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The eighth or ninth one isn’t so bad. A freak snowstorm hits, and Dean dies of hypothermia, somehow. Dean shivers and falls asleep right there on the sidewalk, and then Sam is in a motel room, and it’s a Tuesday morning.
On that Tuesday morning, Sam takes them to a seafood restaurant instead of getting a goddamn Pig’n’a’Poke. Someone undercooked the shellfish or something, and Dean starts freezing up right there from an obscure paralytic marine toxin Sam finds online an hour later.
“Don’ need a hospital if I’m just comin’ back tomorrow, man,” Dean says, once Sam explains about the time loop. Sam resists the urge to say, you’re coming back today. “Wanna die at home.”
So Sam drives them out to a field, maybe fifteen miles out of town, pulls over and puts Dean on the trunk of the Impala. Gives him a beer and watches his hands twitch and half his drink spill over his chin.
He waits. Maybe paralysis isn’t such a bad way to go. “Does it hurt?” Sam asks, and Dean shakes his head, slowly and stiffly.
“When I start to choke, though,” Dean says, “you gotta just put me outta my misery, all right?”
Jesus. Sam looks at his hands. “I can’t do that,” he whispers.
“All right.” Dean leans back, easy. He doesn’t sound like he believes Sam. He says, “How many times you seen me die, anyway?”
“Eight.” Sam clears his throat. He’s— he’s already lost count. “Nine, maybe.”
Dean laughs. “Damn, you ain’t even sure—”
“It’s not a joke, Dean.” Sam exhales. Maybe today’s the day that sticks. Sam thinks that every time, and every time he’s wrong, but what if— maybe they should’ve gone to the hospital, maybe—
“All right. Sorry.” Sam looks over at him. Dean’s mouth moves slow, slurs his words. He’s gripping his bottle tight, like he’ll drop it if he stops paying attention. “Look, I know, man,” he says quietly. “You think I was— I mean, when you, at Cold Oak—” Dean blinks the tears out of his eyes.
“You shouldn’t have brought me back like that,” Sam says. He’s always felt wrong, his whole life, and then sometimes it feels— sometimes it feels right that he’s here, walking and talking. Sometimes it feels like things are finally slotting into place, and that scares him more than anything. He should’ve stayed dead.
Dean doesn’t say anything to that. He just says, after a pause, “The guy you see tomorrow. That ain’t gonna be me, you understand? It’ll be— I mean, it’ll be me, but it’ll be a new me. A different me.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sayin’ I’m dyin’ here, and maybe.” Dean swallows thickly. “Maybe I wanna say my piece. I’m just sayin’, don’t hold it against the guy in that motel room tomorrow if I say somethin’ only a dyin’ man would say, you understand me?”
Sam exhales heavily. “Yeah,” he croaks, “I understand you.”
The wind rustles through the tall grass around the car. Sam wonders if Dean can feel it. He wonders if Dean’s put the dots together the way Sam has: Dean’s dying because of Sam. Someone wants to teach Sam a lesson. Someone with the power to do this, to make Sam relive time over and over and over again, has taken an interest in Sam.
He shivers. He’s always been watched. Hell, maybe he’s being watched right now.
“You wanna say something specific?” Sam asks, instead of dwelling on that.
“I dunno.” Dean finishes his beer, and then carefully sets it down next to him. Sam watches him take a full five seconds to set it down properly, and then stretch his hands out, slowly, and then put them back on his thighs. Dean says, “Don’t think I’m movin’ from this spot anymore, Sammy.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, hoarsely. “Okay, Dean. That’s okay.”
Dean nods, subtly. He tilts back until his head rests on the back windshield, looking up at the sky. “Dad wanted me to take care of you,” he says. “He always— he never said it, but he’d. He’d come home, say shit like— like, hey, kiddo, good on you, cleanin’ the place up. You keepin’ Sammy fed? And if I didn’t do that— I mean, I told you about the shtriga.”
“Yeah.”
“That was my job. But— goddamnit, Sam, I picked you.” Dean rolls his head over to look at Sam, and Sam looks back. Dean— dying again. Sam still remembers the last time — before the Mystery Spot, he means — Dean in that hospital bed, getting healed by that reaper. “I didn’t take care of you ‘cause it was my job, all right. I did it ‘cause you’re my brother.”
“I know, Dean.”
“Jesus.” Dean shifts a little, gets comfortable on the trunk. He looks out over that field, and Sam does, too. Sam sees an empty plot of land. A bird, maybe, or a fox, out in the distance rustling up the leaves. Empty sky.
“Put on some Zep for me, huh,” Dean says. “Physical Graffiti.”
“Yeah. ‘Course, man.”
Sam hops off the trunk with agility Dean doesn’t have anymore, fumbles around in the glove compartment for Dean’s tape. He pauses there with his feet on the ground and his head in the passenger seat, just breathing it in, the smell of this car. His home, too, even if he won’t admit it. He blinks, and thinks about Dean. About what a goddamn shame it’ll be, him dying today, a beautiful day like this. He’s so young. Sam almost cracks the cassette in his hands, thinking about Dean being so young, and him even younger. Dean’s twenty-seven, now.
Every goddamn day Sam thinks about the shit Dean said to him when he left for Stanford, and the shit Dean spewed all while the two of them were growing up, and the shit Dean still lobs at him these days. Sam thinks about the way he grew up hunched under Dean’s protective grip and Dean’s surveillance gaze and Dad’s guns in Dean’s hands— and Sam thinks— oh God, Sam thinks, wouldn’t it be nice one day to forgive him? Wouldn’t it be nice to— to— to get to know each other, really, like adults? Wouldn’t it be nice for Sam to understand the backbreaking history of Dean’s youth and to say, I get it, man, and to tell Dean about his own backbreaking history? At the end of it— wouldn’t that be something they could do for each other? Wouldn’t it be nice for them to grow old enough to do it?
“You alive back there?” Dean calls, and Sam winces. He shoves the tape in, lets the familiar guitar of Custard Pie wash right over him.
Dean’s worse when he gets back. Sam missed it, the turning point, while he was in the car. Dean quirks up a smile, and it strains him to do it. Sam can see that he’s beginning to die.
Sam waits through Custard Pie, blaring out of the Impala’s speakers. And then, over The Rover, Sam says, “I get what you were saying earlier.” Maybe it’s an attempt to grow old enough to forgive the kid who raised him for just being a kid, in five minutes or less. Or maybe not. Who the hell knows.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Sam looks at his brother, who can barely look back at him. To see him there, freezing up— “You weren’t Dad to me,” he says. And then, as if it isn’t obvious, he adds, “That’s a compliment.”
Dean nods slightly. “Okay,” he says. “You turned out okay, didn’t you, Sammy?”
Oh, Jesus. Sam blinks, but he can’t stop the tears this time. “Yeah, Dean,” he chokes out. “Turned out all right.”
“C’mere,” Dean mumbles, his chin frozen still, and Sam slides over. He looks at him all over, sees Dean’s fingers twitching, his wrist jerking upwards. He grips Dean’s hand, and feels Dean try to grip him back. “A’right,” Dean sighs. He rolls his head, best as he can, to look out at the midday sun over that field.
He says, looking away from Sam, “Don’ look.”
“What?”
“If you ain’t gonna—” and Dean curls his fingers in, trying to let Sam go. Choking, he mumbles out, slowly, “Then don’ look.”
Jimmy Page starts in on that crooning opening of In My Time of Dying. Of all the songs to die to, Sam thinks Dean’d like this the most. Maybe he timed it just right.
Sam exhales. “All right,” he whispers. He releases Dean’s hand, and slides back, to let Dean die in peace.
At first, he does look away. He looks at the road, a few yards away from their car. He looks at the trees across the highway from them.
But then— Dean makes a noise, his hand hitting the trunk as it slips off his thigh, involuntarily. Sam turns. God help him, like Lot’s wife, he turns, and he looks.
He realizes immediately that it’s worse to watch than to do something. He hadn’t really believed Dean when he said it.
Sam knows what he’s seeing: Dean can’t swallow anymore. His saliva is pooling in the back of his throat. It will fill his mouth, up the back of his nose. Eventually it will spill over into his windpipe, and fill his lungs. Once his useless, waterlogged lungs are all full up, he’ll die.
It’ll be a slow death. Dean’s death started while Sam was putting Physical Graffiti in the tape deck. As Sam watches, he realizes it might take Dean the length of the eleven-minute conclusion to side one and more to die. Sam might have to go back and flip the tape onto its B-side, and then come back and look away again from Dean dying.
He stands up. His hands are shaking. He walks around to where Dean is sitting, looking out at the sun. He blocks the light as he leans in and says to his brother, “Look at me. I’m with you.”
Dean blinks at him. Probably all he can do, now. Sam inhales, and exhales, and puts his hand over Dean’s throat. “S’all right, Dean,” he says quietly, pressing as firmly and quickly as he can. He feels Dean’s throat sink under his hands, feels tendons crumple. He isn’t crying anymore. “It’s okay,” he says nonsensically as Dean’s body struggles for breath, as Dean keeps his eyes on Sam’s, looks right into him.
Robert Plant sings, and I see them in the streets—and I see them in the field—and I hear them shouting under my feet. Dean’s throat convulses once, brutally, and then the life goes out of him. Sam keeps his hand there on his throat, just to hold him, and then— he lets go, trips backwards, stumbling, a horror in his chest. He feels right. He feels good. It’s got to be my Jesus, oh, take me home. Gabriel the Annunciator has come down from Heaven to tell him his hands are made for killing—
A car slows as it passes them. Sam looks up, catches the eyes of the woman in the passenger seat. She looks right at him, and her eyes are black.
Sam is in a motel room, and it’s a Tuesday morning.