Castiel was in Dean's room when Sam returned, sitting in the chair at his desk and watching him sleep. He glanced at Sam, and didn't ask how whatever he'd been doing had gone as he stood up and left. But he did squeeze Sam's shoulder when he passed him.

Sam just stood there for a while, looking at Dean. He looked so peaceful, in an obscene, almost twisted way. Bloated belly laid out on the mattress in front of him where he'd settled on his side, one arm tucked around it. Tube running into his mouth, slight motion of cheeks and lips and throat as he sucked and swallowed.

Soda sitting in his mouth all night was going to be absolute hell on his teeth, they needed to figure out some way to keep him from winding up with a hundred cavities a week. Then again, according to Crowley, he was literally made for this now. Maybe he didn't have to worry about cavities any more than he did hardening arteries or high blood sugar.

He was still thinking along those lines when he realized that Dean's breathing had changed, and his eyes were open a slit. In the dark, Sam couldn't tell what shape his pupils were.

Sam cleared his throat. "Sorry. Didn't mean to wake you up, just. Wanted to check on you. How're you doing?"

Dean pulled the tube out of his mouth, held the end angled up as he got an elbow under himself with a grunt, followed almost immediately by a belch. "'Bout as good as you could expect, I guess. Feels like I had my mouth on a freaking keg when somebody tapped it."

He nodded to his stomach, then sat fully up, reaching over to turn on his lamp. The motion had him jiggling, loudly sloshing. With the light on, Sam could see his expression: sleepy, content, almost lazy. His eyes were normal. After a second, he asked, "Find anything?"

There was a lump in Sam's throat as he shook his head. "Not yet."

"Hm. Figures." Dean yawned. His teeth looked fine, too. "Hey. You okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just…" Sam brought a hand to his face, wasn't sure what he was doing by the time it got there, made a weak little waving motion. "I'm just tired."

"Look, man, I'm sorry about earlier," Dean told him after a second, shaking his head. "I know I was a dick - "

"Dean. Seriously." Sam cut him off. "You don't need to apologize for that. I-I mean, I was just as much of a dick to you, and I wasn't dealing with…"

He trailed off. Eyes still on him, Dean asked, "How'd things go with Crowley?"

Sam's poker face wasn't all that great when he was this strung out. "How - ?"

"You seriously think you can summon the King of Hell here, to the bunker, and have Cas not notice?" Dean asked him dryly. "I know his voltage ain't what it used to be, and we've got some strong mojo laid down here, but come on."

Sam let out a breath. "It went…'bout how you'd expect. He was a douche, and he can't help. Actually can't, not just doesn't want to."

Bringing the tube back up to his mouth, Dean took a long few gulps. His pupils, which had gotten thinner as they'd been talking, rounded back out. Taking the tube out of his mouth, rubbing at his belly almost absentmindedly with his other hand, he quietly began, "If he had been able to help. If he would've offered you a deal in exchange." He looked up at Sam. "Would you have taken it?"

"Yes." At this point, Sam saw no reason to lie. He got the feeling Dean would see through it, anyway.

"What if he would've wanted me?"

Sam felt a bleak little smile tugging at him, with the rough sensation of fishhooks in his lips. He knew exactly what that felt like. He imagined Dean did, too.

"Only if he would've agreed to take both of us."

Dean drank from the soda tube again, longer this time. His stomach gurgled, sloshed. He never looked away from Sam, and his face had that unreadable quality it got sometimes. It was always a shock to Sam that his brother, who he'd known so well for so long, who fanned his emotions on the table like cards at the end of a round he'd lost despite his reluctance to discuss them, could still keep things from him when he wanted.

"You said you wouldn't have done the same." It wasn't a question..

"Yeah, well." The fishhook smile came back, just a flicker. "I lied." You oughta know how good I am at that, by now.

The conversation felt empty, finished. Sam turned to head over to his own room. He needed to research, dive deeper into this, because maybe Crowley was wrong and there was something else they could try. Something that could be done before there wasn't any point in reversing it anymore, but he wouldn't think about that. He couldn't do it right now, though. Just had to set an alarm for thirty minutes, lay down, could even keep his clothes on…

"Hey." Dean's voice stopped him. "Why don't you spend the night in here?"

Sam eyed him over his shoulder before tentatively asking, "Are you sure you...want me to?"

"Yeah, c'mon." Dean gestured him over, took a gulp from the tube. "I know you. If you don't, you're gonna be coming in here every five minutes anyway to check on me, and I'd kinda like to get some actual sleep. Shift a little of this monster."

He gave his gut a slap, and it visibly wobbled, forcing a belch out of him that he seemed hard-pressed to stifle. Sam winced a little, thought about telling him he didn't have to do that, but maybe it was better. He went to sit in the desk chair, but Dean stopped him.

"Not there." He laid down in increments, grunting as he shifted his bulk with both hands on his belly to steady it, until he was on the very edge of his bed. Tube in his mouth, he jerked a thumb behind him, then spoke around it. "Go ahead."

Sam took small, shuffling steps that made Dean sigh loudly in irritation before he ever even reached the bed. He wanted to make sure he gave him plenty of time to change his mind, though. He crawled up onto the mattress, and it was so narrow that when he laid down, he had no choice but to practically suction-cup his front right against Dean. If he tried sleeping back-to-back, he wouldn't have fit.

Smelling the sharply chemical scent of alkahest rising off Dean's hair, kneecaps tucked securely against Dean's calves, Sam studied the Mark in the light of the lamp he hadn't bothered turning off. He could see a fraction of it against the creamy underside of his arm, where he had it draped casually across his stomach. It was flatter, definitely. More pink than red. Even the spongy alien texture of it had smoothed out.

Sam closed his eyes, listening to the noises of Dean's belly, and of him swallowing down gulp after gulp of soda. The sucking and the gurgling, the sloshing, the churning.

Castiel came in, stood there for a second, then left without saying anything.

Sam guessed they were all pretending that his hard cock wasn't slotted against Dean's ass.

The days passed as quickly as the weeks they wound up turning into.

There was the research, first of all. So long as he was eating, Dean could help, and wasn't super bothered about Sam not wanting him flipping through any eight-hundred-year-old manuscripts when he had a bag of Cheetos at his elbow. Sam was initially reluctant to share everything that Crowley had told him with Dean and Castiel, but what Castiel had said about families and secrets had been throbbing in his brain for days. He could at least put this one out in the open.

"So if I'm not chowing down every second of the day, I'm gonna 'Survivor Type' myself?" Swallowing a mouthful of Little Debbie, Dean eyed Sam skeptically, then held his hand out in front of himself to examine it. "Well, y'know...my fingers are kinda starting to look like sausages, just a little. Don't you think?"

Discreetly, Castiel nudged the box of snack cakes closer.

Despite the good seven or eight hours the three of them were putting in at the library every day, Sam didn't think that anybody really, honestly believed that Crowley had been wrong. That there was something they could do to reverse this. He could see it in the way Dean switched back and forth between Atlas Obscura and Candy Crush on the tablet (when his fingers weren't too greasy to use it), in the way Castiel doodled fractals in the margins of the notes that didn't really contain anything useful. Sam saw it in himself, too. In the way he was doing...other research. In the way he felt like he could be trying harder and didn't know how to motivate himself, because this just didn't carry the same weight that other crises they'd faced had.

Weight. Kind of a funny term to use, considering what was happening to Dean.

Sam told himself there was nothing more he could do, that it was in his head. That the "other" research was necessary, too. That the only reason this might not have the cutting panic of Eve or the literal apocalypse, or even more personal tragedies like the Mark of Cain, was because it wasn't hurting anybody the way those had. In fact, Dean even seemed to enjoy it. But honestly, the direction that line of thinking always led in just made him feel guiltier.

At least Dean seemed to be doing okay, and things between them were...good. Just as weirdly good as that first night had been, if not better. Dean was pretty much always in a good mood so long as he wasn't overly hungry, all calm, mellow. He had his usual sense of humor back, was always up to hang out watching TV or reading if they were stepping back from research for a while, and Sam hadn't seen him snap in that unique, Mark-induced way since the day he'd put him in the alkahest. He hadn't been lamp shopping in weeks.

The Mark itself stayed weirdly flat. No pulsing, no twitching, no redness, no black veins. So long as Dean was fed.

Sam didn't think it was wrong, to enjoy Dean's company. To bask in the relief of (mostly) untainted time together. He wasn't sure that it was all that right for him to touch Dean, but the fact was Dean needed more and more help every day getting up or getting dressed, and both he and Castiel seemed perfectly content to have Sam do it.

Then there was the more...intimate stuff. Like the regular belly rubs Dean had probably needed since the beginning but only asked for a few days in. Sam was incredibly glad he exclusively wore jeans, because boners were easier to pass off in them.

There was the lotioning up, too. Suggested reluctantly by Sam, mostly centered around Dean's stomach, but slowly encompassing more of him every day as it became necessary. He could have left them. A reminder to himself of just how badly he'd fucked up. But it felt wrong to use Dean's body to do that.

"Don't get why you think stretch marks are gonna be such a big deal," Dean complained, poking at one on his side that had popped up before they started doing this regularly. "I'm covered in scars already."

"Can't do a whole lot to prevent the scars, but think about it," Sam answered from where he was pumping Jergens into his hand. "If we fix this, you want everybody to see a million of those every time you take off your shirt?"

He nodded to the jagged purple lightning bolt just above Dean's hip. Dean didn't object to the lotion again.

The odd stretch mark here or there was hardly the end of how Dean was changing. The eyes came back every time Dean needed to eat, and so did the teeth. In fact, they popped up sometimes for no reason that Sam could discern at all, and after a couple weeks, he could swear that Dean's pupils were permanently oval, his teeth always a little sharper than they'd been before. It was the kind of thing somebody might not consciously pick up on when they first met him, but it would nag at them, tell them that something was wrong. If the nonstop gorging didn't, that was.

He grew scales, too. Not a whole lot, thank god; just a dusting of tiny, almost downy things across his shoulders, the sides of his neck, his biceps, his thighs and low on his back. They glittered pale copper and gold and bronze and peach with glossy little black highlights, and Sam saw them every time he bathed Dean or dressed him, and he resented himself for thinking they were beautiful.

There were a lot of other changes beyond the scales to keep him busy.

Like the inevitable ones Sam had been sort of dreading. He'd always figured, in the back of his head, that Dean would put on weight if he made it to a certain age. Keeping the same diet, easing up on the physical activity as his metabolism slowed down, filling out was inevitable. Sam just hadn't thought it would look like...this.

Nobody, not even a guy whose occupation had kept him fighting fit up into his late thirties, could spend twenty-four-seven stuffed to the gills and constantly cramming in more without gaining weight. Even if he were eating the healthiest stuff imaginable, which Sam had given up on even trying for because he didn't see the point in making Dean miserable if it wasn't going to help much anyways. So Dean's hips steadily spread, a second chin swelled beneath his softening jaw, his thighs widened until even his bowed legs couldn't stop them from touching. He had love handles that would have spilled clean out of Sam's hands if he would have grabbed one, a big soft chest he very bluntly referred to as "tits." He jiggled, had a slow, rolling waddle whenever he did manage to move. And his always-bloated gut grew bigger by the day, so enormous by now he wouldn't have been able to get his thickened arms around it even if he tried.

There were constant lazy growls from it no matter how much Dean ate, or how hard he was belching and hiccuping. The ever-present hunger seemed to bother him about as much as the weight gain did. Which was to say not as much as it should have.

"Hey, Sammy, lemme ask you something," Dean said casually as Sam stood at his dresser, sorting through all the different sizes of sweatpants he and Castiel had bought to try and prepare. Pretty soon, they were going to have to start upgrading more than just his clothes.

"Huh?" Sam glanced back over his shoulder at Dean. Having just woken up, Dean was sitting in bed with a Cheshire-cat grin on his face, one hand resting lazily on top of his soda-bloated belly.

Dean's grin widened. "These pants - " He belched, reaching for a doughnut on his nightstand. " - make me look fat?"

Honestly, Dean's growth was hitting Sam a lot harder than it was him. There was the guilt, obviously. Watching this thing he'd caused, this thing Dean hadn't asked for or wanted, happen to his brother. By now, it was like reopening a cut that had built up so much scar tissue it didn't bleed and barely hurt.

The guilt wasn't all of it, though.

Sam hadn't ever thought it was a real kink for him. Or, at least, he'd tried not to let it be, because he figured that he absolutely didn't need it. He wasn't a chubby chaser, he didn't need to be with somebody bigger to be turned on, and honestly? It didn't exactly center around anybody but Dean. Not that anything had ever centered around anybody but Dean for him, if he was being honest.

Before, he'd always been able to write it off as a weird little Freudian knot in the tangled, fraying yarn of his psyche. Even with Dean overeating as often as he did, pulling Sam's eyes inevitably to him. Even with the slight belly Dean would always get when they were in one place or on easy hunts for long enough, swelling soft against Sam when they were in bed together. So Sam had never really felt the need to lean too hard on it, look too far into it. It went without saying that everything was different now.

There were words, he'd learned from the research he did when he should have been looking up more information about alchemy. Feeder, feedee. BHM. Stuffing. Shockingly common thing, from what he'd seen. Whole communities with subsets and offshoots defined by certain facets of fetish. Publications, events, celebrities, there were people who ate and measured and weighed themselves on camera for a living. If they could get a live feed of Dean going they'd probably make a fucking mint.

Of course, all Sam had found outside of a whole hell of a lot of porn was terminology and classification. Which, despite the arguments he'd frequently made to Dean when he was accused of wasting time on research, was pretty much useless. There wasn't exactly a wikiHow article out there on how to stop yourself from popping a stiffy every time your brother/ex-boyfriend belched.

And there were so very many stiffies. Sam tried every trick in the book, from cold showers to meditation, but sometimes it didn't work and he'd wind up jerking off. To Dean. Eating himself into a massive pile of lard.

Maybe he just needed to get laid. He'd been in a dry spell for...a lot longer than he'd ever admit to anybody, but now didn't seem like a convenient or appropriate time to break that streak.

"So you ever gonna tell me what's going on with you?"

Sam looked up from his laptop with a start. "H-huh?"

"C'mon." Dean rolled his eyes. He was settled comfortably on his bed with an extra-large pizza, a platter of breadsticks, and a lot of beer at hand. He'd been craving carbs, apparently. "You think I can't tell there's something bothering you just 'cause I can't look up from a plate for more than thirty seconds? We're literally sleeping together, dude. It'd be hard not to notice."

"I mean." Sitting at Dean's desk, Sam glanced at his laptop to make sure the screen was angled away from him as subtly as possible. "I don't know what to tell you, it's just - "

"It's not you beating yourself up about this," Dean stated, gesturing to his belly. It was resting in his folded legs like an egg that had massively outgrown its nest. "I mean, it's that too, but there's something else. Isn't there?" He took a long drink of beer. "Could be anything, I ain't gonna judge you."

Sam swallowed, pressing his thighs firmly together and thinking very firmly about corpses rotting into their coffin linings. He shook his head. "There's nothing."

"Okay." Dean shrugged. "Hey. You think Domino's still has those cinnamon-stick things? With the icing?" When Sam just stared without answering, he asked, "What?"

"That...that's it?"

"Yeah. That's it." Dean met his eyes with slit pupils and acid irises. "If it was something major, you'd tell me." A beat passed. "Now, cinnamon sticks. Yay or nay?"

Sam took a deep breath and pulled up the Domino's menu.

And sure enough, Dean didn't bring it up again.

So Sam just...kept going. Kept researching. Kept feeding Dean and taking care of him. Kept frantically beating off in his dark room and then sitting with his head in his hands for a long while afterwards. Stepping over the shattered pieces of what had been, because there was nothing new about that, and the only actual weird thing about this whole situation was how long it had taken fate to bring in the wrecking ball this time.

Eventually though, the pieces always knit themselves back together. Just not anywhere near the way they'd fit before.