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His face burned in the fire.
The flames of the St. Stephen’s mission rose against the dark sky of Riverton, Wyoming, tall and voracious, devouring the old wood, the dusty stained glass windows, and entire decades of prayers whispered within those walls. The fire crackled as if it were alive, as if every beam that was broken out of a kind of late response to something that had been trapped there for too long. The air was laden with smoke, ash, that thick, burnt-wood smell sticking to my throat and making it hard to breathe. Dean could feel the heat against his face even from where he was sitting, but that wasn’t really the problem. The real problem was that other burning, the one that climbed up his cheeks and ignited his skin from within, as if something inside him was also slowly catching fire.
He burned as when he saw the boyfriend of the girl he liked and felt a strange, thick shame that pressed his chest with invisible hands. It burned like when in some horror movie that he liked too much, this actor appeared with a twisted smile and an overly intense look, and Dean turned his eyes a second later, pretending to do it for the monster and not for the rest. It was burning like when an old Metallica concert appeared on the motel TV and Hetfield came on stage as if the whole world belonged to him, and Dean stood still, jaw-tight, feeling something he didn’t even want to acknowledge in silence. He burned as if they were entering churches during some case and his eyes, against all logic, were going to be stuck on certain statues of angels, because they had faces too beautiful to be saints and too sad to be anything else. It had always been this way. There had always been that warmth in the background, like a poorly hidden fever, like a lie that his body knew before his head.
That same ardor. And now he was also burning when he thought of them. The two nuns.
The case had been simple, at least in theory. It was always simple when John Winchester explained it. Two nuns. In love. Discovered. Scandal. Guilt. Shame. After the rope. After the ghosts. Dean could still hear his father’s voice saying the words as if he were explaining how to change an Impala spark plug. Dad had explained it with that dry voice of old, as if he was reading the weather: from salt to ash, "Dean. Find the object, burn it and be done."
Dean had nodded like everything was perfectly normal. As if sending your seventeen-year-old son to face only two angry ghosts is just another Tuesday in the life of the Winchesters. As if there was nothing strange in that dry way of saying go and do it, as if his father’s words were as solid as the road they crossed every night. Dean nodded because that’s what he was doing. Because if John Winchester said he could do it, then he had to be able to.
It was a test.
Dean knew this even before his father closed the newspaper and turned off the motel light. There were tests like this all the time: how he cleaned a shotgun, how he entered the door first, how he fired without trembling. But this was different. This was the first time that John really sent him alone. His first case completely alone.
It wasn’t that he’d never been in the front line before. Many times John had let him lead while he walked a few steps behind, silent, watching. Dean knew that look. He felt it between the shoulder blades every time he raised his gun or drew a line of salt. It was the look of a sergeant checking his soldier, measuring every gesture, every possible mistake. Dean had learned to move within that gaze as if he were learning to breathe. But this time it was different. This time Dean entered alone.
Or so Dad had said.
Still, while driving to the mission and turning off the engine in front of the dark building, Dean couldn’t shake the feeling that John was never really far away. It was like a presence that always floated in the distance, invisible but constant. Maybe he’d be somewhere on the road, maybe in a fake Impala with Sam sleeping in the back seat, maybe watching from some nearby hill. John was always there, even when he said no.
He had checked the place together before. He had walked through the silent corridors of the mission, had spoken to the few people in the village who still remembered the history, had found the room where the two nuns had lived. It all pointed to the same thing: a small object, something personal, something that had survived hidden in the right place for years.
The mission was silent when Dean arrived, but it was not the quiet silence of an empty church where there are still echoes of prayers stuck to the walls nor the humble silence of wooden benches and dusty stained glass windows waiting for the next mass. It was another kind of silence, heavier, older, one that seemed to have settled in every corner of the building as if the whole place had been holding its breath for years. The churches must be filled with whispers, gentle footsteps, the crunch of wood under the shoes of someone who enters late and sits in the background, but that mission was motionless, suspended in an uncomfortable stillness that made even the air seem thick. When Dean pushed the door, cold got him first, an old air that smelled like dust, dry wax and something harder to name, something that belonged in the past. He saw them almost immediately: two pale figures gliding down the corridor leading to the bedrooms, moving with a slowness that was not exactly walking, like shadows who had forgotten how to touch the floor. The black habits floated barely on the floor and their faces - pale, still - seemed carved into the same sadness, as if the pain that had left them there had erased any difference between them. They did not shout, attack, show their teeth or the long nails that sometimes angry spirits had; they were simply there, trapped in something greater than anger, and their presence filled the building like the moisture sticking to the walls of old houses: constant, silent, impossible to ignore. Dean said nothing; there was nothing to say. He continued to walk with measured steps, knowing exactly what he had to do, because the cases always ended up being reduced to the same thing: finding the object, the anchor, the little human thing that kept the spirit bound to the earth. found the room almost effortlessly. It was small and tidy, with two narrow beds lined up against the wall, blankets folded with an almost devotional precision, a simple closet and a small bedside table between the two beds; and there, floating over all that, There was that same thick silence that things left when they have been discovered too late. For a moment Dean imagined the room alive: two women getting up before dawn, praying quietly, walking through the halls with gentle footsteps, sharing that tiny space for years; maybe laughing sometime in whispers, maybe touching their hands when no one was looking. The first rosary was in the night table drawer. Dean found it as he effortlessly opened it, the bills worn and soft by years of repeated prayers between his fingers, the kind of small and personal object that hunters learned to recognize at once, laden with enough life to bind a spirit to the world. That surely would have been enough; he could have ended the case right there, set fire and walk away. But Dean kept looking, not quite sure why. Perhaps because something in the room felt incomplete, or because looking around could too well imagine two people living there, sharing that small room with something that couldn’t be shown in the daylight, something too big to hide in such a small place. That’s when I found the second rosary. One of the floor boards was barely loose and, when he lifted it with the tip of the knife, he discovered a small cloth wrapper hidden underneath. Inside was the rosary: smaller, more expended, with the accounts almost smooth, as if they had been pressed between nervous fingers too many times, as if someone had prayed with it not only for faith, but also for fear. Two rosaries. Two women. Two sins, according to the church. Dean stood and watched the accounts for a long time, while the room remained silent and even the ghosts seemed to have been stopped somewhere in the hallway. He finally closed his hand around the rosary and kept it. And when he left the room, the case was already decided. Then came the salt. Then the fire. And then this.
Now the mission was burning behind him. The flames climbed through the old wood as if the entire building had been waiting for years for that moment to surrender to the fire, as if every beam, every bench and every window held inside a patient spark that had finally found air. The orange glow illuminated the night of Riverton and painted the low clouds with a strange, almost unreal color as the shadows of the trees stretched over the dark earth. The fire breathed, grew, twisted with a deep sound that seemed to come from the very heart of the building. And as the church slowly burned up behind him, Dean could feel another fire rising through his face, one smaller, more intimate, and far more treacherous.
His cheeks were burning too.
Then Dean understood something he didn’t want to understand. The idea appeared in his mind with the same clarity with which fire lit up the night, impossible to ignore once he was there. The nuns were burning. That was what the sermons always said, what the grave voices repeated from the pulpits, what people murmured when they spoke of such things in a low voice, with that mixture of disapproval and fascination that always accompanied the sins of others. The fire of hell awaited those who crossed certain lines, those whom they loved in the wrong way, those who looked too long at whom they should not look. If they were burning for evil love... then why did their cheeks do exactly the same every time certain thoughts slipped through their minds?
The heat of the fire did not explain that other heat. That ardor knew him from before, long before Wyoming, from small and silent moments that he had always pushed into the back of his head like someone who closes a door that does not want to open again. Looks that stayed a second longer than they should have. Images that appeared suddenly and disappeared quickly, as if even his own thoughts knew they should not stay too long. Things I would never say aloud, not even when I was alone. And now, sitting in front of a burning church, everything seemed too similar, as if the stories they told about sin and punishment were not so far from something he himself kept hidden.
That wasn’t right. It wasn’t supposed to happen.
Dad wouldn’t be proud of a boy who got those things. Papa spoke of strong men, of men who knew exactly who they were and walked straight without ever doubting, men who did not confuse themselves or look to the sides when the road was clear. Dean had grown up listening to those words until they became a kind of silent law inside his head. Maybe mom had burned too, she thought for a fleeting moment, and the thought was so quick that she hardly recognized it before wanting to put it away. Perhaps that’s why everything had ended in fire that night, because the fire seemed to always find things that the world did not know how to accept.
Dean clenched his jaw as he watched the church slowly burn up, as if that gesture could close any doubt that had opened within him. The flames continued to rise toward the dark sky, devouring the building until it was reduced to embers and smoke. And as the glow lit up his face, Dean made a silent decision, one of those decisions that are made once and loaded for years.
His cheeks wouldn’t burn again for someone like him.
Never.
Even so, when he left the nuns' room with the second rosary hidden in his jacket pocket, he felt the weight of the bills against his thigh as if he were carrying a foreign heart glued to his body. I didn’t need it for the case. One would have sufficed. He could have left it behind and done it, he could have done his job and come back to the car and pretend he hadn’t seen too much. But he kept it anyway. At first he thought it was a sort of miserable trophy, something that a soldier would pull out of the enemy camp to convince himself that he had won. Then he thought maybe it was worse than that. Because there were no enemies there. Just two people who had believed, for a second too brave, that loving whom they wanted was not a sentence. Two people who had thought that being different might be right. Dean didn’t think that. I couldn’t think that. John did, and when John Winchester believed something, the rest of the world had little choice but to settle in.
The smoke made his eyes sting, or maybe it was tears, though Dean refused to accept either option. He sat still, his gaze fixed on the burning church in front of him, unable - or perhaps simply reluctant - to look away from the fire. There was something obscene in those flames, something brutal and unconscionable, but at the same time there was also an eerie beauty in the way fire moved, as the beams slowly fell inward and the sparks ascended to the dark sky as if they wanted to return to some place from which they had been expelled. The fire breathed, grew, muttered in a language that Dean could not understand but still seemed directed at him. As if the flames had something to say to him. As if they had been waiting for him. A part of him wanted in. It was not a clear, heroic, or even particularly logical thought; rather, it was a persistent feeling, an idea that floated deep in his mind like a shadow. Maybe I should. Maybe I should walk straight into the fire and let the flames reach it too. As if he had felt too much, thought too much, was enough to deserve some kind of punishment. But if churches were sacred places - if they were supposed to be God’s refuge, of mercy, of absolution - then why did the fire that came out of them smell so much like hell? Why did he have that uncomfortable feeling that the flames were watching him too, as if they knew something he was not yet ready to admit? Dean swallowed saliva and the gesture scraped him inside, rough and dry, as if even his throat were filled with ash.
He didn’t want to go to hell. No. The idea settled in his mind with a childlike, obstinate, almost desperate force. Dad had promised him. He had said it many times, with that hard-headed certainty that made everything seem simpler than it was: the Winchesters were not going to end like this. Never. Never. As if promises were a shield against fate, as if repeating the word was enough to make it true. Dean began to repeat it too, silently, inside his own head, as if it were a prayer that could protect him. Never. Never. Never. But the more I repeated it, the stranger it began to sound. The word became thin, fragile, as if emptying from within. Never. Never. Never. And then, suddenly, it rang hollow, like an open door in an abandoned house, like something that someone had promised without really knowing if he could keep it. Ever? The thought appeared so quickly that it nearly cut off his air. Dean felt his stomach shrink with a cold sting, an unease that had nothing to do with the smoke or fatigue. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about hell, or eternal punishment, or a God who saw everything and still allowed two nuns to hang themselves on a rope because they had loved in the wrong way. I didn’t want to think about the kind of world that made such a thing possible. Because if that world was real - if those rules were true - then there were too many things within it that could end up burning, too.
But the fire called him. He called out to him with a silent insistence that seemed to come from the very heart of the flames, as if every tongue of fire rising between the beams was uttering its name without a voice. He called him and demanded it, asked for it with an ancient patience, almost reverent, as if inviting him to come closer, to enter, to stay there with him until everything else disappeared. There was something in that call that Dean couldn’t explain, a deep sense of recognition, as if the fire knew something about him that even he didn’t dare look too closely. The fire knew. The fire remembered. The fire had memory of the things that the world tried to forget, of the sins buried under prayers and promises, of the thoughts hidden in the darkest corners of the mind. And Dean understood it in a strange, instinctual way: the fire doesn’t really go away, it just stays put, turns back, becomes a silent embers inside the heart even when one refuses to open it. The fire had begun his life - that was always said in the stories John told quietly about the night when everything changed - and perhaps, if the world was as cruel as it seemed at the time, the fire could also be what would one day take his away.
Fatigue weighed on his bones as if he had aged several years in one night. His shoulders, hands, neck hurt; every muscle seemed to remind him of the effort of the last hours with a deaf, persistent insstence. He had turned seventeen that same day and yet, sitting in front of the embers of a burning church, he felt much older than that, as if he had been crawling for centuries from motel to motel, road to road, of dirty work in dirty work that no one else was willing to do. All I wanted was to get back on the Impala. He wanted to open the door and sink into the front seat as if worn leather could hold him better than anyone in the world. He wanted the familiar smell of gasoline, cold tobacco, and road dust accumulated over years. He wanted the old music on the radio, the deep sound of the engine turning on, the constant buzzing of tires on the dark asphalt. He wanted that simple feeling of movement, the illusion that as long as the car kept moving he could also keep going without having to look too far back. Sleep and drive. Drive and sleep. Sleep today, tomorrow, always. Sleep enough not to have to think about the church, or nuns, or the silent weight of the rosary in his pocket, or the strange way that fire had made him feel too close to something he still didn’t know how to name. Maybe sleep until I wake up. Maybe close his eyes and let the world sit still for once, no fires, no questions, without that constant feeling of walking on something that was going to break under his feet sooner or later.
Behind him, the flames kept licking at night, rising and falling like a huge animal breathing in darkness. But Dean wouldn’t bend over. Not before ghosts. Not before fire. Not before stone angels or before thoughts that did not fit into the life he had been taught to live. He wasn’t like that. He wasn’t delicate. He wasn’t weak. He wasn’t the kind of guy who looked twice what he shouldn’t look at. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would carry a rosary in his pocket because he felt sad to leave it behind in an empty room. He was not the kind of boy who felt an uncomfortable knot in his throat thinking about two women who had loved each other secretly until the world decided that was enough to condemn them. Dean wasn’t what his father said he shouldn’t be. Dean was what he had to be, what he needed to be to move forward, the only thing that seemed allowed in the life he had inherited without asking. No kittens. No feeling too much. No wavering. No asking for help. No looking at the fire and thinking, even just for a second, that maybe staying there would be easier than walking on. Dean Winchester was not like that. Dean Winchester wasn’t going to hell.
After a long time, when the fire was just a pile of red embers silently burning and the sky over the mission had darkened again without the violent glow of the flames, the boy finally got up. The dust from the jeans was shaken with a tired gesture, he kicked a stone that rolled haphazardly on the blackened earth and murmured something of Zeppelin between his teeth, more out of habit than true intention. Everything in him weighed: hands, shoulders, eyelids that seemed to fall from their own weight. He was sleepy, but it wasn’t a normal dream, those that come soft after a long day; it was a thick, deep tiredness, which seemed to have settled into the bones and made everything slightly distant, as if the world were on the other side of a clouded glass. As he walked back to the road, with the smell of smoke clinging to his clothes and the rosary gently pounding on the inside of his jacket at every turn, Dean thought all he wanted was to close his eyes and dream that none of this had happened. To dream that the mission had never existed, that the nuns had not walked through those empty corridors, that fire had not devoured the building as if it were claiming something that had always belonged to it. Dreaming that his cheeks hadn’t burned in that strange way, that dad wouldn’t have to look at him later with that stern expression that always seemed to measure if he had been up to the job, if it had been enough. And, above all, to dream that he himself had not felt, for a brief and luminous second as a spark in the darkness, that the fire was trying to tell him something he did not want to hear.
And if none of that was possible - if the night had already decided to keep those memories - then at least he wanted the Impala. I wanted the deep sound of the engine turning on, the long dark side of the road stretching out in front of them, Sam’s voice from the back seat even if he didn’t say anything important, just to break the silence. He also wanted John’s presence at the wheel, firm and confident, so unbreakable that sometimes Dean didn’t know if that was the closest thing he had to a home or just another order he had to obey. I wanted to go back to that. To the familiar. To things that hurt in a familiar and manageable way. Because the unknown - what I had felt in front of the fire, what I had thought for a second too long - was much worse. The unknown had the exact shape of a truth I was not ready to name. And Dean, as he walked through the dark earth with smoke still in his throat, understood that he was still learning to do the only thing that seemed possible: keep walking like nothing inside him is burning.
Years later - many years later - the fire found it again. Not that of a church in Wyoming nor of a simple case that could be ended with salt and gasoline, but a deeper, older one, one that seemed to have stuck to his bones even after hell. In that place the lights began to tremble first, as if the world was breathing badly; then burst one after another with a dry clap, and the air filled with an impossible hum that made the walls and teeth inside his mouth vibrate. For a brief moment, suspended between noise and silence, Dean saw something that did not belong to the Earth: a gigantic shadow unfurled behind a man, wings stretching too wide to fit in that human space, too old to be understood. When the noise died and silence settled again on the room like dust after an explosion, the man stood there, his drawer worn out and fathomless blue eyes, looking at him as if he had been searching for him forever. I am the angel who brought you out of hell," he said with a calm tone that did not seem human. And at that moment Dean understood something that the seventeen-year-old boy watching a church burn would never have thought possible: that church statues were not mere stone, that angels were not stories made up to fill sermons or scare children. They were real. And yet fire had never really been calling him; perhaps what had haunted him all those years was not the fire, but something deeper, more inevitable. The truth. Your truth. And as he looked at the angel standing between the dead electricity and the smell of old ash, he again felt that warmth rise up in his face, the same small and treacherous fire he had known years ago against other flames. That burning in the cheeks returned.