Some nights, Sam finds him in a dead world, encircles his chalk outline and lies flat on the asphalt in between his sense and Dean's breathing, and in that instance, they both find themselves void. Sam winds around him like foil, mute protest immediately soothed into a deep and comfortable silence of mind and mouth. He scatters his brother's neck and his skin with the impossibility of connection, and the arcanum of the tongues that which they may speak but never do. And for a moment, they are erased; beside themselves in time but not quite existing. In between waking and sleeping, they coil on the illusion of true emptiness and forgetting, and Sam finds his brother to be alien, not quite a brother, but a stranger on his highway. He thumbs into his brother's attention, and pulls him into a hard shoulder; rides through his consciousness like the purring engine of an Impala on a winding tarmac road, a hand clasped over his mouth. No small talk. Just take me home.
For a while they dismantle to the pure unending nothing they both long to be, a sweet absence of thought and of reason. Sam will rip off his brother's grief and Dean will tear Sam's pain in two, leave everything a crumpled heap on the cold motel floor. Their heated whispers vent agony, curling into wisps of cold midnight stillness, they tear into one another, claw out the map of their acropolis of demons on cold skin, and watch an unending highway roll out through them, etching an infinity of problems like patchwork into concrete. And they ignore every inch. Fellate the problems, but never look them in the eye. And beneath shafts of cold, anarchic light, they surge and arch and groan through a passionate nothingness and they forget. Fucked into a state of pure emptiness and absence. But that's all they want, to feel blank, to not feel anything at all.
And in the morning, they won't remember any of it. They slide into place in the car and carry on, down that endless road of problems they can't ever erase, or paint in blissful ignorance. But every so often, it'll happen. Some nights, Sam will find him in a dead world and let him whisk him away, under pale slats of moonlight and motel dust, somewhere on a turnpike between his heart and Dean's.