Author's Note: The amount of love I have for this show is ridiculous. I will never tire of it. Ever.

smoke and mirrors

for Gracie

I hop you're feeling better!

In the end, Ruby was right. There is no saving him.

Dean lives for 365 days after he kissed his soul away and when the clock struck 11:58 he turns to his wet-eyed brother and says quietly, "It's a tough gig, Sammy." He thinks about all the millions of things he wants to explain and settles on, "I love you, dickweasel," and hugs him until the hounds came. He makes a point not to scream, not even to struggle. Fuck hell hounds.

Having your soul ripped from your body sounds like wood splitting; somehow both quick and slow at the same time. Dean rides the pain patiently; he's always been good at compartmentalizing, at tucking certain things into back pockets because bites on the ass are better than bullets in the face.

Ruby was right—fire isn't a metaphor. He burns, actually, physically burns, but Dean has always been good at pretending like he's not in agony. So although every inch of him sizzles and pops he keeps a grin on his face and a joke on his lips, tossing back sarcastic banter with anyone he can find.

He sees a few old "friends". At first he thinks they'll make death worse for him, but there are no exceptions in the pit; he's burning and they're burning and sometimes it's hard for him to remember why he hated them so passionately.

There are no secrets in hell, not exactly; but with so many in the smoke it's hard to tell them apart. Hardly anyone troubles to sift through the acid air to find one. Dean doesn't bother to try and protect his.

X

In the end, Ruby was right. His eyes fade into black.

He doesn't know how long it's been; he doesn't know if Sam is still alive; he doesn't know anything about the world above. But he doesn't forget, either. Sam wasn't just sewn into the seams of Dean's meat suit, he was seared into parts of Dean that can't be burned away without permanently damaging the soul itself. So he forgets about Led Zeppelin and Foreigner and that long, beautiful Impala; he forgets Bobby and his father and Lisa.

But he doesn't forget Sam.

X

Sam's been tracking a demon, and a nasty one. It's been slitting the throats of a string of men and women across the country. There's seemingly no connection between the victims. Sam's stopped caring too much about the why, more just wants to put a stopper on the how.

So he's sitting at a bar, throwing down a beer with Bela because damn the bitch but it's his birthday so she's buying.

She says, "Listen. I didn't just want to wish you happy birthday. There's actually…I wanted to tell you something."

Surprise, surprise, he thinks.

"Stop hunting it."

Usually he can tell if she's speaking from motive but now her face is blank. None of her tells are twitching along the bottom of her nose or winking ever-so-slightly in her right eye. "What?" He asks, startled, almost dropping his beer. "You want me to what?"

"Stop hunting the demon," she repeats, slower, as if talking to a mentally handicapped child. "I talked with the spirit world, and trust me, this is one demon you want to let keep doing its work."

"It's murdering people, Bela."

"No it's not."

He stares at her dumbly, waiting, swirling his beer in the can until at last she caves. "They're not humans, the victims. They're all supernatural and they're all nasty. It can do in a month what takes you a year."

Sam frowns, throwing his head back to stare at the ceiling and absently fingering the charm around his neck. "What sort of demon would kill its own kind?"

X

"Wow," she says, eyes appraising him with a little laugh, "You're good."

"I get that from a lot of women," he answers, tossing her a light wink. The exchange is lighthearted on the surface but burning underneath and he doesn't wait out the wave. Instead he cuts the shit and says bluntly, "You're not surprised to see me."

Ruby shakes her head. "Did you expect me to be, Dean?"

"Not really." He looks down at his hands—well, not his hands, exactly. "Sam's tracking me. I can't outrun him for long. He's too good."

She smiles at him, patting the spot beside her on the couch. "I set Bela on him," she assures him softly. She hesitates before asking, "How'd you get up here so fast? It took me centuries."

He looks up at her, an ironic smile twisting the lips that aren't his. "I wanted a beer," he says.

X

Sam does a background check. Bela is right: most of the demon's past victims have been supernatural. Only one of them isn’t. He's a twenty-year-old man, reported missing from his home in Iowa. No one's seen him since—at least, no one but Sam.

To the family he's a son; to this demon he must be just a meat suit.

X

"Here's what I don't get," Ruby says, shoving the heel of her shoe through the demon's jugular and swiftly digging her blade into its chest. "Why'd you choose a boy who's got cancer?"

Dean rolls the dead man onto his side and into the hole he's been digging for the past half hour. "He'd have died," he answers without looking at her. "This way, he lives as long as I do."

"And his family?"

"Probably reported him missing. But we left a note saying we loved them." He seemed to pause, listening to something. Then he chuckled. "All right, all right. Saying Thomas loved them. They didn't give a shit about Dean. Happy now?" He pauses for a moment before looking up at her. "I gave him the choice, Ruby," he tells her quietly. "He wanted me."

If she's quiet, Ruby can hear a soft voice echoing in her head. It's the pitch she's become used to talking in.

It never occurred to her to listen.

X

Sam turns forty-three the day he sees what used to be Dean for the last time.

He doesn't know that it's Dean, at least once was. He's sitting with Ruby and talking intensely when Dean walks in; of course he doesn’t recognize him. What he does recognize is the body that once belonged to a college student with terminal brain cancer, so he springs to his feet and is halfway through a Latin ritual when Ruby shuts him up with four knuckles to the mouth.

"Sam," she says, stepping gingerly over his body, "Meet our newest arrival, Thomas."

Sam hesitates. "Just climbed out?" He asks quietly. "You wouldn't happen to know—"

"Dean?" Thomas interrupts, smiling sadly. "Yeah, I do."

But in the end, Ruby was right. Hell might not have been able to touch them, but in the light of day his memories are just hazy, fading shadows. Everything that made him Dean is gone.

So Thomas tells Sam blandly, "He burned up, Sammy. Burned all up into ashes."