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apocalypsosTitle: The Days Don't End Here, My Friend
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,700 words
Spoilers: General season one
Warnings: Wincest, sort of (It's Dean/OFC, and kind of far removed. You'll see.)
Disclaimer: If I owned the Winchester boys, they'd be cleaning my apartment right now so I don't have to.
Summary: If you'd ask him, Dean would tell you he's going to die on the hunt. Good luck trying, pal.
*****
The Days Don't End Here, My Friend
*****
1.
"Show me."
"Aw, come on --"
"I'm going to see it eventually, Dean. You might as well show me now so I don't end up standing there staring at it and gaping like an idiot in the middle of a hunt."
"Huh. Good point."
"I didn't forge that law degree, you know."
"Yeah, Sammy, I know."
The glint of steel off the fluorescent lights of an all-night laundromat, a quick slice through the air and Sam's sudden sharp intake of breath.
"Jesus, Dean."
"Yeah, tell me about it."
2.
After Dad dies, Dean starts his own journal. He copies down most of the stuff in Dad's book, writing down exorcisms and spells and ways to kill every last evil fucker on the planet in the same compact chickenscratch. It's like even his handwriting's taking after John Winchester. Glancing over his notes makes his heart warm and his skin crawl at the same goddamn time.
His journal is black and durable with a thick strap of leather holding it closed. Dean takes Dad's lead and tucks photos and mementos in between the pages with only a wish and a prayer to keep them from escaping. Mom and Dad at the house in Lawrence, beaming as they hold each other. His arm wrapped around sixteen-year-old Sammy's neck, yanking him down with a grin the moment after Sam had made some crack about him having to stand on his tiptoes to do it. Sam and the kids making goofy faces for the camera, googly-eyed and sticking out their tongues for Uncle Dean's amusement.
In between the pages are other things as well, pressed herbs and blessed rosaries and yellowed newsprint. The kind of things he doesn't pause over quite the same way.
The journal's first test of how well it'll hold up for the intended purpose is when he tucks it in the back of his jeans at a trendy cappucino-swilling bookstore and saunters out the front door.
He buries Dad's journal under a tree just off a roadside in Colorado. Nice view of the mountains there, and if you close your eyes you can hear the happy burbles of a creek nearby.
Dean can't recommend it enough, if it's the only thing you've got left of a man to bury.
3.
The first entry in Dean's journal is the long and winding and not-all-that-romantic tale of how the Winchesters took down the demon that had haunted their lives for over twenty damn years. It starts with a fire in Lawrence and ends the same way, with one or two other blazes in the middle of the story just to keep it interesting. Dean could read it over and over agan, doesn't want to but does just the same, and when he finishes he always smells smoke in the air no matter where he is.
The second entry reads exactly like this.
I have no idea what did this to me, or how to fix it.
It's the only mention he ever makes of it, because it never gets any more detailed than that.
4.
The first time they go on a hunt together after it happens, Sam notices so fast Dean wonders if he wrote the whole ridiculous scenario on his forehead in his sleep or something. True confessions told by his subconscious in Magic Marker only Sam can see, a lie of omission highlighted in bright fluorescent yellow. Yeah, Sam can't read minds but he can read this, the absences on Dean's skin where memories once lived in the faded evidence of tears in his flesh.
Sam's fingertips trace over the smooth flesh on his arms, the muscles of his chest. With anyone else, it'd be an erotic tease. With Sammy, it's just shock.
He pushes at spots on Dean's skin in the privacy of a dingy motel room, with the curtains closed and the phone off. No one will peek in and see Sam examining Dean's body like some amateur forensic pathologist. No one will call them begging for help with a poltergeist or asking Sam to bring home double fudge ice cream for the kids before he comes back from the hunt.
Dean should bruise but he doesn't, not when Sam squeezes his forearms so goddamn hard or presses at the flat clean space where the shiny burn of a hot poker had once been.
"You about done there, Sammy?" Dean says after a while.
Sam shakes his head, or not, this weird bob and jerk of his chin. His eyes narrow as he leans down to get a better look. Dean feels like a fetal pig in a jar of formaldehyde on a biology lab shelf being gawked at by roomfuls of teenagers.
"You always were a quick healer," Sam says with a reluctant smile.
Dean wishes for the first time in ages that his stomach could still roll and heave like it used to.
5.
Sammy says it's a gift, but Sammy can be a real idiot sometimes.
When Dean comes to visit there's always a room in that huge rich lawyer's house for him to bunk in. It might be the guest room and it might not be depending on whether or not you think Sam's wife making a big deal about him helping pick out the fucking decor counts for anything. Dean always bites his tongue when people ask where he lives because that's Sammy's home and always will be. He tries not to think about how much stuff he keeps in the attic or how Sam's let him take over the garage or how he never sleeps as well on a thousand motel beds as he does between the dark blue sheets of the guest bed that's not one.
The first visit after Sam finds out, DJ crawls into his lap all gangly arms and legs and settles in.
Dean John Winchester. Borrowed names, Dean always says. Poor kid has to have twice the personality to make up for it.
"Got any monster stories this time, Uncle Dean?" DJ says. He tugs up the sleeves of Dean's jacket, looks for new scars.
Good luck with that, Dean thinks. Tell me if you find any of the old ones, while you're at it.
6.
Another Black Dog, another day, and Dean loses track of the tears in his flesh before they heal over and disappear.
He drags himself back to the motel room in pieces, his clothes practically shredded off his body and blood soaked through everything. He can't smell anything else but copper and dampness. When he hauls himself through the door of the motel room, it's habit more than anything else that has him groaning and sore. At least, he thinks that's what sore used to feel like.
The phone rings as soon as he walks in. It's Sam, not much of a surprise.
"Where are you hurt?"
Dean groans again for good measure, slumps down on the bed and hopes the blood doesn't seep into the cheap bedspread. "I'm not hurt, Sammy. That's the point, right?"
"Check again," he says, and Dean could swear he hears him wince on the other end of the phone.
He looks over his chest, his legs, then tugs up the sleeve of his leather jacket. His left wrist bulges oddly, and he mutters a curse before twisting it back into place. The absence of pain isn't a new thing.
"Neat trick, Sam."
Sam sighs on the other end, and maybe it's a good thing he's been cutting down on hunts lately.
"I didn't think so."
7.
"Show me, Uncle Dean."
"Anna, you know not to bother your uncle about that."
"But I want to see, Daddy."
Dean rumples dark brown curls as a distraction, swipes the knife from a small pale hand before she can blink.
"You'll see it one of these days, kiddo. Promise."
Sam gives him a look at that, and Dean just shrugs. Can't promise not to bleed and break and build himself up all over again in front of the kid. That's just not the way things work.
8.
So he's in this warehouse in Pennsylvania, right, trying not to get caught by the deceased and rather pissed-off janitor haunting the fucking place, and his cell phone rings in his pocket. He thought he'd turned it off but apparently everything on this goddamn job is going to go wrong, which is exactly what he's thinking when he flips open his phone to stop the ringing and hears DJ whisper, "Uncle Dean, duck!"
When John Winchester raises you, you hear "Duck!" and don't even think about the why. You just do.
Dean drops like a stone, as if a heavy hook on a rusted chain's really going to do everlasting damage anymore when swung at his head. He doesn't think to hang up, not when he's blowing away the ghost away with rock salt, not when the spirit escapes for the moment with a mournful howl.
The last thing he hears is a quiet, "Don't tell Daddy," and then silence.
9.
And he doesn't tell Daddy, because the next time he goes back to Sam's house -- never home, not really, not even if he stashes all his weapons there and teaches DJ and Anna self-defense in the backyard -- DJ avoids him like the plague. "There's a first time for everything," Lisa says, brushing out Anna's hair as she wrangles both kids around the kitchen in a race to get out the front door.
"Guess it was just a phase," Dean says, and he smiles while he hears Don't tell Daddy whispered over and over in his head.
The restaurant's nice, this cozy little Chinese place Sam and Lisa take the kids all the time. The waitress brings them extra fortune cookies and the owner comes out to say hello. Dean's never felt so out of place, like he's a souvenir taken out of plastic to be shown off.
"Ths is my brother," Sam says, introducing him to the owner with a clap on Dean's shoulder.
The old man beams. "Heard a lot about you," he says to Dean. "Bet Sam took good care of his baby brother when you were little, huh, son?"
Dean forces a smile but can't hide the flinch. Baby faces and puppy-dog eyes don't hold out forever, looks like.
It's Sam fortieth birthday.
10.
He's just ignoring it, letting it slide. He doesn't say anything when Sam gives up the occasional hunt for no hunting at all, bowing out because of a trick knee or DJ's judo tournament or another case in the way. He doesn't say anything when people start assuming Sam's his father anywhere they go. He doesn't even say anything when Sam and Lisa start making cracks about an old fogey like him still picking up girls throwing themselves at his feet.
And this one night the two of them are sitting on the back porch nursing a pair of beers. Dean's been going on about the two waitresses he connived into coming back to his motel room after a hunt in Duluth a month ago and Sam's just gotten finished with another anecdote about a criminal too stupid to live. They both spend a good fifteen minutes laughing their asses off and critiquing his breaking-and-entering techniques and lack thereof from the perspectives of long-term practice.
The backyard goes quiet for a while, and Sam thinks about what he's about to say next for a long time before he actually speaks.
"I'm retiring in a few months."
Dean looks back at him, rolling his beer bottle back and forth between his palms. In the dim glow of the back porch, the gray in Sam's hair catches the light better, and the wrinkles in his skin appear deeper. "A little early to be retiring, wouldn't you say?"
"Not as early as you think," Sam says.
11.
"Dean?"
There's a blonde bartender in Dean's bed, tiny and wiry and covered in tattoos. She crawled up his body the minute they got into the motel room and did things to him that were probably illegal in more than a few states, or should be at the very least. Dean knows there are smudges of her dark lipstick all over his skin, across his chest, around his cock. He doesn't turn on the lamp to check.
If he's guessing right, she's about DJ's age, give or take.
Dean tries to speak low into the phone, not wanting to wake her up. "Yeah, Lisa, what's up?"
She says nothing for a long moment, and all Dean can hear is the usual. The soft rustling of the sheets as the girl curls up next to him in her sleep, crickets from the woods, the occasional rumble of a car driving past the cheap motel on its way to someplace better.
"It's Sam, Dean."
Something in her voice chills his blood. "What's going on?"
"Just ... just come home."
For the first time, Dean doesn't even fight the word, not even in his head.
Home. Hell, yeah, home.
12.
Dean doesn't want to talk about the funeral, doesn't even want to think about it.
And you're sure as hell not going to make him.
13.
Afterwards he sits in the refurbished Mustang Sam bought him to replace the Impala and tries not to think that Sam did that on purpose. Not to give Dean a new car to replace the beloved hunk of rust he'd had to abandon on the side of a road in Idaho. Care and upkeep don't do much good for a car when you're driving it into fights against angry spirits and regularly get it shot full of bulletholes. Sooner or later, shit gives out.
As soon as he thinks that, Dean laughs like a madman, sharp and staccato bursts of sound like a crazed gunfight.
No, he thinks he knows why Sam retired the goddamn Impala for him. Because there's a ghost of Sam sitting in the passenger seat of the Impala, and always has been, young and tall and rubbing at his temples as the visions pound in his skull.
Except this isn't the Impala, and when Dean gets into the Mustang, that's not Sam sitting in the other seat.
"Go home, DJ."
"No."
"I said --"
"I don't care what you said, Uncle Dean. I have to go with you."
He doesn't say why, and Dean doesn't ask. His grip on the steering wheel tightens. "You know what your mother would try to do to me if I let you come with me?"
DJ's never looked much like Sam, more like a tiny John Winchester than anything else. He's always been broad and dark with emotions that sway from one extreme to another. But there's something in the look of him now that screams that he's Sam's son, that cries it out to the world. It's not just because he's sitting in Dean's passenger seat, either. It can't be.
"Who do you think told me to get in your car?" he says.
14.
"Show me."
"You really think you're going to make it a week without seeing it?"
"Then you might as well show it to me now, before I have to see it in the middle of a hunt --"
"-- and get thrown off your game. You're just like your father, you know that?"
"Yeah, I get that a lot. Does that make me the smart one?"
"Are you trying to get me to kick your ass?"
"No, I'm trying to get you to kick yours."
"Hey, smart or funny one. Pick one and stick with it."
"Yes, sir."
15.
They tell people they're brothers, if that, because it's easier than the truth. No one would buy the real story anyway, and it would just complicate things trying to explain it away with some bullshit story.
The old man's still knocking up young blondes. Ask the kid here about his aunt who just took her first steps last week.
When enough years pass by, Dean becomes his son, because it's easier.
Anna's daughter Olivia turns up one day with a bulging gym bag and a sharp familiar gaze that narrows with intensity and moves things without much effort. She takes up the comfortable spot in the passenger seat that her uncle recently vacated with a wink and a grin. She's steady with a gun and a tease with the men, and wrangling her for her own safety in a crowded bar is just as difficult as keeping her safe under the dark looming threat of a werewolf.
Olivia's dark and quick-witted and looks like Sam all shrunken down and girled-up, and Dean turns into her overprotective cousin, because it's easier.
Somewhere along the line, DJ meets this girl, this shy little waitress in Omaha with the sweetest smile you've ever seen, and eighteen years later Jesse's begging him, begging Dean to drag his sorry ass along. He's easily spooked from the first hunt to the last, but he knows his lore and his Latin and the heft of his low raspy voice forces an unnatural obedience from everyone they pass. Jesse never learns to hustle but he never needs to, a whispered command calling money from people's wallets like the Pied Piper calling children from the town.
And Dean is someone's big brother again, because it's easier.
Over and over, over and over, and nothing changes but the way he gets from place to place and the shadow at his side.
16.
Laura straddles his waist in the remains of this seedy bar, right, and that's when everything changes.
It's instinct when his hands settle on her hips, a well-practiced maneuver from a long-ago time. She rolls her entire body like she's riding one of those roadhouse steers, those bucking bronco rides they see collecting dust in a corner every so often, and Dean half-expects her to toss the cowboy hat she's tugged down on her head across the room. Laura curls into him, her lips ghosting over the flutter of the pulse point on his neck.
Her hair still smells like coconut and sunshine and Dean doesn't even get how either is still possible.
If he had brains he'd be shoving her away, but maybe the bombs took away his common sense along with everyone else, because he just holds onto her with a grin and says, "I haven't fucked in public in a while, sweetheart."
"You haven't fucked in a while, period," she says.
And he'd say something to that, he would, but then that sharp little tongue of hers is slipping into his mouth and the English language officially fails him.
17.
Dean doesn't count the years, not like other people does. He remembers them in the companions he keeps and how many steps it takes to get back to Sam from them.
He's in an abandoned motel in some flea-bitten little town, if there's even any fleas left after the radiation's gotten to them. Always a fucking motel, even now, and there's a warm body in the bed beside him, the only warm body that's not his for miles. You can't see anything of Sam in Laura, not even if you squint, not even if you stare at the dark red curls and the pale curves for hours on end. It's only when she wakes that you see it, that sliver of Sam that's still alive in the haunted shadow in her eyes that the nightmares leave behind.
She curls into him when she wakes up most times and asks, "Was it like this for him?"
Her hand is on his chest, and his on her waist. "Not like this," he says.
They both have to laugh, because it's either that or the breakdown, and in this empty world their laughter rings like church bells.
Sometimes he thinks that's why, that Laura isn't a choice so much as a lack of options. That she's his for the taking because there's nothing else to take. She sleeps sprawled out with the slope of her back for the world to see but that doesn't make her any less dangerous. A knife under the pillow and a gun on the nightstand, like the Winchester she is.
Twenty-seven, he thinks to himself, because he counts the generations as he watches her sleep and wonders when it stops being a sin.
But hell, like that's ever stopped him before.
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,700 words
Spoilers: General season one
Warnings: Wincest, sort of (It's Dean/OFC, and kind of far removed. You'll see.)
Disclaimer: If I owned the Winchester boys, they'd be cleaning my apartment right now so I don't have to.
Summary: If you'd ask him, Dean would tell you he's going to die on the hunt. Good luck trying, pal.
The Days Don't End Here, My Friend
*****
"Show me."
"Aw, come on --"
"I'm going to see it eventually, Dean. You might as well show me now so I don't end up standing there staring at it and gaping like an idiot in the middle of a hunt."
"Huh. Good point."
"I didn't forge that law degree, you know."
"Yeah, Sammy, I know."
The glint of steel off the fluorescent lights of an all-night laundromat, a quick slice through the air and Sam's sudden sharp intake of breath.
"Jesus, Dean."
"Yeah, tell me about it."
After Dad dies, Dean starts his own journal. He copies down most of the stuff in Dad's book, writing down exorcisms and spells and ways to kill every last evil fucker on the planet in the same compact chickenscratch. It's like even his handwriting's taking after John Winchester. Glancing over his notes makes his heart warm and his skin crawl at the same goddamn time.
His journal is black and durable with a thick strap of leather holding it closed. Dean takes Dad's lead and tucks photos and mementos in between the pages with only a wish and a prayer to keep them from escaping. Mom and Dad at the house in Lawrence, beaming as they hold each other. His arm wrapped around sixteen-year-old Sammy's neck, yanking him down with a grin the moment after Sam had made some crack about him having to stand on his tiptoes to do it. Sam and the kids making goofy faces for the camera, googly-eyed and sticking out their tongues for Uncle Dean's amusement.
In between the pages are other things as well, pressed herbs and blessed rosaries and yellowed newsprint. The kind of things he doesn't pause over quite the same way.
The journal's first test of how well it'll hold up for the intended purpose is when he tucks it in the back of his jeans at a trendy cappucino-swilling bookstore and saunters out the front door.
He buries Dad's journal under a tree just off a roadside in Colorado. Nice view of the mountains there, and if you close your eyes you can hear the happy burbles of a creek nearby.
Dean can't recommend it enough, if it's the only thing you've got left of a man to bury.
The first entry in Dean's journal is the long and winding and not-all-that-romantic tale of how the Winchesters took down the demon that had haunted their lives for over twenty damn years. It starts with a fire in Lawrence and ends the same way, with one or two other blazes in the middle of the story just to keep it interesting. Dean could read it over and over agan, doesn't want to but does just the same, and when he finishes he always smells smoke in the air no matter where he is.
The second entry reads exactly like this.
I have no idea what did this to me, or how to fix it.
It's the only mention he ever makes of it, because it never gets any more detailed than that.
The first time they go on a hunt together after it happens, Sam notices so fast Dean wonders if he wrote the whole ridiculous scenario on his forehead in his sleep or something. True confessions told by his subconscious in Magic Marker only Sam can see, a lie of omission highlighted in bright fluorescent yellow. Yeah, Sam can't read minds but he can read this, the absences on Dean's skin where memories once lived in the faded evidence of tears in his flesh.
Sam's fingertips trace over the smooth flesh on his arms, the muscles of his chest. With anyone else, it'd be an erotic tease. With Sammy, it's just shock.
He pushes at spots on Dean's skin in the privacy of a dingy motel room, with the curtains closed and the phone off. No one will peek in and see Sam examining Dean's body like some amateur forensic pathologist. No one will call them begging for help with a poltergeist or asking Sam to bring home double fudge ice cream for the kids before he comes back from the hunt.
Dean should bruise but he doesn't, not when Sam squeezes his forearms so goddamn hard or presses at the flat clean space where the shiny burn of a hot poker had once been.
"You about done there, Sammy?" Dean says after a while.
Sam shakes his head, or not, this weird bob and jerk of his chin. His eyes narrow as he leans down to get a better look. Dean feels like a fetal pig in a jar of formaldehyde on a biology lab shelf being gawked at by roomfuls of teenagers.
"You always were a quick healer," Sam says with a reluctant smile.
Dean wishes for the first time in ages that his stomach could still roll and heave like it used to.
Sammy says it's a gift, but Sammy can be a real idiot sometimes.
When Dean comes to visit there's always a room in that huge rich lawyer's house for him to bunk in. It might be the guest room and it might not be depending on whether or not you think Sam's wife making a big deal about him helping pick out the fucking decor counts for anything. Dean always bites his tongue when people ask where he lives because that's Sammy's home and always will be. He tries not to think about how much stuff he keeps in the attic or how Sam's let him take over the garage or how he never sleeps as well on a thousand motel beds as he does between the dark blue sheets of the guest bed that's not one.
The first visit after Sam finds out, DJ crawls into his lap all gangly arms and legs and settles in.
Dean John Winchester. Borrowed names, Dean always says. Poor kid has to have twice the personality to make up for it.
"Got any monster stories this time, Uncle Dean?" DJ says. He tugs up the sleeves of Dean's jacket, looks for new scars.
Good luck with that, Dean thinks. Tell me if you find any of the old ones, while you're at it.
Another Black Dog, another day, and Dean loses track of the tears in his flesh before they heal over and disappear.
He drags himself back to the motel room in pieces, his clothes practically shredded off his body and blood soaked through everything. He can't smell anything else but copper and dampness. When he hauls himself through the door of the motel room, it's habit more than anything else that has him groaning and sore. At least, he thinks that's what sore used to feel like.
The phone rings as soon as he walks in. It's Sam, not much of a surprise.
"Where are you hurt?"
Dean groans again for good measure, slumps down on the bed and hopes the blood doesn't seep into the cheap bedspread. "I'm not hurt, Sammy. That's the point, right?"
"Check again," he says, and Dean could swear he hears him wince on the other end of the phone.
He looks over his chest, his legs, then tugs up the sleeve of his leather jacket. His left wrist bulges oddly, and he mutters a curse before twisting it back into place. The absence of pain isn't a new thing.
"Neat trick, Sam."
Sam sighs on the other end, and maybe it's a good thing he's been cutting down on hunts lately.
"I didn't think so."
"Show me, Uncle Dean."
"Anna, you know not to bother your uncle about that."
"But I want to see, Daddy."
Dean rumples dark brown curls as a distraction, swipes the knife from a small pale hand before she can blink.
"You'll see it one of these days, kiddo. Promise."
Sam gives him a look at that, and Dean just shrugs. Can't promise not to bleed and break and build himself up all over again in front of the kid. That's just not the way things work.
So he's in this warehouse in Pennsylvania, right, trying not to get caught by the deceased and rather pissed-off janitor haunting the fucking place, and his cell phone rings in his pocket. He thought he'd turned it off but apparently everything on this goddamn job is going to go wrong, which is exactly what he's thinking when he flips open his phone to stop the ringing and hears DJ whisper, "Uncle Dean, duck!"
When John Winchester raises you, you hear "Duck!" and don't even think about the why. You just do.
Dean drops like a stone, as if a heavy hook on a rusted chain's really going to do everlasting damage anymore when swung at his head. He doesn't think to hang up, not when he's blowing away the ghost away with rock salt, not when the spirit escapes for the moment with a mournful howl.
The last thing he hears is a quiet, "Don't tell Daddy," and then silence.
And he doesn't tell Daddy, because the next time he goes back to Sam's house -- never home, not really, not even if he stashes all his weapons there and teaches DJ and Anna self-defense in the backyard -- DJ avoids him like the plague. "There's a first time for everything," Lisa says, brushing out Anna's hair as she wrangles both kids around the kitchen in a race to get out the front door.
"Guess it was just a phase," Dean says, and he smiles while he hears Don't tell Daddy whispered over and over in his head.
The restaurant's nice, this cozy little Chinese place Sam and Lisa take the kids all the time. The waitress brings them extra fortune cookies and the owner comes out to say hello. Dean's never felt so out of place, like he's a souvenir taken out of plastic to be shown off.
"Ths is my brother," Sam says, introducing him to the owner with a clap on Dean's shoulder.
The old man beams. "Heard a lot about you," he says to Dean. "Bet Sam took good care of his baby brother when you were little, huh, son?"
Dean forces a smile but can't hide the flinch. Baby faces and puppy-dog eyes don't hold out forever, looks like.
It's Sam fortieth birthday.
He's just ignoring it, letting it slide. He doesn't say anything when Sam gives up the occasional hunt for no hunting at all, bowing out because of a trick knee or DJ's judo tournament or another case in the way. He doesn't say anything when people start assuming Sam's his father anywhere they go. He doesn't even say anything when Sam and Lisa start making cracks about an old fogey like him still picking up girls throwing themselves at his feet.
And this one night the two of them are sitting on the back porch nursing a pair of beers. Dean's been going on about the two waitresses he connived into coming back to his motel room after a hunt in Duluth a month ago and Sam's just gotten finished with another anecdote about a criminal too stupid to live. They both spend a good fifteen minutes laughing their asses off and critiquing his breaking-and-entering techniques and lack thereof from the perspectives of long-term practice.
The backyard goes quiet for a while, and Sam thinks about what he's about to say next for a long time before he actually speaks.
"I'm retiring in a few months."
Dean looks back at him, rolling his beer bottle back and forth between his palms. In the dim glow of the back porch, the gray in Sam's hair catches the light better, and the wrinkles in his skin appear deeper. "A little early to be retiring, wouldn't you say?"
"Not as early as you think," Sam says.
"Dean?"
There's a blonde bartender in Dean's bed, tiny and wiry and covered in tattoos. She crawled up his body the minute they got into the motel room and did things to him that were probably illegal in more than a few states, or should be at the very least. Dean knows there are smudges of her dark lipstick all over his skin, across his chest, around his cock. He doesn't turn on the lamp to check.
If he's guessing right, she's about DJ's age, give or take.
Dean tries to speak low into the phone, not wanting to wake her up. "Yeah, Lisa, what's up?"
She says nothing for a long moment, and all Dean can hear is the usual. The soft rustling of the sheets as the girl curls up next to him in her sleep, crickets from the woods, the occasional rumble of a car driving past the cheap motel on its way to someplace better.
"It's Sam, Dean."
Something in her voice chills his blood. "What's going on?"
"Just ... just come home."
For the first time, Dean doesn't even fight the word, not even in his head.
Home. Hell, yeah, home.
Dean doesn't want to talk about the funeral, doesn't even want to think about it.
And you're sure as hell not going to make him.
Afterwards he sits in the refurbished Mustang Sam bought him to replace the Impala and tries not to think that Sam did that on purpose. Not to give Dean a new car to replace the beloved hunk of rust he'd had to abandon on the side of a road in Idaho. Care and upkeep don't do much good for a car when you're driving it into fights against angry spirits and regularly get it shot full of bulletholes. Sooner or later, shit gives out.
As soon as he thinks that, Dean laughs like a madman, sharp and staccato bursts of sound like a crazed gunfight.
No, he thinks he knows why Sam retired the goddamn Impala for him. Because there's a ghost of Sam sitting in the passenger seat of the Impala, and always has been, young and tall and rubbing at his temples as the visions pound in his skull.
Except this isn't the Impala, and when Dean gets into the Mustang, that's not Sam sitting in the other seat.
"Go home, DJ."
"No."
"I said --"
"I don't care what you said, Uncle Dean. I have to go with you."
He doesn't say why, and Dean doesn't ask. His grip on the steering wheel tightens. "You know what your mother would try to do to me if I let you come with me?"
DJ's never looked much like Sam, more like a tiny John Winchester than anything else. He's always been broad and dark with emotions that sway from one extreme to another. But there's something in the look of him now that screams that he's Sam's son, that cries it out to the world. It's not just because he's sitting in Dean's passenger seat, either. It can't be.
"Who do you think told me to get in your car?" he says.
"Show me."
"You really think you're going to make it a week without seeing it?"
"Then you might as well show it to me now, before I have to see it in the middle of a hunt --"
"-- and get thrown off your game. You're just like your father, you know that?"
"Yeah, I get that a lot. Does that make me the smart one?"
"Are you trying to get me to kick your ass?"
"No, I'm trying to get you to kick yours."
"Hey, smart or funny one. Pick one and stick with it."
"Yes, sir."
They tell people they're brothers, if that, because it's easier than the truth. No one would buy the real story anyway, and it would just complicate things trying to explain it away with some bullshit story.
The old man's still knocking up young blondes. Ask the kid here about his aunt who just took her first steps last week.
When enough years pass by, Dean becomes his son, because it's easier.
Anna's daughter Olivia turns up one day with a bulging gym bag and a sharp familiar gaze that narrows with intensity and moves things without much effort. She takes up the comfortable spot in the passenger seat that her uncle recently vacated with a wink and a grin. She's steady with a gun and a tease with the men, and wrangling her for her own safety in a crowded bar is just as difficult as keeping her safe under the dark looming threat of a werewolf.
Olivia's dark and quick-witted and looks like Sam all shrunken down and girled-up, and Dean turns into her overprotective cousin, because it's easier.
Somewhere along the line, DJ meets this girl, this shy little waitress in Omaha with the sweetest smile you've ever seen, and eighteen years later Jesse's begging him, begging Dean to drag his sorry ass along. He's easily spooked from the first hunt to the last, but he knows his lore and his Latin and the heft of his low raspy voice forces an unnatural obedience from everyone they pass. Jesse never learns to hustle but he never needs to, a whispered command calling money from people's wallets like the Pied Piper calling children from the town.
And Dean is someone's big brother again, because it's easier.
Over and over, over and over, and nothing changes but the way he gets from place to place and the shadow at his side.
Laura straddles his waist in the remains of this seedy bar, right, and that's when everything changes.
It's instinct when his hands settle on her hips, a well-practiced maneuver from a long-ago time. She rolls her entire body like she's riding one of those roadhouse steers, those bucking bronco rides they see collecting dust in a corner every so often, and Dean half-expects her to toss the cowboy hat she's tugged down on her head across the room. Laura curls into him, her lips ghosting over the flutter of the pulse point on his neck.
Her hair still smells like coconut and sunshine and Dean doesn't even get how either is still possible.
If he had brains he'd be shoving her away, but maybe the bombs took away his common sense along with everyone else, because he just holds onto her with a grin and says, "I haven't fucked in public in a while, sweetheart."
"You haven't fucked in a while, period," she says.
And he'd say something to that, he would, but then that sharp little tongue of hers is slipping into his mouth and the English language officially fails him.
Dean doesn't count the years, not like other people does. He remembers them in the companions he keeps and how many steps it takes to get back to Sam from them.
He's in an abandoned motel in some flea-bitten little town, if there's even any fleas left after the radiation's gotten to them. Always a fucking motel, even now, and there's a warm body in the bed beside him, the only warm body that's not his for miles. You can't see anything of Sam in Laura, not even if you squint, not even if you stare at the dark red curls and the pale curves for hours on end. It's only when she wakes that you see it, that sliver of Sam that's still alive in the haunted shadow in her eyes that the nightmares leave behind.
She curls into him when she wakes up most times and asks, "Was it like this for him?"
Her hand is on his chest, and his on her waist. "Not like this," he says.
They both have to laugh, because it's either that or the breakdown, and in this empty world their laughter rings like church bells.
Sometimes he thinks that's why, that Laura isn't a choice so much as a lack of options. That she's his for the taking because there's nothing else to take. She sleeps sprawled out with the slope of her back for the world to see but that doesn't make her any less dangerous. A knife under the pillow and a gun on the nightstand, like the Winchester she is.
Twenty-seven, he thinks to himself, because he counts the generations as he watches her sleep and wonders when it stops being a sin.
But hell, like that's ever stopped him before.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 09:53 pm (UTC)There is something so essentially broken in this that doesn't so much say "fix it" rather than... "it's how it is" like they accept this is how things are, and even though it isn't how they wanted it to be, they go with it because there is no use fighting something you can't beat.
Awesome work, lover.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 07:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 10:30 pm (UTC)What an awesome job and what a curse for Dean, to live past everyone it reminded me of The Highlander.
So sad.
Achingly beautiful and so well thought out.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 10:36 pm (UTC)Waaaaa.
But beautifully written!
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 10:53 pm (UTC)As usual, stellar work. :D
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 11:29 pm (UTC)Thanks so much,
DC
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Date: 2006-08-22 11:37 pm (UTC)And then you brought on the angst, and my head exploded. Oh, Dean. That's all I got. DEAN.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 12:08 am (UTC)*applauds*
Dude, I totally love you for writing this! I have no more words than that. *nods*
no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 01:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 01:37 am (UTC)Dean doesn't want to talk about the funeral, doesn't even want to think about it. And you're sure as hell not going to make him.
So Dean, so fucking Dean, and I'm sitting in the middle of the computer lab at uni, and it's really hard not to start crying now, dman you. And god, When enough years pass by, Dean becomes his son, because it's easier. And Dean is someone's big brother again, because it's easier. *heart-clench*
no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 02:50 am (UTC)I love how you revealed what happened in kidn of a roundabout way. The starkness of part 12, in particular, just killed me.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 02:51 am (UTC)But hell, like that's ever stopped him before. Wonderful last line
Thanks for this - *hugs*
no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 02:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 03:02 am (UTC)But it can't just be any run of the mill Sayanora-Sammy fic that truly affects me.
It's the fic that is well-thought out, strongly crafted, and lovingly written that truly, absolutely TEARS MY HEART OUT!
And that, I'm both happy and devastated to say, is what you've managed to do to me.
What a great story. Thanks for sharing!
Emrys
no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 04:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 05:08 am (UTC)Now i'm sitting here crying, man. Crying, 'cause...he's so fucking lonely. Even with someone there, it's...
*flails*
Love it, dude.