spn_springfling | From now until the end of the world by marciaelena for <user si

Title: From now until the end of the world
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Any warnings: Spoilers for the season 10 finale. Alternate take on what followed the events of that episode.

Saving people. Hunting things. Trying to do right and screwing up royally sometimes, but always with the best of intentions at heart. That's all Dean knows how to do.

But there aren't any people anymore. There aren't any things anymore, either--no demons, no angels, no ghosts or gods or ghouls. As far as Dean can tell, there's no one left besides him and Sam.

*

They watch Chicago burn through the windshield of their car.

It's like watching a movie on TV. (Except for the smell. They're gagging on it even downwind.)

The dirty snowbanks blocking the highway bleed in the sunset, melt in the heat of the fire. Sam backs the Impala away, makes a U-turn, and drives. They've seen this too often by now; they know there's nothing they can do here.

Dean stays quiet in the passenger seat. Night descends upon them, a wispy-thin blanket that can't smother the flames. He tries not to look, but his gaze keeps getting pulled to the glow in the side-view mirror.

"It's almost beautiful, isn't it?" Sam says, sounding just as mesmerized by the sight. "If you didn't know what you were looking at."

Dean cuts his gaze to the side-view mirror again. Yeah, he thinks. Horror is its own kind of beauty. But that's not something he wants or even knows how to articulate without sounding like the sort of monster they've spent their whole lives chasing.

"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear," Dean says under his breath.

Sam responds by stepping harder on the gas pedal.

*

They spend the night in the car, parked near a gas station off I-90. The glow of the burning metropolis behind them doesn't lessen, rising and falling through the dark hours before dawn like the incandescent breath of some invisible creature. They're both exhausted, but each time Dean surfaces from a nightmare he finds Sam still awake in the front seat, eyes gleaming like faint stars.

"Sam," Dean says the third time he claws his way out of a hell so private even he can't remember it. He waits for Sam to look at him. "You okay?"

It's too dark for Dean to decipher the emotion on his brother's face, but it's all there in Sam's voice for him to hear. "Are you?"

The inky space separating the backseat from the front becomes an impassable river. Dean pulls his blanket tighter around himself, tracing Sam's hunched silhouette with his gaze over and over again.

Sleep eludes them both for the rest of the night.

*

From behind the horizon smoke rises high into the air, giant plumes that resemble clouds, like the whole of the sky has come crashing down into the earth.

They don't look at it. Dean stands in the middle of the deserted highway, watching Sam spy on the gas station across from them through their binoculars.

"Looks empty," Sam says.

Dean eyes the Taco Bell sign above the restaurant adjacent to the gas station, squints at the solitary station wagon in the parking lot. Its doors are all ajar and sunlight glints off the rolled-up windows, blinding-bright. No way to tell what might be inside it.

"Dean," Sam says. "We really need more supplies."

Dean watches his own breath dissipate like mist in the frosty morning air. "I know," he says, looking at his brother. They've been living off whatever they can find at places like this, because venturing into any (formerly) populated areas is unthinkable.

They walk back to the Impala, and Dean gets into the driver's side. He sits there gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white and his fingers go numb, burning gasoline while he stares and stares at the station wagon like it's the worst kind of apparition he's ever had to confront.

"I'll do it," Sam says. His voice is laced with all the caring that Dean craves but doesn't feel he deserves. "You don't have to look inside."

"Yeah," Dean rasps, maneuvering the car into the parking lot. "Yeah, I do."

*

Two days later, and the picnic table between them is littered with leftovers from their breakfast. Candy wrappers, orange peels, a bruised half-eaten apple, Sam's empty water bottle. Dean holds a soda can in his hand, eyes closed against the morning glare.

"Dean," Sam says.

Dean blinks his eyes open and casts a sidelong glance at his brother. He sips his soda, not in a hurry to speak, half turning on the bench and taking in the view around them. Trees and more trees, miles of evergreens blurring into the hazy distance. He wonders if it had always been this peaceful there.

"Dean," Sam says again. "I've- I've been thinking. What if-"

A beat. "What if what?" Dean coaxes when Sam doesn't elaborate.

Sam swallows, and Dean follows the bob of his Adam's apple with his eyes. "What if we did this," Sam whispers.

This. People driving off bridges, throwing themselves out of windows, walking into the ocean to drown. Sitting quietly at home while their towns and cities burned to the ground. Mass suicide on a global scale. Like a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie, Dean had said. Only that this time it wasn't funny.

Dean's wondered the same thing, of course. Impossible not to wonder, and just as impossible to fully wrap his head around it. But he can sense the desperation in his brother, the near reckless need to voice the unspeakable.

It's been months. It's well past time for Dean to own it.

"Not you," Dean says. The rumble of his voice is like rockfall, looking to crush everything in its path.

"Yes me," Sam insists. "I swore to myself I'd do anything to get the Mark off your arm. Whatever it took, Dean. And that's exactly what I did."

"I killed Death," Dean says. And the rest of the world followed right after.

Sam sighs, a wretched, shuddering sound. "For me," he says. "You did it for me."

"Sammy." Dean says his brother's name like it's a confession, all rushed and breathless. "I did it for myself."

And that's the truth, isn't it? Dean thinks. When given the option to either leave his brother behind or kill him he couldn't do either. Losing Sam was too steep a price for him to pay, even if the trade-off was the rest of the world.

Sam looks at Dean like he's seeing him for the last time and is trying to memorize his soul. He looks at Dean like he's seeing him for the first time but recognizes him all the same.

Dean returns his brother's gaze, unflinching. It's only his insides that tremble and flicker.

Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.

*

Fire. Fire blazing in Dean's dreams, fire pulsing at the heart of everything.

Pillars of flame by night, pillars of cloud-like smoke by day, glowing-swirling everywhere and leading them nowhere.

And yet. (And yet.)

Among all their grief and loss, they find that they're not lost: any roads they choose only bring them closer to each other.

*

Weeks go by. Months that somehow turn into years.

"Listen, Dean," Sam says one day, out of the blue, like he's answering a question that Dean never knew he'd asked. "We got it all wrong. The world didn't end."

They're sitting on a rocky overhang that juts out over the Pacific. Halfway between the shore and the horizon something's rising from the ocean: out of the blue (out of the blue blue sea) a pod of humpback whales swim up to the surface together, spraying the air with their collective exhales, water clinging to their slick forms like a second skin. A host of dark shapes circle around and around below the froth-capped waves, tinged red and indigo by the sunset.

Dean watches in awe for a while, goose bumps blooming across his skin, tears brimming in his eyes. Sound fills the encroaching evening, lilting notes and shrill ones, a chorus of birds and frogs and crickets, their voices no longer silenced or drowned out.

Sam was right; the world was teeming with life.

"We did this?" Dean whispers.

"You did it," Sam says. He pulls Dean closer to him, pulls Dean down with him, and Dean can think of nowhere else he'd rather be than right here in his brother's arms.

The night is strewn with far-flung stars. They lie under the pinpricked darkness wrapped around each other and Dean lets Sam in, deep, sweet, deeper, sweeter. Dean sinks into his brother like the sky crashing into the ground, heaven and earth coming together like something foretold.

Love. Love like gravity. Love like fire. Love at the heart of who they are.

They lie together in the starlit darkness, but they are wrapped in light.

*

Years pass. Decades, maybe. Dean doesn't age, and neither does Sam.

The planet grows green and lush as a garden. (Heaven and earth come together.) Heaven on Earth.

Sam and Dean wander the continent, retracing routes they'd traveled long ago.

"Look at this," Dean says. They're walking through a vast field that sprouted among the ruins of what was once Manhattan.

"Yeah?" Sam says, not getting it.

Dean offers him a lightning-quick, blink-and-you-miss-it grin. "It's a clover field."

It's an old, old reference. It's a terrible joke, but Sam gifts him with a dimpled smile as radiant as the sun.

*

Decades, then. Centuries. Millennia.

The constellations change, slow-dancing across the firmament. Supernovas erupt in remote arms of the galaxy, one after the other, a chain reaction of light. The moon floats smaller above them, a silver fish slipping away in the stream of time, yet nights have never been brighter.

They watch the sky burst and splinter with luminous fire.

"I think I did that," Dean says. "All those centuries ago, Sammy." He looks at his brother, love breaking him open, making him shine as if he were a star himself. The brightest one of all. "I did it all for you," Dean says, all hushed and reverent, like the holiest of secrets.

And that's the truth, that's the absolute truth. It's Dean's most sacred vow: to keep Sammy safe, keep Sammy close, keep Sammy forever.

When Sam kisses him, the ache inside Dean flares up fiercer and more beautiful than anything could ever be.

*

(Light. Light at the heart of them. Light at the heart of everything.)

*

Ages upon ages. Aeons.

The sun is a bloated red giant looming over the scorched Earth. The oceans are gone, replaced by heaving seas of molten rock.

"Don't be scared," Dean mouths against Sam's ear. They're wrapped around each other as the whole world burns.

Together they float away, away, beyond the cinder of Mars, beyond mammoth Jupiter and ringless Saturn. Evaporating moons, chunks of ancient ice that trickle water into space.

There's no sound out there. Out there they have no voices. No words to describe the sheer terror and beauty of it all.

They hold on tighter to each other as they move into the void.

*

Adrift in the vast night, they dream of the world that was. The feel of the road under the Impala's wheels, the people they called family. Towering cities of glass and steel ablaze in the sunlight. The shapes of leaves and seashells, the songs of birds and wolves and whales, fireflies shimmering on balmy summer evenings. The smell and rush of all of the Earth's long-gone waters.

They touch each other and feel the rush of their blood, the warmth of their bodies like a fever in the coldness of interstellar space.

There's no air out here. No air, no air for them to breathe.

They breathe each other.

*

Cosmic time. Immeasurable time.

Galaxies drift farther and farther apart. Stars expand and contract, explode and implode, spin and collapse.

Dean and Sam bear witness to the heat death of the universe.

And yet. (And yet.) Together they still burn.

In the waning glow of a scattering nebula, Dean maps his brother's body with his hands and lips, and Sam spends a small eternity naming the constellations of freckles on Dean's skin.

*

Darkness reigns. Silence and cold stretch across all the regions of space-time, both near and far.

They cling to each other in the pitch blackness, wrapped in shadow, and in the absolute stillness Dean knows that Sam hears every word they haven't been able to say for too long now, just like he does.

They're as slow as an unwinding clock. It takes so long, so long, but then Sam's lips are against Dean's. Sam's kissing him, he's kissing him, and Dean kisses him back, Dean pours himself into his brother.

They're one soul. They've always been one soul.

Darkness. Darkness with no end in sight.

But Dean knows; Sam knows. They hold on to each other because they know.

It's always darkest before the Light.

***