A/N: For those of you following my Three Reasons AU, I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while. Life got crazy and I will be getting back to Rem and the boys when the inspiration strikes me. Until then, here is a little piece to tide you over. This is not set particularly in that AU, nor is it really canon, but it came to me and I had to write it, so there. Thanks for reading and please review :)
For a while, After, Dean is never quite sure what is real.
It seems his life is always to be divided up, sectioned and fragmented into Befores and Afters.
Before the fire. After Mom.
Before Stanford. After he gave up the single most important thing in his life.
Before Cold Oak. After his soul flickered and died with his baby brother's last breath in his very own arms.
Before Hell.
After.
This After is different. This After, this horrible blank emptiness overlaid with the joke of living, has nothing to do with losing Sam. This time he is the one who left died he died and most days he doesn't know if he's all there anymore. Maybe there are too many pieces of himself now, and there isn't enough left in this After to let him live again.
He doesn't think he remembers how to live again.
But Sam remembers. Sam guides him when he forgets. Sam takes the first bite of every meal, with Dean watching wearily, because it's hard to remember how to eat when everything tastes like ash. Sam circles those broad, square fingers around Dean's too thin wrist and lifts the hand holding a fork full of food to his mouth. And Dean chews, and whatever it is tastes less like it's been recently removed from a crematorium.
Sam puts the socks on his feet every day, because Dean has been cold so long that he can't even feel it anymore. But he feels warmth. He feels the way Sam's hands are hot with the miracle of blood flowing under the skin when they squeeze Dean's numb ones, just for a second.
Sam reaches across Dean's still body for the remote and switches on the TV when Dean would stare at nothing. Sam sits too close to him and huffs in laughter at all the right places when Dean is silent. Sam falls heavy and warm on Dean's shoulder when it is too late and the TV still glows blue in the dark and they should both be asleep.
When Dean wakes gasping and panicked and unsure of reality, with the shadows and fire of Hell licking at the edges of the room, he rolls over and finds Sam. Because, no matter what nightmares and visions, delusions, plague him, Sam is always always constant.
Even the ingenuity of Hell hadn't been able to conjure exactly what made his brother so Sam. There had been a never-ending parade of not-Sam's. And physically, yes, they were practically perfect. But Dean hadn't been fooled, not for one iota of a second. He can't put his finger on why he knew, nothing about the not-Sam's had shouted demon, but he thinks the fact that they hadn't been able to use Sam against him is the only things that kept him spitting in Alistair's face day after day for thirty years.
Sam doesn't know this, any of it. But in those strange not quite waking hours when Dean can't lose himself to sleep, he lays there and watches the washed-out light of the television play over Sam's dear face.
And it's no wonder, really, that Hell could never get Sam exactly right. How could they possibly corrupt such imperfect beauty? The intricacy of hundreds of single eyelashes, feathered together, glinting in the dull light. The exact slope of Sam's nearly straight nose. The perfect Sam curve of those lips, the lower just the tiniest fraction fuller than the upper. The stubborn set to that chin, so much like Dad's like Dean's. The careless flop of that almost curly brown hair.
Hell could never weaponize Sam's memory, never breach and poison that last precious place in Dean's mind, in his heart. Because no matter what anyone—even Sam himself—says, Sam is good. Sam is pure.
Sam is all the good of Dean, and some of the bad, too, and Sam is the only thing Dean has ever done completely right. This Dean knows for certain.