He never thought he'd grow old. But he did. There were years on the road, years and years, pain and fear and loss and foolish silence… and then there were more years, years of a peace he'd believed he would never know. He grew older. His back hurt in the mornings when he woke, taking a breath and leveraging himself into a sitting position on the side of the bed with a wince, pausing to locate his slippers before standing up and sliding his feet into them.
Downstairs he'd get the percolator going and stare out the window over the kitchen sink, looking at nothing until the comfortable hissing of coffee-scented steam broke him out of his trance. Most days he'd call Sam, with not much to say, just laughter and mutual poking of fun at each other's aging quirks. And so the days would pass. In the afternoons he would work on the yard if his back permitted it, sawing up pieces of the old tree that had come down in a storm and carrying them into the garage. And when cold weather came, he had wood to warm himself at the fireplace on winter nights. It was almost cozy enough to forget that he was alone.
Sometimes, not too often, he would take down the small diary from the back of the top shelf where it always waited, pale blue cover stained and faded now, untitled, the pages inside already getting brittle with years. On the first page was scrawled simply the word 'Dean'. And sometimes, not too often, he would open it to a random page and read.
Each word was as gentle as the brush of a feather. The words described so many things, things he had never seen.
The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiled, and how they vanished when he was angry or frightened. (Those wrinkles were deeper now.)
The curl of his lip when he was in hunter mode, focused with utter animal obsession on destroying evil. (That gesture had been dormant for a long time.)
The lift of his eyebrows when he was pleasantly surprised or proud of someone. (This one had been out of commission for a while too; even his crazy little brother couldn't surprise him much anymore.)
The way a small muscle in his jaw twitched when he was holding in some intense emotion. (That habitual clench had led to chronic headaches, worst on the mornings after the dreams he still sometimes had… but not too often.)
The way his gaze would soften with love or harden with despair, never able to fully hide what he was feeling. (About this one, he wasn't sure. The mirror had gotten blurrier over the past few years.)
And whatever they were describing, the words spoke of love, always. Even when it was unnamed, the pages were redolent with it. The tenderness of the careful handwriting, the repetition of the word the writer seemed most fond of: Dean, Dean, Dean.
The character described seemed almost mythical at times, some glowing creature of glory that he could not reconcile with his image of himself. The first time he'd read the book, after finding it somewhere it had clearly been intended to remain hidden indefinitely, he'd whispered between helpless wet blinks: "You mixing up the two of us, angel? There's no way I was ever that awesome." The man described in these pages was a hero. That couldn't be him. The man described in these pages was loved, adored by an eternal flame of purity. That couldn't be right.
It couldn't be true. Because if it had been true, then that love would not have left, would not have flown away on tattered wings into the dark, into mountains too high to conceive of, into spinning galaxies beyond the end of every highway, where even the trusty wheels that had crossed this country a hundred times couldn't take him in pursuit. That love had hidden itself away in the sky, in the night, in time, in silence––that damned distant silence of years and years and words and words that had reached the tip of the tongue so many times, before being swallowed back down.
He'd hunted almost everything imaginable, but here his hunting halted, cast down its weapons and admitted defeat. Because there was no way to follow love into the sky, no way to find something so tremendous, so hidden. All he'd been able to find was the book that carried these words, words that made a picture of a man he could never have been.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
- William Butler Yeats