rivers_bend

Title: In the beached margin of the sea
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Words: 20,500
Rating: Adult
Spoilers: none. Pre-series.
Warnings/Enticements: Sam is 17. Violence (no more so than show)
Summary: Sam and Dean black out on a hunt, and when they wake up, Dean's having visions and Sam can't get new, strange feelings out of his head. When John finds out about the side effects, he'll do anything to get rid of the "curse". But Sam and Dean don't want to go back to the way things were before.





The Road So Far

In Filcher's Hollow, just over a mile south south west from the lightning-struck oak on Pillar Mountain Road, there is a clearing in the woods. Because of underbrush and fallen logs, it's not evident from the ground that the clearing is a perfect circle, and sturdy branches arching into the space from above hide its shape from anyone flying overhead. It's just a clearing, always been there, and no one has ever thought to question it.

At 11:45 PM on August 7th 2000, Tim Baylor and Ray Jenkins are in the clearing with a case of beer, a bottle of whiskey, and an eighth of weed. They are celebrating their release from county lockup by getting wasted. Neither of them care even a little that they are in violation of the conditions of release. At 11:59, they hear a rustling in the underbrush.

"Did you hear that?" Tim says.

Ray is too slowed by weed and booze to respond before three dogs leap at him and start tearing at this throat and stomach. At the same time, two more dogs jump Tim, ripping into his arms and legs. He's screaming, his eyes and mouth full of his friend's blood, when the church bells six miles away strike midnight.

Their bodies are found two days later by three college students on a road trip from San Diego to Boston.

On August 13th, in an effort to prove how not scared of wild dogs they are, Max Bloom and TJ D'Argent bring their girlfriends Missy and Krissy Clementine out to the clearing. The twins have been away at their grandparents' farm since the end of July and haven't heard about the attack yet, so the gesture is lost on them. They assume Max and TJ just want to party. Both girls have been here before with other boyfriends. No big deal.

At least it's no big deal until, less than three minutes after they arrive at the clearing, two-year-old Johanna Jordache toddles out of the woods clutching a dirt-matted teddy bear.

Max screams, though later he swears up and down to anyone who will listen that he was just shouting to get the girls’ attention because everyone knows that girls are better with little kids. Krissy runs over to pick Johanna up. The child disappeared from her bed two weeks before the girls left for their grandparents', and Krissy, who wants to be homecoming queen when school starts again, correctly assumes that the person who can be credited with finding the missing girl will get her picture in the local paper. All press is good press, but being-a-heroine press is best.

Johanna is too young to tell anyone where she's been, and though volunteers from across the county search the woods, no trace of her captors or where she was kept is found.

On August 20th, Miles Rankin goes into the woods with his shotgun, hoping for some out-of-season venison. Two hours later, Albert Wilkie, the town's mailman, picks up Miles, naked, mute, and demented, on the side of the road. Sherriff Alpert finds Miles' gun and clothes in the clearing, but no sign of what might have happened to him. Angie Rankin, who's put up with Miles drinking and sleeping around for twenty-seven years, decides that she can't deal with a man who won't even speak and who keeps trying to eat her prize flowers right out of the garden, so she sends him up to the mental ward in the city hospital.


Washington County, Virginia

Dean's been after John for going on a year now to let him go on a hunt on his own. John was in the jungle by the time he was Dean's age—younger— and didn't even think about it. But now that he knows what's really out there, he's been stalling, even though Dean's smart, quick, as good a shot as John, maybe better. However, lately it's starting to feel like he's got two sullen adolescents on his hands: Sam being Sam, and Dean reverting to the kind of teenager he never was, bored here while Sam's in school and John's making use of a local hunter's library and waiting for a contact to show his face. Tired of Dean's grumbling, John's been scouring local papers, trying to find something to occupy him and Dean both.

Second week of September, he finds a possibility. Two local men mauled by wild dogs in the woods. Not unheard of, but John has learned to be suspicious of animal attacks over the years; they're a favorite explanation for things police or journalists can't explain any other way.

The article is a little short on details: Misters Baylor and Jenkins, fresh out of jail after serving time for animal cruelty, found ripped apart in a clearing a few weeks back. John's karma meter is pinging—torturing animals and then mauled by them?—but there's a better than average chance it is just a bear or coyote attack. No harm sending the boys out, get them to have a look in broad daylight, report back if anything looks strange. Dean's more than capable, and it might get him off John's back for a while. Even if it's something bigger than a coyote, the boys, well-armed and during the day, will be just fine.


~~~~~||~~~~~

Sam hates that he feels excited when Dad asks him to go out alone with Dean to do recon—he's seventeen, he should want to go to the school dance, cop a feel of a cheerleader under the bleachers. He wants to want to. But going out to the woods with his brother: full moon, mossy clearing, no dad— Even knowing that 90% of the appeal is things that will never happen outside his fevered (and sick, let's not forget sick, Sam) imagination doesn't make him less enthusiastic. Just the ten percent that's a late-night drive and time spent with Dean, the maybe chance to impress him with quick reflexes or ninja powers of observation—even that sounds better than a crappy DJ and overpriced soda and a bunch of kids he couldn't care less about getting to know better.

It turns out Dad wants them to go in the afternoon—figures—but Sam still doesn't make plans to go to the dance. Even though he's grumbling that it's not much of a challenge, Dean's clearly excited to have something to do besides sift through stinky old books. With Dean in a good mood, Sam's sure he can talk his brother into going somewhere when they're done looking for coyote shit or whatever. Dad doesn't say anything about them having to come back right away.

With a map sketched by the motel's owner, they find their way to the pullout near the burned-hollow tree—a patch of dirt on the shoulder, big enough to hold three or four cars, tamped down by use over the years. Parked right in the middle is a dusty pickup, empty gun rack in the back window. They won't be the only ones hunting today, which has its advantages. At least they won't look out of place toting guns through the woods.

Still, "Keep your pistol under your shirt," Dean warns Sam, like Sam doesn't know deer hunters don't generally use pistols. Looking around to make sure no one is spying on them from the trees, Dean lifts the false floor of the trunk to get out their weapons.

Sam glances at the truck again. "With luck they'll have headed the other direction and we won't even see them." But, after checking the ammo and the safety, Sam tucks the Smith and Wesson in the small of his back, making sure his sweatshirt isn't caught in the grip.

Dean shoulders their rifle and hands Sam the shotgun, and they head for the clearing.

Sam's first thought is that it looks like something out of a movie—a sunlit beacon ringed by oak and pine, fallen logs inviting hikers to sit and rest—but then they get closer and it just looks like a break in the trees, maybe somewhere the topsoil is too thin over rocky ground for the pines and oaks to take root.

"We'll criss-cross the clearing together," Dean says, interrupting Sam's musings, "and then split up to circle around. But don't leave my sight."

"I can take care of myself, you know," Sam argues, but without much heat. He doesn't want to let Dean out of his sight either; not only because he's enjoying spending time with him, but because he's not exactly hating the way the dappled sun picks up the shift of muscles in Dean's forearm as he moves the rifle to a more comfortable spot, or the way it makes his freckles seem to appear and disappear.

"Yeah, yeah, you're a regular Billy the Kid. But we're still not going farther than the other one can see. Dad's orders."

Sam doesn't bother sharing his opinion on Dad's orders. It's nothing Dean hasn't heard before, and Sam doesn't want to start a fight. Instead, he walks with Dean toward the center of the clearing.

There's not much to see. Grass, dirt, a few late wildflowers, a tatter of crime scene tape. Sam turns to Dean to ask if they're going to go across or side-to-side. He never even gets his mouth open.

The next thing Sam sees is the sky. He's on his back on the ground, the shotgun hard under his right elbow, and the pistol a painful lump against his spine.

"Dean?" he asks, even as he hears Dean saying, "Sam?"

They sit up and look around. Shadows stab deep into the clearing from the west. The sun was high in the sky when they arrived.

"Are you okay?" they both ask, turning to look at each other, and then they both answer, "I think so."

"Jinx," they say next and then laugh. There's an edge of hysteria to the sound.

Standing, they pick up their guns and then stare at each other. Sam can't remember why they're here, and from the look on his face, neither can Dean.

"We should probably get back to the car," Dean says.

Sam looks around the clearing—a quiet peaceful space, with birds twittering from tree branches, a squirrel sitting on a log, tail twitching, watching them—and he can't think of any reason to disagree with his brother.

When they get to the car, Dean puts the guns back in the trunk and gets behind the wheel. Sam's happy to be sitting next to Dean, summer air pouring through the windows, sky starting to go pink in the rear view mirror. He wants to tell Dean to just keep driving, to take him somewhere they can sit and watch the sun set then lie under the stars, but there's a niggling worry at the back of his mind, too. Something's wrong, he might have gotten hurt in that clearing, sick, Dad won't be happy.

Last year, Sam got really, really drunk one night while Dad was away and Dean was out with some girl. The whiskey made him vomit, but it also made him feel disconnected from his anger and frustration. He feels the same disconnection from the worry now.

"Do you think we're drunk?" Sam asks.

Dean looks at him sharply. "Do you feel drunk? Dizzy? Like you're going to be sick?"

The answer is obviously very important to Dean, so Sam considers it carefully before replying. "Not really. I feel fine, actually. But then there's like, I don't know, this haze of worry?" He can't really explain.

"Well, you should be worried," Dean snaps. "We just passed out in the woods for no reason and I don't even know what we were doing there in the first place."

On the tail of Dean's words, Sam's worry becomes clear and focused, but also focused is Sam's memory of Dad sending them out to look for signs of either a wild animal attack or something more in their line of work.

"Looking for coyote shit," Sam blurts.

"What?" Dean keeps his eyes on the road, but Sam can feel him like he's looking anyway.

"We were looking—"

"For coyotes," Dean interrupts. "Or bears. Right. How could I forget?"

"There was nothing there anyway," Sam says. "Just a clearing in the woods. Think Dad was just giving us something to do."

So you'd stop bitching. Sam knows he doesn't say that last part out loud, but Dean still slaps his thigh.

Sam hits Dean back, and they glare for a minute before getting into a slap fight like they used to when Sam was six and Dean was ten and they were both riding in the back seat, supposed to be sleeping. Only this time Sam's winning, Dean handicapped by needing to drive and Sam bigger enough now to have an advantage anyway. They start laughing so hard that Sam can hardly breathe, and only stop because Dean needs both hands to make the sharp left turn into the motel lot.


~~~~~||~~~~~

Dean gives Sam first shower, though, not liking how flushed Sam looks, he warns his brother not to let the water get too hot. Dean's feeling flushed himself, muddle-headed, and wonders again what exactly happened to them. Maybe he should lie down for a minute. Dad probably won't be back for a few hours, no reason not to rest before he cleans up. Then he can get organized, figure out what to tell his father once Dean is less covered in forest floor.

When Dean's hand runs over his abs as he's stripping off his muddy clothes, it sends a thrill south to his cock. Not his everyday reaction to getting undressed, at least not since he was fourteen or so, when just about everything sent a thrill southward. He'd ignore it, but it's a compelling sensation, hardening his dick in his briefs as though he were already stroking himself. The water is still running in the bathroom, so Dean finishes taking his clothes off and sinks down on the bed, wrapping a hand around his cock and tugging. Instead of one of his stock fantasies, his thoughts go unbidden to Sam in the shower.

"No," he says out loud, trying to force his favorite busty Penthouse red-head over the image instead, but the shower scene persists. Only—huh—it isn't actually Sam he can see, but himself, down on his knees, mouth on his brother's dick.

Dean lets go his own dick like it's on fire. "What the—"

He doesn't like to do it, but Dean will, in the darkest recesses of his private thoughts, admit that he's occasionally (or even not so occasionally) thought about Sam in ways that aren't exactly fraternal. However, a longing feeling when Sam wraps arms around him from behind and peers over his shoulder to see what Dean's cooking, or a jolt of lust when a shirtless Sam dips his fingers below his waistband to scratch, is a whole universe away from seeing himself down on his knees, slurping and sucking and—Jesus.

Flat on his back, Dean grips tight to the bedspread either side of his hips. He's not doing this—he's not—but god, it still feels like he's got a hand on himself, jerking hard and slow, the way he likes it when he's got time—

"What the fuck?" he mutters, glaring down his body at his jerking dick and thrusting hips. Then a light bulb goes off. The thing in the woods—it must be a succubus.

An invisible, incorporeal succubus… that made him and Sam pass out for over an hour with no dreams at all and come to just as dressed as when they'd fallen, then followed them home and forced a definitely awake Dean to fantasize about sucking— Yeah. Okay, maybe not a succubus then.

Dean is still gripping the bedspread, but the kneeling-Dean in his mind's eye has just jerked shower-Sam to coming all over kneeling-Dean's chest, and somehow that relieves some of real-Dean's desperate need to touch himself. It doesn't get rid of his hard on, though, and when he realizes that the showering-with-Sam images are gone, he quickly jerks himself to orgasm, thinking of nothing but beautiful busty centerfolds.

Maybe a Siren, Dean thinks as he idly rubs his jizz into his belly. Except Sirens are also not so much with the invisible, incorporeal schtick. He's digging in his duffle for clean clothes when he hears the bathroom door open behind him.

"Hey, Sam—" he starts, but he's hit again with a thigh-shaking quake of want that stops him mid-thought. Gripping the wash-greyed t-shirt nearest his hand, Dean takes a deep breath and turns around. Towel around his waist gripped in one white-knuckled fist, Sam is standing in the doorway, staring at Dean. Or, well, at the wall above and to the right of Dean's head.

"Sam?" Dean's suddenly embarrassed about the flecks of come dried to his stomach, about being naked in front of his brother, though he was naked in front of him this morning and didn't think anything of it. He drapes the shirt he's holding so it covers his dick.

"Shower's all—done. I'm your—It's yours," Sam mumbles.

Dean was set to ask if Sam felt okay, if anything weird happened to him in the shower, but he decides that is a conversation best had when neither of them is naked, so he makes a break for the bathroom the second Sam moves out of the doorway.


~~~~~||~~~~~

As soon as the door closes behind Dean, Sam shakes his head like he's trying to get water out of his ear. Jerking off in the shower had cleared the last of the haze from his head, but then he'd come out into the room and seen his brother bare-ass naked bending over his duffel and been hit with not only his usual lust, but a rush of panic. It's been three or four years since Sam gave up panicking when he got hard thinking about what he'd like to do to his brother's ass, so the return of that feeling is a little freaky.

Now that Dean is safely on the other side of the door, Sam feels better, but he's definitely starting to wonder if there is some kind of panic-inducing creature out there in the woods. Maybe it affects animals as well as people, and it drove whatever canines are out there to attack those two guys. Probably a ghost or something. With all the research they've been doing lately, Dean or Dad might know more.

Dean's wearing his t-shirt when he comes out of the bathroom and keeps his towel wrapped around himself until he's pulled his jeans on. Clearly the panic ghost got to him, too.

"So, I think it might be a poltergeist," Sam says when Dean finally finishes dressing and looks at him.

"Yeah?"

"Something that induces panic, anyway. Maybe not a ghost. But I keep getting freaked out for no reason, and, I don't know, it doesn't really feel like me, you know?"

"Panic?" Dean does concerned-big-brother face for a moment but then his features smooth out. "So like you get a vision of something scary?"

"No, not a vision. It's more like that feeling when you're sure you're being followed but you turn around and no one is there?"

"So you're not seeing things?"

"No." Then Sam actually looks at his brother. Dean looks a little disappointed. "Are you seeing things?"

Dean shakes his head totally unconvincingly.

"What are you seeing?" Sam's worried again, but it's actually his worry this time. "Savage packs of dogs? Axe murderers?"

"No," Dean says. "Not exactly." He flushes, and for a second Sam can see Dean again as he'd imagined him while he was in the shower, flushed, wet—

Then the door bangs open and Dad's back.

His mouth is pinched and he throws his bag with more force than necessary into the corner; it's a good bet the guy he went to see didn't show. Again.

"So," he says, turning to Dean. "Is it a hunt or just some wild dogs?"

The panic is back, buzzing at the back of Sam's head, though panic is too strong a word this time. Worry, maybe.

What the hell am I supposed to tell him? Sam thinks. Only he's not thinking that at all; he knows just what he plans to tell Dad. It's more like the worry is thinking it.

"There's something there," Sam says when Dean doesn't answer Dad.

Shit, don't tell him about losing time, or— The words like a whisper in Sam's head.

Sam looks at Dean, who gives him the tiniest head shake from behind Dad's arm.

Okay, that's fucking weird. Voice in his head again, only this time definitely Sam's own thoughts.

"Boys?" John says in a voice that means they'd better spit it out, and now.

With a quick glance at Dean, Sam continues. "We didn't see any sign of animals at all, wild or supernatural, but—" Sam gets a strong sense again that he shouldn't tell Dad too much, though he's not sure why not. When he fumbles for a moment wondering what he should say, Dean takes over.

"It's probably nothing, but, well, since we got back— Sam and I, we've—"

Sam jumps in before Dad can do more than look sharply at them. "I've been feeling this fear that's not my own."

"What do you mean?" John looks cross still but is starting to look worried, too.

Sam struggles to explain, thinking the drunk metaphor might not be the best one to use with his father. "It's like if you're watching a horror movie, and the guy on screen is terrified and you kinda— You feel what he's feeling, but it's not your fear—"

"So you are seeing things?" Dean interrupts, sounding pissed like he thinks Sam lied last time Dean asked that.

"No! I just meant that it's not my fear."

Now Dad's looking back and forth between them. "Are you having visions, Dean?"

"It's just like Sam said. With the movie. Only I guess I can maybe see more of the— whatever than he can."

Sam feels his chest go tight like he's the one who just lied to Dad, but before Sam can wonder how he knows Dean is lying, Dad's stomach growls loudly, and he declares there isn't much they can do about it tonight anyway, with Conrad gone on an errand and his books therefore out of reach. Asking if Dean feels okay now, and getting an affirmative answer, Dad sends him out for pizza and spends the time Dean's gone yelling at various people on the phone about not being where they said when they said.

Food makes Sam feel better, no more weird feelings that don't belong to him. Surprisingly, Dad doesn't give them the third degree, even after they've eaten; he's happy to settle down in front of the TV, only checking once to see if Sam or Dean has had any strange feelings since he got back.

With Dean and Dad both paying more attention to the documentary about military submarines than to Sam, Sam wonders if maybe he should have gone to the dance after all, but there's something nice about this too. Something settled. So Sam just lies on the bed, watching his dad and brother splitting a six pack, letting sleep pull him under while a narrator drones on about sonar and torpedoes, and the TV's blue-white light flickers on the ceiling.


~~~~~||~~~~~

Saturday morning, the boys are fine, no strange panics, no talk of visions, so when Conrad calls to tell John about a seer just over the state line who has some information about mysterious house fires, John back-burners whatever is going on in the clearing and heads over to Kentucky for the night, leaving Dean with instructions not to go anywhere near the woods.

After a six hour drive, John discovers the fires the seer knows about turn out to be something to do with a single property and nothing to do with Mary's death. But when she sees that her information is a disappointment, the woman has some pretty compelling suggestions about how they can make his trip worth both their whiles, so John not only gets a bed for the night but heads back to Virginia feeling like the weekend wasn't a total waste.

He gets back late Sunday after both boys are asleep. Dean lifts his head when John is unfolding the rollaway, makes as if to offer John the bed, but John just shakes his head and Dean goes back to sleep. Since the boys got too big to share, when they're in a motel they take turns on sofa beds or rollaways. John doesn't mind taking his turn too. He's slept plenty worse places.

Sam gets himself up and ready for school quietly enough that even in their cramped quarters, John doesn't wake until he hears Dean grumble, "Can you take the bus today?" to a Sam all dressed and standing by his brother's bed, backpack in hand.

"Sure," Sam murmurs.

Dean, probably too sleepy himself to worry about waking their father, doesn't lower his own voice when he says, "I'll pick you up after, though," then adds, "There's bus money in my pocket if you need it."

John props up on one elbow. "You gonna be late if you take the bus? You can take Dean's car; he can borrow the truck if he needs to go anywhere."

"Nah," Sam says, looking at Dean instead of John. "I'll be fine." With a clumsy shrug/nod/wave goodbye, he slumps out the door.

John should get up, but he and his new friend hadn't gotten much sleep Saturday night, and he's tired. Before he can second guess the decision, he lets his eyes slip shut and returns to the land of nod.

The second time he wakes, it's to the smell of coffee and fast-food sausage. Dean's putting a grease-stained white bag and a tray of drinks on the table when he notices John's awake.

"Hey," he says. "Loan out your own damned car if you want to be giving Sam something to drive."

Dean's not actually angry—John's seen Dean possessive and pissed off about the Impala often enough to know—but it wouldn't hurt to remind him who the father is around here anyway. "Technically speaking, that is my car. And I've got stuff in the truck."

Dean doesn't bother answering, just tips a pile of wrapped breakfast sandwiches out onto the table and digs into one. John stretches carefully, wary of the wobbly cot, and gets up to join him. After two cups of coffee and three sandwiches each, John is about to tell Dean what he has planned for the day when Dean flinches, hard, like someone shoved him.

"Fuck! Sammy!" Dean cries, jumping up and diving for his jacket.

"Dean?" There's a kick of dread trying to hit John in the guts, but he out-stubborns it, has himself half-convinced that Dean just remembered no one gave Sam lunch money before Dean's half out of his chair.

"Jesus. No." Dean's not talking to John, is looking the other way, and he really doesn't sound like this has anything to do with lunch money. But he's out the door before John can get any more out of him.

"They are going to be the death of me," John mutters, listening to tires chirp as Dean accelerates out of the motel lot.

Short of calling the school—and what the hell is he supposed to say, "My older son just flew out of here like the proverbial bat, shouting his brother's name; anything you want to tell me about Sam Winchester?"—there isn't much John can do except wait for Dean to come back. He has translating to do, so he settles down to that.

Both boys are back just over half an hour later, Dean with his jaw set and his eyes glinting hard, and Sam with a split lip, a grazed cheekbone, an eye starting to swell shut, and one hand clutching at his ribs.

"What the hell happened to you?" John shouts, never having been one to bother with bedside manner when there's information to be gained.

"I'm fine," Sam says, which doesn't answer the question.

Caught up in the mess of Sam's face, John completely forgets the mystery of Dean knowing it had happened from three miles away.

"Kid left his chemistry project in his locker and it spilled, blew the door off; I was in the way," Sam finally says when John looks at him hard, waiting for an answer.

"Looks an awful lot like damage caused by a fist," John counters.

"Well, I guess you'd know all about that." Sam tries to glare, winces, and settles for fixing his good eye on John's face. "Have you ever been hit in the face with a metal door?

John allows that he hasn't. But, "And did the locker door hit you in the ribs, too?"

"Yes," Sam says, gaze steady.

Dean's not saying a word, eyes flicking back and forth between his brother and his father, still looking like he'd like to take a swing at something. John remembers suddenly what started all this. "Dean? You have anything to say about why you ran out of here?"

"No, sir."

"No?"

"No. Sir." Unlike his brother, Dean's looking at his boots, mouth in a hard line.

Differently as they go about it, both his boys' faces mean the same thing. John's not getting any more out of them—not now, anyway. Dean on his own might crack, but when he's in cahoots with Sam, patience is the only thing that works. Doesn't mean John has to like it.

"See to that cut," he snaps. "I've got shit to do."

He scoops his books and journal off the table and slams the door behind himself.


~~~~~||~~~~~

Dean feels sick every time he daubs at Sam's face with the alcohol-soaked swab, which just adds to the anger churning in his guts. It'd be one thing if Sam lied to Dad; Dean's not exactly keen on telling him the truth about everything that's been happening to him the last couple days, either. But he doesn't get why Sam isn't telling Dean the truth.

When Dean tries to lift up Sam's shirt to look at his ribs, Sam bats him off.

"That's it, Sam. What the hell is going on? And don't give me any bullshit about chemistry experiments."

"What do you mean?" Sam's voice is flat as he busies himself putting stuff back in the first aid kit.

"I mean I was serious when I told you the school didn't call me. I could see those guys kicking the shit out of you, Sam. See it like it was happening to me. What the hell is going on?"

He means the visions, but Sam misconstrues, or pretends he does, and starts talking about the bullies instead. They've been after Sam since the second day of school; he hit one of them in the face with a stray basketball in PE and refused to give over his lunch money as an apology. They've been goading Sam for two weeks, but today they decided to drag him behind the old gym, let the one Sam had hit with a ball use his fists and feet on Sam while his five friends held Sam still.

"It's no big deal," Sam insists, when he gets to the point where the janitor came by and the guys let him go. "Assholes in every school."

"Yeah, there are. And it doesn't mean you ignore them beating the shit out of you. But that's not what I'm talking about." Dean grabs Sam's arm, keeping him from walking out of the bathroom.

Sam starts to pull away, but then gives in, dropping back to the toilet seat, his knees brushing Dean's where Dean's sitting on the edge of the bath tub. "I don't know what you want me to say, Dean. You keep asking if I'm having visions. I'm not. Asking me again isn't changing that."

Resisting the urge to squeeze Sam's wrist and shake it in frustration, Dean smoothes his palm over the back of Sam's hand, then links their fingers instead. Tells himself Sam looks like he needs the reassurance, doesn't admit that he needs it just as much.

"What about those weird feelings you said you've been having?" Dean keeps his voice low with effort.

"They're just feelings Dean, I don't know. Hormones or something. Teenagers have fucked-up feelings all the time, right?" Sam's voice echoes Dean's state of mind, too loud in the small space, too high pitched.

Fucked-up feelings. Dean wonders if maybe Sam's been feeling what Dean's been seeing. The shower stuff. If Sam's scared that Dean wants to do shit like that to him, it would explain his freakout. Maybe Dean should leave. He would hate it. Not being with Sam. But it would be safer for both of them. Would be—

"Dean, don't leave me alone. Please! You can't!" Sam clutches at him, one hand crushing Dean's and the other fisting in the collar of Dean's shirt. "I know I shouldn't have let them get me. I should have been able to fight them off. You trained me better than that. But I never thought—"

"Woah, woah, woah." Dean interrupts, stroking Sam's face, his chest, with the hand not being ground to burger in Sam's fist. "You think I'm mad at you, disappointed, because you got a black eye in a six-against-one fight?"

Sam won't look at him. Dean jerks Sam's chin up and lets how he feels about that show on his face. "Sam," he says, when his brother finally meets his eyes.

"They're just a bunch of jocks. I should have been more careful. You work so hard making sure I know how to defend myself… And you were disappointed. I know you were. I could see it in your face."

Dean doesn't understand. Sam has always been good at reading him, and Dean really, genuinely wasn't upset with him for getting in a fight. But. Now that Sam mentions it. "I was disappointed that you lied to me, Sam. That you didn't trust me enough to tell me the truth."

"I— Oh." Dean sees the moment Sam believes him flit across Sam's face, feels it in the relaxed grip on his hand. "You flew into the nurse's office, so angry and scared, and dragged me out of there so fast; I just thought— I don't know. I felt like everything was falling apart. I can't remember ever feeling so scared before. I don't even know why I lied, really."

Sam might not be having visions, but whatever is going on with him is not just teenage hormones. "I think something happened in the woods," Dean says quietly.

"What do you think it is?" Sam looks and sounds ridiculously young.

Dean wishes he had any other answer than, "I have no idea."


~~~~~||~~~~~

At Dean's insistence, Sam spends an hour on the bed with an ice-filled towel over his face, even though he's fine, and he really doesn't need to. He even lets Dean examine his ribs, and hardly gloats when Dean confirms what Sam already knew: none of them are broken. There is a bruise shaped like the combination dial on a locker door, thanks to the bike lock Pete swung at Sam just before the assholes were scattered by the arrival of Batty Bill and his push broom. Proof for Dad, if he needs it. If Dad even remembers Sam got hurt at school by the time he gets back.

While Sam lies in bed feeling more and more frustrated about being treated like a child, Dean prowls around the room like a caged cat, poking through the few books Dad always carries with them, tugging his hair into spikes with restless fingers. When he deems Sam rested enough, he lets him up, sends him out to the vending machine for cokes, and declares it time to brainstorm.

The brainstorming isn't all that helpful. Sam writes ??Wild dog attack and Visions: of violence and unspecified—because Dean's still being cagey about what, other than Sam's attack, he's seen, even when Sam shouts and asks how the hell they're supposed to brainstorm if Dean won't tell him everything—and Feelings ?? not my own on a piece of paper. None of it seems to fit together. Not even when he circles the words and draws spidery lines out from them. Not that he's surprised. The technique has only ever really worked for the paper he did on the Civil War in tenth grade.

Dean proposes that it could be something manifesting people's deepest fears, which makes Sam want to know more than ever what Dean's not telling him, but they decide that while Ray and whatever-his-name-was might have been terrified of dogs, that probably would have made stealing and torturing them difficult if not impossible. And as scared as Dean is of Sam getting hurt, and of seeing it but being unable to do anything to stop it, Sam getting a black eye isn't even close to the scariest thing he can imagine. And Sam isn't afraid of feeling worried. Even when the worry isn't over anything he can identify.

They discount ghosts and all the creatures they've ever heard of that hunt in the woods and decide they don't know enough about black magic to come down on either side of that argument. Sam's just thinking about the town library, and wondering whether it has a computer research station, when he's hit by a wave of frustration and helplessness. He looks up and catches sight of Dean, fists clenched on the table, glaring at their meager pile of books like he's about to set them on fire with his eyes.

"Dean," he says, "are you feeling frustrated?"

"How the hell do you think I'm feeling? We have no idea what the hell is going on and—"

"I think I'm feeling your feelings," Sam interrupts.

Dean turns his laser stare on Sam. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I was sitting here calmly planning how we could get more information while Conrad's gone, and suddenly I wanted to punch something I was so frustrated. I looked up and you were all grr-faced and clenched fists and clearly pissed as hell."

Dean takes a deep breath and Sam can feel the tension in his own chest receding.

"And you were scared in the car after we woke up in the woods, right?" Sam continues. "Like, really scared. Wow. I didn't—"

"I wasn't scared, alright? I was just worried that you were hurt and not telling me."

Sam wonders if all his knowledge that Dean is defensive as hell right now is reading Dean's voice and body language, or if any of it is being able to read Dean's feelings directly.

"Okay," he says, placating. "Whatever. You were stressed. I don't know what that has to do with your visions. Or being mauled by dogs. But it's a place to start, right?" His mind whirls off on a new list of things he wants to look up when they can get their hands on Conrad's library again. Or if the library in town is better than he suspects. He's not really focusing on Dean until he notices a scratching noise and sees his brother has picked up the pen and is scribbling a black square in the margin of Sam's paper, frowning down at it. "Dean?" Sam asks.

"So are my visions coming from you?" Dean's voice, face, and the feelings he's bleeding into Sam are all congruent. The idea makes Dean tense as hell.

Sam's not sure how to answer, made nervous by Dean's stress. "I guess," he finally says. "I mean, it makes sense, right? You said that you could see Pete and his friends beating me up like it was happening to you. Except you knew it was me, somehow." Which, now he thinks about it, doesn't make much sense. Dean has never met Pete or seen the old gym.

"Yeah." Dean pauses, taps the pen a few times. "I could see your shoes when I looked down in the vision, but I knew anyway. It was you. Couldn't be anyone else."

"So I'm feeling your feelings, and you're—I don't know. Seeing through my eyes? Seeing my thoughts?" Sam suddenly feels sick. If Dean is seeing his thoughts, and saw what Sam was thinking about in the shower after they got back from the woods, no fucking wonder he doesn't want to talk about it.

"Sam?" Dean puts his hands on Sam's wrists, squeezing them, eyes flitting over Sam's face. "Sam? What's—"

"Nothing," Sam says, more shakily than he'd like. "I just—So, are you?"

"Am I? Oh. Seeing your thoughts?" Dean takes his hands back, picks at one thumbnail with the other. "Maybe? I can't see what you're thinking now, for sure. But when those guys were—Maybe it's just when you're scared. Or hurt. Something like that." Dean examines his thumbnail like the answers are written on it somewhere.

Sam doesn't want to know, but he has to. "But the other day, you said you saw something that scared you."

"I don't think so." Dean frowns. "You said you were scared and I asked if you were seeing visions of something scary."

Dean doesn't usually play word games. "Whatever," Sam snaps. "You implied that you saw something scary." Though maybe Dean wasn't scared. Probably disgusted is a better word if he did see what Sam was thinking about in the shower.

"I don't know what I saw, okay? I was stressed, like you said. I was stressing you out, too. It wasn't anything clear." Pushing back from the table, Dean stands, turning his back on Sam. "I'm hungry. Dad'll probably be back soon. I'll get us some barbecue from that place the other side of town."

Sam doesn't really want barbecue—his stomach is roiling—but he doesn't want to argue with Dean either, so he doesn't say anything, just lets him go. Once Dean is gone, Sam takes some more Tylenol, and gets himself another ice pack for his ribs, which are starting to hurt again. Lying on the bed with the TV on low, he thinks about his brother.

Dean's been touching him this afternoon. Not only as he had to cleaning Sam's wounds, but casual touches too, just like he always has. Maybe even a little more than always. If he'd seen what Sam thinks about when he jerks off, he wouldn't do that. He'd run a mile in the other direction. Or at least keep his distance. Sam tries to remember what else he might have been thinking that Dean could have seen. Waiting for the water to heat up, he'd thought for a minute how horrible it would be to be ripped apart by dogs; maybe Dean saw that. It would be a little weird for him to hide it, if so, but if he didn't know what was happening, he might have. Dean hates to look like he doesn't know what's going on.

There wasn't really anything else, though. Unless Sam's thoughts strayed to something while he was drying off that he can't remember now because it wasn't important at the time. Forgetting his bruises, Sam rubs his forehead, trying to remember. Not a good plan.

Shifting the ice from his ribs up to his eye, which has gone from dull ache to throbbing, Sam lets out a frustrated noise. He's not going to be able to guess what Dean saw, and Dean seems determined not to tell him, so there isn't much point in thinking about it anyway. The question is, if the same thing happened to Sam and Dean out in the woods, how come Dean's the only one getting images? Why isn't he getting the disquieting feelings that Sam's getting? Sam would rather have the visions. He generally sees the world in pictures anyway. If something is scaring him he can see what it is, doesn't have to deal with just the emotions piling up in his chest without any center.

Maybe that's it. Sam sits up, dropping the soggy towel in the ice bucket. Maybe Dean doesn't see the world in pictures. So he's not sure what to do with what he's getting from Sam, same as Sam's not sure what to do with all of Dean's feelings without images to focus them on.

Sam can't imagine not thinking the way he thinks, but it must be possible. People do process information differently. They did a whole unit on it in social studies last year, with experiments to see if they were visual or auditory or kinetic learners. In class they only discussed teaching, but it would make sense if it's not just about different learning styles but all kinds of brain differences. He wishes Dean would come back so that he could ask what his brother thinks about his theory.

Instead—of course—Dad walks through the door.

"I need a hand with some boxes," he says. "Conrad's back with some more books, so I said we'd give him a hand going through them."

No chance of talking to Dean tonight, then. And tomorrow's school, then god knows what Dad will have planned. Sam wants to tell his dad to catalog the damn books himself, wants to drive his fist through the brown-and-orange wallpaper, rip into the plain white plaster underneath. Then a car door slams and he recognizes that most of his irritation is coming from outside.

Dad has the door open before Dean can get his key in the lock.

"Fucking assholes!" Dean storms in, filling the room with the smell of barbecue. "Don't pay any attention, nearly drive me off the road; I almost took out a mailbox!"

"You're okay though?" Sam asks. Then, "And the car?" knowing that's more important to Dean than his own skin.

Dad rescues the bags of food from Dean's angry gesticulating.

"Yeah, I'm fine. She's fine. No thanks to—"

"Let's eat," Dad interrupts. "We got a lot of books to look at tonight."

Dean calms down pretty quickly at the prospect of pork and cornbread, which makes Sam feel better, too. He's grateful that whatever this is wasn't happening a few years ago when he was learning to deal with pubescent mood swings. He'd have had no chance against a second set of emotions then. Pushing books aside and opening the bags, they all sit at the table and dig into the food.

With full bellies, Sam and Dean follow Dad out to the car to help with the boxes. Sam worries for a minute that the whole truck is full of books, but the large, tarp-covered lump is just a rocking chair Dad's delivering for Conrad because it won't fit in the man's car. Not that the forty or fifty books that are there won't be tedious enough.

They each get a legal pad and a stack of books and set to work. Sam hopes that he might be able to kill two birds with one stone, that there might be something in the books that will help him figure out what's going on with Dean, but so far all of the books in his stack contain rites and rituals, most of them in Latin to boot.

Dean seems to have a box of books about mythical-looking creatures, and Sam tries hard to picture finding a creature that can make two people share thoughts, willing Dean to pick up on it. His brother does look at him, and bumps his knee, but Sam isn't sure if Dean actually did read his thoughts, or if it was just a coincidence. By 10:30, Sam feels as though his eyes are burnt holes in his skull so he says, "I've got school tomorrow. I'm gonna go to bed."

It's his turn for the rollaway, but when he starts towards it, Dean says, "I'll take it. It can be your turn tomorrow. Save us moving the boxes out of the way before we're done."

Sam brushes his teeth and gets into bed, pulling a pillow over his head to block out the light, keeping his thoughts focused on the quiz in English tomorrow instead of on the way Dean looks silhouetted against the lamp, just in case it's getting easier for Dean to read him.


~~~~~||~~~~~

With the boxes of books taking up a lot of the space in the room, Dean doesn't have much choice but to set up the cot right next to Sam's bed. He's quiet about it and succeeds in getting in and under the covers without waking his brother up. With this whole sharing thoughts thing, Dean's worried he's not going to be able to go to sleep, but he's more tired than he thought and drifts off after only a few minutes.

Dean and Sam are in the clearing again, but after dark this time, except Dean can see clearly as though it were day. Sam is young, maybe ten or twelve, his foot caught in a tree root. They need to be running, need to get away. Whatever is after them is getting closer, making Dean panic. Sam is scared, crying, but Dean can't get close enough to dislodge him. Then Sam is free, racing through the woods, shouting for Dean to hurry. When Dean finally catches up to him, Sam has grown up, turned into the Sam he is now, cornered by a gang of vampires, all Bela Lugosi in white-face, cloned and cloned again, claws and fangs bared, advancing on Sam, swinging chains. Dream-Sam screams, and Dean wakes up, panting, choking on air, to see his brother huddled safely under the covers a few feet away.

The sight of him is like a kick in the chest. Dean wants to climb into bed with him, pet and soothe him the way he used to after Sam woke up from a nightmare, to draw comfort from comforting the way he did when they were younger.

But that's not all Dean wants. His cock is hard enough that it's poking out the wash-stretched top of his boxers, his jaw and fists ache with clenching and he can feel his heart pounding in his throat. He wants to be the vampire that catches Sam, tilts his head back and tastes him, wants to drink Sam's blood, feed Sam his own, crawl in through the holes he makes and be Sam's oxygen.

Everything is jumbled in Dean's head, comfort, love, protection, but also sex, hunger, and other, even more twisted things Dean can't let himself think about.

Then Sam stirs, stretches, and Dean starts getting fragments, then whole moments of images echoing his desire to hold his brother. Dean doesn't recognize at first that the thoughts are Sam's instead of his own, and for a few minutes, they feed off each other, Dean's dream thoughts turning into the image of Dean getting up, lifting up Sam's blankets and sliding into bed with him, pulling him close, stroking his hair, kissing his forehead like he used to when Sam had a nightmare. Then Dean tilting Sam's face up, kissing his lips, sliding a hand down Sam's back to move him closer, pull him in so their hips are pressed together, so Dean can't help but feel how hard Sam is—

Even once he realizes that these are Sam's thoughts, understands somehow that Sam saw what Dean was thinking and that he's showing Dean this in response, Dean stays still, hardly breathing. Until Sam stirs and says his name, all the longing and desperation Dean's feeling himself evident in Sam's voice.

That one word galvanizes him. There is nothing Dean could say that makes him anything but the worst brother ever, so he runs, wearing nothing but his boxers, grabbing nothing but his car keys, remembering too late that Dad moved the blanket that usually lives in the Impala's back seat to his truck. Dean gets out to the car, and all he has to keep himself warm is an old corduroy jacket of Sam's. He curls up under it as best he can, but there is no way he's going to get back to sleep tonight.

Unfortunately, that gives him plenty of time to think.

Once Sam's gone to school and Dean can get some clothes, he has to get out of here. He tries, during his hours freezing his nuts off in the car, to convince himself it was just a dream, that he isn't responsible for the fucked-up things his subconscious comes up with, that he didn't make Sam think those thoughts at him. But the more he tries, the less he believes it. Every time he's looked at Sam in the last few years with more than a fraternal gaze grows in significance in his mind until by the time the sun starts glowing on the horizon, Dean has himself half-convinced that he's been molesting his brother since Sam hit puberty.

Of course, Sam picks that moment to come out and bang on the windows. Dean screws his eyes shut, only just remembering in time that if he pulls the coat over his head, it will leave his boxers-clad ass bare to Sam's gaze.

"Dean, for fuck's sake open the door. Stop freaking out about whatever you're freaking out about."

Grateful as he is that Sam can only feel that Dean's freaking out and apparently can't read Dean's specific thoughts right now, Dean would still really rather Sam didn't know anything at all. Even more than he wishes he couldn't see that Sam's thinking about searching Dad's truck for a slim-jim and breaking into Dean's car.

"Don't you fucking dare," Dean thinks as loudly as possible, though he's keeping up the sleeping act as he does.

Sam's thoughts turn briefly to kicking the windows in, then he slaps the car's roof one last time, swearing under his breath, and finally Dean hears his footsteps receding across the gravel-strewn lot.

Based on the sun, Dean reckons that he's probably got another hour to wait before Sam leaves for school, but it's only about twenty minutes before he and Dad walk past, get in the truck and leave. As soon as the truck clears the lot, Dean goes and takes the hottest shower he can stand, until the chill leaves his bones (if not his guts).

Being warm and awake does make him feel better, and for a minute or two, Dean even imagines that he can stay and everything can just go on like it always has, the three of them hunting, getting Sam through school, Dean perfectly happy with his own right hand when there's no time for a pick-up in a bar. But he knows it's too late for that, even if they can find whatever did this mind-reading thing and get it stopped now. Sam knows what Dean was thinking, and even if Sam is thinking the same thing completely independently of his brother, it's Dean's job to keep either of them from acting on it.

He packs quickly, not knowing when Dad's going to be back, and certain that Dad isn't just going to let him leave. Sam will probably kill him for going without saying goodbye, but if he does this right, Sam isn't going to have the opportunity. He'll get over it. They both will. It's the right thing to do. The only thing.

Dean makes it about ten miles before the pain starts. Like a headache in his whole body at first, within two or three minutes it's more like being on fire. Dean has to slam on the brakes because he can't see the road through the crushing pain in his skull. Even while the tiny part of his brain that isn't occupied with wanting to scream in agony wonders what the hell is going on, he knows that it's because he's trying to leave his brother. Somehow he gets the car turned around without driving into a ditch, and heads back towards town.


~~~~~||~~~~~

When John wakes up, he can hear water running in the bathroom. Both boys' beds are empty, though the clock only says 6:48 AM. Sam doesn't have to be at school until 8:30. "Boys?" he calls.

The water shuts off and Sam opens the bathroom door, already dressed, but with sleep-wild hair. He's wearing his early-morning what do you want? face, which is different from his pissed-off what do you want? face, though John would be hard pressed to say how.

"Dean go for breakfast already?" John asks.

Sam raises a hand as though to rub his eyes, then clearly remembers the cuts and pushes his hair behind his ear instead. "Dean's— Yeah. I'm not sure where Dean is." He doesn't look real happy about that.

"Well, he's a big boy. I need to take that chair round to the woman this morning, if you want a ride to school."

Sam looks a little surprised but says, "Yeah. Um, sure. Thanks."

"You gonna do something about that hair, or can I have a shower?" John asks. There's time to stop at the place with homemade muffins and the best coffee in town if he gets up now.

"It's all yours," Sam says.

When John is done, he finds Sam glaring out the window.

"Dean's in his car." Sam says when John asks if everything's okay.

John's not sure he wants to know, but he asks anyway. "What's he doing out there?"

"Sleeping. Sulking. How do I know? He won't open the door."

"You're sure he's breathing?" Of course Sam's sure he's breathing. He wouldn't have come back inside if he wasn't. "Did you two have a fight?"

"Have to talk to fight," Sam huffs, and reaches for his backpack. "Can we stop and get some food on the way?"

"Sure," John says. "Let's go."

They have to walk past Dean's car to get to the truck. Sam glares through the back window at Dean who is lying huddled under a jacket, shoulders and legs bare. He has his eyes shut tight, but John's seen faking enough to know he's not actually sleeping.

"Why doesn't he have any clothes on?" John asks, but Sam just looks at him like that's the stupidest question he's ever heard, and jerks the truck's passenger door open, so John lets it slide.

"I want muffins," Sam says while John's pulling out of the parking space.

"Good. Least we can agree on something." John doesn't bother saying it loud enough that Sam can hear, just heads for Barbara's Buns and Things.

There's time enough to stay and eat at a table like civilized folks, and John wants to ask Sam a few more questions, so he doesn't give his son a choice, just says, "For here," when he orders. Sam scowls, but that's only what John expects.

"Is all this to do with those visions you boys were talking about the other day? With Dean running off to the school?" John is withholding Sam's muffin until he answers, though Sam has both cups of coffee and John wants one real bad, so he hasn't got a leg to stand on, really. He just hopes Sam doesn't notice.

No such luck—the raised eyebrow in the direction of the muffins speaks volumes—but Sam seems willing to talk anyway. "We both woke up in the middle of the night. I was having that feeling thing again, like I told you about, and I'm not sure what was going on with Dean, because before I could ask, he up and bolted, spent the rest of the night in his stupid car."

Once Sam starts talking, John pushes the Very-Berry muffin his way; Sam pushes the black coffee towards John. Waiting to see if Sam's going to say any more without prompting, John takes a sip of his coffee and a bite of his Walnut Wonder. When Sam doesn't go on, John asks what they saw out in the woods.

"We didn't see anything." Sam hesitates. "It—" He takes a bite of his muffin and then blows on his drink but doesn't take a sip. "We got to the clearing. There was nothing to see—just, well, a clearing—and we were walking across it, and the next thing we knew, it was later, and we weren't sure why we were there."

Sam won't meet his eyes, but his jaw's set like even if he knows he should have said something sooner, he's not going to take being told off about it. John can hear his wife saying You catch more flies with honey, John, and he manages to keep his voice conversational.

"Did anything hit you? Knock you over? Was there some kind of smoke, bad smell?"

Sam does look up then, maybe a little surprised John isn't yelling, says, "Seriously. Nothing. One minute I was about to ask Dean what direction we should go, next I'm lying on the ground, Dean next to me. Squirrels, birds, everything just totally normal."

"And you were going to tell me all this when?" John can't help his voice rising a little. He thinks he should get points for trying, but that's not how it works with Sam.

"Ask Dean." Sam picks up his mug, turning in his chair to watch the other customers decide what kind of muffin they want or eat the ones they've chosen. John's gotten what he's gonna get out of him.

"Drink up," John says. "Let's get you to school."

Neither of them bother with small talk in the five-minute drive, but Sam thanks John for the ride when he gets out. "One of us will pick you up at three fifteen," John calls out the window after him, but there's no answer and he has to hope Sam hears over the squealing pack of girls he's passing on his way up the stairs. Pulling out of the drop-off zone, John parks up the street and digs through the glove compartment for the address where he's got to take the chair and the map Conrad drew him. Eugenia Parsons. John can picture her already.

She's pretty much just what he imagined: wizened and stooped, but a firecracker and a half, not shy at all about directing him just where he should put the thing or ordering him to sit and drink some sweet tea with her once the chair is settled to her satisfaction. A woman like that, John figures, knows what's going on in the whole damn county. And he doesn't think he's likely to have any trouble getting her started talking.

Years of practice have made John able to slip things into conversation, to turn a chat into an interrogation, without the other person hardly being aware of it. Once he asks about the dog attack, old Eugenia is off. "Those woods," she says. "That clearing. You just never know what you're gonna get there next."

She tells him a story about a missing girl who was found there a couple weeks after Mr. Baylor and his friend died, the girl not harmed at all but too young to say where she'd been.

"Funny thing," Miss Parsons says. "She was taken a week, maybe less, after her mama's brother came to stay. And they found her the same day the cops took that nasty man away for having dirty pictures on one'a them lap computers business-type people carry around these days."

"That is interesting," John agrees, though he has no idea what it would have to do with what happened to the men with the dogs.

After pouring herself some more tea, she launches into a story about someone she doesn't sound to like much, called Miles, who went into the woods with his gun, and came out without a stitch on. "He's still up t'the loony bin in Roanoke, eatin' shrubbery or some such nonsense." She shakes her head.

That seems to be it, and John's about to slurp down the rest of his tea and make his excuses to go and give Dean the third degree, when she goes on. Apparently when she was a girl there were other funny happenings in the woods that never made the papers. Two men found a stash of gold in a hollow tree and took it, hid it on one of their farms, but they never could find it again, and a man who hadn't left his house for a year after his wife and daughter died in a fire at the school house went into the woods and the next week married a widow from the next county. "Nothing about any dogs, though."

"Anything else?" John asks.

"You a researcher like that Conrad?" She looks at him with a beady eye.

"Sure am," John says, deciding it's definitely getting to be time to go. "And I'd better get back to it. Thank you for the tea."

"Least I could do, asking you to haul that chair all over the porch here."

John takes his leave and heads back to the motel, hoping Dean's gotten over his sulk and out of his car.

But when he gets there, the Impala's not in the lot and when he tries calling, he can hear Dean's phone ringing on the other side of the room's door. "Kid had better just be getting breakfast," John mutters to himself as he shoves the key in the lock. "He knows better than to keep secrets about a hunt."


~~~~~||~~~~~

His escape thwarted by the side effects of whatever the hell got to them in the woods, Dean nonetheless needed a place to think, and settled on Alice's Restaurant, which is a couple of miles from Sam's school. He's been sitting in the back booth for going on four hours now and he still doesn't know what to do, possibly because he's been reading the paper someone left behind instead of actually trying to figure out a plan. Now that he's read every single word, he figures it's time to avoid his problems by ordering lunch before he gets kicked out. The waitress keeps glaring in his direction and tapping her order pad, and hasn't been by to top up his coffee in a while. Dean can't remember the last time he was so distracted that he couldn't even charm a waitress.

He snags the menu propped between the windowsill and the condiment rack, and decides on the chili cheese fries. When she comes over, the waitress—"Anne" her nametag says; she's young, pretty in a fresh-scrubbed way, and Dean should so have been able to wrap her around his finger without even thinking about it—asks so pointedly if he wants anything else that he adds a chocolate shake and a piece of pie to his order, too. With that she's all friendly grin and asking if his coffee needs freshening up, prompting Dean to smile in return.

As soon as she's gone, though, Dean forgets about her, his mind skirting towards Sam and the whole sharing-sex-dreams-about-each-other thing. Shying away from that, Dean eavesdrops on a couple sitting two booths away, who start fighting about whether or not his expressing a desire to sleep with her sister is grounds for breaking up. That distracts him for a while, until the woman says, "Really? You don't see anything wrong with suggesting I have a threesome with my sister?" reminding Dean what he's been thinking about doing with his brother, no excuse of a threesome needed. Then his food arrives and he tries to focus on that.

The chili is spicy and delicious, the fries cooked crispy but going soft under the sauce and cheese just the way he likes them. But in the end his meal can't really keep his mind off what happened last night. Once he's gotten some food into his stomach he feels less sick about the whole thing, though, and decides that if he can't leave, he'd be better off trying to figure out what is going on than trying to avoid the issue forever while living in the same room as Sam, who is not going to let it lie, Dean's sure.

Chili cheese fries demolished, Dean pushes the plate to the edge of the table and pulls his pie closer. It's peach, Sam's favorite, but only about fifth on Dean's list. He remembers when they were little, ordering the last piece of peach pie just so Sam couldn't have it—to get back at Sam for something, or maybe just to be a dick, he can't even remember. But then he'd felt guilty when Dad got pissed at Sam for sulking, wouldn't let him have any pie at all, and so when Dad went to pay, Dean gave Sam the last few bites. Dean hasn't ordered peach pie since. Today he'd ordered it without even considering what kind he wanted. It's odd enough that it seems as good a place to start as any.

Does ordering Sam's favorite pie have anything to do with the visions? Is it all part of whatever happened in the woods? Is it just that Sam's on Dean's mind, or is he somehow turning into his brother?

If Sam were here, he'd probably pull a pen out of somewhere, ask Anne for one, maybe, and start scribbling notes on his paper placemat. Dean's mat is soiled with smears of chili and grease, but writing shit down isn't really his style anyway. He prefers to go over things in the privacy of his own head.

Facts: Sam can sense Dean's feelings, at least when he's scared or angry. Dean can see what Sam's thinking, even what he's seeing maybe, in times of extreme emotion. A distance of three miles didn't hamper his view any. A distance of ten miles makes Dean want to black out with pain. This all started after they went to the clearing where two men were attacked by wild dogs or something that left marks enough like dog bites the authorities felt safe reporting it.

Facts Dean would rather not think about: Sam has vivid fantasies of Dean giving him blowjobs. Dean isn't actually opposed to the idea as much as he probably should be. Dean wakes up wanting to climb into bed with his brother and kiss him in ways brothers don't think about kissing. Sam might have been having these fantasies for a while, but it's also possible Dean put the idea into his head.

For the sake of being thorough, Dean gives the facts he'd rather not think about a moment or two in the spotlight before going back to the facts that don't make him want to get in his car, drive away, and never look back. Because it's easier than fumbling around with visions/thought-sharing/feelings-bleed/whatever, none of which is very accurate on its own, he decides to go with mind-meld as a name for what's happening to him and Sam. Maybe the woods are filled with Vulcans. He's pretty sure they're vegetarians, though, and why would they want to chew on rednecks even if they weren't? Probably not Vulcans.

Maybe what it is that did this isn't what's important, anyway. If Dean's being honest—and really, that's probably best, given how spectacularly badly running away from the issue went—then he has to face that the waking up hard from dreams about Sam didn't start this week, or even this year. And that from the quality of Sam's visions of shower blowjobs, it's unlikely Sam just started thinking this way either.

All the evidence points to the fact that Dean and Sam are on the same page.

Just saying that aloud, even only aloud in his head, makes a sense of calm spread through Dean's chest. Which is pretty much the last thing he expected to happen, and he's not sure he likes it. Admitting he wants to mack on his brother is something that should damage his calm, really. Instead, Dean has a feeling that giving in to the fantasies is more a solution than part of the problem. Maybe that's another side effect of the mind-meld.

Despite the somewhat disconcerting feeling like he didn't think it all on his own, that someone else sat him down and told him, Dean knows what he has to do. If he just talks to Sam, if they just— Whatever. Maybe they don't need to talk; Dean's not really a big fan of the talking. But if he and Sam work together, everything is going to be just fine.


~~~~~||~~~~~

Sam has second lunch, which he prefers, because it means only one class after. Unfortunately, that class is PE. He didn't exactly love it before, but it's sure to be even more fun with bruised ribs and a black eye, the guys who gave them to him right there to enjoy their handiwork. For a few minutes, as he doubled up in pain in the hall between homeroom and first period, Sam thought he'd be getting out of school early again. But as quick as it came on, the pain went, and rather than go to the nurse, he carried on to class. He could cut, maybe, but Dad said he'd pick Sam up after school , and John Winchester is not a big fan of cutting school unless there's a hunt.

"Please finish chapter twenty-one by tomorrow," Mrs. Fuller says, interrupting Sam's thoughts. "We'll talk about war reparations and treaties."

Sam can't wait. Nothing more exciting than war reparations. Fortunately, they had the same text book two schools ago and the test on chapters twenty and twenty-one was the last thing he did before they moved on.

The bell rings and the room erupts with everyone eager for lunch.

Gotta see Sam, gotta see Sam, gotta see Sam.

The thought is sharp and clear, almost like someone—Dean—is standing right behind Sam whispering in his ear. Instead of the cafeteria, Sam heads for the stairs at the front of the school.

Talk to him, gonna be okay, okay, okay.

Clear as he can, Sam pictures walking down the stairs to the drop-off/pick-up point, pictures seeing Dean's car, opening the door and getting in. There are no more words in his head to let him know if Dean gets the message, but when he gets to the front of the school, Dean is sitting there in his car, waiting.

"How did you—" they both say when Sam opens the door to get in.

Then, "It's some kind of mind-meld," Dean says, just as Sam says, "Somehow we have ESP."

When Dean merely chuckles and shakes his head, pulling out of the lot, Sam realizes that he was expecting that sense of worry again, almost bracing for it. Neither of them says anything else for a few minutes; Dean watches the road and Sam watches Dean, sensing a sort of satisfaction from him instead. Sam can't quite identify the feeling—it's not one he's experienced himself—but he thinks it is pretty much the opposite of what Dean was feeling when he went to hide in his car last night.

"So," Dean says, making Sam jump a little, as they turn in the opposite direction from their motel. "I brought you a burger and some pie. Bag on the back seat."

Now he knows it's there, Sam is amazed that he didn't smell the food as soon as he got in the car, except that the Impala has been pretty frequently scented with burgers since Dad got his truck and gave the car to Dean.

"You are the best brother ever," Sam says. He senses a flinch from Dean when he says "brother" but he's looking right at him and doesn't see anything.

Leaning into the back seat to get the bag, Sam ends up brushing his chest against Dean's shoulder. Sam feels an excitement that's half his own and half something he's learning to recognize as his brother's emotional touch. He wants to say something about it but can't imagine what, so he opens the bag to see what Dean brought him. When he spies the pie in its plastic clam shell, he says, "Dude, peach pie? I love you!" Which, yeah, okay, totally wasn't what he meant to say under the circumstances and will probably make Dean run and hide again. He can't help picturing Dean just pulling over, getting out of the car and leaving Sam forever.

"I'm not going to run off again," Dean says, almost dropping a hand onto Sam's knee, but pulling back at the last moment.

"Okay," Sam says, feeling weird that he doesn't feel weirder about the fact Dean knew what he was thinking.

The air in the car feels electric, too charged for Sam to want to eat anything, but he feels like he needs to do something with his hands, and ten minutes ago he was hungry enough that he was almost looking forward to the chef's surprise in the cafeteria, so he pulls out the burger and unwraps it, eating with a single-mindedness that allows him a moment to process the change in Dean's mood.

Burger half gone, Sam looks at his brother again, catching Dean with a little wrinkle between his eyebrows, the one he gets when he's concentrating hard on something like memorizing an incantation. Sam has just enough time to wonder what Dean needs to concentrate so hard on while driving before he realizes there are words to back up the feeling of nostalgia he's been sensing as he chewed.

Peach always was your favorite.

"You remember when you took the last piece of peach pie that time?" Sam asks.

"You could hear me?" Looking pleased with himself, Dean glances at Sam.

"You were thinking about peach being my favorite."

"This is fucking weird." Dean says. "Can't decide if it's cool or scary."

"A little of both, probably." Sam wraps up the last few bites of his burger and trades it for the pie.

"It's good pie," Dean says. "First time I've had peach since that day."

"You always liked other kinds better. You were a jerk to order peach just because you knew I wanted it."

"I'm sure I had a good reason. You probably took something of mine first."

Dean's tone is belligerent, but Sam can feel fondness, affection, something thicker underneath. It makes him squirm with embarrassed pleasure.

Not long after Sam finishes his pie, Dean turns onto an old access road, driving past the first curve and stopping so they can't be seen from the highway and then turning off the engine. He turns toward Sam, putting his knee up on the seat so it almost brushes Sam's thigh.

"It really is freaky being able to feel you like that," Dean says. "But I'm starting to get used to it."

"Me too," Sam agrees, even though he's not sure he is.

"I have a theory. I think we should see what happens when I touch you. Now that the bond or whatever is getting stronger."

Sam can't help thinking about exactly where he'd like his brother to touch him.

"Heh, yeah, I'm not sure I'm quite ready for that."

Sam's face heats up. He's still not sure he will ever get used to Dean being able to read his pervy thoughts.

Dean just smiles, and then his hand alights on Sam's thigh, just above his knee. It does make the touch of Dean's mind stronger. He's terrified, eager, filled with awe.

Wondering if it would be even more intense skin to skin, Sam brushes his fingertips over the back of Dean's hand where it rests on his thigh, settling his hand over Dean's when his brother doesn't flinch away. It's like turning up the volume on a TV and getting a problem with the antenna.

With his own emotions swirling around in his head, and Dean not thinking in pictures, or, at the moment, words, Sam can't pin anything down. Fear, happiness, peace, frustration, love, and—probably from his own brain—cocks, hands, mouths, tongues, in combinations that probably aren't even physically possible, not in the front seat anyway, and god, Sam fucking needs—

"Fuck it." Dean dives at him, too quick to broadcast his intentions, pressing Sam against the window, practically biting Sam's lower lip off in his eagerness to kiss him.

Sam had mostly gotten over his romantic notions—left over from when he was thirteen and never-been-kissed—of what kissing Dean would be like. The notions that there would be tunnel vision and ringing in his ears and fireworks, that it would seem like the world around them ceased to exist. But the pragmatism he'd gained with age hadn't reckoned on the effects of a mind-meld on lip-to-lip contact.

He is the pliant, whimpering need being kissed and the impatient, hungry desire kissing, is opening, wet heat and seeking, teasing tongue, fingers tangling in hair and arms braced against the seat. He is shy and confident, naïve and experienced, terrified and sure. He is the endless reflection of Sam in Dean in Sam.

Sam is still lost inside his brother when the car door drops away from behind his head and he's filled with the need to get outside where there's more room. Somehow he and Dean spill from the front seat onto the grass barely breaking their kiss. Sam is on top of his brother, legs spraddled wide over Dean's hips, dick crushed against Dean's pelvis in a way that's really not comfortable, but he doesn't even care. Dean's using his grip on Sam's hair to move Sam's head as though he thinks if he only found the right angle they could somehow get closer, even though Sam's lips and tongue are pretty much completely inside Dean's mouth.

Dean's need is breathtaking, feeding off and feeding Sam's own, and Sam is actually a little worried that they might set the grass on fire.

"Clothes off," Dean says, except he's still sucking on Sam's tongue, so he must have just thought it.

Either way, Sam's not interested in arguing, and starts fumbling with the hem of Dean's shirt. Unfortunately, it turns out to be impossible to get someone's shirt off while lying on his chest and kissing him, so Sam doesn't have much luck.

"Off," Dean says—this time with his mouth—and pushes at Sam's shoulders until Sam is forced to roll off Dean onto the ground.

Dean attacks his own shirt then, and Sam follows suit. As soon as Sam has his jeans undone, Dean dives at him again, knocking the breath half out of him, kissing his neck.

As Dean nibbles and sucks his way down Sam's neck to his chest, Sam tries to get his hand between them and into his brother's pants. Undercurrent to the never-been-so-horny-in-my-life is a sense that this is right. That under/in/around Dean is the place Sam belongs, the only place in this world that is perfectly, exactly, his.

"Me too," Dean says. "God, it's so fucked up, but me too."

Sam grins so hard his cheeks ache. "Less fucked up than—shit, there—" Apparently Sam really likes having his nipples chewed. "—than being eaten by dogs."

Dean doesn't answer, too busy proving to Sam that he likes Sam's nipples as much as Sam likes Dean's mouth.

They jerk each other off there in the grass, lying side-by-side afterwards, arms touching, playing with each other's fingers, each feeling the buzz of his brother at the edges of his mind.

Eventually the grass starts to prickle and their skin pebble with goose bumps. "We should go," Dean says.

His regret at the words feels just the same as Sam's.


~~~~~||~~~~~

Dean's still not home at three, and John's had enough of cataloging books for a while, so he goes to get Sam. But Sam's not waiting out front among the milling students, nor does he appear in the fifteen minutes John waits. Apparently he didn't hear John's offer to pick him up and went and got the bus before John got there. Not a big deal. Conrad lives a few streets over from the school, so John goes and drops off the books and cataloging he and the boys finished, stays for a few beers. It's after dark when he heads back to the motel.

What he finds when he gets there is the very last thing he ever expected.

Dean's car is parked in front of the room, but there's no light shining through the window next to the door. He figures the boys probably walked to the gas station up the street to get something to eat.

Dean's eating sure enough, but it isn't gas station food.

John makes it to the bathroom before he throws up the cheap beer that's the only thing in his stomach.

When he comes out again, Dean's standing between the beds struggling into his shirt, and Sam has the bedspread pulled up over his hips, but it's not nearly enough to erase the image of Dean lying between Sam's splayed thighs, hands on Sam's waist, head bobbing. John's afraid that image will be burned into his retinas forever.

"What in the hell are you boys doing?" His voice is deadly calm, and he even scares himself, so John's not entirely surprised that his boys flinch and Dean steps a little closer to the bed. Always has been protective of his brother. But there's protecting and there's—

John can't even think about it.

"I asked a question." He cannot begin to imagine he actually wants the answer, but one of them had better speak right now, because he's standing too close to where a gun is hidden under his pillow and he doesn't trust that he's not going to go for it if someone doesn't say something soon.

"He didn't make me."

John's looking at Sam, and Sam's mouth is moving, but he hears Dean too, and when he looks over at his other son, he realizes that they're both saying the words. Exactly together.

They glance at each other, quickly, and then Sam goes on alone. "We're both old enough to know what we want."

"You're not old enough to know anything, yet!" John yells.

Sam goes red, but John can see it's anger, not the shame he should be feeling. Dean's down on the floor, crouching, and John wonders for a second if Dean's planning on leaping for him, but he just stands and hands Sam his jeans.

"And you!" John rounds on his older son. The one who he's never had to worry about. The one who should know better. "He's your brother. I taught you to look after him. Not suck—not do that!" Clenching his fists tight at his sides so he won't do anything he regrets, John tries to take a deep breath, steady himself a little.

"We weren't—" Dean starts.

"What the hell did you two find in those woods?" Two steps and John's close enough to grab Dean's arm.

"Don't hurt him!" Sam says.

"Dean, come with me." John tugs. "Sam, for god's sake get dressed, and do not leave this room. I'm not fucking around here. Your brother and I are going to see what the hell is going on in that clearing."

Sam surges off the bed, angrily pulling on his jeans. "You're not going without me."

"You'll do as you're told." John knows, even as he's saying it, that Sam won't do anything of the kind. He's yanking on his shoes, staring at Dean like he's desperate to tell him something but doesn't want to say it in front of John.

"Fine. Both of you. Flashlights, and get in the car. We'll talk about this more later." He doesn't want them sitting next to each other, so he grabs Dean's keys out of his jacket, and stalks out to the Impala, climbing behind the wheel. Dean sits like stone beside him, and Sam huddles silently in the back seat the whole way out to the woods.

Coming out here at night was not one of John's best ideas ever, but he hands Dean and Sam pistols and grabs the shotgun for himself and tells Dean to lead the way, keeping between the boys, doing his best not to think about why. At least there's a path and they're not trying to break one in the dark.

Sam's furious and Dean's actively annoyed and it's not right. John's the one who should be pissed off. Whatever was done to them, he trained them better than that. Raised them up to talk to him before things got so far, so they could deal with whatever it was. Curses, hexes, voodoo, John doesn't even know what, but something is obviously wrong with them, and, damn it, they should have told him.

When they get in sight of the clearing, John makes them show him exactly what they did. He watches as they head for the middle of the clearing, looking right and left, and then Sam glances at Dean and they both lie down on the ground. After a few minutes, when they haven't moved, John goes over to see what they think they're doing.

They're holding hands, staring up at the sky. They don't move as John approaches.

"Tell me this just started today. Please," he says, standing over them, glaring down at their entwined fingers.

No answer.

"Boys?" He prods Dean's shoulder with the toe of his boot. "Boys?"

They blink, shaking their heads a little like they're shaking off a blow, and Dean says, "We didn't mean for you to see us before."

"Jesus!" John says. "I fucking hope not. But then I hope that you didn't mean to actually do it, either. Something obviously got into your heads, and we're going to find out what. Strange goings on out here, missing little girls, animal attacks, other stuff too. Not just whatever happened to you. Come on; help me search."

Sam and Dean get up then, shine their lights around. As far as John can tell, there is nothing at all remarkable about this clearing, other than that it exists. Then he hears a tinkling laugh from behind him. Whirling around, he shines his light towards where he heard the noise. Dean's light is a second behind, and Sam's a second behind Dean's. At first John doesn't see anything but foliage, but then, at the edge of the trees, he sees movement. A dozen—maybe fifteen—tiny people, no taller than a man's forearm, flitting in and out of the underbrush. Laughing.

You've got to be kidding me. Fairies?

John knows better than to give fae the satisfaction of knowing they've gotten to you, so he doesn't say anything out loud except, "Think we're done here, boys. Back to the car."

"What?" Sam starts. "But—"

Before John has to say anything, though, Sam shuts up, turning and leading the way back to the path. None of them says a word until they're on the road again.

"Were those fairies?" Dean is the first to break the silence.

"Can't think of anything else they could be." John has never actually seen a fairy, but he's read enough books and heard enough from other hunters to be nearly certain.

"Fairy pranks aren't like curses; they can't be broken, right?" Sam's contribution.

"We'll find a way," John reassures him.

"But if you try to bargain your way out of it or anything, you just make them angry and they do something worse," Sam insists.

John wonders what the hell could be worse than his sons being cursed into fucking each other.

"It's not so bad, now we're getting used to it," Dean says. "It'll probably even be useful for hunting when we can control it better."

Before John can ask Dean what the hell he's talking about, Sam says, "We'll learn how to use it. But we should probably do something so no one else gets pranked. ESP is one thing, but being eaten by dogs, even if you kind of deserve it, isn't exactly funny."

"How in god's name is sucking your brother's cock going to be useful in a hunt?" John's disturbed enough by his sons' nonchalance that the words just pop out, despite his having decided he was never going to say them out loud.

"What?" Both boys talking at once again.

Then Dean: "We're talking about being able to read each other's minds. Not—"

"Not the other thing," Sam finishes.

Now John's pissed off and confused. Fortunately, they're nearly back at the motel, because he's pretty sure this isn't a conversation they should have while he's driving. "Stop talking. Both of you. You can explain what the hell you mean when we get inside."

With the door shut and locked, John sits them down, his own back to the beds because it's hard enough to get that image out of his head if he can't see where it happened, never mind staring right at it. "Start at the beginning. Again," John says. "And this time don't leave out the part where you two suddenly have psychic powers."

Looking annoyed, Sam starts.

It turns out the boys had told John about the ESP, just not in so many words. Apparently he was meant to glean from their hints about seeing visions and feeling strange feelings that they were reading each other's minds.

Sam shares his theory that he sees the world in pictures and Dean in words, which is why it seemed at first like different phenomena.

That seems to be news to Dean, too, which John's not sure should be as reassuring as it is. None of what either boy says explains what John walked in on, though.

"So why'd you spend the night in your car?" John asks Dean when no more information seems to be forthcoming.

Dean looks at Sam but won't meet John's eyes.

"Dean?" John presses.

"That part you probably don't want to know," Sam says.

John's had just about enough. "None of this makes any sense!" Fairies are notoriously capricious, and these ones seem to have a vicious streak, but it can also be argued that they're doing good deeds. Yeah, they kidnapped a little girl, but probably got her out of a bad situation, and some would say the dog killers got their just desserts. But what did his boys do to deserve this?

Movement catches his eye and John looks up to see Dean's arm jerk back from where he'd obviously been heading to grope Sam under the table.

"That's it," John says. "Sam, pack your bags."

"What?" Both boys say.

"I'm taking Sam to Pastor Jim. Dean, you stay here; I'll be back in two, three days, and we'll figure out how to break this damn curse."

"No." Dean sounds angry, but more than that, scared. "No, Sam, I'm not going to let him do that."

"Don’t see that you have any say." John cannot understand what is wrong with them.

"I'm not going." Sam's voice is loud, drowning out the pounding of John's heart.

"You're a minor, and you're my son. You're going if I say you're going."

"You'll have to take me too," Dean says, fear gone now, just a statement of fact. "I'm pretty sure whatever they did will kill us if you separate us."

"What the hell does that mean?" John would seriously like to wring every one of those fairies' necks.

"I tried—" Dean looks at Sam, face full of apology. "I tried to leave this morning. Made it about ten miles before the pain was so bad I thought I was being ripped apart."

"What?" Sam asks.

He and Dean stare at each other and the looks they're exchanging make John feel like he's walked in on them all over again.

"Jesus. Cut the ESP crap."

"We'll leave if you don't want us here anymore, but you're not separating us." Sam stands as he says it, leans on the table, arms stiff, probably trying to look threatening.

John can only see his little boy. He has no idea what to do.

"It's late. We'll talk about this again in the morning." John looks at Dean, who has reached up to put a hand on Sam's back. A calming gesture that John's seen a hundred times. But after what he saw today it turns his stomach.

"And you two are not sharing a bed." Fumbling in his pocket, John pulls his wallet out of his pants. "Dean, you go get yourself another room for tonight. If you made it ten miles, you'll be fine with a few hundred yards."

John's surprised when Dean just takes a credit card and does as he's told, but he doesn't let his reaction show on his face. "Get some sleep," he says to his youngest once the door shuts behind Dean.

He figures somebody ought to sleep tonight.


~~~~~||~~~~~

The rooms either side of their original one are occupied, but there's a double three doors down which Dean takes. On his way back he thinks about removing the distributor cap from Dad's truck and his car just in case, but there's no way Dad could get Sam into a car without hurting him, and mad as he is, Dean can't see his dad doing that. Besides, Dean can feel his brother, soft, like a hum under his breath, and nothing is going to happen to him. Dean still has trouble going to sleep, but eventually, with Sam's memories of the afternoon floating through his mind, Dean drifts off.

When he wakes up, Dad and Sam are gone.

There's no pain, not like yesterday, just a sick twisting ache in Dean's gut and nothing but white noise where Sam should be in his head. Not like it's gone back to the way it was before he ever could hear Sam, but like a car radio when you drive out of range, volume turned low. But Sam can't be out of range. Dean would have felt it.

"Fuck!" he says, punching the door. "You fucking bastard!" If Dad expects Dean to roll over, to just take this like he's taken everything Dad shoved at him all his life, Dad seriously needs to start thinking again.

Sam is Dean's and Dean is Sam's now. More than brothers, more than— More than what Dad walked in on. Dean couldn't explain what happened in those woods even with a gun held to his head, but he and Sam are two halves of something now, corny as that might sound, and Dad's moral outrage isn't going to change that any more than it could reverse gravity.

Back in Dad's room, Dean finds his own stuff, most of Dad's, but none of Sam's, except the tattered text books that belong to the high school. He wants to hurry, get on the road now, try to eat up some of Dad's head start, but Dean isn't sure that he's ever going to come back here once he finds Sam, so he takes the time to stuff the few things he'd taken out of his bags back inside, gather what belongings had migrated into Dad's things and find a spot for them in his duffle. He finds a roll of twenties in Dad's socks, enough of them his own earnings that he feels justified in taking it all.

Dad's first aid kit is gone, with all the drugs Dad keeps—morphine, codeine, god knows what else. That must be how he got Sam in the car.

Dean is starting to think he just might kill his father.

There isn't much to pack, since Dean had most of this stuff yesterday when he tried to run, so he's behind the wheel less than ten minutes after he discovered Sam was gone. Then he pulls out into the road and realizes he isn't sure where to go.

Dad said he was taking Sam to Jim—and since Dad's not speaking to Bobby Singer anymore, that's the only logical place to take him—but he also knows Dean knows that's the plan. If he wants to keep Sam away from Dean, it would be stupid to go there. Except. Dad is used to Dean doing what he's told, so it might not even occur to him that Dean would follow.

Which means two reasons to go to Jim's, only one not to. Dean turns and heads for Minnesota. If he pushes it, he can probably make it in fifteen hours once he's on the interstate. Dean wishes he knew how much of a head start Dad has.

Three or four hours in, Dean is rolling past a little Mom and Pop station when the need for coffee overwhelms him. His tank could do with a top-up, too. The girl behind the register clearly read the customer service manual—her smile as she tells Dean to have a nice day is blinding. He's about to say thank you, take his change, when he's hit with a wave of fury, frustration, and an odd sense of déjà vu. It takes him a second to steady himself, and then Dean manages to smile back at the girl.

"Long shift today?" he asks.

"Long enough. Seven to seven."

Dean checks his watch. 10:32. "Don't suppose you had a man come through earlier. Black pickup, brown leather jacket. He'd've bought a black coffee, had a kid with him, 'bout seventeen."

"Yeah," she says, still super enthusiastic. "I did. They boy was real tired looking. He woke up and looked at me for a second when the man got back in the car, though. I felt sorry for him. I always get a horrible crick in my neck when I sleep up against the window like that."

What kind of man gives drugs to his own son? Dean has to work to keep his voice from shaking when he asks, "D'you remember how long ago that was?"

"Sorry," she says. "I'd finished opening everything up, so after seven thirty, probably. I know we look real quiet, but we get more cars through here than you'd think."

It's better than he'd hoped for. He's less than three hours behind. Dad has a lead foot when he wants to, but he's also hauling a lot of truck around on a factory engine while Dean's spent the last year getting the Impala to run beyond her specs and then some. And now Sam's awake, he's gonna give Dad trouble.

The thank you Dean gives the clerk in return for the information is entirely heartfelt.


~~~~~||~~~~~

When Sam wakes up, his head is pounding and his mouth feels like he swallowed a sock. He's been dreaming about being on the road, but apparently that wasn't just a dream, because his face is pressed against clammy window glass, and he can still hear the engine.

"Dean?" he mumbles, tongue stiff. He's trying to open his eyes, but his lids feel stuck shut.

"Dean and I'll come back and get you when we've sorted out those fairies."

Not Dean, then. Dad.

Pushing himself off the door, Sam sits upright and finally gets his eyes opened and focused. "We said, 'No'." He's livid, so mad he should be shaking with it, but his words are flat and dull. "Did you— Jesus, Dad, did you drug me?"

Sam didn't even look at the pills dad gave him in the night when he asked for a couple aspirin for his ribs.

"You boys are obviously under this spell, can't listen to reason. You'll thank me once we deal with the curse."

Sam is not going to thank him, ever. He wants to shout at Dad, explain to him that Sam finally has what he's wanted for what feels like half his life, but the drugs have made him sluggish, which is probably a good thing. It's unlikely Dad would ever let Sam see Dean again if he knew the truth.

Instead Sam keeps quiet, face turned away from his father so he doesn't get too tempted to punch him in the face.

He thinks about Dean, not sure yet how to go about linking with him on purpose, or if that's even possible. The view out the window is no help at all with figuring out where he is, and the clock in the dash has said twenty past seven since Dad got the truck, so Sam can't even make a guess about how long they've been travelling.

There's no sign of the excruciating pain Dean mentioned last night, but Sam doesn't know if that means Dean is close or if it isn't actually distance that caused the pain to begin with but something to do with Dean's intent to leave. Or maybe it's just a random coincidence. Sam needs a minute to think. To breathe.

"I'm gonna be sick," he says.

"You'll be fine." Dad doesn't even look at him.

"Pull over." Sam starts rolling down the window, a threat to puke down the side of his father's truck.

"Okay, okay. The shoulder's wider just up there. Hang on."

By the time Dad stops the car a few hundred yards down the road, Sam is pretty sure he actually is going to throw up. While he stumbles to the bushes at the edge of the highway, Dad goes around to the back, gets a bottle of water from the cooler strapped in the bed. He reaches Sam's side just in time to lay a solid hand on Sam's back as Sam vomits bile into the greenery at his feet.

"You're okay," Dad says, rubbing up and down Sam's spine like he's not the one who gave Sam whatever drugs made him feel this way to begin with.

Sam takes the proffered water, but jerks away, putting a good ten feet between them before he takes a sip. With his mouth rinsed and a few swallows of water in his stomach, Sam feels better. He wishes he had some Tylenol, but there's no way he's taking anything else from his father, even if it comes in a blister pack. Ignoring the thump of his headache, Sam tries to feel for Dean in his mind.

There's nothing at first beyond an increase in the pain in Sam's skull, but then he recognizes the determination driving his anger as Dean's touch. It's soft and far away, like a few notes carried on the wind that you don't even know you've heard until you realize there's a song stuck in your head that shouldn't be there. Sam almost wilts with relief when he feels it.

"You ready to keep going?" Dad says, making Sam jump.

Sam considers stalling—Dean's on his way, he's sure of it—but if they get back on the road, they are bound to pass a road sign and Sam can send an image to Dean, give him an idea of where they are. What Sam would really like to do is knock Dad out, leave him on the side of the road, turn the truck around and head back to Dean. But dad has fifty pounds on Sam and years more experience, so it seems like a bad idea. Instead, Sam drains the rest of the bottle of water and climbs into the truck. He'll need to piss soon, and once he's figured out where they are, he can get Dad to stop again.

Twenty or thirty minutes later they pass a sign that says, "Pleasureville 5 miles." There's a fork and spoon placard on the sign which prompts Sam's stomach to growl.

"I'm starving," he says. "Food up ahead." He learned years ago that asking if they could stop usually led to Dad just asking if he couldn't wait. It's one of the few times being demanding gets you farther with John Winchester.

"We'll see what's there," Dad answers. "Maybe there's a drive-thru. We've got a ways to go."

Pleasureville is not exactly a hotbed of fast food. Their only option is a diner with three booths and half a dozen stools at the counter.

"Get something quick," Dad orders, but Sam's not sure what qualifies, so he gets pancakes, which are what he's craving.

Dad doesn't argue, so Sam figures he's safe, and excuses himself to go to the bathroom once the waitress has headed for the kitchen. While he's there he focuses as hard as he can on what the Pleasureville sign looked like, and on the façade of Lael's Diner and on hoping that Dean is coming after him. He doesn't get any words in reply, but a sense of relief and reassurance comes over him which he's sure must be Dean.

Sam manages to drag their stop out for almost half an hour before Dad gets impatient and practically marches him back out to the car and on the road again.


~~~~~||~~~~~

All day Dean gets flashes from Sam of road signs and mile markers. Dad seems to be sticking to highways instead of the interstate but is definitely heading north west, which is either gonna take him to Jim Murphy's or is a sign he's decided to bury the hatchet with Bobby Singer. There is no one else Dad would trust with Sam. Sure in his direction, Dean gets on the interstate, watching for speed traps, but going as fast as he dares.

It's nine thirty PM and Dean is a couple hours north of Cedar Rapids when Sam blasts him with an image of Pastor Jim's church. There's food, and Sam's safe, but he wants to know where Dean is.

"An hour," Dean says out loud. "I'll be there in an hour." He feels a little ridiculous talking to himself, but he feels like Sam's more likely to get the message that way.

The last hundred miles he keeps the needle at ninety, hoping the cops are busy elsewhere.

Dad's truck is parked next to Pastor Jim's sedan in front of the vicarage. Dean leaves his car on the street. Now that he's here, he has no idea what he's doing, what he's going to say. He can't go charging in guns blazing like the villain from a bad western, shouting, "I demand what is mine," even though that's pretty much what this whole thing feels like. Jim's done nothing wrong and Dad's just Dad, for fuck's sake, trying to protect his sons same as always.

Then Dean sees an image of himself taking Sam's bags out of the truck and loading them into the car, of Sam coming out the side door, them leaving without a fight. Sounds like a plan to Dean.

The plan worked better in Sam's head, though. In reality, Dad comes out as Dean's climbing up to get Sam's duffle. He's more mystified than angry at first, but that's before Dean jumps down and lands a right hook on his jaw.

He doesn't even mean to do it, it's just as soon as he sees his father standing there, all Dean can think about is what it felt like waking up with Sam gone.

"Dean! What the hell do you think you're doing?" Dad sounds incredulous.

Dean thinks about Dad drugging Sam and hits him again.

Blood blossoms on Dad's lip and he takes a swing back, a glancing blow off the side of Dean's head. Suddenly Sam's there, hanging off Dean's arm, and Jim's standing in front of Dad blocking whatever punch was coming next.

At Sam's touch Dean lives Sam's whole day in a flash—puking, the diner, hours on the road trying to get Dad to stop, slow down, pull over without making him suspect Sam was trying to let Dean catch up. Sam's mad at Dad, but he doesn't hate him. Doesn't want Dean to hurt him. Just wants to leave.

"Dean, John, what's going on?" Pastor Jim is looking back and forth between them with concern.

"He kidnapped Sam," Dean accuses, wishing he could take the words back as he says them; they aren't the most politic choice.

"I'm his sole guardian! I can't kidnap my own son!" Clearly Dad is feeling guilty about drugging Sam—he wouldn't be so defensive otherwise.

"Let's go inside," Jim says. "I have neighbors."

Inside, Sam keeps Dean between Dad and himself, something that doesn't go unnoticed by the pastor. But Jim doesn't say anything, just pushes Dad down into a chair and asks Dean if he needs anything to eat.

"Thanks," Dean says and lowers himself to the sofa, Sam pressed tight to his side. Somehow he manages to resist the urge to put an arm around Sam's shoulders. Bad enough Dad walked in on them. Dean doesn’t need to exacerbate the problem.

Dad just glares at him like he's waiting for Dean to speak.

"You drugged him, stuffed him in a car and drove him across five state lines against his will. You can't say that doesn't look like kidnapping."

"And what does what you did to him look like? Sodomy is a serious crime in Virginia." Dad lowers his voice. "Sodomy with a minor who is also your brother—I hate to think what book they'll throw at you for that."

Dean feels Sam prickle a second before he explodes. "He didn't do anything to me! We did it. Together. Stop talking about me like I'm not even here!"

"Sam." Dad raises a placating hand, but Sam's having none of it.

Then Dean sends out a soothing blanket of thought, backed up with the idea that they just want to get out of here, and Sam backs down.

"What are you shouting about sodomy for, John?" Pastor Jim returns with a grilled cheese sandwich on a paper towel and a bottle of coke.

Dad, not surprisingly, doesn't answer.

"Thanks for cooking," Dean says. "You didn't have to."

"Is this the kind of talk that could use an unbiased outsider, or is it family business you'd just as soon I kept my nose out of?" Jim looks at all three of them as he says it, making it clear that this isn't just John's decision.

"We're fine," Sam says. "You don't need to worry."

Jim looks at him carefully then says, "Okay, then. There are a few things I should see to up at the church. There's still a trundle in Sam's room, Dean, if you all want to get some sleep."

Dad flinches at that but bites his tongue until Jim's gone.

Conversation degenerates immediately into a shouting match, Dad accusing Dean of rape, Dean accusing Dad of kidnapping, and Sam accusing them both of treating him like a child.

Dean isn't used to fighting with his father—he's always felt safer obeying—but now he can't stop. His own anger is compounded and multiplied by Sam's emotions, Sam, who never agrees with Dad anyway.

They get up in each other's faces again, so close Dean can see the cracks in the blood where it's dried on Dad's cheek, the flecks of grey in his beard. Dean suddenly understands that this fight is never going to end. John Winchester will never accept that his sons are more than brothers, and Dean and Sam will never agree to go back to what they were. They are at an impasse.

"We're going to go," Dean says, quietly, raising his hands and stepping back. "We're just going to go."

He can feel Sam's intake of breath, adrenalin not his own zipping through him, fear and excitement. He knows it's Sam's because Dean just feels numb.

Family is everything, it's all he has. And he's just given up on it. Not just joining the army, getting a job, going to college—he's leaving.

"If you boys go now," Dad says, voice deadly cold, "you never come back."

Sam's shaking, emotions so volatile Dean can't follow them, but Dean just says, "Yes, sir. I understand."

He doesn't look back as Sam follows him out the door.


The Road After

They headed west that night, Sam taking over driving when he felt Dean drifting towards sleep behind the wheel, pulling over to the shoulder an hour before dawn when neither of them could keep their eyes open any more. They tumbled into the back seat, clung to each other, and pretended they didn't know the other one was crying.

They can't do that anymore. They're so entwined with each other's thoughts and emotions that there's no pretending about anything.

They settled in Washington at first, enrolled Sam in school, found Dean a job fixing cars, but just before Sam turned eighteen, the garage was seized for back taxes and Sam decided he was tired of the rain anyway, so they headed down to California. Dean wanted to learn how to surf, so they landed in an illegally converted garage apartment in Santa Cruz.

They're on the west side of town, only five blocks from the beach, and close enough to the high school that Sam can walk. Their bed is on a platform over a sofa and a desk, and they have their own tiny kitchen and a bathroom. They have free use of the landlady's washer and dryer and can soak in the hot tub any time they want. It's bigger than a motel room and nicer than most of the apartments and ramshackle houses they'd lived in growing up, and best of all, they can afford it on what Dean makes working part time maintaining the shuttle buses up on the college campus. Sam works after school at a second-hand bookstore and earns enough to keep them in groceries and put a little by for a rainy day.

He's going to graduate in two months and he has a full scholarship to Stanford in the fall. Dean was so proud the day Sam got the letter that he was nearly bursting with it, and Sam thought he might blush himself to death with all the things Dean was thinking about him.

Dean's all for moving over the hill when school starts so Sam can be close to campus, but it's only an hour drive, their landlady here loves them, and their rent is half of what they'd have to pay in Palo Alto, so Sam plans on convincing Dean to stay where they are.

In the last year and a half they've learned to keep each other out as well as let each other in, which makes planning surprise parties a lot easier, and has kept them from going insane. Dean no longer has to listen in to Sam's physics teacher running a current through a string of students holding hands, and Sam doesn't know anymore when Dean drops a wrench on his foot, until he gets home and shows Sam the bruise.

But they can tap into the hum at the base of their skulls whenever they need each other, and when they touch it's still electric.

Dean misses hunting sometimes, and when it gets to be too much, Sam will drag him up into the hills and they'll hack their way through the woods, spar, and wrestle until Dean's tired and grumpy and just wants a shower and a soak in the hot tub. Or Sam will find him something to dig up and burn, and they'll go on a mini-roadtrip. Dean knows Sam's humoring him, but Sam knows Dean knows, so it works for them.

Dean also knows that Sam will go back to hunting full time if Dean decides he really can't stand being settled, and Sam knows that Dean wants him to go to college. Secrets like the watch Sam bought for Dean's birthday they can keep, but not anything important. It's not always easy being so tangled up inside each other's heads and hearts, but it's who they are. And neither of them would change a thing.


~~~~~||~~~~~

John is headed east from a haunting in Santa Barbara to deal with a Wendigo in Colorado, but he swings north first, works it so he hits Monterey Bay on the second of June. He takes highway 1 north, and then follows the directions he wrote down on an old envelope. Keeping his distance, he hides behind the bleachers, far enough back to not be seen, but close enough to the stage that he can hear the principal call Sam Winchester up to get his diploma. A familiar voice cat calls from the crowd, and Sam turns, looks out, and waves to his brother, with the biggest grin John has ever seen on his son's face.

It breaks his heart, but he stays to the end, until the graduates start milling with their friends and families, and Sam finds Dean in the crowd, crushes him with a hug.

Several parents and other kids congratulate Sam with hearty handshakes and pats on the back, greeting Dean like he and Sam belong together. From back here, John has to admit, it looks like they do.

He'd thought, a lifetime ago now—when he and Conrad caught one of the fairies and made a bargain to help them create a human-proof barrier in the woods if they would stop interfering with people—that the curse on his sons would be broken and that they'd come back. He'd waited, but they never called. Dean still has his phone—John gets the bills, so he knows Dean's still using it—but John has no idea what to say, so he's never called them either. They know how to reach him if they need him. But for now, they look happy.

When people start gathering their cameras and sweaters, John finally breaks away, heads back to his truck. The road out of Santa Cruz is winding and steep, and he has to take it slow. When he finally gets to the other side of the mountain, where six-lane freeways wait to take him in any direction he could want to go except back the way he came, it feels like he's left his boys in a whole other world.


~fin~
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A/N: First I must thank dreamlittleyo, who is the reason this exists. She gave me the plot bunny and let me run with it, and then was unendingly patient when I didn't so much run as crawl. It's only two months late :) This fic means a lot to me, for many reasons, and I cannot thank her enough.

Thanks also to sylvanwitch who did a FANTASTIC job with beta and reassurance. Any remaining errors are mine.

Thank you also to my flist for helping me choose a title, even though they didn't necessarily know that was what they were doing at the time.

Filcher's Hollow and all its residents are nothing more than figments of my imagination.