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Roman's cousin – one of the few he hasn't met in the ring or backstage – excuses himself to make a snack for his kid, and the three or four others who pop out of the woodwork when they hear someone's making popcorn, and Dean, momentarily left alone in the dining room, takes the opportunity to escape. He slips through the glass door at the far side of the table and out onto Roman's folks' back porch. It's December, but it's also Florida, so he's plenty warm even with just a sweatshirt.
His Shield hoodie, even, which he's somehow never managed to lose, even so many months after it's been relegated to the part of his wardrobe that he's not allowed to wear on camera. It's been washed just enough that it's stopped holding static – no longer sets his hair on end or gives a jolt to everyone who touches him – but the inside is still soft. It probably says something about him that it was easier for Seth to throw him away than it has been for him to let go of this stupid shirt, but that is shit he's not thinking about. At all, if he can help it, but at the very least not during the Reigns holiday-party-cum-family-reunion.
Bad enough Roman's been picking up his pieces for all these months. That he's apparently so worried about what Dean will do if he's left to his own devices during the holiday break in production that he's packed him back home with him like a nervous dog that'll eat your shoes and the couch if you leave him alone too long. The least Dean can do for the big guy is not get in the way of his time with his parents and sisters and uncles and cousins and shiny-haired relatives of every other description.
He reaches into his pocket and fishes out a cigarette. He's quit again. Really. Mostly. He's not even going to light it, but it's good to have something to do with his hands. It's only when he's got it out, flipping it between his fingers and rolling his tense shoulders in an impromptu dance step, that he realizes he's not alone.
A slight woman with silver hair, bare feet, and an enormous coffee mug is perched on the porch rail with her back against one of the posts that supports the roof and watching him with a small smile. He's certain that they were introduced last night, but her name and location in the family tree are lost to him, somewhere in the blur of small talk and hearty food and good cheer between being met at the airport by a whole contingent of beautiful Samoans carrying signs (“Welcome Home Uncle Roman!” “Merry Christmas to our Superstars!”) and crashing out in Roman's childhood bedroom. “Good morning.”
“Morning,” he says, burrowing his hands – cigarette and all – back into the pockets of his hoodie. “Didn't mean to disturb you.”
“This porch is big enough for two, I think.”
He smiles at her joke; the porch runs the length of the whole house. The better to fit everyone for cookouts and whatever else it was you did with a house this big and family enough to fill it.
She takes a sip from her mug. “We can be a little overwhelming, huh?”
He gives a little sigh and resists the urge to put up his hood and shrink into it like a turtle. “I'm that obvious?”
She chuckles, but it sounds sympathetic. “I'm Tania. Roman's mother is my husband's sister. In February, it'll be 38 years since I married in to this bunch, and I still need a minute, sometimes.”
Dean feels older than his years sometimes – when the chill in the air makes all the bones and connections in his shoulder ache, or when he sees kids goofing around in the crowd and realizes he can't remember ever being that carefree – but he finds that he can't imagine 38 years of feeling so much a part of something. The Shield had made it to a year and a half, and that had already seemed like an impossibly long time for someone to keep believing he was worth holding onto.
“Here's my theory,” she says, breaking his reverie in quiet tones, “there are so many of them: brothers, sisters, cousins – so many cousins! – that they all learned to do everything, including love, loudly just to be heard over the crowd. I don't think they realize their welcome wagon is a small army to other people. We don't mean to smother you. Everyone's just glad you're here.”
He leans back, letting the porch rail behind him take his weight and bite into him through the sweatshirt. “You guys don't even know me.” He's more bewildered than defiant, and he's torn between hope and horror that she'll have heard as much in his voice.
“Maybe not yet,” she allows, hopping down from her perch, “but you're part of Roman, and that makes you part of us.” She shrugs and takes a few steps toward him, holding out the hand that's not busy with her coffee for a handshake. He takes it, only a little awkwardly, and her smile broadens. “Welcome aboard, kid.”
The door he escaped through earlier saves him from having to come up with an appropriate reply, when it slides open to let Roman out onto the porch.
“'Morning, Auntie. You keeping my boy company?”
“More like he's being good enough to let an old lady rattle on at him,” she says, giving his hand a quick squeeze before letting go.
When Roman draws close enough, she lets him tuck her against his side in a halfway kind of hug. “You're not old,” Roman says gravely. “You're wise and beautiful.”
She chuckles and pats his chest fondly, “Your mother has taught you well. I'm going to go in and compliment her on the very thorough brainwashing.”
Roman presses a kiss into her hair and turns her loose, closing the last few steps to lean against the railing at Dean's side. “How you doing?”
“I'm good. Didn't mean to make you come looking for me.”
“No worries, man. Just wanted to make sure my sisters' kids weren't still trying to get you to sign all the patio chairs. I mean, Mom's a fan and all, but she just redecorated.”
“Don't want to count on me being a responsible adult for too long?” He smirks. “Good call.”
Roman hoists himself up to sit on the railing, swinging his feet a couple of times, like being in his parents' house has made him a kid again. His hair is pulled back in a low, neat bun, the way he usually wears it outside of a show, but there are half a dozen thin braids – one from each of his little nieces – worked into its length. Roman knows a thing or two about giving in to pleading looks from the munchkins around here.
“What?” he asks, and Dean realizes he's been smiling at him absently this whole time.
“Nothing.” He shakes his head at himself. “You look good, is all. Happy.”
Roman smiles, fucking beams. “Feel pretty good. Nice being back, you know?”
Dean's not sure that he does; times he's been back to Cincinnati as an adult haven't exactly been relaxing or cozy. He doesn't say that – or anything else – though. Doesn't need to.
Somewhere along the line, they've settled into a groove, where Roman seems as comfortable with Dean's silences as with the times when he can't stop his mouth from running. He's at ease with Dean just being however he is from moment to moment in a way that Dean himself rarely is outside the ring.
He turns and settles against the porch rail again, draping over it like the top rope, his elbow propped next to Roman's hip.
“Told Mom I'd make the emergency grocery run for her later,” Roman offers. “If you want to come with, I'll show you a little of the town.”
“Sounds good.”
They're quiet for a while longer after that, while the sunshine beats down and a soft breeze carries in the salt smell of the nearby ocean and the laughter of the kids playing on the swing-set just out of sight around the corner of the house. Beside him, Roman's radiating quiet contentment, the way he does when everything's breaking his way. It's only over the last couple of weeks that he's started wearing that satisfied air again; Dean's missed it.
It's nice, really, the kind of moment that he knows other people – stable people – stop and savor, but it's also the kind of thing that's always made him itch and squirm, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Trying to stay wary enough to ensure that that other shoe won't be a boot that catches him on the chin. It feels shitty, feeling that way even with Roman, who he knows won't fuck him up. Not deliberately.
Of course, he'd known the same thing about Seth, once.
He straightens and flexes his hands into and out of loose fists, throws a couple of half-hearted jabs into the empty air, and wishes obscurely for a length of wrist tape he could unwrap and rewrap until the tension leaked out of his spine. “Go on back inside. You should be spending time with your family.”
Roman doesn't say anything. Doesn't move, either, and Dean can feel those grey eyes on him, patient – fucking obstinate – until he looks up to meet them. The steadiness there matches the conviction in his tone when Roman finally speaks.
“I am.”
Dean looks away, shakes his head, beats out an erratic little rhythm on the railing. Roman feels responsible for him or whatever, sure, but that's not the same thing as family. Not the way Roman knows it, anyway. Ambrose family values are kind of a ripoff; Dean can't possibly pay him back everything he takes.
“Hey, look at me,” Roman says quietly, dropping down from the railing to stand beside him and leaning into his field of vision, not crowding him, exactly, but making himself impossible to ignore. “Why do you think I want you here with me this week?”
“Because keeping an eye on me is easier than wiring bail money to Vegas?”
“You don't really think that.” There's no question in it; Roman's used to making what he says in that voice come true. He's just declared Dean to be less broken than he is, and Dean almost wants to laugh. If anyone could make it happen just that easily, it probably would be Roman.
He chances another glance at Roman, who pins him with a look that drags his heart right into his throat. Before the Shield, before everything they've been through, with Seth and after, he might have mistaken it for pity, bristled against it like the half-feral cat he's so often compared himself to.
But he recognizes it now for what it is instead: pain. Simple and straightforward and on Dean's behalf.
He knows, in a distant sort of way, that it isn't this way for other people, that it's part of the damage he's always half-ass navigating around, but, for Dean, love has always meant giving someone the power to hurt you without even trying. The why and the how much of it are beyond him – if he let himself think about, he'd have to admit that he's afraid they always will be – but taking in the pained expression on Roman's face, and knowing that he's the cause of it, even Dean can't doubt that he is loved.
Roman steps in and curls an arm around him, tight, but not inescapable if Dean really wanted to pull away.
And part of him does. The ragged, raw part of him that's always been suspicious of soft words, that knows that other people's kindness doesn't outlast his own usefulness, wants nothing more than to flinch away from Roman's gentleness and hole up someplace where the whiskey is cheap and the company is hard and disinterested.
But, there's another piece, bigger than it used to be, that wants – fucking aches – to be just where he is. It's that part that wins out. That part that lets him wrap an arm around Roman in turn, drop his forehead onto Roman's shoulder, twist one hand up into a fistful of Roman's t-shirt, like something might drag him away.
Roman responds by closing his other arm around him, lifting a hand to ruffle through his hair. “I don't call you “brother” or “partner” or “best friend” for the sake of the fans.”
“Fair warning: If you tell me to “believe that”, you're going over that railing,” he says, words muffled in the space between them.
Roman chuckles, squeezing him tighter still for a beat, “Sure, but you're coming with me.”