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It's just a goddamn beer, Dean thinks, and he has pulled the labels off enough beers in enough seedy bars to know that at the end of the night, when you're on your knees puking your guts out, your internal organs don't give a shit what that label originally was.
But this one. It comes without a label. And it does come with some big bluff plaid-enfolded guy who cracks it open for him and hands it back like it's no big deal because Jesus, Dean, you don't need a label to tell you that you like something, he thinks and takes a long pull.
Good beer; tastes like hops and malt and just a hint of chocolate. Dark and cold and bitter-sweet and it reminds him of someone.
He tries to fit in, act normal. Like it's all his life, that John Winchester never turned them into these loner monsters of the hunter community. Men who have no idea how to relate to other humans with names like Bucky and Randy and Elvis. So, at the end of the night, who's really the normal one here.
It's too hot in the house, too crowded and loud. Too weird to be at the wake of a guy they don't fucking know, but who shades everything here like the world is made of echoes and the buzz of being on the edge of drunk, and Dean just needs to get the fuck out for a while. Step away from mothers and all the hopes they don't have. Just into cold air and silence and maybe just text that stupid fucking angel to see if he's still alive, doing whatever it is stupid fucking angels do when they're hunting Lucifer etc.
He's a little drunker than he should be. All those hunters who look like them, sound like them, but feel barely real because everyone Dean and Sam have ever known and loved is dead and burned or dead and turned to neutrons or dead and back but not what they wanted. These hunters, these loud, brash, hairy plaid people with their home brews and their junker cars and stories, they're just fictions invented to make the world seem like a real place instead of the dead and empty repetition it's become.
"Jesus, Dean," Dean tells himself. "Could you sound more like a goddamn pussy if you tried?" But even the rote statements he has made to himself all his life sound like fictions. Things he says because they're easy and require zero fucking thought process. Zero scratching at scabbed over wounds. He leans back on the Impala and, after taking another long drink of the bitter chocolate beer, he sets the bottle down on the hood and pulls out his phone.
Texting is better than calling. Calling is personal. Is full of raw spaces where you can give yourself away if you're not careful. Texts can be edited and refined to be careful and meaningless. Texting is not like prayer. It's like putting a coin in a donation bag, dimes into velvet.
Hey. You busy?
Dean drinks the rest of his beer while waiting for a response. The cold is sliding under his shirt and shivering through his jeans, settling into his bones, but he doesn't want to go inside to get another drink. The heat and the noise would only cover up that tell-tale vibration of a returning message. Instead, he takes out his flask and tips back a mouthful of shitty whisky. His phone pings softly.
I was. Are you in terrible? Do you needle meat?
Because Cas has not figured out how to actually think about messages and not just let autocorrect do all the hard work, and because Dean has gotten used to interpreting Cas-text, he just sighs.
No, all fine. Just checking if there was any news on your side. Dean pauses before he can do anything stupid like hit send. Even those few words make him sound needy. Makes him sound like yeah maybe he does needle meat, maybe he needles meat very badly. He laughs, thumbs the line of text away.
I'm good.
What else is there to say? Oh by the way, my mom, who apparently can't handle the fact that Sam and I exist, is at this wake for some guy we never met, and she only met once like a million years ago and he still means more to her than I fucking - than WE fucking do - and no I'm not okay, and I just had to look at a bunch of fucking hunters and think that we are all going to die, probably horribly, and there is no room for happiness in our world. And one day I'll die on the job because there's no better way to go, and Jesus fuck yeah I believe that because what else is left if I don't? - and there will be a wake and people will down their drinks every time someone says, "Hey, did you hear that story about how Dean was an actual honest-to-god demon?" and people will say, "don't say the d-word, man," and no one will actually give a shit that I existed except you. And Sammy, if he's even still alive by that time.
Dean sucks in a breath and wishes he was anywhere but Canada right now.
Because the truth is there won't be a wake for Dean Winchester. Who would even be around to throw one by then? It will just be Jody and some girls who barely knew them, and maybe Crowley will drop by and lighten the mood by pissing on Dean's burning body and that, sir, will be the end of it.
"Dammit. Pull yourself together." Dean throws back his head and drinks every last drop of whisky left in his flask. He is too old to still be doing this, and too young to be this maudlin.
I'm good, he texts. Just checking in. Dean pockets the phone. It's time to go back into that mess and pretend to be normal for a bit. He'll have another bottle of homebrew and try have a conversation with a woman who both is and isn't his mother, and when this nightmare is over, he'll think about giving Cas a real call and not just text him because god knows he could be dead tomorrow and all the do you needle meats in the world won't mean anything if he's not there to read them.
There's a time for everything, to everything a season. And maybe right now it's the season for burying and burning, but after this, there will be a new season. One for planting and growing. For taking a step sideways and finding a different path, because Dean will be damned and back in Hell before he'll end like Asa Fox, swinging from a rope.
And it's just one wake. One mother. He can do this.
And then he'll call Cas.