Past 7
After the incident with the demon hunt, Dean started to make a habit of taking off on his own without telling anyone. It didn't take Sam long to get sick of it.
He looked up one evening to see Dean appear in the library, looking exhausted. Sam hadn't thought it was even possible for him to get tired anymore.
"What were you doing this time?" Sam asked setting his book down angrily, "getting fresh coffee from Guatemala?"
"I've been hunting, Sam" Dean said. "In the last half hour, I've taken out a Chupacabra in Rio, an Oni in Kyoto, and a Werewolf in London. It was easy. Too easy."
"What?" Sam asked, still feeling more than a little pissed off at being abandoned like a child. "You're upset because being nigh-omnipotent takes all the fun out of hunting? Dean, think about how many lives you saved."
"With those three monsters? Forty-six. That's how many they would have taken out before something else got to each of them. Less than fifty. Meanwhile today 152,032 people will still die, and I could save any of them that I wanted. It's not the power that takes the fun out of it, it's the knowledge, knowing how pointless it all is."
"You don't mean that" said Sam carefully. "We help people. We've saved the world!"
"Yeah, and most of the time we're also the ones who endangered it in the first place. All we've ever really done is chase our own tails and I don't know if I can do it anymore."
That was when Sam started to worry. For as long as he could remember, hunting had been Dean's entire identity. Sam had had big dreams growing up. Depending on the month he might have wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut, but Dean had only ever wanted to hunt. The only thing he had cared about, besides his family, was how many lives he could save. Now he had the ability to save anyone he wanted with barely any effort, but even though he had the ability, he still couldn't do it. If no one ever died, the Earth's population would grow and grow, resources would run out, and those in pain would be left to suffer forever. It would be chaos.
Death can't be a hunter. It just didn't make sense, but with that taken away from him, Sam didn't know what Dean was going to do. It didn't look like Dean knew either.
