When Dean walks away, he makes it look like the obvious, rational thing to do.

“I’m beat,” he says, when he’s sure Eileen’s looking at him; and then he simply grabs his phone, which had been on the table, screen up, and gets to his feet.

That’s the thing about Dean: he’s a superb conman, and Sam’s been jealous for years of how easily and gracefully his brother can lie to anyone, but at the same time - when Dean really cares, there’s always something off, and maybe other people (maybe Eileen) can’t see that, but Sam - yes, there it is - a stolen glance to his phone, and it’s not possible, no way, that Cas should have called without either of them noticing, since Dean’s kept the damn thing right next to his glass the whole evening, and then something even subtler - a barely there assessment of the way Eileen’s leaning towards Sam (of the way Sam’s leaning back). There is nothing in Dean’s eyes that Sam can see - no happiness, no disapproval - but, then again, it’s been a long day, and they’re all tired to their bones.

(And the fact Dean’s leaving, going to bed well before midnight, is a real loud way of saying what he thinks about the two of them, anyway.

Not that there is a two of them.)

Sam clears his throat, looks down at his hands, suddenly embarrassed, almost annoyed. It’s not that he doesn’t like Eileen, but something about Dean knowing about it - he has a flash of a dusty afternoon in New Mexico, of Dean driving up to his school, a small crowd of kids forming around Sam and Jean, because the Impala’s big and shiny and cocksure, and it’s a miracle, really, that they can get away driving it, that barely anyone’s tracked them - he remembers Dean slowing down, then stopping, Dean turning down his loud as fuck music just a hint, just enough to look Jean up and down and smile at her and say, You treat my baby brother right, you hear me? and Sam - Sam had planned to kiss her goodbye, like he always did, but it was suddenly too hot, and everybody was staring, so he’d just -

“Just - don’t worry too much, okay?” Dean says, jolting Sam out of the memory. “It was a mistake.”

He brings his hand up and tries to imitate the sign Sam used earlier, but he’s a bit tipsy by now, and he’s also not sure about which finger goes where, because Sam’s been using about a dozen different signs over the last hour, and Dean’s mixing them up. In the end, he sighs in frustration and makes a Spock salute at them both before disappearing down the corridor.

“What was that?” Eileen asks, and Sam grins.

“Live long and prosper? Star Trek?”

“Never saw Star Trek.”

“You never - come on.”

“Not my fault you’re a nerd,” Eileen, moving two fingers in front of her face as if in blessing.

Sam shakes his head at her and smiles, but it’s an empty kind of thing, because everything is seriously wrong - again - and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it. He thinks about Cas, wonders if he should try to pray to him again, and then about that desperate something in Mick’s eyes as he’d pointed that gun at them.

Fuck - why are things always such a mess?

“I should probably get some sleep too,” Eileen says, and so they walk together - Sam shows her where the bathroom is, is taken aback by how bleak and impersonal the room is - not that Eileen says anything, but still - it’s sad. Jess had framed some of her watercolor flowers so that the door would bloom in reds and blues, and Amelia used to have all those silly things - dog-shaped soaps and cat-shaped mirrors and curtains with birds and bees and ladybugs all over them.

“They’re gifts,” she’d said, when she’d first showed Sam around, because he’d been trying to keep a straight face, but yeah. “This is what happens to veterinarians - thank God I can keep the worst of it back at the practice.”

It was only after Mom had gone (again, and this time probably for good) that Sam had realized how much he’d been looking forward to her changing up this place - making it less of a Batcave and more into - into the kind of home Sam had left behind, possibly forever, when he’d chosen Dean over Amelia. Standing there with Eileen, a hand on the bathroom handle, he suddenly understands how unfair and backward that wish of his had been - women don’t automatically come with scented soaps and fluffy towels, and those are things he could buy himself, anyway. He’s a grown-ass man, after all.

“Sorry it’s so - basic,” he says in the end, looking down at Eileen, and she sort of smiles at him.

“I grew up without running water,” she replies, her voice echoing a bit weirdly in the empty room. “I don’t mind.”

***

Twenty minutes later, Sam’s still thinking about that. He feels he knows Eileen, but, of course, he doesn’t. He didn’t know about that water thing, for instance, and that seems like important information.

Or maybe it isn't.

What does Eileen know about him, after all? Sam’s messaged her often, but most of it has been - Sam doesn’t even know. Feeling like a lovesick teenager and hating it, he sits up, gets his phone, turns it on again. As he scrolls through his whatsapp conversations with Eileen, something messy and thorny settles low in his stomach, because, come on - it’s mostly information about the lore, stuff she’d needed or asked about that Sam had found for her in some old book or other - and, Jesus Christ, there are bubbles and bubbles full of weather nonsense - How’s Arizona? Sam had once asked, and even We’ve had some rain here for the first time in forever - what’s wrong with him? Seriously, he needs to change his password more often - if Dean found out about this, he’d never shut up about it.

You treat my baby brother right, you hear me? says Dean’s voice again, and Sam knows Dean wasn’t really talking to Jean - he’d found some condoms in Sam’s backpack only the night before, and Sam had lunged at him to get them back, embarrassed and angry and ready for whatever bullshit his jackass brother would choose to throw at him, and instead - instead Dean had given them back without a fight, a strange expression on his face. Sam had felt Dean’s eyes on his back as he walked back to the desk and started stuffing his notebooks and calculator and battered pencil box into the backpack, but had not looked around until Dean had crowded him against the desk, pushed a forgotten Lord of the Flies essay in his hand. You treat her right, you hear me? he’d said, in a low voice, and there had been so much stuff in his voice - unwilling pride and some kind of sadness and a barely restrained, swallowed down affection - that Sam had just nodded, words like Yeah and I know tumbling out of his mouth.

And three weeks later, in the unfamiliar darkness of a new motel room, Sam had found himself saying, out of the blue, Jean and I - we didn’t - you know and Dean had been silent for a long time before admitting, softly, I, uhm, I was sixteen and it was still a mess. Don’t rush it. They’d never talked about it since, and even those two sentences in the middle of nowhere - it couldn’t be termed a conversation even if you wanted to be generous about it, and yet - Sam remembers it like it was yesterday, the huge weight off his chest, because he’d been fifteen back then and it was becoming more and more difficult to fit in anywhere and girls - everybody talked about girls, all the time, including his infinitely cooler older brother, the full-time hunter, because Dean had left school by then, and he was cockier and more annoying than ever, collecting scars and women like there was no tomorrow, and Sam - he’d always felt like such a loser, and Dean would tease him about girls and Dad would shake his head and laugh, low and proud, whenever Dean was given a phone number scrawled on some napkin, or disappeared through the back door while Sam perfected some pool move and tried to do the physics in his mind, just to keep his brain busy. And so, well - the idea that Dean had waited until he was sixteen to actually do it, and wished he’d waited longer - that had changed everything. Turned the pressure way down, and all.

Sam reaches over, puts the phone on the bedside table and turns the lamp off. He’s still dressed, but whatever - it won’t be the first time he sleeps in his jeans.

It’s strange, knowing there’s a woman in the Bunker.

Or maybe it’s just because he likes Eileen -

(There: he said it.

He likes Eileen.)

- and the shitty day they’ve had doesn’t help any.

Maybe he should make sure Dean’s okay, actually - it’s been weeks since they’ve heard from Cas, and Dean’s been moody and worried the whole time.

Then again, Dean hates being looked after. For some reason, Sam thinks, with a hint of resentment, it’s okay for him to baby Sam to the moon and back, but God forbid someone should actually check -

Sam forces himself to stretch back into his pillow and let it go. His brother’s always been a mother hen, and he means well. No use getting upset.

Also, he’s usually right. Sam had told him over and over again he was over that Lucifer thing and that hunting down the guy was just a job like any other, but, yeah, he’d been lying, and Dean -

Without even realizing he’s doing it, Sam closes his left hand into a fist, then passes his right thumb over the scar on his palm.

Lucifer is gone. Lucifer is gone, and they’ve got enough on their plate as it is.

Like, what if they send Ketch after Eileen? Sam wants to think Mick is on their side now, but the truth is, he just doesn’t know.

His room was never all that big, but now it’s closing in on him, and Sam - it’s some sort of defeat, but maybe a cup of tea or some fresh air or something will help him, distract him from these stupid thoughts and useless fears.

(Hell, what about the stash of pot Dean keeps inside an empty sardines tin?)

As he walks down the corridor, he stops in front of Eileen’s door for a second, but all is quiet. He half expects to find Dean in the kitchen, though, and when he sees the lights are still on, he kind of braces himself against this dance they always do when they find each other moving around the Bunker in the middle of the night, because it’s never clear if pretending to be alright and whole is even helping anyone, but as he steps into the room, Eileen is there, and Sam breathes out, both relieved and anxious. She’s still fully dressed, like him, and she’s holding an empty cup against her chest, her eyes fixed on the metal shelves (salt, bean and tuna cans, water bottles and - if Dean’s not stolen it - a huge pot of homemade jam Sam’s bought on a whim and hasn’t opened yet).

Sam’s not sure if Eileen’s seen him or not, so he stops by the door and sort of knocks on the wall to make his presence known. She startles, her right hand halfway to the back of her pants before she realizes she won’t need to defend herself.

“Did I wake you up?” she asks, and then, before he can answer, she signs a short I’m sorry and moves to put the cup in the sink.

“No, I couldn’t sleep,” Sam says, once she’s facing him again.

They stand there, a bit awkwardly, and something in her expression reminds Sam of how pleasant her body had been against his; of how long it’s been since he’s made love to a woman, and how very desperately he wants to kiss her.

He steps back from the feeling, because they’re friends and they’re probably not going there and if they are, this is not the moment to change anything between them. He passes a hand through his hair instead, pushing it back, and then asks, pretending he’s doing it for her sake, “What do you need? What can I do to help?”

She looks away, then back at him.

“I miss home,” she says. “I want -”

She signs something, way too fast, seemingly without realizing Sam won’t get it, and then she lets her hands fall down again, shakes her head.

“I’m being stupid,” she adds. “Never mind.”

“Do you want to see my home?” Sam asks, without meaning to, and she looks at him curiously. “Not the Bunker, I mean -”

There’s nothing after that. Eileen doesn’t really know how much Sam cares about Baby - Sam’s been making fun of Dean behind his back for years with anyone who’d listen, because come on, and Eileen’s no exception, but the thing is, Dean is right. Baby is not just any car. But explaining how and why in a non insane way would mean touching upon all those topics Sam hasn’t really mentioned yet - their childhood, and the endless string of motel rooms, and Sam sitting inside the parked car, coloring books becoming Roald Dahl books and then Shakespeare and calculus homework, as John stood to one side and barked orders at Dean, unsettingly disembodied, his boots planted on the ground, his torso swallowed up by five thousand pounds of steel and metal as he fixed some stubborn thing their father’s hands couldn’t quite grasp (alcohol will do that to you, and they both saw it and they both wondered about it, Sam knows - he’d caught Dean glancing down at John’s hands as they shook, only just, around a cigarette John was rolling up, and he’d seen John himself curse at it, open and close his hands into fists, and what would happen on the day John couldn’t hold his gun steady?).

No, Eileen doesn’t know, not all of it, not what counts, and Sam can hardly bear to think about it now, not with Lucifer on the loose and another kid dead on their watch. Without actually realizing he’s come to a decision, he crosses the room in three long steps (Eileen doesn’t move out of the way; she just watches him) and he reaches up, palms the tin containing Dean’s secret stash.

“What do you say?” he asks, feeling fourteen again as he opens the thing and shows her what’s inside.

She eyes the contents of the box for a full minute, and then makes a strange face, half mischief, half exasperation.

“I’ll join you,” she says, “on one condition.”

“Which is?”

“I want to see your home.”

So there's no escape from it and it’s stupid and too much and not nearly enough, but Sam still shrugs his shoulders in agreement and grabs the half empty bottle of whiskey from the table as he walks away, leading her to the garage.

This is a bad idea, he thinks as they get there, because the place is empty and dark and slightly threatening and it doesn’t improve much even when Sam finds the switch and turns the lights on, but Eileen’s still following him, so he goes all the way to the Impala and opens the passenger door for her, walks around to the other side.

“I used to hate this car,” he says, sliding the seats further back; and then he gives her the bottle, opens the metal box he stole from the kitchen, takes a rolling paper from the package.

Eileen simply watches him, the thumb of her right hand playing with the bottle’s label, worrying a corner that’s coming loose.

“There was this one time where we stayed in a house for a few months - it belonged to an old friend our dad’s, he was -”

Sam frowns as he tries to describe what China Pete had been like - he can still remember, though the details are a bit vague, a thin, tall man who walked as if he was ninety, slow and careful, his center of gravity all wrong. According to Dad, he’d been some kind of translator, hence the nickname, but it was clear, even for a kid, that the war hadn’t been kind to him. Unlike John, big and steady despite his unexplained absences and his occasional drunken rants, China Pete looked like someone had sucked him dry from the inside out. Dean had been wary around him, but Sam had been enticed by the books piling up in every corner, and he’d taken to watching China Pete as he practiced his calligraphy, the house growing more and more friendly even as Dad turned it into a base of operations and covered every available wall in maps and newspaper cuttings.

He suddenly wonders if the man’s still alive, and his frown deepens as he unseals the transparent bag, takes out a pinch of fragrant, dry leaves and starts pressing them into a dust over the paper. The pot’s a bit too old; it doesn’t take long.

“He had PTSD, I think, though I never knew at the time. I must have been nine, or something,” he says, adding small, rough signs when he knows how. “And I don’t even know why we were there, what Dad was hunting or anything, but that house - it was full of books and art and sometimes I would lie in bed and think of a plan to destroy this car, so we could stay there forever.”

Eileen’s still pale and unhappy, but that haunted something around her mouth and eyes is almost gone. She’s focused on the story, and when Sam stops she unscrews the bottle and drinks a small mouthful of whiskey as she waits for the rest of it.

“Dean would kill me if he knew,” Sam adds, one hand open, his other hand making a sharp downward gesture so that he almost knocks the joint over. “He would kill me dead.”

Eileen laughs.

“But to me, I don’t know - this car was - sometimes it seemed the reason why we kept moving around the country. I didn’t understand much about hunting then,” he says, a bit too quickly, and he looks down before he can catch Eileen’s eyes filling with pity, “and it was like - Dad was always happiest when he was driving, and Dean mostly hated every place we stopped in, and most of the time I felt they’d - forgotten about me. I wanted to live somewhere, I wanted a house and a garden and a dog, and they - I used to watch them from the back seat, and it was -”

Sam looks down, finds he’s almost creased the paper, smoothes it out; starts to roll the stupid thing with slow, clumsy movements (Dean’s the pro, and isn’t he always?).

“Even on the bad days, there was always - a pull, between Dean and our dad. Like they knew some secret they weren’t telling me, and they weren’t subtle about it. Sometimes they would just talk, you know, stuff like, That thing you did last night? You need more practice, and I’d ask, What thing? because I’d been asleep and hadn’t noticed either of them slipping out, but they would not explain.”

1992: that had been Sully’s year. He would sit next to Sam in the car sometimes, blowing up balloons or talking about extravagant recipes in an effort to distract him as Sam kept his eyes on the back of Dean’s head and wondered, for the thousandth time, what killing monsters was really like, and why Dean kept getting hurt even if he was with Dad all the time (as he promised he was) and why they couldn't stay in the same town for more than three months.

Of course, he’d realized - much, much later - that Dean hadn’t been as happy about the situation as he’d seemed. That, in a way, he’d hated the way they had been raised even more than Sam himself. But, well - there was some vindication in the thought, but mostly it was just painful.

As he places a filter on the thin paper and licks the joint shut, Sam thinks about China Pete’s house again; remembers how he would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, how he’d walk to the window in his bare feet, both hoping and dreading the Impala had disappeared from the driveway, because he’d been happy there, and if they’d stayed -

He shakes his head.

“So, yeah, I wasn’t always happy, but this car - it’s like a family member, you know? Like - it’s got this army man stuck in the ashtray - I put it there as a kid, I don’t even remember why, and it feels - it’s - normal parents, you know, they would have notches on a door, to see how fast the kids are growing, but for Dean and me -”

Sam doesn’t even know what he’s saying, exactly. He brought Eileen here because that’s what he does, sometimes - he sleeps in the car when his head’s full of bad things, because he doesn’t want to talk to Dean, and Mom - God knows what Mom thinks about, and if she even wants them around, and he won’t go to Jody with this crap, and now Bobby’s dead, there is no one else, and this is just how things are. But the car - so, yeah, Sam’s been teasing Dean for years, but the truth is, he gets it. This is their home, and as grateful as he is that they found the Bunker, he doesn’t -

“It’s a miracle it’s still in one piece,” Eileen says, a bit awkwardly, to cover up the sudden silence, and Sam shakes his head.

“It’s not a miracle. It’s Dean,” he answers, patting the wheel. “We got into so many accidents, you have no idea. And one time Dean even -”

He can’t finish the sentence, because he can’t bear to think about it: his brother smashing his beloved car, a hot, pitiless summer dragging on and on and on around them. How that had felt like the end of all things.

(Lucifer’s smiles inside his mind, open and warm.)

“But, I don’t know, he always fixes it up, and even puts back those things - like the army man, right here, or his Legos -”

Sam loses his train of thought again.

This was a stupid idea.

They should go back to bed, both of them.

Separate beds, that is.

“Do you have any music?” Eileen asks, and Sam clears his throat, tries to come back to reality.

“Yeah, we - it’s mostly loud stuff, but -”

After a bit of rummaging, Sam find a battered Judy Collins tape, pushes it in. He’s not really in the mood for Metallica right now.

“Is this okay?”

Eileen nods.

“I can feel the vibrations,” she says, in answer to his silent question. “It’s soothing.”

Sam nods. He gets a Zippo out of his pocket, lights the joint up, takes a deep puff.

“Ugh,” he says, waving the smoke away. “This thing is vile.”

Eileen laughs.

“I bet you’re just not used to it.”

“It’s been a while,” Sam admits. “This guy I met in California, he used to make them with jasmine leaves, but Dean won’t hear of it.”

As the words leave his mouth, Sam realizes that he’s lying, and he doesn’t know why. Smoke pot - this is not something they do together. Sam pretends not to know about Dean’s stash, just as he mostly ignores the drinking and the late nights, and Dean never comments when he finds some of it’s missing. They’ve had only two conversations about this - once right before Sam left for Stanford, when Dean had surprised him with a list of warnings and threats that had mostly annoyed the hell out of him, and then another time a few years back, half in jest, and, again, they’d stuck to their familiar roles: Sam, the good student who’d never strayed in his entire life, and Dean, the guy who’s okay with everything because he wants it fast and he wants it hard and he doesn’t care dying or even getting hurt.

The thing is, Sam doesn’t know how not to be this person with Dean, and as he takes a long drag and really thinks about it, he realizes that Dean probably doesn’t know how to be someone else around him, either.

“Having a real home - it’s not a lot better,” Eileen says suddenly, crossing one leg and turning in the seat so she’s facing him. “And this car is beautiful.”

She moves her hand in front of her face, and yeah, this is a sign he recognizes, because it was the first one he’d looked up (though he’d chickened out before actually using it with her), and then reaches out, takes the joint from his hand.

Their fingers brush lightly, and Sam looks down, then away.

“So you didn’t,” Sam starts, awkwardly, but of course, that’s a bad question, bound to drudge up bad memories and bad feelings. “What about Ireland? Do you remember that at all?”

She shakes her head. With the doors closed, the space between them’s slowly getting hazy. Dean is so going to kill him.

“I went back once,” Eileen says, turning the joint in her fingers, and like this, her braid slightly undone, a joint in her right hand and a bottle of whiskey resting on her thigh, she looks positively debauched (Sam tries not to think about it). “When I was twenty. Lillian had asked me to bring her ashes back, and after a while I ran out of excuses not to. It was -”

She hesitates, lowers the joint.

“I thought I would recognize something, that it would feel like - coming home, but it never did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Learned a lot about beer, though,” she adds, winking at him, and Sam smiles, wishing he knew how to do this (wishing it hadn’t been so long since he’s done it).

They fall silent after that. Sam, lulled by the music and the pot, ends up shifting a bit, and Eileen mirrors him, so that now she’s almost resting her bent knee on top of his right thigh. Sam thinks about putting his hand there, longs to feel the warmth of her body (she may be sad and broken, like they always are, but she’s here, and she’s alive, and that’s all that matters), decides against it.

When Someday Soon’s familiar notes start playing, he closes his hand more firmly around the bottle, because this is Mom’s favorite song, isn’t it, and yet she’s never said one word about it, just as she hasn’t mentioned anything else. Sam had hoped for - well, anything, really. Some way to connect to this mother he’s always missed, this woman whose absence had carved a gaping hole right in the middle of his brain for his entire life.

“This is my Mom’s favorite song,” he says, without thinking, and Eileen reaches over to stop the music.

“What is it?” she asks.

“Someday Soon, by Judy Collins. She would sing it to us as a lullaby.”

His words are nowhere near slurred, but he’s not lucid, either, and bitter thoughts crowd the inside of his mind, a hundred of them all at once. That she’d sang the song to Dean, really, because Dean is the one who got some time with her. That this is not even what Dean remembers, but what John had told them both. That the last time he heard this song, he was deep inside a dream, Lucifer’s eyes shining through his father’s face, only just, so that Sam could convince himself that barely there light was really God’s light, and not the Devil’s. How Dean had told him about his own dreams when Sam had woken up. And Mary, Mary smiling at them, Mary lying to them, Mary walking away.

“Would you sing it to me? I want to hear your voice,” Eileen says suddenly, touching his arm, and Sam blinks out of the solid mass of regrets and sadness.

“My voice?” he asks, stupidly.

Her fingers smooth the cotton of his shirt, as if apologizing for disturbing it.

“If I touch you when you sing, it’s like I’m hearing what you sound like,” she says, and the way she doesn’t look at him - Sam knows that means something, but can’t think of what it is.

(It looks like she's lying, but why would she?)

“Uhm, sure,” he says; and, without knowing what he’s doing, he unbuttons his shirt, a part of his brain lazily assuming that she’ll do this like a doctor does, listening for his lungs and his heart and maybe he should move forward a bit, so she can touch him between the shoulder blades as well.

It takes him ten seconds or so to realize the whole thing’s stupid, but closing the shirt again seems even more idiotic, so he doesn’t. Instead, he finally puts his right hand on her knee and reaches over with his left to start the song again.

Judy’s on the second verse.

My parents cannot stand him 'cause he rides the rodeo, she says, and Sam turns the volume up, because it’s been a while since he sang in front of anyone, and Dean doesn’t count.

My father says that he will leave me cryin', he sings, almost cringing at how sappy the lyrics are, and as he starts on the next line, he suddenly feels Eileen’s hands on him - she’s put her left on top of his, and it’s tiny, really, almost fragile, and Sam can’t believe this woman hunts alone and can actually take him in a fight, and then most of his rational thinking evaporates through the top of his head when Eileen’s right hand pushes against his chest, a bit tentatively.

Guess it's 'cause he was just as wild in the younger days, this is how the lyrics go, but Sam’s not really paying attention anymore - he’s watching the top of Eileen’s head, the sliver of her neck he can see through her hair blushing prettily, and everything he is is focused, really, on the feeling of her hands on him - of her left thumb circling his skin, very lightly, of her right hand wide open against his chest, right over his heart, now jumping erratically, beating hard, seemingly bumping against his ribs with every breath he takes.

Sam pretends it’s nothing as he sings the stupid thing to the end, pretends not to notice the way she allows her hand to move up, just a fraction, so her fingers catch the edge of his t-shirt, brush against the skin of his neck. He can’t think about it, because if he did, he’d say something stupid, something like, God, I really want to kiss you, and also Have wanted to for a while now and maybe You’re so very beautiful, and there’s so much light inside you it makes me blind and stupid, and he can’t say any of these things, because there’s no time left. Eileen killed a kid tonight, and that’s not something that she'll ever forget. And as long as she’s here, as long as she’s around them, she’s in danger. Hunting is vicious and messy and dirty, but he and Dean, that’s a whole other level of crazy. He can’t have Eileen sharing in that. He won’t risk it.

He shifts slightly, moving one inch back, and she lets go of him immediately. Sam turns the volume all the way down, and when she finally looks up at him, he says, “I think you should go back to Ireland. I don’t know how long Mick’s going to be able to stall them, and Ketch - they’re not the best I’ve ever seen, but they’re good. You’re not safe here.”

There is a flash of hurt on Eileen’s face that goes all the way down to her heart, but it’s there and gone in a second.

“What about Dagon?” she asks, pushing a strand of hair back. “And the Nephilim?”

“We’ll deal with that.”

“How?”

Figuring Dean will be mad no matter what, Sam leaves the joint’s butt in the ashtray as he tries to summon an answer to that.

“I don’t know yet,” he says, finally. “But we’ll think of something.”

He’s about to add that Cas may know something, but then he remembers Cas is still missing and that other Prince of Hell had nearly killed him, anyway. The empty garage beyond the windshield is suddenly threatening again.

“It’s not fair,” Eileen says.

Who said life’s fair? John’s voice says in his mind, and Sam pushes it back. He thinks about that one time he actually stormed off, about running all the way to the woods and finding Sully already there, sitting cross-legged on the grass, turning some kind of musical instrument over in his hands. Your brother’s coming, he’d told Sam, and I think you should listen to him. Sam had been outraged - a fiery, angry mess of You’re taking their side? and I hate you too - but when Dean had found him, Sam hadn’t had time to say anything - Dean had simply crashed into him, hugged him tight. You can’t run off on your own, he’d said, not here. And, whatever, so Sam had known about the rugaru, but he hadn’t cared, and - I’m sorry, okay? Dean had added, letting him go, dropping to one knee in front of him. About Dad, about this shitty life, about everything. I’ll get you out, Sammy. One day.

“We’ll deal with it,” Sam says again, the sounds of that forest fading away. “It’s more important that you’re safe. I need you to be safe.”

Eileen turns away, hiding her face, and Sam can’t help it - he reaches over, slides his fingers through her hair, undoing the braid completely, and keeps his hand on her shoulder until she looks at him again.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says, a bit tipsily, moving his fingers in front of his face; and then he sighs, gets out of the car, because it’s almost three in the morning and they both need some sleep.

***

When they reach Eileen’s door, she stops, puts one hand on the handle.

“I’ll go back to Ireland,” she says, out of the blue, “if it’s that important to you.”

Sam looks down, then up again.

“It is,” he says, “that important to me.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

They stand there another minute, and finally she sighs, smiles.

“I can’t actually hear your voice when I touch you, you know,” she says.

The So why is right on Sam’s lips, because he’s an idiot and also he’s not entirely himself at the moment, but thankfully she moves before he can ask the question - she takes one step closer to him, reaches up, cupping his jaw; Sam turns his face into it, and it’s like he wants to cry, but maybe he’s just happy.

“You stay safe,” she says; and then she takes another step towards him, stands on tiptoes, and kisses the corner of his mouth, a thing that’s too intimate to be anything else than an I think I want you but also so sweet that what it says, really, is I care about you a lot; a promise and a wish. “You stay safe,” she murmurs again, brushing her lips against his.

“You too,” he says, and he tries to lean into the kiss, because he’s been thinking about this, on and off, for months, and he’s starved for it, but she takes a step back, smiles at him, a bit sadly.

“Goodnight, Sam,” she says, and this is it, and Sam knows that’s not goodbye, he knows he’ll keep sending her stupid information about the weather and emojis he doesn’t really understand the meaning of, and he knows she’ll keep skyping him, her weapons and her injuries accurately kept out of the frame, but he also knows this is not the moment to be more than that, because this is his life and it’s not fair, but as Dean said all those years ago, maybe one day the right moment will come; one day they’ll be together again, one day it will be safe to tell her the uncomfortable, elating, light-as-air truth now blooming all over his heart and lungs.

Still standing in front of the closed door, Sam points at himself, then crosses his arms in front of his chest, his hands closed into fists, and finished the movement by extending his right hand in front of him, as if in invitation for a dance.

One day, he thinks. One day.