Dean isn't about to tell Sam this, but he misses it, how it was before. It's a stupid thing to think. He's back to how he used to be. He knows he should be grateful for it, and really he is. Sam's so happy to have him in this body again. They both survived the deal, they're both alive and Sam's happy. God knows that should be enough.

But Dean's back to the way he was before all this, before Sam went down to the witch in Louisiana and changed everything, and to look at him now it's like none of it even happened. There's nothing different about his body, not a single line or muscle movement out of place. He would know. He spent the first few weeks after the change cataloguing the differences between his old body and his new one. He'd had to know his body to stay alive as a hunter, know all the tiny parts of it and how they moved together, what they could let him do.

When he wasn't in that body anymore, he'd had a new one to learn. He spent the two weeks before the hellhounds should have come and the first few weeks after panicking, first trying to figure out how to get out of that body and then worrying about what he was going to do now that it had become clear that he was stuck there. He'd gotten past that, though, had gotten into thinking that as long as he was stuck there, he should be hunting again. He had to learn the body to do that, and he did.

He did it, and maybe he did it too well, because the body he is in now -- the body he was born in, the body he spent twenty-nine years of his life in -- it doesn't feel like his own anymore.

It should have felt like slipping back into familiarity, but it's nothing like that. His body feels too big, muscles too bulky and tendons out of place. And that's, well. It's no fun, but it's easy enough to deal with. He'll get over that, get back to being used to his body again soon enough. Even if he has to learn this body from scratch, he'll get used to it.

If that were all of it, he'd be fine. But that's not really the problem. The problem is, Dean doesn't feel like Dean.

*

It started pretty early on. Dean knows that now. Maybe it started at the very beginning, though slowly. It must have been building from the inside, deep down, and moving quietly, ever so quietly outwards so that he couldn't tell what was happening but got it only in pieces:

The morning he didn't start when he caught sight of himself in the mirror, still half-asleep. The day the Wal*Mart jeans felt like they fit in all the right places. The first time he pulled his hair back into a ponytail, unthinking. Whenever it was that he stopped thinking about how far forward he had to keep the seat, how the road looked different from a lower angle over the dashboard.

He didn't get it, though. He still didn't get it, right up until it happened: the moment in the bar, a man named Roy leaning over the pool table and leering. Dean knew that expression, had made it himself dozens of times, but still it threw him, because there was something about that moment right then that made it click into place.

He tried to tell Sam about it, what made him so panicked -- probably the fastest he'd ever been so honest in his life -- but Sam didn't get it or didn't want to, and before Dean could get around to explaining it to him better he'd changed back again and Sam thinks it's over. Sam hasn't given a single bit of thought to it, that it might not be so easy as Dean being back in his old body -- everything's back to normal now again, isn't it? It's that easy, the way Sam sees it; Dean hasn't ever thought of asking him about it. He doesn't have to. He can tell from the way Sam clings to his muscles, the way Sam's face relaxes into comfortable lines at looking at Dean now when before there was always this tension, like something terrible might happen at any moment and probably would.

Sam thinks that all of their problems are solved now that Dean's back in his old body and has survived the deal. He's wrong.

Sam never really asked why it worked, what the witch did to Dean in Louisiana. The thing with it is, it shouldn't have worked. If she'd just changed Dean's body, it wouldn't have worked. But that wasn't all there was to it. He'd still been Dean afterwards, but at the same time he hadn't been, not entirely. She'd changed him all right, that witch, and it took him until that moment in the bar to realize it, all the tiny pieces coming together: at some point, Dean Winchester had stopped being a he and started being a she.

It doesn't entirely make sense, not even in her head. It's true, though. She feels it in the same way that she feels the awkward angles of this body, the bone-deep wrongness here, and even if she didn't know it already she'd know she was right because of what the witch told Sam: she could do change Dean, but it will have its costs. Dean knows what that means now.

Sam doesn't know, though, and Dean's not about to tell him. Sam can never know.