Sweaty crumple of mixed bedding and discarded clothes. Even with Sam's hulk feeling like he's going to fuse to Dean's skin, it feels—pretty good, honestly. Dean adjusts his sore neck and Sam accommodates him, resettles. His fingertips occupied with a bruise under Dean's collarbone, testing the edges just careful enough that it almost, almost hurts. If Dean were younger he'd be revving up for round two; as is it's…
"Tell me more about Eliot Ness," Sam says.
Dean slits an eye open but Sam's not making fun. He's watching his fingers, his hair screwed up six ways from Sunday. "He so did call me untouchable, for one thing," Dean says, and Sam blows a lazy raspberry. Dean grins, rolls his hips flat so he can spread out. Heels stretching off the crappy bedroll, skidding in the dust.
"Coolest day in a long time," Dean says. Sam makes a little noise. "Dude was a hunter, you know? Real deal. Wasn't one to suffer fools, either."
"Amazing that he put up with you," Sam says. Dean kicks vaguely but Sam wraps one of those stupid giganto legs over his and he subsides.
What can he say. That—there was about ten minutes where he was positive he was gonna get stuck in the past, with Eliot freakin' Ness and a god of time on the loose and no way to get back, and that was the worst feeling in the world but also—it was a time without Leviathan. A time before everything that'd gone wrong had gone wrong. The sheer terror of the gap at his right hand where Sam should've been aside, there was this. Thought. Kept nagging him.
Camp lantern's still on, sitting on the floor above their heads. Sam's got a blue-white halo. He looks up from Dean's chest eventually, raises his eyebrows.
"What would you've done?" Dean says. Eyebrows a little higher. "If I'd—gotten stuck, or something. Part of the Untouchables for real."
Sam squints at him, for a few seconds. "I would've come and got you," he says. He opens his mouth and closes it. Shakes his head. "No idea how. Kidnap an angel and make them take me back? Or make them get you. Either way."
Kidnap an angel. His brother. Dean squirms on the half-assed pallet. "We both could've got sent back," he says.
He was trying to make like it just occurred to him. Must not quite manage, because there's a pause, after which Sam drags his arm out from under Dean's neck and lifts up on his elbow, looking down at Dean's face. Dean bites his lips between his teeth and Sam says, "What."
"Nothing," Dean says. Sam looks at him for a silent handful of seconds and Dean scratches the stubble under his jaw. "Just—we'd've been—back there, back then. 1944. Before… everything. Not just Dick and the Levis but before, you know—"
"Apocalypse," Sam says. His cheek sucks in on one side, picking up the thread. "Before… angels, hell. Man, Dad wasn't even born. And Mom and Dad met in… what, '74?"
"'72," says Dean, who's already done this math.
Sam takes a deep breath. A little under thirty years, in a world that—yeah, it had its troubles, but not the kind that'd come. Long before a hole would open in Stull. Long before Dean would have to kneel in the mud with blood on his hands and have the future core out into a narrow dark tunnel with nothing at the far end. Long before even that first worst day, one of Dean's earliest memories, when he'd been curled terrified on floorboards not all that different to these and Sam had woken up screaming in the pulled-out drawer that had served them then as a crib and Dean hadn't known how to get him to go back to sleep, and Dad had been gone, and it was worse somehow than the night their mother had burned, with his baby brother making that horrible desperate coughing wail and Dean just—not knowing how to fix it. That night he thought nothing would ever be okay again.
A hand spreads on his chest, over the bruise. He breathes past constriction and finds that Sam's got his head propped on his hand, watching Dean's face. "But you came back," he says. His thumb runs along Dean's collarbone.
Dean covers Sam's hand. "You woulda looked dumb in the hats, anyway," he says. Has to clear his throat. "And you would've had to cut your hair. No way the Untouchables would let you get away with the delinquent look."
"Delinquent, huh," Sam says, raising his eyebrows, and Dean nods, reaches up and pushes it back from Sam's face, says, "You'd be a real mug, you know? A real bunny."
Bunny, Sam mouths, and then slides his hand down to Dean's side, pulls him closer. "Guess it's just as well we can't change history," he says. He curls his arm under his head and lays down, his face turned in close to Dean's, his eyes closing. For a second Dean's in two times at once, watching his brother curl down to sleep. "Wouldn't want to be a delinquent."
"You're already a bunny," Dean says, and ignores Sam mumbling that makes no sense when he reaches to turn off the lantern.
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