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“You’re quiet,” says Sam.
Yeah, he’s quiet. So sue. Dean grunts in reply.
“You said you’d get back to me. About how you were feeling,” Sam continues tentatively.
Dean rolls his eyes and sighs. Shoulda known that one would come back to bite him in the ass. “What do you want me to say?” he sighs, dragging his hand along the steering wheel. Should steer them right into a ditch.
“I just want to know if you’re okay, man.” Dean doesn’t look, because he knows Sam’s making those sad little cow eyes at him, and even though he’s known the kid all his life he’s not quite as immune as he’d like. “You’ve barely said anything since we left the house. When Mom--”
He white-knuckles the wheel and just barely clamps down on the urge to scream. Or maybe find that ditch. “Don’t go there, Sam,” he warns. “Not now.”
“Dean, it was our mother,” Sam says thickly. If he actually cries, Dean might punch him. “It was our--”
He swerves off the road with a hard right, coming to a violent, screeching halt in an unlit parking lot. When he turns to his brother, he’s got one hand on the door, the other on the glove box, staring at him with big eyes.
“Since when do you give a damn?” Dean snarls. “You never cared that she was dead, never!”
He expects Sam to lash back, and he’s waiting for all that piss and vinegar from the month before he left for Stanford--but instead, Sam retreats like a kicked dog. Dean swears, moves to hit-- something, and just barely manages to remember he loves this car more than most people love their kids and stops himself.
“She was just a picture before,” Sam whispers, and Dean’s just this close to losing it. “Just a picture and... and half-remembered stories Dad mumbled when he was drunk. She wasn’t real, you know?”
Dean doesn’t know. The image of his mother remains preserved in his brain like a portrait behind glass. He remembers reading somewhere about how old paintings had to be kept at exact temperatures or they would degrade, and how hard the restoration process could be. So Dean keeps the picture of his mother in an enduring environment of remembrance and devotion, with occasional maintenance in the repetition of sacred memory snapshots, giving the shrine in his brain a touch-up.
The problem is, he took one look at the spirit that was his mother and realized the degradation was so much worse than he imagined.
“But then she looked at me like she loved me. She doesn’t... she didn’t even know me and she loved me,” Sam confides, rendering his car a confessional. “And then she apologized. Why would she do that? Why would she say that?”
He can think of a thousand answers, none of them good: I’m sorry I died. I’m sorry you know what monsters are. I’m sorry this is your life. I’m sorry I left you with them. I’m sorry I’m leaving again.
Dean didn’t get an apology. Maybe no matter what happened Dean would always end up like this: shooting at things in the dark, grasping desperately for a family that never seemed to be reaching back.
“Dean, I--”
Sam lays a hand on his shoulder and Dean smacks it away. Realizes his eyes are wet. Dammit.
“Don’t push me away, don’t--” Sam begs.
“Don’t touch me,” he snaps. “Don’t.”
Sam ignores him and Dean ends up grabbing and holding on for dear life instead of pushing him away. Of course. It’s what he does. They end up clinging to each other in a mess of limbs in tears, Dean desperately ordering Sam to shut the hell up as Sam shushes him and presses their foreheads together.
“It was Mom,” Sam says senselessly. “What if... there’s something wrong with me? What if she died and the whole time there was something--”
“Shut up,” he hisses. “Shut up, there’s nothing wrong with you, and she... she...” He can’t even say it, the words sticking in his throat.
“She loved us,” Sam concludes. Dean nods, fingers digging in, holding on. “But, Dean, I don’t think she’d love me if she knew.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he repeats but Sam shakes his head.
“Not that,” Sam says and Dean suddenly, sharply becomes aware of how tightly they’re gripping one another, how Sam’s been nosing around his hairline like an animal seeking comfort, how they’re breathing each other’s air. How Dean didn’t recognize his own mother and, even after realizing the truth, thought about scattering her with salt anyway, because what if she hurt Sam?
“No,” he insists, not even sure what he’s arguing against. Of course she loves you. Of course there’s nothing wrong with you. Of course you’re not like... that.
If anyone’s the problem, it’s...
“I’m sorry,” Sam says, nuzzling Dean’s neck. Dean shivers. “I’m scared she’d be ashamed of me.”
“She wouldn’t be ashamed of you,” he replies softly. Not of you. Sam presses his lips against Dean’s throat, open-mouthed and wet. Dean grabs Sam’s hair and holds him there, shuddering. “But... we shouldn’t.”
Sam’s hands wander under Dean’s shirt, nails dragging dully down his chest. His tongue flicks out as he moves his mouth under Dean’s jaw, still not quite a kiss. “M’sorry,” Sam mumbles. Dean’s eyes roll up and he pants as lips and hands roam mercilessly. “M’sor--”
Dean yanks Sam back, meets his terrified gaze with his own, sure he looks just as crazed. “Don’t,” Dean demands, then mashes their lips together. Sam gasps into his mouth as Dean takes the opportunity to memorize the taste. It’s going to be his only one, after all. Sam recovers and he spends a languishing minute pressing kisses to his brow, his temple, under his eye, stroking his sides reverently whispering mea culpas the whole while. Then, trying again, for his lips.
He shoves Sam away and starts the car up. He can’t look, can’t risk whatever expression’s on his brother’s face.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he lies for the final time. Whatever is going on with Sam, he can’t even begin to know how to apologize for it.