Chapter Text
I
It all ends in this barn.
Dean keeps talking about cracks in the ceiling, and you try to stay on the road and not punch anything.
You think about saying something about mixing a concussion with alcohol, but you are afraid of what he would say—or not say. Lately, every silence has screamed, and every twitch has concealed a land mine.
“S’not really the breaking, you know; it's knowing— knowing — you can be broken.” His words are slurred, and you aren’t sure if it is the alcohol, the blood loss, or the head injury. He’s slumped against the window, every so often, you see him shift.
Dean tends to wax poetic when he’s a liter short. Your brother once told you that ‘stars burn lonely, like pain’ when he was bleeding out on your lap in the back seat, Dad going 90 down a backroad.
“Drives you crazy.” His mouth moves slow over the words.
He nods to himself, head lolling.
You never should have left him alone, never should have run off to Ruby, not when he was sleeping off a head injury and a nasty eight inch slice to the forearm. He hardly flinched as you stitched. Somehow, that worried you more.
The vamps had gotten the jump on the both of you, but Dean had, true to form lately, taken the brunt of the beating. Like he needed more of a beating after the Alistar debacle that left him lying in a hospital bed for a week staring at the ceiling like it was a map.
You had seen his eyes follow the tiny fissures in the plaster and paint a hundred times. He wouldn’t even pretend to watch TV, wouldn’t talk in anything more than monosyllables, wouldn’t eat until you threatened to stop eating too.
Dean left the hospital with yellowing bruises and a hollowness you don’t think you can ever fill; you left the hospital with a massive headache and a roaring hunger for blood. Blood of demons or blood of angels, either would do at this point.
“Thinkin bout all the things that can break you.”
You are dragging him from the car to the room, a journey of a dozen feet that is feeling more and more like a journey to the underworld.
He’s drunk. More drunk than you have seen him since he was 15 with a fake ID, stumbling home and crashing on the dusty couch.
You should have been there, should have been with Dean, not out with Ruby. You would have kept him from the bar. You would have tried.
"All the things that break...," he murmurs, his breath brushing against your neck, smelling sour. “‘m’glass.”
“How about we get you horizontal?” You squeeze the words out on a breath as you try to keep him standing and simultaneously unlock the door.
“Sammy, you're not like me." Your brother reaches and slides a clumsy hand across your cheek. "You don't…," he spins his hand in the air, “...cracks." He gestures to himself.
When you’ve lowered him onto the bed, pulled off his boots and dropped the blanket from your bed over him, you take a minute to look at him. His breathing is deep; you palm his head, no fever. His face is thinner than it was two weeks ago, the shadows under his eyes darker.
You drop down in a chair and look up at the ceiling, tracing the cracks. And you feel anything but whole.