SPN FIC - Than Never To Have Loved At All
A bit of Thanksgiving for you, albeit late in the day. If you're familiar with A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, all the better, but I think you'll be able to make sense of this even if you're not.
Spoilery for the Australians, unless you're aware of the major plot point that happened in 5.10.
The climbing's no easier than it was when he was a kid; if anything, it's tougher, because he weighs twice as much, enough to shift the precarious balance of half-squashed vehicles piled one on top of the other on top of the other.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Bobby, Castiel
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: 5.10
LENGTH: 2237 words
THAN NEVER TO HAVE LOVED AT ALL
By Carol Davis
The climbing’s no easier than it was when he was a kid; if anything, it’s tougher, because he weighs twice as much, enough to shift the precarious balance of half-squashed vehicles piled one on top of the other on top of the other.
“It ain’t a jungle gym, kid,” Bobby told him years ago, but instead of obeying the implied Get the hell down offa there, Dean had turned to his father, whose expression seemed to say You’ll need to handle worse than this.
Didn’t say Don’t do it.
Didn’t say You’re gonna hurt yourself.
The top of this mountain is the highest point in the junkyard. Which isn’t to say that it provides much of a view of anything.
Except the past.
He’s been sitting cross-legged on the roof of an old blue Ford pickup for maybe twenty minutes when Sam comes shuffling down the aisle between the rows of junked cars and trucks. Sam looks as colorless as the rest of the landscape, bleached by the dim light of almost-winter, by a sun that’s so well hidden by layers of clouds that Dean can’t even tell where it ought to be in the sky.
“Hey,” Sam says quietly.
Dean acknowledges it with a nod. Can’t bring himself to speak, but there’s nothing that needs to be said, either way. Really, he doesn’t want to hear the sound of his own voice, and the sound of anyone else’s isn’t much more of a draw.
As if he knows that, Sam leans against the heap of cars topped by that old blue truck, moving slowly, tentatively, testing the stability of the pile, its ability to bear a little more pressure. When nothing shifts - although something creaks, a raw, ugly sound that cuts through the muffled day - he folds his arms across his chest, fingers tucked into his armpits, thumbs pointing up toward his shoulders.
These last few months, they’ve been trying to learn how to talk to each other. What to say. And what to omit.
These last few days, they’ve been trying to bury themselves in silence.
He understands now (yes, he does) why it was that Dad was always so reluctant to connect himself to other people. Why it was that Dad rejected collecting allies the way Bobby has, collecting friends, why there was never anyone anywhere anxiously awaiting Dad’s arrival, anyone whose face lit up at the sight of John Winchester, anyone who greeted him with open arms, a warm hello, a pat on the back.
There was Kate Milligan, he thinks - but she’s dead now, because of Dad. So is her son. Their son. Dad’s son.
Shoulda stuck to your guns, you dumb son of a bitch, Dean thinks.
See what you did. Because you changed your own rules.
He looks down at his brother’s shaggy hair, at the set of Sam’s shoulders, solid underneath the thin fabric of his gray hoodie.
“I don’t wanna live through this,” he says to Sam.
Sam tilts his head. Looks up. He doesn’t look nearly as upset as Dean thought he might. Instead, he looks kind of resigned. He sighs, a long, slow leak of air, then shifts his head back to the way it was.
“I don’t either,” Sam says after a minute.
They had nothing to bury after what happened in Carthage, nothing to put to a salt and burn, so they settled for burning a picture in the fireplace. Settled for giving Ellen and Jo a lame-ass, grayed-out version of a proper hunter’s goodbye, which is a lot less than they deserved. There wasn’t anyone to call, no one to summon here to help them mourn; Bill Harvelle’s been gone for the best part of twenty years, and as near as they can figure, everyone else Bill’s wife and daughter felt connected to died when the Roadhouse burned down.
Everyone, of course, except for them.
Sam and Dean.
And Bobby.
That doesn’t seem right, to leave behind no more than a trio of people to mourn you. It’s enough that there’s anybody, Dean supposes, but they were good people, Ellen and Jo. They weren’t like Dad - didn’t go out of their way to reject the rest of the world. People liked them. Respected them.
He’s pretty sure they did. And if they didn’t, they should have.
“You wanna go?” Sam asks softly.
“Go where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere.”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know. The job.”
He’s said it out loud a handful of times, thought it in silence a thousand times more: Screw the job.
Screw the goddamned job.
What’s it accomplished, really, all that effort, all that heartache, if Lucifer’s going to win this thing in the end? He will, Dean thinks: he will, because everything’s skewed toward chaos. You can talk about David and Goliath all you want, but as near as he can see - and he’s put a lot of hours into dissecting all this, into playing general, into creating something that will pass for strategy instead of sleepwalking - there’s only one way this clusterfuck’s going to end.
“If I had any kind of a choice,” he says, “I’d go to Key West. Get drunk out of my mind and watch the sunset.”
“We could do that.”
“I’m this close, Sammy.”
“I know.”
He wants to rail, is what he wants to do. Wants to stand on top of this mountain of bashed-up vehicles and scream at the sky.
He’d do it, if he thought anybody was listening.
Anybody other than Sam.
It seems like another life - when doing the job felt good. Felt right. Hell, sometimes it feels like something he saw in a movie, one he watched on cable TV, half-awake in the middle of the night in some beat-to-shit motel room he can no longer remember. The worst of it is, there’s nobody to blame for the way things have fallen apart. Not Dad, not Mom, not that asshat army of angels.
Remarkably, not even himself, because when you come right down to it, that endless plain of misery that’s stretched out in all directions, way past the horizon he can see from his perch on top of this stack of battered cars - it pre-dates him.
The fuckery kinda goes on forever, he thinks. As it began, so shall it end.
And he laughs.
“What’s so funny?” Sam asks, again looking up, this time shielding his eyes with a bladed hand, although there doesn’t seem to be anything to shield them from.
“They picked me.”
Sam’s cheek twitches, like he wants to smile, then thinks better of it.
“I’m our only hope?” Dean says. “Seriously.” He sweeps a hand wide, takes in most of that blighted landscape that surrounds them. “All of this. Billions of people, and they decided to rest the fate of the planet on my back? That’s some messed-up shit, Sammy. That is some seriously messed-up shit. They shoulda picked -“
“We should eat,” Sam tells him.
“What?”
“Just. We should eat.”
Not because of what day it is. Sam looks apologetic, as if he’s sorry to talk about food after what happened. But he’s right: they need to eat, take in sustenance, so they can keep putting one foot in front of the other. Keep throwing themselves into the line of fire.
Keep throwing other people into the line of fire.
They need to eat, for the same reason Dad used to. Nourishment, nothing more. Dean struggles for a minute, tries to remember an occasion when Dad seemed to enjoy what he was eating and can’t come up with one.
“Bobby hasn’t got a friggin’ turkey in there, has he?” Dean grimaces.
“What? No.”
“Then -“
“Soup. There’s a couple cans of Chunky Soup. I think there’s some bread.”
“Somebody shows me a friggin’ turkey, I’m gonna kill ‘em.”
Bobby had the TV on this morning, surfing around looking for news reports. He kept right on going past all the stations that were showing the Macy’s parade, all the stations that had commercials for toys and cars and cellphones, past that Allstate guy talking about the dumbasses who burned their houses down trying to deep-fry a turkey, but no matter how fast he changed channels, the images burned their way through.
The world’s still spinning. Gonna keep spinning until it stops.
He doesn’t want to eat. Whatever he puts in his mouth is gonna taste like paste, or worse. But he’s got to eat.
Gotta keep spinning until he stops.
He steps down from the roof of the old blue truck and walks across the truck bed, then climbs carefully down to the ground. He and Sam walk back to the house together and go in the back door, the one that takes them into the kitchen. He expects to smell soup cooking, because until he’s stepping over the threshold he’s actually forgotten that Bobby’s stuck in that chair, has been using it as a reason to stay out of his own kitchen. Bobby’s not making meals for them any more.
But Castiel, apparently, is.
For what that’s worth.
There’s no soup. There’s…popcorn. And pretzel sticks. And toast.
“Dude,” Dean says to the angel, who’s peering with rapt fascination into the depths of the toaster.
Castiel turns and blinks at him, head cocked, and for the hundredth time Dean thinks he looks like a dog who’s just laid a spit-soaked toy at his feet and wants to play. He looks earnest. Like he’s trying to accomplish something rich and meaningful with…toast.
“What’s all this?” Dean frowns.
“I understood this to be traditional,” the angel says offhandedly, then returns to staring into the bowels of the toaster.
“Traditional?”
“A gesture of friendship.”
“Toast.”
“Do I have it wrong?”
Dean turns to his brother, and it’s a relief to find that Sam looks every bit as bewildered as Dean feels.
Then Sam’s expression shifts. “What?” Dean demands.
“You don’t remember?”
He doesn’t. Then, like someone’s nudged him awake, he does. Remembers sitting in some godforsaken motel room with Sam, eating Chinese take-out and watching holiday specials on TV, wondering if Dad was gonna show before the night was over so Sam could stop looking so damn woeful.
Sam knew all the Peanuts specials by heart, back then.
Maybe he still does.
“All the other kids invited themselves to Thanksgiving dinner,” Sam says with a small ghost of a smile. “And all Charlie Brown had to give them was toast. And popcorn. And pretzel sticks.” He smiles a little bit more then, like he thinks it’s a good memory. Being a kid. Watching Charlie Brown on TV.
“Kinda don’t feel like -“ Dean begins.
Two more slices of toast pop up, and damn if Castiel doesn’t grin at them, dog-like, just for a second. “You will do them honor,” he says as he turns to Dean, and for a second Dean thinks he means honoring the pieces of toast.
“He’s right,” Bobby says from the doorway. He’s a long way from sounding like the soul of good cheer, but there’s a firm note to his voice: the one that says he’s made up his mind how this day ought to proceed, and anybody who disagrees with him is going to get their ass kicked. Or at least, get their foot run over. “We push ‘em aside, it says we don’t acknowledge we ever knew ‘em. Ever cared about ‘em. Sit your asses down. We’re gonna have Thanksgiving dinner.”
Dean’s gaze slides across the table, takes in the bowls of popcorn and pretzels, and the teetering stack of toast.
“You gonna sit?” Bobby growls. “Or do I need to explain a kids’ TV show to you?”
Eventually, there’s soup to go with the toast. And the pretzels. And the popcorn. They sit at Bobby’s kitchen table, the core of an army that grows smaller by the day, an army that’s taken a blow to the heart and likely will suffer more. Probably because he’s sitting on a chair whose seat is a little higher than the others, Castiel seems the tallest of them - seems to preside over this meal that’s mostly his doing. He’s silent for a minute, then he offers quietly, “I thank you for the opportunity to know Ellen and Joanna. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten.”
Who he’s thanking isn’t clear.
But maybe that doesn’t matter.
“Your daddy invited himself in here a long time ago,” Bobby says. “Wasn’t exactly thrilled about him doing it, back then. He was an intractable son of a bitch, and there was more times than not that I was inspired to run him back out the door with my shotgun up his ass. But you learn sometimes that the ones who invite themselves in have something to offer.” Almost unblinking, his whiskered face set firm (and Dean knows why; he’s known Bobby more than long enough to know why) Bobby picks up a piece of toast and holds it aloft.
He’s making a toast. With toast.
“It ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” he says. “In the meantime” - and he glances up - “I thank you for the opportunity to know Ellen and Jo.”
Dean’s hand trembles, just for a moment, as he lifts a piece of toast off the stack. He looks around the table, at his brother, at Bobby, at Castiel. At what his life is, right here, right now.
“Cheers,” he says to his family.
* * * * *
Spoilery for the Australians, unless you're aware of the major plot point that happened in 5.10.
The climbing's no easier than it was when he was a kid; if anything, it's tougher, because he weighs twice as much, enough to shift the precarious balance of half-squashed vehicles piled one on top of the other on top of the other.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam, Bobby, Castiel
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG, for language
SPOILERS: 5.10
LENGTH: 2237 words
THAN NEVER TO HAVE LOVED AT ALL
By Carol Davis
The climbing’s no easier than it was when he was a kid; if anything, it’s tougher, because he weighs twice as much, enough to shift the precarious balance of half-squashed vehicles piled one on top of the other on top of the other.
“It ain’t a jungle gym, kid,” Bobby told him years ago, but instead of obeying the implied Get the hell down offa there, Dean had turned to his father, whose expression seemed to say You’ll need to handle worse than this.
Didn’t say Don’t do it.
Didn’t say You’re gonna hurt yourself.
The top of this mountain is the highest point in the junkyard. Which isn’t to say that it provides much of a view of anything.
Except the past.
He’s been sitting cross-legged on the roof of an old blue Ford pickup for maybe twenty minutes when Sam comes shuffling down the aisle between the rows of junked cars and trucks. Sam looks as colorless as the rest of the landscape, bleached by the dim light of almost-winter, by a sun that’s so well hidden by layers of clouds that Dean can’t even tell where it ought to be in the sky.
“Hey,” Sam says quietly.
Dean acknowledges it with a nod. Can’t bring himself to speak, but there’s nothing that needs to be said, either way. Really, he doesn’t want to hear the sound of his own voice, and the sound of anyone else’s isn’t much more of a draw.
As if he knows that, Sam leans against the heap of cars topped by that old blue truck, moving slowly, tentatively, testing the stability of the pile, its ability to bear a little more pressure. When nothing shifts - although something creaks, a raw, ugly sound that cuts through the muffled day - he folds his arms across his chest, fingers tucked into his armpits, thumbs pointing up toward his shoulders.
These last few months, they’ve been trying to learn how to talk to each other. What to say. And what to omit.
These last few days, they’ve been trying to bury themselves in silence.
He understands now (yes, he does) why it was that Dad was always so reluctant to connect himself to other people. Why it was that Dad rejected collecting allies the way Bobby has, collecting friends, why there was never anyone anywhere anxiously awaiting Dad’s arrival, anyone whose face lit up at the sight of John Winchester, anyone who greeted him with open arms, a warm hello, a pat on the back.
There was Kate Milligan, he thinks - but she’s dead now, because of Dad. So is her son. Their son. Dad’s son.
Shoulda stuck to your guns, you dumb son of a bitch, Dean thinks.
See what you did. Because you changed your own rules.
He looks down at his brother’s shaggy hair, at the set of Sam’s shoulders, solid underneath the thin fabric of his gray hoodie.
“I don’t wanna live through this,” he says to Sam.
Sam tilts his head. Looks up. He doesn’t look nearly as upset as Dean thought he might. Instead, he looks kind of resigned. He sighs, a long, slow leak of air, then shifts his head back to the way it was.
“I don’t either,” Sam says after a minute.
They had nothing to bury after what happened in Carthage, nothing to put to a salt and burn, so they settled for burning a picture in the fireplace. Settled for giving Ellen and Jo a lame-ass, grayed-out version of a proper hunter’s goodbye, which is a lot less than they deserved. There wasn’t anyone to call, no one to summon here to help them mourn; Bill Harvelle’s been gone for the best part of twenty years, and as near as they can figure, everyone else Bill’s wife and daughter felt connected to died when the Roadhouse burned down.
Everyone, of course, except for them.
Sam and Dean.
And Bobby.
That doesn’t seem right, to leave behind no more than a trio of people to mourn you. It’s enough that there’s anybody, Dean supposes, but they were good people, Ellen and Jo. They weren’t like Dad - didn’t go out of their way to reject the rest of the world. People liked them. Respected them.
He’s pretty sure they did. And if they didn’t, they should have.
“You wanna go?” Sam asks softly.
“Go where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere.”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know. The job.”
He’s said it out loud a handful of times, thought it in silence a thousand times more: Screw the job.
Screw the goddamned job.
What’s it accomplished, really, all that effort, all that heartache, if Lucifer’s going to win this thing in the end? He will, Dean thinks: he will, because everything’s skewed toward chaos. You can talk about David and Goliath all you want, but as near as he can see - and he’s put a lot of hours into dissecting all this, into playing general, into creating something that will pass for strategy instead of sleepwalking - there’s only one way this clusterfuck’s going to end.
“If I had any kind of a choice,” he says, “I’d go to Key West. Get drunk out of my mind and watch the sunset.”
“We could do that.”
“I’m this close, Sammy.”
“I know.”
He wants to rail, is what he wants to do. Wants to stand on top of this mountain of bashed-up vehicles and scream at the sky.
He’d do it, if he thought anybody was listening.
Anybody other than Sam.
It seems like another life - when doing the job felt good. Felt right. Hell, sometimes it feels like something he saw in a movie, one he watched on cable TV, half-awake in the middle of the night in some beat-to-shit motel room he can no longer remember. The worst of it is, there’s nobody to blame for the way things have fallen apart. Not Dad, not Mom, not that asshat army of angels.
Remarkably, not even himself, because when you come right down to it, that endless plain of misery that’s stretched out in all directions, way past the horizon he can see from his perch on top of this stack of battered cars - it pre-dates him.
The fuckery kinda goes on forever, he thinks. As it began, so shall it end.
And he laughs.
“What’s so funny?” Sam asks, again looking up, this time shielding his eyes with a bladed hand, although there doesn’t seem to be anything to shield them from.
“They picked me.”
Sam’s cheek twitches, like he wants to smile, then thinks better of it.
“I’m our only hope?” Dean says. “Seriously.” He sweeps a hand wide, takes in most of that blighted landscape that surrounds them. “All of this. Billions of people, and they decided to rest the fate of the planet on my back? That’s some messed-up shit, Sammy. That is some seriously messed-up shit. They shoulda picked -“
“We should eat,” Sam tells him.
“What?”
“Just. We should eat.”
Not because of what day it is. Sam looks apologetic, as if he’s sorry to talk about food after what happened. But he’s right: they need to eat, take in sustenance, so they can keep putting one foot in front of the other. Keep throwing themselves into the line of fire.
Keep throwing other people into the line of fire.
They need to eat, for the same reason Dad used to. Nourishment, nothing more. Dean struggles for a minute, tries to remember an occasion when Dad seemed to enjoy what he was eating and can’t come up with one.
“Bobby hasn’t got a friggin’ turkey in there, has he?” Dean grimaces.
“What? No.”
“Then -“
“Soup. There’s a couple cans of Chunky Soup. I think there’s some bread.”
“Somebody shows me a friggin’ turkey, I’m gonna kill ‘em.”
Bobby had the TV on this morning, surfing around looking for news reports. He kept right on going past all the stations that were showing the Macy’s parade, all the stations that had commercials for toys and cars and cellphones, past that Allstate guy talking about the dumbasses who burned their houses down trying to deep-fry a turkey, but no matter how fast he changed channels, the images burned their way through.
The world’s still spinning. Gonna keep spinning until it stops.
He doesn’t want to eat. Whatever he puts in his mouth is gonna taste like paste, or worse. But he’s got to eat.
Gotta keep spinning until he stops.
He steps down from the roof of the old blue truck and walks across the truck bed, then climbs carefully down to the ground. He and Sam walk back to the house together and go in the back door, the one that takes them into the kitchen. He expects to smell soup cooking, because until he’s stepping over the threshold he’s actually forgotten that Bobby’s stuck in that chair, has been using it as a reason to stay out of his own kitchen. Bobby’s not making meals for them any more.
But Castiel, apparently, is.
For what that’s worth.
There’s no soup. There’s…popcorn. And pretzel sticks. And toast.
“Dude,” Dean says to the angel, who’s peering with rapt fascination into the depths of the toaster.
Castiel turns and blinks at him, head cocked, and for the hundredth time Dean thinks he looks like a dog who’s just laid a spit-soaked toy at his feet and wants to play. He looks earnest. Like he’s trying to accomplish something rich and meaningful with…toast.
“What’s all this?” Dean frowns.
“I understood this to be traditional,” the angel says offhandedly, then returns to staring into the bowels of the toaster.
“Traditional?”
“A gesture of friendship.”
“Toast.”
“Do I have it wrong?”
Dean turns to his brother, and it’s a relief to find that Sam looks every bit as bewildered as Dean feels.
Then Sam’s expression shifts. “What?” Dean demands.
“You don’t remember?”
He doesn’t. Then, like someone’s nudged him awake, he does. Remembers sitting in some godforsaken motel room with Sam, eating Chinese take-out and watching holiday specials on TV, wondering if Dad was gonna show before the night was over so Sam could stop looking so damn woeful.
Sam knew all the Peanuts specials by heart, back then.
Maybe he still does.
“All the other kids invited themselves to Thanksgiving dinner,” Sam says with a small ghost of a smile. “And all Charlie Brown had to give them was toast. And popcorn. And pretzel sticks.” He smiles a little bit more then, like he thinks it’s a good memory. Being a kid. Watching Charlie Brown on TV.
“Kinda don’t feel like -“ Dean begins.
Two more slices of toast pop up, and damn if Castiel doesn’t grin at them, dog-like, just for a second. “You will do them honor,” he says as he turns to Dean, and for a second Dean thinks he means honoring the pieces of toast.
“He’s right,” Bobby says from the doorway. He’s a long way from sounding like the soul of good cheer, but there’s a firm note to his voice: the one that says he’s made up his mind how this day ought to proceed, and anybody who disagrees with him is going to get their ass kicked. Or at least, get their foot run over. “We push ‘em aside, it says we don’t acknowledge we ever knew ‘em. Ever cared about ‘em. Sit your asses down. We’re gonna have Thanksgiving dinner.”
Dean’s gaze slides across the table, takes in the bowls of popcorn and pretzels, and the teetering stack of toast.
“You gonna sit?” Bobby growls. “Or do I need to explain a kids’ TV show to you?”
Eventually, there’s soup to go with the toast. And the pretzels. And the popcorn. They sit at Bobby’s kitchen table, the core of an army that grows smaller by the day, an army that’s taken a blow to the heart and likely will suffer more. Probably because he’s sitting on a chair whose seat is a little higher than the others, Castiel seems the tallest of them - seems to preside over this meal that’s mostly his doing. He’s silent for a minute, then he offers quietly, “I thank you for the opportunity to know Ellen and Joanna. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten.”
Who he’s thanking isn’t clear.
But maybe that doesn’t matter.
“Your daddy invited himself in here a long time ago,” Bobby says. “Wasn’t exactly thrilled about him doing it, back then. He was an intractable son of a bitch, and there was more times than not that I was inspired to run him back out the door with my shotgun up his ass. But you learn sometimes that the ones who invite themselves in have something to offer.” Almost unblinking, his whiskered face set firm (and Dean knows why; he’s known Bobby more than long enough to know why) Bobby picks up a piece of toast and holds it aloft.
He’s making a toast. With toast.
“It ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” he says. “In the meantime” - and he glances up - “I thank you for the opportunity to know Ellen and Jo.”
Dean’s hand trembles, just for a moment, as he lifts a piece of toast off the stack. He looks around the table, at his brother, at Bobby, at Castiel. At what his life is, right here, right now.
“Cheers,” he says to his family.
* * * * *