"Here, hold this." Dean shoves the takeout bag from the burger joint at his brother to free his hands and fish the car keys out of his pocket.
"Dean!" Sam is already holding both sodas. He juggles the bag with his elbow and braces the bottom of it against his hip just in time to keep from dropping it. "Wait! Why don't you-"
"Thanks." Dean grins disarmingly and snatches the bag back as he settles heavily into the driver's seat of the Impala.
"Why didn't you just set it on the roof of the car?"
"You looked like you needed something to do."
Sam curses, coming around to his side of the car. "You always have to be a dick, you know that?" he mutters. He manages to pry open the passenger's side door with his hands full and drops down onto his seat with a huff. He makes a great show of presenting Dean with one of the cups. "And while we're on the subject of you being a dick. Why does every place we eat at have to be some kind of a dive? You know I hate this crap."
"It's convenient." Dean digs one hand into the steamy warmth of the paper sack and locates his burger. "And cheap. And… also awesome."
"It sucks, and it's going to give you a coronary."
"Yeah, well. I'm older, I make the rules."
Sam doesn't say anything. Dean can hear the pout approaching from a mile away. They're going to be driving in silence again. Goddamn it. "What? Are you gonna argue with me about that now, too?"
"You're not really. Older than me, I mean. Not anymore."
Dean looks at him sideways. "The hell are you talking about?"
"Hell. The way time works there. I've technically been alive a lot longer than you."
It's the first time he's heard Sam talk so bluntly, so honestly about the cage since the wall in Sam's mind crumbled to dust, and Dean can't get over the feeling that this conversation is a land mine. If he doesn't tiptoe around it in just the right way, everything will come crashing down again. But this is so Sam, it's what Sam does, he hurls grenades to see if Dean will catch them and diffuse them in time. And here he is, bringing up fucking Hell in casual conversation, and it makes Dean want to run in frantic circles around his made-of-glass little brother in case something trips him up and makes him fall and break again.
Dean wrestles his feelings back into check. He's not made of glass, he forces himself to remember. People don't survive a hundred and eighty years of torture by being fragile.
"Living longer just makes you old, it doesn't make you born sooner," Dean answers in his so-there, end-of-story voice.
"It makes you older. Hence… older brother." Sam gestures to himself in a self-satisfied kind of way.
Dean shakes his head patronizingly. "You're never going to be the big brother, Sammy boy. No matter how much you want to be. It just doesn't work that way."
"No, listen. I've actually given this a lot of thought." Now that doesn't surprise Dean. "Do you ever watch Doctor Who?"
Dean gives him a look. "Do you ever get laid?"
Sam presses his lips together, annoyed, no longer really interested in sharing thoughts on non-linear, wibbly-wobbly timelines.
Dean softens a bit. "I'm sorry, it's just that… really, Sam? Doctor Who? Wasn't that, like, the guy with the scarf on PBS?"
"Forget it."
"There, you see that? Right there." Dean crumples his burger wrapper and stuffs it into the bag on top of the rest of the food Sam hasn't touched yet. "That's what makes me the older brother. I always win every argument."
Sam has gone quiet again. Dean reaches over and turns on the radio. Sam is looking out the window. Not fragile. Not. He nudges the bag toward Sam. "Eat something," he says, and it's both an order and a plea.
"I could feel time passing," he says, a little distantly. "It hurt. Like something sharp dragging over me. Was it like that for you?"
I wish I couldn't feel a damn thing.
"Sam, don't ask me that."
They end up driving in silence for quite some time, and Dean isn't entirely sorry.