4
Dean sees the first stained glass window in a little township in West Virginia. He throws rocks at it until his brother’s face shatters.
1
Before the end, Dean had tried to get rid of anything sharp in their motel room. Sam had used a pen instead; it achieved roughly the same effect.
The blood on his little brother’s palm had been a fight that Dean was destined to lose, and he’d known it from the beginning, from the first time he’d walked into the bathroom and found Sam staring into the mirror with blood dripping from his fingertips onto the cracked yellow porcelain sink and a knife in his right hand and a hot fevered glint in his eyes.
That hadn’t kept Dean from fighting, anyway.
(Sometimes at night Dean had crawled into Sam’s bed, wrapping himself around the emaciated wasteland of Sam’s frame and kissing the poor ragged holes in his little brother’s hands. Thank you, Sam whispered, every time, even though the touch of Dean’s lips never did what Dean wanted it to, never healed anything or made Sam better.)
2
It all had all ended in Blue Eye, Missouri.
You can’t have him, Dean screams, you can’t fucking take him, and there are two guns in his hand and a knife in his belt and he has enough bullets for all of them, for this hungry groaning multitude gathered in the chill dusk outside their hotel, and if he doesn’t then he will tear them apart like an animal and save a bullet for himself and one for Sam and go out like they’ve always been meant to.
But Sam stops him with a hand on his shoulder, out of bed and walking for the first time in weeks, bloody footprints on the carpet and so frail, fragile as glass, pale skin translucent like a butterfly’s wing, and when the crowd sees him standing behind Dean a great sigh rises up like a cloud, like something tangible, frightening in its intensity and desire. Let them have me, he says, it’s okay, Dean, it’s what I want, it has to happen, you have to let me go.
And Dean says, No, Sammy, you didn’t do anything wrong.
Yes, Sam says, I have, but they aren’t punishing me for it.
Dean says, Don’t do it for them, you don’t owe them a damn thing.
I’m not doing it for them, Sam says. They were sent to do this for me.
So Dean lets him go.
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