dangerous. He might not come home from whatever the fuck was in this envelope. Sammy would live the rest of his life believing he hadn't cared about him enough to say goodbye before he left. If he made it back, he needed to figure out a foolproof protocol to exchange messages with Sam. A way to find each other if they ever got separated.

He got into the car without another word and hit the road. At some truck stop a couple hours down the way, he pulled in. Dean knifed open the sealed envelope, upending its contents into hand.

Newspaper clippings. Arkansas Democrat Gazette. Teens Die in Tragic Accident. White Hall Journal. Accident at RR79 Bridge Claims Two Lives. The Arkansas Mirror. Pine Bluff News. No significant variations in the details. No collision. The working theory from the local P.D. was an animal appeared on the road, and the driver swerved, losing control—no foul play suspected. Case closed.

Coroner’s reports. Aiyana Deschene. Nineteen years of age. No drugs or alcohol in her system. Glasses not required to drive. Her eyesight from her last ophthalmologist visit had been recorded as twenty/twenty vision. Cause of death—vehicular accident leading to submersion in the Arkansas River at a depth of twenty-five feet. Asphyxiation resulting from irrecoverable inhalation of water into the lungs (drowning).

Victim two. Courtney Walker. Eighteen years of age. Parishioner at Saint John Church. Cause of death—vehicular accident leading to submersion in the Arkansas River at a depth of twenty-five feet. Asphyxiation resulting from irrecoverable inhalation of water into the lungs (drowning). Body condition: arms folded across her chest. A locket closed in a rigor mortised hand, near-lethal levels of sleep medication Triazolam in her toxicology report.

Odd, for an accident. If you’re in an accident, your adrenaline skyrockets, along with every other fear-related hormone. You panic. Struggle. You don’t wanna die. You don’t fold your arms over your chest in a gesture of self-comfort, or… like you already know you’re in a coffin. Holding something dearer than life in hand.

No foul play means no nitty-gritty forensic report. Dean tossed the envelope and its loose contents into the back seat. He shed his coat and hunkered down to sleep, feet by the steering wheel in case he had to be awake and driving fast. Covering himself with his jacket and overshirt, Dean tugged and tucked in the edges as best he could to keep the heat in. The seat beside him was ice cold, but it’d take on his body heat soon enough. Before too long, he realized he could still smell Lee on him. On his skin, in his clothes, on his hands.

Dean slept badly, shivering from the cold for much of the night, gun in hand under his jacket, finger off the trigger, lying on the front seat.

In the decades since, he’d only seen Lee twice. Things… were never the same.

In the end, it was Sammy who came up with the plan to stay in contact. It cost them twenty bucks a month. They had fifteen minutes to talk at most before it would cost more. Dean had to get a salesperson to set him up with a phone number and give him a SIM card, all without ever handing them a phone. Buying one would cost a clean grand, and there was no fucking way.

They could call the dead-end phone number from a payphone anywhere and leave a message. Next, call the company’s voicemail number from anywhere to retrieve dead-dropped voicemail messages. One catch, though: they could never, ever, call from where they were staying. Long-distance calls from motel landlines would be charged back to their Dad’s credit card, recording the number for him to find. It had to be payphones or otherwise. Always.

There was no way to tell what was lurking about these days. The times he didn’t feel like seeing what was what when the room around him made a noise every five fuckin’ seconds; it was then that he sat down, turned the lights down low or off entirely, parking his arse in a chair the dark. The only light in the quiet space came from the crackling, burning end of a cigarette made from tobacco grown with holy water and laced with clove. Dean put out the butt of the homegrown, home-rolled cigarette he was smoking. If he was feelin’ extra fancy,
he took the time to coat the outside of the filter with something sweet while rolling.

He’d found a stray sock in among the detritus in the back seat the next morning while cleaning the ol’ girl out; wasn’t his, or Sam’s. Certainly not John’s. He’d laundered it, dried it, making sure it was bone dry—spent the extra coin on a second round through the dryer and everything—rolled it up and put it away in a dirt-cheap, generic Ziploc-style sandwich baggy. Dean had stowed it in the very back of the trunk, out of sight behind the gearbox, tucked where the slope of the back seat and the trunk floor met the sidewall. Probably still there. He hadn’t laid eyes on it since. That is, unless Sammy had been a neat freak when…

Dean got up out of his cheap, worn seat at the table. There was little, if any, cushion to the cushioning anymore. His arse and lower back complained about it as he went out into the night with a small flashlight. Propping up the trunk hood, Dean got one knee up on the fender and dug around, fairly gracelessly, in the space behind the weapons chest. His fingers found something plasticky and his heart damned near stopped. He got his hand around it, and he didn’t need to pull it out and see to know, but he did anyway.

Lee had gotten lost along the way, but that didn’t mean the man who stood up for who he was against a gun to his forehead, when no one else ever had, deserved to be discarded and forgotten.

The man Lee hoped to be back then, but never quite managed it, lived in him.

A few states and a few days passed by outside Baby’s chassis, and Dean still didn’t feel he’d screwed his courage to the sticking place—or managed to get any further away from an unpleasantness trying to punch a hole clean through the back of his skull. That whole mess aside for the moment, he spotted the sign of the “antiques” dealer he’d spent the last day and a half tracking down. How these people managed to stay in business when no one seemed to know where the fuck it was? Beyond him. Baby’s wheels crunched to a stop on coarse gravel.

“O, there ain't no rest for the wicked until we close our eyes for good...”

Dean let the song’s refrain finish before turning the keys back in the ignition, a mischievous smile forming on his lips. No, there wasn’t. Pocketing his keys and sending a hand to the back side of his right hip, he unsnapped his holster, concealing it under his jacket and overshirt again.

The place was rundown but cared for. A sizeable cabin with cracked windowpanes, nature encroaching, creepy-crawlies at home in webbed corners and beneath overhangs. Rotted out shells of ancient pick-ups lined up to one side of the lot, leaning toward the surrounding forest. There was no sign of life but an unlocked door. A chorus of sterling silver bells—runed bells—announced his passing through the door.

“Hello?”

Dean called out loudly, not caring to startle or be startled by some rickety old-timer.

The voice that replied was young, sweet, friendly, and very feminine. Dean unreservedly pictured the body producing the sound and found himself not far off when she stepped into view from behind a tall shelf of dust-covered knick-knacks, kitchen implements, and cookware older than he was. “What brings you this deep into the woods, stranger?” Dark, glossy, wavy hair, vivid blue eyes, lips naturally red enough to shame the rose, all packaged up with some very, very nice curves.

“Something a little more exotic than copper ladles.”

She lit a home-grown cigarette and took a long draw, exhaling in Dean’s direction. The smoke’s smell was fresh but strange. “Define ‘exotic’.”

Dean looked around for a second when a tic troubled his eye. Lifting his left hand into the air, he displayed an intricate ring formed in the shape of a newt-like creature with decidedly draconic features. The young woman was taken completely aback when the silver creature opened its sapphire eyes, looked with intrigue into the air around Dean, and began to flick out a tongue thin and transparent as fishing line, yet stronger than steel cable. Ensnaring the smoky wisps circling in the air around him, it inescapably drew them into its minute, hungry maw. Having lost a handful of their brethren, the remaining wisps dispersed, floating up into the rafters and taking refuge there. Sapphire glared menacingly in their direction before returning to her favourite sleeping position around Dean’s ring finger, contently closing her eyes, once again indistinguishable from any other piece of silver in the world.

"Exotic enough for someone who knows a conjured pine wisp when they see one.”

A warm smile formed on her full, saturated, and ruby lips. “Follow me.”

Glancing up into the rafters, Dean watched as the wisps turned on and snapped at each other viciously. One quickly lost a piece of its tail. “Dangerous way to greet your customers.”

"Sometimes, they’re dangerous customers. Can never be too careful,” she crooned, giving him a long, gauging gaze.

Dean nodded, laughing.

"If you’re not aggressive, they’re harmless,” she assured him.

"Holding up his ring hand, he asked, “This little lady wasn’t aggressive?”

"No. She was curious… and hungry. There’s no malice in that.”

A heavy bead curtain separated the front of the shop from the storeroom at the back. As Dean passed through the curtain, the hairs on his body stood on end, gooseflesh raising itself everywhere. He let out a whistle and looked through the doorway now that it was behind him. “What was that?”

"This room looks a little different to anyone I haven’t invited in,” the shop-keep responded.

"Hmm. Whole lotta dusty boxes and empty shelves, huh?” Dean asked as his eyes picked through oddities and ends enough to make any witch, wizard, psychic, or hunter feel like a kid in a candy store. Chicken’s feet. Lots of other feet. A pair of refrigerators and a freezer sat at the far end of the room. Herbs, flora, and fauna displayed on shelving inside, bottled, or vacuum-packed in plastic. Herb sprigs bundled and hanging to dry everywhere. The scent was very, very nice. Stones, metals, knives, wands, custom handguns under lock and key…

"You gonna stand there gawking, or did you show up here with something specific in mind?” Her impatience was genuine, yet lighthearted.

Dean’s hands started patting down his pockets. “Right! List! I have a… list, here… somewhere.” He frowned. “Ha! Got it. There… I mean, uh, here you go!” he stuttered, handing it over with a winning smile. Yep. She was sexy enough to have his words tripping over his tongue.

Intrigued but standoffish, she scanned the list, her expression growing increasingly engrossed.

“Headsman’s axe?” she asked, cocking her head to one side. Something about the tic and the intent, inquisitive look that came with it sent a tingle straight to his dick.

"One belonging to the priesthood rather than a king’s man, preferably.”

Her expression turned a touch harder—a strangely specific thing to shop for. She continued with the things she found odd. “Cat’s eyes.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Dean hummed and nodded as his fingers toyed with a braid of lemongrass. He picked it up, along with nearby abalone shells, and walked it over to what seemed to serve as her checkout counter.

"You'll be happy to know ours are ethically sourced. You have a cooler?” she inquired as she headed toward the refrigeration units at the room's rear. Dean leisurely wandered with her. Neatly arranged in the fridge side by side in reused cardboard boxes that once served as pasta sauce powder displays at a grocery store were vacuum-sealed packages kept at just above freezing, containing small to medium-sized lizards of more sizes, shapes, and colours than it was possible to glean at a glance. Fresh herbs in bagged and tied bundles, their dried counterparts in glass bottles on a shelf beside the fridge. Vacuum-packed hearts of many, many sizes and species.

"I do. Where from?” Dean wondered distantly, pulling back from the temptation to expand his shopping list. What was there already would cost the lion’s share of the paper in his wallet.

“Local vets, SPCA—at least as long as it stayed open. Fresh. Harvested within an hour of euthanasia, discarded after three weeks. Medically unsalvageable animals only. They’ve started releasing healthy animals into colonies. Better than having to put them all down for lack of food and space,” said the woman regretfully as she worked her way through the assortment of many-colored eyes—ice blue, green, yellow. She had some from animals with dual-colored eyes. Often, only a single eye on the animal displayed the trait.

The woman held up a vial; no doubt to emphasize their rarity and thus, higher price point. He gave her an affirmative nod and said nothing. She included all three sets she had in his purchase. “You know your arcane implements and ingredients, stranger. These are all over the map…” She paused and swallowed, carrying on a scant moment later. Dean’s eyes narrowed. She knew something.

"You wouldn’t happen to have any rollers, would you?” Dean asked casually, reclining against a thick wooden support post.

She smiled. “They’re worth their literal weight in gold these days, but, as a matter of fact, I do.”

“Two?” Dean asked, pressing his luck. Her eyebrow went up at that.

Subtly teeter-tottering her head from side to side for a moment, she settled on, “For you, why not?” as a smile grew through her tough exterior.

Dean allowed himself a restrained smirk. The ice was thawing. “So, what do I call you?”

The woman extended a hand. “Lex. Lex Burke.”

"Dean. Good to meet you.” As hard as life probably was out here, she still had nice hands. Callused, but still smooth.

"Dean…?" she pressed, not letting go of his hand.

He did that for her. “Just Dean.”

Lex was quickly grinning and chuckling. “Well, ‘just-Dean’, some of what you have here isn’t easy to come by. How badly do you want it?” she challenged, holding up the folded list between two fingers.

Smirking full-on, Dean replied, “Enough to pay for it.” His tone carried an undercurrent that told her he knew its value, too.

"Up front,” Lex came back, her tone hard.

"Dean's smirk got a little bigger. This would be the biggest payday she’d probably see all year. Still, no reason to be a dick about it and bargain too hard. “Half of any outstanding items now. Half on delivery, with an extra… hundred as a ‘thank you’ and good faith gesture with future dealings in mind.” She was one of the good ones. As if the scenery alone wasn’t reason enough to come knocking again.

"Something changed in her expression instantly. She’d expected to be given a hassle and, because she was a woman, of course, he’d try to snake this haul out from under for considerably less than it was worth… but no. She gave him an appraising look-over. There wasn’t an ounce of conniving malice in him. The deal was straight. “We have ourselves an accord. I’ll keep the extra as a deposit on account. With the world the way it is, I’ve become many things I didn’t think I could be. Still, a thief isn’t one of ‘em. I earn my way.”

"That's more than I can say for myself,” Dean quipped regretfully.

Her eyes narrowed, and again, she found no lie in how he felt about how he made his way in the world—regretful but necessary. “Hmm. Do I need to be keeping an eye on you?” she asked, joshing him in a sultry tone.

The warmth and charm in his eyes and smile could melt an ice shelf. “I wouldn’t mind you keepin’ both of ‘em on me…” He looked her up and down unapologetically. “When you have some time to spare.”

Lex whistled, her demeanour gone biting-cold as driving snow. “Hooo. That’s some thin ice you’re skatin’ on.”

Dean stood up straight, dialing himself back like he’d nearly gotten his dick caught in a mousetrap. “Oh, uh, sorry, my mistake.”

Shaking her head, Lex pinned him in place with piercing blue eyes. There was no denying or escaping how that made him feel and why. Her eyes darted over him, from place to definite place, and he wasn’t sure he liked feeling quite so seen. Being looked over like that by a woman rarely heralded anything good issuing from her lips the next time she spoke. This time, though, things transpired differently. When she did speak, there was a kindness to it he didn’t expect.

"Whatever that was, it wasn't about me… it wasn't even about you."

"Wow. Must be rustier than I thought,” Dean mused, taken aback but relieved things hadn’t soured.

Lex smiled warmly; one of the few things exchanged between them so far that hadn’t been a front. "Don't be hard on yourself about it—you’re not. Just… well, doesn't matter, either way." Her expression took on a dark, wistful melancholy, but she smiled anyway.

Shoving his fingers into his pockets uneasily, Dean genuinely relaxed otherwise. A little real talk suited him just fine. "Really? And why not? Life’s way too damned short, especially now."

Lex turned on him, and everything about her, from her expression to the way she set her body, challenged him. "Because you are as charming, good-looking, well-built, and apparently, well-endowed as you think you are, but that was never gonna be enough to seal the deal from the get-go. And no, there’s no home-team advantage in play."

Smiling, impressed, he cast a furtive glance out the window as he considered his response, meeting her intent glare again when he spoke through a widening grin. "Hmm. That's as good as compliments get around here, isn't it?"

"It is," she replied firmly, allowing herself the vulnerability of being amused.

"In that case, I'll take it." Warmth returned to his expression and smile, bringing a becoming blush of honesty along with it. Now that had been a proper “hello”.

Lex started laughing, unable to help the affection that snuck into her tone and the look on her face. Could probably sweet-talk the Devil himself, this one. "Let's get you squared away with what's in stock, and I’ll see what I can do about what I don't have on hand."

"You, uh… you wouldn’t happen to be a mind reader or somethin’? Not exactly my favourite kind of people. You know, personal boundaries an’ all…” Dean prodded, leafing through the book displayed on a shelf beside him, trying to maintain his cool.

Shaking her head as her deft fingers knotted twine tight around his kraft paper-wrapped package on the counter, Lex replied, “I read body language and micro-expressions, Dean, not minds. Your thoughts, and your business, are your own—unless you talk about ‘em. For the record: please don’t. The less I know about what you people do with what you purchase, the less trouble finds its way to my doorstep. Just don’t think of me as an idiot.” She scribed in black marker the contents of the package in the top right corner, ‘This Side Up’ in another quadrant.

Chuckling and grinning, Dean assured her. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Lex smirked, one eyebrow sitting high on intrigue. “Good.”

The wheels on her dolly were squeaky and low on air. While she allowed him the courtesy of holding the door for her, she wouldn’t let him help unload. Most he could do was make darned sure the trunk hatch didn’t take anyone’s fingers off. He’d rarely—if ever—let someone he’d known for a few minutes get a look at the arsenal he was packin’, but there were no alarm bells with this one. Quite the opposite, in fact.

With a double-check of the dolly and the ground behind them, she made sure nothing had shaken loose and that they were all loaded up, barring what she needed time to procure. Lex closed up Dean’s equipment box. Newly renovated, if he did say so himself, but he didn’t. About as much small talk as could be made had been. The impressed look on her face was enough to tell him he’d made improvements. Enough to afford him the space to come to a place like this and take home a considerable haul.

Dusting her hands off, resting them on her hips, Lex fixed him with a fond look on a face that had finally chosen to show trust. “Watch yourself out there… Dean Winchester.”

Dean's look, posture, and tone of voice turned standoffish instantly. “How do you know that name?”

Lex smiled warmly, chuckling. Full disclosure, then. “From what I hear, you and some like you have been doing a lot of good for a lot of people—especially since shit hit the fan. You ask for nothin’ for it.” The expression on her face turned deadly serious. “If you ever need anything—and I mean anything—you give me a call. I’ll git you what you need.”

Dean smiled, letting his guard down and switching over to a grateful demeanour that was in no way trying to charm her pants off. “Thank you. I appreciate it.” He extended a hand, and she gladly took it, nodding and smiling again.

"Safe travels.” Still wearing a bit of a smirk, she let go and backed away without turning around. She brought the dolly up the ramp and back onto the porch. She put her hand up as a visor against the late afternoon sun, offering him a wave and a smile like she was seeing off an old friend. Dean backed his Baby out of place and brought her nose around toward the road. He turned westward out of the driveway and gunned the engine, charging off along the neglected asphalt.

Shaking her head and grinning ear-to-ear, Lex turned and headed back inside, twirling the OPEN sign on the door over to CLOSED. She decided on breaking out a bottle of
the good stuff after a take like today’s.

Staring out the shop window, leaning against the frame as the sun painted the sky with a sunset to remember, she twirled the amber liquid in her glass, attention wandering off into thought.

Lex raised the whiskey drink in a westward salute, draining it to the last drop.

“O, for a muse of truth,

That we could descend

Into the darkest hells

Of our own inventions;

A kingdom, a stage, a cage.”

~ Shinedown’s “How Did You Love" ~

❗ Dean drove to the remotest piece of wilderness he could find. Picked the biggest blank on the map and drew a line between all of the nearest cities to figure out how to stay as far away from them as possible. That was how he ended up at this guard rail, at the top of this cliff, in the middle of buttfu… he choked on the thought, like it was something disdainful and foul. Dean frowned, trying again. How he came to be here, in the middle of nowhere. He let out a forlorn sigh, looking over the valley landscape below.

Sunset. A breathtaking one. The sun was setting on day three. Whether he’d outright said it or not, he’d meant to be back at the bunker before the clock struck midnight tonight. As things were, he couldn’t go back. Not yet.

A scant hour ago he’d have gladly bedded Lex Burke with fervent, giving vigor that could make a porn star beg for more. He ran a hand back through his hair. What Lex said stuck in his craw in a bad way. Coming on to her—it wasn’t her he wanted sex with, but he’d have done it anyway because it was easier than looking the truth in the eye. Coward[RC1] ; the unwanted thought intruded.

He’d stayed out of towns for a reason. He wanted to take a swing at someone, and—God help him—he didn’t know if he’d be able to stop once he started in on it. His look turned hard and hawkish, surveying the heavily forested yet hardscrabble landscape. His throat began to constrict as something vicious clawed its way out. He turned on his heel and dug into his pocket for his keys, beelining fast for Baby’s trunk. He dug frantically through her contents, finding what he wanted before desperation clouded his ability to look for it.

Dean dropped the wooden handle in his hand. He smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand… hard. “Shut. Up.”

The fuck are you doing? Picking it back up, Dean let the trunk hood drop and slam shut, his heart pounding out drumbeats in his chest and ears. The sound was real. His father might as well have been standing at his shoulder, spitting at the side of his face as he spoke.

“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up…” He vaulted the aluminum guard rail. His feet and legs had carried him to it unawares.

Dean nearly skidded to a stop before the towering oak tree, set his stance wide, and swung. “I SAID SHUT UP!”

SHUNK.

Dean blinked, relaxing his grip on the axe handle. Rage, hate, and something darker than the blackest night lived coiled up inside him. It terrified him. This was the kind of thing you’d think someone got used to, living with it every minute of every day of their whole life, until it couldn’t scare them anymore. The exact opposite is true. When it’s in you, no one but you knows just how bad it is, how dark it gets. No one could ever be as scared of you as you are of yourself, because no one who hasn’t seen it can know just how deep the darkness goes.

His heart was beating fast, running amok on fear and adrenaline. Frantic for something, anything, comforting to latch onto, it wasn’t time with Cas that he rifled through his head and heart and took hold of. It was Lee. Being laid on Baby’s back seat. A strong hand under his skinny ass, lifting him, moving his body so that the twinge of discomfort in his lower back disappeared. Knowing without having ever said a word. Finally, weight and heat. Hungry lips on his, and two heartbeats in two dicks between two sweat-slick grinding bodies, straining to be wrapped up in each other.

Dean’s lips parted as he took in breath deeper and quicker than his nose could handle. His own voice echoed inside his head.

His eyes shot open. Dean’s breath seized.

Aiya.

❗ "I will never let you, or others like you, hurt her, ever again!” Dean backed away, bringing his rock salt-loaded shotgun up to bear. His heel caught on a stone in the ground behind him, firing the shot off wild. That was all the girl’s vengeful spirit needed to make him regret not being sure of his footing. He blinked, and she was within arm’s reach. A vicious swipe of the hand took him across the face, cut deep, and sent him to the ground hard, stones digging into his ribs and arms. He narrowly avoided smashing his mouth off the sharp edge of a rock. She closed the distance between them and hoisted him up by the throat as he spat out phlegm and blood onto the ground.

“Aiy-agh!” Her grip started crushing his throat.

“I tried! I tried… to be like you!” she shouted at him. “To look at boys, and feel the way I do when I look at her. But I can’t. I don’t. Why is that so wrong?!” She screamed it into his face from inches away. The stench of waterlogged, rotting human body nearly got the better of his stomach. Her skin hung from her face where it had been dashed open off the steering wheel and, in other places, cut away by shattered windows. Algae hung from her face, hair, and clothing. Her decomposed flesh crawled with wriggling, consuming maggots.

The inhumanly strong hand around his neck squeezed harder and harder. He didn’t recognize his own voice as it rasped out of his closing throat. “You’ve tried to think about boys that way… I’m trying to stop.” The grip on his throat loosened. He heaved in the first good breath he’d taken in far too long.

“You’re…”

“Like you.” A violent fit of coughing ripped out of his throat, leaving him dazed and short of air. “Kinda, yeah.”

"Then why are you here?”

Dean shrugged in her steely grasp. “Orders.” The word rang as hollow as his conviction. His stomach turned in earnest.

“What did we do to deserve being hunted, like animals…?” She trailed off, searching him for an explanation. Something in his face, or his eyes, but there was nothing. Just… nothing. Complete detachment; the fortress behind which he shamefully hid his lack of reason. Her lost confusion turned to fury. “All we ever did was love each other!”

Dean dropped the shotgun and stopped struggling. All he could manage was to keep from slipping on the mossy bark under his feet and keep from choking himself on her hand. “It’s not about what you did, it’s what you’ll do.” Her whole countenance changed in an instant. Her hold on him evaporated. He lost his footing on a wet, moss-slick root, falling gracelessly to the ground. One look and it was easy to tell, the fury she’d seethed with moments earlier was alien and frightening, even to her. “Whatever that was… Courtney has already lured five people to their deaths. What she’s become? It’s happening to you. You’ve got to be put to rest, or you’re gonna hurt people.” Dean found his way to sitting up as he spoke, started trying to stand, but left his shotgun where it lay.

“We didn’t have the right to love freely among the living, and even in death, you’d take that away from us? Put us down like we’re fucking sick…?” She was coming back for him, flesh hanging off the bones of her fingertips. Her fingers curled in, her bones sticking out like claws.

Dean gulped down the bile in his throat, weakly holding up a hand in self-defence. “No. Not sick. I said, ‘put to rest’, not ‘put down’.” He coughed hard when his breath tripped over phlegm, blinking away water in his eyes. “The longer you’re here, the more control you lose. You’ll turn vicious, feral. How you feel about her will get… twisted. It becomes the reason you do awful things.”

“No, it won’t. We’ll leave. Go somewhere far away from other people, so there’s no one to hurt,” Aiyana insisted, eyes glistening, filled with unliving tears.

Dean’s shoulders sank as he looked away, shook his head and looked for words. “You can’t. You’re bound to this place. Both of you.”

She looked up at him with helplessness in her big, dark, beautiful eyes. “No…”

“Yeah, you are. Or I’m betting you’d have left already,” he said, brushing dirt and crushed moss off his jeans.

Aiya’s watering eyes overflowed. The distorted, otherworldly lilt to her voice was actually kind of… beautiful. “Why?”

Dean held his hands up, at a loss. “I dunno why. I just know how it turns out.” He began limping over to a nearby boulder.

Aiyana cast her gaze toward the river, perhaps seeing something he couldn’t. “How do I stop it? Make her better?”

Shaking his head, Dean replied, “You can’t. But I can break your connections to what’s keeping you here. Then you can both move on, together, to…” Dean shrugged. “Whatever
comes next.”

“Heaven?” Aiya asked, hopeful.

Dean’s expression turned troubled. “I dunno. I don’t think so, but, hey, what the fuck do I know?” He forced out a laugh and tried to smile.

“You don’t believe…?” she asked with gentleness in her tone.

Letting out a scoff dressed as a laugh, Dean answered, “If I can see it, touch it, if it tries to kill me, yeah, I’ll believe it exists. Other than that…” Dean shook his head in a definite, wordless “no”.

Her voice suddenly small and scared, Aiyana asked, “What if it’s nothing?”

Dean nodded, biting his tongue before he spoke. “Nothin’… sounds peaceful to me. A whole hell of a lot better than living in a fog of cold, confusion, fear, and pain. Sounds like mercy.”

Aiyana frowned. There was water in his eyes. He wasn’t only talking about them. A sickness took ahold of her by the very soul. He was so… young, but hard and cold in ways anyone only looking at the charm and humour on the surface couldn’t see. Orders. He wasn’t here by choice, and those words… they were his life. “What if I asked you to leave us alone?”

Dean hung and shook his head. “Even if I did, others like me will find you. And they won’t stop to talk.” She nodded, biting her lip, a bitter, twisted half-smile showing at the corner of her lip for a moment. Dean breathed deeply and sighed. Aiya wasn’t a monster yet. She deserved to be treated like the lost, frightened human soul she was. When he looked up again, there was profound regret written all over his face. “Look, maybe it’s nothin’, but maybe it’s somethin’. You know? Maybe it’s not Heaven, and maybe you don’t get to be you anymore. Maybe you just get to be somethin’, or someone, different next time around.”

Aiya walked to a nearby tree. She rested a hand on the bark, her expression one of sad uncertainty. The wind in the branches overhead filled the forest with a musical rustling. She looked up to the sky, starlight dancing in her large eyes, so dark brown they looked black in the dark. Maybe… becoming part of something different and new wasn’t so bad. “What do you need?” she asked, looking his way, anger gone from her voice.

"I need to find your remains—both of you. Courtney’s family didn’t claim her body. I can’t find it. No one on the reservation will talk to me. I’d, uh, rather not disrespect them by breaking in to find records, if I don’t have to. Where were you buried?”

Aiya began to cry. The elders wouldn’t let them stay, preferring to avoid trouble with white men and the Church, but they revered all life and understood that what they were wasn’t a sickness. Her family and elders would have buried Courtney with her, prepared their bodies and their souls to walk on into the afterlife. Yet, they were still here. What had gone wrong? She let out an ethereal breath as a warm, tugging feeling came alive around something that lived in the centre of her chest. She turned and faced the direction it seemed to be leading until the feeling was pointing forward from the centre of her chest rather than through her ribcage and arm. “I don’t know… but,” she heaved in an unsteady breath. “I think I can take you there.”

Frowning, wary, Dean gauged her for a moment, then nodded. There was no deception or malice in anything about her anymore. She truly was trying to help. “Okay. I gotta get some stuff outta my car, get ‘er off the road so nobody gets any funny ideas. Camoflage ‘er a bit. Then I’ll follow you on foot.”

"I don’t know how far it is.”

Dean smirked, let out a charming laugh, nonchalantly shrugging about the prospect of a very long walk. Laughing, Aiya waved a hand through the air like she was gonna smack him on the cheek. Her hand passed right through him, but Dean mimicked being slapped anyway and let his head hang. He laughed and looked her in the eye, doing his level best to avoid glancing at parts of her that should’ve been clothed, but thanks to time and rot weren’t. “Look, say your goodbyes, all right? I’ll be back.”

Sadness twisted the young ghost’s expression for a moment before resigned acceptance took over. She disappeared right in front of his unblinking eyes. There might come a day when their unnatural ability to do that stopped making his stomach lurch, but today was not that day…

❗ The night he’d put Courtney Walker and Aiyana Deschene to rest was bitter, biting cold. He couldn’t sleep in Baby’s back seat. What little money he had left from his bets with Lee, and then some, went on somewhere warm to stay that night. He showed up at the motel looking and feeling like something even Hell would spit back out. Dean ached everywhere; his ribs, arms, face, hips, back, legs, feet… heart.

He turned the key in the old, creaky motel room door, stepping into an empty room to the sound of screaming hinges and a darkness deeper than the night outside, closing the door behind him. The only things keeping him company were a strange bed, a small dresser and a cheapo coffee machine. No Sammy and his extra bags of books. None of his complaints about how wonky the place smelled. Goddammit, he missed the little tyke. Dean shed his boots, jacket and languidly tossed his duffle onto the bed. He couldn’t summon the will to take just a few more steps to the bathroom and shower off the earth, sweat and grime clinging to him.

Peeling open the turned-down covers, he fell back into the bed and stayed that way, his empty gaze unable to latch onto anything in the blackness. Then suddenly his mind’s eye wasn’t empty.

Lee, here in the same room with him, in the same bed, even if it’s one they didn’t own. A thousand miles from anyone who knew their names. On their own, even if only for one fucking night. To let whatever the rest of what the night could’ve been, be.

A blunt flash of nausea twisted in his gut. He curled up into himself, keeping his pants zipped up, legs together, and hands off his stirring flesh, cutting off the emotion trying to fill him up. The feeling bled away, leaving an achy emptiness behind. Dean sighed out his breath in the wake of a tainted kind of relief.

Don’t. It’s better this way…

Sleep didn’t come easy. Once, he’d almost gotten there, then came the feeling of someone putting a hand and knee down, sinking onto the bed behind him. A hand, a man’s[RC5] hand, touched his shoulder and, for a precious few moments, it felt good. Peaceful and comforting. Then it became a bit too real, and something in him thrashed violently, moving his body the same way. Wide awake again, the half-dreamt feeling evaporated instantly. The room was empty, the door and windows locked, the blinds down. Safe. He collapsed into his pillow and fell into the kind of sleep born of sickening exhaustion rather than peace.

❗ The sight of Courtney Walker’s half nude, rotting ghost flashed before his eyes so vividly it was real; her prom dress hung from her body, her curves, and breasts, in tatters, doing little and sometimes nothing to obscure the petite thatch of hair at the crux of her legs, in the space between her thighs.

Sickness roiled his stomach.

“You fucking bastard,” Dean spat, his hard, collected, cool shell breaking. He shouted what was in his heart into a cold, empty sky. “WE WERE YOUR SONS, NOT YOUR PETS…! I’ve seen people feed their fucking cats and dogs better food than you sometimes left us. And I had… I had to pick up the fucking SLACK!" He smeared tears away from one eye with the palm of his hand. “Didn’t you ever wonder how we didn’t starve when you took off and left us a few days of food then disappeared for two fucking weeks?!”

He lifted the heavy, arms-length axe and swung with a blind, boiling-over rage.

"YOU SICK PIECES OF SHIT!”

SHUNK. He wrenched the axe head free of the tree trunk as he shouted, “I hadn’t even kissed someone yet the first time one of you assholes decided you wanted your cock sucked!”

SHUNK.

The register of his voice wasn’t so low and rough naturally. His throat and vocal cords had seen more… wear and tear than he cared to remember.

“What kind of…” He choked on the memory. “Evil sack of shit DOES THAT TO A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD?!” The words tore at his raw throat on the way out.

Swing. SHUNK.

SHUNK. Dean left the axe where it stuck and put his hands to his face, lips turning down hard and jaw trembling as the accusations rose out of something awful in the back of his mind…

You asked for it. You lured them in. Brought them places. Let yourself be brought. You smiled pretty, opened your mouth. Unbuckled your pants. You chose that—all of it. You used them. They weren’t using you. You chose to be there. To do what you did. You were the one in control. They paid you.

NO. I didn’t want it. Any of it. I had to…

Dean’s stomach twisted something awful. Now that the flood gate had opened, he couldn’t close it. Couldn’t hardly keep his feet. Couldn’t stop… “You think Sammy grew up to be six-foot, four on fucking Spaghetti-Os and Frosted Flakes?!”

SHUNK. Recoil, swing.

SHUNK… SHUNK… SHUNK.

There were times he’d been so malnourished his skin wasn’t supposed to be that yellowish colour. He knew desperation—what it was like to go without food for days. Sometimes water, if the motel had been that bad. Sammy didn’t. His little brother had never gone a day without a meal in his life. Not on his watch.

“When’s Uncle Bobby gonna get here?” Sam whined. Something in Dean took it as a slight. He wasn’t good enough. Like all the rest, he shrugged it off. The bind they were in, the life they lived, none of it was Sammy’s fault—his either.

He had no doubt Bobby was on the road, burnin’ rubber in a beeline toward them as they spoke. “He was on the other side of the country, Sammy. Day after tomorrow, maybe,” he replied evenly, patiently. Caring. Reassuring. Too far. Too long. There was nothin’ for it. No other choice. He’d been out-hustled at the pool table last night. John had started making him keep receipts. He knew enough not to bet with his father’s money, or even everything he had anymore, but what he had left in both reserves was chump change, not enough to buy enough meals for one for three days. He needed something in his stomach to perk him up and keep him going…

The garbled, corrupted words echoed in his head.

You can actually see…

You know… that I’ve tried to…

You know…

Dean stopped his hands’ desperate work—cleaning away rough-hewn edges and splinters—stepping back from the tree trunk. He kept on retreating, taking deep, stilted, needed
breaths in and letting them out evenly. His eyes adjusted to see the towering, hardy, living, breathing thing for what it was. Rich green leaves rustling in the mountain breeze. Roots that ran deep. A sight as handsome and sturdy as it was rough-skinned and gnarled. He looked down at his hands; calloused, joints protruding and wrinkled like they didn’t used to be. Hands that knew the meaning—and the price—of real strength.

He frowned. It had only been the once, and he’d been anything but sober, but his expression softened and his eyelids got heavy as his palms remembered the feeling of Cas’ jittery stomach underneath it, of having him in hand. Hot, slick, shaking, his hips straining upward into his hand and penis sliding through his grip. Loving the feeling of it. He started breathing again when—

Like a slap across the face. What? No. Well, okay, yeah, but…

Something in him hardened and managed not to snap. Hey now, I’m not just any hunter, I’m one of the best.

A punch to the gut. Bobby? What the Hell, man? Of all people, I figured you’d be…

Low, menacing laughter. Heh heh… Heheheheh…

Footsteps. What have we here? Big, bad hunter wants to make looove to the fairy-man. Pack ‘imself some fudge. Adorable. Just… fuckin’… adorable. More laughter; a dark, creeping, unstoppable force, prowling up on him from behind.

Fuck you, Dean thought with a snarl. He turned on the sound, ready to choke the life out of the throat making it with his bare hands… but there was no one to be found.

Fuck me? Heheh. No. Fuck YOU. The voice sounded loud from right beside his ear. It was something straight outta the pits of Hell. It was going to take him. He couldn’t stand still one second longer. He stepped away and to the side, back from the edge of the sheer drop at his feet, his heart thundering in his chest. When the fuck had he walked so close to the edge?! He pulled himself up out of the back of his mind, blinked and saw the world around him again. Turning around and about again, he confirmed there was nothing—no one—there.

Swallowing down his panic, he desperately tried to collect his mind’s reins. Then it appeared again, dragging him, kicking and fighting, back into some pitch-dark pit in the depths of his consciousness. Somehow, he found his feet. The instant he had the footing and form, he turned to strike, driving an elbow straight into the face of… his father. Whether he wanted it to or not, his body obeyed a will not his own and stopped itself on a dime.

“Dad…”
John’s lips moved, but what sound came out was distorted. Sinister. “My son… one of them.”

Dean squared his shoulders, bringing up and pointing a chiding finger at his father. “Hang on just a fuckin’ second—”

The snarl in John’s voice, the sneer on his face, made Dean feel so much smaller than he was. “My own flesh and blood; bitch to a disgraced, crippled angel with a fetish for dumb animals.”

"You go down this road, don’t you ever come back,” John spat at him, physically and figuratively.

His look going hard as tempered steel, Dean wiped away the phlegm from his cheek and put himself toe-to-toe with his father. “I said… Shut. Up. All my life, I looked up to you and thought to myself, ‘I’m gonna be like him. He’s the best—as good as it gets. I was so fuckin’ wrong.”

Dean advanced on his father, and John stepped back. “I might not be the quickest sonuvabitch, but I get there eventually. You wanted everyone to know your name. You needed that, fed on it. But you know what? A great man doesn’t need everyone to know it, he just is—he was, until the day he died. You know what he once told me? That we were his boys, and despite every amazing thing he ever accomplished, raising us was the best thing he ever did with his life. The last thing he did with the last breath he ever took was make damned sure we knew we were loved and that he was proud. That we mattered to him more than anything. He didn’t even have to say it. He didn’t need time to come around to that. It just always was and always will be the truth. An’ you know what the truth is? The parts of myself that I hate the most… every last one of ‘em walks, talks, and believes like you.”

The side of Dean’s lips curled up into a snarl. “You can do what the fuck ever you want with me… John. Say whatever the fuck you like. I’ve taken your worst, and you know what? I’m still standing, asshole. But Cas? I’m warning you: keep the fuck away from ‘im.” Dean watched as the grip of his hands on his father’s throat turned his knuckles white.

Giving his head a shake, Dean did a double-take. He didn’t remember getting his hands on his father. It had been violent enough that John’s split lower lip was trembling. Twitches contorted in his face—his jaw and mouth. He was strangling. Dean blinked. No. Not like this. This isn’t me. I don’t want this. Feeling a kind of peace take over, Dean stepped back.

“No. No more. You don’t get a say in this. I’m done. You don’t get to keep me from having someone I want—someone I am dreaming about—in my life. Not anymore.” The rush in his chest when the words “in my life” left his mouth made him feel like he could vault the moon. All the songs and stories a man could ever imagine couldn’t do it justice. Something good was happening.

John's expression had turned cruel with a knowing edge. His father scoffed derisively. John’s lips moved, but the voice coming out was his own. “Dude, could you be more gay?”

His own voice sounded off in his head like a gunshot. He cringed. Like that was a bad thing—something to sneer at. That wanting sex with another man made someone—made him—lesser. Something to insult real men.

"It's just a bit of fun. Don’t mean nuthin’.” His own words echoed around his brain. The look on Lee’s face when he’d cut him off… Christ. It did. It had. It could’ve been… Can't mean nuthin’.

Feeling good. Only thing sex with someone built like you is good for, right? Fun. Kicks and laughs. One and done. Love ‘em and leave ‘em. Nothing serious. It ain’t for nothing else. Nothing at all. Put it in the ground. Kill it. Burn it. Bury it.

Like he did back then.

Dean shook his head. No. That’s not true. This feeling… what else could it be? What they say? It’s all true. I’ve never felt anything like it. He blinked. Tears ran down his cheeks.

“I’m pouring my heart out here, like a fucking girl…” The darkness inside him cracked him across the face with his own words.

Oh, fuck off. If I hadn’t let that shit out…

Dean heaved in a breath. The remembered smell of rich dirt, decay on the forest floor, green, pungent leaves and fresh, clean water. Melting to the Earth under the feeling of his hand standing in for the gambler’s hole.

Dean blinked. The smells of the forest and the feeling in his groin… gone. A sudden flashbulb memory put his balls in a vice-grip and hit like a fist between the eyes, blinding him to the real world.

“Freeeak. That’s what you are.” The hissing, distorted voice was his own, coming at his ear through a mouthful of teeth grown into flesh-rending points. The voice bubbling up underneath sounded oddly like… Sam?! “There’s no becoming someone else. This is what you’ll always be. Take it from me.” Something he couldn’t see suddenly took hold of him by the neck. Then, it showed itself. He struggled against the doppelganger wearing his clothing, his skin, but it was futile.

This thing absorbed hits like they were nothing. It might as well have been a robotic hand around his throat. “Candlelight dinner for two… out on the patio, strolling hand-in-hand down the boulevard… white tuxes, white roses and you’re goooin’ to the chapel…” Snickering derisively, the hand around his neck yanked him forward as it hissed out its mockery and slammed him back against something he couldn’t see. “That will never be you.”

It was the nineteen-fifties again out here—or worse. It would never happen for them. He knew that down to his bone marrow. Not in his lifetime.

“Something like him, here to stay for love of someone as insipidly sssimple as you?” the thing hissed, punctuating it with cruel, derisive laughter. “You’re alone and you’ll die that way.”

Dean gave his head a few twitchy shakes, eyes watering, lips quivering. “No, that’s not true.”

“They smile pretty, make it look good, but behind all the empty eyes, underneath the pretty smiles… they hate what you are. You’re hideous. Unnatural. Shoving your dick up
inside another guy’s shit chute? That’s just gross. But enjoying it? Craving it? You’re one fucking sick puppy…”

Nothing. He had nothing. He screwed his eyes shut, willing the thing to be gone, opening them again.

Suddenly, Cas was there, over the black-eyed thing’s shoulder, just out of reach, but there was something off about him. Dean didn’t hesitate. “Cas,” he choked out. “Please…” Help me. Dean reached for him. Like he’d never reached for anything or anyone in his life. It wasn’t just his hand he was reaching with. His head, his heart—his very fucking soul. All of it straining for the angel just out of reach. Dean’s stomach twisted something awful as the distance between them began to change—to grow. Castiel stood unmoving, staring at him placidly. No desperation. No disdain. Simply… nothing.

No! Was he… too late? Had he stayed gone too long…? Was Cas turning a deaf ear to his prayers?

He raised a hand against the putrid thing with its hands around his neck, but it stopped his fist mid-air with a bone-breaking grip on his arm. Sniggering viciously, it closed the distance between them and spoke into his ear, dropping the words into the pit of his gut like boulders. “You will never be loved.”

Cas… wait. Don’t do this! Don’t…! Dean felt something in him break, a torrent of panic flowing out. He stopped reaching. Don’t go. Don’t leave me. His throat closed off, the lump inside swelling as Castiel disappeared into the darkness. No. Not this. Not again! CAS! His mouth moved, but no sound came out. Dean started kicking, lashing, and hitting out. There was no breaking free, getting out of this thing’s grasp, but he was never going to stop fighting. Then came the strangest soothing sensation: a comforting hand in the small of his back. He stopped struggling, gave his head a violent shake and finally, he could hear what Cas was trying to say.

It took in a deep, peaceful breath, beginning to grin. “That’s it, isn’t it? Right there. That’s the sticking place.” With a reassuring wink, the vision was gone.

Dean shuddered a chill out of his body, sucking in a deep breath to make up for his recently shallow breathing. He took a few vertigo-induced steps back, his gaze wandering up into the canopy of the tree before him. His hands were empty—except that wasn’t quite true. There was memory in them. The skin of his palms, the insides of his arms, his chest, sides, thighs and back remembered what it felt like standing against the edge of the table in the Bunker library, Castiel’s arms around him, each holding the other close, learning what peace felt like from the natural rhythm of their steady, easy breathing.

A chilly breeze pulled his body and mind up from under the flood of relief washing over him, fogging up his thoughts. He hauled in a deep breath. His gaze, freed from the prison of his mind, wandered down the trunk of the tree, to the roots and the ground, across the short, verdant grass, spotted with thistles, and young trees. His sight found the horizon, drifting to the colourful twilight wisps of cloud and the inky, star-spattered sky above. The absence of electricity across the country showed him a breathtakingly starry sky, the likes of which he’d never seen.

Stepping up to the edge of the plateau, peering over the edge to know what the craggy cliff face below looked like, Dean smiled bittersweetly, remembering one of his darkest moments…

Gravity acting on his heart no longer lured him over the edge. Feeling a little bit crazy, Dean laughed as he smiled and spoke his heart into the blue and purple twilight sky. “I’m sorry, Cas. I’m sorry it took me so long. I’m sorry I’m not gonna be back tonight like I said I would.” The ache in his chest turned truly uncomfortable. He fiercely wanted Castiel here. Now. Dean looked back over his shoulder to where Baby sat, as quiet and constant a companion as she ever was. Forever his ticket home. “I’m on my way, Cas. I’m comin’ on home.” Dean didn’t say it out loud, but he thought it: comin’ on home to you. The thought had him snickering quietly and put a loving grin on his face. If he had to drive through the night, that’s exactly what he’d do.

A sudden lurch in the ground underfoot plummeted his heart down into his stomach’s deepest abyss. What the…? In the timespan of a blink, the plateau’s edge gave out under him. He went down—hard. The hit winded him, a few stones digging into him badly. In the ensuing daze, he failed to realize, at first, that he was sliding over the edge.

With the last scrap of wherewithal he had, Dean snapped his arm backward at a painfully awkward angle, clutching the shoot of a young tree, pleading with the twiggy sapling to save his life.

He felt a root on the far side of the young thing snap.

Don’t. Please, don’t let go.

Tears came into his eyes. He explained it like the flora in hand might understand.

The crumbling stopped for a few moments, seeming as though it was over. His heart thrummed in his chest like never before. It frantically clenched out and inhaled blood like it was gasping in air with no oxygen in it.

He dug his boot heel into the dirt above what felt like a decent-sized rock, and slowly, steadily pushed.

It gave.

The sound he made was a scream wrapped up inside a growl. “Shit. Shit! Fuck!” Two more roots in the sapling gave. All he could do was moan as the ground beneath and behind him sloughed off dirt and stone. He dangled from the cliff face, all his weight hanging from a failing lifeline. There was nothing by his right hand to hold onto. Nothing.

Getting as much of a hold on his breathing as he could, he slowly tried rolling his chest to face the cliff. His shoulder didn’t make it past his face. Another root gave out. Cas was back at the Bunker. He couldn’t heal himself, let alone…

Jack…! No. He wouldn’t interfere. The sickness in his stomach told Dean everything he needed to know; he’d keep his promise. Deep down, Dean knew it was for the best. Tears fell from both of his shot-wide eyes. There was nothing for it.

He waited one heaving breath, then two. Nothing. He couldn’t breathe anymore.

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