[AO3 Crosspost] Your last shiver

[terresdebrume]

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Supernatural
SERIES: -
RATING: Teen and Up
WORDCOUNT: 1 619
PAIRING(S) / RELATIONSHIP(S): Wincest
CHARACTER(S): Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester, Charlie Bradbury, Kevin Tran, Castiel, Garth
GENRE: Suicide fic
TRIGGER WARNING(S): Suicide, Incestuous relationship
SUMMARY: Your story ends in a victorious flight.


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It starts as a tremor in the fingers.

You don’t even pay attention to it at first, tucking your hands deeper in the worn-thin pockets of your jackets and thrift stores gloves, tell yourself it’s the cold making you tremble and nothing else -you’re too young for the alternative, too active, too poor. You keep it to yourself and do your best not to think about it when Cas is near because God only knows what he can see or hear of your thoughts, and you don’t want him to tell Dean -and also because you’ve been reluctant to show him your weaknesses since the Wall.
He’s your friend and it hurts not to be able to trust him fully but you think it would be hard not to realize Cas has a history of hurting you, on purpose or not.

Your fingers shake a little stronger every day and it’s getting difficult to hide, so at night you shove your hands under the pillow and press on them with all the weight of your head, and you tell yourself most cases appear over fifty, you’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe, from this if nothing else.


It’s nearly three months in when you realize you haven’t hit your head on a low ceiling or hanging chandelier in ages, and wonder why that is. You’ve had accidents, of course -a dropped glass, a razor cut, a few harmless bumps against the walls… but hey, you’ve had worse, and it’s not like it’s preventing you from participating on the cases. Yeah, sure, completing the three trials was hell, but then it would have been no matter what and at this point you’re just grateful it didn’t involve any work of precision. Still, you managed to make yourself believe you kept it together, believe you could hide it, believe you were as fast as before and able to hunt, even though you stick more and more to the research jobs.
There is a mirror in the bathroom of your cave, and when you come out of the shower you look at yourself for the first time in a long time and realize: you’re almost bent in half. You’re slumping forward and your shoulders are rounded as if to avoid a hit, hands shivering despite the warmth, and it hits you just then: there’s no way Dean hasn’t noticed.

There’s no way Charlie, or Kevin, or Garth haven’t noticed, no way they’re fooled by your game, no way they still think you could go on a hunt if you wanted to. They know, of freaking course they know, and for some reason the thought makes you want to break the mirror, and the walls, and the bed, and everything else -it makes you want to tear the place down and be buried underneath never to come back up.
Everybody knows what’s happening, and the only reason they haven’t said anything is because they know there’s nothing they can do… unless Dean has decided to play the denial card again and the others are too scared to go against him. You can’t go on like that, though. If they all know, you have to talk about it. You have to talk to Dean.

You corner him in the kitchen, his favorite place, as he’s watching over a pan of fried vegetables -he’s been eating more healthily lately, and you wonder if the unstoppable movement of your arms has anything to do with it.
You think you shouldn’t be surprised when Dean refuses the conversation, even less when he flees from you. You try again, a couple of times, but eventually you just drop it and go on with your life.

(You learn from Garth that Dean asked Castiel to heal you, but the Angel couldn’t. Apparently, Lucifer screwed with your brain too hard for him to take everything away.

Of course, by this point you’ve realized you can barely write anymore, and even reaching for coffee is becoming too difficult a task to perform on your own. The cause doesn’t matter all that much anymore.)


A year in and you haven’t left the batcave in weeks, maybe months.
Keeping track with the time is hard, though you think -hope- it’s due to the absence of calendar more than dementia, and you don’t particularly worry about it so long as Dean is inside with you. You grow nervous when he goes hunting, because if something should happen you aren’t sure you’d be able to manipulate the old phones to call for help -already, you can’t sew him back, you can’t put his dislocated shoulders back in place, you can’t patch him up. Now you can’t even ask for help anymore.
You can’t really tell how long he’s been gone and you can’t protect him, you can’t even try and cook something decent for him to come back to -you can do nothing, nothing but struggle your way from your bed to a seat in the living room -to the bathroom, to kitchen where all your meals are either tasteless or over salted because putting pasta in the water is one think, controlling the amount of spice you pour is quite another- and wait, and hope.

It kills you knowing you’re broken and getting shabbier and more useless everyday, as even turning book pages is becoming something of a struggle, and you want to scream and punch the walls and tear your hair out, but you need coordinated movement for that and you can’t, you’ve lost it, you’ve lost the only thing that was ever truly yours, which is the fact that Dean can count on you -that Dean did count on you, at some point.
You’ve stopped praying, and you’ve stopped eating, and listening to music and reading, and when Castiel asked if he could do something for you, you forgot you couldn’t move any more and tried to punch him for not being with Dean already.

(It looked pathetic, an infant trying to reach for his bottle for the first time, and you ended up yelling all sort of abuse at Cas because you can take everything -torture and death and pain and isolation, even the cage and Lucifer- but not this, not the slow decay of your abilities and the knowledge that you’re a dead weight now, dragging Dean down when he could do so much better on his own.)


A year and a month in, and Dean invites every one of your friends for diner.
He makes pumpkin soup, which everybody drinks with a straw, and the attention makes you smile despite yourself. You have a poker game, with Castiel holding your cards for you, and between the two of you the others are down to their underwear in record time  -Dean has to help you when you lose your socks to a lousy hand, but it’s still a goodnight.
They decline staying for the night. They say they have a job to do, or a life to come back to, and they leave the two of you alone in your little cave, the only solid home you’ve ever known -the best part of your life, really.


Dean undresses you that night, as he does every night, hands soft against the permanent shiver of your body. It’s a familiar scene now, this, you don’t even complain anymore, but this time when Dean has you down to your boxers he takes your face in his hand and kisses your lips, your eyes, your nose.
You welcome him with an eagerness that fails to surprise you, and wonder if he was ever that tender, that thorough with the women he used to pick up a long, long time ago.

Afterwards, when you lay sated on your bed with the tastes of Dean’s mouth and your own come mingling on your tongue, you relish the weight of his head against your chest and you think maybe you should have done that sooner -maybe the two of you have wasted too much time. Still, you figure it’s better late than never, and for the first time in a long time, you fall asleep with a smile on your lips and confident about what tomorrow will bring.


When you wake up the next day, you find all of your clothes packed, your weapons carefully organized on the library tables with little labels on them -Killed my first werewolf or nearly got ganked by that ghoul or Ruby, and you realize it’s all your lives Dean has laid out there, all the little memories he could fish from the past, and for some reasons it brings tears to your eyes like nothing else managed to.
Dean finds you sobbing over the miniature Impala at the end of the table and the little sticky note that says Ours, from the beginning and until the end, and he smiles, a little watery but reassuring all the same as he takes your hand to guide you up the stairs.

(It takes you nearly forty-five minutes to climb them.)


You nap through most of the journey, with no stop you can count aside from gas and orgasmic french fries next to Corona, in California. There’s a road there that the locals believed to go on forever, and Dean says you should drive it all. Of course, you remember the day you investigated that road as well as he does, and you manage to nod.



At the end of the road, Dean takes your hand in his, and the trembling of your body stops as if by magic -though Dean has always been a bit magic to you. Baby’s motor roars when the ground stops restraining the speed of her wheels.



You fly.