Title: There But for the Grace of God
Summary: And, just for a moment, watching his brother sleep in a lonely motel room, Dean understands.
A/N: So more pre-S5 stuff. This one is a Dean POV vignette, set right after the events of the finale. I wrote it quite awhile ago but just now got around to posting. The usual crew needs to be thanks: sendintheclowns and geminigrl11 because they motivated me, keep me in check, and are generally made of awesome. This will be a busy posting week for me, so I hope you all aren't sick of me yet :)
Disclaimer: Nope. Not mine.
-o-
It's nearly two in the morning, and the motel room is hot. The air conditioning unit doesn't work, but grinds uselessly anyway, but Dean knows it's not the heat that keeps him awake.
They drove as far as they could, before Sam made them pull off at a remote field. His brother hadn't said much, and Dean hadn't found the words to break the silence just yet. They burned a body from the trunk, and Dean still doesn't want to know where it came from, who it was. He'd felt sick enough by then that to find the next motel and stop them for the night.
He sends Sam to bed with an economy of words. Sam, for his part, doesn't protest, but obeys with an efficiency not common to his brother. Within minutes, he's curled up and asleep, and Dean finds himself alone.
It's a common feeling. Even with the people in his life, with Bobby and Castiel and Sam, Dean doesn't know who they are, really, and he doesn't know who he is. He wonders if maybe he just doesn't want to know, because the more he finds out, the more it sounds like the same tired story. Epic missions, monumental failures. The one who broke in Hell; the one who is supposed to save the world.
Dean couldn't save himself. Dean couldn't save the world when it counted. Dean couldn't even save Sam.
He sighs, and tries to forget the white light of Lucifer, and tries not to think about how that is just as much his failure as it is Sam's. He should have stopped Sam; his first mistake was to trust his brother at all. He should have recognized it sooner, called Sam on the signs of his downfall harder, locked him up, thrown away the key, and made sure that Sam couldn't wreak havoc on anyone besides himself.
His life is full of should-haves, and it just makes him feel tired.
Sam is still sleeping in the bed next to him, tightly wound into a ball as if he could pull himself even deeper into the void where he's been tucking pieces of himself for years now. Dean thinks he should have seen it earlier, should have seen it years ago, should have seen it when Sam was only fourteen and just so unhappy. Dean wonders when more of Sam was missing than right in front of him, but then he knows he shouldn't, knows he never should have had to ask when it happened, but if anyone understands, it's Dean.
Dean understands the grief that knows no bounds. The weight of failure, the burden of loss. Dean saw Sam murdered before his eyes and, for Dean, the entire world existed and broke on that point. It was all there was, the only thing that mattered, and it was about love and it was about duty and it was just about the fact that there was nothing else without Sam. It led him to a crossroads where he sold his soul without a second thought.
In the days and weeks and months that followed, it was easy to let the fear of Hell cover that, to let the rising sense of dread fill him up until he couldn't remember what it was like to hold his brother's cooling body in his arms. It was easy to be afraid of fire and brimstone so he didn't have to think about the possibility of a life without Sam, of a world where protecting Sam was only a failed mission. Now, when he died, he could do it right, he could do it first, and he could pretend like he was a hero for it, and not the scared little boy that he was.
Because he had been scared. Scared of dying, scared of Hell; but mostly scared of life without Sam, which was what had started him on this path to begin with.
Time in Hell was long and hard, more than he could have ever imagined, and he feels like the demons pulled apart his soul, piece by piece, until all the parts of him were broken and spent. Castiel put him back together, but it's like the pieces don't quite fit, and not even the months since he dug his way out of that grave in Pontiac can make that any different.
Four months or forty years or forty lifetimes. Dean doesn't know; Dean doesn't want to care. Time is a relative thing, he sees now, as the past year on earth seems like an even worse eternity than those grueling decades in Hell. Sure, there's moments of joy--a juicy cheeseburger, a cold beer, a pretty girl--but there's Hell on earth, demons and angels and a brother he doesn't even know anymore.
It's hard to be mad at the demons, when he still feels the prick of fear every time he sees one. It's hard to be mad at the angels, when he still feels a surge of relief every time he talks to one. But it's so easy to be mad at Sam, the brother he died for, the brother who took his second chance and threw it all away, for nothing.
And, really, for worse than nothing. For a demon who lied to him, who manipulated him, who led Sam down the path until Sam was begging for more. The brother who was still more monster than human, if Dean's instincts were right, and the brother he could never trust again. No matter how much Sam reigns himself back in, Dean knows that unequivocally. Some things can't be forgiven. Dean can love, but Dean can never trust, and he understands his father's last words for what they are: an order for Dean and a sentence for Sam. Perhaps Sam's say in this was negated from the day his mother made a deal, maybe it is all Sam's fault after all, but that doesn't change how much Dean misses the idea of family and what it used to mean.
Family when it was his saving grace. More than any angel or higher being; it was all he had and all he needed. Hunting together, living together, dying together.
A naive dream, though, and Dean can see it for the dangerous hope that it is. That it led his mother and his father before him to the crossroads, where they all gave themselves up in the name of one another, and let the rest continual the cycle of grief and regret. Mourn, refuse, overcome: then it's someone else's problem.
Sam, though. Sam was the last of the line. There were no deals left to make, there were no quick fixes left for him to find. Just the endless years of alone that every Winchester before him had fallen victim to and no cure in sight.
Then Dean remembers. Watching his brother, brow furrowed even in sleep, Dean remembers. He remembers the crushing weight of his father's deal, but how it was nothing in comparison to the loss of Sam, the loss of the hope that Sam represented. It was nothing to do with hypocrisy and everything to do with a desperate man.
And, just for a moment, watching his brother sleep in a lonely motel room, Dean understands. Dean understands why they burned a dead woman. Dean understands why Sam took that first drink of blood. Dean understands why Sam had to believe Ruby. Dean understands why Lucifer is walking free.
Sam's sins are great and many, but boil down to the same Winchester flaw: the inability to move on. To let go. Sam took the darkness of their mother's death, the regrets of their father's, the guilt of Jessica's, the utter loss of Dean's, and sold himself piece by piece, slowly but surely until there was nothing left. The man in front of Dean now is nothing but a shell, a hollow echo of the man Sam once was, and that's not a betrayal, Dean realizes: it's a tragedy.
For the first time in a long time, Dean's soul aches, but not for himself. Not even for the world. But for his brother, who lost so much and got no easy out.
And as he watches Sam sleep, for a moment, Dean doesn't care about the apocalypse, he doesn't care about the demon blood, he doesn't care about any of it. Because he remembers the feeling of Sam's body slumped against him, the final exhale of his brother's breath, and the sudden realization that he was alone. He doesn't know how far he would have gone, but he knows that for those days without Sam, nothing was off limits.
Dean closes his eyes, clenches his teeth. When he opens them again, he looks at Sam, looks at his brother, and thinks, there but for the grace of God go I.