Hi everyone, this is a random drabble that I churned out to try to get past writer's block. I'm only on season 3 of Supernatural (but am in love with it so far) and this is my first time trying to write the characters, so please bear with me.
Disclaimer: Everything you recognize belongs to Supernatural and its utterly brilliant writers/producers/etc. If I owned the Winchesters, their lives would consist entirely of pranking each other and having smartass conversations in the car, despite what the following passage may suggest ;)
It's too damn empty now.
Dean needs something, anything, to fill the gaping nothingness that his life has become. Booze, women, hunting — those are easy. Those engage his body, distract his mind. He drinks until he's too wasted to think, sleeps around until he can't recall a single face, and hunts until he's so bone tired that he stumbles back into some small motel room in Nowhere USA and collapses into unconsciousness.
But none of it matters, his mind whispers every day. Shut up, bitch, he spits back, in his own head, and wonders (not for the first time, absolutely not for the last) if he has finally lost his tenuous grasp on sanity, on normality.
Nevermind. Screw normality. And screw Sam goddamn Winchester for doing this to him. For letting him hold on far too tight for eighteen years, for letting him throw his soul into loving his little brother, so that when the kid finally yanked himself away, without warning (without any warning that Dean had wanted to acknowledge), Dean fell back, falling, falling, falling.
He hasn't hit solid ground again yet. It was swept out from under him as a terrified four year old, clinging to his brother and saying where's Mom gone? and he never found it again. Sam kept him in limbo. Anchored him, to somewhere lightyears south of normal but still a safe enough distance from stark raging mad. He doesn't want to know where he's headed now. And he's proud of the kid, he really is, but he wonders what he did wrong to turn the one good thing in his life into the source of his misery. And he wonders if Sam has any idea just how much Dean depended on him.
He lasts until December before he finds himself a pay phone (a goddamn pay phone, this town is so backwards, and he can't remember for the life of him what its name is) and dials up Sam's cell. He picks up on the third ring, and Dean's face burns at how relieved he feels.
"Hello?"
"Sammy — " Dean's voice is rougher than he would have liked and Jesus, is he actually tearing up?
He can hear the smile in Sam's tone.
"Oh, hey Dean. What's up?"
And then Dean knows that Sam has no idea. No goddamn idea. He hates him for that, in a way that makes his heart feel twisted and foreign.
The phone slams back into the wall with a firm click.
The Impala's engine roars to life, accompanied by the sound of mullet rock cranked to a deafening level. It peels away from the curb in a flash of light and noise before disappearing down the deserted road.