Chapter Text
You move your hand, random, pointless, and the absence it meets hurts like a bitch.
This is where you’d reach for him, just waking up, looking for the reassurance of his naked body, the truth of him warming the bedsheets right next to you.
He’s not there. He’ll never be.
You start crying before you open your eyes, like you do every morning now, like you probably always will.
Pain has never been far away from you, not in your life. You’ve lost people; you’ve lost so many people.
This, however, this isn’t just loss.
It’s total, absolute, irreparable annihilation.
You aren’t a living thing anymore; you’re a zombie, and maybe you should hunt yourself, force peace on yourself, stop this unnatural continuation of an existence that no one wants, least of all you.
“Dean,” you say, his name blood on your tongue, the silence in response a set of knives between your ribs.
As for you, you’ve lost your name because he’ll never say it again. It’s got no meaning without his voice. You are only this now, a slippery pronoun that used to mean two but has been cut down to one.
One isn’t enough to live on. You aren’t enough to go on.
Morning trudges forward, heedless of your tears, careless. Light streams into the room, hits your eyelids, paints them red, and you remember blood, so much blood.
You washed it away and thought, senselessly, that his last death mirrored your first one—stabbed in the back, surprised and not ready.
No one expects to die, not even the Winchesters.
You do now.
They say, live every day like it’s your last one. You live every day wishing it were your last one.
Your alarm shrieks, and you wonder, as usual, why you even bother. You’ve got nowhere to be, nothing to do, no one to live for.
It’s habit, the savior of the lost, the purposeless, the bereaved.
You slap the alarm off. Sit up on the bed. Rub your eyes. Stare at the empty space beside you, and think, brokenly, that maybe he spent the entire night out, cavorting, and you’ll find him sprawled on the floor, smelling like an exploded liquor store. You’d smile, you’d shake your head, you’d get him a beer, and you’d love him, you’d love him so much.
There’s no one on the floor.
You should stop this motel-hopping. It’s like pressing your fingers into an old wound, but that’s exactly what kept you sane when you were hallucinating Hell all over the place. That’s what he showed you, what he taught you, how he saved you.
This is different, you know that, you just don’t want to acknowledge it.
That pain was you running toward reality. This pain is you running away from it.
You go to the bathroom, deal with what your body needs to keep up the semblance of living.
He’d slip into the shower beside you, saying he only does it because you will use up all the hot water otherwise, leaving nothing for him. You’d both know it’s a lie.
Shower sex is complicated, that’s what he used to say, but you’d manage, every time.
You stand under the spray, alone, and you can’t get warm, no matter how hot you make the water.
Without him, everywhere is cold.
The bunker felt covered in frost by the time you knew you couldn’t bear another day in its bleeding solitude. Your pain echoed from the high ceilings, filled every nook. You kept ending up in his room, wiping the surfaces with a furious determination, as if he’d come back if only you didn’t let dust settle over his things.
It still settled. He still didn’t come back.
You left Miracle with Donna and threw yourself into an endless road trip, regressing through your life with him, back from your place to places that were never yours.
Maybe if you go far back enough, you’ll find him at the end of the path.
You try to be motionless. You try to move all the time.
It doesn’t change anything.
You’ve hated motels all your life. Truth is, you still hate them.
Before, they were just a sign of your rootlessness, the opposite of home. Now, they’re that times a hundred.
You stagger back into the room from the bathroom and start stuffing your body into your clothes. The shirts hang loose around your torso, and you have to pull your belt tighter to keep your jeans on.
Yes, you know you haven’t been eating. No, you don’t care about that.
All food is spoiled for you. Either you order something you like—and hear his teasing, ringing cruelly in your ears; or you order something he liked—and have your appetite crushed by the past tense.
You subsist on protein bars, an occasional gas station sandwich, instant noodles sometimes.
He wouldn’t want you to die of starvation. Not like this.
You leave the motel, grab a coffee, get a muffin with it, feeling reckless.
“Attaboy,” you tell yourself in his voice, as you take a bite.
It tastes like worms, and you throw it away.
Not today, then. Maybe tomorrow.
Doesn’t change anything for you.
Days don’t mean what they used to mean. When he isn’t there to kiss you awake, or to fuck you to sleep, the sun can screw itself. It rises, it sets, and you’re still alone against the world.
You finish your coffee, get into the car, and drive.
It’s been months. You’ll never get used to the driver’s seat. Funny—you dreamed of getting behind the wheel, but when there’s no one left to fight for it, it doesn’t feel like that much of a prize.
You take turns at random, go as far as you can without sleeping, settle in the first motel you find.
It doesn’t matter where you end up.
The entire world is the wrong place, when you can’t share it with him.
You drop into your king bed, and wish, feverishly, that you don’t wake up.
*
There are, of course, the dreams.
You only get two types of them now: sad ones that leave you crying, and happy ones that leave you wailing.
In the sad ones, he says goodbye to you over and over, his last words etched into your brain, and you try to undo it all, to save him, change places with him, but nothing works—just like nothing worked in your real world.
In the happy ones, he lives, and he stays with you, and you have a life, and everything is bright, full of light, easy, joyful. You wake up, and you lose it all.
Tonight, it’s a sad one.
You’d be grateful for it, if you could still feel gratitude.
Your range of feelings diminished drastically since you lost him. Things just don’t reach you anymore, the world existing too far from you.
It’s not the same as being soulless, and you wish, at mad, tortured hours in the middle of the night, that you could lose your soul again. Be free, painless, reduced to primal physicality.
Your soul is where you keep him, where he told you he’d stay with you.
It was a lie—he’s left, he’s not here, he’s not—but you can’t lose him, even if it’s only an idea of him.
You watch your dream, feel his hand wrapped around yours, and you try to hang on, you try so hard to hang on, as if you could drag him out of the damn dream and back into life.
He told you not to bring him back. It was the cruelest thing he’s ever said to you.
“Don’t go,” you whisper, your lips moving, as the dream fades. “Please.”
There’s no one to hear you.
*
You have his things. His shirts, his tapes, his weapons. You didn’t—couldn’t burn them, couldn’t leave them, couldn’t stop yourself from needing them.
When you feel like your skin is shrinking on you, squashing your organs into a shriveled mess, you grab one of his shirts and try to convince yourself it still smells like him.
It doesn’t, not after this long.
You clean his gun, hoping he’d burst into the room and tell you you’re doing it wrong.
The metal shines, spotless, and you’ve never been so devastated by doing something right.
You play his tapes and sing along, waiting for him to join in.
The music ends, and your voice is still the only one in the car.
You do it again. And again. And again.
If you stop, if you give up on attempting to find him again, you will never forgive yourself.
All that ever mattered, is that we’re together, he told you.
He was right. That’s all that ever mattered, for both of you.
How, then, could he betray you like this?
“I hate you,” you whisper into his shirt, the one with a hole in the back that you stitched together, as if you could sew him back whole, too. It hangs limply in your hands, cold and scentless.
You wait for him to tell you he knows. To smack your chest. Grin his cheeky grin.
It happens, but only in your head.
*
You avoid Arizona altogether.
He didn’t remember the Grand Canyon, so you went again, you two, you a unit, you a crowd, an abundance of you.
It was better than in your feverish memories, because he made everything better, every moment and every sight.
You watched the sunset, and you kissed at the edge of a cliff, and you laughed under the vast, benevolent sky.
Stars smiled at you. You smiled back.
There wasn’t a single apocalypse in sight, and you let yourself lower your guard, relax, believe that you could, at last, have a life.
One month later, you hunted a nest of vamps in Ohio.
One month later, life split into you and him.
*
There are many things you regret.
Losing two years of him, as you tried to replace him with a shiny, glittering college life, which never felt right.
Wasting time on other people, too scared to tell him that he’s the one for you.
Failing him when he was in Purgatory, lying to yourself that you’re doing what he wanted for you.
Letting him believe, in the post-Gadreel haze of hurt, that he meant less to you than he always did.
You sift through all your fights, small and big, and you can’t believe you spent so much time on hurting each other. If only you knew you had so little of it—
It’s no use, thinking about it, but you still do, picking at the scabs covering your heart, making yourself bleed, over and over.
“I’m sorry,” you tell his photo on your lockscreen. “Dean, I’m sorry.”
Maybe if you apologize enough, he’ll forgive you, and he’ll come back, as a reward for your honest contrition.
Thing is, he’s already forgiven you, for everything, but he’s not coming back.
You stare at your phone, at his face that will never age, at the smile you’ll never see again.
No one ever smiled at you like he did, like you’re the sole reason why he keeps breathing, the meaning of every moment he lives.
In the end, you weren’t enough to make him stay.
You regret that the most.
*
It’s an unfair fight, you versus closure.
Your friends, whoever is left, keep leaving you voicemails, keep texting you, keep checking in. They try to pull you toward some cathartic revelation, like he did, holding your hand one last time, telling you what he thought you needed to hear.
You didn’t kiss him. Couldn’t bear the thought of a last kiss, couldn’t bring yourself to seal your farewell with it, as if it’d make it true.
It was true regardless; you just didn’t want to believe it at the time.
You don’t want to believe it still.
Sometimes you convince yourself that his absence is temporary. That he’s just out on a beer run, or meeting with Claire to share some hunting wisdom, or getting more ridiculous stuff for his Dean Cave.
If you wait hard enough, maybe you’ll make it true.
You made the pyre for him, you put his body on it, you watched it burn.
It doesn’t matter.
You’ll always wait for him.
He watches out for you, that’s what he does, that’s who he is, he told you this, he did.
“I need you,” you say into the air, like those are magic words that will summon him, because he can’t leave you like this, can he? That’s not in him, you know it.
You look around, but you can’t see him.
It’s okay. You’ll try again.
Your friends can say what they want, and they can even think they’re doing a good thing, and maybe you’ll nod politely, pretend that their words mean anything to you.
The first thing you’ll do after hanging up is open the last voicemail from him and listen to it.
Hey, Sammy. Sorry, got held up. Be home soon. Bringing pizza, and yes, I got you the veggie one, you sick fuck. Just kidding. You’re okay. Anyway. See you.
There, he promised, and he keeps his promises.
So, you wait.
You don’t want catharsis.
You want your brother, alive.
If your friends don’t get it, they can fuck right off.
*
Fury takes over, from time to time, and you split your knuckles against walls, in room after room.
This is what he’d have done, his rage spilling out of him, too hot to be contained.
It brings you closer to him, this red fog of pure violence, something you do now, as if possessed by his restless spirit.
You wouldn’t mind it—the possession. Gladly, you’d carry him inside yourself, his soul weaved through yours, your body slave to his whims.
It wouldn’t be that far from how you lived.
He has so much unfinished business. You had so many plans.
So what if it keeps him from peace. You’ll take him vengeful, you’ll take him pissed, you’ll take him homicidal.
As long as he’s with you, you’ll kill with him, you’ll do whatever.
You don’t know where he is. Billie promised you two the Empty, but she’s not in charge anymore. Maybe Jack changed the rules; maybe he didn’t.
There are ways to make sure, and you know them.
You have an entire network of psychics to choose from. Your memory is full of rituals for summoning spirits. There’s a fucking Ouija board in the trunk.
He’s just one spell away.
Sometimes you think you’re ready. You get the supplies, assemble the ingredients, memorize the chant. Every time, you chicken out.
You want to hear him, see him, find out where he ended up.
He’s had over a year to settle into his afterlife. If he were the tiniest bit restless, if he weren’t at peace, he’d have made himself known, you have no doubt about that.
This is why you never go through with the spells.
You’re scared you’ll ask him how it is on the other side—and he’ll say it’s perfect.
*
Drinking doesn’t help.
You try to hide yourself in a bottle, like he’d do, but it doesn’t work for you. It didn’t work for him, either, not that it ever stopped him.
Few things stopped him if he was hell-bent on something.
You were one of those things.
He was one of those things for you, too.
You’ve talked each other out of crazy things, from self-sacrifice to deicide, and you were the only ones who could pull that off.
His voice got through anything, it went straight to your heart, your head, your soul; it set you right, it saved you.
It haunts you still.
You can hear him. Every day. That’s what you tell yourself.
“What would Dean Winchester do?” you ask aloud, when you can’t move one foot in front of the other anymore, which is more or less always.
He answers. You listen.
It’s the same thing, most of the time.
Keep on fighting. Keep on living.
Easy for him to say.
You get a beer, you twist the cap off, and it hits you, all over again, that he’ll never open another bottle for you, that even this small, almost unnecessary gesture of care is gone from your life.
Your life is gone from your life, that’s what it all boils down to.
One bottle turns into ten, but all it gets you is an endless repeat of his name in your head, as you keep calling for him, keep waiting for him to click his tongue, call you a lightweight, help you to bed.
You end up dragging yourself to bed on your own.
In the morning, you swear off drinking.
He’d tease you mercilessly for this.
You’d let him.
You’d let him say anything, and you’d hang on his every word.
*
Silence follows you, swallows your footsteps, eats your heartbeat.
You stop watching TV. Unsubscribe from Netflix. Donate your DVDs to Goodwill.
Nothing catches your interest, not without his running commentary. He’d make jokes as if he were five years old, and he’d gripe about plot holes and poor acting, crotchety like an old man.
You always told him you hated it. Threw popcorn at him, demanding that he stop and let you watch the movie in peace.
He never listened. Picked the popcorn off the table or duvet or floor, wherever you were, and chewed it loudly, making more noise to annoy you further.
You weren’t annoyed. You were endeared.
Not that you ever let him know it.
You suspect he knew anyway.
There are few things you didn’t know about each other. You’ve lived, and you’ve fought, and you’ve breathed together. Your lives began and ended with each other. He had four years on you, but he’d told you that they didn’t count, that any time without you didn’t count, not toward what he considered living.
You knew what made him happy, what made him sad, what made him horny. What hurt him, what pleased him. How he managed to carry on, day after day, through loss and heartbreak.
Little things, too. How he liked his eggs. What exactly he thought about ruining coffee with milk. Which one of your shirts was his favorite to pilfer from your laundry. The steps to getting the perfectly crispy bacon, not that you used that particular bit of knowledge, unless you really needed to apologize for something.
It all sits in your head, gathering dust, useless now, forever useless.
You lie on yet another bed in a yet another town, and you don’t need to turn on the TV to see movies in your head.
They play out on the ceiling for you, ghosts of the nights you spent together with him, fake-gasping at plot twists you knew by heart, citing dialogue at each other.
“Even though you’re a virgin, you’re still my brother,” he’d say on your hundred-something rewatch of The Lost Boys.
“You, of all people,” you’d say, already putting away your snack bowl, “should know.”
“Know what?” He’d quirk his eyebrow, but his mouth would tilt into a grin.
“You know what,” you’d say and pounce, ready to prove how wrong his initial statement was.
You’d miss the rest of the movie, but you wouldn’t regret it.
The images fizzle out, and you find yourself staring at blank paint, alone.
Silence wraps itself around you, squeezing into your ears, until you can’t hear anything but white noise.
It’s both a blow and a relief.
*
You get sick.
It’s small stuff: a cough here, a sniffle there.
You aren’t used to having colds, haven’t had them since you fixed your luck, but now they’re a persistent part of your life.
Your immune system is collapsing, which isn’t a surprise.
If you continue pushing your limits, or—more accurately—forgetting you have them, maybe your body will give out sooner rather than later, and all of this will end.
It’s a nice thought.
He yells at you, the image of him you keep at the forefront of your mind.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he says, an order.
“You’re not real,” you say, a capitulation.
Your mind goes blank.
He isn’t here to take care of you, and you don’t want to do it yourself. You get childish and cranky, waiting for your big brother to roll his eyes and feed you soup, take your temperature, tuck you into bed. Read you a story. Ruffle your sweaty hair.
You didn’t have a mom to do that for you. Dad barely functioned himself.
It was him, always him, all your life it was him.
When he disappeared after your showdown with the Leviathans and you didn’t know where he was, you didn’t move on, not really. You had that slight light of hope that he’d come back, that wherever he’d gone, he’d find his way back to you. It kept you warm, it let you breathe.
This time, you know for sure.
You shiver in your bed of the night, and you put your hand on your forehead, trying to convince yourself it’s his. Mad with fever, you almost believe yourself.
When you get better, and you do, somehow, against your will, you feel betrayed.
Your own body, incapable of doing the only thing you need from it—break down and be done with this.
It will, one day.
You just can’t wait for it.
*
Future is a word that doesn’t exist in your head anymore.
There’s the past—forty-two years of it, from the day he first saw you to the day you last saw him. It’s a sacred treasury, complete with traps. You can’t access it without spilling your blood along the way, but you keep going back, even if it costs you all your limbs.
Beside it, there’s the present, murky and colorless. It’s one single day that refuses to end, that you can’t escape. On and on it goes, dragging you with it through a life you don’t want to live.
Beyond that?
You don’t give a fuck.
As long as it, whatever it is, comes and takes you into the night.
You don’t fear the Empty. Your life, you’d argue, is already the Empty; it can’t get any worse.
It could get better, maybe, but you don’t think in those terms. There’s no better without him. Even if you sleep forever, dreamless and unfeeling, reduced studiously to mindless black ooze, your grief will persist. You will be a lump of misery, protruding from that slick surface of nothing, until you poison everything around you, turning emptiness into endless howling.
You don’t fear Hell, either.
Been there, done that.
All Lucifer’s ingenuity can’t compare to a single second in a world without him.
If you burn, you’ll burn, and it wouldn’t be that much of a change.
Heaven, though. Heaven is a tricky thing.
If your Heaven is, still, memories without him, you don’t want it.
You weren’t even really happy in any of those; just excited to rebel against Dad, a childish joy, over as soon as you realized you’d be losing him, too.
If you get forever, it must be with him, or not at all.
You don’t get that lucky, you don’t think so.
Life hasn’t been fair to you; why would afterlife be any better?
You watch the sun rise, you watch the sun set, and you don’t plan further than an hour ahead.
It’s not like the universe respects your plans anyway.
*
You’ve forgotten how to want anything, apart from what you can’t have.
Your body, however, persists.
It doesn’t bother you often, mostly resigned to its fate of neglect bordering on abuse. Sometimes it hits you with a pang of hunger, sometimes it makes your throat itch with thirst. It blurs your vision, insisting that you should sleep, or it twists your back, urging you to move beyond walking to and from the bathroom.
Other times, like now, it wakes you up with an aching need throbbing between your legs, and you can’t believe it.
Of all the things to demand from you, this got to be the most ruthless.
Sex, for you, is tied inextricably to him. Everyone else is just a fuck, and you don’t want those.
You want him to be the last person who touched you. You don’t want anyone else erasing the imprints of his fingertips on your skin.
Even thinking about it makes you gag.
No one can be to you what he was, what he still is, will always be.
You take yourself in hand, close your eyes, and see him.
He’s smiling at you, a wanting, wanton smile.
“Hey,” he says, and he somehow makes one casual syllable glow with want.
You know instantly that this want is for you, and it blows your mind, every time, after all these years.
He can have anyone, but he chooses you. Day in, day out, he chooses you.
“Hey,” you say, trembling because you want him, too, with an immeasurable, devastating force.
He puts his hand on your cheek, brushes his thumb over your cheekbone, sweet and careful. His eyes smolder, and he licks his lips, and just like that, he sets your every nerve on fire.
You stroke yourself, lax and slow, just a hint of friction, while you watch him look at you like he never wants to see anyone else.
Neither of you do.
He tugs you down and licks at the corner of your mouth, drags his tongue over your bottom lip. His fingers tangle in your hair, and he presses his chest against yours, merging your heartbeats.
“You wanna?” he asks, unnecessarily.
You kiss him, because it’s the best—the only—answer you can give.
He grins against you and pulls on your t-shirt, so you tug it off, throw it away, you don’t know where. His t-shirt joins yours, and he glides his hands down your chest, while you work your jeans open.
“So pretty,” he says, and you preen, hungry for your big brother’s praise.
You both are already barefoot in this wherever place that you build inside your head out of memories and dreams. All you need is to get each other out of your pants, which you do, a little hurried, a little clumsy, watching each other with greed in your eyes.
A bed appears behind you, the backs of your knees pressed against the mattress. He puts his hand on your chest and pushes. You drop onto the sheets, obedient, and he gives you another of his praising smiles.
Warmth spreads through you, and he isn’t even touching you yet.
You need him to start touching you.
He knows what you need.
His smile turns wicked, as he takes hold of your chin, tipping your head up, so he can kiss you, a teasing nip of his teeth, a curious nudge of his tongue.
You grab his shoulders, grounding yourself, or your head will float away, overwhelmed, and you want to be present, to feel every touch, every breath.
He puts one knee on the bed and pushes you back again, his palm hot over your heart. You scoot up, until you’re sitting with your back against the headboard, and he’s straddling you, arms folded over his chest.
“What should I do with you?” he asks, and you have so many answers.
“Everything,” is the one you settle on.
He grins, eyes glinting.
“Can do.”
He leans forward, brings your faces close together, and you move your hands from his shoulders to his cheeks, clinging, clinging, needing to believe in this.
You grip yourself tight at the base, and will your mind back to him, the phantom weight of his body over yours.
He presses his hands to the headboard, caging your head, and you kiss him, but he pulls back.
“Lemme look at you,” he says, breath tickling your lips. “Pretty boy.”
You flush, proud and thrilled. He studies your face, as if he intends to sculpt it from memory, etch every line into stone, so it’ll endure through countries and centuries.
This is what you were supposed to be—an epic love story, endless and glorious.
Your own hand moving up your length is all you got.
You focus back on his words, words that you can hear so clearly, because he’s said them to you so many times, and they never failed to make your head spin.
He rubs his nose against yours, a silly little gesture that sends sparks through your bones.
It’s a little ridiculous, how hard you are for him already, how desperately you want him. The only thing that saves you from embarrassment is that he’s the same for you.
You match, simple like that, something you can rely on come whatever.
He takes your bottom lip between his teeth and tugs on it, releasing it with a pop. You love it when he’s playful like this, and you laugh, pulling on his cheeks until his mouth stretches into a wide smile.
It shouldn’t be hot, not for any sane person, but it is for you.
He pulls on your wrists, and you release him, obedient, as he puts one of your hands onto his chest over his nipple. You place your fingers on either side of it and squeeze, earning yourself a satisfied moan from him. He lets you go and presses his palms to your stomach, while you bring your other hand to his chest, too, and focus on his nipples, twisting and pulling and pinching.
“Fuck,” he mutters, squirming over you, “fuck, yes.”
You smile to yourself, when he grinds into you, rubbing his ass over your dick, and you gasp, fingers twitching.
Your hand around yourself stutters, as you try to recreate that feeling and, quite obviously, fail.
Tears well up in your eyes, but he wipes them away.
“‘s okay,” he tells you, even though it can’t be, not anymore. “I’m here.”
For the stretch of a fantasy, you let yourself believe.
He’s warm over you, solid, heavy. It’s almost perfect.
You glide your hands down his body, rub your thumbs over his hip bones. He bends down to catch your mouth with his, as he rummages under the pillow for the lube. You suck on his bottom lip, shiver when he shivers, moan when he does.
This is what you are, the two of you—each other’s mirrors, each other’s echoes.
One pushes, the other gives. One asks, the other answers.
Without him, you have no face, no voice. You have nothing to give and nothing to say.
One dies, the other dies with him.
You press your thumb into your slit, wrenching your mind back to the simple, the physical.
He hands you the lube, and you slick your fingers, as you keep kissing him. His dick skids along yours, a hint of friction, just enough to keep your skin aflame.
You slide a fingertip into him, easy and slow. He murmurs something against your lips, and you don’t need to make out the words to know what he wants.
More, this is what you always want from each other.
You work another finger in, and he moans gratefully into your mouth, as he pushes back, eager for your touch. The more you spread him open, the sloppier his kisses get, until he’s licking all over your face, wet and ticklish.
“C’mon,” he urges between swipes of his tongue. “‘m good.”
You take your hand away and pour lube over your dick, while he sits up, dragging his palms down your chest and stomach. He gets a hold of you and lines you up, his eyes blazing, never leaving yours.
When he starts sliding down, you bite your lip so hard, you almost draw blood.
This, the first moment of merging with him, the feel of your dick just breaching his body, it’s insane, it’s unbelievable. That you can do this, that he wants you to, that you both want the same thing.
It’s what happiness is, or what it used to be.
His body opens for you, as he sinks lower, until his ass is flush with your crotch.
“Ah,” he exhales, delighted. “Just what the doctor ordered.”
You laugh; you thought you’ve forgotten how.
“What the hell kind of doctor that was?” you ask, wrapping your hands around his hips and nudging him forward.
He looks at you, imps in his eyes.
“The ‘shut up and fuck me’ kind.”
You don’t argue with that.
He rolls his hips, and you let yourself go, let yourself do what you ache for.
You guide him up, yank him down, rock him back and forth, changing the angle, until you find the right one, the one that makes him arch over you, curses slipping off his parted lips.
He’s beautiful, hot, magnificent. He’s everything you’ve ever wished for.
You’ll never see him like this again.
“Hey,” he says, soft but demanding. “Hey, hey, hey.” He reaches out to cup the side of your face. “Stay with me.”
You want to, it’s the only thing that you want.
“Why did you leave me?” you ask him, and your hand around yourself stops, as you tear through the wall you’ve built inside your mind to separate what’s real and what’s not.
He looks at you, puzzled.
“Whatcha talking about?” He circles his hips, clenching around you, and you feel it, you tell yourself that you do. “I’m with you,” he says, curling his hand into a fist and pressing it over your heart. “Right here.”
His eyes are so green. His smile is so real.
You believe him. For this moment, you do.
“Okay,” you say, and you start stroking yourself again, just as you watch yourself grip his ass, pulling him down against you. “Okay.”
He leans down to kiss you, a quick, loud smack.
“That’s more like it,” he says, and grins, and you love this grin, you love it so much.
Your hips jerk, as you try to get deeper into him, while he rides you with a cheerful abandon, happy, like you remember him, like he should be.
“Dean,” you say, need to hear yourself say it.
“That’s me,” he says, easy and light, and he flicks your nipple, and you don’t want to know anything else.
This is him, this is your brother, this is the sense of your entire life.
There’s no way you’re letting him go.
You fuck him like it’s the first time, like it’s the last time. His body is yours, just as your body is his—you’re tangled like this, inseparable.
Any force in the world that thinks it can pry you apart is wrong.
You’re going to prove it.
Your fingers dig into his muscle, and they will leave marks, and that’s exactly what you want. He loves your marks, he’s told you that. Ever since he got that ghastly imprint of an angel’s hand on his arm, he’s been eager to have you leave a claim on him, so no one else would dare try this shit again.
He belongs to you because he wants to, and you’re still wrapping your head around it.
Your breath goes harsher, as he moves over you, fast and fluid. You want this to last, but you’ve already gotten more than you’re allowed to have.
Before you can think another thought, he grabs your hand and guides it toward his own dick.
You grip him tight, stroking him in time with the rolls of his hips. He moans, a deep, pleased sound that reverberates through your skin.
“That’s right, little brother,” he purrs, as you pick up your rhythm. “Just like that.”
You know how to touch him, you two know how to touch each other, it’s written into the tips of your fingers, etched deeper than the lines of your fingerprints.
“C’mon, Dean,” you urge, your hand fast around him. “Come for me.”
You need it more than your own orgasm.
“Don’t mind if I do,” he murmurs, his hands landing on your shoulders, as he arches, mouth opened around strained gasps.
You squeeze him, once, twice, and he spills over your chest with a long groan, arms shaking, knees digging into your sides.
Your orgasm runs through you as an afterthought.
He slides off you, when you’re done, and drops onto the bed next to you, looking completely blissed out.
“Good times,” he says, stretching his arms over his head, back arching, as his muscles pop.
You wish they were.
He settles, folding his arms under his head and letting out a long, dreamy sigh. His body glows, perfect and lax, and you want to hug him so tight, there will be no telling where you end and he begins.
You turn your head to look at him, reaching out to put your hand on his belly, just keep it there, feel him breathe. He takes a deep inhale, pushing his stomach up into your hand, before drawing it back in, does it again, up and down, like he’s taking your hand for a drop tower ride.
When he was alive, it’d make you laugh. Now, you can barely stand the way your heart tears to pieces.
“Stay with me,” you say, in vain.
He turns to blink at you.
“Not going anywhere,” he says, like you want him to.
His eyes are soft on you, and you both know he’s lying.
You close your eyes, digging your fingers into his stomach.
“But you did,” you say, and your fingers fall through his body.
You open your eyes, and the room is empty. There’s just you, your hand in a loose grip around your flaccid dick, your come crusting over your skin.
This is all you have: memories and fantasies, taking over your mind for a brief moment that ends, always, with a cold wave of realization.
You take your hand away, wipe it on your t-shirt, and turn over to hide your face in the pillow.
The day comes and goes, and you don’t move, afraid that your body will want something else from you.
There’s nothing you can give it, and there’s nothing it can give you.
You stare at each other, you with an absence of want, it with a surplus of it, and you don’t know how you’re going to survive all its whims.
In truth, you hope you aren’t.
*
The endless road starts getting tiresome.
You aren’t twenty anymore, and you feel it, even through the fog of your grief. Your body gets sore after long stretches of driving, the lumpy mattresses make your back creak, the road food upsets your stomach.
This constant movement, your hopeless quest to find him at the end of the road, it’s futile. It doesn’t help you, doesn’t help anything.
Every next town is a town without him. Every next bed is a bed where he’ll never join you.
Going back to the bunker isn’t an option, that much is obvious, but you still don’t know what to do.
You can’t imagine a home without him.
Wherever you go, you’ll never be where you want to be.
Life, this unyielding bitch that can’t just let you go, dumps a solution on you, not caring whether you’re ready for it.
You’re one hour from Sioux Falls, when your phone rings.
Normally, you’d let it go to voicemail, but something in your gut tells you to take this one.
“I didn’t know who else to call,” Jody says, and her voice is weak like you’ve never heard it.
“I’m on my way,” you say, and drive.