(no subject)

[forthedog]

So Let Us Not Talk Falsely Now
1530 words
R

The world falls away and it’s just them looking down the end of each other’s guns.

Mike laughs. Mike approaches everything with laughter, like a shield, if he were into protecting himself at all. Like a weapon, maybe. Something he hurls at the world. His gun hand doesn’t tremble. Only one of his eyes is any good but he’ll say that one is all he needs.

Dean doesn’t laugh. It’s not that there’s nothing to laugh at, mind. It’s that if he started he’s honestly not sure he would ever be able to stop.

I told you you’d have to kill me, Mike says, and Dean only nods. Yes, that was said once. He’s not sure what the hell it means now. That was over one man, not thousands of them. He never saw it getting as far as the two of them, facing each other down in a field of corpses.

Neil’s not among them. He knows this because he’s decided to believe it.

“I didn’t kill him, Mike.” Maybe no one did. Maybe none of this is happening at all. “I can help you look. C’mon, he might still be—“

“He’s not.” Mike thumbs the hammer back on the pistol. It’s been a long time since he had a gun in his hand and frankly it doesn’t look quite right. “We both know that, Dean. He’s gone. So do it. Seriously, what the fuck are you waiting for?” Conversational. Like he’s actually curious.

Dean shifts where he stands. He’s standing on someone’s fingers. They feel like rubber. And there’s a question, and he doesn’t fucking know why, only that pulling the trigger now feels like the worst thing he could possibly do. A tumble back down into a place that’s burning and pain and redredred.

They’re both soaked in blood that no one else ever sees. It’s like a code. Like they were both lucky enough to get into the same secret fucking club.

Dean lowers his gun.

Mike’s eyes narrow. Otherwise there’s no reaction. The wind blows between them both, return of the son of a fucking cliché, and it smells like sulfur and shit and rotting meat.

“I could have it,” Mike says. “Probably do.”

“Yeah.” In his own ears, Dean sounds as tired as he’s ever been. Tired enough to die. “Yeah, you probably do.”

The moment stretches out. Mike lowers the gun.

“Okay, then.” He looks down at it like he’s seeing for the first time, mouth twisting in faint disgust, and tosses it away. “Let’s see.”

~

Dean doesn’t remember when they both decided to live. There probably wasn’t any one moment. Survival is a process. It’s a choice you make every second you do it. Which is nice, because it means either of them could change their minds at any time.

~

A week later the city stops burning.

“How much of that was Cas, anyway?”

Dean passes the bottle of beer back over. The power grid went down two weeks ago so it’s warm but it’s not like it exactly matters. The roof is warm too, tar tacky-black in sun that nevertheless never really seems to shine hard anymore, lost in haze and smoke. The heat feels like it comes from below, not above. Feels like home.

Dean shrugs. “Dunno. Some. It was crazy at the end.”

“You didn’t see him go down.”

“You didn’t see Neil.”

Mike grunts, allows how that might be so. The joke – the big fucking hilarious goddamn joke – is that neither of them can let go of hope with no body. So every day is torture.

At least there’s company.

“I can’t figure out why we don’t fucking die.” Mike lies back, arms stretched out over his head, bottle forgotten beside him. Fresh scars criss-cross over his belly. Dean finds himself thinking of tracks and trains. “It’d be so much fucking easier. I figured, it ever got to this point, I’d eat a bullet. Just head on over to whatever comes after this. Can’t be any worse.”

He turns his head, fixes Dean with a blind eye. “You’re not scared of it.”

Dean shakes his head. He’s long since burned through the list of things he’s scared of.

So he doesn’t know either.

The sun looks like a bullet hole in the sky.

~

Under a pile of rotting corpses, they find Sam’s knife.

That’s enough for a while.

~

Eventually the smell gets to them, pierces through even the thickest veil of dead nonchalance, so they use the last of the gas in Mike’s bike, head out toward the fields – Dean riding bitch and bitching about it the entire way.

Out here the sun is less lost in greasy corpse-smoke but it’s still not all that clear. They stop in what seems like an inviting patch of green only to find it full of slaughtered, bloated cows, so from there they move into the woods and it feels like a kind of shelter.

The hell of this, Mike says as he uncoils himself into the shadows, is that there’s nothing left to fight.

Dean doesn’t respond. It’s not time yet, to acknowledge what they both know isn’t true.

~

They don’t set a fire. There is no light of any kind after the sun goes down. The stars can’t pierce whatever’s choked the air. It occurs to Dean, sitting in the dark, that he doesn’t even remember exactly what happened. There are only fragments, and none of them even seems all that important.

Cas’s hands. He can’t stop thinking of Cas’s hands, under everything. On his chest, his shoulders, his face.

Wait here. I’ll come back for you, Dean. I promise.

“Hell is waiting,” Dean murmurs aloud into the night, and Mike lets out a sound that isn’t quite a laugh, dry and appreciative, and butts his head against Dean’s shoulder.

“And other people.”

That too.

~

Dean dreams a scatter of black feathers. Falling, like they’ve been blasted clear of a ruined body. He wakes up shaking, thinks he might be shouting, feels the hard bars of Mike’s arms as he’s held down, until the fit passes and his limbs belong to him again and not the thing that’s tearing at him from the inside out.

Mike releases him, silent. Doesn’t move away. They’re both fragments of the night, made whole and solid, fitted together.

~

Food is an afterthought. There are cans of things. After a while Dean thinks he might commit suicide over something as banal as creamed corn.

~

Out of boredom, they end up fighting. Out of desperation. Out of loss. Out of something that intersects with all these things but is none of them. Dean knocks Mike into the dirt and of course he goes down laughing, and then there’s just a rain of blows on both sides, blurring in the twilight. Dean tastes blood and it makes more sense than just about anything has in weeks.

When it’s over they’re side by side, panting, and insanely, Mike slides a cigarette between his lips and leans up to dip the tip of it in flame.

“It’s my last one,” he says after a minute. Like Dean’s owed an explanation. Then, “Neil’s last one.”

Which makes sense. There are probably packs in a thousand shattered corner stores. But none of those would be real.

Mike holds it out. Dean takes it, breathes in home. At some point between the last of the light and full, brutal dark he realizes that he’s totally lost the ability to tell the difference between the meaningful and the completely absurd.

This is assuming there was ever a difference, which he doubts.

~

He thinks about asking for the knife again. Asking for chains. It’s been a long time, but once they made the jagged pieces of the world fit for a while.

But he can’t. That was another life. None of the rules are the same now.

~

“There is no justice.” Dean is orating, he thinks. Not loud, not with any particular pretension, but the sun is rising through its cloak of burned human bodies and he feels the need to say something to the world in general. Because he’s arrived at some conclusions. “There’s no fucking justice. This isn’t a punishment for anything, and fuck knows we both deserve ten times worse, but that’s not why it happened. There’s no reason for any of it.”

Beside him, Mike is silent. Listening. Listening to Dean for a long time after Dean is quiet again. Finally he turns on his side, rolls closer, and when Dean turns his head to look at him Mike tips their foreheads together.

So they stay like that for a while.

“Jesus, you figured it out.” Mike flashes a grin, and it fades into a softer smile. For the moment he looks entirely peaceful, entirely content. “You’re here.”

“That’s all.” Not a question, but he feels Mike nod.

“All anyone gets, really.”

The sun is actually a little warm that day. A little.

~

Waiting through the end of the world turns out to be considerably better if one has company. If it’s company of the right kind.