If the break-up had been the only thing going on, Dinah might have explained further. Or maybe not. She really hadn't wanted an 'I told you so' from Dean. She still stood by her decision to give it another try before. She'd walked away too hastily. She usually tended to do that when things got difficult. And then later, it was hard to justify staying broken up. It was hard to know whether or not she'd sabotaged it herself or whether it truly was broken.
This time... this time she'd tried. She really had. And she knew they were broken.
She had closure. That was worth taking another shot at it.
But none of this was all that important right now. Not a whole lot seemed important at the moment.
There was a small comfort in the knowledge that Dean knew, on some level, what it was to lose a kid that he cared about. He hadn't talked much about the kid that he was missing from back home but Dinah knew there had been one. She had always thought that was at least part of the reason why Dean had always been so willing to help with Jake.
Not that she took comfort in the fact that Dean had suffered a similar pain, so much as she was finding a little bit of comfort in knowing that she didn't have to explain the hurt. That he just knew what it felt like.
"He doesn't remember it here," she said after the tears had died down a bit. "Jesse checked. He's back to his world, back to his regularly scheduled... it doesn't end well."
She fell silent again, just taking the time to try to calm herself again. She was glad that he wasn't pushing her to let go. That he wasn't pushing her at all. But all the same, eventually it got to a point where she realized that she was probably just being selfish to keep hanging on. She swiped at her eyes and then released the hug. She kind of rubbed at the wet spot on his shoulder and then looked up sheepishly.
"Sorry about soaking your shirt."
Shiva had once told her that she needed to learn to keep her tears on the inside. There were times when she thought that maybe Shiva was right. Times when she envied the assassin's ability to remain stoic in the face of pain. She didn't like showing pain. She didn't like putting her friends in the position of being her shoulder to cry on like this.
But there was a much larger part of her that realized that letting her tears fall on the outside and letting those she cared about be there for her-letting them keep her connected to the world even when she wanted nothing more than to disconnect-that was the difference between herself and Shiva.
That was what kept her from veering off the path of light and hope onto one that was far more destructive and murderous. It was what kept her from turning into one of the twisted villains that she fought against.