Work Text:
All this happened, more or less.
(The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.)
Mother Mary, pinned to the ceiling, flames licking her gold curls and bloodied nightgown. So it goes.
Dad, who made a deal with Yellow Eyes, to resurrect Dean, and died alone and unnoticed in a hospital room. So it goes.
Bobby, shot through the head. So it goes.
Ellen and Jo, gone in a literal blaze of glory. So it goes.
Angels falling. So it goes.
Kevin, screaming in agony, features erupting in spikes of light. So it goes.
Crowley sticking his own knife into his belly. So it goes.
Sam and Adam, falling into the Pit. So it goes.
Sammy, stabbed in the back, crumbling to the ground in the moonlight. So it goes.
Lisa, in the hospital, alive, but memoriless. So it goes.
Charlie, bleeding out in a motel bathtub. So it goes.
Castiel, drowning in a black velvet whirlpool.
So it goes. It always does.
He always wondered how he’d end up kicking the bucket. More ways than one, as Winchester luck would have it. And yet, he always lived to die another day. He was more shocked than anyone to make it past his 30th birthday.
(He spent 40 years in hell between 30 and 31. How do you measure a year like that one?)
He wondered if what he had could be considered a successful life. Probably not, seeing as a lot of Dean’s points of pride were either illegal, dangerous, or both. His life was an endless procession of the holy trinity: sex and drugs and rock n’ roll. He’d been on his knees for all of ‘em, too. Didn’t stick.
He liked what Vonnegut said about death. Or, what the Tralfamadorians said. When a person dies, he only appears to die… All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.
It was an earthly illusion, to think that time was linear.
(He’d always wanted to ask Cas about that. How time really worked. As though Dean could teach Cas how cable porn works, and, in turn, Cas could tell him the secrets of life, the universe, and everything.)
This is the story of Dean Winchester.
The year he was dying, back in 2007, he’d written a letter to Sam. It couldn’t be called a will, seeing as it merely said
Sammy-
I’m sorry
I fucked up
I’ll miss
Be good; Baby’s yours. I’m sorry.
Love You,
Dean
He’d tried to write more. To tell his little brother everything he’d meant to, all the things he’d wanted to teach him. How to change a valve cover gasket, how to pick up chicks (or dudes. Dean was nothing if not versatile.). All the stories he’d meant to tell him, about their mom, their life, about Sam as a little kid. Damn it, he had so much blackmail on that boy and now he’d never get to use it.
He had half a mind to ask Sam about it. Lawyers drafted up wills for dying men all the time. Power of attorney and beneficiaries and all that, right? But, in his mind’s eye, he could see Sam’s defeated face, tears welling in his eyes, posture crumbling.
He couldn’t bring himself to do that. To hurt Sam.
And besides, Winchesters don’t talk about things. Not even on their deathbeds.
"Okay, look," he'd said, standing between his father's car and his mother's grave. "I want a big funeral. All right? I'm talking epic. Okay? Open bar, choir, Sabbath cover band, and Gary Busey reading the eulogy. And for my ashes, I like it here. Yeah. You know, as far as eternal resting places go..."
He knew, with the life they lived, he’d likely never be able to stand up at Sammy’s wedding and talk about all their misadventures, regale them all with Sammy’s most embarrassing moments, talk about how proud Mom would’ve been. But dying… was finality. Dean wouldn’t get that ending. There was still time for Sam. Sam wasn’t a marked man, Sam could have the happily ever after he’d always dreamed of.
The angels called him the Righteous Man. Said his life was important. Dean disagreed.
It wasn't anything, really. And it would be so easy to just let go...
Dean knew, had known from the age of four, that he wasn’t destined for the life his mother wanted for him. Soon enough, he’d pull a James Dean: Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. So it goes.
⛥⛥⛥
"We're always going and going and going, and never asking where. Did you ever hear of having more than you wanted? So that you couldn't want anything else and then started looking for something else to want? It seems like we're always searching for something to satisfy us, and never finding it. Maybe if we could lose our cool we would.”
⛥⛥⛥
Having run out of quarters, Dean darted across the parking lot, slipping into the motel room as stealthily as he knew how.
The light in the bedroom was on.
Sammy, asleep in the bed, a dark clouded figure, a shtriga, he’d later learn, hovering over his little brother’s mouth.
He traveled forward again, this time peeking in on a sleeping Ben. Lisa came up behind him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders.
“You comin’, babe?”
“Yeah,” he murmured.”Let’s go.”
She grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the bedroom.
He heard a scream, a frighteningly familiar scream, and he darted through the door.
The room was ablaze.
Sammy was on the bed, reaching for the girl on the ceiling with one hand and shielding his eyes with the other.
“JESS!”
And there, pinned to the ceiling like a butterfly to a pinboard, was Jessica. So it goes.
“Take your brother outside as fast as you can! Now, Dean, go!”
He ran outside, clutching Baby Sammy to his chest, panting heavily.
“Dean, sweetheart, make sure you hold his head up like this, okay?”
“Why?”
“Babies have to build up their strength,” his mother said, pulling him closer, adjusting the crook of his elbow around her infant’s head. The baby's soft tufts of hair were all staticky against Dean's sleeves. “It takes them time to grow as big and strong as you.”
Dean paused at that, thinking. He took in Sammy's big shiny eyes and chubby cheeks. There were little spit bubbles around his rosy baby lips, and the baby seemed to be thinking very hard about something because he just kept staring at Dean. He wriggled a bit, feet kicking upward. “When will Sammy be fun?”
Mary laughed, throwing her head back, gold curls waving. Sammy cooed, giving a gummy smile, spit trailing down his chin. The phone rang before she could answer. "I'll be right back, okay?"
“John,” she sighed, sounding ten years older.
Dean’s ears perked up. When was Daddy coming home?
“John, I— I can’t do this, we can’t keep doing this—”
A beat.
“What about the boys?”
“Sammy’s not even two months old, John. Dean keeps asking me when you’re coming home. They need a father.”
“John, I love you, but—”
“John, please—”
“I know that. And maybe we just need time, but I can’t do this on my own right now.”
“I’ll get by. I always do.”
She hung up, brushing the stray tears from her cheek and taking a deep breath to compose herself.
“Momma?” Dean called.
“Comin’, baby.”
He didn’t want to ask when Daddy would come home. Not after he’d heard that.
Mary stood in the doorway. “What is it, Dean?”
Dean turned to face her, still holding Sammy. He would’ve run to hug her if not for the baby.
“I love you, Momma.”
She smiled, and suddenly the added age was gone and she looked young and beautiful again. “Love you, too.”
“Sammy loves you too,” he murmured.
“Does he now?”
“Uh-huh. Can we go to the park?”
“I think Sammy would like that,” she said, running a hand through his feathery blonde hair.
He looked up at her. Both pairs of green eyes were full of tears.
When’s Daddy coming home? His eyes asked.
“Someday, baby,” she said, pressing her lips to his forehead. “Someday.”
⛥⛥⛥
It’s 35 years later. Mary’s sons are now older than she was when she burned. And yet here she is.
(This time, her little boy had been the one to tell her, instead of the other way around: Daddy wasn't coming home. Daddy had died almost 12 years ago.)
“What can I say?” Dean says with a shrug. “He’s Sammy.”
As if that explained everything.
And, truth be told, it did.
He said that name, Sammy, with the same reverence he’d had as a four year old, when the name was new and fresh in his mind.
Over time, it had become his trademark, second heartbeat binding him back to earth. He lived, breathed, and died for Sammy.
The name was comfort. It was home.
Mary could only guess at what that name meant to Dean. She didn’t know their stories. But she felt the soft warmth of Dean’s voice when he spoke about his brother.
It was Dean’s baby blanket that burned when Mary did. It was snores emanating from the passenger seat. It was jumping off the shed dressed as Superman because Dean did it first. It was textbooks piled in the footwell of his beloved car, a metric shit-ton of fancy-ass hair products, the soft hands patching him up after a rough hunt, with fishhook needles and dental floss stitches and whiskey as disinfectant. It was Lucky Charms and Thundercats and that old brown hoodie he wore all the damned time. It was singing American Pie at the top of their lungs because summer was coming to an end and the windows were rolled down and they were driving through hills and forests on some no-name road in some part of the country and the trees were turning red and gold and Sammy would be going to California in August.
⛥⛥⛥
Sam laughing at him in the passenger seat, ripping open a bag of Slim Jims.
“Dean, you can’t be serious.”
“As the grave, Samuel.”
“You literally desecrated three of those in the last 24 hours.” So it goes.
“Would I joke about this? Would I dishonor Meatloaf like that?”
“It’s Meatloaf, Dean. It dishonors itself.”
“You shut your mouth. Meatloaf rocks. On occasion.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Dean grinned, singing along. “Glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife, glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife…”
“Come on, Sammy, don’t be a chump.”
Sam sighed, but started singing along.
“Though it’s cold and lonely in the deep dark night, I can see paradise by the dashboard light...”
⛥⛥⛥
He turned the radio dial up.
“Dean,” a gravelly voice came from the backseat. “Music is irrelevant in regards to sexual intercourse.“
“Jesus, Cas, don’t call it that!”
“I don’t understand. What should I call it?”
Dean’s hands found their way to Castiel’s waist, sliding along his pelvis, down his legs, up the arch of his back. “Why don’t we get things goin’, then we’ll figure out what to call it?”
He was cut off by the touch of Cas’ lips and tongue and his slender hands working their way over him like a tidal wave and legs tangling and yep, that’s a boner alright and he could taste the perspiration on his lips and cheeks and neck and chest and oh my CHUCK
⛥⛥⛥
He sat up abruptly, still screaming from the dream, drenched in a cold sweat.
“Dee?” a muffled voice from the other bed. “You ‘kay?”
“Yeah,” he gasps, “’m fine, Sammy. Go t’sleep.”
Sam murmurs something unintelligible.
⛥⛥⛥
Sam muttered something under his breath.
“What was that?”
“You heard me” Sam snapped, playing with a forkful of wilted salad.
“You got something to say, you spit it out.”
“Dad,” Dean said gently.
“Oh? Sorry, I didn’t realize my thoughts were of any worth to you, sir,” Sam spat, the ‘sir’ sounding like a dirty word. And oh Lordy, Dean should’ve dragged that boy back to their bedroom by his ears right then and there. And if he’d known what was about to go down, he just might’ve.
“You better get your shit together, Samuel—”
“My shit’s together, Dad! You’re the one who can’t—”
“This is our life, Sam! Does your mother mean nothing to you?”
“This isn’t a life, Dad! It’s an obsession, an addiction, I think Mom would agree—”
“YOU NEVER KNEW YOUR MOTHER!” John roared, his plate shattering on the floor.
Sam froze. Dean’s heart stopped beating.
“You’re right,” Sam said, his voice frighteningly sharp. “But you can be damn sure she’d’ve been proud of her kid getting a full ride to Stanford! Any normal parent would be!”
“Sammy, c’mon—”
“Shut up, Dean! I’m not like you! I can’t live like this anymore! With the motel rooms and the arsenal and all this emotional baggage!”
John started up again. “It’s not always about you—”
Sam laughed, cold and bitter. “It never is.”
“WHAT THE HELL IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?”
“It’s the cause, the fight, the family fucking business—”
“THIS FAMILY—”
“Yeah, because you’re supporting your sons—”
“— GODDAMN UNGRATEFUL BRAT—”
“—drunk in the gutter, on your damn crusade for vengeance—”
“JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T GIVE A DAMN—”
“ NORMAL KIDS DON’T LEARN HOW TO SHOOT AT SIX—”
“— YOUR MOTHER—”
“NORMAL FAMILIES—”
“— WE AREN’T LIKE OTHER FAMILIES—”
“You ever think maybe I don’t want to be your perfect little soldier?”
“IT’S NOT ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT!”
“Just because Dean’s dumb enough to worship the ground you walk on—”
Dean felt like he was gonna throw up. “Sam…”
“Dean knows his place—”
“BECAUSE LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO HIM ALL THESE YEARS—”
“Sam—”
“— LEAVING FOR WEEKS ON END, MAKING HIM DROP OUT, BEATING HIM SENSELESS EVERY TIME YOU DRANK YOUR FEELINGS—”
“YOU LITTLE SHIT—”
Dean’s heart sank into the pit of his stomach. “Dad…”
“YOU HURT HIM, DAD! FAMILY’S SO FUCKING IMPORTANT TO YOU, AND YOU—”
“YOU DON'T LIKE IT HERE, YOU CAN GET OUT!” John screamed. “YOU WALK OUT, DON'T YOU EVER COME BACK!”
John strode to the door, slamming it and leaving. Sam, in tears, darted to the bedroom.
Dean ran to the kitchen sink and really did throw up.
By the time he finished, Sam was standing in the doorway, a backpack on his shoulder and a duffel bag in hand.
“Sammy, you can’t…”
“I have to, Dean.”
“Sammy...”
Sam walked over and hugged him, hard. Dean, in spite of being caught off guard, managed to slip the money from his wallet into Sam’s backpack.
God, I’m so proud of you, Sammy, is what he couldn’t bring himself to say. He couldn’t or he’d cry like a freaking girl. He had to keep it together. For Sam.
“Bye, Dean.”
He walked out of the apartment, never looking back.
That was alright.
All he missed was Dean, sliding to the linoleum floor, head in his hands. Wishing, not for the first time, that his mother were here.
⛥⛥⛥
He didn’t talk for a month after that.
He always got quiet after…
After things like that. He just couldn’t bring himself to speak. Something in his brain just shut down. He’d try to, but he always choked on the words.
Selective mutism, he’d read online. After Lucas from Lake Manitoc, he’d looked it up. Because at first, he’d thought it was only him, that he was screwed up in the head. It’s not like it was a choice. He physically couldn’t, regardless of what his dad said.
When Mary died, John was still gentle, concerned. He didn’t know what was out there yet. So when Dean didn’t talk for six months after Mary, he took it in stride. Doted on Dean and Baby Sammy in every way he knew how.
Because it scared John.
It happened a few more times. After Dean’s first really bad hunt, where a seven-year-old girl was killed by a rugaru because Dean didn’t make it in time. After Sammy ran off. After John. When Bobby and Charlie and Cas died. When he came back from hell.
He gasped, eyes opening abruptly, as though he was starting awake from a nightmare. Encased not in amber, but in a pine box. He could already feel the panic settling in his lungs, struggling to take in the stale air. He pounded on the lid until it gave way to a shower of dirt falling through into his mouth, his nose, his eyes. He clawed his way to the surface, choking on dirt, his entire body feeling raw.
When Dean Winchester finally collapsed on the ground above his own grave, taking in air and sun and light for the first time in forty years, he couldn’t help but sob.
⛥⛥⛥
“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”
⛥⛥⛥
He closed his eyes.
If any angel up there has their ears on, we could use some back up, he prayed silently. Michael was obviously indisposed, not that he would’ve been very helpful. Quite a few were dead.
He took a deep, shuddering breath. He could see Not-Sam’s tall, lanky form in the center of a patch of dying grass and crumbling stones.
He ran his thumb over the side of the cassette, sliding it into the tape player and clicking it into place.
If this was it, he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
Rise up, gather round, rock this place to the ground…..
Well, here goes nothing.
⛥⛥⛥
“So how was school?”
“Fine.”
“Do anything fun?”
“Nope.”
“I call bullshit. What’d you do?”
“Thought Dad said you weren’t supposed to talk like that, Dean.”
“Well, don’t tell Dad then.”
A sigh. “We just did the usual. We’re reading Macbeth in English. I gotta write a paper on the themes of free will and fate.”
“Gross.”
“It’s not too bad. I think you’d like it.”
“You’re a geek.”
A smirk. “Man, I didn’t even tell you ‘bout biology class yet.”
“Ace another test?”
“Better. Remember Julia MacArthur?”
“Your cute lab partner?”
“Uh-huh. Turns out, she needs a tutor. Said she’d give me five bucks an hour, too.”
“Damn. Nice work, Sammy.”
“Yeah. We’re gonna meet up at the library to study for our test on Thursday.”
“You play your cards right, maybe it’ll be an anatomy test, if you know what I mean.”
“DEAN!”
“Sam.”
“Don’t be vulgar!”
“Don’t be a prude.”
“Jerk.”
“Bitch.”
They were both right. Dean did like Macbeth. Not that he’d ever tell Sam.
And Sam… well, young Sammy lost his virginity to the co-captain of the Jackson County High School junior cheerleading squad in Ripley, West Virginia. Not that he’d ever share that with Dean.
It was April, 2001. All was well.
⛥⛥⛥
“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”
⛥⛥⛥
“Uncle Bobby?”
“Good God, boy, what are you doin’ up?”
“Can you come get me?”
“Yeah. Where are you? You’ve got Sam? Where’s your daddy?”
“It’s just me. I’m near Lennox, you gotta hurry ‘fore the cops come.”
“The hell are the cops comin’ for?”
“... Don’t tell Dad.”
“Dean.”
“I snuck out, okay? There’s an abandoned factory down off of I-29. Ghost problem.”
“And you took off by yourself?”
“Took care of it, by myself.”
“Then whattaya callin’ me for?”
“Iaccidentlywreckedthecar.”
“You what?”
“Ghostshovedtheimpaladownintoaravineandshehitatree.”
“Your daddy’s gonna kill me, you know that?”
⛥⛥⛥
“Dean?”
Dean was sanding the Impala. Sam approached tentatively, knowing his brother was close to the surface.
“Bobby’s got chili for lunch. C’mon and eat something.”
"Don't like chili."
Dean didn't bother to look, but he could see Sam's bitchface in his mind's eye, eyebrows raising into his hairline.
"Really? 'Cause I'm pretty sure last time we were here you downed four bowls of Bobby's chili. And made orgasm sounds the whole goddamned time."
(Normally, this would garner a witty retort, a clever, snappy one-liner from Dean. It didn't. And that, above all else, scared Sam shitless.)
“’M working, Sam.”
“I see that.” Sam sat on the gravel, criss-crossing his long legs. “How’s she comin’ along?”
Radio’s the only thing still working. Got a new gas tank, installed most of the glass and the window crank. Refurbished the upholstery. Still gotta paint and prime. Need to fix the driver’s side flooring. Accelerator pump is jammed, which means the carburetor’s still backfiring. But Sammy knew all that. Knew he was currently chiseling away at the car’s exterior, chipping her away to her most basic form, reducing her to four wheels and a metal base, because that’s how he coped. He tore her apart in the way he wanted to tear himself to pieces.
He couldn’t do feelings. Not because he was emotionally stunted, but the opposite. He felt too much.
So no, he couldn’t handle his emotions. But he could do cars.
“Dean…” Sam said, and damned if Dean couldn’t hear the pitiful doe-eyed expression on his face.
“Sam.”
“Are you okay?”
“Fuck off.”
“I mean it, Dean. Are you—?”
“So do I! Fuck. Off. Next person who asks me if I’m okay is gonna get decked.”
“Dean, you can’t keep—”
“You wanna shut the hell up and quit telling me what to do? ‘Cause I can take care of myself without you mothering me. I’m a grown-ass man, Samuel! I’m fine.”
He half expected Sam to call him out on the lie. But Sam’s face remained neutral.
“Well, when you’re ready to be a grown-ass man and deal with things, you know where to find me.” With that, his sonofabitch little brother stood and retreated to the house.
Dean was suddenly irate. He slammed his fist into the trunk. The pain in his hand wasn’t enough. He needed to break, cry, scream until his throat would tear.
He settled for taking a crow bar to his beautiful Baby. Even though she was the only thing in his life that hadn't let him down. Tears and sweat streaked his face, he was bleeding where shards of glass hit his arms.
Eventually, he sank to his knees, running his shaking hands through his hair, his throat choking with the overwhelming pressure of trying to keep it all in and failing miserably.
⛥⛥⛥
In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.
"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.
"Certainly," said man.
"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.
And He went away.
⛥⛥⛥
“Dean?”
“Yeah, Sam?”
“What are you keeping from me?”
“Uh, the tooth fairy’s not real, I screwed your Prom date, and my social security number is—”
“Dean.”
“Well, I don’t really know what you’re angling for here, Sammy.”
“Dean, are you gay?”
Dean scoffed, blushing. “Did you miss all the chicks I’ve—”
“Okay, but there have been men too, right?”
Dean froze before turning on his little brother. “You— you— How did you—”
“I was 11. We were in Pennsylvania, I think, North of Pittsburg, somewhere…. There was this guy, and I saw you two making out on the couch.”
“Tony Valero,” Dean said. “From New Castle, I’d almost forgot about him.”
“Then there was this time you came stumbling home, completely wasted when you were 19, maybe? And, by the looks of it, somebody, ah, Monica Lewinsky’d on your shirt.”
“Sonofabitch, Sammy—”
“I decided not to ask, given how plastered you were.”
“Probably for the best,” Dean said weakly.
“And then there’s Castiel.”
“Cas? What about him? What’s he have to do with anything?”
“You think Cas knows the implications of giving someone a mixtape?” Sam asked,
“I think you should shut your damn mouth,” Dean snapped back.
“I think Cas likes you back,” he continued. “It’s kinda obvious, if you’d pay attention.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Go fuck Castiel.”
“Samuel, I swear to all that is holy—”
“Like Cas?”
“—if you do not remove your ass from this kitchen in the next thirty seconds—”
Sam shrugged, smirking, and went back to his paperback, tossing a strawberry into his mouth. Dean grabbed the paperback and walloped his little brother over the head. Sammy, goddamned little shit that he was, even in his thirties, just laughed and smacked his brother’s hand away.
Check, and mate. Sam: 1- Dean: Nada.
Goddamnit, Sammy.
Mixtapes still worked, right?
He was pretty sure he never recalled Sam giving any of his love interests mixtapes.
Then again, there could be a correlation: no mixtape equals no success. That would expain Sammy.
Yes, a mixtape would do. Not Zeppelin this time.. He’d made a solid 53 minutes and 54 seconds to summarize two, five, ten, twelve years of…. Not friendship, per say, but something else.
- No One Like You- Scorpions
- Bring It On Home- Led Zeppelin
- Summer of 69- Bryan Adams
- Burning For You- B.O.C
- Alone- Heart
- Losing My Religion- R.E.M
- Can’t Fight This Feeling- REO Speedwagon
- Beth- Kiss
- Road To Nowhere- Ozzy Osbourne
- Love walks In- Van Halen
- Why Can’t This Be Love?- Van Halen
- Till There Was You- The Beatles
- I’ll Follow the Sun- The Beatles
- Heaven- Warrant
(How I love the way you move… And the sparkle in your eyes… there’s a color deep inside them, like blue suburban skies…)
And if Cas couldn’t figure out what he meant by that, well, then Dean was shit out of luck.
⛥⛥⛥
Winchester Luck, Dad always had said.
The hospital waiting room was dead quiet.
Somewhere down the hall, a child was bawling.
A woman was crying, signing paperwork at the front desk.
Sam was in the Operating Room.
Fractured wrist, dislocated shoulder with a bullet wound. Broken and bruised ribs, one of which had puntured his lung. Last Dean saw, they were frantically trying to get him oxygen and painkillers.
It made him nauseous just thinking about it. Then again, that might be the concussion he was 87.6% sure he had.
Please, God. Chuck. Cas, anybody, just please let Sam be alright….
A laugh came from behind him.
“You pray for Lucifer’s chosen one?”
Michael.
“He’s not Lucifer,” Dean bit back. “He’s Sam .”
The smirk was evident in Michael’s voice. “You have no idea what he will become.”
“He won’t.”
“You have far too much faith in the boy.”
“Listen, you sonofabitch. This isn’t fucking Star Wars. If you’re looking for me to beg and plead and tell you that ‘ there’s still good in him, Obi-Wan, I know there is!’ Then you’re shit out of luck. But I know Sam, and he’s not going there.”
“You can’t escape your fate," Michael said softly. "You were born to kill your brother.”
“Just like you were born to kill yours?”
Michael huffed. “The time for my final encounter with Lucifer has not yet come.”
“Last I checked, Sam is the one battling Lucifer. Not you,” Dean spat back.
You fool,” Michael hissed. “Lucifer is far more powerful than you even know.”
“And you aren’t? Aren’t you the resident Daddy’s boy up in heaven?”
“You—”
“If you were going to kill your brother, you would’ve done it already. What’s stopping you?”
He never did get an answer. Michael had already dissolved in a whirl of light and the sound of rustling feathers.
⛥⛥⛥
The rustling of feathers informed him that Cas had made an appearance.
“So. Cas,” Sam said, never even looking up from his paper. “I hear Dean’s letting you in back now.”
Dean, who had been chugging chocolate milk straight out of the half-gallon, choked, suddenly wracked with coughing spasms.
“Dean always lets me sit in the backseat. Primarily because you sit in the front seat—”
“Not the car, Cas. Y’know….”
“JESUS CHRIST, SAM—”
“Are… Are you referring to fornication?”
Sam was failing to hide his laughter behind his newspaper. “It’s the Zeppelin fan in him, Cas.”
Dean was startled. “Wait, what?”
“In through the out door, big brother.”
"You sonofabitch."
“I don’t underst—”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”
“If we’re not mature enough to talk about it, we shouldn’t be doing it.”
“Okay, Mom. Jesus, Sam, there’s a reason you never get laid.”
“Laid?”
“Sammy probably hasn’t had any TLC from anybody except his own hand for months, Cas,” Dean added. “He’s just bitter.”
“Better than having to listen to you two screw like Catholic rabbits.”
“We were not—”
“I heard you, Dean! I was literally in the next bed!”
“.... Did you watch?”
“What — I— What the— No, I didn’t fucking watch! I was too busy getting as far away as possible and looking for bleach to get that mental image out of my head!”
Dean chuckled and Sam threw a spoon at his head. Dean caught it.
Cas was still trying to piece together the last several sentences of the brothers’ exchange. “What do you mean by ‘screw’? And what do religious leporidae have to do with it?”
“Screw,” Dean said simply. “Y’know, ‘cause it’s twisty and— oh, fuck, never mind.”
“Regardless, don’t you ever pull that shit again,” Sam said, setting his paper down.
“What about that waitress in Texas?”
“What?”
“The girl you slept with in the back of my car,” Dean said. “That was fair game?”
“You gonna go screw yourselves silly in the Impala?” Sam snorted, motioning to the people unpacking their minivan next door. “Yeah, I’m sure our neighbors will love that.”
“Fuck ‘em,” Cas said gravely. It was obvious where he’d learned the phrase, his soft baritone taking on a gravely edge that sounded a bit too much like Dean.
Sam couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing. Dean lost it, doubled over laughing, and dear, sweet Castiel still didn’t know what was so funny, but he found it hilarious just the same. The three of them were doubled over, laughing hysterically, tears in their eyes, until they’d forgotten what had even caused the disruption.
It was a good day.
⛥⛥⛥
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
⛥⛥⛥
Dean wasn’t fond of the idea of going to school.
For one, who was gonna take care of Sammy?
He didn’t tell Dad this. He didn’t tell Dad anything anymore. Not since the fire.
The other kids whispered about him sometimes. Just because he couldn’t talk didn’t mean he couldn’t hear. Rumors about “that Winchester boy” were already circulating around the staff and students of Langston Hughes Elementary.
Dean was sitting under a table, coloring pictures. Mrs. Kaufmann glanced over at him, standing by her desk at the phone. She was using big words that Dean didn’t fully understand, words like trauma and selective mutism and therapy—
Dean didn’t know what that all meant. Just that there was something wrong with him. He hoped Sammy wouldn’t catch it.
Dean’s picture was of a house. Scribbled orange flames blossomed from the roof, and two stick figures stood outside next to a big black car. The smaller of the figures seemed to be holding something, a blue bundle with a small round face. In the doorway, stood another man: one with sharp, bloodstained teeth and big round yellow eyes.
⛥⛥⛥
Yellow eyes stared back, gazing into green.
His yellow-eyed father, yellow-eyed mother, yellow-eyed Sam. And one fine day, a yellow-eyed Dean came. Alastair kept saying he needed to put himself in the role. He’d never forget that first time he saw his doppelganger rip the flesh off of a screaming, sobbing girl….
He was naked. Chains were rusted to his wrists, his skin chafed away to the tendons. His hands and feet had been staked after they decided that iron bars were not enough to contain the Righteous Man. Stakes through his hands, his feet, one stake straight through his sternum. They were pouring sulfur, acid, something onto his skin, burning and charring the flesh to bones. Hunks of his legs, his stomach, ripped from his body and thrown to hellhounds. His ribcage was chipped open with a hammer and chisel, his own still-beating heart pulled from his chest, firm and full of blood, forced down his throat. He was plagued by that feeling of being feverish and delirious, while also being frozen to the core. He ached everywhere, in every sense of the word. His chest had been sliced open so many times, his entrails pulled out, stretched like that saltwater taffy he’d liked as a kid, then woven throughout the barbed wire as far as they would stretch, and squished up tight and sewn up into his body. The sound of fat and blood and bile sizzling on the ground like bacon. Hellbirds would come and go, always trying to bite off an ear or pluck out an eye, they’d peck and gnaw and chip away at his liver—
He would’ve laughed at that once. He knew his mythology. Except he, unlike Prometheus, had in no way benefited mankind. He couldn’t even save his kid brother, let alone humanity. Plus, the idea of these savage harpies fighting over a liver that had already sustained far too much damage. It was entertaining, for about five minutes at least.
He’d always be fixed up the next day.
Until Alastair came and stuck a thin needle-like sword down his esophagus, and he’d cough up bile and blood for hours before the demon finally punctured his stomach lining. Or he’d use hot steel and iron bars to sear his skin away. Once, he painstakingly snapped each of Dean’s ribs, carving out the flesh and meticulously splitting each ivory bow, cauterizing the lungs beneath. He was peeled and deveined like shrimp, boiled or fried depending on Alastair's mood, stewed in a cocktail sauce of his own bodily fluids. His own bones were used to make knives that sliced through his flesh, or powdered and poured into his mouth and open wounds. Poured ice water directly into Dean’s lungs, laughing as he sputtered and struggled for air. Alastair would carve into his muscles, slicing tendons, cutting the arteries and veins that would spurt his blood across the cavern. Or he’d take him off the wall, and put a chain around each limb, and have him suspended above the flames, his limbs being ripped from their sockets. Alastair painstakingly removed each of his teeth, and forced him to swallow hot coals, sticking needles through his eyelids, holding his eyes open like perverse little butterflies on a pinboard.
He’d cut off his arms and legs and tongue, he’d fillet his skin and hang it out to dry like leather, ribbons of flesh adorning his body like tinsel. Snap each of his fingers, inject bleach into his veins, take a hammer and smash him until every bone, every organ was broken beyond mortal belief, as though he was tenderizing meat, pluck out each finger and toenail, opening up his liver and filling it with shards of broken glass.
And that was how Dean felt, encased not in amber, but in ice and fire. Like broken glass.
⛥⛥⛥
Broken, glassy hazel-blue-gray eyes stared up at him, and damn it if those eyes didn’t get him every goddamned time.
How many years was it now, since a dying John had prophesied this moment?
If you can't save your brother, you've gotta kill him.
That was the only time he could recall ever disobeying a direct order from his father.
And yet, here they were.
“Sammy, close your eyes.”
The photographs. Faded kodachrome colors failing to capture the soft lines of Dean’s baby face, of Mary’s soft gold hair, the soft blue of Baby Sammy’s blanket. All the details that had been washed away like writing in the sand.
Sammy, his baby brother…. That same kid brother he’d doted on, nursed through every childhood illness from the chicken pox to the stomach flu, that little brother he’d guided through book reports and heartbreaks and road maps. The kid he’d stitched up and cleaned up, and cradled in his arms as an infant. And later as a corpse. Sammy, who didn’t have a mom, so he ran to Dean, always to Dean. Dean, who taught him how to tie his shoes and ride a bike and read. Dean, who remembered back to a time when he’d clamber into that baby’s crib in the night, in the early months after Momma died, when Daddy was sleeping or drinking and didn’t hear Sammy’s cries. And he’d hold him, smoothing his feathery baby hair down, rubbing soft circles on his back. He’d put out a finger, and Baby Sammy would clutch it in his pudgy little fist, cooing softly as though he was telling Dean some riveting bedtime story.
The little kid who sat in the backseat with him, reading, teaching himself different languages (June of 1992, his geek brother only spoke to him in Spanish.) sporadically giving him random facts about countries he’d never see, about Latin rituals and and the space-time continuum and hey, Dean, did you know that the average bolt of lightning contains enough energy to toast 100,000 pieces of bread?
And, no, Sam, no he didn’t.
That baby brother Mary died to protect, whom he’d literally lived and died for. He was kneeling before him, crying silently, as Dean raised the scythe. His eyes were still wide open, that weird blend of hazel and blue-gray piercing him like a silver bullet to the heart.
The scythe was drawn back, slicing through the air like Sammy’s lightning bolt that could fry the whole goddamned Wonderbread factory.
Part of Dean vaguely registered the sound of the blade sinking into flesh, muscle, bone.
(He used to know the names of all of those. Well, Sammy did.
Sammy, age 11, back from his first hunt, trying to hold back tears, and saying, “Dean, I think I broke my radius.” And Dean, smiling, because his nerdy kid brother was gonna be just fine.
Sammy, age 15, recalling, in vivid, technicolor detail, how he dissected a fetal something or other in his uber advanced biology class, and Dean had to push away his dinner, but still listened attentively.)
Then Dean looked over at Sam.
Who was very much alive.
And Death.
Who was breaking, fracturing, shattering, like an old Greek temple, crumbling to dust to dust to dust.
So it goes.
⛥⛥⛥
And if I die no soul will pity me. And wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself?
⛥⛥⛥
“Chuck? Er, God?”
“If you’re listening, we need you. Please?”
“Or, y’know, you can keep on ignoring me. When I…. when I reach out, when we need you, and you just…”
“You know somethin’, Chuck?” he said, anger rising like a tidal wave in his gut. “Lemme tell you something, one whore to another.
“I get it, Chuck. I’m the same way you are. I’m this…. This poor, dumb, slut of a man, with the emotional range of a teaspoon. I hurt everyone I love. There is not a person in my life, living or dead, that I have not let down in some way. I act like I have all the answers, when I don’t have a damn clue. I’m sure you can relate, right?
“But Cas is different. Because Cas is dumb, because Cas is a blind fool who doesn’t know where you come from or why or how or even what you’re coming into. Because Cas happens to need you. Cas has dedicated his entire existence to you. And you, you—
“I know what that’s like, to idolize a man who’s really more myth than man. Nothing more than a stream of excuses, always looking out for the common good and never looking out for his own goddamned sons. I know what that does to a kid.
“And if that’s not enough for you? Well, then…. You can get your ass out. You heard me. Same way my old man left Sammy without a second thought. And even when it gets really bad, you say nothing, you do nothing. When time is running out and people are dying, and everything’s going to hell in the blink of an eye, and your excuses suddenly don’t sound as good as they used to and you’ve already forgotten. How you walked out on the one person who needed you. And you forget that somewhere, there is one poor, stupid son of a bitch who still believes in you.
“Why isn’t that ever enough?”
⛥⛥⛥
“C’mon!”
Sammy slammed the car trunk closed, running into the open field. He set the box full of fireworks.
“You got your Zippo?” he asked, holding out his firecracker like an altarboy with a candle.
Dean pulled it out of his pocket, and oh god, did he miss that leather jacket. He toyed with the flame for a minute. Then he lit ‘em up and took off running. Sam was giggling, whooping and hollering as the sky lit up with red, green, purple, gold, blue.
Somewhere outside of Vanceburg, Kentucky, they sat out on the hood of the Impala, looking up at the stars. Dean had taught Sam the constellation stories as a kid, when they’d drive around at night, lulled to sleep by the tales of Perseus and Medusa, Heracles, the Seven Sisters, Castor and Pollux.
He still thought about Castor and Pollux sometimes. One marked for life, the other for death.
They stayed until the sun rose over the empty field. Sam had fallen asleep a few hours before, still on the hood of the car. Dean packed up the few things they’d brought with them and half-carried, half-dragged, half-guided his little brother to the backseat of the car. He drove off at sunrise Roll Me Away playing through the speakers, heading down I-24 to the next not-so great adventure of Sam and Dean.
⛥⛥⛥
“They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.”