Work Text:
“What do you want from us, Dean?”
What did Dean want? Dean wanted to get up at the same time five days a week, settle on the couch with a beer on Thursday nights to watch the game, and sleep in on Saturday mornings. He wanted to wake up with a warm body, wanted to give a kid sugary cereal, and laugh about cavities over the breakfast table. He wanted to mow the lawn. He loved mowing the goddamn lawn. He wanted to work the grill on a sunny afternoon. He wanted peace on a little lot in the middle of the suburbs.
There was a part of him, always kept deliberately small, secret, and out of the way that’s always wanted those things. But now those things were inextricably linked to something else entirely—Sam’s death. Having those things meant Sam was dead. And that glossy magazine life lost its appeal pretty damn fast when he thought about his brother in the ground. The whole dream was infected, rotting from the inside out.
Dean stared helplessly at Lisa. She was right. He wanted. Wanted so much he could taste it. And the taste made him want to vomit.
“Lis’... I... I can’t...”
Lisa snorted and looked away. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
“Come on, Lisa,” Dean pleaded. “You can’t just spring that kind of question on me!”
A derisive curl of her lip turned her expression from exasperation to smoldering anger. “Seriously? Like how you keep springing yourself into my life?”
“I told you, Ben called me,” he replied. The excuse sounded weak to his own ears and Lisa appeared to agree, scoffing as she crossed her arms, leaning back to examine him. “You know I care about you,” he tried. “You and Ben both.”
“Not enough to stay,” she said “Not enough to give up hunting.”
And there it was, the truth laid bare. Part of Dean wanted to let loose with venom: What if I asked you to give up everything you are? What if I asked you, ‘Why don’t you give up being a mother?’ What if I asked you to give up your house, your car, your life, every bit of this paradise, huh?
He kept his words behind his teeth. Those things weren’t even roughly equal, not by a longshot; apples and oranges. Not to mention how absurdly petty it would sound.
“I did,” he said. “I did for a damn year. I haven’t stayed anywhere that long since I was four years old. I stayed!”
“And then Sam showed up,” Lisa countered flatly. What little momentum Dean had promptly faltered. “Sam showed up and you were out that door.”
“I had to—”
“And that’s my point, Dean. You’ll always ‘have to.’ Especially when it comes to Sam.”
“You need to watch what you say about my brother,” he said, the warning coming out blacker than he intended.
Lisa ignored him, of course. It was one of the things he loved and admired about her, how she always bulldozed through his bullshit whether he liked it or not. But this felt like a bridge too far. “No, why don’t we talk about Sam. Seems like after you showed up, we talked about everything but your brother. So let’s do it right now. Let’s talk about him.”
Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true. The first night he came to the Braeden’s, Dean laid it all out—Sam, Hell, the cage, everything. He did it stone-cold sober and wept the whole way through, never allowing Lisa get a word in. He passed out on her couch and the next day when she asked if he wanted to talk about it, he said no. And that’s the answer he stuck to every day afterward.
“There ain’t nothing to say,” Dean bit out. “He was gone and now he’s back. He needed my help, I gave it to him.”
“And when does it stop?” she demanded.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“When are you going to let Sam live his own life without you? When are you going to let him protect himself?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dean snapped; oddly, his heartbeat picked up, fluttering arithmetically in the face of Lisa’s accusing stare. Accusing him of what?
“I don’t think it matters what’s going on with Sam. I think you’ll always find a way to rescue him whether he needs it or not,” she replied. “I think you can’t help yourself.”
“He needed me.”
“He seemed fine when I talked to him,” she said.
“Well, he wasn’t fine. He wasn’t fine then, he isn’t fine now—”
Lisa slowly shook her head. “You’re just proving my point, Dean.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said; he felt like she was running circles around him, kicking up a dust devil of confusion. “Am I losing my mind here? In what universe should I not be helping my brother when he needs help?”
“Nobody is saying that,” Lisa replied almost (but not quite) gently. “But this mission to ‘help Sam?’ It’s never just helping him. You make it the center of your universe, your everything. And that just isn’t healthy. You’re not his father or his mother or his bodyguard. You’re his brother. Helping family out is one thing, but what you do... it’s on a whole different level entirely.”
Dean was never a wiz kid in school but it was more from lack of effort than lack of comprehension. He could string a sentence together, but he never bothered with the reading for English. Hunts taught him more practical history than any Social Studies class could provide, so those assignments more often than not slipped by the wayside, too. Science he could scrape by on pure moxie (and, occasionally, on the off chance of making something explode), but otherwise he didn’t pay them much mind. But the one subject he never had any particular trouble with was Math. Sure, he couldn’t do the whole Rain Man thing with equations in his head like Sam, but without much thought, he got B’s; A’s if he turned in all his homework. Not that he’d ever admit it, but he actually kind of liked math, at least compared to other classes. “Ifs,” “ors,” and “maybes” ruled every other subject, but not math. One answer for one question. Math, in a word, was easy.
Until Geometry. Which was fine at first but then they asked him to prove two triangles were the same goddamn triangle and it all went to shit:
“Just look at it!” he’d shouted. “What, are the people writing these textbooks fucking blind?”
He got kicked out of class for two days for that one. Geometry proofs never clicked for him, not the way algebra or even his few weeks in Pre-Calc before he dropped out in his senior year. Why prove something that was self-evident? What was even the point?
Talking to Lisa was starting to feel like tenth-grade Math all over again.
“He’s my brother,” Dean said which was both wholly encompassing and woefully inadequate. Of course he went after Sam after he knocked on their door—Sam was his brother. Of course he criss-crossed the country with him when he started acting sketchy—Sam was his brother. Of course he made a deal with Death to retrieve his soul from Hell—Sam was his brother.
Lisa studied him with pinched lips and he wished, not for the first time, that he could take a peak into her mind. If he did, maybe he wouldn’t have felt like he got hit by a two-by-four when Lisa opened her mouth again. “If you had a choice between saving Ben and saving Sam, who would you choose?”
Dean gaped at her. “What the hell kind of question is that?”
“Answer me, Dean. If it was a choice between saving one or the other, who would you pick?”
“That’s...” Insane. Demented. Not to mention improbable (and yet, unfortunately not impossible). “I’d never let that happen.”
“No third choice, Dean,” Lisa countered flatly. “No shooting the bad guy and saving them both, no loopholes where everyone walks away. Sophie’s Choice. Who do you save? Sam or Ben?”
Lisa’s stare was unrelenting knives stabbing into his own. No wiggling out of this one. Dean swallowed hard. “Ben,” he replied gruffly. “You know I’d save Ben.”
It was the right answer—he knew it was the right answer, it had to be—and Lisa nodded as if his words were unsurprising. Then why ask the question in the first place? “Of course you’d save a child. But you had to think about it, didn’t you?”
Dean flinched. “What?”
“You had to think about it,” she explained calmly, as if she hadn’t just accused him of terrible callousness. “The answer didn’t come automatically. It wasn’t instinct.”
Dean just stared. Of course he thought about it. Wouldn’t anyone? Or was there some rule in the Book of Normal he’d never heard of?
Lisa continued, “You had to stop yourself from saying Sam.”
“So, what, you’re a mind reader now?” Dean spat. But he couldn’t meet her eye. It hadn’t been a debate between Ben and Sam, not really. What stopped him from saying the first answer that came to mind was, What would Sam say? Sam, he thought, would be ashamed of his hesitation.
“If it was between Ben and my sister, I’d save Ben,” Lisa said softly. “I’m not saying it wouldn’t hurt like hell. I’m not saying I could just get over it. But that’s what being a parent means. Your kid always comes first.” She released a small, bitter laugh. “Then again, maybe I’m a hypocrite. Maybe I’m a bad mother.”
“Stop that,” Dean snapped. “You’re not a bad mother. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Lisa shot him a grateful watery smile. “Truth is, I never should have let it get this far. Especially not after Sam came back. This is my fault, too.”
”What’s your fault?”
“Jesus, Dean,” Lisa barked, the harshness only tempered by the threat of tears in her voice. “Ben wants you to be his father. You understand that, right?”
Dean went still. He felt hot and cold, too small and too big for his skin, ecstatic and terrified, all at once. It wasn’t that he had no idea. He wasn’t stupid or oblivious. But to hear it said out loud like that... It was too much. The reality of it was enormous. Overwhelming.
“I’m not sure what it is you want, Dean, but unless you can give 110% to that boy upstairs, you can’t have it. Not with me,” Lisa said. “That’s why you can’t hesitate. If you wanted to be here, Sam would have to come second. He would always have to come second.”
Sam, falling into the cage. Sam, screaming as Death restored his soul. Sam, convulsing on the ground until he goes cruelly, awfully still. Dean’s heart stopped at the sight. It literally stopped. The fact that it might happen again while Dean was here... He couldn’t fathom it.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose to halt the mysterious burning of his eyes. Lisa looked away as if embarrassed by the sight. He couldn’t blame her. “Lisa—” he croaked.
She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “Don’t you dare apologize. I can’t handle it right now.”
Fair enough. He cleared his throat. “So what now?”
“You go upstairs and tell my son you’re not going to be coming around anymore,” Lisa said dully. His mouth parted in outrage—she couldn’t expect him to just cut them out of their lives completely—but she silenced him with a sharp look. “Tell him whatever you have to, Dean. But he needs to understand that you’re not going to be here.”
“That’s not fair,” Dean blurted. Unfair for himself or Ben, he couldn’t say.
“You can’t have it both ways,” she snapped. “You can’t have one foot out the door. We tried that, remember? And Sam—”
“Why do you keep bringing up Sam?” Dean exploded. “Sam’s got nothing to do with what’s between you and me!”
Lisa laughed in his face. If she’d been a man, he might have lashed out. The only thing that calmed him was her glistening eyes. She didn’t shed a single tear, though. She was too strong for that.
“Sam’s been between us from day one,” said Lisa. “That whole year he haunted us. He haunted our house, haunted your dreams, haunted our bed—”
“Stop it,” he ordered. But, of course, she wasn’t done.
“You really don’t see it, do you?” she asked. “How twisted up you are about him.”
“He’s my brother!” he shouted. They were going in circles. “He’d just died! Did you want me to forget about him? Jesus, if he hadn’t told me to, I wouldn’t even have—”
His mouth abruptly snapped shut. But it was too late.
“What?” Lisa whispered. “What were you going to say?”
Dean shook his head. “It doesn’t—”
“It doesn’t matter? Of course it matters, Dean!”
Her hand went to her mouth and she shut her eyes, turning away. Dean almost reached out but pulled back before he could even lift his arm. She wouldn’t welcome his attempts at comfort, not right now. After a few moments, she steadied herself, straightening up and looking him in the eye.
“Sam told you to come to us after he died, didn’t he?” Lisa asked. “Don’t you dare lie to me.”
Dean lifted his chin in a pathetic attempt to appear defiant. “He did,” he confirmed. “But I don’t see how that—”
“I know you don’t,” Lisa interrupted tiredly. “I know you don’t. God. All this time, I thought maybe I was imagining things. Or... or it was the trauma. I mean, of course it was the trauma. That would make sense, right? What more proof do you need?”
She was mostly talking to herself now but Dean still didn’t like the conversation. “What are you saying?”
Suddenly, her face turned vicious. “You dreamt about your brother every night, Dean,” she snarled. “Every night for a year.”
“And?” he countered heatedly.
She didn’t hesitate in meeting his gaze. Her eyes were steel. “They weren’t always nightmares, Dean.”
Dean stopped breathing.
The floor dropped out from beneath his feet. His ears filled with static. Every part of him went completely, totally numb.
He only ever remembered his nightmares. At least, that’s what he told himself. There was no proof otherwise.
“No,” he said. It wasn’t a response or an argument but that was all he could say. No. But what she said... what she was accusing him of. There was no doubt. She said it like it was obvious. No—like it was self-evident. But he still didn’t (couldn’t) understand.
For a brief moment, Lisa’s expression turned pitying. But almost just as quickly it hardened again. “Go say goodbye to Ben,” she said. “Then get the hell out of my house. I have a date tonight.”
*~*
He wasn’t sure how far away from Lisa’s he was when Sam’s number flashed on his phone. He let it ring, but not too long, giving himself time to breathe. When he answered, the words on the other end of the line left him laughing hysterically (and probably inappropriately). How was it that a conversation about a chick with a haunted organ was less strange than the one he just had with his ex?
It didn’t take him long to stop laughing. That poor girl ended up dead, and by the accidental hand of her own ghostly sister no less (who didn’t deserve what she got either if Sam’s story was anything to go by). It was friggin’ disaster by all measure of things.
The drive to Bobby’s to give his baby some well-deserved R&R was a quiet one. Sam, thankfully, left him be most of the trip, only bothering him with the occasional question about meals. Dean wasn’t hungry.
Eventually Sam cornered him though, where he couldn’t run away (under the hood; he couldn’t leave a job half-finished), and did his best to spin it. They saved people sometimes. The Great Wall of Sam was still in place. What more could you ask for?
According to Lisa, nothing. He was selfish for even asking.
“Anyway, for what it’s worth, I got your back,” his brother said, dripping with an earnestness that couldn’t be faked, somehow skating the line of being saccharine or maudlin. With everything they’d been through—with everything Sam had been through—how could he believe they’d be okay? It was delusional but he said it like it was obvious... or self-evident.
“Yeah, I know,” Dean agreed listlessly. He turned back toward the Impala. Less damage than he thought; most of the damage was on the surface. He could manage.
Behind him, Sam sighed. “So I take it the conversation with Lisa didn’t go well?”
“Don’t want to talk about it,” Dean said shortly.
“Okay,” Sam agreed, though the uncertainty in his voice was obvious. “If you do want to talk—”
“Then I’ll charge you five cents, Lucy,” Dean interrupted dryly. “Grab a wrench or get lost, I’m working here.”
The scuffing of shoes against gravel signaled Sam’s departure. In his mind’s eye, he saw Lisa’s disapproving stare asking, Sam or Ben? as if the answer was obvious. In a blink, there was the dead girl, looking sorrowfully at her dying sister, I didn’t mean for this, as if that was all that needed to be said. Self-evident.
Dean straightened up. “Sam,” he called. Sam stopped and turned around, surprised. “Were you worried I might not come back?”
Sam smiled indulgently. “Not really. Should I have been?”
Yes, he should have. Sam handed Dean over to Lisa on a silver platter. Lisa said if you’re gonna be here, be here. Good brothers want what’s best for each other.
And yet, here Dean was. Again. “Why not?”
Sam frowned, perplexed. Then, he chuckled a bit nervously. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
Damn. Maybe it was.
Dean strode across the scrapyard with more confidence than he’d felt all year. Sam watched him approach with naked alarm but didn’t put up his guard or turn tail. He waited. Didn’t do much more than gasp when Dean grabbed a fistful of his shirt and yank him close so their mouths collided; and then, he parted his lips and let Dean in.
It had always been obvious. And after this, what more proof did he need?