A/N: Images that won't leave your head alone at 4:00 a.m. have to go on paper.
Standard Disclaimer: Eric Kripke and The CW own the characters. The characters own me.
Pietà
If he just hadn't looked back. Maybe then Dean could have kept it together. But Sam looked back with his shattered, tear-streaked face and for a moment the world stopped. Dean's heart stuttered to a halt, his blood stopped flowing, his lungs stopped taking in breath, his eyes darkened and his brain ceased to function. And when everything started up again, Sam had turned away, a terrible resolve in the set of his jaw, and walked through the doorway into a changed reality.
An eternity later, the time it took for a single tear to trace a path down Dean's cheek, the shot rang out, and Dean flinched as if the bullet had penetrated him rather than the guilty, innocent girl who had touched his brother as no other woman had in such a long, long time. And Dean could feel the blood of the wound himself and knew it was Sam for whom he bled. It was always Sam.
How long he stood in the kitchen, afraid to go forward and unable to go back, he didn't know. He found himself moving, eventually, without consciously deciding to do so. He followed the path left by his brother's courage and pain into the living room. Sam was sitting on the floor holding Madison's body against his chest, his face buried in her hair, awkward and beautiful, a work of art dedicated to sorrow and human frailty. He was rocking her body gently, just like Dean remembered rocking Sam when he was a small, frightened child. When they were both small, frightened children.
With no shift or movement anyone else could have detected, Sam signaled his knowledge that Dean was with him again. Dean moved closer, until he was standing right beside his brother and the dead girl in his arms. Sam didn't raise his head, but he leaned into Dean's legs, heavy and weightless at once. Dean reached a hand down and rested it on top of his brother's head, like a benediction.
There would be a later. Life calls to itself and there was much left to be done. But Dean knew that some part of himself and Sam and the doomed girl would linger here forever, a tableau of innocence lost, frozen between one heartbeat and the next.
A/N: Pietà – An Italian word meaning pity, compassion, and sorrow, it is strongly associated with works of art portraying the Virgin Mary holding and mourning over the dead body of Jesus. (definition from ArtLex Art Dictionary).
