SPN FIC - He Who Is Born of Sunlight, He Who Will Die in Darkness
First one's done -- and the WiFi's working again! Yee ha. Have a coda to Red Sky. And no, this isn't a death fic.
Characters: Dean, OFCs
Pairings: Brief implication of Dean/OFC
Rating: PG for language
Length: 3427 words
Spoilers: Up through Red Sky at Morning
Disclaimer: Kripke's toys. I'm playing, uncompensated.
His eyes, bright as slivers of green glass, come back to her. He smiles, a movement that crawls across his face like a wave inching onto damp sand. As he stands up, sliding out of the booth, his right hand tucks a fifty under the lip of the peach pie plate.
People are generous here, sometimes, for stupid reasons.
He Who Is Born of Sunlight, He Who Will Die in Darkness
By Carol Davis
When she wakes up the second time, he’s shivering like he’s standing in a cold wind. He’s moved over to the far side of the bed, leaving a good couple of feet of empty space between them.
The way he’s huddled up, he looks like a little kid who’s afraid to admit that he doesn’t like sleepaway camp, that he really misses home and his room and his mom and dad and his dog, but saying so would be fatally sissy.
She slides carefully out of bed and pads into the bathroom. Uses the toilet and runs herself a drink of water without turning on the light. When she returns to the bed he’s still lying in that same position and she can’t tell whether he’s asleep or awake.
Neither of them bothered to close the drapes. There’s enough light coming in from outside to let her see his face. The grimace that pulls at his features.
Maybe he’s dreaming.
Why she let him stay, why he wanted to stay, she isn’t sure. They only met a few hours ago, down in the brightly lit din of the casino. He was tossing down drinks and tossing down money with cheerful abandon. Not the loud, unfocused gaiety of someone floating on a wide open sea of booze; more like he was celebrating his birthday or a promotion or - she’s thought this more than once tonight - being sprung from jail.
Danny, he said when she asked his name.
Grinned at her, like he expected her to think the name was the most awesome thing ever.
He rolled her name around in his mouth a couple of times like a gulp of good Scotch. Beamed at her some more, like her name, too, was pretty damned awesome.
The sex? Was awesome.
He played it like a child’s game, like it made him happy. She’s been with guys like him before, the beautiful ones with a little bit of an edge (although Danny’s edge seems rawer than most), the ones who know they can have what they want just for the asking. He knows what he wants, and he’s very persuasive about getting there with her in tow, but damn if he doesn’t know exactly how to make it seem like it was all her idea.
He’s so gleeful about it all. Like it’s all good.
Is.
Was.
His face is drawn now, more open than he’d probably like it to be if he was awake. It looks like wherever he is in his dreams, he’s there by himself, and “by himself” isn’t a good thing.
Downstairs, in the glare of the casino, she thought he was well past thirty. Now she isn’t sure. That edge he’s got, and all the scars, the white lines both thick and thin that decorate almost every part of him, make him seem like he’s been wandering his own empty road for a long time. But here, bathed pale by the light from outside, she thinks he could pass for a boy. It makes her want to take him home.
His home, not hers.
He twitches a little in his sleep, and rather than let him wake to find her watching him, she slides carefully back in under the covers.
* * * * *
He turns his head a little to glance at her when she leans against the edge of the table to refill his coffee cup. Then his gaze moves to the stream of dark liquid running from the black plastic lip of the pot. She pauses when the cup isn’t quite full, in case he wants to add creamer.
No; the tiny white containers of creamer she brought him with his first cup are lined up like toy soldiers in the center of the table. None of them has been opened.
She fills the cup as close to the brim as she dares.
“Thanks,” he murmurs.
He’s one of a half-dozen customers in the coffee shop - the stragglers who’re fortifying themselves before another long stretch in the casino. They look distracted, all of them, as if their thoughts are carrying them far away from here: from the coffee shop, the hotel, Atlantic City itself. It’s typical of this hour of the morning; it’s too early for the crowd who’ll take advantage of their free breakfast vouchers, and the few who drift in and out before that rush kicks in look like they have no idea what time it is.
He looks like he knows. Right down to the minute.
“How’s your luck?” she asks quietly, as if it’s an encouragement.
He lifts his eyes to her. They’re luminous, the brightest green she’s seen in a long time, but shadowed. “It’s okay,” he offers, and shrugs a little.
He can’t possibly be here alone. He isn’t that type.
“Your first time here?” she asks.
“First time.”
“But you’ve been -“
“Vegas.” A smirk goes along with that admission, one that says Oh, yeah to the old What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. “Reno. Lake Tahoe. Couple of the Indian casinos. “Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes I ought to have my head examined.”
It’s tough to tell what people are going to order when they wander in at this hour. Just coffee. The cholesterol special: eggs, sausage, bacon, home fries. Pancakes. A good third of them flop the day upside down and go for a steak, or meatloaf, or soup.
Some of them just wedge themselves into a booth and talk on the phone.
She likes trying to figure them out, inventing histories for them, deciding where they’ll go when they leave here. A lot of the early-morning drifters are by themselves, filling small spaces of time in here as if it’s the breakdown lane. The coffee shop is a decent place to catch a breath, to think. To use the phone. It’s quiet in here, relatively speaking, and yet not quiet at all. The noise of the casino is a hum, a vibration, and after seven years of working here it’s worked its way into her bones, to the point where silence bothers her, makes her skin prickle.
He looks like he’s no more keen on silence than she is.
And that he feels the absence of the one who’s not with him like the burn of a raw, open wound.
“Get you more pie?” she asks. “Banana cream’s good.”
He picks up the cup and sips at the coffee, flinching almost unnoticeably at how hot it is. When she approached him the first time, almost an hour ago, and tossed off “What can I getcha?” he asked for pie. Four different kinds. He’s been sampling them since then, and the peach seems to be his favorite. The others are barely touched.
“You got a family?” he ventures, because he’s noticed the ring on her finger.
She plays the radio, volume turned down low, when she goes to bed. She can’t sleep when the room is quiet.
“Used to,” she says.
He looks off toward the wide doorway of the coffee shop, flanked on each side by a revolving glass case of desserts. That’s not what’s drawing his attention, though. He’s looking beyond the brightly lit chrome and glass, into the almost dim hallway that leads back to the casino. A couple of people are walking past, giggling, holding each other up.
His eyes, bright as slivers of green glass, come back to her. He smiles, a movement that crawls across his face like a wave inching onto damp sand. As he stands up, sliding out of the booth, his right hand tucks a fifty under the lip of the peach pie plate.
People are generous here, sometimes, for stupid reasons.
“Keep the change,” he says.
* * * * *
They’d be embarrassed, all of them, that she’s crying here - in the middle of the casino, surrounded by strangers, perched on a stool in front of a Triple Diamond slot machine. But she’s way past caring what any of them would think: her parents, her brothers. They’re two hundred miles away, and they’re probably asleep, and, really, who the hell cares what they think.
It’s Sunday, and that probably makes this all that much worse. Gambling on the Lord’s day.
And that’s a joke. None of them will wake up in time to go to church. Her wedding was the first time either one of her brothers had set foot in a church in…
There’s a guy at the machine next to hers. He’s not looking at her; he’s playing, and frowning, and he’s making no sign at all that he even sees her sitting there.
Bastard, she thinks.
You don’t care, do you? You don’t care any more than he does. Any more than they all do.
She stares at the glass front of her own machine, brow pinched, face contorted into a grotesque mask, a child’s version of fury, and wills him to look at her.
He doesn’t.
He just goes on pushing that big white button.
Her nose has started to run, and she swipes at it with the back of her hand. Her hand is already streaked with snot, some of it beginning to dry and turn crusty. She’s got nothing with her to wipe it away, no tissues, not even a sleeve. It’d be easy enough to slink out to the ladies’ room and use toilet paper, but that seems like surrender, like failure, so she slumps forward a little on the stool, jams her eyes shut, lets her tears drip onto the legs of the wrinkled sweats she pulled on when she got out of bed.
Fucker! she thinks. It’s a scream inside her head.
As if he’s heard her, the guy sitting next to her glances at her, then away. Back at his machine. He pauses in between jabs of the white button and reaches over to the machine to his right. Someone abandoned a drink there. There’s nothing left in the glass but a sip or two, but underneath it are two paper napkins embossed with the logo of the hotel. With a shift in his expression that only lasts a second or two, he passes the napkins over to her. One of them is damp with condensation from the glass, and after a moment of consideration she uses it to smudge the dried snot off her hand. She blows her nose with the other one, then wads them both up in the core of her fist.
He taps the white button again and the machine gives him three bars. He doesn’t seem pleased, or surprised. In fact, he sighs.
She snuffles loudly and looks at the machine. He’s racked up more than a thousand bucks.
She crapped out. Lost every bit of the twenty she started with.
Twenty bucks - that’s probably nothing to most of the people in here. The little old ladies who come on a lark are in the casino in the afternoon: they come on the bus, have lunch, gamble a little, ride the bus back home. The people in here now are serious. Or addicted. Or can’t sleep. Or something. They all look like something out of a cheesy horror movie. Wrinkled and pale, frowning a little or not frowning at all.
“You okay?” he asks.
She wants to tell him it’s none of his business, none of his business at all that she came down here alone at five o’clock in the morning because she couldn’t stand to be up in that room with her husband of two and a half days. That she couldn’t stand lying there thinking that this was all a colossal mistake, that she’s got no idea how to be a wife, that she got taken by surprise, let herself get lost in some little kid’s dream of I’m a grown-up now. Twenty-one, yeah, old enough to be in the casino, but what…
I do. I said I do, but I don’t.
I said…
He looks at her, and she thinks - as fleetingly as a flash of lightning - that if he acts like he’s going to pat her somewhere she’ll deck him. She’s never punched anybody in her life, and he’s got to outweigh her by, God, seventy or eighty pounds, but if he gives her that face that says Poor little girl, what’s the matter? she’ll haul off and paste him one.
Then she sees the truth in his eyes.
“Oh,” she says.
“Thought it was a good idea,” he murmurs absently. “Shit always starts out looking like a good idea.”
She wants to ask him if he’s okay, but her head hurts, and he’s not.
He’s so not.
* * * * *
He’s been sitting there for a while. For forever. Who knows.
He really shouldn’t sit like that, head tipped back, eyes closed. In a place like this, that’s asking for trouble.
In a place like this, she thinks.
On the boardwalk.
A gull circles overhead as she walks toward him, its discordant caw cutting through the damp, raw air, a blade of sound. It’s watching her, watching him, waiting to see if they’ve got something to offer, something to scavenge.
Her shoes tap lightly against the wet, weathered wood, loudly enough for him to hear her, but if he does, he doesn’t react. It could be that he’s perfectly aware of her approach, of the bird sweeping ovals through the air above them, of the traffic nearby, of the ocean. It could be that he’s hyper-aware of everything.
Everything, and nothing.
She sits down lightly at the end of the bench - he’s at the other end - and folds her hands in her lap. They’re pale against the dove gray of her skirt.
Time slips by but nothing changes. The air is thick with fog and even though the sun has climbed a bit higher, the quality and angle of its light don’t change.
His face shifts. Contorts, like someone’s twisting his arm to a point that’s painful. He wants her to leave. Wants her to go without having been seen, without having been acknowledged. She sits there silently, hands folded, listening to the hum and hush of the morning, to the bird still hanging hopeful between them and the open sky.
The air smells of salt, of damp wood, of dead fish, of exhaust.
Finally he opens his eyes. She isn’t what he expected, not at all. He frowns a little, taking in the wimple, the fringe of bangs lying against her forehead, the pale gray novitiate’s habit, the crucifix lying against her breastbone.
He looks like his head hurts.
She can see him putting explanations together in his mind: there must be a mission nearby, or a chapel in one of the hotels that she’s…
Assigned to?
She smiles. Sweetly, gently, as if he were a child.
“When the sun breaks through,” she says, tilting her head back a little to look at the sky, “it’ll be a nice day.”
He can’t figure this out at all.
“Warm,” she says. “In the upper sixties, they say.”
His face says The fuck…?
She closes her eyes. Gives him time, and a little space. Lets him be alone with his bewilderment, until he can convince himself that there’s really nothing all that odd about her sitting down beside him. She can feel him give in; his weight shifts, and he gives more of it to the backrest of the bench. It isn’t any more sensible for her to sit here with her eyes closed than it was for him to do it, but she has no reason to worry.
They’re alone.
No one will come this way for a while.
She lets him be, lets him think. Lets him try to sort things out. When he finally speaks, in a voice that’s softer than the fog, she doesn’t react.
“My brother,” he says. It’s a drawl: muh bruhther. “He doesn’t get it.”
“He will,” she tells him without looking. She can feel him. Knows he’s looking at the ground maybe ten feet in front of where his boots rest on the wood of the boardwalk. His shoulders are slumped, his face drawn into something that’s headed toward anguish.
“He wants me to worry. About me. But I…”
The gull swoops low, caws angrily, beats its wings against the air.
“What was I supposed to do?” he whispers.
She steeples her hands, fingertips touching lightly together. The gull’s webbed feet patter against the boardwalk.
“I don’t know what it is,” he says after a minute. “They won’t tell me. They say ‘worse than I can imagine,’ but I… I wish they could tell me. So I’d know. But…I don’t know if I want to know. Because if it’s real bad, I couldn’t -“
She opens her eyes. Looks at him, because he wants her to.
“He told me. He said ‘look after Sam.’ You know?”
“I know,” she says softly.
“So I just…I did it the best I know how.”
“Of course you did.”
“Now I - I’m just tryin’ to keep going. He keeps tellin’ me to worry. But how do I do that? How do I go around thinkin’ I got two hundred and…I don’t know, however many days left? Am I supposed to count? Am I supposed to keep looking at that?” He falls silent, searching her face. “Do you -“ he says, and it’s barely a sound at all. “You wouldn’t know. Would you.”
It’s strange, and sad, the way he’s clinging to her without moving, without coming anywhere near her.
“You’re not alone, Dean,” she offers.
“I feel like I am.”
“You’re not. You’ve never been alone.”
“I don’t know how to…do this.”
“Do you believe it’s all right to ask for help?”
He looks at the gull. The bird glowers back at him with round black eyes. “Had one job,” he murmurs. “Just the one.”
“And you think you’ve messed it up?”
“I don’t know what else I could’ve done. Don’t know…” He puts a hand to his forehead, crushes his eyes closed as if he can’t bear the light. “Couldn’t let him die. It was my job. And he won’t - he doesn’t get it.”
She lets that lie there for a moment, then says, “He does.”
He finds himself then: finds the absurdity in all this, and rubs briskly at his mouth. If there were tears in his eyes, they’re gone. What he thinks is painted all over his face. He’s decided she’s improvising, telling him things that she thinks he wants to hear.
He doesn’t know her, after all, or she him.
His head wobbles a little, as if he intended to shake off the weight of the world but changed his mind at the last moment. Smiling faintly, and artificially, he gets up from the bench and shifts his weight from one foot to the other.
He looks at her, taller now. He’s stopped being a lost child huddled on a weatherbeaten bench.
“You buy into all that?” he asks.
She could ask All what? But she doesn’t need to. He’ll keep struggling forward for a long while yet, hoping for answers and dreading them at the same time.
“You’re not alone,” she reminds him.
“You oughta go -“ And he has to stop, because he still doesn’t know where she belongs, what place she occupies in this neighborhood. “Inside. Not really safe out here.”
“I appreciate your concern.”
He has to grope for a way to take his leave. It’s sad, in a way, that he doesn’t know how to fit himself into this puzzle. Emotions flicker across his face: dismay, embarrassment, chagrin. She’s too young, too delicate, too female. Too…holy.
That’s his sticking point. She believes, and he does not.
Or believes that he does not.
“I…gotta…”
He settles for simply walking away. For saying goodbye with a tilt of his head. She watches him go, sheltered inside his leather jacket, hands buried in his pockets, head down. Aware of his surroundings but separate from them. It’s going to take him a while yet to fit himself back into the niche where he belongs: with the brother who owns his heart.
The gull moves closer and peers wonderingly up at her.
She glances at the bird, into the reflective black depths of its eyes, then returns to watching Dean Winchester stride away, down the damp grayed length of the boardwalk.