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Dean doesn’t really know what happened to Sam.
What he remembers is Sam and Ruby in that church in Maryland, Sam’s hand over Dean’s heart, staring, transfixed, at the coming of Lucifer, at Hell opening again, wide opened maw of damnation, eager to swallow them both up, and then those horrible few weeks that followed, Sam gritting his teeth through demon nests and watching Dean out of the corner of his eye like he thought Dean would bite him. And watching Sam, afraid for him, like he was all of five years old and about to wander off into traffic, afraid of him, like Dean would turn around and it wouldn’t be Sam sitting next to him anymore. Something that looked like Sam, with his face and hair and broad shoulders, but off, different. Something evil slithered underneath his brother’s skin and wearing him around.
And then Colorado. Sam asked to stop and they sat, quietly, in the mountains, drinking beer. Sam seemed nervous, unsure, the whole time, while Dean considered War’s ring, and Sam confessed what Dean had been afraid of. And Dean let him go, watched Sam go off with his backpack full of ugly shirts and thought bitterly: well good riddance. He didn’t feel much of anything except relief, that with Sam out of the life he was less of a target.
This isn’t Dean’s biggest regret. In the last five years, he’s done more to be ashamed of than letting Sammy go off on his own. He’s killed people, good people, to get his hands back on the Colt, hasn’t saved people he could have. Didn’t give in to all the angels pressuring him when he still had a chance to save everyone, or at least some people. Even if he kills the Devil today, they’re still all dead anyway. It won’t stop the spread of Croatoan, and they’ll all be torn to pieces or turn into Night of the Living Dead themselves.
This Dean, from before, is staring at him with loathing, and they both know that the mistake that Dean made, that he’s already made. This morning, five years ago, Dean got a call from Sammy and they both learned the truth about them, about how they were destined to kill each other and the Devil is circling him, and Dean told Sam that they ought to “pick a hemisphere.”
“Something is broken in you,” Dean tells him. And he knows. Young Dean, barely thirty and hardly a year out of Hell, knows. It’s already eating at him, what he did to Sam, doing to Sam. But he doesn’t know. Doesn’t know that one day, all the angels disappeared and Cas woke up human and the death toll in Detroit totaled over a thousand, and Cas looked up from the news and said: He said yes. It’s over.
After that, after Sam said yes, Dean went outside, into Bobby’s junkyard, and prayed. Nobody answered. For months, he would drink until he was blind and he prayed, screamed at the sky, and sometimes Cas would join him. In May, on Sam’s birthday, Bobby died, taken by some Croats, and he and Cas fled South Dakota, but Dean still asked. Asked Lucifer, asked Michael. Society crumbled around him, but it didn’t matter. Sam was already gone.
Sam called. For Dean, who sits handcuffed to a chair in his cabin, Sam called him this morning. Dean remembers. He remembers how Sam sounded; riled up, terrified. He wanted to come back, but Dean thought he was being smart, keeping them apart. He wasn’t with Sam when Sam said yes. When he gave into the Devil. He doesn’t know if he could have stopped it. Probably not, even though this other Dean, the Dean who only thinks he’s lost his brother, thinks he can. He can see himself putting the pieces together, watch the cogs in his brain spin and churn out another future. Dean wants to shake him, himself, tell him to stop being so damn stupid. Just say yes to Michael, put this whole thing to rest. Kill the Devil before he gets to their brother. But he knows himself. He’s too damn stupid, and he’s too damn stupid about Sam. They won’t give up on each other. Sam’s not strong enough. Dean doesn’t have to be. Half the planet is better than the whole planet.
He’s going to kill the Devil. Dean is sitting the back of the truck. He tells Dean that he needs to see, to understand, that Sam is dead, and he isn’t coming back. He needs to see that all those things he’s afraid of have already happened. There’s something evil in Sam and it’s Dean’s fault. Dean keeps staring at him, and everyone keeps staring at the pair of Deans. When everyone is asleep, Dean shakes his head, says: “What happened to Sam?”
And Dean sighs. “I don’t know,” he tells himself.
The version of him that hasn’t lost Sam yet snorts derisively. “You’re a good liar, but you can fool me — you. Whatever. You know what happened to Sam. Tell me.”
“I wasn’t there.”
“Yeah. Exactly. Why the hell not?”
“I’m not having this conversation with you. That’s on you as much as it is on me.”
Dean crosses his arms, leans his head back. Dean stares at himself in this posture of faux carelessness that he hasn’t assumed in years. He’d think it was longer than the five years that separate himself from this other version of himself, but he knows that whatever else this Dean is, it’s him, exactly where he was five years ago. “You remember this? Meeting yourself in Zombie Land?”
“No.”
“Well, then I just can’t make the same mistakes as you. Why weren’t you with him?”
“Because it was the right thing to do. We’re vulnerable together. You need to say yes.”
Dean snorts again, and Dean can’t stand it, this cocky attitude he has. Worse since he knows it’s fake, that he’s never felt as confident as he pretends he does. “You can’t fool me either,” he tells him. “You know I’m right. The only way to save Sam, to save everyone, is to say yes.”
“We’ll see.”
“No, you’ll see. I already know.”
Dean is glaring at himself, and it’s going both ways. He can’t stand himself, this young cocky version or the older, meaner version. But Dean at thirty still has something to live for.
Dean dreams of what happens to Sam, even though he doesn’t know. He dreams of him in some crap motel room, dirty clothes on the floor, books for warding off angels discarded on every flat surface available. He dreams of Lucifer appearing to him in dreams, and showing him the people he’s killing, and tells him he can stop it. He dreams of Lucifer telling Sam that he was made for him, that he’ll be powerful and strong, strong enough to save everyone, if Sam just says yes, lets him in. He dreams of Sam, strung out, end of his rope, high on demon blood again, trying to save the world on his own, trapped in Detroit and facing down the Devil, who stretches out a hand and picks Sammy up, gentle as a parent, and says: you don’t have to fight anymore. Dean abandoned you, but I never will. And so Sammy gives in.
As far as Dean can tell, that’s more or less how it happened. A demon named Crowley was working both sides until Dean killed him, gutted him for pleasure after he handed over the Colt. Crowley said that it might not work, he should keep him alive just in case. That he knew what happened to Sam, who got him on the demon blood again, but Dean doesn’t care. As far as Dean’s concerned, Sam is dead, and so is he. It’s the end of the world. What does it matter?
It’s August, but it’s freezing, colder as he walks into the garden, where Lucifer is just standing, doing some fucking gardening or whatever it is that Evil Incarnate does. Lucifer turns at the sound of Dean’s footsteps, smiles with Sam’s smile, and Dean is struck with such incomprehensible rage seeing that smile. Sam’s still twenty-six, stuck in that stupid white suit, with his hair tucked all neat behind his ears. If it wasn’t the end of the world, Lucifer could charm any old cashier or unsuspecting passerby with his good nature, with that smile. But Sammy shouldn’t be twenty-six. He should be thirty-one, some lines under his eyes at least. He could tear Lucifer apart with his teeth.
“Dean,” he says, in Sam’s voice. “I’m glad you’re here.” Dean pulls back the hammer on the Colt, and he fires. The first bullet buries itself deep inside Sam’s skull, but Lucifer just smiles as the bullet wound closes up. Dean fires again, but this time misses him completely, unfazed. His hand isn’t shaking, and Lucifer stalks towards him. “You knew that wouldn’t work,” he chides, in a way that is so un-Samlike that Dean is almost glad for it. “You know, he’s still alive in here, scratching away,” Lucifer is saying, knocking the gun out of Dean’s hand. “But he’s been so good. So obedient.” Lucifer grabs Dean by the throat and squeezes until Dean is seeing spots. Tosses him on the ground. His head bounces off the stone path, the pain so brief that he’s more concerned about the warmth of the blood trickling down the side of his face. His dad’s voice in his head, reminding him that head wounds bleed a lot. “So for Sam’s sake, I’ll do this quick,” Lucifer is saying, heel on his neck, compressing his airway, and then, when he can see his own boots running towards the sound of gunfire, Lucifer snaps his neck, and it’s over. It’s finally fucking over.
Dean knew it wouldn’t work. After Crowley gave him the gun, Dean still had some hope of saving Sam. This was in 2010, and he’s been keeping the gun a secret for that long. But before Dean showed up, Cas told him the population of the earth was down to a million, and that even if Sam could eject Lucifer, he’d be ruined. Angels aren’t meant to inhabit their vessels for that long. A few months, at most. Lucifer has been inside your brother for almost five years.
Dean pointed out that Cas had been inside Jimmy for longer than that, but Cas shrugged. It’s just me in here now. I don’t know what happened to Jimmy Novak. Dean could have killed him for that thoughtlessness, but their boarders were breached and the issue of vessels was dropped.
Besides, the lore about the gun all said the same. The only thing that could kill Lucifer was Michael, and Michael was long gone. Even the All Powerful Monster Killing Gun couldn’t stop him.
And then there was Dean, Dean from before Sam broke down and gave in. Before Sam fell to Lucifer. And he couldn’t take any more of it, of the end of the world, so he pulled the gun from it’s hiding place, said he finally found it, their last hope, Dean’s last hope too, giving the poor bastard the wrong idea. He knew it wouldn’t work.
He thought about missing that first shot. He thought about it the whole way there, while everyone but he and Dean slept. He thought about what he would do if it worked, if he killed the Devil. He could keep going, fighting until the bitter end, saving people until something got him too. Just the idea of it, once his perfect ending, is so horrible he almost starts fucking crying.
“What’s your plan here, once you kill him?” Dean asks in the dark.
“Why don’t you mind your own business?”
“Figure this is my business,” Dean says, matter of fact. “At least, it will be. And I just want to know what I’m planning. It’s my life after all.”
“The only thing left to do. What Dad told us to.”
“I don’t think you can do it. I never did.”
“We’re different now.” There are no streetlights, no moon, to see Dean’s expression, but he knows what his own face looks like, knows himself well enough to know how he’s reacting to that. He realizes he’s referring to himself and this other Dean as one person now. If he’s going to save Sam, then he’s got to learn, here and now, what his stubborn self-righteousness comes to. “This is our fault. If you don’t do what you have to now, you’re going to have to kill your brother. You understand me?”
“When it comes down to it, we won’t be able to,” Dean says, echoing him. Conflating of their two persons. They both know it’s true, but neither of them are willing to say it. Later, when Dean walks into the garden and sees Sam with his foot on Dean’s neck, he’ll believe that. And it’s not like Dean wasn’t thinking in then, talking to himself from the past or from a different timeline altogether, about walking up to Sam and missing a shot he could have made at ten. Because, well, Dean knows himself, and the Dean from the past is staring at him. “I know you’re not coming out of this. Even if you do kill Lucifer, you’re eating a bullet the second Sam goes down.” Dean’s voice is edged with indignation. “What about all these people? Huh? They count on you?”
“If it weren’t for me, they wouldn’t be in this mess!” he argues, anger boiling in his gut. He could sock himself, again. It would feel good. “What about Sam! He needed me too!”
This shuts Dean up. Of course it would. Dean knows all his own soft spots, how to make it hurt. It’s him, really, riding back here with him, arguing with him about Sam. They weren’t there for him. They weren’t strong enough to take this burden from Sam. They weren’t strong enough to resist in Hell, or to live without Sam in the first place. Anyway he does the math, he knows it’s all on him. Every last soul —that’s on him. They ride the rest of the way in silence, and Dean dreams about killing the Devil, cradling Sam’s dead body in his arms, and then turning the Colt on himself.
It isn’t what happens. Dean makes eye contact with himself, running towards gunfire, and he sees Dean’s gaze flicker up from his own dying, broken body, and look at Lucifer, wearing Sam, and he knows that it’s too late for him, but maybe it’s not too late for the other Dean, the one who hasn’t lost Sam. At least not yet.