Sorry it took me so long to update! I am unworthy of your love. BUT here it goes!

Dean Winchester heard the girl give a long sniff of her nose through the bathroom door and winced involuntarily. He highly doubted that she was crying.

Dean fell back against the bed and tossed his arm over his face, drowning out the sounds of the TV from the room next door. It was a cheap motel, even by Dean's admittedly cheap standards, and the sooner he went to sleep the sooner he could be awake and headed out of this godforsaken city in this godforsaken state. Dean was starting to hate California.

Like the girl, the room was rented by the hour. Dean honestly couldn't tell what color the carpet had been originally and the threadbare comforter on the mattress might as well have been steel wool for the way it caught on his calloused skin. This room was like the room before, in the state before, in the hunt before. Then the one before that. And then the one before that. They were all the same, from the inoffensive beige wallpaper to the manufactured, geometric designs crisscrossing through the carpet and girls, blank eyed and sallow skinned, just a few blocks away.

Dean only bought girls. He still happily screwed men when the mood struck, but he only paid for the soft bodies, smaller than his and supple and uncomplicated beneath his fingers. All the boys were too young. They always reminded him of something sad and beautiful that he left behind at a truck stop near the Texas-Mexico border with a piece of himself.

Dean didn't need to pay for it, something that he prided himself on, something almost all the bought women commented on. With eyes like that they always said, With a smile like that then they would let it trail off, an unspoken question.

And most of the time, Dean didn't buy it. He liked women. He was good at women in bars. Everyone, every single person in a bar was looking for something. They could be drinking alone or quietly with friends but instead they chose to go out. Chose to look for something in the sea of strange faces and the blur of alcohol and music. Sometimes they were looking for a knight in shining armor. Sometimes it was a mysterious man with a heart of gold. And sometimes, most of the time, Dean reckoned, they didn't know what they were looking for. Dean loved the flirting, the word play, the jokes, the innuendos. He loved the brushes against his arm, the too close whispers into his ear, the giggle, too easy and too high to be anything other than an invitation. An invitation to whatever it was that they were looking for, and Dean was damn good at convincing them that he was it.

But sometimes he couldn't. Sometimes the hunt was too long and the room was too quiet but the bars were too loud. Sometimes he needed to buy something, own something hot and plush and willing, even without a smile, even without having to prove he was worth it. Sometimes he needed to push something down and conquer it, just to feel a little control. Maybe at the end of it all, he was just proving to himself that he had any control in this big joke that was his fucking life.

Dean's skin was crawling with the harsh, high pitched sounds of his neighbors' TV. The beige walls were closing in on him. The stained carpet was moving beneath his feet. This room, like a hundred, a million, rooms before it was locking him in like a prison. He glanced unnecessarily at the clock on his night stand; it was late, too late for anyone besides the demons and the whores to be out in the night but Dean couldn't stay in the motel. He couldn't spend another night in the solitary confinement of the beige walled prison. Maybe if he got out of California. Maybe if he got further away from the family that left him behind.

Both his Dad and his brother left him; the difference was that he knew where Sam was. Sam was a riptide, pulling him in, pulling him into something he should have never wanted in the first place, something that outgrew him. He had to start swimming again, fight the pull of the current because his disgusting need for Sam and Sam's fucking pure and normal love was a goddamn force of nature. Dean couldn't fight it. He could never conquer it. He just had to get used to swimming against the pull, keeping his head above water. Everything in his big fucking joke of a life was just keeping his head above the water.

He got up from the bed and knocked, maybe a little to fast and harsh, against the bathroom door. There was the sound of hurried shuffling and then the door opened to the small, beady eyes of the girl he paid for upfront. She gave a guilty smile.

"Sorry, baby, I'll let you get some rest." She said with a hard smile that Dean sometimes saw on his own face in the mirror behind the bar.

"Can I buy a bump off you?" he asked abruptly and she recovered her taken aback look with another smile.

"You don't need this, sugar. Get some rest. You need it."

'Girl' had been a general term, and now that he had already come and was looking at her in the combined light from the doorway of the bathroom and the light from the nightstand, he couldn't deny what he had so easily shoved into the back of his head as she bounced on his dick twenty minutes ago. She was old enough to be his mother, late forties maybe even older than his father, in her mid fifties. The foundation make-up was settling into the crow's feet by her eyes and was cracking around her mouth, the line of paint breaking as she smiled, among other things, for all the men who drove by. Dean liked women. That included older women, but that was when they were doing things without the coy act of girls half their age. Not when they were using that motherly tone of voice on him. Dean didn't need a mother anymore, that ship had sailed and Dean would be the first to admit that he had suffered from the lack of it. But he didn't need this now.

The woman's smile broke a little bit and she led him to the nightstand, measuring him out a line.

"I don't have enough for that, can only buy a bump right now. Kinda low on cash." He said it with his winning smile, the one she had to recognize because her eyes softened as she looked him over. With a smile like that… hung unspoken in the air. She knew that he didn't buy her because he was into anything weird; didn't want to call her 'Mommy' or put on a plushie costume or anything else that might put off a prettier, younger thing in a bar. He was broken, she saw that much, and he could feel her wonder why. Stupid whore, didn't she know better than go looking for that kind of shit? She looked away from him and back to her task, taking one of the hundred dollar bills he had given her for services provided and rolled it into a straw.

"I don't need to pay for it, baby. You shouldn't either." She said softly, offering the straw to him.

Of course her pimp or her previous client or hell, maybe a drug dealer she fucked earlier in the night gave it to her for free. The only kind of whores that sold were the ones walking the streets and it was getting truly late. Sharing with him was an unexpected generosity, though. Dean gave an appreciative smile.

He hesitated as he held the straw to his nose, then glanced back up at her. "This is just coke, right? It isn't meth?"

She gave a weak, reassuring smile and Dean decided that he really didn't want to know.

Dean answered the phone from the driver's seat of the Impala.

"You weren't in Sacramento." His father's ever-tired voice came through the receiver.

"Finished the hunt, wanted to move on. Didn't know that you were going to meet up with me. You there now?"

"Not for long."

Dean glanced at a mile sign on the highway, and realized that it was sunlight, not headlights that lit the road. He had been driving for almost ten hours and had hardly even noticed. Any other time, any other night he would have turned around and driven another ten hours just to see his father, see the whites of his eyes and all of his limbs intact. But he was so fucked up right now. Too fucked up to deal with anything besides the asphalt and Zeppelin and his beautiful baby, his constant companion. "Where are you now?"

"Almost at Seattle."

"Been driving all night?"

"Since about two, yeah. Couldn't sit still. Wanted to move on."

There was a pause, long and loaded as his father processed this. John Winchester was very familiar with Dean's erratic benders, increasing as they were in frequency since Sam left. For a while, at least, without the pretext of Sam to keep him away, John took Dean to hunt with him. They worked like a team, like a family, and it wasn't so bad. But without Sam to keep him clean, Dean let himself fall into drinking and screwing and doing all the things that he had a harder time doing when he knew that it was Sam who would take his boots off and tuck him in when he finally stumbled into the motel room. Worse than Sam being pissed at Dean or jealous of the people Dean took to bed was Sam being disappointed in Dean.

Sam wasn't dirty. Sam didn't know how it felt to be someone's it. Sam didn't need strange hands and voices telling him that he was beautiful because Sam really was, inside and out. Dean had 'those eyes' and 'that smile' but he was a big, dirty mess of a man who did lines with hookers and fell in love with boys in bathrooms. He was broken behind that pretty face that men clutched as he let them use his mouth. Sam didn't understand why Dean needed that, and just watched with sad eyes and thin lips as Dean tried to make himself feel whole.

Maybe it was because John recognized a broken person when he saw one, but there was little protest whenever Dean took that shot of whiskey that would officially take him from wasted to blacked out. He always took it knowingly and bracingly, poison and medicine in a single swallow. Dean never asked his Dad to help him and maybe John was waiting for him to. There was no hunting him down, no intervention, no real, obvious attempt to stop them or temper the self destructive path of the bender when his father saw all the signs of the mood coming. John Winchester had been on a twenty-two yearlong bender and they both knew perfectly well that he had no right to say a word. Judgment was never really his father's style. But it was harder for John to turn a blind eye to it when Dean was too fucked up to even lie properly.

"Got another hunt?"

"Maybe. Something in Eugene. Did you want to meet up—"

"No. No, I've got a hunt in Jericho… Just…Be careful, Dean."

"I'm always careful, Dad."

More silence, then dial tone as Dean was left alone, again.

Sam's house smelled like Sam. Sam and something foreign, not unpleasant, just different and painful in its easiness. It smelled like lemon candles and the lingering notes of whatever they had cooked for dinner and Sam. It smelled like Sam and a home. It smelled like Sam and the girl that Dean had always told himself that he wanted for his baby brother.

Sam was just as fast as he was when they were teenagers, the last time they were sprawled among each other. When Sam was twelve and Dean was sixteen Dean would let Sam pin him. The kid was a bit chubby in the face still, and short, especially compared to Dean who had filled out well and early. He needed the encouragement, the validation that he was good at it because Dean was sure that he hated it. Sammy didn't even like movies with too much violence, he definitely didn't like hitting his brother, even when his father demanded it. Even when Dean encouraged it.

Then, somehow, without Dean being quite sure how or when, Sam pinned him genuinely. Locked his leg behind Dean's flipped him over and pinned him to the ground, looking down at him with a smirk and pure, terrifying, hot-as-fuck heat. Sam knew all along that Dean had been letting him win. But now Sam didn't need it, he could win on his own now. The tables had turned and they never went back. He wasn't going to boast or rub Dean's face in it, but he would smirk down at his 'big' brother, even after the term smacked of irony.

Dean had sort of hoped that getting Sam out of that apartment, all girlish accents and spindly plants in the windows would feel like Sam again, smell like Sam again. But Sam carried that smell, that hint of her all over him, even long after they left. And Dean decided that it was probably better that way. Better that he was constantly reminded of how Sam finally had what he wanted, that girl waiting for him at that home he finally had after all these years. Dean hadn't ruined Sam after all. Look how happy he was when Dean wasn't around.

It had been a year ago since Dean went to Stanford, finally surrendered and had wound up in Sam's arms and Sam's town and Sam's normal, beautiful life. Dean had fucking given up swimming and let the tide pull him towards Sam or drown him altogether, whichever happened first because Dean was kind of OK with both.

His father had left a vague note on the nightstand, something about Minnesota and a heavily implied 'none of your damn business' and then Dean was alone. Two days after the note, John called and told Dean about a salt and burn two towns over from where he left him. He wanted Dean to "take care of it" and suddenly Dean realized that he had graduated without a ceremony from John Winchester's hunting academy and was on his own. His father had never let him do one by himself before. There was no, "I know you can do it, son." Just a "take care of it" and "be careful" tacked on at the end, like an afterthought.

And Dean knew that his father preferred hunting alone. He knew that his father was a better hunter alone and he tried to not let it sting like it did. But sometimes Dean got sick of knowing how well everyone was doing when he wasn't in sight. But he needed that reminder now, with Sam sitting in the passenger's seat, smelling like her.

But the longer Sam was with Dean, the more he started to smell like Sam again. Not Sam in the bushes of a park behind a tool shed, but Sam at eighteen, living amongst the stale clothes, cheap take-out and the hunter's helper that Dean and John drank by the gallon. She smelled clean, like fresh air and candles and cooking. She smelled pure and beautiful and normal and Sam just absorbed that so easily, like he was made for it. Like he was normal too and he was happy in her Downy fresh sheets.

Sam was smiling and bitching about Metallica and smelling like the old Sammy who used to cling to him in the night so Dean almost forgot that he didn't belong there anymore. Sam belonged with her. And Dean belonged alone.

"I'll take you home." Said Dean. And the words hurt just as much as they did when Dean was drowning and Sam went back to her. And Sam did the smart thing and the right thing and the beautiful thing and chose her over Dean and his dark dirty mess of a life and his series of beige walled prisons smelling like stale air cheap girls.

So Dean let him go to her bed, to her arms and her normal, beautiful life and he drove away because… just because. Because Sam was happy and just because misery loves company doesn't mean it should get it.

But Dean didn't drive off, because he was clearly a masochist. He drove a block, then circled back, killing the headlights. It took him a few long minutes, across the street from their apartment, to look away from the road in front of him to the window of their bedroom.

Maybe he was waiting for Sam to turn around, to come back out the door and call for him. Maybe he was waiting for Sam to come out and climb into the Impala and murmur, Dean again, just so that Dean would know for certain the best and worst moments of his adolescence weren't just perverted dreams and fantasies he had all by himself. That Sam saw how dirty he was and made him clean by wanting him.

But, despite what Sam loved to claim, Dean wasn't delusional. He knew where Sam belonged. He knew where Sam was happy and more than Dean wanting Sam to fill the silence of his motel room with pleas and pleasure broken breaths in the dark, he wanted Sam to be happy. And Sam was happy with her. She was his it, that thing that Sam had been looking for the whole time and Dean just wasn't.

What Dean was waiting for was for the bedroom light to turn on. Dean was waiting to see her silhouette through the floral curtains and then see his shadow join hers and watch them meet somewhere in the middle and in the light like lovers instead of in the dark and in the shame like brothers who both know better.

Then Dean heard the cry, long and mournful. Then Dean saw the light, too fast and too bright, and something primal in him, something hard wired from the age of four kicked in. Sam was on their bed, screaming for her and Dean grabbed him, saved him, even as Sam fought him.

Sam smelled like smoke in the passenger seat of the Impala. Sam smelled like smoke and sat rigid in a way that was eerie in the way he looked like their father. He wasn't crying, he was beyond that, or maybe he wasn't there yet. He was cold, stock still and hard faced. He was terrifying.

But he was there. And Dean was there. And they had work to do.

So they drove off into the dark. Together.

So, that's it for this story. Keep your eyes peeled for other One Shots in this 'verse! And please leave reviews!