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He can hear them in the dark.
There'd only been two beds. When they'd all been kids together, smashed up in a series of cheap motel rooms too small to contain them, Sam and Dean had usually wound up together and Addie had slept with Dad. At least when Addie was little. When she was a little older, there had been the faded and secondhand Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sleeping bag. Sam couldn't remember how many late nights and early mornings he'd tripped over Addie on his stumbling and bleary-eyed way to the bathroom.
Now Dad is dead. Jess is dead. And in a cheap motel room too small to contain him, Sam listens to his sister and brother sharing the other bed. Not sex noises—Jesus God, he hopes not sex noises—but just the quiet murmur of lovers in bed together, soft conversation before sleep.
Can you make sure to lock the door tomorrow, baby? It was unlocked when I came home today.
Yeah. Sure. I'm sorry, hon.
I was thinking about doing some laundry tomorrow. I'm down to my last pair of socks. Anything special you want washed?
Just whatever's in the basket. I was thinking about stir fry for dinner; what do you think?
Sam knows the rhythm of the song even if he doesn't know the words. He turns over in crackling, bleached sheets and puts his back to them, filled with this horrible roiling storm of sickness, dread and grief. The reasons he shouldn't be here seem so infinite and huge. He shouldn't have had to watch his girl die in clouds of fire and heat like a hammer. His hands are still burned, his eyebrows still crispy-shiny and slow to grow in. His hair is the shortest it's been since he left the Winchester Traveling Circus. It's autumn and the smell of burning leaves is enough to make him hang out the Impala's window, retching helplessly onto the passing pavement below. It shouldn't have happened.
But more than that, he shouldn't be here, knowing what Addie and Dean are, hearing it in the way they talk and don't talk, moving together like a finely oiled machine. The signal and answer of their eyes, their lingering hands, the slight flex and press of their lips; no one could look at them and not know. But anyone else who would look at them—anyone whose not Sam—would only see a man and woman, not siblings.
Sam hates that he knows. Hates that they do nothing to hide it, Addie's angry defiance in every look she gives him and Dean's stubborn shame in every look he doesn't give. He hates that he has no right to ask it of them; not after he left them with nothing but each other and certainly not after he was the one to come looking for them, scourged by fire and finally, truly alone. He'd gone back to the only thing he'd ever known like a dog returning to its own sick and found it—them—changed.
But even with everything, they'd taken him in. They'd shuffled aside to make room for him. Because that's what families do.
And for as much as he hates everything about them and his life and this world that he can't seem to climb out of, Sam is grateful for that.
So grateful he could cry.