Fic: He wasn't there again today (I wish, I wish he'd go away)
Title: He wasn't there again today (I wish, I wish he'd go away)
Author: britomart_is
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG
Words: 2700
Notes: This story began its life as a prompt from rejeneration back in May, though it may be unrecognizable now. Spoilers for all aired episodes.
Summary: The story of that year.
Sam doesn't know how long he's there.
There's one clock in hell, but it's broken.
--
Dean slivers his eyelids open when a door-full of sunlight smacks him in the face. "Yaneearyeskull?"
Ben is an apt interpreter. "Maybe you can give me a ride tomorrow morning," he says pointedly.
Dean opens his eyes all the way. Ben has his backpack on. Through the window, he sees the yellow school bus pulling away from the corner. A little girl in a pink tutu walks down the sidewalk cradling a papier-mache volcano in her arms.
"Yeah." Dean sits up on the couch and rubs a hand over his face. It scratches. He should shave. He remembers thinking that yesterday, or maybe a week ago. "Hey, you want to play gratuitously violent video games before your mom gets home?"
Ben cracks a smile. He drops his backpack with a thud before running upstairs to get the first-person shooter he keeps hidden between the mattress and box spring. And oh, is Dean ever glad he got here before Ben starts keeping other stuff down there. It doesn't seem like that long ago that Dean last gave the puberty talk to a scrawny preteen.
Something sharp-toothed is gnawing at the inside of Dean's skull. "Just gotta check on something. In the garage," he murmurs, Ben not listening anyway as he starts up the game.
Dean drowns the ravenous skull-biter in a swallow of Jack and shuts the trunk. He pulls the dust-cover back over the Impala and pats her flank. "Yup," he says, straightening his spine. He's ready to face the morning. Afternoon. Whatever.
Back against the couch and toes digging into plush carpet, he settles in next to Ben, ready to correct his aim.
--
The door, which is not a door, hangs wide open for Sam. From above, he can hear the grass growing down into the soil. He can hear an ice cream truck and pounding children's feet on concrete. He can hear the click-click-whirr of sprinklers on lawns.
Upstairs where the grass grows, there is spaghetti waiting for Sam to eat it and shoes waiting to go on his feet. There are grocery baggers waiting to make friendly eye contact. There are beds waiting to be slept in.
The door is open. The breezes are wending their way down, teasing at the back of Sam's neck even here. The door is open, and Sam could walk through it right now.
He curls in on himself till his ribs grate uncomfortably, compressed. He cowers in his own filth, neck bowed painfully. Sam can't look at the door because if he does then he'll walk through it.
--
Lisa's big on health. There's a white plastic jar the size of a car battery on the kitchen counter. It's full of multivitamins the size of .22 caliber bullets. When Lisa makes breakfast (when Dean's conscious for breakfast) she lays one unobtrusively on the rim of Dean's plate and he swallows it dutifully.
Ben has to get a full physical before he can play baseball in the spring. Lisa's working, so Dean buckles Ben into the truck and doesn't so much as run a yellow on the way. Figures he'll read Highlights and Golf Today in the waiting room for an hour. It isn't till they check in at the front desk that Dean finds out that Lisa's made him an appointment, too.
So for the first time since high school, Dean enters a medical facility without either a fake badge or at least three symptoms of hypovolemic shock. Usually in hospitals Dean's too busy hemorrhaging for anyone to bother him with paperwork. But that's not Dean's life anymore. This is a life with forms, lots of them. Eating habits and exercise questions, the kind that get Dean disapproving looks from the doctor.
Have you ever had a broken bone? Mountain biking accident.
Have you ever had a serious head injury, the form inquires politely. Not that I can recall.
If you are a man, have you ever had sex with another man? No, Dean writes, and the ink is looking a particularly regretful shade of blue. If there were ever a shade of blue that waited too long, hesitated too often, and took for granted that there'd be time for everything to turn out all right, this is that blue.
The form asks for family medical history. Detailed family medical history.
Mother: Deceased. Age 29. Accidental.
Father: Deceased. Age 52. Natural causes.
Brother
The nurse is calling for Dean, may have been for some time. He has to give the clipboard back. It's his turn.
Deceased. Age 27.
She's holding out her hand for the clipboard.
This is the place where Dean has to write something. Accidental: my brother fell in a hole. Homicide: my brother was pushed into a hole. Suicide: my brother jumped in a hole. Dean chooses and scrawls.
The pen snaps in Dean's hand. A creeping blue inkblot obscures everything after the word Brother.
The doctor is flabbergasted that Dean's not a type-2 diabetic with arteries like rocks. "You must have damn good genes," she says. "Lucky man."
Yep, that's him. Lucky, lucky Dean. Actually, doc, every time supernatural forces beyond my control raise me from the grave, they do a little tuneup. As for his genes, Dean has no way of knowing. There has never been an old Winchester. Their mutated cells don't have the chance to grow and metastasize, heart-attacks-waiting-to-happen never do, and the creeping neurological decline of old age is a remote fear: every one of Dean's family has seen Death bearing down on them with excruciating clarity.
The doc sentences Dean to a long and healthy life.
With Dean's luck, he'll live to see a hundred, then die and go to heaven.
--
After a time that Sam can't measure (notches in the door frame, tally on the wall, half-moons bloodied into clenched fists), he stands up and walks out of the door. Because he wants to.
Hell tries to cling to him. Sam brushes it aside like he would cobwebs in his path.
Sam stretches his arms above his head, spine crick-crick-cracking. He walks a distance down the sidewalk, turns, walks back. He picks up a rock from the ground just because he can. Sam looks at the grass. He can't hear it growing anymore.
When Lucifer rattles the bars of his cage, Sam's heart slams against his ribs.
Let me out.
"Put a lid on it," Sam says. "I'm enjoying my freedom." He relishes the word. "Think I'll stretch my legs a little. Feels good."
Lucifer chuckles knowingly. Stretch your legs, hmm? Wherever will you go?
Sam didn't intend to go to the house. But he wanted to. Badly. Now he is standing on the sidewalk.
Dean. Dean is there. Dean is okay. Dean looks rough. Perhaps time has passed. Dean is sitting at a dining table. Dean has always deserved a dining table. One with lots of chairs around it.
Sam's flannel is off and wrapped around his hand, ready to break the dining room window, crawl over the jagged edges of glass, push Dean down right in front of the woman and child and claim him. Sam's already halfway across the front yard. "Oh god." Sam's toes crackle and pop as he tries to glue himself to the lawn, to stop his own stride.
Lucifer's laughing at him again. What do you want, Sam?
"I want," Sam says. He's three steps closer to the house. "I want." In this moment, God could bury Dean in the molten center of the Earth, and Sam would still come for him. Not just would. Could. Sam could break the planet apart to get to Dean, with no more effort than cracking an eggshell in his hand.
You should take what you want. You know that you can.
When Dean came back from hell, Sam thinks, he was dead inside. Sam is so vividly, violently alive that he thinks he's on fire. Dean's always made Sam feel on fire inside, but always mediated by what Sam should do, want, take.
Lucifer has no sense of should. Sam's clinging to his own by a thread.
Sam's another step closer to the house, and he won't be able to do what he should do. Not knock on the door. Not say hello. Not sweep Dean off his feet and promise to make up for lost time. Just take. Everything. So Sam loosens the leash. Just a little. "Go."
Lucifer does what Sam can't. He takes Sam's legs down the street in a exultant sprint, reveling in the simple pleasure of steering his own course. Sam gets a taste of the sensual intoxication of doing exactly what you want. Of power, used and not restrained.
"Go farther," he grits out. "Go fast."
Dean's window remains unbroken. But it would just be so easy.
--
When Ben was barely old enough to sit up on his own, wobbly and always toppling over giggling with joy, Lisa brushed the soft curls off his forehead and promised him that she would never be that mom. That Ben would never have daddy after daddy, that he wouldn't grow up remembering only the backs of those men's coats as they walked out the door.
That's why they never make it past the welcome mat in the first place. But life, it seems, is all about breaking the promises you've made to yourself.
She tells Dean this, when he's slept on her couch for two months and she still hasn't invited him into her bed - the kitchen counter, yes; up against a wall, yes; rug-burned on the floor because they can't make it to any other surface, oh god yes - but not her bed. "Ben will always come first for me."
"Good," Dean says firmly. "You'll always love him more."
"That's not what I meant-"
"I mean it," Dean says. "Good. I can't love you the most either."
All charm, that one.
Dean stares at the drawer she clears out for him. His fingers curl and uncurl around the duffel strap, his shoulder tense under the bag's weight.
"You know what?" she says. "Never mind. This wasn't a good idea." Dean, of all the men she could choose. Dean of the no-permanent-address. Dean with the mental rolodex of small arms dealers in the lower forty-eight states. Dean who doesn't know what a mortgage is, who doesn't know that if you take half-hour long showers you have to pay the utility bill later.
"I'm not going to leave," Dean says. "I can't offer you a lot - can't offer you anything, really - but I can stay."
Lisa works her jaw silently.
"You made a promise to Ben, right? That's why you're worried."
She spreads her palms on the wood-grain expanse of the empty drawer.
"I made a promise, too."
Dean puts his socks and novelty boxers and sweat-stained undershirts in the drawer. But Lisa still doesn't invite him into her bed. Not yet.
--
At the end of a long gravel road there is a squat white house. In the squat white house, there is a frightened man and a frightened woman. Their name is Spenser. In the master bedroom of the Spenser's squat white house, a child ghost with no voice sucks the air out of the room and leaves the Spensers gasping. Back up the long gravel road and down a paved one, beneath the town hall, there is a dusty storeroom with fifty years of newspapers. In the yellowed papers, there is a story that tells Sam about the Spenser boy who ran away and broke his parents' hearts. In that story, there is a picture, and the Spenser boy has freckles. In the cellar of the Spensers' squat white house, there are bones underneath dirt. Between the bony jaws, there is still a suffocating sock. The noisy boy the bones belong to isn't noisy anymore.
Lying on the bed in the squat white house, there are what used to be a man and used to be a woman. They have blue lips and no breath and aren't frightened anymore.
Sam should have saved them. He didn't want to.
--
Dean stopped driving his baby the first day he walked through Lisa's door. Even several months later, when his blood alcohol content was back under the legal limit, she stayed shrouded. Dean did eventually have call to leave the house: a job, a potluck dinner, a parent-teacher meeting, a block party where someone sets off a firework and Dean tries to draw the gun he doesn't have.
Really, she needs at least a grocery run once in a while to keep her in shape. Dean crumples the dust cover on a shelf and slides into the driver's seat. He turns the key in the ignition and it won't start. Not even a grumble and cough of reluctance. She's dead.
On an excruciatingly sunny Wednesday, Dean comes home and finds the car clean. Spotless. No Snickers wrappers and used tissues crushed in the wheel wells. Dean has two seconds to process the proud look on Ben's face before he's walking to the curb and overturning the garbage can into the street. On his knees, Dean sifts through domestic detritus until he comes up with a used Starbucks cup. Black Sharpie scrawls across its surface, tells its history: here once was a venti soy hazelnut latte, extra hot.
It's a drink so absurd that no one else has ever ordered it, or ever will. This is the last such cup in the world and there will never be another. Not ever.
Dean sits in the scattered trash, holding the cup, for some time before he relocates to the back seat of the Impala, where he falls asleep still holding it.
--
When Sam wants the chatty local historian to like him and think he's interesting and talk to him for a long time, some might call that loneliness. When he wants to run a driver off the road for cutting him off, some might call that anger. When he wants to keep the scribbled number a long-lashed brunette slips him and call her and fast forward to a welcome mat and squalling infants, some might call that wistfulness. When Sam doesn't want to continue bleeding from the femoral artery until he passes out and isn't found till he's decomposing, some people would call that fear. When Sam spends every waking minute wanting to drive through four states and a tornado warning just to see Dean's face again, your average man on the street might call that love.
Sam is a prison of bone and flesh and blood and fear. Sam is a cage. Sam has to be a cage. Sam has to be iron. Iron doesn't know regret or hunger or hope.
--
The local animal shelter brings a soft-furred brown dog to sit with a volunteer at the farmer's market. Ben falls in love.
After a hushed conversation with Lisa, Dean goes back to the shelter. He coaxes the dog out of its pen and signs some forms and puts a blue collar and leash on it. Ben names the dog Van Damme and it sleeps at the foot of his bed, leaving fur everywhere.
Two weeks later, it vaults over the picket fence, sprints into the street, and is run over by a beige Toyota minivan with a rosary hanging from the rear view mirror.
Ben cries. Dean curses the dog for blowing his cover, sabotaging him. He's trying, here. He's trying.
--
In the morning, Sam showers, shaves, brushes his teeth, flosses, does five sets of fifteen situps, checks the weather report, confirms what he already knows -- that there are no messages in his voice mail, drinks a cup of coffee, and doesn't let Lucifer out of his cage.
The next day, Sam does it again.
Every morning, Sam wakes up knowing that today could be the day he opens the cage door and lets the devil walk free. Today could be the day Sam stops being a cage and is only Sam.
Sam wants today to be that day. But Sam can't have what he wants.
Author: britomart_is
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG
Words: 2700
Notes: This story began its life as a prompt from rejeneration back in May, though it may be unrecognizable now. Spoilers for all aired episodes.
Summary: The story of that year.
Sam doesn't know how long he's there.
There's one clock in hell, but it's broken.
--
Dean slivers his eyelids open when a door-full of sunlight smacks him in the face. "Yaneearyeskull?"
Ben is an apt interpreter. "Maybe you can give me a ride tomorrow morning," he says pointedly.
Dean opens his eyes all the way. Ben has his backpack on. Through the window, he sees the yellow school bus pulling away from the corner. A little girl in a pink tutu walks down the sidewalk cradling a papier-mache volcano in her arms.
"Yeah." Dean sits up on the couch and rubs a hand over his face. It scratches. He should shave. He remembers thinking that yesterday, or maybe a week ago. "Hey, you want to play gratuitously violent video games before your mom gets home?"
Ben cracks a smile. He drops his backpack with a thud before running upstairs to get the first-person shooter he keeps hidden between the mattress and box spring. And oh, is Dean ever glad he got here before Ben starts keeping other stuff down there. It doesn't seem like that long ago that Dean last gave the puberty talk to a scrawny preteen.
Something sharp-toothed is gnawing at the inside of Dean's skull. "Just gotta check on something. In the garage," he murmurs, Ben not listening anyway as he starts up the game.
Dean drowns the ravenous skull-biter in a swallow of Jack and shuts the trunk. He pulls the dust-cover back over the Impala and pats her flank. "Yup," he says, straightening his spine. He's ready to face the morning. Afternoon. Whatever.
Back against the couch and toes digging into plush carpet, he settles in next to Ben, ready to correct his aim.
--
The door, which is not a door, hangs wide open for Sam. From above, he can hear the grass growing down into the soil. He can hear an ice cream truck and pounding children's feet on concrete. He can hear the click-click-whirr of sprinklers on lawns.
Upstairs where the grass grows, there is spaghetti waiting for Sam to eat it and shoes waiting to go on his feet. There are grocery baggers waiting to make friendly eye contact. There are beds waiting to be slept in.
The door is open. The breezes are wending their way down, teasing at the back of Sam's neck even here. The door is open, and Sam could walk through it right now.
He curls in on himself till his ribs grate uncomfortably, compressed. He cowers in his own filth, neck bowed painfully. Sam can't look at the door because if he does then he'll walk through it.
--
Lisa's big on health. There's a white plastic jar the size of a car battery on the kitchen counter. It's full of multivitamins the size of .22 caliber bullets. When Lisa makes breakfast (when Dean's conscious for breakfast) she lays one unobtrusively on the rim of Dean's plate and he swallows it dutifully.
Ben has to get a full physical before he can play baseball in the spring. Lisa's working, so Dean buckles Ben into the truck and doesn't so much as run a yellow on the way. Figures he'll read Highlights and Golf Today in the waiting room for an hour. It isn't till they check in at the front desk that Dean finds out that Lisa's made him an appointment, too.
So for the first time since high school, Dean enters a medical facility without either a fake badge or at least three symptoms of hypovolemic shock. Usually in hospitals Dean's too busy hemorrhaging for anyone to bother him with paperwork. But that's not Dean's life anymore. This is a life with forms, lots of them. Eating habits and exercise questions, the kind that get Dean disapproving looks from the doctor.
Have you ever had a broken bone? Mountain biking accident.
Have you ever had a serious head injury, the form inquires politely. Not that I can recall.
If you are a man, have you ever had sex with another man? No, Dean writes, and the ink is looking a particularly regretful shade of blue. If there were ever a shade of blue that waited too long, hesitated too often, and took for granted that there'd be time for everything to turn out all right, this is that blue.
The form asks for family medical history. Detailed family medical history.
Mother: Deceased. Age 29. Accidental.
Father: Deceased. Age 52. Natural causes.
Brother
The nurse is calling for Dean, may have been for some time. He has to give the clipboard back. It's his turn.
Deceased. Age 27.
She's holding out her hand for the clipboard.
This is the place where Dean has to write something. Accidental: my brother fell in a hole. Homicide: my brother was pushed into a hole. Suicide: my brother jumped in a hole. Dean chooses and scrawls.
The pen snaps in Dean's hand. A creeping blue inkblot obscures everything after the word Brother.
The doctor is flabbergasted that Dean's not a type-2 diabetic with arteries like rocks. "You must have damn good genes," she says. "Lucky man."
Yep, that's him. Lucky, lucky Dean. Actually, doc, every time supernatural forces beyond my control raise me from the grave, they do a little tuneup. As for his genes, Dean has no way of knowing. There has never been an old Winchester. Their mutated cells don't have the chance to grow and metastasize, heart-attacks-waiting-to-happen never do, and the creeping neurological decline of old age is a remote fear: every one of Dean's family has seen Death bearing down on them with excruciating clarity.
The doc sentences Dean to a long and healthy life.
With Dean's luck, he'll live to see a hundred, then die and go to heaven.
--
After a time that Sam can't measure (notches in the door frame, tally on the wall, half-moons bloodied into clenched fists), he stands up and walks out of the door. Because he wants to.
Hell tries to cling to him. Sam brushes it aside like he would cobwebs in his path.
Sam stretches his arms above his head, spine crick-crick-cracking. He walks a distance down the sidewalk, turns, walks back. He picks up a rock from the ground just because he can. Sam looks at the grass. He can't hear it growing anymore.
When Lucifer rattles the bars of his cage, Sam's heart slams against his ribs.
Let me out.
"Put a lid on it," Sam says. "I'm enjoying my freedom." He relishes the word. "Think I'll stretch my legs a little. Feels good."
Lucifer chuckles knowingly. Stretch your legs, hmm? Wherever will you go?
Sam didn't intend to go to the house. But he wanted to. Badly. Now he is standing on the sidewalk.
Dean. Dean is there. Dean is okay. Dean looks rough. Perhaps time has passed. Dean is sitting at a dining table. Dean has always deserved a dining table. One with lots of chairs around it.
Sam's flannel is off and wrapped around his hand, ready to break the dining room window, crawl over the jagged edges of glass, push Dean down right in front of the woman and child and claim him. Sam's already halfway across the front yard. "Oh god." Sam's toes crackle and pop as he tries to glue himself to the lawn, to stop his own stride.
Lucifer's laughing at him again. What do you want, Sam?
"I want," Sam says. He's three steps closer to the house. "I want." In this moment, God could bury Dean in the molten center of the Earth, and Sam would still come for him. Not just would. Could. Sam could break the planet apart to get to Dean, with no more effort than cracking an eggshell in his hand.
You should take what you want. You know that you can.
When Dean came back from hell, Sam thinks, he was dead inside. Sam is so vividly, violently alive that he thinks he's on fire. Dean's always made Sam feel on fire inside, but always mediated by what Sam should do, want, take.
Lucifer has no sense of should. Sam's clinging to his own by a thread.
Sam's another step closer to the house, and he won't be able to do what he should do. Not knock on the door. Not say hello. Not sweep Dean off his feet and promise to make up for lost time. Just take. Everything. So Sam loosens the leash. Just a little. "Go."
Lucifer does what Sam can't. He takes Sam's legs down the street in a exultant sprint, reveling in the simple pleasure of steering his own course. Sam gets a taste of the sensual intoxication of doing exactly what you want. Of power, used and not restrained.
"Go farther," he grits out. "Go fast."
Dean's window remains unbroken. But it would just be so easy.
--
When Ben was barely old enough to sit up on his own, wobbly and always toppling over giggling with joy, Lisa brushed the soft curls off his forehead and promised him that she would never be that mom. That Ben would never have daddy after daddy, that he wouldn't grow up remembering only the backs of those men's coats as they walked out the door.
That's why they never make it past the welcome mat in the first place. But life, it seems, is all about breaking the promises you've made to yourself.
She tells Dean this, when he's slept on her couch for two months and she still hasn't invited him into her bed - the kitchen counter, yes; up against a wall, yes; rug-burned on the floor because they can't make it to any other surface, oh god yes - but not her bed. "Ben will always come first for me."
"Good," Dean says firmly. "You'll always love him more."
"That's not what I meant-"
"I mean it," Dean says. "Good. I can't love you the most either."
All charm, that one.
Dean stares at the drawer she clears out for him. His fingers curl and uncurl around the duffel strap, his shoulder tense under the bag's weight.
"You know what?" she says. "Never mind. This wasn't a good idea." Dean, of all the men she could choose. Dean of the no-permanent-address. Dean with the mental rolodex of small arms dealers in the lower forty-eight states. Dean who doesn't know what a mortgage is, who doesn't know that if you take half-hour long showers you have to pay the utility bill later.
"I'm not going to leave," Dean says. "I can't offer you a lot - can't offer you anything, really - but I can stay."
Lisa works her jaw silently.
"You made a promise to Ben, right? That's why you're worried."
She spreads her palms on the wood-grain expanse of the empty drawer.
"I made a promise, too."
Dean puts his socks and novelty boxers and sweat-stained undershirts in the drawer. But Lisa still doesn't invite him into her bed. Not yet.
--
At the end of a long gravel road there is a squat white house. In the squat white house, there is a frightened man and a frightened woman. Their name is Spenser. In the master bedroom of the Spenser's squat white house, a child ghost with no voice sucks the air out of the room and leaves the Spensers gasping. Back up the long gravel road and down a paved one, beneath the town hall, there is a dusty storeroom with fifty years of newspapers. In the yellowed papers, there is a story that tells Sam about the Spenser boy who ran away and broke his parents' hearts. In that story, there is a picture, and the Spenser boy has freckles. In the cellar of the Spensers' squat white house, there are bones underneath dirt. Between the bony jaws, there is still a suffocating sock. The noisy boy the bones belong to isn't noisy anymore.
Lying on the bed in the squat white house, there are what used to be a man and used to be a woman. They have blue lips and no breath and aren't frightened anymore.
Sam should have saved them. He didn't want to.
--
Dean stopped driving his baby the first day he walked through Lisa's door. Even several months later, when his blood alcohol content was back under the legal limit, she stayed shrouded. Dean did eventually have call to leave the house: a job, a potluck dinner, a parent-teacher meeting, a block party where someone sets off a firework and Dean tries to draw the gun he doesn't have.
Really, she needs at least a grocery run once in a while to keep her in shape. Dean crumples the dust cover on a shelf and slides into the driver's seat. He turns the key in the ignition and it won't start. Not even a grumble and cough of reluctance. She's dead.
On an excruciatingly sunny Wednesday, Dean comes home and finds the car clean. Spotless. No Snickers wrappers and used tissues crushed in the wheel wells. Dean has two seconds to process the proud look on Ben's face before he's walking to the curb and overturning the garbage can into the street. On his knees, Dean sifts through domestic detritus until he comes up with a used Starbucks cup. Black Sharpie scrawls across its surface, tells its history: here once was a venti soy hazelnut latte, extra hot.
It's a drink so absurd that no one else has ever ordered it, or ever will. This is the last such cup in the world and there will never be another. Not ever.
Dean sits in the scattered trash, holding the cup, for some time before he relocates to the back seat of the Impala, where he falls asleep still holding it.
--
When Sam wants the chatty local historian to like him and think he's interesting and talk to him for a long time, some might call that loneliness. When he wants to run a driver off the road for cutting him off, some might call that anger. When he wants to keep the scribbled number a long-lashed brunette slips him and call her and fast forward to a welcome mat and squalling infants, some might call that wistfulness. When Sam doesn't want to continue bleeding from the femoral artery until he passes out and isn't found till he's decomposing, some people would call that fear. When Sam spends every waking minute wanting to drive through four states and a tornado warning just to see Dean's face again, your average man on the street might call that love.
Sam is a prison of bone and flesh and blood and fear. Sam is a cage. Sam has to be a cage. Sam has to be iron. Iron doesn't know regret or hunger or hope.
--
The local animal shelter brings a soft-furred brown dog to sit with a volunteer at the farmer's market. Ben falls in love.
After a hushed conversation with Lisa, Dean goes back to the shelter. He coaxes the dog out of its pen and signs some forms and puts a blue collar and leash on it. Ben names the dog Van Damme and it sleeps at the foot of his bed, leaving fur everywhere.
Two weeks later, it vaults over the picket fence, sprints into the street, and is run over by a beige Toyota minivan with a rosary hanging from the rear view mirror.
Ben cries. Dean curses the dog for blowing his cover, sabotaging him. He's trying, here. He's trying.
--
In the morning, Sam showers, shaves, brushes his teeth, flosses, does five sets of fifteen situps, checks the weather report, confirms what he already knows -- that there are no messages in his voice mail, drinks a cup of coffee, and doesn't let Lucifer out of his cage.
The next day, Sam does it again.
Every morning, Sam wakes up knowing that today could be the day he opens the cage door and lets the devil walk free. Today could be the day Sam stops being a cage and is only Sam.
Sam wants today to be that day. But Sam can't have what he wants.