Title: Memento Vivere
Characters: Sam & Dean Winchester
Genre: Angst, H/C, Gen
Rating: T
Word Count: 5400+
Warnings/Spoilers: Spoilers for the last few episodes of S9, takes place immediately after last week's 9.15. Possible trigger warning for hinted adult themes such as lack of consent (ie. non-con) and everything that could go along with it.

I come from a long-established fandom (Star Trek) that sees mental violation as the equivalent of a serious physical crime, treats it as nothing less than mind-rape, and that's how I'm approaching the issue, although very obliquely. Nothing graphic, but the topic is danced around. I would never want to trigger anyone, so just be forewarned.

Oh, and my readers know I try to keep swearing out of my fics because I am aware of specific underage readers that I have, but it's impossible to write SPN without the odd TV-okay swear word, so be warned about those in advance.

Summary: After the events of #THINMAN, Sam finally decides to extend an olive branch of sorts to his "hunting partner." In the process, he finds that both he and Dean have old wounds that need to begin healing before they can fix what's broken between them now.

A/N: I am aware that I'm not the only one to write a fix-it for this season's issues, and by far not the best, as it's my first time writing in this fandom despite being a fan for quite a while. But I tend to lean toward fix-its/missing scenes, as any of my readers are well aware, and after a few weeks of debate I finally decided to give in to the muse in order to settle my own thoughts about what's currently happening between the brothers in S9 and the events that started that avalanche of angst and misunderstanding.

I wrote it for my own peace of mind in an effort to reconcile everything to my own satisfaction, but hopefully someone else can enjoy this take on it as well, although it certainly isn't the only interpretation of S9's events. I see both of them at fault, and both of them with equally valid points of view and equally valid reasons to be hurt, rather than one or the other as I've seen some people think – so just a warning that this is merely my opinion and not necessarily mainstream fandom's.

Disclaimer: If I owned them, my crossroads deal would be coming due next year.

The wobbly door to their motel room hasn't even shut before Sam is tossing the weapons duffel on the closest bed, which is still Dean's despite all the recent changes in their dynamics. He stalks over to turn the rattling heating unit up to ward against a chill he can't shake with any number of warm layers or cheap coffees.

The bag lands behind him with a vicious rattling of iron and steel that he knows will make his brother cringe in outrage, but Dean says nothing. The silence isn't unusual now, though in past years when Sam did something so careless, it earned him a slap upside the head (or a punch in the face, depending on the year and how much crap they were dealing with) and the by-now memorized admonishment about treating weapons properly, et cetera, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

But now, there is nothing.

Behind him, the brittle clink of hardware and rattle of bullets: Dean is silently removing the clips from their handguns. A whisper of fabric; placing the pieces on a dry cloth for cleaning. It is a familiar nightly routine, though in years past it's always been a joint effort, usually accelerated by the promise of imminent pizza and a late-night crappy horror movie. Recently, however, Dean has simply taken to cleaning the weapons himself, and Sam has let him, choosing instead to run to the convenience store or the gas station or the local diner – anything to escape the fragile silence of being in a room alone with his…hunting partner.

Now, Sam runs both hands through his hair, closing his eyes for a minute to decide if he wants to break the somewhat lukewarm truce they seemed to have reached earlier this evening.

But it is the shivering scrape of a knife against stone a moment later that wrings the decision from him, by producing the same gut-wrenching sense of helpless panic he thought he had left behind them at the old mill.

Dean doesn't even look up as he turns around, only continues to sharpen the knife he always keeps under his pillow except while in the Men of Letters bunker. A small part of Sam's mind, the part that even after so many years of disappointment still tries to see the best in people, reminds him that this is a nightly ritual for Dean, and that it isn't him trying to manipulate the approaching conversation or Sam's emotions.

The remainder of his mind, however, only churns up the resentment, hurt, anger, and sheer terror that have suddenly become too much to keep hidden under a veneer of wounded martyrdom.

He turns, hands still clenched in his hair, an unconscious childhood reflex to ease a mounting headache. Then, like the lid blowing off a sealed pressure cooker (and that was an experiment in his teens which Dad had thankfully never found out about), it all explodes with a force that he thinks probably surprises both of them.

"Dean, what the hell was that back there?" he nearly shouts, tone tempered only by the knowledge of thin motel walls.

Dean only raises an eyebrow, eyes looking everywhere but Sam's face. "You're gonna have to give me a little more than that," he drawls, with another measured scrape of the sharpening stone.

Sam kicks an errant water bottle out from underfoot as he rounds the corner of the far bed and sits on it, leaning forward with elbows on knees and hands clasped tightly in front of him. "You know exactly what I'm talking about, Dean. Back at the mill, when our bogus Thinman was about to slit your throat? Ringing any bells here?"

Dean's eyes roll in a familiar gesture of blatant annoyance, a far more common sight recently than it has ever been. "Sam, you have any idea how much I don't want to be having this conversation right now?" he inquires, inspecting the edge of the knife at eye level.

"Tough," he retorts, with enough heat that he at least earns two seconds of actual eye contact – more than he's had in the last three hours. "I have a right to know what was going through your head, Dean."

That produces a loud snort. "You have a right to know? I don't think it's in the contract that 'business partners' have to spill their guts to each other, Sam. Nice try." Dean returns to the task at hand, apparently finished with the conversation.

The sharpening stone scrapes over raw, open nerve endings now, and Sam gives the leg in front of him an impatient kick. "I have a right to know when anyone I'm working with has a death wish, Dean."

A tolerant, very condescending eyeroll this time, accompanied by a sigh that would have done his high school drama teacher proud. "Sam, seriously. I don't have a death wish. Our Nightmare on Freak Street had a knife to my throat. What exactly did you want me to do?"

"It was just a friggin' pair of handcuffs, man! I can name at least six or seven defense moves you could have used to take him out with your legs or the chair before the knife got anywhere near your neck! Moves that you taught me when I was, like, fifteen!"

"Sam, you're makin' a way bigger deal out of this than it needs to be. That thing was razor sharp, dude. You and I both know it's not smart to rush a psycho blind who's got everything to lose."

"You could have tried, Dean!" he bursts out even as he mentally curses how desperate he sounds, as that won't help his case at all. "You could have tried," he repeats more quietly, head lowered.

Dean's eyes flicker up at that, just for a fraction of a guilty second, and then slide away, back down to the scrape of knife on stone.

Something snaps inside him, and he lunges. "Would you stop that for just a minute?" he demands, yanking the stone out of surprised hands and flinging it without looking back onto the open duffel bag.

"Dude, what the hell?" Dean gapes at him, eyebrows crinkled in confusion. He sets the knife carefully on his pillow with one hand, catching Sam's retreating wrist with the other. "…Are your hands shaking? Why are your hands shaking?"

"Shut up." He yanks free, spitting the words more harshly than Dean deserves.

"You're the one who started this conversation, Princess. I'm totally good to end it right now."

"No." He leans forward, elbows on his knees once more, hands clenched together tightly between them for steadiness. He forces eye contact and holds it. "I need you to shut up and listen to me, Dean."

"Loud and clear, Houston," Dean replies dryly, using one hand to indicate the few inches of space separating them. "Kind of hard not to hear you."

"That's not what I said." He leans forward with intense sincerity. "I don't need you to hear me. I need you to listen to me, Dean."

Attuned to every gesture and twitch of the man opposite, Sam sees the first spark of anger burn in the far distance of his brother's eyes. Good. That is progress from the calm, detached apathy that has enabled him to keep up his righteous anger over a weeks-old event that he still can't quite let go.

But the spark is extinguished before it begins to burn, and Dean leans lazily back against the piled duffels behind him, offering the condescending smirk he knows Sam hates with every fiber of his being. "Seems to me, partner," and he spits the word out as if it's discount-store liquor, "that I've been doing an awful lot of listening to you, lately, and you've done an awful lot of talking. So excuse me if I don't really want to hear any more of Sam Winchester's Family Pep Talks."

Sam winces, scraping a hand down his face and exhaling slowly. "Ok, fair enough – I deserved that," he murmurs, and he thinks it's probably that admission more than his pleading expression that saves this trainwreck-in-progress.

Dean now regards him coolly, but without the façade of calm superiority. "Yeah, you did," he says pointedly.

Sam is silent, offering the opening gambit to a superior strategist, but his brother is not about to have mercy on him and simply stares back, daring him to continue.

He takes the plunge, because if nothing else he needs to leave this conversation making his brother at least understand; empathy is the first step to healing, and if you don't set a bone that's broken it will only mend incorrectly, crippling its host. With Heaven closed for business and Hell in chaos, the last thing the world needs is the two of them at odds with each other, or what's worse: not caring that they are.

"Look, Dean, I know what I said –"

"Oh, yeah. We both know what you said." Dean rolls his eyes upward, inspecting the water-stained ceiling. "Actually I dunno why you're so pissed at me not trying to take out Creepy McCreeperson with kung-fu and a chair, Sam. You said yourself, you wouldn't have done anything to stop him ganking me either, remember?"

Sam stares at him, genuine shock momentarily derailing his train of thought. "What?" he finally manages hoarsely. "Dean, what...that's not what I said. God, if that's what you heard…"

A knot of sickness burns deep in his gut, because he knows the fault lies with him for purposely choosing ambiguity as his weapon of choice against a man who deals firmly in black and white, good and evil. Comrade-in-arms and enemy. Purity and impurity.

Life and death.

His mounting horror must show on his face, because Dean's loses some of its harsh edges, and he sits up. They face each other, knee to knee, with the tiny table and so, so much distance between them.

"Okay," Sam begins slowly, "this is not the conversation I had planned, Dean. But – you have to know that's not what I meant, when I said I wouldn't have done what you did in order to keep you alive. That I would have let you die if our positions were reversed."

Dean's derision snaps the words like the weapons they are, shards of glass meant to cut deep and heal slow. "Well it seemed pretty damn clear what you meant, Sam. Tell me, how was I supposed to interpret that little gem of yours?"

Sam looks down at his hands, and then back up at his brother, earnestness giving intensity to his words. "I meant, if you were ready to go – if you wanted to go, and wanted to make sure you couldn't come back and nothing could bring you back – if you said you wanted to just finally be at peace, Dean…I'd let you go," he says softly. "Hell, man…I'd put a bullet in your head myself if you were dying painfully and you asked me to." He hopes Dean doesn't notice how his voice shakes (because he did do that, at least four out of those countless Tuesdays, and those are memories he wishes had stayed behind his broken Wall).

"I mean…dude. You've died, how many times? You spent forty years being tortured in Hell, and three fourths of that amount up top, spending every moment of your life having to babysit my ungrateful ass – why wouldn't I let you go?" The last word sticks for a fleeting second in his throat, but he continues. "You heard the angels all those years ago, Dean – the Righteous Man has a ticket straight upstairs this time around. And if that's what you wanted, then yeah. I wouldn't have let an angel possess you, if you were dying peacefully and wouldn't even know what was happening. I would have let you go, Dean."

Dean's eyes have lost some of their anger, but his face still betrays nothing, no indication that he even believes what Sam is saying.

"That doesn't mean, that I wouldn't try to stop you from bleeding out on a hunt, or that I wouldn't take down a Wendigo for you," he says earnestly. "I'd step in front of a bullet for you, Dean – I have, twice! God, how screwed up are we, that you'd think I meant I would stand back and watch a monster kill you?"

Dean has the grace to look slightly ashamed. But it isn't really his fault, and Sam will admit full responsibility for this one. Mea culpa, in a very big way; Sam's a scholar, a reader, a writer. He'd known exactly how hurtful the words would be, and how ambiguously they could be taken. He'd been angry, coldly and blindly furious, and wanted to get through to a man he didn't think was taking seriously enough, the consequences of his decisions.

And in the end, he was nothing more than a child wanting to hurt his older brother as badly as he had been hurt.

But that's another conversation; they need closure on this one first, because he can't stand the thought that Dean could have died tonight, thinking his baby brother was just going to sit back and watch him bleed.

"You still don't get it, do you. Why I didn't look for you when you were in Purgatory," he ventures quietly.

Dean's eyebrows and jaw clench at the word, a familiar defense mechanism Sam knows as well as his own tics and nervous tells. "You got out, Sam. Don't have to explain that to me, I get it. No, don't – I mean it, I really do get it. You deserve to be out of the life, man, if that's what you want."

"It's not what I want! Not what I wanted! And you never gave me a chance to explain! Every freaking time I brought it up you cut me off or changed the subject or – or that, you did that right there, where you just stop listening and are ten seconds from walking out the door to drown me out with a bottle and a bottle-blonde."

Defensive anger, deep resentment, burn in his brother's eyes, a fire that ignites every time this topic comes up. And, having seen the place not long enough ago…Sam shudders at the idea of living in that horrible, monstrous world for an entire year, doing whatever it took to survive. He can't blame Dean at all, for being furious about being left there for so long.

"Well, I'm listening now, Sam," his brother finally sighs, hands upraised with an air of you'd-better-be-grateful-I-am-being-magnanimous-enough-to-listen-to-you-little-brother that reminds him of arm wrestling and bandaids and broken arms and gummy bears and bubble fights in the bathtub. "So tell me, what is college-boy's good reason why he didn't look for me while I was in Purgatory? Because I gotta say, Sam, you could've at least found a way to send me some backup. So why didn't you?"

"Because I thought you were dead, Dean!" His thumb clenches unconsciously around his left palm, a gesture not lost on his brother, though he doesn't dare look at Dean for too long, not now. "The investigation showed that the explosion in the lab left behind traces of radioactivity, Dean – like a miniature, contained nuclear bomb had gone off in there! It's basic physical science! I thought you and Cas and Dick Roman were dead. Disintegrated into atoms. Much more efficient and complete than a salt and burn." He laughs bitterly at his own dark humor, as he still remembers, vividly, the terrifying loneliness of that horrible day.

"Sam…"

"There was no reason to think you'd gone to Purgatory, of all places," he adds, thankful that his voice is steady when he continues; this is an old hurt, but it is by no means healed, only scarred over. "It's not a place meant for humans, so why would I have even thought you or Cas could be there? For a month I interrogated demons to make sure you hadn't been waylaid and sent to Hell – and when they all swore you weren't there…yeah, Dean. I didn't look any further. I thought you were in Heaven, man. With Mom, and hopefully Dad, and I thought Bobby, and Cas…everyone you ever loved, and never got to have for as long as you should've."

He feels a hand on his knee, but he doesn't dare look up, doesn't want to see if Dean still has his doubts, still chalks that old wound up to his ever-growing tally of unforgivable offenses. "Why would I have looked for a way to get you back, Dean?" he asks, shaking his head wearily. "I would never have dragged you back to this, this craphole of a world, no matter how much it hurt to be the only one left."

"Sam…" Dean sounds wrecked.

"You were stone number one, Dean, and then all of a sudden I was the only one left. I wasn't any good to anyone, just a mentally damaged hunter accustomed to working as half of a team. I was a danger to myself and anyone I hunted with, because they weren't you, and they had no idea how to handle my brand of crazy." He absently flexes the fingers of his scarred hand. "Selfish as I am, even I wouldn't drag you back here when I thought you were in Heaven, so yeah. I got out."

The hand on his knee tightens almost painfully. "God, Sammy…why didn't you just tell me this when I came back?"

It's the first emotion other than depression he's heard from his brother since Gadreel left the building weeks ago, and it eases the pain but not the blame, for leaving his brother in Hell's backyard for a year.

"No, don't answer that. You didn't tell me because I didn't give you a chance. That's on me, Sam. And I'm sorry."

"You don't need to apologize, dude. I just…that's basically what I meant when I said what I did about Gadreel's possession if our positions were reversed, Dean," he answers simply, finally chancing a look at his visibly troubled brother. "But I know I didn't say it like that at all, and I did that on purpose – to hurt you."

Dean shrugs. "Can't blame you there. Eye for an eye, man. You've got every right to be pissed for the rest of your life at me. I get it, Sam, I do – power of attorney, issues of consent and all that." He swallows uneasily, but doesn't look away, and Sam as always respects his bravery in facing his own mistakes. "Does it make it any better if I promise you, Sam, if you'd actually been brain-dead…I wouldn't have done it?"

Sam blinks. "…You don't get that either, do you? You don't get what the worst part of it was."

Dean cocks his head slightly. "Uh…renting out Lucifer's vacation home to a new tenant without your permission sound familiar to you?"

Sam stifles a hysterical giggle at the idea that their lives are such that they can make statements like that without batting an eye, but he pushes onward, because if they have any hope of even patching – not mending, they will have to settle for patching – this relationship…they have to communicate, and he's always been the one to talk it out instead of bottling it up inside like his brother.

"It's not the angel possession, Dean, that bothers me the most," he says quietly, hands clenched again in front of him. "Gadreel was pathetically easy to cast out. I mean, come on – I took control of an archangel in my mind at full strength, and Gadreel never once harmed me or my mind like Lucifer did, I'll give him that much.

"It's not even that, if you'd explained it to me inside my head instead of tricking me – I probably would have agreed to it, I probably would have trusted you enough to let him in. I can see everything Gadreel saw, Dean – I saw myself inside my head make the choice to live because of you. But that addendum? I didn't consent to that."

Dean's jaw clenches again at the word consent, and Sam knows he's grasping the fringe of the idea. "I need you to hear me, Dean," he says earnestly, leaning forward to make sure his brother hears him. "I need you to understand why I said those things…why I'm not sure we can ever be okay again. You left me on that bridge after we got rid of Gadreel because you didn't want to stick around long enough to listen to me."

"I'm listening now." The words are perfectly calm, but he knows his brother well enough to see that he's expertly hiding how upset he really is.

"The worst thing, Dean?" He looks away with a shake of the head, a self-deprecating, bitter smile. "The worst thing was you."

"Figures. I get it."

"No, you don't, not yet – if you did, you would understand what's broken here." He looks back, meeting his brother squarely. "All my life, Dean, you've told me – as a little kid, after every fight with Dad, after Jess and after my psychic powers started messing with my head, after Dad died, after I broke open the Cage, even last year with the trials – you've always, always told me that you're my big brother. That while you're around, nothing bad would ever happen to me."

Dean can't quite hide the pain that evokes, but Sam has to continue, to make him understand. "And that's what hurts the most," he says softly. "Do you understand, Dean? What hurts the most, is that my brother didn't just let something happen to me without my consent – it's that you…you didn't just stand by while it happened, you helped plan it, and basically lured me into it.

Dean, it's like – it would be like you roofied me, left me in a hotel room somewhere, called a demon to tell them where I was, and then opened the door when they got there. You might as well have held me down while you were at it."

He sees the exact instant Dean hears the implications of what he's trying to say a little more delicately, because his calm, impassive, I've-been-to-Purgatory-and-lived-to-talk-smack-about-it big brother goes white as a ghost, and stumbles to his feet to get some physical and mental distance from the discussion.

Sam stays quiet, knowing Dean processes things differently than he does – he's the talker and Dean, despite his cracks about Sam's geekiness, Dean's the thinker. Now, his brother puts both hands heavily on the flimsy table by the bar, and leans heavily on them for a few seconds, eyes closed and head bowed low.

"I know it wasn't a physical violation, Dean, and yeah – I'm probably overly sensitive about this particular topic, given Lucifer and everything. But…it feels like…"

"Feels like I…" Dean's voice is harsh with pain, and it stalls momentarily before continuing. "Like I tied you up and let a predator –"

"Don't," he cuts the sentence off sharply before Dean can say the words he purposely avoided. "It's not that serious," he adds gently, because his brother looks legitimately ten seconds away from losing it – a display both of them will hate him for tomorrow if he lets it go that far. "But I just…I need you to understand why I was that angry, that hurt, that I took it out on you by phrasing things lately the way I knew full well they'd hurt you the most. I knew what I was doing, and it was below the belt, man. And for that, I'm sorry."

"Sam, if you apologize for anything –"

"Okay. All right," he interrupts gently, because even his anger can't stand up against the extremely rare sight of his big brother so visibly upset that he doesn't even try to hide the fact that there's a suspicious drop of moisture on the table under his bowed head.

Dean's choked laugh sounds a lot more like a sob, as he squares his shoulders and turns around. "Sam, this is so far from okay…" he trails off helplessly, making an ambiguous hand gesture before returning to pinch the bridge of his nose, dragging the hand slowly down to his mouth. He finally shakes his head, helpless, and falls silent.

Sam stands to meet him on level ground, arms folded loosely across his chest. "That's what I've been trying to tell you, Dean," he says matter-of-factly. "My head knows what you did, why you did it, what you were thinking when you did it – and I get it, man, I do. I don't like it, but I at least understand. But it's not so easy to convince the rest of me, that my big brother didn't knowingly let someone hurt me while he stood by and watched. I mean…if this is how you felt when I was soulless, and let you get turned by that vampire – I can't believe you'd ever forgive me for that."

"Wasn't you."

"We'll never agree on that, but okay," he answers gently. "This is, I guess, basically the same thing."

"It's worse," Dean mutters hoarsely, staring aimlessly at the floor.

"Like I said, we disagree. But anyway, I just needed you to understand where I was coming from, if we have any hope of salvaging…us," he adds, waving a hand generally between the two of them.

Dean frowns incredulously at him. "There's an us?" he asks, clearly in disbelief. "If there wasn't before, there dead sure isn't now. Like you told that kid tonight…some things aren't forgivable."

"Yeah…but I didn't say this was one of those things, Dean."

"Wouldn't blame you if you thought it was, kiddo. I screwed up…God, I screwed up, Sammy! I didn't even know how bad until tonight."

More to give his brother a second to pull himself back under control than anything else, Sam' gaze wanders back to the bed. The gleam of lamplight on silver glints dangerously off the knife on Dean's pillow. When he looks back, Dean is quirking an eyebrow, not following his train of thought.

"I thought you were going to die tonight, Dean," he says bluntly. "I couldn't do anything to stop it – and you weren't going to even try. And…" he clears his throat in embarrassment, because even for him this is spilling way too much, but he might as well finish. "…well, I know family's always been everything to you, Dean – it's all you've ever had. And all I could think about was that you were going to die thinking you didn't have anyone who wanted you still here."

Some color – a flush of guilt – seeps back into his brother's face, and he knows the blow struck painfully on target.

"I said some things aren't forgivable, Dean – and to be honest, I don't know if I can or ever will forgive you. Not for this. I trust you with my life, man; I just don't know if I can trust you with my death, not anymore." It's harsh, but it's the brutal truth, right now at least.

Dean nods silently, his expression fading back into that façade of strong silence he likes to hide behind. He looks resigned, accepting – as if it's no more than he had expected, no more than he deserves. Sam's seen that look far too often in the last few weeks, and to know that he put it there is more upsetting than he will admit yet, even to himself.

Sam takes a step forward.

"But I'm willing to try and forget, until I figure out if I can forgive," he says quietly. "If you can accept that from me, Dean, I want to try."

His brother suddenly looks like his ten-year-old self, when Sam came home from first grade on Valentine's Day and handed him a messy pile of pink glitter and red pompoms because, as the card said in eloquent scrawl, Ms. Peterson saz you give valentimes to the peeple you love so hear Dean.

"Look, man, I'm not innocent in this either, and we both know it," Sam admits with a shrug. "I've been so busy being the martyr, trying to stay pissed at you and trying to make you hurt like you hurt me every chance I get…I've lost sight of what really matters, you know? You and me, and the rest of the world can go to hell around us."

Dean nods, his eyes still betraying a tiny flicker of hope.

"I mean…" Sam glances away for a second, gathering nerve, and then looks back almost shyly from under the hair that has flopped over part of his face. "I know what it's like to make a really stupid decision because you think you're doing the right thing, trusting the right people, because you care too much about someone. Difference is you didn't start the Apocalypse with yours, dude. And Ruby was a lot hotter than Gadreel."

Dean chuffs a strangled laugh.

"You killed my demons, Dean, in more ways than one. You help me put a blade in that angel, and I'll do my best to forget why we're going after him. So." He squares his shoulders, and unfolds his arms. "Can we work with that?"

"Yeah," Dean rasps, lips quirking faintly to one side. "Yeah, we can work with that."

His brother holds out a hesitant hand to shake on it, and Sam uses it to pull him into a very brief, very weird, one-armed pat on the back that probably makes things more awkward than they had to be; but hey, nobody can say he isn't at least making an effort.

Dean looks so relieved it's almost sad when they step back a moment later, and Sam is slightly surprised to find that he's actually happy to have put his brother's mind at some kind of ease. He hadn't realized just how much this was eating them both up inside until now, with the air cleared a little and possibly, just possibly, hope waiting on the horizon.

"Now," he says dryly. He hasn't let go yet of Dean's right hand, and now raises his brother's arm in the air with it. "Let's talk about what a dumbass idea this was, huh? The friggin' Mark of Cain, Dean? When exactly were you planning on telling me what it is? And did you even think about how you're gonna get it off after you kill Abaddon, without passing the Curse onto someone else? Do you even have any idea what the curse is?"

"Um. Well…no. Was kinda busy at the time, Sam."

"Good thing your little bro is a Man of Letters then, isn't it? You think I've just been sitting in that library writing in my diary about our relationship problems for the past few weeks?"

Dean smiles then, a real smile, the kind that crinkles the corners of his eyes, makes him look five years younger and two decades happier.

They're not good, they're really not even okay – but they can still be family, that much Sam is sure of, because nothing less would have scared him as badly as a psychopath with a knife did tonight. And now?

Now they have a world to save, a Blade to find, Knight of Hell to kill, a Heaven to unlock…

Oh, and a pretty awesome bunker to return to.

"Let's go home, Dean," he says, and for the first time in his life he actually means every word.

He knows it will have to start small, but that's okay; he can do small, like generously putting his gum wrappers in his coat pocket instead of the floor of the Impala.

And if Dean comes out of a gas station in Colorado with bottled water and a box of fruit snacks instead of a three-pound bag of M&M's and a giant Slurpie this time around, well, he's obviously trying too. (The fruit snacks are shaped like superhero logos.)

Sam offers to drive the next stretch so that Dean can sleep.

Dean agrees, surprisingly, and chucks the box of snacks at Sam's head through the open window.

Sam scowls but slides over the bench seat while his brother pumps gas.

Dean yells at him for taking a set of speed bumps too fast on their way out of town.

Sam spins the radio dial until he hears a Katy Perry song and leaves it there.

Dean puts on his noise-canceling headphones and sprawls against the window.

Sam licks an entire packet of fruit snacks and sticks them to Dean's face while he sleeps.

It's not much; but then, they've always been pretty good at making do with what little they have.