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Sam falls asleep before they even make it onto the main road, his head leaning against the window, his arms crossed against his chest, and it fills Dean with such complete and utter relief that his eyes start to burn. Sam is whole and okay for the first time in years. No demon blood, no Lucifer, no visions. Soul intact. It won't last. It never lasts for them. They don't get those neat little lives like everyone else, with happy endings and easy smiles. Just as they finish patching up one leak, another one springs up, and Dean's so sick of barely staying afloat.
Dean frowns hard at the road ahead and draws in slow breaths through his nose and does his best not to think of the price of having Sam pale and worn but healing in the seat beside him.
He doesn't think about the way Cas didn't even hesitate, the way he laid his hands on Sam and took on Lucifer, so desperate to make things right. He does not think of how his entire world tilted at the unfamiliar sight of fear in Cas's eyes as he backed away from them or of the high-pitched keening noise he made, like an animal, a defeated, frightened animal, when Dean tried to calm him down, tried to assure him that he was okay. He doesn't think about all the things they should have talked about in that brief window when Cas was still Cas and not Emmanuel and not whatever shadow of himself he is now. Things like how Dean doesn't hate him, how Dean gets it, he really does, deep down because Dean has done stupid, reckless things for the people he's cared about, too. And doesn't make it okay, doesn't make them okay, but maybe they could be again, someday, because they could use all the help they can get these days, with Bobby gone, and just...everyone. Gone.
He doesn't think about how much he's missed Cas, how it hit him square in the gut when Cas had turned to him and told him that he didn't know how to ride a bike.
He doesn't think about Cas left alone in that place with no one to keep an eye on him but Meg. Leaving a goddamn fox to guard the henhouse. And the fact is, they've got less than nothing to go on as far as fixing this. Cas was the only solution, and now they've got an angel in the middle of a psychotic break for the rest of eternity.
Dean, listens to Sam's deep and even breathing, clenches the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white and the pain in his hands turns to numbness, and drives on.