I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Part One
Part Two

The job was the easiest one Dean had ever had, safe and clean and mindless most of the time. Some of the clients were looking for something exotic. About half of those weren’t repeat customers. He thought they tended to get more than they expected. Like Jo, they recognized him for a freak, and they minded.

Then there the ones who liked the freakishness, which Dean actually understood better than he would have a couple of years back. If it hadn’t been for Dean, they’d be off fucking goats or whatever, which wasn’t the most flattering comparison but meant that Dean was probably, on balance, improving the situation for everyone.

Other people were just lonely and willing to pay for guaranteed orgasms. Those were usually the ones who wanted to talk to him. That could be annoying—talking to strangers was always more Sam’s thing than his—but it could also be okay, in the small doses that were all that the incubus glamor allowed.

They were all tested. The women showed Kelty proof they weren’t going to get pregnant. Dean trusted Kelly a lot more on the first part—he needed to protect his other clients – than on the second, but Dean’s options were limited and he figured that anybody rich enough to afford his services would be smart about it.

The sex was weird. Smoking, absolutely. Guaranteed, 100% money-back, Dean batted a thousand, which of course wasn’t a big change, but still would have been noticeable even without the uncontrollable lust he felt himself. It was just—the first few times after he’d been infected, when he’d been out of his head, he didn’t remember much. And with Jo it had been more like CPR than anything else, coming back to life in her arms.

But with Sam, it had felt—like he thought maybe it was supposed to, except even better than that. Like everything was going to be okay forever, on and on together, rolling down an infinite highway and never needing to stop for gas, always a new horizon. Each touch golden and warm, bubbling through him underneath the lightning that sizzled on his skin.

The sex he had now wasn’t disappointing. Dean didn’t work that way. But even the people who seemed nice enough, he didn’t know them, never would, and didn’t much care to. He had it, they wanted it, simple as that. Wasn’t like he’d never taken cash for it before. This was easier, because with the incubus magic in effect they weren’t ever going to do anything he didn’t like, plus the money was a ton better even with Kelty taking his cut.

It didn’t matter, because his body had never really been his own. The mission when he was a kid; then, after the deal, it was Lilith’s; then it was Heaven’s, as witness the mark still on his shoulder. He might’ve had more freedom to move around before the incubus thing, but when pedal hit metal he hadn’t been the one in charge. And after the last battle, when Heaven and Hell had retreated to their corners, he hadn’t made it a year before being incubus-knapped, so it wasn’t like he knew what to do with himself anyway.

His body was a tool, and a tool needed someone deciding what it was supposed to do, whether it was a gun or a sex toy.

He spent a lot of time working out.

****

Dean did call, regular as moonrise, like he knew that Sam was itching to get back in the car and come scoop him up. Like he knew that Sam still couldn’t stop thinking about how he opened up for Sam, the sounds he made, the taste—

There was a lot of time alone in the car on the way back to South Dakota, and after. The loneliness didn’t do Sam any favors.

He moped for a full day before Bobby had him working again—“got to get you out of my hair, boy, I don’t have that much left,” a couple of simple salt and burns that went unmentioned to Dean.

After a week of random conversations about celebrity gossip, gun control (Dean was, shockingly, for it—after all, he maintained, as a criminal he’d still have a gun, but a bunch of idiots would be disarmed), and the proper care and feeding of the Impala, Sam managed to ask whether Dean was doing okay or whether the need was getting to him. After some fumbling over terminology, Dean said, “Oh!” and Sam wasn’t sure which one of them was the idiot. “Don’t worry about that, Sammy,” Dean said easily. “First thing Kelty took care of.”

“That’s great,” Sam said, so thrilled to hear that there’d been specific progress that he could easily ignore the thread of discontent, the little voice that had been whispering about going to visit Dean, giving him what no one else could provide.

“Well, yeah, getting me under control and gettin’ it under control, they’re not really the same thing,” Dean said, uncomfortable again. Sam could picture him, pacing to work off some of the stress of the conversation, wiping his free hand over his mouth and chin. “Just saying, don’t—I’m not sure we’re gonna make the Grand Canyon this year, okay?”

“No worries,” Sam told him, meaning it. “As long as you’re good.”

Dean hitched a laugh. “Good as I can be,” which, well, he was a Winchester.

****

“Um,” his newest client said, stepping into the room with the amulet clutched tight in her hand.

Dean leaned back against the wall and gave her his brightest smile. He’d picked a light blue shirt—getting no sun, white made him look too much like a vampire—and khakis, though he hadn’t bothered with shoes. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Dean.”

“I’m Rachel,” she said, and then looked so surprised that he knew she’d thought, too late, that maybe she should use a fake name. She was plump, maybe five-four, wearing a really nice royal blue business suit and gold knot earrings. Her dark brown hair swung around her shoulders, neatly curled in on the ends.

“Nice to meet you,” he said as she looked nervously around the room and took a half-step towards the one chair, over by the reading desk.

“You too.” She was barely looking at him, flushed high on her cheeks.

“Hey,” he said gently. “This is your show. You just let me know what you want to happen.”

She managed to meet his eyes, though she was still as pink as if she’d just finished a five-mile run. “I—actually, I was hoping you’d. Well. Take the lead?”

“I can do that,” he reassured her. “Any time you want to put that down,” he gestured at the amulet, “we can get started.”

She looked at the chain in her palm and raised a skeptical eyebrow, but didn’t comment. “Okay,” she said, and took a deep breath as she put the amulet down on his desk.

The haze settled into him, golden and delicious, and he didn’t care about anything else.

Afterwards, during the recovery period, she started sobbing.

Dean rolled as far away from her as he could without falling out of the bed. “Are you—” Don’t be a moron. “Did I—can I do something?”

Rachel covered her mouth with her hands to cut off the sound, but she was still crying, her eyes screwed shut and her hair wild around her face. Dean flipped the sheet over her, careful not to touch her. “No, I’m okay,” she said through hitching sobs. “I’m okay.”

Dean shoved his legs back into his shorts, then pulled on the khakis and a stray T-shirt as he tried to figure out what to do about such an obvious lie. “Do you need me to get David?” he tried. Kelty’s smooth talk was the only hope of resolving this situation.

She shook her head, struggling to cut back on the tears, and she was managing to fight them down in frequency. They had about a minute and a half before the incubus glamor would kick in again. He could fuck her through her tears, easy, but the thought lacked appeal. Dean hurried over to the desk, grabbing the chain and wincing at the burn. He was careful not to touch Rachel when he lowered it down, letting it coil in the space just below the hollow of her neck, the amulet winking up at him through the loops of chain surrounding it.

“It’s not a trick, is it?” she asked after a couple more minutes, when she was just gulping breath. “I thought—I was sure it was a gimmick, something you did to make everything seem sexier. Especially when I saw you—” she opened her tear-gummed eyes at last, and moved one hand away from her face to gesture at him. “I mean, seriously? But it’s not a trick.”

“No,” he said.

She laughed, staring at the ceiling. Her fingers curled in the sheet as she pulled it a little further up her body. “Do you know how much therapy I’ve paid for? How many pills, how many devices, how many stupid goddamned books? And all it takes for me to have an orgasm is an actual incubus.”

“I’m not exactly an—wait a second.”

She was pink again, embarrassment mingled with recent activity. “Yeah.”

“That’s terrible,” he told her, unguarded, then froze as he realized that he’d been what Sam would call an insensitive ass.

But she didn’t seem to mind. “Yeah.”

He’d been more than a few girls’ firsts, but that seemed different. God, he was glad to be a guy. Girls were more complicated than spellwork, and it was really pretty awful that this woman had gone through over thirty years without ever coming. At least she’d stopped crying. He might’ve had to run out of the room if she hadn’t. “Well,” he suggested, “why don’t we try for a couple more, while you’re here?”

She giggled, though there was still more than a little sadness in it. “I like the sound of that.”

****

Dean had never called when Sam was away at Stanford. There’d been a couple of postcards that first year, and every few months a package, usually containing cheap porn wrapped around a bundle of cash. Eventually Sam decided that it was a mistake to draw things out like that. When Dad and Dean obviously weren’t willing to talk, he wasn’t going to let them get away with pretending that they still cared. So he marked the next package “Return to Sender”—it had one of their standard PO Boxes on it, so he was pretty sure they’d get the message. And sure enough, that had been the last padded envelope.

Sam had gotten a job at the library to make up the difference. He hadn’t missed seeing Dean’s careful, blocky handwriting on the tan packages, so much neater than his usual scrawl because he wanted other people to be able to read it. Dean’s handwriting was nothing of Dean himself, worse than nothing because the money inside was like some sort of guilt offering, except that Sam was the one who was supposed to feel guilty. He’d wanted none of it.

If Dean had called—

As it turned out, none of that had kept Sam out of the hunting life, so it wasn’t worth revisiting.

Anyway, this separation was completely different, and the biggest change was that Dean called him at least once a day, just to shoot the shit. Cooped up as he was, Dean didn’t ever have much to report, but that didn’t matter. It was enough to hear his voice, make fun of his taste in music, and listen to him bullshit about past victories.

Sam told him about the day’s work, when it didn’t involve hunting anyway. Bobby kept him pretty busy, researching for other hunters and then doing manual labor in the yard. Bobby wouldn’t trust him on a sensitive engine repair any more than Dean would, and Sam wouldn’t have mentioned it if he had, because Dean would only be jealous. But there was always something heavy that needed moving and Sam was good at moving heavy things. Dean seemed to enjoy hearing about his misadventures, especially because a stubbed toe was about the worst danger he reported.

They talked about the past when the present ran out of material, sharing good memories and bad. When Dean got choked up over one of his many losses, he’d go silent—Sam was positive that he used the ‘mute’ button so that Sam wouldn’t hear him breathe all wet and uneven, which was as good as crying for Dean—and Sam would wait him out, just like they were leaning next to each other on the car. Sam could imagine Dean’s face, the warmth emanating from him even when they weren’t touching, and it was almost like being right there with him. Sam’s fingers ached to be wrapped around a beer, just so he could hand it to Dean, brushing shoulders as their fingers overlapped. It wasn’t even about the incubus glamor. That desire had settled into his bones and lived there entwined with the rest of it, but there was a rest of it: Dean, whole and entire.

He lived with the want and didn’t tease Dean about getting back, because he knew it was harder for Dean. Dean was struggling to come home to him. Dean knew what was at stake and he didn’t need any extra pressure from Sam.

****

About five weeks in, when Bobby reported making progress on his side of the plan, Dean took the first step towards easing Sam into his new life. Sam had once told him a fable about a frog and a pot of boiling water. He figured Sam was a lot like that frog: some ideas Sam would never accept outright. But get him used to pieces, a bit at a time, and eventually he’d be right where he needed to be, never noticing how the world had changed around him.

The first step was a doozy, but Dean had a really good story for him.

“So, I have to retire. Quit hunting,” he announced to Sam at the beginning of that night’s call. Then he waited for the sputtering to die down. “Listen: Kelty says even when I have this thing under control, I’m still gonna have to worry about accidents. If I get hit on the head and end up in a hospital, or if I get arrested, I won’t be able to do what I need to do. Can’t take the risk any more.”

Sam breathed down the line for a couple of minutes. “Is he sure?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral. Dean nodded to himself. Sam was nosing around the bait, not quite sure whether he could trust a treat that good-looking.

“Sure enough to convince me,” Dean told him. “You know me, Sam. You think I can keep up some yoga chant, or whatever ends up working for me, in the middle of a firefight? I’m not that calm.”

“What about saving people?” Prodding, looking for a weakness.

“I will be saving people,” Dean pointed out. “I’ll be saving ‘em from me. I figure it’s an honorable discharge. I’m not—I’m okay with it. I gotta be.”

“Dean—”

“Anyway,” Dean hurried, because he needed Sam to think it over for a few weeks, make all the arguments to himself better than Dean ever could, “there’s a long road before I can even think about hunting, or not hunting. Who knows, maybe we’ll figure out some trick that’ll work twenty-four/seven.”

“Sure,” Sam said faintly.

****

Sam didn’t entirely trust himself to stop hunting. The power, corrupt as any demon, still lived in him, gleaming and black and sliding over his soul like a slick of oil. Without a constant reminder of the difference between good and evil, sacred and profane, he might backslide. It wasn’t just exorcisms and telekinesis—those weren’t particularly easy to abuse. He hadn’t bothered with working on the mind-control aspects of his heritage, too caught up in hunting demons, but the potential would always be there.

But if Dean were with him, he could imagine a better way. Building a life together. Coming home to the knowledge that Dean was safe.

He had no freaking clue about how to choke the hunger still burning in him for Dean, but he could deal with the endless want. He’d have to, because the alternatives were not to be faced. It was hard enough being apart even temporarily, waking each morning and fighting not to call and demand Dean return to him, fixed or not.

When Dean was better, the temptation wouldn’t be so strong, and they could be together. Sam deserved some unfulfilled longings in his life, anyway. Lucifer might have kicked most of the pride out of him, but he was pretty sure he could still use some lessons in humility.

It was just that he couldn’t stop thinking about how Dean had felt, skin to skin. Slick and hot and writhing against him, like Sam was the king of the universe without anything demonic about it, nothing but wet heat and shivering ecstasy.

After he burned the bones of a priest who was haunting his parish in Columbus, Sam stopped at a bar with the vague idea of getting just lit enough to find a willing girl. Or, fuck it, a guy. But it was useless. He wanted to curl up inside his own skin, cringing away from anyone who caught his eye. He wanted to turn to the phantom presence at his side and exchange knowing smiles. He wanted—

He wanted, and he’d happily take ten percent of what he wanted if that ten percent was Dean, returned to him. He tried not to say it too often, both because who knew what would follow that basic confession if he got careless and because he knew Dean worried about him anyway. He could hear that much in Dean’s voice when Dean teased him about being all alone with Bobby.

Sam slunk out of Ohio like he was still being chased by the FBI. He went back to Bobby’s because if he didn’t, if he drifted in the Winchester way, he’d be knocking down Kelty’s door before he found another hunt.

****

“So have you always been—like this?” Rachel’s languid gesture encompassed the room, the amulet, and Dean’s body.

“Nah,” he told her, rolling a little bit away. They had a couple of minutes before he’d recharge enough that he’d have to touch her again. “Like I told you, I’m not a real—I used to be a hunter. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, stranger shit than that. Then I got caught by a bunch of succubi and incubi—” he still felt his skin heat every time he had to say it, but given what he’d just done with Rachel it was kind of stupid to be shy—“and something went wrong, I ended up like this.”

“A hunter,” she said, trying out the word. “Tell me about it?”

He thought about it. Hard to see the harm in telling her a couple of hunter’s yarns. “Only if you’ll try some stuff with the amulet on.” If he was careful (and flexible) enough, it would hardly hurt, and if he couldn’t be out saving people at least maybe he could be helping other ways.

“Dean, I—” He reached out and curled his fingers around her upper arm. He didn’t know her, but that kind of despair was hard to hear even from a near-stranger.

“Just give it a try,” he said. “I know what I’m doin’.”

“You think you’re the first guy who thought he could—” She stopped, pale with shame and anger.

“Hey,” he said, and shuffled his body a little closer. “If it doesn’t work, easy enough to do it the other way. And you’ll like the stories, anyway.”

“… Okay,” she whispered, not looking at him.

****

Sam tried not to ask about progress more than once a week. But the fifth time Dean hemmed and hawed and ultimately admitted that he was no closer to being able to walk among civilians unmolested, Sam decided that he needed to be working on the problem as well. It was excellent that Dean didn’t feel the need to go out and fuck like an incubus in order to stay alive (even if Sam thought that Kelty had solved entirely the wrong problem, one that Sam had well in hand—so to speak—before Bobby came up with the guy’s name). Still, Dean’s desire to mingle with common humanity was, Sam thought, not at all unreasonable.

Fortunately, Bobby took a trip to consult with some kind of gunsmith soon after Sam had made up his mind to intervene, allowing Sam free rein. He was extra careful setting up all the wards and Devil’s Traps. He was pretty sure that if he accidentally put himself inside one of those, he wasn’t getting out without a lot of pain. Demon blood: the gift that keeps on giving.

Anyway, he prepared a space in Bobby’s garage and did the ritual.

The figure that popped into existence in the middle of the bare patch of concrete was dirty blonde and green-eyed, heart-shaped face and more curves than Route 1. She was barefoot, wearing something gauzy and white out of a Stevie Nicks music video, and despite that Sam knew that if it hadn’t been for his amulet he would have been rutting against her mindlessly before she’d finished materializing.

Surprise flashed across her face, then morphed into a smirk. “Sam Winchester.”

Fuck, he hated being last year's Hell's Next Top Model. He let his expression harden further.

When she realized he wasn't going to initiate, she smiled wider, lips gleaming. "I would have called you Master," she said, more suggestive than a pay-per-porn ad.

"You still can," he pointed out.

She pouted. "What do you want?"

"Some of your kind did something to my brother, and I want to know what."

The succubus's lips parted. He could see her teeth, sharp and white. "Well, Sam, when a demon and a human love each other very much--or when the demon wants a snack--"

Sam clenched his fist and she curled in on herself, emitting a soft pained sound that Sam was only grateful he didn't find sexy. "They infected him somehow, gave him their glamor. I want to know how to fix it."

She raised her head and giggled then. "No, really? I guess you can take the demon out of Hell, but--"

"He's not a demon," Sam said over her wet rasping breaths. When she managed to look at him again, still trembling with pain, he continued. "How did they do it?"

She choked on her own spit. He waited, then lifted his hand when he judged that she was capable of speech. "I don't know!" she squealed.

"How do you make an incubus?" Sam demanded.

She blinked as if honestly confused. "Why? You want to try?" But her bravado didn't last; Sam didn’t even have to lift a finger before she continued. "There's a special circle of Hell. Just like a regular demon, and then there are--enhancements."

"What kind of enhancements?" Sam asked warily.

Her expression changed, fury mixed with what Sam didn't want to think was self-loathing. With her lip twitching in a sneer, the resemblance to Dean was striking. "Oh, the fun kind. It’s all French ticklers and glitter.”

Sam had never allowed himself to think about how close Dean had come to going black-eyed. Obviously Dean wasn’t a demon, no matter what the succubus said. Even ignoring Sam’s capacity for denial, Dean had swallowed down Bobby’s holy water, so there was objective proof to the contrary. “Could it be done aboveground?”

She tilted her head, examining him like he was a puzzling piece of conceptual art. “Oh, sweetie, you don’t have the first clue about Hell. No wonder it didn’t work out with you and Lucifer. No living body could survive what we do for ten minutes. Whatever happened to your precious brother—and we’ll make a demon of him yet, Sam—he’s not one of us.” Her face contorted, and he could see the gaping black horror underneath through the sweet smile. “But if you want a taste of the real thing, I can provide. It’ll only cost you a couple of weeks—a month, tops. And do you really think you’re going to be around to collect Social Security, anyway?”

He ignored her and tried to decide whether he believed her story. The idea of a special sector of Hell made sense of why there was no particular lore about incubus creation. But then, what had happened to Dean? Possibly there was some lingering taint in Dean that the demons had been able to twist, whether purposefully or accidentally.

When he focused on the succubus again, she was wide-eyed, looking like a human in need of rescue from a monster. Sam didn’t bother adjusting his expression, because nobody who mattered was watching. “Please,” she said, terror stretching her voice too high. “I can—I can give you what you want.”

This wasn’t a human woman. This wasn’t even a ghost echo, lost in its own confusion. This was a monster, and he couldn’t go back in time to when it wasn’t.

He tuned the succubus out and gathered in the power that let him eliminate demons. Yeah, it was dangerous to use, but not as dangerous as letting a demon bounce around Hell knowing that Dean now had an extra set of problems. The Winchesters had too many enemies left for that tidbit to get around.

Exorcising the demon hurt, like it used to hurt, because he was out of practice. He meant to stay that way. The stabbing pain was not exactly welcome, but he found the agony strangely reassuring.

It turned out that, since a succubus wasn’t occupying a human body, what was left over an hour after he ripped out its essence was nothing more than a puddle of not-quite-ectoplasm. That was convenient. Bobby might well have noticed an extra grave on his property, but he was unlikely to check the drains.

****

A few weeks after Dean first suggested quitting for good, Bobby called him. Sam was dropping hints about Bobby retiring and Sam and Dean taking over his place. “I told him, ‘Boy, you’re in such a hurry for me to get out, I’m a mite afraid you’ll try and speed me along.’ Dean,” his voice turned concerned, “you know that’s not—”

“I know,” Dean said, annoyed that Bobby could think differently, even for a moment. “And fuck no he’s not gonna walk off with someone else to go hunting, even if—You let me work on Sam. You work on that freakin’ revolver.”

Bobby didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes, only the display of his cell letting Dean known that the call was still live. “I keep letting you down, son. I don’t—”

“Bobby,” Dean said, his voice coming out soft and shocked. “You have never, never let me or Sam down. I—” He stopped and looked around the room, blurry and indistinct, even though he knew no one was watching. “I know you’ll do everything you can to help.”

So that conversation really sucked. But after a couple of useless runs at Bobby that Sam only described in indirect hints, Sam started thinking bigger than just semi-retirement for them both. Talking about school again, someplace where Dean could get a job. When Dean refused to play along with that last part, Sam would just make up careers for him. For some reason Sam really liked the idea of Dean making furniture. Which, actually, was not the worst thing Dean could have imagined, if he had ever allowed himself fantasies that weren’t about sex. Building something sturdy that people would use, would see every day—if he hadn’t been a hunter, yeah, he could have been into that.

He humored Sam, so obviously that Sam got mad, and then he started to say ‘Sure, Sam,’ without any mocking at all, like Sam was talking about how it might be nice to get a condo on the moon: theoretically true, if you were into that kind of thing, but not relevant. And then he couldn’t help but think about it for real, even though that just left him hollow and raw, shoving his face into his pillow so that no noise would get out. He nearly hated Sam, a little, for making him want it, which was stupid because that life had already been out of the question decades before the incubus thing.

Sam still thought there was a way out for both of them. Dean knew better—that door was only open wide enough to admit one—but each time it was hard, harder than he’d thought it would be, to get off the phone and see the clients and wait for Bobby to call with news.

If it hadn’t been for Sam, and being apart from Sam, he could have enjoyed living in one place. His excuse for quitting hunting sounded better and better each time he rehearsed it.

He liked the thought of the cash piling up, too, buying Sam a future.

Back when Sam was a kid, Dean had kept a wall between what he did and what Sam got. He’d paid for Sam’s clothes and food, anything Sam needed, with Dad’s cash or scam money: pool, poker, or even petty theft when he wasn’t going to get caught. Dean had spent his real earnings mostly on ammo and the car. (Maybe he’d always known, deep down, that Sam was never going to want that part of their life.) Okay, and sometimes he’d use it for beer or whatever, because—because life was hard, and he wasn’t hurting anyone. He was in charge and if a guy wanted to give him folding money for the opportunity to blow him, then Dean was going to take it.

He’d always hated to use his money to make rent, because that was too much like getting Sam mixed up in it. But sometimes there was that too, because Dad never was much good with the accounts, especially once Dean started contributing. If Sam had ever found out, he would have felt guilty and at the same time he would have looked down on Dean even more than he already did. It was just another secret. Sometimes Dean thought about Sam and Dad as civilians. They didn’t want to know and they didn’t have to know.

After Sam left, there hadn’t been any lines to respect. And then after Sam came back there hadn’t been too many opportunities, what with Dean getting a little old for most of the places he knew how to find, not to mention with Sam hanging around all the time.

Sam was going to throw the shitfit to end all shitfits when he found out about his inheritance, but in the end, Dean was sure, he’d be realistic.

****

Sam fucked up his knee something awful on a hunt for a black dog, nearly getting his arm bitten off to boot. He didn’t mean to tell Dean, but he was kind of floaty on painkillers when his cell started to vibrate, and the story came out pretty quickly thereafter.

Dean was furious, which made Sam angry, but not angry enough to cater to Dean’s need to feel guilty. He could imagine the tightness on Dean’s face, the way his lips would pull back, how he’d stalk around the room as he ranted, how the inability to see Sam would make his concern more intense, same as it was for Sam.

“Dean,” he interrupted, when Dean started repeating himself, “’m sorry. Don’t be mad,” tears thickening his voice.

His brother stopped like he’d been hit on the head. “I’m not mad,” he said after a long moment, blatant contradiction. “I just—what’re you doing out there, Sammy?” He sounded honestly bewildered. “You don’t want to hunt, you don’t like it, and you sure as fuck aren’t safe without me watching your back. You’re waiting for me, I get that, so fucking wait for me.”

Sam sank down onto his bed, the one Bobby had shown up with a couple of weeks into his stay, grumbling about how he needed to clear out that storage room anyhow. “I don’t—I need something to do,” he admitted. Planning for the future, like he’d started to do, was distinct from now. And he realized, with the distance allowed by high-quality drugs, that he had no particular roadmap for getting from now to then.

When he came down from his high, he was going to have to change that.

“You tried video poker?” Dean joked, obviously trying to jolly him into a better mood, and Sam obligingly chuckled.

“What do you want to do? When you get out?” He’d asked before, but never got more than lame jokes in return.

Dean sighed. “Ah, Sam—”

He knew it wasn’t a fair question, because Dean had built his entire façade around being the guy who didn’t want anything else out of life but the hunt. But he’d seen enough the past few years to know that Dean had a couple of secret wishes of his own, and not all of them had to end horribly. “Just—talk to me, ‘kay?”

Maybe it was the drugged-out slur in his voice, maybe it was only that it was late, but Dean swallowed audibly and, after further hesitation, said, “I’ve been thinkin’, it’d be nice to have a place outside a big city. Near enough to get anything you want, far enough that we could have a house.”

Sam stretched his leg out along the mattress. Dean’s voice curled into his ear, confessional, and his dick twitched.

He hadn’t allowed himself to do this, ever. Not that Dean would be disgusted—he’d probably find it hilarious, not understanding just how deep Sam’s corruption went—but it was wrong for Sam, dangerous. He knew all that, but the drugs made reality cotton-edged, malleable. He reached down and popped the button of his jeans, wriggled his hand inside. “Yeah? What kind of house?”

“Maybe a Victorian, with one of those little towers.” Dean’s voice still had a little bit of ‘seriously?’ in it, but Dean was nothing if not willing to commit. “Uh, a porch, sit outside after dinner and have a couple of beers. Fireplace for the winter. You could—you could have a study, look out over the garden.”

Sam tugged slowly, enjoying the feel of his cock filling. “Garden? You gonna start growing flowers?”

“Fuck no, that’s your job,” Dean rejoined. “I spend my free time with my baby. You want lilacs and tiger lilies and that shit, you put it together.”

Sam snorted, pressed his thumb down and thrust his hips into the air. He didn’t point out that Dean had named specific flowers in his imaginary garden that he didn’t care at all about. “You won’t go into the back yard, even for barbecue?”

“I didn’t say that,” Dean chided. “Mmm, barbecue. Summer nights, fire up the grill. I could go for burgers and sausage, no reason to choose.”

“It’s your heart attack,” Sam said, a little breathless now, hoping Dean would chalk it up to the painkillers. “You gonna cook for me all the time, then?”

Dean didn’t even bother to curse him. “You’d look good in an apron, making me pie,” he said. His voice turned wistful. “Apple pie, cherry, maybe some Boston cream. I could build a pie safe—you know that’s actual furniture, do you believe it?”

“Yeah, I know,” Sam said, rubbing faster. “You—you build it and I’ll use it,” he promised.

“No fences, though,” Dean said, like that made any kind of sense. “I know there’s that poem and everything, but—I wouldn’t want fences. I’d want to see what’s going on.”

“Sure,” Sam agreed. Right then he probably would have agreed to Dean’s yen to make the front parlor into a Metallica shrine.

“It’d be nice to get a place that needed some work,” Dean said, and even through the haze of arousal, Sam could tell that this was, for Dean, a confession. He opened his mouth on a soundless gasp, grateful for and hating the distance that kept him from reaching out and grabbing Dean. “New roof, new paint, that kind of thing. Makes a place more, you know, worth staying at.”

“Uh-hunh,” Sam managed. He was so fucking close—

“Put a satellite dish in,” Dean mused, “games and those cooking shows you love—”

Sam jerked up and came, shoving his hand in his mouth to silence the groan. He laid back and fought to keep his breath even, pleasure rolling over him like the tide.

“Sam?” Dean asked, just a hint of worry.

“Don’t lie, you’re the one who can’t get enough Food Network,” Sam managed heroically, still seeing sparks of color flash behind his eyelids.

“That’d be awesome,” Dean said, as soft as if he knew Sam was about to roll over and sleep now.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Tomorrow, ‘kay?”

“Tomorrow,” Dean repeated, and even if he couldn’t touch Dean, even if he’d never be allowed to get exactly what he wanted, right now the thought of Dean, safe and certain to be there tomorrow, was enough to make him happy.

Part Four