One.

Things are getting weirder
At the speed of light
Nightmare girl
All this fever dreaming kills my appetite
For love and restless nights

--"Nightmare Girl," Aimee Mann

"Take Sammy out to the car. Now, Dean! Go!"

Dean clutched his baby sister to his chest, and ran.

-----

Sam liked playing pool. She was good at it- one of the few skills that her hunter family tried to teach her that she ever really picked up. Maybe it was because nobody died if she lost a game of pool. Or maybe it was because Dean had taught her, and not her dad. Even now, she could easily remember long-ago shooting lessons, holding her daddy's pistol that felt like it was bigger than she was, Dad standing behind her and correcting her aim, over and over again, always with this level, patient voice that drove her up the wall.

If she was remembering the incident correctly, she'd turned around, slapped the gun into his palm, and stormed back to their hotel rooms, where her books and her soccer ball and Dean were waiting.

At least she'd remembered to put the safety on, first. Her Dad would have been a hell of a lot more pissed off at her if she'd accidentally shot his hand off instead of simply "shirking" her lessons. Like she'd ever wanted to learn how to fire a gun in the first place.

But learning how to play pool was different. Dean had started to teach her when she was twelve and he was sixteen, a two-year gap between the painful, frustrating shooting lessons and tracking lessons and hand-to-hand lessons that had never ended well, because Sam the girl could never measure up to Daddy's standards or Dean's example. For some reason, she'd never held it against Dean, maybe because he'd always gone out of his way to show her the right way, patient in a way that didn't grate along her nerves like Dad's did, always doing his best to make sure that Dad didn't leave her behind, either literally or metaphorically. She'd never wanted to learn how to hunt, but by God she would keep up with her big brother or die trying, and he'd never resented her or made fun of her for it.

Well, much.

He'd taught her in a hundred different bars all across the country, not the trendy new clubs that throbbed in the heart of cities like canker sores but the old kind, where old men came in to have a drink and tell stories and parents brought their kids and Dean brought his little sister, big-eyed and lanky with her hair chopped short because sometimes it was just easier if she went out of her way not to remind her dad that she wasn't, actually, a boy. At sixteen Dean had still looked ridiculously young and pretty- it wasn't until nineteen that he suddenly filled out and started looking like a younger, less grizzled version of Dad- but he was already charming enough that he could get a drink out of almost any bartender, and he'd always sneak a sip to Sam and talk about whatever pretty girl that caught his eye as he showed Sam the proper posture, the proper grip, the best way to calculate angles and shots, how to tell the difference between a gullible mark and someone who'd kick your ass six ways from Tuesday if you tried to hustle him.

Thinking back, Sam figured that it was probably her brother's fault that she was where she was. Because if he hadn't decided to start a running commentary on his sex life just about the time his libido kicked into overdrive, she probably wouldn't be standing here, dazed with dislocation and cheap beer, in the middle of a gay bar twelve blocks off campus with a pretty girl smiling across the table at her.

"Guess that's your game," the girl said. She was blonde, and just about Sam's height- she hadn't gotten the six-foot-plus stature of either her father or her brother. She'd thought it was unfair till she was old enough to be glad that she didn't stand out in a crowd.

"Guess so," she said. She laid the pool cue down on the table, then took in the inviting gleam in the girl's smile and dug into her pocket, pulling out another half-handful of quarters and slapping them down on the table. "Want to go another?"

The girl's smile widened, and she tossed her thick hair off her shoulders, revealing a long, slender neck that Sam wanted to lick. "I'd love to."

Instead, she fed the quarters into the table, and offered her own inviting smile back across the table. "Your break."

Jess leaned over the table, her form almost perfect. "I'm Jessica, by the way," she offered, and broke.

Not one, but two balls in the pocket. Even Dean would be impressed. "Sam," she said in reply, and settled down to watch with pleasure as her new friend started to run the table.

-----

There were things that she wanted to tell Jess, sometimes, in the quiet time of the night when thoughts crowded into her brain, heavy and unwelcome. Some of them were even hers. Some of them weren't, and some nights she would feel Jess tossing restlessly next to her, and she'd see fragments of dreams that she never wanted to know.

There were things that Jess wanted to tell her, too. She wanted to say "I love you," even though she and Sam had only been dating a few months, and she didn't even know Sam as well as she thought she did. She wanted to know more, though. She wanted to ask "Who made you the way you are?" and the answer was both at once so simple and so complex (Dean) that Sam's answer dried up in her throat, born dead as ashes in her mouth before it could reach her tongue.

I was fifteen when I gave my first blowjob, Jess thought, and it was to my older brother, and Sam flinched away from the thought like it was poison, hiding in the library for hours after with her books open in front of her, not reading a word. She got a hold of herself and came home later, bringing cookies in a bakery bag as a white flag, and Jess never asked her what drove her away.

If she'd been anyone else, she might have replied in kind, offered her own confession as balm to heal Jess's wounds. But she wasn't anyone else, and she couldn't tarnish her memories that way. Because Jess's nightmares were a swirling mass of red and black, and an unshaven face with dark, bloodshot eyes, staring down at her while one hand cinched itself cruelly tight in her pretty, pretty hair, and she couldn't taste the cock in her mouth past the blood.

Sam remembered her first time. She and Dean had been lying on a motel bed, somewhere in the Midwest. It had been summer, and the sun had been streaming in past the half-closed curtains, heating the cheerful yellow sheets to a buttery warmth. Dean had been sprawled out on his back, half-sitting up against the headboard, and Sam was settled between his thighs, slowly licking at the head of the cock in front of him with all the hesitant curiosity of any fifteen-year-old girl giving a blowjob for the first time. Dean's left hand was knotted in the sheets, his knuckles turning white, but his right was cradled around her jaw, impossibly large, impossibly tender.

Sam already left the real thing behind once. She refused to double the betrayal by leaving behind her memories of her brother, too.

-----

For the vast majority of her twenty-two years here on this Earth, Dean had been the only thing in Sam's life that really mattered. She was always the odd one out in the unbalanced triangle of the Winchester family- the only girl, the only bookworm, the only one who didn't care about hunting, the only one that wanted a normal life. The only one that made waves. At the head of the triangle was their father, who ruled their little clan with a quiet sort of determination fueled by whiskey and vengeance, and right under him was Dean, the good soldier, the good son. It wasn't that Dad didn't care about her, or even love her, as far as the limits of his own heart would let him, but it was easier for him to put his love into the son that looked and acted like him, instead of the rebellious daughter in a warrior family with her mother's eyes. John Winchester had vowed to never love another woman. Apparently, that included his daughter, though Sam doubted he'd ever realized it.

For a long time she wished that things were different, but when was fourteen, trembling on the cusp of fifteen and what she thought at the time was adulthood, Dean kissed her for the first time, and that was the last day that Sam thought of her father as "Daddy."

She had someone else to love now, and Dean had always, always loved her back.

-----

She knew it was coming before it happened. It was like the smell of a storm, looming just over the horizon. Like the ominous warning rumbles of thunder, nightmares exploded into her sleeping hours with lightning-fast intensity, crystal-clarity that she could not, would not, ignore.

Her friends celebrated her academic triumph- higher scores than she'd had any right to expect, especially considering her patchwork high school education. But she knew more about the damage that could be done to the human body than a lot of doctors ever saw, and she'd already secured her interview for Monday morning, bright and early. She had no doubt that she'd be accepted into med school. All she had to do was show up.

She sat back in the midst of the seething revelry, nursed her drink, and tried to figure out how to get her and Jess out of town.

It wasn't really a surprise when Dean showed up. Like the lurking disaster, she'd felt him coming from miles away. She didn't know that Dad was missing, though. That was an unpleasant shock.

Nonetheless, it gave her the escape hatch she needed. She made Dean wait in the car and made Jess promise her that she'd stay with friends and packed her things and joked off her worry and came home early Sunday morning to cookies on the counter and the dawning realization that if she'd been two hours earlier, then Jess would still be gone and this wouldn't be happening. Her nightmare wouldn't be coming true.

If she hadn't followed Dean, if she hadn't gone right out that door like she'd just been waiting for an excuse, then Jess wouldn't have died. For all of her psychic gifts, she'd ultimately fallen to a very human weakness- she'd loved her brother more than her lover, and her lover had paid the price.

-----

Dean pulled her out of the fire, and held her after, cradling her smaller frame to his larger one like he hadn't since she was eighteen and walking out the door because no white picket fence in the world was big enough to hold a man like Dean Winchester. She twisted the front of his t-shirt in her fists and cried into his shoulder like she hadn't since standing in line to board the bus and watching Dean drive off because if Sam was going to leave him, then by God Dean was going to leave her first. And when her tears were all gone, she pushed him off and walked away.

Four days till the funeral meant three long nights, curled up in the overstuffed armchair because Dean hadn't thought to get a room with two beds. After the first night and the chair that had gone skidding across the room and painfully against his shins when Dean had tried to cross the distance between them, Dean had gotten the hint.

Four days and three long nights, and it wasn't until after the funeral that Sam spoke her first words to Dean since he'd pulled her out of the flames-

"We have work to do."

Dean didn't say anything. He just got in the car, and drove.