(no subject)

[whereupon]

First Recollection
by whereupon
Sam/Dean, vague season two spoilers, PG-13, 5,946 words.
On learning to live forever.


One thousand, one hundred and fifty-one days later, Sam shot himself in a motel room. Dean wouldn't be back until morning, so Sam figured it was as good a time as any.

He sat on the edge of one of the beds, a bed like any of those other anonymous, countless beds in which he'd slept every night for most of his life, and he stared at the pistol held loosely between his hands. It wasn't his best gun, but it was his favorite. His hands grasped it as familiarly now as they had for as long as he could remember, which seemed wrong; he'd imagined that the gun would be somehow unrecognizable, that the weight of what it was about to do would be made apparent. Instead it was the same as ever, the curves of the metal as familiar to him as the way his hands had been shaped by them.

His mouth was dry. He thought that the painting across the room would be a terrible last sight, so he closed his eyes.

He'd thought about leaving a note, some sort of explanation, but he wasn't sure that words would make it any better, and anyway, Dean would know, the way he always did.

He lifted the gun, fitted it neatly against his temple. His hands didn't shake, and he was obscurely proud of that. Of course, there was no reason that they should have. There were times when he thought that he was more comfortable with a gun in his hands than without, though he remembered that this hadn't always been true.

He pulled the trigger. He didn't feel the bullet scorching like a lightning strike, shattering the wall of his skull; he was mercifully unaware of this and of what came after.

When he became conscious again, he was lying where he'd fallen, horizontal across the bed. He ran his fingers carefully across his scalp, and though they caught in the bloody tangles of his hair, his skull was intact. He was intact. He was alive.

When he sat up, he saw the gun on the floor where it had fallen from his grasp. He wasn't surprised that it still didn't feel different when he picked it up and put it aside.

The blankets were beyond salvation. They would have to be burned. He stripped them off of the bed and left them in a pile by the door.

Reflected in the bathroom mirror, his eyes were the same as they'd ever been. He hadn't changed. No one would know to look at him what he'd just done, just as no one would know that he was any older than he'd been on the day on which everything stopped.

He washed his hair without thinking; when the water swirling down the drain was only faintly pink instead of red, he turned off the faucet. His head hurt and he figured that was probably to be expected. He took painkillers, white pills small in the palm of his hand, and washed them down with lukewarm water. He thought that maybe he was the luckiest man in the world, that he could get shot in the head and be fine after a good night's sleep.

One of the two luckiest men in the world, he amended. Of course, lucky men didn't usually feel the urge to shoot themselves in the head, and that was kind of funny in an awful sort of way, but he didn’t particularly feel like laughing.

He stretched out on the other bed, the bed that would have been Dean's, and closed his eyes. It didn't take long for him to fall asleep, and he thought that maybe he was lucky after all, but it could have just as easily been the painkillers exerting their influence.

Dean knew, of course, because Dean always knew. He knew in the same way he knew when Sam was lying about whether he'd been hurt, or whether he was scared, or when he was lying, in the same way he knew what would be the most appalling and most effective thing he could say to Sam in order to distract him from whatever he was worried about. Dean's innate knowledge and his intuition when it came to his brother were frightening things, but Sam figured that he returned the favor in kind.

Sam had gotten rid of the blankets before Dean had returned. He'd made up some flimsy story about spilling something on them and how housekeeping was all out of clean sheets, but he hadn't really believed that Dean believed him.

They were in a bar three states and two weeks away when Dean acknowledged it. Sam had been waiting for him to say something, had wondered when he would. He had almost begun to hope that Dean would let it go, would let it remain something unspoken and eventually forgotten, something that they could pretend was a secret.

"So, you figured you'd shoot yourself," Dean said, the way he might have said so, this girl in Tennessee or this one hunt with Dad. He'd just lowered his bottle of beer to the table and he still had one hand wrapped loosely around it. His eyes were light and green and they cut into Sam like barbed wire, twisting deep. There would be no escaping.

"I had to see if it would work," Sam said steadily. He didn't flinch. Dean's question wasn't unexpected, just as the event about which Dean asked hadn't been unexpected.

"You could've told me what you were gonna do," Dean said. He didn't sound angry. He was wearing his leather jacket and when he shrugged, the material creaked slightly. The noise was inaudible over the barroom crush, but Sam had heard it so many times that he substituted it from memory without thinking. "Or did you just figure, hey, now's a good time, like a spur of the moment thing?"

"If I'd told you, you would've tried to stop me," Sam said. He rested his hands on the table. Between them, the beer bottle was nestled as the gun had been. He thought that this situation was much more likely to be deadly than his attempt at suicide had been, at least in terms of heartbreak and fallout. In terms of actual death, it wouldn't be any more successful than a bullet to the head had been.

Nothing would be.

"Yeah," Dean said. "And you knew why. And you didn't care, so you went ahead with it anyway."

Sam didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say. He had known what Dean would say, and so he had waited until Dean wasn't around. It wasn't because he didn't care, though, and Dean knew that. Dean had to know that.

It hadn't ever been an issue of not caring.

Dean stared back at him. Sam tried hard not to blink. "Did you know it wouldn't work?" Dean asked. To Sam's ears, it sounded like a plea. About anything else, Sam would have given in, but in this, he owed his brother the truth.

"No," he said. He looked at Dean when he said it. He was very aware of the stillness of his own hands, of the dryness of his mouth, of the suddenly foreign feeling of the glass bottle pressed against the pads of his fingers as though it were an artifact from another world. Dean's forehead was creased and there were wrinkles forming faintly at the corners of his eyes. They would never get any deeper.

"I'm getting another drink," Dean said finally. "You want one?"

Sam nudged his beer bottle closer to the edge of the table. It wasn't empty, but it was close enough. "Yeah," he said.

Dean got to his feet and grabbed both of the bottles. Sam didn't watch him go up to the bar. He stared at the table instead, and at his own hands. He thought it was strange that he could remember pulling the trigger, but not anything that came after, nothing before realizing that he was still alive. He wondered if Dean would ask him what it had been like. He wondered if Dean would ever mention this again.

He thought it was likely that Dean would. Considering the amount of time they would have to fill, they would probably talk about everything more than once.

When Dean came back, they drank in silence. Dean watched the people at the bar and Sam picked at the label of his bottle until the paper tore away. There wasn't much either of them could say.

They were investigating a haunting three weeks later and the ghost got the better of them. It sent Sam crashing across the room and it threw Dean out of a second-story window. Despite what he knew, Sam was terrified. He couldn't help but calculate trajectories and the odds of a broken neck.

By the time Sam picked himself up from the rubble of plaster and dust and made it out to the lawn, Dean had climbed to his feet and was dusting himself off. He squared his shoulders and looked defiantly up at the window through which he'd fallen. Around him, the grass shone damply in the moonlight. The town had been plagued with rainstorms for the past week. Sam had fallen asleep to the sound of rain clattering against the window like distant trains the night before.

"Are you okay?" Sam asked. His voice was low, concerned, and his hands shook when he skimmed them across Dean's shoulders and back, checking for injuries.

Dean jerked out of his grasp as though Sam had burned him, branded him. His face was pale, but that could have been a result of the moonlight. "Does it matter?" he asked. Sam stared at him, stung into silence, his throat aching, and Dean picked up the shotgun from where it had fallen onto the grass. "C'mon, stop gawking. We got a ghost to take care of."

At the motel a few hours later, Sam sat on the edge of his bed and tried not to notice that it looked like the bed upon which he'd shot himself. He didn't regret that he'd done that; the regret, as was true of almost all regret, was useless. There was nothing he could do about it; he already knew that he wouldn't try again.

He regretted the consequences, though, and more with every time Dean wouldn't meet his eyes.

A few feet away, Dean stood before the mirror, his back to Sam. When he shrugged out of his jacket, Sam saw that his t-shirt was bloody, stained red, and sliced where the glass had caught it. His jacket had to be shredded as well, but the fabric was dark and heavy enough that Sam hadn't noticed. When Dean lifted his shirt over his head, Sam still expected to see wounds, terrible gashes marring his brother's shoulders and back, but Dean's skin was intact.

Dean dropped the ruined shirt and reached for a clean one. Sam wondered how tired Dean had to be to not take a shower, to not wash the blood from his body. He remembered the feeling of the blade slicing into his back as he stood in that cold ghost-town mud, and he wondered if it had felt like that for Dean, too. He felt as though there was something he'd forgotten, something that he should be doing. Even after all this time, it was unnatural not to insist that Dean needed stitches, a hospital, a miracle.

Sam got to his feet and went over to where Dean stood. As Dean finished pulling the new shirt over his head, his elbow touched Sam's, a fleeting moment of contact.

The t-shirt collar had snagged at Dean's hair and left it in disarray. Sam could see the shadows beneath Dean's eyes and the faint scar across his forehead, things that might not have been obvious to someone else. Sam was always intensely aware of Dean; he couldn't help it. It was a tendency older and more intrinsic than the way he later learned to scan the room for exit routes upon entering or the way he learned to casually ignore questions about his name, his family, his past.

Dean looked at Sam in the mirror, as though that was easier than looking at him in person, as though he couldn't look at Sam directly. "You want something?" he asked.

Sam wanted an end to this, of course, and wanted an easy answer, but he didn’t have the right to ask for either. He couldn't ask that of Dean, and even if he could, neither of those wishes were within his brother's power to grant. He met Dean's eyes in the reflection and said, "You sure you're okay?"

"I'm beat," Dean said. "I'm going to bed."

"Okay," Sam said. The light switch was closer to him than it was to Dean, so he turned it off without waiting for Dean to push past him or to ask. Dean's shirt was strangely white in the dim, illuminating him like a target.

Dean took the bed closest to the door and slept with his back to Sam.

The scant air between them crackled dark and something settled in Sam's stomach like coins on the eyes of the dead, like dread. He thought that both of them might bleed out before the night was over, if it were possible. He felt like he was doing so already: when he breathed, air slipped whistling out between his teeth, and when he swallowed, he tasted copper and iron. The parking lot was abandoned, apart from them; the Impala was a chrome-edged menace a few feet away and broken bottles glinted at the edge of the insomniac circle of streetlamp glow.

They'd stopped for the night because Dean said he was too tired to keep driving. Sam hadn't wanted to sleep in the car, but Dean had refused to give him the keys, to let him drive. That was how it had begun, but even at the beginning, that wasn't really what they were fighting about.

Dean's punch made Sam stagger, but only for a moment; even as Sam rocked back, he was recovering, turning back, his aim set and clear. Dean saw the punch coming, but he didn't move fast enough and his teeth tore at Sam's knuckles.

Dean didn't go down, but he didn't hit back, either. He took a step back that Sam didn't think was a stumble, and Sam watched him, waiting for him to move.

"You really wanna do this?" Dean asked. His expression gave Sam no clue to what he was thinking, but he stood like he was waiting for Sam to move first. Sam had the thought that they would tear each other open if that would make this right, if forgiveness could be found in blood and bone and skin.

He had the thought that they might die trying, so he said, "No."

Dean looked at him for a moment longer and then nodded once. "Okay then," he said.

He turned away and Sam bit his lip, the question hot on his tongue, heavy and inevitable as the pull of addiction. When Sam spoke, it was with the vehemence of a shout, though he didn't raise his voice. "How can you be okay with this?"

Dean's shoulders stiffened and he turned back slowly. Sam shifted his weight, wondering if Dean would hit him again, ready in case he did.

"How am I okay with it?" Dean said, his tone incredulous, his eyes glittering. "I'm not, you asshole. It's a fuckin' wrong thing, it shouldn't've happened, but at least I'm not trying to make it worse. You always gotta do this, Sammy, you always gotta fucking leave because--" He stopped and swallowed like he was choking back words, like he'd changed his mind about speaking them. "I have no fucking idea why. Wanna enlighten me?"

Sam didn't respond; he set his jaw and stared at his brother. If he spoke at all, Dean would throw another punch, or maybe Sam would have answered him not with words but with another punch, had he dared to answer at all, because there were no words for this, no words to make it right, no truth but that which would come in the form of violence.

Sam knew that would cost both of them far too much.

Dean spat blood and said, "Get the fuck in the car unless you're sleeping out here."

They got breakfast in a diner that served it all day. Their boots knocked beneath the table, a familiar tussle as they shoved into a booth with a good view of the door. It was morning and the light came through the windows with unfathomable audacity. It had seemed cruel when they left the motel room, but now Sam welcomed it if only as a reason to keep his eyes downcast.

"I'm getting pancakes," Dean said. He'd gotten pancakes every day for the past week. Sam was beginning to wonder if that was somehow significant, pointed, though it was just as likely that, having tried every item on the menu it seemed every diner in this half of the country was required to use, Dean had given up.

"What is it with you and pancakes?" Sam asked. "Something you wanna tell me?"

"No," Dean said. "Why would I tell you something about pancakes?"

Sam shrugged. "I never know with you."

"Yeah, I guess not," Dean said. Sam blinked. He was hurt, maybe more than he should have been. The waiter took their orders and Sam tried not to be bothered by the fact that Dean was friendlier to the waiter than he was to Sam.

Dean was watching Sam over the rim of his coffee mug. Sam felt dissected, flayed, laid open.

Their food arrived. Sam picked at his eggs. Dean took a bite of his pancakes and talked without swallowing his food.

"Pancakes, Sam," he said. "They're delicious. You should try 'em."

"No, I think the image of your half-chewed breakfast is gonna tide me over for awhile," Sam said. "I might never eat pancakes again, actually."

"Never say never," Dean said. He swallowed and took a sip of coffee. "Forever's a long time."

"I know," Sam said.

"I wasn't sure," Dean said. "I figured maybe I should check."

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose, suddenly frustrated. He wasn't hurt anymore; he was angry. "Okay," he said. "Thanks. I got it."

"Good," Dean said. They ate without talking for a few minutes, until the sound of Dean's fork scratching across the plate threatened to drive Sam insane.

"You're not sick of pancakes," Sam said, making it a question.

Dean looked up at him. "Nope."

"How long do you think it'll take until you are?" That might have been cruel. Sam wasn't sure.

This time, Dean swallowed before talking. "Guess we'll find out," he said. "Eat up. You collapse in the middle of the hunt and I'm not dragging your sorry ass back to the car."

"You'd just leave me there," Sam said.

"Yep," Dean said.

"No, you wouldn't," Sam said.

"Sure I would," Dean said. "You wanna find out?"

Sam was fairly certain that he was right, but he finished his breakfast anyway. As they stepped back out into the parking lot, he wanted for a moment to apologize to Dean, to say, so that Dean would not be able to pretend to misunderstand, that it had never been about him.

Sam had never been trying to leave him behind.

He knew his brother, and he knew that his brother preferred actions to words, that his brother would never say "I love you," but that he would mean it with everything he did. Sam had known that, and he had still pulled the trigger, and he wondered why he hadn't seen this coming. Perhaps he hadn't let himself, he thought. Perhaps he couldn't have gone through with it if he'd thought about it.

He'd had to do it, he told himself, because there were larger things at work, larger forces in the universe, and he had to know. He'd had to be sure, but knowledge never came without cost, and he had not imagined. He had not let himself imagine. And those reasons now rang hollow, sounding only like excuses, attempts to justify, and he knew that he could never say them aloud.

He was beginning to comprehend the enormity of his mistake. It had taken a little while to sink in, for him to realize what he'd done, but maybe that was okay, because it wasn't like he would have run out of time before figuring it out.

Dean started the engine and rattled through his box of tapes, and in the shotgun seat, Sam was quiet and wondered if he would ever be able to make things right between them again.

Facing into the sunset, they stood before the edge of a cliff and faced down something incredibly old and incredibly angry. They took it down with two bullets, one shot each. They stood side by side and fired in unison, and the beast tumbled soundlessly over the edge of the cliff.

They approached the edge and looked down over it. Forest spread out before them, a dense dappled expanse of trees tinged with the light of the dying sun. The beast's dark body was barely distinguishable from the mass of shadows on the valley floor, as though it had finally been accepted by the earth upon which it hadn't been born.

Sam wondered if the beast had ever been anything but angry, raging. He wondered how long it had taken for it to snap. He wondered how long it would take for him, or for Dean, and he was afraid of what would happen then, if they could not be stopped with bullets.

There was something terrifying about the concept of living forever and what changes it would bring. In a hundred years, maybe he would be unrecognizable. Maybe he would be recognizable only to Dean, who after all knew him better than anyone, and maybe that was what would matter. He'd always seen his identity in terms of relation to Dean and he couldn't imagine that would ever change.

It was a quiet sort of revelation, less an epiphany than the remembering of something he'd always known. He couldn't imagine how he would tell Dean, though, how he could tell Dean that he'd ever forgotten, so he remained silent as they stumbled back down the hill to where the car lay waiting, black and fey.

They were trapped in another downpour, a deluge. The world was ending in water all around them, but they were safe within the four walls of the motel room. They were in New England, Sam knew, but he couldn't remember which state. New Hampshire seemed likely. They had hunted ghosts in New Hampshire before, and considering the cyclical nature of things, it seemed plausible that they would be doing it again. Sam remembered that it had rained the last time, too, which made it seem even more likely.

Their lives were no longer cyclical, however. They were linear, straight lines unending, a concept that couldn't exist in reality, though there they were. The double helix of their lives was as eternal as the horizon.

From the distance of the other bed, Dean's eyes glinted. Sam remembered that they had been talking about the ghost earlier that evening, and sometime after that, they'd argued. It had been a miserable argument, knife-sharp and disproportionately cruel, words weighted with the force of years, shared history and shared grief. He remembered looking at Dean as though from a thousand miles away and thinking that this was quite possibly the worst night of his life.

He didn't remember what Dean had said to make him think that. He thought he was probably better off for it.

"You awake?" Dean asked. His voice was sleep-muddled and thick. He sounded like he'd been crying, but he'd probably just woken up.

"Yeah," Sam said. His mouth tasted sour and his tongue was heavy. "Where are we?"

"Connecticut," Dean said.

Sam had never liked geography, anyway. He'd lived entirely too much of it. "You think we'll get tired?" he asked.

"You're not already?" Dean asked.

"Good point," Sam said, though he wasn't sure Dean had known what he meant.

Dean was still talking. Sam thought he'd missed the first part of what Dean was saying, so he couldn't follow the rest, but that was okay. Sam was content to listen to the flow of Dean's voice without having to focus on the words, until Dean said, "You would have left if you could."

The accusation stunned him awake, stole his breath and left him wordless. He got to his feet and lurched over to the other bed. He was momentarily lost until Dean's hand caught his wrist and guided him down to the bed. In the quiet dark, Sam thought about the countless motel rooms in which he and Dean had lain like this, waiting for their father to return. That seemed like such a small beginning for the lifetimes that would follow. Sam imagined the sky above them, the universe teeming with stars.

For all that he had wanted to conquer the world, he knew that this was wrong, that what had happened to him and Dean was a mistake. The universe seemed very small, suddenly, and as though it couldn't be trusted if it were going to make these kinds of mistakes.

"I wouldn't've left you," Sam said. He turned his head to look at Dean. Dean's eyes were closed, but Sam knew that he was awake. "You know that. You would've followed me, if it had. If I'd."

Dean's thumb was pressed against the hollow of Sam's wrist. His ragged thumbnail bit lightly into the skin above Sam's veins. Sam couldn't remember whose pulse he was feeling. It seemed possible that it could have been both of theirs, something they shared. "Nobody should have to do this forever," Sam said. It was an insufficient explanation, an insufficient apology, but it was all that he had, and it was true. "That's what happened to the things we hunt, Dean. That's why we hunt. I don't want us to end up, to, to hurt people."

Dean didn't respond. Sam thought he might have finally fallen asleep or that he was too angry to speak, and then Dean opened his eyes. "Nobody should have to do it forever alone, moron," he said. "We won't. Now shut up, I'm trying to sleep here."

He shut his eyes again and Sam let his own head fall back onto the pillow. He wondered if he would ever be able to forget the weight of the gun in his hand, the precise way the trigger wrapped around his finger. It had been the same way the trigger always wrapped around his finger, and though he hadn't expected tangible evidence of what he'd been about to do, he thought that what should have been his own death hadn't felt any different than any of the others he had caused

He knew, then, that he had never really believed that it would work.

In the dark, lying on the bed beside his brother, that seemed meaningful, though he couldn't find the words to explain it properly, and he didn't dare say anything until he had them.

After awhile, he gave up trying, and in the morning, it didn't seem like something that needed to be said.

Their dirty clothes were spread out across one of the beds. They needed to do laundry. It was an incredibly simple fact, incredibly mundane, but Sam was overwhelmed by the significance. They needed to do laundry, and they would need to do laundry for the rest of their lives. All at once, it seemed an immense undertaking. He considered the amount of detergent they would need and he thought of grains of sand on a beach, and eternity, and his laughter was sharp-edged, a little frightened.

Dean looked up from the table where he was polishing their knives. "What is it?"

"Laundry," Sam said. It felt like his chest was being squeezed, his heart wrung out. He forced himself to breathe. "Do you know how much it's gonna cost to do laundry forever? How much soap it's gonna take?"

Dean stared at him. Sam wondered if he was going insane, or if he'd already gone insane, and then Dean raised his eyebrows. "Eternity, and you're thinking about laundry?"

Sam shrugged. "It's the little things in life," he said, and Dean began to laugh.

By the time they were done, they were both in tears, and Sam's stomach ached. He swiped at his eyes and straightened up. A few feet away, Dean appeared to still be having trouble breathing.

Maybe they were both insane, Sam decided. They would have to be, to get through this.

"Guess you'd better get started on it, then," Dean said. Sam reached for the nearest t-shirt and threw it at him. Dean caught it and handed it to him. His thumbnail scratched across Sam's wrist and Sam was frozen. He thought of the painting on the wall in the motel room, the one he had not wanted to be his last sight.

It seemed like something he should tell Dean about, though he knew that Dean would have no need for the knowledge and would probably not want to hear it.

Dean was pushing the dirty t-shirt into Sam's hand. His thumb was still hot against Sam's wrist. It's the little things in life, Sam thought dazedly. "Hey, you in there?" Dean asked.

"Yeah," Sam said. "I was just thinking."

"Think later," Dean said. "I'm out of clean socks."

"So do your own damn laundry next time," Sam said.

"Then what the hell would I be paying you for?" Dean asked. "'Cause it sure as hell ain't to sit there and look pretty."

"You're paying me?" Sam said. "In what, insults and laundry duty?"

"I let you ride in my car," Dean said. He still hadn't let go of Sam's wrist. Sam wondered if he'd forgotten. "Look," he said. "I just. I know this is tough, but we're gonna, you know. Maybe it's not forever, anyway."

"Yeah," Sam said. "If I had to spend all eternity listening to the worst of Metallica, I'd kill you. Problem solved." After he said it, he realized that Dean's tapes wouldn't last that long, that they wouldn't last very much longer at all, and he wondered if he should prepare for that.

"Only if I hadn't killed you already for bitching about it," Dean said. He licked his lips. His face was still blotchy from laughing and he needed to shave. Sam wondered if he would remember this as vividly as he did the details of the moment at which he put the gun to his head. He wondered if these images would sneak up on him the way that the recollection of the motel painting had, and if he would blush when they did, and then he didn't have time to wonder anymore because Dean's mouth was pressed against his.

Sam dropped the t-shirt and kissed him back. Dean's lips were still dry, but Sam hardly noticed.

Outside the window, traffic inched forward and a car horn honked. They broke apart, but not suddenly or abruptly, and it felt like an agreement or a promise, like the next step. Sam swallowed. Dean's mouth looked swollen. Sam wondered if he should apologize for that, but Dean had kissed him first.

He wondered if he'd been forgiven.

Dean rubbed the back of his neck. "Laundry," he said. "You were gonna."

"I was," Sam said. "Yeah." He reached down to pick up the t-shirt, crammed the dirty clothes into a duffle. When he turned around, Dean was watching him, though he looked away quickly when Sam saw him. Sam bit his lip. "You, uh. You lost your balance, I guess," he said. It was an offering, an exit route.

He wasn't sure what he would do if Dean accepted it.

Dean looked up; his gaze was quick and keen and captivating. "That could explain it," he said neutrally.

Sam was lightheaded and he thought that this was dangerous ground, potentially enemy territory. "But you don't usually trip over your own feet," he said. "So that probably wasn't it."

"Yeah," Dean said. "I trip over yours."

"If you'd watch where you're going, that wouldn't happen," Sam said.

"How can I watch where I'm going when I'm meant to be making sure you're not doing something stupid to get yourself killed?" Dean asked. "I'm good, but I'm not that good."

"Tell me about it," Sam said. "I seem to remember you being the one who came up with that plan with the rope. 'Brilliant,' I think you called it. Or, wait, was that one 'a stroke of genius'?"

"I know, it's hard to keep 'em straight, what with me being so awesome all the time and all," Dean said.

Sam raised his eyebrows. "Yeah," he said. "It's tough. I don't know how I manage."

"Sarcasm's a bitch move," Dean said.

"Which makes sense, since it's your weapon of choice," Sam said.

Dean's eyes widened in surprised outrage and Sam grinned. He grabbed the duffle and left the room before Dean could think of a response.

The laundromat was a block away. Sam listened to the hum of the washers and dryers and flipped through a magazine that someone had left, but he couldn't focus on the words. He thought about how he would be alive long after the other people in the laundromat. A few feet away, a woman in a waitress's uniform the color of sunrise in winter sat with her eyes closed and her hands folded in her lap. At the counter, the attendant turned another page in his paperback, the cover of which was creased and time-faded.

Sam would be here long after their bones were returned to the earth.

His hands shook, then, so he thought instead about how Dean had kissed him, about how neither of them had panicked.

He wondered if that would have happened even if this thing hadn't happened to them, or if now all bets were off, all futures possible.

He thought about all of the ways it could go, and all of the ways that it would go, but they wouldn’t need to rush. They had all the time in the world, and then some, and though that thought caught at Sam's heart, there was a lightness in his chest that he hadn't felt for a long time.

A long time. He supposed that was relative, now.

The washer rattled to a halt. He fished another quarter out of his pocket and slid it into the machine.

By the time the laundry was done and he got back to the motel, the sun had set and the stars were beginning to be visible. He thought about how the stars themselves had burnt out long ago and how he was only seeing their aftermath, and he thought about how he'd already outlived those stars in the moment he was born.

He wondered if he would ever stop looking up, if one day he would be used to this.

He shouldered the bag of laundry and he turned his face from the sky; Dean was waiting.

--

end