Dabarim

1.

After Sam broke Dean's deal, Sam left him.

Technically, of course, it was Dean who left. Sam stayed in place. In California, "working some things out," as if Dean didn't know about the emails back and forth from Stanford, the fucking letter by registered mail, the withdrawals from two of their emergency stashes. He wasn't an idiot, and Sam knew that he wasn't an idiot, which meant that Sam just didn't want to say he was leaving. And, honestly, when Dean managed to calm down—three states gone by—he got that.

Words had never done a lot for them.

Anyhow, a man forces his brother to walk into hell and back to save his soul, he can't expect his brother to be all that pleased with the sight of him. Oh, Sam would do it all over again in a heartbeat; he just didn't want to have to look at Dean and get reminded of what he'd had to do. Dean hadn't needed a lecture on that—it had been in every hunch of Sam's shoulders so they didn't have to touch in their suddenly too-small motel rooms and every time Sam cracked his neck to get rid of the crick that came from hours of staring too determinedly out the window, the other direction from Dean.

That shit did nobody any good. It was like a dislocated shoulder—one quick pull, a lot of pain, a lot of soreness, but at least the arm would work after you did it.

Sam had looked a little surprised when Dean had told him about the hunt down in Texas and slung his bag on the bed, packed and ready to go. "You've got my number," Dean had said, stupidly.

"I guess I could use some time off," Sam had said, as if he was just now thinking of it, and this was worse than having stitches tear. Stitches could be redone. So Dean had hightailed it out of there, and he hadn't looked back, because there was nothing in the rear-view mirror he wanted to see.

2.

After the third worried message from Sam, Dean started sending him cellphone pictures. Road signs—NEW YORK CITY 212—titty bar signs—WORLD CLASS TOPLESS GIRLS—church signs—JESUS SAVES, BUT ONLY IF YOU PITCH STRAIGHT. That worked; Sam even sent him a couple of his own: street signs in English and Chinese, Alcatraz Island, a place that sold classic cars. It was kind of like they were saying "We're okay" to each other, except without the part where that was a lie.

Atlanta was warm, and the ghost haunting the downtown tunnels was a one-man job, easy. The neo-Nazis dabbling in Nordic magic were slightly tougher, but in the end it was Dean goddamn Winchester standing in the synagogue, six unconscious and worse skinheads on the floor around him, and the hippie-rabbi blinking up at him with big grateful eyes.

Dean had sort of thought that rabbis would be like priests, and true, they both had scarves. But hers was tie-dyed silk, like the rest of her outfit, half a hundred shades of blue and purple. The same iridescent colors showed up in the pots and bowls scattered to all sides, half of them shattered to pieces on the floor.

The synagogue looked a lot like a church, with pews, stained glass windows, and even an organ on the back wall. Only the big wooden cabinet and the absence of crosses made it clear that these folks stopped at the Old Testament. Dean wasn't about to disapprove.

"That thing," Rabbi Simcha said at last, "it was real. What they called up was real." Her voice was distant, but Dean guessed she wasn't going into shock. Sometimes God-followers took it hardest, and sometimes they just nodded and went on, happy in the idea that demons meant angels.

Dean never argued.

"Yup," he said, and grabbed some of the loose ropes the neo-Nazis had intended to use on her. He knelt by the one who was moaning the loudest and began to hogtie him. Because his arm was bleeding, and he could tell that the cut was deep enough to scar, he wasn't careful about shoving his knee into the small of the guy's back.

"How did you know what they were planning?" she asked, rubbing her wrists where they'd grabbed her. Her curls had gone to frizz in all the excitement, but she ignored them, same as she ignored the bruise rising on her cheek.

He grinned down at the trussed, semiconscious tough and moved to the next one. "That's my job. I find mystical nasties, I hunt them, and I get rid of them."

She said something in what he guessed was Hebrew. "And you do this alone."

Dean kept working. "I do what's gotta be done."

"But you're hurt."

He closed his eyes for a second. There was a muscle in his right leg that didn't ever let up now, and his back started complaining after about three hours in the driver's seat. He couldn't feel anything in two of his fingers, and three weeks ago he'd gotten a knock to the head that had him puking for two days. "I'm still here," he said.

"I'm going to call the police," she said.

"I can't stick around for that," he told her, looking over at where she was straightening a chair that had fallen. The paint would clean up, but he couldn't say whether the place would ever look the same to her again.

She nodded. "Then can you come back tomorrow night?"

He was already shaking his head. "Places to go, things to kill—"

"Please," she said, her hand going to the star pendant around her neck. He could see the red line on her soft flesh where they'd tried to tear it off.

He wiped his hand across his mouth. "Yeah, okay."

3.

A few tabs of codeine ensured that he went and stayed down. He spent the next day sleeping, stretching, and relaxing. With Sam gone, he could admit that burgers and grease got a little heavy after a while, so he stopped at a deli after a long, rambling walk and had a decent sandwich. There was a ghost up to Athens, scaring the college kids, but it wasn't hurting anybody (yet) and he figured he could go back to see the rabbi, if she wanted to talk to him so badly.

Not like he had a schedule, or anyone to explain himself to.

This was his job now, paying off the debt he'd incurred, every evil thing he smoked going on to Sam's tally. He didn't expect to die in the clear, but he figured he ought to try.

When Dean arrived at the synagogue, he was able to go right in. The broken lock hadn't been fixed yet, and he frowned at it, wondering if she had any tools on hand. She wasn't in the public spaces, but he poked around and saw light coming out of a room at the end of a hall of administrative offices.

"Rabbi?" he called out.

"In here," she said, her voice much less strained than it had been last night.

'Here' turned out to be a full-blown potter's studio. Cousins and grandkids of the pots from last night covered every flat surface, and not a few surfaces that looked uneven. Against the back wall, there were clay sculptures, mostly of people. The nearest, and crudest, was of a guy's head and torso; his arms were holding something up to his mouth that looked like a loaf of french bread, or at least Dean hoped that was what it was supposed to be. The biggest statue was a life-size, full-bodied person, and almost perfect. It could have been sculpted out of marble, except that it was a dull red-brown.

Rabbi Simcha was standing beside the big one, looking down at something in her hand. "The stories are pretty clear about the inadvisability of using magic to intervene in human affairs," she said, just as if they'd been having a conversation. "But you deal in magic all the time, you said."

He nodded, then cleared his throat. "Yeah. Kind of—the family business."

She looked at him. Her eyes were clear and brown. "And what happened to the rest of your family?"

He suppressed the flash of none of your goddamn concern, smiled and tilted his head flirtatiously. "What, I didn't do a good enough job on my own?"

"What's your name?" she asked. "Your real name," she said, before he could open his mouth.

She didn't seem likely to go running to the cops. "Winchester. Dean Winchester."

The rabbi picked up a pen from a nearby shelf and scratched something onto the scrap of paper in her palm.

"Hey, wait, is that my name?" he asked, concerned, moving forward quickly. He didn't recognize the symbols on the paper, or on the statue, though now that he was close enough he could see that the statue was covered with them. He wasn't fast enough to stop her from licking her thumb and then pressing the paper into the statue's forehead.

He could hear wind howling in his ears, even though the air in the studio wasn't moving.

"It was just an exercise," she said. The statue was starting to shake on its base now. Dean could see that the feet weren't as detailed as the rest of it; they sloped gently into the base, so that the body seemed to be growing out of the red earth. "Or maybe I knew, somehow."

"Listen, lady—" he said, and then the statue jerked so hard that the clay cracked. Dean grabbed her and pulled her away from it, because even if she was doing crazy magic he still didn't want her getting killed in front of him.

He stared, his hands going slack on her arms, as the cracks widened and chunks of clay spewed onto the floor, piling up like earthworm casts, revealing—revealing—

A man, shaking his hands free, rolling his shoulders, pawing with clay-thick hands at his unseeing clay eyes until the living flesh came clear.

Dean pulled his gun, wishing like hell he'd brought the shotgun in. The man bent his knees and shuffled a little, until his feet came free of the base with a smacking sound. He was still rubbing at his eyes, which were thick with wet clay, the lashes clumped together, but as soon as he saw Dean, he smiled and held up his hands.

"Dean," he said.

Dean raised the gun.

"Who the hell are you?"

4.

"He's a golem!" Rabbi Simcha said quickly, looking back and forth between them. "He's not harmful. He can't be. I made him—I gave him your name. He's supposed to take care of you."

Dean spared a glance at the rabbi, who was rubbing her hands together with a combination of joy and nervousness. "Yeah, well, put him back! I don't need a freaky statue guy following me around!"

She looked so sad that Dean almost felt guilty—yeah, kind of like a priest that way. "He could help you," she said. "So you could save more people like me."

Slowly, Dean lowered the gun, though he kept it in his hand. Bullets might not do much to clay in any event—if the golem was still clay, which wasn't obvious. Once off the base, the golem was about Dean's height, ruddy-skinned and rusty-haired, like the clay smeared all over it. It looked like an average frat boy, slightly chubby cheeks and an open smile, the kind of face even cops found hard to remember. It had come out of the clay complete with clothes, which made Dean wonder whether it was anatomically correct or just some kind of Ken doll.

Without really meaning to, he found himself listening to the rabbi tell him a long story about the golem's Kabbalistic origins (and no, she said, a bit of snap in her voice, kabbalah had nothing to do with sex, Madonna aside). The golem did seem like a nice guy, if a little dim. So when he started to shift uncomfortably in his rough clothes, admitting that yeah, the drying clay itched in places no one wanted to be itchy, it seemed only reasonable to invite him back to the motel to get cleaned up. Dean could always ditch him later, if the golem got problematic.

And the rabbi gave him a sweater, so Dean kind of had to put her in the 'good' category.

5.

By the end of the first week, the golem had a name—George, the first name Dean thought of that started with 'g,' and they'd taken out three ghosts and one werewolf, emo-free. It was actually fun, when he made himself live in the moment and stop drawing comparisons. George was, in fact, not the brightest statue in the museum, which meant that Dean had to do the research, but he'd been getting used to that anyway, and George could read for specific content well enough when Dean was careful about the instructions.

He didn't eat, and he didn't bleed (they found that out with the werewolf), though it did take some time for his fake flesh to knit itself back together after a wound. He didn't say much, though he had no problem humming along with Dean's tapes. He shook Dean out of nightmares—that book in Sam's hands, the black ink going wet and crimson as it unwrote itself, the yellowed pages going blank—and didn't ask why.

Also by the end of the first week, he'd gained a good six inches in height, his reddish hair had turned dark brown, and he had dimples.

"Stop that," Dean said when he first noticed, not yelling only because it was too weird to yell about.

"I can't," George said back, which he seemed to consider the end of it. It was only after Dean escalated a little that George allowed as how his instructions to take care of Dean were somewhat nonspecific.

"Can't you at least be my height?" Dean asked, knowing that he'd have sounded pretty pathetic to another human.

"No," George said, and wouldn't elaborate, no matter what Dean demanded. Apparently the instructions didn't require obedience, which was just freaking typical of magic.

So in retrospect, it wasn't all that surprising when, after Dean had been watching just enough soft-core to get himself ready to take a long hot shower, George got on the bed with him—"Hey, personal space!" Dean protested, uselessly—and blew him.

Yeah, it was sick, but it wasn't like Dean had anybody to account to.

Also, George didn't have to breathe.

6.

Six months on, they'd really hit a groove, tearing through ghosts like they were cardboard Halloween cutouts, taking on big game every couple of hunts, sweet and mindless. A couple of times Dean went to chat up some girl and realized that he hadn't spoken all day, that was how easy it was.

After a bad hunt, George would watch him extra carefully for days. If he'd been human Dean would have expected lectures, but Dean wasn't big on post-game analysis and George wasn't big on unnecessary talking, so it all worked out.

Sometimes, if he spent too much time sitting around between hunts, he felt the way he had when Dad was gone for too long and the money got tight, when he'd drunk four glasses of water before dinner so that he really, truly meant it when he pushed his plate over to Sam. (Sam could always tell when Dean was lying, but he wasn't that good at figuring out why Dean was telling the truth.)

They kept going, that was what mattered. Even when he was laid up for a week after the tulpa—he guessed it made sense that George would be powerless against another earth creature, though neither of them had known that at the beginning—he resisted the temptation to call Sam.

If he'd looked Sam up on the internet, Dean knew, he would probably be able to find Sam's graduation pictures. Dean had never really paid attention when Sam talked about law school, but he knew Sam had already taken the test, and he guessed that it was still valid, so Sam had probably gotten in everywhere he applied and was just getting ready to start. Somewhere good, he hoped. Harvard maybe.

So it was kind of a shock when his phone rang and Sam's voice came out.

"I, uh, I found us a hunt," he said in Dean's ear, just like he was leaning over the table at some artsy coffee shop, hands clutched around his fancy drink. "It's in Sedona."

"You want to hunt?" Dean asked, confused.

"Well, yeah," Sam said. "A friend of mine from Stanford called me up, I guess I've got a reputation now."

"All right," he said. That explained why Sam wasn't just giving him the details; Sam must think that Dean wouldn't be able to behave himself appropriately in Sam's social circles. "We'll be there in a day," he told Sam, and hung up on Sam's shocked "We?"

Sam was waiting for them at his friends' mansion. It really was beautiful country, all red and orange layers, glowing in the sunlight. The mansion had a little desert-type garden, stuff that didn't need watering, and Sam was sitting on a white bench in the middle of a bunch of carefully arranged rocks. He had a book open, face-down, on the bench next to him, like he'd been mooning for a while before they showed up.

George got out of the car and bounded up to Sam before Dean could catch up. "George Clay," he said, shaking Sam's hand vigorously as Sam stared. "Dean thinks the world of you, you know." Dean got a little bit of a charge out of the fact that, just this once, Sam couldn't look down on someone.

Sam tried to pull him aside to talk about George, but he was pretty easy to redirect towards the hunt, given that the thing they were after had killed six people in the past week. Sam himself was close-mouthed about his current status, and Dean didn't ask, not really wanting to hear about how much nearer Sam had gotten to his perfect life and his minivan now that he didn't have to worry about his hellbound brother.

George sat in the back seat without needing to be told, but then he leaned forward, one arm on each seat back, and told Sam stories of their adventures. He used more words than Dean had ever heard from him, his head turned away from Dean, talking at Sam a mile a minute. Dean wondered if that was how he himself sounded to other people, all cheerful aggression and bragging that wasn't really bragging, because of how it was true.

In the end, the hunt was swift, but grueling and nasty—slime past his knees, and he had to put down towels in the Impala and make them both put on clean clothes before they got in. Sam winced when Dean handed him a fistful of rough restroom paper towels to wipe off his hands.

Dean remembered how slippery their hands had been after the last battle with the demon holding his contract. Their fingers had been so thick with gore that when he'd had to pull Sam up they'd had to grab each other's wrists, grinding the bones together to keep from losing the grip. Sam had still borne traces of black and blue when he'd left.

Sam gave Dean a look of pure betrayal when George changed into an old blue T-shirt of Sam's that had somehow ended up in Dean's duffel before they'd split. It fit George fine, though, and Dean wasn't about to make him give it up.

Sam, he noticed, had kept in shape. Even with magic on George's side, Dean was pretty sure a girl would have found it hard to choose between the two of them.

They both seemed like they were waiting for him to say something. It was easier from inside the car, when he could concentrate on the road ahead, so he ducked inside and waited for them to follow. "I don't know about you," he told them, starting the engine, "but I am beat. I say we bed down for the night, then get you—" he nodded at Sam—"back to granola-land."

"Dean, I—" Sam said, and then glanced over at George and shut up.

There was nothing cheap about Sedona; Dean pulled into the first place he saw that didn't look like it would max out a credit card in a single night. "Get us rooms," he told George. Sam looked like he half wanted to apologize for Dean, but George of course just shrugged, got out of the car, and ambled off.

"So, where did you guys meet?" Sam said, as painfully polite as if he'd been hitting up a source for information.

Dean rubbed the back of his neck. "Atlanta," he said. "Saved a rabbi from some skinheads. George's Jewish," he said, and grinned.

Sam shot him a 'you are so not PC' look. "And you're, what, partners now?"

He put his hands back on the steering wheel. "I guess."

Sam was staring down at his lap. "I did fine on this hunt."

"Course you did," Dean agreed.

"I didn't—the demon blood, it's under control. I know you thought I was dangerous—"

There was a topic he wasn't going to revisit any time this century. Unbidden, the image of Sam, drenched in blood like Sissy Spacek in Carrie, flashed in his mind. "That's all over with," he said roughly.

"Yeah, that's my point, Dean." Sam shifted in his seat, turning his body towards Dean. "I've been researching, meditating—no, don't say it, there's a lot of wisdom in the old traditions—"

He didn't want to hear about Sam's great new demon-free life, no thank you. He knew Sam had reason to think that Dean wouldn't let him go easy. But listening to Sam's hopes and dreams, all perfectly planned-out and not even a Dean-shaped hole in them—that, he couldn't stand.

"Don't really need a recap, Sam."

That was when George came back and tossed Sam a key through the open window. "You've got the room next to ours," he said, and both Sam and Dean stared at him, Dean recovering a little quicker.

"Great," he said brightly. George's caretaking was often annoying, but Dean had to admit that the golem had a real sense of what he needed, and what he needed right now was to be reminded that things were different. That they weren't the kind of brothers who shared a room on the road any more.

"What does it feel like, being a golem?" he asked George when they were putting their stuff away.

George considered the question, the way he considered any question. After a pause, he said, "I have an imperative. It is written into me. I follow the imperative."

"What would happen if I told you not to follow it? If what I wanted was for you to go away?"

George frowned, his expression so like Sam's when he was trying to figure out some obscure translation that Dean's fists clenched involuntarily. "It is written," he repeated.

"Okay, what if you being with me was bad for me?"

He stood motionless for several minutes, long enough that Dean started to worry. Dean waved his hand in front of George's face, wondering if he needed to call the rabbi and ask if there was any place that did good golem repair.

At last, George blinked and moved away from Dean's prodding fingers. "I would stay away from you if that was the best way to protect you."

He knew, he did, that George didn't have emotions any more than a VW Bug did, no matter that they had what looked and felt like faces. So he knew it was unfair to feel a hollowness in his stomach at that answer. "What if you could choose?" he asked. And then, because that was clearly too hard a question, he added, "Choose what you wanted to do. Protect someone else, or do some other job, or just—live."

"Then I wouldn't be a golem."

He wondered whether the rabbi had words to turn a man into a golem. It would have to be easier than starting with clay, wouldn't it? Or maybe not, if clay didn't want stuff on its own.

For some reason, he wanted to go knock on Sam's door. He imagined it, Sam opening the door, smiling at him, handing him a beer, all without needing to talk. It would be awesome.

But the fantasy derailed quickly. Assuming Sam would let him in, the cover charge would be some stupid discussion about the future, their futures, their separate and distinct futures, and that would only end in yelling. He wanted—he wanted to part ways with good memories, even if they had to be a little fake.

That night, George pounded him so hard that the bed dented the wall. Dean got pretty vocal near the end, but it was all groans and curses, so it didn't much matter.

7.

"George, can I have a word with my brother?" was the first thing Sam said when he found them at the restaurant attached to the motel.

Dean nodded at George, getting a nasty thrill from the way George waited for his approval, and the way that Sam noticed. "Why don't you go gas her up?" Dean suggested. Sam's mouth pinched further, like he wanted to say something about Dean allowing other hands on the Impala. And honestly, if George had been human, no way would Dean entrust him with the car; but Dean figured that they were both machines, of a sort, and George had always been gentle with her.

George got out of the booth, and the two of them did an awkward dance, shuffling around each other as Sam slid into the seat George had vacated, across from Dean. They both watched George move his giant body carefully through the aisle between the tables, narrowly avoiding a waitress and giving her an apologetic smile, then cross the parking lot.

Dean could feel Sam's disapproval, coming off him like skunk fumes. Sam had saved Dean's soul, but he didn't want it. As far as Dean could tell, he wanted Dean living some safe and respectable life, the Impala pristine under a tarp in a garage, but he didn't even want to be looking over his neighborly fence at Dean. The reason Sam had never said anything like that out loud, Dean guessed, was that even Sam didn't have the details nailed down. Sam had always had a better imagination than Dean, but some things were beyond even Sam's creativity.

He snuck glances at Sam, who was back to his childhood habit of pleating the straw wrapper into a little stairway. Sam used to do that when the alternative was to say something that would risk a lecture from Dad, back before Sam started courting those lectures. Sam was surely tired of telling Dean how to live. Dean couldn't even say Sam was wrong about him—as long as Dean was who he was, the odds were good that someday he'd crash into Sam's carefully built life, same as before, and make Sam do things he didn't want to know he could do. Again.

I'm doing the best I can, he wanted to say, but even he knew that was useless.

"What do you know about this guy?" Sam said at last, putting his hand over Dean's. Sincere. Sam was always sincere in his concern.

"I know he's got my back," Dean said, not moving.

Sam scoffed. "Yeah, that's for sure. And since when do you take it up the ass?"

Now he did lean back, pulling his hand away, barely restraining himself from kicking Sam under the table. "Since any time I damn well want to—and don't tell me you've got some moral objection, college boy." He knew he was turning red, and he was furious about it, but if it couldn't be helped it had to be ignored. "And since when do you give a good goddamn about my fucks?"

"Since you started hunting with one! He watches you like he's a dog and you're a steak dinner. There's something wrong with him, Dean. He doesn't care about hunting. The only thing he cares about is you."

Dean looked at Sam long enough for him to realize how that had sounded. Then—because Sam should never doubt his instincts, and because he was right—Dean nodded his head. "I know. But he gets the job done."

Sam stared at him. "So, what, you want me to beg you to ditch him and let me come back, is that what it takes? Nice emotional blackmail."

He glared back at his brother, willing Sam not to go over everything in excruciating detail, just this once. "What's your idea here, Sam? You don't want this life, I get that. I'm gonna—I got it covered, okay? You don't need to clean up my messes anymore. But you want me to want something different, that doesn't work any better for you than it did for me."

That hit home, he could tell by the way Sam's brows beetled up. But Sam wasn't one to stop fighting when the ground changed underneath him. "This life isn't the problem. Even if you don't—even if you don't trust me to hunt any more, you've got to trust me on this. You and him, it's wrong. You don't see yourself, the way you look—"

It felt like a lifetime of no and not good enough and do it again catching up with him, except that he wasn't in training any more and Sam wasn't Dad, so doing it again was off the table.

He hadn't asked Sam to come back and remind him of all the ways he wasn't right. He wanted the road and the car and George. He stared mutely, resentfully, at his brother. It was too much, to save his soul and then keep making demands Dean couldn't meet.

"Doesn't it even bother you that he looks like me?"

And like that, Sam handed him the key, the way out of this mess. A clean cut, or cleaner than any of the alternatives; one that might leave him able to stand, after. He smiled at Sam, the kind of grin he'd used to start bar fights when he was younger. "'Bother' me? Nah, Sammy, it doesn't bother me." Each word was as distinct as if it had been machined.

He stood, not stopping to throw money on the table, and left Sam to gape after him, imagining his brother's eyes—bewildered, then horrified—on his back all the way to Nevada.

8.

Three months later, they had just finished up a simple salt-and-burn in an old Pennsylvania cemetary. The night was the kind of indigo-dark that swallowed light so fast that flashlights were just lines of unbearable brightness, not illuminating anything until just before you ran into it. But the darkness was the worst part of the job; the ghost had seemed almost grateful to be released, hadn't even smacked them around any. Dean was looking forward to getting back to the motel, imagining hot water, cable, George's warm body as a pillow behind him on the bed.

They had their shovels over their shoulders, walking up the gravel path towards the Impala, when Jo Harvelle popped out of nowhere, standing in their way.

"Hey, Jo," Dean said, checking his reflexive move for his gun. "This one's all set, nothing more to do."

She brought her shotgun up, aimed right at Dean's chest. "Oh, I think there's something."

"Jo, the hell?" he began, dropping the shovel to the ground, and then Sam came at George, lightning-quick. Dean thought he was going to punch George in the nose, but instead he stuck his fingers—Jesus, through George's forehead, disappearing into the flesh like it was water, his other hand holding George in place.

George jerked and fell to his knees. Sam's hands pressed him down. Green-yellow light flared in George's eyes, then guttered out. He knelt, motionless, a life-size G.I. Joe waiting for a kid to play with. Sam muttered some words in a language Dean didn't recognize, pulled his hand out of George and stuck it in his pocket, then returned with a scrap of paper held between his index and middle fingers.

"What's that?" Jo asked, her voice high and nervous.

They were close enough that Dean could have reached out and touched Sam. But it didn't take a shotgun held on him to keep him still. He felt like a passenger when the driver had stamped on the accelerator, his body pinned in place by the whirl of the world around him.

Sam put his fingers into George again, still talking—Dean caught what he thought was Jo's name—and there was another green-yellow pulse, shining out of George's eyes like searchlights.

"Sam Winchester," Jo said dangerously, "what did you do?"

Dean swallowed, trying to shake off the frozen feeling of seeing Sam again.

"Gave you a partner," Sam said to her, pulling back. His fingers were clean. George slowly got to his feet. "One who's completely loyal to you."

"You said we were just getting rid of it!" she snapped, edging away from George, who had turned towards her. George's eyes were still glowing, though the light was fading. The expression on his face was familiar to Dean, but he wasn't used to seeing it from this angle.

"Magic like this is too powerful to waste," Sam said absently. "I need a minute, okay?"

Jo, obviously recognizing the futility of arguing with Sam at this particular moment (or, more accurately, ever, because that was just the kind of bastard Sam was), turned and stomped off down the dark path. George—George's flashlight, anyway, and Dean guessed George was attached—followed her, and if Dean's eyes weren't lying to him, his stride was already shortening to match hers. Dean sort of wondered what he'd look like when Dean saw him next.

He couldn't go after them, not even if he knew the right words to write on George. Sam had to have known that Dean would never try to take protection like that away from Jo.

Which left him and Sam. With his flashlight pointed at the ground, Dean could just make out the vague outline of his brother, looming like a cenotaph. Maybe it was better that Sam couldn't see his face.

Dean had let himself think that, since George couldn't want to leave—well, he should have known better. Nothing certain but death and taxes, and he didn't pay taxes.

It was fucking selfish of Sam to take George away just because it felt gross to know George was out there—but it was just as selfish of Dean to want to have him, so he wasn't going to whine about it. "If you think I'm gonna stop hunting because—"

Sam grabbed his wrists, shocking him into silence. "Shut up and listen, Dean. I thought it was some sort of slow-acting incubus, but that wasn't it at all, that was just you being stubborn. I tracked down that woman in Atlanta. She explained it all to me. George Clay, pretty fucking funny, was that your dumb idea?" Dean opened his mouth, and was further shocked when Sam's palm covered it. "No, don't answer that. The guy who hasn't been fucking a golem who looks like me gets to talk for a while, 'kay?"

With his left wrist still pinioned by Sam's hand, it was hard to figure out what to do, so he just sort of waved his free hand, which was still gripping the flashlight.

"I told you I needed a break. Not that I was quitting. I needed some time to say goodbye to a part of my life that I already knew was over. And I needed to be sure I could do this without becoming a monster. But you just had to make it all-or-nothing."

Dean could feel the moisture of his own breath bouncing off Sam's skin, and discreetly tried to inch his head back. All that got him was pressure on his spine, because Sam said "No, you don't," and pushed harder, mashing Dean's lips so hard he could feel a cut open up on the inside of his mouth.

This was ridiculous, and there were about fifty things he could do to get Sam out of his face, only forty or so of them painful. He took a step backwards off the path, shifting his weight—and Sam hooked a foot around his leg, wrenching his left arm to the side as they fell, so that Sam's full weight landed on him, knocking his breath out even as Sam's hand finally, finally left his mouth.

"You weren't supposed to find someone else while I was getting my head together," Sam continued, his tone reasonable, as if this were an ordinary conversation. His body pressed Dean into the grass, which was cold and prickly against Dean's exposed skin. His fingers stroked up and down Dean's wrist as if he were trying to take Dean's pulse. Sam was lighter than George, but not exactly a delicate flower; Dean's lungs struggled for sufficient air. "Which, okay, you didn't, but that wasn't really obvious at the time."

Dean got as far as "S—" before Sam brought his arm up to press against Dean's throat, a little harder than necessary to make his point.

"Just so you understand, I'm not your fantasy. I'm not going to change into whatever you want."

Dean couldn't see Sam's face through the white spots of oxygen deprivation and the looming darkness. But Sam was sliding up Dean's body, getting to his knees as he went until he was almost sitting on Dean's chest, Dean's arms riding up his thighs, Dean's belly exposed to the cool night air where his shirt had dragged up. Sam's arm was gone from his throat but he was still having trouble breathing.

Sam's voice fell softly from above. "But I know you're not going to change for me either. And that's okay, now that I know what you really want. I should have known you'd need more than talking." Clinking and shifting noises—he was—he was opening his jeans—Dean's mind went into engine lock.

"You can use your mouth now," Sam suggested, leaning forward—Christ, already hard, bumping against the roof of Dean's mouth, the side of his cheek as he shifted to get a better angle. And it was awkward and even kind of painful, a cramp in his neck and an ache in his back that lasted even past the handjob he got after, Sam's tongue in his mouth like a cork in a bottle all the way through. But when he shook himself silent in Sam's arms, it was still better than he had ever let himself imagine, even in the deepest darkness of night.

"We should go back to Atlanta," Sam whispered to him, before they got up to head back to the Impala. "Just to thank the rabbi for looking after you."

Dean mumbled a protest—like he needed looking after. But he guessed he could get behind the idea of heading south, spending a couple of days on the road.

He had a lot to tell Sam.

Notes: thanks to giandujakiss for beta!