Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural.
Sam Winchester died two hours ago.
It was an accident.
It was one of those moments, that had he survived, he would barely have been able to recall. It was a whizz of a laugh here, a sprint up the stairs after his father there, and then the impact of a demonic force crushing him into a wall that crumpled down with him. There was shock, pain, and a moment of wondering how many stitches he would be shoving off in gym tomorrow when everything went black like the folds of Death's coat.
He was fifteen years old, almost sixteen, and was lying in a grave prepared by his family in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
He had gone through puberty, mastered the art of preparing microwavable ramen noodles, experienced a very wet first kiss, passed eighth grade health class, and had also succeeded in dying a graceless death.
O O O O O
John was the one who was taking it the best. Perhaps a past riddled with accidents that were never meant to be and murdered passion when loved ones were cruelly ripped away from their family as a sacrifice for a cause no one willingly submitted themselves to had done its toll on him, as if he had already wasted all of his tears on Mary years ago and none left to shed for his son. Perhaps he kept himself stoic for the sake of Dean, who desperately needed not to see his father's turmoil on display and then trigger his own. No matter the reason, John's face remained as cold as the gravestone, something that he was starting to believe was irritating Dean to the point of an agonizing eruption of emotions.
He had lost his wife, his friends, and now a son. After a while, the deaths became a blur and the sadness preserved individually for each loss blended into a configuration of pain that could no longer be distributed.
They buried him not five miles from where his heart had decided to give up on the journey. John knew that he belonged next to Mary, just where he himself wanted to spend his lifeless eternity, but a corpse in the backseat of the Impala wasn't something that Dean or John were ready to handle. John insisted on not marking the grave out of caution, since demons currently only seemed to be growing in numbers and mounting in schemes of diabolic chaos just to hurt the human souls they didn't possess. In retaliation, Dean insisted on not burning Sam's body. John had refused, since the thought alone of leaving Sam's body unprotected was ridiculous, but Dean had refused even more adamantly, as if turning Sam's flesh to ash would ruin a memory he held so preciously in his mind. John acquiesced, but had originally constructed a plan to dig up Sam's body and set him aflame when Dean was deep in the arms of slumber, but a steady nagging of guilt had eventually halted him.
He knew that Dean had more to deal with than he did for multiple reasons – his constant absences from home, his stoic soldier-does-as-soldier's-told attitude, his inability to provide fatherly advice and console his sons' worries about death and ghosts. And then there was that barely noticeable extra bit that separated him from Dean and his liaison with Sam, the thing John steadfastly avoided for a countless number of years out of pure ignorance and lack of wanting to face what had became of his sons.
He supposed that now that Sam was gone, it was stopped, but really, it wasn't. He knew from the way Dean took walks that ended after hours with poorly concealed tear tracks staining Dean's cheeks. He knew from the way that Dean vocalized his nightmares at three in the morning crying out for his brother's voice and begging for his survival.
He just needs time, John told himself like a record on repeat.
O O O O O
They were sitting on a couch, watching a rerun of Law and Order at Sam's adamant wishes, when it happened.
"––and at the debate tournament, everyone said I was really good for my age, so maybe, I dunno," said Sam in a voice that clearly indicated that Dean was in for a rather lengthy story, "maybe being a lawyer is really something I should look into."
"A lawyer?" Dean parroted, "You're a hunter, Sam."
"Well, I wouldn't be anymore," Sam continued, and by now, his voice had significantly lost some of his drive when he sensed the edge of disapproval in his brother's tone.
"But you would have to go college first and everything before you could even start thinking about stepping into a courtroom."
"…yeah, I know." Sam said, his feet shifting on Dean's lap like a boy questioned by his father why he was out past curfew without a single phone call. "Just a thought."
Just a thought, Dean contemplated, and stayed silent. He looked down at the socked feet wiggling in his lap. He wondered when Sam stumbled on woolly socks with penguins knitted into them, and poked Sam in the toe, just where the fabric was weathered and threatening to split into a hole marking the next shopping trip for Sam's clothing that he already grew out of like a monkey on steroids. Dean recalled the days when a face no taller than his midsection was staring up at him with an oversized sweater and big, glossy eyes that screamed pleasethat Sam had most surely stolen from a puppy without permission. Sam had grown out of the sweater, but not the eyes. When Dean looked up from his lap to meet Sam's gaze, he found himself once again face-to-face with sad eyes, possibly illegal, as if he required Dean's approval to pick up and live a life of stuffy dorms and endless studying away from his brother. Dean realized with a pang that if he wanted, Sam soon could pick and leave. He was growing older.
He smiled, threw his arm around Sam and wedging his neck in between his elbows, and pulled him in until their foreheads knocked together.
"You ain't gonna leave me, are you, Sammy?"
And without waiting for an answer, he pushed their lips together and swallowed every gasp of surprise and moan of ardency that Sam's throat wanted to contribute to the conversation after that.
O O O O O
Out of broken bones, rivers of blood, and too many dislocated shoulders to tick off on his fingers, Dean had never experienced pain just quite like watching Sam's body hurl into a wall and no longer rise from the floor.
His mind replayed the moment for him a myriad of times, something he can no longer erase from his memory and go a day without remembering. Someone had turned off the volume when in a pile of decayed floorboards and old dust, Sam fell to the ground and didn't shake himself off with a groan of pain and a limp in his step. Dean had rushed forward, his father no doubt wrenching open the doors of undiscovered rooms to end the demonic spirit that had caused the damage, and began dabbing furiously where the blood ran, waiting for the flicker of life in Sam's eyelids. When it never came, and neither did the beat of his heart, Dean collapsed.
It was not a pretty sight to behold. There was a roar that was loud enough to shake the walls off of their foundations that escaped from Dean's throat, raw and broken, followed by thunderous sobs that shook his whole being until his ribs were rattling and his hands were possessed by tremors. He fell to his knees without a single thought devoted to the physical pain he was enduring himself, the emotional whirlwind of agony enough to distract him. He remembered tears, slipping into his mouth, his tongue tasting salt and hurt, until his body had no more tears to give, hands clutching at Sam's cheeks until the warmth ran out.
He could feel John lingering behind him, the sturdy presence of his boots next to Dean's bawling form, as if unaware he knew how to chase away the ghosts, but not the hurt. He wasn't crying, and Dean could hear that much, the silence only making him sob harder for his brother, shaking around like a ragdoll in Dean's grip when he shook him. This was not Monday morning, and this was not a boy too exhausted to pull himself from his dreams and heave himself out of bed; these were Sam Winchester's last moments. He remembered being pulled into his father's grip away from Sam's motionless countenance.
Then all he remembered was guilt and sadness.
O O O O O
Sam Winchester died three days ago.
There was a lot of crying. For a boy who obstinately declared that he was not capable of feeling any estrogen-laced emotions and didn't even possess tear glands, Dean Winchester was a walking contradiction, but mostly, he was just a mess.
The first day, John and Dean both paid their respects and were decent enough to weep. John didn't cry, but he told Dean he had, if only to placate him, even though his eyes, clean of red rims and swollen eyelids, dismissed his lie. If there were others who cared about Sam's untimely death and his vicious removal from life, they never knew. Six feet under firmly packed dirt, Sam wondered if anyone even noticed his absence from third period English, or if his profusely kind science partner mused over what had happened to Sam when he never returned to school.
On the second day, Dean was suffering the most, worse than John. If Sam was upset about John's lack of visible mental burden about his son's murder, Dean's excessive misery surely made up for it. There was no revenge to seek or death to avenge as John had already defeated the demon that caused Sam's final breaths, leaving Sam to assume that this completion was enough to offer John peace in the matter.
To Dean, however, no conquered spirit was enough to provide him an adequate amount of solace.
On the third day, despite the torrents of unrelenting rain, Dean once more visited his brother's grave without the company of his father. He sat on the mud, not concerned for the state of his jeans or the rapid deteriorating of his health as he sat out in the sheets of downpour, and pressed his forehead against the cool stone of Sam's grave as if it were his forehead too.
Sam knew that Dean's innocence was the culprit of his despondency, not a heinous demonic spirit with the power to kill. John, completely robbed of his incorruptibility and innocuous nature, walked away without the slightest of emotional wounds, while Dean whimpered and suppurated in the harsh reality of his brother's death.
Sam supposed that it was better now than later that he was pulled into reality anyway.
O O O O O
Dean was enveloped in a snowy bank as Sam applied pressure to the crimson gash running down his thigh and oozing drops of blood down onto his knee when it happened.
John was fighting the vampire clan that Dean had unfortunately taken the worst hit from, causing his and Sam's prompt dismissal from the hunt. Sam was given careful instructions to heave Dean back to the Impala away from the vampire nest and do his best job nursing the laceration his brother had acquired. Sam, never one to follow his father's orders, knocked aside his rebellious thoughts without a single protest and did just as he was told. He dumped Dean into the snow piling up by a crooked speed limit sign off the side of the highway where the Impala was parked, huddling snow around Dean's wound.
The cold was effectively numbing the injury as the snow developed a soft tinge of pink as the blood trickled down into the ground. Dean was shivering like a man who had fallen into a frozen pond during the wintertime, his cumbersome angle causing his spine to dig into the sign behind him while Sam diligently ripped open his pants and patched up his injury.
"Still with me?" Sam said in a gruff, gravelly voice sounding akin to his father's when whiskey roughened his throat and when he gave orders, even though Dean could still detect the sound of fear in Sam's voice. He felt silly, comforting his brother when he was the one in need of solace, but still managed to reach out and circle his fingers around Sam's wrist.
"'M good, Sammy."
Sam gave a shaky nod, caused either by the crisp November air or the panic he was most likely undergoing due to the situation, and finally managed to finish his work on Dean's leg until a slightly awkward, slightly too taut bandage was wrapped around the wound and the crusting blood was cleaned. Dean could sense the tremors running through Sam's body through the light hold he had on his wrist, and with a gentle tug, had attempted to nestle Sam into his side.
"Hey, Sam, 'm right here."
Before he could even attempt to slide his chin over Sam's bushy mess of a hairy head and wrap his arms around his torso to not only comfort his brother but also warm his steadily cooling body as the snow seeped through his clothes and past his skin, he was blinking into Sam's face, a mere inch and half a second away from his own.
The blood loss, the frozen air, the scare of the entire circumstances took control. Their lips met, chapped and quivering, against each other, in what could only be mistaken as a kiss.
It was over with a cold smack before it had begun, and then once more, the whole thing started up again. Their hands reached for each other simultaneously like a rehearsed reflex, Dean's settling on the back of Sam's neck where the hem of the bristles of Sam's hair met his fingertips and Sam's fingers enclosing around his shirt in a tight fist as their mouths collided through another shiver.
Their lips were numb and their noses got in the way, but they didn't stop. Someone's tongue, no one knew whose, slid over the seam of lips and soon it was very wet, but a wonderful kind of wet, like someone had turned up the heat in Dean's entire body even though his pants were encased in snow and his hands were as pale as a snowman's hue. Sam's hands were roaming under his shirt, freezing fingers playing with his nipples and memorizing the feel of his skin with his fingertips, Dean's own fingers knotted urgently into Sam's hair as if attempting to hold him there forever. Dean heard Sam's rattling breath through his nose, as if he was desperately trying not to break away for air, and it was not until the invasive headlights of a speeding by car shone on their bodies and sufficiently broke them out of their reverie that it ended on sharp gasps slipping from both of their lips.
They looked at each other, lips swollen and glistening, until the familiar sound of John's boots trampling through a fresh layer of snow had Dean springing up onto his good leg like he was just caught red-handed in a robbery scam, eyes full of shame and guilt that Sam had no trouble detecting.
O O O O O
Sam Winchester died two months ago.
Enough time had passed that Dean no longer cried at the mere thought of Sam, who plagued his every thought like a ghost with a goal. He spent a good week persuading John through watery eyes that were constantly threatening to leak their woe to stay in the city for just another day, another day, another day. John found hunts, werewolves, poltergeists, mysterious chains of murders, five days after Sam was buried, but Dean protested, intent on staying close to his brother as if all of it was simply a cruel joke that would result in Sam hogging the bathroom on Tuesday morning and eating all of the fresh cereal on the weekends again if he waited it out until the end. John gave him a fair amount of time, enough time for Dean to even search out Sam's spirit, all in ultimate vain.
After three weeks, John packed his bags, slid a Metallica CD into the radio, and turned it up as high as the volume could go for Dean's sake, as if eventually, the music would slide all of his foul memories away and draw out the Dean he was before the accident. John knew it still existed inside his son. He saw himself inside Dean, the same man who was lost without a wife when she was torn out of his grip without the slightest of warnings, and he made it through. He knew Dean would as well.
They didn't speak about what happened; they listened to music until one of the car's speakers gave out and John mentioned replacing it. Dean refused. He thought about Sam, and about how in a very ironic way, he was the speaker that had died in the car he cared so deeply for. For once, Dean didn't see the appeal in pounds of metal and rubbery wheels, and thinking back on all of the times he spent pampering his beloved car, he knew he should have been spending it with Sam.
O O O O O
Sam was in love with his brother, and Dean knew that. He knew it from the way his brother looked at him alone. The gentle smile, the eyes that always knew that no matter what happened, they always had each other's hands to hold, the barely noticeable wrinkle in his nose that occurred nanoseconds before a monstrous, genuine laugh that Dean had induced. He wondered if it was obvious even to John.
Sam had many plans. He talked about college with the same enthusiasm he had first started harboring years ago, but now he had begun slyly sneaking Dean into his plans as well. He hinted at sharing an apartment in San Francisco while he earned his law degree at Stanford University, at the idea of Dean and him spending weekends solely on the beach with their sandy hands intertwined and all of the nights ending with slow sex in the lukewarm water. He mentioned throwing away their guns and running away from the garbage, and then, that would be all of the running they'd ever have to do again. He brought up part-time jobs and interminable all-nighters studying on the couch. All of the ideas, every single what-if, ended in a solid
together.
Dean told him every single time to keep dreaming, Sammy, you know this is the life for us, but Sam never considered his dejections to be actual refusals, and the stories continued.
It used to be that every night, exactly six minutes and thirty-two seconds after John's telltale snoring began across the room, that Sam would slink into Dean's bed with a wicked smile reserved only for his brother, and proceed to wrap his fist around his length and jerk him off to a rhythm so heavenly Dean could hardly believe anyone would label it as wrong. He would cry out into Sam's neck, muffling his noises through a bite to his shoulder, and when the afterglow settled in, the shame followed soon after. The litany of it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong playing over and over in his mind like a symphony. At one point, he stopped trying to stop the chanting, and started sleeping on the couch instead of the lumpy confines of his bed.
Sam got the hint.
O O O O O
Sam Winchester died seven months ago.
By now, Sam considered no longer counting the days or the weeks, as the slow, steady trickle of forgetting started to wash over Dean's haunted mind. The memory of Sam's death was no longer as crisp and clear as it used to be in the corners of his mind, as it now played in his brain through a blur of overlooked details. As if it now was a tape battered around in its camera a few too many times, the recollections were blurred, and with it, Dean's pain as well.
On the sixth month mark, Dean and John found themselves back in town on mere coincidence for a woman's call for help Bobby Singer had recommended them. John didn't visit the grave. John hardly remembered the name of the town.
Dean excused himself from the burden of seeing Bobby for dinner when the hunt was over with and done with only a few scrapes on his body as souvenirs, instead driving the Impala out to the cemetery where he recalled his brother's grave to be.
When he saw the headstone, he cried once more. It was a soft crying, however, not the kind that took him by the ankles and turned him upside down and made him question the justice of his lifestyle. The sadness, however, was still there, as was the memory of Sam's smiling face.
Sam knew that Dean was no longer guilty, and no longer put himself in the position of the object of blame, finally believing the persuasions of his father that all of it had been an unfortunate incident that no one had foreseen or had caused. He murmured to the gravestone and the dirt beneath it, mumbling out his apologies and his regrets until a solid mass of consternation and hurt lodged itself into his throat again. He didn't leave flowers, but rather planted them, shaking a few seeds of the promise to come into the earth.
Dean and John soon pick up where they left off, driving out of town and continuing their road trip across the country without much residual worry over the missing family member in the backseat. When the flowers started growing, Sam's seventeenth birthday comes and goes without much celebration. He would have been approaching the last years of his high school career, possibly at the top of his class. It was a surreal thought, because it was not where Sam was, but it was definitely where he should have been.
O O O O O
Dean stared down at the letter in his hand, undoubtedly not his own, as if he was delivered severely bad news simply by looking at it.
In a way, he was.
He had taken to throwing away Sam's letters when the senders were colleges eager to hear of his scores in school and seek out his formal applications, intent on protecting him from the normality that Dean was sure his brother was not cut out for, when really, he was tearing up the contents not for Sam's well-being but his own unbelievably strong attachment to his brother that he was not sure he would want to test the sturdiness of with the severing of hundreds of miles between them.
Sam was still in love with him. He talked to no one, not even his own father, the man who would most likely not take well to his queer sons and their activities that have driven them apart. Sam tried to talk about it every night. Dean refused, continuously hoping that Sam will forget about the memories and obliviousness will help erase his own.
He figured that distance might help in the process.
He stopped throwing letters away.
O O O O O
Sam Winchester died three years ago.
The flowers have grown and wilted through harsh winters multiple times. In the spring they grew a few short inches, remaining fragile things that drank away the melting snow from the previous seasons. Dean had yet to see them flourish.
The Yellow-Eyed-Demon was dead, and with it, the flowers started anew with hope in their blossoming petals, tiny and delicate in the cycle of their development. Sam was but a body now, nothing but clothes and bones to burn if the fading memories didn't count. He wished he was alive, there to see the demon that killed his mother die its death as his family was reunited in their ultimate triumph once again. If his mother were alive, Sam knew that she would mourn him. Leaf through photo albums and brush her thumb over Sam's faces through every picture.
Another part of him wished that the Yellow-Eyed-Demon had brought the rest of his family to their fatal end. Perhaps Bobby would find them and bury them by Sam. Perhaps he would finally mark Sam's grave because the need for caution and fear of war was over, no longer causing Sam to be a faceless body under the ground. By now, his gravestone was chipped and has weathered many storms without the protection of his family. His brother was not here to see the damage done to his headstone. Sam knew that Dean would fix it, just as he fixed everything.
Sam had missed out on his childhood. He had missed out on many close-calls, a multitude of victories against evil celebrated with John's alcohol stash in the Impala, the rare bright vacations, the sunburnt high school graduations, the all-nighters in college, the places he wanted to see but could only dream of.
Sam was a fading memory in Dean's mind. His death was blocked out with blurs and hazes that John encouraged to ease Dean's pain. Who initiated the first kisses went forgotten by Dean. His signature expression of condescension, the one Dean always teased him on throughout his teenage years, has faded into ambiguous memories in his brother's head. The good times and the bad times intermingled, and soon the regrets diminished as well. Now all that was left is a faint what if he had survived? loitering in Dean's brain. Sam wondered the same thing.
O O O O O
Sam Winchester died what seemed to be a lifetime ago. He no longer counted the years, soon turning into decades. The flowers planted by his grave forgot to grow one spring a few years back, and now browned leaves remained in the wake of bright flowers originally potted with love. Bobby and Dean commemorated his death on an almost yearly basis, but it was often forgotten. They talked of Sam with sad smiles on their faces, swapping stories of a childhood that was lived years ago. Many deaths had occurred since Sam's, and by now, he was a casualty in the prelude of war, a statistic in the numbers.
His classmates faintly thought of him during their high school reunions, remembering the fond times with their families. All of them had wives, husbands, children, degrees, and success stories.
John was dead by now, yet another victim to the cause. Dean cried, as he should have, but not as hard as he cried for Sam. The memories soon were restored when he burned his father until his ashes glowed and crumbled into fine sand, Dean's tears for his father turning into tears for Sam. It was a dull sadness, no longer eating his soul.
Dean was still alive, no longer counting the years he had gone without his brother. He lived a life absent of Sam with his arms wrapped around his wife, Sam's fading memory sometimes reminding him of the opportunity he had been too late to grasp.
All things he ever lived are left behind. All the fears that ever flickered through his mind. All the sadness that he'd come to own.
A/N: This entire story was inspired by the song Left Behind by the beautiful voice of Jonathon Groff in the musical Spring Awakening. Basically, the story was intended to portray a relationship that Sam and Dean had that Dean was ridiculously ashamed of up to the point until Sam died a premature death at fifteen.
We should never forget the ones we love who died. This is for all of you who have had to experience that.