Chapter Text
John Winchester dies on a Tuesday.
There are almost no sunny days on the northern coast of Washington, but the sun shines through the window as he looks at Dean. The only storm is the one in his eyes.
He’s been sick for a long time, Dean knows it. Sick in the mind, and then in the body, and while this is not a surprise on a technical, or medical, or informational level, it is a shock to his nervous system in a way that Dean cannot understand.
Dean is the only one there when he goes, because Dean is the one who stayed. Dean is the watcher. Dean is the keeper. Of Sammy, of the store, of his father’s last words, of his own seething secrets.
“Dean,” John says, more lucid than Dean has seen him in months. “Promise me– promise me you’ll try.”
“Yeah, Dad, anything,” Dean says, voice tight.
“Promise me you’ll try– to be good. To be better. I want better for you. I know you, Dean, I know your heart. You’re gonna have to fight. Fight harder. Crush the demons there, son. Find the light.”
Even in his most lucid moments, there is the cryptic overlay of paranoia and esoterica, twin flames. Dean tries not to let the familiar feelings of anger rush up into him, not now.
“Yeah, Dad,” Dean says. The sunlight is a knife through the dirty glass of the window. “I will.”
“Promise me.”
Dean swallows, his father is fever hot under his hands. He is going away. He trembles, and then stills.
“I promise.”
****
There is a part of Dean that feels freed once his father is in the ground, and then a part of him that feels sick about feeling that in the first place. What kind of a fuck-up son would even think something like that?
“Gonna miss that grumpy son of a bitch,” Bobby says, clapping a hand on Dean’s shoulder, and Dean should say God, me too, but he thinks it's so quiet in the house, instead.
Sam is crying, Eileen is crying, Bobby is crying. There are guests milling about in the back who are crying. Dean can hear Charlie sniffling and blowing her nose. Dean should be crying too. Everyone is going to notice that he isn’t. But Dean, well, he has this thing; he only cries when he shouldn’t, when it makes no sense to, when it’s anger or fear that is clawing up into his throat. But when things are serious and deadly and terrible, he just… stands there.
It’s almost like he spends so much time waiting for something awful to happen, that when it does there is a sort of peace about it. Finally.
The casket is lowered into the ground. The rain falls. It’s cold, because it’s Washington, and even the late summer can’t scrounge up any real warmth.
Be good, Dean.
Sam comes to stand beside him, shoulder to shoulder. Eileen touches his back. Everyone is crowding around him, looking at him– and he should be crying. He should be doing anything other than staring like that: empty and blank and unfeeling. What the hell is wrong with him?
Be better, Dean.
“Come on,” Bobby says, after a while, after they have stood there long enough, after the service is over and the rain is cold and the end has come and the house is empty and it’s time to leave.
They don’t go back to Dean’s empty house, to the place he’s lived and taken care of John for more than ten years now. They go to Bobby’s instead, the cramped little apartment above the occult bookstore Bobby and John have run together since they settled here.
It’s been years since his father was well enough to take shifts downstairs at Gnosis , but Dean still clocks in five days a week. He doesn’t make it up here as often, and there’s less space than he remembers; every inch of Bobby’s apartment is more crowded with books than the shop is, but it’s a comfort to him now.
“Pizzas are on the way,” Bobby says, hanging up an actual, literal landline telephone. There’s just the four of them, sitting in the living room. The smell of dust and leather and old books is heavy in the half light.
Eileen looks at Sam, and Sam nods at her. Dean is used to them communicating wordlessly, but usually there is ASL to bridge the gap. He raises his eyebrow at them, and Sam looks caught.
“We, well– we have some news. I know this isn’t really the time, but we didn’t– we didn’t plan it this way. It sort of just happened.” He’s signing along as he talks, and Dean looks between them.
“Okay, spill,” Dean signs with his words. After three years of Sam dating Eileen, he has a pretty solid grasp on the language. He’s not as fast as Sam, but he can get the words out, and spell what he doesn’t know.
“We’re engaged,” Eileen says, too excited to speak and letting her hands fly out to form the words instead. And then, with her voice, “Surprise!”
“No shit,” Bobby says, and his voice is full of mirth. “Well, hell knows we could use some good news today, get over here.” He pulls her into a hug.
Sam looks at Dean, and Dean looks at Sam.
The thing is, Dean is having trouble hooking his heart up to his head today. None of his emotions are where they should be, and it takes him a beat too long to get it together, to get the words out.
“Congrats, Sammy,” he says, pulling his giant little brother in for a hug. He means it, he does– but he doesn’t sound like he means it, and he doesn’t really understand why there is a hole in his heart at this news, too, why this also feels like grief today.
He hopes that whatever muted reaction Sam is getting from him can be explained away by the lingering grief, by the horrors of the day, by the fact that Dean was the one with John when he died, the one to see him go.
“Mix bag of emotions today,” Sam says, “I know.” And the strongest feeling in Dean is relief at not being caught lacking, at Sam giving him an out for his shitty half-reaction.
“You’re a lucky man, Sammy,” he says, and he means it. Sam has no idea how lucky he is.
“Yeah,” Sam looks over at his fiance, signing happily to Bobby over a stack of books. “I am.”
****
Dean is five years old the first time he realizes something might be wrong with him.
Mom has been dead for a year, and he only knows that dead means gone where he cannot go, and that dead means they don’t live in their house anymore. That dead means they drive in the car, and sleep in motels, and that dead means something bad got her, and took her, and that dad is going to find the bad thing.
They’ve been staying in a motel in Tenkiller, Oklahoma for almost a week. Dad leaves for hours at a time, tells Dean not to make any noise in the room, to make sure Sammy doesn’t cry no matter what, and Dean feels nothing but terror when, inevitably, the baby he is holding in his pudgy little arms does cry.
He thinks, at first, that as long as Dad doesn’t find out Sammy cried, he won’t be in trouble. The threat is not yet a larger and more pressing discovery , a threat that will haunt him in so many ways for so many years, the threat is still just John.
He’s careful not to leave them for more than a few hours at a time, but when an old woman staying a few doors down offers some friendly advice for teething babies, Dad must realize that Sammy has been wailing because suddenly, they’re not left alone in the motel, but being watched by that same old lady at the park.
It’s hot and dry out here, but she gives him juice and tells him to play with the other kids while she keeps Sam on her lap, and Dean is a very good listener, so he does.
The only shade is under the blistering metal of the playground equipment so that’s where they huddle up, him and a few other boys.
“We could play house,” someone says, and Dean misses having a house so much that nothing in the world sounds more fun.
“I’ll be the baby,” someone says, and another voice, “I’ll be the dad.”
“I’ll be the mom,” Dean says, because he misses having a mom so much, too.
They play. It doesn’t feel like having a house or having a mom but he likes doing a high voice and making the other kids laugh and crooning, oh, poor little baby, at the boy with dark, dark hair.
At night, later, when dad asks him what he did that day, he tells him.
He’s seen dad mad lots of times, and lots of times he gets mad about stuff Dean didn’t know he was gonna get mad about, but this one feels different, this one feels worse.
“The hell would you wanna play mommy for? Don’t you know you’re a boy? Boys don’t do that Dean. They play cops and robbers. They play men. ”
Dean wants to argue with this. It feels important that he tells his dad that can’t be true, that playing mommy is fun, that playing house is good, that he likes it. But he can tell that he has made a mistake so he listens intently and pretends like he understands when dad tells him, “Never do that shit again. Understand?”
He does not understand, but he can tell that this is bad, and that it’s got something to do with wanting to be a mommy and that dad is seeing something deep, deep inside of him and telling him it’s wrong.
“Yes, sir,” he says, and that’s the end of it.
It won’t be the last time John has to tell Dean things like this; it won’t be the last time Dean feels built wrong.
****
When Dean gets home, the house is so empty. It’s been empty all week, in the space between John’s body being removed from the house and put in the ground, but the empty is heavy now.
Dean pours himself a glass of whiskey. He stuck to beer at Bobby’s, trying to avoid the knowing gaze of his uncle, pretending he wasn’t planning on getting shithoused. There is no one here to pretend for. Now, his grief can be as ugly and untamed as he wants it to be.
Two drinks in and he realizes that what he’s feeling about Sam is not just happiness too close to grief, but real grief itself. For a long time, Sam needed him. He was more of a parent than John ever was, he was the one who protected, and fed, and encouraged and bandaged every scraped knee.
John had needed Dean, at the end, but now he was dead.
Sam had needed Dean, at the start, but now he was starting a family of his own and Dean thinks, briefly and selfishly, of driving off a cliff.
They’d lived on the road until Dean was seventeen, until Bobby had finally intervened, found them holed up in a cold war bunker in Sour Lake, Texas, with John preparing for the end of the world.
Bobby had gotten him help. Had gotten him meds. Had put him to work at the store. John had a PHD in occult theology, that’s how he’d met Bobby in the first place, all those years ago. But grief and booze and a ticking time bomb of a brain had turned an academic and historically accurate knowledge base into some kind of psychotic obsession in the wake of losing his wife.
For the first and most formative years of his life Dean had lived on the run, convinced that monsters and demons and ghosts were real, that they were out to get him, that he was not safe, could never be safe; even if he kept whatever monsters might live in his own head quiet.
Then suddenly– they had a house. Suddenly, they had school. He’d lasted all of three months but Sam, well, Sam had loved it. He’d started high school and thrived. Dean had tried and failed, ended up getting his GED a year or two later at Bobby’s insistence, but Sam– Sam had gone to fucking college, of all things. Had done well. Dean feels nothing but pride about this, because if there is any good in him he put it in Sam long ago, because Sam is the one who can let it shine.
The house is so, so quiet. Too big for just him.
Dean thinks that maybe ghosts are real, after all.
****
“Don’t stand like that,” Dad says, and his voice is angry. Dean is nine years old and they’re at a country fair and he doesn’t know how he’s standing wrong. He looks up at his dad, confused and sorry, so sorry. “Stand straight, hands off your hips, like a boy should stand. Jesus, Dean.”
Dean forgets sometimes that there is a way boys are supposed to stand. He wonders if all boys have to correct for this, or if something is wrong with him, specifically. He thinks about soldiers, their straight backs, their stiff legs. He tries to rise, to stiffen his spine. He nods at his dad, I got it, don’t worry, I won’t forget. But the look in John’s eyes is not the same look he gets when Dean spills something or can’t spell a word, the look that fathers give their sons as they figure out how to live life. It’s a disappointed look. It’s a hurt look. It’s a sickened look.
Dean keeps his shoulders real straight all day, doesn’t forget even once.
****
Be good, Dean.
Dean drinks down the mouthful of words, bitter. He’s drunk now, well and truly, and he’s sad that his dad is dead and he’s sick over the fact that in his final moments of life, in the small dregs of lucidity that clung to the glass of his brain, all that John Winchester had to say to Dean was to fix it , whatever was in him, the thing that now Dean can name, but chooses not to. The thing that John could always see but Dean had to learn about the hard way.
The tears come late, they should have come graveside, when he could lean on his brother or Bobby, but they come now instead, whiskey thick. And it’s not just that John is dead, it's that Dean is built wrong and he wanted, more than anything, for his whole life, to prove to his dad that he wasn’t and now he can’t. He never can.
He can’t prove it to John, but he can prove it to himself.
****
Dean isn’t really the praying type.
Dad and Bobby, well, they’re old occultists. Even before John lost his sense of reality, his interest in the obscure and the occult went beyond the mere academic. He believed, and not in some crackpot way, but in a down on your knees in the dirt, face to the sky kind of way. You would think that God and the monsters don’t go hand in hand but in John’s mind, if evil was real, if demons were real, if Hell was real, well… Then God was too.
“Humans want to worship,” he’d told Dean. “A long time ago, they turned to the sun, made God out of him, out of the sea, out of the passage of time itself. Called them Ra, and Neptune, and Chronos. All over the world, where there were people, there were temples. We are called to heaven, to the stars, we are connected to each other. Religion is a cage when it’s done wrong, see, because it’s not about obedience to man, it’s about obedience to God .”
Dean was never sure about that. He didn’t believe in ghosts, not the kind that tore you up in a real way, just the ones that haunted your mind. He didn’t believe in God, because the world was full of wrong and bad and at some point during his teenage years he realized that the doctrine of John’s truth was psychosis. He didn’t believe in Hell because he didn’t believe in Heaven, because all that matters is now, all that matters is how you live and who you save and who you let down.
Dean isn’t the praying type, but he misses his dad and he feels like he’s hollowed out and there is something so wrong with him and so broken and he doesn’t want to be like this. He wants to make good on his promise.
It’s easy to collect the things from around the house. Dean might not be a believer but fourteen years on the run with nothing but demons to hunt and another ten spent on the academic end means he knows what he needs if he wants to, if he wants to do it for real.
Everything is here. There is already an altar, it is already adorned. There are candles and herbs and an athame.
Dean lights the white candles, the red ones too, the ones carved with names like Michael, and Gabriel, and Raphael. He makes a circle of angelica root. He burns bloodroot over hot charcoal in a small, metal bowl. He burns sage and yarrow bare until the smoke is thick. He gets on his knees, drunk and crying. It smells like his father. It smells like whiskey.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he only knows how to do it. He knows the words, he hopes he can give them weight. He expects nothing to come of this except a sore throat and smoke clinging to his flannel but he wants so badly to believe, right now, since his father isn’t here to do it for him.
The blade of the knife is cool against his overheated skin when he cuts. He lets the blood drip down into the flame, watches it cough him back out.
“God,” he says, “please make me good. I want to be good.” The words are thick and they stick in his throat. “I call on archangels, I call on the heavenly bodies, I call on those we cannot see. I invoke, conjure, and command you. Make me good. Show me how to be good. I promised him, I have to– I don’t know how. Please, show me how. Show me how to be good. Show me how to be good. Show me how to be good.”
He repeats the words: a chant, a prayer, he speaks them over and over until his knees are aching from the old wood of the floor and his throat is thick with smoke and his eyes burn and the candles have melted down into puddles on their little plates.
“Please, someone show me how. Anyone. I need– I need help.”
In the end he falls asleep like that, curled up in a ball at the foot of his father’s altar, haunted by the same man who’s been haunting him his whole life, regardless of what side of the veil he’s on. Whiskey sleep is sticky, and it takes him roughly and then spits him back out before dawn, mouth thick as cotton, body tender as a bruise.
It takes him a minute, when he’s finally awake, to realize that he is not alone.