Author Notes: This is officially the Chrissie Lost a Bet to Nova story, if anyone is keeping score at home, and has been slowly coming together since October. And when I say slowly, I mean sloooowly. It's being built upon a list of 11 prompts given to me as a result of my defeat in wordly battle, and should be my standard 8-10 chapters when completed. Yes, I'm posting WIP - *pauses for raising of pitchforks* - and as usual, the prompts will be revealed at the end of the story.

For our boys, there will be an abundance of both emotional and physical pain, and for you readers, there will not be TOO much lag time between chapters. Hopefully. *knocks on wood*

This story takes place between Abandon All Hope and Sam, Interrupted, and so follows roughly the same timeline as "It's Not the Fall that Kills You" and "The Sudden Stop at the End," but is a stand-alone story.

After the Fall

Prologue

There's blood, everywhere.

It's caked in his hair, matting the short strands together, and staining his clothes. It's stuck in the creases of his knuckles and wicked dark and stubborn around the edges of his fingernails.

Some of it is his, but most of it is not, and no matter how much he scrubs and soaps and scours, the blood won't come out in the wash.

Dean's no stranger to blood. Kind of comes with the territory, actually. He's intimately familiar with its power to heal or bind, or blast a winged son of a bitch back to the homeland. Its power to taint, corrupt and poison.

This is a way of life that, one way or another, is built upon the blood that's shed, and he's long grown used to the thick, indescribable scent of it. To the warm, metallic tang of his own flooding his mouth or spilling from his lips. To the feel of it drying tacky and uncomfortable on his skin, pulling tight on the fine hairs of his arms with even the smallest of movements. To bending over the small, dirty sink of a dark, nondescript motel bathroom scrubbing at thick crimson drips with a rag soaked in peroxide while Sam paces out in the main room, hip-deep into the lecture about recklessness he seems to have forgotten he memorized from an old one of Dad's.

Dean knows his way around the aftermath of a battle, knows what that can look like, in victory, and in loss.

Usually, the blood left behind is faceless, if it has come from a victim; or is worn as some morbid badge of triumph, if the slain is a monster of some kind. Sometimes it's both, in the case of any demon they've ever dispatched with the knife.

Despite his best efforts, oftentimes if the blood on Dean's hands isn't his own, it's his little brother's. More often than he'd liked. Minor, inconsequential cuts and scrapes here and there, on an almost daily basis, but sometimes it's worse.

Seeping through carefully placed bandages after the daevas rearranged all of their faces in Chicago.

Too rapidly cooling as it flooded into the palm he'd pressed against Sammy's back at Cold Oak.

Soaking swift and dark through snugly wrapped linen napkins not long ago in Windom.

These stains aren't from Sam. But they're neither faceless, nor were they won in the throes of battle. Dean thought he'd steeled himself for this exact outcome, thought he was prepared to deal with this but the blood left behind stands out to him in a way none has since he washed his hands in Cold Oak.

The worst of it has been left on the jacket – that soft, broken-in coat that's been to Hell and back with him. But after they'd gotten back here to Bobby's, after Dean had mostly shaken off the shock of their failure and the residual pounding in his rung skull, he'd found it all over his clothing, dispersed across his jeans, button-down and t-shirt like some kind of uncontainable airborne pathogen.

It's likely some of the splatter is Dean's own, of course, from the split at his left temple that keeps drawing pitiful looks from both Sam and Bobby, and admittedly could have done with a stitch or two, but he's not looking to run tests or anything. The thought of any of it being theirs – being hers – is enough to throw him so far off of his game, he's altogether forgotten what they're playing. Or why.

Dean's disgusted by the sight of his clothes and he won't wash any of it – won't EVER wear it again – but he hasn't yet made a move to thrown any of it out. That day's outfit is a twisted jumble of fabric in the corner of the upstairs bathroom and his jacket remains draped over the back of a chair in the library, hanging where it'd been carelessly dropped with bloody spots and smears dried stiffly into the canvas sleeves.

Going through the motions of throwing it away, of bundling it up and cramming it into a trash can – it feels too much like casting her aside, like reducing their sacrifice to something as trivial as soiled laundry, or a mess to be cleaned, and he can't do it.

Sam will, eventually. Because Sam is all about talking and spewing feelings and connecting with your inner what-the-hell-ever, but he's also a lot stronger than Dean, and he'll be able to do this one small thing that Dean can't.

But for now, there's blood.

To be continued...