Fic: Reconstruction Site (1/1)
Title: Reconstruction Site
Rating: PG-13/T
Warnings: Mild language, blatant use of a h/c kink, various very secondary OCs
Author's Notes: I dare any hurt!Dean fan to watch the first episode of BBC's Sherlock and not at least toy with the idea that inspired this. Spoiler free for season six
Summary: Two years after the events of the season five finale, Dean's doing the best he can to live his life and keep his promise to his brother. But someone's out to make sure he doesn't.
When the first message came, Dean almost missed it.
He could be forgiven for this. The message was written on the back of an "I ♥ Indianapolis" postcard shuffled in between two bulk mailers full of coupons, and juggling the mail, the house keys, and his cane could be a hassle on a good day -- which it wasn't. It was a game day, for one, and while Dean loved watching Ben play baseball, the few seats at the diamond in the park went quickly, and there was no way Dean was going to make Mrs. Milton, seven months pregnant with her fourth kid, or Grandma Jacobs, pushing 80, stand, bum leg or no. Of course, Lisa hadn't been able to make it, which meant shuffling about with his cellphone camera, trying to catch all the big moments, and then explaining to Ben that his mom had gotten stuck in traffic behind a tipped tractor trailer on her way back from the city. After the game, he'd overheard Margie from down the street referring to him as "the Braeden's nanny", and it was a good thing Ben had gone off with his teammates for celebratory ice cream so he didn't have to hear the string of curses Dean rattled off at the steering wheel on the drive home. He figured he was lucky he managed to get past a head full of "meds, beer, nap" looping like a refrain from a Police song long enough to remember to get the mail at all. Letting a few of them slip through his fingers in the front hall was just the tiny cherry on top of his shit sundae for the day.
He'd've walked right by it even after it fell, too -- Lisa would have understood, having been the one to insist on putting in a new door with no mail slot and hanging the metal box under the house numbers, well within Dean's reach -- but he caught sight of his name written in thick block letters on the address line and froze. He never got mail, save for his monthly credit card bill, and that was addressed to his shiny new legal identity, Max Weidenbach. This didn't even have his last name, just "DEAN" and Lisa's address, which no one from his old life should even have, much less be sending postcards to.
He cursed under his breath and limped to the kitchen to drop off the rest of the mail and his keys, pausing for a moment to lean against the counter and shake out his right hand, which was aching almost as fiercely as his leg. He gave the refrigerator -- and the pill bottle sitting on top of it -- a longing glance, then sighed made his way back into the front hall. He stopped in front of the dropped mail, wrapped both hands around the grip of his cane, and slowly lowered himself down into an awkward, one legged crouch, his left leg sliding out to the side like he was doing some kind of seriously crappy dance move. He shuffled the fallen mail together with his right hand, the left still clenched tightly around the wobbling cane, then pushed himself back to his feet as quickly as he could without falling over. He sighed again once he was upright, swapped the mail for the cane, and headed back to the kitchen where he could finally sit his ass down and stretch his leg out properly.
It was only when he had his pill bottle, a beer, and a pillow under his heel that he turned his attention back to the postcard.
"37.8 -86.6", read the postcard.
"Son of a bitch," said Dean.
*
The coordinates were for Calvary Cemetery in Cloverport, Kentucky. Dean paid them just enough attention to figure out that they weren't for, say, Disney World, then tossed the postcard in the recycling bin -- Lisa would throw a fit if she found perfectly good paper in the trash -- and proceeding to get as drunk as he responsibly could when he was medicated and would potentially be called upon to pick Ben up from the ice cream place at any moment.
That wasn't very drunk, and Dean found himself rather bitter about that fact.
The responsibility was all Lisa's influence. When he'd first arrived on her doorstep just over two years before, depressed and beaten on the inside, even if his face no longer resembled a work by Picasso on the outside, he'd managed to lose a week to the bottom of a bottle or several, and had no intentions of being sober ever again. It was only Lisa and her redirection of his energy to menial tasks around the house that drew him out of his funk and into something resembling a life.
In all honesty, Margie from down the street hadn't been far off. While Dean would never -- ever -- refer to himself in those terms, there weren't many others that he could claim that were much better. He certainly wasn't Lisa's boyfriend or anything of the sort, though they did occasionally sleep together. Her housemate, maybe, the kind who didn't have a job of his own and made up for it by making sure her son got to where he needed to go on time, did his homework, had a packed lunch, and an orderly house to come home to.
Yeah. He was the freaking nanny.
*
The second message was harder to ignore.
For one thing, his name was written in bright red block letters and underlined three times. For another, he had an audience.
It was tucked into the sliver of space between the back of the trunk lid and the back windshield, folded in half and angled so that Dean's name faced out towards the parking lot. It wasn't a post card, this time, but a scrap of a bulk mailer addressed to the "current resident" of an apartment a few away. Dean tried to snatch it up before anyone spotted it, but Joe was only a few feet behind him with the grocery cart, and nosy as hell.
"Who's Dean?" Joe asked.
"How the hell should I know?" The folks at the grocery store had never gotten the half-assed "it's a nickname, you know, James Dean?" story the neighbors and parents at the school had gotten, and Joe only knew Dean as Mr. Weidenbach. Joe's face fell, and Dean sighed inwardly, stuffing the message into his back pocket. "Someone probably stuck it on the wrong car."
Joe nodded, cheering right back up and fidgeting with the shelf/seat on the grocery cart. Dean leaned his hip against the Impala and dug out his keys. Mrs. Milton had been shopping today, too, and knowing Joe, he was anxious to get back in and make sure she had a hand getting her bags out to her car, too.
"I've got this from here, kid," Dean tried, but Joe was already dragging the case of bottled water off the bottom of the cart. Mrs. Milton, it seemed, would just have to wait until Dean got his groceries loaded up.
It was a little bit odd, calling Joe "kid" -- he was clearly at least Dean's age, if not older -- but it'd made Joe grin ever since the first day they met, when Dean was still getting used to the cane and the new limitations of his bum leg. Joe'd swooped in out of nowhere, pulling Dean's bags from his cart even before Dean finished getting the Impala's trunk open, and Dean had just about torn his head off. "I'm Joe," he'd said, gesturing to his name tag with his chin, "I'm the bag boy," and Dean had snorted hard enough he hurt his nose.
"I thought that job was for kids," he'd said.
"Yes sir," said Joe. "I'm the bag boy."
Joe lived with his mother and worked at the grocery store every day but Sunday. All of his coworkers had picked up Dean's "I don't need help, dammit" vibes within a few minutes of his first arrival at the store, but Joe wasn't the sort of guy to take no for an answer, and after a few unsuccessful attempts to dodge him, Dean had stopped arguing. He figured helping customers with "different capabilities" made Joe feel useful, and, well. He could relate.
That was Joe's term. "My mother has different capabilities," he'd told Dean once. "I know hard it is for you folks."
Dean was pretty sure Joe had his own set of "different capabilities", but never asked.
When the bags were all loaded, filling the trunk almost to its capacity -- Ben had an appetite almost to rival Dean's, and Lisa wasn't exactly a shy eater, either -- Joe patted his hands proudly on the cart and smiled. "All done, sir."
"Yeah, kid. I noticed."
Joe ducked his chin, smile growing larger, then nodded towards Dean. "I can take the thingy inside, if you want. We can make an announcement for Dean."
Dean grimaced, then noticed Mrs. Milton making her way out of the store over Joe's shoulder. She stopped her cart at the curb and started pulling out bags to drape over her arms, resting a few things on top of her pregnant belly, and Dean had to fight the urge to smile. "Hey, looks like you've got another client."
Joe turned, yelped, and set back out across the parking lot at a jog. Dean shook his head and turned away -- only to curse when he noticed Joe had left the cart behind. He looked from it to the cart stand, a good fifty feet away, and sighed.
Okay, so maybe he'd gotten just a little bit used to relying on Joe's help.
*
The second message had coordinates for Kirksville, Missouri. Dean plotted out a route in his head on autopilot, then worked out how long it would take him to get up there and back.
A little under seven hours. Two years ago, that would have been nothing at all. But Ben was starting a day camp in a few days, and Lisa was getting on Dean's case about seeing her chiropractor again, and while Dean made sure he hit the gun range a few times a month and did his best to keep in shape, just about any hunter out there would probably be better suited to handling the case than he was. Sure, he'd chosen his cane largely based on how well it could double as a bludgeon if need be, but there weren't actually many supernatural creatures you could take out by beating them over the head.
Besides which, he'd promised Sam. Keeping that promise was one of the few things that kept him going at all, some days. He sure as hell wasn't going to break it, now.
Even if his better days still kind of made him want to scream.
*
Dean wasn't even the one who spotted the third message.
Ben's scout troop did a weekend trip up to Lake Michigan at the end of August, shortly before school was due to start up again. For the entire month, it seemed to be the only thing anyone in the house wanted to talk about. Ben, of course, was jazzed to go hang out with his friends in the wilderness for a few days away from his mom. "The girls camp out just a few miles away," he told Dean one night as they did the dishes. "It's going to be awesome." Lisa was convinced that Dean should volunteer to go along and help out, probably just so she could have a weekend "without any boys". She even buttered him up by buying him a new cane with a retractable ice pick -- which she joked he wasn't allowed to use on "anything that might bleed". No amount of whining about how much he hated camping would deter her, even when he pointed out why he didn't like it in the first place. "Exactly," she said. "They might need your kind of help."
Dean hadn't offered anyone "his kind" of help in more than two years. The last time the world had needed "his kind" of help, his brother had ended up in Hell.
"I just worry about you," she said, and when Dean rolled his eyes, her voice went from sympathetic to pissed off. "Dean, I like you. You're great with Ben and you've been a huge help around here. But I swear to God, if you don't get out of this house for more than four hours at a time, I'm going to rip your balls off and feed them to Margie's shih tzu."
Dean hedged. Lisa reached for the salad tongs.
Lisa won.
"Man," Ben told him, twenty minutes into the six hour drive up to Manistee, Michigan. "You are so whipped."
They set up camp just next to the lake in three groups of four kids and one adult. Ben and his friend Steve had to show Dean how to put together the frame of his brand new, collapsible backpacking tent, then got bored with him when it came time to put down the tent pegs and ran off with Lucas and Rajan to explore the lake front. It took twenty minutes of dragging himself around to get the thing secure, and when he finally grabbed for his cane to push back to his feet, his entire leg seized up and sent him flopping right back to the ground. That, of course, was when the scout leader, a man closer to Bobby's age than Dean's, stopped by to check in and hauled him to his feet one handed.
"You can't let those boys run over you like that, Sport."
Dean gritted his teeth and thanked him.
He had a whole new set of reasons to hate camping.
"Dean!" That was Ben, calling to him from a good ways down the shoreline of the lake. Dean could hear him and at least one of the others tromping through the trees. "Dean, you gotta see this!"
The scout master -- he'd told Dean to call him by his first name, but Dean couldn't remember what it was -- gave Dean a once over, even as Dean planted his cane on the uneven ground and started limping after Ben's voice. "You sure you're up for this, Sport?"
He was just that kind of guy, the kind who would always see someone like Dean -- blue collar, sarcastic, disabled -- as something less than, no matter how many ways Dean found to prove otherwise. That was probably why Dean never bothered to remember his name. Hell, wasn't like the man ever used Dean's, either.
Dean turned just enough to give him a tight lipped smile and a wave with his free hand. "I'm good." He turned back to the woods. "Jackass."
Steve broke through the trees to the camp ground first and skidded to a stop, waving his arms, Ben just behind him. "Mr. Weidenbach, you gotta see this." They were already turning back, bouncing on their toes as they clearly fought the urge to go running up ahead again like over-excited puppies. Steve was starting to turn almost purple. "We're gonna find treasure!"
Behind them, the scout master gave a hearty, chuckle. Dean ignored him. "What, you find a giant X on something?"
Ben shook his head, grinning ear to ear, and Dean wondered if all the hassle of the tent and the scout master and, you know, camping, might be worth it just to see that look on the kid's face for an entire weekend. "Better."
"They're spray painted on a rock!" said Steve. "This big!" He held up his arms, one stretched up over his head, the other extending straight out, palm flat in the air, indicating a pretty considerable height. "Coordinates!"
Dean slowed.
"We think it might be for geocachers," Ben explained. "Rajan looked them up on his phone and the spot's only, like, a mile from here --" Ben stopped talking when he noticed Dean wasn't right next to him any more. "Dean?"
Dean groaned inwardly. Maybe the kids were right. Maybe they were for geo-whoevers. Wasn't like the world revolved around Dean anymore, right? "Yeah, I'm coming."
Ben nodded. "It's just a little further. The ground's pretty even."
Jesus, even the twelve year old kid was trying to make concessions for him. Dean resisted the urge to stab something with the retractable ice pick in his cane.
Ben and Steve lead him to a small clearing, set back a little ways from the lake side. While Ben was right, the ground was fairly firm and even, there was no path leading into it, and the boys made a show of stomping down the plant life to clear his way. Dean shifted his weight to his good leg and helped out with his cane, much to the boys' delight, then stepped into the clearing.
The rock in question was set into the dirt, more like a platform than a free standing rock. The numbers sprawled out across its surface in thick, faintly glinting white lines -- freshly painted, if Dean didn't miss his guess -- and surrounded by what looked at first to be a very lopsided circle, but Dean soon realized was just a really, really large "D".
Or, you know, maybe the world still revolved around him a little, after all.
*
The first thing Dean did was forbid the boys from going looking for whatever was at the coordinates, thereby eliminating any cool points he'd managed to build up by being the laid back adult with the awesome car. Especially when Rajan shot down his "they weren't put there for you" with a solemn "Geocaching is for everyone," leaving Dean stuck with "because I said so". He ordered them all back to camp, followed them long enough to be reasonably sure they'd at least go to the camp, even if they didn't stay there, then pulled out his phone and called Castiel.
He half expected the number not to work any more, but Castiel picked up on the first ring.
"Dean," he said. "It's good to hear from you."
"Yeah, well, wish I could say likewise." Dean's hand clenched around the phone and he leaned back against a tree, slowly working his left leg, trying to loosen up the muscles. "What the hell, Cass?"
There was a rush of air and the sound of feathers, and then Castiel was standing beside him. "You're distressed."
Dean snorted and half-stumbled away, caught off guard by the sudden appearance. "Goddamn right I'm 'distressed', Cass. You want me for something, you tell me. Don't leave creepy ass messages where anyone could find 'em."
Castiel shook his head. "I haven't left you any messages. I've been very busy. I thought you'd prefer to contact me, first."
Dean wondered if Castiel's reangelfication had come with lessons in in how to lie convincingly. He doubted it.
"If they're not from you, who the hell are they from?"
"I don't know. As I said, I've been very busy. The apocalypse left Heaven in disarray. My remaining brothers have looked to me to fix it."
Dean narrowed his eyes at him. "You haven't been sending me coordinates. A post card, note on the car, painted on rocks. . . ?" The look on Castiel's face confirmed it -- the notes weren't from him. "Dammit. I thought -- I'd say it was Bobby, but this isn't his style." He leaned heavily on his cane to pace away a few steps, running his free hand through his hair. "Wait, how the hell did you find me?" His hand went to his chest. "I thought I was still blocked from angel radar."
"I traced your phone. Dean." Castiel looked Dean up and down slowly, his brows drawing together. "What happened to your leg?"
Dean glanced down, thinking for a moment how odd he must look to someone who hadn't seen him in the last two years. "Nothing, really. Just . . . getting old. Lifestyle caught up with me." Castiel leaned forward, peering into Dean's face, and Dean leaned back. "Right, anyway, this has been swell, but I just wanted to know about the coordinates. I've got a troop of kids to keep track of, I'm sure you've got stuff to do."
Castiel nodded slowly. "You'll call if you need anything further."
It wasn't a question, but Dean answered with a shrug. "Sure."
"Or . . . if you want to talk."
Dean rolled his eyes and turned to start making his way back to the camp. "Yeah, whatever, man. And, hey, that goes both ways. You can --" There was another short burst of breeze behind him, and he knew Castiel had left.
Well. That was the way Dean's goodbyes usually went, anyway.
He shook his head and turned back towards camp, only to nearly trample over Ben, who stood with his legs braced on the path, his arms folded over his chest. Dean jammed the end of his cane further into the ground to keep from falling. "Jesus, kid, you're almost as bad as he is."
Ben didn't move. "Who was that?"
"That?" Dean sifted through a couple of lines -- Castiel could be a park ranger, or maybe someone camping nearby -- before rejecting them. "Old friend."
"The angel?"
Dean frowned, then waved his hand to try to gesture him out of the way. "How'd you --"
Ben still didn't move. "I listen. What's going on here, Dean?"
Dean sighed. "Nothing, okay? Let's just go back to camp."
"No." It was a verbal footstamp and laying down of law that reminded Dean so much of Sam that it took his breath away. "Tell me what's going on." Ben held up his hand, eyes narrowed dangerously. "And don't tell me some lie 'for my own good'. I can handle it."
Dean's head jerked back. "I'm not going to lie."
"You were," Ben said. "You had Mom-face."
"Mom -- I did not!"
Ben pursed his lips and tilted his head and holy crap, the more Dean got to know him, the more he felt like this kid was a Winchester after all. That was a classic bitchface right there. "Dude," he said. "I know a Mom-face when I see one. It's about those numbers, isn't it? That's why you called your angel. They mean something."
Dean sighed. "It's something my dad used to do. I think . . . I think someone's trying to get me back into hunting."
Ben nodded. "Good."
That wasn't what Dean was expecting. "What?"
"You should get back into hunting. No offense, dude, but you're getting boring."
"Boring."
Ben nodded harder. "All you do is cook and clean and stuff. You're Dean Winchester! You're supposed to be saving people! Like you saved me and my friends."
Dean rubbed his free hand down his face, then shifted to start limping around Ben, uneven terrain be damned. "That's not what I do any more, Ben."
Ben hopped sideways to block Dean's path again. "Why not?"
Dean stared at him. "Are you kidding me?"
"You're scared."
Dean started towards the other side of the path. "Stop it, Ben."
Ben followed, refusing to let him past. "You are! Is it because of me and Mom? Because we can take care of ourselves."
"I know that."
"Then why?"
Dean planted his weight on his right foot, lifting the cane to wave it at Ben. "How am I supposed to hunt, huh? I can barely walk."
"You walk fine." Ben grabbed at the cane. Dean barely managed to pull it away in time. "Your leg's an excuse. That's why you didn't get your angel to heal it up."
Dean froze. "No, it's not."
"Yeah? Then why?"
Dean shoved the cane into the ground with more force than was strictly necessary and started trying to dodge past Ben again. "He has better things to do."
Ben stepped in front of him, so close this time the kid had to crane his neck to look up at him. "You're full of crap."
Dean shuffle-stepped, managing to make his way around Ben and started for the camp with renewed vigor. "We're not having this conversation."
Ben followed, dogging Dean's steps. "Those coordinates are only like a mile away. What if something happens? What if whatever it is comes for us, tonight?"
Dean shuddered. Ben had hit Dean's worries right on the head. The hunt, whatever it was, could be anything. A vengeful spirit, a water creature, a wendigo. . . . He made a mental inventory of his supplies in his head and wanted to kick himself when he realized how small his personal arsenal had gotten. Salt, one shotgun, a handful of blades. He could maybe take out a wendigo with a road flare, if it held real still.
Dad would kill him for being so unprepared.
"We'll put down salt," he said, pumping more confidence into his voice than he felt. "Some runes. We'll be fine."
"What if it's Sam?"
Dean froze again, his lungs seizing in his chest, a fresh stab of pain rising from the base of his left foot all the way up his spine to his neck. He turned slowly to face Ben. "Sam's gone."
"What if he came back? You did."
Dean swallowed hard, choking on his own breath. Forget the theoretical wendigo or his father, this kid was going to kill him. "I never told you about that."
"I told you: I listen."
Dean closed his eyes, a flash of memory of the early days, when it was all he could do to keep himself from flying apart, when Lisa's voice and her arms were the only things that kept him grounded late at night. "Ben." He took a breath, held it for a moment, then forced himself to continue. "Where Sam went -- there's no coming back."
Ben sucked his cheek in and ground his jaw. It was a bad habit, one Dean had noticed when the kid's usual confidence was shaken. "You don't know that."
Dean turned to start towards the camp again. He was exhausted, weighed down by the conversation and the throbbing pain in his leg. "Come on," he said. "Your friends are waiting. We've got stuff to do before dark."
*
Ben was a trooper, weaving together a story to go with the symbols Dean got them all to draw on the ground around the three campsites. The scout master and his assistant -- Tom or Tim or maybe Arthur -- looked on with matching amused expressions as the boys all got into the "old Native American lore" and tossing scary stories back and forth while they worked. Arthur -- or Tim, or was it George? Dean had to get better at remembering these people's names -- shot him a thumbs up before they broke back into their groups for the night.
"Kids love that stuff. You're really good with him."
Dean shrugged. "Thanks."
"You're lucky," the man said. "Took me four years before I got my step-son to do more than glare at me when I suggested anything."
Dean blinked. ". . . Yeah," he said. "Ben's a great kid."
"You make a good dad."
Dean felt his skin flush, even as his stomach flipped over at the prospect of being that responsible for another human being. Sure, he took care of Ben when Lisa was busy. But dads could make or break a kid.
He was doing the right thing, he decided. Not going after whatever the coordinates referred to. He'd pass them onto Bobby when they got home -- hell, Bobby would probably love to hear from him -- and someone else could take the thing out.
Dean knew what it was like to have a hunter for a father. It didn't end well.
*
Nights had never been Dean's best time, especially now that he wasn't spending them hunting down evil. He'd known before setting out on the camping trip that he wouldn't be getting much sleep -- sleeping on the ground with a bad leg was just asking to not be able to move at all come morning, and, well, it was camping. Dean had hated camping even before he'd ended up, however briefly, strung up in a wendigo's lair. Once the kids were in their tents, he set himself up on a camp chair with his foot propped on a log, the old army blanket he still kept in the trunk of the Impala draped over his shoulders, the shot gun tucked into his lap. If anything came for the kids in the night, he figured he'd be ready.
He didn't count on the exhaustion -- both physical and mental, thanks to the mystery of the messages -- to pull him under only about an hour after the kids finally quieted down.
His dreams had become strange things since he'd stopped drinking himself to sleep. The nightmares still came with alarming regularity, but it was about even odds these days as to whether he'd be treated to half-memories of his time in Hell, or anxiety dreams filled with endless grocery store aisles filled with canned goods labeled in gibberish, slippery floors, and a jeering sales staff.
Maybe it was the "dad" comments from the assistant scout master, maybe it was his own worries about being left alone with four boys to keep track of, but whatever it was, that night by the fire circle, ringed in salt and symbols, but his mind took him back to before the fires of Hell, before he even started hunting. In his dream he crouched beneath a round table with Sam, neither of them any taller than the table was high. A few pairs of feet poked through the floor length white table cloth, shuffling back and forth as their owners fidgeted and ate and spoke in wordless murmurs with each other. A band played, something innocuous and vaguely romantic, and when Dean lay down flat on the floor and peered under the curtain of the table cloth, he could see high heels and brightly shined shoes tapping and spinning on the dance floor.
A woman's voice rang with laughter, and though Sam was far too old for it to be possible in anything other than dream logic, Dean recognized it as his mother's. One end of the table cloth lifted away like the flap of a tent door, and she peered through, smiling at them.
"Come on out of there, my little hunters," she said. "It's almost time to go home."
Dean opened his mouth to protest -- they hadn't even had the cake yet, and she'd promised -- when the snap of a breaking stick ripped him from the dream and woke him with a gasp and a muffled curse.
It took him a moment to get his bearings, and then a moment longer to let his eyes adjust to the darkened campsite, but as soon as he was certain he could do so without falling, Dean was up and out of the camp chair, his cane clenched in one hand, the shot gun up and ready in the other. The campsite was quiet, save for the the rhythmic chirping of night insects and the occasional snuffle of sleeping preteen, so Dean scanned the surrounding tree line, making almost a full circle before his eyes landed on the source of the sound.
The damn kid looked at him -- made full eye contact -- then turned and bolted deeper into the woods.
He didn't have to wonder what Ben was up to -- he was doing exactly what Dean would have done, if he was twelve years old and camping out not far from a suspected hunt. Dean lowered his shotgun and stared after him for a moment in disbelief, either way.
"Son of a bitch, Lisa's so gonna kill me."
*
A mile of wilderness terrain wasn't like a mile of road or grassland. The path Ben followed through the woods was winding and rough, and though he'd slowed down from his run as soon as he was out of sight of the campsite, Dean still had to limp for all he was worth just to keep up. He tracked Ben's progress by the occasional flash of the kid's cellphone -- like all his friends, Ben had a GPS app loaded into it, and he was clearly using the thing to make sure he didn't get lost. He also clearly had no concept of how visible even that dim light could be on a dark night through relatively wide-set trees. Dean made a mental note to teach him that. Just as soon as he was done killing him for running off half-cocked. Dean lost him for a few moments not far from the GPS coordinates, when Ben broke into a run again, rounding a turn in the path past an uprooted tree trunk, and Dean was thinking up new and creative tortures for him -- he'd make him clean the Impala's undercarriage with a tooth brush, for one, then maybe tie sticks to his legs and set him on a fast moving treadmill -- when Ben screamed.
Thoughts of punishments, of the way his leg was throbbing, of anything but NO! slid right out of Dean's mind. The next thing he knew he was breaking through a patch of trees into a clearing next to the lake, just in time to see the washed out, flickering form of a burly backwoodsman dragging Ben towards the water.
Dean didn't waste his breath voicing his denial. He raised the shotgun and fired without breaking his stride like it hadn't been more than two years since he'd last faced anything like this. He reached Ben's side before the spirit had even completely dissipated. The kid was groggy, rolling his head in the muddy sand. Blood trickled from his hairline, and Dean pressed the base of his palm against it gently, setting the shotgun aside to fist his other hand in Ben's shirt.
"Hey. Ben, look at me. You okay?"
Ben gasped and his eyes rolled once before they managed to focus. "Dean." He swallowed, then looked past him and grinned. "I knew it."
Not the reaction he'd been expecting. "Knew what?"
Ben grinned harder, his hand coming up the pat awkwardly at Dean's wrist. "You dropped your cane."
Dean blinked, then glanced over his shoulder. Ben was right; he'd made it almost fifty yards without the cane's added support, and had done it at speed. He looked back. "You little shit."
Ben laughed, then cut off abruptly, his eyes going wide. "Dean!"
An icy hand speared through Dean's back between his shoulder blades and wrapped its thick, blunt fingers around his heart. Dean had a moment to reflect on how fucked up it was that that was a familiar sensation before the hand pulled back, dragging him bodily with it. He gagged, unable to pull in a breath around its grip, his whole body cramping and burning as the spirit raised its fist in the air, leaving his arms, legs, and head dangling. He tried to order Ben to run or grab the shotgun or anything, but his body had stopped listening the moment the hand had passed through his spine. The spirit brought Dean's head level to its face and breathed in deep, setting its spectral beard fluttering.
"You'll do," it said, and then Dean was airborne, sailing out over the lake like a ragdoll.
Dean hadn't missed this.
He hit the water back first, what little air he'd manage to pull in before the spirit had grabbed him rushing from his lungs with the force of the impact. Then he was under, staring up into a distorted moon, unable to fight his body's instinctive attempt to breathe. He choked, convulsing, and felt like his back had broken under the strain.
He wondered fleetingly if where he'd end up this time -- if maybe Hell would be bearable if Sam was at his side -- then thought of the spirit throwing Ben in after him and mentally howled.
The wobbling, fading moon above him exploded into a mass of glimmering silver, and Dean must have ended up in Hell again after all, because then Sam was there, looming over him all wide eyes and floppy hair, just like he was the last time Dean had seen him, standing over the door to Lucifer's prison.
"Dean," Sam said. "Jesus, you jerk," and Dean spit what must have been a gallon of water right into his face.
Someone laughed, and then Ben was there, his face right next to Sam's, eyes bright and lips wide in a grin. "Dude," he said, "I told you," and Dean manged to find more water to cough up onto him and decided it would be better for all involved if he just passed out.
*
Passing out didn't really happen in Hell. Neither did dreams of white table cloth tents and chocolate cake and his father laughing and holding his mother as they spun around and around on a dance floor to a live band of Ghostfacers, so Dean had to conclude that he'd managed to survive somehow, after all.
He woke up still on the lakeside, curled up on his side in the traditional rescue position, his mouth tasting of mud and blood and bile, his whole body knotted into one giant muscle cramp, but he was staring at Sam and Ben sitting side by side facing him, back lit by a grave fire, as Sam gave Ben a quick overview on how to load the shotgun, so he decided all that was okay.
*
"It was you. The messages were from you." Dean leaned back on his bed in his little basement "apartment", his leg propped up on one of Lisa's brightly colored throw pillows. Sam sat hunched on the floor against the opposite wall -- Dean didn't have much by way of furniture.
Sam ran a hand down his face. "Yeah."
"What the hell, Sam?" Dean resisted the urge to get up and pace -- the adventures of the weekend were already taking his toll on his leg and back without the added stress. "You're the one who made me promise to stop hunting in the first place!"
"I know, I --" Sam huffed softly. "I didn't really think you'd do it. Or about what it'd do to you."
Dean glared. "And what, exactly, is that?"
Sam poked Dean's left knee with his foot. "There's nothing wrong with your leg, Dean."
Dean growled and shifted sideways in his chair. "Like hell there isn't. I can barely walk, Sam."
"You did well enough following Ben. Did even better running to save him."
"That was some . . . freak adrenaline thing."
"The doctors have never been able to pinpoint why it hurts."
"You've been talking to my doctors, now? Just how long have you been back, anyway?"
Sam looked away. "That's not the point, Dean."
"Like hell it isn't. We're not doing this any more, Sam. It's crap. You tell me the truth, dammit, or we are done here."
Sam closed his eyes. "It's not -- it's not a 'how long'. It doesn't work like that." He opened them again, staring down at his hands. "I came and went for awhile. Just got . . . glimpses of you. You were doing okay, so I thought I should just leave you alone, but then you had the cane. . . . I had to know what happened. I stole your file, looked at the x-rays. There's nothing wrong with your leg."
Dean raised his eyebrows. "Yeah, I kind of beg to differ."
"It's psychosomatic."
"You're psychosomatic."
Sam snorted. "I know you know what that means, Dean. Look, you've been hunting forever. I should have known that you couldn't just quit without feeling . . . crippled."
"I'm not crippled!"
"Exactly!" Sam threw his hands in the air. "But some part of you -- your body knows you're not doing everything you're supposed to. So it . . . hurts."
Dean rolled his eyes, but gave up belaboring the point. Sam and the doctors could throw whatever labels they wanted on the subject, but the fact was his leg hurt.
But for a few glorious seconds out in the woods, charging in to save Ben -- it hadn't.
"So, what, you want me to just ditch everything here? Leave Ben and Lisa behind like everyone else we've ever known?"
"No, Dean. I --" Sam broke off with a sigh, looking away again as he organized his thoughts. "Why does it have to be a zero sum?" Dean blinked at him and he continued. "You can have them, too. You're allowed to have good things."
"Oh god," Dean groaned. "Shoot me now."
"I'm serious, Dean. Dad always tried to teach us that hunting was everything, and we always believed it. But why can't you do both? Other hunters have. Hell, Ellen and Jo had an entire other life."
"Yeah, well, look where that got them."
"The apocalypse got them. And that's over."
Dean hated to admit it, but Sam had a point. He knew Lisa would be okay with short trips -- hell, she'd probably love it, and Ben was already all over the idea of Dean getting back into hunting. As long as he never let it follow him home.
Could he do that? Could he separate his life out that way and still keep the people he loved safe?
"What about you?"
"What about me?"
"When I'm playing house, what are you going to be doing?"
Sam dropped his head. "I don't --"
Even after not seeing him for two years, Dean still knew Sam well enough to see where that was going. "You're not evil, Sam. I think you proved that back in Stull. If I can have my cake and eat it or whatever, so can you."
Sam was back to avoiding eye contact again. "I don't think --"
"I'm not doing this without you, Sam. Either part. I can't."
"Yeah, you can."
Dean smacked him in the shin with his cane. "No," he said. "I can't."
It started out slow and wasn't quite reaching its full potential, but Dean knew there was a smile building on his brother's face. "Yeah," Sam said softly. "Okay. I can try."
Dean grinned. "Damn right. I know just where you can start, too."
Sam looked up. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. Mrs. Milton's gonna drop a kid at any moment. She's gonna need a nanny."
Sam groaned, and for the first time in far too long, Dean started to think, really think, that maybe he could do this -- this whole "life" thing -- after all.
The door separating Dean's room from the rest of the basement creaked open and Ben peered through. "So you'll do it, right?" he asked.
Dean sighed and pressed his hand to his head. "Let me guess. You were listening?"
Ben cast a sidelong glance at Sam, then slipped all the way into the room. He nodded.
"You gotta stop doing that, kid."
Ben shrugged, then came in and bounced onto the bed by Dean's foot. "So. When's our first gig?"
Sam laughed and Dean leaned up to smack Ben upside the head. "How about the 31st of are you freaking kidding me?"
Ben's eyes went puppy-dog wide and he looked back and forth from Dean to Sam plaintively. "But I helped!"
"Yeah, try that again when I'm not still bruised from a reverse belly-flop."
Sam pushed himself up using the wall and came over to sit on the other corner of the bed. "I don't know, Dean. Without Ben I might've had to take that sucker on all by myself."
Dean gaped at him. "You -- Sam, what --"
Ben cheered, raising both fists into the air. "Yes! Best uncle ever!" He jumped up and ran from the room before Dean could protest. "I so gotta tweet this."
"What?!" Dean pushed himself upright and started groping for his cane, but found it out of reach. "No tweeting about hunting!" He turned on Sam. "This is so all your fault."
Sam wasn't looking, staring instead at the open door, looking gobsmacked.
"Sammy?"
"He called me 'uncle'."
"Yeah, well, he calls me 'boring'. So there's no accounting for taste."
Sam made an odd choking noise in the back of his throat, then lowered his head with a grin. "Shut up."
A thump sounded from above them, followed by Lisa's incredulous voice: "He told you you could what?"
Sam's grin vanished with a muttered curse, and Dean flopped back with a laugh, feeling giddier than he had in years.
Yeah. He could totally do this.
###
Rating: PG-13/T
Warnings: Mild language, blatant use of a h/c kink, various very secondary OCs
Author's Notes: I dare any hurt!Dean fan to watch the first episode of BBC's Sherlock and not at least toy with the idea that inspired this. Spoiler free for season six
Summary: Two years after the events of the season five finale, Dean's doing the best he can to live his life and keep his promise to his brother. But someone's out to make sure he doesn't.
When the first message came, Dean almost missed it.
He could be forgiven for this. The message was written on the back of an "I ♥ Indianapolis" postcard shuffled in between two bulk mailers full of coupons, and juggling the mail, the house keys, and his cane could be a hassle on a good day -- which it wasn't. It was a game day, for one, and while Dean loved watching Ben play baseball, the few seats at the diamond in the park went quickly, and there was no way Dean was going to make Mrs. Milton, seven months pregnant with her fourth kid, or Grandma Jacobs, pushing 80, stand, bum leg or no. Of course, Lisa hadn't been able to make it, which meant shuffling about with his cellphone camera, trying to catch all the big moments, and then explaining to Ben that his mom had gotten stuck in traffic behind a tipped tractor trailer on her way back from the city. After the game, he'd overheard Margie from down the street referring to him as "the Braeden's nanny", and it was a good thing Ben had gone off with his teammates for celebratory ice cream so he didn't have to hear the string of curses Dean rattled off at the steering wheel on the drive home. He figured he was lucky he managed to get past a head full of "meds, beer, nap" looping like a refrain from a Police song long enough to remember to get the mail at all. Letting a few of them slip through his fingers in the front hall was just the tiny cherry on top of his shit sundae for the day.
He'd've walked right by it even after it fell, too -- Lisa would have understood, having been the one to insist on putting in a new door with no mail slot and hanging the metal box under the house numbers, well within Dean's reach -- but he caught sight of his name written in thick block letters on the address line and froze. He never got mail, save for his monthly credit card bill, and that was addressed to his shiny new legal identity, Max Weidenbach. This didn't even have his last name, just "DEAN" and Lisa's address, which no one from his old life should even have, much less be sending postcards to.
He cursed under his breath and limped to the kitchen to drop off the rest of the mail and his keys, pausing for a moment to lean against the counter and shake out his right hand, which was aching almost as fiercely as his leg. He gave the refrigerator -- and the pill bottle sitting on top of it -- a longing glance, then sighed made his way back into the front hall. He stopped in front of the dropped mail, wrapped both hands around the grip of his cane, and slowly lowered himself down into an awkward, one legged crouch, his left leg sliding out to the side like he was doing some kind of seriously crappy dance move. He shuffled the fallen mail together with his right hand, the left still clenched tightly around the wobbling cane, then pushed himself back to his feet as quickly as he could without falling over. He sighed again once he was upright, swapped the mail for the cane, and headed back to the kitchen where he could finally sit his ass down and stretch his leg out properly.
It was only when he had his pill bottle, a beer, and a pillow under his heel that he turned his attention back to the postcard.
"37.8 -86.6", read the postcard.
"Son of a bitch," said Dean.
*
The coordinates were for Calvary Cemetery in Cloverport, Kentucky. Dean paid them just enough attention to figure out that they weren't for, say, Disney World, then tossed the postcard in the recycling bin -- Lisa would throw a fit if she found perfectly good paper in the trash -- and proceeding to get as drunk as he responsibly could when he was medicated and would potentially be called upon to pick Ben up from the ice cream place at any moment.
That wasn't very drunk, and Dean found himself rather bitter about that fact.
The responsibility was all Lisa's influence. When he'd first arrived on her doorstep just over two years before, depressed and beaten on the inside, even if his face no longer resembled a work by Picasso on the outside, he'd managed to lose a week to the bottom of a bottle or several, and had no intentions of being sober ever again. It was only Lisa and her redirection of his energy to menial tasks around the house that drew him out of his funk and into something resembling a life.
In all honesty, Margie from down the street hadn't been far off. While Dean would never -- ever -- refer to himself in those terms, there weren't many others that he could claim that were much better. He certainly wasn't Lisa's boyfriend or anything of the sort, though they did occasionally sleep together. Her housemate, maybe, the kind who didn't have a job of his own and made up for it by making sure her son got to where he needed to go on time, did his homework, had a packed lunch, and an orderly house to come home to.
Yeah. He was the freaking nanny.
*
The second message was harder to ignore.
For one thing, his name was written in bright red block letters and underlined three times. For another, he had an audience.
It was tucked into the sliver of space between the back of the trunk lid and the back windshield, folded in half and angled so that Dean's name faced out towards the parking lot. It wasn't a post card, this time, but a scrap of a bulk mailer addressed to the "current resident" of an apartment a few away. Dean tried to snatch it up before anyone spotted it, but Joe was only a few feet behind him with the grocery cart, and nosy as hell.
"Who's Dean?" Joe asked.
"How the hell should I know?" The folks at the grocery store had never gotten the half-assed "it's a nickname, you know, James Dean?" story the neighbors and parents at the school had gotten, and Joe only knew Dean as Mr. Weidenbach. Joe's face fell, and Dean sighed inwardly, stuffing the message into his back pocket. "Someone probably stuck it on the wrong car."
Joe nodded, cheering right back up and fidgeting with the shelf/seat on the grocery cart. Dean leaned his hip against the Impala and dug out his keys. Mrs. Milton had been shopping today, too, and knowing Joe, he was anxious to get back in and make sure she had a hand getting her bags out to her car, too.
"I've got this from here, kid," Dean tried, but Joe was already dragging the case of bottled water off the bottom of the cart. Mrs. Milton, it seemed, would just have to wait until Dean got his groceries loaded up.
It was a little bit odd, calling Joe "kid" -- he was clearly at least Dean's age, if not older -- but it'd made Joe grin ever since the first day they met, when Dean was still getting used to the cane and the new limitations of his bum leg. Joe'd swooped in out of nowhere, pulling Dean's bags from his cart even before Dean finished getting the Impala's trunk open, and Dean had just about torn his head off. "I'm Joe," he'd said, gesturing to his name tag with his chin, "I'm the bag boy," and Dean had snorted hard enough he hurt his nose.
"I thought that job was for kids," he'd said.
"Yes sir," said Joe. "I'm the bag boy."
Joe lived with his mother and worked at the grocery store every day but Sunday. All of his coworkers had picked up Dean's "I don't need help, dammit" vibes within a few minutes of his first arrival at the store, but Joe wasn't the sort of guy to take no for an answer, and after a few unsuccessful attempts to dodge him, Dean had stopped arguing. He figured helping customers with "different capabilities" made Joe feel useful, and, well. He could relate.
That was Joe's term. "My mother has different capabilities," he'd told Dean once. "I know hard it is for you folks."
Dean was pretty sure Joe had his own set of "different capabilities", but never asked.
When the bags were all loaded, filling the trunk almost to its capacity -- Ben had an appetite almost to rival Dean's, and Lisa wasn't exactly a shy eater, either -- Joe patted his hands proudly on the cart and smiled. "All done, sir."
"Yeah, kid. I noticed."
Joe ducked his chin, smile growing larger, then nodded towards Dean. "I can take the thingy inside, if you want. We can make an announcement for Dean."
Dean grimaced, then noticed Mrs. Milton making her way out of the store over Joe's shoulder. She stopped her cart at the curb and started pulling out bags to drape over her arms, resting a few things on top of her pregnant belly, and Dean had to fight the urge to smile. "Hey, looks like you've got another client."
Joe turned, yelped, and set back out across the parking lot at a jog. Dean shook his head and turned away -- only to curse when he noticed Joe had left the cart behind. He looked from it to the cart stand, a good fifty feet away, and sighed.
Okay, so maybe he'd gotten just a little bit used to relying on Joe's help.
*
The second message had coordinates for Kirksville, Missouri. Dean plotted out a route in his head on autopilot, then worked out how long it would take him to get up there and back.
A little under seven hours. Two years ago, that would have been nothing at all. But Ben was starting a day camp in a few days, and Lisa was getting on Dean's case about seeing her chiropractor again, and while Dean made sure he hit the gun range a few times a month and did his best to keep in shape, just about any hunter out there would probably be better suited to handling the case than he was. Sure, he'd chosen his cane largely based on how well it could double as a bludgeon if need be, but there weren't actually many supernatural creatures you could take out by beating them over the head.
Besides which, he'd promised Sam. Keeping that promise was one of the few things that kept him going at all, some days. He sure as hell wasn't going to break it, now.
Even if his better days still kind of made him want to scream.
*
Dean wasn't even the one who spotted the third message.
Ben's scout troop did a weekend trip up to Lake Michigan at the end of August, shortly before school was due to start up again. For the entire month, it seemed to be the only thing anyone in the house wanted to talk about. Ben, of course, was jazzed to go hang out with his friends in the wilderness for a few days away from his mom. "The girls camp out just a few miles away," he told Dean one night as they did the dishes. "It's going to be awesome." Lisa was convinced that Dean should volunteer to go along and help out, probably just so she could have a weekend "without any boys". She even buttered him up by buying him a new cane with a retractable ice pick -- which she joked he wasn't allowed to use on "anything that might bleed". No amount of whining about how much he hated camping would deter her, even when he pointed out why he didn't like it in the first place. "Exactly," she said. "They might need your kind of help."
Dean hadn't offered anyone "his kind" of help in more than two years. The last time the world had needed "his kind" of help, his brother had ended up in Hell.
"I just worry about you," she said, and when Dean rolled his eyes, her voice went from sympathetic to pissed off. "Dean, I like you. You're great with Ben and you've been a huge help around here. But I swear to God, if you don't get out of this house for more than four hours at a time, I'm going to rip your balls off and feed them to Margie's shih tzu."
Dean hedged. Lisa reached for the salad tongs.
Lisa won.
"Man," Ben told him, twenty minutes into the six hour drive up to Manistee, Michigan. "You are so whipped."
They set up camp just next to the lake in three groups of four kids and one adult. Ben and his friend Steve had to show Dean how to put together the frame of his brand new, collapsible backpacking tent, then got bored with him when it came time to put down the tent pegs and ran off with Lucas and Rajan to explore the lake front. It took twenty minutes of dragging himself around to get the thing secure, and when he finally grabbed for his cane to push back to his feet, his entire leg seized up and sent him flopping right back to the ground. That, of course, was when the scout leader, a man closer to Bobby's age than Dean's, stopped by to check in and hauled him to his feet one handed.
"You can't let those boys run over you like that, Sport."
Dean gritted his teeth and thanked him.
He had a whole new set of reasons to hate camping.
"Dean!" That was Ben, calling to him from a good ways down the shoreline of the lake. Dean could hear him and at least one of the others tromping through the trees. "Dean, you gotta see this!"
The scout master -- he'd told Dean to call him by his first name, but Dean couldn't remember what it was -- gave Dean a once over, even as Dean planted his cane on the uneven ground and started limping after Ben's voice. "You sure you're up for this, Sport?"
He was just that kind of guy, the kind who would always see someone like Dean -- blue collar, sarcastic, disabled -- as something less than, no matter how many ways Dean found to prove otherwise. That was probably why Dean never bothered to remember his name. Hell, wasn't like the man ever used Dean's, either.
Dean turned just enough to give him a tight lipped smile and a wave with his free hand. "I'm good." He turned back to the woods. "Jackass."
Steve broke through the trees to the camp ground first and skidded to a stop, waving his arms, Ben just behind him. "Mr. Weidenbach, you gotta see this." They were already turning back, bouncing on their toes as they clearly fought the urge to go running up ahead again like over-excited puppies. Steve was starting to turn almost purple. "We're gonna find treasure!"
Behind them, the scout master gave a hearty, chuckle. Dean ignored him. "What, you find a giant X on something?"
Ben shook his head, grinning ear to ear, and Dean wondered if all the hassle of the tent and the scout master and, you know, camping, might be worth it just to see that look on the kid's face for an entire weekend. "Better."
"They're spray painted on a rock!" said Steve. "This big!" He held up his arms, one stretched up over his head, the other extending straight out, palm flat in the air, indicating a pretty considerable height. "Coordinates!"
Dean slowed.
"We think it might be for geocachers," Ben explained. "Rajan looked them up on his phone and the spot's only, like, a mile from here --" Ben stopped talking when he noticed Dean wasn't right next to him any more. "Dean?"
Dean groaned inwardly. Maybe the kids were right. Maybe they were for geo-whoevers. Wasn't like the world revolved around Dean anymore, right? "Yeah, I'm coming."
Ben nodded. "It's just a little further. The ground's pretty even."
Jesus, even the twelve year old kid was trying to make concessions for him. Dean resisted the urge to stab something with the retractable ice pick in his cane.
Ben and Steve lead him to a small clearing, set back a little ways from the lake side. While Ben was right, the ground was fairly firm and even, there was no path leading into it, and the boys made a show of stomping down the plant life to clear his way. Dean shifted his weight to his good leg and helped out with his cane, much to the boys' delight, then stepped into the clearing.
The rock in question was set into the dirt, more like a platform than a free standing rock. The numbers sprawled out across its surface in thick, faintly glinting white lines -- freshly painted, if Dean didn't miss his guess -- and surrounded by what looked at first to be a very lopsided circle, but Dean soon realized was just a really, really large "D".
Or, you know, maybe the world still revolved around him a little, after all.
*
The first thing Dean did was forbid the boys from going looking for whatever was at the coordinates, thereby eliminating any cool points he'd managed to build up by being the laid back adult with the awesome car. Especially when Rajan shot down his "they weren't put there for you" with a solemn "Geocaching is for everyone," leaving Dean stuck with "because I said so". He ordered them all back to camp, followed them long enough to be reasonably sure they'd at least go to the camp, even if they didn't stay there, then pulled out his phone and called Castiel.
He half expected the number not to work any more, but Castiel picked up on the first ring.
"Dean," he said. "It's good to hear from you."
"Yeah, well, wish I could say likewise." Dean's hand clenched around the phone and he leaned back against a tree, slowly working his left leg, trying to loosen up the muscles. "What the hell, Cass?"
There was a rush of air and the sound of feathers, and then Castiel was standing beside him. "You're distressed."
Dean snorted and half-stumbled away, caught off guard by the sudden appearance. "Goddamn right I'm 'distressed', Cass. You want me for something, you tell me. Don't leave creepy ass messages where anyone could find 'em."
Castiel shook his head. "I haven't left you any messages. I've been very busy. I thought you'd prefer to contact me, first."
Dean wondered if Castiel's reangelfication had come with lessons in in how to lie convincingly. He doubted it.
"If they're not from you, who the hell are they from?"
"I don't know. As I said, I've been very busy. The apocalypse left Heaven in disarray. My remaining brothers have looked to me to fix it."
Dean narrowed his eyes at him. "You haven't been sending me coordinates. A post card, note on the car, painted on rocks. . . ?" The look on Castiel's face confirmed it -- the notes weren't from him. "Dammit. I thought -- I'd say it was Bobby, but this isn't his style." He leaned heavily on his cane to pace away a few steps, running his free hand through his hair. "Wait, how the hell did you find me?" His hand went to his chest. "I thought I was still blocked from angel radar."
"I traced your phone. Dean." Castiel looked Dean up and down slowly, his brows drawing together. "What happened to your leg?"
Dean glanced down, thinking for a moment how odd he must look to someone who hadn't seen him in the last two years. "Nothing, really. Just . . . getting old. Lifestyle caught up with me." Castiel leaned forward, peering into Dean's face, and Dean leaned back. "Right, anyway, this has been swell, but I just wanted to know about the coordinates. I've got a troop of kids to keep track of, I'm sure you've got stuff to do."
Castiel nodded slowly. "You'll call if you need anything further."
It wasn't a question, but Dean answered with a shrug. "Sure."
"Or . . . if you want to talk."
Dean rolled his eyes and turned to start making his way back to the camp. "Yeah, whatever, man. And, hey, that goes both ways. You can --" There was another short burst of breeze behind him, and he knew Castiel had left.
Well. That was the way Dean's goodbyes usually went, anyway.
He shook his head and turned back towards camp, only to nearly trample over Ben, who stood with his legs braced on the path, his arms folded over his chest. Dean jammed the end of his cane further into the ground to keep from falling. "Jesus, kid, you're almost as bad as he is."
Ben didn't move. "Who was that?"
"That?" Dean sifted through a couple of lines -- Castiel could be a park ranger, or maybe someone camping nearby -- before rejecting them. "Old friend."
"The angel?"
Dean frowned, then waved his hand to try to gesture him out of the way. "How'd you --"
Ben still didn't move. "I listen. What's going on here, Dean?"
Dean sighed. "Nothing, okay? Let's just go back to camp."
"No." It was a verbal footstamp and laying down of law that reminded Dean so much of Sam that it took his breath away. "Tell me what's going on." Ben held up his hand, eyes narrowed dangerously. "And don't tell me some lie 'for my own good'. I can handle it."
Dean's head jerked back. "I'm not going to lie."
"You were," Ben said. "You had Mom-face."
"Mom -- I did not!"
Ben pursed his lips and tilted his head and holy crap, the more Dean got to know him, the more he felt like this kid was a Winchester after all. That was a classic bitchface right there. "Dude," he said. "I know a Mom-face when I see one. It's about those numbers, isn't it? That's why you called your angel. They mean something."
Dean sighed. "It's something my dad used to do. I think . . . I think someone's trying to get me back into hunting."
Ben nodded. "Good."
That wasn't what Dean was expecting. "What?"
"You should get back into hunting. No offense, dude, but you're getting boring."
"Boring."
Ben nodded harder. "All you do is cook and clean and stuff. You're Dean Winchester! You're supposed to be saving people! Like you saved me and my friends."
Dean rubbed his free hand down his face, then shifted to start limping around Ben, uneven terrain be damned. "That's not what I do any more, Ben."
Ben hopped sideways to block Dean's path again. "Why not?"
Dean stared at him. "Are you kidding me?"
"You're scared."
Dean started towards the other side of the path. "Stop it, Ben."
Ben followed, refusing to let him past. "You are! Is it because of me and Mom? Because we can take care of ourselves."
"I know that."
"Then why?"
Dean planted his weight on his right foot, lifting the cane to wave it at Ben. "How am I supposed to hunt, huh? I can barely walk."
"You walk fine." Ben grabbed at the cane. Dean barely managed to pull it away in time. "Your leg's an excuse. That's why you didn't get your angel to heal it up."
Dean froze. "No, it's not."
"Yeah? Then why?"
Dean shoved the cane into the ground with more force than was strictly necessary and started trying to dodge past Ben again. "He has better things to do."
Ben stepped in front of him, so close this time the kid had to crane his neck to look up at him. "You're full of crap."
Dean shuffle-stepped, managing to make his way around Ben and started for the camp with renewed vigor. "We're not having this conversation."
Ben followed, dogging Dean's steps. "Those coordinates are only like a mile away. What if something happens? What if whatever it is comes for us, tonight?"
Dean shuddered. Ben had hit Dean's worries right on the head. The hunt, whatever it was, could be anything. A vengeful spirit, a water creature, a wendigo. . . . He made a mental inventory of his supplies in his head and wanted to kick himself when he realized how small his personal arsenal had gotten. Salt, one shotgun, a handful of blades. He could maybe take out a wendigo with a road flare, if it held real still.
Dad would kill him for being so unprepared.
"We'll put down salt," he said, pumping more confidence into his voice than he felt. "Some runes. We'll be fine."
"What if it's Sam?"
Dean froze again, his lungs seizing in his chest, a fresh stab of pain rising from the base of his left foot all the way up his spine to his neck. He turned slowly to face Ben. "Sam's gone."
"What if he came back? You did."
Dean swallowed hard, choking on his own breath. Forget the theoretical wendigo or his father, this kid was going to kill him. "I never told you about that."
"I told you: I listen."
Dean closed his eyes, a flash of memory of the early days, when it was all he could do to keep himself from flying apart, when Lisa's voice and her arms were the only things that kept him grounded late at night. "Ben." He took a breath, held it for a moment, then forced himself to continue. "Where Sam went -- there's no coming back."
Ben sucked his cheek in and ground his jaw. It was a bad habit, one Dean had noticed when the kid's usual confidence was shaken. "You don't know that."
Dean turned to start towards the camp again. He was exhausted, weighed down by the conversation and the throbbing pain in his leg. "Come on," he said. "Your friends are waiting. We've got stuff to do before dark."
*
Ben was a trooper, weaving together a story to go with the symbols Dean got them all to draw on the ground around the three campsites. The scout master and his assistant -- Tom or Tim or maybe Arthur -- looked on with matching amused expressions as the boys all got into the "old Native American lore" and tossing scary stories back and forth while they worked. Arthur -- or Tim, or was it George? Dean had to get better at remembering these people's names -- shot him a thumbs up before they broke back into their groups for the night.
"Kids love that stuff. You're really good with him."
Dean shrugged. "Thanks."
"You're lucky," the man said. "Took me four years before I got my step-son to do more than glare at me when I suggested anything."
Dean blinked. ". . . Yeah," he said. "Ben's a great kid."
"You make a good dad."
Dean felt his skin flush, even as his stomach flipped over at the prospect of being that responsible for another human being. Sure, he took care of Ben when Lisa was busy. But dads could make or break a kid.
He was doing the right thing, he decided. Not going after whatever the coordinates referred to. He'd pass them onto Bobby when they got home -- hell, Bobby would probably love to hear from him -- and someone else could take the thing out.
Dean knew what it was like to have a hunter for a father. It didn't end well.
*
Nights had never been Dean's best time, especially now that he wasn't spending them hunting down evil. He'd known before setting out on the camping trip that he wouldn't be getting much sleep -- sleeping on the ground with a bad leg was just asking to not be able to move at all come morning, and, well, it was camping. Dean had hated camping even before he'd ended up, however briefly, strung up in a wendigo's lair. Once the kids were in their tents, he set himself up on a camp chair with his foot propped on a log, the old army blanket he still kept in the trunk of the Impala draped over his shoulders, the shot gun tucked into his lap. If anything came for the kids in the night, he figured he'd be ready.
He didn't count on the exhaustion -- both physical and mental, thanks to the mystery of the messages -- to pull him under only about an hour after the kids finally quieted down.
His dreams had become strange things since he'd stopped drinking himself to sleep. The nightmares still came with alarming regularity, but it was about even odds these days as to whether he'd be treated to half-memories of his time in Hell, or anxiety dreams filled with endless grocery store aisles filled with canned goods labeled in gibberish, slippery floors, and a jeering sales staff.
Maybe it was the "dad" comments from the assistant scout master, maybe it was his own worries about being left alone with four boys to keep track of, but whatever it was, that night by the fire circle, ringed in salt and symbols, but his mind took him back to before the fires of Hell, before he even started hunting. In his dream he crouched beneath a round table with Sam, neither of them any taller than the table was high. A few pairs of feet poked through the floor length white table cloth, shuffling back and forth as their owners fidgeted and ate and spoke in wordless murmurs with each other. A band played, something innocuous and vaguely romantic, and when Dean lay down flat on the floor and peered under the curtain of the table cloth, he could see high heels and brightly shined shoes tapping and spinning on the dance floor.
A woman's voice rang with laughter, and though Sam was far too old for it to be possible in anything other than dream logic, Dean recognized it as his mother's. One end of the table cloth lifted away like the flap of a tent door, and she peered through, smiling at them.
"Come on out of there, my little hunters," she said. "It's almost time to go home."
Dean opened his mouth to protest -- they hadn't even had the cake yet, and she'd promised -- when the snap of a breaking stick ripped him from the dream and woke him with a gasp and a muffled curse.
It took him a moment to get his bearings, and then a moment longer to let his eyes adjust to the darkened campsite, but as soon as he was certain he could do so without falling, Dean was up and out of the camp chair, his cane clenched in one hand, the shot gun up and ready in the other. The campsite was quiet, save for the the rhythmic chirping of night insects and the occasional snuffle of sleeping preteen, so Dean scanned the surrounding tree line, making almost a full circle before his eyes landed on the source of the sound.
The damn kid looked at him -- made full eye contact -- then turned and bolted deeper into the woods.
He didn't have to wonder what Ben was up to -- he was doing exactly what Dean would have done, if he was twelve years old and camping out not far from a suspected hunt. Dean lowered his shotgun and stared after him for a moment in disbelief, either way.
"Son of a bitch, Lisa's so gonna kill me."
*
A mile of wilderness terrain wasn't like a mile of road or grassland. The path Ben followed through the woods was winding and rough, and though he'd slowed down from his run as soon as he was out of sight of the campsite, Dean still had to limp for all he was worth just to keep up. He tracked Ben's progress by the occasional flash of the kid's cellphone -- like all his friends, Ben had a GPS app loaded into it, and he was clearly using the thing to make sure he didn't get lost. He also clearly had no concept of how visible even that dim light could be on a dark night through relatively wide-set trees. Dean made a mental note to teach him that. Just as soon as he was done killing him for running off half-cocked. Dean lost him for a few moments not far from the GPS coordinates, when Ben broke into a run again, rounding a turn in the path past an uprooted tree trunk, and Dean was thinking up new and creative tortures for him -- he'd make him clean the Impala's undercarriage with a tooth brush, for one, then maybe tie sticks to his legs and set him on a fast moving treadmill -- when Ben screamed.
Thoughts of punishments, of the way his leg was throbbing, of anything but NO! slid right out of Dean's mind. The next thing he knew he was breaking through a patch of trees into a clearing next to the lake, just in time to see the washed out, flickering form of a burly backwoodsman dragging Ben towards the water.
Dean didn't waste his breath voicing his denial. He raised the shotgun and fired without breaking his stride like it hadn't been more than two years since he'd last faced anything like this. He reached Ben's side before the spirit had even completely dissipated. The kid was groggy, rolling his head in the muddy sand. Blood trickled from his hairline, and Dean pressed the base of his palm against it gently, setting the shotgun aside to fist his other hand in Ben's shirt.
"Hey. Ben, look at me. You okay?"
Ben gasped and his eyes rolled once before they managed to focus. "Dean." He swallowed, then looked past him and grinned. "I knew it."
Not the reaction he'd been expecting. "Knew what?"
Ben grinned harder, his hand coming up the pat awkwardly at Dean's wrist. "You dropped your cane."
Dean blinked, then glanced over his shoulder. Ben was right; he'd made it almost fifty yards without the cane's added support, and had done it at speed. He looked back. "You little shit."
Ben laughed, then cut off abruptly, his eyes going wide. "Dean!"
An icy hand speared through Dean's back between his shoulder blades and wrapped its thick, blunt fingers around his heart. Dean had a moment to reflect on how fucked up it was that that was a familiar sensation before the hand pulled back, dragging him bodily with it. He gagged, unable to pull in a breath around its grip, his whole body cramping and burning as the spirit raised its fist in the air, leaving his arms, legs, and head dangling. He tried to order Ben to run or grab the shotgun or anything, but his body had stopped listening the moment the hand had passed through his spine. The spirit brought Dean's head level to its face and breathed in deep, setting its spectral beard fluttering.
"You'll do," it said, and then Dean was airborne, sailing out over the lake like a ragdoll.
Dean hadn't missed this.
He hit the water back first, what little air he'd manage to pull in before the spirit had grabbed him rushing from his lungs with the force of the impact. Then he was under, staring up into a distorted moon, unable to fight his body's instinctive attempt to breathe. He choked, convulsing, and felt like his back had broken under the strain.
He wondered fleetingly if where he'd end up this time -- if maybe Hell would be bearable if Sam was at his side -- then thought of the spirit throwing Ben in after him and mentally howled.
The wobbling, fading moon above him exploded into a mass of glimmering silver, and Dean must have ended up in Hell again after all, because then Sam was there, looming over him all wide eyes and floppy hair, just like he was the last time Dean had seen him, standing over the door to Lucifer's prison.
"Dean," Sam said. "Jesus, you jerk," and Dean spit what must have been a gallon of water right into his face.
Someone laughed, and then Ben was there, his face right next to Sam's, eyes bright and lips wide in a grin. "Dude," he said, "I told you," and Dean manged to find more water to cough up onto him and decided it would be better for all involved if he just passed out.
*
Passing out didn't really happen in Hell. Neither did dreams of white table cloth tents and chocolate cake and his father laughing and holding his mother as they spun around and around on a dance floor to a live band of Ghostfacers, so Dean had to conclude that he'd managed to survive somehow, after all.
He woke up still on the lakeside, curled up on his side in the traditional rescue position, his mouth tasting of mud and blood and bile, his whole body knotted into one giant muscle cramp, but he was staring at Sam and Ben sitting side by side facing him, back lit by a grave fire, as Sam gave Ben a quick overview on how to load the shotgun, so he decided all that was okay.
*
"It was you. The messages were from you." Dean leaned back on his bed in his little basement "apartment", his leg propped up on one of Lisa's brightly colored throw pillows. Sam sat hunched on the floor against the opposite wall -- Dean didn't have much by way of furniture.
Sam ran a hand down his face. "Yeah."
"What the hell, Sam?" Dean resisted the urge to get up and pace -- the adventures of the weekend were already taking his toll on his leg and back without the added stress. "You're the one who made me promise to stop hunting in the first place!"
"I know, I --" Sam huffed softly. "I didn't really think you'd do it. Or about what it'd do to you."
Dean glared. "And what, exactly, is that?"
Sam poked Dean's left knee with his foot. "There's nothing wrong with your leg, Dean."
Dean growled and shifted sideways in his chair. "Like hell there isn't. I can barely walk, Sam."
"You did well enough following Ben. Did even better running to save him."
"That was some . . . freak adrenaline thing."
"The doctors have never been able to pinpoint why it hurts."
"You've been talking to my doctors, now? Just how long have you been back, anyway?"
Sam looked away. "That's not the point, Dean."
"Like hell it isn't. We're not doing this any more, Sam. It's crap. You tell me the truth, dammit, or we are done here."
Sam closed his eyes. "It's not -- it's not a 'how long'. It doesn't work like that." He opened them again, staring down at his hands. "I came and went for awhile. Just got . . . glimpses of you. You were doing okay, so I thought I should just leave you alone, but then you had the cane. . . . I had to know what happened. I stole your file, looked at the x-rays. There's nothing wrong with your leg."
Dean raised his eyebrows. "Yeah, I kind of beg to differ."
"It's psychosomatic."
"You're psychosomatic."
Sam snorted. "I know you know what that means, Dean. Look, you've been hunting forever. I should have known that you couldn't just quit without feeling . . . crippled."
"I'm not crippled!"
"Exactly!" Sam threw his hands in the air. "But some part of you -- your body knows you're not doing everything you're supposed to. So it . . . hurts."
Dean rolled his eyes, but gave up belaboring the point. Sam and the doctors could throw whatever labels they wanted on the subject, but the fact was his leg hurt.
But for a few glorious seconds out in the woods, charging in to save Ben -- it hadn't.
"So, what, you want me to just ditch everything here? Leave Ben and Lisa behind like everyone else we've ever known?"
"No, Dean. I --" Sam broke off with a sigh, looking away again as he organized his thoughts. "Why does it have to be a zero sum?" Dean blinked at him and he continued. "You can have them, too. You're allowed to have good things."
"Oh god," Dean groaned. "Shoot me now."
"I'm serious, Dean. Dad always tried to teach us that hunting was everything, and we always believed it. But why can't you do both? Other hunters have. Hell, Ellen and Jo had an entire other life."
"Yeah, well, look where that got them."
"The apocalypse got them. And that's over."
Dean hated to admit it, but Sam had a point. He knew Lisa would be okay with short trips -- hell, she'd probably love it, and Ben was already all over the idea of Dean getting back into hunting. As long as he never let it follow him home.
Could he do that? Could he separate his life out that way and still keep the people he loved safe?
"What about you?"
"What about me?"
"When I'm playing house, what are you going to be doing?"
Sam dropped his head. "I don't --"
Even after not seeing him for two years, Dean still knew Sam well enough to see where that was going. "You're not evil, Sam. I think you proved that back in Stull. If I can have my cake and eat it or whatever, so can you."
Sam was back to avoiding eye contact again. "I don't think --"
"I'm not doing this without you, Sam. Either part. I can't."
"Yeah, you can."
Dean smacked him in the shin with his cane. "No," he said. "I can't."
It started out slow and wasn't quite reaching its full potential, but Dean knew there was a smile building on his brother's face. "Yeah," Sam said softly. "Okay. I can try."
Dean grinned. "Damn right. I know just where you can start, too."
Sam looked up. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. Mrs. Milton's gonna drop a kid at any moment. She's gonna need a nanny."
Sam groaned, and for the first time in far too long, Dean started to think, really think, that maybe he could do this -- this whole "life" thing -- after all.
The door separating Dean's room from the rest of the basement creaked open and Ben peered through. "So you'll do it, right?" he asked.
Dean sighed and pressed his hand to his head. "Let me guess. You were listening?"
Ben cast a sidelong glance at Sam, then slipped all the way into the room. He nodded.
"You gotta stop doing that, kid."
Ben shrugged, then came in and bounced onto the bed by Dean's foot. "So. When's our first gig?"
Sam laughed and Dean leaned up to smack Ben upside the head. "How about the 31st of are you freaking kidding me?"
Ben's eyes went puppy-dog wide and he looked back and forth from Dean to Sam plaintively. "But I helped!"
"Yeah, try that again when I'm not still bruised from a reverse belly-flop."
Sam pushed himself up using the wall and came over to sit on the other corner of the bed. "I don't know, Dean. Without Ben I might've had to take that sucker on all by myself."
Dean gaped at him. "You -- Sam, what --"
Ben cheered, raising both fists into the air. "Yes! Best uncle ever!" He jumped up and ran from the room before Dean could protest. "I so gotta tweet this."
"What?!" Dean pushed himself upright and started groping for his cane, but found it out of reach. "No tweeting about hunting!" He turned on Sam. "This is so all your fault."
Sam wasn't looking, staring instead at the open door, looking gobsmacked.
"Sammy?"
"He called me 'uncle'."
"Yeah, well, he calls me 'boring'. So there's no accounting for taste."
Sam made an odd choking noise in the back of his throat, then lowered his head with a grin. "Shut up."
A thump sounded from above them, followed by Lisa's incredulous voice: "He told you you could what?"
Sam's grin vanished with a muttered curse, and Dean flopped back with a laugh, feeling giddier than he had in years.
Yeah. He could totally do this.
###