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Sam watched as Dean finished bundling up Bobby, and then as he came back into the kitchen. He passed Sam right by, not brushing up against him or leaning up for a kiss like Jess used to do sometimes, but Sam hadn't expected him to. Even if that was the type of thing Dean did (it wasn't, not while he was sober), they kept things toned down at Bobby's. What happened behind closed doors was one thing. What happened while Bobby was in the next room, facing them even if he was asleep, was another entirely.
Sam turned around, leaning his other shoulder against the wall to face into the kitchen, and saw Dean frowning into the open fridge. One hand was braced against the closed freezer door and he leaned down slightly, looking along the lower shelves.
"Hey," he said over his shoulder, "go see what we've got in the pantry."
The pantry had plenty of space but not much food. Half the shelves were covered in salt canisters and boxes of bullets. Dried herbs stored in mismatched old jelly jars stood in rows on the floor, but Sam knew they weren't for cooking. The ground level's cache of emergency rations, MREs on the top shelf and Aqua Blocks on the shelf directly below, was off limits as well. A shelf at Bobby's eye level held the food they were allowed to eat: a collection of creamy chicken-flavored ramen noodles, a box of off-brand Cheerio's standing open and probably gone stale, a few cans of ranch-style beans, the kind of canned chili that looked like vomit even before you ate it, and a box of raisins. Bobby had two bottles of whisky tucked away there, too.
Sam ran down the list for Dean, who'd gotten out the carton of eggs and what was left of the pack of American cheese singles they'd picked up the last time they were in town.
"Grab me some noodles," Dean said, frowning. "And some beans."
Sam moved a pile of books off the counter and into a chair so he could lean next to Dean and watch him put the food into a glass pan from a cabinet. He'd been watching Dean throw things together into these sort of casseroles for as long as he could remember. He rarely wanted help with them, but Sam knew he'd demand it if he did.
Sam started cleaning up the mess when Dean put the pan into the oven. He worked as quietly as he could, trying not to wake Bobby, but between the alcohol and the exhaustion, Bobby should be able to sleep through the two of them. Sam peeked in the oven when he'd put everything away but wished he hadn't. The food was a dark yellow mess at this point, thick with clumps of beans and noodles, and smelled nowhere near as good as Sam assumed it would in half an hour. The soup Ellen had briefly described sounded much better than this.
Sam fetched a fistful of bottles from the fridge and followed Dean outside. He hadn't mentioned where he was going when he left the room but Sam found him in the first place he checked, on the trunk of the car. Sam traced his fingers from her hood and across both doors down to a taillight, and then hopped up to join his brother. Dean took a beer, they arranged the others between them, and for a while, they just drank.
"You think Bobby and Ellen ever really..." Sam let the sentence trail off, but Dean snorted, shaking his head, and Sam knew he'd gotten the point across. Dean took another swig instead of answering and Sam did the same.
"We should've stuck around to see her," Dean said eventually, looking across the lot instead of at Sam. "It would've taken what, an hour?" He shook his head again. "We should've stayed."
Sam sighed and ducked his head, picking at his bottle's label. "We didn't know."
"Fuck that," Dean said. "We didn't learn anything from Rufus? She could've kicked it on a job before we saw her again, she could've choked on her fucking dinner, and we wouldn't have bothered to wait to see her again." He drained his bottle and Sam watched his throat work around the beer, watched the skin around his eyes wrinkle as he squeezed them shut. "I don't know how many times we have to see our people die before we learn better."
"So we'll start," Sam said. He nudged his knee against Dean's and kept it there until his brother glanced over.
"I don't understand why we're such hot shit, either." Dean looked away again. "They can't need us to be vessels anymore if we side-stepped the apocalypse, so why the hell does Cas think we're more important than fifty thousand other people?"
Sam shook his head, but he'd been thinking the same thing. Why was his life, his afternoon drinking in the sunlight, worth twenty-five thousand other people's chance to do the same thing? They'd all been dying horribly, but they'd lived first. Now they'd never even existed in the first place, all so Sam could keep sitting here.
He finished his beer and moved on to a second. Dean opened another for himself and clapped one hand over Sam's knee about halfway through the bottle. One still sat between their legs, Sam having brought out an odd number. It sweated condensation on both their jeans. He thought about going for it before Dean could but he checked his watch first, then bounced his leg to jostle Dean's hand.
"Your egg goop is going to start burning soon," he said.
"Bitch," Dean said. "It might be goop, but you certainly eat it every time I make it." He squeezed Sam just above the kneecap, goosing him, but pressed a hard kiss to Sam's mouth before the tickle had even faded. Sam followed him back inside, cracking the final bottle open as he went.