Chapter Text
Dean Winchester hated weddings almost as much as funerals. Too many expectations, too many cheap suits, too many people pretending happy endings were real. Still, there he sat in the back row of a little white church outside Lawrence, Kansas, wearing a charcoal button-down that Sam had practically forced him into while the woman he loved married somebody else.
Rain hammered the stained-glass windows hard enough to shake them. Wasn’t there some superstition about rain on your wedding day being good luck? Dean almost laughed at the irony.
“Dude,” Sam muttered beside him, “you can still leave.”
Dean tipped back another shot from the flask hidden in his jacket. “Nah.” Because leaving would’ve been easier, and Dean Winchester had never been very good at easy.
At the altar, Nichole Harper smiled for the crowd while her fiancé—Tyler Grant, former college quarterback turned hometown golden boy—slipped a ring onto her finger. Everybody in town loved Tyler - Ole Miss graduate, family money, clean-cut - the safe choice. The kind of guy mothers pointed at during church picnics.
Dean watched Nichole’s hands tremble while she repeated her vows, and then she looked up. Straight at him. It lasted barely a second, but Dean knew her too well. He saw the tiny hitch in her breathing, the tension in her shoulders, and the way her smile never quite reached her eyes anymore. He’d memorized those things months ago in motel rooms, and truck stops, then in the bunker, and even one stupid perfect week at a lake cabin where she’d laughed so hard she snorted soda through her nose. But that was before she went back home, before she met Tyler. Or maybe before she convinced herself Tyler was the better choice.
The reception was worse. The entire town was packed into the VFW hall drinking beer beneath strings of cheap white lights while country music echoed off the walls. Dean stayed parked at the bar. Whiskey, neat, again and again until the burn in his chest almost matched the ache underneath it - almost.
Across the room, Tyler handed Nichole a champagne flute. She took it with a smile, then when he turned away, Dean watched her quietly pour the entire thing into a flower vase beside the sweetheart table. Based on her body language, she could use a good stiff drink. It wasn’t that she couldn’t hold her liquor. He’d seen her down beers and shoot the good whiskey right next to him. His stomach dropped. No champagne, no alcohol, all night long he had only seen her sipping from a water glass. The only reason she wouldn’t be drinking now, the only reason to waste a whole glass of champagne and hide it…Dean stared at her harder.
She felt it instantly, eyes flicking toward him across the crowded room, and there it was again - that look. Not guilt, fear, like she was standing on the edge of something she couldn’t take back.
“You’re staring,” Sam said quietly.
Dean ignored him because suddenly he was remembering two months ago. 2:13 AM, rain pouring outside the bunker, Nichole showing up soaked to the bone and half-drunk with mascara running down her cheeks.
“I can’t breathe in this town anymore,” she’d whispered before kissing him hard enough to shut down every rational thought in his brain.
Dean remembered her hands in his shirt, her tears against his neck, the way she kept saying his name like she was trying to convince herself he was real. They’d ended up tangled in his sheets by dawn, and afterward, while she slept against his chest, Dean had let himself imagine impossible things.
Morning ruined it because she’d pulled away fast - quiet, scared. Then she disappeared. No sign of her until the wedding invitation arrived three weeks later.
Dean poured another whiskey and another. His gaze drifted back to Nichole. She had one hand resting low against her stomach, protective, instinctive. His chest tightened so hard it hurt. No. No way. But then she looked at him again, eyes glossy with tears she kept trying to blink away, and Dean knew.
“Dean,” Sam warned softly.
“I know.”
“You don’t know.”
But he did. God, he did.
The music shifted into a slow dance. Tyler pulled Nichole into his arms while everybody clapped and swayed and smiled like this was some damn fairy tale.
Dean couldn’t breathe in the room anymore. He shoved away from the bar and headed outside into the storm. Rain drenched him instantly. Good, maybe it’d wash the whiskey and regret out of his system.
The VFW hall doors creaked open behind him a minute later. Dean didn’t turn around.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Nichole whispered.
He laughed bitterly. “Funny. I was thinking the same thing about you.”
Silence. The only sound was the rain pouring off the roof in heavy sheets. Until finally she said, “Sam told me you came.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
Dean faced her then. She stood barefoot in the muddy grass, holding up the hem of her white dress. Her mascara was smudged. Her pearls sat crooked around her throat. She was beautiful, miserable, and pregnant. The realization sat between them like a lit match.
Dean’s voice came out rough. “How far along?”
Nichole closed her eyes. That was answer enough.
He looked away fast, jaw tight. “Tyler know?”
“No.” The word cracked. Thunder rolled overhead.
Dean dragged a hand down his face. “Jesus Christ, Nichole.”
“I was gonna tell you.”
“When?”
“I don’t know!” Her voice broke completely then.
And suddenly she looked less like a bride and more like the terrified girl who had shown up at his door two months ago desperate for somewhere safe to fall apart.
“I can’t do this,” she whispered. “Everybody expects me to marry him. My daddy would lose his mind if he knew—”
“If he knew what?” Dean snapped. “That you actually loved somebody?”
Tears spilled down her cheeks. Dean instantly regretted the harshness in his voice, but he was angry - at her, at himself, at the whole damn town.
“You think marrying that guy fixes this?” he asked quietly.
“No.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
She looked at him like the answer should’ve been obvious. “Because people like you leave, Dean.”
That hit harder than any punch he’d ever taken.
Nichole laughed shakily through tears. “Hunters don’t stay. You don’t stay.”
Dean opened his mouth, but nothing came out because she wasn’t wrong. He thought about every grave behind him, every motel room, every sleepless night, and every goodbye he never saw coming. How could he ask her to choose a life built on blood and monsters and constant fear?
But then Nichole stepped closer, voice trembling. “Tell me not to go back in there.”
Dean’s heart slammed against his ribs. One sentence, one word, that was all it would take. Stay. He could say it, could grab her hand and run. The Impala was ten feet away. But Dean Winchester had spent his entire life ruining good things, and he couldn’t bear the thought of ruining her too. So instead, he looked at the rain falling between them and said the cruelest thing he’d ever forced himself to say.
“You made your choice.”
Nichole flinched like he’d slapped her. Then she nodded once, small and broken. She turned back toward the hall, and Dean watched her go without moving. At the door she paused long enough to glance back at him one last time, and even through the rain, he could see it clearly: those weren’t happy tears. Then she disappeared inside while Dean stood alone in the rain, whiskey burning in his veins, wondering if the child she carried would someday have his eyes.