one-lane highway

His bones have ached awhile. Egg whites hard to choke down, sick in the mornings, slow at night. Shake it off; run, don't let it show. Supernatural flu, maybe, or just flu, or maybe just, you know, the life. Or it's the blood, tinglings of the old psi that make him pinch his nose, fingers itch-drifty with memory. It's the deal he's made (with himself? That too; you reap what you reap what you reap.) Dean doesn't know about that. It's not your job, he'd say, we agreed. It's not your job either Dean, it's nobody's job to save the world, really, from cosmic backlash, from god and death and the dark, and yet--we try, even if we break more than we save. (Or: I do, Dean. That's what I'm saying.) Or just that we save only what we can, and after all this time and dimension we're still just our bodies, still fragile, still (oh this is a good one) small.

He'll be gone soon, one way or another--and it's a relief. Or--it's an option. Wondering what your absence will look like isn't a terrible pastime, not terrible in a lifetime of terrible pastimes. (Like: Kansas. Like sun on your brother's face. Like home.)

What's up with you, Dean says, and he means: lack of sleep and lack of food and lack of sleep and mom and OK unresolved torture issues and post-imprisonment and maybe other things he don't know about. He means: British Men of Letters. He means why. He means being haunted but he won't say that, not exactly, not ever.

He means magic, shadow-box families the way they oughta be (or: old shadows, way they break into your apartment at night), or the way Alicia Banes looked, heart-hollowed, spine sunk to the bloody floor, and the way Max shrank, kneecapped in decay, over his mother's body.

He's not himself (Sam, that is). Or he is. It's hard to tell anymore. Made up of those twigs, maybe, like the borrowers do. Porting your own ex-heart in a cage of branches. More love and memory than sticks can hold.

That's when you sit down at the table, read about grace and lost angels and the end of time. Think about all the frontiers. Angel-paths walked through you, demon tracks walked through you, addict's ladders up your arms that can't be seen except by certain eyes. All the traces over and over this sad beautiful terrible earth. Through the veil and back again, fresh helices. Through the empty, where there's nothing to see but nothing, and dust.

That's when you sit down at the table with yourself, look yourself in the eye, put your palm-scars flat on the fresh-carved letters there. That's when you say: let's make a deal.