A/N: Thank you so much to ImpalaLove and Guest for reviewing the last chapter! You guys are awesome :) Sorry for the angst, as always.
Spoilers: 10x21
Lebanon, Kansas
May, 2015
There's a bloody body in the tub, eyes wide open. There's a severed arm hanging from a chain back in the bunker. It's all unraveling.
Red blots the wall like vibrant graffiti, not yet the muddy, brownish color it turns when it dries. A fresh kill. A sight he knows well, now, a scent he recognizes.
As Sam retches into that trashcan in the presence of his newest, biblically catastrophic misstep, Dean sinks onto the blood-slick tiles. He feels his jeans absorb the blood – whose, it's not clear – and his pants go tacky. The smell of copper is overwhelming, and he has to put his head in his hands because the smell is pleasant, and the Mark is throbbing.
"She loves you, Dean – we all do."
That proclamation had hit Dean like a sucker punch, and he's sure it showed on his face. It's an unspoken rule that the Winchesters don't say that word, don't tell each other they looove them. They just don't. Never have. Sammy said it once when he was three – "I wuv you, Dean" – and he'd corrected him right away.
Dean slipped up only once, nearly ten years ago. He broke the rule, whispered that mawkish phrase into his baby brother's corpse, and felt immediately mortified – weak. As though he could be any reduced to anything less than what he already was.
Sam hadn't said it outright just now, but he might as well have. And he realizes: Sam thinks he's talking to a corpse, too.
That's why she's dead, as smashed up as that laptop on the floor. That's why everyone around him dies, including Sam, including Castiel. That's the root of it. It doesn't matter if they say it or not – what matters is whether it's true, and it had been true for Charlie. It's simple. It's mathematical: everyone who loves him dies. And oh-how-melodramatic it sounds, but also so true. He has been marked long before this. Maybe even forever. He lived but four years in blissful ignorance before his curse was revealed.
He knows, now, what he must do. What he should have done a long time ago.
And suddenly John Winchester is talking: You do what you have to, Dean. You do the good and honest thing and end it before your baby brother has to. You owe him that, at least. You put an end to this.
I know, I know, he thinks. He knows. He could do it. He always thought he could. It's not like he's never stared down the barrel of a gun before, never written a suicide note.
You do what you have to.
He knows John would never condone this, but somehow the worst, darkest part of him speaks in his father's voice. He tries not to read too much into this, because self-psychoanalysis is something he generally tries to avoid. They say all behavior his rooted in childhood experiences, right? Well, that makes a hellova lot of sense. You don't need to be a shrink to predict that Dean's blood-soaked childhood would lead right here, to this war-torn motel room.
Sam sobs suddenly, "This is all my fault," and Dean looks up from his hands.
His eyes are bright when they meet his brother's, and his face is expressionless, devoid of any judgment. He looks a new man.
Sam, already distraught, becomes unnerved because he has steeled himself for a shouting match. He expected a 'Of course it is, you should have listened to me,' or a 'Look what you've done.'
What he gets instead is, "No, it's not. It's mine."
Dean stands, flexes his legs. His pants are stiff with clotted blood. There's a perfect handprint in the mess on the floor, and a matching coat on his right palm. He wipes it on this thigh.
Sam balks at him and looks as though he wants to weep. Tears are swimming in his chocolate-brown eyes, unshed, and he grits his teeth. "How can you say that? How can you say that?" he demands.
Head bowed, he gives him a non-answer. "I should've let Cain kill me."
And then Dean leaves. Leaves Sam alone, alone in a room that reeks of blood and vomit and burnt electronics and failure.
And Sam cries over a corpse.
A/N: I'm sorry!