Disclaimer: Supernatural is totally under the Kripke's command. And he's doing an awesome damn job, so I won't be wresting control away any time soon.
A/N: 500 word (exactly!) tag to "All Hell Breaks Loose, Part I." Rated for the utterly realistic description of recently deceased body – so don't read it if you haven't experienced something like this before. I don't want to scar you. (smile)
LONG TIME, NO SEE
Dean knows death.
He knows death decades old, as dry dusty bones with the flesh long gone. He knows death younger, with desiccated skin and the remnants of life hanging on in the form of clothes and hair and items tucked by loved ones into coffins.
He knows death, newly made, born out of gasping breaths and blood gurgling deep in lungs, spilling out over straining lips trying to speak, or breathe, or continue on.
He's wanted to know the death of spirits, blasting or burning away in salt and fire. He's wanted to know the deaths of creatures that hunt man, in silver or iron or holy water; he's come as the collector for enough that he knows the look in their eyes.
He's known his own death, intimate as a Reaper's gentle caress, and just as cold.
Dean has made it his life, so that he'll never have to know Sam's death.
Slamming into the mud, he catches his brother as Sam drops to his knees, hearing soft noises of pain panted out from between parted lips. The rain has gone, but his face is still wet –
No, Dean thinks, as if the force of his denial can keep it away.
The other kid is gone, Bobby chasing after.
"Sam!"
He doesn't know it, when it happens. Not consciously. Dean has seen enough people die to know that there is no such thing as a light in their eyes, and you cannot see when it fades. He's handled enough fresh bodies to know that the heat of life stays with them, even after the soul warming their flesh has fled. So for a short time, he can pretend.
Not long, though.
Because it was always the limpness of the bodies that betrayed their state, more than anything else.
There's something about life, even slammed into oblivion, that screams I am here! once you lean in close. It's the way that, even knocked ruthlessly unconscious, there is still tension to certain muscles, keeping the head upright, the limbs in their sockets.
The dead don't have that built-in preservation. They don't need it.
Sam doesn't either.
Clutched in his arms, Dean can't grip tight enough to hold Sam's soul into his brother's body – and more than the cessation of warm breath against his neck, he feels Sam go, in the way all the tension drips out of him. In the way his brother relaxes impossibly, settling against him as baby Sammy used to, soothed into deep sleep by the brother curled around him at night.
Dean can fool himself for a little while, in the warmth of his brother, in that he can't see if Sam's eyes are open and staring or just shuttered in a wince of pain.
But it doesn't last.
The scream rips out of him, falling on ears that are no longer listening. "SAM!"
For a long time, Dean can't see beyond that moment.
What am I supposed to do! What am I supposed to do?!
Fin
