Well, Sam wasn’t wrong. The panic room wasn’t any kind of paradise to be locked in, no matter how much the occupant needed it. Cot’s a piece of crap, too. Dean knows Bobby doesn’t go for the softer things, much, but man. Given that being shut in here had a pretty decent chance of turning into your last night on earth, he could’ve at least sprung for a mattress pad. A decent blanket. Something.
Dean sits on the edge of the bed. He turns his wrist against the handcuff and looks at the underside, the blue veins. Knows he could pick it if he had any damn thing left on him to pick it, but Sam didn’t leave him much but his boots. Knows he could pull, and bleed, and dislocate or even break his thumb and force his way out that way, but Sam’s locked him pretty tight and he’s not positive he could drag his way out, and if he screwed it up then he’d just be in a bunch of pain, and Castiel’s probably too mad at him to heal it. He could just bleed out. He turns his wrist in the cuff again, grips the edge of the mattress with both hands. Easy to imagine. The blood sluicing down—and it’d take a while, unless he hurried it along somehow—snapping a spring off the bed and making the wounds jagged and wide and red—making the world slow and slide and shut down, hopefully permanently, so he wouldn’t have to bear it anymore. So Bobby and Cas and everyone who ever relied on him wouldn’t have to bear it, anymore. Except of course it wouldn’t be a solution because he can’t. Everything he was ever taught flooded up against that last lead door and stopped. More’s the pity.
The panic room door opens, creaking. He keeps looking at the floor.
“You want some water, or something?” Sam says.
Dean smiles at the iron between his boots. “I’m good.”
Drag of metal on metal—Sam pulls the desk chair over, sits a yard away from Dean. Not far enough away that Dean couldn’t grab him, if he made the lunge. If he wanted to. He doesn’t know why Sam isn’t worried about it.
“What’s in the box?” Sam says. Dean smiles at the floor. “Don’t make a Brad Pitt joke. The box you had, in the motel in Cicero. I put it in the trunk before I drove the car back up here.”
Dean looks up. Sam’s watching him. Small frown but he’s not mad. He doesn’t even seem disappointed, even if Dean’s been—everything he’s been.
“What I had,” he says. His voice is rough and he clears his throat. “Just… stuff. I thought maybe you’d…” He shakes his head. “Feels stupid. Talking about, you know, crap maybe you’d remember me by, except here I am. Just stuff. Dad’s jacket, my gun, my keys. Wrote a letter.”
Sam raises his eyebrows. “A letter.”
Dean shrugs. “Doesn’t matter, now.”
Sam looks like he’s not sure about that. Dean wishes he hadn’t mentioned it. Imagines Sam ripping off the duct tape and reading the stupid crap he’d written down and thinking that it was all Dean had wanted to say. Felt too messed up to leave without even a note but he couldn’t—formulate it, not out loud and not in writing either, turned out, especially if Bobby or someone else might see it too. How much he loved Sam and resented him and needed him and how this hole in the center of his gut that had started who knows how long ago had just gotten bigger, and bigger, and he’d worried that what he felt for Sam would fall into it and get lost but it didn’t seem to work that way, somehow. The hole got bigger and what him-and-Sam meant got bigger, too, and stranger and stronger and more unwieldy, until there were days that Dean thought he’d suffocate under it, or drown maybe, or that he’d lose his mind with worry, or that he’d—start to hate Sam, maybe, for making him this terrified. For being this thing he couldn’t stand the idea of losing and yet that had been lost to him over and over. Until the hole felt like it took up all of him, just this absence held vastly empty under the barrier of his skin, and what him-and-Sam meant was going to destroy the whole planet, and it felt more right to just—simplify the equation. Subtract the thing by half and maybe there’d actually be something left, afterward. Even if Dean weren’t around to see it then at least there’d be something.
“I wish I could make you believe it,” Sam says. Dean refocuses. The spinning shadow of the fan above cuts random light over Sam’s face. His mouth tucked up on one side, sorry. “I don’t know how. There’s not any—evidence I can show, or logic. It’s not a case. It’s just something I know and I can’t make you understand.”
“Guess I shouldn’t have dropped out,” Dean says, and Sam smiles in this weird flat way that doesn’t look like smiling at all, and Dean can’t make him understand, either, how sorry he is, and how little it matters that he’s sorry. That he has to say yes to Michael because there is no other way he can think of in the world to save as many people as they can but also to save Sam, from Michael and from Lucifer and from himself, most of all, and to save Dean from having to see that, too. He’s thought about how it’ll go. When they got to talk to Jimmy Novak he explained that being possessed by an angel was like being chained to a comet: terrifying, absolute, a blaze of blinding light, and Dean thinks—hopes—that that’s true, that with an archangel it’ll be worse, that he can close his eyes and sink into it and there’ll be pain, he’s sure, but he’s been through hell and pain’s nothing he worries about, if he won’t have to see his brother fall.
“I’m kinda jealous Cas got to beat you up,” Sam says. Dean snorts. Then Sam leans forward, quick, takes Dean’s face in both hands. Dean stiffens but Sam doesn’t—hit him, or choke him, or kiss him. All equal possibilities considering the day. Sam only looks him in the eyes, with this expression like—he’s five years old and wishing for answers Dean can’t give. Dean reaches up with his uncuffed hand and grips Sam’s wrist. His pulse fast under Dean’s thumb. Sam takes a deep, shuddery breath in, closes his eyes tight. When he opens them they’re damp but he doesn’t look five anymore. “We’re going to save Adam and you’re not going to say yes. I don’t care if you don’t believe it. I know.”
This year’s been too terrible for the empty pit in Dean to feel any smaller. “Okay, Sam,” he says, because it’ll get him out of this room. Sam nods and stands up and goes for the keys. Dean watches him, tall and broad and beautiful, and wishes he had faith.
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