"Circles"
Mystic25
Summary: A brief interlude after 8x23. About brothers.
Rating: K, nothing really detrimental here.
A/N: This little ditty just came to me after watching a lot of old Spn episodes, then rewatching "Sacrifice"
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"I don't have much money, but boy if I did.
I'd. I'd buy a big house
where we both could live."
~Ellie Goulding "Your Song" (originally sung by Elton John)
"Come on, let's say goodnight to your brother."
~Mary Winchester "Supernatural: Pilot"
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It's night.
It's been night for as long as the whiskey in the bottom of Dean's glass has been full.
The room doesn't show the night, it doesn't have windows. It is artificially lit with lamps, the furniture is old and it creaks.
But it is theirs.
It's his and his little brother's.
They always had a home, in Detroit steel and black rubber, in each other. But they never had a house.
And even though it wasn't supposed to make a difference, it did.
It made a difference when they were weary beyond heaven or earth's comprehension. When they're understanding of both shifted like a sliding of shingles off an old house.
Having a home that had four walls, and places to store their shoes, pegs for their jackets, smells from past cooked meals in the kitchen creeping in the rooms where they laid down at night – it mattered.
Dean drank slowly from the glass that he would never see the bottom of, at least not tonight. He stared at the mountains and rises that was his brother's body on its side.
Sam was still damaged, and broken, in ways that no one could help. But he was still with Dean. He was asleep and not dead, and that counted like the house counted, only a million times more.
His tough as nails little brother; it was both happy and humbling to be mixed into something that tied Dean's entire existence into one singular thing.
It made life hurt like a mother, made it so much harder to bear because he wore his heart outside his body.
But Dean drank in the dark to Sam's life, not his death.
He drank deep and slow. Then set aside the glass and scooted his chair as close to the bed as he could get without being noticed for hovering.
Sam breathed in and out in a rhythm, one that Dean watched like the waves he dropped Sammy in as a kid, hearing him squeal something that was so wholly happy it formed its own feeling.
He stared through the gray at the image of his brother. His kid brother, not a kid anymore. Not for a time long enough for an ache to settle into Dean's chest. But it was a proud kind of ache, watching Sam go from something so young and cub like to something grown.
Something that Dean grew with like the expanding branches of an old tree that had survived fires and development. That proclaimed to the world that it was still there underneath all the damage.
Dean wanted nothing more that Sam to live a long life well past old age, with a family that spread out like a stain. He never told the rest of the that story though, that his ideal world for his brother, would include him in it. Long after the wives and the children and the grandchildren had gone it would be them aged old wizened crotchety men in a house that existed above ground, sitting side by side just how they started. And when it all finally ended to go out together right to the very last clock stroke.
It was Dean's real ideal world.
It had always been.
If he had any sense of carpentry and lack of death wishes he would build that house, away from the demons and the angels, and have it waiting for them. The cement of their home down under the ground wasn't as warm as wood, or as bright. But it was where Sam was. And right now, it was enough.
They weren't old yet after all, but hopefully one day, they would be.
Dean stood up an and watched Sam sleep with the deepest of breaths. He placed a warm hand on Sam's head and kissed the side of his face. When he broke away, he roughed the hair up on those side burns with his thumb.
He moved away to the door and a sliver of light broke through the dark room as Dean pushed it open. He looked back into gray at his brother, and watched him for a moment longer. "Goodnight Sam."
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End.
R/R please.