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All things considered, Sam was lucky to get a door in his face at the Dobbs's house, instead of a fist. He deserved for her to hit him, and he would have planted his feet and taken whatever she wanted to give him. Married to the sheriff, widowed and living alone: Sam thought Brenna could've worked him over pretty well.
Dean turned the heater all the way up, and he didn't look at Sam as they headed back to the house. They needed to clear out fast, in case Brenna was going to hit with the law instead of with her hands. Sam didn't think she knew where they'd been squatting, but they still had a deadline. Roadblocks weren't that hard to set up.
Brenna's neighborhood gave way to a touristy district full of mostly-familiar restaurants. Sam didn't study any of the passing scenery too closely until it bled back into the residential area on the outskirts of town, heavy on For Sale signs and light on parked cars. He wondered how many other towns had widows of his making, where else his picture hung as a reminder and a warning in law enforcement offices.
He wasn't supposed to scratch, but he didn't know what not to be doing. It wasn't as if he was picking at his memories on purpose. They were of Hell, and Sam saw enough of what Dean went through a few years before to know that he didn't want to dig any of those things back up. But he just didn't know what was making him remember things, and so he didn't know how to stop doing it. Sam had kicked holes in walls before, had shouldered his way from one room and into the next as drywall and paint flaked onto his clothes and into his hair, and he could only hope the wall in his head was strong enough to stand a little accidental picking.
Dean's favorite thing to say these days was, "Stop scratching it, Sam," sprinkled liberally with cursing depending on their location and what Sam had done to prompt the comment in the first place. People never failed to stare when Dean did it in public, which of course he did. Well, Sam was probably overdue for a round of STI tests, based on what he remembered of his sexual history in this town alone. If he'd fucked like that here — and fucked was the word for it, Sam knew none of that sex had been anything close to making love — he'd probably fucked like that everywhere. Somehow he doubted he'd been careful the entire time.
He glanced at Dean, wondering if Dean should get tested, too. He hadn't figured out how to ask if he and Dean slept together while Sam was gone. They clearly weren't now, but would Dean have wanted to, with Lisa somewhere in the picture?
And since Sam had been the type of guy who fucked other people's wives, who shot people in the head and called it saving them, who beat a man bloody and left him gurgling in the middle of the road, would he have cared about what Dean wanted in the first place? That wasn't a conversation to have on the way back from a job, but Sam didn't want to have it at all. Dean hadn't brought it up himself even while they hunted something that was killing Sam's previous partners, which Sam could only hope was a good thing.
He glanced at Dean, who was watching the road. It probably made Dean feel better to tell himself nothing was actually Sam's fault, but Sam knew better. Brenna and that deputy knew better. Sam might not have been present while any of it happened, but he was left with the blood and assorted other bodily fluids on his hands anyway — and if Roy'd told the truth, it wasn't just disease Sam could have been sprinkling around the country. He couldn't know how many other jobs he botched, how many other creatures he'd sent from town to town to town. He'd been in Hell, sure, but he was there for the same reason almost everyone else went: to pay for his own mistakes. What happened in Bristol was just another consequence of mistakes Sam made a long time ago.
They slowed to join the line of cars at a stop sign, and Sam looked at his brother again. The red glow of someone else's brake lights caught on the gray coming in around Dean's temple. It made Dean's frown seem more severe. He knew Dean was worrying, because that's what Dean tended to do any time Sam had a problem, but Sam kept his hands on his own side of the car instead of reaching for Dean. Before Detroit he could have clapped a hand on Dean's leg anywhere between his hip and knee, but he couldn't tell how Dean would read it now. He couldn't tell if Dean wanted Sam to touch him at all.
Sam wanted to try, for what it was worth, but it wasn't worth much. He hadn't done anything to earn that sort of comfort recently, and Dean didn't deserve to have Sam's messes piled up in front of him again.
"We shouldn't stick around," Dean said. He took his foot off the brake as the car in front of them went through the intersection, and he finally looked at Sam while the traffic in the other lanes moved along. Sam nodded and turned back to his window, and Dean sighed. "C'mon man," he said, quieter this time. "You know they don't all have happy endings."
Sam snorted. "Not usually for this reason, though."
"That's right," Dean said. "It's not usually like this at all."
Sam frowned at him but Dean looked back toward the road. It was their turn, and Dean gunned it through the intersection without saying anything. Sam rolled his eyes and started trying to remember what he'd left where around the house.