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[personal profile] rahmi
The Demon Fic of Doom, part 2. For part one, go here.

Dean goes to Missouri while he should be spending first period catching up on sleep. He takes the Impala, because he might as well have his baby with him, and he leaves the note taped to the milk in the refrigerator.

He gets a perverse sort of pleasure in scribbling “Went to Missouri to learn the truth” in the journal Mom’d bought him a year ago, and then scrubs a hand over his hair and rings the doorbell.

The woman who opens the door is the same, but different. It’s something he’s come to recognize as a side-effect of whatever the fuck had happened to his family; there’s less wear in her face. Missouri looks less like she’s spent the last however old her old butt is looking at evil and more like she’s just had to tell her hundredth customer that his wife loves him very much.

It’s weird to see all the changes that Sammy not fucking being here has made, and he’s maybe considering thinking about those changes after he’s found his brother. Maybe.

Missouri takes one long, long look at him, and then her face falls and she murmurs, “Oh, honey. You‘ve got a long way to go.” She ushers him in with a hand wave and has a glass of sweet tea in his hands before he can even process that she’s looking at him with the same look she’d given Sam so long ago.

He’s pretty sure he should be offended that she’s treating him the same way she treated Sam’s lethal puppy dog eyes.

“Just how long is long?” Dean asks after he’s downed his glass of tea, “Are we talking halfway around the country long, or ‘fuck, you’re going to be gray before you even get near him’ long?”

Missouri gives him a warning glance, and since her hand twitches towards the big ass spoon she’d been using to stir the tea, he shuts up pretty quickly. Yeah.

“Whoever it is you’re chasing is stronger than I am, Dean Winchester, and he doesn’t want to be found,” she says, “Trying is going to be like… well, it’s going to be like making your Daddy realize that what he saw wasn‘t just a dream.” 

Which, great, just fucking fabulous; he already damn well knew that. If that was the extent of help he could expect from her, he’d be better off driving out of town now and getting a headstart on Dad.

“I didn’t say I couldn’t help.“ Missouri’s voice cuts into his thoughts, and he realizes she’s staring at him like someone might stare at a mangy, idiotic dog. She taps her hand against the coffee table until he mutters an apology and then she pins him with a glare and wags a finger at him. “Now, boy, you cuss at me again and I’m gonna thump you one. I‘m trying to help your stupid self.”

Dean counts to three, slowly, then goes up to fifteen when that just makes him want to walk out the damn door and figure it out himself. “So give me something to work with, Missouri!” He holds up his hands when it looks like she’s gonna go for the spoon again and looks away. “Look, I gotta find him; all I need is a place to start.”

There’s a long beat of silence before Missouri sighs and says, “I can’t tell you where exactly to look; there’s a few really powerful psychics in this country. But I’ve been keeping an eye on one in particular. He showed up about twelve years ago, moves around a lot. He’s in Wisconsin right now, has been for a few weeks at least, but I think he’s getting ready to move on.”

He nods, tries very hard to not jitter his leg up and down as he asks, “You got a town name to go with that state?”

“Lake Manitoc.”

The name doesn’t zing like he thinks it maybe should, but he keeps getting an image of a little boy with the same big, scared eyes Sammy’d had when confronted with the monster under the bed. Coupled with the warning bells screeching through his head about lake water, he knows something’s in there about Wisconsin. Somewhere.

Damned if he can pull it out though.

“Before you go running off, boy, stop and think for a minute. This psychic, he doesn’t stay around long, and I’ve got a feelin’ he’s going to be stepping it up as soon as he realizes you’re tracking him,” Missouri stirs the tea again and pours herself another glass without looking up. She frowns at the liquid in her cup, rubs her forehead, “You be damn sure you’re ready to go before you start spooking him.”

He’s already got three credit card applications in the glove box of the Impala and a fake I.D. that proclaims him to be of legal drinking age. Dean’s not stupid; it’s the habits of a lifetime that have him packing the gun he’d bought from a seedy dealer a few weeks ago with his shiny brand new I.D, and there’s a silver knife shoved down into his boot. It’ll take a while before he has all the gear again, but he’s not going off half-cocked.

He’s got his car, he’s got a fucking case (finding his Goddamn little brother anyway), and if it’s the last thing he freakin’ does he’s going to have his brother back. Yeah. He’s ready.

Missouri’s still swirling around her tea when he stands up, but she says softly, “You’re a stubborn one, Dean. Stubborn as your Daddy must be. I just hope you can out stubborn the one you’re chasin’.”

Winchester Stubborn, Pastor Jim had called it. Or would call it. Whatever. They’ve all got it in spades, but Dean’ll be damned before he lets his little brother show him up in that department.

Dean grins cockily at her and says, “I taught Sam everything he knows; he can’t outrun me for long.”

Missouri politely refrains from pointing out that Sam’s been off of his radar for twelve damn years even with him looking his hardest. She also doesn’t tell him that he could be chasing his own tail for all he knows, and he appreciates that, he really does.

Sammy’s gotta be twelve going on thirty-six by now, but Dean’s still older. 

He’ll find him.

----------------------

It takes him three weeks to find and burn all Peter Sweeney’s body, and it really only takes that long because he’s stupid and doesn’t think that Peter would try to kill him. The ghost had only ever gone after the family members of his attackers, ignoring everyone else, so Sam figures he’s pretty safe in the water.

That’s what gets him into trouble.

Sam’s not prepared for the first sucking pull on his hand or the second, and he’s really not ready for a little decomposing boy to rear up from black water. Peter looks at him with filmy white eyes and crosses his skinny little flaking arms across Sam’s throat, and Sam’s never going to be sure if his powers saved him or if Peter just got bored of him when he got far enough away from the bones.

Either way, he ends up being fished out of the water by Christopher Barr. Sam opens his eyes to a face he can vaguely remember seeing in a mortuary article, with an anxious, heavily pregnant woman hovering in the background, and then rolls over onto his side and vomits up stale lake water and the taste of waterlogged flesh.

It’s an idiotic mistake, one for new Hunters and people who have something to prove; because of it, he spends a week in the hospital with a broken arm and social services breathing down his neck.

He’s kicking himself even as he plays stupid and young, letting his lower lip quiver and his eyes get big and wet when they ask him about his family. Nobody says a word to him, but Sam knows everyone assumes they’ve drowned in the lake; they dredge it and for a few days Sam tries to cheer himself up by thinking that they might just uncover Peter and do his job for him.

They start gently talking to him about finding a foster family after the lake’s turned up nothing new, so he climbs out of his second story window and shimmies down to the ground without breaking a sweat. Some things just never go away. 

It’s a tense few days while the police search for a chubby twelve year old (and how he managed being chubby, again, would have amused the hell out of his brother), but they lose interest after a while, assume he’s moved on, and he can get back to getting rid of Peter Sweeney.

No way in hell is he stupid enough to get anywhere near that damn water again, so he buys bottled water from some small time store at the edge of town and hikes to the treeline everyday.

The next two weeks are spent sitting in a tree and giving himself migraine after migraine calling each. Tiny. Little. Bone to him. It’s slow and about as painful as his visions used to be, but at least he doesn’t have to get near the lake again.

He gets into a tug of war with Peter over his femur that would have made Dean cackle in glee. He ends up juggling his attention, randomly grabbing another bone just long enough that Peter lets go of the one he wants, and then it comes flying out of the water with enough force to take his head off if he’d let it. 

As it is, Sam spends another few minutes wiggling it free from the tree trunk before he drops it onto the steadily growing pile.

When he’s finally got all the bones together, he salts them, lights a match, and then pauses. Sam glances up at the lake and feels his mouth purse together.

“I’ll tell her, when I’m done,” he says. The water ripples and a small head pokes out, grey skin and dead hair that would have made him vomit if he hadn’t seen worse. “She’ll know what happened to you.”

Peter just watches him for a long moment, big white eyes just barely visible over the gentle waves, and then he disappears back under the water. Sam drops the match before it can take out his fingers and watches the way the pathetically small pile of bones goes up like tinder.

The feeling of something wrong with the lake flickers out at the same time that the flame flickers to life, and Sam says a little prayer for Peter before trudging back towards town.

He calls the Police and gives them a heads up on something burning out near the lake, calls Mrs. Sweeney and tells her gently that she might want to ask the cops about the newly discovered corpse, and then he grabs a shovel and digs Peter’s red bike out of Andrea Barr’s backyard. 

It’s a bitch to do with only one working arm, and for a long minute he misses Dean so badly that he has to lean against the shovel and just breathe.

He’s leaving town, hitching towards Burkitsville, Indianna, when the feeling at the back of his skull he’s been ignoring for months solidifies into “Dean!” It’s so strong that he actually stumbles and has to lean carefully against a barbed wire fence, shift his backpack to the ground so that it doesn’t knock him completely over.

Sam traces that feeling until he finds a ball of restless energy at its other end, determined and grim; he spends a quiet moment fucking panicking over the thought of something going after his family, after Dean, before he realizes that the thing pulsing stubborn all over the damn place is also hissing “Sammy.” 

Like he’s six years old and eating the last of the Lucky Charms.

Like he’s nine and sullenly refusing to tell Dean how he’d gotten a black eye.

Like he’s thirteen and forgot to duck.

Like he’s twenty-three and needs someone to tell him he isn’t going to be a monster so much that it hurts.

Dean.

Oh fuck no, Sam thinks. No. Dean was supposed to be in Kansas, getting his home and his family and everything that he should have had the first time around. Dean was supposed to be putting his hands up girl’s skirts and flirting outrageously with every high school bimbo he could find. Dean was not supposed to be thinking about finding him because Dean wasn’t supposed to remember him.

Go home, he thinks hard enough, he hopes, to give Dean a fucking migraine. And he starts running.

----------------------

Mary can't say she's honestly surprised when her baby disappears one day, sixteen years old and watching the world with hooded eyes. She doesn't recognize her boy in this man he's becoming, doesn't know why he moves with all the military training she once told John she'd hit him with a frying pan if he taught her son, and to be honest, she's a little scared of him.

He’s taught Abby to speak Latin, though she could swear that there’s no way in hell he could know how to speak it himself. There’s salt ground so far into her window sills that even scrubbing for hours doesn’t get it out and it’s just right back there the next morning anyway. There’s cat’s eye shells littered along the surfaces of Abby’s room and Mary’s swept more than one of them from underneath her bed.

There’s a pentagram scribbled in permanent marker on the floor underneath the ugly rug John’s mom had given them; Dean had drawn it, perfectly straight lines and all, when he was six. She checks it every few months, to see if it’s fading, but she’s almost positive Dean traces over it weekly.

So her boy’s a little odd. John’s uncomfortable talking about it and the only time she mentioned it to her preacher he’d decided that her son was possessed by the devil. They’d found a new church after that (it didn‘t help that he‘d been caught stealing holy water, of all things, a few weeks before).

But still.

When he turns those green eyes on her, sometimes Mary thinks he's looking at someone who's not really there. It's like he sees a completely different person when he sees her, like he's expecting something else, and she's lost track of the amount of times his entire face falls when he opens his eyes and sees her shaking him awake.

Still, he's her son, and when he doesn't come home from school she frantically calls everyone she thinks may even have heard the name Dean Winchester.

Abby’s the one who finds the note, and that’s another thing they don’t talk about. Dean’s talk of a Sam had tapered off over the years into something almost non-existent; they’d pretty much chalked it up to him having a very real imaginary friend, but that had never sat well with Mary.

Now that he’s gone to go find his Sammy, Mary doesn’t know whether to cry or cross her fingers, ignore rational logic, and hope he finds the boy he’s been searching years for.

It’s maybe a little of both that has her never out of arm’s reach of a phone.

----------------------

Lake Manitoc doesn't feel the same way his faded memories insist it should. Without even thinking too hard about it, Dean knows that Sam's not there anymore and what's-his-name of the lake has had his big shining moment of moving into the light.

He sticks around for a few days anyway.

The first day he finds out that the cops have recently found the corpse of a small boy.

The second day he discovers that a red bike belonging to a missing boy from twenty years ago had been found propped up in Sheriff Devins’s backyard.

The last day he’s there he gets the only real information he can find in Lake Manitoc.

Dean isn't good with remembering the jobs themselves, not like Sam apparently is, but he never forgets a person. Andrea Barr is shuffling along the edge of the lake, looking like a beached whale as a man helps her keep her balance. She's laughing while she waddles along, dark hair flying in the wind, and Dean’s positive that she’ll never look like the struggling, almost broken little thing he’d met back when.

They smile when they come up near him, exchange pleasantries. Dean slides on his please-help-me-mask like he’s never taken it off and asks, “You seen a kid around here? He’s about twelve, brown hair, green eyes?”

Andrea draws her eyebrows together and rubs a hand slowly across her stomach while her husband looks out at the lake.

“Who’s asking?” Andrea finally demands, and Dean’s happy to fill her in on his runaway little brother, how he’d taken it into his head to join the circus after their mother had died (he winces a little at that, because Sam had really wanted to join the circus at twelve, until Dean told him that clowns would eat his eyes and use his guts for a highwire) and he needs to find him soon.

He looks just old enough that they’re willing to believe he’s got guardianship over his younger brother, and that gets sympathetic faces from both the Barrs. The man’s the one who says, “He almost drowned in the lake about... four weeks ago, maybe. Disappeared right after Social Services started talking about foster care.”

Dean can remember how that water had felt with Peter in it, dark and cloying and sick, and his fists are clenching at the thought of Sam almost drowning in that. He forces himself to relax, to smile ruefully at the Barrs and thank them before walking away.

Sam’s not here anymore, Dean knows. He could check the records, maybe finagle his way into looking at the hospital reports, but he’s willing to bet they aren’t going to have much more than a basic outline of a surly twelve year old who can climb out windows like they’re ladders.

Dean pulls out his phone and dials Missouri while he makes his way back to the Impala.

"Boy," she says before he can even get a hello out, "You are not going to be callin' me every time you can't figure out where to go."

"Sure," Dean agrees instantly. No use pissing off the only psychic he knows, at least not if she can tell him something. He waits a beat for her to offer the information he wants without him having to ask, and then screws up his face and asks hopefully, "Can you tell me where to go this one time, though?"

She's sighing on the other end of the line like he's just asked her to get naked and dance. "Get that image out of your head right now, Dean Winchester!" she snaps suddenly, and Dean guiltily tries to think of something other than the cringe inducing vision of a fat black woman dancing the robot stark ass naked.

It doesn't really work, but after a little persuasion his mind decides that it's going to shut down out of self-preservation, which is always a good thing.

Missouri sounds like she's really missing having him in smacking range when she speaks again. "He's movin' into Indiana," she says, then after a pause, "Seems to be thinking an awful lot about apples, but I could be wrong."

Apples, Indiana, Scarecrow. He remembers a fugly scarecrow and apple pie that was kind of terrible, no matter how many people were sacrificed to their pagan gods.

You don't forget a place like Burkitsville, not with it's scarecrow and killer townsfolk.

Dean’s taking the cell phone from his ear to hit the call end button when Missouri’s voice comes across again. “Your momma and daddy are lookin’ for you, Dean. Why don’t you drop them a line or a note, let them know you’re still alive. It’s a terrible thing, not knowing where your baby is.”

Dean stares at the phone like it’s grown an extra head, and then he promises to send them a postcard as soon as he gets to Burkitsville. Yeah, he’d been planning on letting them know he hadn’t been kidnapped by some freaky psycho, he’d just been planning on waiting until he’d actually, you know, had Sammy with him so they didn’t think he was completely insane for leaving in the first place.

He’s got an odd sort of feeling that it would be best to contact them before he has Sam.

He speeds all the way to Burkitsville.

The town's empty. Like ghost town empty. A door to the gas station swings open and closed with a creak he can hear over the sound of the Impala's engine and there's nobody sitting on the bench in front of the diner. It's creepy as hell, but judging by the smell of smoke that's still lingering, he's willing to bet that he didn't manage to get here before Sam did.

The orchard is razed to the ground; every single tree is a black lump of ruin and there's a suspiciously human shaped burnt pile where Dean thinks the scarecrow's cross should have been. The whole orchard feels like it's in denial, even with the townspeople gone, and Dean has to smile at it all.

Sam had kept him from burning the whole orchard the first time around, muttering something that's yellowed with age in his memories but was probably something practical about getting caught in the blaze themselves.

It's overkill, Winchester style, and he feels something loosen a little bit in his chest.

Sam's alive. He's just... not there.

This was the start of a disturbing trend, Dean realizes weeks later.

He's led on a wild goose chase from one side of the country to the other, Jericho, California to Ohio, and sleepy Iowa town to Hibbings, Minnesota. There's always a trace of Sam left in the towns; a grave desecrated behind an old house in Jericho, a preacher who's entire church was ransacked of all silver, the mysterious solving of over a dozen missing person's cases in Hibbing, but there's never any Sam.

Dean's lucky if he can get a person who remembers seeing a scruffy brat skulk around.

After a while Missouri stops being able to help. She lets him know that the psychic's found a way to block out even her most careful feelers, and he's on his own from then on out.

It wouldn't be so bad, if his brother wasn't such a freakin' smarty pants. Dean knows how Sam thinks; he's picked up on the fact that Sam's doing all the hunts they've done before, the easy ones now that they know what they are.

The hardest part of finding Sam should have been getting his memory to cooperate long enough to spit out some hunts they'd gone on, after Stanford only because Sam's too small to go after some of the things they hunted with Dad. It should have been a cakewalk to figure out which hunts Sam would deem most important and just wait in a town for him to show up, but the little shit's psychic and contrary.

Sam knows that Dean knows how his brain works, and so Sam must be making an effort to only go after the hunts Dean wouldn't think he'd go after, because Dean can't find him. And then Dean would start to go after those hunts because they might be the ones Sam's trying to get to in order to confuse him and then it all just kind of spirals out until Dean's twitching on the floor with a headache.

He loses Sammy for about a year when he's twenty, and he very controllably panics. He can't stop thinking that Sam's in a ditch somewhere, or he's been strung up by one of the million ghosts who thinks he looks good dangling by his neck. In desperation, he finally goes to the Roadhouse, and that's where he picks up Sam's trail again.

Ellen tells him, after the introduction that includes, "Boy, you should go home. You're too young to be huntin‘," that they'd had a file mailed to them a few weeks ago. Someone had put together a case on an old asylum out in Rockford, mailed it from Lafayette, Indiana.

Lafayette means gunshots and terror over losing his stupid little brother, but it also means a psychic like Sam. It takes him a full three hours of speeding to have the blinding insight that Sam goes to ground with the psychics when he disappears off his radar.

It’s a good plan, but not so good now that he’s figured it out. Dean feels kind of like a heel when he bullies a sophomore with twitchy hands into telling him how long it had been since Sam had skipped town; even so, he stays well out of range of those hands. Mr. Tinkles’s death is enough of a warning for him.

The kid tells him that Sam had mentioned going to New York next, so Dean spends five minutes thinking of the farthest hunt from New York he can remember and ends up heading towards Colorado.

Of course, Sam’s not there, but there’s mention of an old abandoned mine suddenly collapsing.

He's impressed, in a vague kind of 'I'm going to kill you' way, because Sam's been evading him for years using this very simple, very stupid kind of thinking. Mostly, though, he's determined to find his brother so he can pound some sense into him.

Dean decides, somewhere around the third year, that every year he's looking, he’s going to add another punch to deliver when Sam least expects it.

He's up to six, with an understanding that if it takes more than ten years he's going to chop Sam's legs off so he can't run again, by the time he finally gets to stop counting.

----------------------

It's kind of fun to butt heads with Dean again, if your definition of fun somehow involves needles and your crotch.

Sam skips out on heading towards the jobs he really wants to finish first, because that’s where Dean’s going to look for him. Instead, he heads towards the half-forgotten ones, the ones that nobody ever died in or that won’t become active for years.

He burns down the Hell House in Texas before the stupid guys can make it into a nightmare, and he breaks into Reverend Sorenson’s parish to burn everything that has a trace of silver in it; the necklace is the first to go.

He’s got some half-assed, nebulous idea that if he runs long enough and hard enough, Dean’ll give up and go home to Mom and Dad.

When Dean starts to get too close (which he's a little impressed by, because he has no clue how his brother manages that), he takes a break and heads to Saginaw. So far he's stayed far away from the psychic kids, the ones the Demon had wanted to control, so he doesn't think that Dean'll look for him there. At least not until he exhaust all the other possibilities.

Max Miller is how he remembers him; small and skittish, scared eyes and heartbreak. Sam sits on the high concrete wall of the high school entrance and watches the way he flinches from contact. The kid’s got a black eye and a broken arm, but he catches his books before they fall without touching them.

“Hey Max,” Sam says when he gets close enough.

Max looks at him and clams up. He’s scared, trembling a little and inching slowly backwards. “Hey,” he finally mutters, “Do I... do I know you?”

Sam taps his heels against the wall and smiles at the other boy, gently tugs one of his books higher into his hands when it looks like it’s going to slip again. “No,” he tells Max’s startled face, “But I think I can help you.”

The rage is already there, Sam finds out about three weeks into teaching Max better control of his telekinesis. Max lashes out with his power when he thinks he’s being made fun of, but it’s all instinct and no control; Sam can deflect it without really thinking about it, send a flying book into the wall instead of him, but other people aren‘t going to be so lucky.

He finds out that Max has a reputation for strangeness, that nobody comes near him at school because a bully had once gone flying when he’d been about to hit him.

If he kills someone, it’s not going to be because he really wants to, but because he’s scared.

That’s the part Sam wants to take care of. You can’t teach a kid to stand up for themselves after they’ve been so beaten down, not in the amount of time he’s got before Dean figures out to head towards him, but Sam does his best to try.

He leaves Saginaw three months later, hoping he’s not going to see a technicolor rendition of Max killing his family anytime soon.

Lafayette, Indiana has Scott Carey in it. Sam spends a good week and a half, two weeks just watching the boy, because he’s a wildcard, but he seems like a genuinely nice kid. He never touches people or animals though, and Sam can imagine why.

He doesn’t have the same power as Scott, because his tends towards lighting things on fire rather than electrocuting the hell out of them, but he figures it’s the same basic principal. Scott’s all for it, after he convinces the kid he’s not a stalker.

Scott’s a slow learner, too scared to try using his power on anything living or dead until Sam finally volunteers himself as the guinea pig. Then he’s just flat out terrified.

Sam finally just rolls his eyes and slaps Scott’s hand onto his arm. There’s a static cling to it, but Sam clamps down on the rush of electricity before it can do more than make his hair stand on end and raises his eyebrows at Scott.

“See? Guinea pig. Now come on, try to control it yourself.”

He’s more than a little shocked by the time Scott can control it enough not to accidentally kill a person. Not shocking them is another story entirely, but Sam counts it as something of a victory that he won’t accidentally kill the neighbors cat in a few years.

While he’s in Lafayette, he dreams about shooting his brother with a shotgun and an empty gun clicking three times before he stopped pulling the trigger. When he wakes up, he borrows Scott’s computer and starts printing file after file of reports on an abandoned asylum in Rockford.

He scribbles notes on the sides of the pages while Scott tries to not electrocute a bunch of crickets to death; there’s a sizzle and a unhappy little murmur as he writes carefully and clearly that under no circumstances should a person enter the asylum alone to hunt.

Scott takes another cricket out of the pet store bag while Sam traces the route to the secret room in red ink on the map he’d found.

He sends it to the Roadhouse when he’s done and tries hard not to think about Bill Harvelle taking the case.

That actually turns out to be a mistake, because Dean’s been floundering for the past year, grabbing at straws while Sam carefully monitors him, and a week after the file hits the Roadhouse he’s got a purpose again. Sam swears to himself when he realizes that his brother’s on his way and he hitches out of town so fast that he’s two states away before he remembers telling Scott he was going to head to New York next.

He immediately turns around and heads towards the wendigo in Colorado, hoping to lose Dean.

He has a string of bad luck for the next two years, stupid little hunts gone wrong that leave him dodging Social Services again, and then the icing on the cake comes when he’s hitching to Cornwall, Connecticut, and he finally concedes defeat.

Sam watches the truck drive off with all of his belongings still sitting on the floorboards of the passenger seat and massages his forehead. Yeah. This was a sign.

Dean’s been on his ass for the last few months, closing the distance so quickly that Sam’s head is spinning, so he just leans against a nearby fence and scowls at the cows.

Sam holds still and waits for his brother to come to him.

----------------------

Dean's in the Impala, tapping the steering wheel in time to Wicked World when something makes him whip his head to the side, and there's a tall, bare-chested boy with shaggy brown hair sitting on a fence. It's the middle of a highway that goes to Bumfuck, Nowhere, and he's just not that damn lucky, but he's slamming on the breaks and frantically apologizing to his baby even as he jerks her to the side of the road.

He's got a gun in one hand and a bottle of holy water in the other, and he knows, vaguely, that if this isn't Sam he's going to give some hitching kid the surprise of his fucking life.

It isn't a hitching kid.

It sure as fuck is Sam.

Sam looks younger than he did the first time he was eighteen, and that's a fucking kick in the teeth that Dean does not need. He knew Sam had always wanted normal, and maybe he should have stopped and thought about the fact that Sammy had spent the last six years running from him as fast as he could.

Dean has a moment of thinking that maybe he's been chasing a ghost all this time, that this is Sam but not his Sammy, before Sam looks up and says simply, "Hey Dean."

He does the first thing he can think of, and that's uncapping the holy water and flinging the entire bottle of it at Sam. When that fails to bubble, he slits his eyes and bares his teeth. There's sun in Sam's eyes and he's squinting just enough that when Dean comes at him he can't see it, not that it would have helped; Sam's on his back on the other side of the fence in a heartbeat, staring at the sky with eyes that have been haunting Dean for years. 

"What the fuck, Sammy?" isn't much better than a "Hey Dean," as far as greetings go after eighteen years without each other, but it's about as much as he can trust himself to say. He leans on the fence and shakes out his hand, watches Sam smear blood from his split lip and lets himself take in the fact that, hey, he's not full of the crazy.

That's always a great big fat plus on his side.

He thought, for a little while, that maybe, just maybe, he was just insane and the person he'd been chasing was some random psychic Missouri had managed to dial into years ago. He'd even sat up one night with a bottle of whiskey and entertained the idea that he might be chasing after Max Fucking Miller for all he knew, and there was shit all he could do to figure it out.

It's good to know that it's just been Sam, being his usual bitch self.

"You finally get tired of running?" he asks, when it looks like Sam's plan is actually to just lie on his back and rub his sticky fingers together, "Or is there some special reason you decided to hang out on the side of the road to freakin' nowhere?"

"It actually goes to Cornwall," Sam says, and holds up his hand like he thinks Dean is going to actually take it and haul him upright. Aside from you know, being fucking pissed about having to chase his skinny little ass from one side of the continent to the other, he has blood smeared on him and for all Dean knows Sam could have some freaky blood-borne virus now.

Which doesn't explain why he hauls Sam up, but, whatever. "Dude. Cornwall?" It takes a second, because thanks to something he's got a huge bank of memories to sort through, but he gets it. "Maggie. And hoodoo granny? What the fuck, you have to save everyone, again? I gotta say, Sam, you've got an awesome martyr complex going on.”

Sam sets his mouth stubbornly, but Dean's remembering how damn ridiculous Sam looked at eighteen, all gangly height and no weight, and he's snorting and shoving Sam's shoulder before he can help himself. It beats giving him a black eye to match that lip. “Seriously. The fuck, man?”

“I want to help them before people start dying.”

Dean rocks back on his heels, then puts his back to the fence before he can give into the need to haul off and smack Sam again. He scrubs his hand slowly against his leg, watches the small, dark smear of blood rub off into the cotton, and says, “That’s not what I meant.”

His brother (hell, it‘s good to think that again and have a person next to him who matches that description) lifts one side of his mouth in an awkward little half smile and looks away. “I know.”

There’s a moment of what amounts to pretty much silence; Dean can hear the whine of mosquitoes and the cows a hundred yards behind them are lowing to each other, but Sam’s still as a statue and twice as quiet.

He’s just about ready to give up on waiting and pummel the answers out of Sam when he breaks the silence.

“How have you been?” Sam asks suddenly, turning to look at him with earnest puppy dog eyes.

I’ll take stupid questions for two hundred and fifty, Vanna. “Actually, I’ve been a little tense, Sammy,” Sam’s face relaxes a little bit when he starts talking, despite the fact that his tone of voice should be enough to make him defensive at the very least, “Something about having to chase a bitchy little psychic from one end of the country to the other.”

“I, uh, I thought you’d give up if I made you run long enough?” Sam coughs under his breath when Dean turns and pins him with an incredulous expression. Winchester. Stubborn. What. The. Hell. Sam laughs a little when he looks up and sees Dean’s face, shrugs his bare shoulders. “Yeah, I know. I was hoping you’d... stop remembering, or something.”

“You’re an absolute idiot, Sam.”

Sam huffs softly. “Sometimes.”

Another silent moment, but it’s Sam’s turn to break it this time, and Dean’ll be damned if he makes this any easier for the brat. What the hell was he thinking all this time?

“I,” Sam stops, tries again, “What’s the last thing you remember from before?

“Clearly? Meg playing mumbly-peg with my head," Sam flicks a glance up towards the back of his head and grimaces; for just a second, Dean'd be willing to swear that there's a hand probing at his skull and he reaches over to smack Sam again. "I'm fine, man.

"Anyway, everything gets pretty fuzzy after that." Fuzzy as in dead. "I remember you making a deal with demons like a friggin' retard though."

"You would have done it for me."

And yeah, he probably would have, if he could have made sure it wouldn't backfire all to hell and back. But that was him and this was Sam and Sammy didn't get to make those kinds of choices, those kinds of sacrifices. "No, I wouldn't have. But see, I'm not a total idiot."

Sam makes a face somewhere between disbelief and a smile as he says, "Liar." He scoffs a hand through his hair, slaps one of the early mosquitoes drifting lazily around his arm. "The. The jinniyah liked me, I think, because there were a lot of ways it could have gone wrong, but I just wished... I wished that everyone was still alive, you know?"

She probably did like him, Dean thinks, because if she didn't... he's glad that Mom being alive doesn't involve a burn ward or a million other things that could have gone wrong with a wish like that. But at the same time...

That's not all you wished, was it Sammy? "What else?"

"Nothing, that was it," Sam's tugging on his hair though, flicking his fingers through his bangs in one of those tells Dean's never been able to beat out of him. In some ways it seems like Sam's the same person he grew up with, and in some ways he doesn't, because he keeps seeing all that unscarred skin and he wants to stare.

"Uh-huh," he says after a minute of letting Sam twist his hair into even more ridiculous whirls, "And if that nothing has anything to do with the fact that I've had to chase your ass for the last six years, I'm going to kill you."

"I wished that you guys could be normal."

Yeah, there it was. "You guys." Dean drawls, and watches the way Sam goes from twisting his hair to scratching the back of it. Uncomfortable and guilty and Dean is going to kill his scrawny butt. "You wished we could be normal, fine, okay, I can work with that. Not that I ever wanted normal, but, whatever.

"What did you wish for you?" he asks.

"That I'd remember." Sam stops messing with his hair and glances at him from the corner of his eye. Dean's waiting for what he knows is coming next, narrowing his eyes as Sam picks at the moldering wood of the fence. "I never meant for you to remember too, Dean," Sam says finally, and Dean wants to hit him again.

The scary part is that Dean’s pretty sure he wouldn’t have remembered if the jinniyah hadn’t taken a ghost touching her totem as a valid wish... maker person. “Because that makes it just peachy, Sammy.”

Sam shrugs his bony shoulders, pulls a long sliver of wood off of the fence and tosses it over his shoulder. "You were supposed to be happy."

See, the thing is? A lifetime of Mom and Dad and normal and home versus a lifetime of pain and blood and loss and Sam, and there's no freakin' contest because one has Sam and the other doesn't. His brother's a total retard if he thinks otherwise. "You're something else, aren't you Sam?"

There's not too much they can say after that. Dean sits on the fence until his ass starts to feel like it’s being cut in half and then he pushes off and goes to the Impala. He’s jiggling his keys from hand to hand as he regards his baby, considering, before he turns back to Sam and raises his eyebrows.

Sam’s watching him from underneath his too-long hair, worrying on his lip a little bit as he sneaks glances from the keys to the Impala to Dean’s face like he‘s not sure if Dean’s going to take off and leave him there. Dean really wants to hit him for being so stupid. 

“So. You coming?”

A grin is tossed his way, so familiar it hits him in the gut and almost makes him tear up. No way in hell is that happening, though, so he blinks rapidly, turns his eyes towards the sun so that he can have an excuse if that doesn’t work.

Sam’s not paying attention to him though, because he vaults over the fence with easy, long legged grace he immediately negates by almost falling flat on his face a second later. Dean snorts and holds back a comment about tripping on his own feet, because Sam had been the clumsiest bitch he’d ever met as a teenager; the only time that wasn’t true was when he’d had a weapon in his hands.

He stops Sam before he can do more than rest his fingertips on the Impala, because this was starting to drive him nuts. “Where’s your stuff, dude? No way you’ve been hitching without a backpack or a knife or, hell, a shirt.”

There’s a knife produced from Sam’s jean pocket, quick as a flash. “I had a gun,” he says as he tucks the switchblade back into his pocket and scratches abruptly at the small of his back. Dean can see a smear of black on his fingernails when Sam pulls them around to look, and rolls his eyes. The mosquitoes are getting bolder.

“Yeah. You had a gun. You probably had a shirt at some point too, princess. Past tense. Where’s your stuff?”

His brother trails his fingers along the Impala's shiny black paint and mumbles, “I got mugged," down at her.

Dean has to stare at Sam for a minute because no way did he hear that right. Then he doubles over and laughs; Sam makes a pissy face at the clouds, folds his arms and tells him to laugh it up. He can't stop snickering though, because Sam's freakin' huge already, even if he's got no weight behind it, and he has psychic powers for God's sake and he got mugged by--

"A truck driver waving a gun. Shut. Up. Dean."

A truck driver with a gun. And a beer belly. Dean snorted some more, took Sam's punch like a man and wondered out loud what the hell a truck driver with a beer belly would want with Sam's shirt of all things.

"He, ah. He said he had a daughter that would really like my shirt," Sam holds up his hands when Dean starts wheezing with laughter, looks somewhere between mad and horrified, "Man, I was just glad to get out of the truck before they decided they wanted my pants too."

Sam's rubbing his fingers into the Impala's hood, petting it like a lost kitten as Dean practically howls with laughter. It's a good long while before he can get himself under control again and even then he's smiling like he hasn't in twenty-some odd years.

"Jerk," Sam mutters when Dean can finally breathe again.

"Yeah, yeah," Dean gives one last laugh, looks at Sam out of the corner of his eye, and feels that warm squishy feeling start up again. He squashes it ruthlessly. 

"Okay," Sam's fidgeting suddenly, squinting into the setting sun as he taps his fingers against the Impala's hood. "So, now what do we do?"

Dean knows that he's talking about where they're going, what they're going to do, if he's going to beat the shit out of his little brother for being gone. And, okay, he really wants to beat the crap out of Sam right about now, but.

Sam's shoulders have rounded up and he hasn't seen his little brother in twenty years, and getting drunk sounds like a pretty valid option.

“We’re going to get drunk. Or I am, at least.” Dean grins and jostles Sam’s shoulder with his own, because Sam’s back at a normal human height for another few months at least. “You’re too young to drink, aren’t you kiddo?”

Sam’s face pulls up into the expression Dean is always going to associate with him screaming that he doesn’t want to poop in the potty, then smoothes out again. “You didn‘t care the first time I was underage.”

“And look how well you turned out,” Dean says and sniffs loudly when Sam turns pissy eyes at him. “No alcohol for ickle Sammy-kins.” He slaps Sam on the back, in the exact place where he can see a gigantic mother of a bug bite coming up nicely, and smirks when Sam actually has to catch his balance before he shoots him a dirty look.

Awesome.

Yeah, he’d had Gayle for twelve years, but, man, it felt good to have his little brother again. Dean knows every expression on Sam’s face, knows the way he’ll move before he does it, and dammit, he fucking missed the pain in the ass.

If that’s not a reason to get drunk and be an obnoxious big brother, he doesn’t know what is.

----------------------

“Dude,” Dean says. 

Sam glances up from counting the amount of beer Dean has gleefully polished off and looks his brother over. It’ll only take a few more bottles before he can nick Dean’s shirt right off his back, he figures, and slaps another mosquito acquainting itself with his chest. 

“Dude,” his brother mutters again, softly, “We cannot call the Yellow-Eyed Demon Yellow-Eyed Demon for the rest of our lives; I vote we name him… Bob.”

“He’s dead, man. I don’t think it matters what we call him.” Sam’s watching the way the mosquitoes are going out of their way to stay away from Dean, not really paying attention to whatever his brother’s babbling about; he used to be used to the way Dean’s mind wandered when he drank too much.

Dean’s grating and he’s loud and he’s the most important person in his life.

Sam’s willing to die for a lot of people; he’s learned he’s willing to live for Dean. If living involves humoring his brother while bloodsucking bugs make a snack out of him, he can live with that. Mostly. “Seriously Dean. Bob?”

“What? It’s easy to remember and it just goes with ‘Meg,’” Dean throws quotes up around the word with his fingers, rolling his eyes and finishing his beer in the same moment, “Meg and Bob. Bob’s an annoying son of a bitch that can’t stay dead; you ever meet a good guy named Bob?”

“Uh, Bobby, for one. Man, you’re totally messed up aren’t you?”

“The only thing wrong with me is Bob,” Dean declares to the sky, spreading his arms out as he tosses the empty bottle somewhere off to the left and flops back into the grass, “Bob needs to go drown. Heh. Drowning Bob. That’s kind of an oxy-whatever isn’t it?”

Dean’s waving his fingers around in the air, happy and mostly content, so Sam isn’t going to tease him for knowing what an oxymoron is. At least not until he’s hunched over the side of the road tomorrow, puking his guts out.

He’s an awesome brother like that.

Dean mouths ‘Bob’ one last time, then props himself up onto one elbow and reaches for a bottle Sam’s only too happy to supply. Sam gives him a minute to chug down half of it, then tangles his fingers in the hem of Dean’s shirt and gives an experimental tug; Dean lifts obligingly, and he’s happily peeling his brother out of the shirt he’s been coveting for hours.

It’s too big in the shoulders and it smells vaguely like Dean picked it up at a Good Will and refused to ever wash it again, but it’ll keep most of the little mosquitoes away from him. 

Dean’s eyeing him when he pops his head out of the neck hole, a kind of ‘wait a minute…!’ look on his face, before he starts snickering under his breath. “Scrawny.”

“I’ll be bigger than you in less than a year,” Sam feels the need to point out, “So shut up. Before I decide to hide the beer somewhere high.”

“Yeah, sure,” Dean dismisses. He absently reaches out and smacks a mosquito that had just landed on the back of Sam’s hand, then squints at Sam and says, “I tell you that if you take off again, I’m gonna put a leash on you? I have one all picked out and everything. It’s pink.”

“Yeah, you did.” Vibrant pink. Pink enough that it kind of made his eyes cross. Sam’s got a sneaking suspicion that Dean’s spent a little too much time thinking about it, because there’s also a eye-searingly purple collar that Dean assured him would fit around his neck and a lead long enough to “let you go do your business by yourself like a big boy, Sammy.”

Sam’s pretty sure Dean’s not kidding in the slightest.

“Good.” Dean settles his hand back on his chest and yawns hugely. “Don’t leave me again, Sammy.”

There’s a wealth of feeling behind those words. Sam already knew that they weren’t okay, that they weren’t going to be okay for a very, very long time, but it’s still a punch in the gut to hear his big brother practically begging him to stay. He thought Dean would be okay with Dad and Mom. He hadn’t stopped to consider just how stubborn Dean could be.

Sam reaches out and touches Dean’s bare shoulder briefly, before pulling his arms completely into the sleeves of his shirt and crossing them over his chest. He’ll go get another shirt out of the Impala as soon as Dean passes out. “I know how to stay, jerk.”

Dean waves his beer bottle lazily at him and grins. “Heel, bitch,” he says amiably, then shouts when Sam reaches over and peevishly upends the bottle all over Dean’s chest.

----------------------

Sam wakes up because Dean’s got his ice cold hands shoved up the back of his shirt. He makes a face, rolls over onto them so that Dean’ll have pins and needles in twenty minutes, and goes back to sleep.

Dean wakes up because there’s something suspiciously warm sliding down his bicep and his hands feel like they’re on fire. He pulls a face at the sky, jostles Sam’s head off his shoulder, and yanks his hands around so that they’re resting on Sam’s belly.

He realizes Sammy’s awake when they’re slapped hard enough to sting. “Man, keep your own damn hands warm,” Sam says fuzzily.

“You’re in my space, Sam. Deal with it.”

Sam grumbles something that sounds suspiciously like he was the one being clingy, so he goes to jab his fingers into one of the scars that still hurt sometimes. Hey, it’s a big brother’s prerogative.

Only there’s about a mile of uninterrupted skin under his hands and he’s scrunching his eyebrows together and sitting up before he wakes up enough to realize that sleeping next to Sam isn’t exactly normal anymore, and then he slumps back into the grass and mutters “leash” direly under his breath.

Sam makes a rude noise back at him and shoves his shaggy head into his shoulder. Dean gives him to the count of fifteen, then inserts his hands back under Sammy’s (his, dammit, that shirt was his) shirt, and is asleep again before that hangover he can feel pulling at the back of his head takes over.

----------------------

They head towards Cornwall in the morning, because Sam's insistent on talking to hoodoo Granny before she ups and has her stroke. They've got an agreement on this though, and as Dean chugs water and advil he thinks that it's going to be nice to go home afterwards.

But for now...

"I want you to tell me about," he waves a hand in between them, squints even behind his sun glasses as Sam scratches a bug bite bloody, "Everything. Your life. You know. Hunts, weird new fears, if you somehow managed to bang a celebrity before they got famous..."

"You're a pig, Dean," Sam says; he wipes his bloody fingernails off on the jacket he's filched from Dean's duffle bag. After a moment where Dean's almost afraid he's going to have to beat it all out of his brother, Sam murmurs: "I'll show you mine, if you show me yours."

It's tit for tat after that, one story for another, and by the time they get to Cornwall, Dean's ready to hunt down anyone who ever handled the case file of one James Taylor and Sam is leaning back, obsessively flipping through that encyclopedia he calls a brain to figure out what’s ugly enough to scar Dean for life.

----------------------

It's the second of May when John gets a postcard from his son for the first time in almost a year. Dean’s been in sporadic contact with them since he’d run away; he’d forwarded them a copy of his GED four years ago and they’d sent him the Impala’s registration as a reward, but they haven’t seen him in years.

It's a relief to pick up the card and flip it to see the simple "Dean" scrawled at the end of a message, to be able to hand it to Mary and watch her eyes fill up with tears. They're boy is alright.

The card reads a simple, "Found Sammy. Coming home. -Dean."

They're not sure what to make of Dean's Sammy; Dean's been talking about a Sam for so long that they're just grateful he's finally found one that passes the test. John's vaguely worried that he won't have anyone to carry on the family name, Mary's humming to herself as she airs out Dean's room, and Abby just crosses her arms and scowls bitterly at the idea of her runaway brother coming home.

There're some bridges to mend there.

Mary's practically giddy for the next few days, telling him over and over again that she's so happy her son is finally happy and John lets that carry him through right up until the moment one tall son of a bitch unfolds himself from the front seat of the Impala.

The kid can't be any older than Abby is, eighteen at the most, but he's the tallest boy John's ever seen and his fists clench at the thought that this kid could physically overwhelm Dean if he wanted to. He’s got hands the size of Kansas and he’s wearing what are clearly Dean’s clothes, because they’re hanging on his skinny little shoulders like sails. John can already tell that he isn’t going to like this kid one bit.

Or at least, he spends a minute thinking that before the kid hesitantly meanders up the stairs after Dean and then.

Well, all John can think is that kid has Mary's smile and his father's eyes and the same damn dimples that are creasing Dean's cheek as he hugs his mama. His mind automatically supplies "baby-boy" and "Sammy" in place of the simple Sam the boy offers and for just a second, he knows this boy like he knows his wife and his daughter.

Then it’s gone and he figures he must have been imagining it. The kid’s eyes are hazel, murky-green, maybe, and that’s a common enough color, and the smile is just blinding, not familiar. It’s all in his head.

"So, who's this handsome young man?" Mary asks a minute later, arm still slung around Dean's back as she turns a brilliant smile on Sam

Sam ducks his head and Dean snorts softly before reaching out and punching him in the arm. "Dude. Don't do the shy routine."

"I'm Sam," he says after shooting Dean a filthy look. Huh. That's the second time the boy's introduced himself, and John's just noticing that both times he didn't give a last name. Odd. "It's. It's really nice to meet you." He smiles again, ducks his head like he doesn't really want anyone to see it.

One look at Abby and John can tell the girl is smitten.

This was going to be wonderful.

----------------------

They've only been given one bed; Mom had just smiled and winked at their horrified faces while Dad pretended to be busy staring at something down the hallway. Sam had gotten stuck trying to tell them that no, no they were just--

Dean's elbow in his side had told him, that, no, they really weren't brothers to their parents. Because Sam wasn't a Winchester anymore. He'd ended up stuttering out that it really wasn't like that while Dean gave an uncomfortable little grin and shrug.

Mom had just smiled wider and patted Dean on the shoulder. "You don't have to hide anything from us, sweetie," and that had been the end of that.

They spend a long minute contemplating the bed and then they both sigh. The bed's too short for his legs and there is no way in hell that the both of them are going to be able to share it without some kind of wrestling match, so Sam pretty much figures he gets the floor until they leave. Great.

Dinner's in twenty minutes.

Sam's flopped out on the bed, arm over his eyes as Dean flips through his perfectly preserved closet. He can hear people moving around downstairs; hear Dad bellowing for the meat and Mom yelling back to go get it himself. Another voice joins in, all sullen tones, and he grins suddenly. 

Abigail, as she introduced herself, had been a surprise. She's blond haired and green eyed, shorter than their mom and she had glared at Dean before stomping off. "Man, your little sister hates you."

"At least she's not checking out my ass," his brother responds. Sam pulls his lip up, waves a lazy finger in Dean's general direction because that was creepy as all fuck. Not only did his parents think he was fucking his big brother, his little sister, who he just now found out about, was trying to flirt with him. She's his age and she's cute but, no. On so many levels.

Dean tosses a shirt his way, mutters to himself a little bit more, and then hauls another one out. "These should fit your pretty little shoulders, princess."

"Fuck you," Sam says automatically.

"Not right now, honey," Dean murmurs, "I've got a headache."

Dean goes still when the nearest hanger beams him in the back of the head before going back to innocently hanging from the rack. He shoots Sam a dirty look that Sam doesn't have to see to know is there and kicks the bottom of his foot. "Bitch."

----------------------

They leave three days later because they're both getting prickly. Sam's tired of sleeping on the floor and Dean's tired of Gayle attempting to glare him into oblivion because she wants a shot at his "boyfriend." 

He's spent a good few hours laughing himself sick as Dad pulls Sam aside and gives him the lecture on treating his son right, but that's cut pretty short when Sam raises his eyebrows and tells him that Dad's assuming he's the bitch in their relationship. Then it's more a matter of telling Sam to shove it when he starts whispering "overcompensating" under his breath.

There's a haunting in Ohio and Sam's been keeping an eye out for the shapeshifter in Missouri but Dean's thinking about heading for Cape Girardeau and taking care of the Killer Truck before it... actually turns into a Killer Truck. Sam just pulls out a map and traces a route when he mentions it, so he's pretty down with that.

Mom presses sandwiches into Sam's hands and kisses him on the cheek, tells him not to be a stranger and to take care of her son. Dean rolls his eyes when Sam grins at her and cheekily says that it’s a full time job keeping Dean from doing something stupid.

Gayle’s got on a top that almost has Dean shrugging out of his jacket and dropping it on her shoulders; he can’t say that he misses missing her growing up, because she’s a class-A little bitch right now with a wardrobe skimpy enough to make him ashamed for her. And the fact that she’s flaunting it in front of Sam makes him want to both laugh hysterically and cringe.

Sam offers her a small smile, backs up and curls into himself a little when she steps forward. Gayle crosses her arms under her breasts, pushes them up on display like they need any help in that top, and Dean has to walk towards the Impala before he can give into the urge to tell her to go put some clothes on.

Dad’s waiting against the car, running his hands along her sleek lines, but he doesn’t say a word when they come up. He smiles a little, nods his head, and then he and Sam are settling into his car and driving away.

“It’s a squonk,” Sam says out of nowhere, when they’ve hit the highway.

“Uh-huh, sure it is,” Dean doesn’t look away from the road because there’s some pissy mini-van full of face pulling kids in front of him but he flicks a few fingers in Sam‘s direction, “Mind clueing me in on this little conversation, Francis?”

“That thing you found when you were thirteen?” Sam says like he’s stupid and has zoned out in the middle of a conversation. Dean’s pretty damn sure that he mentioned that thing in passing weeks ago, before they finished taking out little Maggie and headed home. “I think it’s a squonk.”

“The ugly little son of a bitch?” he asks, just to make sure.

“Squonk,” Sam says firmly. Dean risks a glance at him that tells him pretty much what he already knows; Sam’s got his head tilted back in the ‘I’m thinking, don’t bother me’ pose that makes Dean instantly want to throw cheetos at him.

“They’re a type of, ah,” Sam clears his throat uncomfortably and says, “Fearsome critter,” like he’s just waiting for the teasing. He keeps going before Dean can do more than start grinning, “They’re so ugly that they spend their whole lives crying.”

“And they turn into water?”

“Tears,” Sam corrects idly.

“Huh.” Goddamn, I missed you, Sammy, Dean thinks, awed. Dude, who else knows what he’s talking about when his only description was ugly as sin and cried a lot? “That’s my encyclopedia,” he says instead. Awesome.

“Bite me.”

They’ll come back to visit Mom and Dad and Gayle later. For right now, Dean’s pretty content to turn the music up to drown out Sam’s bitchy silence and head towards Missouri.

I suxxors at endings, in case you can't tell. *slinks away*
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