As if Birth by crowroad3 for <user site="livejournal.com" user=

[springflingmod.livejournal.com]

Title: As if Birth
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: G
Any warnings: S11 spoilers




You wonder what’s burning, if you can wonder--and he’s all wonder now, larger and smaller than ever before, and not death, not quite. For awhile, he just isn’t. Then he is again. And a body, and quick.
*
Dean!
Voice is the first thing, then feet. Speak, walk. If you can speak, walk, you live, or what passes for living; say nothing of pulse, breath.
Traveler, someone says, get down the road.
Dean!
There’s dark.
No answer.
He’s on a path, but he can’t see it. There’s no shape, but there’s place.
What ‘s your name, he says, to himself, what’s your name?
*
A reaper said: Empty.
A reaper said: Unclean.
And sang a lament for Death.
A traveler said: give me the open road.
Mary, mom, said: baby, you look terrible.
Sam, says a voice, somewhere, get on down the highway.
*
These are memories. This is a body.
My name is Empty, he thinks.
Then he’s Sam again.
*
This is a place. He’s a shade. He’s a brother.
Sam, he says, to himself, and --
Dean!
Sometimes Empty, if that’s what it is, smells like cornfield, sometimes like fire, but those (he says to himself) are memories, leaking from life, from other. This is Empty, the ur- motel, not part of anywhere.
There’s no weather here, no time, only--
He has a palm.
He presses to remember.
*
There’s the road.
There’s memory, asterism; the hood of a--
Baby. An angel, the one they called friend--
Sam, Cas says, get on the road.
He tells himself stories, maps the old--
mindstates, from Kansas to Kansas; Lebanon, Lawrence.
He walks.
*
Sometimes he doesn’t have a face.
Or he doesn’t know if he has a face, become shade entire, until there are feet, down in the gloom, far down.
Overgrown, Dean says, and it’s the first, first he’s come close, not his voice but the memory of.
You’re a grown man, Sammy, overgrown.
Sometimes he loses his body whole, dispossesses,
and then comes back to it:
Mine, this is mine. And you--
I’m here, Dean says—
look for me.
*
There are signs, somewhere:
HOW DID WE DIE.
IS DEATH.
A CROSSROADS.
25 Miles to ROADSIGNS.
To all your LOSSES.
Roadside crosses.
To US.
*
You got to help yourself, boy, you’ve got to build. There’s that memory, dad (someone else, wearing his face), steady behind the wheel--
He helps those who help. Help themselves.
He’s on a road, but he can’t see it. There are shapes in the gloom. This is a place.
Billie said: Empty.
A traveler said: give me the open road.
Mom said: baby, you look terrible.
Ash, bless him, said,
Oh, you know--
soulmates.
Sam, Cas says, find your brother.
*
Sam rubs his feet on the edges of Empty.
Sam sits, remembers his possessions.
Dean’s hands, the ones that carried, that always did.
His brother’s hairline, lip-warm. Wheel-well, window.
Head-to-head and hip-to-hip, like souls.
*
Sam’s feet are wearing the faintest fade in the black, like strips of light, like the most faded of traces, trails.
There’s a memory of keys, of magic books.
This landscape is all memory, a shadow of memory. Diner. Motel. Not always the places you’d think you’d remember. Not heaven or hell, so much. Earth.
If he had real feet they’d be worn to blister, to bone; if bone, to what’s beneath.
He sits, if sitting. Prays, if praying.
Well-played, my boy, Death said.
Well-played.
*
A voice in the gloom says--
Sam!
Sammy.
Sam!
There’s another quickness here, just by. A voice, a footfall.
The smell of burning, a banging.
The outline of his brother is a darker shade in the dark (easy there, he might say; is that a memory?)
Does this mean we’re--
Does this mean we’re--
Does this mean we’re--
It means --
It means we’re both here, Dean says, and there’s a flash of Maine woods, and --
then, arms.
*
There’s another shape nearby. A glimmer, a tick.
You built Baby out of the dark, Sam says, and hears wind.
That’s a thing, is what Dean’s says, the one job--
(I could do without you.)
(We freaking built ourselves out of a void. It can’t be.)
What do you say, little brother; there’s no place like
-- well, no place.
--home
--300 miles to Red Lodge.
--Memory crashing.
If this is free will then--
Sammy?
There are hands. They have hands.
They have lips.
They have memory.
They have tires, a roof.

And there they are, here. Roll her down, slip in, hands close between; breath again, and fire. Dean has eyes, and there, a spark like color, the idea of. Look for horizon, where it’d be. Faint shape, newish moon. You and me, Dean says, and they are; atom by atom, if atoms, weightier.
Sounds good, their hands so close on the wheel, each other. (She’s not speaking yet, but she will, running on well, Empty. Love made substance, if the first force, made whole.)

They roll her down in the dusk, in the first dark, to where Sam’s feet have worn them,
at last, a shining highway home.