"His Sweetest Downfall"
Note: This was inspired by the song Samson by Regina Spektor after I heard Casey Withoos version. The title is adapted from a line in the song.
The song is believed to have been written for a friend of Spektor's who died of cancer (the treatment causes hair loss like the story of Samson)
This song and the end of Sam and Dean's story resonates very personally with me. This is my version of Sam's last thoughts at the end of Swan Song.
He saw him only for a moment. A moment that held the pages of his entire life.
Damned from his cradle, he stood at the edge of his grave. Sam's eternity would be spent forever between the teeth of Hell's creator and Heaven's most vicious. They were the pillars that he, for all his demonically enhanced strength, could never have brought down by force.
More than shame, more than penance. Not for the world. Contrary to popular belief, this moment had nothing to do with saving the world at all.
His brother's eyes as green as life on Earth. All God's creation in those eyes.
Dean. The first person and last person he ever loved. The first and last person to ever love him.
The story would go on without them. There would be no legends. No Bibles. No fairy epochs for Sam and Dean. They were alone in the end.
In the end, it was not Sam's strength that won the day. It was his sweetest downfall.
His brother. The one who he had destroyed himself to avenge. The one he had failed time and again, even for every epic feat he'd taken on in his name.
Sam was Dean's martyr. Always, always. Dean, near to perfect, may have failed to see it. Sam who was tarnished from birth had always reigned himself in to make that man proud. Dean whose living green eyes now felt galaxies from reach.
Oh, if only he could understand! Whenever he breathed the word "come" Sam would follow. And he would have followed him to the end. Straight into Hell, if he'd been able.
He was following him now. Making up for lost time, for the year he couldn't save him. Oh, if only Dean could understand that Sam had only meant to save him. He hadn't known his own strength as he'd torn through demonic armies, carrying out his father's kamikaze for his mother again in their lives as brothers. Mary had been the love of John's life. And Sam, at this moment, realized as he realized before that Dean had been a whole different color of love, but the love eclipsing his life all the same. It had not been arrogance in his heart, though demon blood may have contorted the way it beat. It was this love and only this love that drove him to drink his cancer and sent him to his ruin.
"It's going to be okay."
He had to go.
History would forget him. The angels would spread the mud of his name until it was clean gone. Even for his sacrifice, he would not live down the moniker of Abomination. He would always be the one who freed Lucifer, not the one who vanquished Lilith and bound Lucifer up into the deep again. Not a hero. Not forgiven.
And though no one believed in him and none would go with him on his quest to make meaning from all his madness, he stood here suddenly unafraid. They may be filled with doubt, but he had to have faith. If not in a higher power, then in the fact that he had been alive for something. That he may have been Lucifer's key, but he was lock and chain as well-maybe this was the something he'd been born to do. He gripped onto that with all that was left of his own bleeding will, even though Lucifer exploded every blood cell trying to claw free of him.
"It's going to be okay, Dean. I've got him."
He had to go.
He drew a final breath. Michael challenged him. He turned to face him. He answered him, but it wasn't him answering. It was just a stream of consciousness, holding on to the last fraction of that supernatural strength that he had never wanted.
His last few seconds were spent reflecting. What else could he do with a mind as sharp as swords like his had been?
Should he wish for forgiveness in the end? Did he really need to be forgiven? Maybe only he and God understood that terrible burden that had been his strength. As destiny would move, Sam's damnation was the only way that Dean and the Universe with him could keep salvation. Should he apologize for the very thing that made him "Sam"? Just because it was beyond their comprehension, did that mean it was any less important to the grand design? Maybe he had to die some unholy thing so the pure and beautiful could go on being.
If this was the grand design, then it was good. In his heart, in that hour the strangest. Sam's spirit smiled.
He closed his eyes. Spread his arms. He sought surrender in the end.
Maybe he had not been a good man. If he was an abomination, that was beyond his control. The poison entered his lips before he'd been able to talk. It had been tempted into storm's fury by a witch and destiny and grief. Wrath and ruin wreathed him in flame. Maybe he was unforgiven and maybe he deserved to be. They could all be right or wrong with their jeering dogmatic opinions. Their religious zeal for the cause of the angels.
Yet he could let that go. He could sleep on it, tossing and turning on his bed of coals forever.
Because he could be a good brother. Perhaps only once. Perhaps only at the end.
But he could do this one thing for his Dean. The circle could remain unbroken after this was over.
As he slipped over the edge, staring into oblivion, it was Dean's face he saw. Not darkness. Not fire and doom and the yawning jaws of infinity. It was Dean. His sweetest downfall. The moral of his story. The stroke of midnight in his life's chronicle. His first word and his last. The Oracle of all his life's lessons. The question his life had never been able to answer. The measure he never could meet or fill.
In the end, it was Dean. Dean left broken and bloodied at the mouth of the Pit that had taken him.
Before he tasted Death, Sam wondered for a split second if Dean would remember him? Then, he was gone. His body burned up in the cold fire of the Cage. Castiel would later gather its cells from the Universe, never needing to venture into the Cage. It would walk the earth without his soul. He would be formless and void and his deep places would roll out into the Empty. Far away, his corner of Dean's heaven shattered in a supernova of light and sound ceasing to exist as his place there did as well. His exile official. The key tossed away, with relish, as the angels mourned their Michael.
Sam would never know any of this. Dean was the last thing he knew. The rest was downfall and darkness.