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The air conditioner rattles like a dying lawn mower, coughing out lukewarm air that smells vaguely like wet carpet and cheap cleaner. A neon vacancy sign buzzes through the flimsy curtains, the red glow slicing the dark into dull, aching strips. The bedspreads are that weird nubby fabric motels always think counts as “stain-proof,” and the framed art is a faded print of a sailboat, like the room is trying to pretend it isn’t two miles from a truck stop and twenty from anything that looks like water.
Dean throws himself onto the closer bed face-first, boots and all.
“Home sweet dump,” he mumbles into the pillow, voice muffled, and then, louder: “Leave it to you to pick the one room where the AC has a personal vendetta.”
Sam drops his duffel between the beds, scrubs a hand over his face. “There were two rooms left,” he says. “One of them had a smell I couldn’t identify.”
“And this one’s what, elegantly eau de murder?”
Dean flips over, squints at the ceiling, and then lets his head loll toward Sam. He looks wrecked in the way he only gets when the job is done and he hasn’t let himself admit it yet: eyes half-lidded, shoulders still tensed like he’s waiting for something to come through the door.
“Tell me you grabbed something edible.”
“Gas station burritos and a suspiciously cheerful apple.” Sam lifts a plastic bag from his shoulder, sets it on the table, and hears the wrapper crackle like a tiny fire. “I also got water. And—” He holds up a small paper cup. “Coffee.”
Dean blinks. “At eleven p.m.”
“It’s decaf.”
“That’s a hate crime.”
Sam huffs a laugh. It’s a low sound, short-lived. There’s a press in his chest, like a palm pushing from the inside out, and he doesn’t know if it’s relief, or the echo of sirens that aren’t there. He reaches for a bottle of water, unscrews the cap, and the plastic squeal of it makes Dean wince.
“Dude,” Dean says, “volumes exist. You don’t have to use the max setting.”
“Sorry.” Sam drinks, cool water sliding down his throat, and it doesn’t do a thing to wash the night out of him.
He looks at the curtains, the slit of neon, the silhouette of the AC hunched like an old dog beneath the window. He looks at Dean, who’s already half-gone, shoes hanging off the edge of the bed, one arm flung across his eyes.
“You taking first shower or what?” Dean asks without moving his arm.
“You can. I’m… not tired yet.”
“Liar,” Dean says, and then his body loses two inches to the mattress like his bones finally got the message and agreed to stay.
Sam stands there for another minute because that’s what he does: waits for the quiet to settle like dust. He toes off his shoes, lines them up neatly beside the bed because it gives his hands something to do, and sets the water bottle on the nightstand. He stares at the bottle. Stares at the way the neon paints it the color of a cut. He looks away.
He should be tired. He should be more than tired—he should be bone-deep done, drifting before his head hits the thin motel pillow, knocked out by the kind of exhaustion that feels almost like mercy. Instead he’s wired, every nerve alert, his brain chewing on old bones. If he closes his eyes, he can feel heat that’s not the room’s: the close press of a dream that didn’t mind being a cliché—fire and shadows and the smell of hair burning. It stole his breath, stole it enough that he woke with his hands clawing at the sheets, spitting out a name that doesn’t live in the world anymore.
He hadn’t let it get that far, not this time. He had cracked his eyes open when the dream started to tilt toward that familiar edge; he had yanked himself back by the collar. But the taste of it is still there. Guilt is muscle memory. He could do it with his eyes closed.
He takes the bathroom first. He doesn’t know why he lied to Dean; maybe it made it easier, like saying he wasn’t tired would trick his body into believing him. The light buzzes to life, thrumming like a fluorescent hornet’s nest. The mirror is a little hazed in the corners, speckled with tiny scratches that map constellations across the glass. He brushes his teeth, rinses, stares at himself.
He looks like a guy who slept in the front seat of a car last night, which he did, and like a guy who hasn’t slept right in longer than that, which is also true. He looks like his brother and not like his brother, like he’s built out of the same blueprint but got a different architect somewhere along the line. There’s a line between his eyebrows that never used to be there. He presses it with a finger, like he can smooth it out.
When he goes back into the room, Dean hasn’t moved much. He’s rolled onto his side, one knee crooked, mouth open just enough to say he’s not fully gone. The TV’s off; they didn’t even bother with static tonight. The only sound is the AC and the occasional car slipping by outside, tires whispering secrets to the pavement. Sam turns off the bedside lamp. The room goes almost dark except for the neon red slice across the ceiling, like a wound that refuses to close.
He lies down. He pulls the covers up, and the fabric is rough, pilled from years of other people’s sleep. He turns his head. He turns it the other way. He closes his eyes and clicks through lists in his mind—states, capitals, the names of the stops on a bus line he hasn’t seen since he was a kid—as if memorization is a kind of prayer, as if repetition is a lock that could keep the bad things out.
His body doesn’t buy it. The lump of the mattress feels like a hand at his spine. He shifts. The sheets rasp. He opens his eyes and it feels like falling.
“Stop thinking so loud,” Dean mutters, which makes Sam start because he made zero sound.
“I’m not,” Sam says automatically.
“You are,” Dean says. Then: “And you lied about the shower.”
Sam swallows. “You were already asleep.”
“Uh huh.” Dean rearranges himself with the efficient gracelessness of a guy who’s been living in crappy beds since he could walk. He flips his pillow, pulls the corner over his head, and then peels it back.
“What, did the mirror stare back?”
“Funny.”
“Thought so.” Dean clears his throat. “You gonna keep vibrating over there, or you gonna actually try?”
“I’m trying,” Sam says, and it comes out more defensive than he means. There’s a beat where he listens to it hang in the air. He sighs and adds, softer, “I am. It’s just…”
“Just the greatest hits,” Dean says, voice slanting toward something that isn’t quite sympathetic, isn’t quite mocking. He knows Sam will hear the difference. He always has.
Sam turns on his side, faces the wall, folds an arm under his head. “Something like that.”
“Okay,” Dean says, and it’s a word that can hold a lot of things—agreement, dismissal, surrender. In Dean’s mouth it usually means we’ll fight later; it means I’m not making you talk if you don’t want to, but I’m not leaving the room either. “Okay.”
Sam breathes. In, out. The AC rattles a bit like it’s shivering. Every time he’s about to tip over the edge into sleep, his brain kicks the underside of the bed. He fits a hand against his stomach and tries to set it there, like weight could anchor him to the moment.
It doesn’t.
The red light flickers. The room creaks like old knees.
After fifty years—ten minutes—he gives up. He swings his legs out of bed, barefoot on carpet that’s both too thin and too thick. He goes for the water bottle, drinks again, then sets it down carefully so it doesn’t click against the nightstand. He walks to the window and parts the curtains a sliver. The parking lot is a black slab, a single lamp puddling yellow around it. The Impala sits in that circle of light like a ghost that decided not to disappear. He thinks about walking out there, about sitting in the driver’s seat and letting the smell of leather and motor oil do what it always does—remind him who they are, who he is. But he could wake Dean with the door chain, or the hinge squeal, or the simple fact of absence.
He lets the curtain fall back into place.
“Sam.”
He turns. Dean hasn’t moved from the bed, but his voice is clearer, a little less sleep-chewed. “Yeah.”
“C’mere.”
“I’m okay.”
“Didn’t ask,” Dean says, without heat. “I said come here.”
“Dean, I’m fine. Just restless.”
“Uh huh.” Dean’s hand reaches out, groping the air between the beds like he’s trawling for a light switch, and his fingers hook in the hem of Sam’s t-shirt when Sam comes close enough to be caught. Dean gives a short tug, not enough to make it a joke, more like gravity reminding you it exists. “Quit pacing. You’re making the room seasick.”
“I wasn’t pacing.”
“You were doing that thing where you ghost around like you’re in a museum.” Dean’s fingers are still there, warm and solid at the hem of Sam’s shirt. “Get in.”
Sam exhales. He can feel something bristling in him, the knee-jerk insistence that he handle this alone. He’s twenty-something, six-four, built like he could shoulder a building if it asked nicely. He doesn’t need to be… He doesn’t need—
Dean makes a sound that’s basically the annoyed cousin of a laugh. “I can hear your pride from here, and it’s real loud, but we’re not arguing. Either you get in your bed and sleep, or you get in mine and sleep. Those are the options. Pick one.”
“Bossy,” Sam mutters, but the corner of his mouth twitches, and it’s enough of a crack that something gentler gets in.
“Yeah.” Dean’s hand taps, twice, and then slides away. “C’mon.”
Sam hesitates one more beat because that’s how he’s wired. Then he gives in, because that’s how he’s wired too. He moves the few steps to Dean’s bed and lies down on top of the covers, awkward as a teenager.
“There. Happy?”
Dean groans. “Oh my God. Get under the blanket; what are you, visiting from a colder climate?” Then, as Sam begrudges his way beneath the blanket: “Shoes.”
“I already took them off.”
“Good. I wasn’t above throwing them at your head.”
Dean shifts, making space like he’s done this before, which they both know he has. When they were kids and when they were not. When the room was new and when it was the same room with a different motel sign. He hooks an arm out, not reaching exactly, just… present. “Okay?”
Sam settles.
The mattress dips around Dean, a gravity well that’s embarrassingly easy to fall into. He closes his eyes and the dark behind them lurches, but it’s different now; it’s smaller. He breathes in and his senses do what they remember: find the anchor points. The smell of Dean—gun oil, soap, a sweetness that might be the lingering ghost of something fruity from the gas station aisle. The sound of Dean’s breathing, steady as a metronome. The warmth that radiates like a space heater with a conscience.
Dean keeps his voice easy.
“You wanna talk about it?”
“No,” Sam says, too fast, and then adds, because he’s not a jerk, “Thanks.”
“Anytime.” Dean makes the word casual, but it lands with weight. He shifts again, closer, until his knee bumps Sam’s. “You need earplugs for the AC?”
“I’m fine.”
“You cold?”
“No.”
“You lying?”
“Maybe.”
“Yeah.” Dean drags the blanket up an inch anyway. “You know I don’t care, right?”
“I know,” Sam says, and he does; he does. That doesn’t always make it easy.
“Okay. Night then.”
“Night.”
It should end there. It should be that simple. But the thing about brains—the thing about Sam’s, specifically—is that getting still sometimes makes the noise louder. He drops a clean minute into the dark before the memory sneaks back in with different clothes on, and when he flinches Dean feels it.
Dean’s arm slides across Sam’s chest like a guardrail falling into place. It’s solid, not trapping but there. “Hey, hey.”
“Sorry,” Sam says, jaw tight around the word.
“Didn’t mean—”
“I’m not mad,” Dean says, like only a man who’s been accused of being mad a lot would say it that way. “I got you.”
Sam doesn’t answer. It’s enough to be held like this, the weight of Dean’s forearm below his collarbones, the warm fit of Dean’s chest along his shoulder blade when Dean shifts closer, the tuck of Dean’s chin against the back of his head. The blanket pulls with them, creates a little cave that holds their breath and the faint smell of bleach. Sam presses his tongue to the back of his teeth and tastes a phantom of smoke. He swallows it. He breathes.
“Dude,” Dean says eventually, voice rough with not-sleep, “you know you don’t have to—” He stops, changes lanes. “You’re allowed. That’s the whole sentence.”
Sam’s throat tightens. “Allowed to what.”
“To need stuff,” Dean says, like he’s explaining carbs to a bulldog. “To not sleep. To… I don’t know. Be a person.”
“I am a person.”
“Uh-huh.” Dean’s hand curls into the fabric of Sam’s shirt. The gesture is absentminded and unfailingly specific: a thumb rub at the sternum, and then a lay-flat like he’s diffusing a bomb. He learned this on a hundred nights exactly like this one, and even if he thinks he forgot, his body didn’t. “I got you. You hear me?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” Dean exhales, a sound that could be a laugh. “Also, if I get rug burn on my face from this pillow because you’re hogging the soft spot, I’m suing.”
Sam’s laugh is quieter, reluctant. “On what grounds, exactly.”
“Cruel and unusual brothering.” Dean shifts again, the bed protesting. “Gimme your giant mitt.”
“What?”
“Hand. Give.” He navigates by feel until he gets Sam’s hand in his, and then he guides it up, pats it flat against Dean’s chest. “See? Evidence I’m breathing. No ghosts. No demons. No heat. Just me. You can do the count thing if you want.”
“The count thing,” Sam repeats, but he’s already doing it. The ridges of Dean’s ribs beneath his palm. The rise and fall—one-two, one-two—like waves. His hand is big enough that he feels it across most of Dean’s chest, and that’s ridiculous because he shouldn’t be thinking about the science of it, but the math helps. He can fit his hand around this proof. It’s stupidly comforting.
“You good?” Dean asks, voice small with tiredness.
“Yeah.”
“Liar,” Dean says, but he doesn’t sound annoyed. He just sounds like Dean. “‘S okay.”
The room breathes around them. The AC rattles. Tires whisper. The neon hums. Sam’s body starts to ease by increments, like a brass dial turned a millimeter at a time. He says, without deciding to, “It was like before. The dream.”
Dean’s fingers press once against the back of Sam’s hand. “Yeah?”
“Not… not exactly. But close. The heat. The… I couldn’t move.” He hears himself stumble, hits the tight part in his chest and has to swallow around it. “I hate that it still feels new.”
“Trauma’s real good at reruns,” Dean says. “Networks never cancel it.”
Sam’s laugh is a broken thing, halfway to a cough. “Great.”
“You want me to do the thing,” Dean says, and it’s not really a question; he’s already shifting, his hand leaving Sam’s to curl around his shoulder, thumb hooking by habit at the slope where neck meets muscle. The touch is enough to ground Sam in his body. “The ‘you’re here’ thing.”
“I know I’m here,” Sam says, and he does; it’s just that knowing sometimes sits beside feeling and they don’t talk.
Dean does it anyway, voice low and steady. “You’re in a motel off I-35,” he says, naming the interstate like a spell. “Room smells like sadness and lemon bleach. AC’s trying to give us tetanus. Impala’s outside, last spot near the soda machine. I felt every pothole you hit.”
“I didn’t hit—okay, I hit two.”
“Four,” Dean says, pure confidence. “You’re under my arm. My arm is the good kind of heavy. You’re warm. Blanket’s scratchy. There’s a stupid boat on the wall, even though we’re landlocked. There’s still a sticker on the bottom of the lamp because the guy who assembled it hates his job. There’s an apple in a bag that’s gonna go to apple heaven in, like, twelve hours because no one’s eating that.”
“I might.”
“You won’t,” Dean says, with deep affection and astonishing certainty. “Not because it’s an apple, but because it smells like gas station.”
Sam starts to argue and then lets it go. Dean’s voice is a rope; he doesn’t need to cut it on purpose.
Dean keeps going, softer. “You’re safe,” he says, and the word makes Sam flinch but it’s better, somehow, that it lands from Dean. “I’m here. Nothing’s coming through the door. If it does, I’m closer.”
“Dean—”
“What,” Dean says, like he’s daring Sam to call him out for what he means: what he’d do, what he will always do.
Sam swallows. “Nothing.”
“Uh-huh.” Dean’s chest moves under Sam’s hand. One-two. One-two. “Gonna ask you a real stupid question,” Dean says after a minute.
“Okay.”
“You wanna hold on or be held.”
It’s stupid, and it isn’t. The distinction matters in a way Sam hates that it does. He bites at the inside of his cheek. “I don’t know.”
“Then we’ll do both,” Dean says, simple. He slides his arm more securely over Sam’s chest, a hug from behind that doesn’t lock, that doesn’t trap. His other hand finds Sam’s wrist and tucks their hands together at the center of Sam’s chest, the way you’d warm something with both palms. “There. That’s a two-fer.”
Sam’s eyes burn. He lets his head tip back into the curve of Dean’s shoulder, lets the shape of them do the work: the length of him a line broken by Dean’s presence, the reality of another body saying you are not alone. He breathes, deeper now. In the deep he finds the edges of sleep gathering like weather.
“Hey,” Dean says, a warning disguised as a tease. “Sleep, Littlefoot.”
Sam snorts. “Wrong brother.”
“Whatever. You’re both tragedies in human form.” Dean nudges his knee against the back of Sam’s, a gentle rutting that somehow says stop thinking. “Sleep, little brother.”
The words land like weight. Sam feels them travel through the part of him that still wants to argue, wants to perform being fine. The insistence in Dean’s voice is what makes it okay: not an order so much as a permission too fierce to ignore. Something in Sam lets go. It’s not dramatic; there’s no swell of music. It’s a tiny unclenching at the base of his skull, a slight loosening under his ribs. The ache doesn’t vanish. It just makes room.
He doesn’t know when he drops off. He just knows that when he wakes, the light in the room is the thin blue of just-before, the neon red guttering like a tired heart. The AC is still clattering, heroic and useless. Dean is still pressed along his back, arm heavy in that same not-trap, their hands still held at his chest like a pact. Sam is warm, and the warmth isn’t a threat.
He holds very still, letting his brain take inventory without picking up a weapon. He feels his heartbeat, the echo of a dream that wasn’t all sharp edges this time—fragments of a diner somewhere, Dean stealing fries, a waitress with a bee tattoo. Normal things, small things. He catalogues the good the way he’s learned to catalogue the bad.
“Hey,” Dean says, voice rough, morning tangled in it. He doesn’t move immediately. “You up?”
“Yeah,” Sam says, his own voice sandpapered. “Sort of.”
“Any bad dreams?”
“Actually…” Sam considers. “One okay one.”
“Ha.” Dean sounds pleased to a degree that makes Sam’s throat tight again. “Beat the system.”
“For tonight.” Sam shifts, careful. Dean’s arm compensates, giving and then reclaiming the space like water. “You, uh—”
“What.”
“You don’t have to—” He gestures with the hand Dean isn’t holding. This, he means. The holding. The fact of being allowed to admit he wants it. “You can go back to your own bed.”
“That my cue to let go?” Dean asks, and does not let go.
Sam exhales through his nose. “That was more like a courtesy offer.”
“Declined,” Dean says. His arm tightens for a second, a squeeze with an adult’s strength and a kid’s certainty. “You were jerking awake every twenty minutes, man. I’m sleeping just fine like this, and if I wasn’t, I still wouldn’t move.”
“Dean.”
“What,” Dean says, maddeningly patient.
“It’s… embarrassing.”
“Yeah, for me,” Dean says. “I’m cuddling a sasquatch.” He sighs into Sam’s hair, the sound fond. “You remember when you were ten and your legs got too long for the cheap motel beds and you kept falling off because you slept near the edge?”
“Vaguely,” Sam says, wary.
“I remember because I kept finding your dumb face on the carpet at three in the morning.” Dean bumps his chin against Sam’s head. “Dragged you into my bed so you’d quit waking up with carpet pattern on your cheek. Dad bitched because it left you with weird cowlicks in the morning. Worth it.”
“I don’t remember Dad saying anything.”
“Yeah, well.” Dean’s voice goes softer. “I hear the director’s commentary sometimes.”
Sam lets that sit. He’s not sure what to do with the ache that comes with it, the old hurt that’s more like weather now than a wound. He turns under Dean’s arm, slowly, until they’re face to face—half because he wants to see, half because he needs to confirm this isn’t a dream. Dean squints at him, hair shoved up in a way that would’ve been a felony in high school, stubble going aggressive on his jawline.
“Morning,” Dean says.
“Barely.”
“You drooled on my shirt.”
Sam blinks. “No I didn’t.”
“Could’ve,” Dean says, serene. “The possibility existed. It’s the thought that counts.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“And yet, here you are.” Dean tips his head, like he’s looking at something beyond Sam’s face. His hand is still at Sam’s chest, their fingers tangled the way people hold reins. “You breathing okay?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Yeah.”
“You want me to let go? You want space?”
Sam should say yes. He should, in that neat way he knows how to when he’s trying to make things easy for the people he loves. But the shakes haven’t fully left him; the deep twinge in his belly that says prepare, prepare hasn’t fully stood down. He wants to be brave in a way that feels like sitting guard all night, but this—this is another kind of brave. He licks his lower lip, shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe not yet.”
Dean’s eyes flicker. There’s no triumph in them; there’s relief. He doesn’t pull Sam closer; he just… stays. “Okay,” he says. “We can do not yet.”
They stay like that long enough for the light to shift again, for the edges of the room to reappear: the lamp, the table, the two bottles of water, one half-drunk and glowing like a red-lit aquarium. Sam listens to Dean’s heartbeat under his hand and thinks, not for the first time, that Dean is one of the only real things he knows.
Eventually, predictably, life insists on itself. The AC hiccups like it swallowed a bug. A door slams somewhere down the walkway. The ceiling moans with the weight of someone who hasn’t discovered step lightness. Dean clears his throat and doesn’t move. Sam smiles and doesn’t either.
Dean says, “So, nightmare context now that it can’t chase you? Or pass?”
Sam rolls the idea around in his mouth. “It was… stupid.”
“Doubt it.”
“It was a burning building,” Sam says. “One of those daycare ones. Bright, small chairs. The kind of place that’s supposed to be safe, which makes it worse.” He looks at Dean’s nose because he can’t look him in the eye for this sentence. “You were inside. I couldn’t get to you.”
Dean’s thumb makes a tiny circle against Sam’s shirt. “Couldn’t or didn’t?”
Sam flinches. “Couldn’t.”
“Okay,” Dean says. He delivers it like a verdict, accepting the word Sam chose and making it true by sheer will. “And then you woke up in the moving museum of horrors that is your brain.”
“Basically.”
“You know what I like about nightmares.”
“That they end?”
“That you can rewrite them,” Dean says. “You’re the only one who gets to decide which version lives in your head. So.” He shifts, and in that small movement Sam feels the intent. “I go in, I come out. You’re at the door with the stupid blanket with ducks on it because it’s a daycare and daycare blankets have ducks. I grab it. We go outside. The building’s toast but we’re not. I cough dramatically to get extra sympathy. You roll your eyes. We eat the apple out of spite.”
Sam huffs. “That is a stupid blanket.”
“Right?” Dean says, grinning. “Duck pattern is a war crime.” His grin gentles. “Point is: you get to change the channel.”
“I don’t always feel like it.”
“I know.” Dean bumps his forehead lightly against Sam’s. “That’s why I got the remote.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, and this, right now, is the only true thing that doesn’t hurt at all. “Yeah.”
They could get up. They could shower, pack, find a diner with a sign that says BEST COFFEE IN TOWN even if the town is a parking lot and the coffee is a dare. They could start the car and put this room behind them so quickly the memory of it has to run to keep up. But the morning still feels liminal; in this light the world seems willing to let them borrow another hour without charging interest. So they don’t move.
Dean eventually lets their hands separate, not all the way—just a slackening that allows Sam to shift as needed. He stretches his arm overhead and pulls the pillow lower, flopping onto his back like a fish in the exact right puddle. “You know,” he says, “if you wanted me to spoon you for warmth, you could’ve just said.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Your eyes asked.”
“My eyes were closed.”
“They were noisy.”
“Dean.”
“Yeah.” Dean glances over, that sudden change from tease to quiet. “You feel safer like this. That’s fine. That’s better than fine. That’s the job.”
Sam rolls onto his back too, their shoulders touching. “You don’t have to make me your job.”
“I know,” Dean says, tone making clear he’s not entertaining any follow-up arguments. “I want to.”
Sam breathes in. Holds. Lets it go. “That’s the part that scares me.”
Dean turns his head, eyes on him. “Why.”
“Because if you want to, it means I’m allowed to want it, too. And if I want it…” He trails off.
“And if you want it, you’re afraid it won’t always be there,” Dean says, unflinching. “Or that wanting means weakness. Or that I’ll run out.”
Sam closes his eyes. “All of the above.”
Dean makes a thoughtful sound. “Okay. But think about all the ways that’s dumb.” He starts counting on his fingers without lifting his hand. “One: I have never shut up a day in my life, so running out of anything is not a concern. Two: You are allowed. That’s not a thing that can be taken back. It’s a sticker. Once it’s on your forehead, it’s not coming off without rubbing your skin raw, and I’m not letting you do that. Three: I’m your brother. This is what I do. Four: I would rather you ask and I say yes a thousand times than you don’t and you rot from the inside because you think that makes you tough.”
Sam opens his eyes and looks at him. “That’s a lot of numbers for this early.”
“Math is my love language,” Dean says solemnly. Then, less solemn: “You didn’t wake me up on purpose, by the way. Your feet did.”
“My feet.”
“They have hooves, Sam.” Dean shakes his head like he’s dealing with a tragedy. “You hit the floor, it sounds like a herd migrating.”
“I was trying to be quiet.”
“I know.” Dean lets his gaze drift, like he’s looking at the ceiling but seeing something else. “Here’s the thing, okay? You don’t have to try that hard around me. You don’t.”
Sam swallows. “I know.”
“Uh-huh,” Dean says, the I know you know but I need you to hear it again flavor of that syllable unmistakable. He turns back on his side, facing Sam, and hooks an arm over Sam’s middle, possessive as a lazy cat. He tucks his face in close enough that his breath ghosts Sam’s cheek. “Gimme five more minutes.”
“You’re the one who started talking.”
“Yeah, and now I’m ending it,” Dean says. “Shut up and sleep.”
“I already slept.”
“Shut up and sleep more. It’s called a nap; look into it.” Dean settles, and the bed receives him like a known weight. “Sleep, little brother.”
Dean says it like he’s said it before, like he’ll say it again. It’s a sentence that takes up residence in the space under Sam’s ribs and leans against the furniture like it pays rent. Sam lets his eyes close and doesn’t fight the fact that his body obeys more quickly this time.
He dreams. He dreams the rewritten dream, which is a miracle he refuses to examine too closely: the daycare with its stupid duck blanket, Dean’s hand coming out of a doorway, hot skin, gasp, cough, eyes bright with smoke and life. He dreams Dean coughing shamelessly, hamming it up for the hypothetical EMTs. He dreams an apple that tastes like gasoline and sugar and that somehow isn’t disgusting because Dean announces “delicious” with such conviction the universe caves.
When he wakes again, it’s to the feel of Dean shifting, untangling, drifting toward the side of the bed with a noise that says ugh, mornings. Sam reaches out without thinking and catches his wrist.
Dean looks down. In another life this could be a movie moment; in this life it’s just the way they talk.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks,” Sam says.
“Anytime,” Dean says. He squeezes Sam’s wrist, an answer that means both I know and you’re welcome and you don’t have to thank me ever, not for this. He yanks his hand away and smacks Sam’s calf.
“Now git. We’re finding a diner and we’re stress-eating pancakes.”
“You’re stress-eating pancakes. I’m having eggs.”
“You’re having whatever I order you,” Dean says, getting to his feet and stretching, every joint popping like popcorn. “Which is a stack as high as your weird hair. We’re carbo-loading for the emotional labor of you sleeping.”
Sam snorts. He sits up, rubs at his face, and then just… sits there a minute more, letting his system check complete. The room is the same and it isn’t. The AC still rattles; the neon still buzzes. The sailboat still pretends it might one day touch water. But the weight on his chest is different, redistributed like a pack worn correctly for the first time in days. He feels the imprint of Dean’s arm across him like warmth under the skin—the kind that lingers, that doesn’t sting.
Dean is rummaging in his bag for a clean shirt, muttering about the cruelty of cotton blends. He pulls one on and glances over, reading Sam the way he reads a map. “You good?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. Then, because truth is an economy and they can afford it this morning, “Better.”
“Cool.” Dean jabs a finger at the bathroom. “Go make yourself human. We’re out in ten.”
Sam nods. He stands, joints protesting, and pads toward the bathroom. At the door he pauses, a thought catching him by the collar. He looks back at Dean. Dean is watching him in that easy, alert way he has, like he never really stopped.
“What,” Dean says, eyebrows lifting.
“Nothing,” Sam says. And then, because he can, because he’s learned, because it’s morning and the dream ended, “Just… If it happens again.”
“It will,” Dean says, no apology in it.
Sam nods. “Okay. Then—”
“Then we do this again,” Dean says. “I grouse, you lie, I catch you, you sleep. Rinse, repeat.”
Sam smiles, small. “That easy.”
“That easy,” Dean says. He points, impatient and fond. “Bathroom, Sasquatch.”
Sam obeys. The bathroom light buzzes up like a hive again. He looks in the mirror, half-expecting to see someone else, and finds his own face staring back: a little puffy-eyed, hair a mess, but his. The line between his eyebrows is softer. He brushes his teeth and doesn’t need to press the line away with his finger. He rinses, turns off the tap, and the silence that arrives is actual silence, not the kind filled with a threat.
When he steps back into the room, Dean’s got their duffels by the door and the car keys doing laps around his finger. Dean looks like sleep still clings to him behind the eyes, but his mouth is quick to grin.
“Diner’s six minutes away,” he says. “I checked the map.”
“Of course you did.”
“They have actual butter, not that weird oil blend. We’re livin’ large.”
Sam grabs his boots from beside the bed—lined up neatly, because last night he needed the order—and pulls them on. He ties them. He stands. He looks at the bed and, for once, it doesn’t look like an enemy he managed to survive. It looks like a thing that did its job and can be left behind. That’s new. He doesn’t say so.
At the door, Dean bumps his shoulder against Sam’s, and the touch says as clearly as words: I’m here. Sam’s body doesn’t flinch from it; it leans, just enough to count.
They step out into the morning. The air smells like damp pavement and coffee someone spilled in a hurry. The parking lot hums with the low-grade life of a cheap motel: a maintenance guy with a cart; a woman corralling two kids into a minivan; a man smoking and staring at a map like it offended him personally. The Impala is right where they left her, black paint catching the first honest light of the day. Dean looks at her like a man seeing a long-lost friend. Sam lets himself smile at that, because routine is also a miracle.
Dean unlocks the car and slides in. Sam goes around to his side, opens the door. He hesitates and leans on the roof for a second, looking across at Dean. There’s a moment there, a beat that could get spoken or not. He chooses not. He gets in and shuts the door, and the sound is the exact kind of solid that means they’re starting, again.
Dean glances over as he fires the engine. “Seatbelt, menace.”
“Seatbelt, mum,” Sam returns, clicking it into place.
The engine rumbles them into motion. The motel slips by. The neon sign bleeds its last into the blue. The road opens up in front of them like a mouth asking for a story. Dean turns the radio low in case Sam wants quiet. Sam rests his head back against the seat and watches the lines appear and disappear beneath them, stitched white on black.
They don’t talk for a minute, and the silence is easy. When Dean does speak, it’s casual: “So. Pancakes shaped like something stupid or regular discs of joy.”
“What could they possibly shape them like.”
“Ducks,” Dean says, immediate. “Payback.”
Sam huffs out a laugh that doesn’t scrape him from the inside. “Regular discs of joy.”
“Coward,” Dean says, and there’s nothing mean in it, only the warm cheap thrill of teasing that doesn’t hit a bruise. He taps the steering wheel with his fingers, counting a rhythm only he knows. “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Proud of you,” Dean says, eyes on the road.
Sam looks out at the world coming on, feels the words settle in his chest where last night’s weight used to be. He doesn’t argue with them. Not today.
“Thanks,” he says.
Dean nods, like a man who expected that answer and still needed to hear it. They drive. The town is small enough that the diner finds them before they find it, big neon coffee cup promising salvation in all caps.
Dean parks in a spot with maximum view of the door, because of course he does. They go inside, and the bell on the door announces them to a room that smells like bacon and maple syrup, like sugar and grease and the salvation of ordinary hunger.
A waitress with a bee tattoo on her wrist brings them coffee without asking and water with lemon slices that float and flash like coins. Dean orders like a man bargaining with his own cravings; Sam orders like a man who, for once, doesn’t need to prove anything. The food comes fast. It tastes like heat and salt and the weird blend of comfort and regret that all diner food carries. They talk about nothing important and everything that matters: whether the woman two booths down is going to convince her kid to eat the toast; whether the coffee actually counts as coffee; whether the world will let them have this hour without trying to take it back.
It does. For almost an entire hour, it does.
When they walk back out into the day, the sun has cleared the edge of the building and found the Impala like a spotlight.
Dean squints at it, hand shielding his eyes. “She’s showing off.”
“She deserves to,” Sam says.
“Damn right.” Dean claps Sam on the shoulder as they round the hood, the kind of clap that has a point. He opens the driver’s side door, pauses, and leans across the roof a little. “Hey.”
Sam looks over. “What.”
“Tonight,” Dean says, casual like he’s asking about a movie. “If you need me to do all that again.”
Sam rolls his eyes, but the gesture is soft. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
“Good,” Dean says. He gets in, and Sam does too.
The world makes room for the car like it always does, shifting lanes in its sleep. Dean merges them into the day. The AC in the car is honest and cold. The freeway unspools.
They drive. And when Sam’s head tips to the side, his eyes sliding closed not with jerk-start panic but with the righteous exhaustion of a man who knows he can sleep because someone else is watching the road, Dean glances over and smiles, small and proud and a little smug.
“Sleep, little brother,” he says, softer than the engine, and he does not let go.