Archive of Our Own

Dean dies at nine pm on a Thursday. Sam doesn’t have time to cry or soak in the Great Lake or loss because there, where Dean died in the middle of a blood-soaked barn, there is still a five-alarm fire.

He saves the tattered remains of the day on autopilot, his heart leaking in his chest while he comforts brothers who still have each other, and parents, and friends—

Sam returns to the bunker in the weak sunlight of Friday morning, too damn tired for this but unable to stop himself. Pushing forward is all he has left. There’s no divine intervention, no demons to deal with, no spells and blood magic to undo this one last cosmic wrong.

This, he thinks, as he washes the last of the blood from his hands and turns toward the muslin-wrapped body on the map table, might be an ending even Chuck would find too cruel.

He builds a pyre and lays Dean on it. There’s no one left but him, so he says some words. He whispers his goodbyes as he lights Dean’s Zippo one last time and tosses the flame.

It takes until sunset for the flames to burn down to smoking embers. Sam stands guard until they do, Miracle at his side. It’s nine pm on a Friday when Sam lets the pain inside his chest break through the wall he’s spent years bricking up around his heart. He cries, he cries for days, but Sam Winchester lives.

***

Dean dies at nine pm on a Thursday. His last breath and his first breath are the same, stuttering and blood soaked, but then he swallows an easy breath and the sun is bright against his skin. He’s sitting—Bobby’s there, and there is peace in this dreamscape roadhouse he almost doesn’t believe. The pain that burned through him in his last breath is gone, replaced with something else. Emptiness, maybe, he isn’t sure. It’s dull, but he feels it and lets it take root inside him.

He loves this place, heaven remade by Jack and Castiel. Baby will take him anywhere, and he drives to an endless loop of the classics, beating a tattoo against the leather of the steering wheel. The air feels clear in his lungs, his eyesight is sharper than it was in life. The ache in his right knee is gone. Pain is a memory, darkness chased away by the healing light of heaven’s sun, but the emptiness in his chest sometimes lights him up like a flame. He’ll be along haunts a corner of his brain, the refrain to a song he’s sung his whole life-after-death, catchier than the labored strains of pop music echoing in the halls of a department store.

Sam doesn’t come all at once. He dies the slow death of an old man, in parts and pieces, and Dean feels him coming before he does. Dean stops on a bridge, nowhere and five minutes from everywhere, because the sucking hole in his chest is finally filling in. It’s beautiful there like it is everywhere—Jack didn’t skimp—and he waits, watching the river run by, as Sam Winchester dies.

He feels it then, the promise of peace fulfilled inside him, and he smiles.

“Hey, Sammy,” he says.