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Dean doesn't know why he does it anymore.
He can't sleep for more than forty-five minutes, an hour, at a time. Not even tonight, when he and Sam are holed up in a half-way decent side-of-the-highway motel to rest up and lick their wounds after a half-way decent hunt. He lays awake, motionless, eyes fixed on the ceiling, and wonders why he does it. Does anything, really.
He's got options, alternatives – for all that he and Sam can't seem to stay dead, he knows there's ways out of the game, and ways to make sure that he stays out. It wouldn't be fair to Sammy, but Sam knows more than anyone that life's not fair, so what's one more injustice.
He used to get through nights like these by thinking about the little things that made it all worth it. The taste of a good burger, and the warm, primitive satisfaction of a full stomach; smiles from pretty girls; the feeling when it's just him and the Impala racing across a hundred miles of empty desert highway. But it seems so long since he's felt any of that, since he's felt anything at all.
He shuffles through memories, playing that dangerous game of imagine-what-if that he knows is eating Sammy alive.
There was a year, when they were kids, when he and Sam had stayed in the same place long enough to complete an entire semester at the same school. He had taken a physics class – nothing too complicated, but the teacher was cool, well, cool for a middle-aged high school teacher – and Dean had actually liked learning about mechanics and motion. Acceleration, impact force, friction – it all made sense in an almost intuitive way, expressing with words and numbers what Dean instinctively knew about how to hit a moving target, or reduce the force of an unavoidable punch.
Because of inertia, the force necessary to stop an object in motion is greater than the force necessary to keep an object in motion, Dean recalls – part of a lecture he had memorized for an exam he took an eternity ago. He had passed the exam, but it didn't matter because the next day he mixed up the words in a Latin prayer and fucked up an exorcism.
I have too much inertia, he thinks. He keeps doing it, the hunting and the heroics, because it's easier to keep moving than stop.
† † †
“Really, Dean?” Sam says, an incredulous expression on his face. “From a freaking flask? What are you – Bad Santa?”
Dean wonders what's taken Sam this long to notice, what Sam will do – because, goddammit, Dean would never say it out loud, but in the dark of night when it's just him and Jim, Jack, and José, he's more than once thought that he needs someone to do something. Anything. He needs an outside force.
Sam does nothing. Dean's not surprised. After all, it's how they dealt with Dad. Just ignore it, just ignore their inner demons and find something with too many teeth and claws to slaughter and send to hell.
† † †
Things reach critical mass when Dean gets pulled over by the cops for speeding on the way to provide back-up for Sam in what should have been a simple hunt that went south when Leviathans showed up. The cop's about to let Dean off with a ticket when she notices the empty beer bottle in the cup holder.
“Sir, I'm gonna need you to step out of the car and take a Breathalyser test.” she says.
“I told you, lady,” he says, reaching for the pistol he keeps in the glove compartment. “I don't have time for--”
The handcuffs snap around his wrists, and he's hauled off to the station, where he's charged with resisting arrest and driving with a .242 BAC.
It's near midnight when Cas shows up at the police station. Dean doesn't know where Cas got the money to bail him out, and he doesn't care. His head hurts. He wants a drink, or two, or six.
Sam's waiting with the Impala outside, having rescued it from the police impound lot.
“Hey bro,” Sam says, claps his hand on his brother's shoulder. “Good to see you again.”
“Yeah. You ok?” Dean gently brushes Sam's hair out of the way so he can get a better look at the bruises and rough sutures marring Sam's face.
“I'll live. How bout you? Cops didn't rough you up?”
“Nah, I'm fine. Let's just – let's get out of here.”
Dean moves towards the driver's seat.
“Sorry, Dean,” Sam says, dangling the car keys. “I'm driving tonight.”
They leave for a case in Wisconsin the next day, and Sam drives. Dean doesn't ask to switch seats with his brother. He doesn't want to hear Sam tell him he needs to sober up. He knows, goddammit, he knows he has to get his shit together but it's too hard, his head hurts, he wants a drink.
† † †
When they get back to the motel after an afternoon of gathering information about the disappearances of children from the local police department, and families and friends of the victims, Cas is sitting on one of the two beds, shoes and coat off, filling in a newspaper sudoku puzzle.
Sam kicks off his shoes and sits on the other bed, opening up his laptop to begin researching their monster of the week. The wi-fi connection isn't working, so Sam goes to see if the woman at the check-in desk can do anything about it.
The moment Sam leaves, Dean goes to the grimy mini-fridge, takes out a bottle of beer and downs half of it in one gulp. Suddenly, Cas is standing in front of him, and angrier than Dean's ever seen him, and sadder, too. He takes the drink out of Dean's hand.
“This has to stop, Dean. I pulled you out of Hell. I can't just stand by and watch as you fall back down.”
† † †
They're in Florida, and happy that, for once, their hunt has taken them to palm trees and beaches. They're even staying at a proper hotel instead of a motel; there's been surprisingly more room in their budget for food and shelter now that Dean isn't drinking a fifth of liquor a day.
Sam knows that Castiel doesn't need to sleep, but he keeps his mouth shut when Cas makes a show of yawning.
“Mind if I bunk with you again?” Cas asks Dean.
Sam's pretty fucking sure that Dean doesn't mind, but that's the way they do it – they all need to sleep, there's two beds in the hotel and Dean's smaller than Sam, so Cas shares with Dean, and Sam keeps his mouth shut when he wakes up in the middle of the night and sees them, limbs wrapped around each other and holding on for dear life.
For so long, Sam hasn't see any other way to help Dean except to look the other way. But now Cas is here and maybe, if the two of them were to approach Dean, he might – might what? Sam doesn't know what he wants Dean to do. Normal people would go to meetings and therapists. But normal people have free time, permanent addresses, and health insurance. Dean has a guardian angel holding him tight and that's just going to have to be enough.
It's ironic, that they spend so much effort saving everyone else that they can barely keep themselves together. Sam knows – in the same, detached way that he knows Isaac Newton wrote Principia Mathematica – that it's only a matter of time before they crash and burn.
What'll the world do then, he wonders. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to take a break, rest up, and trade in the nights with demons for afternoons with a psychiatrist. But he also knows that if they stopped and found some semblance of normal, not pretend-normal, like Dean had with Lisa and Ben, but real apple-pie life normal, if they ever found that, they would never give it up. And what would the world do then, except force the role of hero onto another poor bastard. Motion is conserved, and so is misery.