Disclaimer: Still nothing belongs to me. Darn it.
A/N: This is a tag to "All Hell Breaks Loose, Part I". If you haven't seen the ep yet, be warned there are spoilers ahead, so you might want to wait to read it (you should not even read the rest of the warning!). I have no idea what Part II is going to do, but this reflects the end of Part I and so is not exactly upbeat. All reviews/constructive critcism gratefully accepted.
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The Way The World Ends
He sort of remembered how the poem went. Something about some saying the world ends in fire, some in ice. Sammy would be—would have been—amazed to learn his philistine of an older brother knew any poetry at all. Some of the stuff, though, wasn't half bad.
It had been Mrs. Palmer, his English teacher in seventh grade, who had opened his eyes to poetry. Okay, he had partly paid attention because Mrs. Palmer had been, to a thirteen-year old, the epitome of female hotness. But she had been cool, too, not stuffy or inflexible. And she didn't choose girly poetry that always made him gag. She picked stuff about war and knights on quests—he had always thought of his Dad when he read those poems—and destruction and things that go bump in the night and the end of the world. He always read those last ones very carefully, because he knew all about how the world ended.
The world ended in fire. He just knew that back then. Because his certainly had. It had been fire that had killed his Mom. And his Dad. Yeah, John Winchester had continued to breathe and walk and eat, and he had learned to hunt, but the father who had played baseball with him and hugged him and who had loved him not only when he bulls-eyed every shot, that man had burned in the same fire that killed Mary Winchester.
Fire had taken his home, his security, his childhood. So he knew damn well that the world ended in fire.
But he had been wrong. The world really ended in ice. In the chill of his brother's body as it cooled even as Dean held him and rocked him and begged him not to leave. In the cold of the mud in which they knelt as the ice seeped into his very bones. In the icy emptiness in his heart and the cold loneliness of the road that stretched before him. In the frosty silence that surrounded him, now and forever bereft of laughter or love or warmth.
Everything that had ever mattered to him was gone, stolen away by the darkness that lurked behind every splash of sunlight, and he was alone. Abandoned yet again, however unwillingly. For nothing. A life of fighting evil that left the Winchesters outcast among humans, hunted by those they had tried to save, and which had ultimately ended in total defeat. He had been right and Sam had been wrong. There was no God, no greater good and, in the end, no purpose to anything.
He knew Bobby was right. He should burn Sam's body to keep it safe from supernatural predators. But Sam was just lying there, on the bed, looking more asleep than anything else and some small, desperate, crazed part of him kept waiting for his little brother to wake up. If the end of the world were around the corner, as Bobby believed, well, then, he could wait for Sam to wake up until then.
And the one thing he was really sure of was that he would not burn in Hell when the end came. Because he was already in Hell.
And it was cold.
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A/N: The last 30 seconds of this ep knocked my socks off.. Bravos all around. Please let me know what you thought of the story.