fic.
Hot Ashes for Trees
SPN; gen; 600 words.
::
Somewhere along the way, the wheels came off your wagon.
There's the obvious tragedy, and your resulting slide into single-mindedness, at the cost of everything else. But that's the easy answer, isn't it; the real damage was cumulative. A lifetime of thinking about nothing else, not even what you're doing to your sons. Years of telling yourself you're doing it all for them, when really you're just doing it for you, for your own peace of mind, chasing a sense of closure that can never exist because you never saw her death as a conclusion; it was always your beginning, and it can only end badly. You've got calamity written all over you.
Somewhere along the way, the very things you claimed to be protecting became your greatest casualties. It's only fitting that in the end you try to make up for it, a day late and a dollar short, by committing your grandest act of selfishness yet.
*
There is nowhere safe in your own head anymore.
You were always up for escapism, whether it be from a life too hard for someone who felt as much as you did (the rubric of hunting and fucking your way across the country, the gospel of fast cars and rock n' roll) or from a diet of shitty diner coffee and your brother's long-suffering stares (he is there with you; nothing more needed). Your get-away car, your escape route, are suddenly broken down, blockaded, and the thing is, you're not sure you didn't let it happen. You always had a knack for being your own worst enemy.
Your father's eternal disappointment in you is the phantom pain you can't shake off, and you miss that limb more than anything you thought you were fighting for all along. Your kid brother doesn't know where to start with you. You're meant to be there for him, not the other way around. You have no idea how to be helpless, but it comes easily enough, like a knife to the gut.
*
For all your childhood histrionics, you were never one for martyrdom.
His grief grates at you, overshadows your own. You feel petulantly resentful at his refusal to mourn because you've got dibs on being malcontent. You hide your rancor badly.
But inevitably, the depth of his despair touches the part of you that's been ready for this since you'd first realized what it was your father did when he left you. The opposite of "alone" was always your brother, your cavalry, the only one who never let you down, the only one who didn't think less of you for leaving. The only one who knew self-preservation when he saw it, but couldn't indulge in it to save his life. Still can't.
Your wounds are bleeding all over, on everything; on yourself, on him, seeping into memories of the girl you almost loved, staining those of the mother you never really had. Loss isn't a constant; there's only so much room for it, and you've got to keep up.
You become a better son. A better brother. This wasn't the plan, but it was unavoidable, you suppose, the way everything else seems to be.
*
It's a little like dying all over again, you think, watching them fall one by one, the way heroes do in stories. Once upon a time you had three things that made you whole, three kings warring for your affection, three men who defined who you were. These days you're the definition.
A crusade, a memory, a tall tale.