(no subject)
How to Live Through the Epilogue
by whereupon
Supernatural: Gen, R, post-5.22, 3,670 words.
So the thing about endings is that they don't really exist.
So the thing about endings is that, like unicorns and (you used to believe, until one laid his hand upon you and spoke the word of God, thus hauling you out of the hell you'd come to call home) angels, they don't really exist. Sure, there's death, but in your experience, that doesn't mean a damn thing other than that you get torn to shreds and wake up with a new address and a new set of rules, or you get shot or beaten or stabbed (if you're lucky, maybe you just pass out, choking on your own blood), and then you open your eyes and get to do it all over again. Maybe other people get the whole pearly gates experience, but after actually meeting the guys in charge of that, you suspect that what passes for their immigration policy means that almost everybody you've ever met is going to be bunking in hell.
So maybe, also like unicorns, endings only come to the virtuous and virginal. You haven't been either of those since the day you hid the box of Lucky Charms from your brother because you were sick of giving him everything and the day you ditched class to fuck Mitzi Klemmer in the back of her dad's Chevrolet, respectively. (You would have ditched class anyway; Mitzi was just one of the best coincidences that ever happened to you.) So you're screwed, but then, most people are; it's just that most people don't have to pay for it again and again and again. Most people die once and get it over with. You, on the other hand, you die, and then you come back, and you lose track of how many times you do it, until that last time, the time that you really didn't expect to survive, the time that should have really killed you, if you were living in any kind of just universe (which you've always known you aren't, but you'd kind of hoped you were wrong about that), when you don't. You don't come back, because you don't die.
It turns out that if you save the world for everybody else, losing your own in the process, and if, because the fates are three seriously sadistic bitches and God doesn't care either way, you live through it, emerging victorious from the rubble that doesn't even contain the body of everything you've ever loved, because that's gone somewhere you will never be able to follow, no matter how many deals you make -- well, then you've got nothing. You get to live, that last time, but at the cost of everything that ever mattered. That's it, kid, game over. Take your prize, which is small enough that you can close your hand around it and not even notice, the way it weighs less even than the wind, your tattered little soul, and get the hell out. And that's one motherfucking gutpunch hell of a truth, the kind that you can't forget even when you're drunk enough that you've almost forgotten your own name, because the fact that you're there to get drunk in the first place means that even though your heart's been ripped out and torn to shreds, you're terribly, inexorably, still alive.
And the fact that you're still alive means that you have to keep going. The fact that you're still alive, and that you remember what the price of that was, means that eventually you put down the gun you've been holding for the last hour and a half as you tried to work up the necessary courage and you crawl beneath the cold, clammy sheets of the bed in the room you've rented for the night, because your brother didn't die to save the world only so that you could blow your brains out in the kind of motel room you spent your whole life up until now in and that you will probably spend the rest of your life in, because it turned out that you can surround yourself with the things that you think maybe you've always wanted, but you can't forget what they cost you. You can't forget the reasons you wanted those things so badly, and those reasons? They haven't gone away.
The world's still a fucking awful place, filled with things that will hunt and torture and murder for the sheer fucking glee of it, and some of those things aren't even human, and that makes them something you can take care of. If you can't kill yourself because one of the last things you swore to him was that you would live, you can at least kill something else that deserves it.
Not to mention that if you've spent almost all your life moving, staying in one place for more than a month will do a lot more than set your teeth on edge. It'll have you slamming doors and looking over your shoulder even more than usual and reaching for your gun at shadows, only to remember that you had to swear you'd keep your guns out of the house, if you were going to stay there. And it's boring. You wake up sometimes and beneath the fucking agony that is being alive, you crave greasy truckstop food and the certainty with which you hefted the weight of your favorite sawed-off and the way the air smells when you've got the windows down and you're doing ninety down some back-country road with fields going sunlit-gold on all sides and all you have to do is keep driving and everything will be okay.
So you do what you have to do. You kiss your girl (who was never really your girl, but you like to think of her like that, like all those girls in your songs, worldshaking and endlessly beautiful girls with gentle hands and soft smiles and tight jeans, dirty and sweet just like the song says), and you say goodbye to the kid who isn't your son (who doesn't think of you as a father, who doesn't understand why you started hanging around again and who asks his mom about you when he thinks you can't hear, who says things like why does he cry so much and Trevor says your new boyfriend's a drunk and when you get married, my daddy's gonna hit me the way his does and looks at you with something like fear when you come back that night with a black eye from the only punch Trevor's asshole of a dad landed, and if the son of a bitch wants to go to the ER and report you to the fucking cops, you'll be glad to explain to them exactly why you did it), and you get back in the car.
You get back in the car, and you drive, and some mornings you wake up beside someone whose name you don't remember and who doesn't offer breakfast, and other mornings you wake up screaming from nightmares you remember all too well, and every night, you go to sleep hoping that the next morning you will not wake up, because you might able to do this by yourself, but that doesn't mean you want to. You don't ever tell yourself that this, that you, will stop hurting, because after this long, you know that you won't; wounds merely scar, and you learn to walk with their weight.
Some days, you limp more than others. Some days, you can't bear to leave the room, can't do anything more than drink yourself into a quieter place and hope that tomorrow it will be easier, or that at least you will be stronger.
You don't sleep with guys, you're not gay or anything, which makes it that much worse when, outside of Reno, you let somebody blow you because when you're drunk he looks like your brother did when he was twenty-two, all defiance and innocence and that stupid hair you threatened to cut a thousand times over, and because you're wrecked enough not to care about the consequences, to care about what it will mean that you've done what you're doing. In the morning, you can't meet your eyes, reflected in the grimy mirror in the restroom of that truckstop off the long black line of I-80. You would have never. You tell yourself it was a moment of weakness and that it won't happen again. You were desperate and lost and would have done anything to let yourself pretend for a moment that he's still here with you in any form, that you haven't been left alone this final time, and if you can't believe that, that at least the fact that you are alone now isn't evidence of your failure, of how you will inevitably fail every person foolish enough to put their faith in you. The next night, you fuck a girl with a porn-star mouth and big blue eyes. That doesn't erase anything. You can't begin to think of a way to apologize to him. You've never been good at apologizing to the dead, or to the living, for that matter.
You begin to break down, because it's that or begin to forget him. You'd have sworn that you were already broken, that things couldn't get any worse, but in truth you know that they always can. The world will gladly kill you, if you let it, but you can never let yourself fall that far. Like a stay of execution, you always remember what you promised him, and at the last minute, before the knife can break your skin or the gun can fire or you can open your mouth to speak the words that in this bar will have you beaten and left for dead, you turn away and stumble back to your motel room or to the car. You lie there in the dark, waiting to fall asleep or pass out, and hate yourself for being too stubborn to die. You hate him for doing this to you. You hate yourself for still loving him enough to keep your word.
You talk to yourself, and to him. Sometimes you think you hear him answer, and you're never sure whether it's because you're being haunted or because you want to hear him so badly that you convince yourself you can. A third possibility is that you've snapped, but that's not so much a possibility as an essential truth, and it happened a long time ago, before any of this, and by now you can't remember being any other way. You get weird looks from the people at the next table, the chick at the cash register, the guy in the oilstained blue work shirt who stops to ask if you need help. Sometimes you stare back at them until they look away, frightened or shamed, and sometimes you blush and look down at your coffee or your French fries or your beer, and sometimes you grab bills from your wallet without bothering to check their denomination and crumple them on the table and walk as fast as you can out to your car, because one of the first things your dad ever taught you is that soldiers don't cry, and they sure as hell don't cry in front of other people; other people would only ever use that weakness against you.
You talk to angels, sometimes, if cursing may be said to be talking, but only one of them ever answers you. What he tells you doesn't help, though he might mean for it to. He tells you of other brothers, other sons and other fathers and the sacrifices they made; he tells you, as though he thinks you might have forgotten, that this is what you wanted, and he tells you that you only hurt because you're alive, which you already knew. Were you stone or clay, you would be glad for it, if only flesh and breath and bone could be exchanged without taking with them the memory of love.
Some days, you think you should have traded the lives of everyone else on this planet for him, for his, because they, like you, don't deserve to be alive in a world in which he isn't, especially if they continue to go about their existence as though something terrible has not happened, as though something has not been lost. You'd take it back, if you could, all you've bled for them and all you've given up; you'd give them up instead, you tell yourself, and then you are ashamed, because he wouldn't have, and he's the one in hell now for it, for them, for you.
He was always a better person than you are, and you've always been proud of him for that, and this is where that's gotten the both of you.
You heard once that as long as there's someone alive who remembers you, you're not really dead. You've buried and burned and mourned too many people to believe that, but sometimes you tell yourself that you're living out of something more than debt, that you're living so that someone who knew him, who knew all of him, who knew how good he was and how blind that made him and that he didn't cry the first time he got shot, though he did the first time you were, and that he listened resolutely to Melissa Etheridge even after you laughed to the point of crying when you found out and you told him that meant he was officially a lesbian, will exist to counter of all of the people who never knew him or who dumped him the day before prom or who thought he was the serial killer son of a survivalist, the way the newspapers said. This doesn't bring you any comfort, but you keep living anyway. You're not very good at it, but it's the only thing left for you to do.
Sometimes you think about all of the other ways things could have happened. He could have been a lawyer, like he wanted, and you could have bled out years ago, stars growing dim as you lay sprawled on your back in a field of unharvested corn, your shotgun just out of reach of your numbed fingers. You both could have died in the first fire, or in the second; you could have failed to pull him from the flames, and you would have died trying. Your dad could have chosen his life over yours. You could have accepted your brother's fate, and yours, after he died on his knees, slumping into your arms in that forgotten graveyard town (no, you couldn't have). He could have given up on you, after you were taken to hell. You could have listened to each other, when you came back.
Maybe there is a reality in which these things happened. Maybe there is a reality in which you both live happily ever after, though you don't think that was ever a possibility. Maybe there is a reality in which one of you does, though you don't think that's possible, either; how could you be happy if he weren't (and vice versa, a small and selfish part of you would like to think). Maybe there's at least a reality in which you're dead, in which you're not in hell or anywhere at all, where you won't be dragged back into daylight, where you can be at peace at last.
But this is the reality you've got, and in this reality you breathe and you sleep and you ache, and always it feels like you are bleeding, as though your heart has been cut out by your own hand and in its place is a void, a black hole, a world collapsing in upon itself, and though you never get used to that, you learn to live with it. You do not look down to see if your shirt is stained red, and the taste at the back of your throat which is copper which is sorrow can be diluted with any number of things, though it never truly goes away.
And though you don't believe in miracles (just because God exists doesn't mean he's worth asking for a damn thing), one day, you get one.
One day, you're coming out of a diner, hungover and holding a hand up to shield your eyes from the sun even though you're wearing sunglasses, and wincing at the pull of the haphazard stitches you put in your chest the night before (because it doesn't count as giving up if you die in the line of duty). One day, you're coming out of a diner and as you step into the sunlight, you feel at once, like waking up or dying or what you remember the word of God sounded like when it was spoken to you in hell, every one of your scars and your bruises and the places in which you are worn thin as light. You cannot move, for the weight of it, and when you lift your head to see how much farther you have to walk before reaching your car, you see instead this guy getting out of, unfolding out of, a really hideous Civic, and his expression is dazed and his hair is tangled and you know him before you can remind yourself that there's no fucking way. You say, "Sammy" without thinking about it, ready to add Sorry, I thought you were somebody else the way you have all of the times before this, but this time--
This time, he turns. This time he turns. This time, you stare at him, and he's there to stare back, and it occurs to you that maybe you should draw your gun, that just because it looks like him doesn't mean that it is him, but you don't move, because if it isn't, you don't really care.
Cut down on the job or left bloody on your back outside some sunburnt diner with a neon sign in the shape of a clock in its front window, death is death is death, and this time, today, at last, you're too goddamn tired to talk yourself out of it. (I'm sorry, you tell him in your head, and he only shrugs and looks away like he knew this was coming; he's psychic, after all.) You smile because that's the way Dean Winchester dies, in the story you've been telling yourself since you were a kid, the way you never have yet -- with your boots on and a grin on your face, and if the bastard comes near enough, you'll spit bloody at his feet with the last strength you've got.
"Dean," he says, and his voice cracks when he speaks, one word like that's all he can manage, one word fractured by the hope it contains.
He tells you that you look like shit, and you tell him that the feeling's mutual. There's an awkward silence. His face is slick with tears, and you realize that yours is, too, but both of you are soundless. If you speak now, the film will warp, the record will scratch; this will not be real, this will never have happened. You cannot risk that.
Neither of you move, until you both do.
He tells you he doesn't remember how it happened, or why, or how he got here. You tell yourself that nothing is free, that you will have to pay for this, that God and the universe demand a sacrifice paid in grief and sorrow for everything that you are given, but after awhile, you begin to hope, and then even to believe, that you're wrong. You begin to think that this is what you get, after everything -- not a happy ending, because they don't exist, but maybe another chance, maybe a chance for real this time, something true and yours, not already inked with somebody else's fate, the destiny somebody else chose for the both of you.
This doesn't take away any of it, anything that happened, the way your bones ache or the fear that keeps you awake or the parts of you that, once abandoned, once killed, will never again be anything other than crooked and bent. It doesn't stop your nightmares, or his, and at a gas station outside of Tulsa, he loses it, and he doesn't speak for a whole week after that.
But at night, when you're not sleeping and he isn't, either, you can hear him breathing, and he's there beside you in the car; he answers your questions and speaks to fill the silences and spills Mountain Dew across his jeans and the front seat, and you slap his freakishly large hand with their knuckles as scarred as your own have become again away from the tape deck over and over.
There are bad days, more than you can count, and you learn not to count them. You don't count anything at all. On the bad days, you think that any minute you'll stop breathing, or he will; you'll open your eyes and one of you will be gone and you'll both be in hell. On the good days, it doesn't hurt to breathe, and you don't tell yourself that those days will end, or that they won't. You're here, as is he. You have both harrowed hell, and you are returned.
One day it will be too much. One day you'll go down, or he will, and neither of you will come back up, swinging or otherwise. You're vulnerable: you can die, now that he's back. You're human. Your heart is bloody and fragile and beating. You can give up. One day, you will, and maybe it will be accidental or maybe it won't, but it will be forever, and on that day it'll also be together, because that's the way this legend goes. The two of you, always and forever, against everything that stands in your way.
It's not really an ending, but you don't mind.
--
end
by whereupon
Supernatural: Gen, R, post-5.22, 3,670 words.
So the thing about endings is that they don't really exist.
So the thing about endings is that, like unicorns and (you used to believe, until one laid his hand upon you and spoke the word of God, thus hauling you out of the hell you'd come to call home) angels, they don't really exist. Sure, there's death, but in your experience, that doesn't mean a damn thing other than that you get torn to shreds and wake up with a new address and a new set of rules, or you get shot or beaten or stabbed (if you're lucky, maybe you just pass out, choking on your own blood), and then you open your eyes and get to do it all over again. Maybe other people get the whole pearly gates experience, but after actually meeting the guys in charge of that, you suspect that what passes for their immigration policy means that almost everybody you've ever met is going to be bunking in hell.
So maybe, also like unicorns, endings only come to the virtuous and virginal. You haven't been either of those since the day you hid the box of Lucky Charms from your brother because you were sick of giving him everything and the day you ditched class to fuck Mitzi Klemmer in the back of her dad's Chevrolet, respectively. (You would have ditched class anyway; Mitzi was just one of the best coincidences that ever happened to you.) So you're screwed, but then, most people are; it's just that most people don't have to pay for it again and again and again. Most people die once and get it over with. You, on the other hand, you die, and then you come back, and you lose track of how many times you do it, until that last time, the time that you really didn't expect to survive, the time that should have really killed you, if you were living in any kind of just universe (which you've always known you aren't, but you'd kind of hoped you were wrong about that), when you don't. You don't come back, because you don't die.
It turns out that if you save the world for everybody else, losing your own in the process, and if, because the fates are three seriously sadistic bitches and God doesn't care either way, you live through it, emerging victorious from the rubble that doesn't even contain the body of everything you've ever loved, because that's gone somewhere you will never be able to follow, no matter how many deals you make -- well, then you've got nothing. You get to live, that last time, but at the cost of everything that ever mattered. That's it, kid, game over. Take your prize, which is small enough that you can close your hand around it and not even notice, the way it weighs less even than the wind, your tattered little soul, and get the hell out. And that's one motherfucking gutpunch hell of a truth, the kind that you can't forget even when you're drunk enough that you've almost forgotten your own name, because the fact that you're there to get drunk in the first place means that even though your heart's been ripped out and torn to shreds, you're terribly, inexorably, still alive.
And the fact that you're still alive means that you have to keep going. The fact that you're still alive, and that you remember what the price of that was, means that eventually you put down the gun you've been holding for the last hour and a half as you tried to work up the necessary courage and you crawl beneath the cold, clammy sheets of the bed in the room you've rented for the night, because your brother didn't die to save the world only so that you could blow your brains out in the kind of motel room you spent your whole life up until now in and that you will probably spend the rest of your life in, because it turned out that you can surround yourself with the things that you think maybe you've always wanted, but you can't forget what they cost you. You can't forget the reasons you wanted those things so badly, and those reasons? They haven't gone away.
The world's still a fucking awful place, filled with things that will hunt and torture and murder for the sheer fucking glee of it, and some of those things aren't even human, and that makes them something you can take care of. If you can't kill yourself because one of the last things you swore to him was that you would live, you can at least kill something else that deserves it.
Not to mention that if you've spent almost all your life moving, staying in one place for more than a month will do a lot more than set your teeth on edge. It'll have you slamming doors and looking over your shoulder even more than usual and reaching for your gun at shadows, only to remember that you had to swear you'd keep your guns out of the house, if you were going to stay there. And it's boring. You wake up sometimes and beneath the fucking agony that is being alive, you crave greasy truckstop food and the certainty with which you hefted the weight of your favorite sawed-off and the way the air smells when you've got the windows down and you're doing ninety down some back-country road with fields going sunlit-gold on all sides and all you have to do is keep driving and everything will be okay.
So you do what you have to do. You kiss your girl (who was never really your girl, but you like to think of her like that, like all those girls in your songs, worldshaking and endlessly beautiful girls with gentle hands and soft smiles and tight jeans, dirty and sweet just like the song says), and you say goodbye to the kid who isn't your son (who doesn't think of you as a father, who doesn't understand why you started hanging around again and who asks his mom about you when he thinks you can't hear, who says things like why does he cry so much and Trevor says your new boyfriend's a drunk and when you get married, my daddy's gonna hit me the way his does and looks at you with something like fear when you come back that night with a black eye from the only punch Trevor's asshole of a dad landed, and if the son of a bitch wants to go to the ER and report you to the fucking cops, you'll be glad to explain to them exactly why you did it), and you get back in the car.
You get back in the car, and you drive, and some mornings you wake up beside someone whose name you don't remember and who doesn't offer breakfast, and other mornings you wake up screaming from nightmares you remember all too well, and every night, you go to sleep hoping that the next morning you will not wake up, because you might able to do this by yourself, but that doesn't mean you want to. You don't ever tell yourself that this, that you, will stop hurting, because after this long, you know that you won't; wounds merely scar, and you learn to walk with their weight.
Some days, you limp more than others. Some days, you can't bear to leave the room, can't do anything more than drink yourself into a quieter place and hope that tomorrow it will be easier, or that at least you will be stronger.
You don't sleep with guys, you're not gay or anything, which makes it that much worse when, outside of Reno, you let somebody blow you because when you're drunk he looks like your brother did when he was twenty-two, all defiance and innocence and that stupid hair you threatened to cut a thousand times over, and because you're wrecked enough not to care about the consequences, to care about what it will mean that you've done what you're doing. In the morning, you can't meet your eyes, reflected in the grimy mirror in the restroom of that truckstop off the long black line of I-80. You would have never. You tell yourself it was a moment of weakness and that it won't happen again. You were desperate and lost and would have done anything to let yourself pretend for a moment that he's still here with you in any form, that you haven't been left alone this final time, and if you can't believe that, that at least the fact that you are alone now isn't evidence of your failure, of how you will inevitably fail every person foolish enough to put their faith in you. The next night, you fuck a girl with a porn-star mouth and big blue eyes. That doesn't erase anything. You can't begin to think of a way to apologize to him. You've never been good at apologizing to the dead, or to the living, for that matter.
You begin to break down, because it's that or begin to forget him. You'd have sworn that you were already broken, that things couldn't get any worse, but in truth you know that they always can. The world will gladly kill you, if you let it, but you can never let yourself fall that far. Like a stay of execution, you always remember what you promised him, and at the last minute, before the knife can break your skin or the gun can fire or you can open your mouth to speak the words that in this bar will have you beaten and left for dead, you turn away and stumble back to your motel room or to the car. You lie there in the dark, waiting to fall asleep or pass out, and hate yourself for being too stubborn to die. You hate him for doing this to you. You hate yourself for still loving him enough to keep your word.
You talk to yourself, and to him. Sometimes you think you hear him answer, and you're never sure whether it's because you're being haunted or because you want to hear him so badly that you convince yourself you can. A third possibility is that you've snapped, but that's not so much a possibility as an essential truth, and it happened a long time ago, before any of this, and by now you can't remember being any other way. You get weird looks from the people at the next table, the chick at the cash register, the guy in the oilstained blue work shirt who stops to ask if you need help. Sometimes you stare back at them until they look away, frightened or shamed, and sometimes you blush and look down at your coffee or your French fries or your beer, and sometimes you grab bills from your wallet without bothering to check their denomination and crumple them on the table and walk as fast as you can out to your car, because one of the first things your dad ever taught you is that soldiers don't cry, and they sure as hell don't cry in front of other people; other people would only ever use that weakness against you.
You talk to angels, sometimes, if cursing may be said to be talking, but only one of them ever answers you. What he tells you doesn't help, though he might mean for it to. He tells you of other brothers, other sons and other fathers and the sacrifices they made; he tells you, as though he thinks you might have forgotten, that this is what you wanted, and he tells you that you only hurt because you're alive, which you already knew. Were you stone or clay, you would be glad for it, if only flesh and breath and bone could be exchanged without taking with them the memory of love.
Some days, you think you should have traded the lives of everyone else on this planet for him, for his, because they, like you, don't deserve to be alive in a world in which he isn't, especially if they continue to go about their existence as though something terrible has not happened, as though something has not been lost. You'd take it back, if you could, all you've bled for them and all you've given up; you'd give them up instead, you tell yourself, and then you are ashamed, because he wouldn't have, and he's the one in hell now for it, for them, for you.
He was always a better person than you are, and you've always been proud of him for that, and this is where that's gotten the both of you.
You heard once that as long as there's someone alive who remembers you, you're not really dead. You've buried and burned and mourned too many people to believe that, but sometimes you tell yourself that you're living out of something more than debt, that you're living so that someone who knew him, who knew all of him, who knew how good he was and how blind that made him and that he didn't cry the first time he got shot, though he did the first time you were, and that he listened resolutely to Melissa Etheridge even after you laughed to the point of crying when you found out and you told him that meant he was officially a lesbian, will exist to counter of all of the people who never knew him or who dumped him the day before prom or who thought he was the serial killer son of a survivalist, the way the newspapers said. This doesn't bring you any comfort, but you keep living anyway. You're not very good at it, but it's the only thing left for you to do.
Sometimes you think about all of the other ways things could have happened. He could have been a lawyer, like he wanted, and you could have bled out years ago, stars growing dim as you lay sprawled on your back in a field of unharvested corn, your shotgun just out of reach of your numbed fingers. You both could have died in the first fire, or in the second; you could have failed to pull him from the flames, and you would have died trying. Your dad could have chosen his life over yours. You could have accepted your brother's fate, and yours, after he died on his knees, slumping into your arms in that forgotten graveyard town (no, you couldn't have). He could have given up on you, after you were taken to hell. You could have listened to each other, when you came back.
Maybe there is a reality in which these things happened. Maybe there is a reality in which you both live happily ever after, though you don't think that was ever a possibility. Maybe there is a reality in which one of you does, though you don't think that's possible, either; how could you be happy if he weren't (and vice versa, a small and selfish part of you would like to think). Maybe there's at least a reality in which you're dead, in which you're not in hell or anywhere at all, where you won't be dragged back into daylight, where you can be at peace at last.
But this is the reality you've got, and in this reality you breathe and you sleep and you ache, and always it feels like you are bleeding, as though your heart has been cut out by your own hand and in its place is a void, a black hole, a world collapsing in upon itself, and though you never get used to that, you learn to live with it. You do not look down to see if your shirt is stained red, and the taste at the back of your throat which is copper which is sorrow can be diluted with any number of things, though it never truly goes away.
And though you don't believe in miracles (just because God exists doesn't mean he's worth asking for a damn thing), one day, you get one.
One day, you're coming out of a diner, hungover and holding a hand up to shield your eyes from the sun even though you're wearing sunglasses, and wincing at the pull of the haphazard stitches you put in your chest the night before (because it doesn't count as giving up if you die in the line of duty). One day, you're coming out of a diner and as you step into the sunlight, you feel at once, like waking up or dying or what you remember the word of God sounded like when it was spoken to you in hell, every one of your scars and your bruises and the places in which you are worn thin as light. You cannot move, for the weight of it, and when you lift your head to see how much farther you have to walk before reaching your car, you see instead this guy getting out of, unfolding out of, a really hideous Civic, and his expression is dazed and his hair is tangled and you know him before you can remind yourself that there's no fucking way. You say, "Sammy" without thinking about it, ready to add Sorry, I thought you were somebody else the way you have all of the times before this, but this time--
This time, he turns. This time he turns. This time, you stare at him, and he's there to stare back, and it occurs to you that maybe you should draw your gun, that just because it looks like him doesn't mean that it is him, but you don't move, because if it isn't, you don't really care.
Cut down on the job or left bloody on your back outside some sunburnt diner with a neon sign in the shape of a clock in its front window, death is death is death, and this time, today, at last, you're too goddamn tired to talk yourself out of it. (I'm sorry, you tell him in your head, and he only shrugs and looks away like he knew this was coming; he's psychic, after all.) You smile because that's the way Dean Winchester dies, in the story you've been telling yourself since you were a kid, the way you never have yet -- with your boots on and a grin on your face, and if the bastard comes near enough, you'll spit bloody at his feet with the last strength you've got.
"Dean," he says, and his voice cracks when he speaks, one word like that's all he can manage, one word fractured by the hope it contains.
He tells you that you look like shit, and you tell him that the feeling's mutual. There's an awkward silence. His face is slick with tears, and you realize that yours is, too, but both of you are soundless. If you speak now, the film will warp, the record will scratch; this will not be real, this will never have happened. You cannot risk that.
Neither of you move, until you both do.
He tells you he doesn't remember how it happened, or why, or how he got here. You tell yourself that nothing is free, that you will have to pay for this, that God and the universe demand a sacrifice paid in grief and sorrow for everything that you are given, but after awhile, you begin to hope, and then even to believe, that you're wrong. You begin to think that this is what you get, after everything -- not a happy ending, because they don't exist, but maybe another chance, maybe a chance for real this time, something true and yours, not already inked with somebody else's fate, the destiny somebody else chose for the both of you.
This doesn't take away any of it, anything that happened, the way your bones ache or the fear that keeps you awake or the parts of you that, once abandoned, once killed, will never again be anything other than crooked and bent. It doesn't stop your nightmares, or his, and at a gas station outside of Tulsa, he loses it, and he doesn't speak for a whole week after that.
But at night, when you're not sleeping and he isn't, either, you can hear him breathing, and he's there beside you in the car; he answers your questions and speaks to fill the silences and spills Mountain Dew across his jeans and the front seat, and you slap his freakishly large hand with their knuckles as scarred as your own have become again away from the tape deck over and over.
There are bad days, more than you can count, and you learn not to count them. You don't count anything at all. On the bad days, you think that any minute you'll stop breathing, or he will; you'll open your eyes and one of you will be gone and you'll both be in hell. On the good days, it doesn't hurt to breathe, and you don't tell yourself that those days will end, or that they won't. You're here, as is he. You have both harrowed hell, and you are returned.
One day it will be too much. One day you'll go down, or he will, and neither of you will come back up, swinging or otherwise. You're vulnerable: you can die, now that he's back. You're human. Your heart is bloody and fragile and beating. You can give up. One day, you will, and maybe it will be accidental or maybe it won't, but it will be forever, and on that day it'll also be together, because that's the way this legend goes. The two of you, always and forever, against everything that stands in your way.
It's not really an ending, but you don't mind.
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end