The Winchester Revision: Chapter Three
3
His face is fused to the pillow with dried tears and muddy blood from another nosebleed. Chuck groans and pries himself away from the mess, crawling to the edge of the bed with cracking joints to stumble down the hallway to the bathroom. He plunges his face under the sink and turns on the cold water, lets it drown him, growing colder every second. He waits until he can’t feel his nose and forehead before pulling himself free. He gropes blindly for the soap until he finds it, lathers up his hands and sets about scrubbing the evidence of another bad night from his face.
The same nightmare had woken him up. The one where he looks at his face in the mirror and, even though it's all the same stubble and teeth and eyebrows, sees someone he doesn't recognize. Not because he's changed but because he's suddenly realized that he doesn't exist, that he never existed. That all his embarrassing memories and human flaws are just a cleverly written back story by the biggest writer in the business.
His head is pounding. He needs coffee.
Chuck dries his face and, after a quick and deep inhale, dares to open his eyes.
There he is, staring back at himself. White faced and terrified, dark circles under his eyes, soppy bangs hanging over his forehead and dripping down his collar.
How can he really know if what he is writing is what he wants to write? If God could possess a writer, maybe make a writer, who was to say he couldn't do so in just such a way that would precipitate the post-possession freak out Chuck is currently having? If God constructs you to the purpose of acting as a sentient pen, do you have any rights to free will?
Chuck plunks down on the toilet seat and sits, hands hanging between his knees. He plucks at the corner of his t-shirt sleeve where some of the blood has dried.
He's just a sock puppet then, button eyes popped on with a hot-glue gun, and without the hand up his ass he's falling apart.
And the story? His desires? What are they? If he is nothing but a tool that has served its purpose, why does he still feel the need to leave something behind? Why not just collapse immediately into a pile of excess organs and bones and ideas?
Eventually, when he feels so tired from slogging through the quagmire of his own thoughts that he can't bear to sit still anymore, Chuck rises and goes downstairs to his kitchen and his hideous walls. He makes coffee; it tastes like soggy ashes and asparagus. He sits at the computer; the screen looks like an opaque window that his eyes keep trying to see through. He rests his hands on the keyboard; they feel like heavy leaden gloves and it's hard to make his fingers move.
Why keep writing?
Just in case he does have a say, he supposes. Just in case it matters.
x0x
Mary Winchester, when she spoke at all, used to tell her boys that angels were watching over them.
Dean was seven when she went away forever. And the way she went, abrupt, self-imposed and without any goodbyes, made Dean re-evaluate his own ideas about angels. He was against them, for one thing. And if they were watching, if they were, then it only stood to reason that other things were watching as well. For years this bothered him, drove him out of his bed in the twilight hours to sit in the dark hallway watching the front door with a kitchen knife in his hand. On nights when his father didn’t come home he would be up all night.
It was a precaution at first: Dean believed one hundred and ten percent in ghosts and monsters until he was eleven and a half. But by the time he was nine his nightly vigils had mutated from just in case to I’ll wait until…
He fully expected that one night something wrong was going to come through that door. Because Harrison, New Jersey was a terrible place and Dean was smart enough to know that terrible things were hiding there.
Eventually Dean got sick of waiting and went out to find the monsters himself. He took his kitchen knife with him. He thought about taking his mother's gun but it was heavy and he was afraid of it (he always imagined it twisting like a snake in his hands, blowing his head off-things like that happened sometimes).
Dean kept the knife under his jacket and just kept walking until his feet were sore. He was looking for the "bad" end of Harrison, (that he always heard his teachers and people in the supermarket talking about whenever there was a shooting or a robbery on the news) but in the dark all of Harrison looked bad, so he just walked down every alley he found. It was chilly and his hands grew cold and the contrast between the night and the streetlights made all the roads look twisty.
He was just beginning to realize, with a sharp, shivery feeling, that he was very, very lost when he heard the click of high heels coming toward him. Monsters, he'd known, probably didn't wear high heels. But he'd mashed himself up against a wall anyway.
The lady who came sighing around the corner- nails raking through her mussed hair, her shoulders curving inwards-stopped when she saw him. She was blonde but it looked dirty in the half-light and both of her eyes were bruised. Her fingers absently checked the buttons on her short skirt before she flashed a grin through red lips. She clicked over. Dean double checked that his knife was out of sight.
The lady leaned against the wall next to him and lit a cigarette.
"You got a home, hun?" Her voice was ash and honey.
"Yeah," said Dean, thinking it was a stupid question to ask anyone.
She looked down at him, smoke curling out of her mouth. Her eyes weren’t bruised after all, just circled with dark make-up that had smeared. She was probably, Dean decided, pretty. As pretty Mom had been.
"You should be there, then." She crouched down and tipped Dean's chin up with her long fingers, toward the street light on the corner. "You don't look beaten," she said, pulled on his pant leg, smoothed the shoulders of his jacket, "you're clothes fit and you don't look starved." She took another drag. "However bad you think it is, kid, it's worse out here. Go home."
She thought he was running away. Dean remembered he didn't know where he was. He cleared his throat.
"I don't know how," he admitted. "But I'm not running away, I'm hunting monsters, I think there must be some out here," he showed her his knife.
Her forehead crinkled in surprise. Dean noticed for the first time how impossibly big the knife was in his small fingers.
"Yeah," the woman said softly, "yeah there are. Come on," she stood up and took Dean's free hand.
They walked until they came to a pay phone, and then Dean sat on the curb while the woman made a phone call. He watched her while she tapped her toes and spoke into the receiver.
"Hi, I got a lost kid here, need someone to take him home. Lakeland and Ashmont...No, I'll wait with him."
Dean knew from the way she was dressed and what he'd seen on TV that she was a hooker. She was nicer than he'd always imagined a hooker would be though. And she didn't look so distorted and haunted like the ones from the movies. She looked like somebody's mother dressed up to go partying. She didn't smell so bad either, he noticed when she hung up the phone and came over to sit beside him.
"You know your address, right?" she asked him. Dean nodded.
He only had a half formed idea of what hookers did. He knew they had sex for money, what he didn't understand was why? On TV they cried all the time and talked about how painful it was…
Dean couldn't imagine this lady crying.
"Does it hurt?" he asked her without thinking.
She had been in the process of digging another cigarette out of her purse, but she froze and stared at him when he spoke. Dean knew he wasn't supposed to ask questions like that, but he'd always wondered because Mom had to have done it at least twice, and if that was why she'd been upset all the time...
The lady closed her purse, her face open and strange. She wrapped her arm around Dean's shoulders and squeezed him into a one armed hug.
"No, honey," she'd whispered into his hair. "Not like you're thinking." Dean hadn’t been hugged like that in two years. He was tired and hungry and confused and sick to death of being scared. Tear crept into his eyes. He turned his face into the lady’s jacket and balled his fists. She rubbed his back with mom hands.
She talked to him until his nose dried up. And then he'd told her about Sammy and knew that he could never go monster hunting again. If he got eaten Sammy would be alone.
A cop car had pulled up after a while, and a police officer got out and asked Dean where he lived. He thanked the lady and told her to get on home too.
"Sure thing, chief," she answered amiably, helping Dean into the front seat. "What's your name, honey?" she asked him.
"Dean."
"Nice to meet you, Dean. I'm Ellen," she messed up his hair, shut the door and then was gone from Dean's life forever.
Dean left his knife on curb for her when the cop wasn't looking. She seemed to know where the monsters were.
xxx
"Who uglied you up?" Were Bobby's first words to Dean on Thursday morning. Dean took a swig of his coffee and didn't answer because it was seven in the morning and he had a strict policy about mornings and heart-to-heart chats (other than the one that stipulated there were no heart-to-heart chats in the life of Dean Winchester, there was another which forbid them between the hours of midnight and eleven fifty-nine p.m.). Fortunately, Bobby was the most perceptive asshole Dean knew and had already worked out the not very difficult mental calculations while Dean was giving him the finger.
"John," Bobby concluded on his own, in the same voice he used for phrases like "fire hazard" and "new Mazda models". Dean shrugged.
Bobby handed him the keys to the garage and told him that the new engine block had come in for the Subaru and it was up to Dean to screw his way through 497 shims, twice, to get the old one off and put the new one in. He took the keys and his coffee and went off to the cool dusty smell of the garage, where he flipped on the lights and cranked on the radio.
The station hadn't been changed since Dean had started working here a year ago. It was always the same.
Today, Bob Seger was feeling like a number. Dean couldn't really sympathize, could only wish for that kind of anonymity, personally he felt like he had big ass target on his back.
Dean put his hands on his hips and faced the Subaru. She was school-bus yellow with a sporty black strip running along the bottom. Some asshat had put sports tires on her and rearranged the silver letters that were supposed to say Subaru to say buS. This guy, whoever he was, did not deserve a new engine block. And Dean did not deserve to be the guy who had to spend 497 shims, twice, to get the damn thing in. But he was getting paid. And it wasn't the cars fault.
"Baby," he said as he raised her on the lift and sat himself on a wheeled toolbox, "your life is harder than mine." He had two hours of peace commiserating with the poor, abused Outback before Bobby slouched in and parked himself on a jack-stand.
"How did Sam take that shiner of yours?" he asked. Dean dropped a handful of shims noisily into a bucket. Bobby also had a rule about heart-to-heart's. It required that they take place, grudgingly, at least once a month, this rule extended to all those in his employ and anyone else unlucky enough to be considered 'family'.
Dean itched his nose on the sleeve of his t-shirt. He looked up to the clock and the wall and pretended to muse about the time, and then he bent over and pretended to muse at the underbelly of the Subaru. When he had wasted as much time with that as he could, he pretended to look around for an imaginary shim he knew he hadn't dropped. When Bobby's waiting silence began sound like a punch waiting to be thrown Dean finally said:
"He said he's never gonna forgive Dad."
"And you think forgivin's a bad habit."
Dean gave up on the shim he wasn't looking for anyway and glared at Bobby because was he fucking kidding?
"He wants forgiveness he can start apologizing any time," he said. Then he turned away and bent back to the Subaru. He was done encouraging this train-wreck of a conversation. Bobby knew all of his sad shit and he always took Dean's side in the end. Bobby reached over to pull the bucket away, arresting Dean's progress.
"Look," he growled, "I'm not trying to appeal to your overdeveloped sense of martyrdom, but you gotta know you are the only person who can help John. I know it ain't up to you to fix his problems, and you don't even owe it to him, things he's done to you and Sammy, but you're in a position now to either save the man's life or put the nail in his coffin."
"What the hell do I look like, Bobby?"
"You look like a kid with troubles."
Bullshit. Dean hadn't been a kid in years. Maybe Dean had never been a kid, just a twisted grown up in a smaller body.
"Fuck you, Bobby."
"You got reasons enough to hate your old man, I know," Bobby pressed on, his famous temper disturbingly absent. "But you're old man's got more personal issues than a bear's got shit, Dean, and he aint gonna be able to shovel himself out alone."
Bobby was a real poet.
Dean's first instinct was to reply, "I don't hate him," which was why he didn't say anything. Because maybe he did, and maybe that was fucked up. John was an asshole, and borderline abusive (although, perhaps he'd crossed that border, Dean's eye still twinged) but he was family and there were rules about that. Or there should have been. Bobby took Dean's silence as some kind of tacit agreement and said, carefully:
"He's not a bad man. Not really. He's just been drowning in his own demons for too long. And he's been punishing himself for what he's done to you kids all these years, even if you can't see it that way."
Dean was suddenly remembering the time he had walked into the kitchen after school one afternoon when he was fifteen. John had been sitting in the living room on a kitchen stool, stone cold sober and sobbing into his glass of orange juice. One of Mom's old forty-fives was playing. Dean had stood frozen in the doorway and then backed out silently before John could see him. He took Sammy to the mall, and when they came home John was in the garage and there was an empty bag from the liquor store on the kitchen counter.
"Where'd you pick that crap up?" Dean wondered out loud.
"Read it in some damn book about Buddhism," said Bobby, he kicked the bucket back. "Doesn't mean it's not true, wise ass."
On some fey malfunction of the brain, Dean went home and suggested something similar to Sam over reheated, reconstituted macaroni and cheese.
"Bullshit," said Sam in a voice that Dean thought sounded bizarrely like his own. "If he felt that way he would stop. Or he would at least try."
Dean didn't know shit about Buddhism so he let the subject drop.
xxx
And yet-and yet, people said it was a disease. Which implied a victim, some form of helplessness, of requiring help or medication.
Who would choose to become such a person?
Gabriel's door was closed but not latched and the sound of a violin concerto was coming from within. All Sam had to do was knock, lift up his hand and let his presence be known. It was late in the afternoon, nearly five, and Dean was off in the library catching up on all the reading he'd missed for his Feminism class. And Sam was here, standing at a crossroads.
"As soon as you're done second guessing yourself I have a question about the correct usage of the m-dash, because I have a feeling the author of this email does not clearly understand it," said Gabriel, loudly and suddenly. Sam jumped and felt his face heat up. He sighed and pushed the door open and promised himself, for the hundredth time: It's just this once.
Gabriel was frowning expressively at his computer and made a frustrated gesture as Sam walked in.
"This student seems to believe she is Emily Dickinson," he muttered and pounded something out on his keyboard. Sam sat down and studied the bookshelf nervously while Gabriel finished. The jester had toppled sideways over the weekend and his face was hidden against the pile of loose-leaf papers he'd fallen on. The strings on his left side were tangled.
"Why do you keep him here?" Sam asked when the typing stopped. Gabriel looked over his shoulder, following Sam's gaze. He smiled at the puppet and reached up to set the little effigy to rights.
"Because he is the best expression of myself," said Gabriel, manipulating the knots away.
Sam didn’t quite know what that meant.
"I have asked a friend for a favor, by the way, and he’s agreed to help.” Gabriel continued, placing the jester gently back in his customary vantage point. And then he asked, casually, as if they were talking of nothing at all: "Do you still want it?"
Sam didn’t know. But, he reasoned, if he changed his mind he could always just throw it away.
"Yes," he answered softly.
Gabriel pulled open the top drawer of his desk.
"Close the door," he requested. Sam obliged and shifted forward to the edge of his seat. "I asked him to get you something smoother than I usually use but he said he wanted to make sure he got it right,” Gabriel rooted through the drawer and produced a plain, white, unmarked envelope. It had been unsealed already. “He’s stopping by here on Friday, come by again around three. He asked me to give this to you in the meantime.” Gabriel pushed the envelope across the top of the desk, putting a Hershey kiss on the top as an afterthought.
Sam picked it up. His mouth was dry.
The envelope might have been empty except for a dark slip of something that showed through the white paper. Though Gabriel had already done the honors and the envelope was cut wide open along the top, Sam didn’t look inside.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s…” Gabriel paused, “research. He thought it might ‘bring some light to your murky questions.’” Gabriel waited while Sam tried to sort that out and then shrugged before Sam could open his mouth. “I don’t get it either, and I peeked.”
“Right.” Sam put the envelope in the pocket of his jacket. He thought he could feel its extra weight, insubstantial but undeniable, pressing against the muscles of his chest.
xxx
Castiel’s apartment was on the second floor, at the top of a squeaky set of stairs and at the end of a dirty, ocean-spray hallway. He checked his mailbox, which was empty, and shouldered his way through the front door with his bag slung over his shoulder.
She was sitting on the third step up from the bottom, wearing a pink and white princess dress.
Castiel froze when he saw her, his right foot resting on the first step, his letter opener clutched in his right hand. His heart dropped right out of his chest, like the spring falling out of a pocket watch, and everything went still inside him. She couldn't have been older than eleven.
She looked up at him with dark brown eyes, alarmed, and brushed her dark brown curls from her pale face with a trembling hand. Her feet were bare and dirty but the rest of her was clean. Her hair was brushed, her dress was only a little stained. She stood up slowly, trailing her hand along the blue-gray wall as she skirted around him to her own door. Castiel saw, as she turned and ducked inside, the blue and black marks, like wide bracelets on her wrists.
The door clicked shut.
He'd meant to say "Hello."
Castiel walked up the stairs and let himself into his apartment, pausing over the dilemma of the deadbolt on his door. Some small things required a great deal of consideration, and it was minutes that he stood standing, his finger closed over the chilly brass.
In the end he left it unlocked.
He didn't bother to turn on the light of his own hallway, but made his way along the dim corridor by the cloudy light from the windows to the kitchen and turned that light on. The three caddy corner windows there were drawn and shut and might as well have been solid wall for all that he'd used them so far. He put water on to boil and pulled a mug down from the cupboard. And then he just stood, tired and tense, staring at the old bible propped up between the microwave and his toaster. A gift from Paradise after he’d been adopted, his friends had all written him notes in the back. He kept it out of nostalgia and a keen sense of irony rather than faith.
God, Castiel thought, had very little to do with a person's day to day life. Or if he did he was just an observer, either powerless or unconcerned with the tiny sufferings of tiny individuals.
Beneath his feet, after the ominous sound of a door slamming, a false silence began. And now Castiel could recognize it exactly for what it was. He’d been hearing it for two weeks, digging up guilty memories while he listened, asking vague questions of the neighbors.
Yes, they knew the family he meant, and wasn’t she a beautiful little girl? But the mother was hardly ever home and the father had some problems. Still, it was best if everyone minded their own affairs. The girl seemed alright, didn’t she? And the few times the cops had come they hadn’t done any good. Yes, best to just mind your own and leave everyone to their business.
Castiel turned off the burner and poured steaming water into his mug. He dropped a teabag in to steep and carried it over to the table. The tapping that drummed out the end of his fingers was an extension of the ticking, the rhythm that was spilling out from inside him. He cupped his hand over the top of the mug, let the steam coalesce and burn under his palm, and then he took his hand back and left the tea behind.
He turned off the kitchen light and wandered through his apartment, spent five minutes staring into his linen closet, eyes fixed on a useless box of Band-Aids and a bottle of Aspirin on the top shelf. Then he wrote three names for girls in the frost on his window, wondering if any of them were right? He didn't go near the bedroom, didn't even look in through the door. Eventually he ended up in the bathroom, standing before the mirror and the sink, just looking at his own face.
He studied the shadows beneath his chin and wondered how to break the silence? Because it wasn’t silence, the sounds were only too quiet to hear. But he suspected they were there, a caged, boxy tempo.
If he struck out hard enough, would it fall apart like glass?
Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not;
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
No.
He was sitting on the seat of the toilet, hiding from the image of his fractured visage and cradling his hand, a familiar sensation of horror clotting inside his stomach, when the pretend quiet ended. Someone turned on a TV in the apartment below.
Chapter Four