InsaneJournal

Who? Dean, Jules, background Rose!
What? Cursebreaking.
Where? Local hospital
When? Tonight, midnightish.
Why? Because.
Warnings? Gratuitous angst, basically. Character (not)death.
Status: Iiiiin progress!


Dean hated hospitals. Even more, he hated sitting vigil for someone who might not make it - and it was worse, still, when even the doctors and the nurses who came in to check on things looked sad and said things like there's nothing we can do. To his credit, Dean had managed not to start yelling or threatening any of them, making them help her. Mostly, that was because he didn't have the energy to get angry, when he was too busy being terrified and already grieving.

She looked completely fine. She wasn't pale or sickly, she wasn't in pain - there was no obvious signs that anything was wrong. She might as well have been sleeping. But the monitors they'd put her on showed her brain activity levels were rapidly going down - pretty soon, there would be nothing left. Maybe they'd put her on life support, they'd said, once the brain shut everything else down - but they had said they weren't sure there would be much point. He'd listened without moving, eyes on Jules and his hand on the railing of her bed, and the knife strapped to his leg felt suddenly heavier and wouldn't leave his mind, but he didn't reach for it and the doctor had left without any reason to kick Dean out of the hospital or call the police.

The police - Dean wanted to go down there, find out what had happened - properly, from everyone who might have been there - maybe run some EMF test, look for sulfur, something. Anything. He wanted this to be something he could fix. If it was just a hunt, it would be easier, he could deal with it - but even if it was, right now, he couldn't leave her. He couldn't even leave her to go help Sam, and if he could have he would have been there because someone was screwing with his family, and he wasn't going to put up with that - but Jules wasn't going to last much longer. He knew that. So he had to stay.

The readout on the monitor dropped a little more.

As Rose was arriving, it dropped even more - completely, nothing left, and it seemed like almost immediately everything else stopped, too. There were alarms going off and nurses and doctors rushing around, and Dean let himself be pushed back, out of the way, while they tried to see what they could do. But eventually they just stopped, too, and someone was calling time of death...

When the flurry of activity had died down, when they'd all left - the medical staff first, to give them some time, and then Rose, after, urging him to say goodbye, as if that was something he could do, as if it was that simple - Dean moved towards Juliet- her body, there was nothing else left, and he was familiar enough with corpses, it wasn't as if he'd never seen a body before - even an important one, Sam or Dad or Adam, it wasn't the first time he'd lost someone that mattered, far from it - even so, he was hesitant to reach out and touch her.

She was still warm, still felt like she was alive, like she should have just been sleeping. He knew she wouldn't be, for long, soon she'd be cold and eventually there would have to be some kind of an announcement, he'd have to tell everyone, and there'd be a pyre, and then, after, he'd have to keep going, because he had Ben, he couldn't afford to just break down, he had to be okay for Ben, and for Sam, and for the whole damn apocalypse, and he just... didn't want to.

Fingers brushing strands of bright hair off her face, Dean fought to find his voice, fought the instinct to just stay quiet, stay still, wait for it to go away. It wasn't going away. Going silent wouldn't help anything. "I love you," he murmured, voice low, "I'm sorry, I should have- I don't know. I should have found something." He withdrew again, for a moment, his head down, tears on his face and his hands in his pockets. His hand brushed something cool and smooth in his pocket and he thought he was going to be sick, tugging the two gold bands from his pocket and turning hem over between his hands. He'd linked them together with a cord, shoved them in a pocket in his jacket months back when he'd meant to ask her-

It would figure this was the jacket he'd grabbed, running out the door to go to her when she'd first been admitted.

"Guess better late than never," there was no humor there, his voice was practically nothing, untying the string, shoving it in his pocket again. He should have asked. For real, not when he was under the influence of some random seal crap, or when they were drunk. He'd waited - it had never seemed like a good time, some level of traumatic always going on around here, and lately everyone and their cousin had been getting engaged, he hadn't wanted her to think he was just doing what everyone else was doing, he'd wanted it to actually matter-

- and now she was dead.

He didn't say anything else, couldn't, really, losing that battle despite his best efforts. He looked at the gold bands again - they were the ones from Vegas, he'd saved them, had meant for it to be kind of a thing, he'd give her this one before the fancy one he'd let her pick out, it didn't really matter what order the rings went in did it? It just mattered that it meant something, and these did. These were special, even if they were plain. He tucked one of the rings into her hand, curling her fingers around it (she was getting colder, stiffer; extremities cooled first, everything else followed), leaning forward to press a kiss to her lips.