Angsty s10 ficlet!

Set after 9.23. Contains some s10 spoilers.

Monument

Dean's gone, again.

Sam sits in the middle of the summoning ritual, holding ash in one hand and the tattered remains of Dean's jacket in the other, paint like blood and blood like skin on his clothes. He calls for Crowley in every language he knows, reversing spells and interlocking them like he's constructing equations, making science out of the arcane, throwing words like grenades that explode in empty air.

Crowley still doesn't come, and Sam rubs the ash into the folds of the jacket, fingers slipping into tears and ripping them further, trying to summon Dean's corpse out of sheer will. He imagines Crowley parading Dean's corpse in Hell like a trophy—the corpse of the killer of the greatest threat to his throne. He imagines Crowley building a throne out of Dean's bones and a crown out of his skin, and he crawls to a corner and vomits, static in his ears and white behind his eyelids, and there's no air, no air, no air—

Fifteen minutes later, he's packed two bags of weapons and every book he thinks can possibly help him, and discovers the Impala is missing.

He laughs, because why not? The Impala has no purpose now that Dean doesn't exist; she sprang from Dean's hands over and over, destruction to renewal and back again, and each time, the sticky vinyl seats and the malfunctioning vents and the creaky doors remained. Each time, Dean returned to slide into the driver's seat with Sam curled next to him, jaw to knee to ankle, cruising down open roads with music that's turned bittersweet with age, and banter that's prayer and prayer that's condemnation. The laughter catches in Sam's throat, mutates until it's something painful that threatens to rip out of him, and so Sam picks up the keys of the first car he sees and tears out of the Bunker.

He hunts demons almost exclusively over the next few weeks; none of them will tell him about Crowley's whereabouts, and in this Sam feels a kinship that goes beyond the blood he shares with them—loyalty unto death to an absent leader. The Winchesters have always believed in building monuments for each other's deaths, and this is Sam's—the demons he kills with the knife, the bodies he leaves in his wake, every drop of blood resisted and every desperate, cracking, where's my brother?! When you live for a dead man, murder becomes benediction; you can only hold onto the dead when you've killed everything else about you.

The monument cracks, sometimes.

There's a day when Sam's on the street and sees a young woman in a summer dress, her back turned to him, long brown curls catching the sunlight, and Sam feels like somebody's opened his ribcage and turned everything in there inside-out. He swallows against his nausea and stumbles into the nearest public restroom he can find. He catches himself in the dirty mirror: the prominence of the bones under his skin, the circles under his eyes, the bright blue strap of his sling and the yellow-green blush of old bruises peeking from under his collar. He thinks, I don't remember getting this way, and then, Even without Dean to tell me what I'm not. He pauses a moment, chases down the nausea and the sense of betrayal with a couple of pills from the bottle in his pocket, and leaves.

Two months later, he discovers that Dean's a demon. He chases his brother like he once chased Crowley; at Dean's let me go, he can only look at the rooms he's sealed himself into and think, I don't know how to fight my way out anymore.

(you never left, sam.)

Dean's stalking Sam through the bunker with an axe in hand, eyes flashing black and words promising death, but it isn't until Dean stops, haloed in red light, and says, Who's the real monster here? that a horrible, craven part of Sam cries, dean's home. dean's home.

Finis