Archive of Our Own ^beta

Sam thought that he stopped believing in happy endings when the demon took Jess, when Dad traded himself in, when the hellhounds took Dean. But every single time, something happened and he kept going, and it got better for a little while before it all went wrong again. He still thought that maybe, maybe, things could turn out all right.

Then Dean said yes, and Sam stopped believing that happily ever after was something that could happen to him.

Dee could have told him that. She lost her brother when she was ten years old, and everything after that, well, she never really thought she'd live through it at all.

~*~

It's been a little over a month on the road, and somewhere in the back of Sam's brain, he can't help but make comparisons.

Dee is softer than Dean, in some indefinable way that has nothing to do with her gender. All he knows about her family is that she lost her Sam when she was still pretty young and even that much he's had to deduce for himself, but he knows from watching her with Castiel that she knows about being the older sister just like Dean was always the older brother. The difference is in the open tenderness she shows toward the angel, butter-soft after Dean's gruff affection that Sam has spent his whole life learning to translate. She ruffles Castiel's hair, and touches his shoulder and holds his hand, sometimes, when she feels some guy watching her and wants to head him off at the pass. One time, Sam came back from a food run and found them sitting side-by-side with their backs pressed up against the railing of the motel's patio, and Dee had her head on Cas' shoulder while she was pointing at something in the sky. Like that.

She doesn't look at Sam like that, but that makes sense because he's not really her brother any more than she's really his sister. They have their own thing and it's good enough for Sam, who's just happy to have her when he'd finally accepted that he was going to spend his life alone. It's not the same as it was before, of course nothing could be, but Sam can't help but make comparisons- and she doesn't love him the way she loves Castiel.

Which is okay, totally, because Castiel would never leave her the way Sam did, would never break her heart and leave her alone with Dad thinking that she wasn't good enough to make him stay. Castiel doesn't have anything left but Dee. Sam supposed he should just be grateful that Castiel brought her back with him at all, instead of staying with her in the other universe where Sam wouldn't be able to interfere with his greedy hands and desperate heart.

Dee wriggles comfortably into the passenger seat, putting her booted feet up on the dash. "Goddamn, but I feel good. Nothing like a good exorcism to get the blood running."

She can't possibly know how ironic that statement is, Sam thinks. Sam hasn't told her everything about the lead-up to the apocalypse, their entire stupid lives spent in service to heaven and hell, or even all that much, really. Dean went to hell for Sam and Castiel brought him back and Sam ended the world and Dean saved it the only way he could. The basics. She didn't know about the demon blood, the long, slow-motion fuckup that was Ruby, and all of the things he'd been able to do with his powers when he had her blood in his veins.

"You're just happy because I did all the work," Sam shoots back on autopilot, able to argue with Dean in his sleep. "All you had to do was pace around and look threatening."

"Hey, that's a lot more work than it used to be. Where I come from-" She always says it like that, like she's talking about her home town instead of a different fucking universe. "-all sorts of demons and hellbeasties were properly terrified of me. Now they all go 'Who are you again?' and I've gotta teach 'em respect all over again. It's a tiresome process, kiddo, and that's the gospel truth."

As if her slightly-blasphemous words have summoned him, there is a slight vibration in the air and Sam knows without looking that there is an angel in the back seat. "Hello, Castiel."

"Heeey, Cas, didja catch the show?" Dee twists around to grin childlike. Sam glances in the rearview mirror, and Castiel is smiling back at her, with an open human affection that is still strange to witness. "We cleaned up back there."

"I have heard, yes," Castiel says, slow and measured, but there is more emotion, more life in his voice than Sam has ever heard. Weirdly, adjusting to Dee is nothing compared to adjusting to the new, improved Castiel. "I'm sure the townspeople are properly grateful."

"Who the hell cares about them?" Dee says flippantly, and reaches over the back of the seat to scruff the top of Castiel's disordered mop of hair. "Man, you so need a fucking haircut."

Castiel frowns at her. "It seems adequate to me."

"You look like a Chia Pet died on you," Dee says frankly. "It's bringin' me down, and I am not exactly known for my dedication to the fine arts of personal grooming."

This is not exactly true. She'll never be one of the world's premiere beauties, not in the gloss-and-polish kind of way that's always drawn Sam in, but she wears her jeans and tanks tops and hoodies like other women wear couture, like the uniform of battle it is to her. And no matter how many consecutive days they spend on the road, she is always compulsively, immaculately clean, in a way that speaks to someone who spent too long in a place where cleanliness wasn't an option. She never wears makeup, and she pulls her shoulder-length blonde hair back with a rainbow's worth of bandanas and worn ball caps for obscure college sports teams, but she's still got this weird, off-beat kind of beauty that catches people by surprise. Every once in a while they'll just be walking down the street on an ordinary day and someone will stop and stare at her like they've seen a mirage, and she never even notices.

Sam aches with the familiarity of watching people watch her. An edge of rabid protectiveness has been added to the mix, but that's not unfamiliar after the years spent post-deal and pre-hell, and then post-hell and pre-apocalypse. Sam has never been the older brother and he still isn't now, but he's gone through plenty of wanting to be bigger than Dean and then just bigger than Dean's problems, which he's never quite managed. But he can sure as hell be bigger (and meaner, and better-armed) than just about any yahoo looking to try his arts on Dee, even if Dee has proven pretty conclusively that she can goddamn take care of her own ass, thank-you-very-fucking-much.

"If my hair bothers you, I will get it cut," Castiel says seriously.

Dee smiles back at him, and there's the softness that Dean never had. It's not that Sam ever doubted that Dean loved him, because he knew (knows) that Dean loved him more than anything in the world, except, ultimately, the world itself. But Dean's love was something that ran heavy and steady and deep, hidden behind his very real awkwardness and hard edges, something he never knew how to express except in the extremity. Sam looks at Dee and he sees what Dean could have been if he hadn't felt the need to cover up his affection with gruffness and humor. He doesn't know if it has anything to do with her gender or if it's the way she loved and lost and found over and over again, but Dee is fierce with her love, and anything but shy. She smiles at Castiel like she wants to wrap him up and hold him tight against the world, never mind that he's a fucking angel with the powers of Heaven at his disposal and there's not a damn thing that Dee can do to protect him.

She looks at him with the same kind of helpless, desperate love that Dean always had for Sam, and when she says softly "We'll find someplace in the next town," and then twists back around to the front, his gut twists with the knowledge that she doesn't look at him the same way.

~*~

When it was all over, Sam had to deal with the fact that he'd outlived his only family. Again.

He couldn't get more than halfway across the parking lot and he definitely couldn't go through the wide electric doors that led into the hospital, but he could sit outside and look up at the fourth-floor window, second from the left, and he could imagine the sunlight slanting across Dean's face, the absurdly hot nurses bustling around and (heh) giving him sponge-baths. Imagining Dean's fantasy of being brain-dead was better than the likely reality of some burly nurse named Bob who didn't give a flying fuck about the John Doe coma patient who saved the world.

Castiel didn't show up for a while, which Sam actually thought was kind of surprising because Castiel had his full-on angel mojo back and could once more flash in and out like it was going out of style. He and Sam had bonded, some, in that last year while they counted down toward the inevitable end, and while he'd never hold a candle to the pull of devotion that Castiel had felt for Dean, Sam figured that they were at least close enough to friends that Cas would come and say goodbye before he Raptured back into God's loving arms or whatever.

But when Castiel did come back, it wasn't to say goodbye. He appeared like a wavering mirage at the end of the parking lot, and when he crossed the distance between them Sam could see the fires of renewed purpose burning after a year of doubt.

The first thing he said was, "I am going to find him again."

Sam was sitting on the hood of the Impala in the hospital parking lot, looking at the sidewalk and the invisible line that he couldn't cross. "There's nothing to find, Cas. He's right there. We just can't get to him, and it wouldn't do us any good if we did."

Castiel shook his head. "That- that shell is not Dean Winchester. I will find him again."

Sam looked down at his hands so he couldn't see the painful hope on the angel's face. "You and I both know it doesn't work that. Unless you mixed up a few critical details, then his soul just isn't in calling range anymore. He's gone."

Castiel looked at him with the wide, sad eyes of a child. "I have looked everywhere on this plane and others," he admitted. "And he is not there."

Sam's heart squeezed tight in his chest, and he choked back a gasp of pain. Maybe he'd been hoping too, a little… But he'd always known that Dean's soul would be cut loose when Michael slipped in. Dean had known, too, it's just that he chose differently. "He's gone," Sam said, more softly now, and Castiel slumped hard onto the hood of the Impala, next to Sam.

"He cannot be gone," Castiel said, as if he was speaking the words of God Himself. "He is Dean."

Sam almost smiled. "He'd love to hear you say that, man."

"There must be something that remains," Castiel said, but he didn't look like he believed it.

The problem was, he didn't look like he was giving up, either. And while angels, admittedly, had a lot more post-mortem options than your average mortal, Sam couldn't help but think that that expression on Castiel's face meant no kind of good for anybody.

~*~

One thing that Dee definitely has of Dean's is his unrelenting and exasperating charm, the kind of "how ya doing?" casual comfort around strangers that Sam's never felt. It took him forever to feel anything like at home in his own skin, once upon a time, and he spent his awkward teenage years watching Dean wrap nearly everyone he met around his little finger. Now he knows that he'll never be able to just talk to people like that, never be able to start conversations in line at the grocery store or flirt with waitresses or chat with the gas station attendants about the weather, but he does know that he's good in extremis, when people need someone to look at them and tell them that someone believes in them. Sam is not charming, but he is sincere.

Dee is charming, almost dangerously so when she puts her mind to it. When Dean was doing his thing, people always got the same laughing, incredulous look, the look that said can you believe this fucking guy, the look that wondered why they were smiling anyway. Dean just had that much personality overflowing from the corner of his smirk. Dee's too worn to have Dean's overflow of charisma, but she always knows how to play exactly to what people expect of her, and sometimes in his more uncomfortable introspective moments Sam wonders what she's playing for him.

She's good with people, is the main point, except for a bad tendency to get awkward and smirky when the going gets rocky with a witness, but Sam's pretty used to that so it works out. Dee slots pretty comfortably into his system of interacting with the outside world, actually, and he'd wonder where she figured it out but, see above, re: playing all the right angles, and it's not like it's a bad thing, so he pretty much stops over thinking it after the first couple jobs.

He's thinking about it again, though, when Bobby finally threatens enough terrifying curse-like things for her to reluctantly drive into Sioux Falls and wander down the back roads to the junkyard well under the speed limit. Sam would wonder how she knows how to get here, except Dean always had that freakish ability to remember every single road he'd ever laid wheels on, so. Mostly he's busy wondering what the hell her problem is. She's seen Bobby once before, when Castiel first brought her over, and he was basically welcoming after he got through calling her an abomination at the top of his lungs, so he can't for the life of him figure out why she's dragging her heels so bad.

He dozes a little, for the last twenty miles or so, but he wakes up to the sound of wheels on gravel, and the first thing he sees is her hands, clenched white-knuckled around the wheel, and beyond them, the back of a beat-up green pickup truck. "Jo must have finished the black dog case in Minnesota," Sam says, with real pleasure, because it's been months since he's seen Jo, and for a while there she was the closest thing to human contact he was getting on a regular basis.

"Yeah," Dee says through a clenched jaw, "great," and she gets out the car, slamming the door on Sam's startled expression.

Bobby comes out to meet them, and he doesn't hug Dee but he does give her a very respectable handshake, which from him is nearly incomprehensible levels of enthusiasm. Sam gets a hug, and while he's getting his ribs crushed he sees Dee, over Bobby's shoulder, with her hands tucked in the pockets of her jeans and looking awkward.

"Well if isn't the goddamn Winchesters," Bobby says, once Sam is allowed to breathe again. "Took you long enough to get here, boy."

"Don't look at me, she was driving!" Sam says defensively, and Bobby turns on Dee with a scowl.

"You mean to tell me you're finally obeying the speed limit now of all times?" he demands, and Sam can see the little grin lurking under the surface clear as day, but maybe Dee can't because she shoots back, "No better day for it," with the nervous smartassery Dean always used with cops.

Bobby shakes his head like he wants to be mad, but the lurking grin surfaces in the corner of his mouth, and he claps Dee on the shoulder. "Would have laughed my ass off it you'd gotten a ticket now of all times," he says, and Dee smiles back a little tentatively like she's not entirely sure that she's in on the joke.

It's baffling and a little painful for Sam to watch, because he doesn't know what to do with a Dee that's this tentative around anybody, much less Bobby, what the fuck? Bobby was pretty much their uncle growing up, and Sam spent more than one lazy summer weekend playing in that junkyard while Dean fucked around with some ancient engine and Dad tied one on. Bobby's been there for the worst of them in the last couple of years, and if he can forgive Sam for ending the world (and also for pretty much cutting him off after Dean's deaths, both of them, even) then Sam can't imagine anything strange enough to leave Dee as awkward as a nun in a whorehouse.

"You two grab your bags and come on in. Harvelle the younger's confined to the couch and is going just about stir-crazy so I sure hope you can keep her distracted for a bit so I can get a moment of peace in my own damn house."

"I heard that!" Jo yells through the open front door, and when they tromp inside after Bobby, Sam sees the cast on her foot and forgets about Dee's weirdness.

"What the hell did you do?" he demands, already grinning, because Jo looks so disgruntled that he knows immediately it's an embarrassing story rather than some daring close call.

"It's not important," she mutters, and behind them Bobby says, "Tripped in a friggin' gopher hole after she wasted the black dog," and Jo shouts, "It was really dark in that field! And anyway you stole my crutches!"

Sam sits on the coffee table in front of them and laughs helplessly, and after a minute Jo gives up and starts chuckling too. "Okay, I do have to admit, it was probably one of the most embarrassingly stupid things I've ever done," Jo says, and Sam rolls his eyes extravagantly.

"Yeah, like you've had a chance to rack up such a huge list," he says. "It takes time to get a proper list of stupidly embarrassing stories. Right, Dee?"

He glances over his shoulder and finds her watching the three of them with a distant, sad expression on her face, and it's the same look she gets whenever someone (Sam) tries to bring up the Sam from her universe. It's the expression she gets when she's thinking about someone she's lost, and it comes to him sudden and hard, that she's probably seen Bobby and Jo dead.

He can't believe that it didn't occur to him before, because she's never said as much exactly but he knows that she's lost just about everybody that really meant something, and he should have thought. How utterly weird must this be for her, to leave her own world and come to his and find all of these people that she's mourned, living and breathing and making all of the same stupid jokes as before. It was always easier for Dean to believe in good things when they happened to other people.

"Right," Dee says, one thumb plucking restlessly at a belt loop. "Ask Sam about the rabbit's foot."

It's a Sam-and-Dean story, but it's one that she knows pretty well because she's amazingly talented at digging out the embarrassing stuff, and normally he'd be promising revenge for her even bringing it up. But the awkward angle of her body just fills him with this ridiculous protectiveness, like he can shield her from her own grief, and so instead he just says loudly, "That is dirty friggin' pool, Winchester," trying to sound more upset than he really is. He's pretty sure it doesn't work, because when Jo starts clamoring for details and Bobby starts coughing out a laugh and eagerly starting off the story, Dee sends him a secretive, grateful little smile that warms his heart.

"I'll get there," she tells him later, when Bobby and Jo crashed for an afternoon nap and they're hanging out in the junkyard. "It's just too weird, right now."

"I think Jo's got a bit of a girl-crush on you, actually," Sam says, just to be a dick, and he's rewarded by a hard punch on his shoulder, lightning fast.

"So maybe we'll bond over how to kick your ass," Dee says, syrupy-sweet, and Sam crosses his arms over his chest and makes unimpressed faces at her till she has to prove her point with an impromptu sparring match. That night over dinner, she's too busy smirking at his bruises to feel uncomfortable, so Sam kind thinks it's worth it.

~*~

Sam always felt at home in libraries. He spent his teenage years hiding from his father in them; he met Jess in one; he spent a year in them trying to break Dean's deal; and after Lucifer rose he spent endless hours being sent after bits of lore that Bobby didn't have squirreled away in his house.

Which is probably how Sam found himself sitting in the back room of the county library ten miles from Dean's hospital, trying to get the flickering Wi-Fi signal to cooperate and arguing in a fierce whisper with Bobby: force of habit.

"I'm telling you, it's not a selkie. What would a selkie want with teenage girls? They target fishermen."

"Boy, didn't you hear a damn thing I just said? All of the girls it killed were related."

"All five of them?" Sam said skeptically. An old lady passing by his table gave him a disapproving look; Sam hunched his cell phone tighter into his shoulder and gave her a dead-eyed stare until she huffed and moved off. "In a town of, what, a thousand people? Their family charts must look like a Gordian Knot."

"Oh, yeah, they're inbred as fuck," Bobby said impatiently. "Tiny fishing village on an island, what do you expect? But Sam, whatever did 'em flayed 'em alive and took their skins. Tell me that don't sound like a selkie kill."

"It kinda does," Sam admitted, "but selkies don't kill without reason. And they don't roost in the Pacific. The only ones we get in this country migrated from the UK."

"In case you didn't notice, we had a fuckin' apocalypse," Bobby said, exasperated. "A coupla selkies nest on the wrong coast is the least of the weird shit that we're going to see now that it's over. All of that energy had to go somewhere."

Sam didn't want to think about the back surge of power that had erupted when Michael had lifted Dean's hand, clasped around the flaming sword, and struck his brother through the heart. "So it's a selkie. Fine. Why are you making me hack the morgue records on what has to be the worst Wi-Fi service I've ever seen?"

"You got better things to do, boy?"

But I'm retired, Sam wanted to say. Somehow he thought that Bobby would find that less than convincing.

"That's what I thought. You should take that car of yours somewhere besides the hospital and that shit diner you keep telling me about and take a trip out to the West Coast. Some fresh ocean air'll do you a world of good."

"I'm retired," Sam hissed anyway. "I'm not hunting anymore!"

Twenty feet away, a middle-aged guy with hippy hair browsing through the stacks gave him a thumbs-up. Sam silently despaired for humanity.

"So what're you going to do instead, just sit on your ass staring at the hospital doors your entire life? If you're going to grieve for your brother do it the right way, do something that he would have wanted for you."

"He wanted me to retire. Which he told me. Out loud. Multiple times. While sober," he added, since they both knew Dean.

"Retire and do something with your life, and if you're not gonna do that then you might as well hunt," Bobby said intractably. "Go to Oregon, Sam, and if you want to keep moping around that parking lot then you can do it when you get back."

Sam dropped his head to scrub a hand across the top of his hair in mute frustration, trying to figure out how to explain this or if he should just hang up on Bobby and turn his phone off. Bobby would make him pay for it, but it might get the message across.

When he looked up, Anna was sitting across the table from him.

"Gotta go, I'll call you back," Sam said into the phone, and flipped it shut while Bobby was saying something about being a stupid son of a bitch. "Hi."

"Hello, Sam," she said, in that low, cool voice that always creeped him out, just a little. Castiel did it too, when he wasn't getting worked up over something, but Castiel had always been like that and Sam had pretty much just gotten used to him. When he looked at Anna he had a hard time seeing the angel that had led armies, and instead saw the young woman who loved life and maybe loved Dean a little, too, enough to give him understanding and a wild ride in the back of the Impala, and Sam knew how Dean loved those. She'd been human, and then she wasn't anymore, and it was just… creepy.

"You came to see Dean," Sam guessed. She nodded. "And then me?"

"I tried to get them to lift the ban," she told him. "But the ward only works as long as it applies universally to anyone who knows Dean's true identity. It's like the runes on your ribs. If they write in exceptions, even for you, then others can find a way."

"I know all this," Sam said, a little more gently. She was trying, really she was, but if Castiel couldn't talk them into it, Anna didn't really have a chance. "But thank you anyway."

"It's not fair," she said, and for a moment she sounded like the girl he'd met, caught between her short human lifetime and the millennia of inhuman memories. "You're blood. You should be by his side."

Personally, Sam felt the same way, but he had a feeling Bobby would be trying to haul him away from the hospital even if Sam could go inside and sit by Dean's bed in the coma ward and watch him breathe. Bobby had said goodbye right around the time Dean said "yes."

"Are you going to go on that hunt?" she asked, nodding towards his phone. So she'd been here a lot longer than he'd been able to see her. Typical.

"I don't know," he said. "I've been here a lot, but people seem to think that I need to move on."

"They're right," Anna said. "That is what humans do. They grieve, and then they go on to do other things, find other people."

"I never want to replace Dean," Sam said harshly.

"Then hunt alone. But hunt. Because it's what you were born to do."

"I thought I was born to end the world," Sam said, because he was sometimes an asshole and also kind of stupid.

Anna appeared unruffled, however. "A tiger with no stripes still has teeth," she said. He looked away, trying not to think about that metaphor too closely, and when he looked back she was gone.

He stared off into the distance for a long, long time, thinking of Stanford and Jess and leopards and their spots. He didn't have teeth, but he had a trunk full of weapons and a laptop covered with heavy metal stickers. Maybe that would be good enough.

He flipped open the phone and hit speed dial three. Bobby's voice cut of the beginnings of the second ring. "Well?"

"Give me an address," he said, and Bobby did him the courtesy of not asking him why his voice sounded so raw.

~*~

Sometimes, when they're stuck on the road for hours and Case isn't there to keep Dee entertained, she makes him tell story after story of his life, inhaling the details with a greedy kind of need that Sam can't entirely fathom. He still knows only the bare bones of her life without him, even as she's filling in the texture of his life with Dean. Sometimes, though, when she's pliant and listening and open at the conclusion of yet another episode in the Fucked Up Life of Sam Winchester, he can nudge her into a bout of nostalgia and pry out a story in return.

Today he's telling her the whole fucking stupid saga with Gordon, as a hunter and an assassin and how he'd eventually been turned and then died at their hands. He's really getting into it, using different voices and almost hitting Dee in the face with one too-expansive gesture, but when he's done all she has to say is "Poor Gordon." He gives her a disbelieving look and she adds, defensively, "Well, c'mon, he must have hated himself so much."

"Poor Gordon? He tried to kill me!"

"He was just… like that," Dee says, waving her hands helplessly. "It was always black and white with him. Dad and I had to beat some sense into him a couple times, but he was a good hunter." There's a smile on her face, hard-edged but a little fond, a little sad. "A damn good hunter. Maybe even better than Dad."

"But not better than you?" Sam teases.

"Hell, no. A fact I had to make clear to him on a couple of occasions."

Sam grins blindly at the road in front of him. More than anything else, he loves to hear about her kicking ass. He used to love Dean's stories, too, when he was little and more than a decade away from being there for every one of Dean's triumphs. "Oh, man, this I gotta hear. When was this?"

"A bunch of us were closing in on the yellow-eyed demon. There were a couple of the kids working with us-"

"Like me," Sam interrupts. He knows she worked with the other demon-touched children, a lot more than he did, but she doesn't talk about it much. When she does, she always talks like that, calls them "the kids" like they were a group of kindergarteners on a field trip and it was her job to play chaperone.

"If you'd live that long, yeah," Dee says distantly. She always sounds exactly the same when she talks about her Sam- avoidant, and cold, and hurt. "He must've put two and together- pretty much everyone knew about mom, you know? Dad was so well-known in hunter circles it was almost like an origin story. Anyway. Gordon figured it out, about you, and the demon, and he said a few things."

That's all she says, but Sam winces in instinctive reaction. Even when Sam was six years old and the other first-graders were calling him "boogerhead," Dean was always a little quick to react. "What'd you do?"

"Put my gun in his mouth and told him if he ever spoke ill of my kin I'd blow his brains out. Then I told him if he so much as looked crosswise at the kids I'd do the same, but I'd take his balls first."

Sam is silent for a long, respectful minute. "What happened to him?" he asks eventually.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Dee shrug. "He didn't make me pull the trigger, if that's what you're asking. One of the demonspawn got him. He died trying to save Ellen's life." She looks out the window, and the downward curve of her mouth makes him inexpressibly sad. "He didn't make it."

Sam doesn't know what to say to her. All of the losses in his own life, she's lived through and worse. He and Dean always had each other first, even when they were so mad Sam could just choke the life out of him, or when the secrets and unspoken things between them threatened to strangle them both, they always had each other. But Dee was alone of the road, gathering her little ragtag army of friends and losing them one by one.

"I had Cas," she says. Sam looks sharply over at her, and she laughs a little ruefully. "Not reading your mind, kiddo. It was pretty obvious."

"Did you-" No, he isn't going to ask her if she regretted leaving it behind. "How did Dad die?" he asks instead.

She looks down at her hands. "Azazel started collecting the kids into his freaky little summer camp, and Dad went in to get them back. He saved all of ours and one new girl besides, but he left the Colt with me."

"Oh." Weird, to think that in her world Dad died at the same time Sam did. And he's heard enough to know that they didn't marshal the troops and take out Azazel at the Gate, either. Three more years, that took, while Dean made his deal and went to hell and came back to fight in the end times. Three years that Dean had Sam, and Castiel, while Dee was on her own-

Except she wasn't. "Was that when Castiel crossed over?"

"After the funeral." Dee smiles with a rueful sort of affection. "It wasn't exactly your standard 'touched by an angel' routine, either. I almost shot him."

"Wouldn't have worked without the Colt," Sam says, not without a certain sense of wistfulness. There have been quite a number of angels he would have been happy to shoot through the heart.

"Well, I know that now. Then, not so much. And it wasn't my best day."

There's a faint sound like the fluttering of a thousand wings and then Castiel is in the backseat. Once upon a time, that sort of thing would have caused Sam to nearly crash the car; now he just rolls his eyes in tandem with Dee.

"You're like a cat," accuses Dee. "You know? Say your name and there you are."

Speak of the devil and he appears. Sam says doubtfully, "I don't think that's cats."

But Dee isn't listening to him. She's frowning over the seat back at Castiel. "How'd your visit with Anna go?"

"She still will not speak with me," Castiel says sadly. "She does not forgive me for bringing you into this world."

Sam says nothing. It doesn't have anything to do with Dee, really, and if Castiel were thinking clearly he'd know that. Anna doesn't forgive Castiel for, as she sees it, ceasing to mourn Dean. Sam is allowed to move on, because as she put it, that is what humans do. But angels are supposed to be constant; angels forget nothing. They have all the time in the world to hold vigil, and so Anna can't understand why Castiel would go off and find another Dean Winchester when the original model has not reached the end of his natural lifespan. Castiel is far closer to human than Anna these days, though, and he obviously doesn't know how to explain it to her. Sam would, except he thinks that this is one of those things that you just have to figure out.

"Give her another century or two," Dee advises. If it bothers her to hear how much an angel apparently hates her, she doesn't let it show. But then, she and Castiel likely worked out those bits of awkwardness right around the time Sam was trying to save Dean from his deal. "It's not like you're short on time."

Castiel smiles ruefully at her and unknowingly echoes Sam's thoughts. "I'm afraid that after my years spent among the humans, I have grown… impatient."

Dee laughs. "Turned you, didn't I?"

Castiel doesn't say what both of them are thinking, that it was Dean who had begun the process. Or maybe Cas doesn't think it at all. He doesn't seem to remember, some days, that Dee and Dean are in fact separate beings; he speaks of them as if they are one being, Dee just a continuation of the man Castiel rescued from hell. Dee, Sam has noticed, only encourages him, the way she gives every person she meets exactly the person that they seem to need her to be. Sam's always wondered if she does it on purpose, because she doesn't do anything near the same with him, and she's always utterly careful not to presume too closely on his relationship with his brother. Sam can't do what Castiel does, can never make himself think that Dee and Dean are the same person. He started by keeping a checklist of their differences in his head, as if to guard against any incursion against his memories of Dean, but gave it up before too long because she quickly stopped being not!Dean and just became Dee.

In his more honest moments, Sam thinks that Castiel probably has the better deal. Castiel loves Dee because she is Dean, plain and simple. Sam can't do that, can't see her as the brother he would have given everything for, and because of that, he doesn't know how he's supposed to feel about her at all. And no matter how comfortable things get between them, he knows that she doesn't exactly know what to do with him, either.

~*~

Sam was in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles at least from any person he'd ever met, when he heard a knock on his motel door.

Scowling, assuming it was the manager coming to complain about a declined credit card or something, Sam shoved the Colt in his waistband (just in case he was wrong) and marched to the door. He was busy, damn it.

Jo grinned at him from the other side of the threshold when he yanked the door open. "Hiya, stranger."

Sam hadn't gone back to South Dakota after he'd given in and done the job that Bobby wanted, and he hadn't gone back since then, either. Bobby's was the closest thing to home base that any of them had anymore, but Sam didn't want any part of home when he couldn't share it with his brother. He and Bobby had lots of pleasant shouting matches over the phone while Sam tried to talk him through the finer points of less-than-legal internet usage, and that worked just fine for both of them.

He hadn't even thought about Jo since the final battle. He'd always liked her fine, sure, but even when she'd worked with them she'd had the whole flirting-friendship-thing with Dean, and she was so wrapped up with Dean in his mind that he'd put her entirely out of his head, along with all other Dean-related things like peanut M&M's, plane phobias, and the box of mullet-rock tapes hidden at the bottom of the trunk with Dean's jacket folded around it.

"Uh, hi," he said, and he knew his expression was less than welcoming, but Sam was kind of in a "avoiding humanity at all costs" phase right now, and he was getting in touch with his inner jerk. Dean would be so proud. "Why are you here?"

"You gonna invite me in, Sasquatch?" she demanded instead of answering, and Sam really kind of wanted to say no and slam the door in her face, but he wasn't that much of a jackass, so he stepped back and waved her in kind of sarcastically. She just smiled sunnily and strolled right past him, utterly uncaring of the waves of go away he was beaming in her direction.

"Okay, so, once more with feeling," he said, slamming the door behind her and locking it pointedly. "Why are you here?"

"Bobby told me you're taking another run at one of the cabal leaders," she said.

When Dean said yes to Michael, he made sure that it was under the agreement that Lucifer was the only one who'd get taken out. Unfortunately, leaving Earth intact meant a distressing lack of cleansing as regards to demonic infestation, and the power vacuum after Lucifer's death meant that the higher-ups in Hell's hierarchy, usually crossroad demons who glutted themselves on human souls, became the new rulers. They formed a little cabal of power and stepped up human recruitment schemes, and while there were a lot less demonic mass murders going on, there were also dozens of people every day who didn't read the fine print before they signed a contract with their broker, or their bank, or in one particularly inspired case, the rewards card at their local grocery store, and found themselves doomed.

Sam wasn't actually trying to kill off the cabal members, because he'd had enough of tilting with windmills and as long as they weren't trying to set off yet another fucking apocalypse, he was all about the devil you know. But you couldn't accidentally summon a crossroads demon, so people who made deals by necessity knew what they were getting into. People who didn't even know demons existed selling their soul when they thought they were just signing the mortgage on their new house, that was a fucking problem. And if someone needed to enforce a volunteers-only policy, well, Sam was happy to act as a reminder.

"It's nothing I haven't done before," Sam pointed out. "It's kind of what I do, now, as a matter of fact."

"Yeah, and you've gotten out on sheer luck alone how many times now? Don't try to lie, I've been asking around," Jo said, before he could answer. "Most of the time, that's how many. I'm all for playing bad cop with demons who want to break out of traditional mayhem, but the way you're doing it, Sam, it's just stupid." She offered him a rueful grin, like a peace offering. "And I know from stupid plans."

"So you've got a better plan," Sam said, and crossed his arms over his chest. "Please, enlighten me, O wise one."

"Let me help," she said immediately. "Just think about how much risk you're cutting out if you let me take the knife and kill off a few lieutenants while you're delivering the warning. You'll still have the Colt if you need it, and it'll put a lot more teeth into the potential consequences of fucking up."

She'd really thought about this, Sam could tell, and it made him feel guilty for saying no, but, "No." He worked alone, and he wasn't going to change that even for Jo, who'd been there for them all the way. Sam only ever hunted with his family, and he was damned if it he was going to change that just because the going got tough. "I can handle this."

"Sam." She sounded so abruptly serious that Sam really looked at her for the first time since she'd walked into the room. She looked desperate, and it wasn't a good look on her. "You're going to get yourself killed, okay? And I get how maybe you don't care about that, but the rest of us have lost kind of a lot already and don't want you getting your stupid ass shot just because you can't compromise a little, so can you maybe just work with me on this? Please?"

Still he hesitated. He could actually see her point, and when he thought about the fact that she and Bobby and Ellen were going to die someday he got a clutching, hollow feeling in his chest, but he just couldn't. He could keep going because Dean would have wanted him to, but he never worked with anyone but Dean, and it's unimaginable that he would start now.

"Listen, you don't have to worry, I don't want to be your partner or anything," she said, talking fast now because she could sense his possible capitulation. "There's tons of hunts out there, with all the hunters who've retired, and I'm not trying to take anybody's place or tag along where I'm not needed, but this a two-person job, Sam. It really is. Even you have to admit that."

"Yeah, you're right," he said, and it felt like something cracking inside, but honoring Dean's memory wasn't worth getting himself killed. It took a while, but he finally learned that one the hard way. "How much do you know about the target?"

"Local banker," she said immediately. "I already scouted out the bank, and I'm pretty sure he's only got a couple of soldier demons watching his back. This town's too small to attract attention."

"Well, it attracted mine," Sam said, and waved her toward the table, covered with papers. "I'm working on a plan of attack, but if you've got a feel for everyone's schedules, that would definitely help."

She smiled at him, soft and relieved. "I can definitely do that," she said.

He smiled back.

~*~

Dee hates dressing up. This isn't really much of a surprise, because Dean never really enjoyed shucking his jeans and t-shirts for a monkey suit either, but Dee regards fancy clothing with the same level of loathing that Dean reserved for planes and emo music. Her usual starving-artist attire is loose enough to move easily in and cut low enough to serve her purposes when she's playing pool with Neanderthals for their money, so she sees absolutely no reason to change, and most of the time she's right.

Unfortunately, tonight they have to go and remind of the cabal's agents exactly why Hell now has a volunteers-only policy on buying souls, and since Smith runs of Vegas' premiere casinos, at least one of them has to dress the part.

"Have I mentioned I'm not happy about this?"

"Maybe once or twice," Sam says dryly. "But this is the best way and we both know it."

They're still in one of the back parking lots, which is pretty much empty of anybody but a bored attendant at the other end. Sam's leaning against the Impala's hood and watching Dee pace around a lot. It's surprisingly soothing, actually. It's rare that she gets this kind of upset, working herself up to a nervous wreck instead of just annoyed or pissed off or anything else on the general anger spectrum, and he's realizing that it's easy to be calm when she's not. He and Dean always took turns being the one to freak out, and he forgot how reassuring that is, while he was on his own. The closest he came to a partner after Dean was gone was Jo, and Jo is just experienced enough not to freak out easily and not quite experienced enough to appreciate the value of a minor nervous breakdown.

"Dee," Sam says, and gets a quiet rush of pleasure when she immediately stops short at the sound of his voice. "I did this a few times on my own and a few times with Jo, and trust me, it's a lot easier- and safer- with a partner."

"Then call Jo!" she exclaims, in the tones of someone who's stumbled onto a clever solution. "She's got to be better than me at this whole thing."

"I thought you were the best at everything," Sam teases, but she doesn't laugh and give him an affectionate cuff like she usually does, just looks at him with anguished eyes that have a freakish weakening effect on Sam's limbs.

"Sam. Look at me."

He's been trying not to, honestly. The dress she's wearing is very short, and backless, and has a lot of silver fringe swaying hypnotically across her mostly-bare thighs. He really, really does not want her to see him staring at her thighs and get the wrong idea. It's just… glitter. Everywhere.

"You look great," he says honestly. It's not like she's normally any less attractive, it's just that it's more subtle than he's used to, with no makeup and showing only as much skin as she damn well feels like. Even when Sam sneered at Dean's boozy bombshell taste in women, he himself never really looked at any girl who's less than a knockout, and he's looking at Dee right now and realizing that if she walked into a bar he'd probably buy her a drink, no questions asked. Right now she's so exactly his type it hurts, and it's a little ridiculous, and he really, really hopes that this is a good sign for the eventual success of their plan.

The clothes are just window dressing, though. She's still the same girl who Sam has seen sweaty and dusted with graveyard dirt and still reducing a gas station attendant to a stuttering, nervous wreck. There's no amount of makeup in the world that can hide the force of her personality, and Sam thinks that that's probably the reason she's going to knock 'em dead, because in a world where everything is fake the honesty of Dee's smile has got to be fucking blinding.

Dee huffs an annoyed breath at him, thankfully unaware of his train of thought. "I look stupid."

"Not even." He can see the signs of her freakout winding down, so he straightens up from the hood of the car and grabs the little shoulder purse that contains their backup plan. "And anyway you're forgetting the best part."

"There's a good part?"

Sam offers the purse to her. "If this all goes pear-shaped, you're probably going to get to kill some bad guys."

She grins. "Okay, so maybe this isn't a terrible plan."

It's a great plan and she knows it. He and Jo refined it and several variations, and unlike a lot of his plans, he knows to a fair degree of certainty that this one is going to work. Normally, Sam's the one who delivers the warning to the leader, because his name is the one all the bad guys know and hate, while his partner takes the Colt and kills off the lieutenants. But Smith (Smith, for God's sake, does the demon have no respect for his heritage?) has ensconced himself at the back of his casino like a spider in its web, and Sam's usual tactic of "Open the fuck up, I'm Sam Winchester and I was there for the death of Lucifer!" just doesn't seem to cut it here.

Thus, gorgeous woman, fancy dress, purse with the demon-killing knife tucked away inside. Dee likes to complain that none of the bad guys know who she is anymore, but that's changing rapidly. Most of the movers and shakers of the supernatural world know that Dee Winchester is even more vicious than her predecessor and that her guardian angel is back to full smiting ability, so Sam is pretty confident that Smith isn't going to try anything against a woman who can call down the wrath of God. It's not a foolproof plan, but it's better than most.

"This is going to work," Sam tells her. "I've got the Colt and you've got an angel on speed-dial, you don't get better odds than that. We're going to kick ass."

"Like I need the help," she sneers, and Sam thinks that it's over, they're good to do, but then he sees one last flash of insecurity. She must really hate this dress.

"You're sure that you're not better off with Jo?" she asks him.

He could say, "You're here and she's not," or even, "You already know that you're the better fighter," but both of those things, while true, aren't the point. She's not fishing for a compliment. This isn't about that.

So he says, "There's nobody I'd rather have with me on this," because it's what she needs to hear, but also because it's the truth. It's true of a lot more things than just this one job.

He's rewarded with a brilliant smile. He was right; made up and dressed like that, her grin is blinding. Sam feels like he's smiling back in slow motion. "We good?"

"We are good," she decides. "We're going to kick some demon ass."

Yeah, that's the Dee he knows. Freakout definitely over. "Ready to go?"

"Yeah, yeah, see you on the other side." She flips him a nonchalant wave. "Two hours."

"Two hours," he agrees, and they go their separate ways.

~*~

When he'd been spending all of his time hanging out in the hospital parking lot staring at the doors he couldn't go through, Sam ate most of his meals at the Worst Diner of All Time™, in which the food was absolutely awful and the coffee usually burnt. The only reason it stayed in business was because it cannily situated within spitting distance of both the hospital and the police station, and tired cops and paramedics and nurses were usually too exhausted after their shifts to even taste the food, much less make judgments about the coffee.

For a while, after he started moving on, he tried doing the Dean diet, which seemed to consist mostly of pancakes, cheeseburgers, and bourbon, because it seemed like he should at least try it. But yelling at himself for eating shitty food wasn't the same as telling Dean that he was going to have heart attack, so after a month or two he gave up and started getting salads again, and trying not to think about how hard Dean had laughed when they started carrying "healthy choices" in fast-food restaurants.

It was usually a toss-up as to how waitresses reacted when he ordered a salad or vegan wrap or something. If he's in the middle of the college district of any big city, they'd have died-dark hair and their facial piercings would wink when they smile approvingly, but usually, if he was in some roadside diner, his waitress would be plump and motherly and annoyed. Dean had always had some kind of bizarre pull when it came to waitresses, he always had them in a little charmed puddle, eating out of his hand and bringing him extra slices of pie with ice cream and patting him on the shoulder like he reminds them of their sons. Sam was always awkward and brusque, not trying to be insulting but somehow he always put their backs up anyway.

"You done with that plate, honey?" his waitress asked. He nodded silently, not looking up from his hands wrapped around his mug, and she whisked it away.

Since Dean was gone, though, Sam thought that he gave off waves of desperation or something, because waitresses freaking loved him. Most of them probably thought he was having girl trouble, and Sam got in a good few moments thinking about Dean's face if he could have heard that tidbit, but then he always got sidetracked thinking about Dean and he'd sit there, quiet and morose with his coffee, and his waitress would make a face like he couldn't get his lines right and they'd bring him his check without offering dessert. It was okay, Sam never really liked pie that much anyway.

Another plate thunks down on the table in front of him, and he looks up to find a slice of cherry pie, with a big scoop of ice cream melting all over one side. He turned to look at the waitress, who was plump and comfortable with it, had a pack of cigarettes in her apron pocket, and had her iron-gray hair pulled back into a loose bun, gone frizzy with the heat. The nametag on her shirt said "Bobbi."

Dean would have freaking loved her. He would have flirted like crazy, and she would have gone pink in the cheeks and smoothed a hand over her hair even as she was scolding him, and after she was gone he would have leaned across the table and said, "Hey, think she's Bobby's awesomer twin?" and Sam would have laughed and thrown something at him and told him he was being a dick.

"Uh," Sam said, awkwardly, "I didn't order this."

"I lost my daddy two years back," Bobbi said. "You just sit there and enjoy your pie," and then she patted him on the shoulder and left before he could figure out what to say.

He blinked down at the pie and felt his eyes prickle with tears. When he'd lost Dean before, when the hellhounds took him and nothing Sam could do would bring him back, he'd spilled out his grief and his anger all over the place, till he was like a beacon of rage, calling to people like Ruby that he was alone and ready to be taken advantage of. He didn't really like that he was that obvious to some random woman in a diner.

But it was different this time around, he knew. He wasn't angry anymore. He couldn't be angry at Lucifer for trying to end the world, because that's what Lucifer was designed to do, even as he seemed to think that he'd gone off the reservation. He wasn't angry at Michael, because Michael had respected Dean enough to limit his sphere of destruction to Lucifer and leave the rest of humanity to heal from the apocalypse, and he couldn't even be angry at God, though he wanted to. He definitely couldn't be angry at Dean, because he always knew that Dean would pick the world over himself. It was just a matter of time, and Dean had been so, so tired, at the end. He'd been ready.

Fuck, Sam thought. And ate his pie.

~*~

Dee is a health nut, which is just weird to Sam in every way possible. Sometimes she acts so much like Dean it hurts, like when she floors it on the highway at night or starts air-drumming over the steering wheel, but then she'll do something completely out of left field, like sneer at the barflies that Dean would have gone to as if magnetized or say, "Hey, I've heard about this place, it's supposed to have the best vegetarian menu in the area," and Sam's bizarre reality will reassert itself.

It's not just a matter of eating right, either. She follows an exercise regimen that would have made any of Dad's old Marine buddies shake their heads with pride, and every day when they weren't actively working a job she finds an empty patch of land and practices her shooting. She laughs it off with some joke about 'all that 'my body is a temple' crap," but she obviously takes it so seriously that Sam can't help but wonder, does she feel like she has something to prove?

Sam wakes up, usually, to the sound of her off-key warbling in the shower, but this morning he rolls over in bed and finds her on the floor, counting out sit-ups under her breath. Sam just lies still and watches her, half-asleep still and lulled by the monotone count. "Two sixty-two, two sixty-three, two sixty-four…"

She usually sleeps in one of her collection of oversize t-shirts, but now she's wearing a pair of sweats and a sports bra. He tanned skin is lightly sheened with sweat, and Sam is hypnotized by the play of muscles in her stomach and across her shoulders.

He never gets a chance to watch her, not without her knowing he's doing it. Dean never noticed unless he actually caught Sam in the act, but then Dean grew up with Sam's gaze on him and only felt off when Sam didn't have his full attention fixed on his brother. Since Dee has come into his life, Sam has gotten good at sideways looks and glances beneath his eyelashes, cataloguing her in moments thought to be unobserved, one tiny piece at a time. This, this is like a banquet, offered unexpected to a man used to crumbs. Only barely awake, Sam drowses with his eyes half-closed and lets his lidded gaze feast to bursting.

She finishes up on three hundred and rolls fluidly to her feet, only then noticing him watching her sleepily. Her face goes tight and blank for a moment, but then she laughs shakily and runs her hand through her hair. "Hey," she murmurs.

"Hey," he husks back. She smiles, soft and indulgent.

"It's still early; you can sleep for a while longer. I'm just going to go run a couple miles."

Sam doesn't like to think of her out there, looking flushed and approachable, where other people can get to her. "Alone?" He knows it's stupid even as he says it- her gun and holster on the table are a mute testament to her ability to take care of herself- but he's already lost his brother, and no matter that Dee isn't precisely his sister, he can't stand the thought of losing her, too.

She doesn't take offense, surprisingly. "Nah, Cas shows up every morning to keep me company." So that's when Castiel was arriving every morning; Sam has just been thinking that he's been using his angelic powers to keep an eye on the potentiality of pancakes. "You go back to sleep, okay? I'll be fine."

Muzzily, Sam lets his eyes fall closed. "'kay."

Dee doesn't leave immediately, though, and after a second he feels her fingers brush his hair off his forehead. "Sweet dreams, kiddo," she says, almost too softly to be heard, and then she moves away.

The last thing Sam hears before he falls asleep is her light laugh as she greets Castiel. The door shuts behind her, cutting off the rest, but the sound of her laughter follows him into dreamland.

~*~

Zombies. Sam hated dealing with zombies, because they were mindless and disgusting and they always made him feel guilty. Even after so many years he wasn't immune to the wrongness of disturbing a grave to burn some bones, and most of the zombies that were solid enough to claw their way out and shuffle around were intact enough that Sam could see their drawn and wizened faces. They looked awful, but they looked human, and there was something just fundamentally wrong with taking a machete to the neck of something that looked human and was up and walking around.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of fucking zombies out there now that the apocalypse was over. The ritual to lock Death back into the cage Lucifer had broken caused a major necromantic backlash, and these days pockets of zombies just started crawling out on their own, no raising ritual and no one controlling them, just a whole bunch of rotting corpses wandering around aimlessly. Some of them retained enough memory of their lives to go to the home of a loved one, a sister or husband or child, and then things got really bad, so pretty much any hunter still active was on-call when it came to zombie cases. Some of the other hunters (Jo) loved it, but Sam, not so much.

"I had to pick up my phone," Sam muttered to himself, wading through a loose pack of moaning corpses, hacking left and right. "I was asleep, and when I saw Bobby's name on the screen I knew it was going to be nothing but bad, but I still picked up the fucking phone. Because I never fucking learn."

"Behind you," a voice said, and Sam reacted, swinging his machete around and beheading the zombie behind him before turning to identify the source of the warning. Castiel stood a couple feet away, hands tucked into the pockets of his trench coat, just watching instead of, you know, helping to take down the two remaining zombies that were still trying relentlessly to shamble their freaking way out of the cemetery.

Sam took them down quickly, then glared at Castiel. "Thanks for the help," he said pointedly.

"You're welcome," Castiel replied, with the same grave immunity to sarcasm that always drove Dean up the wall. "You've started hunting again."

"Yeah, well." Sam shrugged awkwardly, tried to cross his arms and then remembered that he was holding a freaking machete, then tossed it aside. He'd pick it up later. "Everyone kept telling me that waiting around the hospital was stupid and I needed to do something with my life."

"Dean would be glad," Castiel said. "He was proud of you. He said you were the best hunter he'd ever known."

He'd never said that to him, Sam thought resentfully, but he knew it wasn't fair. Castiel never would have gotten so close to Dean if Sam hadn't been so thoroughly pulling away, and after Lucifer rose Dean was still balanced awkwardly between them. He'd always told them different things, confided different parts of himself, and for all of the things he'd told Castiel about Sam, Sam knew that there were things Dean had told him about Castiel that Castiel would like to know. Someday.

"I was wondering when you were going to come by," Sam said. "You still questing for a fixit?"

"Not exactly," Castiel said. "I know now that I can't save this Dean."

Sam had accepted that the moment that Dean said yes, but Castiel had a very different kind of faith than him. Sam only believed in the bad things with any degree of assurance; the one lesson he'd learned from Dean that he wished wasn't true. Sam was sad that Castiel had finally given up, because there was maybe a part of him that maybe hoped there was a way, but mostly he knew that he was going to spend the rest of his life without his brother, and he knew that Dean would hate it if Castiel spent a human lifetime on a futile, grieving hope.

Then he caught the rest of Castiel's assertion, and his eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, 'this' Dean?"

Castiel smiled the tiny curl of satisfaction that was as close to a grin as he ever got. "I managed to secure the spell to pass between universes," he said. "There are an infinite number of alternate worlds, all shadows of this one. In at least one of them, there must be a version of Dean who is still alive and willing to return with me."

Sam really, really did not have anything to say to this. No, actually, he did. "You are insane."

"Perhaps," Castiel said with a nod. "That is what Anna said, and Michael, and Gabriel. But Gabriel still gave me the spell, and I'm still going to use it."

"You can't just steal a new Dean, Castiel, it doesn't work like that!"

Castiel cocked his head, birdlike, and studied Sam through his dark, fathomless eyes. "Don't you want to have your brother back?"

Sam felt his breath catch in a hard, painful knot under his breastbone. "My brother is gone, Cas, and I never want to have some other brother to replace him. Never."

Castiel nodded solemnly. "I understand," he said. "I will not bring you a new brother," and then he was gone.

Sam stared at the spot where he'd stood for a long, long moment, then decided that there was pretty much nothing he could do about this. If he was lucky, Castiel truly did understand and wouldn't try to bring him some alternate Dean like a cat dragging a bird up to the front door, and he wouldn't have to deal with this again. If he was really lucky, Castiel would abandon this whole mad scheme altogether and Sam wouldn't have to deal with it at all, but if he was unlucky, well, he'd have to deal with it later. Much, much later.

With a groan, he bent down to pick up the machete. He had to find a faucet and clean off, and then he had to go break the news to the townspeople that they had a bunch of decapitated corpses to rebury. Damned if he was going to do it himself.

~*~

The thing about Dee is that she's a hunter in a way that even Dean never quite managed. Dean loved hunting, loved living on the road and killing monsters and saving people, but there was always a tiny part of him that wanted… oh, not to find some kind of normal life, but maybe to have always been normal. Sam wanted to walk away and start over, but Dean always wished for a reboot button, to take the supernatural right out of their lives from the beginning.

Dee didn't think that way at all. When they encounter one of those perfect families on a hunt, the kind with the dog and the two point five kids and the perfect lawn in the suburbs and lemonade in the fridge, she doesn't get that mixture of disdain and longing that Dean never could quite hide. Families, good ones, just don't interest her one way or another, except as how they relate to their case. No, her buttons have more to do with neglectful fathers, men with too much attitude, and women who can't stand up for themselves. She never says a word against him, but Sam sometimes thinks that she hated her John Winchester even more than Sam ever did his.

Which didn't stop her from following exactly in his footsteps, obviously. But she wanted it, which Sam sometimes thinks that Dean never really did, no matter what he said. Dee did. Sam doesn't know at what point her dreams changed, but somewhere along the line, Dee chose to be a hunter. Maybe things changed when she was still really young, or maybe she figured out how to remake herself in adolescence the way Sam so longed to be able to do, but she did it. While Dean got himself drafted into Dad's war, Dee signed herself up. Sam can see it in her joy with every case they work.

"Zombies, Sam!" Dee is grinning so wide that Sam has the absent thought that her face might split in half. "We get to kill zombies!"

"It's not really as entertaining as it seems on TV," Sam feels compelled to correct her, as he loads up on guns. Blessed-salt-silver, the nuclear bomb of supernatural ammunition. He's still trying to figure out how to add in iron without screwing with the silver's purity. "You had the Croatoan thing in your world, too, right? They're like that, only slower and they smell terrible."

"No, no, totally different," Dee insists. She slings the machete sheath over her shoulder, grabs the extra shotgun and two boxes of the nuclear ammo, then slams the trunk shut. "Zombies are the unholy undead," she intones. "Croats are just really pissed-off people. I didn't buy that bullshit when they came out with 28 Days Later and I'm not buying it now."

Sam sighs. "Fine, you win. Zombies, yaaaay!" He waves an imaginary flag around over his head. "Can we just go in and kill them now?"

"I feel like you're not really going into this with the proper spirit of adventure," Dee tells him, but she leads the way to the warehouse where the terrified townspeople have managed to corral the undead, so Sam calls it a win.

An hour later, watching Dee try to use her gore-soaked shirt to wipe off the machete, Sam says, "You know what? I think I'm gonna call dibs on first shower."

"Don't be such a retard, we're not getting into the car like this." She gives up on her shirt and resorted to (very carefully) wiping off the blade on her jeans, it was clean enough to put back in the sheath.

Sam watches the whole process with some amount of amusement. "What are you planning to do? Call Cas and have him magic out the gunk?"

"Uh, no, because that'd be stupid." She scoops up her shotgun from where she tossed it when she ran out of ammo. "I saw a spigot with a hose on the side of the building. We're going to rinse off and then lay down some towels before we get back in the car and go back to the hotel."

Sam still has it in him to be delighted at the contrast between Dee's comfortable practicality and her bloodthirsty glee at zombie-killing. Dean would have loved zombies, Sam thinks wistfully, that one with the lovesick nerd just hadn't lived up to Hollywood standards. He knows that Dean would have loved a lot about this long post-apocalyptic cleanup, not the least of which would have been meeting himself. Her. Dee. Dean would have adored Dee. Knowing him, he would have been in bed with her in two seconds flat.

The thought of Dean doesn't hurt the way it used to. Is this what it feels like to say goodbye? he wonders. Is this moving on? What is he moving on to, anyway? On the best of days, he still has no idea what he's doing with Dee. He still doesn't know why Castiel brought her over at all.

A blast of cold water interrupts Sam's musings, and he whips around in fury to see Dee holding the hose and grinning at him. "Closer your eyes and think of the upholstery," she says, and sprayed him again, her thumb over the opening of the hose, turning the lazy stream of water into a high-pressure blast.

Sam growls and lunges for her, managing to tackle her before she can eel away. She's tiny underneath him in a way Dean has never been, but she's also not even close to fragile in a way that Dean was, after Hell, and by the time that he's managed to wrestle the hose away from her and scramble to his feet, he's pretty sure he has teeth-marks on his earlobe.

Comfortable on the gritty pavement, she stretches lazily and laces her fingers behind her head. "Well?"

He lets her have it full-blast, and she squeals at the cold and then laughs like a maniac, arching into the spray. When he's done she's soaking wet head-to-toe, her jeans clinging like a second skin and her powder-blue t-shirt gone transparent. As it turns out, she's wearing a black bra underneath, clasped at the front.

"You finished?" she asks, her eyebrows cocked. Sam suddenly becomes uncomfortably aware of his own body, his ear throbbing where she bit him, the heaviness of his own wet clothes, and the warmth forming in his lower belly.

And he also has a giant, stupid grin on his face, his because this is the happiest he's been in years. So he just smirks and gives her a long, slow once-over, snickering when she jauntily flexes up her hips for his perusal. "Yeah, I think you're gore-free."

"Excellent!" She bounds to her feet, making a face at her sopping wet jeans. "Hey, do you think I could get away with driving back pantsless? These feel disgusting."

Sam gives in and laughs. "You can sure as hell try. But I'm not bailing you out if you get arrested for indecent exposure."

She grins at him as she digs the keys out of her jeans pocket, with some difficulty. "Yes you will."

He catches them when she tosses them to him, underhanded. She never let Castiel drive, the angel had told him, not once in the three years he spent in her world. But she hands them over to Sam like it's nothing. "Yeah, okay, maybe I would."

~*~

Sam knew that for all his ridiculous LSAT scores and research skills, he could sometimes be kind of fucking stupid. History had provided several stellar examples of his utterly inability to exhibit common sense when under stress, which was why he and Dean had always worked so well together. Given time to think about it, Dean couldn't come up with a workable plan to save his life, but he always had the right answer, the swift comeback, the no go this way instinct that always came to the fore on the spur of the moment. Between them, they just about made one functional human being.

It was times like these that Sam missed his brother the most, he thought, leaning against the side of the jail phone booth and listening to the ring in his ear. Dean had been the fast-talker, and without his brother beside him to spin some beautiful line of bullshit, Sam was left flailing around like a chicken with its head cut off when the cops showed up. If he'd kept an ear out better he wouldn't have gotten caught in the first place, but that was just one of the many ways that Sam was not the hunter his father had been.

The ringing stopped with a click, and Jo's voice came on the line, short and clipped like any hunter. "Yeah."

"Jo, it's Sam. I need a favor."

"What's up, sweetness?" Jo was in a good mood today, her voice filled with chirp and good cheer. "You planning another job?"

Sam was painfully, painfully aware that the cops might be listening in, a couple feet behind him. "Not exactly. I need you to come bail me out."

There was a long, long pause on the other end of the line. "Of jail?"

He gripped the receiver hard enough to hear the plastic creak in protest. "Yeah. I'm in Kansas. Lawrence, actually."

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," she said flatly. "You managed to get pinched in your own hometown? For what, jaywalking?"

"I was in the cemetery after hours," Sam said, with some semblance of dignity. "The cops were pretty understanding once they saw mom's grave, but they still had to bring me in. Can you do it, or not?"

"Oh, I can do it," she said, and this time he could hear the laughter in her voice, threatening to bubble through the surface. "But I am going to hold this over your head for approximately forever, I hope you know."

"I can live with that," he said. "Thanks, Jo."

"Don't thank me yet; I'm at Bobby's and he's going to have some choice words for you once he hears where I'm going. Try not to get in any more trouble in the next couple of hours, okay?"

She hung up before he could reply, and Sam set the receiver back on the cradle, turning to the police officer behind him and offering up his wrists for the handcuffs. "My bail will be here in the morning."

"Glad to hear it," the officer said with a genuine smile, and led him back to his cell.

The officer would be a lot less friendly if the angels hadn't wiped his records as a final kind of parting gift, Sam thought. When they ran his prints here, the only pops were his status as witness to Jess' death and his endless string of residences, last known address at Stanford. "Serial killer/arsonist/grave robber, presumed dead," wasn't the kind of thing that put a smile on a cop's face. Sam had been a lot more careful this year, wiping his prints whenever he wasn't wearing gloves, cleaning up any blood he'd left at a scene, that kind of thing, but he'd always known his luck was going to run out eventually. He was just lucky he'd only gotten popped visiting his mom's grave during off-hours, because there were so many worse things they could have caught him at.

It was a long night, but Sam didn't even bother trying to sleep. Jails weren't really designed to be restful, and Sam had nothing but bad memories when it came to jails, bad memories and good people dead and cases gone wrong. At least before, he'd always had Dean with him, keeping him company and keeping him from getting lost in thought with an endless string of wise-cracks and stupid prison sex jokes and games of twenty questions. He'd always had Dean with him.

Sam sat alone in his cell and he imagined his brother beside him, thinking about how much Dean would have been enjoying himself at Sam's expense. If Dean had been alive, they probably would have gotten arrested long before this, because Dean was just as spectacularly bad at staying away from trouble as he was spectacularly good at getting back out of it again. If Dean was here with him, it probably would have been his fault that they'd gotten caught in the cemetery. (Dean wouldn't have gone there in the first place, though, so that's Sam's theory shot: he didn't think about that.) It would have been Dean's fault, but he would have blamed it one Sam anyway, all aggro posturing and mockery until Sam would have wanted to kill him, but at least he wouldn't have been alone.

He was so tired of being alone.

He felt gritty and exhausted when Jo showed up with his bail the next morning, like he'd lost some of the momentum that had kept him going all these lonely months. He forced himself to smile and play nice with the police while they went through the routine of releasing him, but it used up all his words and he was quiet and surly with Jo as she gave him a ride back to the Impala.

She seemed to understand, anyway.

~*~

Dee's good at pool, and she's great at darts, but she's best at poker. Poker, she once told him, has the highest stakes and the least chance of getting your ass grabbed "on accident" when you were trying to play, plus she'd learned all the best cheats from some ex-boyfriend forever ago.

Tonight she's playing pool, not poker, but Sam's watching her and thinking about ex-boyfriends. She doesn't talk much about anything when it comes to her life before Castiel brought her over, admittedly, but he's been able to get at least a pale etch-a-sketch version, the outlines, if nothing else. He has an idea of what it was like for her. He doesn't know if she's ever been on a date.

The presence of at least one ex-boyfriend in the extremely sketchy narrative he's managed to extract implies some sort of dating scenario, and honestly it's hard for Sam to imagine any version of Dean having trouble finding something (someone) to do on a Saturday night, but Dee is frequently and loudly scornful of the entire concept, so Sam doesn't know. The only girl Dean ever really fell for was Cassie, and Sam never got the full story of that courtship out of his brother, but Cassie seemed the type to want her chair pulled out for her, much less going on proper dates. Then again, Dean always had that tiny, quiet longing for a normal life, and Cassie was his way of playing out the fantasy just like Jess was for Sam. Dee doesn't want a normal life, has never wanted anything close to normal as far as Sam can tell, so why should she stick to convention standards when it came to relationships, either?

But she had some kind of lover back in her world, Sam knows that much for sure. And not just because of her jokes about learning poker from some ex, but because he can see it in her eyes, sometimes, when they're in a bar like this one and they can see some couple arguing loud enough to hear over the music. Most people wince and look away awkwardly, but Dee just looks sad, and lost somewhere in her own head. She left someone back there, or maybe he left her, first. But she had someone, and she doesn't anymore, and as far as Sam can tell, she wants nothing to do with dating.

This is hard for some men to understand, which Sam can kind of get, seeing as how she's ridiculously fit under the wife-beater she's wearing and she just ran the table and took the redneck she's playing for twenty bucks, so hey, he's probably writing marriage proposals in his head right now. This happens a lot, and normally Sam finds it funny, because Dee always looks so bewildered when some drunk gets earnest and heartfelt at her. She should be used to it by now, but instead she never seems to see it coming.

Today it's a lot less funny, because the drunk in question is a lot more pushy than heartfelt, and Dee's been backed up toward the bar, step by excruciatingly slow step, trying to duck away from him, and he's just not getting the hint. Sam feels an ache in his jaw and realizes that he's clenching his teeth, but holy shit, if that guy lays a hand on Dee Sam's going to break it, and fuck it that Dee can take care of herself, Sam needs to break this guy's face too.

He also might be a little drunk himself, a possibility that presents itself when Dee makes one last duck away from the friendly drunk's advances and plasters herself at Sam's side instead. Sam stares down at her head, leaning casually back against his shoulder and his arm, which has somehow ended up wrapped around her shoulder, and freezes.

"This is Sam!" Dee announces brightly to the swaying drunk. "He's my boyfriend, and he's much larger than you. Please go away now, and don't come back."

There were an almost infinite number of more tactful ways she could have phrased that, Sam thinks, and braces himself for a fight, but after one long up-and-down glance while Sam is sure that he's about to get into a bar fight, the drunk seems to accept the inevitable and staggers back to the pool table. Dee lets out a sigh of relief.

"Jesus, I thought he'd never take the hint."

Sam jerks his arm out from around her shoulders. "What the hell was that about?"

Dee swivels to look at him with a confused frown on her face, which quickly smoothes into blankness when she gets a look at his expression. "It's nothing," she says flatly. "I just didn't want to get into a bar fight over twenty freaking bucks and a dude with an epic case of blue balls, so I played the old 'boyfriend card.' I used to do it all the time with- Castiel."

Even slightly drunk and weirded out, Sam catches the bare hint of a pause before she says Cas' name, and he realizes that she's talking about the mystery lover from her world again. He can still feel the ghost-sensation of her body pressed along his side, and she's using him to pull a maneuver that she used to use her boyfriend for? What does that even mean, anyway?

He apparently doesn't come up with an answer quick enough, because she says quickly, "Look, if it bothers you I can just use Cas instead, okay? I won't do it again."

She turns to the bar and she orders a drink, and Sam can see the set of her shoulders that says she's upset and trying to hide it. Jesus, he hurt her feelings. That's the last thing he wanted to do.

He touches her arm, lightly, just above the elbow, and she looks at him inquisitively, her eyebrows still drawn down in that unhappy frown. "You just surprised me," he tells her, just loud enough to be heard over the music.

"Weirded you out, was more like," she shot back. "It's fine, I promise."

He has to fix this. "Weeeell," he drawls, making a big production out of it, "Might be a bit more than surprised. Thing is, the last time someone said something about being my girlfriend, there was a love potion involved, so there were some traumatic flashbacks to deal with, you know how it is."

Her lips twitch, and she brings her drink up to her mouth to hide it. "Poor Sam," she says over the rim of her glass. "Was she scary?"

"Terrifying," Sam says with a straight face. "The mustache was the worst part."

That wrings a genuine laugh out of her, and she sets her drink back down on the bar and knocks his boot lightly with hers. "Definitely poor you. Listen, you need me to set you up with a girl who doesn't have bizarre facial hair, you let me know. I'll find you someone good."

Sam grins back at her and doesn't think about the mystery lover from her universe, or the (entirely fictional) mustache woman, or even Dean's endless attempts to fix him up with someone after Jess' death. "Thanks, but this is all I need."

~*~

Bars had never been Sam's thing. This was a constant source of amazement to pretty much everyone he met in college, up to and including Jess, who wasn't exactly a party girl herself. There was just something about bars that was so inextricably tied into the college experience, and Sam had tried to like them, honestly, gone out on Friday nights with Jess and Beck and Zack and everyone, but Sam got itchy and uncomfortable in bars, remembering all the times that he'd sat in the passenger seat in some gravelly parking lot and watched Dean flash red in the light of the neon sign as he went inside to retrieve their dad. Even after Sam hit his growth spurt at fifteen and ended up taller than either of them, Dean always said "Wait in the car, Sammy," and even at his worst Sam had always waited. In college Sam felt uncomfortable in bars because all he could think about was his brother going inside to get their dad, and on the road with Dean Sam hadn't felt much better because all he could think about were all the times he'd wasted with Jess, the too busy being the wallflower in the corner booth when he should have been enjoying every second he had with her.

Also, it didn't help that he was a) a total lightweight despite his size, and b) a maudlin, mush-mouthed drunk, grabby and incapable of properly finishing a sentence. Dean could swill half a bottle of Jack and still run the table at pool, but Sam was gone after a couple of shots. It wasn't pretty, and he avoided being in that situation whenever possible.

"Hiya, handsome. Get you something to drink?"

And there was that weird thing where bartenders seemed to love him. It was like they had special radar for emotionally distressed people who tipped well. This one was darkly gorgeous and fit in a more-than-just-a-Stairmaster-addict kind of way, and her smile was intent and faintly predatory, friendly with a heavy edge of flirtatious. She'd been giving him that same smile all night with every beer she brought.

"I'm actually waiting for someone," Sam said automatically, because it's what he always said when he was waiting for Dean and some girl hit on him. Of course, then Dean would show up and make disbelieving faces at Sam for turning her down, and then he'd flirt with her and offer her a drink and usually, leave with her phone number. Sometimes he left with her, and Sam was back to square one, only he had to pay their tab and pick up his brother at oh dark thirty when Dean sent frantic HELP WE LOST THE HANDCUFF KEYS texts.

The bartender, whose lips were painted a blood red color that made Sam's stomach roil in uneasy remembrance, leaned across the bar in such a way that her actually really kind of impressive breasts were framed perfectly by her snug red tank top. "Really? Because you've been here for a while. You sure you didn't get stood up?"

Sam let out a crack of laughter, startling her backwards a little from her easy, confident slouch. "'Stood up,'" he repeated, and bit his lip before he could break out into hysterical laughter that would probably end with her calling the cops. "I guess you could say that."

The bartender paused, visibly considering abandoning this particular pursuit, but after a moment her self-confidence came back and she put one hand on his arm, lightly enough that it didn't feel like a trap. Her nails were painted red too, he noticed dispassionately, and trimmed short for practicality.

"I get off in half an hour, if your girlfriend isn't going to show."

Sam cocked his head to the left. "Don't have a girlfriend," he said slowly. She smiled wider.

"If you want to call me your girlfriend I'm okay with that," she returned, "but only for tonight."

Dean would have freaking loved her, Sam thought. Dean loved the take-no-prisoners type, as if the more he got shot down the better he liked you, and Sam never quite got Dean's thing for women who could walk all over him until he met Cassie. Gorgeous, assertive, intelligent, and a bartender, yeah, Dean would be champing at the bit to get a chance at this one.

Sam felt nothing.

"Just my tab," he told her.

Her face fell, but she was good at her job and slapped a professional smile on top of her disappointment. "Be right back," she told him, and whisked herself over to the computer.

Sam's phone buzzed angrily in his pocket while he was waiting, and he pulled it out to find a series of texts from Jo.

bobbys got another job for us

someone new not smith afuckinggain

he says come by and he'll tell you about it

Sam rolled his eyes. He hadn't been back to Sioux Falls since the final battle, and Bobby's nagging had apparently expanded to use of proxy. that's what phones are for, tell him to just call me with the details, he texted back, then looked up when the bartender came back with his tab.

"Thanks," he told her, and she nodded shortly, moving on to the next customer like he'd ceased to exist.

Sam left an extra-large tip anyway, then pulled on his jacket and left the bar.

~*~

She doesn't touch him very often, that's the thing. He thinks that's maybe why he got so weird in the bar, six states and three hunts ago, because it was just so unexpected. Nothing to do with the feeling of her much smaller frame curved along his side, and everything to do with the sudden intrusion of another human into his space. When they're sparring she never holds back or goes in like it's anything less than a full-on fight to the death, but the rest of the time she keeps her hands to herself, holds herself away from him in a way he's almost sure is unconscious. Dean never hesitated to lay hands on Sam whenever he damn well felt like it, grabbing his wrist or slapping his shoulder or lazily bumping into him when they walked. Sam never realized how much he depended on that till it went away.

He's starved for touch, so hungry for contact that he throws himself into those sparring sessions, knowing that it's going to hurt but chasing that brief spike of satisfaction like a rat hitting the button. He could go out to a bar and lose himself in all the touch he can stand, but the idea is distasteful to him, somehow, and also kind of feels like it didn't count. A stranger manhandling him would never feel like Dean, and if he plies some girl with alcohol into giving him a fucking hug it wouldn't be Dee, either. It's stupid, but there you go. Sam Winchester's life in a nutshell.

"The most important thing is to remember who you're fighting:" Dee tells Jo, one chilly afternoon in Bobby's big backyard, "Is it or was it ever a human being? Because no matter what they're doing, ghosts and demons and so on still think like people. You can't just throw away millions of years of evolutionary instinct just because you can suddenly walk through walls."

Jo snorts. "We're all just really big apes, is what you're saying?"

"Well, some of us bigger than others," Dee says with a teasing glance in Sam's direction, "but basically, yeah. Something that's never been human, no matter how much it might look otherwise, isn't going to come at you the same way. Cas, you wanna do me a favor and demonstrate?"

Castiel nods, and unfolds from his position seated on the porch steps, a couple of treads above Sam. Sam can't really feel him moving even when he steps neatly over Sam's much larger frame, and he thinks that maybe Dee has a good point. But he's still looking forward to the demonstration.

Dee shifts into a ready position as Castiel steps into her space. Jo prudently scrambles out of the way and comes to sit next to Sam. "This is going to be so cool," she confides.

He can't help but agree. Dee mostly likes fighting with Sam better because (as she likes to complain, loudly and often) she got her fill of fighting Castiel and losing in her universe, so he doesn't get to see them do this very often.

In the yard, Dee picks up a nearby crowbar (makeshift weapons were part of an earlier lesson) and nods and Castiel. She doesn't need any further signal.

Castiel seems to explode into movement. One second he is standing calmly, hands loose and open at his sides, and the next is his right in front of Dee and striking with brutal strength and speed.

She manages to avoid the first handful of blows, a fact that has got to be as impressive to Jo as it is to Sam, but in a matter of moments she's on the ground with Castiel efficiently pinning her arms behind her back, the crowbar buried in a tree fifteen feet away.

Next to him, Jo mutters, "Wow." Sam nods in silent agreement.

Dee turns her head to spit out dirt. "Did you see that?" she calls breathlessly.

Jo is busy staring at Castiel with wide eyes. "Not really," she admits.

"Exactly." Dee taps the ground; Castiel steps away and puts out a hand. She allows him to help her to her feet with a lot more graciousness than she shows on the rare occasion that Sam manages to get the best of her. "No mercy, no hesitation, no wasted movements. Cas is more human than most angels, but when it comes to battle that goes to the wayside and he fights to end the fight. Period, end of story.

"Okay, next example." She turns expectantly to Sam, who stands up with a reluctant groan even as inwardly, he's wound tight with nervous excitement. She told him earlier that she wanted a full-contact spar, emphasis on contact, and his skin is already tingling with anticipation. "Ready?"

Sam steps into the yard as Castiel takes him place on the steps, then shifts to attack-ready position. In response, Dee squares herself into the defensive. "Ready."

"Go."

He charges, and hits her with his full weight right at the midsection. They go down, Dee twisting like a shadow underneath him, and somehow when they hit the ground he'd on his face in the grass and she's on his back, perched high on his shoulders with his arms twisted up behind his back. He can feel the blood-warmth of her inner thighs on his ribs even through the layers of her jeans and his shirts, and her breath is hot on the back of his neck.

"You done?" she murmurs, right into his ear.

He bucks and twists a little, for form's sake, but she rides it out and holds him fast. He nods.

She squeezes his wrist one last time, in smugness or gratitude he can't tell, then climbs off him. Sam rolls to a sitting position but stays down, tucking his knees up to his chest to hide the erection he got the second she pinned him. The fact that he's really that desperate for contact isn't something he really wants to advertise to Jo, an angel, and his sort-of sister.

"And that's the difference between humans and everything else," Dee explains. "Humans can't seem to get over the animal instinct to use their size, even when they know it's not that much of an advantage." She shoots Sam a teasing grin. "Non-humans like angels don't do that because a) they didn't evolve out of apes that liked to posture and beat their chest, and b) a lot of them are basically non-corporeal on this plane and walking around in borrowed skin, so their concept of size is sort of different. Any questions?"

Jo starts talking about whether demons really count as human-based, and at some point Dee starts walking her through some particularly vicious move, but Sam tunes it all out. He just sits there on the grass and goes away into his own head, feeling his hard-on go down as the heat slowly leaches out of his body and into the cool air of the spring evening. He's fine. He probably needs to go out and get laid or at least get a massage, but otherwise he's okay. Dee is his sister, from another universe, sure, but still basically an elder sibling to all the other Sam Winchesters that might be out there. This desperate need for her to just touch him will go away and then it will stop being weird. It'll be fine.

Castiel comes to stand over him and studies him gravely. "Are you well?"

Sam laughs, and if it sounds a little strange, he doesn't think Castiel knows him well enough to notice. "Mostly."

~*~

The worst part about hunting on his own, the part that Dean never told him, was how much it fucking sucked to dig up a grave by yourself. When it came to splitting up the hunt between them Dean almost always took the grave while Sam did whatever else was needed, and now that he was on his own Sam was realizing that Dean had just been used to it by then, a couple years hunting by himself under his belt when he'd always had to dig on his own, after Dad had gone his own way. Dean never complained, which Sam was kind of wondering about now, because Dean complained about everything.

He'd never wanted Sam to ask about the two years between Dean's last contact at Stanford and showing up on his own with Impala, though, and in retrospect Sam realized that Dean had gone out of his way to keep from inviting questions about that particular period of his life. Sam hadn't noticed at the time, because he'd been so busy thinking about that same stretch of time when he'd been with Jess and Jess was all he could think about, back then. Now he was wishing he hadn't let Dean manipulate him, that he'd asked all the questions and found out about Dean's life without Sam as thoroughly as Dean had investigated Sam's life without Dean, because now he was on his own and all he wanted to do was ask his big brother, And what do I do now? And Dean wasn't there to give him answers anymore.

Tonight was just particularly bad, he knew, because the Virginia soil was all heavy red clay and Sam was running on about three hours of sleep, and it'd been so long since breakfast that he'd gone past hungry and back into not wanting food at all. He was just in bad shape, was all, he'd be fine as soon as he could finish the job and force down a granola bar or something and crash for about ten hours straight. He knew his limits intimately and in great detail, and this was nowhere near that point. He'd be okay.

It was just that he felt shitty and he was missing Dean more than usual tonight, because Dean had always had a sixth sense when it came to Sam and would practically bend over backwards to cheer him up when he wasn't feeling great. The thing he didn't really get until it was too late was that he didn't just rely on Dean to help him get the job done; it was about Dean with his stupid jokes and taking shop and humming out of tune and just basically being there for Sam, warm and breathing and looking after Sam and loving him with every breath. His brother.

Sam didn't have a brother anymore.

He tossed one last scoop of dirt out of the grave and rested the shovel against the side of the hole, digging into his pocket with dirt-cake fingers to grab his cell phone. He pressed speed dial one, entered his code, and then listened again to Bobby's message, left yesterday morning when Sam was in the library and didn't feel like arguing with the man about why he never came by anymore.

"Sam, it's Bobby. I know you're probably working that ghost rider case, but I thought you should know, I bought a space for Dean. It's in Lawrence, the same graveyard as your mother. Right next to her, as a matter of fact." There was a pause. "It's what he would have wanted, son. Now I know you're probably mighty pissed at me and I know it's your place to take care of this, but Sam, you're not taking care of a damn thing, and somebody had to do it. For when it's time." Another pause. "I think you'll like the headstone, anyway." A final, longer pause, and Sam stands in the open grave and listens to Bobby's breathing on the phone, cut by a long sigh. "Come by and see me, Sam. We're all we've goddamn got left. Come back."

The line clicked shut, and Sam slowly closed his phone, shoving it back in his pocket like it burned him. That was at least the third time he'd heard the message, but it didn't seem like it was getting any easier to listen to.

Sam was standing in a grave and it seemed suddenly utterly, horribly wrong that Dean should be put in a box in a hole like this, like the vastness of determination and loyalty and pyromania and sarcasm could possibly be contained in some tiny plot of earth. Like Dean was too much to be contained.

But Dean wasn't in there anymore; the thing that Bobby was talking about burying was just this empty shell of flesh and bone that breathed from sheer bloody-minded biology, stubbornly refusing to admit that the soul was gone. The grave in Lawrence could never have been able to contain Dean's spirit (the world hadn't been big enough for that) but it could hold Dean's body, because that was all that was left. Bobby recognized that, even when Sam was still kind of deluding himself.

"I can't go back," he said to the open air, because he loved Bobby like the father John Winchester had never been but he couldn't do it. He couldn't just drive under that rusting sign and pull up to the front porch and stride in like it was any other day, because Dean's footsteps wouldn't be on the floor behind him and that was wrong. It was goddamn wrong, that Dean was gone; Dean should be next to him making fun of Sam's too-short shovel and flicking dirt onto his shoes and singing "Enter Sandman" tunelessly under his breath. If Dean were here right this instant, he'd turn and look at Sam and say-

He'd say what the fuck are you doing, Sam realized, disgusted with himself. He'd say, why haven't you been to Bobby's, are you trying to break the old man's heart, and he'd say, stop treating Jo like some unpaid intern, and he'd say, stop acting like an idiot and live your goddamn life.

Dean would be so disappointed with him. At least in California, when Dean came to see him two years in and they got ridiculously drunk before the fight that sent Dean storming off for another two years, at least then he'd been happy and Dean had been able to see that. Even with the way things ended, Sam had been able to enjoy his life because he knew that no matter what Dean said, Dean was happy for him, happy that his little brother was happy, the only thing Dean ever really cared about. At least then it was all worth it.

Now, Sam didn't even know what he was doing. It had been six months, and Sam still felt like he was missing an arm.

Sam started digging again, trying to clear his mind of everything but the action of digging, entire and whole, trying to think of nothing else. It wasn't until the tip of the shovel hit the wood of the coffin with a hollow thunk that Sam realized he was crying so hard he could barely breathe.

~*~

Sometimes Dee goes out on her own. Never when they're working a case, but when they're in the in-between times, drifting along the major highways and looking for the next hunt. She'll grab the keys like normal, and she'll ask him along like normal, but there'll be something in her eyes that says, "Say no" and he knows that this is one of those times that he's definitely not welcome.

It isn't like he resents her occasional forays into the world of bar hookups. Dean used to get laid once a week at least, before his death and torture and resurrection, and he was never so considerate about keeping Sam out of it. He should probably follow her example anyway, because the last time he got laid was Ruby and that's just wrong on so many levels.

But it does bother him. It shouldn't, but it does. And he tries to tell himself that it has nothing to do with the way his skin hums every time she comes near him, the way his heart beats faster when she smiles at him and the way he can listen to her for hours and never get bored and the way it made him happy just to look at her. He tries to tell himself that, but he's fallen in love once before, and so as an unfortunate consequence he recognizes that symptoms when it's happening again.

"Hey. Whatcha doing up?"

Sam jumps violently and almost crashes into Dee, standing right behind him. "I didn't hear you come in."

"Sorry."

He looks up and realizes that she's wearing Dean's leather jacket, the one that Sam had tucked carefully away in a box in the trunk. Sam's brain feels like it's breaking. "Just spending some time communing with my baby," he says, waving a hand at the laptop in front of him. She leans in to glance at the screen, looking interested, and for a panicky second he thinks that he maybe left porn on the screen or something. But then he realizes that he wasn't watching porn, he was reading a weird news site, and even inside his own head he sounds so fucking stupid he wants to kill himself. "She's been feeling neglected, the way Castiel's been finding all our hunts for us, lately."

She laughs, like she's supposed to. She's gorgeous when she laughs. Gorgeous all the time, really. Sam felt like whacking his skull on the tabletop a few times, but decides she'll probably take that the wrong way.

"Just so long as you're not waiting up for me," Dee says, her gaze steady.

Sam's usually much more alert, and at the first sound of the Impala's wheels on the gravel it's lights out in bed. He's very good at faking sleep well enough to fool the suspicious, after all the years with Dean. But tonight he was so distracted by his actually kind of ridiculous predicament (alternate-universe sister, Jesus) that he didn't hear her pulling up.

"No," he says, and even to his own ears it sounds like a lie. She sighs and sits down on the end of the bed closest to him. He tries not to twitch at her proximity.

"I thought so."

There's something off in her voice, something dark and hurt, and he hates the thought that he caused it, even if he doesn't know why. "I'm sorry. I worry."

She lets out a disbelieving huff of air and sits down on the bed closest to him. He'd take it as a good sign, if he didn't get the feeling this conversations is going nowhere good in a hurry. "Damn it, Sam. Do you really expect me to believe that you did this for Dean, too?"

She doesn't bring up Dean, usually, not in any way that compares him to herself. Then again, Sam's never seen her wear Dean's jacket before. The lights are always carefully off when she returns from these little excursions, and he's usually trying so hard to be believably asleep that he never would have heard the tiny telltale creak of well-worn leather.

"No," he says, because honesty is probably the best policy at this point. Very careful honesty. "But Dean had pretty much stopped, by the time that I lost enough that I started to worry about things like this." After Dean died. He doesn't need to say it; they both know what he means.

She scrubs her hands across her face. Even with the space between them, he can smell cigarette smoke from the bar. "So this isn't a double-standard thing?"

He just stops and gapes at her, because is that what she thinks? Sam has never been the type of guy who thinks that guys can pull off that bullshit but women who did it were sluts or whatever, because he's pretty sure that if that thought so much as crosses his mind Jess will come back from the dead just to beat him to death with her women's studies textbook. He's tired and jealous and stupid about her, but he only stays up when she's gone because it kills him to think that sometime she might not come back.

But that's what Dee has been thinking that he's been thinking; she's been going on all this time thinking that Sam was, was judging her for her choices and thought less of her for them. She thinks that Sam disapproves, like Sam has any right at all to disapprove of anyone's choices.

"No," he says, and his voice is so raw that her head snaps up. He meets her gaze when she stares at him, because he wants to make sure that she understands him on this. "It's not like that at all. I swear."

She laughs, shakily. "Sorry to be an asshole about it, then. Some guys are like that."

"Not me," he says, and manages a grin for her that she hesitantly returns.

"Apparently not. I dunno, maybe it is stupid, it's just…" She spreads her hands helplessly. "I don't know what else to do, Sammy."

Sammy, Jesus, she's never used Dean's nickname. It sits a little too comfortably on her tongue, like Dean's jacket on her shoulders. Sometimes, in his clearer moments, he realizes that the lines between Dee and Dean are a lot more blurred than he likes to tell himself, and he wonders if he would have been able to love her at all if he hadn't loved Dean first. They don't have the same memories but he trusts her as he would the brother that grew up at his back, and he finally understands himself clearly enough to realize that his trust issues are so fucking huge that he can't love anyone who's not already that far in.

She's not Dean, though, no matter what he always knows that, because Dean would never have admitted that to Sam and Sam would never have been able to do to Dean as he does now to Dee, reaching out and grabbing her hands between his. Dean would have laughed it off and yanked his hands away and probably smacked him on the back of the head. And maybe it would have been okay anyway, and maybe not, but Dean's not here and she is and he made her sad and that's the last thing he ever, ever wants to do.

"You do what you have to," he tells her, low and sure. "That's what survival means."

She looks down at their joined hands for a long moment, and when she looks back up at him her eyes are dark and full. "And if I want to do more than just survive?"

He closes his fingers tight around hers. "Then you do that, too."

~*~

Bobby's phone call woke him up in the middle of the morning, when he'd only been in bed a couple of hours after an all-night hunt. Exhaustion made the drive to Sioux Falls take on a hazy, dreamlike quality, and the entire way there all he could hear was Bobby's voice repeating in his mind, hesitant the way Bobby never was, "Castiel's back from the other side, Sam, and… you better get here."

That was all he'd say, no matter how much Sam had pressed him for details as he'd tied on his boots and tossed the last of his belongings into his duffel bag, so Sam had no idea what had happened. Had Castiel actually brought back a Dean from the other world? Surely he wouldn't have done that, not when Sam had made his opinions on that perfectly clear. Maybe he was just back to tell them that he'd be gone again, this time for good? Sam really had no fucking clue what he was driving into.

Better get here, better get here, getheregetherebettergethere, echoed in his head, as he pulled up past the Singer Salvage sign and slalomed the Impala around the usual rusting hulks in the driveway. One of them ended was completely blocking the driveway, and Sam braked and sat there idling for a long moment staring at it, before making a disgusted face and killing the engine. He walked the rest of the way down to the house, his hands shoved in his pockets to ward off the cold.

There was a blonde woman wearing jeans and a denim jacket sitting on the porch steps. Sam start smiling automatically, thinking that it was Jo, but when he got closer he realized that he'd never met this woman at all.

She looked up when he reached the bottom of the steps, and smiled back in automatic response to the grin he'd had ready for Jo. She was either a hunter or a customer (rare, but not unheard of) waiting on parts for her car, and either way hiding on the porch to get away from the shouting he could hear going on just past the door. Reluctant to go inside and have his life turned upside down by Castiel all over again, Sam sat down on the steps next to her.

Neither of them spoke for a long time, Sam listening with half an ear to Bobby's raised voice, his words an indistinguishable blur of what the fuck. It was oddly familiar from dozens of remembered childhood arguments, and Sam made himself comfortable on the steps, sneaking glances at the woman next to him.

She had her knees pulled up to her chest with her arms wrapped around them, her head down like she could block out the sounds of the argument inside. Her blonde hair was tied back in a careless ponytail that spilled down over her shoulder, and her boots were worn and caked with mud. Sam revised his estimate back to hunter, and studied the angle of her jaw, the resigned slope of her shoulder, the cupid's-bow curve of her upper lip, searching for some hint of familiarity. He'd met most of the hunters still active, in the last few years, and there weren't enough women his age still in the business that she should be such a complete stranger to him.

She was the one who spoke up first, finally, maybe spurred into speech by his unrelenting stare or maybe just lost in thought. Either way, when she said, "I didn't think it was going to be like this," it was rueful and a little sad, and Sam barked out a crack of laughter that made her jump.

"I know exactly what you mean," Sam said, chuckling a little. She ducked her chin, but not enough to hide the smile that tugged at the corner of her lips. "In my experience, if life is going as expected it's only because you're going to stumble off the map a couple steps later."

At that she finally turned to look at him, and Sam felt a click of recognition so intense it was almost audible. Everything inside of him seemed to slow down and whisper, yes, this one.

"At least you have a map," she said, with a little smirk.

"Map's not worth the paper it's written on if you can't read it."

She tucked a stray bit of hair behind her ear and cocked her head, and the sunlight picked out strands of green in her hazel eyes. Sam was struck, suddenly, by a sense of familiarity- and the strange feeling that she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

"I think we have officially killed this metaphor," she offered, and he smiled back at her helplessly and thrust out one hand.

"I'm Sam," he said.

Her eyes went wide, like a startled doe, and she let out a shaky laugh as she grabbed his hand and shook. "Okay, it's a little weird meeting you like this," she said with a hesitant grin, "because I'm-"

Before she could finish her introduction, Castiel blew through the doorway, leaving the storm door flapping angrily behind him. He came to a halt on the steps, studying Sam and the hunter with an expression that almost looked like satisfaction.

"Good," he said. "You've met."

"We were just working on that," Sam said, but he had a sinking feeling in his chest. The woman was turning to face Castiel with a smile on her face that Sam had seen on Dean's a thousand times in that last year, and it could have been coincidence except Bobby came storming through the door after Castiel, shouting, "It's just not right, you goddamn stupid feather duster!"
Calmly, as if he wasn't upsetting Sam's entire existence all over again, Castiel said, "Sam, I'd like you to meet Deanna Winchester."

Slowly, Sam let his hand drop away from hers.

~*~

Dean's body is still alive, technically, lying in all mechanical comfort in the coma ward, but Dean's soul is gone. Sam accepts this, in the way that Dean used accept bad things while Sam was busy raging uselessly against God, the universe, and everything, but a year after the final battle Sam is only barely able to think around the edges of what happened to Dean. He can only think about the fact that his brother is dead and this time he's not coming back when he's alone, without Dee's steady breathing beside him, an exact match to the sound Sam has been falling asleep to for his entire life, give or take four years and four months. Dee fills up all the empty spaces in a room or in the car, and Sam doesn't have to think Dean's dead when she's next to him. He hasn't visited the cemetery in Lawrence since the time he got arrested, before Bobby paid for Dean's space and his marker, and until today, he didn't think he'd set foot in this place before he had to. But now he needs to think.

Dean's grave lies at Mom's right hand, right where he belongs. Someday, when the angels give up on holding Dean's shell in state as some sort of fucking monument to sacrifice, they're going to take down the wards, and Sam will go in and sign the papers and then this will be Dean's grave in truth. A real grave, in a real graveyard, consecrated and traditional, instead of some lonely cross in a field in the middle of nowhere. It sort of makes Sam sick in the stomach even to think about it.

But. Bobby's done a good job here, even Sam has to admit. The headstone is simple granite, nothing ornate, but underneath the name and dates are only three words:

Brother
Son
Protector

Sam traces his fingers over the stark black letters. "You'd probably hate this," he tells the stone sadly. "But it's perfect. Saving people, hunting things, the family business, right? That's who you were."

"I think he would have gotten a kick out of it."

Sam twists around, somehow unsurprised to find Dee standing behind him. "How'd you find me?"

"I knew where you were going the moment we hit the Kansas border."

Of course she did. Bobby probably told her about the empty grave long before Sam was able to think about its existence.

"Do you really think he would have liked it?"

She shoves her hands into her pockets and regards him with inscrutable eyes. "I would."

"But you're not Dean."

Even as the words leave his mouth Sam regrets them, but he can't take them back. Maybe he wouldn't even if he could. It needed to be said.

Dee exhales roughly, then collapses in slow motion into a sitting position next to him, a puppet with her strings cut. "Right."

Sam winces at the lost tone of her voice. "I didn't mean that how it sounded."

"No, you're right. I'm not him. No one ever would have written anything about my family on my headstone."

He can't stand this. "I'm sure that's not true." He can't imagine any version of Dean caring about anything more than family. Maybe Dee took a whole ragtag band of hunters and demon-touched and one lost angel under her wing and called them hers instead of Dean's incredible and unceasing focus on Sam, but just because she had a different family doesn't mean it didn't matter. It's impossible for Sam to believe that her family hasn't been her driving motivation since the day she was born, brother or no brother.

She sends him a quick, unhappy smile. "Nice of you to say that, but you don't know what you're talking about." She picks at a frayed spot on the knee of her jeans, and Sam focuses on her chipped purple nail polish so he won't have to see the expression on her face. "I never told you how Sam died, in my universe."

Sam swallows hard. "No, you didn't."

"I was still pretty young." Her fidgeting fingers halt, and she spreads her palms over her thighs. "It was the striga. Dad was using us as bait but he didn't tell us, because Sam was too young and Dad wouldn't train me anyway. This was before he found out that Mom had been a hunter. He didn't know that women could."

Sam knows where this is going now, knows with a terrible sense of inevitability. He doesn't remember the striga; he was too young at the time. But Dean remembered, all too well, and Sam can still see the expression on Dean's face as he told the entire fucked-up mess of a story.

"Dad got a false alarm, was called away to the other side of town. He left his shotgun behind, but I didn't know how to use it."

Jesus, John Winchester not teaching his eldest how to shoot a fucking shotgun? Sam feels another spurt of anger and his long-dead father. It wasn't even his dad that did this, but it was someone enough like him that Sam can understand every stupid piece of reasoning, every well-meaning bit of old-fashioned sexism, that went into the decision.

"I watched out for him, just like Dad told me to," Dee says, assuring Sam like she's not entirely sure he'll believe her. "I didn't leave even for a minute. But I didn't hear it come in. I went into Sam's room to check on him, and there it was, and I couldn't stop it. I grabbed Dad's gun and I tried to shoot it, but…"

"You missed," Sam finishes for her, when she chokes on the words. "Dad didn't make it back in time?"

"No," Dee says. Her knuckles are turning white from the force of her grip around the long muscles of her thighs. "We got Sam to the hospital, but the striga moved on when it realized hunters were in town, and it was too late. We buried him right next to Mom." She nods at the expanse of grass that Dean will someday lie beneath. "Right there."

Sam reaches out for her before he can stop himself. "Dee."

She catches his hand between hers, but her gaze doesn't shift from Dean's headstone. "Dad taught me after that. I was all he had. And I learned everything he taught me and more; I was the goddamn best. But it doesn't fucking matter, because I let my little brother die. Right in front of me."

"No," Sam says flatly. "The only one responsible was the striga."

"You survived in this world," Dee says. "Dad actually trained your brother, and because of that you survived. It seems pretty simple to me."

"Dean wasn't even there," Sam says. "I don't remember, but he told me about it, a long time ago, when we found the striga again. He got bored and went to play video games. If Dad hadn't come back in time, I would have been dead here just the same as in your universe." He rubs this thumb along her knuckles. "Dee. You did your best. Do you honestly think anyone would have blamed you for that? Because I never would."

Still holding his hand, she scoots a couple inches closer, and in a gesture that just about stops his heart, she lays her head on his shoulder.

"I love you, you know," she says conversationally. "It's stupid. But I'm not your brother, and I'm not even your sister. I haven't been anybody's sister for decades. And I spend every fucking moment of the day with you, and you're you, and so I just- can't help it."

Sam feels his hand tighten around her fingers. "Dee," he says helplessly. His skin is buzzing. His heart is in his throat. "Dee."

"I'm sorry," she says into his collarbone. "I know it messes everything up, this is not why Castiel brought me over, I'm so fucking sorry."

Sam closes his eyes. "Oh, baby, if you only knew," he sighs, very softly.

He feels her move away from his side, and when he opens his eyes she's on her knees in front of him and staring at him from a distance of about two inches away. "Don't tell me," she breathes. He smiles back at her, a little lopsided.

"You're not my brother," he says, as if that's explanation. When she catches her breath, he realizes that maybe, for her, it is. Who could possibly understand better than she?

She tips her head down till her forehead is resting on his. It feels like one of the most intimate moments he's ever had, both of them stripped bare of secrets and breathing each other's air. "It's still stupid, you know," she murmurs.

"I don't care," he murmurs back. "I've been twisting my head around like an idiot trying to get around this, and now you're here with me and I just don't care. I've had to sacrifice enough in my life, you know? I want just one thing, just this one thing, that I can have and be happy."

"I know," she says, and in her voice he hears all the loss, the long years of loneliness and longing and grief, wounds that Castiel's presence bandaged but never healed. The lover that she had there, in her world, someone she cared about more than she liked to admit- Sam knows instinctually that she lost him just like she lost all the rest. It's probably how Castiel convinced her to give it up and cross over, a chance at a fresh start. A new partner. A second chance.

"We deserve this," he tells her. "Dee, baby, we deserve this so much. I know that this is probably going to go horribly wrong and I know you know that this is probably going to go horribly wrong, but I just don't care. I love you. Please don't tell me you're going to let a little thing like common sense get in the way."

"Well, hell, when you put it that way," she says, and Sam opens his eyes and looks cross-eyed at her face so close to his, and he can see that she's smiling. Hell, she's grinning.

Sam has wanted to kiss that grin longer than he can even admit to himself, so he scoops her up in his arms, tumbles her into his lap, and does just exactly that. She laughs and flails a little, but he just keeps kissing her and kissing her and then she's kissing him back, her arms wrapped around his shoulders fiercely, like she can hold him to her against the entire world just from the force of her will.

They sit there in the grass at the foot of Dean's empty grave and they kiss so long that Sam loses track of time, and it's the best thing in the world. It feels like benediction, like wherever Dean's soul went when Michael burned him clean, he can see them and he's happy for them. The late spring sunlight warms his shoulders, and it feels like Dean's hand, solid and approving and affectionate. I'm here, it feels like he's saying, I'm here and it's okay to be happy.

"It's okay to be happy," Sam murmurs into Dee's mouth, and she laughs low and thick.

"It totally is," she tells him, and then they lay down in the warm grass in the middle of the day where the world can see, and she proves it to him.

And it feels right. It feels just exactly right.

~*~

Several hours of shouting behind them, Sam found himself sitting on the back porch with Dee beside him, watching the sunset over the tops of the trees. Sam was utterly exhausted, only a couple hours of sleep after a long hunt and a longer drive today, and the light show was starting to take on a surreal quality, making Sam wonder if some of the more spectacular colors were actually there or just in his head.

Sam glanced over to his left and saw that Deanna was perched as tentatively on the edge of the step as if she could just lean forward and fly away. Her hands were tucked between her thighs to ward off the gathering chill, and she looked so utterly different from his brother, smaller and delicate even under the obvious muscle and sort of ethereal, like she could just fade out if he didn't keep looking at her directly. Dean was always larger-than-life, solid and there even when he was right on the verge of death, living his life with a physicality that Sam always found baffling. This woman couldn't possibly be some version of his brother, the man Sam could still feel in the car with him like some kind of ghost after the Hellhounds took him.

Then she turned to look at him, and she had the same steady gaze of Dean's, that always pierced Sam right to the heart. Her eyes were the same shade of green-tinged hazel, she had the same overfull mouth that could turn to sneer or smile with equal ease, and the stubborn thrust of her jaw was exactly the same.

"I didn't know that you didn't ask for this," she said unevenly. "It's been- god damn it, Castiel was in my world for years, and he never told me that. I wouldn't have said yes if I knew."

Oh fuck me, thought Sam reflexively. Except Dean knew better and he still said yes, which was even worse.

"I'm so sorry," she said, her shoulders hunched with anxious shame. "I can't go back, but I'll stay out of your way. You won't have to deal with me on top of everything else-"

His hand was on her arm before his brain even had a chance to react, causing her to stutter into silence. "Stay," he told her, and it was only after he said it that he realized he meant it. "Stay with me."

She bit her lip, looking down at his hand on her arm like she'd never seen one before. Then she looked back up at him, and her gaze was both knowing and kind. "I'm not him, kiddo."

It stuttered his heart to hear that on her lips, the one name that Dad used to call him and Dean never did. "I know you're not," he told her, and she'd never realize how much of the truth that really was. She was Dean, kind of, in a theoretical way that he could only barely grasp- but also in the more concrete way that's visible in the tilt of her head and the way she holds her body. Now that she was looking right at him he could see the same heavy, physical charm that Dean always exuded into every space he inhabited. But she was also the same woman that had smiled at Sam on Bobby's front porch and Sam had thought that she was the most beautiful girl in the world.

"I know you're not Dean," he repeated, and made himself smile at her. "You're Deanna Winchester."

She smiled back, tentative and all brand new. "My friends call me Dee."

~*~

The crazy thing is, it works out. They get their goddamn happily ever after.

Neither one of them ever saw that one coming.

.end.