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Sam stabs his shovel into one of the larger mounds of grave dirt and leans against the handle to take a breather. This is the sixth of six graves they’ve had to exhume tonight and Dean had gone flinty-eyed and cold back at the sight of the very first child’s bones. He always gets like this whenever they’re dealing with kids, and Sam’s not too far behind him really. Still, six graves in a night—well, five and a half so far—isn’t as easy as it used to be. Not that it was ever that easy to begin with. He deserves a short break. They both do, honestly. Sam leans back against the grave wall and stretches his cramping fingers out. At least they’re on the last one, a Lucas-something. Keeling. Keller. He wipes the back of his sleeve across his forehead and squints up at the gravestone in the moonlight. Kellinger.
Dean is still digging away, unnoticing or uncaring of Sam’s little recess. Tiny flecks of gray dirt are clinging to the short strands of his hair. They coat the collar of his jacket in a fine dust every time he moves.
“Hey, Dean?”
He just gets a grunt in reply, Dean’s shoulders taut and tense as he keeps on shoveling.
“You said Amara brought Mom back to thank you, right?”
“Yeah,” his brother says distractedly, still focused on the work. But he’s slowing at Sam’s questioning.
“How did you do it?”
Dean finally stops then, stretching out his arms and rolling his neck back with a few audible popping sounds. The two of them would probably be a chiropractor’s worst nightmare. “It was kinda easy, actually,” he says, resting his own shovel against the wall and turning around to face him. “I mean, terrifying as fuck, hoping she wouldn’t get pissed off and trigger the bomb in my goddamn chest, but we just…talked. Honest.”
Sam can’t hold back the slight huff of amusement. “What, like, ‘Could you pretty please not blow up the sun?’”
Dean tosses him a weak smile in response. First display of actual humor since they started digging. At least Sam’s distracting him from the grisly work. “She wanted Chuck, man,” he says. “Not me. Not really. Turned out all that magic longing bullshit was just a placeholder for how she felt about her brother.” He shrugs and scrubs a hand through his hair to dislodge some of the more stubborn grit, then grimaces as he gets stuck in the gel, wiping the remaining mess off on his jeans. “Chuck showed up, she apologized, and then they zapped off together to who knows where. Then he said you and me were in charge of all the really shitty heroic stuff from now on,” he adds a little bitterly.
Sam chews at his lip for a bit as he tries not to nitpick too obnoxiously. “Okay, I’m sorry, Dean,” he says after way too short a moment, “but that doesn’t make any sense. I thought it was…sexual between you two. Plus, I’m pretty sure qareens only focus on dark desires. Hell, you even told me she kissed you.” Dean just raises a single eyebrow back at him, holding the stare for a long time until Sam finally gets with the program. “Oh,” he says simply. Then he scrunches his nose up, trying not to feel like a hypocrite as the muted shock turns to budding amusement. “Really?”
“I’m thinking maybe that’s why it was able to hook me like that,” Dean says tiredly, shoving his hands in his pockets and leaning back against the grave wall. “Two peas in a pod, me and Amara. Both wanting our brothers like a couple of reprobate sickos. I could relate.” Then he snorts a little at his unintentional pun. “That wasn’t on purpose.”
“So…” Sam ventures awkwardly, “Chuck and Amara, huh? God and his sister.”
“Guess so.”
“Huh,” he says. “I mean, there’s sibling incest in a ton of creation myths.”
Dean groans as he knocks his head back against the wall of dirt. “C’mon, man. Don’t do that. Don’t be Sam right now.”
He lets out a muted laugh at his brother’s ridiculous phrasing, intentional or not. “Yeah, sorry,” he jokes. “I’ll try to avoid that in the future.” Dean smiles back at him, eyes closed as he does his best to rest standing up. Soaking in the short reprieve for as long as he can. “So, is there something you’d rather talk about instead?” Sam asks, fiddling with the edge of his sleeve. “’Cause I’m a little worried about the way Mom—”
“How about we talk about why you were dragging those mattresses up and down the halls a couple nights ago?” Dean interrupts, firm, like he’s wanted to bring it up for a while now and just couldn’t find a chance.
One by one, Sam’s nerves go all jittery at his brother’s statement, an uneasy feeling settling low in the base of his stomach at being caught out. It was late. He’d specifically waited until it was late. No one was supposed to hear.
He had laid in bed for a long time the night they got back, just getting the violent whirlwind of his thoughts in order and trying to process the unfathomable reappearance of their mom. Trying to process...everything that had happened that day. Carefully locking it all away until he could cope. He’d laid there until the details of the past week had eventually started to come back to him, images filtering in like a broken reel from an old film. His worry for Dean. The threat of Amara. Chuck. Donatello and Metatron and Lucifer…locking himself inside Sam’s room. Lying on his very bed. Doing who knows what. Making it smell like him.
Sam had rocketed off those covers so fast he’d whacked the back of his hand against his bedside table hard enough to bleed. Feeling violently sick to his stomach at just the thought of how he’d already been lying in that same spot for hours. He couldn’t sleep on that bed, not once he’d remembered. Couldn’t use the mattress or the blankets or the pillows. He could barely even stand to look at it. So he’d swapped the whole thing out. They were all identical anyway, other than Dean’s special memory foam. And Sam was quiet. He’d made sure to be quiet so that no one would notice he’d done anything at all.
Dean is still waiting for an answer when Sam risks a glance back up, his eyes open now and fixed steadily on him. Sam knows it’s futile, but he still clears his throat and tries to sound innocent. “What are you talking about?”
“I wasn’t asleep that night,” Dean says, all casual and matter-of-fact. “Was in the kitchen.”
Sam takes a silent moment to curse the fact that he’d claimed a room so close to the stairwell as his own. Noise carries in an empty fucking bunker. It was stupid of him not to think of that. “What were you doing in there at two in the morning?”
“Making a friggin’ soufflé, Sam,” his brother says sarcastically, the implied, ‘None of Your Business’ flashing in big, figurative letters between them. He waits for a bit, but when Sam doesn’t make any attempt to come clean, he continues on. “At first I thought it was for Mom, y’know, that you were just switching out her lumpy mattress or something, but you didn’t go into her room again.” Dean takes an even breath. “Your door opened, then the empty room next to yours opened, and then yours did again.”
Sam focuses on a spot on the opposite wall and clenches his teeth together. Focuses on his breathing as he tries not to break.
“And then you took a shower.”
He can’t help the flinch on that one. He’d scrubbed his skin raw after her. He’d scrubbed his skin even rawer later that night. “I’d been marinating in sweat and blood and piss for two days,” he says quietly. “A shower is normal behavior.”
Dean lets out a short sigh, like Sam’s answer has disappointed him somehow. “Cas cleaned you up right away. Fixed you good as new. And, okay, the second we get home you take a shower that’s three times as long as usual, fine, I’m willing to chalk that up as cleanliness.” He takes a step closer, pushes off from the wall to get into Sam’s space. It’s already claustrophobic as fuck in here. In the grave of a goddamn child. Barely enough room to turn around. “But then you take another one,” Dean continues lowly, “even longer, only a few hours after that? At two in the fucking morning? And then another when you wake up? And then again at the motel today? That ain’t ‘normal’, Sam.”
He isn’t thinking about it. He isn’t going to think about it. It didn’t happen.
Because it wasn’t real, whatever happened in his head. It was just a mix of whatever satanic concoction she dosed him with and the longing of his own grieving mind. It was nothing. A dream. A thought. …But no matter how often he keeps telling himself that, he can’t stop his stomach from curdling into sick knots. Can’t stop remembering the whisper-feel of her hands on his back. The smell of her. How he kept asking for more, panting and eager, like a fucking dog on her leash. Of waking to find his boxer-briefs clinging to his inner thighs, sticky and wet, and knowing that she’d watched him, all prim and proper in her sensible pantsuit, as he’d come in his jeans like a thirteen-year-old kid. How she’d seen the whole thing, him filthy and bleeding and tied to a chair as his unconscious body had shivered through an orgasm right in front of his torturer…and then he’d begged her to touch him some more.
But worse than any of that, more disgusting than all the rest of it, is the wave of nausea that surges over him at the memory of the enjoyment itself.
Because Lucifer had mostly made it hurt, had ripped and torn and clawed him apart from the inside out. Though the blood and horror and agony are almost a dim memory now, locked behind a hazy wall ever since Cas took his madness away. Lady Bevell, however, had simply laid there the entire time. No violence or pain. Just that serene, accommodating smirk gracing her pretty features with every new answer she’d wormed from his drugged mind. She’d been soft in the dream world, and warm and wet, and so easily willing to acquiesce to every desire Sam could think of. So fucking willing.
Sam bites down on his lip, hard, and tears the sickly-sweet image out of his head before it can fuck him up even more. A few years ago, Dean had done much the same. Had chased away the memory of Lucifer by bending as far in the opposite direction as he could go, still and compliant and non-threatening. He’d laid back and kept his hands to himself and had allowed Sam to take whatever he needed—or, more aptly, whatever he could manage—without making any sudden moves. Without asking anything for himself. Attempting to smooth over the trauma by not touching him anywhere or any way Lucifer had. Because as much as Sam had tried—and dear fucking Christ had he tried—he hadn’t been able to play catcher for a real long time afterwards.
But now… Sam swallows hard at the ice-cold, sick feeling in his chest. The thought of having Dean like that again fills him with an unexpected dread. Just the idea of fucking into his brother while he lies there, relaxed and easy, taking it so gently—like she took it so gently, embracing him with such tender care, a sinister mockery of affection, smiling that all-knowing smile. Loving him—because it was love in that fucked-up, nightmare pastiche of his psyche. Playful and easy and goddamn fucking romantic. Because that was how she could get her precious information, that was the tiny chink through which she could pry and tear into the vulnerabilities of his soul, and Sam’s brain had filled in all the gaps. She’d touched him the way Dean touches him. She’d tainted and soured the very idea of pleasure as she used his body against him, uncaring of how much lingering destruction she left in her wake as long as she got her goddamn answers. She’d screwed him up in a way that, for all those hundreds of years of torture and meat hooks and hellfire, Lucifer had never quite been able to.
She was talented, really.
More than he’d given her credit for.
And now, Sam can’t possibly find even footing because neither of his fucking—not the word, don’t say the actual word—had even the minimal decency to stick to similar methods, leaving him torn between the two extremes with no hope of respite. Pain and pleasure both hold terrors for him now…and if he happens to stray slightly too far in either direction, Sam will plummet headfirst into the dark, sucking well of his own memories.
Dean is still watching him when he comes back to himself. Quiet and patient as he waits for him to pull himself back together. A quick once-over lets Sam know his eyes are still dry at least. Small mercies.
“What—” His voice sounds like sandpaper when he finally speaks again. “What is it you want to know?”
“That British chick,” Dean says gently. “She hurt you.” It isn’t a question. “Worse than you’ve been letting on.”
Sam lets his shoulders drop. There’s no point in holding it in anymore. “Yeah,” he says, resigned to admitting the truth. “Both of them. There was another one—another woman—brunette, same accent.” He scrubs a hand over his face, probably leaving streaks of dirt and death along his jaw, and doesn’t meet his brother’s eyes. “She did most of the heavy lifting at first. She was terrible at it though.” He tries for a chuckle, but it comes out reedy. “Real amateur-hour stuff. Freezing water. Then the whole blowtorching my foot thing.”
Dean twitches his lips a little in sympathy. “Yeah, she got me and Cas with some juiced-up brass knuckles. Mom drove an angel blade right through her heart.”
Sam can’t even drum up a smile for politeness’s sake. “Good.”
“What about the blonde bitch?”
“Well, she shot me,” he can’t help but point out, just the slightest bit of sarcasm running through his words. “And after the other one left, she—” Sam’s tongue darts out nervously and he tastes soil as he wets his lips. “Toni, her name’s Toni. She drugged me with something. Made me hallucinate some stuff.” Dean’s brows start to draw together in concern, so Sam gets to the meat of it as quick as he can. “Just—deaths of people we couldn’t save,” he explains reassuringly. “Painful things people have said to me. Shit like that.” He grants Dean a weak shrug and very carefully doesn’t mention that most of the words were his brother’s. It was a long time ago. He’d deserved them. “You were in there a lot,” he says instead. Diplomatic. “All the times I watched you die.” And it’s mainly the truth anyhow. “But I, uh, knew it was a trick. I almost got out. Except, she had one of those long cattle prods.”
“Jesus.”
Sam sucks in a deep breath before continuing, skipping over the worst parts. “Then she, um, sliced me up a little. That’s what the cuts were. Ruined my shirt.” He finally lifts his head, meeting his brother’s gaze as he tries to look contrite. “It was pretty standard stuff. Nothing I haven’t been through before.”
Dean watches him for a long time, his eyes never wavering from Sam’s own. Like he’s waiting for something else.
“I’m fine, man,” Sam insists quietly. “Really.”
A low wind picks up, blowing through the grass over their heads. A few more pieces of dirt trickle down from the walls to rain down between them.
“When did she fuck you?”
Sam’s throat instantly closes up in panic. “What? I never said—”
Dean lets out a sharp sound, an angry sibilance escaping through his teeth. “Sammy, you were up at ass o’clock dragging mattresses around instead of sleeping. And then this morning, you said you heard Mom walking around the night before, which means you must’ve been up too.” He crosses his arms over his chest, probably trying to tuck his fingers away from the night’s slight chill now that they aren’t digging anymore to keep warm. “You’ve taken six showers in the last three days,” Dean continues, pointedly. “Plus, you’ve been picking at your left hand whenever you think I won’t notice.” He lets out another tense sigh. “And when I tried to hand you a cup of coffee over your shoulder earlier, you jumped about half a foot into the air. As fucking awful as it is to say, I know what you act like when you’ve been…” His brother trails off then. Silence again as the wind whistles over the opening of the grave.
They’d never actually said the word the first time either, after the Cage. They don’t do that, the two of them. They never have. Some sort of Winchester trait for repression that had never quite been bred out of the bloodline. Mom’s probably got it too, given the oddly cheery blankness of her smiles the last few days.
It takes a long time for Sam to get his tongue to work. “If you knew, then why did you…?”
Dean shakes his head, but at least he’s got a slightly pained smile stretched over his lips. “I was waiting for you to bring it up, man.” He lets out a quiet scoff. “I mean, aren’t you the ‘feelings’ guy? Why wouldn’t you talk to me about this?”
“You’ve been dealing with a lot.”
“So have you. So has Cas. We’re always dealing with shit, Sam.”
Sam swallows roughly, a heavy lump of shame sticking in his throat. “I didn’t want Mom to know,” he whispers, so hushed he isn’t sure if Dean can hear it. But then he raises his eyes again. “Please don’t tell her. About either of them.”
Dean just looks at him sadly, like he’s hurt Sam had to even make the request. “I wouldn’t do that, Sammy,” he says. And then there’s another quiet moment before Dean lets out an unexpectedly soft chuckle.
“What?”
But his brother just shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says with a bitter ghost of a grin. “Just a stupid thing that popped into my brain. It’s dumb. And kind of shitty. And if I actually said it, you’d probably break your shovel over my head.”
Sam tries to return the faint smile and nods in understanding. Dean’s like that now. Careful. Conscientious about jokes he’d never have given a second thought to back in the day. Back when Sam would have laughed right along with him. He still oversteps sometimes, but it’s not on purpose or anything, and he always shuts up the second Sam lets him know he’s toed over the line.
Dean scrapes his hands over his knees a couple times, and then drops down onto his ass. Sitting up against the grave wall. “So what did she do exactly?” he asks wearily, and Sam knows they’re not talking about Mom anymore.
He steps over to the other side of the grave and settles down right beside his brother. Their arms flush from shoulder to elbow. “She drugged me again,” he starts quietly. Trying to keep it clinical. Just a laying out of the facts. “Or actually, a spell, I think. And it made me…” Sam bites at the edges of his tongue, the pain a distraction from the guilt. From the humiliation. “It was like we were together,” he says haltingly. “In my head. It was another hallucination, or a dream or something, but it was lucid. I could feel everything. All of it. Like it was real.” Sam takes another deep breath before continuing. Dean listens in patient silence. “But the memories were all warped,” he finally gets out. “She and I—” Sam swallows hard and waves a hand around in lieu of a better explanation. “In the…thing, we were together. Like, not in a relationship exactly, but it felt—” The nausea creeps up his gullet again, tears stinging at the backs of his eyes. “I think I loved her. I…wanted her.” He tries to clear his throat, but his voice won’t even out. “We had sex, and then I wanted to do it again. She was using it to get me to talk, like a reward.” The word burns fighting its way past his teeth, and he has to drag the next part out by force, painful and aching as he rips the fresh wound open again. “And I wanted it,” he says in a rough whisper. “I asked for it. I fucking asked—” Sam slams his eyes closed against the threat of actual tears, shutting the floodgates before any can manage to escape. That’s enough. He doesn’t want to say any more. He can’t. That’s the gist of it anyway.
His brother remains quiet for a long time beside him. Waits until Sam’s mostly got ahold of himself again. Doesn’t say anything shitty like, “That’s not that bad.”
“You know it wasn’t—” Dean cuts himself off, then drags his bottom lip through his teeth as he tries to put the words together. “We’ve been around enough magic and shit to see that kind of thing before,” he finally settles on. “It’s just—not your fault. Y’know? Making you like it…that’s not on you.”
Sam drops his head to rest against his brother’s shoulder, and he’s probably getting even more grave dirt in his hair but he doesn’t care. “I know,” he says quietly. It’s not like Lucifer hadn’t played with shades of that same concept. More violent and graceless when he did it, but still. “I mean, it didn’t even happen. Not really. It’s stupid to be so fucked up about it.”
Dean lets out an unexpectedly derisive snort. “That’s dumb, man.” And then there’s an awkward shuffle as Sam pulls back to stare at him. “What? It is,” Dean says defensively. “I mean, by that logic, Hell didn’t happen either. ‘Cause it wasn’t your actual physical body, right? Yours was up here with me, being a douchebag.”
“And with Samuel,” Sam adds in grudging agreement. Though the memory sends a spike of worry through him right as he thinks it. “Shit,” he lets out under his breath, “do we tell Mom about Samuel?”
“No,” Dean says immediately, before getting back to his original point. “And my body wasn’t actually down in Hell either. It was rotting in a fucking hole in the ground.”
Sam can’t curtail a wince at the bluntness of his brother’s words. “Jesus, Dean.”
“But it still happened, y’know?”
Sam lets out a long sigh. Dean does have a point. And it does let him breathe a little easier, strangely enough. “Yeah,” he agrees softly.
They both sit there for a long stretch of time, comfortable silence wrapping around them like an old, worn-in blanket from the Impala’s trunk. “I’m sorry, Sam,” Dean says after a while. “If that means anything.”
“Me too.” And it does feel better, Sam has to admit, lancing the wound like that. Getting it out there so he never has to talk about it again.
“So…are you doing okay?” he brings up after another moment.
“Well I really regret not killing her now,” Dean spits, low and bitter. “But, to be honest, I was kind of regretting that the moment it happened.” He cracks his knuckles in his lap, tensing and un-tensing his fists. “What about you?” he asks flatly. “Having any more trouble with seeing shit that isn’t there? You got a tiny British woman hanging over your shoulder instead of Lucifer this time?”
Sam can’t help but let out a small laugh at the gallows humor. “Nah, nothing that bad.” He picks at his dirty fingernails for a bit, and then decides to tell the whole truth. “I just…wonder if it’s real sometimes. All of this.” He waves a hand around to encompass the both of them. “It’s not as bad as last time though. Just kinda feels too good to be true. You being alive. Mom too.”
Dean reaches out to pluck Sam’s left hand out of the air, trailing his fingers over the skin of his palm—whole and unmarked again after Cas had fixed the damage he had done with that shard of mirror. His brother still traces the phantom edges of his old scar though, the jagged hook that used to reside there. “You just gotta remember all that shit I said before, right? That I’m the…” Dean squints a little, lines deepening at the corners of his eyes. “What did I call it again?”
“Stone number one,” Sam answers easily.
His brother makes a face at the quick response. “Did I really say that? God, that’s fucking lame. How do you remember that?”
The smile that spreads over Sam’s face feels real this time. “It helped.”
Dean rolls his eyes playfully, incongruous with the scenery around them—and the conversation they’re having. “Well, then I’m stone number one, okay?” he says. “And rock number forty. And all the other ones in between. I’m a whole fucking mountain of boulders.” Then he digs his thumbnail right into the center of Sam’s palm. Just enough to sting. “You feel that?”
“Yeah.” Sam’s voice is a little throaty, but he gets the words out.
“That’s real.”
He nods his head. “Yeah,” he says again.
“Different than Hell.”
“Sharper,” he agrees quietly.
Dean catches his eyes, honest curiosity in his gaze. “Different than Lady Bitch of Bitchminster’s spell?”
Sam smiles again. “Yeah, it is.”
Dean leans back against the wall with a self-satisfied nod. “Alright. Good.” He lets Sam’s hand go and laces his own together over his lap. Sam wraps his elbows around his bent knees, somewhat mirroring his brother’s pose. “So, you have to pinch yourself every once in a while to prove you’re not dreaming,” Dean recaps lightly. “That’s not too bad. Anything else?”
Sam bites at the inside of his cheek to stall for time, scrapes at his jeans a bit with his fingers. “It made me...not wanna do anything like that for a while.”
“‘That’ being enjoyable, vanilla sex?”
He drops his head onto his crossed arms at the ridiculousness of their lives. “Yeah.”
“Okay then,” Dean says easily. The same way he always does. Bending over backwards to make everything easier for him. “Though we could maybe still…” Dean lets out an awkward sigh as he trails off. “You want it to hurt a little?” he offers quietly, a last-ditch attempt at a solution. “We could go the other way with it.”
Sam shakes his head. As shoved down and locked away as the Cage memories are, it still doesn’t take too much to dredge them back up again. And understandably, those are even worse than what he’s currently dealing with. “No,” he mumbles into his forearms, trying not to pity himself too much. Though pain has unfortunately become somewhat of a lifeline for him in regards to his ever-more-necessary reality checks, it has pretty much the opposite effect in the bedroom—dragging his mind back into the Pit, and into things he has no interest in reliving. “I mean, I still might be able to do some stuff,” he mentions tentatively. “She didn’t have long enough to ruin everything.”
Dean reaches out to stroke a gentle hand over the back of his head for a while, then he wraps his fingers around the ends of his hair and tugs a little bit. “What a sadistic fucking bitch, huh?”
The absurdity of it all has Sam snorting out a smothered laugh into his own arms. Dean isn’t referring to the torture, or the knife wounds, or even the “S’mores foot” as he so eloquently called it earlier. He’s pissed off at what she did when she wasn’t hurting him.
So is Sam, really.
“So no sex, huh?” Dean says eventually. Then there’s another long pause until Sam tilts his head to look up into his brother’s eyes, almost gray in the low moonlight, but still so clear. “Maybe we…maybe we take a break for a little while.”
And Sam’s heart cracks in half even as he’d just been about to suggest the same thing. “Yeah,” he says listlessly, “that makes sense.”
Dean sucks in a short breath. “Look, it doesn’t mean—”
“I know.”
“It’s just, considering Mom and all…”
“I know.”
Sam stares at his brother for a moment longer, weighing the potential risks to figure if it’s worth asking Dean for one last kiss. Then he wonders how pathetically self-pitying it is to be considering it a ‘last’ anything at all, even in the privacy of his own mind. Like some overdramatic teenage girl.
He worms his way under Dean’s arm instead, resting his head against his chest and savoring the solid thump of his brother’s heartbeat under his ear. His slight whisper of fear melting away as Dean lets him without even a cursory grumble about cuddling.
Sam doesn’t care about the sex, not really. He just…still wants the rest of it. Wants to fall asleep with his face pressed into Dean’s neck. Wants to drape himself over his brother’s back as he watches him cook. Wants to walk into the library late at night, slide the stack of research books away, and know that Dean will kiss him for it, arms heavy around his shoulders and callous-rough hands tracing circles against his scalp. But he can’t have it. He knows he can’t. And he wouldn’t ask that of Dean, not with things the way they are. Dean’s not worried that their mom might walk in on them fucking—or, maybe he is—but he’s more worried about slipping up in other ways. It was hard enough when Kevin was living with them, and the kid barely left his room. There’s no way Mary wouldn’t notice even the slightest aberration in their supposedly fraternal relationship. She’s a hunter. She was good at it. Probably will be again once she finally gets the hang of the whole internet thing.
And Sam gets where Dean’s coming from, he does. He doesn’t think they ever would have started anything if John hadn’t died when he did. Dean wouldn’t have been able to do that while their dad was still around. Fucking him being too against his brother’s Prime Directive or something. Like sex is a betrayal of the ‘Take Care of Sammy’ mandate stamped into his soul, instead of just a natural extension of it. Sam’s been willing and desperate since he was sixteen fucking years old, no matter who cared to know about it, but Dean can’t get past the guilt sometimes. Sam knows that. And he understands. He just hates that life isn’t ever fair. Dean gets him, or he gets his mom…but not both. Never both. Not in full. Because the world is an ungrateful fucking bitch. They’ve saved the whole stupid planet more than anyone should ever have to. They just saved the goddamn sun, but that’s never fucking enough, is it? They get a family, or they get each other. Take your pick. Them’s the rules.
And Sam could never drag Dean away from a chance at a family. Not in a million years.
Sam wiggles in a little closer, knowing that the instant he pulls away they’re gonna have to finish digging up this grave. Then they’re gonna have to burn the body of another child, and then go back to the motel and to a mother who smiles at Sam like she’s trying to love a stranger. This might be the last chance at intimacy they get for a long time, tucking their relationship into the back seat for as long as Mary is riding shotgun. Sam twists his head a little until he can make out the blade of Dean’s jaw, tense and tight above him, and Sam knows that it means his brother is thinking the exact same thing. Which means they’re both gonna be in pissy moods for the rest of the night, and he hasn’t even brought up the subject of Mom yet the way he wanted to. He’s going to have to, at some point, and Dean’s sure as hell gonna snap at him for it.
“Still,” Sam finally says, nuzzling into the jacket under his cheek and breaking the easy silence, “it’s all worth it, right?” He pulls in a breath, the scent of dirt and sweat and Dean’s skin. “Having Mom back?”
There’s a slight pause as Dean digests his words. Just a little too long. “Yeah,” he says eventually. He tilts his head back and stares up at the sky through the open grave, but there’s a sadness in his smile. “Totally worth it.”