This one is a longer one-shot than usual but I figured I'd still throw it into this little collection. Set in Season 8 sometime after 8x21 The Great Escapist SO SPOILERS. (As a refresher: this is the episode we first meet Metatron and after Charlie's Djinn video game dream). Dean's POV.

Stages

I am nowhere.

The world still turns around me, but I don't have to feel it if I don't want to. Things are quiet, though not in the eerie way. It's more of a humming buzz in the background and nothing else, a slim echo of sound that is just enough to offset total silence. Total silence will drive you nuts. It's true. I once read about this sound-proof room you can sit in, but after just a little while you start hallucinating all kinds of crazy, and apparently the longest a person has ever lasted in there was forty-five minutes. That's not the kind of quiet I want, so it's not the kind I've created here. There's still that hum.

"Do you wanna be alone?" Sam's voice drifts through this thin barrier of mine, the one I'd been working on constructing since I was four years old. I had originally meant to create an unbreachable wall of stone, but things hadn't panned out that way, and now that I know about that soundproof room, maybe it would've been a bad idea anyway. Still, after Mom, all I wanted was quiet, so I began erecting the framework of something that would eventually allow for total isolation. But the first time I heard Sammy cry out in the night, the first night after Mom and the fire that took her, I replaced stone with fiberglass so that I could always find my way back to him. So it is a flimsy, fragile structure, but every now and again I still pull it into the forefront of my mind, just as a way to keep a tiny bit of quiet captured within it for a bit longer. This silence is like being underwater. Like half-drowning in a bathtub. There's that bloody world all around me, but the water floods in and I can find a small sliver of calm to bury myself in.

"Dean?"

I watch the barrier shatter before my eyes, just as it always does when I hear that voice. I bring my hands up to catch some of the stray pieces. Others cling to my eyelashes. Blinking back to where I am, I find my brother's eyes watching me, the brows above them inching higher and higher the longer I stay silent. But how do I respond to a question like that?

"Do you want to be alone?"

I have a question for you Sammy: Isn't that what I've been afraid of my entire life? Isn't that the one thing I would never want?

Don't answer that.

Anyway, I know that's not what Sam's asking right now. Wrong context, wrong state of mind. I try to formulate a response that makes sense, though nothing really ever does when it comes to our lives, that much I've figured out by now. I settle on a small shake of my head, quite miniscule but still noticeable to Sam, who takes that as his invitation to sit down across from me, two beers in one hand. He slides one over to my end of the table, takes a swig of the other, eyes only leaving me for the small amount of time necessary to knock the bottle back.

My little brother really is big. Of course I know this already. I am with him every day, have known his ins and outs since we were kids, but every once in a while I like to look at him through a stranger's eyes, just so I can really see him in all his overgrown glory. He's got those wide, brown eyes and that thick, floppy hair falling all over his face, and despite the pushed-back shoulders and the grim line of his lips that I wish was a smile, he still looks for all the world like a puppy who has never understood his size or his influence. Especially the influence he has on me.

"You wanna talk about it?"

Those brown eyes searching, looking, waiting patiently for big brother to shape up and start acting like big brother again. His faith can be exhausting.

A more pronounced shake of my head this time, to which Sam smiles, dimples popping out like they always do, no matter if the smile is genuine or not. This one is, I think. Sad, but genuine. I used to be able to know for sure.

"Look Dean, you can't shut down on me, okay?" Sam says, his smile fading to something more serious, the worried expression he wears far too often. "I need you here with me, now more than ever."

It's the eyes. Those big, stupid puppy-eyes. I swear, the kid could convince everyone that Satan is the Messiah with a face like that, and he knows exactly what he's doing when he uses it. Witnesses, victims, me. He knows. This time though, I can't give him what he wants. I still can't seem to open my mouth, not even to take a sip of the unopened beer he has set in front of me. I'd need something much stronger anyway. Those inquisitive brows of his are crinkled now, knotted all around up there on his gigantor forehead. He really looks worried and I should probably say something, but separating my teeth seems like too much effort. They are clenched together just inside my lips, grinding into each other as I sit here at this table in this tiny motel room with my little brother across from me, sipping his beer determinedly. I know this next stage now, the one he's just transitioned to. It's called the "two can play that game" scheme, and I watch those big eyes narrow a bit as he takes another sip of his beer. He regards me knowingly, raises those stupidly expressive eyebrows of his as I stare at him and try to figure out how my tongue has become lodged so permanently inside my unyielding mouth.

It's not that I mean to drive him crazy. It's just that I have nothing to say. And even if I did, my body isn't responding. I truly have shut down; the one thing Sam has asked me not to do. Well, the one thing besides picking up any more waitresses from Tampa, but I sincerely doubt that's on his mind right now. Not even sure why it's on mine. Maybe to avert my thoughts from the more pressing issues at hand, the solutions to which are not hidden inside my unspeaking mouth. Maybe that's why I haven't spoken. Maybe I have nothing left to offer anymore.

Oh well.

My usefulness in my little brother's life has lasted longer than I ever thought it would.

"Please? Dean. Please?"

Next stage.

He sounds like he's six again and he's just found out our motel TV doesn't work on the day I'd promised him a cartoon marathon while Dad was away. John Winchester almost ripped apart the whole place once he realized we weren't in the same room he left us in. Silly, inadequate me forgot to warn him or the poor, frail woman at the front desk that after he left on his hunt, I'd opted for a room with a working TV for Sammy's benefit. First and last time for everything.

Other things, you have to experience over and over again. Like this pleading look in Sammy's eyes. I open my mouth. Close it again. I grab onto the cold neck of my beer bottle and pull it closer to me, sliding it along the table until it is sitting just beneath my chin. Maybe I can start with a drink and go from there. Maybe I can start with a sip of this cold beer and then I can open my mouth and tell my brother what he needs to hear. It will sound something like: "It's okay, I'm fine," and it will stick in my teeth and slide along my gums but I will say it again until he believes it.

I do not have to believe it.

It takes three tries to open the beer. My hands keep slipping along the label, condensation dripping down the sides as I struggle to get a proper grip- one hand on the bottle, one on the twist-off cap. It digs into my fingers and it hurts more than it should, but I finally wrench it off. And I still can't drink from it. My mouth has stayed stubbornly closed, lips pressing into one another as if they have been glued together by the clumsy hands of a first-grader as he sticks macaroni onto a family-filled picture frame.

Maybe I've been hexed.

I mean, we're not hunting a witch at the moment, but that would at least explain this ridiculous inability to explain myself, to break this stupid silence of mine. A hex is much better than admitting to what a child I'm being, worse than the one responsible for gluing my lips shut. So maybe that's it. I've always hated witches, with their bloodlust and their sacrifices and their all around lunacy. No thanks Bette, don't need any hocus pocus from you please and thanks. I should have Sam start looking for a hex bag before I die. I should find a pad of paper to write it down with. I should write down a lot of things, just in case Sam doesn't know them already.

"You're starting to freak me out, man. Please just talk to me."

He does sound a little freaked out. Definitely not full-blown little brother panic mode, but he's building up to it. I really should say something before…

Oh.

There it is.

Next stage.

We've switched to anger, the phase where I can barely see those eyebrows anymore because they're scrunched too far down by his eyes. He's scowling at me like I'm a dog that won't sit, stay, roll over. Those I could do, it's just the 'speak' command I'm having issues with at the moment. I run a hand over my silent mouth, feeling my eyes fall to the table, then flicker back up to look at my brother. I think I've got the same expressive eyebrows as him now, all squashed and crumpled into something that looks like a mix of pleading and sorrowful. Sammy's expression doesn't soften. Sammy's past the reassurance stage. Once he gets to anger, it's hard to rein him in. Unless I could open my goddamn mouth. But I can't.

"Fine. Whatever, Dean. You don't wanna talk? Fine. You call me when you do, how about that? Because I'm not sticking around if this is how you're gonna be. You're not the only one who feels this, you know that? It's not just you who loses."

Sam coughs twice, grabs his coat, and leaves. Always leaves. I flinch when the door slams shut, and it feels like the first time I have shifted since I sat down. No wonder Sam is angry. That little fiberglass barrier inside my head doesn't do much good if I myself have turned to stone. Maybe that's it. Maybe we ran into Medusa when I wasn't paying attention, and now I've literally been turned to stone. Or maybe Sam asked for King Midas's touch. I certainly feel heavy enough to have been turned into gold. Plus, it'd be nice if things were Sammy's fault for a change. But they're not. I know they're not, so Sam's free of the burden that comes with blame. I'm also not even sure if he's touched me since it happened. There had to have been a reassuring pat on the shoulder or a strong hand on my chin as he tilted my head up, looked for hidden injury beneath the thick paste of another person's blood. On my hands, in my hair, seeping into the rundown fabric of the jacket that is now folded into a messy pile next to the door of this motel room, hardening into one large stain of used-to-be red. I can smell the iron from here. Or maybe the smell is coming from the blood that is still clogged beneath my fingernails, hardening into more stone, even after all that scrubbing.

Outside, a car horn blares. Brakes squeal on asphalt, but there is no collision I can hear.

My wall is gone now. It's not just the silent humming anymore; it's everything. The sounds are all flooding back in and I don't think I'm ready for them, but they come anyway. Some of them are here and now, but I can also hear the screaming from earlier, the sounds of the woman as she fell, as she gasped for air in my arms, as she told me she wasn't ready, wasn't ready. And then her breath turned to panting turned to wheezing turned to nothing as I sat with her, as I watched her body deflate from woman to shell to nothing. Nothing but a bloody memory I will always carry, always knowing I was too late. Nothing I could do but watch her die quiet.

No matter what they tell you, death is quiet. Whether it is a soldier plucked from the horrors of battle or an asthmatic left in the dark with no inhaler, those last moments are soundless and insignificant. No wonder I've gone crazy then. Too much silence in my life.

Outside, an engine rumbles. It sounds like my car, but there is no way it could be.

It is.

Sam carries two bags: one plastic and one brown paper, the key to the motel dangling between two fingers with the Impala's keys between his teeth as he reaches back to close the door and sets the bags down in front of me. He huffs one of those big exhales of his, through his nose and not his mouth. It sounds like a last breath; it sounds like her last breath, and I flinch away from it, pushing back from the table and onto my feet. It's my turn to leave. Now that my peaceful little wall is down and my brother is back, I need a long ride with music blaring and nothing else.

But Sam has other ideas. Sam is in front of the door and he's not moving. He's not mad anymore though, which makes me wonder which stage he's moved to now. Usually I can tell by the eyebrows, but they are currently balancing nicely on his forehead, giving nothing away.

"Eat," Sam commands, gesturing to the plastic bag on the table with an incline of his head. Now that I am standing, sitting back down would mean defeat. So I just stand there, looking up at my little brother like the absolute idiot that I am, all silence and no fight left in me other than this pitiful attempt at a nonverbal "No."

Sam isn't having it. He grabs my shoulders and steers me back into the chair I have just vacated, pushing until I comply. But there is a softness behind the touch, no matter how forceful it may seem. He pushes only with the base of his palms, his fingers squeezing gently as my knees hit the plastic chair behind me and fold willingly back into a sitting position. There is a brief moment where I wonder if maybe there is a different reason for the gentleness of it all. Maybe he's not being nice. Maybe he's just getting weaker. Sicker. Worse. Sam nods to himself as if he agrees with my silent thoughts, though there is no way he would ever admit to his swiftly deteriorating state, even as he continues to cough up blood and spit it into motel tissues when he thinks I'm not looking or listening. Problem is, I always am. Sam moves to the plastic bag and takes out a plastic container. There is too much plastic in this room.

Inside the container is a ham sandwich: big and round and overflowing with condiments and toppings. Only the ones I'll eat. No tomatoes. No lettuce. Extra cheese.

Next stage then. We'll call this one 'practical mode,' I think.

He is like a seasoned nurse administering pain meds; meticulous, all business. He pops the lid off of the container holding the sandwich and pushes it closer to me, frowning when he sees that my beer still hasn't been touched since he left. Funny. Usually he's ecstatic when I'm not drinking.

"Eat," he says again, and finally those eyebrows float back up to his forehead, the picture of expectancy and a touch of patronization. I suppose, seeing as I'm the one who isn't talking, I kind of deserve to be treated like an unruly toddler. The sandwich actually looks good. Sam must've stopped at the food mart a few miles down the road and grabbed something from the deli. Still, I make no move to touch it. After all, apparently I can't open my mouth. Instead, I stare up at my brother. My brother, who didn't think to get a meal for himself because he hasn't even approached the beginnings of an appetite in at least a week. I wonder when I'll start to really see the weight fall off of him. I think it will be soon, seeing as I know every telling twitch of his lip and can predict almost every faltered step. Those eyebrows of his tilt, sad and pitying- an expression I hate when directed at anyone but the witnesses we interview. There, it works. Here, it just makes me less hungry than before. If he's not eating, I'm not eating.

"You get like this sometimes."

Sam sits down across from me, hands folded in front of him like a villain in a movie who is about to start twiddling his thumbs. But Sam is no villain, and his fingers stay still, weaved together on the table where he sits, directly across from me. They look thinner already, but I know it must be my imagination. My eyes ask the question my mouth cannot, and Sam smiles the same as before- sad and genuine.

"You know, when bad things happen? You just...stop talking for a while. It's a defense mechanism, something to protect you from all the crap that gets thrown our way when you finally get tired of taking it. I asked Dad about it once, when we were young. He said it happened after Mom. You wouldn't talk unless you had to tell Dad that I needed something or if you had to whisper to me to calm me down on nights I couldn't sleep. Dad never found out what you were saying to me. I bet he wishes he had asked."

If I couldn't talk before, now I definitely can't. I don't understand the stage we're on or the deep set of Sam's eyebrows or the way he's looking at me. It's not really pity, not like I thought. It's not even sadness, really. He waits a moment before he talks again, just in case I've decided to.

I try. I open my mouth and nothing comes out. There is too much nothing in this room, too. It goes nicely with the plastic.

"It's okay, you know." Sam sounds old. He sounds ancient. He sounds like a man with a burden on his back and a hole in his heart. And I know all of the things that put both of them there- the weight and the wound. I have killed most, but there are some things you can't snuff out, no matter how hard you try.

"It's okay if you need more than a minute," he continues, separating those enormous hands of his. He sets them palm-down on the table, fingers slightly spread apart and stretched out in front of him. Reaching for me without reaching.

"You don't always have to hold all of this in, though."

Sometimes I hear him talk to witnesses and sometimes I hear him talk to me and I think he should've been a therapist instead of a lawyer. Then I remember he can't be either anymore. That thought pulls at something, something painful that is buried between my lungs. Sam is still talking, but he is not oblivious to the sudden pickup in my breathing. It's just one battered inhale-exhale, but Sam hears it. Sam keeps talking.

"It doesn't mean you're not strong, it just means you need help. We all need help sometimes, Dean. So you can do this if you want to. You can stop talking for a while and take all the time you need to push past it like you normally do. Or if you want, you can talk about it, too. You can tell me. I promise you, I'll be here. I'll listen."

Yep. Definitely a therapist. The kid could've done a ton of damage control in a lucky high school somewhere in nowhere USA, I swear.

I open my mouth, but all that emerges is a small cough.

Sam coughs too, but his is a more vicious sound, a swollen harshness from deep inside his chest.

Still, he smiles, because that tiny cough of mine is the closest I've come to speech in a while. Truth be told, we're both encouraged by it. Sam's eyebrows do that little twitch they do when he knows he's finally onto something, when he's uncovered the latest piece to the puzzle that is the case that is the monster that is our lives.

"I...can't."

I say the words, finally, but they don't sound like my own. They are strangled and small; a mouse caught in a trap with the cheese still untouched. I swallow hard and try to push past all the stickiness in my throat, but it all just comes out like a half-drowned swimmer still struggling for oxygen. I wonder if it's possible to catch what Sammy has, even if I'm not the one doing the Hell trials. I'll take it. I'll take it all in a second if it means he gets better. I can't say any of that out loud of course, so I don't.

"I don't know...how."

That's what I say instead, and it sounds uglier than I thought it would. There is a catch on the 'h' in 'how,' and I swallow past it so my sentence sounds half-finished and pathetic, kind of like this entire situation. We've done this before, done this so many times before. There is always someone we can't save. It's the gig. So I don't understand why this one is hitting me like it is, making it impossible to get up from this table and crack a joke, make Sammy laugh so he can stop worrying and we can get a good night's rest before we drive the seven hours back to the bunker tomorrow morning.

I see the girl again, the one I couldn't save, there in the forefront of my memories. I watch her fall, body already half-limp with an inevitable death. And suddenly I am tossed into the throes of another recent memory, into the swirling pool of guilt and blood and pain inside my head. There is a brief flash of Sam, lying in a hospital bed. There is a flash of Charlie's mom, lying in the bed across from him. I know this to be a dream, but I remember the very real fear that place held, the darkening pit of dread Charlie and I faced together in that cold, white room. And just outside, a group of vampire-super-soldiers lined the doorway, and I did not have enough bullets.

I never seem to have enough bullets.

"What?" Sam asks, his hands still sitting on the table between us, fingers curling in as he watches my every expression, as he tries to understand what's wrong with his brother now. I didn't mean to say the thing about the bullets aloud, so I'm glad Sam doesn't understand what I mean. I'd given him a brief summary of my tour inside Charlie's Djinn-induced nightmare after it happened, but I hadn't told him about the prone figure I'd seen in the hospital bed- the spitting image of my little brother, as silent and unmoving as I had been earlier today when that same brother demanded a response. Now, at least, I have begun to talk again. If you count this sad attempt at conversation, that is. I shift back in my chair, and I am glad to find that I am not made of stone after all.

"Come on, man. You gotta give me something here," Sam coaxes, bringing one of those hands up to rub against his forehead. He is tired. Always tired. And sicker than I have ever seen, a cold that can't be fixed until we figure out the final trial, the one that will slam the gates of Hell shut forever. I remember once when Dad was away, Sammy came down with the flu. He was eight, I was twelve, and it was the worst twenty-four hours of my life.

Not anymore.

There have been a lot of 'worsts' since then, but this one is different. This one is a slow burn, and it is taking everything from him. I can't remember the last time Sam missed a practice target. I can't remember the last time he collapsed on the floor of a hotel room with a 107 fever and the sound of God's word echoing in his ears. It had taken far too long to fill that tub with ice, far too long to pull the unconscious form of my enormous little brother into that freezing cold water, and longer still before he emerged from it, gasping for air and insisting that Metatron was just around the corner, hiding away in his book-filled coward's lair. Sam is falling apart, and he is taking me with him whether he wants to or not. Of course, he would never want to.

"It's okay, Dean," he says, pushing up from the table and kneeling in front of me.

Another memory.

Suddenly, I am back at a cemetery in Lawrence, Kansas and the world is coming to an end, until it isn't. Suddenly, my little brother is standing on the edge of damnation and he is telling me everything is okay. "I've got him," he says. And then he falls. He pulls me down with him.

Except here, in this motel room in a different city in a different state, he doesn't do any of those things. He just puts a calloused hand on my shoulder and waits for me to meet his eyes before he speaks, those stupid eyebrows pushing deep into his head as he reassures me.

"I can't lose you now, Dean. We're right there, and you gotta stick with me until the end, okay? You come talk when you're ready. Til then, we should both get some sleep." He pats me a few times on that same shoulder as I nod, my head seeming to sink lower each time until my chin is pressed against my chest. I push out another battered inhale-exhale and I keep nodding until Sam has gravitated all the way to his bed farthest from the door, always farthest from the door so that when the monsters come, I can protect him. So that when the monsters come, I'll be first line of defense or, if need be, the first to die. I was supposed to protect him from this too. It was supposed to be me.

Sam whispers now, a promise carried across this room with its thin walls and broken television set (no room change this time) as he lies down on his thin little mattress and flicks his lamplight off but leaves mine on. Without the second lamp, the remaining light throws long, ugly shadows across the room. I shouldn't be able to, but I swear I can feel them sliding along my face, jagged slivers of black cutting across my cheekbones and burrowing into the sockets of my eyes.

"It's almost over, Dean," is what he whispers to me in the half-dark. I suppose it is meant to reassure.

Instead, I see a white room with a white bed with the familiar beeping of more than one monitor. I see a tall, motionless form lying in that bed, an array of wires weaving in and out of pale skin and sunken bones. I see no choices or demon deals or dimpled smiles, just a long, ugly road that ends with a sudden drop and an unthankful mess of blood and grief. Sam is the blood and I am the grief and I cannot find a scenario that allows me to survive it this time.

Sam looks and he sees a light that shines through all of this filth. He told me so himself. Sam believes in happily ever after. Sleepy Sunday afternoons in some far-off future, lounging on the porch with a glass of iced tea and a mess of long hair leaning against his shoulder and smiling lips to match his own, but all I can see is the dark and disastrous end that always, always comes sooner than we imagined it would.

One final stage, and it's almost here, just like always. Just like Sammy said.

It's almost over, and I doubt either of us survives.

Thanks for reading. Hope everyone is enjoying a nice, lazy Sunday full of reading and/or writing! I love hearing from you, so please leave your comments/thoughts!