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When Sam was about fifteen, he came across some quote in a library book about your parents being a mystery. Sam had stared at the quote, confused and unimpressed, until suddenly it had clicked, and he found himself staring at Dean, wide-eyed, until Dean had asked him what the fuck he was staring at him for.
What Sam had finally realized was this: John had never been a mystery to him. Once he was old enough to understand much of anything, his father was a pathetically open book. He was angry at what he had lost, and desperate for revenge. He was so full of grief it had crowded out the softer parts that their mother must have loved him for. He looked at Dean and saw a ghost; he looked at Sam and saw the Devil. Sam knew all of this, and it had allowed him to navigate his relationship with his father more smoothly than if he had not. He talked back to John because all he saw was a man whose anger made him small, and when one day he stepped into John’s space and watched his eyes widen as he realized that Sam had grown taller than him, Sam couldn’t help but grin.
Dean, on the other hand, Sam had never understood. Sam could not understand why Dean wore that jacket that was two sizes too big; he could not understand why Dean worshiped that car and John’s music; he could not understand why Dean sometimes disappeared, his eyes becoming unfocused and a slightly haunted look crossing his face. He did not understand the fear that was sometimes on Dean’s face when they heard John’s key in their motel room door. As he got older he understood where the food Dean brought home came from, but he didn’t know where Dean had gotten the money. And he didn’t understand the way Dean looked at him when he didn’t think Sam was looking—like if he looked away, Sam would suddenly disappear.
Sam knew who had raised him, and it certainly wasn’t John. But it was something Sam had never really considered before, that Dean was more than just his brother. That he was his father, and his mother, too.
Sam had closed the book and resolved to be more grateful. To try harder to understand.
When Cas dies, Sam doesn’t understand, necessarily, but he does know. Loss never gets easier, even though in a line of work like theirs you’d think it would. Grief, though, does; you find ways to cope, the ones that work, the ones that won’t kill you. It takes time, but grief fades.
Most of the time.
When Cas dies, Sam is devastated. Of course he is. Cas is his best friend, and Cas understands what it’s like to be so intrinsically different—in a supernatural sense—in a way that Dean never will. But Sam, as horrible as it sounds, has gotten used to Cas dying. This is the fifth (or maybe the sixth, he really has lost count) time, and Sam knows the drill. He will feel a sharp pain in his chest. He will feel the ground tilt beneath him. He will throw himself into work in an attempt to forget. He will voice constant platitudes, both to himself and to Dean (and now, heart-wrenchingly, to Jack). Prayers and phone calls will go unanswered. There will be an empty space at the dinner table. Sam will turn sometimes to say something to someone who isn’t there. His heart will break all over again.
Sam is used to this. He knows this dance. He’ll do the steps, and he’ll get used to the idea that Cas isn’t coming back.
Sam understands that it isn’t the same for Dean. He has never coped as well with loss, has always felt so responsible for the deaths of those around him. But Cas is different. Sam hadn’t really understood the first time, when Dean carried that trench coat from stolen car to stolen car and drank so much Sam wasn't sure he was ever sober and woke up shouting Cas's name while Sam pretended he didn't hear, but he does now. When Cas dies, Sam is devastated, but Dean is shattered.
What Sam also understands is that this time is different from the times before. Maybe it’s Jack. Maybe it’s the way it happened. Maybe it’s the fact that Cas had been in the bunker so much more lately, had woven himself into their home. Maybe Dean has finally admitted something to himself. Whatever it is, Sam knows he cannot begin to fathom Dean’s grief. He knows that there is something more intimate about this burial, about this goodbye. He stands back, and lets Dean call the shots.
He waits as Dean carries Cas inside. As he wraps Cas’s body in what Sam later identifies as the gauzy purple curtains. As he carries Cas back out. As he builds the pyre. As he lays Cas on top of it. As he gets in the car with a box full of ashes and drives away.
When Jess died, Sam felt like the ground had been ripped out from under him. He was off-kilter for weeks, months, hell, years. He saw her on street corners, in diners, in his nightmares and his dreams. Some days it hurt to breathe. Some days it hurt to even move. He loved her. He would have married her. She haunted him for so long he thought she’d never stop.
Except she did. One day she was gone. One day he stopped hurting, and one day he could breathe more easily. The ground slowly leveled out. The world stopped feeling so empty. And he found that he could love her in a smaller space, somewhere special tucked away, and move on.
What Sam sees on Dean’s face as they stand in front of the roaring fire, heat blasting his skin, is something Sam has never seen or known before. It is too big. There has been no screaming, no crying, no begging (at least not that Dean has let Sam see), but somehow this silence is worse. Sam understands, deep in his bones, that for Dean this is a haunting that will never end. He wishes he could put out the fire, turn Dean away, pull Cas from behind a tree and say Here he is. He’s fine. Sam wishes he could, for once, shield Dean the way Dean has shielded him his entire life.
But he can’t do any of that. The fire is too big, the rising smoke is too thick, the child that isn’t quite a child standing beside them is too painful of a reminder. So Sam stands next to his brother, unmoving, and offers the only thing he can—to carry this for him. To let Dean take some of this unfathomable grief and place it on Sam’s shoulders. Sam knows that Dean won’t, that Dean can’t, but he offers anyway, and he aches.
When Dean tells him that he spread the ashes in a meadow covered in blackberry bushes, near a windmill and a garden and a creek, Sam feels tears sting his eyes. He swallows them down, smiles, nods his head, tells Dean he thinks that’s a great spot, because he knows it’s what Dean needs. He knows that Dean won’t name this grief, won’t name the thing that brought him to that windmill, and so he won’t name it either. But when Dean leaves the room, Sam closes his eyes and lets the pain wash over him—from his own loss, and from the knowledge that there’s no fixing this. Sam has fought the fucking Devil, but this. Well. No one ever really knows what to do when their parent is in pain.
Your parents are a mystery. Sam has accepted this. Sam believed that the older he got, the less of a mystery Dean became, but in reality some mysteries were solved while others cropped up when Sam wasn’t looking. He understood the jacket. He understood the car and the music. He understood the fear. He thought he probably understood the money, and because of that he thought he probably understood the disappearing as well. But he doesn’t understand this grief. He never will. He knows, though, what it means, why it’s there. He knows it has to be an unbearable weight. He knows he will do whatever he can to lighten it.
He knows Dean will never let him carry any of it, but he also knows he’ll never stop offering.