God, it had been a long day.

Sam was dragging his feet as he trudged back to the motel after six damn hours spent hunched over a computer at the library searching for leads.

This was fucking impossible.

He hoped that Dean had been more successful questioning the locals, but he had resigned himself to the fact that his brother had most likely spent the time cruising the "menu" at one of the dive bars he always ended up in.

These days, Dean was all play and no work, but Sam couldn't find it in his heart to chastise him.

The man was hell-bound in less than eight months, and although Sam had been searching high and low for a way out, he kept coming up empty-handed.

Dean deserved to have a little fun.

He deserved to roll around in a bit of self-indulgence after the life he'd had, and although Sam secretly wanted Dean to just be his brother again, or at least to act like he cared about the ticking time-bomb hanging over his head, he wouldn't say anything.

He just couldn't.

He hoped that Dean was at least back at the motel, though.

They had agreed to meet up at 8:00, and there was a lot to discuss. At the very least, he needed someone to bounce a few ideas off of.

As he arrived at their room, he was surprised to see that the door was slightly ajar, and he frowned, pushing it the rest of the way open.

He stood completely frozen for a few seconds, speechless as he took in the sight before him.

The room was dimly lit, but the soft glow was enough to illuminate Dean, on his knees by one of the twin beds, half-naked with his mouth around another man's cock.

The guy was tall, muscular, and tan, with hair that that came down to curl out slightly from his neck. His leather pants were pooled at his ankles, and his big hands were wrapped around Dean's head, guiding him up and down while obscene little noises of pleasure leaked from his throat.

Sam hadn't been spotted yet, and he should have bolted.

He should have high-tailed it down to the lobby to wait it out.

He would have waited there until he had seen the stranger leave, and then he would have headed back to the room, ready to pretend that he hadn't seen anything...that he hadn't just witnessed his brother blowing Mr. Fucking Leather Daddy.

It's what he should have done, because...hey...self-indulgence? Having a little fun? Trying new things (apparently)? Eight months to live?

Instead, though, he felt a hot rush of intense anger begin to churn in his gut, enough to spot his vision red, and his hands tightened instinctively into fists by his sides.

"Hey!" he growled, a little startled by the rough sound of his own voice, and Dean's fuck buddy leapt back, cursing loudly.

Dean turned to face Sam, still on his knees and looking abashed, but not nearly, nearly enough.

"Oh shit, Sammy," he said lazily, wiping his chin and forcing a little smile. "This is a little awkward. I was just-I was...meet Jim. Aaaahh...Johnny?"

Jim/Johnny was pulling his shirt over his head in a hurry, glaring down at Dean, who, despite the uncomfortable situation, still had the audacity to look like the cat who had swallowed the canary.

"You said you didn't have a boyfriend, asshole," Jim/Johnny said, grabbing a black bag from the table and striding across the room toward Sam.

"I'm sorry, man," he said, shaking his head and giving Sam a once-over before stepping around him and out the open door. "I didn't know he was taken. And it's Noah." The last sentence had been aimed at Dean, but Dean simply shrugged, pulling himself to his feet and stretching luxuriously.

"Yup. Okay, then. You have a good night, Jim," he said, taking the few steps into the bathroom and closing the door with a soft click.

"Fucking jerk," Noah muttered under his breath, stomping away down the hall, and Sam had to fight down the nearly-crushing desire to chase after him and pound him into the concrete until his face wasn't so damn pretty anymore.

"You're being irrational," he panicked to himself, quickly latching the door and sinking down onto the edge of the closest bed, his heart hammering furiously in chest.

"What the fuck was that, Dean?" he finally said after a few long moments, raising his voice enough to be heard over the sound of running water from the sink. "Are you fucking out of your mind? I come back to the room after working all fucking day to find you getting some other dude's rocks off? Jesus fucking Christ."

He heard the sound of the doorknob, and Dean poked his head out, a fucking smirk on his face of all things.

"That's a lot of 'fucks,' Sammy," he said, and Sam felt his blood begin to boil dangerously over. "Besides, what's the big deal? You've walked in on me before loads of times. What's one more?"

It was the last straw.

Sam jumped to his feet, prowling over to his brother and wrenching the bathroom door all the way open, planting his body as a barrier between Dean and the rest of the room.

"This is different, and you know it," he growled, overwhelmed by the urge to strike out and hit Dean right across his stupid, slutty mouth. "Since when do you let random men shove their dicks down your throat, huh? Or is this just a one-time thing to cross off your damn bucket list? You looked like a damn...you looked like-"

"Sammy, just-"

"No, Dean. Don't 'Sammy' me. I'm sick and tired of your bullshit, okay? While you've been crawling around being drunk and reckless and apparently fucking everything that moves, I've actually been trying to save your sorry ass."

He paused for a moment, pressing his palm to his forehead before continuing.

"We have eight months, Dean. Eight months. Have you even thought about that? And, for that matter, have you stopped to think about me at all in this equation? Do I mean so little to you these days? You're my...I just...I feel like I don't even know you anymore."

His breath was coming heavy as if he'd just run a marathon, and Dean raised an eyebrow, his expression softening almost imperceptibly.

"How long have you had that one cocked and loaded?" he murmured, dipping down to slip underneath Sam's arm and out into the bedroom.

Sam sighed, dropping his arm in defeat.

"It doesn't matter," he mumbled, watching his brother squat down to open the mini-fridge and grab a couple of beers.

"Want one?" Dean asked, and Sam shook his head.

Shrugging, Dean perched himself on the edge of one of the small wooden chairs and pulled out his pocket-knife, wrangling the top of the bottle off with a small pop before taking a long, gratifying sip.

"Let's just call it a night, okay?" he said with a tired smile. "I don't really feel like-"

"Did you let him fuck you?"

Shit.

What?

It wasn't what Sam had meant to say, as much as he realized he didwant to know.

It had just...slipped out, and he felt the color rising in his cheeks as his chest constricted painfully.

That line, the one he used to love to toe, felt like something off limits these days, something that would open its jaws and snap him up if he got too close.

Dean choked a little on his mouthful of beer but, surprisingly, didn't come back at Sam with something expected like, "What kind of a fucking question is that?" or "Why the hell would you want to know, you perv?"

Instead, he snaked out his tongue to wet his lips before raising his eyes with a kind of steely, smoldering intensity that hadn't been directed at Sam in ages and had been missing entirely ever since he had purchased his one-way ticket to sunny paradise.

"No," he responded, his voice breaking a little. "No, Sammy. I didn't let him fuck me. I didn't let him kiss me. I didn't let him hold me. I didn't let him fuck me."

Sam's breath caught in his throat, and his gaze fell to the floor as the air between them thickened perceptively.

Here they were again, suddenly in this...deeper place, this strange, familiar, inevitable place that had always crept in on them from the shadows, enveloping them in a claustrophobic mist that clouded everything, silenced everything.

It took him by surprise, absent for so long, and he chewed his lip nervously, feeling the weight of the moment as it struck like a ton of bricks.

Had it always been this...heavy?

It had begun around the time Sam was a high school freshman, maybe earlier. It was hard to distinguish the before from the after, because the feelings all seemed to meld together. Love, safety, family, partnership, togetherness. Always togetherness.

The heated glances, the charged moments, the lingering touches...all secret and unspoken, undefined and unidentifiable, had just slipped in between the cracks when neither of them had been looking.

It wasn't all the time.

It was just...sometimes, and it was never clear who started it, but it was always Dean who shut it down.

Dean had approached these moments ready for battle, warring between his feelings and his moral compass, always giving in to a degree but walking around for hours after as if he had the taste of bile in his throat.

To Sam, the dynamic he and his brother quietly shared had always seemed natural, comforting even. They were close, as close as two humans could most likely be, and the closeness was right.

It wasn't just something he grew to want, but something he grew to need. They both needed it, the private moments, and Sam could never quite understand why Dean was so repelled by something so simple, so basic, so...human.

The line had always held.

They would lie together, naked chests touching, and they would just feel. They would stroke each other's arms and kiss each other's collarbones and press in close until they were flush against each other.

It was never more.

And it was never less than wonderful to Sam.

It had never felt wrong to him. It had never felt wrong that he had wanted to map Dean's skin with his fingers, that he had wanted to taste, to wrap himself around, even to possess, but...when he left for Stanford, something hard enough on its own, he had been handed a normal plate of life to compare himself to, and he had finally understood why his brother had always fled their touches with such poorly-concealed horror.

In a rush, he had seen himself the way that Dean must have...twisted, dirty, stained, corrupted, and he had tried to push the sickness down deep into the already-rotten corners of his mind, but it had always been there, looming in the shadows and rearing its ugly head full-force within the first five seconds of seeing his brother again after four long years apart.

The dynamic was dark, then, after Stanford.

Ugly.

Monstrous...the way Sam, himself, felt.

It grew from poisonous seeds into a dangerous animal in a small cage, and he began to shy away from it like a skittish colt, his brother following suit, until the forbidden feelings were all but forgotten, buried under long cases and all-nighters and family turbulence and carriage rides with death.

Until tonight.

Until just now.

Dean had shattered it all with a few words and a glance that would mean nothing to anyone else.

Only to Sam.

And he didn't know if he was furious, relieved, hopeful, fucking terrified, a little of each, or none of the above.

"Sammy, can I ask you a question?" Dean suddenly spoke, breaking the heavy silence and causing Sam to straighten his head with a snap, his neck cracking audibly.

"Yeah," he said, clearing his throat and sucking in a panicked mouthful of air. "Sure."

"Me and Jim-"

"Noah."

"Whatever. Me and him...I have to ask. Are you really angry because I was fucking around while you were working? Or is it because I was with another guy?"

Sam stared, unsure of what his brother was actually asking.

"I haven't turned into some kind of homophobic asshole, Dean. Is that what you're getting at?"

Please let it be. Please don't let it be.

Dean shook his head, shifting restlessly in his chair.

"No. No, it's not. What I mean is...are you angry because I was with...another guy? You know...what I mean?"

This time it was Sam's turn to choke a little, the words themselves spiking out to strangle him, and he shoved his hands roughly into the pockets of his jeans like he always did when he was feeling like his mind was spinning out of control.

"Are you, uh, asking me if I'm...jealous?" he almost-whispered, finding it hard to comprehend the fact that they were actually saying any of this out loud.

That had always been unspoken rule number one, and it had been iron-clad, kept that way by Dean, Dean, who was now flirting with that same dark abyss as casually as if this was a conversation about Sam's grades or Dean's new favorite band...like the ones they used to have.

Don't talk about it.

Don't talk about it.

Never. Ever. Talk. About. It.

"Yeah, I guess that is what I'm asking," Dean responded, his voice a low hum that seemed to vibrate through Sam's skin like an electrical current. "You don't have to feel...it's okay, you know, if you are."

He trailed off, and Sam turned away abruptly, his back facing Dean and his hands braced on the marble counter.

"Does it matter?" he growled, suddenly feeling a renewed burst of anger followed by the urge to just put everything on the table, once and for all, walking-on-eggshells be damned. "I mean, this thing...this thing between you and me, whatever it is, it's still just...I'm just...in the end, I'm still just your fucked-in-the-head kid brother, Dean. You could never stomach…any of it, and I get it. Believe me, I get it. I know how screwed up it is, okay? So, yes. I was jealous. I was fucking furious and jealous and it made me feel sick to see him touching you. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't fucking matter, and tomorrow morning, we'll have coffee and waffles, and I'll be fine, and we won't bring it up again. Ever. Just...I don't want to see that, Dean. Don't you dare let me walk in on that again, okay? I don't...I can't see that again."

He was breathing heavily, his knuckles white even against the pale hue of the marble, and when he felt Dean's hand on his shoulder, he jumped, spinning around to face his brother who had silently closed the distance between them.

"Sammy," Dean murmured, fingering the fabric of Sam's t-shirt. "My god, is that what you've been thinking this whole time? That I'm disgusted by you? That I'm...repelled by you? I mean, Jesus Christ. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. You have...you have noidea how far that is from the truth."

Sam's muscles were coiled like springs, and he shivered, raising his eyes to Dean's.

"Do you maybe want to clarify?" he asked in a low voice, brushing Dean's hand away. "You're not a very subtle person, Dean. And I'm not blind. I've always known how you really feel about this. There's no use pretending. I don't want your pity."

Dean made a guttural sound deep in his throat, reaching out again, this time to grip Sam's shoulders.

"My pity? Are you out of your mind? Don't you get it? I was disgusted with myself, Sam. I thought that I was...manipulating you. I thought you...that you just wanted...I thought that I was taking advantage of you. Every time. And I couldn't stop myself. I always gave in. And I always hated myself for it. I'm your big brother. God, I was supposed to keep you safe, to protect you, and I just-"

His words were cut off as Sam leaned in to kiss him, hard, his mouth slamming against Dean's with enough force to draw blood.

He hadn't planned it. It had just...happened, and he fought against his own panic as he wrapped his hands around his brother's head, holding him in place.

Dean tried to leap back in surprise, his hands pushing against Sam's shoulders, but Sam was an unmovable force when he wanted to be, and he didn't budge as he continued to press against his brother's lips with desperate urgency.

His mind was spinning. He couldn't think.

Kissing Dean was exhilarating and humanizing and infuriating and powerful and a million other things that Sam would think about at some point. There would be time for that later. There would be time for discussion and dissection afterwards.

Sam wanted this now.

He needed this now.

Dean's mouth was still tense with shock, but it began to smooth slowly into soft, responding pressure even as he continued to resist Sam's grip, relentlessly struggling with his upper body as Sam continued the kiss.

Growling in frustration, Sam found himself biting into Dean's lower lip before pulling back…putting a few inches between their faces but sliding his arms possessively down to his brother's waist to keep him from moving away.

"Dean-" he began, his voice a low rumble of impatience, but Dean interrupted him almost immediately.

"What the fuck, Sam?" he hissed, the words coming out as more of a breathy gasp than he had probably intended. "What…what the fuck?"

Sam sighed, not enjoying the press of guilt and confusion and anger that was suddenly creeping into the back of his mind again now that Dean's lips weren't flush against his own.

"Why do you always have to make everything so damn difficult?" he groaned, easing back on the vice grip he had around Dean's torso and taking a resentful step back. "Can't you just…do you have to be fucking Jiminy Cricket right now? I don't want to fix things tonight. I don't want to do the right thing or get logic-ed to death or fight with you or leave you alone or…anything."

He knew that he wasn't making much sense, and he turned his head sideways to avoid Dean's penetrating stare, met with nothing but suffocating silence.

"You know what? Fine," he snapped, letting go of Dean with a forceful shove that made his older brother stumble backward, reaching for the wall to steady himself. "If this is how it's going to be, then I'm going out. I can't be here. I won't do this."

As he began to turn on his heels for the door, Dean suddenly reached for him, missing his shoulder but still managing to clutch the sleeve of Sam's shirt tightly in his fist.

"Let go of me," Sam spat, his tone a cold warning, but Dean used the leverage to pull Sam toward him, effectively closing the space between them.

"You know you're a dick, don't you?" he said, but the insult didn't resonate in his soft voice or reach his eyes, which Sam was surprised to see were smoldering darkly under heavy lids. "I mean, my god, I just didn't…I wasn't prepared for that. You come out of left field throwing the mother of all curve balls and then get pissed when it catches me off guard?"

He shook his head at his younger brother, but the corner of his mouth twitched a little, and Sam started to feel that tingling warmth from a few moments ago begin to pool in his abdomen again, his primal self battling with the part of him that wanted to deny Dean a second chance just to punish him for…for what, exactly? For feeling confused? For having an instinctive struggle response to being held immobile? For not immediately bending to Sam's will?

Even in his head, it sounded bad.

Sam narrowed his eyes at Dean anyway, his brow still furled in frustration.

"What do you even want, Dean?" he asked bluntly, squaring his stance and meeting Dean's gaze with an intensity that was somewhere between demanding and accusatory. "Either you want this or you don't, and I'm not in the mood to indulge you while you beat around the bush with me on this. I can't do that and keep my shit together at the same time tonight, so what do you want? Do you want me to stay or do you want me to go?"

He felt aggressive and unstable, like he couldn't control himself. He knew that their situation was as far from black and white as it was from normal, but he felt almost…mean. He didn't want his brother to feel comfortable with this or to have any space to regain composure, and his realization of this fact simultaneously made him feel sick to his stomach and turned on even more than he had been with his tongue pressed between Dean's lips.

"I-I want you to stay," Dean stuttered quickly, his expression now speckled with uncertainty again, and Sam felt his own pulse quicken alarmingly. "I want you to stay. Fuck. I do. I just want…to be on the same level, you know? To…to be in this together, on the same page."

He moved his free hand a little awkwardly to Sam's chest, sliding his fingers experimentally downward, but Sam found himself catching his brother by the wrist and aborting the tantalizing gesture before it could go any further.

Dean's mouth fell open in confusion, and he hunched his shoulders defensively.

"You…changed your mind?" he barely-whispered, the words steely with something close to devastation, and Sam felt another pulse of guilt almost overpower him.

Almost.

"I don't want us to be on the same level," he suddenly blurted out in a voice so calloused he barely recognized it as his own. "Not for this. Not this time. Not when it's always been you steering this thing off of cliff after cliff after cliff, too narrowed in on your own guilt to bother trying to figure out how I was actually feeling all these years and what was actually happening. Not when I find you sucking off a stranger like an eager slut only to have you push me away when I'm kissing you because…because what? Because with me you suddenly develop a moral code about this kind of stuff? Or was it because you weren't the one who did it first?"

He barely took a breath before continuing, his grip tightening on Dean's hand until he could see the lines of pain across his brother's face.

"This is going to be on my terms," he said through gritted teeth. "My way. My calls. Or it ends right now for good."

His chest was rising and falling heavily, and he was acutely aware of the fact that he was crossing at least a few pretty big lines, but something dark had grabbed hold of him on the inside, and…whatever it was…it was filling him with a fiery need unlike anything he had ever felt before.

Dean just gaped up at him, struck momentarily speechless by Sam's outburst, and Sam didn't wait for a recovery or an affirmation before slamming Dean's body into the wall and attacking his mouth as if he was suffocating and all the oxygen in the room lay behind his brother's sinful, deceitful, fucking perfect cock-sucking lips.

This time, Dean went slack between Sam and the wall, not a single muscle tensing in protest of the violent control Sam had unexpectedly exercised over him, and Dean's immediate, out-of-character submission flooded Sam's gut with a stabbing surge of arousal that had his vision nearly whiting out.

Growling, his pushed his tongue between Dean's teeth, demanding entrance, and Dean opened up with a throaty purr that had Sam thrusting his denim-clad cock against his brother's hip far sooner than he had planned to.

The full-body shudder that the act elicited from Dean, however, spurred Sam into a steady, grinding motion against Dean while he fucked into his brother's mouth with his tongue, wanting…needing to taste every inch and reach every possible depth. To know everything. To take everything.

In the back corner of his logical mind, he knew that a confrontation about his obvious feelings of anger and resentment laced with jealousy and some big-time control problems was inevitable, not to mention the fact that the heavy issues between them still loomed, waiting to crash down on them again when the smoke cleared. But, for now, Dean was pliant and willing against him, and Sam had no intention of wasting the experience by worrying about the state of his sanity or the true weight of what was happening. No. He was going to make sure that this night would be one that neither of them would ever forget, regardless of what the future might hold.

Dean, who had been thoroughly (albeit reluctantly) allowing his little…or at least younger…brother to hold the reigns and take back some of the power and control that Dean knew he had robbed him of, was rapidly discovering that surrendering his body over to a pissed-off Sam was not the uncomfortable situation that he had decided he would just have to endure for the sake of his brother's obvious need to purge a decade's worth of pent-up emotions.

In fact, the experience of being at the mercy of Sammy as this hungry, massive, dark, and dominating force was becoming the single hottest thing that Dean ever could have imagined.

Letting his head fall backward to bare his throat as Sam moved his mouth from Dean's lips to the sides of his jaw felt like swimming underwater in a Jacuzzi without all the bubbles.

Sam growled arousal against his neck, and Dean suddenly understood that there were many different types of drowning, some of them as sweet and heady as sinking slowly under in a lake of roses. He'd never been one for the drowning metaphor, but he was ready to make it his religion, to worship at the altar of these Jagged pieces of Sammy as they dragged him away from the air and down into the depths of some stormy ocean.

Sharp teeth raked across his adam's apple, and Sam's fingers snaked up from their place on Dean's hips to wrap possessively around his neck, splayed wide and applying just enough pressure to have Dean sucking in shallow, gaspy breaths and clenching his hands into tight fists at his sides.

Sam smirked hotly, licking a stripe up to Dean's ear before whispering, "Your life is literally in the palms of my hands, Dean. How does it feel knowing that your little brother is in control of what happens to that…pretty throat of yours?"

His grip tightened in demonstration, and Dean knew that if Sam didn't have him pinned, his legs would have almost definitely given out underneath his own weight by now.

Sam loosened his fingers a little and shoved his hips forward almost brutally, his hard length sliding against Dean's, and Dean couldn't even find it in him to be embarrassed by the girly mewling noises that were escaping from the back of his throat as Sam continued to move and press himself in little circles against Dean's aching, straining cock that was begging to be freed from his now agonizingly-tight jeans.

"F-fuck…Sammy," he rasped, leaving the thought hanging as he struggled to figure out which of the hundreds of thousands of words he supposedly knew was supposed to come after 'Sammy.'

"Fuck," he reiterated, "I…I…"

His eyes were rolling back in his head of their own accord, and he suddenly, mercifully remembered what he needed to say.

"Sam, I'm gonna, gonna…if you keep, fucckk, I can't-"

His failed sentence turned into a throaty moan as Sam dropped a hand between their bodies to roughly palm the outline of Dean's erection, his smirk gone and replaced with an expression of pure lust and savagery that seemed to cut down into Dean's very soul with its burning intent.

"You cum on my terms," he said, crawling his fingertips slowly up Dean's length until they were poised teasingly over the button at the top of his jeans. "You wait until I give you permission. Got it?"

Dean tried to stifle a poorly-concealed groan of objection but nodded obediently, squeezing his eyes tightly shut for a moment as he scrambled haphazardly for some kind of mental composure that would put his feet on slightly more solid ground. After a deep breath, his shakiness seemed to steady a bit, and he was able to take a little step back from that precarious 'edge-of-the-earth' he had been looming over.

But, in the next moment, when he felt the tug of Sam's fingers as they began to work at his fly, he suddenly knew that there was no point in even trying to hold himself together tonight…not under his brother's wicked administrations…not when he was so far gone.

Sam, who was watching Dean come apart at the seams like an exploding piece of art, felt a rush of white-hot satisfaction that went straight to his cock.

Dean. Cool, composed, in-charge Dean. Dean, who was now panting like a rabid animal and unabashedly thrusting his hips as Sam painstakingly pulled down the zipper of his jeans. Dean…his Dean. Giving it up so…fucking…gorgeously.

God…

"No Jim or Johnny or Noah or even fucking sex-god incarnate is going to take you more completely or wreck you more beautifully than I'm going to tonight," Sam found himself hissing against Dean's throat, and as he watched his brother's pupils blow out to near impossible proportions at his words, he suddenly knew what this was all about.

He needed to scrub them out. All of the "Noah's" who had imprinted themselves on his brother. He would carve himself into every nook and cranny even if he had to lose himself doing it, because if he could hold enough of the puppet strings, maybe…just maybe he could tug in the right places to make Dean fight for the chance to live. Really fight.

And if it all still went south (deep south), well, Dean was not going to die belonging to anyone but Sam.

In every. fucking. way.