for the love of it

His voice rasps. Sam grimaces. Writes it down, too, damn him. Like Dean's a damn wikipedia article he's referencing.

"This is not a question," Sam says, carefully. He ignores Dean's eyeroll. "I wonder how you know this stuff. I mean. I know we've been doing a lot of research but it seems—I don't know. Impossible."

It's not a question and so Dean doesn't know how to contribute. His tongue's felt weighed down, ever since they left that cabin in the mountains. His head hurts, fuzzy like lack of sleep and a hangover headache are warring for which can suck most, but Sam's been in some level of freak-out since yet another who-knows-how-terrible weird mark has imbued itself onto Dean's body and so here they are, at the tables in the library, researching through the night. Dean wants to say, hey, at least this one isn't trying to make me into a murder machine, but he can't seem to speak without being asked for something. Sam probably wouldn't appreciate it, anyway.

The spell leapt from the witch bitch's grimoire as Dean was tossing it into the fire, like it refused to die even as she went down under Sam's bullet. With the grimoire gone they'd probably be up the creek—and yet.

"I'd like you to drink a glass of water," Sam says. Another careful non-question. He sets it in front of Dean. "Your throat sounds like it hurts."

It does. Dean drags his hands over his face, hard, and then drags them over the back of his skull and presses his fingertips brutally into the muscle at the back of his neck that's aching like after a twenty-hour drive. Like trying to shift poured cement. Then he picks up the glass and drains it in cool glugging swallows, until his belly sloshes, and then he leans back in his chair with his eyes closed. Not the worst thing in the world to have Sam coddling him. From Sam, this counts as coddling.

The chair next to him drags out. "Don't hate me," Sam says. That's not a question, either. Dean gives him a sidelong squint and Sam's got his elbows braced on the chair arms, hunched, looking sorry. He's looked sorry a lot, this year. Dean can't say it but he hopes he communicates how dumb he finds the whole attempt is with, whatever, the shape of his ears and the distance apart his knees are set, and closes his eye again. "Yeah, okay," Sam says, quiet. Then: "Why can't you talk of your own volition?"

Dean's mouth opens.

Thing is, he's not saying it. It's like there's some portal that opens somewhere around his voicebox and information pours out from some other place. The answer's something about the witch cursing whoever killed her with knowledge beyond blah blah, but that doesn't mean Dean's got to pay attention to it or knows what it means. His head's killing him, anyway. Sam's writing down something while Dean babbles about a Greek curse originating from Delphi and Dean's just—a speaker, turning in to radio wherever. Crank the volume and listen to him go.

"This is… incredible," Sam says. "Dean, I think—could you tell me anything?"

"Yes," Dean says, and expects more, and nothing comes. Level of detail is all over the place, but whatever it is always seems to be true.

"Huh." A dragging sound: Dean opens his eyes, and Sam's pulled up his laptop, is clicking around. White light washing out his face. "Okay: what website am I looking at right now?"

"Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia," Dean says. When isn't he.

Sam squints at the screen, says, "What's the URL?", and Dean doesn't get to call him an absolute bitch before he starts parroting out: "H T T P S colon slash slash—" although at least Sam looks like he regrets it well before Dean gets to say Oracle.

His throat really does ache by the end and his head hurts bad enough that tears smart at the corners of his eyes. From talking. Somewhere, Sam at age twenty-two is feeling vindicated. The room blurs and he closes his eyes again, grips the table so as not to sway so visibly. "Are—" Sam starts, but luckily he seems to remember to use the massive brain in his massive head and doesn't ask; he touches Dean's arm, instead, gently at first and then squeezing hard. It hurts a little, is warm. Feels good. Dean should get cursed by some kind of dead Big Fat Greek Wedding broad more often.

"Yes or no questions, maybe," Sam says, mostly to himself seems like. Then: "Does answering hurt?"

"Yes," Dean says. Sam is supposed to be the smart one, right? He's testing that now.

"Does… the complexity of the question increase the strain of answering?"

"Yes," Dean says, voice cracking like he's friggin' thirteen, and Sam squeezes his shoulder instead, and then the back of his neck where everything seems to have been replaced by screaming furiously hot steel, and somehow Sam's hand doesn't sear right off so that must be something that Dean's dealing with on the inside. He feels like he should be visibly smoking.

"Hey," Sam says, quiet, and touches Dean's face, and—ah, damn it, the tears have spilled over so his face is all wet. He'd crack a joke about cutting onions but he figures Sam's heard it, and anyway he already got a lecture about autonomic responses to pain when he broke his collarbone, that one summer when they were kids, does Sam remember? None of which he can say but Sam maybe gets it anyway, since he smears his thumb over Dean's cheek and then says, "Stop being a wuss," so Dean can shove vaguely in the direction of Sam's heat, and Sam can grunt on the weak impact and then say, "Okay, c'mon—" and drag Dean to his feet even if he thinks he might faint.

His bedroom. Sinking into the memory foam, his forearm over his eyes. Sam turns on the bedside lamp and Dean flinches, even with the shade, so the lamp goes off again. A few seconds pass before Sam sits on the side of the bed.

"Guess it would've been too good to be true to just get the answers to life, the universe, and everything," Sam says. "Or, I guess we could, but then you'd blow up? What do you think, worth it?" Quiet, although he's just about the one thing that doesn't seem to hurt right now. Dean fumbles a hand down and finds Sam's leg, warm through denim, and flicks him as hard as he can. "Ow." Yeah, that's what he gets.

Sam sits there quiet for a while, Dean's hand tucked in against his thigh. While Dean breathes it feels like the pounding of his head reduces, a little—just a regular high-speed drum solo and not a Keith Moon explosion—and it feels less like he's gonna puke and have a stroke all at the same time.

"One reason we've got to fix this: I don't know how, but somehow I'm missing the crack you'd normally make about me holding your hand." Dean snorts. Sam's fingers move against his pulse. "Maybe later we can try more yes and no stuff. I want to be able to just ask how to get rid of it but I don't want to give you an aneurysm."

Sam's hand moves up his forearm. Dean swallows. Lot of answers they could use.

He expects Sam to get up but he stays. His hand folds over the mark on Dean's arm and stays there. Another pulse point but Dean guesses that's not why. Sam's warm, which is a stupid thing to keep thinking but it just feels so damn good Dean can't give himself too much crap for it—he is warm, and he feels right, and he smells good on top of everything else. Been a long time and everything's been so weird and scary, even scarier than normal which for their lives is really saying something, and he missed Sam, is all. A lot. More than he could say, and now that he wants to say it he can't. His life's a real joke, a lot of the time.

While his pulse slows further he thinks about the last time Sam was in this bed. Six months ago maybe. With Sam hating him and him knowing he deserved it, and how that didn't matter in the face of the dumb physical release they both needed, and how they didn't look at each other and it was dark and for Dean's part at least it wasn't even enjoyable, just—an exercise, muscle being used to its highest straining point and then the relief of dropping the weight, endorphins flooding, making it seem worth the effort. The next-day ache something you didn't think about in the moment. Kind of thing you didn't want to remember in the minutes before you died but it came up in the last flickering montage, the way he'd sat on the edge of the bed feeling loose and nasty and drained and just rotten down through every layer down to the very center where the little kernel he relied on to be himself, to be anyone worth knowing at all, had gotten dislodged and he wasn't quite sure he knew how to find it again. Sam had walked out of the bedroom without saying anything and that had felt right, or at least like the least wrong thing, considering all the wrong that had gone on. On the day he died, that last time, even if getting his lungs perforated hadn't been on the top things he wanted to do that day, that last little fleck of him felt like it got pinned down under the blade—he'd been there, at least, and been able to look at Sam and have Sam see who he was, and all the sorries he'd wanted to say and all the fault he knew was his just bubbled up and evaporated into the dank air and he didn't know, then, how to sum it up. All he should've said to his brother and all he felt and there wasn't time to say sorry for that last time. To apologize for all the times before. To go back, down the years and decades, and say wish I hadn't saddled you with all this, and yet also to say—I'm so glad they saddled you with me, and yet also—you are the best part of me, and yet also—and yet also. How impossible it was to summarize what being Sam's brother had meant and would always mean. Because where would he be, otherwise.

Sam hasn't let go of his arm. His heart beats slow as honey.

"This isn't a question," Sam says. Dean's fingers twitch against his leg. Sam's voice is low, even. "I've been thinking of the crappiest things to ask you. Big stuff, little stuff. Every thing I've wanted to know all my life. Things that happened when I was gone. Stuff I know you lied about. Like whatever happened to the Starburst I was saving in my backpack, that time in fourth grade when I wanted to share them with Laura Harris." It's almost a question but apparently not enough of one, thank god, because Sam really wouldn't like the answer. "I want to know how to get that thing off your arm. I want to know why you did it."

Dean pulls his arm off his face. Sam's looking right at him, in the half-light.

"Thing is, I think I know, but I don't know that I know." He seems like he's about to say something else and bites his lips between his teeth instead. He swallows, and shrugs. "Hard to cut out filler words."

That doesn't make sense but that's not unusual when Sam's thinking out loud.

What Dean can't say:

It was the obvious thing to do. Things were real bad between him and Sam but that wasn't the only reason, or even the main reason, he said yes. There was a huge evil thing that was going to just get huger and more evil and he was presented with the only way to stop it and there wasn't, for him, much more reasoning than that needed to do what was necessary. Maybe if Sam had been with him, Sam would've talked him out of it. Maybe. But more than likely, they would've just argued about which one of them would have to get laid out on the sacrificial altar this time around, and after he'd nearly lost his mind and his heart trying to stop Sam from dying last time, he'd be damned if it was Sam who'd die this time, and—he would've done whatever it took to get the thing on his arm and not Sam's. Including betrayal, as bad or worse than what he'd done to keep Sam alive last time. So, it was just as well. He'd defeated the huge evil thing and all that was lost was himself. Not much of a weight on the scales, really. And Sam would be fine. Sam had proven that, half a dozen times over.

"Your pulse slowed down," Sam says. Dean can't even really nod—that seems to count as communication—but it's obvious, anyway. Sam's cheek sucks in on one side and he looks all over Dean's face. "I guess this might be counterproductive, but—your head still hurt?"

"Moderately," Dean says, and then he makes a face. Who talks like that? It makes a little pulse of pain bloom at the back of his neck where his spine hits his brainstem, but so what.

Sam kinda laughs. "Okay," he says, and then sits there, with his hand big and warm at the crook of Dean's elbow and his eyes still on Dean, and his body there, close. God, has Dean missed that. Six months isn't the longest they've gone but—six months feels like a long time, these days. Knowing how quickly the days can run out.

"Sorry," Sam says, first. Dean sighs and Sam gives him a look. Yeah, Dean's got looks too. Even so, Sam lets go of his arm and then lays his hand heavy on Dean's chest, meets his eyes. "This is a question." Dean raises his eyebrows and Sam holds there, lips parted, like he's really thinking about it. Then: "Do I need you?"

Dean's mouth opens and he says, "No."

If it didn't hurt on a number of levels it'd be kinda funny how Sam's face changes. Full-on blanch, like faced with the nastiest-ever monster. Dean's chest feels like it's been hit with a sledgehammer and he pushes Sam's hand away, struggles up to sitting, only Sam grabs him again by the arm, shaking his head, brow all crumpled, but hell—if they've proven anything in the last dozen hours it's that Dean is a mouthpiece for the truth, the ultimate truth, the truth that's past guesswork and implication and is just actual fact handed down from the universe.

"Wait," Sam says, like Dean's saying any of this crap out loud. Dean twists his arm away and puts his back to the headboard, the wall. Sam lets go with his hands held high, face all sorry. "That's not true, though, Dean. It's not true."

Dean looks at the ceiling, because he can't shrug or shout and he thinks if he tried to leave Sam would just fight him about it. If that's what Dean answers then that's the answer. He just wishes Sam hadn't been enough of a dickhead to prove it to them both.

"God, I can't think how to—" Sam touches his leg, and then the center of his chest, and Dean smacks his hand away but Sam puts his fingers right back, like he's sounding Dean's body for answers. "Do you need me?"

"Yes," Dean says, and really ought to punch Sam in the face for proving the contrast, but as he's grabbing Sam's wrist Sam shakes his head and says, quick, "Do you want me?" and the answer to that is, of course, "Yes," and Dean's just about sick with it. Why is he—

"Do I want you?" Sam says, and then fast while Dean's opening his mouth, "I don't know if that's enough. But I do, Dean. I want you here, and I do need you no matter what—I don't know, maybe not to literally live, but I want you, I want you with me, I want to hunt with you and I want to be here because it's where you are, because—god, do you know why?"

Dean's answers blur from yes to no. Sam holds his jaw, curled in weird on the bed, eyes all over his face again, searching. His hair stupid in the back-light from the hall. No, Dean doesn't know why. "I could make you answer," Sam says, tight, hurt. Dean grips his shirt. "I want you. Do you believe me?"

"I—" Dean says, and his throat stalls. His head hurts but nothing's arriving to fill it.

Sam curls forward, his forehead touching Dean's. "This curse sucks," he says, breath hot on Dean's mouth, and Dean can't argue with that but there's this ringing in his ears that's kind of distracting him. Sam's skin smells so good he can't stand it. "I want you. Is that true?"

Dean nods, the answer whispering out.

Sam's thumb dragging over his cheek, rasping in his stubble. Under his sternum there's the weird panicked feeling of having missed a step down in the dark, where your whole body lurches in unthinking terror, but also this weird tight coil of—of he doesn't even know what. Two true things to hold at the same time and if they're true then how could he not believe them?

Sam's thumb pushes hard under his bottom lip, dents it against his teeth. His head dipping, his temple against Dean's. Dean gets a hand on his shoulder and wants to say—fifty things. Wants to punch him, still. A little. Maybe a lot. Six months, though, and how screwed up they've been. His heart thuds low in his gut and his head hurts but so what. He sits up more and Sam moves with him, his shoulder curving in toward Dean, his other hand sliding down Dean's side.