Author: Minervacat
Fandom: Supernatural (crossover)
Pairing: Dean/Ray Kowalski, Dean/Lilah Morgan, Dean/Chloe Sullivan, Dean/John Sheppard, Dean/Faith
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Five people Dean Winchester fucked in, on, or near the Impala, and five conversations he had with his little brother.

First job Dean went on, by himself, after Sam left, was in Chicago. Dirty warehouse on the South Side, south of just about everything except the docks and the factories, and when he got there, 4 PM on a Tuesday, the place was already swarming with cops. He fooled enough people to get enough of a look to know it was somebody making human sacrifices - for a purpose, not just for fun - before a detective with hair that stuck up all over his head looked him up and down and said, "You ain't CPD and you ain't a reporter, get the hell out of here."

Then the guy had scrubbed a hand over his face like Sammy always did when he was tired, and said, "Shit, what the hell do I care? You don't look like a crazy person who leaves guts all over the floor when they're done hacking up a guy, let's just pretend you're just real curious about murder scenes and call it good." He'd looked Dean up and down, turned around and shouted at somebody further inside, "Dewey, tell Welsh I'm gone for the day, leave the file on my desk, okay?"

He'd stuck a hand out and said, "Ray Kowalski, Chicago PD."

Dean was so surprised that he hadn't gotten tossed out on his ass, tossed in jail without bail, or punched in the face that he forgot to give the guy a fake name. "Dean Winchester," he said. "I think you got somebody making sacrifices to a demon in there."

"Shit," Kowalski said. "Just my fucking luck, I thought Fraser goes back to Canada, the crazy voodoo shit stops and I just get some nice normal murders. You an expert on demon sacrifices?"

"Yeah," Dean said. "I kind of am."

Kowalski said, "Want to get a beer?"

Dean said, "Yeah, I kind of do."

A bottle of tequila between them later, Kowalski had Dean backed up against the Impala, handle on the passenger side door digging into the small of Dean's back and he couldn't even be bothered to care, because Kowalski had shoved Dean up against the car, kissed him hard, and dropped down on his knees. He undid the buttons on Dean's jeans with a practiced hand, and the Chicago night air was cold on Dean's dick for half a second, enough to send a shiver up Dean's spine, before Kowalski's mouth was all over him, hot and wet. "Fuck," Dean groaned, "don't fucking stop."

Kowalski kept Dean's hips pinned against the door with one hand, working the base of Dean's cock with the other, and all it took was a couple of minutes of clever tongue and Dean was shuddering with the force of his orgasm, hands fisting in Kowalski's spiky hair, whatever product he used crunching underneath Dean's fingers.

Kowalski got up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and leaned against the car next to Dean. Dean was still feeling boneless, lazy with the haze of a good blowjob still clouding his head up, but he knew enough about back-alley hookups to wave a hand and say, "You want me to?"

"Nah," Kowalski said, and that was that. Then, "Look, if it is somebody making sacrifices, can you do something about it?"

Dean almost wasn't sure what he was talking about, but right, warehouse, human guts, the whole reason he was up here to begin. "Yeah," he said. "But I work alone. Give me a night down there clear of anybody from your department, I'll give you the asshole who's going this. No more demons on the South Side of Chicago, forever and ever, amen."

"Buddy," Kowalski said, "the South Side of Chicago's got more demons than you could even name, expert or not." He turned his face away from Dean when he said it, but Dean spent 18 years reading Sammy's guarded expressions and he knew a man with a lot of secrets when he saw one.

"I'll take care of this one," Dean said.

"You better," Kowalski said. "My Lieu will have my head if I let you waltz in there and don't come up with a suspect." He turned on his heel and ambled back down the alley, towards the black GTO Dean knew was hidden in the shadows at the end; a car that Dean would have traded Sammy for once upon a time, mint fucking condition. Kowalski waved a hand at Dean back over his shoulder and said, "Send me a fucking postcard when you get this guy, so's I can close the file, all right?"

Dean shook his head, got back in the car and drove down to the warehouse. Easy work, stupid fucking college kids messing with shit they didn't understand, and he ran the demon off with a standard exorcism and half a gallon of holy water. Left the kids tied up out front of the place, a note taped to the rope that said, "For Detective Ray Kowalski, CPD."

He saw Ray on the national news that night, answering questions about the case and when some nosy reporter asked, "So who did leave the perpetrators apprehended for you?" Kowalski snorted and looked straight at the camera. "A superhero," he said. "One of those ones on TV like Buffy What's-Her-Name."

Dean snorted a little, too, and after he turned off the TV and the lights and double-checked all the shitty locks in the shitty motel room in East St. Louis, he lay in the dark and, for the first time since Sammy left, didn't think about his little brother. He slid a hand into his boxers, palmed his dick and thought about Detective Ray Kowalski, CPD.

Sam was 16, awkward and all knees and elbows and hair in his eyes, when he brought his first girlfriend home. They were living in Tucumcari, New Mexico, and Dad spent most of his free time in the desert chasing down haints, which meant it was Dean's job to give Sammy a hell of a hard time about girls.

Her name was Jenna or Jenny or something like that, and all Dean remembers about her is that she had freckles on the backs of her arms and she smiled up at Sam like the sun rose and shone out of his ass. 16 was the year that Sam shot up four inches in five months and tried to eat them out of house and home, and he spent a lot of time being completely unaware of doorframes and breakable objects teetering on the edges of things, at least until he'd cracked his head on a particularly low one or sent something made of glass shattering to the floor, respectively.

The first time Sam brought Jamie home, Dean was lying on the couch, out of view from the kitchen, watching SportsCenter with the sound muted, and the only reason he knew Sam was home from school was the resounding crash of yet another juice glass taking a flying leap from the counter to the linoleum. Dean opened his mouth to say, "Goddamnit, Sammy, is there anything left in the kitchen to actually drink from besides the carton?" but he stopped with his mouth open when Sam said something first.

Sam gave up apologizing for breaking things six weeks ago, when the last cereal bowl they had exploded in a mess of Lucky Charms and milk all over the floor, but he was standing in the kitchen, saying to someone who wasn't Dean, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, just, just, stand there for a minute while I clean this up, okay?"

And then there was a distinctly feminine giggle, so Dean levered himself up off the couch (like he needed to watch the highlights of the Cowboys getting destroyed for the fourth time today; you'd think SportsCenter could at least get some new highlights while Dean was stuck in a shitty apartment waiting for his little brother to get home from school) and peered carefully through the doorway into the kitchen. Sam was mopping up a puddle of Coke from the floor, and an honest-to-God girl was sitting at the table, laughing down at him, schoolbooks piled on the table in front of her.

Dad had spent two years taking the piss out of Dean every time he picked up some girl in a bar, and Dean didn't even bring most of those girls back to the apartment, just banged them in the backseat of the Impala, parked out in front of shitty bars. Sammy actually brought a girl home, Dean wasn't going to miss out on that chance.

He crept into the bedroom - not that Sam or the girl noticed, Dean could have been a herd of stampeding elephants for all they had eyes for anything but each other. When the sounds of glass clinking in a dustpan had subsided, he strolled out of the bedroom and straight through the kitchen. Sam looked up and opened his mouth, but before he could get anything out, Dean slapped a condom down onto the table in front of him.

Sam turned six shades of red. The girl covered her mouth with a hand and giggled. Dean said, "Have fun, kids. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

Sam at 16 was just starting to want something different than their life, and that was also the year Dean was the pissiest about being grounded from most of the hunting to stay home and watch Sam. Sammy and Dad wouldn't start fighting until the next year, when Sam got his SAT scores back and started talking about fucking college, but Sam started fighting with Dean the year before that.

Jackie was a relief, because Sam didn't make the mistake of bringing her back to the apartment more than that first time, and she kept Sam out of Dean's hair for long hours at a time. It always ended the same way, though, because Sam was trying to stop being a hunter that year but at the same time, he wasn't stupid enough to walk home in the dark without a shotgun and a bottle of holy water. Since the schools tended to get a little upset when Sam brought a shotgun to school, it meant phone calls to Dean, it meant Dean had to get up off the couch and into the Impala and go retrieve Sam from wherever he was.

Sam at 16 wasn't speaking to much of anybody, let alone his brother or his father, and Dean was tired of fighting and tired of sitting around watching Sam try to be normal, so mostly he let everything just go by. But it was a Thursday and it was raining and Sam was at some friend's house way the hell over on the other side of town, and by the time Sam, soaked to the skin just from running between the house and the front seat of the car, slid into the seat beside Dean and started dripping puddles on the floor, Dean was just annoyed enough to needle him a little more.

"How's Janice?" Dean asked.

"Jenna," Sam mumbled.

"Whatever," Dean said. And then, as brightly as he could manage with a straight face, "So, you fucked her yet?"

Sam said, all scandalized like Dean hadn't been saying inappropriate things since Sam was old enough to understand them (saying them before that would have just been a waste), "God, Dean, you are such an asshole."

"I guess that's a no, huh?" Dean said. "How about boob? You've at least touched boob, right?"

"Fuck you, Dean," Sam said, and slid further against the door.

"Jeez, you're no fun at all," Dean said. "Send me a postcard when you finally get some, why don't you?"

Two years later, Dean wasn't actually speaking to Sammy when the postcard arrived, care of General Delivery in Gulfport, Mississippi, via post offices in El Paso and Tucumcari. It had a Palo Alto postmark, and a picture of a flawless green campus sprawl on the front. The back said, "Finally got some."

If Dean hadn't been so pissed at Sammy for leaving them, he would have laughed.

Instead he folded the postcard in half, shoved it inside his wallet and when Dad asked who it was from, Dean said, "Just some girl I'd almost forgotten about."

And that was that.

Before he'd gone to Palo Alto to find Sammy, Dean had swung through L.A. to look up a guy Dad had worked with a couple of years back, Wesley Somebody-Or-Other. Turned out the guy was dead, but an associate of an associate of somebody who'd known him pointed Dean to a lady lawyer in town, said she might be able to help Dean out. Dean paid fifteen bucks to have somebody else park the Impala - fuck, he hated L.A. - and shoved open the doors to the lobby of Wolfram & Hart, LLC.

He'd heard stories about these guys, the kind of stories that Caleb and the rest of Dad's buddies passed around, that Wolfram & Hart had been the center of anything evil that ever went down in Southern California, but that was before their building had burned down or exploded or something like that, a couple of years ago.

He hadn't heard anything since, so maybe they were playing the straight and narrow now. From what Dad had told him, this Wesley guy had been one of the good guys, so why a lawyer from an evil firm would know anything about him was a mystery to Dean. Then again, he didn't ask a lot of questions, so he didn't have a lot of answers, either.

The lawyer was tall, long legs and Dean was sure that if he ran his hands up under her skirt she'd be wearing stockings that hooked to garters. When she came around her desk, shook his hand and drawled, "Mr. Winchester, I presume," Dean was pretty sure she was also the kind of girl who wasn't wearing anything at all underneath that skirt. "Lilah Morgan," she said. "What can I do for you?"

"I was looking for a guy," Dean said. "Wesley. Guy at a karaoke joint told me you could tell me what happened to him."

"He lost the eternal battle," she said blithely, but her eyes flashed with some emotion Dean couldn't read, and then turned predatory. "You're a very pretty boy."

He fucked her in the back seat of the Impala, retrieved from the overpriced valets, parked behind her apartment building. At least, he assumed it was her apartment building - she didn't ask him up and he didn't offer to go. She laughed, low, a little dirty, a little wicked, when he ran his hands up her thighs and answered his own theories; garters, yes, panties, no.

When the scarf she hadn't taken off fell away from her neck, Dean saw a jagged red scar all the way across her neck. It wasn't fresh, but it wasn't a long way toward healed, either. Dean had stared for a minute, and Lilah said, "Bad ex boyfriend" before she wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and kissed him again, leaving no room for him to ask questions at all.

She let Dean shove her skirt up to her waist and slide his hands inside her shirt. When he ran his thumbs across her nipples, she grabbed his hips and yanked him down against her. It was the best kind of anonymous sex Dean had ever had, even if he actually knew her name, all teeth and nails and sweat. Lilah writhed underneath him, clawing at his back and shoving up with every thrust he made, and when he came, face pressed against her neck, she bit his shoulder hard enough to draw blood. Not that he realized it then, lust-drunk and pliant, but when he stripped his shirt off later that night, there was a crescent of teeth scabbing into his skin.

Afterwards, when they'd straightened clothing and Lilah had smoked a cigarette, smoke wreathing up around her head in the halo of a streetlight, she'd climbed out of the car, high heels swinging from one finger and leaned back in the driver's side window. She slid against Dean's cheek and pulled him in for a kiss, biting his lip before she pulled back.

"Hope you find what you're looking for, kid," she said, and then she turned her back and sauntered away, fading into the shadows and the rising fog like she was a ghost.

Dean watched the alley for half an hour, but she was gone like she'd never been there, and when he climbed back into the car and headed up the coast, he was thinking about Sam's disappearing act and not pretty lady lawyers at all.

When Dean was 16, he didn't duck or cover when Dad told him to, flushing out a nest of creatures with high-powered dynamite. He ended up mostly deaf in both ears for a couple of months, and Sam, 12 and bratty, entertained himself by torturing Dean, moving his mouth indistinctly but making no sounds, so Dean ending up pounding on the kitchen table and saying, "What? What?" in increasing frustration.

That's when he started listening to Metallica, too, deaf and with a fresh driver's license (legal, state of California, which is where they were when Dean turned 16) and his own set of keys to the Impala in his pocket. If he turned the heavy metal station on the radio up as loud as it would go, he could feel the music rumbling through the seats, even if he could barely hear it over the hum in his ears.

He got a lot out of spending three months almost deaf, learned to read lips and that came in handy down the road for more than a couple of reasons, but the best thing he got out of it was Metallica, because when he finally could hear again, it turned out that the music was even better than it felt.

Plus it made Sam crazy. When he slid in the front seat of the Impala the night Dean showed up to get him, he wrinkled up his nose and said, "You're still listening to this?"

Dean said, "Yeah, so fucking what, Sammy? You got a problem with it?"

"It's got no tune," Sam said.

"So you're a hipster now, huh?" Dean said. "Death Cabs for whoever the fuck, that it?"

"I didn't like Metallica when I was 13, Dean," Sam said. "I don't like it now."

Dean said, "Whatever." Then he turned the radio up louder, just to watch Sam screw up his face in disgust.

Even while Sam was gone, Dean turned the music up louder than was comfortable whenever he drove by himself. There were a lot of empty roads in the country, and a lot of time spent in a car without anybody else. Turn the music up, and he couldn't hear the silence of the empty seat beside him.

Most of the time, anyway.

The engine in the Impala quit fifteen miles from anywhere on a back road in Kansas, just gave right out in the dark. Dean rolled the car to the shoulder and dropped his head down onto the steering wheel, because a dead car on an empty stretch of road was what he'd spent his entire life avoiding - bad things happen on empty roads, boys, Dad used to say, so unless you're working, try not to get caught on one. He was weighing the options - spend the night in the car and hope for the best, or hike back to the last gas station he saw and pray they were still open - when somebody (something) rapped on the window of the passenger side, startling Dean into crashing his head against the steering wheel.

It was a pretty little blonde girl, and Dean was cautious enough to think that she was an apparition until he saw the car parked in front of him, lights on but engine not rumbling. He stared at her for a couple of seconds, and she pantomimed rolling the window down. Dean waved a hand at her - yeah, all right, hold on - and slid the gun jammed underneath the seat out onto the floor.

Then he leaned over and rolled the window down, and the girl leaned in breathlessly. "Hi," she said. "I'm Chloe, and I hope you're not a rapist or a murderer, because my car is dead and my cell phone is dead, and I just really want somebody to sit with until it gets light."

Dean scowled. "How do I know you're not a crazy person?"

"Trust me," the girl said, and then she reached through the window, unlocked the door and slid into his passenger seat. She rolled the window back up, popped the lock down and settled back against the door. "So. A lot of weird shit happens around here, you can't be too careful. Plus, if you try anything, I've got mace." She grinned at him, and Dean just stared.

"Weird shit?" Dean said. "Try me. It can't be any weirder than the stuff I've seen."

"Meteor rocks causing super powers," the girl said. "And you didn't tell me your name."

"Wendigos, werewolves and succubi," Dean said. "There's no such thing as superpowers."

"Don't knock it 'til you've seen it," Chloe said. "I've seen stuff even horror movies couldn't make up. What's your name?"

"Dean."

"Mind if I sit here until the sun comes up, Dean?" Chloe said.

"Sure," Dean said. "Why the hell not? At least two of the strange women I've met on the side of the road have turned out to not be evil, maybe I'll go for three."

"Oh," Chloe said. "I'm not evil. I'm a reporter. I'm covering a story on voter fraud in Metropolis right now. Only evil in that is the people tampering with votes, you know?"

She was funny. She propped her feet up on the dashboard like Sam used to and told Dean stories that had him halfway to hysterical laughter and halfway to complete incredulity, all with that same dry sense of humor that every reporter Dean had ever met was blessed with. He could fake being a cop, he could fake being just about anything - his job, you had to be just about everything if you wanted to stay sane, stay alive, stay mostly sober - but he'd never managed to fake that reporter's sense of humor and of all the IDs in his glove compartment, not one of them was press.

The sun was coming up and Chloe had been talking non-stop since she climbed into the Impala four hours earlier. It was like being trapped with Sam when he had hold of an idea and wouldn't let it go, except that she was way cuter than Sam. When she said something that was particularly outrageous, she looked at him with the corner of her mouth turned down and her eyes smiling at him. She asked a lot of questions, too, and every time he gave her half an answer - or no answer at all - she just grinned at him and shook her head and kept talking. Just like Sammy.

The sky was pinking up and Dean almost turned the key in the ignition, just to see, but instead he leaned over and kissed Chloe, stopping a sentence about some kid who could breathe underwater like a fish. She laughed that dry little reporter's laugh against his mouth and then wrapped her fingers into his hair and kissed him back.

Dean was flat on his back in the front seat of the Impala, only the necessary clothes discarded, with Chloe sliding against him, when the sun cracked the horizon. She leaned down and kissed him, sloppy and wet, and he thrust up against her helplessly. He clutched at her hips when he came, and she laughed and kissed him again while she shuddered around his cock.

He was still panting on his back when Chloe smoothed her skirt down and climbed out the passenger side door. She leaned in and said, "Thanks for saving me from the bad guys, Dean" before blowing him a kiss and walking back to her car, gravel crunching under her shoes.

She pulled off down the road without a hitch, and when Dean sat up and turned his own key, the Impala roared to life. Nothing tried to eat him on the side of the road, the car was driving again, and he'd gotten laid. Not a bad way to start a Wednesday.

They pulled into Poplar Bluff, Missouri on a Tuesday, and there was a crowd milling outside the church they parked in front of, people with signs and people with newspapers and people just standing around. "Hey," Dean said. "Primary elections, man. Let's go vote, Sammy, huh, how about it?"

"That's illegal," Sam said. "And besides, you don't have ID, you don't have voter registration."

"Shows how much you know," Dean said, and leaned across Sam to rummage through the glove compartment. Underneath the medical IDs and the government IDs, there was a packet of voter registration cards, some real and some forged, rubber-banded together. He fished them out and flapped them in Sam's face. "See? Voter registration. And look here, Sammy, not one but two from Poplar Bluff. They got a lot of trouble in Poplar Bluff, Dad and I have been through here half a dozen times in the last two years."

"It's illegal," Sam protested.

"So is digging up graves and setting bones on fire," Dean said. "Didn't see that stopping you last night."

"That's different," Sam started to say, but Dean was up and out of the car before he could finish the sentence and Dean knew that if nothing else, Sam would always follow him wherever he went. Could be a demon in a polling place, and wouldn't Sam look stupid if he hadn't gotten Dean's back there?

It was raining, just a little, and they stood outside with the other voters lining up. Dean's neck felt damp and clammy, and Sam's hair was falling further into his eyes than normal. Sam was quiet, cranky, and Dean stared at his brother and thought, How did you end up wanting to go to law school?

It wasn't that Dad had never cared about politics - they read the papers every day, and of course the occasional small town politician got taken over by something that had more evil than raising tolls on its mind - but they didn't talk about it. Dean voted in a presidential election once, because they'd been keeping an apartment in East St. Louis long enough for a nice legal voter registration, but the government wasn't something Dean or Dad had ever paid a ton of attention to.

They'd spent their life on the run from people who made Dean's job harder, just by trying to do their own. Law school wasn't the kind of place Dean expected Sam to end up - except Sam had been trying to escape his whole life, and law school was about as far from running from the cops as anybody could get.

"You know that rumor about Chicago, that dead people vote?" Dean said, nudging Sam with his hip. Sam grunted. "It's totally true."

"Zombies?" Sam said, refusing to look at Dean.

"Nah," Dean said. "Just ingenuity."

Sam huffed, shifting in the rain, which was starting to come down harder. Dean could tell that Sam wanted to ask questions, wanted to know the answer, but he didn't want to ask. "Just real smart still alive people," Dean said. "Nothing supernatural about it."

"Yeah?" Sam said, twisting his head and peering down at Dean through the hair in his eyes.

"Apparently, in Chicago? You don't have to have ID to vote, just two people who live in the district to vouch for you," Dean said. He couldn't even remember who'd told him this, maybe that cop back in Chicago the first fall Sam was gone - whoever it was had told that everybody knew and nobody gave a shit, which was one of the reasons Dean really liked Chicago.

"That's the dumbest thing I ever heard," Sam said.

"Yeah, well, people in Chicago think the Cubs are going to win the World Series eventually," Dean said. "Not the brightest bulbs in the bunch. And you wouldn't believe the shit they say about the mayor, about Daley? It's un-fucking-believable, but we've never heard facts, anything other than rumors, that he's not human."

"Now you're just shitting me," Sam said.

"Maybe," Dean said. "Wouldn't you like to know?" Sam punched him in the arm and Dean grinned. "You know what, Sammy? I don't think I really want to vote today after all."

"I stood in the rain for nothing?" Sam said.

"I thought you said it was illegal," Dean said, putting a hand on Sam's back and shoving him out of line, back towards the Impala. "Come on, I'll tell you about the time Dad and I actually found zombies running the Democratic primary in Sioux Falls."

They drank beer in the town's one bar until their contact showed up, and when Dean tossed his newest passport into the glove compartment two days later, he was surprised to see the stack of voter registration cards still sitting on top, Poplar Bluff on the very top of the pile.

He shot a glance at Sam, who shrugged and said, "Still illegal. Just, never know when you're going to need to vote in Boise, right?"

Dean just laughed.

When what they thought was a werewolf turned out to be a trio of rabid sheep - who knew sheep got rabies, anyway? - Dean was stuck in Tahoe waiting two days for a mechanic with too-high prices to fix a busted alternator in the Impala. Dean fucking hated Tahoe, and he especially hated it in November because it was cold and snowy and full of yuppies and their SUVs.

It took him four tries to find a damn hotel room, and even that one cost him way more than he wanted to be paying. It took him six tries to find a bar that wasn't full of snow bunnies in tiny parkas and too-tight jeans or full of asshole flyboys on leave from Travis. The place he finally settled on was a damn hole-in-the-wall, the kind of place that even Dean didn't normally set foot in.

There were eight guys in the bar, and seven of them were missing at least four teeth. The eighth was leaning up against the bar, wearing jeans and hiking boots and, when he turned around to see who'd walked in the door, Dean could see a USAF sweatshirt. The guy at the bar raised an eyebrow at Dean and quirked one corner of his mouth up. He had sleepy eyes and hair that stuck up all over his head, and Dean tried to avoid military types most of the time (he got punched in the face by demons enough, thanks for asking, he didn't need to get punched by soldiers, too) but this one looked like he knew how to make trouble.

So Dean sidled up beside him and ordered a beer, and only when the bartender had uncapped the bottle and Dean had taken a long drink did the guy beside him say, "Hey."

"Hey," Dean said.

"John," the guy said, sticking out a hand.

Any other day, Dean would have turned and run right there, because the last thing Dean needed any day of the week was to be fucking someone with his father's name, but John no-last-name had the sort of steady pin-you-to-your-seat gaze that Dean was only used to seeing on Sammy when he got serious, so instead he just said, "Dean."

"Up here for vacation?" John asked, and Dean watched the long line of his throat swallowing beer for a minute before answering.

"Nah, work," Dean said. "Only my car broke down, goddamned piece of shit Impala, and now I'm stuck."

"That sucks," John said. And, "Another beer?"

Four more beers and they ran the table playing eight ball against two of the toothless guys. Another two each and they were stumbling out of the bar into the street, 3 AM and almost empty now. John was leaning up against Dean's side, heavy and comfortable, breath warm against Dean's ear, and Dean could see his own breath ghosting through the air.

"Where's this Impala?" John said into his ear, voice low and Dean knew a come-on when he heard one. "I want to see this car."

"Aren't you military, dude?" Dean asked. "Don't you have to, I don't know, not ask or tell?"

"Nobody's asking," John said, and closed his teeth gently over Dean's earlobe. "And nobody's going to tell my CO, either, so I think we're okay."

The mechanic was at the end of two long blocks, and they only passed a couple of equally drunken tourists as they stumbled down the street, John without a coat, hands jammed into the back pockets of Dean's jeans. The mechanic had one of those open lots, no fences, and the Impala was beached in a back corner, almost invisible if Dean hadn't been looking. John ran his hand over the hood and hummed happily when they got to it, and then said, "Nice ride", the same low, dirty voice he'd been slurring into Dean's ear ten minutes earlier.

Then he reached out and hooked his fingers in Dean's belt loops, and Dean went willingly.

Dean didn't kiss other guys much, because the kind of guys he picked up in bars were the blowjob and see you later types, but sometimes, and he had forgotten about the satisfying rasp of stubble when he kissed another guy. John kissed like he knew what he was doing, biting at Dean's lower lip when Dean reached for the button on John's fly, and groaning into Dean's mouth when Dean wrapped a hand around John's dick.

Dean was about to drop down, pin John's hips up against the headlight behind him and blow him when John ran his tongue along Dean's jaw to his ear and murmured, "Fuck me."

Dean didn't have to be told twice. "Turn around," he said, and John shoved his jeans down to his knees and braced against the hood of the car, throwing Dean a look over his shoulder that, for all the sex Dean has had in life his, he thought only really existed in cheap motel porn.

"Come on," John said, and Dean undid his own jeans before he pressed up against John's back, wrapping a hand around John's cock and jerking him hard, efficiently. John got with the program fast, dropping his head between his bent elbows, thrusting into Dean's hand until Dean felt the familiar muscles tensing across John's back and John shuddered, spilling over into Dean's palm.

Dean shoved his jeans down to his knees, slicking his fingers up with the come on his hand, and slid a finger across John's ass. He twisted it into John's asshole, stretching with careful little thrusts as John shoved back at his hand, trying to get more. "Come on," John said, a growl in his voice, and Dean added another finger. John's body took both fingers easily, and Dean didn't hesitate when John twisted down on them harder. Sliding his fingers out and wiping the last of the come across his own cock, he grabbed John's hip with one hand and his dick with the other and pushed in.

"God," John groaned, and Dean pushed farther. John's ass felt fucking fantastic, and when Dean was finally balls-deep, John's ass pressed firmly against Dean's hips, he slid a hand around to John's dick, already half-hard again. He stroked it once, twice, and John shoved his ass back at Dean hard. "Are you going to fuck me or what?" he said.

Dean gripped John firmly and pulled out, thrusting back in roughly. "Shit," he said, and John said, "Yeah, like that," and Dean let go. He fucked John hard, nails digging into John's skin, and he could feel his own orgasm building fast, pleasure pooling at the base of his spine with every stroke of his dick into John's ass.

John turned his head again, the same lazy way he'd turned to look at Dean in the bar, and ran his tongue across his bottom lip, and Dean collapsed across John's back, biting down hard on the back of John's neck. John shuddered underneath him, and Dean wedged his hand between the grill on the front of the car and John's body, wrapped it around John's dick, and brought him off against in four sharp strokes.

Dean was sweating like a pig, but it was still too cold outside to stay balls-deep in anybody, no matter how pliable a guy he was, for very long. He pulled out, leaning away from John to pull up his boxers and do up his jeans, while John rolled over onto his back, sprawled out against the hood, and did the same.

When all their clothes were rearranged, John slid up the car, propping himself against the windshield, and Dean put a foot on the bumper and joined him. The sky was clear and the streets were empty - everything was quiet. Dean stared up at the stars for a while, enjoying the buzz of a good lay, until John said, "Got a light?"

He'd unearthed a cigar from somewhere in the pockets of his sweatshirt, end already clipped off. Dean dug into his own pockets for his Zippo, handed it over without a word and was rewarded when John passed him the cigar, smoke curling up above them.

"So," Dean said. "You in Tahoe long?"

"Ship out for Afghanistan in two days," John said. "I'm at Travis right now, pre-deployment."

"That sucks," Dean said, and they didn't say much of anything else that night at all.

Dean knew every scar on Sam's body because he'd cleaned every wound, held Sam's hand in hospital emergency rooms while Dad told bold-faced lies about how his 17 year old son had gotten exactly that kind of eight-inch slash down his arm from a pair of gardening shears (when really it was a werewolf with a vicious set of claws, and every full moon for the next six months was an awful kind of waiting game until Sam snapped, "For Christ's sake, I'm not going to turn into a wolf, you can stop looking like I'm going to eat you" at Dean and that was that).

Except he didn't, because they were drinking tequila in a bar in San Jose, the week after Dean went and got Sam, and Sam turned his left hand over and there was a dark scar, tiny and round, on the back of it, just below the knuckle of his ring finger. Sam was still sullen, scared and angry and not talking to Dean as though it were Dean's fault that this demon wanted everything any of the Winchesters had ever loved, and Dean almost didn't ask - but then he did.

"Where'd you get that?" he said, and slammed back another shot of tequila. His head felt swimmy, not drunk, but like the blood-rush of adrenaline or the blood-rush of a wound you couldn't staunch.

"What?" Sam said.

"That scar," Dean said. "That's new."

"Oh," Sam said, and his face went quiet and still and Dean braced himself to get punched in the face, because he knew this expression of Sam's, and it always ended with Dean, well, getting punched in the face. "That. Jess, um, Jess stabbed me in the back of the hand with a pencil. In a Poli Sci class. That's how we met."

"You met because she stabbed you?" Dean said. "Christ, Sammy, leave it to you."

"What?" Sam said, suddenly angry, clipping the table with an elbow and sending shot glasses tumbling to the floor with a crash and a clatter. "Just because I didn't pick her up in a bar, showing off my big, manly scars, doesn't make it any less real."

"Calm down," Dean said. "I'm just saying, stab wounds in class, bruises in a bar, it's all the same when you get down to it. Bleeding guys get the chicks."

"I'm nothing like you," Sam said. "That's not what I do."

Dean flipped his hand over, palm up, and the thin white scar cutting parallel to his lifeline glowed in the shitty fluorescent lighting. He'd gotten that one at 14, losing his grip on a silver knife amidst the blood and gore of two full-grown werewolves, and Sam at 10 had been fascinated by the cut, the healing, the scar. "Sammy, come on," he said. "We all got scars. Everybody bleeds. You're telling me nobody in high school kissed you because you showed up with a black eye the day after a fight. Nobody, ever?"

"Nobody," Sam said, and he wrapped his hand around the neck of the bottle of tequila like he wanted another shot, except their glasses were in a shattered heap on the floor.

"You're such a fucking liar," Dean said, leaning back in his chair, hand still palm up on the table. Sam glared at him.

"And you're legally dead," Sam said. "So which of us is better off?"

Dean didn't have an answer for that question that wasn't neither of us, jerkwad, and he didn't think that was what Sam wanted to hear.

Dean was tracking a succubus in Cleveland, through the most disgusting alleys he'd ever seen in his life, when he backed around a corner and ran into somebody doing the exact same thing from the other direction. He whipped around, leveling the barrels of the shotgun at the stranger's face, blinked twice, and realized that he had a crossbow - an honest-to-fucking-God crossbow, like he hadn't seen since the last one Dad broke ten years ago - pointed straight at his throat.

Another blink and he realized that the crossbow was attached to a brunette in combat boots and leather pants and a tank top that showed off both a flat stomach and a fantastic rack, and who was wearing an expression that Dean recognized as who-are-you¬ right off.

"So," the brunette said. "Go on. Who the fuck are you? You're way too male to be a Slayer, you're way too hot to be Wesley back from the dead, and you don't look stupid enough to be wandering around Cleveland at 4 a.m. if you weren't looking for something in particular."

"Dean Winchester," Dean said. "Can you stop pointing that thing at me? Last crossbow I saw, my little brother shot me in the thigh with it."

"I'm not going to shoot you if you don't make me," the woman said. "You're looking for something. Give me the right answer and I'll think about not putting a bolt through your throat, how's that?"

"Succubus," Dean said. "You?"

"Vampires," the woman said, and lowered the crossbow just a hair. Not that Dean felt any better about it, since now it was pointed right at his heart, but she was at least eyeing him like maybe he wasn't going to leave her for dead in this alley.

"No such thing as vampires," Dean said. "And I would know."

"You don't know shit," the woman said. "But you know from succubi, at least, since I guess that old shotgun's full of salt, and you get points for that."

"Whatever you say, honey," Dean said, and she poked him with her crossbow, hard.

"Don't call me honey," she said. "Come on, I'll help you find yours if you help me find mine." And almost as an afterthought - "I'm Faith."

"No last name?" Dean said, but she pretended not to hear him, and he was already following her down the alley. So she was chasing something that Dean knew didn't exist - vampires, shit, everybody knew vampires were about the only thing out there that was still only legend - but she clearly wasn't the kind of girl Dean was going to have to explain his business to. She got it already.

The sky was pinking with dawn when they finally tracked the succubus down. She was wearing the body of a six foot tall blond woman, perfect curves and perfect tits and perfect cheekbones, lurking outside the back door to what Faith said, mouth pressed against Dean's ear and voice low, was a strip club. They were crouched around the corner, peering at her from behind a couple of garbage cans, and if Faith's tits were pressed up so close to Dean's back by accident, he'd eat his shotgun.

The trouble with hunting succubi alone, Dean had figured out, was that after you were done, you had all this excess desire and no one to fuck but your own hand. Dean didn't get to hunt with gorgeous women very often, much less gorgeous women who knew what they were doing, and he could already feel the succubus radiating raw desire into the air and into his bones. "Come on," he said. "Let's get this over with."

Faith snickered, mouth pressed against the back of his neck, and then licked a stripe up the back of Dean's neck. For a split second he thought, Forget the succubus, let's do this now, but the door to the club cracked open and the succubus's blank face went from boredom to interest and he remembered why he was there. "Okay," Faith said and gave Dean a shove that almost sent him face first into the trash cans. "Show me how big your gun is, baby."

It was a routine point-and-shoot - he'd killed at least a dozen succubi, one of those demons that turned up everywhere without discrimination and rarely pulled any tricky kinds of punches, and after he'd shooed the potential victim off down the alley, he'd turned around to find Faith leaning against a wall, the top button on her pants undone already, eyeing him up and down like she wanted to eat him.

"Sure it's dead?" she asked.

"Sure as I am that vampires don't exist," Dean said, leaning his shotgun up against the trash can where she'd settled her crossbow. He braced his arms against the wall, leering down at her, and she smirked at him.

"Can you fuck and watch your back at the same time, then?" she drawled. "Because if vampires don't exist, that thing's still alive."

"Shut up," Dean said, and kissed her. Her hands went straight to his shoulders, pulling him down against her, and she shoved at her pants, shimmying out of them in a move that suggested a lot of practice, and wrapping a bare leg around his waist. Dean fisted a hand in her hair and shoved at the button on his jeans with the other hand. He pulled away from her mouth, trying to work his jeans down his legs, and Faith bit along his jaw while he struggled.

"Come on," she said. "I haven't got all night."

It was hardly night anymore, the sky gone all orange and gold with the sunrise, but he wasn't one to argue. She shoved a condom into his hand - he didn't know where she'd been hiding that, but he wasn't going to complain about her lack of clothing - and after he rolled it on, one-handed fumbling like he hadn't since he was 15 and losing his virginity, she wrapped both legs around his waist. He steadied her hips with one hand, brick on the wall biting into his knuckles with a sting, and slid inside her.

She groaned into his ear, fingers scratching at the back of his neck, and when he thrust into her, she said, "Yeah, yeah, come on, you can do better than that."

Dean didn't meet too many girls who were a match for him on the hunt or in the bedroom, and he wasn't going to miss his only chance with a rare one who could do both. She was hot and wet, and her legs clenched around his hips like a vise as he pounded into her. "God," Dean groaned. "Jesus, fuck, Faith, yes."

She shuddered underneath him, her head dropping back against the wall behind her, and Dean rested his forehead against the brick and pumped harder, turning his head to bite along her jaw. Faith said, "God, yes, come on, come on - " and then she was clenching around him, muscles shuddering and Dean took a hand off her hip to twist in her hair, kissing her as he came.

He held her up against the wall for a minute, face resting on the cool brick, and then she unwrapped her legs and straightened up, pulling her pants back on. "Hey, thanks," she said. Dean yanked his pants up, tossing the condom into an open trash can, as she shouldered her crossbow and cracked her neck with an easy roll.

Dean stared at her. "Who the fuck are you?"

"I'm a vampire slayer," Faith said, turning away from him. She smirked at him over her shoulder. "Who the fuck are you?"

Dean stood in the alley, watching her walk away, and shook his head a little. Vampire slayer. Christ, he always found the crazy ones. At least she hadn't sucked his soul out.

He drove out of Cleveland feeling relaxed and lazy; vampires, man. It took all kinds.

Fact: Dean and Sam spent most of their time in one of four places - the front seat of the Impala, cheap motel rooms, up to their knees in mud in the middle of the woods, and dive bars.

They were outside of Decatur, Illinois, tired and dirty from chasing a Civil War soldier's ghost around a cemetery for six hours before finally sending him back where he was supposed to be. The bar was particularly dank and dirty, with half the fluorescent light bulbs burnt out overhead, and on the jukebox, Lyle Lovett was wailing that he loved everybody, but especially Dean.

The beer was cheap, though, and when Dean asked for a bottle and two shot glasses, Sam didn't complain that he only had one liver, Dean, and he needed it for the rest of his life, like he usually did when Dean wanted to do some serious drinking. Old Style in cans, and Jim Beam poured with a heavy hand. Some days, whatever they were hunting just lay down and died when it got a whiff of them. Some days it was harder. Some days he fell down a steep hill and hit every gravestone on the way down and his knees swelled up like grapefruits. It was a hazard of the job. Some days were longer than others - this had been one of them.

Dean's back hurt, and Sam was hunched over his drinks like he would bite anyone who tried to take them away from him, and Lyle Lovett was still wailing, the song starting over. If Dean knew who'd programmed this song into the jukebox eight times in a row (and counting), he might even start a fight - if he didn't have to do too much work while he was fighting.

And Sam was definitely too tired to have Dean's back tonight, and given the clientele in the bar - well, Dean wasn't scared of a whole damn lot in the world but he might actually be afraid of a couple of the guys in here.

He bumped his elbow against Sam's, and Sam jerked up, slopping Jim onto the table, glass loose in his hand. "What?" Sam said, and he sounded even more tired than Dean felt.

"If I punched the guy at the end of the bar for putting this song on the jukebox, would you get my back?"

"Are you stupid?" Sam asked. He threw back what was left of the shot he'd spilled onto the bar and poured himself another. He threw that one back, too, and said, "No, seriously, Dean, are you stupid?"

"What?" Dean said. "This song sucks."

"It does," Sam said. "But I'm exhausted and your entire back is black and blue and that guy looks like he could eat you for breakfast and still have enough room for me afterwards."

"A couple of bruises never stopped you from punching me."

"Yeah," Sam said. "That's different."

Dean poured himself another shot and raised an eyebrow at Sam.

"You're family," Sam said, a little drunk, tripping over the word family. Sam didn't like to talk about family. Family meant that Sam couldn't just cut and run this time, like he did before. Family meant that Sam had people who cared about him, which had always made Sam nervous - Dean understood that. Run out on people who care about you, and, well, maybe they don't get your back when you come back. "If you can't punch family when they're being a pain in the ass, who can you punch?"

"Asshole at the end of the bar who put this fucking song on the jukebox ten times in a row," Dean grumbled.

"You don't know it was that guy," Sam said accusingly. He poked Dean in the shoulder, hard. "You don't know that."

"I don't know shit, Sammy," Dean said. "But I know you got my back, right?"

"Dean," Sam said, and stopped, because what could Sam say to that? Yeah, of course I do, Dean, and that didn't need to be said. Or Fuck, no, I don't, and if that was how Sam felt Dean didn't want to know.

"We're family," Dean said. "You got my back."

"Yeah," Sam said, and poured them both another drink, and Lyle kept on howling that he loved everybody, over and over and over again. Maybe he was just drunk, but something tense uncurled at the bottom of Dean's spine, something that had knotted up the day that Sam walked out the first time. Maybe family didn't mean much to most people these days, but it sure as hell meant something to Dean, and maybe Sammy, too.

author's notes: Vi did beta duty and Sid audienced 85% of this while i was writing. laura cantrell & gordon mcintire provided the title from a song of the same.