The last half of season eight was nothing short of genius. It gave me so much inspiration to write, that it kind of backfired. I have so many half-finished stories because there are so many plotbunnies hopping around in my head I could focus on one story long enough. This story gave me a bit of trouble, and I've been tinkering with it for a month or more. I think I'm finally done with it. Just some brotherly schmoop, nothing too complicated. Please let me know what you think. Thanks!

Lather Rinse Repeat

He always seemed to wake up at the same time every Sunday.

Sometimes to the haunting and treacherous solitude when he first saw he realized Dean had vanished. Sometimes to Dean's laughter echoing in the hot Texas wind that ruffled the curtains and twinkled the windchimes.

Sam wasn't sure which was worse.

He pushed his body, weary and pained from age and abuse, out of bed. The air outside was cold and still, but there was a peace in the morning. One that Sam didn't often find in the working at the motel in the afternoon, making dinner in the evenings, being haunted at night.

It was the same ritual every seventh day: grab the microfiber car mit, the expensive soap that often left his shirts stained with blue and the bucket from the mess hall closet. Fill it with water.

Wash the car.

Remember Dean. Embrace the pain. Feel the love.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

It was a practice of meditation and reverence, and an exercise in grief-a wound torn open over and over so it wouldn't heal. Once it did, Dean would be forgotten...and Sam deserved the pain. He carried it like a prize. Sam thought over the days with Dean, his favorite memories, and his worst failures as a brother. Sometimes he smiled as he buffed the fender, glided light blue bubbles over glittering black paint, because there had been more hilarious and priceless memories that Sam had ever imagined. The rare joy that peppered his life mostly came from Dean.

Today, Sam cried, jagged sobs that ripped and tore and stabbed out of him like bullets from a gun. Sam wept so hard he couldn't get air. Lightheaded and bereft, his knees gave out until he was dropped on the side of the car, clutching the door handle and trying to remember something other than demon blood, betrayal, Dean's heartbroken expressions as he failed him again and again.

Amelia had somehow known to respect his worship. When it got bad like this, when Sam would fall into despair and grief and self-hatred so thick, he had panic attacks, she would come and drop a kiss onto his shoulder. "We'll do it together, okay? Come on, baby, get up." And he'd stand and start again, scrubbing and crying while she rinsed and loved.

Today though, no one came, and Sam had to do it himself. With his chest aching sharply like the power his crying had actually broken his ribs and with his head pounding so hard he could barely see, Sam Winchester straggled to his knees and scrubbed pathetically at the bumper.

"Sammy, what the hell?"

The sleep-ragged rumble obliterated the stricken haze of failure and grief and self-hatred with an eerie efficiency. The mit hit the pavement in a splatter of blue suds. But Sam didn't turn around. This had happened before, a spectre of Dean emerging, born from Sam's visceral desperation.

"I know you're an overgown man and all that, but you friggin' can't disappear on me...not when you're hurt."

The timbre was right, the growl of what other people would mistake as anger was spot on. Sam could separate the frequencies of the voice, parse the octave of a worry and fear beneath the bluster and bravado. He swiped his hand over his face, wishing phantom Dean would go away. Seeing him always made the inevitable disappearance harder.

But then his entire field of vision was composed of nothing but his older brother. Not a wavering watery Dean that was never quite in focus, but an imperfect version with nasty scrapes on his forehead, bags under his eyes and the stubble darkening his chin. "Sammy, hey,...can you talk to me?"

Gobsmacked, Sam could only blink. "Dean?"

"Who else would it be?"

"But you're dead, man...Crowley said...he told me that I was alone...and y-you disappeared."

Calloused hands squeezed his shoulders hard enough to bruise. "That's it, kid, we gotta get you horizontal."

"I don't get it."

"That's an understatement of the year," Dean groused. "Pretty sure that Leviathan quite literally knocked you into last year."

"Wha'"

He couldn't quite grip the reality around him, it sluiced through his fingers like a sand through his fingers. But there was concern and light and life in the green eyes that stared at him and he clung to that with the desperation of the bereaved.

"You're hurt and concussed and stoned. I'll explain it when you're two out of three. Let's get you lying down."

Dean steered Sam away from the half-washed Impala and into a motel room he'd never seen before. The wallpaper was checkered with jauntily hued birds. He helped him climb into bed, lifting his feet when Sam's strength gave out. He felt it now, the muted prickle of pain and the stupefying haze of narcotics. "Lay on your left side, Sam. You're back's a mess and your ribs are cracked on the right."

"...'s numb," Sam whispered, face pressed into the pillow.

His cheeks were still wet with tears, and the grief was still palpable. He hiccuped pitifully before Dean plucked some tissues from the tiny pack on the nightstand. Sam closed his eyes as Dean wiped his face with them, their scratchiness was inexplicably soothing. "What about your head? Does it hurt?"

It pounded now that Dean mentioned it. The rhythm was unsettlingly disjointed, making his stomach queasy. "Yeah."

Dean folded the blankets over him. "Sleep's probably the best thing for you, Sammy. You go on some kind of concussed walkabout again and I'm chaining you to the bed."

"It's Sunday," Sam muttered. "Have t'wash the car on Sunday."

Dean rubbed his forehead wearily. "Why, Sam? Tell me why."

The tears were there again, licking down his cheeks and soaking the pillow. "Because you died...and I had to remember."

His brother wasn't placating him when he hitched a knee up on the mattress, and braced one arm over his body. "Remember what?"

The walls melted into a little more than a tacky haze, and Sam barely stuttered out an answer. "That you were my brother...even when I didn't deserve it." As he faded, he prayed Dean would still be there when he woke up.

-SPN-

His eyes fluttered open to walls dappled orange sunlight, a mouth that tasted like he'd gargled with garbage, and body that felt like it had grappled with a Mack Truck and lost. Sam groaned, too disoriented for words. He jerked at the harsh screech of chair legs sliding across hard tile, and the creak of old furniture.

"Sorry...too bright?" Dean asked.

Sam mashed his face into the pillow until the fire behind his eyelids down died to a dull crackle. The bed dipped with Dean's weight, and Sam found the simple gesture far more comforting than it should have been, like balm on a burn.

"How are you feelin'? Eggs still scrambled?" When Sam shrugged, clearing his throat, Dean pressed on. "You remember what happened?"

He wasn't sure how he could forget razor-sharp teeth curled into a vicious smile, the smell of cedar and Borax as he crashed through the wall of the abandoned barn. "Leviathan wanted to play with its food first. It gets blurry after that."

Dean sighed with blatant relief. "You scared me, Sammy."

Sam chanced a glance backward at his brother, squinting into the shadowed room. Dean himself seemed haunted and ill. Something had happened. Dean hadn't been this shaken after the fiasco of a hunt on the abandoned farm. "Tell me," he rasped, voice cutting in and out like static.

"You've been pretty out of it. Not sure if the was the concussion or the pain meds we doubled up on." Dean summarized as he retrieved a bottle of water and a straw for Sam.

"Sorry," Sam whispered after taking a few tentative sips. His stomach somersaulted queasily, and he handed it back. "Things are clearer, which is awesome 'cause who wouldn't want to miss feelin' like a chomper's chewtoy?"

"That bad, huh?"

Sam closed his eyes, trying to hold himself as still as possible. His head pulsed with hot pain that nipped at the backs of his eyes, but his back was nothing more than tight, white-hot agony. "M'back's killin' me."

"It should. I dug out enough wood to build a bird house." The slant of the bed disappeared as Dean got up to putter around the room. "I'd give you more painkillers, but I don't want to come out of the john to find out washing the car barefoot in October."

Sam flushed with cold as he was assaulted with sense memories of palpable, choking grief, a jolt of Amelia's perfume and the slap of soap and water in a dingy white bucket. He must have relived one of the fifty-two grief-stricken Sundays. It explained the grit of dried tears on his face, why Dean's presence was far more healing than any medication or pad of gauze.

Silence folded over the motel room and created a suffocating tension. Dean continued to tinker and comfort, pulling back the covers to examine Sam's back.

He audibly winced at the sight of Sam's bare back. "This should help a bit," he said, pressing an icepack to his upper back near his right shoulder, where it hurt the most.

Hissing, Sam fisted the ratty bedspread. The cold helped to numb the pain so much that Sam managed to doze, only waking when Dean shifted the icepack. He unexpectedly started talking. "I, uh, I think I've been hammerin' you pretty hard about the whole purgatory thing. It's hard to see past all that...murk to realize that you probably went through it too."

"You don't owe me an apology, Dean."

"Right back atcha, dude," he breathed. Dean jiggled the ice lightly until Sam gazed back at him. "Purgatory was nothing but runnin' and slaughterin' and constant fear. In the middle of all that crap, Sammy, you were the one good thing I could focus on. I wouldn't have made it topside without you. I should have told you that sooner." Dean's voice tremored with emotion. "So whatever guilt you're carryin', you need to let it go. You're a good brother, Sammy."

It was hard to talk around the lump in his throat, hard to see with the silver building in his eyes, so Sam just reached up to grip Dean's arm.

"No more weepy Sundays." He ordered with a swat to his side.

Sam snorted a laugh into the pillow, heart lighter than it had been in more than a year.

The next time Sam washed the car, he dumped an entire bucket of water on Dean's head, his laughter echoing through the trees like a song.