Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

For one split, haunting second, Dean doesn’t recognize him. He’s distracted by the man sitting three rows from the front, leaning in too close to Jo’s side, speaking softly with his lips against her ear. He has dark skin and dark eyes and the look of a jailbird dodging parole. After a lifetime of living off of gut decisions, Dean thinks he knows a liability when he sees one.

It takes a half-smile from Jo and the sound of scraping chairs to remind him that the little jailbird is just one of five, so he glances quickly at the rest of them, positioned in the back with an eye towards the whole room.

When everyone is settled in their rickety classroom chairs, Ellen lights a cigarette and murmurs, “Good, you’re all here.”

It’s between the flicker of her silver plated lighter and Ellen’s first inhale that Dean sees him. His hair is long, longer than their father would have ever allowed it, styled back behind his ears and sun-dyed auburn. Adrenaline tunnels Dean’s vision with each inhale and dulls the sound of Ellen’s voice until all he can think is that Sammy’s childhood wish came true, because he has a solid few inches on Dean in each damn direction.

Dean can’t tell how long it takes for his head to catch up to his heartbeat, how long he spends staring at the edge of his little brother’s jaw line. It’s like time has drifted on and it was only seconds ago that Sam was just seventeen, underfed and self-righteous.

He catches a stray hand gesture from where Ellen is standing, laying down the law, and he forces his attention back towards the front of the room. Even with his heart beating like a tripped alarm, he keeps his feet still, his arms crossed. He’s heard the rundown already. He brushed out the details himself in the Harvelle bayside getaway at the end of a polished oak table.

“Now as far as introductions go, this is an alias job.” Ellen exhales smoke up towards the ceiling. “I’m sick of you fuckers taking plea deals and ratting each other out in the interrogation room.”

She points at each man in turn, starting with the jailbird and a murmured, “From this point onwards, you’re Mr. Blonde.”

Sam is assigned to orange, his least favorite color as a child, and when she ends with Dean, declaring him Mr. White, Sam twists in his chair. Their eyes meet and God, he looks just the same even as his breathing stutters and his jaw tightens. Seconds stretch on in Dean’s strange, taffy-pulled time and Sam is turning back to face Ellen.

“Wait a minute,” snaps the man to Sam’s right. He looks about Dean’s age, with pale, sallow skin and a row of gritted white teeth. “Why the fuck am I Mr. Pink?”

“You got a problem with pink?” Ellen asks, eyebrows raised.

Pink shrugs, glancing around the room like he’s expecting some kind of murmured agreement. “I mean yeah, a little bit. It’s just, there’s so many colors out there and you went ahead and assigned me pink. What about purple, huh? I could live with purple.”

Ellen stubs out her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe, exhaling smoke through her nose. “You think it’s fucking feminine, do you?”

He sits back, his hands raised in immediate surrender at the tone of her voice. “Alright, alright, Ellen, no offence. Just thought I’d ask, that’s all.”

“Then think again next time,” she says. “And don’t you dare open that mouth to talk back to me, boy, or I’ll have you out on the sidewalk before you can say pussy.” Jo hides her smile with a hand splayed over her lips and Sam’s eyes stay fixed to the tiled floor at his feet.

“Right. Anyone else have complaints about their names?” Ellen asks. There’s absolute silence as she continues, “And does everyone know each other’s names? Good. Because that’s the only fucking thing you’re gonna know. I don’t want any personal details. Not a single one. Don’t mention where you served time, don’t mention your hometown, don’t mention your favorite fucking vacation spot because cops are getting generous these days. Understood? Good. Then we meet at eight on Tuesday morning. Don’t be late.”

The men file out of their makeshift boardroom and Dean forces himself not to watch them, not to look anywhere other than the old public school desk that Ellen is leaning against. She catches Dean’s eye once the door finally clicks shut and summons him to the front of the room with a soft, “Well, c’mere.”

“So?” She asks.

“So,” Dean repeats, tapping his fingers against his leg. He feels like he’s waltzing through a precinct with blood diamonds tucked away in his pockets. For a moment, it hurts to breathe. “You sure about these guys?”

“Most of them,” she admits.

“Those are worrying odds, Elle.”

“My gut’s at ninety-nine percent,” she says. “Where’s yours?”

“Closer to seventy.” He pauses, trying not to count the seconds it has been since his brother walked out that door. “What’s Blondie’s story?”

Ellen follows his gaze. “Don’t you worry about Mr. Blonde. We go back, farther than even you and I do, boy. He’s rough around the edges these days, but he’s damn good at his job. And he’s loyal. If that gut of yours is at seventy, make sure you’re watching the rest of them.”

She doesn’t leave room for questions, no space for Dean to say that loyalty isn’t what worries him here, that Blondie looks like he has an itchy trigger finger and wants a boy in blue for a target. Instead, Dean gives a false salute and says, “If you trust him, then I do.”

“Good man,” Ellen calls after him.

The sidewalk is clear when the door swings shut behind him and Dean digs out his sunglasses with a habitual wipe of his shirtsleeve across the lenses. He takes a left at the first turn in the road, like muscle memory, and then another. Sure enough Sam is just around the corner, standing against the brick wall of an auto repair shop closed for the weekend.

Dean grabs him roughly by the elbow and walks him back towards the main drag with a snarled, “Don’t say a fucking word. Keep a look out for stragglers.”

“They’re gone,” Sam says, struggling to find his footing. “I waited, watched them all leave.” His voice is so familiar, deeper than before, but only just.

“Then walk.” He shoves Sam ahead of him, watching the road and peeking down alleyways until they’re close enough to the Impala for Sam to tuck himself into the passenger seat. When he’s sure that no one is sparing them a second glance and that Jo isn’t hanging around with her usual gang of mutts waiting on her momma to pick up shop, Dean gets in the car and reverses into the street.

He has a house on the outskirts of Anaheim, rent paid in cash to the wealthy daughter of a Los Angeles real estate mogul, but he knows better than to bring Sam within a half mile of his current mailing address.

Instead, he drives north towards the mountains, where little travel lodges dot the highway for hikers and climbers and fucking tree huggers who flock like moths to Hines Peak. They sit in traffic with their windows down, cooking on the half-finished route of highway two-ten, until finally they’re far enough from the city to detour onto back roads and through old suburbs. They’re silent all the way to Castaic, with Sam staring resolutely out the window and Dean watching him from the corner of his eye, hungry for any detail of his little brother that he might have missed.

He’s clean-shaven, with wide sideburns and a strength to his jaw that wasn’t there when Dean was lathering him up with shaving cream and teaching him how to hold a razor. He smells of the pomade he used to slick back his hair and sweat from the summer heat. There’s a scar along his temple, curving into his hairline, barely noticeable but for Sam’s sun dark skin.

He pulls into a half empty motel parking lot dotted with Jeeps and little compact Acura Legends with yin-yang bumper stickers and California flags waiving from radio antennas. Dean throws open the door with the car barely in park and pops the trunk, digging for an old tee from his duffle. He changes into a Steely Dan shirt, tapping his bare feet against the hot blacktop as he swaps out his loafers for boots. This isn’t the place for a man in business attire and Dean sure as hell isn’t looking to draw attention to himself.

“Stay in the car,” he tells Sam through the cracked window. “I’ll get us a room.” Sam’s eyes drift down the front of his chest and he nods, pulling unconsciously at the cuffs of his dress shirt.

The lobby is a sickening seventies nightmare of dirty shag carpets and lime green walls and Dean feels oddly at home. He offers an easy, “Howdy,” to the kid at the front desk and asks for two queens.

“Where’s the other sleeper?” He asks, idly running his finger down a thickly bound roster.

“Back in the car,” he says. “Getting our bags sorted. We head for Alamo Mountain at dawn.”

The kid nods his greasy head like he’s heard that exact sentence a dozen times today and he hands Dean two keys with a dismissive smile. “Your room’s around back,” he says.

Sam is stripped down to his dress shirt, sleeves rolled up as he sweats through his slacks.

“Come on,” Dean says, grabbing his bag and gesturing for Sam to follow. They check the locks on the car doors like the little toy soldiers they once were and head for the rooms lined along the back of the lodge.

The entry way is dark and musty, smelling of cigarette smoke and a floral chemical cleaner, and for a moment he loses himself in childhood déjà vu, like he’s walked through this very door a dozen times before. Behind him, Sam fumbles for the light switch and floods the room with an eerie orange glow. The sight of his brother in the familiar damp of motel fluorescence is like a scene from one of his most vivid nightmares, the ones where his little brother follows in John Winchester’s footsteps. The slow, ticking realization that Sam may have inherited more than just their father’s dark lashes and humidity curled hair triggers something in Dean, something vicious and scared and buried deep.

He shoves Sam against the door and punches him hard enough to break his nose— and it would’ve too, if he hadn’t jerked to the side just in time for Dean to barely catch his cheek bone. Sam scrambles back, blocking Dean’s hits until he swipes his feet out from under him, sending them both tumbling to the floor. They struggle for a moment, teenagers again as Dean straddles his waist, his knees digging into the carpet as he pins his brother’s hands above his head.

“Dean,” Sam whispers through bloodied teeth. “Stop.”

“What the fuck, Sammy?” He asks, breathing heavy as his lungs work overtime to recover from the delayed shock of seeing his estranged brother for the first time in eleven years. “What the fuck are you doing here, huh?”

Sam wrings his fingers from Dean’s grip and reaches for his face, cupping his cheek even as Dean flinches away from his touch.

“Look at you,” Sam says, tracing the lines around his eyes with his thumb, allowing his fingers to fall against his jawline. He smiles then, meeting Dean’s eyes for the first time since he walked through the door of that rundown school building. “You’ve gotten old.”

“Fuck off, Sam,” he says, pushing off of him and tumbling to his side, fingers cupped over his bruised knuckles. Sam is sitting up, pressing his sleeve against his split lip.

“What are you doing here?” Dean asks again, quiet and too afraid of the answer to watch him say it.

“I’m working a job, same as you.”

“No, Sam, that’s not - ” he pauses, unsure what to say. “You were - ”

“Out?” Sam asks, turning to face him, blood drying in smears against his chin. “Took me all of two years on my own to find out that you never really get out of this, Dean.”

Dean shakes his head, his stomach tightening into stone. “No, no, Sammy.”

He sent his brother to college with a few grand saved from a handful of dock heists and some cheap pulls from poker games played with stacked decks. Their father drank himself blind at the sight of Sam’s acceptance letter so Dean helped him pack his things and walked to him to the Greyhound bus stop in Lafayette, Louisiana. It broke his heart to do it, to adjust the baseball cap shading his eyes, to buy him a coke and a pre-made sandwich from the general store and tell him to do good, to keep his head down. The boy he raised was going to college to live a Santa Monica life with a handful of kids and a white picket fence.

“I’m so proud of you,” he’d whispered, pulling him into a hug when he was still just Dean’s height and not an inch taller. “You’ll do so well, you’re so fucking smart.”

Sam had wiped away tears with clenched teeth and whispered instead of speaking. “You’ll call?”

“Of course.” It was a lie, because Dean had no intention of tethering his baby brother back to the nest. He knew where he was headed, either a ten-year sentence or the cold hard ground, courtesy of a bullet from a police issued semi-automatic. Instead, he spared his brother the inevitable heartbreak and sent Sam off to Palo Alto with every dime he had. All he kept in return was the memory of Sam’s profile through the darkened bus window.

“I tried,” Sam begins, like floodgates opening. “I got some shop cleaning jobs and worked a diner shift in the evenings after class. I saved the money you gave me for textbooks and groceries, but it couldn’t last me forever. It wasn’t all bad,” he assures him. “The line chef at work always gave me dinner for free and no one ever cut my hours. But eventually my shifts got longer and my grades started slipping and in my third year they threatened to pull my housing stipend. I had to quit one of my jobs to give myself more time to study but then I was always, always short on cash. Sometimes short on food. I was exhausted,” he says, and he looks it now, eyes dark and hooded.

“Then I got my new roommate and I realized pretty quick that he was dealing pot on the side.” Dean exhales his name and Sam turns to him with a wry smile. “I wanted to go to law school, you know. But I couldn’t keep working long hours while scrambling to study. I needed a high LSAT score to pull another scholarship, since my grades had already taken a beating. So I made a deal with him, thought it’d only be temporary.”

“Sammy,” he whispers. “What happened?”

Sam tips his head up towards the ceiling, his palms flat against the carpet. “It wasn’t temporary.”

Dean follows his imaginary timeline across the cracking drywall. Eight years ago, when his brother was struggling to keep it together, turning up half asleep to pre-law lectures because he worked until the breakfast shift, Dean was looting yachts tied up in San Diego. He broke into a dozen boats in the span of one evening and made off with enough in jewels alone to make a down payment on a house near the water. Their father always said that the class acts retired to Connecticut with all the other politicians and thieves, and at twenty-four Dean had the money to do just that.

He quit, at least for a while, busying himself with a job at an auto repair shop specializing in European imports. His house was freshly painted and he had one of those refrigerators with a built in ice dispenser and a kitchen with a greenhouse window and a working thermostat. He lived in a neighborhood of Westport families who playacted perfect little visages of apple pie lives. He attended weekend barbecues and watched fireworks shows and he had a neighbor named Josh who called him ‘Deano.’

He tried so hard to be something more than just a criminal, to be the kind of man that could belong in his little brother’s imaginary life, and his breath hitches at the thought of Sam working street sales while Dean spent his weekends in lawn chairs. Sam was right about one thing though, it’s damn hard to stay away.

“Jesus, Sammy, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Sam says, his eyes following the same lines in the dry wall. “Just one thing led to another, you know? There’s a lot of money in drugs these days. I’m a better thief though, as it turns out.”

“You should’ve gone to law school,” Dean says, not quite sure if he meant to say it out loud. “I should’ve been the one to send you there, to pay for the books, and tuition, and - ”

“Well,” Sam begins, cutting him off. “I did go. I mean, for a year. Then there was a big warehouse job, lifting morphine from a transport facility. After that, one of the bosses took notice and I just - ” He shrugs, exhaling. “I stopped going.”

He looks guilty, like he expects Dean to be disappointed, like he can barely get the words out. Dean all but tackles him back to the floor, straddling his hips and wrapping his arms around him and holding him to his chest like he should have done the second he saw him in that abandoned fucking schoolroom. Sam gasps into his collarbone and fists his t-shirt in his hands.

“God, I missed you.” Dean has been waiting to say it for years, certain that he would never get the chance.

“I missed you too,” he answers, his voice muffled against Dean’s skin. Dean tucks his chin over the top of Sam’s head, turns his nose into his hair, and breathes in.

He has eleven years of confessions. Eventually he’ll have to tell him how their father died with his fingers stretched towards Dean’s, how the coroner counted seven shells in his chest and it still took him a full minute to bleed out. But that can come later, when the lamps are switched off and they’re tucked into their respective beds, whispering across the gap like they used to do as children.

For now, though, Sam’s arms are tight around his waist and Dean’s old knees are beginning to ache and neither of them say a word.

—

Dean has spent most of his adult life imagining his brother’s. In the haze of early morning light, he has dreamed up gym memberships and black BMWs and office jobs in shiny San Francisco. He’s imagined him settling down with his college sweetheart, an art student from Idaho or Orlando or Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. He’s decorated a hundred different apartment buildings in every city across California’s coast. In Dean’s daydreams, Sammy always stayed in California.

And now, with his little brother just an arm’s length away, he doesn’t even know where to begin. So he starts somewhere simple, as Sam makes himself comfortable with two pillows stacked under his elbow, his hand resting at his temple. “Do you still live in California?”

Sam looks away, as if his first question was really the hardest. “I move a lot,” he admits. “You know, depending on the job. And sometimes I end up staying a while.” It’s the story of their lives, only a sliver of the blame that lies at John’s feet. “But now, I guess, I kind of live in Maryland.”

“Baltimore?” Dean asks. He remembers it well; six months working a shipping heist and telling seven year-old Sammy that Daddy was a sailor like Popeye.

“No, closer to the Chesapeake. I have a house there, but I’m renting.”

“Are you - was there ever - ”

“A girl?” He asks, letting Dean down easy with a smile. He sounds like he’s twelve and curled beside him in a makeshift blanket fort, reading The Lord of the Rings with a flashlight and giggling at Dean’s attempts to pronounce their made up fucking names.

“Yeah. Or I don’t know, a dog? A white picket fence to go with that house of yours?”

“There were a few,” he says, turning on his back to face the ceiling. “Some stayed longer than others. But you know this life isn’t really made for that.”

Dean hums in agreement, because he can remember their father telling him exactly the same thing when he was still young enough for it to break his heart to leave cheerleaders and diner waitresses to their sprawling suburbs. “I’m sorry,” he says, for the hundredth time that night. “You deserved better.”

“I like my life,” Sam assures him, tracing idle patterns in the air with his fingers. “And now you’re here,” he sighs.

“Not going anywhere,” he says and Sam’s smile turns forced.

“I know, it’s just - I’m worried.”

“Me too,” Dean says, because his stakes haven’t been this high since he was twenty-one with a little brother waiting for him in a roadside motel. “But afterwards - afterwards you know I’m not running.”

“Or maybe we’ll both run. Start somewhere new, get out of the life.” He’s smiling, like the idea is something impossible and sweet.

“Deal,” Dean says, shifting closer to the edge of the bed. “We finish this job and we can go where ever you want.”

“For real?” Sam asks, turning to face him. “You’ll give it up?”

“Done it once already, kiddo, and you were all the way in California. This is as good a place to end as any.”

“Wherever we want,” Sam breathes.

“Pick a city, Sammy, any city.”

Sam grins into his pillowcase. “I’ll think about it. In the meantime, tell me something, whatever really, but tell me about you.”

Dean starts with Connecticut, recounting his brush with suburbia and its many mysteries. He tells him about his first heist out of temporary retirement, how he learned to crack a model eighty Brown safe and was worshiped by his entire team for a full minute and a half before he tripped the alarm. He glosses over prison, keeps it quick, reminds him that Georgia is the same muggy, fly breeding hellhole that it was when they were kids.

It’s enough, for a while, to watch from a distance as the expressions blend together on his brother’s face. He watches each reaction, cataloguing every snort of laughter and every quick inhale. Sam offers a few stories of his own, but mostly he just listens.

When Sam finally asks about John, Dean coaxes him over to his bed with a soft, “Yeah, alright. C’mere.”

He moves away from the edge, making room enough for them both. As Sam settles in beside him, Dean wraps his arm around his shoulders and pulls him close. He’s all muscle now with no give, but something about him still feels the same. He switches off the light and Sam rests his head on Dean’s shoulder, listening as Dean tells him that their father is dead, that he died years and years ago on a job working muscle for a narco gang in Chicago.

“Glad you got out of the drug trade, Sammy,” he murmurs into his hair. “Gangs are a fucking death sentence. A job’s a job but that shit ends only one way.” He can feel the damp slide of Sam’s tears against his skin and he kisses top of his head, allowing his lips to linger.

“God.” Sam’s voice is breaking. “He died hating me.”

“No,” Dean says, adjusting his hold. “No, no, he didn’t hate you. He was so fucking proud of you and so ashamed of how he raised you, and Sammy, he loved you more than anything.” Dean served as the contrast that highlighted Sam’s heart of gold and John reminded him of it every chance he got.

“Do you promise?” Sam asks, his voice hoarse. “That this is it, that we’re done afterwards?”

Dean runs his fingers through his brother’s hair, thick and soft to the touch. “Yeah, I promise.” And of course he does, of course, because the second he laid eyes on his little brother his heart was set on something more than diamonds.

“We’ll have to be careful,” Sam says, his voice soft as if he’s afraid to break the spell of motels at dawn. “On Tuesday, Ellen can’t suspect anything. And Jo spends most of her time watching you.” It’s suggestive and offhand and Dean knows what he’s going for.

“She’s a cute kid,” he admits. “But I more or less watched her grow up and she knows better. You’re right though, about Ellen. We arrive separate, we leave separate.”

“We can’t ignore each other,” Sam agrees. “But we shouldn’t interact too much.”

“You play bookworm, Sammy. I’ll play jock, just like the old days.” He looks up for just a moment and Dean thinks he sees something desperate in the glassy reflection of his eyes.

“It’ll be fine,” Sam says, though it sounds more like reflex than a reassurance.

“It will be,” he agrees. “I’ll take care of everything.”

“We should sleep,” Sam murmurs pushing himself up, turning towards the bed in the corner. Dean holds tight to the ridges of his shoulder, refusing to let go.

“Stay with me,” he says.

Sam laughs, a soft, broken sound. “Do you remember?” He asks collapsing back against Dean’s chest. “How angry Dad would get when he would wake up and find us in the same bed?”

“Yeah,” Dean says.

What he doesn’t tell him is that when Dean turned fourteen, their father sat him down and said, “Sam’s too old to be sleeping with you.”

Dean was quick to explain that Sam still had nightmares and it was too dark to sleep in some of those little backwater towns. He told him that it’s too cold, half the time, for a ten year-old who’s all skin and bones. He told him how Sam shivered and shook and that it took Dean wrapped around his shoulders to warm him.

John took one look at him and said, “Let me rephrase that. You’re too old to be sleeping with Sam. It stops now.” His tone had made Dean’s skin crawl and his stomach twist in unpleasant little sailor’s knots, and it wasn’t until he was years older that he finally understood why.

Dean arranges the pillows until he’s flat against the mattress, with Sam sprawled across his chest. He slots their legs together so that Sam’s knee rests against his thigh and their ankles twist and knock until finally they’re comfortable. Once they’re settled, Dean sighs into his brother’s hair and says, “Well I hope wherever our old man is now, that he can see us. The bastard. ”

—

Dean eyes open to an old flip dial alarm clock spinning out a shaky twelve twenty-four. His head aches from sleeping and he’s sticky from the afternoon heat. For all of a single second it doesn’t feel unusual to have the bed to himself in an empty motel room bathed in kitschy orange California sunlight. But that second passes quickly. Dean hasn’t stayed in a motel this shabby since he was working petty theft with John.

He sits up and pulls off his sweat soaked t-shirt, tossing it into a corner with Sam’s button-down that he left crumpled on the floor. He stretches, rolling his shoulders and his neck, working out the kinks as his body readjusts to the pains of sculpting itself around his little brother. He’s cracked nearly every vertebrae up to his neck when he spots a note left on Sam’s pillow, scratched onto motel stationary.

‘Coffee and burgers’ it reads in Sam’s fitful script. Dean smiles and shakes his head and presses buttons on the old-school seventies window unit until it coughs cold air. He thinks that Sam must have left an hour ago at least, if he managed to slip out of the room without waking him. So Dean showers with cold water, taking his time and lingering under the spray until the summer heat is long forgotten.

He steps out of the bathroom to Sam sitting back against the headboard, nibbling at a burger on a hard roll bun. He gestures vaguely towards a grease stained paper bag as Dean scrubs his hair with a towel.

“Yours is normal,” he says, smiling at Dean’s expression.

A few cups of gas station coffee are stacked on the bedside table and Dean’s burger is packed away in wax paper, lukewarm from nothing but the weather. “You’re a saint,” Dean tells him.

“Got more for dinner. We can just reheat it. There’s a microwave in the lobby. Told the front desk that you were sick, hiking trip canceled.”

“Yeah? And what did he say?”

“He thinks we’re fucking, obviously.”

Dean snorts into a handful of fries. “Good enough. As long as he doesn’t think we’re planning a heist.”

“I imagine we’re safe there.”

They eat in silence for a moment and he sinks into the familiar sound of Sam picking at his food, until he says, “We should probably leave tonight, anyway.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Sam says, like he’s raising a bet. “Let’s just stay here today. Please.”

They used to spend so many days locked away in hotel rooms, reading books and making up new rules to old board games with missing pieces. They would trace constellations and tell each other ghost stories to pass the time. Then Dean got old enough to tag along on jobs and stayed small enough to squeeze through holes in wire fences and little basement windows.

“You’re wearing my shirt,” he says, because he’s always been a coward compared to his fearless little brother.

“Not like you gave me time to grab a change of clothes.” It’s tight on him, a size too small.

“You look like an idiot.”

“Yeah, shut up.” Sam lies back with his hands on his stomach, their thighs pressed together as Dean licks ketchup from his fingertips. “I’m so fucking full. It’s a good thing we’re staying because it’ll be hours before I can move.” Sam always did have such a peculiar way of getting what he wanted.

“You picked apart half of your burger. You probably ate a fourth of it.”

“No I didn’t.” Sam’s eyes are closed and his cheeks are flushed from the heat.

“I’m looking at it right now. There’s three quarters of a burger there.”

“It’s a wonder I missed you at all,” Sam says wistfully, curling up on his side until his cheek is pressed against the hem of Dean’s boxer shorts.

He plays with the ends of Sam’s hair and murmurs, “You know, Ellen may try and call me. It’ll be strange if I’m not home between now and Tuesday.”

“So what?” Sam’s voice is muffled. “What’s there to be suspicious of? Say you were out getting blown by hookers. I don’t give a fuck. Does anyone even know you have a brother?”

Ellen always suspected that he had a kid tucked away somewhere. It’s an easy assumption to make because their social circles collect estranged fathers like postage stamps, but she always said that what gave him away was how he looked at Jo like he’d suddenly remembered something.

“Trust me,” she said once, passing him a lit cigarette. “I look at seven-year-olds now and I just see her blonde hair, remember how white it’d get in the summer. All those freckles.”

Dean looks at seven-year-olds and he sees Sam kicking around a beaten old soccer ball in an empty construction lot in Indiana. Dean would scrub the dirt from his face with a wet paper towel and Sam would do his best to bite at his fingertips. He even got him, once. So maybe he did kind of have a kid tucked away, one that came with eleven years of radio silence and the memory of their father’s rules about distance and propriety.

Now he looks down at his little boy, twenty-eight and tall enough for his feet to hang off the end of the bed, and he still sees a seven year-old with a soccer ball.

“No,” he says. “You’re right. We’ll stay. Just until tomorrow.“

Sam smiles like he’s won his bet. “Lay with me.”

“We just woke up,” Dean points out.

“I’ve been up since six,” Sam says, his eyes already closed. “Lay with me. Just for a couple of minutes.”

He remembers how Sam would crawl into Dean’s bed when their father was out on a job, murmuring, “Just a couple of minutes,” as his alarm clock worked through a snooze cycle. “‘I’ll go to school, I will. Just let me lay with you for a couple of minutes.”

Dean feels a sudden and inexplicable lump in his throat, so he lays down and shuts his eyes and let’s Sam murmur, “Thank you,” into his shoulder.

—

They meet in a diner off of Slater Street, far from the Arts District and the downtown traffic. He’s there before Ellen is, helping a waitress shove tables together and counting off place mats and silverware.

Ellen greets him with a firm handshake and a knowing grin. “You eyeing that girl, huh? Still breaking hearts?”

“Only occasionally,” Dean admits. The waitress is Los Angeles beautiful but southern sweet. “I don’t like to play on the job.”

“You lying dog,” Ellen says, taking a seat at the head of the table, gesturing for Dean to sit at her side. “I’ve seen you take home girls with a stack of stolen bills in your back pocket.” Dean ducks his head like he’s been caught and orders coffee for them both with an easy grin to the waitress. Her tag says Rose, written in sharpie marker, and Dean wonders if it’s her real name.

Mr. Blue is through the door next, taking a seat on the right side, his back to the wall. He’s the oldest out of all of them with greying hair to match his eyes. Everything else is unremarkable and Blue blends right in to the bustle of the cafe, forgettable and easy. He nods to them both and pulls out a rolled up copy of the Los Angeles Times. Dean meets Ellen’s eye and she smiles, shaking her head.

“Trust me,” she says, speaking low into Dean’s ear. “He’s not a talker, but he’s handy.”

Sam comes next, tipping his head and sitting down at the opposite end of the table. Blue doesn’t look up, instead he turns the page and begins reading the classifieds.

“Are we ordering?” Sam asks, his voice soft and polite as he glances down at the little laminated menus scattered across the table.

“Go for it, kid,” Ellen says just as Mr. Brown slips through the door. He’s young and mousey and Dean wonders how he even makes a living with those doe eyes of his. He greets them each with a hardy handshake and a taste of his Tennessee drawl.

Sam flags down the waitress, ordering coffee with sugar and cream for the table.

“Nothing to eat, Mr. Orange?” Dean asks, watching Sam set the menu aside.

“Maybe once everyone gets here,” he replies with an easy smile.

“Well I have a short stack on the way,” Dean says, turning to Brown. “And Ellen over here ordered a steak and eggs hash, so have at it.”

Mr. Pink comes through the door in dress sleeves and a Sunday suit and takes a seat next to Blue. “The conversation boring you, is it, Mr. Blue?” He asks, peaking over his shoulder at the newspaper. Sam watches them closely as if he’s expecting a response, but Blue only continues to read.

Mr. Blonde is the last to arrive with Jo at his heels, taking the empty seats to Sam’s left.

“Good,” Ellen says. “Everyone put in their order and once the girls get our food out here, we’ll talk business.”

They spend two hours in a cloud of cigarette smoke, running through the heist with a stopwatch in hand, timing everything down to the second. Brown asks rapid fire questions about the buildings on each side of the jewelry store, asks for the make and model of the alarm system, the distance to the closest fire station. “Sometimes they answer alarm calls, you know.”

“Not anymore,” Sam says. He’s stayed mostly silent, content to watch and take direction. “Theft alarms aren’t wired to fire alarms, haven’t been since eighty-six.”

“You’ve done your research,” Ellen says with a nod of approval.

Sam stares down at his napkin. “I’ve been fucked by alarms one time too many.”

“I hear you,” Blonde says, stirring his cold coffee. “Alarms fucked me too.”

Blue watches, his eyes flittering from face to face before stopping on Blonde. Dean is certain that he knows exactly what he’s thinking. “Right,” Dean says. “Back to it.”

Sam doesn’t say another word until Ellen stands to tally the bill and he thanks her for breakfast. She watches him, a curious tilt to her head, and answers, “You’re welcome.”

Dean barely listens to Jo’s little spat with Pink about his refusal to tip the waitresses, instead he’s watching Sam as he folds his napkin into a neat little square, piling it on top of his plate with his silverware. So little has changed in eleven years and as Sam hands over his share of the tip and then some, Dean thinks he must have done something right. His boy turned out to be a criminal despite his college degree, but at least he has some fucking manners.

“Alright boy,” Ellen says, her hands resting on Dean’s shoulders. “When are you gonna take them on the drive by?”

“Sunday,” Dean says. “When everything’s closed. I’ll take Orange and Pink. Blue can have the rest.”

Ellen snorts. “Fine. But you’re taking Jo along too.”

He grimaces as Ellen shakes his hand, sealing the deal. “You’re killing me, Elle.”

“She’ll behave,” Ellen says. It’s a lie and they both know it, but he makes a show of scowling either way.

“Alright,” he says, standing with a loud scrape of the cheap diner chair. “Sunday at one o’clock. Orange, Pink, and Joanna Beth are with me.”

“Fuck you, White. It’s Jo.”

Dean twirls his hand in a mock bow and heads for the door. He knows Sam will wait for Blue to shuffle out after him, chatting idly with Brown and avoiding eye contact with Pink. It will take a few minutes to make his excuses, so Dean waits by the Impala and squints up at the hazy glare of the California sun.

Sam walks past him, head down, hands in his pockets. “Restaurant called Riley’s in Arleta. Six o’clock.”

“There’s restaurants out there?” Sam doesn’t answer and Dean watches him go, leaning on the Impala until he finally turns a corner.

—

“Alright,” Dean says, shoving a handful of fries into his mouth as Sam picks at some fucking rabbit wrap with whole wheat. “Here’s the deal. I don’t trust Blonde as far as I can toss him.”

“Agreed,” Sam says. “I’m not too keen on Mr. Pink either, he seems like an opportunist.”

“We’re all opportunists, kiddo. That’s why we’re in this line of business.”

Sam shrugs and reaches for the pickle stuck with a toothpick on Dean’s plate. He bites through it with an audible crunch, just like when they were kids and Sam would collect everyone’s dill pickles within seconds of their dishes hitting the table. Dean grew to like pickles, kind of like he grew to like caviar and shrimp cocktail and well prepared sushi, but he doesn’t have the heart to say it.

“More than most,” Sam clarifies, taking a sip of water. “Mr. Blue and Mr. Brown seem run of the mill.”

“Agreed. So it’s Blondie and Pinkie we’ll look out for.” Sam fiddles with the toothpick, shuffling stray bits of tomato goo around his plate. “Hey,” he says gently, forcing Sam to look up at him. “It’ll be okay. We agreed, right? After this job, we’ll be done.”

“Yeah,” Sam answers, a hollow, quiet sound.

“And it’s pretty low risk, this thing. Low security. I know you and I have both have worked gigs ten times as dangerous for half the payout.”

Sam’s eyes flitter back down to his wrap, though he doesn’t touch it. “I have a bad feeling, Dean. Maybe we should just - ” He pauses, a quick exhale. “Maybe I should back out. Then you can wait a day and do the same. Say you’re not on board without the original line up.”

“It’ll be fine, Sam. Our pull will be enough to set us up, for us to start back on the straight and narrow. Hey, who knows, maybe you can go back to school.”

He ducks his head like the thought still brings a sting of shame that he never quite shook off. “Maybe,” he says, and it’s as close to an agreement as Dean is going to get.

—

It was easy enough to explain to a five year-old that Mom lives in heaven, in a place far away where angels take your soul to keep. All he had to do was say that she watched over them and she always would. Dean never really did believe it, especially not at nine years old with little Sammy balanced on his knees, but he damn well made it convincing.

Sam would lay his head against Dean’s chest, his hair baby soft against his throat, and say, “Tell me about heaven.”

Dean must have described a hundred heavens in the course of his brief childhood. He told Sam about marshmallow clouds, about chocolate fountains and feather soft beds and learning to fly with angel wings. When they got older, he described the ocean, temperate and calm, with child-sized sailboats dotting the horizon. Sometimes, heaven was just a house in a tiny suburban neighborhood like the kinds they saw in New England, cozy and a little Stepford Wives, with doors that opened into playrooms with infinite supplies of toys.

“There’s no bugs in heaven, right Dean?” Sam would ask, eyeing dead roaches overturned in a motel bathtub.

“Not a single one,” Dean would agree.

When Sam turned ten, his questions grew harder to answer and Dean learned that there was no easy way to explain the motel rooms, or the fake drivers’ licenses, or their father’s perpetual absences broken by quick getaways.

“We’re running from the bad guys, Sammy,” eventually led to questions about why Daddy was scared of policemen. He asked why they used fake names at school, why he bothered to learn Winchester in careful script if they were just going to be the Johnson’s again. He asked why they didn’t have a hometown, not like all the friends he made, friends who grew up in Salt Lake City or just off the corner of Queen’s Boulevard and Fifty-Fourth Street.

“You know, kiddo,” he’d said one night, holding Sam close and eyeing the beat up old library books stacked on the bedside table. “It’s kinda like Robin Hood.”

“We give to the poor?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, well, we steal from the rich, anyway. Rich people who break all the rules that normal people have to follow, who step on everyone to push themselves higher. It’s just part of life, you know? Bankers cheat and cheat and cheat until guys like Dad finally bring them down a notch.”

“That’s not so bad,” Sam said, humming as Dean ran his fingers through the thick curls at the base of his neck.

“No,” Dean agreed. “It’s not so bad.”

He still sees the shadow of his optimistic little ten year-old in the man sitting on the edge of a motel bed, pulling his shoes off and tucking his socks into the heel.

“What?” Sam asks, catching him staring.

“Nothing,” Dean says with a smile.

Sam doesn’t dwell on it. Instead he unbuttons his shirt and pulls off his belt and stretches his hands high above his head. “We ready for bed?” He asks.

Dean won’t fall asleep for hours. “Sure,” he says.

They take turns spitting toothpaste over the shallow grooves of a shell sink and Dean gargles with tap water while Sam rolls his eyes. It’s familiar, like they could have always had this if only Dean hadn’t left his little brother at a bus stop with no intention of ever seeing him again. Sam sets the rattling old air conditioner to its highest setting and crawls into the bed farthest from the door.

“You can have your pick, you know,” Dean says, settling himself against the pillows. "You're all grown up now." When they were kids, John always had the bed closest to the door. He said it was a precaution, just in case, and Dean didn't understand the sentiment until he was much older.

“No,” Sam says, his voice soft. “It’s okay. Actually - Dean. I wanted to ask something, you know, about after I left.”

Sam is fiddling with his hands, picking at the skin along the edges of his fingernails and Dean smiles as he reaches for the lamp. “Jesus, Sammy, if you wanted to share, you only had to ask. No reason to make up excuses.”

Sam laughs, a soft nervous sound as he makes room for Dean on the bed. “I’m really not - ”

“I don’t mind,” Dean insists, cutting him off. “Questions or no questions, kiddo, I don’t mind.”

Sam settles down against the mattress, working himself up to whatever is stuck under his tongue, so Dean takes the initiative to tug his body closer, settling his arm loose around his waist. Sam entwines their fingers at the tips, tightening his hold in nervous little flutters.

“You wanna talk about Dad?” He asks, finally.

“I just - ” He begins and Dean thinks that he loves this boy more than all the diamonds in Africa.

“It broke his heart to let you leave,” he says. “But he was so glad we did. He never wanted that life for you. I don’t think he was imagining law school, you know, but he wanted something else.”

“What about you?” Sam whispers. “What about your life?”

Dean thinks about telling him that the first time he killed a man he was just seventeen. John had patted him on the back and sent him home to find his little brother fast asleep on the couch, clutching a copy of Treasure Island to his chest. He snuck into the bathroom without waking him and let the fan and the running water drown out the sounds of his desperate, chest aching sobs. When he finally pulled himself together enough to dry off and get dressed and carry his little brother back to bed, he decided that he’d pull the trigger each and every time if it meant Sam didn’t have to.

Instead, Dean pulls him closer, knocking their knees together, and says, “I liked it, you know? Hated school, hated my part-times. But you were so fucking smart and ambitious and I knew when you were just five that you’d get out. And Dad was slow on the up take with you, but he knew it too, I promise.”

Sam takes a shuttering breath through his mouth and Dean knows what is caught in his lungs. “You were his fucking pride and joy. So much like him, it’s why you two were at each other’s throats all the time."

“Did he miss me?” Sam whispers against his skin, barely audible.

Dean wipes the tears away from his temple, thumbing over the damp of his hairline. “Yeah, yeah he did. Of course he did. He beat himself up over not giving you a proper send off. Even just the next day, you know. When he’d sobered up enough.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam murmurs, wiping at his eyes, trying to pull away only for Dean to hold him steady.

“I know what I did must’ve fucked you up,” he begins, tracing patterns over his brother’s bare skin.

“No, no, Dean, don’t. I understand, I promise. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, you know? And I would’ve done the same exact thing.”

“But you ended up here anyway. And with no one to help you through it. If I’d checked in on you - ”

“No,” Sam says. “Don’t think like that. Please, I’m happy it turned out like this.”

Dean breathes him in. “You sure about that, kiddo? You live in Maryland.”

Sam laughs, wet and congested. “It’s not so bad anymore. Most places aren’t so bad anymore.”

Their childhood was a whirlwind tour of the worst of the continental U.S. “You’re probably right about that.”

Sam falls silent and Dean cradles him close. They’re both sweating despite the air conditioner’s best efforts and Sam’s cheeks are still damp, but his eyes are closed now and Dean would count every lash if he could. Sometimes, Dean wishes John had something in the way of last words, something other than blood bubbling up past his lips. He wants more to give Sam, some kind of justification for how their lives turned out.

All he ever offered Dean in the way of explanation was a snarled, “You want to get thrown into the system instead? Think how long Sammy would last there. I’m the best you’ve got. Both of you.” Every word was said over too much whisky and too little sleep. For the first time, he finds himself wishing he’d asked more often.

“He loved you,” Dean says softly, but Sam is already asleep, his breathing heavy and even. “Not as much as I did, but enough.”

—

Sunday is Los Angeles hazy and everything is hot to the touch when Dean picks Sam up from a crumbling little apartment just outside of Compton.

“You should’ve let me drive,” Jo says, arms crossed in the passenger seat as they wait for Sam to make an appearance.

“In your dreams, sweetheart. You know I love you, but I love my baby more.”

“Watch your mouth, Dean,” she says. “Don’t want me mentioning to Momma that you’ve become a cradle robber in your old age.”

“Ellen finds me charming,” he says, noting Pink’s snort of disbelief from the backseat. Dean’s eyes flicker up to the rear view mirror. “Well she certainly don’t find you charming, Pinkie.”

“Fuck off, White.”

Sam folds himself into the backseat before Dean can offer up a response. He nods to them each in turn and asks softly, “We gonna drive or are you two still tapping your dicks after that pissing contest?”

Jo laughs, twisting in her seat. “I like you, Mr. Orange.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean says, turning the ignition. “You can flirt with the kid later, Joanna Beth.”

Sam meets his eye in the mirror for a split second before his gaze turns out the window. “Didn’t realize you were the jealous type, Mr. White. You should keep your eyes on the road.”

Jo sniggers and Dean heaves a sigh. “Talkin’ back to me in my own fucking car. What’s this world coming to?”

Pink rolls his eyes, his tone attempting good humor when he says, “To be expected, isn’t it, with a bitch in the front seat and a fag in the back.”

Jo whirls around. “You wanna repeat that you motherfucker?”

“Woah,” he says, hands up, swaying slightly as Dean takes a hard right onto a traffic cleared street. “I was joking, sweetheart. If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the fucking heist.”

“Oh I can take the heat,” Jo says. “But I don’t have the temper or desire to deal with assholes, you got it? So you either keep your little mouth shut or I’ll put a bullet in there. And don’t you ever call me sweetheart.”

They spend the rest of the drive in silence, though Dean can’t help the little grin fixed firmly across his lips. He parks parallel across from the jewelry store, watching shoppers and Sunday church-goers out for their boardwalk strolls. The second the engine turns, Pink is out of the car, stepping into the street. Sam is quick to follow and Dean pats Jo’s thigh before she can reach for the handle.

“Keep from killing him today, alright? You and Pink are going to walk it first, then Orange and I will go once you two come back.”

“Really?” She hisses, as Sam waits with crossed arms beside the parking meter. “You get tall, dark, and handsome and I get pinned with Mr. Pasty?”

“Jo,” He begins with a laugh. “Tall, dark, and handsome is exactly why I’m not letting you follow him down an alleyway. The last thing we need is for one of our boys to get arrested for eating pussy in broad daylight.”

Jo sighs, a little wistful. “He’d be so good at it though. I can always tell. It’s like a sixth sense.”

“Alright, alright. Enough. Go catch Pink before he gets lost, the fucking child. And don’t kill him,” he shouts after her as she walks away in her high heeled boots, gesturing at Sam to take her place.

“No promises,” she calls with a girly wave of her hand that he’s certain she’d never be caught dead doing outside of the diamond district.

“Well she is certainly - “ Sam pauses, grinning.

“Yeah, no kidding.” Dean says. “She’s Ellen’s fucking kid, though, isn’t she? I feel for Pink a bit. But there was no way in hell I was going to spend any amount of time alone with that sleazy fucker in my car.”

“Good call,” Sam says, fiddling with the hem of his shirt.

“Hey,” Dean begins, soft and wary. He reaches over, smoothing his hand up Sam’s forearm. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he says with a small smile, keeping his eyes on the sidewalk. “I just wish we already had this over and done with.”

“I know,” he says, easing down to Sam’s hand, gently touching their fingertips together like Sam used to do when they were children. “It will be soon. And then we can go where ever we want.”

“Telluride,” Sam whispers, his eyes closed.

“What, the ski town?”

“Yeah.” There’s the smallest of smiles at his lips.

“Alright, kiddo. Colorado it is. You’ll get to watch me tumble down a fucking rocky mountain, I guess, if that’s really what you want.”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “It is.”

“You fucking sadist.” He threads their fingers together, one last squeeze of reassurance, before he says, “You ready for a run through?”

They take turns describing each step with a thief’s precision. Sam is as mechanical and efficient as he’s always been and Dean chimes in with little reminders about how many exits there are and the error of a mislaid wall on the floor plan. They’re on the fourth set, Sam’s eyes trained on his watch, when Jo and Pink return.

Sam steps out and holds the door open for her, but Dean is leaning over the hood, shaking his head. “Oh hell, no. Jo, you’re in the drivers’ seat.”

Jo gives Sam a cute little wink and Dean rolls his eyes. “We’ll be quick,” he says.

“Good,” Jo murmurs, lighting up a cigarette and rolling down the window. “Momma expects us at the club by four. Properly dressed,” she adds, with a pointed look at Pink. “So you better haul ass.”

—

Dean would rather skip the festivities, but he knows better than to turn down one of Ellen’s invitations. It’s meant to be a criminal’s version of team building, sitting around in a bar and trying to one-up each other with their close encounters and near misses. It relieves a bit of tension, pouring drinks and laughing like old men.

Ellen teases him into a few stories of his own, classics she calls them. Dean knows how to hold a room, he leaves Brown crying with laughter and Blonde smirking into his glass. Dean is used to having all eyes on him, but Sam hasn't stopped watching him like a little brother with a hero complex so Dean reaches around the table for a toothpick and tips his beer onto the floor.

“Jesus, White,” Sam says, standing suddenly. “A little too much to drink?”

“My bad, my bad,” Dean says, laughing. “I’ll buy you another, Orangey.”

Sam meets his eye and says, “No need. I was just nursing it anyway, damn thing went warm.”

Dean has played his part for the night, providing a few minutes of entertainment and provoking the rest of them to spill their most embarrassing secrets. But, like these nights always do, their glasses make way for whisky tumblers and their conversations turn to the good men and women they’ve lost to more than just solitary confinement. These days, Dean thinks, career criminals are more likely to die from cirrhosis or by eating a bullet of their own choosing.

“And drugs,” Ellen adds. “Too many of the good ones are turning to the drugs trade.”

Sam hums in agreement and Blue watches him from over the rim of his glass. “Why’d you get out, boy?”

He looks up, absentminded swirling the whisky in his glass. “Lot’s of reasons,” he says. “But mostly ‘cause of the overdoses.”

Pink winces in sympathy and Jo nods her head and Dean is left to ask, “What overdoses?”

“Fentanyl,” Sam says. “It’s always been around hospitals, but it just got street ready back in eighty-eight. If you compare the dosage of fentanyl to heroin, it’s like grains of sand and the whole damn beach. It’s powerful, it’s cheap, and it kills more people than bullets by half.”

“Then why use it?” Brown asks.

“Like I said, powerful and cheap, and the best fucking cut in the world if you get the science right. But no one in these black market Detroit labs are really measuring the micrograms, if you know what I mean. So dealers are dropping dead from their own product and so are the buyers. Gangs are fumbling in the north, selling along territory lines is a logistical nightmare. I saw it coming a few months off and decided to jump ship.”

“Smart boy,” Dean breathes.

“Sounds like an opportunity to me,” Blonde says with a shrug.

Sam smiles. It’s an old expression, it ages him a decade. “It’s not a comfortable lifestyle, despite the money. You steal a painting or a sack of diamonds - ” They chuckle and Sam ducks his head. “The cops will set off their sirens and hold their investigations but eventually they forget about you. If you’re running a few bricks of cocaine a night, you’re not ever safe. The DEA doesn’t forget anybody.”

“Fuckin’ feds,” Blue says, holding his glass out for Sam to toast. “You made the right choice.”

Jo is next to change the subject, talking about police brutality in Rialto, and Dean spends the rest of the night watching his brother hold onto his whisky without taking a sip. Sam might weigh in even to a fucking quarterback but the kid sure as hell can’t drink. It isn’t until hours later, when they’re alone in a bar near Sam’s shitty rental, that he talks him into a few shots of tequila.

“Come on, Sammy,” he says. “All that time in California and you don’t have a taste for patrón?”

Sam sighs into his shot glass. “Couldn’t afford it in school.”

“And after?” Dean bites into a lime wedge, humming.

“After, I tried to avoid partying with dealers.”

He’s already tipsy from Jo’s heavy-handed cocktails and he grins as he watches Sam hesitate with his second shot. “Come on, you didn’t even drink at the bar.”

“Because someone was too busy knocking my beers over.”

“C’mere,” he says, pointedly ignoring him. “Let big brother teach you something.” He licks a line down the back of his hand, ignoring Sam’s embarrassed yelp and pours some salt onto his skin. “Lick it, then take a drink.”

Sam does, his eyes squeezed shut and Dean laughs as he hands over a lime wedge. “This shit is terrible, Dean.”

“Alright, alright, princess.” Dean orders a stout to wind down and gets Sam a rum and coke. That seems to be the perfect formula, soda pop with the bite of booze, because Sam is downing them like the juice boxes he used to suck dry at twelve. By the time the lights come up and the bartenders begin to close shop, Sam is leaning on him like his own legs are made of rubber cement.

“C’mon, kiddo. Good thing we’re just a block away from your place, huh? Not sure you’d make it much farther than that.”

“I’m fine,” Sam murmurs, his face turned into Dean’s hair. “Just tipsy.”

“Sure you are,” Dean says, grinning. “Now where’re your keys?”

“You’ll stay the night?” Sam asks, leaning heavy against the wall as Dean unlocks the door to his apartment.

“Why not,” he says, ushering Sam inside. He knows it’s a risk, playing house in the city instead of finding a room at a little interstate motel, but Sam is all loose limbed and sweet when he tumbles into bed and the endlessly selfish quarter of Dean’s heart doesn’t mind the odds.

“You gonna get undressed?” He calls from the kitchen, pouring them each a glass of water from the tap.

“Probably not,” Sam murmurs into the pillow. “Unless you’ll do all the work.” His hips shift against the mattress and Dean rolls his eyes.

“You know, you’re about a hundred and fifty pounds heavier than you were the last time I got you dressed for bed.”

Sam flops onto his back, his eyes half lidded and a ghost of a smile at his lips. “And taller, too. God,” he sighs up at the ceiling. “I remember when you used to call me runt, shorty, midget - ”

“Yeah, alright.” Dean says, undoing the button on Sam’s jeans and pulling them down his hips. “I get it.”

“Oh, Dean,” Sam says, reaching for his arms. “You don’t though. You’re the short one now.”

“Hysterical,” he says, tossing his jeans into a pile on the floor and starting on his socks. “You’re hysterical.”

“My little brother,” Sam coos as Dean slides into bed next to him.

“I’m going to push your drunk ass onto the floor if you keep this up.”

Sam shifts into him, his octopus arms wrapping firmly around Dean’s chest. His forehead is pressed to the back of Dean’s neck and he allows their ankles to tangle together like they did so often as children. “Your feet are cold,” Sam murmurs into his skin.

“You’re just unusually warm.” He was never this warm as a kid. Dean was always wrapping him in moth eaten afghans and setting him down in front of rickety radiators. He’d bundle him in sweaters and coats lifted from Goodwill and pull beanies down over his ears and hold his glove-covered fingers in his pocket when he walked him to school.

“I know,” Sam hums, followed by a barely audible, “I missed you.”

He doesn’t really feel the need to say it back. So instead he pulls Sam’s arms tighter around his stomach, folding his wrists up against his chest. “Go to sleep, kiddo. You’re gonna feel like shit in the morning.”

He feels the soft press of Sam’s lips to a notch in his spine, like he’s waiting to say something important. “Good night,” he whispers instead, and Dean feels every word.

—

Sam wakes, hungover and glassy eyed, and blinks up at the ceiling like he doesn’t quite know where he is.

“Compton,” Dean reminds him, propped up on a pillow with a borrowed sci-fi book open in his lap.

Sam rubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms. “Jesus,” he groans, opening them again. “Are you reading Dune?”

Dean flips back to the cover. “Yeah, guess so.”

“Where did you even find that?”

“Bookshelf,” Dean says gesturing towards the corner.

Sam nods his head, his lashes fluttering, and lets himself collapse back against the pillow. Dean snorts, shaking his head. “Is noon too early for you, kiddo?”

He curls onto his side, facing Dean, his nose buried into the fabric of his pillowcase. “We’re free today, right?”

Dean nods, idly piecing his fingers through his brother’s hair. “Yeah. Free until Wednesday.”

Sam sighs like his punctured lungs can’t hold air. “Then you can stay?”

Ellen will inevitably call. She’ll have information from their mole in the LAPD, spitting state secrets about the weekday roster and available squad cars. There’s always more information to consider, more exit strategies to iron out. Sam’s fingers tangle in the hem of his boxer shorts, tugging, waiting for his answer.

“Yeah,” he says. The soft, off-white color of the sheets makes Sam’s skin look darker than sun-kissed. His wrist is dotted with little moles that weren’t there when he was sixteen and his lips are a hungover, chapped red. Hazel eyes flutter open and he smiles when he catches him staring.

“You read this book yet?” He asks, clearing his throat. “‘Cause it’s not half bad.”

Sam hums, nodding his head. “Not in a long, long time. I wouldn’t mind hearing it again.”

Dean shifts closer to Sam’s side, settling into his sleepy afternoon warmth and pulling the sheets up past his shoulders. “I think you just want to hear me fuck up these names.”

“Maybe,” Sam agrees.

But of course, Dean reads anyway. His voice is deeper than it was when they were children and he can no longer flip between the lineup of voices he had perfected while reading The Lord of the Rings, but the weight of Sam’s body at his side and the fading afternoon light feels so familiar that for just a moment, he might as well be on Arrakis.

—

Dean is running late. His clothes are uncharacteristically wrinkled and he hasn’t shaved since Sunday. He hopes he looks like he’s pulled a handful of all-nighters fucking women in seedy Sixth Street bars and not like he’s spent the last two days locked in Sam’s apartment, ordering take-out and reading to his brother while he slept.

The bar Jo picked out is just this side of too young, with loud music and low lights. He knows that in her own way she thinks she’s being strategic. No one will glance at a group of old men huddled in the back, murmuring over rolled up floor plans. The second he steps through the door, Dean feels the full weight of his age down to the hour.

Jo has their arms threaded together before he even has the chance to look around, all but shouting, “You’re late.”

Dean eyes the crowded dance floor as he bends low, his lips to Jo’s ear. “I’m guessing Ellen ain’t here.”

“What gave it away?”

“She wouldn’t be caught dead in a place full of teenagers.” He spots their little bunch of misfits crammed into blue tinted booths in the back, two circular tables pressed between them. He counts four darkened silhouettes against the backlit club light.

“Mom’s tapped out of this one,” Jo says, steering them towards the bar. “She says you’re supposed to run the show.”

“Seems like she’s not the only one missing.”

“You gonna have a cocktail with me? Or are you preserving your fragile masculinity?” She leans heavily on a barstool, making eyes at the poor boy mixing drinks.

“Get us whatever you’d like, sweetheart.”

Jo orders something sweet and sticky with a cachaça base, topped with shaved ice and strawberry sauce. She tips the bartender with a twenty, winking as she leans up to press a kiss against Dean’s cheek. “She said not to worry about Mr. Blonde,” she murmurs into his jaw. “He’s doing special work for the family. Completely confidential.”

Dean takes a sip of his cocktail and shrugs. “Guess it’s just us then.”

Jo hums, tonguing at her straw. “Mr. Orange got here first.” She fakes a shiver. “Wanted some quality time with him, but you know, I think Mr. Pink may be right. Can’t get him to even glance my way.”

Dean chuckles into his drink. “Or maybe he doesn’t want to get caught fucking the boss’ daughter.”

“Oh please,” Jo says, with one last lingering squeeze of his bicep. “I’d be the one fucking him.”

“Alright,” Dean says, taking the empty seat where the two tables meet and kicking his feet back. “Sorry I’m late. Had some business to take care of.”

Pink snorts and Dean smiles sweet, taking an extra slow sip of his cocktail. “What’cha laughing at, Pinkie?”

“What the fuck is that you’re drinking?”

“Jo?”

“A very berry caipirinha,” she says with a smile.

“A very berry caipirinha,” Dean repeats, glancing at Sam as he tips back in his chair. “It’s not every day a lovely young lady offers to buy a man a drink, now is it?”

“I thought we came here to work,” Blue snarls, hidden partially in the shadow of the booth, his flannel coat still hanging loose from his shoulders.

“We did,” Dean agrees. “Kind of. But seeing as this place is dark as fucking night and two-thirds of us are over the age of thirty, I figure we move this party two doors down to a little pool bar I know too well and talk this out over a game or two.”

Jo sighs dramatically and finishes her drink with a few steady gulps. “Old people are boring, right Mr. Orange?”

Sam smiles. “I don’t know,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind beating a few old men in a game of pool.”

Dean slams his empty glass onto the table. “Oh kiddo, you’re on.”

—

Dean sits the first few rounds out, preferring to balance himself on the very edge of the table with a stop watch in hand, timing each answer down to the millisecond. Jo plays a halfhearted round against Brown, winning but not by much. She’s too busy making eyes at Sam, running her hand slow and steady down the faded resin. Sam plays along, just a little, as if the beer he’s pretending to drink might just be loosening him up.

Blue is a few short plays away from beating Pink by the time Dean gets through the list of staff and their shift rotations.

“And as a reminder,” Dean says, watching as Pink’s knuckles turn white against his pool cue. “A few broken noses are fair game, but don’t go flipping your safety off unless you’re running from a cop. Got it? This ain’t the wild west. We’re keeping things quick and clean.”

Pink looks ready to say something vaguely derogatory when Blue sinks his eight ball.

“Alright, Orange,” Dean says, holding out his hand for Pink’s cue. “I think that leaves you and me.”

The way Sam handles the chalk is instantly familiar, along with the careful sway of his stance, the slight curve of his shoulders. He doesn’t ask if he should break and Dean doesn’t give anything in the way of instruction. Instead he racks the balls and waits for Sam to line up his shot. Sam took to shooting pool so much quicker than card games. Dean always thought it had to do with that little part of him that still ached to join the sixth grade mathletes, the part that wanted more than just probability and odds to work with. As always, Sam insisted, Dean was overthinking it.

“It’s a fun game,” Sam had told him. “That’s all.”

For the few short years when Sam looked old enough to flash a fake ID, they made good money hustling drunk college kids away from their trust fund money. Dean kept every dime hidden away, a little trust of his own.

Brown whistles as Sam breaks with more than a few pocketed balls. He doesn’t even allow Dean a comeback before he’s lining up his next shot. “Three and six in the corner pocket.”

“A solids man,” Dean says with a smile, because of course Sam always has been.

He makes the shot. “Hope you’re okay with stripes.”

Brown wolf whistles with every play and Jo watches them both with a finger to her lips as they dance their way along the green, calling their shots. Dean tosses the chalk over his shoulder and Sam catches it with practiced ease, topping off his cue as Dean sinks lucky number eleven.

They’re down to three balls when Blue finally pulls up a chair. “You boys sure know how to play.”

“Learned from the best,” Dean says with a hearty wink.

Sam hums, running his fingers along the edge of the table. “Me too.”

Dean wins the first round by a single shot. Sam is already racking the table and pulling another cue from the wall mount when Pink slaps him on the shoulder and Brown hands him another beer.

“Best out of three?” He asks without turning.

“If you wanna get your ass beat three times, sure.”

Sam smiles and Dean sees his brother at sixteen, tall and broad for his age, shaggy hair falling into his eyes. “I needed the practice round,” he admits. “I haven’t played in years.”

—

Ellen calls him in Anaheim and Dean wonders how long she’s been trying. Despite his best intentions, Dean has spent almost every night allowing his brother’s steady breathing to lull him to sleep. He leans against marble countertops, eyeing the decor of an heiress’ kitchen and wishing he was still in Compton.

“Heya, Elle,” he says, holding the phone against his shoulder.

“Just checking in,” she says. “Making sure everything’s set for Monday.”

“All looks good on my end." They’re both silent for a moment and he hears the murmur of Ellen’s latest secretary boy from her doorway. She hums in muffled agreement as Dean scratches invisible patterns into the counter. “And listen, Ellen, when the cuts are done, I think I’m outta here.”

She pauses, a catch of breath. “You telling me that you’re retiring, boy?”

“Yeah,” he says, tracing his initials along the veins in the granite. “I think so.”

She's silent for a long time. “Alright. Well, if that’s what you want, once this is done I’ll lose your number.”

“Thanks,” he breathes, turning to stare up at the ceiling.

“Don’t mention it. And one last thing, before I let you go.” She pauses, a distant shuffle of paperwork. “What’s your opinion on Mr. Orange?”

Dean’s shoulders stiffen with the kind of pointed adrenaline that always makes it feel as if he can hear his own pupils dilate, like everything widens and contracts all at once. “You askin’ me a personal question or is this about the job?”

Ellen snorts. “I know he’s a looker, but I was wanting something a bit deeper than that.”

He tries to think back to any possible slip up they could’ve made. He wonders if he was drunk enough at the bar to allow his hand to linger on Sam’s shoulder one time too many. Maybe they were too familiar as they circled around the edge of the pool table, too comfortable in the heavy pull of each other’s orbits.

“He seems good,” Dean says. “Orange and Blue are the only ones with even a lick of sense.”

“Right,” she says.

“Why, you having second thoughts?” His fingers are numb and the hard plastic of the telephone groans under his grip.

“No,” she begins, long and drawn out, like she’s leading into something. “You always could read a man quicker than most. I trust your judgment.”

“Well then, I already told you where my trouble is, and it ain’t with Orange.” He knows he’s crossing Ellen’s invisible line in the sand but he can’t help but say it. Dean has twice as much at risk with this job and Blonde is a killer in thief’s clothing.

“I’ll see you in two days,” she says. “And you’ll be a far richer man then.”

—

They meet in a motel downtown, full of vacationing families and the patter of children’s feet echoing down through thin ceilings. The second Dean is through the door, Sam is throwing himself into his arms, whispering frantically against his neck, “Please, please, let’s not do this. Let’s just go.”

“Sammy,” he murmurs, pulling away to look his brother up and down, taking in his red-rimmed eyes and hollowed cheeks. “What’s going on?”

Sam looks five years old again, begging him not to leave him outside the doors to his kindergarten classroom.

“Please,” he whispers, glassy eyes spilling over, his hands desperate and shaking. “I’ll go anywhere. We can go back to Connecticut if you want, it doesn’t matter, I don’t care, let’s just go.”

“Sam, c’mon, you’re not making sense.” He sets his brother down on the foot of the bed and kneels at his feet, their hands clasped together because Sam refuses to let go. “It’s all planned out, kiddo. We’re almost done.”

Sam shakes his head, stands of hair sticking to his damp cheeks. “I can’t go through with it,” he says. “I can’t.”

Dean chuckles, a little desperate. “We’re talking diamonds here, Sammy, not murder.”

Tears fall faster from his closed eyelids. “Please, Dean,” he whispers. “I’ll go anywhere.”

Dean spent most of his life wishing he could give Sam everything he wanted. He remembers being nine years old and stealing peanut butter from a grocery store for the first time. He remembers reaching high for the crunchy kind off the top shelf just because Sam preferred it. He remembers lifting Snickers bars from gas stations because his father would never spend the extra sixty-two cents to make Sam smile. He remembers being fifteen and wanting to give him a little town house and a fluffy green lawn and a swimming pool. He never really could give his brother much of anything, though the good Lord and exactly no one else knows how hard he tried.

“Come on, Sammy,” he says. “We’re talking about the rest of our lives, here. We can go anywhere, do whatever you want, just as soon as we have diamond money lining our pockets.”

“We don’t need it,” Sam whispers, his skin slick with tears and his hands fisted in Dean’s sleeves. “Please, we don’t need it.”

They do need it, though, because Dean has his eye on twenty acres in the Adirondacks and college tuition in upstate New York. “Sammy,” he says, reaching up and cupping his face in his hands, forcing him to look down, to meet Dean’s eye. “You know I’ll keep us safe.”

“It’s not you,” Sam whispers, tears at his eyelashes.

Dean knows just as well that they’re playing with fire, because they’re only two out of five and it takes one little slip of a finger for the whole thing to go south. “No matter what, we’ll be fine. And the second something smells off tomorrow, the second we so much as hear a siren, we run.”

Sam’s lashes flutter shut, his fingers tightening around his wrists like Dean had given him something to hold on to. “Yeah,” he breathes, steadying himself. “We’ll run, we’ll get out.”

“Exactly, kiddo. We always get out.”

Dean untangles his hands from Sam’s iron grip and begins to unlace his boots. He runs his thumb over the damp notches in Sam’s ankles as he works and once his boots are stacked in a neat little soldier’s row beside them, he presses his thumbs into the base of his Achilles tendon where all his stress is kept and drags down to the slope of his arches. Sam makes a soft sound above him and Dean allows himself an extra moment to rub the tension from his brother’s feet.

“You smell like a rat died in your shoe,” Dean tells him eventually, threading his fingers between his toes and pressing back until his joints crack.

“Hey,” Sam says, his voice still thick from tears. “Didn’t ask you to touch them.”

Dean hums in agreement and slowly sets his feet back onto the carpet. “Come on,” he says. “Get changed. We have an early start tomorrow.”

Sam obeys, brushes his teeth with robotic little movements, and strips down to a wife beater and boxers. He sits on the edge of the bed with his head down, fingering the seams in the polyester comforter. He’s stalling and Dean can’t help but smile around the rim of his water glass.

“Go on, get in bed.” Sam hesitates before he slides under the sheets. His hair is soft and clean of the gel that keeps it in place and now it fans across the pillow and falls over his ears and Dean sighs as he reaches for the light switch.

“Move over,” he says, his voice soft.

“Thank you,” Sam whispers.

It’s dark and tomorrow they have diamonds to steal, so Dean pulls his little brother close and runs his fingers through his hair and lets him settle into his ribcage. “I was thinking,” he says after a while, his lips still pressed to the crown of Sam’s head. “That maybe I’m tired of cities.”

“Yeah.” Sam’s breath is warm against his shirt. “Me too.”

“And I mean, New York is a little cold in the winter.”

“A little,” Sam huffs, a breath away from laughter.

“So maybe, I don’t know, Tennessee. Like near the Smokey’s.”

He can feel him smile, warm and wet and comforting. “Maybe Kentucky,” he says.

Dean hums in agreement. “Always was more of a bourbon man, myself.”

“I’d like to see the races,” he says, whispered like a secret into his ribs.

“There are races in New York, kiddo. There are races everywhere.”

“Shut up,” he murmurs. “You know what I mean. The Derby and the track season and I’d like to watch them without having our grocery money set on a trifecta.”

He runs his hands down Sam’s shoulders, taking in every dip and groove. “Alright,” he says. “We’ll go to the races.”

“But with nice clothes.”

“In nice clothes,” he amends. “And we won’t bet on a single damn horse.”

“We’ll just watch them run,” Sam sighs into his skin.

—

Dean wakes before dawn and for the first time in a decade and a half, he feels the long forgotten flutter of fear in his gut. He knows he has to get up, that he has to make it back to Anaheim before the sun rises, so he gives himself until the count of ninety-nine to gently roll his brother onto his side and kiss his closed eyelids.

He wakes with a sigh. “You’re leaving?”

Dean nods, his nose still tucked close to Sam’s temple. He presses a single, indulgent kiss to his cheekbone, and then to the other. When Sam was little, he would grab Dean’s face and press little kisses to each cheek, murmuring, ‘Bonjour, bonjour.’ He never quite worked out where his brother picked it up, television or any number of towns that dotted his short life, but he laughs now, thinking of those little fingers on his cheeks.

“Bonjour,” he says.

Sam doesn't answer. He only presses their cheeks together and holds tight. It’s getting bright enough for Dean to see him by, with blue light filtering through cheap curtains and he knows it’s time to go.

“Sammy,” he begins, but Sam shakes his head, cutting him off.

“Promise me,” he says. He can feel Sam breathing through parted lips.

“I promise.”

He nods, eyes closed like he’s committing it to memory. “Alright. Go.”

Dean pulls away, through it breaks his heart to leave his brother alone in bed, with tear glazed eyes and trembling fingers. “Nine o’clock,” he says. “I’ll be at your apartment at nine.”

“I’ll be ready.”

—

The second shots are fired, Dean grabs his brother’s arm and shoves him back towards the wall as the room erupts in chaos. Blonde is standing on one of the display cases, the body of a sales manager bloody at his feet.

“Don’t anybody move,” he says, alarms blaring.

He watches as the crowd of shoppers staggers and stops, stuck between the impulse to flee and the barrel of Blonde’s gun. Dean spots a young girl in the crowd, no older than twenty, with her hair braided in pigtails. Her fingers are free of engagement rings, bare but for sparkling nail polish as she slowly reaches for the glass door. He sees a tear fall from her lashes as she prepares to lunge for the only clear exit. She barely has her hand on the glass before Blonde puts a bullet in her back.

He hears Sam shout from somewhere behind him, barely audible over the alarm, and then the sirens start. Dean pushes Sam towards the doors, cocking his gun to part the crowd, and Blonde smiles like a fucking maniac as he watches them from the display case. “Where you going, Mr. White?”

Dean has his Colt in one hand and his little brother’s wrist in the other, so he aims for Blonde’s forehead.

“We’re leaving,” he snarls and Blonde shrugs before turning on another customer, a soft thirty-something wearing a herringbone hat. His blood splatters against the wall and Dean shoves Sam out the door.

“Run,” he snaps, “Stash your gun. Take the first left.”

Brown stumbles out behind them, a good few feet short of Dean’s heels, shouting at them both to wait, please wait. He turns briefly, the slightest glance behind him to the sight of Brown running as fast as his little twig legs will carry him. Dean misses the bullet that tears through Brown’s head, but he hears his body drop.

“Fuck,” he gasps, his lungs burning. “He’s dead.”

The street is flooded with cop cars and just as they make it off the main drag, a cruiser pulls up onto the sidewalk. Dean is reaching for his gun, ready to take aim at the sight of four blue uniforms but Sam is calling his name, urging him forward, and a voice somewhere behind them screams, “Stand down. Stand fucking down. Do not shoot.”

It’s six blocks before they lose them, before Sam is stumbling back against a brick wall and Dean is running his hands over his brother’s chest, checking for injuries.

“Fuck,” he whispers, their foreheads pressed together, Sam’s breathing ragged against his lips. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“We need to lift a car,” Sam says. “Come on. I’m fine, Dean.” He pulls Dean’s hands away from his chest, kissing his open palms. “I’m fine. But we gotta leave, we gotta go now.”

They follow the curve of a half empty street as sirens and gunshots draw more and more people up towards the diamond district. Sam smashes the butt of his gun into a car window, undoing the lock to the scream of a car alarm.

“Jesus, Sammy,” he snaps, watching Sam kick open the footboard and slice through the alarm wire with a pocketknife. Sam is still fumbling with the wires, tying his little copper threads together as the engine purrs, when a police cruiser stops in the middle of the intersection and a woman in blue steps out.

“Hands up,” she shouts. “Both of you, hands where I can see them.”

She’s part of the second wave, he’s certain, headed straight for the jeweler’s before the sound of a car alarm set her off course. He knows by now, in a distant way, that there must have been a leak. There isn’t another reason in the world for a dozen cop cars full of kevlar to show up the second a manager presses her panic button.

“Sammy,” he murmurs, raising his hands above his head. “Get up.” She takes a step forward and Dean glances at his wrist watch. He counts off six minutes and forty seconds since Blonde shot bullets into the ceiling, the LAPD response time.

“Alright,” he says. “Alright, no trouble. We just wanted a car. We’ll come quiet.” Her gun stays trained on Sam and Dean can see her itchy trigger finger from a mile away.

“Sure you did. And it’s got nothing to do with the robbery up at Hill Street?” She’s closer now, a few paces away, coming nearer like a hunter with forest game. “Looks like you’ve been running from something.”

“Hey,” Sam says, gently, holding out his hands. “It’s not what you think, let me get my wallet, I want to - ”

“Don’t fucking move,” she says, just as Dean hisses Sam’s name.

“Don’t worry,” he repeats, slowly reaching for his jacket pocket. “I’m unarmed. My name is Samuel Winchester, I’m a - ”

She takes the shot the moment Sam’s fingers touch the hem of his jacket and Dean pulls his gun from his waistband in the seconds it takes for her to turn. The cop is dead before her body hits the ground and Sam is stumbling back against the car door, clutching at his stomach.

“No,” Dean whispers, rushing to his brother’s side, kneeling down to the sight of blood spreading like flood water across Sam’s white shirt. “No, Sammy.”

Sam gasps, a broken, pain filled sound. “Did you kill her?”

“Yeah, bitch is dead, Sammy. Come on, come on, gotta get out of here.” He helps Sam into the back seat with the engine still running from Sam’s hot wire job. “Sit tight, kiddo, come on. Lie back.”

“I’m fine,” Sam groans, his hands already coated in blood as he tilts his head towards the door. “Get in and drive.”

Dean swerves onto the street, narrowly avoiding the cop’s body left on the side of the road and her car abandoned at the intersection. He heads south towards the inner city, doing his best to avoid the road blocks that will litter the highway until all five of them are rounded up in either police holding cells or body bags. He takes back roads towards USC Hospital, situated off the interstate and far from their little crime scene.

Sam lets out a soft gasp of pain, but that’s the only sound he makes as he presses one hand to his stomach and the other to the back of the drivers’ seat, bracing himself against one of Dean’s erratic turns.

“Don’t you worry, kiddo. We’ll get you to a hospital.”

“No,” Sam gasps. “Not a hospital, Dean.”

“We’re going to a fucking hospital, Sam, whether you want to or not. So we’ll serve a little time, big deal. Been there done that, and it ain’t so bad, not really.”

“No,” Sam groans, but Dean’s big-brother credentials means he’s long since mastered speaking over him.

“You have all the time in the world to read. You’ll love it, you fucking nerd.” He glances in the rearview mirror to a beige interior smeared with blood.

“Just - ” Sam gasps in pain, his teeth clicking shut as the car shutters over a particularly large pothole. “Just bring me to the meeting spot, Dean. Drop me there and run. The cops will get there soon enough.”

“No fucking way,” he snaps, hands tight on the wheel. “You don’t know that, you could bleed out on the fucking floor.”

“It was a setup,” Sam says, his voice thick with blood and saliva. “They have to know about the warehouse. And if they don’t, you can leave me with a gun. A few shots in the air are as good as a phone call.”

“No way, Sammy. No way. We’re going to the hospital - ”

“Dean,” Sam gasps, his voice broken and his eyes squeezed shut against tears. “God, Dean, please. Please just bring me there and leave. I promise they’ll find me. I’ll be fine and you won’t go to fucking prison, just please, please, listen to me.”

He sounds desperate and frantic and so frighteningly out of breath that Dean finds himself agreeing in an attempt to calm him down. “Alright, alright Sammy. You just lay back, okay. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“I swear to God,” he says. “If I see you turn onto the highway I’ll open this door and let myself fall out.” His hand is slick with blood, twisted above him to rest on the handle.

“Sam,” he begs, barely able to bring himself to focus on the road when he can see his little brother bleeding out in the backseat. “Be reasonable, kiddo, come on.”

“I am being reasonable.” He shifts enough to lie flat on his back, both hands pressed to the bleeding gash of the bullet wound. “She got me right in the gut and it’s painful but slow. We both know that. If we’re smart I have hours, lucky and we have days. If you leave me at the warehouse, I’ll get to a doctor in time and you don’t have to go to prison.”

“You’re not going down for this alone,” he insists.

“If I open this door,” Sam begins, “I’ll be too weak to close it again.”

Dean meets his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Then I’d just slam on the breaks.”

“And send me flying?” He asks through gritted teeth. “Kill me faster?”

“You’re not dying, Sammy.”

“I know,” Sam assures him. “I know, just get me to the meeting place, and I’ll be just fine. I promise, Dean. I promise.”

—

The warehouse is empty when they get there, and Dean is all but carrying his little brother over the threshold as they stumble towards the loading dock. He sets Sam down gently, listening to every hitch in his erratic breathing, his cut-off groans of pain.

“Alright, alright,” he says, shrugging off his coat and working open the buttons on Sam’s shirt. He carefully pats the blood away with the lining of his jacket, a sorry excuse for sterilized gauze, but it’s as clean as they’re going to get on the dusty floor of an old factory. As gently has he can, Dean pulls the wound apart, looking for any hint of a ruptured organ. Sam grits his teeth and groans low in his throat, but he doesn’t tell him to stop.

“Okay,” Dean says, his breathing quick. “Looks like everything’s still together.”

Sam nods, watching as Dean wipes the blood off onto his pants. “I know. I’d feel it otherwise.”

Dean pulls the folding knife from Sam’s front pocket and gets to work sawing the seams of his jacket.

“You can’t tourniquet a stomach wound,” Sam reminds him, his voice faint.

“No organ damage, bullet’s still in there. I sure as fuck can truss it up to slow the bleeding.”

Sam makes a soft, whimpering sound of pain when he wraps the cloth in tight knots around his stomach, until Dean’s fumbling hands jostle his lower back and cause him to cry out in a momentary lurch of agony. “Fuck, Dean.”

“Sorry, sorry,” he whispers, working quickly. “You’re the one who’s refusing to go to a fucking hospital so I’m kind of doing the best I can here.”

Sam nods with his eyes closed, breathing heavily through his mouth. “No, I know. It’s fine. I’m sorry.”

Dean is still tying knots with what is left of his suit jacket when the door flies open and Pink scrambles in. “Jesus,” he shouts, sweaty and shaking, eyeing them like he’s been cornered by a wild animal. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“You’re alive,” Dean says, putting a little pressure on Sam’s stomach and reaching up to smooth his hair back, keeping it out of his eyes. He doesn’t look away from his little brother’s face, pale and smeared with blood. “That makes three of us.”

“What the fuck happened to him?” Pink asks, gesturing vaguely in Sam’s direction.

“Cops.” Sam’s eyelashes flutter shut as Dean traces the ridge of his cheekbone and down the slope of his pulse point. Blood is drying sticky against his skin and flaking off in little patches at the base of his throat.

“Well fuck,” Pink says. “That leaves two of us then, cause it doesn’t look like he has long. Blue is dead, cops got him too.”

Dean whirls around, just as Sam reaches for his hand, pulling his attention back to him like he would at six years old just by tugging at his fingertips.

“Get out of here, Pink,” he snaps. “We know it was a setup and as far as I’m concerned you’re a prime fucking suspect. How’d you slip outta there, huh? And why would you show up at the meeting point once it’s been compromised?”

Pink paces like a maniac, the soles of his loafers sliding over drops of Sam’s blood. “The fucking back door is how. I was with the assistant manager, had the diamonds and everything, and - ”

“The diamonds,” Sam says softly, and Dean repeats it, just a breath louder.

“Yeah, I got ‘em, stashed ‘em. Figured I’d pit stop here, see if anyone got out.” He stops, running a frantic hand through his hair. “Not that I feel fucking inclined to open my mouth now, seeing as we don’t know who spilled. Could be Mr. Brown, could be anyone.”

“Brown is dead,” Dean tells him. Sam reaches down towards the bullet wound and Dean catches his hand, entwining their fingers and murmuring a soft, “No touching, kiddo. Gotta let it clot.”

Pink is watching them, open mouthed and sweating red. “What the fuck are you two, anyway? And how the fuck did you get out? What’ve you got for this kid and how do you know he’s not the snitch? I smelled fag on him from the get go.”

“You shut your fucking mouth or I’ll shut it for you,” Dean shouts. Sam’s free hand is fisted in his sleeve, but he doesn’t say a word.

“Hey, all I know is, it ain’t me. Mr. Brown and Mr. Blue are doornails, and Mr. Blonde is the psycho who shot up the joint. So that leaves you and Mr. Orange here. Ellen’s worked with you for years and I trust that shit. And this kid may be dying but you don’t know him from Adam.”

“Yes I do,” he snaps, just as Sam’s fingers tighten in warning. “And he’s not fucking dying.”

Pink pauses, edging towards the pistol tucked into his waistband. “This was supposed to be a blind job.”

“Yeah, well. Ellen doesn’t know everything, now does she? If you got the diamonds, Pink, then go. If we’re right about this, cops’ll be here any second.” Dean runs his blood slick fingers through Sam’s hair, parting it back like his pomade gel.

“And what about you, huh?” Pink is pacing again, teeth gritted.

“I’m getting my kid some fucking medical attention, what the fuck do you think? I’m only here because we think it’s been compromised. The cops’ll come with ambulances.”

“You’re fucking crazy,” Pink says, eyeing the door. “They’ll snatch you up too.”

“He’ll leave,” Sam says, his voice hoarse. “When we hear the sirens. It’s better than risking a hospital drop off.”

“No fucking kidding. There’s a reason for the rule, you know. Better to bleed to death than wake up handcuffed.”

“I won’t bleed to death,” Sam says, quiet enough for Pink to miss. “They’ll come.”

“We’re giving it an hour,” Dean says to Pink, gritting his teeth. “An hour before I take him in myself.”

“What about the others?” Pink asks, restless.

“There’s only Blonde left,” Dean says. “And if he steps through that door, I’ll kill him. Go find Jo, figure it out, just fucking leave.” He turns his attention back to Sam, wiping away the tears that have collected at the corners of his eyes.

“Yeah? And what am I supposed to do if you get yourself arrested right along side dead-man-walking over there? You know my face and that’s enough liability for me. How do I know you’re not going to rat to the cops?”

Dean reaches for his pistol and aims for Pink’s head. “You stay here, I’ll put a bullet in you. Then you won’t have to worry about me ratting to anyone.”

“Fine, Jesus, you fucking psychopath.” Pink is half way to the door when they hear the sound of an engine turning. He freezes and Dean cradles Sam carefully against his chest as he adjusts his aim towards the closed door.

“Could be a cop,” Sam whispers, pulling urgently at Dean’s collar again. “Run, it could be a cop.”

“No sirens,” he says, keeping his aim steady.

“There wouldn’t be - there wouldn’t be. They don’t wanna spook anyone.”

“I’m not leaving, Sammy.”

“Dean,” he gasps just as the door opens and Blonde saunters through. He’s holding a shake from Lyon’s and a cocky tilt to his smile that keeps Dean’s finger on the trigger.

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“Heya, Mr. White. Orange got shot, huh? Too bad.”

“You take a step closer and I’ll put a bullet through your skull,” Dean warns him.

Blonde steps back, his hands up, fingers still curled around his cup. “Now what’s all this about? I thought we were buddies.”

Pink watches from the sidelines, one foot still planted in the direction of the door, like he’s ready to run.

“You shot a fucking kid.” He thinks about the girl’s body, left slumped against the glass door. He’s taken more than one life since the job he worked at seventeen and every single one stays with him, bundled forever like a globe set on his shoulders because he’s raised a little boy and he knows just how much those bodies weigh.

“I told that bitch that if she set off the alarm, people were gonna die. Well she set it off and it forced my hand. I couldn’t make a threat and not follow through.” He sets his shake down on the ground and takes a few careful steps forward. “Now, are the diamonds here or did I just risk this joint being blown for nothing?”

“Dean,” Sam whispers, quiet enough for only him to hear. “Just go, please. The cops’ll be here any minute.”

“You know,” Blonde says, an oil slick smile at his lips. “Ellen thought there was something off about him, but we never pegged you for a faghag, Whitey.”

“Please, go,” Sam is whispering, pulling Dean’s attention back towards him, running bloody fingers along the length of his jaw.

“You’re gonna let him bleed out anyway, huh? That’s cold, man. Wouldn’t it be nicer to just put a bullet in your sweetheart’s brain? It’ll save him a whole lotta agony, in the long run.” He reaches for his gun, tucked away inside his jacket pocket. “I can do it for you, if you want. I’m a great shot, he wouldn’t feel a thing.”

Dean cocks his pistol. “I’m pretty sure I told you not to get any closer.”

“You know, White. I might just have to insist, because I think Orange here is our little water spout.”

Dean takes a warning shot at Blonde’s feet, listening as the bullet ricochets off the concrete. Pink shouts, his arms covering his head. “God fucking damn it White, what are you doing?”

“Take a step closer and I’ll shoot you through the head. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. He isn’t the snitch.” Dean’s voice is calm but his heart is racing like it was when he first felt his brother’s blood leak out through the gaps in his fingers. “He took a fucking bullet from a cop. He’s clean.”

“See, I think that may just have been bad luck. Good old Ellen, she called me before the gig, said ‘if you’re going to watch out for anyone, you watch out for Orange.’”

“Funny,” Dean says, his hand steady. “Because she didn’t say a word to me about you going on a fucking shooting spree in the middle of what was supposed to be a pick up job. You’re a fucking liability, Blonde. So I can’t say I really trust Ellen’s judgment right about now.”

“Oh that’s too bad,” Blonde says. “‘Cause she’s on her way over, and she’s pissed. She’s pretty damn certain Orange gave up the ghost and I’m inclined to believe her.” He smiles then, eyes dark in the factory lowlight.

Sam groans his name, his eyes fluttering again, like the shock is setting in. “Hey, hey,” he says, keeping his aim but dipping his head down to shake his little brother awake. “Come on, passing out is not an option right now, kiddo. It’s going to send your blood pressure plummeting.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam whispers.

“It’s okay, just stay awake.” He nods weakly against his thigh and Dean looks back up. “Why him? Blue and Brown are dead, Pink seems to have escaped by some miracle, and I’m here unscathed. Why doesn’t she think it’s me?”

“I don’t give a fuck why she thinks it’s Orange and not one of those other dead motherfuckers. What I do know is I’m going to put a bullet in his brain and then Pinkie over there is going to hand over the diamonds.”

They both hear Pink’s sudden intake of breath. “Yes,” Blonde says, waving around his gun like it’s an action movie prop. “I know you got the diamonds, Pink. I was standing on the case, watched you hightail it outta there.”

“Yeah, well, I stashed them. I don’t have them on me.” Pink’s voice is an octave short of panic as Blonde turns to face him. “What? You think I’m some kinda rookie looking for jail time? I’m not gonna show up here with fucking contraband tucked under my seat now am I?”

Dean leans down to presses a kiss to the bridge of his brother’s nose and then, making sure that Blonde’s attention is still on Pink, he takes the shot. He gets him once to the chest and Blonde empties his magazine in spray of bullets as he falls to his knees. He feels two hit him, sudden and shocking and so fucking familiar that he can’t believe he’s forgotten what it’s like to get shot. He hears Sam say his name, slurred with panic, and Dean finishes the job with a bullet to Blonde’s head.

“Jesus Christ,” Pink is shouting. “Jesus Christ, you killed him.”

“Yeah,” Dean gasps, taking a deep breath, testing his lungs. “You better get those diamonds and run, Pink. If this place wasn’t compromised before, it sure is now.”

Dean uses every last bit of strength to rebel against the agony in his body and shift his brother onto his lap. He bends over him, heaving with the effort, and eases Sam’s blood drenched hair from his forehead as the door clatters shut. Sam’s hands are shaking as he reaches for Dean’s face, falling short and fisting his shirt collar instead.

“I love you, Dean. God, I love you. And I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

He keeps his hands in his brother’s hair, piecing the wet strands through his fingers. “You a cop, Sammy?” He asks softly, blood lining his teeth.

Sam nods his head, a soft sound caught at the back of his throat, tear tracks winding through the blood on his cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Dean, I never wanted this.”

“I know, kiddo,” he says, shushing him, as Sam’s breathing grows ragged with panic. “I know you didn’t. But a cop, Sammy. You’re a proper hero, a boy in blue, huh.”

“A fed,” Sam manages and Dean laughs though it strains every nerve in his left side to do it.

“Damn, baby, you don’t do nothing half way. Dad wouldn’t exactly be proud but I sure as hell am.” Sam’s eyes flutter shut and Dean holds him tight and shakes him awake. “Hey, stay with me Sammy. They’ll be here soon, you’ll get help soon. Just stay with me.”

“It was true,” Sam says, eyeing the blood soaking through Dean’s shoulder, tears leaking down across his temple. “Everything I told you, it was true. It’s just - I got caught, I wasn’t even twenty-two. And the agent who picked me up, he put me to work, used me as intel.”

“Dangerous,” Dean breathes, because he knows what happens to federal assets in the drug trade. “That was so fucking dangerous, Sam.”

He laughs and it sounds more like wheezing. “I know. But I was really good at it. So eventually they hired me, put me through the academy. I told them - told them I was a foster care runaway. ‘Cause of our records, you know. All the fake names. They didn’t think I had a brother.”

Sam’s eyes are glazing over and Dean knows he has to keep him talking. “Alright, Sammy, focus. What’re the drug sniffers doing tailing us, anyway?”

“I’m not in narcotics anymore,” Sam manages. His pupils are blown wide, eating up his irises as he stares blindly at a spot above Dean’s shoulder. “I’m criminal enterprise. Ellen’s been a big target for years. So has some of the guys - ” He stops then, coughing and coughing until blood dribbles down his chin. Dean wipes it away with shaking fingertips and holds his hand tight to the wound in his stomach.

“Who else?” He asks, fighting to keep Sam conscious. “Who else were they after?”

“Bobby Singer,” he says, slowly. “Mr. Blue. He’s - he and Pink were the bigs. Christian Campbell. It was supposed to be three for one.”

“Well,” Dean says, eyeing Blonde’s body sprawled across the floor. “It was something like that.”

“Didn’t know about you,” Sam says, his voice desperate, his fingers too weak to hold onto his sleeve any longer. “I never would’ve - I didn’t want this.”

“I know,” Dean reminds him. “And I don’t mind, Sammy, not one bit. You’re one of the good guys, doing a good job.”

More tears slide down Sam’s temple, mixing with blood and sweat and Dean nearly misses it when he says, “Can you walk?”

“Probably,” he says. “But I’m not going anywhere.”

“You don’t have to - not really. Just hide, Dean. They’re not gonna search, not if I tell them it’s empty. They’ll believe me, they’ll - “ He starts coughing again, wheezing and gasping as Dean rubs at his chest and whispers sweet words into his hair. Sam takes a moment to catch his breath before he continues, “I can’t get arrested. We can still have - we can still run. We can meet in Charleston.”

“South Carolina?”

Sam smiles, his eyes fluttering. “West Virginia. You remember it?”

Dean was eighteen and Sam wasn’t fooled by his stories anymore. They lived in the slums of Charleston, West Virginia, for all of eight months. He wonders what it is that he remembers about that summer, because all Dean can recall is how Sam would tuck himself into his books and drift farther and farther from his brother’s grasp.

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Yeah, I remember it.”

“The blue bridges,” he says. “The light blue bridges, over the river. You remember the bank?”

“The movie theatre,” he says, because now Dean can picture every painted brick of that shitty little cinema where they watched old reruns of sixties classics. It sat, humid and sweating, on the banks of the river, with the sounds of highway traffic rattling the walls. They spent a whole afternoon watching the Star Wars movies back to back, Sammy’s shaggy little head pressed against the seat, his fingers greasy from popcorn.

“Just hide,” Sam begs. “Please just hide. I’ll keep talking, you’ll be able to hear me. And then you run, Dean, you run to Charleston. And I’ll meet you there - at the theatre.”

Dean laughs and tastes blood. “And if it’s not a theatre anymore?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he whispers. “I’ll find you, I promise, I’ll find you.”

Dean cradles him close, breathing into his hair as he ignores the agony of two bullets lodged deep. “Not sure if I can make it outta here, kiddo.”

“Yes you can,” Sam whispers, frantic. His heart is a hummingbird’s wings against Dean’s hand. “Yes you can. If you can walk, you can drive. You can drive, you can make it to Ellen. She’ll have a doctor.” He’s hesitating and Sam can sense it, so he opens his eyes and whispers. “Kiss me. Kiss me just once and then meet me in Charleston.”

Dean bends low enough that he thinks his body may just tear from it and he presses his lips against Sam’s. Their mouths are coated in blood and tears and his lips are chapped and sore to the touch but Sam is breathing into his mouth and Dean takes every bit he can get.

“Charleston,” he whispers, shifting slowly from underneath Sam’s weight, pillowing his head with what remains of his jacket.

“They’re coming,” Sam whispers, smiling at him with glassy eyes.

“I’ll stay where I can see you. I’ll stay close.”

“Yeah,” Sam says in a breathy exhale. They hear the sound of gravel crunching under the slow spin of tires, the careful footsteps of on duty cops and the jingle of dog collars. “Charleston.”

“Charleston,” Dean repeats, holding it close like a lifeline. He tucks himself behind the plastic covered remains of a forklift, doing his best not to jostle his shoulder or pull at his side.

Sam goes still against the concrete, limp and quiet. “I’ll meet you in Charleston, Sammy, I’ll be there by the time the leaves turn, waiting on that fucking riverbank. Bet you anything it still smells like garbage.”

“Ten bucks,” Sam murmurs, soft and barely audible.

The doors open to the sound of metal and rubber boots and Dean squeezes his eyes shut.