One shot done for this prompt by beccj on Live Journal:
Dean finds himself in the role of a reaper, and must take Sam's soul.
Death be not Proud
Dean's first time as a trainee reaper had been just a day. An awful, gut wrenching, heart breaking experience, but brief. Temporary.
The second time was different.
x0x0x0x
It started with a dream. Or at least Dean had told himself it was a dream.
They were in a motel somewhere in Nebraska. Sam was taking one of those lengthy showers that had become a habit since Death had restored his soul and Cas had so helpfully filled him in on some of the messed up stuff he'd been doing without it for that year and a half. Dean was lying on his bed, staring at the stain on the ceiling (that looked disturbingly like Ronald Regan), and trying not to think about the fragility of Sam's wall, when the blink of a tired eye took him to a dark alleyway, stinking of piss and rotting vegetables. It felt like a little déjà vu from his beat down from Castiel, and for a second he thought maybe the angel was involved. He looked around expecting to see that inscrutable blue gaze, hear that gravelly voice telling him some mysterious crap about destiny.
He wasn't there long, only had enough time to realise that there was an old hobo inside the pile of rags heaped against the wall; that the old guy appeared to be dead, and that there was a shadowy figure in a cheap black suit leaning over the body. Then he blinked again at the noise of a door opening behind him and found himself back where he started, with Sam emerging in a billow of steam from the motel bathroom.
Fuck. Must be even more tired than he'd thought to drop off like that in the middle of the afternoon.
Then shit had happened, because shit always happens to them, and Dean had forgotten about the whole thing.
x0x0x0x
Until it happened again. Dean had been tucking into a particularly good burger while listening to Sam expositing his research on their latest case when suddenly he was – elsewhere. In mid-bite. He was still busy masticating a mouthful of juicy beef as he found himself standing in what was clearly a hospital, at the bedside of a young woman he had never seen before. He had time to notice that she was very beautiful, if somewhat pasty pale, before he saw the reaper, looming like a dark shadow on the other side of the bed. He stepped back in shock, nearly inhaling the remains of his food.
The reaper had ignored him and done its job, left him spluttering incoherently as it walked the woman's weeping spirit away to wherever these souls go when called.
It had taken Dean a few moments to work out that it was Sam thumping him on the back while he spit out his half chewed mouthful onto the plate in front of him, and that he was back in the truck stop diner where he'd started.
After he'd stopped choking, and they were safely in the Impala away from the curious clientele of the diner, Sam told him that he'd seemed to just space out for a few seconds before the coughing fit. Dean told Sam what had happened, where he'd been, and confessed that it wasn't an isolated incident.
Sam being Sam pressed Dean for every minute detail until Dean was ready to scream.
They called Bobby, researched the wazzoo out of very source they could find (even the Campbells) and came up with precisely nothing. As the days, then weeks, then months went by and there was no recurrence, Dean told Sam to drop it. Or at least stop talking about it, because Dean was done.
All was quiet for three months.
Then Dean woke up in Afghanistan.
x0x0x0x
He opened his eyes only to be dazzled by the low sun and staggered by the cacophony that assaulted his ears – shouting; explosions; automatic gunfire. Pale dust was settling on everything, including the running stretcher-bearers with their blood-soaked burden - and Dean knew it was all in vain because he could be in this in-between state for only one reason. To watch someone die – again.
There were reapers all around. He had never seen so many all together like this, and it twisted something, deep in his gut.
Helpless, Dean witnessed the soldier on the stretcher lose his last battle even as his comrades carried him past, winced as one of the wizened black-suited reapers touched the man's hand (no pretty Tessas here on the battlefield it seemed) and braced himself to wake up as he had all the times before. To find himself back in the Impala with Sam shaking him, desperate for him to return to his vacant body.
But this time, nothing happened. War carried on around him. More reapers came, and more soldiers died. Dean was there and not there. He could do nothing and it was more frustrating that he could have expressed. The sun rose higher, its intensity not adding anything to the cold winter air. Dean could smell how thin the atmosphere was, how low in oxygen, and he would have known they were at altitude even if he hadn't been able to see the steep, broken, rock strewn slopes that surrounded them. He could feel the sun scorching his skin and cursed beneath his breath.
"Son of a bitch! I'm not even here but I'm still getting sunburn."
He cursed even louder a few seconds later, when an explosive device went off right under his feet, triggered not by his incorporeal footsteps of course, but by the poor soul now sitting confused and angry beside him, whose bodily parts had vapourised into a fine mist of blood and flesh and bone.
Dean was shaking and nauseated, bent double trying to breathe without breathing in the human remains that now constituted 80% of the air around him.
"Enough already!" he muttered into his knees, hearing his own voice dull and muffled inside his head, ears still deafened from standing on top of the blast. Like the sunburn, it seemed his body was 'there' enough to be impacted by the environment, yet not there enough to be able to talk to anyone, of for anyone to see him. And fortunately for him, not there enough to have been disintegrated like the poor sap who was still sitting, bewildered, in the bottom of the crater. Dean had every sympathy with the dead guy. His own hands, though braced on either knee, were still shaking, and his blood thudded loud inside his skull, his ears still buzzing.
He wondered where the kid's reaper had got to.
"What's going on? Why aren't the paramedics coming to help me?"
Dean straightened, looked around for the tell-tale dark suited anomaly but there was no sign of any thing that looked like a reaper. He and the abandoned soul were alone in their little crater, a small oasis of calm amidst the frenetic activity that surrounded them. Military paramedics, blue bereted soldiers (United Nations, Sam's voice helpfully pointed out in his head) and a small group of terrified civilians were all shouting and rushing around in a way that probably had some order to it if you knew what to look for.
Dean looked at the kid sitting on the rubble at his feet and sighed. Looked like he'd have to be the one to tell him he was dead. Dean would bet that he was barely nineteen if he was a day. Man, this sucked.
"Hate to tell you this, kid, but there's no medic can help put you back together after this," Dean gestured at the bomb crater and the kid looked around, puzzled. "Yeah, afraid so. You're deader than a doornail, and it's time to move on."
Ignoring the shocked expression on the dead soldier's face, Dean held out a hand to help him to his feet. The soldier hesitated for a second then grasped the offered hand. Dean pulled the kid up, and for good measure put an arm around him in one of those awkward I-don't-know-you-but-it's-probably-time-for-a-man-hugs - and that was when everything changed. The young man – hell, Dean didn't even know his name! – sighed into Dean's neck and on that exhale morphed into a warm glowing light that kept moving into Dean and through Dean until every bright particle was absorbed and gone.
It only took an instant, but Dean knew. He had just reaped that soul.
He stood for a moment, waiting to wake up. He waited and waited.
He didn't wake. Nothing changed. Around him the aftermath of the roadside bombing played out in tragedy and grief while all Dean wanted was to go home to Sam.
"Peachy. Just fucking peachy."
Dean stood there until the sun went down and the mountain air chilled to near freezing. He'd shouted himself hoarse, yelling at Death, or Tessa, or anyone really, to tell him what the fuck was going on. The living couldn't see him, and the dead were a little too preoccupied freaking out at the manner of their dying to answer him. The other reapers just glowered, then had largely ignored him, though one guy had taken a moment away from his latest reaping to tell Dean to man up and get on with his job.
That was when Dean started to feel it. A kind of tugging, that was urging him to move. When he finally took a step, the tug grew stronger and two steps brought him, not merely out of the crater, but out of Afghanistan all together. He wasn't sure that it was an improvement, since wherever he was now, it wasn't the Impala.
x0x0x0x
For six days Dean moved from death to death across the globe, feeling like the embodiment of Genesis 1:2 – hey, I read…and it was just as hard as he remembered from his single day with Tessa. The children were always the worst because they shone brighter, and the darkness they left behind was all the blacker for it. His heart ached with it, but this time he reaped them all without protesting out loud. He hadn't forgotten Death's lesson about consequences and the chaos caused by a butterfly wing, though he never stopped railing at the 4th Horseman to let him go home. Death never answered.
The seventh day Dean found Sam and wished he hadn't.
Sam was broken.
He was lying on his back, staring at the stars, the faintest of smiles on his lips as his eyes traced the shape of Orion. A tiny fleck of blood at the corner of his mouth was the only colour left on his face. Dean dropped to his knees next to Sam, all the breath gone from his lungs. Sam was wearing a mask of vulnerability that made him look too young; he looked like he had after Cold Oak when Dean had laid him out on that filthy mattress and Dean couldn't bear it.
Sam turned his head slightly as Dean arrived, the half smile brightening to a full one at the sight of his big brother.
"Dean! I was wondering if it would be you. What took you so long?"
"Sam."
It was all Dean could manage before his throat closed up. He reached out a hand, then stopped, left it hovering over Sam's chest, too scared to initiate a touch in case doing so inadvertently reaped his soul. Because obviously, Sam couldn't die again. Dean couldn't allow that. Dean swallowed, found his voice.
"Hey, this isn't so bad, you'll be fine. Did you call 911 already? Come on, where's your phone, we need to call Bobby…"
Sam's breath was rattling in his chest as Dean scrabbled carefully at Sam's torn and bloody jacket, looking for the cell phone. He started violently as Sam's cold fingers grasped his wrist, terrified that the contact would start the soul-glow, but nothing happened.
"Dean. Don't."
Sam's grip was too weak to hold for long, and his hand dropped away, leaving Dean frozen in place. Sam started to talk, each word croaked out in painful slowness that made Dean want to scream at him to stop, even while he clung to every word as if it was a life-preserver.
"You were gone for so long, I'd given up hope of seeing you again. We didn't know what to do with your body after you left it behind, and we couldn't find answers anywhere. Nothing like this had ever happened before. So Bobby called in a favour and we stashed it in a morgue's freezer, hoping against hope that would be enough to keep it fresh until we found you."
Dean shook his head. Gone so long? But it had only been a week. He wanted to ask the question but Sam was struggling on and he daren't interrupt.
"Then when Bobby died last year, I think I gave up hope. I'm sorry, Dean. I thought I'd lost everything. So I stopped hunting, tried to find that normal life we'd always been on the margins of, but it didn't work…I didn't fit in any more. Too many sharp edges. No purpose."
Dean's vision was blurred but he couldn't shed the tears.
"So here I am. Dying a hunter's death and it's okay."
"Fuck, Sam, what about this is okay? There's nothing about this that's okay!"
"See that sky, Dean? You know, that reddish star on the left, round Orion the Hunter's shoulder, that's Betelgeuse. Remember how you used to laugh and say it was an awful movie?"
Dean tried to crack a smile. "Dude, I loved that crap. And Geena Davis was hot, man."
Sam smiled in return, a better effort even through the pain than Dean had managed.
"Well, Betelgeuse shines so bright because it's going to go supernova sometime soon, and when it does it'll be the brightest star in the sky." Sam's grin at the look of impatient incomprehension on Dean's face made Dean wince a little, distracted by the sight of blood on Sam's teeth.
"Pay attention, Dean, this is important. Point is, I'd rather go out in a spectacular blaze doing something worthwhile, than fade into obscurity in an old folks' rest home forty years from now."
"You sound like – like …"
"I sound like you, Dean."
"Well I don't want you to sound like me. Just because I'm the oldest doesn't mean I'm always right."
Sam didn't answer. Dean blinked and the tears finally fell. His hand felt for Sam's frozen fingers and clutched tight as if letting go would make any difference. He could see the stars reflected in the empty darkness of Sam's open, unseeing eyes. A hunter's sky for a hunter's death.
You'd have thought having watched your brother die so many times before, it would have gotten easier, but the ice in Dean's heart said otherwise.
He didn't know or care how long he knelt there, but it was a gentle touch on his shoulder that alerted him to the fact that he had company.
x0x0x0x
"Dean."
The sound of his name started his heart beating again. He turned his head and looked up. Sam's arm was outstretched, offering Dean a hand up just as Dean had that young soldier such a short time ago. Or maybe it was a decade or so ago, since Dean seemed to have been reaping a lot longer than he had thought.
Dean took his brother's hand.
x0x0x0x
Death smiled in satisfaction as he watched the Winchesters finally moving on together in a veritable supernova explosion of light. He took a meditative sip at the mega-sized cola, savouring the way the bubbles chased after the taste of the most excellent pickle chips he'd brought from that little place Dean Winchester had recommended once.
At long last, the meddling of demons and angels was balanced out, and the natural order was restored.
"All in all, a job well done." Death concluded. It was what he was good at, after all.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and Death walked behind him.