Title: illachrymable
Disclaimer: not my characters
Warnings: spoilers for everything aired; future!fic AU
Pairings: implied one-sided non-incestuous het
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 580
Point of view: third
Notes: the title means something you are unable to cry over. Make of that what you will.
There is a book she reads sometimes, to remember. It isn't the only of its kind, but it was the first, all those years ago, when a prophet dreamt of two brothers. It spawned a whole series, spin-offs, a television show, and three blockbuster movies.
They are a franchise now, like the superheroes. Bigger than Batman, and wouldn't Dean like that?
No, she thinks. He'd rather everything be left hidden, ignored. He'd rather no one know his name than everyone think it's just a story.
The movies end differently, of course. The books kept on after their story came to its conclusion. Some people thought they went on too long, way past when they should have stopped. But she knows that fiction is different from fact, and no one would have been happy with the actual finish.
She sure wasn't. And she wished it could have gone differently. She still wishes that, when she starts at the beginning and reads Woman in White to the final page, when Dean stands beside his brother outside a burnt apartment and Sam says brokenly, "We got work to do."
It's not the same. She's one of the few left who knows they were real, those Winchester boys. She's one of the few left who ever met them, who survived the encounter, who remembers what's real and what's myth.
Kids dress up like Dean and Sam Winchester for Halloween. Pre-teens swoon over their actors, and there's a booming line of action figures, and she can hear his voice in her head, Sam marveling at what all has happened in the decades since.
She knew them. She nearly killed Dean, and she was there when he looked Death in the face and made a promise he never intended to keep.
She reads the book sometimes, the one where the Winchester patriarch traded himself for Dean, her first appearance in their story. It's different written down; Dean came so much closer than the prophet let on with his words. But she could never have taken him. Only her father had the strength to reap Dean's soul for good.
She was there when Death did, when he held out his hands to the Winchester brothers. She watched as the brothers exchanged glances, a whole world of conversations in a heartbeat, and she closed her eyes while Dean smiled and Sam nodded, and she didn't follow as her father led them home.
She didn't follow. She can't follow. Death ordered her to stay, and she does, reaping those who need reaping, until only a handful of people remember the actual men anymore.
And this woman in front of her is the last. One hundred and five years since Rosie met the Winchesters, since Dean carried her out of a burning building, and she looks the reaper once called Tessa right in the eyes.
"He didn't feel the same," Rosie tells her with a sad smile, and she can see the baby girl Dean saved. "He never would've."
"I know," she says, placing a hand on Rosie's forehead. "Go home now."
After Rosie passes on, she looks around the room, at the shelves lined with books, outdated movies, DVDs that don't work anymore. She walks to the first book of the series, the one that began it all, and she lets her fingers trace over the cover illustration, the drawing that looks nothing like the men she knew.
Come home, daughter, Death says, and she wonders if they'll be waiting.