This is the way the world ends (Trigger)
The most random thoughts always occur at the most irrelevant timing. Like, when a poltergeist slid him up the wall one time and even as he was trying to find a way to break free, one back part of his mind was playing its own background movie of the time Katie had shoved him against the library shelves and kissed him hard because he didn't have the guts to.
Or that time dad let him drive the car and even in his elation, wind through his hair, sun on his skin, music blasting loud, there was this mental bitter aftertaste of miles in the backseat and different beds, towns, people, unsteady life.
Relevant thoughts. Irrelevant thoughts. Misplaced bits and pieces. Always there, a hum of fragments whirring at the back of his mind.
His knees are bloodied and his jeans torn. The ground pressures against his knees, his soles arch behind him, his palms burn. His sweat stings and mixes with tears he doesn't register, and his boxers are sticky. He's spent. It's like something carved a big hole out of him, and now what's left isn't Sam Winchester but an empty shell.
"Oh God, Sammy…" Dean rasps across him. "Oh God, Sammy…" His voice breaks down and he starts crying, and the gun he is raising again against his brother is shaky in his hands. It's too late now. Dean knows it. Lets his hands fall with the gun against his thigh, lets his back lean against the ruined car.
"Goddammit, Sammy. Oh God ohgodohgod…"
Sam doesn't say anything. He's too wasted. There was power in him, see. Carefully wrapped up like a candy bar, a bomb ticking inside of him. Him, and all the other children like him.
It was supposed to be the end, the final stand, them against the Demon. Closure. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Their final stand wasn't supposed to fit in the Demon's plans for them.
The Demon wasn't supposed to be the conductor, linking them all together like a chain, unleashing them all at the same time.
"I just need my trigger, boy," he had said, purring and shaping his voice as deep as John's. His yellow eyes gleamed at their pain. "Just need my trigger… Sammy."
And Dean raised the gun against Sam and Sam waited for that trigger to go, saving himself from going off in the Demon's hands. Dean never pulled.
The Demon did. Sammy went off.
Pulse after pulse, power released, riding him as he rode it, the highest wave ever, washing through the children like him till they released too. Wave after wave after wave, like a tsunami, it hit the world and swept it. Wiped it clean.
Come in his pants, sweat on his skin, tears in his eyes, Sam on his knees and the world ending because his brother couldn't pull the trigger and let him be one, and the Demon laughing, laughing, soaring in its true shape because the barriers had vanished and the season of Men had passed.
He wants to die. Knows the Demon won't allow it.
"You two shall roam the Earth," it had said. "Whatever is left of it. And know that you have failed, you and your daddy. Winchesters."
World devoid of humane noises, filling with hisses and screeches like the needle sliding wrong on the LP and hell rejoicing and moving to a new realm.
"Earth is now ours," it said. "One step closer. Now we can conquer Heaven too."
Time has no meaning. Breath has no meaning. It feels like he has been here forever, broken and bleeding, listening to Dean's resigned defeated sobs. Maybe he has. Maybe he just has.
He's thinking of defeat and pain and despair and the demon and Dean and the end, the end of everything. And just in the back of his mind irrelevant ribbons of thought: a poem he had read in his sophomore year by Robert Frost and the first lines loop just there, at the fringe of consciousness:
Some say the world will end in fire.
Some say in ice.
And Sam's thinking, wrong. Poet's got it all wrong. All poets. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper? He thinks not.
This is the way the world ends: with him. And Dean.
Not fire. Not ice. Love.
-The End.
DISCLAIMER: If they were in my possession I'd tie them to my bed and never let go. No, really. (and they'd better not try to escape either.)
SIDENOTE: There are two more stories that form my apocafic trilogy. One is called The Fourth Day (since the world ended) featuring Jo and Ash, the other is The Conman (and the end of the world), featuring Bobby. I'll upload them as separate stories (not chapters) in days to come.