Preparing yourself for the worst thing that can happen doesn't make it any better.
It's weird, because Sam thought it would. After all, when you have a year to make a plan for moving on, getting over, adjusting, you think you would have a pretty solid plan.
But that's not quite how it works. Because no matter how many times people tell you that it's going to happen, no matter how much evidence to the fact you see, or stupid jokes about the inevitability of it all your brother cracks, there's no way to truly convince yourself that half of you is going to die.
To truly grasp and understand that that part of your life that you grew around, that you wormed yourself into and with, no matter how much they protested, is going to be totally, inexplicably, painfully, permanently gone.
Gone.
Gone, with capital letters, underscoring, circling, emphasizing.
Because no matter how you plan for it, no matter how many extra love yous, caring gestures and long, memorizing looks you take, there's no way of knowing or planning for what will actually slice you, or part of you, to ribbons.
Sam knows this. Knows this now. Now that Dean is lying in a pine box to his left, as he digs a six foot hole that is supposed to be the last mark his brother makes on the world.
Dean's amulet — for it will never be anything but Dean's — swings back and forth with his movements.
Safekeeping, he reminds himself, not inheriting.
It still carries traces of Dean's blood, as do his hands and the backseat of the Impala. Small, tangible reminders of existence. Insignificant, yet too important to wash away. Not yet.
He had thought he knew what grief was when he lost Jess, when he lost their dad. Thought he knew the dull, niggling ache of accusing regret.
Bobby had said again and again that it wasn't his fault, wasn't anyone's fault but Lilith's. That they had all tried to outwit the bitch, but no one had thought to look for her among their own. No one's fault, Sam, just how it happened.
But the little voice in the back of his head knew better. It knew how Sam could have saved Dean sooner if he hadn't been too scared to learn Ruby's tricks. It knew that Sam could've exorcised Lilith before she got her slimy hands on Dean if he had been paying attention instead of embracing the soaring, certain relief that they had outwitted her. It knew that everything would've been just fine if Sam had never allowed Jake to kill him.
Hell, it knew Dean would've been just fine if Sam had never been born in the first place.
So, Sam digs, and he curses and he plans and he achesachesaches because Sam was never meant to be without Dean. It was written in the chronicles of time and the accounts of the ages that SamandDean was never supposed to be just Sam.
He grunts as he maneuvers the box — not coffin — into the grave.
And then, he stands. Shocked and frozen. Because Dean's in that box. That coffin. This isn't a hole, it's a grave. The place where they put people to rot because they can no longer mean anything to those putting them there.
Sam knows Dean's in hell. God, he knows. And he shudders and shakes every time he thinks of it because there is nowhere worse for his brother to be.
Except for the place where he isn't. And Sam never fully understood, hasn't let himself stop enough to begin to. Because Dean is gone. Because there's a vacuum in the space he once occupied.
Because he expects Sam to carry on, to keep going with this black hole in his soul for the next 10, 15, 20 years.
Because there is no plan, there is no memory, no keepsake that can encompass the fact that two paths that once converged and entangled have ended their journey and one must continue on without the other. Onward into the unknowable darkness that is the future.
Alone.
There is no past to relive or present to savor.
There is just… After.
And Sam cries.