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Dean turns seventeen today. It’s supposed to mean something, he thinks. He can’t remember the last time he went to a birthday party, but he knows from the other kids at school that seventeen is important.
It’s why all the stories—the songs on the radio, the films snuck in between one town and the next—are about seventeen-year-olds. Seventeen means this:
Being old enough to set out on your own, but young enough for it to mean something special instead of just sad. It’s aspirational, at least for all the middle schoolers reading well-worn paperbacks in the back of their dad’s car parked behind a bar. When you’re twelve and don’t have any friends that last longer than six weeks, seventeen seems miles beyond everything. It’s the kind of thing you dream about. It’s something you can hope for, especially when it’s hard to picture yourself getting to be as old as your dad is. Some days it seems all you’re destined for is an early grave.
Dean is getting ahead of himself with all the philosophizing. It’d be nice to be one of those kids. But Dean’s long passed most of the few books he owns to Sammy, who reads voraciously and always seemed better at being a normal kid. Sammy needs those dreams more, and deserves them more, too.
All those coming-of-age movies are bullshit, anyway. The last birthday present Dean ever got was a gun too heavy for him to hold with one hand, and all you need to set out in the world on your own is a gun and a car and a fake ID.
His dad’s just teaching him a lesson, is all. God knows he needs to learn if he wants to make it past seventeen.
It was supposed to be simple. A salt-and-burn, something Dean could do in his sleep, has done a million times since he was a kid. A haunted church in Wyoming to match the haunted church in Kansas, and Indiana, and North Dakota. It’s almost always a small-town ghost bitching over small-town drama. Dean feels bad for them, sometimes, but at the end of the day it’s not his problem. He’s just here to protect people. That’s his job—to be the hunter, the shield and the sword, so that normies don’t get hurt over something they never got the chance to know about. It wouldn’t be fair. Someone has to do it, and once you know, you don’t get to just walk away. You don’t get to un-know things. His dad didn’t raise a fuckin’ coward.
He digs up the bones but they’re not the right kinds of bones. That’s the first thing Dean notices as he catches spots of brittle white-pink beneath the old dirt, and it’s a knee-jerk feeling more than a fact. The differences between a set of male and female bones aren’t as obvious as most people think, but once you’ve done this a couple of times you start to recognize ’em. These bones do not go together.
Of course, Dean already knows this. He’s not stupid enough to throw himself into his first solo hunt unprepared. He’s read the file his dad handed to him with a pat on the back and a gruff, “Figured it’s about time, son.” He’d read it as soon as John left the room, and then dragged his eyes over the words again and again until they’d started to burn. They’re about as seared into his mind now as anything ever sticks in there. Two nuns—St. Stephen’s Indian Mission, Riverton WY. Got caught, killed themselves before someone else did it for ’em. Target’s likely a small article hidden somewhere in room—bible, rosary maybe? Dean can handle it.
The bible’s sitting next to him in the dirt right now, earth staining the yellowed pages black. There are little messages scribbled in the margins, dates and bible verses and poems and drawings. Dean only needed to see the first one to know enough, to recognize them for what they are—love letters. He knows he should destroy it, but there’s a little voice in the back of his head that keeps telling him to wait.
Wait for what? What are you waiting for?
He doesn’t know the answer. Doesn’t want to? What’s the difference, anyway?
Dean refuses to think about why he carefully extracts the bones from the first grave and lays them in the second. The jug of gasoline shakes in his hands. He doesn’t even have the time to think about it, he tells himself later—that’s when the ghosts show up.
“They killed us for love,” the dead nun tells him. She’s angry—of course she’s angry—but there’s something about her that shows the same hesitance as Dean. It’s like she pities him, almost, which is ridiculous. Dean’s not the ghost here. She doesn’t know anything about him.
She must’ve been barely five years older than him when she died. It’s disconcerting. He’d thought the nuns would be older, less—innocent-looking.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady,” he says. “You killed yourselves.”
She gives him one last look, and this one would mean I know what you’re trying to do, and it’s not working. But that’s not what it means, because Dean’s not trying to do anything. He’s here to get rid of a problem. To prove himself. He’s seventeen, and that’s what seventeen is supposed to be.
Then she lunges for his neck.
The other nun—silent so far, alternating between staring at Dean and the first nun with an unreadable expression, freckled and pretty and so, so young—goes for his heart.
He wins the fight. Dean knows he will win before he does—Winchesters don’t lose fights, as a rule. Dean remembers being small, sitting in an office with a bloody nose and bloodier knuckles. John might’ve given him shit for causing trouble, and he probably would’ve been more disapproving if he’d known why Dean had gotten into some of those fights—but. He’d always looked at Dean with something close to pride on his face when Dean’d said, “You should see the other guy, Dad.” Despite everything Dean did to try and be what John wanted, sometimes it seemed like it only made things worse—like the fact that he had to try was his first failing.
There’s blood smeared across his face when he flicks on a cheap lighter, aims it at the gas-coated bones. His earlier impulse makes it easier, in the end—only one grave to burn.
It’s quiet after. Dark outside, lit only by the slowly dying flame and the stars. Despite the warmth of the fire, Dean’s trembling. It’s freezing outside, and the adrenaline of a hunt never leaves as fast as it comes—it lingers, makes him jump at everything and nothing. It’s funny how at the safest moment of the hunt, he feels more afraid than before.
The bible’s still there, perched just on the edge of the grave but mostly unscathed. Dean really needs to burn it now. One of the most cardinal rules of hunting is to never leave loose ends lying around.
He flicks through the pages anyway. His thumb catches on the edge of one, dog-eared and underlined in faded ink.
“Beloved, let us love one another,” Dean whispers, “for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”
Dean tosses the book into the fire with a practiced carelessness, ignoring the folded piece of paper burning a hole in his pocket.
He doesn’t cry. Dean’s seventeen. He’s been too old for crying for twelve years.
He turns and walks away without looking back.
John and Sammy are waiting in the Impala a few miles out. Sammy’s getting sleepy this late, but he still greets Dean with a hug.
“Everything go alright?” his dad asks.
“Yes, sir,” Dean replies.
John’s eyes roam over him, looking for something Dean can’t guess. Trying to catch him out in a lie, maybe. There won’t be one to find.
He nods. “Happy birthday, son.”
That night Dean dreams of fire.
It’s the fire from the grave; it’s hellfire. His face is hot from it. The fire’s growing, and he wants to run, but somehow his feet are rooted in place. He just stands there watching as the thought spirals through his head—he knows, he knows, he knows. He can’t breathe, and Dean doesn’t know if it’s from the smoke or the sheer panic of the realization. This is a warning.
John can’t know. There’s nothing to know. Dean has spent the last few years carefully averting his eyes, borrowing his dad’s leather jacket, flirting with girls at bars and drinking at them, too. Dean Winchester is his dad’s perfect little soldier.
Dean Winchester kissed a boy in an empty storage room three high schools ago. Chris had been Dean’s only friend in that town—a permanent outsider, for a reason Dean had never been able to figure out until it was confessed to him in between drags of a shared cigarette. They’d kissed in the storage room, and in Chris’ car while cutting class, and then in the motel whenever Sammy wasn’t around.
Then John came back from wherever he’d fucked off to and they’d packed up and moved to the next motel and Chris had been left behind.
He never kissed another boy again.
Of course, because this is a nightmare, the boy is back. His lips are red and swollen, almost bloody-looking. There’s a trail of hickeys peeking out from under his collar. He has big, dark eyes and long lashes and he’s beautiful, in all the ways Dean’s not allowed to think other boys are beautiful. Maybe that’s how John caught him—all it took was one look at the bruises on his neck and Dean’s guilty eyes, tainted by the bodies they had looked at, to know there was something wrong with Dean.
Chris is here and he’s also a ghost now, and he says, “They’ll kill us for love, Dean,” and he says, “You’ll kill yourself for it, too,” and then everything is on fire.
January 24, 1996
Dean turns seventeen today. We went shooting. Then I sent him out on his first hunt. I’ve let him take the lead before, but I’ve always been there to back him up. This time he’s on his own. Partly it’s a test, and partly I wanted some time with Sammy. Should be no problem for Dean. Ghosts of two nuns haunting St. Stephen’s Indian Mission in Riverton, Wyoming. Simple salt-and-burn mission. Nuns in love with each other, then discovered. Killed themselves. We scoped the situation out, figured that something must be left behind that’s now a focus for the haunting. Bible, rosary beads, some small article that’s hidden somewhere in their room. I figured Dean would take care of it no problem, but I still stayed close by with Sammy.
Dean took care of the nuns just like I thought he would, but I don’t think I’m going to be sending him on any more solos soon. That one was a little tense.