Just a little something I wrote when I should have been working on Glimpses. Also, since fanfiction requires much less effort to write than original fiction, I tend to write a lot more when I'm procrastinating. Like now, for instance.

He doesn't want to go to Hell.

It hits him painfully and all at once, like the first clap of thunder in the storm or the bad news you never see coming. He glances over at Sam sitting in the passenger seat, flipping through the pages of some decades-old newspaper printout (and he'll never admit, but secretly Dean likes when Sammy gets his nerd on because it makes things feel normal), and thinks to himself: I don't want to die.

He's never wanted to die. Not really. Oh, he's said it before; he's acted like death would be the ultimate blessing, pretending that he wants to die, wants the escape, because hunting makes you old and tired and jaded and saying that you want to die, when every day of your life is spent in constant danger, is easier than admitting that you don't, when it's inevitable that someday soon you will. But even on his darkest days, he has never really wanted death. There are too many good things in the world: like Sam, and girls, and sex, and greasy burgers, and driving his baby down empty country roads, blasting ACDC and not giving a damn what anyone else thinks.

Dean does not want to die. All he had wanted was to save his brother. Something in him broke at the sight of Sam's cold, empty body—his nerves snapped, just like that, because up until that point, the spark of light guiding him out of the bottle on his darkest nights had been Sam, and now that Sam was gone there was nothing worth living for. The only thing in the world he had honestly wanted during the nightmare of Cold Oak was his brother, happy and alive and well.

That was all he had ever wanted. His intentions had been pure, pure as the driven snow, or whatever the hell people said when they meant totally and completely honest (if a little selfish, because Dean thought he had always needed Sam around more than Sam had needed him).

But you know what they say: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Dean doubted the person who had originally coined the quote had meant it quite so literally.

At first, he had only been sad for Sam. For leaving Sam on his own to deal with the consequences of Dean's desperate act, for abandoning Sam, for bringing him back and then saddling him with the heavy weight of guilt (and he knew his brother far too well to harbor any illusions that Sam wouldn't feel horribly guilty for Dean's death). After all, Sam was his baby brother, and Dean was supposed to watch out for him. He was the annoying kid who never used to shut up when they were on long road trips, the one who used to whine about being left home when he and Dad went hunting, the one who was always too damn smart for his own good—and yeah, he could be a giant pain in the ass but he was Dean's pain in the ass.

But not anymore. It hit him with a cold shock that Sam would very soon be a total orphan, the only surviving member of his family at a mere twenty-four years old. And it was Dean's fault—maybe not completely, maybe not his fault for Mary, but certainly his fault for this deal, and in an indirect way Dean knew he had caused his father's death, too. (Winchesters always died violent, in the end.) He thought it was strangely ironic, the twin circumstances of both his and his father's deaths. Dean had always followed in his father's footsteps, but this time he was following John right off a cliff. Both short, tragic lives, lives marked by years of blood and anger and pain.

He wanted something different for Sam. His kid brother had always deserved to be something more in life than a hunter. Dean knew the score; he was a hunter, had always been, and the life of country backroads and cheap motels and creatures that sane people didn't believe in was the only thing he had ever known. But Sam was sensitive. He was a brainiac, a soccer player; a would-be lawyer, a should-have-been husband, a once-upon-a-time father.

And he deserved more than his brother's selfish, bloody sacrifice.

Dean turns the music up louder and wishes that, just this once, it could drown out his thoughts.

FIN.