The Winchester Revision: Chapter Seven
7
Some endings are never told.
Writers will die before their time or realize they have a higher calling in social justice or just go back read what they wrote the day before and reach immediately for a match. In this way beginnings too, counter-intuitively, grow old and die, or are forgotten, or go up and fall down in flames.
It’s a shame. Because while all stories are not created equal, all stories certainly deserve at least one full telling.
Chuck’s fucking kitchen walls look like God-damned El Dorado in the morning. Golden like hope, like the sun, like the future of unstained children. Chuck squints at them, he hates these walls. When he pulls himself upright and turns his head, against all the protestations of the muscles in his neck, to look at the clock he discovers that it is seven thirty. He is being blinded by a brand new sun, the day is in its infancy.
He wants coffee. His throat is dry. Chuck inhales deeply and sneezes.
He rubs his face and finds a night and a day’s worth of stubble. His stomach is cramping but he thinks it’s hunger and when he flexes his fingers and his knuckles pop he thinks it’s the chill in the air.
He’s not dying after all. Not today.
God must still need his storytellers.
Chuck gets up and takes the stairs two at a time to the bathroom. When he’s there he closes the door and locks it, even though he lives alone. He takes a much needed piss, and then looks closely at his face while he washes his hands. His eyes are bloodshot and tired and his face is shined with dried sweat, but he only looks like a guy who slept at his kitchen table. He doesn’t look like a corpse or like a phantasm manifested out of some omnipotent imagination. He looks like Chuck.
Chuck cleans himself up and puts on clean clothes and takes a walk to the beach. He leaves his lap top on the kitchen table and the poem tacked to the wall. He goes to his seaside café, where he hasn’t been in almost a week, and gets a tiny white cup on a tiny white saucer. He sips his espresso and can’t believe how noisy it is.
When it begins to rain he goes home.
After he is safe behind his front door, he looks around at the house he never bothered to grow comfortable with and asks the obvious question.
“Why am I alive?”
And he has no idea. Unless it really is because of the story. Unless the only real proof of living is a voice.
He imagines a silent world, a world with no stories. A place where people walk around and bump into their neighbors and fall in love but who, when they close their eyes, can’t tell who is standing in front of them.
Chuck shrugs, and gives up, and makes breakfast.
It is October and the leaves are going or gone and the wind is frigid off the sea and everything falling asleep or getting ready to die before Chuck sits down at last at his kitchen and rips the poem from the wall. Being one of the lucky few who isn’t dying before his time, who lacks the personality for social justice issues, and who can’t be assed to find his matches, Chuck rereads the story he’s written with the intention of finding it an ending. He has spent the last two months being alive again and figuring out a thing or two and now he just needs to wrap up the business of this revision before he can move on.
He discovers, as he reads, that he hasn’t written a story at all, but a beginning. It is a real beginning and it, absolutely, a fairytale.
Because that is what fairytales are exactly, the preludes to the greater adventure. All the climaxes and falls and monsters are misdirections, red herrings; fairytales don’t tell whole stories at all, they set up a blank page for new ones to start or old ones to begin again.
Chuck began three new lives. Now all he has to do is set them in motion.
The moral is not: They lived happily ever after-someone else must have added that flourish along the way-but just:
They lived.
He has coffee percolating on the other side of the room and it smells like creation (bitter and sweet, at odds with itself). Chuck sighs and the poem flutters away under the gust to hide itself beneath the refrigerator. Chuck lets it go, barely notices its loss. He raises his strong hands.
His fingers on the keys make the same soft tapping sound as rain in the gutter or mice in the walls.
x0x
Castiel leaned against his window and looked out while a family was split apart and a mother cried and the Social Services people filled out paper work. He also listened. He made sure to hear every word said until he heard the little girl’s name.
“Ruby!” The mother cried it as the police held her back and her baby girl was ushered into a stranger’s car. Ruby was crying silently, she didn’t say a word, but waved at her mother though the glass as the car door closed.
Castiel closed the shades and tried to breathe. He wasn’t an observer anymore. His phone was still clutched in his hand. He’d been holding it for hours, ever since he took the mirror off the wall and dialed 9-1-1. There was an empty cup he’d meant to fill with tea on the table. The deadbolt on his front door was locked.
Outside an engine started and they took Ruby away. He hoped it would be enough.
Castiel went into his bedroom to sit down, he was feeling sick and dizzy, a little beat up. He took off his clothes to shower and discovered bruises on his hips in the shape of Dean Winchester’s hands. He aborted the idea of the shower and moved into the middle of his bed, his books and teaching notes were piled all over it. Each folder was carefully labeled. There was still a light green post-it note stuck to one of them. An old library book was buried beneath the papers.
And there was a gun, on top, that didn’t belong to him. He was going to have to return it very soon.
xxx
The back of Sam’s throat tasted like a chemistry set and his legs were a wobbling mess and his tongue felt like a rolled up papyrus. He was standing in a loud hallway, full of beeps and electronic voices paging doctors. Dean was standing in front of him, hesitating outside the door of room three twenty-two. Dean hadn’t said anything since he’d woken Sam up an hour ago, face dark and speaking all the things he wasn’t going to say out loud:
disappointment, anger, betrayal… he’d just bundled Sam up and into the car to drive them to the hospital where John was waiting.
Dean turned suddenly, looked Sam right in the eye and asked: “What do I say?” And the unsaid things fell away because this was bigger. And maybe because Dean understood, even if he didn’t approve. Dean had always been good at understanding Sam.
Sam took his big brother’s hand.
“Tell him…what you saw.” Confusion flickered across Dean’s face followed by the white wash of awful revelation.
“Sam,” he said hoarsely,
“I don’t blame you, Dean. And I don’t think he will either.” He squeezed Dean’s hand. Dean swallowed and shook his head. He mumbled son of a bitch, under his breath and finally pushed the door open.
xxx
Dean Winchester felt fucking ridiculous. His face was flushed with embarrassment and his hands were shaking and he was sure this whole idea of Sam’s was going to go wrong for all of them. But Sam was sitting behind him, over by the window where he could pretend to be invisible, and John was looking at him in confused expectancy because when Sam had walked in the door he hadn’t even waited for John to speak, had just said: “Dean has something to tell you,” and had gone to sit down.
And now, Dean had to find something to tell.
He was sitting in a chair he had pulled up to John’s bedside. The room was warm and unoccupied except for Dean and his very fucked up family. Across the hall someone else was watching a movie that was apparently all about people screaming at each other.
“You gonna spit it out, Dean?” John asked, soft and broken, barely a trace of the man Dean almost remembered from his childhood. He was waiting for the blame to fall.
Dean thought about what Sam said in the hallway. What Cas said the night before. What he had been unsaying for fourteen years.
“I saw it happen,” he said. It was unbelievable how easily the words rolled off his tongue.
John frowned.
“Saw what happen?”
“I saw mom…I was playing behind the curtain when she came in. I don’t think she knew I was there, but I saw…”
“Dean,” John reached out and grabbed Dean’s hand, “stop.” His eyes were welling up, filling with tears. John pushed himself upright on unsteady arms, he was mashing all of Dean’s finger’s painfully together in his grip. “Why are you telling me this?”
Dean was cold without his jacket. It was folded carefully across the room in Sam’s lap. The chair next to Sam looked empty and Dean found himself wishing Cas was sitting in it. His sharp blue eyes would have cut Dean’s mouth open for him, and his hands would have caught all the words before they spilled to the ground.
“Because,… I knew what she was going to do. I tried to, I wanted to tell her…I tried to scream but…she just. I tried, Dad.” Dean closed his eyes and ground out: “But I couldn’t make a sound.”
x0x
The very bottom of the aged and yellowed paper peeks out from beneath the refrigerator door. It has settled safely out of the way of the breeze and as it begins the long process of becoming lost forever, the raindrops stop, and the typing stops, and the only sound left is that of a writer breathing.
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.