Archive of Our Own

It hadn’t rained for weeks and the dark parking lot outside the bar stunk like trash, piss and puke, which didn’t help Sam’s mood. He’d bitten a couple of his nails down to the quick, and Dean, leaning on the hood of the car next to him, had already made his way through the flask he’d brought with him; Sam could tell by the tipped-back angle of his head when he took a swig.

“We’re so stupid,” Dean said, again.

“We’re desperate,” Sam said. He chewed at his left thumb nail. “There’s a difference.”

“We’re not Crowley desperate. That’s a unique fuckin’ breed of stupid.”

Dean squinted into the open mouth of his flask, then tipped his head all the way back and shook the flask over his tongue. A single drop of whiskey came out. He looked towards the bar, across the parking lot, where its red-and-blue neon beer signs glowed enticingly in the dark.

Sam said, “Don’t. He’ll be here any minute.”

Dean scowled down at his feet instead. “He’s already late.”

Sam was half hoping Crowley wouldn’t show up at all, because with that avenue exhausted, they’d have to come up with something better. Sam just couldn’t think of what that better thing was yet.

Dean said, “He’s not gonna just give us a hellhound. He’ll know it’s for something.”

“He doesn’t know about the trials. We don’t have to tell him what it’s for.”

“The guy ain’t in the business of doing favours. Or not asking questions.” Dean shook his head. He looked at the bar again. “The only thing we’ve got to give is the other half of the tablet, which—”

“I know. But… anything else.” Sam sighed. He turned his face towards the velvet black sky, cloudless, stars twinkling back at him. “So, maybe we owe him one. We’ve had debts before.”

“Not to him.”

“If you’ve got any better ideas, I’m all ears.”

Dean shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and sulked. Sam kept staring up at the sky.

For weeks, they’d tried to find a hellhound some other way, but they kept coming up short. No crossroads demon would come when they called, and trying to find someone whose deal was coming due quickly was the bleakest needle in a haystack. Crowley was dangerous, but manipulable. One dead hellhound would mean nothing to him, and they had to have something he wanted in return.

Crowley drawled, “Next time you boys want to parler, I pick the venue. I’ve had torture chambers that smelled better than middle America.”

He stood a few paces away, hands in the pockets of his black coat, smiling placidly. He looked over his shoulder towards the bar, then back at Sam and Dean.

“Could have at least bought me a drink,” he said faintly, as if to himself.

“Hey.” Dean snapped his fingers a couple times. “Focus. You wanna talk or not?”

Crowley looked back at him, frowning. “Not. You called me here. I assume you’re looking to give me the other half of the tablet.”

Dean sneered. “Out of the goodness of our hearts.”

“Maybe. I don’t pretend to know what goes on in that five-car pileup you call a consciousness.” Crowley’s eyes landed on Sam. He nodded in greeting. “Moose.”

Sam nodded back, gut twisting. It felt clear all at once that none of this would help, a waste of time at best, and at worst, suicide. They were idiots.

“We need a hellhound,” he said anyway.

Crowley smiled. “How convenient. I need the other half of the tablet. You’ve got yourself a deal.”

“No,” Dean cut in. “Not that. We’re here to deal, but not with that.”

The smile dropped off Crowley’s face.

“So, you’re here to waste my time, then. Lovely.” He squinted at Sam, then Dean. “What do you want a hellhound for?”

Dean said, “Sam’s been getting lonely on his morning runs. We figured it’s time to expand the family.”

Crowley raised his hands. “Alright, don’t tell me. I already told you—if this is some new demon-killing scheme, I can make more. They’re an infinite resource.”

“Then why care?” Sam said. “We’re not a threat. Give us a hellhound and we’ll get out of your hair.”

“I care because I don’t like you. I don’t want you to have things you want, and I don’t trust you. I shouldn’t have to spell this out.” Crowley sneered again. “If you’re seriously trying to offer me anything other than your half of the tablet, you were stupid to try. Ta-ta.”

“Wait!” Dean barked. Sam knew it was supposed to sound authoritative, but he could hear the desperation in it. “We’ll owe you one. You want something else down the line, and we—we’ll talk. Alright?”

Sam could see how hard it was for Dean to say it. He looked sick. Crowley, on the other hand, started to look pretty pleased.

“Skipping straight to the groveling! You must really need this pooch.” He took an idle step to the left, turned and surveyed the bar. “The thing is, boys—other than the tablet, you don’t have anything I want. Anything you do have, I can just take.” He turned back around, frowning. “Especially now, when I know you’re up to something, and your somethings rarely benefit me. So, please—name something I could possibly want badly enough to help you.”

His eyes were on Sam when he said it and Sam’s brain whirred overtime. Like it or not, they knew Crowley. He only had a few key motivators. He wanted power before everything else, anything that could raise his standing or be used as leverage. They hadn’t explored the Men of Letters bunker yet. Maybe there were spells or artifacts in there that Crowley would want; they could give him carte blanche and let him pick any one thing they had—but that was risky, they had no idea what he’d find in the bunker’s winding halls and storerooms. Crowley wanted to cause pain and get revenge, so it was possible that he had some enemy they could help him get an edge on, but that was morally risky. More often than not, Crowley’s enemies were good.

Crowley wanted chaos. He wanted violence and fear and disorder, orgies and mass killings, he was an unpleasant little gremlin and they’d been beating him back with a stick for years, there had to be something—all Crowley ever did was want, they were standing in a hot, sticky parking lot in Kansas and there had to be something that he wanted, he—

Sam watched as Crowley’s eyes, which had been fixed on his, slid downwards. Down over Sam’s mouth, and lower.

Sam’s heart did an off-tempo beat, flipping in his chest. The neon on the bar behind Crowley wavered like a heat mirage.

Sam didn’t think about it often. It was just one more unpleasant thing about Crowley to add to the pile, secondary to all the worse things, and Sam didn’t know what it said about him that he’d never thought to use it to his advantage. Maybe it said something good, to other people, but Sam mostly felt stupid.

“Me,” he said, his voice sounding far away in his ringing ears. “I’m something you want.”

Crowley’s whole face changed, soft with shock, eyebrows raised. He was silent for a long moment, and then spoke very slowly.

“Go on.”

Sam kept staring. Inside his pockets, his hands pulled into fists.

Dean took a step into Sam’s view. “Wait, what? Wants you for what?”

Sam raised his eyebrows at him and pressed his mouth tight. It took Dean a second, but then he took a huge step back.

“Oh, God.”

Crowley waved a hand at him without taking his eyes off Sam.

“Nobody’s talking to you.” He took a step towards Sam. “Moose. I’m listening.”

Sam clenched his jaw. They needed this hellhound, they needed to start the trials. Closing the gates of Hell was worth everything, and if they could get what they needed, especially without innocent bloodshed, Sam had to do it.

“You heard me.” He tried to keep his voice tough and sure. Maybe his long pause would sound intentional and not like he was stalling for time because he hadn’t thought this through. “One night.”

If he showed weakness—any more weakness than what was inherent in offering himself up on a plate—Crowley would tear him apart. Sam had to at least pretend they were on even ground, so he held Crowley’s gaze, even though it burned. Crowley’s brow was furrowed. Thinking.

Dean said to Crowley, “I thought that was just some stupid shit you said to mess with us. No way you actually—”

“Yes way, I actually.” Crowley’s lip curled up in disdain. “You boys may be neck-deep in ironic, try-hard masculinity, but I’ve had time to evolve.” He nodded at Sam. “He knows.”

Sam nodded back. He did know. He tried to remember if he and Dean had ever talked about Crowley’s sleazy advances at any length, but they hadn’t. What was there to say about it until now? Sam never thought Crowley was joking; Dean, apparently, did.

Crowley said, “And, this would be”—and then he hesitated, in a way Sam had never really seen him do—“not rooted in any genuine desire or attraction on your part, then. Outside of this hypothetical deal.”

Sam scowled at him. On what planet—“You know it’s not.”

Crowley’s mouth twisted to the side. He smiled, not nicely.

“In that case, I’m flattered by your offer, really, but I’ll pass. I know you don’t think much of me, but believe me when I say a captive audience doesn’t make my dick hard. If I wanted to rape you, I could. I would.”

Sam’s stomach turned over and his throat burned. He swallowed it down.

“Not like that,” he said quickly. Again, control: he tried not to show how emphatically he needed it to be not like that. “I’d be… willing.”

He didn’t know how he’d do that when the sheer thought of having Crowley anywhere near him made him sweat, and not in a good way, but—he could do it. He’d done lots of things he didn’t want to do. It would just be putting on a show, playing a character, and he did that all the time. Most days, even.

He had Crowley’s interest, he could tell. Crowley was staring at him like the rest of the world had dropped away, perfectly still, like a predator in waiting.

“Is ‘willing’ something you’re able to do?” Crowley asked.

Sam said, “I’d make it work.”

“Sam.” Dean put a hand on his shoulder. “Stop it.”

Dean was making a dude what the fuck face at him where Crowley couldn’t see. Sam conveyed a wordless back off at him as best as he could. Dean bared his teeth. Sam tried to go back to ignoring him, but Dean slapped a hand against his chest.

“Hey. I’m serious.” Dean looked at Crowley, his hand still on Sam like he was keeping them apart. “No. Never. Not in a million years. This one’s a big fucking no from me, you’re sick.”

Crowley held up his hands in mock surrender. “Don’t look at me, this was your brother’s brilliant idea.” He smiled at Sam. “You do surprise me, Moose. As much as it pains me to say it, credit where credit is due—you got me. This is genius.”

“Do we have a deal?” Sam asked.

Crowley took a step towards him, then another. “You must really, really want this thing. Him, he fucks anything that moves, but you—”

“I know where everything goes.” Sam drew up to his full height. It was easy, with Crowley closer, to tower over him. “Is it a deal or not?”

“Not!” Dean barked again, getting between them. “Putting aside the ‘sick and wrong’ part for a minute, we’re not stupid enough to walk into a trap. You get Sam alone, defenseless— come on. That’s an angle.”

Crowley rolled his eyes.

“In what world am I stupid enough to bring down your fanatical wrath by killing your brother? Every demon on the planet knows to kill you as a pair or not at all.”

Sam hated that he wasn’t wrong. Crowley had little incentive to make this into some kind of trap for Sam alone.

“Besides,” Crowley went on, “driving a stake between you two would be more fruitful in foiling your tablet-related plans than any trap I could set. I hear you’ve been at each other’s throats again. Par for the course, these days, isn’t it?”

“Shut up,” Dean spat, so obvious. Sam winced. Crowley’s face brightened.

“There’s a sore spot. See what I mean? I win twice over. I get one pliant, willing Winchester in my bed, with all the fun that entails, and I get to torment the other with the knowledge that his pliant… willing… naked brother is in the bed of his enemy.”

He drawled out the last part slow and lascivious, watching as Dean’s face screwed up worse with each word. Sam’s jaw started to ache with how hard he was clenching his teeth. If he thought about it too hard, he’d lose it, so he focused on the dull pain.

Crowley’s eyes flicked to Sam. His smile was awful, his eyes practically glittering with glee.

“You’ve got yourself a deal, Moose. Any details you’d like to hammer out?”

About a million, Sam thought, and quickly scrambled for the most pertinent ones.

“One night,” he said again. “Not tonight.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Sam!”

Sam ignored Dean. “I’m not going to Hell.”

“No, no. I’ve got a place topside, all the amenities.”

“Fine.”

“Jesus, wait!” Dean blurted out. He put both his hands on Sam’s chest. His panicky face eclipsed Crowley. “Sammy, come on, think about this for a second, alright? He’s gonna tell everyone, and then every fuckin’ demon and creep in the country is gonna know you—you—”

A very Dean-like concern. He couldn’t even finish the sentence. Sam leaned to the side to get Crowley back in view.

“Well?”

Crowley shrugged.

“The sword cuts both ways—you could tell, and I could tell, but I think you’ll agree that it doesn’t reflect particularly well on either of us. Humiliating, comes across as an over-share, et-cet-er-a.” He dragged out the last word. “I’ll be keeping my mouth shut as long as it’s advantageous to me, and I imagine it will be forever.”

Crowley would get laughed out of Hell if anyone found out he’d fucked a Winchester, whether he tried to make it look like some kind of power play or not. And, proven point for Sam: fucking a demon wasn’t a bonus for any human, and spinning it in some way that made it look worse for Crowley also seemed impossible. It was a stalemate, Crowley’s humiliating desire against Sam’s humiliating desperation. Nobody won, nobody emerged unscathed.

“Deal,” Sam said, and Dean’s hand pulled into a fist on his jacket. “We get the hellhound right after. Any hellhound, and we don’t return it.”

“Deal,” Crowley said easily. “But, understand—I want you game. Do what you have to do to get there, but I say jump, you say how high. I say…” His eyes cut over to Dean and back, and he smiled. “Well. I won’t get into the gory details in front of polite company, but you catch my drift.”

Humiliating. Sam set his teeth on edge.

“Not a problem.”

Crowley’s smile was a mile wide and impossibly smug.

“Glad to hear it. Do me a favour and try to wash off some of the grime first.”

Sam blinked, and Crowley was gone. A red neon sign on the bar started flickering.

By the following night, Sam’s throat was sore from shouting. The Men of Letters bunker—which they were apparently squatting in now, hadn’t had much time to talk about that, but Sam had some questions to say the least—echoed like hell, made for the occasion.

“That’s not the point, Dean!” Sam shouted. “This is as good as it’s ever gonna get!”

They were in the library. They’d spent the day alternately fighting and hiding from each other, saying sorry, man, I just need to cool off, and then very much not cooling off. Now, they were not cool. They were yelling again. Dean slammed his hands down on a table.

“There’s gotta be another way! I told you, gimme another day, we can—”

“There is no other way! You’re not getting it, just—”

“Oh, I get it! I’m crystal fucking clear on your little plan, trust me!”

“But you’re not listening! We start the trials and nobody dies, in what world—”

“I don’t care. If you think I’m gonna let you do this, you—”

“Let me?”

Dean instantly realized his mistake. “I didn’t—”

Sam went around the side of the library table so he could get up in Dean’s face. It wasn’t the first time they’d argued about this specific thing today, they kept rehashing the same few points around the whole thing, but it was the first time it really boiled over. Sam smacked Dean’s shoulder.

“You’ve been doing skeevy transactional shit with chicks on cases since you were a kid, but when it’s me, you’re, what, worried about my purity?”

Dean shoved him back. The distance was good.

“When it’s the King of Hell you’re transacting with, yeah, I’ve got some thoughts! It’s not about purity, Sam! It’s about—”

“About what? He’s the one making a mistake! He gets nothing, and we get what we need to end this!”

Dean’s face was indecipherable, twisted and fucked. “He gets you.”

He looked so sad. It took the wind out of Sam’s sails, and he backed up, cowed.

“Not in any way that matters,” he said.

They both went quiet. Dean seemed embarrassed. Sam huffed, angry and impotent.

“I’m gonna shower.”

Dean squinted at him. “You’re showering for him?”

Sam rolled his eyes and took off for where he was pretty sure the showers were. Dean followed him.

“Up and to the right,” Dean offered.

Sam plodded through the bunker. The neatness of the place was disarming, it was like a pristine time capsule—the old-school decor, the glitz and gold, like nothing Sam had ever seen. A lifetime in motel rooms made his new-space routine hard to shake, but he hadn’t found any bed bugs in the mattress corners and the A/C not only worked, it was automatic. Perfectly temperature controlled, like a wine fridge. It freaked him out.

They reached the barracks-style washrooms. Sam headed into the showers, and when Dean tried to follow him, Sam shot him a look over his shoulder. Dean held up his hands, fine, fine, and stopped short at the lockers. Sam went into the showers and ran one while he stripped.

“Showering makes it feel normal,” he called to Dean as he stepped out of his boxers. “I dunno. I get cleaned up before I go out.”

He stepped under the spray of the shower and let it hit him in the face, hotter and harder than any motel they could ever afford. Some fraction of his endless tension bled away.

Dean called from the other room: “What if he wants you to wear a dress and heels?”

The tension came back. “Then I wear a dress and heels.”

“What if he wants you to wear a gimp suit?”

Sam turned his head. Dean was leaning in the doorway to the showers with his arms crossed.

“Why do you know what a gimp suit is?”

“Wh— why do you know what a gimp suit is?”

“You’re the one who— Okay. Don’t.” Sam broke off and squeezed his eyes shut. He tipped his head back under the spray. “Believe it or not, what I’m wearing isn’t the part I’m worried about.”

That shut Dean up. They never talked about this part of what they did. If a woman had information on a case, Dean would ‘butter her up,’ which usually meant disappearing for the night, coming back to the motel in the morning and going straight into the shower. If it was a guy, Dean would get halfway there, buy him a beer and maybe tilt his face towards him across the bar, bat his lashes. What Sam was doing now wasn’t so different than that, he told himself. He had to believe that.

After a while, Dean said, “I’ll go.”

Sam blinked at him through the water. “He doesn’t want you.”

“I look enough like you if he squints. I’ll wear a wig. And stilts. Closest genetic thing, right?”

“This isn’t a joke.”

“Who’s joking? We didn’t ask if he’d take a substitute.” Dean just looked at him for a while, morose. “I don’t want you doing this, Sammy. I’m serious. If I can take the bullet…”

“Then you’ve just taken the bullet, and we’re no better off. I’m touched, alright, but I can handle myself.”

“I can’t let him torture you.”

“It won’t be like that.” Sam said it, but he wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was like that. The line between sex and torture blurred often and easily, and after all three hundred of Crowley’s years, almost all of those as a demon, Sam couldn’t imagine his tastes being particularly vanilla. Especially not for a nemesis. “He said it wasn’t a trap. He can’t kill me.”

“There are worse things than—”

“I know.”

Sam lathered up with the sliver of soap they carried around. That morning, he’d steeled himself up in preparation, and he couldn’t let that guard down now to dwell on how criminally tender it made him that Dean would even consider trading places with him.

Dean asked, “Since when are you into dudes?”

Sam snorted and turned away from him. “Jesus, not this again.”

“What?”

“Him being a dude isn’t the point and you know it.”

“But?”

But. Sam made a policy of not looking inwards. He did what he had to do and he did it perfectly. He did the right thing, whatever it was. Everything else was secondary, or, ideally, not anything-ary at all.

“But nothing,” he said, “I dunno. I’m not. It’s not something I’ve really thought about.”

“Oh, come on, don’t give me that.”

“Give you what?”

Dean waved his hands aimlessly, looking uncomfortable. “Every guy’s thought about it. You hit a certain age and you start thinking about it all the time, and you think about ‘til you’re, like, sure. Sure that you don’t, I mean.”

Sam leaned back out of the water to stare at him.

After a beat, Dean said, “What?”

Sam went back under the water. “Nothing.”

He watched the soap suds slide down his thighs and had the strange sense of being betrayed by his own body. If he had a different body—one Crowley didn’t like, if it was even like that—he wouldn’t have to go through this. His stomach dipped and for a second it felt like the floor dropped out from under him. In a few hours, he’d be—

“You want dick pills?” Dean asked.

“You’ve got dick pills?”

Sam already knew he did. Dean shrugged.

“You want ‘em or not?”

Willing, Crowley said. That probably only meant one thing. Sam hung his head under the shower and let the water pound at the back of his neck.

“Get ‘em. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

Dean left and Sam finished showering, toweled off and put his clothes back on. He found Dean in the library pouring whiskey from one of the Men’s ostentatious decanters that Dean was so taken with. There was a little box on the table by his hip.

“Thanks,” Sam said.

He picked up the box and turned it over in his hands; generic, only one blister pack left inside. Dean poured two glasses and slid one across the table.

He looked at the pills in Sam’s hands—pallbearer-grim about it—and then away.

“I’ll come with. Wait outside, in case things go sideways.”

Sam grimaced. He picked up his glass and threw it back in a single gulp.

“Nah.” He winced; he’d expected it to be good whiskey, but Dean had filled the decanter with the rotgut stuff they kept in the car. “Thanks, but I don’t want you in a three-mile radius. You know.”

Maybe it was stupid to not have Dean waiting in the wings, but Sam couldn’t imagine seeing him afterwards. Not right afterwards. He’d planned to get a motel somewhere and spend the night alone licking his wounds.

Dean must have gotten it, because he just nodded and leaned on the edge of the table next to Sam, staring down into his glass.

Sam opened his mouth to give him more empty reassurances, anything to get that look off his face, when his phone started to ring. Sam’s phone.

He fished it out of his pocket. Unknown number. He picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Moose. Hope I didn’t interrupt any primping.”

Sam frowned down at the floor. Next to him, Dean tensed up when he clued in. “How’d you get my number?”

“I found it in a bathroom stall, along with some scathing remarks about your parentage and endowment. Get a pen, I’ll give you my address. Should be in your neck of the woods, if my intel’s right.”

Sam sneered, as if Crowley could see him. “Just tell me.”

Crowley told him. Sam wasn’t familiar with the area but it was upstate, some two hours away. Two hours during which Sam had to drive alone and stew and vividly imagine what horrors were about to happen to him.

Crowley said, “See you soon, sweetheart,” and hung up. Sam stared at his phone afterwards, like there was some trick he wasn’t getting.

Dean was watching him, he could see out of the corner of his eye. Sam couldn’t look at him. Between Amelia and Benny, Dean had been all over the map emotionally, in turns clingy and standoffish, pissy and prickly and everything else, but it still wasn’t easy to see him like this. It was like his dog was getting put down.

“He doesn’t like you,” Dean said finally. “He might take the occasional break from actively trying to kill us, but the guy ain’t our friend. Don’t forget that.”

Sam swallowed hard. Dread sat heavy in his gut and he couldn’t tell if he was overreacting or underreacting because he’d never been in a situation that even remotely resembled this one before.

Quietly, he said, “I don’t think he’s gonna let me forget that.”

Sam did breathing exercises as he drove. He kept the radio low, some country station playing old western swing. He tried not to think about the atrocities Crowley had committed, and, Jesus, those were just the ones they knew about. Whenever Sam had two minutes alone, he still had visions of seeing Crowley snap Kevin’s girlfriend’s neck, the way her body went limp. Those same hands would be on him.

He turned up the radio. He felt childish and stupid, and mad at himself for it: it had been a long time since he’d thought of sex as some holy, sacred thing, and he told himself that this wasn’t any different than when Crowley basically had him working as a hired gun, but it was different. Murder wasn’t invasive or humiliating. Sam had no doubt that Crowley would make sure that sex, for him, was both. And for all Sam’s experience with violence, sexual violence was a different breed of thing.

He carefully put that thought away, because he had to. One thing at a time.

He got into town and followed his GPS towards the address Crowley gave. He became increasingly uneasy as the houses kept getting bigger and nicer; old mansions in the shadows of giant trees, extravagant gates in front of long, winding drives. It was early summer and mostly dark, and each orange pool of streetlamp Sam drove through brought him a bit of solace from its light before plunging him back into dark. He counted the street numbers as they approached the number of—whatever this place was, Crowley’s home, hideout, something like that. The thought of Crowley owning property on earth tripped Sam up enough to keep him occupied for the rest of his drive, because how did Crowley get money? Did he, or was everything he owned extorted or bartered for?

Sam found the address. A massive iron gate stood between two white brick pillars a ways up from the road lined with lilac bushes. He turned in. As he was looking for an intercom, the gate swung slowly open with a grinding creak. Sam drove inside.

The drive was shaded and winding, with immaculate lawns between the trees on either side. The house started to appear in glimpses between the leaves and stretched seemingly endlessly in both directions, pristine white brick and rows of windows on two floors. It was beautiful. Sam wished it weren’t.

There were no cars outside. He pulled up and parked, and got out before he could lose his nerve. He left his overnight bag in the car. Walking into the lion’s den armed with Viagra and a demon-killing knife wasn’t somewhere he thought he’d end up, but life came at you fast. A few months ago, he had a girlfriend.

The night air was sweet with florals and pleasantly cool. Sam went up the steps to the front door feeling beyond stupid, tense and awkward and doomed. Picking up a prom date. Being led to the gallows.

The door opened before he could touch the intercom next to it. It was Crowley, somewhat surprisingly—with the house looking the way it did, Sam expected more pomp and circumstance, but it was just Crowley, there in his usual black shirt and slacks. But: no tie, no jacket, and he was in his socked feet. Black dress socks. Even that slight change was enough to get Sam’s hackles up.

“Hello—” Crowley stopped and made a face. “‘Hello boy’ doesn’t work. I’m used to you being a plural.”

Sam scanned the entryway visible behind him; dark wood and patterned tile, immaculately clean and, importantly, empty. No flunkies.

Crowley stuck out a hand, palm up.

“Weapons. And don’t tell me you showed up empty-handed.”

Sam just stared at him. Crowley rolled his eyes.

“You’ll get them back. Come on.”

Not much of a choice. Sam reached into his jacket, pulled out the demon-killing knife and placed it reluctantly into Crowley’s hand.

Crowley weighed it appreciatively in his palm, turned it over and looked at it. When he noticed Sam’s squint, he said, “I’m clean. Pat me down if you want.”

And then he spun a slow circle, and Sam did look for weapons, but it wasn’t like Crowley needed them. He was a weapon.

(Sam remembered Ruby and her otherworldly strength, his only point of comparison for any intimacy with demons. She muscled him around in bed sometimes—held him down, picked him up—but he’d been young and stubborn back then and he told her it was emasculating. He’d come to regret not getting her to do it more.)

“Well,” Crowley said as he stepped to the side and swept out an arm. “Come in.”

Sam stepped into the entryway. The house was just as beautiful inside, vaulted ceilings with intricate crown moulding, wainscoting, rich mahogany panels and forest green walls, dark and shaded, lit by a few dim lamps. The tile under his feet gleamed. He toed off his shoes, following Crowley’s lead. He glanced into the hallway on one side and up the curling staircase on his other. No signs of life.

Crowley said, “There’s nobody here, if that’s what you’re wondering. Nobody on the whole property. Like I said, I’m not exactly keen on this getting out.”

He took off down the hallway and Sam followed. The house smelled of age and oiled wood, like a well-loved chess set. There were no pictures on the walls of the hall they went down, none of the ephemera of humanity.

Crowley said, “You realize this is the first time I’ve ever seen you without your brother, and it’s only because you’re having sex. I assume he’s waiting in the car?”

Sam scowled at the back of his head. “No.”

“Shocking. Surely he asked to come,” Crowley said, not a question. Chagrined silence from Sam. Crowley chuckled. “Did he ask to watch?”

Sam rolled his eyes. The hallway opened to a sprawling kitchen, white and navy blue with a giant industrial range, a small breakfast table in one corner and a marble-topped island as big as some motel rooms Sam had stayed in.

On the island was an ancient-looking bottle of red wine and two glasses.

Sam stopped walking completely. Crowley strode to the far side of the island, set Sam’s knife down and produced a corkscrew from somewhere. He got to work on the wine bottle.

“I’m assuming you don’t want to be sober for this, so, let’s start there, shall we?” He twisted his wrist and the cork came free with a pop. “Cheval Blanc, 1947. Not my nicest bottle, but good enough to be wasted on your unrefined palate.”

Sam stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking dubiously at the stools on his side of the counter. Crowley paused in pouring wine when he noticed Sam wasn’t sitting down. He frowned at him.

“It’s a little late to be trying the silent treatment. What are you doing?”

Sam was too busy thinking about the truth to come up with an appropriate lie.

“I thought it’d be easier if I didn’t talk.”

Crowley sneered at him. “You thought we’d get down to it right in the foyer? Where’s the art in that?”

Sam had no fucking idea what to say to that, because, yeah, he did. He expected a dungeon and whips and chains and blood on the floor, slurs spit against the back of his neck. A gimp suit. A beautiful kitchen that smelled faintly of baking spices was slightly outside that scope.

Sam said, “Uh.”

Crowley set the wine bottle down with a loud clunk.

“God, you wouldn’t get the point if I stabbed you with it.” He sighed laboriously and spread his hands out on the counter. “So. Surely you know that I have the power to make any living thing look like you.”

At Sam’s face, he went on.

“No? Well, I could. Easy as anything, I could glamour up some demon, and make them study your tapes so they walked and talked exactly like you. And they’d do it, flawlessly, because I’m their king. But that wouldn’t mean anything.” He shook his head and huffed, like he couldn’t believe he had to explain any of it. “It’s because it’s you, unfortunately. You’re here because you’re you.”

He finished pouring the second glass of wine and slid it towards Sam. Sam took a hesitant step towards the counter. Another. He tested the edge of each tile with his toe, for pressure traps. He reached the counter (safe) and put his hands on it as if holding on for dear life. The white marble was ice cold and veined with stony gray.

“You want me to sit here and act like we’re on a date,” he clarified.

“No! Wh— Jesus, I knew you were thick, but this is something else.” Crowley leaned in meaningfully and spoke slow. “This isn’t a date. People on dates are nice to each other, and I don’t want you to be nice to me. You, are not nice to me. I want you to sit there and… be you.”

After a second, he seemed to realize how that sounded and he leaned back, scowling at nothing. He picked up his glass.

“Now, drink your bloody wine. It costs more than your car.”

Sam watched as Crowley busied himself with his wine and he realized he’d made a huge mistake in his calculations. He’d been steeling himself up to withstand torture. Crowley wanted to court him.

“Wow.”

Sam hoped that sounded appropriately disparaging. He took a sip of his wine; he’d seen Crowley open the bottle, and anyway, poisoning wasn’t his style. Sam didn’t have the words he’d need to describe anything useful about a wine, but it was rich and strong and earthy and weird. He didn’t hate it. Amelia had been a wine drinker and he’d gotten used to it.

Crowley was looking at him again. Sam tried to stand it. He tried to decide whether Crowley had trimmed his beard, special for the occasion.

Crowley said, “I can see those cogs turning, so let me beat you to it: I’m fully aware of how pathetic this is. There’s nothing you could say to me that I haven’t told myself a hundred times.”

Sam nodded slowly.

“Yup. Pretty pathetic.”

Crowley sneered. “About as pathetic as whoring yourself out to the King of Hell for the sake of some half-baked scheme?” He smiled when Sam scowled at him. “We’re in this together now, whether you like it or not.”

Mutually assured destruction, just like Sam thought.

“So why do it?” he asked. “How could this possibly be worth it?”

He was terrified of the answer. Already—just this conversation, just sitting there in front of his wine—he felt suffocated by Crowley’s desire. Before, that desire came out in childish, slimy comments, playful enough to deny if asked, but that social veneer was gone. Sam didn’t notice at first, but he could feel it now: desire poured off Crowley in waves, unabashed and obvious, and it was suffocating. Holding the attention of someone so sickeningly powerful made Sam’s skin buzz. He didn’t know what to call the feeling. It was like a tension headache.

Crowley sighed, finally. He spoke with the resigned tone of a man answering a question he’d asked himself many times.

“It’s worth it because I feel about you the way your idiot brother feels about cars.” His eyes started somewhere near Sam’s hands and dragged up. “You’re beautiful, like any well-made thing. And that makes me want to take you apart.”

Sam stared at him. Crowley stared back and his dark eyes were serious, no joking mirth, and Sam was acutely aware of his own blood rushing through his veins. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

Crowley shrugged and looked away and the tension snapped like a rubber band.

He said, “That, and I’m an idiot. But you already knew that.”

Crowley took a giant glug of wine and poured himself another glass, then glanced with disdain at Sam’s full one. Sam took the cue and drank some, and it helped, somewhat. Beautiful, from a creature whom Sam had never seen appreciate anything at all.

Sam cleared his throat. Curiosity briefly won out over spite.

“You, uh… You barter a lot of guys back to your place?”

Crowley snorted. “You’re not going to believe this, but I do just fine without coercion as part of my usual repertoire.”

“Really?”

“Don’t look so surprised. Just because you don’t find me attractive doesn’t mean I don’t get more tail in a month than you’ll see in a lifetime.”

Sam laughed without meaning to, not in a nice way. Crowley seemed to like that and smiled into his wine before going on.

“I’m serious. There’s a type of power you can’t buy. When I walk into a room, people look at me, and not for the same reason they look at you.” As if proving a point, he looked at Sam, open and unabashed. “You’ve been given a gift of genetics, and it makes people want you. People want me because I’ve spent hundreds of years making sure that they want me.”

“Yeah? How’s that work?”

Crowley moved in a way that was so innocuous that Sam wouldn’t have noticed it if he weren’t staring at him like a hawk—without seeming to at all, Crowley shifted so he moved around the end of the counter, closer to Sam.

“The trick,” he said slowly, “is to look at everything as if you own it. As if everyone and every thing—animal, vegetable or mineral—will be begging you to own it by the end of the night. Everyone just… wants to be owned. Even the proud.” His eyes were fixed somewhere near Sam’s jugular. “Especially the proud.”

Sam had the sudden, plunging realization that Crowley had been having sex for hundreds of years. The thought bounced off the insides of his brain like a loading screen, not landing on anything.

Crowley said, “You’re going to want to finish that,” motioning at Sam’s wine. “You’ve been a stunning conversationalist, but it’s time to get down to brass tacks.”

Sam downed the rest of his glass and Crowley poured him another, which he immediately drank half of, much to Crowley’s amusement. Sam wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Okay. I—” He paused as he was poured more wine. “I get to talk now.”

Crowley waved a hand at him, go on, clearly pleased. It only pissed Sam off more. He wanted to do the thing, he wanted to take the reins.

He said, “I’m assuming you want to fuck me.”

Crowley made a face that Sam couldn’t even begin to decipher. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

Sam sat back. He’d need those pills to do it the other way, but he could do it. He had to. He didn’t like it any more than the rest, but maybe he could derive some sick satisfaction in getting Crowley on his back.

“Okay. So, uh. You want me to—”

Crowley laughed. “Male parochialism at its finest— No. Pass. Too pedestrian. Grunting and heaving over each other like animals.”

Sam didn’t know how to even begin to respond to that. Hearing it was a relief, somehow. He wasn’t sure how he would have fared with either of those, although the possibilities left in their absence were… troubling.

Crowley saw his trouble. He smiled. “The limits of your imagination are truly pathetic, Moose.”

Maybe Dean wasn’t so far off with the gimp suit. Sam’s fingers tapped aimlessly at the base of his wine glass. He tried to will his palms not to sweat.

Crowley was leaning in—not in and up, not for a kiss, just closer, close enough that he could drop his voice, and—he didn’t smell like anything and that always freaked Sam out with Ruby, no human scent, skin and sweat, no life—“All I need from you is willing. You let me worry about the rest.”

Sam just stared down at him, at where his forearms were braced on the counter on either side of his glass. Sam had never really looked before, never noticed the little things: hairy knuckles, pale hands and thick wrists, blunt fingers like he worked with his hands. Annoyingly clean nails.

Crowley said, “I’ll ask one more time—you’re sure you can do ‘willing’?”

Sam nodded mutely. He’d almost convinced himself. Crowley nodded back, pleased, still close enough to speak lowly.

“I have spells, if you need them. Little blue pills, if you insist on being human about it.” His mouth curled again in a catty smile. “I’ve maintained an erection in situations that would give you PTSD, but. I know not everyone can be so virile.”

Sam’s idiot pride flared like a wildfire before he could douse it, masculine and wounded. He sneered down at Crowley and straightened up to his full height.

“I’ll be fine, thanks.”

Immediately after saying it, he knew he’d been baited into it. His neck and ears flushed hot. Crowley just tutted at him.

“There’s that pride.” Again, Crowley’s eyes wandered over Sam’s face, lingering on his neck. His left shoulder. His voice was distracted, mumbly. “You be careful with that.”

Crowley’s desire was a black cumulonimbus during a thunderstorm, heavy and towering and bigger than anything on earth. It was passionate in the way that holding someone underwater until they stopped breathing required passion. Sam stared at him like he was keeping his eyes on a pivoting enemy; blinking would give him an opening. They were too close. The taste of wine sat warm and thick in the back of Sam’s throat and he could feel it making him slower. More pliant.

“Upstairs,” Crowley said after a while, “last door on the left. Clean yourself up and put on the robe. Then go to the second-last door on the left, and wait.”

Sam left Crowley in the kitchen, moved on numb feet back to the entryway and up the wide mahogany staircase that gleamed in the dark. The landing at the top led down a narrow hallway lit by small wall lamps; no picture frames, all the doors shut. Sam had busted numerous ghosts in this same kind of narrow old hallway.

The last door on the left opened to a very spacious and very empty white-tiled bathroom. A giant black bath towel hung on a rack by the biggest claw foot tub Sam had ever seen. Something black and satiny hung next to it. There were an assortment of items lined up with intent on the white marble countertop and Sam went over and examined each in turn.

Viagra (brand name, box unopened). A small, brown-glass bottle with a gold foil label, and the label was in German, but they were clearly poppers. Moisturizer, some kind of individually packaged wipe and a bottle of Advil.

Sam took three Advil for the hell of it and looked at the poppers for a long time (he could pretty much guess at ‘transzendentes Sexvergnügen’) before setting the bottle back down. He glared at the Viagra for a while too, kicking himself and his stubborn pride.

Once he was done with that, he stripped nude. He left his clothes in a pile on the tiled floor and went to the silken thing on the towel rack—the aforementioned robe, go figure. He put it on and it was perfectly his size, which he hated the way he hated all of this. It was like a dollhouse sickeningly catered to him, skin-crawlingly intimate just as much as it was sterile and empty, a demon playing make-believe. It was Crowley in his socked feet offering Sam wine, leaving him wet wipes and moisturizer before he had some kind of weird, coerced sex with him, like that could make up for anything, and Sam hated it. He let it happen, but he was allowed to hate it, too.

He leaned against the cool tiled wall opposite the sink and closed his eyes, hung his head and tried to breathe.

He knew he had to put it away. He had to take the part of himself that cared and asked questions and lock it up somewhere safe until this was done. It was a well-worn feeling, watching John—almost always John, but later and more occasionally, Dean—hound the wrong witness, bark up the wrong tree and brush Sam off when he tried to course-correct. He’d had practice since then at keeping his head down. He asked for this.

Eyes still closed, he focused on the physical. The silk robe was heavy and cool against his skin, like water. He cupped his dick through the fabric. He squeezed it, sorry, and got some vague stir of interest at the touch.

A humiliating fact of timing that he hadn’t let himself think about yet was that he hadn’t had sex in a while. Maybe a long while.

The sex with Amelia hadn’t been great—nobody’s fault, and they’d tried, but it was all affection and no chemistry, and Sam remembered craving the closeness more than any kind of passion or desire or skill. Since then, with everything going on, there’d been nothing. He’d weathered longer dry spells easily and often, but this was one of the first that felt long. It made this whole thing twice as embarrassing as it should have been, like if he wasn’t careful, Crowley would feel the need.

Sam’s dick thickened in his hand, filling against his palm. He didn’t want Crowley to see it totally soft; pathetic narcissism, he knew, but knowing didn’t make it go away. He clunked his head back against the tiled wall behind him, frustrated and seething, trapped. Then he stood up, adjusted the belt on his robe—carefully avoiding himself in the mirror—and headed back into the hall.

The hardwood floor was cold under his bare feet. The next door over, as instructed, opened unlocked, revealing a small bedroom; sparse and unwelcoming, not lived in. There was a giant bed against one wall covered in a dark, satiny duvet, and an ostentatious Victorian dining chair facing the foot of the bed.

Sam wandered closer. A pile of neatly bundled ropes sat at the end of the bed, and a bottle of lube. His heart spiked into his throat looking at the ropes. Not ideal.

He looked between the bed and the chair for a moment and eventually sat on the end of the bed. He studied the carved scrolls of wood on the arms of the antique chair and its embroidered green upholstery. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, and went back to absently kneading his dick. There’d be no getting fully hard, but he could salvage a bit of his pride. He glanced down at the ropes next to him and touched one; jute, oiled and treated, a finger’s width around. Four or five lengths of it. He should have taken the Viagra.

Crowley came into the room, same outfit, empty-handed. He took in Sam sitting on the bed and flicked his hand at him.

“You’re in the chair.”

Sam opened his mouth to argue before he remembered, willing. He got up and sat in the chair instead, watching as Crowley crossed the room towards him. Something burned in his gut, not arousal but a kind of trepidation that was almost similar, a twin fear and thrill of the unknown. An intense desire to get it over with.

“No matching robe,” Sam said, for some pathetic attempt at snark. “Didn’t know you were such a prude.”

“Oh, please. Prude. I’ve pissed in the mouths of people you’ve read about in books.” Crowley sat on the end of the bed in front of Sam, next to the rope, and started rolling up his sleeves. “Do you want to see me in a robe?”

Obviously not, but Sam had thought about whether he found Crowley attractive, as much as he could manage. He didn’t, but it was also impossible to separate Crowley from the things he’d done. There was no being objective about it and it muddled the rest, so maybe he could have been attractive, but it didn’t matter even a little bit. He could have looked like Megan Fox and Sam wouldn’t have felt much different about him.

“You wish,” Sam said, too late.

Crowley smiled, head tipped down as he cuffed his second sleeve up to his forearm. Sam watched, no other movement in the room to distract him. He felt giant next to Crowley, looking at the comparative size of their legs; his own, bare, splayed as casually as the arms of the chair would allow. The insides of his thighs looked milk-pale in the low light of the bedroom and he managed to find that embarrassing.

Crowley said, “Your loss. You should see me in heels, they really make my calves pop.” He nodded at Sam, somewhere downwards. “Come on. Show me what I’m working with.”

Sam fought the urge to close his eyes. He stood, nudging the chair back with his legs, and tried to think about… anything else. Failing that, he kept his mind carefully empty.

He slipped the sash of the robe free and let it fall open, eyes fixed on the wall above Crowley’s head. The robe slid slick off his shoulders after that and draped over the chair behind him. He stood there and didn’t look down.

“Good God,” Crowley said, some garbled mix of awe and derision, “you think you’d slouch more.”

Sam squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t know what he expected. All of this was all over the place, Crowley’s oppressive desire taking turns with his habitual taunting. Sam didn’t know which he preferred. Both were excruciating. He shut his mouth and stood there and let himself be looked at like some fucking grade school nightmare.

Crowley said, “Some people have all the luck. Sit, Moose. Would you loosen up? You’ll pull something.”

Sam made himself sit. The robe was spread over the chair under him and it made him slide. He looked anywhere but Crowley; over his shoulder, at his arm, at the bedspread behind him. Being naked in front of someone who was capable of tearing him apart was a kind of vulnerability Sam had never experienced, not just naked but flayed alive. Again, Ruby, sure, but he hadn’t thought of her like that. The danger hadn’t felt real.

“Jesus,” Crowley said, almost breathy, and there was that desire again. “You freaks live in that car, where do you find the time for a body like that?”

Sam fumbled for an answer. “I don’t know. Motels. I get up early.”

He realized with a horrifying lurch that he was actually flattered, somewhere buried that he couldn’t control—to have a creature as long-lived as Crowley find him attractive, it meant more than some cute cashier staring at his arms. It went deep. Sam was mortified by the thought of that and felt his chest get hot, rising up his throat.

Crowley reached out and brushed his fingers against the tattoo on Sam’s chest.

“Ah, this hateful thing,” he said, in a fond sort of tone. The fingertips turned into a scrape of nails. “One cut, and I could be inside you.”

Horrible klaxons went off in Sam’s brain, pure, unfiltered terror. Before he could move, Crowley flattened his hand against Sam’s chest to press into the tattoo.

“I won’t. Your brother would kill me.”

Relief, however minor. There were always worse things. Crowley’s knee brushed Sam’s as he shifted on the bed, and Sam kept his eyes fixed elsewhere.

Crowley said, “So. How this works.” A dry whisper of rope from next to him. “You sit there, for as long as I ask you to. I’ll tie you up, to make it easy. And you don’t tap out.”

Sam’s eyes snapped to his. Crowley was already looking back.

“No rope,” Sam said quickly. Crowley smiled.

“You’re going to want rope.”

“No rope,” Sam said again, firmer. He wanted to explain—that he’d spent enough time tied up against his will that it ruined any pleasure he might have gotten from being tied up consensually—but Crowley wasn’t worth that kind of honesty. “I’ll sit. I don’t tap out.”

Crowley narrowed his eyes. He reached out and brushed the bundles of rope onto the floor.

“Alright. No rope.”

All that was left was the bottle of lube next to him. Sam tried not to look at it.

He said, “So no, uh… No implements, then.”

He’d expected Crowley to wheel in one of those stainless steel trays you saw in operating rooms, full of sharp things that were going to go inside him. That seemed to be missing.

Crowley raised his eyebrows. His eyes crinkled like he thought that was funny.

“Torture tools,” Crowley clarified.

“Yeah. I thought you’d be all… whips and chains.”

Crowley huffed an annoyed laugh. His gaze dropped, moving back down Sam’s naked body. Sam swore he could feel his eyes on his skin like an iron brand. Weight and searing heat.

“I’m very whips and chains, actually.” Crowley’s words came slowly, distracted. “Don’t think I’m not. Last week—few weeks ago—I had a man up here. A demon, no one important. On his request, I disemboweled him, then healed him afterwards. Over and over again, for hours. I ran his guts through my fingers.” Slower than anything, Crowley reached out and brushed the backs of his knuckles against the inside of Sam’s knee. “He couldn’t stop coming. A nearly religious ecstasy.”

Sam didn’t say that he’d had nightmares about exactly that. Crowley uncurled his hand and turned it over, pressing warm against Sam’s thigh, palm open. It was a firm touch, like the way you soothed a horse. It was certain. Whatever Crowley was feeling, it wasn’t nerves.

He mumbled, “I thought about that, with you, but you’re already well-versed in whips and chains. That makes it less fun.” Sam couldn’t look at him. His entire world narrowed to the hand on his thigh. Crowley started stroking his thumb back and forth. “Making you suffer my hospitality. Giving you pleasure. Forcing you, however briefly, to consider my humanity.” Even without looking at him, Sam could see the white flash of his smile. “That’s a wound that won’t heal.”

Pleasure. Sam barely had time to register the word before Crowley’s hand was wrapping around his dick.

Sam shot back, pressing himself back into the chair, and his eyes slammed shut. He gripped the arms of the chair with his nails dug into the wood like claws.

It was— Sam couldn’t think about it. He wasn’t hard, not really, which was its own kind of humiliating. Nobody wanted their flaccid dick touched. Crowley was gentle as he worked him in his hand, squeezing, and Sam grit his teeth so hard it hurt. He wondered if Crowley noticed his eyes were shut; if he had to look at him while he did it, he wouldn’t make it.

He felt his dick start to respond, the traitor. He was mortified.

“Look at that. It gets bigger.” Crowley’s voice, all quiet and intimate, was like a railroad spike through Sam’s brain. “You flatter me.”

Sam held himself so still, pushing into the chair. He expected implements. He hadn’t prepared for any of it to feel good and it was excruciating, he couldn’t help it, of course it felt good, it was a hand on his dick and he was fucking human. The context should have mattered more and he was furious that it didn’t.

Crowley said, “You can close your eyes, but don’t go anywhere.” He gripped him for a moment punishingly hard; Sam’s whole body drew up, trying to get away. “I want you present.”

Every thought Sam tried to have fizzled out half-formed before it got anywhere. I just have to sit here. I can’t leave. I have to take it. I can’t leave. There was no getting around it, just enduring, and he’d endured worse, but this was different. Torture wasn’t humiliating, not like this. Pried-up fingernails weren’t housed in the same part of the brain as handjobs.

He winced when Crowley spoke again.

“Your job—other than sitting there and looking pretty—is to not come. It doesn’t stop when you come.”

Sam gripped the arms of the chair. He thought about nodding and didn’t. Crowley kept going and it wasn’t just good, it was too good, better than doing it himself, better than some mouths he’d had on him. Sam didn’t know how Crowley was doing it but it was—precise, perfectly, every stroke ending where it needed to, every point of pressure exactly where it had to be. Kind of like he’d been practicing for hundreds of years.

Sam was all the way hard now and his whole face ached from how tight he held his jaw and how hard he squeezed his eyes shut. Crowley shifted on the bed, there was a click, and then lube dripped onto the head of Sam’s dick, quickly picked up by Crowley’s fist. That didn’t help, not by a mile. Sam felt his dick throb dangerously, way too eager, and he knew Crowley could feel it too. Maybe Crowley could feel all of him, his blood and heartbeat, his breathing. Maybe he was using it, timing everything to play his body like an instrument.

Crowley said, “You like a challenge, don’t you, Moose? You always seemed like the type. Always looking for your limits. Pushing others.” More lube, the circle of his fingers closing over the head with each stroke. “Is this a limit?”

Sam’s toes curled against the floor. The slickness was maddening, the perfect slip of skin on each stroke, root to tip, relentless. He would have jerked off earlier if he’d known, but he thought the issue would be staying hard, not trying to hold back.

Crowley’s other hand landed on Sam’s knee and eased his legs apart; Sam hadn’t realized he was trying to close them. He felt his whole body flush hot, burning, and it had only been a few minutes. He tried to relax and push against the tight knot of pleasure building low in his belly, breathe deep, anything to stave it off—torture, vomit, baseball—

Crowley’s other hand squeezed Sam’s thigh and made his concentration slip. He let himself fall into the feeling for a split second, giving in. At the same time, Crowley slid his wet thumb against the bundle of nerves up under the crown of his dick, and it was too much—Sam bit into his cheek so hard it broke the skin, but he was already past where he could claw it back from and he started to come.

Crowley let go of his dick at the exact wrong second. The effect was profound and gutting—Sam reached that crest or just shy of it and got one empty stab of pleasure as his dick drooled come, a few weak spurts that splattered on the chair between his legs, but almost no relief. It was just a hot, persistent ache and something that almost reminded him of an orgasm.

It felt like he’d been punched in the chest. He hung his head and his heart pounded in his ears. He opened his eyes: his bare thighs, spread, and his dick hanging angry and hard and red between them. Come dripping off the silk robe draped over the chair under him. Crowley’s hand on his thigh just above his knee, the sleeve of his shirt rolled up to a pale forearm.

Crowley went, “Huh,” faintly surprised. “You’re not very good at this.”

He grabbed Sam’s dick again and Sam twisted away, lifting involuntarily, over-sensitive. Crowley’s grip was loose, working the shaft.

He said, “You’re lucky I don’t feel like fingering you. You wouldn’t make it out alive.”

Sam gripped the arms of the chair with everything he had and the urge to reach out and grab Crowley’s arm was overwhelming, anything to get him to stop for even a second. Sam didn’t move. He said he’d sit still, he had pride. He was sensitive like he came, but without the sated release of actually coming, and it was agony. He closed his eyes again, blessed dark behind his lids. He focused on his body, his breathing, anything to withstand the sharp, sparking pleasure of being touched. It helped, kind of.

More lube drizzled onto the head of his dick and dripped down. The cold shock of it felt good. Crowley’s voice was closer than he thought, low and raspy.

“That was, what, three minutes? You’re in for a long night.”

Time passed. Sam didn’t know how much time, and it felt like hours, but it couldn’t have been. He didn’t think about time in situations like these; he made sure his world’s perimeter ended just beyond his gaze. The only real thing in the world was his body, pulsing angrily and sweating hard, swollen and aching. The chair under him, the robe now bunched up and soaked with his sweat. The hardwood gone warm under his feet. Crowley’s two relentless hands, slick with lube and come.

Things were slower now, after however long. Crowley ran one slippery finger up the underside of Sam’s dick, over and over again. His other hand cradled Sam’s aching balls, tugging gently when he got too close. Sam came— he wasn’t sure. Three or four times, all ruined, and he’d gotten close a million others. The line between coming and not coming was blurred and unimportant. Nothing was real but the blood coursing through him and every muscle in his body taut like a bow string.

He was getting close again. He’d gotten good at knowing and knew how to brace for it. He had one ankle hooked behind the leg of the chair and if he flexed his leg in a certain way, it helped. The inside of his cheek was bitten raw, but he’d managed to stay mostly quiet because any sound that came out of him was mortifying, impossible to live down.

“Careful,” Crowley mumbled. He hadn’t been saying much else for a while, just mumbled words, don’t, wait, hold it. He seemed to know before Sam did when he got too close.

Just one finger moving slowly up his dick, circling the head, and it was almost enough to get him there. It would have been, but just when he thought he couldn’t take it, Crowley backed off.

Sam’s entire body tensed. It felt like he’d come if he moved a single muscle anywhere. It felt like he was already coming, held there, suspended, but somehow time passed, one second, two, and he survived.

“Good,” Crowley said, so quiet Sam hardly heard him over the rush of static in his ears.

Sam let go of the breath he’d been holding once it was safe. Sweat dripped off the tip of his nose. Crowley did this thing with his balls, a kind of knead and roll that was strangely comforting.

“Are you always this sweaty?” Crowley asked.

“Yes,” Sam said, not thinking. Thinking wasn’t an option anymore.

Crowley ran a hand up Sam’s flank; his skin was burning hot, or maybe it was just Sam’s.

“Gorgeous,” Crowley said quietly, almost to himself.

Sam tried to keep his eyes open. He’d given up on keeping them closed a while ago and instead stared fuzzily downwards, everything just blocks of colour. His dick was so red it was almost purple. Crowley’s pale skin and flushed hands, his black shirt and slacks. Crowley’s face was tipped downwards and Sam hadn’t looked directly at him the whole time; he was a high forehead and a straight nose, a scratch of beard. He was focused, like a craftsman in his workshop.

Crowley took Sam’s dick in the circle of his fingers again, mind-numbingly gentle. He always was, at first, after he let Sam get close. Sam focused on the feel of his hand and keeping his stomach tight, keeping his hands glued to the arms of the chair. He had to make it through the next five minutes, and then the next five minutes after that, and nothing else mattered.

Crowley gripped him tighter, using his whole hand, twisting his wrist on the downstroke. Sam ground the front of his hooked ankle against the leg of the chair. The pain helped keep the pleasure back. His entire body was buzzing, wanting, desperate for release, and he had to keep it back.

A little faster, tighter still. Saying it felt good didn’t feel right anymore, good didn’t matter and he was raw and spent, but it was earth-shatteringly intense if not strictly pleasurable. Sam chewed the inside of his lip. He hung his head, shoulders hunching, and tried to wipe his sweaty face on his own shoulder. His hair stuck to his cheek.

Crowley cleared his throat. His hand slowed, switching up the pace. It built up again.

“How are you holding up?” he asked, so softly.

Sam just breathed at him, an annoyed huff. Talking took up energy. Earlier, Crowley tried to goad him into answering, cooing, oh, he likes that, and other pieces of inflammatory coddling to piss him off. Sam hadn’t given him the satisfaction of getting a rise out of him.

Crowley’s hand clicked wetly as he worked Sam in his fist, quicker again. Sam felt his balls draw up; he held himself still, pushed back into the chair, moved his tongue inside his mouth. He was close again. He stared at the flex of Crowley’s arm. Crowley shifted his weight, closer, one knee against the inside of Sam’s. He used it to press Sam’s legs apart, always wanting to close.

Crowley said, “I’m willing to bet you haven’t thought about anything else, this whole time.” Faster, slick and tight and fucking relentless. Sam could barely follow what he was saying. “That big, hyperactive brain of yours is finally quiet, eh? You’re always go, go, go, never looking into that shredded pile of ducting you call a soul. But you’re in your body now.” He slapped Sam’s dick with his open palm, just shy of too hard. It brought Sam back from the edge. “Present.”

Even that twinge of pain felt good to Sam now, any new sensation. He had the presence of mind to be furious that Crowley was right—he hadn’t had a spare second for anything else, not worrying about the trials or Dean or what came next. Furious. He had his first spare thought then: how good it would feel to lean down and tear Crowley’s throat out with his teeth. Even that got twisted into a kind of pleasure and Sam’s stomach got all hot and tight as he played out the fantasy. Blood in his teeth. Demon blood and its diesel-like tang. It was the first time he’d thought about it in years.

Crowley slapped his dick again. It pulsed and drooled and Sam hissed between his teeth.

“Stay with me,” Crowley said, taking his dick up in his hand again. Sam pushed back against the chair to keep from bucking up into his grip. “You’re almost there.”

The sheer thought of being finished almost made Sam come. Crowley went back to his punishing rhythm, that perfect focus, each slick twist of his fist coming right up against what Sam could take. Sam grit his teeth and his shoulders came up again. He braced a foot against the floor and it made the chair grind back an inch with a loud grating sound.

Crowley said, “Hold still,” in that perfectly placid, placating tone. “I won’t stop this time. Is that what you want?”

Sam thought about biting him again (blood thick on his tongue and in his nose, its viscous, metallic scent, the head rush). There was no more teasing, no stringing along, just steady, dizzying strokes. Sweat poured down Sam’s neck, it felt like he was boiling from the inside out, his fingers slipped on the arms of the chair and he couldn’t make them hold onto the lacquered wood anymore. The thought of actually coming was terrifying, he wanted it, he wasn’t sure if he could even do it anymore. His thighs started to shake and he couldn’t make them stop. He was so close he could taste it.

“Sam.” Crowley’s voice was gravelly and hushed. Maybe a little out of breath. “Go ahead.”

Sam was breathing loudly with his mouth, eyes screwed shut, and he finally sunk into it and let go. He felt out of control and shaking with it after holding back for so long, it felt like he was coming apart at the seams, nothing had ever been so good or so terrifying, to feel like that.

His hand slipped off the chair and he clawed into Crowley’s upper arm, twisting his fist into his shirt, wrenching him in. Sam hunched over and shuddered all over and came, finally, properly, with a low, guttural groan he couldn’t keep back. His hair brushed the top of Crowley’s shoulder. Crowley kept stroking him through it, exactly how he needed it, and Sam kept coming longer than he thought he could, waves of it until it was borderline unpleasant, electric. He didn’t think about a single thing other than the way it felt.

Crowley, very quietly, very close to Sam’s ear: “Good boy.”

Sam’s whole body was swollen and sore and pounding as he came down off that high. His head was still near Crowley’s shoulder and he could hear his breathing, kind of choppy. Sam still had his hand clenched around his arm, he couldn’t make it let go. Crowley still had his hand on Sam’s dick. Sam was so dizzy and spent that it took everything he had left not to slide to the floor on his knees. He spent a moment there putting the pieces of himself back together, and then he slowly sat back, and they both let go.

Looking Crowley dead in the eye for the first time since he sat down was almost worse than the rest of it. It put a face to the hands. He looked faintly surprised, staring up at Sam, and… flushed. Flushed and kind of glowy and rumpled, miles from his usual sterile demeanor. He looked almost as awkward as Sam felt. Sam didn’t think it was possible.

Crowley sat back on the bed to put some space between them and wiped at the spot on his sleeve where Sam grabbed him. It was noticeably wet from Sam’s sweaty hand.

“I told you you’d need rope.”

He had Sam’s come on the back of his other hand, Sam was horrified to notice, and on one of his legs. More was splattered on the chair and the floor between them, which was fucking humiliating, and—Crowley was hard. Sam saw that for the first time and his exhausted brain spun out, trying to remember if he’d noticed before, but he could see the shape of it in his black trousers, thick and obvious. Sam had been so focused on withstanding the whole ordeal that he forgot to think about how Crowley, presumably, was getting something out of it. Obviously he was hard. Obviously he liked it.

Crowley had a cloth, all of a sudden. A handkerchief. He wiped Sam’s come off his hand and leg and didn’t look directly at him. Sam couldn’t tell if he was pleased or what, but he mostly looked embarrassed. Sam had expected an endless amount of smug, and he waited for it to come, nervous. If that was what Crowley wanted to do to him, he could only imagine what returning the favour might look like.

He wasn’t as put off by the idea as he’d been before they started. Payback would feel good. He was green by any measure of comparison, but he was pretty sure he could make Crowley squirm.

Crowley got to his feet. His leg brushed Sam’s as he edged by him.

“Clean yourself up and meet me downstairs.”

And that was it. He left the room, leaving Sam naked and alone on the wet chair with the reek of his own sweat and come. Sam just sat there for a moment, listening to the thundering heartbeat in his ears gradually slow. He thought about wiping up the come on the floor and didn’t. When he stood up, his legs were shaky as a newborn foal’s, but he managed to drag himself back to the bathroom.

Sam’s only good, safe thought in the shower was that the soap in there smelled like peppermint. His whole body hurt from being so tense for so long and his mouth tasted like blood.

He got out and toweled off, dreaming of the bleachy motel sheets he’d crash on once he made it back into town. He’d take a page out of Dean’s book and pick up a fifth somewhere on the way in to help him sleep.

Speaking of: he fished his phone out of his jacket pocket. Four texts from Dean.

lemme know when you get there

you’re there already I guess

Sammy text me ok

no details. sorry man

Sam flipped his phone around in his hands, naked and dripping onto the tiled floor. He considered calling him, but, Jesus, what would he say? I’m fine. No, he gave me a two-hour handjob. Yeah. Yeah, a bunch of times. My brain feels like a hornet’s nest. We’re going to confession tomorrow.

In the end, he just sent i’m alive and put his phone away. He slicked back his wet hair, pulled on his clothes and winced at the drag of cotton over his spent dick. He reminded himself how much worse it could have been.

That had to be it. The plan was: he’d go downstairs and Crowley would give him the hellhound. Sam didn’t know a ton about hellhounds, but there had to be a way to make them heel or transfer ownership, even if he couldn’t see the thing. It would spend the night at the motel with him, and then he’d take it back to the bunker and they’d cut it open. Easy as anything.

He opened the bathroom door and was hit with—meat. Something smelled like cooking meat. His stomach clenched. He crept down the hallway and down the stairs with the careful, measured steps of someone in a horror movie. Into the foyer and down the long hallway that opened into the kitchen, following some indistinct sound.

Crowley stood at the stove in front of a giant stainless steel pan.

The whole kitchen smelled of olive oil and rich meat. A lowball glass of something amber sat on the counter by Crowley’s hip, next to an orange and a pile of vegetables on a wooden cutting board. There was a dark bottle and a clean, empty glass on the island, right next to Sam’s demon-killing knife, sitting there like some inane piece of interior-design kitsch.

Crowley slid a spatula under the edge of whatever hunk of meat was searing in the pan. He was wearing the same clothes as before—or a new set, laundered and jizz-free—and he had his free hand in the pocket of his slacks. Sam wondered if he’d jerked off. Maybe he’d teleported somewhere and fucked something. He looked remarkably relaxed.

Sam said, “No.”

Crowley looked over his shoulder. “Shower wasn’t to your liking?”

“No. We’re not doing this. I held up my end of the bargain, and you owe me a dog. Now.”

Crowley chuckled and turned back to the stove.

“You said ‘one night,’ not sex. It’s still night.” Without looking up, he pointed at a stool. “Sit.”

Sam opened his mouth, then closed it with a snap. He was an idiot, and too proud by half.

He lowered himself reluctantly onto the nearest stool. The demon-killing knife was within arm’s reach. He yearned.

He bit out, “This is fucking pathetic.” Crowley didn’t even turn around.

“Very. Please, help yourself to a glass of the nicest scotch you’ll ever have.”

The bottle on the counter in front of Sam looked medieval. He snatched it off the counter, wrenched out the cork and poured himself a giant glass.

“Fucking pathetic,” he said again, and threw back the whole thing. It was smooth as hell, but that wasn’t the point. Crowley watched from the stove with open amusement as Sam poured another.

“That mouthful alone would cost—”

“Don’t care,” Sam said, and drank the second one. The head rush was a welcome distraction, the spin and churn and heat. Crowley chuckled and went back to his pan.

“Surely you’d rather I pamper you like this, as long as you’re captive. All things being equal.”

Sam thought about that. His brain wasn’t working well enough yet, between the scotch and the orgasms, to come up with anything good or quick as a retort. He watched Crowley grab a plate from the cupboard above his head, lift the meat out of the pan with his bare hand—it was some kind of poultry, not chicken—and set it down on the plate. Sam poured himself another glass of scotch. He was quiet for long enough that Crowley just went on.

“How would you have done it, if I let you pick the venue? What’s the go-to Winchester date night?” He scraped at the fond left in the pan. “You buy me two Coors Light and fuck me from behind in a dirty bathroom stall?”

There was a thought. Sam would’ve gotten some petty kind of joy from debasing Crowley, if their roles were reversed. He instantly felt guilty for thinking that, then pathetic for feeling guilty over it at all—of course it would bring him joy to shove the King of Hell’s face against a stall door. He would’ve made him lick the floor, too.

“Or the back seat,” Sam said eventually. “You hate our car.”

“You know me so well.”

Crowley went back to his cooking. He crushed two cloves of garlic with the flat of an enormous chef’s knife and dropped them into the sizzling pan. Watching him cook was unnatural and unpleasant, and Sam was hypnotized. Crowley started chopping some carrots. Carrots, for fuck’s sake.

He said to Sam, “Get as drunk as you want, but you’re staying for dinner. I made you cry with pleasure without asking for anything in return, I think the least you could do is eat my duck ragu.”

Sam squinted at the back of Crowley’s head. “I didn’t cry.”

He was ninety percent sure that was true. His face had been kind of wet, but that was sweat. He made noises at the end there, but they weren’t sobbing. Not being able to keep from grabbing Crowley’s arm was a knock to his pride, but he sure as hell didn’t cry.

Crowley said, “Whatever you need to tell yourself,” and Sam wanted to whip his glass at him. He settled for another sip of scotch and let it coat his tongue. He’d never drank something so rich and smooth in his life and it was fucking infuriating.

Crowley chopped carrots. Sam glared daggers at him and flexed his hands around his glass, running violent fantasies through his head. The frying pan popped and hissed. After a while, Crowley looked over his shoulder.

“Could you at least try to enjoy this?”

“No,” Sam said right away. “Fuck no. Why are you enjoying this?”

Crowley sighed and turned around. He took a drink of scotch and leaned his hip on the counter. He brandished the knife as he spoke.

“I don’t need to eat. Alright? That means I rarely get to cook, and I like cooking.” Another drink, and he turned back around. “This segment of our evening is called ‘humouring an old man,’ and it’s much, much worse than the sex part. Be grateful I’m not making you put that slinky little robe back on.”

The carrots went into the pan and Crowley started chopping an onion.

Sam said, “You hate me.”

“Yes, massively. And for some reason, that means I get an unparalleled joy from forcing you to spend time with me.”

“You’re joking.”

“You have no idea how much I wish I were joking. I’m giddy over this.”

Sam stared. He sipped his scotch. He knew he had to stay—that was the deal, and his useless morals wouldn’t let him welch anyway—but he didn’t have to make it easy for either of them. Crowley spent enough time rubbing Sam’s nose in all his own fuck-ups, Sam could return the favour.

He said, “But you want me, too. A lot.”

Crowley glanced at him over his shoulder, pausing only briefly before going back to his onion-chopping.

“We’ve already established that. Sorry if touching your cock for hours on end left that unclear, I’ll try to be more forward next time.”

Sam scowled. “You want me so bad you’re willing to trade for me, like an idiot, and you’re enjoying yourself right now, even though you know I’m only sitting here ‘cause I have to.”

“We’ve established that, too. Look.” Crowley set his knife down with a clatter and went over to where Sam sat at the island. Sam wanted him to look mad, but he didn’t. He was smiling. “You’re trying to embarrass me, but it won’t work. I live every day with the knowledge that I’m a sad old pervert, it’s not news to hear it from you.” He picked up the bottle of scotch and topped up Sam’s glass with a practiced flourish, his eyes downcast. “You have no idea how much time I’ve spent trying to find an angle on you. Some way to trick you into wanting me back, get you away from that ball and chain you call a brother and under my wing.” He looked up. He slid Sam’s glass towards him. “But, if you were easier to trick, I wouldn’t want you so badly. It’s a conundrum.”

Sam made himself hold his gaze, jaw set, bearing the weight of that black, heavy desire. He’d been trying not to think about it, but the reality of what they’d done snuck up on him, what he let Crowley do—twitching helplessly at every flick of his fingers, coming in his hand, letting good boy go unmentioned and unpunished. Maybe Crowley didn’t feel shame, but Sam sure as hell did. He could never take it back.

Crowley slid away and went back to the stove.

“You can keep trying to embarrass me if you’d like, but this’ll go by quicker if you just get drunk and have dinner with me like an adult.” He scooped up the pile of expertly diced onion and dropped it in the pan. “Remember upstairs, how nice it was to turn off your brain? Do that.”

Sam couldn’t imagine having the luxury of a silent brain at will. His brain was currently vividly and unhelpfully imagining how he might have done things differently—played his hand a little smarter, gotten Crowley in the back seat like he’d said—bit him until he bled, fucked him until he was drooling on the seat—and then he wouldn’t have been forced to play house. He knew he could make Crowley feel shame if he tried hard enough, everyone had something. If…

Sam cleared his throat. “If I’d asked, would you have let me set the rules? For this?”

Crowley tossed something green into the pan, silent. Sam didn’t think he’d get an answer, but then he did.

“In the interest of making this as painful as possible for you, I’ll tell the truth: yes. You caught me very, very off guard. If you’d set your terms quick, I would have done anything you wanted, so long as it meant having you.” Another glance over his shoulder. “But, you didn’t.”

Sam dreamed of coming up behind Crowley at the stove and making him slam his hand down into the sizzling pan. Severing his spinal column with the demon-killing knife and letting his limp body catch the pan handle, flipping his stupid carrots and onions all over the floor. Better than any sex Sam ever had.

Crowley looked back at him, smiling. He nodded at Sam’s drink. “Let me know if you want something stronger. It’s never a bad time to get into heroin.”

Sam watched him cook for several quiet minutes while he stewed in his regret. Some kind of stock went into the pan, ripe tomatoes, bay leaves, and the duck. Sam downed another scotch on autopilot, feeling it now, numb and buzzing in his fingers. All he could think about was what Dean would do if he saw him in that chair upstairs, submitting so easily to someone who’d been responsible for such unthinkable atrocities. Sam wiped his hands on his jeans.

He knew he had to turn off his brain. He was drunk enough and desperate enough that it might be possible. He took off his jacket and dropped it on the floor next to his stool, then leaned forwards with his elbows on the counter, trying to trick his body into relaxing.

“Why do you like cooking if you don’t eat?” he asked.

Crowley said, “Why does anyone like anything? It’s a valuable craft.” He got a lid from a cupboard and covered the pan. Much to Sam’s horror, he seemed done with the stove, and came back to the island across from Sam, so Sam actually had to look at him. “You seem to think I’ve spent the last three hundred years sitting alone in a dark room, leaving only to bother you and your idiot brother. This might surprise you, but I have interests. Hobbies, even.”

“No way.”

“Mhm. What would you do if you could live forever?” He topped up Sam’s scotch with the last of the bottle. “I studied under a head chef at a fabled restaurant in Marseille in the ‘20s. I speak a dozen languages.” He paused and frowned. “The thought never even crossed your mind, did it?”

Sam blinked through his shell shock. It hadn’t occurred to him that demons did anything non-demon-related. It wasn’t something he asked Ruby about. They hadn’t done a ton of talking.

Sam said, “You don’t have a soul,” and Crowley beamed. He leaned forwards across the counter.

“That’s an interesting one, isn’t it? We think of art—or even, all ability to desire—as something innately human. And humanity is, you could argue, the soul. So what does it mean if a creature like me is capable of truly appreciating a fine concerto? Of crafting duck ragu for his beautiful and infuriating house guest?”

He flicked his eyes to that horrible, glowing red. The intensity of the glow bled into the skin around his eyes, making them look like they were full of blood. It was awful. Sam leaned way, way back on his stool.

He said, “You’re mimicking humanity. You’re just going through the motions.”

“Isn’t everyone? Let’s say you’re right: what’s the difference between that and, for example, a young man who learns what women want a man to be, and changes himself to fit that prescription? He goes to galleries and pretends to be interested in art, travels with her and pretends to respect other cultures, hides the worst parts of himself. There’s nothing genuine there. But because he’s human, he gets a pass? With his soul as worthless and shriveled as it is?”

Crowley flicked his eyes back to normal. His smile was unwavering and endlessly pleased.

Sam said, endlessly weary, “So you’re a philosopher, too.”

“I may have been close personal friends with Johann Herbart, yes.” Crowley pointed at Sam’s scotch and picked up his own empty glass. “The ragu needs to simmer. Finish that and I’ll make cocktails, we’re moving this conversation to the couch. You like Campari?”

Sam watched him open a cabinet in the corner of the kitchen, revealing rows and rows of bottles, and take a few out. Various shiny copper bar implements came out of another cupboard, and fresh lemons from the fridge, and Sam just had to sit there and watch.

“Your torture game is next level,” he said faintly. Crowley grinned.

“Now you’re just trying to butter me up. I’m taking that as a ‘yes’ on the Campari.”

Sam sat next to Crowley on a green velvet sofa in the sitting room next to the kitchen and, over the course of the next hour and a half, argued incessantly and became thoroughly drunk. Crowley would get up every so often to make another round of bitter, herbaceous cocktails and Sam would follow him so he could keep yelling at him. Crowley had done everything and he thought that made him right about everything, and he was insufferable. Anything Sam said, Crowley had a bad-faith devil’s advocate retort. Sam wanted to throttle him.

Crowley was at the stove. Sam loomed behind him and threw his hands in the air.

“You know that’s not true! You’re intentionally ignoring the entire—”

Crowley looked over his shoulder and smiled up at him, sort of wistful.

Sam scowled down at him. “What?”

Crowley shrugged and lifted the lid off the pan on the stove. The duck was glossy and saucy and browned; on the other burner, a giant pot of fresh pappardelle noodles boiled away. He stirred the sauce with a wooden spoon, breaking up the tender duck. He picked out a bay leaf with his fingers.

“I spend all day every day around yes-men who hate me, but submit to me out of some pathetic desire to suck up to their boss. You, on the other hand, seem completely immune. You have no idea how attractive that is.”

Sam rolled his eyes and went back to his drink on the island. “Don’t say that.”

“Don’t be so frustratingly alluring, then.” Crowley lifted the noodles out of the water with a pair of tongs, dropped them into the pan and stirred them into the sauce. “You love to argue just as much as I do, by the way. You’re practically glowing.”

Sam frowned. Any glow was a drunken flush, and the house was too warm. He’d taken off his flannel and was wearing just a gray T-shirt.

“Not in the annoying way that you do.”

“It’s possible that no one’s ever told you this because you’re handsome, but you are also very, very annoying. We’re two peas in a know-it-all pod.” Crowley motioned to a cupboard. “Get me two of the pasta bowls, top shelf. Cutlery’s below.”

Sam grumbled, more at Crowley’s comment than at being made to help. He set the small table in the corner of the kitchen with their cutlery and brought their drinks over. Crowley dished out two steaming bowls of pasta and brought them to the table and—Jesus, Sam had no idea what time it was, but it was late. He was too wired to have much of an appetite earlier in the day but he was starving now, previously kept at bay by all the drinks.

They sat across from each other and Crowley gestured at Sam’s plate, eat, and Sam reluctantly speared a hunk of shredded duck and a noodle with his fork—thinking again of poisoning and traps, but Crowley had plenty of opportunities earlier and he had no reason to wait until then—and popped it in his mouth.

It was unfortunately excellent. Sam hadn’t had a home-cooked meal since Amelia, and before then, not since he could remember, unless you counted Chef Boyardee at Bobby’s. But this had acid and richness and heat and Sam descended on it like a fucking vulture, like he hadn’t eaten in days. The noodles were perfect and he hated it.

He shoveled food into his mouth for a long time and didn’t even think about Crowley until he came up for air.

Crowley had eaten some of his own dish, but then, he was just looking at Sam. With a weird look on his face.

Sam asked, “You’re not getting off on this, are you?”

Crowley’s smile was complicated. “No.”

Sam grimaced and went back to his noodles.

“You’re sick and pathetic.”

“Keep talking like that and I’ll think you’re angling for a second round, lover boy.”

Sam kicked him under the table. Crowley seemed to like it, and didn’t kick back (Dean always kicked back).

Sam had been very carefully not thinking about Dean much until then. He’d give Dean a pared-down briefing of the night if he asked, because he knew there was no way he could explain the dinner and drinks in a way Dean would understand. Sam didn’t understand it. There would have been ways out, he could have fought it or at least argued, but he’d just rolled over.

In the very back of his mind, under all the old cardboard boxes full of sweaters and Christmas decorations, a tiny voice said: it’s because you’re bored. You’re bored and burnt out at the same time and it’s killing you.

He glanced up at Crowley. Crowley was eating, and he’d gotten a glass of wine from somewhere to go with the meal. He didn’t offer Sam one. It was late and Sam was too tired and drunk, but he had the thought: he’d probably fight me if I asked. It was a fun fantasy. Sparring with Crowley or something like it, beating the shit out of him. Demons could heal and Sam could probably have cut him, if he wanted to. Crowley would have let him.

Sam got a weird tingle down his spine as he lingered on that. Not arousal, but—that tiny voice that shrieked again about newness, imagining Crowley looking up at him with his face blooming with bruises, bloodied and torn. That would be new.

Crowley said, “I’ll keep you until midnight. Fair?”

Sam nodded, mouth full. He was too busy eating to check his watch.

They finished the meal without saying much. When they were done, Crowley got to his feet and took Sam’s plate.

“Unless you’re planning on staying in my guest room, I assume you’ll want to sober up a bit before you drive.” He brought the plates to the sink. “Coffee?”

Sam was preoccupied by the used plates and imagining Crowley doing the dishes in a gingham apron and yellow rubber dish gloves. There was no way—either someone else did them, or he threw out the plates and got more.

Sam said, “Sure.”

He leaned on the counter and watched Crowley grind coffee. Crowley switched back to scotch; Sam had never seen anyone but Dean drink so consistently and show it so little. Crowley moved around the kitchen with a practiced efficiency that said maybe he spent more time there than Sam originally thought—not a showroom, but a vacation home.

Sam said, “So, you’re not at all worried that I’m gonna tell everyone I saw the King of Hell playing homemaker.”

Crowley snorted without turning around from the counter.

“That’s a strange way to say ‘thank you for the delicious meal, Crowley.’ Work on that.” He got a French press from the cupboard. “I was the doctor who lobotomized Rosemary Kennedy. I worked with Oppenheimer. One backwater hick of a hunter thinking I’ve gone a bit soft is far from a blow to my reputation.” Ground coffee went into the press. “You’re not the first pretty-boy I’ve been sweet on, and you probably won’t be the last. Stories get told.”

Sam had two warring thoughts: one, maybe there had been another human that Crowley aimed his possessive desire at before Sam and, to a lesser extent, Dean—inevitably there was, Sam wasn’t so stupid as to think Crowley’s violent passion for him was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, and if not a human then definitely another demon, some past partner in crime—but also—

“Rosemary Kennedy. Did you… meet JFK?”

Crowley laughed at him. He poured hot water from some kind of tap into the press.

“Of course that’s the part of that you’d latch onto, you little nerd.”

Maybe Sam was mildly interested. “So what?”

French press full, Crowley got out a delicate china mug and sat it on the counter next to it. He brought his scotch over to the island to stand next to Sam.

“I did more than meet him—we had a deal. Ten more years in exchange for a clean bill of health.”

“Right. His…”

“The endocrine disorder, but that wasn’t the half of it. He was on every drug known to man to manage his various disgusting maladies. Didn’t make it very far before he was shot, but that wasn’t me. Scout’s honour.”

Sam had a dozen questions. A hundred. He physically bit his tongue inside his mouth.

Crowley smiled at him. “You think that’s fascinating. You love this.”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“You do. You think it’s so cool that I met JFK, like a starry-eyed schoolboy.” Crowley leaned in. Sam’s demon-killing knife was on the counter between them. “How do you think I became King of the Crossroads? You don’t climb the ladder by catching nobodies. I inserted myself—literally or metaphorically—into every major event of the past two centuries.”

Sam spent a moment on inserted. “Literally. Like…”

Crowley smiled. “When I could. I had an affair with Cary Grant, to name one.”

“No way.”

“Yup. He gave abysmal head, the poor man. All teeth.”

“Did he have a deal?”

“No. I just thought he was handsome.”

Again, Sam wondered. The concept of Crowley feeling genuine affection for any living thing was a bridge too far, but it was possible that he’d had relationships. The idea seemed too far-fetched. Pathetic, somehow. Performative and sad, like putting a dog in a little jacket.

Crowley leaned in closer.

“Speaking of which. Since we’ve become such good friends,” (a derisive snort from Sam) “you won’t mind me asking—am I your first foray into batting for the other team?”

Sam grimaced before he could stop himself. He hadn’t thought of that.

“You can’t be flattered. You made me do it.”

Crowley said, “I know, I know,” but he sounded pleased anyway. And he paused afterwards, and got a funny look on his face. “Now, uh, does that include…”

Sam didn’t get whatever he was getting at. “What?”

Crowley gave Sam a knowing look that he still totally blanked on. He couldn’t imagine what gay experience he’d had that Crowley would know about, if he didn’t remember himself. He had the chilling thought that maybe Crowley had been watching him his whole life, like God. Maybe he saw his eyes wander in some swimming pool locker room in 1996.

Sam said again: “What?”

Crowley hesitated again and glanced at the French press, then back at Sam. He smiled, sort of wry.

“Surely you’ve… dipped your pen in the family ink. Don’t even try to tell me you haven’t.”

Sam tried to muster up some surprise that his only response to the accusation that he was fooling around with his brother was mild chagrin. A few years ago, maybe there would have been shock or anger, something, but not now.

“Nope,” he said.

Crowley put his drink down. His surprise seemed genuine. “Never?”

“Never.”

Crowley seemed to consider this, an exaggerated frown and huh, imagine sort of face.

“Then why are you like that?”

Sam worked his jaw back and forth, staring at a spot on the cupboards. He could point to a thousand different things, because his entire life, no exceptions, was made up of things he could point to to illustrate why he and Dean were ‘like that.’ We took baths together until he was a teenager. I’ve spent nearly twenty-four hours a day with him for my entire adult life. I dressed his dead body and carried him out to the woods and buried him by myself.

In the end, he went with, “I lost my virginity when I was sixteen.”

Crowley snorted. “Congratulations. To him?”

“No! No. But.” Sam tapped his fingers against the counter. “He was in the other room.”

“Was he, now?” Impossible mirth in Crowley’s tone.

Sam said, “Well, yeah. I was with his girlfriend.”

Crowley grinned, hugely. “Were you, now?”

Sam looked away. It wasn’t a memory he could forget: it was a sweltering summer in some apartment they were renting and the girl’s breath was sour and hot with beer. Her name was Katie. The mattress springs screeched and all Sam could think about was the wedge of light coming in through the open door, beyond which was Dean, sitting on the couch. The TV wasn’t even on.

Crowley went to the press and poured Sam his coffee. He made a motion at the fridge, milk, and Sam waved his hand. He took the cup when Crowley offered it to him, hot enough to burn, and set it down.

He said, “We were all drunk, the three of us. She said I was cute, and Dean thought it’d be funny, ‘cause I was a virgin. I was drunk enough to also think it was funny, and she was hot, so. Her and I go into the bedroom. I fuck her, kind of, but it’s weird and bumpy and after a while she just goes down on me.”

Crowley purred, “That Winchester charm.”

Sam punched him in the arm before going on.

“So then, when she comes up for air, she kisses me, and—and she says—‘your dick tastes just like your brother’s.’“

They sat with that for a moment, both of them silent. Sam sipped his coffee; it was good, strong and scalding. He slid into one of the stools at the island. Mentally, he was in an old apartment staring at the wedge of light coming in from the living room past the open door, watching for movement. Wondering.

Crowley sighed.

“Poor boy. You never had a chance.”

“Nope,” Sam said, popping the p. “If we were ever normal, I don’t remember it.”

He could have said that Dean watched him shower earlier that evening, and that they had an entire conversation during it like it was nothing, because it was nothing. Or that one of the things that made Sam nervous about the Men of Letters’ bunker was that they’d have separate rooms, and he spent virtually his entire life up until then sleeping in the same room as Dean with a few brief, notable exceptions. But he didn’t know how to say any of it and not sound bitter, because he was bitter. He didn’t like being like this. He’d wake up in the middle of the night at Amelia’s in a panic because he couldn’t hear Dean’s quiet snores.

Crowley came around the counter and sat in a stool next to him, swiveled towards him so his knees brushed Sam’s hip. Sam thought about moving one space over and didn’t. He realized Crowley hadn’t been pawing at him outside of sex which, that morning, Sam had braced himself for. He thought he’d be beating him off with a stick.

Crowley said, “You’ve thought about dipping that pen, though. You’ve thought about the ink.”

Sam stared down at his china cup. The things he’d thought about doing to Dean, just to see if Dean would let him, would’ve landed him in jail. Whether any of it was related to attraction was a gossamer shroud over the body of the thing.

He slid his cup over the counter until it touched Crowley’s arm, just above his wrist.

“Irish this up for me.”

Crowley slid off his stool, his eyes glittering.

“Bossy.”

He looked over his liquor cabinet and came back with a bottle of something golden with a label all in Spanish. He put a splash in Sam’s coffee and Sam tasted it; citrusy and boozy, warm spices. Crowley left the bottle by Sam’s elbow and sat back down.

They considered each other for a moment. Crowley didn’t look tired, which figured. Sam felt like shit and was sure he looked it, too. When he used a shampoo that wasn’t his own, his hair got all fluffy. He tucked his hair behind his ear, thinking about it.

Crowley said, “Admit it. This is the best date you’ve ever been on.”

His eyes crinkled when he smiled, and he got a little wrinkle in his nose. Sam wasn’t sure he’d ever really seen him smile—not a toady smirk, but a real grin. He looked almost boyish. It made Sam want to jam his thumbs into his eyeballs until they popped.

Sam said, “I thought this wasn’t a date.”

The smile persisted. “I lied.”

Sam accidentally smiled back before he caught himself and made it into a scowl, just because—Jesus, it was ridiculous. The whole thing was fucking ridiculous. He’d have his whole life to start hating himself for this night, but now, it was— there was humour in it. There had to be.

He drank his coffee with Crowley sitting quietly next to him, sipping his scotch. Coffee, along with the talk of dating, made Sam think of Amelia. She’d been the only person he’d spent any time with that wasn’t Dean since adolescence—there was Jessica, but, looking back, Sam had been half feral the whole time they were together, short and jumpy, still learning how to be a person. He didn’t have much of a life to share with her. The same thing could be said about Amelia, but at least he was older.

And now, he had dinner with Crowley. His stomach dropped as he realized that it was the most genuine experience he’d had with a partner, if only because Crowley wasn’t worth lying to. He’d lied to every woman he’d ever been with. It was a horrifying and humbling thought and Sam kept talking, desperate to hear something other than the howling guilt banging around in his head.

“I had a girlfriend earlier this year. Like, a real thing. We lived together in Texas. Had a dog.”

Crowley said, “I know.”

Sam glanced over at him. He was never sure how much of their lives Crowley knew about, and the thought that it was a lot was unpleasant. His flunkie demons following them, watching from the shadows… Sam went on.

“It was… I dunno. Comfortable. We went grocery shopping. I’ve never actually had that.” They’d get enough food to fill a cart, and some of it would be vegetables. The closest thing he got to grocery shopping with Dean was putting a massive bottle of bottom-shelf whiskey into a basket along with cookies and other road snacks, maybe instant noodles if the motel had a hotplate.

That, on top of his revelation about honesty, made him say what he said next.

“You’ll be—what did you say, ‘giddy’?—to know, I’ll be out of your hair soon. For good.”

Crowley froze with his glass raised halfway to his mouth. “Sorry?”

“I’m out. After”—he couldn’t mention the trials, backpedaled—“after Dean and I figure out some stuff, I’m getting out. Hanging up the sawed-off.”

Crowley set his glass back down. “Grocery shopping did that much for you?”

“You don’t get it, you— Jesus, why am I talking to you? You’re a fucking monster, there’s no—”

Crowley reached out and laid his hand over Sam’s where it was resting on the counter. Sam’s jaw snapped shut so hard his teeth clicked.

Crowley said, “The same reason you’ve been talking to me all night.” He squeezed Sam’s fingers. “You’re unbelievably fucking lonely.”

His hand was strangely soft, but Sam knew that already. He was so surprised by the touch and the accusation that he didn’t think to pull away, and Crowley continued.

“From one unbelievably lonely person to another—you learn to spot it in others.” He took his hand back slowly. “You, specifically, spend your life next to exactly one person, and it’s someone whose emotional state you have to constantly manage. Which means that you’re lonely without even getting to experience the joys of solitude.”

Sam’s temper flared up in a familiar knee-jerk shut up about my brother. It was a knife to his gut, realizing the very next second that Crowley was right and still feeling that pig-headed, all-consuming possessive pride of family that meant he couldn’t bring himself to actually agree. Not about Dean.

Crowley added, “You see how I might relate.”

Surrounded by flunkies and business associates, but no friends or family. Alive for hundreds of years, with nobody. It was Crowley’s own fault, but still—some part of Sam that had yet to calcify felt for him, for just a second. Sam squashed it down.

“Yeah,” he said, trying not to sound too choked.

He rolled the word ‘lonely’ around in his head. How could he be lonely when he hardly spent any time alone? He thought about his morning runs, or driving while Dean slept, getting dropped off so he could walk somewhere while Dean took the car, and he liked being alone. He’d always seen himself as an introvert. Loneliness was a goal, not a burden.

Crowley said, “You know, I couldn’t make you talk tonight. If you’d sat silent for twenty minutes afterwards, it would have been tedious enough to let you go. But you didn’t.”

Sam grit his teeth. He shook his head at himself, furious. Whether that was true or not didn’t matter. He was the stupidest man alive.

He said, “Maybe I’m lonely. Whatever. But if you are too, then you get why I want out.”

Crowley cocked his head at him and said nothing. Sam made himself go on.

“I’m tired. All the time. I want… a home. Real, lasting connections with people. With anyone. We don’t have friends, we have contacts, and I want…” He huffed and rubbed his eyes. This was stuff he’d never even managed to say to Dean, for obvious reasons. “I want a normal life. I want to join a rec softball league and go to the same restaurant twice. I want to be fucking comfortable for once, for a while. For the rest of my life. I don’t know.”

He went to say, I sound fucking stupid, but he didn’t think that. He meant all of it. He thought it sounded brave.

Crowley gave an emphatic sigh. “Oh, God, you’re breaking my heart. You almost believe that.”

“I’m serious.”

“You’re not! You’re Sam Winchester, you don’t play house!”

He’d almost shouted that. Sam leaned away and scowled at him.

“We’re playing house right now.”

“Yes, playing. You want to do it for real?”

“Not this, but—”

“Well, this is what you’d get. Listen to me.” Crowley leaned in. “Imagine this, but you can’t have another drink because you work in the morning. This, but I made casserole surprise. Instead of wanting to kill me with your bare hands in an extravagant manner, you feel a mild sort of fondness for me at best. We had routine sex eight days ago, and you’re ambivalent to whether we ever do it again. The rugrats are howling. You spend your nights in front of the telly, clipping coupons.”

Sam’s heart beat hard. Instead of leaning back again, he leaned closer, sneering.

“You don’t know me. I want the coupon-clipping.”

“What you want is something new. You think that thing is ‘normal,’ but it’s not.” Crowley’s eyes flitted over Sam’s face, concentrating, like he had so many times that night. “You’re extraordinary, Sam. You have an extraordinary capacity for the unnatural and the unreal. You’re capable of extraordinary violence. Bury your head in the sand if you want, but nothing about you has ever been normal.”

Sam remembered Stanford, the closest he’d ever come to normal, and how he was always on his back foot there. He aced his classes and worked thirty hours a week, but he drowned in everything else, lonely and aching and awkward, even with Jess. Especially with Jess. He’d been permanently out of his element.

He swallowed noisily. He leaned away first, forgetting not to. “It could be.”

“Not a chance.” Crowley had something like a smile on his face. “Like it or not, you were always destined for my seat. There’s a… case to be made there, for a tandem rule. You and me, side by side. Kings of Hell.”

Sam felt like he was on his back foot now. The coffee hadn’t woken him up in any way that was good and he just felt drunk, but faster. Crowley kept talking.

“I think of what you could do—who you could be—if you weren’t so saddled by the need to be good.” His hand wandered towards Sam’s again. “Haven’t you felt it? Your whole life, you’ve been fenced in by the narrow minds of others. If they would just listen to you, you’d put it right. But they don’t. You want to make them, but you don’t. You’re held back by some flimsy sense of morality, when you’re held back at all.”

Sam wished he could deny it. Most days, most of the time, when he let his guard down— anyway. He wished it were further off the mark. Crowley went on.

“It must be excruciating for you. You know you’re right. If you let yourself be right, you could fix everything.” His hand kept creeping across the counter, though his eyes stayed on Sam’s. “Don’t forget, Hell is about punishing the wicked. That seems right up your alley.”

Sam waited to feel Crowley’s fingers brush his, but instead, there was a high, whispery scraping noise.

Sam looked down. It was the sound of a blade moving slowly along marble. Crowley had picked up the demon-killing knife. As Sam watched, he flipped it expertly in his fingers so the point faced out, then slowly drew the blade up Sam’s throat. Sam met Crowley’s gaze. No part of what he felt was fear.

Crowley said softly, “I see you biting at that muzzle. I could take you off-leash.”

Sam stared down at him. The tip of the knife sent a twinge of pain into the fleshy part under Sam’s chin. It felt like a game of chicken, which one of them would move first. Crowley had that glow on his cheeks again and he was close enough that Sam could see his crow’s feet and smell his cologne and the amaro on his breath. The desire was plain on his face and Sam wondered if this was one of those aforementioned moments where he could get anything he asked for, if he asked for it. A pony. A blowjob. Peace on earth. A throne in Hell.

Crowley lowered the knife and leaned in.

Sam leaned way, way back.

“What?”

Crowley went still. “What?”

“Are you trying to kiss me?”

Crowley slid off his stool.

“Don’t flatter yourself.” He left the knife in front of Sam. “It’s midnight, Cinderella, you’re free to go.”

He swept up Sam’s half-finished coffee and brought it to the sink. Sam stared at the back of his head, buzzing with adrenaline. He finally checked his watch. It was one AM.

He picked up his jacket and flannel off the floor by the island, donned both and slipped the knife into an interior pocket. Crowley led him to the door and there was something crackling between them with each of their socked footfalls, Sam’s ears burned and he felt suddenly bulky and restricted in his jacket, playing the drunk’s game of it would be so easy to stay here, just stay, just fall asleep. He knew he had to go. Even if he only made it a mile down the road, he’d rather sleep in the car.

He pulled his shoes on by the door and Crowley followed him out into the cool, sweet summer night. On the short walk to the car, the hair on the back of Sam’s neck stood up. He heard a low, wet growl that couldn’t have come from Crowley and spun around.

Crowley had his hand out and to his left, by his hip, making a sort of scratching movement with his fingers. Sam didn’t clue in until he heard distinctly canine panting from seemingly nowhere. He resolved instantly not to tell Dean that he’d forgotten about the hellhound.

Crowley said, “His name is Rocko. He won’t attack you or your brother because I’ve asked him nicely, but don’t bring him around anyone else if you like them.” He looked down at where the hound presumably was, with a wistful sort of look on his face. “He’s a good boy.”

Sam wished he hadn’t learned the dog’s name. He liked dogs.

He couldn’t see the hound but he could feel it as it walked towards him, heard the clicking of its nails on the asphalt. His throat tightened with nerves, remembering the animalistic snarling as Dean was torn to ribbons when his deal came due what felt like a lifetime ago (was a lifetime ago, and then some). He opened the rear door of the car and the whole frame creaked as the dog climbed in. Sam closed the door carefully behind it.

Crowley stood with his hands in his pockets a few paces away. Sam couldn’t read him well enough to place the look on his face.

Crowley said, “Well. If you ever need to borrow an egg or some sugar, you’ve got my number. Wash your asshole next time, I’ll teach you some things about yourself.”

Something about that stupid quip was Sam’s final straw after all of the rest of it, gritting his teeth through Crowley’s painful flirting and having to bear the knowledge that their miserable lives had any kind of common ground. It was something he’d spend weeks forgiving himself for, and if he didn’t regain some tiny measure of ground, he wouldn’t be able to stand it.

He grabbed Crowley by the front of his shirt, dragged him clean off his feet and slammed him back into the side of the car. Sam felt the shocked breath Crowley took, and his fists curling up against Sam’s chest ready to knock him away, and the muffled noise he made as Sam kissed him hard on the mouth.

Crowley was on board instantly. Sam pinned him to the car with his body and fucking took him, gave him everything he had in a savage howl of a kiss, despite the newness of the soft scrub of his beard against his chin and the thick fingers that fumbled up his neck.

Sam couldn’t remember his last kiss, it was so long ago. He had the thought out of fucking nowhere that Dean would probably kiss him if he asked—not anything weird, just comfort, sometimes, when they were wrecked—and this wasn’t that, but empirically, it was good. Crowley was a good kisser. The part of Sam’s brain that registered that was completely separate from the part that thought about sinking through Crowley’s lip until teeth touched teeth, that wanted blood to fill his mouth and spill out, tendons and sinew snapping against his lips like a wolf pulling at the meat of its kill. Sam’s heart thumped and his balls drew up, sick and traitorous. Crowley’s tongue stroked and flicked along his own and he tilted where Sam put him, went pliant against the curve of the Impala’s door. Sam imagined that red demon smoke choking down his throat. He wondered how far it would get with the anti-possession tattoo, whether the mouth counted or just the throat or lungs; at what point it counted as being filled. What awareness would be Crowley’s as he poured into Sam’s body. If the smoke would make his eyes sting.

Inside the car, the hellhound started barking wildly. It sounded like rolling thunder, its teeth snapping, claws clattering and screeching against the rear window.

Sam grabbed Crowley’s face as hard as he could and wrenched him back. Spit strung between their mouths. He could feel Crowley’s molars through the flesh of his cheek.

Sam spat, “If I wanted you to, you’d be eating out of my fucking hand. Don’t forget it.”

Crowley’s pupils were huge. His voice was muffled by Sam’s hand squishing his cheeks.

“Noted,” he said, breathlessly.

He was a small man outside of his borrowed strength. When Sam let him go, he slid down the car until his heels hit the ground. His hands trailed down Sam’s neck before falling away.

Inside the car, the dog was still barking. Crowley thumped a fist against the glass.

“Heel.”

He was looking at Sam when he said it. The dog went quiet. Crowley’s face was red, and he looked vaguely shell-shocked. Sam smiled.

“Night, Crowley. Thanks for dinner.”

He stepped back, dragging Crowley’s gaze with him; Crowley had a bemused look on his face, pleased and wry. Sam got into the car and drove off, watching Crowley watch him in the rear view with a surprising amount of satisfaction. He got out his phone at a red light on the way out of town and texted Dean, on my way home, then paused. Added: wasn’t so bad.

EPILOGUE

Dean came out of the bunker as soon as Sam pulled the car up, with a lost and harrowed look like a husband made to wait outside the operating room during a difficult birth. He patted Sam’s jacketed arms, checking for wounds.

“You look”—Dean started talking before finishing his assessment—“good. You look good.”

Sam remembered how dark their thoughts had been before he left. Dean was just glad to see him not visibly bleeding. Sam nodded, no idea how to start, and then the hellhound in the back seat barked and gave them something else to talk about.

Dean was diplomatic enough to wait until after Sam had settled, and the hellhound had been put in one of the bunker’s many unused rooms for the time being, and two glasses of whiskey had been poured, to pry any further.

He said, “I’m gonna take your lack of a limp to mean you don’t need me to take you to the hospital.”

They were sitting across from each other at a table in the library; it was half past three and Sam was already hung over and practically dead on his feet, but he knew he needed to debrief.

“Nope,” Sam said slowly. I need a psychiatrist, he wanted to say, but he wasn’t about to get into that. “No, uh, violence.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “None?”

“I thought you didn’t want details.”

“I didn’t. I don’t.”

Sam stared at him. Dean drank his whiskey. From the flush across his cheeks and the fact that he was just wearing a T-shirt, it wasn’t anywhere near his first glass. Dean cleared his throat and swirled his whiskey, pretending to be casual.

“Did you… have… sex?”

Sam had some options with phrasing: third base, hand stuff, or ‘yes,’ depending on how mature he wanted to be about it, or how detailed. He wasn’t interested in getting detailed.

He said, “Something like that,” and left it there, easily bearing the weight of Dean’s incredulous stare. Sam pretended he didn’t notice it, looking thoughtfully at a sword on the top of a bookshelf. It looked old.

Dean spoke slowly, like he was trying not to.

“I just can’t picture it, is all.”

Sam wondered how hard Dean was trying to picture it. He turned towards him. The blush across Dean’s cheeks muddled into his freckles to make it all look darker and Sam felt something close to what he’d been feeling all night, but forty-five degrees to the left—passion like holding someone underwater, repulsion and desire all at once, family ink, your dick tastes just like your brother’s. The way Crowley’s beard felt against his chin, and his slippery-soft hands. The idea that maybe some seal within Sam had been broken. A hardship withstood and him, emerging out the other side, changed.

Dean looked as bad as Sam felt, his eyes bleary and red. They’d been quiet for too long and they both knew it.

Dean said, “So, what’s he packin’? Are we talking an acorn, or a total hammer? It can’t be in between.”

It came out so flat. Sam shrugged at him.

“Dunno.”

Dean opened his mouth, then shut it. Sighed. Visibly decided not to ask. He pushed his chair back from the table and got to his feet, taking his whiskey with him.

“C’mon, I’ll make you some grub. You must be starving.”

Sam got up and followed him out of the library, even though—“I’m not hungry. But thanks.”

Dean stopped, on the steps into the room with that big lit-up table, and turned around.

“What’d you eat?”

Sam answered before he thought better of it. “Some kind of pasta. Duck.”

“You went out? With him?”

“He cooked,” Sam said.

He’d been hoping to avoid that part. Dean held a home-cooked meal as more valuable than gold, which made it more of a betrayal to eat with Crowley than to fuck him, Sam was pretty sure. It was treason. Dean just stared at him with this hard frown for a moment before heading for the kitchen again.

“I’m making you a fucking burger.”

Sam followed. He watched Dean’s back as he moved, the freckles on the backs of his bare arms, and wondered if this would change things between them, and for how long. He doubted it, after everything.

“Hey,” Sam said, and Dean made a hm? noise as he entered the kitchen. “Would you have watched?”

That stopped Dean dead. Sam couldn’t stop thinking about Crowley’s correct guess right off the bat, that Dean had asked to come, and Sam could have phrased it better, but—

Dean turned around in the middle of the kitchen, face blank with shock.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sam shrugged, feeling stupid. Crackling.

“I dunno. You asked to come, I just— answer the question.”

“No,” Dean said quickly, and went to the fridge. It was full, Sam could see, stocked with groceries. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Dean at a fridge that held more than beer. “You’re a sick fuck, you know that? No. Obviously not.”

That was also flat. Sam put his hip against the table as Dean moved around the kitchen, gawky and weird because he knew he was being watched.

Sam took a leap, his heart thumping hard. Not normal, but honest.

“No?” he prodded.

Dean stopped at the counter, stricken. He sighed hard, rubbed his face and looked anywhere but Sam.

“I mean… if I had to,” Dean said eventually. “To keep you safe, or…”

He trailed off. He was staring forlornly at the pack of ground beef he’d taken out of the fridge, in its shiny plastic-wrapped tray, and he held still for a moment, waiting for Sam to say something back. When Sam didn’t, Dean went back to making burgers, and Sam sat on the edge of the dining table and let him do it.

Why are you like that, Crowley had said, and the truth was that Sam had always been… something. The open bedroom door, the slice of light coming in, the silent TV. He was watching Dean cook him a spite-dinner at three in the morning, but sometimes it felt like he never left that bedroom. He’d always be laying there, wondering if Dean was watching.