They know they're not ready for the Demon, but it's more than ready for them.

It picks off Andy first, while he and Dean are investigating a haunting in North Dakota.

Sam watches them, watches the way Andy dies screaming, trying to bend the other psychics into letting him go until they cut his tongue out and roast his brain.

It's just cruel, needless violence, because the Generals are all immune to his power anyway, but what makes Sam start vomiting after the vision ebbs away is the fact that Ava's there.

She's smiling her sweet, loopy smile, and when his head clears enough that he can think, he looks at Dean and swears her eyes were locked on him the entire time.

It's the opening gamble.

Sam gets three days grace before the visions start up in earnest, a cycle of death after death after death. He's aware, vaguely, of Dean's white face looming in between the murders, of Dean's hands manhandling him out of puked on clothes and into the Impala, but mostly he just lives in the violence.

Dean spends seven days driving them as far away from everything as he can while Sam's head explodes with vision after vision, the Demon's Chosen gutting and pillaging and burning in every city in the country. They come so quickly he can't even pinpoint a location, just finds the end of one massacre only to be led into the beginning of another.

In his more lucid moments, he realizes that Dean's running more from the other hunters than he is from the Demon. The Demon has proved time and time again that it can track them down damn near anytime it wants to; the hunters, not so much. Everyone's looking for someone to blame, for someone to help, and both their phones are ringing off the hook.

It blends in with the shrill scream of another woman, another man, another child.

The visions don't let up so much as something in Sam's brain finally says enough. He's aware of a feeling like picking at the dead skin after a cast comes off, and between one vision and the next he finds that he can regulate them to the back of his mind with ease.

Dean bitches that it would have been a goddamned good skill to come up with seven fucking days ago, but there's relief softening the harsh edges to his face. Sam doesn't ask how many mysterious deaths have been tallied up in the last week, because he's not really sure that either of them could stand knowing.

Instead, he calls Ash, one of the few people they're still on speaking terms with. He doesn't actually get through, which doesn't surprise him, but the message he gets is tailored to them. Sam listens to it once, while Dean's sleeping in the backseat, then says Dean's name softly and puts it on speaker phone when his brother jerks awake.

"Sam'n'Dean. The activity is all over the freakin' place, man. Just pick a town." There's a long, low pause, the sound of a smoke filled breath shakily exhaled, then, "Jo's dead. Found her strung up outside the Roadhouse doors, so it'd be good to not show up here. Everyone's gettin' pretty itchy."

Dean's mouth thins out as he says, "Meg," and Sam watches the backs of his eyelids for a minute and says, "Petaluma." He opens his eyes and doesn't think about the fact that Ava has to know they're coming even before they do, that he's got ten different ways for Dean to die just waiting behind his eyelids.

They curl up around each other in the backseat when they have to stop. It's uncomfortable; the backseat of the Impala was too small for the both of them when they were still teenagers. They spend a good hour kicking each other each night and bitching about needing more space; Dean has a tendency to shove his cold hands up the back of Sam's shirt, and Sam drools sometimes.

But it also means that Dean doesn't have to reach as far to shake him awake from the inevitable nightmare, and Sam doesn't have to wake up with his brother draped over the back of the seat, snoring on his shoulder, so they make do.

He's right about them waiting.

The instant they cross into the city where the most dying is happening, something hits all three of them, Dean, the Impala, and Sam. Sam goes down nearly crying as his head explodes with pain, as the visions double and triple to the point where even not really seeing them anymore can't stop the agony; Dean's trying to reach for him as the Impala suddenly skitters out of control and then there's blackness for a few blessed seconds.

When they come to, they're being lifted out of the trashed car by a woman with Meg's slow smile.

"Dean-o, Sammy-boy. It's just swell to meet you two again. Would you like to see Daddy?"

Sam's still reeling a little, but he struggles when she hands him off to a man with a really bad toupee. The man simply tightens his arms and chuffs under his breath, cuffs him lightly on the side of the head and tells him to behave like Sam's an errant puppy.

If he could wrap his mind around the fact that a man, not possessed, because he can fucking well tell now, almost a foot and a half shorter than him is keeping him pinned to his chest, he might be fighting it a little more.

"I'm going to kill your Daddy, sweetheart," Dean mumbles under his breath and Meg laughs as she leans in to lick the blood that's running freely down the side of his face.

"Baby, you couldn't kill him if you tried," she hoist him over her shoulder, slaps his ass and easily holds down his struggles with nothing more than a small hand, "Oh. That's right. You already have. Not very good on following through, are you?

"Does that carry over into bed?"

He hangs upside down from his own vantage point over the shoulder of bad toupee man and listens to Dean and Meg insult each other. It's almost a relief when they get to a slaughterhouse building and the Yellow-Eyed Demon is standing there. Almost.

The relief lasts for all of the ten seconds it takes for toupee man to dump him on the floor and for the both of them to realize that there's a familiar face in the semi-circle of people around the demon.

Ava gives them a bright smile and a thumbs up.

"... oh, that's just all kinds of wrong, Sammy." Sam turns his head to look at Dean, at the way he's still hanging from Meg's shoulder like a sack of potatoes and pulling a face at Ava's enthusiasm. Yeah, he can understand that.

"Eyes up front, boys," Meg says, and then Sam's being shoved against a wall and pinned in a way that brings back memories he doesn't need right now, not with the visions whispering that Dean could die this way or that way or he could go with a gun in his hand after he takes out a Sam that smiles almost as widely as Ava while he rips a small boy to shreds.

The Demon's gliding to him a second later, negligently telling Meg that she's welcome to play with Dean over Dean's protest of hell no, she's a disease ridden cunt.

Sam buttons down tight the minute he realizes that some of the visions insistently clattering for his attention have his eyes flashing yellow at Dean. He wants to worry about Dean, about what a demon carrying one hell of a revenge torch can do to a body, but Dean will never, ever forgive him if he gets possessed because of him.

"You're going to be my new host, kiddo," the Demon says, leans in to, swear to God, sniff his hair, "All that power trapped up in your head..." He nuzzles his cheek and Sam can't help the surprised skip of his eyes over to Dean's.

Dean's got both eyebrows raised, paying more attention to him than the way Meg's crooning in his ear. "What is it about you that has all the demons clamoring for a piece of your ass?"

Meg takes that as an invitation to actually start hurting him and Sam snaps his eyes back to the demon he has to deal with before it can make him feel helpless and small.

"Sammy, Sammy, Sammy," the demon hisses, soft and low, and if he could fucking move enough to hit it he would. No one was allowed to call him that but Dean, already choking and sputtering in the grip of Meg's newest meat puppet. "It doesn't have to be like this, you know. Just open up a little bit," and here the Demon waits as Dean makes a little choking noise that causes Sam's entire body flinch, "And Dean-o will be just fine.

"I would hate to undo Daddy's touching sacrifice. Wouldn't you?"

It's trying to get a response out of him, trying to make his heartbeat spike so that it can pry its way in, so Sam, perversely, clamps down even tighter on everything but the anger. "You're looking a little tense," he lifts his lip in a snarl, tries to smile like Dean does, "Why don't you go relax with Meg?"

There's an almost shocked silence, the random milling of the Demon's generals and the whispering taunts from Meg grinding to a halt with gratifying quickness.

Dean wheezes out a quiet, "Dude, demonic incest? Really?" before Meg's got him bleeding out all over the place again and there's suddenly a huge stream of movement that Sam's mind can't comprehend altogether.

He sees Ava go down out of the corner of his eye, clutching her head and almost screaming, and the Demon flicking a hand at Meg in a move that would have made Dean snort and giggle to himself if he wasn't so busy trying not to die, and then he sees Meg shrug.

Ava's yelling, "DON'T--!" when Dean goes flying. Sam barely hears her.

Sam's reaching for Dean even though he knows he's not going to make it; he's cursing loudly, fighting the power that's got him pinned to the wall, and in the back of his mind he's wailing something childish and pleading, no Dean no no no n--

Dean's looking at him, the instant before his head breaks open on the cement. Dean's looking at him and his eyes say sorry and whoops and Sammy and Sam's forever going to equate his powers to the sound of his brother's skull splitting open.

It whips out of him like it did back at the Miller's, all this energy desperately trying to do what he wants, the little kid in him babbling that Dean can't die if his brains aren't actually leaking out the back of his skull and it's like he's holding both hands to Dean's head, only he can't really feel the way the grey matter tries to slip slide through his phantom fingers.

That's when the Demon leaks in, shoves its way through the cracks Sam's feeling as Dean's brains are literally slipping through his psychic fingers.

He's got a moment of being shoved into a neat little box in his head, of a cage closing as the Demon whispers menace and smug sureness, and then he fucking snaps. He's not even sure what the hell's going on in him, but something picks up the memory of Scott Carey's trembling voice saying that he fried the neighbor's cat, turns it over and stares at if from a different angle, and then it clicks and he's using it.

The Demon's recoiling and shrieking inside him, trying to open his mouth and flee, but Sam just clamps down tight, the way he'd been told would help stave off demonic possession. He's roasting the fucker from inside him, and okay, every inch of him feels like it's on fire and it hurts like every loving fuck, but he's past caring.

Meg's interference doesn't even really register with him; the moment he feels the demonic presence swell, he's got everyone pinned down to the floor, easy as breathing.

He hears Ava babbling, distantly, while he's still hunting down the last traces of the Demon in him, "You shouldn't have killed him, oh God, you shouldn't have done that, I tried to stop you! He's going to burn us all, we're going to explode oh God, oh God."

That's a pretty good idea, he decides. When the demon inside him stops trying to get out, he turns on the others, bares his teeth, and watches the way Ava's face melts off in the fire that comes. Sam absently prevents Meg from slipping her leash, from pulling out of the body of some poor woman who'd been brain dead for weeks now, and just lets them all burn.

The smell of burning flesh is pretty rank in an enclosed space, but Sam just drops to his knees next to Dean and stares.

Dean's face is looks pretty normal, a little beat up, a little bloody, but normal. The back of his head is still being held together by the stubborn part of Sam that refuses to let any part of his brother end up smeared in with the ashes of half a dozen other people. Sam trails his fingers across Dean's forehead, apologizes softly to the air because he's got no salt and he's not stupid enough to think that Dean would ever rest without him.

It takes him far longer than it should to realize there's a cloud of black smoke hovering just to the left of him.

"If you don't leave right now, I'm going to kill you," he tells it listlessly. "In fact, I just might do it anyway."

The smoke wafts for a minute, pulls up into itself and spreads out again, and then it speaks. "We are prepared to offer you a deal." Sam can't tell if that's actually out loud or if the black smoke he's melted into his flesh is responding to what the demon's thinking.

"I'm going to kill you all." He closes Dean's eyes, leaves his hand there so that he won't have to see when they open again. "What makes you think there's anything you could give me?"

"We are prepared to offer you a deal," it says again, like he hadn't even spoken, "It is outside our regular realm of actions, but we wish very much to not fight a war for the dead.

"You're nemesis is dead, Sam. Why kill more when you don't need to?"

He's starting to get a headache, a mother fucker of a thing behind his eyes that goes great with the general feeling of third degree burns under his skin, and Dean's skin is already too cold. "I'm still not seeing a reason not to."

"You are aware of the deal your father made for your brother? We are willing to offer the same deal to you."

Sam's shaking his head before he even thinks about it, tracing the fingers of his free hand across the amulet on Dean's chest. "It would kill him."

There's mostly silence, broken only by the grating almost noise of the black cloud shifting around itself, the sound his body's making as it tries to absorb the remains of the demon that's plagued him all his life. Sam just strokes Dean's hair with the hand he's got over his eyes and wonders if black smoke burns as well as bodies do.

"We want only a token sacrifice, Sam. Say, your powers, in exchange for your brother, father, and mother. That seems like a fair deal, doesn't it?"

Mom? Sam looks up from Dean, realizes he's crying when he only sees a blur of dark, and furiously wipes his face on the tattered sleeve of his jacket. Mom and Dad? How the hell was that even possible?

He wants to take it, no questions asked. He really does. But demons aren't known to play fair and no matter how much he wants to curl up into a ball next to Dean and just lie there until he dies, his brother would kill him if he did something stupid.

"If I don't have psychic powers, what's to keep you from going after them all anyway?" he wants to know.

"Ah. How about this then? We make a little deal. One that benefits everyone involved. You get to keep your powers. We bring your family back. You don't kill any more demons, and we don't touch your family," the smoke twists into itself, expands exponentially until Sam realizes that there's actually more than one demon whirling around in front of him.

"Of course, we can't speak for all of the demons, so you'll have to be extra careful, make sure not to piss anyone off, won't you?" there's multiple coughing sounds that might be a laughs, then a different speaker hisses out, "Winchesters. They piss everything off."

Sam feels his brain half-heartedly track the speaker in the mass of seething demons and try to set it on fire. He doesn't try to stop it. The demons stir a little, one separating off from the rest to curl around his back in apparent chiding, and Sam tells himself to focus, think, stop just feeling.

He's still got his palm over Dean's eyes and he's still holding his head in.

"The Yellow-Eyed Demon?" he finally manages to ask.

There's another coughing sound and Sam doesn't even have the energy to flinch away when a tendril of that black smoke curls towards his face. It recoils a moment later anyway, and then there's more coughing laughter and another voice says, "Oh, he's dead. Congratulations, you're now the proud owner of a body soaked in demon. How does it feel?"

Great. He hates the supernatural things that think they have a sense of humor. "You aren't going to try to bring him back?"

"We're doing this for us," that's a forth voice, four demons, and from the size of the cloud Sam kind of wonders what the fuck they're so scared of. He's wiped, ready to fall over, and feeling more energy drain out by the minute as he holds Dean's broken body together like it still matters. "Why the fuck would we bring back the idiot who got us in this mess in the first place?

"'Oh, we can conquer the humans, have so many suffering meat puppets at our hands. It'll be fun! Let's just toy with a couple hundred of the humans that could probably kill us if they ever got their shit together enough to figure it out… oops.' Good riddance.

"So, we got a deal?"

Sam wants to tell them to fuck themselves. He really does. But Dean's dead and Dad's dead and Mom's dead and Jess is dead and if there's any way to fix that, he's going to take it. "I don't kill any more demons. You don't touch my family," Sam drops his head, hunches his shoulders as he imagines just how furious with him Dean or Dad would be, and then says, "Deal."

"Good."

A scuffling sound at the door makes him whip his head up to stare, makes his powers go haywire as they simultaneously try to shove the approaching figure into the nearest wall and electrocute it. He's tired though, and now that he's had time to go numb he can't quite get it to work anymore, and he ends up pushing the woman back a few inches as her hair smokes warningly.

She's got demon-black eyes and a pretty, sculpted face, and Sam's positive that even if she wasn't being controlled by a demon like a handy meat puppet that she would be tripping warning bells in the back of his head. She tosses her hair over her shoulder, clucks disapprovingly at the smoke still rising from it, and a moment later it smothers out like it was never there.

"That wasn't nice," she says. "My host is most displeased." She pauses for a second, surveys the greasy remains of half a dozen people and then turns impressed eyes onto Sam. "She does, however, greatly appreciate this display of pyrokinesis. She feels that there should be more burnings in this time period.

"Catch, Sammy," she says suddenly, and yeah, his reflexes aren't really working all that great right about now either, because he can't figure out if he wants to remove the hand that's making sure he doesn't have to deal with Dean's staring eyes (green and dead and no more Dean in them at all and if he thinks about he's going to start screaming and never stop) or the one clutching Dean's charm.

The thing that lands on the floor just to the left of his drawn up legs is pretty much a pile of bones held together by strips of what looks like leather. He's never been good with bones, but he's pretty sure those are human finger bones and a bird furcula, and he starts to get a weird feeling shivering up his spine when his gaze whips back up to take in the demon-possessed woman.

There's a general coughing sound again from his peanut gallery of demons and then the one still behind him is reaching out tendrils of smoke to pick the ugly thing up and drop it onto the back of the hand curved over Dean's cheeks.

He lets his hand turn over and curl around the pile of bones, keeps the back of his fist pressed over Dean's eyes and tries not to feel the way Dean's eyes have opened again. It tingles in his palm, like there's an electrical charge getting ready to release and then it warms almost to the point of burning.

The instant his hand closes over the bones, the demon wrenches free from the not-woman, and she's squatting next to him with a wave of exotic smelling perfume. "That's a dirty trick," she says as she tilts her head up to look at the amassed demons, "You're lucky I'm nice."

More demon laughter, shifting in the black cloud, before she locks eyes with him and he feels like he's just dipped his hand into fire. "You've got a wish coming your way."

"You're a jinn," he says to her, to the gathered demons who have all fallen mostly silent, "You're a jinn and you're working with... demons?"

"Jinniyah, boy." She surveys him with a squinted look and smiles. "A female jinn is called a jinniyah. What are they teaching you kids these days?" She tosses her head, makes her hair fall across her chest in a way that highlights the glittering patterns on her dress, and waves a hand up at the cloud of demons.

"I owed one of them a favor," she wrinkles up her forehead, shrugs, and mutters darkly that she can't tell them apart and isn't quite sure which one she owed the favor to, "A while back someone vacated one of my pretty harem boys when I asked nicely enough. It'll be good to balance the books again."

The demons swirl some more. Sam's almost finding it hypnotic and he has to shake himself and concentrate on the pain beating against his temples and the pinched feeling he's getting from holding onto three things when he's only got two real hands. "Why do you want to make a deal if you can possess a jinniyah?"

"Demons can't make wishes, Sammy; that's why we trick humans into doing it for us." It's the second voice again, and a lick of dark smoke towards the jinniyah, which she just nonchalantly waves her hand through like it's nothing.

Somewhere in the back of his head, along with all the pounding and the little kid gibbering wildly for Dean to wake up, is Bobby's voice telling him to be damn glad that anything purely evil, demonic, or dead can't make wishes, or else the world would be a fucking hell pit to live in.

The jinniyah laughs like a crackling fire, drags her hand through the ash that's settled all over the floor and licks it clean with a purr. "Nice burning here, Sam," she declares, "I approve. I miss all the burnings that used to go on in this country."

Sam's stuck on the fact that she's licking people and demon off of her dainty little hand. He feels his stomach rise and is vaguely surprised to find that it's the first time all day, despite Dean being cold and dead next to him.

She notices him watching, because she guiltily puts her hand flat against her knee and smiles at him again.

"Close your eyes, kid, and make a wish. No strings attached, from my end at least," she's touching Dean as she says it, murmuring under her breath about a waste of a perfectly lovely man and how much she'd love to take him back with her if only he were still alive. She's lucky that Sam doesn't have his knife because he'd have chopped her hand off for it.

As it is, he's too tired.

Her hand feels like his bones do, like it's sizzling on the inside, just about ready to burst into open flames. Sam thinks about batting it away, but leaves it there. If she's touching him, than she's not touching Dean. "You've got my talisman," she says, nodding to his fist, "Any ridiculous old thing you want is yours.

"Make it a good one."

The demons are seething again, coiling around each other as they wait to see what he'll do.

So he closes his eyes, grips Dean's amulet hard enough that it's cutting into his palm, and he makes a wish.

I want Mom to be alive. I want Dad to be alive. I want Dean to be alive. I want them to have a home and be safe and I want to remember all of this so I'll be able to protect them if something comes after them. I don't want Mom to die and I don't want Dad to ever have to teach Dean how to be a soldier and...

And I don't want to be there with them, because supernatural shit is drawn to me.

"That'll do, Sammy," the jinniyah says softly and there's a touch like a whisper against his forehead and the world stops and rearranges itself just for him.

The jinniyah is one of her kind, all tricky phrases and fire born impulsiveness, so when the ghost touches the little bit of bone and hide that passes for her talisman right as she makes the world fall away in favor of one twenty five years ago, she grins in delight and gives him a gift.

She hopes he's happy with it.

John's dreaming about his sons. He's dreaming about a man with yellow eyes and the way his boy's head sounds when it opens to spill grey matter that doesn't go anywhere; he's dreaming about the way his baby looks numb and uncaring while he sets three people on fire. He's dreaming about Dean, all grown up and all torn down, being dead and someone he knows in his dream bones is his other boy, his stubborn "why?" son, wishing he was.

He's dreaming about hell, about burning and burning because he had to have his vengeance, about knowing that nothing the demonic sons of a bitches down there could do to him would be worse than what he's done to his two boys.

John's dreaming about blood and fire, suffering and sacrifice and family, and he wakes up to the sound of screaming.

It's not the kind of baby screams he's come to expect from having a small child. It sounds like somebody's dying in the room next to his, like they've just lost an arm or a leg and are screeching out their death throes in some foreign country filled with sun and rain.

He almost gets violently sick all over the bed, because it sounds a lot like what he was just listening to in his head, like a man holding his brother's brains in as he waits for the world to end.

Mary's already rolled out of the bed and running across the room, late term pregnancy be damned, by the time he stops groping around for his gun. He's got a moment of embarrassment that the first thing he thinks of is to shoot the poor bastard to put him out of his misery and then he's getting up to check on Dean too.

His son's kicking and screaming on his bed, shrieking words that he has no business knowing as well as the occasional, "No, Sammy, no!" The name Sammy conjures up something, some half image of a boy with dark curly hair and a deadly pout, a man who's ridiculously tall and still has the same puppy eyes, but it's gone in the same minute, whisked away with the knowledge that he might have had a son named Sammy, if Mary wasn't carrying a girl.

John's still shocked, staring at this wild little thing when he'd put a happy, smiling little boy to bed a few hours ago, but he snaps out of it when he sees a small heel going on a direct collision course with Mary's very pregnant belly.

It's a minor miracle that he catches Dean's foot before it hits Mary; no one besides him seems to notice anyway, Mary still trying desperately to gentle her boy and Dean trying just as desperately to roll off the bed and away from her. John just hovers ineffectively around the both of them, catching Dean's fists and feet before they can do any damage, making sure Mary doesn't fall off the bed.

He feels pretty damn useless, and pretty damn scared. John's damn sure that most three year olds don't wake up from nightmares screaming that they're going to kill their mother if she doesn't let them go find Sammy right the fuck now. He's sure that Dean doesn't even know language like that, and if there's a little bit of panic curling in his stomach, he's also damn sure he's entitled to it.

It's a long fifteen minutes before Mary manages to get Dean into her arms.

She's singing softly to him, rocking him with helpless tears running down her face, but Dean sits there like a rag doll, like he's never been there in his life. Even then, he's still weakly throwing out punches, hiccupping under his breath as he demands Sammy back, repeating that they're dead and he doesn't believe in them so they needed to go the hell away and stay dead, and give Sam back.

Dean's voice breaks when he adds a forlorn please to the end of that sentences, and that's what finally breaks John out of his incredulous numbness. He curls one arm around his wife and the other around the his son's shaking little back, and he tells him that everything's going to be okay.

"Sammy," Dean whimpers again, "Where's Sammy?"

Mary rests her head on top of their sons and whispers, "It's a bad dream, love. It's okay. It's okay."

They call a child psychologist in the morning, because there's bad dreams and then there's what Dean had last night. John's finger pauses over 'psychics' for a few seconds, before he shakes himself and goes on. He reminds himself that there's not such thing as psychics or boys who can ignite things with their minds, and then calls the psychologist.

Mary spends most of the day letting Dean feel the bulge in her belly because it's the only thing that will calm him down. He pets her stomach with firm little strokes, whispers questions to it and holds his breath like he's expecting an answer. Once or twice, John's almost sure that he hears the word demon, and he thinks back to his finger hovering over the name Missouri.

They both pretend hearing their son croon Sam and Sammy and little brother at the unborn baby isn't one of the most disturbing sights they've ever seen.

After that initial freak-out, Dean thinks he's pretty calm, all things considered.

Well, he'd tried to murder both Dad and Mom the night after he woke up in freakin' Stepford, but his stupid little tongue got mixed up in the Latin and his fingers felt fat and useless around the knife. He'd whispered "christo" at them three times each while they slept, then put a hand on Mom's stomach and told Sammy that he better be okay in there.

He doesn't really want to believe that Sam would be stupid enough to make a bargain with demons, to make a goddamn wish like an idiot, but it's all around him and he figures that maybe, just maybe, Sammy got away with it.

That mean's everything's fine and he just has to wait for Sammy to pop out so that he can scream at him about taking stupid risks.

There's not enough salt to do all the windows and doors, but there's enough to do what's going to be Sammy's room and Mom and Dad's. Dad doesn't have any kind of silver knife in the entire house, and the one gun he can find is disused, grimy, not working right, and he has a whole what-the-fuck moment over his Dad, the marine, letting his gun get like this.

His head chooses that moment to pipe up that swearing was bad, and damn, he is so not going to deal with that.

He spends a good hour crouching under the desk in Dad's office going through every swear word he can think of until that little voice decides to whither up and die. Christ.

So, yeah, he's pretty damn calm about it all, through the shrink (what the hell?!) trying to get him to play with dolls a few days later and Dad lecturing him on swearing; a gleeful little part of his mind plays bitch and fuck and damn and cunt on repeat the entire baby-lecture, while the rest of him tries to remember if his Dad had ever talked to him like he was an idiot.

He nods in all the right places, says, "Yes, sir," and then, belatedly, Daddy, because Dad's looking at him like he doesn't know what to do with him again.

All things considered, he thinks he's pretty freakin' calm.

He's four years old again, his mom's alive, his dad's alive, and he's going to strangle Sammy as soon as he's born. That's about as calm as he gets.

And he stays pretty calm until he looks at the calendar and his stupid four year old eyes take a good thirty seconds to realize that it's May fucking sixth and Mom's pregnant. It's May sixth, Mom's still pregnant, and that's not Sammy in her stomach.

Dean's wailing before he realizes it, reaching out for the nearest sharp object like that's going to make the date change, make it so Sammy's the baby in Mom. He's stabbing the calendar before he can even rationalize it, one part of his mind stepping back and raising its eyebrows while the rest of him tries to physically change the date so it's right.

It needs to be right.

There are arms around him, shouting above him, and a huge hand closing around his knife; Dean kicks out, loses his balance because he's not the right height, nothing's right. He goes to slash at the person trying to pry his knife loose, but there's a face floating somewhere high up that he knows like breathing and he'd never hurt, so he lets the knife go and concentrates on willing the world to be him and Sammy against the evil sons of a bitches out there.

A soft hand catches him, cradles him against the belly that's not holding Sam and he starts spitting curses at the world in general, because he can't hate Mom.

He has this horrible sick thought that Sam had wished he'd never been born, like he used to scream when he was twelve and chubby and cute and sullen, and then he's just screaming at the top of his lungs, brain shut down, game over, you lose.

When he comes back online, he's embarrassed as all hell to realize he threw an honest to God temper tantrum. Mom's still rocking him on the floor of the kitchen, gentle fingers stroking through his hair, pregnant belling forcing him to curve with her; Dad's crouched down next to them, spattered with grease and white in the face as he holds a butter knife in one hand and the phone in the other.

Dean feels numb and weighed down and like there's panic just sitting there on the horizon. He hates this. He hates thinking like a grown up and reacting like a child, hates that his mind immediately supplies grown up instead of adult, and he hates that he has no fucking clue where his baby brother is and his first instinct was to throw a tantrum instead of finding out.

The first thing he decides, hiccupping in his mother's arms, is that there is no way in hell Sam would be stupid enough to wish himself dead. Not because he thought his little brother was too selfish to do it, because Sam would, just because he was a freakin' idiot and tried to blame himself for things that weren't his fault, but because Sam had to have known he would pull heaven and hell apart so that he could find and kill the stubborn bitch for doing that to him. No, Sam was alive. Somewhere. He had to be.

Didn't mean Dean could find him when he was four.

So he decides to bide his time, which is something he's not especially good at. He putters around the house, hides bits of herbs that help ward off evil under the sofa, runs his fingers along the Impala's glossy black paint, and tries very hard to not think about the fact that Sam is out there somewhere without someone to watch is back.

He's gets a little sister named Abigail three days later and manages to hold back the impending meltdown until he's alone in his room.

She's cute, in a wrinkly, red-faced, not Sam way. Cute. But not Sam.

Mom immediately starts calling her Abby and love and Dad wraps his hands in her little pink blankets and coos over her, and all Dean can think about is that it should be Sam being called Sammy. He refuses to call the baby Abby and doesn't bother having an explanation in mind because nobody really asks a four year old why they do the things they do.

Dean calls the baby Abigail for a full three weeks, before Dad makes him sit on the couch and plops her into his arms. She waves around her little fists, scrunches up her face, and then blows an air bubble that pops spit all over his shirt; he pulls a face at her and goes to give her back to Dad, but then her eyes open and she makes a little gurgling sound.

He remembers Sammy making that noise, five, six months from now, curled up with him in a motel room while Dad goes silently crazy trying to keep them safe. It sounds like home, more than anything else that's happened recently, and he thinks, I forgive you for not being Sam.

She gurgles again and Dean gurgles back at her.

The baby becomes Gayle after that, because he still gets stuck on Abby sounding too much like Sammy in his head.

She likes to follow him around, when she learns to toddle. It's not a big deal, because he doesn't do much besides wander into a library now and then and wander back out with a book about jinn tucked into his backpack. It's slow going and frustrating and all he's learned is what he already knows; he wants to talk to Bobby, he wants to talk to Dad, hell, he'll even take talking to Ellen or Missouri right about now.

Nobody takes a kid seriously though, so he plods on with his work and continues to try to find Sam.

Gayle decides when he needs a break. She'll bring him books and toys, bits of rocks and leaves, and he always squats down next to her and explains what they are in patient tones. Gayle's a bright kid, towheaded where Sam had been dark haired, but she still likes to show her big brother things and Dean tries to treat her... almost like he'd treated Sammy.

He gets in trouble a few times for explaining to her that salt repels evil or telling her that the rosemary she'd picked out front was for protections and exorcisms, but he'll be damned if she doesn't know what to reach for in case a monster gets past his protection lines. There's bits of runes carved into her window and iron stashed under her bed, but she doesn't know how to use a gun or a knife or her teeth for that matter. That's about as far as he's willing to compromise, even if Mom and Dad don't actually know he's compromising.

His little sister can childishly lisp the Rite of Blessing and takes great pleasure in hunching next to him and whispering it over her bathtub every night, fingering the rosary beads he'd nicked from the church for her.

Most of the time, she listens to him without question. He knows Sammy never did that.

She's four the first and only time she brings him the one book in his room he's told her repeatedly that she's not allowed to touch. He remembers Sam at that age, how he'd nod seriously at whatever you told him and then giggle as he did it anyways, so he really shouldn't have been surprised.

"Dean," she calls happily, lugging a cardboard book by the cover flap as she runs to him, "Dean, read me this! No read it before, read it to me!"

Dean's guts freeze up when he realizes she's waving a bright orange book around, and then he's yanking it out of her surprised little hands. "You don't get to touch that book, remember?" he makes sure to let that sink in for a minute, waits for her mouth to pull up into a pout, "Get another one."

"Please?" Gayle asks, big green eyes going bright and puppy-ish. She's got nothing on Sammy at that age, though, and Dean tucks the book behind his back and shakes his head until she huffs and walks away.

She drags another Dr. Seuss book to him a minute later, still pouting, and climbs into his lap so that he can read The Lorax to her. Gayle smells like syrup and her finger sticks to the book when she demands to know what a word means; he has to pry it loose and a bit of brightly colored paper sticks to the tip as he reads about the Lorax lifting himself by the seat of his pants.

When he's done reading and she's lost interest, he picks up his book. His name's on the inside, but he's never so much as cracked it open because it freakin' hurts to look at it sometimes; he keeps seeing some ratty headed kid with a snotty nose and a huge smile asking him to read it over and over again.

Green Eggs and Ham was always going to be Sammy's book. He can remember Sam spending weeks telling everyone at the diners that he was Sam-I-Am.

The stupid kid had even gone so far as to hide a slice of ham for weeks in the Impala once; it had taken both him and Dad scouring the car before they found the moldy meat wedged under Sam's car seat. And Sam had thrown a temper-tantrum when they threw it away, until Dean had leaned over and whispered that he'd make him green ham the next time Dad was out on a hunt.

A few drops of food coloring (alright, the entire damn bottle) had made Sam's ham and eggs as green as he'd wanted them, and Dean had just shrugged and sheepishly smiled when Dad came home to Sam's dyed mouth and hands.

His hands tighten on the book, then he gently sets it down next to him on the couch and goes back to wading his way through the Thousand and One Nights.

Mom drops it off at a local charity drive a year later and he doesn't even notice.

Dean's thirteen the year Mom and Dad pressure him into joining the school baseball team. He hates it immediately, because the only reason they want him playing is because they desperately want him to find friends; he kind of knows he's apparently filled the geek role of the family without Sammy around, but it's not like he can't find his own toes or anything.

He's just the weird kid who's always got his face buried in books about wishes.

His teammates have all been on the team longer than him; they offer snide little remarks about his hand eye coordination and Dean immediately itches to show them up.

It's not like it's hard to "accidentally" hit the ball a hell of a lot farther than the little fucker with the big mouth could ever dream of hitting it. And it really isn't his fault that Fucker's sidekick was the one closest to where the ball took off into the park behind the baseball diamond, really.

Dean watches with satisfaction as Sidekick jogs his chubby ass out into the heavy underbrush.

It's a lot less satisfying when the lardass comes back blubbering with terror over hearing crying and seeing something that he claims is a big foot. In the middle of the damn city park, which, yeah, while a little overgrown? Would so not be up to housing a man eating yeti thing.

Dean knows Sam was never this stupid. He misses his kid brother something fierce when all he can get out of the boy later on is that the thing was crying and it ran away when he got near it.

He goes home, sidles up to the family computer when Dad and Mom aren't paying attention because he's got a freakin' weekly limit on how many hours he can spend on it and he used all of those up on Sunday. There's no history of people reporting crying in the wooded area just behind the park, and his search for anyone that could have become a Woman in White turns up empty.

By the time Dad catches him on the computer and threatens to take away his library pass (and, oh, God, he's Sammy in this life and he kind of wants to commit ritual suicide or go bond with the Impala right the fuck now, because he's a girl), he's pretty much decided that Lardass is just a stupid kid with an overactive imagination.

Except that even the coach is talking about the creepy weeping in the park, so.

Mom's got a silver letter opener that she keeps in her jewelry box. Dean takes that, and he takes Dad's gun, and he ditches baseball practice to see if there's a supernatural thing out in the trees.

He's not sure if it's an honest to God hunt, but he's itching under his skin to kill something, anything, to feel like he's actually doing something instead of sitting around with his head up his ass. He wants to find Sam. He'll settle for being able to gut or burn something evil.

It's maybe an hour before he hears the crying and zeros in on it.

The thing crying is pretty damn fugly. It's hiding its face behind gnarled, fucked-up fingers, but the rest of it is just as ear-splittingly horrible as its face must be; its skin sort of slips over its shoulders with every sob and if Dean looks too closely at that he's going to upchuck his after school snack all over the park grass. There are warts growing all along its bony little body and he's pretty sure that's slime dripping from what looks to be an open sore of some kind.

It gibbers at him when he comes closer, tries to curl into a tiny ball of disgusting flesh while it cries quietly to itself, and Dean hears Sammy at his side, waspishly telling him that their job was to hunt evil, not kill supernatural things.

So he makes himself lower his knife a little bit and hunches down into a squat a dozen feet away from it. "Hey. Ugly," Dean winces, catches himself before he can apologize when the thing squeezes its face tighter and lets out a miserable little noise, "You're scaring a buttload of kids; could you tone it down a little?"

There's an increase in the thing's ability to cry before its fingers stutter down from its face so that Dean can get a full glance at just how ugly the thing is. Dean can't really think of a way to describe it to himself, just kind of blacks out everything but the way it's mismatched, squinty eyes leak tears.

If he's ever pressed for a description, which he thinks is pretty damn unlikely, he'd have to say that it kind of looks like a frog that fell out of the ugly tree and hit every damn branch on the way down. That's if his brain doesn't chose to miraculously block the image from his mind. Self preservation instincts run strong in the Winchesters, and he'd really like to be able to keep his lunch down, thanks.

The thing hiccups a breath and then, swear to God, he thinks it smiles at him.

It is, hands down, one of the most freaky, scary ass things he's ever seen in his life. Either one of them. It feels like the thing is scarring his mindwith how ugly it is; he's got his knife raised in some half-assed attempt to get it to stop doing that so he isn't forced to carve his own eyes out as his head gibbers in shock.

He's really, really insanely glad that nobody had stumbled on this thing yet, because he can see people going insane over something like this.

Just when he's made up his mind to try throwing his knife at the creature just so that it'll stop it, it melts. Literally. One minute there's a brain scarring fugly monster sitting on the ground and smiling in what he hopes to fuck is supposed to be a sweet manner, and the next there's this inoffensive puddle of water leaking into the grass.

If he had Sam to bitch to, his brother would never hear the end of this freakin' weird hunt. But he doesn't, and no one else knows jack all about what's hiding in the shadows, and Dean never does find out what the hell the thing was.

Freak Show never starts its crying routine again.

His teammates spend a week mourning the fact that they can no longer triple dog dare each other into searching for the source of the crying and then they turn their attention to just how sweet Amanda Shanks looks in a miniskirt.

Dean would be pretty down with that, if it wasn't for the fact that he feels like a dirty old man for even looking at her.

When he's sixteen he kisses his first girl (again), and he pukes in the grass two seconds later. He's dry heaving and cursing all little brothers under his breath as he upchucks his pancakes all over the damn football green, because, of course, this was Sam's fault.

By the time he looks up, the girl's gone, and he gently slams his head against a handy nearby bleacher.

That pretty much effectively kills any cool points he'd gotten by being the first to kiss Jean Baker, all long long legs and gorgeous smiles, but she was just so goddamn young. She'd tasted like tangerine lip-gloss and left sparkly shimmers all over his mouth and he'd felt like a cradle robber the instant he kissed her.

He is so going to get Sam for that.

Along with a bunch of other shit.

Fuck, he misses his little brother.

When Dean gets home that night, he hauls ass up the stairs then tromps back down so that he can watch Gayle and Dad and Mom flitter around the living room. They look like a family, like his family, but they can't take the place of a gap-toothed little sissy boy who'd crawled into bed with him after nightmares until he was fourteen.

They're not Sam. And he's not finding anything, anywhere, on what to do if a jinn grants a wish and you want to find the one who made it.

Dean stays up most of the night and writes sixteen letters before he finally burns every single one of them and scribbles out a simple, "Sorry. Be back when I find Sam," on the back of his algebra homework.

They find a baby out in a field in Lawrence, Kansas. No one comes forward to claim him, but there's something not quite right about him that keeps him from getting snatched up by all the couples wanting infants.

He watches people with too old, unfocused eyes and the more superstitious of the nurses on duty claim that they've seen him move things without touching them. They name him James Taylor after the officer that found him, and off he goes into foster care.

When James Taylor is five he bluntly tells his foster mother that she's not allowed to call him James or Jamie, because that's not his name. He thinks that maybe she thinks that he's only playing a game, that he's had her read him Green Eggs and Ham a few too many times, but he keeps insisting.

He's terrified that if he starts answering to James that Sam Winchester won't exist anymore and there'll be nobody to protect his family later on.

Sam's not really surprised when he ends up back in state custody after that. He just keeps telling them that his name is Sam until they start using it to humor him. He gets his own copy of Dr. Seuss before they send him to a new home, something dropped off from a charity collection, and it's the only thing he won't let anyone else touch.

He hides under the bed in his new temporary house and traces his fingers over the name written on the front page until it smudges into illegibility.

When James "Sam" Taylor is nine he gets into his first really bad foster home. He meets Joe Carver and his small, cowed wife Amber, and the other three fosters he's going to be sharing a house with.

The first time it happens, Sam's so stunned that he lets it. He goes to school with a black eye and a busted lip the next day, utters the time honored "fell down the stairs" excuse when his teacher asks about it, and he walks around in a daze.

Sam calls home after school's let out, fishing change from the gutters until he has enough money to call Lawrence. He never knew their old house number, but he looked up the Winchester, J. and M. years ago, and he clutches the phone with sweaty fingers as it starts ringing.

"Hello?" He knows Mom's still alive because he made it that way, but it still feels like a punch to the face (like Joe's punch to his face) to hear her voice answering the phone when he's only ever heard her say Dean and Sam and I'm sorry before. "Hello? Is anyone there?"

For a giddy moment, he wants to say, "Yeah. This is Sam Winchester. I'm your son, only not really. You didn't have me in this reality; I kind of had myself. Can you come take me home?"

Instead, he stutters and stammers until he manages: "Uh. Hi." Sam clears his throat and almost hangs up the phone because he wants… "Can I. Is Dean there?"

"Dean's at baseball practice right now, kiddo. I can tell him to call you when he gets home if you want?" Mary sounds cheerful and full of life, and he can't do this to them. He can't.

Sam hangs up the phone before he can ask what time Dean'll be home so that he can call again.

He leans his forehead on the greasy glass of the telephone booth and tries very hard not to cry like a baby. It's better that Dean wasn't home, he tells himself, because then how would he have explained that he needed the other boy to call him Sammy so that he could pull himself together? It really is better.

He's seen what happens to kids who grow up beaten down. He knows that none of these kids are psychics, but that doesn't mean they can't be dangerous later on; Max Miller's bruises still swim in front of his eyes at night.

So he puts his stupid, scared nine year old self comfortably in a box in the back of his head, and pulls his wearier twenty-four year old to the front. It's the first time he's done that, and he can tell even before he gently closes the box that it locks from the inside and isn't ever going to open again, but he doesn't want to be young and stupid anymore.

He feels thirty when he's done, which makes him snort. A hand dash across his eyes and the tears are gone and he has a plan.

Sam waits until the next time Joe decides to go after one of his kids; it's Aaron that sets the man off, and the instant Joe's fists start falling, Sam calmly walks into the kitchen and calls 911. He doesn't say a word into the phone, just sets it down gently against the countertop so that the operator can hear Aaron crying and Joe screeching.

Then he hefts up the ashtray that's been wailing its story to him for the last four days and walks back into the living room. The girls are huddled together in one corner, crying quietly into each other's hair; Aaron's curled into a ball on the floor and Joe's rearing back to deliver another kick, so he's got a pretty damn clear shot.

Dean and Dad had taught him to fight vicious when he was small; he doesn't know if it's because he feels so damned small or because he is, but he can hear Dean's voice in the back of his head muttering "knees and dick, Sammy, or the eyes if you absolutely have to. Leave the grown up fighting to the grown ups."

So he gets a good grip on the ashtray and flings it at a tempting target.

The ashtray connects with Joe's kneecap hard enough that Sam gets a satisfying little crack for his trouble. When Joe falls over screaming and clutching his leg, Sam kicks him in the face, hard enough to knock him out but not hard enough to snap his neck (if his nine year old body could, at least.)

The police show up to find him checking Aaron's ribs, Phoebe and Elizabeth huddled up tight against his back, and they don't know what to do with him. That's pretty obvious, because Sam's sitting there calmly answering their questions while the girls cry in the arms of a policewoman and Joe is wheeled out on a stretcher. Aaron goes next, cracked ribs, nothing serious, Sam wants to tell them, but he just shrugs and says that, yeah, he did attack his foster father.

Sam gives a little nod to the ashtray when he says it, and the chunk of frosted glass wiggles in delight; there's a ghost trapped there, a little boy who says his daddy hit him too hard with the tray one day, but as he watches a soft glow surrounds it and the ghost is gone.

Children are the easiest to appease.

When James Taylor is eleven years old he jerks his head up in the middle of class because there's going to be a demon wreaking havoc in Garden Plains in a little under two days. It's not the Yellow-Eyed Demon, because whatever's left of that one gives him lovely periodic nightmares of hell, but it's an honest to God demon tripping his visions.

He raises his hand and asks to go to the bathroom, snags his backpack on the way out the door when the teacher goes back to grading papers and is at a bus stop within the hour.

Sam's got money he's been saving for years, little allowances that foster parents have given him and prize money from science fairs, so he's not worried about eating or anything for the next few days.

He exorcises the demon quickly; it's a low level sucker that can't even fling him around without laying hands on him. Sam's careful not to let the power whip out, to not kill it even as it tears free and travels back to hell, because a breaking a deal with demons is a really shitty idea.

There's not a scratch on him when he plods back to the bus station, just a grateful family and a little girl left behind who is always going to have nightmares about places she might never end up going.

His birthday's passed already, between one Latin word and another, and he doesn't even realize it until he sees the date on the calendar the bus station has politely provided. Sam's twelve years old, and he makes a decision as soon as he remembers it.

He kind of knew already he wouldn't be able to do normal. That's why he'd made sure that Dean and Dad and Mom could.

James Taylor doesn't go back to foster care.

James Taylor stops being James Taylor and starts being Sam Winchester again, and he gets on a bus heading to a job he can remember doing fourteen years ago.

Dean goes to Missouri while he should be spending first period catching up on sleep. He takes the Impala, because he might as well have his baby with him, and he leaves the note taped to the milk in the refrigerator.

He gets a perverse sort of pleasure in scribbling "Went to Missouri to learn the truth" in the journal Mom'd bought him a year ago, and then scrubs a hand over his hair and rings the doorbell.

The woman who opens the door is the same, but different. It's something he's come to recognize as a side-effect of whatever the fuck had happened to his family; there's less wear in her face. Missouri looks less like she's spent the last however old her old butt is looking at evil and more like she's just had to tell her hundredth customer that his wife loves him very much.

It's weird to see all the changes that Sammy not fucking being here has made, and he's maybe considering thinking about those changes after he's found his brother. Maybe.

Missouri takes one long, long look at him, and then her face falls and she murmurs, "Oh, honey. You've got a long way to go." She ushers him in with a hand wave and has a glass of sweet tea in his hands before he can even process that she's looking at him with the same look she'd given Sam so long ago.

He's pretty sure he should be offended that she's treating him the same way she treated Sam's lethal puppy dog eyes.

"Just how long is long?" Dean asks after he's downed his glass of tea, "Are we talking halfway around the country long, or 'fuck, you're going to be gray before you even get near him' long?"

Missouri gives him a warning glance, and since her hand twitches towards the big ass spoon she'd been using to stir the tea, he shuts up pretty quickly. Yeah.

"Whoever it is you're chasing is stronger than I am, Dean Winchester, and he doesn't want to be found," she says, "Trying is going to be like… well, it's going to be like making your Daddy realize that what he saw wasn't just a dream."

Which, great, just fucking fabulous; he already damn well knew that. If that was the extent of help he could expect from her, he'd be better off driving out of town now and getting a headstart on Dad.

"I didn't say I couldn't help." Missouri's voice cuts into his thoughts, and he realizes she's staring at him like someone might stare at a mangy, idiotic dog. She taps her hand against the coffee table until he mutters an apology and then she pins him with a glare and wags a finger at him. "Now, boy, you cuss at me again and I'm gonna thump you one. I'm trying to help your stupid self."

Dean counts to three, slowly, then goes up to fifteen when that just makes him want to walk out the damn door and figure it out himself. "So give me something to work with, Missouri!" He holds up his hands when it looks like she's gonna go for the spoon again and looks away. "Look, I gotta find him; all I need is a place to start."

There's a long beat of silence before Missouri sighs and says, "I can't tell you where exactly to look; there's a few really powerful psychics in this country. But I've been keeping an eye on one in particular. He showed up about twelve years ago, moves around a lot. He's in Wisconsin right now, has been for a few weeks at least, but I think he's getting ready to move on."

He nods, tries very hard to not jitter his leg up and down as he asks, "You got a town name to go with that state?"

"Lake Manitoc."

The name doesn't zing like he thinks it maybe should, but he keeps getting an image of a little boy with the same big, scared eyes Sammy'd had when confronted with the monster under the bed. Coupled with the warning bells screeching through his head about lake water, he knows something's in there about Wisconsin. Somewhere.

Damned if he can pull it out though.

"Before you go running off, boy, stop and think for a minute. This psychic, he doesn't stay around long, and I've got a feelin' he's going to be stepping it up as soon as he realizes you're tracking him," Missouri stirs the tea again and pours herself another glass without looking up. She frowns at the liquid in her cup, rubs her forehead, "You be damn sure you're ready to go before you start spooking him."

He's already got three credit card applications in the glove box of the Impala and a fake I.D. that proclaims him to be of legal drinking age. Dean's not stupid; it's the habits of a lifetime that have him packing the gun he'd bought from a seedy dealer a few weeks ago with his shiny brand new I.D, and there's a silver knife shoved down into his boot. It'll take a while before he has all the gear again, but he's not going off half-cocked.

He's got his car, he's got a fucking case (finding his Goddamn little brother anyway), and if it's the last thing he freakin' does he's going to have his brother back. Yeah. He's ready.

Missouri's still swirling around her tea when he stands up, but she says softly, "You're a stubborn one, Dean. Stubborn as your Daddy must be. I just hope you can out stubborn the one you're chasin'."

Winchester Stubborn, Pastor Jim had called it. Or would call it. Whatever. They've all got it in spades, but Dean'll be damned before he lets his little brother show him up in that department.

Dean grins cockily at her and says, "I taught Sam everything he knows; he can't outrun me for long."

Missouri politely refrains from pointing out that Sam's been off of his radar for twelve damn years even with him looking his hardest. She also doesn't tell him that he could be chasing his own tail for all he knows, and he appreciates that, he really does.

Sammy's gotta be twelve going on thirty-six by now, but Dean's still older.

He'll find him.

It takes him three weeks to find and burn all Peter Sweeney's body, and it really only takes that long because he's stupid and doesn't think that Peter would try to kill him. The ghost had only ever gone after the family members of his attackers, ignoring everyone else, so Sam figures he's pretty safe in the water.

That's what gets him into trouble.

Sam's not prepared for the first sucking pull on his hand or the second, and he's really not ready for a little decomposing boy to rear up from black water. Peter looks at him with filmy white eyes and crosses his skinny little flaking arms across Sam's throat, and Sam's never going to be sure if his powers saved him or if Peter just got bored of him when he got far enough away from the bones.

Either way, he ends up being fished out of the water by Christopher Barr. Sam opens his eyes to a face he can vaguely remember seeing in a mortuary article, with an anxious, heavily pregnant woman hovering in the background, and then rolls over onto his side and vomits up stale lake water and the taste of waterlogged flesh.

It's an idiotic mistake, one for new Hunters and people who have something to prove; because of it, he spends a week in the hospital with a broken arm and social services breathing down his neck.

He's kicking himself even as he plays stupid and young, letting his lower lip quiver and his eyes get big and wet when they ask him about his family. Nobody says a word to him, but Sam knows everyone assumes they've drowned in the lake; they dredge it and for a few days Sam tries to cheer himself up by thinking that they might just uncover Peter and do his job for him.

They start gently talking to him about finding a foster family after the lake's turned up nothing new, so he climbs out of his second story window and shimmies down to the ground without breaking a sweat. Some things just never go away.

It's a tense few days while the police search for a chubby twelve year old (and how he managed being chubby, again, would have amused the hell out of his brother), but they lose interest after a while, assume he's moved on, and he can get back to getting rid of Peter Sweeney.

No way in hell is he stupid enough to get anywhere near that damn water again, so he buys bottled water from some small time store at the edge of town and hikes to the treeline everyday.

The next two weeks are spent sitting in a tree and giving himself migraine after migraine calling each. Tiny. Little. Bone to him. It's slow and about as painful as his visions used to be, but at least he doesn't have to get near the lake again.

He gets into a tug of war with Peter over his femur that would have made Dean cackle in glee. He ends up juggling his attention, randomly grabbing another bone just long enough that Peter lets go of the one he wants, and then it comes flying out of the water with enough force to take his head off if he'd let it.

As it is, Sam spends another few minutes wiggling it free from the tree trunk before he drops it onto the steadily growing pile.

When he's finally got all the bones together, he salts them, lights a match, and then pauses. Sam glances up at the lake and feels his mouth purse together.

"I'll tell her, when I'm done," he says. The water ripples and a small head pokes out, grey skin and dead hair that would have made him vomit if he hadn't seen worse. "She'll know what happened to you."

Peter just watches him for a long moment, big white eyes just barely visible over the gentle waves, and then he disappears back under the water. Sam drops the match before it can take out his fingers and watches the way the pathetically small pile of bones goes up like tinder.

The feeling of something wrong with the lake flickers out at the same time that the flame flickers to life, and Sam says a little prayer for Peter before trudging back towards town.

He calls the Police and gives them a heads up on something burning out near the lake, calls Mrs. Sweeney and tells her gently that she might want to ask the cops about the newly discovered corpse, and then he grabs a shovel and digs Peter's red bike out of Andrea Barr's backyard.

It's a bitch to do with only one working arm, and for a long minute he misses Dean so badly that he has to lean against the shovel and just breathe.

He's leaving town, hitching towards Burkitsville, Indianna, when the feeling at the back of his skull he's been ignoring for months solidifies into "Dean!" It's so strong that he actually stumbles and has to lean carefully against a barbed wire fence, shift his backpack to the ground so that it doesn't knock him completely over.

Sam traces that feeling until he finds a ball of restless energy at its other end, determined and grim; he spends a quiet moment fucking panicking over the thought of something going after his family, after Dean, before he realizes that the thing pulsing stubborn all over the damn place is also hissing "Sammy."

Like he's six years old and eating the last of the Lucky Charms.

Like he's nine and sullenly refusing to tell Dean how he'd gotten a black eye.

Like he's thirteen and forgot to duck.

Like he's twenty-three and needs someone to tell him he isn't going to be a monster so much that it hurts.

Dean.

Oh fuck no, Sam thinks. No. Dean was supposed to be in Kansas, getting his home and his family and everything that he should have had the first time around. Dean was supposed to be putting his hands up girl's skirts and flirting outrageously with every high school bimbo he could find. Dean was not supposed to be thinking about finding him because Dean wasn't supposed to remember him.

Go home, he thinks hard enough, he hopes, to give Dean a fucking migraine. And he starts running.

Mary can't say she's honestly surprised when her baby disappears one day, sixteen years old and watching the world with hooded eyes. She doesn't recognize her boy in this man he's becoming, doesn't know why he moves with all the military training she once told John she'd hit him with a frying pan if he taught her son, and to be honest, she's a little scared of him.

He's taught Abby to speak Latin, though she could swear that there's no way in hell he could know how to speak it himself. There's salt ground so far into her window sills that even scrubbing for hours doesn't get it out and it's just right back there the next morning anyway. There's cat's eye shells littered along the surfaces of Abby's room and Mary's swept more than one of them from underneath her bed.

There's a pentagram scribbled in permanent marker on the floor underneath the ugly rug John's mom had given them; Dean had drawn it, perfectly straight lines and all, when he was six. She checks it every few months, to see if it's fading, but she's almost positive Dean traces over it weekly.

So her boy's a little odd. John's uncomfortable talking about it and the only time she mentioned it to her preacher he'd decided that her son was possessed by the devil. They'd found a new church after that (it didn't help that he'd been caught stealing holy water, of all things, a few weeks before).

But still.

When he turns those green eyes on her, sometimes Mary thinks he's looking at someone who's not really there. It's like he sees a completely different person when he sees her, like he's expecting something else, and she's lost track of the amount of times his entire face falls when he opens his eyes and sees her shaking him awake.

Still, he's her son, and when he doesn't come home from school she frantically calls everyone she thinks may even have heard the name Dean Winchester.

Abby's the one who finds the note, and that's another thing they don't talk about. Dean's talk of a Sam had tapered off over the years into something almost non-existent; they'd pretty much chalked it up to him having a very real imaginary friend, but that had never sat well with Mary.

Now that he's gone to go find his Sammy, Mary doesn't know whether to cry or cross her fingers, ignore rational logic, and hope he finds the boy he's been searching years for.

It's maybe a little of both that has her never out of arm's reach of a phone.

Lake Manitoc doesn't feel the same way his faded memories insist it should. Without even thinking too hard about it, Dean knows that Sam's not there anymore and what's-his-name of the lake has had his big shining moment of moving into the light.

He sticks around for a few days anyway.

The first day he finds out that the cops have recently found the corpse of a small boy.

The second day he discovers that a red bike belonging to a missing boy from twenty years ago had been found propped up in Sheriff Devins's backyard.

The last day he's there he gets the only real information he can find in Lake Manitoc.

Dean isn't good with remembering the jobs themselves, not like Sam apparently is, but he never forgets a person. Andrea Barr is shuffling along the edge of the lake, looking like a beached whale as a man helps her keep her balance. She's laughing while she waddles along, dark hair flying in the wind, and Dean's positive that she'll never look like the struggling, almost broken little thing he'd met back when.

They smile when they come up near him, exchange pleasantries. Dean slides on his please-help-me-mask like he's never taken it off and asks, "You seen a kid around here? He's about twelve, brown hair, green eyes?"

Andrea draws her eyebrows together and rubs a hand slowly across her stomach while her husband looks out at the lake.

"Who's asking?" Andrea finally demands, and Dean's happy to fill her in on his runaway little brother, how he'd taken it into his head to join the circus after their mother had died (he winces a little at that, because Sam had really wanted to join the circus at twelve, until Dean told him that clowns would eat his eyes and use his guts for a highwire) and he needs to find him soon.

He looks just old enough that they're willing to believe he's got guardianship over his younger brother, and that gets sympathetic faces from both the Barrs. The man's the one who says, "He almost drowned in the lake about... four weeks ago, maybe. Disappeared right after Social Services started talking about foster care."

Dean can remember how that water had felt with Peter in it, dark and cloying and sick, and his fists are clenching at the thought of Sam almost drowning in that. He forces himself to relax, to smile ruefully at the Barrs and thank them before walking away.

Sam's not here anymore, Dean knows. He could check the records, maybe finagle his way into looking at the hospital reports, but he's willing to bet they aren't going to have much more than a basic outline of a surly twelve year old who can climb out windows like they're ladders.

Dean pulls out his phone and dials Missouri while he makes his way back to the Impala.

"Boy," she says before he can even get a hello out, "You are not going to be callin' me every time you can't figure out where to go."

"Sure," Dean agrees instantly. No use pissing off the only psychic he knows, at least not if she can tell him something. He waits a beat for her to offer the information he wants without him having to ask, and then screws up his face and asks hopefully, "Can you tell me where to go this one time, though?"

She's sighing on the other end of the line like he's just asked her to get naked and dance. "Get that image out of your head right now, Dean Winchester!" she snaps suddenly, and Dean guiltily tries to think of something other than the cringe inducing vision of a fat black woman dancing the robot stark ass naked.

It doesn't really work, but after a little persuasion his mind decides that it's going to shut down out of self-preservation, which is always a good thing.

Missouri sounds like she's really missing having him in smacking range when she speaks again. "He's movin' into Indiana," she says, then after a pause, "Seems to be thinking an awful lot about apples, but I could be wrong."

Apples, Indiana, Scarecrow. He remembers a fugly scarecrow and apple pie that was kind of terrible, no matter how many people were sacrificed to their pagan gods.

You don't forget a place like Burkitsville, not with it's scarecrow and killer townsfolk.

Dean's taking the cell phone from his ear to hit the call end button when Missouri's voice comes across again. "Your momma and daddy are lookin' for you, Dean. Why don't you drop them a line or a note, let them know you're still alive. It's a terrible thing, not knowing where your baby is."

Dean stares at the phone like it's grown an extra head, and then he promises to send them a postcard as soon as he gets to Burkitsville. Yeah, he'd been planning on letting them know he hadn't been kidnapped by some freaky psycho, he'd just been planning on waiting until he'd actually, you know, had Sammy with him so they didn't think he was completely insane for leaving in the first place.

He's got an odd sort of feeling that it would be best to contact them before he has Sam.

He speeds all the way to Burkitsville.

The town's empty. Like ghost town empty. A door to the gas station swings open and closed with a creak he can hear over the sound of the Impala's engine and there's nobody sitting on the bench in front of the diner. It's creepy as hell, but judging by the smell of smoke that's still lingering, he's willing to bet that he didn't manage to get here before Sam did.

The orchard is razed to the ground; every single tree is a black lump of ruin and there's a suspiciously human shaped burnt pile where Dean thinks the scarecrow's cross should have been. The whole orchard feels like it's in denial, even with the townspeople gone, and Dean has to smile at it all.

Sam had kept him from burning the whole orchard the first time around, muttering something that's yellowed with age in his memories but was probably something practical about getting caught in the blaze themselves.

It's overkill, Winchester style, and he feels something loosen a little bit in his chest.

Sam's alive. He's just... not there.

This was the start of a disturbing trend, Dean realizes weeks later.

He's led on a wild goose chase from one side of the country to the other, Jericho, California to Ohio, and sleepy Iowa town to Hibbings, Minnesota. There's always a trace of Sam left in the towns; a grave desecrated behind an old house in Jericho, a preacher who's entire church was ransacked of all silver, the mysterious solving of over a dozen missing person's cases in Hibbing, but there's never any Sam.

Dean's lucky if he can get a person who remembers seeing a scruffy brat skulk around.

After a while Missouri stops being able to help. She lets him know that the psychic's found a way to block out even her most careful feelers, and he's on his own from then on out.

It wouldn't be so bad, if his brother wasn't such a freakin' smarty pants. Dean knows how Sam thinks; he's picked up on the fact that Sam's doing all the hunts they've done before, the easy ones now that they know what they are.

The hardest part of finding Sam should have been getting his memory to cooperate long enough to spit out some hunts they'd gone on, after Stanford only because Sam's too small to go after some of the things they hunted with Dad. It should have been a cakewalk to figure out which hunts Sam would deem most important and just wait in a town for him to show up, but the little shit's psychic and contrary.

Sam knows that Dean knows how his brain works, and so Sam must be making an effort to only go after the hunts Dean wouldn't think he'd go after, because Dean can't find him. And then Dean would start to go after those hunts because they might be the ones Sam's trying to get to in order to confuse him and then it all just kind of spirals out until Dean's twitching on the floor with a headache.

He loses Sammy for about a year when he's twenty, and he very controllably panics. He can't stop thinking that Sam's in a ditch somewhere, or he's been strung up by one of the million ghosts who thinks he looks good dangling by his neck. In desperation, he finally goes to the Roadhouse, and that's where he picks up Sam's trail again.

Ellen tells him, after the introduction that includes, "Boy, you should go home. You're too young to be huntin'," that they'd had a file mailed to them a few weeks ago. Someone had put together a case on an old asylum out in Rockford, mailed it from Lafayette, Indiana.

Lafayette means gunshots and terror over losing his stupid little brother, but it also means a psychic like Sam. It takes him a full three hours of speeding to have the blinding insight that Sam goes to ground with the psychics when he disappears off his radar.

It's a good plan, but not so good now that he's figured it out. Dean feels kind of like a heel when he bullies a sophomore with twitchy hands into telling him how long it had been since Sam had skipped town; even so, he stays well out of range of those hands. Mr. Tinkles's death is enough of a warning for him.

The kid tells him that Sam had mentioned going to New York next, so Dean spends five minutes thinking of the farthest hunt from New York he can remember and ends up heading towards Colorado.

Of course, Sam's not there, but there's mention of an old abandoned mine suddenly collapsing.

He's impressed, in a vague kind of 'I'm going to kill you' way, because Sam's been evading him for years using this very simple, very stupid kind of thinking. Mostly, though, he's determined to find his brother so he can pound some sense into him.

Dean decides, somewhere around the third year, that every year he's looking, he's going to add another punch to deliver when Sam least expects it.

He's up to six, with an understanding that if it takes more than ten years he's going to chop Sam's legs off so he can't run again, by the time he finally gets to stop counting.

It's kind of fun to butt heads with Dean again, if your definition of fun somehow involves needles and your crotch.

Sam skips out on heading towards the jobs he really wants to finish first, because that's where Dean's going to look for him. Instead, he heads towards the half-forgotten ones, the ones that nobody ever died in or that won't become active for years.

He burns down the Hell House in Texas before the stupid guys can make it into a nightmare, and he breaks into Reverend Sorenson's parish to burn everything that has a trace of silver in it; the necklace is the first to go.

He's got some half-assed, nebulous idea that if he runs long enough and hard enough, Dean'll give up and go home to Mom and Dad.

When Dean starts to get too close (which he's a little impressed by, because he has no clue how his brother manages that), he takes a break and heads to Saginaw. So far he's stayed far away from the psychic kids, the ones the Demon had wanted to control, so he doesn't think that Dean'll look for him there. At least not until he exhaust all the other possibilities.

Max Miller is how he remembers him; small and skittish, scared eyes and heartbreak. Sam sits on the high concrete wall of the high school entrance and watches the way he flinches from contact. The kid's got a black eye and a broken arm, but he catches his books before they fall without touching them.

"Hey Max," Sam says when he gets close enough.

Max looks at him and clams up. He's scared, trembling a little and inching slowly backwards. "Hey," he finally mutters, "Do I... do I know you?"

Sam taps his heels against the wall and smiles at the other boy, gently tugs one of his books higher into his hands when it looks like it's going to slip again. "No," he tells Max's startled face, "But I think I can help you."

The rage is already there, Sam finds out about three weeks into teaching Max better control of his telekinesis. Max lashes out with his power when he thinks he's being made fun of, but it's all instinct and no control; Sam can deflect it without really thinking about it, send a flying book into the wall instead of him, but other people aren't going to be so lucky.

He finds out that Max has a reputation for strangeness, that nobody comes near him at school because a bully had once gone flying when he'd been about to hit him.

If he kills someone, it's not going to be because he really wants to, but because he's scared.

That's the part Sam wants to take care of. You can't teach a kid to stand up for themselves after they've been so beaten down, not in the amount of time he's got before Dean figures out to head towards him, but Sam does his best to try.

He leaves Saginaw three months later, hoping he's not going to see a technicolor rendition of Max killing his family anytime soon.

Lafayette, Indiana has Scott Carey in it. Sam spends a good week and a half, two weeks just watching the boy, because he's a wildcard, but he seems like a genuinely nice kid. He never touches people or animals though, and Sam can imagine why.

He doesn't have the same power as Scott, because his tends towards lighting things on fire rather than electrocuting the hell out of them, but he figures it's the same basic principal. Scott's all for it, after he convinces the kid he's not a stalker.

Scott's a slow learner, too scared to try using his power on anything living or dead until Sam finally volunteers himself as the guinea pig. Then he's just flat out terrified.

Sam finally just rolls his eyes and slaps Scott's hand onto his arm. There's a static cling to it, but Sam clamps down on the rush of electricity before it can do more than make his hair stand on end and raises his eyebrows at Scott.

"See? Guinea pig. Now come on, try to control it yourself."

He's more than a little shocked by the time Scott can control it enough not to accidentally kill a person. Not shocking them is another story entirely, but Sam counts it as something of a victory that he won't accidentally kill the neighbors cat in a few years.

While he's in Lafayette, he dreams about shooting his brother with a shotgun and an empty gun clicking three times before he stopped pulling the trigger. When he wakes up, he borrows Scott's computer and starts printing file after file of reports on an abandoned asylum in Rockford.

He scribbles notes on the sides of the pages while Scott tries to not electrocute a bunch of crickets to death; there's a sizzle and a unhappy little murmur as he writes carefully and clearly that under no circumstances should a person enter the asylum alone to hunt.

Scott takes another cricket out of the pet store bag while Sam traces the route to the secret room in red ink on the map he'd found.

He sends it to the Roadhouse when he's done and tries hard not to think about Bill Harvelle taking the case.

That actually turns out to be a mistake, because Dean's been floundering for the past year, grabbing at straws while Sam carefully monitors him, and a week after the file hits the Roadhouse he's got a purpose again. Sam swears to himself when he realizes that his brother's on his way and he hitches out of town so fast that he's two states away before he remembers telling Scott he was going to head to New York next.

He immediately turns around and heads towards the wendigo in Colorado, hoping to lose Dean.

He has a string of bad luck for the next two years, stupid little hunts gone wrong that leave him dodging Social Services again, and then the icing on the cake comes when he's hitching to Cornwall, Connecticut, and he finally concedes defeat.

Sam watches the truck drive off with all of his belongings still sitting on the floorboards of the passenger seat and massages his forehead. Yeah. This was a sign.

Dean's been on his ass for the last few months, closing the distance so quickly that Sam's head is spinning, so he just leans against a nearby fence and scowls at the cows.

Sam holds still and waits for his brother to come to him.

Dean's in the Impala, tapping the steering wheel in time to Wicked World when something makes him whip his head to the side, and there's a tall, bare-chested boy with shaggy brown hair sitting on a fence. It's the middle of a highway that goes to Bumfuck, Nowhere, and he's just not that damn lucky, but he's slamming on the breaks and frantically apologizing to his baby even as he jerks her to the side of the road.

He's got a gun in one hand and a bottle of holy water in the other, and he knows, vaguely, that if this isn't Sam he's going to give some hitching kid the surprise of his fucking life.

It isn't a hitching kid.

It sure as fuck is Sam.

Sam looks younger than he did the first time he was eighteen, and that's a fucking kick in the teeth that Dean does not need. He knew Sam had always wanted normal, and maybe he should have stopped and thought about the fact that Sammy had spent the last six years running from him as fast as he could.

Dean has a moment of thinking that maybe he's been chasing a ghost all this time, that this is Sam but not his Sammy, before Sam looks up and says simply, "Hey Dean."

He does the first thing he can think of, and that's uncapping the holy water and flinging the entire bottle of it at Sam. When that fails to bubble, he slits his eyes and bares his teeth. There's sun in Sam's eyes and he's squinting just enough that when Dean comes at him he can't see it, not that it would have helped; Sam's on his back on the other side of the fence in a heartbeat, staring at the sky with eyes that have been haunting Dean for years.

"What the fuck, Sammy?" isn't much better than a "Hey Dean," as far as greetings go after eighteen years without each other, but it's about as much as he can trust himself to say. He leans on the fence and shakes out his hand, watches Sam smear blood from his split lip and lets himself take in the fact that, hey, he's not full of the crazy.

That's always a great big fat plus on his side.

He thought, for a little while, that maybe, just maybe, he was just insane and the person he'd been chasing was some random psychic Missouri had managed to dial into years ago. He'd even sat up one night with a bottle of whiskey and entertained the idea that he might be chasing after Max Fucking Miller for all he knew, and there was shit all he could do to figure it out.

It's good to know that it's just been Sam, being his usual bitch self.

"You finally get tired of running?" he asks, when it looks like Sam's plan is actually to just lie on his back and rub his sticky fingers together, "Or is there some special reason you decided to hang out on the side of the road to freakin' nowhere?"

"It actually goes to Cornwall," Sam says, and holds up his hand like he thinks Dean is going to actually take it and haul him upright. Aside from you know, being fucking pissed about having to chase his skinny little ass from one side of the continent to the other, he has blood smeared on him and for all Dean knows Sam could have some freaky blood-borne virus now.

Which doesn't explain why he hauls Sam up, but, whatever. "Dude. Cornwall?" It takes a second, because thanks to something he's got a huge bank of memories to sort through, but he gets it. "Maggie. And hoodoo granny? What the fuck, you have to save everyone, again? I gotta say, Sam, you've got an awesome martyr complex going on."

Sam sets his mouth stubbornly, but Dean's remembering how damn ridiculous Sam looked at eighteen, all gangly height and no weight, and he's snorting and shoving Sam's shoulder before he can help himself. It beats giving him a black eye to match that lip. "Seriously. The fuck, man?"

"I want to help them before people start dying."

Dean rocks back on his heels, then puts his back to the fence before he can give into the need to haul off and smack Sam again. He scrubs his hand slowly against his leg, watches the small, dark smear of blood rub off into the cotton, and says, "That's not what I meant."

His brother (hell, it's good to think that again and have a person next to him who matches that description) lifts one side of his mouth in an awkward little half smile and looks away. "I know."

There's a moment of what amounts to pretty much silence; Dean can hear the whine of mosquitoes and the cows a hundred yards behind them are lowing to each other, but Sam's still as a statue and twice as quiet.

He's just about ready to give up on waiting and pummel the answers out of Sam when he breaks the silence.

"How have you been?" Sam asks suddenly, turning to look at him with earnest puppy dog eyes.

I'll take stupid questions for two hundred and fifty, Vanna. "Actually, I've been a little tense, Sammy," Sam's face relaxes a little bit when he starts talking, despite the fact that his tone of voice should be enough to make him defensive at the very least, "Something about having to chase a bitchy little psychic from one end of the country to the other."

"I, uh, I thought you'd give up if I made you run long enough?" Sam coughs under his breath when Dean turns and pins him with an incredulous expression. Winchester. Stubborn. What. The. Hell. Sam laughs a little when he looks up and sees Dean's face, shrugs his bare shoulders. "Yeah, I know. I was hoping you'd... stop remembering, or something."

"You're an absolute idiot, Sam."

Sam huffs softly. "Sometimes."

Another silent moment, but it's Sam's turn to break it this time, and Dean'll be damned if he makes this any easier for the brat. What the hell was he thinking all this time?

"I," Sam stops, tries again, "What's the last thing you remember from before?

"Clearly? Meg playing mumbly-peg with my head," Sam flicks a glance up towards the back of his head and grimaces; for just a second, Dean'd be willing to swear that there's a hand probing at his skull and he reaches over to smack Sam again. "I'm fine, man.

"Anyway, everything gets pretty fuzzy after that." Fuzzy as in dead. "I remember you making a deal with demons like a friggin' retard though."

"You would have done it for me."

And yeah, he probably would have, if he could have made sure it wouldn't backfire all to hell and back. But that was him and this was Sam and Sammy didn't get to make those kinds of choices, those kinds of sacrifices. "No, I wouldn't have. But see, I'm not a total idiot."

Sam makes a face somewhere between disbelief and a smile as he says, "Liar." He scoffs a hand through his hair, slaps one of the early mosquitoes drifting lazily around his arm. "The. The jinniyah liked me, I think, because there were a lot of ways it could have gone wrong, but I just wished... I wished that everyone was still alive, you know?"

She probably did like him, Dean thinks, because if she didn't... he's glad that Mom being alive doesn't involve a burn ward or a million other things that could have gone wrong with a wish like that. But at the same time...

That's not all you wished, was it Sammy? "What else?"

"Nothing, that was it," Sam's tugging on his hair though, flicking his fingers through his bangs in one of those tells Dean's never been able to beat out of him. In some ways it seems like Sam's the same person he grew up with, and in some ways he doesn't, because he keeps seeing all that unscarred skin and he wants to stare.

"Uh-huh," he says after a minute of letting Sam twist his hair into even more ridiculous whirls, "And if that nothing has anything to do with the fact that I've had to chase your ass for the last six years, I'm going to kill you."

"I wished that you guys could be normal."

Yeah, there it was. "You guys." Dean drawls, and watches the way Sam goes from twisting his hair to scratching the back of it. Uncomfortable and guilty and Dean is going to kill his scrawny butt. "You wished we could be normal, fine, okay, I can work with that. Not that I ever wanted normal, but, whatever.

"What did you wish for you?" he asks.

"That I'd remember." Sam stops messing with his hair and glances at him from the corner of his eye. Dean's waiting for what he knows is coming next, narrowing his eyes as Sam picks at the moldering wood of the fence. "I never meant for you to remember too, Dean," Sam says finally, and Dean wants to hit him again.

The scary part is that Dean's pretty sure he wouldn't have remembered if the jinniyah hadn't taken a ghost touching her totem as a valid wish... maker person. "Because that makes it just peachy, Sammy."

Sam shrugs his bony shoulders, pulls a long sliver of wood off of the fence and tosses it over his shoulder. "You were supposed to be happy."

See, the thing is? A lifetime of Mom and Dad and normal and home versus a lifetime of pain and blood and loss and Sam, and there's no freakin' contest because one has Sam and the other doesn't. His brother's a total retard if he thinks otherwise. "You're something else, aren't you Sam?"

There's not too much they can say after that. Dean sits on the fence until his ass starts to feel like it's being cut in half and then he pushes off and goes to the Impala. He's jiggling his keys from hand to hand as he regards his baby, considering, before he turns back to Sam and raises his eyebrows.

Sam's watching him from underneath his too-long hair, worrying on his lip a little bit as he sneaks glances from the keys to the Impala to Dean's face like he's not sure if Dean's going to take off and leave him there. Dean really wants to hit him for being so stupid.

"So. You coming?"

A grin is tossed his way, so familiar it hits him in the gut and almost makes him tear up. No way in hell is that happening, though, so he blinks rapidly, turns his eyes towards the sun so that he can have an excuse if that doesn't work.

Sam's not paying attention to him though, because he vaults over the fence with easy, long legged grace he immediately negates by almost falling flat on his face a second later. Dean snorts and holds back a comment about tripping on his own feet, because Sam had been the clumsiest bitch he'd ever met as a teenager; the only time that wasn't true was when he'd had a weapon in his hands.

He stops Sam before he can do more than rest his fingertips on the Impala, because this was starting to drive him nuts. "Where's your stuff, dude? No way you've been hitching without a backpack or a knife or, hell, a shirt."

There's a knife produced from Sam's jean pocket, quick as a flash. "I had a gun," he says as he tucks the switchblade back into his pocket and scratches abruptly at the small of his back. Dean can see a smear of black on his fingernails when Sam pulls them around to look, and rolls his eyes. The mosquitoes are getting bolder.

"Yeah. You had a gun. You probably had a shirt at some point too, princess. Past tense. Where's your stuff?"

His brother trails his fingers along the Impala's shiny black paint and mumbles, "I got mugged," down at her.

Dean has to stare at Sam for a minute because no way did he hear that right. Then he doubles over and laughs; Sam makes a pissy face at the clouds, folds his arms and tells him to laugh it up. He can't stop snickering though, because Sam's freakin' huge already, even if he's got no weight behind it, and he has psychic powers for God's sake and he got mugged by--

"A truck driver waving a gun. Shut. Up. Dean."

A truck driver with a gun. And a beer belly. Dean snorted some more, took Sam's punch like a man and wondered out loud what the hell a truck driver with a beer belly would want with Sam's shirt of all things.

"He, ah. He said he had a daughter that would really like my shirt," Sam holds up his hands when Dean starts wheezing with laughter, looks somewhere between mad and horrified, "Man, I was just glad to get out of the truck before they decided they wanted my pants too."

Sam's rubbing his fingers into the Impala's hood, petting it like a lost kitten as Dean practically howls with laughter. It's a good long while before he can get himself under control again and even then he's smiling like he hasn't in twenty-some odd years.

"Jerk," Sam mutters when Dean can finally breathe again.

"Yeah, yeah," Dean gives one last laugh, looks at Sam out of the corner of his eye, and feels that warm squishy feeling start up again. He squashes it ruthlessly.

"Okay," Sam's fidgeting suddenly, squinting into the setting sun as he taps his fingers against the Impala's hood. "So, now what do we do?"

Dean knows that he's talking about where they're going, what they're going to do, if he's going to beat the shit out of his little brother for being gone. And, okay, he really wants to beat the crap out of Sam right about now, but.

Sam's shoulders have rounded up and he hasn't seen his little brother in twenty years, and getting drunk sounds like a pretty valid option.

"We're going to get drunk. Or I am, at least." Dean grins and jostles Sam's shoulder with his own, because Sam's back at a normal human height for another few months at least. "You're too young to drink, aren't you kiddo?"

Sam's face pulls up into the expression Dean is always going to associate with him screaming that he doesn't want to poop in the potty, then smoothes out again. "You didn't care the first time I was underage."

"And look how well you turned out," Dean says and sniffs loudly when Sam turns pissy eyes at him. "No alcohol for ickle Sammy-kins." He slaps Sam on the back, in the exact place where he can see a gigantic mother of a bug bite coming up nicely, and smirks when Sam actually has to catch his balance before he shoots him a dirty look.

Awesome.

Yeah, he'd had Gayle for twelve years, but, man, it felt good to have his little brother again. Dean knows every expression on Sam's face, knows the way he'll move before he does it, and dammit, he fucking missed the pain in the ass.

If that's not a reason to get drunk and be an obnoxious big brother, he doesn't know what is.

"Dude," Dean says.

Sam glances up from counting the amount of beer Dean has gleefully polished off and looks his brother over. It'll only take a few more bottles before he can nick Dean's shirt right off his back, he figures, and slaps another mosquito acquainting itself with his chest.

"Dude," his brother mutters again, softly, "We cannot call the Yellow-Eyed Demon Yellow-Eyed Demon for the rest of our lives; I vote we name him… Bob."

"He's dead, man. I don't think it matters what we call him." Sam's watching the way the mosquitoes are going out of their way to stay away from Dean, not really paying attention to whatever his brother's babbling about; he used to be used to the way Dean's mind wandered when he drank too much.

Dean's grating and he's loud and he's the most important person in his life.

Sam's willing to die for a lot of people; he's learned he's willing to live for Dean. If living involves humoring his brother while bloodsucking bugs make a snack out of him, he can live with that. Mostly. "Seriously Dean. Bob?"

"What? It's easy to remember and it just goes with 'Meg,'" Dean throws quotes up around the word with his fingers, rolling his eyes and finishing his beer in the same moment, "Meg and Bob. Bob's an annoying son of a bitch that can't stay dead; you ever meet a good guy named Bob?"

"Uh, Bobby, for one. Man, you're totally messed up aren't you?"

"The only thing wrong with me is Bob," Dean declares to the sky, spreading his arms out as he tosses the empty bottle somewhere off to the left and flops back into the grass, "Bob needs to go drown. Heh. Drowning Bob. That's kind of an oxy-whatever isn't it?"

Dean's waving his fingers around in the air, happy and mostly content, so Sam isn't going to tease him for knowing what an oxymoron is. At least not until he's hunched over the side of the road tomorrow, puking his guts out.

He's an awesome brother like that.

Dean mouths 'Bob' one last time, then props himself up onto one elbow and reaches for a bottle Sam's only too happy to supply. Sam gives him a minute to chug down half of it, then tangles his fingers in the hem of Dean's shirt and gives an experimental tug; Dean lifts obligingly, and he's happily peeling his brother out of the shirt he's been coveting for hours.

It's too big in the shoulders and it smells vaguely like Dean picked it up at a Good Will and refused to ever wash it again, but it'll keep most of the little mosquitoes away from him.

Dean's eyeing him when he pops his head out of the neck hole, a kind of 'wait a minute…!' look on his face, before he starts snickering under his breath. "Scrawny."

"I'll be bigger than you in less than a year," Sam feels the need to point out, "So shut up. Before I decide to hide the beer somewhere high."

"Yeah, sure," Dean dismisses. He absently reaches out and smacks a mosquito that had just landed on the back of Sam's hand, then squints at Sam and says, "I tell you that if you take off again, I'm gonna put a leash on you? I have one all picked out and everything. It's pink."

"Yeah, you did." Vibrant pink. Pink enough that it kind of made his eyes cross. Sam's got a sneaking suspicion that Dean's spent a little too much time thinking about it, because there's also a eye-searingly purple collar that Dean assured him would fit around his neck and a lead long enough to "let you go do your business by yourself like a big boy, Sammy."

Sam's pretty sure Dean's not kidding in the slightest.

"Good." Dean settles his hand back on his chest and yawns hugely. "Don't leave me again, Sammy."

There's a wealth of feeling behind those words. Sam already knew that they weren't okay, that they weren't going to be okay for a very, very long time, but it's still a punch in the gut to hear his big brother practically begging him to stay. He thought Dean would be okay with Dad and Mom. He hadn't stopped to consider just how stubborn Dean could be.

Sam reaches out and touches Dean's bare shoulder briefly, before pulling his arms completely into the sleeves of his shirt and crossing them over his chest. He'll go get another shirt out of the Impala as soon as Dean passes out. "I know how to stay, jerk."

Dean waves his beer bottle lazily at him and grins. "Heel, bitch," he says amiably, then shouts when Sam reaches over and peevishly upends the bottle all over Dean's chest.

Sam wakes up because Dean's got his ice cold hands shoved up the back of his shirt. He makes a face, rolls over onto them so that Dean'll have pins and needles in twenty minutes, and goes back to sleep.

Dean wakes up because there's something suspiciously warm sliding down his bicep and his hands feel like they're on fire. He pulls a face at the sky, jostles Sam's head off his shoulder, and yanks his hands around so that they're resting on Sam's belly.

He realizes Sammy's awake when they're slapped hard enough to sting. "Man, keep your own damn hands warm," Sam says fuzzily.

"You're in my space, Sam. Deal with it."

Sam grumbles something that sounds suspiciously like hewas the one being clingy, so he goes to jab his fingers into one of the scars that still hurt sometimes. Hey, it's a big brother's prerogative.

Only there's about a mile of uninterrupted skin under his hands and he's scrunching his eyebrows together and sitting up before he wakes up enough to realize that sleeping next to Sam isn't exactly normal anymore, and then he slumps back into the grass and mutters "leash" direly under his breath.

Sam makes a rude noise back at him and shoves his shaggy head into his shoulder. Dean gives him to the count of fifteen, then inserts his hands back under Sammy's (his, dammit, that shirt was his) shirt, and is asleep again before that hangover he can feel pulling at the back of his head takes over.

They head towards Cornwall in the morning, because Sam's insistent on talking to hoodoo Granny before she ups and has her stroke. They've got an agreement on this though, and as Dean chugs water and advil he thinks that it's going to be nice to go home afterwards.

But for now...

"I want you to tell me about," he waves a hand in between them, squints even behind his sun glasses as Sam scratches a bug bite bloody, "Everything. Your life. You know. Hunts, weird new fears, if you somehow managed to bang a celebrity before they got famous..."

"You're a pig, Dean," Sam says; he wipes his bloody fingernails off on the jacket he's filched from Dean's duffle bag. After a moment where Dean's almost afraid he's going to have to beat it all out of his brother, Sam murmurs: "I'll show you mine, if you show me yours."

It's tit for tat after that, one story for another, and by the time they get to Cornwall, Dean's ready to hunt down anyone who ever handled the case file of one James Taylor and Sam is leaning back, obsessively flipping through that encyclopedia he calls a brain to figure out what's ugly enough to scar Dean for life.

It's the second of May when John gets a postcard from his son for the first time in almost a year. Dean's been in sporadic contact with them since he'd run away; he'd forwarded them a copy of his GED four years ago and they'd sent him the Impala's registration as a reward, but they haven't seen him in years.

It's a relief to pick up the card and flip it to see the simple "Dean" scrawled at the end of a message, to be able to hand it to Mary and watch her eyes fill up with tears. They're boy is alright.

The card reads a simple, "Found Sammy. Coming home. -Dean."

They're not sure what to make of Dean's Sammy; Dean's been talking about a Sam for so long that they're just grateful he's finally found one that passes the test. John's vaguely worried that he won't have anyone to carry on the family name, Mary's humming to herself as she airs out Dean's room, and Abby just crosses her arms and scowls bitterly at the idea of her runaway brother coming home.

There're some bridges to mend there.

Mary's practically giddy for the next few days, telling him over and over again that she's so happy her son is finally happy and John lets that carry him through right up until the moment one tall son of a bitch unfolds himself from the front seat of the Impala.

The kid can't be any older than Abby is, eighteen at the most, but he's the tallest boy John's ever seen and his fists clench at the thought that this kid could physically overwhelm Dean if he wanted to. He's got hands the size of Kansas and he's wearing what are clearly Dean's clothes, because they're hanging on his skinny little shoulders like sails. John can already tell that he isn't going to like this kid one bit.

Or at least, he spends a minute thinking that before the kid hesitantly meanders up the stairs after Dean and then.

Well, all John can think is that kid has Mary's smile and his father's eyes and the same damn dimples that are creasing Dean's cheek as he hugs his mama. His mind automatically supplies "baby-boy" and "Sammy" in place of the simple Sam the boy offers and for just a second, he knows this boy like he knows his wife and his daughter.

Then it's gone and he figures he must have been imagining it. The kid's eyes are hazel, murky-green, maybe, and that's a common enough color, and the smile is just blinding, not familiar. It's all in his head.

"So, who's this handsome young man?" Mary asks a minute later, arm still slung around Dean's back as she turns a brilliant smile on Sam

Sam ducks his head and Dean snorts softly before reaching out and punching him in the arm. "Dude. Don't do the shy routine."

"I'm Sam," he says after shooting Dean a filthy look. Huh. That's the second time the boy's introduced himself, and John's just noticing that both times he didn't give a last name. Odd. "It's. It's really nice to meet you." He smiles again, ducks his head like he doesn't really want anyone to see it.

One look at Abby and John can tell the girl is smitten.

This was going to be wonderful.

They've only been given one bed; Mom had just smiled and winked at their horrified faces while Dad pretended to be busy staring at something down the hallway. Sam had gotten stuck trying to tell them that no, no they were just--

Dean's elbow in his side had told him, that, no, they really weren't brothers to their parents. Because Sam wasn't a Winchester anymore. He'd ended up stuttering out that it really wasn't like that while Dean gave an uncomfortable little grin and shrug.

Mom had just smiled wider and patted Dean on the shoulder. "You don't have to hide anything from us, sweetie," and that had been the end of that.

They spend a long minute contemplating the bed and then they both sigh. The bed's too short for his legs and there is no way in hell that the both of them are going to be able to share it without some kind of wrestling match, so Sam pretty much figures he gets the floor until they leave. Great.

Dinner's in twenty minutes.

Sam's flopped out on the bed, arm over his eyes as Dean flips through his perfectly preserved closet. He can hear people moving around downstairs; hear Dad bellowing for the meat and Mom yelling back to go get it himself. Another voice joins in, all sullen tones, and he grins suddenly.

Abigail, as she introduced herself, had been a surprise. She's blond haired and green eyed, shorter than their mom and she had glared at Dean before stomping off. "Man, your little sister hates you."

"At least she's not checking out my ass," his brother responds. Sam pulls his lip up, waves a lazy finger in Dean's general direction because that was creepy as all fuck. Not only did his parents think he was fucking his big brother, his little sister, who he just now found out about, was trying to flirt with him. She's his age and she's cute but, no. On so many levels.

Dean tosses a shirt his way, mutters to himself a little bit more, and then hauls another one out. "These should fit your pretty little shoulders, princess."

"Fuck you," Sam says automatically.

"Not right now, honey," Dean murmurs, "I've got a headache."

Dean goes still when the nearest hanger beams him in the back of the head before going back to innocently hanging from the rack. He shoots Sam a dirty look that Sam doesn't have to see to know is there and kicks the bottom of his foot. "Bitch."

They leave three days later because they're both getting prickly. Sam's tired of sleeping on the floor and Dean's tired of Gayle attempting to glare him into oblivion because she wants a shot at his "boyfriend."

He's spent a good few hours laughing himself sick as Dad pulls Sam aside and gives him the lecture on treating his son right, but that's cut pretty short when Sam raises his eyebrows and tells him that Dad's assuming he's the bitch in their relationship. Then it's more a matter of telling Sam to shove it when he starts whispering "overcompensating" under his breath.

There's a haunting in Ohio and Sam's been keeping an eye out for the shapeshifter in Missouri but Dean's thinking about heading for Cape Girardeau and taking care of the Killer Truck before it... actually turns into a Killer Truck. Sam just pulls out a map and traces a route when he mentions it, so he's pretty down with that.

Mom presses sandwiches into Sam's hands and kisses him on the cheek, tells him not to be a stranger and to take care of her son. Dean rolls his eyes when Sam grins at her and cheekily says that it's a full time job keeping Dean from doing something stupid.

Gayle's got on a top that almost has Dean shrugging out of his jacket and dropping it on her shoulders; he can't say that he misses missing her growing up, because she's a class-A little bitch right now with a wardrobe skimpy enough to make him ashamed for her. And the fact that she's flaunting it in front of Sam makes him want to both laugh hysterically and cringe.

Sam offers her a small smile, backs up and curls into himself a little when she steps forward. Gayle crosses her arms under her breasts, pushes them up on display like they need any help in that top, and Dean has to walk towards the Impala before he can give into the urge to tell her to go put some clothes on.

Dad's waiting against the car, running his hands along her sleek lines, but he doesn't say a word when they come up. He smiles a little, nods his head, and then he and Sam are settling into his car and driving away.

"It's a squonk," Sam says out of nowhere, when they've hit the highway.

"Uh-huh, sure it is," Dean doesn't look away from the road because there's some pissy mini-van full of face pulling kids in front of him but he flicks a few fingers in Sam's direction, "Mind clueing me in on this little conversation, Francis?"

"That thing you found when you were thirteen?" Sam says like he's stupid and has zoned out in the middle of a conversation. Dean's pretty damn sure that he mentioned that thing in passing weeks ago, before they finished taking out little Maggie and headed home. "I think it's a squonk."

"The ugly little son of a bitch?" he asks, just to make sure.

"Squonk," Sam says firmly. Dean risks a glance at him that tells him pretty much what he already knows; Sam's got his head tilted back in the 'I'm thinking, don't bother me' pose that makes Dean instantly want to throw cheetos at him.

"They're a type of, ah," Sam clears his throat uncomfortably and says, "Fearsome critter," like he's just waiting for the teasing. He keeps going before Dean can do more than start grinning, "They're so ugly that they spend their whole lives crying."

"And they turn into water?"

"Tears," Sam corrects idly.

"Huh." Goddamn, I missed you, Sammy, Dean thinks, awed. Dude, who else knows what he's talking about when his only description was ugly as sin and cried a lot? "That's my encyclopedia," he says instead. Awesome.

"Bite me."

They'll come back to visit Mom and Dad and Gayle later. For right now, Dean's pretty content to turn the music up to drown out Sam's bitchy silence and head towards Missouri.