Because He Could Not Stop for Death...
..she kindly stopped for Dean...
It was the empty bed that bothered him the most. The plainness of it, the sameness, the wrongness. No rumpled blankets, no wrinkled sheets, no 6'4" frame crammed untidily corner to corner across it. It never changed and the static of it was maddening. Even on hunts when they were tracking from opposite angles, there was always some proof of life: wadded up balls of clothes in the corner, steam in the shower, blood on the sheets. Something.
The second night he tossed his duffle on other bed just so he had something besides the unmussed avocado bedspread to stare at. So that in the finite period of time between waking and remembering Sammy was gone, and the seconds it took to reach for the whiskey bottle, he could fool himself into feeling a little less alone. On the third night he tugged at the covers to expose the clean, flat sheets, arranged the pillows the way Sammy liked them (piled side to side, so he could roll over and burrow in the middle of the night, like he had since he was old enough not to smother himself) and left the whole mess hoping it would buy him a few more seconds in that twilight place between dream and grief. By the end of the week, when his phone was finally silent of even Bobby's calls, he ventured out to find someone, anyone, to fill the growing pit inside himself.
The bar was like any other dive bar he'd ever been in over the years, maybe a little dirtier, a little greasier than the average, but no place that he couldn't sit his ass on a bar stool and not feel welcome in. If he had wanted to feel welcome anywhere right now. Mostly, he just wanted more liquor and a nice rack to get lost in. The liquor was cheap enough or he was just pitiful enough that the barmaid, a cute brunette with a tiny frame that reminded him just a bit too much of Jo Harvelle for him to feel entirely comfortable, took whatever bills he threw uncounted on the bar and kept the bottle tipped over his shot glass until last call. The rack came attached to a blonde with a rocking little body in a tight Ramone's t shirt and jeans that were painted on, but a smile that revealed teeth like a picket fence. He decided if he just bent her over the hood of the Impala it wouldn't matter if she smiled at him or not.
Dean excused himself to the rest room and splashed cold water from a rusting faucet onto his face. He stared at the wide eyes and sunken cheeks that looked at him from the cracked mirror and didn't recognize his own reflection. Behind him, a urinal flushed and he ducked his head to the faucet again. When he came back up, swiping his wet hands through his close cropped hair, the largest biker he had ever seen wedged himself between Dean and the door and paused a moment to look at him.
"Dude," the biker said, one hand on the door handle, "Whatever you're doing to yourself, a bullet would be faster." He looked as though he might say more, then maneuvered his bulk through the door and into the anemic light of a bar breaking down for the night.
Dean followed a short time later, the smell of the urinal following him into the narrow walkway where he wrinkled his nose in distaste. Scrubbing hard at his face, he paused a moment to watch that amazing ass kneel on a bar stool, idly pivoting back and forth in boredom as she waited for him. He scratched roughly at his hair and realized he hadn't showered all week, his hair spikey and lank under his fingers. Most jarring was the realization that the odor in the narrow hallway wasn't coming entirely from the bathroom, either, and the stink of a weeks worth of cheap whiskey and night sweats clung to him like the stench of sulphur. Sammy would be downright embarrassed to be seen with him right now. He wasn't so far gone as to realize that the only kind of girl who would go home with a man in his condition was probably not the sort of girl he should probably bring home. He flipped up the collar on his leather jacket and quietly slipped out the back entrance. There are few things worse than being stood up on a date, but being stood up on a one night stand was certainly one of them. This was the sort of crap he'd pull when he was seventeen, but now he was just too tired to care. The Impala rumbled to life around him as he left behind that amazing ass and the rack that came with it twisting by herself on a frayed bar stool.
Just like the bed had all week, the passenger side of the Impala sang with wrongness as he drove back from the bar. This wasn't something making a phone call could fix. There was no driving the next town over, or even three states away to collect his little brother and get on with the next case. No amount of waiting for Sammy to get his head out of his ass and decide he was a member of the family after all was going to put him back in that seat. Dean couldn't sell his soul, his car, or his left nut to make this right. He couldn't even pass a fucking drive thru without thinking he should pick Sasquatch up a salad and a Diet Coke. So he didn't eat. What he did decide, as he stumbled through the hotel room door an hour before and caught another whiff of himself, was that he didn't want his corpse stinking up the place even before he had started to decay.
Dean balanced in the shower while the water made the lazy transition from scalding to arctic, palms flat against the tile in front of him and head bent. It sluiced down the sides of his face and pooled under his nose, forcing him to take gasping, shallow breaths or risk drowning. He only dragged himself out of the tub to stand on the chipped linoleum when he noticed the white noise in his head start to quiet. He wasn't particularly interested in sobering up, although the threat of it lingered at the corner of his consciousness, it was just that inside the buzz in his head there seemed to be this small still place of clarity and he wanted to take a moment to explore it.
There was no fixing this. Sammy was gone. Dead and gone. And not even to an eternal Thanksgiving dinner in the sky, or to spend eternity with cold pizza and a stray dog, or anywhere else he could imagine Sammy wanting to be. He was in the Pit. And Dean knew that if he thought his own tour of duty in Hell had been bad, Sammy's was a whole universe full of worse. Dean had been one of many souls sliced and diced and left to rot on the rack, but Sammy had the full and undivided attention of two of the biggest pricks to ever grace Eternity. How could he have let him say yes? Their malingering had cost them precious time. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. The what if's rattled around in his head like loaded dice. Maybe if Dean had agreed to be Michael's vessel, they could at least have had each other. It's not like it would have been the first time they'd had their asses handed to them in stereo. Instead, Dean felt like he had condemned Sam to a long and lonely road with no one there to walk it with him. The bottom line was; he had let Sammy down.
Dean took the clean clothes he had hung for himself off the hook on the back of the door and dressed, his mind still wandering, imagining Sam in that Place. His tender hearted brother, the one who could never intentionally hurt a thing, the one who would almost rather take a beating than give one, the one who had turned his face away in distaste when they had bled those demons dry. Bled them so Sammy would have enough mojo to welcome Lucifer in and not incinerate on the spot. Sammy, the one who had wanted nothing more than to leave this infernal life behind and marry a nice girl and have a nice life had become one of the monsters. He would spend the rest of his immortal life being tormented by them, and Dean would spend the rest of his immortal life being haunted by the fact he had had one job. "Take care of your brother, Dean." And he had failed. Dean was good at fixing things. He could fix his car, he could exorcise a demon, he had even managed to bring Sammy back from the dead a time or two, but there was just no fixing this one.
There was no where left to go. Nothing left to do. After a week, the only comfort he had was the heft of his .45 and the weight of a whiskey bottle, and now even the whiskey bottle was getting light on him.
It wasn't so much a solution as all he had left. For a moment he felt bad-there would be blood splatter. Someone was going to have to clean up after him and he'd mostly likely ruin a perfectly good hotel room. He considered finishing the job in the tub, but decided he at least deserved to go out sitting up. Like a man. Like a Hunter.
The things civilians don't think about.
The click and slide of the clip was unnerving in the silence of the room. It was a jarring reminder of what he was leaving behind and how he was getting there. The chambering of a round was too loud after the soft rustle and scratch of the pen against the paper. The note, written in tidy script on hotel stationery and detailing the disposition of his remains sat propped on the tv, away from ground zero. He didn't want any grey matter tying his corpse up in red tape. His few belongings were already in the Impala waiting for Bobby to dispose of as he saw fit. He wanted the shortest route to getting his body back to Bobby for a good salting and burning, so the note detailed his own need for a quick end after his brother's death from a lingering illness (what else could you call a possession, really). He counted on this little podunk police department to only perform a perfunctory autopsy and release him within a day or two. The clean up would take longer than the investigation.
A second letter, to Lisa, sat next to Bobby's, folded neatly in an envelope waiting for Bobby to mail. After a moment of thought, he slid two quarters next to it for postage. He had less to say to her, but felt he at least owed her some kind of an explanation. Especially after the last time he had showed up on her doorstep. He didn't mention anything about where he was going, only that she and Ben would be safe, and he wished them a good life. It all sounded trite and contrived, but he didn't have any better way to say what was on his mind. Sammy had always been the one good with words.
He picked up Sammy's 9 mm, the only thing of his he had kept after Detroit, and weighed it against his own .45, one in each hand. Ah, the debates that had raged over those two guns.
"Bigger isn't always better," Sammy had said.
Dean had grunted. "Yeah, says Sasquatch."
He considered using Sammy's gun to finish the job, but then decided it would be like spitting in a dead man's face after he had promised Sam he'd make a life somewhere.
He paused a moment after slipping the safety off his weapon, adjusted a moment in his chair, as though comfort mattered. Paused again.
"Are you here?" he called out to the air. "I," he didn't know what to say, how to call Death's emissary out, but for some reason it was suddenly important to know he wasn't dying alone. "I know you're there. You don't have to hide from me."
There was a rush of air, like angel wings, spring breezes, and cold winter nights. And then she was there. Her black hair still hung down her back thick and straight, a black leather jacket over a grey silk shirt and jeans. Casual Friday for Death's Fedex girl. Her grey eyes regarded him without empathy or animosity, although her lips tipped upward in the hint of a smile.
"Tessa," he said, setting both weapons back on the table.
"Dean," she crossed her arms as she slid into the chair opposite him. After a moment of silently watching each other, she shrugged out of the jacket and hung it across the back of her chair, as casual as any friend settling in for a visit.
"So, you're here." Dean leaned forward and rested a hand on each gun, as though Tessa needed a quiet reminder of why she had come. "Is this where you say 'I told you so'?"
Tessa pursed her lips and looked chagrined. "Why would I do that, Dean? What purpose would it serve?"
Dean shrugged, sat back in his chair in an angry slouch. "You were right, you know." He stared at her, perhaps trying to find some lost part of himself in her face, before waving a gun around carelessly, as one might gesture with a drink in their hand. "The angels didn't have anything good planned for me. I'm just kind of like the girl who got passed around at the party."
His lips thinned out into an angry line, and Tessa could see two little dimples form under the scruff of his beard. "Did you know? Did you know what they had planned and you just let me and Sammy walk into it like a couple of assholes stomping on a hornets nest?"
Tessa pondered him silently for a moment. There was nothing left to him but hurt, his soul as flayed as any body stripped down to muscle and sinew. He'd been wounded when she had seen him a year ago on his spirit walk. Wounded, but like a soldier that didn't know how to stay down no matter how many bullets he took. This man was ready to lay down on the battle field and put the gun to his own head.
"I didn't know anything, Dean," she said, with a small shake of her head. "It was an educated guess. I know the nature of angels, and rarely do they ever have the best interests of humanity in mind. It was a fair assumption they didn't have your, or Sam's, best interest in mind, either. We're all just tools to them. You, me, and sometimes even each other."
Dean nodded, if not satisfied with the answer at least unwilling to expend anymore energy on the subject. "So, does that mean, yknow, this is 'it'?" Tessa always left him feeling...unbalanced. Today, she was a cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless, even if she didn't have the answers he wanted.
"It's your choice, Dean. And while technically I can't interfere, I have a soft spot for you." She leaned forward a moment and inclined her head, mirroring his posture. "Or, you could call it professional courtesy." She sat back, crossed her legs and folded her hands neatly in her lap. Eyes that had seen the fall of Rome watched him carefully. For a moment he had a dizzying vision of falling into her irises and watching the birth of stars before his hand clutched the engraved metal of his .45 and he snapped back into himself. Snapped back into his own thoughts like startling awake from a dream of falling.
"I'm out of choices, Tessa." Restlessly, he set down his gun then picked it up again from the table, rested it in his lap without taking his hand off it. "But, I'm glad it's you."
"I called in a favor or two. You're still the one who got away, Dean. Whether you come with me today or a century from now, it will always be me who leads you from one life to the next." She sat perfectly still, her voice like a calm lake.
"I'm ok with that." He looked confused for a moment, glancing to the right and left of himself. "Wait a second, I'm not, I didn't...I'm not dead already, am I?" Whoa, wouldn't that be like eating the last cookie in the box without realizing it.
"No." She smiled indulgently at him, as one would smile at a child who had just discovered something the rest of the world took for granted. "Let's just say, the die has been cast, but hasn't landed yet. You're still breathing, you haven't even clicked the safety off, from what I can see. But Dean," the smooth surface of her voice now seemed to eddy with an emotion Dean wasn't used to hearing from a Reaper. She sounded sad, almost regretful. "Oh Dean, the despair weighs on you like the earth already weighs heavy on your grave. I saw you when you wanted to live. I met you when the door should have closed on your soul without a moments hesitation and you kept it open by sheer force of will. But now, there's nothing. There's nothing left inside you, nothing for you here. But me."
"Was that supposed to be a pep talk? Because wow, lady..." Dean dipped his head and twisted it side to side, a habit she had noticed the first time she had met him, as though he were trying to shake his thoughts into some kind of sensible order.
"No pep talk. Just the truth. Remember, I can't interfere, so I'm just stating the facts." She leaned forward, fingers laced together between them, and held his gaze. "You are so etched with despair you can already feel your own death creeping along the edge of your soul. The soul that would rather have killed me," she held her hand up when he opened his mouth to object, "I know you wouldn't now, Dean, your objections are unnecessary. But the soul that would have killed me then, if you knew how to kill a Reaper, rather than cross over, would now curl in on itself and be led away like a lamb to the slaughter."
She was right. He had been dying slowly for years, really. Famine had said as much to him, back when Sammy was still alive and such things mattered. If he had been empty then, he was even emptier now. He felt like a nameless, faceless void inside himself. Skin stretched painfully over a sucking black hole. He had already made his decision. He clicked the safety off. It felt like all the best parts of him had fallen into that pit with Sammy and now he was just empty. All a bullet would do is shake loose that last little scrap that was still hanging on, like a withered vine to the stone wall of his mind.
"Do you usually," Dean scrubbed at his face with his free hand, his movements slow and heavy. "Do you see them-" he waved the gun at her, "yknow..."
"Do I usually witness the death?" She finished for him. Dean nodded.
Her manner was quiet and calm, the expectant waiting of someone unbothered and untouched by the myriad pains of human existence. She had taken infants and old men to her with the same passive grace as she had stood on battlefields and collected the bloody and confused souls still too shell shocked to object to the abrupt nature of her appearance or their departure. She moved through the world unfettered by human uncertainty, and yet, there was something about Dean Winchester that caused tremors in the eternal calm of her existence.
"Sometimes," she finally answered, "I just...instinctively...know when a soul is ready to be collected. I may arrive a little early or a little late, but the timing is irrelevant to the turning of the Universe so long as I do arrive. It's much as a farmer knows when it's time to harvest his wheat, and all that matters is that he does so before the field starts to go fallow."
She watched Dean, her face steady, unchanging. "If you're asking if I'll be bothered by it," she flicked a finger toward the gun in his hand to indicate what 'it' she was talking about. "No."
Tessa didn't elaborate that the physical detritus of the human condition wouldn't effect her as much as the thought of Dean's body as broken as his spirit. It caused a physical ache she couldn't quite identify.
She had meant what she had said. Even when his human body had been on the brink of death, his spirit had fought her off with a determination she hadn't seen before or since from any of the many souls she collected. But here, now, his body whole and healthy, she knew he didn't even need the human weapon he held in his hand. His spirit was so shattered by the loss of his brother that he could very well lie down in the bed now and be dead in a day or two. A gentle brush of her consciousness against his, the same way she had known to appear to him as a pretty brunette four years ago, now only found the crumbling warren of a broken spirit.
He looked up, as though suddenly inspired. "Were you with him? Were you there, with Sammy?"
Her face didn't change, but her eyes flicked downward for a moment. "Sam didn't die. He was removed from the world outside the natural order of things. None of us were with him. All he had was you."
She watched his eyes go glassy. It was almost more heartbreaking than if he had collapsed in a sodden mess at her feet. Inside her, a tide slowly rose. Centuries of calm ebbing and flowing in the presence of this man who had intrigued her since the day he grasped her hard and pulled her away from his body. She could have taken him by force, if she had wanted, but that wasn't her style.
She reached out a hand to touch his human frailty. To offer a seemingly human comfort as she had that night in the hospital room, the first time he should have died. The first time he slid through the cracks in the natural order of things. Dean turned his head into her touch and she felt his human warmth against her palm. Felt a salty tear seep into her skin and his breath huff out in a rush along her wrist. When his shoulders shook with quiet sobs it seemed natural for her to kneel before him, offer what comfort she could and hold him as she had seen humans do for each other.
"Why," the other Reaper, Jacob, had asked her. "Why do you want this one when he isn't even yours?"
"He was mine, once," she had replied. She had no other reply because she had no other explanation. The whole of the Universe shook with the damning of Lucifer and Michael, and Sam Winchester with them. Even as she continued to collect souls, her awareness of Dean Winchester's time approaching had niggled at the back of her consciousness until she had approached his Reaper, slipped herself out of space and time to hold that place for Dean. To take him if he needed her, to release him if the flame of life rekindled in his damp soul.
"You cannot interfere." Jacob had reminded her. "You cannot tilt the scales to collect a soul you lost, and you cannot weigh them elsewise to save a soul you owe."
"Release him to me, then," she had bargained. Bargained for the soul of a man who had only touched her once, twice, and left her pondering his existence the way even emperors had never impressed her. "Release him to me now so that whenever his time comes, he is mine to collect. Then this droplet in the lake of time will be irrelevant, his passing or his remaining unrelated to my intentions."
Jacob had shrugged, waved a hand vaguely in her direction as though the whole matter was unimportant. "He's yours. But for neither vengeance nor kindness. His fate-"
"Is his own." She finished for him. "His thread has already been shorn and tied and unraveled and still he's connected to both the mortal realm and beyond. Even if I had considered violating the natural order of things, he's already done that well enough on his own." She winked herself out of existence in one place and rethought herself here, in this room, as Dean scribbled his final words to the last two people who meant anything to him. She didn't need to be told how to do her job, even if this particular man caused her to step to the left of her usual job description.
It was impossible to tell who moved first, Dean's sobbing breath hot gainst her neck, her fingers slipping through his still damp hair in a mimicry of human comfort. The scent of the hotel soap was sharp to her, his own scent just underneath something between the smell of summer rain and good whiskey. His lips on hers startled both of them and she had just enough time to wonder how far this was crossing a line before she felt his tongue slip between her gasping lips.