Archive of Our Own ^beta

2006

The guy had a five-o’clock shadow that burned against Dean’s skin as he ran his mouth down the side of his neck. He also had a tan line on his left ring finger that Dean wished he hadn’t noticed.

They were in the cab of the guy’s truck. Dean had been promised a hotel room—new context, given the ring finger—but the second Dean shut the passenger door behind him, the guy was on him. Sam was back in the bar but the truck was around the corner, nowhere near, and there was safety in that. It was cramped with the two of them; Dean wasn’t small and the other guy was big and broad, in his early fifties. Their breath was loud in the small space and the worn fabric upholstery smelled like coffee and smokes.

“I thought you were messing with me when you bought me that beer.” The guy spoke against Dean’s neck, breath hot in the freezing cold. His hands were hot as an iron where they slid up under Dean’s shirts to grip at his sides. “A young guy like you—fuck, look at you. Thought you were gonna scam me.”

Later, Dean would take a twenty out of the guy’s wallet when he went to the bathroom, but that wasn’t the main thing. The thing that had made Dean’s pupils dilate from across the dark, grungy bar was his curly mop of black hair and his boxy canvas jacket. The thing that made shame choke down his throat as real as fire and smoke and worse things.

Dean let his head fall back against the window, eyes shut. He grabbed the guy’s jacket in fistfuls over his shoulders and yanked him up, knees falling open to let him get closer, until their mouths crashed together. The guy’s cracked, calloused fingers smoothed over Dean’s cheek and curled around his ear, dragged him in. He rubbed Dean’s hard dick through his jeans, inexpert but eager. Guys his age were inexpert with the whole ‘guy’ thing more often than not, and shaking out of their bones with all that eagerness. Dean sucked his tongue. 

“I mean, Jesus,” the guy rasped, panting against his mouth, “I’m old enough to be your—”

1994

“Dad,” Dean choked out, “slow down, I’m fine.”

All he could think about as John hauled him out of the car was that the hunt was supposed to be a step up, but still easy. He’d just turned fifteen and John was, in his own words, ‘lobbing him an easy one.’ The ghost of a disgruntled housewife was haunting an apartment complex, and Dean managed to get himself stabbed.

It was a spring night and the air was biting cold as John kicked the car door shut behind him and steered him through the motel parking lot with a hand on the back of his neck, keeping a desperate eye out for onlookers. It was two in the morning and spitting rain, so the lot was deserted, with only the blue neon MOTEL sign lighting their way. Dean kept the rag in his hand clamped over the gash on his upper arm like John told him to. It hurt so bad his whole arm was shaking with a clean, sharp pain.

John opened the door to their room in a wash of heat and light. Dean felt the tears caught in his eyelashes prickle with the warmth and scrubbed them away before Sam could see. Sam was scrambling off by the time they had the door half open.

“You’re back! What took—”

Sam froze, bouncing on the end of the bed. He was wearing plaid pajama pants and one of Dean’s old T-shirts, swimming in both at only ten years old. The TV was playing some old mobster movie, but Sam’s hair was all stuck up on one side and his face had red marks in it from being pressed into the sheets; he’d been asleep.

Dean said, “I’m okay, Sammy,” before Sam could say anything.

John ushered Dean through the room without stopping. “Bathroom. Get.”

Dean was getting big enough that he could have dug in his heels and put up some resistance to John’s force, but he didn’t want to. Getting patched up was always embarrassing, but at the same time, there was something about it that bloomed warmly in his chest: for a few minutes, he had no responsibilities, no weight, nothing that needed to get done. He had a dad who was taking care of him. John would say something like ‘chicks dig scars,’ or tell stories about his own scars, and Dean would feel cool despite whatever fuck-up caused his injury. John usually let him have a beer afterwards.

Their room’s cramped bathroom reeked of mildew and age and was covered in tiles painted with little blue flowers. Dean peeled his sleeve away from the cut, wincing, and ran the faucet. John took the med kit out from under his arm and opened it on the counter.

Sam’s face appeared in the dark doorway. “What happened?”

Dean glanced down at him. Sam’s fingers danced on the door frame near his hip, and his eyes were big and alarmed, but he was clearly trying to keep it together. A few months ago, Dean got a knock to the head on a hunt that looked worse than it was, and it had Sam bawling his eyes out. In a different motel room, a different state, Sam sat on the edge of the bathtub sniffling, his little fingers twisted in the hem of Dean’s shirt, while John iced Dean’s forehead. The restrained panic he was showing now was miles away from that.

Dean offered him what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

“Just a flesh wound.” The tap water started to run warm over his fingers and he gingerly touched his upper arm, chin twisted down to look. He hissed between his teeth, at the sting of it and the disgusting flap of skin that the cut created. “That ghost bitch was flinging knives around. Quicker than my cat-like reflexes.” It came out flat. Sam sniffled. “I swear, Sammy, it’s just a cut. What, Dad—two stitches?”

“If that,” John said from next to him. “It coulda been a lot worse. You were quick.”

Dean bit back a smile. The last time John caught him basking in a compliment, he cuffed him on the shoulder and told him not to get a big head, but Dean was pretty sure he was kidding around. But they also put on a show for Sam sometimes: on more than a few nights, Dean locked the bathroom door while he patched up John’s wounds so Sam wouldn’t see him cry, or see John start to babble and pass out from pain meds.

John motioned at the toilet. “Sit. It won’t take long.”

Dean closed the toilet lid and sat. His sleeve was too big to stay rolled up, so he pulled his shirt over his head without jostling his arm too much and dropped it over the lip of the tub. Sam was still hovering in the doorway, watching as John pulled out his Zippo and heated the suture needle.

Dean said, “Go back to bed. I’ll be in there in a sec.”

Sam looked skeptical. His eyebrows got all tilty. He was getting harder to fool with every passing month, and Dean was having a hard time keeping up with him. He couldn’t keep parking the kid in the corner for long, and it scared the shit out of him.

John knelt in front of Dean on the bathroom floor. He gave Sam a look Dean couldn’t see. “Sam.”

Sam frowned. He tipped his head to the side to try to see Dean’s wounded arm, considered it, then took a step back.

“Fine. But come get me if something happens.”

“Always do,” Dean said.

Sam disappeared into the dark of the room. Bed springs creaked, sheets rustled and the TV stayed on, but Sam never stayed up for long, not in a warm bed on a cold night. Dean always joked that Sam could sleep standing up like a horse; he’d slept through gunshots, broken bottles and squealing tires. It was a blessing that Dean hoped stuck around.

John kept heating the needle with his lighter, dark eyes watching the flame. Dean felt his arms goosebump in the cold room and fought the urge to rub them. The cut followed the curve of his left bicep and had mostly stopped bleeding, just a thin pinkish trickle down the inside of his arm. John was right, he’d gotten off easy.

“You’ve gotta be aware of your surroundings,” John said. His voice was low, mumbling, to keep out of Sam’s earshot. “Work on your peripheries. Her knife was glinting.”

Dean looked down at his knees. “I know. Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t be sorry, be better.”

He said it with a monotony that betrayed indifference; he didn’t mean it, he just had to say it. He always said it, and he was right. Dean couldn’t argue even if he wanted to.

John set the lighter down and threaded the hot needle. He settled on his heels on the cracked tile floor in front of Dean, nudging one of Dean’s muddy, jean-clad knees wider. Dean watched his face—call it concern, or survival. John was tired, more than normal, and his usual rasp of stubble was almost a beard. They’d been on a string of shitty, unsatisfying hunts, no worthwhile leads, and it showed. His hair was getting long, nearly enough to tuck behind his ears, and his gray T-shirt was smeared with blood across his chest where he pulled Dean out of the way in the apartment hallway. He looked every year of forty under the fluorescent lights, but to Dean, it was cool, all grizzled and tough. No sleazy old guy ever told John Winchester he had a pretty mouth.

John took Dean by the arm and turned him into the light.

“Three or four. Not so bad.” In the bright light, his eyes had some colour to them, deep hazel and not black. “You good?”

Dean nodded sharply. He wanted to ask for whiskey like John always did, but John hadn’t liked it the last time he asked. He’d popped a couple pills in the car on the way over, which was nearly as good, but admittedly less cool.

John pinched the skin of Dean’s bicep and breathed out, long and slow, as he started the first stitch. Dean exhaled through the pain in an unintentionally matching breath, bracing himself. John’s free hand squeezed his arm tighter. His fingers could almost fit all the way around.

He mumbled, “Easy,” his eyes moving briefly to Dean’s. “Breathe.”

Dean breathed harshly through his nose, teeth grit, head twisted away like he could hide the pain from him. His whole arm was burning. One of legs twitched against John’s knee. When he was smaller, he would have pulled on John’s shirt and whined, but he was better than that now. He clenched his fists so hard his fingers hurt.

The first stitch was done. Dean panted out a hard breath, eyes open in the brief reprieve from the sharper pain, staring up at the cracked crown moulding where the wall met the ceiling. 

“One down,” John said again, quiet. “Hold still.”

Dean squeezed his eyes shut and as the needle pierced him again. He tried to think of better things—jumping into a lake in summer—waking up warm in bed on a cold winter day—sucking a girl’s lower lip, the way her hands felt in his hair—but he had a hard time going anywhere else. The cracked toilet lid was digging into his ass cheek and the suture hurt and John was close to him, not uncomfortable, just—embarrassing, twisty-hot. He could smell his breath and his body as he moved, sweat and metal and gun oil, laundry detergent, leather. Dad.

John usually spoke steadily when they did this, taking the opportunity of a captive audience to poke holes in the hunt or prod Dean to see whether he could spot the holes, any chance to hone him. A more generous interpretation was that he wanted to distract him. But now, he was quiet. Dean felt him breathe out again, long and slow, and he ran his thumb up Dean’s upper arm. It was firm and steady, like he was trying to soothe him. 

He said, “You’re getting good. Really good. A knife’s not bad. You were sharp with that sawed-off.”

Dean’s head was twisted away, but he looked back then. John’s face was near his arm, close enough that he could see the faint, lifetime-old freckles over his nose, the same ones he had. John didn’t make a point of giving compliments, not more than once and rarely sober, rarely after Dean had fucked up, and Dean felt this palpable tension start to creep up his chest. Like John was saying something nice to follow it up with something new and bad, or buttering him up for something. Covering his own ass over some thoughtless but harmless cruelty. We’re moving before the end of the school year, I sold Sammy’s computer, it’ll be motels ‘til June—

John’s thumb pressed into the swell of Dean’s bicep, close to the cut. His other fingers wrapped around his arm as the needle went in again.

“Look at you. You’re gonna be as big as me soon.” His palm was warm and dry on Dean’s cold skin. “I don’t know when that happened. Makes me feel old.”

The needle slid through easily, the sickening tug of the suture; Dean closed his eyes again. His face prickled hotly. He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. John’s voice was low and nostalgic and Dean didn’t know why his heart was going so fast, it was just— different. It was new. He was sure it was new. 

He wet his lips. John breathed out slowly again and he felt the heat on his arm, on his chest, going goosebumped again.

“Jesus,” John said, nothing more than a whisper, like he was saying it to himself. “Look at you.”

Dean tipped his head down. It put their faces close together and he could see the new flecks of silver in John’s eyebrows as he looked back at him, and his long lashes, and he found the word for the embarrassing twisty-hot feeling in his stomach. It was intimacy. It was intimate, cripplingly so, to be shirtless in a tiny bathroom with a needle in his arm and his dad kneeling between his feet, his hand on his bare skin. It wasn’t something they did.

John’s eyes flitted over his face, but he didn’t say anything else or stick the next suture in, brow drawn, frowning. Dean’s heart was beating so hard he felt dizzy. He had another thought creeping up next to ‘intimacy,’ something huge and terrifying and wrong that nonetheless made its way in, settled in the bottom of his gut and made a home there as he felt his dad’s breath wash over his face.

John’s hand slid up Dean’s arm, needle forgotten. He curled fingers around the cup of Dean’s shoulder, his eyes watching his hand’s path, then slid them up towards his neck. He brushed through the buzzed hair at the hollow of Dean’s skull. Closed his palm around the back of his neck.

Dean wasn’t breathing, hot, twisty, giddy, panicked. His eyes flickered. He wanted to close them. This, he was absolutely sure, was new.

He couldn’t stand it. He shuffled one of his feet on the floor until it bumped John’s knee. “Dad?”

They both froze, John looking up at him from the floor with his lips parted like he was going to say something, even though Dean had never seen him hesitate. His eyes dropped to Dean’s mouth for one scalding second, and then the next, he was on his feet.

He turned away and scrubbed a hand over his face with a harsh, ragged breath, like he was surfacing. His wedding ring glinted in the light.

Dean started to get up. “What—”

What’s going on, what did I do, but John just waved a hand at him, straight-armed, as if to keep him back.

“Stay. I’m going out.”

Dean landed back on the toilet lid, automatic. “But—”

“No buts. Go to bed.”

“I—”

John was already in the other room, passing in front of the TV so his silhouette shone in the blue light on the far wall, this hunched, prowling thing. Dean heard a sleepy murmur from one of the beds, but John didn’t acknowledge it. The door opened and slammed shut, the car’s engine growled, and he was gone, whiplash-quick.

Dean sat in the bathroom staring out at the dark doorway with his heart thumping, mouth buzzing, fingers numb with adrenaline. He shifted in his seat. His head spun with a thousand things he’d never thought about before or never admitted to thinking about—rough hands, bigger than his—weight and heat, pressure—and suddenly everything else he’d ever done in girls’ bedrooms or under bleachers seemed banal and childish in comparison to this new, rotten, burning thing.

He rubbed a hand over his mouth and the swing of the needle, still hanging on a thread from his arm, brought him back to earth. There was an inch of cut left to stitch up.

“D?” Sam called from the other room, slurry with sleep. “Are you okay?”

No, he wanted to say, followed by a wave of roiling nausea. The thought of Sam seeing inside his head just then was a nightmare, it made his palms sweat. He felt like if he so much as looked at the kid, Sam would know, just like that.

At his silence, Sam ventured, “You want help?”

Yes. Dean had to shut his eyes against the sting behind them.

“All good, Sammy. Just cleaning up.”

He took the needle in his free hand and tucked his chin down against his shoulder so he could see. It took half a minute of steeling himself up before he could bear to make the final stitch by himself.

2006

The guy dropped Dean off in the morning, back at his motel. It was a cold, bright day and the heater in his truck was broken, so Dean sat hunched with his hands in the pockets of his jacket on the way there, feeling the vague sense of humiliation he always felt as a passenger in any car. The guy’s age didn’t help; it felt like he was being driven to school.

“This one here?” the guy asked.

“That’s the one,” Dean said.

He turned into the parking lot. Dean intentionally didn’t say which room was his, but the guy parked next to the Impala anyway. Dean suppressed a grimace. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat again, sore, and took his hands out of his pockets.

“Thanks for the ride.”

The guy shut off the engine. “Least I can do.”

Another suppressed grimace from Dean; he wasn’t into the gratitude thing that too many older guys did, the worship of it all. This guy didn’t need to do it, he was a fox—a married loser, sure, but he was handsome in a rough kind of way. He had thick eyebrows, a sharp nose and a squarish jaw that, Dean imagined, got him a lot of chicks when he was Dean’s age. Or a lot of dudes. There hadn’t been much talking at the motel room about life or occupations or anything that wasn’t a grunted question or answer, but Dean thought he looked like a dock worker. A mill guy. Maybe it was the knitted cap.

He glanced at the closed door to their room. Curtains drawn, Impala empty. He had time. He wasn’t a total asshole.

“I’ll, uh. See you.”

The guy had the decency to snort at the sheer concept of them seeing each other again, which Dean appreciated almost as much as the rest of it. He leaned across the centre console. After a final glance at the door to their room, Dean met him halfway.

He was a good kisser, Dean could give him that, warm and firm and a nip of teeth. He hadn’t been bad in bed either, not pushy enough, but good. Balked at only a few requests. Dean’s eyes fell shut. The guy’s hand slid into the collar of his jacket and curled around the back of his neck. That was good, he remembered. Dean appreciated effort.

The creak of the motel room door wasn’t enough warning. Dean slammed back into his seat before he saw even a suggestion of Sam in the doorway, but there weren’t a lot of reasons he might get dropped off at five in the morning after disappearing from the bar.

Sam stood in the door of the room in his socked feet and his big brown hoodie, aiming a bemused smile directly at him. His eyes slid from Dean to the other guy and back.

The guy was looking back at him. “Uh. Your…?”

“No, no. Brother.”

“Does he know—”

“Yes. No. Kind of.” Dean wrenched his door open with a squeal of grating metal. “Catch you later.”

He slammed it shut behind him without looking back and loped to the door, hands shoved into his pockets again. Sam stepped out of the way and beckoned him in with a flourish. He scowled straight ahead.

“Not a fucking word.”

He kicked off his boots, took off his jacket and tossed it on his bed. Sam shut the door gingerly.

“You’ve, uh. Got a type.”

“What did I just say?”

Dean went into the bathroom, some wet green thing that reeked of Sam’s shampoo, and snatched his toothbrush off the counter. His tongue tasted like hell. When he had a mouth full of foam, Sam appeared in the doorway behind him, leaning on the frame. Dean expected some goofy, joking look, textbook little-brother bullying, but Sam was serious. And quiet. For too long.

“What?” Dean said, toothpaste splittle flying.

Sam’s eyebrows were doing work. He sucked at not looking concerned.

“I’ve been pretty diplomatic about this. But…”

Dean scrubbed at his back molars, mouth open wide. “What, is this ‘cause he’s old?”

“I—”

“‘Cause I know for a fact you wanted to fuck the mom from Married With Children when we were kids, and you don’t see me staging an intervention over it.”

He expected blustery scoffing and embarrassment as Sam took the bait, but again, Sam was quiet. Not even a blush. 

“Since… Dad. You’ve been…”

Sam trailed off, like a fucking idiot. Dean spat noisily into the sink and tried to pretend his heart wasn’t going nuts.

“Jesus, what, Sam? Since when do you give a shit about this stuff? I don’t go around holding up scorecards for all the chicks you’re not banging, you fuckin’ monk, you’d think the least you could do is—”

“He looked like him, dude.”

A lead weight dropped into Dean’s stomach. He still had his head hung over the sink and kept it there a few extra seconds, for good measure. He looked up and met Sam’s eyes in the mirror, that face, and fought to keep his voice even.

“Do you have any idea how fucked up our relationship is if you think you can say shit like that to me and not get your teeth knocked out?”

Sam held up his hands. “You didn’t want me to say something? There’s been, what, three guys? You parked right out front, I thought—”

“You’re sick.” Dean shook his head and ran the faucet, stuck his face underneath and sucked water. He spat. “Trust me, Freud, if I ever want your opinion about where I’m sticking my dick, I’ll ask.”

He kicked out blindly behind him to shut the door, but Sam blocked it from closing with his forearm.

“You know it’s not about that,” Sam said quietly.

Dean kept his head over the sink, splashed water on his face, scrubbed soap. His mouth was raw from a night spent sucking dick and drinking whiskey, skin greasy with dried sweat. A hangover pounded behind his eyes. There was no good time to have this conversation, but this had to be one of the worst. His ass still hurt.

Behind him, Sam made a frustrated sigh and shuffled his feet. “If you wanna talk, or whatever, you know I’m—”

Dean slammed his wet hands down on the counter and barked, “Sam, leave it.”

It took Sam a second, but he went into the other room. Dean kicked the door shut, loud enough that the echo banged around in his ears. He hunched over and put his forearms on the counter, and his head in his hands, and took a few long, deep breaths. 

Should have made him park down the block. Shouldn’t have stayed the night. Shouldn’t have gone, period.

He was slipping up. He was stumbling under the weight of going it alone for the first time, since, with no one left alive to help carry the load. No one else to hide and hate themselves and do the backflipping justifications needed to keep doing what they were doing, or to deal with what to do now that it was over. No one else to look Sam in the eye. Just the empty space where a person had been.

1997

It was a sweltering August night in a flat state. The girl’s back made a wet, sticky sound when she shifted against the leather seat of her car; she was wearing a ribbed tank top, barely anything, all skin. She giggled, nervous.

“God, sorry.”

Dean brushed her hair back, knuckles gentle against her sweaty nape. “All good.”

He kissed her again, deeper, tipping her face up to meet his. It was baking inside the car from being parked outside the movie theatre for hours, even though the sun was setting now. Now, they were parked next to the house that Dean, Sam and John had been staying in for three weeks. The girl’s name was Jennifer and Dean had met her in the school parking lot while waiting to pick up Sam. She was a senior, and pretty without knowing it; no makeup, perky tits. Skittish. 

Dean brushed his thumb against one of her nipples through her top and her gasp went straight to his dick. They’d been parked outside for five minutes, making out while he bided his time before asking her to drive them someplace else, the empty lot down the block or a trailhead he knew some ways away. The Impala was parked next to them; John, and probably Sam, were home.

Dean nipped the girl’s top lip and she squirmed. He slid his hand down her side, gripping hard, but it wasn’t— something was different in him lately, and it wasn’t all good. High school girls weren’t doing it for him. He was eighteen and just grateful to be getting laid, but he’d gotten a few slaps to the face for being too rough. He felt guilty as hell over it, but it was just… different. It was like he couldn’t get there, wherever there was, not just coming or making a girl come, but to— he didn’t know what to call it. To lose his mind for a while. To have someone hold him down. He’d been having dreams, one every few months, where he woke up sweating and hard. They were specific. They didn’t help the guilt. He thought about the dreams when he caught some guy looking at him over the top of a diner booth, or in the parking lot of a motel. He didn’t know what kind of beacon he was putting out, but there was a question in their eyes he was terrified of answering.

There was nothing he didn’t know how to answer between this girl’s legs. He eased her thighs apart with one warm palm and tried to lose himself in another kiss—the taste of her lip gloss, her soft, shy tongue, her hands stroking the sides of his neck.

Her hand, laying over top of his on her thigh.

“Wait,” she panted, laughing anxiously again. “I— We— we should slow down.”

Dean put his hand back on her side.

“Sure.” He rested his cheek against hers. “We don’t gotta do anything you don’t wanna do.”

She moved against the seat again, her hands smoothing over the back of his neck, tacky with sweat. Her breath smelled like spearmint; she’d been chewing gum earlier and he wondered if she’d swallowed it. He wanted to put his hand between her legs and feel her grind against his palm through her tight jeans. He wanted her to sit on his face. He kissed her cheek instead, nuzzling, and tried not to rub his hard-on against her leg.

She slid her hands down his chest and off. “Can we go out again next week, maybe?”

Disappointment, then guilt over feeling disappointed. Dean sat back, hands to himself, and smiled at her.

“Sure. I got your number.”

They’d be gone by the weekend. Their lead here had gone cold and John found something else for them up in Maine. They would get there before school started for Sam in a few weeks. There’d be new girls with new cars and new phone numbers scrawled on the palm of Dean’s hand.

He got out of the car after a final goodbye kiss and Jennifer drove off while he stood for a moment in the dirt lane that ran up the side of the house, willing his boner to go down. He looked at the small, dilapidated bungalow they were renting, alone at the end of a long country lane, nobody around to ask questions. The sun was nearly down, but he didn’t know what time it was. A yellowy lamp shone in one of the side windows.

Dean headed up the front steps, thinking of the beer he’d grab from the fridge and the shower he’d jerk off in and the bar he’d go to later, if John would lend him the car. It was still early, he could get up to something. Find someone to sit on his face.

The door was unlocked and the place was dark inside, and hot as hell despite the open windows. It was all musty maroon carpet, two bedrooms and a cramped kitchen coated in a patina of old cooking oil. It smelled of age and mold and past renters’ cigarettes.

John was sitting alone at one end of their tweed loveseat, nursing a beer and watching what Dean instantly pegged as the ending of Dirty Harry on the clunky, flickering TV. He had his bare feet up on the coffee table, resting near three empty beer bottles. His navy blue shirt was dark under the arms, hair stuck to his forehead.

John looked at him and gave him a short sound of a greeting, hm.

Dean toed off his sneakers at the door. John took a swig of beer. He was lean-looking lately, and strong. They’d been working out more in the fallow spaces between hunts, stark T-shirt tan lines and broadening shoulders on all three of them, even Sam, who was growing like a weed. 

“Where’s Sam?” Dean asked.

“Those kids from school came and got him.” John nodded back at the kitchen. “Grab me a beer?”

It was a question in theory only. Dean went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. It was fucking dire: a case of beer, a half-empty plastic container of bologna and a pack of Kraft singles. He rethought his plans for the night. There was a dive on the way out of town where they’d had good luck hustling pool. They could use a few bucks. The face-sitting, if he was lucky, would keep until afterwards.

From the couch, John said, “That the girl you’ve been seeing?”

Dean’s head snapped up. He was still leaning on the open fridge door. He grabbed two beers, then elbowed the fridge shut and popped off the caps.

“No, sir. Different girl.” He paused. His eyes flicked to the window with the lamp in front of it. “You were watching?”

John kept looking at the TV. On the screen, a bus full of kids crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. Dean stood in the middle of the kitchen, watching.

Summer was a pressure cooker. It put everything right up under the surface. Hunts were grueling in the heat and throngs of tourists made things difficult anywhere costal, but it was more than that. Sam was out of school, giving him more chances to fight with John. John got quiet and his looks got longer. Things like this happened more: tense half-conversations in the dark, one too many drinks, the two of them alone while Sam was out in the woods somewhere or dicking around with the neighbour kids. Dean’s dreams, right up under the surface.

The necks of the beer bottles sweated in his hand. He chased his tongue around in his mouth. He stared at the sweaty curls at the back of his dad’s neck.

He went up behind the couch and handed John his beer. John raised a hand to take it without looking over his shoulder and their fingers brushed.

“You’ve been after a lot of girls, these days.” John set the fresh beer on the arm of the couch next to his other. “Looks like you know what you’re doing with ‘em.”

He’d been watching. A hot flush rolled down Dean’s back.

“I guess,” he said, noncommittal, awkward and distracted. He was imagining John watching him with a girl, closer. Telling him what to do to her, what he wanted to see. Good boy. She likes that.

It was a proxy war type thing, Dean always thought. They didn’t fight about it or even talk about it, but they both knew. There was no way John didn’t know. Dean would watch him do push-ups when he was supposed to be sparring with Sam. For a long time, Dean passed it off as a sick kind of jealousy—John could grow a beard, John was big, rugged and rough; Dean was pretty, Dean had trouble keeping on weight—and once he couldn’t pretend anymore, it was just another thing he shoved down inside him and ignored so he could take care of his family. It made him feel insane if he thought about it too long, but, he told himself, that was true of a lot of things about the way they lived their lives: Sam didn’t get anywhere near two thousand calories a day, and Dean shuddered when his dad squeezed his shoulder. They were just different flavours of unforgivable.

He stood behind the couch and imagined John standing in the window like a fucking pervert, watching Dean grab some high school girl’s tits in her Honda Civic. Dean knew he should have hated it, he should have been furious, but he wasn’t. He’d never known anything else. There was never a time when his father’s attention didn’t make him dizzy and sick and pleased, and he had no illusions, he knew it had something to do with how often he got that attention—how often he caught John looking back, watching him—but what did it matter if they were broken in the same way?

Dean looked out the dark window and huffed a breath. He wished it made him sick. At the same time, he was glad it didn’t, because he didn’t think he could say no even if it did. He’d never known how to say no, or even thought to try. But it didn’t matter. These nights when they let it simmer, found excuses to get too close and say their quiet, cryptic things, nothing happened. Neither of them would ever broach the surface. Dean knew that. John would start talking about Dirty Harry or he’d go quiet again, and Dean would shower and leave the house. Usually Sam would come home, and that made everything go back to normal. Daylight would come. There were a lot of things that fixed it, and one of them always did, reliably and like clockwork. It never went too far. Dean’s dreams stayed dreams.

“You,” John started, then took another drink; Dean startled at the sound of his voice, sure that they were done talking. “You were about twelve, the first time I caught you checking out a chick’s ass. You were always a skirt-chaser.” A glassy sound as he tapped the bottle against his teeth. “Like your old man.”

Dean flushed again. The room was so hot, he felt sweat wet under his arms. He stood there, not sure whether he was supposed to stay or go. John didn’t talk about Dean’s girls often. He’d comment on it once in a while with a kind of grudging respect, a father’s playful bullying, but even still, it always felt out of place. Dean always wondered, horrified, whether it genuinely bothered him. Like maybe he was jealous.

“Is that bad?” Dean asked, carefully.

John looked at him over his shoulder. The light from the TV caught on the silver in his short beard, making it glow white.

“What are you standing there for? Sit.”

Dean realized for the first time that John might have been drunker than he thought. He should’ve known, four empty bottles visible but God only knew how many before that at some bar. Dean’s heart pounded hard in his chest. Drinking thawed the ice. Made it thin. Jesus, it was thin, John had been watching him.

Dean went slowly around the side of the couch, eyed the empty spot on the loveseat next to John—not enough room, John’s knees wide, in the soft gray sweats he wore between hunts or while he healed up—and then the dining table by the door. He took a seat at the table. John’s eyes followed him. They looked slate gray in the dark, not the bright hazel that matched Sam’s.

“When’s Sam gonna be home?” Dean asked.

He didn’t mean to say it. He knew what it sounded like. John shrugged and looked back at the TV, took another drink.

“Didn’t say.”

Dean drank his own beer, ice cold in the summer heat, so cold it hurt to hold it. He set the bottle on the table and wiped his hand on his jeans; sweat or condensation, both. He had the insatiable urge to catch up to John, finish off the case of beers or check the cupboard for whiskey, anything to level the ground. Or have an excuse. He took another drink, then another.

John said, “She looked young.”

She was. Even at eighteen, Dean went for college girls or older, less drama and more skill. Jennifer had been an anomaly and look where it got him, home before dark with blue balls and a gel-pen phone number that nervous sweat had already smudged from his palm.

He felt guilty and mean immediately after thinking that. It wasn’t Jennifer’s fault. He wanted something she couldn’t give him, that was all. She was sweet.

“Yessir,” Dean said, looking down at his beer because he didn’t trust himself to look up, because he could see John looking at him again. “Seventeen. I think.”

John nodded. Another drink, already down to the last of his beer, his head tipped all the way back; Dean watched.

“Seventeen,” John echoed, wiping his mouth with his wrist. “You like ‘em older, normally. Is that right?”

Dean’s ears were burning. This was one of those conversations where he couldn’t tell whether John was making fun of him and couldn’t figure out how to care. Being talked about was unbearable either way.

“Yessir,” Dean said again, nodding down at his beer. “Normally.”

Part of him wanted to tell him how old ‘older’ had gotten lately, women who were John’s age and fucked like they wanted to eat him alive, but that would be getting too close to the real thing, and they didn’t talk about that. 

John laughed and it made Dean jump. When his head snapped up, John was hauling himself to his feet, setting his bottle on the table to clink against the others. He shook his head, still chuckling.

“God, you’re a weird kid, you know that?” He went into the kitchen. He favoured his left foot, his right ankle still tender from a bad fall last week on a hunt. He’d been insufferable before he was up walking on it, crabby, home all day. “I’m at some diner trying to eat my breakfast, and I look up and catch my kid staring at the tits of a waitress twice his age. You got a weird type.”

Dean squeezed his eyes shut. He finished the rest of his beer in one long pull, carbonation burning. He could hear John in the kitchen opening the fridge door, the clink of bottles in his hand.

“Come on, I’m just having fun,” John said. There was a hiss as a bottle cap came off. “You don’t want me to see it, don’t do it.”

Dean opened his eyes, vision blotchy, and John was coming towards him with a fresh beer in each hand. The dark room made him all shadows and Dean could see the shape of his dick in his sweatpants; half hard or just big, Dean could never tell. He looked away again, frantic, and clenched his teeth. He stood up to take the beer when John offered it. They were nearly the same height now and it put them eye to eye, which felt like some gained ground. Again, their hands brushed.

“While we’re on the subject,” John started, and Dean bloomed with sweat. There was something in John’s voice that meant trouble, and this conversation had gone on way too long. “I see you looking at a lot of stuff, these days. A lot of… people.”

Dean’s face went numb. “People?”

“Don’t play dumb, you know what I’m talking about.” John’s eyes searched his face. He frowned. “Every fill-up joint and bar, you’ve got your eyes on some—some guy, who’s—”

Dean didn’t remember deciding to do it, but he slammed his beer down on the table and tried to bolt. His ears were ringing, heart in his throat, all of it worse when John’s hand shot out and grabbed his shirt.

“Don’t you walk away from me,” John snapped.

Dean stopped. Going wasn’t an option. He shut his eyes again, it was excruciating, half turned away and he could smell him, different from the cold, earthy way he smelled in winter when he was all leather and metal. Summer was sweat and Old Spice and beer on his breath.

“Sorry,” Dean choked out, which usually didn’t help, but he couldn’t just stand there. His eyes were still closed, every muscle in his body tense, hands in fists at his sides. There was a clunk as John put his beer on the table next to Dean’s. 

“I’m not stupid. You think I wouldn’t notice?”

“Nosir.”

“You wanted me to notice?”

“No! Fuck, it’s not—I’m not—”

“Bullshit, I— look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Dean made himself look. John’s face was a few feet from his, barely visible with the TV behind him. He still had Dean’s sleeve twisted in his fist. Somehow, all Dean could think about was whether he’d locked the door behind him when he came in.

John said, “I see you looking. All the fucking time.” His voice was low, tense and mumbling, his eyes unwavering on Dean’s. “I’m not supposed to see it? Every day, I catch you looking at— at—”

It was finally happening. It didn’t feel real. Dean’s hands were freezing cold with fear, clenched and bloodless, so hard his ring dug into his palm.

He stumbled over the words and heard them in his own ears.

“I see you looking, too.”

John pushed him hard with both hands, a drunken parking-lot shove. Dean staggered back into the table and knocked over their beers, bottles crashing together, rolling off the table and landing with a dull thud on the carpet, pouring out.

Dean put his hands up to block another hit, but John grabbed him by the front of the shirt. Dean wrapped his hands around his wrists reflexively, but he wasn’t sure he could break his grip even if he tried.

“What did you say to me?” John snarled. “The fuck did you just say to me?”

“Nothing! It’s nothing, it’s not—”

“I wouldn’t—I’m not—”

There was an exact second, somewhere in there, where it changed. It wasn’t a fight. Dean could feel it in the air like a static charge, under their skin, in the way John stopped pulling on his shirt and leaned his fists against his chest and put his weight on him. I wouldn’t. I’m not. 

“I know,” Dean said quickly, shaking his arms for emphasis. “I know. I know you wouldn’t.”

He didn’t know. John was looking at his mouth even then. Dean wondered if he knew he was doing it. He wet his lips without meaning to.

John said, “What am I supposed to do?”

His voice was broken and his face looked fucking awful, twisted and sweaty. Dean didn’t have an answer for him. Tell me when you figure it out.

John said it again. “What the fuck am I supposed to do? When…” His hands unfurled on Dean’s chest, giant, both palms pressing into the tops of his chest. Pressing, like he was making sure that he was solid. “Fuck, I can’t even look at you.”

He was looking at him. His eyes wandered over Dean’s face in the dark, desperate, as one of his hands groped up to Dean’s shoulder, and then the side of his neck. He hung on. His palm was clammy. 

Later, Dean would swear to himself that he saw John twitch, that he started to lean in. It didn’t really matter, and he’d never ask. Dean crushed their lips together in an off-centre, anguished kiss.

The first second made Dean think of being a kid, what choice did he have—his mother’s lips on his cheek, and his father’s—John picking him up, being carried in his big arms— fucking sickening, unrecognizable from here. His stomach clenched with nerves and reflexive bad-wrong-kill-it, world-ending, dizzying fear, then— melting. John’s mouth went soft against his and his hand curled around the back of his neck, wet and hot. Dean opened his mouth, lips sliding against his, and took a single terrified breath and held it in his lungs until he was dizzy, hands balled into fists at his side. John’s other hand came up and cupped his face, thumb slowly pushing up the line of his cheek.

Dean made a soft sound in the back of his throat that was blood-curdlingly needy, hellish in his ears, and it ruined everything.

John let him go all at once and shot back, magnets opposed. Dean was moving before he could think.

“Sorry”—stumbling towards John, pathetic, his socks were wet from the spilled beer and it fucking reeked—“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, don’t be mad.”

‘Mad’ wasn’t right. John put a hand over his face and turned, then two hands, sliding up into his hair and grabbing on.

“Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Dean had never seen him like this, worse than a hunt with a body count, worse than his worst injury, not like anything Dean had seen since he was four. Almost as bad. Worse, because Dean was hard.

“I’m sorry,” Dean said again—he kissed him, he started it, “forget it, we’ll just forget it, I’ll—I can—”

Go, run, leave, kill myself, kill you, join a nunnery. Any of the above. John had his back to him, his hand over his face and squeezing at his temples like he wanted to pop his skull. And he was babbling.

“I can’t do this. Holy fuck, I can’t do this, I can’t—”

Clint Eastwood was on the TV behind him like some bad joke, John in silhouette and silver around the edges. Dean was practically vibrating out of his skin. He wanted to get out and clear his head and get his heart to stop racing like he was being hunted. He could still feel John’s mouth on his. He figured he would for a while.

Two steps closer, Dean’s beer-wet socks squelching on the carpet, and he reached for John’s shoulder, not thinking. It was a new world where he wasn’t supposed to touch him.

“Dad—”

The worst possible thing he could say. John flinched and struck his arm out, but Dean caught it and shoved it down.

He wanted to drive until he passed out behind the wheel, run until his legs broke, burn himself alive, but— there was no forgetting. This would ruin everything if he let it, both of them and everything they had. He could fix it. He had to.

He took John by the face, both hands, fingers digging in. The room was so hot and John’s skin was burning. Dean made him look at him. 

“I want it. Okay?” Dean swallowed hard. “It’s not you. I want it.” A deep breath. Taking the plunge. “It’s okay.”

Age six, pressing a blood-soaked rag to a gash on John’s arm while he fumbled with bandages. Age twelve, easing an empty whiskey bottle out of his numb fingers. Age eighteen, holding his face in his hands and giving him absolution for putting his tongue in his mouth. All variations on a theme.

John looked like he’d been disemboweled, bleeding, guts all over the place. He tried to back up but Dean followed, still holding him by the face. 

“Dad,” Dean said again, hoarse and pleading, “it’s okay. I…”

John backed into the end of the couch. He looked like a trapped animal, wild-eyed in a way Dean had never seen him on a hunt. His eyes frantically searched Dean’s face like he was looking for some joke or clue or tell. They were frozen for a second, and Dean thought: if he doesn’t push it, drop it. You said your piece. Maybe you can salvage this.

John fisted his hands in Dean’s shirt. Dean braced for a shove backwards, flying into the table, falling to the floor—

John pulled him in and kissed him. One of his fistfuls of shirt also had the amulet in it, and the tug of the cord around his neck gave Dean a sharp, awful thought of Sam, as if he were in the room.

John kissed hard, messy, teeth grazing the inside of his lip, hands yanking on Dean’s shirt to get him closer. Dean fell in willingly, the hands on John’s face sliding back into his hair, thick and oily between his fingers, wet with sweat at his nape. He could feel him breathe with his nose, ragged and hard, almost a whine of anguish when he exhaled. Dean stroked his thumbs over his grizzled jaw, dizzy, floating.

John slid off the side of the couch, walking backwards and pulling Dean with him. His teeth sunk into Dean’s lip and his tongue slid against his and it was fucking agony but he felt so solid and warm under Dean’s hands, rough and hot like everything he’d spent years trying not to think about. It didn’t feel real. To call it good would be glossing over too much, he couldn’t even come close to thinking of it like that, but it still wrecked him worse than the best kiss he’d ever had. John kissed like he wanted to eat him alive.

The house had two bedrooms, one that Sam and Dean shared and another that was John’s. John’s room was dark and cooler than the rest of the house. Dean kicked the door shut behind them and he couldn’t tell who was moving faster, if John was pulling or if he was pushing him, but he got spun around and his back hit the bed, and John was on top of him, bearing down. Everything was breakneck fast; Dean yanked his shirt over his head, fumbling and stuck, and John raked a hand down his front with another harrowed moan into his mouth. It felt like someone was sitting on his chest, like John’s hands were around his throat instead, and he hated that it felt safe to get pinned down like that.

During some fight once, Sam told him, we’ve gotta set some boundaries, man, this shit isn’t working. It stuck with Dean because he hadn’t understood then and still didn’t. None of them had any boundary worth mentioning and Dean sure as hell wouldn’t have known how to put up any, even if he could imagine what it would be like to want some, which he couldn’t. All he knew is it would be safe inside his dad’s ribcage and Sam would be safe in his, like a set of matryoshka dolls. 

He groaned against John’s mouth, too lost to remember whether he was supposed to be quiet, and dug his fingers around both John’s arms, hard and built but with the soft skin of middle age. He was so heavy on top of him, like nothing Dean ever had before, and the wooly scrape of his beard against his chin was blisteringly new. Dean was so hard it didn’t feel possible, every second of friction against his jeans making him push his hips up like some desperate virgin. He didn’t know if he was allowed to be hard, if that’s what they were doing, if John was, and he wasn’t lucid enough to figure it out. 

John put his hand flat on his bare stomach—Dean sucked in, reflexive—and slid it downwards until it bumped against his belt. Dean’s hands flew to it first, quick and clumsy, to get it open and off and to lift his hips to get his jeans down. John sat back to give him room to do it, one knee planted between his legs. Dean risked a glance down and saw the front of John’s sweats tented out; no misunderstandings or denial or anything good left. 

Dean pulled his boxers down along with his jeans and shut his eyes tight, like that would make it not real. His dick slapped up against his stomach when it sprung free and he felt John’s hands clawing at his jeans, taking over, pulling them down his legs and off.

Dean kept his eyes closed. He couldn’t watch, he couldn’t see him looking. More intrusive thoughts that curdled in his stomach: naked in front of his dad like he was a little kid, getting bathed in motel tubs, sharing the shower before he got too old for it. He felt John move, the pilled cotton of his sweatpants against his bare legs, the creak and tilt of the bed as he got up on his knees to pull them down. Dean looked. The only light was the last reaches of sunset coming in through the slats in the blinds, but it was enough. John wasn’t wearing boxers under his sweats. His dick was big, uncut and dark, and thick in a way that felt humiliating; Dean had always wondered, often enough that he knew he had no business wondering, long before the rest of it settled in. John had a white scar low on his pubic bone and a smattering of moles at the top of a thigh furred with dark hair. Dean only saw him for a second before his mouth was on his again, hard and desperate, his big shoulders blocking out the light. 

John’s mouth was sour with beer and stale breath, hot, swollen. Both his hands gripped Dean’s sides a little too hard and the pain brought Dean back to himself. John’s dick skidded against his thigh, tacky and warm and hard, and it shut off his last remaining brain cells. 

John grabbed the back of his thigh and hefted him up so Dean’s ass was against his thighs and his bent knees framed his arms. He spat in his palm and Dean’s panic kicked up to a fever pitch. He reached down and grabbed John’s wrist with both hands.

“Waitwaitwait,” Dean sputtered, twitching at the sound of his own voice for the first time in forever. “There’s, stuff. In my room. Please.”

He hated the way it sounded, but he didn’t want to get torn apart. He didn’t remember opening his eyes but then he was staring up at John, also for the first time in what felt like forever. John was staring back, mouth slack and breathing hard, brow furrowed. Dean answered the question he saw in his eyes.

“Girls. I got it for girls, in the ass, not…”

He’d gotten the lube for jerking off, but girls sounded cooler. Either one was cooler than what John was suggesting.

For a desperate stab at something masculine, he added, “I’ve… never. Done…”

Done it with a guy, done this, done anything even resembling this.

It was the wrong thing to say, he’d misread the look. John’s face twisted and crumpled. He looked wrecked. More wrecked.

“Aw, shit,” he said softly, and started to sit back.

Dean grabbed his arm.

“Wait, wait.” Dean swallowed hard, and John stopped. “I lied. There—there were a few guys. Not many.”

There weren’t any guys, not even a kiss and sure as hell not sex. John was never great at telling when Dean was lying; he did it so rarely, he figured, that John never got a read on it. It was valuable when he really needed it, even if lying made guilt rise in his gorge like bile. He could say it because it was what John wanted to hear. I didn’t break it, it was like that when I found it.

John just looked at him. His eyes were black in the dark.

“Get it,” he said, and nothing else.

Dean vaulted off the bed on pure adrenaline, practically running out of the room and into his. He pulled off his socks, feeling stupid, grabbed the lube and hurried back to John’s room. He sat on the edge of the bed, also feeling stupid—what was he supposed to do, lie back and spread his legs?—but it was only for a second before John grabbed his arm, groped up to his shoulder and guided him down to the bed.

The bottle of lube left his hands, at some point. At some point, two big hands spread his legs, lifting one calf up and over John’s thigh, and Dean just panted up at the ceiling, lost. He couldn’t catch his breath, like he’d been running, and his head was spinning. He closed his eyes to make it stop, but it got worse when a slick, cold finger circled his asshole and pressed inside. 

He thought it would hurt more, but it was just a dull kind of sting. His back came up off the bed, curling in like the last spasms of some dying thing. John rubbed a hand over his chest to ease him back down, shh, mumbling something incoherent.

The feeling was foreign and invasive, full and tight. He didn’t know what to do with his hands and twisted them anxiously in the sheets. Two fingers made it ache worse. He imagined Sam coming back early, Jennifer driving home in her Honda Civic wondering whether he’d call, the happy and idealistic kid he’d been when he was eight, watching his dad finger bang him. His shame was like a third presence in the room, physical and leering down at him. John was just shapes in the dark, and his hands, one working inside him and the other pressing into the soft inside of his thigh to keep his legs apart. He wasn’t particularly gentle, but he wasn’t rough. He twisted and spread and crooked his fingers in a way that made Dean’s imagination run wild—who, and when? He couldn’t have, not him, but—maybe during the war, bored and lonely—he assumed Dean had, so he must have done it himself—maybe something more recent, stuff in locked bar bathrooms while his boys slept—but whatever it was, he was good at it. Dean had no point of comparison but it felt like John knew where to go, his fingers were calloused and thick and Dean could feel his dick drooling untouched on his stomach. 

After three fingers, it felt like nothing else could fit and it hurt all the way inside him, all the way to his spine. He could hear John breathing, and another sound, wet, clicking. He only realized John was stroking lube on his dick when he fumbled up to his knees, slinging Dean’s legs around his hips as he went. 

Dean’s heart jackhammered in his throat. He couldn’t watch. He wanted to put his arms around John’s neck and bury his face in his shoulder like he was ten and getting carried to the car, but he kept them fisted in the sheets. At the first slippery press of his cock head against him, Dean whispered, “Oh, God,” mostly to himself.

John started to push in and the first shock of pain was so intense it took Dean’s breath away, sharp like a knife and slow like torture, like being carved up from the inside. John mumbled shh and rubbed a hand over his stomach, the other pulling Dean slowly onto him by the hinge of his hip, shh. His rubbing hand brushed his dick and it was almost too much. Dean couldn’t get a full breath in, couldn’t move, kept trying to spread his legs wider, like that would help.

Once the head was in, it was easier. A sound rumbled in John’s throat that sounded like relief, a grunt, his head hung down so Dean couldn’t see his face. Dean felt sweat—he assumed, too quiet for tears—drip from John’s shadowed face onto his belly, hot like it was boiling. The sheets stuck to his back. He tried to remember how to breathe. 

John dripped on more lube, pulled out and eased back in, and Dean whined without meaning to. It felt so good and so horrific, so overwhelming that it clawed at his throat, the steady pressure as John worked in, in shallow, slick thrusts. Dean felt sensitive and raw after taking John’s fingers and he couldn’t stand it, it felt weird, it felt like he was turning him inside out, it felt like— His hand twitched towards his dick for relief, anything, and the second his fingers brushed it he was coming, his whole body seizing up, dick spurting onto his stomach.

He tried to hide it with his hand, a wipe across his skin while it was still pouring out, but John grabbed Dean’s wrist and pulled his hand away. He stared down at it. “Oh.”

As if he wouldn’t be able to tell anyway; Dean felt his body clench around him, rhythmic and involuntary. Dean’s face was burning scarlet all the way down his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“Sorry. Sorry.”

John had gone still inside him, holding his hand. Slowly, John bowed over him, pulling his wrist up over his head and pinning it to the mattress. The movement made Dean’s spent dick rub against his belly and he tried to twist away.

“It’s okay,” John mumbled, hardly words. Sweat dripped from his hair onto Dean’s cheek. “You’re okay.”

Dean pressed his lips together, still tense with aftershocks of his orgasm. John mouthed at his cheek, sliding up to his temple, and started to press his hips in, in, inch by excruciating inch. Dean took a shuddery breath, head tipping back, wrist flexing in John’s grip. He pushed up with his arm to see if John was holding on for real, and he was.

It burned. It felt like there couldn’t be any more of him left to go in, and there was. Dean’s toes curled so tightly they went numb.

“Dad—”

“It’s okay,” John said, except his voice cracked at the end. “Jesus, you’re—”

Dean wanted to hear the end of it so badly, he was what, but then John pulled all the way out, slow and infinite, and started to fuck him for real. 

It wasn’t like anything Dean ever had, no measure of comparison. It felt like it was happening to someone else. John let his wrist go and Dean’s hands flew to clutch at John’s arms without thinking, anything to hold onto as he pushed into him over and over again, slick and burning hot and huge. John dug all his fingers into the meat of Dean’s thigh and pushed it up against his chest. Folding up like that meant Dean couldn’t get a good breath in and his head started to spin, his throat was dry and he was shaking all over, he wanted to hide his face, he wanted to kiss him again, he wanted to come.

Dean wondered if this was how girls felt when he did it to them. He couldn’t believe anyone else in the world had ever felt this. He petted his shaking hands up John’s arms and felt small under him, precious. Nested. He angled his hips in a way that made John gasp and buck into him, faster, the slap of their skin obscene in the quiet house.

It went on. Dean opened his eyes. They’d adjusted to the dark and he could see John now, his face drawn as if he were in pain, body heaving as he hammered into him. Unreal, beautiful and hotter than anything Dean could imagine, embarrassing, intimate, the worst thing he’d ever seen.

John opened his eyes, just smudges of black in the dark. He choked on his breath. 

“Oh, fuck, don’t look.” He slapped his hand over Dean’s face, heavy and salty with sweat, sticky with lube, just enough pressure to push Dean’s face to the side. Dean breathed into it, mouth open and crushed. Everything went black and warm. “Don’t—”

Dean could feel it when he came inside him, the way his dick throbbed and the heat of it. John took a sobbing, shuddering breath from deep in his gut, like a death rattle. The hand on Dean’s face pulled into a fist and rested there, and he went still for a while, heaving. It hadn’t taken that long. 

Somehow, the stillness hurt worse. Dean’s whole body pulsed with pain and exhaustion, stuck to the burning sheets. John was a thousand pounds on top of him all of a sudden. He wanted to come again but there was no world where he asked. His jaw was trembling and he couldn’t make it stop.

John slowly took his hand back, sticky with spit. He sat up. He rubbed Dean’s stomach again, like a habit; he got so close to his dick and Dean almost took his hand and made him touch it. 

The pulling out hurt worse than anything else. John did it slowly, but it was sticky and dragged and Dean muffled a yelp of pain against his knuckles. John swore softly.

“Shit. You’re bleeding.”

Dean sat up. He still had his legs bent over John’s thighs and he couldn’t believe how small he looked by comparison, seeing them together like that, him all shiny and bright and new where John was hairy and scarred. John’s dick hung full and heavy between his legs, smeared with come and something dark. The sheets between Dean’s legs had red on them.

Dean had been with a few virgins, the truth only brought to light in moments exactly like this, where they stared down at the sheets together. He knew it wasn’t the same thing, but he was pretty sure he felt just as humiliated as those girls had. Nobody wanted to bleed.

He didn’t know what to say. With the clarity of afterwards, of post, he was too shocked and overwhelmed to even think about speaking.

“Go clean up,” John said, and folded himself out from under Dean’s legs.

He didn’t sound mad, but not… Dean didn’t know what he expected.

Not sure what else to do, he mumbled, “Yessir,” and shuffled off the end of the bed. He pulled on his jeans, no boxers, and his shirt; they weren’t a ‘walk around naked’ type of family, and what if— He kept his eyes on his bare feet as he walked. His heart batted around his chest like a trapped bird and his whole body ached, worst between his legs.

The bathroom light was caustic and bright, so he kept it off and moved in the dark. He blushed for no one, demeaned anyway to be cleaning his own asshole. Any desire he’d had to come again was a distant memory. The bleeding had stopped. He didn’t meet his own eyes in the mirror as he washed his hands.

John wasn’t in the living room or kitchen when he came out. It was a small house and Dean could smell them even in the hallway, sweat and sex and lube magnified by the summer heat, mixed with the beer still soaking into the carpet by the TV. Dirty Harry had finished and some sitcom he didn’t recognize was playing, the only light in the room.

He went to John’s bedroom door. John had stripped the bed into a pile of white sheets, comforter heaped on the ground, and he was sitting on the edge of the bare mattress. He’d put his sweats back on and taken off his shirt. He was worrying his hands together between his knees in a nervous gesture Dean didn’t see on him often. It took Dean a second to realize he was spinning his wedding ring around his finger with his thumb. 

Dean rubbed the back of his own neck, wiping stale sweat from under the amulet’s cord. What was there to say? How did he ever think doing it would be better than wanting it?

John didn’t look up, although he must have heard Dean standing there. Dean looked at the sheets again and thought about the blood and the spilled beer and Sam.

“I’ll take them to the laundromat.”

Dean stepped into the room and bundled the sheets into his arms. He knew this was huge, that he’d done something that would change his life forever—all their lives—but he couldn’t think about it. It was like the tip of the iceberg, tiny, with this huge weight underneath. He needed to think about getting the sheets clean, because if he didn’t, thinking about the other thing would slice him in two.

John looked over his shoulder at him, almost. Dean could just see the side of his face.

“You can go in the morning.”

Dean shook his head. He tried to think of something to say that didn’t sound pathetic. I need to do something. I need to clean before he gets home. What do you want me to do, sit here?

“I’ll go now,” he said instead. John hadn’t given a direct order, so he didn’t have to obey.

He expected John would correct himself and make it an order. Secretly, in a worse, deeper place inside him, he wanted—not expected—John to ask him to stay. Tell him to get back into bed. Talk to him.

John just nodded, silent, and didn’t get up off the bed. 

There was comfort, at least, in that they seemed to be in the same boat: with the skin of lust and tension torn away for the first time after being there for longer than either of them would ever admit—Dean remembered the motel bathroom and the stitches all at once, John’s dilated pupils and wandering hand—everything exposed to the air was just raw and sore and unthinkably, unforgivably horrific.

“‘Kay,” Dean mumbled, and took the sheets out of the room. 

He shoved his bare feet into his sneakers, no socks, and left the house holding the sheets in his arms. It was cooler outside but only slightly, still oppressively hot after sundown. Somehow, he didn’t think about taking the car; his only thought was that he hadn’t asked John if he could take it, so he wouldn’t take it. He walked down the cracked, weed-grown sidewalk that led from their house through the neighbourhood, passing through pools of street lights he wished he could turn off. His heart kept pounding in his ears and in his aching ass.

Their nearest laundromat was the back half of a corner store ten minutes away. The bell above the door jingled as he opened it and the elderly woman behind the counter looked up, said nothing, and went back to watching a Korean soap on a small TV mounted to the shelf that held the smokes. The place was deserted, although one of the dryers was running. Dean shoved the sheets into a washer, fished a quarter out of his pocket and set it to run. 

He sat in one of the three plastic lawn chairs under the greenish fluorescent lights across from the machines and stared at the one that was his. It had a glass front and he watched the white sheets slosh around in the sudsy water. He thought he could see the flash of red every so often. He spun an unwilling fantasy where the whole thing filled up with red, and the lady at the counter came over and asked him about it. Whose blood is that? Are you okay? Do you need me to call someone?

The car was gone when he got back to the house carrying the fluffy sheets with their sickly sweet detergent smell, head empty, feet sore from the sneakers without socks. When the door swung open and he saw Sam on the couch, it took his breath away: in all his glassy-eyed numbness, he’d forgotten that Sam didn’t already know. Dean realized he’d spent the last hour expecting, however subconsciously, to never see him again.

“Sup,” Sam said lightly, not taking his eyes off the TV. He was slumped down with his feet on the coffee table, wearing gym shorts and a giant white T-shirt with some faded logo on the front. His hair was unwashed and sweaty and flipped over the wrong way. He’d turned on all the lights and the house seemed nicer, somehow. 

“Where were you?” Dean asked, wandering in. He looked down by the table: the beer splatch was still visible on the carpet and he couldn’t tell if someone had tried to mop it up.

Sam frowned, his eyes moving from the TV to Dean.

“Basketball with Josh. What, you want me to get a permission slip?”

Sam was fourteen now and calcifying in front of Dean’s eyes, hardening into something sour and unhappy that was nearly unrecognizable from the starry-eyed kid he’d been a few years ago. Dean felt like he was letting it happen, too caught up in his own shit to do what was right for his brother.

“No,” Dean choked out, sounding stupid. “Whatever. No.”

He was horrified to feel tears pricking at his eyes. He wanted to crawl into a hole and die, puke until he felt clean, tell Sam everything and face his inevitable wrath as some kind of penance. Instead, he dropped the sheets on the dining table and stormed for the bathroom.

The couch springs squealed as Sam shot up. His hand closed around Dean’s shoulder.

“Hey, what?” Sam spun him around; Dean scrubbed at his eyes. “Are you okay?”

Sam was the same height as him, maybe even taller, and Dean fucking hated it. It wasn’t important, especially not then, but it was all he could think about with Sam so close and with the fresh memory of how small he’d looked against John, and it pissed him off. Dean smacked at the hand on his shoulder.

“I’m fine, fuck off.”

He tried to leave again. Sam grabbed him by the arm. He had big, witchy hands, and they were always cold.

“Dude, are you crying?” Sam asked.

Dean, officially, started crying. He shoved a fist against his eyes and bit his teeth together and tried to stop it, but he was crying in front of his little brother. It wasn’t full-on sobbing, but frustrated, overwhelmed tears spilled out anyway. His face was wet and hot.

Sam said, “Oh, shit,” faint and surprised.

Dean could hardly hear him over the blood pounding in his ears. He shook his head and wiped at his eyes. He tried to turn around again but Sam pulled him into a hug before Dean could fight him off. 

Dean’s fist was trapped between them and he didn’t move it. His chest wracked with a silent sob and he felt Sam’s ropey arms tighten around his shoulders. Sam’s shirt was worn thin and smelled like sweat and grass, boyish summer. Dean kept his free hand at his side. He didn’t want to hug Sam back. It felt like a privilege he’d lost.

“Shit. What happened?” Sam asked quietly. “Bad date?”

It felt pathetic to hear that as a first guess. His voice was too close to Dean’s ear. Dean eased him back with the hand against his chest. 

“Let’s go with that.”

He couldn’t meet Sam’s eyes and stared instead at the wet spot on his collar from his tears.

“Is there a girl you want me to beat up?” Sam tried, with a weak laugh. “That’s not funny. Sorry.”

Dean rubbed his eyes. “There’s no girl, Sammy.”

He didn’t mean it like that, but he realized how it sounded when Sam didn’t say anything back right away. And it was true. Sam had no idea how much there wasn’t a girl.

“Oh.” Sam didn’t sound mad. Dean clung to that. “Okay. Uh. What are my odds of beating the guy up? Is he big?”

Dean laughed wetly. “Shut up.”

Conveniently, that wasn’t confirmation nor denial, and they would live in that place for a long time. Dean looked up. Sam was smiling at him, awkward but trying. Dean imagined him knowing the truth and still looking at him like that. 

Sam slugged him in the arm. The moment broke.

“If you’re done being a huge bitch, come watch TV. Robocop’s only halfway done.”

He bapped Dean on the arm again like Dean hadn’t been crying into his chest a second ago, and flopped back down on the couch. Dean watched him over the back of the couch, numb, somehow still standing.

“Where’d Dad go?” he asked after a second, followed by a sharp bite to the inside of his cheek. Sam’s head bobbed as he shrugged.

“Dunno. Wasn’t here when I got home.”

Dean wondered. Some bar, he figured, drinking the taste of him out of his mouth. It’s what Dean would do. His mouth tasted like blood.

“Have you eaten?” he asked.

Sam took too long to answer. “Josh brought pizza.”

Dean pressed his lips together. Guilt was sour in the back of his throat, and anger, however brief—you still think you can lie to me, you little shit?—but telling Sam not to lie to save his feelings would be the worst pot-kettle-black he’d ever done.

“Cool,” Dean said, not even trying to sound okay. “I’m gonna go out.”

Sam twisted around to look at him over the back of the couch, brow furrowed. “Dad’s got the car.”

“I’ll walk,” Dean said.

He did. He showered, changed, and walked forty minutes half across town to get to a bar he knew John wouldn’t be at. He won them a hundred bucks worth of grocery money at the pool tables before he got too drunk to stand, spent a third of it settling his tab, then threw up in the parking lot. When he made it back home, the Impala was parked in the driveway, the house was dark and John’s bedroom door was shut. The sheets were still sitting in a pile on the table.

2006

Dean was face-down with a mouthful of sheets. A new guy from a new bar in a new town was hammering into him from behind with a hand on the back of his neck to keep him down, on request. The guy was gorgeous, curly salt and pepper hair and a full beard, a familiar enough shape to his nose and eyebrows, broad and ruddy. And he was interested: he’d met Dean’s looks at the bar and wordlessly got him to meet him in the alley for a handjob in the dark. Afterwards, when Dean was still sweating into his jacket and too drunk to be anything but incoherently pleased, the guy invited him back to his place, and of course Dean said yes, a case just closed, Sam placated and nowhere to be until morning.

The guy’s name was Robert or Ronald or Richard. Dean was going with Robert, but it didn’t matter much. Robert was a warm body and an alright dick and a big hand curled around the back of his neck to keep him pinned. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when he’d started to want that so badly—getting held down, some kind of restraint—but it became a habit. It drove him crazy.

Robert made all these hot grunting sounds as he fucked him, skin slapping, his other hand on Dean’s hip to pull him back into him with each thrust, and it was heaven. His hands were calloused, he must have worked for a living, and when Dean kept his eyes closed, so drunk he couldn’t remember getting from the bar to the apartment, he could pretend.

“Fuck,” Dean panted into the sheets, turning his head to the side to take a ragged breath; the fingers around the back of his neck slid to splay over his jaw and lower face, squishing his cheek. “Fuck, yeah, that’s—”

Robert put his fingers in his mouth. Bonus points. Dean moaned around them and sucked without thinking, sloppy but earnest. John would do the fingers in the mouth thing too, sometimes, mostly when he was drunk. Sucking them to get them wet so he could fuck him with them, sucking his come off them. It always seemed to get him going. That, by extension, got Dean going.

The fingers drew out and grabbed his face again, wet with spit. Dean buried a moan in the sheets. The guy was fucking him so hard he jerked forward with every thrust and slid on his knees, stubble rasping on cotton, the amulet swinging forward and catching him under the chin. He was too drunk to be fully hard, but it felt so good to get filled up.

With his eyes shut, he could imagine a motel. He could smell leather and sweat and metal and gun oil. 

“Fuck”—Dean choked out, pushing back on him, hands clawing at the sheets—“Dad—”

Robert breathed in sharply, and all at once, stopped.

“Okay, hey, nope.” He put a hand on Dean’s back and carefully pulled out. “That’s twice now. Boner kill.”

It took Dean a second to realize what he’d said. Robert was moving back and away, sitting heavily at the other end of the bed. Dean tried to turn over and got twisted in the sheets.

“Fuck, sorry.” He shook his hand free from the sheets, turned over and pulled his legs in, knees aching. He scrubbed a hand over his face to try and clear his head. “I’m drunk. I’m just drunk, sorry. I’m fucking wasted.”

He looked at the guy for the first time in a while. He was probably in his late fifties and wider than Dean by half, hairy everywhere. He clearly took care of himself in a way that made his extra weight sit well, big arms and a wide chest. He was red all the way down his chest and still hard, still wearing a condom. And he was frowning.

“‘Daddy,’ I get, but dad is…” He trailed off and scratched his beard. “Fuck, man. This is awkward. You wanna talk about it?”

“Holy shit, no.” Dean put his face in his hands and tried to get the room to stop spinning. “This is humiliating. Can we not—”

“Hey, I’m serious. Uh—it’s Dean, right?” Robert peeled off the condom and started to climb off the bed. “You want a coffee, Dean?”

“No. Please.”

“I’m putting on coffee. You need a coffee.”

“Don’t—”

Robert was already striding naked out of the room. “Fine, then leave. I’m making coffee.”

Dean folded over forward into the bed and groaned in agony. He’d never slipped up so bad that he remembered, or if he did, he’d never had a guy call him on it so openly. It was a fucking nightmare. He didn’t think ‘dad’ was so different than ‘daddy,’ and old dudes ate up the whole ‘daddy’ thing. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. That he was so far off the rails that this guy could hear that it was something, just from that, was beyond embarrassing.

He kept his face in the sheets, hands folded over the back of his head, and tried not to hyperventilate or hurl. After a while, he heard Robert come back in. He could smell the coffee before he sat up.

“If you’re going to puke, tell me now,” Robert said. “Bathroom’s down the hall.”

Dean sat up carefully, the room tipping and spinning around him. He looked around for the first time—it was a nondescript male bedroom like any of the hundreds he’d been in, a big bed and a nightstand cluttered with old receipts and half empty glasses of water. It was cheaper than the kinds of places guys of this age usually had, in Dean’s experience. Divorced, maybe, or just poor. Robert was standing naked by the bed with two heavy white mugs full of coffee.

“I’m good,” Dean said, his voice wrecked like he was anything but. The room kept spinning and he shuffled back against the wall for support. 

Robert leaned across the bed and handed him one of the mugs. He was mostly soft now; his foreskin was loose, dark and wrinkled. There was something horribly intimate about seeing a guy’s soft dick. Dean took the coffee mug in both hands, looking into its black depths instead of the guy’s junk.

Robert sat up by the headboard, resting his mug on his bare thigh. Dean took a sip of coffee and it scalded his tongue. He took another mouthful anyway, the pain clearing his head. He risked a glance up at Robert.

He said, “I know this probably looks like rock bottom from where you’re sitting, but I’m still not gonna get into my daddy issues with some guy who gave me a back alley handy.”

Being an asshole was safe and easy. He didn’t know why he was sticking around in the first place, but sobering up couldn’t hurt. His thoughts were still coming in fuzzy and piecemeal and his body was still coming down from the fever pitch of sex.

Robert shrugged and raised his mug to his mouth. “Fine, then don’t. But it sounds like you want to.”

His voice was deep and gravelly and it kind of made Dean want to cry. He really was losing it. He didn’t need any of those three final tequila shots.

“The hell do you care? I don’t even know your name.”

Another shrug from (?) Robert. He seemed genuinely unfazed.

“You probably know this, but you’re astoundingly beautiful. That entitles you to things other people don’t get.”

“Like free therapy.”

“Like a cup of coffee and a friendly ear. And if you felt like sucking my dick after, I wouldn’t stop you.”

Dean snorted. “Right.”

“Hey, I’m just being honest.” He slurped his coffee. “And it’s Richard, by the way. Rich.”

Dean nodded. “Dean.”

“I know.”

Dean thunked his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. The mug was burning his fingers, but he had to keep it balanced on the soft bed.

After a beat, Rich said, “So, this is about your dad? Your actual dad?”

Dean groaned. “You’re serious about this?”

“Like I said: I’ve heard a lot of ‘daddy’ from guys your age. I’ve never heard a dad.”

Dean rubbed his eyes. “Alright, I get it.” He left his hand there, squeezing his temples. Conveniently, it hid his face. “I dunno. My dad died, a few months ago.”

“Sorry for your loss.” Rich nodded, almost solemnly. “And, uh. Before that?”

Dean dropped his hand into his lap, took a deep breath and made himself look at him. He must have looked fucked, because the guy’s eyebrows went up instantly.

“Shit. You’re joking.”

Dean just shook his head. He rearranged things, nervous; picked up the mug, pulled a corner of the sheets over his naked lap and set the mug down in the crook of his bent knee. A successful three seconds of stalling.

“It wasn’t like that,” he said finally. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Yeah, you probably do.” 

“I wasn’t a kid. It was, you know, two consenting adults. He didn’t— It wasn’t like that.” He held his breath for a while, then let it go. “I was twenty. We just… started fucking.”

He knew he’d been younger than twenty but he hated how eighteen sounded, like too many guys he’d known who wanted a medal for holding off an underage chick until she was legal. Maybe it was like that, but he had a few sorry scraps of pride left. He wouldn’t go around admitting it.

Rich said, “So you just—willingly—started banging your dad.” When Dean scowled at him, he added, “Sorry.”

They lapsed into silence again. Dean stared down into his coffee, feeling his blush spread to his ears. He’d never told anyone before, not even an inkling. It felt like falling, careening towards the ground, but he didn’t expect it to be so freeing.

“We had… a weird life.” He paused. The standard ‘salesman’ line didn’t fit, not for this. “He was a con man, kind of. A drifter. We moved around a lot, no home base. Things just got fucked up somewhere along the way.”

“And your mom?”

“Dead. For a long time.” He clicked his thumb nail against a hairline fracture in the mug handle. “He never got over it. That type of thing.”

That type of thing, he said, as if it were a tale as old as time. You know, the thing where you start having sex with your nomadic, widower father and play the role of his surrogate wife for nearly ten years, while hiding it from your little brother. That old chestnut.

Rich said, “That’s heavy.”

“No shit. I know— shit, it must sound…”

“It sounds fucked up. I’ve, uh… I’ve got a kid, about your age, and… holy hell, man. It’s not my place, but I can’t see how that happens. Can’t see how a guy… whatever.” He scratched at his beard again. “Don’t listen to me. Sorry about your mom.”

Dean got an ache behind his eyes, the grief and sorrow coming in hot and fresh like it was yesterday. He couldn’t tell this stranger that John died to save him, and that despite every fucked-up misstep that made up Dean’s whole life, he’d been trying. He loved him. Reducing John Winchester to some con man who touched his kid made Dean feel sick and unclean. To say nothing of—

“I got a—a brother, too, he—”

That was what finally made him choke up. He sighed, gnarled and angry and frustrated, and rubbed his face again.

“Fuck. Forget it.”

He took a swig of coffee, then clambered off the bed. He stood and set his mug down on top of a pile of receipts on the nightstand, while Rich watched him with his big, dark eyes. Rich had the same long eyelashes and thick eyebrows. It was what made Dean go for him in the first place.

Rich said, “I’m no shrink, but you should really talk to someone about this.”

The voice, too. Not quite, but a similar twang. Dean thought about that, instead of this piece of stunning kindness given by a stranger who didn’t have to give it, because if he did, he didn’t think he could keep it together anymore. He felt like some broken, jagged thing held together by zip ties and gaffer tape. One wrong move and he wouldn’t be a thing anymore.

He said, “I’ll get right on that.”

He took Rich’s coffee from him and set it next to his own. When he sank to his knees on the floor next to the bed, Rich pivoted to sit in front of him without being told. He brushed his fingers through the buzzed hair above Dean’s ear and palmed the side of his head. 

Rich said, “You don’t have to,” but his voice was low and wanting and he was already chubbing up. Good stamina for an old guy. Dean ran his hands up his big furred thighs and his mouth flooded with spit. 

“Consider it payment for therapy rendered.” Dean took him in his hand and started to jerk him to hardness. “Hold me down, okay? I wanna choke on it.”

2002

In the first six months that Sam was in California, Dean and John maxed two credit cards paying for motel damages, one place in Salt Lake City and another in Baltimore, from smashed TVs, broken mirrors and holes in the drywall. The rest of their money went towards pills and whiskey, which were more than a little responsible for the motel damages.

Now it was February, and they’d spent the last week in a bitterly cold corner of Ohio up by the lake. John had gotten wind of a hunt and it was something new, a pattern they’d never seen before, so they hoped it was a real lead. Not only was it not new at all—it turned out to be a weird kind of shtriga—but they’d both gotten themselves pretty badly hurt. Dean dislocated his shoulder and John pulled something in his right leg.

They stumbled back to the motel at midnight on the last day with their eyelashes frosted shut and their own blood freezing in the collars of their un-insulated jackets. John couldn’t put any weight on his right and Dean had his usable arm looped around his middle, holding him up.

“Easy,” Dean said, when John tried to lean against the door to fish out his room key. “Don’t be a hero.”

John snorted an annoyed huff, but didn’t make him let go. They got the door open and the room, cheap and ugly as it was, was blissfully warm from the radiator chugging away in the corner. Dean steered John towards the bed.

“Sit. I got your boots.”

Another grumble out of John, but no real fight. “We got any whiskey left?”

Dean hummed in the affirmative. He shucked his jacket and the shirt under it to let the warmth in, then grabbed their shitty plastic bottle of whiskey from the counter where they’d left it the night before. He cracked off the top, took a swig and passed it to John, who took it and did the same. He made a face and wiped his mouth afterwards.

“Rotten shit,” he coughed. 

“Uh-huh.”

They’d been light on cash before this hunt and dropped everything to get to Ohio, so it had been nothing but bottom shelf liquor and gas station snacks for a week. Dean was light-headed and hung over most days, but he was getting used to it.

John took another chug of the rotten shit. The frost in his hair made it look more silver than it was. He was letting it get long and it curled out from under his black knitted beanie. 

Dean knelt on the carpet in front of him and unlaced his boots for him with one hand, cherry red in the cold, no gloves. They’d be lucky if they didn’t get frostbite. His dislocated shoulder ached bad now that it had started to warm up and the arm wasn’t much use, curled pathetically against his side, but he wanted to get a look at John’s leg. It had been an awkward, twisting fall.

He put his good hand just above John’s knee and squeezed, gently. John winced with his whole body and seethed through his teeth, “Jesus.”

Dean frowned. “Seems bad. Lemme—”

“Your shoulder first. Come on.”

Dean acquiesced, struggled to his feet and took a seat next to John on the bed. John set the whiskey down, stripped off his jacket and dropped it sodden on the floor. He brought a hand to the back of his skull, gingerly.

“How’s your head?” Dean asked.

“Fine. Yours?”

“Stopped bleeding.”

John nodded. Dean turned to the side to present him with his dislocated shoulder. His black T-shirt was soaked through from snow and sweat, and John’s hand pressing to the back of his shoulder, cold as it was, felt warm by comparison. John’s other hand came around his side to pass him the whiskey, then settled at the top of his chest.

“You want something to bite on?” John asked. Dean shook his head, then took another drink. “Alright. On three.”

It was a family joke. He never went on three.

“One, two—”

The jerk of motion hit Dean before the pain, pressure on his shoulder and then the white-hot burst of agony as it popped back into the socket. He grunted and pushed back against John, head back, fingers twisting into a claw around the neck of the whiskey bottle.

John’s arm slid around the top of Dean’s chest and held his far shoulder, forearm up under Dean’s chin. His sleeve was cold and wet, but his face was warm when he pressed it against the back of Dean’s injured shoulder.

“Easy,” John murmured against his shirt. “It’s done. You’re okay.”

Dean held still as the pain worked its way through him, every muscle taut. He dropped his head back onto John’s shoulder and panted up at the ceiling, whiskey bile burning in his throat. John rested his weight on him from behind so they were pressed together from chest to back to hip, and stayed like that.

After that first sweltering summer night when Dean was eighteen, it happened again a few weeks later, and then again a few weeks after that, and somehow four years went by that way. And now here they were. Not where Dean thought he’d be at twenty-three, but it could be worse. Probably. It was Dean’s longest—‘relationship’ wasn’t right, but—it was the longest he’d had sex with any one person for his entire life, beating the next closest ten times over. It had to be one of John’s longest too, from what he’d heard, other than— anyway. He tried not to think about his mom much, since.

John moved his mouth against the back of Dean’s shoulder, a motion Dean might have called a nuzzle if it came from anyone else. The pain was dissipating. Dean took another swig of whiskey to help it along.

“We got a sling?” he asked.

“Mm. Lost it in Davenport.”

A botched hunt got the cops on their tail, a whole motel room full of supplies left behind. “Right.”

He kept his eyes closed. John’s hair was soft against his cheek and his arm was heavy over his chest, and Dean basked in it. This part was still new. Before Sam left, they stole time together while Sam was off on his own, which happened more frequently as he got older (Dean realized too late that he’d been studying, and what he was studying for). Since Sam left, they had to figure out how to be around each other without a constantly ticking clock and the fear of discovery, and it was fucking messy.

Case in point: a few weeks ago, after splitting a fifth of drain-cleaner vodka, John spanked him. It was just a few loud, cracking slaps, but he was bent over his knees and everything. It made Dean hard enough to pound nails. Any tact or sanity or sense of self-preservation they’d been clinging to had left with Sam, with nobody else around to hold it together for. They slept in the same bed and shared shirts. When they fought, things got broken. Dean called Sam and it went straight to voicemail, John dialed and never made the call. Dean got spanked. Life trudged on uncaring around them as they fell apart.

Dean shifted his weight forward to stand and John took his arm back. Dean motioned up at the headboard. “Sit back. Lemme look at you.”

John gave him a look, but again, he didn’t fight back. That meant his leg actually hurt.

He pulled off his wet flannel and shifted back along the bed while Dean found his least rancid long-sleeved shirt and tied it into a makeshift sling. When he looked back at the bed, John was in his underwear, head tipped back, mouth around the whiskey bottle.

Dean took one look at his leg and said, “Oh, gnarly.”

The sprain, tear, whatever it was, was so bad that John's leg had started to bruise black-purple all up the outside of his thigh. No broken skin, but a galaxy-like pattern of colours along the shape of his muscles. Dean went up next to the bed and ran his fingers over the bruise.

“Watch it,” John warned. 

Dean ghosted his fingers over him instead. “Can you bend it?”

“Not well.”

There wasn’t much they could do for it besides have him pop some heavy-duty pills for the swelling, ice it and see how it was in the morning. Dean kept tracing his fingers up the bruise until it reached the leg of his boxer briefs, then stopped. He glanced up at John to get a read on him.

Their thing was a balancing act, sometimes. He was supposed to be tough, but not talk back. Be ready when he wanted it, but don’t just roll over. Take what was given, and give liberally. Be soft—John holding him just then, the arm across his chest, nuzzling his shoulder—only when following a lead. It wasn’t so different from when he was a kid, watching for John’s signals and reading him as a kind of self-preservation, only the stakes were higher now. There were new, different signals, and less of a pattern to them. They were both all over the place.

John was interested. His eyes were dark and heavy-lidded, and he looked down to where Dean’s fingers were brushing his thigh.

“You be careful with that.”

There was a rarely-heard playfulness in his tone. It was the highest rank on the John Winchester risk-reward spectrum: if Dean played it right, he was in for one hell of a night. If he played it wrong, there could be another TV screen shattered by a chair leg.

Dean rested his hip against the bed, reached up and took off John’s beanie. He slid his fingers through his warm, greasy hair and smiled down at him.

“What are you gonna do about it, old man?”

John smiled back, dimples and everything. He’d had enough whiskey to cheapen it, but Dean’s heart went nuts anyway. John wrapped his fingers around his wrist and tugged.

“Give you something better to do with that punk mouth. Come here.”

John pulled and Dean went. John’s mouth was full and soft against his and the scratch of his beard against his chin was more familiar by now than any home Dean ever had, any girl, any friend, any town. John kissed like he wanted it every single time, hungry and demanding. It said a lot of things he didn’t say out loud.

Emboldened, Dean slid his hand up John’s thigh and cupped his dick through his boxers. He was soft, but he’d get there. John sighed against mouth and moved his legs apart and Dean shifted more onto the bed, kneaded him with his palm and felt him start to thicken. John slipped off Dean’s sling and carefully pulled his shirt over his head with some mumbled encouragement, up, then took off his own. Dean loved the smell of him, post-hunt grimy and human and hot.

Dean ran his hand up John’s arm, still cool from outside, to scrub his fingers through his soft winter-thick beard. He kissed the corner of his mouth and nosed at his cheek, at the neat scar there that went up to his temple.

“I can suck you off,” Dean offered.

They were both battered and tired, no need for anything fancier. Dean learned he liked sucking dick, but more than that, he liked how much John liked it. He liked doing it best while John was driving, hearing him try to keep it together. Dean knew he was good at it. It was a point of pride.

John tilted him back into a kiss, deeper, hand curled around the back of his neck. It always made Dean think of picking up a dog by the scruff. His other hand dragged down Dean’s bare back and into the waist of his jeans.

“Ride me,” John mumbled. He rarely asked for it, rarely had to; a shudder went down Dean’s spine at the sound of it. “Your arm’s not too bad?”

“Nah,” Dean said. “I’m a pro.”

His arm hurt, but John had no chance of putting enough pressure on that knee to do it any other way, and now that he knew it was on the table, Dean wanted it viciously. 

He struggled out of his jeans one-handed with help from John, got John’s boxers off and climbed into his lap, attached at the mouth and fumbling. They didn’t do it like this often and Dean got a stab of embarrassment at the inevitable childishness of it, him in John’s lap. He wondered if John did too, and didn’t ask. It was vulnerable enough to have their faces so close together, and to be the one doing the work, that he didn’t need to kneecap himself by talking about it. John was the one who suggested it, and he was grabbing Dean’s ass to make him roll his hips against him. That was as green a light as any.

“Ah, God,” John sighed. He pressed his thumb to Dean’s lower lip and drew it along. “Look at you.”

John said that a lot, always with whiskey breath. He didn’t make a habit of maudlin declarations—as if ‘look at you’ covered the breadth of it, and maybe it did—and he’d only commented on Dean’s appearance point blank a handful of times ever, the most notable being on the kind of night where they were so drunk it was remembered only in snatches. They were in a booth at some wood-paneled dive bar, and John leaned across the table, grabbed Dean by the face and said, you’re so beautiful it makes me sick, then kissed him. It wasn’t the kind of place where two guys kissing would be received well, let alone two guys with thirty-plus years between them. It got a hell of a lot worse when John let him go after the kiss and said, I can’t believe you came outta me. Dean was the more sober of the two of them and got them out of there pretty quick.

“Yeah?” Dean said lightly, increasingly out of breath. Straddling John meant he had to look down to see him, and it made him feel all loopy and weird. “What about me?”

That got him another smile, too close to see much of, just a flash of teeth and a hand on his face pulling him into another kiss. 

“Cocky little shit.”

Practically sweetheart. Dean was soaring.

John felt blindly around the side table for the lube, the bottle new and already half empty, but they were both too proud to carry around one of the giant pump bottles. He pressed it into Dean’s hands and bit at his jaw as Dean got up on his knees and worked himself open, easy after the kind of week (month) they’d had. John jerked him off while he did it, slow and teasing, intense with his rough hands. John still wore his wedding ring; Dean was used to how it felt cold and smooth against his dick.

With his own fingers stuffed inside him and John’s on his dick, Dean was twitchy, keyed up and responsive, and John liked to tease him about that—God, I’m barely touching you—so he tried to keep it together. It was hard. No matter what they did, it made him feel flayed alive. 

John took his hand back and Dean heard a papery thump and the crinkle of plastic. John broke the kiss and tapped a condom packet on his thigh.

“C’mon, you’re good.”

Dean sat back to watch him tear open the pack and roll on a condom. They still occasionally fucked other people, or so Dean assumed—he did when he wanted a girl, but it was very ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ and he, privately, tried to keep John sated enough that he didn’t look elsewhere. So they never knew which of them was patient zero, but someone gave someone gonorrhea the year prior, and only after that did they start using condoms. Dean imagined leaving Sam a voicemail about it: I started making Dad wear a condom when he fucks me, is that what you meant when you said ‘boundaries’?

He got up on his knees. John petted his thighs until he started to sink down onto him, and then he dug his nails in. Dean bowed his head, shoulders shuddering. He loved the burn of those first few seconds, the breathtaking intrusion of it, the way John grabbed at him; there was always a hint of worry there, though he’d never say it.

He dropped his forehead against John’s once he was on, closed his eyes and caught his breath. His hands moved on autopilot to the amulet around his neck and spun it around to the back, so it hung between his shoulder blades.

“Why do you do that?” John asked, tone unreadable.

Dean hadn’t realized he did it often. He never thought about it.

“Sam gave it to me. I don’t—” He briefly debated not saying the next part. “I don’t want him watching.”

John would get it. Sam hovered over their shoulders like a spectre and so what if Dean was a little superstitious, now more than ever? He tried to think if they’d ever mentioned that Sam gave him the amulet. He couldn’t remember it coming up before now.

John didn’t say anything back, but his hands urged Dean to move, lifting, squeezing. Dean sighed and flexed his thighs and leaned back, careful of John’s leg and his own arm resting gently at his side. They’d done it like this before, however rarely, and he knew how to move. He braced his good arm on John’s shoulder for leverage.

“Yeah,” John sighed, noisy, head thunking back against the wall, “fuck, just like that.”

John’s hips lifted into him, gentle with his busted leg, and he smoothed his hands up and down his sides, rough, flattering. Dean’s hand pulled into a fist on his shoulder, working up a rhythm. When he fucked girls it was never enough, not after this; it felt good but it didn’t make him breathless and sick, it didn’t blast every other thought out of his head like an atom bomb, he didn’t shake. With girls, if he was drunk, he had to focus and put his mind to finishing. With John, he was constantly trying not to come, like some antsy teenager. It was a renewable resource.

He wrapped his fingers around his dick and got one stroke in before John grabbed his hand. “Not yet.”

Dean groaned softly and his pace faltered, and John bit at his chin, turned his face into his and kissed him, torrid, all teeth. Dean grabbed at John’s neck and hung on. He rose up a little higher as he rode him, made each stroke a little longer, thighs burning, until John started to tense up under him. If he weren’t hurt, John liked to flip him over and fuck him into the mattress to finish them off. Dean was sweating. John slid a hand down the curve of Dean’s back and grabbed his ass, fingers right in his crack to feel where he was stretched around him. 

Giddy panic, fear, pleasure so sharp it almost hurt. His dick dripped onto John’s stomach. John kept tracing his hole, pressing, and Dean dug his nails into his shoulder. They were breathing too hard to keep kissing and Dean panted against his cheek instead.

John pressed the tip of his finger inside him, along with his dick. The pain was unreal. Dean’s dick jerked, untouched and drooling. 

John mumbled, “Good boy.”

Dean was way too old for that shit, or he should have been. He felt his face get hot anyway, more than just embarrassed. He didn’t know what to call it. The kind of embarrassment that made his dick hard.

“Jesus,” he choked out, nearly hyperventilating. He couldn’t move much anymore, just rolls of his hips. It was beyond invasive, terrifying, unbelievably good.

John nipped at his top lip and kissed his slack, open mouth. “Go ahead.”

Dean’s hand flew to his dick, stripping it fast as John kept pushing up into him. The friction and the stretch was too much and he came in nothing flat, fucking glorious, shaking with it. He was too out of it to aim politely and striped John’s stomach, all the way up to his chest.

John pulled his hand back, grabbed Dean’s ass and bounced him in his lap to make him keep moving. Dean braced his hands on John’s shoulders, rocked into him and held on. He felt the amulet thump against his back. John dug a heel in, bucked up into him so hard he lifted them off the bed, and pressed his face to the top of Dean’s chest as he came. His mouth was open, but he was quiet about it. He usually was.

They lowered back down, slowly. Dean felt John throb inside him. He made his hands uncurl from their agonized fists and willed all his other muscles to relax, tight with pleasure and sore from the hunt. His whole body pulsed as his adrenaline drained, his heart pounded, his brain emptied out. John ran a hand down his sweat-wet back.

Things were simple afterwards, never much pageantry. Dean squeezed John’s shoulder before lifting carefully off him, ignoring the sting. He swung out of his lap and flopped heavily on the far side of the bed where the cool sheets were a balm on his burning skin. He left his ankle resting on John’s good leg, feeling sappy. He sighed, pleased, and closed his eyes.

There were worse ways to lick their wounds after a sloppy hunt. They could finish off that whiskey and find something passable to watch on TV until they passed out. Tomorrow, a new job and a new state.

He felt John shift around, silent, and opened his eyes. John was pulling off the condom. His face was flushed with exertion and shining with sweat and Dean propped up on an elbow to watch him. He was getting ropey as he got older and he had a hard time keeping on weight, not that they’d been eating enough for him to even try. He had the squarish pockmark of a vaccine scar on his upper arm and what looked like a knife scar under it. He looked good. He was the only man Dean had ever known, a perpetual yard stick. He was perfect.

There was something about the way he was moving, though. John was ignoring him. He was pissed off about something.

Dean went through the checklist: maybe Dean came too quick or stopped too soon. Maybe he made John use his leg too much, kissed him too much, came on him, missed something. It was an endless checklist, and it was always better to ask than to get it wrong.

“What’d I do?” Dean asked.

John pulled up a corner of the maid-tucked sheet to wipe Dean’s come off his chest. He still didn’t look at him, and the pause was too long before he spoke.

“Do me a favour next time and don’t mention your brother during sex.”

Dean’s first thought was: does that mean you’re not already thinking about him?

Because Dean was. Every second, half of his brain power was devoted to thinking about Sam—where he was, how he was doing, whether he was safe and happy. And deeper, worse and more selfish: how he’d be making friends Dean would never meet and doing things Dean would never do, halfway across the country, all of which felt impossible to even imagine. The feeling was somewhere between an amputation and a divorce, and it was infuriating that John wouldn’t admit to feeling even a fraction of the same thing. There was no Sam-Free Zone, and expecting one was fucking insulting.

“So that’s how we’re doing this,” Dean said slowly. He levered himself up to sit and pulled his leg back from where it rested on John’s. “Can’t say his name, can’t acknowledge his existence. We just pretend he’s not haunting us like a fuckin’ ghost.”

John had the gall to shrug. He kept cleaning himself off like it was some all-consuming task. “Who’s haunted? Your brother made a choice, and now he’s living with it.”

‘Your brother,’ he kept saying, like he was shirking the blame. Your brother. 

“You don’t think we had something to do with that choice?” Dean chewed the inside of his kiss-swollen lip. It wasn’t enough to shut himself up. “Dad, Sam knew.”

John looked up at him. His eyes were flinty and cold. “You know that for a fact?”

“He had to. We weren’t always… great.”

Especially when it first started, they fumbled it. John would get absent-minded and restless afterwards, and Dean, eighteen and still over the moon, got all blushy and come-drunk. It didn’t seem so bad at the time, but looking back, it was humiliating. Might as well have shown Sam the condom.

“He didn’t.” John shook his head. “Unless you told him, he didn’t.”

He finally tossed the sheet aside. He swung himself up to sit on the edge of the bed, minding his injured leg, and grabbed the whiskey bottle from where they’d left it on the nightstand.

Dean said, “I didn’t tell him.”

“Then he didn’t know.”

Dean bristled at the accusation. “You didn’t see the way he’d look at us? Nothing gets past that kid. Shit, I mean—knowing the rest of your family is screwing each other? There’s no way that didn’t fuck him up.” He blew out a sigh and ran his hands through his hair. “You ever think he…”

He always wondered whether Sam might have seen them. It happened in movies all the time: the cheating wife, blissfully unaware that her husband watched her and her new beau through the window, disgusting and unthinkable to the audience. Sam was a hunter, he moved quiet. One unlocked door, one midnight walk where he noticed the shape of the Impala’s hood parked by the roadside. It was a fucking nightmare, but it wasn’t unreasonable. 

John huffed and took a swig of whiskey. He wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, piggish, and looked at Dean over his shoulder.

“Why are you always trying to make this into something else? You think I like this?”

He wagged the bottle between the two of them. He’d said similar things before, but it still hurt. It wasn’t about liking it. Love, sex, their whole thing, felt more like some symbiotic, parasitic relationship than anything human. Maybe they were both worse for it, but Dean couldn’t see either of them living without it. Or maybe it was just him.

“I think you’re doing it,” Dean said carefully. “I think you don’t do things you don’t want to do.”

“Is that what you think? You think my life’s been so fucking perfect, Dean? It’s all worked out for me?”

“This”—Dean gestured around them, to the shitty motel room, the garbage whiskey, the empty space where Sam was supposed to be—“isn’t working out for anyone.”

John rolled his eyes at him, which felt shockingly cruel. He used his good foot to hook his boxers off the floor and kick them into his hands. He pulled them on and hobbled to his duffel bag to pull out a clean pair of jeans, which he also struggled into. Dean felt stupid and vulnerable still sitting naked in bed, but he couldn’t move.

John said, “Nobody’s twisting your arm. You don’t like what’s going on here, say the word and it’s done.”

“I don’t want done, I—”

“What do you want? Sounds like you got a lot of ideas about this thing oughta go, you got something you wanna say to me?”

Dean had a lot he wanted to tell him, things he’d gone over in his head so many times he’d worn them thin. I want you to treat me like your partner. I want you to trust me. I want you to let me drive. I want you to blow me more than once a year. I want you to listen to me, I want to talk about Sam, I want to stop pretending both of us aren’t fucked up without him, and I want you to come to Stanford with me and apologize to him so he’ll finally come home. 

In his dreams, he told John all of it, calm and collected, and John said, you’re right, I never thought of it like that. You’ve grown up, son. I respect you.

Now that Dean had his chance in real life, he choked. He took too long and John sneered at him.

“That’s what I thought. If you don’t want to be here, then fuck off to California with your brother. But don’t you start lecturing me.”

John pulled a wrinkled old shirt over his head and Dean realized with a shock of horror that he was getting ready to leave. Shock, bleeding into betrayal and anger. Dean didn’t usually let it get so close to the surface, but there it was, because this wasn’t the first or fiftieth time they’d gotten into a fight after sex that ended with John leaving him alone in some shitty motel room to stew in it. He crawled to the edge of the bed and sat up.

“Fine, storm off again,” he spat. “Tell me what you think that’s gonna fix.”

John said, “I’m not arguing with you, Dean.”

Dean expected a fight, but John just sounded tired. He wasn’t looking at him anymore. Dean thought, with an aching sadness and resignation, I don’t even get to get mad properly.

“Then talk to me.” It came out pathetically earnest. He couldn’t take it back, so he doubled down. “Please.”

It got to him, Dean could see it. John sighed that sigh he did sometimes, like an old basset hound. His thumb spun his ring around his finger.

“I can’t,” he said quietly. “Not about this. You know that.”

Dean did know, but. “You could try.”

John looked him in the eye then and held his gaze, him standing over by the table and Dean naked at the end of the bed, and it made Dean realize how rarely they really looked at each other those days. Those five quiet seconds of unbroken eye contact felt more intimate than riding his dick. John looked sad, or sadder than usual. It was something in the eyes. A widower’s emptiness.

He shook his head, rubbed a hand through his hair and looked away.

“Every day, I pray to God you start telling me no.” His voice was like gravel. He swallowed hard. “Other than that… I got nothing to say.”

Whatever Dean thought John was would finally say when he asked, he naively didn’t expect it to be so gutting. But still, Dean didn’t blame him. Not really. The things Dean felt about being half in love with his own father for his entire life could fill a long, disgusting book, but he knew it had to pale in comparison to whatever John was going through. What he had been going through every day since that summer night when Dean was eighteen, in silence, not talking to him or anyone about it. Since before then, probably.

“I’ll go, if you want.” Dean gestured to where John was subtly leaning his weight on the dresser. “You can’t even walk.”

John shook his head. “Stay. I’ll shower.”

He nodded at the open bathroom door and started to make his way over, kind of pathetic with the hobble. Dean watched him go. 

Dean wasn’t going to tell him no. He knew he should, more than anything, but he’d have better luck telling Sam to stay gone. He knew there was no breakup to this, no fixing it, like one of those sick trees that was rotten all the way inside. John was right, like he usually was: there was nothing to say.

While John was in the shower, Dean pulled on boxers, put his sling back on and got his phone out of his bag. He sat on the bed—only one bed this time, so it was his side, on the right—and flipped his phone open. He stared at his recent calls: SAMMY SAMMY SAMMY SAMMY, all bounced.

He hit call and put it to his ear. It rang, so Sam still hadn’t disconnected the number. Dean watched steam billow out from under the bathroom door, and spun the amulet around to lay on his chest, and let it ring.

2006

After the gate to Hell was closed and the yellow-eyed demon was dead, Sam and Dean drove.

Bobby and Ellen understood that they had to be alone and Dean was pretty sure you could see his hands shaking from space anyway, no explanation needed. Him and Sam drove through the endless pitch black farmland of Wyoming with the stereo off, sitting in perfect silence listening to the rumble of the engine. Ostensibly, they were heading for the next town over, but mostly Dean needed to drive.

His thoughts flitted around in his head like paper in the wind, nothing he could grab onto. Sam, alive. Dad, dead. Him, somewhere in between. Sam knew now what Dean had done to save him. John for him and him for Sam. Nested.

“Dean,” Sam said softly.

They hadn’t spoken in the twenty minutes since they left the graveyard. Somehow, hearing Sam threw Dean back into his body from wherever else he’d been, and he ached all over in places he was numb before. His head and back throbbed with pain and could smell the blood on his face but, Jesus, it was good to hear Sam’s voice.

He looked over. Sam’s eyes were shining in the dark all blinky and red and cried-out, but his eyes were open and it was the best thing Dean had ever seen.

Sam said, “Was it… hard for you? To see him?”

Dean looked back at the road. “Dad?”

“Yeah.”

Like a knife in the throat, slitting him in two. For a split second, he thought John would come back for good. John put his hand on his shoulder and it felt real, down to the way he dug his thumb in. If Sam and Ellen and Bobby hadn’t been there, Dean would have tried to pick up John’s hand and kiss his knuckles. It was the only thing Dean could think about. It would have made for a fitting last moment. Their actual last moment together wasn’t something Dean even remembered; a quick hand on his neck while Sam’s back was turned, a check-in, a goodbye that he didn’t know was a goodbye. It had sat rotten in his gut for a year.

He put himself back together. “You tell me, he’s your dad, too.”

Sam laughed. Not a good laugh. It was unhinged and crackly.

“Holy shit. Can we not keep doing this? Now?”

“Doing what?”

“Dean.”

“What?”

Sam got frantic. “Pull over.”

“What? Why?”

“Stop the car, I’m serious.”

Dean was going almost a hundred and slowed it down as quick as he could, then hauled over onto the gravel shoulder. There were no lights, middle of nowhere, irrigation ditches and power lines on both sides and farmland beyond that.

While the car was still rolling to a stop, Sam wrenched his door open and climbed out.

“Sam!” Dean called. “What the fuck?”

He threw it into park and shot out after Sam. Sam was already a few yards away, but he wasn’t running, which meant this was a ‘talking about something’ pull-over, one of the worst kinds. Dean’s mind raced, wondering, as he wandered after him.

“Sam, what the—”

Sam whirled around. He ran his hands through his hair, manic, lit up by the headlights.

“Okay, I know you don’t want to do this and I don’t either, but if we can’t say it now, then we can’t—there’s one thing, I—I don’t know how to say it, I just have to say it, I can’t—”

“Slow down! What the hell are you talking about?”

Dean met Sam where he was coming towards him and Sam stopped walking. Dean was between him and the headlights and Sam’s face was dark.

Sam asked, “Did he make you?”

“Did who make me what?”

“Dad. Did he…”

He trailed off, and somehow, it took Dean a few long seconds. When he got it, he was so shocked that Sam was finally saying it that he forgot to keep pretending. He shoved him hard.

“Jesus, Sam! Shut up!”

Sam threw his hands in the air. “He’s dead! You don’t have to keep—”

Dean grabbed him by the front of his jacket, teeth bared. “Shut your fucking mouth, don’t you talk about him like that. He just saved our lives, you can’t—”

“He’s fucking dead! You don’t have to keep covering for him!”

“I’m not!”

“‘Cause I’m not gonna sit here and let you talk about him like he’s some kind of god, I can’t—I can’t, Dean, you can’t make me—”

Dean grabbed him by both arms and pulled, making him stoop down so they were face to face.

“I don’t want to do this, man, please.” Dean’s voice cracked. Sam stopped trying to interrupt him. “After all this shit? Can we just get a room somewhere? Have a few beers? Eat something?” He felt raw and insane, blubbering, and he couldn’t stop. “Fuck, I spent three days staring at your dead body, can I just look at you?”

Sam just stared at him, wide-eyed and gutted. Nothing knocked Sam out like a please.

“Okay.” Sam put his hands on Dean’s arms and squeezed, so they were mirror images of each other, grappling. When he straightened up, Dean let him go. “Pull in here. We’ll sit.”

They got back into the car and Dean drove ahead to where a dirt road broke into the field on the right, overgrown with long, flowering grasses. The road was unfenced on both sides and Dean pulled off into the field. The ground was mucky and wet with recent rain and rocks pinged up against the undercarriage, grass swishing noisily against the sides.

He got them far enough from the road before killing the engine. It was too cloudy for stars, so he left the lights on. It wasn’t ‘laying on the hood’ weather by any means, but being in the wide open felt so good he could almost breathe.

They got out at the same time, but as Dean went around to the front, Sam went to the trunk. Sam caught Dean’s questioning look and tipped his head towards the hood.

“Sit. Stay.”

Dean knew he should have made a joke (heel, boy) but he didn’t have it in him. He hopped up on the hood and lay back on the windshield. 

He called to Sam, “We’re out of beer, if that’s what you’re looking for.” I drank it all and puked it all up while you were dead, he didn’t add.

No response, but Sam was digging around in the trunk. Dean folded his hands over his stomach and closed his eyes. He tried to look relaxed, but his heart was hammering in his chest. Did he make you? Humiliating and pitiful. They were on the verge of actually getting into it after so many years, and on top of everything else, he felt like his insides were on the outside. He could sleep for a thousand years, he could run until his legs broke.

The car rocked as Sam slammed the trunk shut, then again as he got on the hood. Dean’s eyes flew open when something wet touched his face.

Sam was pressing a damp washcloth to the cut on his forehead. He frowned and tried to sit up, but Sam said, in a very small voice, “Let me.”

He was looking at the cut, not meeting Dean’s eyes. Dean lay back down. 

Sam wiped away the blood with a gentleness that was always impressive for someone with such huge hands, and Dean had to swallow a lump in his throat. Sam always tried. No matter what stupid shit Dean got himself into, Sam was there with a fistful of Advil and a bottle of water, when John only gave him a disapproving glare and a set of punishing wind sprints.

Dean pressed his lips together, eyes aching with unshed tears. One year. That meant one year left to keep it together, one final home stretch and he’d take it to the grave with him. Or— one year left, to be a brother without this weight that had been bearing down on him for a decade. That one sounded pretty good. Whatever was left between him and Sam after the truth was out, it would be the real thing. He owed Sam that much. John would have to forgive him when he saw him on the other side.

Dean kept his eyes shut when he said it. Easier that way.

“You knew?”

Sam huffed a humourless laugh. The washcloth left Dean’s head and the car creaked as Sam sat back.

“Jesus, Dean.”

Dean blinked his eyes open. They’d adjusted to the dark and he could see Sam’s face in profile. He was moving away to lay back on the hood, at the same time that Dean propped up on his elbows.

“What?”

Sam shook his head, mouth twisted into an uncomfortable grimace. He still wasn’t looking at Dean. “It’s kind of a hard thing to miss.”

Dean’s ears burned. It felt worthless to be embarrassed now of all times—one year left, what good was spending any of it on shame?—but he couldn’t help it. He choked on it. He wondered whether Sam had actually seen them, or maybe he found some of the ephemera, a condom or a packet of lube. A mark on Dean’s wrist or John’s back. Maybe John said something when he was blackout drunk, or, Christ, maybe Dean did. He couldn’t stand not knowing. He needed to know if it was his fault.

“How long?” he asked.

Sam sat up next to him. “How long have I known?”

“Yeah.”

“For sure? Uh.” Sam pinched the bridge of his nose, face tipped down. “I was sixteen, probably? A water main broke at school and I came home early. And.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dean gurgled, raising a hand as if to signal stop no go back shut up.

Sam said, “I just—heard. I didn’t see.”

Sixteen. All that time they spent worrying and fighting about it and they didn’t even make it two years. It would have been awful, too—creaking bed springs, their skin slapping, his pathetic squeals of pleasure. Dean drew up his knees and put a hand over his face. 

“I can’t believe this.”

It didn’t feel real, even as it unraveled around him. It felt like it was happening to someone else. The only thing that felt tangible was that Sam had been dead, and now he was alive, because of Dean. He’d done that. That he was actually talking to Sam, and talking about this, was— the kid who’d heard him and John, who knew what they were doing, was a different kid. This one had died. Dean, too, was going to die.

He spun his wheels like that for a while, mindlessly looping, head in his hands. The hood was still warm under them and the engine pinged as it cooled.

Quietly, Sam said, “You’d know, if it were me.” Dean looked over. He was scowling out at the field. “If it were me, you’d kill him.”

Dean couldn’t remember the last time he thought about that, but he had: he wondered with horror and a jealousy that made him want to drink bleach whether he was just the first son who’d agreed to it, not the first son John had tried. He’d never thought of it exactly the way Sam was putting it, but—if he’d found out John was fooling around with Sam, regardless of anything else—it made him sick. It made his hands flex with violence. Sam wasn’t wrong. He would’ve taken Sam, stolen the car and drove until he ran out of country, but that wasn’t the same thing.

“I’m not asking you to forgive us,” Dean said to his hands.

Sam pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“Fuck, listen to you. I should’ve…” He swallowed and gave a horrible nearly-laugh. “I didn’t even think. You were my big brother, you looked out for me, I didn’t even think to look out for you. I thought— I don’t know. I should’ve looked out for you.”

“You did.”

Another laugh. “Not very well.”

Fucking heartbreaking. There wasn’t enough resurrection in the world to make up for the ways Dean failed his brother. Nobody took on weight like a Winchester, and he was stupid to think that Sam was somehow immune to the nagging worry that plagued him and John.

He had nothing to say to that, nothing profound enough in his stupid brain to make Sam give up the blame. He wanted to be shocked that Sam would blame himself, but he knew how he’d feel if it were him, and nothing would help. When he sat next to Sam’s dead body going over the laundry list of his life’s failures, nothing could have made him let them go.

Dean stared down at his hands and spun his ring around. His head was pounding, the cut cold and raw where Sam had been dabbing at it. Crickets chirped. Rain started to plip off the hood of the car and hiss in the grass. He still felt John’s phantom hand on his shoulder.

“He didn’t,” Dean said into the silence. When Sam looked over at him, questioning, he added, “Make me. Ever.”

He could see Sam keep staring at him out of the corner of his eye. Nothing could have made him look back.

Sam said, “You were just a kid. You can’t seriously—”

“I wasn’t a kid.”

“Yeah, you were. You were what, like fifteen? That’s not—”

“I was twenty.”

Sam stared at him, for a long time. “I can’t tell if you seriously believe that.”

“What does it matter? It was my call. I made a decision. We made a decision.”

Part of him wanted to make the whole thing crash and burn by telling Sam every gory detail, making him gag over it, anything to get the fire he knew he deserved. He kissed me outside a gas station once and when some guy gave him shit for it, Dad lost it and beat him half to death. I heard him crying in the bathroom afterwards, a few times. I’d jerk off for him in the passenger seat on long drives. He liked to watch. He liked coming in my mouth. He called me ‘baby’ when he was really tanked. He got a lot rougher in bed after you left. I liked it. A lot.

Sam slid off the hood and leaned against the bumper. He blocked one of the headlights and it was hard to see without it. Rain spat through the beam of the remaining light.

Sam said, “You worshiped him. That’s not deciding.”

Dean slid off the hood in the same way. He grabbed Sam’s jacket and spun him around to face him.

“I said it was my call, alright? Whatever was fucked up with him, it was fucked up with me, too. I can’t make you get it, but we were— It didn’t…” Dean trailed off, feeling stupid. Sam was looking at him like he wanted to cry and it set Dean’s teeth on edge. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything.”

Dean let him go. He couldn’t look at him yet, at the same time that letting him out of his line of sight made him panic. So he looked at him.

“I’m not gonna stand here and tell you it wasn’t ten kinds of fucked up, but you don’t get to treat me like I’m some fucking charity case, and if that’s why you wanted to talk about this shit, then fine, congrats, you’re—”

“That’s not why.”

“Then what?”

“Then, I don’t want you… blaming yourself.”

Sam was so awkward and so earnest. It reminded Dean of that first night, afterwards, the two of them standing in the living room after Dean brought the sheets in. Him, coming apart at the seams, manic and sick and scared, and Sam… there. Like he always was. Sam had known this awful, fucked up thing for years, and he was still around. 

Dean said, “Don’t pretend you know what it was like. You left. I was…” He looked away. It was one of those moments when he really, really realized that John was past-tense, forever. John would never have to have this conversation. “I wanted it. Alright? And he…” 

Don’t say it, Dean told himself, desperately, trying to haul the words back in. Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it—

“He needed me,” he finished.

He saw Sam wince. Dean’s face was hot but he hoped it was too dark to see. He knew how it sounded, and it was exactly like that.

Sam just huffed. “Yeah, well. You needed a dad.”

Dean was eighteen again. He was crying in front of his kid brother asking for forgiveness he had no right to have, and Sam was just standing there giving it to him like he was worth forgiving. Dean wanted to get him to a warm, dry motel room and bundle into the same bed and fall asleep watching late-night TV. He wanted to wake up and roll over and have the last ten years of his life be a dream. Sam would be a plucky twelve-year-old who jammed his freezing toes behind his knees to wake him up.

Dean had no idea how long they stood there for, staring at each other with matching what do we do now expressions in the glow of the headlights, getting rained on harder by the minute. Sam’s hair stuck to his forehead and his jacket was going dark over the shoulders.

Dean opened his mouth to say something—something worthless like are we good, as if there could be any good after a betrayal like I was fucking our dad—when Sam grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him into a hug.

It was so fierce it knocked the air out of Dean’s lungs. Sam’s hands fisted in the back of his jacket and his ear was pressed to his cheek. Dean’s hands hovered over Sam’s back, empty.

“You don’t have to—”

“Shut up. I know.” Sam’s arms curled up behind his shoulders, his damp sleeves soaking in. “I’m so sorry, man.”

Dean laughed an awful hacking laugh. “What the hell are you sorry for?”

There was another pause that was a little too long. “Just shut up and hug me.”

Dean sighed, settled his hands on Sam’s back and fell into him, heavy and exhausted and wrung-out. 

He turned his face into the crook of Sam’s neck where his collar was wet with rain and warm from his body. He smelled like sweat, metal and gun oil. Dean closed his eyes.