Supernatural fic: Know
Title: Know
Fandom(s): Supernatural
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,755
Summary: They’re halfway between here and there, and she wonders if one day he’ll hand her a pistol and not say anything; he wonders if one day he’ll hand her a pistol and she’ll fire.
Know
She sees him leaning against a tree, far away from the ceremony and lit up in shadows and gray, his body, despite its sturdiness, looking like one more gust of wind could blow him away. And, considering the deadness in his eyes, she thinks that’s probably what he’d prefer.
She sees him see her, and if he had any desire to do anything but simply subsist, she’s sure he’d clench his jaw, maybe straighten up a little to be more man-stoic. But as it is, he’s not, and his eyes merely drift back over to the man dressed in black with a tiny swatch of white at his collar. Well, to be more specific, at the thing behind the man dressed in black.
As far as these kinds of things go, even he’d say it’s ornate. All cherry wood and silver fastenings. It was something her parents picked out, because she was too distraught to even think about things like that, and he was nothing more than what he is now-a dark figure on the fringes of society.
She sits next to her parents, who are shedding the appropriate amount of tears, listens but doesn’t to the man in black’s lyrical speech. It doesn’t sound heartfelt, not at all, and the way his face isn’t even in the realm of sadness tells her he’s not thinking about what he’s saying, but perhaps about if his wife is going to make meatloaf for dinner.
Wife.
She swallows heavily, pulling her black coat tighter around her as another gust of wind dances by.
Wife.
The title she could have had, once upon a time, but would now never get. He was her one, her only, and she knows a ways down the line, her mother would tell her that he’d want her to move on, to be happy. She knows now and she’ll know then that it’ll be fruitless to try and convince her mother that she doesn’t give a fuck. Let all the other women in the world have those men, Mom, she envisions herself saying. He was it for me. He’s gone, and so am I.
And then, because she’s still got a small flare for the dramatic from the two years of plays she did in high school, she’ll grab the already-packed duffel in the foyer and storm out of the house. (She’d shut the door gently, though, because slamming it would border on childish.)
Her mother would weep, her father would comfort, but she’d be gone. Where, she doesn’t know. East. Somewhere east. Right now, she hasn’t the presence of mind whether Nevada or Vermont sounds better, just has plans to drive and drive until the needle points to empty. And then maybe, while she’s broken down on I-80 in the middle of the night waiting for morning when some nice Windstar or grizzled old trucker stops to give her gas, maybe she’ll drop down on the gravel-glass-debris of the freeway shoulder, lean her back up against the greasy and scalding wheel well, and cry her heart out.
The sound of cars barreling down the cracked asphalt would drown out her tears, and if there were, God forbid, some miscreant looking to drag her away and rip her body to shreds, she has a feeling she’d be too emotionless for them to go through with it. Miscreants like that want a victim who’d scream and beg for their life-because it gets them off, she remembers from her criminology class-not listless ones who most hours of the day don’t care if they live or die anyway.
She hasn’t gotten any farther than east, and so she thinks back to a mere six days ago, when she’d had a five-year plan, a career in mind, and had secretly started house-hunting. Now all she’s got is east, and yet she can’t seem to give a shit.
Her mother nudges her, and she comes back to reality to see the congregation rise acceptably grievously from their chairs, line up by the ornate thing and lay down generic flowers bought from Wal-Mart. She sees some tears on their faces, and they look real, but she knows they’re false. Most of the people here she’s never even heard of, let alone seen, knows they’re just people her parents invited.
She feels a sudden, unexpected rush of hatred, because seriously, who are these people to come to fake-mourn a man none of them know anything about? Who are these people who periodically come up to her and offer their sympathies and yet have an air of I-know-better around them? Who are her parents to tell her how she feels? She’d wanted a small affair, wanted cremation and a non-ceremony by the beach. He’d always loved the beach, she remembers. The way his hair caught the breeze and his eyes lit up with the waves because, as he’d said, My daddy never let us stay in the same place for very long. ’Fore now, I’d only seen the Pacific in movies and postcard shacks. Thanks.
But it’s not happening like that. It’s happening in some gloomy cemetery, the clouds bleak and silver, wind kissing the trees, the tombstones spread out along the flimsy grass like they’re tired of standing up, of guarding the rotting corpses that lie beneath.
It’s her turn now-or, well, it’s supposed to be her turn. Her mother gently prods her back so she’s up at the ornate thing, and she’s got a white something-flower in her hand, rubbing the stem between her fingers. She glances at the photograph set on the cherry wood top; it’s his school picture, and it looks nothing like him. He’s smiling, but there’s just the Is it over yet? that comes with mandatory pictures; his eyes are bright, but not dancing; his dimples are there but only out of habit.
They hadn’t even bothered to ask her for a picture. A real picture.
She senses she’s holding people up, like she’s that person in the Space Mountain line who hems and haws about going on the ride, making everyone else think Oh for Christ’s sake, get out of the fucking line, you wussy, and let the rest of us enjoy it.
So she bails. He wouldn’t want this anyway. He was never much for crowds, even less for pity-fake or real-and he’d hate her going through the motions.
So she shrugs out from under her mother’s arm, and runs. She hears some quiet shouts after her, but she’s always been a fast runner, and soon the sounds die away.
She’s not entirely sure where she is (James Getzler, b. 1903, d. 1947 probably won’t apprise her of the location), but there’s a very convenient and unassuming rock, and if the brisk, taut air is a hard place, then she’s caught between them. But she doesn’t acknowledge that, because really, her mind is anywhere but what her mother or the others of the assemblage are thinking.
Scrunching her knees up to her chest, she looks at the flower she still holds in her hands. It remains there for a few more seconds before she rips all the petals from their center, in a crude facsimile of he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not. Only it’s not a daisy, and she already knows the answer. He loves her. Loved her. Of course, she thinks, it doesn’t matter now, because like the not-daisy petals destroyed on the grass, whether he loved her or not is immaterial.
She feels him before she sees him.
She’d have thought it’d be her mom, maybe her dad, coming to get her, but it isn’t. The holy-shit-someone’s-here sense that curls around her neck and down her spine is tense, devastated, masculine.
It takes all her energy to turn her head, and she’s not surprised at all to see him in a similar position to her, only up against a tree, a big oak this time instead of the feeble willow he’d been leaning on during the…process. (Ceremony, my ass, she seethes internally. Ceremonies are for weddings like the one I’ll never have.)
His eyes are dead, hers too, and neither she nor he utters a sound, but the very unspoken invitation is there, and she finds herself standing on unsure legs, walking over to him. She sits down, the tree’s uneven bark snagging her jacket.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice low and husky, rough with what she knows all too well have been hours of crying.
She looks at him, hazel eyes meeting green, and then looks back down at the grass. “Thank you,” she replies, her own voice scarcely more than a whisper.
There’s a beat, and then, “I’m…”
He trails off, like the will to even speak simply petered out mid-sentence. “I know who you are,” she says anyway.
She reaches up to rub at her nose, sniffling once. “He’d hate this,” she breathes, the muscles in her face halfheartedly trying to smile. “He’d hate this.”
His shoulder against hers jostles as he glances down at her. “Yeah,” he agrees. “I…didn’t want to come, but…”
This time, she does let out a breathy chuckle. “Me neither,” she says.
And then it all comes out.
She’s not sure how much he actually understood, because she’s a mess of tears and sniffles and hiccupping sobs, but he stays there as if he does. “I didn’t do what he wanted,” she says, gesturing wildly. “He told me once that he’d want to be cremated, have his ashes spread in the Pacific. And what did I do? I slapped him on the arm and told him to study for the LSAT. And now look. There’s this stupid fucking lavish fanfare that he wouldn’t want, that I don’t want, that you don’t want, and now he’ll be stuck in the ground rotting away and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
She looks down at her hands again, ashamed.
“I’m just going to leave,” she confesses, confesses to the man she’d heard next to nothing about, and the man she’s spoken to even less. “Drive east, until there’s nowhere else to go.”
She drags her eyes back up to his, and they’re mostly unreadable, but there’s glimmers of understanding, and maybe a little pride, too. “Sounds good,” he answers, and she wonders if he’d had the same idea.
He begins to say something else, but then her father’s voice is cutting through the air, slicing the thick ice. She looks at him next to her, and doesn’t smile. “I…”
She has no idea what to tell him or say to him, so she says nothing. He says nothing, and in that nothing, she turns to leave, following her father’s voice and not listening to whatever condolences he’s undoubtedly uttering. She lets him guide her into the car, lets him lead her into her childhood home and up the stairs to her room that hasn’t changed since she was fifteen.
She lays in bed not sleeping, just feels heat on her face and smoke in her lungs. She keeps her eyes open and staring up at the glow-in-the-dark constellations on the ceiling that had remained stuck for as long as she can remember. Because she knows if she closes her eyes for even a second, her body will send itself to sleep, and her imagination will run wild. She’s not sure if it’d bombard her with happy dreams, or with nightmares, but it’s a gamble she’s not willing to take.
She wonders if she’s been completely stripped of all emotion besides grief, because when a tapping comes at the window, she doesn’t jolt, even though it’d been unexpected. She rolls her head toward the sound, thinking maybe she’d imagined it, but it comes again.
She slips out of bed and shuffles to the glass, drawing aside the curtains. His face greets her, grim expression and hollow gaze. She unlatches the window and pulls it upward. “You were listed in the white pages,” he says. Then, hitching his thumb behind him, explains, “I climbed a tree.”
She thinks she would have laughed if he’d said that a week ago, thinks he would have laughed (and rolled his eyes) too, but she doesn’t laugh now. “What do you want?”
It’s a loaded question, but he answers it superficially. “There’s something I need to do,” he says. “I don’t need someone with me to do it, but…I think you should be there.”
If it’ll put her inevitable nightmares at bay for that much longer, she’ll do anything. She grabs her jacket from her bedpost, and slips on some shoes before returning to the window and, without a second thought, ducking under and out. She slides it closed, and then walks along the roof to the tree. It isn’t the first time she’s snuck out of her house, but she feels a hand slip into hers, and looks up to see him kneeling, very plainly providing steadiness. She doesn’t need it, and it’s so something he would do that her chest hurts and she almost drops the hand. But she doesn’t, and soon her feet impact the ground, waiting for him to nimbly descend the tree as well.
He walks her to a sleek black car just around the corner, opens the front door for her, and then goes around to the other side. There’s no seatbelts, just a bench seat and a tape deck. Neither care for music anyway, though, and as the engine starts with a rumble and he steers it out onto the street, she lets her forehead drop against the cool glass of the window, he resting his elbow on his door.
It’s a new moon, and so she doesn’t recognize where they are until she hears gravel crunch underneath and ping the tire rims, and before he cuts the headlights, she sees that sign.
She glances over, question in her eyes. She knows he sees her, but he doesn’t respond, just gets out of the car and expects her to follow suit. He makes quick work of opening the trunk and getting some items out (she knows she sees knives and guns and things, but doesn’t comment, because she’d already known he had knives and guns and things, even if he never told her about them) with swift efficiency. He gathers the items into a duffel, switches on a flashlight, and then heads into the yard of death and despair, hesitating only a moment before putting an unsteady hand at her back.
It’s warm, but she gets no real warmth from it. She thinks he probably feels the same from her. They arrive at that place, and he drops the duffel on the ground. There’s a larger tool in his grip that she hadn’t noticed before, and if she could feel shock anymore, she would once she watches him stick the spade of a shovel into the soft earth and fling dirt off to the side. He carefully avoids the temporary marker whose contents she knows but doesn’t want to read, and it doesn’t take him long to dig, the soil loose from recent aeration.
She stands there, holding the flashlight he hadn’t asked her to hold, watching as he displaces grave dirt; she knows what he’s doing, but she says nothing. She knows this is illegal, this is immoral, but she does nothing. Just stands there in the cold and holds the flashlight.
Hours or minutes later, she hears a dull thunk, and he sets the shovel up on the ground, his head barely visible from the hole. As if having done this a million times before, he hefts himself out of the grave, wiping a hand across his cheek. It only succeeds to make a few specks of dirt into a long smear, and she thinks maybe she ought to mention it, but hasn’t the energy to do so.
He doesn’t look at her as he shuffles things around in the duffel bag and when he stands back up, he’s got a rusty can in one hand, and lighter fluid and a matchbook in the other. She puts it together a second too late, and can do nothing but watch as he sprays the gasoline over his body, then drenches it with what she can see now is salt, and then lights and drops the matchbook inside.
Fuel and fire ignite, sending a whoosh up from the grave and lighting his face up in harsh relief, his eyes reflecting orange flames.
It’s contained, the fire’s contained, but her heart starts jumping, and as she feels the heat caress her face and the acrid smoke reach her nose, she drops the flashlight, runs a distance away and empties the saltines and snitched tequila that had been in her stomach. She hangs her head, hair thankfully already up in a ponytail, and doesn’t even know she’s sobbing until she falls onto her back and feels her shoulders quake on the unforgiving, stony grass.
She doesn’t hear him approach until he lies on his back next to her, and she thinks he might maybe be crying a little, too. He lets his movements speak for him as he reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a flask, and, after taking a lengthy swig of it, passes it to her. She doesn’t know what’s inside it as she takes a sip, and it’s something strong and bitter and thick, and she thinks it might be some kind of whiskey, but she’s not sure. She does know it’s got alcohol in it, though, and that’s enough. She drinks it like it’s the damn Prohibition, and finally, he gently takes it from her.
Her throat feels like it’s been scrubbed raw from the liquor, but it’s a different hurt than when it’d been scrubbed raw by suffocating smoke, and she thinks this is better.
She sits up, facing it, and this time she’s transfixed. The orange and yellow flames lick the sides of the grave, wanting to swallow whole the graveyard but unable to. It instead settles for devouring him, as if its ashy brethren hadn’t already done so once before. She imagines him alone down there, the fire greedily snatching up his hair (Would you just let me cut it, please? she remembers asking him more than once), sliding along his muscled forearms, an orangey blanket covering his dimples.
Beside her, he’s transfixed, too, and though he doesn’t know at all how her heart is ripped and shredded and stepped on, she thinks he might have an idea. The flames start to die down sometime between now and soon, and she’s not sure if she’s blinked at all, or if she’s even breathed. She assumes she must have, because she’s not dead yet (doesn’t know if it’d be a bad thing if she were).
Neither rise to get the tools or cover up the earth again, neither have the intention, inclination, or strength to do so.
It’s still dark, and the moon seems to feel how they do-doesn’t want to give off light or provide a subject for some lowly painter-and it takes her a minute before she realizes there’s a hand in front of her. She looks down to see his fist just hanging there in midair. Going through the motions, she takes it and opens it up. Gasps at what’s inside.
He takes it by the metal, holds it out to her. The diamond gleams in the non-illumination, mocking her. “It was in his pocket,” he says, voice more a guttural whisper than what she imagines is his usual smooth velvet. “I think he’d…I mean, he wanted to…he probably…”
She doesn’t spare him, he simply trails off, the ring looking wrong just wrong between his fingers. She imagines it between his, his earnest blue-green eyes nervous as he says the words, and she turns away, like if she does so, his face won’t taunt her. (It doesn’t work, and she didn’t expect it to.)
“He wanted you to have it,” he says, looking at it with despair, seeing but not really the black-tie and pretty-dress event he’d now never get to attend.
She looks at him, then back down to the diamond, and with shaky fingers takes it from him. She slides it onto her left ring finger, and it fits as well as she had when he held her, and the simple white gold band looks all right and all wrong. But it’s glued to her finger now, and she knows she’ll never take it off. Can’t ever.
He looks at her and she looks at him, tears in both sets of eyes. “You wanna come?” he asks.
She doesn’t ask where. Just nods. There’s nothing left for her here, and after all, she had intended to get the fuck out anyway. “Yes,” she says.
He offers her his hand as he stands, and the hard stone cuts into his flesh but he doesn’t comment. They walk over to the grave, and he halfheartedly fills it back in, his every cell exploding with pain as he does so, even though he’s now nothing but ash. He packs everything into his duffel and hefts it onto his shoulder.
“Need anything?”
It’s another loaded question, they both know that, but she, like he had, takes it superficially. “No,” she answers, and she means it. Nothing will ever not remind her of him, none of her clothes, none of her shoes, nothing. Even the pajamas she has on remind her of him. You look adorable, he’d said, right before kissing her senseless.
He throws the bag in the false-bottomed trunk and then gets in the driver’s seat.
They’re halfway between here and there, countryside blurring beside them, and she’s not looking at him, not looking at anything really, when she says, “I miss him, Dean.”
He answers simply, but his heart pumps another round of unadulterated agony into his bloodstream, and hers does also. “Me, too, Jess. Me, too.”
He doesn’t know her, not really, and she doesn’t know him, and she thinks he shouldn’t be driving and she shouldn’t be riding next to him, but then, any rationality she once had died with him. The flames ate that up, too, along with everything else.
They’re halfway between here and there, and all she’s got is him and his ring, and she wonders if one day he’ll hand her a pistol and not say anything; he wonders if one day he’ll hand her a pistol and she’ll fire.
Once, twice, two bodies, two souls, both finally joining the third.
Fandom(s): Supernatural
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,755
Summary: They’re halfway between here and there, and she wonders if one day he’ll hand her a pistol and not say anything; he wonders if one day he’ll hand her a pistol and she’ll fire.
Know
She sees him leaning against a tree, far away from the ceremony and lit up in shadows and gray, his body, despite its sturdiness, looking like one more gust of wind could blow him away. And, considering the deadness in his eyes, she thinks that’s probably what he’d prefer.
She sees him see her, and if he had any desire to do anything but simply subsist, she’s sure he’d clench his jaw, maybe straighten up a little to be more man-stoic. But as it is, he’s not, and his eyes merely drift back over to the man dressed in black with a tiny swatch of white at his collar. Well, to be more specific, at the thing behind the man dressed in black.
As far as these kinds of things go, even he’d say it’s ornate. All cherry wood and silver fastenings. It was something her parents picked out, because she was too distraught to even think about things like that, and he was nothing more than what he is now-a dark figure on the fringes of society.
She sits next to her parents, who are shedding the appropriate amount of tears, listens but doesn’t to the man in black’s lyrical speech. It doesn’t sound heartfelt, not at all, and the way his face isn’t even in the realm of sadness tells her he’s not thinking about what he’s saying, but perhaps about if his wife is going to make meatloaf for dinner.
Wife.
She swallows heavily, pulling her black coat tighter around her as another gust of wind dances by.
Wife.
The title she could have had, once upon a time, but would now never get. He was her one, her only, and she knows a ways down the line, her mother would tell her that he’d want her to move on, to be happy. She knows now and she’ll know then that it’ll be fruitless to try and convince her mother that she doesn’t give a fuck. Let all the other women in the world have those men, Mom, she envisions herself saying. He was it for me. He’s gone, and so am I.
And then, because she’s still got a small flare for the dramatic from the two years of plays she did in high school, she’ll grab the already-packed duffel in the foyer and storm out of the house. (She’d shut the door gently, though, because slamming it would border on childish.)
Her mother would weep, her father would comfort, but she’d be gone. Where, she doesn’t know. East. Somewhere east. Right now, she hasn’t the presence of mind whether Nevada or Vermont sounds better, just has plans to drive and drive until the needle points to empty. And then maybe, while she’s broken down on I-80 in the middle of the night waiting for morning when some nice Windstar or grizzled old trucker stops to give her gas, maybe she’ll drop down on the gravel-glass-debris of the freeway shoulder, lean her back up against the greasy and scalding wheel well, and cry her heart out.
The sound of cars barreling down the cracked asphalt would drown out her tears, and if there were, God forbid, some miscreant looking to drag her away and rip her body to shreds, she has a feeling she’d be too emotionless for them to go through with it. Miscreants like that want a victim who’d scream and beg for their life-because it gets them off, she remembers from her criminology class-not listless ones who most hours of the day don’t care if they live or die anyway.
She hasn’t gotten any farther than east, and so she thinks back to a mere six days ago, when she’d had a five-year plan, a career in mind, and had secretly started house-hunting. Now all she’s got is east, and yet she can’t seem to give a shit.
Her mother nudges her, and she comes back to reality to see the congregation rise acceptably grievously from their chairs, line up by the ornate thing and lay down generic flowers bought from Wal-Mart. She sees some tears on their faces, and they look real, but she knows they’re false. Most of the people here she’s never even heard of, let alone seen, knows they’re just people her parents invited.
She feels a sudden, unexpected rush of hatred, because seriously, who are these people to come to fake-mourn a man none of them know anything about? Who are these people who periodically come up to her and offer their sympathies and yet have an air of I-know-better around them? Who are her parents to tell her how she feels? She’d wanted a small affair, wanted cremation and a non-ceremony by the beach. He’d always loved the beach, she remembers. The way his hair caught the breeze and his eyes lit up with the waves because, as he’d said, My daddy never let us stay in the same place for very long. ’Fore now, I’d only seen the Pacific in movies and postcard shacks. Thanks.
But it’s not happening like that. It’s happening in some gloomy cemetery, the clouds bleak and silver, wind kissing the trees, the tombstones spread out along the flimsy grass like they’re tired of standing up, of guarding the rotting corpses that lie beneath.
It’s her turn now-or, well, it’s supposed to be her turn. Her mother gently prods her back so she’s up at the ornate thing, and she’s got a white something-flower in her hand, rubbing the stem between her fingers. She glances at the photograph set on the cherry wood top; it’s his school picture, and it looks nothing like him. He’s smiling, but there’s just the Is it over yet? that comes with mandatory pictures; his eyes are bright, but not dancing; his dimples are there but only out of habit.
They hadn’t even bothered to ask her for a picture. A real picture.
She senses she’s holding people up, like she’s that person in the Space Mountain line who hems and haws about going on the ride, making everyone else think Oh for Christ’s sake, get out of the fucking line, you wussy, and let the rest of us enjoy it.
So she bails. He wouldn’t want this anyway. He was never much for crowds, even less for pity-fake or real-and he’d hate her going through the motions.
So she shrugs out from under her mother’s arm, and runs. She hears some quiet shouts after her, but she’s always been a fast runner, and soon the sounds die away.
She’s not entirely sure where she is (James Getzler, b. 1903, d. 1947 probably won’t apprise her of the location), but there’s a very convenient and unassuming rock, and if the brisk, taut air is a hard place, then she’s caught between them. But she doesn’t acknowledge that, because really, her mind is anywhere but what her mother or the others of the assemblage are thinking.
Scrunching her knees up to her chest, she looks at the flower she still holds in her hands. It remains there for a few more seconds before she rips all the petals from their center, in a crude facsimile of he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not. Only it’s not a daisy, and she already knows the answer. He loves her. Loved her. Of course, she thinks, it doesn’t matter now, because like the not-daisy petals destroyed on the grass, whether he loved her or not is immaterial.
She feels him before she sees him.
She’d have thought it’d be her mom, maybe her dad, coming to get her, but it isn’t. The holy-shit-someone’s-here sense that curls around her neck and down her spine is tense, devastated, masculine.
It takes all her energy to turn her head, and she’s not surprised at all to see him in a similar position to her, only up against a tree, a big oak this time instead of the feeble willow he’d been leaning on during the…process. (Ceremony, my ass, she seethes internally. Ceremonies are for weddings like the one I’ll never have.)
His eyes are dead, hers too, and neither she nor he utters a sound, but the very unspoken invitation is there, and she finds herself standing on unsure legs, walking over to him. She sits down, the tree’s uneven bark snagging her jacket.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice low and husky, rough with what she knows all too well have been hours of crying.
She looks at him, hazel eyes meeting green, and then looks back down at the grass. “Thank you,” she replies, her own voice scarcely more than a whisper.
There’s a beat, and then, “I’m…”
He trails off, like the will to even speak simply petered out mid-sentence. “I know who you are,” she says anyway.
She reaches up to rub at her nose, sniffling once. “He’d hate this,” she breathes, the muscles in her face halfheartedly trying to smile. “He’d hate this.”
His shoulder against hers jostles as he glances down at her. “Yeah,” he agrees. “I…didn’t want to come, but…”
This time, she does let out a breathy chuckle. “Me neither,” she says.
And then it all comes out.
She’s not sure how much he actually understood, because she’s a mess of tears and sniffles and hiccupping sobs, but he stays there as if he does. “I didn’t do what he wanted,” she says, gesturing wildly. “He told me once that he’d want to be cremated, have his ashes spread in the Pacific. And what did I do? I slapped him on the arm and told him to study for the LSAT. And now look. There’s this stupid fucking lavish fanfare that he wouldn’t want, that I don’t want, that you don’t want, and now he’ll be stuck in the ground rotting away and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
She looks down at her hands again, ashamed.
“I’m just going to leave,” she confesses, confesses to the man she’d heard next to nothing about, and the man she’s spoken to even less. “Drive east, until there’s nowhere else to go.”
She drags her eyes back up to his, and they’re mostly unreadable, but there’s glimmers of understanding, and maybe a little pride, too. “Sounds good,” he answers, and she wonders if he’d had the same idea.
He begins to say something else, but then her father’s voice is cutting through the air, slicing the thick ice. She looks at him next to her, and doesn’t smile. “I…”
She has no idea what to tell him or say to him, so she says nothing. He says nothing, and in that nothing, she turns to leave, following her father’s voice and not listening to whatever condolences he’s undoubtedly uttering. She lets him guide her into the car, lets him lead her into her childhood home and up the stairs to her room that hasn’t changed since she was fifteen.
She lays in bed not sleeping, just feels heat on her face and smoke in her lungs. She keeps her eyes open and staring up at the glow-in-the-dark constellations on the ceiling that had remained stuck for as long as she can remember. Because she knows if she closes her eyes for even a second, her body will send itself to sleep, and her imagination will run wild. She’s not sure if it’d bombard her with happy dreams, or with nightmares, but it’s a gamble she’s not willing to take.
She wonders if she’s been completely stripped of all emotion besides grief, because when a tapping comes at the window, she doesn’t jolt, even though it’d been unexpected. She rolls her head toward the sound, thinking maybe she’d imagined it, but it comes again.
She slips out of bed and shuffles to the glass, drawing aside the curtains. His face greets her, grim expression and hollow gaze. She unlatches the window and pulls it upward. “You were listed in the white pages,” he says. Then, hitching his thumb behind him, explains, “I climbed a tree.”
She thinks she would have laughed if he’d said that a week ago, thinks he would have laughed (and rolled his eyes) too, but she doesn’t laugh now. “What do you want?”
It’s a loaded question, but he answers it superficially. “There’s something I need to do,” he says. “I don’t need someone with me to do it, but…I think you should be there.”
If it’ll put her inevitable nightmares at bay for that much longer, she’ll do anything. She grabs her jacket from her bedpost, and slips on some shoes before returning to the window and, without a second thought, ducking under and out. She slides it closed, and then walks along the roof to the tree. It isn’t the first time she’s snuck out of her house, but she feels a hand slip into hers, and looks up to see him kneeling, very plainly providing steadiness. She doesn’t need it, and it’s so something he would do that her chest hurts and she almost drops the hand. But she doesn’t, and soon her feet impact the ground, waiting for him to nimbly descend the tree as well.
He walks her to a sleek black car just around the corner, opens the front door for her, and then goes around to the other side. There’s no seatbelts, just a bench seat and a tape deck. Neither care for music anyway, though, and as the engine starts with a rumble and he steers it out onto the street, she lets her forehead drop against the cool glass of the window, he resting his elbow on his door.
It’s a new moon, and so she doesn’t recognize where they are until she hears gravel crunch underneath and ping the tire rims, and before he cuts the headlights, she sees that sign.
She glances over, question in her eyes. She knows he sees her, but he doesn’t respond, just gets out of the car and expects her to follow suit. He makes quick work of opening the trunk and getting some items out (she knows she sees knives and guns and things, but doesn’t comment, because she’d already known he had knives and guns and things, even if he never told her about them) with swift efficiency. He gathers the items into a duffel, switches on a flashlight, and then heads into the yard of death and despair, hesitating only a moment before putting an unsteady hand at her back.
It’s warm, but she gets no real warmth from it. She thinks he probably feels the same from her. They arrive at that place, and he drops the duffel on the ground. There’s a larger tool in his grip that she hadn’t noticed before, and if she could feel shock anymore, she would once she watches him stick the spade of a shovel into the soft earth and fling dirt off to the side. He carefully avoids the temporary marker whose contents she knows but doesn’t want to read, and it doesn’t take him long to dig, the soil loose from recent aeration.
She stands there, holding the flashlight he hadn’t asked her to hold, watching as he displaces grave dirt; she knows what he’s doing, but she says nothing. She knows this is illegal, this is immoral, but she does nothing. Just stands there in the cold and holds the flashlight.
Hours or minutes later, she hears a dull thunk, and he sets the shovel up on the ground, his head barely visible from the hole. As if having done this a million times before, he hefts himself out of the grave, wiping a hand across his cheek. It only succeeds to make a few specks of dirt into a long smear, and she thinks maybe she ought to mention it, but hasn’t the energy to do so.
He doesn’t look at her as he shuffles things around in the duffel bag and when he stands back up, he’s got a rusty can in one hand, and lighter fluid and a matchbook in the other. She puts it together a second too late, and can do nothing but watch as he sprays the gasoline over his body, then drenches it with what she can see now is salt, and then lights and drops the matchbook inside.
Fuel and fire ignite, sending a whoosh up from the grave and lighting his face up in harsh relief, his eyes reflecting orange flames.
It’s contained, the fire’s contained, but her heart starts jumping, and as she feels the heat caress her face and the acrid smoke reach her nose, she drops the flashlight, runs a distance away and empties the saltines and snitched tequila that had been in her stomach. She hangs her head, hair thankfully already up in a ponytail, and doesn’t even know she’s sobbing until she falls onto her back and feels her shoulders quake on the unforgiving, stony grass.
She doesn’t hear him approach until he lies on his back next to her, and she thinks he might maybe be crying a little, too. He lets his movements speak for him as he reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a flask, and, after taking a lengthy swig of it, passes it to her. She doesn’t know what’s inside it as she takes a sip, and it’s something strong and bitter and thick, and she thinks it might be some kind of whiskey, but she’s not sure. She does know it’s got alcohol in it, though, and that’s enough. She drinks it like it’s the damn Prohibition, and finally, he gently takes it from her.
Her throat feels like it’s been scrubbed raw from the liquor, but it’s a different hurt than when it’d been scrubbed raw by suffocating smoke, and she thinks this is better.
She sits up, facing it, and this time she’s transfixed. The orange and yellow flames lick the sides of the grave, wanting to swallow whole the graveyard but unable to. It instead settles for devouring him, as if its ashy brethren hadn’t already done so once before. She imagines him alone down there, the fire greedily snatching up his hair (Would you just let me cut it, please? she remembers asking him more than once), sliding along his muscled forearms, an orangey blanket covering his dimples.
Beside her, he’s transfixed, too, and though he doesn’t know at all how her heart is ripped and shredded and stepped on, she thinks he might have an idea. The flames start to die down sometime between now and soon, and she’s not sure if she’s blinked at all, or if she’s even breathed. She assumes she must have, because she’s not dead yet (doesn’t know if it’d be a bad thing if she were).
Neither rise to get the tools or cover up the earth again, neither have the intention, inclination, or strength to do so.
It’s still dark, and the moon seems to feel how they do-doesn’t want to give off light or provide a subject for some lowly painter-and it takes her a minute before she realizes there’s a hand in front of her. She looks down to see his fist just hanging there in midair. Going through the motions, she takes it and opens it up. Gasps at what’s inside.
He takes it by the metal, holds it out to her. The diamond gleams in the non-illumination, mocking her. “It was in his pocket,” he says, voice more a guttural whisper than what she imagines is his usual smooth velvet. “I think he’d…I mean, he wanted to…he probably…”
She doesn’t spare him, he simply trails off, the ring looking wrong just wrong between his fingers. She imagines it between his, his earnest blue-green eyes nervous as he says the words, and she turns away, like if she does so, his face won’t taunt her. (It doesn’t work, and she didn’t expect it to.)
“He wanted you to have it,” he says, looking at it with despair, seeing but not really the black-tie and pretty-dress event he’d now never get to attend.
She looks at him, then back down to the diamond, and with shaky fingers takes it from him. She slides it onto her left ring finger, and it fits as well as she had when he held her, and the simple white gold band looks all right and all wrong. But it’s glued to her finger now, and she knows she’ll never take it off. Can’t ever.
He looks at her and she looks at him, tears in both sets of eyes. “You wanna come?” he asks.
She doesn’t ask where. Just nods. There’s nothing left for her here, and after all, she had intended to get the fuck out anyway. “Yes,” she says.
He offers her his hand as he stands, and the hard stone cuts into his flesh but he doesn’t comment. They walk over to the grave, and he halfheartedly fills it back in, his every cell exploding with pain as he does so, even though he’s now nothing but ash. He packs everything into his duffel and hefts it onto his shoulder.
“Need anything?”
It’s another loaded question, they both know that, but she, like he had, takes it superficially. “No,” she answers, and she means it. Nothing will ever not remind her of him, none of her clothes, none of her shoes, nothing. Even the pajamas she has on remind her of him. You look adorable, he’d said, right before kissing her senseless.
He throws the bag in the false-bottomed trunk and then gets in the driver’s seat.
They’re halfway between here and there, countryside blurring beside them, and she’s not looking at him, not looking at anything really, when she says, “I miss him, Dean.”
He answers simply, but his heart pumps another round of unadulterated agony into his bloodstream, and hers does also. “Me, too, Jess. Me, too.”
He doesn’t know her, not really, and she doesn’t know him, and she thinks he shouldn’t be driving and she shouldn’t be riding next to him, but then, any rationality she once had died with him. The flames ate that up, too, along with everything else.
They’re halfway between here and there, and all she’s got is him and his ring, and she wonders if one day he’ll hand her a pistol and not say anything; he wonders if one day he’ll hand her a pistol and she’ll fire.
Once, twice, two bodies, two souls, both finally joining the third.