After Sam, Dean Winchester didn't fall apart. He didn't kill himself and he didn't break, at least not so that it showed. He also didn't settle down with a wife, 2.4 kids and a dog. He didn't go to school, get a real job, or do anything else vaguely normal with his life.

After Sam, Dean Winchester hunted because it was all he had left. He hunted because when he was hunting he didn't have to think about everything he had lost. He hunted and hunted and never let himself stop.

After Sam, Dean Winchester started losing track of the days, then the months, then the years. Time ceased to matter to him, unless it was directly connected to a hunt. Time didn't move in linear fashion any more -- the months and years of hunting alone blended together into one long, cold blur, but the day Sam died was always yesterday.

After Sam, Dean Winchester abandoned whatever caution he'd started out with. He stopped caring whether he got hurt and he didn't usually bother to get proper treatment when he did. He broke his right leg hunting a wendigo and threw together a half-hearted brace and kept walking on it. The limp he was left with wasn't pretty, but he could still run when he had to.

After Sam, and sometime after the broken leg, Dean Winchester got a stake driven through his left hand by a really pissed-off poltergeist. He pulled it out and went on hunting. The nerve damage made his fingers stiff and a little on the clumsy side, but he didn't much care because he could still load and fire a gun, and that was all that mattered any more.

After Sam, Dean Winchester became one of the deadliest hunters in the world because he didn't care what he had to do to get the job done. Everyone who knew anything about hunting knew his name, but no one wanted to work with him, because he was reckless and ruthless and damn dangerous, a caged tiger with a look in his eyes that suggested he might start hunting his allies if he ran out of beasts to kill. If you needed Dean Winchester's expertise, you called him and then stayed the hell out of his way. Some older hunters swore he'd once worked with a partner, but most people didn't believe it -- nobody could be crazy or suicidal enough to work full-time with Dean Winchester. The man was a green-eyed, head-to-toe scarred killing machine, and it was impossible to imagine him actually caring about someone.

After Sam -- a long time after Sam -- Dean Winchester actually went on a hunt with someone else, a young hunter with only a few years' experience. "If you get in my way, I'll kill you," was pretty much all Dean said to the kid. The kid was a good enough hunter, but he was young and overconfident and just cocky enough to work alongside a man everyone warned him away from -- a living legend with a reputation for not giving a damn about anything but the hunt.

After Sam, after the broken leg and the staked hand, when Dean took the hunt with the kid, he didn't remember how many years had passed, but he knew it was a lot. There was gray in his hair, and his whole body was getting stiff and achy from too many years of almost constant injuries, but he didn't let it slow him down. Dean saw the kid's eyes flicker suspiciously from his bad leg to his mostly useless left hand. Dean didn't give a damn what the kid thought -- he'd come here to kill a bitchy ghost with a penchant for knives, and he was going to do the job and get the hell out.

After Sam, a long time after Sam, Dean Winchester's leg gave out at dusk in a cold graveyard in central Wisconsin, and a ghost plunged her knife into his heart with a cackle of glee. "Bitch," Dean said grimly, and blasted her with rock salt, and then sat down hard against a gravestone. He could see everything with impossible clarity -- his breath hanging in the crisp air, the moon's first rays falling across the snow, Venus shining bright in the darkening sky. The ghost let out a wail and melted away into the cold night as the kid finally got around to setting fire to her bones.

After Sam, and after the leg and the hand and the knife to the heart, Dean Winchester sat in a graveyard in the cold and tried to remember where he was and what he'd been doing. "Sam?" He called, his voice cracking with exhaustion and desperation. "Sam, where are you?" Dean looked down, and there was so much blood, and he thought Sam’s not going to be happy. Sparks like fireflies danced in front of his eyes, lighting the dying night. "Sammy?"

After Sam, and after Dean went down from a knife to the heart, the overconfident kid showed up just in time to hear Dean Winchester's last words. Had he not heard it himself, the younger hunter wouldn't have believed that voice, almost sobbing with desperate hope, could have come from Dean Winchester. Pausing a respectful distance from the dying man, the kid realized that Dean Winchester, killing machine and cold-hearted bastard who just didn't give a damn, had been human once, had actually cared about someone.

After Sam, Dean Winchester lived to be forty-three years old and then bled out into the snow, still waiting for his brother to come back to him.