Disclaimer: Sam and Dean do not belong to me.
Set post season 2 so sort of spoilers.
It's not a leap year, Sam thinks. That's not something he really has ever thought of before: what did it matter if he had one more day to study? One more day to puzzle through dad's book or pretend not to be annoyed by the music blaring in the Impala. Music that Dean calls "classic" and he calls "twenty years out of date and more concerned with volume than melody." But one day seems an eternity all of a sudden; one day is one three hundred and sixty fifths of a year. If it had been a leap year then he would have had one extra day, and he of all people knows what can happen in a day.
He has been staring blankly at the computer screen for so long that the colours are blurred and the text might as well be hieroglyphics for all the sense they make. Raising his head, it takes a while for real life to rearrange itself - for a moment everything is pixilated like a fault in reality. A glitch in the Matrix, Jess would have said. She had loved that stupid movie, even made him watch the crappy sequels. But Jess is dead, The Matrix is a movie with actors and special effects, and the only one who's going to be snapping the clapperboard at the end of this particular scene is a demon looking to cross a name off its I.O.U list.
Dean is still at the counter of the cheap diner they had stopped at on the way to Kansas. Another spate of mysterious deaths, another long drive, one more stop off for congealed food and bitter coffee. The waitress is in her thirties, attractive enough in a slightly careworn way. Dean has her fluttering around him like a teenager, pressing her elbows together to deepen her cleavage, overly-mascara'd lashes fluttering coquettishly. Sam watches the exchange briefly, before turning his attention back to his computer. Once he might have rolled his eyes, been irritated at his brother for slowing down their mission for something that even now he considers tawdry and faintly embarrassing. Not anymore.
He looks the same; looking up at the woman with wicked green eyes and giving a grin that promises anything she wants so long as it's over in half an hour. He doesn't talk about what's to come and he never mentions their father, but he moves as though he knows what is expected of him and behaves accordingly. Seduction is no longer playful - there is a quiet desperation to it that most women do not see, and for the first time Sam knows what it is like to wake his brother from his nightmares and try not to be hurt when Dean snaps at him for his concern.
Sam shuts his computer and attempts to smile when the other waitress slides two plates of toast and eggs onto the table in front of him. Both he and Dean have ordered their eggs "easy", which is strange since Dean usually prefers his eggs so solid that they verge on the rubbery. It's a stupid little thing, but it's a couple of minutes saved, and when Dean slumps down into the seat opposite him, the waitress forgotten, Sam passes him the salt and doesn't say anything.