You have to let me grow up.

We cleaned up the blood and got the girl to the hospital and torched the leshi and got back to the motel long after midnight. We didn't say much to each other than the usual necessities along the way. Back at the motel, Sam grabbed clean clothes out of his pack and gestured to the bathroom door.

"I'm gonna -." He said it hesitating, and I knew what was coming. I'm gonna take first shower, okay? Not being polite like I always thought he was being, but like he needed my permission.

You have to let me grow up.

Then he huffed a breath and headed for the bathroom, tossing over his shoulder, "I got first shower," before he shut the door and snapped the lock and left me alone in the room wondering what the hell I'd ever done to deserve that crack.

You have to let me grow up.

I have to let him grow up?

He's been grown up ever since that Christmas he was eight, when he jacked Dad's journal to find out the truth. And when Dad finally got home late Christmas afternoon, Sam met him at the door with the journal in his hands, telling Dad straight out what he'd done, waiting for the eruption that never did happen.

The next day we started teaching him how to hunt.

Eighteen years that kid has been grown up and he's complaining now that I -

Kid.

No, I'm not the only person in the world who thinks of Sam as a 'kid' - Bobby does, Ellen does, but they think of me as a kid too. I'm the only one apparently who it bothers Sam that I think it of him.

Well, he is a kid. A kid I can't see over, but still -

The water shut off in the shower and so I didn't look like I was brooding when Sam came out, I hefted my computer onto the table and booted it up. I considered googling 'pain in the ass little brothers' just to see what I came up with, but I decided against it just in case Sam took himself a look at what I was researching.

I didn't need to worry of course. He came out of the bathroom and pushed his bloody clothes into his pack, barely said, 'night' to me and got into bed.

He had the bed farthest from the window which was the bed closest to the door, but the door was so far away, it didn't matter. Usually, I took the bed closer to the door and, back in the day, that was on purpose. Dad always took the bed closest to the door, I got the next one, and Sam got the roll-away rolled as far away from the door as possible. Then when it was just the two of us, I took the bed closest to the door, most times anyway.

Was that why he thought I didn't think he was grown up? Because of where we slept? I took the closest bed to the door because it was habit, it was strategy.

It wasn't an insult.

And this past year Sam took the closest bed lots of times anyway. Though that doesn't mean he wouldn't still carry a grudge about it.

You have to let me grow up.

What the hell did that mean, anyway? Of course he's grown up. I know he's grown up. Maybe I've been keeping him on a leash these past few weeks, but hello? Demon blood, throwing over his own brother for a lying skank?

Apocalypse?

Well, yeah, I have my own big part in that too. I know I do. Sam hasn't once thrown that back in my face. So see - he is grown up.

Yeah, I know. Not the kind of grown up he was talking about.

Rain started slashing against the motel and thunder pounded overhead. Sam turned onto his side to watch out the window. The bedroom half of the room was dark and I only had one light on in the kitchen behind me. But I could see him, I could see that his eyes were open, watching the lightning and rain.

If I can tell by his breathing that's he still awake, does that mean I'm treating him like a kid brother? If I had insisted he take first shower anyway because he was covered with blood, would he have thought I was bossing him around?

How have I not let him grow up? How could I possibly keep him from growing up? He's been taller than me nearly ten years; if he thought I was treating him like a kid, why didn't he just tell me? All these years, all our lives, I thought Sam could tell me anything.

I thought.

Are secrets and lies part of Sammy's 'grown up' world? No, I guess not. To him they were a symptom of 'little brother-ness'. If he'd felt more equal to me -

No. No, I don't want him to be like me, I don't want him to feel like me. I want - I wanted - I still want so much better for Sam than I ever felt I had a right to.

Does that really make me such a horrible brother?

Okay, no, I know, Sam didn't say I was a horrible brother, just that I'm bossy. Actually, all he really accused me of was being a big brother. I've been accused of worse.

By people I cared less about.

Lightning flashed in the sky and thunder like gunshots followed. Sam bundled his second pillow under his head to get a better line of sight out the window.

No, okay? No. I have no idea why Sam bundled the pillow up. Sammy when he was little would bundle his pillows up when he wanted to watch out a window from his bed. Why full grown up Sam did it, was I even allowed to speculate?

Was I not allowed to care when he's hurt or tired or upset? Was I supposed to sit by and let him patch up his own wounds? When he met Castiel and was so disappointed in how angels really are, was I supposed to not reassure him?

After losing Jess, after losing Dad, after losing Madison, after I made my deal, after I came back, Sam had nightmares in varying degrees of misery. He hadn't had any recently, but if he did, if he woke up in the middle of the night gasping for comprehension, was I supposed to go back to sleep without asking if he was OK? Was I supposed to buy his lie that he was fine if I did ask him?

Like I lied whenever he asked me if I was okay when I had a nightmare.

Was that was this was about?

This whole past year - and it had to be just this past year that Sam was squawking about -

No. No, he had a legitimate complaint, didn't he? It wasn't my getting pissed at the Ipod dock, or the swings I took at him when I discovered his new & improved way of exorcising, it wasn't the torment of the panic room or me chasing him down to the honeymoon suite. Like I told Sam then, I only wanted to be sure he was okay, and I knew he would do the same thing for me.

And he would. Only I would push his concern away. I was allowed to 'mother-hen' Sammy; he wasn't allowed to try and take care of me.

That was what this was about, wasn't it?

Yeah, Sam had a legitimate gripe of how I'd been treating him the past three weeks, or since Ilchester, really. Forget how pissed I was, how abandoned I felt, how sick I got whenever I thought about it all. Just like I thought it was my job and mine alone to keep the Apocalypse from starting, these past weeks I thought it was up to me alone to stop it. As far as I'd been concerned, when Sam was along, it was for the ride, when he wasn't along it was for the better. When he came back, I thought I had to keep as tight a grip on everything we did, everything he did, as I did when he was still in single digits.

Sam had a legitimate gripe about that. Looking back, I knew I'd treated him worse than Dad ever did, and I wondered how he'd borne up under it all without taking my head off.

But I knew too, it wasn't just the bossiness that was bothering him, it wasn't the bossiness or the distrust or the bad temper, and he wasn't just asking for the right to be bossy and distrustful and bad tempered just as much in return.

He was asking me to let him - he was asking me -

To be equal it wasn't just that Sam got the declared right to responsibility and authority. I could do that, that was easy. We'd had that before lots of times, anytime I was out of commission, Sam was in charge. That had happened a lot - too often - this past year. That wasn't it.

It was that I -

I -

Sam was asking me for the undisputed right to take care of me. Same as I ever took care of him. Equal in being strong, equal in being weak.

Equal.

That was the hard part. The really hard part. That was going to take a whole lot of doing.

Three flashes of lightning shot by in a flash of seconds and another artillery succession of thunder rolled so hard it rattled the table I was sitting at, and I heard Sam's softly declared,

"Wow."

Maybe to the world he wasn't a kid. He was twenty six. If Jessica hadn't died, by now Sam would be a lawyer and married and maybe even a father already.

To me he was a kid. He was more than a kid. He was my kid. He always had been. That wasn't going to change. How I felt about him was never going to change.

How I treated him had to. How I let him treat me had to change.

That was the hard part.

Within a half hour the lightning and thunder had rolled away from us and all we were left with was waves of rain sloshing against the window. Sam unbundled his pillows and repositioned himself for sleep. I shut down my computer and dragged my poor aching body over to my bed. I knew I should take a hot shower but the bathroom was sooo far away over there past the foot of my bed.

"The codeine is in the bathroom." Sam said.

"Why'd you leave it in there?"

"Because you need to take a hot shower or you'll be too stiff to move tomorrow. And if you can go in there to get the painkillers, you can go in there and take a shower."

I didn't answer him immediately because I was half giving him a death glare and a half a goofy grin. He turned his head toward me.

"I'll get 'em for you if you need me to." He said.

"Thanks, I'm gonna take that shower."

"Okay." He repositioned himself to sleep. ""Be sure you take two pills."

Letting Sam take care of me was going to be hard, but apparently I was going to get a lot of practice.

The End.