Chapter Text
Chapter One: Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love
Paris greeted Dean Winchester with rain.
Not a dramatic storm. Not the sort of weather poets wrote about. Something finer than that… a mist that was almost not rain at all, that hung in the air and let you walk into it, that turned the gas lamps below into smeared coins of light and made the whole city look like something seen through a fogged window.
It beaded on the brim of his hat and ran in cold threads down the back of his collar.
It was enough.
Dean stood at the top of the hill overlooking Montmartre. Carpetbag at his feet. Notebook under his arm.
The bag had a broken clasp. He had been meaning to fix it since Liverpool.
The cobblestones fell away in dark, uneven ribbons before him.
Somewhere below, a street curved out of sight between two rows of buildings that leaned toward each other at the top like men sharing a secret.
The rooflines were irregular and close.
Chimneys.
Ironwork.
A single shutter hanging open on a high window, its blue paint gone gray in the wet.
He stood there long enough that the mist stopped feeling like weather and began to feel like the air itself.
Below him, Paris glowed.
Church spires.
Gas lamps.
Rows of windows burning gold against the gathering dark, each one a different shade of it... amber, brass, the deep orange of a fire left to go low.
The smell of the city came up the hill in waves: coal smoke and bread and something green and alive underneath it all, the way a river smells before you can see it.
Music drifted upward from somewhere unseen.
"You're staring."
The driver had climbed down from the box and was crouched at the near wheel, working at something with a rag that had long since given up being clean. He did not look up.
"A little."
"You'll stop." He rose, pushed his hat back, and looked at Dean the way a man looks at a letter written in a language he already knows he doesn't speak.
Dean grinned. "I doubt it."
The driver snorted. "Americans always do."
He tucked the rag away, gathered the reins into his left hand, and climbed back up to the box in one practiced motion, as though the conversation had concluded some time ago and Dean simply hadn't been informed.
The carriage moved off down the hill. Its single lamp threw a long shadow that swept the cobblestones like a pendulum before the whole thing rounded the corner and was swallowed by the dark between the buildings.
The rain came down harder.
Dean picked up his bag.
The descent proved steeper than it had looked from above.
He took two wrong turns, one into a courtyard where a dog lifted its head and decided against him, one into an alley that terminated in a wall and smelled powerfully of butter and onions from a window somewhere overhead.
He stood in that alley for a moment with the rain ticking against the cobblestones and his notebook pressed flat beneath his arm.
A drop of water landed on the cover.
Dean wiped it away immediately.
The leather had darkened from the crossing. Salt air. Damp weather. Too many days at sea.
His thumb brushed the worn edge automatically.
He had slept with it beneath his pillow on the ship.
Eaten with it balanced beside his plate.
Twice, he'd woken in the middle of the night, convinced he'd left it somewhere and searched the cabin before remembering it was right there beside him.
The notebook contained nearly two years of songs.
Some finished.
Most not.
Margins crowded with rewrites and crossed-out lyrics and fragments of melodies he wasn't entirely sure he'd borrowed from dreams.
Enough music to fill a dozen evenings.
Enough hope to fill an ocean.
He was not putting it in the bag.
It had neglected to mention the rain.
Third street past the fountain. Blue shutters. You cannot miss it, Gabriel had written.
He found the fountain. He counted three streets and stood in front of something that was either a very old door or a section of wall that had given up the distinction.
He was still deciding when a hand closed around his elbow from behind, and a short man with paint in the whorls of his fingerprints steered him firmly around.
"English?" Gabriel said, already moving.
"American." Dean fell into step. "How'd you know it was me?"
Gabriel made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
His gaze dropped briefly to the notebook, rain-dark at the corners and tucked beneath Dean's arm like something valuable.
"You crossed an ocean carrying that thing."
Dean looked down.
"It's a notebook."
Gabriel snorted.
"No."
His eyes flicked back up.
"It's worse."
Then he started walking again.
"I have a place," he said. "Cheap. The smell goes away after a few days." A pause. "Most things do."