Prologue
The end didn't come with a bang. It came with a yelp and a thud.
After more than five and half decades of hunting, it wasn't a ghost, a demon, or a werewolf that finally took down Dean Winchester. It was a nightmare. Dean awoke one night from a screaming, flailing, nightmare with his sheets wrapped around his wiry, slightly wrinkled body. In a panic, he jumped out of bed, failed to untangle his feet, and fell to the floor with a yelp and a thump.
The next morning, Sam found him still lying there, moaning piteously. A trip to the hospital left Dean grumbling about both diagnosis and prognosis.
"What the hell does he mean, 'I'm old'?! He's a quack, Sammy! He should be giving me pills to fix this, not telling me I'm old! I know how old I am! And a pulled muscle doesn't take three weeks of bed rest!"
This was answered with a calm, logical response, "You're 65! You're old!"
To which Dean answered, equally calm and logical, "He gave me a cane, Sammy! A cane!" Said cane was then shaken in Sam's face.
After more than twenty minutes of calm, logical, "discussion", Dean eventually won his case, and Sam agreed to continue hunting while Dean "took a little time off, just a week or so, because he is not old". The next week, when Dean tried to hobble off on a hunt, Sam prevented this by the simple method of beating him up the stairs at a slow walk and leaving without him. When Dean tried to join him the following week, Sam put his foot down.
"If you can make it out to the car without your cane, you can come."
Dean didn't come. And that was the beginning of the end.
As weeks turned to months, Deans back healed... slowly. When he finally managed to walk around the bunker without his cane, Sam let him come on a routine salt and burn. It seemed to go fine, until Dean... flinched.
Sam was busy excavating the grave, while Dean stood lookout with a shotgun. When the ghost appeared, Dean turned to it, raised the shotgun, and flinched. The ghost kept coming, raised it's fist to strike, and disintegrated when Sam swung the iron end of his shovel through it. After that, they finished the hunt without issue. But they both knew. And it hung over them.
Dean resisted going on another hunt for two weeks, afraid he'd flinch again. Sam didn't push him, not at first, but when a younger, less-experienced hunter picked up the trail of a vampire nest and called for help, Sam talked Dean into coming. And despite all of Sam's reassurances that it wouldn't happen again, it did. Dean flinched.
They walked into the nest in the middle of the day, walking quietly but confidently into the abandoned cabin, the younger hunter carrying out the unconscious prisoner/blood bag. As Dean walked further into the cabin, taking a silent count of the sleeping vamps, one of them woke up and jumped him. Dean flinched. Sam moved quickly, taking off his head with one swing of his machete. Unfortunately, the thump of the vampires falling body awoke the other sleeping vamps... all nine of them. By the time the other hunter returned, the cabin was a bloodbath. Sam and Dean took out six of them, but when the other hunter arrived, they were pinned down and injured. He quickly beheaded two of them, and Sam finished off the last.
After several days of brooding and drinking, Sam and Dean finally sat down and talked about what happened. When the shouting ended, and Dean realized there was no getting out of it, he admitted the problem.
"I'm afraid, Sammy."
Sam, knowing better than to interrupt- or, Chuck forbid, show pity- remained silent.
"I'm afraid of getting hurt. I mean, I fell out of bed and damn near crippled myself! What'll happen next time I get thrown into a wall, or tackled, or- or possessed?!"
Sam heaved a sigh and shook his head sadly.
"I don't know, Dean. But honestly, I'm afraid, too. For both of us. I'm not exactly young anymore, either. But what are our options? Retire?"
Dean looked surprised, then thoughtful.
"Well why not? It's been over a decade since we had an apocalypse to stop, and there are other hunters out there who can do what we can. Face it Sammy, that doctor was right. We're old. We shouldn't be living in a secret underground bunker hunting monsters anymore. What's gonna happen next time I fall? Or what if something worse happens?"
Sam was stunned.
"What are you saying? You wanna retire? What are you gonna do? Sit on the beach drinking beer all day? That's not you, Dean! And besides, we're some of the oldest, most experienced hunters alive! The world is still full of monsters!"
"Monster that somebody else can deal with!" Dean cut in. "We can still be useful! Look at how many hunters relied on Bobby! We could do that! But digging up graves? Chasing werewolves? That's a young mans game!"
When Sam remained silent and thoughtful, Dean continued.
"Let's get ourselves a little cabin on a beach, somewhere warm. I know a little pancake house in Florida that makes the best waffles this side of the country. Or we can go to Miami, or anywhere we want! We can take the whole friggen library with us if you want."
"Well," Sam hedged, "we would have a chance to finally make that online database of Supernatural lore we've been talking about."
"Right, yeah, the database thing! You've been talking about that for years! So what do you say?"
After a brief hesitation, Sam replied, "alright. Let's do it."
And that was that.
Sam and Dean had several years of peace... or, well, their version of peace, anyway. They became consultants for hunters across the country, had a wall of phones with labels such as FBI, DEA, and US Marshals, they created their online database of supernatural lore (well, Sam created it), and they spent a lot of time sitting on their porch overlooking the ocean, drinking beer. Most importantly, though, they spent a lot of time with their family, Jack, Jodie, Alex, Claire, Donna, and all their various spouses and children.
Over the months and years, Sam and Dean began to slow down even more. Dean starting having difficulty getting in and out of bed, up and down stairs. Sam, conversely, was physically healthy, but began to show his years in other ways. Going out shopping for the same item three times in one day, calling his adoptive grandkids by their parents names, losing his train of thought in the middle of a sentence. While they both failed to notice their own deterioration, neither of them could miss their brothers difficulties. They both, simultaneously, began asking their family for help. Thus, the family called an intervention for the brothers. It was... interesting. There was much shouting from both brothers when they realized the intervention was for them both.
"What the hell do you mean I'm getting slow?!" Dean bellowed.
"My mind?! There's nothing wrong with my mind!" Sam yelled at the same time.
Both were silenced with a shout for quiet from Jody. Jody, who was the same age as them, and who had always seemed, somehow, to be a mother-figure to them both. Even with the miraculous return of their own mother many years ago, and her death from cancer, of all things, they had continued to look upon Jody as a mother-figure. So it was instinctive that they would fall silent when she barked for quiet. And when she continued in a sharp tone, reminding them of her own advancing age, and her use of a home nurse, they took on the universal look of all boys being scolded by their mothers. Both muttered a quiet, guilty, "sorry".
After that, the discussion became more civilized. The brothers turned to each other, discussing quietly the things they had noticed about each other, and their need for more help in their daily lives. Eventually, they arrived at the conclusion that an assisted living facility would be their best option. The moment they decided this, they turned to their family, and Alex immediately thrust a brochure at them. Of course, Dean took one look at the brochure, and rejected the place for being "full of old people!"
The next day, Sam dragged Dean to the place, and made him look around. At first, Dean whined and groaned. While walking through the building, however, Sam was distracted by the extensive library, leaving Dean alone in the hallway. When Sam finally pulled himself out of the library, it was to find Dean flirting with a female resident, a sprightly woman of 73 years. When Dean turned to Sam, they both saw a sparkle in the others' eyes.
"Alright," Dean muttered with a nod. Nothing more needed to be said