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Now I’m the one left screaming through the night.
And how was I to know?
I’m not strong. I should’ve saved you.
And, oh…I hope you know that you’re my home.
But now I’m lost, so lost.
“Forest Fire” by Brighton
Dim. Sam’s eyes are dim. Two minutes ago, there was a galaxy of emerald and gold and cobalt and mahogany flowing through the depths of Sam’s eyes, and now they’re dim. Almost gray irises reflect back the freezing South Dakota moonlight. That vivacity that Dean could always count on, Dean’s North Star that burned so brightly and always illuminated his way back home, has faded away.
The piece of Dean’s soul that Sam’s presence kept alive for the last twenty-two years begins to decay, crackling apart piece by piece into nothing. Sammy’s light was snuffed out and Dean is left adrift, hopeless in the ensuing blackness.
His pleading, “Sammy?!” starts off gruff, stumbling over the agony lodged in his throat. Dean’s voice cracks halfway through the syllables of his baby brother’s full name and ends abruptly, pitched up into a scream.
Simultaneously strong and gentle, Dean’s forearms prop up his pliable little brother’s chest and his calloused fingertips brush, breathtakingly light, where they sit along the length of Sam’s jaw. Dean desperately searches every one of Sam’s features, yearning for any hint of movement, for this to not already be over, for there to be the faintest glimmer of recognition on the face Dean knows better than his own. For something to answer the desperate plea in Dean’s eyes.
Sam’s gaze is unfocused, lingering somewhere in the distance. His only response to Dean is a horrifying silence that sends a chill from the base of Dean’s skull down through his boots to the tips of his toes.
Don’t go, Sammy. Please.
Don’t leave me here alone.
Dean notices his breaths forming droplets in the freezing night air as they travel toward Sam. But they’re only Dean’s. The knowledge that Sam’s lungs have stilled overtakes Dean, exhaled mist pulling at Dean like a riptide that yanks Dean under.
His right-hand drifts of its own volition to grip onto Sam’s jacket collar and he tries to ground himself in the textured fabric that has helped define “Sammy” since that weekend in California when their lives changed, irreversibly and forever. Sam chose to hit the road, to be there with Dean, sitting in his place in Baby’s passenger seat and helping Dean find Dad when Dean was wholly scared of losing them both. Sam’s light was intoxicating and reignited a matching flame in Dean’s core that Dean thought died out on what, before tonight, was the worst night of Dean’s life. His mere existence sustained Dean’s, and after so long, Dean was finally whole again.
But now.
Sammy, please.
Please please please please please please please please. Don’t. Please…
Dean’s grief is an unavoidably present, physical agony. He pictures the knife that took his baby brother away carving into his chest, tangible and excruciating as it cuts up under each of his ribs and flays away bits of his heart and soul, until there’s nothing left of him. Sam is dead and Dean is too, in every single way that matters. Holding Sam’s body in his arms, Dean has never been so completely, helplessly alone.
Lost…lost you.
“No,” Dean exhales, one simple word that opens a floodgate. “No no no no no…” Dean rambles out in a stream of consciousness that tapers off into a mumble as he hauls Sam’s torso up against him.
“Oh G—” he barely chokes out, involuntary and destroyed, when little brother’s skull lands atop Dean’s shoulder like a lead weight. It’s such a devastating glimpse of familiar and home and Sammy that it steals the remaining breath from Dean’s lungs. “Oh God,” he says in a whimper, breaking apart and adjusting his grip on Sam’s shoulder to bring his brother in closer.
Come back, Sam. Come back to me. Please. I ca—
Silence. A gasp Dean can’t stop as his eyes lay bare the truth in his heart. An arm clutched around Sam, firm and terrified. A hand at the base of Sam’s skull, tangled up in hair wet from rain and sweat and death. Knuckles clinging so tightly to Sam that they would ache if he could feel anything other than the absence of Sam’s pulse beating where his jugular is leaned against Dean’s neck. Pressure of Sam’s full weight leaned into Dean. All these touches. Completely empty.
Dean feels himself unraveling, his control slipping through his fingers faster than grains of sand from the beach he never got around to taking Sammy to visit. Dean can’t stay still. His hand travels across Sam’s shoulders, through his hair, up to his face, and lands on the curve of his back, stopping inches above the wound that took him away. His other arm reaches under Sam’s in a last ditch effort to bolster them both.
He heaves out a sob as he turns his face inward and buries his nose into the curve of Sam’s shoulder, and notices how much broader they are than the last time he held him in his arms. At some point when he wasn’t looking, his brother grew up. Yet somehow, he’s small in Dean’s hold. His baby brother, always.
Dean breathes in the scent of Sam, of home, knowing Sam is gone but still, there Sam is. Warm against Dean’s nose and lips. Dean chases the comfort of his brother’s lingering warmth, hiding from the earth-shattering reality beneath his fingertips. Dean slams his eyes shut as he burrows further into his brother’s collar and watches Sam’s life play behind his own eyelids.
The glint in Sam’s eye as Dean walked toward him with a homemade board game after he overheard a “watch out for Sammy” and the door clicked in the other room. The toothy grin when his eyes landed on Dean where he stood in the back of a school cafeteria, beaming with pride as Sam won the sixth-grade spelling bee. Knowing that Sam’s laugh as he ran across the field was in response to the “whoop!” Dean let out from the bleachers after Sam’s penalty kick sent a soccer ball flying past the goalie’s hands.
The encompassing heat from flames surrounding them as Dean pulled them out of another fire.
Tears streaking down Sam’s face as he straightened up and stepped through the door of a San Francisco apartment, and the lone tear Dean felt travel down his cheek in response to his brother’s hurt.
Screaming at Sam to look out. Being too late. The unrelenting terror of knowing his purpose for living was evaporating into the night at the end of a sprint.
Dean sees it all so clearly. Love. It was everywhere. In the way he looked at Sam in the car, and Sam would grin back. In the steady movement of his hands as they stitched Sam up. In the crooked smile and fingers that mussed up Sam’s hair when he wanted to pick at him, just because. In the strength of his arms that kept Sam glued together after a vision threatened to break him apart.
Love was painted across every second of the life Dean lived, always and only, for his baby brother.
There were all those times when Dean showed Sam the unending depths of his love for him. All the times he didn’t say it. Never said it. Not once. Because that isn’t something Winchesters do.
Sam never heard those words from him, even though it was written into every one of Dean’s cells, his nerves, on his heart and soul, every time he said his baby brother’s name.
Too late now.
The realization slams into Dean, forcing a gasp into the crook of Sam’s neck while he holds him close.
“Love you,” Dean mumbles into Sam as his world ends.
Can’t hear me. You won’t…You…Sammy.
Love you love you love you love you.
Don’t.
Dean’s face shatters, cracking him open and releasing more tears onto Sam’s jacket. He does the only thing he can do and dips his chin back to press his lips into the curve of Sam’s shoulder. He can’t kiss away this boo boo. Not this time. But he’s still Sam’s big brother. And he doesn’t know what else to do.
He pauses there with Sam for a moment, but it’s too short. Not enough time. They never had enough time. And now there’s none left. It’s all wrong.
Instinct leads Dean to pull Sam in, impossibly tighter, and lock his chin over Sam’s shoulder. He shifts his arms to wrap around Sam, hands landing on Sam’s back, clutching him in a protective shield against the cold night. Guarding his baby brother. He’ll never let Sam go.
Sam feels delicate in Dean’s grasp. Something to be protected, Sam’s malleable body rests like putty in Dean’s hands whenever Dean moves. His hand drifts down Sam’s back, landing with intention over the wound that is still leaking into that jacket. He covers it up and tries to push away that reality, while shifting them both, so tenderly, from side to side on their knees in the mud.
Dean says goodnight to his baby brother for the last time as he rocks him to sleep.
His vision blurs and another tear forms then escapes in the well-trodden tracks rolling down his cheek. Dean holds on tight and cries out in a voice he doesn’t recognize, “SAAAMMMM!”
With a wheezed inhale and hand traveling up to the nape of Sam’s neck, Dean’s body tries to keep his lungs moving and oxygen moving to his brain. But the pain in his chest is so palpable that Dean’s lungs may as well be crushed in a vise. It’s pointless anyway. Dean doesn’t need to breathe. Sam is gone.
A tear falls. And then another. Raindrops on Dean’s face and a mixture of snot and tears on Sam’s collar. There’s a mutiny in Dean’s lungs and they gulp for air, as he nuzzles back into the stillness of Sam’s neck. Dean weeps into him, rubbing gentling circles along the short hairs under his fingertips while he keeps his face buried against Sam’s throat.
Sam is immobile and Dean is a live wire.
Somewhere in Dean’s core, a shudder zips along his spine. It radiates out to his limbs and his hands start to shake. Denial floods into him alongside the trembling he can’t stop. Not real. This can’t…No.
No.
Dean pushes himself back just enough to be able to look directly into Sam’s face. It makes what’s left of his heart sink to the floor.
Gone. You’re gone.
Sam’s features are lax, eyes closed and mouth open with a drop of blood trailing down his chin. The tremor wracks Dean’s hands and he sees the shakiness in his fingers mirrored in the tiniest movements of Sam’s cheek where Dean’s hands hold him.
Dean’s face crumbles and his tear ducts impossibly find more tears to cry, when his attempt to wipe the bloody drip off Sam’s face smears it along his chin instead.
Broken. Body and soul, Sammy and Dee both. In the mud and the night and the empty.
The self-loathing always under the surface roars in his ears. Let you down. Just like always.
“I’m sorry,” Dean pushes out in a soft voice, so young. A frightened little boy. He pulls Sam back into him, shuts his eyes tight, and unravels into his brother’s neck. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so—” he stumbles through the words, tears dripping in a trail of their own down Sam’s neck.
Sammy isn’t there for any of it.
His absence is a black hole. Dean lost the other half of his soul, and he took Dean’s purpose and light along with him into the night.
Dean smiles when he feels Sam’s pulse speed up against his own neck. He encloses Sam in an inescapable, bone-crushing, hug and breathes in the smell of his baby brother, healed and alive and everything.
Worth it.
“Owww…” Sam croaks out and Dean fights away the tears forming in the corners of his eyes, instead squeezing Sam ever tighter.
“Ahhh…Dean,” Sam pushes, the pain in his voice unmistakeable. Dean takes another second for himself, memorizes every point where his brother is steady and whole against him, before he lets him go.
Dean meets Sam’s eyes. Stardust. “I’m sorry…” Dean rasps, trying to keep steady when his world is still righting itself.
“I’m sorry, man,” Dean continues, as little pieces of his soul begin to click back into place under his baby brother’s undivided attention. Sam’s existence breathes life into Dean as they stand together in the low light of the abandoned house.
“I’m just…” Dean starts, quiet. “I’m just happy to see you up and around, that’s all.” He hears the lie in his own voice and knows that he’s telegraphing it to Sam. Small mercies, Sam lets it float unanswered in the distance between them.
Dean sees the torch he carries reflected back at him in the golden flecks of Sam’s hazel eyes. There’s light in them again. Boring into Dean’s soul. Burning brighter than Hellfire.