#pictured: me desperately struggling not to keep quoting beckett

[katsidhe]

Fic: vladimir and estragon are dead [15.19 coda]

AO3

Summary: what plea, what surrender, will a bored God possibly accept at this late hour?

The world is empty.

They drive across a landscape that is only a little more desolate than it always has been. This is their end and their beginning, this is where their roads always lead: to highways with no cars for miles, empty backwaters and ghost towns. This time it’s only slightly more literal. The fulcrum of the universe shifts and tilts with them; the center of mass of the earth moves devastatingly, tenderly.

Sam waits for the gutting claustrophobia to kick in, and finds that he can’t make the feeling truly latch on. Maybe it’s because it’s always been here, curled up in his heart like a parasite. It’s not that Sam isn’t used to the idea of a prison larger than a planet, creation as a dark and empty pit, company laughably limited. He finds his mind instead attempting to flit over more practical concerns. When will the electrical grid fail? How many fires have already started, set by unattended stoves, how many cities are burning? How long until every light winks out, until darkness and silence returns to swallow the trappings of civilization?

Cas is dead, and he has died so many times, they’re all dead, they’ve all died so many times, but the pain still squeezes his heart, catches him under the collarbone like a knife. It hurts moving, breathing. But the losses Sam carries mean nothing compared to the weight of what he has personally managed to erase. His stubborn spite, his fetid desire to carve out a life for himself and his tiny family, his rebelliousness managed to get the fucking multiverse killed. Sam has never been to Asia, but now four billion people who lived there are gone. It is absurd to mourn. It is absurd to exist.

Sam won’t allow himself to feel the grief but he will permit the guilt to cripple him. What does it matter if he’s crippled? What does any of it matter? His defiance led to this: a blank page. An empty canvas.

When they reach the Bunker, the stars are bright above. It is the impossible, cold glory of a vast aquarium, viewed from the inside.

They drink together in the quiet. More accurately, they attempt to. Dean gamely downs pull after pull of whiskey. Sam tries. The first shot has him retching, spitting like it’s battery acid. He vomits on the library floor.

Dean laughs meanly, says, “I can drink for both of us.”

Sam looks up and meets his eyes and feels his face twist into a rictus laugh too. He finishes being sick and he doesn’t clean up, doesn’t bother. Cleaning, like many things, is not a concept.

It doesn’t feel like the world has ended down here, even though Sam knows it has. Could be any other day, miles and miles from civilization, insulated underground behind wards that keep out anything short of a god (or anything without the keys). This hole in the ground doesn’t feel vaster or emptier than it normally does. The wider world has never existed in this space; this is the center of the entire universe, just the two of them.

Dean passes out at some point, and Sam lays his head down too. He strips down to one layer, tosses his overshirts at a chair, kicks off his shoes, then his socks. He runs his fingers over the smooth grain of the table, over and over and over. He feels the worst kind of drunk, dizzy and lightheaded with a pounding headache. He should drink some water. He should eat some food. He won’t, though. Who’s depending on him now? For what purpose should his body be fueled? What power, fair or foul, mundane or magical, ought to keep his bones from collapsing in on themselves, into bloody withered dust?

“How do you summon God?” Dean asks muzzily, when he blinks awake again under the golden fluorescent light.

”Maybe the amulet,“ Sam offers. He’s been picturing it mutely all night, turning it over and over in his head, with the weight of heavy responsibility.

It’s dragged out of hiding. The brass is not just warm to the touch, it’s searingly hot. It burns Sam’s fingers when he tries to take it out of the box: even the barest brush of the cord makes him flinch away. Dean wraps his shirt around his hands and tries, and swears. The heat is not diminished one degree. Eventually Sam just takes the entire memory box, upends it messily on the library counter, uses a broken pencil to fish out the amulet and dump it in the metal bowl, among the herbs and the roots and the bones of a small furred creature.

By silent agreement they take everything outside, blinking in the bright dawn chill, leaving Jack to his miserable sleep. Sam is still barefoot. The sharp gravel opens tiny wounds. Shoes seem a pointless inconvenience, some petty barrier between himself and the world, and for what? What can reach him now?

It’s the strongest summoning spell Sam knows. Enochian and Sumerian, to call like to like, to invoke heavenly power. A sigil Rowena taught him, that inscribes itself in purple flame.

He chants quietly in the stillness. The amulet flares in blinding white light, but as the brilliance dampens Sam can make it out when it melts, when it dwindles into pointless black sludge. Dean touches the bowl briefly. Sam feels nothing.

Not that it matters. He knows Chuck can hear them. He prays, too, with belief and desperation he hasn’t felt in years. He gets on his knees, and after a moment, Dean joins him. It makes Sam’s heart twist.

They pray to a God who is not absent. The spot in his shoulder where Sam shot God and himself aches sharply. God wants him to suffer, he knows. He understands where they live now, in a wasteland with something that hates them. This is familiar territory. They are Chuck’s entertainment, his bulwark against a devastating darkness.

Nothing and nobody shows. Sam shifts from his knees into a full-body prostration, doesn’t look to see if Dean does the same. Instead, he buries his face in the dirt. Tears still won’t come. It’s not  that he’s numb. He’s just had too much practice, that’s all. Please, he prays, please, he is so sorry, he will bear any humiliation, any torment, he will bear any trial, please, for mercy—

A thought, a message, or a memory. Will you, Sam? Will you? What will you do for me? Will you cut out your heart for me, hold it in your hand, will you eat it?

And Sam knows this isn’t enough. Of course not, their mere surrender is never what Chuck wanted. Sam knows what Chuck wants, right? He’s lived it long enough. Chuck wants to watch.

“Dean,” Sam says. He sits up and brushes dirt from his face. Dean is already standing. Staring up at the risen sun. He’s holding his knife. He’s figured it out too.

“I know,” Dean says.

Still on his knees, Sam looks at the knife. “We have to make it good,” he says. “Not too fast, right?”

Dean stares down at him in horrific fury. There are tears in his eyes. “This is fucked.”

Sam smiles like a flinch, just at the corners of his mouth. “Not like we haven’t been here before,” he says. “It’s okay.”

Dean comes a step closer. Close enough. Hit me, Dean, Sam thinks, Sam urges. He wants it with his whole being, invites it. The whole universe sings with the cosmic rightness of it. The new sun wants this to happen, the sky the Kansas fields the deep blue sea God in his Heaven and the Devil in his Hell, every molecule, every uncounted star and every grain of sand wants this. Sam wants this, with sublime intensity.

Sam wants to say the words to summon Dean’s wrath, but in this moment he can’t remember them. Maybe just being is enough. It should be. Maybe just kneeling here in the dew-damp grass will be enough, to fan the sense-memories. It is for Sam. He can feel the tears coming, for the first time since the world ended.

Dean’s face forces itself into something like a snarl. It’s ugly. “I’m not torturing you, asshole,” he says.

Sam shrugs, with one shoulder. His other hurts with an abominable, shooting pain. “Gut wound?” he suggests. This time he does smile.

Dean scoffs. “You do me first,” he says. He takes Sam’s arm and drags him upright. He paws at his belt, brings out his gun, and presses it into Sam’s hands.

Sam doesn’t fumble on the slide, on the grip. His fingers check the weapon and click off the safely with automatic efficiency. He nods loosely. He understands. This too is the sacrifice demanded, and neither of them may shirk their parts.

“At the same time, then,” Sam says.

Dean scrubs his hand over his face. He nods.

“Chuck!” Dean screams. “Chuck, this is for you! You’d better fucking FIX THIS! Bring them back, bring them all back. Here’s your goddamn ending.”

He looks at Sam, and Sam looks at him. Sam puts his hand on Dean’s shoulder, to keep them both upright. Dean grips his arm with painful intensity. When the knife slides into Sam’s abdomen, and twists in a burst of breathless star-bright agony, some puzzle piece of the universe slots into alignment. When Sam’s fingers bury the muzzle between their bodies and pull the trigger, crimson relief overtakes him in a flood.

Their breath releases in a gasp. For long, impossible moments they remain upright, swaying, foreheads pressed together. Sam wants to clutch instinctively at the fatal wound, but that would mean releasing the gun or releasing his grip on Dean’s shoulder, both absurd impossibilities. Dean’s hand is cold on his arm but so warm in the mess of his stomach.

An eternity later they stagger apart. Sam watches fascinated as his breath mists in the dawn air.  He gasps again as the knife slides out and drops, as the gun drops next to it. Now finally his fingers are permitted to explore the bloody gape of his torso. His searching eyes meet Dean’s, similarly poleaxed. Now his brother’s face has relaxed into half a grin, high on gory oblivion.

“Together,” Dean breathes, on a trickle of blood. “Hah.”

Sam nods. They’re both sinking inwards, gravity dragging them down. Where will they go, he wonders, with Death’s death, God’s spite, the world’s emptiness. Somewhere either better or worse than here, he decides, and it doesn’t matter which.

“Picturesque enough?” Dean spits at the sky. His smile is broadening. His eyes are red. He’s hungover, or actually, still drunk, Sam thinks. Blurry with misery. Sam is only drunk on guilt.

The sun climbs higher. Sam breathes in bloody panting gasps and watches red mud form around them. He and Dean aren’t touching anymore, and somehow that too feels right. He can listen and watch Dean curled into himself and dying out of the corner of his half-slitted eye. The heat of the new day builds, skimming over them like the brush of a giant hand. The pain in his shoulder splits him through, worse than the pain in his gut. When he coughs, the world itself shudders.

The blood pools in grass and dirt, forming little eddies and ponds. Like an ecosystem, Sam thinks. He tries to imagine a new world springing up from where he and Dean are soaking into the soil—fresh life, a microcosm of new biota. It’s all he wants. But the only image he can picture is the slick of black oil sheen at dusty gas stations, the unnatural rainbow opalescence of toxic reflections, a poison where nothing at all can grow. He doesn’t pray for meaning, but he wishes he were allowed to. Like in the Cage, it carries the sick certainty that the only God that can hear him is one that certainly means him ill.

Between one blink and the next, Chuck is standing on the grass, loafers brushing the pooled blood. “Hey, guys,” he says. He’s smiling, only very faintly.

“Bring them back,” rasps Dean. He’s nearly gone. They’re both nearly gone. “We did what you wanted.”

Chuck doesn’t respond. Doesn’t do anything like pull up a lawn chair, either, like Sam might have expected—just stands and stares with perfect inhuman attention.

Sam doesn’t feel it when Dean dies, but he knows it happened. When Sam dies, God is still watching over him.

Chuck is smiling when Sam gasps back to life, when he hears Dean gagging a few feet away. Sam recognizes the expression, because he’s seen it before, in a dim and bloody tunnel, in a different universe.