Tag to 11x23, but also a revisiting of many deaths and rebirths throughout the show. SPOILERS for all seasons. Dean's perspective.
And So We Are Born Again
Fire comes and it destroys, and from the ashes of a home in Lawrence, Kansas comes the first rebirth, the re-sewing, the folding of new skin, the forging of tougher bone: duty plucked from the lap of tragedy. Small hands curl around the baby in his arms, and Dean Winchester is so impossibly young and so terribly scared, but he understands. He is four years old, and he cannot be a child anymore.
He has to look after Sammy.
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It is later now, many years, and a knife slides into vertebrae and severs. There is screaming, a fall that lasts forever and no time at all and ends in open arms that search and find red and know but can never accept. Strong hands curl around the shoulders of the body in his arms, and Dean Winchester is so impossibly ruined and so terribly lost, for he cannot understand this. He is twenty-seven years old, and he is not a brother anymore.
And that cannot be true.
All it takes is a kiss at a crossroads for his soul to be marked. One year to save the world before it ends for him and for the one he saved, the one who must go on living. But for now, Dean walks into the room and sees Sam, and his little brother is moving and he is here again, and that will always be enough.
Sammy smiles, soft and fragile, and Dean holds him just a little too tight.
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It is Wednesday, and Dean does not remember the one hundred Tuesdays that came before. But he watches, sees the way his little brother scans every street corner twice, three times. Sees the set of Sam's shoulders and that look he got the one time Dean went to get breakfast and forgot to leave a note. Dean sees this, and tries his best not to disappear from sight for a while.
He doesn't remember, but Sammy does.
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Dean Winchester dies on a Friday, on the floor of a stranger's kitchen. Chest is ribbons, cheeks speckled in blood, eyes still so green but gone murky with the fogs of Hell. He misses the tears that fall from Sam's eyes, doesn't see what he has left behind. Spared that memory, but he is not spared Hell.
And Dean stays for forty years.
He wishes he had stayed forever, for he had only just learned how not to feel. But instead he rises once more, breathing dirt and crawling from the depths of a grave encircled in destruction for which he has no name but "bad news."
Remembering destroys quicker than flame, this rebirth born of vanished scars and added weight; another duty to take on. It is not as willingly upheld this time, for Dean already has too much to carry and where were the angels when he needed them? Rocks block a swollen throat, tears whispering against eyelashes but he is moving, has to keep moving with fluid stride and those eyes, dulled but green, lovely green- the color of a blooming earth. He supposes he will choose to carry on.
If only because Sammy is here.
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This new death is not his own, and somehow that makes it worse. It is the tearing of a soul, the rip, snag, break of reaching for a little brother locked too far away and already burning. A fall into the Pit to save the world before it ends for him and for the one he left behind, the one who cannot go on living. Still, Dean tries, a half-emergence of messy limbs and open wounds that ooze and bleed and cannot be repaired until the day Sam Winchester walks back through the door with a smile all wrong, a body without soul.
Dean falls back into the life he has always known, but he soon realizes that the man in the seat beside him is not the one he has been missing for so long.
Sammy is still burning, and Dean cannot survive until he fixes it.
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Death is smoother this next time, completely voluntary, a long syringe on a hard table that Dean barely feels when his head drops against it, breath whispering out of him in one, long huff. It is not forty years this time, not even four months. It is seven minutes on the other side, speaking with Death himself for a deal to save his brother again (because Sam is locked away and hurting and Dean needs him to come back).
Life swoops back into his lungs with decided intensity, an adrenaline shot to the heart. Dean plays Death's game and he fails a test rigged from the beginning, but somehow still, it is enough to make things right.
Sammy has come back to him.
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Purgatory isn't really death, body and soul travelling to the land of monsters on a pilotless plane, but Dean supposes it still counts. He doesn't remember the crash landing, just every single second after it—a year of dive and dodge, claw and scratch, slash and roll and just survive. This place stinks of death but it tastes of another rebirth, another duty he is all too willing to fulfill if it means doing what he was made to do. It is easy and it is right and one year burns away all the excess so that when he finally returns to a forest in Maine and a brother who didn't look, didn't search, didn't even…
his skin has been rubbed raw, nerves exposed and singing to the open air.
In time, Dean travels back to himself once again, remembers cheeseburgers and a soft kiss with a stranger and the road beneath his tires.
And he forgives Sammy.
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Fire again, and it burns bright and foul against the skin of his right forearm. Cain's Mark, the very one, branded deeper than bone. If a river were to run through him, he imagines it would boil and scream. He hopes this is just another reshaping of self, just a slight alteration that makes him strong enough to do the job- to kill a Knight of Hell. Not so deep down, he knows it is something worse.
Abaddon falls at his hand, too many strikes to an already dead corpse, and it is victory but he is not much better off than her and he meets Death again not too long after, hole in soul and blade in chest while his brother holds together all his messy pieces and tells him not to let go.
"I'm proud of us," Dean says with the last exhale he has, and it is the truth.
He thinks he feels Sammy catch him.
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Another rebirth comes, one he never asked for and never wanted. He is a phoenix from the ashes brought back one time too may, brought back with pitch-black eyes and the Devil's heart.
Dean remembers a hammer meeting wall, a little brother's head ducking just beneath it, just in time. He remembers wrists bound and blood shrieking and he does not want to remember anything else, anything but Sammy and Cas, standing in front of him with eyes wide and fists curled. They watch as springtime finally returns to black pupils flooded green, harsh dusk turned dawn at last. Dean wishes this felt like another new beginning, but he can feel the sticky taste of so many regrets, the strangled "what have I done?" forever curled beneath his tongue.
And still, a marked man, Cain's curse coursing through every artery.
It's removal comes a long time later and is instant weight lifted, new lightness that lasts only as long as it takes for the first plume of Darkness to break through the earth, black lightning crackling across a violet sky. The weight settles back across shoulders then, intimate and familiar, reeking of fault and blame and "Here We Go Again."
As Darkness closes in on what might be their last death, Dean looks at Sam.
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It all feels like déjà vu now, a record playing on repeat, doomed to play itself out. Dean wonders how many more rotations. Another one comes now. They have been spared from bigger evils, but one well-aimed bullet and Dean watches his little brother slump and fall with exaggerated slowness.
Dean does not leave him alone for long. Just for a moment, but that is all it takes to come back to a body without a heartbeat, a brother no longer breathing.
He forces death from a pill bottle this time, swallows quick and waits impatiently.
It's not even a choice. It just is.
Sam is gone, and Dean needs him back.
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After this, after all of this, they are both still here, and he is grateful. But when She comes back to him in dreams, black smoke billowing at his heels, licking at the remnants of his good intentions, Dean knows it will be another ending. One way or another.
He ignores it for as long as he can.
Time passes, monsters die at his hands, and a little brother still walks beside him, right where he has always belonged. The Darkness is out there, her touch leaving ugly marks across the world, pouring into the cracks of gray matter inside a head thrown against too many gravestones, but sometimes Dean doesn't have to remember that.
Until he does.
And of course. Of course it must be him, a nuclear bomb of souls to annihilate Amara; a weapon as he has always been. And just as it has always been, this choice is not a choice. But he wishes that this time, just this one time, it didn't have to be him. Or Sam. Let someone else take the reigns, let someone else fall to the flames and burn burn burn.
Dean looks down at his mother's gravestone because he cannot look at Sam, and he doesn't think this time will be like all the other times. No more feathers left on the phoenix, no more lives left to be reborn from flame.
Sammy folds impossibly small into his big brother's arms.
Dean closes his eyes and knows he won't be coming back.
How about that EW Magazine cover win, huh? If you haven't seen the spread yet, I recommend checking it out because it's really something. Anyway, here's my attempt at waiting out the last bit of Hellatus. Reviews are always welcome (duh)!