Spoilers for 4.04; one-shot; no, I don't intend to set it within a larger context. This isn't what i'd call serious fic-work - think of it as a nightbug.
These powers, he says, they're like playing with fire. The words taste like ashes in his mouth, like that which remains after the Fire has devoured: wood or stone or plant, it doesn't matter – that which the Fire leaves all tastes the same, he knows.
Like playing with fire, he says, and: I'm done with them. He's staring at the reflection of his face on the car window as he says so. Reflections tell more truth than the thing itself, more often then not, and it is apt that this would be his reflection: the lines and colours of his face show clearly against the backdrop of the night.
I'm not doing it for you, he says – true words, watching the hollow darkness inside the reflection of his mouth as his lips move.
His reflection. The colours so lifelike, so lines so well-defined.
It's my choice.
His eyes, though… his eyes are empty. Their reflection, anyway: hollowed up, no distinction between the pupil and the iris. Reflections reveal the truth of the thing itself, more often than not.
He doesn't remember if this reflection has looked like this Before. He's tempted to put his fingers against the glass but Dean has excellent peripheral vision and Sam doesn't want the attention. This attention.
He wonders if flesh tastes the same after the Fire, too, and he wonders which arson it was that did this.
He thinks of there being no salt mixed in with the ashes. There are times when he pretends that it's the aftertaste of a salt-and-burn: that the trivial fire had done its alchemy, that the salt and the Evil had annihilated each other like matter and anti-matter.
He can still see the blood and the fire. The flame is still playing in front of him, for him, as Dean watches. Flesh smells differently than wood or stone as it burns, and Sam is still left wondering if their ashes taste the same.
He think they do.
His name is not ash, yet, if Sam is his name. It tastes bitter, like a drug, Sam, and his Hebrew is good enough to see the irony in that, to think that English is a cursed language if it can so naturally transform a benediction into damnation.
He tastes the other names, sometimes. Samuel tastes like ash, especially when he tries to wrap his tongue around the foreign pronounciation and say Shmu'el: it had been consumed by the Fire, this one. For five months now he knows that it had been taken from him a long time ago, this name, because the ashes of it had always tasted cold in his mouth; he knows how hot, fresh ashes taste, now, had known it since two weeks after burying Dean, when he'd woken up between night and morning, bathed in sweat and freezing cold, lungs tightened into blockage, and he'd tried saying this name which he'd tried to denounce, Sammy, and the breath in his mouth was a breeze blowing straight from the pyre, carrying the taste of ashes warm and fresh.
There is a level of his mind on which he believes that he can still make or break this choice. That he is merely standing on the edge of the Pit, outside of the Pyre, that the Fire has left more than a husk. Underneath the husk which the Fire has left for its purpose, the one who could have been Samuel and who had been Sammy and who wonders at how English knows not the Holy from the Damned , he sees his Void-black eyes in his reflection and knows that what words come out of the emptiness between his lips is more lightweight than the finest particle of ash.