Chapter Text
Sam had known there was a big possibility of the person the spell targeted reliving the memory as a dream, but even when he thought it’d be Dean, he hadn’t worried. He doubted nightmares of that time were rare for his brother.
He hadn’t counted on seeing what he saw, of course. Hadn’t counted on forcing Dean to relieve it, on being pushed into such a state of rage that he nearly toppled the table over, sending books, papers and lamps tumbling onto the floor, on seeing his brother stumble in after hearing the noise, their eyes locking, startled green on fiery hazel, both instantly knowing the other knows.
He also hadn’t counted on that rage escaping as a destructive force aimed straight at Dean’s chest, of fucking course.
“What the fuck was that about?”
“I could ask the same thing!” Dean replies, crossing his arms, alarm fading into wariness really fast.
“Jody needed help, and I needed a memory for a spell to help her. I just didn’t know it’d show me… That. So I repeat, what the fuck was that about?”
He wants to go over there and hug his brother, but at some point in his life that instinct got cross-wired with the one to scream at him, and he feels truly out of control, concern and sorrow being masked by anger, so perfectly you’d never know they were present in his words.
“Not really any of your business, Sam. I made damn sure of that.” And there’s also some vulnerability trying to shield itself behind the coolness, but Sam’s tough-as-nails I-don’t-break-that-easy big brother has always been soft at the core where only Sam can really reach, and usually he treats that privilege with some respect, but now he just wants to feel something break.
“The hell it’s not my business! I mean, don’t you think I’m entitled to knowing something this big, to knowing what went on behind my back?”
There’s just so many little things that keep flashing before his eyes, moments he’d filled away and forgotten about and now demand attention, comments he’d heard or made and now feel like acid against his tongue, the very foundation of his identity fading alongside the modicum of peace he’d made with his father’s memory since the man died. And God, he knows that’s not the way he should be going about this, he took the appropriate classes a lifetime ago, knows how to communicate with victims except not like this, when the victim is his brother and the perpetrator is his father and his whole world feels like it is crumbling as he watches.
“Why, Sam? Feeling left out of the fun?” Dean sneers, humor always, always his go to when his back is to the wall and the gun is trained on his head, but that’s just the lit match dropping into Sam’s gasoline-rage.
“Fuck you, Dean, just because you enjoyed being dad’s bitch…” He wouldn’t have moved out of the way of the punch even if he had actually seen it coming and not just asked for it with his little barb, but as it is, he doesn’t even see his brother move, just feels an impact like a freight train against his cheek, toppling like a tree with a rotten root system, taking down a chair with him in his descent.
He doesn’t try to stand up.
“Say that again, Sam, and I’ll make sure your little death wish gets fulfilled myself, got it?” Not waiting for an answer, Dean storms out, the clank of his boots hitting the metal staircase reverberating through the floor directly into Sam’s skull where it had made painful contact with the concrete.
He waits until he hears the door slam to let a few tears fall, not even bothering to pretend to himself they’re caused by physical pain.
He doesn’t blame his brother, not even a little bit. Not watching what he did, not seeing his sheer youth and fragility, not knowing how he was practically conditioned to put Sam above himself at all times and how easily that could be used against him, especially by the one that did the conditioning. It’s just that he feels impotent, like this is just another time he let his brother down and should have found a way to atone for (should have gone through with atoning for already, he can’t help but correct), and he wants the fight to ground him that Dean’s here, and safe, and away from their father’s reach, except he’s not here right now because Sam ran him off, and they’re never, ever, ever really safe, and the man’s hand has been weighing down their paths for so long it feels like they’d float away if that weight was lost.
The bender that follows is not the biggest one he ever went through because he had to watch his brother get dragged to hell in bloody, chewed up ribbons, but it comes close.
They don’t talk about it when Dean comes back, scarily sober and that much more dead eyed. Or when Cas asks for their help later in the day and they answer, when he locks Dean up, when they team up again, or when they’re in the car on the way to kill the bastard scribe wreaking havoc on the world. But later, when he’s hauling Dean’s body back to the bunker, the echo of the wheezed out “I’m proud of us” making him choke back tears, Sam knows that moment was amongst the pile of words and actions and fucking tragedies that had killed his brother just as surely as the angel blade had.
There’s a stupid, adoring-little-brother part of him that’s constantly at war with the part of him that’s watched his brother die more times than he can count, and that part doesn’t believe he can die, that anything will ever keep Dean from coming back to him, from being his big brother and keeping him safe and being the one constant Sam has ever had in his life. It’s why it was easy, in the bright-lit kitchen of their new home, to say “same circumstances, I wouldn’t”. Because no, his brother can’t die, and if he does, he’ll come back if he can, so if he’s ever in that hypothetical, far-fucking-away scenario, sure, I’ll let him go, I’ll respect his choice, I won’t fight to keep him with me at all costs even if hurts him. It was easy to shut down their relationship when he could always count on it being there for him to pick back up when he had burned off the anger and betrayal.
Dean’s blood cooling on his hands is as good as an ice bath to remind him that this time he might have just wasted so many precious moments on anger and coldness that his brother died believing Sam would be okay with it.
But he isn’t, isn’t okay with it, isn’t okay with the gaping wound in his chest that grief causes, isn’t okay with living the rest of his life feeling like he’s missing a limb, won’t do it. He’ll bring Dean back, back from wherever he’s been taken, back to life, back to his side where he freaking belongs.
He asks Cas, once, in those weeks that stretch forever between the stupid note on Dean’s bed and depositing his shaky, newly-human, finally home brother back on that same bed, if the angels knew.
“I’m not sure if the leaders did. I was only made aware when I pierced your brother’s soul and body back together in hell.”
Sam relays, guilt-ridden, how he had reacted the day he found out, how he doesn’t know if Dean can ever forgive him.
“You know, Dean told me about the night he stopped you from finishing the trials to close the gates of hell” Sam almost interrupts, not really needing the reminder of such shitty times, but Cas soldier on “He was quite intoxicated, of course, but I got the gist of it. I know you feel weighed down by the times you have “let your brother down”. Do you recall what he had to say about it?”
Sam does, in fact, remember, a new pebble of guilt sitting heavy on his chest at the memory. He’d been forced to shift his perspective on the entire affair after seeing Dean die yet again, and the night kept plaguing his dreams as he remembered choosing to live, to keep fighting besides him, and then throwing it back in his face. But he also recalls the part Cas mentioned, how Dean had shown him that, when he looked at him, the Sam that had hurt or disappointed him wasn’t the one that counted. That anger and bitterness did not overcome them, who they are to each other, how right it is for them to be, and stay, together.
Sam still has doubts over how far he can really stretch his brother’s forgiveness before it snaps like a rubber band, but chooses to let hope assuage his fears for now. He can always deal with the rejection later, when Dean’s back.
They do bring him back, a little worse for the wear, spent from the warpath he’d been on, lugging around so much beautifully human guilt that Sam feels guilty in turn at the relief in seeing his brother’s self-chastising expression as he avoids meeting their eyes. But he’s here and fully him again, so there’s very little that can sour the mood as he makes record time in retrieving his many spoils of war (greasy, cholesterol-laden concoctions that Dean’ll actually need to eat for the first time in weeks and isn’t that wonderful?).
But, frantic search over and no leads on the hunting front even if they weren’t on a Cas-suggested mandated break, there’s room for his discoveries to call his attention again, to ponder and wonder and sulk , as Dean would call it if they were back at quite the teasing place with each other they should be at.
Or, well, if Dean was talking , period, because for the first week after the cure he doesn’t do that or much of anything, gets so scarily thin from lack of eating or drinking water and an excess of screaming nightmares and vomiting that Sam’s considering dragging his brother into the Impala for the third time in as many months and sticking him into a hospital bed where they’ll at least give him some fluids and dreamless sleep in an IV bag. But he resists, unwilling to admit defeat where his brotherly duties are concerned, and little by little he regains pieces of Dean in the form of food that doesn’t end up coming back up in a half-digested bilous mess, eyes that meat his own on good days and mumbled apologies whenever they can’t on the bad ones.
So, yeah, lots of introspection time.
One night, after one too many stilled attempts at conversation, one too many flinches at sudden movements and entirely too much time missing someone who’s sitting right there, who he just got back, damnit, Sam ventures asking.
“What were you going to study?”
Dean freezes almost cartoonishly, beer bottle half-way to his lips, legs tensing up into two almost perfectly parallel lines where they’re stretched over the table.
“I keep picturing it in my head, building up this scenario, seeing you kicking ass at freaking MIT, but I’m missing details. Some sort of engineering, probably, right?” He insists, letting all of his affection bleed into his tone, all his pride overwhelm the cadence in his question, the opposite of the last confrontation about it.
“Yeah. Mechanical, probably.” Dean says, a little awkward, clearing his throat. But something sparks in his eyes at the honest query, the open tenderness, clearly having bottled up this pride for too long to contain the leakage after the dam burst open. “Although one of my teachers kept talking about biomedical, and I was a little tempted, gotta say.”
“Do you know what happened to Andrew?”
“He went. Lost contact afterwards. He’s probably working for NASA or something by now, he hadn’t decided yet either, but he always leaned towards aerospace.”
Sam almost chokes out Do you regret it , but that question is as redundant as it’s cruel, so he nods.
There’s a heavy, pregnant pause, when Sam wonders which minefield of sensitive topics they should try and navigate through right now. He almost smiles picturing their dad gruffly telling them to work it out already, boys , blissfully forgetting, if just for a second, what he’d uncovered about the man.
Thinking of John was as likely to bring a smile to his face as it was to make his blood boil in the last few years, but now it fills him with despairing rage and an almost childish sense of being lost.
"I don’t get it, man, with d… John. I just… You stayed with him, you were so freaking loyal, and all for…?”
He knows he let his goddamn tongue run wilder than it should when he sees the ire sparkle, firecracker-quick, in his brother's eyes, and even more so when it's just as swiftly replaced with a blank look that’s all too reminiscent of another heart-heavy conversation in the kitchen, only a few months ago. He almost wants to laugh, because Same circumstances, I wouldn’t was so far out of the realm of reality, both in how he tried to mean it and how Dean heard him back then, that he can’t help feeling an empty, delirious kind of dark humor at the thought.
“According to your brilliant observations, I liked being dad’s bitch, so…” Dean shrugs and chuckles callously, the edge to his tone far colder than the beer he finishes off in the next long swallow before he moves abruptly, chair scraping the floor as he pushes himself away with the clear intent to lock himself up in his room for the foreseeable future. Sam’s stomach convulses painfully, making him sputter as his gag reflex floods his mouth with saliva, guilt eating away at him as he works on something to say because he’s got the sinking feeling that letting his brother walk away now will break them beyond repair.
How come his brother chased him through their home’s hallways with a hammer and muder promises rolling off his tongue, yet he can tally up far more offenses on his side of the fence?
“Dean, man, I didn’t mean to say something like that, I just… I was in chock, or in rage mode, whatever you wanna call it. I don’t… I know it isn’t like that, ok? I mean, I’m just… You gotta know you deserved better, deserve better than that and for you to stay even when you didn’t need to protect me anymore, when you shouldn’t even have been in a position where you had to protect me like that… I guess I just want to understand."
There’s another lull in the conversation where Sam stares, tensely, at Dean bowstring-taut back, then Dean sighs, having clearly come to some sort of conclusion in an inner debate.
“Look, I’ve been meaning to tell you anyhow, I need to pick up some books. It’s close enough to here that I can be there and back in two days and still go on that little getaway and being honest, I was planning on making the drive alone, think the time would do us both some good. But I know you, know you probably have a million questions, so be up at five tomorrow to come with, and I’ll try to answer some, ok? But no promises, and when we’re back, I’m not talking about this again, capisce?” Dean stalks away, any answer unnecessary because of course Sam’ll be standing by the garage door at 4:50 sharp. Hell, they both know he’ll probably write down what to ask and list it in order of importance in case he runs out of time.
The next morning, the tension in the car is so thick it feels like a knife would bounce off it. Sam hates wasting the small, precious window of opportunity to learn more about his brother with silence or small talk, but he still starts off easy. “Where are we going to get those books and why leave so early?”
“Cicero, Indiana.” Sam recognizes the name instantly, more than a little uncomfortable. There’s a flash of his creepy stalker routine when soulless and he cringes as he waits for the rest of the context.
“Like I said, I started getting a ton of books when I lived there, and some were ancient or extra-rare or dangerous or some whacky combo of all three, so I kept them in this storage unit I rented for dirt cheap in a long contract coz the owner’s kid was in the middle of the whole changeling thing and she was grateful. I forgot all about it when we were running around trying to stop the Leviathans, but I got an email a few days ago. The building’s been sold and they’ll be tossing everything they can’t sell if I don’t collect it all by the end of this week. Figure it’s better not to let those things get in the wrong hands, and hell, might be something useful we can salvage.” He shrugs, unaware of Sam’s stilling beside him, an uncomfortable feeling crawling up his gut.
“Anything in particular you remember?”
“If you’re asking if I remember anything that could help with this” Vague gesturing with his branded arm “No. But, well, I hoarded anything that felt like it was related, and this whole mess sure is biblical enough we might just get lucky.”
Sam nods and turns his glance away, taking a second to recompose himself.
Maybe because he’d been so thoroughly wrong back then, but he had forgotten one of the first things Dean’d told him when they met after Stull was the fact he’d still looked for ways to get Sam out. It’s not about keeping a score, but it hits him like a freight train that it hadn’t been, in the end, about looking or not. Even all the books they might find would have probably been useless in getting Dean into the cage and out with Satan’s vessel in tow, and he can clearly remember the emphasis on “ after you looked for me” in Dean’s plea to know the timing of Sam’s early retirement when his brother was lost to Purgatory.
It was about letting the other know he’d been sorely missed, fought for, wanted back , and it smacks him across the face that he’d not conveyed the same when Dean had fought his way out of Purgatory, that all the times he swallowed the urge to call Dean a hypocrite or didn’t understand Dean’s anger, he’d been missing that Dean had practically been screaming at him, that all he wanted was proof he was loved.
“I knew you’d come.” He says, confession forced out of him like it’s making space for the revelation, voice barely daring to disturb the air, “Against all logic, no matter what he said, no matter how he twisted anything around… I always knew I just had to hang on a little longer and you’d come and get me.”
Dean goes silent for a moment in response and Sam can tell that affected him, that show of hands baring a level of trust and complicity that the years seem to have stole from them, but he eventually jokes:
“Oh, well, would have come sooner if robocop hadn’t decided to play hide and seek for a year.” Dean clears his throat and shocks Sam a little bit with his next sentence “I mean, if you need more reason to think that wasn’t you, you were the person whose interests he went against the most, if you look at it that way.”
Sam’s smile is so fond after that he knows he must look ridiculous, but he doesn’t care. Such a simple way of putting it, really, but it does loosen the knot in his stomach a little.
“I’ll accept that when you accept you weren’t at fault for what happened when you were a demon. Deal?”
Dean snorts but doesn’t argue back, turning his head just so that Sam can’t be totally sure if the wrinkling of the corner of his brother’s eyes are from a smile or from concentrating on a sharp turn he maneuvers the Impala around. Sam knows, anyways.
He decides to let hope take charge a little. He can’t change what happened to Dean when they were kids or his initial reaction to it, but he can be there for his brother and help him share the load now.
Sam takes a deep breath and decides to get on with his point.
“I’m not going to interrogate you or anything, ok? But I do want to know some stuff about the memory I saw.’
Dean gives him a look as if to say clearly , but refrains from commenting. The mood shifts in the car, but it’s not so charged as to suffocate.
“When did it start?”
There’s a long stretch of silence before Dean starts answering, and Sam can see the debate between whether answering truthfully or not answering will end up giving more information play out behind his brother’s eyes.
“I mean, it wasn’t… All out, at first. It escalated but…” Shudders, gives up the pretense “My ninth birthday, if I had to pick a date. S’why I don’t celebrate, since we’re in this whole sharing and caring moment.”
Obviously, there wouldn’t have been any age Dean would have answered that would have made it okay, not in the double digits or if he said it’d been after his eighteenth birthday. But the information still settles like curdled milk in his guts, and it’s all he can do not to puke.
They aren’t big on birthdays either way, but they don’t mention Dean’s at all, every January 24th going by as if it’s just another block in the calendar. His brother won’t even tolerate Sam just being nicer than usual on the day, and he’d finally reached the compromise of buying him a slice of pie seemingly unprompted a week before or after the date, just randomly enough that he can’t get reprimanded for the reminder, after years of begging for a celebration or an explanation as a child and teenager. And now he knows why.
“NINTH? He… You were a child, how could he…”
“Look, Sam, c’mon, it’s messed up, I know, but he wasn’t some evil, child-diddling monster, okay? I doubt he’d ever do it to another kid and, man, I know he wasn’t great with you either, but he fucking loved you, this doesn’t have to change how you see…”
“YOU THINK THERE’S A WAY IN HELL I COULD EVER LOOK AT HIM THE SAME?” He reigns in his voice, just barely, hating the way his brother winces “Dean, him hurting you is enough reason for me to hate him, and God, I do. I’m glad he’s dead and if he wasn’t, I’d end him myself. Only a monster would do what he did, and the fact he no one else got hurt is less than the bare fucking minimum, because it being “just you” doesn’t make it okay in any way, shape or form. Please tell me you know this?” He has to physically hold his hands together to stop himself from making air quotes the way Dean hates, for emphasis, or to pick another fight, so he can beat it into his brother’s skull that his pain is not a detail or afterthought in this. “I’d made my peace with the man, sure, but on false pretenses. I like to think you know me better than thinking I’d just be able to ignore this. And he might have loved me in his way or whatever, but he sure wasn’t the person who raised me or was there for me, so if you still want to use that as an argument, I’ll still come out on your side. Every time.”
Dean’s expression shatters, if for just a second, and he shallows convulsively before speaking in a rusty whisper.
“You don’t know that. I wasn’t some innocent flower, specially not around the time of the memory you saw. Hell, sometimes I’d… Egg him on.”
Oh, Dean
“I know I reacted like a dick, Dean, but I don’t blame you for any of it, and I’m not gonna sit here and let you blame yourself, either.”
“For fuck's sake, Sam!” Dean throws the car into park so harshly anyone else would get the riot act read to them for treating his baby that way, turning to Sam with his voice thickened by held-back tears, “Do you need me to spell it out? I’d seduce our fucking father so he’d stop yelling and go to sleep or not question how I’d gotten the money he sure as shit hadn’t left or leave you alone, and you’re gonna try and give me the after school special routine of it wasn’t your fault ?”
“It wasn’t. It wasn’t your fault that the adult you were supposed to trust and be protected by put you in a situation where you felt like you had to “seduce” him to keep the peace or to protect me.” He pauses, knowing it’s fifty-fifty on whether the next comment will cause Dean to storm out, but takes his chances “You’d never, not in a million years, blame me in the same situation, no matter how often I got in his face or went up against him.”
Dean’s face goes ghost white and sick green so fast it feels like someone put a filter over Sam’s eyes, clearly taking the worst case scenario from the phrase.
“No, it never happened. I had no idea, Dean. You kept me safe, I just wish you’d been safe as well.” Sam’s quick to reassure, and watches as the color slowly comes back to Dean’s face.
He waits until Dean’s calm enough to go back to driving before rephrasing what he’d been wondering last night.
“Why didn’t you go to college, after I’d already left?”
“I considered it, but it was never the right situation, never the right moment… I wanted to be a hunter still, I just thought I had a shot at being more, too, and it just… Felt like my chance had passed. Plus he, uh, he stopped, even before we started hunting separately.” After he couldn’t hold you over my head any longer rings in the air between them “I thought… I don’t know man, it’s stupid, but I guess I thought I could just, get over it, forge on, ya know? I…” Shallows, looks away, “I wanted my dad back. The one from before it all happened. Thought if I was good enough, I could get it.”
Sam’s heart feels like a dozen elephants have stampeded over it at the inconsolable heartbreak in his brother’s voice. It’s not stupid, it might be the singular most achingly human thing he’s ever seen, but the sad truth is, Dean can campaign all day long for humanity, with flaws and all, and at the end of the day, still won’t give himself an ounce of grace for having them.
“Anyone else ever knew?”
“Pass.” Dean replies, immediately, and Sam has to actively bite down the impulse of screaming that this isn’t 8th grade truth or dare. He’s very suspicious of why this question, of all possible ones, gets passed on, but Dean hadn’t promised to answer everything and he’s already being far more open than Sam had expected, so he nods and continues.
“Did I make things worse? When we fought or when…”
“Sam, if you won’t let me take the blame, I sure as shit won’t let you, man, c’mon, you didn’t even know. Plus…” Dean is fast approaching his limit on exposing himself, but forces the words out through his teeth anyhow, motivated by the sheer anguish on Sam’s tone “It didn’t get worse when he was mad, not really. He’d beat me more than… Anything else then, but he didn’t need an excuse to be pissed enough to do it, and it sure ain’t on you if he used you as an excuse. It got worse when he was sad, actually.”
“He beat you? What do you mean by get worse?"
Sam’s somewhat surprised that the news actually surprises him. He doesn’t know why he’s shocked John would hit his brother when he’d done other things that had two grown men who kill nightmares by trade maxing out on euphemisms to avoid saying out loud. Maybe it’s just the sadness of how… Hopeless he can imagine Dean being, a child stuck between physical abuse and much more intimate violence, no matter the circumstances.
“C’mon, Sam, why do you need details, Jesus Christ.”
Sam shallows, trying to phrase it correctly, even though he feels utterly lost himself.
“It's not that I need details, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t really want, it’s just… I keep making up gradually more horrible scenarios in my mind and it’s not like anything you tell me will be good or… I just… I hate that this happened to you. I hate that I didn’t notice and that I couldn’t help and that no one freaking helped you when you were a kid and that you are carrying all of this alone and I guess I just… I just want you to be okay.” Sam finishes lamely.
Dean is silent for long enough Sam resigns himself to having closed the topic permanently much sooner than agreed upon, and he almost jumps when his brother’s voice fills the air again.
“You remember Bela Talbot?” Sam blinks, startled, for a good ten seconds before slowly nodding “That’s why she made her deal. Her parents were like him, and she sold her soul to get them away from her. She told me all of this when we met in the pit, and she was so gone, man, almost fully demonic, enjoyed ripping me apart almost as much as Alastair did, but she didn’t get how I wouldn’t wield for the longest time, wanted to break me as bad as he did just because she thought we were so similar. And eventually we got to the same conclusion, that we might be, but she didn’t have you. She didn’t have anything to anchor her to any shred of humanity, before hell and especially not in there. So, you helped. You might not have known at the time. But you did. Still do.” Dean clears his throat and ups the volume on the radio, a silent plea for a break, and Sam’s all too happy to oblige, tears making him almost unable to see the glowing red digits or get air down his windpipe.
They make it to Indiana before nightfall, but decide to crash in a motel and head out for the lockup in the morning.
They’re both laying in the dark, neither able to fall asleep, when something else Dean had said flashes across Sam’s brain, making him sit up in the dark with a heavy heart.
“Dean? What did you mean earlier when you were talking about getting money when he hadn’t left it?”
He doesn’t turn his head, but can easily picture the full body tensing Dean does, all muscles pulled taut as the question sinks in.
“C’mon, Sam, do some math. We’d be left alone for three weeks with enough money for two if I stretched it so thin we might as well go panhandling. We had to eat and keep a roof over our heads, and I’d already learned there was something I was good for, so…” There’s a sound of scratchy fabric rustling, indicative of a shrug coming from the other man, and Sam once again wants to scream. “Kinda hard to find someplace that will hire a twelve, fourteen, hell, even seventeen-year-old with no address or references who’ll be gone in either a week or a month. Finding someplace’s owner that will get his rocks off with one? Easy as pie.”
Sam knows he hasn’t been such a hair-trigger-crier since he was an actual toddler, but he finds himself chocking up on even more tears. He’d had vague memories of knowing Dean sometimes had to resort to something unsavory when John was gone a bit longer than planned, but he’d pictured pick-pocketing or hustling, which he’d also learned to do as an older teen and hated, or even getting involved with drugs in some way. Not this, selling himself, being backed into a corner where the only way out he saw was letting grown men take advantage of him for money.
“You can’t think this is seriously no big deal.”
“I never said it wasn’t. It was the crappy hand I got dealt and I dealt with it.” He pauses, sighs, and moves on “I got good at hustling and scamming and plain stealing and I had to do it less and less and it’s been years, alright? Made me a little fucked in the head, sure, but at this point, shit, what didn’t?”
“Dean…”
“Look, you don’t get to judge me for this. I did what I had to do, ok? We were as okay as could be given the circumstances and…” The sentence gets cut off as Sam’s full body weight punches the air out of Dean’s lungs. His brother had been so caught up in his rant he hadn’t even noticed Sam get out of bed and launch himself into his, giving him a full body hug. Sam forces himself to let go of the embarrassment even as Dean goes perfectly still.
“Can you get it through your damn skull I’m not judging you? I’m angry, honestly angrier than I can remember ever being, but I’m not angry at you. I’m in your corner, man, c’mon, you have… You have got to know this.”
It hits Sam then that this is the first embrace they have shared since… He doesn’t even remember when (he’s not counting craddling and carrying Dean’s body, he’s not). The church where they watched the angels fall? The thought makes him cling that much harder, hitting him all over again how close he came to spending the rest of his days regretting not hugging his brother more.
Eventually, Dean’s arms encircle him, hesitant like he fears Sam will take back the affectionate gesture if spooked, but they do eventually share an embrace. Sam lets go when they can both half-assedly pretend the other’s shirt is wet because of the humidity of the air, but doesn’t go back to his own bed, choosing to curl up on his side facing his brother.
“Take a goddamn picture” Dean grumbles with an arm thrown over his eyes but obviously feeling Sam's scrutinizing gaze on him, but makes no further move to dislodge his brother. They tend to reserve bed-sharing for the particularly horrific nightmares or more serious bouts of illness, but Sam thinks they can be excused for breaking the rules this once. Plus, Dean’s still recovering is the card he’ll pull out in case he’s questioned by his allergic-to-being-taken-care-off brother.
They fall asleep like that, two supersized men in a normal-sized bed, and are still snoring peacefully when the alarm rings signaling their agreed upon time to go fetch the contents of the storage unit.
Breakfast is almost normal, and Dean smiles at the waitress and orders more food than his stomach can handle at the moment and even looks like he might actually want to eat it of his own volition and he actually teases Sam, which he never thought he’d be so happy about, so he relaxes a little, does the crosswords and the sudokus on the paper while trying to think of what he wants to say.
He’s accepted there’s things he’ll always want to know out of some mix of morbid curiosity, righteous anger and masochism and will never find out, but he’s unsure that the things that were actually important about this were all covered, and is starting to think they also will be buried deep in the list of things they don’t talk about alongside the whole subject once they’re back in Kansas.
It’s in one of the books strewn about the little storage unit that he finds the next challenge of communication. They’re supposed to be shoveling them into boxes to be sorted later, trying to escape the overwhelming dust and tight deadline, but one of the titles catches his attention. It’s about portals and different realms, which had been enough to make him pause when he’d read it in the bold red and swirly latin, but the cover is an almost life-perfect sketch of the portal he’d used to get out of Purgatory.
He must make some kind of noise or be caught up looking at it for longer than he realizes, because Dean’s suddenly in his field of view, snapping his fingers to bring him back to the present. He can barely contain his sorrowful stare as he turns the heavy tome around so Dean can see it too.
For a beat or two, neither of them talks or moves. Sam feels gutted, like the very first time he’d heard where Dean had spent his time while he tried to rebuild himself in Kermit, stuck here in this little room where he can almost taste the weight of Dean's grief under the thick layer of dust and wondering if his brother would be able to detect the same from Amelia’s cheerful living room, where he spent many restless nights unable to cry away the emptiness that threatened to implode him that entire miserable year.
“Oh, well, even if you’d known this was here, you wouldn’t have guessed that’s where I’d gone, Sam. Lets get going.” Dean says, shaking himself as if to dislodge cobwebs, so perfectly logical and diplomatic and downright robotic Sam wants to throw the book at his head.
“Because I wasn’t looking in the first place, you mean?”
“Jesus Christ, Sam, no that’s not what I meant. I’m not trying to pick a fight. Can we just pack this shit up and get gone?” Dean’s barely concealed exhaustion is the only thing that forces Sam to give himself a mental slap and reign in his temper.
“I’m not trying to pick a fight either, Dean. It’s just that… I’m sorry, ok? I’m so freaking sorry that I left you alone in that nightmare for a year, and I’m even more sorry that I couldn’t say this when you first got out, that I iced you out and made you think even for a second that I was anything other than thrilled to have you back, that I refused to even try and empathize with you because it just reminded me too much of howI’d fucked up. I… I missed you. So bad. But I thought I was letting you rest, for once, that you were safe and at peace in heaven, De, I… If I’d known you were hurt and needing me, I’d have come, nothing would have stopped me. And I’m sorry that I couldn’t figure that out, that I let you down when you counting on me was kinda what I spent my whole life trying to get you to do, I’m sorry I acted like an ass, but I’m still kinda mad you’d take that as me not caring or not wanting you back because that’s just downright wrong ." He turns his face to the side to angrily swipe at a few runaway tears that have carved paths down his cheeks, so he doesn’t notice his brother’s moving until he collides against him, the novelty of two hugs in as many days without accompanying immediate catastrophes almost (but only almost) enough to make him forget to hug back just as hard as he’s being crushed by Dean’s arms.
“I’m sorry, Sammy, that I couldn’t see past my own issues that you were hurting too. But we’re both here and we’re okay and I haven’t been mad about this in so long, c’mon." He taps Sam on the shoulder, affectionately, and Sam thinks he’ll be released, but Dean hugs him impossibly tighter for a second and whispers “I missed you too." Before clearing his throat and getting back on to his task.
They aren’t anywhere near perfect, and Sam knows they’ve got a long road ahead of them. But for the first time in years, it feels like they’re walking it together rather than crashing head-first onto each-other-s paths, and he knows, deep down, that when they’ve got each other like that there’s very little they can’t get through.