I Sold My Soul to Heaven (fanfic)
Title: I Sold My Soul to Heaven
Genre: gen, future!fic, character study
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Dean, Sam, mentions of others
Spoilers: Up through 4.21 plus speculation on 4.22
Word Count: 666
Warnings: Angst (and lots of it)
Disclaimer: Supernatural belongs to Kripke, et al.; Not mine. For fun, not profit.
A/N: An early birthday present for engel82. I promised her a speculative Dean Winchester character study, and this is it...
Summary: The title pretty much says it all...
“I sold my soul to heaven. I sold my soul to hell. In the end, I couldn’t save the one thing that mattered more to me than life itself.” -Dean Winchester
***
Centuries from now their story may be a legend. A tale of two brothers. A tale of love and friendship. A tale of woe. A tale of a love more star-crossed than the greatest tragedies of Shakespeare and ancient Greece.
Today, Dean Winchester just wonders how he went so wrong. How they went so wrong. How did love turn into a brother lost, hell on earth?
The voice in his head grows quieter every day, but it hangs on, arguing, equivocating. It was to save Sam, not kill him, not drive him away. Not turn him into the thing they both feared.
But that was just it. In the end, Dean’s fear turned into something else. Mutated into blind hatred and rage. It was an easy excuse to blame-blame Ruby, blame Azazel, [blame their mother; their father], blame it on the thing Sam had become, declare Sam the monster. But Sam, Sam embraced it, embraced the difference. Where Dean saw supernatural abnormality, Sam saw the reason and explanation for his life apart, the why and the how of his difference…
Dean couldn’t see past demon = bad, angel = good. How ironic that he, who never believed, would trust an angel over his own brother. He never gave Sam a chance to explain. Sure, Sam could have been more forthcoming, but Dean also could have listened.
Instead he closed his ears and heart and mind to his brother and saw only the difference. For a few moments Dean became the demon, the tormentor, and echoed his father’s words. For a moment, Dean became everything his brother and father and Azazel ever accused him of being-weak, a puppet, a good soldier, daddy’s little blunt instrument, a racist bigot who couldn’t see past the difference to see his own flesh and blood. And he spoke. Words he never meant nor wanted, words he loathed for their destructive power in his life.
And Sam. Sam did the only thing he could. He walked out the door, and could never come back. Without Dean, without his brother’s love, Sam had nothing but to become the monster.
***
Every day the other voice grows stronger in Dean’s head. Failure. Monster. Couldn’t save your brother. Turned your back on him. Didn’t listen. Couldn’t see the truth. The hatred and wrath and pain directed inward at himself, blinding, consuming. The loss searing and stinging, the wound raw and bleeding. The places in Dean’s soul where Sam once lived open and empty, the gaping maw of a bottomless wound that can never be healed. Dean neither fears nor wants for heaven nor hell, for neither has anything to offer him, nor anything for him to fear. He knows he’s sinned. Unforgiveable. The taint of betrayal permeates him. The greatest torture is knowing that you had you other half, a part of you, and you tore it out, defiled it, and corrupted it beyond repair. So you can never be repaired. And Dean knows that’s exactly what he did.
So lies the conundrum. To kill Sam or save Sam. Dean knows he made his choice. He sacrificed his chance, he gave up on his brother and condemned him to his fate. And soon the day will come when brother faces brother, and the end of all things will hang in the balance. Dean may have pledged himself to god and his angels, but Dean’s still not sure god exists. Or if he does, if he cares about what happens to the humans here on Earth. Either way, it doesn’t matter, for Dean must pay for his sins. And the only penance is to allow the brother he destroyed to destroy what he has become.
When that day comes… History and legends will have to make their own judgments because Dean Winchester is through.