A/N: Thank you so so so so much to Charloes Angels, ImpalaLove, and helinahandcart for reviewing! Get pumped for episode 10 tonight! Since you guys didn't seem to mind the angst or the unconventional layout, here's take 2...
Spoilers: Season 9
Somewhere, between all the wires and monitors and heartless blips, there must be meaning. He searches for it through clouded eyes, searches for it with a clouded mind.
After everything, he asks himself, How can you still search?
IVs and tubes are hooked up to his brother's body, twisted and tangled like a failed marionette's strings. Controlling his heart, his lungs, his blood, but not his fate. They can't bring him to life, can't make him act how he's supposed to. They can't reel Dean out of this pit of abject misery, can't break the haze of wrong and wronger.
But he searches. He searches because he's searched before, because he's found salvation more than once.
The words in his brain don't match the ones falling from his lips.
Just one more time, he pleads, just one more time.
Dean is tainted, stained, but, despite striving and shamming his entire life to be otherwise, not faithless. He knows he doesn't deserve this, knows that redemption is as far beyond him as it can possibly be. He knows he turns to evil all the time (every time), just as he knows it is still his contingency plan.
He doesn't deserve this, but Sam does. Sam's not ruined, not like he is. Sam wouldn't want another demon-deal. Sam is good.
Don't do it for me.
He's in a chapel, and he's a sinner. He's praying for something he doesn't have a right to. The dark-spot on his soul is real, and there is no penance that will scrub it away. He can feel it there, burning, close to his heart.
Dean knows all these things. He knows. And still, he's on his knees, hands folded and sweaty.
A tear slides down his cheek and he wants to punch something until it bleeds, to let the stain grow until it consumes him entirely. Maybe he would. Maybe he will.
Light streams in from the ceiling. He sees he's not alone. There's an old lady two feet to his left, a young boy five pews in front of him. They're all praying too, praying like he is. What makes him more worthy? What makes Sam more worthy?
They're not. He isn't. But –
Just one last miracle.
And he knows, guiltily, that his voice is the loudest one in the chapel.
.
.
.
.
.
Sam's heart is heavy and purposeless, like a paperweight. It sinks through his body, plummeting, until it leaves him altogether. It forsakes its inhospitable home because it can't stand to live there anymore.
Sam's soul wishes it could follow.
And then he feels indescribably light, as though he might float away – float right on up to Heaven, even though he knows he ought to be sinking down to Hell along with his paperweight heart.
Something anchors him to earth, though. Something lodged between the stench of blood and the sound of his own sobbing. It keeps him there, keeps him present. Weighing in his arms.
How many times can he be expected to do this? How many times can he carry –
The lightness makes him dizzy, makes him long for the counterbalance of his grief-burdened heart. He needs it. He needs the equilibrium. He needs it so he can see clearly, so he can make out his brother's features on the purple, bloated face of the corpse in front of him.
Because now there's just –
There's the blood, and the swelling.
There's the mouth that just spoke, and the stillness.
There's him…
And there's nothing.
He is alone.
He is alone in the car, alone in the bunker.
He has been alone, before. He has felt alone since he learned the word. The feeling and being have never intersected before, though, not like this.
After the first time there was Bobby, and now there's just –
No Bobby, no one.
Just whiskey, a burning in his stomach that at least makes him feel something more than nothing.
And a trove of supernatural artifacts. He has the tools to make this right. He has the know-how to bring his brother back. He has the will to go the distance, the will he lacked before.
Because there's no right and wrong anymore, no moral and immoral. There's only a line that's been crossed so many times it's become trampled, indistinguishable. He couldn't draw it again, even if he wanted to. It doesn't exist.
Do you think he would want this?
They've stopped asking themselves these questions.
Sam is grasping at matches, hands trembling. His vision is blurred for a myriad of reasons, and the searing in throat stems from the same varied sources. He is selling his soul before he even sparks the flame.
That line, that line is gone, a shadow, a dream…
All he understands is a bloodline, all he understands is Dean. And Dean is gone too, and he's not coming back unless you do something.
Circumstance thwarts him, not his conviction. If he could, he would, a thousand times yes. He would do anything, everything, everything he said he would never. But he doesn't even have the choice.
It hurts so much, and he just wants it to be over, and –
SAMMY LET ME GO
If he lets him go, he'll float away.