Pretty Damn Good

"This is gonna sound weird," Sam said.

There was only the faintest of slurring in the words. Sam had been never been much of a drinker for most of their lives, though intake had increased over the past few years. Probably had something to do with all the crap in their lives, Dean surmised; and maybe, too, with big brother. The lies. The violence. The shit-ton of, well, shit that had rained down on their lives. Some of it their doing. But not all. God help them, not all.

Yeah. God. Had something to do with it, too.

Dean shifted. They'd imported a stained and scuffed leather couch from a thrift store a few weeks before—were the Men of Letters so dead in the ass they sat only upon wooden chairs?—and now were flopped casually at either end. Side by side, digesting dinner, but with a world between them. And then there was the slightly wobbly coffee table from a different thrift store, that Dean had stripped and stained so the only bottle rings visible upon the surface came from those they achieved themselves, because coasters were not a Winchester thing, though Sam occasionally shoved a napkin under his beer. The table was now Minwax's Gunstock brown, because he'd found it amusing in its appropriateness. Maybe the couch was Wendigo tan, or some such thing.

Feet were set upon the table. Sam's sock-feet, because he took off his boots before hoisting heels onto the table. Dean never bothered. He'd stripped and stained the thing; he could rest boots on it if he wanted. Sam had given up trying to house-train him.

Dean knocked back a gurgling slug of his sixth—seventh?—beer. "Weird is what we do."

"So, I'm a little buzzed," Sam confessed.

"Ya think?"

"And maybe this will strike you as really, totally stupid—"

Dean raised a skeptical brow. "'Maybe'? You're buzzed, Sam; there's no 'maybe' about it, if you're starting off with 'This is gonna sound weird.' I'm pretty sure whatever comes next will definitely be really, totally stupid."

Sam grunted the way he did when he disagreed, but wanted to continue the conversational thread without getting sidetracked. "Four years, man."

Dean waited for more than that. Other than marking time, the words meant nothing. But when Sam didn't say anything more, Dean turned his head and gazed at him.

God, but the kid's all grown up. Still the irredeemable hair, still the puppy-dog eyes when he needed them (or thought he did), but the rest of him . . . well, hitting your 30s did that.

Big moose of a man, yup; Crowley had it right. Almost six-five, two-twenty last time Sam had said, with incredible reach and, when he uncorked it, massive strength and almost unlimited power. Even without juicing on demon blood.

I am not small, Dean reflected. Because he wasn't, not at six-one and one-ninety. But no one actually sees me when I'm standing next to Sam. Because he's just so damn big!

Though, yeah; ladies noticed him. Maybe he wasn't 'so damn big,' but he did okay.

And he realized, right then, that he was a little buzzed, too. Maybe he was on his eighth or nineteenth beer.

Dean prompted his very large little brother. "'Four years.' Four years what?"

"Almost four years," Sam rectified.

Which seemed significant to his brother, but told Dean nothing at all other than an amendment of a timeframe. "Sammy—"

"You were gone. Absent. Not in my life. I mean, there were other times, yeah. You were dead, or in hell, or purgatory." Dean squinted one eye at the off-hand tone, Sam making it sound like he'd gone out to a convenience store or something equally mundane. "But this was different. This was me."

Dean unsquinted and stared at him. "Use your words, Sam. Or—" —he waved a hand, "—use other words. The kind that, you know, make sense. Because I got no clue here, man."

Sam finally swiveled his head and met Dean's eyes. "Stanford."

Dean rubbed hard at his brow. A headache threatened, and he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with his beer consumption. "A fancy-ass school in Palo Alto for a hundred bucks, Alex."

"Look at us. Look at this." Sam's flap-handed gesture apparently was intended to encompass the entire bunker. "All those motels, the occasional rental house or apartment, even the Impala. Home. And I hated it. So I removed myself from all of it. And I . . . " His tone dropped. "And I lost you. For almost four years I didn't even know you, Dean. I mean, you told me you were twenty-six when you came to get me when Dad was missing. Like you expected I didn't know."

"Well, did you?" He meant it to tease, to be brotherly snark. It came out a little more belligerent than that.

"I knew," Sam said. "Every January 24th, I toasted your birthday. Four times. Four years. Would have been five, and God knows how many more if you hadn't come to get me."

That pinched. It also threw Dean back into thoughts of the djinn's alternate world. Would it have been that way for real? Brothers in blood, but not spirit? "So, you don't think we'd ever have kissed and made up? That now, all these years later, we still wouldn't be speaking?"

In dim lighting, Sam's eyes were dark. "You don't know how many times I was afraid there wouldn't be any years at all, Dean. You and Dad could have been killed on a hunt, and I'd never know. It was why—" And he broke it off, just like that, looking away quickly.

Dean frowned at him. "Why what?"

Sam shrugged. "Nothing." And drank beer.

He insisted. "Why what, Sam?"

Sam heaved a sigh, picked briefly at the bottle label with thumbnails. "You know how you said Dad checked up on me sometimes when I was at school?"

"Yeah."

"I made Bobby promise to call me now and then, let me know you were still alive."

Dean's mouth dropped open. "You had Bobby call? Sam, we hadn't seen the guy for, what, 4-5 years before the car wreck! Why would you bring Bobby into it?"

More importantly, why hadn't Sam called him?

Then again, in those days Dean really was John's perfect little soldier and would have told him Sam had called, and that was a can of worms Sam not only had walked away from but stomped on when Dad told him to stay gone.

"I needed to know," Sam said. "It wasn't often. Couple of times a year. Bobby knows—Bobby knew—everything about everyone." He hitched one shoulder in a defensive little half-shrug. "I didn't stop caring, just because we weren't speaking. And it wasn't like either of you were working 9-5 jobs in an office building."

"So you enlisted Bobby as a snitch?"

Sam smiled a little. "My big brother's Big Brother."

Dean scowled. "He never told me that."

"That's because he was a sneaky bastard," Sam pointed out.

Dean stared hard at his amber-hued bottle as old grief bubbled up, as it sometimes did. "Damn Dick Roman."

After a moment, Sam said, "Yeah."

"So, why exactly are we talking about this? I mean, we didn't have contact for almost four years, and it was stupid, and it sucked . . . but why this conversation now?" He pointed at Sam's bottle with his own. "It may have something to do with that being your twentieth beer, but—"

"Sixth," Sam clarified, as he would.

"But," Dean reiterated, "I don't think that's it. Or not all it is. Why this? Why now?"

Sam stared at him. "Look at your phone."

"What?"

"Look at your phone, Dean."

"And you call me bossy." But Dean dug his cell out of his pocket nonetheless. "Yeah? It's a phone. You make calls with it. Receive calls on it. Write messages. Can even view porn on it. What am I doing with my phone, Sam?"

"Look at the date."

"So it's November 2nd—"

And Dean stopped dead.

He stared at the screen, at the readout. At glowing white numbers.

November 2nd.

"Crap," Dean declared.

Sam said, "Thirty-two years and three-hundred-and-sixty-four days ago, everything was white-bread, apple pie in the Winchester household in Lawrence, Kansas. Big brother Dean almost five, little Sammy one day shy of six months. Now here we are some three hours and change away from that place, thirty-two years and three-hundred-and-sixty-five days later, living in a bunker built by a secret society dedicated to tracking the supernatural. And I'm thinking I wasted four years . . . that I lost my brother because I was a selfish asshole."

Yes, Sam was buzzed. Maybe he was, too; or maybe he wasn't. Dean pulled his legs off the table, leaned forward, thumped his beer down on the surface. It might leave a pale, sweaty ring in the Gunstock wood stain. It might not. He didn't care.

Dean looked his brother dead in the eye. "It wasn't selfish to want to go to college, Sam. It never was. And you never lost me. One day we would have met up again, even without Dad disappearing. Because what we've got is for life. Hell, it's even for death. It's bone-deep. And I don't give a damn if this is some kind of weird-ass co-dependency, or a foxhole brotherhood in addition to being real brothers, but it's for good. It's forever. And I wouldn't have it any other way."

Sam looked back. His eyes were steady. The faintest of curve of his mouth crept into a dimple-displaying smile. "Damn straight."

"Damn straight." Dean nodded with finality. "So, I think that's enough caring-and-sharing for the next decade. And I'm breaking out the whiskey. Want some?"

"Yeah."

Dean went off, pulled out the bottle, poured two fingers' worth into two tumblers, handed one to his brother as he returned to the couch. "Here's to . . . " He paused as he sat down, settled his ass into a cracked leather cushion. "What are we drinking to?"

"Mom and Dad." Sam paused. "Bobby."

Dean nodded after a moment, remembering fire and heat, his dad shouting; remembering, too, Bobby's growled 'idjits.'

Then he added something—someone—more. "And to a girl who made a Smurf t-shirt look really hot."

Sam smiled; he could do that, now, when he thought of her. "To Jess."

"Who really was way out of my little brother's league, you know."

"And in yours?"

"Hell, yeah."

"In your dreams, short-bus."

They grinned at one another. Yeah, Dean thought, what we have now, what we've made, is pretty damn good.

Then, in perfect accord, they knocked back whiskey.

~ end ~

So, after watching the S11 finale a second time, I went back and viewed the pilot again, for like the sixth or eighteenth time. Yup. Then was, and now remains, pretty damn good.

Nah. Better.

Heights/weights courtesy of JP and JA. Jared said on a DVD he's six-five, though he usually claims six-four. At a con he mention he weighed 220 and was 30 pounds heavier than Jensen, who has said he is six-one. Then on the show they put the guys in boots. It's no wonder Richard Speight once said it's the only cast on TV where the leads look like they could be demon hunters!