On the few occasions Dean would speak of fear (i.e. whilst drunk, possessed, or otherwise forcibly stripped of masculinist boundaries) it would concern belief that everybody left him, everyone would carry on without him someday (MomDadYouCasLisa) and he didn't know how to be alone. Sam never imagined people left him. He wouldn't deserve that. He left. People died, not because they meant to. On the contrary, it usually seemed to surprise them. They died because it turned out that King Lear was right, way back in freshman English, and the Heavens were not cruel.
They were indifferent.
It had been years since they'd seen the angels. After Dean, he'd tried on a few occasions to contact Castiel. Either Cas was – whatever happened to angels when they ceased existing – or, like the rest of them, he had simply lost interest in the doings of Earth, and returned to the higher plane of existence on which he'd spent the first billion or so years of his being. Sam didn't quite believe that. Perhaps he just didn't want to. It would be nice to see Cas again though. He'd forgive him.
They'd both lived a long time for this life. Relatively speaking. Forty was old in hunter terms, and after the gates were closed, they'd had a good three years of something approaching peace and routine and things being – easy. Sort of easy. Alone, now, things were harder. Sam was thirty-eight, in terrestrial terms, but a lifetime of running and fighting and getting hit over the head with blunt objects turned out to be cumulative in its effects. Getting harder to get out of bed in the winter. But the dog got him up. He supposed that was a good thing, feeling indifferent about life in general, to have a dog to get you out of bed. The dog had turned up a few months after Dean died, starving and flea-ridden and collarless. He hadn't adopted her. He put some food out, and maybe left the shed door open on cold nights. The dog hung around and filled out some. Grew back a little fur. Didn't seem to mind being called 'dog' when he couldn't quite manage to think up a better name. Couldn't leave her outside November.
Funny he'd never thought Dean would die. Not permanently. Everyone else, okay, fair enough, but maybe they'd simply defied the odds one too many times. Or maybe in that one respect he was just not quite sane (the most crazy, tangled-up thing I've ever seen in my life) and expected a different result for no logical reason. If life was sad because people died, that meant life itself should be valuable. Dean had lived like life was valuable, Sam guessed. Sure, he was an insecure passive-aggressive semi-alcoholic fuckup, but he liked people and food and his car and sex and he'd loved Sam. Intensely. Complicatedly, unhealthily, but without reservation, and it turned out that Sam alone was less functional than perhaps he'd imagined he'd be. Perhaps he should take the dog, go down to the town tomorrow. But why? The goddamn difficult thing wasn't pain, it was indifference, being left behind under indifferent heavens in a world free of demons and all the people who had died, come and gone out of a life, some life, hadn't he earned the chance to a little happiness?
But that was the bitch, wasn't it? You didn't earn. The universe didn't owe you shit, and it didn't hate you either. You saved the world, three or four times, and the sun kept rising and falling and the weather traipsed through irregular seasons, and wars were fought and babies born and the nights were quiet out here.
The dog didn't mind. She was sleeping.