It hadn't been forty years like it had been for Dean. But it had been long enough. Long. Enough. They had broken him and put him back together wrong. He could feel the cracks and the misalignment, in his bones and in his head. But Hell was not the place wherein Souls that had not been bartered could be traded. He had nothing left. He had not sold his soul; it wasn't, after all, his to offer. He shared it with his brother and Dean was walking a path of light. And he, well, he was that from which darkness emanated swimming in bloody waters to a shore of pulverized bone. He was oblivion and the endless night, dissolution and disintegration. He was the nightmare that could not be woken from. He was the poison and the disease. He was pain and agony. The despair and the dread.

But, in the tortuous eternity he'd willingly chosen and accepted, he had to believe that Dean was care-taking what defined them, was guarding its promise of Paradise, protecting it with the same fierceness he had wrapped him in his entire lifetime.

The fact and truth that their brotherly embrace had become something more only strengthened his belief in his brother. Cemented his resolve. On a loveless plain he knew what love was and his grief came to him in the shape of that loss. His memories were not consolation but they did reprieve with a desperate kind of hope that belonged only to him.

Hope was antithetic in Hell and he had to hold it tight and hard and as small as a diamond in the centre of his mind.

He wasn't as strong as Dean had been. They threw this at him as though it were a wounding insult, it was a balm. He didn't last twenty years on the rack; he became what they required of him. He let it all go save for the hidden jewel inside his head, he allowed them to break his bones, shatter his teeth, twist and torture him and then he became what he had hoped he was not.

The world had ended. Yeah, yeah, there was still a girl, and a young man, not a boy anymore, not really, that's what the years ticking by did – grew boys into young men and young men into old men unless they had Winchester blood defining the edges of their hearts and this he knew Ben did not. And that comforted him. So, yeah there was a boy and there was a girl and there was he in a grotesque parody of "one of these things is not like the other." But he wasn't laughing. There was a girl. There was a house, and coffee and eggs in the morning, dinner at night, tv and a recliner. Pick-up softball games on the weekend.

There was a girl. A girl he had considered to be a kind of answer to a question he no longer was asking.

A Honda Accord, gold trim, the Impala mothballed and tarped, tethered to the Earth with spider webs, on the side of the house, and the keys buried at the bottom of his duffel which was buried at the back of the closet in the guest room. There was a girl and there was a broken man.

There was no heavy metal tape deck, no worn black leather upholstery, no greasy diners, no pool hustling, no Internet research, no mouldy libraries, no faux FBI. None of it.

At first, there had been an awkward kind of shuffle to the bedroom and then it wasn't awkward and then it was again. And after a while he moved into the guest room. And rolled the stone back across the doorway.

The sun rose, every single god-damning day, a new day dawned and the world hadn't actually ended. But it had. His world had ended. He knew this because when he closed his eyes the last moments of the world were branded there on the fucking insides of his eyelids. The last moments of his world - Sam closing his eyes like a prayer, arms stretched out, the ghost of a smile.

The world was over. Done. Finished. Kaput. The whole thing lost. He knew this because he felt the negative edges of what had been his life. Rimmed in razor sharp shadows; long lingering shotgun breaths, hard pec on pectoral, teeth marks to bitch about in the morning and then take sly pleasure from throughout the day finger tracing into the indentations of his brother's dentition in the flesh defining the inner ridges of his biceps.

The weight. The heaviness that had been Sam. Gone.

He pushed the memories down and yet in dreams they returned and after a while, days, weeks, he wasn't sure, he began to welcome them, wait for sleep like the errant lover he'd become. He yearned, ached for the dissolution the disintegration into the past. Into that which was real. His world. His life. Their life. Singular.

It was twisting him, hurting him. He began to walk with a limp, his back tense and bowing beneath this new weight. Sorrow. He found broken blisters on his heels each morning, fresh from running in his dreams turned nightmares. His lips cracked and bled each and every single time he tried to smile.

Nine o'clock. Wishing Ben sweet dreams and sleep tight, kiddo, and see you in the morning. Ten o'clock. A quick kiss on the cheek from Lisa, lingering warmth he wiped off his face the moment she left the room. Eleven o'clock and then finally the Witching Hour and he was medicated. Highball narcoleptic. Staggering into the guest bedroom falling the way a body from a bridge falls, into the bed into the arms of Morpheus. Lying still so as not to remember until he was asleep. Waking memories would gape him like a wound.

The brush of the sheet across his ear so much like and yet not like Sam's lips. Just. There. Come back to me, come back, come back.

In the mornings he would wake, stretched wide on the rack of the bed. Tears let like blood, the knife of his longing laying him open.

Hell on Earth...standing here. The syphilitic prostitute, the bomb-strapped child, the infidel, the heretic, the sinner, the sin eater, the broken hearted, the stained, the tainted, the lost, the buried, the shattered. Holding in both hands all the pieces that no longer fit together. Standing street side to the show he had requested, would have written himself if asked, the domestic situation comedy that was anything but funny playing out like a tragic opera behind the curtains of suburbia.

The separation by glass. See but do not touch. Watch but do not comfort. Wail and do not be heard.

He stood and watched and pain flowed through him; blood in his veins, cramping inside his guts; winding like worms. His hands and feet twisted on backwards, nails for teeth, mind cleaved open and weeping. He stood destroyed by his own hand, his own destiny writ long before he was born, conceived inside the bruised skull of the yellow-eyed demon.

He had fulfilled. And all that was easier than standing on the street watching Dean live out the life he'd made him swear upon, made him swear it like they did when they were kids.

Swear it, Dean, swear you will, swear it, swear.

Sworn.

He had sworn it. And destroyed himself. He woke in the darkest part of the night and whispered, "I'll forgive myself if you come back."

Out in the street, watching. A parody of the quintessential guardian angel, he listened hard and heard and the diamond in his mind glittered.