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Sam couldn't understand why Dean liked to do this after every hunt: buy a six-pack and hope the ice wouldn't all melt before they found a scenic overlook, or a bridge on the outskirts of town, or sometimes just a road running through a field, so that they could stand around in the elements and drink. There were bars all over the place, and if Dean wanted a celebratory beer or whatever, they could find someone to serve it to them.
But Sam didn't understand a lot of things about Dean. Dean hardly made any sense at all, and that was without him seeing things no one else could. Dean did things he didn't want to do, and he didn't do things he did want to, and he acted like it was unspeakably wrong for Sam to ever call him on it. So Sam mentally shrugged and stayed on the hood of the car, watching him drink. If Sam didn't drink at all, maybe Dean would go through enough bottles for the both of them, and then he'd not only pass the keys to Sam, he'd fall asleep before they got three miles down the road. If it worked, Sam would have a few hours of not having to second-guess his every action.
Sure enough, Dean fished out another pair of bottles once he finished his first beer, and held one out to Sam. Sam shook his head, and Dean asked, "No?" but then set down the extra beer between them, next to his own hip. Dean had his habits, at least, and Sam was good with patterns.
"I tell you what," Dean said, gesturing at the field with his bottle. "I'm still glad it wasn't actually aliens."
Sam snorted and shook his head. "That's really the highlight of the job for you?"
"Hell yes," Dean said. "We've got enough to deal with without adding aliens into the mix."
"If you say so," Sam said. His soul being locked up in a box with the devil still seemed big enough that anything else took a back seat, even aliens. Crowley hadn't said a thing about being willing to trade for aliens.
What Crowley wanted was important, because Sam was mostly sure he did want to get his soul back. It was sixty:forty in favor of leaving it in the cage, at the most. He didn't miss what he'd lost, but playing along seemed like the best way to get Crowley off his back. Sam could still feel physical pain, and he didn't want his intellect to go to Hell too, so Crowley had him by the balls as long as he had him by the soul.
It made no sense to deal with the fairies, anyway. Sam remembered how hung up on Dean he used to be, and there wasn't any point in getting his soul back if he'd have to trade a first-born son for it somewhere down the line. Sam didn't have any kids — and he should get a vasectomy while he was still thinking clearly, so it'd stay that way — and his fat of the land would probably be Dean. Sam remembered the times he'd been with soul but without his brother, and he knew he probably wouldn't like that to happen again. No sense in getting his soul back only to make it ache.
But relief at finding fairies instead of aliens was stupid. They hadn't ruled out aliens in general, just in this instance. They could still be out there.
"You know we only ruled out aliens in this case, not in general," Sam said. "They could still be out there."
"God, shut the fuck up," Dean said, but when Sam looked at him, Dean was almost smiling, and his shoulders were still relaxed, and he'd spoken with the same tone of voice as earlier in the conversation. Sam decided he probably wasn't mad.
"I'm just saying," Sam said. "Can't prove the absence of something."
He saw when Dean's jaw clenched, and the skin around his eyes stopped wrinkling up. These were usually signs Sam had fucked up, gotten some note entirely wrong in any given situation. He thought for a moment and clapped his hand on Dean's shoulder, because no matter what Dean said he wanted, he didn't glare at Sam, or shake his head and correct him, nearly as much if Sam pulled out a trick from his old life every so often.
But Dean reacted just like he had when Sam touched him in the motel: stiffening up, not in the fun way, and turning his entire body to look at Sam, and then glancing away and taking another big swig of beer. Sam turned back to the road and let his hand drop, rolling his eyes. He'd misjudged in the motel, too, but then he'd thought it was a sex thing. Dean didn't want Sam to touch him after he'd been fucking because the two of them used to fuck. Things like that seemed to upset people on a regular basis.
But neither of them had been getting any right this second.
Sam decided it was just another case of Dean being nonsensical. He hadn't tried to keep Sam from seeing him with Lisa, when Sam first showed up. Dean couldn't have known then that Sam had stopped caring about where Dean put his dick, but he'd still been out in the open with her. Sam thought there was more cause for hurt feelings over people living together than over a one-night stand, but he only thought it: he didn't know.
Dean hummed instead of saying anything else, and Sam shrugged. He looked down into the cooler, because a beer might be nice after all, but decided he'd rather have the time to himself, and he left the rest for Dean to drink. The wind blew threw the fields on either side of them, and Sam leaned back on the hood, and waited Dean out through the rest of the six-pack.