Chapter Text
April 2022
It was late evening in Ithaca, windy and cool, and Maeve was tucked up on the porch with an Irish coffee and one of her broken clocks, when a great black behemoth of a car came rumbling up the street. She glanced up from the tiny ratchet wheel she was working on, curious. It had been a good six or seven years since she’d seen anything other than a quiet hybrid tooling around town, and this beast was all heavy steel and glossy paint and shining chrome, easing into the drive next door with a decidedly un-PC growl and a purr. Erin, lover of all things old and loud and mechanical, was already coming out from the kitchen, eyes alight, before the engine even went quiet in the dusk. ‘327 four barrel,’ she said, as though that meant anything to Maeve at all. ‘Gotta be. Nothing else sounds like a three-twen—and oh, my God, she’s a ‘67 Chevy.’ There was something in her voice that sounded very much like reverence. ‘Oh, look at her, Maeve.’
Maeve looked. Maeve saw a big black noisy car.
‘It’s, um. Very pretty,’ she said, dutifully, as the driver’s door creaked open.
The tired-looking man who got out was probably in his forties, and he was certainly very pretty, dressed in worn jeans and boots and a soft grey tee beneath warm flannel. He was already moving around the front of the car as his passenger started to climb out, careful and slow. The other man was dressed in the same kind of clothes as the driver, and he had soft dark hair falling forward into his eyes, and memories of Elías and of the cancer ward at Cayuga Medical were suddenly blooming fresh and dark and unlovely in Maeve’s mind, because this other man looked as though he might be dying.
Her sister’s hands settled on her shoulders, soft-skinned and warm.
‘Easy, Sammy,’ the driver said, as he got a shoulder beneath the thin man’s arm to take some of his weight. He had a nice voice, gravelly and low, and Maeve watched with quiet concern as he helped the other man (Sam?) toward the house and steadied him as they made their slow, careful way up the porch stairs. ‘We’re gonna rest in the foyer for a couple minutes when we get in, okay?’
Sam’s voice was wry. ‘Yeah? Will there be lollipops?’
‘ . . . what?’
‘You’re treating me like I’m two, Dean.’
From the tenderness evident in the other man’s hands, she expected an apology, or gentle reassurance, but, ‘Dude, you were better than this at walking when you were two,’ was what she heard instead, and Sam snorted out a sweet, startled laugh, leaned a little into his companion as Dean fished keys from his back pocket with one hand, opened the front door. It closed behind them a moment later, and after a moment more Erin squeezed her shoulders, gently, in love and comfort and remembrance, and went back inside. Maeve sat turning her wedding band (widow band, now) for a long while on her finger before she returned to her work.
For the first time in a long while that night, she dreamed of Elías.