Lebannon, Kansas - 9:26am.

Dean slipped Ruby's knife into the inside pocket of his jacket and spun in a circle, looking for his newly-cleaned colt. It was weird having somewhere he almost called home. A base to come back to. He was so used to being on the move, on the road, that the repeat performance was almost unsettling. Almost. He remembered Larry's words - The safest place on Earth. Yeah, that was where he wanted Sam right now.

He had caught his brother's smirk when he confessed to 'nesting,' but it was no less than true. They had spent time coming and going at Rufus' cabin, but there was no denying it reminded him of the absence of the two older hunters, and he knew Sam felt the same.

The irony of the fact that 'home' was back in Kansas hadn't escaped him, either. He knew Sam didn't remember anything before the hunt, but Dean remembered all he had to.

In fact, what Sam thought or felt about anything anymore was a mystery to Dean.

He grabbed up the colt from the bed, hooked a hand through the strap of his duffle and made his way down the hall to the library.

Sam was bent over a leather-bound book so battered it was almost a cliché, not to mention the tottering stack of likely future victims stacked up beside his head.

Dean frowned at him.

"What're you doing going all geekazoid on me now for? Saddle up Sammy, we're out of here in five."

Sam looked up at him with an arch to his expression that made Dean groan inwardly. He was in for an argument. Sam huffed a sigh and pursed his lips.

"You know this is going to add up to nothing, right? Just like the last two leads."

Dean dumped the duffle onto a nearby chair with a dull clank of blades and moved toward his brother.

"So what, huh? We just sit on our asses? Pass up the chance this one's legit?"

Sam almost sneered, shuffling his shoulders.

"I guess I just don't see the point."

Dean took a few steps forward, tilting his head in question.

"The point in following the trail of some monster, or something worse? Four women are missing, Sam. Second town hit with this MO so far."

"Last two leads, Dean. Dead ends."

Dean stopped and narrowed his eyes at his brother.

"That what this is really about?"

Sam glanced up at him, then away. He leaned back in his chair, lacing his hands behind his head and stretching out his shoulders with a sigh.

"Maybe I just want to get this done. One down, two to go."

Dean closed his eyes briefly against that eventuality.

"Sam -"

"Nah man," Sam cut him off, standing and moving towards him. "Bring it on. I'm not saying I want to face … whatever this is, but I want it to be over. For both of us. We could still have a life - I know you don't believe it, but I have to."

"Look," Dean countered, taking a few steps toward Sam, his brother almost within arm's reach. He had both dreaded and anticipated this argument. He just hadn't expected it to creep up on them both so soon, with how cagey Sam had been about the whole subject for weeks. "I know -"

Before Dean could get into the meat of the discussion, there was a sudden flash of sharp, bright light like a flair that took both brothers off guard, Dean throwing an arm up to shield his face, Sam staggering back in surprise. When the white cleared from view, they found themselves standing in a field. A wide, distinctly empty green field. The sudden change from wading into a minefield of an argument to suddenly and inexplicably standing in some random field rattled them both.

Dean flexed his hands around the grip of the colt he hadn't even been conscious of drawing. He cast his eyes around until they caught on an equally bewildered Sam.

"Okay," he said cluelessly, looking around in every direction, every nerve he had on high alert. "That happened. What the hell, man?"

"I don't know."

"No seriously, what the hell?"

"I don't know!"

Sam spun in a slow circle, raking his hands through his hair in a sign of stress, sliding down to press against both cheeks in a way that might have been funny under less weird circumstances.

"Uh … okay, so we were in the library, uh, arguing about a hunt …"

Dean raised his brows, shooting a sidelong glance at Sam. "That helps how?"

"Just go with it," Sam replied, waving his hand in a circle as if winding in a reel. "You were packing weapons, I was reading about …"

He broke off, frowning.

"Sam?"

"Dean …" Sam's voice was faint, his hand straying familiarly to the small of his back, patting down his chest. "I'm unarmed."

"What?"

"I didn't exactly expect to need to be packing researching ancient pagan gods in the library, okay?"

"Great, perfect," Dean snapped sarcastically, turning in a circle of his own, expecting some kind of attack. It wasn't like they had taken this field trip on purpose. He knew he only had the colt, loaded with silver, on him apart from Ruby's knife in his jacket. He could be completely unprepared for whatever crazy was going on and that made him edgy. Around them, the meadow was bright and still, washed in the broad golden sunlight of midday, the shin-deep grass lush and green. A row of gentle hills rose in blue-grey distance on the horizon to the left, to the right, the peppering of evergreen trees thickened into a light woodland.

"Pagan gods," Sam murmured, eyes abstracted.

"What?" Dean snapped.

"Pagan gods. That's what I was researching right before we started that argument. The old Celtic gods of the seasonal year."

"So?"

"I think … I think this is high summer."

"Get on with the big reveal Sam, 'cause I'm completely lost here."

"Maybe … summerland. The home of the sun god of summer."

"You've got to be kidding me."

"How else do you explain it? One minute we're standing in the library, the next minute we're … here? Wherever here is? It's iconic summer here. It's too much of a coincidence with what I was reading. You weren't doing anything weird, were you?"

"Unless cleaning guns and packing blades like I do every day was weird today, then no."

Sam flapped his arms. "That's all I got."

Dean licked at his lips, eyes skittering in all directions.

"Okay, so, if you're right, I reiterate - what the hell?"

"Uh, well the lore says the god of high summer could be found in the sacred orchard, probably apple, with a sacrificial altar nearby. But it's supposed to be mythical …"

"So getting yanked into mythical alternate realities is on the cards, now?"

Sam shrugged. "Guys time-travelling through our motel closets?"

"That's great, that's just friggin' great," Dean snarled, shaking a butterfly off the barrel of his gun. He gave an incoherent growl and pushed past Sam, who spun to track his brother, eyes wide.

"Wow, where are you going?"

Dean half-turned and levelled Sam. "Look we can't just stand around here all day and tan. You said a woodland, right?"

He aimed at the thickening of trees with the barrel of the colt. "I'd put money on the woods being that way. Lets move out."

Twenty minutes' silent walk, and it was getting hot despite the dappled shade of the canopy overhead. The grass that tangled in their laces and caught at their jeans was topped with fertile heads of honey-coloured seed, all around them silent and still but for a gentle breeze and the meandering flights of colored butterflies, the distant calls of summer birds. Sunlight painted the woodland in shafts of green and gold, and despite the weirdness, the overwhelming lazy, relaxed atmosphere of the place was beginning to dull Dean's defensiveness. Sweat was beginning to gather under his collar but despite that, he wasn't uncomfortable. His muscles were warming and lengthening out with the slow pace of the exercise and the heat around him. He tried to order himself to be vigilant - they were walking around in an unknown and possibly hostile territory after all, but somehow he couldn't muster up the energy. The warmth and bizarre sense of safety and serenity tugged at the loose ends of Dean's memory, touching a recollection that spread a slow smile across his face.

"Hey Sam, you remember that summer we spent in Colorado, must have been three weeks holed up in that cabin in the mountains, minimal provisions, spent all our time hikin' and fishin' like regular hunters?"

"Sure," Sam scoffed, "yeah, I remember falling over that nest and getting stung by all those fire ants."

Dean gave a sudden laugh. "I'd forgotten about that."

Sam rolled his eyes and grumbled "I wish I had."

Dean kept pace with his brother a few steps in silent contemplation, shooting Sam a sidewards glance under his lashes. His smile slipped a little as he thought harder on that subject.

"So, even after everything that happened … y'know, since, you still remember being strung by ants one random summer a hundred years ago?"

He idly wondered if he and Sam had actually stacked up a hundred years between them yet, then decided he didn't want to think about it.

Sam was apparently on his wavelength, regardless. He unconsciously pressed a thumb into the scar that crossed his palm, his expression pinching.

"It's like you said, right? It feels different up here to the pain … down there."

"Right," Dean replied, tucking his chin toward his chest in silent acknowledgement a moment before he tried again.

"Remember Bobby had to hike up and get us, 'cause Dad was already a week late and still on a job? Remember how pissed he got when he couldn't get us to draw down on a single deer?"

His smile broadened again at the memory of the old man. Ah, Bobby.

"Yeah, look how that turned out."

Swimming in the images in his head of that summer, when he and Sam were if not completely innocent, then certainly moreso than they were now, his brother's words took a moment to reach him. The smile slipped off his face. He jerked a look at Sam.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Whatever it was in his brother's tone that had turned Dean's head was bleeding into his expression.

The gentle sorrow he would expect of Sam was there, but there was something … else. A solitary cold, hard note of challenge that he hadn't heard in a long time. Somewhere in the contradicting dark holes in the back of his memory, Dean could almost hear glass shattering, and a voice he hardly recognized as his own echoing Dad's words, words he never dreamed he'd hear himself say. You walk out that door, don't you ever come back.

And Sam …

Dean blinked quickly, shaking his head, focusing back on his brother in the present. He shuffled his shoulders against the sweat suddenly stinging under his shirt, knocked a little off balance by the sudden, unexpected change.

Sam shrugged. "It used to worry us, Dean. Back in the day. Face it, the killing's got easier."

That was probably true too. He didn't want to think about that, either. An initially innocent conversation was quickly heading back into waters he didn't want to swim through, now … or ideally ever.

Instead, he pulled in a breath, deliberately shook the idea away from him, hitched a lopsided grin back in place and slapped Sam's shoulder.

"Lighten up, buzz kill. We're in summerland, right? So lets go bag us one hot son of a bitch."

He dropped Sam a smirk and lengthened his stride, deliberately taking the lead, knowing his brother was following regardless.

Both Winchesters continued in silence, scuffing their boots against the tangling grass, heading further into the thickness of the trees. Sam stayed silent, his hands idle of anything more useful, stuffed into his pockets. Dean shot him covert glances every few minutes, but didn't chase the subject of the past, or the future.

The trees funnelled into a darker arch ahead, and Dean stopped, slapping the back of one hand against Sam's shoulder. His eyes caught on a sharp tongue of red in the mellow green and gold of the trees and the sunlight.

"Sam -" He pointed to the tattered length of red ribbon tied to a nearby tree stump.

Sam frowned, moving past Dean to tug it free as his brother cast his eyes around them, suddenly and inexplicably wary.

"A lot of religions use flags or ribbons as offerings," he said. "We're getting close."

"There," Dean pointed a finger ahead of them. "That look like a path to you?"

Sam didn't answer, simply rose from his crouch before the stump and followed Dean's finger, down the tree-lined passage leading forward.

As they walked, more ribbons appeared in every colour, tied to branches and tacked onto trunks, coupled as they moved down the avenue by bunches and wreaths of picked flowers.

Dean would have smiled when he realized that something so completely innocuous had made him draw his gun again, but something was definitely beginning to crawl up his back. Not fear, he reasoned. It was almost a quickening of energy, a response to some kind of supernatural power.

Sam stopped ahead of him, and Dean raised his eyes from the ribbons and carefully placed flowers to follow Sam's line of sight. It didn't take long. Ahead, an old stone arch was barely visible beneath dipping boughs and creeping vines. Dean didn't specifically recognize the etched symbols peppering the surface, but their like was obvious.

"Sam."

When his brother turned his head, Dean tossed him Ruby's knife. At least with two weapons between them, they could come at this thing from two angles if they had to, and more than that, he wanted Sam able to defend himself with at least something that might be effective.

Sam nodded, moving beneath the stone arch and further into the trees, Dean on his heels.

On the other side, the small, twisting forms of grape vines wrapped in gnarled fingers around pinnacles of stone, and Dean's heart quickened. He marked Sam's long fingers flex around the knife, held low just below his hips, ready.

The stones led the brothers on to exactly what Sam had predicted - the rich, vibrant bright green leaves and patched grey bark of an old apple orchard.

Ahead, the ribbons and flowers peppered the grass and trees in stabs of color, the apple trees finally leading to a small clearing.

Something shifted in Dean's perceptions, and Sam stopped at exactly the same time.

Before them, a humanoid figure stood shin-deep in the grass, still, its head bowed over an old, chipped stone altar.

"Hey," Sam's voice sounded strangely rough.

The form before them turned, and again that shift seemed to itch behind Dean's eyes. Blinking brought the figure into sharp focus.

It was easily as tall as Sam, with broad, full shoulders touching hair of startling pale gold. Its skin the iridescent star-pale green-gold of a deep sea pearl, eyes the blue of a summer sky with the intensity of sunlight striking clear water. Dean felt his jaw drop with the barrel of his gun, and sensed Sam's fighter's stance suddenly relax in surprise beside him. It was indescribably one of the most beautiful things either man had seen.

The sun god of summer blinked at them slowly.

"Uh," Sam tried, but didn't seem to be able to get much further.

"We … we thought … we were here to kill you," Dean heard himself say.

The sun god smiled at him. "I know."

Its voice seemed to slip past their ears entirely, merely translating its meaning into their heads without leaving a sound behind. It circled slowly toward them, and for some reason neither hunter could ever after place, neither raised a weapon. The dancing blue eyes travelled curiously over them, taking in their appearance in a piercing way that reminded Dean uncomfortably of Zeus. It smiled softly, reaching out to catch Dean's shirt between two fingers. Again, for no good reason he could figure, he didn't recoil.

"I await the hunter every year," it continued. "Just, he isn't usually dressed as strangely as you."

"What d'you mean?" Sam asked, slightly breathlessly.

The sun god slanted its body to the side, raising an arm in welcome to the stone altar beyond, densely decorated in ribbons, young boughs and festoons of summer flowers.

"You don't mean …"

Sam's eyes were wide, and despite his words, Dean knew he got the gist. He understood himself, though he wished he didn't. The sun god tilted its head in question.

"As it is so, must be so, every year of years," it said.

"Hang on just a damn second here," Dean demanded, snapping himself out of the weird spell the creature seemed to be winding around their brains. "You want us to off you? What the hell?"

The creature dipped him a strangely knowing smile.

"Sacrifice must be made."

It raised its piercing eyes first to Dean's face - who straightened up despite himself the way he had under Dad's scrutiny as a kid - then Sam's, whose expression broadened out into something Dean couldn't read. It narrowed its eyes analytically.

"You know sacrifice, I see. Know it well, not just as an empty word for a time when mankind still sacrificed lambs on the alters of the old ones. Like your ancestors before you for generations, you fight for the balance kept between light and dark, good, and evil. You can embrace the darkness to exemplify the light."

It dropped its eyes to the grass at their feet, and both brothers released breath they hadn't been aware of holding.

"You of all should understand your presence here. You have each felt your sacrifice, lived it, know the necessity of it, the weight it carries. Could either of you have given less? Nor can I. This is the way it has always been, despite the changing of the world. I am that sacrifice, all sacrifice, so the wheel will turn again, the crops wane to be nourished and reborn. And so it will be until there are no more seasons, no more days."

It cast a glance over them before turning away, crossing the short distance to the alter in a few strides. It reached down, and turning back to the Winchesters, silently held out a curved brass blade in an open palm.

"Wow, wait a minute," Dean protested, holding out a hand against the god's offer. "You said you knew we were hunters. If you know that, you aught to know we hunt evil. Far as I can see, you ain't it."

"You're here to keep the balance as you always have," the god replied implacably. "Light exemplifies here, but without the dark, is just as destructive. Fulfil your calling, hunter."

"Oh, screw that -" Dean began, cut off unexpectedly by Sam's soft voice.

"Dean."

Dean rounded angrily on Sam, who was looking up at the god with his characteristic gentle sorrow.

"He's right."

Dean's eyes pinballed between the strange bright god and his brother.

"We hunt evil, Sam. End of story."

"It's never been the end of anything, and you know it," Sam said, with a succinct truth that cut at Dean. "Not after everything we've been through."

Swallowing hard, he stepped forward and took the brass blade from the god's open hand.

Dean shook his head. "This is wrong," he said softly.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, Dean could feel a tide rising, a dreadful knowing that his brother was right. Despite everything his mind told him, his instincts reacted independently. His gut clenched in sorrow he didn't understand and didn't want to.

He flicked a worried glance at Sam, who closed his eyes and thrust.

Dean jumped in shock as the brass knife sank deep into the sun god's chest, and the pale form dropped back against the stone altar, vibrant eyes closing willingly. Blood as red as the first ribbon in the woods, the first sign of the god's presence, spilled out starkly against the rock.

Sam and Dean stumbled back out of a dark, sucking void that seemed to yank them backwards sharply just behind their eyes. Dean had a confused moment of feeling like his eyes were being sucked backwards out of his head before his boots registered the solidarity of the ground beneath his feet, and he snapped his eyes open.

He blinked quickly in the subtle light of the Letters library, breath ragged, and immediately spun around on instinct to find Sam. His brother was by his side, eyes wide and expression mirroring his own shock. Dean spun his head around a second time - there was no sign of the orchard, the altar, or the bright god. Sam looked down at his hand, panting out of rhythm with Dean. As if to prove it hadn't been a dream, he still grasped the curved brass dagger in his fist, the knife and his fingers coated thickly in the royal red of the sun god's blood. Sam dropped the knife with a gasp.

"What - what just happened?" Dean asked when the echoes of brass clattering on the floor had bounced into silence.

"We just … sacrificed the sun god of summer?"

Dean started to reply, found he couldn't find the words, and turned in a circle, shoving his hands into his hair. Sam looked down at the dagger and blinked. He picked it up, and wandered silently over to the sink. Dean turned to stare at his back when the sound of running water filled the silence.

Suddenly spent, Dean dropped into a chair by the table Sam had been researching at only that morning. How long had they been gone?

After a moment Sam joined him, setting the clean dagger on the table between them. Both brothers stared at it, their silence stretching out.

"So … what, is this place just randomly full of black holes to mythical dimensions now?" Dean asked, almost sarcastically, confusion coming out as anger.

Sam shook his head slowly in bewilderment. "I guess the truth is there's a lot we don't know about this place, or the Men of Letters. It's not like Henry had the chance for a full recap."

Dean sighed and scratched at his head. Something about all this was making him uneasy - more uneasy than usual with their brand of strange. He dropped his hand to look up at Sam, suddenly tired.

"Did we do the right thing, here?"

Sam nodded. "I think so. Yeah it may have been wrong, but it was the right thing to do, Dean. He was right, there's a balance to things. One we've screwed for too long."

Dean shook his head. "Y'know, for gods, they get some raw deals. I mean, this is the second one we've met whose whole life is just dyin' over and over."

He dropped his eyes and spoke to his hands. "Makes you wonder if we were there by accident. You could say the same for us."

Dying, over and over. Sacrificing everything, always.

"Hey," Sam's voice coaxed his brother's head up, drawing his eyes. "Think about it this way - he'll be back, next year. If it wasn't an accident and we were somehow drawn into his death because of everything we've been through, then maybe we were drawn into his resurrection, too. It's just as true for both of us."

Sam and Dean stared at each other a moment, before both silently dropped their eyes to the dagger, the last sign of the sun god.