A/N: 12x03 = PAIN.

Rock salt leaves deep, dime-sized bruises. It stings and smarts and runs the whole gamut of colors, red-purple-yellow, but the point is, bruises heal.

Dean, though. He wasn't taking any chances. Couldn't pull that trigger. Couldn't risk that it would go wrong, that the salt would pierce where it should only bruise.

Because if there is something he's always known, it's that his mom is anything but permanent.

He can pull a trigger and she'll be gone, rock salt or no. He can take too long to kick down the door and she'll be frozen, ice instead of fire taking her this time, but always, always, starting with her heart.

She will be gone if he isn't careful. That's what he told himself on the kitchen floor, don't screw this up, Dean, don't show her the raw edges, don't tell her the bad parts, don't screw this up…

He was so careful, but she is still gone.

Somehow, Dean Winchester, left behind a hundred times, didn't take into account that she would leave him, too.

Sam knew.

But then, Sam always knows. Sam is the master strategist, the brains of the operation, and Sam learned from Dad to plan for every contingency, no matter how painful.

It's Dean who was blindsided, Dean who flew too high on something that felt like dreams come to life, Dean who believed he understood her for a moment, Dean who didn't ask for perfect, only for her.

But she wanted perfect, or something, and Dean has never been that.

It's been a tired life, always on the edge of shame. He thinks back to that awful first winter, the winter when he was still the little boy she remembers, overlong bangs and big eyes. He remembers Sam, small and helpless, but still too heavy for him to hold. And even then, he thinks, it set in, trying to be things he could never be. He grew up as fast as he could for Dad, for Sammy, but it was never fast enough. He is always chasing down what he's supposed to be, and he oversteps in that desperate eagerness.

It's an embarrassment. This is Dean, screwing up.

Maybe he could have said something different. Maybe there was something different to say. But she left Sam too, and Sam is so much better at knowing what to say.

Maybe, then, it wasn't so much them—maybe Dean isn't important enough in the grand scheme to have it be his fault—maybe it's the world. The world that doesn't know her, the world that is nothing like she remembers.

He is standing in the kitchen, because his room reminds him of her, and he is standing in the dark so that Sam won't find him. He can't talk to Sam, not right now. Sam's grief is too pure and incomplete. Sam saw and suffered the unexpected, an unknown mother reentering his life, and then leaving again.

But Dean spent all his life praying for this, praying for her, to only have her back again, and Dean was supposed to make this work. Come hell or heaven or the high waters that come with killing floods—Dean should have made this work.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Maybe it wasn't the contingency that needed planning—this is no contingency, it's a pattern. They all go away, because they must find perfection, somewhere, tangled up in horizon lines.

They all search for it, in revenge, in freedom, in time. Dad and Sam and Mom.

They all must leave him to find it.

Perfection, after all, is never found with Dean.