"Where are you going?"

Sam looked back at Dean and zipped up his jacket. Shrugging his shoulders, he curtly replied, "Out."

"Out?" Dean asked. Instead of responding, Sam turned without a word, clearly intent on minimizing verbal contact. "Hey," Dean called, getting up from the bed and taking a few steps towards his brother, "if you're going for another secret rendezvous with your hell bitch-"

"It wouldn't be any of your business!" Sam snapped, yanking the door open. He gave Dean a glance and took a deep breath. The past few weeks had been tense. Dean had just returned from the dead, pulled out of Hell by an actual angel, and Sam was becoming all-too aware that his constant company was a less-than-Heavenly being. He knew in his gut that this wouldn't end well, especially if the angels were as all-knowing as he believed them to be. And with Dean's unwillingness to see Ruby's good side-

"Can I borrow your laptop?" For a while, Sam didn't answer. He had been expecting another lecture about how stupid and reckless he was being, about how things needed to go back to the way they were before they started hanging out with non-hunters. So the use of his laptop? Not exactly one of the prevalent thoughts on his mind.

Waving his hand in front of him as though checking to see that Sam was still conscious, Dean asked, "You all right there, Sammy, or did you decide to go Helen Keller on me?"

Ordinarily, Sam would have made a comment about the political incorrectness of that statement, but now wasn't the time. He was so used to getting blamed and scolded that he was certain Dean's request to borrow his laptop was just another attempt to hack into his privacy. At length, Sam did his best to keep himself from sounding accusatory as he asked, "Why would you want to borrow my laptop?"

"I'm hurt and offended," Dean said lightly, shoving his hands into his pockets. "Before I took that epic trip down south, you would've known darn well what I'd want a computer for." Seeing that Sam wasn't following him, Dean explained. "Porn. Duh."

Disgusted, Sam remarked, "Dean, I thought you were doing that whole 'warrior for God' thing!"

"You ever read the Bible, Sammy?" Dean queried, though he clearly wasn't being serious. "Noah had a bunch of kids, and Jesus himself was the great-great-great-great whatever of some famous king. Know how all that happened? Sex. People had sex back in biblical times. Nothing wrong with it, totally natural, and if they had camcorders back then-"

"Okay, you know, that's a big heaping pile of blasphemy, even for you," Sam groaned as he closed the door of the motel room. Moving towards his laptop bag on the small dinette table, he withdrew his computer as he pleaded, "Just promise me that you won't click on anything that'll make it crash, okay? It'll take months to go back and relocate all of my favorites and everything."

"Don't worry, Sammy," Dean told him, going for the duffel bag he had stowed under his bed. "It's a DVD. All legit, legal, and virus-free."

"When did you find the time to hit up an adult video store?"

After a brief pause, Dean grinned up at Sam and replied, "There's always time for simple pleasures, Sammy."

Sam desperately tried not to think about what kinds of pleasures Dean's DVD would provide, and so he turned on his laptop and merely shook his head as he headed for the door. He stopped when he heard Dean call his name.

Seeing that he had Sam's attention, Dean sat down at the table with a disc in his hand. Despite his earlier levity, he was now completely serious. "If you see Little Miss Skank, tell her that if she messes you up just a little bit more, I'll send Castiel on her ass so fast that the trip back to Hell will give her whiplash."

Though Sam had a number of choice things he wanted to say, he decided to bite his tongue for the moment and left Dean alone in the room.

Unfortunately, Sam's plans for the night ended up falling through.

He had been intending on working with Ruby, but she never showed. Either she forgot, or something important was keeping her from making good on her promises. Sam didn't want to think about what could be more important than helping him stop Lilith.

After over an hour of waiting, Sam tried to ignore the knot in his stomach and headed back to the motel. Maybe Ruby would show up out of nowhere with a snide remark, as she had so often done in the past. But no, that was a different Ruby. The Ruby he had come to know during Dean's stay in Hell was a bit more upfront and to the point. They were on the brink of war, and Ruby knew better than to toy with him too badly when they had so much work to do.

As Sam approached the room he shared with Dean, he noticed that Dean hadn't closed the blinds all the way. Remembering about his brother's preferred form of "entertainment," Sam stopped and tried not to think about the hurry Dean must have been in if he hadn't even bothered to completely close the blinds. As much as he didn't want to, Sam thought it was best to peak into the room to be sure that he wouldn't walk in on something thoroughly inappropriate.

What he saw chilled him more than catching Dean midway through a solo act. His brother was sitting at the table, staring into the laptop's screen with an expression of pure, gut-wrenching disappointment. With his mouth hidden behind a clenched fist and angry tears shining in his eyes, Dean's face was everything Sam had one day feared it would be. It was agony and quiet rage, not much different from when his father had discovered that Sam wanted to leave the family business.

Sam wondered if Dean had stumbled across the various links he had found about the effects of demon blood on humans. Most of the information was horribly inaccurate, but there was that one website run by a Satanist in Reno that had been spot-on. Had Dean noticed the similarities between Sam and these unnamed "subjects" in the twisted man's studies? Was Dean now privy to the fact that Sam and Ruby's relationship was actually a means to transfer some of her demonic strength into him? Or had Dean received some sort of angelic intervention, a video of Sam doing things he had sworn he would never do?

Sam's heart pounded in his chest as he thought over the myriad of possibilities. As he watched, he saw that Dean was muttering something under his breath. Leaning his burning forehead against the cool frame of the door, Sam felt as though he were drowning. He knew that he had been in over his head with the whole Ruby thing, but it had never seemed so bad, so long as Dean didn't know how far he had gone. And now that he knew….

One way or the other, it was always going to come down to this. All Sam could do now was hope that Dean would give him a few moments to explain before simply punching him and tying him to a chair to keep him from doing anymore damage to himself. Still, he at least wanted to know how much Dean knew. There was still the chance that some things could be glossed over.

As slowly as he could, Sam turned his key into the lock and silently cracked open the door. He was slightly surprised to hear some kind of music coming from the room, and even more surprised that it wasn't rock. Still, he overlooked this and strained his ears to catch the words Dean was uttering to himself.

"Dammit. Goddammit."

Sam closed his eyes, feeling dizzy from his defeat. As angry as Dean sounded, it wasn't likely that he was going to allow him to tell his side of the story. That only made Sam all the more shocked when he heard what Dean cried out next.

"Dammit, Sharpay, you sneaky little bitch! Leave Troy the hell alone already!"

Confused, Sam forgot about his covert actions and opened the door all the way. Catching sight of Sam, Dean quickly paused the DVD and draped one arm around the laptop as though protecting it from view, his free hand wiping at his face as though the erase the previous emotion. After some time in which the two brothers simply stared at one another, Dean said, "Hey."

Stepping into the room, Sam uncertainly replied, "Hey." Seeing that Dean kept shifting his body to keep the screen from view as Sam moved closer, Sam asked, "Who were you talking to?"

"What?" Dean asked dumbly. "Who was I… nobody. Why?"

Sam reached across the table and dragged the laptop closer to him. Not wanting to get yelled at for accidentally breaking the machine, Dean let him take it as he absently scratched the back of his head. As Sam observed the paused image on the screen, Dean lamely explained, "It's, uh, a commercial for, uh… I mean, you know how Disney basically owns everything, right? So, uh…."

"Is that Zac Efron?"

"No!"

"Are you sure?"

"N-, I mean, yeah! I mean, who's Zac Efron? I dunno anybody named Zac Efron." Desperate to wipe the emerging smirk from Sam's face, Dean heatedly asked, "How do you know who Zac Efron is?!"

"Uh, I used to live with a girl."

"Oh sure, that's your excuse for everything, isn't it?"

"Still a viable excuse, man. Wanna tell me why you of all people are watching High School Musical?"

"… the complex storylines!"

Sam finally couldn't keep back his laughter. On the one hand, it was always nice to find out something unexpected and potentially embarrassing about his brother. And on the other, he could rest easy knowing that, for at least one more night, Dean wouldn't try to disown him. For all of his irritating habits and outright silliness, Dean was still Sam's big brother.

Shrugging good-naturedly, Sam remarked, "Whatever floats your boat. Once Sharpay stops being a bitch, wanna go grab a beer?"

Dean couldn't hide his surprise as he asked, "I thought you had something going on with Skanky McDemonPants."

Clenching his teeth as he continued to smile down at his brother, Sam remarked, "Change of plans. Ruby's MIA for the night, so rather than sit around shooting insults at each other, I thought we could, I don't know… be brothers for a while?"

After a long while during which Dean seemed to search his brother's eyes, he nodded and rose to his feet. "Sounds like a crazy idea, but I'll try anything once."

As Dean went to grab his jacket, Sam pushed the laptop back towards his side of the table. "Finish your movie, first. It's not that bad, if you can stomach extra cheesiness."

"I said I'll try anything once, Sammy," Dean remarked as he put his jacket on. "I've seen it plenty of times on TV. Just a guilty pleasure, even if the last song is awesome." Seeing that Sam had trouble comprehending the idea of him watching that movie even once, Dean grinned and punched Sam lightly in the shoulder as he headed for the door. "C'mon, Taylor. You promised me a beer."

Trying to remember which character was Taylor, Sam turned and followed his brother out the door.