themegalosaurus:

13×21 coda || 310 words

Dean should have pushed Sam, that night he gave her the spell. “I know what Rowena is dealing with,” Sam had said, his face soft and vulnerable in the way that always catches Dean’s heart. “She’s not the only one who feels helpless.”

“What do you mean?”

Dean asked. He did ask. But he didn’t want to know. And Sam had seen it on his face, the not wanting, and had sniffed a little and blinked and his eyes had shuttered over, and he’d given Dean some bullshit spiel about getting to Mom and Jack.

It’s not like Dean doesn’t know the kind of thing that happened in the Cage. The dark stuff. The stuff Sam doesn’t talk about, that they can’t ever talk about because the only time Dean heard it was from Sam half-deluded during those scary six months when his wall came down. (Then, and from Crowley in the sticky depths of some no-name dive, when Dean was drunk and a demon and certainly couldn’t care less.) (“Nasty stories about what happened to poor old Moose,” Crowley had said, testing the waters, and drip-fed the gory details until Dean sloped off to get laid.)

It’s better to talk about this shit. Dean knows that. He wants Sam to be able to talk about it; Sam whose walls are more carefully constructed than anything Death ever built him. He wants to know. And yet he’s been pussy enough to be glad Sam can’t say it out loud.

All this to say

that when Sam stumbles into the campsite crusted with blood, a miracle in brown plaid and ugly jeans; and then behind him, Dean recognises Lucifer’s familiar shape; he sees the sick, dull shame in his brother’s eyes and he remembers all of it, is hit with it, this weight of what he doesn’t (does) know.