Archive of Our Own

Friday brings more rain, but Dean's used to it by now. He parks illegally when he runs into Coffee Messiah on his way to work, pulling the hood of his sweatshirt over his head for the dash into the café.

"You should come by tonight," the barista says. She's cute in the way that Seattle girls are: short maroon-tinted hair, pierced eyebrow, "Toys in Babeland" tank top, snapping dark eyes.

Dean takes his usual red-eye, hands over three dollars. "Yeah?" he says. "What's tonight?"

"Movie night." She drops one quarter, then a second, into his hand, and smiles. "Last Tango in Paris. Ever seen it?"

He can't imagine watching that in public. "Uh, yeah."

"Then I don't have to explain why you might like it." She smiles again, turns to the next customer, but turns back. She has some sort of swirling, symmetrical design tattooed between her shoulder blades, illustrating the path from one to the other. In other times, Dean might have imagined how long it would take him to trace it with his tongue; now he just admires the precision of the work, wonders briefly where she got it done.

"Stop by," she says to Dean. "It's worth seeing again."

He gets back to the truck—no ticket, thank God—and wonders whether he should bang his head on the steering wheel.

Mackenzie always comes by the garage for lunch on Fridays. He has his own place now—he's subletting from and cat-sitting for a friend of hers who got a research gig in Paris through the end of August—so they don't see each other as much. Mackenzie seems to feel that he no longer needs constant supervision—and to be fair, the sides of the Aurora Bridge no longer seem as tempting as they once did—but she still likes to check up on him.

On the rare sunny days, they sit outside, but usually they're in the office. The rain hasn't let up since this morning, so they're inside today.

Kenzie takes out what appear to be a pair of wraps, followed by an RC cola for each of them. Dean inspects the wrap Kenzie hands him. Its contents have a suspiciously soylike cast to them. "What the hell is this?"

"Food. Provided by me at no cost to you. Shut up and eat, you ingrate."

Ritual completed, they do.

He tells her about the barista at Coffee Messiah this morning. "Wait," says Mackenzie. "I think I know who you're talking about. Brunette with a dark red wash on her hair? Tattoo on her back?"

"Between her shoulder blades."

Kenzie's eyes widen. "Oh, shit, Beano"—it doesn't even bother Dean anymore that she calls him that—"she's hot." Kenzie starts laughing. "For real? Last Tango in Paris? Butt-buttering and all?"

Dean mumbles something.

"So?" Mackenzie says through a mouthful of tofu and whatever variety of sprouts she decided they should eat today. "You gonna do it? Because, man, I'd hit that, and you know I'm not usually into girls."

"I can't believe you just said 'I'd hit that.'"

"What? I would!"

Dean shakes his head and eats some soy protein wrapped in spinach tortilla. When he looks back up at Kenzie, her laughter is gone, and her eyes are sympathetic. "Baby, you have to get up off the ground sometime."

"I'm not much of a catch right now, Ken."

"I doubt this girl is looking for a long-term thing. It'd be something fun. A summer fling before you head off for stardom in the world of mathematics."

"It's like that's all just been shut off," he admits. "I'm not opposed to something fun in the short-term, theoretically. But I could probably go take a vow of celibacy, and I wouldn't feel like I was missing much."

Mackenzie chews on one side of her lower lip, then the other; then she bites her thumbnail. "Dean, I don't mean to bring up the past or get TMI here, but I don't remember that...um, being an issue for you. Ever. At all."

Dean feels himself turning red, but he doesn't disagree. It's true.

"I just want you to feel better, Dean," Mackenzie says quietly. "If Hot Barista Girl isn't going to do it for you, then don't. I just want you to have some fun. To not be sad."

"I'm doing a lot better than I was," Dean says. He moves his food from his lap onto the table and puts his arm around her. Mackenzie's hair is blue this week, and ironed stick-straight; by nature, though, it's a mass of dark curls that he used to love to bury his hands in. She's close to his height, and that's in sneakers rather than the platform heels she wears onstage. She has smelled the same the entire time he's known her: Johnson's Baby Shampoo and the perfume she always wears. He can't remember the name of it, but it comes in a blue bottle with flowers on it. He can still picture it sitting on her dresser in her dorm room at Wellesley.

"I know," Mackenzie says, "but I still worry."

"You're such a mother hen," Dean tells her, smiling. "You may have blue hair and piercings in places that make my balls shrink to contemplate, but that doesn't disguise the fact that you just want to feed everybody."

"Look, I was raised Jewish on Long Island, OK? It's not the kind of upbringing you can just shake off. If I feed the world potato pancakes—or, you know, veggie/seitan wraps—everyone will be happier. There would be no wars if everybody would just sit down and eat some latkes and listen to Sleater-Kinney."

Mackenzie Markowitz: indie icon, maker of latkes, craftswoman of foreign policy.

They sit like that for a while, silent and companionable, until Dean's lunch hour is over.

"What've you got going on this afternoon?" she asks as he walks her out.

"Alternator. Couple of carburetors and probably a timing belt. You?"

"I've got to finish that column for Bust and email it in. Hey, so if you're not going to get your Brando on with Barista Girl, you should come over tonight. I'll cook a dead animal in your honor."

"You don't have to—"

"Enh, I don't have much excuse to char up some meat otherwise. Seven o'clock?"

Dean gets off at five. He scrubs his hands with Goop, then washes them with soap, then coats them with the Neutrogena stuff that all the guys in his garage in Lawrence used to use. Nothing sissy about it, they'd agreed: The unscented kind doesn't smell girly, and if your woman wants your hands without cracks in them, well, men sacrifice for the noble cause of getting laid.

Dean, honestly, just prefers his skin uncracked.

The rain has tapered off, but it's still misty. Dean's starting to wonder whether Seattle shares the sun with the rest of the planet, or whether the city is actually in its own separate universe that does not include a solar system. It's not even that it rains so much here—the Southeast, he's read, has a higher annual rainfall than Washington does—but it's just gray. Really gray. A lot.

Somebody is standing next to his truck.

At first he thinks it's Mackenzie, having finished her column early, but this person is even taller than she is. With shorter hair. Which isn't blue. Broader shoulders. Enormous backpack. Male.

Sam.

They haven't spoken since January. Dean abandoned his Boston cell phone, going from 617 to 206. The only people who have the new number are Mackenzie, Ash, and the few friends he's made out here. There have been a couple of emails from Sam; they're still sitting in his inbox, tantalizingly boldfaced, unread. Periodically, Dean highlights them onscreen and then navigates away. If he reads them, he'll end up responding, and he knows what he'll say: I miss you. I love you. Yes. Whatever you're asking, yes. And that's not helpful when he and Sam are supposed to get over each other.

"I brought coffee," Sam says, and hands Dean a cup from Café Solstice. Not hello, not how are you, not fuck you for not answering my emails. Coffee.

Dean takes it, smells it. Coffee, black, with sugar. The cardboard cup is warm in his hands.

There are a million things he could say, but what comes out is, "How did you get here?"

"I flew."

Dean shudders. He hates flying, always has. Has managed to do it only a few times in his life.

"Thanks for the coffee," Dean says.

"You're welcome." Pause. Silence. "Can we, like, get in your truck? Out of the rain?"

"Oh. Uh, sure. This is barely rain, by local standards."

Dean unlocks the truck. He and Sam get in. Dean's still holding the coffee. He thinks he's forgotten how to drive.

"Do you want me to take that?" Sam asks with just a trace of amusement in his voice.

"Um. Yeah. Thanks." He hands the cup to Sam, but still doesn't start the truck. He looks over at Sam. "What are you doing here? Why aren't you in school? Does your...your dad know you're here?"

"Graduation was Wednesday," Sam says. "This is the only thing I asked for, for my birthday—my legal birthday, that is—and graduation. To come out here." Sam's expression doesn't change, but Dead sees his hand tighten on the door handle. "To see you face-to-face, so that if you want to tell me to fuck the hell off, you have to do it in person and not just by ignoring my emails. Goddamn it, Dean, I miss you, and I get it if you don't want us to...to be doing what we were before, but having you completely out of my life sucks, man. Things happen and I think, 'I have to tell Dean about that,' except I can't. I can't even call you, because I don't have the damn number. And a few times I broke down and emailed you, which I guess you deleted—"

"No," Dean says. "No, Sam, I didn't. They're still in my inbox. I look at them every time I log in, and I talk myself out of opening them, because...because it wouldn't be good."

"I think I sent the first one in February. That was three months ago."

"Yeah," Dean says.

Sam laughs a little and rests his head on the back of the seat. "Dean. Dean. I don't even know what to say to that." A moment goes by, and then Sam says, "So what are you doing for dinner?"

Dean blinks. Then he remembers Mackenzie's invitation. "Shit, I need to call Mackenzie. I'm supposed to be over there at seven."

Sam shakes his head. "I think you're off the hook." At Dean's no-doubt-perplexed look, Sam adds, "How did you think I found you?"

Dean's been in such shock that the question is only now occurring to him. "How did you find me?"

"Your aunt gave me Mackenzie's address. I got here and tracked her down, and after pacing back and forth for a while, and threatening to kill me if I hurt you, and then pacing some more, and then ruminating that what happened wasn't my fault either, and then threatening my life a few more times anyway, she told me where you worked."

"You talked to Aunt Martha?" He'd emailed his aunt Mackenzie's address and phone number shortly before leaving Ash's—he was at the roadhouse for a couple of weeks, tending bar, breaking up fights, and evading Jo Harvelle's questions—but that's the only contact he's had with his family since he left Lawrence.

"I actually talk to Aunt Martha a lot. I think this conversation might do better with some food, though."

"Um," Dean says, "OK." He starts the truck and starts to pull out of the parking space, then realizes he has no idea where he's going. "Are we going, you know, out? Or are we going to my apartment? Or— I don't even know."

"I'd like to see where you live," Sam says.

They have to stop by the store, since Dean doesn't have a whole lot of food in the house, and he also needs to replenish his stock for Michel and Jacques, Jennifer's fat calico and fatter tabby. It's oddly not-weird, being at the store with Sam—they argue over what to eat (Sam, unsurprisingly, is totally fine with things like spirulina, which Dean finds anathema to any decent diet), and finally Sam starts pulling down items such as flour, eggs, and maple syrup.

Dean blinks.

"Breakfast for dinner," says Sam. "Unless you can think of something different."

They end up having pancakes. Which is just fine with Dean.

They sit at the table in his small living room, Michel in Sam's lap and Jacques in Dean's. There's silence for several minutes after they sit down, until Dean finally says, "Happy graduation."

"Thanks. It wasn't really a big thing. I more or less checked out of there in January."

Dean winces, but doesn't respond to that directly. "Where are you going to college?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"Don't you have to have your deposit in by now?"

"Yeah. But the decision isn't final until I actually show up." Sam glances around, deliberately changes the subject. "This is a nice place. How'd you end up with it? And with two cats with French names?"

"It's not mine," Dean says. "It's Mackenzie's friend Jennifer's apartment—and cats. Who are named after Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. She's in France until the end of August, so I'm subletting until then."

"Dr. Bissel said you decided on Stanford."

Rockshire's headmaster is gray-haired and stern, the scion of a long line of New England shipping magnates, and Dean considers it a testament to how awful he must have looked and sounded in early January that, rather than manneredly tearing Dean a new asshole as is Dr. Bissel's wont, the man was nothing but kind and sympathetic when Dean resigned due to "family issues." Dr. Bissel has kept infrequent but regular contact, and Dean did let him know when he accepted Stanford's offer rather than MIT's, Harvard's, or Princeton's. Dean told Dr. Bissel that it was because Stanford's specialties are more in line with what he wants to do, but that's actually not true: Harvard and Princeton have the stronger number-theory faculty, but he wants to be as far from Massachusetts as possible, and there's no way he's living in New Jersey for seven years, even if Springsteen is from there. The truth is that Stanford is deliciously far from anywhere he's ever lived, and it never gets cold there.

"Yeah," Dean says.

"MIT must have been pissed."

The person who had, in fact, torn Dean a new asshole was his undergraduate advisor. "Dr. Kim kind of hates me right now."

"But Stanford's offer was better?" Sam says.

They'd been about the same, allowing for the higher cost of living in Palo Alto. Dean shrugs. "Tuition, assistantship, living stipend. I'm probably just going to live in their graduate housing—it's not the most beautiful ever, and I'll have a roommate, but I figure one crazy hacker is better than the four I lived with in Boston."

"Aunt Martha didn't know," Sam says. "Where you were going, I mean. Until I told her."

"Yeah," says Dean.

"So you just cut off everything with them?"

Dean shrugs again.

"That's not an answer," Sam says. "Come on, Dean. You cut ties with your whole family?"

"This surprises you?"

"Since they're decent people and they raised you? Yeah, it surprises me. It's not like you. You were always so close to them."

"I thought I was," Dean says, and it comes out softer than he intends.

"Aunt Martha," Sam says after a few moments go by, "I get why she did that. Why they did that. I don't one-hundred-percent agree with it, but I understand it. I can forgive her for that. John too."

"I can't," Dean says.

"Even if they were doing it to try to keep us safe?"

Dean doesn't answer.

"What I can't forgive," Sam continues, "is the way John treated you. Like you were supposed to be his little soldier or something—like you were supposed to give up your life for whatever crusade he's on. Like you were supposed to want to do that. He lost one son, but he still had another one, and that was you, and you're amazing, and John acts like you're a disappointment, and there's no Goddamn excuse for that."

Dean doesn't answer that, either—can't answer that, doesn't know how—and Sam gets up to take their plates into the kitchen. His hand makes a gentle, brief weight on Dean's shoulder, but the touch, light as it is, seems to linger, branding the shape of Sam's hand through Dean's shirt and onto his skin.

"So," Sam says from the sink, "where's good to get ice cream around here?"

This, Dean can do; this is familiar. "The Mix isn't far. That's good."

"Mix," says Sam. "Does that mean they mix stuff into the ice cream?"

"Yeah, all kinds of things." More familiar ground; this is safe; this is something Dean knows. "I usually get chocolate ice cream with Heath Bar."

"I totally need some of that. Just let me wash these dishes first."

"I'll dry," says Dean.

Dean gets what he always does; Sam orders a vaguely horrifying concoction of hazelnut fudge ice cream, peanut butter chips, and butterscotch and marshmallow sauces. Dean can't understand how Sam can eat it, but Sam looks to have achieved heights of ecstasy previously available only to mystics in towers.

They're walking back to the truck, stuffed to the gills and high on sugar, when something occurs to Dean. "Where are you staying?"

"Some hotel downtown. The Pan-Pacific, maybe? Debbie found it; I have it written down somewhere. I can just take a cab, but my backpack's at your place."

"Stay with me," Dean says. It's out before he can put a harness on his mouth. "It's not a...thing. But there's no reason to pay for a hotel. Or for your dad to pay for a hotel. I'll take the couch; you can have the bed. The cats will each have somebody to sleep on. Oh my God, kill me before I keep talking."

"Dean," Sam says, "can I please hug you?"

This, mercifully, requires only one word, not even a full sentence, for answer: "Yes."

It's been nearly five months since Dean has touched Sam, but as far as his body is concerned, it might as well have been yesterday: Sam feels the same, smells the same, holds Dean the same way, one arm around his shoulders with his other hand cupping the back of Dean's head. Dean loses track of how long they stand together in the growing dark, pedestrian traffic redirecting itself around them, but he keeps his face pressed against Sam's shoulder, turned slightly away from Sam's own, because what he wants to do is move his head, just a little, and kiss that familiar, beloved mouth, and that's not what's supposed to happen, because he and Sam are supposed to be getting over each other, except that Sam just threw a wrench in the wheel of that entire process, but Dean can't see anything too terribly wrong (in the grand escalating scheme of wrong that has been going on since last October) with standing here on the sidewalk in the U-District and breathing Sam in. Nothing has to happen; people can hug; friends hug; it doesn't necessarily mean anything.

"Hi," Sam whispers.

"Hi," Dean whispers back, and knows, irrevocably, that he's never getting over Sam.

The rest of the evening could be like any other visit between a person and his houseguest. They watch Grosse Point Blank—appallingly, Sam has never seen it—and Dean puts clean sheets on the bed for Sam and makes up the couch for himself. Sam goes to take a shower, and Dean tucks the sheet around himself and tries to read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (he's almost all the way through the series, which Mackenzie and Jennifer claimed he was a philistine for not having read) and not remember being in the shower with Sam in his small bathroom at Rockshire, or lying back against Sam in that giant bathtub in Chicago, dozing while Sam kissed and touched and washed him.

Dean turns off the light and closes his eyes while the water's still running, and he pretends to be asleep when he hears the door to the bathroom open and Sam walk through it.

It's maybe not surprising that he has nightmares about the fire.

He's small, so small, head barely clearing the countertops, and the baby in his arms is heavy, squirming and crying with fear. Dean wants to cry but he can't, has to get Sammy out first—but he can't run fast enough, legs too short, baby too heavy, flames rising too fast, and now they're in the kitchen, surrounded by fire, and the door is close but the flames are closer, and upstairs his father is screaming his mother's name—

"Dean. Dean! Wake up!"

Sam—this Sam, nowhere near a baby anymore—is crouching by the sofa, fingers gentle but insistent on Dean's arm, face tight with concern. He sees that Dean is awake, and his hand moves to stroke Dean's hair, light, reassuring. "It's alright," he says. "Just a dream."

Dean takes a breath, lets it out, tries to steady his quickened heartbeat. "Yeah. Thanks for waking me up."

"You OK? Do you want me to make you some tea or something?"

"I'm fine. I should be able to get back to sleep. Go back to bed."

"You sure? That was— I mean, you woke me up and I was in the other room."

"I'm sure, Sam."

"OK. If you really think so." Sam pulls his hand away, gets to his feet, turns off the light and goes back into the bedroom.

Dean closes his eyes and, to his great surprise, does in fact fall back asleep.

"Dean! Dean! Damn it, wake up."

Second verse, same as the first. Dean opens his eyes.

The concern is still there, but there's a wryness, too, when Sam asks, "So, what kind of tea do you want?"

"Sam, go back to bed."

"Just so you can wake me up again?" He goes into the small kitchen, and Dean hears him opening a cabinet. "Did you rent this place from a lesbian?"

"The cats named after French philosophers didn't give that one away?"

"That and the multiple varieties of herbal tea. Peppermint, rooibos, vanilla rooibos, peach rooibos, St. John's Wort, honeybush (dude, that sounds dirty), peach honeybush (dude, that sounds really dirty), lemon ginger, blackcurrant, linden flower, or—oh, here we go—chamomile?"

"Isn't there any black tea in there?"

"Like I'm giving you anything with caffeine in it. Moron. Chamomile it is."

In a few minutes, Sam comes back bearing a steaming cup of something that smells like lawn clippings. He nudges Dean and says, "Sit up," then hands him the steeped lawn clippings and makes himself comfortable on the other end of the couch. "I'm just gonna sit here and read Harry Potter while you drink that. It's a pretty long book, so I can stay for as long as it'll take you to complain about drinking lesbian tea."

Dean gives Sam a dirty look, by which Sam appears entirely unfazed. Dean blows on the tea and takes a sip. Sam put enough honey in it that it doesn't taste completely like lawn clippings. Dean drinks it slowly. Sam, uncharacteristically, refrains from further commentary.

When he's done, Dean looks over to see that Sam has fallen asleep with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in his lap. He should have known that Sam would only shut up due to being asleep. Dean turns off the light and re-forms his nest on his end of the couch.

He sleeps dreamlessly.

Dean wakes up to another rainy gray morning typical of Seattle. The cats are sleeping loaves on the back of the sofa. Sam is in his arms.

Dean doesn't know when that happened. He stayed on his end of the couch. Sam, however, did not, and now Dean's lying on his back with nearly two hundred pounds of Sam curled against his chest. This sofa is clearly not intended to hold two of them—it barely holds Dean on his own—but the expression on Sam's face is nothing but sleeping contentment. And Dean's hands, traitors that they are, have settled in Sam's hair and on his back like they have every right in the world to be there.

Friends, Dean is pretty sure, don't do this.

Dean shifts a little, and Sam wakes up. "Time's it?"

"Early. About six thirty."

"Oh." Sam raises his head, looks around. He tries to stretch his legs, which Dean could have told him would be a losing battle. "'S crowded. I'ma go back to bed."

Dean drops his arms to let Sam go. Ruthlessly, he quashes any desire to be on this admittedly inadequate couch with Sam—whom, Dean reminds himself yet again, he's supposed to be getting over. Have gotten over. Whatever.

"You should go with me," Sam adds.

Dean knows what he should say. Knows what he wants to say. Settles for saying nothing.

"'S not a sex thing," Sam says. "Couch is small. And I sleep better with you there."

Dean's yet-again-traitorous hands want to push their way through Sam's hair, want to pull his head down to kiss him. They're in the perfect position, lying close, legs tangled together—it seems more unnatural not to do it, to veer away from the obvious trajectory.

Dean keeps his hands where they are, but he says, "Yeah, me too," and follows Sam into the bedroom, trailed by Michel and Jacques.

It's a queen-sized bed, plenty of space for both of them. None of the lamps are on, but there's enough light from outside that Dean can't pretend not to meet Sam's eyes when they lie down. They lie on their sides, facing each other, and when Sam reaches a tentative hand across the space between them, Dean reaches, too, lacing their fingers together.

Friends don't do this, either.

"What are we doing?" Dean asks.

"Going to asleep," Sam says.

Dean looks deliberately at their joined hands.

"Going to sleep together," Sam amends.

"And that statement clarifies so much."

"Do you really want to process at whatever butt-early hour this is?"

"No," Dean admits.

"Then go to sleep," Sam says, "and we can talk in the morning."

"It is morning."

"We can talk later," Sam corrects himself, rolling his eyes. "Go to sleep."

Dean does.

He wakes up three hours later, lying on his belly, with Sam pressed up against his side, arm across his back. Dean extricates himself to go take a shower, and manfully resists the urge to kiss Sam's hand, forehead, or hair, even when Sam makes a sleepy noise and burrows into the warmth left by Dean's body. Dean gets in the shower and doesn't know whether to laugh, cry, or jerk off. He settles for washing his hair.

Sam's still in bed when Dean gets out, but he wakes up when Dean opens a drawer to try to find a clean pair of jeans. "Wear the patched ones," Sam says lazily. "I like those."

Dean complies—for the mere reason, he tells himself, that they happen to be clean—and finds a long-sleeved button-down, also clean, then turns to go back into the bathroom to dress.

"You're not going to let me watch you put them on?" Sam says in that same voice.

"Sam!"

Dean forgot how Sam gets when he's like this: warm, indolent, loose. Practically no filter from his brain to his mouth.

Sam makes a show of turning onto his stomach, putting the pillow over his head. "I won't watch. Get dressed."

Dean does.

While Sam's dressing—a ritual that involves not-insubstantial amounts of time dedicated to washing his face and arranging his hair—Dean feeds the cats and makes breakfast.

"Bacon," Sam says, emerging from the bathroom, having spent a good twenty minutes ensuring that his hair looks appropriately and effortlessly tousled. "My kingdom for bacon."

"It's almost ready. Hold your horses, Prince Charles. Or should that be Queen Elizabeth, given how much time you just spent on your hair?"

"Bite me. Where's my bacon?"

Dean puts a waffle in front of him, and Sam shuts up.

Dean brings over the rest of breakfast and sits down. "You never answered my question about college," he says once he has applied sufficient amounts of butter and syrup to his waffle and sugar to his coffee.

"I said I hadn't made up my mind," Sam answers, suddenly inordinately interested in his own waffle.

"Yeah, but what the hell does that mean? Are you thinking of taking a year off?"

"No, I'm going. It's just..." He pauses and looks up at Dean. "I talked my dad into putting in deposits at two places. At Harvard and Stanford."

"Can you even do that?"

"The colleges don't cross-check. I think they kind of assume that if you're plunking down that much cash, you're going."

"But you'll be forfeiting one."

"Fuck it," Sam says, and puts down his fork. "I came this far; I might as well just lay it all out. Where I go depends on you. If you want me three thousand miles away—if you don't want to see me, or if you just think it would be better—then I'll go to Harvard. It's not like that's a big sacrifice of my academic career. But I've got a space reserved at Stanford, too, and I have to tell you, Dean, that's where I'd really rather go. And it has nothing to do with the schools themselves and everything to do with you. I know you said that we needed to get over each other, but I've spent the past five months trying, and it's worked pretty much not at all. I mean, I talk to Aunt Martha now, and my dad and I have kind of started to mend fences, but there's still a giant hole in my life where you're supposed to be. But if you don't feel the same way, or if you want to keep acting like you don't feel the same way, then tell me."

"Sam," Dean says, helpless.

Sam's face softens. "If you need a little while to think about it, I get that. I mean, I know I just dropped this on you out of the blue. I can go stay at the hotel, or, hell, I can go back to Connecticut. I know it's a big thing to hear."

For a moment the apartment is utterly silent. The cats are motionless, watchful; even the traffic outside on Broadway might as well have ceased, as though the world has paused to await the answer.

"I don't need to think about it," Dean says. "Stanford. Stanford, Stanford, Stanford. Stanford again and Stanford some more and Stanford one more time."

There's another silence, like the shock of stillness after an explosion.

"Will you please come over here?" Sam says. The smile on his face is breathtakingly bright, joyful hope as brilliant as a new sun.

"Yes," Dean says, and goes. Sam meets him halfway. Their kiss tastes like maple syrup and tears and love.