#dean respond to a prompt in less than fifty million paragraphs challenge

[dekanos]

this shit has taken everyone i've ever loved. @ruinedmyself — sent from this prompt (x) still accepting!

the anger has been building in him for months. no matter how many times he's tried to express to sam that nothing good will happen if he tries to break the conditions of the deal, the kid keeps trying his damned hardest to find a loophole. it had to come to a boiling point eventually, and dean's limit is reached when he walks in on sam buried in various textbooks regarding demonic pacts. where he'd gotten those from, dean can only guess — if it means having to share a few select and harsh words with bobby, then so be it — but it had been enough for him to start an argument.

‘ you think i don't know that, sam!? you think i'm not right there with you!? ’ because that's the kicker here, isn't it? that they've both loved, albeit in different ways, and lost. sam's just lucky he hadn't been hold enough to remember the fire, to know the feeling of sudden and unbearable grief. being fours years old and having to go from waking up that morning with forehead kisses gifted over breakfast to knowing that you'll never feel the comforting touch of a mother's hand again is something that changes you so viscerally. and he hadn't even had time to process his grief, because it had been all guns blazing, leaving the only home he'd ever known to go out on the road and hunt down a fucking demon, of all things. the same demon who years later, in a manner that can only be described as cosmic fucking irony, would cruelly snatch his brother from him when gaining access to him had been the very reason that their mother had been killed in the first place.

in some fucked up way, dean thinks, this deal makes them even. if sam can understand even a singular iota of the grief that dean had felt holding his brother's lifeless body in his arms, then this would have been worth it. because he can't possibly know what it's like to feel responsible for the loss of the one person on earth that you've dedicated your entire reason for existing to keeping safe and protected. the sense of failure that had wholly engulfed him, that he would've had to carry with him for the rest of his life if he hadn't done something, anything, to rectify what he considers his greatest mistake, would have ruined him. ‘ i'm not gonna apologise for doin' what i had to so i could keep you safe, sam. i'm just not. and you can hate me all you want, but i'd rather live my life knowin' you were out there somewhere hatin' me, than knowin' you weren't out there at all. ’