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1999
When John Winchester first became known to the hunter community, he was Mary Campbell’s civilian beau, an alright, down-home kind of guy. This was always followed by: it’s a shame, having her outta the game, but, whatcha gonna do? She got out. Good for her.
After Mary died, John was her widower, spoken of with wariness and pity. This was followed by, increasingly often as the years went on: and those two weird sons of theirs.
Some hunters met Dean in his mid teens, mistaken occasionally by strangers as John Winchester’s butch daughter before he started to fill out, with Mary’s features so obvious in his; this was when Sam was still too young and got squirreled away in ratty motel rooms while John and Dean worked cases, Dean carefully in the background to keep away from CPS, and John using his rough, honeyed charm.
Conversations then generally went: Jesus, the kid’s what, fifteen? The sick fuck. You couldn’t pay me to do that to my kids, it’s bad enough that I HAVE kids. Was it Mary’s idea?
Followed shortly by: The brass balls on that twerp, goddamn. Start ‘em young, apparently.
Sam starting to hunt was like a weird hunters’ debutante ball. By then, everyone knew who John was: tough to talk to, single-minded, got around, had a good heart somewhere in there once you got past the whiskey and grief. So there was an expectation: John’s youngest, grows like a weed. Hair like a hippie, dead eyes, always in the back seat. Yells a lot.
The thing that stuck out to Brian in particular was the first time he saw Sam and Dean on a hunt together. Brian was still feral and seething over the death of his girl, a goddamn werewolf if you could believe it, but you didn’t forget a thing like those boys.
The kids hung back when John showed up a day and a half after Brian’s call, leaning on that beaten black car. Their handsome, angular faces that looked like they belonged on MTV were at odds with their stunted, cave-raised social skills.
Brian went up and stuck his hand out towards them, Sam first.
“Nice to meet you. I’m—”
The kid had a bright smile when he felt like using it, dimpled and sweet, and clear green eyes that matched his brother’s. Not as sour as Brian had heard. Sam reached out.
“I’m—”
Dean slapped Sam’s hand away.
“Dad’s got the deets,” Dean said to Brian, and jerked his head in the direction John had left.
Brian balked for a second, trying to remember if he’d ever been called out by a kid five or six years younger than him, whether he’d beaten the kid’s ass then, or whether he’d be able to now.
He gave Sam a commiserating look that tried to say, wow, this guy, huh?
He did not receive one in turn. Sam just nodded his head the same way Dean had, hair in his eyes, brows drawn. So, Brian left.
He didn’t say much to them as they made their way out into the bush, but he caught them watching him when John couldn’t see—and only when John couldn’t see, or otherwise John would tell them quit eyeballing and they’d look away, practiced, like maybe that happened a lot. Looking with their sharp eyes, as if Brian had done something to earn the distrust. He was brand new to hunting, no reputation to speak of, but it was like they never had a stranger around, period.
The boys didn’t talk in full sentences. Brian was up ahead with John when Dean said to Sam, following only silence, “Shut up.” A long pause. “I wasn’t going to.” An hour later, Sam scoffed at nothing and said, “I know. Obviously.”
The hunt didn’t go well. The thing they were after, all hair and teeth and claws, got the drop on them deep in the woods. Dean got a big gash on his upper arm before Sam blew the creature’s head off with a shotgun in a spray of blackish blood. Brian felt bad about the kid getting hurt, but he got off a hell of a lot lighter than Brian would have if he hadn’t called them.
Back at the car, Brian awkwardly third-wheeled their family drama. John yelled at the boys for their carelessness, Sam yelled back and Dean sat silently clutching his bleeding arm between them. It was hard to watch.
John cooled off. He went over to where Brian was pretending to be fascinated by some lichen on a nearby tree.
“Sorry about that,” John grumbled. “They’re still green. Shouldn’t have happened.”
“All good. They’re good kids. The little one’s a hell of a shot.”
John nodded, with something that was almost pride tugging at a grizzled cheek.
Brian looked over John’s shoulder to the boys. Dean was sitting on the back seat of their car with the door open, feet on the ground, and Sam knelt nearby sorting through a first aid kit. They were speaking quietly, Brian could see their lips move. Sam readied a needle and thread with an efficiency that spoke to practice and his stomach turned over at the thought.
“C’mon,” John said to him, brushing past towards the house. “Talk to her with me, she’s got a thing for you.”
Brian bristled. So soon after losing his girl, he didn’t want to hear that, but that kind of thing rolled so easily off John’s tongue, nothing more than a way to ingratiate yourself to a vic, make the minor comfort they were able to provide after a successful hunt go down smoother. Brian wasn’t ready for that part of being a hunter, he thought, or maybe that was just a thing for John. The charming drifter thing.
They went inside. They spoke to the woman for a while, stilted and awkward with her being confused and freshly widowed and working with half a story. John ended up with her sobbing into his chest, and the look he gave Brian over her head was an exasperated give me a minute. Brian wondered if John had been fucking with him when he said she liked him.
He went back outside with his hands in his pockets, strolling down the winding, wooded drive from the house out towards the dirt lot where they were parked. He didn’t know how this whole thing normally worked, was he supposed to stick around and wait for John before he left? Pay him? Watch his kids? The eldest had to be nearly twenty, they didn’t need watching.
He wandered back to the cars. It was a cool summer evening and under the canopy of trees it was almost dark, sweet-smelling from the grasses and wildflowers. He thought about his dead girlfriend. About the thing with hair and teeth and claws that dove at the kids, and how Sam fired at it like it was nothing. John yelling at him anyway. Brian hadn’t pegged him as the overprotective type, but that could show up lots of different ways.
The Impala’s shiny trunk came into view around the final corner of the drive, dappled sunlight on the paint. The rear door was still open, Dean was still sitting on the seat and Sam was kneeling in the dirt between his open knees. Brian winced at the thought of seeing that wound getting stitched, he really had to toughen up or he wouldn’t—
When the boys came fully into focus, he thought for a moment that they were kissing, with Dean’s hands in Sam’s hair like that.
The shock and horror of it stopped him dead in his tracks. He was far enough back and in the shadows that neither boy looked up, and after a second of staring he realized they weren’t kissing, which was only marginally better.
Their foreheads were pressed together. Dean had Sam’s head in his hands, clutching and digging in, and Sam was grabbing at the front of Dean’s t-shirt like he was yanking it up under his chin, like it was a fight, but Brian wasn’t sure it was. They were too close, Sam kneeling right between his legs like that, and he could see them talking, inaudible but frantic. The only word he caught was stupid, but their voices were too similar to know who had said it. Dean’s sleeve was pushed up and the angry, swollen gash on his arm had already been stitched and cleaned.
Brian had a brother. Hadn’t talked to him in a few years, but even when things were good between them, they weren’t… clutchy. The closest they got to touching foreheads was a pat on the shoulder, and he didn’t know any brothers who got closer than that.
He didn’t move, hypnotized by how embarrassing it was to watch them. He felt like a voyeur intruding on a strange, panicky moment clearly only meant for two; he hadn’t seen them touch in front of John via anything other than a slap or a punch, so it was… private. Clandestine in a way he didn’t want to think too hard about. Dean’s fingers kept petting Sam’s hair back.
He couldn’t imagine how awkward it would be to interrupt, so he walked carefully back to the house and met John outside the door when he came out, the front of his ratty shirt wet with girl-tears. Brian made sure to make plenty of noise as they went down the drive this time, and when they reached the car, the boys were on opposite sides of it.
The memory faded quickly from Brian’s mind as his subsequent hunts strung together and he cut his teeth and strengthened his mettle. He didn’t remember that the greasy hunter with the symbiotic teenaged sons was John Winchester until he started to hear about Sam and Dean long after John’s death, and the trouble they got themselves into, and how they were still strange and private and way too close for anyone else’s comfort.
2010
Tim didn’t have the soft spot for the Winchesters that some had. After thirty years on the job, Tim didn’t have a soft spot for much at all, and sure as shit not two reckless know-it-alls like Sam and Dean, who were messing around with angels and demons and forces they didn’t understand. Tim, like most hunters, would be hard pressed to forgive the apocalypse.
He was gassing up his truck at a stop on the border between Louisiana and Mississippi, sweating into his beard in the midday sun. He was headed up to Memphis on a call about a poltergeist—see, nothing wrong with some good old-fashioned ghost hunting, Tim had been ghost-busting for forty years without bringing goddamn demons into it—and he’d been driving for days with no A/C and no time to stop and fix it.
He leaned on the side of his truck and watched the pump guzzle up his hard earned, meager dollars. His eyes glazed over with the heat and monotony and it took him a minute to register that there was a guy on the other side of the pump, talking on a cellphone.
“No, still hot as hell. Louisiana, for another few miles up.”
Tim recognized the ostentatious make of the car before he recognized the guy, and allowed himself a small, private sigh of exasperation.
He leaned his head to the side to see around the pump. He saw the back of a giant, tanned arm, long hair curling against a shoulder and one godawful sideburn. The young one, then. Sam. He leaned forward some more to see the front seat of the car, empty. No brother.
One was better than two, at least, and he got the quiet one. They’d crossed paths a few times over the years, but with any luck, Sam wouldn’t notice him, facing the other way, or wouldn’t care enough to say anything.
He glanced at Sam’s big arm again. He looked like one of the guys his daughter had photos of in her bedroom. That more than anything let Tim know that the Winchesters didn’t get it—what point was there in vanity, in their line of work? In being anything other than faceless, utilitarian? There was no excuse for anything else, a man wasn’t supposed to look like that. Their heads obviously weren’t on straight.
There was nobody at the other pumps and Sam’s voice rang out in the quiet as he spoke into his cell.
“Yeah? You miss me?”
It wasn’t sweet so much as it was flirty, teasing, almost mean. Tim could see the side of his face, and his smile was a smirk.
It caught Tim off guard. What you heard—whether you wanted to or not, the way people talked about them—was that the short one fucked anything that moved, and the tall one only took it out on holidays with the china and silverware. He didn’t hear that either of them had a girl on the go, not one that got phone calls, but as big as the rumour mill got, they couldn’t actually be expected to know everything.
So, maybe Sam Winchester had a girlfriend, or at least a regular thing. He’d have to tell Jerry when he saw him next, Jerry was the worst of them, he had a rock hard hate-on for the Winchesters that never went down. Tim didn’t see the point in it, but people talked about the kids as if they were celebrities, half mean gossip, half jealousy-admiration. A waste of time as far as Tim could see, it was a vapid young person’s game, but most hunters didn’t have a lot else to talk about. Rusty social skills.
Sam said, “I’m gonna fuck you so hard you can’t walk tomorrow.”
Tim choked on his spit. His head snapped up to look at Sam, who, although he didn’t seem to have noticed him, had curled his shoulders in the way a person did when they told secrets.
Tim glanced at his pump. Not near full enough for the drive. He wished he could shut his ears.
Sam laughed into his phone.
“Oh, please, how quickly we forget Omaha. You made me bring you breakfast in bed ‘cause you were lying face down ‘til noon, you pillow queen. That counts as not walking.”
Excruciating to overhear; Tim grimaced, ears burning. That kind of familiarity meant a girlfriend for sure, and it only made him hate the guy more, because how fucking stupid did you have to be to bring a woman into this life? How arrogant? It took a Winchester level of hubris to even consider it. The idiot probably wanted kids, too.
Sam laughed again. It was unbearably warm. Tim thought about his dead wife.
“Uh-huh. Yeah, I know you do,” Sam said softly. “I’ll be there in a few hours, you freak, just do something else. You— God, you’re gonna get carpal tunnel. Watch a documentary. Think about math.”
He was quiet for a while. He curled his hair behind his ear. Tim hoped he was done, but he spoke up again.
“He’ll go away if we ask him. He gets it. If you wanna… make a production out of it. Get some champagne.” He paused. “I’m kidding.” Another pause. “Okay, I’m kidding about the champagne. But we can have a free night, I think we’ve earned it.” He leaned more heavily on the pump, his voice going even lower. “We’re gonna want him out of earshot. You’re gonna want him out of earshot.”
Trying to ditch the brother. Tim could only imagine how stuffy it got to be attached at the hip like that; hunters were supposed to be solitary, and even if there was a guy you worked with often enough, you didn’t travel together. Not in the same car, the same rooms. What the hell would you talk about all day?
Tim heard—among the many Winchester Facts he learned against his will—that they only ever booked one room. Never two. Just frugal, maybe, or else…
He didn’t buy into that garbage, the sick shit people said about them. He didn’t like them, and he trusted them about as far as he could throw them, but you just didn’t say that about a guy. Not about his brother.
The door to the gas station opened with a jingle of the bell above it. Tim expected to see Dean, but it was that other guy that always followed them around, the one who dressed like Columbo. He was holding Cheetos and a blue Gatorade.
The guy perked up when he saw Sam on the phone and charged around the hood of the car.
“Is that Dean? Let me talk to him.”
“Cas—”
Cas snatched the phone from Sam. Tim almost covered his eyes.
Christ, this is so goddamn awkward, he—
“Hello? Dean!” Cas’ face brightened. “Hello. It isn’t the teacher, his alibi checked out. What did you find on your end?”
Tim’s stomach dropped into his knees. His pump shut off with a loud clunk, but he didn’t move, frozen.
Cas went on. He took the phone around to the passenger side.
“Have you been— MacGyver? Who’s MacGyver? Is he helping you with your research?”
Cas kept talking into the phone. Talking. To— to—
Tim was still frozen when Sam turned around to hang up the nozzle, chuckling fondly.
Sam looked right at him.
At first, he clearly didn’t think anything of it and almost looked away. Later, Tim would never be sure what tipped him off: whether he recognized him personally, or if it was the aura of grief and unwashed violence that surrounded all hunters, but something did it, and a split second later, the colour drained out of Sam’s face.
No sense in pretending he hadn’t heard the phone call, hadn’t heard that Dean. They were two feet apart and Tim still had the nozzle in his hand.
He opened his mouth. Shut it. Watched in horror as Sam’s shock was replaced by a cool, calculated, stillness.
Tim shoved the thing back into the pump and, panicking, turned and took off for the gas station. He saw Sam turn his head out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t see him move, and then he was safe inside.
The guy behind the counter said something to him, but he hardly heard it. He beelined for the grimy men’s room at the back and banged inside, still sweating from the heat and the nerves even though the room was air-conditioned like a meat locker.
He took off his hat, wiped his forehead and put the hat back on. He could feel his heart beating in his throat.
The mental gymnastics it would take for him to come to any other conclusion after that phone call were staggering. He didn’t have the energy.
He ran the faucet and slapped water on the back of his neck, then dried off and went to a urinal.
He’d have to think carefully about what to do with this new information. His instinct was nothing short of razing the earth, felling a dynasty, knocking two smart-ass kids down and down and down a few million pegs. But he had to think it through, or at least wait for a new state and a payphone and for his hands to stop shaking.
Mostly, he thought, fuck my life, I owe Jerry fifty bucks.
The door creaked open behind him and he nearly jumped out of his skin.
He kept his eyes on the cracked tile in front of his face, spine ramrod straight. Heavy footsteps came into the room, and a big dark shape appeared to his right.
‘Big’ being the operative word. He knew who it was.
He was right at the next urinal. A few choice words flew through Tim’s head, shit you apparently weren’t supposed to say anymore. He set his teeth and willed himself to finish pissing faster. He had half a mind to wait it out, make him leave first.
He was entertaining the thought of being a tough guy about it—spitting why don’t you go home to your brother or Jesus Christ man I used to stick up for you freaks—when Sam spoke first.
His voice was very careful, very quiet, and it radiated perfect, white-hot violence.
“No one would believe you if you told them.”
He said it with such restraint, such promise and threat that Tim squeezed his eyes shut. His blood roared in his ears and he tried to think of anything cool to say.
“I won’t say anything,” he said instead, stumbling over it. He hated himself, the kid was thirty years his junior, for Christ’s sake.
He half expected to feel a gun or knife point at the small of his back. He’d heard things about what the two of them did for each other, and shutting him up permanently to keep a secret as big as this didn’t seem outside the scope of that.
After a beat, all Sam said was, “I know.”
Sam zipped up, washed his hands and left the room. Tim stood there at the urinal like an idiot until he was certain he was gone.
INTERLUDE
Lawson leaned across the sticky wooden table towards the other guys with a leer on his slick, young face.
“Jerry says he saw them going at it in the back of that car of theirs outside Atlanta last year, I shit you not.”
Tim groaned and swiped at him with one of his hairy mitts.
“Shut up, Lawson. Jerry’s a pervert.”
“Jerry’s just got his ear to the ground! It’s piling up, everybody’s got a story now, you notice? People seeing ‘em being… close all the time. Close in a way you notice. I know plenty of brothers, I don’t go around saying they’re feeling each other up.”
“And I don’t need you giving me the Winchester Daily Digest every time we go for a goddamn beer. Anyone ever told you you’re a little too interested, huh? It’s un-Christian.”
“Oh, you shut your mouth, old man, don’t make me—”
Brian rarely spoke up when they went for beers, younger than the rest and poorly suited for the life. But then, he looked down into his beer and said, “Leave them alone, they’re good kids.”
Kyle, a thick-necked blowhard on his fifth beer too many, scoffed hard enough to fleck splittle onto the table between them.
“The fuck you talking about, good kids? They’re the reason we’re in his whole mess! They caused the fucking apocalypse! Can we all just agree that that’s worse than whether or not they’re stickin’ it to each other?”
Brian mumbled, “It just ain’t right to talk about. Other people’s business.”
“Hey, I hate the little buggers for professional reasons, okay? A guy wants to fuck ‘n suck his own brother, that’s his business.”
“Jesus, Kyle, would you can it?”
“And, if I may be so bold, I think if you’re fuckin’ your own brother, it becomes other people’s business.” He took a loud, pointed sip of beer. “Becomes likely you’re gonna get on the receiving end of some street justice, once that starts going around.”
Brian frowned hard. “I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that.”
Kyle held up his hands in mock surrender.
“Don’t shoot the messenger! I’m just sayin’ what folks are thinking. Whatever they’re up to, it ain’t right to be that close to a guy. Lawson, you know what I mean.”
“Hey, I just heard it from Jerry! I don’t mind the guys. Tim’s the one who—”
Tim slammed his beer down on the table. He was red in the face.
“I ain’t doing nothing,” he spat. “Even if—if—any of the shit you girls gossip about is true, I don’t wanna hear it, alright? I don’t wanna think about ‘em, I don’t wanna talk about ‘em, and the next guy who says anything that even rhymes with Winchester is gonna get it.”
There were vague nods and everyone went quiet, nursed their beers, picked their teeth and felt belatedly embarrassed about the amount of energy they were devoting to a debate on whether two guys they barely knew were having sex with each other.
After a spell, Lawson grumbled, “Least I’m not a pervert like Jerry.”
2012
Lawson wasn’t on Sam and Dean’s trail so much as he was cleaning up after them, in a willing sort of way: working the cases they couldn’t focus on, getting phone calls from people saying I couldn’t get ahold of Sam, are you free? It was an alright life, taking their seconds, and he knew he wasn’t the only one.
Once in a while, he caught up to them. Tonight was one of those nights. He spied them from across the loud, crowded, stinking bar, looking huge at a tiny round table hunched over their beers. They were easy to spot, and Lawson had wondered for a long time whether it was hard to look so distinctive, whether it messed up their cases; you got remembered in small towns when you were eight feet tall or looked like something out of GQ. It had to blow their cover, being head-turningly handsome. Lawson took pride in his unremarkable, inoffensive face, average height and two-dollar haircut. He got by.
He was also alone. He took his time with his beer and watched the Winchesters the way he’d channel surf to a sitcom already in progress and watch because he had nothing better to do.
The boys seemed to be in high spirits, a lot of laughing, a lot of beers. Dean had two fingers in a splint and Sam had a mottled bruise on his cheek, but that’s the way it always was. Lawson was struck as always by how old they were—the old-timers talked like they were kids, but Sam looked thirty or even older, a few years older than himself.
A girl started chatting him up and he forgot about the Winchesters for a while. She was a med student or something, great hair, and he bought her and her friend about four drinks by the time they disappeared again and he was left way drunker than he meant to be, with way less cash than he started with.
He went to the bar and got another beer anyways. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, surveyed the room and found the brothers at the pool table, finishing up a game against two frat-looking guys. There was a stack of bills on the table’s edge.
Lawson ended up over at the pool table without thinking about it. Sam was taller up close. They’d crossed paths a few times but not for a while, and Lawson had no reason to think that either brother would remember him, which suited him just fine.
He couldn’t hear them very well over the din, but he watched them win the game. Dean wagged the pile of money at one of the frat guys with a shit-eating grin, then pocketed it. Lawson expected to see a fight, but the guys just stalked off.
Dean turned to him next, still smiling.
“Wanna play?”
He didn’t, but he said yes anyways. They played a game, no money at first, and both of them kept buying him beers, enough that he made up the money he lost to the girls.
Somewhere, he realized he’d never had a guy buy him so many drinks before. Or any drinks, really.
Dean always stood with the back of his shoulder against Sam’s arm, overlapping like that. No matter where they took their shot from, they gravitated back towards the same side of the table afterwards so they could stand like that, like magnets, and casual in a way that he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been looking for it.
Lawson was drunk enough to watch them unabashed, which he knew they noticed, but he didn’t care. Weren’t these guys his friends? They both had these funny smiles on their faces like maybe there was something he wasn’t getting, but weren’t they all buddies? Everyone knew Sam and Dean, they were everyone’s friends.
They put money on the second game, which was stupid in retrospect. Lawson had started to see double.
“I’m a hunter, too,” he said, whisperingly loudly to Sam, who had to stoop down to hear him.
Sam smiled. “We know.”
“No shit? You remember me?”
“No. You’re just a, uh… type.”
Unshaven and sad, probably. Lawson was dimly aware that he was losing the game by a mile, but he wasn’t so interested in it. He always had a beer in his hand and, despite himself, he was a little star struck—this was the Sam and Dean Winchester, he wasn’t immune to that.
“You guys,” Lawson started, or tried to, “you—I thought you’d be younger.”
Dean said, “Yeah, well. Me too.”
Sam snorted. They rarely said anything directly to one another, just looks and sounds and touches. The touching was weird, bumped shoulders and tugged shirts and guided elbows. They were never more than an arm’s length away. Dean had his back against Sam’s arm again.
Lawson asked, “Are—are you guys always together? Like, always always?”
That got a chuckle out of Sam.
“I dunno, Dean, are we?”
Dean elbowed him. “Shut up.”
Lawson got the impression that they were pretty tanked, too; every time Dean got him a beer he also got Sam one, and it seemed like they were having some silent conversation about that.
“When’s the last time we spent more than a day apart?” Sam asked Dean. Dean rolled his eyes.
“Fuck if I know.”
“You do too know. Aspen, in January, you got—”
“—kidnapped. Right. Slept in that cube van.”
“Right.”
It was currently late August. They’d been together every day for eight months.
“How… long was it before January?” Lawson asked slowly.
Sam gave him an indecipherable look. Dean kind of waggled his eyebrows.
“Your shot,” Dean said eventually, gesturing at the table with his beer.
Lawson lost an indeterminate amount of money. After the game, he found himself sitting at their table without knowing exactly when he decided to be there. He had a fresh beer. Dean put a dark green plaid flannel on.
“So, Texas?”
Lawson blinked at him. “What?”
“You said you’re from Texas.”
He wasn’t so drunk he didn’t know they were making fun of him, just drunk enough not to care.
“Right. Right, yeah, Dallas. I mean, it’s— it’s like that doesn’t even matter anymore, you know? After all this? Like, what’s home?”
He watched the two of them share a look like a car crash.
“Fair enough,” Sam said faintly.
Lawson looked from Sam to Dean and back. They had a similar face shape, the same eyes, but not so much that anyone would say twins. Not even enough that they really looked related, and he wondered whether they used that, to hide, if they were. If they. If it was like people said.
“Do you—” It was coming out before he could stop it and they both had their eyes on him, the music was loud and he was so drunk and it wasn’t like it mattered, but maybe no one had ever tried asking. “You know what people say, right?”
If it gave either of them a start, he didn’t catch it.
Dean folded his arms across his chest and leaned back, smiling a slow, mean grin.
“No, tell us.”
He twitched as Sam kicked him under the table.
Lawson’s face was sweating. He was starting to see double; the edge of Sam’s hair overlapped Dean’s cheek, it made it look like they were touching. One of Sam’s arms was around the back of Dean’s chair.
He couldn’t say it. Whatever it took to look a guy in the eye and ask if he was fucking his brother, it would take even more beers than Lawson currently had to get him there.
But, he’d still had enough to pry. He leaned forward across the table, like he was sharing a secret.
“Do you two, like, uh… share… girls?”
Dean laughed sharp and loud, right away. “Wow.”
It didn’t look like he was going to get his teeth knocked out, that was good. Sam’s jaw ticked, but he hid it by drinking his beer.
Dean’s grin was thousand-watt, and it was its own answer before he gave a real one.
“What, you’ve never had a threesome with your buddy?”
He winced, likely from more Sam-induced pain somewhere. Sam’s whole face was red.
Lawson said, “I… don’t have a ton of threesomes,” which was true, and he generously didn’t add, not with my brother. He didn’t want to explain that most guys couldn’t go around getting threesomes on tap.
The two of them were so… handsome. The thought that they were maybe-possibly-sort of choosing to fuck each other and not scores of hot chicks was mind-boggling, how many loose screws could two guys have? What was their childhood like? How many concussions had they had? Were they actually serial killers?
Dean just scoffed, still beaming.
“You’re missing out.”
“Dean,” Sam hissed.
Lawson blurted, “Do you tell them? That you’re—”
It was just the double vision but Dean looked like he was tucked under one of Sam’s big arms where it was curled around the back of his chair. Lawson forgot what the guy looked like when he wasn’t grinning.
“Yeah,” Dean said. “Chicks love it.”
The cold night air was a shock, Lawson wasn’t sure when he went outside. His head was spinning and he vomited on the asphalt outside the bar, greasy clapboard siding under his palm as he braced himself against the wall.
Strong hands on his shoulders, steering him around when he was done.
Darkness, movement, the baritone rumble of an engine. It didn’t smell like his truck. Voices over low music.
“He’s not a toy.” Annoyed.
“It’s what he gets for being nosy! It’s funny!” Jubilant.
“Shut up, you were leading him on.”
“It’s not like he’s gonna remember.”
Then, too quiet to be heard in anything other than fits and snatches, don’t—bitch—you’re gonna—trouble—snitch.
He puked into a toilet in a bathroom that smelled like Old Spice for what felt like a lifetime.
From somewhere above him:
“So, are you trying to get us to fuck you, or are you just a weird dude?” A pause while Lawson threw up some more. “Who do you want first? What’s your poison, size or technique?”
From the other room: “Dean, leave him alone.”
Somehow, it was morning. Lawson blinked his bleary eyes open into a scratchy floral bedspread, face down. He groaned with the agony of being conscious and his mouth tasted like yeasty stale beer and throw-up. He only remembered broad strokes—playing pool, Dean’s sharkish grin.
There was a laugh from somewhere. A moment later, a pair of jeaned legs came into view past the edge of the bed.
“Morning,” Sam said, mirth obvious in his tone.
Lawson swiveled his face up, squinting, until he could see him. Sam was wearing a dark green flannel. He held a bottle of water towards Lawson.
“Drink up. Check-out’s in ten minutes.”
Lawson took the water with a grateful grunt and hauled himself up on his arms. He looked around. He was in one of the room’s two beds.
He slurred, “Shit, sorry. I took your bed.”
The other bed was rumpled and slept in. He tried to remember if it was rumpled when he got there last night.
Sam said, “Don’t worry about it. Dean, uh, slept in the car. C’mon, I’ll drive you back to your truck.”
Sam dropped him off at the bar with a brief, “Sorry about Dean,” no doubt the thousandth time he’d said that in his life, then left.
Lawson drove his pounding headache to a gas station for some burnt coffee and a fistful of Advil. He parked on the far side of the lot in the cold morning sun, popped his door for some fresh air and sat with his legs hanging out, nursed the coffee and waited for the pills to kick in before he got on the road.
He lit a smoke and got his notebook out of his jacket pocket, relieved to find he hadn’t dropped it in his embarrassing, drunken stumbling. His wallet felt pretty fat, too. He flipped the notebook open to the latest page to go over the notes he took during his last interview with the vic on the case he was stuck on.
There were notes at the bottom of the page where he left off, scrawled in blue pen in an unfamiliar hand.
It’s a black dog
Below that, details. He went back into the gas station for a refill, then sat there in the cab of his truck and read them all.
2018
Kyle hadn’t laid eyes on either Winchester in close to ten years, but he heard they spent a lot of time in Kansas, so he wasn’t surprised to see them when he drove through. But, he didn’t expect it would be at the grocery store.
He thought they’d be younger. And bleaker.
They were in the produce section. Sam was holding up a lemon. Dean was holding up a plastic lemon-shaped container of lemon juice concentrate. An argument was taking place.
Kyle was down at the end of the aisle with his basket—butane, bottled water and a few other things to stock the truck before he headed up north. He watched them unnoticed.
Their faces were weathered and lined; he miscounted the years and thought they were supposed to be near thirty, but these were middle-aged men, ropey and sunburnt, crows feet and glints of silver at the temples. Kyle’s own age, give or take.
They didn’t look like the guys they told stories about. It was hard to look at them and imagine what they’d done. Kyle’s deep-seated resentment became confused and muddled. They looked like two roughneck dads shopping for a cookout.
Their lemon argument was apparently not serious, because it devolved into crinkle-eyed smiles and elbows and Sam putting four real lemons into their basket, Dean leaving the plastic lemon behind.
Dean carried the basket. They walked side by side, arms brushing. One of them would point at something and the other would shake his head, or give an enthusiastic thumbs up. Sam put his hand on Dean’s elbow to steer him away from snacks.
Kyle remembered what the guys used to say about them. Or still did, depending on who you talked to, but the rumour mill went stale a while ago since they started keeping a lower profile; it was more a conversation about whether they were still alive than whether they were screwing.
Seeing them then, though, in a podunk grocery store in Lebanon, Kansas, Kyle suddenly felt stupid that it was ever up for debate. They had the aura of a married couple who’d been together forty years and still had sex, easy physicality and playful ribbing and laughter. It was embarrassing to look at, and more damning than any of the gossip that ever went around.
He crossed paths with them a few more times as he finished his shop, careful to not look directly at them and give himself away. They were both smaller than he remembered, wiry and lean, but he had no doubt it was them.
He ended up behind them in the checkout line. They put their groceries into four brown paper bags as they chatted with the cashier. Sam paid with a credit card. As they picked up the bags, two each, and turned to leave, Sam caught his eye and gave him a brief, polite nod, not one of recognition or shared understanding, just a ‘friendly neighbourhood grocery store’ nod. This, from a guy who caused several apocalypses and spent a lifetime in hell.
They left. Kyle was pensive and quiet as the elderly cashier started ringing him through.
“How’s your day going?” she asked, more small-town politeness.
“Good, good,” he said, distracted. Sam and Dean were just reaching the doors. He nodded his head towards them. “You know those guys?”
“Hm? Oh! Oh, them. You could say that, yeah.” She looked up at him. “You live around here?”
“Yeah,” he lied, “just down the block some.”
She nodded. “Ah, yeah. Yeah, they live up in that big abandoned warehouse some ways outta town. Or, I thought it was abandoned, anyways, but I guess they converted it into something, by the sounds of it. Lofts and whatnot, I bet. Can’t escape those city folks movin’ in, even here. Streets gonna be crawlin’ with bar-i-stas soon.”
The Winchesters lived somewhere. Kyle couldn’t picture it.
“Uh.”
The lady looked up, alarmed.
“I don’t mean those two, though! They’re good men, those—shoot, I don’t remember their names, but—they’re good guys, both of ‘em. Blue collar folk, born around here, you know? A good type.” She paused. “And nobody minds about… you know.”
Kyle realized he was having a different conversation than he thought.
“Oh. Are they…?”
He didn’t know the proper words, but it seemed like she didn’t either. She was done with his groceries, but there was no one in line behind him and she made no move to hurry him along, so he didn’t go.
“Maybe it’s not my place to say,” she said carefully, “but it don’t seem like they’re hiding it. Nobody’s got a problem with it around here.”
It was the second time she said it. He wondered if it was true. “Yeah?”
“Mmhm. Every few Sundays, give or take, they’re down at Anastasia’s, that dive by the tracks, having a little date night. It don’t bother nobody—if two grown men wanna get drunk and play grab-ass, that’s nobody’s business but theirs. I wish my husband paid me that kinda interest, I can tell you that.” She laughed, incredibly fond. “They act like a coupla little boys around each other. Oldest puppy love I ever seen.”
Kyle had the brief, well-aged thought that if Jerry were still alive, he’d owe him twenty bucks. He gave a quick glance upwards in reverence.
“But,” the cashier went on, “you get the impression the families don’t approve, you know? Never seen ‘em with any friends, never bring anyone around. Sad, but not surprising—their age, and being from around here and all. Can’t be pretty. We still got a ways to go.”
Kyle hummed in agreement. He almost said, they’ve been through worse.
She turned to the register and clacked a few buttons.
“Well, if you’re living ‘round here now, you’ll get to know ‘em soon enough. They spend good money in this town. The little one’s a mechanic I think, not sure about the big one. Something with computers.”
Sam and Dean Winchester, killers of gods and angels and demons: a mechanic, and something with computers.
“I’ll be sure to say hello,” Kyle said.
He paid cash, they exchanged pleasantries and he left. He thought about how the two of them weren’t out of the game—nobody got out, sure as shit not the Winchesters—but somehow they managed to find… this. A kindly old cashier making small talk about their date nights and a community that felt they were a part of it. He wondered if they ever came in with cuts and bruises, and how they explained them away.
He thought about his own dingy, flea-bitten rental in Idaho Falls, the closest thing he had to a home base, and wondered how the goddamn Winchesters managed to do better than him. He considered maybe asking, going by that bar on a Sunday to see if they wanted to shoot the shit, but he had no idea what he’d say. It had been too long. Best to leave them to whatever the hell they had going here and be grateful that they’d given him and so many others so much stupid shit to gossip about over the years. They probably had better things to talk about now.