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Chuck Shurley’s cancer starts as a headache, a kind of itch where his spine meets his skull. He drinks more than he used to, uses all his sick days at home watching daytime soaps with a bottle of bourbon in hand. Within a month he’s in the hospital, hooked up to tubes and machines, a stern-faced doctor standing in front of him with a clipboard saying he’s got six, seven months at best. Chuck starts breathing heavily and they have to sedate him when the panic attack peaks.
They move him to a hospital for the terminally ill in Lawrence, Kansas (they don’t use the word hospice, but Chuck can sense it the second they pull into the parking lot- it smells like death, and hopelessness). Chuck has his laptop, his grandmother’s bible (he’s not that religious, really, but it seems wrong to leave it) and some science fiction paperbacks from middle school. That’s it, that’s his whole life in a duffle bag, his whole life spread out on a white hospital shelf.
Chuck hasn’t got any family, no friends he cares enough about to say goodbye to. He’s got six months full of nothing to do and no one to spend it with. The other people in the ward just depress him- lots of elderly women, sad middle-aged men, a woman whose husband and teenage daughter visit her every day. The worst is a six year old, a tiny, fragile boy who’s spasming on the floor the first day Chuck wanders into the rec hall (Chuck mostly sticks to his room, after that).
The pill bottles on the nurse’s cart start to look awful friendly, the lake he can just see out his window inviting. How bad can death be, right? Chuck starts hyperventilating just thinking about it, the first time, and they have the crash cart on standby in case his heart gives out. But when he sleeps he dreams of bullets, of speeding cars, of sleeping pills washed down with whisky.
The day he’s going to do it, the Winchesters check in.
Chuck sees them out the window, their long black car pulling into the parking lot. The rumble of the engine is a welcome reprieve from the quiet, measured sounds of the ward, and it catches Chuck’s attention. First out of the car is a shorter guy with a leather jacket and close cropped hair, a gold pendant hanging against his chest. The guy walks a little stiffly around to the passenger door and opens it. He slings his passenger’s arm around his shoulders and hauls him up to a standing position. The passenger is taller, with longer, lank hair. He looks like he’s in pain. Chuck sees an orderly rush out with a wheelchair, but the shorter man waves her away. Step by step, the two of them make it to the front door, and then they disappear inside, the concerned orderly trailing behind.
Chuck figures they must be his new roommates.
Later, the shorter one saunters in and drops his backpack on one of the empty beds. The taller one comes in after him, his hand braced against the wall for support.
“Dean Winchester, pleasure to meet you.” The shorter man, evidently called Dean, is leaning over in Chuck’s direction, his hand stuck out. Chuck takes it, a little nervously, and shakes. “This is my little brother, Sam.” Sam nods from where he stands in the doorway, forcing a smile.
“Chuck Shurley, likewise.” Chuck puts a bookmark in his novel and sets it down on the nightstand as Dean falls onto his bed and groans, his eyes falling shut.
“Hospital beds, gotta love ‘em.” A moment later, Dean opens one eye and shoots a glance toward the door. “Need a hand, Sammy?”
Sam’s still standing uncertainly in the doorway, one of his legs shaking slightly. He looks away and nods, almost ashamed. Dean pretends not to notice and rolls off the bed, taking Sam by the arm and leading him to the third bed. “Come on, big guy,” Dean says as he props Sam against the headboard, punching a pillow into place at his back. Sam shoots Dean a grateful smile, and Chuck sees that these two are different than the other lonely souls on the ward.
“So, what’re you in here for?” Dean asks with a grin, and Sam hisses “Dean-”, but Chuck just smiles, for the first time in ages.
“Uh, brain cancer. Terminal, but, well, you knew that.” Chuck nods his head nervously, his fingers playing at the edge of the sheet.
“Sucks, man.” Dean steeples his hands in his lap, perching on the edge of Sam’s bed.
“You?” Chuck asks, uncertain.
“Genetic disease of unknown make and model.” Dean winks. “Passed down from our mom to us.” For all Dean’s joking, Chuck sees the tensing of his adam’s apple and quickly looks away. “Terminal, but you knew that.” Chuck thinks to ask ‘how long?” but isn’t sure if that’s taboo. Sam somehow reads his mind, though, and speaks up, quietly but strongly.
“I’ve got six months, Dean probably a little longer. We tried to stay out of the hospital for as long as possible.” Chuck doesn’t ask why Dean, the older brother, has a better prognosis than Sam- the track marks on the inside of Sam’s pale arm say it all.
“Me too, almost.” Chuck says, stuttering a little, “Five months left, maybe six.”
Dean’s expression has gotten slightly more pained, and there’s a moment of awkward silence. Before it can drag on too long, Dean jumps up and claps his hands.
“Well, I don’t know about you two, but I’m starving. Where can a guy get some decent grub around here?”
***
Over the next few days, the Winchesters make themselves at home. Dean props up a picture of a smiling blonde woman on the nightstand. “Our mom, Mary” he says when he catches Chuck looking. The backpack Dean brought with him the first day is full of books- from what Chuck can tell, a few law books, a few books on Latin, some novels and a tattered copy of Slaughterhouse Five. They all seem to belong to Sam, except Slaughterhouse Five, which Dean reverently places on his nightstand next to the picture of Mary. Chuck pretends he doesn’t see the silver blade hidden at the bottom of their backpack, and pretends he doesn’t notice the strange scars that are scattered across both brothers’ bodies when they take off their shirts. He doesn’t ask questions, just gathers what he can from their actions- a snapshot of a scruffy looking middle-aged man that gets tucked in the back of Slaughterhouse Five and not mentioned again, the horned gold pendant Dean makes a fist around when he’s in pain, the way Sam flinches when something clatters in the hall.
There are three cigarette burns down Sam’s hip like a constellation, and when Sam catches Chuck staring he reddens and turns away.
The brothers are a mystery, an enigma, more intriguing with every morning that Dean sings Sam awake, crooning along with “Heat of the Moment” on the radio, the way they divide up their dinner trays (Sam gets the vegetables and Dean always, always gets the pie), how Dean manages to hustle pool in the rec room (garnering disapproving stares from the nurses), the way they both loosen up when somebody named Bobby calls, who wants to know how the two of them are doing and when can he come visit them.
A little over a week into their stay, Sam falls and breaks his arm, his bones brittle and his joints ten different kinds of fucked up. Dean starts shouting when it happens, runs to Sam moaning on the ground and falls to his knees next to him. Chuck hobbles to the door (his balance is getting worse and worse these days) and shouts for a doctor. In the end, Sam is fine, but when they bring him back to the room bandaged and bruised that night, Dean slips into bed with him (“just like when we were kids” Sam chuckles), wrapping his arms around Sam’s weakening frame.
The orderlies keep their mouths shut.
When it becomes clear Sam is going to need a wheelchair, Dean says he’ll get one too, even though he can still get around without too much effort. (“What can I say, Sammy? Chicks dig the wheelchair. It’s like I’m the professor dude from X-Men!” At that, Sam only rolls his eyes.) Even then it takes some convincing to get Sam into one- Chuck thinks Sam sees it as giving up.
One night, when Dean is winning some poor soul’s chewing gum playing poker in the rec room, Sam wheels over to where Chuck’s reading in bed.
“What do you have there?” Sam smiles, and Chuck feels his stomach drop. He tries to ignore it (Chuck Shurley, you are not allowed to fall in love with four months- less- left to live.)
“H.P. Lovecraft.” Chuck hands the book to Sam and ducks his head nervously. “His, uh, stories without as many tentacles.” Sam chuckles and flips through the yellowed pages, his grin widening.
“I was obsessed with Lovecraft as a kid. Creepy as hell, but good.” Chuck nods, and Sam points out a paragraph that uses the word eldritch three times and they laugh, and before Chuck’s entirely sure what’s happening they’re facing each other, Chuck’s legs dangling off the bed, talking about literature and mythology and books they didn’t know anyone else had read, and when Dean walks into the room an hour and a half later they’re laughing like maniacs, Sam gesturing wildly, his smile wide.
Chuck immediately tenses up, stutters something stupid, realizing how open he’d been. Dean shakes his head and says “No problem, Chuck, glad to see someone putting a smile on my baby brother’s face,” and Sam playfully slaps Dean’s arm as he walks by, and Chuck is the happiest he’s been in weeks.
Later, in hushed tones, Chuck asks something innocuous about childhood, and Sam’s eyes get sad. Chuck immediately apologizes, but Sam says no, it’s fine, if you want to know I want to talk, and Chuck nods because he doesn’t know what else to do. Chuck listens with rapt attention, about how Mary Winchester had died in this very hospital when Sam was an infant, he can’t even remember her. Sam talks about traveling around the country in the backseat of that big black car in the parking lot, the Impala, talks about how his dad would show up at their motel room drunk and hit them. Chuck’s eyes flicker to Sam’s hip where he knows the cigarette burns are. Sam talks about trying to go to college despite his dad’s threats, his girlfriend Jess who died in a house fire, how he got hooked up with a drug dealer called Ruby and went down a pretty dark road, how Dean had got him to rehab and hadn’t left his side since. He mentions, quietly, how his dad had died in a car crash, swerving so the driver’s side would take the full impact of an out-of-control semi. Chuck finds himself squeezing Sam’s hand, so much larger and warmer than his own.
“Sometimes I feel like there have been demons after me since the day I was born, lurking in my blood to strike me down when I was finally getting it together, you know?” Sam sighs, and Chuck says he’s sorry, and Sam smiles saying “It’s not your fault. In fact, you’re one of the few good things to have come out of this” and Chuck feels his heart trying to beat right out of his chest.
“Cut the mushy crap you two or I’ll puke, I swear” Dean says from the corner of the room, and the two of them blush. Chuck doesn’t miss the way Sam squeezes his hand before returning to his own bed.
That night, Chuck dreams, a dream of angels and demons and impossible things, of two brothers who loved each other more than anything in the world. He wakes up at 3am shaking.
Chuck boots up his laptop and begins to type.
Chuck tell himself it’ll be short, just something dumb he can show to Sam when he’s done to make him laugh, but after a day of work on it he knows it won’t be anything near that simple. The story gets away from him, twisting and turning and getting stranger and stranger. The snarky nurse Meg Masters becomes the demon Meg, Death is the lawyer who arrives to settle some debts with Dean and ends up staying for pizza, Gabriel is the sweet, funny guy down the hall who dies a few weeks after the Winchesters arrive. Crowley and Zachariah are the bitchy but entertaining therapists they all get assigned to see. Other characters- Bobby, Ellen and Jo, Cassie- are harvested from the stories Sam and Dean tell over dinner, and Chuck feels a little guilty for using them but he can’t help it. Their ordeals in his story reflect their ordeals in real life- a story Sam tells about Dean getting nearly killed and left in a ditch in New Orleans becomes Dean in Hell, Sam whispering about almost killing himself ODing becomes the chapter Chuck titles “Lucifer Rising.”
Castiel, however, is entirely of Chuck’s creation. When Sam and him are laughing, sometimes Chuck catches Dean hovering at the doorway, hesitant, lonely even. Dean laughs it off, sneaks in some beer, says he’s fine, but sometimes he cries in his sleep, and Chuck can still see the scars from where John Winchester lashed out. He wants Dean to have a companion, knows Dean always fucks up his relationships with women, and hopes to God Dean won’t beat him up for writing his love interest as male.
Chuck doesn’t dare write himself in love with Sam, because that would seem presumptuous and make the whole damn thing creepier than it already was. His relationship with Sam in real life seems to have come to an impasse, neither of them willing to take the causal, fleeting touches a step farther.
All three of them are steadily declining. Chuck is weak, and dizzy, and he gets headaches so sharp he can barely see. Sam’s arms are too weak to move the wheelchair, so he just sits in front of the window, with a book or with Chuck in the chair opposite. Dean can’t stand, anymore, and he pretends it doesn’t bother him for Sam’s sake but Chuck can see how hollow and haunted he is. Chuck thinks Dean would have blown his brains out long ago if it wasn’t for Sam tethering him to life, giving him something to look out for.
One night, Chuck wakes up to the sound of a heart monitor beeping out of control, and a second later a swarm of nurses and doctors in white are crowding the room, the lights have been flipped on and Sam is shouting “Dean, DEAN!” Dean is spasming, his eyes rolling back into his head, and Sam is stricken. The nurses roll Dean’s bed out of the room, and Chuck can hear them running down the hallway. Sam is too weak to even lift himself up when the nurse says Dean is going in for surgery. Instead he sinks into the pillows and starts to cry, the room now dark, the only sound the humming of wires and pipes in the walls.
Chuck slips out of bed and pads across the cold tile floor to where Sam lies, shaking ever so slightly. Wordlessly, he climbs under the scratchy hospital sheets, pressing himself against Sam’s side, an arm slung over Sam’s chest. It’s a risk, Chuck knows it, and he half expects Sam to shove him right out of the bed. Instead, Sam locks his arms around Chuck’s tiny frame, pulls him in, buries his face in Chuck’s hair. Sometime later, Sam’s lips find Chuck’s and they’re kissing, warm and wet and soft, both too weak to do anything more than touch.
Chuck looks at the calendar and is startled to see he has maybe two months left.
Dean returns from surgery, all laughing and joking, saying “Bet you thought I’d kicked the bucket, huh? No way I’m going to let your skinny ass outlive me” and ruffling Sam’s hair. There’s a square of white gauze over Dean’s heart when he pulls off his t-shirt that night, and Sam chokes back a sob.
Slowly, carefully, Chuck and Sam explore each other, softly kissing and running their hands along each other’s skin on nights where Dean is at the rec hall (Dean claps Chuck on the shoulder one afternoon and says Chuck, you’re a good guy, and Chuck, hopes that’s Dean giving his blessing). Sam is getting weaker, and he apologizes to Chuck for it, and Chuck only laughs and shows Sam how his hands have started to shake.
By day, Chuck writes. It’s getting harder to type, and words aren’t coming to him as easily as they once did. He knows he’s getting close to the end of the story. This is something he wants to finish before he dies.
One night, in the dark, Sam’s pink lips reach Chuck’s ear and Sam whispers, “I love you.” Chuck whispers back “I love you, too,” and Sam whispers “I’m sorry” and starts to cry. Chuck runs his fingers through Sam’s hair and concentrates on the warmth of their bodies together. “I’m sorry we’ll never get an apartment together, I’m sorry I’ll never make you dinner or take you out, I’m sorry we’ll never have sex, for fuck’s sake-“
Sam cries, and Chuck holds him, and he prays to a God he doesn’t believe in.
Less than a week later, Sam goes into cardiac arrest as he sleeps.
Dean screams for hours, then falls silent. Chuck cries and scrabbles for Sam’s limp body as they wheel it out of the room.
Dean has Sam cremated. Chuck signs the two of them out of the hospital, wheels Dean out to the Impala and lays him in the passenger seat. Dean looks frail, and tired, and empty. Chuck wonders if there wasn’t some truth after all in what a nurse had murmured, “one soul in two bodies.” Chuck slides into the driver’s seat, starts up the car, and drives the two of them out to the lake.
When Mary was dying, back when John was a good father and Sam was an infant, the four of them had driven out to this lake to swim. Dean had built a sandcastle for Sam to sit in, crowned him king of the lake with a daisy chain Mary’s frail fingers had woven. On the same shore, Dean and Chuck scatter Sam’s ashes.
They drive back to the hospital. Dean is silent. Chuck wheels him back into the ward and down the hall to their room. The third bed sits conspicuously empty, made up with fresh sheets. Dean surprises Chuck with a hug, tight and strong. In the night, Dean cries.
The doctors approach Dean with a new medication plan less than a week later. They use terms like “cautiously optimistic” and “trial version” and Dean nods, signs on the dotted line, barely seems to notice he’s taking red pills instead of blue.
The next week, he can walk again.
Dean is furious. He upends tables, smashes glass, shouts at a nurse. “I don’t want to fucking live! I don’t want to fucking KEEP GOING without my brother!” He won’t take the meds for a few days, until Bobby calls and shouts his ear off, telling Dean to take his damn pills and next time somebody dies, call him for the goddamn funeral. Dean quiets, apologizes, hangs up with a “keep trucking, old man” and the ghost of a smile.
Chuck pours himself into finishing his book. He doesn’t have time to re-read or re-write, he’s writing as fast as his fingers will move. The last chapter is hard, heartbreakingly so, and Chuck has to stop and cry for half an hour straight three sentences into the second paragraph.
In Chuck's ending, Sam is happy, and safe. Heaven and Hell are shut for good. The monsters of the earth are slowly dying off and the general population is none the wiser. Dean has Castiel. They all get to grow old, and gray, and when they die they die peacefully, in their sleep. There are no reapers, no afterlife, no spirits. They just walk off into the dark, together.
Chuck types “The End,” watches the cursor blink in and out, and smiles. He wishes Sam could have seen it.
That night, Chuck slips away in his sleep.
****
Dean is sitting at a bus station in Kansas.
Bobby is coming to meet him, because even though he’s mostly healthy Dean doesn’t trust himself to drive his baby when his legs could lock up at any moment. Bobby’s going to drive him back to his place in Sioux Falls, and Dean’s going to stay there for a while. Maybe he’ll go back to being a mechanic, or bartending. Hell, maybe he’ll open a bookstore.
Clutched in Dean’s hands is a big, fat binder. In it is the book Chuck wrote. Dean has read it cover to cover three times. He still doesn’t know what to make of it, but he knows Chuck got it right, somehow, got Sam and Dean down to every scar, every lonely night driving across the country, every needle and every drop of blood.
It hurts, to read about Sam, smiling and laughing and living, and Dean cries every time he reads the last chapter. Dean is glad for it, though, the story of a life lived with his brother, the story he can never have.
From the corner of his eye, Dean spies the flash of a tan trenchcoat as the man wearing it rounds a corner.
the end.