Part One: The Last Fifty Miles

Sam doesn't get visions anymore. That's how it starts.

They're in the parking lot outside of a gas station in Coalgate, Oklahoma when Dean realizes it. He's got a bag of donuts in one hand, keys in the other as he moves to unlock the Impala. When he doesn't Sam frowns at him over the hood.

"When was the last time you had a vision?" Dean asks.

Sam considers. "I dunno. It's been while, I guess. Are you going to unlock the car?"

Dean turns the key but doesn't get in. "Can you narrow it down a little?"

"Uh . . . before the thing in River Grove, maybe?" Sam's counting back weeks the same way Dean is. He laughs softly. "Geez. It's been a while, hasn't it?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know how I didn't notice," Sam says. "I mean, I guess we kind of had a lot going on: the ghosts in Los Angeles and the djinn--"

"And the prison job," Dean adds.

"Can we please never talk about that again?"

Dean grins. "I'm telling you, Sammy, a teardrop tattoo and you would've fit in just fine."

Sam throws the wadded-up receipt at him; Dean dodges it.

"Still, though, doesn't it seem weird that you would've just stopped having the visions? Like, what, your psychic radar just shut down?"

"I dunno. I'm not complaining, though."

Dean slides into the car, sets the donuts up for easy access on the seat between them. "No, I guess not." He turns AC/DC on and up and drives away.

*

They've got a job lined up in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It looks to be a spirit haunting a movie theater, a simple salt-and-burn deal, but they don't get in until after nine and there's no reason to rush in blind. They get a room at the Rodeway Inn and find a bar.

"Reconnaissance, Sam," Dean announces, depositing two shots and a beer in front of him. "Get on it."

"This doesn't look much like reconnaissance." Sam makes a face but throws back the shots.

"That's the spirit," Dean says, grinning into his beer.

If any bar in the world ever deserved the name honky-tonk, it's this one: big-haired girls, country music and a peanut shell-covered floor. Dean sets himself up at a pool table after a while. They don't really need the money right now, so he doesn't play to win; it's just something to do with his hands while he talks to some of the local boys. Everything points straight towards an angry spirit, which makes things easy; they can go right in tomorrow, dig those bones up and be on their way.

He comes out twenty bucks ahead after a while and decides to give it a rest. When he turns, though, Sam's not where he'd been before, leaning against the bar and talking to the bartender, and a momentary panic sets in before he recognizes Sam in the corner, chatting up some chick. Dean grins and says, "Attaboy, Sammy," to his beer, before what he saw really sets in and he does a double-take.

It's been four months since San Francisco and Madison, and in that whole time Sam hasn't made one attempt to get with a girl. Sam is one damned good-looking guy, and plenty of girls have asked Dean about him -- it's got something to do with the way Sam hunches over the bar, Dean thinks, trying to smaller than he is, or maybe with his dimples; chicks love dimples -- but this is the first time Sam has returned any of the interest in four months. Dean can't figure out why it should be a girl in this particular bar in Hot Springs, Arkansas, who's the one to manage to get to Sam, but Sam is bending over her, his mouth moving on her neck; clearly Sam wants her, and Dean's not about to interrupt. Sam's got a room key and he knows how to get to the hotel.

Dean finishes his beer and heads back. He watches pay-per-view porn and jerks off lazily, then falls asleep with most of his clothes still on, feeling better than he has in a long time.

*

When Dean wakes up it's sometime after dawn. Sam is back, and he's freaking out; Dean can sense it in the air before he's even fully awake, and he seriously considers going back to sleep until Sam calms down. But it's already morning and Sam can tell when he's faking, anyway, so he rolls over and says, "Hey, how'd the rest of your night go?"

Sam's wearing a track in the carpet, he's pacing so hard. "How much did you see?"

Dean stretches, scratches at his stomach. "What do you mean? How much did I see of what?"

"I mean, what was the last thing you saw me do before you left?"

"Uh. You were in the corner about to get it on with some girl."

"Yeah," Sam says. "Yeah, well, I did."

Dean grins. "All right, Sammy! Good for you."

Sam scowls. "No, it's not like that. I wasn't planning on sleeping with anybody last night."

"Well, you never know when you're going to run into a hot chick," Dean says cheerfully against Sam's panic.

Sam pushes a hand through his hair. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, she was hot. She was also twenty-five years old and had just gotten her G.E.D."

"There you go! She's hot and she's a social climber. She wants better things out of life than Hot Springs, Arkansas!"

Sam just shakes his head. "You didn't meet her, Dean."

"Whatever. So, was she good?"

"That's not the important thing here," Sam says stiffly.

"Ouch. Sorry, buddy." Dean shifts to the side of the bed and digs in the pile of clothes on the ground for a t-shirt. There's a solid black one that's more or less clean; he pulls it over his head.

"It doesn't matter. That's not what I'm trying to tell you. I talking to the bartender, Dean, and the next thing I knew I was fucking Melba Lynn out back of the bar!"

"Melba Lynn?" Dean says.

"The girl."

Dean winces in sympathy. What a name. "So wait. You don't remember anything between talking to the bartender and fucking this girl?"

Sam frowns. "I remember talking to her in the corner and getting her to leave the bar with me -- like, I remember having done it, but I don't remember actually doing it, you know? It doesn't make sense."

Dean chuckles. "Aww, c'mon, Sam. Sure, it does. You had too much to drink and you fucked a random girl. Shit happens."

"First off, I don't just sleep with random girls," Sam bristles. "You know that. And second, I didn't have anywhere near enough to drink for that."

"So maybe the bartender put a couple shots of vodka in your beer or something."

Sam scowls. "I think I would have noticed if my beer tasted like vodka, Dean."

Dean stares at him, considering. "So what, you think something else is going on here?"

"I don't know." Sam exhales hard.

Dean lets his mouth curve into a smile. "Whatever. Sounds to me like you just lost track of how much you had to drink and relaxed enough to get laid for once in your life. And okay, so the chick wasn't really your type, but it happens. A little sex isn't gonna kill you."

Sam frowns, screws up his forehead. "Actually, uh. Let me--" He fishes for his wallet, pulls out an unopened condom. "Shit. I'm pretty sure we didn't, uh."

Of all the stupid, stupid things -- but Sam doesn't need the safe sex lecture, Dean's sure of that. He gave him that lecture when Sam was thirteen; he couldn't look Dean in the eye for a week afterwards. But Dean knows for a fact that Sam doesn't mess around when it comes to using condoms.

"It's probably fine," Dean says, keeping his tone light; Sam's already freaking out enough for both of them. "If your dick falls off, we'll get you checked out."

Sam begins to smile, but it fades quickly. "She could be pregnant, Dean."

Dean swallows hard. "There's a good chance she's on birth control," he says. "Lots of girls are." But that doesn't mean that this particular one is. If it's taken her until she's twenty-five to finish high school Dean's not holding out hope that she knows where to find the local Planned Parenthood.

Sam's thinking something similar, from the way the unhappiness moves across his face.

"Look," Dean says, "it's probably fine. It's going to be okay."

Sam's face is unreadable. He puts the condom away, sticks the wallet back in his pants. "I'm going to go take a shower," he says.

*

Sam's quiet over breakfast, but some of the tension drains from his shoulders when they go by the public library to start researching the case. It could be the distraction of having something to do other than think about what happened last night, Dean thinks, but he's pretty sure that it's actually just that Sam is an enormous dork and loves libraries.

This has got to be the easiest case ever; they barely even have to work for the info. There are plenty of accounts of the old Malco Theater being haunted all over the Internet: people keep hearing screams in the basement at night; light fixtures fall down no matter how many times the staff fixes them; and a couple of janitors have reported seeing a glowing woman in the basement. The spirit hasn't really been harming anyone, other than scaring one of the janitors into tripping over some boxes and breaking his ankle, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't still lay it to rest.

Sam finds everything they need in some microfiche. "Our spirit's name is Alberta Lowell," he reads off the screen. "She was murdered in her bed in 1953. They never figured out who did it. Supposedly the husband, Henry Lowell, had an airtight alibi, but there's still a lot of speculation that it was him. And acutally, I'm pretty sure it was."

"Oh yeah?" Dean says, leaning over Sam's shoulder. "How come?"

Sam taps at the screen. "Generally spirits haunt places for a good reason. Henry Lowell used to own the Malco Theater."

"Fair enough," Dean says. "I'll buy it. You know where Alberta's buried?"

Sam scrolls through more of the microfiche. "Yep. Crestview Memorial Park."

They've got nothing to do until they can go salt and burn Alberta after dark, so they give the tourist deal a try, head to the hot springs. Dean gets a full-body massage from a girl named Chandra. It's even better than the Magic Fingers Bed. Chandra has five silver rings in each ear and after she's finished she lets him fuck her in the bathroom. That part's pretty awesome, too.

Sam passes on getting a massage, but he spends all day in and out of the hot springs, and Dean watches most of the rest of the tension ease out of him in the sunlight and the steam.

Other than the actual digging up the corpse part, Alberta Lowell is the easiest angry spirit to deal with in the history of ever. She doesn't throw a single surprise. Still, it takes them until well after midnight to finish refilling the grave, and Dean's completely beat, so they head straight back to the hotel afterwards and go to sleep.

*

Sam's freaking out again when Dean wakes up. It's a little after seven in the morning.

"Jesus Christ, what now?" Dean groans.

"I went out last night after we got back," Sam says without preamble.

That's got Dean sitting up. "You what?" Sam isn't ever all that psyched about going out at all, let alone by himself, let alone after a hunt -- and okay, it wasn't that hardcore of a hunt, but they still spent half the night digging up a grave, and no matter how many times you do it, digging six feet of dirt out of the ground never stops being exhausting.

"Yeah." Sam sits down on the desk chair and turns it so he's facing Dean. "I don't know. When we got back here I swear all I wanted to do was sleep. And I went to sleep, but then sometime after two I was in the bathroom of a bar, screwing some girl. And you know I didn't have anything to drink last night before I went to bed, Dean, you saw me." His face is pinched-up, unhappy and confused.

"Okay," Dean says slowly. "The weirdest thing here is how you found the energy to get back up and go out, because let me tell you, I feel like I could sleep for a week."

Sam blows his hair off his forehead. "Yeah. I don't know what's going on with me. This isn't like me, Dean. You know that. I don't do things like this. It's like I'm possessed or something."

Dean's guts twist at that thought. He's been hoping that Sam would never get possessed again; but if it were to happen, he's been hoping he'd know as soon as it happened, that he'd notice it wasn't actually Sam in Sam's body. Dean pulls out his flask of holy water. "There's one way to find out, isn't there?"

Sam nods and takes a swig. Nothing happens.

"I guess that rules out demonic possession." Dean considers and says, "Y'know, it could just be that you've finally discovered your libido after twenty-four years, and you're trying to make up for lost time."

"Subconsciously?" Sam says dubiously. "Because I gotta tell you, when I went to bed last night I wasn't planning on leaving anytime in the next decade."

Dean scratches at his leg, exasperated. "I dunno! Work with me here."

Sam chews on his lip and then pulls out his wallet. The same condom's still in it, untouched. "You know that I know better than this, Dean. Something seriously wrong is going on here."

And until Sam produced that condom again, Dean might have argued with him, might have tried to convince him that it wasn't a big deal, but now he says, "Okay. Okay, we'll figure it out."

*

It's not a curse, it's not a spell and it's not alien sex pollen, at least, not as far as they can figure; they've never run across actual aliens, and that time with the Trickster doesn't really count. Whatever's going on with Sam, it's not mentioned in any book Dean's ever read, and Dad's journal is coming up blank. They try calling Bobby, but he doesn't know anything, either.

"I'll ask around, see if I can figure anything out," Bobby says. "In the meantime, keep a close eye on him, Dean."

"Yeah, I will. Thanks." Dean grips the phone tighter, curls it towards his shoulder.

"I'll get back to you as soon as I can," Bobby says, and hangs up.

*

They're on their way to check out a string of disappearances in Greenwood, South Carolina: five women gone in the past three months, completely vanished without any signs of a struggle. There aren't any signs of supernatural activity either, though, and Dean's with the police on this one: it's a very good kidnapper behind it, or they've all joined a cult; either way, it's none of his and Sam's business. But Sam insists he's got a feeling about the case, and they don't really have anything else lined up, so they're on the way.

Sam was talkative enough earlier when they were outlining the case and debating the fastest way to head east from Oklahoma. But they've been in the car for a while now and Sam's been quiet, and Dean's got a pretty good idea of why.

"It could still be nothing," he says halfway through Alabama.

"Sure," Sam says. "Also, Bigfoot could be real."

"Bigfoot's real!" Dean says, outraged. "Haven't you seen that show on the Discovery Channel? They have pictures and first-hand accounts and video evidence and everything!"

Sam raises his eyebrows. "When you say video evidence, you're talking about those fuzzy shots some guy made of his buddy?"

"Whatever. They found tracks. Bigfoot's totally real."

"Okay, sure," Sam says, and rolls up the window to sleep against it.

It's just past dark when they get in. Dean turns to Sam while they're waiting for the off-ramp stoplight to turn green and says, "D'you want to grab some dinner, maybe hit a bar after?"

Sam stares at him. "Have you forgotten about my thing?"

"Your irrepressible sex drive, you mean?"

Sam frowns. "Do you think you could maybe take this seriously?"

"I am taking it seriously!" Dean says. "Something crazy is going on, I know. I'm taking it very seriously. But come on, you have to admit this is at least a little funny."

"At least a little funny, Dean?" Sam parrots back. "We still have no idea what's going on with me. We don't know if it's something that's going to keep on happening or what, and I really don't think we should be going out before we know what's going on!"

"Fine, okay, sorry," Dean says, clenching the steering wheel. "Forget I asked."

They end up checking into the Jameson Inn, getting pizza delivered and watching Die Hard on TV. The credits roll a little after eleven and Dean's already falling asleep. "You ready to call it a night?" he says, poking Sam's shoulder.

Sam mumbles something unintelligible and jerks awake. "What?"

Dean repeats the question.

"Yeah, sure," Sam says. "But could you do something for me first?"

Dean yawns. "Yeah?"

"Could you tie me to the bed?"

And just like that Dean's completely awake. "What?"

Sam flushes but says, "Look, we don't know what's going on with me, right? And I definitely wouldn't have thought I'd've gone out last night, but I did, so I just don't want to take any chances tonight, okay?"

For some reason Dean's mouth has gone dry. "You want me to tie you to the bed," he says, just to make sure he's hearing this right.

Sam stares at him. "Yeah. I mean, maybe the last couple of nights were a fluke, and maybe nothing's going to happen tonight, but I'd really rather play it safe. It's a lot harder to go out when you're tied to the bed, I figure."

Dean feels itchy, his skin strangely tight. "Yeah, okay, that makes sense," he says slowly. "Let me go get the stuff from the car."

"Okay."

He stays outside too long, trying to remember how to breathe evenly, and he doesn't know why he seems to have forgotten how. Eventually he gets himself under control. When he heads inside Sam lies back immediately, spread-eagled. "You already go to the bathroom and everything?" Dean asks. "You'd better not wake me up in the middle of the night because you've got to pee."

"I'm good."

Dean swallows. "All right." He saws the rope into two pieces. "Just the wrists should do it, don't you think?"

"I hope so," Sam says.

A four-poster would be the best for this, but they aren't in the Ritz Carlton. There's some space between the wood of the headboard and the metal of the frame, though, and Dean wedges the rope through it, knots it tightly, then takes Sam's wrist in his hand. He can feel Sam's pulse quickening; Dean's blood pressure jumps to match it.

"You sure you're okay with this?"

Sam rolls to look at him. "I'm the one who suggested it, Dean. It's cool. You might want to make that last knot a little tighter, though."

Dean nods and fixes it, then goes on to the other wrist. After he pulls the last knot tight, Sam tests the ropes. There's enough slack that his arms shouldn't go numb, but nowhere near enough to be able to untie himself.

"Feels pretty good to me," Sam says, then looks down. "Oh, huh. Guess I forgot. Do you mind . . ."

Dean stares at him for a minute. "Do I mind what?"

Sam looks down again, and that's when Dean gets it: Sam's still fully dressed. "I can't fall asleep if I've still got my jeans on," he says.

"Huh," Dean says. "Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you asked me to tie you up."

Sam kicks off his sneakers and socks and fixes Dean with a puppy dog look. "Just take them off for me, would you? Please?"

Dean exhales. "Fine. Because I am just that awesome of a brother, fine, but you owe me." He reaches for Sam's belt. There's no reason his hands should be shaking; he wills them steady. Sam lifts his hips to let Dean slide the jeans over his ass and down and the moment stretches far too long before Dean's got the jeans all the way off.

"Thanks," Sam says.

"Sure." Dean drops the jeans on the floor and concentrates on breathing. "You good now?"

Sam strains agains the ropes again. "Yeah, I'm good. It's too hot for a blanket."

"Good, because remember, I'm not getting up in the middle of the night to untie your sorry ass." Dean's voice sounds wrong to his ears, too loud; he just undressed his brother, who is tied to a bed to keep him from going out and fucking random girls, and he used to think the things the Trickster pulled were the gold standard for really fucking weird but the current situation just might beat it out.

"I'll keep that in mind," Sam says gamely. "G'night, Dean."

"Night."

Dean strips down to his boxers and lies down on the other bed, but he's rattled, can't sleep.

*

He wakes up in the dark to see someone looming beside his bed. He already has his knife in his hand before he realizes it's just Sam. "Jesus Christ, you scared me," he breathes, and then he remembers that when they went to sleep, Sam was tied to the bed and says, "Wait. What the fuck?"

Sam's mouth twists. "I guess you didn't need to worry about me waking up and having to pee, huh?"

Dean sits up. "What the fuck?" he repeats slowly.

Sam exhales. He's not even panicking. This is beyond panicking, Dean thinks; this is what happens when you've been panicking for so long that you can't even remember how to panic anymore. "I don't know, Dean. I mean, we tested those knots, right? They were good. You saw them. But uh," he swallows and holds out his hands so Dean can see the welts on them, crusted dark red, "it looks like I got out."

"You -- Jesus."

"And it's the same as before," he says. "Well, in the sense that I don't remember doing it. And I remember having done it, but only parts of it. I don't remember the whole thing. I mean, it must have taken a long time to get out of those knots, but I don't really remember how I got out of them. How did you not hear it?"

Dean works his jaw, tries to swallow. "I dunno, Sammy." Because usually he's a light sleeper, wakes up to anything; Sam knows that as well as he does, but he didn't hear a thing. "I guess you were really quiet or something."

"How can you be really quiet when you're getting out of bonds, though?" Sam asks. "I feel like I'm losing my mind."

"So it was the same as before, then?" Dean says. "You went out and fucked some girl?"

"Yeah," Sam says. "Yeah. I don't even know what her name was, Dean."

He sounds totally miserable, and Dean doesn't even know what to do about it, so he just says the first thing that comes to mind. "You, uh, wanna watch cartoons or something?"

Sam stares at him. "Cartoons?"

"Why not?"

Sam keeps staring. "At 5:17 in the morning?"

Dean shrugs. "I bet they're on already." He fiddles with the remote. It turns out that ass o'clock on a Saturday is prime cartoons time in Greenwood. Looney Tunes. Dean doesn't entirely hate South Carolina. And Sam can make whatever jokes he wants to make about Dean having the maturity of a five-year-old as long as it's keeping him distracted.

"We should call Bobby," Sam says after the second episode of Scooby Doo.

"And tell him what?"

"Tell him what happened. It can't hurt."

"Yeah, okay," Dean says, and picks up the phone.

Bobby's quiet for a moment after Dean explains about Sam and the inexplicable bond-wriggling. "Are you sure this isn't you we're talking about here, Dean? Wanting to get with girls so badly that he'd break himself out of ropes doesn't really sound like Sam."

"Hey! I don't need to get with girls that badly," Dean says. "I have excellent self-restraint."

Bobby snorts over the phone at the same time as Sam suppresses a laugh from across the room.

"I hate you all," Dean says loudly.

"Sure you do," Bobby says. "But go through this with me one more time. You swear you tied Sam up tightly enough that he shouldn't have had a chance of getting out, and then he gets himself untied and goes out and sleeps with a girl without you hearing a thing?"

"Yeah, that's pretty much it," Dean says.

"Well, fuck, Dean. I hate to say it, but the thing that's bothering me the most here is that you didn't even hear him. Maybe you're getting soft in your old age or maybe it's something else, but either way you need to step it up. Tie him up again tonight and for God's sake, keep your ears open. We need to know how he's doing it if we're going to have any chances of figuring this out."

Dean hates the familiar tightening of his throat, the feeling of having failed. He fights down the urge to say, "I'll do better, sir" -- Bobby isn't Dad -- and instead says, "I'll let you know what happens. But you don't have any idea of what's going on yet?"

Bobby huffs. "If I did, you'd know already."

"Okay, thanks," Dean says, and hangs up.

They get waffles from the diner down the street a little after nine. Sam's doing all right, as far as Dean can tell. "You wanna figure out what's happening to those chicks?" Dean asks as they pay.

Sam pushes his soggy mess of waffles around the plate. "Yeah, sure."

They spend a frustrating morning interviewing friends, boyfriends and parents, but they come up dry on all counts. There doesn't seem to be anything that the missing women even have in common, really; a couple of times people mention the missing women's general unhappiness with their jobs or lives or current circumstances, but the police have been through all this with them before, and that's not anywhere close to a good enough link to make a pattern.

They finish with the last of the women's families a little after two. "I'm telling you, Sam, I really don't think there's anything we need to be worrying about here. Have you heard a single thing that sounds supernatural about this? I mean, it's a little weird that there are this many women going missing, sure, but that doesn't mean a creature or a spirit or whatever has anything to do with it."

Sam frowns. "I know, okay? There's just something about it that's bothering me, is all, and I just want to keep looking for a little while and see if I can figure out what it is. If I don't figure it out by tomorrow, we can go."

"Fine," Dean says. It's not like they have another case lined up yet or anything, and if Sam's got a feeling about the case it's a good enough reason to stay, even if Dean's ninety percent sure Sam's wrong. "We'll keep looking. After lunch, though, because I'm freaking starving."

They find a family-style restaurant that serves big plates of barbeque and cornbread and fuck if Dean doesn't really like South Carolina. The waitress is named Molly, and she's cute, college-aged and redheaded. She brings the check and smiles shyly at Dean.

A couple of the missing girls were in their early twenties, Dean remembers, and it feels like they've asked everyone else in the whole town about them, so he says casually, "Hey Molly, what do you know about those women who've gone missing?"

"Sue Ann Renson and Tara Andrews and them, you mean?" she asks.

She doesn't seem suspicious or anything, so Dean looks at the bill and counts out his cash slowly. "Yeah. Did you know any of them?"

Molly shrugs. "Yeah, sure. I went to high school with Sue Ann and Tara. Why do you want to know?"

Sam leans over the table. "It just seems weird, is all. I mean, the police don't have any leads, their families don't know what's going on -- if it weren't for the fact that there are five of them who did it, it'd seem like they all just ran away or something."

Molly frowns. "It's real funny that you should mention Sue Ann and them, actually, because just the other day my friend Betsy was swearing she saw Sue Ann on the street."

That's got Dean sitting forward. "She did? Where?"

"On Duncan Street. She was coming home from a party and she said she saw Sue Ann going inside the old Radford place. Betsy was pretty drunk, though, and anyway we haven't seen Sue Ann in ages, probably not since the summer after high school, so she was sure she was just imagining things. I would have forgotten all about it if you hadn't just brough it up. Funny timing, huh?"

"Yeah," Dean says, finishing counting out the bills. "That is funny. The old Radford place, you said?"

"Yeah. It's a big old white haunted house," she says. "It's got those creepy windows like in the Amityville Horror."

Dean nods. "Gotcha. Thanks for lunch."

Molly smiles. "My pleasure. See you around!"

With that smile, Dean's about thirty seconds away from asking her to meet him out back on her break, but Sam's eyes are on him and he pushes the thought down. There will be other red-headed college girls, and he's already got her out of his head and moved on to thinking about the case. "What's your feeling about this, Sam?" he asks, unlocking the car. "Because my feeling is, Molly's friend wasn't hallucinating anything. What if these women aren't missing at all? What if they've just gone underground?"

"Underground in the sense of having joined a cult or something?" Sam says.

"Or something," Dean agrees. "I don't know. Let's go check out the Radford place, see if we can find anything."

It doesn't take long to find the house Molly was talking about, and she's right: it does have those creepy-ass Amityville windows. There aren't any signs of life in the place that they can see from the street, so Dean pulls over a couple blocks down and gets out.

They walk around the outside of the place, peering through the windows, but there's still nothing to be seen. Dean's about ready to call it off when Sam examines the foundations and says, "Hey, check this out. It looks like there's a basement."

Dean jimmies one of the back windows with a knife and they climb inside. They check around the upstairs of the house just to make sure there aren't going to be any surprises, and then they hunt for the basement door. It doesn't take long to find: it's the only one of the interior doors that's locked. Sam presses his ear against it and motions Dean forward. There are muffled voices behind it and low thumping music.

Dean nods. Sam pulls out his lockpicking kit and goes to work. The bolt turns quickly and Sam eases the door open; it doesn't even squeak. It's dim in the basement below them, and Dean's afraid the sunlight from the ground floor might give them away, but the quality of the voices doesn't change. Dean pulls out his knife and creeps down the stairs, Sam at his back, and then the basement opens up in front of him.

People are sprawled across ratty couches and all kinds of stuff hanging from the ceiling and taped to the walls. The only light comes from lava lamps and a couple of black lights in the corner. That music is still thumping, low and insistent, and it's hard to keep his heartbeat from moving to match it. The whole place smells like sweat and pot and piss, and there's no question about it: they're in a drug den.

There are about a dozen people in the basement, all in varying degrees of functional. Dean recognizes one of the women passed out on a couch as Tara Andrews, although she looks like shit, and after squinting hard he can identify two of the others. A man tries to rush Sam with a knife, but his movements are off, erratic, and Sam knocks him out cleanly; he crumples to the floor, and no one else tries anything.

Sam goes to Tara Andrews and says, "Are you all right?"

Her eyes go wide with terror and she says, "Please don't tell anyone I'm here," and vomits on Sam's shoes. And there's their answer, Dean thinks: they're here of their own volition, these women, and he doesn't know what would have made all five of them get into drugs this hard all at once, but people do crazy things. It makes him sick to think what could have driven them to it, that their families wouldn't have even noticed--

A woman in the corner is clutching her knees to her chest, rocking back and forth. Dean goes to her. It's Sue Ann Renson; he recognizes her from the picture in the paper. Whatever she's dosed up on is bad. She can't even get her head up to look at him. He catches a glimpse of her wrist and pushes the sleeve up to reveal needle tracks. Heroin, then, he's guessing. She's saying something but the words are all jumbled.

"What?" Dean says, leaning in, and the mumbling turns into words: "Blood in the mouth," is what she's saying. "Blood in the mouth, evil in the blood." Nonsense babbling, just those two phrases over and over -- "Blood in the mouth, evil in the blood" -- and she's shaking like she's having a seizure, and then she gets her head up and stares. Dean turns to follow her eyes and she's looking straight at Sam, still hissing about evil and blood, and something twists in Dean's gut. She's dosed up, he tells himself, she's just saying things, but he can't fight down the need to get out of there now.

Dean drops her arm, walks over to Sam and says, "Come on, we can't do anything do for them, let's get out of here and call the cops."

Sam looks around the basement. "Yeah, let's go," he says reluctantly, and follows Dean out.

They call in an anonymous tip from a gas station pay phone in the next town over. Dean stocks up on Twinkies and peanut M&Ms and chain-eats them as he drives, ignoring Sam's disgusted looks. Dean was right about there not being anything supernatural going on with the case, but can't bring himself to gloat about it, and he can't get Sue Ann's words out of his mind. It doesn't mean anything, what she said. He turns the music up and tries to drown out his thoughts.

They head west; Dean doesn't really have a destination in mind. They take I-20 past Atlanta and stop about an hour later at a hotel just off the highway. Sam pulls out his laptop as soon as they check in and hacks into the hotel's wireless.

Dean gives him about thirty seconds before he says, "Where's our next hunt, wonder boy?"

Sam stares at him. "Impatient much? I'm working on it."

Dean's already itching for a good hunt, a real one, with lots of shooting and lighting things on fire. "Right, well, let me know when you find anything," he says, and picks up the phone book to look for take-out options. "Mexican good with you?"

"In Georgia?" Sam says dubiously.

"Sure, why not?"

Dean can actually hear Sam's eyeroll. "We're about as far from Mexico as you can get and you want to -- never mind."

Dean grins and orders burritos. It turns out the place delivers, which clenches the deal, because no way is Mexican food delivered right to them not going to be awesome. He feels a little better already at the thought of it.

And okay, maybe it's not one hundred procent awesome. It's giving Dean about the worst gas ever, but it doesn't matter, because dude. Burritos. He gets sodas from the machine in the hall to go with them and turns on the ten o'clock Law & Order rerun.

"The body's in the the dumpster," Sam says without looking up from the laptop.

"I hate to break it to you, buddy boy, but the body isn't always in the dumpster," Dean says. "The bathtub."

God damn it if the dead chick isn't in the dumpster, though. "They're still not always in the dumpster," Dean tells him.

"Definitely not," Sam says smugly.

Unfortunately, Law & Order always gets about eight billion times less exciting after they find the body. Dean tries to concentrate on the show but he can't do it; he's itchy after that shit in Greenwood. He could really stand to go to a bar and drink a couple beers, but he can't do that, either. He thinks of the conversation with Bobby that morning. They need to figure out what's going on with Sam, and for that he needs to stay awake and sharp.

Sam doesn't even make it all the way through the episode before he's yawning. "You ready to call it a night?" Dean asks.

"Yeah," Sam says, then flushes. "Except we might want to try something other than ropes this time, considering how well those didn't work."

"I think we've still got some handcuffs in the back," Dean says, tongue heavy in his mouth.

"That should do it for my hands," Sam says. "And get the rope for my ankles, okay?"

Dean nods, digs for the keys in his pocket and heads outside.

It still doesn't mean anything, Dean tells himself. He's just confused or something, and he definitely doesn't think about Sam like that. But when he comes back in Sam's stripped down to his boxers, spread-eagled on the bed, and Dean goes hard in about two seconds flat.

"You all right, Dean?" Sam says, glancing up. "You look kind of funny."

"Your face looks kind of funny. I'm fine." He gets Sam handcuffed and tied before he has to bolt for the bathroom, but it's a close thing: he's coming before he's even got his dick all the way out of his jeans. He takes a long shower afterwards, breathing hard. God damn it. It doesn't get much more fucked up than this.

It doesn't matter. It's just a weird situation, is all, he's under some kind of stress from it, and it'll all be over soon.

When he gets out of the shower, Sam's already asleep. That's good; Sam needs it. Dean lies down on the other bed, but even if it weren't for the fact that he needs to stay awake in case something happens with Sam, he wouldn't be able to sleep. He can't ever get comfortable. He gets up and turns the A.C. on high, but it doesn't seem to be working; he's still too hot in his skin.

Sometime after two a.m. he hears noises coming from Sam's side of the room. At first Dean thinks it's just the A.C. finally kicking in, but the A.C. unit is at the foot of Dean's bed, and the sounds are from behind him. He's got his back to Sam's bed, and much as he wants to roll over and see what's going on, he's afraid Sam might realize he's awake if he does, so he keeps face to the wall and breathes steady and slow.

He has to strain to catch the sounds, but they're still there: a slow creak, a scrape of skin. Sam's trying to get out again, he's got to be, and damned if Dean knows why. Dean doesn't move, watches the flashing numbers on the hotel alarm clock and listens to the low noises. It's been nearly half an hour when there's a different noise, a slow crunching of bone, and Dean bites down on his bottom lip to keep from making a sound. Sam doesn't make a single pained noise, even though he had to have just broken his own hand to get out of a pair of handcuffs, and how he can stay silent through that -- how he could have done that at all -- Dean doesn't have any idea.

The noises aren't any louder after that, but they come more rapidly: the click of the other set of handcuffs being sprung, the untying of ropes, and the rustle of cloth: Sam's getting dressed. If Dean weren't completely awake and straining to hear this, he never would have had a clue it was going on; he knew Sam was a good hunter, but nobody's this good, this quiet.

Another rustle of cloth, and the shadows in the room shift: Sam's leaving, he's out the door, door closing silently behind him. Fuck. Fuck.

Dean's up and moving, pulling on his boots and heading out. He wastes a couple of seconds making sure he doesn't make any noise as he gets the door shut, because that would be stupid, giving himself away -- and fuck, he's thinking of this as if it's a hunt.

Which it could be, the slow roll in his stomach tells him. Something's very much not right here, and he knows it: Sam wouldn't be leaving under his own power, and there's no chance in hell Sam could have gotten out of those handcuffs and bonds that quickly or quietly. He's good but he's not that good, and if it weren't for the fact that nothing happened when Sam drank the holy water Dean would be sure he was possessed. Sam would be able to break his own hand to get out of a pair of handcuffs, Dean thinks, but not if his life didn't depend on it, and if he wasn't completely sure of it before, he is now: it may not be a demon that's doing this, but Sam can't be completely in control of his body.

Dean can make out Sam's form at the edge of the parking lot, moving towards the main street. He doesn't know why Sam's not taking the Impala, but then he realizes he's still got the car keys in his pocket, and no matter what is controlling Sam, it would have had to have known that going for Dean's keys would have been the number one sure way to get Dean awake and pointing a knife at his face. Sam's moving fast and quietly, but that's not anything unexpected; Sam's always been good at moving quietly. He turns right out of the parking lot.

Dean catches up to where he can see around the hotel, and it becomes obvious where Sam's headed: there's a dive of a bar just down the street.

Dean hangs back as Sam goes through the door, fingers his knife. He counts to one minute, two, then walks into the bar.

It's smoky inside, dim and oddly full -- but then again it's a Saturday night. A lot of the people here move through the bar comfortably, like they're regulars.

Sam's easy to spot: he's at the bar, an empty pair of shot glasses and half a beer in front of him. His wrists are bleeding from the fresh effort of getting out of the handcuffs, he's favoring his left hand, the one he broke getting out of the handcuffs. It's already swelling up. The bartender looks a little nervous around Sam, but then Sam pulls out a twenty and slides it across the counter and the bartender's back on board, pouring him another beer as Sam chugs the rest of the one in front of him.

It's too fast, Dean thinks, and it's wrong; Sam drinks, sure, but not like this, not when Dean's not around to push him. Dean's making his way through the bar to get Sam, do something, when the bartender hands Sam a second beer. Sam picks both of them up and heads towards the back of the bar.

Dean's good at pushing through crowds -- give him a government official's ID and he's excellent at it -- but he's not good at doing it without causing a scene and that's about the last thing he wants right now, for Sam to realize he's here before Dean's ready for it. He moves as quickly as he can, his eyes never leaving Sam. And that's another thing: Sam's got a good four inches on him (not that Dean would ever admit it to his face) and it's kind of hard to be stealthy when you're 6'5" -- except that Sam's slipping through the bar like it's nothing, like he could hold up a hand and the crowd would part for him.

Dean loses sight of him for a moment, people closing in, but there's no exit the direction Sam's heading and no need for Dean to panic. The crowd shifts and Dean's got him in his sight again: he's in the corner, chatting up a dark-haired chick in a green dress. She's holding one of Sam's beers with one hand and she's touching the other hand to Sam's arm; Sam's curling towards her, inviting, about to kiss her, and then Dean's there, hand on Sam's shoulder, not thinking about anything other than that he can't let this happen.

Sam turns into the touch, but Dean's just staring, hand heavy on Sam's shoulder. Dean can't lift it, can't stop staring: Sam's pupils are dilated out to the edges of his irises, full-black, and he grins at Dean, perplexed, but it's not Sam's grin.

"Get out of here," says the thing that isn't Sam, skin-crawlingly pleasant, and Dean doesn't know if there was a whammy in the words or not but either way he's out of there, scrambling into the parking lot and vomiting on the gravel. He pukes up the burrito and lunch from the diner and probably everything else he's eaten in the past week and he's not thinking about anything, he can't.

The second he's back in the hotel he's got Bobby on the phone. He's still not thinking. He can hear himself talking to Bobby, explaining what he saw, and he knows he sounds calm enough, logical, but he can't figure out what he's saying; he knows the words but the sentences don't make sense.

Bobby's silent on the other end of the line. "I'll call you back within the hour," he says finally. "Don't go after him."

Dean breathes through his mouth and hangs up the phone. It's three a.m. He turns on infomericals and keeps his gun in his hand.

He doesn't have long to wait. Ten minutes and the keycard slides in the door. Dean clicks the safety off the gun.

The second he's through the door, though, it's obvious it's Sam: the ease of movement is gone, and he's tired, slow and wincing, cradling his broken hand -- and Dean's already puked up everything he's eaten in weeks but he can't stop the urge, he's in the bathroom, clinging to the toilet, gagging on stomach acid.

"Dean?" Sam's saying, but Dean can't even get his head up to look at him.

"Give me a minute," he says to the toilet.

"Yeah, okay." There's the sound of shoes hitting the floor and the creak of the bed as Sam lies back on it.

The only thing left to puke up after a couple of minutes is his stomach, and Dean's really hoping it doesn't come to that. He washes off his face, spits in the sink and comes back out.

"Sorry about," Dean says. "Let me see your hand." He takes Sam's hand and runs his fingers along the lines of the break. Sam sucks in a sharp breath. "Fuck, Sam."

"I know," Sam says, taking his hand back. "How do you do something like that, Dean? How in the world do you break your own hand to get out of a pair of cuffs?"

"I don't know," Dean says, his mind full of what he'd seen at the bar: Sam's eyes gone black, the thing's words coming out of Sam's mouth--

"I don't know, either. I don't even know what happened, Dean. I don't know if I slept with anyone or what happened at all. The first thing I remember after going to bed is leaving a bar, and my hand hurting like a bitch and--" He's babbling, Dean realizes; Sam's barely holding himself together. "And I'm losing it. I'm losing my mind. I've got a few flashes of what happened, right, but that's it, except you -- you were there, weren't you? At some point, in the bar. You were there and I said something to you and you left. Why'd you--"

Dean's cell phone rings. He's not going to answer it but then Bobby's name flashes on the screen. He curls his mouth into a frown for Sam, says sorry and picks up. "Yeah?"

Bobby's voice is urgent. "Dean. Is he there?"

Dean looks at Sam and mouths, Bobby. "Yeah, why?"

"Okay, good. Don't let him go anywhere."

There's an edge to Bobby's voice, a thin line of nerves, and goosebumps prickle along Dean's arm. Bobby doesn't do nervous. "Why?" he says slowly.

Sam flashes him a look and says, "I'm taking a shower," and goes into the bathroom.

Dean slumps back against the bed. "Sam's taking a shower," he tells Bobby. "What's going on?"

Dean can hear Bobby considering his words. "What did John tell you about Sam?" he says finally, and that's Dean's stomach rolling over again, all right.

"What do you mean, what did Dad tell me about Sam?" Dean repeats back, stalling for time, but it doesn't do any good.

"Just answer the question, Dean."

He knows it's Bobby, and that Bobby's doing him a favor, whatever it is that he's trying to tell Dean, but still he has to force his mouth open, force out the words. "He said Sam might turn."

"It's not a might kind of thing anymore, Dean. He's turning."

Dean's glad there's nothing left in him to puke up. "Turning."

"Yeah."

"It's not a sure thing, though," Dean says, trying to convince himself. "It's not done or anything, and there's some way to stop it, right?"

Bobby's quiet. "I'll tell you what I know," he says finally.

"I'm all ears."

There are so many different ways that this conversation could play out, and Dean's thought of a dozen of them in an instant: it's just a curse, or it's that virus from River Grove kicking in, but it's curable, or it's nothing, really, Sam's just a stealthier hunter than you thought he was and the condoms thing is just a fluke--

"I want you to take everything I'm about to say under the condition that I can't be completely certain," Bobby says. "I haven't seen Sam since this started, but from what you're told me and from what I've found, I'm pretty damn sure."

"Okay," Dean says. "Go on."

He can hear Bobby working his mouth like there's something nasty in it, and then he just says it: "Demons like to reproduce."

The words filter into his head slowly. "Demons like to reproduce," he repeats back.

"The no-condoms thing," Bobby says. "Dean, I know your daddy raised you boys smarter than that. But evil things like to reproduce, and condoms tend to get in the way of that."

"You're gonna have to give me a minute here, Bobby."

Bobby waits a few seconds, then says, "I'm not going to sugarcoat this for you. Dilated pupils? Breaking his own hand to get out of a set of cuffs? That's not your brother, Dean."

Dean's vision blurs. "Yes, he is," he hisses into the phone. "He is too my brother. You haven't seen him, Bobby. He comes back and it's him. It's just a couple of hours and then he's back, all the way, so don't try to tell me he's not my brother."

Bobby is quiet for a moment. "John told you what to do if Sam turned, didn't he?"

"Listen to me," Dean says firmly. "Sam and I went through this before. I'm not killing Sam. Maybe he's turning but he hasn't turned, not all the way, and there's still -- there's got to be something we haven't thought of, hasn't there?"

Bobby exhales. "If I thought there were any chance at all of stopping it, don't you think I would have told you already?"

Dean grips the phone. "You said you weren't completely sure about this."

"Yeah, because I haven't seen Sam with my own eyes. But all the signs are there, Dean, and believe me when I say that there's no way to stop this."

"I've got to keep trying, Bobby," Dean bites out. "Don't you know that? There's got to be some way out there to stop this, and I'm going to find it."

Bobby sighs. "I know you can't kill him, Dean. I just wanted to make sure you know what you're dealing with here."

"I'll figure it out," Dean says firmly.

"If there's anyone in the world who's stubborn enough to do it, it's you," Bobby says. "But look, you're going to have to restrain him for now."

"That didn't exactly work so well before," Dean says.

"Yeah, I know," Bobby replies. "Just binding him wouldn't be enough. He's turning, and it sounds like he's getting pretty damned strong in the process. Look, I can't guarantee anything, but there's one thing I can think of that might work."

Sam comes out of the bathroom then, the towel hanging low around his hips. Dean swallows and says, "What?"

"A cage," Bobby says.

*

"So let me get this straight," Sam says fifteen minutes later. "We're driving to Detroit to meet a guy who makes--"

"Cages, yup." Dean taps his fingers on the steering wheel in time with the music.

"So I'm going to stay in a cage until we figure this out." Sam runs his hand through his hair. "Awesome."

"Hey, you got any better ideas?" Dean says.

"I'm not complaining. I'm just glad we've got something that'll work until we figure this out."

"Yeah, me too," Dean says, ignoring the squirming of his guts.

They stop at a twenty-four hour clinic just north of Atlanta and get Sam's hand put in a cast. They're lucky: Sam says he fell on it skateboarding, and the doctor doesn't even question it. It's a nasty break, six weeks in a cast at least, but it doesn't really matter. They aren't going to be doing any hunting until they figure out how to stop what's happening to Sam.

It's a little after five in the morning. They've been awake at this time of day a little too often recently; Dean can see the strained lines on Sam's face. He hates the reason they're awake but at least it's a good time for driving: low mist hanging along the road as the sun angles through the trees and no traffic to slow them down.

Just over the Tennessee border Sam wakes up sharply and says, "A cage. This guy in Detroit will make a cage of out anything, you said?"

He's wary of Sam's tone. "That's what Bobby said."

"God damn it, Dean. Why the fuck didn't he say anything about this when we were in San Francisco? We could've -- Madison--"

There's really nothing Dean can say to that, and after a while Sam's anger relaxes back into sleep.

Sam can sleep while they're on the road, Dean thinks. He can't exactly jump out of the car and go looking for a chick to impregnate while they're doing eighty on the interstate -- and sweet Jesus, he didn't just have that thought. They can't keep driving forever, though; the nights of not sleeping enough or at all have been wearing him thin, too, just like they're wearing on Sam. He'd keep driving forever if he knew it would make things better, but he knows that it won't and he can't.

*

"Let me drive," Sam says outside of Knoxville, Tennessee.

"Naw, it's fine, I can just keep going," Dean begins, but Sam cuts him off.

"You almost drove us off the road a few miles back. Let me drive for a while. You can take a nap or something."

Dean doesn't want to say it but he bites the bullet. "What if you turn while you're driving? We can't take that risk, Sam. And yeah, I'm tired, but I should be good now that the sun's up."

"It hasn't ever happened in the daytime," Sam says. "I know you're worried, Dean, but look at you. You really need the sleep. Just take a nap for a couple of hours and then we'll switch back, okay? It'll be fine."

They trade spots in a McDonald's parking lot. It's a little after ten in the morning and the sun's already hot enough to need the A.C. on; Dean cranks it up then balls up one of Sam's hoodies for a pillow. He's asleep instantly, some of the best, hardest sleep he's gotten in ages. When he wakes up it's a little after one. They're in another McDonald's parking lot and Sam's tapping his shoulder.

"Lunchtime," Sam says, and his eyes are hazel, wide and clear. Everything's fine.

*

They don't do it often, and it's probably not the best idea considering how tired they both are, but they drive through the night, trading off every couple hours or so. When it's his turn Dean keeps ESPN Sports Radio on, catches the box scores from the West Coast night games. He can fall asleep to any music in the world, but listening to baseball highlights keeps him awake, keeps him sharp. There were a couple of springs in high school where he played baseball before they moved on. It's a good sport, baseball, a clean sport, the connection of bat and ball. It was like the feeling at the end of a hunt, but always an uncomplicated one, without casualties, because no matter how much the game meant or how long it lasted, it had a beginning and an end; it could be moved past, even if you didn't want to.

It's the middle of the night and they're driving north. It's a short night, if you're sleeping. But it's three a.m. and the last of the recaps are done; Dean turns off the radio. It's that odd hour of the night, too late to be early, and Dean thinks that they could freeze time and stay here forever, at this non-hour on an empty highway. They could stay here, in the darkness and the silence, asphalt slipping past. There's nothing that could find them here.

*

Dean stops for breakfast around six. Sam shudders awake and takes in the golden arches. "Dude, this is the third McDonald's we've been at in the past twenty-four hours. Don't you think it's maybe time for a new restaurant?"

"We didn't eat at the first one, and this is the only place open right now in Bumfuck, Ohio," Dean says cheerfully. "Plus I want a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit. Suck it up."

Sam yawns and stretches, his shoulders cracking. "Fine."

They eat inside so Dean can take a piss. He's the bad kind of tired, though: even the large coffee isn't doing him any good.

"My turn to drive," says Sam, sounding more or less chipper.

"Yeah, okay, sure." Dean curls up against the window and passes out.

God damn it if Sam isn't playing whiny girl music when he wakes up, though. He's got his iPod broadcasting over the radio and the combination of the upbeat whining and the beeping in the background is just about enough to drive him to throw the iPod out the window.

"C'mon, Sam, you're killing my car. She can't stand this shit, you know that. What have I told you about music made after 1980?"

Sam raises his eyebrows. "You know all the words to REO Speedwagon," he says.

Dean grins. "That's for getting girls, dude. And it's worked multiple times, might I add."

"Whatever. I think your car can survive The Postal Service."

Dean stares at him.

Sam sighs. "That's the name of the band, dumbass."

"Soon as the song's over, you're putting on Back in Black, is all I'm saying," Dean informs him, curling back up against the window.

Half an hour later they're in Michigan. There's nothing much to distinguish it from Ohio other than the massive blue Welcome to Michigan, Great Lakes -- Great Times sign.

"That is possibly the worst pun I have ever seen," Sam says.

"Whatever," Dean says. "I mean, it's right, isn't it? Personally, I've had some awesome times in Michigan, and the lakes are pretty great, too, I understand."

Sam punches him on the arm, never taking his eyes off the road.

Dean grins and turns up the music.

A few minutes later Sam turns to him and says, "Fifteen miles to La Salle? Wait, when did we get to Michigan?"

"You're kidding me, right? We spent a good five minutes making fun of the sign--"

But Sam's staring at him blankly.

They get it at the same time, Sam's eyes flaring wide. "Stop the car," Dean says. "Blinkers on, stop the car, pull over."

Sam doesn't have to be told twice. He puts the blinkers on, signals, checks his blind spot, does it all by the book. He slows down once he's in the far right lane and eases the car onto the shoulder. The road's wide here and the shoulder is grassy and flat. Sam puts the emergency brake on, turns the car off and keeps both hands on the wheel. He's shaking, or maybe it's Dean.

"What's the last thing you remember?" Dean asks.

Sam swallows. Dean watches his Adam's apple move in his throat. "Driving past Bowling Green."

"That was more than an hour ago," Dean says.

"That's it," Sam says. "That's the last thing."

Dean exhales slowly through his mouth. "What did we talk about at the Michigan border?"

"What do you mean, what did we talk about? I just told you, I don't remember anything after Bowling Green."

"There was a sign," Dean says, trying to stay calm and failing. "We talked about it for a good five minutes, Sam!"

"I don't know, okay? I don't know! It doesn't feel like I was sleeping or anything or like I was out of it. All I know is I was in Ohio one minute and then the next I was seeing the sign for La Salle!"

He's angry, scared-angry, pretty much the only kind of scared they ever saw from Dad, and Dean knows not to push against this, but God, the urge to is there.

"Don't say it," Sam cuts in. "Whatever you're going to say, don't say it, because Jesus, I know, all right?"

Dean closes his mouth, opens it again. "I'm driving."

Sam gets out of the car, walks around to the passenger side. Dean opens the door, gets out and lets Sam in. Sam doesn't say anything the rest of the way to Detroit.

*

They've lived through silence in the car before but this isn't just silence. This is the knowledge that anything they say will come out wrong, that their voices are working against them. This is the last fifty miles, fear thinning in the car like oil, the certainty that no matter how far they drive, it won't be far enough, and Detroit's skyline looms ahead.

*

The neighborhood is quiet at two in the afternoon. Kids still at school, Dean thinks, and everyone else at work. The only car on the street is parked outside of the auto repair shop, which matches the address Bobby gave them. It doesn't really look like the kind of place a guy who custom-builds cages would own, but then again Dean doesn't really know what that would look like. Hannibal Lecter's basement or something.

"You think he's there?"

Dean starts a little at the sound of Sam's voice. "Let's go find out, I guess."

As soon as Dean opens the door the heat is a solid wall in his face. "I frigging hate summer."

"Summer hates you, too," Sam says oh-so-maturely, and Dean feels a little better. A Sam who's cracking jokes is a Sam who's still at least kind of okay.

The big bay doors of the garage are shut, but there's another door around the side. Dean tests the knob and it opens to reveal a small office. The walls are lined with shelves and filing cabinets. An ancient A.C. unit cranks to life in the window beside the door, and ther's a guy sitting at a desk directly in front of them, scribbling on a notepad. He's probably in his fifties, dark-haired and wearing a pair of overalls that proclaim him to be MIKE.

"Sorry, I'm closed for the day. You'll have to come back another time," says the guy behind the desk.

"We don't mean to bother you," Sam says, "but we're looking for Mitchell Allen. Is he around?"

The guy's expression doesn't change. "Never heard of him."

Sam stares him down. "Are you sure? This was the address we had for him."

"We're friends of Bobby Singer's," Dean adds.

The guy's face relaxes into a smile. "You should've said so from the start! I'm Mitch. You must be the Winchesters, then. Bobby said to keep an eye out for you."

Dean fidgets. "Did he now?"

"Yup," Mitch says. "D'you mind shutting the door behind you . . ."

"Sam."

Mitch nods. "Sam. Right. So you're Dean, then."

"Yup," Dean says.

"Well, come on in. I've closed the garage for the day, like I said, but the side business doesn't really have set hours. I've got to tell you, I'm kind of out of the business these days, but I'm always ready to help friends of Bobby's."

"Good to hear," Dean says lamely.

"Hey, that your car out there?" Mitch gestures at the Impala. "Nice car."

Dean grins. He feels a whole lot better about the guy already. "Thanks."

"C'mon. It's too damned hot to work on cars, but it's not so bad where the other stuff is. Follow me." He puts the cap on the pen he'd been writing with before and sticks it in his shirt pocket, then leads them out through the door.

Behind the garage is a dirt lot filled with old cars. Towards the back, half-obscured by the body of a Ford pickup, is a shed. It looks like a tool shed, but when Mitch removes the padlock there's a set of stairs leading down, and the whole thing is looking a lot more like the Hannibal Lecter scenario than it was a few minutes ago.

Even after Mitch trips the lights it's dim in the basement, but the welding equipment is easy enough to make out, and the neat piles of silver and steel.

Mitch gestures at the room. "This is it. The side business. So what material are you looking for?"

"Iron," Dean says.

"Iron," Mitch repeats.

Dean keeps his poker face on. "Yes, sir." He can't say anything more than that without giving himself away, but Mitch is no fool: Dean can see him cataloguing the list of things you'd want to keep in an iron cage and coming up with nothing good.

But Mitch doesn't say anything other than, "How big do you want it?"

"Big enough for something about Sam's size," Dean says. "Maybe a little bigger." And if that doesn't give them away, Dean doesn't know what would, but they're just going to have to trust that Mitch won't give them up.

Mitch nod slowly. "You're lucky you came on a Friday. I've got the garage all closed up for the weekend, so I can go ahead and get started."

"How long's it going to take?" Sam asks.

"Not longer than the weekend."

Dean nods. "And it'll be strong enough to--"

"It'll hold whatever you put in it," Mitch says grimly. "Don't worry about that."

*

Bobby calls a couple of hours later, after they've agreed to stop by the garage tomorrow and have checked into a Holiday Inn.

"Haven't heard from you in a couple of days," Bobby says. "How's he doing?"

"Fine," Dean says. "We're fine. We met up with Mitch earlier."

"And he's making the cage for you?" Bobby asks.

"Yeah. What's his deal, anyway?"

"What do you mean?'

Dean shifts the phone to the other ear. "He doesn't really seem like a hunter."

"That's because he isn't, really," Bobby says.

"Yeah, okay. But how do you get into making cages? You don't really see shit like that on eBay."

Bobby's silent for a moment. "His daughter got bit by a werewolf when she was five," he says finally. "He didn't know about werewolves or any of it before she got bit, but it's kind of hard to miss when your daughter turns into a monster around the full moon, and he did his research. When she was little he and his wife kept her locked in the basement, but she kept getting stronger. He didn't want to have to kill her, so he did his research and figured out that keeping her in a silver cage might work. So he taught himself how to build cages."

Dean grips the phone tighter. "And you couldn't have told us this when we were in San Francisco four months ago?" he hisses. "Damn it, Bobby."

"You're right, I didn't tell you, and you can judge me all you want, if you like," Bobby says. "But wait until I've told you the rest of the story first."

"Fine," Dean says tightly.

"Her mother let her out," Bobby says. "The daughter was crying about how she didn't want to be locked in anymore, didn't want to be kept in a cage like a monster, and the mother couldn't take it. She let the girl out, and right then the girl started to turn. The mother tried to get her back in the cage but she couldn't do it in time, and the girl turned and killed her."

Dean swallows hard. "Jesus, Bobby."

"Maybe I was wrong to make that decision for you four months ago," Bobby says. "But cages do funny things to people. No matter how much they don't want to hurt anybody else or how willing they are to be locked up, eventually they start to need out, and eventually they find a way to do it. A cage is only a temporary solution, Dean, and don't you ever forget it."

"Bobby," Dean starts to say, but he's already hung up the phone.

"What'd Bobby have to say?" Sam asks from across the room, staring at the laptop.

"Nothing," Dean says. "Nothing important. You want to order some pizza?"

They eat pizza on their beds and watch T.V. Dean can't stop thinking about the conversation with Bobby. He wonders why Bobby told them about Mitch at all, if a cage is only a temporary solution and Bobby's so sure there's no way to stop what's happening to Sam. Dean clenches his teeth at the thought. He can't kill Sam, he'd never be able to do it, but Bobby's got a point: he can't keep Sam locked in a cage forever, either. Bobby has to be wrong about the other part of it, then. There has to be a way to stop this, and Dean's going to find it.

*

Sam doesn't go out that night. Dean knows because he sticks a slip of paper between the door and the frame while Sam is in the bathroom, and when he checks in the morning it's still there. Dean badly wants to believe it means that it's over, that everything's okay, but he knows better. It's just one night that Sam didn't turn. It's not over.

*

Mitch has already got a good bit of the cage done when they stop by around noon. He's going at it systematically: the main framework first, thick bars for the four corners and the main connections between them, then a latticework of smaller bars in between. He's stringing them all together and welding the joints; that's what takes the most time, he says. That and bending the major parallel bars around the outside of the cage.

Mitch lets them stay for a while and watch. He works like they aren't even there, the way Sam used to be with his geometry homework in high school: total concentration. After a while, though, Mitch says, "I'm going to take a lunch break, then get back on this. I should be done sometime tomorrow morning, if you want to come back then. Have you got a number I can call?"

Dean gives him his cell phone number and checks the notepad Mitch scratches it down on to make sure it's right. "Talk to you tomorrow, then."

Mitch nods and waves them out. Dean remembers that his daughter was a werewolf who killed his wife. He realizes, then, that Bobby never told him how that story ended, what happened to the daughter after that; but looking at Mitch, the firmness of his movements and the hard lines of his face, Dean has a pretty good idea.

*

Dean's positive that there are things to do in Detroit while they wait for the cage to be finished, but he's too distracted to figure out what. They grab lunch and head back to the room. Dean lies down to nap but he's restless. It's like it's too hot in the room; he can't ever fall all the way asleep, even though the A.C.'s cranked as high as it goes.

"There's a Tigers game tonight," Sam reads off the laptop. "Against the Kansas City Royals at 7:05. You want to go?"

"Sure. Yeah, definitely," Dean says, jumping up and pulling on his boots.

Dean's too itchy to stay in the hotel room, so they end up getting to the stadium a full two hours early. They wait in the parking lot and buy a couple beers off some tailgaters. They go inside as soon as the gates open. Dean makes Sam come with him to the front of the stands to watch batting practice, fight little kids for fly balls. Sam tries to act all sarcastic about it but he's always loved this stuff, and he can't hide his smile when he catches a pop-fly off Gary Sheffield's bat.

"That was just because you're eight feet taller than everyone else, Sasquatch," Dean tells him. "Give the rest of us a fighting chance, why don't you?"

"Just because I've got catlike reflexes and you don't," Sam begins, but hands the ball to a little kid standing near them anyway. The kid looks to be maybe two years old, but he's already got his ball cap and glove on, and the way his face lights up when Sam puts the ball in his miniature glove makes Dean think that being a dad would have to be about the most awesome thing ever.

It's probably not that great of a game, but it's the best Dean's ever been to, better than any of the ones he used to go to when he was on the road alone. Sam's beside him in the stands, back sweat-sliding against the plastic seat. They've got five dollar beers in their hands, spicy sausages with mustard and onions and Cracker Jacks. Sam actually likes that shit even though no matter how many boxes you buy, the prize will never be less lame -- it doesn't matter.

At the bottom of the fourth inning Dean goes to take a piss and brings back a Tigers cap for Sam and jams it over his head. It's the biggest one he could find and it's still just barely big enough, but Sam wears it the rest of the game anyway. At the seventh inning stretch they sing "Take Me Out" as loudly and obnoxiously as they can, grin at people's frowns.

Sam falls asleep in the passenger seat on the way back to the motel, face mushed against the window, and Dean smiles into the rearview mirror: it's a good night, the best of nights.

*

Mitch calls at eight the next morning. "It's ready," he says.

Even after having seen the cage partway done yesterday, Dean's surprised by the sight of it. It's huge, large enough to stand up and stretch your arms out in, solid-looking enough that he'd be willing to put it up against a nuclear blast without hesitation. It's beautiful, even, in the way that the Impala is beautiful: hard metal and strong lines.

"So where are you taking it?" Mitch asks, and Dean starts.

"I'm not sure yet," Dean says finally, and it's the truth: he hasn't thought through this part of things, although it's stupid not to have; there's no good reason why he hasn't. (Except that there is: he didn't want to think about it.) Of course it can't stay in Mitch's basement; they'll need a place to put it, a basement or a warehouse room, a place where it can be used.

Sam flashes Dean a tight smile. It doesn't reach his eyes. "Where's the nearest U-Haul rental place?" he says.

*

When they get back Mitch has already managed to get the cage out of the basement. "There's a freight elevator in the back," he explains.

But still, even with the help of a ramp and some rollers, getting the cage loaded into the U-Haul is a bitch. It's still early enough in the day that the full force of the sun isn't on them, but it's got to be eighty degrees out already, the kind of summer heat that doesn't ever fade, not even around dawn. They manage it between the three of them, although it's kind of tricky with Sam's wrist. Dean's shirt is plastered to his back by the time they're done and he would give his left nut to be able to jump in an ocean right now.

Sam pushes his hair off his forehead and says, "Thanks, Mitch. How much do we owe you?"

"Just for the materials." When they begin to protest, he cuts in, "The labor's free. You're friends of Bobby's."

Dean counts out the cash, hands it to him. "Thanks," he says again, and Sam echoes him.

"You're welcome. Oh, before you go, let me show you how it works." He jumps back into the U-Haul and says, "The catch is here. Get up here so you can see it right."

It's a tight fit for all three of them inside the back of the U-Haul with the cage, though. "You know what, why don't you just show Dean," Sam says, jumping back down. "He can explain it to me later."

"You sure?" Mitch says.

Sam pushes the hair off his face. "Yeah. D'you mind if I use your bathroom, actually?"

"Sure. Just through the door to the left," Mitch says, pointing.

"Great. Be right back." Sam turns and heads towards the office.

He doesn't want to know how the lock works, Dean realizes. That's why he's leaving, and if Mitch sees right through that, too, he still doesn't say anything. "Here," Mitch says. "Let me show you, and then I'll let you try it it, okay?"

It's easy enough, the locking mechanism, but there's no way to undo it from the inside without some kind of metal object. "So make sure you keep lock-picking supplies away from the cage," Mitch says. "It's pretty obvious, but y'know, no forks or anything."

"Got it," Dean says.

Sam comes back out of the building then.

"And if you've got any questions or need anything, you've got my number."

"Yup, we're good," Dean says.

"Hey, what happened to your car?" Mitch says suddenly.

"Oh, we left it at the U-Haul place," Dean says. Sam hasn't turned in a couple of days -- at least, not that Dean's noticed, and isn't that a pleasant thought -- but they hadn't wanted him to drive, nonetheless. "We're going to go back and pick it up on the way out of town."

"The lot's right by I-75," Sam adds. "It seemed kind of stupid to drive two cars all the way out here and then just go right back by there anyway, y'know?"

"Fair enough," Mitch says neutrally. "Well, it was good to meet you boys, and tell Bobby hello for me next time you see him, will you?"

"Sure." Dean opens the driver's side of the U-Haul. "See you around, Mitch. And thanks again."

Mitch waves until they turn the corner.

"I think he knows," Sam says as soon as the garage is out of sight.

"Probably at least something," Dean admits. "I don't think he's going to tell anybody, though."

"Hope not," Sam says. He's looking out the window and Dean can't see his face.

They head back to the U-Haul lot and hook the Impala up to the trailer hitch. Dean hates to do this to his car but there's nothing for it: Sam can't drive.

They're coming up on the on-ramp for I-75 South when Sam says, "Take the next one. Head north."

"How come?"

"I called in a favor. A friend of mine's got a place we can use."

"This friend of yours got a name?"

"Jimmy McIntyre. He was at Stanford with me. I called him when I said I was going to the bathroom. His family's got a cabin outside of Vassar. Usually they'd be there right now, but they just moved to California, so he said it'd be empty all summer."

"You don't think this is going to take the rest of the summer," Dean begins.

"All I mean is, the cabin's usually occupied right now, and this year it isn't," Sam says.

"You still didn't answer the question."

"I don't know, all right? Can we just drive to Vassar and get everything set up and worry about that part later?"

"Fine," Dean says tightly, and jams Metallica into the tape deck.

They get to Vassar a little after noon. Dean is starving. They grabbed a couple of bagels from the continental breakfast on the way to Mitch's this morning, but there's been a lot of lifting and hitching and driving since then. Vassar has a gas station and sandwich shop combo, though, and that'll work.

The girl behind the counter is petite, blonde and big-breasted, which goes a long way towards improving Dean's mood. If it weren't for that fact that she looks like she's maybe sixteen, he would totally tap that. Instead Dean reminds himself that it's probably her first summer job, and that there's not a single state in the US of A where a twenty-eight-year-old man having sex with a sixteen-year-old girl isn't illegal, and orders a couple of Italian subs instead.

"You two new around here or something?" the girl asks as she makes their sandwiches.

Sam shakes his head like he's waking up. "Uh, yeah. We're Jimmy McIntyre's cousins."

"No way! For real?"

"Yeah," Sam says. "They said we could use the cabin since they're not here this summer."

"Yeah, how're they liking L.A.?"

"Jimmy said it's a real change from Michigan."

The girl snorts. "I bet. Oh, sorry! I'm Annie. What are your names?"

"I'm Sam."

"Dean."

"Nice to meet you both. And here's your food." She hands them over the counter, and Dean grins at the way her fingers brush against his hand when he takes his sandwich.

They grab a couple cans of soda from the case by the door and sit down at a table near the window. Dean inhales his sandwich in about thirty seconds flat. It's a pretty damned good sandwich.

Sam takes his time with his. "Hey Annie," he says about halfway through. "You don't think you could give us directions to the cabin, do you? I got them from Jimmy but I lost the piece of paper somewhere along the way."

"No problem," she says, and starts rattling off streets and turns. Sam's nodding along, but Dean lost her after the first three lefts. "You know what, let me write that down for you."

Sam smiles winningly. "That'd be great."

"How long are you planning on staying for, d'you know?"

"We're not really sure yet," Sam says. "See how it goes, I guess. Is there a grocery store around here, too, by any chance?"

She writes down the directions for that, too, and in the meantime Sam's finished eating.

"How much do we owe you?" Dean asks.

"Oh, don't worry about it. You're new here; it's my treat. Plus my boss doesn't come in until four anyway." She's definitely looking at Sam as she says it, and Dean can't help but grin. Attaboy, Sammy.

As soon as they're in the car, Dean says, "Dude, she totally wanted in your pants."

Sam huffs. "She couldn't have been older than sixteen, Dean."

"Do you really think sixteen-year-olds don't think about sex? Hate to break it to you, but they definitely do."

Sam curls his lip. "Not everyone is you as a teenager. Thank God. She was just being friendly."

"Uh-huh. Sure."

"Whatever. Let's go to the grocery store."

"How come?"

Sam just stares at him. "You planning on going and getting us food every day once we're out at the cabin? 'Cause you might have missed this, but the cabin's kind of out in the middle of nowhere, and also, I'm going to be locked in a--"

"Fine," Dean cuts him off before he can finish the sentence. "Let's go."

Dean hasn't really done much in the way of grocery shopping in years, not since Sam was in high school and used to insist they stay in the same town at least through the end of the semester. Other than the spring of Sam's senior year, Dean can't remember if they ever actually did; somehow he doubts it. The only reason he knows they stayed put that one spring is that Dad got his left leg half chewed off by a bunch of pixies around the same time. He spent the whole spring being pissed off that he couldn't hunt and taking it out on Sam.

But the motions of grocery shopping are familiar, fruits and vegetables going into the cart first -- on the shelf where a kid would sit, if there was one -- then bread, all the fragile things first. Dean stocks up on potatoes and rice -- he doesn't know what kind of stove the cabin has, but those are things you can always cook, even if you have to build a fire first -- selects meat and beans, some cans of soup. On the cereal aisle Sam insists on putting a box of Fruity Pebbles in the cart, which he hasn't eaten since he was a kid, but if Sam wants it, Dean's not about to deny it to him. Dean grabs a thirty-brick of Coors and sticks it under the cart and checks out.

They put the groceries in the back of the Impala and drive to the cabin. Sam was right: it's pretty damned far out there. They pass a bunch of gravel driveways at first but after a while even those thin out and disappear. The road is narrow and not particularly well-paved, curling through thick woods. The turn-off for the cabin is just around a curve and they almost miss it. Off the main road it's still another couple of minutes crunching down gravel before they get to the cabin, which is in the middle of a clearing.

It's a wooden cabin; plank construction, with a pair of windows framing the door, which looks to be wide enough that they can get the cage through it. The key is hidden under a planter around the side. Sam unlocks the door and they go in. Nobody's been here since last summer for sure, from the amount of dust all over the place; there are sheets covering the furniture at least, but dust is thick on the floor. Dean hates cleaning.

It's not all that big inside, but at least it's open, which makes it less cramped than it would be otherwise. There's one closed-off section in the back left, which Dean's guessing is the bathroom, but everything else is out in the open. The kitchen is in the back right corner, along with a table with four chairs in front of it. A couch is in the middle of the room and a pair of twin beds are along the left wall, under the shadow of a loft. There's a ladder leading up to it; Sam's already climbing it.

"There's a queen bed," he calls down. "And some boxes."

Dean's halfway to calling it for himself when he remembers that Sam's not getting any of the beds, and he isn't that big of an asshole. "We'll check them out later. Let's get the stuff inside."

They bring the duffel bags, the rock salt and the guns inside. The groceries are the only other thing to bring in, besides the cage, and Dean has no idea how they're going to get that inside, heavy as it is, even with the rollers Mitch loaned them.

They'll just deal with it later, Dean decides. He heads back out to the car to get the groceries. There's a refrigerator in the kitchen. It looks like it run off the gas generator around the side, so he turns that on when he goes back outside. Its tank is nearly full, which is good; that's one less thing to have to deal with. It takes a couple of trips, but he and Sam get the groceries in.

Sam starts unpacking cans of beans and soup, putting them in cabinets. He gets to the cereal bag and makes a face. "Dude, Fruity Pebbles? I stopped eating that when I was twelve!"

"Don't give me that shit. You're the one who picked it out, buddy."

Sam's quiet, and something seizes in Dean's gut. "Sam?" he says, turning, but Sam keeps his eyes on the ground.

"Last thing I remember, we were on the highway," Sam says quietly. "I-75, just outside of Birch Run. I guess -- I was hoping I fell asleep or something."

"No," Dean says. "No, you were awake, you were with me the whole time, when we got lunch at the sandwich place, don't you remember? Annie, the chick who wanted to get with you, except you didn't believe it and anyway she was sixteen and--"

Sam's shaking his head. "Next thing I remember we were on the little road, a couple minutes before we got to the cabin."

"But we went to the grocery store, too," Dean says. "We went to the grocery store and you picked out your nasty-ass cereal and you don't remember any of it?" And maybe he's babbling but he can't stop himself: that's a solid couple of hours Sam can't account for, and Dean had no idea. He couldn't tell it wasn't Sam.

He thinks he's maybe shaking a little, and Sam is moving closer to him, saying, "Dean? Dean, it'll be okay, you know it will."

Dean's nodding and saying, "Okay, okay." But something's not right about this; something isn't sitting right in his stomach. It's probably just the whole situation. Nothing about this could possibly be all right; this is the dictionary definition of not all right, but Sam's trying to convince him that it'll be okay. That's not Sam's job, that's Dean's, and Dean's got to believe it, doesn't he? If he doesn't believe it then they don't have a chance of making it true, and he has to, he has to make it true. And so he tells himself they'll figure it out, they will.

*

Getting the cage inside involves a lot of sweating and cursing and nearly breaking Dean's left foot, and he's really just happier having it done and not thinking about it. But that's just the thing: he doesn't want to have the cage inside at all.

But Sam's calm about it, and if he can be calm about it then Dean sure as hell isn't going to freak. It's damned hot inside the cabin, even with the windows and doors propped open, and Dean's mopping sweat off his forehead with a t-shirt.

"I think I'm going to take a shower before we do this," Sam says, rummaging through his duffel bag for a towel.

"Yeah, okay," Dean says. Sam strips down to his boxers and Dean's not trying to stare but he's failing; he can't seem to look away, and God damn it, he thought this was over, just a fluke or something. It's got to be that they're alone in the cabin, he thinks, that they're so far away and removed from everything familiar; he's just confused, that's all that's going on. They're in a crazy situation and it's messing with him. But he's still staring at the line of Sam's back as he unbends and turns to look at Dean quizzically.

"You all right?" Sam asks, holding the towel in the crook of his arm.

"Yeah." Dean swallows. "I'm cool. Take your shower."

And there are so many things he should be doing right now that aren't what he does: he sits down on the edge of one of the twin beds and unzips his jeans, pulls his cock into his hand. He tries to think about big-breasted blondes or that little redheaded waitress in Hot Springs or even Annie the sixteen-year-old but none of the images stick. He comes with Sam's name on his tongue, the curve of Sam's back in his mind, and he is so beyond fucked; both of them are.

By the time Sam gets out of the shower he's got himself all cleaned up; his t-shirt was too sweat-soaked to wear anymore, anyway, and it's really too hot for a shirt. Sam's just wearing boxers when he comes out of the shower, and Dean is really damned glad he just jerked off because otherwise he wouldn't stand a chance of not getting hard again -- and even though he did, his cock still twitches in interest.

"So how do you want to do this?" Sam says.

It turns out Dean's still not entirely back with it yet, because he says, "Do what?"

Sam gestures at the cage. "Just lock me in, you figure?"

"I guess so," Dean says slowly, but he doesn't want to say it at all. Suddenly there are all sorts of things to think about, like what if Sam has to go to the bathroom, and is Sam really supposed to sleep on the floor of the cage? Is Dean supposed to let him out at night and just hope the urge to go out and fuck random girls doesn't resurface? Maybe if he drugged Sam, Dean thinks, with elephant tranquilizers or something, just enough so he'd sleep through the night -- and then he realizes what he's been thinking and feels ill.

They'll figure this out, they've always been able to figure things out; it's just that he's not ready for this to be real. The fact that he's locking Sam in a cage will never be all right, should never be real.

"Let's just go ahead and do it, yeah?" Sam says. "There's no reason to wait, is there?"

There are a million reasons, Dean thinks, a billion, and yet he swallows and undoes the latch. Sam smiles at him tightly and pats his shoulder -- and that's not right, Dean shouldn't be the one getting reassured here, he's not the one who's about to get locked in a cage. Then Sam steps inside, turns around to face Dean, and Dean closes the door and locks it and it's done.

*

Dean breathes a little easier after that; he can't figure out why. Maybe it's just that it feels like they're finally doing something, after all that build-up. The cage isn't a solution, he knows that, but at least now they don't have to worry about anything happening while they figure out the rest.

They just sit there for a while, grinning at each other like fools, until Sam says, "Now what?"

"What do you mean, now what?" Dean looks at him in confusion. "We figure this out, and in the meantime you should be good. We're good for now."

"That's kind of what I'm talking about." Sam pushes a hand through his hair, which is still wet from the shower. "The figuring it out thing. How exactly are we going to manage that? We're kind of out in the middle of the woods, Dean. We aren't going to be able to get wireless out here, and where's the nearest library? Was there even one in town?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"I just mean I don't think we're going to be able to figure this out from here, is all. Not to mention that we couldn't find anything about this when we were in Hot Springs, and it had a pretty good library. It took Bobby days before he had any idea of what was going on with me, and he had every possible resource at his disposal."

Dean stands up. "I'm not really following what you're getting at."

Sam stands up, too, and grips at the bars. "What I mean is, I don't know how we're going to manage to solve this."

And now Dean's just confused. "What do you mean, you don't know how we're going to manage to solve this? We'll improvise. We'll figure something out with the Internet thing. You can get radio signals from Mars on that crazy cell phone of yours, can't you? We can probably rig it to pick up a little Internet."

Sam laughs, though for the life of him Dean can't figure out what he's laughing at; the Mars thing wasn't that funny, and the timing of the laugh is off. "Dean, Dean, Dean. We're not going to figure it out."

Dean stares. For a moment he's too stunned to answer, but then he says, "You don't mean that, Sam. I know you don't mean that. It's going to be okay, right? You said so yourself just a minute ago." He's confused and it's making him babble; he can't seem to stop talking now that he's started.

But Sam's smiling now, and it's the same smile from the bar the other night, the smile that isn't really Sam's, and Dean's stomach turns over. "Of course it's going to be okay, Dean," he says. "I'm going to be okay. I'm going to be more than okay, better than ever before."

His irises aren't solid black but it doesn't matter; Dean doesn't need to see that to know that it isn't Sam. It can't be, not when he's smiling like that. Dean fights down his shiver. "You're not my brother. You're a demon or something, you're possessing him, but you aren't Sam."

The thing in Sam's body smiles again. "Oh, Dean. Don't you recognize your own brother?"

"Where's Sam?" Dean hisses. "What have you done with him?"

"I am Sam," the thing croons, sing-song. "Sam I am. I'm your little brother, Dean, the thing you love most in all the world, far more than you should--"

"Shut up!" Dean shouts. "Shut up and bring my brother back, God damn you."

The thing cackles and grins at him, a flash of teeth. It throws back its head and its posture shifts, muscles tensing, and then Sam's staring at him fearfully through the bars.

"Dean?" he asks hesitantly. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"It wasn't you," Dean says. He doesn't mean to be backing away but he can't seem to help it. "It wasn't you. Sam, how long were you gone? You have to tell me how long you were gone?"

Sam stares. "What wasn't me? And what do you mean, gone? I wasn't gone. I was just talking about how we were going to have trouble getting Internet out here and all of a sudden you're staring at me like I've grown an extra head or something."

And Dean can't help it: he's sure he's staring at Sam even worse now than he was before. "No. No, you were gone. For a couple of minutes at least, you were gone, and you were saying -- you really don't know you weren't here? You couldn't even tell? Usually you can tell, can't you, that you're missing some time, even if it just feels like you were asleep or something?"

Sam shakes his head. "Yeah. Something like that. But this time, I don't know, maybe it's just because it was only for a couple of minutes, right?"

It sounds like he's trying to convince himself as much as Dean, so Dean says, "Sure, maybe."

"No," Sam says immediately, crouching down. "No, we know better. We can't start telling ourselves stuff like that. I've always had some idea before at least, but this time I couldn't tell at all; I had no idea." He looks small on the floor of the cage, small in a way Dean hasn't seen him in a long time, because Sam's always been his little brother but he hasn't actually been smaller than Dean for years, a decade at least. Dean wants to draw Sam to him, make him believe that everything's going to be okay, really okay, not okay in the way that the thing that was not Sam meant, and he looks to Sam in the cage, means to open the door--

"Don't do it," Sam says, and Dean starts.

"Don't do what?" he says slowly.

"You were going to open the door of the cage, weren't you? Don't do it."

Dean gapes. "How did you--"

"I could see it in your eyes," Sam says. "Don't do it. You can't, do you understand? We don't know what's going on with me, so just don't do it, okay?" He's hunched up small on the floor of the cage, miserable.

Dean swallows and takes a step towards him. "Sam--"

"Don't get too close," Sam snaps. "You don't know what's happening to me, and you don't know what might happen if you -- I don't want to hurt you, Dean."

Something breaks in Dean's chest. "You're not going to hurt me, Sammy." He tries to say it clearly but it comes out jumbled, all wrong.

Sam understands it anyway, and there's a grim set to his mouth. "Not as long as you don't come too close, I won't."

*

Dean goes and takes a shower after that. He doesn't even really want to leave Sam alone in the cage while he showers, but Sam tells him he's being ridiculous. "You can't stop going to the bathroom or whatever just because I'm in here," he says. "I'm not exactly going anywhere."

But that's just the problem: Sam's standing in the cage in nothing but his boxers. They've never been big on shorts, and it's way too hot for jeans, and they're in a cabin in the middle of the woods, and it's not like it should matter when it's just the two of them. But Sam's standing in the middle of a cage wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, sweating again already even after his shower, and that shouldn't be having anything like the effect it does on Dean.

He runs the water cold and wills his erection down, thinks about Jay Leno taking a shit, and yup, that one's never failed him yet. He leaves the shower on for a while after, though, washing the sweat out of his hair and off his back and concentrates on the sting of the salt coming off his skin. He puts on a clean pair of boxers and nothing else -- he's just going to have to hope that Jay Leno keeps up his undefeated record as a mood-killer, because it's really too hot for pants -- and opens the bathroom door.

Except . . . Dean's staring at the middle of the room where the cage should be. It's there and Sam's in it, like he should be, except -- his brain can't seem to get through this -- except he's not wearing his boxers, they're balled up in a corner of the cage, and he's sitting on the floor, staring right at Dean and fisting his cock. He doesn't even stop at Dean's presence, doesn't even hesitate. He's got a slow, lazy rhythm going, the purple head of his cock slip-sliding through his fingers.

"I could hear you before," Sam says. "You were jerking off when I was in the shower. I could hear you."

"Over the sound of the shower?" Dean says. He tries to keep his voice calm, tries to pretend like there is absolutely nothing odd about this, that Sam isn't jerking off right in front of him, talking about having listened to him jerking off, that this whole thing isn't happening at all. "How?"

"I don't hear you denying it," Sam says. He takes his hand off his cock, reaches low to play with his balls, and Jay Leno doesn't stand a chance against Sam's low moan. "Look at you, hard again already. What were you thinking about, Dean? Were you thinking about me on my knees, sucking your cock? Were you thinking about your cock up my ass -- no, my cock up your ass?"

Dean does his best to push his groan down and his best isn't nearly good enough. "Sam, what are you doing?"

"What does it look like, big brother? Today -- this wasn't the first time you did this, was it? No, you've done this before, jerked off thinking about me. More than once, haven't you, Dean? You love to think about me like this--"

"No," Dean says, because it's too late and he knows it but someone has to deny it and it's going to have to be him. "No, Sammy, don't, you can't--"

Sam laughs. "I can't what? Come on, Dean, tell me." He licks the fingers of his left hand, up to the edge of the cast, and circles them slowly around his nipples.

Dean clamps his teeth hard together. "Don't do this, Sam. You don't want to do this. You don't want this."

Sam's eyes flash wide. "I don't want this? How in the world would you know what I do and don't want? Don't you know I've been wanting this for years? I want this, and so do you."

"No."

"You say my name when you come," Sam says quickly. "You come saying my name, you've been doing it for a week now, and you can deny it, Dean, deny it all you want, but that doesn't make it any less true."

And he's right, a scary amount of right: Dean had been trying so hard not to think of that part of things that he had managed not to realize that he'd been doing that, every time, that Sam was the last thing he thought about before he came-- "How do you know that?"

"I hear things," Sam says. "Come on, Dean. Look at me. You want to. You want me to fuck you all over the bed, fuck you up against a wall, you want me to push up into you until you scream. Come for me, Dean. Come for me now."

And he does, in his boxers, right then. He doesn't even touch his cock, and it's the most mind-blowing orgasm he can remember; there's no fighting it down, not even a chance of it, and Sam's stroking himself through his own orgasm, licking the come off his hand, and God, if he thought they were fucked before--

And then Sam looks down at himself and says, "Dude, what the fuck?" and Dean knows. It wasn't Sam that just did that; it was the other. It wasn't Sam, and Dean's running to the bathroom, puking that Italian grinder right back up, and then he's outside to call Bobby.

He's halfway through dialing the number before he realizes he has absolutely no idea how to explain this. What can he possibly say? They need someone's help, no doubt about that, but he can't just give Bobby the facts and leave him to sort through them; he can't tell Bobby about this.

He has figure out enough of what's happening that he can tell Bobby about it, that Bobby can use the information without knowing about this. Dean doesn't want to think about it at all. There's a part of him that's saying that's the best way of dealing with this, just not thinking about it -- but no, he can't do that. He can't lie to himself. That's one of the things that Dad spent the longest drilling into him and Sam: the necessity of seeing things as they are, seeing them the first time, right and without delusions, without just concentrating on what you're looking for or what you want to see and ignoring the rest. Dean can't tell Bobby what happened -- and God, if Dad were here--

He can't tell anyone about this, but he has to think about it, figure out what happened. He has to be able to do that much.

And when he thinks about it, thinks about it carefully and with a hunter's eye, there's one thing that sticks out at him: I've wanted this for years, said the thing that is not Sam, and Dean doesn't know why it should be sticking out at him more than all the rest but he trusts his instincts; his instincts are good. I've wanted this for years. It could be a lie, or it could not be -- demons tell the truth sometimes, too, when it suits them -- and the thought that it might be true makes something stick in Dean's chest. He doesn't know why this is so important but he has to figure this out somehow.

He heads back inside. Sam's got his boxers back on. He's wiped the come off his hand onto his leg, where it's already begun to crust.

"Hey," Dean says quietly.

Sam doesn't look at him. "Hey."

"Do you," Dean begins. He breaks off, breathes and tries again. "Do you remember what happened?"

Sam keeps his eyes down. "I think I've got it pretty well figured out."

"That's not what I asked," Dean says. "Do you remember what happened?"

Sam ignores him and says instead, "I told you, didn't I?"

"Told me what?" Dean says slowly, and this is the hinge, this moment; this is the point at which it turns.

"You weren't supposed to find out," Sam says miserably. "You weren't ever supposed to find out."

Dean swallows hard. "Tell me, Sam."

"I already did, didn't I?" Sam says. "I know I did. I don't remember it but I know I did, I have to have--"

"So it doesn't matter if you say it again." The urge to go to Sam is strong in him, almost too much to push down. "Tell me, Sam," he says, and Sam does.

Sam looks up, meets Dean's eyes and says, "Why do you think I hardly ever talked to you while I was at Stanford? I've wanted you since I was sixteen. I thought if I got away from you and stayed gone, it would stop. There was Jess, and I thought I was okay, thought I was done with it -- and then you came back and Jess died and it hadn't stopped, Dean, it never stopped--"

"Sam," Dean says wonderingly.

"You weren't supposed to know," Sam repeats. "You weren't supposed to find out about it."

"Sam," Dean says, trying to fit everything into his voice: the crushing in his chest so tight he can't remember how to breathe, the hardness of his cock against his stomach, how the sound of Sam's voice is enough to make him come.

"Sam," he says again, and maybe this time it clicks: Sam looks up as he says, "I want this, too. I don't know how I didn't know before, didn't figure it out years ago, but God, Sam, yes." And he can't stop himself: he's at the door of the cage, now, undoing the lock.

"Don't do this, Dean. You don't want to do this." There's a pleading note in Sam's voice, enough to make Dean choke out a laugh.

"Do you really not get it? I want you, Sam. I want you, Sam, need you, come on--" And he's got the door of the cage open.

Sam presses hard against him, mouth opening over Dean's. His tongue is in Dean's mouth and his hands are on Dean's back, his cast scraping rough over Dean's skin; Sam is pulling him all the way into the cage and fitting their hips together. Dean shudders at the first touch of their cocks, slim hardness and heat, and it's like remembering something essential, relearning a thing he can't have ever known but feels like he should have. He pushes his hands into Sam's hair, grabs at his shoulders, and Sam's hand curls around his neck.

"You really didn't want to do this," Sam breathes into his ear, and something crashes into the side of his skull -- the cast, he thinks -- and there's nothing but a spreading darkness.

*

When Dean comes to he's naked, locked inside the cage, and Sam is gone.

*

Part Two: The Rule of Three

Dean has no idea how long he's been knocked out. He tries to match the angle of the sunlight on the walls to a time of day and work backwards, but he has no idea what time it was when he got knocked out in the first place, when Sam--

Oh God, Sam. "I've wanted you since I was sixteen," Sam had said, and Dean had said he wanted Sam, too, and opened the cage. Opened the cage. Fuck.

He traces his fingers along his temple, probing at the bruise, and immediately wishes he hadn't; Sam clocked him good. Or rather, not Sam; the other. "You really didn't want to do this," it had said in his ear right before it smashed his skull open with that cast. But that's the not worst of it: Dean had wanted to do this, wanted to so badly that he forgot everything but his need for Sam.

He has no idea how it got so out of control so quickly. How long has it been since this whole thing started? A week, maybe two? He tries to figure it out exactly but, like the number of hours it's been since he was knocked out, the time seems fluid and slips through his fingers.

Dean might not know how much time has passed, but he can count forwards. Sunlight helps, makes it easier to tick off the time on the wall, but he can keep the minutes and the hours in his head without it, too. It was something he had practiced in dozens of hotel rooms, in the backseat of the Impala crossing the country over and again. He'd have Sam cross-check him with a watch sometimes, to make sure he'd gotten it right, but after a while it wasn't something he had to think about consciously anymore; it started to feel instinctive. So he can count time forwards, and he does: an hour, two.

He doesn't recognize the way the sunlight's hitting on the wall -- he's not familiar enough with this time of year in Michigan, the positioning of the windows or the trees -- but details come to him gradually. It was late afternoon when Sam said he'd wanted Dean since he was sixteen, when Dean opened the door of the cage; the light would have been thinning out towards dusk, then. The cabin is pretty far north, Dean knows, and he wishes he knew just when sunset is; but watching the shifting of the shadows it becomes clear that it's not moving towards sunset at all. The light is becoming stronger, more yellow, hotter.

If he had to guess, he'd say it's probably sometime around noon, and he's disoriented now, badly. He has no idea how long he's been knocked out, if it's just been the night or if it's been longer, a night and a day. Worse, has no idea how far Sam could have gotten in that time. Not only that, he doesn't know where Sam would have gone, or even if it's Sam in control of his body at all.

That's the worst of this. He hadn't been able to tell all the time when it was Sam and when it was the other. And then there's another thought, one that makes his throat seize up: when Sam said he'd wanted Dean since he was sixteen, it could have been a lie. It could have been the other in control of Sam's body, telling Dean what Dean wanted to hear. He doesn't have any way of knowing that Sam ever regained control, he realizes now. It could have been the other faking all the way through. In control of Sam's body, it wouldn't have been that hard to contort his features into a puppy dog face, the muscles and lines that would make Dean fall for it--

Dean thinks of what Bobby said about Mitch's daughter, doing anything she could to get out of the cage, and the mother believing her, and Dean can't breathe, suddenly, is clutching at the bars and wheezing, because that's the thing, isn't it? He can't be sure it wasn't Sam, but he also can't be sure it was -- and trying to get him to open the door of the cage, trying to get out . . . That doesn't sound like Sam.

Dean pushes the thought down.

His stomach rumbles, and that's how he figures it out: it can't have been more than a day since Sam's been gone. Dean's hungry, but it's not the deadly kind of hungry it would be if it'd been days since he'd last eaten. It feels like it's been a long night and it's time for a great big plate of fried eggs and toast and Canadian bacon, maybe some hash browns -- and he really needs to stop that line of thought right now before his stomach eats itself. He puked up everything he ate yesterday, he remembers, so no wonder he's hungry, but he's not starving, not like the winter he was seventeen when Dad went off on a hunt and left him and Sam in a cabin in Montana. They got snowed in for the better part of two weeks, and by the end he and Sam were discussing cannibalism in a way that wasn't entirely joking. The upshot of it is, he knows what hunger feels like, and this isn't it. It's a good thought. It means it hasn't been that long since Sam's been gone. He'll come back to himself soon; he'll remember where he left Dean, what must have happened, and he'll be back.

Dean counts the time. He begins to learn the way the sunlight moves across the walls of the cabin. It's hot still, and humid, and he's thirsty, but that's nothing he can't withstand for a while, although he guesses the nice thing about that cabin in Montana was that at least they never had to worry about running out of drinking water, since they'd been surrounded by it in solid form.

It's not comfortable, sitting in the cage. After a while Dean's ass starts to fall asleep, and he thinks, idly, that when Sam comes back they should put a pillow on the floor for him, or one of those cushions for the bench-seats of canoes. Dean stands up for a bit, stretches, and relishes the popping of his spine. His arms and thighs are sore from getting the cage inside -- yesterday, he remembers. That was only yesterday. He didn't think to stretch afterwards, and even though he showered the soreness is still there. He turned twenty-nine in January, and he's got to remember to stretch now or he feels the strain for days.

The time doesn't pass especially quickly, but it passes: three hours since he woke up, four. It's getting towards the middle of the afternoon. Five hours, six. It's evening now, and bugs are biting. In addition to minutes, Dean starts to count the number of mosquitos he kills.

That winter in the cabin, he and Sam played a lot of trivia. It was an easy way to pass the time. They came out about even in the supernatural categories, Dean edged slightly ahead in sports, and Sam won the rest cleanly. Sam has always known more about everything than Dean does; he had to have been born with a computer instead of a brain. That's what Dean's always figured, with the way Sam remembers everything he's ever learned. Dean's good at remembering things he's heard, rumors and hearsay, things passed on by the mouth. He doesn't retain things he's read but he can remember that winter in the cabin, when they were quizzing each other on medicine.

How long can you survive without oxygen? had been the question, and the answer fills his mind immediately, the cadence of Sam's voice.

The rule of three. A man can survive three seconds without blood, three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food. It had been followed by Sam's laugh, rumbling and low.

It's mostly an old wives' tale, Dean remembers now; only the first of those things is always true. The rest you can train yourself into, extend; you don't even need to, if you're strong at the start. He's never really tested the press of water against his lungs, and that time in the cabin didn't go on long enough for it to be a true test of hunger. Dean has always kept a stock of water in the trunk of the Impala to ward against breakdowns in the desert, and thus far it's worked. He's put himself up against a lot of things, but as for the outer limits of what his body can take, he's never felt the need to test them.

Dean passes the time by counting the number of hunts they've gone on in the past year: the number of poltergeists they've wasted, vengeful spirits, evil creatures. He counts them by state, by month, by the number of people the things had killed before he and Sam arrived.

Sometime after the long shadows meld into dusk and there's nothing in the cabin but the weight of darkness and the low humming of crickets, Dean closes his eyes and sleeps, curled up on the floor of the cage.

He wakes up with the dawn, his right hipbone shifting painfully back into place and his stomach growling to life. He swallows hard and wishes he had a small stone to put in his mouth, an old way of keeping the saliva running.

Beneath his stomach gnawing on itself there's another bite, and this one's harder to ignore: it's been a day and a half since Sam's been gone. A day and a half, and they didn't tell anyone where they were going. Dean hadn't even thought about it consciously at the time. He hadn't needed to think about it; he hadn't wanted them to be findable, not even by Bobby.

Dean counts the minutes again through the morning, learns the exact angle of light that means noon. He counts the hours through the afternoon, tries to play the trivia game but can't get into it. Around five that evening a thought begins to form, a twisting of his gut; it's the one thing he's always feared above all else, although the circumstances weren't ever like this before. At dark he lets it creep through, and afterwards there is no stopping it.

Sam isn't coming back.

*

Dean dreams of the ocean, of mountainside streams, of pushing his face down into water and drowning in it. He dreams of Golden Corral all-you-can-eat dinners and of breakfast platters at a thousand nameless diners, pancakes overflowing. He dreams of Sam smiling at him from across a table, of Sam's mouth opening over his, of Sam fucking him down into a bed as Dean bites his knuckles to keep from crying out. He dreams of Bobby storming into the cabin and opening the door of the cage, wide-eyed and frantic.

Only the last of these is true.

*

Bobby hands Dean a cup of water before he goes looking for a pair of pants for Dean to put on. Dean gulps the water down and refills the cup from the tap. He tries to savor it, remembering the urge to drink his weight in water after long runs and the way his stomach fills to the point of bursting, but he can't slow down until after the fifth cup or the sixth. Bobby, meanwhile, has found a pair of boxers and jeans in Dean's duffel bag. Dean doesn't want to put the cup of water down long enough even to put the clothes on, which is the only thing that tells him how close to delirious he really was.

Bobby gives him a couple minutes to get the clothes on, but he's impatient, Dean can tell. "How much of a head start does Sam have?" Bobby says finally.

Dean remembers the days of counting time, but he lost the count somewhere in the past day or maybe more; he can't remember when it was that he started to dream of water. "What's today?"

Bobby checks his watch. "The twenty-fifth."

Dean backtracks. "Three days, then."

"Jesus Christ, Dean," Bobby exhales. "And I'm guessing he took the Impala, seeing as it's not out front."

Dean nods. "I figured." He moves towards the window. Sure enough, the Impala's gone. The U-Haul's still out there, though. They've getting charged by the day for the rental; they really should have returned it days ago, Dean thinks, and now he's sure he's a little hysterical, because there are so many more important things to be worrying about than the freaking U-Haul. They paid for it on a hustled credit card, anyway.

"Three days of a head start," Bobby repeats. "Jesus."

Three days from Michigan could mean anywhere in the country, Dean thinks. It could mean Canada: they're only a few hours from the border here. Three days' head start, and Dean thinks what Sam could have done in that time -- what the thing in Sam's body could have done. He swallows it down. They'll deal with that when it comes up. Right now they just need to find Sam.

"Let's go," Dean says, but Bobby puts a hand on his arm.

"How long has it been since you ate something? You need to get some food in you first."

Dean shakes Bobby's hand off. "I'm fine."

Bobby stares him down. "Three days without eating isn't fine, Dean."

"Fine," Dean says. He goes to the kitchen, opens one of the cabinets and there's the box of Fruity Pebbles -- "I haven't eaten that since I was twelve" -- and he almost loses it right there, but he grips at the counter, keeps himself together. He grabs the box of cereal and the two packages of beef jerky behind it. "I'll eat on the road."

Bobby frowns but says, "All right," and grabs one of the bags of guns to take out to the truck. Dean checks the guns perfunctorily. It doesn't look like Sam took any of them, which should be reassuring -- he's not planning on killing anyone, at least -- but there are other ways of killing that don't require guns, and Dean doesn't feel any better at all.

Dean gets in the passenger seat of Bobby's truck and concentrates on breathing in through his nose, out through his mouth. They're going to find Sam. They are.

*

"Do you have any idea where he might have gone?' Bobby asks when they're back in Vassar, trying to figure out which way to take I-75. Logic says south: the whole country's that way, and he and Sam have never been much of ones for Canada. But Dean doesn't really know how much good logic's going to do here.

"How the hell am I supposed to know?" Dean says, but there's a flicker of movement behind Bobby's head: across the street, a bright red pick-up truck is pulling out of the gas station parking lot, and Dean's stomach rolls over. "Wait. Pull into that gas station."

"What is it?" Bobby says, putting the truck in park.

Dean jumps out and shuts the door. "Give me five minutes," he says through the driver's side window.

He was pretty sure before, but the moment he walks in the sandwich shop, bell clanging above his head, he's certain: Annie catches sight of him in the middle of handing some guy a sandwich over the counter and she freezes for a moment. She pulls herself together quickly, Dean has to give her credit for that, but he already saw it. He hangs back, pretending to scan the menu, while Annie rings up the guy's sandwich.

Dean moves to the side to let the guy out and waits. Annie pushes the hair off her forehead and exhales, a gesture that's so like Sam that it throws Dean for a moment.

"Hi," Annie says. There's a stiffness to her posture that wasn't there when Dean saw her last, and he doesn't have to ask what caused it. He remembers thinking she was hot when he first saw her, and yeah, she is, but he wouldn't have ever acted on it -- now more than ever it's clear that she's just a kid, and the thought of what must have happened leaves a sick taste in his mouth. He should probably do something to make this better, but he doesn't even know where to start. I'm sorry my brother committed statutory rape, but it wasn't really him, you see, it was the evil thing that's controlling his body doesn't really seem like it'd help things much.

Dean doesn't know how to make things better for people, anyway. The only person he's ever really had to try to make things better for was Sam, and the same rules don't apply here. Plus, he's pretty sure he did a crap job of that.

Since he doesn't know how to make things better, Dean gives up the pretense of even trying. "When was he here, Annie?"

"Sunday," she says. "He came by right when I was getting off my shift."

"What time was that?" Dean interrupts.

"Six o'clock. He bought a sandwich and ate it while I closed up. I asked him why you weren't with him, and he said he just wanted a little time alone. He said it was lonely out at the cabin. I said you'd only been there for a few hours, he hadn't hardly had time to get lonely, and he--" She pauses. Dean waits for her to go on, and she does. "He put his hand on my arm and said he wanted to see me again."

Annie shifts a little, fidgets. She seems to need prompting. "And then?" Dean says.

"And then I said my house wasn't that far away and I asked him if he wanted to come hang out for a while."

Dean had known the way this story was going to go the moment he walked through the door, but knowing is different than hearing it. Suddenly he doesn't want her to keep talking at all. But this is his mess, and he's sure as hell got to be strong enough to listen to this.

Annie blushes furiously but doesn't look down as she says, "And things went from there. I guess you can figure out the rest."

It takes Dean a moment to recognize the taste in his mouth as relief. "Yeah," he says. "I guess I can."

Annie's quiet after that, and Dean can't even begin to guess what she's thinking. Is she wondering at his timing, why he's only now coming by? Is she wondering who it is that's waiting in the car outside, and why Sam isn't with him now? Dean has no idea. He feels like maybe he should hug her or something, but hugging's never really been his thing, and he's not sure that it wouldn't make things worse if he touched her.

The silence is beginning to stretch too long when Annie says, "Dean?"

"Yeah?" he replies. Careful, he thinks for some reason. Careful.

"Sam," Annie says slowly. "He's . . . not entirely all right, is he?"

Dean swallows. "How do you mean?"

Annie bites her lip. "I mean, he's schizophrenic or something, right?"

Dean knows an out when he hears one. "Something like that," he says. "He forgot to take his meds." He hates himself a little for what he's about to say, but he says it anyway: "Look, Annie, he doesn't even really remember what he does when he's not on his meds, and--"

Annie stops him. "It's okay. You don't have to apologize for him. I'll be okay."

Maybe she will be, maybe she won't, but it's an out Dean's going to take. He nods, then says, "Do you mind if I ask you something else?"

"Sure."

Dean can't help thinking he's pushing his luck, pushing the limits of what she'll believe without asking too many questions, but he asks it anyway. "Do you know what direction he took out of town when he left?"

Annie stares. "How do you know he left town after that?" she says.

Dean doesn't let his expression change. "He was gone for most of the night before he came back. He couldn't really remember anything until today, but he said there was a highway. We're just trying to piece it all together, what he did when he wasn't himself."

It's a good line, and wasn't himself is as good a phrase for this as any.

"I can't be positive," Annie says finally, "but the way he turned off my street, I'd be willing to bet he went south."

It's not certainty, but it's better than what he and Bobby were operating on. "Thanks, Annie," Dean says, and means it.

She smiles with her mouth but not her eyes. "You're welcome."

Dean turns to go, but on impulse turns back. "Have you got a pen and a piece of paper?"

Annie hands him a notepad for taking orders and a stubby pencil. Dean scrawls his cell phone number down and hands the pad and pencil back to her. "In case you need anything," he says. He doesn't want to examine too closely just what it would be that would be enough to make her call.

Annie smiles again, tightly, and says, "Thanks. See you around, Dean."

Dean returns the smile and doesn't say, No, you won't. The door clangs shut behind him and he's suddenly certain that she's going to rip up his number and throw it away. He's oddly glad about it.

He heads back to the truck and gets in.

"Well?" Bobby says.

Dean breathes in, exhales. "Head south," he says.

*

They're an hour south of Vassar when Dean thinks of it, and laughter bubbles up in his chest. "His cell phone," he says at Bobby's questioning stare. "Sam never goes anywhere without his cell phone."

Bobby's voice goes gruff, the closest he can get to letting Dean down easy. "I tried calling him before," Bobby says. "He never picked up."

Of course Bobby would have already tried. Dean still says, "I'd like to try again, if you don't mind," and holds out his hand for Bobby's phone; Dean's hasn't been charged in days. He vaguely remembers the low-battery beep echoing through his dreams.

Bobby doesn't reply, just hands him the phone.

Six rings and it goes to voicemail. It shouldn't hurt as much as it does. Instead of leaving a message, Dean hands Bobby back the phone and hunches down in the passenger seat to sleep.

*

A couple hours further south they stop for lunch and run all of Sam's credit cards. They don't get any hits. It's not like Dean really expected they would. Sam's not stupid, and from what he's seen, neither is the other. But that's the thing: without any credit card traces, there's no way to track Sam short of putting up missing persons posters and waiting for the second coming of Christ. They could bring the cops in, except that they can't: it's been six months since Deacon sprung them from jail, and the missing persons warrant is still out. Besides, there'd be no quicker way to drive Sam underground than to call in the cops.

Because he doesn't know what else to do, Dean shows Sam's picture to a couple of gas station attendants: one in Sidney, Ohio, another in Falmouth, Kentucky. They haven't seen him; Dean didn't really think they would have. He's got to try, though. He doesn't know what else he's supposed to do.

It's all too familiar, this hunt, this feeling of uselessness. When Sam was possessed by the Meg demon, Dean went through these same motions. There wasn't anything else for it than to wait for Sam to come back to himself and call that time, either.

It's been three days so far. It took a week, last time, and Dean dealt with it. It sucked, but he got through it. He doesn't remember it being this bad last time, though. He doesn't remember this constant crushing of his chest against his lungs.

But he got through it last time. He can do it again; he can make it through another week. He doesn't want to think what will happen if it takes Sam longer than that.

*

Bobby pulls over for the night in Brayton, Kentucky, seven hours south of Vassar. They get a room in the Black Dog Inn. Nobody questions it when Bobby asks for a double.

Bobby brings in every gun he's got in the truck and sets to cleaning them. It's a lot of guns. Dean helps him for a while until Bobby says, "I'd like to clean my own guns, if you don't mind," and Dean stops. Because yeah, he gets that: no matter who it is that's trying to help, they're still your guns; it's still your life that could depend on them working, and you don't want to trust anyone else with that.

Dean gets his own guns out and starts to take one of the rifles apart. Usually the ritual of it is calming, but he can't get into it, and he puts the pieces down. "I'm going to go for a walk or something," he says.

Bobby looks up sharply, oil rag in hand. "Dean--"

"I'm not going to do anything stupid, all right? I'm not going anywhere. I just want to walk around for a minute. Jesus Christ."

Dean didn't realize he was going to snap until he's already done it. Bobby's eyes flare wide, but all he says is, "Be back in fifteen minutes."

"Fine," Dean says, and he's gone.

The Black Dog Inn is built on an incline, but then, it seems like everything in this town is just barely clinging to the side of the mountain. They're deep in Kentucky, coal-mining country, backwoods thick in the vowels. It's not any cooler here than it was in Michigan, but Dean jabs his hands into the pockets of his jeans anyway to push the fabric away from his legs. He could probably walk across half of the town and back before his fifteen-minute limit is up, he thinks, but instead he heads straight for the office.

It's already someone different behind the desk than the guy who was there when Bobby checked in: a pimply kid with headphones on, tapping on the counter in time to his music. He scrambles to take the headphones off when Dean walks through the door. "Can I help you?" he says politely.

Owner's kid, Dean thinks. "Yeah. I--" He hesitates, feeling stupid about what he's about to do for some reason, but he goes through with it anyway, pulls Sam's picture out of his wallet and slides it over the counter. "Have you seen this guy anytime recently?"

The kid frowns. "Really tall guy driving a black car?" he says, and Dean's entire body goes slack with relief.

"Yeah," he says, "that's him." Dean can't quite fight down the urge to laugh; a lone giggle makes it out, which he tries to pass off as a cough. He doesn't think the kid's buying it. He scratches at his wrist. "When was he here?"

"Monday," the kid says. "He checked in pretty late and left really early in the morning."

"How early?" Dean asks, gripping at the counter.

"Probably around eight," the kid replies. "Before we started serving breakfast, anyway. Why are you looking for him?"

"He's my brother," Dean says, and the kid nods.

"He run out on you?"

"Something like that," Dean says, but he can't hold the grin down anymore: Sam was here, of all places, and not that long ago. They're heading the right direction, he and Bobby; Annie was right about Sam having headed south, and he's so fucking glad for this, even if the information's a couple of days old, even if they're still incredibly far behind Sam. It's something, more than they had before, and Dean can't help grinning a little over it. It wasn't that he ever thought they weren't going to find Sam; it's just that he feels better knowing they're on the right track.

*

Bobby looks up sharply when Dean walks back into the room. "What's got you grinning?" he asks, wiping off his oil-covered hands on a rag.

"He was here," Dean says, kicking off his shoes. "Sam was here on Tuesday. The kid at the desk recognized his picture."

Bobby just stares for a minute. "That's some kind of coincidence," he says finally.

"You're telling me. He was here, Bobby." There's something about the way Bobby's looking at him that's a little off, but Dean can't keep the excitement out of his voice.

Bobby shifts one of the pistols he's been cleaning from hand to hand. "Of all the places for Sam to have spent the night," he says, "why here?"

"I don't know," Dean says, "but he did, so let's get some sleep so we can get right back out there in the morning and find him, okay?"

"There's just something bothering me about this," Bobby says slowly. "That's all. I don't know, Dean. I just don't have a good feeling about this."

"What's there to not have a good feeling about?" Dean says through his grin, and the room explodes.

Dean hits the floor and covers his head with his hands, but before he's even all the way down he can tell he wasn't right: it wasn't the room that exploded, it was the ceiling, and it was the ceiling above Bobby's head. The air is thick with plaster but Dean's up already and moving through the dust. Bobby is prone, unmoving. He's covered in detritus and he's bleeding but that's nothing vital, he should be fine, except that he was right by the source of the explosion and he has to have all kinds of bruising. That sort of thing would hurt like a bitch, but Bobby's not crying out in pain; he's not making any noise at all. And then Dean sees it: the strange twist of his body, his back's unnatural curve--

"Bobby," Dean says urgently, "Bobby," but he doesn't reply. Dean presses his fingers against Bobby's throat, leans his ear low over Bobby's mouth -- and there, he's not imagining it, there's a bit of breath, the faintest of pulses against his fingers. Bobby's still alive.

Some long-buried first aid knowledge surfaces -- spinal cord injury, don't move the victim -- and Dean runs outside. The owner's kid is already there. "What happened?" he says, wide-eyed, staring past Dean into the room. "I heard -- holy fuck."

"Call 911," Dean says. "You've got to call 911."

The kid looks a lot taller than he did a minute ago; that's because Dean's sitting down, he realizes. He slid down to the curb without even noticing it. The kid's still staring at the room.

"Do it!" Dean snaps up at him, and that shakes the kid out of it; he sprints back towards the office.

A man and a woman come out of a room further down the row. They walk up to Dean and the man says something to him; at least, his mouth is moving, but no sound comes out. The woman stares past Dean into the room and forms her mouth into the perfect O of a cartoon scream. Dean looks down and finds shards of glass in his right arm. He begins to pull them out. There are a lot of them, a few dozen at least, so he has to concentrate. One at the time he pulls them out.

There are flashing lights and firemen sometime after that. They try to talk to him, too, but there's no sound coming out of their mouths, either. Dean just smiles at them and shakes his head. "You're going to have to speak up," he says patiently, but he can't hear himself talking, either, and that's when it clicks: it's not that people aren't making any sound, it's that he can't hear it.

One of the firemen must have guessed something's wrong, because he grabs Dean by the arm. Dean doesn't try to fight him off, even though he's pretty sure he could take the guy. He lets the fireman lead him toward an ambulance and sit him down on a stretcher. There's a paramedic who wants him to lay back but he won't do that. He tries to explain that to the paramedic -- if anything's wrong with him, it's not something that he needs to go to the hospital for; he's just waiting for his hearing to come back -- but that doesn't get through to the paramedic, not all of it, because the guy's still pushing on him.

And then his hearing comes back, a quick-building roar of shouting and sirens. The paramedic who's been trying to get him to lie down is yelling something to another paramedic about shell-shock and hearing loss. Dean slips out of the paramedic's grip while he's turned -- he should have known better than to take his eyes off Dean -- and goes looking for Bobby. It doesn't take long.

They've managed to get him out of the room and onto a stretcher somehow. He's still unconscious.

"Is he going to be all right?" Dean asks one of the paramedics.

"I'm going to have to ask you to back up, sir," the guy says firmly, not taking his eyes off Bobby.

"No, look, I'm his nephew," Dean lies.

The guy's demeanor changes a little, goes kinder for Dean's benefit. "We won't know for a while yet," he says, but he lets Dean ride with Bobby in the ambulance. It's a long trip on winding roads, the gurney jerking with each bump over poorly-paved asphalt. About ten minutes in Bobby groans back to consciousness when they round a hairpin curve, which Dean figures has to be a good thing -- he's definitely alive, for sure -- except that now he's groaning with every bump they go over. Dean thinks of Bobby's back, the strange twist of it--

He's going to be fine. He is.

After a year at least they get to the hospital. The paramedics lower the gurney to the ground as Bobby grunts in pain, rush him into the emergency room. A nurse stops Dean as he blindly tries to follow the paramedics in. "I'm sorry, but you're going to have to wait here," she says. "We'll let you know what's going on as soon as we can."

"Okay, sure," Dean says, turning.

"Wait, let me have someone check out that shoulder for you," the nurse says, frowning.

Dean cranes his neck. Only then does he notice the blood on his left shoulder. "I don't think it's mine," he calls after the nurse, but she doesn't listen to him.

It is his, as it turns out, but it's just a few pieces of glass wedged into his shoulder, and none of them particularly deep; there's just a lot of blood. They didn't hit anything vital and there's no need for anything more than a couple of Band-Aids, although the nurse puts a couple stitches in the longest of the gashes just for fun. He tells her not to bother numbing him; it's a couple stitches in his shoulder, he can take it, and the pain is good: it slams him back into himself. He was out of it for a while there, but the sudden bite of the needle in his shoulder pushes the situation into focus: he's in a hospital in the middle of nowhere; something is terribly wrong with Bobby's back; Sam is days ahead of him, somewhere to the south.

Sam. Dean has no idea how long it's been since he last thought of Sam -- right before the explosion, when he came back from the office, where the kid at the desk said he'd seen Sam -- but Dean has no idea how long it's been since then. It could be a couple of hours; it could have been a day. It was sometime after dusk when he went to talk to the kid at the desk, and it was full-dark for the ride through the mountains, but he has no sense of how long it's been since then. There's no clock in the room, and even if there were he doesn't know how much it would help him.

The nurse doesn't seem to notice his rising panic. She finishes dressing the wound and says, "You can go back to the waiting room now, if you want. You're sure you don't need any Tylenol or anything?"

"I'm sure," Dean says, pulling his shirt back on. He needs to get a new shirt, but the duffel bag is somewhere back in the hotel, buried under a pile of rubble and dust, and he doesn't know when he's going to see it again. At least he's got his wallet and his cell phone in his pocket; other than the keys to the car, that's really all he needs, and then he remembers that he doesn't have the Impala, either. Sam does.

Dean goes back to the waiting room, but he's itchy, can't stay still. He needs to be doing something, and he doesn't know what it is that he thinks that could be; he's no surgeon. He doesn't really want to examine just what it is that he is thinking about too closely, even though he knows: Sam. He was at the Black Dog Inn a couple days ago; that's the first sign of him Dean's had, and he hates the thought of losing the trail now that he's found it. Bobby's in surgery; there's nothing Dean can do for him here.

He doesn't realize he's made up his mind until he's at the receptionist, telling her that he's going to call Bobby's wife and she'll be here for Bobby. "You got somewhere else to be?" the receptionist asks, disapproving.

Dean draws his mouth tight and thin. "Yeah. I do."

*

Dean goes out into the parking lot and calls Ellen, tells her Bobby's had an accident and that she's pretending to be his wife for the purposes of Carroll County Hospital. Dean can hear the heaviness of her silence over the cell phone. "Where are you haring off to that's so important that you can't stay with Bobby and you're calling me?" she asks finally. "Dean, where's Sam?"

Dean hangs up on her, and then he steals a car.

The pickings are pretty slim, but at least it's dark out. He picks an old Toyota Camry because it's parked around the side of the hospital, away from windows, and because it's easy to break into and easier to hotwire. Less than five minutes and he's pulling out of the hospital lot and looking for the highway.

He follows smaller roads to bigger ones, and it's not long before he's in luck: on the right is an on-ramp for 55 South. He takes it.

*

Somewhere in Tennessee it occurs to him that he should be tired. He's pretty sure that the last time he slept, it was on the floor of the cage -- he has no idea how long it was between when he lost track of time and went delirious and when Bobby arrived -- but that's not real sleep, not the kind that leaves you feeling better. But Dean isn't tired. He doesn't know when the last time he got a normal night's sleep was; not since the whole mess with Sam started, that's for sure, and how long has that been? It doesn't matter. He's not tired and he's not going to stop driving, not now that he's finally on Sam's trail for sure, and when he's got so much time to make up for.

Dean gets coffee and a chicken biscuit from a Hardees drive-thru in Spring Hill, Tennessee a couple hours after dawn. He doesn't even really feel the caffeine but the chicken biscuit goes straight to his blood, crispy and flaky and hot, just the right amount of oil and salt. He gets gas at the same exit and shows Sam's picture to the attendant; he doesn't know why, but he's sure even before he pulls the picture out of his wallet that the guy will have seen Sam. And he's right: the guy frowns and says, "He was here yesterday," and Dean can't help grinning stupidly at the guy. Either Sam's slowing down or Dean's catching up, and either way it doesn't matter: he's going to find Sam, and soon.

On impulse he shows Sam's picture to the girl at the Wendy's drive-thru window in Cullman, Alabama when he gets lunch, and she's seen him, too. "Last night," she says, and he smiles at her, takes his change in one hand and his bag of burgers in the other. He's always liked Wendy's burgers, but these are the best he's ever tasted. Anticipation is thrumming through his blood. When he catches a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror he thinks he maybe looks a little insane, cuts on his face from the explosion and dark rings under his eyes, but it doesn't matter.

In Priceville his cell phone buzzes in his pocket and the beginning of "Smoke on the Water" blares out. There wasn't any question in Dean's mind of who it would be, and the name on the screen confirms it: Sam.

"Dean?" Sam says. "Dean. I'm in Birmingham. The Winfrey Hotel. Room 213."

He hangs up before Dean can even get a word in, but it doesn't matter: there's a sign on the right: Birmingham -- 75 miles. He'll be there in an hour; he's almost done it. He's going to catch up to Sam.

Dean almost misses it. He goes to close the phone, and he almost does it without thinking, but something nags at him and instead of flipping it shut he looks at it and his stomach rolls over: the screen of the phone is dark. He hasn't charged his cell phone since before Sam left him in the cabin. It ran out of battery two days ago at least, if not before, and yet Sam just called him on it.

There's a sharp metallic taste in his mouth. After a while he realizes he's remembered to feel fear.

Dean's been so caught up in everything that's been going on to remember to be afraid of what's going to happen when he does catch up with Sam. But now that he's had the thought he can't push it down: it wasn't Sam in control of Sam's body when he left. Dean has no idea how long it's been since it was actually Sam in control of his body. He doesn't know which of them it was that called him and gave him the number of that hotel; now that he thinks about it, he doubts it was Sam. When Sam was possessed before and finally got enough control back to call Dean, he was terrified.

But the voice on the phone this time didn't sound terrified at all.

And there's another thought, worse: all these times people have seen Sam in gas stations, fast food places? Bobby had thought there was something weird about it; he thought there was something wrong when the kid at the desk said that Sam had been at the Black Dog Inn. Dean didn't worry about it, didn't think there was anything going on there. But that explosion . . . Dean hasn't been thinking about it, because he didn't want to, but he's thinking about it now: did the thing that's controlling Sam's body know that they were going to be there? Did it lead them there? Dean tries to remember if there was some reason that they stopped at that exit, if he felt some particular pull towards Brayton; he can't remember that he did, but then again he wasn't paying attention to that sort of thing.

Dean eases his foot off the accelerator now, lets the car slow five miles per hour, then ten. Bobby knew something was wrong; Bobby figured it out, and Dean was so caught up in the idea of finding Sam that he didn't want to listen to him. Dean's thinking about it now, though, all right. He just got a call on a cell phone that hasn't been charged in four days, and he doesn't know what he's driving into. He needs to pull over and call for back-up. He needs to do anything other than head straight into this alone. If he's ever been sure in his life that he's driving into a trap, it's right now.

Dean means to keep his foot off the gas pedal, he does. He means to put on his turn signal and take the exit for the next town, find a pay phone and call the Roadhouse. He means to do all of this. Instead he puts his foot back on the gas and accelerates towards Birmingham, sixty miles ahead.

*

He gets into town a little after nine-thirty. The town is dark under the sheen of the half-moon. It's a good-sized place. Dean should have at least had to drive for a while before finding the hotel, if not stop and ask someone for directions, but somehow he takes all of the right turns and there it is, rising up before him. He doesn't think it's a coincidence.

The Winfrey Hotel is a two-story place, upscale; not their usual style. Ratty, run-down places tend to ask fewer questions when you come back in at two in the morning covered in dirt and blood. Places with nice carpeting and bellhops have always made Dean nervous, and he doesn't want to examine too closely why it is that Sam's staying here now. He parks the Camry at the end of the lot, not bothering to lock the doors. If someone wants to steal his stolen car, they're welcome to it.

The lobby's pretty crowded when Dean walks in; it looks like some kind of high school sports team is spending the night at the place. A little ritzy for a bunch of high school kids, Dean thinks, but the crowd means he doesn't have to bother lying his way past the desk; he just heads straight for the door off the back of the lobby, the long polished brass and maroon-carpet hallway. Room 213, Sam had said on the phone; Dean's at Room 240 right now, and the numbers are decreasing. The numbers cut off abruptly at the end of the hallway, but there's another hallway leading off to the left, moving in the right direction now. Dean runs his hand against the brass accent on the wall, just for the sake of smudging it.

It's a pretty big hotel, bigger than it looked from the outside, but the numbers are getting closer: he's ten rooms away, then five. 215, 214, Dean's there. It says 213 on the brass placard beside the door and he doesn't realize it until just now but his heart is trying to break through his chest and he can't remember the last time he breathed. Nothing else for it, Dean thinks, and knocks on the door.

There was another moment before that Dean had thought of as the turning point, but this is another: his hand on the door. There's still time, now. He could still make it to the end of the hallway -- it's not far -- and out the door, could still get out of here and call for backup. He could still do it; there's still time.

And then there isn't.

The doorknob turns and the door opens, and there, behind it, is Sam. His face collapses inwards when he recognizes Dean, all the tension leaving his muscles, and he says, "Dean."

Dean can't help himself: he grabs him and pulls him close, because it's Sam. It's really him, and not the other. It's Sam, and Dean clings to him. He thinks that if he keeps Sam close enough they could bleed into one another. The thought doesn't really make sense even as it moves through his head, but he presses his hands against the muscles of Sam's back, pushes his face into Sam's shoulder.

Dean's reluctant to let go of Sam long enough even to get inside the hotel room, but somehow they manage to get inside and get the door shut. Dean manages to let go of Sam; it takes a lot of effort, and Sam smiles wryly at him. "Missed me, did you?"

"God, Sam," Dean says, letting his relief color his words. It's all he can do to keep from pulling Sam back into another hug to make sure he's really there, and God, he really is turning into a girl, isn't he? He doesn't care.

"It's good to see you, too," Sam says, sitting down on the edge of the bed, and only then does Dean notice the blood on Sam's knuckles.

"What happened to you?" he asks.

Sam holds his hand up, examines it. "I'm not sure," he says slowly. "Today's the twenty-sixth, isn't it?"

Dean starts to nod, then catches himself. "I'm not actually sure. It's been a weird past few days."

Sam's mouth curves into a downwards smile. He picks the remote up off the table beside the bed and turns the T.V. on. The ticker-line along the bottom of the local news station says it's the twenty-sixth. "It was the twenty-second when we got to the cabin in Vassar, wasn't it? Dean, I don't remember anything since that night."

"Since that night," Dean echoes. "Since when that night?"

Sam swallows. Dean watches his Adam's apple shift. "Dean."

"Tell me you remember what you said." Dean only realizes he's clenching his fingers into fists when he feels the bite of his hangnail into his palm. He wouldn't normally notice the pain, but the moment is stretched thin, crystalline. Out of the corner of his eye he can see the T.V. flickering; he can hear the sleek A.C. unit whirring to life.

Dean can see the fine lines of Sam's forehead, the crinkles of his mouth, the way Sam's shirt pulls over the muscles beneath it and the way Sam is turned towards him, the groan of the mattress as Sam shifts forward on it and says, low and raw, "I said that I'd wanted you since I was sixteen. I remember that part, Dean."

The words are barely out of Sam's mouth before Dean's kissing him. He can't stop himself; he doesn't even notice he's moving across to the bed until he's there, and he can't stop himself once he is. Dean curls his hands around Sam's head and licks his way into Sam's mouth, presses against him. Sam falls back onto the bed and pulls Dean down on top of him, their hips slotting together, and Dean can't stop kissing him.

"Less clothes," Sam breathes against his mouth. Dean would rip his shirt off his body if it meant he could keep kissing Sam while he took his shirt off; as it is, it takes him a few tries before he gets away from Sam. He pulls back just long enough to get his shirt off. Sam shrugs off his own shirt and goes for Dean's belt; Dean cants his hips back to give Sam better access.

Dean slides his mouth along Sam's shoulder as Sam pushes Dean's pants down and off. Dean sucks a breath in when Sam grabs his cock, and it's too much already, Sam's huge hand jacking him hard and fast. Dean scrabbles at Sam's belt, shoves his hand down Sam's pants. Sam hisses and arches into Dean's hand, grips down harder on Dean's cock, and that's what does it for Dean, the tightening of the grip, and he bites out, "Sam," as he comes. Sam's eyes darken with lust and it's not long before he's coming, too, pulsing into Dean's hand.

Dean is boneless, falling onto the bed beside Sam and pressing himself against the length of Sam's side. Dean doesn't have to be looking at Sam to know that Sam's grinning. He smiles against Sam's side and sleeps.

*

Dean wakes up naked in the dark, and panic seizes him: he showed up and he and Sam -- had sex, is what he means to think, but he can't quite wrap his mind around the thought -- and he's alone in the bed, and Sam is--

--nowhere to be seen, except there's a sliver of light along the bottom of the bathroom door, and Dean swallows down his relief.

But then the door opens and Sam steps out, fully dressed, shoes on, and it's like the relief was never there at all. "Sam?" Dean says, the sharp bite of fear pushing through his tiredness.

"Dean," Sam says. Three strides and he's across the room, cupping Dean's chin in his hand like he's a skittish animal or a girl, long fingers tilting Dean's face up. "Hey," he says softly. "It's okay."

Dean stares into his eyes, heavy and dark. He pretends Sam can't feel the way his blood is racing through his veins. "What were you up to before, Sammy?"

Sam moves his hand off Dean's jaw, slides it around to stroke Dean's hair. "Shh, Dean. It's okay." It's the sort of thing Dean used to do for him when Sam was very small, and it's an incongruous gesture, coming from Sam. It's harder to resist the urge to stop talking and relax into the movements of Sam's hand than Dean would like.

"Just answer the question, Sam," he says, quiet but firm.

Sam's features shift into a strange half-grin. "Fine. I was out at a bar, but then you knew that. You can smell the cigarette smoke, can't you?"

Dean can: the sickly dryness lingering in the air. He hadn't realized he'd noticed it, but he had. "I guess I did know that," he says slowly.

The smile deepens on Sam's face, cutting into his cheeks. "So I guess you don't need to ask what else I was up to, do you?" He's still stroking Dean's head, tugging at the short hairs behind his ears, and Dean can't help reacting to it, leaning into the touch, even as he shudders.

"I guess not," Dean says, voice scratching in his throat. "Tell me something, though. What should I call you?"

Sam's hand doesn't stop moving over his head. "What do you mean?" he says too easily, voice too devoid of strain.

"You're not Sam," Dean bites out, but Sam's face is near to his now, and there's nothing off about it, not a single line out of place. He presses in closer and Dean lets him; God help him, Dean lets him.

"I'm your brother," he breathes against Dean's mouth.

"You're not Sam," Dean repeats, but the words fall silent as Sam's mouth closes over his, Sam's tongue stealing the sound away so that it's like it was never there at all.

*

When Dean wakes up, light is filtering through the blinds and Sam is smushed against him, arm draped over his chest. Dean's naked and Sam's shirtless. Sam's pants are shoved halfway down but he's still wearing shoes, and it's that that propels Dean out of the bed and into the bathroom, breathing hard with his back against the door.

When he had woken up in the middle of the night, it had been the other in the room with him, not Sam. Dean had known that, he'd known it, but -- he wets a washcloth and wipes the dried come off his cock, his stomach -- they had sex anyway, and he tries to remember how he could have possibly gone from that realization to having sex.

Dean brushes his teeth, splashes cold water on his face and tries to ignore the clenching of his guts. But no matter how he twists it, unexplained memory loss is bad news. He thinks of the first few nights Sam came home confused -- "I wasn't planning on sleeping with anyone, Dean" -- the earnestness on his face, how badly he'd wanted Dean to tell him it was going to be okay, there was an explanation for this and they were going to figure it out . . .

It's not a good feeling, not knowing why he acted the way he did last night, but behind it is another feeling, worse: he's failed Sam. Dean told him they were going to figure this out, they were going to solve this, and they haven't; Dean hasn't. He got Sam into the cage but he couldn't keep him there. He let the other trick him into opening the cage right back up; he didn't even last a few hours. Dean was too stupid then, too weak and too easily tricked, and he's still failing Sam now.

"What am I supposed to do?" he bites out, gripping at the sides of the sink, but there aren't any answers, not for this. He stays there for a long time, until finally Sam's voice wafts through the door.

"Dean?"

Dean does the only thing he can. He ties a towel around his waist and goes to Sam.

Sam's sitting on the bed nearest the bathroom. His face is open, full of concern. "Dean," he says softly. "You don't need to worry about that."

Dean swallows, his throat sticking. "What don't I need to worry about?"

"This," Sam says, spreading his arms wide. "Everything. Me."

"I've always worried about you," Dean says, sitting down on the bed next to him. It feels like the words are coming from somewhere far away, like they're moving through a dream.

Sam smiles a little. "I know you have. But you don't need to anymore, don't you see?"

Dean shudders. "I'll always need to worry about you, Sam. It's my job."

Sam grips Dean by the arms, holds him steady. "But I'm okay now, Dean. I'm better than I ever was before."

Dean exhales, relaxes in Sam's grip. "I know," he says, and he's surprised to realize it's true: he does know. Sam's okay, he's fine, and Dean smiles at the thought.

Sam returns the smile.

*

They raid the continental breakfast and leave right after that. It's good to be behind the wheel of the Impala again, Sam in the passenger seat beside him. They aren't heading anywhere specific; it doesn't matter. They're on the road, and that's the important thing.

They compromise on the music -- "Nobody doesn't like CCR," Sam replies when Dean asks if Sam wants to listen to his girly crap -- and Dean sings along softly when it looks like Sam's sleeping:

Sam isn't really sleeping, though. Dean catches him mouthing along, eyes still closed:

They're heading west, their default direction: no matter where they start out, they always seem to end up heading west. It's a Friday morning and the highway is clear; they don't stop until Dean's stomach growls for a minute straight, sometime after two.

"I think that means lunchtime," Sam says, smirking.

Dean swats at him, but pulls off at the next place he sees, a truck stop diner. It's pretty quiet but everything that's coming out of the kitchen smells great, so Dean's not complaining. He orders an enormous bacon cheeseburger and chows down. Sam is giving him one of those you're going to have a heart attack and die by the age of forty looks, but Dean really fails to see how Sam can take the moral high ground when he's eating a basket of onion rings. That's all beside the point anyway, point being, this is one damned good burger.

It's almost unbelievable how good it is to be back with Sam, too. It's crazy how hard it was to be away from him for those four days. When Dean thinks about the fact that they barely spoke for the last two years Sam was at Stanford, let alone saw each other -- Dean can't figure out how he withstood it. He's back with Sam now, though. That's the important thing.

They take their time eating lunch. There's no reason to hurry, and especially when Dean's got a burger like this in his hands, he wants to give it the kind of attention it deserves.

"That," he says to the waitress when she comes to clear their plates, "was an awesome burger."

She grins at him and sets down the check.

"Do you mind getting that?" Sam says, standing up. "I'm going to go to the bathroom."

"Yeah, sure," Dean says, watching Sam walk towards the back of the diner.

Dean doesn't notice it at first, digging through his wallet for a couple of crumpled fives. He doesn't notice it when the waitress takes his money, and he doesn't notice it while he watches her counting coins out of the register. When she brings his change back to the table, though, that's when he notices it: the slow build of returning detail, like watching a heat mirage resolve into what's actually there. It doesn't even entirely make sense in his head, but the sounds of the diner are louder, the colors are brighter, and Sam--

--isn't with him at all. It's not Sam that's with him, it's the other; he doesn't know how he didn't notice it before, how he could have possibly failed to see it, but it's been too easy, this whole day, everything falling into place too well, and shouldn't he have noticed that before? Things can't be easy with Sam right now, not after everything that's happened, but today's been like it used to be, those rare times before when it'd been long enough between the deaths of people they loved that they could almost be okay again, when there wasn't something huge hanging over their heads, like the possibility of Sam turning, and Dean needs to get out of here, he needs to get out of here right now.

There's a hand on his arm. There's a hand on his arm and Dean relaxes into it. "Sam," he says, the word warm on his tongue, and Sam smiles at him.

"Hey. You ready to get out of here?"

"Yeah, sure," Dean says, sliding his wallet back into his pocket. He's got the oddest feeling, like there was something he was worrying about just a few minutes ago, but it slips through his mind too quickly to catch. It can't be that important, anyway, if he can't remember what it is. He follows Sam back out to the Impala, squinting into the sunlight, and everything is fine.

*

Dean has no idea what day it is, but time doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is Sam's mouth pressed against his throat, murmuring, "I'm okay, Dean. We're okay. We're better than we've ever been," and finally, finally Dean knows that it is true.