Hell's Greatest Weapon

Chapter 36: Are You There, God? It's Me, Gragnis

You spent a few minutes writing on a piece of paper, putting anything you might want Dean to know if this somehow worked and he woke up.  It was only a single, one-sided page of writing—you were never good at writing sentimental little tidbits—and you folded it easily into an envelope along with the charm you wore around your neck before shoving that envelope into the front pocket of your backpack.  With a sad smile you looked at the canvas bag that had managed to make it through quite a few years with you; it changed shapes a ton of times, of course, but as the backpack it was heavy-duty.  Easily twenty or so years passed while you used that backpack, and you were sad to part with it, as stupid as that sounded.  

You left it with Sam, only telling him to hold it before you left the hospital room.  Once down to the end of the hallway, you heard the coding in Dean's room, heard his heart flat line, heard the rush of hospital workers as they ran in to try and resuscitate him.

You heard Sam yell, but that was the last thing your ears caught before you were in a dead sprint down the hall, down the staircase, out the doors of the hospital.

There's a type of fear that you remembered reading about, hearing about, even seeing on the TV when you had a chance to actually relax, that was always a mystery to you.  You knew the typical jump scare, the 'what could possibly be hiding around the corner' fear, but you always had the comfort of knowing that you couldn't die, that there was no way you were up against the thing that would kill you. There was always a blanket of knowledge you held that kept you from experiencing fear to its fullness, so naturally you never quite understood it.  Yes, you could have been physically harmed, but that was the worst.  You never feared for your life, never had the displeasure of knowing that your life sat in someone else's hands.

But as you swallowed your pain and sprinted down the road, slowly getting further away from the hospital while trying to keep your mind fixed on anything except the sound of impending death in Dean's hospital room, you felt it.  You felt that fear that you couldn't quite understand; you finally knew what it was like to face death. 

Real death, too.  Not the man in the suit, not one of his reapers, nothing simple like that. Death.  The act of removing life from the body.  The separation of the body and the soul.  The stopping of all bodily functions prior to being judged, being sent to either Heaven up above or Hell down below.  Death.

It was odd, terrifying, and you understood why people came to say, "the greatest fear is fear, itself."  You continued running, but your brain seemed to have gone onto autopilot as you considered what might happen next; scenario after scenario ran through your mind and every single one ended with your death.  Your true, absolute, real death. 

You had never faced that before. 

You couldn't feel your body after a while, your legs only sprinted out of habit rather than command, your lungs breathed without your feeling them, your pulse slowly dulled from your senses; you saw your body below you, saw as your feet stepped, one after another down the road until you came to a field.  You watched as your body stopped just at the foot of the field, watched as your arms flew into the air and a yell erupted from your mouth.

But you didn't feel any of it.

No, your mind was on autopilot.  You couldn't think, you couldn't control yourself, couldn't sensor the words that flowed from your mouth like air from a pent-up balloon, couldn't even form coherent thoughts in your mind.  Your vision blurred, and all at once the only thing you could feel was your heart drop and your stomach implode. You wanted to vomit, wanted to do anything to be rid of this feelingyou had, this type of dread that took to plaguing you, but there was nothing you could do.  You knew how this was going to end, and you knew that you needed to initiate it.