#future!dean

punch himself in the face in the next frame.

He has not taken care of himself...

'Holding you closer than most, cause you are my heaven' (05x04-The End)

@spnhiatuscreations 2020

And, probably most important, he didn’t want to be left to face that he was the last one left standing.

What was it Cas had promised him once?

Everyone, except me.

Yeah. That hadn’t worked out so well.

*

As a new vamp, hunger was still his strongest urge, but now there was grief, and there was shame, the way there hadn’t been before he'd been left alone. Usually when he started feeling this low he’d pray to Cas and spill his guts to the empty air. But Dean couldn't be sure anymore that he deserves to pray or that he even can. Do vampires have human enough souls to be worth hearing?

He fed, and he kept moving, and he caught movie marathons here and there. For the first time Dean’s glad his mom didn’t live to see how it all turned out.

Sam was gone. Once that would have been enough to stop Dean moving, but something about the way that everyone had been picked off and torn away from him had changed things. He’d prepared himself for losing Sam long before the vampirism - he just hadn’t expected to stick around to see much of the aftermath.

A month after he’d killed Jody and Bobby and he was still feeding – but now he'd started focusing on animals or people he felt deserved it. A few times it didn’t take much to deserve it, but still. It wasn’t so different from his old life.

He was just so crushingly alone.

Alone like he’d left Benny alone.

Dean thought about Benny a lot. Maybe if he ended it all and killed himself he’d see him again - maybe he really was still down there with Sam. Dean imagined it would be easier to forget everything he was missing if he was back in Purgatory. He wouldn’t feel like a monster there, wouldn’t feel punished.

And if Dean got there and found that there wasn’t any Sam or Benny waiting for him down there then he could just slip up one day and follow them into nothingness. It was starting to sound peaceful, nothingness. Dean had existed for so long now and died so many times and whatever he did it was never the finish line. They’d beaten so many monsters, so many gods, and still they never got to win a happy ending, or even an ending. Nothing they’d done had been enough.

Cas has asked him once if he’d really take freedom over peace. He wanted to get back there and scream in his own face peace, pick peace you stupid, stubborn sonofabitch.

But every day he kept getting up, kept on moving.

And eventually he found himself back at Cas’s grave. It hadn’t exactly been on purpose, he’d just...

Fuck, he was so tired of being alone.

AO3