AN: This was a write-a-drabble-in-twenty-minutes-or-less challenge I gave myself. It's set in season six right after Sam got his soul back. Dean's having trouble believing it's really back.
Dean knew Sam had his soul back.
He'd seen Death put it in him, after all. Heard Sam scream as Death stuck that ball of light and his arm past his bony wrist inside Sam's chest.
But he was having trouble really believing it. Like he'd doubted his senses when he'd seen Sam after the djinn attack. He kept expecting to see dead, flat eyes. The eyes that had watched him be beaten and turned by the vamp with the Weird Al hair. The eyes that hadn't flickered at using a baby for bait or torturing a child. The eyes that hadn't had one ounce of concern in them when Dean returned from being nabbed by fairies, or when Meg threatened to torture Dean.
Dean did know it wasn't like that. Sam's soul was back. He was Sam again. Dean knew it. At least his brain did. His lizard brain though, viscerally didn't believe it, or trust that Sam had his back.
He was getting there, though.
He knew as soon as Sam reached for a hug, his eyes softening just before he latched on like his life depended on it. And when Sam grabbed a stunned Bobby with the same arms that had knocked out and tried to kill the older man.
Dean knew it when Sam convinced that Penny girl's sister to let them in, sympathy dripping from every word he spoke and sincerity shining from his face. And when he scolded Dean for stealing Penny's diary. The way he talked to Melissa in the hospital and shot Dean a bitchface for pushing about whether or not she was a virgin. The way he gave up chasing one dragon man to save Dean from the other.
Dean was starting to believe it.
Dean was trying to believe it. Sam slept now, sometimes cashing out on his laptop like old times. He tapped his fingers to music and gave Dean crap about what he ate. Then Dean woke up early one morning to see Sam emerging from the gas station across the street from their motel with three coffees and two bags of food. He crouched down at the corner of the building and gave one bag and one coffee to a homeless man lying there. Dean would bet Sam had slipped some money into the bag, too. And the next night, when a spirit threw Dean into a pile of manure, Sam laughed. He laughed while he finished dusting the ghost, while he helped Dean back up, and all the way back to the motel, dimples on full display and eyes sparkling like Christmas lights.
It wasn't a sardonic chuckle or sarcastic snort. It was a real, irresistible, chocolate and rainbows laugh.
Then Sam sewed up the gash on Dean's arm without a word about the smell and tossed Dean's clothes and cleaned out the car while Dean used up every drop of hot water in the motel. And he returned with a double cheeseburger with extra onions and an entire apple pie.
"Good thing I was with you. You were in deep shit," he said when Dean's mouth was too full to respond. And then he laughed so hard he went to sit on the bed and missed and slid to the floor, still laughing full on, wiping eyes full of mirth.
And then, finally, Dean believed.