A/N: Just popped into my mind, as I was sorting out my thoughts and feelings—OMG, THE FEELINGS—about the Season 9 finale.

Please, pretty please, review? ;)

For the first time in a long time, Sam sees the child in his brother's eyes.

It's been so easy to think of Dean as the world does—surefooted and quick-witted, brave and brutal, lethal charm and hardened exterior. It's been so easy to be angry at his brother the way he always has, for blind loyalty (to Dad) become blind leadership (over Sam).

But Sam sees his brother's gaze reach for him, something deep within it pleading and outstretched, a child's arms begging for home and family lost—Sam sees the blade strike down and in and through, sees the slump of shoulders in the lines of exhaustion and dying in the clearest way he knows, and Sam feels the vestiges of his anger and resentment spill out and away from him, tracing the same paths as his brother's blood.

(Because he'd forgotten, till now, how much of Dean is still so very young).

And he doesn't know—has never known—how in these awful, final moments it is possible to have a thousand memories flash before his eyes and his heart. But he remembers Dean at eight, at twelve murmuring the only prayers Sam had ever known him to say…

'Please bring her back. Please let my mom come back.'

And after everything, Sam understands. Looks into his brother's eyes (the eyes that only look for him, as they always do), and sees the child's faith there.

Sam knows that it doesn't make it right, but the reason Dean has always brought him back is because he believes he should. Believes it to be the best way. The only way. To a child, death cannot be final.

It's strange, how much death there has been in Dean's life, and yet he never seems to understand that someday Sam must join that number. How many times has Dean died for Sam—how many times has Dean died for everything—and asked for nothing more than that Sam live. And Sam remembers his own anger, his incomprehension of the lengths that Dean will go to keep Sam here, but he sees now that it is all Dean thinks he can do.

Dean began the only life he's really known in fire and death, a child never let to be so again. A child with his brother in his arms.

And Dean has never let him go. Oh, he's let him stray, but he's never let Sam out of his life wholly. Never let Sam out of life wholly.

Sam is everything to his brother.

But it's only now, watching the man with the child's eyes bleed out before him, that Sam remembers that his brother is also everything to him.