Dean's almost positive he'd prefer the distance. Not because he's an asshole that doesn't want to be touched, but becuase it borders on too much, an electric kind of thing that goes right to his chest. And because he's sure that the second Sam drops his hand onto his shoulder, that he'll know. That he's lying, that he's a piece of trash, that he's a million and one things, but most of all, that he's someone who tortured souls in Hell. That sort of makes him unworthy of a whole lot, and most definitely Sam's affection, and he stares off at nothing in particular for a good long while, jaw set to try and ward off the welling of emotions that's set to brim over at any second.

Finally, he looks back at Sam's words, tries to digest them for what they are, for what Sam believes to be real, here. That Dean's endured his brother's death and somehow managed to take it without doing something about it, that he sat on his ass for months and let Sam rot in a grave.

Not. Likely.

But he can't mask everything that flickers across his face and he's sure the pain is registering as just that: pain, the heartache of losing the one person who meant the most the most to him. And now that he's staring him down again, it's tearing him up inside to know he let Sam down, out of everyone. He's sorry, god is he ever sorry, but nothing he can do is gonna fix that or make it alright. All he wants to do is crumble but he's standing here, trying to take the onslaught of what he's feeling, and boil it down to the things that he's now trying to make Sam believe. That this is loss, cold and hard and real, and only loss, that Dean is trying to buck up in the face of getting his little brother back without having done anything to save his soul.

"Yeah. You made it back."

Except, Dean doesn't want to sit on that fact because Sam made it back because Dean made it so. He sold his soul and Sam doesn't know it and why not? Why is time different here, why's Sam off kilter from when he's from - Dean didn't think time travel was a real thing so what the fuck's up with that. It makes it so much easier to try and flee from the emotions of it, dragging a hand down his face and forcing himself into the land of confusion, trying to push away the dregs of terror that are reinforced in the back of his mind and settle on the things that he doesn't understand about this place.

That just seems so much easier than dwelling, than facing what he cannot stand.

"But why, Sam? Why are we here, we got no reason to be. You don't think this is all a little, y'know- freaky?"