A/N: Theoretic spoilers post 6.22. Story swings A.U. even from there. Of late I've been on this kick for stories that deal with how things might have been had Dean and Sam never existed. I know there's a couple of other stories that deal with a similar topic, but like several artists using the same subject, everyone comes up with a different scenario. The two chapters here are supposed to be separate parts of the same story. And there's one more tale-a longer one-yet to be told.

No apologies for the tragedy; the story is what it is. And much thanks to Ainaof for beta-reading! ^-^ Hugs to you, hon!

Summary: Sam's wall is broken. Bobby is dead. Castiel is gone and Dean asks Death a final favor.

Inverted Catastrophe

Story 1

Dean stirred in the stiff chair when the night nurse entered to check Sam's vitals. She impassively registered his temperature. Dean silently watched every move, listened to each sound. She did not speak, did not greet him or say a single word about Sam's status. He was just another patient in a large ward.

How unfair that she did not realize were it not for Sam Winchester's sacrifice, she'd not be alive; no job, no family and no future.

The nurse recorded her findings and departed the way she entered.

No change.

Two weeks, no change. No change. Dean knew nothing could bring Sam back to him now. The outside world moved on as it ever did. The unfairness of it all left a bitter taste in Winchester's mouth.

Bobby died, thanks nothing to Raphael. The only other member of their little family saved Sam's life. For what, the embattled hunter failed to guess. Dean had no strength or will left. He cared about nothing outside of Sam.

Castiel gave everything he had to destroy Raphael and by default, the angel took out Crowley and several of his top demons. Dean hurt so much he choked up and stopped breathing. All the secrets and lies led to a sacrifice Dean wished had never happened. Why couldn't Castiel trust him enough to ask for help? Why? Such a completely craptastic situation.

Utterly alone, forsaken and once again the lone survivor of a war, Dean saw no future for himself. Sam was lost to him, lost in a hell Dean dared not even think about. Numb with such deep shock, even his broken heart no longer hurt, even as certain as Dean was that his soul bled profusely. His sleep, plagued by nightmares, granted no solace, no peace. He shed no tears. Not because he tried to be a 'big boy', suck it up and move on but because he didn't have the strength. Dean was as dead inside as Sam looked outside.

With a soft, cracking voice, Dean whispered the incantation to beseech a final meeting with Death. Not that he believed Death might come to his rescue. Dean was, of all things, a realist.

Dean had other plans.

"I am sorry for your plight, Dean," Death declared upon his arrival. The persona's underlings and peers thought it highly uncharacteristic that Death made as many exceptions for the Winchesters as he did. Death shrugged them off. Technically, he answered to no one. What he did was his own business. Besides, the brothers were as much a force of nature-of the natural order of things-as himself. And while the boys had unruly inclinations and tendencies toward recklessness, they still commanded respect.

Dean nodded. Coming from anyone else, he'd look on the statement as a platitude. Dean wanted no one's pity. But coming from Death, it was meant as a balm. "I-I was wondering if, um, you'd... take us."

The persona's angular, ancient face tilted just enough to indicate uncertainty. "You are asking me to take both of you?"

Dean settled his gaze on his unconscious brother's expressionless features. "It's over. Completely. We've screwed up enough, I think. And... I was wondering if you'd make it so that we never existed." Dean blinked green eyes at the tall lanky figure standing at the foot of Sam's bed. Deans swallowed as much emotion as he could. But one tear, one tear for his brother, escaped. Dean did not bother to wipe it. He lost. He lost.

Death raised dark eyes to the ceiling. "Let me make this clear: you want me to take you and your brother and erase you from all of history? You want me to make sure you never happened?"

"Yeah." Dean nodded. "We've messed up everything. Heaven's in chaos. Hell is running rampant. There are things running all over the planet to the extent that we don't even know what's monster and what's Human. And it's our fault." Dean bowed his head and clasped Sam's cold hand.

Death smiled because he knew otherwise. Dean and Sam didn't just save lives, they saved the living from a life of hell. They taught angels the value of redemption, loyalty and the depth of love's power. The boys reminded demons the reasons for their eternal condemnation.

But Dean did not understand that. Those facts were over his head. In his state of grief, they were too big to envision. All Dean saw was what it cost him and his brother. The price they paid was more than anyone, anyone at all, should have to pay. Death laid a compassionate hand on Dean's shoulder and caught the man's shoulders as Dean's soul left his body. He situated the prone figure comfortably and gently set Dean's hands in his lap.

Death squeezed Sam's hand once. "Your brother is waiting for you, Sam," he said quietly. Sam's heart monitor flattened and a flurry of activity winded through the ward toward the room. Nurses and doctors rushed past Death and his reaper.

~XXXXXX~

Mary Winchester wept over the grave of her unborn son. On her knees, she rocked herself. "Why? Why?" she kept asking. It was unfair! She was going to have a son! But the miscarriage robbed her of Heaven's angel. It took months and John's constant soothing reassurance for Mary to emotionally recover.

The baby was going to be her first. The baby was supposed to represent a new family, a new and real life for her and John. Mary abandoned her father's mad obsession with the paranormal. She wanted nothing more to do with the things in the dark. She wearied of the constant sorrow and tragic end to other people's lives. John took her from all that death. He saved her.

The following year, John and Mary adopted a sweet three year-old Asian girl abandoned in San Francisco. Deanna filled their lives with laughter, pride and surprises. But Mary still wanted a baby; something that lived on as part of her and part of the love of her life. One failed attempt after another drove Mary to seek help.

The second miscarriage devastated her. Mary spent time in a mental health facility until she accepted the fact that she wasn't meant to have a child of her own. She accepted it and busied herself with the lives of two other children she and John adopted. Mary lived a full life but always, at the back corners of her mind, she wondered what might have been.

~XXXXXX~

John was sorry he could not give Mary the child for which she longed. He tried to be as good a man to her as possible. He worked long and hard at the auto repair, climbing as close to the top without owning the business. Pleased with his work, the owners sent him on trips now and again to establish other shops around the state. On one such trip, John met Kate Milligan.

It was bad judgement on his part, John knew. The one-night stand was a sore, sore mistake and he did not know how to tell his loving wife. He did, however, manage to keep the situation under the rug.

Then Kate died in a hit-and-run. John was not about to bring little Adam home to his wife and three adopted children. So he swept Adam into a foster home.

That was that. That was all. John went back to his life and thought nothing more of it.

~XXXXXX~

"It had to be you, Sam."

Sam heard that time and again but no one said why.

Jesse Wright did not warm up to Adam right away. Leery of strangers the little boy avoided his foster brother and almost never spoke to him. But little by little, Adam coaxed the younger child into a tentative trust. The boys weren't the closest of siblings, but they were all they had. The family, while not abusive, had their differences, tethered together by strings of necessity rather than love.

Jesse reached age twelve and the world turned inside out for his adopted parents. First came petty theft. That led to gang fights and juvenile hall. Adam tried to reason with his little brother. After all, they were in the same boat. But Jesse didn't see it that way. He was a throw-away child, tossed to the world by a birth-mother who didn't care.

While Jesse never committed any felonies, his unruly behavior landed him in the occasional bout with the law. So at age seventeen he enlisted.

Boot camp turned the unruly young man into a hard-edged, cold, calculating soldier. Jesse ended up in places and battles not publicized by the government or the media. He saw the ugliest part of life. He dealt with rape gangs, warlords and human trafficking in the darker parts of the world. All the horrors of military life pushed him into a darkness from which he refused to climb out.

By age twenty-three, Jesse survived three military campaigns and served three months in a South American jail for raping a fourteen year-old girl.

Adam chose college. He wasn't striving to top all his peers in engineering, but he earned a solid degree and landed a good job. When he saw Jesse again, Adam did not recognize him. He was glad his little brother returned to the states, even if it was for a six-month leave. Their short-lived reunion did little to soften Jesse's heart. He astonished his family with powers he kept safely hidden until his enlistment in the military. He never told them of the incidents, the deaths, the one night he danced with demons.

But Adam, the practical child between them, suspected the darkness simmering just under Jesse's skin. Maybe it was the way Jesse carried himself. Maybe it was the things he'd say so off-handedly.

Maybe it was the creepy darkness in the boy's eyes that suggested the truth of his nature to his foster brother. At the end, none of mattered as Adam lay in the middle of the parking lot at two A.M., bleeding out from their worst fight. Jesse left him for dead and declared it was time to end his family relations.

Adam prayed.

Someone came to the young man with an offer: "Just give me permission to use you to save your family. It's all you need to do."

No clear record exists stating exactly when Jesse took the devil into him. The only thing historians claimed was an incident in a small ancient church in Maryland. A bright light shot up from the Earth. An explosion excavated a sixty-mile crater in Maryland. Two hundred twelve people died.

The apocalypse rocked the planet with the force of an asteroid collision. The entire eastern seaboard smoldered with death. Dead things from the sea choked the shorelines. Great and terrible storms obliterated the midwest. Japan sank into the ocean. An unnatural fire burned Russia. An unfathomable earthquake rocked the Middle East and a great chasm opened from Saudi Arabia across Iraq into Iran.

Silence reigned in Heaven as the host looked on in shock. Certainly they were warned the Apocalypse was going to be awful. They were told the cost of their war pushed the death toll into the hundreds of millions. But this... this event they unleashed wound out of control. Their little dust devil spun into a full-force F-6 tornado. Now helpless to stop it, to stop Jesse and his friend, Lucifer, all the angels could do was wait it out and hope Michael fulfilled his destiny and conquered the evil.

Those angels who supported Humans more so than their hard-core warrior peers quietly grieved the fate of the world. Michael succeeded. He won. The devil, and thereby, Jesse, died at his hands.

But the price...

Castiel hung his head, grief stricken. He wished there could have been another way.

End