The drive back to the bunker was three hours long, and Dean knew the silence that had settled would not last long. Almost as soon as the thought had crossed his mind, Sam turned toward him.
"I can't figure out how that witch's spell had no effect on you." He said it like he was making conversation, but Dean knew that it was a question.
"Yeah, weird." He knew his brother wouldn't accept the answer, but for some reason he enjoyed dragging these things out.
Sam glared at the side of his face, while Dean refused to turn away from the road in front of him. "You just stood there, Dean. You knew the spell wasn't going to work." Once again, a statement that was actually a question.
"Yeah, I had a pretty good idea. Besides, I knew if it did work you would have been able to get her and the spell would have been broken anyway." He hid his slight amusement while he gave his brother vague answers. He had to get some enjoyment out of this, especially knowing where this line of questioning would lead.
"And what idea was that?" A real question that time!
"Well, when we were researching, it said that the spell could not affect those already afflicted… and I have already been afflicted." He said the last part a bit quieter, although he had meant to say it all indifferently.
His brother's eyebrows jumped to his hairline so quickly he could see it in his peripheral vision. "You are already afflicted with a love curse? Since when?" Sam asked. He seemed suspicious of Dean's answer.
"Well, something like that." He grinned sideways at his brother and turned back to the road, ignoring the frustrated huff coming from the passenger's side.
"What the hell, Dean! Stop being so cryptic and tell me what the hell that means!" The bench seat was vibrating with the force of Sam's movement as he turned more of his body toward his brother. As if that would make him talk. Or maybe he thought he'd understand better if his whole body was facing Dean.
"Don't go all chick-flicky on me now, Sam." He warned, frowning a bit to prove that even thinking about the upcoming chick-flick moment was already upsetting him.
"Alright…" His brother agreed warily.
"My heart is already full of love. There was no space for her."
There was dead silence in the car as his brother processed that. There was no way he was not going to comment on it, so Dean just waited silently and prayed that the upcoming observation wasn't some form of ridicule. Not that he had any right to hope. He knew, if the shoe were on the other foot, he would have mocked Sammy until his little brother killed him.
"I guess Cas ended up helping out with that hunt after all." The softly spoken words were like a knife plunged directly into Dean's heart. So his brother did know, after all.
"Yep, and you better not tell the annoying bastard."
Sam's mouth fell open in surprise. The silence that followed lasted the rest of the car ride.
Sam flopped down into the chair beside his, dropping a large book on the table in front of him. It was a book on love spells. Of course.
"So you knew." He started, and then never added to the comment. Dean took that as an out immediately.
"I know a lot of things."
Sam rolled his eyes and started again. "You knew you were in love with him." He was still making statements that sounded like questions.
"Yep." Dean would have loved to say that he was being deliberately obtuse, but he honestly had no idea where this was supposed to be going.
"I always just assumed that you just hadn't realized your feelings yet."
For some reason that comment made anger curl up in Dean's stomach. "Well excuse me. I may not be a college boy, like yourself, but I'm not completely retarded." He glared at his brother and dared him to find a reason why anyone would be so dense that they could be in love with a guy for going on four years, and not even realize it.
The anger and the comment seemed to leave Sam taken aback. Dean knew he wasn't good with emotions, and he tended to push them down and away whenever they did crop up, but did his brother really believe he couldn't even recognize the emotions he did have?
"So what are you going to do now?" His brother asked him in a tone that meant to calm him, Dean knew.
"About what?" He was seriously becoming confused at where his brother was going with this.
"About being in love with Cas!" Sam sounded like he was becoming frustrated, which Dean didn't understand at all.
"Um… nothing?" What did his brother think he was supposed to do?
"What? Why not?" And now Sam sounded sad. His little brother was a roller coaster of emotions today.
Dean just stared at his brother for a while, not really having an answer for that. He knew why he'd never done anything about his feelings for Castiel, but he didn't really have the words to explain it to his little brother. The look on Sam's face said he was going to have to try, though.
"Nothing is ever going to happen between me and Cas." He said softly, but firmly.
"But why?" Sam asked, just as softly, like he didn't want to scare Dean off. "I'm pretty sure he feels the same way about you." And he looked hopeful, like he saw some kind of happy ending on the horizon.
Dean just shook his head at his brother and sighed. "I know." He admitted, dropping the eye contact and watching his own fingers run down the edges of the table between them.
"Then why?" Sam asked again.
"Cas guards my heart." He finally said, hoping to get this conversation over with at this point. "As long as he is in there, no one else can be."
Sam's eyes widened and he stared back at Dean. "No one else can hurt you, you mean." And then the anger came, as he'd known it would. "You allowed yourself to fall in love with him, knowing that you would never do anything about it. Didn't you?"
Sam slammed his big hands down on the table, startling Dean enough to look into the fire in his brother's eyes. "You knew you could do what you wanted, when you wanted, who you wanted and you'd never have to worry about it. Because Castiel guards your heart for you."
Dean could only confirm that.
"That is seriously messed up, dude." The look of disgust on his brother's face was another stab in Dean's heart. Too bad Sam already had a place in there. Cas couldn't protect him from his brother's disappointment.
"I'm not asking you to like it, Sammy." He said. He didn't try to sweeten it either. That was the way things were and his brother was going to have to deal with it.
Sam jumped up from the table so quickly his chair nearly fell over behind him. "Good, because I don't. " His words held a hostility Dean hadn't heard in awhile. "Maybe you should stop thinking of yourself for five seconds and think about how Cas feels. Asshole." And he stomped his giant ass right out of the library.
What Sammy didn't seem to understand was that his heart was only protected as long as he never let anything happen with Castiel. If it did, his heart would be wide open for being ripped out again, and he knew he wouldn't be able to take it. It was safer this way.