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Dean’s hands were trembling on the steering wheel.
At points, there would be lights on the road. Sam’s brother’s face a suddenly lit window. He was more pale than Sam would like; white-faced in all directions. Eyes creased in focus, raw mouth corners, the split lip, abrasions on the side of his face and dark circles around his wrists. Sam could’ve traced it all back to something that had happened to Dean, but in truth, there was always something, some pain. Half his face coated in blood one night, a blackened bruise on his forehead the other, and Sam would never know what it meant, what it had done underneath.
Dean’s hands were shaking.
Something in Sam tightened then. It was the same sort of thing that turned into anger some days, a sickening worry the other; the same coil in him that breathed more shallow in the Impala’s air, that demanded out, out, out!, the same thing that put that sick fear into Dean’s eyes, the please, man, hey, please, I’m begging you, please, please, the thing that drove Sam out the door anyway, away.
Since Dad’s death—since the crash, maybe—or before that, since they don’t need you like you need them, since Dean bleeding out and begging, begging—the coil in Sam’s chest had wound tight, so tight. Hard, painful there. He kept it pushed down, kept pushing Dean, until—well.
He didn’t know if he regretted it, not letting his brother keep himself locked tight, but the coil in him, the tension… His brother had said And I should have stayed dead and a sadness had slammed into Sam’s chest that he couldn’t explain, something that had maybe always been there, pressing on him, on the coil, and Dean—Dean was heavy, melancholy in a way he would never admit to, Dean could not be left alone with a demon at a crossroads, Dean could not be left alone with anything, least of all himself, Dean was tired, and how long could you keep this worry up until it killed you? Really? Worry was just another push at tension, which was anger, and Sam needed to get away. Sam’s fate, and Dean interpreted it as a burden on his own shoulders, always, and Sam wasn’t even allowed to blame him, because Dean thought he deserved it, because it wasn’t Dean who had put it there.
But Dad was dead. There were still so many fights to be fought with him but he’d died instead, and—
The worst thing about Dean, maybe, was that you couldn’t argue with him about anything important. Sam had tried, and it always turned Dean into Dad, into a shadow that you could never grasp, you’d only hit the wall behind. Or if not into Dad, it turned Dean inside out; all the protective layers gone, leaving someone you could hurt just by stepping too close. And it wasn’t fair. Sam’s anger had been heavy in his chest since he was nine years old, .45 clutched in his hand, staring at the closet, Dean smiling at him like Doesn’t Dad make everything better? turning around to the light in the living room, realizing, somehow, he’d got it all wrong. Dean didn’t know everything. He didn’t think guns were all that heavy.
All that anger, where was it supposed to go? His brother just crumpled. His brother thought he should be dead and acted like he already was. He couldn’t be argued with, so Sam left out that part and left, as was his right, and wondered, sick to his stomach with fury, what it would make Dean into. Dad again? Or that inside-out beating heart?
In that moment, Sam had barely been able to hear it: Code: I’ve got a gun to my head. You ditched me. There was blame, but Dean had known he would come, which meant Dean had finally grown himself some object permanence: Sam wants me alive even when he leaves me.
It was all progress, in a way, because when Sam finally said, You can’t run from this. And you can’t protect me, and hated himself a little bit
(But I’m gonna die. And you can’t stop it.)
Dean said, I can try, and it didn’t feel like suffocating. It felt like a suddenly untightening screw, a loosening in Sam’s chest. Dean trying was Dean living, and Sam had forgotten that, maybe, for all of Dean’s faults, he had always lived for Sam yet. And inside-out or not, he’d always stayed through his anger, let their blood mingle. His hands were trembling on the steering wheel, but it was just another thing he couldn’t control. Sam would fault him for his choices, not for all the rest of it.