I was going to wait until I was all finished with "Heart" to write new stuff, but the last two chapters I wrote are just waiting on my editor and I'd like to give her a break, and this little ficlet didn't take long to write.

And I can't have been the only one who noticed this.

The table was a mess - enough of one that it was even starting to bother Dean. There were stacks of ancient, delicate-looking books next to piles of newer ones. Sheaves of folders. Tight groupings of handwritten journals and notes. Bundles of pages printed off from the internet, haphazardly paperclipped together in one of Sam's half-assed attempts to impose some order on the chaos. Everything here had been cracked open at one point as part of their desperate search for a way to kill or at least seal away a deity of destruction on par with God Himself, and then tossed aside as soon as the two of them figured out they didn't hold anything useful. It'd all been pretty fruitless so far.

Dean guessed that that wasn't that big of a deal, though. Even if they'd had a solution to their enormous, Darkness-shaped problem, tied up in a nice, neat package with a big red ribbon, it wouldn't've been much use. Considering that they hadn't been able to find so much as a trace of her for over two weeks now.

On the far side of the cluttered table, Sam'd precariously balanced his laptop on a huge, leather-bound book of traditional Saxon folklore. He was peering intently at the screen and tapping away at the keyboard. Dean wasn't nearly as good with computers as his brother, but Sam had explained the gist of what he was doing to him. He'd set up a simple scan to search news sites for keywords - about soulless psychopaths running around, sightings of that nasty black crazy-fog, and women fitting Amara's description, for example - and then he was manually searching through the hits he got to see if any of them were what they were looking for.

It was slow work, boring as hell, and he'd been at it for hours without anything to show. Dean was sitting across from him, yet another useless book that he hadn't even looked at open on the table in front of him. He felt a lot like the book right now, actually. He would've been helping, but his own computer was down for the count, preoccupied with installing the latest batch of updates from Windows as slow as it possibly could. So there wasn't much he could do right now. Besides ask Sam, "Anything yet?" for the millionth time.

"No," Sam replied, shaking his head. Dean was amazed by his patience with him - again, for the millionth time. "I think I'm gonna call it a day soon." He sat back in his chair for a second and closed his eyes, probably resting them. "I'm sorry, Dean. Nobody's gotten their soul sucked out, no towns've had a mysterious fog that turns people into rage-zombies roll in, no...fundamentalist Christians or anything have been torn apart in fits of jealous rage. It's like she's just dropped off the face of the Earth."

"Guess she might've figured out we're looking for her," Dean replied with a shrug. He didn't think they'd done anything to tip Amara off, but she had all kinds of freaky knowledge when it came to them. Or him, more specifically. "She's probably holed up somewhere for the time being."

"Yeah, maybe," Sam agreed, rubbing at his face with one hand. He sounded distracted. Dean couldn't blame him. "We know she's definitely not out somewhere people can see her, at least." He lowered his hand, and a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as Dean watched. "I mean, with a woman that gorgeous, you'd think anybody who caught sight of her would post a picture of her or something."

Dean, arms folded on the book in front of him so that he could lean on them, raised an eyebrow. Sam's voice'd had a playful note in it, one he hadn't heard from him in at least a few days. And now he was grinning like he'd just told a joke. If he actually had, though, Dean hadn't caught it. So either he hadn't been getting enough sleep lately, or Sam hadn't.

"Okay," he said, figuring that agreeing would just be easier. He pushed himself to his feet, sliding his chair backwards with the backs of his knees as he straightened up. "I don't know about you, but I think I could use a break. I'm gonna go make a sandwich, grab a beer. You want one?"

Sam looked slightly disappointed, but instead of telling Dean why, he asked, "The sandwich or the beer?"

"Either."

"Think I'd better wrap this up before I start drinking. Sam shot a less-than-fond look down at his laptop. Dean didn't point out that, because of his size, it usually took around three beers to even get Sam buzzed. "But I could eat. I'll come make a sandwich." He pushed the screen down about halfway and stood, then gestured to the clutter that'd totally taken over the surface of their table. "Maybe you can try and make some headway on this when we're finished."

"Sure," Dean agreed, having zero intention of actually doing it. He was chomping at the bit to actually help, not to be the damn maid. "I'll do some laundry while I'm at it."

Sam was either oblivious or willfully ignoring his sarcasm, because he didn't say anything. In the kitchen, Dean broke the seal on a new jar of mayonnaise while Sam screwed around with a bunch of veggies on the other side of the room. Dean'd just started spreading a thick layer of the mayonnaise onto a slice of bread when Sam called out to him.

"So...about how Amara looks," he began. Dean glanced heavenward for a second, even though he'd never received much help from there. It hadn't occurred to him that they'd ever have this conversation, but he'd still rather skip it. He didn't want to talk monster girls with Sam.

"Yeah," Dean replied, still working on the mayonnaise. "She's super hot. Believe it or not, Sammy, but I noticed. I know she's the ultimate evil and all, and that she was a newborn baby, like, six months ago...but I'm not dead."

"Uh, no," Sam said. Dean looked over his shoulder to see him leaning against the counter, back to his own sandwich, and shaking his head. "I mean, yeah, I guess she is hot, but that's not what I meant."

"This about what you said earlier?" Dean focused on his sandwich again, now putting dijon mustard on a different slice of bread. Talking about this had gotten him thinking about Amara. Her face, her curves, the bounce of her hair...and that was a real pain, since he'd been spending a big chunk of his time lately trying not to think about all those things. "'Cause I didn't get it. Sorry."

"Yeah. I know." Sam was squinting at him now; Dean could feel it. "Have you...seriously not noticed?"

"Noticed what?" He'd already said that he'd picked up on the fact that the Darkness was attractive. What did Sam want from him?

"Dude, she looks like me."

Dean stopped spreading the mustard, even though he'd only been around halfway done. That didn't sound right. And it'd just come hurtling out of left field.

"What the hell are you talking about?" he asked after a second, putting down the bread and the knife and turning to face Sam. "No, she doesn't. You two don't look anything alike. For starters, she's a chick."

"Yeah," Sam agreed. "And if I were a 'chick'..." The way he said the word made it clear he didn't like it. "...then I'd probably look a lot like Amara."

"Oh, no you wouldn't," Dean responded immediately, holding back a snort.

"Well, she's tall," Sam started. He held a hand out in front of himself and ticked his fingers up as he listed things off. "She's tan. She's got long brown hair. And she has, uh, very pronounced cheekbones." He touched his face to indicate his own. He looked almost embarrassed about it.

"All that doesn't mean she looks like you," Dean argued. He had a mental picture of Amara in his head right now, and it didn't bear any resemblance to his brother, standing across from him.

"It kinda does," Sam countered.

They stood there in silence for about ten seconds, just staring at each other. Dean still didn't see it, no matter how hard he looked at Sam. So, stubbornly, he spoke up. "She doesn't look like you."

"She does."

This time, Dean let his snort out. That was it - he was done. He threw up his hands and turned back to his sandwich, which was sorely in need of making. He finished with the mustard, then started stacking lunch meat, pieces of deli-sliced cheese, and leaves of iceberg lettuce on top of the mayonnaise slathered bread. His stacking sped up when Sam started talking again.

"Whiiich makes the fact that you're so into her a little creepy, actually," he said thoughtfully. "Maybe it's some kinda Freudian thing and you really want to - "

Dean slammed the mustard-covered piece of bread down on top of his finished sandwich, almost tearing it in half. The sad little squelching noise that it made wasn't exactly the conversation-stopper he'd had in mind, but at least it shut Sam up before he could say whatever horrible thing he'd been planning on.

"It's just 'cause I had the Mark," Dean said, yanking the nearest drawer open and rummaging through it until he found a sufficiently-sharp knife. "We're connected because of it. That's all it is. There's no physical attraction, so even if Amara did look like you - which she doesn't - it wouldn't mean I had some sorta unconscious crush on my ugly-ass little brother."

"You said you'd noticed how hot she was, though," Sam pointed out, not bothered at all by the insult. "So doesn't that mean that you think...I'm pretty, too?"

Sawing his sandwich aggressively in half, Dean shot what he hoped was a withering glare at Sam. His eyebrows were raised and his face was straight, but only barely. There was a giant, amused grin just below the surface, struggling to get out.

"I'm going to my room." Dean tossed the knife aside, then picked up the plate with his sandwich on it and stalked out of the kitchen. He didn't bother cleaning up any of the things he'd left out on the counter. Sam could damn well take care of all that.

"No, hey, wait! This is a good thing!" Sam called after him, sounding like he was only just managing to hold back gales of laughter. "Next time you can't stop thinking about Amara or you're not sure you can hurt her or something, just think about our special connection!"

Dean hunched his shoulders and swore under his breath as he hightailed it back to his room. It wasn't funny. For a second, he briefly considered grabbing one of the weapons off his wall and really hammering that point home to Sam, but he waved the idea away. He'd rather not have to deal with the resulting mess - especially not in his kitchen. He made food in there.

Amara looked absolutely nothing like Sam, and vice-versa. Just because they both had long, flowing chestnut hair and model-grade cheekbones and big, sad, dewy eyes didn't mean there was a resemblance.

And anybody who thought Dean was attracted to his brother was just plain sick.