Blu miraculously posts yet more fiction, on the internet
Title: Aletheia
Summary: Dean has to remember everything. Lisa doesn’t get to remember any of it. He wonders which of them is really luckier.
Word count: 4,500
Rated: PG-13 (language, sexuality)
Notes: Set post-S6; Spoilers apply
Genre: Het-ish gen, angst
Characters: Dean, Sam, Lisa and Ben; Dean/Lisa
A/N: Follows Lethe, though both pieces stand alone.
Disclaimer: Not the CW, just messing around in their sandbox, making Dean cry
***
Now that he knows Lisa and Ben are back on track with the life they had before him, Dean feels like he’s doing the remembering for all three of them. Everything seems to bring him back to that year, from a baseball game on the motel T.V. to the food he eats. I made Ben pancakes, he finds himself thinking morosely over breakfast. Then he pushes the plate away from him with a disgusted grunt because really? Pancakes? In the course of a year he made Ben just about every breakfast he could think of, he can’t deal with each goddamn meal turning into a trip down memory lane.
“You okay?” Sam says carefully. He knows exactly what’s going on. Has been going on for the past ten months, despite all the distractions of rebelling against a particularly vengeful god.
“Fine,” Dean replies, a sliver of self control away from snapping at his little brother for asking at all.
Sam raises his eyebrows, but lets the lie sit between them, like he will for as long as Dean needs it to. Dean stabs a pancake with his fork and drags the plate back in front of him. Letting Lisa go was the right thing to do. He mechanically shovels bites of food to his mouth, chews without tasting and swallows. She and Ben are better off not remembering everything said while Lisa was possessed. They’re better off without any part of the nightmare world he dragged them into.
Sam wants to talk it out, knowing him probably at least half out of guilt. Both of them remember it was Sam’s dying wish that meshed Lisa’s life with Dean’s in the first place. Apple pie and barbeques, indeed. But Sam was right, Dean had been happy. Despite everything, he had started to adjust. Last ditch effort to have a family of his own, and it actually seemed to be going well. And then….
He could have said no when Sam came back. If he were a different person, he could have said no.
But Dean hardly blames Sam for his own fucked up priorities. The real reason Dean can’t unload is Sam didn’t have the choice he did. Dean is lucky: Sam left Jess on the false premise they were just spending a few days looking for Dad, and he ended up with six years of monster blood and motel sheets. Sam’s happy ending died way back on that night at Stanford, and ever since then he’s just been getting used to the fact.
On the other hand, up ‘till that hospital room Dean had a chance to have the life beyond hunting they’d both wanted once upon a time. Unlike his brother, he knew what he was giving up when he left, and even when he asked Cas to do what he did. And in the end, Lisa made it out alive; she’s off living a long and happy life. How can Dean bitch about that to Sam?
At least he had a choice.
*
“You sure you’re ready?” Sam asks, insistently.
“Yes,” Dean reassures him. He’s always ready; that’s what it means to be a hunter.
The demon they’ve tracked here, Melchom, was Crowley’s accountant. He made it out alive by running like hell after all the purgatory shit went down, and now they get to pretend that this one, unlike every other demon they’ve tracked down and questioned, knows something new about the spell that opened purgatory or, even more improbably, something about how to reverse it. It’s a tall order, trying to believe any of that could possibly be true. Then again, look how far he and Sam have come on pure, unadulterated dumb luck.
Sam smashes the lock on the old warehouse’s doors with the butt of his shotgun, and takes point down the hall. Dean scans the doors branching off to the left and right, looking for one that’s just a bit different, one with a tell-tale sign of being opened recently.
Sam tips his chin towards a door to the right; the hinges glisten more that the others in the bean of his flashlight.
Dean pushes down slowly on the handle, gun cocked and ears piqued for any sounds on the other side; he thinks he might hear voices, and when the door eases open it’s obvious that someone is having a conversation down there in the basement. A loud one. He and Sam exchange knowing looks.
Alert to any unpleasant surprises they might find on the way, the two of them jog down the hall towards a lighted stairwell, the voice getting louder as they approach.
They position themselves on either side of the door, backs pressed to the wall and guns at the ready. “Is that an exorcism?” Sam mouths at Dean. It certainly sounds like one.
Dean peers into the stairwell; there’s a man crouching on the midway landing with a sniper rifle across his knees, and down in the cavernous room below, between the old machines, is Melchom in a devil’s trap, being exorcised by a woman wearing a cropped leather jacket and tight black pants.
“Damn in, we got scooped,” Dean growls. He looks again, just as the demon’s essence spews out of the man’s mouth and is sucked down to hell along with any information he might have had. “Sonofabitch.”
The man on the landing whirls around, the rifle instantly up and pointed at Dean’s face.
“Hey, hey,” Sam says, elbowing Dean out in front of him and raising his hands in surrender. “We’re hunters, it’s cool. We’re hunters.”
The man lowers his gun a fraction, and he’s really only a teenager. Dean squints at him, an odd feeling in his stomach. The kid looks over at the woman down the stairs for instructions, and Dean’s eyes follow.
It’s fuckin’ Lisa.
*
Dean gapes. Sam recognizes her, too, and sucks in an audible breath.
“Uh, what. What are you doing here?” Dean demands, barely managing not to say her name. He can feel Sam’s eyes boring into the back of his head. Not very smooth, he knows, but the best he can do until the gears in his brain start meshing again. Which might happen sometime next year, if he’s lucky.
“Killing demons,” Lisa says with a hard edge that’s definitely new. “Didn’t mean to step on any toes, but…” she shrugs unapologetically. “Early birds, and all.”
“Haha, hah,” Dean laughs, a little hysterically. “And you bring your kid? What is he, twelve?”
“Thirteen,” Ben snaps. Dean looks over at him again in disbelief. His voice has cracked, and he looks a foot taller than he used to be.
“It’s dangerous,” Dean insists.
Lisa’s eyes narrow. “You know, it’s really funny because it sounds like you’re telling me how to raise my child. You wanna give me any more parenting advice, there, Mr. Rogers?”
“I’m sorry,” Sam apologizes over Dean before his brother can say something to make the situation worse. “Everybody’s a little tense, we came here expecting a fight and you two just caught us by surprise is all.” Lisa looks mollified. Dean bets Sam’s giving her those puppy eyes.
“I’m Sam, this is my brother Dean,” Sam says carefully.
“Winchester?” Lisa asks, instantly suspicious. God, Dean thinks, an ice cold shock of exposure running through him. She remembers.
“All the hunters talk about you, over at the Roadhouse.” She looks from one to the other. “Like a legend or something. They say you started hunting when you were four.”
“Thirteen,” Dean corrects automatically. Of course she doesn’t know them. But… Roadhouse?
Lisa smirks. “Not really in a position to be pointing fingers, hmm?” She takes the stairs up to where Ben is standing and looks up at them with her arms crossed. “Lisa. This is my son, Ben. Word is, you two can kill angels. Hell, they say you killed the Devil himself.”
“Sure, close enough,” Sam answers, guarded. “Who’s they?”
“Hunters at the Roadhouse.”
“Burned down, years ago,” Says Dean. A shapshifter? “Try again.”
Lisa fixes him with a look, and he’s transported back to that year, when he’d come back from the store with just a case of beer and ten pounds of junk food. No way that look is faked. It feels like being kicked in the chest.
“Yeah, Harvelle’s burned down and I understand she and her kid died a few years later when the devil made this world his playground …” she stops, seeing their expressions.
Sam clears his throat and un-grits his teeth. “They were friends of ours,” he explains. Lisa stops, then nods respectfully.
“I’m sorry. They sounded like good people.” She shakes her head slightly, with obvious regret. “In any case, a friend of theirs set up a bar for hunters in Colorado last year, named it the Roadhouse as an homage. Now that nobody’s trying to exterminate us anymore, I guess we need a place to swap stories.” She pauses with a wry smile. “I have to say, it’s a total sausage fest.”
“Guess we aren’t missing much, then.” Dean half smiles, too. She and Jo would have gotten along. “That’s where you got a lead on him?” He nods at the corpse still tied to the chair, not letting himself think about Ben seeing corpses, in all likelihood lots of them.
Lisa shrugs. “It’s where I learned to figure things out on my own. Got a few friends who pass along bits and pieces they think I could use.”
“Sounds fair,” says Sam. “What about paying that favor forward? We’re looking for purgatory, and you just ganked our last lead. He say anything before you exorcised him?”
Lisa blinks, surprised. “I thought that was just a rumor. Well, the second he realized he was trapped, he started yelling how he “didn’t know how to open it, he swore!” so there you go. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I went through a flask and a half of holy water, and that’s all he’d say. I doubt he was lying.”
“Great,” Dean grunts.
“Look, he didn’t have anything I was hoping for, either,” Lisa says, shifting her weight. “One of the hunters at the bar set us up with a safe house just north of here. Not the Hilton, but it’s got hexes and sigils built in. We can talk more there. If you can do half of what they say, I have a lot of questions for you.”
Dean grimaces. “Look, we’d love to help but we’re not the best people to get involved with right now.” Just like he wasn’t last time. He doesn’t know if he’d prefer running now and never seeing her again, or keeping her in his line of sight for the rest of eternity. “Purgatory’s just the tip of the iceburg. We’re hunting something big.”
“Same here,” Lisa says with a unpleasant smile.
*
“You’re sure?” Dean demands.
“You already asked me twice, answer’s not going to change,” Lisa answers testily. “None of the things I’ve hunted said anything about purgatory, or alphas, or “Crowley,” or souls. And nobody at the Roadhouse either, or at least nobody who isn’t a drunk. More of a drunk than the rest of them.” She amends seeing Dean’s look.
“Sonofabitch,” Dean mutters, rubbing his face. They’re sitting at the table in the safe house, a dirty and splintery thing that makes up most of the furniture in the place, along with the four chairs around it and a stained couch in the living room. There are two bedrooms with rickety cots down the hall that he and Sam dumped their bags in, while Lisa and Ben are sharing the master suite off the living room.
Sam sighs and leans back. “Well, I guess that’s not unexpected. You got any other leads?”
“There are rumors about one demon, Succorbenoth,” Lisa says without much enthusiasm. “As I hear it, he’s a gatekeeper of hell. Maybe he knows something about Purgatory’s gates too?”
“Could be, but he hasn’t been topside since the mob ran Chicago,” Dean says. “Dead end.”
“Of course.” Lisa runs a hand through her hair in frustration. “Ben, hun, you mind checking our ammo and oiling the guns? “
The teen gets up with a distrustful look in Dean’s direction, and walks across the room to where Lisa stowed the weapons. Sam looks between Lisa and his brother, and murmurs an excuse before heading down the hall to his room. Dean glares after him. He probably thinks he’s being helpful, abandoning his brother like this.
“So.” Lisa says, glancing at Sam’s back with mild curiosity. “If purgatory’s just one piece of the puzzle, ‘big’ is an understatement for what you’re hunting.”
“You could say that.” It’s surreal to talk to her like this. Like strangers. “What about you, what’re you hunting?”
Lisa lets his deflection slide. “Don’t know exactly,” she says.
Dean chuckles humorlessly. “Gonna be a bit tricky, then.” She both is, and isn’t the woman he remembers. He can’t look at her enough, from her hair (longer) to her face (the same).
“Well, that’s where you come in. I’m short on facts, and I need someone with a few more years of hunting under their belt to help me turn what I’ve got into a name.”
Dean can’t say he likes where this is going; it sounds too much like his childhood. “Okay, then, what have you got?”
For the first time since they’ve re-met, Lisa actually looks vulnerable. “A big chunk of nothing, mostly.”
“Alright, well, what started you hunting? I’m sure you have some clues.” This is the part he dreads to hear. What tragedy was visited on the family without him, but for his sins all the same? A demon trying to get revenge? Cas crossing yet another line?
Lisa laughs. “No, I mean nothing. That’s the clue I’ve got. There are holes in my memory, just about a year’s worth. I need to find the thing that took them and get them back.”
*
“Uh, wow,” Dean says. She’s hunting him. “I mean. Huh. That’s a little unusual, typical story is you saw somebody die.”
Lisa looks unamused. “I guess that makes me lucky…?”
Dean forces a laugh. “Parts of my life I’d like to lose,” he jokes. But he means it, too. There are whole swaths he’d just as soon be rid of. He wants her to understand.
“No,” Lisa says. “No, you don’t know what it’s like.”
“I guess not,” Dean admits softly.
“Whatever happened, it happened to me. To us,” she amends, nodding towards Ben. “I have to believe that matters. It’s not right to just have that taken away.”
Dean clears his throat. “You’re sure it’s even supernatural?”
“Definitely. Ben and I were in a car crash about ten months ago, and afterwards I just…I kept feeling these burned out places in my head. As far as I can tell the thing pillaged through about a year and seared out whatever it was they didn’t want me to know.” Lisa stops, collects herself.
“Once I convinced myself I wasn’t going crazy I went to a psychic. Well,” she laughs, “lots of psychics. Until I found one I could take seriously. Trust me, that took a while. But when she told me that she could see that my memory had been tampered with, it was such a relief. Would have been better if she could say what did it, but the closest she could get was ‘something with major mojo’.“
“Just the kind of thing you want to go toe to toe with,” Dean says.
Lisa smiles at him, that bright familiar smile. “Girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”
What Dean needs, he realizes is a fifth of whiskey. Maybe two. “And then it was just a hop and a skip to life on the run? With a kid?”
“Hey,” Lisa says “Don’t cross that line three times.” They stare each-other down for a second, and Dean breaks first.
Lisa leans back in her chair, satisfied with Dean’s cowed silence. “Once I learned that the only things with the juice to root through memories and take something specific were high-level demons and angels, yeah I ran. Clearly, they knew where to find me if they wanted seconds, and that wasn’t gonna happen. I found my way to the bar, and I learned the hexes and sigils and all that from some guy who learned it from some other guy in South Dakota.”
“And that’s how it is,” Dean says.
“That’s how it is,” Lisa agrees. “I pin down the biggest demons I can, I question them, I exorcise them, and Ben and I take out whatever else we bump into on the way. And what keeps me going is thinking that this time, this time we’re gonna find the one who screwed our lives up.”
“You realize there’s a good chance that even if you find the thing, best you’re gonna get is revenge, right?” A good chance he’ll remain the sole keeper of their year together.
“Yeah,” Lisa says softly. “Still better than not trying at all.” Dean wants to go to her and wrap her in his arms, to comfort her like she did for him all those times after Sam died. But of course, he can’t. It’s only in his head that they’re old lovers. As far as she's concerned they only met a few hours ago.
“Are there any drinks in this joint?” He asks.
*
Dean’s buzzed from the half bottle of dusty rum he and Lisa just demolished, but not in a way that makes sleep appealing. Instead he’s just staring at the ceiling of the small, dark room, going through all his snapshots of that year with Lisa. The booze-tinged memories of the first months, when he alternated between rage and depression and Lisa was his rock through it all. The feeling of her skin. The first time Ben hugged him, and the arguments, and laughing over the stove, and her body limp in his arms as he ran for the car, knowing it was too late. It’s all there, preserved in bright, clear memories. Memories and nothing else.
There’s a knock on the door. “Yeah,” he grunts; Sam always wants to process their feelings.
But it’s Lisa.
“Hey,” she says, leaning up against the door.
“Hey yourself,” he answers, pushing himself up on his elbows. “What’re you doing here?”
Lisa tips her head back and forth, lips puckered as if she is seriously considering the question. “It’s a tough life,” she says, sitting down on the foot of the cot. “You take your fun where you can get it.”
“Oh,” Says Dean. He opens his mouth to deflect her with a reference to Ben waiting back in the room she’s sharing with him, and maybe being a little young to understand “fun where you can get it,” but then he remembers Lisa’s face the last time he tried to step in for Ben’s interests.
“Look, don’t take it too personally,” Lisa says with that casual warmth, so much the Lisa he remembers. “You’re my type is all, and from the way you’ve been staring,” she trails off with a polite shrug. “Not exactly subtle.”
Dean knows they can’t. Not with everything he remembers, and all the things she doesn’t. But then, part of what he remembers is the perfection of her breasts in his hands. But then, he’s the reason she’s and Ben sold their apple pie life for abandoned houses and exorcisms. She and Ben are in danger despite- or because of- him sacrificing her memories on the alter of his conscience.
“I don’t really think this is a good idea,” Dean says without much conviction.
“Oh, it isn’t,” Lisa says, nodding and sliding up next to him. “Little bit like living out of a car, going after monsters that can break your neck soon as look at you isn’t a good idea.” She bends over close to him to whisper in his ear, “I guess we’re just not ‘good idea’ kinda people.”
Damn it, he’s hard. He puts a hand on her shoulder to push her back a safe distance but it ends up a little closer to a caress, and she’s suddenly in his arms, all of her, pressed flat against his chest as she kisses him deep and slow.
He responds almost instinctually, raising his hand to brush that place just under her ear that always made her shiver- it still does.
Lisa pulls back and licks her lips. Dean’s never wanted someone this badly. Her eyes are running down his torso hungrily, like she’s never seen him naked. Which, of course, for all intents and purposes she hasn’t. While Dean, he can recall with utter clarity what’s under her loose tank-top, the soft curves that are filling out her tight black jeans.
“Look, hey,” he murmurs nonsensically, his hands on her waist keeping her close, or keeping her away- he can’t tell. “Just… not tonight.”
Lisa rocks back, bemused. “I have to say, you don’t look like the waiting type. Did I come on a little strong?”
“No, no, it isn’t you. God knows it isn’t you,” he says, allowing himself another quick glance at the peaks of her nipples. “I just can’t.”
Lisa takes a moment to digest his apology, and nods. “Is it alright if I stay awhile?” She asks. “Ben and I were really thinking we’d caught a break, meeting you, but it’s still the same old ‘what next’….” She shakes her head sadly. “I wanna not be a mom for an hour is all.”
“Yeah,” Dean says, accepting her body into the space beside his. He holds her tightly, willing their flesh to communicate everything he isn’t saying.
*
“I think it was a person that got erased,” Lisa says into the dark. “A lover.” Dean can feel the vibrations in her chest, pressed up against his ribs. “Just, the kind of things I lost seem like they’re places where a person would go. I don’t know, it’s mostly just a feeling, but that’s all I’ve ever had to go on. Since the crash. I’m sorry, is this weird?”
“It’s fine.” Dean’s glad she can’t see his face, or feel how tight his throat has gotten. “You think you’ll find him?”
Lisa sighs. “No.”
“Probably not,” Dean agrees.
“I mean, if something big went to all the trouble of burning this guy out of my memory, it’s a little ridiculous to think they’d leave the real article bouncing around, right?” She sounds resigned, but there’s still an echo of heartbreak in her voice, heartbreak for him.
She never chose this; he did, and he was wrong. Dean was playing god before Cas was, he’s the monster in this scenario hands down. He was trying to save her, but how did he fail to see that even the Lisa who seemed so angry and sure when she told him they were done might still want a memory of the way they loved each other once? And now he’s taken that away from her. From both of them.
*
The four hunters don’t even have breakfast together; there’s nothing to eat, anyways. Dean remembers when he used to make pancakes for Ben. Lisa goes about packing up without a second thought.
“Sam, we gotta tell her,” Dean whispers.
“Tell her what,” Sam snaps, sotto voce. “That god himself eternal sunshined her? You know she’d go after him, do you really want her in the ring with Castiel the Almighty?”
“I don’t know,” Dean growls, “This is just really fucked up.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, voice tight, “I think everybody here gets that. I’m just not really seeing an easy solution.”
Dean curses under his breath. He has half a mind to protest that, if nothing else, an answer will allow her to stop hunting, but he and Sam know better than anyone it’s not a lifestyle you get out of once you’re in. And without an angel to restore the memories- if that’s even possible- is the cliffs-notes version going to do her any good? Bring her and Ben peace? Even Dean thinks his story sounds far fetched, there’s no guarantee she’d buy it at all. And if she did, giving her his side of events as truth might be a worse lie that leaving the gaps.
“We gotta at least… stick with them, make sure they’re okay.”
Sam’s eyes are understanding, but his tone firm: “You’re not going down that rabbit hole again,” he pronounces. “The best thing we can do is just stop interfering. It’s her choice to live this life, and she’s watching out for herself and Ben just fine. We drag her back into our lives, that’ll only get harder.
“And you know we can’t be around them, with you remembering everything and them not, you know how wrong that is.” Dean looks over at Lisa, who’s poring over a map with Ben. “Tell me you know how wrong that is,” Sam insists.
“I know,” Dean admits.
“Look,” Sam says quickly, as Lisa and Ben finish picking a route and start to stow the last of their scant belongings, “We’re gonna find a way to get Cas to be just Cas again, and when we do, he can make this right.”
Right, Dean thinks. He can’t begin to imagine her reaction if she found out about what he did, before and right now. Yeah, the more he thinks about it, ‘right ‘ is pretty much an impossibility at this point, up to and including an act of god.
*
“I’m sorry we couldn’t help each other out,” Lisa says, and she sounds like she means it.
“Yeah,” Sam says. It’s good he does, because Dean’s not sure his vocal cords are working at the moment. He shifts his feet on the scrubby grass beside the safehouse as if that’ll help him find solid footing.
“You’ll call if you get any leads?” She asks.
“Sure thing,” Sam answers with an easy smile. “Same to you.”
Lisa smiles back, at Sam and at Dean, too.
His self control pretty much crumbles. “I know you don’t want to hear this but don’t let revenge be the only thing in Ben’s life. Hunting doesn’t have to be everything, take time out. Get him through school, at least a GED, give him some options. He deserves a shot at normal life,” Dean pleads. “You both do.” Sam tenses beside him, waiting for the explosion.
Lisa does, indeed, look pissed, but she also looks amused. “I swear, you’re more concerned about my kid than some people I’ve dated,” she says incredulously. “Thanks, I guess.”
“Yeah well, I know the life.” He turns to Ben, or the gawky teen who’s taken his place. “You take care of your mom.”
Ben nods grudgingly. Dean wishes he could imagine some respect mixed in the boy’s standoffish gaze, but he can’t.
Lisa slings her bag over her shoulder and puts an arm around her son, and together they turn and walk to their car. She looks back, just once. And that memory, like every single other one, is going to be branded in Dean’s mind for the rest of his life.
***
Previously: Lethe
Summary: Dean has to remember everything. Lisa doesn’t get to remember any of it. He wonders which of them is really luckier.
Word count: 4,500
Rated: PG-13 (language, sexuality)
Notes: Set post-S6; Spoilers apply
Genre: Het-ish gen, angst
Characters: Dean, Sam, Lisa and Ben; Dean/Lisa
A/N: Follows Lethe, though both pieces stand alone.
Disclaimer: Not the CW, just messing around in their sandbox, making Dean cry
***
Now that he knows Lisa and Ben are back on track with the life they had before him, Dean feels like he’s doing the remembering for all three of them. Everything seems to bring him back to that year, from a baseball game on the motel T.V. to the food he eats. I made Ben pancakes, he finds himself thinking morosely over breakfast. Then he pushes the plate away from him with a disgusted grunt because really? Pancakes? In the course of a year he made Ben just about every breakfast he could think of, he can’t deal with each goddamn meal turning into a trip down memory lane.
“You okay?” Sam says carefully. He knows exactly what’s going on. Has been going on for the past ten months, despite all the distractions of rebelling against a particularly vengeful god.
“Fine,” Dean replies, a sliver of self control away from snapping at his little brother for asking at all.
Sam raises his eyebrows, but lets the lie sit between them, like he will for as long as Dean needs it to. Dean stabs a pancake with his fork and drags the plate back in front of him. Letting Lisa go was the right thing to do. He mechanically shovels bites of food to his mouth, chews without tasting and swallows. She and Ben are better off not remembering everything said while Lisa was possessed. They’re better off without any part of the nightmare world he dragged them into.
Sam wants to talk it out, knowing him probably at least half out of guilt. Both of them remember it was Sam’s dying wish that meshed Lisa’s life with Dean’s in the first place. Apple pie and barbeques, indeed. But Sam was right, Dean had been happy. Despite everything, he had started to adjust. Last ditch effort to have a family of his own, and it actually seemed to be going well. And then….
He could have said no when Sam came back. If he were a different person, he could have said no.
But Dean hardly blames Sam for his own fucked up priorities. The real reason Dean can’t unload is Sam didn’t have the choice he did. Dean is lucky: Sam left Jess on the false premise they were just spending a few days looking for Dad, and he ended up with six years of monster blood and motel sheets. Sam’s happy ending died way back on that night at Stanford, and ever since then he’s just been getting used to the fact.
On the other hand, up ‘till that hospital room Dean had a chance to have the life beyond hunting they’d both wanted once upon a time. Unlike his brother, he knew what he was giving up when he left, and even when he asked Cas to do what he did. And in the end, Lisa made it out alive; she’s off living a long and happy life. How can Dean bitch about that to Sam?
At least he had a choice.
*
“You sure you’re ready?” Sam asks, insistently.
“Yes,” Dean reassures him. He’s always ready; that’s what it means to be a hunter.
The demon they’ve tracked here, Melchom, was Crowley’s accountant. He made it out alive by running like hell after all the purgatory shit went down, and now they get to pretend that this one, unlike every other demon they’ve tracked down and questioned, knows something new about the spell that opened purgatory or, even more improbably, something about how to reverse it. It’s a tall order, trying to believe any of that could possibly be true. Then again, look how far he and Sam have come on pure, unadulterated dumb luck.
Sam smashes the lock on the old warehouse’s doors with the butt of his shotgun, and takes point down the hall. Dean scans the doors branching off to the left and right, looking for one that’s just a bit different, one with a tell-tale sign of being opened recently.
Sam tips his chin towards a door to the right; the hinges glisten more that the others in the bean of his flashlight.
Dean pushes down slowly on the handle, gun cocked and ears piqued for any sounds on the other side; he thinks he might hear voices, and when the door eases open it’s obvious that someone is having a conversation down there in the basement. A loud one. He and Sam exchange knowing looks.
Alert to any unpleasant surprises they might find on the way, the two of them jog down the hall towards a lighted stairwell, the voice getting louder as they approach.
They position themselves on either side of the door, backs pressed to the wall and guns at the ready. “Is that an exorcism?” Sam mouths at Dean. It certainly sounds like one.
Dean peers into the stairwell; there’s a man crouching on the midway landing with a sniper rifle across his knees, and down in the cavernous room below, between the old machines, is Melchom in a devil’s trap, being exorcised by a woman wearing a cropped leather jacket and tight black pants.
“Damn in, we got scooped,” Dean growls. He looks again, just as the demon’s essence spews out of the man’s mouth and is sucked down to hell along with any information he might have had. “Sonofabitch.”
The man on the landing whirls around, the rifle instantly up and pointed at Dean’s face.
“Hey, hey,” Sam says, elbowing Dean out in front of him and raising his hands in surrender. “We’re hunters, it’s cool. We’re hunters.”
The man lowers his gun a fraction, and he’s really only a teenager. Dean squints at him, an odd feeling in his stomach. The kid looks over at the woman down the stairs for instructions, and Dean’s eyes follow.
It’s fuckin’ Lisa.
*
Dean gapes. Sam recognizes her, too, and sucks in an audible breath.
“Uh, what. What are you doing here?” Dean demands, barely managing not to say her name. He can feel Sam’s eyes boring into the back of his head. Not very smooth, he knows, but the best he can do until the gears in his brain start meshing again. Which might happen sometime next year, if he’s lucky.
“Killing demons,” Lisa says with a hard edge that’s definitely new. “Didn’t mean to step on any toes, but…” she shrugs unapologetically. “Early birds, and all.”
“Haha, hah,” Dean laughs, a little hysterically. “And you bring your kid? What is he, twelve?”
“Thirteen,” Ben snaps. Dean looks over at him again in disbelief. His voice has cracked, and he looks a foot taller than he used to be.
“It’s dangerous,” Dean insists.
Lisa’s eyes narrow. “You know, it’s really funny because it sounds like you’re telling me how to raise my child. You wanna give me any more parenting advice, there, Mr. Rogers?”
“I’m sorry,” Sam apologizes over Dean before his brother can say something to make the situation worse. “Everybody’s a little tense, we came here expecting a fight and you two just caught us by surprise is all.” Lisa looks mollified. Dean bets Sam’s giving her those puppy eyes.
“I’m Sam, this is my brother Dean,” Sam says carefully.
“Winchester?” Lisa asks, instantly suspicious. God, Dean thinks, an ice cold shock of exposure running through him. She remembers.
“All the hunters talk about you, over at the Roadhouse.” She looks from one to the other. “Like a legend or something. They say you started hunting when you were four.”
“Thirteen,” Dean corrects automatically. Of course she doesn’t know them. But… Roadhouse?
Lisa smirks. “Not really in a position to be pointing fingers, hmm?” She takes the stairs up to where Ben is standing and looks up at them with her arms crossed. “Lisa. This is my son, Ben. Word is, you two can kill angels. Hell, they say you killed the Devil himself.”
“Sure, close enough,” Sam answers, guarded. “Who’s they?”
“Hunters at the Roadhouse.”
“Burned down, years ago,” Says Dean. A shapshifter? “Try again.”
Lisa fixes him with a look, and he’s transported back to that year, when he’d come back from the store with just a case of beer and ten pounds of junk food. No way that look is faked. It feels like being kicked in the chest.
“Yeah, Harvelle’s burned down and I understand she and her kid died a few years later when the devil made this world his playground …” she stops, seeing their expressions.
Sam clears his throat and un-grits his teeth. “They were friends of ours,” he explains. Lisa stops, then nods respectfully.
“I’m sorry. They sounded like good people.” She shakes her head slightly, with obvious regret. “In any case, a friend of theirs set up a bar for hunters in Colorado last year, named it the Roadhouse as an homage. Now that nobody’s trying to exterminate us anymore, I guess we need a place to swap stories.” She pauses with a wry smile. “I have to say, it’s a total sausage fest.”
“Guess we aren’t missing much, then.” Dean half smiles, too. She and Jo would have gotten along. “That’s where you got a lead on him?” He nods at the corpse still tied to the chair, not letting himself think about Ben seeing corpses, in all likelihood lots of them.
Lisa shrugs. “It’s where I learned to figure things out on my own. Got a few friends who pass along bits and pieces they think I could use.”
“Sounds fair,” says Sam. “What about paying that favor forward? We’re looking for purgatory, and you just ganked our last lead. He say anything before you exorcised him?”
Lisa blinks, surprised. “I thought that was just a rumor. Well, the second he realized he was trapped, he started yelling how he “didn’t know how to open it, he swore!” so there you go. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I went through a flask and a half of holy water, and that’s all he’d say. I doubt he was lying.”
“Great,” Dean grunts.
“Look, he didn’t have anything I was hoping for, either,” Lisa says, shifting her weight. “One of the hunters at the bar set us up with a safe house just north of here. Not the Hilton, but it’s got hexes and sigils built in. We can talk more there. If you can do half of what they say, I have a lot of questions for you.”
Dean grimaces. “Look, we’d love to help but we’re not the best people to get involved with right now.” Just like he wasn’t last time. He doesn’t know if he’d prefer running now and never seeing her again, or keeping her in his line of sight for the rest of eternity. “Purgatory’s just the tip of the iceburg. We’re hunting something big.”
“Same here,” Lisa says with a unpleasant smile.
*
“You’re sure?” Dean demands.
“You already asked me twice, answer’s not going to change,” Lisa answers testily. “None of the things I’ve hunted said anything about purgatory, or alphas, or “Crowley,” or souls. And nobody at the Roadhouse either, or at least nobody who isn’t a drunk. More of a drunk than the rest of them.” She amends seeing Dean’s look.
“Sonofabitch,” Dean mutters, rubbing his face. They’re sitting at the table in the safe house, a dirty and splintery thing that makes up most of the furniture in the place, along with the four chairs around it and a stained couch in the living room. There are two bedrooms with rickety cots down the hall that he and Sam dumped their bags in, while Lisa and Ben are sharing the master suite off the living room.
Sam sighs and leans back. “Well, I guess that’s not unexpected. You got any other leads?”
“There are rumors about one demon, Succorbenoth,” Lisa says without much enthusiasm. “As I hear it, he’s a gatekeeper of hell. Maybe he knows something about Purgatory’s gates too?”
“Could be, but he hasn’t been topside since the mob ran Chicago,” Dean says. “Dead end.”
“Of course.” Lisa runs a hand through her hair in frustration. “Ben, hun, you mind checking our ammo and oiling the guns? “
The teen gets up with a distrustful look in Dean’s direction, and walks across the room to where Lisa stowed the weapons. Sam looks between Lisa and his brother, and murmurs an excuse before heading down the hall to his room. Dean glares after him. He probably thinks he’s being helpful, abandoning his brother like this.
“So.” Lisa says, glancing at Sam’s back with mild curiosity. “If purgatory’s just one piece of the puzzle, ‘big’ is an understatement for what you’re hunting.”
“You could say that.” It’s surreal to talk to her like this. Like strangers. “What about you, what’re you hunting?”
Lisa lets his deflection slide. “Don’t know exactly,” she says.
Dean chuckles humorlessly. “Gonna be a bit tricky, then.” She both is, and isn’t the woman he remembers. He can’t look at her enough, from her hair (longer) to her face (the same).
“Well, that’s where you come in. I’m short on facts, and I need someone with a few more years of hunting under their belt to help me turn what I’ve got into a name.”
Dean can’t say he likes where this is going; it sounds too much like his childhood. “Okay, then, what have you got?”
For the first time since they’ve re-met, Lisa actually looks vulnerable. “A big chunk of nothing, mostly.”
“Alright, well, what started you hunting? I’m sure you have some clues.” This is the part he dreads to hear. What tragedy was visited on the family without him, but for his sins all the same? A demon trying to get revenge? Cas crossing yet another line?
Lisa laughs. “No, I mean nothing. That’s the clue I’ve got. There are holes in my memory, just about a year’s worth. I need to find the thing that took them and get them back.”
*
“Uh, wow,” Dean says. She’s hunting him. “I mean. Huh. That’s a little unusual, typical story is you saw somebody die.”
Lisa looks unamused. “I guess that makes me lucky…?”
Dean forces a laugh. “Parts of my life I’d like to lose,” he jokes. But he means it, too. There are whole swaths he’d just as soon be rid of. He wants her to understand.
“No,” Lisa says. “No, you don’t know what it’s like.”
“I guess not,” Dean admits softly.
“Whatever happened, it happened to me. To us,” she amends, nodding towards Ben. “I have to believe that matters. It’s not right to just have that taken away.”
Dean clears his throat. “You’re sure it’s even supernatural?”
“Definitely. Ben and I were in a car crash about ten months ago, and afterwards I just…I kept feeling these burned out places in my head. As far as I can tell the thing pillaged through about a year and seared out whatever it was they didn’t want me to know.” Lisa stops, collects herself.
“Once I convinced myself I wasn’t going crazy I went to a psychic. Well,” she laughs, “lots of psychics. Until I found one I could take seriously. Trust me, that took a while. But when she told me that she could see that my memory had been tampered with, it was such a relief. Would have been better if she could say what did it, but the closest she could get was ‘something with major mojo’.“
“Just the kind of thing you want to go toe to toe with,” Dean says.
Lisa smiles at him, that bright familiar smile. “Girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”
What Dean needs, he realizes is a fifth of whiskey. Maybe two. “And then it was just a hop and a skip to life on the run? With a kid?”
“Hey,” Lisa says “Don’t cross that line three times.” They stare each-other down for a second, and Dean breaks first.
Lisa leans back in her chair, satisfied with Dean’s cowed silence. “Once I learned that the only things with the juice to root through memories and take something specific were high-level demons and angels, yeah I ran. Clearly, they knew where to find me if they wanted seconds, and that wasn’t gonna happen. I found my way to the bar, and I learned the hexes and sigils and all that from some guy who learned it from some other guy in South Dakota.”
“And that’s how it is,” Dean says.
“That’s how it is,” Lisa agrees. “I pin down the biggest demons I can, I question them, I exorcise them, and Ben and I take out whatever else we bump into on the way. And what keeps me going is thinking that this time, this time we’re gonna find the one who screwed our lives up.”
“You realize there’s a good chance that even if you find the thing, best you’re gonna get is revenge, right?” A good chance he’ll remain the sole keeper of their year together.
“Yeah,” Lisa says softly. “Still better than not trying at all.” Dean wants to go to her and wrap her in his arms, to comfort her like she did for him all those times after Sam died. But of course, he can’t. It’s only in his head that they’re old lovers. As far as she's concerned they only met a few hours ago.
“Are there any drinks in this joint?” He asks.
*
Dean’s buzzed from the half bottle of dusty rum he and Lisa just demolished, but not in a way that makes sleep appealing. Instead he’s just staring at the ceiling of the small, dark room, going through all his snapshots of that year with Lisa. The booze-tinged memories of the first months, when he alternated between rage and depression and Lisa was his rock through it all. The feeling of her skin. The first time Ben hugged him, and the arguments, and laughing over the stove, and her body limp in his arms as he ran for the car, knowing it was too late. It’s all there, preserved in bright, clear memories. Memories and nothing else.
There’s a knock on the door. “Yeah,” he grunts; Sam always wants to process their feelings.
But it’s Lisa.
“Hey,” she says, leaning up against the door.
“Hey yourself,” he answers, pushing himself up on his elbows. “What’re you doing here?”
Lisa tips her head back and forth, lips puckered as if she is seriously considering the question. “It’s a tough life,” she says, sitting down on the foot of the cot. “You take your fun where you can get it.”
“Oh,” Says Dean. He opens his mouth to deflect her with a reference to Ben waiting back in the room she’s sharing with him, and maybe being a little young to understand “fun where you can get it,” but then he remembers Lisa’s face the last time he tried to step in for Ben’s interests.
“Look, don’t take it too personally,” Lisa says with that casual warmth, so much the Lisa he remembers. “You’re my type is all, and from the way you’ve been staring,” she trails off with a polite shrug. “Not exactly subtle.”
Dean knows they can’t. Not with everything he remembers, and all the things she doesn’t. But then, part of what he remembers is the perfection of her breasts in his hands. But then, he’s the reason she’s and Ben sold their apple pie life for abandoned houses and exorcisms. She and Ben are in danger despite- or because of- him sacrificing her memories on the alter of his conscience.
“I don’t really think this is a good idea,” Dean says without much conviction.
“Oh, it isn’t,” Lisa says, nodding and sliding up next to him. “Little bit like living out of a car, going after monsters that can break your neck soon as look at you isn’t a good idea.” She bends over close to him to whisper in his ear, “I guess we’re just not ‘good idea’ kinda people.”
Damn it, he’s hard. He puts a hand on her shoulder to push her back a safe distance but it ends up a little closer to a caress, and she’s suddenly in his arms, all of her, pressed flat against his chest as she kisses him deep and slow.
He responds almost instinctually, raising his hand to brush that place just under her ear that always made her shiver- it still does.
Lisa pulls back and licks her lips. Dean’s never wanted someone this badly. Her eyes are running down his torso hungrily, like she’s never seen him naked. Which, of course, for all intents and purposes she hasn’t. While Dean, he can recall with utter clarity what’s under her loose tank-top, the soft curves that are filling out her tight black jeans.
“Look, hey,” he murmurs nonsensically, his hands on her waist keeping her close, or keeping her away- he can’t tell. “Just… not tonight.”
Lisa rocks back, bemused. “I have to say, you don’t look like the waiting type. Did I come on a little strong?”
“No, no, it isn’t you. God knows it isn’t you,” he says, allowing himself another quick glance at the peaks of her nipples. “I just can’t.”
Lisa takes a moment to digest his apology, and nods. “Is it alright if I stay awhile?” She asks. “Ben and I were really thinking we’d caught a break, meeting you, but it’s still the same old ‘what next’….” She shakes her head sadly. “I wanna not be a mom for an hour is all.”
“Yeah,” Dean says, accepting her body into the space beside his. He holds her tightly, willing their flesh to communicate everything he isn’t saying.
*
“I think it was a person that got erased,” Lisa says into the dark. “A lover.” Dean can feel the vibrations in her chest, pressed up against his ribs. “Just, the kind of things I lost seem like they’re places where a person would go. I don’t know, it’s mostly just a feeling, but that’s all I’ve ever had to go on. Since the crash. I’m sorry, is this weird?”
“It’s fine.” Dean’s glad she can’t see his face, or feel how tight his throat has gotten. “You think you’ll find him?”
Lisa sighs. “No.”
“Probably not,” Dean agrees.
“I mean, if something big went to all the trouble of burning this guy out of my memory, it’s a little ridiculous to think they’d leave the real article bouncing around, right?” She sounds resigned, but there’s still an echo of heartbreak in her voice, heartbreak for him.
She never chose this; he did, and he was wrong. Dean was playing god before Cas was, he’s the monster in this scenario hands down. He was trying to save her, but how did he fail to see that even the Lisa who seemed so angry and sure when she told him they were done might still want a memory of the way they loved each other once? And now he’s taken that away from her. From both of them.
*
The four hunters don’t even have breakfast together; there’s nothing to eat, anyways. Dean remembers when he used to make pancakes for Ben. Lisa goes about packing up without a second thought.
“Sam, we gotta tell her,” Dean whispers.
“Tell her what,” Sam snaps, sotto voce. “That god himself eternal sunshined her? You know she’d go after him, do you really want her in the ring with Castiel the Almighty?”
“I don’t know,” Dean growls, “This is just really fucked up.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, voice tight, “I think everybody here gets that. I’m just not really seeing an easy solution.”
Dean curses under his breath. He has half a mind to protest that, if nothing else, an answer will allow her to stop hunting, but he and Sam know better than anyone it’s not a lifestyle you get out of once you’re in. And without an angel to restore the memories- if that’s even possible- is the cliffs-notes version going to do her any good? Bring her and Ben peace? Even Dean thinks his story sounds far fetched, there’s no guarantee she’d buy it at all. And if she did, giving her his side of events as truth might be a worse lie that leaving the gaps.
“We gotta at least… stick with them, make sure they’re okay.”
Sam’s eyes are understanding, but his tone firm: “You’re not going down that rabbit hole again,” he pronounces. “The best thing we can do is just stop interfering. It’s her choice to live this life, and she’s watching out for herself and Ben just fine. We drag her back into our lives, that’ll only get harder.
“And you know we can’t be around them, with you remembering everything and them not, you know how wrong that is.” Dean looks over at Lisa, who’s poring over a map with Ben. “Tell me you know how wrong that is,” Sam insists.
“I know,” Dean admits.
“Look,” Sam says quickly, as Lisa and Ben finish picking a route and start to stow the last of their scant belongings, “We’re gonna find a way to get Cas to be just Cas again, and when we do, he can make this right.”
Right, Dean thinks. He can’t begin to imagine her reaction if she found out about what he did, before and right now. Yeah, the more he thinks about it, ‘right ‘ is pretty much an impossibility at this point, up to and including an act of god.
*
“I’m sorry we couldn’t help each other out,” Lisa says, and she sounds like she means it.
“Yeah,” Sam says. It’s good he does, because Dean’s not sure his vocal cords are working at the moment. He shifts his feet on the scrubby grass beside the safehouse as if that’ll help him find solid footing.
“You’ll call if you get any leads?” She asks.
“Sure thing,” Sam answers with an easy smile. “Same to you.”
Lisa smiles back, at Sam and at Dean, too.
His self control pretty much crumbles. “I know you don’t want to hear this but don’t let revenge be the only thing in Ben’s life. Hunting doesn’t have to be everything, take time out. Get him through school, at least a GED, give him some options. He deserves a shot at normal life,” Dean pleads. “You both do.” Sam tenses beside him, waiting for the explosion.
Lisa does, indeed, look pissed, but she also looks amused. “I swear, you’re more concerned about my kid than some people I’ve dated,” she says incredulously. “Thanks, I guess.”
“Yeah well, I know the life.” He turns to Ben, or the gawky teen who’s taken his place. “You take care of your mom.”
Ben nods grudgingly. Dean wishes he could imagine some respect mixed in the boy’s standoffish gaze, but he can’t.
Lisa slings her bag over her shoulder and puts an arm around her son, and together they turn and walk to their car. She looks back, just once. And that memory, like every single other one, is going to be branded in Dean’s mind for the rest of his life.
***
Previously: Lethe