The first week, Sam probably spends more time wishing he could be numb than he does moving.

Never mind how much more important one thing is than the other. His own head and getting too deep in it have always been his biggest problems, and right now, he doesn't even have Dean around to pull him out.

He can operate like this. He can function. He's good at it, even. That's one thing he and Dean have always had in common, something they either inherited from their father in utero or had pounded into them at malleable ages: they thrive under trauma, feed off pain and hardship, are at their best and their most efficient when they're tunneling under a mountain and shrugging off the granite raining down on their shoulders. Even as they're hating every second.

The difference between them is that Dean will have a blowout, swipe a few lamps off the tables and put a few holes in the drywall, and then he's good. He can compartmentalize, shove it down, and sure, maybe it'll all come bubbling back up in the worst kind of way soon as he stops moving, but he won't have to deal with it while he's chopping necks and burning rubber.

Sam has to think everything to death even while he's trying to run as fast and as far as he can, and he is already sick of being alone with himself.

He thought he was past wanting to be like Dean and hating Dean for it, had been since his mid-twenties at least, but maybe the whole recent "Dad coming back to life" thing has him regressing, because right now, he wishes he were his older brother for more reasons than one.

Sam hunts.

He starts looking for cases on the third week, picks one up on the fourth.

He has to be selective. Short, quick, involving things he already knows well. He can't afford to spend a lot of time hanging around and doing research. In and out in under a week is ideal, wham, bam, thank you, ma'am.

He has tried so many times to walk away from this. But in the end, it's the only place he can go. What was it Zachariah said to Dean? When he had him in suspenders and Sam in khakis, memories scraped brutally clean of each other as they passed in the hallways of a haunted skyscraper?

You're a hunter. Not because your dad made you, not because God called you back from Hell, but because it's what you are. And you love it. You'll find your way to it in the dark every single time and you're miserable without it.

This is true of them both.

Once, when Dean was drunk, very drunk, drunk past the honesty threshold, he said Zachariah might as well have been talking about what the two of them were to each other.

This is also true.

Sam buys a trustworthy little 2000s hybrid with Charlie's magic credit card - he's lucky as hell it was his turn to tote it around. The car is about as far as he can possibly get from the Impala. It's compact and silvery and modern, smells like carpet shampoo and air freshener inside. He resists the urge to douse the seats with whiskey and gunpowder. He'd never get the ratio right, and it being wrong would be worse than it not being there at all.

He rebuilds his arsenal under a dozen fake names that all pull sparkling background checks, stores guns and knives and bottles of holy water in neat compartments beneath the back seat, fully labeled and impeccably alphabetized. He's always suspected himself of mild, undiagnosed OCD, and now it's in full swing.

Sam talks to no one more than he absolutely has to. He doesn't make friends. He picks up on whispered speculation he's a psychopath, serial killer, on the spectrum. Man in Black. It reminds him of the brutal, blank days in Gabriel's pocket universe, tracking a fake trickster, ignoring a fake Bobby, fake Dean's fake death filling his veins and his soul like frozen lead.

Sometimes a salt and burn runs longer than he expected. Torched the wrong body, didn't account for the human element. Then he has to blitz out of town with horns and howls on his heels, the scent of wild places and fresh blood thicker in his nose than the clean car scent.

Sam wards himself from head to toe. Charms, amulets, hex bags, even a couple new tattoos. He doesn't think it makes a difference, but there's nothing else he can do to slow them down.

Slow him down.

Sam is buying time with counterfeit money.

The acid of coffee sears at the violent chips in Sam's teeth and the lines of his stomach unless he mutes it with milk and sugar and artificial flavors, his one concession to processed crap. Dean can make fun of him all he wants. Caramel macchiatos and French vanilla cappuccinos are gifts from something that is not God, because it actually loves humanity.

There have been times in his life, though, when Sam wants the bitterness biting into the whole tract of him with every swallow, the rich smell and tormented flavor pulling memories harshly to the surface. 2008, when Dean was dragged bloody away from him for the first time. 2013, when he was blown into Purgatory. And so many other years and days and hours.

He starts drinking it black again now, doesn't even realize it until he hears himself ask the waitress for it, stops himself from automatically ordering a slice of pie.

The Wild Hunt belonged to Gabriel first. God gave it to him early on, after Eden and Lucifer but before the Flood. He used his horn to bring it to heel, and God told him to hunt evil, to root it out where it grew and burn it at the roots. A vigilante posse of liminal souls led by an archangel.

Sam finds this during the course of the research deep dive he carries out in rural libraries and on spotty wifi networks, and he can't say he's all that surprised. He experienced the savage streak that saws through the center of Gabriel firsthand.

There is no mention of God creating the Hunt. Sam doesn't know if this is just a mythological plothole, or if He didn't make it. The second option makes something along his spine prickle coldly.

There were other Huntsmen, after Gabriel was called home. Herod was one. Apparently Cain killed him sometime during the Bronze Age, took his place, because that's how it works; the Huntsman's killer succeeds him. Not that Sam needed a book to tell him that at this point.

Yeah, thanks, could've used that a few months back.

He tries to justify it, tell himself this information's been tough to find and they didn't know it was relevant at the time, but the fact remains. They should have done more research, and research is his forte, and just like so many other times he's lost Dean, this one is all Sam's fault.

He can't believe the weight of that doesn't pop the tires of the car when he's in it.

Sam spends his most precious minutes, the ones he's clawed fiercely out for this exact purpose, picking through useless information in search of what he really wants. The Hunt as an ill omen. Led by King Arthur and Sir Francis Drake. Woden. Ties to Purgatory, Elphame. Ghost riders. Dragons. He knows he won't use any of it, most of it probably isn't even true, but he's been wrong about that before, so he files it all neatly away.

Nothing about disbanding the Hunt. Nothing about curing the Huntsman. None of the sources Sam finds seem to even consider that anyone would ever want to do that, and Sam hates the people who wrote them.

He does find one thing, though. About Cain. The fifth or sixth or seventh Huntsman, depending on the record.

He walked away.

There is no mention of why, there is no mention of how. But Sam takes that information and clutches it tight inside himself when he catches a few raw hours of sleep that night.

He dreams about his lips and tongue on the bloody Mark, hot and ridged on the flesh of Dean's forearm, both lock and key to a billion-year-old door Sam broke down to keep his own world intact.

Castiel calls him first.

It happens during the fifth week, when the reality of being hunted is just beginning to sink in but hasn't yet become one of the mundane horrors that haunt Sam's life. His eyes burn and there's a persistent itch sunk deep between the meat of his shoulder blades, a throbbing spider made of tangled nerves. When his phone buzzes in the midnight quiet of the university library, Sam flinches.

He checks the name on the screen. He knows it won't be Dean's. It hurts him anyway to see it's not.

"Hello?" His voice is rough with disuse.

"Sam." Castiel sounds grave. "Is everything all right?"

"Yeah." Sam rubs at his eyes. "Why wouldn't it be?"

There's a pause. "I haven't heard from you or Dean in over a month. Neither of you have been back to the bunker, and he's not answering his phone."

"We're fine." Sam thanks a God he hates he doesn't have to smile. "Just a...real tough hunt."

"Do you want me to come and help?"

"No." Sam realizes a second too late that that came out of his mouth too quick. "Thanks, Cas, but. W-we're good. Honest."

Castiel doesn't believe him. He's worried. Why the hell wouldn't he be? But it was Sam and Dean he drew his humanity from, no one else around to model healthier behavior for him, so he doesn't push.

"All right. Be safe."

"Yeah. You too, Cas. See you in a while."

Jody calls next. She's fiercer, though, harder to shake, won't take no for an answer. The second time she calls, she's at the bunker with Castiel, and they want to talk to Dean. They want reassurance that Sam is not shattered enough to do something stupid. He can't give it to them because he doesn't have that himself.

After that call, Sam wards himself so he can't be tracked, shielding against spells and angel magic.

They keep calling. Castiel is growing frantic. Jody breaks down, screaming, hurling things she's obviously been keeping buried and festering for years.

Sam is hollow enough by then, a week sometime in the twenties, to ditch every phone they know the number of. He's already called in all the favors he can; that well's tapped out.

He knows it's what Dean would do, in his situation. Even if he wouldn't want Sam to.

Sam knew it was a bad idea, going back to the bunker. But all he had was what he'd been carrying on him when the Hunt showed up (a few knives, gun, ammo, couple charms, lockpicks, stake) and a stolen car. Dean might have been okay with that, Sam couldn't be. Then again, Dean would've had the Impala and everything in it, with the keys practically glued to him at all times.

Also, there was something childish and wounded pulsing hurt inside Sam, something that just wanted home. Kind of ironic how bad he needed the bunker, considering how long it'd taken him to put down roots in it compared to Dean.

He'd always thought that, of the two of them, Dean was the wilder one. What an unpleasant and guilty shock to find out how wrong he was.

He made it just outside Lebanon, in the quiet, anonymous hours of the night when weapons and fangs always seem to stab deeper into weakened flesh, before he realized something was wrong. He killed the engine, coasted to a stop, sat there listening to the ticking for a long time and trying to convince himself that it was the only noise he could hear. It wasn't, of course. He unfolded himself from the dinged-up Corolla, banging his knees because he's used to accommodating for their car, his car.

Lebanon was full of noise. It all rang hollow, sounded unreal. Whoops and howls and the clang of weapons, the thunder of wheels and tires and hooves and boots and paws. Sam swallowed deeply, hoped there was no potential prey for the Wild Hunt in this corner of Kansas, knew there had to be even if he didn't yet understand the criteria it used. He had led it here. People would die, because of him, again, and he was guilty about that but it was such a weary, worn feeling it barely even stung, settling on top of the weight he'd carried for decades.

He knew then he couldn't go anyplace Dean could predict. Couldn't run anywhere he knew, had to randomize his locations and routes. Anything familiar was a potential showdown. And he couldn't call anybody for help, couldn't go looking for them - because he could not bring this to the doorstep of those he, they, loved. He already has enough family blood on his hands to fill an Olympic swimming pool, and what's there burns filthy in the furrows of his soul.

The demon laughs when Sam tells it what he wants. Hysterical, howling laughter, doubled over at the waist, tears streaming out of bloody-black eyes. Sam waits with a jaw clenched so tight it hurts his teeth, and his fists in the same boat. His nose and ears ache. It's cold in a crossroads at midnight.

"The Wild Hunt?" the demon gasps out, once it can talk again. "Led by Dean Winchester?" It wipes its eyes, shakes its head. "Yeah. No dice, Lurch. You're SOL - we're not risking that thing tearing through Hell just so you can bone your brother again." It grins. Its vessel is wearing braces with bubblegum-colored bands. "Buy a Fleshlight."

Killing it doesn't feel nearly as good as Sam hoped.

Dean caught the Huntsman, a dead-eyed guy in a high-and-tight and sleek desert camo, right through the heart with a mistletoe stake. Because somehow Sam trawled that up out of the lore but not what would happen after. Dean killed him to a chorus of shrieks and howls and wails, face tight and stony with fury and grief and guilt. The Huntsman still had Carrie's blood all the way up to his elbows. Even now, turning it over and over and over again in his mind like a sick worry stone, Sam could swear he let Dean do it.

Dean bore him to the floor with a meaty thwack, his own knees cracking sharp against the cement under the worn carpet, and the Huntsman was dead before they hit. The corpse almost instantly dissolved into something like a mass of toxic fireflies, a thousand glowing shades of green, and it looked like Dean was kneeling in a pool of neon. They swirled around him, landing on him, and he dropped the bloody stake to swat and scrape at them, swearing. Sam charged forward, trying desperately to help, and his heart jolted nauseously into his mouth when he realized they were sinking into Dean. Dissolving.

He was so focused on trying to get rid of them (useless, they went right through his hands with a sensation like an ice-cold needle running between his metacarpals) he didn't even notice Dean was just sitting there, face numb, blank. Not fighting anymore.

Sam only looked at him once all the fireflies had vanished, breathing hard, spooked by what'd just happened and how fucking calm he looked. He only vaguely realized Carrie's body had vanished, too, and the rest of the Hunt had fallen silent.

"Son of a bitch," Dean said, almost to himself.

"How're you…" Sam started, but his mouth was too dry to talk. He swallowed. "H-how d'you feel?" When Dean didn't answer, he was suddenly desperate to fill the quiet. "What the hell was that? D'you think - "

"I think you oughta leave," Dean interrupted steadily.

"What?" Sam demanded, shaken. "What the fuck're you - "

The words shriveled cold on his tongue when Dean looked at him, and there was something wrong with his eyes. They were dark, liquid, predatory.

It reminded Sam of something, a memory half-buried in the smoldering sludge at the bottom of his brain, one with the flat, sharp razor-blade quality of his soulless days. Dean with blood on his mouth in an alley, Dean smashing lights in their motel room, covering his ears, screaming in abject sensory overload as his gums and eyes and organs ached and ached and ached with change.

Sam already knew then he needed to leave. But he didn't actually go until it was almost too late, until Dean grabbed his bicep, bared teeth that already looked too sharp, and snarled out a strained, desperate "Poughkeepsie."

The thirty-second week, Sam accidentally asks for a room with two queens. It's the first time in months.

"Wait, sorry," he says quietly. "Just...just the one bed. Please."

The clerk, a woman in her fifties with raccoon eyes and limp ringlets, eyes him for a long time, then abruptly says, "Already punched the code in. No singles left anyway. You're in 13B, enjoy."

Sam doesn't take the key she slides across the desk at first, tries to argue. But with how damn stubborn she is, she might as well have some Winchester in her. (She actually might; he is in Illinois.) After a few token minutes, he just takes the key, because he's too hollow to make it into a real fight.

He sleeps that night, because he can fall asleep anywhere. Benefit of growing up on the road; the only places he's ever really had trouble have been the soft, permanent beds of his and Jess's apartment, Amelia's house, the bunker.

Even unconscious, he's aware of the other bed, incandescently empty across the room. It drops the temperature enough to rime the dirty curtains with frost, breathes ozone from between springs and sheets. Because it might as well be a ghost.

A horn sounds, wavering, in the black, starry space before dawn. Sam leaves before the howls can rise to accompany it.

The first time Sam and Dean made love, they did not, because it never happened.

Sam has dreamed about it plenty. Planned it out plenty. Convinced himself it was going to happen, has been tortured using it by things that wanted to hurt him, and always chickened out, so many times that even if he'd bothered to keep count, he would've lost it by now.

Wanting Dean is such a core facet of Sam's personality, a piece of him he hates and depends upon so much, he doesn't even know when it formed. He can only be glad he didn't say anything before he figured out it was wrong. There have been days when Sam was dead sure Dean has always felt the same way about him. There have been days when he knew that, if he even hinted at it, Dean would walk right out of their shared life.

Sam is caught up now in a complex slurry of guilt and grief at never having told him. It isn't even an option, with things like this. But even with the possibility of eternal separation laid out at Sam's feet like the bone-splitting drop from an endless skyscraper, a long asphalt drag of shredding agony all the way down, he knows he wouldn't tell Dean and risk ruining what they had even if he could. He knows that if he gets Dean back, he will keep his mouth shut.

He is, after all, a Winchester. He is his father's son.

There was a girl. Just like always.

They dropped everything to help her. Just like always.

Sam was jealous. Just like always.

He hates it. He doesn't enjoy resenting people he doesn't know, people who are in trouble, but it's a kneejerk reaction for him. At least he's gotten to the point where he can almost always tear his way through it without anybody, including him, noticing it. That wasn't the case, though, with Carrie Jones, who they found hitchhiking in Wyoming, and confessed to them from the back seat she was being hunted.

They warded her, Dean told her it'd be okay, Sam did research (not enough). He did not like the way Carrie gravitated towards Dean, clung to him, practically, even though Dean didn't seem interested or even all that aware.

Is it because it reminds you of how you treat him? asked the snide little voice that rode around in Sam's head. It sounded like him as a teenager, sometimes. Sometimes it was Dad. Sometimes it was Ruby.

They figured they'd wait for the Hunt to arrive. Kill the Huntsman. Everything would be dandy, because it wasn't like they hadn't taken out gods before.

They didn't know how the Hunt chose its prey. They didn't get why, when the Huntsman showed up, he looked back and forth between the two of them and laughed.

"Ain't got no beef with either of you boys," he told them. "I can smell it on you: you're clean." He nodded to the door of the charmed motel room they'd stashed Carrie in. "Just lemme at the bitch, and we won't have trouble."

They didn't know exactly what a Huntsman could do, either, especially with the other members of his Hunt backing him up. They did not stand a chance, even as every member went out of their way to avoid shedding what they saw as innocent blood.

Months after Carrie's death, Sam spends time he should be using for research to run a background check. It's a comprehensive one, takes a while. Turns out Carrie's real name was Allison Graham, and she used to live in a small town in Michigan. She used to have a toddler, too, and a boyfriend. Sam reads doctor's notes, police reports, court proceedings, and he isn't surprised by the story of abuse and lies he pieces together. Carrie-Allison telling the cops and CPS over and over again that the bruises dappling her son definitely weren't coming from his father, filing a missing person's report weeks after anyone had last seen the boy, eventually insisting she definitely hadn't helped bury the tiny, battered body.

Sam isn't surprised. But he is savagely, causticly hateful.

This is what Dean sacrificed his soul to avenge, he thinks to himself as he closes his laptop, knowing he can't afford a break but needing one anyway.

It feels very, very familiar.

The weeks are months, eventually, and then the months are a year and change. Sam's skin feels shredded beneath the surface, swollen and fragile on top, as if he is a walking bruise and if anyone who isn't Dean touches him, he will tear wide open.

The Hunt is getting faster, or maybe he's getting easier to track. He no longer has a week before he has to worry about moving on, eventually, and then it's a matter of days, and now he's lucky if he is allowed to spend a single night. He hears howls almost constantly. They remind him of hellhounds. How incredibly fortunate that he's the one on the run from this, when he's never been chased down and eaten alive by them, rather than Dean.

Speaking of Dean, Sam could swear he hears him calling for him, in among the howling.

Sammy!

Sam goes to smaller and smaller towns, where his presence endangers fewer and fewer people. He disappears into the American Midwest. This is the place he and Dean have always been made of, after all, where they were born, where they chose to make their home. Prairies, farmlands, nameless places that all look the same, ten thousand miles of road crisscrossing the hunting grounds of ten thousand all-American monsters, and Sam still believes Dean knows every inch of them like he does his own veins.

Sam has to stop hunting. There is no time. He can only run, and keep looking for salvation, sifting through a Mojave's worth of sand for a bullet he only hopes exists.

It's on the Friday of the sixty-sixth week that Sam finds out how Cain left the Hunt behind, because of course he's been laser-focused on that for over a year with the kind of savant intensity that's both a blessing and a curse in the most cliched way.

He's talking to a retired professor in Wales, an ancient man whose specialty was, is, Anglo-Saxon mythology. A stroke's left him unable to speak anything but Welsh and there's no translator available, so Sam's ripped himself through a jerry-rigged crash course in the language. He seems to be getting by.

The Wild Hunt's old, according to the professor, and very, very powerful. It doesn't release its hold on those it catches unless something more powerful or with more claim to Huntsman or Hunter pulls them loose. In Gabriel's case, it was God and Heaven, calling to him. In Cain's, it was Hell, and all its Princes.

"Y-ydych - chi'n sicr?" Sam stresses, stumbling brokenly through the sentence.

"Ydw," the professor confirms. Sam can't even thank him, just hangs up and stares mindlessly into space for what turns out to be almost an hour.

Here's the numbness he wanted earlier, finally.

The Mark is gone. The Princes of Hell are extinct. No one knows where Chuck is, and the few remaining angels would laugh Sam right out of Heaven if he went to them asking for a favor. He knows, at least technically speaking, how to spring a soul from Hell, but how would he get Dean down there? He's already tried the demon route and they very obviously aren't interested in taking him.

And even if they were, even if they could. Would Sam really send him back down there, with no concrete guarantee he'd be able to get him out?

He would ask himself if torture is better than hunting. But he knows that both he and Dean have already had that question forcibly answered for them, multiple times.

Sam keeps himself awake for hours, clawing over and over again at the walls of his own brain with the repetition of How? How? How?

He draws blood, but no answer.

On the sixty-seventh week, Sam gets tired of running.

Dean catches up to him in Kansas, which makes sense. All their beginnings and ends seem to tie back here. At least all the ones that matter.

Sam's shacked up in a roadside motel the owners abandoned during the '08 crash. The place was probably built shabby, and a decade standing empty hasn't exactly done it any favors. It's okay, though. He won't be here long.

He sits on the dusty, sagging bed he refuses to sleep in even if it is his for-real-this-time last night on Earth, jaw set, hands clasped, knee jiggling rhythmically up and down. He's been hearing the noises of the Hunt at all times for around a month now, but soon as he was planted, they started getting louder and louder. He's stripped off all the charms and wards, burnt or marred the tattoos. Nothing to do now but sit.

Then Sam hears a sound he didn't even realize he was waiting for: a car horn, honking out in the parking lot. More familiar to him than his mother's voice will ever be. After that, there's dead silence.

Sam stands up and goes outside, not bothering to close the door behind him. He's had the lore of the Wild Hunt living rent-free in his head for a year now, and it always seems to suggest the Hunt brings thunderstorms and shrieking wind, either generated by it or to hide it as it passes or both. And maybe that's true, when the Hunt or its Huntsman wants it to be. But right now, the air's moving about as much as a corpse, stars stale pinpricks in the sky, the moon a limned hole of deeper black. He smells the slaughterhouse reek of blood and offal, forests, plains, veldts and tundras, everywhere untamed.

There is just enough light for him to see his pursuers, finally caught up.

The sun-cracked asphalt is crowded with figures, mounted and not. There are horses, motorcycles, what Sam could swear is a wyvern, something he can't look at too long because the amount of eyes and legs make him queasy. There are humans, vampires, werewolves, ghouls, djinn, dragons, okami, demons and angels, even, and is that a fucking Leviathan, face just a gaping pit of teeth and tongue and twitching throat? Then there are the dogs, prowling through everybody's legs, looking at Sam, every single one of their eyes fixed on him. He's seen Hellhounds, black dogs, but these are...different.

None of the assembled creatures touch him. They're all yards away, arrayed in a horseshoe shape, and at the bottom of it, right in front of Sam, is the car.

It looks different somehow, even though the basic shape's the same. It's more dangerous. Sleeker, sharper, a single rippling sliver of shine to paint that otherwise melds right into the night. There's something draconic about it. Undeniably alive. Sam does not know how it makes him feel.

The door opens on the driver's side, and Dean gets out.

He almost seems taller than Sam remembers, but then again, he hasn't seen him in a year and he's over six feet tall, even if Sam's brain codes him as short. There's almost no light, but Sam catches a faint tapetum flare in his eyes anyway, bright green. There's something wrong with them. Maybe the pupils are shaped strangely, maybe there are no whites, maybe it's something else, but...it's definitely something.

Dean looks young. The crow's feet are gone, the whisper of gray at his temples. He looks healthy. He looks happy.

The leather jacket he's wearing is the same black as the Impala, and fits him a hundred times better than their dad's old one, lost ages ago. There are knives strapped to his hips, a gun holstered on his thigh, and he moves like a predator on boots that make no noise at all. He looks like what anyone unconsciously imagines when they think the word "hunter," Sam included.

Dean walks around to stand right in front of the car, directly across from Sam. He leaves bloody footprints on the pale asphalt.

"Glad you came to your senses," he tells Sam, voice a whiskey-velvet purr he hasn't heard from him in years, outside dreams. "Nobody can outrun this thing. And you can't outrun me."

"I never wanted to outrun you," Sam says softly. "Wasn't ever trying to. Just wanted some breathing room."

"Right," Dean agrees, "to do what you do best. Research. That's always been your wheelhouse, Sammy, but I guess I was more into the…" He pauses, and when he smiles, all his teeth look a little too sharp, and he has too many canines. "Blood and guts."

Sam says nothing. Dean continues after a second.

"But you were plenty good at that, too. In your own right. So...figured out a way to 'save me' yet?"

He throws up air quotes around the words. Sam ignores that. He also ignores the voice in his head, now a bitter young version of himself, pointing out how naturally Dean's fallen into this role. How a part of it's always lived in him.

"No," Sam tells Dean. "It's not that. I-I'm not sure there is a way, not one I can live with, at least, and even if there is. It's not worth it."

He swallows with a throat full of broken glass. Dean tilts his head.

"Not worth getting me back?"

"Not worth running from you any more," Sam clarifies. Dean waits. He goes on. "You're not gonna end the world like this. A-and you don't wanna be saved. And all I've ever really wanted, Dean, is for you to feel good about...letting me go. Walking away."

Dean is definitely not smiling anymore. Sam takes a deep, deep breath, one that makes his ribs creak and stings his lungs.

"Now I know that can happen."

Silence. There's nothing from Dean, nothing from the Hunt. Not even the cooling ticks of the Impala. Maybe she runs cold these days. Or she's always hot, a living thing, blood in her engine rather than gasoline.

"Maybe - maybe it's better if things...end this way," Sam says softly. "I know the kinda people this thing runs down, now. And." He smirks, so he doesn't gag on the bitterness of what he is. "You've been after me for over a year."

There is so much for him to pay for. Lucifer, the Apocalypse, everything he did while soulless, releasing the Darkness, a million other stupid decisions that hurt and killed people who didn't deserve it. And Dean. Even if you only tallied up all the sins Sam's committed against the person who loved him most in the world, left out everything else, he's a monster.

He is ready, finally and completely, to accept his penance, and this time there's no one around to shield him from it.

It feels good, in the way a long-expected heartbreak does.

"I was always gonna die." Sam smiles. "I want you to do it. Maybe I always have."

Dean studies him. It would make sense for him to be looking at him like he's something to eat, something to kill, but somehow, that's not the sense Sam gets. It's a long time before Dean speaks.

"We came after you for a reason," Dean agrees eventually. He begins to walk towards Sam, the distance dying between them, and Sam looks at the knives, the gun, Dean's hands, wonders how he'll do it. "We can smell it on people, sin. Something...unforgivable. It yanks us right in, me especially. Like a damn bloodhound, can't turn away. But you know what flipped the switch, Sam? 'Cause it was only one thing. That sicced us on you."

That catches Sam off guard.

"You know what it was?"

His mind scrambles. Flits to Lucifer, his year with Amelia, unleashing Amara, leaving for Stanford.

How do you weigh a sin? How do you quantify human misery?

Dean is right in front of him now, and Sam is suddenly not ready to die. Not while he's confused, not while there's something he doesn't know. He opens his mouth to ask, but Dean's already answering me.

"Leaving me, a year ago," he says, "and not coming back."

Then he kisses Sam, the way a rattlesnake strikes an ankle, their mouths melded like they were born this way. His strange teeth rip savagely into the fragile meat of Sam's inner lip, releasing a hot copper bloom across their tongues. With the amount of times they have bled into each other, stitching up wounds with their own still flowing, it is as much Dean's blood as it is Sam's, and it tastes like it.

Three changes have happened in Sam's body when Dean pulls back, string of red spit keeping them hooked on each other for a second. He is panting raggedly, for one; his eyes are full of tears, for another; and his cock is hard enough to pound nails in his jeans, for a third.

"If being dumber than a sack of rocks was a big bad, though, that probably would've set us off too," Dean comments. His voice is rougher. Chainsaw tearing through leather. He sweeps Sam's blood and saliva up off his chin with a thumb, pushes it into his full, pink mouth and sucks with a flutter of his throat. "Thinking I could ever live without you." The thumb comes out with an obscene, slurping pop. "No matter what either of us are."

Sam has never thought of himself as prey, despite how frequently he has been. He is a human in a world full of things with fangs and claws and proboscises, a fragile little sack of meat and jelly with just the barest hint of Hell in him to make him spicy. He has been hunted. He has been caught. He has been bitten, cut, drunk from, knocked out, choked, imprisoned, tied down, bled, fed off of, used. And through it all, in his own lens, he has remained a hunter, because that is what he was raised as, what he chose to be. He has always been in control of himself, even when possessed. He has always belonged to himself.

Now, though?

Bleeding before Dean?

For the first time in his life, Sam is prey. He is still alive, but already belongs to someone who is not him. And all he can do is spread his arms to expose his soft parts, and tilt his head back to bare his throat, and offer himself.

Dean holds up his end of a sacred contract, and he takes.

The wind is knocked out of Sam in two bursts, once when Dean hits him, and once when they hit the ground together. Bruises erupt front and back. Dean's mouth is on Sam's, and then it's on his jaw, and then his throat, and he is marking everywhere, laying claim.

Dean tears him naked, snarling, and Sam grabs him, blunt nails digging into satin flesh over steel-cable muscles, and grinds so hard against him bones creak on both ends. He is desperate, he is gasping. He screams the first time Dean bites him on the outside, fucking razor teeth flying through his shoulder like butter to practically grate against his collarbone, precome all but shooting out of his throbbing cock. It puddles in his navel, drips from his head, provides merciful lube when Dean grabs him and strips him from balls to slit. More spills out with every jerk, like he's being milked.

"You like that?" Sam would say Dean purrs it out, but it's too rough for that, a low, satisfied growl. He grabs Sam's jaw, pushes his head back to the point it hurts, and licks along the long, exposed column of his neck. "So pretty for me. Such a good little bitch."

Sam pants, grit grating against his scalp, and finds himself sucking on Dean's fingers. The next thing he knows, Dean yanks him up by a handful of his dirty hair, hauling him into a savage, bruising kiss. Sam tastes death in his mouth, the clean, bright, fierce blaze-of-glory, heat-of-the-moment, Butch-and-Sundance end they have always wanted.

Sam clothes Dean in his touch, hands on every part of him he can reach. They have been apart a year and Sam is so desperate to rememorize him, to refill the spring that's run dry in his head and heart. He is starving, he is dying of thirst, he is burnt and frozen and he's known all along that only Dean is the cure for all of that.

He doesn't fall neatly into the mental map Sam had built of him before. There are no tender spots, there is no softness. He is lean, taut, optimized, feels like a living weapon in Sam's hands. So he isn't gentle with his touches.

He bucks against Dean, he twists, grabs, claws. He bites back. Dean has to fight to keep him on the bottom, and he's sure as hell never going to get him on his stomach. Dean laughs. They are both slick and heaving with each other's fluids, chests rebounding off each other as they suck in air, and Dean's eyes are alive and bright in the darkness. Sam has never more perfectly understood why fighting and lovemaking are so often mistaken for each other.

It is a good night, but Sam does not go gently into it.

It doesn't feel like they're screwing on asphalt. There's wet grass and leaves underneath Sam, snow, sand, soft, loamy, blood-churned earth. Sam's only wounds are from Dean himself. When Dean suddenly enters him, impaling him with one thrust and a howl of animal pleasure, Sam is surprised there is no pain besides the stretch and burn of sudden fullness, then shivers wildly when he realizes he was somehow wet.

How many times has Sam guiltily allowed himself to imagine this, in dirty flashes he felt more like apologizing for the older he got? How many different ways has he considered it going? Gentle, loving. Crazed with lust. Angry and hateful, the white-hot momentum of catharsis. And of course he considered something like what's happening now. Sex like animals mating, an alpha taking what he's just been waiting to be given. But Sam could never have predicted the sheer ferocity with which Dean pistons in and out of him, hips a frantic, pumping blur as he slams home into Sam again and again. He's almost unbearably thick, the rim of his head dragging over Sam's prostate like a fishhook made of lightning, and for each fraction of a second that Sam lies empty on the back stroke, his inner walls are spasming with the need to have Dean back. And of course, the entire time, Dean's hand is on Sam's cock, his other holding him down as Sam grinds and pants and twists, keening his pleasure.

Dean lasts, and lasts, and lasts. It feels like hours. And it's like Sam can't come until he does. But finally, Dean's rhythm begins to break down, the noises he's making get even more savage, and his movements fray around the edges as he loses control. Sam can tell, when his balls smack against his ass, that they're pulsing. Then he finishes, a throbbing, boiling-hot gush, shudders rolling down his back and up his legs. And Sam is coming, too, crying out his brother's name as waves of acid pleasure wash his vision white.

The Hunt howls around them. Its members have been raising a cacophony in chorus since Sam's back hit the ground, shrieks and revving engines and clanging weapons, but now it builds towards a crescendo.

It is at this peak, when every nerve in Sam's body is alive to the point of singing, that Dean's teeth meet in his throat and he rips all of his most important channels wide open.

Sam's hand locks on the back of Dean's head when he pulls back, fingers claws, nails sunk into fragile scalp and blood welling against the beds. He stares up at Dean and his dripping red mouth, lips so full, and his body judders, heart wild in his chest. The orgasm doesn't stop. And by the time it is well and truly finished, Sam's lungs are already full, but he's bleeding out far too fast to drown.

He sprays scarlet into Dean's face anyway, and Dean doesn't flinch, hands coming up to stroke through Sam's hair, tender. He lets Sam grab onto his wrist with his other hand, anchor himself. And his expression is soft. There is forgiveness, there is adoration and acceptance. Dean looks like a man reunited with his one true love. And Sam reflects it all back at him.

When Sam dies, it feels like coming home.

When he comes back, it feels like the best orgasm of his life.

He's risen from the dead before, many times. It's never been all that spectacular, if he's being honest. This...heat floods into him, and sensation crashes directly through the thin wall between pleasure and pain, tears sprouting in wide-open eyes even as he howls loud enough to make his own ears hurt, pounding from the inside out.

There are hands on him, on skin that must be glowing with the molten supernova happening beneath it. Dean's hands. Dean's touch on him, and Dean's scent in his nose, and Dean's taste in his mouth. Dean's voice in his throbbing ears, when he quiets, breathing raggedly. He knows he's safe, even if Dean weren't telling him so over and over and over again, a rumble of affection and amusement in the back of his throat.

"Dean?" His voice comes out quiet, rough.

"Welcome back, Sammy." And yeah, that's his name.

Sam opens his eyes. He thinks it's day at first, because of how bright it is, then notices how everything is in shades of hazel-limned silver. Pearl stars in a gray sky. Night still, it's just...he can see.

He sits up. Dean doesn't help him, but he stays close. The Hunt is clustered around them, quiet, expectant.

Sam's teeth feel strange in his mouth.

He feels strange in his body.

His soul is burning. Every cell's humming with life, with strength.

There are trumpets in his blood. Hunting horns.

"You ready?" Dean asks, and Sam looks at him.

"Yeah." He is, he realizes. He can feel tugging from all around him, calling, scents and feelings, rot and corruption, blight and pain. A new kind of hunt to be on. A new kind of case to work.

Sam has never meant it more when he tells his brother, who is waiting expectantly, "We got work to do."

He should've known better, he realizes in the weeks and months and years and decades to come. Dean's right, one of his sins was being stupid, when he always thought he was so damn smart. There's no rule, nowhere in any of the lore, saying a hunt, even one set in motion by God Himself or something even older, can't be led by two Huntsmen.

Especially if they are one soul in two bodies, fitting into each other and into their role as snugly as a gun into a holster, teeth into a wound, a key into an ignition.