Work Text:
You would think that growing up driving from one corner of the country to another you’d never set foot in the same place twice, but it turns out to be the furthest thing from true. Patterns repeat themselves. There are a finite number of highways, after all, a limit to the towns and the people that need you and the quickest route from A to B.
If one person is in a car traveling 70 miles per hour against the wind and someone else is hurtling toward him at a quarter the speed of light and they start on opposite ends of the globe at what time will they collide and what steps should be taken to minimize the damage?
Sammy I don’t know do your own goddamn homework.
He’s been here before. The trees are thicker and greener than they have any right to be for eastern Nebraska, dense enough to filter out the light from the setting sun and cast weirdly shifting shadows over the picnic pavilions scattered a respectable distance from each other. He wasn’t sure, at first (wasn’t thinking about anything except for the tightness in his chest and panic and get down!! and don’t think, don’t think, the way his breath rattled and stop stopstopstop) but it’s the same plastic-sheathed diamond mesh pattern on the picnic tables that Sammy had gotten his fingers stuck in, threaded through right up to the knuckles and Dean had laughed at his panic because they were only eleven and seven and when you’re that age shit is funny, and you can tease your brother with threats of amputation until your dad comes over with engine grease and you can slide your fingers free and by supper time you’ve forgotten the embarrassment and fear.
Dean doesn’t know why he stopped at the rest area. Why he stopped at all. Why not keep driving, keep his foot on the gas until it runs out or the road curves and he can’t turn the wheel fast enough. In Nebraska there’s a stretch of I-80 that’s straight as an arrow for sixty miles, and Dean thinks it’s the cruelest thing the department of transportation ever thought up.
Breathe, dammit. Breathe.
Please.
He drifts, immobile in the driver’s seat, the sunlight slanting lower and lower through the back window of the Impala until it’s an orange glow cresting the edge of the backseat. There are other cars pulled up to the curb, minivans with kids hopped up on too much sugar and not enough hours to stretch their legs, exhausted mothers trying to keep four-days worth of luggage and snacks from bursting out of the trunk. They come, and they go, and Dean ignores them because he’s trying very hard right now not to think at all.
He succeeds, mostly, for the better part of four hours, floating in a haze that’s almost denial, and almost working, until a knock on the window startles him out of it.
“Hey!” The man’s wearing what looks like a janitor’s uniform, an olive-green jumpsuit with a dark blue collar and his name embroidered above the breast pocket. Gary. “You can’t sleep here, you know,” he yells through the window.
Dean pushes the door open, and Gary stumbles back. “Fuck. Oh, fuck, man, are you—“
“Shut up.” Dean leans out the door, bracing himself against the steering wheel with his right forearm. His legs don’t seem to work anymore, but they need to, because he has to get out, keep going, keep moving. He’s been sitting on his ass for too fucking long, and you can’t fix anything if you don’t make a move, can’t save anyone without driving to the next town over. Dean’s getting soft, a fucking waste of space.
“Jesus fuck dude, don’t go anywhere, I’m calling a fucking ambulance—“ and he’s gone, sprinting down the sidewalk to the squat brown building.
“Jus’ gotta take a piss,” Dean slurs to no one. He’s got his legs out of the car, and they’re enough to hold him, teetering on the pavement with one hand clenching the doorframe tight enough for his knuckles to bleed white. He pushes away and doesn’t look back, not at the empty passenger seat or the dark smear of blood staining the leather. Don’t think. Don’t.
He’s been here twice, he realizes, staring into the dark, the grass awash with yellowed artificial light from the street lamps. With dad and Sammy, and then a year ago, or maybe three, driving back with Cas from a case. He’d stopped to hit the head, and Cas, because he was still an angel of the Lord, lingered outside. He’d come back out, wiping his wet hands on the front of his jeans because they’d run out of paper towels and hand driers are germy as fuck, to find Cas staring intently at a concrete saddle with irregularly-placed holes, his head cocked to the side.
“It’s a climbing thing,” Dean had explained. “For kids.” And then he had kissed him, because Cas’s lips were warm and chapped, and because he could.
(don’t think about his lips, or his smile, or the way she left his chest in shreds and the fucking God-awful rattle when he tried to say goodbye—)
He comes up short against the concrete saddle, tries to prop himself up with a hand but his legs are done, so he slides to the ground instead, leaving a reddish trail along the pebbly surface. End of the line.
He lets himself feel the pain, finally, radiating from his side spreading and growing until it’s not just the bullet wound, it’s in his chest and his throat, bubbling up and threatening to spill over.
(“Pathetic,” she’d laughed, before she shot him, and she wasn’t wrong about that—ambushed by a bitter angel looking for revenge, Cas down and broken before either of them knew what was happening, and Dean so desperate to keep it from being true, to hold Cas’s Grace in his fractured body with his bare hands if he had to, to notice that she’d gotten ahold of his gun until it was too late.
Yeah. Pathetic.)
Honestly he’s not surprised it’s his own gun that’s going to end him. He just always thought he’d be the one to pull the trigger.
‘M coming for you, Cas. I think.
One disgraced angel, Hell’s most promising student, and Heaven broken at the seams: where do they end up?
He can hear a siren in the distance, a suggestion of flashing lights against his half-closed eyes, but he doesn’t think he’ll be here when they show up.