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They don't make it six hours on the road, maybe not even five. It's still light out when Dean pulls into the motel parking lot, the same grey rain-fogged light they've been driving through since some time before they passed the last state line. Dean cuts the engine, puts both hands on the wheel, leans his head against the back of his hands, and just breathes.
Both hands. Sam tries to remember how long it's been since Dean took his left hand off the wheel. How long since Dean stopped prodding at him with lame jokes and dumb lines and just turned up the music instead, how long since Sam looked at him, at anything but the winter-shorn fields out the window or the road up front, black as the water closing over a drowning man's head.
"Back in a sec," he says, before he pushes open the car door; he says it too carefully, but Dean doesn't snap at him. The uneven slump of his shoulders is all wrong, like the broken frame of the Impala in the Bobby's yard, her lines all wrenched out of true. When Sam comes back from the motel office, Dean still hasn't lifted his head, even though the car's parked with a clear view of the office door. Sam tries to convince himself this is a good sign. He knows better than to try to offer help across the parking lot, but he shoulders both their bags before Dean gets a chance.
The smell of stale cigarette smoke hits them the instant Sam pushes open the door to the room, and Sam swears, drops the bags on the closest bed, and goes to open both the windows. At least they're not facing the parking lot: the air's cold but fresh. When he turns around, Dean's still standing in the middle of the room, his face a blank. Sam'd like to think the weird blueish pallor of Dean's skin is just a reflection of the overcast sky, but when he flips on the overhead, the grey's still there, and the bruises show up redder and more raw.
Sam pulls his brother's coat off, shoves him into an armchair, and goes for the first-aid kit. The bandage is a mess, brown blotched with fresher red stains. He shouldn't have let Dean drive, but it hadn't occurred to Sam to protest or to Dean to offer the keys, and even if it had--
Even if it had, Dean probably would have said no. He likes driving, likes the reassurance of being in control.
Sam cuts the T-shirt off rather than try to raise Dean's arm over his head, then pulls off the bandage. Dean doesn't even bitch about the sting, which means--it just means he's tired. A bullet in the shoulder, that's not that bad. Dean's just tired.
Sam makes Dean swallow the codeine and the amoxicillin before he swabs out the wound and cuts Jo's stitches loose, what remains of them. (Fingers pushing into bunched flesh and wrenching, and you can feel the groan more than hear it, the vibration through chest and bone and muscle clearer than the awful half-stifled sound.) Sam stitches the wound up again careful and quick (his knuckles bruised and reddened and the little stabs of pain every time he has to shift his grip) and Dean never looks at him, his head tilted back on the chair and his eyes half-closed and his hands spread open and deliberately loose on his knees. Sam doesn't think about anything but the needle and the thread and the way they both breathe, slow and easy. Cautious and quiet. As if they're hunting, or being hunted. Don't look this way. No one over here.
"Dean?" he says when he's done, and Dean blinks and shudders and runs a hand over his face as if he's waking up. Blinks again, hard.
"Sorry," he says, "sorry, Sammy," and then stops, bewildered, like he can't figure out what to do next.
"Dude, you're wiped," Sam says. "C'mon, let's get you to bed," and Dean lets himself be manhandled across the two feet to the bed and dumped on the mattress with a grunt. He smells like sweat and blood and clothes left to dry balled up in a washing machine, or on a body pulled out of a lake in fucking Minnesota in the middle of winter.
"Should call Jo," he mumbles into the pillow as Sam unlaces his boots.
"In the morning," Sam says, pulling the boots off, and takes the mumble trailing off into sleep as agreement. He pokes Dean awake enough to get him slide grumbling beneath the covers. The grumbling subsides into a snore, and Sam holds onto his brother's wrist, holds onto his hand like a girl, slides down onto his ass on the floor beside the bed and puts his forehead against his crossed wrists and tries to inhale in time to his brother's breathing. His heart hammers against his ribcage like it's trapped there, like it's something he can't afford to ever let out.
I'm not going to kill him, Meg told him, and it's not fair that she sounded like that girl, that he thinks of a demon by the name of Meg Masters, who has a family somewhere in Massachusetts who'll never know she died in South Dakota, he knows it's not fair, but it's the only name he's got for her. I'm not going kill him yet. I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to show you how much your brother loves you. Think he'll keep his promise, Sam? Think he'll eat his own gun after? Maybe I won't need to kill him at all.
Demons don't understand love. They see it, they know how to use it, but they don't get it. Sam knows that now. Meg hates Dean, pure as burning, and she thinks that's what love's like. She thinks Dean really didn't pull the trigger because he was too afraid to be alone. Hatred doesn't leave you lonely, so demons think love doesn't, either. So fucking stupid. You'd think they could figure out that much, when the only way they know how to measure love is by the pain it causes and the holes it leaves behind.
Dean asleep in that motel room in West Texas, and Sam's going to remember it forever now, the dumb green-striped wallpaper as imprinted on his brain as the color of the paint Jess had chosen so carefully for their apartment. Dean asleep and Meg standing over him and she didn't pull the trigger because of hate, and she'll never understand what it means that Dean didn't pull the trigger later because of love.
Sam wipes his eyes, pulls his elbows in; thinks about his dad locking a demon inside his ribs like locking it behind the bars of a cage. He misses his dad so hard it hurts. He doesn't know what to do, and Dean doesn't know what to do, and all he's got between the two of them and a passel of hunters and a pissed-off demon or ten is Dean's devotion and a couple of pieces of tin Bobby probably found in a crackerjack box and palmed off on them as a placebo. Dean's devotion is unbreakable. Dean isn't. Dean will stand between him and anything, and all that means is Dean will die first. He understands it now, understands Dean's voice cracking apart and his body slamming against a wall and not even fighting it, not even fighting. You and Dad, you're all I have--
Maybe Sam's stupid as a demon himself. Figuring out love by the holes it leaves behind.
Cheap bleach from the motel blanket prickles harsh inside his nose, and blood and stale smoke curdle in his mouth ("Menthols are so freaking girly," Dean said, after he'd given up on the sex jokes and before he'd stopped talking altogether, "should've figured it out then"). The draft from the open windows plucks goosebumps down the back of his neck. Creakily, Sam gets up, stretches his arms above his head. He tucks Dean's blanket closer in, then goes to lower the windows a little in their frames. He braces himself there with his hands on the sill, looking out at nothing a while, scrubby backlot pines that may even make a decent windbreak in thirty years. He breathes deep, breathes in the air coming down from the north cold and impossibly clean, like it's rushing down from some better world, some brighter country they can get to, if they just get in the car and drive.