The Winchester Revision: Chapter Five
5
The monsters are here.
Chuck trembles and keeps his face close to the computer screen, trying to ignore the shadows in the edge of his vision. They are creeping in behind the morning shafts of sunlight but he knows they aren’t coming through the windows or the door. And if he sees them, if he really sees them, he’ll never stop seeing them because they belong to him. They are his monsters; his creations, seeping in, finally, to the edges of his mind.
His madness has come later than he was expecting. Chuck runs a sweaty palm over the short fuzz that’s left on his head. As his eyesight begins to go, as his body prepares to shut him up inside, these figments arrive. They reach for him, curses beneath claws, truths behind their teeth, allusions dripping from their mouths. Poetry. On the wall, in the breeze of the monster’s breath (or perhaps it is still the ocean breeze?) the yellowed paper moves and brushes against Chuck’s ear, straining against the thumbtack that pins it down like a butterfly’s corpse.
Chuck spits out poison through the keyboards as fast as it can choke him. Every horror and pain, he pours it out into the story, hoping to drain his wound, to gain himself some time. His noble intentions have been twisted into a desperate and selfish endeavor. He writes like a drowning man swims, like a starving man eats; he writes like it could save his life.
This, he thinks, pressing closer still to the glowing screen, the muscles in his back pulling and cramping, is the downward turn. His neck and wrists are killing him. He feels like a car that was driven too far, too fast, by an engine he’d never been meant to run. At last, he’s close to the end. This is the heart of the maelstrom, here the story plummets, spirals down, and cascades into its final disasters.
Then there will be only the aftermath.
He has been an idiot. If he wanted to give his characters relief, if he wanted a happy ending, then he shouldn’t have written a fairytale. Fairytales are full of darkness, and Chuck doesn’t have the strength to write about the sun anymore.
He’s failed, already, in his revision. Now he’s like a fatally wounded soldier, morbidly pulling back his bandages just because he wants to see what the damage looks like.
x0x
The nightmare came at the tail end of a very good dream. There were blue eyes burning into him and black hair between his fingers, warm lips on his neck. He arched himself into the touch, seeking the heat, and turned to bite the living body, to make his own need known.
And then he was alone in the bedroom. Or in a bedroom. The middle of the afternoon steamed in through the windows, curtains thrown wide. The room smelled like laundry. Dean was sitting on the edge of the bed looking at the open doorway to the hall and trying like hell to look at the floor, to identify what bright figure was occupying his peripheral vision, (a sprawled figure dressed in white) but he couldn’t seem to bring himself to do it.
And there was something stuck between his teeth.
He picked it out with his thumbnails and pulled it, felt the tug behind his tooth and running along the roof of his mouth. A small bloody knot emerged, pinned between his forefinger and his thumb. It was one end of a taut piece of thread, the other end was still stuck in his mouth. Dean pulled again and the thread kept coming, yanking out reluctantly as if there were a whole spool of it jammed in Dean’s mouth somewhere.
A tooth, suddenly relieved of a pressure Dean hadn’t been aware of, fell to the floor between Dean’s knees. Dean tried to look down at it, but the figure in the corner of his vision still prevented it. He let to tooth go and froze, the pile of bloody thread in his hands. The thread, Dean realized, was holding his mouth together and by pulling on it he was undoing the seams.
The roof of his mouth flapped down like loose wallpaper and Dean pinned it back up with the tip of his tongue. Another tooth fell out. He wanted to call out, to ask anyone for help, but if he made a noise everything would unravel. And he couldn’t know if it was only his mouth or, if the thread continued, what else would fall apart.
Dean woke up half out of bed already and sweating. He kicked the tangle of the sheets away and went shaking into the bathroom where he checked every single tooth, carefully, in the mirror.
Cas stared at him in horror when he recounted the dream two days later, on Tuesday, as they stood on the library steps, engaged in one of those conversations that was meant to last five minutes and instead had already gone on for an hour.
“Are your dreams always so vivid?”
Dean shrugged, thought only the bad ones and said: “Nah.”
Cas was leaned against the brass railing, arms tucked in close around his body, coffee cradled in his hands. Dean was leaned next to him so their arms were pressed together. And, though Cas was looking at Dean, Dean was watching the icicles melting on the eves of the library. He studied them like they were the only thing happening, like he wasn’t seriously thinking of turning taking his professor’s face in his hands.
Dean sipped his coffee and waited for something to happen. At length, Cas exhaled beside him, as if coming to a decision, and leaned in closer.
“Dean, I am unsure how to ask this,” he said, soft and low. Dean could feel the rumble of his voice through in his shoulder, pressed up against him. “But you’re reaction to the book I assigned seemed…very personal.”
Dean had been waiting, he’d known the sharp edges of those eyes were going to cut him open eventually.
“Dean,” Cas pressed “were you-“ he left the question unfinished.
Raped? Dean wanted to supply for him. Molested? Victimized? He met Cas’ eyes and shook his head.
Cas didn’t look relieved. He looked, if anything, more horrified.
“It wasn’t Sam, was it?”
“NO,” Dean’s voice jumped out of his chest. “Jesus…God, no. I would never let Sam-“ it trailed back into wordlessness, ending with a rasp. Castiel nodded and looked to the ground.
Dean’s pocket buzzed. He shifted his coffee to his left hand and dug his phone out of his pocket. Sam’s name was lit up on the little screen. Dean flipped the phone open.
“Yeah?”
Sammy’s voice, tinny and strained, bit out from the other end:
“Dad’s here.”
Dean straightened away from the railing and Cas. He had to push the next word out of his mouth like it was a boulder. He tried to reorient himself in the spinning world.
“Where?”
He hadn’t expected this so soon.
“Parking lot. He’s way out of it, Dean, talking about angels-”
The phone snapped closed in Dean’s hand and he was running already. He’d known since he was sixteen that this would happen, that one day he would be living his life and then he would turn around and there would be Sammy asking “Dean, where were you this time? Why weren’t you there?” They lived on each other’s precipices; it was only a matter of time before something knocked them down.
Dean hurtled across the campus, tearing through the falling dark to the back lot behind the science building. It was easy to move forward. He felt like he was following in his own footsteps, his boots landing in grooves perfectly molded to their size and shape. He felt like this road was paved exactly for him. This disaster, this failure, fit him like a glove.
He thought he heard footsteps following behind and ran faster, in case it was his own ghost coming up behind him. Snapping at his heels.
Too late-- As he’d always known he would be someday. The shouting reached his ears, two voices, amazing like each other, brazen across the little lot that was usually filled only with the sound of the crows. There were two or three other students, clustering on the top of the hill by the freshman dorm and looking down, pausing as they passed on the other side of the artificial line of trees.
Dean flew between the parked cars and saw that Sammy had John backed up against the hood of the Impala, his father’s arms gripped in his hands. They were both screaming like they needed heaven to hear them. Dean could see the sheen of sweat on John’s face as he approached and he could hear the tears on Sammy’s. Sammy was in John’s face, shaking him, tearing his voice apart with ugly words.
John wasn’t listening. He was spitting out Dean’s name, like it was a curse, and trying to push Sam away.
“Sam,” Dean barked as he slowed his pelting to a stride, the noise of two broken people shouting cut off at the sound of his voice. Sam stepped back automatically without even looking at Dean. But he was reaching out with his arms still, mouth pressed tight in a grimace, like if he just find a way to reach his father John would hear him and stop fucking up his life. John tried to straighten, he looked at Dean with a grave and twisted expression.
Dean expected the stale and crisp scent of booze but it was something else, something sweeter. He looked at the thick sweat and John’s heavy eyelids and his eyes fell to the rolled up sleeve of John’s left arm.
What’s he done to himself this time? Dean turned to look behind him.
What’s he done to Sammy?
Sammy was unmarked. Dean tried to catch his eye.
“Dean,” his father’s voice under Sam’s white face.
“Holy-“ Sam was saying as Dean turned around.
And then all the sound went out of the world. It just fuzzed out and stopped like a turntable coming to the end of a record.
John had leaned back against the hood of the Impala. He was looking up at Dean from under the hoods of his eyes and cradling a black .45 colt in his hand. Mary’s gun, Dean’s mother…
I’m too late. Dean thought again, and realized for the first time what he was too late for.
He’d spent his whole life with his eyes on Sammy, watching carefully, waiting on the balls of his feet for the second shoe to drop. Dean had made damn sure he was always there for Sammy, had always come every time he thought Sam would call. But, thinking back, Dean realized that Sam had never asked for help, had usually managed the big things on his own. It was something Dean was always proud of him for.
And in the meantime, John Winchester had been hanging on by the tips of his fingers, scraping through every day in desperation, screaming for help, while Dean just kept turning his back and walking out and slamming doors and not answering the phone.
John held the gun out to Dean like it was a rose.
“Is this what you want from me?” he asked.
No. Dean thought, but his voice was gone.
“Because I think I can give you this now,” his hand was steady on the hammer as he pulled it back. His shirt stained with sweat and his lips were quivering, but his hand was steady.
Never.
Sam was pulling desperately at Dean’s arm and shirt, tearing it at the seams, trying to get Dean out of the way. Dean didn’t move. The gun wasn’t for him.
“I’ve been a coward for a long time,” John turned the gun around so he was looking down the barrel. He smiled at it, tenderly, like it was his wife’s sleeping face. And hell, what did Dean know? Maybe that was what he saw. “But if this is what you need from me.”
It’s not. Dean tried to say. But his silence was absolute.
Stop. Don’t. The words wouldn’t come. Dean shook off Sam and rushed forward, put his fist into his father’s nose. It crunched under Dean’s knuckles, and John took the hit like a brick wall except for the blood that poured out. He lifted his hand, slowly, to catch the flow as it smeared into his beard and looked at Dean with the dazed expression of just another surprised drug addict. Dean yanked the gun away.
“We need a goddamned father you moron,” Dean snarled, using different words since the ones he needed were missing still. “We need you. We need you to stop fucking yourself up and fucking us up,” Dean wrestled with the gun until the chamber popped open and the bullets sprayed onto the ground. He dumped the last one out of the barrel and then shook the empty gun in his father’s face. “I mean what the fuck, Dad! At least when mom did it she did it quick! You’ve spent years dragging us down with you and now you wanna check out for good? Now you wanna act like a martyr? I don’t fucking think so!”
John Winchester was holding his nose and slowly sliding down the fender of the car to the asphalt. “She always said the angels come at the end,” he mumbled, shaking his head. Then he looked skyward, right through Dean. “No angels here,” he said, and Dean knew with a hollow pain that his own tirade hadn’t been heard.
“Dean,” said the interfering voice of someone who didn’t belong here. Dean looked over his shoulder, the raging inside his ribcage prepared for another fight, and recognized the empty battlefield of Cas’ face. “Perhaps,” Cas said calmly, though his voice shook, “we should put the gun away before the police are called.” He was holding out his hand, willingly, and Dean felt his fingers aching and cramping. He gave Cas the gun.
Sam was in the background on his knees picking bullets up off the ground.
“We should take him to the hospital too,” Dean managed after a minute. The blood was starting to soak into the front of John’s shirt. He seemed mindless of the pain and kept gazing into the sky. “I broke his nose and I don’t know what he took but when he comes off it…”
“I will drive you,” said Cas.
Dean was about to protest, but Cas was moving to the driver’s door of the Impala, slipping the gun into the pocket of his coat. The casual gesture was unfathomable to Dean, that Cas would carry the gun Mary Winchester killed herself with because Dean was too fucked up to carry it himself.
Sam got to his feet on his own while Dean pulled John off the ground.
xxx
The hospital smelled like formaldehyde and really stale coffee stains and lemons. Sam sat on the chair made of metal while Dean talked to the nurse behind the glass window on the other side of the room. John was swaying and sweating at Dean’s side, held up by his oldest son’s arm wrapped around his ribcage. He was muttering unintelligibly and kept trying to lie down and go to sleep on the floor. Dean was rambling off a list of John’s medical information by rote. Eventually the ER doors swung open and Dean half pushed, half dragged John through and disappeared into the hallway of ringing phones and hospital noises.
Cas was sitting next to Sam, a still and calming presence. Oddly at ease with all of his surroundings.
Sam was tired. He was tired from standing and tired of sitting and he felt used up and emptied out. He wanted to go home and curl up on the couch and watch terrible movies with Dean. Instead, he slumped forward over his knees.
A hand, palm up, offering support, appeared in the corner of his vision. Sam took it and held on. He closed his eyes and forced himself to take shallow breaths, fought back the mess of everything inside him. He tried to remember all the things he always told himself he’d do for Dean when things went to shit, as he’d known they would eventually. But all he had was the feeling of being suffocated by his own chest.
Once, only once (and it had fallen into the category of ‘Things Dean Never Needed to Know’) Sam had skipped a class to go see his high-school guidance counselor. It was last year, the second week after Dean moved away, and Sam, without Dean’s wordless but comprehending presence, had wanted someone who could help him figure out all his messed up shit.
He’d spent the better part of the hour skirting around the truth, misleading the woman with incorrect insinuations and lies of omission-he was only fifteen and didn’t want to accidentally get Child Services involved, one more year and he’d be free after all-but he had also made it clear that things were bad and he wasn’t sure what to do. He’d wanted advice, not even a solution because he wasn’t sure there was one, but some helpful suggestions at least.
“It’s not your fault, Sam,” he’d been told instead. “I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but you’re still very young and it is simply not in your power to fix this.”
Sam had gone home depressed and disappointed.
What really sucked was that the stupid guidance counselor was right. Sam couldn’t fix anything because he was still just a kid. He could play grown-up all he wanted but in the end it was clear that Sam was still just Dean’s baby brother. Just some messed up little boy who was helpless without Dean.
He must have been squeezing Cas’ hand numb. But Cas only squeezed back, gave as good as he got, kept Sam grounded in the midst of all his striking memories and useless epiphanies. The surreal experience of sitting in the Emergency Room holding his brother’s, teacher’s hand was completely lost on Sam. It felt right even, that Cas should be there. It felt like he had always been there.
Why was Dean taking so long?
When Sam opened his eyes the off-white tiles were swimming in his vision. His shoes had melted into hazy blobs and it took a long, raggedy breath to keep it all down.
His head snapped up when the E.R. doors buzzed finally back open. Dean came trudging out, his hands in his pockets and his back bowed. He looked exhausted. Sam watched him plod across the floor, and look up and see Sam. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and straightened his back, took the rest of the distance in three long strides.
The thing inside Sam’s chest took a swing and broke free, rushing out as a choked sob. Dean crouched down in front of Sam, put his hands on either side of Sam’s arms.
“Hey,” he said.
Sam let go of Cas and wrapped his arms around Dean. He buried his whole face in Dean’s neck and collar and just let the tempest go, let it whirl out of him, uninhibited, unembarrassed, like he was nine again. His sobs echoed in the hush of the waiting room.
He tried to keep in mind that Dean was probably keeping all his own calamities contained so he could take care of Sam. But all Sam could remember clearly was that Dean was all he had, all he’d ever had, and that without Dean he would have been stuck trying to ford this horrible story alone. How, when Sam had called to say that he got into UDel he hadn’t even had to ask before Dean was already telling Sam what to pack and what to leave behind and flipping through the yellow pages to find a lawyer.
Sam cried himself hoarse. He cried himself empty, into a state of loose apathy and sleepiness while Dean soothed warm palms up and down his back.
“Easy, Sammy” Dean was rumbling somewhere in the general vicinity of Sam’s ear. “We got this. Everyone’s alright.”
Dean, twelve years old, pushing Sam towards the stairs. Easy, Sammy. I got this. John splitting the silence in the house with his shrieks and curses, while Dean barricaded the bottom step with his pissy attitude. It’ll be alright.
It will be alright.
Sam pulled away, sucked up all his gross in one giant sniffle, and looked his brother in the eye.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
Dean looked surprised at the question. His eyes flickered from Sam to Cas and back to Sam.
“Course,” he said lowly.
Liar. Sam didn’t say. He was too tired for this mystery, it had been culminating all his life and he couldn’t deal with whatever secret Dean was keeping at the moment. He let Dean pull him to his feet and walk him back out to the car, Cas holding the doors and keeping close while keeping his keeping his distance at the same time.
Sam fell asleep in the car on the way home from the hospital and dreamed that Dean had been too late. He dreamed that John took Mary’s gun and shot himself in the head. But instead of an exploding mess of brain and blood and tissue, the bullet left a perfect circle in the back of John’s head, and out of it a black smoke poured forth and John collapsed to his knees like he was deflating, his irises swallowed into the dark caverns of his eyes. His teeth bared in a perfect, white grin.
Dean’s face in the darkness looked like a ghost when Sam was shaken awake. Professor Novak was standing behind him, a specter dressed in black. The gate of the apartment building clanged and pinged and broke out of its top hinge when Dean swung it open. There was an untimely warm wind blowing, making the stones slippery as the snow and the ice melted. The light in the stairwell flickered as they ascended to the second floor and the apartment was a whole patch of midnight on the other side of the door.
Sam wandered immediately into the safety of his own room under the pretense of following Dean’s suggestion of: “Bed, man. Now.” He even turned out the light, choosing to sit in the darkness of his windowless room.
His nap had refreshed him. Or at least his nightmare were forcing him into a reconsideration of the wisdom of going back to sleep immediately. If such subconscious demons were waiting for him he wasn’t really in a rush to meet them.
Sam sat in the dark and thought about his helplessness in the parking lot and back at the hospital. Was he really so lacking in character? Was he really doomed to only fulfill his role of ‘Dean’s little brother’?
Unacceptable. And he did have at least one avenue. He had a path to understanding, to empathetic knowledge. If he could know, not only through intellectual investigation, but first hand, the drugs that had John so entrapped.
It wouldn’t take much. He only needed a taste of self-destruction, he could extrapolate from there.
Sam opened his cell phone for light and went to his bookshelf, the third shelf up from the bottom, and scratched thoughtfully at the binding of The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
xxx
Lucifer had come later than most of the kids. He was twelve and Castiel was ten and he was the first friend Castiel had that actually wanted to talk about things. Lucifer read a lot and talked even more and had come to Paradise with an arsenal of pretension and dangerous ideas. He was well read up on myths and the classical legends; Milton was his favorite.
Their friendship only lasted a year, because two weeks after his eleventh birthday Castiel was adopted by the Novak’s, a good, liberal, Irish Catholic family who were fine with Castiel’s constant questions and did everything they could to encourage his curiosity.
That year, however, was full of firsts for Castiel. Lucifer somehow found ways to sneak cigarettes, liquor and dirty magazines into Paradise. He hid them all under Castiel’s bed because he shared a room and thought they might be found. Lucifer was worldly, he didn’t talk about his past, but it was clear he knew about a lot of things. Castiel couldn’t imagine what he could see in a boy who’d spent his whole life tucked away in Paradise.
“Why me?” he’d pressed one afternoon, leaning close to the open window to take a drag of the cigarette Lucifer had offered him. They were in the attic, whispering plans to each other. Lucifer was very good at demystifying all the secrets of the grown up world. The door to the attic had never even been locked and there was nothing inside but old furniture, cobwebs and boxes. The smoke stung his lungs, but left him sharper and relaxed.
“Because you’re like me,” Lucifer had answered. “You don’t just accept all the bullshit that people tell you. You think about things.” Lucifer looked out the window. “Most people just wanna tell other people what to do, or to do what they’re told. They don’t even think about what they’re doing.” He’d looked back at Castiel, patient and placid as he always was. “You think,” he’d concluded.
xxx
I have not thought this through. Castiel realized belatedly, standing awkwardly in the Winchester brothers’ living room while Dean ushered Sam off to bed. He couldn’t very well take Dean’s car back to the college, and Dean, however much of a show he put on for his brother, was obviously exhausted and swinging on the end of his tether. Castiel could call for a cab, but that would be tedious and expensive and it was already going on midnight.
Dean wandered back in, slipping out of that second skin of his and dropping it over the blinking red light of the answering machine.
“Whatever it is, I’ll deal with it in the morning,” he said and rubbed at his face. “Thanks for everything tonight, Cas. You’re going way above and beyond your call of duty here.”
Castiel shrugged. It didn’t really feel like he was going above and beyond his duty. He felt like he was exactly where he was supposed to be. Which only proved that he was in the wrong place; in the home of a student he’d nearly crossed a line with before, long after sunset with no way home.
The apartment was in an old house, with big, old windows that shuddered as the wind picked up outside. It made a whistling sound and snuck in through the gaps left by the aging wood at the corners of the window frame, bringing with it the faint smell of ionization and unlikely rain. An early, out of season storm. The walls of the apartment were the same eggshell white that nearly all apartments were. Castiel rather thought the room was too bright.
“Cas?” Dean’s uncertain voice brought him back to his own tenuous predicament, “Why are you here?”
Castiel had assumed his answer was obvious: I don’t know. But when he opened his mouth he found himself saying:
“I’m here for you.” His sleepy brain caught up with the accidental implications when the shock showed on Dean’s face. “To help, I mean. I-“He pushed himself away from the wall, seeking his pocket blindly with his left hand. He would call a cab after all. Forget the cost, he was tangling himself in a web he wouldn’t be able to back out of if he didn’t run for it now.
The sound of Dean’s inhale was lost under the sound of the wind, but Castiel saw his chest expand, and then its forceful contraction as Dean wrestled out the words:
“Will you stay?”
Castiel paused. The improbability of such a request, the impossibility that Dean would ask such a question, not just in light of the dangerous attraction between them, but in light of all that Dean was, a reluctant hero, a victim, a grown up child. The suggestion was tantamount to a request for help, as express a plea as Dean was ever likely to issue, and made only one answer possible.
Castiel slipped out of his coat and hung it on the hat rack in the corner.
Chapter Six