"Well, this is my family. My family hunts, you know? It's what we do."

Sam walked back to his own room, the words he spoke to his mother leaving a foreign feeling on his tongue. He almost got out of hunting, but his family hunted. It was what they did. It was why he came back. To family. Always family.

That was Dean's ideology. Family is the most important and is an absolute reason for justifying why he does what he does, but Sam always felt differently about it. Family is important, he would never deny that, no matter how unconventional his own was. But was it really why he stuck around in the life he never wanted?

He laid on his bed and watched the ceiling fan spin, tracking it with his eyes. He couldn't read Mary like he could Dean. Hell, it was hard enough believing that she was alive. He didn't really know how she felt when she mentioned that she heard he got out but, for reasons unknown to her, he was back in the game. He had been back in the game for over a decade now because of one fateful night.

A night that he could never tell Mary about. If she was anything like the Winchesters he grew up with, then the complete knowledge of everything she missed would crush her with guilt—regardless of how much Sam and Dean would insist that neither of them have ever blamed her for the lives they ended up leading.

He tried to leave more times after Azazel's death, but always found his way back into the Impala with Dean in the same way that Dean kept coming back even when he should have been dead.

If he said it enough times, he might be able to convince himself that he really did come back because family is the end-all, be-all. If he really thought about it, there were plenty of times that he wouldn't have made it through without Dean, who always made sure Sam was okay even if they were on bad terms because, for him, that's what family did. That was his job. Sam, instead, spent his younger years always trying to escape his family and what it meant to be part of it, which Lucifer claimed was the result of Sam trying to run to him as though they had some connection.

Lucifer, whose current status was unknown. Amara did something to him. Banished him, maybe. Sam hoped that she killed him instead and gave him the mercy of not having to live with the knowledge that his biggest tormentor no longer roamed the earth.

Still, the ceiling fan above him spun round and round, an oddly accurate representation for his life. Repeating the same cycle over and over. It might be a little different with each spin, but the basis was the same. Was he as content to live with that as he pretended to be?

If he left, Dean would still have Mary. Dean didn't really need him around anymore, hadn't needed him after he left for Stanford (and even admitted that he didn't need Sam to search for their dad, but that he just didn't want to do it alone), but would he be able to find normal? Was he too deep into the hunter life that it was his only option left and all other opportunities passed right by without him noticing?

A soft knock at the door pulled him from his reverie and, with his permission, Dean stepped into the room with a half-empty beer bottle in hand. Sam suspected that even without his permission, Dean would have barged right into the room anyway. That was what he did.

"How're you doing?" he asked. He pulled the chair from Sam's desk next to the bed and took a seat, leaned back, and propped his feet up next to Sam.

Sam shrugged, his shoulders back to being in one piece and no longer painful to move. "Cas healed me."

"Yeah, well, Cas can't heal everything," Dean said, sounding so nonchalant and innocuous in hiding his true question.

"Honestly? I'm not positive that I'm actually not in that basement right now, tied to a chair, and that Toni decided to use that potion-spellwork combination hallucinogenic bullshit again on me because liquefying my brain has become an acceptable option to her. Just collateral damage, you know?"

"Hallucinogenic what?" Dean took a long drink from his beer. "Jesus, Sammy, what'd she do to you?"

"Whatever she thought would work," Sam said. He cracked a small smile. "I told her that after being tortured by The Devil himself, she couldn't compare."

"You know this is real though, right?" Dean asked. "Not whatever potion crap she gave you. I'm alive. You're alive. Mom's alive. Everyone's gonna be alright."

Sam stared at the ceiling fan again for a minute before he looked at Dean. The last time he couldn't distinguish between reality and the makings of his own mind was after his memories of Hell returned, his memories of nearly two centuries of torture at The Devil's hands. A time when he almost shot Dean.

"Amara was supposed to be the end, Dean. Like 'The End'. Capitalized and fade-to-black over," Sam said.

"When has there ever really been an end for us, Sam? You want to know what happened? The soul bomb never went off. Chuck diffused it once he and Amara worked things out. She just wanted her brother," he said. "They went off on some divine vacation, but Amara brought Mom back as a gift to me before they left. Might sound crazy to someone else, but that's kinda the normal course of our lives."

"Yeah, I guess it is."

"Hey, Sam?"

"What?"

Dean hesitated before speaking again, but Sam let him have all the time he wanted. Not like he had any other pressing concerns, and for once that came as a relief instead of a source of restlessness.

"What would you have done if I hadn't shown up?" Dean asked. "You know, if things went the Plan A route."

"Would it have mattered?" Sam asked.

"Of course, it would have mattered!"

Sam shook his head. "It really wouldn't have mattered. You would have been in The Empty. Mom would still be in Heaven. Cas, well, he was fine before I was around. He'll be fine after I'm gone."

"Sam," Dean said in a low, warning tone.

"I don't think Toni would have let me go until I told her what she wanted, which was never going to happen. She would have had to torture me to death," continued Sam, not giving Dean the chance to continue his thought or reprimand Sam for being okay with dying when he had nothing left worth living for. "It doesn't matter now either, Dean. Like you said, everything going to be alright."

He told his mom that it was family that led him back to the hunting life again and again, not revenge. But revenge was the very thing that led John into the hunting life, and Sam and Dean by extension. She wasn't what he expected when he first met her in the past, but at the time even being able to have those memories of her—despite the fact that she had no idea who he was and that the angels wiped her mind afterwards—was enough. He was glad just to have been able to associate a person with 'mom', a term that was more of an abstract idea throughout the majority of his life.

Now, he finally had the chance to have a mother. To get to know the woman whom John loved so much, he started a supernatural crusade in order to find her killer and accepted that there was a whole other world he needed to learn about first. To know the woman that gave Dean simple moments, like the consideration of cutting the crusts off of his sandwiches, to remember her by in the four years he spent with her.

Did he really want to give that up to take another chance at chasing normal? Didn't it just all come back to family anyway?

"I think you were right," Sam said.

Dean, in the middle of taking a drink, nearly choked on his beer, but regained his composure in record time. "I'm always right, Sammy," Dean said. "What was I right about?"

Sam shook his head with a smile.

"Come on, Sam," Dean said. "You gotta tell me. What if I need to repeat it in the future to make sure it sticks in that thick skull of yours? Sammy—"

Sam ignored his brother's rambling attempts to figure out what Sam admitted he was right about.

Maybe family was the end-all, be-all that Dean believed it to be.