Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

APRIL 15, 2010

Summoning Crowley had been easier than he wanted it to be, and it didn’t give him enough time to second guess himself. Dean stood by his car, a few dozen yards from Bobby’s house, in the middle of the scrap yard. The demon appeared before him, arms crossed, expression smug but otherwise unreadable.

“What do we have here?”

“I want to make a deal – I need you to protect me and Adam from Zachariah and the other angels. There’s only one place they can’t go, not without putting up a huge fight.”

“You want to hide out in Hell? A bit grim, even for you.”

“Do you think I would have summoned you if there was any other way? I’ve thought it through a hundred times. This is the only way they don’t get their hands on either of us.” He paused, taking in the cold indifference on Crowley’s face. “Come on, I know there’s gotta be something I have that you want. I’ll do anything. We’ve got the rings of two horsemen. We have a demon-killing knife.” Crowley still just stared, eyes narrow, like he was doing math in his head. “Crowley. If this is what it takes…even my soul. Please. If Michael gets his hands on Adam or me…it’s game over, for everyone. Everywhere. Yourself included.”

“I can’t take your soul, Dean.” Crowley waved his hand dismissively, speaking at last into the desperate silence. “In fact, I cannot take any form of payment.”

“But Crowley, please, you gotta – “

“I wasn’t finished. I can’t take anything in exchange, because I don’t want this on the books. If I’m going to be harboring two fugitives, I can’t leave a bloody paper trail. And if this were a true deal, I’d be bound to guarantee its efficacy. Which I cannot do, in this case. Your plan has legs, but you know I can’t outright promise it will work. Lucifer is stronger than me, and if he wants you, he’ll find you. The same can be said of Heaven, though I doubt their resources support such a mission at this juncture.”

“So you’ll do it?”

“I’ll hide you and your brother in Hell,” Crowley agreed, but there was a sour look on his face.

“There’s gotta be a catch,” Dean huffed.

“Not a catch, exactly.” Crowley leveled him with an uncharacteristically sober look. “Dean, if you decide to hide downstairs until your friends figure out something permanent, you might be waiting an awfully long time.”

“I know.”

“Then the only thing I ask for in exchange for my services is your patience,” Crowley replied, eerily solemn. It was so rare that he wasn’t putting on a show or exaggerating for effect. Dean almost preferred his peacockery to this. “If you get down there and change your mind, I won’t be able to return you to the surface without putting myself in serious danger – without putting you and Adam in danger as well.”

“I…I understand.”

“Then it’s settled. Anything you need to put in order before we go?”

“Shit. Yeah. I should leave a note or something, for Sam.” Crowley raised a judgmental eyebrow, but said nothing. Dean scrounged around in his glovebox for a pad of paper and a pen, and scribbled out something he hoped would be explanatory enough, without inviting them to second guess his decision. “Could you make sure he gets this?”

“I suppose.” Crowley was back to his pompous posturing, but it was almost a relief after that weirdly sympathetic bout of sincerity.

“Then, I guess I’m ready.”

+++

Sam.

I know we said we’d find some way to do this without either of us saying yes.

Well, I thought of one. And I know you won’t like it.

Now that Adam’s back, we’re on the clock, and you know it.

I’m gonna get Crowley to stow us somewhere, some place nobody can snatch us back from.

When all this stuff blows over, hopefully Adam and I can get back topside, but no matter what

I want to make sure Zach and the rest of them can’t get their hands on us.

Don’t try and get me back, not until you’re sure the coast is clear.

Take care of yourself, and Bobby. Don’t let Cas do anything crazy.

Dean

+++

The shift was instantaneous, and from what he could tell so far, irreversible.

Adam had been on the couch at Bobby Singer’s house, and now he was standing in in a studio apartment beside Dean and some short guy in a sharp black suit.

“You must be Adam,” the short man smiled at him, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Welcome to my summer home. Dean’s arranged for a bit of an extended stay for the both of you.”

“What?” He turned to look at Dean, who was staring a hole in the floor. “Who is this guy? Dean? What’s going on, man?”

“I’m Crowley.” The man extended a hand, and Adam couldn’t bring himself to shake it. As if he were used to people refusing to touch him, Crowley merely smirked and stuffed his hand in his jacket pocket. “You won’t exactly find yourselves comfortable here, but it’s about as good as anyone can do, given the circumstances. I’ll stop in to check on you, when I have a chance, but it won’t be frequent.”

“Why won’t we be comfortable?” Dean asked, looking up for the first time since they’d apparated in this strange place.

“It’s Hell, Dean. You, more than anyone, should understand what that means. It’s the realm of suffering – it isn’t possible to skirt the rules on this one. Be glad you came to me and not some other demon with your little quandary. This place is a walk in the park by comparison to other corners of Hell. And don’t worry, I’ve got the place rigged up to its lowest setting. It’ll be boring, but you’re safe as can be, I assure you.”

“Crowley,” Dean hissed, and Adam was helpless to do anything more than stare at them as they argued with one another, because holy shit, he was in Hell. Crashing at a demon’s house, apparently. “There’s only one bed? Are you kidding me?” Dean complained, and Crowley rolled his eyes.

“Relax, princess. There’s a sleeper sofa.” Crowley gestured at the lumpy brown couch in the middle of the room. “Try to behave yourselves, it might be a bit of a long haul, with the time discrepancy. Don’t open the door for strangers. If there’s an emergency, you can press this button, and I’ll come by as soon as I can.” He tapped his pointer finger against a switchplate on the wall, simple and beige, almost like a dimmer switch for lights, but instead of a dial, it was a compressible button.

Adam stared at the button, willing anything about this situation to make sense. Dean barely glanced at it before his attention was back to Crowley.

“I swear, if you use this opportunity to pull anything – “

“I know, I know. You’ll rip me a cornucopia of new orifices. Look, I’d love to stay and chat, but I have better things to do than lounge about Hell with you two chaps. I’ll be back in a little while to see how things are going, try not to miss me too much.”

Before either of them could say a word, the man was simply gone.

“Dean, what’s going on?” It was the only thing he could think to ask. Dean was white as a sheet.

“I couldn’t think of another way out.” Dean’s voice sounded far away.

“Way out? Dean, a way out of what?” He asked, but Dean just stood there, mouth pinched into a tense line, not meeting Adam’s eyes. “Answer me – what is this a way out of?” He grabbed Dean’s arm and shook it, which only succeeded in getting him to look Adam in the eyes. The man looked almost seasick, pale to the point of greenishness, eyes so wide that the whites were practically swallowing his irises.

“You remember the angels, they weren’t gonna let up, alright?” Dean whispered. “At least, here, they can’t get us. We’ll be safe, until Sam and Bobby and Cas figure something out.”

“And here, here, that’s really Hell? We’re in Hell?”

“Yeah, we’re in Hell.”

“Fuck that!” Adam surprised himself with his own anger, but it felt good, to be angry. “I want out of here. If you want to twiddle your thumbs down here until your brother digs you out, be my guest, but I don’t want any part of it.” He marched over to the button that Crowley had pointed out to them, reaching for it, but Dean grabbed his wrist and wrenched him away from it.

“You don’t understand, we can’t go back. It’s too dangerous.”

“I don’t care! I didn’t sign up to get brought back to life, I didn’t sign up to get solicited by angels, and I didn’t sign up to get dragged to Hell. I’m out of here. Now let me go!” He wriggled in Dean’s grasp, but it wasn’t much of a fight. Dean was older, and stronger, and he wouldn’t release his grip, even though Dean’s face was contorted in obvious emotional anguish.

“I know you didn’t, and I’m sorry you got pulled into this mess. It’s my mess. It was the angels that resurrected you, and it’s the angels that want to wear you around and smash the damn planet, okay? I don’t…I don’t want that – for either of us. And I know this sucks – so bad, it sucks so bad, but you gotta believe me when I say it’s for the best, alright?”

“Let me go,” Adam nearly growled, fighting against him harder, using his free hand to punch against his ribs, his sternum, his jaw. Dean eventually got a grip on that wrist, too, and he held him still.

“Adam, Adam, listen, please,” Dean begged, and as much as Adam hated him in that moment, the look on his face pushed all the fight out of him.

He stood there, panting, staring up at his half-brother.

“I’ll let you go, and you can press that button, but it ain’t gonna do you any good. Crowley isn’t letting either of us out until things have blown over. It’s just…it’s too dangerous – for him, and for us. Now that we’re out of reach, all bets are off as far as civility goes. The angels, I know this is hard to understand, I know it sounds nuts, but the angels aren’t the good guys. And I think you know that. I mean, dangling your mom in front of you, like a carrot on a stick? Resurrecting you to do their bidding?” Dean let out an exasperated wheeze, something that wished it was a laugh. “Before you showed up, they pulled out all the stops trying to get me to do what they’re askin’ you to do. They tortured me, tortured Sam. They sent me into this bizarre future where there were zombies and stuff, told me if I didn’t do what they wanted, that’s where I’d end up. You met Cas, right?”

“Yeah, he’s…he’s an angel, though, isn’t he?”

“He’s an angel, yeah,” Dean got a strange look on his face, something almost soft passing over his expression, “He, uh. He pulled me out of Hell, to begin with. It’s a long story. But, he’s the one who told me all the stuff, about being Michael’s vessel, and back then, he was one of Zach’s number one guys.” Dean hiccupped a little, and it struck Adam that the man might be on the verge of tears. “And he gave it all up. For us, for, for me. Because he looked at what Heaven was trying to do, the war they were trying to start, and he realized that it was wrong.”

Adam was frozen in place, less by Dean’s grip (which, at this point, was far looser) and more by the heaviness of his words, the way they seemed to tumble out of him and crash on the floor between them.

“And I know he’s gonna be so upset, that I’m back in Hell – cushier digs, but still Hell – after everything he’s done for me. And Sam, and Bobby, they’re gonna be so fucking mad. But this was the only way, to ensure Michael wouldn’t have a vessel, that he couldn’t bribe or threaten or trick one of us into giving in. It was the only way to be sure that he wouldn’t hurt you, or kill you, trying to bait me.”

“You really think they’d use me as bait for you? Dean, I barely know you. I hadn’t met you until like, yesterday.”

“I know.” Dean swallowed and looked away. He released Adam’s wrists and put a few steps of distance between them, but Adam made no move for the button by the door. “I know. But, uh. You remember how you died…”

“Hard to forget being eaten alive.”

“Right,” Dean scrubbed a hand across the back of his neck, face flushed red – a welcome departure from the sickly pallor he’d been sporting before that. “But, uh. The thing that ate you. A ghoul. It has the ability to take on the body of the most recent person it’s killed. And their memories. It was after our dad, but he’d been dead awhile by then. So we turned up instead, when it called, and it figured that was close enough – he had killed it’s dad, the year that our dad met your mom. It pretended to be you.” His voice was hoarse and so quiet that Adam found himself stepping closer to hear him better.

“But you didn’t know me, I died before we ever met.”

“Right, right,” Dean breathed. “But it pretended to be you,” he emphasized, eyes shining with tears still waiting to be shed as he fixed his gaze on the wall behind Adam. As it washed over him, the magnitude of what must have occurred, Adam sucked in a shaky breath. He imagined finding out you have a brother, finding out he’s in trouble. Trying to help him. Finding out it’s already too late, that he’s already dead. “And when we figured out part of it – that a ghoul had killed your mom and was after you – I swore I’d protect you. I wanted you to have a shot, you know? Finish college, live a normal life. I never got that, and, and Sam almost got it, but I fucked it up for him, and I just.” Dean swallowed hard and looked up at him, a tear finally escaping to roll down his cheek. “And then it just didn’t matter. You’d been dead. Just being related to us, that was enough. To ruin your fucking life, man. And even after you were dead, being related to me got you sucked out of Heaven.”

“Dean, you’re not the reason I died. You didn’t even know I existed.”

“You wanna let me off the hook for it, fine. But it’s on me. And the angels, that’s on me, too. And this,” He gestured at the apartment, its unremarkable creamy beige walls, its brown sofa bed, its cramped kitchen, its saggy double bed, its uneven linoleum floors. “This is on me, just me. And I’m doing it because I don’t want you to get the short stick again, but I guess I forced your hand anyway. Six in one, half dozen in the other.” He choked out a laugh, and Adam had the unaccountable urge to soothe him in some way, to make him sit still and drink a glass of water, to count backwards from fifty until his breath evened out. “Man, I’m so sorry. But you’re stuck here. We’re stuck here, and it’s my fault, and it’s our only chance.” He ducked his head, shame sending a blush flaming up his cheeks.

“Okay,” Adam heard himself whisper. Dean looked up, wiping harsh streaks down his face, like if he just applied enough pressure, his tears would retreat in fear of his wrath.

“Okay?”

“I get it, I think. We gotta ride it out down here. Trust everyone else to think of something, and get us out when things calm down. It sucks. And it was the only thing you could think of to keep us both safe. Do I have it right?”

“Yeah,” Dean nodded, eyes rimmed red.

“Then I guess we just have to…wait and see.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed, relief swamping his features, something like a smile wobbling across his lips. “Just, just wait, and see.”

Chapter Text

APRIL 15 – APRIL 30, 2010  //  5 YEARS IN HELL

“I’ll take the sleeper sofa,” Dean offered, once they’d both started yawning. It felt like it’d been one day, but Dean knew that time moved with more zeal in Hell, pushed forward impatiently. He would explain that to Adam at some point soon, but it seemed like too much for the first day.

“I’m shorter, it makes sense for me to take it,” Adam countered, pragmatic. He had a stubborn set to his brows that was becoming familiar. It reminded Dean of Sam. Of John.

“Yeah, but it’s my fault you’re here. I’m not gonna make you sleep on a fucking couch, dude.”

“That’s stupid,” Adam dismissed his argument, rolling his eyes, every bit the nineteen year old he’d once been, and was again.

“Yeah, well, tough,” Dean snorted, amused despite himself. It had been a long time since Sam was that age.

“How about this. You take it tonight, I take it tomorrow. We switch off, yeah?”

Dean glared at him, but Adam just stared back, eyebrow raised in silent question. Dean sighed, defeated.

“Okay, fine. If that’s really what you want.”

“It is.” Adam sat on the edge of the double bed. “I think if one of us has a shittier go at things down here from the jump, we’ll be at each others’ throats in no time.”

“You’re probably right,” Dean grumbled, scrubbing a hand down his face before reaching down to fold out the sofa’s mattress and bed frame.

Neither of them having brought a change of clothes, Dean slept in his jeans and t-shirt, but left his belt, boots, and utility jacket on the arm of the couch. Adam elected to sleep in his underwear, not used to sleeping over the sheets like Dean, ready to run at a moment's notice.

In the dark, Dean couldn’t sleep. All he could do was think about Sam, and Bobby, and Cas, and the mess he’d left them to clean up on their own. Part of him screamed ‘coward!’, that he was just running from his problems, running from his family, running from his responsibilities.

He wondered if Adam was asleep yet, or if he also lay awake, staring into nothing, thinking too hard.

In the morning, Dean woke up from a nightmare, panting and gasping. He hadn’t even remembered falling asleep. He sat up, looked around, remembering where he was. Adam wasn’t in bed, sheets rumpled but bed made. Just then, Adam came out of the bathroom, wearing his jeans and t-shirt, drying his hair with a towel.

“You’re up,” Adam observed, not quite a greeting. “Water pressure in there is shit.”

“Well, it’s Hell, so,” Dean coughed, throat dry. He shrugged, threw up a hand in a ‘what can you do?’ sort of gesture.

“So…what? Everything here’s just gonna be mediocre?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad,” Adam mused, wandering into their cramped kitchen and popping open a cupboard. He grabbed two mugs, then fished around in the pantry until – he let out a grunt of triumph – he found an open bag of coffee grounds.

“S’there an unopened one?” Dean asked. Adam leveled him with a flat look.

“What d’you think?”

“Sheesh, sorry,” Dean grumbled, dragging himself off of the sofa-bed, folding the blanket he’d used and setting it on the back of the couch. He folded up the mattress bit again, wincing at a pinch in his back. He wondered if the double bed Adam had was any more comfortable.

Adam scrounged through the lower cabinets until he found an old coffee maker, a scuffed white monstrosity coated in a thick layer of dust. He wiped the grime off with a wet rag, then plugged it in and got the coffee brewing.

“Only enough for one pot.” Adam brought him a mug when the coffee was done, posture apologetic, as if he was somehow to blame for the scant quantity of coffee. By then, Dean was sitting on the couch in a bit of a daze, the weight of an indefinite stay down here collapsing down on him at last.

“You hungry?” Dean asked, and Adam shrugged. “Depending on what there is out there, I can make breakfast.”

“Sure,” Adam sighed, sitting down on the couch just as Dean got up to check out the kitchen, coffee in hand. He could tell by the woody tang of it that the coffee was stale, but it was better than nothing – shit, it was better than some coffee he’d drank topside.

The fridge, surprisingly, was loaded to the gills with food. He pulled out the carton of eggs, which only contained five, and a bargain pack of bacon. He perused the other contents of the refrigerator, just to get a sense of what they were working with. There were two sticks of butter, a carton of skim milk that was just a day past its date, a tub of strawberry yogurt, a jar of apricot jam, a jar of raspberry jelly, a deck of Kraft singles in the deli drawer, along with a Ziplock bag of unidentified lunchmeat – which looked to his seasoned eye like roast beef. In the door, there were two cans of grapefruit seltzer water and various condiments, all of which were open and poorly maintained, their caps crusted with dried sauce. The crisper drawers were crammed full of vegetables and fruit – cucumbers, carrots, bell peppers, spinach, clementines, pears, apples, and one very sorry container of blackberries, all shrively and old. On the shelf beside the milk, there were three beers, a half-full plastic bottle of orange juice (extra pulp), and a Styrofoam take-out container that Dean is deeply uninterested in investigating further.

The freezer was more barren – just a bag of tater tots, a nearly empty pint of Haagen Dazs Rum Raisin ice cream, and a small frozen turkey. There was ice in a small bucket, just inside the door, and it rattled when he shut the door again.

The pantry was just as packed as the fridge. There was a whole shelf of canned goods, bags of beans and lentils, a huge sack of rice, a smattering of spices, and a pound and a half of flour. There was half a loaf of bread, with a spot of mold on the heel, though otherwise it looked salvageable. A ceramic bowl with two russet potatoes and a big purple onion. A cannister of popcorn kernels, a bag of Cheetos, two boxes of chocolate pudding mix and a box of lime Jell-O powder. One big container of chicken broth, store brand. There were three boxes of cereal – Rice Krispies, Cinnamon Cheerios, and Shredded Wheat. For sweet stuff, there was a bag of black licorice Twizzlers and a container of golden Oreos.

He snagged the bread, to go with the eggs and bacon he’d be making, and fumbled around in the cupboards until he found a pan. There was olive oil and salt and pepper beside the stovetop, and he drizzled some oil in the pan, letting it heat up a little before cracking his eggs. He slapped half a dozen strips of bacon on a cookie sheet and popped it in the oven.

“You want your eggs fried, scrambled, what?” Dean called over his shoulder to Adam, who was sitting on the couch, fiddling with the TV remote.

“Whatever you’re doin’ for yours is fine,” Adam answered, distracted by whatever it was he was working on.

“Toast?”

“Yeah, just like, one.”

The toaster at least was already on the counter and plugged in, ready to roll. He pulled out two slices of bread, then snagged the heel, too, scraping the mold off of it and popping them all in the toaster.

He laid out two plates, serving food to each as it came out. He grabbed one of the sticks of butter from the fridge and slathered some on the toast, reprimanding himself silently for not getting it out earlier to soften, since it was tearing up the grain of the toast as it was now.

“Food’s ready,” Dean announced as he scraped an equal amount of scrambled egg onto each plate.

There was a small table on the opposite side of the room, flush with the wall, with two mismatched chairs arranged beside it. He brought their plates over and set them down there, plopping down in the larger of the two wooden chairs. Adam joined him, looking troubled.

“TV giving you crap?”

“Kinda, yeah,” Adam laughed, like Dean was telling a joke by accident. “S’only got one channel, I think.”

“One channel? Shit, which one?” Dean asked, shoveling eggs into his mouth. He’d lived in and out of motels all his life. He could make do with pretty much any television show, by now.

“It’s the USA Network? All that’s showing is something called Burn Notice?”

“The fucking cop procedural channel?” Dean grimaced before taking a big bite of bacon to drown his sorrow. “Fuckin’ hate procedural cop shows.”

“Me too.” Adam took a sip of his coffee. “We can keep checking. Maybe it just has inconsistent reception?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Dean sighed, not really believing that anything could be so benign, down here. “You know, um. There’s something I gotta tell you.”

“What else?” Adam asked through an angry laugh, taking a snarlsome bite of toast. “We’re already in Hell, dude.”

“That’s kinda what I gotta talk to you about, actually.” Dean scooped up his last bite of eggs and washed them down with the dregs of his coffee. “See, time works kinda…different here.”

“Different how?” Adam narrowed his eyes, focusing in on Dean’s pinched expression.

“You heard Crowley, yesterday, when he said we might be here a while? With the ‘time discrepancy’?”

“Yeah.” Adam glared harder.

“Well, time passes…faster, here. A month on Earth is a decade, in Hell.”

“A decade?”

“Yeah.” Dean sucked in a breath, let it out loudly. “When I was down here before…it was just four months, topside. But it was forty years, for me. A really long forty years.”

Adam, surprisingly, softened. He stared at Dean for a long time, studying.

“I’m guessing you weren’t just kicking it in a crappy studio apartment?”

“No,” Dean laughed, mostly due to the break in tension. It was a wheeze of a laugh, the sound a prey animal makes. “It was…” Dean couldn’t figure out how to put it in words. He pressed his lips together, felt them grind against the flat fronts of his teeth.

“Hey, Dean.” Adam leaned forward across the table, locking eyes with him. “Don’t tell me about it, alright? I don’t want to know, I think. I bet it sucked, and I don’t really need you to elaborate.”

“Really?” Dean asked, embarrassed by how relieved he sounded, how near tears. People so rarely let him off the hook for stuff like this. Sam certainly hadn’t.

“Really, dude. I sure as shit don’t want to relive getting murdered by ghouls, you know?”

“Yeah, that’s…that makes sense.”

“So. Time. It’s been like, a day here already. Is that just a few hours, up there? It’d have to be, right?”

“I mean, I guess we could do the math on it, if we really wanted to. But I don’t think that’ll help much, with the mind-fuck of it all.”

“Might even make it worse.” Adam stood up, grabbed both of their dirty dishes, and headed for the kitchen sink. Dean watched him in brow-furrowed wonder. He couldn’t remember the last time someone did the dishes for him.

“Might,” Dean agreed, absently, watching Adam suds up a sponge and start in on their plates. “You want me to dry ‘em?”

“Sure,” Adam shrugged, like he hadn’t really noticed that he’d even begun washing their dishes until Dean mentioned it. He ambled over and scooped up a towel from the stack on top of the fridge, and Adam passed him the first plate to dry. It was novel, working alongside someone on something so mundane, so domestic. Sam didn’t really team up on chores with him like this.

“What else you wanna get up to today?” He set the dry plate down on the counter, taking the next one from Adam.

“Saw some board games on the shelf by the bed,” Adam noted, neutral. “Might be some CDs, or tapes laying around? Didn’t see any books.”

“Yeah, me either.” Dean stacked the second dry plate and set about drying a mug.

“There’s Monopoly, and Battleship, and like, a deck of cards? I think there’s some other stuff, but those were the first things I saw.”

“Battleship could be fun.” He dried the second mug, then gave a cursory towel swipe to their respective forks and the spatula he’d used for the eggs. He put everything away while Adam scraped the pan under hot water.

+++

“There’s not enough pieces,” Adam complained as they opened the game case.

“It’s Battleship!” Dean laughed incredulously, “When does it ever have all the pieces?”

“Always?” Adam looked at him like he was nuts. “I never lost any.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean shook his head, suddenly feeling very small. “It’s not like I lost them. I didn’t own it or nothin’. I just never played one that wasn’t beat all to hell.

“Right,” Adam intoned warily. “We can work around it.”

Dean could hear the steady drip-drip-drip of the faucet in the kitchen. He ignored it.

+++

After about a dozen rounds of Battleship, a disheartening inventory of available VHS tapes (Howard the Duck, Showgirls, The Abyss, and The Purple Rose of Cairo), Dean made dinner – just sandwiches, using the probably roast beef and the Kraft singles, as well as a few begrudging leaves of spinach and what appears to be some sort of spicy mustard. They each had one of the three beers.

The sink drips, drips, drips. He tweaked the faucet, the knobs, the pipe underneath. Nothing helped.

+++

“You sure you want to take the couch tonight?” Dean asked, this time dressing down to his boxer briefs, the idea of sleeping in the same clothes he’ll be wearing all day, every day, for God knows how long too grim to bear.

“Mhmm,” Adam hummed his assent as he pulled his own shirt over his head, sofa-bed already made up beside him.

“Gotta warn you, that thing’s murder on your spinal cord.”

“All the more reason to switch out who has to deal with it.” Adam thunked down onto the couch as Dean shut off the light.

“Guess so.”

+++

The next morning, Dean was up first, and went out to the kitchen to start breakfast. He thought about starting a pot of coffee, but they’d used up what was left the day before. He chuckled to himself, thinking about punching the emergency button to ask Crowley to buy them some more.

He pulled out the carton of eggs, which should have had two left. It seemed too heavy. Curious, Dean popped it open and found that somehow, there were five again, just like the day before. The same five, in the same spots they’d been in.

Fumbling around in jittery shock, he found the bacon, unopened, as it had been the morning prior, pristine and waiting for him to cut the plastic. He whirled around to open the pantry, found the same nearly empty bag of coffee grounds, the same half loaf of bread with a spot of mold on the heel. The coffee pot wasn’t on the counter, like they’d left it the day before.

He pulled it out of it’s hiding place in a lower cabinet, caked in dust, and he grabbed a dishtowel and swiped it off in sneeze-inducing puffs.

Glancing over at the couch, he grinned at his half-brother, conked out still, snoring lightly. He put on the coffee and got busy making breakfast. They wouldn’t even have to do the dishes today, he mused, since apparently everything would reset regardless. Deep down, he knew it was the same strange physics at work that had knitted his ruined body back together every night, creating anew the canvas upon which pain would be wrought, and it made something in his stomach tight and anxious, but he chose to move past it, to let himself reap the benefits in this particular context without thinking too hard about it.

“Good morning,” Dean murmured in greeting as Adam awoke to the smell of coffee.

“Thought we were out?” Adam slurred, sitting up on the sofa-bed.

“It’s all back,” Dean explained, “I think every night, it renews. We’ve got back everything we used yesterday. And everything’s back where it was. Had to dig out the coffee machine again, just as dusty as before.”

“Huh.” Adam rubbed his eyes. “Guess that’s a good thing.”

“Could be worse,” Dean shrugged.

+++

It took about six weeks for them to come up with entirely new rules for their game of Battleship, which entailed an elaborate set of guidelines that had to be memorized – since nothing written down on paper would stay overnight. They even took up their bare bones game of Monopoly, which was missing all of the hotel pieces, all of the community chest cards, all of the fifty dollar bills, all of the railroad cards, one of the die, and only had the thimble and the iron as character pieces.

Adam had a real knack for coming up with new and interesting rules for things, and Dean was entertained enough by that alone to let him dictate how to play around the many many gaps in materials.

He decided they’d use aces from the deck of playing cards to represent railroads, and would use the rest of the deck of playing cards as community chest – except the fives and jacks, which would stand in as fifty dollar bills. When you drew a ‘community chest’ card, if the suit was black, your opponent would give you a positive card effect (you collect fifteen dollars, etc), and if the suit was red, your opponent would assign you a negative card effect (go to the nearest property owned by your opponent and pay rent). They used dry beans from the pantry as hotels.

The first time they played it, Adam snapped up the iron player token, and Dean crossed his arms in dissent.

“How come I gotta be the thimble?”

“It suits you,” Adam replied, grinning a wicked little brother grin that Dean had seen on Sam’s face plenty of times.

“You tryin’ to say something?” Dean felt a blush rising in his cheeks. He felt stupid for caring this much, but it seemed significant. One of the only real signs of what Adam thought of him, so far. They’d been careful to avoid talking about the world outside, about their families, their lives, their selves. They both seemed equally intent to keep the peace, to reduce friction. This was one of his first glimpses into what Adam saw, when he looked at Dean, and he was beyond flustered by the possible implications. Adam, to his credit, seemed to clock that his ribbing was hitting too close to home, and he softened considerably.

“No?” Adam ran his thumb along the edge of the heavy pewter game piece, perfectly shaped like a tiny iron. “To be fair, I don’t think this one’s all that much cooler.”

“Irons are like, dangerous.” Dean felt even stupider trying to express his thoughts in actual words. “Thimbles are…I dunno, wimpy?”

“Or…thimbles are like. Armor. Like a shield. And irons are tools, or, or weapons?” Adam offered, far too generously, in Dean’s opinion.

“Come on,” Dean scoffed, plucking the thimble up, ready to be done with this conversation.

“I mean, seriously though. You’ve got a kind of protection thing, seems like. Why else would we be down here, right?” Adam continued, undeterred. “And I don’t know, I probably would’ve just steamed ahead and gotten myself into trouble, if you hadn’t brought me here.” He gestured at Dean – “Thimble,” and back to himself, “and iron.”

“Yeah, we’ve officially been down here too long, if that made any fuckin’ sense.” Dean shook his head fondly. “You wanna get rolling or wax poetic about the coffee pot and the cutting board next?”

“Might be a fun game,” Adam teased, rolling the single die twice, to make up for the missing one. “If we ever get hard up, just pick two things and force a metaphor out of ‘em.”

“Hard up, being the operative sentiment.” He watched Adam carry his little iron over to Baltic Avenue. “You’re just gonna hover it over the board? Man, you gotta walk it there.”

“What?” Adam looked at him in abject confusion.

“Yeah, man, you gotta, like this – “ He rolled the die two times and walked his thimble to St. Charles Place, clicking it on every space he passed. “Otherwise, the other person can’t count your spaces against what the dice say.”

“I mean, they can,” Adam argued, “They just can’t do it auditorily.”

“Fine, you get what I mean though, right?”

“Whatever,” Adam breathed, rolling again and moving forward four spaces, clacking his piece melodramatically against the cardboard. “Happy?”

“Very,” Dean grinned, scooping up the die again.

+++

Roughly three months later (Dean had been trying to keep track, and failing) they were both getting pretty tired of the same food all the time. It wasn’t like they could look up new recipes, or buy new ingredients. It came to a head one morning when Adam scraped his breakfast into the trash, untouched. Dean didn’t even have the heart to stop him.

“You want cereal instead? Or yogurt?”

“I’m so fucking tired of that yogurt,” Adam groaned.

“There’s fruit,” Dean offered weakly.

I know there is! There’s always fruit! There’s the same seven clementines, and the same two pears, and the same four gala apples, and the same carton of crusty ass blackberries!”

“Sorry,” Dean sighed, picking at his own eggs. He’d fried his, for a change of pace. He hadn’t bothered with bacon.

“I’m going back to bed.” Adam walked back over to the bed and crawled right back in, sheets probably still warm from when he’d been asleep there not an hour before.

“Alright.” Dean finished his food in silence and rinsed his plate in the sink, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary. He stared into the cold bright void of their fridge, willing it to be different, for it to reveal something to him. He pulled out all the sauces in the door, read their ingredients, tasted them. There was a bottle of maple syrup that’d been hiding behind a tall bottle of barbecue sauce. One of those short cartons of heavy whipping cream was nestled behind a tub of bread and butter pickles, which in turn had been hidden behind a massive squeeze bottle of ketchup.

The freezer still held that same frozen turkey, which would take ages to thaw, and would of course be whisked back to the freezer during the night, hard as a rock again. He supposed he could try thawing it out in the sink – there was no microwave to speed things along. Adam was snoring softly across the room. Dean decided to give it a try, running cold water and submerging the turkey in it, sink drain plugged.

He set about prepping things to go with it – used a few different sauces to make a glaze for the bird, mixed some spices to rub it down with, chopped their onion and carrots to cook alongside it. He boiled their potatoes and peeled the skins off, mashing them in a bowl using a big fork (since there was no potato masher to be found) and mixing in a dash of cream and a bunch of butter. He switched out the water thawing the turkey every half hour or so, to make sure it stayed cold enough.

He was still waiting for it to thaw through, and had already prepped all his sides, so he turned his attention towards a dessert. They had a preponderance of fruit, and not much in the way of granulated sugar, so he opted for an apple crisp. He hadn’t made anything like it in a very long time, honestly hadn’t made much of anything in years, not since that stretch of months they’d lived in a run down apartment while Sam was finishing high school. He’d made a peach crisp, there, and had been blindingly proud of himself for pulling it off.

By the time he finished getting that ready, the turkey, all four and a half pounds of it, were finally thawed, and he made quick work of getting it dressed and into the oven. There were no clocks in this place, but Dean had a good internal sense of time, and estimated that it was about four in the afternoon when he finally had a chance to go sit on the couch and wait for his turkey to cook.

Bored of waiting and ill-inclined to wake Adam with the television, which would almost certainly be playing Law & Order reruns, he went and took a shower. He seldom did, since their bodies didn’t seem to get dirty or stinky, like they refreshed every day right along with the apartment and its contents.

It was nice, though, to stand under the hot spray, even though it was little more than an impotent trickle.

He came out feeling renewed, as silly as it was, to feel like you were turning over a new leaf in a place like this, where nothing new can be made, or kept.

Adam slumbered on, miserable and small, and Dean wished they were closer to one another, wished he had anything at all to offer him as comfort besides his own guilty conscience, his own mealy-mouthed apologies.

He checked the turkey, and it was coming along nicely. He popped the carrots in along with it, put the potatoes on the stove to heat slowly, seasoning them periodically.

Wishing they had wine or something else suitably interesting to drink with their meal, he dug around in the pantry and fridge, looking for anything else to try. He kept coming back to those pitiful little blackberries. For the first time since they’d arrived here, he got them out of the fridge and inspected them. They weren’t moldy, but they were dehydrated, robbed of their vitality by the fridge’s dry conditions. He dumped them in a saucepan with an inch or so of water and brought them to a boil, at this point just curious to see if anything could be done with them whatsoever. He ripped open a few sugar packets from the mug cabinet and shook their contents into the bubbling mass, stirring lazily, watching the water darken and thicken.

He paused to check the carrots and turkey, then went back to stirring. He ended up with a syrupy goo, so purple it was almost black. He took it off the heat and tasted it, expecting a gritty bitter taste, surprised to find that it was more or less like blackberry jam, if a great deal thinner in consistency.

Alone for what was essentially the first time in over four months, he found himself humming songs to himself as he tooled around the kitchen, looking for nicer plates than they usually used, looking for fancier serving dishes. In a cupboard high above the stove, perched over the hood vent, was a set of porcelain plates adorned with little purple flowers painted in the center, edges gilded in a delicate design. He carefully brought them down, teetering on a wooden chair in bare feet as he did so, and brought down a large silver serving tray that had been stashed there as well.

Checking the progress of the items in the oven, he deemed the carrots done, moving them to the top rack away from the heat, and slotted the apple crisp into its place beside the turkey, which smelled wonderful by then. It wouldn’t be much longer, before everything was done.

He set the table, once again confronted with the question of what to drink. He returned to the fridge, running through the inventory in his mind over and over again, until he remembered those grapefruit seltzers. In truth, they sounded awful, but he’d never deigned to try them. Snagging some ice from the freezer, he prepped two tall glasses and poured a seltzer into each. He took a sip and wrinkled his nose in displeasure. It was too sharp, barely even a hint of sweetness. His blackberry concoction sat across from him on the counter, unassuming. He spooned some of it into his glass and gave the whole thing a good stir with the handle of a fork, trying another sip. It was interesting, bearable. Maybe Adam would like it. He put some blackberry sludge in his glass, too.

Adam woke up just as he was pulling the turkey out of the oven, and his voice startled Dean so badly that he nearly dropped the pan (there was only one oven mitt in the apartment, so he had a towel wrapped haphazardly around one hand – a recipe for disaster).

“What the fuck?” Adam asked, not really asking Dean, just asking the air, asking the universe. He had a habit of doing that, a tone of voice reserved for disbelief.

“You’re up!” Dean exclaimed once the turkey was safely perched on the stovetop. “Good nap?”

“Dean…” Adam crept into the kitchen on hesitant feet, like he was scared. “What’s going on?”

“I’m, um.” Dean looked around at the apartment, at the kitchen. He had to admit, there was a lot to take in. “I’ve been cooking dinner,” Dean explained, gesturing at the food all around them.

“Uh-huh…” Adam glanced at the potatoes, then the carrots and onions. He stared at the turkey for a full thirty seconds.

“Kind of a lot, huh?” Dean could feel himself blushing, and he hated it. “Sorry, got carried away, I guess.”

Adam’s focus snapped back to him, like Dean’s words were a physical blow. To his confusion, Adam looked near tears, nostrils flaring, eyes shining.

Dean didn’t know what to say about it, so he went with the neutral option of pretending not to notice.

“Right, well. Um. You can carry the drinks over to the table, and I can fix us plates?”

Adam didn’t even nod, he just picked up the two glasses of vaguely purple bubbly liquid and stalked over to the table. He dropped into his chair like dead weight, leaden and rigid.

Dean carved off generous helpings for each of them, and served heaping portions of the side vegetables. He peeked at the apple crisp, and turned off the heat, though he left it in the oven to brown in the residual warmth.

Setting a plate in front of Adam, and one at his own spot, he tried to dispel the lump of unease in his throat.

“Uh, dig in, then,” Dean mumbled, taking his first bite of turkey. It was unbelievably good, well worth the effort, well worth the wait. He was a few bites in before he looked up at Adam, who still hadn’t taken a bite. He looked even more distraught than he had in the kitchen, tears visibly pooling on the cliff of his lower lashes, though surface tension kept them from spilling out.

Dean set down his own fork, not sure what to do. They’d both been through the emotional wringer these last few months, but neither one of them had cried yet. Or, well, not where the other could see. Dean cried in the shower sometimes, or in bed at night.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Dean asked, hushed and gentle, worried that if he came at this wrong, it could make things a whole lot worse.

“Just,” Adam looked up from his plate, and the tears did fall, then, two perfect tracks down his cheeks. Dean’s chest ached. He looked like a kid. He was, really. “I’m pretty sure it’s my birthday.”

“Oh,” Dean breathed. Time worked differently, he knew, and had accordingly stopped keeping track of these hypothetical days. Adam, apparently, had been keeping track all on his own.

“This morning, I was so…I couldn’t believe I’d been killed, and then brought back, and then just…stuffed down here to rot. To watch the same TV and eat the literal same food and do the same stupid shit until people I don’t know and don’t trust manage to fix everything. I figure I can’t die down here. So I just…went back to bed. I didn’t want to play the game anymore.”

“Hey, I get that,” Dean assured him, but Adam sniffed hard, shook his head, bullied his expression into something more composed.

“No, I…you don’t get it.” Adam gritted his teeth. “I wanna be mad at you! I wanted to, at least. But…” His brows drooped, tension leaving him. “Nobody’s ever done something like this just to cheer me up. Not even my mom.”

“I mean, I didn’t – “ Dean started, but Adam shook his head, fighting a smile.

“Bullshit, Dean.” Adam held his gaze. “This morning, I blow up about eating the same shit all the time, and you spend all day figuring out new shit to make for me. You even found new fucking plates to serve it on, man.”

Dean shrugged, feeling caught.

“Yeah,” Dean sighed, recognizing the futility in protesting it. Adam picked up his fork and took a bite of the turkey, groaning in appreciation as he chewed.

“Fuck, dude. You’re the best.”

Dean laughed in surprise at the praise, which just kept coming. Every new thing Adam ate was accompanied by enthusiastic feedback – even the beverage, which he liked a great deal more than Dean did.

After they’d stuffed themselves with turkey and potatoes and carrots, Dean pulled the apple crisp out of the nearly cooled oven and brought it over to the table. He couldn’t find any birthday candles out there, but he did stumble across a box of long kitchen matches.

He set the whole pan of apple crisp down in front of Adam.

“Happy birthday?” He asked, more than stated.

“You made dessert?” Adam responded, eyes wide.

“Well, yeah.”

“Dude,” Adam exclaimed, with great feeling. He went to pick up the big spoon Dean had brought over, to serve himself some, but Dean waved his hand away.

“Gotta blow out a candle and do the whole wish thing first!” Dean insisted, lighting one of the matches and sticking it into the center of the apple crisp.

“You gonna sing?” Adam challenged, eyebrows high on his forehead. Dean rolled his eyes, the flame marching down the matchstick as they dawdled.

“Sure, kid.” And Dean did sing. For the first time since Sam was like, fourteen, he sang ‘happy birthday’, and Adam blew out the match flame, and Dean clapped in what was meant to be a sort of sarcastic display, but which ended up being rather sincere. They each served themselves a veritable mountain of cinnamon slathered apples and toasty oaty crust, and for the first time since he arrived in this wretched little place, he felt like he wasn’t just treading water.

+++

The months skated past, but not as cruelly as before. They spent more time getting to know each other. They talked about their childhoods, their families. The strange shared father that neither of them knew how to love, that neither of them could ever get a real read on, no matter how hard they’d tried. Adam talked about how he’d always wished he’d had siblings, and Dean talked about how he’d always wished he had friends, not just acquaintances, but people he could hang on to for years. Adam would talk about his college pals, and about his high school friend group that had preceded it. Dean talked about Sam, about Bobby. About Cas.

It had been a few years, somehow. Crowley had stopped by once in that time, just to ‘check in’. He’d refused to give them any information about the world outside, besides that Sam and Bobby and Cas were well, and that they had a plan brewing.

They were used to the ins and outs of the place. Used to the leaky faucet in the kitchen, used to the parade of crappy cop TV running on a loop, used to the finite combination of foods at their disposal, used to the impermanent permanence of all things. Used to the uncomfortable beds, which somehow seemed to alternate in quality at random. Sometimes, you’d sleep on the double bed and be worse off than on the couch. Sometimes you’d sleep on the couch and feel like your spine was getting ground to bits by the bed frame. There was no rhyme or reason to it. They continued to alternate.

“Dude,” Adam said, sitting on the edge of the double bed in his usual sleepwear, just boxers and his t-shirt, “You gotta come feel this mattress.”

Dean sighed and abandoned the blanket he’d been smoothing over the fold out mattress, complying.

He sat down and his eyes went wide. It was heavenly, like a cloud. It had never been that comfortable, in all the time they’d been here.

“What the…”

“I don’t know, but, like, right?” Adam asked, giddy.

“Man, you lucked out,” Dean snorted, rising up reluctantly to trudge back over to his bed, which at first blush seemed even less comfortable than usual tonight.

“We should share it,” Adam blurted out, surprising both Dean and himself.

“It’s a double bed, Adam.” Dean felt like he was talking to a crazy person.

“Yeah? So?”

“So, I’m over six feet tall. You’re like, almost as tall as me. How would that even work?”

“I don’t know but I’ll feel so fucking bad if I get to sleep on this and you miss out. What if it’s never this good again?” He asked, suddenly frantic.

“I…yeah. Okay.” Dean rubbed a tired hand over his face. “Maybe head to foot would work?”

That’s how they ended up crammed together on one double bed, on the very last night of April, 2010. It had been fifteen days, in the real world, and five long years for them.

“You awake?” Adam hissed in the darkness, about ten minutes after they lay down.

“Yeah.”

“You ever play two truths and a lie?”

“Not since I was like, twelve,” Dean giggled, head brushing against the footboard as he moved.

“Which one am I allergic to – scallops, brazil nuts, or chicken?” Adam whispered sharply.

“Scallops?” Dean answered through a yawn.

“Nope!” Adam replied, victorious. “Brazil nuts.”

“That come up often?” Dean teased.

“Thankfully, no.” Adam paused. “Your turn.”

“This is dumb, you didn’t even do two truths. You did two lies and a truth.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Okay,” Dean sighed, resigned. “Which of these is a lie,” he emphasized the word, melodramatically, “The impala got possessed by a ghost, it gets 15 miles per gallon, or Sam was briefly turned into it.”

“Turned into the car?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. What’s your guess?”

“Um, that one?”

“Well, you’re wrong.”

“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

“Nope.” Dean smiled up at the ceiling, which he could barely make out in the dark. “Sam got turned into the car by an archangel, like, Knight Rider style. Temporarily.”

“Fuck, that’s crazy!” Adam laughed, the bed shaking with it.

“Yeah, and it got possessed by a ghost, too. More than once, I think.”

“So how many miles does it get per gallon?”

“Like ten? Twelve on a good day.”

“Yikes.” Adam thought for a moment. “Alright, which did I not do – go to summer camp for mimes, go to summer camp for the trombone, or go to bobsledding camp?”

“You’re telling me two of those are true?” Dean cried, throwing a spare pillow toward the headboard. It hit a surprised Adam, and he let out a disgruntled ‘oof’. “How many camps did you go to, man?”

“My mom worked a lot! In the summer, it was either camps or stay at home bored by myself all day. I was at boy scout camp for half the summer, and then the rest, I had to find other camps to fill my time.”

“Man, I always wanted to go to summer camp,” Dean lamented. Adam patted his shin in sympathy.

“It was fun, sometimes. Other times it sucked.”

“Yeah, but that’s like, everything, when you’re a kid.”

“Guess so. You gonna pick one?”

“Gotta be mime camp. Ain’t no way there’s even a mime camp to go to.”

“Nah. I didn’t go to bobsled camp.”

“You went to MIME CAMP? There’s a MIME CAMP?” Dean shouted, sitting up halfway to stare at the blonde tuft of Adam’s head peeking out of the covers. “Man, bullshit.”

“Hey, your turn,” Adam replied coolly.

“Okay, I’m not afraid of snakes, flying, or clowns?”

“Clowns. I bet there’s so many creepy clown things out there, man, I don’t even wanna know.” Adam shuddered.

“Wrong again,” Dean gloated, “Sammy’s the one that’s afraid of clowns. And, for the record, there are creepy clown things out there. And they’re so fucked up. This one time – “

“Don’t wanna know!” Adam repeated, and Dean chuckled.

“Fine, fine. It’s flying. Scares the fuck out of me.”

“Yeah?” Adam sounded surprised, sobered by the fact.

“Yep.”

“Why?” He asked, after a beat. “You do such scary shit all the time. Why flying, of all things?”

“I…I dunno. I’m just a normal person at the end of the day, you know?” Dean picked at the seam of the blanket covering him. “Most things, I can control at least a little. Showdown with a ghost? I call the shots, and if I make a mistake, that’s on me. But flying? I just have to wait, and to…to trust that somebody I’ve never met is going to do everything right.”

“That’s…wow,” Adam whispered.

“What?”

“I get it.”

“Yeah?”

“I mean. I’m not afraid of flying. But, that’s kinda how I feel, down here.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“You learn any good coping mechanisms at mime camp?” Dean needled, and Adam laughed.

“Maybe so! I’m not sharing ‘em with you, though, asshole.”

“Good, I don’t want your dirty mime secrets anyway.”

They both laughed for a little while, tapering off into easy silence. The bed really was more comfortable than it had ever been. Maybe more comfortable than any bed Dean had ever slept on in his life. He let himself sink into it.

“Goodnight, Dean.” Adam rolled over, back to Dean.

“G’night, kid,” Dean muttered, already teetering on the edge of sleep.

Chapter Text

MAY 2010  //  YEARS 6 – 15 IN HELL

“Dare.”

“Man, you haven’t picked ‘truth’ in like, four months!” Adam complained, tossing a clementine up above his head, catching it. He lobbed it up again, and Dean walked behind the couch and snatched it out of the air.

“Mhmm.” Dean tossed the ball from one hand to the other, back and forth, forth and back. “You think we could do some juggling? Might be fun.”

“Maybe, yeah,” Adam mused, before remembering what he’d been driving at in the first place. “But, later. Seriously, why only dares?”

“Just more fun, I guess.”

“Oh, sure. Doesn’t have anything to do with your big meltdown last time?”

“Meltdown’s kinda harsh,” Dean grumbled. “I just didn’t wanna talk about it.”

“Yeah, but I’m not gonna ask about it. Lesson learned!” He raised his hands in mock surrender. Dean came around the side of the couch and sat down on the arm of it, angled toward Adam.

“Okay. Fine. Ask me.”

“Truth or dare.”

“…Truth.”

Dean leveled him with a hard stare, almost challenging him to fuck it up. Adam assured himself that he was reading too far into it.

“Easy one – what’s the ugliest car?”

“Like, specific? Or broad?”

“Either.” Adam shrugged. Dean chewed his lower lip. He thought it was a softball question, but Dean’s mind seemed to be studded with landmines. Maybe this was one of them.

“Hmm. Ugly, like objectively? Or in my opinion?”

“In your opinion, dude.” Adam shook his head in fond disbelief. “Nobody asks questions in truth or dare to get like, facts. I’m not gonna quiz you on state capitals and math problems, you know?”

“Yeah, yeah. You didn’t grow up with a shithead brother, then. Used to grill me about all kindsa shit, when we played this game.”

“So. Ugliest car.”

“Yeah,” Dean blew out a heavy sigh. “Trucks.”

“What?” Adam laughed at the simple answer. “That’s it, trucks? Just, all trucks?”

“Yup. Some are uglier than others, but they’re all so square. Just the aesthetic equivalent of like, two carboard boxes on wheels.”

“Never thought about it that way,” Adam mused. It had been almost six years since either of them had seen any kind of vehicle in real life, including trucks. Thinking about them now felt kind of like thinking about a giraffe – something you know exists somewhere, but never where you are.

“Plus, guy who drives a truck, instant douche signal. Especially somewhere urban. Unless you’re like, hauling fertilizer all day or towing shit around, there’s no reason to have one.”

“Instant? Damn.”

“There. Your turn. Truth or dare?”

“Be kinda hypocritical if I said ‘dare’.”

“I wouldn’t give you shit for it,” Dean punched him in the shoulder, teasing.

“Truth.” He looked over at Dean, who was still grinning from his little dig, though his eyes were distant, like he was really mulling something over.

“I know I got pissed off about it, last time…” Dean ventured, and Adam held his breath. “But I think it was a fair question. I’m gonna ask it to you, and if you want, you can ask me back.”

“Okay,” Adam murmured, tracking every micro-expression of his half-brother’s face as he spoke, trying to divine his intentions, his expectations. The sink dripped in the background, the only sound besides Dean’s breathing.

“Did you like John?” It wasn’t how Adam had asked it, four months prior. But it’s what he’d meant, when he asked ‘what was it like, growing up with Dad?’, and that made it worse, to hear it echoed back like this. To hear how it had sounded to Dean’s ears. No wonder he’d gotten so upset.

“Not really, no.” Adam looked down at his hands in his lap. “Man, I wanted to, really bad. Tried to be grateful – I mean, how many kids who grow up not knowing anything about their father get that kind of a chance, get to meet him, get to spend time with him?”

“But you didn’t like him.”

“Hard to like a guy who’s hardly ever around.” Adam held out his hand, absentmindedly, and Dean plopped the clementine into his palm. They’d spent long enough around each other that these kinds of physical gestures were self-explanatory. He rolled it between his fingers, felt where the wrinkly orange skin had pulled away from the fruit within. “He’d show up, try to impress me – take me to a baseball game on my birthday, or teach me how to drive while my mom was at work. Stuff that could’ve meant something, if he did any of the other stuff. The hard stuff. The being there for you kinda stuff. But he was doing it as like, an apology. A way of saying he wouldn’t do all that other stuff, ever, and this was all I was going to get.”

“That sounds like John,” Dean commiserated. Adam wondered how different their childhoods had been, really. If they’d just been two sides of the same lonely coin.

“Truth or dare?” He asked, looking back at Dean. He tried his best to convey that he was giving him an out, if he still wanted it. One last exit, before you hop on the toll highway.

“Truth.” Dean smiled, just at the corner of his mouth, and Adam wanted to know why, but that wasn’t the question he was supposed to ask.

“Did you like John?”

“Yes and no.” Dean was quiet for a long time, and Adam wondered if that was it, the only answer he’d get. Eventually, Dean cleared his throat and started again. “Even when I was real little, he wasn’t perfect. But back then, back before – he was just a normal guy, you know? Trying to fit into married life, into fatherhood. If nothing else had happened, I like to think he woulda figured it out. But then mom…and that was it, you know? Hard to like someone who doesn’t really exist anymore.”

Adam let out a surprised exhale at the brutal honesty of it. Dean shrugged, queasy smile still tugging at his lips.

“S’true. He abandoned us, even when he was in the freakin’ room. He put so much on me, right from the start. Wanted me to pick up the slack – all of it, mom’s and his. And he’s all I had, until Sammy was old enough to talk. So I liked him, or I tried to, or something. Because I didn’t have anybody else, in the whole world. I wanted him to be proud of me, and by the time he was…I wasn’t me, anymore. He was proud of this like, character, that I created. And by the time I had his approval? I didn’t want it anymore.”

“Sam wasn’t kidding, when he said I was probably better off for not having grown up with him.”

“Yeah, I mean. Sam hated him, growing up.” Dean snorted a bitter laugh. “Til he was dead. Then all he could do was talk about the guy, what he would’ve done in our shoes. How to be the people he had wanted us to be.”

“Kinda wild, but I uh. Don’t even know how he died, actually.”

“Demon.” Dean went to the kitchen and pulled out one of their three beers. He looked at Adam for a second, and seemed to intuit just from his posture that he also wanted one, so he snagged another, popping them both open on the edge of the counter. “He made a deal, to save my life.”

“Didn’t you…” Adam knew he must look ridiculously lost. Dean handed him a beer as he came back over, sitting back down on the arm of the couch. He took a swig.

“Do that for Sam? Yeah.” Dean shook his head, maybe wistful, maybe regretful. “I keep tellin’ myself I’m nothing like John, but…not really beating the comparison on that one.”

“You think you’re like him?”

“Don’t you?” Dean asked, before swallowing a long pull of his drink.

“No.” Adam stared at him, hard. He tried to find any traces of John, in there. Maybe something in the arc of his brow, or the set of his lower lip. But nothing obvious. Nothing damning.

“Think you’re the first person to say that.” Dean sounded small.

“Sam really thinks you’re like John?”

“Says so, sometimes. But I don’t know if that’s what he really thinks, or whether he’s just saying it to make me feel bad.”

“Maybe it’s just hard for him to separate you guys, in his mind.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re both kinda his dads, in a way?” Adam glanced over at Dean, whose beer was frozen mid-air on its trajectory to his mouth. His lips were parted in surprise. Adam barreled on. “Like, ever since he was a little kid, you were doin’ dad stuff. Maybe even more than John was, right? I bet it’s hard to separate out your role in his life from John’s.”

Dean’s jaw clicked shut, and he rose from the end of the couch, rather woodenly. He drifted to the edge of the kitchen, set his beer down on the countertop, and continued on toward the bathroom. Adam was kicking himself, internally. He should’ve just stopped while he was ahead.

“Dean, wait – “ He called, rising from the couch as Dean grabbed the bathroom door, had one foot in the little tiled room already.

Dean turned, almost startled, and forced a half-smile.

“M’not mad. Just,” Dean waved an explanatory hand in front of his torso, then ducked into the bathroom. Adam heard the lock click. The shower hissed to life, muffled by the door.

+++

“You’re telling me that in seven years, you haven’t told me there’s a fuckin’ CD player?” Dean fumed, on his knees beside the bed, dusty stereo that he’d dragged out from under there sitting by his left leg.

“There’s only shitty CDs! I didn’t want to get your hopes up!” Adam countered, pointing at the equally dust-coated box of CDs Dean had discovered.

“I can’t believe this, man.” Dean stared at the CD player, caressing it with one hand. “Seven years of no music, and this was here the whole damn time.”

Dean scooped up the box of CDs, cradling it close to his chest like an infant, and began thumbing through them.

“Un-fucking-believable,” Dean muttered. “Fucking Morrison Hotel is in here. I coulda been listening to The fucking Doors!” He hissed.

“Dean,” Adam started, apology brewing, but Dean let out a strangled wheeze of surprise.

“Tusk! Fleetwood Mac! Are you kidding me, ‘shitty CDs’?”

“Okay, but there’s also like, four Scottish instrumental anthologies. And Jessica Simpson!”

“Sweet Kisses is nobody’s favorite album, but I wouldn’t kick it out of bed for eating crackers,” Dean snorted, tracing a finger over the dusky blue spine of the CD case.

“Who knew it’d only take seven years for you to lose your marbles.”

“Oh, gimme a break. I’ve heard what you sing in the shower.” Dean flashed him a wicked smile.

“You can hear that?”

“Dude, the walls are what, like, four inches thick? ‘Course I can.”

“You’ve never said anything about it!”

“Why would I? Doesn’t bug me. A man should be able to sing in the shower in peace.”

“Whatever,” Adam huffed, blushing as he remembered his last shower, singing ‘Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair’ from his high school’s production of South Pacific. “You gonna plug that thing in or what?”

Dean scrambled on hands and knees over to the outlet by the bed and plugged in the stereo, popping the CD slot open with a mechanical chtick. One of the plastic CD cases squelched as he opened it. He blew the dust off of the disc and placed it in the waiting player, pressing it down until it clicked. He closed the lid and hit play, then sat back on his heels and waited for it to start.

The steady, trudging beat of ‘Over & Over’ started up, and Dean let out an audible sigh of relief.

“Christine McVie, I could kiss you,” Dean murmured as her voice drifted out of the speakers. Adam hadn’t ever been much for Fleetwood Mac, but he felt tears springing to his eyes at the sound. Dean was right – seven years without music was too long.

As the song faded out, he got more of a grip on himself, and the musical tone shifted with the next song, which was much faster. He didn’t recognize it, but Dean seemed to.

“Hell, I’d kiss you too, Lindsey.”

“Lindsey?”

“Lindsey Buckingham?” Dean replied, quirking his brow, mouth twisting down into a troubled frown, like he’d just realized Adam was some kind of pitiful fool.

“Sorry,” Adam shrugged.

“Man, that’s just sad.” Dean turned up the stereo, and the third track came on, which Adam already liked a lot better than the second.

“I like this one.”

“Yeah?” Dean grinned, “You and Christine, then.”

“She sang the first one?”

“Uh, yeah, she did.” Dean rolled his eyes, like this was obvious.

“And Lindsey, she sang the other one?”

“She? Lindsey’s a dude.”

“Sorry, jeez.”

“You know anything about music?”

“Not this kind, no.”

“Then what kind?”

“I dunno. Uh, Beck? Arctic Monkeys?”

“Christ, you’re worse than Sam.”

“I mean, we got time. Educate me, if it’s that important to you.”

“Okay,” Dean got a funny look on his face, but it disappeared as soon as it had come. “So Fleetwood Mac is five people – Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, John McVie, Stevie Nicks – that’s who’s singing on this track, it’s called Sara – and then, Lindsey Buckingham.”

“Lemme get a beer for this,” Adam huffed, realizing this was going to be a long conversation, and mostly one-sided.

“Grab me one?”

“Mhmm.”

“Okay, so the thing you gotta know about Fleetwood Mac, is they were all fucking each other, and fucking each other over, and getting fucked up on all kindsa shit. By the end, half of ‘em couldn’t stand each other – and that’s why some of their shit is so good,” Dean explained, reminding Adam of an English professor he’d had in his first semester, who talked just like this about the private lives of classic authors. He popped the cap off his beer and settled in to listen.

+++

“No, no, no, fuck!” Adam wiped his eyes and rolled over on the sofa bed, pulled himself up to peer over the back of the couch at Dean, who was hunched over on the floor, pleading with the CD player.

“Dean?” He yawned, and Dean whipped his head around to look at him.

“Ah, fuck, sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“What’s wrong?”

“CD player’s busted.” Dean said it the way you might say ‘my dog just died’.

“How’s that even possible? Everything resets.”

“Guess not everything.” Dean flopped back onto the floor, laying on the clammy linoleum. “Sink’s always broke. Crisper drawer came off its track last week, ‘n it’s still fucked up.”

“You weren’t gonna tell me?”

“You didn’t notice?” Dean countered, venomous. Adam took a deep breath, to avoid lashing out right back. Dean got like this sometimes, when he felt helpless.

“You’ve been doing all the cooking. I haven’t been in the fridge in a few weeks.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Dean huffed, covering his eyes with the back of his forearm. “What if everything in here kicks the bucket, what if it all stops working?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, what if it’s not just the sink, and the drawer, and the friggin’ CD player?” Dean sounded miserable. Laying on his back like that made his voice sound different, younger. Not so deep.

“What, like, entropy? Like it all just falls apart, the longer we’re here?”

“Maybe, yeah,” Dean warbled, distraught. Adam rose from the sofa-bed and crept over, crouched down next to him. He looked at the CD player, the disc slot gaping open like a scream.

“What’s wrong with it?” Adam asked, worried that if he just started messing with it, it’d only upset Dean more. Dean slid his arm further down, so that it was his hand that was covering his face.

“Won’t play without scratching ‘em all to heck. Skippin’.” His voice was muffled by the heel of his hand.

“Mind if I test it out on one of the instrumental ones?”

“Be my guest.”

Adam scrounged around under the bed until he felt the box, hooking a finger in the side and scooting it out. He selected an album with four men on the cover, all wielding bagpipes in what felt like a threat, to Adam and his bagpipe-hating ears.

He popped it into the player and closed the cover, pressed play. There were a few solid seconds of wailing honking bagpipes before the telltale hiccup of a CD skipping. Another few notes. A longer skip, the sound of a pencil scribbling on drywall, a dry scratchy scrape. He winced, pressed pause.

“See?” Dean mumbled, and all Adam could do was sigh.

“We had it for what, ten months?” Adam asked, and Dean groaned in agreement. “That’s better than nothing.”

“I just wanted to listen to ‘Tusk’. Or ‘Peace Frog’,” Dean whimpered.

“Hmm.” Adam tapped the floor beside him. It made a hollow thunk. He smiled down at his hand, tapped the floor again, kept tapping – rhythmic and slow, building the tempo up incrementally. Dean uncovered his face, curious.

“You drumming ‘Tusk’ for me?” Dean asked after a few minutes of this, grinning in disbelief.

“Maybe,” Adam grinned back. Dean began humming the horn part over top of it, and it occurred to Adam that he’d hardly ever heard Dean sing, even though they’d spent almost eight years living on top of each other. The last time must have been that first birthday, when he’d cooked him a makeshift feast.

At the right time in the song they were performing together, Adam threw his head back and shouted “Tusk!” – and Dean crunched in on himself in a fit of laughter.

“Thanks, man.” Dean sat up, recovering his breath. “I don’t tell you near enough, but if it was just me down here, I’d’ve gone full crazy a long time ago.”

“Damn straight!” Adam laughed. “You know,” he ventured, “We could just, like. Sing.”

“You and me?” Dean raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, why not?” Adam crossed his arms, challenging him with his body language. “That’s what people did before recorded music existed. They just did it live.”

“You know what. Yes.” Dean got to his feet, gripped by the possibilities this opened up. “Who needs a stinkin’ CD player anyhow?”

“Now the real question is, what songs do we both know?”

“I bet we can figure somethin’ out.”

+++

“I’m tellin’ you, we get outta here, start a band,” Dean insisted, too serious. It had been a few straight weeks of teaching each other songs. It had been almost a year, since the CD player broke. They got on kicks like this, sometimes, when talking was too hard, but silence was unwelcome.

“Oh, shove it. We aren’t starting a band, Dean.”

“You play trombone! That could be handy,” Dean continued to scheme, as if Adam hadn’t spoken.

“We’re certainly not starting a band that highlights trombone music.”

“Better than bagpipes?” Dean teased.

“Anything is.” Adam rolled his eyes.

“Then drums, like you been doin’. Drums and back-up vocals.”

“And you’d do lead vocals?”

“And guitar. I took guitar lessons, once,” Dean added, an afterthought. And that was new information. It had been a few months, since he’d learned much of anything new about Dean.

“John paid for you to take guitar lessons?”

Dean immediately blanched, and Adam clamped his own mouth shut. He was getting better about biting his tongue, instead of digging himself a deeper hole.

“No.” Dean sucked his lower lip into his mouth, tongue darting out to worry at the seam between his chin and his lip.

“Then…?” Adam prompted after a few tense moments of silence.

“Girl I knew. Robin. She taught me for free.”

“Thought you didn’t have any friends.” Adam meant it to be good-natured. Teasing. It came out too flat, too genuine. Dean flinched, and Adam felt like an asshole.

“I didn’t,” Dean said, sounding far away, like he was standing at the bottom of a deep well. He paused, and Adam wondered if it was just an only child thing, or if it was specific to him, the way he always seemed to step on Dean’s good mood, to make him feel stupid, or wrongfooted. Like he had to explain himself.

Another angle he considered was Dean’s own rush to carry shame, to find fault with himself and his ideas, turning innocuous observations into critiques – deserved critiques. Of course, he worried that he was just looking for a way to let himself off the proverbial hook, to pass blame for Dean’s sudden downturn in mood on him.

“Right,” Adam replied, trying to think of a way to pivot out of this conversation. Dean started up again though, saving him from saying something else that would make things worse.

“I got arrested, when I was a teenager. I was shoplifting.” Dean looked defeated. “Food. I was stealing food. For Sam ‘n me. The cops called Dad, let him know what happened. And he told ‘em to let me ‘rot in jail’.”

“Christ,” Adam breathed.

“But cops took me to a boys’ home, instead. Sonny’s. He was…I would’ve stayed, if Dad hadn’t come by after a while, bored of havin’ to take care of Sam all by himself.” Dean’s color was coming back, and his shoulders squared off again. “That’s where I met Robin. She’d come by, teach some guitar if people were interested.”

“And she wasn’t your friend?”

“More than. Was gonna take her to a dance – all dressed up and everything. But Dad showed, needed me for a hunt. Had to stand her up.”

“Oh,” Adam replied, knot in his stomach. Just how much had Dean had to give up, over the years? “Well, okay then.” Adam swallowed, still searching for a way out of the snake pit he’d dropped their conversation into. “So you’re lead vocals, and guitar. And I’m backing vocals and drums. Think we can teach Sam to play bass?”

Dean looked over at him, and Adam could just tell, that he could see it as the olive branch it was. He shook his head, scraped together a smile.

“Nah, Sammy’s hopeless with music. He can be our manager or somethin’. Bet we could teach Cas to play bass though.”

“Yeah? He’d definitely do it, if it was you that was asking.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dean asked, faking offense. A few years ago, the offense taken might’ve been genuine. It struck Adam how far they’d come.

“Just seems like you could get that guy to do just about anything, if you asked nice enough.”

“Whatever,” Dean laughed. It didn’t escape Adam’s notice, the way his cheeks pinked.

+++

He’d been in a shit mood since he woke up, and Dean walking on eggshells around him just pissed him off that much more. Dean had stopped keeping track of the days. Adam wished it was that easy. They’d been down here ten years. A decade. Just a shade longer than half of the time Adam had been alive on Earth. And it was Dean’s fault.

“You hungry?” Dean asked, eyes flicking away from the episode of White Collar that Adam had been engrossed in. Dean hated the show, and all the other cops and lawyers stuff on their only TV channel. Frankly, it was far from Adam’s liking, too, but it was comforting. Made it feel like somewhere, the world was waiting for them, breath held, holding a spot for them to slot back into.

“What’s it matter? Don’t need to eat anyhow.” It was true. They’d run a few experiments, in the previous year – whether things still reset if you don’t fall asleep, whether it’s possible to stay up all night in the first place, even in shifts. They found it impossible to stay awake all night – supernaturally so. They’d also tested to see if you get stinky if you don’t shower for a month (Dean bit the bullet and volunteered as guinea pig for that one, since Adam relied on showers for his mental health), and whether you’d starve if you didn’t eat (Adam volunteered for that one, since Dean cooked to cope with stress – even if he’d never admit that that was the case).

“Don’t need to, but, you know. You might want to.”

“Don’t care.” Adam stared at the television. Imagined what it would be like to walk down a busy street, like the characters were doing on screen. He wanted it so bad that he was getting a headache.

“I’m gonna make french toast. You want some?” He knew what Dean’s game was here. Adam loved french toast – especially the way Dean made it. Neither of them could be sure what time it was, but it had to be well past three in the afternoon.

Adam shrugged, grunted noncommittally. Dean, ever placid, content to wait anybody’s bad mood out if they’d let him, stood up and went to the kitchen. True to his word, Dean began whipping up the egg mixture for french toast.

When it was finished, he didn’t even ask if Adam wanted any, or set a place for him at the table passive aggressively (the way his mom might’ve, back in the day). He just brought it right to him, where he was camped out on the couch, and handed it to him.

The first few bites were divine, as always, and he reminded himself not to look like he was enjoying it too much, because he was mad at Dean. It would just muddy the waters, to act grateful and then pivot right back to brooding. Dean sat at the other end of the sofa, socked feet up on the cushion, knees drawn up to his chest, plate balanced between them.

He was about halfway done with his food, when Dean spoke, setting Adam’s teeth on edge.

“S’it good?”

“As it can be,” Adam bit back, and Dean’s neutral expression of mild curiosity fell, and part of him wanted to take it back. Apologize for snapping. But the part of him that woke up angry glowed like a hot coal with grim satisfaction. Let him feel like shit, too. Let him feel as trapped and hopeless as Adam did.

“Somethin’ bugging you?” Dean asked, after another five or so minutes of tense silence.

“You.” He shot a meaningful glare over at Dean, and Dean looked caught somewhere between anger and simple hurt.

“I can go camp out in the bathroom, if you need a break?” They did this, sometimes. One of them would get overwhelmed by the lack of alone time, by the constant sound of another person breathing and blinking and thinking nearby, and they’d sequester themselves until the feeling passed. But this was different. It wouldn’t matter if Dean went to the fucking moon, because Adam would still be here, waiting for an eternity to pass. And it would still be Dean’s fault.

“Sure, go hide. Very you,” Adam sneered. Dean’s face turned red, blooming up from his shirt collar.

“S’that supposed to mean?”

“isn’t that what we’re doing down here? Hiding?” Adam was seething, and it felt good. “We’re down here playing fuckin’ house, while Sam and Cas and Bobby could be getting their asses kicked. And we’d just be down here, twiddling our thumbs, none the wiser. Eating french fuckin’ toast.”

“Thought you said you’d give this a shot,” Dean started, but Adam cut him off with a bout of nearly hysterical laughter.

"What do you think I’ve been doing, Dean?” Adam shouted. “It’s been ten years! Thirty days, topside. They’ve had a month, I’ve waited a damn decade! Am I just supposed to be patient forever?”

“You’re angry at me.” Dean’s expression cleared, and Adam just stared at him. Obviously he was angry, he was fucking livid. So why did Dean look almost relieved? “Come on. Hit me. Won’t even hit you back. Free one.”

“Are you insane?” Adam whispered, voice hissing through his gritted teeth.

“It’ll make you feel better. Come on.” Dean leaned into Adam’s space, arms limp at his sides. He tilted his face toward Adam, cheek first. An invitation. Adam leapt up from the couch, backward, nearly falling over the arm of it as he went.

“You are insane!” Adam cried, anger mingling with a fear that made his toes numb.

“Man, you never hit somebody or somethin’?” Dean looked bewildered by Adam’s response, like somehow Adam was the crazy one, like somehow he was overreacting.

“Not like that!”

“Well, maybe you should try it. Make me feel as bad as you do.” Dean gestured between them with an outstretched hand, and Adam recoiled further, feet sliding on the linoleum until he was backed against the kitchen counter. Dean got up from the couch and stood in front of him. “Dude, relax. If you don’t want to, then don’t. Whatever.”

“This is your fucking problem, Dean. Somebody gets upset with you – for something shitty that you really did – and you take the blame, sure. But you don’t take responsibility. You’re happy to let people beat up on you if it’ll get ‘em off your back. But the minute you have to actually bite the bullet and work to fix your mistake? You run away.”

“You don’t know shit about me,” Dean hissed, and Adam grinned, triumphant, for having struck a nerve. Finally, that calm veneer was washing away. Finally, he could hash this out.

“The hell I don’t! I’ve seen you every day for the last ten years! I’ve heard your life story a million times, could recite it all, back to front – “

“Just what I’ve told you!” Dean protested, interrupting. He stuck an accusing finger in Adam’s face. “You don’t know anything about me!”

“Are you really that full of crap? Huh? That I could live with you for ten years and not even know you?”

“I’m not full of – “ Dean started, but Adam kept going.

“Bullshit!” Adam shouted. “Either this whole time, you’ve been full of shit, or I’m right.”

“That’s not true!” Dean cried, sounding more distraught than angry. “I swear, I – “

“Save it! Seriously! All the self-flagellating crap, all you do is make decisions for other people, and take on whatever consequences there are, because you’d rather be in control and deal with the fallout than actually let anyone else make their own decisions!” Adam shoved Dean’s shoulders, and Dean let out a surprised puff of air. “You talk all the damn time about Bobby, and about Sam, about how much you care about them and want them safe, but you don’t love them enough to trust them! You don’t trust anybody!”

“Of course I do! I trust them to figure this out without me – “ Dean leaned back into Adam’s space, but Adam interrupted again.

“Sure, you trust them so much that you lit out of there without even telling them, without even asking what they thought. Even Cas! You think he’s so great, the sun shines out of his angelic ass, but you don’t give a damn what he thinks, or you wouldn’t be down here, because there’s no way he would have let you do this, is there?”

“You shut up about Cas – “

“Or what, huh? What’re you – “ Dean interrupted him with a clean punch to the face, rocking him back on his heels. If he hadn’t been backed against the counter, he would’ve fallen right on his ass. He groped around behind him and grabbed a cool metallic handle – probably the whisk from the french toast mixture – and swung it right at Dean’s face. It was heavier than it should’ve been, and he only realized why right as it completed its arc and connected with his temple. It was a metal frying pan, the one Dean had used earlier.

It made a dull clang as it crashed into his skull, and Dean dropped to the floor like a ragdoll.

“Fuck!” Adam dropped the pan, and it crashed obnoxiously onto the linoleum, but Dean didn’t stir at the sound. Adam scrambled down onto the floor beside his unconscious half-brother, snippets of his EMT training from a literal lifetime ago flickering to the front of his mind as he tried to assess the damage.

Dean was bleeding from a laceration along his hairline between his eye and his ear, and Adam knew that head wounds bled more than other ones, intellectually, but it was something else entirely to see it in action. Of course, Dean had suffered two head wounds, in the last minute or so – the primary injury (frying pan to the face, probably the sphenoid bone) and the secondary injury (linoleum floor to the parietal bone).

He thought about applying pressure, to stop the bleeding, but what if he had a skull fracture? Pressure would only make that worse. Adam could hear himself mumbling curse words and other panicked nonsense, but he couldn’t divert the necessary brain power from triaging Dean to make himself stop it.

Shit, was he even breathing?

The thought crashed into him with physical force, and he stared at Dean’s chest, thought he could see it rising and falling, but what if it was his imagination, some twisted wishful thinking? He bent forward where he was perched on his knees and pressed his ear to Dean’s chest, and he let out a strangled cry of relief when he heard the steady thumping of his heartbeat.

Now that he was sure Dean didn’t need CPR, he gingerly straightened his body on the floor, lining his head up with his neck and spine, before hopping up to get supplies. He trashed the bathroom digging through the cabinet under the sink for anything remotely useful, coming away with a pack of gauze and an expired bottle of ibuprofen. Adam tore through the kitchen next, and scooped up a stack of tea towels from the top of the fridge.

He plopped back down beside Dean, not even noticing that he’d sat in a small pool of blood. He lay the gauze on top of the wound first, since it was sterile at least, then layered a hand towel on top of it. Gently, he pressed his fingers against different points on Dean’s head, feeling for any unusual give, or any obvious fractures. Finding none, he wedged a particularly fluffy tea towel under Dean’s head as a sort of cushion against the hard floor, and then applied pressure to the wound below his temple.

“I’m sorry,” Adam whispered, after enough agonizing minutes had passed that he was getting desperate.

The TV was still on, and the episode he’d been watching when they began their fight had ended – the program had switched from White Collar to Law & Order, which had come to indicate to him the shift between daytime television and the evening block of programming. He wished he could remember how much time had been left in the episode – had Dean been out for only ten minutes, or half an hour? There was really no way of knowing.

He stared down at Dean’s face, slack in unconsciousness, streaked with blood. Whether ten minutes or thirty, he’d been unconscious far longer than the ninety second window that tended to herald relatively undamaged brain function. It was fairly possible that Dean had a brain bleed, or something else that would claim his life.

The sink, above him and across the counter, dripped.

A faucet could leak, here. A CD player could break. Could Dean die? Would he ‘reset’ overnight, or would he be just as broken in the morning as he was right then?

Adam was delirious with stress. The idea of Dean, dying because of this stupid fight – because of Adam – made him feel like throwing up. Dean could die, and Adam would be doomed to live here indefinitely, all alone, with only his guilt to keep him company. It was a selfish thought, and that paired with the fear itself drove his nausea to new heights. He leaned away from Dean, hands still fixed against the towel he was pressing to his head, and retched, though nothing came up but a few acrid splashes of bile.

Tipped away from Dean, he looked up at the door, which had been closed for years – since Crowley checked in on them so many years ago – and the emergency button beside it. Was this the kind of emergency it was meant for? He hadn’t thought so, but he was beyond desperation at that point. Crowley had magic powers of some sort, being a demon and all. Maybe he could heal Dean.

He’d only just begun to rise to his feet, when Dean groaned back to consciousness.

“Fuuuuuuck,” Dean lamented, voice thick and wet. “Sam?”

“Dean?” Adam bent over him, moved the towel to get a good look at his eyes. “Dean, do you remember what happened? Do you remember where you are?”

“I…um…” Dean stared at him, eyes heavy-lidded. One pupil was blown wide, nearly overtaking the iris. The other was narrow, little more than a pinprick. “You’re my brother,” Dean said, with a tone of discovery, like he’d only just remembered the fact.

“Yes! Yes,” Adam replied, nodding along. “You’ve got a head injury, a big cut. And you’ve got a concussion.”

“Hurts,” Dean grunted, and he tensed his abdomen and scooted his arms back to get his elbows poised to take his weight. He was trying to sit up.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Adam put his hand on Dean’s chest, palm to sternum, and eased him back down. “Don’t move, okay? That could make things worse.”

“M’fine,” Dean groused, “Do this shit all the time.”

“Yeah, well, that’s pretty damn stupid.”

“Well, I’m pretty damn stupid,” Dean countered, smirking, before his pain settled over him, turning it into a grimace.

“No arguments from me,” Adam grumbled. “Do you remember what happened?”

“You already asked me that,” Dean said, though his face was pinched in discomfort.

“You never answered me!”

“Yeah, I remember. You started a fight, and you said a bunch of shit about me. I decked you, and you brained me with a fucking skillet.”

Adam looked away, guilt swimming up his throat, feeling suspiciously like vomit. He pitched hard to the right at the last second, throwing up everything he’d eaten in the last few hours in a stinking puddle beside the couch.

“Sheesh, you’d think you were the one with a busted skull,” Dean teased, still sounding strange, words ragged, like they hurt coming out.

“That’s not funny, Dean.” Adam shuddered, thinking about the very real possibility that Dean did have a skull fracture.

“You’re tellin’ me!” Dean grinned before wincing back to a tense neutral expression.

“It really isn’t,” Adam mumbled, reaching down to apply pressure again.

“Man, this is why I told you to just punch me in the first place. You didn’t get it out of your system, just got more pissed off, and when I hit you – which, sorry, but you were asking for it – you went nuclear.”

“I didn’t mean to pick up the pan. I thought I was grabbing like, a whisk or something.”

“Not really the point.”

“No, yeah. You’re right.” Adam let out a long sigh, adrenaline tapering off, leaving him exhausted and a little chilly. “I’m sorry. I was just so mad. I’m still pretty mad, I guess, but I don’t know…I don’t know if I’m mad at you, as much.”

“Do you really think all that stuff?” Dean asked, sounding impossibly small.

“Which stuff?” Adam thought back on all the things he’d said – about Dean being a coward, a control freak, untrusting, more comfortable with shame than responsibility. He winced as he remembered what got him punched in the first place.

“About me being full of shit. You not really knowing me,” Dean replied, and Adam was momentarily speechless. Of all the things that he’d hurled at Dean, that was what had hurt the most?

“I didn’t. Mean it.” Adam hated how relieved Dean looked, to hear it.

“Good. Good, because, I’ve never lied to you. I never would. All we got is each other, down here.” Adam felt like an even bigger asshole, then. Because he had lied to Dean. About small things. Stupid things. Fibs, really. Just for his own entertainment, he’d thought in the moment. But now, he wondered if these white lies were really so innocent. If they weren’t signs of something bigger, a fundamental resistance to vulnerability, to closeness. “Sure, there’s stuff I’ve kept to myself. Stuff I don’t talk about – not just with you, but just. In general. But I promise, I haven’t lied.”

Adam stared down at him, his one uncovered eye, the open expression on his face, and he made a decision.

“Well, I have.”

“You’ve…?”

“Lied. To you. About some things, over the years. Nothing…big…but yeah. Just, to seem more…I don’t know. Funny? Interesting? I wasn’t really thinking much about why, at the time. But. Yeah.”

“What’ve you lied about?” Dean asked, and he didn’t sound mad so much as bewildered.

“Just stupid stuff. Like, I didn’t ever win a spelling bee – I was just being a dick, because you thought I couldn’t spell ‘serendipitous’. And I didn’t pass my driving test on the first try – I fucked up parallel parking, and I had to take it again.” He stopped his admissions, only because Dean was laughing. “Stop laughing, dude! I feel fucking horrible about this!”

“S’just. You don’t gotta confess to this shit, it’s so embarrassing,” Dean giggled, jarring Adam’s hand from its perch on Dean’s head wound.

“Chill out, or you’ll agitate the wound.”

“Forget sometimes, that you were in school for doctor shit,” Dean muttered.

“Just pre-med. I was a freshman.”

“But you wanted to be a doctor, right?”

“Yeah,” Adam tried not to think about that, most days. He still wanted to be a doctor, if he was honest with himself. Dean let out a fizzling sort of whistle, which would have been robust if he’d been sitting up – more diaphragm support.

“So I’d have a lawyer brother and a doctor brother?” Dean chuckled, but there was something sad in his expression, a tension unreleased.

“Yeah? S’that a bad thing?”

“No, no, ‘course not. Just wish you both had gotten a fair shake, is all.” Dean shoved Adam’s hand away from his face and sat up, much to Adam’s dismay. “I’m fine, alright? Tired of laying on the floor.”

“I might not be anywhere close to being a doctor, but I did get an EMT certification. You shouldn’t be up yet.”

“S’not like we can call a doctor to give me the okay, right? Gotta get up sometime.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Your funeral, Adam almost added, before nearly choking on the thought.

They sat in silence a moment, TV droning in the background – the Law & Order rerun was on the trial bit of the episode, so there was a lot of tense dialogue. The sink was dripping, as always.

“If you’d gotten a fair shake – what would you have been?” Adam asked. Dean just looked at him, giving nothing away, and somehow saying a thousand different things. “Don’t tell me you don’t think about it.”

“Not anymore,” Dean looked over at the TV, like it could rescue him from having to answer.

“But you have.”

“Yeah. Who hasn’t?” Dean shook his head, then winced as he was again reminded of his dual head injuries. “Lotsa stuff, I guess.”

“Like?” He wasn’t sure why he wanted to know so bad. Maybe it was because Dean seemed so reluctant to confess. Maybe it was because it would say something about Dean, about who he was at his core, underneath all the armor he’d built in hunting. Maybe it was just because Dean deserved to have dreams, too, even if they were only ever things he’d mourn.

“Wanted to be a – fireman, when I was little,” Dean started, and Adam swallowed hard. Kid whose mom dies in a housefire wants to be a fireman. As devastating as it was predictable. “And when I got older, thought it’d be nice to be a mechanic. I was good at it – fixing cars and stuff. Still am, I suppose, just not a lot of cars down here to work on.” Dean tried for a grin, but it looked as contrived as it was. “There was lotsa dumb shit, too, obviously. Kid shit. You know, rockstar, cowboy, racecar driver. That sorta thing.”

“I wanted to be a cowboy, too. When I was real little,” Adam admitted, and it felt good. To be honest about it. He wasn’t sure he’d have done that, the day before.

“Yeah?” Dean smiled, easy and true.

“Yeah, had one of those sticks with a stuffed animal horse head on it, used to trot around the yard with it for hours.”

“Always wanted one of those,” Dean chuckled, wistful.

“Never too late,” Adam teased, and Dean laughed harder.

“Yeah, that’d be something. ‘Hey Sam, I’m back from Hell! Happy to see you, too. We gotta swing by a Toys-R-Us real quick’.”

“Hey why not?” Adam laughed, too. When both of them regained composure, he spoke again. “But really. It’s never too late. You wanna be a mechanic? You could. Or a firefighter. It’s not like, a pipedream, you know?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“No, of course not. But neither was pre-med. Nothing’s like, simple. But it’s not impossible.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“How’s your head doing?”

“Hurts,” Dean shrugged, then winced as the motion pulled on his neck muscles.

“Think we should call Crowley about it?”

“What’s he gonna do about it, kiss it better?” Dean scoffed.

“I don’t know, I mean, he’s got powers and stuff? Can’t he fix stuff?”

“Maybe. Don’t really want to call down the cavalry just yet. I’ve been through a lot worse.”

“That’s a dumb reason not to take care of stuff now.”

“Tell you what – if it’s not better in the morning, I’ll press the stinkin’ button myself. Deal?”

“Deal,” Adam grumbled.

“You wanna watch something?” Dean asked, after a minute or so.

“I’m sick of cop shit for another month at least.”

“Nobody told you to spend all day watching that stuff.”

“Then what, a movie? If I have to watch another frame of ‘Howard the Duck’ in my human life, I will gouge my eyes out of my head.”

“What about ‘Purple Rose of Cairo’?” Dean asked, feigning neutrality. If there was one thing Dean sucked at, it was hiding his enthusiasm.

“You like that one, don’t you?”

“Yeah, so?” Dean crossed his arms, lower lip pushed forward in a pout. “It won awards and stuff.”

“Okay, fine. We can watch it. But we gotta rewind the tape, from last time.” Adam stood up and went over to pick up the VHS case from beside the television. “And we’re not watching it again right away. Just once.”

“Oh come on, it’s always better on the rewatch. Shouldn’t I get to do whatever I want? I got my face bashed in like, an hour ago.”

“Technically, every watch is the rewatch.”

“Aw, you’re no fun.”

+++

In the morning, Dean was better – but not back to normal. His concussion was gone, and his head wound had healed, but it left a thin scar in its wake.

“So it doesn’t unmake injuries,” Dean mused, staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, fingers tracing the slanting line of pale flesh where the cut had closed, “It just heals them super fast?”

“Guess so,” Adam stood leaning against the threshold of the open bathroom door, staring in wary relief at the mended skin.

“I’d suggest running an experiment or two to see what the rules are, but I think I’ve had enough blood for the time being.”

“Me too.” Adam shuddered. The stains on the linoleum were gone, the towels as clean as they always were in the mornings. But he could still see them, vivid crimson in his mind’s eye.

+++

“Are you crying?” Adam balked, and Dean turned to him, face wet and jaw set in silent defiance, from his end of the couch. “You’ve seen it like, a hundred times by now.”

A hundred and thirty-two, Adam knew, though he also knew that Dean liked not to keep track of things like that, so he pretended not to know it. They’d watched ‘Purple Rose of Cairo’ more than any of the other three films by a longshot.

A hundred and thirty-two times, over the course of twelve years (twelve years and eighteen days, specifically), and Dean hadn’t ever cried over it. Until now.

“Yeah,” Dean replied, snuffling. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand until his tear tracks weren’t shining. “So what?”

“Nothing, nothing. You can cry at a movie. Just figured if you were gonna, you’d’ve done it by now.”

“Yeah, well. ‘M full of surprises.” Dean stuck his tongue out, crinkling his nose. Adam just shook his head at the mockery, knowing it was Dean’s way to deflect from his own vulnerability.

“Guess so.”

+++

“Why can’t I ever bring him up? Why’re you so touchy about him?” Adam asked, miffed, trying to pretend he wasn’t as curious as he was.

“I’m not touchy!” Dean argued, stirring a pot of beans on the stove with a bit too much aggression.

“Okay, then you should have no problem talking about the guy.”

“Exactly!” Dean agreed hastily, and Adam smirked, knowing he had him right where he wanted him.

“Great! So, answer the question – what do you like about him?”

“Lotsa stuff,” Dean grumbled, staring down at the beans.

“Like?”

“You never ask me shit like this about Bobby and Sam,” Dean countered. Adam rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, well, you don’t run yourself in circles trying not to tell me anything about them.”

“I talk about Cas all the time!”

“Sure, but not like you talk about Sam.”

“Well, he’s not like Sam.”

“Great, so what’s he like?”

“He’s…I don’t know. He’s super intense. But he’s not doing it as like, an intimidation thing. I mean – he’s intimidating, too. But I think that’s kind of a byproduct. He’s not doing it to be intimidating. And he’s really blunt. Really sincere.”

“You like that.” Adam was just making an observation, but the storm cloud on Dean’s face indicated that he’d taken it as a sort of accusation.

“I like knowing where I stand with him, yeah.”

“Okay. What else?”

“He’s a good friend, you know? Even before he ran out on Heaven, he was always looking for ways to help me out. Even when he like, knew he wasn’t supposed to. And he’s really dependable. He shows up for me, I guess. Like, this one time, we got kidnapped by Gabriel – the archangel – and – “

“Is this when Sam got turned into the car?” Adam asked, the whole ordeal ringing a faint bell.

“Yeah, yeah. We got trapped in like, a TV show hellscape. And Cas was way outgunned – I mean, up against a whole ass archangel, right? And he just kept looking for ways to get through to me. Kept popping up and trying to help before Gabriel would send him away again. We got out, and all I could think about was what that asshole had done with Cas, where he sent him off to. He was beat up pretty good, but we got him back okay.”

“Wow, that’s…a lot.”

“And this one time, Zachariah – you know that bald asshole – he zapped me into the future. Or what he said was the future. Like, a future if I didn’t do what he wanted me to do. There were zombies everywhere, and future me was a grade-A douchebag. Future Cas was just…just going through the motions. It was…awful.” Dean shuddered. “And future me ended up getting him killed, in this idiotic bid to stop Lucifer. And I got yanked back to the present, and Zachariah was gearing up to really put the screws to me, right?”

Adam nodded, trying to imagine what that must have been like. To see all that destruction, to take on the guilt, the blame. And then have to turn around and try to hold your ground, knowing what you know.

“Well, he’s like, seconds away from ripping me a new one, and then – boom – I’m gone. Cas scooped me up, got me out of there. Acted like it was no big deal, like I didn’t even need to thank him for saving my ass. He’s just like that, you know? He doesn’t really get that I don’t…that there’s not really anybody that’s ever done that kind of stuff for me. And if they do, they aren’t doing it just because. They’re doing it because they want something from me.”

“You should talk about him more,” Adam replied, studying Dean’s face, the way he’d softened more the longer he spoke.

“Yeah?” Dean asked, brow furrowed.

“Yeah. I like hearing about him.”

“Alright, yeah.” Dean smiled, tentative and fleeting.

“What do you think they’re doing, up there?” Adam asked, even though they rarely discussed that side of things. It led to stress, or fights, most of the time.

“Busting ass, probably,” Dean snorted. “They’ll figure it out.”

+++

Adam watched, throat tight, as the scene played out the way he knew it would, the way it had every time he’d watched the movie.

They were up to two hundred and eleven viewings, because they’d really gone on a tear earlier in the year.

Two hundred and eleven times in almost fifteen years, he’d watched ‘Purple Rose of Cairo’, and only now was he getting choked up.

He curled in on himself, pulled his feet up onto the couch cushion and wrapped his arms around the peaks of his knees.

On the screen, Monk was fighting dirty, beating up Baxter after he’d won fair and square, then turning his ire on Cecilia. She never did anything for herself, never wanted anything for herself, and the one time she had, it’d had collateral damage. She felt Baxter had rescued her from the tragedy of her life, at his own expense, but she didn’t understand that Baxter would rather fall for her a hundred times, than go back where there was a perfect place carved out for him already. He had a role to play, a mission to carry out, and he’d give it all up if it meant being there for her. She just…couldn’t see it. Thought she was dragging him down. That it was her job to set him free.

The tears finally broke free, as the credits rolled, those final moments of the film replaying behind his eyes, memorized down to the frame from how much he’d seen them in his life. Cecilia, watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance, contending with loss. With freedom. With hope. With guilt.

“Are you crying?” Dean asked, gentle, little more than a whisper. He sounded curious, though. Astounded, perhaps.

“Yeah,” Adam choked out around the lump in his throat.

“I get it.” Dean sat watching the credits roll by, before speaking again. “S’beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Adam sniffled. “But it’s so fucking sad.”

“Wouldn’t be as good of a movie, if it ended up all neat and tidy.”

“But it’d be a better story,” Adam protested. “Baxter wants freedom! He wants freedom, with Cecilia!”

“He does,” Dean nodded, somber. He was trying to placate Adam. He wouldn’t have it. He wheeled on him, pivoting on his couch cushion to face him.

“He doesn’t care if he’s leaving something else behind! He doesn’t care what he’s supposed to be doing! He wants to make his own decisions, and she won’t let him!”

“They’d never be happy, if they said to hell with what other people think and got together anyway. They’re just…from different worlds, you know? They can’t be what the other one needs, not forever.”

“Bullshit,” Adam hissed, sulking like a child. “You’re just like Cecilia.”

“Oh yeah, people are always saying how much I look like Mia Farrow,” Dean laughed, but Adam remained serious.

“You are! You like to think you’re on the outside looking in, but you’re not. You could get out! You could change, you could have what you want, but you think you’ll fuck it up. You won’t even try!”

“Are we still talking about the movie…?” Dean raised a curious eyebrow.

“I don’t know,” Adam sighed, deflating. “Shit, forget it. I’m just…just tired. It’s a good movie. Just sad, is all.”

“If you say so, man.” Dean got up and headed into the kitchen with his empty beer bottle. “Still some popcorn on the stove, you want it?”

“No, you go ahead.”

He ejected the film from the VCR and put it back in the case without rewinding it. He resolved not to watch it for at least a few months.

+++

Though he hadn’t told Dean why he wanted him to go to the trouble of thawing out the turkey on this particular day, Dean assumed it was important, and did it anyway.

It had been fifteen years. Adam figured if they didn’t celebrate, they’d have to mourn, and he’d rather celebrate if he had a choice in the matter.

Because he started so early in the day, they were able to eat the turkey for lunch and dinner, and a sort of midnight snack. They almost got through the whole thing before their stomachs protested.

“If I hadn’t made potatoes, we would’ve eaten it all,” Dean lamented from his spot in the double bed, speaking into the darkness. Adam rolled over on the sofa-bed, trying to find a position where the metal frame wasn’t digging into his kidneys.

“The potatoes were good! I’m glad you made them.”

“Aw, you’re just sayin’ that. S’just potatoes and butter.”

“Hey, honestly. They were really good.”

“Thanks.” They were both quiet, but Adam could hear that they were both awake still. It went on for a few minutes, the silence between them, just the sink’s staccato drips and the rhythmic huff of Dean’s exhales keeping time.

“Which is true – I had a pet dog, a pet cat, or a pet fish.”

“Fish,” Dean answered easily. “Your mom would never let you have a dog or a cat.”

“Yep,” Adam conceded. “She didn’t really even want me to have the fish, but I won it at the school carnival. It only lived for like, three months.”

“What was its name?”

“Buddy,” Adam snorted a chuckle, remembering it after all these years.

“Good name for a fish.”

“Is there a bad name for a fish?”

“Oh, probably,” Dean sounded thoughtful, “Might be a good game, if we’re ever hard up.”

“Maybe. Your turn.”

“Alright, which one of these did Sam always want as a pet – dog, cat, or lizard?”

“Dog,” Adam fired off, certain of the answer.

“Yeah, you got it.” He could hear Dean roll over, bed springs creaking. “Kid ran off once, scared the bejesus out of me. Turns out he was just holed up in some abandoned shack, hanging out with a stray dog.”

“You ever want a pet?”

“Nah,” Dean dismissed, sounding uneasy. “Too much work. Messy. Not like we had a place for ‘em to stay anyhow.”

“Makes sense.” Adam let the matter drop, though he suspected Dean wasn’t being entirely honest with himself. “Hey, Dean?”

“Mmmm?” Dean must be pretty tired by now, if he couldn’t even muster a full reply.

“I never went to mime camp. I just thought it’d be funny.”

“No shit?” Dean mumbled, surprised but not angry.

“Sorry,” Adam muttered, feeling better for having come clean, and worse for having lied about something so silly in the first place.

“It was,” Dean sighed into his pillow, so softly that Adam barely heard it.

“It was what?”

“Funny,” Dean clarified.

Adam tried to think of something to say back. But before he could, Dean’s snore broke the silence. He smiled to himself, and fell asleep feeling lighter than before.

Chapter Text

JUNE 2010  //  YEARS 16 – 25 IN HELL

Dreaming in Hell was a minefield for Dean. He’d either find himself embroiled in nightmares, torture-tinged and sulphuric, or he’d wander in a melancholic ache, haunted by the faces of his loved ones, which he had not beheld in so long. The best he could hope for, when his head hit the pillow, was a night without any dreams at all.

He’d never dreamt of a flood.

It was in the middle of one of his usual dreams – Cas, slicing his arm and painting his blood onto a creamy white wall, bodily between Dean and Zachariah. In that moment, in real life, Dean had been coiled like a spring, terrified to his very core. Looking back at it, imagining he could still feel the lingering press of Castiel’s fingers over his lips, all he felt was safe. He was nostalgic to the point of devastation, for that time when it felt like they could do anything, if they did it together.

As Cas slammed his hand into the sigil he’d painted, Zachariah was indeed banished, but this time, it was water that took him. As though some unseen door burst in on itself, a deluge released, heaving and hungry, sweeping him away in a roar of roiling foam. Cas, in the dream, whipped around, defying his usual choreography, eyes wild. Dean had the sudden and unaccountable urge to kiss him, but he didn’t have the chance.

Cas gripped his shoulders, his mouth making the shape of the word ‘go’, though the sound was lost to the rush of water. The familiar burst of grace told him he was being sent, pushed through space, like a marble rolling through sand. The last thing he saw was the water, claiming Castiel, his mouth parted in an inaudible shout of surprise, hair floating around his head in a mockery of a halo, coat billowing in the water like wings.

Dean’s eyes flicked open, the dream over. But the sound of rushing water remained.

He sat up from his spot on the fold-out couch, trying to get his bearings in the dark. It wasn’t morning yet. His clothes were wet. The sheets were soaked. His hair was plastered to his face, like he’d been standing out in the rain. Dean leapt up from the bed, nearly slipping on the wet floor, and ran to Adam’s sleeping form on the double bed.

“Hey! Hey, wake up!” Dean shouted, grabbing his arm and shaking it.

“What?” Adam grumbled, rubbing his eyes. Adam was dry, more or less, and so was his bed. The sound of falling water was still quite loud, but not as immediate.

“Wake up!” Dean yelled again, not really awake yet himself, sure that something had gone dreadfully wrong but unsure what, exactly, or how to describe it.

“I’m awake, I’m awake, Jesus!” Adam rolled out of bed to his feet, taking in Dean’s drenchedness, and the thunderous waterfall coming from the ceiling above the couch. “What the fuck is that?”

“I don’t know!” Dean shivered, water cooling on his skin, and his exclamation came out rattlesome and stilted.

“Well, fuck this! I’m not gonna drown in Hell!” Adam stomped over to the apartment door and, for one terrible moment, Dean thought he was going to grab the doorknob and twist, to let in all the rot beyond. Instead, Adam drew in a deep breath and slammed his palm into the emergency button, a mirror of his dream, wherein Castiel engaged the sigil in the same fashion.

It depressed with a plasticky click, muffled by Adam’s hand, and the entire room lit up red, illuminated from no discernible source.

Both of them could have exclaimed a dozen different expletives to express their shared fear and unease, but it would have been redundant to their twin facial expressions, mouths open and eyes wide, as they tried to imagine what would happen, now that they’d invoked their one line of communication.

They waited. And waited. And waited.

Now that there was some light to see by, Dean watched the water jetting out of a hole in the ceiling, the faint outline of a damaged pipe only barely visible through the gush of water.

“Didn’t even know there was like, real plumbing down here,” Dean mumbled, still staring up at the leak.

“Maybe there isn’t,” Adam mused, also staring, “Maybe there’s just leaks. To like, make shit worse.”

Dean shivered, partly because he was cold, and partly because the thought was troubling. He tore his gaze away from the ruptured pipe and went to the bathroom, grabbing two bath towels and wrapping himself up in them, hoping he would be warmer once he was dry.

He was just coming out of the bathroom, when Crowley arrived.

“You better have a bloody good – “ Crowley was already grumbling before he’d even made it into the apartment, but he stopped when he laid eyes on the obvious problem.

“Didn’t really know who else to call,” Adam explained, and Dean could tell that he was trying his best not to sound as frustrated as he was. Whenever Adam was working to maintain politeness, there was a sort of masculine grind to his tone that was otherwise absent. Dean stifled a smile, hearing it now.

“Peculiar,” Crowley grumped, snapping his fingers almost as an afterthought. The leak vanished, as did all evidence of it. Dean felt himself dry beneath the towels, as if he’d never been wet. Crowley stalked over to the kitchen and opened one of the cabinets, tossing the contents out behind him carelessly. A few dishes crashed to the floor, shattering. Everything else thumped impotently on the linoleum, undamaged but a mess nonetheless. Dean gritted his teeth at the spectacle, but Adam yelped in surprise. Crowley, unphased by the mess and the two men themselves, dug around in the now empty cupboard until he let out a muffled “Ah-ha!”

“What is it?” Adam asked, arms crossed defensively over his chest. Crowley fiddled with something in the cabinet a little bit more before emerging with a satisfied look on his face.

“Something must have tripped the setting up higher. Never play with the switches in back of this cabinet.”

“Switches?” Dean asked, “I didn’t even know there were switches back there.”

“Well, pretend there aren’t, kitten.” Crowley snapped his fingers again and the broken and jumbled items on the floor were gone, back in the cupboard again, unbroken and orderly. “It’s been a joy to see your smiling little faces again, but I’m really terribly busy, so, be seeing you,” Crowley snarked as he made for the door. To Dean’s surprise, Adam blocked the way, standing in front of the door.

“That’s it? It’s been years for us, you know? You come through and fix this big leak and that’s it? Tell us what’s going on up there, with the others.”

“Why would I know anything about that?” Crowley scowled, but Dean could sense some dishonesty there. “It’s not like I take brunch with that lot. They’re all alive, they’re all working their wee fingers to the bone trying to come up with something. Happy?”

“No, not really,” Adam huffed. “If you’re not gonna tell us anything, can you at least cut us a break here?”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know, better movies? I mean really, Howard the Duck? Maybe some better board games? You could fix the CD player?”

“Didn’t even know there was a CD player,” Crowley mused, eyebrows rising in genuine interest. “Look, sometimes things just show up here, without my having anything to do with it. Tell you what. One new board game, one movie swapped in for Howard the Duck, yeah?” He didn’t wait for a response, just snapped his fingers, then pushed past Adam, whose jaw was slack with surprise.

“But you – “

“Very awfully busy, so sorry lads,” Crowley muttered as he closed the door behind him. Curious, Dean drifted over to the game shelf, and sure enough, there was a new addition.

“Mouse Trap!” Dean exclaimed, genuine excitement sparking in his chest. He hadn’t played that game in years, probably since Bobby picked up a set at the thrift store and he’d made Sam play it for weeks one summer. “Shit, Adam, go check the movies!”

Adam, still stunned from the rapid developments since waking up, wandered over to the television and crouched down to inspect the VHS tape cases.

“Holy shit,” Adam breathed, “No fucking way.”

“What, what? Is there something new?”

“Yeah, there’s…It’s Treasure Planet, man.” Adam said it with reverence. Dean quirked a curious brow.

“Treasure…Planet?”

“You’ve never seen – oh, I mean, yeah, of course not. It’s um.” Adam faltered. Dean came over and sat beside him, took a look at the tape case himself. It was an animated Disney movie, but he’d never heard of it.

“Looks kinda cool,” Dean ventured, beginning to piece together what was going on. Maybe Crowley picked this movie for the same reason he picked Mouse Trap. Adam turned to him, red-cheeked, and hazarded a smile.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I’ve never heard of it. Is it…uh…pirates?”

“Dude, it’s awesome, it’s like, it’s pirates, and it’s space, and it’s a retelling of Treasure Island – “

“You wanna watch it?” Dean asked, and Adam grinned.

“I know we like, just woke up,” Adam hedged, but Dean just shook his head.

“I’ll make pancakes, and you get the video stuff all set up, right?”

“Okay,” Adam agreed, still beaming.

+++

“So did you watch this when it came out?” Dean asked before cramming some more popcorn into his mouth. They had watched Treasure Planet dozens of times since Crowley brought it a few months prior.

“Yeah, my mom took me,” Adam admitted, still staring at the screen.

“Sounds fun,” Dean nodded. His father had never taken him to see a movie, and he’d never really thought it was strange until now. Adam glanced over at him, and as if he could read his mind, he gave him that look, that nervous sort of apologeticism blooming on his features. Dean waved him off. “Whatever, whatever. I’m glad you got to do shit like that.”

“Yeah but – “

“It’s not like I never went to the movies, alright? Bobby took us a few times, and Pastor Jim. And I took Sammy plenty, once I was old enough.” He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to defend himself about it. Sometimes it just seemed like Adam had this sob story in his head, when Dean’s childhood came up, like he was throwing a little pity party for him in there. He didn’t want Adam’s pity.

“Hey, chill. I know that, just sucks that John wasn’t – “

“There’s lots of stuff about John that sucks a whole lot worse than not taking my ass to the movies.”

“Okay, sorry,” Adam relented, turning back to watch the film. Dean sighed, feeling kind of like an asshole for cutting him off and getting so worked up.

“Hey, wait.” Dean grabbed the VCR remote and paused the movie. “Look, I know you didn’t mean anything, I’m just…I don’t want you thinkin’ I had this like, miserable fuckin’ life or something.”

“I’m not saying you did, but…I mean, it sounds pretty bad.”

“I don’t know. I try not to think of it in black and white.”

“…because it would seem bad, if you did?” Adam guessed, and Dean huffed an exasperated laugh, punching him lightly on the shoulder.

“Maybe, I don’t know.” And Dean didn’t know. He made it his business, not to, if he could help it. Sam seemed to think that Dean never thought about things, never introspected or self-analyzed, but that wasn’t true. Dean knew a lot about himself – maybe too much, to ever really be comfortable in his own skin – but he tried not to think too hard about his father. “Dad just…there’s plenty of stuff I’d change, if I could, but I can’t. And ruminating on it doesn’t do me any good. And wishing I could change it doesn’t either.”

“That makes sense.” Adam was still looking at him like that, though. Like he was watching Dean in his mind’s eye, many years younger, and feeling sorry for him.

“Come on, I know your childhood wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Don’t sit there feeling bad for me.”

“I’m not ‘sitting here feeling bad for you’, dude. I can’t help like, empathizing.”

“Does empathizing always have to involve the puppy dog eyes?” Dean gestured to Adam’s face, waggling his fingers illustratively in front of him.

“Puppy dog eyes? I do not – “

“Aw, come on, you’re as bad as Sam with those things.”

“Just, watch the movie, sheesh,” Adam grumbled, but he was smiling, so Dean considered it a win, at least for the moment.

+++

“You think you’ll go back to school?” Dean asked one night, when he couldn’t sleep. It was getting to be an issue, though he had yet to fully acknowledge that fact. His dreams had been getting weirder, if not worse, exactly.

“When we get out?”

“Yeah, man. When else?” Dean sniffed, but Adam just snorted a mostly silent laugh.

“Nah, I don’t think so.” Adam shifted on the couch, and Dean heard the metal frame protest. “I mean, I’m legally dead, so. Not really on the table anyhow.”

“Ah, come on. We can get you set up with a new name and stuff. Forget all the practical shit for a minute. Would you wanna?”

“I guess, yeah. I mean, kind of a crazy opportunity, coming back same age and everything. I want to do something with it.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed, thinking about when he’d come back from the dead himself. When Cas had brought him back. Carried him, really, if the scar on his arm was anything to go by.

“What’re you gonna do?”

“Same thing as always,” Dean forced a lighthearted tone that he wasn’t feeling, “Just, you know. Hunting.” Adam saw right through him.

“Yeah, because you love that sooo much.” Adam’s eye roll was practically audible.

“Someone’s gotta do it,” Dean argued, trotting out the same arguments he made to himself in his own mind. The same mantras that kept him going while Sam was away at school, while Dad was off chasing shadows.

“Doesn’t have to be you,” Adam shot back, sounding pretty fired up for some reason. “Shit, I mean, haven’t you done enough for one lifetime? Haven’t you given up enough, to help other people?”

“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Dean sighed, thinking about the souls he tortured in Hell. How nothing would ever be ‘enough’, not really.

“What do you think Sam would say?” Adam asked after a long moment.

“He’s never understood it, he doesn’t get why I gotta do it,” Dean replied. He’d never really had to explain it out loud, but it was true. For Sam, hunting was a part of his life, a chapter that would (and should) end. It was all Dean had ever known, really. It was what he was good at, something he could do with the skills he had, to make the world better.

“Okay, well what about Cas?”

“What about Cas?” Dean bristled.

“Do you think he’d want you to just hunt forever?”

“Why would he care?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Adam asked, sounding genuinely baffled.

“I don’t know, I mean, why would it matter to him?” Dean asked back, just as confused. “When all this is over, he’s gonna be back in Heaven. Why would he give a fuck what I do then?”

“You really think that?”

“What?”

“That he’ll go back to Heaven after all of this?”

“Yeah, I mean, yeah. Why wouldn’t he?”

“Um. I don’t know.” Adam turned over again, his next words muffled by his pillow. “Must’ve just, uh, misunderstood some stuff, I guess.”

“Must have,” Dean agreed, feeling very awake, all of a sudden. Adam was asleep a few minutes later – Dean could tell just by the change in the sound of his breathing. He lay awake, wondering what Adam had thought Cas would do, and why he thought that.

When his dream came, he hadn’t even remembered falling asleep in the first place.

Pamela had her hand on his shoulder, layered right over the scar there, and she was starting her invocation.

“I invoke, conjure, and command you, appear unto me before this circle.” The words kept going, on and on and on, many more times than they had in real life.

She repeated it dozens of times, the intonation never shifting, never deviating from that first utterance. She was like a record, stuck on one section, the needle jumping.

“Castiel?” He heard himself say, but that was wrong. When this had actually happened, Pamela had been the one to hear his name, to say it. He’d only been repeating her words, when he said it that first time.

The television flicked on across the room, and that had happened before, but it had only been static. This time, it was Purple Rose of Cairo, though he couldn’t tell when in the film. It was one of the scenes where the film within the film is playing, where Baxter and the others are getting ready to leave for Copacabana.

“We’re meeting the countess and Larry Wilde,” Dean caught the tail end of a line before Baxter spoke.

“Well, I am very impressed, I really am. You have yourself quite a place here. You know, I still can’t get over the fact that 24 hours ago, I was in an Egyptian tomb. I didn’t know any of you wonderful people, and here I am now…” Baxter’s sentence drifted off. He seemed distracted. Dean couldn’t help staring at the TV set, tuning out Pamela’s chanting. He felt a little bit like Baxter must have, ignoring the script. “I’m on the verge of a…madcap…Manhattan…weekend…” Baxter turned to face the camera full on, expression warm and affected. “My God, you must really love this picture,” He gushed, and Dean blushed. The camera didn’t pan out to Cecilia in the audience, as it did in the movie. It stayed on Baxter as he awaited a response.

“Me?” Dean asked, and Baxter continued his lines.

“You’ve been here all day, and I’ve seen you here hundreds of times before.” And that wasn’t the line exactly, but it was close.

“You mean me?” Dean asked again, perplexed.

“Yes, you…you…you’ve…I gotta speak to you. Who are you?”

“Dean,” He answered, astonished as Baxter climbed out of the television set and into Pamela’s living room.

Except, it wasn’t Baxter anymore. It was Cas, standing there, staring at him, almost expectant. Like that very first time they met, in the barn.

“You’re…”

“Castiel. I’m an angel of the Lord.”

“No, I know you are, I mean…you don’t…this isn’t where I meet you.”

“Why not?”

“It just, it isn’t. I meet you later, in the barn. With Bobby.” Dean stood up from the table, and Pamela continued like he hadn’t moved. Sam and Bobby likewise sat waiting, unaware of the change. He walked over to Cas, the strange mirage quality of the dream making him feel almost lightheaded. “You should go back, it isn’t time yet,” Dean found himself insisting. Cas only cocked his head, regarding him with open confusion.

“Go back? I’m never going back, now that I’ve met you.” Cas echoed Baxter’s lines from the film, and it made something flip in Dean’s stomach.

He woke up in a cold sweat, gasping, and flung himself out of bed to make it to the toilet in time to throw up.

+++

“Just, turn it off?” Dean pleaded, and Adam gave him the stink eye.

“Come on, we haven’t seen this episode!”

“That doesn’t mean it’ll suck any less,” Dean countered.

“But it’ll suck in a new, exciting way!” Adam snatched the remote off of the cushion beside him. He’d been through this enough times with Dean to know that his next move was going to be a remote grab, and he preempted it.

“I think you’re giving the writers of Burn Notice a little too much credit,” Dean grumbled. He made like he was defeated, sagging against the cushion, waiting for Adam to let his guard down. Then he lunged over him and wrenched the remote from his hand. Adam squawked his surprise, and pulled it back, fingers jamming the buttons as he did so.

The channel changed, but instead of static, there was something else playing. They both dropped the remote in shock and turned to face the TV set.

“That’s the power – of OxiClean!” A bearded man shouted, body partially obscured by a phone number in bright yellow at the base of the screen.

“Do we have…” Adam started, staring wide eyed.

“…another channel?” Dean finished the thought, also staring.

Immediately, he picked up the remote and scanned through every channel. All snow, except the USA Network…and apparently, now, this channel. They watched it with rapt attention, and after ten more minutes of the man (Billy Mays, they learned some time during those ten minutes) demonstrating the strength of OxiClean, the commercial ended…only for another to begin.

“The SunSetter Retractable Awning is a…”

“Do you…do you want to watch some…infomercials?” Adam asked, looking as conflicted as Dean felt. Who in their right mind wanted to watch infomercials? But then, were either of them really in their ‘right mind’ anymore?

“Um. Maybe just for a little bit. Until we get tired of it.”

“Yeah,” Adam agreed hastily, “Just until the um. The novelty wears off.”

+++

The novelty didn’t really wear off.

It had been months. Maybe years – Dean wasn’t counting. It became a sort of ritual.

Dean’s favorite commercials were the ones where they played a bunch of popular songs. Just snippets of them, just enough to make you hungry for it, and then they’d move on to another song. The Time-Life Ultimate Love Songs Collection commercial was playing, and he and Adam sang along to every excerpt, knowing exactly when the songs would end and bleed into the next.

When the commercial ended (chased by a Magic Bullet Blender commercial), Adam shut off the television and insisted they go back through and try to sing the full versions of the songs they’d heard, or as much as they could remember of each of them.

By the time they were through the first thirty songs, they’d sung themselves hoarse, and Dean called it quits and grabbed them each a beer.

“Why’re there so many love songs?” Adam asked after a sip of beer had somewhat soothed his throat. He still sounded pretty scratchy, to Dean’s ears.

“That’s just what people sing about, being in love. Wishing they were in love, wishing they weren’t. Wishing someone loved ‘em back, or better, or different. Missing somebody, or being done missin’ ‘em. I mean, there’s other stuff people sing about, sure. But everybody can relate to the love stuff.”

Adam looked at the darkened television for a few moments, pensive, then shook his head, like he’d arrived at some kind of conclusion.

“I don’t know. I can’t, I don’t think.”

“What, relate?”

“Yeah, to the love stuff. I had crushes, I guess. And at prom, I made out with – “

“Right, yeah. TMI.”

“TMI my ass, it’s been like twenty two years. I’ve known you longer than I was alive, dude.”

“Twenty two, huh?” Dean closed his eyes. He hated thinking about the time passing. He tried to center himself, in the dark of his eyelids.

“Dean, sorry, I didn’t mean to – “ Adam started, but Dean cut him off, eyes still closed.

“No, it’s okay, just give me a minute.”

They sat in silence for a moment, Adam probably kicking himself for letting it slip, Dean trying to make peace with the numbers, with the time itself, the perceived time and the real world time, the months that had passed above them. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

“So, you can’t relate to all that stuff?” Dean asked, telegraphing that he’d recovered enough to return to their original discussion. Adam sighed in obvious relief, though Dean wasn’t sure Adam was aware that he’d done so.

“Not really. I mean. I was 19. Not much had happened yet when I…”

“Yeah, that’s. Yeah. Makes sense.’

“How about you?”

“How about me?”

“Yeah, did you…? I mean, was there ever anybody you, you know. Thought about when you listened to love songs?”

“Oh, I guess. I mean. You know about Robin. And there was this girl, Cassie. I was in love with her. We’d been together longer than I’d been with anybody, and I told her about, you know, hunting and everything.”

“Yeah?” If Adam’s eyebrows rose any higher, they’d’ve flapped right off of his forehead like two pale birds.

“You can imagine how well that went,” Dean huffed, remembering how she’d quite literally kicked him out.

“Jesus,” Adam sighed.

“Course, she calls me years later. There’s a haunted fucking truck, killing people, and suddenly she remembers my number. You know how it goes.”

“That’s…wow.”

“Believed me then, not that it mattered anymore. We both still felt…but it…that was behind us. It wasn’t something we could have, after everything else.”

“That sucks,” Adam said, sounding sincere. Dean gave him a half-smile, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“Yeah, it does.”

They sat there for a little while, drinking their respective beers. Adam fidgeted a little, then a lot, leg bouncing, fingers fiddling with the droopy paper label on his beer bottle.

“Dean, um,” Adam started, then stopped. He waited for him to continue, but when it was clear he wasn’t going to, Dean pressed.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing, never mind.” He looked down and away, leg bouncing so much that it was jiggling the couch cushions.

“Bullshit, nothing,” Dean chuckled. “Come on, what?”

“Just, so…nobody else, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Nobody else, just Robin, and Cassie?”

“Oh, I don’t know. There was this chick, Lisa, she was great. Still think about her some. And when I still hunted with Dad, there was this guy, Lee – he kinda dropped off the map awhile back. But, uh. Nobody else major, I don’t think.”

Adam turned to look at him, and he looked positively constipated with unspoken thoughts, like he was full to bursting. Dean cocked an eyebrow at him, and Adam looked away again.

“Dude, spit it out!”

“Nothing, just. Forget it.” Adam got up and put his empty beer bottle on the counter, grabbed the last beer from the fridge and popped off the cap. Took a big swig.

“You’re acting wild, dude. Just say it, you’ll feel better.”

“Right, yeah,” Adam laughed, but it was tuneless, gruff. He was kind of scaring Dean, if he was honest with himself.

“Hey, if you don’t want to, fine. Just, seems like you’re pretty keyed up over there.”

Adam downed the rest of his second beer, uncharacteristic of him, and set the empty bottle beside the other.

“What I wouldn’t give to get drunk down here,” Adam grumbled to himself before looking up at Dean. “Look, I’ll – just, I’ll say it, and then, if you get mad, or if I totally misread, or whatever, then, um. I’ll go kick it in the bathroom for a bit, or whatever. Just don’t take this the wrong way, okay?”

“O…kay?”

“What about, um. Cas?” Adam asked, the last word more of a squeak.

“Oh,” Dean breathed. Adam stared at him, like he was waiting for fireworks to shoot out of his ears, or for him to start tearing the furniture to shreds like a wild animal. Dean just sat there, unable to think any new thoughts, unable to revisit any old ones. He turned to look down at his hands, one gripping his beer bottle, the other laying limp on his thigh. He flexed his fingers, splayed them out over his jeans, then clenched them into a fist. Spread them out again.

“Sorry, I – “

“He’s an angel,” Dean explained, tongue feeling too big for his mouth. He didn’t look up at Adam. He waited for his brother to respond, but he was silent. “I’m a…well, and he’s an angel, right? So, yeah.”

“Right,” Adam replied after a few awkward beats, stretching the word out, like he was looking for the weak spot in it.

“Yeah. So.” Dean looked up, and Adam was pretending to be very busy looking for something in the fridge, as if they hadn’t had the same groceries at their disposal for (Jesus fuck) twenty two years now. “Does that…?”

“Totally! Yeah, it, yes. Totally. You wanna watch Treasure Planet?” Adam asked, flustered.

“Sure,” Dean agreed before finishing his own beer.

+++

“I remember these,” Adam groaned as the next infomercial flickered to life before them. A woman with stick-straight hair seemed to be lamenting her lack of volume, then a friend handed her a crescent moon shaped plastic apparatus.

“Bumpits,” Dean recalled just before the name of the item flashed across the screen in big letters. “God, those things are hideous.”

“Yeah. Remember those hair ties that had like, fake hair pieces on them? Did girls wear those when you were in school?”

“Ugh, yeah. And those weird little donut things, for buns?”

“Donut things?”

“Yeah,” Dean set down his beer and made a donut shape with his hand, thumb and forefinger closing in a loop, “Like, it was squishy and usually vaguely the same color as the girl’s hair, but you sort of arrange the hair around it, to make it look bigger I guess.”

“Like the Bumpit,” Adam nodded in understanding.

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Wild. Crazy how shit like that sells. It doesn’t even look good in the commercial.”

“Speaking of, I think it’s a sign that we should call it a night. If I have to look at one more of these things I’m gonna go nuts.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Adam yawned, getting up to go over to the bed. Dean flicked off the TV and folded out the sofa bed.

They both settled in for the night. Sometimes, waiting for sleep to take him, Dean would wonder how long they’d been down there. He didn’t want to know, really, but it was always an interesting thought experiment for him to guess. The last time Adam had let anything slip, they’d been down here for twenty two years. That had to have been at least a year ago. Back during one of their many Treasure Planet kicks. Of course, not even three months must have passed topside. He rarely let himself think about what everyone was doing up there. He didn’t let himself now, either.

He dreamed of that night that he prayed to Castiel outside his motel room, when he was certain Lilith was going to get one over on them, was going to find a way to trick Sam. He stood there by the soda machine, heart in his throat, begging Cas to help him.

“Prayer is a sign of faith. This is a good thing, Dean,” Cas praised, looking more human than usual in the neon glow of the motel sign.

Dean was supposed to say something relevant, something about needing help, but he just stared at him, at the soft round swell of his cheek, at the curve of his upper lip. Cas continued on script as if Dean had spoken.

“I’m not sure what I can do.”

He remembered being angry, the first time he heard that, feeling like Cas was messing with him. Why show up at all, if he wouldn’t help. He watched him with new eyes now, wondered if it was the warped lens of memory that made him seem so torn, aching to help and hamstrung by Heaven, or if he’d really been so conflicted at the time, and Dean had been too blinded by his anxiety to see it.

“It’s a prophecy. I can’t interfere,” Cas explained, even though he didn’t have to. No angel other than Cas would have deigned to explain it to him.

“You wanted to help me,” Dean said, remembering it all anew, “I convinced you to do it, but you already wanted to.”

“What you’re asking…it’s not within my power to do,” Cas replied, still on script.

“You did anyway,” Dean whispered. He missed Cas’s eyes on him, hadn’t felt that intensity in too long. He stared into them, at the pink neon light reflecting off of the whites of them.

“Yes,” Cas gritted. Reaching for a frustration with Dean that he was supposed to be feeling, but couldn’t quite evoke.

“I miss you, man,” Dean reached out, but aborted the gesture, worried that any major deviation would end the dream, or twist it somehow.

“I’m sorry,” Cas replied, just as he had in real life.

He knew that he’d yelled at him, then. Laid into him about God, about how he felt used. He hadn’t expected Cas to respond at all, really, had just figured he’d fly away, above it all. Dean had started to storm off, unwilling to be the one who gets left. Wanting to do the leaving, for once.

“Dean. Dean!” Cas called after him, or the other version of him, the one that had turned his back to leave the angel there.

But in the dream, he stayed there, watching, and he caught a glimmer of something in his expression. Something kind, something aching. A harmless dog chained up in a back yard, straining against his bonds to greet a visitor.

“You must understand why I can’t intercede. Prophets are very special. They’re protected.” Cas was practically winking at him, with how heavily he was trying to suggest his plan.

Dean remembered being confused by the non sequitur, but then, he knew how it would all go down, now. It was easier to guess, in hindsight.

“If anything threatens a prophet – anything at all – an archangel will appear to destroy that threat. Archangels are fierce. They’re absolute. They’re Heaven’s most terrifying weapon.”

“Don’t I know it,” Dean sighed, thinking of Lucifer. “I hope you’re okay up there, Cas.”

“Yes.”

Dean stared at Cas again, at the warmth in his expression, the mischievousness sparkling there. Had Cas always been this way, even before he met Dean? Or was there just something about the two of them together, that brought it out in him?

“Then the most fearsome wrath of Heaven would rain down on that demon. Just so you understand,” Cas looked off to the side before his gaze slid back to Dean, and something bright blossomed in his chest. “Why I can’t help.”

Cas smiled, barely. He wasn’t sure anyone but him would even call it a smile. It was just an upward suggestion of the muscles in his face, a twitch at the corner of his lips. God, his lips. He stared at them until they moved again.

“Good luck,” Cas breathed, and Dean couldn’t hold back any longer. He reached out his hand and curled it around Cas’s bicep, feeling the solid heat of him under that trench coat.

And he woke up. He pulled his blanket over his head, breathing in the humidity of his own respiration, playing the dream on a loop in his mind. For the first time in twenty five years, he prayed.

Chapter Text

JULY 2010  //  YEARS 26 – 35 IN HELL

It was an accident, at first. He dropped a glass, in the kitchen, and it shattered at his feet.

“You barefoot? Don’t move, I’ll grab the broom.” Dean hopped up from the couch, pulled on his boots, and retrieved the broom out of the bathroom. It was tucked behind the door most of the time – there was rarely occasion to use it, considering that all messes righted themselves by morning.

Adam felt a familiar tightness growing under his sternum, and he clamped his eyes shut, feeling the heat burning behind his eyelids. It was stupid, to cry about a broken glass. They had like, ten glasses. Even if this one somehow stayed broken, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But he couldn’t figure out how to communicate that pragmatic truth to his nervous system.

“Come on, you’re okay, it’s just a cup,” Dean assured him when he reappeared, broom in hand. Adam couldn’t make himself move, or speak. “Hey, actually, you know what?”

And Dean didn’t say anything else. Just punctuated the sentence with a crash. Adam’s eyelids flew open at the sound, and he saw another glass, broken to bits on the floor in front of Dean.

“There,” Dean grinned, “See? Now we’re even.” And he set about sweeping up the shards of glass, like it was nothing. He scraped them into the dustpan and emptied it into the trash.

“Dean – “

“Stay there another second, I’m gonna go back through and make sure I got everything.” Dean wetted a paper towel under the faucet, then dropped it on the floor and pushed it gently with the head of the broom. He pinched one corner of it and pulled it up, holding it up to the light so Adam could see the way it glittered. “Nasty suckers. Once, Sam broke a jam jar while I was, um, out, and he was embarrassed, right? So he didn’t tell me about it, when I got back from, um – and anyway, I was kind of uh, preoccupied, and I didn’t notice. And then I’m walkin’ out of the bathroom, because I showered, and I’m barefoot, right? And got a footfull of these little things. Didn’t know what hit me, and I was already in a shit mood, ‘cause, um. Anyway. Poor kid felt terrible. He was like, twelve, old enough to know better, but – and don’t tell him I told you this – he just cried like a baby, felt so bad. So I showed him how to clean it up himself, if it ever happened again. You know, not just the big pieces, but the tiny ones too.”

Adam just stared at him until he shrugged and threw out the paper towel. He watched him stalk back to the bathroom and replace the broom. There were always so many gaps, in the stories Dean told about himself, about his life. Adam had filled them out in as many ways as he could imagine – with atrocities, with mundanities, with tragedies. At first, he felt he was getting most of the picture, but the more he learned, the more seemed to be missing – blotted out, omitted, obscured.

“What were you doing, that night?”

“Pardon?” Dean turned to regard him as he emerged from the bathroom, broom back in its place.

“You know, when you cut your foot, what had you been out doing?”

“Oh, I don’t remember.” Dean shrugged, heading over to the couch. He was an awful liar. At least he didn’t try to get one past him very often.

“You don’t? You said you were preoccupied over it. And that you were in a bad mood because of it.”

“I did?” Dean rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, one of his many nervous tics.

“Yeah,” Adam replied, waiting to see what Dean would do. He just bit his lip and nodded, staring off into the middle distance. “Hey, you don’t have to, uh. I was just curious.”

“No, it’s,” Dean laughed, but it was a dry sound, like two wooden boards scuffing together. “Shit, why not, right? I never…uh,” Dean closed his eyes, and for a second Adam wondered if he was just going to end the sentence there, but he didn’t.

Or, well, he didn’t end it, but he did pause long enough to take a deep breath, then another. He got up from the couch and got himself a beer, grabbed one and handed it to Adam without looking at him. He cracked the cap off and left it on the counter instead of throwing it out, which was unlike him. He only continued his thought when he was back on the couch, after taking a huge gulp of beer.

“You ever need money, like, need it?” He asked, looking in Adam’s eyes with almost alarming intensity.

“I, um. No, I guess not?”

“Good, that’s. Good.” Dean nodded, took another swig of his beer. Adam still hadn’t opened his own. “But um. I. There were times when Dad would, just. He always left us money, but you know, sometimes he’d be gone awhile. And a motel room in middle of nowhere Indiana is a lot less expensive than a motel room in like, Cincinnati, right? And a box of Minute Rice from Big Lots is a lot cheaper than it would be at a corner store, or even an IGA. But he didn’t always think about that. And so we’d end up somewhere like that a little too long, and money’d get tight, and I’d have to get us some more scratch.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Adam heard himself say. The beer was sweating, in his hand, condensation pimpling the label, making the adhesive underneath slide against the glass. Dean didn’t acknowledge him, just drank some more before speaking again.

“I’m good with pool, and cards. And darts, but people don’t play that for cash as much. People don’t always want to go up against a kid – I think they think it’d be mean, they think they’d beat me. Or they just think I was too young to be in a place like that, which, I guess I was. But hey, strike out there, no problem right? I can fix up cars, and I’m pretty handy. I’ve done, you know, yard work, and farm work, and uh, like, inventory and stock room stuff. But people aren’t always looking to hire a kid for that, especially under the table. And especially during the school year. Looks bad, me working on a school day.”

“…right.” Adam made his legs move him out of the kitchen and over to the couch. He hated the distance between himself and Dean, in that moment. Hated that it might look like he was keeping it on purpose, like a buffer between them. He sat down on the opposite side of the couch, tucking his legs under him on the cushion.

“And, it’s um, it’s funny really. How people are so nervous about all that ticky tack bullshit stuff, when you’re, you know, sixteen, or whatever. But there’s other stuff that’s kinda worse, and they aren’t so nervous about it.”

“I don’t…?” It felt disingenuous, to say he didn’t understand, because he was actually pretty sure he did understand, quite clearly. But he didn’t want to get it, he realized. Didn’t want to be correct, in this particular assumption. He realized, in useless retrospect, that he very much didn’t want to have asked this of Dean in the first place.

“I just. I needed money. Like, needed it. Sometimes. And after I got caught stealing, and Dad let me get sent to Sonny’s – I was lucky, I know that. The odds of ending up somewhere that good a second time? I couldn’t risk that. And looking back, I mean, how stupid, right? Because getting caught like that, with, with some guy – not like I wouldn’t have ended up in a worse jam, for that. But I didn’t get caught, and I got paid, and it was all,” Dean gestured in the air for a moment, searching for a word, “Copacetic, right?”

Adam went to take a sip of his beer, only realizing he hadn’t opened it yet when the lid grazed his lips. He set it back down, resting it on his thigh.

“Shit, you want me to open that for ya?” Dean asked, focusing his attention on Adam again.

“Sure.” He handed it over, and Dean levered it open on the edge of the TV stand.

“Here, kid,” Dean smiled, handing it back. Adam took it, and Dean looked like he was gearing up to continue.

“Hey, um,” Adam started, fingers tugging on the loose flap of the label, “I get it.”

“Hmm?” Dean hummed in question, cocking his head to the side a few degrees. Adam looked up from his beer and locked eyes with Dean.

“I get it, what you’re saying.” Adam held his gaze, and Dean’s face cycled through a few expressions before landing on something like relief. “Thanks, for um. For telling me.”

“S’no big deal,” Dean huffed, fooling neither Adam or himself. Adam took a sip of his beer, flicked on the television.

“You’re right,” Adam replied, working to keep his tone even, because it felt important, to maintain a level of nonchalance here, “It’s not.”

In his periphery, Dean grinned.

“You wanna watch Treasure Planet or somethin’?” Dean asked. “I’m gonna make popcorn.”

“Sure,” Adam replied. “I’ll rewind the tape.”

+++

It was also an accident the second time.

“Aw, shit!” Dean cursed from the bathroom.

They’d both been taking a bit of a breather from one another for the day, and Dean had claimed the bathroom. There were days when it seemed the weight of being perceived, even by Adam, was physically painful to the man, and this must have been one of them. Dean had brought all three beers with him into the bathroom, along with the Cheetos and the jar of bread and butter pickles. He’d also scrounged up every scrap of paper he could find in the apartment, along with a pen from the junk drawer in the kitchen.

“What?” Adam called from the other side of the door. He’d spent the day watching cop shows, because Dean wasn’t around to complain the whole time. One of his favorite Law & Order reruns was on, the one where Felicity Huffman guest stars as the defendant.

“Nothing, I got it,” Dean groused, somewhat muffled by the door between them. Adam got up anyway and went over to the door. He opened it a crack, accidentally catching Dean on the shoulder with it.

“Sorry!”

“Shit,” Dean hissed, stumbling forward and catching himself on the sink, which was a mess of broken pickle jar pieces. He yanked his hand back, blood already running down his arm in a slow stream.

“Sorry,” Adam offered, more quietly. Sometimes it felt like all he could do was make things worse.

“S’okay, just. Go on, I got this.”

“You’re bleeding,” Adam replied, like Dean might not be aware. Dean turned to look at him, still hovering in the doorway, and pulled an exasperated face.

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“I can dress it.” Adam gestured at the cut, which looked pretty deep.

“I’ve got it,” Dean repeated, frustrated.

“Yeah, sure,” Adam dismissed, not amused by Dean’s inane refusal to accept help even on days when he wasn’t already fed up with the man. “Enjoy stitching yourself up with your non-dominant hand.”

“Like it’s hard?” Dean scoffed, still posturing, but Adam detected a troubling grain of truth to the boast.

“You’ve…?”

“Haven’t always lived with you, y’know.”

“Yeah, but wouldn’t Sam, or John…?”

“When they were around, sure,” Dean shrugged, using a hand towel to push the glass shards off the counter and into the bathroom waste basket.

“Well, I’m around now.” Adam sidestepped yet another conversation about John Winchester’s neglect, and literally sidestepped the chunks of glass on the bathroom floor, crowding Dean in until he had no choice but to have a seat on the closed lid of the toilet. “So just. Let me handle it, okay?”

“Fine,” Dean grumbled, sticking his arm out in front of him and turning to look moodily at the shower curtain. Adam prodded the wound on his hand, to get a sense of its depth, and it gushed another lazy gout of blood. It was definitely long enough and deep enough to need stitches, but then, did they even have a needle? And wouldn’t it just be a scar in the morning anyway?

“Two truths and a lie,” Adam sighed, “This needs stitches, we have the stuff for that, and I know how to suture.”

“We don’t have the stuff for that,” Dean answered, a smile tugging at his lips. “It’s okay, kid. You can just clean it up and stick the gauze on with the painter’s tape out in the kitchen.”

“Yeah, alright.” Adam turned to go get the tape, then on a whim scooped up the broom and swept the rest of the glass up and dumped it in the bin. He took a long stride over the spot where it had fallen, in case there were glass splinters. Out in the kitchen, he snatched the painter’s tape and a paper towel. Back in the bathroom, he set the tape down on the tank of the toilet and ran the paper towel under the faucet before dragging it over the counter by the sink, then the floor, picking up all the sparkly sharp bits the broom hadn’t caught. He dropped it in the trash, then rooted around in the cabinet under the sink until he found the gauze, which he hadn’t had occasion to use since he’d accidentally smacked Dean with a frying pan.

Dean was grinning at him when Adam emerged from his digging about.

“My turn, right?”

“Hmm?” Adam took a clean washcloth and got it damp in the sink, so he could clean off some of the blood.

“You know, two truths and a lie.” Dean winced as Adam wrapped the cloth around his hand. The cut was about four inches long, down the outer edge of his palm, under his pinkie finger.

“Oh, sure,” He mumbled, not paying much attention. The wound wasn’t bleeding much anymore, just a few drops beading at the seam of it.

“Okay – I’ve shot myself, I’ve shot Sam, I've shot Cas.”

“Two of those are true?” Adam looked up at him then, baffled. “Bullshit.”

“Not bullshit!” Dean laughed.

“Okay, then I guess you haven’t shot yourself.”

“Nope.”

“How’d you do that?”

“Well, I mean. It wasn’t me, technically. It was like, a shapeshifter. But he looked just like me. Trippy as fuck.”

“Man, I don’t think that counts.”

“Aw, you’re no fun,” Dean pouted.

“Wait, so which one is it?” Adam asked, drying the now mostly clean wound with another cloth. “Sam, or Cas?”

“Haven’t shot Sam.”

“But you’ve shot Cas?”

“We didn’t know each other yet,” Dean hedged, “It wasn’t personal. And he was fine. Angels, y’know?”

“Yeah, how’d he feel about it?”

“I don’t know, probably neutral? Back then he played his cards pretty close to the vest.”

“I don’t care if he’s an angel or not, nobody feels neutral about getting shot,” Adam chuckled, laying the gauze over the wound. He grabbed the painter’s tape and unspooled a few inches. “Did he say anything? Or like, make a face?” Adam scrunched his nose and brows demonstratively, and Dean wheezed a laugh.

“Maybe? When I was shooting at him, no, he just stared at me. But I, uh, I stabbed him, too. Because the guns hadn’t done anything. And he sorta smiled at me, I think?”

“You stabbed him?” Everything Adam learned about Dean and Castiel made him want to start throwing things, lately. He taped the gauze down on one end, and ripped some more tape to secure the other.

“I thought he was bad news!” Dean defended himself lamely, “I didn’t even know angels were a thing yet. I thought some big badass demon dragged me out of Hell – I mean, seriously, I had this huge handprint burned on my arm, and I’m supposed to assume this guy’s a cupcake?”

“That’s what that’s from?” Adam couldn’t contain his surprise. Dean blushed, and Adam filed that away to puzzle over later.

“Yeah,” Dean admitted, sounding all kinds of embarrassed. Adam taped the other end of the gauze down.

As soon as it was clear that Adam was finished administering first aid, Dean was up and on his way out of the room.

Adam stood in front of the mirror and sighed. It was strange, never looking any different, even though he felt like he should look old and worn out. He smiled wanly at his reflection, then left the bathroom.

“Don’t use your hand too much, or it’ll start bleeding again. I don’t have more gauze, so if you go through that one, it’s down to towels.”

“Aye, aye, Cap,” Dean grumbled, flumping down onto the couch. “Can we watch literally anything else?” Dean asked, staring miserably at the opening credits for another episode of Law & Order. He didn’t wait for a response before flipping over to the infomercial channel.

“ – because you’re going to be slapping your troubles away with the Slap Chop. Now look – here’s a potato – “

Dean seemed instantly sucked in by the commercial, but Adam zoned out almost immediately. He gave himself a headache, with how hard he was thinking about how to ask Dean more about Cas.

+++

“You sure about this?” Dean asked, disposable razor poised inches from Adam’s head.

“Yeah,” Adam closed his eyes, “Do it.”

It had been thirty years. He’d looked exactly the same, every day, for thirty years. He ran the math five times in the shower that morning, just to be sure.

“Okay, stay still.”

Dean brought the razor close to his scalp, but not touching, and stroked carefully with the grain of his hair. It made a strange bristly metallic sound. There was a rhythm to it, and Adam let himself get caught up in it.

“Wish we had some clippers,” Dean lamented after several itinerant minutes of silence. “Used to cut my hair, and Dad’s, and Sammy’s. Well, Sam only wanted scissor cuts, kid thinks he’s freakin’ Keanu Reeves or something. Mophead. But clippers for me ‘n Dad.”

“Clippers would be faster,” Adam needled, sarcastic by default. Dean paused the movement of his hands to laugh.

“Shut up,” He said through a smile, “Ungrateful son of a gun.” He resumed his methodical work, “You get too mouthy, I’ll give you a lightning bolt or somethin’. Maybe a NASCAR number. You’ll look like a real grade-A douche.”

“Message received,” Adam snickered.

“Anyway. You’re lucky I know how to trim you up with just one of these things,” Dean asserted.

“Why is that, anyway? You had clippers.”

“Didn’t always have electric though,” Dean replied, like it was nothing. Adam’s eyes were closed, and even if he opened them, Dean was above and behind him, but he wished he could see his face, when he said it. “Squattin’ in some abandoned building, or livin’ outta the car. Still need a top up, every few weeks.”

Adam just sat there, thinking about all of the gaps, all of the hidden pieces of that story. About what it must be like, to have to cut your hair with a plastic razor in a derelict farmhouse, or while squinting at yourself in the side mirror on your dad’s car. His thoughts were interrupted by an abrupt “Ta-da!”

He opened his eyes and stood up from the chair that they’d pulled into the bathroom. Adam looked at himself in the mirror and smiled wide. He looked different.

“Only really know the one haircut,” Dean said by way of apology from beside him, his reflection animated just over Adam’s shoulder. He looked at Dean, then back at himself, then Dean again. He looked back at his own reflection and laughed.

“Dean, you made a mini-me!” He cackled, and Dean’s cheeks reddened, but he laughed along. “Don’t worry – I like it. Thanks.”

“Hey, no problem.” Dean set the razor back on the counter. “Even if you get sick of it, it’s just hair. It’ll grow out.”

“Yeah,” Adam replied, though thinking about it now, he wasn’t so sure.

“You should grab a shower, get all the little hairs offa ya.” Dean gestured at the shower, and Adam nodded. Dean patted the door frame on his way out.

+++

He’d been afraid that it would be back the next day, that it would be like he’d never cut it at all, but he was relieved to see his hair just as short in the mirror that next morning.

Except, it stayed short. For weeks, he convinced himself it was just growing very slowly, and then months. And he realized that, of course, it wouldn’t be growing. Neither of them had needed to shave their faces, or trim their hair, or clip their nails since they got here. This was some sort of biological stasis.

All in all, he was just thankful Dean hadn’t decided to give him a lightning bolt. Or a NASCAR number.

+++

The third time that they broke things in the apartment, it was very much intentional.

“Man, you are such a fucking hypocrite,” Dean snarled from across the room. He was standing in front of the couch, facing Adam who was standing on the other side of the kitchen island. Dean was mad, but Adam was something else, something red-faced and nauseous.

“In what way?” Adam spat, sharp edged and blurry-eyed.

“It’s like, every time I even mention John – or Sam, even – you get out the big sad eyes and the serious voice and then like, one time I say anything about your childhood – “

“One time? We talk about my childhood just as much as yours!” Adam shouted back, feeling his face pull into a grin, one that was more instinctive, something between a cat showing its soft underbelly as a form of surrender and a jackal bearing its gleaming teeth to its prey.

“ – the one time I say anything about your childhood, you act like I’m a fucking pansy for it!”

“A pansy? Where are you getting this shit?”

“That’s it, isn’t it? You’re allowed to worry all you want about me, but as soon as I do it to you I’m just overreacting, right?”

“Dude, I don’t know what’s got you so pissed – “

“Bullshit,” Dean huffed, storming over to the kitchen, closing the gap between them too tightly for the mood they were both apparently in. “If you don’t know what pissed me of, then say it again!” Dean picked up an empty beer bottle off the end of the counter and pitched it over his shoulder without looking back, staring forward at Adam even as it shattered loudly against the far wall.

“Dean, I – “ Adam, for all his insistence to the contrary, knew exactly what he’d said and done to upset the man. He still wasn’t eager to own up to knowing it.

“If you don’t know why I’m mad, then say it again!” Dean yelled, taking another step toward Adam, who took a reflexive step back. He hurled another bottle behind him, but that one wasn’t quite empty, and the few final sips of beer splashed out when it hit the floor with a hollow musical thud.

“I know why you’re mad,” Adam admitted, “But I don’t want to say it again – I didn’t mean anything by it the first time, and I don’t like, stand by it, or something!”

“Man, fuck you,” Dean hissed, stepping into his space again. Adam was backed against the wall now, nowehere to go. “You didn’t mean it? Ain’t even said you’re sorry for it.” He sounded more sad than angry, but Adam didn’t really register that right away. Didn’t understand that the pained twist in Dean’s expression wasn’t rage, it was hurt. So Adam decked him, and immediately regretted it for two reasons.

One – Dean had been retreating. He wasn’t even actively angry anymore, just raw, just upset. The punch, subsequently, missed his jaw and cheekbone, instead crashing into Dean’s chin and mouth, the peaks of his knuckles slamming individually into him.

Two – Adam hadn’t had to punch anyone before. He’d done what felt natural – tucked his thumb under his four fingers and clenched tight. The second he made contact with Dean’s face, there was a horrid pain in the knuckle of his thumb. He’d broken it.

Dean, for his part, stumbled back, hand clasped over his own mouth.

“Holy shit,” Adam whispered, the angry fog clearing from his system, leaving him with a throbbing immobile thumb and an uncomfortable silence. The sink dripped, and he couldn’t remember hearing it do that in ages. He was suddenly struck with curiosity – had it stopped and started up again, or had he simply acclimated until something suitably shocking sharpened his senses enough to bring it back to the fore?

“Fuck,” Dean cursed quietly, though it came out more like ‘phugg’, and the moment he opened his mouth to speak, a gloppy mess of blood spilled out over his lips and chin, most of which was concealed by his still raised hand, though the bits he could see weren’t pretty. Some blood splattered onto the floor, disgustingly thick where it had mixed with his saliva.

Adam just stared, cradling his injured right hand in his left, holding both away from his body. Devoid of context, it might have looked like Adam was holding out his right hand as some sort of peace offering, waiting for Dean to take it. He said nothing, could think of nothing to say.

“You okay?” Dean asked, consonants mushy. He grabbed a paper towel and spit heartily until he could pull his blood spattered hand away from his mouth. He rinsed his hands in the sink and grabbed another paper towel. After he let his wet hands dampen it, he carefully wiped his chin and lips to clear the blood slathered there.

“I…uh…my hand,” Adam explained, still confused how Dean was the calm one in all of this.

“Lemme see.” Dean held out his own hands to receive Adam’s injured one. He couldn’t help but stare at Dean’s mouth as he spoke. His bottom lip was split in two places, and it had to sting just to speak. His teeth were stained streaky crimson with blood.

Adam deposited his right hand into Dean’s waiting cupped hands, and the man immediately turned it over gingerly in his warm fingers, inspecting. He grazed his own uninjured thumb over the knuckle of Adam’s, which elicited an instinctive hiss from him. Dean’s eyes flicked up to his, and Adam had to look away. Somehow, he only looked concerned.

“You broke it, idiot,” Dean laughed, though it was devoid of any real malice. If anything, he sounded fond. Perhaps wistful.

“I broke it?” Adam croaked, distraught. Dean smiled at him, wide and unembarrassed, split lip and bloody spit be damned.

“Yup,” Dean dismissed, turning to the fridge and grabbing the pint of ice cream (rum raisin, a disappointment in every sense of the word). He handed it to Adam, miming holding it over his thumb. Adam copied him and grimaced in stinging relief as the cold swept away the gristly throbbing in his joint.

“Dean,” Adam started, feeling as small and stupid as he sounded, “I’m sorry.”

“Dude, it’s – I overreacted,” Dean muttered, looking over his shoulder at the two puddles of broken glass where his beer bottles had landed. “We’re good, right?”

“Yeah,” Adam sighed, so relieved that he felt a little like throwing up. “And I…I really didn’t mean anything by it. Really. I’m really sorry.”

“Even if you did, it’s not…you’re not…not wrong.” Dean scratched the back of his neck, habitually pinching his lips in thought, then wincing as his injuries flared back into searing reality. “And it’s not…I don’t know why some stuff, I get so mad, but. S’not you, and you should be able to say shit without…whatever. We’re good, okay?”

Adam could tell that Dean was trying to drop it, but he didn’t want this to come up again, down the road. He wanted to talk it out now, and not have to wait for the resentment shoe to drop later.

“We’re good, but – when I said that, I didn’t – it definitely wasn’t because I like, think you’re a ‘pansy’, or some shit like that, okay?”

“Just, can we – we don’t have to talk about it, yeah?”

“No, I really want to make sure that we’re good – “

“We’re good!” Dean burst out, stomping back to the living room, sounding exhausted.

Adam stood there, trying to choose his next move. He watched his brother sink into the couch cushions, tip his head back on the back of the couch, close his eyes. He crossed his legs, then uncrossed them. Spread his hands on his thighs, then clasped them over his stomach, then quickly pulled them apart. Sometimes, it felt like the act of observing Dean affected him, in some intrinsic way. Like in viewing him, whether he could see you watching or not, you applied some invisible kind of pressure to him, squished him down. He watched him for at least a minute, maybe two. But then, what was time, in a place like this?

“I didn’t think you were acting like my mom.”

Dean’s eyes flicked open, but he remained otherwise motionless. Silent. The faucet dripped.

“Dean. Really. It’s just something I used to say, if my friends were on my case, you know – ‘what are you, my mom?’, I didn’t mean to imply you’re like. A ‘pansy’ or something. It’s,” Adam took a deep breath, tried to remind himself that there were benefits to honesty, “It’s actually kinda nice. That you care about that stuff, even though it’s in the past now anyway.”

“I…look, I just. Forget it. It’s a normal thing to say, I’m just being a fuckhead, okay? We’re good – “

Dean was cut off by, of all things, Crowley. At some point in all of this, he’d come in, quiet as a church mouse, and stood stunned in front of the closed apartment door.

“It's feeling a little Lord of the Flies in here, boys.” Crowley stepped over a shattered beer bottle as he came further into the room.

“Crowley,” Dean said it like an exclamation and a greeting, all at once.

“I can’t exactly get on your arses about cleaning up for company – not like you knew you were having a guest.”

“How’s it going, up there?” Adam asked, terrified of getting an answer, terrified of being lied to.

“It’s going well,” Crowley answered, though he stared at Dean for a long moment as he did so, like he was studying him. Dean’s cheeks flamed at the attention, but he didn’t look away. “I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t,” Crowley looked over at Adam, curious, “killed each other yet.”

“We’re good,” Dean insisted, and Crowley looked back over at him.

“Yes, so I heard.”

“Can we – while you’re here, could we – “ Adam stammered, trying and failing to ask for something – anything new.

“You know, I think I’ve got just the things for you scamps.” Crowley went back to the door, and before grabbing the knob, snapped his fingers, almost as an afterthought. The litter of broken glass disappeared, and the bottles weren't merely empty on the counter again. They were gone from view, presumably full and in the fridge once more. Before either he or Dean could get a word in edgewise, the demon had gone.

“I need a beer,” Dean mumbled, and Adam laughed.

“Coming right up,” He went to the fridge and pulled one out for each of them. They were both still buzzed from the same beers, which they’d drunk roughly an hour earlier. Maybe they’d actually get drunk, for once.

“No shit,” Dean laughed, taking one from Adam and cracking it open on the TV stand. Adam opened his on the the kitchen counter.

They drank in jovial silence for a few minutes, TV droning an infomercial for some ceramic pan in the background.

“Dad said somethin’ like that, once.” Dean stared forward as he said it, and Adam, chugging along on his second beer, took a second to process what Dean was talking about. “I uh, he came back from a bad hunt – scratches, broken ribs. A gunshot wound. And I was fussin’ over him – I’d dropped outta high school by then, but Sammy was still at home and stuff. And uh, he was drunk and he shoved me off. Said ‘what are you, my wife?’, and I just. I freaked. So. Sorry.” He punctuated the thought with a long sip of his beer.

“Hey,” Adam said, soft enough that Dean leaned closer to hear the rest of the sentence, “We’re good.”

+++

It took them three days to find the first item Crowley had left behind for them. The game ‘Guess Who?’, which Adam had loved as a kid. His mom had been so sick of playing it that he suspected that she may have intentionally misplaced it once or twice, just to manufacture a break for herself.

It took them a little over a month to find the other item he’d left. It was wedged into the cabinet under the bathroom sink, where they spent very little time unless they needed something fairly specific.

It took them almost two years to actually use the second item.

“What if it looks dumb, though?” Dean stared at a spot on his leg, about two inches above his knee, on his inner thigh.

“You never wear anything but jeans, who gives a shit if it looks dumb?”

Dean seemed appeased by that answer, but he kept staring at that small patch of skin, freshly shaved, crudely stenciled, and glistening with a sheen of Aquaphor. Adam freed one of the needles from its sterile packaging.

“What if it just, just goes away tomorrow?” Dean asked, pulling at the edge of the patch of skin, watching the stencil warp with the flesh.

“Then it goes away,” Adam shrugged, “You can get it again, if you want. Or get one like it when we get out. Only one way to find out.”

“Fair enough,” Dean agreed, sitting back against the couch arm, leg out on the cushions in front of him. Adam dipped the fresh needle in the ink he’d poured into a bowl, then crouched over Dean’s leg and looked up at Dean one more time before making the first puncture.

“You ready?”

“Born ready,” Dean grinned, and Adam didn’t detect a single note of hesitance, surprisingly enough.

He stuck the needle in at a tight angle along the edge of the stencil.

+++

In the morning, the very first day of their thirty sixth year, the tattoo he’d made on Dean’s leg was still there, though perfectly healed.

Dean rejoiced at the sight of it, sticking his leg in the air to show Adam. It was the outline of a beer bottle cap, a real one used as stencil outline. It had come out pretty good, in Adam’s unprofessional opinion.

The sight of it stirred an unexpected feeling in him, though. He hadn’t really realized it until then, that the only marks Dean had gained since they were sent down here were scars from injuries Adam had given him – the short jagged cut in front of his ear, the long one on his hand, the tiny one on his chin that Dean probably didn’t even notice, even though Adam did. Now, though, there was an intentional mark – a sign of something given, not taken.

“You like it?” Adam asked, even though the answer seemed obvious. He felt like something huge and unknowable hinged on this one thing, this one little intentional scar.

“Hell yeah,” Dean confirmed, thumbing over the healed flesh with a warm smile on his face. He looked up at Adam, “You know, if that doctor thing doesn’t pan out, I bet you could make it as a tattoo artist.”

Chapter Text

AUGUST 2010  //  YEARS 36 – 45 IN HELL

“It’s barely a game,” Adam groused, “Like, it’s almost as bad as Candy Land.”

“You can’t be serious,” Dean rolled his eyes, laying out the board for Mouse Trap on the table.

“Okay, Chutes and Ladders? You don’t get to decide anything, it’s like, like preordained.”

“You could say that about any dice game.”

“Maybe every dice game is boring,” Adam muttered, looking away melodramatically. He crossed his arms over his chest tight. It reminded Dean of Sam, as many of Adam’s mannerisms did.

They’d been in this place a long time. Longer than either of them had ever been alive. He was beginning to suspect that he’d been in this apartment as long as he’d been in the Pit, though he wasn’t sure. He could ask Adam. He wouldn’t.

Having Adam around was truly life saving. Sanity saving, even. It was hard, some days, to remember life before. To remember people’s voices, their faces, the places they’d gone and things they’d done. But it was easier to remember these things for Adam, to answer questions and tell stories. It was easier to remember these things when he was looking at his brother, noticing the similarities and differences between him and Sam, or him and John, or him and Bobby. The many differences between him and Cas.

“Tell you what, however many times we play Mouse Trap, we can play double that of Guess Who? later. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds like a fuck ton of Mouse Trap,” Adam lamented, before adding a reluctant nod of approval.

They were three games deep, neither of them having said much of anything yet, just following the directions and the rolls of the dice. It was meditative, peaceful. Dean liked that Mouse Trap required very little decision making – it was a feature, for him. Not a bug.

“I think this has to be the last one for today,” Adam announced as that third match drew to a close. The trap was built and set. Dean was pretty sure that, if the dice stayed on his side, Adam was going to lose. Again.

“Yeah, alright,” Dean agreed. Three rounds was honestly more than he thought he’d get out of Adam.

“Maybe we have a snack, and then…” Adam trailed off, but he didn’t need to finish his sentence for Dean to know what he meant. Really, conversation was at times almost perfunctory, between them. It was easy to tell from posture alone, from the shape of a silence, or the angle of the set of the other’s mouth, what they were thinking, what they wanted, how they felt.

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll play Guess Who?, I know.”

“That’s gonna be – “

“Six games, yeah, I know,” Dean feigned resignation, but he smiled a little. It was another sort of game they played, pretending to be more exasperated with one another than they truly were.

The clementines were pleasant enough, and they ended up eating them all as their snack, peeling them en masse and separating all the little squishy sections, then dumping them in a big bowl, the way you might serve pretzels or chips at a party. Early on, Dean had developed a sort of nervous habit, of peeling all the white spongy pithy bits off of his clementines, and Adam had, without ever bringing it up, joined in on it. Both of them working in tandem, they had all the clementines peeled in no time.

“We can just – “ Dean started, and Adam nodded, interrupting him – if only to finish the thought.

“Eat ‘em while we play?” Dean nodded back, and carried the clementine bowl to the table. Adam grabbed the game of Guess Who? from the stack of board games and brought it over, unboxing the two boards and setting them down.

“Has your person ever owned a dog?” Adam asked as his opening salvo. Early on in owning this game, Dean had declared that they could no longer ask about things like hair, eye, and skin color, or even facial features or genders. Adam had initially balked at the idea, saying that that was the whole point of the game, to narrow down the options visually. But Dean was tired of asking the same six or seven questions. It was funny to look back on that original hesitance. Adam took to the new rules like a fish to water. Dean would never admit it, but he actually really liked this game, now that they’d changed it to be more interesting.

“No, never.” Dean stared at the person he’d drawn, a blonde man named Joe with a puckered mouth and red glasses. Adam nodded sagely and flipped down about half of his character tiles. “Has yours ever been married?”

“No, but they wish they had.”

Dean flipped down almost all of his tiles, since Adam had inadvertently ruled out both those who looked to Dean like they had been married, and those who looked very happy not to have been.

Adam studied the remaining tiles in front of him. Dean could tell, just by the sectors still standing, that Adam had not accidentally eliminated the Joe tile. It was anyone’s game, unless he himself had made an error.

“Has yours ever built anything? Like, not just something big like a house or something, but like, ever just a Lego thing?”

“What kinda question is that?” Dean laughed, “Everybody’s built something, come on.”

“Fine,” Adam shrugged, bit his lip. He studied the tiles in front of him. “Does yours seem like they’re good with their hands?”

Dean stared at the Joe tile, pondering him. He liked to think of himself as a decent judge of others, just given his upbringing and line of work. Adam may not know it, but Dean was also an excellent authority on whether a man seemed like he’d be good with his hands.

“No, absolutely not.” Adam scrunched his nose, looking conflicted, before flicking down two tiles. Dean looked down at his remaining tiles, all of them women except one. It was his favorite tile, which might have struck him as odd, if he thought about it long enough. After all, who has a favorite character in the 1987 edition of Guess Who?, besides someone who’s played it hundreds of times? His favorite tile was Robert, a fair gentleman with dark hair and blue eyes, these rosy little cheeks, and a troubled frown. He was the only man of the bunch who seemed unhappily unmarried.

“Your turn,” Adam needled, grinning. He knew that Dean knew it was his turn. He wasn’t even being impatient, really. It was all part of that game they were tacitly playing, where they pretended to be irritated, just to have something to do. Dean shot him a snarky look, then went back to studying his tiles. Adam, unperturbed, popped two clementine sections in his mouth and waited patiently.

“Is yours kind?”

“In what way?”

“Like, you know. Are they nice?”

“Nice is not the same as kind,” Adam equivocated, chewing thoughtfully. Dean grabbed a section of clementine and bit it in half, marveling at the tiny beads of citrusy goodness inside that one miniscule sliver of fruit.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, you know. Nice is like, you say ‘hi’ to everybody and hold doors and stuff. Kind is like, bigger. Lots of different types,” Adam explained as he grabbed another piece of clementine.

“Yeah?” Dean prompted, curious. Adam’s outlook on the world wasn’t oppositional to his own, but it dovetailed sharply in another direction, and he was always eager for a glimpse of that deviation.

“Yeah, like, some people are just open and pleasant and warm, all the time. They’re kind as like, base level operating standard. And some people are only kind to people who they respect, or people they like, or whatever. And some people seem super aloof and cold even, but they hate seeing somebody sad, or in trouble, and they surprise you. You need somebody in your corner, and all of a sudden, there they are, right?”

Dean stared at the Robert tile, and it stared inanimately back.

“Okay, then, is yours that type of kind, the cold kind?”

Adam stared at his subject tile, mulling it over.

“I think so.” Adam seemed satisfied with his own assessment and tossed three sections of clementine into his mouth. Dean dutifully flipped down two of his remaining tiles, though he left Robert standing. “Ith yourth boring?” Adam asked, mouth full.

“Yeah, definitely.” He stared down at Joe, his beady little eyes. Joe looked like the most bland man you’d ever meet, like he only owned khakis. Adam let out a grumpy sound and flipped down just one tile. He must have been banking on a ‘no’.

Dean stared at his few remaining tiles. He couldn’t tell if it was personal preference talking, or if his intuition was to be trusted, but he felt strongly that Robert was the correct tile. He looked over his game board at Adam, who had just swallowed the clementines he’d been chewing.

“Is yours Robert?” He asked, and Adam scowled.

“Yeah.” He picked up the card at the front of his board and flipped it around to show Dean that it was, indeed, Robert. “What was yours?”

“Joe,” Dean showed him the card. Adam sighed, accepting defeat.

“Frickin’ Joe,” Adam grumbled, “Hate that guy.”

“Yeah?” Dean was delighted to hear that he wasn’t the only one with favorites and least favorites.

“Yeah, he looks like my high school’s vice principal, Mr. Mullins.”

“He looks pretty dull,” Dean agreed. He cleared his throat. “What do you, uh, think about Robert?” He asked, and Adam cocked his head, curious. He wasn’t smiling exactly, but he was very nearly doing that. Just one small muscle movement is all it would take, to make it a true smile. He studied the Robert card, mouth still twitching up.

“I don’t know,” Adam raised his eyes to meet Dean’s, irises sparking with mischief, “What do you think about Robert?”

“He just, uh. Seems nice, is all. Kinda reminds me of…” He decided not to follow that thought any further. He found himself doing that pretty often, really.

“Well, I like him,” Adam announced, theatrically loud, “He looks considerate, and intelligent…very strong.”

Dean broke eye contact, looked down at the bowl of clementines. Snatched one and stuffed it in his mouth, just to have something to do.

“Like I said,” Adam continued, staring at Dean still, “He seems kind, in there somewhere. Don’t you think?”

“Sure, but. I mean. He’s just a cartoon,” Dean murmured.

“Oh, obviously. Yeah. Just a cartoon,” Adam conceded, flipping his tiles back up and sticking the Robert card back in the box. “Ready for round two?”

“Sure,” Dean agreed, flipping his own tiles back up and discarding Joe. He drew a new subject card – a woman with a green beret cocked jauntily on her head.

“Does yours like going to the movie theater?” Adam asked, going first because he’d lost the previous game.

“Loves it,” Dean answered. Adam smirked as he flipped almost all of his tiles down.

+++

He couldn’t keep a dream journal, but he wanted to.

A few times, he’d grab some scratch paper and scribble out the salient points from a given dream, but it wasn’t satisfying, especially knowing that the words would be gone by the following morning, not even erased, but unmade. Unwritten. Even the writing itself wasn’t as cathartic as he wanted it to be. He always felt he was missing something, leaving out some key detail. Awake, but not aware, scribbling things in a nonsensical order.

His frustration, both with the transience of his words and their inherent inadequacy, came to a head one morning. Instead of trying to describe how the version of Sam in his dream had been staring at him, he started sketching it, and was almost pleased with the result. It was a marked improvement from how he felt after writing about his dreams, certainly.

That had been over a decade ago, at least as far as time in Hell was measured.

In the intervening years, he’d gotten pretty good, though he still hadn’t revealed this new hobby to Adam. He always waited for days when they were spending time apart, or completed his works while Adam was still asleep, or showering. There wasn’t really a reason that he was keeping it to himself, besides the harmless thrill of having something private, something personal.

On this morning, Dean was focused on hands. Specifically, Cas’s hands, though he dismissed the significance of that particular detail, telling himself that it was only because he’d dreamt of Cas. He was sure that if he’d dreamt of anyone else, it would be their hands he was drawing. He sort of wondered why it was, that he dreamed of Cas more than anyone else in his life, but he didn’t follow that thought to its logical end point. That was another private hobby of his, it seemed.

He was so busy avoiding that particular line of thinking that he didn’t notice Adam stirring across the room, padding silently from the bed to the kitchen, then from the kitchen to the couch, where Dean was single-mindedly scribbling.

“That’s really good,” Adam murmured, watching his hand track deftly across the page, shading the knuckle of Castiel’s thumb.

Dean inhaled sharply in surprise, slamming his left hand down over the drawing, as if he’d been caught doing something horribly embarrassing.

“Whoa, sorry,” Adam muttered, placating and residually sleepy. “I’ll go get the coffee going…”

“Yeah, thanks,” Dean replied, sliding his hand carefully off of his drawing. He looked down at it, not with the kaleidoscopic eye of a dreamer, but the discerning eye of an artist. Adam was right. It was really good. “Sorry about that, I uh, you just spooked me. Didn’t know you were up.”

“It’s okay.” Adam started the coffee brewing, punctuating the action with a massive yawn and a vertical stretch. “You like drawing?”

“Guess so,” Dean replied, not having thought about it as an art form before. For him, it had been an outlet, a bridge between waking and sleeping.

“You should do it more,” Adam suggested, unaware that Dean drew almost daily. “It’s pretty cool.”

+++

“Adam!” Dean yelled, staring at the television like it would disappear if he so much as blinked.

Adam popped his head out of the bathroom, hair still wet from the shower.

“Dude, what?” He asked, agitated.

“PBS!” He shouted back, staring at a woman nod along while a thin man in a gray suit explained the provenance of a watercolor painting she’d brought in.

“Pee bee ess?” Adam asked, squinting. Had it been so long that the guy had forgotten about PBS?

“Dude, PBS?? Like, the public broadcasting station? Like, you know, Sesame Street? Antiques Roadshow? Telethons? Fuckin’ Celtic Woman? PBS?” Dean gestured wildly as he spoke, mind racing as he considered the smorgasbord of television programming this had opened up to them.

“Holy shit, PBS?” Adam breathed, scrambling out of the bathroom and into the living room, towel wrapped haphazardly around his hips.

“Yeah,” Dean refocused on the television, “WTCI Chattanooga, if you wanna get technical.”

Adam disappeared back to the bathroom, emerging only a minute or so later, dressed and ready to watch some blessedly new television. Since there was no TV Guide channel, there was no way to know what programming was in store, but so far it had been a solid block of Antiques Roadshow. He’d watched it plenty of times in motel rooms, growing up, and had a bit of a soft spot for it – though he’d never admit that to Sam.

“I used to watch this all the time,” Adam gushed, watching the TV with wide eyes, “This, and This Old House. Whenever my mom was on a night shift, they’d have these big marathons on all night. It was great.”

“Yeah? I used to watch this stuff in motels. Everywhere’s got PBS, you know?”

“Yeah,” Adam grinned. He turned up the volume, just in time for that classic musical sting to play as they revealed the appraisal value.

+++

“What’re you drawing?” Adam asked from his spot on the other end of the couch. Dean looked up, shaken from his concentration, but not unpleasantly so. He glanced over at the television, which was playing an episode of Nature about owls. He’d been using it as a reference for his sketch, one long wing, stretching across the page.

“Owl,” Dean replied, tilting his head towards the television to indicate the inspiration. Adam nodded.

“You ever see one, like, in real life?”

“Plenty. You?”

“Nah, but there was one living in our neighborhood when I was little. I heard it calling at night, sometimes.”

“When we get out, we should go looking for one. They’re pretty neat.”

“You see a lot of them?”

“Yeah, actually,” Dean replied, never having dedicated much thought to what kinds of animals he’d seen, and how frequently. It seemed like something people who didn’t spend much time outside were more likely to dwell on. He figured if you’d had to sleep in your car, or camp out enough times, you stopped seeing so much of a line between yourself and the critters around you. There was less novelty to seeing an opossum, or a skunk, or a raccoon, or an owl. There were times, standing in the middle of some overgrown cemetery, shovel in hand, sun setting over his shoulder, when he heard crows calling to one another, and almost felt he could understand what they were saying.

“That’s cool,” Adam replied, because he didn’t quite understand.

“Yeah, I guess,” Dean agreed, because he didn’t quite want Adam to understand.

+++

Dean wasn’t keeping track, exactly, but he was pretty sure they’d watched PBS for several weeks straight. They kept falling asleep on the couch, TV glowing in front of them, only to wake up in a stiff-limbed heap and start all over again.

“Favorite Sesame Street character, go,” Adam prompted, eyes glued to the screen.

“Twiddlebugs,” Dean rattled off, and Adam laughed so loud that it actually made Dean flinch. “Come on, what?” Dean asked, feeling self conscious. Which was stupid, he thought, chastising himself. Who gave a shit if Adam thought that was a dumb answer?

“Sorry, sorry, that’s – I love that, really,” Adam assured him once he could breathe again. “It’s just, my favorite was always Slimey, so,” Adam lapsed back into laughter, and Dean chuckled along, at last understanding what was so funny.

“Bugs, they’re both bugs,” Dean laughed. “Why Slimey?”

“I don’t know,” Adam sobered, thinking hard on the question. On screen, Rosita was singing a song about different times of day. “It was kind of cozy looking, to be a little muppety worm like that.”

“That makes sense,” Dean replied, not just to be nice. It really did make sense to him. He liked the way Adam looked at things. “I liked the Twiddlebugs sorta the same way. It seemed nice, having Ernie look after them. They’re always there, in the window box.”

“That makes sense,” Adam echoed, though he was looking at Dean like that again, something he did less and less as the years wore on. Dean reminded himself that it wasn’t pity, and took a deep breath.

“Spit it out, Dr. Phil,” Dean nudged his brother, and he rolled his eyes at Dean.

“Nothing, really,” Adam assured him. “Not like I have a lot of room to talk – I’m the one that thinks it’d be cool to live with Oscar the Grouch!”

“Okay, but it would be cool,” Dean insisted.

“Anyway,” Adam rolled his eyes again, “I think we both just like the idea of being all small and secure, and I guess it’s kinda sad. Not just your answer – both of us,” Adam explained.

“I mean, I guess. I was a kid, when I first watched it, and so were you,” Dean thought aloud, and Adam nodded along, listening, “It makes sense, if you’re a kid and you’re, you know, uh, alone, a lot. That you’d imagine a world that’s, you know, smaller. Safer. Where somebody’s lookin’ out for you.”

“Yeah,” Adam replied, and Dean didn’t have to look at him to notice the emotion underneath the word. He reached his arm over the back of the couch and around Adam’s shoulders, giving him a short firm squeeze before retreating.

“Wish I knew about you sooner, kid,” Dean said after a beat, surprised to hear himself say it. He was feeling a bit emotional himself, all of a sudden.

“Me too,” Adam agreed quietly, scooting a bit closer on the couch.

+++

Most of the time, he knew when he was dreaming, and he was usually grateful for that. This time was no different – he knew it was a dream. But he wished, just for a moment, that he got to even pretend it was real.

It was accurate, down to the earthy tang of wet asphalt scenting the wind, the gleam of the pink-orange streetlight overhead. Cas was standing there, just as he had been in real life, looking fond and aloof and hesitant to say something. That look had inspired Dean to try to break the tension with a compliment – ‘that’s pretty nice timing, Cas,’ he’d said. Now all he could do was stare.

“We had an appointment,” this echo of Castiel said, dutiful and exact.

Dean placed his hand on Cas’s shoulder, as he had back then, and he felt real – warm and alive, just as he had that night. It was a blessing, to be able to touch him like this without the dream caving in on itself. This was when he’d said ‘don’t ever change,’ but that was because of what came before. The Castiel he’d seen in the future (or fabrication, perhaps) that Zachariah had inflicted upon him, how broken he’d been. How he’d broken himself for Dean.

Now, that ordeal anything but top of mind, he didn’t reach for that reactionary command.

“I miss you,” Dean murmured, because it was true. There were other true things he wanted to say, but it felt wrong, somehow. To say them in a dream, where Castiel couldn’t actually hear them.

Cas smiled, that blushing flattered half-smile that made Dean’s heart beat loud in his ears. He knew how the rest of the dream was supposed to go, and he decided it would be okay, to skip all that. To end it how he wanted, for once. He drew Cas in by the grip he had on his shoulder and kissed him.

He got to have exactly three seconds of this, before the dream ended.

His eyes weren’t even open yet, before he was pushing back the covers and scooting toward the edge of the bed, fingers itching to draw.

Snatching a pencil and some paper, he snuck into the bathroom and sat on the tile floor, back against the latched door, and got down to business.

+++

“You always win Monopoly, man, can’t we play Mouse Trap?” Dean whined, and Adam rolled his eyes.

“We like, just put it away, dude. Like, three hours ago. I’m not playing any more Mouse Trap today. Or tomorrow. Ten rounds is ten too many.”

Dean rolled the dice, moving his thimble four spaces ahead. He landed on Marvin Gardens, which Adam owned. He forked over his rent money with a stern pout.

“When we’re done with this game, we can switch,” Adam sighed, “But not to Mouse Trap!”

“Battleship?” Dean asked, not feeling terribly enthusiastic about it, though it was preferable to Monopoly. Adam rolled the dice and landed on Free Parking, because of course he did.

“What about Guess Who?,” Adam asked nonchalantly as he counted and organized the stack of money he’d just lucked into.

Dean knew his part in the dance here, the choreography of banal frustration they’d gotten swept up in, but he was tired of it, all at once. He was tired of performing, even that tiny little bit.

“That sounds awesome,” Dean grinned, and Adam stopped counting his fake money and stared at him, jaw slack.

“Cool, yeah,” Adam managed, eyebrows knitted together in confusion.

They rushed the rest of the Monopoly session, Adam winning in a landslide.

Adam set up the Guess Who? game boards, and Dean grabbed the bag of Cheetos out of the pantry. It was, as all things in the apartment were, static. Every day, the bag reappeared, identical to previous iterations. The exact same Cheetos in the exact same package, ad infinitum. They’d gotten to the point where they recognized specific Cheetos – there was a huge one, almost five inches long and forked on one end, that Dean had permanent dibs on, and one that was somehow a perfect circle, a loop you could stick on your finger like a very dusty ring. Adam preferred that one, though he’d never said that outright. Dean could just tell.

“Okay,” Adam said, eager to begin. He drew a subject card and nodded, taking in the character before him. Dean did the same. His was a broad faced man in a policeman’s cap named Eric, with a wide closed-lipped smile and a tiny button nose. Maybe it was just the cop thing, but this one always gave him the creeps. One of the things John Winchester had done right as a parent was to instill a deep distrust of law enforcement in his children. “Is yours someone who looks in the mirror and like, checks themself out?” Adam asked.

Dean stared down at his card, at Eric, and shuddered.

“I’ll bet so,” Dean replied, gut twisting in disgust. He crammed some Cheetos in his mouth. Adam flicked several of his tiles down. Once Dean had finished crunching, he asked his own query. “You think yours ever picks up hitchhikers?”

“Hmm,” Adam worried his lower lip with his teeth, thinking hard. “Only if they’re hot,” Adam decided, looking at his subject card with a judgmental slantwise glance.

“Yuck,” Dean laughed, dismissing several of his tiles. He had always hated hitchhiking, even when the drivers weren’t creeps. He never had much trouble finding a ride, though sometimes he wished he would have. It was a lot, to be confronted with what kinds of things people thought he deserved, and what they thought it should cost him.

“Does yours chew cinnamon gum?” Adam asked, squinting at his tiles like they would speak to him if he gave them his best detective stare. He missed the queasy look that crossed Dean’s face. Dean hadn’t ever seen himself make that face, but he could imagine what it must look like. Haunted might be a good word.

“Yeah,” Dean answered, unable to muster his usual bravado. Adam looked up, concerned. It didn’t take much, anymore, for either of them to notice when something was wrong with the other.

“You good?” He asked, puzzled.

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean assured him, picking idly at the edge of the card in front of him. Eric’s smile was disgusting. Mocking, even. He closed his eyes. Figured he must really be losing it, if he could feel mocked by a cartoon cop.

“Dude, talk to me.” Adam sat up straighter in his chair – Dean could hear it shift under his weight as he moved. He kept his eyes closed. It felt better, easier, even though he wasn’t sure why.

“S’nothin’,” Dean lied, waving a hand between them as if to literally clear the air. “Does yours, um. Is yours.” Dean pinched his eyes shut tighter. “Shit, is yours loud?”

“Loud?” Adam asked after a few silent beats. The sink was dripping, and Dean felt mocked by that, too.

“Yeah, is he loud, you know? Like, he knows he’s bein’ loud, and he knows you hate that, and he’s loud anyhow just, just kinda because you hate it?”

“Um,” Adam replied, and did not continue.

“Hey, uh, forget it.” Dean opened his eyes, and the room seemed brighter than before. Too bright, even. He squinted down at his card, Eric still staring guilelessly forward, smiling ear to ear. “I can ask something else.”

“Yeah, okay.” Adam was looking at him, searching him for something, but he didn’t ask. Dean could have hugged him for that, for not asking. Hell, maybe he should hug him for it.

“Thanks,” Dean looked up at his brother, locked eyes with him. Adam raised one eyebrow, openly bewildered.

“You’re…welcome?” Adam wrinkled his nose. “Man, are you sure you’re good?”

Dean shrugged, then stood up, feeling very stupid. Adam stared up at him, then slowly stood up as well. Taking a deep breath, Dean leaned forward and hugged him, the way he sometimes hugged Sam, where it became something powerful, like a wish, or a spell. Adam hugged back, not as crushingly as Sam tended to. More tentative. After half a minute or so, he pulled back, managed a crooked smile, and plopped back down at the table. Adam stayed standing for a second before sitting down again himself.

“Does yours have stinky shoes?” Dean asked. Adam blinked at him then smiled, like he had just learned something very special, and had decided to keep it to himself.

“Just the most putrid fucking shoes,” Adam expounded, “Like, noxious fumes. Fucking biohazards.”

“I see,” Dean got rid of most of his tiles, leaving three standing.

“Has yours ever fallen down while ice skating?”

“Oh yeah, big time,” Dean laughed, feeling better already.

+++

It was one of those days, where they couldn’t stand the sound of the other person breathing, the lingering potential energy of another person’s thoughts heavy in the air. Where Dean felt watched, but not seen.

As was his mode, he set up shop in the bathroom, drawing supplies and snacks provisioned.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror – something he resolutely avoided, most days. It was jarring, to see just how similar he looked now to the day he’d first arrived in this place. There was a faint scar just in front of his ear, from where Adam had whacked him with a pan once, but he looked mostly identical to how he had however many decades ago. He glanced down at his knee, covered by denim, and remembered with some measure of relief that there was a tattoo under there. Dean didn’t feel the need to interrogate why it was comforting, that the tattoo was real and had stayed, would continue to stay on his skin. It just was.

Looking back up at the mirror, he studied his face, not as a man, as a self, but as an artist. It abstracted itself before him, gave way to angles and lines, to arcs and shadows.

For the first time since he’d started drawing in Hell, he made a self-portrait. When it was done, he left the bathroom and snagged the blue painter’s tape out of the kitchen. Adam was napping on the couch, the credits for The Abyss crawling on the TV screen.

Back in the bathroom, he ripped off two pieces of tape and stuck one on either end of the paper, then taped it to the mirror, right over top of his own reflection. He smirked, and the drawing stayed stoic, static. He smiled wider, relieved.

+++

“Why do you think they got together?” Adam asked out of the blue, staring ahead at an episode of Antiques Roadshow.

“Who?” Dean asked from the kitchen, where he was trying his level best to make a pound cake from memory.

“John and my mom.”

“I mean, you want the birds and the bees or what?” Dean laughed, turning to preheat the oven.

“No, I mean, why him, of all people, and why then? And why’d she let him come meet me, later?”

“Why’s it matter?”

“I don’t know, doesn’t it just…matter, like, inherently? Don’t most kids know that stuff about their parents?”

“Not really. I know my parents liked the same music and stuff. And my mom wanted away from her folks, and Dad wanted to settle down, stop thinking about stuff from being overseas. Also, uh. I think they were sort of a ‘match made in Heaven’, like. Literally.”

“That’s a thing?” Adam asked, sounding disgusted. Dean felt a little disgusted over it, too, if he was honest with himself.

“Yeah, there’s real cupids and stuff. Angels that make people fall in love, if there’s a reason that it has to happen.”

“That’s…wow. Yikes.”

“Not the most romantic set-up,” Dean agreed, mixing his wet ingredients with the dry ones.

“But my mom – “

“I mean, not to be crude, but I’m guessing they just, you know, hit it off. He was in town, needed patched up, she was a nurse, and you know, the rest is, uh, history.”

On the television, an older gentleman just learned that the letter his grandmother had told him was written by Martha Washington was a forgery. Dean looked away from the man’s tired, sad face.

“If she knew what he was like, and what he did, why’d she let him just waltz into our lives like that?”

“Maybe she didn’t know,” Dean posited, pouring his batter into a loaf pan that had seen better days. “Or maybe she thought it was just more important to give you that option, even if he wasn’t like, gonna be ‘Dad of the Year’.”

“Maybe,” Adam agreed, sounding sour. “I wanted a dad so bad, when I was little. And then I had one and all I could think was, like, is this it? Is this what it’s supposed to be like, or is this just some other thing?”

“I don’t think John was what a dad’s supposed to be like, Adam,” Dean laughed, shaking his head at the notion. “I think he tried to hide that better, with you. Which was probably pretty confusing. Talk about mixed signals.”

They were both quiet for several minutes. The pound cake went into the oven, for better or worse. Dean busied himself chopping up pears to fry in butter and cinnamon. They’d go well with the cake, if it turned out.

“I still don’t get why he didn’t tell me about you,” Adam sighed, frustrated, “Or why he didn’t tell you about me.”

“Well, he didn’t tell me ‘n Sam about you because he didn’t wanna share his new family, I imagine. Or he didn’t want us spilling the beans about Hunting. Or he just thought he’d fucked us up bad enough, didn’t want us messing up this apple pie life he had going.” Dean discarded the cores from the pears. “And you know, similar deal the other way around. Also probably felt weird to admit, that he’d left us alone to go off and meet your mom in the first place.”

“Jesus,” Adam hissed through his teeth, and Dean looked over at him. A commercial for Masterpiece Theater was playing on the TV set, unacknowledged, as Adam was now looking over at Dean.

“What?” He asked, dumping the pear pieces into a skillet with some butter.

“Just, do you think that?”

“Think what?”

“That he didn’t want you like, like tainting me?”

“I mean, he wouldn’t’ve said it like that, I’m sure. But yeah, I do.” Dean realized it was true as he said it, and it hurt to put those words out into the world, even if only for Adam to hear. Based on the look on his brother’s face, it must have hurt similarly to hear it.

“Dude, I would trade every second I ever had with that guy for time with you. You know that, right?” Adam asked, sounding incensed. His cheeks were bright pink.

“Sure,” Dean nodded, pushing the pears around in the pan as the burner heated up.

“Seriously,” Adam insisted, “I can’t imagine how much happier I’d’ve been, if you – or you and Sam, even – showed up to take me out to a baseball game, when I was a kid, instead of him.”

“Really?” Dean asked around a lump in his throat, and Adam nodded.

“Really, yeah.”

+++

“You ever draw me?” Adam asked, tending the popcorn that was popping on the stove. Dean glanced up from his work, a side profile of Cas. He’d decided to give him a frown – just the slightest downturn of his mouth. Barely an expression, to the untrained eye.

“No, actually.”

“Why not?” Adam had a sort of pouting look on his face, but Dean wasn’t sure Adam intended that.

“I haven’t really drawn much that’s down here. Some stuff from TV maybe. But I’ve only even drawn myself once.”

“Oh,” Adam replied, and it occurred to Dean that he was just going to let it drop. Adam was like that. He didn’t push. Most of the time, Dean liked that about him – loved that about him, in fact. There were lots of things about his brother that he loved.

“I could, though. If you want?”

“Yeah?” Adam asked, smile melting across his features.

“Yeah, man.” Dean turned over the paper to the blank back. “When you take that off the heat, come over here.”

Adam checked the popcorn a few more times as the percussive burbling sounds tapered off, then turned off the burner and transferred the snack to a large bowl. He dumped a bunch of melted butter and salt over it and stirred it with the handle of a wooden spoon.

Back on the couch, he plopped down across from Dean and gave a very serious ‘I’m posing for Art’ face.

“Just look natural,” Dean huffed, amused and frustrated and a little nervous to draw someone who’d actually see their likeness when he was done. Who might be able to wrinkle their nose and say ‘that looks nothing like me’.

He started broad, with the shape of his face, the empty spaces he’d fill with light, with movement, with form. His focus narrowed and narrowed until he wasn’t even looking up from the page anymore. As if he even really needed Adam to model for this, when he’d seen him all day, every day, for close to fifty years.

“Can I see it?” Adam asked, after some amount of time had passed. Dean had no idea if it’d been a minute or an hour. Adam got up to fetch the popcorn.

“It’s not – “ He was going to say ‘done’, but when he looked down at the paper, it was perfectly presentable. Dean could have spent another hour, just shading and darkening certain lines, smudging graphite here and there to soften him, to add depth. “Um, I mean. Sure.”

Popcorn bowl in hand, Adam came back over and circled around behind Dean, leaning over his shoulder, weight braced on his forearms on the back of the couch.

“I…” Adam started, but his words drifted away from him. Dean waited, patient and curious. Adam was like this sometimes, starting a sentence to stake a claim on the airspace it would eventually occupy, but unable to follow through until he’d analyzed his thoughts. “Is that how I look, to you?” He asked, not sounding insulted, but tinged with a degree of incredulousness that set Dean on edge.

“Yeah,” Dean answered, anything more detailed reserved for when he was better able to gauge what Adam was feeling.

“It’s…I look so…so young,” Adam whispered the end of the sentence, like it was a secret, or a confession.

“You’re nineteen,” Dean offered in response, which was apparently the wrong answer. Adam laughed, but it was more of a reflex, a way of breathing that could capture his anguish.

“Not anymore.”

+++

“Man, I don’t know!” Dean laughed, sitting back in his chair and running his fingers through his hair in quasi-defeat. “I can’t think of any good questions today.”

“Just throw something out there,” Adam encouraged. They’d been on a sort of hiatus from Guess Who? for a few months now, but they were back on it in a big way, and Dean felt he’d lost his touch.

“Alright, uh, does yours have like, a dark secret?”

“Yes, I think so. Not dark like, serial killer dark. Dark, like, tortured artist dark.”

“Like the pastor guy in The Scarlet Letter?” Dean asked, flipping down tiles.

“Yeah, totally!” Adam barked a laugh. “Okay, is yours afraid of wide open spaces?”

Dean looked down at his subject card, a girl with blonde pigtails and a bland expression, named Anita.

“Nah, probably not.”

“Rats.” Adam flicked three of his tiles down.

“You think yours has ever said ‘no’ to his boss?”

“Yeah, all the time. I think he was like, super kiss ass for awhile, and one day just like, snapped. Full freak out. Now he like, smokes pot in the breakroom and plays solitaire on his desktop.”

Dean grinned, pleased that by seeding a pronoun in his question he was able to rule out girls. He turned almost all his tiles down.

“Is yours kinda pissy in the mornings?” Adam asked.

“Yeah,” Dean nodded. The kid on his card looked like she was probably in late elementary school, maybe middle school. Sam had been a real piece of work in the mornings, at that age. “Gotta drag ‘em outta bed.”

“Very interesting,” Adam rubbed his hands together, evoking mad scientist schemery. He flipped most of his tiles down.

“Yours like guys?” Dean blurted, not really realizing he’d been thinking the question until it was out. He flashed a nervous glance across the table, but Adam looked unphased. He was still staring at his tiles.

“Definitely, yeah,” Adam murmured, “Maybe that’s his big secret?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Dean muttered, flicking all of his tiles down but two. He only had Robert and Bernard left.

“Does yours order their ice cream in a cone?”

“Yeah,” Dean replied, tension easing out of him for some reason he couldn’t identify. “Only waffle cones.”

“Nice,” Adam flipped all his remaining tiles down but two.

“Is it Robert?” Dean asked, making hesitant eye contact with his brother.

Wordlessly, Adam flipped his subject card around, confirming that Dean had won.

Chapter Text

SEPTEMBER 2010  //  YEARS 46 – 55 IN HELL

“You know, I used to be halfways decent at this,” Dean huffed as one of the clementines rolled under the couch. Adam hooked his foot behind the fruit and kicked it back into the space between them on the floor.

“Used to be,” Adam teased, and Dean took mock offense at the dig. He stooped down and scooped up the clementine, holding three now in his left hand.

“Okay hotshot, you try.” Dean handed Adam the clementines, and Adam took them, tossing one lightly, as if to test it. His brother took a half step back, giving him room to try in earnest to juggle the clementines.

Adam stuck one of them in his back pocket, focusing on just two for a moment, getting a feel for tossing them in a syncopated sort of rhythm and catching them with the opposite hand. Dean watched with the attentive stare of a school teacher, hands empty and poised to catch any rogue throws.

He’d imagined sometimes, as a kid, what it would be like to have an older brother. Someone to play basketball with in the spring, lobbing balls at the net he’d mounted above the garage door. They’d watch scary movies together, after Mom had gone to bed, and when they were older, they’d cover for each other when they were sneaking out to go to a party or hang out with a girl. But Adam hadn’t really ever expected to get an older brother. He was old enough to know that if you didn’t have one when you were born, that ship had already sailed.

And yet, it hadn’t. Here he was, fumbling through a lesson on how to juggle, taught by his real life older brother. If he squinted, if he looked at this clusterfuck from the right angle, sometimes it seemed like a blessing.

“Nah, you gotta like,” Dean mimed with his own hands a more exaggerated version of what Adam was doing, “Like, scoop it. Less upward motion, when you’re throwing, or your hands aren’t gonna be ready to catch the next one, when there’s more than two.”

Adam adjusted his methods until going back and forth with just two felt rote. He added the third back in and made a few successful passes before the rhythm got away from him, sending one of the makeshift balls out wide. Dean snatched it out of the air and held out his hand in a wordless request for the other two.

“Look, you almost had it there,” Dean praised. “You can’t get caught up staring at your hands, or at just one of the things you’re tossing around.” He cycled the three clementines up into the air, sending them back up as soon as they met his palms. It was almost musical, the patter of their shiny orange rinds against his thick palms. Adam watched, not really learning whatever bit Dean was trying to teach him, just caught up in his fondness for the moment.

“You’re pretty good at this,” Adam said after a few minutes of watching Dean remember how to juggle, distracted half smile resting absently on his older brother’s face.

“Juggling?” Dean asked, not looking up from his task.

“That, yeah, but more just,” Adam’s sentence rolled forward, uncatchable, “Being a brother.”

Dean looked up at him, concentration broken, abandoned citrus fruits dropping to the floor in three dull thuds.

“I’ve had a lot of practice,” Dean deflected, ducking his head and squatting down, ostensibly to pick up the clementines. Adam knew it was an excuse not to look at him, but he didn’t mind. He was used to the many hoops one had to jump through, when talking to Dean about these sorts of things.

“Is that why you learned to juggle?” Adam asked, genuinely curious. “For Sam?”

“Oh, that was probably part of it. Probably was just bored.” Dean pushed the clementines back toward him as he stood up, and Adam took them. “Your turn.”

Adam sent them all cycling up into the air, and again lost the sequence fairly quickly. He let out a frustrated blast of an exhale, and Dean chuckled, clapping him on the shoulder reassuringly.

“Hey, relax,” Dean said through an easy smile, “You’ve got plenty of time to practice.”

+++

Something Adam would have done, if he’d grown up with a brother, would be staying awake for hours just talking. He loved sleepovers at his friends' houses for this precise reason. They’d spend the evening eating frozen pizzas and playing xbox games, but the lights would go out and they’d all snuggle into their respective sleeping bags, and they’d talk. There was something magical, about that place, something sacred in the warm darkness of camaraderie, hearing each other breathe, hearing each other think, until someone would break the silence, whisper out a secret, and the others would catch it with careful hands.

Having a brother, Adam had figured, would be like having a sleepover every night. So far, he’d sort of been right.

They’d been in Hell for a little over forty eight years, and as their fiftieth year slowly and inexorably approached, he couldn’t help thinking about what they’d do on the outside. He had to believe they’d get out, because the only other choice was despair.

As night fell, Adam lay awake on the sofa bed, not least because of the metal frame of it digging into his shoulder, and he put words to the fears he had been bearing alone.

“What if we get out, and it sucks?” Adam breathed, not loud enough that he’d wake Dean, if the man was already asleep.

“Mm – hmm?” Dean hummed, clearly rousing from near-slumber. “D’you say s’m’thin’?”

“Ah, forget it,” Adam dismissed through a smile, turning over to let the bed frame grind against his other shoulder.

“No, no, I’m ‘wake,” Dean grunted, bed sheets rustling as he propped himself up into a reclined seat against the headboard.

“I was just wondering, um,” Adam began again, feeling foolish repeating this baseless fear, “Like, what if we get out, and it just. Sucks?”

“You remember what it’s like out there?” Dean huffed in confused amusement. “It ain’t gonna suck, man.”

“I mean. I liked my life and all. But it kinda did suck sometimes.”

“In the way that everything sucks sometimes, sure.”

“But don’t you think being down here all this time…like, we’re going to be different. I won’t have seen anybody but you for decades, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” Dean agreed, waiting for Adam to continue.

“And aren’t you worried that you’re gonna get out and be like, weird about it?” Adam’s fingers flexed in the blanket he’d been gripping.

“Look, I’m gonna shoot you straight on this one, and I’m not…I don’t want to talk about this, and I don’t want you to ask me about it, okay?”

“…okay?” Adam waited with bated breath to hear what it was that Dean was gearing up to admit.

“You know I’ve been in Hell before.”

“Yeah,” Adam swallowed hard.

“”It wasn’t like this,” Dean sighed, “I um. It was. Well, it was Hell,” Dean laughed, more of a rasp.

Adam lay still, listening.

“When I got back, when Cas um. When Cas brought me back, I was…I was wrecked, you know? I was guilty as fuck, and I couldn’t sleep, and sometimes I’d see something and just, I’d just be back there.” Dean sucked in a breath, let it go in a steady blast. “And still – still – being out again, alive again? It was amazing. Nobody really understood – Sam, Bobby, they couldn’t get it – and I didn’t want them to know, what it was like. But they treated me like I was the same me, and it helped me be that guy again, or, some version of that guy.”

The sink dripped, tapping insistently, like impatient fingers drumming on a dining room table. He didn’t want it to remind him of his mom, and it did anyway.

“I can’t promise you that when we get out there, everything’s gonna be all sunshine and rainbows. In fact, I can damn near guarantee it’s not gonna be. But you’re gonna get outta here – we’re gonna get out of here. And we’re going to live our lives. Nobody up there pulling the strings, nobody using us and pitting us against people. Just doing what we want, going where we want. Being who we wanna be. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Adam replied, throat tight all of a sudden. He waited, to see if Dean had anything else to say, but there was only the soft shuffle of Dean settling back down to try for sleep. “Goodnight, Dean.”

“G’night,” Dean mumbled, mostly into his pillow.

Dean was out in just a few minutes, but Adam stayed awake awhile, thinking about getting out – not about the escape itself, but what might come after. What he might get to decide comes after.

+++

“I’ve only ever seen this with plastic bottles,” Adam said for about the third time since Dean suggested the activity. Dean rolled his eyes, the effect somewhat dulled by the fact that he was chugging a beer.

“Now,” Dean answered, breathless from the beer he’d downed in a few seconds, “You’re gonna see it with a glass one.” He took the newly empty beer bottle and filled it about a third of the way full with water from the kitchen tap.

“If you wanted it to have liquid in it, why’d you drink it all?” Adam asked through a smirk.

“Because, if we spill beer, it’ll be stinky and sticky. Spilling water? No big deal. And come on, I don’t wanna waste beer for this.”

Dean plopped down on the kitchen floor, back propped up against the cabinets. Adam followed suit, sitting down beside him.

“Okay, you’ve done this with a plastic one?” Dean asked, turning to regard Adam briefly. He adjusted his grip on the beer bottle.

“Yeah.”

“This is like that, but you grip up here,” Dean explained, holding the beer bottle with his thumb and first two fingers, just under the lip of the opening. “And you gotta give it more follow through. You release it just a little bit later, than you think you should, ‘cause it’s heavier.”

To demonstrate, Dean lifted the bottle a few inches off the floor and swung it forward until it was nearly upside down, then released it and retracted his hand. The bottle continued its arc in the air and dropped back onto the linoleum floor, wobbling a little on the thick glass of the base before settling upright.

“No shit,” Adam marveled at the minor feat.

“Give it a go,” Dean encouraged, scooting the bottle over to Adam.

Adam plucked it up, mimicking Dean’s grip on it, and pitched it forward, waiting until it was nearly inverted before loosening his fingers. For a second, it seemed like the bottle would stick the landing, but the arc ended early, and the bottle came down on the edge of the base, tipping over and rolling a few inches before stilling.

“Not bad,” Dean said through a grin, snatching the bottle up and holding it with three fingers again. “Remember, you have to hold on longer than you feel like you oughtta, okay?”

He flipped the bottle again, smooth and effortless. It looked like a magic trick, to Adam. Or like Dean had consecrated it to this purpose, enchanted for this specific thing, to defy gravity at his command. Like he hadn’t been chugging that beer at all, had instead been whispering a spell into its glass belly, had been anointing it into his service with his spit.

“Here, you try.” He gestured toward the bottle, but Adam shook his head.

“I wanna see you do it again,” Adam goaded, and Dean’s mouth curved up in amusement.

“Sure, okay,” Dean agreed, pinched the bottleneck and sent it around in a graceful loop once more. It landed, heavy and sure, on the floor between them.

Adam plucked it up, let it dangle from his fingers for a moment, trying gauge the heft of it, the difference between its solid shell and its sloshing innards. He swung it forward, but didn’t let go, just felt the way it pushed through the air, then let it drift back to center, still hanging from his fingertips.

“Shit or get off the pot,” Dean admonished through a laugh, and Adam laughed right back. He sent it up and around again, releasing it just as it rounded the halfway point, and he held his breath.

It glimmered in the harsh overhead kitchen light, turning so slowly that it may as well have been floating, then landed on the floor, clanking and then rocking back and forth a few times, click-click-clicking on the linoleum.

"Nice!" Dean congratulated him, “See, not so hard, huh?”

“No, guess not,” Adam agreed, eyes still focused on the bottle, unchanged by its trips through the air. A regular bottle, untransformed. No outward evidence of its accomplishments.

+++

“What were you like, when you were nineteen?” Adam asked into the quiet, rolling onto his back in the double bed.

“I dunno, why?” Dean asked, sounding as awake as Adam himself, despite the late hour. He wondered which of them spent more time like that, staring at nothing in the dark, listening to the other one dream.

“I don’t know, just like, I didn’t know you back then.”

“Doubt we had much in common,” Dean mused, some combination of bitter and nostalgic. “I was workin’ odd jobs. Doing hunts with Dad and Sam. Nothing too exciting.”

“You say that like I was such an exciting nineteen year old,” Adam snorted.

“I don’t know,” Dean hedged, sounding uncharacteristically reserved, “College and all that. Sounds fun.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I mean, why else would so many people do it, if it wasn’t interesting?”

“I dunno, jobs? You gotta get a degree for most things now, I think.”

“You didn’t like it, then?”

“No, it was fine,” Adam replied, chewed on the thought a few seconds, “Just a thing I needed to get done, so I could get to what I actually wanted to do.”

“Doctor stuff,” Dean filled in, and Adam nodded.

“Yeah,” Adam amended, remembering Dean couldn’t see him in the dark.

“I think I’d like it,” Dean ventured after a few silent minutes, after enough time had passed that Adam assumed the conversation had ended.

“College?”

“Yeah.”

“I think you would,” Adam responded, sort of surprised to find he even had an opinion on the matter, but he did. Dean had so much love for information, remembered so many constellations of facts, and he could fix just about anything, it seemed. It was like he could look at anything and just see the way it was meant to work, the way it ought to come apart, the way it ought to be put together. Sometimes, Adam felt like Dean could do that with people, too.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Hmm,” Dean hummed, but let the subject drop. After another few minutes, he circled back to Adam’s original question. “Lonely, I guess. I was busy, and lonely, when I was your age.”

“Yeah?” Adam prompted, not sure what to say. Intent on not spooking him with too many questions.

“I mean, Sammy was in school still. I got jobs, mostly grunt work – dishwashin’, warehouse stuff, whatever. I didn’t have my GED yet, so I was still pretty limited, with what’d take me.”

“You got your GED?”

“Yeah,” Dean answered, and even though Adam couldn’t see his brother in the darkness, he could tell his proverbial hackles were up, ready to defend himself.

“That’s really hard,” Adam replied. One of his friends in college, Brittany, had gotten her GED. She’d had to quit high school while recovering from a nearly fatal car accident. From what he could tell from what she’d said about it, getting your GED was probably harder than just fumbling your way through high school. “When’d you get it?”

“Back in ’02, December. I was staring down the barrel of my 24^th birthday and I just. I dunno. Needed to feel like I’d done something. Like I could do something.”

“That makes sense,” Adam said, just to fill the conversational space between them.

“But this was before that, you know. Like, 1998. We were still moving around a lot, even though I was trying to get us to stay in one place a little longer, mostly for Sam. High school’s hard enough without switching out every month or so. He was lonely in a different way, being the new kid, everywhere we went. That kinda makes kids curious though, so making friends wasn’t as hard as it could’ve been for him. But I didn’t really…I mean, I only met people at work, or on cases with Dad.”

“Yeah, that does sound lonely,” Adam agreed. He’d had his fair share of lonely years. Sometimes he felt like he may as well have lived alone, for how infrequently his mother was home and awake. Still, he’d had friends at school.

“Didn’t have a lot of time to wallow or nothin’,” Dean dismissed the sympathy easily, never eager to dwell on his own shit. “Like I said, I was busy. If I wasn’t on a case, I was working as much as anyone would let me, taking overtime like crazy.”

“Pulling your weight?”

“More like picking up slack,” Dean grumbled, openly bitter. “Older I got, less John felt like he had to work. I was so fuckin’ sick of motels by then. Got us sublets when I could swing it. Nice to have a real kitchen, all that. I know Sam liked living in an apartment better than a motel. Much better than squatting, obviously. And you know, once we were old enough, Dad was all about squatting. Why shell out for a motel, when you can sleep in some dump for free?”

“Jesus,” Adam muttered, mostly to himself.

“That’s John for you,” Dean laughed, “Point is, I was working a lot. That’s most of what I remember of being nineteen. Hell, most of what I remember of being seventeen, and eighteen, and nineteen and twenty, you know?”

“And after that?”

“Oh, I was still working all the time, and doing cases, and whatever else. But I stopped thinking so much about it. Stayed lonely maybe, but stopped feeling it. Plus, I mean. I started doing some stuff for me. Going out, being social. Sam hated that, I think. I’d go home with somebody, or stay out late at a bar, and he’d be so pissed at me the next day. He was old enough to look after himself for a few hours, I mean, he was halfway through high school. But he acted like I was throwing him to the wolves or something."

"Probably just missed you," Adam posited, but Dean laughed.

"Yeah right. Missed me makin’ him dinner and washing his stinky socks for him.” Dean rolled onto his side, the rest of his words softened by the bedding as it swallowed them up, “All he ever did when I was home was bitch at me, about me doin’ everything Dad asked me to do, about me goin’ out.”

“You think that’s why he left?” Adam asked, then immediately regretted asking. He bit his lip, worried.

“For a while, maybe. If I’d’ve been home more, maybe he wouldn’t’ve…but I don’t think so. He wanted out, for a long time. Away from John. He wanted to live a life, be a normal guy with a normal job, all that good stuff. And it hurt when he walked out, of course it did. But after awhile, I was just kinda glad he made it out. I looked him up, every now and then, just to see if he was doing okay, still in school. Thought about visiting him, or calling him up, but…I don’t know. He got out, right? And I figured, if he wanted to hear from me, he knew how to get ahold of me. Why step on his toes? Give him a clean break or whatever.”

“You were happy for him.” Adam said it as a sort of revelation, but Dean heard it as a question.

“No, not…it’s not like I was sitting around glad he was gone, or something. I just…he was doing what he wanted, and it sucked that I couldn’t be part of that, but it made sense, that I couldn’t be there. I got it, you know?”

“Yeah,” Adam murmured after a few long beats of silence, trying to imagine what it would be like, to let go of one of the only people you know. To feel like they’d outgrown you, and make peace with that.

Dean didn’t speak again, and Adam wasn’t sure if it was because he was asleep already, or because he was done talking.

+++

“It’s just something you should know,” Dean insisted, not frustrated but on his way there.

“Why?” Adam groaned, exasperated with Dean’s persistence. He muted the TV, which was playing an episode of White Collar that he’d admittedly seen three times before.

“You never know when you’re gonna need to throw a punch, man,” Dean argued.

“I’m pretty sure I know actually. I don’t want to punch anybody, Dean.”

“Says the guy who’s punched me,” Dean shot back, smirking in preemptive victory.

“One time. Once. My punching days are over.”

“You didn’t think you were ever gonna punch anybody, until you punched me, right?”

“Dean,” Adam groused, but Dean plowed ahead.

“Come on, you gotta know how to do it without breaking your freakin’ thumb.”

“I learned my lesson! I won’t tuck my thumb, happy?” Adam made a fist to demonstrate that he had adapted since their spat over a decade prior.

“Dude, your thumb can’t just be out to the side like that.” Dean reached over and folded Adam’s thumb down in front of the knuckles of his middle and forefinger. “See, this is why you need to learn how to do this the right way.”

“Okay, so I’ll do it like this!” Adam waved his corrected fist around between them, demonstrating that he’d held the new finger formation. “End of lesson.”

“Whatever,” Dean dismissed, turning back to face the muted television. “Surprised Dad never taught you this.”

“Oh fuck off,” Adam grumbled, distinctly not in the mood to talk about their father. “I’m glad he didn’t.”

“Hey, sorry,” Dean replied, sounding genuinely guilty, “That wasn’t fair, sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Adam sighed, unmuting the television. “Just sick of thinking about him.”

“Yeah,” Dean said, quiet, almost to himself, “Me too.”

+++

Adam didn’t really have nightmares. Didn’t usually even have dreams. Considering how disturbed Dean seemed by his own dreams, Adam counted himself lucky on that front. On the rare occasions that Adam did dream, however, he ran into another problem entirely.

Adam’s dreams were rather difficult to parse from reality.

The setting was identical to the apartment, down to the last bathroom tile scuff and persistent drip of the kitchen sink. Dean was picture perfect, no lingering somnolent fog of uncanniness, no haze to his movements, no inconsistencies in his tone. Adam, for his part, experienced no strange lulls or gaps, no failures of dream logic, no glitches or snags in visual inputs.

Usually, it was only the content that would tip him off to the dream being a dream – that, or the simple fact of waking, reminding him that he’d been asleep to begin with.

He’d had a dream, early on, wherein Dean spoke at length on different kinds of chemical compounds, something Adam knew Dean didn’t know much about. It was just some leftover fragment of his own education, finding a new way to float to the surface of his consciousness. He hadn’t had a hard time figuring that one out on his own, especially since the dream was set during the day. Adam was sure he’d have remembered Dean piping up about chemistry out of the clear blue sky.

It stood to reason that sooner or later, the lines would actually blur – not that Adam would know, if they had.

It had been fifty years, and Adam had kept his mouth shut about it all day, knowing how much it would bother Dean to know it, but laying in bed that night, he couldn’t help feeling like the day needed something to mark it, something to seal it, to acknowledge its passing.

“What’re you gonna do different, once you’re outta here?” Adam asked into the darkness.

“Eat more good food,” Dean answered, voice sleep-heavy. “You?”

“Come on, take it serious, man.”

“I am bein’ serious. Life’s too short not to eat well.”

“Okay, well. Pick something else then.”

“Bossy,” Dean grumped, even though Adam could hear the amusement in his tone. “I don’t know, lemme thinka somethin’. You go.”

“Okay,” Adam replied, then paused awhile to think of his own answer. “I think I wanna travel. I’ve spent my whole life in the same spot. I want to see more of what’s out there.”

“That sounds nice,” Dean said through a massive yawn. “Maybe a beach? Always wanted to spend some time on a beach.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, always too broke, and too busy.”

“A beach sounds nice,” Adam agreed. “What’s your thing?” He asked after a long silence. Dean didn’t respond, and Adam made peace with the fact that his brother had fallen asleep, when he piped up again at last, sounding more awake than he had before.

“Think I’m going to take myself more serious,” Dean said.

“More serious?”

“Mhmm,” Dean rumbled, rolling over on the sofa bed, metal frame squealing under him. “There’s stuff I just…stuff about me that doesn’t line up with what other people think, or what I think I should be like. And I never really give that stuff any air. But maybe I should. Maybe I will, you know?”

“What kinda stuff?”

“Oh, personal stuff,” Dean hedged, quieter than before. “Hard to explain.”

Adam let it go, but after another long silence, Adam’s consciousness drifting close to sleep, Dean spoke again.

“Like, I don’t know. Maybe this whole thing with Cas.”

“Cas?” Adam asked, barely clinging to wakefulness.

“Yeah, I mean. Maybe I should think more about how I feel about him. Stop shoving it down, like it doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” Adam agreed, hazy and proud and so sleepy.

“I mean, he’s an angel, and I’m…” Dean trailed off, and Adam couldn’t help the déjà vu feeling that bubbled up in him, like he’d heard Dean say that before. “But it matters, even so.”

“Mhmm,” Adam hummed.

+++

“Sorry I fell asleep during all that,” Adam started in the morning on the first day of their fifty-first year. Dean turned back to look at him from where he was stirring eggs on the stove.

“Don’t sweat it,” Dean said before turning back around to focus on making breakfast. They remained in companionable silence awhile, Dean cooking, Adam sipping coffee at the table. When the food was ready, Dean brought over two plates and dug in. Adam nibbled at a piece of bacon, lost in thought.

“I know you think, because Cas is an angel, that he’s like, above all this stuff,” Adam began his train of thought. Dean looked up at him with a facial expression somewhere between cautious and confused. “Like, he doesn’t feel stuff like humans do, or he shouldn’t, but for what it’s worth – from what you’ve told me about him – I think he does. Feel stuff, I mean. And I don’t see why that would be a bad thing.”

“It’s not a bad thing,” Dean responded slowly, like he had to take a moment to sift through what Adam had said, to figure out which part to address first. Adam wasn’t done, though.

“And I don’t know if you think he shouldn’t like you, or if you just think he like, doesn’t, or can’t, but I mean, it sure sounds like he does.

“Um, yeah?” Dean asked, cheeks reddening. He looked down at his plate, pushed his eggs back and forth with his fork. Adam watched him, wondering why he was so guarded, when he’d been so open (or as open as Dean was really capable of being) the night before.

“Yeah, dude. I mean, maybe you just can’t see it from where you’re standing, but it’s like, everything you tell me about the guy, he’d do anything for you. Kind of already has, when you think about it.” Adam took a bite of eggs and pondered it all some more. “Early on, I thought it was the whole guy thing that had you holding out, but that’s not it, I know. So if it’s just the angel thing? I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”

“Cool, um. That’s. Thanks?” Dean was red, from the tips of his ears to the collar of his shirt. “You wanna give Showgirls another shot?”

“Oh,” Adam had a bit of conversational whiplash, but smoothed past it. Maybe Dean just needed the faceless sort of faux anonymity of their late night talks to discuss this sort of thing, he thought. “Sure, but I doubt it got better since the last time we watched it.”

“A girl can dream,” Dean snickered, taking a swig of coffee.

+++

“Did you believe in God? Like, before all this stuff obviously.”

“Hell no,” Dean laughed from his spot on the double bed. “I thought that was like, grown folks fairytales. And if there was a God, I figured the bastard must be pretty fuckin’ sick. Even aside from all the shit I’ve been through, all the hurt in the world? Wars, genocides, disease? Hunger? Any god that lets all that shit happen is a sick motherfucker.”

“Guess you were kinda right,” Adam replied. Even though it wasn’t new information, exactly, hearing Dean’s bleak take left him feeling hollow.

“How about you?”

“Nah, wasn’t really raised religious or anything. Can’t really picture Mom goin’ to church.”

“But did you think there was somebody up there, or some like, bigger something behind it all?”

“Kind of? I liked thinking there was like, some sort of energy, tying it all together.”

“I mean, even with what we know. Could be, right? So God’s a deadbeat, and angels’re pricks. Doesn’t mean there’s not something bigger than all of that.”

“You think so?”

“Don’t matter what I think,” Dean countered, adjusting the covers around himself with an audible swish of fabric. “What do you think?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Adam paused, thinking about it for the first time in a long time, finding himself sort of comforted by the whole idea, of something bigger than God, something better.

“You’re right,” Dean said after a long while, voice slurred with sleepiness, “S’nice, to think about it like that.”

“Yeah,” Adam murmured, smiling. “Goodnight, Dean.”

“G’night, kid.”

Chapter Text

OCTOBER 2010  //  YEARS 56 – 65 IN HELL

“I just think that if someone were to re-cast the film,” Adam expounded, movie paused on the screen in front of them while they talked, but hesitated to finish his sentence until the sink had finished its percussive interruption, “It would make sense to cast someone less conventionally attractive than Mia Farrow.”

“I don’t really think it matters, though,” Dean argued, not bothering to pause as the sink dripped under his words. Adam set his teeth on edge, but said nothing about it. “Whether she’s pretty or not, or how pretty, it isn’t the point of the movie.”

“I know it isn’t the,” Adam waited for the sink to finish dripping, “Point of the movie, but it’s still important. I think the character makes more sense if she looks super normal, like it could be anyone. And it makes Baxter make more sense, and her sense of,” Adam paused again, “Disbelief is more reasonable, if she’s not used to that kind of attention. Plus her marriage makes more sense, because you’d understand why,” another pause, “She would marry someone like that in the first place.”

“Pretty people make shit decisions all the time, man.” Dean didn’t bother with a long response, too focused on the strange new mannerism his brother had developed, wondering when it had started, if he’d been missing it, or if it was new.

“Sure, I guess so but,” Adam paused. The sink dripped. And dripped. After nearly twenty seconds of dripping, it ceased, and Adam spoke again. “I think it would just add something, if she didn’t have that to fall back on.”

“You good?” Dean asked, watching him closely, not bothering to respond to Adam’s assertions about the film. Adam nodded, looking puzzled.

“Yeah, I’m…yeah, why?”

“You’re just, uh. Talkin’ funny.”

“No, I’m not,” Adam replied, looking more confused. Dean shrugged and unpaused the movie.

“Alright, well,” Dean replied, at a loss for how to confront him further, “Good, I guess.”

+++

The new tic didn’t disappear on its own, as Dean had hoped it might. If anything, it got worse. More pronounced. Adam had taken to pausing films or muting the television when the faucet would drip. Dean couldn’t tell if it was because he didn’t want whatever it was they were doing to be interrupted with the auditory clutter of the sound, or because he was making space for the sink, a third roommate of sorts, to speak. In either case, he was worried about what it meant, and how to address it.

It had been going on for a few weeks, getting slowly and steadily worse, when Dean finally decided to ask Adam about it directly.

“Sink buggin’ you?” Dean asked after Adam muted the episode of Antiques Roadshow they were watching for the fifth time since they’d started it.

“No,” Adam replied, neutral, staring ahead at the screen.

“Yeah, except,” Dean sighed, sure down to his core that he was stepping squarely into uncharted territory, “It’s just that you, uh. Get real quiet when it drips. You notice that?”

“No,” Adam replied, as dispassionately as before.

“Well, you do. You mute the TV for it, you notice that, right?”

“I guess,” Adam replied.

“Dude. Look at me.” Dean grabbed the remote control off of the cushion between them and turned off the television. Adam huffed an irritated exhale and turned towards him. “Now, look. I don’t…it doesn’t bother me, if you just…if this is important to you, or something. But I want to be on the same page here. So tell me, straight up, what’re you thinking, what’s going on with all of that?”

“It’s not…nothing’s ‘going on’, alright?”

“If nothing’s going on, then why don’t you tell me a story, and not stop in the middle when the sink drips, how about that?”

“Sure, yeah,” Adam replied, his jaw set in defiance.

“Okay, then. Go.” Dean gestured between them, ceding the conversational floor to him.

“What about?”

“Anything, I don’t know. Tell me something you haven’t told me before, I guess.”

“Okay…” Adam chewed his lower lip, deep in thought. The sink dripped. “When I was a kid, like probably five or six, my mom sent me down to the basement to get a box of light bulbs, because the light in the bathroom was out, and it took this weird old kind of light bulb you couldn’t get anywhere anymore, so she had a bunch of them in bulk down there.” Adam paused.

“You’re doing it again,” Dean noted, not unkindly, as the sink dripped. Adam’s expression pinched, somewhere between embarrassment and unease.

“Oh,” he breathed, “That’s, oh.”

“Keep going. Try to not do it, this time.”

“Y-yeah, okay.” Adam took a steadying breath. “And so, I was going down to the basement, and it wasn’t like, a gross old basement or something. It had bright lights and metal shelves and it was clean and organized and stuff. But I don’t why, I just – “

The sink dripped, and Adam’s sentence came to a standstill, but Dean dropped a reassuring hand on his shoulder, and he picked back up again even as the sink continued its rhythm.

“I just hated being down there by myself. It felt like every time I turned my back on one part of the room, like somebody was watching me. Not like, maliciously or anything but still, just. Watching. I think it’s normal, for a kid to,” the sink dripped, and Adam took a too-long pause, but resumed before it finished dripping. “To not like being alone, or being alone in a part of the house they don’t spend much time in, but I still, sometimes I think about it and I wonder what the point of it was, you know? Why send me down there for stuff, and not just do it herself? Couldn’t she tell, that I didn’t like it? Or, or like, was that maybe the point? Like, trying to make me less afraid, by making me do it enough times that it felt normal?”

“Much better,” Dean murmured when it was clear Adam was done with his story. “You get what I mean though, right?”

“Yeah,” Adam confessed, looking exceedingly nervous. “I don’t…I don’t know why I’ve…”

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” Dean soothed, squeezing Adam’s shoulder lightly, “We’ve been down here fifty-some odd years, makes sense we’d get weird about something sooner or later.”

“I guess so, yeah,” Adam replied, looking down at the couch cushion. He traced the edge of it with his pointer finger, back and forth.

“And the story, you know. I didn’t know your mom, so I can’t say for sure, but I get what you mean.”

“Honestly, I didn’t know I was still holding on to that, until it came out just now,” Adam said, more to the sofa than to Dean. His fingernail scratched lightly at the seam of the couch cushion.

“I think that’s kinda normal. Stuff from when you’re a kid, it gets buried, and then one day, it’s up at the top again, and you can’t figure out why.”

“Is it? Normal?”

“I mean, I think so, yeah. Happens to me, at least.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Dean replied, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. He hadn’t meant to bring the conversation around to himself, and now that he had, he wasn’t sure how to redirect it.

“About what kind of stuff?” Adam asked, because his idea of loneliness was a brightly lit basement, and his idea of abandonment was his mother alive and waiting for him upstairs.

“Stupid stuff,” Dean deflected, turning the television back on. Adam knew him pretty well, by now. He didn’t press, and Dean reminded himself to be glad.

+++

His dreams of Hell were always abstract, and he wondered if it was because of his brain’s inability to process something so profoundly horrific, or because Hell was itself disjointed and nonlinear. By the very nature of the question, he could not determine the answer. Still, he wondered.

It was the not knowing. It was the crank tightening the gears, the music slowing on a jack-in-the-box, coiled and eager. It was not knowing when the next horror would dawn, or when the present horror would cease. Anticipation, yes, but neither patient nor impatient, just a constant precipice. There were times when his consciousness, his not-body, mistook this anticipation for the hot coal singe of arousal, though far more frequently, it was the heart-in-your-throat bitter copper tang of what-if, the moment before a jump scare in a film.

Dean’s dreams of Hell were usually that grinding movement forward, mine cart on iron tracks as it descends, dark tunnel swallowing him into its lightless gullet. Sometimes he’s on the rack, sometimes he’s hoisting someone else up onto those hungry hooks. He dreams of things that there aren’t words to describe, things that have happened to him, things that he’s done to others, for which there is not language on Earth. He wakes up from these dreams certain that he’ll be covered in blood – his, or someone else’s. Sure that all that’s happened since has been a new form of torture, that he’ll open his eyes and Hell will sprawl out around him, undulating and wet and screaming.

Lately, his dreams of Hell haven’t had the visceral sting of memory.

Lately, his dreams of Hell have merely been a setting, a dollhouse where he lies wooden and waiting, while new nightmares unfold.

Lately, his dreams of Hell have been dreams of Cas.

Sometimes, he hides from Castiel as he comes blazing through the Pit, showering sparks of holy fire. He hides, because there is nothing more terrifying, after a lifetime of suffering, than salvation.

Sometimes, he fights against Castiel, clawing at him, rabid and blind. He fights to stay in the Pit, where suffering is fresh and predictable. Where hope cannot be grown, where he is free of even the paltry vestiges of optimism.

Sometimes, he drags Castiel down with him, the heft of his own sin, his own degradation too much even for an angel to bear.

In one such dream, Dean chastised him, trying everything that he could to convince him to let Dean drop, to cut his losses and leave Hell behind.

“They can find someone else – they’re going to find someone else, really!” Dean cried, thrashing in Castiel’s implacable hold. “Just – go! Go back to Heaven, tell them you failed. Go back, don’t get stuck down here like me,” Dean begged. Cas only stared, blank and open and too vulnerable for his own good. Hadn’t anyone ever taught him not to look so damn innocent? Dean thought, through the haze of his dream.

“Go back? I’m never going back, now that I’ve met you.” Cas once again mirrored the lines from the film.

Dean woke up nauseous. He couldn’t bring himself to eat all day – not that it mattered. Such things were optional, in Hell.

+++

The sink kept dripping, and Adam made a valiant effort not to backslide into his strange habit, but Dean could tell it was wearing on him.

“What is it, about the sink? What bugs you?” Dean asked one morning over a mostly silent game of Battleship. Sometime in the last few decades, they’d modified the rules to the point where it was hardly recognizable. All shots were called via signals tapped on the table.

They’d each developed heavy superstitions about certain ship placements, certain shot calls, and the order in which these things had to be done. The game was as much about these layers of choreography as it was about winning or losing, anymore. It was soothing, a self-contained series of rituals that could be conducted in concert, both secret and public, both isolated and collaborative.

Dean tapped the table twice, then raised his thumb and pinkie finger. A shot called against B-6. Adam examined his board, then set his hand palm-down on the tabletop, a sign that Dean hadn’t hit any of his ships.

“Doesn’t bug me,” Adam huffed, defensive. Dean was sure that if he had been looking at his face, he’d have seen him roll his eyes. “Just, can’t help noticing it.”

“I mean, I notice it too.” Adam gave him a flat look, and Dean shrugged it off.

“But you don’t have to notice it. I just woke up one day and I couldn’t help it. Every time, I wonder if it means something, like, if it’s reacting to us, or to the room. The passage of time. Anything. You know?” Adam tapped the table four times, then raised his pointer finger. A shot on D-1.

“Like the CD player,” Dean replied, laying his hand flat on the table, palm down. “You’re worried it might mean stuff’s breaking down?”

“Maybe,” Adam conceded, but Dean could tell from his tone of voice, it was only for his benefit, to soften the blow of being wrong. It’s something Adam hadn’t bothered with when they first got down here, when he hadn’t been in a hurry to befriend Dean. At some point, the niceties got added into his mannerisms, and Dean spent a long time relearning him. “But more like, wondering how alone we really are. Shit, I sound crazy, right?”

“A little,” Dean answered honestly, because you’ll only make somebody feel crazier if you lie to them. “But like I said, we’re kinda due for it by now. Could’ve been way worse.” Dean tapped the table once, held up all of his fingers on one hand, minus his thumb. A-4.

“Don’t see you doin’ any crazy shit.” Adam laughed, but he sounded sort of hurt. Like he wished Dean were struggling like he was, if only to feel less alone. He put his hand on the table, palm up. A hit.

“I do plenty of crazy shit,” Dean countered, trying to remember the last time he’d looked at his face in the mirror. Trying not to think about how bad his dreams had been lately. He smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. He was having a hard time remembering what his face looked like, when he moved it into that particular expression, but Adam responded well enough.

“Yeah, sure you do,” Adam sighed, sounding both convinced and unsatisfied. He was probably painfully aware of all of Dean’s strange foibles, but they must not stack up, in his mind, to equal whatever it is he’s going through.

“Okay, fine.” Dean paused to wait for Adam to tap out his next move, and Adam paused while the sink dripped its own called shot from across the room. When it finished, Adam tapped the table six times, teeth gritted, and stuck out his thumb. F-5. Dean placed his hand palm-down on the table. “Forget the why, then. What do you think we can do to make it easier?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, like, put something in the sink so we don’t hear the drips? Or turn the faucet on full blast all the time so it’s not dripping.”

“Yeah but I’ll know that it’s like, trying to drip,” Adam insisted, and Dean bit his lip, because the first thought in his head wasn’t always the kindest, or the most helpful.

“Okay…” He blew out a thoughtful puff of air, and tapped the table once, then held up his index and middle fingers. A-2. “What if I just take the damn thing apart? Just, unscrew the pipes. Dismantle the whole system, hmm?”

Adam laughed, because he must have figured Dean was joking, but he looked up when he realized Dean was serious, ice blue eyes flashing with something like fear, and something else. Something like hope.

“Come on, you wouldn’t do that.”

“We don’t need it.” Dean waited for Adam to let him know whether he’d hit his ship or not, but he was clearly distracted by the prospect of some renegade plumbing. “I mean it, I would.”

“Yeah?” Adam asked, not even looking at the game board. In lieu of answering him verbally, Dean stood up from his chair and crossed the room calmly, crouched down in front of the cabinet below the sink, and opened it up. He found the hot and cold water valves easily, and twisted both as far counterclockwise as they’d go. Once he was sure they were closed, he stood and ran the faucet until no water was left in the pipes. Adam was still sitting at the table, twisted around in his seat to stare at Dean, slack-jawed and silent. Dropping back down, he reached in and manually unscrewed the pipes feeding up from each valve, left them drooping limp and disconnected.

Shutting the cabinet with a victorious snick, he stood and walked back to the table. Adam was still speechless. The sink, for its part, was silent.

“Don’t leave me hangin’, man. A-2, what’s the story?” Dean chided, and Adam blinked a few times before laying his hand palm-up on the table. Dean smirked. “Thought so.”

+++

This dream was a nightmare, he thought, because it smelled like sulfur and tasted like pennies and his skin was melting off in places, too hot to stay solid.

He couldn’t be sure, though, because just as he was tumbling down, legs giving out, magmatic ground rushing up to suck him in, the dream shifted.

Something smooth and wet swept across him, like the tongue of some massive tiger as it cleanses its young. Cool air blasted past him, sweet with some strange scent, the vegetal tang of a forest floor, rain-soaked and evergreen. Soaring high above the Pit, his heart leapt in his chest, and he twisted in the clutches of whatever great beast had plucked him up.

His body was encircled by massive talons, pale and strong, tipped with brilliant silver claws. Following these appendages up, he saw a creature that has no real-world analog, something like an owl, but orbited by satellites of eyes, a constellation of spinning rings, the whole thing rippling with light, marbled with it, so bright that he could hardly keep his own eyes trained on it.

“Castiel?” Dean asked, déjà vu slamming into him like a mini van. The bird-like creature that was carrying him up, up, up, glanced down at him, cocked its massive head.

It had the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, and he stared at them so hard for so long that it took him a moment to realize he’d awoken, that he was only seeing an afterimage against the dark underside of his own eyelids.

He tried to draw the dream, all strong bird feet and broad flat owl face, but he had nothing to color with, and he gave up on the drawing before it was done. Even if he’d had crayons around or something, he was sure that nothing would have come close to that blue. Nothing ever could.

+++

“It’s gonna sound stupid,” Adam laughed self-consciously from the double bed, and Dean smiled in the dark, barely bothered by the frame of the fold-out couch digging into his shoulder.

“So?”

“Just, it’s been literal years,” he explained, “So it’s dumb, that it’s only bothering me now.”

“Lay it on me, dude.”

“I kinda…I think I miss the sink dripping.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah, I just, I dunno,” Adam laughed again, nerves offgasing like methane in a swamp. “Woke up this morning and all I could think about was how it was so quiet, without it.”

“And that’s why you can’t sleep? Really?”

“Maybe?”

“I’ll fix it, but if you go all Tom Hanks Cast Away on me, I’m gonna shut it off again faster than you can say ‘Wilson’, we clear?”

“Crystal,” Adam chuckled. Dean got out of bed, the apartment air almost too cool on his bare skin. He’d taken to sleeping in just his skivvies, if only to preserve the difference between night and day.

Not even bothering to turn on the light, Dean opened the cupboard beneath the sink and reached in, reattaching the water hookups to their respective valves by feeling alone, then turning both valves clockwise as far as he could.

“Back to normal,” Dean announced as he made his way back to the sofa bed in the dark. It wasn’t hard. They’d been here so long, he could navigate the entire place with his eyes shut. Could touch any item in the fridge or pantry without so much as peeking first. Maybe we should try that, Dean thought, smiling idly. It had been a long time since either of them had thought up a new game.

As if on cue, the sink dripped two tentative drops as he settled back into bed. Adam wheezed a disbelieving laugh.

“No shit,” he breathed, so quiet that it must not have been intended for Dean’s ears.

“G’night, Adam.”

“Goodnight, Dean.”

+++

He’d never had a dream like this before.

He hoped he never would again.

Above him, crashing down like a fighter jet through a dense forest, Castiel was falling through all of Hell, down to the Pit. Down to Dean. Wings smoking, all six of them, lit fuses on a bundle of dynamite. By the time he makes it down to the bottom, he’ll be more splintered shard and charred shrapnel than angel.

“Cas!” Dean shouted up at him, not sure why he wanted the angel’s attention. Not sure what he thought he could do to help, at that point. The ruin of his own body was secondary, the way his blood was seeping out of him in waves, pulsing in time with his weakening heart as it pumped its last. “Stop, Cas! Go back!”

Somehow, through the thousands of feet separating them, Cas must have heard him. He turned his face, huge and blank and just as on fire as the rest of him, towards Dean as he continued to fall.

“Go back? I’m never going back, now that I’ve met you.”

Dean woke up, sweat on his skin like the blood from his dream, hot and sticky. He wrestled out of his sheets and scrambled to the bathroom, let the shower run ice cold over him until his fingertips were blue, until he was shivering against the clammy tile wall.

+++

“Why do you always do that?” Adam asked over a game of Mouse Trap one morning. Dean looked up from the board and cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Do what?”

“This,” Adam gestured, reaching his right hand across his chest and squeezing his own left shoulder four times. “Sometimes it’s tapping, but whatever. Why do you do it?”

Dean’s gaze drifted down to his own right hand, still resting lazily atop his left shoulder, perched and bird-like. He dragged it down and laid his hand flat on the table, watching it with a pang of betrayal.

“I dunno,” Dean admitted, trying to maintain an air of calm. “Do I do it a lot?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Adam replied, mostly focused on the game. “I haven’t given it a lot of thought, really. Just, you know, curious. Is it a good luck thing? Because I gotta say, unless it’s some serious mojo, I think I’ve got you beat on this one.”

“Not a good luck thing,” Dean muttered, shoulder tingling guiltily under his shirt. Adam looked up at the obvious strange tone, face softening into concern.

“Something wrong?”

“Didn’t, um.” Dean used his left index fingernail to push at the cuticle of his right thumb. “Didn’t know I was doing that, actually.”

“The fours?”

“Is it always fours?” Dean mused. Adam nodded. “Yeah, that, then.”

“I didn’t know you didn’t know,” Adam explained. “Sorry.” Dean wasn’t sure if he was apologizing for not catching it, or if he was apologizing for bringing it up. In either case, Dean’s answer was the same.

“Don’t be, I’m glad you, uh, told me.” Satisfied with his thumb, he moved on to the cuticle of his right index finger.

“You know why you might be doing it?” Adam asked, and Dean thought about that brand the day he’d climbed out of his own grave. How it stung, fresh and angry pink.

“Biblical numerology,” Dean blurted, and Adam scrunched his nose and eyebrows in confusion. If he hadn’t been so consumed with his own issues, Dean would’ve grinned at the sight. Adam’s confused expressions were always entertaining. “Fours, they’re, you know. Completeness. Holy. Gematria and stuff.”

“Riiiiiight.” Adam’s face scrunch only deepened, and Dean did crack a smile then.

“Forget about it,” Dean waved him off, and Adam shook his head, redirecting his attention back to the game. Privately, Dean resolved to keep better track of his hands, going forward. He’d made it this far without developing any truly crazy habits, and he hoped to keep it that way.

Chapter Text

NOVEMBER 2010  //  YEARS 66 – 75 IN HELL

There was a time, earlier in their stay, when they both frequently needed space away from one another, and one of them would hole up in the bathroom while the other had free run of the rest of the apartment for the day. In the last five years or so, Adam found that they needed this less and less. Or perhaps, needed it even more, and requested it less and less. It was a shift he hadn’t sensed until it was complete, that he couldn’t seem to reverse. Did not want to reverse, even if he knew he should want to.

He didn’t want to be away from Dean – even out of his line of sight. The idea of being alone down here, truly alone, was unbearable. Sometimes he’d wake up in the morning, long before Dean, and would just stay in bed, listening for Dean’s muted exhales, his body shifting against the sheets. The longer it took to get these confirmations, the more stressed he’d become, frozen clutching his own blankets, like a child convinced there’s a monster under his bed.

This was how he discovered that Dean was plagued by nightmares.

Nightmares that made him kick and thrash and fling his sheets on the floor.

Nightmares that made him grunt and huff and yelp and gasp and whine.

Nightmares that made him wake up and run to the shower, that made him scramble out of bed and into the kitchen for a tall glass of water, that made him sit on the floor and take deep breaths with his head between his knees.

For the first time in a decade or so, he wasn’t sure how to bring something up with Dean, because he wasn’t sure how to reveal the extent of his knowledge, and therefore, the extent of his concern.

One morning, Dean woke up from one such nightmare and quite literally fell on the floor trying (and failing) to disentangle himself from his bedding. It seemed as good a time as any to broach the subject.

“Bad dream?”

Dean looked up at him from his contorted position on the floor, face flushed with some inscrutable mix of embarrassment and lingering adrenaline.

“Um,” Dean replied sagely, squirming out of the lasso of his sheets and clambering to his feet.

“You wanna talk about it?” Adam offered, sitting up in bed to engage more fully in their conversation. Dean stood in the middle of the room, having had the relative misfortune of being in the sofa bed the night before. Even though he was awake and oriented by then, he was still breathing like a man who’d been chased for miles, patting his own bare arms and torso as if to make sure they were real and intact.

“Nah,” Dean breathed, voice lower than usual, as it often was in the morning.

“You wanna talk about the one from two days ago? Or three days before that? You wanna talk about the screamer you had a week and a half ago?” Adam asked, too frustrated to keep from showing his hand, but making an effort not to sound smug. This wasn’t a ‘gotcha’ moment, he reminded himself. This was a discussion they needed to have, considering they were going to be down here for the foreseeable future.

“Just nightmares,” Dean dismissed, retreating into the kitchen, getting down a glass and interrupting the lazy drip of the sink to draw himself some water.

“I mean, I know they’re nightmares, Dean. I just – don’t you think it’s gotten a little out of hand?”

“I guess?” Dean answered, frustration lowering his voice further. He gulped down his water and filled the glass again. “You got any suggestions on how to fix it, I’m all ears, man.”

“I mean, you could talk about it, and – “

“So, not that,” Dean interrupted. “That’s bullshit. Any other suggestions?”

“It’s not bullshit,” Adam protested, getting out of bed at last. He figured his position might come across more strongly if he was at least on literal equal footing. “Talking helps – I mean, how many things have we fixed by talking through them, since we got here?”

“Look, Oprah. I’m not saying talking doesn’t help anything. Just. Not this,” Dean explained, waving his hand in the direction of the empty sofa bed.

“How do you know it doesn’t? If you don’t even try – “

“I just do, okay?” Dean interrupted, tone hard. Not like steel, inflexible and strong – like ice, cold and close to shattering. “Jesus, between you and Sam…” Dean trailed off, shaking his head with a tight expression. It had been a while since Adam had thought about Sam, in truth. It felt weird, to be in the same thought as him, the same sentence. Caught off guard by the sudden bout of internal comparison he was subjecting himself to, he let the matter drop.

+++

Most mornings now, Adam spent watching Dean draw. A routine of sorts, just sipping his coffee, Dean across from him at the table, scribbling away, sketching something that would be erased by the next morning. Fingers brushing across the page, tip of his pencil scuffing softly along, mesmerizing Adam with his silent intensity. He knew, even though Dean rarely said anything at all about his drawings, that more often than not, they were bits and pieces of his dreams.

He wondered if Dean was drawing them out to excise them from himself, pulling them free of his mind like splinters, collecting them outside his body, outside his brain, where they had no sway over him.

He wondered, conversely, if Dean was drawing these things because he was clinging to them, because these fragments were all he had left of whatever his unconscious mind had conjured, and he wanted to preserve them, insects sealed in glittering amber, timeless and dead in equal measure.

On this particular morning, he was sketching silhouettes around a small circular table, hands clasped, heads bowed, like a family joined in a pre-dinner prayer. Adam wasn’t in the habit of asking about Dean’s art, and he didn’t now. The figures looked sort of like Dean’s family, he supposed. There was a woman, though Dean had only outlined her, her wavy dark hair brushing the tops of her shoulders. There was an older man, broad-backed, wearing a ball cap. A tall man, dark hair tapering off around his cheekbones, who Adam was almost certain must be Sam. Another man, no features defined whatsoever, but judging from the set of his spine, the angles of his face in profile, had to be Dean.

It made sense that Adam wouldn’t be in this picture, he reminded himself, as Dean sketched out a television set in the background, scribbling hard over the screen, evoking staticky snow.

Coffee finished, Adam got up and rinsed his mug in the sink, lingering in the kitchen a little while as Dean finished his drawing. He wanted to ask his brother something, but nothing in particular. It was a feeling that he’d had frequently as of late, this need to clarify…something, but not knowing what that something was. Not being able to sit with that not knowing long enough to get to the root of it.

Dean must have sensed Adam’s eyes on him, and looked up from his page with an eyebrow raised, but Adam ignored him, dug around in the pantry as a way of breezing past the moment, as if he didn’t know where everything was by now. He heard Dean get up from the table, chair scooting back on the linoleum with a familiar squelching chirp, and for a second he thought Dean was coming to the kitchen, to confront him. Instead, he heard him settle on the couch, the TV flicking on with a hiss of electricity. He was sort of relieved not to be made to explain himself, but there was something else there, too, something like disappointment.

+++

“You’ve been quiet,” Dean observed, several years later, though for what little had occurred in those intervening years, Adam figured they may as well have been days. Hours, even.

“Maybe I just ran out of stuff to say,” Adam replied, feeling terse, moody. He’d had his hackles raised for months now, maybe longer, all spikes and barbs. If it bothered Dean, he hadn’t made any indication of that.

“Is everything…are things…are you…?” It was just so Dean, to not have figured out what he wanted to ask before asking, that it nearly brought a fond smile to Adam’s face. Those muscles were stiff though, and the smile never came.

“I don’t think the sink’s fuckin’ talking to me again or anything, alright?” Adam snipped, because he was still embarrassed about it, even after all these years.

They’d been playing a game of Battleship, and were sitting across from one another at the table, but Adam couldn’t remember whose turn it was, or when the last time was that either of them had a hit. They may as well have been sitting there for days, and if there wasn’t such a strict day/night cycle here, he might even have suspected that they had been. Dean peeked at Adam over the top of the board, and the worry creasing the skin around his eyes made Adam feel like a total asshole. Before he could amend his statement, though, Dean was speaking.

“You know I don’t think you’re nuts, okay? We’ve both done weird shit. Both still do. That’s just kinda par for the course. I just meant…I dunno. I miss you, I think?”

Adam dropped his gaze, stared down at his game pieces until they blurred.

“Here I am,” Adam replied after too long of a pause. Toneless, something that could have been a deadpan joke, if he wasn’t so miserable.

“No, I know, I just,” Dean took a deep breath, then looked away, over at the kitchen. His exhale turned into a shaky bitter laugh, and Adam had lived with him long enough to hear the subtle difference between Dean laughing at Adam and Dean laughing at himself. This was self-deprecation if he’d ever heard it. “Fuck, I dunno. I suck at this. I know you’re here, of course I do. And I’m – obviously this sucks, obviously – this is Hell – but, I just…” Dean looked down at his own board now, and Adam was watching him again, watching the pinch of his mouth, constricting until his lips were white. “It always kinda felt like we were in this together, you know? And lately…”

“Well, we’re not.” Adam wasn’t sure where the words were coming from, this hurt he’d been deferring, had been forcing into different shapes for so many years, how it was emerging now, sharper than anything he’d managed to say or think in years. Dean sat back in his chair as if he’d been struck physically, and Adam, had he been in a better mood today, or that week, or that year, probably would have taken that moment to backpedal and apologize. Dean would forgive him. He always had before. But Adam was in a rotten mood, and he didn’t take it back, or apologize. He went in for the kill. “We’re not in this together. I’m not here to entertain you. I’m waiting out a fucking prison sentence. So I’ve been quiet lately. Sue me.”

Dean’s whole expression went still, smooth like glass. Breakable, too, the part of Adam that loved his brother thought. He looked so breakable. Green eyes found his own, and Adam held them, caught somewhere between anger and regret, unsure which emotion his eyes were revealing, which thing Dean would see when he looked into them.

“Oh,” Dean said, the way someone might if they realized they’d left their wallet at home when trying to pay for groceries. Embarrassed, disappointed, a little afraid. “I think I’m gonna hit the latrine,” Dean mumbled, and rose from his seat, headed for the bathroom before Adam could think of anything else to say. The bathroom door shut, and it didn’t open again for the rest of the day. Adam went to bed, and Dean was still in the bathroom when he finally dozed off.

+++

He started thinking about Sam, mostly as a way to be cruel to himself. Or, as an extension of how he’d already decided to be cruel to himself, perhaps. It had been about three months since he’d snapped at Dean, and they hadn’t said much of anything to one another since then. He’d understood what Dean meant, about missing him, even if he’d pretended not to, but he hadn’t been able to relate. Dean was always within reach, emotionally and literally, and he had figured that he had made himself similarly available.

Now that they were in this melancholy stand-off, though, Adam finally knew firsthand what Dean meant. He missed him, awfully. Had dreams where they were talking again, where they’d make a big bowl of popcorn and watch Burn Notice just so Dean could make snide comments about it the whole time, and he’d wake up with an ache behind his sternum so heavy and despairing that he’d wonder briefly if it was a real medical concern.

He wasn’t sure when this silent treatment stopped being about stubbornly refusing to let Dean off the hook and became a way of putting himself in his place, building back up the wall between himself and Dean. Sometimes he thought of something his mother had told him, when he was just a kid, dealing with stupid spats on his hockey team. That holding a grudge only makes your hands tired. He hadn’t really understood it back then, but he did now.

So, Sam.

Adam only met Sam briefly. Just long enough to have about a million questions about this man he was genetically linked to – which, in Dean’s defense, he’d answered probably at least half of over the last 72 years. Thanks to Dean, Adam often felt like he knew Sam personally. Like he’d grown up with this mop-headed nerd, just as Dean had. He could picture Sam hunched over books, could picture him huddled up in the backseat of the Impala, trying to sleep through a winter storm. He could hear his voice asking about where John went, when he left them in motel rooms. For awhile, Adam figured he and Dean must be about as close as Dean and Sam, having spent what was essentially a lifetime together, but now he wonders.

It was this wondering that has kept him quiet. It was perhaps even this wondering that made him go quiet to begin with. He might not describe this kind of insecurity as loss, but his brain and body processed it that way. The prospect of emerging at long last from this Hell and finding that he was only a placeholder, a poorly designed substitute for Dean’s real brother, would hit him harder than the death of his mother. It was this realization that buried him for good.

Adam stopped eating, after that. Was partway through making eggs and just…stopped. Dumped them in the garbage, washed the pan, and went back to bed. He stayed in bed for days, and he thought Dean might not have noticed, somehow. Or that he didn’t care. That the last vestiges of whatever charade he’d been carrying on, this ‘big brother’ act, had shriveled and disintegrated at last. He pretended, even to himself, that he was glad, in a bitter sort of way, to be done with it. To have it all out in the open.

On the ninth morning of this constant languishing, he awoke to the familiar sag of another body joining him on the bed. This entire time, he’d been sleeping in the proper bed, had left Dean to deal with the creaky sofa bed on his own instead of taking turns as they had done for decades. Briefly, he dismissed Dean’s presence as a simple statement on that, an unsubtle call for Adam to stop hogging the better bed. He flipped over, turning his back to Dean, and pressed his face down into his own pillow, grumbling performatively about nothing at all. No reason not to go back to sleep, he figured. A hand landed on the back of his neck, warm and heavy. A motherly touch, comforting, concerned, palm heating the knob where his spine curved into his neck.

“Wha - ?” Adam grunted, scooting away, but not far enough that Dean was forced to break contact.

“If you ain’t gettin’ outta bed, then I guess I gotta come to you.”

“What do you mean?” Adam asked, tone not as sharp as he intended, blotted and dulled by sleep. He should be better at pushing Dean away, but he’s missed him.

“I know you don’t…that we’re not…” Dean started, tapering off with a frustrated huff of air. Adam smiled to himself, the first smile he’d managed in almost a year now. No matter what, Dean would always be this person, whose heart was so close to the surface, whose words were so elusive. He’d always have to go hunting around inside himself in order to get his point across. The rest of Dean’s words wiped the smile off of Adam’s face. “I get that you feel trapped – fuck, that you are trapped. Here. With me. Because of me. And I’m…I know you’re not here to entertain me, I mean…if I’ve ever made you feel that way…fuck. I just like spending time with you. Guess that’s kinda selfish, given the context. And maybe you don’t like spending time with me, or you’re just tired of it after all these years. But you can’t keep…I mean, of course you can. You can do whatever you want. I can’t stop you. But I hate watching you just…give up.”

“I’m not giving up,” Adam insisted, turning onto his back and pushing his palms against the mattress to sit up, back propped up against the headboard.

“You sure?” Dean asked, and Adam looked at him, wary. It was the first time he’d really looked at Dean in over a week. “Longest I ever spent in bed was four days. And I only stopped because I ran out of cash to pay for the motel room. And I was giving up, when I did it.”

“Four days?” Adam asked back, curiosity getting the better of him, scaling the paltry walls he’d built between himself and Dean like it was nothing. Dean’s lips twisted in a sort of smile, but his eyes drooped at the edges.

“Yeah. January 2004.” Dean rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. His voice warped, gravity on his diaphragm pulling the gravel out of his voice. “Just came off a real screamer of a Black Dog case that Dad sent me off on. Debriefed him on the phone when I got back to the motel, got chewed out for taking so long to take the fucker down. I was beat all to hell, big nasty bruise on my jaw. Big bite on my thigh that took forever to stitch up on my own, and it stung like crazy,” Dean snorted a laugh, even though nothing he’d said was funny. “I’d show you the scar – girls always asked about it, if they saw it, ‘cause it looked like a fuckin’ bear or shark or something, I swear – but Cas did away with all that when he brought me back, so,” Dean ended his sentence, shrugging even though he was fully horizontal. “Told Dad I got hurt pretty bad, needed to take some time to heal up. He hated that.”

“That you got banged up?”

“Maybe? He figured if I was better at my job, I’d’ve gotten out clean, maybe. But no. I think…more the time than anything else. Hated when I needed to take a day or two off. Thought it was a waste. Selfish, maybe. Maybe it was, kinda.”

“It wasn’t.” Adam didn’t mean to come down so hard on it, biting his words out, but that’s exactly what he did, and it made Dean’s eyes drift to their corners momentarily, reading Adam’s face for a tense moment before swiveling back to the ceiling, his expression softening somewhat.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Dean drew his arms up and crossed them above his head, then rested the base of his skull on his forearm, like a man lounging on a beach. The easy pose looked out of place here, especially given the subject matter. “Anyhow. Once I got myself triaged I got in bed and just…couldn’t find a good reason to get back out. I knew I was draining my cash, I knew I was pissing John off worse with every call I let go to voicemail but…fuck. Just seemed so pointless, all of a sudden. Laying there, all I could think was that it wouldn’t be that bad if I just…stopped.”

“Hunting?” Adam asked, and Dean closed his eyes, lidded softly, as in sleep. Not pressed closed. It made a lump form in his throat, watching Dean turn inward that way. It always did.

“Living.”

“Oh,” Adam said, at a loss. Dean’s eyes stayed closed.

“The only one who’d miss me was John, and even then…I don’t think it mattered so much that I was me, that I was his kid. I think he’d just feel like he was…I dunno, workin’ from a deficit. Down a man. Frustrated like he was when we were out of cash, or ammo. Not sad, really. Inconvenienced, I guess.”

“What about Sam?” Adam blurted, because he’d been thinking about Sam for months now. Thinking about how he and Dean had always been there for each other, always would be. How Dean went to Hell for Sam. Had kind of done it again, even. How he hadn’t thought twice about roping Adam into this second trip downstairs, when he thought it would benefit Sam.

“I guess I figured he’d already made his peace with it.”

“You thought he was done with you?”

“He was.” Dean turned and opened his eyes, and held eye contact with Adam for the first time in over a week. “He said as much. And it had been…by then? Two years, give or take. I hadn’t heard from him since he walked away. What did it matter if I actually died, you know? I figured I was already dead, to him.”

“But you guys are so…”

“I mean, I was wrong,” Dean laughed, just a short sound, reassuring and mild. “That’s kinda the point of the story, kid.”

“Oh,” Adam said again. He felt very young, all of a sudden, younger than he had in decades.

“It was my birthday, too,” Dean added, like it was nothing, like it was an unimportant detail. An amusing coincidence, maybe. Like he thought it added something darkly funny to the story. Like it didn’t make Adam’s stomach cramp and clench, to think about. “Turned 25.”

Adam pictured it. Turning 25 in some musty motel room, sleeping in sheets that smell like exertion and cheap detergent. Sweating out some mild fever from the bite of a cursed hound. Blood clotting in the seam of amateur stitches, feeling your heartbeat throbbing against your femur, injured leg warm and heavy and sick. Face aching where you were struck, bruise tightening the flesh, yellowing at the edges, ripening like a plum in the center. How chewing, swallowing, talking, would all hurt. Worrying about what little money you had being wasted on rest. Being alone in a way that seemed preordained, that was unavoidable. The only company you could call on being a father who could muster nothing but contempt for your suffering.

“You didn’t,” Adam said, like it wasn’t singularly obvious, and Dean smiled gently as Adam spoke. Almost like he expected Adam to ask, because it was something Adam would do. "You didn’t kill yourself.”

“No, I didn’t,” Dean agreed, sitting up against the headboard beside Adam, their shoulders brushing between them. “Would be a pretty neat trick, to come back from the dead twice.”

“I mean, you have, actually more than that if – “

“Right, yeah, whatever. This was before Heaven gave two shits about me.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Nothing,” Dean said, after a long moment. “I didn’t.”

“You didn’t change your mind?” Now Adam was truly perplexed, and it must have shone through in his tone, because Dean cracked a fond smile.

“Nope. Just…stopped feeling urgent. I figured I’d kick it on a case sooner or later. And in the meantime…why rush? I didn’t suddenly fall in love with the idea of being alive, I just…didn’t feel like hurrying things along, I guess.”

“So you did give up.”

“I did not,” Dean argued, elbowing Adam in the ribs, just hard enough to make Adam hiss, then laugh.

“Then what?”

“Giving up is giving up. I got out of the fucking bed, I paid my freakin’ motel bill, I got in my car, I got on the road. I listened to my voicemails. I took a case. I kept going.” Dean stared at Adam, like he wasn’t sure if Adam had understood him, but felt it might be rude to ask directly if he had. “I didn’t give up.”

And for a second, Adam still doesn’t get it. Active or passive, it didn’t seem like much of a difference. Whether you were taking it into your own hands or waiting for the universe to strike you down, if you looked at life like that, wasn’t it all the same? But then, he took stock of his own body. Of the humid stagnancy under the sheets, the stiffness in his joints from lack of use. The way his eyes felt permanently crusted from sleep, the way it had taken his mind so long to orient upon waking. And he got it. He got the difference, between these things. Between giving up, and waiting, and trying, and living. They were like rungs on a ladder, a long climb out of a deep pit. Dean could have stayed at the bottom. And he didn’t.

“You…yeah.” Adam wasn’t sure how to explain what he had discovered, so he reached out, clasped his hand around Dean’s where it lay on the bed between them. Squeezed, tight, before letting go again. “You didn’t.”

+++

The peace they reached was tentative, and somehow absolute. He could tell Dean still felt like shit, but he wasn’t sure how to change that, short of lying. Because he did feel trapped, and saying he didn’t wouldn’t be convincing.

But they were back to their little routines.
Back to watching television and eating snacks and tossing clementines back and forth.
Back to Adam taking showers and Dean cooking breakfasts, back to board games and the occasional discussion.
Back to Dean drawing pictures and Adam not asking questions about them, watching over the rim of his coffee mug.
Back to Adam paying attention in the mornings.
Back to not asking Dean about his nightmares.

Until one morning, Adam woke up after Dean, for the first time since his bedrotting stint, and found Dean sitting at his bedside, sitting in a chair he’d dragged over from the table, sipping coffee. Just…watching.

Adam startled at the surprise sight of another person, so early upon waking, but relaxed just as quickly. Dean winced sympathetically.

“Sorry, I…” he laughed, shook his head. “God, I tell Cas how fuckin’ weird it is, and then I turn around and do it to somebody else.”

“Watching me sleep?” Adam asked, not bothering to mask the sass in his voice. Dean grinned.

“I mean, sort of. You were makin’ a racket, so I came to check on you. And…I didn’t really want to wake you up or nothin’, just felt weird to…ignore you? When Sammy was little, sometimes he’d…ah, nevermind. Sorry, really.” Dean rose from his chair and grabbed it by the wooden arch at the top, carrying it back to the table. Adam almost wanted to protest, to ask him to stay by his bedside, but that would be weird.

“Not a big deal,” he said, instead of asking him to stick around. “But…what? About Sam?”

Dean waved a dismissive hand, moving towards the kitchen to offload his empty mug.

“Nothin’,” Dean assured him, like he didn’t want to bother Adam with stories about his past. His life. Lately he seemed so much less sure of himself. Less sure of where he stood, with Adam, less sure of what he was allowed to ask of Adam. It wasn’t what Adam wanted, but he didn’t really know how to get back to the easy way things had been between them. Every time he thought about it, all he could do was feel helpless and guilty. “You want coffee?”

“I – sure, but,” Adam paused, gave himself time to change his mind, but decided to plow ahead. He was tired of walking on eggshells. “But, really. I want to hear about it. About him, if you want to talk about that.”

“Oh, I mean. Okay, yeah,” Dean played it off, but Adam could see the way his shoulders set into a tense line as he poured Adam’s coffee. “Nothin’ too crazy. Just, when we were kids. If he was havin’ a bad dream or something, and he woke up, he liked somebody to be there. Didn’t like feeling alone, or like he didn’t know where he was, that sort of thing.”

Adam thought about it, two little kids in a motel room, one of them waking the other with the scuffle of a nightmare. He thought about Dean rubbing his eyes, perching beside Sam, waiting to be there for him, whenever he’d eventually wake. And he thought about this morning, where he’d apparently been stirring in his sleep, and Dean had stopped whatever it was he’d been doing – drawing, probably, if he’d already made the coffee – and dragged a chair over. To be there whenever Adam opened his eyes.

“Thanks,” Adam said, because it was as close as he could safely get to how he really felt. It was as nice of a thing that Dean would allow Adam to say to him. It was as kind as Dean was willing to allow Adam to be to him.

“Oh – uh. Yeah. Welcome.”

+++

“I swear, like, I’m on the phone for two minutes, guy manages to get his shoe stuck in a grate. Like, was I worried about the curse or whatever? Yeah, of course. But it was pretty fucking funny, too.”

Adam wasn’t sure how they got on the topic of this old case – he’s pretty sure he accused Dean of having too much luck for it to be a fair game of Monopoly, because the dice just seemed to keep rolling his way no matter what. But somehow, that had led them to this saga about a rabbit’s foot, and it was far more entertaining than playing Monopoly for the billionth time.

“You laughed at him? He was cursed!”

“It was funny!”

“Still,” Adam snorts a laugh of his own at Dean’s guilty expression, “I mean, he’s your brother.”

“So? That makes it even funnier,” Dean protested, grinning at his own joke. Adam rolled his eyes.

“Well, if I had a brother who was cursed, I wouldn’t laugh at him. Even if he tripped, or got his shoe stuck somewhere, or whatever.”

“I mean, you do kinda have a brother that’s cursed – two, even. Just, not in a funny way.”

“Yeah, but you guys aren’t – “ Adam blurted, before cutting himself off. It’s too late though. Dean’s expression fell, smile rolling off, his eyes losing their light. Like a computer, powering down. He averted his eyes, instead fiddling with the little shiny thimble character token that had become his default. Adam just watched, wishing he hadn’t said a damn thing.

“That’s. Yeah.” Each word seemed like a battle. “I don’t…I didn’t mean…”

But Dean did mean it, Adam realized. Dean sees Adam as his brother. As Sam’s brother. Really. Fully. And he’d been so consumed with doubt about where he stood with Dean, for years now, that he hadn’t understood this. Could not understand it. That Dean isn’t ranking them. That Adam isn’t some consolation prize, some runner-up in the brother contest. And he’s made the last few years relatively miserable, all for nothing. All in service of an insecurity that never had a leg to stand on.

“You did,” Adam said, and Dean looked up at him, looking caught. Ashamed, maybe, or just old fashioned embarrassed. Like he thought Adam was going to make fun of him, or put him in his place. And, well, Adam supposed that was a fair thing to be afraid of. Because not so long ago, he’d sort of done just that. Told him to take his concerns and shove them, that whatever closeness they’d cultivated was obligate. Nothing more. But as mad as he was about all this, about being trapped down here, as mad as he would always be about it, Adam found that he couldn’t stand by those words.

“Yeah,” Dean admitted, helplessly. Oblivious to the revelations Adam was having on the inside, still living in the mire of the moment, sinking. “I just – yeah.”

“Hey, I know I’ve…I know I’ve said some…some things,” Adam sighed, because here it was. All the backpedaling he’d been avoiding, all the apologizing he hadn’t wanted to get around to. “Some really awful things. About – this, about you. But it wasn’t true. Not really. And it wasn’t fair – I’ve known that for a while now. Just haven’t known how to say it.”

“I’m not sure what you mean, man.” Dean looked up at him, cautious and confused, but trying so hard, and that hopeful effort made something twist in Adam’s chest.

“I mean, this is like…these last few years have been…they’ve been my January 2004, you know?”

“I – oh?” Dean managed, then repeated, softer – “Oh.”

“And I think I’ve finally uh, gotten back on the road, you know?”

“Oh,” Dean murmured, staring, fascinated.

“I don’t – I’m not,” mad at you, Adam wanted to say, but that wasn’t it. He swiped an irritated hand down his face, dug his palm against his mouth until the edges of his teeth ground into the inside of his lip. Dropped it again, when he was ready to speak. “We are in this together. I want us to be, and we are. We have been. I’m sorry I said that we weren’t. I said it to hurt you, I think. And it worked.” Adam heard his own voice break a little on the last word, but he was beyond embarrassment. Maybe that was growth. He couldn’t remember a time in his life where hearing his voice crack hadn’t made him feel stupid.

“Yeah, it did,” Dean agreed, but his eyes were warm. “But, you know. S’okay.”

“Yeah?” Adam asked, not sure he could believe that it was that easy. That swift. Forgiveness seemed like it should be more elusive than that.

“Yeah, man. I’m…I’m really glad, that you don’t…I’m glad we’re in this together, okay?”

“Really?” Adam asked, laughing a little wetly in his disbelief.

“Yeah, really. Sam’s hit me with some doozies over the years. Just kind of a brother thing, I think,” Dean assured him, somewhere between comforting and teasing. It was a visceral relief.

“You really…mean that?” Adam whispered, feeling raw. A hermit crab, between shells.

“Mean what?” Dean asked, before replaying his sentence in his own mind, not needing Adam to clarify before understanding dawned on his features. Everything about his face softened, all at once. “Yes, I – of course I – yes. You’re our brother, Adam. You’re my brother.”

“Just…I know it’s dumb,” Adam mumbled, sounding so childish to his own ears, with the way his unshed tears were congesting his nose, rounding his consonants. “I just thought…”

“Hey,” Dean got up from his seat, abandoning their half-finished game of Monopoly to come around to Adam’s side of the table and squat down beside him, so he was at eye level, despite the fact that Adam was still seated. He turned in his chair, to look at him head on. “Hey, c’mere,” Dean implored, opening his arms and pulling Adam in against his chest, hugging him tight. Dean had only ever hugged him once before, so it came as something of a surprise. He was so caught off guard that he stopped focusing on holding back his tears, and they flowed out quietly, soaking into the shoulder of Dean’s shirt where his face was mashed against the fabric.

“You’re not just saying that, to make me,” Adam hiccuped, embarrassingly, which he worried might undercut the seriousness of his question, “to make me feel better?”

“Nope,” Dean answered, more into Adam’s hair than anything. Adam was pretty certain that this was the longest hug he’d ever had, and it wasn’t even past the minute mark. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Bad, maybe. “You’re my brother, sorry. No take backs,” Dean said, just enough teasing infused in his tone to bring a wobbly smile to Adam’s face.

“You sure you want to take on another shithead younger brother?” Adam teased back, pulling away even though he would have been just fine hugging for even longer. Dean stayed close, like he could somehow sense that Adam needed that.

“Yeah!” Dean exclaimed brightly, small sincere smile lighting on his lips. “How lucky am I? Turns out I got two nerdy baby brothers, and I only had to change diapers for one of ‘em.”

Adam laughed a lot harder than the joke warranted, but it was mostly to cover up the pang of uncomplicated affection that stemmed from hearing Dean call him his ‘baby brother’. Dean laughed right along with him, and didn’t comment on how he was maybe definitely still crying a little bit. Because Dean was a pretty good brother, Adam figured.

Chapter Text

DECEMBER 2010  //  YEARS 76 – 85 IN HELL

“When we get out of here, what’s the first thing you’re going to eat?” Adam asked, watching Dean stir the beans he was cooking.

“I dunno, cheeseburger?” Dean offered, trying not to actually consider the question. Thinking about being out made being here that much harder.

“Really, that’s the best you’ve got?” Adam chuckled, sipping his beer. Dean checked the rice, just to have something else to focus on. “Come on, I know you love food, there’s gotta be something specific.”

“Haven’t really thought about it,” Dean admitted. It was true, but it felt like a lie. “How about you?”

“Oh man, I’m gonna get a whole pizza, and a coney dog, and french fries,” he sighed, like he could taste these things, if he thought about them long enough. “And a milkshake. Or, no – cheesecake.”

“Hell, why not both?” Dean laughed, taking the rice off of the heat. “Nobody’s gonna judge, I don’t think.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Adam seemed restless. He drummed his fingers on the countertop, which normally wouldn’t bug Dean, but right now it was all he could think about. “You really don’t have any ideas, for what you want to eat?”

“Told you, cheeseburger,” Dean replied with a tense shrug, hoping he’d just drop it. “Anyhow, today I’m hungry for black beans and rice, because that’s what’s for dinner,” he declared, turning off the burner the beans had been cooking over.

“Yeah, alright,” Adam agreed, expression sour.

“Hey, you’re the one who went and got all riled up for a bunch of food that,” that we’ll never have anyhow, Dean almost said, and choked, pivoting, “that we don’t have down here,” he finished, dishing out beans and rice into two bowls. He opened his own beer and took a grateful swig.

“I know,” Adam sighed, taking his bowl with a limp lack of enthusiasm.

“Come on, I make good black beans and rice,” Dean groused, affect slipping back towards the tone he used to take with Sam, when he’d bitch about whatever food Dean had been able to scrounge up. “I know you want something else, but that’s what we’ve got right now.” He remembered that, though it was all unbearably repetitive, they did actually have a fridge and pantry full of alternatives, unlike when he was struggling to feed Sam, growing up. “I mean, you know, if you want something cooked, other than this, you can make it yourself.”

“Okay, yeah,” Adam agreed, looking at him with eyes narrowed by suspicion. He could tell Dean was doing a lot more thinking than talking. If he wanted to know what about, he was just going to have to ask outright. He didn’t though, and they ate in a rectangular sort of silence, all sharp corners and long flat looks when one thought the other wouldn’t notice.

When they’d finished the meal, Adam seemed poised to say something, but Dean wasn’t in the mood to talk, even about something trivial, so he moved quickly to the couch and turned on the television, leaving it on whatever station Adam had last been watching, not even noticing which channel it was on, really, or what show was playing.

“Thought you hated Burn Notice,” Adam noted with some amusement, tempered by suspicion. Dean shrugged.

“Grows on you,” Dean replied, and he could feel Adam’s skepticism without even looking at him.

“Right.” He could practically hear the eye roll, but he didn’t care. Adam let it drop, for real this time, and Dean was grateful. Though that still left him watching Burn Notice, so he counted it as more of a Pyrrhic victory.

+++

A few years later – Dean’s not sure how many, he doesn’t count – Adam asked the same question again, and Dean wondered if he even realized he’d already asked it.

Dean was scrambling eggs, toast cooling on the unused half of the stovetop, butter soaking into the tops of them.

“Alright, we get topside, what’s the first thing you want to eat?” Adam asked. Dean thought he might be dreaming, and let the hot edge of the spatula rest against his wrist, just for a second, just long enough to feel it sting, enough to be sure he was awake.

“Cheeseburger,” Dean answered, like he hadn’t said it before, like Adam hadn’t ever asked.

“That’s it?” Adam asked, incredulous.

“Yup.”

“Okay, what’re you gonna have on it?”

“Patty, cheese. Bacon maybe.”

“Wow, exciting,” Adam shot back, sarcastic but playful. Dean didn’t feel like playing at the moment. Any time he thought about getting home, he had a hard time feeling anything at all.

“Yeah, well,” Dean shrugged. He turned off the burner, but couldn’t quite summon the energy to lift up the pan and dish out its contents onto the waiting plates. He stood there and stared down at it.

“Don’t you want to know what I’m gonna eat, when I get back?”

“Pizza,” Dean replied, feeling like he was in a trance. “Whole pizza, just for you. And a coney dog.” Adam didn’t say anything, so Dean kept going, like it was some kind of test. “French fries. And a milkshake, or some cheesecake, or both.”

“That’s – “ Adam started, but Dean interrupted, turning around to face him as he spoke. Adam was staring at him with wide eyes.

“You never said what flavor milkshake. Or what kind of cheesecake. Or what you’d get on the pizza.”

“Yeah,” Adam said, like he was agreeing with something. Maybe he was, maybe just agreeing that he’d never specified.

“So,” Dean did turn back around, then, and summon the strength to lift the pan and distribute the eggs. He issued them each two pieces of toast. “Hungry?” He asked, scooting his plate towards him across the counter.

“Yeah, I – “ Adam took the plate, brought it over to the table, where his coffee mug was. Dean ate his standing in the kitchen, leaning over the sink. “Thanks,” Adam added, after he’d had a few bites.

“Don’t mention it,” Dean answered easily.

+++

They were back on a ‘two truths and a lie’ kick lately, which was significantly harder for having known one another for over eighty years now.

“My first crush had brown hair…brown eyes…and the first time I saw her, she was wearing a blue skirt,” Adam started. Dean thought for awhile, trying to remember if Adam had ever mentioned a first crush.

“She wasn’t wearing a blue skirt,” Dean replied, after he’d thought about it awhile. His beer was warming up in his hand, but he liked the weight of it, and decided not to set it down, even though it’d stay colder longer that way.

“Damn, how’d you guess that?” Adam laughed, shaking his head.

“Your first crush was Paige Willis, right? You met in preschool, but you ended up dating in eighth grade. She had brown hair, and brown eyes. So, I dunno, had to be the skirt.”

“You remember that?” Adam asked, shocked and amused.

“Yeah, ‘course I do,” Dean grinned, “she was in chorus with you, for the school musical.”

“Shit, Dean, I should be more careful about what I say, if we’re ever going to play this game again.”

“Oh, I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff you could stump me with, just gotta dig deeper is all.”

“Maybe,” Adam huffed, “but it’s your turn.”

Dean considered several courses of action before choosing his set of three.

“I’ve been to Alaska, Hawai’i, and Washington DC,” Dean declared. Adam burst out laughing before he answered.

“Hawai’i! You’ve never seen the ocean, and you hate flying.”

“Ding, ding, ding!” Dean chuckled, “Gonna have to hit me with a real toughie this time, kid.”

“Alright,” Adam replied, sounding locked-in. He rubbed his hands together, like a gymnast chalking up. “Best desserts – peanut butter fudge, peanut butter cheesecake, peanut butter milkshake.” He sat back, arms crossed over his chest in preemptive pride, waiting to be proven victorious. Dean shook his head and took a swig of his beer.

“Fudge.”

“Come on, how could you know that?”

“Lucky guess?” Dean offered, not convincingly. Adam raised a skeptical eyebrow and Dean heaved a sigh. “I don’t know, man, you never talk about wanting to eat fuckin’ fudge when you get out of here.”

“Oh. Right,” Adam replied, like something had just occurred to him, something he couldn’t or shouldn’t mention. “Well, I think you’ve got this game in the bag.”

“I don’t know if that’s – “ Dean started, sportsmanlike and agreeable, but Adam shook his head.

“No, you’ve got me on this one,” Adam insisted. “What do you wanna have for dinner, anyhow?”

+++

“Fuck!” Adam hissed, jumping back from the stovetop, shoving his burnt thumb into his mouth on a reflex.

“Burn yourself?” Dean asked, hopping up from the couch. Adam nodded, brow furrowed in frustration with himself. The burn would be gone in the morning, they both knew, but that still left Adam with a whole day of discomfort ahead of him, seeing as he’d been making breakfast. “Here, run it under the tap, spit’s not gonna do anything for it.”

He turned on the faucet, and Adam reluctantly stuck his thumb under the stream of cool water.

“That’s going to be an adjustment,” Adam mused, staring at his angry pink skin as the water flowed over it.

“S’only for the day,” Dean reminded him, but Adam shook his head.

“No, I mean, when we get out of here.” Adam shut off the water, and Dean handed him a dish towel, feeling numb. Like he himself had been soaked under cold water, until his nerve endings were fried.

“Oh?” He managed, face tingling. He fought off a shudder.

“Yeah, like, I burn my hand on the edge of a frying pan upstairs? That’s like, a whole thing – it’ll blister, I’ll have to take care of it, all that. I won’t just wake up back to factory settings.”

“Yeah, that’s – yeah,” Dean agreed. His hands were clenched into fists at his sides, nails digging crescent moon cuts into the meat of his palm. He didn’t notice, and neither did Adam. When he went back to the couch and rested his hands on his thighs, they left four little blotches of blood in the denim. He considered washing out the cuts. He considered trying to rinse the blood out of his pants – they were a good pair, one of his nicer pairs of jeans. The only one he had, down here.

He didn’t bother, in any case. It would all be undone, by tomorrow.

And it was, and it wasn’t. His jeans were clean again, no trace of red. His hands were healed, but the faint lines remained, pale and accusatory, in a row along the heels of his hands.

+++

Adam had been quiet for a few days, which wasn’t unusual. Dean was just glad that he’d gotten out of bed every morning, and accepted food. He even played a few rounds of Battleship, though he stuck to hand signals.

One evening, as he puttered around in the kitchen, Adam on the couch watching Treasure Planet for the billionth time, albeit on mute, he was overcome by the need to hear Adam speak. To hear something besides his own footsteps and his own breathing and his own heartbeat.

“Where’re you ordering the pizza from? Or are you like, makin’ it yourself?”

Adam paused the movie and looked over with a facial expression that required no verbal accompaniment to convey its meaning – what the fuck are you talking about?

“You know, when we get out. You said you’re gonna eat a whole pizza. Are you ordering it? Is it freezer pizza? You rollin’ out your own dough, here? What’s it gonna be?”

“Probably whatever’s closest,” Adam admitted, voice rough from disuse.

“But if you could pick any pizza?” Dean prodded, the relief of his brother’s voice nearly knocking his legs out from under him. He leaned forward, forearms on the counter, to steady himself.

“I guess…I guess B. C. Pizza, in Mackinaw City.”

“Like, Michigan?”

“Yeah. In Michigan.” Adam glanced back at the television, the frame stuttering even though the VHS was paused, like it was anxious to keep moving. Like it hated being trapped as much as they did. Everything finite, yearning for its end. “Me and mom went on vacation there, a few times. Nothing crazy, just a little motel by the lake. I’d swim. Ride my bike. But she hated cooking even when we were at home – sure as hell wasn’t gonna cook on vacation. So we’d get B. C. Pizza the first night, and Chinese the next night. Then we’d go out for burgers and fries at this weird little Dari-ette and we’d have ice cream after – I always got a milkshake, and mom got a coke float, with chocolate ice cream. And on the last day, we’d get B. C. Pizza again.”

“Sounds nice,” Dean managed. It sounded better than nice. He couldn’t really imagine taking a proper vacation.

“It was,” Adam agreed.

“When we get out of here – “ Dean started, every word sticking in his throat. Adam interrupted him.

“Dean, don’t.”

“But – “

“I’ve been thinking.” Adam didn’t add anything to it. It wasn’t the beginning of a thought, but a declaration all its own. Dean stood, hunched over the counter, waiting. When no words came, after what could have been hours, but was probably just a minute or two, he spoke.

“About?”

“It’s been eighty four years, down here. That’s like, eight months on Earth, right?”

“Yeah, about.”

“And Crowley hasn’t been down here since…”

“No, I know,” Dean grunted, closing his eyes. It was his fault, that they were talking about this. He was the one who wanted Adam talking again. All he could do was stand there and take it in.

“And maybe…maybe they’re making progress up there, you know?”

Dean only nodded, words out of reach.

“But maybe…maybe not.”

Adam waited for Dean to respond, and in truth, Dean waited for himself to respond, for whatever instinct had kept him alive all those years to grab the wheel and steer him into calmer waters, but his lips stayed pressed together, and his words stayed nebulous and slippery. The best he could do was an anguished click of his throat, swallowing saliva in preparation for a sentence he’d not been able to form, in his head or in his mouth.

“And if we don’t make it out of here…I don’t know, isn’t it sad, to always be thinking about getting out? Isn’t it sorta worse, to just keep talking about it?”

Dean could agree. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t already thought this, hadn’t been thinking it for decades. But hearing it from Adam, it was too much. It was too close to being real, if they both believed it. Dean could pretend to have hope for anyone, could siphon hope from even the smallest reserve of someone else’s determination. Down here, though, it was just the two of them. If they were both out of faith, there was nothing left to hold on to.

He looked up at Adam, still leaning on the counter, letting it hold him up. Adam was staring at him, exhaustion written in every line on his face. His face, which should have been ancient, but instead was rounder and softer and younger than Dean’s. A perpetual child, his youth a mask that cannot be unfastened.

In his time hunting ghosts, Dean occasionally heard stories about glass coffins. How wealthy families would bury their children in glass caskets, under the promise from charlatan salesmen that the bodies inside would not decay, would not mold or be touched by vermin. That their precious children would remain forever angelic in eternal sleep. It was all a scam, of course. Glass caskets were expensive and, while somewhat more airtight and water tight than market alternatives, they did little to stop the natural breakdown of tissue. Not that these families ever found out this fact, considering all proof of the scam was conveniently six feet underground.

Both he and Adam had been resurrected, rebuilt by angelic hands, and buried alive, forced to claw their way out of the soil, lungs straining, fingers tunneling like worms. Dean, perhaps as foolish as those grief-blind parents of old, had buried them all over again, this time in a coffin of glass. A desperate bid for stasis, for preservation. But being buried is being buried, no matter how exquisite the corpse remains.

“What did you get, on your pizza?” He asked, standing up straight again, imbued with some new store of strength.

“Dean, are you even listening to me?” Adam asked, bewildered.

“If you got pineapple, you legally have to tell me.”

“I can’t believe you right now,” Adam gritted, crossing his arms over his chest. “Don’t you get it? We’re stuck here, maybe forever. I mean, shit, can we even die? Are we already dead?”

“Black olives? Sam likes those, and I pretend I don’t, but I kinda do. Don’t tell him that, though. He’ll never let me live it down.”

“Dude! Forget about that shit, forget about Sam, forget about fucking pizza,” Adam raged, flinging his hands up over his head in exasperation. “Can we leave here? If we press that button, and Crowley doesn’t come, what then, huh? If we open that door, what then? You’ve been to Hell before, is there a fucking road or something? Is there a way out?”

Dean glanced at the button, and thought about grave alarms. How usually they weren’t functional anyhow, and anyone buried by mistake might be tugging on a cord that was disconnected during interment. How even if they did work, there usually wasn’t anyone within earshot, if by chance that bell would ring.

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those white sauce motherfuckers, because that shit’s nasty.”

“So what, you’ve just totally lost it now?” Adam sneered, cheeks red with anger, eyes bright with fear.

“No,” Dean answered him directly, because he wanted him to understand. “No, I haven’t lost it. You think we’re never gettin’ outta here? Fine. Maybe so! I don’t know, okay? I get what you’re talking about – I’ve been thinkin’ it long enough for the both of us but I – “ he stopped to take a deep breath, lowering his voice from the near shouting volume he’d been at. “But I get it now. Whether or not we ever make it out…if we give up on it, if we stop thinking it could happen? We’re fucked. Because think about it. What if we get out, and we’ve been living like we never will? What’s that gonna do to our heads, hmm? Nothing good, that’s for fuckin’ sure.”

“Dean – “ Adam started, expression softer, though his jaw was still tense.

“Just…even if you’re sure we’re never getting out of here, can you pretend? If you don’t wanna pretend for yourself, can you pretend for me? God knows I’ve been pretending for you.”

Adam stared at him for a long time, lips pressed together so tightly that they were white, blood drained by the pressure.

“Sausage and peppers – green ones, and banana peppers. No jalapenos, they’re always the canned ones, and I hate those. And yeah, white sauce is the pits,” Adam said, after what seemed like an eternity. “You?”

“Classics, I guess. Pepperoni, but sometimes it’s so damn greasy, fucks up the cheese. Chicken bacon ranch is good, except when they do the ranch under the cheese. That’s foul.”

“Yeah,” Adam agreed, sniffling. “Where’re you gettin’ your burger?”

“I dunno. Wherever’s closest, I guess. Gonna be hungry, I bet.”

“And what’re you gonna get on it?” Adam challenged. Dean understood. It was proof of concept. It was keeping up his end of the bargain. It was a pact they were making.

“American cheese. I know that’s a trashy answer, but it’s just how I’ve always gotten ‘em, so.” Dean shrugged, and Adam listened with rapt attention. “Pickles, but not a bunch. Raw onions – white onions, cut up real small, like they do at Wendy’s. One leaf of lettuce, but only if it’s crisp. And no tomato – makes the bread soggy. Plain old sesame bun, nothing that won’t squish down in your hand. Bacon, if I can get it. No ketchup – that’s for fries. No mustard – that’s for hotdogs. No mayo – that’s for a BLT. If they’ve got it, some ‘a that pink stuff, like you get on a Big Mac? But if not, no goop.”

“Alright,” Adam agreed, like Dean had made some sort of proposal. But then, Dean supposed he had. “Alright, yeah.”

+++

Dean hadn’t stopped having nightmares, but he’d stopped giving as much of a shit. Cas kept plunging into Hell to save him, and Dean kept watching him die. Dean kept begging him to leave him behind, and Cas kept insisting that he couldn’t, parroting Baxter’s line like it’d been written for him, like Woody Allen’s script had been the mouthpiece for one perfect stupid angel to pledge his naïve allegiance to Dean all this time.

Hope was a match burning down towards his fingers, and he was almost impatient to feel the burn when it’d finally kiss the skin.

Adam hadn’t asked about the nightmares at all in the last decade or so, and Dean hadn’t thought to say anything. There was nothing to say. It was not a novel guilt that he felt, this bruise-blue ache that stalked him into sleep. He’d had regrets on Earth, and he was unsurprised that they’d followed him to Hell.

He prayed, sometimes.

More often, he thought of reasons not to. At the top of the list was the possibility that Castiel could hear him. He hated the idea, that he was burdening him with the weight of his despair.

Dean dreamed, exactly once, of Castiel shoveling dirt over him as he lay in his grave, no wooden coffin standing between them in this unreality.

"Why?” Dean asked, dirt in his mouth, wet and full of life, “why bring me back, just to bury me again?”

“What is a tomb, without a stone?” Castiel replied, toneless, dry as coffin wood.

“If Heaven wants to use me, why leave me down here?” He begged, shoving loose earth from his eyes, from his lips. It was heavy against his chest, his pelvis, his legs, where it was piled highest. Where his hands could not reach.

“The Lord raised Lazarus,” Castiel explained, like he was reminding him of something they’d discussed at length, even though Dean was sure they had not. “But it was his own legs that carried him out from his grave.”

Dean awoke, throwing his blankets onto the floor in a heavy heap, gasping for air. Adam was still asleep. His feet led him to the door, which he spent so much time refusing to think about. It stood there, as it always had, closed and latched. His hand moved toward the knob, but did not connect. Dean stared at the knob until his vision blurred, eyes boiling in unshed tears. He leaned forward, resting his forehead on the cool unyielding wood, and he did not pray.

Chapter Text

JANUARY 2011  //  YEARS 86 – 95 IN HELL

Before Hell, Adam hadn’t spent much time thinking about hope. If pressed, he might have described it the way so many people do – as a resource, a kind of mental energy perhaps – hope is to the heart as blood is to the body. It can be depleted, it can be restored. All of this passive, of course. All of these as the result of outside forces acting upon the self. When hope is lost, there is no recourse but patience. It hadn’t mattered to him, and he hadn’t formed an opinion of his own, outside of the syntactic defaults of the English language, the implications of common phraseological positioning.

In Hell, after having spent what Adam knew to be eighty eight years and four days in this perpetual uncertainty, he had at last developed an opinion on the subject of hope. The genesis of this opinion may have been gradual, perhaps so slow that he had not noticed its formation, a diamond crystalizing under the weight of the earth, but his realization of it was sudden and jubilant, a miner striking true.

Before, he might’ve thought such a paradigm shift would come at a moment of grand importance, as if to mark a milestone, to signal some great transfer of one period of life into the next. Perhaps it was a reflection of how much he had changed in all this time, that he found it completely fitting that this new understanding revealed itself to him in a moment of utter mundanity.

“Why add sugar?” Adam had asked as Dean dropped a few spoonfuls of it into the bowl in front of him.

“I dunno, just have to add it, or the bread won’t rise.” Dean shrugged, then continued. “I know when you’re using real yeast, it’s ‘cause the yeast has to have something to eat, or it’ll die. But I don’t know if beer has yeast in it? Or something else?”

“You make this before?” Adam asked, suddenly skeptical about this use of one of their three precious beers. Dean laughed, long and loud.

“All the time. Always had beer around when we were kids, and I didn’t even have to buy that myself. Everywhere we went, I was always swiping sugar packets – and you know, salt and pepper packets, honey and jam and butter pats, all that shit. So all I had to actually buy was flour, and that’d last for a long time, traveled pretty well once I stuck it in an old coffee cannister instead of that flimsy ass paper sack.”

“Motels don’t usually have ovens though,” Adam pointed out, and Dean rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, no shit. Look, we stayed in plenty of motels, and the car when we were really strapped. But a lot of the time, Dad would rent out some cheapo apartment for a month or two – especially during the school year – and just leave us there, goin’ out on his own to take on hunts, usin’ it like a home base.”

“Well, how’d you even learn how to make it in the first place?”

“Ah, some lady my dad left us with for a few weeks – Deborah, maybe? There was this case up in the Allegheny Mountains, when I was like, nine. And Dad was gonna have to hike a lot, to get to where the creature was – can’t even remember anymore what it was he was huntin’. Wish I had his journal down here. Anyhow, don’t matter. He saw this lady’s ad in the paper, in this dinky little West Virginia town – Petersville? Petersburg? Somethin’ like that,” Dean explained as he mixed the dough, “and it said she had a room for rent, but you had to be okay with kids, ‘cause she had a little four year old daughter at home. So he comes over, tells her he’ll pay double what she’s askin’ for the room for the month – which, she probably wasn’t askin’ much, but still. Tells her he’ll pay double if she watches us the whole time he’s gone off hikin’. And she’s so hard up, she says yes.”

“Wow,” Adam replied, because he could just imagine his own mother – on her own, running low on funds, living in a house that’s just a little too big for her and her little boy all by themselves – renting out one of their rooms to some stranger. If she hadn’t worked nights, maybe she would’ve.

“Yeah, so. Sammy and her kid – Kelsey? Kimberly? I dunno, think it was a ‘K’ sorta name. They got on like gangbusters, hardly had to do anything more than keep an eye on them while they ran around the yard all day. So Deborah, she has me help out with laundry and stuff, and when it seems like I’m good at that – which, I oughta be, since I’ve been doin’ mine and Sammy and Dad’s clothes for years by then – she taught me how to help her out in the kitchen.”

“That’s…nice,” Adam ventured. The way Dean said it, it sounded like a pleasant memory, but it was always hard to tell, with him, what was actually nice and what was just something that carried the welcome ache of nostalgia, no matter how sad it had been at the time.

“She was nice,” Dean agreed, transferring the dough to a rectangular pan with high sides. It was the only thing he’d had Adam help with – buttering the pan. “Like I said, she was kinda broke, too, so stretching the cash to feed two extra little mouths probably wasn’t easy. But she made a loaf of this stuff, every other day. She always said it was the cheapest, easiest bread you could scrape together, and I’m inclined to agree.”

“I’m excited to try it,” Adam said, mostly to have some way to cap off the discussion, but as the words left his lips, he found that they were entirely true. He was excited to try something new. He was happy to be in the kitchen with his brother, talking about their childhoods again, about which there were seemingly endless things to discuss. The smell of flour in the air, the promising glow of the oven as Dean slid the pan into its waiting warmth.

That was the moment, the diamond shining, dirt streaked and solid. Adam was full to the brim with hope, and it was on purpose. The end was no more within sight at that moment than any that preceded it, yet he’d chosen to be here, not passive and anxious and waiting, but present and alive and participant.

He did not find himself longing for escape, for freedom, though there was a part of him that always would – that always should, that must – but instead, for more of this, for more simple joy, pleasant anticipation, and human connection. He had hope that there would be more, and it was not an organic hope, springing up wild like some errant dandelion on the surface of his soul, but a deliberately seeded, carefully tended, dutifully pruned tree, bearing fruit at last.

“She’s gonna be about an hour,” Dean announced as he shut the oven door, oblivious to Adam’s epiphany. “Anything you wanna do in the meantime?”

“Yeah,” Adam replied, beaming, “you think you could teach me how to draw?”

Dean’s eyebrows raised, and the corners of his mouth lifted with them, his whole face surprised into a smile.

“Yeah?” Dean asked, because it was in his nature to double check things, to clarify. Adam just grinned, sincere and implacable, and Dean shook his head fondly. "Yeah, alright. Let me grab some paper."

+++

“You ever get sick of that?” Dean complained through an easy smile, stepping around where Adam was sitting on the floor.

“No,” Adam replied, flipping the glass bottle that’d been dangling between his fingers with a practiced grace.

“Should’ve never showed you how to do that,” Dean lamented, “I’ve created a monster.”

“Yeah, you have,” Adam agreed, swiping up the bottle from where it’d landed right side up, swinging it in a lazy arc before releasing it, watching it fall perfectly once again, clinking against the linoleum as it stilled.

“You bored, then?” Dean asked, after several minutes had passed. Dean was peeling a clementine, picking all the white scruffy threads off of each little section, mostly to prolong the experience.

“Hmm,” Adam considered the question, flipping the bottle a few more times, watching the water he’d added slosh against its transparent walls. “No, not really.”

Dean kept picking at the fruit in his palm, staring idly at Adam on the floor beside him, at the bottle he was flipping incessantly. He looked blandly amused.

“You bored?” Adam asked back, after awhile. Dean had begun eating his clementine, now that he’d fully divested it of pith and detritus.

“Nah,” Dean replied, still staring. He nibbled the seam of one clementine section, carefully lifting the clearish membrane away from the juice-filled vesicles within.

They stayed that way awhile, Dean meticulously dissecting his clementine, Adam repeating the same mechanical motion without flaw, for several minutes, the silence between them its own sort of conversation.

“When we get out,” Dean started, and Adam flicked his gaze briefly up towards him, to show he was listening, before returning his focus to the bottle. “I wanna eat a whole lime.”

“Yeah?” Adam laughed, having never considered attempting such a thing.

“Yup. Gonna peel the damn thing like an orange and eat it like that.”

“Why?” Adam asked, baffled and entertained by the idea.

“I dunno, just,” Dean shrugged, looking down at his last section of clementine where it rested, glistening in his palm like a jewel, “don’t feel like I’ve ‘preciated limes enough.”

“Yeah? You think limes are neglected, in the citrus world?” The bottle clinked again as it landed, like punctuation made audible.

“No, plenty of people like limes,” Dean deferred, shaking his head. He popped the last section into his mouth and hummed a pleased note as he chewed. “But I don’t wanna get to the end of my life and not have really like, had a lime.”

“You don’t think it’ll be like. Bitter?” Clink. “Or nasty?” Clink.

“Maybe?” Clink. “But I kinda don’t care about that part.” Clink. “I was standin’ here, missin’ limes, and I thought,” clink, “if I’d ever taken the time to really get into it with a fuckin’ lime, I would probably be able to remember it so good that it wouldn’t even matter, that I don’t have one here.”

Clink.

“Maybe so,” Adam conceded. “Maybe…I dunno…maybe you’re supposed to miss it. Maybe you’d just miss it that much more.” Clink.

“Ah, maybe,” Dean sighed, though he didn’t sound sad, just reflective. The bottle landed again. “Sometimes, I think I’m getting so good at missing stuff that I…that I don’t know how I’m ever gonna deal with not having to, anymore.”

Adam set the bottle down and looked up at his brother, who looked so tall from his spot on the kitchen floor, and still somehow childlike, unsure of the angle of his elbows, the dangle of his hands from his wrists.

“Maybe you’ve always been really good at it,” Adam suggested, thinking about a lot of things Dean had told him over the years. Thinking about how stubbornly convinced he was, that when all was said and done, Cas would head back to Heaven and think of him no more. “Maybe it’s got nothing to do with being down here, really, and you’re just noticing it because there’s nothing else to think about.”

“What, missing stuff?”

“Yeah,” Adam answered, unwilling to elaborate. Dean’s brow furrowed.

“Maybe,” Dean agreed, leaning one hip against the counter, like standing had become tiresome, but the prospect of sitting down was herculean by comparision.

Adam went back to flipping his beer bottle, and Dean went back to watching.

+++

“I think I expected Heaven to be better,” Adam admitted, taking a long sip of his beer. Dean hummed in agreement, but waited for Adam to continue. “Like, it was just…just stuff I’d done already. Just stuff I had enjoyed, but nothing…nothing big, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” Dean sighed. “You know I know,” he added, and Adam nodded. They’d discussed his and Sam’s trip to Heaven on a few occasions. He took a sip of his own beer, as if gathering his thoughts. “I kinda thought I’d have more say in it? Or that it would be…that it would be perfect?”

“Me too,” Adam confessed. “I think while I was there, it was alright, but out here…I don’t know how I could have stayed. I don’t know what I’ll do, whenever I actually die again.”

“Me either,” Dean agreed, laying his head back on the top of the couch cushion, staring up at the uninspiring blank slate of the ceiling. “And I’m kinda scared that when I do…there’ll be stuff I actually wanna relive, but they won’t want me to.”

“Yeah?”

“Like, memories of certain…certain people, or moments in my life, that Heaven doesn’t approve of.”

“Oh,” Adam thought about their time together down here, how it was a slap in the face to angels specifically. He thought about Castiel, how everything he and Dean shared was ulterior to Heaven at best, and unsanctioned at worst. “If you could have like, one good memory, guaranteed. What would you pick?”

Dean sat up straight again and laughed, nervous at the prospect of answering the question. He took a swig of his beer, preparing himself to speak.

“I guess…there was this one time, in Maine. Well, Pennsylvania first. Sam and I were…we weren’t hanging out, for a while. And Cas had been off doing – whatever, he was off doing Cas stuff. And he just popped in out of the clear blue sky and asked me to help him with this crazy fuckin’ suicide mission.”

Adam nodded, indicating his continued interest, and Dean took a deep breath.

“I went with him because – I mean, guy’s got nobody in his corner but me, by then. We drive up to Maine, so he can rattle Raphael’s chain – “

“Raphael, like – like the archangel?”

“Yeah,” Dean snorted a laugh, “like the archangel.”

“Shit,” Adam cursed under his breath. Dean shrugged, amused smile playing at his lips.

“That’s Cas, for you. Real firecracker. So, we get up there, and we’re waiting to pull the trigger on Cas’s big plan, you know? And he says he’s probably gonna die, even if we do it all exactly right, and I just…I kinda can’t wrap my head around it. I mean, I just got this guy on my side of things. And he’d died, not that long ago, and got brought back from the frickin’ dead. Losing him all over again…I needed a distraction, and I think he did, too.”

“Gotta admit, this sounds like a bleak fuckin’ memory so far,” Adam teased, and Dean blushed.

“I’m givin’ you context, dude. I haven’t got to the memory part yet.”

“Right, yeah, okay,” Adam replied, rolling his eyes, “you were saying?”

“Anyway, I ask the guy what he wants to do – last night on Earth and all that. And he says he’s just gonna sit around and think. Unbelievable. So I suggest some shit – drinkin’, maybe gettin’ some action, and he goes all nervous, like, immediately.”

“About drinking?”

“No, about like, sex.”

“Oh,” Adam mumbled, and briefly worried he was about to hear about the time Dean and Cas had somehow overcome their enormous communication barrier to have one melancholy fuck.

“I know, right? So, circle gets the square, guy hasn’t ever had sex, like, ever. And I think, hey, this is something we can solve, this is at least something I can do for him.”

“Right,” Adam agreed, trying not to let his shock show on his face. More than anything, he did not want to hear about Dean ‘solving’ Castiel’s virginity.

“I’ve been around the block before, so I take him to this place, kind of a cathouse – and look, I don’t, I mean, you know I don’t pay for stuff because of all the, when I was – “

“I know,” Adam assured him, frankly relieved that he wasn’t about to hear about Dean’s sex life.

“Yeah, so, anyhow. I know how to get in the door, though, and we get settled, get drinkin’, chick comes over, things move right along, Cas goes back with her after I give him sorta the low down on what to do and what to skip, and he ain’t been back there more than five minutes when I hear this fuckin’ scream,” Dean paused, grinning.

“Okay, and?”

“Well, I mean, I go back there – and I don’t even know for sure if it’s Cas that’s the issue, but it’s just kinda hard-wired at this point, like, hear a chick scream, go see what’s going down. I get back there and sure enough, it’s Cas. But not like you think – chick is fine, just pissed off. Turns out – get this – Cas is makin’ out with her, and he, I dunno, like, senses that she’s sad, and figures out she’s thinkin’ about her dad leaving her when she was a kid, so he just, angel mojo magically knows that he left ‘cause he hated his job, not ‘cause of his family or whatever. And he tells her that, like a total creep stalker. She’s flingin’ her shoes at him and stormin’ off, I drag Cas outta there, laughing my ass off, and he’s just grinning at me like he has no fuckin’ clue what set her off. But I never saw him happy like that before and I just…I wanted to let him hang on to that for a while.”

“Okay…?” Adam had ceased trying to predict what was going to come out of Dean’s mouth, because it was apparent that it would be nothing he could ever anticipate. He finished his beer in one gulp and hopped up to claim the final one for himself. He figured he earned it, listening to this rollercoaster of a best memory.

“I think, getting him laid is probably a bust – by then it’s like, one in the morning, not much to do in Waterville after midnight. But I’m standing in that alley behind the cathouse and the air is cool, but not cold, and I look up, and there ain’t a damn cloud in the sky. And it just hits me.” Dean snapped his fingers, emphasizing the impact of his realization.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Dean said through a wistful smile, like he was already back in that moment, back in that alley with Cas. “I get back in the car, and I drive us out to a big field, get our old blanket outta the trunk. And I got us all settled in for some grade-A stargazing.”

“Oh,” Adam breathed, and it made sense, despite the lead up. Somehow, though, Dean describing stargazing with his friend on what he believed to be the eve of his death turned out to be leagues more intimate than hearing about them fucking would have been, though Adam couldn’t really say that to Dean.

“I know I must've bored the guy to tears, tellin’ him everything I could remember about constellations and stuff that I’d picked up over the years, but he seemed like he was having a good time, so we just…lay there, and looked up, and talked. And I realized that, aside from Sam, I hadn’t ever really cared so much about one person. The idea of him dying…I was gonna miss him so much.”

“Of course,” Adam agreed, baffled as to why Dean would want to relive this memory, right now, or ever, but certainly in Heaven, on a cruel loop. Dean scrubbed a hand over his cheek, and Adam wondered if he was tearing up.

“But he said he wished we could just…just lay there and look at the stars together forever. And I gave him shit for it at the time, because who says shit like that? But I think it’d be nice. If that’s…if that’s what Heaven ended up being. If I just got to be in that moment as long as I wanted.”

Adam was silent for a few seconds after Dean finished explaining the memory, and Dean didn’t seem bothered by the pause. He was still trying to come up with an adequate response to what was effectively a profession of love when Dean spoke again.

“So, what would you pick?”

“For my memory, like, for Heaven?” Adam asked, barely remembering the question through the tumult of his own thoughts on Dean’s story.

“Yeah, what would you wanna know was in the line-up?”

He bit his tongue to stop himself from listing a few things that’d happened since they came down here, memories of himself and Dean, enjoying the simple comfort of having a brother to rely on.

“There was this one time, my mom and I were out in Michigan, on a vacation. And I was gonna be heading to summer camp for a few weeks afterwards, so I was really trying to make the days count, because I knew I wouldn’t see her again for awhile.”

Dean nodded encouragingly, like he understood the feeling exactly. Probably he did.

“And she woke up one morning while we were there and just got obsessed with the idea of biking out to this one weird little beach, like four miles away from our motel. So we packed up a buncha water and sunscreen and granola bars, and on our way through town we bought sandwiches for later, and we biked out to the beach. The whole time I’m riding behind her, I keep thinking like, there’s never been a sunnier day, there’s never been a bluer sky. And we’re biking past fields, and the forest, and there’s horses out on somebody’s lawn flicking their tails, and there’s birds on the electric lines talking back and forth. I’m like, I dunno, ten maybe? And I just think like, it can’t ever get better than this.”

Dean didn’t say anything, but Adam had his full attention. He’d shifted in his seat, so he could look at him head on as he spoke.

“And we make it to the lake – Lake Michigan, ‘cause we biked west – and get all settled, eat some granola bars, stick our tired feet in the water…it’s the clearest water I’ve ever seen, up there. And all day, we had the beach all to ourselves, just us and the birds and the fish, and the sun on the water. You know how sometimes when you’re a kid, you think to yourself like, I’m never going to forget this moment, I am going to remember this, no matter what, like, I’m burning this into my brain?”

“Yeah,” Dean replied, voice a little hoarse.

“Well, that’s what I did. I had just finished my sandwich, and I was washing the salt from my chips off of my hands in the water, and I was looking down at my hands and I just thought, like, this is the best day. Not for any real reason, but just because like, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. There’s nowhere else I'd rather be, and nobody I’d rather be with. And when I got to Heaven…”

“It wasn’t in the rotation,” Dean surmised, eyes suspiciously wet.

“Yeah.” Adam looked down at his hands, which were much bigger than those in his memory, that day at the lake, but were still somehow the same hands. “But it should’ve been.”

“Yeah,” Dean agreed, his own hand breaking into Adam’s field of vision, clamping warm and sure around Adam’s hand where it rested on his thigh, “it really should’ve.”

+++

“You sure?” Dean asked, poised as he was to begin, always taking another second to be certain. It was something Adam was sure that John had tried to beat out of him, but something he was privately glad Dean had retained. Dean was always going to be this kind of person, whose hands hesitate at exactly the right time.

“Yes,” Adam confirmed, shifting in his seat on the couch. They rarely sat this close, and it was strange to have Dean’s hand on him like this, where it had a purpose beyond mere connection.

They’d prepped the area well, shaved what little leg hair was in the way, outline shining through the thin layer of Aquaphor.

“You don’t gotta get one, just ‘cause I have one,” Dean reminded him for maybe the twentieth time since Adam had brought it up a few days ago. He wasn’t even frustrated with the repeated offers of an out. It was nice, really, that Dean gave that much of a shit about it.

“Aw, you’re just worried yours won’t look as cool, if I’ve got one,” Adam teased, and Dean huffed a laugh, letting some of his own anxiety out on that puff of air.

“Nah, you know that ain’t it,” Dean mumbled, fingers flexing around the needle in his gloved grip.

“Yeah,” Adam agreed fondly, “I know.”

Dean didn’t warn him when he pushed the needle into his skin the first time, and the honesty of the pain wasn’t so much a surprise as it was an absoluteness, a truth that had been muffled by so much time spent in stasis. He wondered how many punctures it would take, to complete the outline of the bottle cap Dean had traced there, twin to his own tattoo, the one Adam gave him sixty years ago to the day.

They didn’t talk, while Dean worked, his face so close to Adam’s leg that he wondered how the back of the needle wasn’t poking him in the cheek on every recoil. From Adam’s vantage point, he couldn’t see the tattoo coming into being, or Dean’s hands moving methodically over his skin. He could see the back of Dean’s head, the spot on his scalp where his hair spiraled out from, and the tight tension of his shoulders and back as he worked, hunched forward as he was.

The only reprieve from the needle’s relentless sting was the rhythmic predictable pause of Dean adding more ink to the needle, just often enough that Adam didn’t need to ask for a real break, but infrequently enough that he almost forgot it was coming until it would happen again.

By the time the tattoo was finished, he’d reached a meditative sort of blankness, everything around him blurred and soft at the edges, himself and Dean the only sharp points of certainty. Dean pulled away, the vertebra of his neck and upper back clicking in loud complaint as he sat back, having not moved in over an hour.

“What do you think?” Dean asked, voice sure, eyes nervous. Adam looked down at the shape, now permanently etched into his thigh, and smiled.

“I love it,” Adam replied, after he’d thoroughly examined it, tugging on the sore skin around the puffy pink area of the wound. Dean breathed an unadorned sigh of relief.

“Yeah?”

Adam had been alive for a very long time, had been down here for most of it. Might be down in this little corner of Hell for the rest of his life. There was no reason to be happy, in that moment. There was no cause for hope to stir in his chest, feather soft and kestrel strong. But he’d decided to feel those things anyway, and he couldn’t help the sunrise swell of them, rising in his heart, dawn-bright and unbreakable.

“Yeah,” Adam assured him. “Yeah, I do.”

Chapter Text

JANUARY 11-14, 2011  //  YEAR 96 IN HELL

They hadn’t even had breakfast yet.

Adam was drinking coffee. Dean was drawing, pencil scraping over paper, predictable and slow. He was in the middle of wondering if he’d ever drawn the exact same image twice, over the years. If that was possible, or conversely, if it was possible he hadn’t. If he could contain an infinite supply of potential art, or if there was a limited number of things he’d be able to create in his life.

He heard the door latch, turned his face towards it like a dozing dog stirring at the sound of footsteps on the porch.

Crowley stood at the entrance of the room, expression dark and unreadable. Adam had yet to notice him, his back to the door where he was sitting. Something on Dean’s face must have alerted him to the presence of their visitor, and he twisted in his chair to look behind himself.

“Crowley?” Adam asked, sort of accusingly, “Where the hell have you been?”

“Busy,” he replied, terse in a distinctly sincere way. It put Dean’s teeth on edge, that Crowley didn’t even bother with his usual flair, humorless and blank.

“What are you here for now?” Dean asked, eyes glued to the demon, heart hammering in his chest. “Just checking in?”

“No,” Crowley admitted, taking two steps closer before pausing, shoving his hands into his suit pockets and staring hard at Dean. It felt like he was looking past him, or looking at him as a body, rather than as a person. Like he was seeing Dean’s face, but not Dean himself. “Congratulations, boys. Good things come to those who wait, or something like that.” He delivered the line dully, eyes flat.

“Are you serious?” Adam blurted, jumping up from his chair, mug slipping out of his hand, not spilling by some miracle, coffee just sloshing up one side, splattering onto the table like a volcano’s opening salvo. A few drops caught on Dean’s drawing paper, soaking in and spreading, brown and blotchy. He took a few steps toward Crowley, squaring up with him, like he wanted to make sure this wasn’t some kind of a joke. Dean watched from his seat at the table, numb with shock.

“As a heart attack,” Crowley drawled, crossing his arms over his chest. “Do you boys need time to pack? Say goodbye to the old place? Or are you ready to rejoin society?”

Dean momentarily considered taking him up on the sarcastic offer of time to say goodbye. He had spent more of his life here than anywhere else, and he knew without a doubt that he’d never be back. He wasn’t sure he was ready to just leave it all in the dust, no matter how eager he was to see Bobby and Sam again, to see Cas again. But it wasn’t a serious offer, and it would be a waste of time. He stood up from the table slowly, picking up his half-finished drawing on a whim and folding it up hastily, shoving it into his back pocket.

“We’re ready,” Dean confirmed, knees shaking. He was afraid, but not of Crowley. There wasn’t an easy way to describe what was scaring him, and he didn’t have time to sit and think through it. He just had to push through the feeling.

“Yeah,” Adam agreed, glancing back at him with a questioning look, like he could tell Dean was nervous – probably he could. They’d lived together a very long time. Maybe a hundred years. Dean didn’t know. “We’re ready,” he echoed, turning back to face Crowley again.

“I suppose we should be off then,” Crowley replied on the edge of a sigh, looking around the room like one might look at their childhood bedroom. Not for the first time, Dean wondered what this place was to Crowley, how he’d come to possess it, what it was for when it wasn’t a storage unit for two valuable human refugees. “Come on,” he urged them to approach.

“How are we…” Adam started, and Dean knew what his question would be, even if he wasn’t going to finish it.

“…Leaving?” Crowley surmised, and Adam nodded. “I’m the mule, you’re the coke,” Crowley replied, voice tinged with the barest trace of amusement. Dean got the impression that he was in a bad mood. That he’d be making more of a meal of this if he was his usual self. It put him even further on edge.

“Gross,” Adam hissed.

“Don’t be such a prude,” Crowley snarked, “you came here that way, too, even if you don’t remember it. Now let’s get moving. It’s a regular war zone out there, and it’s only going to get worse the longer we spend catching up.”

“Yeah, alright,” Dean agreed. “Let’s go.”

Satisfied, Crowley uncrossed his arms and approached Adam, tapping him on the shoulder. Adam would’ve dropped unconscious to the floor if Crowley hadn’t hooked a surprisingly strong arm behind him and lowered him slowly. Dean knew Adam was fine, could see him breathing, but he felt a burst of genuine fear behind his sternum, and he took a reflexive step back.

Crowley raised an unimpressed eyebrow at him, then stepped towards him.

“Relax, Squirrel,” he assured him. “It’s going to be a turbulent flight. You’ll want the dramamine.”

“You sure he’s – “ Dean started, throat clicking, cutting off the sentence. His gaze flicked back down to his brother, then up to Crowley. To his surprise, something like genuine empathy warmed the demon’s gaze before he recomposed himself.

“He’s stellar. Best sleep of his life. Gonna wake up feeling like a million bucks,” Crowley deadpanned, and that return to form was strangely comforting. Crowley was most legible to him like this – sort of an asshole, but in an impersonal sort of way.

“Alright, yeah,” Dean huffed, shaking out his nerves a little. The sink dripped. Crowley reached out and tapped his shoulder, and everything went dark.

When he opened his eyes next, he was laying on the couch in Bobby’s study, the sun just beginning to peek through the window. Beside him, Adam was still asleep, still breathing deep and slow.

His first instinct might have been to celebrate, once, but there were too many questions. He peeled himself up off the couch and followed the sound of something slamming around in the kitchen. Crowley stood there, his back to the doorway, thinking himself alone.

Dean asked the first of many questions, throat scratching, thirsty in a way he had forgotten was possible.

“So, it’s really over?”