A/N: They say confession is good for the soul. Sam talks. That's it. Except for just a smidgen of angst...

Film is a shout out to Ilka. Cookies to anyone who gets it.

~~C~~

Ever since September, things have been... weird. Crazy weird, even by our standards. Seems even the amazing, incredible, wonderful things couldn't just be simple. Things like Dean coming back. For just a moment in that crappy hotel in Pontiac, the world was brighter, clearer, the air fresher somehow. It was rank; dirt and sweat layered under cheap soap, and it took Dean another month to finally stop smelling like something the cat dragged in. But it was like stepping out into winter, cold and sharp, a welcome slap in the face.

For a while.

Then there were angels and demons and war and the end of days. Spirits rising and coming after us, all of us; seals and gifts and threats. Even when it wasn't all apocalypse and time travel and Lucifer rising, things were just...

Well, yeah.

Weird.

I mean, Rougarous aren't so left field, not really.

But ghost fever? A shape shifter who thought he was Boris Karloff on a bad day?

Even in our world, that's out there.

And then, couple of days ago, there was this wishing well. Only, it worked. Some dork had found a coin, a freaking cursed Babylonian coin that made wishes come true and of course, people are just nuts so it might as well have been the apocalypse starting right there in Concrete, Washington.

But... it got me thinking, you know? Or Dean did anyway. He made a wish to test it. Asked for a damn sub and got a side of e-coli with it but he asked me what I would have wished for and all I heard was this little voice in back of my head that said, 'My wish already came true.'

I could have wished that I'd found a way to save him from the Pit in the first place.

I could have wished that Mom had never seen the demon, never made that damn deal.

But I just fed him some line about Lilith's head on a plate, some bull that wasn't quite shit, deep down, and thought 'It already came true.'

Later on, when he'd puked himself inside out and fallen asleep, I couldn't stop thinking it. And I remembered him saying once, he wanted to see the Grand Canyon and we never did, with everything that happened after. Even with everything that happened, somehow we never quite found the time to see the Grand freakin' Canyon.

And I thought, 'Maybe that's what I'd wish for.'

So anyway, after super-hero-kids-gone-bad and the lightning and all of it was done, I figured we could do it. Go see the canyon, I mean. I didn't tell Dean, just made up a hunt in Colorado, hikers going missing and turning up a month later minus their memories and a pint of blood or two and we packed our shit and headed South.

Like I said. Even the good stuff can't just be simple for us.

Guess I should've looked a bit harder before I made up that pile of crap about missing hikers. Turned out I wasn't too far wrong, only it wasn't memories and some blood they were missing. It was their damn hearts.

Been there, done that.

We didn't even know there was a real hunt there. Dean figured out I'd made the whole thing up about ten minutes after we got into town. He was... I don't know. Kind of... sad. Happy, like a kid in Disney, but sad too. Like it didn't mean what he thought it would. Like he could see through the magic and the costumes, and underneath it was just tricks and dust.

Illusion.

We went out there on the first night and the first thing you notice is how quiet it is. We could've been the only people around for a thousand miles or more. It's just, just so old. This massive slice ripped out of the ground, chewed out and you can feel every single sunrise and sunset it ever saw, a kind of cumulative pressure that's trying to crush you and hold you up and pull you apart all at the same time.

It was... special.

All the things we've seen, and nothing's ever been special. Not like that.

Makes you remember what's worth fighting for.

There's this look he gets, sometimes. I guess he's always had it, I just never noticed before. Then last year, about a month after... after The Deal we were driving through some mid-West state. Iowa? Maybe. It was just cornfields and straight roads, one-horse-towns at the crossroads and sunlight, and Back In Black came on the radio. He didn't say anything, just... got that look. Like he was trying to fix that moment, that song, that place in his memory. Trying to make sure he never forgot it.

He had that same look at the canyon the other night. Right before everything went sideways. He smiled and I thought 'this was a good idea.' Exactly that. I remember thinking exactly those five words.

I just wanted to give him something back, you know? He sold his soul for me, and I think maybe he did it a long time ago, really, back before I died, before Dad died. So I wanted to give him something.

Should've known better.

Remember that film we saw once? Some awful, import slasher flick about werewolves in freaking Scotland or something and you couldn't decide whether to laugh or be scared. There was that one scene where one of the good guys climbed into the car and there was a Werewolf behind him and you could see the moment he realised it, the instant he figured out he was about to die and there was nothing, nothing he could do about it.

It was like that.

We stood there on the edge and I looked right at that damn moon and never thought once about Werewolves. I never thought about any of the monsters and the nightmares. We were just two guys, two regular, normal guys looking at the view and then, I don't know, he must've heard something or seen it in the corner of his eye or something, 'cause he just shoved me out of the way. He looked right at me when it charged him, knocked him straight over the edge and he looked me right in the eye and it was the same as that stupid, crappy film.

He knew he was going to die and it was already too late to stop it.