Bittersweet and Lavender, for boysinperil
Title: Bittersweet and Lavender
Author: sowell
Recipient: boysinperil
Rating: G
Wordcount: ~1,700
Warnings: None
Author's Notes: In flower terms, Bittersweet = truth, Lavender = constancy.
Summary: For the prompt "ANYTHING AT ALL in which an outsider targets a post-hell or post-purgatory Dean as recently returned from active duty military." I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind, but I hope you like it anyway! Takes place between 8.09 "Citizen Fang" and 8.10 "Torn and Frayed."
Mama Ro’s house had cats-eye shells strung like a curtain in the front hall. They clacked together as she pushed through them, swaying gently back into Dean’s face. December in New Orleans wasn’t exactly crisp, but Mama Ro’s house was hot enough to roast a turkey, and the whole place smelled sickeningly sweet.
“Kinda toasty in here,” Dean remarked, ducking out of the way of a creeping, long-tendriled plant. “Not exactly tourist-friendly.”
Mama Ro tossed a withering look over her shoulder. Her body seemed tiny underneath her intricately-wrapped layers of linen, but there was visible strength in her posture. “I’m no tourist attraction, Mr. Winchester. The heat is for my babies. If you don’t like it you can leave.”
There was creole in her voice, pulling stickily at some consonants, making others disappear entirely. Her skin was a smooth dark chocolate, eyes grey and luminous. It was impossible to tell how old she was, but Dean had serious doubts about her motherhood status.
“My babies,” she repeated, stopping to caress the lurid pink petal of some tropical flower. Her eyes swept the room, and Dean’s followed, taking in the flowers crowding every corner. There were flaming pinks and oranges, deep blues and violets, stalks as big as tree trunks and dripping stigmas that looked like teeth.
Dean cocked an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Let me guess - you read my mind?”
“Your face. Sit down, please.”
He seated himself gingerly in her rough-hewn armchair. The arms were too high and the back was too curved and the unfinished surface dug into Dean’s arms. He shifted minutely, beginning to regret this. This was the last time he’d take Garth’s advice.
She seated herself opposite him, across a polished card table. “All right, Mr. Winchester. Ask what you came to ask.”
And there was the rub. Dean had no fucking clue what he was doing here.
“Look,” he began uncomfortably. “I know you could probably look into your crystal ball or read your tea leaves or whatever and recite all my deep dark secrets back to me. I’ve hopped a ride on the psychic train once or twice before. I know the drill.”
“Mmm hmm. You’re a soldier?”
Dean stopped his verbal floundering and squinted at her. “What?”
Her hands shot out in a sudden spurt of movement and closed around Dean’s wrists. He tried to jerk away, but there was unsettling strength in her fingers. She yanked his arms forward until they rested on the card table, face down and helpless in her grip.
“You were at war very recently.”
“What makes you say that?” he asked carefully. His heart was beating too hard, and he told himself it was because of the heat.
“You look ready to bolt,” she said lightly. “You carry two weapons in my house, and you near jumped out of your skin when I touched your wrist. You’re an open book, Mr. Winchester.”
Sometimes, when it rained overnight, Dean still woke up smelling the blood-rotted trees of Purgatory. More than once he’d fallen asleep sitting up with his back against the wall, because the bed felt too exposed. He’d seen Sam looking, stupid crinkly eyebrows and all, and had thought no. No way to explain a year without shelter or food, where four hours was a long sleep and a day without a new open wound was a good one.
“Yeah,” Dean answered, clearing his throat. “War. I guess you could say that.” He tried to take his arms back again, but her grip tightened.
“You’re safe here,” she told him, accent molding the words into something that sounded like truth. “Let yourself relax.”
He was trembling a little with the tension, Dean realized. He took a deep breath and, very slowly, let his muscles uncoil.
“Good,” she said. “Soldiers who come home from war, sometimes they bring a storm with them. They come to Mama Ro looking for a safe way out.”
There was a storm, all right. But Dean was pretty sure it had less to do with the battlefield and more to do with the angry click of Sam on the other end of the phone line, cutting Dean off. Cutting Dean out. Dean thought of Martin’s dead eyes, the fragile way Elizabeth had looked up at him, Benny gone deep underground and Sam gone into radio silence.
Storm? Shitstorm was more like. Still…
“Okay, so things aren’t exactly coming up aces right now. But I’ve been at war since I was four years old, lady. Career soldier, here. So you’re gonna have to do better than that.”
Lightning-quick, she whapped him on the side of the head, then grabbed his wrist back before he could even rub his stinging ear. He jerked back, nearly toppling the armchair.
He gaped. “What the hell?”
“There are rules in my house. It’s Mama Ro and nothing else. Not lady, do you understand me?”
When he finally stopped sputtering, he leveled his deadliest glare at her. “I’ve killed people for less than that,” he said darkly. Which wasn’t strictly true, but Mama Ro was about two seconds away from making a murderer out of him.
She looked entirely unimpressed. “Do not be threatenin’ me, boy. Do you want answers or not?”
“I haven’t even asked you a question yet!”
She lifted his right wrist. Her fingers were very slim and dark against his hands, but they held fast. “When you were a boy, you broke your right wrist.” She shook the wrist for emphasis.
Dean remembered. It had been so stupid. He’d been sixteen, and he’d shimmied up the damn drainpipe on Haley Dimarzio’s house, just to hear her squeal and fret from the ground. He remembered the creak of the rusted joint giving way, remembered the sick crack when his right wrist had broken his ten-foot plummet. Dad had read him the riot act for being careless and made him clean the guns every night for three months.
“Tell Mama Ro - what does a career soldier do when his trigger hand is broken?” she asked, raising one eyebrow.
Dean shrugged. “Use the other one.” Dean had been able to hit a moving target with his left hand before the cast even came off, and he’d been a crack shot with both ever since. So fuck you, Dad, he thought fiercely.
“And even after the break is healed, you go on using the other hand?”
“No. Well…sometimes. I guess. You know, I could have asked my drill instructor if I wanted a shooting lesson.”
Quick as a rattler, she boxed the other side of his head. He bit down on his curse for fear he’d get hit again.
“Listen. Think about learning to use your right hand again. Think about how it felt.”
His ears were ringing now, in perfect counterpoint to the angry throbbing. “It hurt like hell,” he admitted. “My left hand was stronger for months.”
“But you forced yourself to re-learn anyway. Why?”
“I don’t know…because I didn’t want a useless hand? And it’s better to have both. Gives you more options in a fight.”
Her look turned cagey. “And if you could only use one. Which?”
Dean opened his mouth, but nothing came out. What kind of morbid line of questioning was this?
He shook his head, looking down at his right and left wrists clasped in her hands. Before Cas had wiped his slate clean, his right wrist had ached in the cold and had an angry bump where the bone had been pinned back together. Even now, he felt the phantom ache sometimes and rubbed it without thinking.
His left wrist had never been anything but pristine.
“Right, I guess,” he said. “If I had to choose. Which I won’t.”
“Even though, once broken, it’s more likely to break again?”
“Yeah.”
“Even though the left one has never let you down?”
“…Sure. I guess.”
“Why?”
He took a breath. “Because…because it’s my right hand. I write with it and drive with it and… I like it that way, okay?”
She released his hands and sat back. His skin hummed where her fingers had been, warm and tingling. She smiled, revealing straight white teeth and crinkles by her eyes.
“You have your answer, Mr. Winchester.”
Dean stared at her. “Answer to what? Trigger hands, storms…what the hell are you talking about?”
“Something’s broken,” she said. “It’s time to fix it. That, or learn to use your left hand.” She looked calmly up at him, brown hands folded on the table.
“No, it’s…” He stopped. Thought about Purgatory. About the bloody months of running and fighting, Cas vanished and Benny a lurking presence and always Sam, Sam, Sam at the back of his mind. And then the months after, wondering if he’d been on Sam’s mind at all.
You got Sam, Benny had said, and it had never sounded less true.
He was broken, all right. He just wasn’t sure if Purgatory or Sam had been the fall.
Metaphor. He could do metaphor, no matter what Sam or his tenth grade English teacher had to say about it.
Mama Ro must have read the comprehension on his face, because there was a placid smile on her own.
“You understand,” she said. “I guess you’re not so stupid.”
He bit down on the inside of his cheek, suddenly unsure. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I think it might be too late.”
She shrugged, lifting a delicately-draped shoulder. “Mama Ro only sees what is, not what will be. The decision is yours.”
“Yeah, great,” he muttered, pushing out of his chair. He hadn’t had much luck making good decisions lately.
“But,” she said, and he stopped. “It’s rarely too late, so long as both parties want to fix that what’s broken.”
And fuck if Dean didn’t want to believe that. His whole broken self wanted it. He could see Sam, the way anger could freeze his face, turn his voice cold. Sam didn’t get over things; he pickled in his own hurt until there was nothing but hurt left. The longer Dean waited, the worse it would get. Dammit, what was he doing wasting time with a crazy flower lady when he should be on the road already?
He was up and headed for the door when Mama Ro’s voice stopped him again.
“Dean. I hope that you find Sam and heal this break. Something tells me you would not do well with a permanent switch in trigger hand.”
Dean didn’t bother to ask how she knew about Sam, or just what she thought a permanent switch would do to Dean. After all, he’d hopped a ride on the psychic once or twice before.
Author: sowell
Recipient: boysinperil
Rating: G
Wordcount: ~1,700
Warnings: None
Author's Notes: In flower terms, Bittersweet = truth, Lavender = constancy.
Summary: For the prompt "ANYTHING AT ALL in which an outsider targets a post-hell or post-purgatory Dean as recently returned from active duty military." I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind, but I hope you like it anyway! Takes place between 8.09 "Citizen Fang" and 8.10 "Torn and Frayed."
Mama Ro’s house had cats-eye shells strung like a curtain in the front hall. They clacked together as she pushed through them, swaying gently back into Dean’s face. December in New Orleans wasn’t exactly crisp, but Mama Ro’s house was hot enough to roast a turkey, and the whole place smelled sickeningly sweet.
“Kinda toasty in here,” Dean remarked, ducking out of the way of a creeping, long-tendriled plant. “Not exactly tourist-friendly.”
Mama Ro tossed a withering look over her shoulder. Her body seemed tiny underneath her intricately-wrapped layers of linen, but there was visible strength in her posture. “I’m no tourist attraction, Mr. Winchester. The heat is for my babies. If you don’t like it you can leave.”
There was creole in her voice, pulling stickily at some consonants, making others disappear entirely. Her skin was a smooth dark chocolate, eyes grey and luminous. It was impossible to tell how old she was, but Dean had serious doubts about her motherhood status.
“My babies,” she repeated, stopping to caress the lurid pink petal of some tropical flower. Her eyes swept the room, and Dean’s followed, taking in the flowers crowding every corner. There were flaming pinks and oranges, deep blues and violets, stalks as big as tree trunks and dripping stigmas that looked like teeth.
Dean cocked an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Let me guess - you read my mind?”
“Your face. Sit down, please.”
He seated himself gingerly in her rough-hewn armchair. The arms were too high and the back was too curved and the unfinished surface dug into Dean’s arms. He shifted minutely, beginning to regret this. This was the last time he’d take Garth’s advice.
She seated herself opposite him, across a polished card table. “All right, Mr. Winchester. Ask what you came to ask.”
And there was the rub. Dean had no fucking clue what he was doing here.
“Look,” he began uncomfortably. “I know you could probably look into your crystal ball or read your tea leaves or whatever and recite all my deep dark secrets back to me. I’ve hopped a ride on the psychic train once or twice before. I know the drill.”
“Mmm hmm. You’re a soldier?”
Dean stopped his verbal floundering and squinted at her. “What?”
Her hands shot out in a sudden spurt of movement and closed around Dean’s wrists. He tried to jerk away, but there was unsettling strength in her fingers. She yanked his arms forward until they rested on the card table, face down and helpless in her grip.
“You were at war very recently.”
“What makes you say that?” he asked carefully. His heart was beating too hard, and he told himself it was because of the heat.
“You look ready to bolt,” she said lightly. “You carry two weapons in my house, and you near jumped out of your skin when I touched your wrist. You’re an open book, Mr. Winchester.”
Sometimes, when it rained overnight, Dean still woke up smelling the blood-rotted trees of Purgatory. More than once he’d fallen asleep sitting up with his back against the wall, because the bed felt too exposed. He’d seen Sam looking, stupid crinkly eyebrows and all, and had thought no. No way to explain a year without shelter or food, where four hours was a long sleep and a day without a new open wound was a good one.
“Yeah,” Dean answered, clearing his throat. “War. I guess you could say that.” He tried to take his arms back again, but her grip tightened.
“You’re safe here,” she told him, accent molding the words into something that sounded like truth. “Let yourself relax.”
He was trembling a little with the tension, Dean realized. He took a deep breath and, very slowly, let his muscles uncoil.
“Good,” she said. “Soldiers who come home from war, sometimes they bring a storm with them. They come to Mama Ro looking for a safe way out.”
There was a storm, all right. But Dean was pretty sure it had less to do with the battlefield and more to do with the angry click of Sam on the other end of the phone line, cutting Dean off. Cutting Dean out. Dean thought of Martin’s dead eyes, the fragile way Elizabeth had looked up at him, Benny gone deep underground and Sam gone into radio silence.
Storm? Shitstorm was more like. Still…
“Okay, so things aren’t exactly coming up aces right now. But I’ve been at war since I was four years old, lady. Career soldier, here. So you’re gonna have to do better than that.”
Lightning-quick, she whapped him on the side of the head, then grabbed his wrist back before he could even rub his stinging ear. He jerked back, nearly toppling the armchair.
He gaped. “What the hell?”
“There are rules in my house. It’s Mama Ro and nothing else. Not lady, do you understand me?”
When he finally stopped sputtering, he leveled his deadliest glare at her. “I’ve killed people for less than that,” he said darkly. Which wasn’t strictly true, but Mama Ro was about two seconds away from making a murderer out of him.
She looked entirely unimpressed. “Do not be threatenin’ me, boy. Do you want answers or not?”
“I haven’t even asked you a question yet!”
She lifted his right wrist. Her fingers were very slim and dark against his hands, but they held fast. “When you were a boy, you broke your right wrist.” She shook the wrist for emphasis.
Dean remembered. It had been so stupid. He’d been sixteen, and he’d shimmied up the damn drainpipe on Haley Dimarzio’s house, just to hear her squeal and fret from the ground. He remembered the creak of the rusted joint giving way, remembered the sick crack when his right wrist had broken his ten-foot plummet. Dad had read him the riot act for being careless and made him clean the guns every night for three months.
“Tell Mama Ro - what does a career soldier do when his trigger hand is broken?” she asked, raising one eyebrow.
Dean shrugged. “Use the other one.” Dean had been able to hit a moving target with his left hand before the cast even came off, and he’d been a crack shot with both ever since. So fuck you, Dad, he thought fiercely.
“And even after the break is healed, you go on using the other hand?”
“No. Well…sometimes. I guess. You know, I could have asked my drill instructor if I wanted a shooting lesson.”
Quick as a rattler, she boxed the other side of his head. He bit down on his curse for fear he’d get hit again.
“Listen. Think about learning to use your right hand again. Think about how it felt.”
His ears were ringing now, in perfect counterpoint to the angry throbbing. “It hurt like hell,” he admitted. “My left hand was stronger for months.”
“But you forced yourself to re-learn anyway. Why?”
“I don’t know…because I didn’t want a useless hand? And it’s better to have both. Gives you more options in a fight.”
Her look turned cagey. “And if you could only use one. Which?”
Dean opened his mouth, but nothing came out. What kind of morbid line of questioning was this?
He shook his head, looking down at his right and left wrists clasped in her hands. Before Cas had wiped his slate clean, his right wrist had ached in the cold and had an angry bump where the bone had been pinned back together. Even now, he felt the phantom ache sometimes and rubbed it without thinking.
His left wrist had never been anything but pristine.
“Right, I guess,” he said. “If I had to choose. Which I won’t.”
“Even though, once broken, it’s more likely to break again?”
“Yeah.”
“Even though the left one has never let you down?”
“…Sure. I guess.”
“Why?”
He took a breath. “Because…because it’s my right hand. I write with it and drive with it and… I like it that way, okay?”
She released his hands and sat back. His skin hummed where her fingers had been, warm and tingling. She smiled, revealing straight white teeth and crinkles by her eyes.
“You have your answer, Mr. Winchester.”
Dean stared at her. “Answer to what? Trigger hands, storms…what the hell are you talking about?”
“Something’s broken,” she said. “It’s time to fix it. That, or learn to use your left hand.” She looked calmly up at him, brown hands folded on the table.
“No, it’s…” He stopped. Thought about Purgatory. About the bloody months of running and fighting, Cas vanished and Benny a lurking presence and always Sam, Sam, Sam at the back of his mind. And then the months after, wondering if he’d been on Sam’s mind at all.
You got Sam, Benny had said, and it had never sounded less true.
He was broken, all right. He just wasn’t sure if Purgatory or Sam had been the fall.
Metaphor. He could do metaphor, no matter what Sam or his tenth grade English teacher had to say about it.
Mama Ro must have read the comprehension on his face, because there was a placid smile on her own.
“You understand,” she said. “I guess you’re not so stupid.”
He bit down on the inside of his cheek, suddenly unsure. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I think it might be too late.”
She shrugged, lifting a delicately-draped shoulder. “Mama Ro only sees what is, not what will be. The decision is yours.”
“Yeah, great,” he muttered, pushing out of his chair. He hadn’t had much luck making good decisions lately.
“But,” she said, and he stopped. “It’s rarely too late, so long as both parties want to fix that what’s broken.”
And fuck if Dean didn’t want to believe that. His whole broken self wanted it. He could see Sam, the way anger could freeze his face, turn his voice cold. Sam didn’t get over things; he pickled in his own hurt until there was nothing but hurt left. The longer Dean waited, the worse it would get. Dammit, what was he doing wasting time with a crazy flower lady when he should be on the road already?
He was up and headed for the door when Mama Ro’s voice stopped him again.
“Dean. I hope that you find Sam and heal this break. Something tells me you would not do well with a permanent switch in trigger hand.”
Dean didn’t bother to ask how she knew about Sam, or just what she thought a permanent switch would do to Dean. After all, he’d hopped a ride on the psychic once or twice before.