[Fic] One Last Candle (to keep out the light) [1/4]
Title: One last candle (to keep out the light)
Part: 1 out of 4
Author: youaregonecas
Wordcount: 1.747/7.238 words
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Sam/Gabriel
Tags: letters, depression, major character death, suicide (mentioned), unrequited love, grief, a lot of angst going on, please read at your own risk, season 10 divergent
Summary: Sam Winchester was lost. Lost big time. He once had his brother to help him when he really wasn't in a good place, but now? Now even Dean is gone. With Dean gone and Gabriel gone too, he just doesn't know what to do.
Terrified of his own thoughts, he writes a letter to Gabriel, bringing back memories he hoped he'd never have to face again.
Sam Winchester closed the door to his bedroom, locking it out of mere habit. He had nothing to hide, not anymore. Not how that he was alone in the bunker, now that the only one that could come in was Kevin’s ghost. Or… Dean’s. He locked the door without even realizing that he did it. If Cas was around and he wanted to come in, he didn’t have to use a key or door anyway, he could just zap himself in there.
The Bunker was not his home, not anymore. Not with nobody there to share it. It already felt too big with only two people there, but at least, with Dean there, Sam hadn’t felt so alone. This was different. This was pure and raw loneliness.
Was it the loneliness that drove him to this? Writing again after ages? Was it the half bottle of whiskey that he had downed earlier? He didn’t even care anymore. He had to do something before he went completely stir crazy.
25th of December, 2012
Hi Gabe,
Hi Gabriel,
Hello Gabriel,
How are you? Good I hope? Man, life’s been crazy around here. Makes me miss you and your texts a bit. It has been a while since we last spoke. A shame. I uh, kind of need the distraction right now. There’s been some stuff happening and if I am honest, Gabriel? I am drowning, drowning in all that I am feeling. It is all so incredibly overwhelming. I didn’t even know that a heart could break into so many pieces.
It’s the twenty-fifth today. Christ’s completely wrong birthday. I don’t know why us humans love it so much. I mean, I don’t know, I guess it can be fun when you’re a kid. Dean and I never had that. Dad was always hunting, never there. Christmas never became something we really celebrated.
But Gabe? This Christmas, I am lonely. So damn lonely.
Without Dean this is all so different. I guess you don’t know, but Dean… Dean’s dead. He got the mark of Cain and then Metatron killed him with the First Blade. There’s more to tell you about him, more than these two lines, but, I can’t. I can’t tell you. It hurts too much, not having Dean there.
Dean died because of something that we should have stopped god damn. If we’d just taken care of him, if I had never let Dean go in he wouldn’t have been killed with his own blade. I mean, how weird and just plain wrong can something get? Getting killed with your own weapon.
I buried Dean yesterday. Hell, I am not a skilled man, but I made him a coffin. Worked on it for a week, a whole damn week. Dean lay on his bed for a whole week. After I… after I buried him, I locked the door behind me, I just couldn’t bear the room anymore.
Where have you been Gabe? The past few weeks, all I’ve heard is that you’re dead. Cas believes that news. He has been around the past couple of weeks. Something you probably know. At least, I hope. He seems to believe you are gone. Me, not so much. You’re too stubborn, we thought you were dead before and you ended up being alive so yeah, not going to throw in the towel just yet.
I just, I don’t know, please know that if there is anything, anything at all, that you can always come to me, okay? I’ll be here to listen I’ll be here to fight too…
Gabriel, I know that we haven’t always been the best of friends and that we haven’t talked in such a long time, but if there is anything that I can do for you, anything at all, you tell me and you come here. Truth is, you are the only thing that I have left of my old life, the only thing that reminds me of how it used to be, as sad as that may sound.
Take care of yourself Gabriel, please.
Sam
He was pathetic, he knew that. He knew that calling on the Archangel was the last thing that he ought to do, but it wasn’t like he was ever going to read the letter anyway. He sighed has he folded the letter closed, putting it in the destined envelope. One day, they would have to hunt Gabriel down, see if he was alright, but today? Today wasn’t that day.
Today was supposed to be a day to gather your family around you and well, have at least a little bit of fun. Like that was going to happen. His whole family was, quite literally, dead. Mary, John, Dean, Bobby, Ellen, Jo. None of them couldn’t be there. All of them were somewhere either up or down.
Crowley wouldn’t answer either. He tried calling on him, tried everything to get Dean back. If only he could save Dean from hell. If only. He’d go in, he would trade his soul for Dean’s, but Crowley wouldn’t. He just scowled and told him the same thing that the Trickster had once told him, what now seemed like a lifetime ago: That he had to learn to live without his brother. They couldn’t keep testing fate.
And however reluctant, Sam agreed, he gave up.
That meant spending Christmas alone in the bunker, locked away in his room. Ever since burying Dean, he hadn’t opened the door to his room. Dean’s room was too familiar, too much like him even if it had never been a home to his brother.
“Merry Christmas,” he whispered under his breath, lingering just a little bit longer at the door. Sam didn’t even bother to stop the slide of his hand against the door. “I don’t, I don’t know what to do without you here, Dean. Merry fucking Christmas man.”
He didn’t even notice the wind and snow until he locked the door of the bunker behind him, the letter tucked into the pocket of his jeans alongside the others. The hundreds maybe that he had started writing to Gabriel after his presumed death.
He hadn’t looked back on them after he was done writing them. Hell, even now he didn’t want to open them, read back what a mess his life had been back then. He didn’t want to read about him getting hurt and well, telling Gabriel about his emotions had to hurt reading back on it.
“Here goes nothing,” he sighed as he stepped into the Impala, faintly wary about the fact that he could very easily slip in the snow. It almost shocked him how little he cared. Yeah, he could slip and hit a tree. He wouldn’t care if he walked away from the wreck or not. Feeling so low was scary, but at the same time, not.
Sam didn’t even realize that he was headed to the little clearing where he buried Dean until he was already walking in the woods, leaves breaking under his feet. The snow was melting under his steps, the slight crunch the only sound that filled the air.
The woods didn’t manage to calm him down, no matter how much he needed to. The wooden cross was still there, his name etched in it, the amulet dangling from the place where the two pieces of wood intersect. Sam had fished it out of that garbage can years ago, but never offered it to Dean. He knew that the souvenir would only hurt is brother, so selfish as it was, he kept it.
Sam crouched down in the snow in front of his brother. The scene was so familiar, too familiar. He’d been here, with Jess, with John, with Bobby, but never with Mary. No matter how much it hurt not to have that connection to his mother, he’d been too young when she died. Her grave was no more than a tombstone to him. He didn’t have the memories that Dean had.
Jess’s had hurt, hurt more than he had ever imagined. The feeling that he lacked when seeing his mother’s grave, he got when he saw Jess’s. The wave of guilt that hit him when he saw the date of her death so clearly, the death that he had caused. A short life ended on that second of November, 2005. He had loved her, still had that ring he had bought her. It lay on his dresser in the box. She’d never get a chance to say yes.
And then, their father had died too. He’d seen his body burn like he had watched Jess burn on the ceiling that night. Losing his father was completely different. John hadn’t been a real father to him, he had been that jackass that took care of them occasionally. It wasn’t like he didn’t grieve for his father or it didn’t hurt him to have lost him, it was just different.
Bobby died and Sam remembered feeling so incredibly numb when that heart beat stopped. After that, he didn’t remember a lot, he only remembered the silence that followed between him and his brother, how he kept looking around to see where Bobby was before remembering that Bobby wouldn’t join them anymore. He lost track of how often he dialled his number to ask him for information on a case, before realizing that he’d never answer.
And now Dean… Just looking at the wooden cross made his heart ache. That was Dean. His brother. All those memories that he had with Dean, all those both good and bad ones, they all resurfaced. They were there, fresh in his memory. He only had to blink to see them. There were so many, so many that were like a knife to the heart.
Sam sighed before opening the first letter, the letter that he had written all those years ago. He didn’t even remember them clearly. In at least one of the first, he had been drunk. Drunk out of his mind and he couldn’t even remember why it was. He’d remember soon enough, while reading them.
But the thing was, he was scared to open the letters. He knew what they could do, what could be in them. All those old wounds would be opened up again. Just now he would die to feel whole again. They would make him feel worse. Which would be unavoidable. They would make him hurt again, over losses that he had finally worked through.