He doesn't do alone very well, he knows that now.
He spent six long months without Dean once, six months when he watched himself become cold and distant and a killer. He didn't like that version of himself very much and he vowed that he wasn't going to become like that again.
Except, maybe, he had.
He is sitting, cross-legged, atop the lumpy motel bed, his bag and coat slung on the empty mattress opposite. He still hasn't gotten used to booking a single room, preferring to use a double. He can't stop ordering a pot of coffee and two cups in diners either and he wonders how long it is going to take to break that habit.
Last time it was six months, this time it has been far longer, but it doesn't change, it never changes.
All he wants is his brother back.
There have been girls of course. Despite what Dean thought, he isn't and never was a monk. He was just choosier that's all. Jess, Sarah, Madison, he can count them on one hand, the women he has loved and lost. Now he spends the night with them, leaves them in the morning without even a cell number. He knows that Dean would have laughed, said 'That's my boy.' Somehow that makes him stupidly proud.
He has Bobby too, the older man only a phone call away. He'd stayed there on occasion, Christmas, Thanksgiving, his birthday. He never really celebrated those days, just liked having the company, even if it only meant a bottle of jack, a TV dinner and a pat for one of Bobby's junkyard dogs.
Bobby was growing older now, his eyesight failing, hands shaky around his research. Sam knew, deep down, that soon he was going to lose him too and it hurt, hurt more than it should. Sam wished he could maintain that numb detachment he had once had, but that had gone years ago and he felt every pain, every loss, his body a mass of aches and regrets.
There was Ellen, but she had her own family. Jo had managed to find a husband and was now a mother herself, an unruly brood. Sam popped by from time to time, but he never felt easy around Jo and, although Ellen was kind to him, he could see the relief in her eyes when he finally left.
He remembered what Dean had said about Rufus, about the old hunter, lonely and bitter. Sam hadn't wanted to become like that, hadn't wanted to be his dad either, hadn't wanted to make bitterness and revenge his only reason for living. He hadn't wanted to go on hunting, hadn't wanted to stay on the road, driving from place to place, searching for something that he was never going to find.
He searches out demons, hunts them down, traps them, talks to them before he sends them to hell. He doesn't want to think about why he does that, doesn't want to think why he just doesn't exorcise them immediately, send them back to hell.
He tells himself he is hoping to get some information about Dean.
But, if he were totally honest with himself, it is because he is hoping that, one day, one of the demons will BE Dean and he will have found his brother again.
He doesn't know what he might do then, but he knows that he won't be able to send his brother back to hell, not after all these years of trying to get him out.
He doesn't do alone very well, he knows that now.
And one day, Dean will come back to him, and he won't be alone anymore.
End