He's always so, so alone. Except for a brief period of time when he swore he'd seen Sam, not long after he first appeared here, clutching to thin air in front of him. He was still in shock, Sam looked ashen and neither acknowledged the other. After awhile, Sam simply disappeared, but he didn't worry about it when he focused hard on the reality and saw Sam and Dean together, killing the Yellow Eyed Demon with help from another ghost... John Winchester in the flesh? Stranger things have happened, I guess.
It's cold here. Kind of grey. If he focuses very hard, he can get some sense of what's happening in the real world but it's blurry and so, so disturbing-- the flashes he does see. The only good thing he's seen is Ellen and Jo are hunting together, which makes him happy. Ellen was so unhappy when Jo left, he thinks before wondering how he remembered that after so many-- decades? centuries? Time has no meaning in this place, it could've been mere weeks on the other side. He wonders if his death and the burning of the Roadhouse brought the Harvelle women together.
He looks in awhile later, finding Dean thrashing about in a nightmare and frowns. Time is moving faster as now Dean has a strange scent to him. He thinks it's hellfire mixed in with a little sulfure but he's not sure, his senses a little muddled on this side of the veil. They're all self-destructing and I can't do anything.
The next time he looks in, Lucifer walks the earth. He thinks he's untouchable here, this weird in-between place, but even as vague as senses have been for him since he arrived here, he's worried-- for Ellen and Jo, Bobby and of course the Winchesters. For all of human kind...
He loses the will to gaze upon reality any longer, prefering to be alone in this cold, empty universe where there's nothing to look upon. Even without looking, he can't help but feel worthless since he can't do anything from here except fret. He's weak. I'm sorry...
Ages have passed when he hears a voice, for the first time in ages. "Ash?" It's soft, female. Young. He closes his eyes, trying not to react. He knows it was inevitable, considering how things were the last time he glanced upon the world of the living.
"Ash." This voice is stronger, deeper-- still female, but with the grit of age and loss tempering it. This time he does look, unable to stop himself.
Ash shakes his head rapidly, his long hair whipping him in the face with each turn. "Both of you?" It's been so long since he's had someone to talk to, his voice sounds foreign. Even so, he'd rather never heard his voice again than witness this.
Jo glances over at her mom and nods slowly, holding her arms out to him. He's dazed and silent as he joins them and quickly hugs her, not sure what to say. She's too young for this-- they all are, really. War's not age exclusive, he knows this, but even in death it's a hard pill to swallow.
"How long have you been here?" Ellen asks, unable to look away from him. If he hadn't known better, he'd have thought she missed him. The thought makes him smile, though it probably looks forced to the girls. He's not had much to smile about in so long...
"Yeah, I just-- don't know how long exactly. Time feels differently here," he explains, his words feeling muddled, uncomfortable. Another thing he has to struggle to remember-- conversational skills "Slow. A lot of things feel different here."
She nods, looking around at the bleak surroundings. "I'm sensin' that." Jo is still hovering close to him, as if she can't believe that they're all together again. She wraps an arm around her and continues staring at Ash like she always did even when he was living-- like he was a conundrum that she needed to figure out. It always made him feel vulnerable when she did it while they were alive, but here it feels familiar and almost like home.
"What?" he asks, when the silence drags on and the two keep staring at him.
"I'm just wonderin', have you ever tried to leave here?" Ellen asks, stepping closer to him.
He blinks a time or two, his mouth open. "I-- no." He thinks in retrospect that that's probably a little weird but he's never exactly done anything normal. Why start in the afterlife?
She abruptly closes her eyes before breathlessly whispering, "Do you hear that, Joanna Beth?"
"Is it dad?" the girl murmurs, a reverent look on her face.
"Yeah..." Ellen's attentions turn back to Ash and she smiles at him, a bit of the hardness leaving her face. "Ash, what do you really have to wait around for any longer? Come with us."
He yearns to but something's holding him back: he doesn't know how, and Ash doesn't like doing things he doesn't know. "How, Ellen? What am I missing?"
Ellen smiles at him and touches his shoulders, turning him around. "Do you see it?" she asks breathlessly and he stares ahead. "Right there, in front of you this whole time... you see it, right?"
He blinks and tries to think about all of the lore on limbo that he's read or heard about-- people remain until they let go of their past desires, wants, afflictions-- all of it. He thinks about his time in the roadhouse, his time at MIT... even the lackluster childhood that he spent behind a computer monitor to hide from the reality of an unhappy household and very few friends at school.
Ellen is still looking at him expectantly, however, and something in her gaze encourages him-- he lets it all go, the weight dropping from his shoulders, like a breath of fresh air... He then looks at where she indicated and sucks in a deep breath. A bright light, that he thinks would've been blinding in reality but just seems comforting and welcoming here, is before them, waiting patiently for them to enter.
That part of the lore is correct, he thinks with an almost delirious smile as he stares at it.
Jo's hand slips into his, squeezing quickly. "Are we ready?" she asks, looking over at her mother.
"I am. Ash?"
He takes a minute to look at the women by his side. He now knows what he's been waiting for this whole time, the void within him disappearing... "Y-yeah," he says, completing the chain as he takes Ellen's hand.
As they did in life so many times, the three go forward together.