Author's Note: Thanks for waiting everyone! I think we have three more chapters of this one and that's it, so hopefully this moves you forward just a little and you like it. Thanks especially to hitchcock-startlet (for everything), bhoney (for not letting me forget) and gr8read (for the push tonight). Please review—I write for you; so tell me what you like and what you hate and what you want!

Chapter 4

Exhausted by the yeti stalking and the craziness of Dean's episode, the Winchesters were in bed asleep before midnight. The morning started with breakfast in the dining room and then more research.

Sam worked the laptop and Dean worked the phone, both reaching out to various hunting contacts in hopes of figuring out what to do with their new furry friends. Lunch came and went and they still hadn't managed to find any useful leads.

Snapping his phone shut, Dean turned from the window he'd been staring out as he made calls. "Well, Demian is pretty much with you on this, and he had some ideas."

Sam had been half listening in on the conversation for the last ten minutes or so, when the change in Dean's voice indicated he was meeting with some success. "What'd he say?"

"He says it's a mythical creature—and his version fits with the stuff we were leaning toward."

"Okay, so what does he think we should do? Has he ever hunted one before?"

"No, but his uncles supposedly did, back in the 30's."

"Really? Where?"

"Himalayas. And before you ask if we can chat them up; they're all dead."

Sam's expression became noticeably gloomier; "Anything actually useful?"

Dean smiled, "Wouldn't you like to know?" Without waiting he spoke again. "To listen to old Demian tell it, his uncles—Boris, Yuri and Dmitri—were a pretty spectacular sight in the good old days. They spent their final years in the mountains traveling between villages that needed help fending off the local wildlife."

"I can't think that paid too well . . ."

"The natives treated them as honored guests and Demian said the villagers paid them in gold and wives," Dean said with a sly smile.

"Nice work if you can get it," Sam grinned.

"Yup."

"So . . ."

"Bottom line, he's going to do a little checking and get back to us. He says that they don't have any supernatural powers they're just massive, strong, and mean. And they smell like walking death."

"Excellent."

"The Brothers Balakov took them down by tranq-ing them with some kind of herbal concoction—local Himalayan stuff—and then just—"

Dean drew a hand across his neck and made a squishy, sucking sound.

Sam raised an eyebrow and leaned back in his chair, making a low whistle as the front legs left the floor.

"That's what he's checking on; the herbs," Dean said.

"Anything about how the thing ended up here?" Sam asked. "I mean, it's not like it just walked on down Everest and hopped a boat to Alaska."

"My guess is that someone had it shipped in for sport and couldn't quite keep up."

"Could have been for research," Sam offered, cocking his head.

"Maybe. Not a lot of places that could keep this puppy perfectly chilled."

"True enough," Sam said, his gaze faraway as his brain tried to work the case's questions.

"So what do you want to do while we wait?"

Sam glanced at his watch and sighed. "It's almost noon—how about lunch?"

"And then a nap," Dean nodded.

"You okay?" Sam asked, his focus returning sharply to his brother.

Dean growled and glared, but the implied threat didn't frighten the concern off of Sam's face. "I'm fine," he said in a dangerous tone, daring Sam to push the issue. Raising an eyebrow, Sam stared hard at his brother, reflexively assessing what he saw. Dean broke away first, as he often did these days.

"Let's go," he said, terse and tired.

"Salmon salad sandwich for you," Josie said, setting the plate in front of Sam, "and prime rib with garlic mashed potatoes for you!" she said with a grin at Dean.

Both boys thanked her (Dean more enthusiastically than Sam) and they dug in. Dean kept his gaze on his plate, carefully avoiding the possibility of catching his brother's eyes. When Dean wasn't in a talking mood Dean wasn't going to react well to the kind of wheedling Sam had in mind, so Sam just watched him and thought about what he'd seen in the months since Dean's escape from the Underworld.

Dean was still leaner than he'd been before Hell, his features more defined because of the weight he'd lost since coming back. It was one reason Sam had began to push that they stop and eat, at a table, in a place with a menu. He'd noticed pretty fast that their usual pattern of drive-ins and gas stations allowed Dean to hide the fact that he wasn't eating much.

When Sam pressed, Dean would mutter something about snacking while Sam had been asleep (which Sam was convinced was a lie), or promise to grab something next time they stopped (a promise he wasn't often keeping).

The sharpened angles of his jaw and cheekbones, the bridge of his nose and his wrists, were not minimized by the dusky smudges under his eyes. Sleep was also an apparent problem for Dean, and his exhaustion was etched even more deeply today.

Dean was quiet—he'd always had the stealth of a jungle cat—but just as Dean possessed a sixth sense when it came to Sam, Sam had the same ability to read between the lines when it came to his big brother. He knew that since coming back Dean spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling in the dark instead of sleeping.

More than once Sam had almost sat up in bed at 3:27 in the morning and called Dean on it . . . but something he couldn't give language to stopped him every time. It didn't take a professional shrink to see that Dean was struggling, and he had good freakin' reason for it. But even knowing that the healthy thing was for Dean to talk to someone—to get help working it all out—it was hard for Sam to step beyond the boundaries set by their father.

It'd taken serious time for Sam to even begin to let his own guard down and Dean hadn't had the benefit of Psych 101 and free campus counselors . . . or Jess. Dean only knew one way to deal—the way John Winchester's example had taught him. Suck it up, kill a monster, box it away, leave it at the last stop on the way out of town.

He didn't fault Dean for the dysfunction, and it was, he supposed, the reason that he'd waited this long, even with the lack of eating and sleeping. It was way too personal, in the Winchester world, to get into someone else's head—to assume you could fix something. John had been a firm believer that talking didn't help and the only way to heal a person's innards was to leave them alone to die or work it out themselves. For Sam to try and coax Dean into facing the trauma he'd experienced seemed both a gross invasion of privacy and like stepping on the kind of crack that could break your brother's back. It felt like treachery.

Sam watched as Dean buried half the steak under the mashed potatoes and piled the steamed broccolini on top of it. Dean wasn't alright, no matter what he said, and this latest development—the weird reaction to fire—was too much. Sam couldn't just sit on his hands and wait for his brother to really fall apart.

His preoccupation was interrupted by Josie clearing their plates and Dean ordering wild blueberry pie for both of them, Sam decided that there would never be a good time for this, and at least in public Dean was less likely to run, holler, or hit him. So waited until the pie was delivered and then took a deep breath and set his jaw and his heart for the fight.

"Dean, I'm worried about you," he said, his voice low and easy.

The fact that Dean didn't look up from his plate, was an indicator that the elder brother had been expecting a "conversation". Dean sighed and leaned back in his chair, the fork in his hand still as stone. Except for his chest rising and falling he didn't move at all and it appeared to Sam like Dean was frozen as the tundra surrounding them, as if waiting for an assault.

It was the last thing Sam wanted his brother to feel, but he wasn't surprised by the reaction. He wished he could think of another way, a quicker way to get past the worst of this. Something more like ripping a Band-Aid off a nicked finger than this . . . which felt more like slowly removing a sticky, bloody bandage from a gaping chest wound. He sighed quietly and tried again.