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"Just our luck to get whammied by a Celtic god on our first day back in the game," Dean grumbled, breath billowing out in front of him as he rubbed his hands over his goose-pimpled arms roughly.
"We woke him up after millennia of undisturbed sleep, and we’d been trampling all over his forest and spilling blood on his resting place. Did you expect him to just ignore us?" Sam swiped at the back of his neck, fingers coming away shiny with moisture. His face was as red and sweaty as Dean’s was pale and chilled.
"Fucking horned bastard," Dean spat for good measure, wishing he could have kicked Cernunnos’s dumbass glowing head in for hitting them with a curse this uncomfortable. "Dammit," Dean said, blowing frigid air onto his blue-tipped fingers uselessly, "I’m freezing my balls off, Sam. Get the fuck over here, warm me up."
"I don’t think it works like that," Sam muttered, but he joined Dean on his bed and looped an arm over his shoulders, heat distorting the air around him like he was a furnace. Dean groaned loudly, because even Sam’s impossibly high body temperature was doing nothing to help; he still felt like he had an illogically large shard of ice lodged in his center. "This is the worst,” Dean complained, sticking a frost-bitten hand down Sam’s pants to see if maybe it would have any effect. Disappointingly, it was clear that Sam could no longer feel cold any more than Dean could feel hot.
Sam ignored the hand currently traveling south in his jeans, frowning hard and wiping at the sweat over his upper lip. Dean leaned in to lick it off, stopping when Sam squirmed and turned his face away. “Not now, Dean. Jesus, we’re kind of in the middle of a small crisis here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
"Well what else are we supposed to do? I know for a fact that the dick who did this to us practically doesn’t exist in the lore, and I don’t see you volunteering any bright ideas. C’mon, we can at least blow off some steam, huh?" Dean cupped Sam’s face with hands that felt like numbed weights, kissing him hard and deep before he could reply.
Sam was unresponsive for a minute, but opened right up when Dean brought his tongue into the equation, moaning into Dean’s mouth and raking his fingernails over Dean’s back. It was a little excessive for Sam, but Dean definitely wasn’t complaining, pulling Sam’s hair impatiently as he sucked on his tongue and kneaded at his bottom lip.
When Sam broke the kiss, his face was soaked in sweat, beads of it dripping off his chin and leaving his bangs curled-up and darkened. “Fuck me, Dean,” he breathed, his face so thoroughly flushed that he looked like he’d just run ten miles. “Um. Normally I’d get right on that, but…are you sure you’re up for it? You look kind of…off,” Dean hazarded, trying to feel at Sam’s forehead before remembering that it was a futile action. “Ugh,” Sam answered, drawing Dean back in and covering his mouth with quick, hungry kisses. Dean hummed at the back of his throat, senseless fingers working clumsily at the button of Sam’s jeans.
He was distracted from his goal when something tickled his cheek, and he reached a hand up to brush it away, when another something crept up his arm. Dean pulled back abruptly and stared, bewildered. There were plants growing out of the sheets of the bed, stems and leaves winding over Sam’s legs and up to his fingers, waving merrily when he prodded at them in shock. “What the hell,” Sam wondered, starting to disentangle the plants from around his limbs with a displeased scowl. “Holy shit,” Dean added, suddenly noticing the completely out-of-place snowdrift that had appeared at the foot of the bed. There was a scattering of half-melted snowflakes on the nightstand.
Sam grimaced, pulling particularly hard on a bundle of thin roots that seemed to have fused with his shirt. The glass on the nightstand exploded right as he did so, sending shards flying into the snow caking the carpet. They’d both jumped at the burst of sound, riveted to the shattered glass with a growing sense of dread. When Dean turned back to Sam, he saw that a tangle of tiny flowers and leaves was slinking through his hair. He widened his eyes incredulously, pointing at Sam’s head. “Uh, you’ve got…” Sam felt at his hair immediately, cursing when he grabbed a fistful of greenery. Dean swallowed around the tightness in his throat.
"What’re we gonna do? There has to be some kind of a cure; we can’t live with this forever.”
When he wrung his hands to punctuate his statement, a loud thump sounded from the corner of the room. Going over to inspect the source of the noise, he found a hailstone the size of a walnut by the dresser. “What were that freak’s exact words, again? I was kinda distracted by the three faces and the ram-headed snakes.” Sam shook his head frustratedly and thought for a second.
"Something about us each losing control with thy other self, just like we do in, um, places of sanctuary best unsoiled by…the likes of ye blasphemes." Dean wrinkled his nose contemptuously.
"I can’t believe there’re gods who still talk like that. That asshole stag needs to get with the times." Sam put his head in his hands, fingers twisting in hair and leaves. "There’s no way out of this, Dean. There’s no way out of it, and it’s gonna keep getting worse until we can’t stand to be around each other." Dean exhaled through his nose, cloud of breath appearing and disappearing as he considered their situation with a hopelessness that was escalating by the minute. "Fuck,” he exclaimed, kicking the bed frame too hard and making his big toe throb resentfully.
There was an ominous tinkling noise coming from the direction of the lone window, and when Dean’s eyes darted over to it he saw that it was spiderwebbed with cracks, patterns of frost eating at its sides.
"I’m going outside," Sam declared suddenly, pulling his sweat-darkened shirt over his head and standing up with a flourish. After a pause, he took his pants off, too, kicking them aside. “You’re going out like that? I know you’re a closet exhibitionist, Sammy, but it’s the middle of October. You’ll offend the locals.”
"I don’t think there’s any danger of me running into anybody this early in the morning." Sam pulled at the waistband of his boxers with a wistful expression, like he actually wished he could prance around buck naked, underwear be damned. Dean kind of wished Sam could, too. "I’ll go with you," Dean said, considering his jacket before remembering that it wouldn’t do him any good in his current condition. "Fuckin’ claustrophobic in here."
"Maybe…" Sam mused, head tilted to the sky with his eyelids shut, foliage and flowers framing his face where they had grown out of the grass surrounding his feet. "Maybe we should…take a break."
Dean looked at him in surprise, going over to sit by him in the shade of the tree and leaving patches of frost on the ground in his wake. “What’re you talking about, Sammy? It’s been a week since we worked a case; feels like enough of a break to me.” Sam swallowed, and Dean tracked the movement with his eyes, the line of Sam’s neck exposed and tempting as he continued to lean his head back against the bark of the tree. He was sweating buckets again, rivulets tracked down the sides of his face and bare skin glossy all over, and Dean wished he could touch him without inadvertently creating a hailstorm, or some shit.
"I didn’t mean a break from the job," Sam clarified hesitantly, finally opening his eyes and giving Dean a hooded look. "I meant, a break from. Each other." Dean sat back on his haunches and frowned. "Where’s this coming from? I do something to piss you off?"
"What, aside from the usual?" Sam tried for a smirk but it came out all wrong, and that was just as well, because Dean had a pit of dread weighing his stomach down and he wasn’t in the mood for jokes.
Sam swept his hands over the grass carelessly, twitching when roots began to push out of the earth at his touch, curling towards him eagerly. “This is what’s pissing me off, Dean. The stupid curse. I can’t control what it might do when you’re around me, and the same goes for you. I hate to say it, but that Cernuunos guy knew what he was doing; he got us good with this one.”
"Bullshit. It’s not even that bad," Dean barked, but the burst of anger that had him clenching his jaw had also started a relentless flurry of snowflakes falling into his eyes, even with the searing heat of Sam’s body nearby. "Jesus fucking Christ," Dean swore, swiping at his eyes and noticing that the tree roots at his feet had started to freeze over. "Dean," Sam said, achingly soft, and took his hand, holding firm even when Dean tried to pull away. The stems winding through Sam’s fingers tickled Dean’s palm. "It’ll just be for a while, okay? Just to see if it lets up when we’re apart. Besides, won’t it be a relief not to have to put up with me for a day or two?"
Dean could’ve punched him for that, because all he could think of was Stanford and how numb he’d felt when Sam was gone, like he couldn’t properly fit the daily grind into his life, smooth its unruly edges down and keep it contained, without his little brother there to do it with him.
Overhead, thunderclouds were forming, springing into existence within the space of seconds as Dean tried to breathe evenly. “Whatever, Sam.” Dean snatched his hand away and stumbled to his feet as it began to rain, rapidly darkening the ground and making Sam’s plants bob and dance. There was honest-to-god steam coming off Sam as the rain pelted him, and Dean would have told him how stupid he looked if he didn’t feel a wave of nausea rolling in his gut. He had no idea which one of them was responsible for the rain, and he didn’t really care. He followed his old frost-edged footsteps back to the motel without looking back, because he knew that if he did, he wouldn’t be able to bear Sam’s expression; it’d punch a breath out of him and he’d march right back over and they’d be chained together for good, freak weather incidents or not.
Afterward, he tried to console himself with the idea that they couldn’t stay apart for more than a few days, that Sam’s little experiment really would be doomed to a short life-span no matter how the curse acted on them while they went their separate ways. But then again, Sam was one stubborn bitch, and the kid had been chasing normalcy all his life, and it maybe didn’t help the matter any that Dean was just as stubborn and had a competitive streak three miles wide. If Sam wanted to try outlasting the curse, Dean wasn’t gonna be the one to cave and go crawling back to him.
Still, as days turned to weeks turned to months, Dean felt the distance between him and Sam like it was a tangible thing, and he threw himself into toilsome hunts to try to curb the pain that had taken up permanent residence in his chest, flurries of snowfall following him into haunted forests and flakes gently shrouding him as he slept, ice encasing lonely motel-room mirrors and perpetually frostbitten fingers relearning their way around a gun.
Dean reacquainted himself with missing Sam, woke up most days with his brother’s name on his lips and an itchiness behind his eyes, missed Sam’s laugh and the way his brow furrowed when he was annoyed and his beautiful goddamn mouth.
The curse was the most noticeable when Dean let his guard down, saw something and thought, Sam would get a kick out of that, or ended up drunk in a gutter without Sam’s huge shoulder to lean on and his stupid voice rumbling warm and berating in Dean’s ear. At times like those, Dean would find himself slipping on sudden patches of ice, or surrounded by confused pedestrians who were squinting against frosty winds when the sky had been clear and sunny not seconds before.
The weather reports on the outdated TV sets of innumerable motel rooms across the country became riddled with mentions of unstable weather patterns, and Dean realized after a while that he could track Sam with minimal effort if he tried; the reports of unprecedented droughts and heat-waves were practically a trail of footsteps leading him to his brother. He could have found Sam and knocked him around a little, or laid him out on the bed of whatever hole-in-the-wall he was staying in and made him forget they were ever apart—though the curse would surely make that last bit hazardous to any and all surrounding furniture.
But he never followed the trail that would never grow cold.
Instead, he hunted, and he dreamed of Sam, and he waited. He waited a long, long time, the skies becoming instantly overcast whenever he stepped outside, icy zephyrs following him around and his heart growing heavier by the day. At the other side of the country, the air shimmered with heat and metal surfaces became scalding to the touch every time a certain tall man with downcast eyes passed by.