Hiding Behind The God Given Face

[sweetprince]

Title: Hiding Behind The God Given Face
Disclaimer: I am claiming no ownership of the Winchesters.
Summary: Sam gets possessed by the spirit of a girl who had a crush on Dean back during his high school days. Unfortunately, she won't leave Sam's body unless Dean kisses her.
Pairing: Wincest
Chapters: 2/2
Genre: first time
Rating: NC-17
Acknowledgements: This story started as a whacky idea between immoralilly and myself. We were trying to come up with a way that wincest could actually be portrayed in the show. Somehow this smacked me upside the head and became a little less than whacky.

Part 1


Dean stops, his face goes blank. “Huh?”

“It’s a code! There’s a code in the verse!”

“Are you high?” Dean asks, mouth full of bread and roast beef.

Maggie growls. “That guy gave me the idea with his paper! Get us back to the hotel and I’ll show you, jerk!”

Dean shoots her a look and unlocks the car. When they get back to the hotel, she starts pulling books out and ordering them across the tiny little hotel desk. She places the verse directly in front of her and starts crossing out words and circling others the way that Sam had started in the verse.

She tries a systematic pattern and comes up with nothing. Then she tries an alpha-numeric pattern and a theme-based pattern. Two hours later Dean is watching Ellen Degeneres and Maggie is tearing Sam’s hair out.

“Are you sure it’s a code?” Dean intones, not even looking away from Ellen’s hot guest.

Maggie throws a theology text at him. It flies through the air and then stops in motion, pages frozen open. Dean’s mouth drops.

“Okay, what—”

The book flies straight back into Maggie’s hand. “That’s it! Psalm numbers!”

“What?!” Dean stares at her in mute shock. She’s scrawling on the page again and reordering words. “Maggie, what the fuck!”

She ignores him and scrawls the new sentences out on the page. “I’ve figured it out!”

Dean growls at her and she holds the new sentences up for him to read. “‘The survivors shall be great and terrible, turned to slaves of my will, and the heavens shall pour blood and fire. Everyone who calls my name shall see the sun go out and escape into the darkness,’” he reads off and then looks at her bewildered. “Well that’s hardly any more cryptic then what it said before! You could have just been rearranging things!”

“Dean!” she cries. “Look at it, every word appears in a psalm of a corresponding number! Escape, the second word of the 11th line of Joel’s prophecy. And here it appears in Psalm 11:2, and so on and so forth!”

“I—” Dean broke off. “Explain what happened with the book.” Maggie bent back down over the new work and started shuffling Sam’s research around. “Maggie!”

“It’s nothing.”

Dean shook his head. “Don’t tell me it’s nothing! Sam said he couldn’t do that anymore. So that had better be some weird ghost thing!”

“Dean—” she pleaded with him, trying to change the subject.

“Tell me!” he said, gripping her shoulder with punishing fingers, nails digging in deep. She winces and gasps. Dean feels a little bad, Sam’s going to have some pretty ugly bruises when he gets back.

Her knuckles clenched tight around the pen she was holding. “Your brother…he—there’s just—haven’t you noticed how whenever he’s looking for something he finds it?”

“I—”

“He figured out this code after how long? Without even have anything to go on?”

Dean stared at her. “He would’ve told me!”

“He doesn’t even know how powerful he is!” she protested. “Only I noticed right away because after being in my own head—well, it’s noticeably different!”

“But Sam said—”

She sighed and looked down at her hands. “I know.” Dean turned away from her, breathing in deeply. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Look, Dean, can we at least figure out what this means?”

Dean turns back to her. There she is, wearing his brother’s body like he wears that horrible camel-colored jacket. It’s like when he was little, and all he could think was: I want my mom. God, I want my mom. He wants her gone, he wants his brother, not this girl who thinks that Dean is her end all be all, or something equally horrifying. He shakes his head and squares his shoulders, because this is what he does, he soldiers on. He says fuck it, I’m gonna have a party, like the best of them. And nobody will ever know otherwise.

“Yeah.” He nods. “Yeah, we should do that.”

She cocks her head at him and then starts talking, “You never even told me what this translation was for.”

“Oh, right,” he intones, she looks exasperated at him, like she can’t figure out why he’s upset. He shuffles through the stack of papers and folders that Sam had left before being taken over by Maggie. He locates the folder of crime-scene shots under a pile of take-out menus, Yum-Mee China Wok right on top of the mangled and pale women with vacant eyes. He hands the folder to Maggie and turns back to the dingy window. “Four different victims, all found with that passage from the Tanat or Tanakh or whatever the fuck gouged into their skin.”

He hears the folder hit the floor with a small pwaf sound and turns back around. “Getting a little clutzy—” he breaks off when he sees the pictures spread all over the floor and the way Maggie has got Sam’s hands pressed to his mouth. It’s Sam’s post-vision face.

“Maggie, what—” he tries to ask her what’s going on, but she’s jolting out of the chair, trying to get as far away from the pictures as possible, nearly tripping on the bags of ammo and supplies.

“I don’t—I can’t—oh my god!” she hides herself in the corner of the room and Dean has another one of those epiphany-type moments. Apparently when Sam isn’t around, Dean really can do this. He remembers those horrible four years of silence, four years of frustration to tears. But he could do it on his own.

“Maggie, how did you die?” he asks slowly.

She’s shivering and shaking and refusing to look at him. Her hands are tight in Sam’s curls and he’s afraid she’s going to start bashing his brother’s head against the wall.

“Maggie—”

“NO!” she shouts, and the glass breaks out of the windows. Dean hits the ground, covering his head with his arms as the pieces rain down, shards tinkling against the furniture and carpet like an out of tune song. Maggie screams as the TV explodes.

“Christ!” he shouts, pulling himself into a sitting position. His arms are dotted with shallow cuts. There are times for Sam’s cajoling and persuasive words. This is not it. Women are systematically dying and he doesn’t know why. Maggie’s just proved there are more victims that they don’t even know about.

Maggie is leaning back into the corner. There’s a jagged cut down Sam’s forearm and looking at it just pisses Dean off. She can go have her useless hysterics elsewhere where it isn’t hurting his brother and she can fucking well enlighten him with what’s going on.

He pulls himself to his feet, puts his father’s best ‘on your feet, soldier’ voice on and orders, “Maggie, talk to me!”

She shakes her head and mouths no. An ambulance blows by their motel, sirens blaring. Dean turns to look out the window where the lights are flashing bright blue and red. Two rigs are gunning it down the street and it’s probably just a coincidence, but it’s given him an idea.

“That could be for some other girl, some other young woman who’s being defiled and written on like she’s nothing, like she’s trash, for whatever vile purposes.”

“Don’t ask me!” she says, slamming her head back against the wall. “Please, don’t ask me! I don’t want it!”

“Maggie, do you want justice? Do you want these girls to have justice? Tell me what you know!” He bends down and grasps Sam’s strong forearms in his hands. “You can speak, but they can’t!”

She’s crying, huge racking bitter sobs, like her world’s ending. She’s hunching into her legs and gripping Dean back, shaking in his arms like she’s fighting not to fly apart. “Please, Dean, don’t make me talk about it!”

Dean could soften his tone, tell her it’s all going to be all right, but she’s standing in his way from saving these girls and getting his brother back, and he’ll be damned if he has the energy to just let her sob and wash it all away the way Sam would. “Tell me how you died, Maggie.” She looks up at him, like she’s gathering up the resolve and he knows he’s won. He tilts his brother’s chin up and looks deep into those familiar hazel eyes that now seem so alien and gives in. “I’ll kiss you, once we stop the person who did this.”

Her sobs quiet then and she nods, eyelashes dotted with water. “You’ll let me move on?”

He sighs. “Yes, once you help me, I’ll help you.”

She wrangles out his grip and wipes her eyes. “Okay. Okay then.”

He steps back and away from her, giving her the space she needs. She picks herself up off the ground and the glass swirls up off the dirty carpet and refits itself back into the frames, mending seamlessly together.

He swallows. God, if this is what Sam can do—

Maggie interrupts his thought process like she heard him. “That was a ghost thing, dumb ass.”

He rolls his eyes and pulls a face. Glad to see she’s back in fighting spirit. “All right, whatever, talk!”

She nods and stoops to pick up the scattered photographs. “I was at home by myself. It was about a month after you packed up and left. I wasn’t all that surprised. Beside your name in the Senior Issue of the paper there was just a big blank, no college, no trade school, no army, no peace corps or community service program, just a white space.”

Dean looks away from her and thinks back on that. He’d been scouted by both Ohio State and Notre Dame to go play football for them, and Pastor Jim had called him about Notre Dame, said he should definitely do it. He hadn’t even filled out an application. There was nothing in college that he’d wanted, not even for a second. He didn’t have that same drive to go out and be someone the way Sam did. Sam was only fourteen and he’d looked at Dean with despair for a full six months surrounding that time.

“Don’t you want anything for yourself, Dean?” Sam had asked him again and again.

“Anyway, I was at home alone and I heard the back door blow open. We were having a really blustery July. Lots of summer storms. I went to go shut it and it happened so fast, like a car crash. I was just walking along, hardly paying attention and then I was lying on the floor while this bastard cut into me…” she broke off, her voice getting thick around a sob.

Dean keeps his face carefully blank. He doesn’t want to interrupt. “I begged him to stop. ‘Please, don’t, please don’t,’ I told him over and over, but he didn’t stop.”

“Did you see his face?” Dean asks.

“No not clearly, I was so out of it…I just kept waiting for somebody to come get me. I thought, at any minute, my dad’s going to be home,” she chokes. “I didn’t even realize he was writing on me in Hebrew, it burned, it hurt so much, and I felt like I was choking on blood.”

Dean nods and looks off into space, wondering. “But definitely a man? Not a spirit or a creature?”

“Yes, he let me go for a second and I hit him across the face, my charm bracelet caught him above his eyebrow. I remember his skin hanging off in a flap.”

Dean pauses to ruminate. Whoever it was might have a scar on his face. That helped a little. Maybe he could get Maggie to hack him into the police database and see if he could find anybody with any scars in the system. It was a long shot, but it was something. Oh hell, fuck that. No it wasn’t. Possible scar? Was he on crack? They weren’t going to go anywhere with that.

“The next thing I knew I was dead, standing above my body, shouting at people to talk to me.” She laughs bitterly. “I was at my own funeral, not that many people came.”

“Maggie,” he tries to inject. Now probably would be the time to comfort her. She cuts him off and doesn’t let him go on.

“It’s not like I was very nice when I was alive, I guess.”

Dean sighs. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not. You feel a little guilty,” she scoffs, “but only a little, because you want your brother back.”

“Maggie—”

“Whatever, Dean,” she shakes her head. “It’s fine.”

“I wonder what the connection is between the victims,” he changes the subject and starts fiddling about with the papers on the table.

She snatches them out of his hands. He wants to protest, but he supposes she’s got a right to be snippy after all of that. She pages through all the information they’d dug up on the victims and then looks at him like he’s stupid.

“It’s right in front of your face, dufus!”

Dean stares at her blankly.

She scoffs and spins the folder around and fans out each woman’s profile. “An auto-mechanic, a DC intern, a lawyer, and an electrician,” she points out and shoves the papers at Dean to sit down in front of Sam’s laptop. She hammers away at the keys and Dean winces, because ooh, she’s still really mad. He understands, he really does, but she always seems to take it out on Sam some how, whether it’s Sam’s computer, or his actual body. Dean doesn’t like it.

She shakes her head. “God, you two are dumb, I don’t know how you missed it.” She yanks him down by his t-shirt to look at the missing person reports displayed on the screen. “I cross-referenced careers against missing women in the last ten years, this long string right here all show up. God knows what he did with them.”

“Looks like we have a misogynist on our hands.”

“Oh excellent,” she claps her hands. “I’m glad you understand the meaning of that word.”

Dean waps her with the folder. “And I’m glad to see you’re back to normal.

She ignores him, she’s still typing away. “Well, look at that, 75% of the unsolved homicides here in Cumberland involve professional women or teens going off to college.”

“Motherfucker,” Dean curses when he looks at the numbers. “So all I’ve got to go on is a misogynist with a possible scar on his face from a charm bracelet.”

Maggie unfolds his brother’s body from behind the desk and stands above him. “No not all,” her voice is as derisive as ever.

Dean could pick a fight with her but he doesn’t have the patience. “All right then, genius, tell me what else we know.”

She gingerly holds up a photograph of a dead girl’s leg scrawled over in Hebrew. “He’s obviously got some religious education, enough to be able to write in Hebrew, enough to come up with that Psalm based cipher.”

Dean sits down on the bed and puts his head in his hands. “Man, I wish Pastor Jim were alive, he’d tell me how to go about this.”

“There are two major Catholic churches in Cumberland, Dean,” she shoves at Dean’s leg with her new shoes. “SS. Peter and Paul and St. Marks, and then there’s B’er Chayim Congregation which we should probably also check out.”

“Er, what?”

Maggie crosses Sam’s arms. “They’re the only ones I can think of that would have the know how.”

Dean throws up his hands. “Protestants have a theology education, too!”

“Well, whatever, let’s check these out first.”

“Setting terms now?” Dean asks.

“Oho, you bet,” she snarls. “And you’re going to kiss me when we find him!”

Dean stares at her for a long moment. “I promise.”

*

Once again it had been a long grueling day of getting nowhere. There was nobody with scars, nobody coming up with EMF, nobody even looking remotely suspicious of hurting young boys. Every damn priest and rabbi checked out perfectly. And Dean hated putting on the damn dog collar and blacks for nothing. He had a suspicion that Maggie just wanted to see him in the priest get up though.

It was really weird to turn around and find the spirit inhabiting your brother’s body perving on you. Dean felt the risk of them being mistaken for a couple increase exponentially, and when you were running around in a priests outfit? That was not supposed to happen. She, of course, could care less.

Dean watched her trip over Sam’s height and twist Sam’s kind face into every shade and value of irritated. He felt his heart break. When he flirted with girls there wasn’t Sam’s resigned amusement or his teasing, just Maggie shoving Sam’s elbow into his gut. Repeatedly. He missed the way Sam cut his pancakes into perfect little squares and didn’t let them touch his fruit like they’d get contaminated. He missed the way Sam folded up the Newspapers after Dean messed them all up and read him the police blotters in the car when the drive was getting long and his knee was aching.

It had only been two days. But there wasn’t any warm presence at his shoulder. Dean could go out and murder someone right now, get framed or some shit, like that dude on TV, and Sam would still love him, would still break into prison for him. Maggie was a reminder of those horrible few months before Sam left for college, when he was still there, still with them, but he was just a hurt dark shadow who had few words for Dean and none for Dad.

He shoved the thought away. He’d get this job done, and then he’d lock lips with his brother, if that’s what it took to get him back. And there hadn’t really ever been a question of it, he and Maggie both knew it, he’d just needed a few days to work himself up to it.

They were at SS. Peter and Paul, about to call it quits for the day, only to attempt St. Mark’s the next, when Father Michael Antoninus, not to be confused with Father Michael Ambrose, asked Dean why he took the black. Dean furrowed his brow and said the first thing that came into head.

“My brother.” And hey, it was true. He wouldn’t be running around in this ridiculous priest get up if he didn’t want Sam back so badly.

“Your brother?” Father Michael asked, face tilted up like he was ready for a story.

Dean sighed and nodded. “I thought it would bring him back.”

“Ah,” Father Michael places a palm on Dean’s shoulder. “You are still so young.”

But Dean doesn’t feel young and he hasn’t for a very long time.

*

They don’t get anywhere again. Dean knows they’re looking in the wrong places the same way he knows that Angus’s riff on “Shoot to Thrill” has no comparison. He and Maggie have been fighting, fighting, fighting. Dean, who’s usually asleep like a rock, is having real trouble. It can’t be good for his brother to be all pressed up tight inside his own body, shoved out of the way in favor of Maggie’s consciousness. He doesn’t like it. But Maggie’s more stubborn than his brother by half, and she doesn’t seem to care how he feels about the matter.

“What’s Sam really like?” she asks, when they settle in for bed. “I get little flashes sometimes, I feel what he feels, but it’s funny, I don’t really know who he is.”

Dean sighs. “Sammy’s a lot like you, I guess, but more self-aware, gentler.”

It’s her turn to sigh. “I figured you’d say something like that.”

Dean rolls over in bed. “He wanted to work for the DOJ. I mean, he never told me, but I used to find the internet searches and the pamphlets and the programs.”

“Do you ever wish you hadn’t been raised the way you were?”

“No,” he tells her, tone sharp.

She clears her throat. “Liar.”

“You and Sammy don’t really talk do you? You don’t really ever just enjoy each other’s company?”

Dean shuts his eyes and feels nausea wash over him. “Not for a long time.”

She goes on, ignoring all the signals he sending her to shut up. “He was seventeen when he lost his virginity to a girl in the organic garden club with blunt cut hair and a t-shit that said ‘whoever heard of a nice piece of elephant?’”

Dean remembers that day. Sammy coming home looking flushed and hazy and just a little bit triumphant. He’d known that fucked out look anywhere. He’d waited for Sam to tell him about it, but he hadn’t said a word.

“He loves you so much, you know that?” Dean blinks up at the ceiling and doesn’t answer. “It all gets a little muddled up in my head sometimes, what I feel for you, and what he feels for you, and I just—I want to be a part of you.”

Dean makes a strangled noise. He doesn’t like the direction this is going in. So he’s got to shut her down some how. “Maggie, I think that was a come on!”

She throws a pillow at him. “Way to ruin the mood, buttface!” He hears her shuffling around in bed. Dean clenches his fists in the sheets.

*

Dean sits with his feet propped up on the heavy oak table in the library, reading an old issue of the Sunday comics. Maggie goes through the microfilm of birth and death records. She’d posited, somewhat plausibly, that maybe it was a spirit inflicting all the damage. Dean doesn’t think so, since there wasn’t any ozone or angry activity left at the sites of any of the deaths, but he’s been infected by the frustration that Sam was carrying around since day one.

Those priests had been so goddamn wholesome you could’ve eaten off of them. It had driven Dean a little nuts. They kept leading them through their rectories and showing them their reading programs and explaining what they did for battered women. Dean would’ve exploded if he’d had think of everybody else all the damn day.

He sighs, bored and tired and frustrated, skimming Doonesbury and keeping a firm eye trained on Maggie. He feels uncomfortable in the library, like it’s teeming with the ghosts of memories. Sam’s first kiss for one, with Dean standing on the other side of the book shelf. Dean remembers foisting Sam off here when he went parking after a game, leaving him to do his homework on Fridays. God, Sam was such a geek and yet people had always loved him without him having to try. Dean knew it too well.

It’s funny to think that Maggie never met Sam and now she kind of was him. Sam certainly knew about her. He’d listened like he was paid to when Dean bitched about her, all calm-faced and concerned eyes and softly-spoken advice.

A familiar figure enters the room. Mr. Bowen. It would be just Dean’s luck that he ran into him. His class was an elective, but John had found it valuable, so Dean had sat through two semesters of mind-numbing theological discussion and bible verse that had never sunk in.

Dean hopes that Mr. Bowen won’t recognize or see him. He sinks low in his chair and brings the paper higher up in front of his face. One of the last conversations he’d had with Mr. Bowen had been had been in the principal’s office about the “graffiti” he’d found Dean scrawling on his desk. It had been a little difficult to argue that all the religious sigils he’d carefully etched into the wood were necessary without looking completely insane, so he claimed to have seen them in one of the texts Bowen had himself.

He figures Bowen won’t be all that open to Dean asking him for help now that they’re in absolutely dire straits. Sam would want him to try though, and if Bowen holds the key and Dean doesn’t pursue it—well that would be shitty. He’s summoning up his courage and getting to his feet, ready to pursue the teacher who’s wending his way through the reference section.

Maggie jerks around, Sam’s deadliest expression on his face.

“Whoa, Sam,” Dean says to her, stopping short. They’d decided awhile ago that calling Sam Maggie in public would just invite too many questions. “What’s up with you?”

She raises a finger and points at Bowen, who’s using a step ladder to pull down some heavy books from the top shelf of the Judaica section. Mr. Bowen seems to sense their eyes on him and he snaps his head around to stare, eyes flaring in the light. Dean’s stomach drops out. It was right in front of them the entire time. And Sam had scoffed when Dean had said Bowen was chock full of crazy.

Mr. Bowen jumps off the ladder, book in hand and bolts out of the heavy front doors. The librarian shouts after him when the sensors at the door go off, but abruptly cuts herself off when Maggie leaps over the reference shelf like an Olympic track athlete. The librarian screeches when Dean tears after the two, jacket flying up and revealing the gun holstered at his waist. He rolls his eyes, pushing past a series of high school students working on a history project. Outside Bowen is skipping through traffic, and Dean sees the cars shake, and their windows spider web. Sam’s body is glowing, his blue-brown eyes shining like LEDs.

Dean has the strange foresight that the entire street is going to blow apart.

“Maggie, stop it!” he yells, sprinting towards her, and she jerks in surprise, eyes returning to normal. Dean heaves a sigh of relief. They keep running. Bowen’s old and spindly and out of shape and yet he’s faster—jumping up over low slung fences and navigating through the stream of cars like a cat. Dean is starting to feel the burn in his thighs. Maggie looks barely winded. He curses his brother’s long legs.

“There’s no way I can catch up to him,” she gasps out and Dean shakes his head. She takes in a deep gasp of air, “But I can do this!”

A pile of bricks lying along Bowen’s path fly in front of him, and he smashes into them with a sickening crunch. Dean and Maggie skid to a halt next to his prone form only seconds later. Bowen’s glasses are imbedded in his nose, he rolls weakly on the ground and spits two broken teeth out into the dust. Maggie winces.

“Don’t faint!” Dean tells her and trains his gun on Bowen’s writhing form.

Sam’s face hardens and Maggie advances on Bowen. Dean is a little chilled at the sight. “Been awhile, old man,” she says, nudging Bowen with the rubber toe of Sam’s new converse.

“I don’t know you,” Bowen bites out viciously, swiping at his mouth. He glares up at Dean. “But I do remember you, Winchester!”

Maggie squats next to Bowen, elbows laid across Sam’s knees. “Think again.”

Bowen tries to kick up at Sam, but is stopped mid-action by Dean clicking off the safety on his gun. “You remember Maggie Cole?” Dean asks. Bowen stares at him, eyes filled with hate.

Bowen shakes his head. “Of course I remember, terrible tragedy, girl was going on to bright things.”

Maggie snorts and tugs a stained handkerchief out of Bowen’s breast pocket. She swipes it across his bloody forehead, revealing the white line of his scar slicing through his eyebrow. She makes a disgusted sound.

“You don’t recognize me, Mr. Bowen?” Maggie asks him. “I suppose I look a little different.”

Bowen growls and his body rises up off the ground, arms coming up like whips. Dean shoots him, once, in the shoulder and he collapses back on the dusty concrete. He whimpers, but the voice that comes out is warped, gravelly, not his own.

“Why’d you do it, Bowen?” Maggie asks, voice going quiet. “Kill all those girls?”

The iron round Dean pumped into Bowen’s shoulder is smoking and the religion teacher keens.

“Tell me, old man!” Maggie shakes his shoulder. “Or I’ll have him shoot out your kneecaps next.”

Dean raises a brow at her, but she doesn’t budge. He thinks it’s very likely that if he shoots out his kneecaps, she’ll fall like a log at the first rush of blood.

Bowen’s wailing increases to superhuman levels and Maggie has to push her palms against her ears. “Get thee behind me, Satan!” she screams and Bowen subsides with a wail.

When he finally speaks, it’s with the voice of many. “My will is that of the creator, by his hand, do I so move!”

“You think God wants you to kill all these women?” Maggie hisses, “God? Whose second commandment is love thy neighbor like yourself? Was it not you who taught me that?”

“They were agents of sin!” he screams and claws down Sam’s arm. Dean goes to shoot him in the other shoulder, but something about Sam’s posture changes, his body loosens, like he’s suddenly more comfortable with his limbs. Jesus, did Sam kick Maggie out on his own? Sam turns to look over his shoulder at Dean and winks.

He bends back down over Bowen and presses his fingertips to the teacher’s forehead. “Agents of sin? You can’t come up with a better reason?”

Bowen’s body starts convulsing and Sam glows, fingertips irradiated like he dipped them in glowing paint. Dean’s heart sinks. How much of Maggie’s abilities really have to do with Maggie? He knows with a certain clarity that she could’ve easily lied to him. Who is his brother really? Dean’s starting to grasp the true extent of everything that Sam left out.

“You’re my brother, and I’d die for you, but there are some things I gotta keep to myself.”

Whatever Sam is doing right now—it scares him.

Bowen rolls back and forth, spine snapping taut and then relaxing. Sam holds on, grabbing Bowen’s struggling arms and forcing them against his chest as he glows brighter still.

“I will not be stopped by the likes of—” Bowen screams and then choked himself into silence. Spirits start forcing their way out of his mouth. Shiny translucent and trembling images of pretty women with their lives cut short. They array themselves around Bowen and Sam.

“Why?” one of them wails at him. Dean thinks his eardrums might rupture. Maggie seizes control of Sam’s body again. He can tell by the way Sam’s head rises and his knees drew back together. He puffs out a frustrated breath of air. Still going to have to kiss her.

“What did I do?” another ghost covers her pearly face with transparent palms and sobs. “I was getting married in a month!”

“Tell us why,” Maggie exhorts softly. Dean begins backing away.

“I consumed your sin so that I could be made stronger, so that I could act as the arm of God,” Bowen wails, voice thin and broken. He struggles against the tide of spirits who shove and poke and pull at him.

“How long?” Maggie ask, she glances around at the thirty odd spirits who blink in and out in the stark light of the construction site. Bowen shakes his head and refuses to answer. Maggie shouts, “How long?”

He finally coughs weakly, “Twenty years.”

The spirits start shrieking, faces tilted up to the sky, and Dean turns away. No one would blame him for this but it feels like his failure. Sam’s hand is on his shoulder, but it’s not his brother, he thinks bitterly.

“You act like this is your fault,” Maggie ventures, fingertips trailing down his arm. Dean shivers and shifts away.

He takes a deep breath and changes the subject, “How are we going to deal with him?”

Maggie smiles, it’s not pleasant. “They are!” Dean looks back at Bowen and the spirits of the dead women. He’s screaming again and Dean hadn’t even noticed. She walks off, hands in Sam’s pockets, practically whistling.

Dean jogs to catch up. “And what about them?” Christ, that’s not the only question they’ve left unanswered. Kissing and Sam’s abilities and Jesus, it feels like the entire world is up in the air. Like he’s a kid again, and he’s just found out that Santa Clause isn’t real. Dean cranes back over his shoulder, Bowen’s limbs are flying about in a bloody mess, gore everywhere, slowly spirits are blinking out.

Maggie nods, catching him staring. “Their unfinished business.”

“How come he didn’t…eat…you?” Dean stumbled.

She twirled in Sam’s body. “I’m special.”

Dean throws up his hands. “That’s one way of putting it…”

She doesn’t rise to the bait. “And now, what you promised me?”

Dean nods, biting his lower lip. “Once we get back to the hotel.”

She looks betrayed. “You can’t put it off, Dean! That’s not fair!”

“Hey, I promised!” She’s stomping away from him, shoulders drawn up around her ears. He catches up to her, grabbing and whirling her around, framing her face with his palms, like he’s down so many times when Sam is a step away from the edge. “Listen, I promised. I always keep my promises. It’s just, I’m not making out with you with my old religion teacher as a pile of road kill over there!”

She’s crying. He feels irritation welling up in his stomach. What about this situation is his fault? He wants that explained to him. He didn’t ask for Maggie to have a crush on him! Quite the contrary. He keeps his expression even and steps away. Maggie laughs weakly and rubs at her eyes. They fall into step on the way back to the car and he watches the way their legs move together. It’s the first time she’d figured out how to even her pace to match his.

*

Dean sits at the foot of his bed, eyes on Maggie, who’s leaning against the TV stand. They stare at each other in awkward silence. He heaves a sigh. “Who’d have thought I’d be doing this.”

“Life is like quick sand, you think you’ve got his plans figured out…” She points at the ceiling. Dean looks at her blankly. “What? I heard it in a Delta Goodrem song!”

Dean nods slowly. “Are we even speaking the same language?”

Maggie narrows Sam’s cat-eyes at him. “The only language I want to speak is that one.” She points at the bed this time.

Dean hacks and coughs, appalled. “Okay, you, stay away from the lines!”

She huffs and rolls her eyes, arms crossed tight across Sam’s chest. “Look, could you just kiss me?”

Dean breathes in deep and gets to his feet, shrugging off his jacket and setting it to the side. He looks at her and nods, swallowing audibly. He reaches for her with one hand, cupping her chin and running a thumb across the jut of Sam’s cheek bone. With another stabilizing breath he leans in and brushes his lips across Sam’s.

Her arms come up around his neck and that’s odd, because Sam has four inches on him. He goes with it though, tilting his head back at an odd angle, and yeah, obviously she doesn’t know how to do this. He’s her first kiss. He’s doing his best here. It’s his brother’s mouth he’s pushing his tongue into, after all. She sighs and opens against him, letting his tongue flick hers. It feels cold against his mouth. He feels her eyelashes flutter against his cheek.

He knows it’s Sam in his arms because of the way kiss changes, goes from being awkward and tense into something Dean doesn’t have a word for. Sam shifts, suddenly aware of his body. His arms fall from Dean’s shoulders and Dean thinks he’s going to tear himself away, ask him what the fuck is going on, but he doesn’t, he pulls Dean against him, sucks Dean’s tongue into his mouth and moans.

Goodbye, Dean, he hears whispered against his ear.

Dean’s eyes flutter open and closed. Everything about this is crazy—the last thing he wanted. He hasn’t thought this through at all, but then, when does he ever? He’s sliding his hand around and clenching it in Sam’s hair. He’s already gone and done it now, might as well deal with it when it doesn’t feel so good, doesn’t feel so much like coming home after many years of wandering lost.

They’re spinning, covering the space between the TV and the bed. Sam falls back against Dean’s mattress, tugging Dean with him. It’s awkward and ridiculous again, they’re laughing and clicking teeth and learning each other by the skin of their palms. Sam heaves Dean onto him by the leather of his belt and he snakes his clever fingers under Dean’s shirt.

Dean is fascinated by Sam’s neck where it meets his jaw and the curve of his lower lip and the flush high up on his cheeks. It feels good, maybe too good, that’s why he’s doing it. Sam is pulling him back into equilibrium, callused fingertips running over the warm skin of his back. Sam kisses him with the weight of his dreams and his fears behind it. And Dean fears it, because there’s only one person who can kiss you like that, and if it’s Sam then—Dean is startled by fiery lines of semi-sweet pain down his back.

Sam had scraped his nails down Dean’s back like a woman thrown from gentleness in the middle of her orgasm. And God that gets him. Dean’s breath comes out all shaky against Sam’s neck. Sam chuckles a little, and fuck that, little brothers do not get the upper hand in sex.

Dean brings his thigh up and grinds down into Sam’s crotch. Wraps a hand more accustomed to a gun than to a lover around Sam’s throat, and thumbs his Adam’s apple. Sam moans at the pressure and his eyes snap open to connect his gaze with Dean’s. Dean ducks his head, sinks his teeth into Sam’s lower lip. And Sam just has to one up him, mother fucker, that’s his hand rubbing Dean’s dick through his jeans. And Dean will get him, just—just give him some time to think. He wants to peels the layers off of Sam and—

His cell-phone rings.

Sam snorts when he reaches to grab it, lying like a dead-weight across his younger brother. Dean flicks Sam’s forehead with his thumb and forefinger and flips his cell-phone open.

“This is Dean.”

“Dean, it’s Bobby.” Dean’s eyes open wide and he jerks himself off of Sam, falling to the floor in a tangle of limbs and a loud thump. “Dean? You still there?”

“Yeah, Bobby, I’m still here.” He rolls flat on his back and finds Sam leaning over the edge of the bed, peering at him. He rolls away from Sam so that he doesn’t have to look at him and asks, “What do you need?”

*

“I can’t believe you kissed back!” Dean says, head in hands after he gets off the phone with Bobby. He’s sitting on Sam’s bed because he’s afraid to go near his own.

“Oh I’m sorry, this is all my fault!” Sam snaps. “I come back into my body to find your tongue in my mouth and I’m to blame?”

“Well you could’ve said ‘Ew, no, wrong, bad touch, Dean!’” Dean replies, voice a little high-pitched.

“Well you could’ve stopped it at any moment, it’s not like we were so caught up in the throes of passion that we couldn’t tell what we were doing!” Dean snorts and Sam’s eyebrows lower over his eyes. “And it wasn’t a bad touch, anyway.”

“I—we’re—that’s just Maggie muddling up all your feelings!”

“Oh yeah? She muddle up your feelings too?” Sam shoots back, pacing back and forth in front of the windows.

“No.” Dean sighs. “I don’t even know what that was.”

“All right, fine. If you don’t want to do it again, we don’t have to,” Sam tells him. “But lets just make sure we’re absolutely clear what it was, and it was not bad.”

Dean puts his head between his knees and breathes deeply. When he speaks up his voice is raggedy, “Psychotic, we’re both psychotic.”

Sam sighs and flops back onto Dean’s bed. “Of course, Dean.”

*

They go out for dinner, back to Penny’s to say goodbye. It’s stiff and formal and Sam only breaks the silence to ask about the bruises Maggie left on his body. They’d already had the conversation about the clothes. Sam had gone to change out of the form-fitting jeans and shirt the minute he’d gone back only to find that Maggie had damaged or gotten rid of pretty much everything.

Sam had almost cried. Dean probably shouldn’t have laughed at him, but okay, Sam’s new wardrobe was only five steps away from emo-hipster kid. Hunters were going to think Sam was the Anti-Christ just because he had a designer label on his jacket.

Sam had pegged him with a dress shoe in the exact spot Maggie had hit him and then Dean had kind of wanted to cry. Now he’s sitting there, trying not to stare, ice pack for his shoulder while Sam puzzles over a Monte Cristo. Sam had poured more water from the pitcher Joanne had set down without touching it and magnetized the silverware with a touch. Dean was holding up his knife, blade pointed at the ceiling with two forks dangling from it. Sure, he knew that happened with silverware, something to do with the dishwasher.

Actually, Dean, it’s because their trash can has magnetized sides so that they can just upend the plate, and the silverware sticks to the sides.

Dean made a face at the memory of Sam explaining that to him, coffee at his elbow, paper in hand like a scene out of the fifties. So Dean knew that silverware could get magnetized, but this was crazy, he’d never been able to do with with two forks. The weight had been too much for the magnetic pull. He added another one. Three.

A little girl in a booth was looking at him with round eyes and furiously trying to do with her own knife. No luck. Dean flicked the forks, watching as they twirled. Sam took a bite of his Monte Cristo and the forks fell with a clatter.

Dean looked at his brother expectantly. Sam looked back, Monte Cristo still in hand. He swallowed, took a sip of water and squared his shoulders. “Ever since Maggie, it’s been…easier…to do stuff.”

“Uhuh.”

Sam looks back down at his sandwich and Dean gives up. Sam will tell him sometime in the next century, but only if Dean doesn’t pressure him. They don’t speak for half an hour, just eating their food, and calling for more coffee refills. Dean knows they’ve got to figure this out, set rules or something, but Sam’s too busy fiddling with sugar packets. Dean decides he’ll ignore him. That always makes him come round.

“Are you—is it okay that I didn’t—didn’t tell you about all that I could do?” Sam struggles around his words, like they don’t quite fit in his mouth.

Dean looks up from the little sudoku book Maggie had bought herself on the second day there. He’s addicted, carrying it around in jacket pocket. “What?”

“About my abilities?” Sam continues. He looks tense, skittish.

Dean scratches at his face.

When Dean doesn’t answer, Sam looks down at his hands. “I understand if you want to separate. I know you’re always saying it doesn’t bother you, but I know it does and maybe with this whole Maggie thing we should just—”

Dean interrupts, “‘Wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’”

Sam stares at him for long moments, his eyes bright. He knows how the verse ends. He doesn’t need Dean to finish it. He ducks his head then. “I guess Bowen managed to beat a few things into you.”

“Nah, used that to get into this really hot Born Again Christian girl’s pants.”

“Liar.”

Dean shrugs and goes back to penciling in numbers. Sam can’t know that when he learned it, he really did have his little brother in mind. Penny brings the check after that, she’s got two boxes of pie, and she didn’t charge Dean for his second plate of chicken tenders. Dean figures out the tip like it’s still there.

“Y’all come back this way, don’t leave it ten years like the last, lord knows I ain’t gonna be around forever.” She says, and swats at Sam’s butt, like she did when he was being rowdy back in the day. Sam colors and waves goodbye, Dean grabs her up and twirls her around. “We’ll be back, Joanne, for your fabulous pie.”

She laughs and tells him to set her down. What would her husband say? They walk out the door of the diner, and Sam knows, as their boot heels crunch through the gravelly parking lot, they won’t be back.

*

They lie staring up at the ceiling in separate beds. Dean had been all for getting straight back on the road, but Sam asked for a good night’s sleep. Dean supposes that’s fair. But now neither brother can fall asleep. Dean’s been shifting back and forth in bed, kicking sheets around and adjusting his pillows. Sam’s told him to shut up twice, and when he isn’t Dean can hear his beleaguered sighing.

“Do you think we were always moving in this direction?” Sam finally asks, breaking the fragile glass silence. Dean doesn’t have to ask to know Sam’s referring to the kiss.

Dean screws his eyes shut tight. “No,” he tells his brother abruptly.

“No?” Sam repeats. “I’m gonna have to disagree with you.”

Dean groans. “Fine, just disagree in your own head or something.”

“Dean,” Sam starts, voice patient. “I think we were, but then we moved, and we changed.”

“Yeah, you became a little bitch.” Dean rolls, presenting his back to Sam.

“Yeah? Well you became the living dead.” Sam throws a pillow at him, it hits home with a thump. “I was clearly just compensating for your complete lack of emotion.”

“And what about this exactly makes you think we were headed towards fraternal incest?” Dean rolls back over, to find Sam lying on his side, facing him. “You were fourteen!”

Sam cracks a smirk. He slides out of bed and Dean lies frozen as he pulls the covers off of Dean, straddling him. His thumb swipes a burning tingly line across Dean’s lower lip. Dean feels blood rush to the surface of his skin, flush running from his cheeks down to his chest. It’s dark, Sam can’t see it, but he can see the glassiness of Dean’s eyes.

Dean rolls Sam under his body and they go skidding over the sheets, limbs tangled together, bare skin meeting for the first time. Sam’s expression is blank, he stares up at Dean, but in the absence of emotion Dean fines meaning.

Maybe they were moving toward this. Trembling glances and buzzing when their fingers touched. A tight squeeze around his heart when he sank into all those girls. They wasted so much time.

He kisses Sam, gripping him tight, working his hips against him. He tastes of sugar and mango Altoid sours, sweet with a bite. This is what they are, a tangle of lips and limbs and messy feelings, and Dean’s hand reaching between them to curl around Sam’s cock. Sam breathes, let’s Dean touch him, learn where Sam starts and ends.

“Is this how you make love?” Sam exhales.

Dean looks up. The skin of Sam’s abdomen glistens from Dean’s tongue. “No,” he says shortly, irritably.

Sam laughs, pulls him up, crushes their mouths together, melts Dean’s mind with slick flicks of his tongue. He would be aces at making out, Dean thinks, considering that’s the farthest girls would let him go for the longest time. He remembers Sam tense and sexually frustrated, lying in the bed across from Dean’s, while Dean laughed at his hilarious stories of how Sheila or Courtney or Sarah absolutely would not give it up. Now he’s here, grinding and gasping against his brother, wondering how Sam will convince him to give in.

It’s not difficult for him, he catches Dean at a lull, flips them back over. Dean finds his wrists pressed into the pillows by his head, sensation is wrenched out of him as Sam takes his body by storm—teeth at his collar bone, fingers hooking into boxers and tossing them aside, hips between Dean’s thighs. Two days ago there was an awkward girl that Dean really didn’t know inside the warm velvety skin and layers of muscles. Dean doesn’t really know this side of Sam either.

He palms Dean’s skin, tongues along the crease of Dean’s thigh and takes his pleasure in Dean’s. Dean should ask, ‘have you done this before’ or ‘do you know what you’re doing?’ He should, but he’s afraid of the answer. So he holds back, let’s Sam talk him through the breach of one long finger and then two. There is Sam’s mouth tonguing over the slit in his dick, jabbing just under the crown, never giving him the time for second thoughts. Dean moans, it’s too much, much too much. The muscles in his thighs tremble.

“Dean, I’m going to—”

“Just,” Dean breathes, “Just do it.”

Sam spoons up behind him, holding onto Dean’s hip with one hand, and carefully fitting himself against Dean’s opening with the other. He rests his chin on Dean’s shoulder.

“You know I’ve done this before,” Dean snaps, when the bite of pain gets to be a little much and he’s fighting against tensing up.

“Oh yeah? How long ago was that? And were they as big as me?”

“I—” Dean breaks off, drawing the syllable out as Sam slowly slides inside him. It’s almost a gasp, the noise that comes out of him. He arches against Sam, lets him push deeper. “Arrogant bastard.”

Sam shakes and holds still, reaching around to tug Dean’s cock. Once. Twice. “It’s not arrogance if it’s true,” he replies, voice strained, nose against the sharp curve of Dean’s shoulder. Dean cries out as he thrusts in and hits his prostate. He’s vibrating with this, whatever it is. He can hear it in Sam too, in the snag of his breath. Sometime in the future he’ll strong arm Sam up against a wall, and take from him, put that arrogance to good use.

“God!” he cries when Sam fingers whisper over the slit of his dick, pressing down with the pads, smearing pre-come and his own saliva. He’s fighting that pressure, he wants to come. Fucking little brothers. They just have to string you out to the breaking point. Sam’s playing with him, in control of himself and holding Dean just at the edge.

Dean changes the angle of his hips and reaches back to draw Sam closer, deeper inside. His brother chokes, loses his rhythm. Dean feels a rush of satisfaction and he draws Sam’s hand up to nip at his finger tips. There’s that butterfly sensation at his shoulder, Sam’s eyelashes fluttering over his skin. He shudders and Sam’s hand is back on his dick, palm and callous working against his skin in smooth strokes.

There’s blankness in the space behind his eyes. Dean can’t draw breath in and his brain is too preoccupied with the synapses firing in his groin. He’s coming, spilling out over Sam’s hand and the worn sheets. He clenches down without thinking and there’s a hitching noise falling past Sam’s lips, like he’s going to sneeze. His hand’s stilled on Dean’s dick, and Dean pulls it to him, pressing Sam’s palm flat against his beating heart. Sam comes, his cock pressed sharp against Dean’s prostate, and it makes Dean shake.

Dean wakes up to an empty bed and he struggles into a sitting position, blinking sight back into his eyes. Sam is standing naked, looking out the window into the overcast night sky. There’s tension in the muscles of his shoulders all the way down to his legs. Dean can see nail marks in the skin by his hip and Dean wonders when that happened. It’s all a long blur now, a contest to see who can play each other’s body better. He hasn’t had that much sex in a long time.

He says the first thing that comes out of his mouth. “You made me come, you don’t get to take that back.”

Sam glances over his shoulder, his outline faintly silver from the incandescent bulb of the street light. “I was just thinking, what if we hadn’t left that summer? What if you’d gone to Ohio State or Notre Dame or something?”

Dean looks down at his hands, the tent of his spread knees under the covers. “A lot of people would have died.”

Sam is silent, his head is bowed low, there is understanding in the structure and frame of him, but also defeat.

Dean breathes through his nose, and he rubs at his face. “And who’s to say I wouldn’t have blown my knee out and ruined it all? Where would I be then? I’m not like you, Sam.”

Sam nods, lets it go. It isn’t acquiescence. Sam will never stop believing that he is more, that he can be more. And maybe that is love. Because Dean will never stop believing that Sam can beat the demon’s legacy, that he is still human and whole and amazing when he controls things with his mind or looks ahead into what will be. And it scares him, sometimes, all the time, because Sam walks a road unknown in a place that Dean cannot follow.

Dean holds onto that like he holds onto his brother: with a clenched fist and a gun in one hand.

*

They pull out onto the highway the next morning and head west without ceremony. Sam is sleepy and loose in the passenger seat. Dean looks at his brother now, the way he spreads his denim-covered thighs, trying to accommodate the length of his legs, and there is another layer running over him. One that owns sexuality. And Dean was right, you can’t take that back.

Sam doesn’t ask to visit any last landmark as Dean ratchets up to 75 in a 65 zone. Although Dean thought he might. He is still and silent and when Dean looks over at his younger brother, a rabbit-quick glance, he knows they’re thinking the same thing.

Once, this place was home. There was a super market that Dean stole comics from. An internet café where Sam first plugged college into a search engine. A girl he left behind with an acid tongue and a penchant for hurling insults. Now this place is alien, foreign. Dean is a stranger. He walks through this town and feels all the dreams he had bubbling up, seeping out of the Georgian brick and stone and wood. They fill his mouth and he has to fight to keep them inside. He can’t go back. Not in time. So he puts miles behind him, Sam in the passenger seat getting frustrated over Sudoku, and doesn’t look over his shoulder.

*

And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:

Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.
-Book of Ruth, The Bible



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