The Epilogue in a Very Long Biography
Genre: Hurt/Angst/Comfort
Pairing: Gen.
Rating: Teen+
Word Count: ~2,000
Warnings: Violence, death. Sorta.
Prompt: The End spoilers. End!verse. "There is a tall man in the camp today."
Author's Notes: Not particularly beta'd, not particularly happy with this. I don't know. I had it then I lost it. But here's my sad attempt anyway!
There is a tall man in the camp today.
He is muscular and tanned from working in the sun - fixing his mistakes until it sets and soaks the world a red-orange, carrying heavy beams of wood like his own deconstructed cross. He wheels bricks, he sows in fields, he sweats and doesn't eat and sometimes doesn't even sleep (no matter how many of the townspeople tell him rest, tell him to have a bite). By the time anyone realizes how unnatural such a thing is, he's gone as fast as he'd appeared. From settlement to settlement, he's a ghost in raggedy clothing. His hair is long and shaggy and drawn back into a small ponytail. His fingers are long, thick at the joints, at the knuckles. He's worked long and hard, never content to stop; it's been years since his first appearance like this in another town far away, and now he's in this unnamed little spit of dirt. Helping to build a library.
Raelyn watches him under the shade of a gnarled-up tree and wonders what he's like, because he doesn't talk much. He's cute, she thinks. He's too old for her, but he's cute. And he's out of place.
She wanders over to him and holds up a hand to still his progress. Tells him she wants to take his photograph.
He looks ill at the thought. "For what?"
"We all need to be remembered," she says. "I'm making a wall of memories. Can I, please?"
She doesn't work, really. She's got severe asthma and her leg doesn't function properly anymore. But she counts her blessings, because she's twelve and alive and may get to live out the rest of her life. Not a lot of people would get to, anymore. This is something she can contribute, and it is as important as anything else. Her step-mother said so.
The tall man shifts nervously, a shovel clenched in his hands, and he seems really small for a second when his eyes soften and he chews his lip. That would've been a good picture, she thinks. A very good one. Better than the frown he usually has, though she wishes she had been able to get a shot of him working without him noticing: the furrowed brow, the dedication, the dirty hands and pants, thinned lips, taut muscles, focused eyes. He was on a mission when he worked. Now, he just looks mostly lost.
"I - " he starts, but it doesn't seem like he has it in him to deny her this. He straightens up. "Alright. One picture. Memories are important, right?" and to that she nods gratuitously. Yes. Yes. Memories are the most important things they have right now, other than the future. Memories are why they're bothering, isn't it?
She takes a snapshot. She doesn't much like it, though, because he looks like he's trying for her sake. The sun isn't just right.
But it'll have to do for now.
***
The tall man sleeps in their attic for the night. It sounds like a rude thing to offer a guest, but the basement is her favorite place to hole up and rest; there's a window to peer out at the outside world, and the mattress is really soft. Comfortable. Raelyn can only imagine that the man's feet hang off pretty far, though. After all, he's at least a whole foot and a half taller than her, maybe more. Maybe he's never stopped growing. Or maybe he used to be even taller and shrunk down in the wake of all of this. She supposes she'll never know.
It's not important right now. There's an extra sandwich on her plate and she's sneaking up the ladder, through the dark of midnight. He hadn't eaten, she knows. He hadn't touched a single crumb, and she has to wonder why he'd punish himself so much. She inhales food, so maybe her opinion is skewed, but it's one of the few pleasures they can give themselves now, especially after all the trouble it took to get this far. When she tip-toes across the rickety wooden floorboards, she's frozen at the entrance by deep, inconsolable sobs (masked into a pillow, she knows that sound). His voice is rough and wrecked and he's crying - as if the view outside had been unmarked graves of everyone he'd loved. She knows she should leave him to mourn, but she doesn't believe in leaving a weeping person to carry their loss alone. Upon entering the attic, she finds him curled on his side miserably. Shaking.
She nudges him the plate, doesn't back away despite how quickly he whips up to look at her.
The mortification is no surprise.
It takes a few minutes of awkwardness, where she's plucking at her pants and he's eating the sandwich like it's wet cement, but she finally sees his shoulders slump. He has surrendered his solitude. He waves the white flag for her, so she makes up a very sad game where they say a word and tell each other a memory associated with that word. He says necklace, and she talks about her grandmother who had died in the mayhem of The End, how she had given her a necklace for her Graduation from elementary school. She still wears it. Every word seems to cut into him like a dagger, which is strange to her, because it's not his fault that her grandmother has gone away.
"She's in Heaven, you know," he says quickly, and is so sure of himself that she can't even remotely consider him crazy. "It's not - It's not a horrible place, either. Memories. That's what I've heard; you live in your best memories."
Raelyn's thin smile broadens. She parrots from before, "Memories are important."
It's her turn in the game. She says 'car ride' next, and he laughs (so he doesn't cry, maybe) and explains the etiquette of prank wars. The sandwich is gone, their eyes are red, and the sun is rising in the distance. He thanks her for getting him through the day to another morning, and she takes a picture. It's no better than the first, and the lighting is horrible, and he's wet-eyed, but he's smiling and it looks about as good as it ever will, maybe.
***
He stays for a good while and helps build a hospital.
***
Someone says he's the Devil. Long live Sam Winchester, the man who said yes - long live the world's most notorious sinner; addict, betrayer, weakling, lemming, monster. Stories drifted. The tall man - Sam - is surrounded in the fields while he works, Raelyn watching from under her tree as she always does. Angry men fall on him like a murder of crows and she can hear the punches and kicks. They're calling him names. They're damning him and spitting on him, and she can't break through the circle. She screams and hits them on the backs and is inevitably shoved aside, left to listen to the epitaph of a dying man - grunts and choked noises of pain - until he's quiet and motionless between a sea of people; their legs are like a forest he's lost in, bloody and dazed. They drag him to her tree. His neck is bent funny and it's all wrong, it's so wrong, bleeding all over everyone's good memories and soiling the future and - and this shouldn't happen. He needs to be saved.
They hang him up by the neck like a flag on the strongest branch, and then lets him sway brokenly in the wind. He's all blood and frozen remorse, kept like that while they yell for her to go home, but she waits (and waits and waits) until they leave him to rot. It's dark out so that when she finally rushes over to him, she can barely see that his eyes are awake slits and he's groping pathetically at the branch above his head. It's horrifying, wrong, and she knows he should be dead. He should be dead. He wheezes when they lock eyes.
She climbs up the tree without a second thought and feels faint by the time she gets to the top, her bad leg trembling, but she cuts him down. As his body crumples on the floor she's already sliding back down and reaching for him through blood-matted hair. She palms a pale face. "It's okay, I got you, I got you," she mutters, but she's not remotely sure how to fix this. He should be dead. He's not dead. He broke the world, apparently, but she doesn't have any desire to hate anything anymore. She couldn't hate it if she tried. "I, I, I'll get some medicine and bandages - I don't know how to fix this, but we can, can try."
He ruffles her hair. His eyes are vibrant. Not like a dead man's.
He gets up, bites back a curse, and limps away with his hand curled around his ribs.
That's it - his biography.
He tells her goodbye.
That's it.
***
She has a boyfriend and is pregnant at twenty when Dean Winchester walks into town with a small group. He's all hard edges; his eyes are dark; he's unapproachable. She hates it a lot, so she takes a picture of him. It ends up being a scowl on the glossy Polaroid, but maybe she can work with it. "I'll draw a fucking sharpie smile on your face," she even tells him. He lightens up, perhaps a fraction. Later on, she finds him at her Wall of Memories and he's staring at a picture of a red-eyed man sitting in an attic with the sun reflecting off his face.
His voice trembles when he asks where she got this (and he looks older than she thought).
She explains 'the tall man' as she walks over (doesn't limp, hasn't limped since Sam ruffled her hair, hasn't coughed and choked and wheezed since Sam touched her head); it's so easy to remember all these years later. The walking corpse. She'd cried and cried and cried for hours after he disappeared into the distance. Because who else would get Sam Winchester through another morning? Had that not been her greatest accomplishment then? She would never know if he survived past these photographs on her wall. If his future would simply be aged photos she had took when she was young and in love with looking through a camera lens.
"He was a fucking idiot," Dean Winchester bites (never looks at her, always looks at the photo, never elsewhere). "... Fucking idiots."
Eventually, watching this soldier stare at the tall man, she pieces it together. Prank wars. Amulets. Beer can wreathes.
"He loved you, you know," she adds softly, "So much."
His eyes grow wet, but he doesn't cry.
It's hard to tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
The scraggly man who had come into town with Dean Winchester sees the two pictures of Sam Winchester, too. Cas, they called him.
"Sam," he speaks fondly. And then, after a hesitant pause, he asks, "... Can we have one of these?"
****
He and Lucifer had wrestled and clawed and bit each other like two wet, rabid dogs inside of one body. Sam had surfaced like a gasping half-drowned man to the sight of his brother in a heap, neck pressed unnaturally with a face as pale as death. Sam healed him with a touch and fixed the crumpled bodies in the compound - and then he simply left. He didn't want them to wake up to his face.
He had to go. He took his memories of before, took his loneliness and guilt and desire to die and put it in his back pocket.
And he walks.
There are no words in any language that carry the weight of what he's done, and he wears it in his eyes. Sam walks and walks and walks. He reaches a new settlement in the west and helps them rebuild a mini-market. His hair has a streak of gray in it, and he has a little trouble keeping up the same old pace. The power has began to fade from his limbs. He tires now. Has to sit and rest. He curls up under a tent and dreams that someday, maybe, he'll get to go to Heaven. It's a ridiculous notion, really. It's what he's done for a long time now: work, dream, work, dream. I wonder how Mom is. I wonder how Dad is. I wonder how Jess is. I wonder how Dean is.
He's back up on his feet in no time, wandering back toward the collection of working men in the distance.
Someone says Sammy.
He turns around and breaks down, encompassed in strong, familiar arms.
Someone rubs circles in his back and he begs for them to kill him, but they just pull a jacket over his shoulders and lead him home.
Pairing: Gen.
Rating: Teen+
Word Count: ~2,000
Warnings: Violence, death. Sorta.
Prompt: The End spoilers. End!verse. "There is a tall man in the camp today."
Author's Notes: Not particularly beta'd, not particularly happy with this. I don't know. I had it then I lost it. But here's my sad attempt anyway!
There is a tall man in the camp today.
He is muscular and tanned from working in the sun - fixing his mistakes until it sets and soaks the world a red-orange, carrying heavy beams of wood like his own deconstructed cross. He wheels bricks, he sows in fields, he sweats and doesn't eat and sometimes doesn't even sleep (no matter how many of the townspeople tell him rest, tell him to have a bite). By the time anyone realizes how unnatural such a thing is, he's gone as fast as he'd appeared. From settlement to settlement, he's a ghost in raggedy clothing. His hair is long and shaggy and drawn back into a small ponytail. His fingers are long, thick at the joints, at the knuckles. He's worked long and hard, never content to stop; it's been years since his first appearance like this in another town far away, and now he's in this unnamed little spit of dirt. Helping to build a library.
Raelyn watches him under the shade of a gnarled-up tree and wonders what he's like, because he doesn't talk much. He's cute, she thinks. He's too old for her, but he's cute. And he's out of place.
She wanders over to him and holds up a hand to still his progress. Tells him she wants to take his photograph.
He looks ill at the thought. "For what?"
"We all need to be remembered," she says. "I'm making a wall of memories. Can I, please?"
She doesn't work, really. She's got severe asthma and her leg doesn't function properly anymore. But she counts her blessings, because she's twelve and alive and may get to live out the rest of her life. Not a lot of people would get to, anymore. This is something she can contribute, and it is as important as anything else. Her step-mother said so.
The tall man shifts nervously, a shovel clenched in his hands, and he seems really small for a second when his eyes soften and he chews his lip. That would've been a good picture, she thinks. A very good one. Better than the frown he usually has, though she wishes she had been able to get a shot of him working without him noticing: the furrowed brow, the dedication, the dirty hands and pants, thinned lips, taut muscles, focused eyes. He was on a mission when he worked. Now, he just looks mostly lost.
"I - " he starts, but it doesn't seem like he has it in him to deny her this. He straightens up. "Alright. One picture. Memories are important, right?" and to that she nods gratuitously. Yes. Yes. Memories are the most important things they have right now, other than the future. Memories are why they're bothering, isn't it?
She takes a snapshot. She doesn't much like it, though, because he looks like he's trying for her sake. The sun isn't just right.
But it'll have to do for now.
***
The tall man sleeps in their attic for the night. It sounds like a rude thing to offer a guest, but the basement is her favorite place to hole up and rest; there's a window to peer out at the outside world, and the mattress is really soft. Comfortable. Raelyn can only imagine that the man's feet hang off pretty far, though. After all, he's at least a whole foot and a half taller than her, maybe more. Maybe he's never stopped growing. Or maybe he used to be even taller and shrunk down in the wake of all of this. She supposes she'll never know.
It's not important right now. There's an extra sandwich on her plate and she's sneaking up the ladder, through the dark of midnight. He hadn't eaten, she knows. He hadn't touched a single crumb, and she has to wonder why he'd punish himself so much. She inhales food, so maybe her opinion is skewed, but it's one of the few pleasures they can give themselves now, especially after all the trouble it took to get this far. When she tip-toes across the rickety wooden floorboards, she's frozen at the entrance by deep, inconsolable sobs (masked into a pillow, she knows that sound). His voice is rough and wrecked and he's crying - as if the view outside had been unmarked graves of everyone he'd loved. She knows she should leave him to mourn, but she doesn't believe in leaving a weeping person to carry their loss alone. Upon entering the attic, she finds him curled on his side miserably. Shaking.
She nudges him the plate, doesn't back away despite how quickly he whips up to look at her.
The mortification is no surprise.
It takes a few minutes of awkwardness, where she's plucking at her pants and he's eating the sandwich like it's wet cement, but she finally sees his shoulders slump. He has surrendered his solitude. He waves the white flag for her, so she makes up a very sad game where they say a word and tell each other a memory associated with that word. He says necklace, and she talks about her grandmother who had died in the mayhem of The End, how she had given her a necklace for her Graduation from elementary school. She still wears it. Every word seems to cut into him like a dagger, which is strange to her, because it's not his fault that her grandmother has gone away.
"She's in Heaven, you know," he says quickly, and is so sure of himself that she can't even remotely consider him crazy. "It's not - It's not a horrible place, either. Memories. That's what I've heard; you live in your best memories."
Raelyn's thin smile broadens. She parrots from before, "Memories are important."
It's her turn in the game. She says 'car ride' next, and he laughs (so he doesn't cry, maybe) and explains the etiquette of prank wars. The sandwich is gone, their eyes are red, and the sun is rising in the distance. He thanks her for getting him through the day to another morning, and she takes a picture. It's no better than the first, and the lighting is horrible, and he's wet-eyed, but he's smiling and it looks about as good as it ever will, maybe.
***
He stays for a good while and helps build a hospital.
***
Someone says he's the Devil. Long live Sam Winchester, the man who said yes - long live the world's most notorious sinner; addict, betrayer, weakling, lemming, monster. Stories drifted. The tall man - Sam - is surrounded in the fields while he works, Raelyn watching from under her tree as she always does. Angry men fall on him like a murder of crows and she can hear the punches and kicks. They're calling him names. They're damning him and spitting on him, and she can't break through the circle. She screams and hits them on the backs and is inevitably shoved aside, left to listen to the epitaph of a dying man - grunts and choked noises of pain - until he's quiet and motionless between a sea of people; their legs are like a forest he's lost in, bloody and dazed. They drag him to her tree. His neck is bent funny and it's all wrong, it's so wrong, bleeding all over everyone's good memories and soiling the future and - and this shouldn't happen. He needs to be saved.
They hang him up by the neck like a flag on the strongest branch, and then lets him sway brokenly in the wind. He's all blood and frozen remorse, kept like that while they yell for her to go home, but she waits (and waits and waits) until they leave him to rot. It's dark out so that when she finally rushes over to him, she can barely see that his eyes are awake slits and he's groping pathetically at the branch above his head. It's horrifying, wrong, and she knows he should be dead. He should be dead. He wheezes when they lock eyes.
She climbs up the tree without a second thought and feels faint by the time she gets to the top, her bad leg trembling, but she cuts him down. As his body crumples on the floor she's already sliding back down and reaching for him through blood-matted hair. She palms a pale face. "It's okay, I got you, I got you," she mutters, but she's not remotely sure how to fix this. He should be dead. He's not dead. He broke the world, apparently, but she doesn't have any desire to hate anything anymore. She couldn't hate it if she tried. "I, I, I'll get some medicine and bandages - I don't know how to fix this, but we can, can try."
He ruffles her hair. His eyes are vibrant. Not like a dead man's.
He gets up, bites back a curse, and limps away with his hand curled around his ribs.
That's it - his biography.
He tells her goodbye.
That's it.
***
She has a boyfriend and is pregnant at twenty when Dean Winchester walks into town with a small group. He's all hard edges; his eyes are dark; he's unapproachable. She hates it a lot, so she takes a picture of him. It ends up being a scowl on the glossy Polaroid, but maybe she can work with it. "I'll draw a fucking sharpie smile on your face," she even tells him. He lightens up, perhaps a fraction. Later on, she finds him at her Wall of Memories and he's staring at a picture of a red-eyed man sitting in an attic with the sun reflecting off his face.
His voice trembles when he asks where she got this (and he looks older than she thought).
She explains 'the tall man' as she walks over (doesn't limp, hasn't limped since Sam ruffled her hair, hasn't coughed and choked and wheezed since Sam touched her head); it's so easy to remember all these years later. The walking corpse. She'd cried and cried and cried for hours after he disappeared into the distance. Because who else would get Sam Winchester through another morning? Had that not been her greatest accomplishment then? She would never know if he survived past these photographs on her wall. If his future would simply be aged photos she had took when she was young and in love with looking through a camera lens.
"He was a fucking idiot," Dean Winchester bites (never looks at her, always looks at the photo, never elsewhere). "... Fucking idiots."
Eventually, watching this soldier stare at the tall man, she pieces it together. Prank wars. Amulets. Beer can wreathes.
"He loved you, you know," she adds softly, "So much."
His eyes grow wet, but he doesn't cry.
It's hard to tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
The scraggly man who had come into town with Dean Winchester sees the two pictures of Sam Winchester, too. Cas, they called him.
"Sam," he speaks fondly. And then, after a hesitant pause, he asks, "... Can we have one of these?"
****
He and Lucifer had wrestled and clawed and bit each other like two wet, rabid dogs inside of one body. Sam had surfaced like a gasping half-drowned man to the sight of his brother in a heap, neck pressed unnaturally with a face as pale as death. Sam healed him with a touch and fixed the crumpled bodies in the compound - and then he simply left. He didn't want them to wake up to his face.
He had to go. He took his memories of before, took his loneliness and guilt and desire to die and put it in his back pocket.
And he walks.
There are no words in any language that carry the weight of what he's done, and he wears it in his eyes. Sam walks and walks and walks. He reaches a new settlement in the west and helps them rebuild a mini-market. His hair has a streak of gray in it, and he has a little trouble keeping up the same old pace. The power has began to fade from his limbs. He tires now. Has to sit and rest. He curls up under a tent and dreams that someday, maybe, he'll get to go to Heaven. It's a ridiculous notion, really. It's what he's done for a long time now: work, dream, work, dream. I wonder how Mom is. I wonder how Dad is. I wonder how Jess is. I wonder how Dean is.
He's back up on his feet in no time, wandering back toward the collection of working men in the distance.
Someone says Sammy.
He turns around and breaks down, encompassed in strong, familiar arms.
Someone rubs circles in his back and he begs for them to kill him, but they just pull a jacket over his shoulders and lead him home.