A/N: It should, I suppose, be noted that not only do I not in anyway support the ideas of suicide/mercy killing discussed here, but I also don't believe that Dean would act on them.
Warning: suicidal thoughts.
Sam turns sixteen on the West Coast. It's still chilly in Washington, but the air is fresher than anywhere else and for a few weeks, Dean kinds of loves it. It's so different from all the other places that they've known.
They're hunting the ghost of a shaman who had a habit of cursing people.
Unfortunately, before they salt and burn him, he curses Sam.
.
Six days, Bobby says hoarsely over the phone. Six days before you'll know.
Till then, Sam is wan and pale, with a low-grade fever and chills. They can't tell if it's the curse or the cure working.
John drinks.
Sam shivers.
Dean wishes more than anything that it was him, instead.
.
They sit on the gray beach and Sam counts mountain peaks. "Wanted to hike Everest."
"Course you do. Nerd." The playful insult chokes in Dean's throat, even as he changes the thought to present tense, not past. Not hopeless.
"Some people don't make it."
"Huh."
"Dean."
"Yeah?"
"I'm not going to make it, am I?"
"Up Everest? Probably not."
"No. I mean…" Sam trails his fingers in the sand, sentence unfinished. The sky is too clear here, rose and purple in morning and evening, stretching out eternally beyond the mountains' frames. It's worse than the Midwest, somehow, or maybe that's just because Sam is dying.
"Shut up, Sammy." Dean says the harsh words gently. "You—Bobby came up with the cure. Bobby's a strange old bird, but he's brilliant. You know that."
Sam's been bitchy since he was eleven years old, a wiseass for much longer than that. But now, he turns to Dean and his eyes are brimming and much, much too young. "What are you going to do, if—"
Bobby said that the curse brought fatigue and fever—and then twenty-four hours of psychosis before the end.
Bobby said it was supposed to be a reckoning, the final week.
And now Dean's sitting here under mauve sky, trying to think of an answer to his brother's question, and he's struck dumb.
Because the first thing that pops into his head is that if Sam doesn't make it, when the hallucinations start setting in—Dean will wrest the keys from Dad's drunk fingers, buckle Sam into the Impala like he's four years old again, and then Dean will drive them both over one of those twisting mountainside gullies.
"Dean?"
Dean jolts back into the present, into something that resembles sanity. Somehow, in all of this, he smiles. "Sammy, I'm not gonna do anything. 'Cause you're gonna be fine."
He's lying through his teeth, right then. But thankfully Bobby Singer is brilliant, and the cure proves Dean right.
(It's years, though, before he can go back to Washington.)
(It's sooner, though, that he realizes that those six days are what pushed Sam out of the hunting life in the first place.)
.
The closest thing to home they've ever known, aside from the Impala, is smoldering. If it were any other time, Sam would be mourning the books lost and the memories turned to smoke, and maybe Dean would join him. But all Dean can do is split apart into a million pieces that all still stay strung together, vertical somehow, and he's shaking like a leaf because no, not Bobby—if there is a God who ever loved his world, it cannot be Bobby.
Sam stumbles off, looking for him. Sam is hollowed out, always pushing away demons only he can see. Dean wishes more than anything that it was him, instead.
Bobby, he hears Sam shout and he thinks, dammit, Bobby, you can't go, you can't leave me, you're the only one who always promised not to leave me—
And doesn't death break every promise? And isn't death the only thing that's sure, even if the hour isn't? And isn't Dean as young and stupid and struck dumb as he ever was?
The sky is dark above him and the ground is gray under his feet. Gray like West Coast sand.
Dean swallows and forces out words, doesn't have to force out a smile because there is nobody watching.
He dials Bobby's number, and nobody picks up.
This isn't the first time he's considered mutual suicide.
But this time, he almost means it.