SPN: "not the burnt and broken" (5.22 coda)
Title: "not the burnt and broken"
spoilers: for 5.22
words: 1,135
rated R
warning: I like her, and I'm willing to argue. :P
disclaimer: Kripke did it, and I'm just interpolating.
Summary: Dean had always known it ended sad, or bloody. He never realized how much he was counting on bloody. Or, you know, dead.
~*o*~
Dean had always known it ended sad, or bloody.
He never realized how much he was counting on bloody.
Or, you know, dead.
He remembered, as though through the warped reality of high fever, kneeling there alone in the parched grass of Stull Cemetery.
He remembered Castiel's words and how they'd circled and chimed their way around inside his head, like a mob of angry sparrows:
You are not the burnt and broken shell of a man that I believed you to be.
You are not the burnt and broken shell of a man that I believed you to be.
You are not the burnt and broken shell of a man that I believed you to be.
Then, looking up, he felt Castiel's cool fingers on his forehead, felt the pounding wretchedness of the swollen flesh and broken bones of his body drain away, as Castiel knit him back together in one kind and terribly unkind instant. Again. Pulling him up from perdition, to leave him again, in perdition.
Lost. Alone.
He'd been a while at Bobby's. It wasn't like Bobby needed him there. In fact, just the opposite. Bobby didn't like to see Dean drink alone, and Dean soon realized, with the quantity of Turkey they were consuming, that he was doing more to cement Bobby's reputation as the town drunk of Sioux Falls than decades of Bobby acting out "guilty, mourning, paranoid recluse" had done.
So Dean pulled himself back together. He shared a final bucket of chicken with the only man left alive that loved him like family, and he drove from South Dakota to Indiana.
Like a bat out of hell, it would have been a twelve-hour drive.
It took him a week.
The first day, as he pulled away from the junkyard, his eyes were burning, his chest was tight, and he had in the AC/DC, but "Back in Black" just didn't sit right. He jammed the stereo off.
He drove through a haze of tears until the sobs starting tearing him open. He pulled off the two lane road into some old farmer's pasture, weeds high and gate open. The Impala idled around him as he lay across the steering wheel, gasping for breath, groaning out his pain like a newbie on the rack. Eventually he turned off the ignition, and just let himself fall sideways into the shotgun. Pressing his check against the leather where Sam would never, ever, sit again, he just howled into the empty, deafening silence, until his throat was raw and his stomach felt like he'd done a John number of situps. Eventually his tears hollowed out. He stopped crying.
You are not the burnt and broken shell of a man that I believed you to be.
Yeah, right, he thought, because all this triumph that we saved the world makes me feel so much better.
Finally the urgent need to piss drove him out of the car-- just far enough to relieve himself into the grass.
The sunlight gleamed off her paint job, and he remembered again how Sammy had stared into the car like he was seeing the ghost of their mother. It wasn't even a misery that he'd never know how Sammy had grabbed the reins. He could feel a low stir of duty satisfied, that he'd been there for Sam, when Sam stood up and saved the world from the train wreck Dean had started when he sold his soul. Been there, done that. Literally, nothing left to lose. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Dean got back in the car.
You are not ...
Dean flipped the tape and reversed it to the beginning. Dark bells tolled. That was more like it.
Dean got back on the highway and made it to some little town across the line in Minnesota, where the bar had a pool table and was staggering distance from a room where Dean never even flipped the light on, never laid a salt line, just passed out face down on the bed.
His eyes snapped open at 3 am as usual, head pounding. He rolled over, used to maintaining his shuffle on a bare four hours. Nowhere to be, nobody to be it with... not the burnt and broken ...
The television filled the silence at least. Televangelists, infomercials. Thank God they'd save the world for humanity, right, Sammy? Dean selected the porn, filled the room with the formulaic chanting of yes, yes, oh God, do it, the slapping of flesh against flesh. It was enough to carry him dull until dawn.
A little diner had surprisingly good coffee and they were generous with the bacon. Dean focused on every bite, chewing, tasting; the salt and burn of the bacon let him know he had made it through one more darkness. He drank four cups of coffee and drove across another day.
There were a surprising number of dive bars in the vicinity of Peoria, the town where they'd found Ava's boyfriend torn to pieces, her diamond on the floor. He spent a few nights there vampire, doubling his stake from dive to dive and sleeping the days away.
He knew he was good, but by the time he was up several thousand, he began to question the breaks, the way the cue ball stopped just so, the way his marks just scratched their heads and walked away from their money. In his room the last night, he yelled for Cas, demanding to know if he was being paid off, but he got no answer.
Before he left Peoria, he drove to the pound and dropped a couple hundred into the collection box. You are not said Castiel, and he tried to picture the kid and the dog the money might bring together.
It was only a few hours from Peoria to Cicero. He was showered, shaven, and sober when he knocked on Lisa's door.
Despite all she'd said, he couldn't be sure of his welcome. He struggled with himself, there on her threshold. This wasn't what he deserved, and he sure as hell wasn't what she deserved. Every fiber of his being longed for Sammy or for death. There was nothing left inside him for a generous, loving woman, the only woman who had ever acknowledged him as a Hunter, seen through the facade to the truth of him, and still wanted him to stick around.
She opened the door.
He babbled something and practically fell into her arms, desperate to feel something, his heart pounding like it was going to burst out of his chest, his breathing rough as she held him.
Her arms were strong. He could feel how relieved she was to see him again, even as her compassionate murmurs filled his ears.
Breathing into Lisa's embrace, he swore he'd do his damnedest not to hurt her, and wondered how badly he'd fail.