Here we are again, another year, another angsty finale tag! I should really make this a yearly tradition, at this rate I'll probably never be out of emotions over the finale. What this story lacks in plot, it makes up for in angst and science. It's a little different than what I normally write, but still, I hope you guys enjoy! To those of you still writing and interacting with stories three years after the finale, thank you. And an extra thank you to my buddy Lilac Letter for listening to my rambling about this story and inspiring one of the science-y moments, you're the best :)
Oxidation: the process in which an electron is removed from a molecule during a chemical reaction; also the process in which a chemical substance changes because of the addition of oxygen.
Examples: the slow rusting of iron, the rapid burning of wood.
The sound of dirt and gravel crunching under the Impala's tires joins the rattling from the heating vents as Sam carefully maneuvers her off the highway and onto an unpaved backroad. The side-to-side jostling is familiar. The wealth of space in the front seat is not. He glances towards the backseat to see Miracle, still asleep in his pile of blankets, not voicing any complaints. Sam continues.
The yellow headlights cut through the inky blackness, illuminating a light brown stretch of road that Sam follows until he sees an old white oak. As he gets closer, it's transformed from a small stick poking up from the flat land into an eighty-foot tall, thick-trunked tree, the ground below it strewn with acorns. The leaves, black in the night, turn flashes of dark red when the headlights swing against them as Sam pulls the Impala behind it and parks. KS-8 and stretches of flat farmland—now lacking miles and miles of picked golden corn—sit to the west. The land in the east swells ever so slightly in a steady, black wave against a star-spattered sky.
But Sam isn't so concerned with east and west, north and south. He's concerned with up.
He parks the Impala, cuts the lights, and kills the engine. She clicks in the now-silent night. The next breath he pulls in shouldn't logically feel any colder than the one before, not with the warm air still trapped inside, but it does anyways.
Logic has been an indeterminate thing these past few days.
Sam casts another glance back at Miracle, puts on his jacket, and opens the door. The chilled night air rushes in and he closes it as soon as he's out. He won't be long. It's just past two in the morning, and he'd told Jody he would see her for breakfast. She hadn't commented on him driving through the night, which he appreciated.
He levers himself onto one side of the Impala's hood and very carefully adjusts to lean back against her windshield. When he raises his eyes to the sky, the first constellation he sees is Orion.
The air in his lungs grows colder. The oxygen seems to crystallize as he breathes it in.
How has it only been a month since he and Dean had last come out here? The Orionids had been at their annual peak, and so they had made a night of it. Beer, snacks, a blanket to stretch out next to the car as the stars swirled overhead.
"You know, Orion is the closest thing we've got to a constellation of our own," Dean had said as he snapped off a bite from his licorice rope. He tore his eyes away from the sky for a split second to make sure Sam saw how much he was enjoying the candy. Sam very pointedly ignored him in favor of the pretzels he had brought along. Undeterred, Dean looked back up and continued. "Pretty cool he gets a meteor shower too."
Sam did know, and it was cool.
Later, they laid down on the blanket, pressed shoulder to hip next to Miracle, and craned their necks to the stars to watch the sky spin. For hours.
When the sun started to lighten the sky, Dean had brushed himself off, stood up, and offered Sam a hand up. He'd taken it, pulled himself to his full height, and they'd smiled at each other. Dean always looked lighter after nights like that. Sam remembers wishing, even then, that he had taken a photo to save Dean's expression and cement it in time, as if to somehow prove to the world that they had these moments, precious few that they were, in amongst the chaos and loss that seemed to swirl in a constant maelstrom around them.
He didn't take a photo. On the drive out, Sam tried to burn the image into his mind instead.
Breakfast was diner food. The roads were wide open. The world they'd saved continued marching to the beat of time's drum.
Sam didn't bring a blanket this time, worried, against all logic and the promise he'd made to Dean, that without that hand up he may lie down and not raise himself when the sun came up.
The Impala is holding him up now, like she always has. It's not enough, but it's what he has. The other half of her sleek, black hood is empty enough to reflect tiny amounts of starlight.
Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Gradually, his eyes adjust.
The horizon is a wavy black line. Above it, stars fade into existence and reach up to coat the sky. More seem to appear by the second. The Milky Way is a hazy, glowing brushstroke, stretching across half of Sam's field of vision, almost close enough to touch. It's nearly one hundred and eighty degrees of stars.
It reminds him of the field trip his class took to the planetarium in fifth grade. They'd been corralled into an auditorium with a screen that covered the domed ceiling. The lights had dimmed, the stars came out, and the attendant brought out a laser pointer to show them various constellations. In the darkness, it had been hard to tell where the wall ended and the starry screen began.
Sam cants his head left and right and still sees stars. He and Dean never bought a laser pointer. Dean would simply point, finger right above Sam's eyes so he could see what Dean was looking at, and say, "We should name that one the Death Star."
They both knew it was the Corona Borealis, but Sam would shake his head, smile, and indulge his big brother's antics.
He suddenly feels very small underneath this seemingly oppressive and borderline overwhelming night sky in a way he never did when Dean was by his side. The two of them could take on the universe, and it felt like they had. Now, it's just Sam, resting on a black car on a swath of lightless ground, enveloped by the dark. Staring down the universe alone. The blackness surrounding him could swallow him whole without a soul to bear witness.
Sam breathes in a freezing breath that slots between his clenched teeth. He focuses on finding constellations that Dean was always drawn to. Perseus, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor.
The Corona Borealis isn't in the sky tonight. Orion continues his march, his belt drawing a bright northeast-southwest line against the dimmer stars, his sword-like nebula a dim white shape pointing south. Gradually, his jaw begins to relax.
Every so often, he spots a tiny moving light from a satellite as it flies by. It takes almost half an hour before he sees a meteor in a streak that appears and quickly vanishes, but not before Sam can make out its color.
Green.
The logical part of his brain knows that it's the iron-nickel compounds oxidizing as they hit the atmosphere that emit the colored glow. The rest of his brain thinks about his brother.
Shooting stars were the first magic Sam ever believed in, and he believed in them because Dean made it so. It was good luck to see them. If you were fast enough to make a wish before they completely disappeared, your wish would be granted.
Sam never asked if it was something Dean had gotten from Mom, in those precious four years before…everything.
Despite being dubbed as a "book-nerd" by his brother, Sam has always learned the most from other people.
Bobby was the first one to teach him that a star's light could continue even after it had died. The idea had been mentioned in passing during one of his sixth grade science lessons. Dean had no clue why, Dad was hardly around to even pose the question to, and so the answer had fallen to Bobby the next time they were deposited on his doorstep while Dad went off to hunt.
"Do I look like the kinda person that studied astrophysics in college?" Bobby had asked with a furrowed brow when Sam first brought the question up.
Sam had shrugged. "Any kind of person can go to college." He knew that for a fact. Maybe one day, it could be him. "So…maybe."
There was a long silence, the kind where Dean or Dad usually dropped the subject and assumed said silence would clue Sam in to that fact. Sam pursed his lips and went back to eating his sandwich at the table.
In a surprising move, Bobby sat down across from him, brow still furrowed, but this time in concentration instead of confusion. "The way I figure it, and don't go quoting me on this," he said, immediately grabbing Sam's attention. "You know how when you go outside, stand in the sun, and you come in out of the sun and still feel warm?"
Sam nodded, of course understanding because he did that practically every day.
"It's like that." Bobby paused for a moment as he thought. "The light, the energy, takes a while to get to you, and you can feel the warmth even after you've stepped out of the light for a bit."
"So, when a star goes out, we could still see it for a long time until all its energy gets to us?"
Bobby shrugged. "Sounds about right."
"So if our sun went out, how much longer would we see the light?"
Bobby had smiled at that and pushed Sam's plate closer towards him. "That one is above my pay grade. Now come on, you've got homework to catch up on."
Sam now knows the answer: a little over eight minutes. He can't remember where he picked that number up. But he remembers that conversation with Bobby as if it had happened yesterday.
Some of the stars above him don't exist anymore, and yet their light remains.
Another green meteor streaks by.
The stars sparkle. He can imagine running his hands through them.
Late into his sophomore year at Stanford, a lifetime ago, he'd driven with Jess and a few of her friends to Malibu to watch the effects of a rare north-stretching bioluminescent red tide as extra credit for their general biology class. It was only a six-hour drive, her friends had said. They made a weekend of it.
Sam hadn't been expecting to see the sea light up in bright teal flashes whenever the water was disturbed. It sparkled like something out of a sci-fi film. Every wave crest glowed and every crash brought forth an influx of light. They walked along the beach, kicking glittering stars with their feet and holding the sky in their hands.
Sam couldn't help thinking that Dean would've loved it.
Later, as they sat on the dark beach, extremities sticky from the salt water, Sam watched the sky. The light pollution made it hard to see much, but he could pick out a few constellations before they disappeared into the starry sea.
Jess had leaned her head on his shoulder and explained how every light in the water was quite literally a life. A tiny organism called a dinoflagellate that, when disturbed in especially warm and nutrient-rich waters, emitted light via chemical reaction. The enzyme and substrate were named after the Latin term for 'light-bearer'.
Luciferase oxidized luciferin and brought forth millions of tiny suns.
Sam was more familiar with the term from his time spent in the family business.
When those suns winked out en masse, the sudden lack of oxygen in the water could contribute to mass fish die-offs. The tiny dinoflagellates brought with them an overabundance of life, of freedom, of color, and just as suddenly, the resulting absence of it.
Unlike the stars they seemed to emulate, there was no continuing light after their death.
He should've taken Dean to see a bioluminescent event. Dragged him all the way to California or Florida, both states that Dean disliked for varying reasons, and promised the whole way that it would be worth it. Sam would've sat him down on a beach, watched his face as the waves crashed, and not even had to voice the 'I told you so'. The stars would always be there. Events like this were fleeting.
But in order to do that, they would've needed to make it to a beach in the first place.
Sam wonders, distantly, about the speed of the dinoflagellates' light-bringing oxidation in comparison to the slow rusting of a rebar in a barn. To the rapid burning of a funeral pyre.
To the speed of nuclear fusion that powers the celestial bodies above him.
His vision of the stars begins to blur. Sam lets out a shuddering breath that puffs into a cloud in front of his face. The oxygen has been stolen from his chest in the sudden absence of his most important source of light, leaving a gaping, pitch black hole in its wake. He hasn't been able to breathe deeply enough or let enough air out since it happened to feel stable. To feel like he's doing anything but clinging to a piece of sodden, sinking driftwood as the storm beats down and his head begins to go under.
For the first time in the too many times Sam has lost Dean, he knows exactly where his brother's soul is and, because of that knowledge, won't be doing anything to try to bring him back. There's no life preserver of figuring out a spell or making a deal with a demon to keep him preoccupied until he can get Dean back. There's no excuse that he doesn't know where Dean is so he has no idea where to even begin looking.
The simple truth of the matter is—
Sam is here.
And Dean isn't.
He's gone, no more chemical reactions to create the light that Sam could still swear he feels if he just doesn't turn around too fast. When stars die, their light continues on. When dinoflagellates die, their lack of light strips an ecosystem of what it needs to survive. How is it possible that his brother's absence is doing both?
The tear that tracks down Sam's face is hot for an instant before it cools.
His knowledge of the shining sea and the expanse of sky is a patchwork of moments. His dad teaching him to navigate by the stars. Books describing the optimal time for a ritual based on the earth's position in the cosmos. Men of Letters files detailing eclipses and their effects on monster populations dating back hundreds of years. All useful, but he doesn't hold those memories in his chest with the same ferocity he does the image of Jess, bathed in moonlight and an otherworldly blue glow on the warm California beach. He doesn't grip them with white knuckles the way he does the memory of Dean's freckled face, tilted towards the sky with an easy smile on his face, the weight of the world off his shoulders for just a moment.
The Impala's hood is almost completely cold now, the remaining heat from the engine slowly being stolen by the night air. Just a few more minutes, then he'll get back on the road. If he closes his eyes and breathes a certain way, there's just enough residual warmth to try and convince himself there's another body next to his on the hood, another set of eyes looking up at the stars and wondering how many of them still exist.
And how many of them are just luminous ghosts, one pinprick of persevering light in a sparkling sea.
A little while ago, I spent three weeks at sea aboard a ship dedicated to ocean exploration. We spent most of that time 100-200 miles from shore, and as someone that has always lived in a fairly light-polluted city, the amount of stars I saw blew my mind. To make it even better, we sailed for a few nights over some patches of bioluminescence. Standing at the back of the ship, watching the water sparkle while the sky sparkled, it's something I won't ever forget. So this was my attempt to combine some of that with my favorite thing for the brothers to do: stargaze, but make it angsty. Hopefully someone liked it, it's probably one of the most self-indulgent things I've written, combining my love of Supernatural, marine science, and stars, and I had fun writing it :) thank you for reading!