I see light at the end of this tunnel

I just don't believe that Dean would have left Sam at that age (this is barely after 3.8 in the timeline) for days at a time, or have him take a bus by himself. That is completely ridiculous considering how protective Dean was over Sam at that age.

Hi anon! This seems odd to me because I don’t understand why it would be Dean’s decision? He was 13 years old. That kind of arrangement would be down to John and I don’t imagine Dean would have had much say one way or the other. In fact, he says as much to Sam in the episode, over the phone, when Sam wants to come with them: ‘I asked Dad and he said no. What else do you want me to do?!’

I think maybe the suggestion that these would have been Dean’s choices to make links up to the other difficulty I have with what you are saying. I don’t dispute that Dean was protective of Sam when they were younger (as he still is at times, which can be both good and bad). But he was a child, just like Sam, and the evidence we see in the show suggests that his protectiveness wasn’t the all-encompassing parental care which I have sometimes seen it made out to be. We know from episode 5x06 that Sam ‘used to’ make his own dinner when he was small (and I had assumed even before last night that this would have been in situations like 11x08, when Dean and John were away pursuing a case).. We know that Dean would drop Sam at Plucky Pennywhistle’s restaurants when it was inconvenient to have a little brother trailing along behind him. We see in Bad Boys that Dean lost the food money ‘in a card game’, which at least suggests that he went out at night without taking Sam with him. I’m not saying Dean is at fault for “neglecting” Sam (or ‘not being there for him’, as Dean says in 11x08) - again, he was a child and couldn’t or shouldn’t have been expected to provide an adult standard of care, or necessarily to understand what was appropriate. It seems to have been quite usual for Dean and Sam to have been left alone at motels as children, so this probably would have seemed like a normal situation and not something to make a fuss about. After all, back at the motel is at least usually a safer option than out on the hunt, right? (1x18 notwithstanding I guess.) 

Anyway, all of that means that what happened in 11x08 didn’t feel to me at all unexpected, let alone ‘completely ridiculous’. Eric Kripke seems to agree (he tweeted Jenny Klein and said that the episode was ‘true to the boys’), which meshes with my own sense that this episode built on the picture of Sam and Dean’s childhood that was built up during the earlier seasons of the show.