A/N: This was written for tifaching in the spnspringfling fic exchange on LJ. It's uh, Dean/Alastair, sort of post-Apocalyptic, and set several decades after 6.22.

Warnings: SPOILERS for 6.22: The Man Who Knew Too Much, blood, gore, references to torture, character death, pov-jumping, present-tense, metaphor-abuse. Also, um. My first attempt at slash. .

Disclaimer: I don't own Supernaturalor any of its characters.

My heartfelt gratitude to the wonderful das_mervin for giving this a read-through on very short notice.

In This Alien World

Freedom is red.

It is red and vast, stretching for miles under an unforgiving sun. It burns the soles of his feet and turns him half-blind with dust and heat, but it is freedom, and he walks on.

are you dean winchester

The words cloy in the air, sticky and sickly-sweet. He stops and looks up at the whited-out sky, one hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. His lips part, but the moisture that should've afforded him speech is running in great rivulets down his body, soaking the scraps of cloth he wears.

i knew you, a long time ago

He staggers on through the fire and the dust, because if he can't answer he can at least (be free) reach the end of this godforsaken desert and find—

sam is here too, you know

—there. He can feel it, beyond the burning itch between his shoulder blades, beyond the knives that scrape at the insides of his parched throat—muscle-clenching, hair-raising instinct.

He's being followed.

He begins to run now—

you can still do it

—and Freedom sways and shimmers all around him, the sunlight bouncing off everything at harsh angles and stabbing into his eyes. Something hits him on his back and he tumbles, falling and rolling in a near-endless sequence of sun-ground-sun until everything is nothing but red sand and Freedom isn't freedom anymore. A heavy, warm weight pins him face-down to the ground and he hears a low chuckle.

"Well," Alastair says, "didja miss me, Dean?"

They can't see the sun anymore.

Ice crystals fall from his skin when he moves, catching the electric light in a muted, short-lived rainbow. Even with the light, the room is impossibly dark; mind-numbingly cold. Everything is covered with a cancerous layer of ice – everything except the bed in the centre and the little boy sitting next to it.

"Jesse." God, his voice sounds wrecked, scratching around the inside of his throat like it just wants to burrow a hole through his windpipe. He's too old for this. Way, way too old for this. "How is he doing?"

Jesse looks up at him and smiles. Light from an unseen sun glints off his hair, casting a soft glow that almost looks like a halo—"I think he hears me," he says, looking at the occupant of the bed. "He'll be fine, Sam."

It's funny how seventy years of hearing the same words in so many different situations don't make them any more reassuring.

He's flipped around. Sweat drips into his eyes and Alastair is a silhouette against the sun, dissolving at the edges. He blinks, and when he opens his eyes again, Alastair's head has blocked out the sun. The demon leers down at him, and he can see bits of meat (bits of himself) caught between his teeth.

"Dean." He tilts his head. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to escape."

Dean grins, although he thinks his teeth must've been scraped to nothingness by all the sand at this point. "You don't... know better," he rasps painfully.

Alastair just laughs. He gets up and effortlessly lifts Dean to his feet. "I suppose you think you're being clever, getting that friend of yours to ensure both of us ended up here." He leans into Dean, close enough that Dean can taste the sulphur on his breath. "But you forgot that this? Is my domain."

dean we're here

Alastair's touch feels cool on his bare shoulders, even as the grip begins to tighten and nails dig into his skin and the blood flows and the sweat burns on the fresh wounds—"Forty years of fighting the lowest of Purgatory's scum." The demon shifts his head a little further, lips centimetres from Dean's ear. "There are better uses to all that time. You should know, Dean."

"You're the last," Dean says, and oh god, it hurts, the claws digging in and in and rusty nails in his throat and the sun beating down and roasting him alive and—it hurts, and it's the most alive he's felt in decades. "Last... and then we're done."

Freedom is pain.

The days since Castiel's sacrifice – murder? His one last gift? – have been spent fighting. There isn't a moment that Sam can think of in his (two hundred and) seventy years that hasn't been consumed by conflict and the bone-crushing, gut-wrenching feeling that everything in the universe is out to kill you, and now—now he thinks he's finally tired. Tired of the struggle. Tired of cleaning up their messes, fighting every monster released on Earth ever since Castiel self-destructed and let loose Purgatory's denizens.

"These demons," he says. "They're the last, right? I mean, that's it. We're done after this."

Jesse hums idly and reaches out to touch Dean's arm. It's truncated at the elbow, forearm removed when it was crushed beyond repair in a stupid hunting accident over a decade ago. Between your missing leg and my arm and the whole soul-mates thing, Dean used to tell him, we've enough fodder for another pretentious prophecy, eh, Sammy?

"There's no such thing," Jesse says suddenly. "There's always going to be something else."

"I know," Sam says. "But we stop here."

Jesse says nothing.

Fifty years ago, Dean killed Sam.

He doesn't know how it happened: just that there was a moment when he was slicing through another nameless soul (they screamed their names oh they screamed but what did it matter it was hell) and the next he was sliding the knife into Sam's neck. He remembers that one moment of looking at his brother's eyes and seeing the fear and betrayal there, and then—Alastair's hand on his, Alastair's voice in his ear.

(you can always go back)

But he didn't want to. He didn't. He couldn't.

(you can go back and die, or you can live)

He cut his brother's throat and watched him die, Alastair in him and around him, and could only think this is how i live this is how i live—

"Is this how you live?" Alastair asks him. The red dust-haze and its lazy sun-baked shimmer is still obscuring most of his face; Dean thinks of those forty years in Hell when Alastair was never more than a shadow-figure nestling within Dean's soul and ripping him apart from the inside. A glint of teeth and tongue, a flash of the knife, that constant, violating touch, that voice that never stopped asking him to—

Alastair shifts, licks a long lazy line down from Dean's ear along his jaw. "It's nothing compared to what we achieved, you know."

we're here, dean. you can do this.

Dean closes his eyes and shudders. "What we achieved?" he says, voice nothing more than a hoarse whisper. But Alastair understands (he's always understood). "Was... starting the Apocalypse."

Alastair chuckles. "Exactly. You were such a magnificent student; destined for great things."

"Sorry I... kinda pulled... the plug on the big plan, then."

"But you never did, Dean." Alastair lets go of his shoulders. "This is the end of your exam. And you? Have passed with flying colours." He leans in and kisses Dean furiously. Even as Dean feels the kiss like sharp teeth and blood and sulphur (and life), there is a sudden warm weight in his hand. Dean chances a look at it: it's a long, beautiful knife, shining painfully in the sun.

use it as you must.

Dean doesn't think. He plunges the knife into Alastair. The demon staggers back, surprised, blinking at Dean's hand still closed around the hilt of the blade in his stomach. Dean pushes and twists and drags, until Alastair is twitching, blood bubbling from his lips. "That's it," Dean says. "I'm done."

Alastair smiles, red-stained teeth in a red haze. "I'm proud of you," he says, collapses, and lies on the burning ground, unmoving.

Dean stands for a long moment, panting, before the world does one last tumble and is swallowed by darkness.

"It's over," Jesse says. "Dean's about to wake up; come on, Sam!"

Sam pushes himself up from the chair with a stifled groan and limps his way to the bed. Dean's eyes are open, but he stares at both of them, unrecognising. "Dean?" Sam reaches out, shakes his brother's shoulder. "Dean, come on, man—"

"I don't think he can answer," Jesse says contemplatively. He smiles up at Sam. "This probably means it's time."

Sam frowns. "Time for what?"

Jesse gestures for him to come closer; when Sam leans in, he touches both of their foreheads. "To say goodbye."

The world dissolves into nothing.

When Sam wakes up, he's in the Impala. He's barely thought this is impossible; the Impala was destroyed twenty years ago when he realises that he's young again: all of his limbs are intact, he's got most of his hair back, and the near-constant, gnawing pain in his bones is gone. He opens the door and steps out of the car to see Dean leaning against the hood, young and whole. An empty highway stretches out into a horizon bathed in the light from two moons and a brilliant galaxy of stars.

Dean doesn't turn as Sam settles next to him on the hood; he merely smiles and says, "Thought you'd never wake up."

Sam grins. "Does it matter when we've got eternity ahead of us?"

Dean turns; his eyes flash pitch-black. "No," he says. "I guess it doesn't."

Finis