Chapter 5 One Night Stand

It always rained in Seattle, Dean remembered wearily, hunching tighter into the corner of the car as he listened vaguely to the hiss of the tyres on the wet road and turned his head away from the glitter of oncoming headlights. In most of the state, he added to himself.

Sam was driving them west and north and the rain had started somewhere around Spokane and had been with them ever since. It drummed on the metal roof, an under-beat to the steady shoosh-blat of the wipers over the windshield. It pattered against the glass next to his face. It rushed down the steeper sections of the highway and occasionally was thrown into the car by the traffic going the other way.

Rain had trickled down the windows of Bobby's house, a deluge that had started sometime around midnight and had just kept coming. Walking up the stairs in the darkness, Dean felt his heart thumping in counterpoint to that steady noise, over the roof and the walls and the panes of glass. He was nervous and on edge because the woman who was in the bedroom at the end of the hall on the second storey was somehow different to anyone else he'd met. Ordinary and normal…but not. Not at all.

He'd woken five hours earlier, mouth dry and head pounding, filled with the screams of the damned and the smell of sulphur and the taste of blood in his mouth. He hadn't had a dream like that in a while. It brought it back, searingly bright. How could he admit what had happened to him, what he'd done, down there? Terry had told him he hadn't turned into something else and he hadn't argued, hadn't believed it, had just left. Driven out of the house and into the car between wanting something he didn't think he was going to have, and fearing he already had it but the cost was going to be higher than he could pay.

When he'd come back, he'd taken his boots off at the front door and moved silently up the stairs. He'd watched her sleeping, curled up in a tight ball under the covers, the streetlights showing the tracks along her cheeks, the darker patches on the pillows. He should've turned around then, he thought, brows drawing together at the memory. Should've turned around and let it go.

When had he ever done that with Sam? Or his father? He couldn't make himself leave the bedroom either.

Undressing soundlessly, he'd inched his way onto the bed, under the covers and something had happened when he gotten close. Close enough for skin to touch skin and the warmth of her to seep into him. She'd sighed and relaxed, the pinched look on her face smoothing out and he'd felt…different. He hadn't known exactly what that difference was or what it meant. Only that the tension that had been knotting him up from the moment he'd woken in the middle of the night dissolved without fanfare, leaving him feeling quiet, in a way he hadn't felt since before his father had disappeared, before he'd gone to Palo Alto to find his brother.

Memory drifted into unconsciousness as the sounds of the car and the highway and his brother became more and more faint, left behind.

"I didn't think you wanted to be here," she said, her eyes searching his, shadowed and uncertain.

"Guess you got that wrong," he replied, pulling her close and stopping the questions he could see in them.

It'd been different again, different from the other times. An unhurried exploration that had been give and take in a way he'd never had before. Cassie had been as hungry for him as he'd been for her, but there hadn't been a sense of sharing each other in that brief-lived relationship. They'd been slaking their hunger in each other, not trying to build it into something that had meant anything more. With Lisa, he'd known the first time he'd met her what it was she looked for. A part of him had been disappointed, just a bit, in that knowing. He'd seen it before and he knew it didn't change. With Terry…with Terry everything changed, every time and that part he'd missed, that one he'd sensed but hadn't really known about, had been there.

She had learned him as quickly as he had learned her, in every way, not just the physical. Learned the paths and hollows and clusters of nerves that lit up and chain-reactioned, exploding arousal until it was unbearable. She hadn't been obvious in her response to his touch, but he was experienced at picking up on those small things that told him if something was working and how well. And he'd never missed a step with her.

She'd known the things that he couldn't talk about and she'd known how to read him. He'd been slower at that, but he hadn't had her head-start. He'd wanted to catch up.

The memories collided with the emotions he refused to look at and the dream was more real than the reality of the car and the rain and the city getting closer. He tasted and touched, listened and watched and tried to cling to the vanishing feel of her under him, around him, senses drowning in a desire that was satisfied every time but never satiated fully.

"Morning," his brother's voice swept away the last of it, and Dean opened his eyes reluctantly, wishing he could've stayed there for a little bit longer.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The morgue was cool but not cold, but the shiver ran up Dean's back anyway as he looked down at the body, its flesh greyish-blue, darker underneath. Then one day, boom, your number's up. Ness' voice played in his head again. No denying that, he thought, his gaze catching on the puckered, bloodless lips of the amputation of the vic's left hand. According to the report Sam had passed over before they'd arrived, this guy had been thirty, working his way up whatever ladder he'd thought would bring him success, owned his own home. Then boom.

And he was standing here, pretending to be a federal agent, staring at a dead body.

Every morning, when I open my eyes, I know what I'm doing, what I'm fighting for.

Son-of-a-bitch agent was talking way too much in his head, Dean thought, trying to bury the thoughts and concentrate to what his brother was doing.

"So," Sam walked around the long steel table. "What's our boy here weigh?"

Raymond, the coroner's assistant, looked down at the report in his hand. "Uh. A buck ninety. Thrown against a wall so hard it buckled," he said, shaking his head. "Based on the blood flow at the crime scene, the hands and feet were cut off while he was still alive, just like the others. The killer wanted him to suffer."

Dean looked expressionlessly at him. "If he'd wanted him to suffer he wouldn't have picked cuts that bled out so quick," he remarked. "All vics are male, right, with the same kind of, uh, artwork as this?"

"Yeah. Identical."

"Thanks for your time, Raymond," he said as he took several photos of the design cut into the victim's chest with his phone. "We'll be in touch."

Dean followed his brother into the hall. "You don't want to know about any other evidence they found?"

"Bobby sent the stuff from Frank through, it's in the file in the motel," Sam said distractedly, looking at the images on his phone. "I don't know, I've never seen this symbol before."

He looked up in time to avoid running into his brother's back as Dean came to a stop in the middle of the parking lot. Sam dropped a hand on his shoulder as Dean's expression remained drawn.

"Let's get a bite to eat, go back to the motel and haul out the laptop," he suggested, wondering if this was just the long drive and weird case, or if there was still a lot of fallout from what Chronos had said.

"Great idea," Dean nodded, turning to face him, his expression clearing. "Actually, that's a brilliant idea. Here's my counter. You do that, and I'll go undercover, mingle with the locals and uh, see what kind of clues bubble to the surface."

"You mean, go to a bar," Sam said flatly, turning to see the blue neon sign across the road that had grabbed Dean's attention when he'd come to a halt.

"Wow, if you want to oversimplify it."

"What's going on?" Sam asked. "This is a case."

Giving his brother a shrug, Dean said, "Yeah, and here," he added, pulling the newspaper he'd picked up in the morgue office from his coat. "Look at that."

Sam took the paper and looked at the front page. Six dead in pile-up on the interstate. Woman pushed off fourteenth storey balcony by boyfriend. Four people dead, food poisoning from local restaurant suspected.

Looking back at his brother's face, Sam said, "So?"

"That's eleven we couldn't do anything about, man," Dean pointed out. "Just today."

"You're right," Sam agreed. "We can't do anything about car accidents, regular murders or food poisoning." He threw the paper onto the asphalt. "We can do something about monsters attacking people and killing them."

"You heard Chronos," Dean said, looking back at the bar. "We can't stop them."

"He didn't see his future, did he?" Sam demanded. "So he wasn't all-powerful. What's this really about?"

"Nothing," Dean told him, turning away. "I'm tired. I want a break. That's it."

"Dean…"

Dean walked away, his hands jammed in his pockets. He could feel Sam's gaze, pounding insistently at the back of his head, but he ignored it. What he wanted, he thought bitterly, was not to be him.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Sam watched him go. Of course it was about Terry, he thought. Everything had been about Terry, one way or the other, from the moment she'd disappeared from Bobby's yard almost five months ago.

Getting into the car, he started the engine and pulled out for the motel. Dean wouldn't talk about it. The closest they'd come had been a brief talk on the drive back after the Jersey thing. They'd gotten things straight between them, at least, and he'd seen his brother had been genuinely happy about that, but Dean had clammed up the minute that conversation had gone around to him.

He'd let it go because there wasn't a point to making Dean feel worse than he already was. In some ways, that constant litany that she was safer in her world was true, he couldn't argue that. In others, he could see that it'd broken something inside of his brother, something he didn't think anyone could fix.

Dean would rather die than admit to his feelings, Sam thought caustically as he waited for his burrito and salad at the restaurant four blocks from the motel. Would want to die if the alternative was having to say out loud that he'd needed someone and there was no one to fill the place she'd been.

He stopped the car in front of the room and got out, his brain still feverishly trying to work out a way getting his brother to deal with everything he hadn't been dealing with in the last few years.

In Girardeau, he'd been amazed to see that his big brother could be hurt by a relationship. He'd watched Dean pretending that he didn't care in every meeting with the fiery reporter and he'd realised that there were unexpected depths to his brother that he'd never even considered. He'd thought, when it came time to take Lucifer back to the cage, that extracting the promise from him to live a normal life was the best thing he could offer Dean. He hadn't seen the cost of that normal life with Lisa and Ben and he hadn't seen that his brother needed something that normal life couldn't provide, needed a meaning even when he was trying to deny it, and needed someone with him who he could trust, all the way through. Lisa had been a long way from someone like that.

He hadn't seen his brother's slow motion fall with Terry, not until it'd been too late. Even in Dearborn, there had been a lingering doubt when she'd admitted how she'd felt and had made him promise not to tell his brother. He'd forgotten how good Dean could be at hiding things he didn't want to be seen.

Dumping the take-out bag on the table, he sighed as he sat down and opened the laptop. His brother wasn't getting over it. If anything, he'd become more taciturn and withdrawn with every day that had passed. A few times now, Sam had woken in the night, hearing his struggles with his subconscious. He didn't know what those nightmares were about but the few questions he'd asked about them had been met with a stony silence or a pointed change of subject.

"Your brother has walled himself in so tightly for so long now, that I'm not surprised that when he fell, he fell so hard that he couldn't get back up," Lauren had said to him, before they'd left Sioux Falls. The bedroom walls had been dappled in intermittent moonlight and her face had been washed in that mottled light, serious and making his heart skip a beat.

"You think that's it?" Sam had asked doubtfully. He couldn't imagine it, not really, even when he'd seen Dean's reactions and the even more telling lack of reactions over the past few months.

"Yes, I do," she'd said, pressing closer against him. "I think he's lost and he can't find a way to be who he was before."

It fit, Sam supposed, opening the plastic container holding the burrito absently. It explained the recklessness that was appearing more and more, and the depression that seemed to follow those moments. He couldn't think of any way to help.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The door opened behind him, and Dean stumbled backwards into the apartment, the woman in front of him maintaining her fierce pressure on his mouth, the fingers of one hand undoing his clothing at the same time as she reached behind her to slam the door shut.

She was beautiful, long reddish gold hair, tall and full-breasted and slender-hipped, endless legs and she was so hungry for him he hadn't gotten more than a couple of mouthfuls of air since they'd gotten into the cab outside the club. It was all wrong, but he was trying to ignore that, painfully aware there was a touch of desperation to everything he was doing, hoping she wasn't feeling it too, or didn't care if she was.

His eyes were closed and it wasn't enough. He fought to keep his memories buried deep, undressing her as fast as she was undressing him and it felt…forced.

"We're not in a rush, are we?" he murmured against the smooth skin of her neck, hoping it would slow things down, make it easier to see the woman who was standing in front of him instead of the one in his head. "Got all night long."

She laughed, low in her throat, her lips brushing over his ear. "I want your cock fucking me deep, right now," she told him bluntly, and the image, and the soft slither of her tongue, sent a jolting shock right to his groin. He backed up to the bed and let himself fall back on it, watching as she crawled up over him, her face shadowed, her eyes wide and dark, staring while her hands touched and stroked and desire lit an inferno along his nerves.

It was all wrong, he thought despairingly and desperation grew in him. He rolled on top of her, trying to slow the wild kisses, catching her wrist in one hand. She rolled them back over, stronger than he'd thought, twisting her arm to free her hand. She was voracious, demanding, and finally he gave up trying to wrestle some control back, letting his eyelids close as her mouth and hands pulled responses from him and she enveloped him in a furnace of pressure, riding him hard and fast until it was all he could do to hold back. When he felt the hard ripples contracting around him, he groaned and came with a tangible feeling of relief, hearing her cry out as her body squeezed him and milked out every last fucking drop.

Two and a half hours later.

Dean opened his eyes as a languid rush of heat flowed through him and peered blearily down the length of his body. Lydia smiled at him, her fingers continuing their small circular stroking along the insides of his thighs. It hadn't been even an hour since the last time, he thought, his smile back a bit uneasy. He couldn't check that because it didn't look great to look at your watch in the middle of someone…well, doing what she was doing…but he was sure he wasn't going to be joining the party just yet.

He was wrong.

Muscles aching and nerve endings twitching in reaction, Dean let his head drop back onto the pillow as she rolled off him, uncaring of the sticky mess that was drying rapidly on and under him.

Pussy-whipped.

It wasn't entirely accurate in the current usage of the term, but it described what he was feeling, he thought, easing himself to one side gingerly. The long muscles of his back and the backs of his thighs protested at the change in position.

"Here," Lydia said, pushing a bottle of water into his hand as he looked around at her.

She carried her own to the other side of the bed, dropping onto the mattress with a contented sigh and rolling easily onto an elbow as she lifted the bottle and swallowed several mouthfuls in quick succession. He looked at the bottle and shrugged internally. He probably was dehydrated.

"I like your stamina," she said, her smile a little secretive as she turned back to face him.

Stamina, he thought. As a cardiovascular workout, the last five hours had been…challenging. As a release from the tension that was knotting him into a pretzel, it'd been more effort than result.

Lydia leaned over and took the bottle from him, twisting around to set it on the nightstand next to hers. He felt himself flinch back a little when she closed the space between them, that secretive smile still playing on her lips.

"Just relax," she whispered against his mouth as she leaned over him. "We'll go real slow this time."

An hour and a quarter after that.

Dean looked at the ceiling vaguely, gradually registering the change across the smooth white plaster of the light from the window.

Daybreak.

He yawned, jaw cracking and turned his head cautiously to look at the woman lying next to him, finding not one speck of desire in the sight of the curves of shoulder down to waist, the rising mound of her hips and the taut roundness of her ass. He wondered a bit bleakly if he'd ever be aroused again.

Every muscle and tendon was complaining. It hurt to pull in a deep breath and he wondered if he'd cracked a rib. He was too damned tired to sleep and too exhausted to stay awake and from the steady breathing of the woman next to him, she was already sleeping, apparently finally satiated.

He'd wanted a night off, a night to lose himself in someone who didn't want anything more than that, to forget about the thoughts and memories that hovered around him all the damned time, a night to really pretend to be someone else. Someone without his life. He didn't think this night had done all that well on those counts.

Fifteen minutes later, he was just starting to drift off when Lydia's alarm went off, shattering the morning quiet. The mattress dipped as she rolled immediately out of the bed, moving fast around the room and picking up his discarded clothing.

"Come on, I've got an early morning meeting," she said, tossing the bundle of shirt, jacket, pants, boxers and socks onto the bed next to him. "You have to go."

"Wh-what?" he grumbled, fatigue dragging at him as he sat up. "Not even a coffee?"

"One block down on the right," she told him succinctly, stopping at the bathroom door. "Great espressos. That's your choice, isn't it?"

She didn't wait for an answer, going into the bathroom and shutting the door. He heard the shower going and rubbed both hands over his face as he looked around the apartment and squinted at the sunshine flooding through the tall windows.

It was good to feel appreciated, he thought acidly to himself, getting out of the bed and starting to dress.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Clutching a huge cardboard cup of black coffee, Dean saw his brother across the street and walked over, his stomach grumbling furiously about the lack of breakfast carbs and grease. He didn't have a hangover but that was the only silver lining he could find.

"You look like crap," Sam commented as they met.

"Yeah, well I feel worse than I look," Dean admitted, slurping down another mouthful of the hot liquid. He caught his brother's speculative look and realised that hadn't been the impression he'd wanted to give. "I do recommend the Cobalt Room, by the way," he added quickly, glancing casually down the street. "Awesome night. Although, I think I'm getting too old for this."

Sam opened his mouth and Dean decided he didn't want to hear whatever it was his brother was going to say.

"You get anything on that symbol?"

"Not yet," Sam said as they walked up the steps of the portico to the apartment building. "I did check with the neighbours of the previous attacks. Something came up."

"Yeah, what?" Dean yawned as they waited for the elevator.

"Four guys, two of them were married," Sam said, dropping his voice as the lift pinged and the doors opened, three people walking quickly past them. "One of the others was engaged. All of them cheated on their other halves."

"Yeah, well, people slip up." Dean frowned. "This isn't a Woman in White."

"No, I don't think so either," Sam agreed quickly. "Might be nothing, but one of the neighbours was a good friend of the vic and he said the guy married his wife right out of high school, totally in love with her, and he'd been surprised as hell when he'd told him."

"Siren?" Dean pondered. "They don't usually go all Scarface over their vics."

"The last one made the vics kill for them," Sam said, nodding. "It doesn't feel like it."

"Well, this makes vic number five, let's see what that tells us," Dean said as the floor number pinged and the doors opened.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The wind moaned as it came between the two narrowly spaced buildings, and Sam saw his brother shiver slightly.

"Where's your coat?"

Dean made a face. "Left it at Lydia's place this morning."

"Who's Lydia?"

"My, uh, workout partner from last night."

Snorting, Sam said, "What are you – trying to get a second date?"

"Hey," Dean protested. "She had an early meeting and I didn't even get a shower or coffee."

"Wait a minute – she threw you out?"

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up," Dean grumbled, feeling another blast of cold, damp wind trickle down the back of his neck. "I gotta get that damned thing back."

He pulled out his phone and dialled the number. "Hey, uh…oh, Lydia, it's, uh Dean, from last night. Left my coat at your place. Gimme a call back."

"You know her name and you called her," Sam's voice rose a bit as he grinned.

"Bite me."

"And she gave you her number, that's sweet," Sam continued, unable to resist. At least his brother hadn't spent the night drinking himself into oblivion.

"They always give you their number," Dean told him dryly, ignoring the exception to that rule who popped into his head. "Another guy who cheated, you send that to Bobby and Lauren?" he asked, hoping the subject change would be honoured.

"Soon as we got out of there," Sam nodded. "Lauren sent a message saying they might have something, they're emailing the files."

"I'm freezing," Dean complained, turning up the ridiculously inadequate collar of his suit jacket. "I'm gonna grab my coat, I'll meet you back at the motel later."

"Sure," Sam agreed.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Seven hours later.

Dean paced across the motel room, dodging the low table next to the sofa as he wheeled around to make a return crossing.

"So what?" Sam looked at him curiously. "I mean, so maybe she has another kid she didn't tell you about."

"Nope, just the one," Dean said, slowing and shaking his head. "Emma. But last night, when I was with her, she didn't have any. And I was at her place, man. There was no playpen, no blankets, no rubber ducks.

"Right," Sam said doubtfully. "Like you would have been focused on that kind of thing."

"Hey, that's the first thing you notice. Red flags," Dean told him defensively, heading for the kitchen and extracting two beers from the small fridge. He walked back and handed one to his brother.

"Then, all of a sudden, boom – baby," he added, knocking the top off his and gulping a mouthful. "And not one of those red-faced newborns, this kid was standing up."

"Yeah, the one you thought talked," Sam said noncommittally.

"Oh, it talked. And not baby talk, either," Dean asserted, throwing himself into the armchair and staring broodingly at the bottle in his hands.

"Now you know so much about child development?"

"I know enough to know that they don't say, "Hey, Mom. Who's that guy?" So, cut to this afternoon and Lydia's handing this kid who's calling her mommy over to these two women, right? But this is not a baby. No, no, this kid's got to be five. And same name – Emma."

"You know, George Foreman named all his sons George," Sam remarked.

Scowling at him, Dean said, "Are you deliberately messing with me?"

"Just sayin', this is kind of –"

"Dude, I know weird. Okay? There is no non-weird explanation for this. This morning, Emma was a baby. By sunset, she's Hannah Montana. Early years." He shook his head, lifting his bottle again. "What about the other vics? Anything to tie them together other than cheating on their girls?"

"Yeah, I pulled a bunch of cold cases, from all over the country. There's a two-year pattern, Dean," Sam said, tapping a finger on the files on the table. "Between six and nine men killed, hands and feet chopped off, symbol carved into their chests. The hook seems to be a local club or bar, some up-market pick up joint that all the vics frequent."

"In Chicago, eight guys were found dead and mutilated. In Miami, it was six," Sam continued, flipping open a folder. "Here, we're up to five already, and the common hangout looks like being –"

"The Cobalt Room," Dean said flatly.

The shrill ring of Sam's phone cut through the conversation and Sam pulled it out, opening the laptop as he put the phone on speaker and set it down.

"What do you got, Bobby?" he asked, bringing up the files they'd gotten earlier.

"Alright, that symbol? It's Greek, a variation of the sigil for Harmonia, one of the earliest Greek goddesses, before the pantheon, even."

"Get to the fun stuff," Dean grunted, getting up and standing behind Sam's chair. Over his brother's shoulder he looked through the images that Sam was bringing up.

"Oh, it gets fun alright," Bobby assured him. "Harmonia and Ares had kids, all daughters. Known as the Amazons."

"Like Wonder Woman?" Dean asked. Sam rolled his eyes at the screen.

"No, you idjit," Bobby growled. "These gals really existed, a whole sub-culture of tribes of just women, stronger, faster than most men. They had a ritual mating with whatever unlucky bastards were nearby and after they were pretty sure they were knocked up, they killed the guys, after cutting off various body parts."

"Awesome."

"Sam?" Lauren's came over the phone's speaker. "The sacrifice of the males was directly for the goddess. She gave them near super-powers, incredible strength and accuracy with all weapons. They're not going to be easy to take out."

"There's more," Bobby warned. "These girls were practically wiped way back when and the deal with Harmonia pretty much turned them into non-human monsters."

"Their gestation rate is unbelievably fast," Lauren interjected. "Less than twelve hours after impregnation they give birth. The child grows at the same extraordinary rate, reaching maturity in thirty-six hours or less."

Sam looked at Dean, one brow lifting. "We, uh, might be seeing that."

"What?" Bobby's voice squawked out of the speaker. "Tell me that idjit didn't –"

Dean leaned forward. "We'll get back to you, Bobby." He cut the call and looked at Sam.

"Lydia's kid."

"Dean, I mean, wow…" Sam said, looking at him. "So maybe, I mean, you're the –"

"Don't say it."

"Look, if that kid's yours –"

"I said, don't say it!"

"Fine," Sam said with a shrug. "I won't. But Dean, dude, seriously…a one-night stand and you…roll the dice? You don't even –"

Brows drawn together, Dean snapped, "Of course not, whaddaya think, I'm brain-dead? Accidents happen…if one even did…which, I-I-I don't think –"

He stopped talking and walked to the window. "No, you know what? We're – stop. We're not gunna talk about this any more 'cause my skin's starting to crawl!"

Sam sighed. "Alright, fine. But if it's true, if it happened…"

"Yeah, I know," Dean said, looking at the floor. "I gotta hang onto my hands and feet."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Four hours later.

The wipers cleared the rain and the glass flooded again, the reflections through the streaming water mottling as the lights of oncoming vehicles filled the interior of the car. Dean sat in the passenger seat, staring at the lights without seeing them.

"Look, man, she wasn't yours. Not really," Sam said, as they passed out of the city limits.

"Actually, she, uh, she was, really," Dean said quietly, leaning back into the seat. "She just also happened to be a crazy man-killing monster. But, uh, hey."

The complete rat's nest of impressions and emotions and thoughts of the last few hours was still roiling around in his head. He didn't know how he'd felt about the girl who'd shown up the door, who'd told him he was her father. The sense that he'd lost something throbbed behind it all, even though he knew that he hadn't, not in the way he'd wanted it.

"You know what? Bobby's right. Your head's not in it, man. When Ben almost died, you were wobbly, but now..."

"Now what?" Dean challenged, turning to look at him. "Oh, what, you're dealing with all your shit so perfect? Yeah, news flash, pal – you're just as screwed up as I am! You're just... bigger."

"What?!"

"I don't know!" It'd been right up next to his teeth to tell his brother that he had Lauren, someone. He'd bitten it back because it couldn't help. And it wasn't fair. None of it was fair.

"Look...Dean, the thing is, tonight...all this crap you're carrying around and not dealing with almost got you killed. Now, I don't care how you deal. I really, really don't. But just don't – don't get killed," Sam said, letting that plea at the back of his mind come out.

"I'm not looking for a way out, Sammy," he replied, several minutes later when the silence in the car had thickened to the consistency of honey.

"Could've fooled me," Sam muttered ungraciously under his breath. He caught a glimpse of his brother's smile from the corner of his eye and felt a spurt of surprise.

"Yeah," Dean agreed, knowing how some of the things he'd done in the last couple of months had looked. "It's just – I just – I thought – and then –"

He couldn't say it. His chest was tight and breathing was hard but he tried again. "I thought things were gonna be different."

"I know," Sam said quickly, knowing the struggle it'd taken for Dean to admit even to that. "I did too."

"I would've killed Emma, Sam," Dean said quietly. "I get it didn't look like it, but that wasn't the way I thought – I would've."

"Okay." Sam waited for him to continue, throwing a quick sideways glance when he didn't. "I know this is hard, okay? But I meant it. Don't screw up now –"

"I'll do what I can."

"Well, what's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I'll do what I can. All right? You can shut up about it," Dean snapped, his meagre store of patience worn away by the shouting in his head. He hunched away from his brother to look out the side window.

He couldn't deal with it he'd wanted to tell Sam. But that wouldn't come out, no matter how many times he'd tried to phrase it. Every case they'd worked in the last five months had hammered something else at him that was a reminder of some kind and he couldn't figure a way to let her go the way he'd done with Lisa. Maybe he was being unrealistic. Maybe he was obsessing. He didn't know. He just couldn't shut out his memories and he couldn't shut down the feelings that meandered in and out of his thoughts like driftwood on the tide and he couldn't get away from the constant goddamned pain of knowing that was all gone and he'd never get it back.

He wasn't looking for a way out. That was the truth. He just wasn't looking as hard at the things he got himself into as he'd done before. He had the feeling that's what his brother was really worried about. The bigmouths had taken over one of the most powerful corporations in the world and were positioning themselves to take everything over. How were two guys supposed to fight them? Maybe this time their luck wouldn't hold and it'd be over. The way he felt right this minute, it'd be a relief.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~