kin & keeper; part 9.

[steeplechasers]

Cicero, Indiana

Present Day

“Did you hear about the haunted house?” Ben said, when he burst through the door and dropped his backpack on the floor, and Dean straightened, bewildered.

“Hello to you too,” he said, and then said, “what?”

Lisa followed in after her son, rolling her eyes and closing the door, and she gave Dean a pointed look when she passed into the kitchen. Ben crouched down to dig through his backpack, excitable.

“Seth told me that, like, there was a big black van outside?” Dean leaned against the side of the couch, crossed his arms. “And there were people in there all night, you know, doing investigating? They're a club or a society or something.”

“Paranormal investigators?”

“Yeah,” Ben said, and snorted, looking up at Dean with a conspiratorial grin. “I bet they're not half as good as you, though.”

“Ben,” Lisa said, in warning, from the kitchen.

“You should go hunt the ghost,” Ben said, dropping his voice. “I bet you'd do better than them.”

Dean forced a smile. “Yeah, sure. Maybe.”

“Ben, get in here and get started on your homework.”

Ben sighed, grabbed up something from his backpack and went obediently into the kitchen with his mother, and Dean leaned against the couch for a while longer, eyes locked on the middle distance.

It was January-two weeks since he'd spoken to Cas; the New Year had come and gone and the calendar in the kitchen had been replaced, folded up and tucked away in the stacks of all the others in the study. Work, thankfully, had picked up, but it was in a lull again now. He was dreading the expanse of the next week with nothing in it.

“Seth tell you the name of the, uh-society?” Dean called, keeping his voice nonchalant, down the hall.

“Dean,” Lisa said, with that same warning tone.

“Midwestern-something?” Ben replied, and there was a brief scuffle of lowered voices, and he said nothing else.

Lisa swung her head around the corner a moment later, her black hair falling against her face like a curtain.

She raised her eyebrows and mouthed, “What are you doing?”

Dean shrugged.

Lisa glanced back down the hall to be sure Ben was still doing his work, and then came into the living room, one hand on her hip; she pushed up briefly onto her tiptoes to kiss Dean hello, and he closed his eyes, easy under her touch.

“I thought this stupid house was old news,” she said, low enough that Ben couldn't hear, against his lips.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. If they've got a team out there-”

Lisa sighed. “Yeah, a team with a skull and crossbones painted on their van. I've seen it.” She rocked back onto her heels, reached up to smoothe his shirt against his shoulder. “That poor family's probably being taken in for everything they've got.”

Dean didn't respond; he didn't think it wise to tell her he'd been driving out there during the winter to keep an eye on the Okoro house. It still didn't seem haunted-but from what he knew of the man of the house, he didn't seem the type to waste money on a research team if there was nothing of substance to research.

“Ben's right, though,” Lisa said, twisting her lip reluctantly. “I mean, honestly. If those poor people really are being, you know-haunted-you'd be a better help to them than the Midwestern Professionals Paranormal Research Society.”

“You think?”

“Mm. I think.”

They stood there a while-her hand resting carelessly at his hip-simply existing; after a moment her eyes flickered up to his face.

“You been okay?” she asked, softly.

Dean looked down between them.

“Yeah,” he said eventually-a thick little lie-and he smiled as best he could at her. “I think so.”

“You know,” she said slowly, “if that place really is a case, and if you wanted to take it-”

“Lis.”

“-if it would do you good, get your blood flowing-I wouldn't be against it.” She looked him hard in the eyes, though he shied back a little away from her. “I mean, it doesn't seem all that dangerous. And you're going to be so cooped up this week-”

“Lisa.”

She sighed, settled-let her forehead bump against his collarbone for a moment.

“I don't like what you used to do,” she murmured. “You know that. I just mean-if you wanted to. If the temptation ever crossed your mind. It's part of you. You know?”

She hesitated then, for a second.

“And maybe it could be-I don't know.” She took a breath, gathered herself. “A kind of closure?”

He looked down at the curve of her black hair, its curling at the nape of her neck, unsure what to say.

“Lis,” he said softly, “I don't do that anymore.”

Lisa raised her head, looked at him again; let her lips rest gently on the corner of his mouth for an instant; then she drifted back and away, her hand lingering just a moment on his waist; she turned and disappeared down the hall like a ghost herself, and he stood there in the living room, itching under his skin.

But he did go to the house, despite what he'd said.

She was right. A hunt like this, simple and clean and uncomplicated, would provide a kind of closure, if he chose to take it. Sort of like a bookend on that part of his life, he supposed, and he knew, though he was rusty, that he was still up to it-if the case existed at all.

He parked down the street as usual, just as night was falling, and pulled at his mouth. The paranormal society's van was out front, but its back doors were open and people were coming in and out to the van and back with armfuls of stupidly advanced equipment. They looked like they were leaving. Dean recognised Mr Okoro standing in the open doorway, watching them work.

He frowned. Why would the so-called professionals be leaving? Had they fixed the problem all by themselves?

He doubted it.

Dean watched until the front door of the house closed, and loitered there a moment longer. The Midwestern Paranormal people were still loading things into their van. They didn't look too happy.

He could take this, he realised. If something really was happening in that house, he could fix it, and in less time than a bunch of hacks in a black van. And it would do no harm to anyone. Even if it did pull up memories, he wasn't interested in keeping those down anymore.

Dean thought of Castiel, sitting across from him in that coffeeshop, quietly urging him to keep his promises. If he was ever going to let go of what his life had been once, when he'd still had a family on this Earth-maybe this was how to go about it. One last hurrah. A six-gun salute to the closing of the open road.

He got out of the truck before he could stop himself.

It was windy and cold and he'd neglected to bring anything to cover his bare throat but he jogged across the street anyway, hands stuffed into pockets, eyeing the closed-up windows of the house as he went. A girl with a ponytail was overseeing some acne-faced kid as he arranged and re-arranged things with wires in the back of the van, like some fragile game of Tetris; when she heard Dean's boots on the sidewalk she turned.

Dean gave her a grin that he hoped was friendly. “Hey.”

The girl looked him up and down. “Can I help you with something? We're trying to head out.”

“Yeah, um, I thought so-you guys were working that house, right?” Dean said-he could feel himself slipping into his old habits of lying and smooth-talking as easily as if he'd never left. He leaned conspiratorially towards the girl, ticking an eyebrow. Ignorant Suburban Dude. “Is it really-you know?”

The girl's eyes darted to the house and back; her jaw set into place. “What? Haunted?”

Dean nodded.

“Of course it is. Why else would we be here?” With a disdainful flick of her ponytail she turned back to the kid in the van.

“So you guys are, like, professionals, huh? You ever get a ghost on film?” He stepped off the curb, the more to annoy her-she seemed the type to spill when annoyed-and she gave a heavy sigh, shifting sideways away from him.

“Yes,” she said, biting the word out through the cold.

“You're all finished here, or what?”

“Sir, we're on a tight schedule,” the girl snapped, keeping her eyes firmly averted from him.

“So the ghost's gone, or-”

“Look,” the girl said, whipping around on him faster than he'd expected-he stepped back up onto the curb-“this house is above our pay-grade. We're done here. If you're interested in our services we have a number on the website.” She gave him a withering glare, shouted “hurry up, Dave,” at the acne-faced kid in the van, and disappeared behind the driver's-side, leaving Dean alone on the sidewalk, the looming house at his back.

A moment later the doors on the van closed from the inside, and the engine started up, and with a brief blink of headlights it rolled down the street and away from him and into the dark.

Dean stood there, gnawing his lip, for a long time, thinking.

The house was like a creature all its own, behind him, and he realised that this was the closest he'd been to it so far-he turned on his heel to look at it, where the peak of its roof was blending into the blackening sky.

This house is above our pay-grade. And there really wasn't much else that could mean-whatever was going on in there was too much for people who apparently did this for a real living, people he knew from experience would never give up on a chance to wring gullible families dry for their investigations.

Greedy-ass amateurs hadn't lasted a week inside this place. Maybe there was something here after all.

And maybe Lisa was right. Maybe this was something he needed.

“Do you really think I should look into that house on Caplin?”

“Why?” Lisa said, rounding the corner of the master bathroom with her hair tangled in a towel. “Are you thinking there's a job there?”

For no real reason, Dean pushed against the windowpane, testing the lock. It held. The glass was cold as ice against his knuckles.

He shrugged. “I was thinking about what you said-”

“Uh-huh.”

“I dunno.” He turned, leaned against the window. Two spots of brilliant frost against his shoulder-blades. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, head bowed, tousling out her wet black hair, and after a moment she looked back up at him, all attention. “Might be good for me.”

Lisa smiled, gently.

Dean crossed the floor to sit next to her, snag a stray drop of water from her cheek with his thumb. She balled up the towel and pushed it into her lap, said nothing.

“But if I do take this case,” he said, keeping his eyes low, in the safe places of her collarbone and throat, “then when it's done-I'm done. With all of that, forever.”

Lisa hummed softly in her throat-laid her hand against his knee. He cleared his throat.

“I'm gonna sell all the guns,” he said, trying very hard not to think about what that meant; “I'm gonna get rid of everything I have from back then that we don't absolutely need and then I'm through.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Lisa sighed, put her towel aside on the bed, the tips of her fingers coursing lightly over the material of his sweats.

“I mean-I'll applaud you for trying. But honestly, Dean,” she said, in the tone of voice that meant he had to look at her, “do you really think you can do that? Just-empty out all the things you've got left over and be a whole new person?”

He shrugged. “That's what I'm here for, isn't it? That stuff is pretty much all I have left to get rid of.”

Which wasn't quite true. But there wasn't much else to be said.

“Last hunt, huh?” Lisa said, after a time. She laughed a little, in her throat. “What do you think? Is it gonna be a memorable one?”

First hunt since Sam, last ghost I'll ever put down, last bastion of my whole life? Of course it'll be memorable; it'll be like dying, he thought, but he didn't say it; just pushed a strand of her wet hair behind her ear and kissed her forehead and got up to brush his teeth for bed.

It was harder now, of course, to insert himself into places where he wasn't meant to be; he was a local at this point, and people knew his face, especially on Caplin Street. Fake badges and fake names wouldn't cut it in Cicero where people knew him as Lisa Braeden's boyfriend. He had to find a believable lie to get him past the front door of the Okoro house.

He drove past it a few more times the next day until inspiration hit.

When he rang the bell, bouncing on his feet in the cold, Mrs Okoro answered.

She looked like Hell-bags beneath her eyes, a mouth creased down by frown lines, and she looked at him with a mixture of exhaustion and distrust.

“Can I help you?”

“Actually, ma'am, I might be able to help you,” Dean said, digging into his pocket for one of the cheap business cards he knew he kept in there-his boss at the construction company made everyone keep at least a few on them at all times. He held it out, and she took it, squinted down at the black lacquered name, Hamilton County Roofing & Construction, and then she squinted up at him.

“Couldn't help but notice you've got some hail damage up there,” Dean said, gesturing aimlessly in the direction of the roof. “From that storm this summer?”

Mrs Okoro nodded, very slowly.

“Now I know you folks have been-preoccupied, so you haven't gotten around to fixing it-”

“What do you want, sir?” Mrs Okoro said, weary as anything.

Dean cleared his throat. “If it's not too forward, ma'am, I've got some downtime in my schedule right now, and I could easily patch all that up for you in less than a week.”

Mrs Okoro looked up at her ceiling, and then back down at him; she twisted her mouth a little, and he could hear her clicking her tongue behind her teeth, considering. She looked like a scared animal, he thought. Worrisome.

“I don't know if we can afford your company's rates,” she said, after a long time.

Dean thought of that ridiculous black van, and how much assholes like those probably charged for their quack operations; she was probably right.

“I could at least take a look?” he offered, shrugging. “Give you an estimate based on how bad it is? No charge for that, of course.”

Mrs Okoro didn't say anything-just looked at him, anxious. Her nerves seemed fried, and no wonder, if this place was really as bad as the Midwestern people had made it seem.

After a long time she stepped back, opened the door a little, ducked her head.

“Attic's upstairs. Door at the end of the hall,” she said. “If you want to take a look.”

Dean felt a wave of triumphant relief. He hadn't lost his touch, then, after all.

“Thank you, ma'am,” he said, squeezing in past her. “Won't be long.”

Clearly something had shifted since he'd first laid eyes on this family. The house was nice enough-well-kept, everything in its place-but the air inside was oppressive; most of the doors were closed and, on inspection, locked. The kids' rooms were empty and as morose as any child's room he'd ever seen. They didn't look lived-in at all, and when he rounded the balcony on the second floor where it overlooked the main room, he saw why-the living room floor was crowded with mattresses, and half-open suitcases on the floor out of which clothes were spilling, and Mrs Okoro wandering across the tangle of sheets and pillows into the kitchen down below.

Sleeping in the same room; safety in numbers. Dean swallowed hard. He'd seen a few families do that before, and it was always when something really evil moved through their halls.

But the attic was where the violence had been in this house, so he made his way down the corridor to the attic door. It opened easily.

Up a few stairs and around another corner and he was in-he had to stoop to walk; the rafters were low. Sunlight broke down onto its slatted floors through holes in the roof, and cold wind too, and Dean ducked around them, looking up at their ragged edges. This place definitely needed repair work, but he wasn't here for that.

It wasn't hard to figure out who the guilty spirit was in this house-it was the young man who'd killed himself up here, years ago, and was probably buried in the cemetery near the center of town. But Dean sat down carefully in the corner of one wall anyway, crossing his legs, breath frosting; he needed proof before he jeopardised his job and his home to dig up a corpse like that.

He wasn't likely to get any in daylight, but he sat, quietly, hoping.

Dean breathed a long sigh, looking up at the punctures in the shingles, the spots on the wooden floor where rot and mold was beginning to set in. That'd need to be fixed, too, once these poor people were in the right frame of mind to care about things like rot and mold. The last thing they needed was a ceiling collapsing while they were fending off a malevolent ghost.

It was deadly quiet up here but for the occasional whistle of the wind against the holes; there was nothing stored up here-only cobwebs and silence, and the hum of the heater downstairs.

He wished Sam was there. If for nothing else than conversation, he wished he wasn't alone up here. Wished he could look over into the corner to see his brother trying not to bash his head on the roof, poking into niches and nooks and crannies for anything interesting, rattling off some banal fact about the build of the house, getting his hair caught in a spiderweb-anything.

Hunting had always been more fun with Sam. God, but they'd always found something to laugh about in places like these-stupid jokes about Scooby Doo, or an awkward family photo on the mantle-and he'd never said it but Dean knew that Sam had always liked haunted houses best. They'd let him see people, know them. Glimpse the order of their lives. Touch the counterpanes and cedar chests and bathroom mirrors he'd never had. Maybe let himself pretend that he owned them, once in a while.

Now he was alone in an attic Sam would have loved and he couldn't even look forward to going back to the motel to tell him about it, to brag about how easily he'd gotten inside. This case would be over in less than a week and then he was done, and there'd be no more haunted houses, and that was just one more little thing he was going to lose.

Dean blinked down at the slatted floor to keep tears from rising in the cold-reached inside his pocket on a whim to pull out his keys.

The wood was swollen and soft with recent rain. He gouged Sam's name in deep, in pointed pale letters, as deep as the sharp edges of his house key would go. Ran his fingers over the splintery result so that it came away clean, three little letters no one would ever notice in a windy attic he would never see again, but Sam liked haunted houses.

S A M.

So this was here for him.

He left before he could let himself linger too long. Told Mrs Okoro he needed to talk to his boss about the pricing but he'd be in touch. Drove to the library to look up the records of the man who'd killed himself in their attic, pulled up the report on the Midwestern Paranormal website, ran the two side by side. They seemed to match up. The man who'd died in there had been an abusive drunk, by all accounts-left bruises on his wife and kid just like the bruises Mrs Okoro and her children had found on themselves; neighbours said his shouting had rattled the walls, just like their walls had rattled in the night. Things thrown and smashed, howling voices in the empty space beneath the roof.

He still wanted proof before he exhumed the body-wanted to see the spirit with his own eyes, to be certain-but for now there was nothing to do but wait for the right time to get back into the house again.

Dean sighed, leaned back in the library chair-looked hard at the potential spirit's pixellated corporeal face staring at him from the computer screen.

The space at his right felt empty and cold.

1994-1995

There were scares. There were long black nights that only seemed to get longer the lankier Sam got, the taller Dean grew against the side of the Impala. In most places the only comfort they got on nights like those were the glow of the stars in the wide empty country sky, peering in through their windows, and the rest was discomfort-cold rooms with broken radiators, Dad gone for weeks sometimes, whole weeks, convinced now that Dean was old enough to be in charge of his brother for so long without help. And though he was, there were still scares-childish fear coming back up like bile sometimes, when tree branches scraped at windows, or locks rattled, or when Sam came down sick and Dean wasn't sure who to call.

Once, in North Dakota, Dad took deep gashes to the arm and the face from the clawed thing they were hunting and only had time to yank them from the back seat and thrust them back into the room before he was off again, off after the thing, screaming down the road, steam grinding out behind the Impala in his wake, and Dean covered in his father's blood and Sam's eyes wide and full of fright, and Dean sat in the window that whole night, his sawed-off propped up against the glass, and Sam lying down with his head in his lap, fitfully asleep. And Dean watched, even when his eyes itched and drooped, even when the blood dried in his eyebrows and his eyelashes, watched while the dark folded and faded down into the sunrise, waiting for Dad to come back-half-expecting him to never appear on the road up to the room again. Half-expecting to have to rouse his brother and wander out into the world by themselves, orphans at last, alone in the heat and the cracking weeds with just a shotgun and worn-in shoes.

But Dad came back, grotesquely triumphant, and Dean was too exhausted to clean the blood from his face, so Sam did it. Standing on tip-toes in the bathroom, his eleven-year-old fingers bunched up in a wet rag, his knuckles stained red, and he didn't say a word. Just bit his lip and concentrated. Dean was too tired to thank him, but he wished for weeks afterward that he had.

There were other scares, harder, sharper ones. Something smart with wings and talons escaped Dad in Wisconsin and was almost halfway into the room where they slept, climbing through the window near Sam's bed, before Dean woke and swung up over his brother's body and shot it in the face. They'd had to split fast that night, ditch the room and the shrieking creature's flapping, brutalised body stuck in the window, ducking behind the motel to avoid the revolving red-and-blue lights that came in response to the gunshot. They'd huddled in the cold next to the dumpsters until Dad came back and found them and snatched their things from the room and spirited them away from that town, away from the thick black blood on the window ledge. They'd had to leave some things behind. And that seemed to become a trend-things got lost, things stayed behind, and Dean couldn't help but notice that ever since Moscow a year, two years ago, it was happening to Sam, too, and still happening.

Pieces coming off. Flakes, like gold, peeling off and turning to ash. He supposed it was called growing up, but it still struck him as strange, that Sam could do that. That Sam was getting taller, skinnier, his hair longer, his eyes sharper, his mouth tighter, and though Dean still glimpsed him sometimes and saw the toddler who'd first walked to him across a hotel floor more than ten years ago, more and more it was Sam, the eleven-year-old, the twelve-year-old, the one with the sense of the humour, the crooked teeth, the nut-brown sun-kissed skin and the dimples in his smile. The one who could lift things from store aisles and gas-station racks now just as easily as he could pick a lock with a paperclip, who was better with a pistol than Dean, but not as good with a rifle. He befriended stray dogs on the streets and sometimes he swore when Dad wasn't around and he studied, bent over motel tables in harsh lamplight at night, his tongue between his teeth, and passed classes with flying colours even though no one but Dean cared enough to tell him they were proud.

It seemed every year that they only got poorer. Whatever money they'd had in the early years after Mom's death was gone. It was spare change and credit card scams now, and Sam and Dean sitting cross-legged on the floor carefully cutting coupons out of newspapers and grocery store catalogues with their Swiss Army knives, milking those slips of paper for everything they were worth. A bottle of orange juice in the motel fridge was how they knew they were doing alright.

Sam got lean and hungry and not only from lack of food. Dean saw it, and didn't know what to do about it. Sometimes it thrilled him, a little, when he caught glimpses of himself in Sam, when he saw him field-strip a gun with as much expertise as their father and flick his hair out of his eyes to put it back together, when he found himself saying “yes, sir” to Dad in tandem with him. And sometimes it scared him. Sometimes he saw the fire in Sam's eyes and shrank from it. No fire, he thought, no fire like that had any business in a twelve-year-old's eyes. It was ambition; it was fierceness; it was desperate, angry longing for the kids Sam saw on playgrounds, or the white picket-fences they loitered outside while Dad went in to talk to the family. It was disgust for how well he field-stripped those guns. And sometimes-sometimes it was aimed at Dean, Sam's starving gaze; it curled, sharp and hot, against the hollow of his throat, and he didn't understand it. He was sixteen; he knew, now, how to kiss girls, and how to keep himself carefully separate from the rest of the world, to minimise the pain of leaving every place they came to. He was sixteen and getting good at being who he was, and it disrupted all that, thinking about the way Sam looked at him sometimes, as if he were the sun and the solution all at once.

There was Montana and Wyoming, Mississippi and New Hampshire, the Gulf of Mexico and Mount St Helens; there were witches, lake monsters, skinwalkers and poltergeists, and some of them came for Sam and Dean, and some of them didn't.

In Nevada Dean shot a werewolf through the heart with a silver-tipped arrow one night and let the soot from the thing's ashes stain his face until it was silvery-grey and he felt savage and proud, and Sam wouldn't look at him for a week.

And there were the times Sam went missing, for a night sometimes, or two. On Dad's watch it was always rebellion, always an attempt to make him mad, to show him that he didn't control Sam as much as he liked, and whenever he was finally dragged in there was shouting and smacks and Dean would haul him out back and shout at him some more, grip his stupid face in his hands and beg him with his eyes to stop doing that, to stop causing trouble. After a while it was just hard to take.

But when he ran off on Dean's watch, it wasn't to hurt him, Dean knew. It was because Sam was a twelve-year-old boy and a restless one at that, and the world he lived in was huge and full of teeth and it was frightening and he wanted none of it. It wasn't hard to bring him home, those times. He was always hiding out in the nearest park, eating beef jerky on a swing-set, or camping out behind the fence of a friend he'd made at school. When Dean found him he'd look up at him and not say anything at all and quietly, meekly, come back with him, back to the room or the empty house or the shack on the county road, and Dean buried all those flights of fear and never breathed a word of them to Dad.

As long as Sam came home again, as long as Sam came back to him, he could wander if he needed to. Dean understood that need.

There were birthdays with nothing in them. Days of driving for twelve, sixteen hours, both of them slumped together in the back seat, Sam breathing softly through his sleep against Dean's shoulder, Dean watching the leaves fall or the snow drift or the sun burst across the flattening sky. Weeks of Wonderbread and expired peanut butter and water from the spigot of the hose. Hours of listening to Sam sharpening the blade of his favourite knife, grinding it down to a deadly edge, and looking at him and thinking of how he seemed so much older than his still-growing bones. Two years of smokestacks pushing into Ohio fog, graffiti and manhole covers, skin getting tough with scars, the smell of books of lore clinging to Sam like a following cloud of dust, filling Dean's head whenever they wrestled on the hard motel floor. Dark days, and only slivers of light breaking in across his little brother's cheek, softening him for an instant before carving away again, and his hungry mosaic eyes glimmering in streetlight and moonlight.

Gasoline; Child Services made a grab for them in Rhode Island. Things building up and falling away on the edge of the world too fast for Dean to remember completely even only hours afterward. Sam building up and falling away, like a strange little willowy tree, as familiar to Dean as the back of his own calloused hand and as unfamiliar, too, as every new unknown town, every half-abandoned Sinclair station, every wilderness on either side of the two-lane road. Twelve years old and he seemed to be the mystery of everything around him, and Dean didn't know what was fiercer: his fear of that bigness in such a small boy, or his love.

Idanha, Oregon

July 1996

They made it back to the hotel just in time-half an hour before Dad was due back, fifteen minutes before the earliest he'd appear.

For a minute they sat there, the both of them, the Impala idling and then coming down into silence when Dean twisted the key back, their breath steaming up the window from the inside, looking at the moth-filled light above the door. They were both breathless. Dean had broken the speed limit at least twice to get them back on time, before Dad came back and realised they were gone, out in the wilderness of someone's ranch-land shooting cheap fireworks up into the wet black sky-and he'd seen Sam gripping the handle of his door with a grin on his face every time Dean sped up, every time the raindrops fell just a little harder as they coursed down the highway. His grey hoodie was smeared with mud and his face was, too. Dean had to suppress a laugh, glimpsing him in the rear-view mirror. He'd slipped in the wet smoking grass as they were running back to the car, too aware of the time.

The lot was dark and spotty with the rain that had fallen over them on their way back and now the car smelled like mud and sparklers, and Sam was staring at the closed door of the room with big eyes. The look on his face was the same look he got every time he knew they'd pulled off something they weren't meant to.

“Go on in,” Dean said, reaching over the smack lightly at Sam's arm, reluctant to break the moment but acutely aware that Dad's truck would be coming up any minute. “Get that mud off your face before Dad sees.”

Sam jumped a little at the sound of his voice and looked at him, then nodded, hair dripping onto his knees. He popped the door and jogged up and around the glare of Dean's headlights, fumbled with the room key and then disappeared inside. Left it open just a little, a rectangle of light.

Dean sighed, relaxed back into the leather.

He couldn't help smiling a little; couldn't help pausing to lean against the side of the Impala when he swung out a moment later to light a cigarette-bad habit he'd picked up last year-and let the drizzle cool him down. Off down the parking lot there was only one other light on and then there was sky, and he could almost imagine the blue smoke of their fireworks was somewhere out there obscuring the stars, still.

Sam had been right. Dad would never have let them do that, if he'd known Dean intended it. He was extra-paranoid these days, for whatever reason. Hardly ever let them out of his sight unless it was with an order to stay in the room and answer the door for no one. He was shifty, suspicious-slept with his shotgun fully loaded under his pillow and insisted his boys do the same, but wouldn't tell them why. Dean thought maybe it had to do with the Monster, capital M, or something like that, but he didn't particularly care to find out.

If Dad had known Dean wanted to take Sam out into the wilds, largely unprotected, with a milk crate full of fireworks-Dean let smoke hiss out from his nose, the way a girl in Washington had showed him once-he'd have taken it out of Dean's ass, that was for sure. He could almost imagine the lecture-haven't you got any sense, boy, probably, you are seventeen and reckless, and maybe he would have said well, yes I am, sir, and that's grown-up enough to leave me with my kid brother for weeks on end, and I don't see how it's not grown-up enough to have some fun every now and then. But in all likelihood-he took another drag, watched the end of the cigarette light up orange-in all likelihood, he wouldn't have said a thing.

It was true, though. Dad's paranoia wasn't his, and it sure as hell wasn't Sam's. And he was seventeen. He smoked a pack a day, and he could hold his liquor, and he'd kissed a boy three months ago out behind the high school in Wyoming and he'd enjoyed it-not that anyone would ever know. He was more grown-up, he knew, at seventeen than Dad had been. It was well within his jurisdiction to use his hard-earned pool money on a few Roman Candles to put a smile on his little brother's face.

Those smiles were getting rare, and they were precious. Dean knew that. Dad didn't understand. Dad looked at Sam and saw a little green toy soldier, like the ones Dean had played with as a kid. He didn't see a child. He saw a gun mount.

So that was Dean's job, he'd decided for himself. To make sure Sam never thought of himself as a tool.

In that field he'd been a child. Thirteen. Spinning around in those sparks like he was dancing in the rain. Bob Dylan muffled against the closed-up windows of the car parked in the grass. That had been good.

Dean wasn't one for taking pictures, but he wished he'd had a Kodak or something out there. If only to get one blurry washed-out image of Sam grinning at him under the flash and the bang in the sky. If only to catch hold of a little bit of that fire, that wildness, that was only getting bigger in his little brother's skin the older he got, that still managed to put a little wonder in Dean. It seemed like something he was going to want to remember, someday, when things were different.

He'd come to realise, this last year, that he didn't understand Sam.

He glanced towards the open door-behind it, whisps of steam were whispering out from the bathroom-threw his cigarette down and ground it into the concrete with his heel. Went inside.

No, he didn't understand his little brother very well at all. He was too smart, and not kid-smart, but grown-up-smart-as smart as Dean was, at the very least. And he saw things, still, the way Dean had known he'd seen things as a baby. Not dangerous things; not things on the other side of any veil, but possibilities-hopes. Dreams. He could tell you Sam's favourite colour (dark, dark red) or how long it took him to brush his teeth or how long it took him to fall asleep but he couldn't for the life of him begin to know what went on behind those summery eyes sometimes.

But that was alright.

Dean closed the door behind him. The shower was on, and Sam's muddy jacket was draped over the luggage rack outside the bathroom.

“You almost done? Dad's gonna be back soon,” Dean called, picking up the jacket with two fingers and depositing it in the sink. He turned the water on as hot as it would go, plugged up the drain. The bathroom door was open and he could see the shadow of Sam's skinny body behind the curtain out of the corner of his eye.

“Can you grab me boxers or something?”

“Nah.” Dean smiled a little, watching water swirl in the sink basin.

“Dean, come on.”

“I'm washing your jacket, get your own underwear.”

The shower shunted abruptly off and Sam's arm reached out to snatch a towel from the rack. A minute later he came out, holding it tight around his waist, and he elbowed Dean as he passed by. “Jerk.”

Dean didn't say anything, but watched in the mirror over the sink while Sam tried his best to unzip his duffel sideways with only one hand. He pumped some soap into the sink and turned off the faucet and set to scrubbing the dirt and the grass stains from the fabric.

Sam paused in the doorway as he was going back into the bathroom. “Hey. You got some-” He gestured ambiguously with his fist full of clothes around his neck. “On your collar.”

Dean left the hoodie to soak in the water and shouldered into the bathroom with Sam, who was struggling to put on boxers without dropping his towel. He'd nearly succeeded when Dean pulled off his muddy shirt and then he lost his balance and stumbled into the wall behind him, and Dean craned a curious look over his shoulder.

“Contain yourself, Sammy,” he said, sarcastic, grinning.

Sam flushed a bright red and scowled at him, or at the joke, Dean wasn't sure; he didn't dwell on it. He reached in to wet a washcloth in the shower and scrub the dirt off his neck while Sam wrestled on a T-shirt and then the front door opened and they both froze.

Sam looked at him, eyes huge, and Dean could tell he was thinking frantically about the mud in the passenger seat and the jacket soaking in the sink and their mess of dirty clothes on the floor. He bit his lip, nervous, and Dean tossed his washrag into the shower and reached down to conspiratorially ruffle Sam's wet hair.

“Not a word,” he mouthed, hoping his expression was conveying the unspoken I'll take care of it, and then he did something without thinking-planted a quick peck on the corner of Sam's mouth, for absolutely no reason other than to reassure him, and then he swung out around the corner of the door.

Dad was laying out his guns on the bed, and glanced up when Dean appeared.

“What have you boys been up to?” he said, without much interest, taking only a slow moment to register Dean's naked chest and what was probably still a smear of mud on his neck.

Dean shrugged, cleared his throat. “Just, uh. Went down to the lobby for a Coke. Washing up.”

“You haven't been out.”

“No, sir.”

“Because I didn't give you permission to go out.”

“No, sir.”

Dad looked at him hard, but his gaze was exhausted, and he didn't say anything else; didn't seem to notice the full sink and the muddy jacket, or the fact that both his sons were cooped up in the bathroom at the same time.

When he sank down on the edge of the bed to peel off his boots Dean swung back into the bathroom to give Sam the all-clear and found him standing there, barefoot on the tile, lanky body absolutely drowning in one of Dean's too-big T-shirts, face still wet from the shower, staring at him with a blush on his face so hot it could heat a small room.

Dean went still, uncertain, and then remembered. He'd kissed him. Why had he done that?

But brothers kissed brothers, sometimes. It wasn't strange. They saw it on TV all the time. It didn't mean anything.

But Sam looked like he was about to burst, as if Dean had done something startling and new and incredible that he'd never done before.

“What?” Dean said, quietly, feeling his own face grow hot-why that, too?-and he didn't wait for an answer, mostly because he was afraid, very suddenly, of what it might be. He left Sam in there, looking shell-shocked, and grabbed a shirt from his bag and settled down with a sitcom and tried not to think about his heart bumping in his chest, or how he could almost imagine the sound of Sam's heart doing the exact same thing in the other room.

Eventually, Sam came out of the bathroom, and settled down next to Dean just like every other night. He kept his knees drawn up and his arms closed in and didn't say anything about it, and didn't say anything the next day, either, or the next week, or the next month.

But sometimes Dean saw him, when Sam thought he wasn't looking, picking at his lips in the wing mirror, as if he didn't know what to do with them anymore.

Dean tried not to think about it. There was nothing to think about.