layne67

Title : From This Edge of the World
Author :

windsor
Rating : G

Sam can't stop looking at Dean. He can't remember his mother and God help him, he's beginning to forget what John was like, too. He wants to hold onto Dean, doesn't want to ever forget how Dean looks like, what Dean is. And he only has ten more months to do that. So he can't stop looking.

The sunlight is thick and the pavement hot when they step outside again, Dean shading his eyes with one hand and jingling the keys with his other. Sam understands, now, why Dean always glanced his way from time to time, unthinking and natural. Because part of it was making sure he was okay, keeping him safe, but a lot more had to do with the rest, with how Dean must have known that Sam would leave him years before he himself did. And so Dean had looked and touched and tattooed that knowledge below his skin, scratched it into his bones, synchronized it with the steady, relentless squeeze of his heart and lungs, burned it deep and vicious and hurting inside himself so that he would never, ever be rid of it, so that it was a pain he could not be surprised by. He had done it before Sam left and he did it after Sam came back, as if he was always ready to wake up one morning alone again.