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It was hard, losing Jess. Worst day of his life, really; Sam had no problem sharing that information with those who had a macabre sense of curiosity, and dared to ask. It always angered Dean, the way they would spot the dead counter on Sam’s wrist and just blurt out their questions, as though that were an okay thing to do.
It wasn’t. There were just things you didn’t ask. It might have been some God’s stupid choice that people had to wear their heart on their sleeve, but it didn’t mean people shouldn’t show some sense and not pry into things that weren’t any of their business, like asking a young man about the soulmate counter on his wrist that had gone dim and grey, the timer no longer displaying numbers but instead black lines where they might have been.
It was different once. Dean remembered the day well; he had still been living at home, working part time in Bobby’s garage while he went to a local college, and Sam had been sending text messages all day long that the family should be prepared for a Facetime call that evening. Dean had gotten his mother, Mary, an iPad not long after Sam announced he would head to California for college, and the family used it regularly to have video chats with Sam while he was gone. They had expected news about Sam’s LSAT scores but instead were greeted by a pretty blonde tucked against Sam’s side, she and Dean’s baby brother displaying the matching counters on their wrists, bright red and locked to the time and date of when they had met.
Mary had cried; her baby had found his soulmate! Even Dean’s father, John, had gotten a little misty-eyed. Dean had grinned alongside his parents, happy for his brother, in spite of everything.
A little over two years later, Sam came home from California with a defeated slump to his shoulders, and a blank counter on his wrist. A house fire had taken Jess and seemingly with it, all of Sam’s hopes and dreams for the future.
Time had changed things, a little. Years past and Sam began to smile again. There were others out there, he had realized, who had loved and lost the way he had. He had met a girl who wore her own broken heart like a badge of honor, just the way he did; Sarah was a sweet and lovely woman, whose fiancée, a paramedic, had been killed by a building collapse while trying to pull an injured woman from the wreckage of a gas leak explosion.
She had moved in with Sam just a month prior, and Dean had a feeling that it was for keeps. They care a great deal for one another and each understood the part of the other that would always belong to the one they had lost. Dean hadn’t voiced it, but he seen flickers on each of their wrists in recent weeks; it didn’t happen often, he knew, but sometimes people could fall in love and find a new soulmate. He was pretty sure Sam would be calling the family about it soon.
For now, though, he watched quietly, and did his best not to lash out at those who would pester Sam with the questions they should never have asked.
“It was worth it,” Sam explained to their waitress at the diner that he and Dean had picked for lunch that Saturday afternoon. “Even the little time we had together. It was worth everything I went through after I lost her, just to have it.”
“I don’t know,” the waitress replied, frowning.
Sam smiled. “You’ll understand soon enough,” he told her, and reached out to tap gently against her wrist. The counter there was ticking away the seconds, showing an expanse of two years, four months, and eight days before she would meet her own soulmate.
The girl smiled in return. “Guess losin’ somebody like that’d be better than never finding them,” she agreed after a moment.
Dean couldn’t help but notice the way his brother’s eyes cast a quick sympathetic glance in his direction, and he sighed.
This was the reason Dean wore a lot of long sleeve flannels and thick-banded watches.
When Dean was born, the counter on his wrist declared that he would meet his soulmate when he was aged seventeen years, two months, and six days. He barely took note of the thing until he was five or six and his parents explained what it was, and then went through the same period of fascination that every child did, watching the numbers tick away and wondering what it meant to have a soulmate.
When he was nine, his counter started blinking in and out, and his parents panicked, rushing him to the hospital. That was when Dean learned that the counter was tied to a person’s heartbeat, and if the beat stopped, so did the counter. Their fear had been that Dean was ill, but the doctors had assured them in what Dean had considered strangely gentle tones that it wasn’t Dean’s own heart that was causing the problem.
Everyone had gone very quiet after that.
Dean had just turned twelve when his counter stopped ticking away and zeroed out, switching over to grey dashes where the numbers should have been. He didn’t understand at first, and his mother started to cry every time she tried to explain. He had been afraid, unsure of why his teacher had gone wide-eyed and pale and rushed him to the nurse’s office, insisting his mother be called and he be taken home for the day. When his father returned from work that evening, grim-faced and slouched, he had taken Dean into the den for ‘a talk’. It was then that Dean knew it had to be really bad.
By fifteen, he was tired of the sympathetic looks and the questions. When people would point out his dead counter, he respond with a quick and acerbic ‘So the fuck what? Mind your own god damn business!’ and not even be scolded by adults for it, so pitied as he was.
Some people didn’t get a soulmate, he reasoned, and that was fine. Maybe he just wasn’t meant for all that sort of thing. At thirty, he was okay with it, or so he liked to think. Sure, it was hard, coming home to an empty apartment. The only people looking for love with a guy like him didn’t want him for more than a night, and that grew old rather quickly. They would leave in the morning with a smile on their face and the knowledge that their soulmate was still out there somewhere, not dead and buried like Dean’s. They had a future to find, and Dean just didn’t.
Sam and Sarah finding each other was a grand and rare thing, and Dean bore his brother no ill will for it. He knew logically that Sam and Sarah were a meant-to-be kind of thing, and nothing would have changed that. Even if some small selfish part of him wished he had met her first, if only to have a chance at finding something real.
“Hey, Dean,” Sam said, startling his brother from his thoughts. “I didn’t mean to…”
“What? Hey, c’mon Sammy, don’t get all weird on me about this shit,” Dean said with a practiced casual voice, waving his hand in a dismissive gesture. “I told you before, it’s not a big deal,” he added, and drained the last of his coffee even as he stood to leave.
Sam eyed him skeptically. “Yeah, that’s what you keep saying,” he responded.
Dean patted him on the shoulder. “Your turn to pay,” he reminded, gathering his leather jacket from the diner booth. “I gotta go, meeting some douchebag doctor with paint choices for his ’69 Camaro that I’m working on. You believe it, this guy says ‘make it blue’. Like, which blue? Got a half-fuckin’-dozen in stock and about eight more shades that’d look good on the car that I could order. No, just ‘make it blue’.” He rolled his eyes.
Sam laughed. “Most business owners find it best not to call their clients ‘douchebags’, Dean,” he said, raising the last of his own coffee to his lips.
With a snort, Dean shook his head and walked towards the door. “Not to their faces, maybe!” he called over his shoulder as he left.
Dean tried not to think on it as he drove. He tried not to think about counters while he pulled into the parking garage at Mercy Medical. He pretended he wasn’t thinking about second chances when he got a visitor pass at the hospital lobby. He wished his brain would stop yammering about soulmates while he rode the elevator to the fifth floor of the hospital, where he would be meeting his client in the doctor’s lounge during the man’s shift.
With a sigh, Dean gave in. He was alone in the elevator after all, it wouldn’t hurt to look. He pulled back the sleeve on his jacket and flannel, glancing down towards the dead counter on his wrist, and nearly passed out.
There were numbers on his wrist, a lot of zeroes but a few minutes counting down, flashing from red to black to red again, alerting him that his wait was finally winding down.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. He made it a point not to look at the thing, not to mock himself with a cold dead countdown clock, and he had no idea when it had changed. He nearly missed his floor, the doors starting to close before he had time to step out, so that he had to pound on the button inside the elevator to stop it from shutting and moving on.
Dean moved in a daze, staring at the counter, feeling almost as though it were leading him along. The rational part of his mind knew better, told him it was lucky this was happening in a hospital, because he was probably having some kind of heart attack, but all he could do was walk along and stare.
“Aha, there he is!” a familiar voice called. “Yo, Winchester, you’re late! You got my paint samples or what?”
Dean turned to face the doctor, face pale, and nodded. “Yeah,” he agreed quietly. “You’re… you’re a heart doctor or whatever, right Gabriel?”
The shorter man nodded. “Cardiologist,” he agreed. “Hey, come meet a sample of my work. Still too soon post-op to be walking around, I’ve been wheeling him in a chair just to get him out of bed for a while. Castiel, wheel your ass over here and show the good man what a talented bastard I am!”
When whoever Gabriel was calling to didn’t respond, he moved quickly to grab the man’s wheelchair and roll him towards Dean. The man in the chair looked as shell-shocked as Dean felt, pale and mouth agape, eyes gone wide and staring.
Eyes. Those eyes. Dean would remember for the rest of his life the thought that came to mind, of how he could mix and play with the samples of blue automotive paint in his pocket for years and still never find a shade equal to the blazing bright blue of the man in the wheelchair.
When he felt the sudden burn at his wrist, Dean knew: the date and time had been branded there, finally, after all of these years. The man in the wheelchair wore a matching mark in bright red at his own wrist.
“Dean Winchester, this is my brother Cas,”Gabriel went on, seemingly unaware of what was happening in front of him. “Born with a bum ticker. They gave him a ventricular assist device when he was thirteen, then just plain popped the damn thing out when he was sixteen, gave’im pneumatic set up to keep the blood pumping, at least till I got my MD.” He cracked his knuckles and grinned. “Finally got him a new heart, patched the whole thing in just a couple weeks ago. My best work, right Cas?”
He frowned when he realized his brother wasn’t responding, and that the mechanical restoration specialist who had come by to drop off paint samples had knelt to the linoleum tile floor of the hospital corridor, bringing him eye level with Castiel.
“When it… when it stopped running, they told me you must’ve died,” Dean said quietly. He extended a hand towards Castiel and the other man met his grip, their counters lining up opposite on another and displaying the same date and time.
“They didn’t warn me, when they put in the VAD, what would happen,” the other man replied. His voice was low and rough, and it was immediately the most beautiful thing Dean had ever heard in his life. “I came out of surgery and saw it. I didn’t think I’d ever find you.”
Dean gave a short laugh, swallowing against the lump in his throat and doing his best to pretend that there weren’t tears beginning to blur his vision. Castiel wiped at his own eyes with his free hand and suddenly Dean didn’t care, a tear escaping to streak its way down his cheek. Castiel reached out with his free hand to wipe it away and Dean closed his eyes at the touch, softly sighing at the feel of a warm loving hand on his cheek.
Still not able to speak, Dean instead covered Castiel’s hand on his cheek with his own, causing the other man to gently smile.
“Hello, Dean,” he said softly.
Dean closed his eyes. “Hey Cas,” he replied.
Finally getting with the program, Gabriel gaped. “Holy shit!”