"We'll be back in the morning."
"What about..."
"Yeah, yeah, Bobby. Detroit. I know. We'll leave in the morning. Okay?"
"Dean."
"Let me do this. Please."
Bobby bit down on the edge of his tongue and nodded. "Yep. We'll see you both in the morning then. Sam."
Sam moved past him, a clap on the shoulder that became a reassuring squeeze and then a lingering affectionate pat. He long-strided around the back of the Impala and opened the passenger door, folded himself in and shut the door with a clanging sound of finality.
Bobby felt his eyelids close sympathetically, then he opened them again to find Dean looking from him to Castiel standing beside him and back again.
He watched Dean shrug off their gazes, climb into the car, and pull slowly away. An unavoidable cloud of junkyard dust obliterating the Impala and the two figures inside of her. Bobby shoved a fist against one eye, shaking his head, then shrugging it all off.
"C'mon, angel. You ever play Liar's Dice?"
The sky is an unexplored ocean of stars, the ground beneath their bodies the shore from which they will depart. Dean's car is the dark shadow bidding them safe passage.
And this is how you spend your last night on Earth, he thinks to himself. But then he pushes that away, opening his eyes, willing himself to let it go, focus on Dean. He lifts himself onto his elbows. Dean is quiet beneath him but he knows that his brother is far from being asleep although his eyes are closed.
His face is set in a strange repose which unnerves Sam a bit. He needs Dean to focus, too. He leans down into Dean's heat, a prayer from the bitter cold answered.
"Mmmm...I know I'm good, but that good?" he whispers and for a long moment there is no response and Sam feels a cold chill run down the long length of his spine. Then he is rewarded with a slow, sly, and crooked grin, eyelids fluttering, the impossible lashes. From quiet repose, he watches as his brother's face breaks into something cocky and yet still so beautiful, animating him, lighting him up from within. Sam thinks, that's for me, that's because of me. I lit that fire, I switched on that bulb, I sparked him from the inside out. He leans in and presses his lips, warm and soft against Dean's mouth and rolls over onto his side. In a rare move he snakes one arm beneath Dean's shoulders and pulls him to him, encourages him up onto his side and Dean, in an even rarer move, allows this manhandling and lays his head onto Sam's chest, presses his right ear above the place where Sam knows his heart is still beating the distinctive rhythm of the satisfied syncopation of love.
"The sun's coming up..." he trails off.
Sam reaches out and traces the hard line of his jaw. "And it'll come up tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that."
Dean continues, "And it's just going to keep on rising and setting. Babies are gonna keep on being made and getting born."
"And dying. The world isn't going to stop. Now."
Dean lets out a heaving breath. "Yeah, now. Great pillow talk."
"Hey, I'm not the one who wants to talk."
"No? What do you want, Sammy?"
"I want to make sure you never forget me."
"Oh, Sam. Every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of my god damned life. You know I won't. But I've been where you're going and," he stops, a choked sound swallowed, "you've got to forget me. It's the only way you'll survive it."
"I'm not going to forget you Dean. Not tomorrow, not the next day or the day after that. Not ever, okay. And if it makes it worse, well...I'll bear it."
He watches as a shudder moves through Dean's body and then the instinctive gesture as his brother covers his face with both hands. He realizes that Dean is crying.
"No, no, no, Dean. No. Here, oh Dean, here..." He sits up and reaches down, wrapping his long fingers around Dean's wrists, tugging his arms up, hands off his face. And Dean slips his hands down through the circle of his grip, entwining their fingers and Sam has to close his eyes and hold back his own tears because it is a tenderness he's rarely felt and definitely doesn't feel deserving of. He lowers himself, slowly, achingly slowly, down to his brother's body, fitting his long legs in between Dean's knees, his thighs, his ankles, holding hard now onto Dean's hands, bending both of their arms and tucking them tight beside their cleaving bodies. Holding fast. "Don't let go, don't let go," he mouths the words into the whorl of Dean's ears.
"Never."
He closes his eyes, hand stroking Dean's hair, falling into sleep, his fingers fall away...
...and he finds himself standing on a great black plain beneath a silvered sky, walking towards a river winding like a venomous snake through the silt. He looks down and stops, squatting and scooping up a handful; he recognizes the ash of human bone. He wipes his palm down the front of his jeans and realizes he isn't wearing the usual jeans and t-shirt, but rather a crisp and creased white suit. He stands. He looks up and the sky is tarnished, a mirror reflecting back the barren place. He can see the figure he thinks must be himself looking up, looking down, and he looks back to the horizon quickly.
He draws closer to the water and there is a dock with a line of people standing before it, and his gaze drifts to the small blood red waves and ripples and there is a boat moving towards his side of the shore. A hunched and bent and straining figure in the bowhead poling the craft forwards through the gruesome eddies.
He moves past the milling group and steps onto the rotten platform, feels it rock beneath his feet, steadies himself and stands on the edge as the skiff knocks up beside it, the ferryman tossing him a sodden rope as thick as his wrist. He looks and sees the pontil and goes down on one knee and ties it off. As he straightens, he finds the boatman looking at him severely.
"We don't take your kind. Seems you need to turn yourself around." He looks over Sam's shoulder and with a motion of his hand, the small group on the shore begins moving forward, flowing around Sam and onto the small boat. They stand in a tight knitted knot at the far end, the shape of them more singular than that of individuals.
"I think I'm supposed to be here," he says but the words ring hollow. "I think. I can't remember right now, but this place is where I'm supposed to be going."
"Not this place, child. This is the place you're leaving." The ferryman pauses in his herding and directing and turns back to him. "You're ensouled. Go home."
"Home? That is my home. Over there." He raises his arm and in a sweeping gesture far too grand to recognize as his own he indicates the river and all the shadowy land on the other bank.
"Not any more." The boatman leans heavily on the worn pole, holding the lurching rocking boat, the sinewy forearms bare. "Come here."
Sam steps forward and the ferryman stretches a palsied hand towards his face. Long bony index finger rests on the bow of his upper lip. "Closer," he whispers and Sam leans into the finger, towards the face. "Forget. Forget. Remember it only as a dream."
He is being kissed out of the dreaming. "Dean?" he whispers, not wanting to open his eyes. He can feel Dean's fingers ghosting across his lips, then Dean's mouth again.
He lets the dream fall away from him and pulls Dean hard against his chest, holds him fiercely, then turns him beneath his body, pressing himself home.
"I can't." Dean whispers and his voice catches on the edge of panic. He reaches up and holds onto Sam's neck, tight, open-palmed, pulling his head down until their foreheads are pressed tightly against one another. "Sammy, I can't do it."
Sam pulls back, looking down into the shadow darkened face and nodded. "Yeah. That's okay. You don't have to. We don't have to."
"I wanted to. I wanted to show you..."
"Dean. I know. I know already."
The next time he wakes from the dream it clings to him like a shroud and he remembers it in the same way the amnesiac forgets his past.