SPN FIC - Out of Your Half-Dreamed Dreams
Got things organized faster than I thought. So here it is -- more fic to add to your huge list of "I'll read this when I find a minute." :)
Characters: Dean and Ellen, with a tiny bit of Bobby and Sam, and mentions of John
Pairing: Dean/Ellen
Length: 3,603 words
Rating: R (sex, but not very graphic)
Spoilers: AHBL II
If Dean/Ellen spins your head around, consider this: Samantha Ferris is only 38.
Last night Bobby told her what was going on. About the deal Dean made for Sam. It makes sense to her, as horrible as the truth of it is - if it was Jo who'd been lying there turning cold, she would have cut the same deal. It's what you do for love when the love is that deep, even if you don't know exactly what it is you're buying.
Out of Your Half-Dreamed Dreams
By Carol Davis
He is, she thinks, a little bit of every man she has ever cared about, all thrown carelessly into one green-eyed, time-worn package.
By rights he should be like Billy was at that age: the glad handshake, the ready grin, the quicksilver laugh. Dean has all that, but it often shows itself at the wrong time, and it's even more often buried under a desperate need to please, to keep bailing out a boat so full of bilge that the bottom rotted out long ago and no one noticed.
"I'm good," he says to Bobby Singer, and Bobby rolls his eyes as he picks up his keys. Bobby's tried four times to get out the door and Dean has stalled him every time. Another request, another "Could you…?" to slow things down. It's a tap dance, a way to distract them from what's going on, what they've seen, what's yet to come.
"Chips," Dean says. "Barbecue flavor. That'd be good."
Again, Bobby stops moving.
"What?" Dean frowns.
"I don't know," Bobby sighs. "I just thought maybe we could get through the weekend with fewer provisions than Admiral Peary took when he set off to explore the North Pole. Are you done? Store's eight miles, and if you 'forgot' something, I'm not goin' back."
"I'm done. I'm good."
"Fine." Bobby takes a step.
"Take him," Dean says, nodding at Sam. "He likes to push the cart."
"What?" Sam sputters.
"You like to push the cart, man."
"When I was five."
And Bobby's out the door, before the bickering can really kick in. He's made a fist around his keys. The screen door bangs shut behind him and they can hear him muttering as he strides toward his truck.
"Maybe you should go," Ellen says quietly to Sam. "Keep Bobby company. Go on. Dean and I'll get things picked up a little. Make the beds." When Sam hesitates - still making faces at Dean - she nods to him silently, a very tiny movement, hoping Dean won't catch it.
Dean doesn't. And Sam's convinced.
"Huh," Dean muses as the door thumps shut behind his brother. "That was…fast."
They listen to the roar of the truck starting up and the clatter of tires on gravel. When the noise fades out it leaves behind a silence that's almost painful.
"Works both ways, you know," Ellen says. Dean hikes a brow at her. "He's concerned about you, too," she clarifies.
"Doesn't need to be. I'm -"
"Good?"
"Yeah."
His eyes flash and he tosses her that crooked grin. God, he could charm the bark off a tree. She thinks about smokescreens then and wonders how many times he's let down his guard in front of anybody. Sam. Bobby. John.
They all stood in a cemetery in Wyoming two days ago and watched John Winchester battle the demon he'd been pursuing for more than two decades. The thing was, John died a year ago. Went to Hell because of a deal he made to save Dean.
A few days ago, Dean made the same deal, to save Sam. With slightly better terms: he's got a year left to live.
"Ellen?" Dean says softly.
She looks at him, raises a brow.
"I'm sorry. About the…the roadhouse. And…"
She figures words will stick in her throat, so she settles for nodding, then manages to whisper "Thanks."
"If I can -"
"Not much to be done about it now."
She lost everything there, in the fire. The building itself, the business, the stock, all her records. More than a dozen people, a few of them strangers, most of them friends, including Ash, who'd shown up one afternoon a couple of years back and never left. And all of her belongings: books, photo albums, her clothes. She's wearing one of Dean's t-shirts because she hit the road with what was on her back, and that was pretty rank after what went on in the cemetery.
So she can stop staring at Dean, she looks around Bobby's cluttered house. It's a man's house, for sure. A nest, really: the things he needs, the few things he loves, are arranged in heaps that must make some kind of sense to him. When they were all here a few days ago, she watched him find books as quickly as if they were shelved according to the Dewey decimal system. Actually they aren't shelved at all, and when she looks at them there's no rhyme or reason to the arrangement. It's all haphazard, like the clusters of old cars outside in the salvage yard. But it must make sense to him.
She wishes something made sense to her right now. Anything. Any little thing.
"You want coffee?" she asks Dean.
The smile comes back, but it's a little more everyday, a little lower in wattage. "Sure. Yeah. Thank you. But I can -"
"I'll do it."
On a shelf in the kitchen is a massive silvery contraption: a gourmet coffee maker that must have set Bobby back six or seven hundred dollars. She stands in the middle of the kitchen and ponders it for a minute, because it's like a big chrome rose in a briar patch of mismatched dishes and mystical paraphernalia. The morning sunlight bounces off it in a way that makes her wish for sunglasses. In the cabinet above it she finds three packages of fancy coffee, the kind that goes for ten or twelve bucks a pound.
Maybe Bobby won it somewhere, she thinks.
She measures coffee into a filter, fills the reservoir with water, switches the machine on.
"He needs some time," she says just loudly enough for Dean to hear. "He's been with you nonstop since -"
"I know," Dean replies absently.
"That why you told Bobby to take him?"
"Nah. He likes to push the cart."
While she was turned away, he found himself a seat on Bobby's beat-up couch. The stacks of books that were on the couch a minute ago are on the floor now, neatly balanced so they won't fall over. He catches her looking but goes on studying the pile of junk over by the door.
"You need some time too?" she asks. "Want me to shut up?"
He doesn't say anything.
She brings him a mug of coffee when it's ready and smiles at his nod of acknowledgment. He's here, but not here - as far away as if she was looking at him the wrong way through a pair of binoculars.
Last night Bobby told her what was going on. About the deal Dean made for Sam. It makes sense to her, as horrible as the truth of it is - if it was Jo who'd been lying there turning cold, she would have cut the same deal. It's what you do for love when the love is that deep, even if you don't know exactly what it is you're buying.
She can't imagine what Hell really is - the place that John Winchester crawled up out of along with a couple hundred demons and lord knows what all else. She and Bobby looked on in astonishment as John said goodbye to his boys back there in the cemetery - goodbye for the last time, she's sure. Where he's gone on to, if indeed he's gone anywhere at all, she can't guess. If there's justice in all of this, he's with Mary now, but who can say.
Dean's got the same look on his face that Jo wore the day they found out about Bill. My dad's not coming back, it says. And I don't know what comes next.
She pours coffee into a mug that says Farmers First United Bank on it in purple letters and leans against the doorframe with it cradled between her hands.
"You don't have to do that," Dean tells her.
"Do what?"
"Don't tiptoe around me."
"I won't."
"You already are." He falls silent for a long while, staring into his coffee more than drinking it. His gaze is pretty much locked on the floor when he finally offers out of the clear blue, "I used to like it when my mom did the laundry." His voice drifts a little, and Ellen wonders if that's where his head is right now: back in Kansas, thinking of a time before the Winchesters' lives fell apart. "She let me help her fold the towels," he goes on after a minute. "Couldn't do the big ones - my arms wouldn't reach. But the little ones. And the washcloths. They always smelled good when they came out of the dryer." He falters again. "I tried to figure out what that smell was. Fabric softener, I know, but do you know how many kinds of that stuff there is? I never could figure out what kind she used. I tried to remember what the bottle looked like, but…"
Fabric softener. Her mind's so full of mush she has to force it to tell her what fabric softener is. She's starting to feel like she doesn't know up from down. But that's no surprise; she's had maybe six hours' sleep in the last two days, and not a whole lot to eat. "You'll work it out," she says.
"Maybe they don't make that kind any more."
"Possible."
"I was with her, you know." When she frowns, he sighs, "In my head. A djinn got hold of me, and I cooked up this whole fantasy thing with my mom and Sam and our house in Lawrence. Sammy and I didn't get along. Everything else was good - I had this hot girlfriend, and a job, and I hung out with my mom. My dad was dead, though." Dean grimaces, a twitch that rolls through his face from south to north. "You'd think if it was my fantasy I'd make everything right. But my dad was gone and Sam thought I was an ass."
"Sam loves you."
"Yeah," Dean says. "I know." Then he looks into his coffee mug and scowls. "What's in this stuff? It tastes like fruit."
"I don't know."
Dean puts the mug down on the floor and slouches back into the couch cushions like he just can't hold himself upright any more. He hasn't gotten any more sleep than she has, if he's gotten any at all. The four of them stopped at a motel last night, but they might as well have saved the money.
Ellen holds onto her Farmers First mug but squeezes her eyes shut. Thank God, she sees only the filtered darkness of looking through your eyelids.
No flames.
No image of that building, of the life she and Billy put together, being destroyed. Of her friends dying.
Screaming.
"You should go lay down," Dean says.
She shrugs. "Said we'd -"
He gets up from the couch with some effort and starts walking down the hallway that leads to the back of the house. There are bedrooms down there, she supposes; when they were all here a few days ago she only got as far as the bathroom. Still hanging on to the warm mug, she follows Dean down there. He stops at the door at the end of the hall and nods inside. The room's got a bed covered with a faded quilt, a dresser, a chair. And more piles of junk. Half the bed is taken up with stacks of CDs in scuffed jewel cases. She can see some of the covers from the doorway: Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline. The Patsy album is one her daddy liked to play back when she was a kid in pigtails.
"He buys 'em at flea markets," Dean offers.
Bobby's whole life looks like it came out of a flea market. Smiling absently, Ellen moves past Dean into the bedroom and begins sifting through the CDs. Louis Armstrong. Ella Fitzgerald. Alvin and the Chipmunks.
When Dean reaches past her to start moving the CDs off the bed she touches his arm to stop him. "My dad loved music," she says. "He had a lot of these. Vinyl. Not CDs."
She thinks of John Winchester and his cassette tapes. He gave her a lift in the old Impala a couple of times and always took time to shove a cassette into the deck.
A George Carlin comedy disk. The soundtrack from Star Wars.
"God," Dean mutters. "Look at this shit."
It's not an indictment of the quality of Bobby's collection as much as the sheer quantity of it. Dean picks up a couple of the jewel cases and snorts at them as if Bobby's gone completely beyond redemption.
He leaves uncovered another one she recognizes. Linda Ronstadt, For Sentimental Reasons. Slowly, as if she's afraid it'll go away if she moves too quickly, she reaches for it, picks it up, holds it in both hands. "Billy - Bill - bought me this." Her eyes move over the song titles listed on the back. Bill sang all of them to her in his slightly froggy tenor, once upon a time. Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. You Go To My Head. Round Midnight. "I went to work there soon as I was old enough to work," she says, not entirely to Dean. "Bill didn't own the place then - he just came by now and then for a drink. He was there one night at closing. Couldn't get my car started and he offered me a ride."
She leaves it unfinished but Dean knows what the capper is. "Jo?"
"Jo."
"She…still in Minnesota?"
"I suppose."
It occurs to her then, as she's standing in Bobby's spare bedroom with the scuffed-up CD in her hands - something she's stubbornly, if mostly unconsciously, refused to look at. Jo took off months ago, after the Winchesters gave her a taste of what hunting was like. She could have died in Philadelphia on that first hunt, but she didn't; either way, she got a taste for the life and she bailed. Left the roadhouse. Left home.
Wasn't there when the fire took everything.
Wasn't there.
A sound rises in Ellen's throat, a terrible animal sound. Her fingers tighten on the jewel case enough to crack it up the middle.
"Ellen?" Dean says, scared.
"Oh, God," she moans. "Dear God."
Her legs start to go out from under her and it doesn't matter that there's not really a clear space to fall into, she's going down anyway. Dean catches her halfway and folds down with her, gathers her into his arms when they reach the floor. She's sobbing then for the child she lost but didn't lose, hasn't seen for months but will see again.
For the child who wasn't a part of that Hell-born fire.
Whose screams Ellen didn't hear.
She goes on weeping for a long while, forever, still clutching the broken jewel case, crushing it against Dean's back. He smells like Bill, she thinks fleetingly, like leather and smoke and sweat and musk, and like that ridiculous fruity coffee. He holds on, rubbing her back with the flat of one hand, saying nothing, making soft shushing noises.
For a minute, because she's had no sleep and nothing to eat in two days but a package of trail mix and a sandwich and two apples, she thinks he is Billy, quicksilver Billy who sang to her in the dark the night they made Jo.
But he's not.
But he's here, and Bill is not.
She pulls back a little after a while and turns the jewel case over and over in her hands. "He gave me this," she mutters.
The one Bill gave her is gone, along with everything else.
"My dad," Dean whispers. "I - I know he had blinders on sometimes. But he - he wouldn't have put your husband in danger on purpose. He would have thought they were okay. He would have set himself up before he'd do it to somebody else."
He believes that.
And so does she. She has for years, since the shock of Bill being gone started to fade into a dull ache.
"I know," she murmurs. "I know."
She met Dean back then, before Bill died, going on sixteen years ago. Met him through what his father said about him and the snapshot John kept in his wallet. She remembers all the colors of what John said about his son: the pride, the regret, the pain. He'd have done anything to spare Dean this life of wandering, of absence, of having to dream of what might have been. She wonders if, when John stood in the cemetery with his boys, he knew what Dean's signed himself up for because he loves Sam so very terribly much.
Dean is looking at her, wanting her to be all right. He'll be the strong one, but wants to wish himself out from under that.
He's that boy John told her about all those years ago, and yet he's not.
He's not Billy, either.
But he's here.
She tips her head a little. He does the same thing, leans in, touches his lips to hers. It's nothing more than that at first - just a gentle touch. He lifts a hand to her face and brushes the tears away with his fingertips, watching her, holding on to her eyes. He's a grown man, she thinks, with everything and nothing left to him for a year, just one year.
He leans in again, the fingers that wiped away her tears moving to twine themselves in her hair. This time the kiss is serious. She loses hold of the jewel case and faintly, distantly hears it bump against the rug.
There's love here, and yet there isn't. She's his friend. Jo's mother, but not his mother. And he is John's child but not hers. Really, he's not even John's child any more, not the boy in the snapshot, the twelve-year-old in the ball cap perched on the tailgate of somebody's pickup. He's seen too much, suffered too much; if there's a child left in him at all, that child makes himself heard only when he's playing with Sam, trying to recapture what he had when he could still hold back and let his father be the strong one. He said goodbye to John two days ago, and the truth of that is written all over his face: he is the oldest Winchester now.
It's wrong, and it's right; either way, the shirt he loaned her comes off along with everything else. There's just enough room on the rug for them to come together, almost blindly, forgetting where they are and where they've been and what lies ahead. His hands are warm and persuasive against her skin; he knows what he needs, what she needs, and how to accomplish all of it. When he looks down at her there's no regret in his eyes.
He doesn't call her by name, so maybe he's thinking of someone else and maybe he isn't. He looks at her as if he's drinking her in, saving the picture of her for later. When she closes her eyes she doesn't think of Bill, can't think of Bill, or of what might have been if John Winchester had never come to the roadhouse. Instead, she clutches Dean's shoulders, wraps her legs around his hips, pulls him in deeper.
His mouth finds hers again and for a moment they're breathing each other's air, sharing each other's space, each other's life.
They go over the edge, her first, him a moment later, in near-silence, shuddering, unable to hold onto the sense of together any longer.
He moves onto his back, pulls her close, holds her.
Looks up at the ceiling.
She wonders if, after he leaves this room, he'll want to be near her, look at her, touch her. Then he shifts his head and smiles fleetingly at her and she knows what the answer is. "You should get some sleep," he says quietly. He gets up easily, picks up piles of CDs and shifts them to the floor in the corner. Clearing off the bed only takes a minute. He reaches down for her hand, helps her to her feet, then turns down the quilt. There are clean sheets and a blanket underneath. When Dean starts to reach for his clothes she shakes her head. "They'll be back from the store," he protests, but not very vehemently. At this point in the game, it's hard to care whether Sam or Bobby will be perturbed. Maybe they won't be. There are bigger things to worry about.
And that's what wins: what's happened, what's going to happen, what might happen. There's a war going on, and when that's true, you find comfort where you can.
She wakes up during the night, when everything is dark and quiet. Dean is asleep beside her, sprawled on his belly with one hand shoved up under his pillow. The bedroom door is closed and nothing seems wrong. When she listens, carefully and almost holding her breath, she can hear the stuttering buzz of someone snoring somewhere nearby.
She's hungry, demandingly hungry, but it's past three in the morning according to the clock on the dresser.
Three in the morning on the third day.
Three hundred and sixty-two left to go.
She looks over at Dean Winchester and rests the back of her hand against his cheek. Even in sleep he feels the touch and smiles at it.
He's like every man she's ever cared about, and none of them.
And if she has anything to say about it, nobody's taking him anywhere at the end of this unholy year.
Characters: Dean and Ellen, with a tiny bit of Bobby and Sam, and mentions of John
Pairing: Dean/Ellen
Length: 3,603 words
Rating: R (sex, but not very graphic)
Spoilers: AHBL II
If Dean/Ellen spins your head around, consider this: Samantha Ferris is only 38.
Last night Bobby told her what was going on. About the deal Dean made for Sam. It makes sense to her, as horrible as the truth of it is - if it was Jo who'd been lying there turning cold, she would have cut the same deal. It's what you do for love when the love is that deep, even if you don't know exactly what it is you're buying.
Out of Your Half-Dreamed Dreams
By Carol Davis
He is, she thinks, a little bit of every man she has ever cared about, all thrown carelessly into one green-eyed, time-worn package.
By rights he should be like Billy was at that age: the glad handshake, the ready grin, the quicksilver laugh. Dean has all that, but it often shows itself at the wrong time, and it's even more often buried under a desperate need to please, to keep bailing out a boat so full of bilge that the bottom rotted out long ago and no one noticed.
"I'm good," he says to Bobby Singer, and Bobby rolls his eyes as he picks up his keys. Bobby's tried four times to get out the door and Dean has stalled him every time. Another request, another "Could you…?" to slow things down. It's a tap dance, a way to distract them from what's going on, what they've seen, what's yet to come.
"Chips," Dean says. "Barbecue flavor. That'd be good."
Again, Bobby stops moving.
"What?" Dean frowns.
"I don't know," Bobby sighs. "I just thought maybe we could get through the weekend with fewer provisions than Admiral Peary took when he set off to explore the North Pole. Are you done? Store's eight miles, and if you 'forgot' something, I'm not goin' back."
"I'm done. I'm good."
"Fine." Bobby takes a step.
"Take him," Dean says, nodding at Sam. "He likes to push the cart."
"What?" Sam sputters.
"You like to push the cart, man."
"When I was five."
And Bobby's out the door, before the bickering can really kick in. He's made a fist around his keys. The screen door bangs shut behind him and they can hear him muttering as he strides toward his truck.
"Maybe you should go," Ellen says quietly to Sam. "Keep Bobby company. Go on. Dean and I'll get things picked up a little. Make the beds." When Sam hesitates - still making faces at Dean - she nods to him silently, a very tiny movement, hoping Dean won't catch it.
Dean doesn't. And Sam's convinced.
"Huh," Dean muses as the door thumps shut behind his brother. "That was…fast."
They listen to the roar of the truck starting up and the clatter of tires on gravel. When the noise fades out it leaves behind a silence that's almost painful.
"Works both ways, you know," Ellen says. Dean hikes a brow at her. "He's concerned about you, too," she clarifies.
"Doesn't need to be. I'm -"
"Good?"
"Yeah."
His eyes flash and he tosses her that crooked grin. God, he could charm the bark off a tree. She thinks about smokescreens then and wonders how many times he's let down his guard in front of anybody. Sam. Bobby. John.
They all stood in a cemetery in Wyoming two days ago and watched John Winchester battle the demon he'd been pursuing for more than two decades. The thing was, John died a year ago. Went to Hell because of a deal he made to save Dean.
A few days ago, Dean made the same deal, to save Sam. With slightly better terms: he's got a year left to live.
"Ellen?" Dean says softly.
She looks at him, raises a brow.
"I'm sorry. About the…the roadhouse. And…"
She figures words will stick in her throat, so she settles for nodding, then manages to whisper "Thanks."
"If I can -"
"Not much to be done about it now."
She lost everything there, in the fire. The building itself, the business, the stock, all her records. More than a dozen people, a few of them strangers, most of them friends, including Ash, who'd shown up one afternoon a couple of years back and never left. And all of her belongings: books, photo albums, her clothes. She's wearing one of Dean's t-shirts because she hit the road with what was on her back, and that was pretty rank after what went on in the cemetery.
So she can stop staring at Dean, she looks around Bobby's cluttered house. It's a man's house, for sure. A nest, really: the things he needs, the few things he loves, are arranged in heaps that must make some kind of sense to him. When they were all here a few days ago, she watched him find books as quickly as if they were shelved according to the Dewey decimal system. Actually they aren't shelved at all, and when she looks at them there's no rhyme or reason to the arrangement. It's all haphazard, like the clusters of old cars outside in the salvage yard. But it must make sense to him.
She wishes something made sense to her right now. Anything. Any little thing.
"You want coffee?" she asks Dean.
The smile comes back, but it's a little more everyday, a little lower in wattage. "Sure. Yeah. Thank you. But I can -"
"I'll do it."
On a shelf in the kitchen is a massive silvery contraption: a gourmet coffee maker that must have set Bobby back six or seven hundred dollars. She stands in the middle of the kitchen and ponders it for a minute, because it's like a big chrome rose in a briar patch of mismatched dishes and mystical paraphernalia. The morning sunlight bounces off it in a way that makes her wish for sunglasses. In the cabinet above it she finds three packages of fancy coffee, the kind that goes for ten or twelve bucks a pound.
Maybe Bobby won it somewhere, she thinks.
She measures coffee into a filter, fills the reservoir with water, switches the machine on.
"He needs some time," she says just loudly enough for Dean to hear. "He's been with you nonstop since -"
"I know," Dean replies absently.
"That why you told Bobby to take him?"
"Nah. He likes to push the cart."
While she was turned away, he found himself a seat on Bobby's beat-up couch. The stacks of books that were on the couch a minute ago are on the floor now, neatly balanced so they won't fall over. He catches her looking but goes on studying the pile of junk over by the door.
"You need some time too?" she asks. "Want me to shut up?"
He doesn't say anything.
She brings him a mug of coffee when it's ready and smiles at his nod of acknowledgment. He's here, but not here - as far away as if she was looking at him the wrong way through a pair of binoculars.
Last night Bobby told her what was going on. About the deal Dean made for Sam. It makes sense to her, as horrible as the truth of it is - if it was Jo who'd been lying there turning cold, she would have cut the same deal. It's what you do for love when the love is that deep, even if you don't know exactly what it is you're buying.
She can't imagine what Hell really is - the place that John Winchester crawled up out of along with a couple hundred demons and lord knows what all else. She and Bobby looked on in astonishment as John said goodbye to his boys back there in the cemetery - goodbye for the last time, she's sure. Where he's gone on to, if indeed he's gone anywhere at all, she can't guess. If there's justice in all of this, he's with Mary now, but who can say.
Dean's got the same look on his face that Jo wore the day they found out about Bill. My dad's not coming back, it says. And I don't know what comes next.
She pours coffee into a mug that says Farmers First United Bank on it in purple letters and leans against the doorframe with it cradled between her hands.
"You don't have to do that," Dean tells her.
"Do what?"
"Don't tiptoe around me."
"I won't."
"You already are." He falls silent for a long while, staring into his coffee more than drinking it. His gaze is pretty much locked on the floor when he finally offers out of the clear blue, "I used to like it when my mom did the laundry." His voice drifts a little, and Ellen wonders if that's where his head is right now: back in Kansas, thinking of a time before the Winchesters' lives fell apart. "She let me help her fold the towels," he goes on after a minute. "Couldn't do the big ones - my arms wouldn't reach. But the little ones. And the washcloths. They always smelled good when they came out of the dryer." He falters again. "I tried to figure out what that smell was. Fabric softener, I know, but do you know how many kinds of that stuff there is? I never could figure out what kind she used. I tried to remember what the bottle looked like, but…"
Fabric softener. Her mind's so full of mush she has to force it to tell her what fabric softener is. She's starting to feel like she doesn't know up from down. But that's no surprise; she's had maybe six hours' sleep in the last two days, and not a whole lot to eat. "You'll work it out," she says.
"Maybe they don't make that kind any more."
"Possible."
"I was with her, you know." When she frowns, he sighs, "In my head. A djinn got hold of me, and I cooked up this whole fantasy thing with my mom and Sam and our house in Lawrence. Sammy and I didn't get along. Everything else was good - I had this hot girlfriend, and a job, and I hung out with my mom. My dad was dead, though." Dean grimaces, a twitch that rolls through his face from south to north. "You'd think if it was my fantasy I'd make everything right. But my dad was gone and Sam thought I was an ass."
"Sam loves you."
"Yeah," Dean says. "I know." Then he looks into his coffee mug and scowls. "What's in this stuff? It tastes like fruit."
"I don't know."
Dean puts the mug down on the floor and slouches back into the couch cushions like he just can't hold himself upright any more. He hasn't gotten any more sleep than she has, if he's gotten any at all. The four of them stopped at a motel last night, but they might as well have saved the money.
Ellen holds onto her Farmers First mug but squeezes her eyes shut. Thank God, she sees only the filtered darkness of looking through your eyelids.
No flames.
No image of that building, of the life she and Billy put together, being destroyed. Of her friends dying.
Screaming.
"You should go lay down," Dean says.
She shrugs. "Said we'd -"
He gets up from the couch with some effort and starts walking down the hallway that leads to the back of the house. There are bedrooms down there, she supposes; when they were all here a few days ago she only got as far as the bathroom. Still hanging on to the warm mug, she follows Dean down there. He stops at the door at the end of the hall and nods inside. The room's got a bed covered with a faded quilt, a dresser, a chair. And more piles of junk. Half the bed is taken up with stacks of CDs in scuffed jewel cases. She can see some of the covers from the doorway: Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline. The Patsy album is one her daddy liked to play back when she was a kid in pigtails.
"He buys 'em at flea markets," Dean offers.
Bobby's whole life looks like it came out of a flea market. Smiling absently, Ellen moves past Dean into the bedroom and begins sifting through the CDs. Louis Armstrong. Ella Fitzgerald. Alvin and the Chipmunks.
When Dean reaches past her to start moving the CDs off the bed she touches his arm to stop him. "My dad loved music," she says. "He had a lot of these. Vinyl. Not CDs."
She thinks of John Winchester and his cassette tapes. He gave her a lift in the old Impala a couple of times and always took time to shove a cassette into the deck.
A George Carlin comedy disk. The soundtrack from Star Wars.
"God," Dean mutters. "Look at this shit."
It's not an indictment of the quality of Bobby's collection as much as the sheer quantity of it. Dean picks up a couple of the jewel cases and snorts at them as if Bobby's gone completely beyond redemption.
He leaves uncovered another one she recognizes. Linda Ronstadt, For Sentimental Reasons. Slowly, as if she's afraid it'll go away if she moves too quickly, she reaches for it, picks it up, holds it in both hands. "Billy - Bill - bought me this." Her eyes move over the song titles listed on the back. Bill sang all of them to her in his slightly froggy tenor, once upon a time. Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. You Go To My Head. Round Midnight. "I went to work there soon as I was old enough to work," she says, not entirely to Dean. "Bill didn't own the place then - he just came by now and then for a drink. He was there one night at closing. Couldn't get my car started and he offered me a ride."
She leaves it unfinished but Dean knows what the capper is. "Jo?"
"Jo."
"She…still in Minnesota?"
"I suppose."
It occurs to her then, as she's standing in Bobby's spare bedroom with the scuffed-up CD in her hands - something she's stubbornly, if mostly unconsciously, refused to look at. Jo took off months ago, after the Winchesters gave her a taste of what hunting was like. She could have died in Philadelphia on that first hunt, but she didn't; either way, she got a taste for the life and she bailed. Left the roadhouse. Left home.
Wasn't there when the fire took everything.
Wasn't there.
A sound rises in Ellen's throat, a terrible animal sound. Her fingers tighten on the jewel case enough to crack it up the middle.
"Ellen?" Dean says, scared.
"Oh, God," she moans. "Dear God."
Her legs start to go out from under her and it doesn't matter that there's not really a clear space to fall into, she's going down anyway. Dean catches her halfway and folds down with her, gathers her into his arms when they reach the floor. She's sobbing then for the child she lost but didn't lose, hasn't seen for months but will see again.
For the child who wasn't a part of that Hell-born fire.
Whose screams Ellen didn't hear.
She goes on weeping for a long while, forever, still clutching the broken jewel case, crushing it against Dean's back. He smells like Bill, she thinks fleetingly, like leather and smoke and sweat and musk, and like that ridiculous fruity coffee. He holds on, rubbing her back with the flat of one hand, saying nothing, making soft shushing noises.
For a minute, because she's had no sleep and nothing to eat in two days but a package of trail mix and a sandwich and two apples, she thinks he is Billy, quicksilver Billy who sang to her in the dark the night they made Jo.
But he's not.
But he's here, and Bill is not.
She pulls back a little after a while and turns the jewel case over and over in her hands. "He gave me this," she mutters.
The one Bill gave her is gone, along with everything else.
"My dad," Dean whispers. "I - I know he had blinders on sometimes. But he - he wouldn't have put your husband in danger on purpose. He would have thought they were okay. He would have set himself up before he'd do it to somebody else."
He believes that.
And so does she. She has for years, since the shock of Bill being gone started to fade into a dull ache.
"I know," she murmurs. "I know."
She met Dean back then, before Bill died, going on sixteen years ago. Met him through what his father said about him and the snapshot John kept in his wallet. She remembers all the colors of what John said about his son: the pride, the regret, the pain. He'd have done anything to spare Dean this life of wandering, of absence, of having to dream of what might have been. She wonders if, when John stood in the cemetery with his boys, he knew what Dean's signed himself up for because he loves Sam so very terribly much.
Dean is looking at her, wanting her to be all right. He'll be the strong one, but wants to wish himself out from under that.
He's that boy John told her about all those years ago, and yet he's not.
He's not Billy, either.
But he's here.
She tips her head a little. He does the same thing, leans in, touches his lips to hers. It's nothing more than that at first - just a gentle touch. He lifts a hand to her face and brushes the tears away with his fingertips, watching her, holding on to her eyes. He's a grown man, she thinks, with everything and nothing left to him for a year, just one year.
He leans in again, the fingers that wiped away her tears moving to twine themselves in her hair. This time the kiss is serious. She loses hold of the jewel case and faintly, distantly hears it bump against the rug.
There's love here, and yet there isn't. She's his friend. Jo's mother, but not his mother. And he is John's child but not hers. Really, he's not even John's child any more, not the boy in the snapshot, the twelve-year-old in the ball cap perched on the tailgate of somebody's pickup. He's seen too much, suffered too much; if there's a child left in him at all, that child makes himself heard only when he's playing with Sam, trying to recapture what he had when he could still hold back and let his father be the strong one. He said goodbye to John two days ago, and the truth of that is written all over his face: he is the oldest Winchester now.
It's wrong, and it's right; either way, the shirt he loaned her comes off along with everything else. There's just enough room on the rug for them to come together, almost blindly, forgetting where they are and where they've been and what lies ahead. His hands are warm and persuasive against her skin; he knows what he needs, what she needs, and how to accomplish all of it. When he looks down at her there's no regret in his eyes.
He doesn't call her by name, so maybe he's thinking of someone else and maybe he isn't. He looks at her as if he's drinking her in, saving the picture of her for later. When she closes her eyes she doesn't think of Bill, can't think of Bill, or of what might have been if John Winchester had never come to the roadhouse. Instead, she clutches Dean's shoulders, wraps her legs around his hips, pulls him in deeper.
His mouth finds hers again and for a moment they're breathing each other's air, sharing each other's space, each other's life.
They go over the edge, her first, him a moment later, in near-silence, shuddering, unable to hold onto the sense of together any longer.
He moves onto his back, pulls her close, holds her.
Looks up at the ceiling.
She wonders if, after he leaves this room, he'll want to be near her, look at her, touch her. Then he shifts his head and smiles fleetingly at her and she knows what the answer is. "You should get some sleep," he says quietly. He gets up easily, picks up piles of CDs and shifts them to the floor in the corner. Clearing off the bed only takes a minute. He reaches down for her hand, helps her to her feet, then turns down the quilt. There are clean sheets and a blanket underneath. When Dean starts to reach for his clothes she shakes her head. "They'll be back from the store," he protests, but not very vehemently. At this point in the game, it's hard to care whether Sam or Bobby will be perturbed. Maybe they won't be. There are bigger things to worry about.
And that's what wins: what's happened, what's going to happen, what might happen. There's a war going on, and when that's true, you find comfort where you can.
She wakes up during the night, when everything is dark and quiet. Dean is asleep beside her, sprawled on his belly with one hand shoved up under his pillow. The bedroom door is closed and nothing seems wrong. When she listens, carefully and almost holding her breath, she can hear the stuttering buzz of someone snoring somewhere nearby.
She's hungry, demandingly hungry, but it's past three in the morning according to the clock on the dresser.
Three in the morning on the third day.
Three hundred and sixty-two left to go.
She looks over at Dean Winchester and rests the back of her hand against his cheek. Even in sleep he feels the touch and smiles at it.
He's like every man she's ever cared about, and none of them.
And if she has anything to say about it, nobody's taking him anywhere at the end of this unholy year.