Brothers are brothers.  As such, when you’re family, as close as you are, there are some things that you just can’t or don’t want to reveal about yourself or what you’re going through, and this would be how ‘Supernatural’ hunters/parabatai/Men of Letters Sam and Dean Winchester handle things.  Even though they might be going through something, if it’s only one of them that’s dealing with it, they tend to want to keep it that way and handle it themselves, especially for the sake of not getting the other into the same trouble.

So, now that Sammy has taken the burden of having to go through the trials, what does this mean for their bond as brothers and being honest with each other?

“I do feel like the trials are going to take a toll on their relationship because … it’s something that Dean really wanted to do,” [Jared] Padalecki says. “That’s not necessarily the way it worked out, so I think Dean doesn’t resent Sam, but Dean resents that he wasn’t able to do it.” When God tests a man’s strength of character, he doesn’t go easy on him. Sam is going to have a really rough go of it, and he’s going to do his best to hide his struggles from Dean.

“Dean and Sam have always been like, ‘Just be honest with me! Tell me what’s going on.’ But obviously the trials are taking this toll on Sam, but he doesn’t want to go to his brother and say, ‘Listen, buddy, I’m scared. It’s hurting, and I’m coughing up blood.’ He’s like ‘No, I’m good, I’m good, I’m good,'” he explains.

Naturally, Dean begins to question Sam’s fortitude. “Sam’s lying to Dean, and Dean’s lying to Sam, because Sam’s like, ‘You don’t believe in me!’ and Dean’s like ‘Of course I believe in you,’ but Dean is having his doubts.”

Jensen Ackles puts it this way, which I think is accurate:

“I don’t know whether the brothers will ever fix things. The strains are less, there’s an unbreakable bond as we’ve seen,” he says. “Try as they might, they are bound by blood, and that will always be there. The straining relationship, and the bickering, and the not understanding what each other is going through, the trying to battle all those things — that’s always going to be there.”

And although Sam and Dean have cooled their tempers and it seems lessened the tension for now,  it might not be that way for very much longer, because there’s still that strong possibility of Ty Olsson‘s Benny will return, which I certainly hope so.

“The character itself I think was really cool, because Dean’s never really had a relationship anywhere close to that. His relationship with his brother is what it is, and everybody knows about that, then there’s the relationship with Cas, which was strained and tattered and torn, and there was a whole bunch of stuff there,” says Ackles. “But to have somebody who was a war hero with you, to have a brother-in-arms kind of thing, was something that hadn’t really been explored, so I really liked that connection that Dean had … kudos to [Jeremy] Carver for going with that storyline. I thought it was awesome, the whole Purgatory thing. Selfishly, I hope that Benny comes back.”

You can watch the video interview at Zap2it.