You slip through the window after Dean, the frame groaning like a guilty conscience. The air inside Sam Winchester’s apartment feels too clean, too tidy—like someone has tried to press the creases out of their own life and pretend the fabric was never worn. It smells faintly of old books and detergent, the sort of domesticity you and Dean haven’t known in years. Maybe ever.

Your heart is already beating too fast, not because of whatever thing might be stalking John Winchester across the country, but because this is Sam’s place. Sam’s life. The one he built without you.

Dean moves confidently, flashlight steady, but you’re shaking from something more primitive, something that tastes like memory and regret. You wonder if he can hear it in your breathing—your pulse louder than the floorboards. Dean never says anything, but he notices everything. Especially now, when your entire being feels tightened like a bowstring.

The living room is sparse, almost ascetic: textbooks stacked like monuments of stubborn hope, a jacket draped across the back of a chair. You run your fingers over the sleeve as if fabric can still hold warmth. Dean gives you a look. You pretend not to see it.

Then a shadow lunges out of the hallway.

Dean barely has time to grunt before Sam slams him against the wall with the kind of force you remember from training sessions in abandoned lots, from hunts where adrenaline ate whole hours alive. You stay frozen—absurdly, idiotically frozen—because it’s him. Because the first sight of Sam in years is nothing like you imagined. No soft reunion, no quiet apology in the doorway. Only fury, breathless and bright, and the sharp outline of the man he’s become.

“Get off me!” Dean shouts, struggling.

Sam moves like a blade—quick, sure. Stronger than before. But softer too, in the way his eyes are unguarded, in the way he hesitates for a split second when Dean’s face hits a stripe of moonlight. Dean uses that moment to twist free.

“You’re supposed to be a college boy, Sammy,” Dean huffs, rubbing his shoulder. “Didn’t think they taught you how to tackle people here.”

“Dean?” Sam’s voice cracks across your nerves like a struck match. He stares, disbelief drowning every hard edge. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Dean dusts himself off as though nothing has happened. “Dad’s on a hunting trip,” he says, tone darkening, “and hasn’t been home in a few days.”

Sam looks between you and Dean, jaw tightening, and finally says, very quietly— “and you couldn't have called first instead of breaking in?"