"It's late," Sam said, standing in the study doorway.

Dean down from the mantel, looked over at his brother standing in the doorway. Sam's arms were crossed, that much he could discern, his shoulder heavy on the oak doorpost, for support more than relaxation. Dean knew Sam's hip had been bothering him even though he played it off as the mother of all senior ailments.

Dean rubbed his shoulder; yeah, they had a few of those.

"Late? Sam, it's not even eleven."

"Yeah, and you're usually in bed by—what? Nine-thirty?"

Dean didn't admit to his heavy eyelids or the way his chest had been bothering him, old wounds acting up. He leaned back on the plush embrace of his favorite chair and stared up at the enormous painting on the mantel. Monet, Sam had called it. Like it belonged in this house, or anywhere near it. This ghost town with just the two of them and their footsteps echoing off the walls.

"So, uh." Dean cleared his throat. "What's on the agenda for tomorrow?"

"That would be—nothing." Sam said from behind him. "Same as yesterday. And the day before that. And pretty much every day for the last two years."

"I figured." Dean picked up his glass of Scotch and swirled it, watching the dancing patterns of dark liquor swirling in mottled glass. "Dude, remember when we used to drink poor-man's beer?"

Sam's laughter was the way it had always been in the last thirty years: full but quiet and soft, with a tinge of sadness. His limping footfalls crossed the room and he sat on the enormous footrest of the armchair, facing Dean, their knees touching.

"Someday, you're gonna tell me why you did it." Sam said.

This was the same conversation they'd had every single night for thirty years. And just like every night, Dean answered, "Not tonight, Sammy," and took a drink with that famous smug smile. Whittled, now, with the years, like the rest of him, leaving permanent creases at the corners of his mouth and his eyes.

"Ben's bringing your grandkids over tomorrow." Sam said, like he was Dean's personal secretary.

Dean chuckled under his breath, and it dissolved into a cough for a minute before he looked up again, twitching on a smile. "Lis woulda loved to meet them."

Sam didn't mention, and Dean didn't mention, that early-onset, genetic Alzheimer's would've sapped that joy from Lisa's life if the cancer hadn't. Bad luck seemed to follow the Winchesters wherever they went, but by the time a Reaper had come for Lisa's soul two years ago, Dean had gotten beyond blaming himself. He'd settled with bad fortunate a long time ago, and accepted that there were some things that could never be changed. So when he'd looked up from Lisa's side and seen Tessa, still purely rich and young, he'd just said, "I'm next."

She'd touched his shoulder and taken his wife, and that was that.

"In the meantime," Sam added, breaking the somber spell of silence wrapping around the study. "Homework."

He scooted a book across the floor toward Dean with his good leg; Dean reached down to pick it up, and Sam's comment was reflexive, not meant to sour the mood: "Don't strain yourself."

Dean picked it up anyway, reading the title even though it was fuzzy on the edges. Years of squinting past the reflection of brazen sunlight on a car's black hardtop, all the knocks to the head he'd taken, had narrowed his vision beyond any real functionality. That Sam had essentially become his eyes since Lisa died was an unspoken reality between them. Dean couldn't see things that weren't close to his face.

"It's War and Peace." Sam said. "And you promised you'd read it when I was fifteen." He laughed when Dean looked up at him, Sam's laugh-lined face a haze before him. "Never too late to start on your bucket list."

"Ah, I've already had the war." Dean said lightly, sliding the book away. "Now I just want to enjoy the peace."

Two weeks later, Dean was sitting beside his brother's bed, in the large and quiet house, while Sam struggled for his last breaths. And though Dean's shoulder ached and his chest hurt and he could barely see in the darkness, his instincts cast back to those of a twenty-seven-year-old man, a boy, really, trapped. Watching his brother die. Though this time knowing it was inevitable, it was far cleaner and quieter than anything they'd ever hoped for back then, and that to save Sam would be a cruelty.

Sam looked different than he had then; his gray-and-brown hair still long, Dean had never convinced him to cut it, not really. And his hand, beside Dean's on the sheet, curiously withered and lacking any ornamentation. A stark contrast to the gold wedding band Dean had been wearing for twenty-seven years.

Sam was restless, slipping into fitful bursts of slumber only to wake an hour or two later, with the hushed hurting sounds that had never changed, not since he was a child. Each time Dean would come awake beside him—noticing the waxing hours on the clock glowing brightly beside the bed—before he would stroke his brother's sweaty bangs aside and whisper comfort to him.

Eventually, Sam would drift again.

And then came the time when he didn't, when his eyes, only half-lucid, found Dean's face in the darkness.

"Dean?" His voice, a raspy imitation of the power that had once commanded demons to their knees. And Dean, with none of the belligerent dignity that had shaped him in his youth, took his brother's hand.

"Yeah, Sam?"

"You ever gonna tell me why you did it?"

If not tonight, then never. That was the unspoken postscript as Sam's familiar bright eyes found his in the darkness, and they were all that Dean could see.

"Why'd I take you back in?" Dean asked, quietly. "Why'd I drop out of the hunt after you got your soul back and drag you behind me all the way to Lisa's?"

Sam swallowed, a painful scraping of his Adam's apple against paper-thin skin. "Why'd you want me to stay?" To stay, and Sam had never married, but had lived as the fourth member of a small family that was just him, and Dean, and Lisa, and Ben. And then just him and Dean and Lisa. And then just him and Dean.

Like it had always been, really, in late nights in front of the television long after Lisa and Ben had gone to sleep. In drives through the neighborhood at night, while they searched for danger. In the stories they'd told over beers when Dean's drinking buddies—and they were Dean's, not Sam's, really, Dean was always all that Sam had had—when they'd all gone home.

Even in a crowd of people, they'd never belonged unless their eyes met across a jam-packed kitchen at Christmas, in the quiet of the back lawn where they'd exchange the same four presents every year: skin rags they never read and shaving cream Sam stopped using when he turned thirty, and oil that collected dust after the Impala was gone and the Nutrigrain bars that Dean couldn't eat because the doctor told him not to.

"Dean?" Sam said again, his voice fainter. "Why'd you want me to stay? Was messed up—couldn't think straight. Why take me in?"

"Because," Dean began, and the word came out all wrong, twisted and sad. "Because you're my brother, Sammy. That's what brothers do."

And somewhere after 'Sammy', Sammy wasn't there anymore, and Dean was alone, clutching his little brother's hand. And it wasn't Sam and Dean anymore.

It was just Dean.

He stood up, the essence of composure, and walked into the study; and picked up War and Peace, and sat beside Sam's bed again, and read it into the infant hours of the morning. That was how Ben and his wife and their two grandchildren found him, with the pages dampened by the small drops of his tears, and Dean asleep, slumped over the bed, his head on Sam's arm.

Dean went the quietest of them all, a week later, without Lisa's death throes or Sam's long hours of fading. He was asleep, and suddenly he wasn't, he was standing beside the bed, looking away, toward the door. And Tessa was there with her arms tucked behind her back, in a white dress and with a softness of inevitability in her eyes.

"You were always my first. Reaper, that is." Dean said sardonically.

"Very cute." She glided toward and rested her hand on his cheek. "Time to go home, Dean. And this time, I'm not taking no for an answer."

"I'm with you, sweetheart."

Dean followed her into the light, and didn't look back.

He found himself standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon.

It was just the way he remembered it, beautiful in the sunset, a wash of pink and purple ribbons spread out across a molten red sky. Dean walked along its edge for half a mile with his hands in the pockets of his old leather coat—the one Ben had worn for a night out with his friends at seventeen, and ruined under the wheels of an ATV. It was a comforting, heavy warmth on his shoulders, and he walked until he came around a twisted copse of scrub-brush, and stopped.

He'd forgotten the sheer, sleek beauty of the Impala, when the last time he'd seen her she'd been rusted and sad and decrepit, on her way to Bobby's at sixty years old and falling apart at the seams. Here she was in her prime, a glossy wonder of the world, the vibrant sunset cast across her arched top. Dean ran his hand along the side of the car on the approach, and finally looked up to the person sitting on the hood.

Sam, of course, said nothing. If he'd been waiting a week, he could wait a little longer. While Dean checked the trunk for weapons by force of habit, and walked back around her, his palm hugging to the curve of the window. Until he finally came to lean against the bumper beside Sam's feet, hands still in his pockets, and looked out across the vast expanse of the canyon.

"Hey," He said, affably.

"Hey yourself." The reply, just as quiet. Dean looked up at Sam sideways.

"Why this Heaven?" He asked. Though they'd chosen it together, as he'd known soulmates had to do. A shared memory that meant the world to them, and he knew why it was his. But Sam, that puzzled him.

Leaning back against the windshield, his hands also in his pockets, Sam cocked his head at Dean. "You remember why we came here?"

"Yeah. On our way to Lisa's, after you got re-souled." Dean shook his head with a smile. "Man, you were messed up. You had a fever to beat Hell and you kept shaking and puking up your guts."

"I guess I did." Sam chuckled.

"And me, I kept playing that Zeppelin track on repeat and I didn't shut up the whole time." Dean slid his way up until he was sitting on the nose of the Impala, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped.

"So, that's why it's your Heaven?" Sam asked, gently teasing.

"Nah." Dean squinted against the light rippling over the horizon, basking in the stark, vivid clarity of every sight around him; like breaching the surface of deep waters and opening his eyes for the first time in years. "It was just—good to have you back, Sam."

"Huh." Sam said, with polite incredulity.

"Why?" Dean challenged. "I don't exactly see how the whole barfing-and-sweating thing makes it into your Top Five Fantastic Days."

Sam smiled. "You're kidding, right?" He asked. "Dean, this was the first place you ever actually told me you loved me. I mean, sure, we'd been saying it for years—so to speak. It just," A shrug. "It felt like forgiveness."

And forgiveness had been a long road from there, from wayward touches to unhindered teasing and finally, to acceptance as they'd lived that life behind them and looked toward the future instead.

"Thought you were too out of it to remember that." Dean grumbled. Though he'd remembered for decades afterward, sitting on the hood of the car beside his weak, floppy-headed brother, and nudging his side, and telling Sam quietly, "Love ya, Sammy." The first time he'd said it since the day Sam had been born. Said it outright, and meant it, with all the affection and protectiveness and pride an older brother could manage.

"Not that out of it." Sam said.

"You know I'm not gonna say it again." Dean remarked after a few seconds of silence, laden with expectation.

"I know." Sam agreed. A few moments of companionable silence trickled in before he added, "And thanks for telling me—why you did it. Why you took me in."

"Yeah, no problem. Bitch."

"Jerk."

And there was more love in those words than many people knew in a lifetime, as they looked together toward the edges of their personal Heaven with the war behind them, and relished in their peace.

The sun had long set when Sam shivered in the dusky chill. "It's late."

"No way, Sammy." Dean scooted back and leaned his shoulder against Sam's, adding warmth to his brother. "You kidding me? This is where everything starts."

And in the silence that followed, with their heads back against the windscreen, it was just Sam and Dean once more.