Glossolalia
I'm not quite sure when I fell in love with you.
I don't think I could pinpoint it if I tried. This isn't the sort of thing that crystallizes down to just one second. It happened in a million moments, not not just one. And, those, I remember. Sewing up a wound between your shoulder blades, one you couldn't reach yourself, we had to be young because there are so few scars on you in the memory; I remember how you winced and swore under my touch, I remember smelling blood, sweat, alcohol, you. Being shaken awake by you, pulled out of a motel bed that smelled like sex and beer, it was the middle of the night and you were so excited because you had solved whatever case we were working, and I couldn't help but grin and blink away my exhaustion because you were so proud of yourself. Sunlight glinting off of that flask you always keep in the pocket of your jacket (maybe Dad's, maybe Bobby's, maybe just yours, I'm not sure) as you raise it to drink whatever's in there, light flashing into your eyes and illuminating the million different shades of green in there. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I remember every single one of those moments. Maybe not the details, but definitely the way the light hit you and outlined every perfection, how your voice buzzed in my blood and under my ribs, how I felt.
The flask. You know, you drink way too much. But I'm pretty sure you know that, and I guess there are worse ways you could cope, so I won't bring it up.
I fell in love with you over a matter of years. Maybe I would have tried to stop it if I knew what was happening, maybe I would have thought it was wrong, but it's a little too late for that now. How was I supposed to know that, one day, when you clapped a hand on my shoulder and grinned at me with your face all scratched up, blood glistening in your hair as the sun set, my heart would catch and I wouldn't be able to breathe? How was I supposed to know that you talk in your sleep, and sometimes you cry, and how was I supposed to know those half-murmured words about monsters and people you couldn't save and, way too often, me...how was I supposed to know they'd be like a freaking spell? Pulling at parts of me I thought had died years ago, fish hooks sunk into my heart and my marrow, drawing out tears and gasps and a desperate need to fix you. You're broken pieces in my hands, you know that? You're damned sharp, I cut myself on you sometimes, and that probably doesn't even make sense, does it? I keep holding onto you anyway. I don't have the slightest idea how to glue you back together, but at least I can keep all those shards in one place and working in relative harmony. And, y'know, maybe I'm broken, too, and maybe our pieces fit together.
This is the kind of thing that sneaks up on a guy. What I feel for you, I mean. Apparently, it's also the kind of thing that puddles and drips and fills up all of the hollow places inside me. There were a lot more than I knew. It formed in a billion nameless, dingy hotel rooms, came from the sounds of exorcisms and angel's wings, found its way into me when I focused on your breathing in the middle of the night and prayed it would never stop. I don't really know how to explain this to you. How to tell you that your heartbeat is like a song, and I wish I could get close enough to hear it. I can't do this to you. I don't have the greatest track record when it comes to relationships.
I've seen you in those perfect, vulnerable little moments that paint a clearer picture of who you are than any of your self-made slang or your clothes or your music. I can see you right now, face turned to the sun, eyes closed and hair sparkling gold, features splashed with light and arranged into an expression of perfect bliss as you take in the early-morning heat. I can see the little flicker of pleasure around your eyes and mouth as you pull on a freshly-washed shirt; maybe it's torn and burned in places, but at least it smells like soap and not blood or sulfur. I can see you when you brush against me. When we're hunting, when we're in danger, and I stay close enough for you to touch me without even meaning to. You get this look on your face. Just for a second. Someone else probably wouldn't have caught it. Utter peace, and reassurance fueled by the knowledge that I'm right there with you, and I'll always be there...and you're not alone.
I'll try and tell you what you are to me, Dean. Yeah, I'll use your name, too, it's not like I could pretend I was talking about someone else here. Am I talking? Or just thinking? I can't really tell. I never would have told you any of this before, you would have flipped. And I can't stand your anger, your disappointment. Every word you say against me feels like it's being cut into my flesh.
So. Here goes.
You are brilliant green eyes, fierce and wide and defiant even when reflecting Hellfire, and close-cropped hair that looks black in one kind of light and dirty-blonde in another. To me, you are blood being gently dabbed off my knuckles with alcohol, and shirts that smell like that awful cologne you wear because you think women like it (and maybe they do, I wouldn't know-and you definitely bed enough of them), and furious, jagged music. You're the pattern of lights in Heaven's sky. You're stargazing, cold beer, the glossy black finish of an ancient but beautiful car. You're comfort, and about seventy different types of pain no one else can make me feel (jerk), and black smoke and salt and loyalty and resurrection and that little bump on my jaw that I got when you broke it while we were sparring, back when we were kids. You hated yourself for that. I didn't.
I want you to know this, now, because the doctors say you probably won't wake up. They told me you took a really nasty blow to the head and there's not much left inside there. Not that there was much to begin with-sorry. You might still be hanging around, but I bet you took off screaming when I started, if you are. Sorry. I couldn't keep it inside anymore.
I'm waiting to pull the plug. The one that's keeping all these machines going, keeping you technically alive. I haven't done it yet. Part of it's 'cause you have kind of a bad habit of coming back, and I don't want to screw with your plan, if you have one. Or if someone else does. Part of it's because...Dean, I don't know if I can kill you like this. You wouldn't want to live like this, hooked up to machines and brain-dead, just like you wouldn't want to live if something got you and turned you. But you're not a monster. You're still a man, still my brother, and all those tubes make you look so small.
You're a force of nature, Dean, a whirlwind of emotion and noise and life. This isn't you. Where have you gone?
There's nothing for me to fight this time, and I know I'm gonna have to let you go. Let you die. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
What do you believe you're leaving behind? Nothing, probably. You think death will end you completely, wipe every trace of you from the Earth. You didn't so much as keep a diary.
And you forgot about every life you touched, every child you pried out of the jaws of a monster, every innocent you refused to let die. You forgot about me, too. I've been with you from the beginning, and your story might as well be tattooed on me, carved into my bones like Enochian cloaking runes, for how deeply it's seared into my memory. If someone cut me open, they could read all about a courageous, righteous, resilient man, who did what he could and what he had to and hated himself for it, even though he left a path of saved lives behind him. A man who fought off Satan, defied the will of God to do what he knew was right, a man who died for the only family he had left-multiple times. A man named Dean Winchester.
I love you. I don't know how long it took me to realize that, but I do. More than anything else.
I'll go, as soon as you're gone. I'll pick up right where we left off...saving people. Hunting things. I will tell everyone I meet about you, Dean, about who you were and what you did and why the entire human race owes you a debt a mile wide. You made mistakes, I saw how that hurt you-but you made up for them.
You won't be with me, but I'll remember that bond, that instinct, rooted deeper than breathing and hurting like stretching a dormant muscle with every heartbeat.
I'll remember you.
I don't think I could pinpoint it if I tried. This isn't the sort of thing that crystallizes down to just one second. It happened in a million moments, not not just one. And, those, I remember. Sewing up a wound between your shoulder blades, one you couldn't reach yourself, we had to be young because there are so few scars on you in the memory; I remember how you winced and swore under my touch, I remember smelling blood, sweat, alcohol, you. Being shaken awake by you, pulled out of a motel bed that smelled like sex and beer, it was the middle of the night and you were so excited because you had solved whatever case we were working, and I couldn't help but grin and blink away my exhaustion because you were so proud of yourself. Sunlight glinting off of that flask you always keep in the pocket of your jacket (maybe Dad's, maybe Bobby's, maybe just yours, I'm not sure) as you raise it to drink whatever's in there, light flashing into your eyes and illuminating the million different shades of green in there. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I remember every single one of those moments. Maybe not the details, but definitely the way the light hit you and outlined every perfection, how your voice buzzed in my blood and under my ribs, how I felt.
The flask. You know, you drink way too much. But I'm pretty sure you know that, and I guess there are worse ways you could cope, so I won't bring it up.
I fell in love with you over a matter of years. Maybe I would have tried to stop it if I knew what was happening, maybe I would have thought it was wrong, but it's a little too late for that now. How was I supposed to know that, one day, when you clapped a hand on my shoulder and grinned at me with your face all scratched up, blood glistening in your hair as the sun set, my heart would catch and I wouldn't be able to breathe? How was I supposed to know that you talk in your sleep, and sometimes you cry, and how was I supposed to know those half-murmured words about monsters and people you couldn't save and, way too often, me...how was I supposed to know they'd be like a freaking spell? Pulling at parts of me I thought had died years ago, fish hooks sunk into my heart and my marrow, drawing out tears and gasps and a desperate need to fix you. You're broken pieces in my hands, you know that? You're damned sharp, I cut myself on you sometimes, and that probably doesn't even make sense, does it? I keep holding onto you anyway. I don't have the slightest idea how to glue you back together, but at least I can keep all those shards in one place and working in relative harmony. And, y'know, maybe I'm broken, too, and maybe our pieces fit together.
This is the kind of thing that sneaks up on a guy. What I feel for you, I mean. Apparently, it's also the kind of thing that puddles and drips and fills up all of the hollow places inside me. There were a lot more than I knew. It formed in a billion nameless, dingy hotel rooms, came from the sounds of exorcisms and angel's wings, found its way into me when I focused on your breathing in the middle of the night and prayed it would never stop. I don't really know how to explain this to you. How to tell you that your heartbeat is like a song, and I wish I could get close enough to hear it. I can't do this to you. I don't have the greatest track record when it comes to relationships.
I've seen you in those perfect, vulnerable little moments that paint a clearer picture of who you are than any of your self-made slang or your clothes or your music. I can see you right now, face turned to the sun, eyes closed and hair sparkling gold, features splashed with light and arranged into an expression of perfect bliss as you take in the early-morning heat. I can see the little flicker of pleasure around your eyes and mouth as you pull on a freshly-washed shirt; maybe it's torn and burned in places, but at least it smells like soap and not blood or sulfur. I can see you when you brush against me. When we're hunting, when we're in danger, and I stay close enough for you to touch me without even meaning to. You get this look on your face. Just for a second. Someone else probably wouldn't have caught it. Utter peace, and reassurance fueled by the knowledge that I'm right there with you, and I'll always be there...and you're not alone.
I'll try and tell you what you are to me, Dean. Yeah, I'll use your name, too, it's not like I could pretend I was talking about someone else here. Am I talking? Or just thinking? I can't really tell. I never would have told you any of this before, you would have flipped. And I can't stand your anger, your disappointment. Every word you say against me feels like it's being cut into my flesh.
So. Here goes.
You are brilliant green eyes, fierce and wide and defiant even when reflecting Hellfire, and close-cropped hair that looks black in one kind of light and dirty-blonde in another. To me, you are blood being gently dabbed off my knuckles with alcohol, and shirts that smell like that awful cologne you wear because you think women like it (and maybe they do, I wouldn't know-and you definitely bed enough of them), and furious, jagged music. You're the pattern of lights in Heaven's sky. You're stargazing, cold beer, the glossy black finish of an ancient but beautiful car. You're comfort, and about seventy different types of pain no one else can make me feel (jerk), and black smoke and salt and loyalty and resurrection and that little bump on my jaw that I got when you broke it while we were sparring, back when we were kids. You hated yourself for that. I didn't.
I want you to know this, now, because the doctors say you probably won't wake up. They told me you took a really nasty blow to the head and there's not much left inside there. Not that there was much to begin with-sorry. You might still be hanging around, but I bet you took off screaming when I started, if you are. Sorry. I couldn't keep it inside anymore.
I'm waiting to pull the plug. The one that's keeping all these machines going, keeping you technically alive. I haven't done it yet. Part of it's 'cause you have kind of a bad habit of coming back, and I don't want to screw with your plan, if you have one. Or if someone else does. Part of it's because...Dean, I don't know if I can kill you like this. You wouldn't want to live like this, hooked up to machines and brain-dead, just like you wouldn't want to live if something got you and turned you. But you're not a monster. You're still a man, still my brother, and all those tubes make you look so small.
You're a force of nature, Dean, a whirlwind of emotion and noise and life. This isn't you. Where have you gone?
There's nothing for me to fight this time, and I know I'm gonna have to let you go. Let you die. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
What do you believe you're leaving behind? Nothing, probably. You think death will end you completely, wipe every trace of you from the Earth. You didn't so much as keep a diary.
And you forgot about every life you touched, every child you pried out of the jaws of a monster, every innocent you refused to let die. You forgot about me, too. I've been with you from the beginning, and your story might as well be tattooed on me, carved into my bones like Enochian cloaking runes, for how deeply it's seared into my memory. If someone cut me open, they could read all about a courageous, righteous, resilient man, who did what he could and what he had to and hated himself for it, even though he left a path of saved lives behind him. A man who fought off Satan, defied the will of God to do what he knew was right, a man who died for the only family he had left-multiple times. A man named Dean Winchester.
I love you. I don't know how long it took me to realize that, but I do. More than anything else.
I'll go, as soon as you're gone. I'll pick up right where we left off...saving people. Hunting things. I will tell everyone I meet about you, Dean, about who you were and what you did and why the entire human race owes you a debt a mile wide. You made mistakes, I saw how that hurt you-but you made up for them.
You won't be with me, but I'll remember that bond, that instinct, rooted deeper than breathing and hurting like stretching a dormant muscle with every heartbeat.
I'll remember you.