[Coffinhouse] 3080.
Original post.
He thinks about climbing back inside, God's honest truth.
And really, the coffin? Not that appealing. Not even when you've spent half your life knee deep in the bodies and coffins of others. Especially when.
But Dean is relatively certain he died, and he died bloody. When that happens, a pine box is exactly where you should end up--permanently. You don't just climb out when you start itching for a better neighborhood and an extra half-bath in the guest bedroom.
He stands beside his grave in the center of a ring of petrified trees and wipes the sweating earth from his palms. Runs his fingernails down the seam of his jeans. They don't come away any cleaner, but they come away warm. The feel of the motion reminds him of something, though he can't quite place what. A part of him insists it makes a sound like splitting flesh, even though he's pretty fucking sure it doesn't.
The sun beats down. He sweats, chest still heaving from his (well, what the hell was it? zombie climb?). He can see the breeze trickle down through the dead trees on his left; then it crawls down his nape and drags a jagged shudder down his spine. There's a moment when his cheeks and his ears, and the small of his back and the dip of his ribcage--slick with the fabric of his sweat-drenched T-shirt--turn to ice. Dean doesn't remember being dead, but he remembers dying. He'd know the feeling anywhere.
He turns from his coffin and runs hard the first half mile, into sun and dust and heat and nothing.
--
It's all about core temperature. He doesn't want to sweat, and he doesn't want to suffocate. After Sam's seventh smart-aleck suggestion that he buy a wool holiday sweater, Dean snaps, and he takes half their wardrobe out front and sets the entire fucking pile on fire, in the middle of the icy parking lot.
The pile doesn't burn to ash, because the ice melts and the body of the fire is caught in the resulting deluge, and Dean isn't about to waste perfectly good Rittenhouse Rye just to give the sputtering mess another go.
That's for him.
It burns all the way down and then some.
Sam doesn't ask him to come inside, even when the sun sets and the temperature drops to zero. He's giving Dean space and accepting Dean's deflections, and Dean's sure some part of Sam believes that laying off on the touchy-feely is what Dean wants (mostly because that's what the mouthy, surface part of Dean says he wants) but they both know better.
They way they are now is just easier, plain and fucking simple. The part of Sam that takes phone calls in the bathroom and never goes to sleep before Dean doesn't want to drag Dean back inside every night. The part of Dean that locks himself in the Impala with too many bottles of whiskey and drinks until he can't feel a damned thing around him doesn't want to come back.
And the part of Sam that runs out groggy and coatless at three in the morning, hammers on the window until Dean's trial-and-error finally unlocks the door and stumbles into the blanket Sam has waiting--he's getting cold, too. Getting tired.
The part of Dean that cares enough to fix that is a long way from home. If Dean prays, it's only that this part of him is someplace fucking tropical.
The whiskey spreads wide in his chest like a family tree, blood-warm.
--
They're in California for a day. It's cold there, too. They burn every copy of Chuck Shirley's Supernatural in their fire pit, because the car's jacked to hell once again, the way it's been ever since Dean did not climb back into that coffin.
It's part of that whole Apocalyptic thing, Dean's pretty sure.
"You think burning the fucked-up gospel of the Winchesters fuck-ups is one of the seals?"
Sam smiles and says he hopes so. He passes Dean a half-can of baked beans and tells him to mix it around; the bottom's burnt and the top's still cold, but that's as good as it's going to get.
It's the only thing they've said in almost seventy-two hours.
Dean forces down a couple forkfuls of beans until, for the first time in his life, the metallic tang to the canned beans starts to kill his appetite. (It tastes like blood.)
Sam stalks off beyond the ring of firelight to take yet another call, and they don't speak until they're in Indiana all over again, and Sam says, "Room 247."
--
Then Sam's really gone. He walks away from a picnic table in the middle of nowhere and hitches a ride with a bearded man in an SUV.
And the kick is, Dean let him go. Because that was the sane, logical, mature thing to do. Given the seven months of crazy, moronic adolescence that put them on that road, at that table, fresh from a fight with Hell on wheels, in the middle of that Apocalypse, it's probably a good place to start.
Dean's pretty sure he will always love his brother. But there's a love you can feel at your back, nothing between your shoulders but the secrets you share, and then there's a love that culminates in a two minute phone call every couple years.
Dean figures if they can break forty-five seconds a couple months from now, they'll probably count themselves lucky. If, you know, they're still alive.
It's hard to dwell on Sam's puppy-dog eyes and his shitty cursive and the way he hunches over desks and refuses to dog-ear books and rolls his laundry instead of folding it when half the time Dean's expecting black eyes and bloodied lips instead. (The rest of the time Dean thinks about Sam at nine, or twelve, or twenty-two, even though knows too well that's not Sam, either. Not anymore.)
Dean explains to Bobby that he and Sam split because it was the sane, logical, mature thing to do.
Bobby explains that Dean and Sam are goddamn idjits, and they wouldn't know sane, logical, or mature if it slapped them upside the head straight into next April.
Castiel, in his trenchcoat, sits straight in his seat. He goes through the motions of breathing and speaking when he gives Dean the tax accountant version of what Bobby said, but the condensation doesn't puff out in clouds the way Sam's breaths would. Jimmy Novak is deader than a doornail.
--
The only thing harder than fixing things is realizing you can't.
Dean's lying prone atop their latest motel's ashtray-scented blankets, knuckles pressed into his eyes, hot wet breath curling back into this face with every exhalation. Keeps his hands from freezing off, and his face, too, but his back feels naked and his knees ache and he shivers anyway.
He's supposed to be asleep. Nursing a concussion or something; he doesn't even remember. At some point the day collapsed in on itself and Dean seized the first viable excuse to shut down the whole operation.
His phone rings, and Dean hears Sam's watch drag against the bedside table as he makes a blind grab for it. He quests in the dark for five Super Bowl-length seconds, until Dean pulls his phone from his pocket.
The LCD claims it's from "O'Connor's Oriental Rugs." Dean swears, and crashes haphazardly into the bathroom. Locks the door behind him. "You're fucking with me, right? Crowley O'Connor?" he says.
Two minutes later Dean flushes the toilet--that counts as trying, right?--as he clicks his phone shut.
Sam's sitting in bed, poring over the motel's Gideon Bible. Dog-eared. He doesn't go back to sleep.
Neither does Dean.
He's out the door before he remembers Sam had driven, and Sam still had the keys.
He walks five miles along the freeway before he finds a bar that looks like it mixes things other than shirley temples and strawberry daquiris. Place has got nice, sturdy pool cues, too.
He finds his way back to the motel a few hours later, nursing bloodied knuckles he can't actually feel, because it's just too damned cold. His socks are soaked and his boots are heavy and the wet is creeping up his pantlegs. He collapses in the chair by the door.
His hands burn. Sam has the heater running overdrive.
"What is that?" Dean asks.
Sam gives a non-committal shrug. "Croissant?"
"Breakfast?"
"Yeah."
"There another one?"
Sam wipes the flaky crust of his croissant on the thighs of his jeans. "Thought you went out to eat. Sorry." Beats a retreat to the bathroom.
Dean sets the room's thermostat to 50 and goes out again, in search of breakfast.
Too late, he remembers Sam still has the keys.
--
And this is what they are, for three more months.
Dean thinks about death, and dying. Sam makes wisecracks about sweaters. Dean drinks alone. Sam drinks alone, to--on the other side of the room where Dean is drinking alone. They watch things burn, like old clothes and ghost's bones and the books that shove everything naked into the limelight. Like Bobby's wife. Like Ellen and Jo. Like Adam Milligan (and it's the second time this year. Gotta be a Guiness record).
Either Dean's lost feeling in his cheeks, or it's cold all the damned time. It's May.
He can't look at the other side of the car. He doesn't even have the cuddly warmth of the popsicle named Castiel to keep him company, this time.
That's about when Dean stops talking to himself and turns the heater up as high as it will go.
He can't stop shaking.
--
They're on the couch. Dean's watching the credits of some kid film roll by, white on black. Ben and Lisa are asleep.
Ben's eyes are only half-lidded, the way Sam's were when he was that age, maybe a little older. He has his hands curled into his pajama top, head jammed awkwardly into the corner where the couch meets the wall.
Lisa is curled into Dean. She's a soft weight on his chest, warm and unassuming.
(This is the part where normal people smile, and fall asleep. They thank God for their fortune and their loved ones. Whatever their failed aspirations, their tragedies--they are grateful. They know they do not deserve the lives they're living. They live them anyway.)
Dean feels heat at the back of his neck, then his fingers. It's like his fingernails are melting off.
They itch. Burn.
It's like the heat at his neck has hands. He can feel the fingers as they press down one by one. Maybe it's Alistair using his windpipe as a clarinet. You are such a thrilling little instrument, Dean. It's an old image, buried deep, but given Sam's current address, Dean isn't surprised Hell is coming back to fuck him, too.
He doesn't scream this time. He's suffocating.
Cold now, like iron wires pressing on his back. Cold now, like the Impala, the night he slid across ice-kissed leather and knew this was for good.
Cold now, like the admission that to this day, the Sam in his head is not someone he can trust. Like the understanding that what the real Sam did was the sane, logical, mature thing to do. (Call it a leap of faith, but he'd trusted Sam then. Look how that panned out.) He's been to the place Sam vanished. It rained, and Dean dug, but that plot of earth means about as much as a grave has ever meant. He can talk to empty air all he wants. Sam's still missing.
--
Dean thinks about Hell, and imagines demons whispering Sam's name. He's probably a front-pager at demon Sunday school by now; Lucifer's conqueror and all that. (Too bad Hell's the only place that notices.)
Dean thinks about Heaven, where he would be alone in the Impala, driving out toward some place he will never reach.
Dean thinks about his coffin. The one somewhere in Illinois, or Indiana--he can't even remember. Dry, airless. Warm with the heat of sun-baked earth. Home.
--
It's years later when Lisa comes home with a tube of Pillsbury croissants. Ben is newly thirteen, and is now allowed to use the stove. (When it's a good day, and Dean is on his meds, he finds this hilarious. Ben can shoot a BB gun and he's been to Washington D.C. for a week on his own--with his teacher, and their eighteen chaperones, and his ninety-seven classmates--but he is not allowed to use the stove.)
The croissants bake golden, then gingerbread-brown, and finally turn to ectoplasmic goo in the oven. Ben proves his ability to use the fire extinguisher.
Dean volunteers a trip to the grocery store to pick up another tube of dough, and another baking sheet. They live in the city now, on the sixth floor of an apartment complex called Lakepointe. Lisa says they moved here because she was offered a directorial position at the city's YMCA, and Ben says they moved here because Sherry Klein moved here, but Dean knows why.
He's expensive.
It's three blocks to a Russian deli. It won't be Pillsbury, but it might be easier on the smoke alarm if they forego the baking process this time.
Dean is halfway back to Lakepointe when he takes a right instead of left and ends up at a small park--two blocks long, one wide. There's a bench in the center, below the one scraggly tree. He imagines Sam sitting there, if only because he can't imagine why else he'd make the trip.
Maybe he was on a breakfast run or something. He doesn't remember when he started making up these fantasy skits, and he honestly doesn't care, but he knows he wants to visit the park, and he knows what it will take to get him there. The supporting details couldn't matter less.
He fumbles for one of the Russian pastries as he nears the park bench. It tastes like butter and apples.
Sam looks up from whatever it is he's doing--again, the details don't matter--and waves Dean over.
Dean quickens his pace. He takes out another one of the pastries; this one's for Sam.
"Oh," says Sam, and Dean thinks the Sam in his head should, at the very least, be a little more grateful than oh. "Thought you'd gone out by yourself. Sorry." Sam raises a half-eaten croissant.
And Dean laughs; he can't help it. Out and out laughs. Because the Sam in his head isn't even on the same wavelength as he is. The idea should kill him, and maybe at one point it would have, but the more Dean thinks about it, the more okay he is with this.
The Sam in his head stares at him blankly. Then Dean gives him up, because he's busy trying not to choke on butter and apple. He has too much food in his mouth to be laughing quite that hard.
"Yeah, you're okay, Sammy," he says, once he's got everything under control again. "Not too bad."
Dean knows Sam is never coming back--the first three, six, nine months, he'd entertained thoughts to the contrary, but if something was going to happen, it sure as hell would have happened by now. But if he did. If he did, Dean knows it would be the Sam who fucked Ruby, and drank demon blood, left him bruised and choking on the ground in the honeymoon suite of some ritzy hotel. It would be the Sam with secrets, and resentments--the Sam who takes his keys and eats alone and ultimately, inevitably, leaves him. It would be that Sam.
It's obvious--not exactly rocket science, since that's the only Sam--but it's different today. That's the only Sam. The Sam Dean trusts, or doesn't trust. The Sam who's dead, or in Hell, or wherever he is. The Sam who's here in his head, or the Sam who's gone. It doesn't matter where he is or where he isn't. All one, whole Sam.
Dean feels warm and good, like butter and apples. He makes it back to Lakepointe hours later (where does the time go?). Lisa's already taken Ben out for dinner; the smoke from the croissants was so bad, the entire building was forced to evacuate.
"Sorry. We thought you'd gone out to eat or something," says Lisa.
Dean shrugs. That's fine. That's more than fine. More fine than it has ever been.
Lisa smiles, tells him that's a relief. Then she asks him if Dr. Sarto had, you know, upped his dosage or switched medications or something. Maybe.
--
His epiphany in the park seems massively less stellar some hours later, in the dark of his room, alone again. The sheets are cold and starched straight and stiff. He can feel the regular cold settling into his cheeks and his joints and the small of his back.
But he can still feel it flicker in his chest, and he can hold on to that. He can swing that. He knows he can. Something about core temperature, if he remembers right.
--
He has to drive sixteen miles with a pine box strapped to the roof of the Impala before he's far enough out from the city limits to avoid incarceration. It's four in the morning, someplace wide and flat. Dean tugs his load from the roof, winces as it squeals against metal and paint.
Coffins are damn heavy.
Finally, it comes crashing down, in a cloud of dust. Dean drags a box from the backseat of the Impala and dumps its contents into his coffin--the final forty-four volumes a certain pulp fiction series. Damps the covers with Rittenhouse Rye.
He stands at the foot of his coffin, shivers with the wind chill.
Then he flicks open his lighter, and drops it. He hasn't felt so certain of anything since the night he drove to Stanford, and got Sam.
"We were trying to find Dad." He hardly believes it; that particular crusade is far in the past and almost as forgotten. "This is--I don't know. This is probably going to sound really stupid, but you're not here, so..."
Deep breath.
"I went and got you, so we could go find Dad. And, uh. In the end, I guess I finally found actually you. All of you."
His coffin catches easily, as do (their) books. They burn bright and warm and true.
"Sorry it took so long."
He thinks about climbing back inside, God's honest truth.
And really, the coffin? Not that appealing. Not even when you've spent half your life knee deep in the bodies and coffins of others. Especially when.
But Dean is relatively certain he died, and he died bloody. When that happens, a pine box is exactly where you should end up--permanently. You don't just climb out when you start itching for a better neighborhood and an extra half-bath in the guest bedroom.
He stands beside his grave in the center of a ring of petrified trees and wipes the sweating earth from his palms. Runs his fingernails down the seam of his jeans. They don't come away any cleaner, but they come away warm. The feel of the motion reminds him of something, though he can't quite place what. A part of him insists it makes a sound like splitting flesh, even though he's pretty fucking sure it doesn't.
The sun beats down. He sweats, chest still heaving from his (well, what the hell was it? zombie climb?). He can see the breeze trickle down through the dead trees on his left; then it crawls down his nape and drags a jagged shudder down his spine. There's a moment when his cheeks and his ears, and the small of his back and the dip of his ribcage--slick with the fabric of his sweat-drenched T-shirt--turn to ice. Dean doesn't remember being dead, but he remembers dying. He'd know the feeling anywhere.
He turns from his coffin and runs hard the first half mile, into sun and dust and heat and nothing.
--
It's all about core temperature. He doesn't want to sweat, and he doesn't want to suffocate. After Sam's seventh smart-aleck suggestion that he buy a wool holiday sweater, Dean snaps, and he takes half their wardrobe out front and sets the entire fucking pile on fire, in the middle of the icy parking lot.
The pile doesn't burn to ash, because the ice melts and the body of the fire is caught in the resulting deluge, and Dean isn't about to waste perfectly good Rittenhouse Rye just to give the sputtering mess another go.
That's for him.
It burns all the way down and then some.
Sam doesn't ask him to come inside, even when the sun sets and the temperature drops to zero. He's giving Dean space and accepting Dean's deflections, and Dean's sure some part of Sam believes that laying off on the touchy-feely is what Dean wants (mostly because that's what the mouthy, surface part of Dean says he wants) but they both know better.
They way they are now is just easier, plain and fucking simple. The part of Sam that takes phone calls in the bathroom and never goes to sleep before Dean doesn't want to drag Dean back inside every night. The part of Dean that locks himself in the Impala with too many bottles of whiskey and drinks until he can't feel a damned thing around him doesn't want to come back.
And the part of Sam that runs out groggy and coatless at three in the morning, hammers on the window until Dean's trial-and-error finally unlocks the door and stumbles into the blanket Sam has waiting--he's getting cold, too. Getting tired.
The part of Dean that cares enough to fix that is a long way from home. If Dean prays, it's only that this part of him is someplace fucking tropical.
The whiskey spreads wide in his chest like a family tree, blood-warm.
--
They're in California for a day. It's cold there, too. They burn every copy of Chuck Shirley's Supernatural in their fire pit, because the car's jacked to hell once again, the way it's been ever since Dean did not climb back into that coffin.
It's part of that whole Apocalyptic thing, Dean's pretty sure.
"You think burning the fucked-up gospel of the Winchesters fuck-ups is one of the seals?"
Sam smiles and says he hopes so. He passes Dean a half-can of baked beans and tells him to mix it around; the bottom's burnt and the top's still cold, but that's as good as it's going to get.
It's the only thing they've said in almost seventy-two hours.
Dean forces down a couple forkfuls of beans until, for the first time in his life, the metallic tang to the canned beans starts to kill his appetite. (It tastes like blood.)
Sam stalks off beyond the ring of firelight to take yet another call, and they don't speak until they're in Indiana all over again, and Sam says, "Room 247."
--
Then Sam's really gone. He walks away from a picnic table in the middle of nowhere and hitches a ride with a bearded man in an SUV.
And the kick is, Dean let him go. Because that was the sane, logical, mature thing to do. Given the seven months of crazy, moronic adolescence that put them on that road, at that table, fresh from a fight with Hell on wheels, in the middle of that Apocalypse, it's probably a good place to start.
Dean's pretty sure he will always love his brother. But there's a love you can feel at your back, nothing between your shoulders but the secrets you share, and then there's a love that culminates in a two minute phone call every couple years.
Dean figures if they can break forty-five seconds a couple months from now, they'll probably count themselves lucky. If, you know, they're still alive.
It's hard to dwell on Sam's puppy-dog eyes and his shitty cursive and the way he hunches over desks and refuses to dog-ear books and rolls his laundry instead of folding it when half the time Dean's expecting black eyes and bloodied lips instead. (The rest of the time Dean thinks about Sam at nine, or twelve, or twenty-two, even though knows too well that's not Sam, either. Not anymore.)
Dean explains to Bobby that he and Sam split because it was the sane, logical, mature thing to do.
Bobby explains that Dean and Sam are goddamn idjits, and they wouldn't know sane, logical, or mature if it slapped them upside the head straight into next April.
Castiel, in his trenchcoat, sits straight in his seat. He goes through the motions of breathing and speaking when he gives Dean the tax accountant version of what Bobby said, but the condensation doesn't puff out in clouds the way Sam's breaths would. Jimmy Novak is deader than a doornail.
--
The only thing harder than fixing things is realizing you can't.
Dean's lying prone atop their latest motel's ashtray-scented blankets, knuckles pressed into his eyes, hot wet breath curling back into this face with every exhalation. Keeps his hands from freezing off, and his face, too, but his back feels naked and his knees ache and he shivers anyway.
He's supposed to be asleep. Nursing a concussion or something; he doesn't even remember. At some point the day collapsed in on itself and Dean seized the first viable excuse to shut down the whole operation.
His phone rings, and Dean hears Sam's watch drag against the bedside table as he makes a blind grab for it. He quests in the dark for five Super Bowl-length seconds, until Dean pulls his phone from his pocket.
The LCD claims it's from "O'Connor's Oriental Rugs." Dean swears, and crashes haphazardly into the bathroom. Locks the door behind him. "You're fucking with me, right? Crowley O'Connor?" he says.
Two minutes later Dean flushes the toilet--that counts as trying, right?--as he clicks his phone shut.
Sam's sitting in bed, poring over the motel's Gideon Bible. Dog-eared. He doesn't go back to sleep.
Neither does Dean.
He's out the door before he remembers Sam had driven, and Sam still had the keys.
He walks five miles along the freeway before he finds a bar that looks like it mixes things other than shirley temples and strawberry daquiris. Place has got nice, sturdy pool cues, too.
He finds his way back to the motel a few hours later, nursing bloodied knuckles he can't actually feel, because it's just too damned cold. His socks are soaked and his boots are heavy and the wet is creeping up his pantlegs. He collapses in the chair by the door.
His hands burn. Sam has the heater running overdrive.
"What is that?" Dean asks.
Sam gives a non-committal shrug. "Croissant?"
"Breakfast?"
"Yeah."
"There another one?"
Sam wipes the flaky crust of his croissant on the thighs of his jeans. "Thought you went out to eat. Sorry." Beats a retreat to the bathroom.
Dean sets the room's thermostat to 50 and goes out again, in search of breakfast.
Too late, he remembers Sam still has the keys.
--
And this is what they are, for three more months.
Dean thinks about death, and dying. Sam makes wisecracks about sweaters. Dean drinks alone. Sam drinks alone, to--on the other side of the room where Dean is drinking alone. They watch things burn, like old clothes and ghost's bones and the books that shove everything naked into the limelight. Like Bobby's wife. Like Ellen and Jo. Like Adam Milligan (and it's the second time this year. Gotta be a Guiness record).
Either Dean's lost feeling in his cheeks, or it's cold all the damned time. It's May.
He can't look at the other side of the car. He doesn't even have the cuddly warmth of the popsicle named Castiel to keep him company, this time.
That's about when Dean stops talking to himself and turns the heater up as high as it will go.
He can't stop shaking.
--
They're on the couch. Dean's watching the credits of some kid film roll by, white on black. Ben and Lisa are asleep.
Ben's eyes are only half-lidded, the way Sam's were when he was that age, maybe a little older. He has his hands curled into his pajama top, head jammed awkwardly into the corner where the couch meets the wall.
Lisa is curled into Dean. She's a soft weight on his chest, warm and unassuming.
(This is the part where normal people smile, and fall asleep. They thank God for their fortune and their loved ones. Whatever their failed aspirations, their tragedies--they are grateful. They know they do not deserve the lives they're living. They live them anyway.)
Dean feels heat at the back of his neck, then his fingers. It's like his fingernails are melting off.
They itch. Burn.
It's like the heat at his neck has hands. He can feel the fingers as they press down one by one. Maybe it's Alistair using his windpipe as a clarinet. You are such a thrilling little instrument, Dean. It's an old image, buried deep, but given Sam's current address, Dean isn't surprised Hell is coming back to fuck him, too.
He doesn't scream this time. He's suffocating.
Cold now, like iron wires pressing on his back. Cold now, like the Impala, the night he slid across ice-kissed leather and knew this was for good.
Cold now, like the admission that to this day, the Sam in his head is not someone he can trust. Like the understanding that what the real Sam did was the sane, logical, mature thing to do. (Call it a leap of faith, but he'd trusted Sam then. Look how that panned out.) He's been to the place Sam vanished. It rained, and Dean dug, but that plot of earth means about as much as a grave has ever meant. He can talk to empty air all he wants. Sam's still missing.
--
Dean thinks about Hell, and imagines demons whispering Sam's name. He's probably a front-pager at demon Sunday school by now; Lucifer's conqueror and all that. (Too bad Hell's the only place that notices.)
Dean thinks about Heaven, where he would be alone in the Impala, driving out toward some place he will never reach.
Dean thinks about his coffin. The one somewhere in Illinois, or Indiana--he can't even remember. Dry, airless. Warm with the heat of sun-baked earth. Home.
--
It's years later when Lisa comes home with a tube of Pillsbury croissants. Ben is newly thirteen, and is now allowed to use the stove. (When it's a good day, and Dean is on his meds, he finds this hilarious. Ben can shoot a BB gun and he's been to Washington D.C. for a week on his own--with his teacher, and their eighteen chaperones, and his ninety-seven classmates--but he is not allowed to use the stove.)
The croissants bake golden, then gingerbread-brown, and finally turn to ectoplasmic goo in the oven. Ben proves his ability to use the fire extinguisher.
Dean volunteers a trip to the grocery store to pick up another tube of dough, and another baking sheet. They live in the city now, on the sixth floor of an apartment complex called Lakepointe. Lisa says they moved here because she was offered a directorial position at the city's YMCA, and Ben says they moved here because Sherry Klein moved here, but Dean knows why.
He's expensive.
It's three blocks to a Russian deli. It won't be Pillsbury, but it might be easier on the smoke alarm if they forego the baking process this time.
Dean is halfway back to Lakepointe when he takes a right instead of left and ends up at a small park--two blocks long, one wide. There's a bench in the center, below the one scraggly tree. He imagines Sam sitting there, if only because he can't imagine why else he'd make the trip.
Maybe he was on a breakfast run or something. He doesn't remember when he started making up these fantasy skits, and he honestly doesn't care, but he knows he wants to visit the park, and he knows what it will take to get him there. The supporting details couldn't matter less.
He fumbles for one of the Russian pastries as he nears the park bench. It tastes like butter and apples.
Sam looks up from whatever it is he's doing--again, the details don't matter--and waves Dean over.
Dean quickens his pace. He takes out another one of the pastries; this one's for Sam.
"Oh," says Sam, and Dean thinks the Sam in his head should, at the very least, be a little more grateful than oh. "Thought you'd gone out by yourself. Sorry." Sam raises a half-eaten croissant.
And Dean laughs; he can't help it. Out and out laughs. Because the Sam in his head isn't even on the same wavelength as he is. The idea should kill him, and maybe at one point it would have, but the more Dean thinks about it, the more okay he is with this.
The Sam in his head stares at him blankly. Then Dean gives him up, because he's busy trying not to choke on butter and apple. He has too much food in his mouth to be laughing quite that hard.
"Yeah, you're okay, Sammy," he says, once he's got everything under control again. "Not too bad."
Dean knows Sam is never coming back--the first three, six, nine months, he'd entertained thoughts to the contrary, but if something was going to happen, it sure as hell would have happened by now. But if he did. If he did, Dean knows it would be the Sam who fucked Ruby, and drank demon blood, left him bruised and choking on the ground in the honeymoon suite of some ritzy hotel. It would be the Sam with secrets, and resentments--the Sam who takes his keys and eats alone and ultimately, inevitably, leaves him. It would be that Sam.
It's obvious--not exactly rocket science, since that's the only Sam--but it's different today. That's the only Sam. The Sam Dean trusts, or doesn't trust. The Sam who's dead, or in Hell, or wherever he is. The Sam who's here in his head, or the Sam who's gone. It doesn't matter where he is or where he isn't. All one, whole Sam.
Dean feels warm and good, like butter and apples. He makes it back to Lakepointe hours later (where does the time go?). Lisa's already taken Ben out for dinner; the smoke from the croissants was so bad, the entire building was forced to evacuate.
"Sorry. We thought you'd gone out to eat or something," says Lisa.
Dean shrugs. That's fine. That's more than fine. More fine than it has ever been.
Lisa smiles, tells him that's a relief. Then she asks him if Dr. Sarto had, you know, upped his dosage or switched medications or something. Maybe.
--
His epiphany in the park seems massively less stellar some hours later, in the dark of his room, alone again. The sheets are cold and starched straight and stiff. He can feel the regular cold settling into his cheeks and his joints and the small of his back.
But he can still feel it flicker in his chest, and he can hold on to that. He can swing that. He knows he can. Something about core temperature, if he remembers right.
--
He has to drive sixteen miles with a pine box strapped to the roof of the Impala before he's far enough out from the city limits to avoid incarceration. It's four in the morning, someplace wide and flat. Dean tugs his load from the roof, winces as it squeals against metal and paint.
Coffins are damn heavy.
Finally, it comes crashing down, in a cloud of dust. Dean drags a box from the backseat of the Impala and dumps its contents into his coffin--the final forty-four volumes a certain pulp fiction series. Damps the covers with Rittenhouse Rye.
He stands at the foot of his coffin, shivers with the wind chill.
Then he flicks open his lighter, and drops it. He hasn't felt so certain of anything since the night he drove to Stanford, and got Sam.
"We were trying to find Dad." He hardly believes it; that particular crusade is far in the past and almost as forgotten. "This is--I don't know. This is probably going to sound really stupid, but you're not here, so..."
Deep breath.
"I went and got you, so we could go find Dad. And, uh. In the end, I guess I finally found actually you. All of you."
His coffin catches easily, as do (their) books. They burn bright and warm and true.
"Sorry it took so long."