Rating:M(Hard, hard R now that the NC-17 stuff is gone)

Pairings:Dean/Castiel, Dean/Alastair, Dean/Gordon, Dean/Sam, Sam/Jess, Sam/OFCs, Dean/OMC's, Dean/Cassie

Disclaimer:I don't own

Summary:SPN AU based off the novela Marianela. The fire that kills Sam and Dean's parents leaves Dean disfigured and Sam blind. Sam is adopted by the Winchesters, Dean isn't. Or, in simpler terms, Dean is ugly, Sam is blind, and they meet.

Warnings: Underage dubcon, teen prostitution, some forced teen prostitution, prostitution, sex(most of the graphic stuff is gone), character deaths, racial slurs, language, and violence. This is a mature fic. Please read it as such.

A/N: I believe I've fixed all the mistakes with converting this from HTML, if I haven't, just let me know and I will fix them.

Lick the Valleys Up

Mommy is screaming so loud it hurts his ears.

Daddy screams too, but he's yelling words. Go get your brother.

Sammy isn't crying. He's quiet, sucking on his toes, all wet and slippery. His hands get wet with Sammy's spit and it's yucky.

The fire is real hot and he's not supposed to play with it. Daddy says fire is bad, that it burns, it'll hurt. He got burned when he touched a pan on the stove trying to get Sam's bottle. Mommy held ice to it while he cried.

Daddy shouts, pounding on the other side of the door. Go outside, now.

Fire is orange and it makes his face warm. The fire is all over the carpet, dancing on the door. Dean go.

He cries it hurts so much. His Batman socks are burning. The front door is blocked by a wall of fire. He jumps through. He's just like Batman. The fire is everywhere and Sammy's crying.

Mommy and daddy aren't screaming anymore.

Ellen Harvelle has been a PICU nurse for thirteen years. She's seen her share of injuries: amputations, children with IVs put directly into their spines, toddlers burning with fevers, brain dead little things on ventilators, just a hiss and click of the machine pumping to make them breathe. Dean Smith is the worst pediatric burn case she's ever seen. The burns are second and third degree, across thirty percent of his body, blistered and red, skin burned away completely, exposing his little bones and muscles, nerves singed away by the flames. Tell-tale brown spots seep through his gauze and it's all they can do to pump him full of antibiotics and hope to hold off infection until he's stable enough for skin grafts.

Social services taking his brother set his recovery back by weeks. When the worker took Sam Dean tried to crawl after her, pulled out his ET tube and flopped to the floor, wheezing with a collapsed lung, scabs across his burns ripped open. Social services say they'll come for Dean when he's ready for discharge. They're trying to find a foster home equipped to handle physically handicapped children, but they say he'll likely end up in a group home. What they don't say is that equipped really means willing. They need to find parents willing to take Dean in. No one wants an ugly child; it's why the Winchesters only took Sam. A baby with burned retinas is better than a disfigured four year old.

"Good morning Dean, do you want to go for a little walk to the playroom today?" Dean doesn't talk because of the trauma. The removal of his brother has scarred him worse than the fire, worse than listening as his parents burn to death.

The soles of Dean's feet were burned almost black. They had to surgically remove three layers of charred flesh before they could reach skin worth salvaging, where blood still flowed. The skin is raw pink and tender, Dean has teeny blue slippers he's supposed to wear, and he has to hold a nurse's hands to help keep some of his weight off his feet. Dean's been in the PICU two and a half months, without his brother for six weeks, and everyday he asks for Sammy, cries himself to sleep every night, stroking the fur of the black teddy bear the firefighters gave him. Ellen watches Dean play and thinks of her little Joanna, who is Dean's same age but a little bigger, with rows and rows of sun blonde curls. She looks at Dean and can't imagine her baby in here, is glad she doesn't have to, because she couldn't take it. Dean's parents are lucky to be dead so they don't have to see him suffer. Sam is lucky John and Mary Winchester wanted him, didn't leave him trapped in here, caught up in the endless cycle of his brother's suffering, Dean's recoveries and relapses, piercing screams in the middle of the night that have the night nurses talking.

"How about chicken fingers for dinner Dean?" Dean just pets his bear, cradles it like a baby. Dean calls it Chevy after the car. It's his only friend in the world, the only one on the ward who will go near him. The other children are afraid of him, because they say he looks like a mummy wrapped up in his bandages and that he's going to eat their brains. Dean's never looked so lonely.

Today is the first day he doesn't mention his brother.

The kids at school call him a monster, Quasimodo like from the Hunchback of Notre Dame. They point and stare and whisper. He can feel their eyes on the scarred half of his face, the stretched, glaringly pink skin. He can't look in the mirror sometimes he's so ugly, shockingly bright pink skin that never fades over white like a regular scar, the faint line of stitches from dozens of operations, pig's skin sewed onto his face until they could grow enough of his own skin for him. He doesn't like school. They put him in the classes for special needs kids because they think he's stupid. He's fourteen fucking years old and learning how to count past fifty, to remember how to write his name and number, the names of his parents. He doesn't have parents so he just pretends to be stupid, stares blankly when they try to get him to read. He doesn't have to talk if they don't think he knows how. He likes the silence. No one laughs at him when it's quiet.

"Hurry the fuck up Dean." Gordon pounds on the bathroom door hard enough that the sound echoes off the tiles. There are ten of them and two bathrooms to share. It always smells like piss because the younger kids can't make it into the toilet to save their lives. There's a puddle of it on the floor right now, sitting wet and yellow off to the side, in the lazy shape of one of the Great Lakes.

"There's another bathroom you know." The right half of his face isn't burned at all. If he covers the left with his hand sometimes he can pretend that he's normal. Everyone says the accident's a shame, because he'd have been so pretty, and he thinks if he had to choose he'd his face burned everywhere rather than just half. It's like knowing what could have been, how undeniably beautiful he should be. Sometimes girls see just the good half of his face and smile at him. They never smile at him once they see the other side though, the mangled flesh that shows him for what he is; a burn victim. A burn victim orphan is the worst fucking combo in the world. No respectable family wants a son who looks like something spawned by Freddy Krueger and Jason. The families that wouldn't mind to take him in are people he doesn't want to go with.

"Dean!" The doorknob rattles as Gordon twists it. Gordon's going to beat the crap out of him for this later. "Goddammit Dean!" Gordon kicks the door and the thin metal bolt flies off the wall, clatters on the floor beneath the sink. "I have to take a piss." Gordon shoves him out of the way and he falls on his ass into the puddle of urine. It soaks cold into the seat of his best pair of jeans, smells acrid like ammonia and saltier with a musky human scent. "Don't watch me piss, faggot." Gordon's already got his dick out of his pants, sighing in audible relief as he starts to relieve himself.

"Fuck you." He smells like piss and they don't do laundry for another two days and this is his last pair of clean pants."Asshole." His jeans and boxers are wet to the very crack of his ass, the denim clinging to him damp and heavy. Gordon is the biggest dick here. Gordon bitches about his parents' murders six years ago, says he's gonna become a cop so he can hunt the guy who did it down himself and shoot him square through the eyes. Gordon's got a little sister who visits him every once in a while, maybe three or four times a year, a perky little thing with pretty good tits for an eleven year old.

"Hey there Deano." There's no lock on the second bathroom door, it busted off long ago, before Dean even came here. Dean's been in this home the second longest, the only one who's lived here longer is Alastair.

"Hey." Alastair's older than him, he'll be eighteen in April, and then he has to leave. He's not quite sure how he feels about Alastair. There's something about him, something dark and secret. They say Alastair's mom was a crack whore and his dad was her pimp. They also say Alastair killed his father when he was three years old, shot him with his own gun. He doesn't know if it's true or not. What he does know is that Alastair has scars up and down his back, the lines of a belt welted permanently into his skin, right between his shoulder blades. Alastair smokes cigarettes and drinks and is pretty cool, insanely cool, really. He hooks up with hookers the block over for free, brings 'em back here and screws their pretty little brains out, lets the rest of them watch if they pay him. He still doesn't like being alone with him. Alastair looks at him funny, and once he caught Alastair cutting the legs off a sewer rat, watching it try and drag itself away on the bloodied stumps where its legs used to be, bones splintered and pink with blood. Alastair stamped on its head and the rat crunched loud enough for Dean to hear. Alastair picked up the mashed and bloody little body and put it in a shoe box; from where he was crouched he could see dozens of bones in the bottom, graying bits of flesh stuck to the yellowed bones.

"What are you doing?" Alastair keeps a pack of cigarettes in his back pocket, he slides a cigarette out and lights it with a silver lighter, one that has his name written across the front in cursive black letters.

"What does it look like?" He's standing barefoot on the bathroom floor, naked from the waist down, soaking his jeans and boxers in the sink. They only have the cheap flower scented soap that comes from dispensers; it makes the water a murky pink. "Washing piss out of my clothes." Scrubbing the pants with his hands is hard. His left hadn't doesn't work too well, it's stiff, skin and muscle only half his, half someone else's, and it feels tight every time he flexes his fingers, grips his jeans to rub more soap into the fabric. He hates his stupid cripple hand and his cripple face and his unfair ugliness. Gordon and Alastair and Zach and everyone else get to look normal. If he can just look normal maybe the people who took in his little brother will want him as well. He doesn't remember much about his brother only that his name is Sam, or was Sam, and that's it. He has one memory of Sam but it's one of those old memories, so old he can't draw detail from it, blurry as a reflection in a dirty puddle on the street.

"You have an accident Dean?" Alastair blows smoke in his face. Alastair always smells like smoke and dirty cigarettes. "Wet yourself huh?"

"Shut up." Gordon might be the biggest dick but Alastair is a close second. Alastair's staring at the left side of his face, where his skin literally melted and burned off his face, slopped off in charred flakes. He remembers how much it hurt, how hard it was, how he screamed, how his face and his arm and his parents went up in flames. His file says the fire was an accident, something electrical, a plug that sparked in the wall. It's kind of pathetic; how a faulty lamp could change his life, make him so fucking ugly. "You've seen my ugly face a million times Alastair, take a friggin' picture already."

"It's not that ugly." Alastair shuts the door carefully, quietly, leans against it with all of his weight. Dean swallows the bitter taste of panic. Alastair has a switchblade none of the adults know about, a silver, gleaming thing, good quality, better than anything they can buy on the street. "You're really not too hard on the eyes Dean, not too hard." Alastair's eyes drift down below his waist, the paleness of his thighs that Gordon's old t-shirt doesn't cover. "I've seen cunts uglier than you."

"I'm not a queer." He's really not, he only looks like one, with his pretty half of a face and girly plush lips, thinner than someone his height should be, hair a little long because he likes when it's long enough to cover the permanent blisters on the far left of his forehead.

"Do you really think you're gonna get pussy looking the way you do?" Alastair rolls his cigarette to the corner of his mouth, grips it lightly and holds it there between his teeth. "You aren't. Chicks are shallow Deano; they won't understand you like I do." Alastair unbuckles his jeans and lets them fall. He isn't wearing underwear. Alastair has more belt marks on the insides of his thighs, ugly reds and flat lines, most of them a faint pink or white if they weren't too deep. "I'm no beauty queen either. You and me kiddo, we gotta carry the scars of our pasts around on us forever while everyone else stores them where we can't see." Alastair wraps a hand around his cock, strokes it firm and beckons Dean forward with his other, so cool and casual as he smokes. Dean doesn't have friends, none of the boys around here like him, the older ones are too busy to care and the younger ones too afraid. Gordon's the only one who pays him any attention, beats his ass for hogging the shower and plays cards with him late into the night on Saturdays, brings back stolen beer for them to share if he's in the mood. Gordon's rarely in the mood to be nice, plus he's already got a best friend, a friend with parents. Gordon hangs with a guy named Kubrick most of the time, spends a lot of time at his house, smoking or looking at Playboy or whatever. He wants to have a real friend, someone who sees past the ugly.

He walks to Alastair and sinks heavy to his knees. Alastair smiles so nice at him, the way Dean remembers his mother smiling at him, like he's the best and prettiest thing around. He's never sucked dick before, but he's seen Alastair get his dick sucked, seen a couple other people get head in the bathroom at school.

*NC-17 scene deleted*

He isn't sure if he's supposed to swallow or spit it back. He can't make himself let Alastair's come into his stomach, because that can't be good for him, so he spits it right out onto the floor; white and milky near Alastair's bare feet. Alastair laughs and wipes a dribble of come from his chin, on the bad side, knuckle touching his weird feeling skin.

"Not too bad. You have real potential." Alastair gives him a cigarette, lights it for him. He coughs so much he thinks he might die, his eyes watering, and he forces the smoke down and out, over and over, mimicking the way Alastair holds it limply in his lips. "Believe it or not, but your mouth is the fucking prettiest thing this side of the state, even with a face like that." Alastair makes something bloom warm in his belly, something he realizes is pride. No one has ever said such nice things about him before.

"You really aren't disgusted by me?" He tips ash from the end of his cigarette onto the floor; it lands in the pool of semen.

"There are things out there a lot worse than you. Other people would agree with me."

"No shit?"

"Yeah. You know" Alastair gets this wicked grin, smile stretching from one side of his face to the other. "I bet there's people who would pay to fuck a pretty thing like you."

"Yeah right." He's seen hookers and whores, none of them have faces worthy of horror movies, the things parents tell their kids stories about at night to frighten them. He's not good enough to be even a hooker or a whore; he's just nothing, the lowest rung on the ladder of life.

"No I'm serious." Alastair looks like he's serious. He isn't smiling anymore, his forehead wrinkled in concentration. "You don't give yourself enough credit. You're living with a dangerously low dose of self-esteem my friend. That only leads to problems." He blew Alastair in the bathroom and that is definitely a problem in the grand scheme of things. "I have to be going. I'll catch you later, Deano."

Alastair has Dean ditch school half a week later, says he can tag along with him. Alastair buys him a chocolate shake at nine in the morning, stretches out on his side of the red plastic booth and watches the waitresses walk by, drinks three or four mugs of coffee before he finally pays the bill and asks the youngest waitress for a slice of pie to go, for the kid Alastair says, winking at him.

"Would you like to watch TV?" There is one television at the group home, but it's an old one, with a picture that's fuzzy at the edges and fades in and out during a bad storm. "There's a motel a few blocks over that charges by the hour. We could catch a couple hours or something."

"Fuck yes man." He licks pie crumbs from the corners of his mouth. He's never had pie before, it's so sweet and flakey and delicious. Alastair leads him to a motel and leaves him in the parking lot to go inside and get the key, gestures for him to walk around back so he can sneak him in.

"They don't let kids under eighteen in here. Stay out of sight or I'll leave your ass here." Alastair sits with him on the bed for a while, won't give him a cigarette when Dean asks, tells Dean to go wash his face and his hands, brush his teeth with a toothbrush he's carrying. He does what he's told, because it's not such a strange thing to ask of him. Alastair probably wants another blowjob or something.

When he comes back from the bathroom there is a man in the room with Alastair. The man is short, balding, and pudgy around the middle, with thin black rimmed glasses pushed up on the bridge of his nose. He's sweating through the collar of his button up blue shirt, even though it's only fifty-five degrees outside, the radiator in the room cranked on low.

"Jesus." The man rasps, loosening his tie. "You weren't kidding when you said he was messed up."

"You asked for damaged goods. You don't get more damaged than him."

"Alastair, what's going on?"

"Shut up and take your clothes off Dean." Alastair stares at him colder than ice. He takes his t-shirt off, slides his pants down to his ankles. He knows what Alastair is doing, why he's here, why Alastair was so nice to him today, the couple days before. "I'm telling you, you aren't going to get a better deal. You can't get a virgin ass this cheap anywhere."

"Okay." The pudgy man chokes, pulling a stack of bills from his wallet. Alastair sits in the corner, counting them slow and methodic as Dean rolls over onto his stomach, buries his face in his hands and waits. This isn't so bad either, not if he watches the headboard move forward into the wall, tenses the muscles in his belly rather than in his ass, rides out the ache and the slide of lube and latex between his thighs. It feels like forever before it's over, the weight off his back so he can breathe again.

"You did good." Alastair puts a hand on his sweaty shoulder and that pride blossoms again. It really wasn't bad at all. Alastair plucks three bills from the small wad of cash. Sixty dollars cash; someone paid sixty dollars to fuck his ugly ass into oblivion. Alastair leans over him, presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. "So goddamn good, my pretty little bottom bitch."

"Don't call me that." He laughs and Alastair spoons up behind him, slides right up where the other guy was before, pushes in without a condom and fucks him, hands on his hips. He feels something other than pride in his belly, that familiar heat of arousal from nights of jerking off silently in his bunk, alone in the bathroom, thinking about boobs and delicate fingers with painted nails touching him instead. Alastair fucks him softer than he thought was possible, fucks him and fucks him and fucks him. He's tired and sloppy and sore by the time Alastair finishes and he's got his own come smeared on his stomach, on the blankets. He dozes off like that, messy with come on him and in him, lube splashed onto the mattress, a used condom lying on the floor.

"What do you say about doing this again?" Alastair is smoking in his underwear when Dean wakes up, legs crossed at the ankles, money resting on his chest. "I don't know if you'd make sixty bucks in one go again, that's usually a first time thing, but you could make twenty or thirty a go, get five or six goes in a day and you're looking at a pile of cash, we both are."

"What good will it do me?" He's stuck for four more years. He could run away if he wanted to, if he had somewhere to go and some way to live. "Money can't get me out of here."

"I can." Alastair drags deep enough from his cigarette to choke on the smoke, drown himself in it, more smoke than air inside him. "I'm out of this shithole in a month and a half. I'll take you with me."

"You promise?"

"I'm a man of my word."

He starts ditching school twice a week to go with Alastair back to that same motel. Alastair buys him breakfast in the morning and he's fucked three times by noon, hiding the scarred side of his face in the pillow when Alastair tells him to, sliding his thighs like Alastair had him practice, stretches out an makes the tiniest moans. Others are into the disfigured thing and he plays that up when Alastair wants him to, lies flat on his back and lets them see, jerks them off with his burnt left hand, lets them rut against and come all over the splotchy uneven pink skin of his face. There are days he and Alastair can pull in almost a hundred and twenty dollars each. The cash racks up after a while and in a month he has a significant amount of money hidden in his pillow case, other bills tucked into the toes of his shoes, stuffed deep in his pockets. He's swimming in money sometimes, drowning in it. He buys ice cream and pie and giant cookies with M&M's, more sweets than he's had in all his life. He fills out a little more, stops looking like a sick kid, too knobby at his elbows with pale chicken legs. He looks slightly better than before, not that it's that hard, anything is a step up from the fucking burn unit face that's more like a Halloween mask than his skin.

It's a mucky cold day in early April, the kind of cold that should bring snow but doesn't, with a wind chill that makes his teeth chatter, his bones rattle in place. He tugs his jacket tighter around him, a leather jacket way too big for him, but it was the only size the store had. He'll grow into it is what Alastair says to him.

"Go pack your shit." This is the first duffel bag he's ever owned. The foster kids get nothing but a big black plastic garbage bag to lug their stuff around in from home to home. He never even got that. He's lived in the same place for ten years and he never had any stuff to begin with. His toys and clothes and parents burned up years ago. He had a stuffed bear for a few years, until he was too old for it, and the guys called him a baby. He stuffed it in a garbage can one morning and that night he cried but he got over it, like people do.

"You leavin'?" Gordon's drunk and it's eleven thirty on a Saturday morning. Gordon's still drunk from the night before, stumbled in the window at six, reeking of booze, puked on himself twice and none of them bothered to help him clean up.

"Yeah."

"Where are you going?"

"Los Angeles I think." LA is a long way away, out on the coast, further from Kansas than Dean's been.

"Lemme come with you." Gordon rubs sleep from his eyes.

"No." Gordon's normal, Gordon's got friends. Dean doesn't have anything, he needs to leave more. "Don't rat us out, okay?"

"No one fucking cares where you go." Gordon rolls over, settles under his sheets. The metal of the bunk bed creaks under the shift of his weight. "They'll be glad not to see your ugly face anymore."

Gordon meets him at the door anyways, dragging his brown army style bag by the strings.

"I want to come." Alastair looks Gordon over, sizes him up. Gordon's tall for someone his age, almost six feet at fifteen, hair buzz cut close to his scalp.

"Okay." Alastair shrugs, blows smoke in Gordon's eyes to see if it pisses him off. "You pay for your own stuff. We all pitch in for places to sleep."

The road to California is a long one. He blows truckers for rides when he can, takes the bus when he can't, sits with his face to the window, Alastair napping on his other side, head tipped forward with a cigarette always between his teeth. Sometimes the cigarette slips forward and falls burning on Alastair's collarbone, the butt a glowing orange. Alastair never notices. The smell of burning flesh makes Dean's insides scream so he picks it off for him, puts it back in his mouth or puts it out against the underside of his seat, grinds the ember down to ash. Gordon doesn't pay attention; Gordon's only there, sitting a seat behind Dean, napping against the window pane. The big cities pay great, when Alastair can find him work. They catch a movie in Chicago, an adapted to film version of Phantom of the Opera. It's a chick movie but the guy is just as ugly as he is, with the face of something terrible, corrupted from birth, who has never known the kiss of a woman, not even the touch of his own mother's lips. Dean can relate to that. Gordon calls him a pussy for it and Alastair touches his disfigured cheek with his thumb, brushes popcorn grease and butter across it.

Alastair fucks him during the night when he feels like it. Gordon watches sometimes, flat out on his stomach, half asleep, dark eyes bleary and reflecting the silver glow of the moon. Gordon doesn't say anything about it, just slides over when they're done so Dean can sleep in the bed. Alastair gets a bed to himself; it's a rule, one of the big ones. Alastair does something different one night, pulls his switchblade from beneath his pillow and clicks it open. He cuts little thin lines in Dean's skin that bleed more than they hurt, fat droplets of blood like precome that bubble up and slide wet over him. Alastair digs a hole with the switchblade, twirls it around while it's in Dean's flesh, below the notch where his throat and the top of his chest meet. Alastair carves out the skin there while blood spreads out of the wound like food coloring in water, small at first before it snakes its way along, darkening as it goes. His chest is painted red and Alastair rubs his fingers in it, gets them good and bloody. Gordon doesn't say anything about it. Gordon wakes up with some of Dean's blood on the sheets and ignores it.

Blood washes off him in streaks of color that turn the water swirling around the drain pink, pinks up the white or yellowness of the floor. He has dozens of mostly healed over and fresh scabs by the time they cross the border into Nevada. They make good cash in the city; settle in for a week or two to work. Gordon makes what he calls nigger money, busting tables and washing dishes, working random construction jobs during the day. Dean would like to work jobs like that too if anyone would hire him. No one wants the repulsive kid working on their building, in the kitchen of a restaurant where a customer could see him. He only knows how to do what Alastair taught him, to lie flat and be ugly, as ugly as anyone pays for him to be. Alastair puts makeup on him a time or two, bright, scarlet red lipstick on his mouth that emphasizes the ugly unnatural color of his old burns, metallic blue eye shadow that makes him look like a clown. Alastair finishes with him and he's a child's ugly doll all painted up, girly lips and eyelashes and ugly. The makeup smears everywhere, colors smudged on the bed, a rainbow of red and black and blue, mascara runny with his sweat, trailing black lines down his cheeks and chin.

"Any particular reason you're Alastair's whore?" Gordon cleans the cuts on his back, the ones low on his spine, where he can't reach, can't see without straining his neck.

"What else would I be?"

Gordon's silent, tapes pieces of toilet paper to his skin instead of gauze or bandages. Gordon presses but the blood keeps coming. There are moments he thinks he might bleed to death, shrivel up to nothing, an empty husk, skin without the stuff on the inside that keeps him together. "You don't know what it's like to be a monster, Gordon." Monsters don't have real friends. Dean doesn't have a Kubrick, other boys to fall back on. All he's got is Alastair.

"Kubrick's dead." Gordon has Dean's blood on his fingertips. "I killed him, strangled him with my bare hands. It was an accident." Gordon looks sorry for it, a general kind of sorry, the sort of sorry that says he regrets what he did but would do it again in a heartbeat, the kind of sorry that everyone lives with. Alastair says there are always things in life you don't want to do, and you can do them and try and be happy, or sit back and be miserable forever. That's the way the world is. "I don't want to talk about it." He adds, wadding up toilet paper to press to a particularly stubborn cut, Alastair's initials dug into his hip.

"I don't want you to talk about it." It doesn't matter, they're ugly and a murderer and a bastard together. They're vicious and whores and tough. They're anything they want to be really, everything they are.

"You're good to go." Gordon washes his hands in the sink, the water so, so red with blood.

Alastair gets them an apartment on the third floor of a proper Los Angeles shithole. The Mexican grocery store blasts music late into the night and gunshots sound in the darkness to an alien beat, sirens wailing their unique melody close behind. The apartment is two bedrooms, Alastair has his own and Dean shares with Gordon. Gordon works days at the Mexican market, sweeps up and stocks shelves so he doesn't have to be at the apartment when Alastair's there. Gordon and Alastair don't talk; they have a silent truce between them. Gordon calls Alastair a wannabe pimp and Alastair calls Gordon a worthless jungle bunny, a porch monkey who can't even do simple tricks to pay his way through.

"I'm fucking tired of this bullshit, Dean." Gordon tosses a baseball up into the air from his bed, catches it when it falls, throws it up again, up and down, up and down. "I'm not living with him anymore."

Dean wants to talk but he's sore deep down between his thighs. Not many people are interested in the freak kink here, they like their whores young and pretty. He's getting too tall, nearly fifteen and growing like a weed, almost as tall as Gordon already. He's too filled out from morning runs along the streets before the sun is out, when he can run alone in the shadows, hood up to conceal his face, sprint until his heart feels ready to burst and turn back. Growing up has made him uglier, stolen the beauty of his younger days, the soft and pale vulnerability.

Alastair's headboard collides with his bedroom wall in a thud he and Gordon can both hear. Alastair has a girl named Lilith with him most nights. Lilith helps Alastair bring in the girls. Alastair sells girls out these days, pretty girls, ugly girls that are ugly in the acceptable way, not the abnormal way, with chunky thighs or wide noses and beady eyes. Not ugly in his way. He's ugly in the way that can't be fixed, can't be covered up; ugly in the special way no one will find pretty.

"You say you want to leave every night, I'm tired of hearing the same old thing." Gordon makes a face at him and turns over, tosses his baseball against the wall and catches it on its way back to his hands, adding to the thud thud of Alastair's bed, covers up the noises Lilith makes, her sharp pants and groans. "You shouldn't have come in the first place if you and Alastair were gonna have bitch fests." Gordon hits him in the shoulder with the baseball. "You're a dick."

"You can suck my fat black cock." He's never done that, not to Gordon. Gordon never asked him to, never showed any interest. Gordon isn't a virgin, smells like perfume and sex after shifts some nights, brings girls back with him and leaves a sock hanging on the door. He's thought about doing it for Gordon before, if Gordon wanted it, sliding down wet and sucking Gordon 'till he came, letting Gordon fuck his face. "I didn't mean it." Gordon kicks his sheets down. Gordon sleeps naked, scratches at his belly. "No offense man, you're not my type."

"I'm not anyone's type."

Gordon looks at him like he's sorry for him. Dean never thought Gordon would pity anyone, he never thought that Gordon could feel much more than anger.

"If everyone just went after their 'type'" Gordon makes air quotations with his fingers. "I'd be knee deep in bitches. If only." He wants to say thank you, but Gordon would punch him in the face, bruise him up on the good side.

Alastair makes Lilith his new bottom bitch, says the bottom bitch has got to look the part. You understand Deano. He doesn't, bottom bitch is the first and the best, not just the prettiest. Alastair gives him a speech about responsibility, how Dean can't supervise the girls, that it takes a woman's touch, that all he needs to focus on his selling what he's got. Dean advertises and advertises and barely anyone comes. Alastair starts losing interest in him as the money he makes dwindles down to a single twenty, sometimes only a ten. The only time Alastair talks to him anymore is when he comes into his room at night, cuts him up and fucks him, leaves him covered and shiny with his blood.

He's whimpering while Alastair traces his blade around where he thinks his heart is. He whimpers for Alastair, not for himself. This is a night to please Alastair so he puts on the waterworks, shivers and sobs rather than acceptance. He barely notices the hurt anymore, could probably start to like it if given enough time. He's a slut, a whore, an ugly bitch, a jacked up little cunt, sorry excuse for pussy. Alastair crawls out of his bed as soon as he comes, closes his blade against his knee. Gordon's drinking beer in the other bed and empty bottles clatter on the floor, rattle together because Gordon steps on and over them.

"What're you doing?" Gordon pours a stream of beer onto his face, douses him with it, beer and blood soaking his sheets. He's dripping everywhere, his skin and his hair and inside him, wet with blood and beer and come.

*NC-17 scene removed*

He and Gordon don't talk about it after.

Alastair starts running his business in the empty storeroom of the Mexican place Gordon works at. Gordon stole the keys for him and he gets paid to keep watch, stands inside the doors and listens for footsteps, handles the initial interactions with the customers. Gordon charges an entry fee and keeps it for himself, won't let the guys who don't pay him in, won't let others in even if they're willing. He's kind of like a bouncer, leans against the walls and with a wad of cash growing fat in his pocket. Dean shows up every night and waits for someone to pick him.

One of the girls is crying at the far end of the building. He creeps through the sheets and curtains Lilith's strung them up to create a sense of privacy, each mattress with its own curtains to hide it from the rest of the world. He walks through the spaces like prison cells, past people on the mattresses, and peers out behind a brilliant purple sheet that's the color of a summer plum, a fresh bruise. The youngest girl, he thinks her name starts with an L or a P, is crying loudly as she stands in front of Alastair, barefoot and half naked. She's really young, too young for breasts and hips, the flat lines of a young, undeveloped body.

"You know the rules Ruby." Alastair tilts back in his chair, smoking. "You haven't made money in over a week, you're done here." She cries harder and Alastair sighs, finishes his cigarette and tosses the butt onto the cement floor. "You have to understand sweetheart, this is a business." Alastair gathers the child to him, sits her on his knee. "I can't keep someone around who doesn't give me something in return. I got you an apartment to share with the other girls, bought you clothes; you don't get that for free baby." Alastair puts his hands on either side of the girl's face, like he's going to wipe her tears away, and he breaks her neck instead, one sharp twist and a crack. Alastair drops the body to the floor. "Dean." Alastair shouts, lighting a new cigarette. "Come here."

He goes, waits a while so Alastair thinks he walked all the way over. He steps over Ruby's crumpled body.

"What is it?"

"Get Gordon for me; tell him to put the body in the dumpster out back."

Gordon doesn't pick Ruby up. He stares at her, breathing, clenching and unclenching his fingers at his sides.

"You throw her away yourself." Dean thinks he gets it. Gordon's little sister is around Ruby's age, probably twelve years old by now. Gordon can't just throw her away like a piece of garbage.

"I'm not doing nigger work." Those are awful, awful words. Gordon bristles at them. "You do what I say or you're next."

"I'm not afraid of you."

One of the girls starts yelling.

"Cops!" She screams and everyone starts to scatter. Girls run half naked for the door, others pull down sheets and towels and curtains and use them as clothing, running out the back door and over gravel on bare feet. The sound of sirens is louder than ever.

"Shit." Alastair drops his cigarette, scrambles to his feet. "Someone must have called the cops on us." Alastair freezes suddenly; Dean looks over his shoulder back at Gordon. Gordon has a gun in his hand and Alastair is staring down the front of it, at the shining black metal, polished over smooth. "Are you—" Gordon squeezes the trigger and the bullet hits Alastair square between the eyes, blows blood and brains out the back of his skull in a wet explosion of red mush and pieces of bone. It's like watching a movie in slow motion, the spatter of Alastair's blood painting the wall, Alastair's body landing on the cement beside the child's, blood pooling out from the back of his head. He should care more. He should want to be sick, should lean over and puke his guts up beside the bodies cooling on the floor.

"I had to kill him, he was a monster Dean." He should say something to Gordon. Then what does that make you? "I had to."

He runs and the gun goes off once, twice, three times, then there is a storm of gunshots, loud as thunder, and then there's nothing, the silence of sirens while he runs.

Sam can smell his mom's cookies burning before she does, before they actually start to burn. Just before cookies burn their smell turns darker, sharper, the crisp before the inevitable char. His mom has never been a very good baker, and she's even worse at it when she's upset, fretting over things in that silent, motherly way of hers. This is an understandable thing for her to be worried over. He's been the center of his parent's world for almost eighteen years, since he was seven months old.

"I don't want a cookie mom." She puts one in his hand anyways. It's warm, still soft from the oven but the bottom has a definite crunch to it; that blackened scent he's become familiar with. He can taste it without biting, letting the burnt flour and sugar roll over his tongue. "I'm really not hungry."

"You won't get to eat your mother's cookies forever Sam, live it up now." His dad is a yard and a half to the right, words slightly muffled around what is most likely a cookie. He slowly eats the corner of his, tastes the burnt and the bitter, the gooey chocolate chips. He gave up wondering what his mother's cookies looked like long ago, because he has nothing to compare the descriptions to. He doesn't know brown or black, the shape of a circle if he isn't tracing one, the defined solid of a chocolate chip. He's given up on picturing everything throughout the years; it just frustrates him, like putting incorrectly shaped blocks into holes frustrates a child; a dilemma without the proper understanding. "You won't get this kind of cooking anywhere else."

"I have to get to the orientation at the church; I'll call you if I need a ride later." His dog Buster pants at his feet, nudging his leg with his nose, licking him through the denim. He finds Buster's leash and wraps the end once around his hand, lets Buster lead him out the door.

It's twenty-four steps from the kitchen to the front door, then three before the steps, there are two steps in total, and another seventeen paces to the end of the walkway, after that he makes a left, two side shuffles and he can touch the end of the metal bus stop pole with his stick. He doesn't have to take the bus, his parents could drive him, could afford to pay someone else to drive him. His dad made money off investments in computer companies he made in the seventies and eighties, purchases of stocks no one thought would pay off. The old buddies who laughed at his dad for buying shares in companies called Apple and Microsoft back in the day are probably lamenting their past financial choices. He likes to take the bus though, it makes him feel more independent, gives him a modicum of control over what he has no way of ever controlling. It's a hard thing to be blind, it's like never fully knowing the world, and at the same time knowing it better. He doesn't know what it looks like but he can feel it, taste it, smell it, hear it better than anyone else blinded by outer appearances.

"There you are Sam; I've been waiting for you." He ties Buster to the pole outside the church, scratches his fluffy, furry head. Pastor Jim takes his hands, half to shake them, half to direct him inside in a subtle way, subtle enough he doesn't think Sam knows what he's trying to do. Sam lets him think so, because he's only trying to help, and it's not his fault for wanting/needing/feeling obligated to do it. "I was pleased to hear you'd volunteered for our special friend in need program."

"It's no problem. I'm glad to be able to give something back to the community." He is, he likes to reach out to people, give them his perspective on the world, improve their knowledge. This is a good program, pairing physically handicapped individuals together, giving them an opportunity to bond over mutual disabilities, and for one to touch the life of the other in a positive way. This is the kind of program that makes his heart warm and looks damn good on college applications. Specifically the church is reaching out to poor and uneducated handicapped youth, people who are the opposite of Sam.

"Originally I was going to have you teach Braille to a boy who recently lost his vision from playing with BB guns, but someone I know suggested a different young man. He's not blind, but he hasn't had much of a formal education, I think he could learn from you. What he needs most though is a friend, can you be a friend Sam?"

"Of course."

"Great." Pastor Jim's hands are warm and sweaty from the early June air, the sun that beats down too hot on the back of Sam's neck, has him sweating under the collar of his shirt. "Just have a seat here, I'll go and get him." Pastor Jim guides him into a chair, less subtle this time, overly enthusiastic. He sits there in silence for a few moments, drumming his fingers experimentally against the tabletop, absently testing the surface, feeling for cracks.

After several minutes the chair across from him squeaks on the floor as weight settles into it and another pair of hands settles on the table, absolutely motionless.

"Hi, I'm Sam Winchester." He extends his hand, waits for a handshake. The response is hesitant, terse, the quick contact of a palm and a squeeze.

"Dean." Dean's voice is low, deep, too deep for someone significantly younger. He could be a teenager, but he's probably older, sounds older, a hint of life experience in the uninterested tone of his voice, like he's been through things like this dozens of times before, and the roughness of his hand indicates a year or two of physical labor, he can't be younger than Sam.

"Nice to meet you Dean." It's quiet after the standard introduction, required formality. He doesn't know what to say, how to strike up a conversation. He can't detect nervousness in body languages, determine interests from clothing logos. Dean could have long purple hair, breasts and be half naked, and he would have no idea, no way to discuss it with him. "I'm blind, just in case the sunglasses and awesome cane didn't clue you in." Dean laughs an audible laugh and there is another creak of weight, probably Dean slumping forward or back; relaxing.

"Are we supposed to sit here and cry over what's wrong with us? I'm going to have to pass if we are. I came because I was told there would be free food and we were only going to hang out, no feelings involved."

"You don't have to tell me what your disability is, if that's what you're asking." Some people, especially the newly handicapped are defensive like this, prefer to ignore the problem until it becomes a festering emotional wound. He can understand the urge to pretend everything is fine, that you're typical and fit into the world. When he was little he'd pretend the same, pretend he could see, delude himself into believing he could see the sun, the grass, the sky, the color of his own hair in the mirror. "I can't exactly see it anyways, for all I know you're a floating head with a hand."

"I'm Thing from the Addams family to you?"

"I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. As you can guess I don't watch a lot of TV."

"Right, sorry." Dean shifts in his seat again; clears his throat. "So….how old are you?" He feels like he's on the most awkward blind (both literally and figuratively) date in history.

"I'm eighteen."

"In school?"

"I start my senior year of high school in August." Dean rocks back and forth in his chair. Sam can feel the vibrations of the wood beneath his feet. So far giving back to the community is more difficult than he anticipated. He'd been hoping to teach blind children to read, find someone to share his experiences with, inspire to strive to succeed in life. "What about you?"

"I'm too old for high school. Man, I haven't been to school in eight years." Dean's older than he expected, much older, his late twenties at least.

"You're twenty-six?"

"No." Dean laughs again, it sounds embarrassed, there's the soft brush of a hand across the back of a neck, skin touching loud enough for him to hear. "I dropped out of high school when I was fourteen. I wasn't getting an education, so I didn't see the point. They had me in special Ed. I'm not very special."

"I know what you mean. One of the reasons my parents enrolled me in private school is because most of the public schools were going to mandate I be put into special education."

"Sucks dude. If we don't look normal, they don't think we are."

"What is normal anyway? It depends on the person making the comparison right?"

"Fuck yeah. You're normal to me Sam." Dean's not so bad, despite his continuous movement, a physical expression of his nervousness, maybe his resentment over the situation. Sam wouldn't want to be here if his parents had insisted he go. "Do you want to go to college?"

"Of course, I don't know where yet, there are so many places to choose from. Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, UC Berkeley, U of Chicago, Northwestern, Duke, they're all great." Dean stops moving for a second, then starts his motion up again, as though he was pausing to think, connect the names to places before letting the words and ideas flutter from his head completely.

"Go for broke and get a degree at all of them."

He laughs, he can't help it.

"It doesn't work like that." There is the dearth of movement again.

"I'm a ninth grade dropout, be nice."

"Sorry." This isn't going to be completely horrible. He could spend time with Dean. He could even help get him interested in going back to school. He could make Dean a better Dean, if he wants to be one, or he could like Dean just as he is, it doesn't matter. This isn't solely for his benefit, this is for another person, this is Sam, being a special friend in need. "Would you like a cookie? My mom packed me way more than I can eat this morning."

"I love cookies." Dean reaches for the paper bag as soon as Sam sets it on the table, a crinkle of brown paper when Dean shoves a hand inside. Sam waits for it, for the choked noise on Dean's part, the wet sound of a partially chewed, burnt cookie spat into a hand. Dean eats without complaint, eats like he's starved for them, grabs seconds and thirds.

"I can't believe you like my mom's cookies."

"They're not that bad, a little crunchy on the bottom yeah, but you can't be too picky. I would have killed for homemade cookies when I was younger." He hardly understands the words. Dean's cheeks sound stuffed to bursting.

"Your mother burnt things worse than my mom?" Dean stops eating, drops his cookie to the table, deathly silent.

"There was only one time anything burned in my house." With that, Dean pushes his chair out; it skids across the wood, screeching awful. "It was good to meet you Sam, but I gotta get to work, I'll see you later."

"Can I get your number or something? That way I can get in contact with you so we don't have to meet here every week."

"I don't have a phone." Dean may or not be lying. Most people have phones these days; they come included in most homes or apartments.

"Then let me give you my number, you can call me if you want to do anything." He has a pen and slip of paper in his pocket. He takes his time, makes the shape of numbers like he was taught. He knows they don't look well done, with the same proficiency as a child learning to write, but he's gotten better at it over the years, can do it without a teacher directing his hand, helping him recall the loops and curves, the flat and slanted lines.

"Thanks." Dean takes the paper and leaves, his footsteps retreating until they're gone.

Sam sucks on a rock-hard and burnt cookie on the bus ride home.

The city goes dead quiet in the afternoon, from twelve to three, when most people are working, others eating lunch in restaurants with air conditioner and fancy, leather-bound menus. Dean walks the street in ninety-degree heat, the collar and small of the back of his shirt clinging to him wet. The quiet of the city makes him uncomfortable, reminds him of the awkward, glaring silence that happens whenever he walks into a room for the first time, the pause for everyone to get a good look at his face, gasp and gape before returning to their conversations. It's like the quiet of the night while he waited for men to come to his bed, place money on the dresser and strip off their shirts. That was a long time ago, years and years, a different lifetime with Alastair and Gordon, younger and stupider and somehow satisfied.

"Hello Dean, I thought you'd be at the church group for another hour." Castiel is on his hands cleaning, washing the carpet floors of the apartment by hand, a bottle of carpet foam and a scrubber in his hands. Castiel is a freak about cleaning, he's a freak about a lot of things really, but cleaning is the biggest. He insists cleanliness is next to godliness, whatever that means.

"Person they had me with needed to leave early." He takes the scrubber Castiel points to, joins him on the ground, the cleaning solution soaking through the knees of his jeans. "We cleaned the carpet yesterday."

"Things get dirty in a day, Dean." Castiel's a little fucked in the head, it's understandable. His mother was a schizophrenic with religious delusions. She raised him for fifteen years before social services took him. They met in a group home after Dean got caught shoplifting a bag of chips and they found him squatting in buildings slated for demolition and renovation. "Who did Pastor Jim assign you to work with?"

"A blind kid named Sam. Fuck you for making me do it, by the way." He met up with Castiel again after three and a half years on his own, trying to work the only way he knew how. There was this big black guy, middle aged, bald or shaved head, always in a suit, who loved to come on his face, pop his dick from Dean's mouth last minute and spurt all over his left side, then rub his come into the glaring pink skin, like his jizz was going to heal it. That guy still loves coming on his face, pays him once or twice a week to meet in a motel and do it. He doesn't really do the sex for money thing anymore; he's too big, too tall, lost his teenage appeal, the soft lines of his body and skinniness of his thighs and back. He doesn't look so delicate and girly these days.

"God wants us all to give back and make this world better Dean." Castiel fancies himself a man of God, some version of a priest, a warped religious mind since childhood. The only time he isn't holier than hell is late at night, in the early hours of the morning, the moon shining through the open window, the rush of cars keeping him awake. Cas lays beside him in bed, because they only have one room, one bed. Cas doesn't work, dedicates himself to volunteering at churches and soup kitchens, helping the needy. Welfare checks barely cover the rent for their apartment and each time he and Cas go to the office he plays the part of dumb disfigured boy, who Cas has taken into out of the goodness of his heart, but can't work because Dean requires around the clock care. It's a good gig, a good two hundred bucks a month, plus the hundred he makes from Facial Guy every week to cover the cost of food and utilities. Money stretches thin and they get by, he'll work jobs like Gordon, a brief stint in construction one day to pick up thirty bucks, washing dishes for a few hours for twenty. He makes the money; Cas saves the souls, and nighttime they fuck if Cas is in the mood.

Sex with Cas is a ritual that has to be followed to the last step. He showers first, scrubs everywhere, until he's pink everywhere and the skin is new and tender, especially the skin around his hole. He does it every night, washes himself all over, just in case, because he never knows when Castiel is going to spoon up behind him, fuck him like that, in the sideways position, when he's still wet from the shower and smells like soap. *NC-17 material removed*

"Are you going to spend time with him again?" Castiel has sweat running down his forehead, dripping in thick beads of moisture. The carpet cleaner is a thick white foam standing an inch off the ground.

"Are you going to bitch at me if I don't?" Cas doesn't answer, leans forward and puts his back into his scrubbing. He gets like this sometimes, too absorbed in his charity or his cleaning or his own thoughts to care. Dean doesn't think of them as friends, not friends in the conventional sense. He doesn't know what a normal friend is like, what kind of relationship that is supposed to be. He's never had a friend; he has nothing to compare any of this to. He and Castiel don't talk except for when they do; fuck so late at night he's exhausted and fucked out before Cas ever gets into bed, fucked out from dealing with the world. "Yeah I'm going to see him again. There's a good chance I'm going to get free food out of the deal." He'd like to follow through with something for once, cross the finish line for the first time. The only thing he's done consistently in his life is be ugly, hate the scarred skin on his arm and face. The chemicals on his hands start to burn, seep in down deep beneath his flesh to make him sting. He has to go to the bathroom and wash them off; it would be too ironic if he lost the skin of his right hand due to chemical burns, it would be the worst piece of luck he's ever known, worse than ending up like this.

Time has done nothing to smooth out the appearance of his face. As a kid he'd hoped it would, hoped getting older would make him handsome, that maybe he'd shed his skin like a snake, wake up one morning and peel his outside off. If anything he's worse now, his close cropped hair does nothing to hide the blister red section of his forehead, the sensitive skin of the left side of his face burnt from too much time in the California sun, starting to wrinkle and sag like he's a man of seventy on his left. He's tall now too, extra noticeable in a crowd. He wears hooded sweatshirts and baseball caps when he can, sometimes in eighty degree heat, sweats himself half to death in order to hide his face. Halloween is the best time of year, gives him the best excuse to wear a mask. His favorite mask is the one from Phantom of the Opera, the one that hides just half his face, makes him look normal and pretty. He met his first and only girlfriend on Halloween night, mask snug on his face. Her name was Cassie and she was the closest to beautiful who had looked his way. She was thirty pounds overweight, chin rounded and plump at the bottom, a small fold of fat pushing over the top of her jeans.

Cassie had seemed amazed he spoke to her at first, amazed that he'd want to talk to her. He'd been so goddamn good-looking that Halloween before his nineteenth birthday. Cassie had brought him back to her apartment and let him take off her clothes; palm the roundness of her large breasts. She saw his ugliness when she peeled his mask away, kissed the roughness of his scarred cheek and helped guide him into her, held the base of his cock between her fingers and slid onto him, wetter and warmer than anything he'd felt. She'd stayed with him for two months, two months longer than he thought a person would want to be with him. They fucked and they fought and they kissed, watched movies on her couch, ate Chinese food out of the cartons late Saturday nights. He'd loved her so, so much then; during the days he thought he had a real chance. He knows now that he doesn't, that he's unlovable, that Cassie had tried hard to love him and failed. I love you, he'd said the night she turned him away, door opened to the length of the security chain, the metal painted over gold, don't you love me? I thought I could baby, but it's too fucking hard. She stroked his chin with her pudgy fingers, skin soft as the lining of the inside of his sweatshirt and sent him away from her front door.

"Mop the bathroom; I have to do the windows." Their mop is a disgusting scraggly thing, worn out and overused, white wig thingy a dull yellow and gray. The cleaning chemical is pine scented with a hint of ammonia, strong enough to burn his nose each time he breathes. He spreads the solution across the tile, between every crack. He never knows what's so fucking dirty they're cleaning six times a week, only resting on Sundays, because Sundays are the day of the Lord and a day of rest. Sundays are the only time of week they're normal, two guys who split a pizza and share a pack of beer, fuck a little after the sun goes down. The smell in the air makes him dizzy, blood pulsing in his head in the throb throb throb of a tiny heartbeat, like a mini alien living in his skull, one that is going to burst out and eat his face.

He and Castiel have a lemony sharp scent, bitter cleanliness, Windex and Pine Sol and Resolve. He's too tired to bother with a shower, crawls into bed salty with dried sweat. The moonlight is dim silver brighter than sun on metal, bright enough to hurt his eyes. Summertime is brightest at night since the lights are never off, city humming with that bee buzz of energy, kids out of school and some people off work, families spending time together by force. He misses the dark of winter, when he can't see his hand if it's more than a foot from his face. Cas shifts restless in his sleep, cock pokes half hard into the dip of his spine.

"You awake?" Cas gives a nod that vibrates the mattress of the bed. "Do you want me to?" His mouth still tastes like mint from his toothpaste. Castiel buys the ultra duty kind with whitening strength that comes in three different colors, red and blue and white in one dab. He and Castiel brush their teeth for five minutes each, side by side, spit and scrub the inside of the skin to get it clean gain. He's scrubbed and sterilized enough for a lifetime. If he has a place of his own someday he's going to fuck cleaning, live like he and Gordon and Alastair used to, socks and clothes and stuff piled everywhere. Castiel nods again and Dean shimmies down, crawls beneath the blanket. It's warm under there, between the bed and the sheets, resting his hands on Cas' knees.

*NC-17 material*

His breath tastes of come, that salty bitter of semen, gross as old mayonnaise and just as thick in the back of his throat. "I'm gonna get something to eat." They have the crusts of week old pizza in the side of the fridge, stuff to make sandwiches, pounds and pounds of raw hamburger meat, ground up red and bloody. They eat hamburgers so often he's starting to hate the things. Cas' mom had a thing for them too, made burgers every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night except during Lent, then they'd have them on Thursdays instead.

He has a sandwich, piles meat and limp brown-greenish lettuce on almost stale bread. He needs to go to the store in the morning, or maybe now. He doesn't sleep too well most nights anyway, sometimes he lays awake and watches the light play on the ceiling, dance from crack to crack in the plaster. He sleeps and he doesn't sleep, sometimes in that in-between space, the half awake but not aware state. Mustard drips yellow from the end of his sandwich onto the counter, the edge of the kitchen sink. He's going to let it sit there until it crusts in the morning and they clean it up all over again. He'll be fucked if he has bleach and soap scum underneath his fingernails tomorrow. They don't have a telephone but there's a payphone in the hall of their building, down by the top of the stairwell. It's been rigged over the years and there's a permanent supply quarter sized slugs of lead taped to the underside that get replaced every week as they're used up.

The receiver is sticky and the phone rings three times before it's picked up.

"Hello?" Sam sounds hoarse and sleepy, he sounds like two thirty in the morning, like the faint orange light in the hallway.

"Hey Sam, it's Dean." He takes another bite of his sandwich, this time mayo falls onto the light brown carpet. "Sorry to call so late."

"No, no." Sam yawns and the sheets rustle faintly in the background, then there's someone breathing harshly into the phone. "No Buster, down." Sam laughs for a second. "You didn't wake me up or anything, I was reading."

"How do you read if you're blind?"

"I don't use my eyes, I read with my fingers."

"The fuck?" It's too late or maybe too early for him to think about the logistics of reading with fingers. Reading with eyes is hard enough.

"Braille, I'll show you sometime. What's up?" Sam sounds so casual, like it's okay for Dean to call him at two thirty in the morning, the hour some people are just crawling into bed.

"Got off work a little while ago, thought I could make it up to you for having to leave earlier." He hates going outside, always has, but he could stand it if he had a reason to, if he could be out of the apartment. He wants out of the cycle of work and clean and fuck, watching for water stains on the ceiling, scrubbing jizz off the sheets. "Do you want to do something?"

"My parents are going to a friend's house tomorrow; you could come over around noon. We could watch the baseball game and have pizza or something." He wants to ask how Sam can watch TV if he's blind, because it seems pretty impossible to be able to watch television with his fingers too, but he doesn't ask, stuffs more sandwich in his mouth and chews until it's all wet mush that tastes like nothing.

"Sounds great." He writes Sam's address down with the pen attached to the payphone by a metal chain. Sam lives out in the suburbs, the good part of the city, where everyone is in bed by eleven and the neighbors have perfect lawns. Dean wanted to live in a house like that once. He'd seen pictures of them advertised on billboards, in commercials, in the background of photos taped to the inside of different men's wallets.

His body is thrumming with energy when he hangs up, alive in the night. He can't go to bed now. He picks up the phone again, wishes that he had more people to call. Everyone he used to call is dead and he should care more that they're dead, he should miss them. He doesn't give a shit and that does worry him. Gordon and Alastair were never that bad, they kept him fed, kept him clothed, fucked him some nights and not others.

"It's me." He gets a gruff, irritated grunt of a response. "I know it's late. I need some cash. Can we meet now, half price?"

"My kid has an early baseball game in the morning." Uriel sounds pissed, which Dean doesn't blame him for. Normal people have jobs they need to get to at eight in the morning; they have wives who wake up when they get phone calls in the middle of the night, kids who make them go watch their shit.

"Please."

"Be at the Motel Six in twenty minutes."

He's covered in jizz by the end of it, hot, thick steams of it; his eyelashes clumped together, strands of it drooping over his lips. He's a steaming mess of come, all white and pretty, the semen white enough to cover up the beginning to fade and wrinkled skin, like half of his face is smeared in mime make up. Uriel sounds less angry, drags two fingers through his come and wipes a clean line on his face, brings his spunk over to Dean's lips and shoves his fingers between them. Jizz has always tasted an equal amount of sweet and bitter, never a pleasant taste, an underlying flavor of the sweat and musk of dick. Porn makes it sound like the sweetest Kool-Aid ever known; really it's just body fluids soured by saliva and cock.

He goes home, cleans the rest of his face off in the morning.

The air smells of sun warmed grass in the California summers, the earth parched over and brittle; dry as dust and hard as concrete under his bare feet. They're rationing water this year and the backyard takes the brunt of it, the grass so dehydrated it crunches to the touch, crumbles between his fingertips, against his cheek while he lies on it, the sun beating down hot on the bare nape of his neck, the sliver of skin where his t-shirt rides up on his back.

"I hate droughts." Dean says sleepy, words slurred because one of his cheeks is pressed flat to the dirt. Dean always lies on his belly, never on his back, curls in on himself sometimes, never sits on Sam's right. He wonders if Dean's in pain sometimes, if his disability is more life threatening, some chronic illness that will be the death of him. "That's what I hated about living in LA." Dean doesn't talk about the past much, always claims he doesn't have much of one, standard foster care shit until his eighteenth birthday, nothing special or memorable about it. He's never mentioned LA before. "They'd force us to ration our water so me and my—" Dean pauses, shifts the tiniest bit, a hitch in his breath. "I guess they were my friends. It's funny you know? When you're a kid you don't think about stuff like that, you don't think these guys are my friends, they're just the dudes you hang out with. Anyway, we'd have to share showers and stuff it got real bad, or else we'd get fined for going over the set limit. I never really shared showers with Alastair, but me and Gordon would double up all the time. God, it was like the gayest thing you'd ever see; two teen boys sharing a shower, really fucking Birdcage or something. Man, we used to joke that it was the only time two guys could share a shower without having to worry about dropping the soap." Dean laughs, soft and bitter, dry as the earth Sam rubs his fingers over, that he picks blades of grass from.

"You lived with friends when you got out of your group home?" He likes when Dean talks, could and does spend hours listening to it. He asks Dean to talk about cars and girls and whether or not he thinks OJ did it, anything at all. He likes Dean's voice, the smooth inflections when he's animated, the low rumble when he laughs. Because he's blind he's always preferred sound to smell or touch or taste. People don't just talk to him most of the time, not even his friends. People ask him how he's doing, if he needs help, to describe how it feels to be blind. Dean doesn't ask any of that, Dean plops down on Sam's couch or the foot of his bed and goes on and on about dirty jokes he heard at work, the rack on a woman he passed in the street, how often he gets laid. It's normal guy stuff between two inherently abnormal men.

"This was when I got out of the first group home. Alastair turned eighteen, said he was going to get a place in California and asked if I wanted to come along. Gordon came with us and we sort of wandered for a bit, saw the sights, worked to make cash for buses. Then we got this shitty little two bedroom apartment in one of the crappiest parts of LA. Those were good times though, way better than the group home. I had freedom there. I'd go out to eat with Alastair and stay up with Gordon until whenever, drinking beer the manager of the store he worked at let him have in exchange for making less than minimum wage." Dean has a fond note to his voice and he means what he's saying, how good those days were for him, how he misses them, yearns for his youth in silence. As happy as he is for Dean to have memories like that, Sam finds a certain sadness in them, in Dean's pleased and content remembrance of them. Sam has dozens of memories like that, dozens and dozens, thousands of happy days with his parents and friends, running on the beach with Buster in the summertime, opening smoothly wrapped presents on Christmas morning. The jubilation of Sam's life twists deep into his bones, a guilty pang in both his femurs, the vertebrae in his spine.

"Why'd you go back to a group home?" He shouldn't pressure Dean. It's their unspoken code, the conversation goes where it goes on the other person's own terms, nothing forced, nothing too personal.

"Alastair got himself a girl and Gordon went to go live with his little sister. We grew up Sam. We were fucking crazy kids for over a year and then we grew up."

"Where do you live now?" That's taboo as well, one of the forbidden things. Dean lives where Dean lives, arrives at Sam's house smelling so strongly of Pine Sol and Windex Sam's nose and throat burn, bile churning queasy in his stomach.

"I have a roommate; we share an apartment down in the city, nothing fancy."

"Sounds nice."

"Nice enough."

They go inside when Sam's naked arms begin to sting with an incipient sunburn. Buster greets them at the sliding glass door, prancing happily, long tail wagging vigorously as it bumps against Sam's legs. Dean roots through the fridge while Sam walks slowly towards the counter, feeling for it as he goes, counting the steps in his head.

"You want a Popsicle?" Dean shakes the box loud enough for Sam to hear.

"Only if it's grape."

"It's all about cherry flavored." Dean unwraps his Popsicle for him, presses the stick into his hand gentle. Dean's helpful in a way that isn't condescending, that doesn't have Sam's bone marrow bubbling with anger, a flare of irritation to prove that he can handle things just fine on his own. Dean slurps away on his noisy and messy, humming with his satisfaction, throat buzzing happy like a swarm of elated bees. Dean makes those sounds often when he eats. Dean enjoys food more than anyone Sam has ever heard eat. Dean cherishes it, appreciates the flavors, satisfied with the ordinary and the simple. Dean won't eat Dijon mustard but he'll suck the acrid smelling stuff off his thumb in buckets, doesn't bother with French breads or expensive rolls and goes straight for the white bread. He's spent almost every day of the last three weeks with Dean and it doesn't feel like an obligation anymore, part of a program to enhance his chances of success in the academic world.

"Dude, could you eat louder?" He laughs, biting a chunk out of his Popsicle despite the pang of protest from his teeth when the cold of it hits them. "You sound like you're sucking dick." Dean stops eating completely, swallows audibly before continuing, chewing instead of licking. "I was just kidding." Dean doesn't respond, chews ritually and swallows. "Look, Dean, if you really did suck dick, it doesn't matter to me. I was only making a joke."

"I have to meet a friend today." Dean stands and Sam hears the unmistakable plunk of a half eaten Popsicle landing in the garbage can. "We meet every Thursday afternoon, I'll see you tomorrow." Dean leaves him there, sitting in his kitchen, Buster licking the soles of his feet, standing on his hind legs to try and reach the Popsicle, falling against Sam with each of his attempts. He doesn't know if Dean's lying about meeting a friend or not, supposes it doesn't matter in the long run.

"How was your day, sweetie?" His mom comes home from work while he's listening to the Dodgers game on the TV. She bends over to fuss with his hair, comb her fingers through it to untangle the sweaty strands. "Did you have a good time with your special friend?"

"His name is Dean, mom. He's not my "special friend"." Special friend makes the whole arrangement sound gay and it's not. Pastor Jim says it's about making a connection with a like minded person who shares an aspect of your life. "We had a good time; we hung out in the backyard for awhile."

"That's good; you're such a nice boy for doing this Sam. You care so much about other people."

"You're the one who raised me; no parent tries to raise a selfish child." His mom smacks him playfully on the back of his head.

"What do you want for dinner tonight? Your dad said he wasn't going to be home until later this evening and to go ahead and eat what we want."

"What do we have?"

"Pasta? I could bake chicken breasts and toss us a salad."

"It doesn't matter mom, I'll eat whatever you make."

"No complaining, then." She's cheerful, singing under her breath as she sets to work in the kitchen, gas stove clicking while the burner does its best to try and light. He falls asleep to that, the familiar sounds of domesticity, his mother's footsteps on the expensive, apparently granite tiles. He doesn't know what granite looks like, how aesthetically pleasing of a kitchen it makes, but he knows it's there and when he walks on it he occasionally pretends he has an idea what granite looks like. It never works the way it should because he's never seen a thing, doesn't know where to begin. He can't even see what most people assume he does. The kids in his class think he only sees darkness, when really, he just doesn't see anything at all. He can't see darkness if he has no idea what darkness is, can't grasp the concept of it, the nuances of light and dark, the curls of shadows in the sun, the descriptions are all just empty words he reads in books. He'd like to see his own shadow someday, the angles and planes of his face, inspect the tiny indents in his cheeks where the skin dips down tight, the dimples his mother used to poke and prod at, kiss over and over as he sat in her lap.

That night he dreams of lying in his backyard with Dean, the sun so hot it's blistering, his skin sizzling off his bones. He loses sections of himself in layers, slops away with the charcoal smell of burnt toast and bacon. He melts and melts until beneath he's someone new, flesh wet and shiny with blood or fluids, reborn by the rays of the unforgiving sun. His eyes have bubbled away as well, the scarred and scorched retinas gone, shining, functional nerves in their places. He can see and he can't, finds Dean's face easier than he has before, puts palms on it to feel the softness, the delicate bones that make Dean's chin. Dean's prettier than Sam thought boys could be, pretty as a girl, and it's strange to think so and at the same time it isn't. Sex is purely physical, no more than skin deep, different octaves of the voice, hips, breasts, and dicks he can't see. He's into girls but he could be into guys too, because he doesn't imagine they're the antipodes they're made out to be, because everyone has to feel the same on the inside, the same amounts of heat and smoothness, muscles tight.

"What're you doing Sam?" Dean gasps breathless, Sam's thumbs probing the corners of his mouth, dipping in to get slick with his saliva, test the warmth beyond his lips. He could kiss Dean's lips, they're thinner than a girl's, a little split and chapped, don't have the scent of saccharine fruits and they aren't greasy with films of lipstick and gloss.

"Looking." He slides a hand down to Dean's shoulder, the one on the left, finds nothing but the empty space of Dean's sleeve. Dean's never touched him with his left arm before, never sat with Sam to his left. Dean hasn't told him yet but he knows that Dean only has one arm, that he's self-conscious about it, that it's why he won't go out in public without a baggy jacket, steals one of Sam's hoodies if they go to the movies or to eat. "I don't care if you're missing an arm." Dean doesn't have a nub attached to his shoulder, no remnant pieces of skin covered bone. There's nothing, Dean was born with nothing there, a congenital defect that is more startling than it is an impairment. Sam wonders about it though, if Dean's parents gave him up because of it, couldn't handle a son with only a right arm, who could never play baseball with his dad on Saturday mornings, who could never grasp his mother's face with two tiny hands. "You're fine the way you are." He's been told since he was three that his differences are what make him special, that the imperfections highlight the beauty in life. When he was a kid and couldn't go on bounce houses at birthday parties with the other kids, his dad would sit him on his knee and say that everyone has their own kind of handicap, his was just more obvious, he was getting off easy, because there wasn't a thing a blind person couldn't do except play in crowded bounce houses, and there were worse things than that in the world, worse things that could happen to a person.

"Thanks. I feel validated as a cripple." Dean tilts his head down, face shifting in Sam's hands. He places his fingertips along Dean's jaw and tips his face back up so he can look at it. "You're pretty close dude." Dean's breath is cool on the base of his neck, comes out in tiny flutters that are cold across his sweat.

"I think I'm going to kiss you." As he moves his hands higher his fingers brush through the longer strands of Dean's hair. Dean's hair is long enough he can tangle his fingers in it, shorter than Sam's, the ends of it dangling just past his ears. "I hope you don't mind."

"I'll kick you in the balls if I do." Dean's breath is cherry and grape popsicles, icy sweet. Kissing Dean is refreshing like blue-raspberry Kool-Aid in the middle of the night, the first rain of the winter, the kind that loosens the packed earth and brings the fresh scent of water and metal with it. Dean is soft as a girl, delicate as one except his shoulders are broader, his features more ruggedly defined, square jaw and a button nose.

"I've been thinking about what happened in the kitchen." Dean swallows the words, mouth half open while Sam talks into it, can't bring himself to relinquish his conquest over Dean's lips. "About the dick sucking incident." Dean sucks in, draws oxygen from Sam, his sweat and his heat. "I think you're probably awesome at it."

"Doesn't take a rocket scientist to suck a cock." Smart girls give terrible head. Sam's first girlfriend, Madison, was captain of the science team, star student in AP biology. On their fourth date she climbed off her living room couch and tried unsuccessfully to unzip his jeans with her teeth, got her braces caught on the zipper halfway through. He helped get her unhooked and she sucked her off in a sloppy wetness that he supposed was technically a blowjob. It had hurt more than he thought a blowjob would, too much teeth coupled with a paucity of saliva. He'd come to get it over with, his dick acting in some strange version of self defense, aroused at the idea of getting her warm, bordering on painful mouth off of his most important limb. Madison had gotten better, because he can attest to the slogan that practice does in fact make perfect, or at the very least a halfway decent blowjob. Jo gave the best blowjobs of any girl, wasn't afraid to get deep and dirty, press so far forward her nose touched his belly, her hands teasing at the very base.

Dean doesn't suck cock like a professional or a girl well rehearsed in the ritual of it. He does it with the proficiency of a guy who has settled onto his knees once or twice before, learned the shape and weight of a dick instead of pussy. Dean's versatile, adjustable, the baseball glove that can mold to differently sized hands, expand and be broken in anew, tightened and trained by an expert. Dean is clay that has only started to be shaped, smoothed and spun into a perfect bowl.

*NC-17 material removed*

He twists strands of Dean's hair around his index fingers and—

"Sam, get up, we have something to tell you." The weight of his father is on his side of the bed, his dad's hand heavy on his shoulder, the smell of his mother's shampoo to his left, one delicate hand in the center of his sweaty back. Beneath the sheets he's rock hard and aching, and above them he's flushed and embarrassed, too warm for his own skin.

"What? I'm up." He pushes himself up until his back finds his headboard, bunches the blankets around his lap as he wills his problem away, contemplates the smell of skunks after they are hit by cars and the chaffing feel of hands so dry they hurt his dick.

"Sam." His mom's voice is a tearful squeak, high pitched and constricted because she can't relax her throat well enough to properly speak.

"Did someone die?" The last time his mom sounded this way they'd gone to see his grandfather in a pine box. He'd touched his grandpa's cold flesh and stood on tiptoes to reach into the casket, let his knuckles sit against his grandpa's colder-than-stone, wrinkled skin and he cried a little then, awkward at twelve years old, too fat and too short, missing the grandpa who hid candy in his pockets and couldn't see very well himself, his nearly blind partner in crime. He doesn't know who is left in their family to die.

"No sweetie, no one died." His mom clears her throat, sounds more calm and collected; bright and cheerful. "It's good news."

"Good news about you." His dad finishes, tousling his hair like he hasn't since Sam was smaller than him, didn't need to tip his head down if he wanted to pretend that he could meet his father's eyes. "Great news about you champ." Hair tousling again, fingers across his scalp, smoothing it over, brushing his hair into something feral and wild, primitive jungles he's read of but will never see, something dark and wild and unfamiliar. "We got a call from a surgeon at Stanford this morning."

"I already told you guys I don't want to go to Stanford."

"No, that isn't why he called." His mom touches him, touches his cheeks, his chin, thumbs his eyelids, cradling his face gentle. "He can fix your eyes. He's developed a new technique for removing scarred tissue and replacing it with healthy cells from donor eyes." It sounds complicated, implausible, something out of science fiction, corneal transplants and retinas spliced into his head while he's strapped to a table, crackling and whirling of machines above his head, a metal rod catching lightning from the sky, shocking his dead eyes to life, a scene stolen straight out of Frankenstein. His parents smell of desperation and despite it hope blooms warm in his belly, the hope he's suppressed for almost eighteen years, never allowed himself to indulge in, the hope of damned men and those who could not accept reality. He may be able to see his face in the mirror one day soon, learn the colors by more than their names, know that jeans are blue because he can recognize the shade rather than associate the color with the brand name. He will read books and be able to form pictures from the words inside his head, rather than process words mechanically, without imagination, only voices and smells and textures in his brain. He will watch movies and know the characters by more than their voices, will see the fiery explosions of cars rather than hear the boom and crunch of glass and metal spewed high in a burst of flames and heat.

"He's coming down to examine you later next week, if the operation is successful, you'll be seeing by the time you start school. You'll be able to read without Braille only a few weeks after that." His dad clasps his shoulders with emotion and his mom is crying silently, the shaking of her body making the mattress vibrate, tremble and move as she does. "We know you need time to process this son, just come down for dinner when you're ready."

"What do you look like, Dean?" For a second the world stops, slows down, glosses over blue.

"A young George Clooney." His left hand flexes, the singed nerves beneath the skin unusually active, spontaneously signaling pain when there isn't any. His arm looks half decent today, the flesh pale in the lack of light, most of the wrinkles hidden by the sleeve of his sweatshirt, only the back of his hand giving the extent of his crippleness away. "Does it matter?" Sam's not supposed to know what he looks like. It's part of their dynamic; the ugly leading the blind. "Since when do you care about my movie star good looks?" Someone must have told Sam, whispered to him the horrors of Dean's face, pulled him aside and said that yes, he's ugly enough to make babies cry in a heartbeat, the cheapest whore to work the streets, a thousand gallons of invisible spunk on and in him. He smells like jizz sometimes, his nose thick with the stink. There are days he thinks Sam has to be able to smell it too, recognize the foul odor of an ugly slut.

"I haven't had a chance to tell you yet—" Sam stretches his feet out onto the coffee table, wriggles his toes in his white, white socks, socks that are almost snow and sit with the soft look of clouds made of white cotton candy, whipped up and fluffed to be smooth. "But I'm having eye surgery in a few days; the doctor says there's a good chance I'll be able to see." He figured this day would come, just like it had with everyone. Soon enough people see him for what he is and get tired, wad him up and toss him out like a semen covered tissue, a sloppy used condom too slippery to be tied off. That's him, that's his life, come stains and dried lube, blood and burned beyond hope of repair skin.

"Dude, that's fantastic. Congratulations." His belly burns, his skin too, spine crawling angry, bones bunched up and howling mad, his blood a jealous, poisoned thing like stagnant water or cleaning chemicals left to sit in the bathroom, filled with floating bits of dust and half drowned flies. Sam's condition is reversible, fixable with a razor and some dead guy's eyes. Dean's always going to be the way he is. It isn't fair, not in the universal sense, but in the day to day it's ordinary. Sam gets to see Dean's fucked up face and Dean can be ashamed of it. "You get to see your first pair of boobs." He punches Sam and Sam's shoulder is startlingly thick, more muscle than someone his age should have. "Oh man, you can watch your first porno. It's like losing your virginity all over again."

"We can watch one together; I've been dying to see Star Whores."

"More of a Genital Hospital man myself." He saw porn for the first time at fourteen, lying in a bed that smelled with a day's work of sweat, sucking a guy's cock in sync with the fucking on the TV, watching through his half lowered eyelashes while a blonde got pounded in both ends.

"I didn't need to know that." Sam laughs, a kind of laugh Dean hasn't heard from him before. Outside the sky is pink and orange with the fading rays of light from the slowly sinking sun and in the kitchen Buster slurps loudly from his bowl of water, nails clicking over the fancy tiles. The television hums in the silence, casts light in the almost dark. Sam creeps a little closer to him on the couch; Dean watches his white socks move. "I have weird dreams sometimes Dean." Sam breaks the quiet, finds the remote after a few seconds of fumbling, finds the biggest button with his thumb and clicks the TV off.

"Clowns or midgets?" Sam doesn't know what clowns or midgets are, not in a way he can relate to, in a way he can see. Sam has descriptions from books memorized, can't focus on the details books can't teach, can't begin to cover because things like that can't be put into words. Writing messes up like that sometimes, isn't able to be real, comes off too easy. He picked up a book about prostitution once, half for kicks, half required reading for the group home, a step into the light of absolution they said, to cleanse himself of the sin. He read the thing cover to cover, read about Maggie and cried for her, for reasons he didn't understand, lay in his bunk and sobbed over a girl who never existed, who wasn't fleshed out or real. The book talked about asshole brothers and drunks for parents and the tragedy of poverty and he didn't get it, couldn't relate, didn't understand the point of the thing. He knew the thickness of a dick, the feeling of being stretched too tight everywhere, inside him and on his skin, the nearly soul deep numb of afterwards and the book didn't have any of that, just poor Maggie, hated and misunderstood and dead. It was a fucked up thing to give a sixteen year old to read. Social workers lacked common sense and sensitivity back when he was younger.

"I'm going to ignore that comment." Sam clears his throat and the awkwardness is hot enough to feel, to taste and smell, like rotting fruit in a sun warmed room. "I had weird dreams about you."

"Was I a midget clown? I had a dream like that once, did it with Jennifer Aniston, Brad watched."

"I'm being serious you asshole."

"Okay, sorry, keep telling me about your dirty dreams."

"It wasn't like that, jerk." Sam's voice goes an octave too high, cracks nervous, words low in his throat. "I had a dream I could see you and you only had one arm." Dean wants to laugh, throw his head back and find it fucking hilarious, his lungs no longer tight with the suspense of it all. Sam thinks he doesn't have an arm, if only he could be that lucky. People feel sympathetic for the one armed guy, hold open doors, smile, admire him for his perseverance. People don't look the ugly guy in the face, think it'll offend him more, make him self-conscious, damage an already unhealthy sense of self worth. There are days he'd rather be looked at for his ugliness than ignored completely because of it, but those are days that are few and far between.

"I have both arms Sammy, I promise."

"Prove it."

"Fine." He bumps one arm against Sam's elbow, then the other, touches them both to his forearm at the same time, squeezes his bicep with two sets of fingers. The fingers on his bad hand protest, nerves going off like fireworks, so bad he can practically hear the crackle and boom under his skin, nestled safe around his bone. "Two hands, and I have two legs too, two of everything I'm supposed to have. Probably even have two dicks if I looked hard enough."

"I don't need to touch those." Sam's voice cracks again and Dean sees it then, is taken aback by it, flattered and confused. No one's just ever wanted him before, paid for him or put up with him but never wanted him, it makes him uncomfortable all over, shuddery and jittery deep in his marrow, shaking like a virgin girl's panties on prom night.

"Fuck." He says, because there's not much else to say except yes and sure and of course and no problem, everything he's ever said when this question comes into play. He likes Sam; he'd like to get off with Sam while he has the chance, before Sam can see him. He might even be a little in love with Sam, in the way someone loves their best friend and brother, the person who sees them for beyond what they are, that lame soul mate crap that's been spewed for centuries, find the other half of your soul or some fruity shit. Sam isn't the missing half of his soul, the lost piece of the family he's never had, Sam's the first real friend he's ever had, and that means more than an imaginary concept of true love he doesn't believe in.

"Dean?" Sam is quieter now, smaller, like he's embarrassed, red rushing to his face, sunburnt-looking, red as Dean's face used to be in the old photographs in his case file, the ones taken the day he got out of the hospital, freshly burnt and puffy looking.

"Fuck." He repeats, heat in his own cheeks, because he can't seem to form a sentence using real words. "I didn't know. I had no idea."

"I didn't know either." Sam rubs the back of his neck in that awkward, slow motion, the one that Dean's seen half a million times before from men pulling cash out of their wallets, watching him tug his pants back over his bare hips, staring continually at the left half of his face. "It's not important. We can pretend it never happened." Sam coughs, intentional, reaches wild to find his glass of water on the table. "How about those Lakers?" Sam fumbles his water and the glass falls to the floor, cracks into pieces and spills, shards of glass and a puddle of water across the hardwood floor. "Shit."

"I'll get it." There are paper towels in the kitchen and he uses eight entire sheets, soaks them soggy with water, wads up a dripping ball of them in his hands. The glass has only split into six large pieces and he picks them up and collects them in the palm of his hand so they rattle together when he drops each new one in. He's an expert at cleaning now, could probably make a living out of it, apply for a job as a hotel maid, so long as he doesn't have to wear the outfit.

"Thanks."

"Enjoy it, pretty soon you're gonna have to do shit like this for yourself." He keeps a flask of alcohol on his hip, just in case, has for years and he opens it, screws off the top and drinks. All that's inside it is cheap whiskey he keeps in the freezer, behind three giant bags of ice, past the frozen hamburger meat. Alastair bought the flask for him on his fifteenth birthday, tossed it to him full of something that was sour and stronger than anything Dean's ever had to drink in his life. It's cheap and anything he puts in it always has the faint taste of metal but it has his name on the bottom, scratched in with Alastair's pocketknife rather than professionally engraved. Alastair always went for the do it yourself type things, whatever he could do to save a buck. Fucked up as it is, Dean thinks sometimes he misses him, in the worst of ways, scars on his chest and belly and back that just won't heal, burnt into him deep.

"Dean." Sam's voice wavers, choked over with emotion, burning shame and maybe fear.

"Sam, it's okay." He puts his good hand on Sam's thigh, more friendly and intimate than he's used to, reassuring without snaking his hand towards Sam's zipper, taking out his cock so later Sam will take out some cash. "I don't care." Sam's shoulders lose their tension and he's visibly relieved, lets out a soft, held in sigh. "It's no big deal." He slides his fingers this time, slowly slowly, friction from Sam's jeans on his palm, rough heat that warms so good. "You're pretty okay yourself." Sam's face has lost its flush because his blood is starting to concentrate somewhere else, flow south of the border, to the appendage Dean knows best, has handled for almost half his life. "Your parents are out until ten, right?"

"Y-yeah." Sam shudders, Dean's hand slipping inside his jeans. It almost feels wrong to do this without getting paid, without blades pressed into his skin, without darkness and the moon and the smell of lemon scented cleaning fluid. In Sam's living room there's light from the streetlamps and the moon, the orange glow from the hallway, the rest of the living room mostly dark. "You don't have to do this, though, Dean." Sam means it, Dean can hear the truth in his voice, feel the deliberate stalling of the motion of his hips.

"I've had dreams about you too Sam." He has and they were never like this. He doesn't dream about sex much because he gets off at least once a day, gets other people off at least once a day. He dreams about Sam reading to him in his backyard, about sharing a beer with Sam in the sun, Sam listening to what he has to say and caring, everything he already does with him, everything he can't get anywhere else.

He kisses Sam and he's careful, leans in and touches him with only his lips and the right side of his face, the tips of their noses rubbing together. Sam tastes like spit, wet with saliva and it's wholly innocent, unspoiled and nothing Dean's known. He must taste like whiskey and smell like Pledge and Windex, faint hint of latex deep in his throat from sucking a dick at three in the afternoon for extra spending money, so he could pay for his half of a pizza and buy more toilet paper and Lysol on the way home.

"Jesus." Sam breaks the kiss for air, sucks in a noisy mouthful, reaches up to cup Dean's face. He grabs Sam by the wrists and pushes him to the side, flat onto his back, holds his hands down, away from his face and kisses him again, let's Sam test his bottom lip with his teeth. "Jesus your lips, fucking pretty, full lips, prettier than a girl's." He's never thought too much of his mouth, normal and pretty but not a good fit or the rest of him, for a boy who is only half-pretty, still too half-pretty for a boy to be.

"You don't know what they look like." He laughs a little, swept up in the goodness of it, a rush of excitement to his spine.

"Yes I do. I know you, you're the most beautiful thing in the world, I can feel it." Sam sucks his lower lip in and bites it, smoothes the bite over with his tongue. Sam's struggling a little against Dean's hands but he can't let him up, can't let him touch, presses his face into the crook of Sam's neck and licks it, ruts their hips together. "Come on, let me touch you. I'm blind, feeling you everywhere is my thing." Sam strains and in a serious fight Dean couldn't win, doesn't have the size or the weight or the muscle.

"I know what I'm doing, you need to learn patience." He lets go, Sam doesn't move and he gets his jeans down most of the way, boxers as well.

*NC-17 material removed*

"I ruined your shirt, by the way." Sam's too breathless to speak but not quite enough to laugh, runs a finger through Dean's jizz and cracks a smile.

"Think my mom will believe I spilled something on myself?"

"Not unless you eat a lot of mayo."

"Gross." Sam laughs again, tying the condom off while Dean pulls his pants up. "You didn't come on the couch did you?"

"Just on our shirts." Jizz dries like grease, crusts over white, the glaze of spilled body fluids, stains Dean's had on his clothes for years. "Gimme yours I'll toss it in the wash." There are no slots for quarters in Sam's washing machine. He dumps Sam's red and black flannel into the machine and listens to the water collect in the basin, rumble angry to life, chug like a steamboat going up river.

"Did you put yours in?" Sam shivers, sweat drying on his chest, the sheen of his skin fading in the air. Dean tosses Sam a blanket from the closet in the hallway, hits him square in the back of the head. Sam's house is so ordinary, upper class suburbia, five bedrooms and four baths, more room than they need. The only ones ever here are Sam and his parents and his dog, no little brothers or sisters to share the home with. Under any other circumstances, in a different life, if he were a different Dean, he'd have wanted to stay, make one of the extra bedrooms upstairs his.

"I don't have parents Sam; no one is going to care if I come home with a little come on me." His shirt is already starting to stick to his belly, dried over and completely stuck. It hurts to pry the stiff cloth from his stomach and he runs water over the spot on his black shirt, over and over, soap lathered in his hand, spreading white over the black, foamy bubbles that pop and lather more.

"Wow, that's incredibly depressing." His shirt is wet all down the front and Sam manages to grab it, curl his fingers into the damp fabric and pull him forward, bent over the back of the couch.

"I hardly notice anymore." Sam tips his face up, clearly wants to kiss him, reaches up with his free hand to try and find Dean's face. Luckily Sam touches his right cheek, the good and pretty side of him, cups it with his giant palm and kisses him. Their teeth touch and it shouldn't be this clumsy, he shouldn't be this bad, his front teeth resting against Sam's, spine bent at a bad angle, jizz faint on his shirt. He's better at this, so fucking good, better than anyone. Sam's young and blind and smart but half stupid, can't see what is in front of his face because Dean doesn't let him, only now he will, now he'll see and that'll be the end to everything.

"I'm having the surgery on Monday." Sam speaks lazily into Dean's mouth, pushes his breath and his words into him, fills him up with them, with their vibrations and heat. "Will you come visit me?"

"'Course." He pushes his words into Sam this time, makes him swallow them down, suck 'em in and drown in them, some of the last words he'll ever want to hear Dean say. "I'll even bring you flowers."

"I don't like flowers."

"Well you're getting them, so tough." Castiel grows daisies on their windowsill, the ledge of the fire escape, waters his big potted plants, flowers that climb higher and higher and higher towards the sky, bright white with yellow centers, the simplest, tiniest flowers that can be. They're goodbye flowers, cheerful and bright and not particularly memorable, plain as dirt, common wherever there's a patch of grass.

Sam's going to remember his face more than his crappy flowers anyway.

The world smells of antiseptic, the burn of over sterilized floors and bleach sharp enough to sting, make his eyes water beneath their bandages. There's a dull ache behind his eyelids, a resounding, throbbing ache, pulsing with his heartbeat, blood surging behind and into his eye sockets. Morphine hardly takes the edge off of it, but it settles, dissipates into discomfort he can tolerate, focus his mind away from as he flexes his fingers in the sheets, swings his legs over the edge of his bed to touch his socked feet to the solid floor. Cold seeps through his socks as he tests his weight on his feet, waits to see if he's going to tip over, if dizziness and blood rush to his head. He doesn't sway just forces himself to rock once or twice on his heels and sit back down, find the plastic arm of the bed and follow it with his hands, press the slightly indented, red button the nurses showed him when he checked in. The nurse who comes is wearing flat, soft soled shoes that squeak when she speeds up her pace and are silent when she walks carefully, well aware of the sound that occurs if she doesn't. She's wearing a flower perfume much like the one his mother wears, lighter in fragrance, eroded by the passage of the day, the myriad of air molecules moving across her skin, the smell of hand sanitizer and Jell-O on her clothing.

"Good to see you're awake." She sets a tray down on the table that folds out and extends over his lap. The food has a salty scent to it, a hint of lime from the wriggling Jell-O he touches with his index finger to feel it jiggle, and there is a deeper, richer smell of gravy lathered meat, one that reminds him of the TV dinners his babysitter would cook for him in the microwave.

"Where are my parents?" His mother told him over and over, while she held his hand to her cheek, that she would be there at his side when he woke up.

"Visiting hours are over, but they promised they're going to be here first thing tomorrow morning." She opens his Jell-O cup for him, he can tell from the hiss of plastic and foil being torn back, can smell the fresh burst of lime scented molecules in the air. "Your fork is at four o'clock, meatloaf at twelve and your jell-o is at six, just give the nurse's station a ring if you need anything else. Your mother left some books for you on the dresser." She taps the dresser with her fingers hard enough for her nails to click against the wood, give him an idea of its general location. It's only two or three feet to his right, only a step or two if he climbs out of bed.

He smells Dean before Dean speaks. He has Dean memorized, lemon Pledge and bitter chemicals, rubbing alcohol and drinking alcohol mixed together, the faintest hint of sweat and leather, hair gel and mouthwash. Dean never wears cologne except on the occasional days that he does, when he comes to visit with colognes on his skin that are never the same selection, as though Dean goes through new samples on a whim, raids the free sample counters at department stores.

"I think your Jell-O is alive." Dean slumps loudly into the chair by his bed, either leans back or forward, the creak of the chair's legs giving him away. "Seriously, bitch is friggin' scary."

"It doesn't taste like it's alive." The Jell-O cup is to his left of his plate and the spoon cuts through it soft as butter. There is no movement in his mouth other than his tongue and the reflexive spasm of Jell-O in its death throes, quivering and shivering down his throat.

"How are your eyes feeling?" Dean brushes a finger over the bandages, the gauze wrapped tight enough to hold a steady pressure, loose enough to allow him to move his head without skin bulging over the edges of the gauze like fat spilling over the top of an overweight person's jeans.

"They hurt, but the morphine helps. It's pretty awesome actually."

"I bet, you lucky son of a bitch." Dean tosses a bouquet of flowers at his face and it hits him square in the nose. He inhales a whiff of flowers that have an aspect of sourness to them, a fermented kind of smell, not quite the right kind of sweet, with stems that are short and limp, petals that fall off against his fingertips if he touches them.

"Daisies?" His elementary school used to have daisies out on the soccer field, he got to know their smell during gym class, when he'd sit on the ground and take in the smells, the sounds of the other kids playing soccer, running free across the half damp grass.

"Sometimes I forget you have a super nose." Dean takes the flowers back, presumably to put them in a vase, Sam can't be sure, Dean makes little nose except for the soft patter of his footsteps on the floor. "I hope you're not too bored in here all by yourself. It's gotta suck, you can't even watch TV."

"My mom left me some books. How did you get past the nurses? They told me visiting hours were over." Dean laughs and Sam imagines his chest rumbles with the laughter, sound vibrating deep in his throat.

"You underestimate me." Dean snatches food from Sam's plate because he thinks he doesn't know or he knows Sam can hear the almost inaudible displacement of air and feel the insignificant rush of an arm moving past his face. "All I had to do was play the cripple card. I told them I was a patient on my way back to my room, they let me right through. I can be stealthy." Dean chews and it's all clicks of his teeth touching one another, the wet noise of shifting food, rhythmic swallowing. "I'm like James Bond dude, or Batman. Yeah, I'm Batman."

"That better not make me Robin." He wishes he could know the references as Dean does, with all of his senses. Batman and Robin are just words in his head, empty descriptions, red capes and black suits and masks over their eyes, all things he's never seen but will see soon enough. The bandages are supposed to come off his eyes in the following twenty-four hours and he'll get his first glimpse of light and possibly the faintest inkling of color depending on his progress, if the rods and cones in his eyes are ready to transmit information his damaged retinas can pass on to his optic nerve and process, form the all important pictures in his visual cortex. "How long are you going to visit Dean?" He hasn't been alone in a hospital overnight. He hasn't been in a hospital longer than a few hours, stuck in the emergency room in his mother's lap or at his father's side, in for scrapes and cuts that required basic stitches, the occasional possibly fractured limb. He's never been anywhere, hospital or home, school or a friend's house without Buster and he misses the weight of a body at the foot of his bed, the excited scamper of paws and warm, slimy morning kisses from a giant tongue.

"I dunno, it depends on how exciting you are. Right now I'm thinking about an hour, more if one or both of us gets naked."

"Funny." That's who Dean is; he's funny, quick to comedy, completely and utterly superficial. Dean is a puddle on the driveway. Sam doesn't know he's there until he steps in him and after he does the bottom of his foot is barely wet. He doesn't know much about him and he's beginning to think he never will and he's surprisingly starting to be upset by it. "You do anything interesting today?" He returns to his Jell-O, holds the cup firm in one hand and the spoon in the other, protecting it from Dean.

"Nah, I just did some work today." Dean's always been nonchalant about his job, waves off the idea of work like a man swatting buzzing insects with his hand.

"Construction again today?" Dean's mixed cement once or twice, helped lay bricks, saw pieces of wood in half until his palms bled and calloused over hard, rougher than any hands Sam has touched, rough and worn out by life.

"I wish, today was just same old same old, boring customer service stuff. One of those jobs where you stand outside a store and handout pamphlets and fliers. It doesn't take a genius and they really don't give a crap about your past job experience. I got paid in cash, strictly-under-the-table, less-than-minimum-wage-type gig but hey, fifty bucks is fifty bucks." Dean stretches out in his chair, props his feet up on the edge of Sam's bed, sneakers near Sam's hip. "You gotta learn to take any opportunity you can, Sammy, you can't coast by life on your looks, and you can't pull the blind boy card anymore."

"I had no idea you were so insightful Dean." He smiles around the spoon, rests his teeth in the curve, pushes his tongue flat against the rounded bottom, bites back his laughter.

"I'm deep has hell. You should listen to me more." Dean has a pack of cards in his jacket pocket and he deals them out, says they're going to play a few games of poker. The cards have Braille in the corners so he can read them, know his hand before he bets. Dean wins eight hands in a row before Sam realizes he's cheating, claiming he has the better hand because Sam never bothered to feel his cards to be sure he's telling the truth. "Tell me something Sam." Dean puts a new set of cards in his hand, shuffles the deck over and over, more times than necessary, a sound to fill the room while Dean thinks. "What're you looking forward to seeing the most?"

"I don't know." He has a pair of threes and nothing else, keeps his only ace and trades the other two cards in for new ones.

"Yeah you do." Dean nudges him in the chest with his elbow, the bone prominent through the stupid paper-thin hospital gown. "There's gotta be something. A rainbow? Your favorite book? Something equally lame?"

"You're just going to laugh at me if I tell you." Dean deals him a seven and a Jack, but only two of the cards in his hand are the same suit, and still only one pair of threes.

"I promise I won't laugh, scout's honor."

"I highly doubt you were a Boy Scout." Dean has cards worse than his and his imaginary pile of money grows. "You probably think it's sappy or whatever, but I want to see what my mom looks like." Surprisingly, Dean doesn't snort, doesn't make a sound, not even the tiniest laugh or sniggering comment.

"I think it's nice." Dean sets the pack of cards down hard, drops them onto the little table. "I have trouble remembering what my mom looked like sometimes. It comes and goes, but I know she was beautiful, the most beautiful woman who ever lived." Dean settles into silence, deals cards again, shuffling mechanically, without feeling, tossing cards onto Sam's lap, one two three, until a pile sits on top of his stomach, the junction where his dick meets his pelvis.

"How'd your mom die?" Sam knows how his biological parents died, there are nights he dreams about it, when he can smell the smoke and his lungs burn inside his chest, wither up and crumble to ash, his skin blistering and bubbling off, dripping down thick and slick as soup, burnt flesh and burnt wood and burnt dreams in the air. He wakes up swearing those nights, drenched and tangled in his sheets, the screams of a mother and father he's never met ringing in his head, the phantom crackle of burning wood in the very back of his mind.

"A terrible way, the worst way a person can die." Dean pushes his chair back with a dull screech of the legs across the floor. Dean's going to leave now and it's exactly what he expected would happen, not a single deviation from the equation in his mind.

Dean doesn't leave, he shifts his weight instead, moves somewhere and then there's the press of a body at the foot of Sam's bed, moving up, the plastic frame of the bed creaking old and broken and dangerous. Dean's hands rest warm on the gown covered skin of Sam's thighs, like the cloth isn't there, Dean's body heat radiating straight through the thin layer. Sam feels naked under Dean's hands and his cock fills with a surge of blood, stirring between his legs, half hard and insistent. "Someone's happy I'm here." Dean laughs and pushes his gown up, very clinical in the action, grabs Sam with one hand and holds him in the most intimate kind of embrace. "I'm going to suck you."

"Do it." He should be better; he should know better, he does know better. He knows enough to tell Dean to stop, to know it's a distraction or desperation or just Dean. Dean who must be the most beautiful thing to ever come into the world, to ever exist, for anyone to ever have dreamed could possibly come to be in some time or place. Dean with his plush, fat mouth softer than a newborn's skin, his hands that move as ghosts, everywhere and nowhere, feather gentle unless they're firm, gripping and stroking. "I can't wait to see you Dean." Dean's mouth is on him and it's far better than Sam dreamed, too good to be true, so good he's convinced he has to be dreaming, that this is a midnight fantasy, a wet dream on the hospital ward.

*NC-17 material removed*

Somewhere footsteps echo through a corridor and he can't muster enough blood for higher brain power, face the possibility of a nurse walking in while he's snug tight in Dean's throat, wet and warm and cozy. He would live in Dean's mouth if he could, never wants to leave, sighs at the cold air each time Dean pulls up, bobs and dives back down, the most bizarre game, Dean breathing harsh enough through his nose for Sam to feel, the warm pants of air that blast over the skin where Dean's nose meets the bottom of his abdomen, where heat pools beneath his skin, where his blood bubbles alive.

He comes and Dean doesn't budge, doesn't even lift his head, drinks it down, coughs when he finally sits up, chest heaving hard enough to rock the bed a little. Dean sits on his knees and he's rock hard in his jeans, cock jutting against the lower part of Sam's leg, right above his patella, the crease where his joint bends and his muscles flex to make him move. Dean rubs against him, works his hips in coordinated movements, breathing shallow and fast. He finds the hem of Dean's pants and unzips them, pushes his hand in through the opening, immediately finding Dean's heat, Dean's heartbeat and blood throbbing in his cock. Dean isn't wearing boxers so he has room to work, no barriers to overcome, just forms a hollow fist with his hand and feels Dean fuck into it. Dean's always quiet after he comes and there's nothing Sam wants to do more than kiss him, squeeze Dean's face firm between his hands and wreck his mouth, memorize the shape of his face so he can recognize it later.

"Dean?" The bed is too small for the both of them and Dean is lying on his side, face turned to Sam's neck, warming it with each exhalation.

"What?"

"Are you beautiful?" It is difficult to ask, even harder to say, thick and dripping on his tongue, cotton stuck to the roof of his mouth, burning embarrassment in his face, heating him everywhere red. Sentimental and trivial to ask but he wants to know, deep rooted curiosity in his soul, eating him alive, eating him up because it's all he can think about now that he can see, because he doubts there can be a thing more beautiful in the world than Dean. "Or handsome, you know, so it sounds manlier."

Dean doesn't laugh and there is no gentle teasing.

Dean sounds resigned and weary, more tired than anyone Sam has ever heard; the dull ring of apathy in his voice.

"No Sam. I'm not handsome or beautiful or pretty." Dean's a liar or modest or both, soft under Sam's hands and warm beside him and of course he's a liar, the prettiest liar of them all. "I'm really not."

"I don't believe you." He finds what he guesses is the right side of Dean's face and runs his fingers over it, along the bones in his jaw and the shape of his ear, the curve of his nose. Dean feels beautiful and feelings don't lie to the blind, not when their eyes lie enough, lie to them about the outside world and how it is more than smells and sounds and textures beneath skin.

"That's fine." Dean puts his hand over Sam's, hold it there and removes it carefully. "Just remember that I tried to tell you."

Dean lies with Sam until his eyes turn heavy under the layers of bandages, gauze plastered over his eyelashes and eyelids, stifling his soon to be functional eyes. Dean rolls off the bed, yawning, murmurs goodbye and shuffles out, his feet dragging across the tile, the scuffling of the tired and the elderly and the dead.

Morning brings new smells to his room, the scent of eggs and toast, what might have been bacon once, and what is definitely cherry lip gloss and green apple body wash, the type girls at his school wear, come to class smelling like artificial fruit.

"Good morning!" The new voice is bright and cheerful, distinctly young, bubbly and uplifting. "My name's Jess, I'm here to bring you your breakfast. I'm a candy striper." She shakes his hand and it's smoother than liquid, than the molecules used to make her flesh.

"I'm Sam." Her hand is small in his, dainty, and her fingernails have a glossed over feel to them, nail polish painted on in layers.

"I know, we go to the same school. We had AP Lit together last year." Jess unsnaps the table and pushes the tray around to him, waits for him to seek out the edges of the plate before she hands him the fork and knife. "I'm not allowed to ask this, but what are you here for?" Jess pulls up the chair that Dean sat in and his mother and father will sit in at some point and goes quiet, patiently waiting for his response.

"Getting my eyes removed. I figured since I'm blind there's no real need to have them there. I'm going to get glass eyes that come in different colors, one for each day of the week." Jess giggles and it is a happy sound, light, reminds him of bubble gum at birthday parties and snow cones in winter, shivering with the taste of lime and grape on his lips, holding a soggy paper cone between his mittens. "I'm getting my eyes fixed. Believe it or not but I'm going to come to school without my dog and the stylish sunglasses."

"Wow, that's wonderful. Congratulations. You must be beyond excited."

"You have no idea." The eggs are cold but he doesn't feel much like eating, stabs around with this fork for no other reason than that he can. "I've been wondering what it would be like to read without using my fingers since I was seven."

"It's hot stuff, a veritable party with your eyes."

"Vocabulary word, very nice."

"I have to impress the patients somehow." He wonders why he hasn't met Jess before, how odd it is to be in the same room with someone for nine months and never know her name. "I have to go finish delivering meals to the rest of the hall, I'll come by later?"

"That would be great. Until my parents get here I'm stuck doing summer reading."

"I haven't even started the books yet, we can start them together. I'll be back in a while."

Hospitals make Dean uncomfortable; make him flashback to when he was little, stuck in the burn ward for over six months, waiting for grafts to heal and someone to want to love him, wrapped up like a mummy even on the bottoms of his feet, his stupid stuffed bear his only friend. The hospital was the loneliest time in his young life and it was heaven compared to what was to come. The nurses fawned over him and petted his good cheek, read him stories when he asked and gave him ice cream to try and get him not to cry each time they had to peel the bandages back, let the doctor poke and prod at his tender new flesh, scrape away the crispy stuff. Hospitals were great in comparison to the group home and school, kids taunting his arm and his face, the weirdness he was made of, the ugliness that he has been reborn into. In another life, the life he was supposed to live, the one with his mother and father and little brother, he could have been someone special, the best looking son of a bitch he's ever seen.

People start trickling out of the hospital around seven, the especially dedicated ones sticking around until they're kicked out, holding the hands of their relatives and smiling, even when they know in a few days there's not going to be a reason to come back. There's only two reasons to come to a hospital, to be fixed or to die, and Dean's already been crappily stitched back together once. If he comes here again he wants it to be for good, for it to be the end to his Frankenstein life. He's the man made with the parts of other people, the skin of a pig and dead men on his arm and face. He's nothing but a patchwork quilt, the product of medical breakthroughs and a decent hand.

He should have come sooner but courage is a hard thing to muster, especially when there's the certainty of loss entangled in it, coiled invisibly around his ankles to make him stay back, stuck in the apartment for hours on end, three days passing by. Sam's going to bolt when he sees him, gets a full on, real honest to god look at his face. Sam'll soak in the grossness like a sponge and recoil like he's been burned, burned as bad as Dean was when he was young and full of promise, not a monster that should be hidden from the world. Sam can look at the world now and recognize it, he knows beauty by more than touch and sound, the way Dean sucks his dick. He's losing a good friend all because someone as perfect as Sam doesn't deserve to have to look at someone like him, isn't fucked up enough to look past it, should be allowed to have all the pretty girls he wants if he wants them. Dean will stick at his side if Sam asks him to, be the ugly wingman to help him score with the chicks, the poor disfigured friend Sam is kind hearted enough to pal around with in public. It's the end of an era and he's never been too fond of change, prefers structure and predictability, orders and a schedule to follow, no deviations from the plan of the day.

He feels like less of a freak in hospitals. Most of the nurses don't even give him a second glance, they just assume he belongs there, carry on like they've seen a dozen of him before. They probably have, he's not the only burn victim, and he's not the worst, shouldn't be moping over what happened when there are people a hell of a lot worse. He remembers people bandaged almost head to toe, tubes down their throats, blackened and burnt beyond repair. He sat in his little sterile bed, feet wrapped up and swollen, watching them die one by one until he could go be with the other kids, away from the bandages stained with spots of yellow and brown pus, infections seeping through the cloth. That used to give him nightmares, used to haunt his dreams, the thought of himself covered too tight in bandages and suffocating, the stench of his own sour body fluids in his nose and throat.

"Can I help you honey?" The nametag of the nurse who stops him reads Missouri. It makes him want to ask what kind of parents name their kids after a state and why Missouri of all places. He bites his tongue because she glares at him, even though he hasn't done anything wrong, hasn't said a word. She's looking at his face and he tugs his hood up higher, forward to cover more of his fucked up left side.

"I'm just heading back to my room; I was looking for a snack." She's suspicious, but even the most tough ass, stern nurse won't interrogate a burnt up young man like him, not when he looks like such a tragically nice boy, a guy who could have been something special, a guy who is already special in the fucking worst of ways.

"Baby, there's no need to hide around here." She pushes his hood back, pushes it off him, removes his safety wall from his head with just her fingers. "There, you're so handsome when you actually show your face." She lies because lies are his bandages; lies are how people try to help him cope with the pain, with his face. They tell him he's almost pretty and hope his ego grows three sizes in one day like the Grinch's tiny heart.

He feels naked. The air is too cold on his sensitive cheek. He's tempted to run, shove his hood back up and pull the strings, mold it around him tight, only his nose and eyes peeking through the hole.

Sam's not alone in his room, he's sitting on the front end of his bed, legs crossed, facing someone thin with long, long blonde hair, the two of them laughing. The girl holds up little laminated cards, Dean can only see the backs of them, and Sam says a word in response, a color or an object or a letter. She's quizzing him, showing Sam pictures of what he's never had a chance to see, what he has to learn to function in the world. It's like teaching Sam how to count and read all over again.

"Orange, the fruit, not the color, but the fruit is also orange."

"Right. You're doing really well. We can probably start working on reading tomorrow, now that you can recognize the letters."

"You have no idea how stupid I feel." Sam rubs at his eyes with the backs of his hands, rubs at them and they're so wide and green, shining with a spark of recognition, alive for the first time in Sam's life. Dean's so proud of him it thickens his throat, weights down his chest. "I already know how to read."

"You'll get there, until then you can keep doing your fancy finger thing." She touches Sam's hands and doesn't pull them back quickly enough, lets her much smaller hands linger close. He doesn't need to stay and watch, he can see what'll happen already. Sam will lean in and kiss what must be an achingly pretty girl on the mouth, cradle her face tender like he wanted to do to Dean. She'll kiss him back and it'll be every romantic movie wrapped into one, perfect and sweet and the beginning of something wonderful, the teenage passion love starts out as. There won't be a place for Dean in the pictures that they'll put on the mantle of their house someday, that they will show to their children if they ever go that far.

He's hollow inside, the burnt shell of a baked potato, the inside scooped out and devoured. He's not a brave man, if he were he'd go in the room anyways, say hi, help Sam in ways he doesn't know how, the very best help his dropout education can offer. He isn't brave though, so he doesn't go in, and his chest is emptier than a used up tank of gas, a bone dry riverbed in the summer. It hurts, more than he's used to, the kind of rejection he can't shake off, worse than any of the others, than the disgusted looks he gets on the street, the way Cassie kissed his good cheek. This hurts more than it did with Alastair, it's getting replaced by something blonde and pretty again, something with breasts and hips and a normal face. He couldn't make enough money for Alastair and now he can't make a good enough friend for Sam. He thinks he's breaking a little inside, into carefully planned out pieces, delicate cracks in bullet proof glass, penetrating deeper with the pressure of failure, the solid load of sadness on his ribs.

He puts his hood on and god it's better, it hurts less, it's easier to spin quick on his heel and head back the way he came, hands in the front pocket of his jacket, laced together and trembling. This is the end and he can see it, his last chance at finding a friend, someone who can look past him, see him for who he is, maybe not love him, not find beauty in what he is, but accept him, treat him like anyone else, any stranger, acquaintance, or friend on the street. If he can't stay friends with a blind man than there's no hope, no end to a lemon scented and condom covered existence, the taste of lube and latex stuck in the back of his throat forever, burned into it like childhood flames into his skin.

The surgeons' lounge on the fourth floor is ridiculously easy to break into. The doors aren't locked, there's no one to block his way, the lights dimmed down low in the room that's the mint green color of hospital scrubs. They're smart enough not to leave surgical instruments lying around, he has to rustle through a drawer of plastic forks and knives before he finds a real blade, polished smooth and silver. It's stupid to keep something so dangerous in the hospital; they have to have seen the episode of ER with the schizophrenic guy who stabbed the pretty med student and Carter with a knife from the doctors' lounge. Television teaches things sometimes, when people are paying enough attention to listen.

The handle is a thick wooden one, not the plastic kind that the infomercials advertise for at three in the morning, the blades that can cut through wood and concrete, but can't do shit on a tomato when they're actually paid for and shipped out. He clutches the handle hard enough the muscles in his palm cramp; that his hand quivers restlessly with the effort. He's been told numerous times by different professionals that he's impulsive, quick to steal, quick to fuck, quick to run. A social worker told him he was emotionally unstable as a result of childhood trauma and loss, a complete lack of structure as he grew up. He just does what he wants when he wants to, doesn't see anything wrong with that, not if it makes people happy, keeps everyone entertained.

He bleeds the color of summer strawberries crushed on asphalt, the juice stained across white countertops, his hands and the corners of his mouth, a bright red stain on the carpet that never came out and weirdly Castiel didn't freak, just laughed along with Dean and licked seed flecked berry blood from his fingertips. He bleeds strawberries and cherry popsicles, red water colors and ruby lipstick, the reddest color in the universe probably. It takes him back to being fourteen and stupid, Alastair scraping designs into his skin, giving him tattoos made of blood and pain, Alastair's initials carved carefully between his shoulder blades, almost deep enough to touch the bone. Dying is trippy, in slow motion, slowed down enough that he can count the beats of his heart like the last beats of an executioners drum, counting him off into eternity.

Everything stops, goes dark, and then starts up again, kicked back to life. There is an IV in the back of his hand and gauze wrapped around his wrists, wound more than twice over. He can't flex his hand or bend his arm at the elbow. The whole thing is eerily similar to his first skin grafts, only there is nothing to numb him, no morphine dripping into his veins. A few gashes in his arms aren't serious enough for pain killers; that, or this is their way of discouraging suicides, by showing him how painful it can be if he doesn't do it right the first time, as some kind of fucked-up deterrent.

Castiel sits at the foot of his bed, elbows on the mattress, hands folded in prayer, head bowed. He prays silent like always, hides his thoughts inside his head, held in by the bones of his skull. One day he's going to ask Cas what he prays about, what he hopes for, if he wants world peace or an end to hunger, or if he wants God to just give him a fucking sign for once, reward him for years of belief and blind faith.

"Hey." His voice is a dry rasp, weak and ugly sounding. "You been here long?"

"Since this morning." Castiel lowers his arms and his hands rest on Dean's ankles, fingers find the bones beneath the skin and absently rub. Cas touches his ankles even though they're dirty, the faintest hint of red splashed across them, blood that dripped down his body, trickled to the bottoms of his shoes. His socks are ruined, dried over and over with his blood, shriveled, stiff and maroon. "I started calling hospitals looking for you. When you didn't come home I assumed someone had gone psycho on you." Cas drags his finger across his throat, pantomimes death.

"Sorry to disappoint. I'm the only one who went psycho on me." He would laugh if he could, if it didn't hurt, if the laugh wouldn't echo and rattle in his chest, trapped beneath all the bones and skin.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Suicide is eternal damnation. You're risking your soul." His soul is fucked eight ways already, fucked in ways he'll never understand. If hell and god and heaven were real he'd be doomed already. Only Jesus can reform a whore, Castiel would tell him, Mary was cleansed of her sin by the hands of the savior and in death she walked in heaven's kingdom with the virgins and the righteous and the devout. Cas says to him that the deformed are remade and he'll find his true form in paradise, that he'll be rewarded with beauty in exchange for piety, like he's some kind of ugly schoolgirl doing the popular girl's homework hoping for a chance to be cool.

"I'll take my chances with it." There is no God and Castiel's setting himself up for some hell of a disappointment. He's seen death and it's slow and frozen and quiet. Death really is just one long sleep, nowhere for the soul or mind to go, resting in the ground for eternity, coffin and body slowly eaten by worms and cockroaches. He spent a month in August digging graves at the cemetery after the usual guy hurt his back. He knows the solid slide of a shovel through sod, the bitter rich smell of dirt, the last dirt a corpse will ever smell, he even has the measurements down to a T. He's had to help clean the crypts too and he's seen those bodies, bones gnawed clean, dull yellow and gray, stringy messes for hair and grinning skulls. That's what death is, death is smiling beneath your skin because everything is over, smelling the putrid stink of your own rotting flesh.

"I won't." Cas is so serious, patting the back of his hand, signing a cross with his hands, touching Dean's forehead, his chest, each of his shoulders, murmuring what Dean now knows by heart in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. "I think we should move." He couldn't see it before and he can now and he's an idiot. Castiel is his friend, all faults and fucks aside. Cas doesn't imagine him better or want him better or think he's better. He's a whore, a liar, and a cheat, but it's okay, doesn't seem to make a bit of a difference here. They'll run welfare scams until they're too old to move and Castiel will go to church and clean like his fucking ex-nun of a mother taught him to and Dean will do anything for money like Alastair taught him to. He and Cas both are shaped by other people and maybe together they can try to be something new, different from the molds they were set into by birth. "Once you can leave the hospital you can say goodbye to Sam and we'll go upstate."

"Don't make me see him Cas." His throat closes and his eyes feel wetter than they've ever been, prickling hot. He can't remember the last time he cried, it was something he gave up when he was a kid, after the first few hundred teasings, people asking kindly and gently but always laughingly what happened to his face. "Please don't let him see me. He thinks I'm normal."

Castiel nods and he must be the most understanding person in the world.

"The doctors say you're being held here on a seventy-two hour psychological hold. We won't be leaving until then, in case you change your mind." If there were a chance he'd change his mind about it he probably wouldn't be lying here, bandaged at the wrists, IV dripping fluids into him, his head getting a little thick, like cotton swollen with water.

"They drugged my IV." Not the good drugs either, the ones meant to fix his head, little happy pills in liquid form. They're nice things; he likes the soft hum of content in his belly even if there is fuzz growing on his tongue like mold on an orange left to sit in the sun.

"Antidepressants." Castiel unfolds his tray slides it to him and he is facing a lumpy, white pudding cup and a sandwich on brown wheat bread, no mayo, just plain turkey and tomato, not even mustard to liven it up. "You should eat your pudding."

"I'll fuck a duck before I eat tapioca."

"That would be uncomfortable. I think it would bite you first."

"Not an image I needed." He's got some weird picture of Big Bird on his knees giving him oral in his head, drug-related, hopefully. "Man, leave me alone so I can eat in peace without mentions of bestiality. Fucking weirdo." He doesn't mind being alone with his head right now, he can stand it, nothing but the metronome beat of silence, his brain put on pause, temporarily inactive, a television crackling with static, waiting for a signal.

"I'll return later tonight." It looks like Cas is gonna kiss him for a minute, eyes shining like he wants to, watching the shape of Dean's lips as he brings one triangle-shaped half of his sandwich to his mouth. The look passes, as if it wasn't there at all, probably because it wasn't, his stoned out mind playing tricks on him, giddy for reasons he doesn't know.

"Bring better food." He could go for something with bacon, something greasy and cheap, gritty with salt, steaming hot inside plastic and paper wrappers.

"I will." Castiel waves goodbye to him and it's kind of ridiculous for Cas to be visiting him at eleven thirty in the morning wearing his best suit, the blue buttons reflecting the florescent light. His life seems shot to hell these days, bleeding and dying on the floor, in its last throes of agony, sputtering messy and dramatic. Things will settle out eventually, he knows it; life's dynamic like that, rises and falls but eventually levels like the ocean. Sure there are swells and dips but in the end it's relatively stable, one long flat expanse of blue.

He's nearly finished with his dry tasting lunch when there is a timid knock at the door. A blonde girl is standing in the doorway and holy shit she's beautiful, the type of pretty that doesn't seem real at first, the type that belongs on television and in magazines. Long, gorgeous blonde curls and big blue eyes, a tight little yoga instructor body, perky ass and bouncy breasts that even the candy striper uniform can't hide. He recognizes her instantly, it's difficult not to remember the sweet thing sitting with Sam in his room, on the foot of his bed like she belonged there, giggling and pretty and breathtaking.

"Do you mind if I come in to get your tray?"

"Go ahead." She stares at his face with that misty eyed glance, the sympathetic one that he gets from mothers and nurses, the one accompanied by the clucks of shame at the tragedy. She wants to pet his hair and stroke his cheek and tell him he's the most special boy in the world for facing adversity the way he has. She wants to tell him he's too precious for this world or some other crap line.

"You don't want your pudding?"

"Not when it's tapioca." The words come out harsher than he meant, meaner and uglier, a ugly as he feels inside and out.

"I agree with you on that one, this stuff should only be served on the geriatrics ward." Her blonde hair shines perfect with highlights and her lips have sweetness to the scent of them that reminds him of Cassie, a warm and kissable smell. She won't stop sneaking peeks at him from behind her hair when she thinks he's focused on the television or the snatches of blue sky he can see out the window if he cranes his neck so far to the left it aches with a sudden sharpness that makes the muscles twinge and tremble.

"Go ahead and ask." He gives her permission because he hates waiting for the question to come around. There are pleasantries he isn't willing to deal with this morning before this girl can bring herself to blurt out her curiosity over what the fuck happened to his face.

"I wasn't—" She flushes, red spreading from the very inside of her cheeks and outwards, way back to her ears, all of her face scarlet and hot. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay, I'm used to it." She stands beside him like he's given her an invitation to peer up close, given her front row seats to the Dean Smith freak show.

"How did you get those burns?"

"My house caught on fire when I was a kid. They're nasty, I know, but the doctors tell me childhood deformities build character. Be sure to spread the word on your way out, peep shows start every hour on the hour." The girl stands quiet and wordlessly slides off her latex glove, curls her fingers into her palm reflexively before extending them, offering her hand towards him. In the very center of her palm, radiating out, big and gaping and ugly is an old, scarred over burn. He can see the faint pattern of spiraling circles burnt into the skin.

"I tried to get cereal out of the kitchen cupboards when I was five. I used the stovetop as leverage to pull myself up onto the counter; it didn't occur to me that my mom had just finished using the front burner to make breakfast. My hand stuck to the metal, when my dad pulled me off the flesh ripped away."

He touches her hand, glides his fingertips over the skin. He's never touched a burn that wasn't his, never felt the roughness and wrinkles of another person's scar tissue and skin grafts. Her hand is cool and the white powder from the gloves sticks to him, a chalky and dry dust. Her wound is nothing compared to his, but she knows the pain of a part of yourself sizzling away, the horrific smell of your own burnt hair and skin, the weight of ugliness sitting where people can see.

"Not bad." He drops her hand, wipes the white onto the bed. "My name is Dean."

"Jess." Short for Jessica he's sure, a respectable girl's name, perfectly common and ordinary, the opposite of her face and her body, something plain to go along with the pretty. "Are you here because of the burns?"

"I think we both know why I'm here, unless it's routine to send burn victims to the psych ward." Jess gapes at him, her mouth pink and open, smudged shiny with lip gloss. "Tried to kill myself, it didn't work so I get a nice room in this place." Jess brings her lips together in a tight, white line but the look of sympathy etched into her baby blues is gone, replaced by what can only be disappointment and misunderstanding. "But I guess I also get the pleasure of your company, ain't that right sweetheart?" She's Sam's girl and as nice as she is to look at it hurts. Jess is what he could have been, who he should have been; undeniable, crazy, astounding beauty.

He gets her blushing again with a wink of his good eye.

"Yes you do." She picks up his tray, hugs it close to her chest, crosses her arms around it. "I'm just supposed to bring your trays in and out though; I spend most of the day with the kids on the oncology ward." She's a saint too, reads to children with cancer and helps the blind learn how to see.

"I'll make sure to eat a lot of meals then."

She smiles at him before leaving, one long, full beam of a smile that has him wondering what it is like for Sam to kiss her, if he licks away the taste of make up or lets it sit on his tongue, smear across his own mouth, paint him shiny as well, shiny and fruity and sweet. He wonders which of them Sam prefers to kiss, the real deal or the attractive figment of his own blind imagination.

There is more beauty in the world than Sam ever knew. Life has depth and Technicolor, one and two and three dimensional, every plane of reality, the different dimensions that compose the universe. He lives in this new vibrant and brilliant place, where everything is new, where it's all pretty. He feels reborn, remade by God's hands, sculpted to meet his potential, the dreams he once assumed were out of reach. He can see and drink in the details like vital nutrients, feels like he's grown twice as tall, taller than anyone possibly could be, augmenting with his new knowledge. He had studied his parents and memorized the sight of them. His mom's hair is blonde and his dad has gray at his temples and his mother smiling at him in the morning when he comes walking down the stairs spikes his blood with streams of happiness so hot he burns alive in ecstasy. Buster sleeps beside him in bed at night and Sam watches him sleep, scratches the dark brown fur at the base of his ears and rests his fingers on the blackness of his muzzle, the wet charcoal color of his nose. He is in a permanent state of perfection and splendor, the colors and shapes and shines of the entire world to take in, breathe in and make a part of his memory.

The phone rings and there is no more blind fumbling for it, no uncertainty on his side of the line. He can see exactly who is calling, reads a little slower than he should but he'll catch up, already recognizes the alphabet and knows just what letters put together form what words.

"Hi Jess." The phone is cool against his ear and his hand, the plastic shiny white and smudged gray in the bottom corner from where he dropped it early on a Saturday morning.

"Hey Sam." He loves the sound of Jess' voice more than he does her face. He can't help it, doesn't know how to appreciate the aesthetics yet. He isn't an expert on beauty, not by a long shot, but if there were ever a need for comparison, some kind of crazy prettiness standard, it would be Jess. He isn't sure what constitutes the epitome of loveliness, only that Jess must be it, with her slightly rounded cheeks and pink mouth, blue eyes and curly blonde hair the color of the sun, the same as his mother's. "Are you still going to pick me up from the hospital?"

"I was just on my way out the door." Buster is bouncing at his feet, nails scrabbling on the hardwood floor, excited to go out. For the first time since Sam got him he doesn't need to take Buster with him, leaves his leash sitting on the kitchen counter. "I'll see you soon." Jess blows him a playful kiss through the phone, follows it with a giggle, the cheerful in her voice reminding him oddly of Dean. Dean who was never cheerful or bubbly, Dean who he hasn't seen in seven days, Dean who sucked him off in the hospital bed as a way of saying goodbye, snuck off later and didn't bother to return. He wanted to see Dean so badly, touch his perfect mouth with his fingers, check to see if it is as pink and plush as it feels, as kissable looking as it is when it parts to let Sam's tongue lick in. More than anything he wanted to see Dean's face, see him smile, watch him suck Sam's cock and lie on his back while they fucked. He wants to know what Dean's face is like when he comes, if his lips part in a quiet sigh or if his eyes open wide and expressively. He'll never know and disappointment is a bitter aftertaste in this throat, hard to swallow and difficult to ignore.

Being blind was akin to living in a dream, a semi-conscious state, never fully alert or able to perceive his surroundings. Now he does and sometimes it's overwhelming, itches at his skin, pounds in his head until he has to shut his eyes and breathe, dwell in the familiarity of the oblivion. The bus is full of colors, unique looking people, blurs of trees and cars and buildings outside the window, the shocking blue of the late afternoon sky uninterrupted by clouds.

Jess is adorable in her candy striper uniform and he's glad he will never miss out on this sight again; Jess smiling as she takes a patient's tray, tucks a curly strand of hair behind her ear, pretty and glowing. He's going to ask her on a date tonight after he takes her home, ask if she wants to be the one to go with him to his first movie, if she could share that experience with him. He'll wear his best shirt and she'll wear her nicest skirt and he'll try and kiss her by the end of the night, lean in when he says goodnight and hope she leans in too.

"You ready to go?" She kisses his cheek in the hallway, presses her pink and purple purse into his hands.

"Just a minute, there's someone I want to say goodbye to." He follows Jess down the hallway and pauses in the doorway to watch as she goes in, bouncing blonde curls and long, long legs. Jess goes over to the young man wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, tight jeans worn thin at the knees, and the legs are frayed at the bottom near the cuffs. He's lacing up a pair of boots with steady and careful determination. Sam's never seen that kind of boot before, they look solid and sturdy, an ugly dark, almost black brown. Jess puts a hand on the guy's shoulder and he glances up, lets his laces fall.

He swallows back shock, the expression of appalled awe that his face urges him to make. The guy looks so different, in a way that Sam's never seen, a way he can't compare to what little he has seen. For all he knows this is another variation of normal, one end of the human spectrum, wrinkled, pale and pink skin stretched onto skulls. He'll ask Jess later, when they're alone, on the walk home, to fill any empty pauses that might form themselves in the air, to drown out the sound of their feet on the pavement.

"Happy to be going home today?" Jess sits down beside the young man and Sam locks eyes with him. His eyes are water bright and green, the color green of Sam's front lawn, the green in the box of crayons Jess bought him to help him learn colors. He doesn't respond to Jess' question, bends forward again, so far over Sam can only see the top of his head, the short brown hair, soft without gel, and finishes lacing up his boots, silent as can be, only nodding when Jess speaks to him further. It's rude but he must be wary of Sam, shy in front of strangers. "I want you to meet my friend." A vigorous head shake; no. "Please, I know you want to get out of here, please?" Another head shake, another no, and then he's up, darting past Sam and down the hall, sprinting, a blur of blue flannel and jeans and light brown hair. He smells like the hospital and the lemon scent of cleaning solution, faint of cigarettes and cologne and sweat. He knows the smell, knows it so well he can smell it when he dreams. Dean. "I'm sorry about that. Dean's been dying to get out of here for days." Oh god, Dean.

"Dean?" His mouth has gone cotton ball dry and his heart is beating too fast in his chest.

"Dean Smith, he's a nice guy, so sad though. Only one person ever came to visit him."

Dean.

"I'll be back, wait for me in the cafeteria, buy something to eat." He gives Jess the twenty in his pocket and runs as quickly as his legs can carry him, fastest he's ever moved, the muscles in his legs burning as they warm, flying down the corridors after Dean, slipping on the floor as he makes a sharp turn, out the exit, onto the street, into the dying light. The sky is smeared with colors, purple and orange but he doesn't have time to look, hooks a right around the corner to the bus stop, the nearest one for two and a half blocks. "Dean!" Dean's standing and leaning against a pole, bright with the rays of the dying sun, blue flannel and blue jeans and boots and Dean. He looks nothing like Sam imagined and it doesn't matter, he's been waiting a week, no, months for this and this is his moment, this is their moment.

"Hi Sam." Dean won't meet his eyes, turns his head and watches the street, the ashen gray of the sidewalk, littered with wrappers and cigarettes.

"Dean." He pulls Dean to his chest without asking, wraps his arms around him and isn't sure if he'll ever let go. "I thought, I don't even know what I thought. You never came back." Dean's cheek rests against Sam's neck and he can feel the texture of the skin, a rough, wrinkled softness. "You should have told me you were in the hospital, we could have been sick together."

"I wasn't sick." Dean rolls back his sleeves. There are bandages on his arms, wrapped around his wrists tight, perfect white and rumpled. "It doesn't matter. I was stupid; it's not going to happen again. I didn't know how to say goodbye to you Sam. You deserve better, and now you have better." Jess isn't better than Dean. Dean jerks out of his embrace, jerks out and away, into the street and then, then. It's slow motion, it's high definition picture, it's a wonder of sight he can't take back. The bus collides with Dean and Sam would give anything, the world and Jess and his life to not have to see it, hear it; smell the sharp iron of Dean's blood. The bus hits Dean with a crunch and a burst of brilliant, crimson dark spray of blood, spattering the front of the bus up to the window. Dean disappears for a few moments and when the bus screeches to a halt Dean is lying in the street, his skull broken and smashed by the bus' tires, a mess on the pavement that isn't human. Sam rushes to him and Dean is warm and bleeding. He sits with Dean's body on the pavement, the asphalt drenched in Dean's hot blood, as red as melted crayons or strawberries or lipstick. He sits with Dean and cries until Jess touches his shoulder and the paramedics load Dean onto a stretcher. Jess clings to Sam and they are both stained with Dean's blood, blood red as a sunset, crusted over and waiting.

Dean dies on a Tuesday and the day is burned forever into Sam's memory, burned into him like the burns on Dean's skin, permanent, an intangible haunting of his brain. Dean is buried on a Thursday and it's a day Sam will forget because he wills himself to. The local church pays for the funeral because Dean doesn't have a family or the money to pay for his own coffin, a headstone to go on his grave. Sam stands in the cemetery in his nicest suit, the sun beating down on his face and shoulders, absorbed by the black of his suit, sweat sticky and dribbling at his temples, his neck, making him damp. There is only one other person at Dean's funeral, a man sitting in a single white folding chair, praying so intently while the priest speaks, giving a sermon to an audience of one, white collar drenched with sweat.

The ceremony ends and there are no tears, no sobs, the cemetery is quiet as death. Dean's grave is simple, elegant, a cheap, pine box coffin, a cross painted onto the front, along with the image of a woman in a green-blue shawl, her hands outstretched and welcoming, her shoulders bathed in light. She's such a serene image and he hopes she's there to guide Dean to heaven, the visage of an angel come to set him free. The man in the tan coat and blue suit sits beside Dean's grave, plucking ruby red petals off roses with his fingers, scattering them on the top of Dean's coffin where it sits six feet below the ground in a neat rectangular hole that seems too big to hold a body, too large of a place for Dean to ever go. The petals scatter in the wind in that dark and lonely pit, polka dots across the wood, curling inwards on themselves with incipient wilting.

"You're Castiel, aren't you?" Castiel nods but doesn't say a word, tugs his coat tighter around his shoulders despite the heat, he must be burning up from the outside in. "Dean mentioned you."

"He mentioned you too." Castiel's hair is matted and damp, plastered to his forehead, the sun brilliantly hot, burning and blazing. "Is there anyone—"

"There is no one. Dean had no one." Castiel sits on the dirt and clenches a handful of the earth, squeezes it between his fingers, curls his hand into a fist. "Did he—" Castiel pauses, bows his head. "Was his death intentional?"

Sam thinks back to that day, the glow of the headlights on Dean's face, the surprise in his eyes, in the frantic parting of his lips.

"No. I don't think it was. It was an accident."

Castiel gently tosses the clump of dirt into the grave, it lands solid on the coffin with a thud. Sam lets his own rose fall, join Dean in the dirt, ready to be buried, Dean and trivial objects of affection, a meager sacrifice to a dead man.

"Sam." In the cemetery Jess is beautiful, black sundress and high heeled shoes, walking to him solemn across the grass. She takes his hand and they stand at Dean's grave together, in the silence and the sun, the quiet of the summer afternoon, surrounded by the spaces where a thousand men and women have been laid to rest with his same ritual.

"Let's go Jess."

He doesn't think about Dean for years; a decade, stores Dean in the tiny crevice of his mind and seals it tight, carries on, lives in the new, visual world.

He's twenty-eight and married, two kids and another on the way, when he dreams of Dean, the strength of his thighs, the lemon and salt smell of his clothes, the burnt and damaged skin on his face, a remnant of his childhood. He dreams of Dean's disfigured face, the sound of his laughter, the touch of his hands.

He dreams of Dean as he was.

Beautiful.