FIC - Dean's Colt (for ladytiferet)
title: Dean's Colt
pairing: none
rating: PG
summary: Dean reflects on his long and epic love affair with firearms.
This is for ladytiferet, who requested a story about Dean's firearms proficiency. I hope you like it, darling.
I don’t even really think about it anymore, I guess, the motions are all so automatic, they’re like braking around a curve in the road or raising a forkful of pie from a plate. Compress, lock, and remove the magazine spring, clean the spring and the magazine, put it all back where it belongs, grab the well-used thin, barely-red-anymore rag and apply the gun oil. My thoughts can wander while I disassemble and clean a gun. And so I let them wander.
Over the years, there had been so many. I remember clear as day the first time Dad handed me a shotgun. He’d wanted to teach me on a 28 gauge, he’d told me later, but the ammo was more expensive and harder to obtain. And though the .410 was more of a challenge as far as hitting a target, it had much less of a kick to it, which was an advantage on account of me only being 8 years old. I’d watched him do target practice so many times, I can’t even imagine what the look was on my face when he handed me that shotgun and let me give it a go. I know I wasn’t afraid to hold the weapon, wasn’t afraid to shoot it. I was afraid I wouldn’t be good at it. The thought of not being good at it was too much to bear, I willed the doubts out of my tiny little brain and decided right at that minute that I would be good at it. No. I would be excellent. Outstanding. If I had to practice every minute of every day and forego sleeping and eating and cartoons and playing tag with Sammy, I was going to learn to shoot like my dad.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to sacrifice all that. Before six months had passed, I was handed a pistol, and it was like being handed a million dollars on a silver platter. It was a Smith & Wesson revolver with a four inch barrel, a tired old thing that had spent countless rounds, nothing like the beauty I’m holding now, carefully removing the slide, lock, firing pin…but at the time I thought it was the most amazing object that had ever been in my hands. Dad took way too long, in my childlike opinion, telling me about how different shooting a pistol was from a shotgun. You can’t hold it up against a stronger part of your body, you just have your hands and your aim. Concentration. Practice. Self-discipline. Practice. Straight sight. Practice.
“No matter how good you think you’ve gotten, son, no matter how many years you have behind you, if you don’t keep up with your practice, you’ll lose your skill.” My dad’s voice was as clear in my head as if he were still alive. “You have to have confidence in yourself, confidence in the weapon, understand?”
And yeah, I did understand. Everything he said was something from Scripture in those days, the Gospel According To John (Winchester). So I studied that iron sight like nothing I’d ever tried to remember before, lining it up with the empty cans on the fencepost in front of me. I used every single curse word I knew (silently, since I didn’t want to interrupt the target practice with getting my ass beat for using foul language) every time I missed one of those stupid fucking cans.
So maybe I didn’t have what it took to get a scholarship to Stanford, but I was smart enough, in third or fourth grade, to know what it took to become proficient with weapons. My grades in school were barely passable, my conduct was just decent enough to let us stay under the radar most of the time, because every minute I was in some ridiculous classroom expected to give a rat’s ass about the history of whatever state we happened to be in at the time, I was thinking about getting in some more target shooting with that shitty Smith & Wesson revolver. If there were ten empty cans on the fencepost or half-brick wall or fallen tree, within a few months, I could hit at least eight, but most of the time I could hit them all.
I let my thoughts wander back to the present, where most of the time I feel like an utter and complete failure at life in general. I know I do good things, but it never feels like whichever people I save seems to stack up high enough to equal the number of people I let down. I don’t know a lot of people, to be honest, I’ve got Sam and Bobby, but most of the people I encounter take my outward countenance at face value. Here’s a guy who knows what he’s doing, they think, I’m sure, when I give them my cocky grin and my serious low-pitched voice. And the girls…every one of them who sneaks out to the backseat of the Impala with me, or into the alley behind the bar where I see them, they all think this macho bullshit is real, which is fine, because it gets me laid plenty.
The truth is, the only time I feel like the one who’s confident, sure, way-off-the-charts competent, is when I’ve got a gun in my hand. That’s what I know. It feels like it’s in my blood now, the way that Sam’s dumb ass thinks there’s some kind of beneath the surface evil lurking in his own blood.
I look down at what I’ve got in front of me on the tiny motel room table, a rare moment of privacy where I’m alone with a pistol, taking care of it, cleaning the extractor, the breech face, the feed ramp. So far from where I started. This beauty is magnificent. I’ve got shotguns, I’ve got other handguns, I have a genuine appreciation for Sam’s Taurus that he seems to favor over all the other firearms at his disposal.
Sam, now, he’s always been better with knives. Both of us have always had them, liner-lock pocket knives, I found out later that Sam carried one even when he was away at school, like it was a habit, or maybe something that he found comforting when he was under the illusion that being armed wasn’t necessary. He carries a six-inch butterfly knife now, always, and I sleep with a ten-inch Bowie knife under my pillow like I’m five and it’s a stuffed teddy bear.
Thoughts wandering again, I remember having to take over training him to shoot after Dad became too frustrated to continue. Even then, I felt a nagging sense of guilt, maybe if I hadn’t been so quick to learn, it wouldn’t have been such a disappointment to Dad that it took Sam so much longer with guns, that Sam didn’t have a passion for it like I did. Not that he didn’t pick it up eventually, I won’t deny that my brother can shoot dead-on when he needs to, and that he takes (almost) as much care as I do with keeping his own weapons in perfect working order.
Back to now, without even giving it much thought, I’ve cleaned the feed ramp, the breech face, the extractor and started to reassemble the pieces of this magnificent piece of machinery in my hands. My Colt 1911 .45, ivory handle, semi-automatic, full magazine with one in the chamber gives me seven shots, and I can reload in a hot second.
It’s not the one-and-only. I killed Azazel with THE Colt, yeah, you know the one. I’ve blasted many a creature with rock salt from a sawed-off shotgun, I’ve even come close to drooling over an eight-shot Mossberg 500 with a pistol grip and an adjustable stock that I’ve seen in a magazine.
But there’s not another weapon that makes me feel more confident than this Colt, my Colt. I can hit a target, whether it’s target practice or an actual target, from 50 yards with one hand, steady as a surgeon with a scalpel. With this in my hand, I am, for that moment, the man who most of the time I only pretend to be.