"tell me you love me/ tell me you're not miserable." –richard siken
Dying in an alley, blood flowing from a thousand little cuts, a thousand croat teeth marks that pierced your skin and broke your bones and left you here. Dying in an alley, because he was reckless and you were stupidly, stupidly following him, what else is new? Nothing. You won't tell him goodbye, because he'll just curse you, and you'd prefer to die from blood loss then from his bullet in your brain because you wouldn't shut up.
In truth, you'd rather say a thousand things that aren't 'goodbye, dean'. And as you try to pull yourself inch by bloody inch over to his side, as you watch his head gradually slump towards the pavement and his hands quiver from the pain, you recite them to yourself, one after the other. A thousand things for a thousand seconds. If you both last that long.
Hello, dean.
You realize you never had a proper hello, by human standards. Blowing windows out isn't much of a greeting, and you wonder if you had met him under different circumstances if you could have been friends.
Hello, friend.
The word tastes like him pushing you away. The word tastes like a hundred nights he ignored you banging at his cabin, a hundred nights that you slept outside his door and heard him drink and cry and hurt himself. The word tastes like the time that he told you that he wishes you had left him in hell, that he wishes that it had been his brother that survived, instead of you.
Hello, brother.
His words, not yours. "You are like a brother to me." Course, he retracted that several months ago, or has it been years since he treated you like someone he loved? You don't know, can't remember. It's been years, years of hunting and fighting alongside each other, years of patching up each other's wounds and ignoring each other's addictions and sitting outside of each others cabins in silence studded with the feeling of abandonment. You're not alone tonight, you think. It doesn't make you feel better. Dean's head has slipped into a puddle of liquid, his blond hair stained red, his face turned away from you.
Hello, leader.
Every morning, assume your positions. He'll give the orders, face turned away from you. He'll clean his gun in the opposite room. He'll sit and listen to you talk with a bored expression, interrupt when you get to the punch line. He'll steal the girl you really wanted, then kick her out of his cabin in the middle of the night and she'll end up with you anyways, but it's not the same. You realize you don't want to say this, anyways. He may have been your leader, you may have followed him, but you realize now that you made him your god, and maybe that's why you're both lying here.
Your head sinks down into its own red puddle, and you finger the ends of your hair, curled and sticky with blood. Like Dean's. You look over, whisper his name, but he doesn't move. His chest is still rising and falling, his hand, missing several fingers, still resting on a smoking gun.
Hello, soldier.
He's always reminded you of Michael, which is more than ironic. When you were young, in heaven, you would watch Michael give orders, listen the way he talked about your father. You would watch him fight. You remember the first time you watched Dean, saw the very same motions. The weapons may have been different, but you recognize the look of a soldier of that caliber, and that's always been Dean. You've never told him that before, how much he reminds you of your big brother. You doubt he'd consider that a compliment. Most of the time, now, you think that he reminds you of a blank shell of Michael, and you feel like it's more than one brother that you've lost, and the one that isn't blood has always mattered more.
Hello, dean.
"Dean Winchester is saved", were the first words you heard, the first time you heard his name. You had acted on orders, rescued a soul that remained unidentified until he was topside again. You remember many things about that trip, but mostly you remember the sound of his lungs as they refilled with air and you watched him clamber out of the grave. Like resurrection. Like hope.
Goodbye, dean.
His chest is sagging, his fingers are slipping off of the trigger, he's struggling to turn his head towards you. You suck in your breath, because right now the only thing you can think is that you'll forgive Dean everything if he'll just look at you right now, before you let go. He does, exhaling your name, bitterly, brazenly, barely hearable from his dying lips. "Cas, you bastard, looks like this is it." You reach out a skinned, broken hand, place it on his cheek as he goes cold. I'm sorry, dean.