New SPN fic! ...not quite in before jossing.
Stupid CW promo department, releasing episode sneak peeks a week ahead of the air date. :(
Rating: gen.
No warnings apply.
Thanks to
akamarykate for the beta.
FIVE LIES DEAN TELLS HIS MOTHER (AND ONE LIE SHE TELLS HIM) by Jayne L.
1.
"How did you and Sammy start hunting?"
Dean looks at his mom--his mom--walking beside him on the road's shoulder. Her fair hair and white nightgown catch the moonlight like the shreds of fog that hang low in the ditches; if she weren't wearing his jacket--practically drowning in it, too-broad shoulders slumped halfway down her arms, too-long sleeves rolled and bunched sloppily at her wrists--he'd think she was a Woman In White.
Her bare feet are careful but steady on the grassy verge. Not for the first time, Dean wishes he'd taken his phone with him when he left to kill Amara: he's equal parts itchy about Sam and Cas thinking he's dead, and worried about Mom slicing her freshly-resurrected feet open on a piece of dirty roadside litter while they look for something to hotwire. Her gait hitches every now and then when she steps wrong on a piece of gravel, but she doesn't make a noise of complaint. She's focused on where she puts her feet, her expression one of calm concentration.
With that question, and the resolutely casual way she asked, it looks like a poker face.
Dean wishes like hell he could've told her he and Sam were anything other than hunters. Tax adjusters, electricians. Fucking milkmen. He's never been able to bury the way she looked when she was young: swearing that her kids wouldn't be raised in the life; devastated when she found out they'd been raised in it anyway. He's happy she's here--for this, for her, to have come out of the long, deep swamp of crap that was the Mark and the Darkness, he's fucking thrilled--but he hates that her second chance at life means she has to find out, again, that all her good intentions the first time around meant jack shit.
"The demon that killed you wasn't exactly subtle," he begins, careful. "Dad knew something was out there, and when he found out what it was--"
"John, too?" And it turns out Mom's poker face is terrible: vicious unhappiness cracks right through her calm. "Your father started hunting because of how I died?"
Something coils up under Dean's sternum, high and tight. "It's not your fault--"
She's already shaking her head. "I didn't want you boys to know about any of this." She sounds bitter. She sounds angry and defeated. "I didn't want you to have to worry about any of it. I wanted you to be safe, to have normal lives--"
"Not knowing about what's out there wouldn't have kept us safe."
"I know, honey, but--"
"No, Mom--" The thing in Dean's chest winds up and up, anxious and sad, and he swings around to block her path, stopping her short. "Sammy and me, we didn't grow up easy. I'm not gonna lie to you and say we did. And I'm sorry as hell that you weren't there to see it, to help us through. We--" Needed you, he almost says, but he swallows it. He knows how it feels not to have been where you were needed. "We missed you. But Mom, look at me. We grew up." She softens at that, finally, the tense lines of self-reproach starting to ease away from her eyes and mouth as she looks up at him.
Up at him. Dean's dizzied by a sudden memory of wrapping his skinny little-kid arms around her knees and burying his face in her apron--it smelled like flour, like sweetness and spices, like goodness--before craning his neck so he could see that face beaming down at him. He finds himself smiling, awestruck all over again at the fact of her, here. Alive. He uses it. "Sammy really grew up, he's got like four inches on me, he's a friggin' Sasquatch," he says, and it surprises a broken chuckle out of her.
Stepping aside, Dean gestures for her to start walking again; they move on, Dean's boots clomping on the empty road, Mary's feet rustling the grass. "Not to brag or anything," he adds eventually, focused on the nighttime horizon, "but we've actually saved the world once or twice. If we weren't hunters--if we hadn't been brought up the way we were..." He shrugs, resolutely casual. "Dad did right by us."
Mom doesn't say anything, just keeps minding her steps.
After a while, she drifts closer and loops her arm through his, tucks her warm hand into the bend of his elbow.
The knot in Dean's chest loosens.
2.
"What is he?"
Cas is staring at him like he's the second coming, and yeah, okay, next time Dean heads out to die for the cause, he's definitely bringing his phone so he can give everybody the heads up when he lives through it. But Mary's hand is tight under Dean's, still gripping the stock of her pistol, finger still stretched over the trigger guard tensed to curl under and pull, so Dean just sends up a prayer (Not now, Cas, there's so much she doesn't know yet, I'll explain everything later--) and keeps pressure on her wrist, making sure the gun stays aimed at the floor. "He's an angel."
Her hand twitches. Her eyes widen, darting to Dean before returning to Cas, sizing him up anew. For all that she's surprised, her voice is steady when she asks, "And how does an angel get involved in my sons' lives?"
Dean feels Cas's gaze boring a hole in the side of his head. He hopes like hell he got the message. "It's kind of a long story--"
"Then give me the Reader's Digest version."
--and Dean's catapulted back to when he was three, four years old. He used to run his hands back and forth over the year's-worth of Reader's Digests stuffed into the basket beside the big armchair in the den, just to feel the riffling pages under his palms. It's been decades since he last spared half a thought to Reader's fucking Digest, but the name of it--in his mother's voice--cuts through him, a swathe of warm memory. His palms tickle with it.
It's not the first time he's had this kind of shit bubble up on him since his mom came back. He shakes it off. "Okay. Okay, I, uh, got myself into some trouble a while back, and Cas--" Dean's lip curls, wry. "--Cas pulled my ass out of the fire. And then he stuck around, helped Sam and me save the world a couple times."
Her hand's relaxed now: the gun hangs loose at her side, doesn't have to be held down. Dean chances letting go of her wrist as Mary turns her full attention to him, curious and concerned. "Must've been pretty bad trouble, for an angel to step in."
He forces a shrug; tries to make it look careless. "It was a long time ago." Her mouth firms, but Dean shakes his head as he backs away. "It doesn't matter. What matters is, Cas has helped us through a lot. He's family now. A bullet wouldn't hurt him much, but it's the principle of the thing."
She watches him, considering. His mom, face upturned and searching. Dean feels like the worst kind of amateur in an interrogation, ready to blab out something, anything, to fill the silence. Somehow, he holds his tongue.
"When you were little," she says finally, "I used to tell you angels were watching over you. I guess I was right." And she smiles. It's small, and there's a tightness around her eyes that says she knows he's not telling her everything. But she smiles and Dean's a kid again, so damn thankful to see it because it means things are gonna be okay. "Sorry about the gunpoint," she continues, turning her smile to Cas. "My reflexes kicked in."
Cas, the dry bastard, barely flickers a glance Dean's way. "It's hardly the first time someone in your family has threatened me with a weapon. Your reflexes must be hereditary."
And that's it. Introductions made; questions shelved. They get back to figuring out what the fuck's happened to Sam.
Later, though, Dean turns from putting the last dinner dish into the drying rack to find Cas hovering in the door to the kitchen, watching him with soft eyes. Dean overplays his startle. "Dammit, Cas--"
Cas takes three long strides across the room, and then Dean's being hugged. He hugs back because, hell, by now he was supposed to be dead and gone for good, torn into pieces too small to be worth Billie's time; he's man enough to admit that this, Cas warm and solid and hugging him fiercely, is better.
"I missed you," Cas says, his chin digging into Dean's shoulder.
Dean chuckles into his hair. "C'mon, man, you only thought I was dead for like a day."
Cas's arms tighten around him. His fingers flex where they're spread on Dean's back. "I missed you," he repeats.
Dean lets himself be held.
When Cas finally steps back, one of his hands idles on Dean's elbow. Dean knows what he's going to say before he opens his mouth. "Why didn't you tell your mother the truth about how we met?"
"I did." It comes out a bit too quickly, a little defensive. Dean turns to the counter and picks up the dishtowel, busies himself with folding it. "I was in trouble, you pulled me out of it."
"That's not the whole truth."
"She asked for the Reader's Digest version." He doesn't have to look to know that Cas is watching him the way he always does when Dean tries to skirt an issue: patient and plain and too damn perceptive. "She doesn't need to know the whole truth. I don't--" The end of the sentence jams up in his throat, crawling there hot and guilty: --want her to know. He doesn't think he can say it. After a second, he turns back to Cas, but can't quite raise his eyes any higher than the wrinkled lapel of his coat. "Don't tell her I went to Hell, Cas, okay? Just--don't."
It's a long moment before Cas says quietly, "All right."
Dean lets out his breath.
3.
They're hip-deep in mouldering MoL spellbooks, trying to find a locating spell to punch through the nuclear-grade warding hiding Sam, when Mary huffs out a half-laugh. "The Men of Letters," she says when Dean looks up. "When I was really little, they used to contact my parents with jobs every now and then. From what your grandparents said, they were all fussy librarians who didn't like to get their hands dirty." With a wondering glance at the bunker arching around them, she shakes her head. "I can't believe you boys got mixed up with them."
Dean huffs out a chuckle of his own. "Yeah, you and me both."
"So how did you?"
"Oh, well." He clears his throat. "Uh. We're legacies."
She grins widely, as if he's joking. When Dean doesn't laugh, her expression twists into sheer incredulity. "What? How? Those snobs wouldn't let a hunter's kids into their hallowed halls, and your father was a civilian."
"Dad was." Dean looks back down at the book in front of him. He flips a page. "His dad wasn't."
"His dad was a mechanic! John said he would've been unemployable after the war if Everett hadn't taught him everything he knew about fixing engines!"
"Not Everett. Henry."
There's a hard silence from across the table. Then: "Let me guess: another long story?"
"Grandpa Everett was Grandma Millie's second husband." After they met Henry, when they were on a hunt in the right part of Illinois, Sam took a side trip to the county records office one slow afternoon and found out that Everett flouted the conventions of the day by taking Millie's name when they married. Dean can't exactly blame the guy. He sure as hell wouldn't want to spend his whole life answering to the name Everett Chubbs.
Sighing, he pushes his book away and slumps back in his chair, scrubbing his hands over his tired eyes. "If it helps, Dad didn't even know the Men of Letters existed, and neither did we until...three years ago? Four? They've been pretty much extinct since the early sixties."
Mom stares at the books spread across the tabletop, faintly stunned. "I can't believe I married a Man of Letters. That's some coincidence."
Dean thinks about Heaven's vessel-breeding programme; the Cupid that made his parents fall in love. Biting down on long-curdled resentment, he bobs his head in a slow nod. "Sure is."
4.
Sam's cellphone turns on, its GPS along with it. It's a trap--obviously, it's a trap--but it's also a lead. The only one they've got.
Cas is already on the road; Dean texts him to meet up in Holdrege, then he and Mom load up the car and roll out.
They've been driving for maybe ten minutes--Dean's just settled into cruising speed on Route 281--when Mary reaches for the radio knob and starts fiddling. She wheels through static and talk before she hits a clear signal: some godawful electronic garbage. Inexplicably, that's where she stops, her hand freezing on the tuner. Dean's about to invoke driver-picks-the-music just to get the damn noise turned off when she says, "This is the Impala."
Dean slants her a look.
"We went to the garage and there it was," she explains, an odd smile pulling at her mouth, "and it was the most normal thing in the world. I didn't even think about how long it's been." She twists the radio dial 'til it clicks, killing the so-called music, then settles back in her seat. "I can't believe it's still roadworthy."
"Dad gave me the keys when I turned eighteen," Dean tells her, ignoring the skepticism in her voice. He gives the wheel a surreptitious, reassuring pat. "Been keeping her up ever since."
"You have?" Her odd-cornered smile turns broad and easy. "You've done an amazing job, honey," she says, and in the heart of his usual firm pride in his baby, Dean feels something new unfurl, something small and warm and shy.
"The family car," Mom muses. Her gaze travels around the interior before landing on him again, thoughtful. "Have you or Sam ever..."
Dean waits. When the sentence does nothing but hang, he prompts, "Have we ever what?"
"Have you ever thought about settling down?" Dean doesn't know what she sees on his face, but whatever it is makes her try immediately to backpedal. "Sorry, sweetheart, if I'm being too much of a 'mom'--"
"No, it's okay." He says it kneejerk: he doesn't want her to feel like she shouldn't have asked. But his shoulders tighten up, and a muscle ticks in his jaw as he starts biting down on things he doesn't think he should say. Things he knows will make her regret asking. "I mean, it's--I don't--"
"You don't have to--"
"No, Mom, I just--"
"Really, it's none of my--"
"We both tried it." He says it firmly, and Mom subsides. In the sudden quiet, Dean orders his thoughts. "Sam had this girlfriend in college--"
"Sammy went to college?"
Dean grins at her flat-out delight. "Yeah, Sammy went to college. Giant nerd got himself a full ride to Stanford. Found a real nice girl there--Jess--but, uh." He clears his throat to cover the abrupt disappearance of his grin. "When that didn't work out, he got back on the road with me. Then a few years later, there was Amelia. I never met her, but the way he talked about her--" He stares at the road, at the point far in the distance where the blacktop pins the horizon, and thinks he probably should've stopped with Jess. "I think she was good for him," he manages.
In his periphery Mom's smiling, small and genuine, if wistful. Her left hand's curved over the lip of the bench seat; her thumb smooths absently over the vinyl. "And you?"
"There was--" Dean darts a glance at the speedometer and eases up on the accelerator: his lead foot got heavier when he wasn't paying attention. "I lived with this woman and her kid for a while. Lisa, and Ben. She and I, we had a thing for a little while, and then after--uh, later on, when I was in a rough spot, they took me in. Let me stay as long as I needed."
"Do you still see them?"
Dean's hands are white on the wheel, holding her steady. He clears his throat again. "No."
"What happened?"
"Job kept getting in the way."
They ride in silence for a few beats, the car swaying beneath them.
Softly, Mom says, "I'm sorry, honey," and Dean knows--he knows--that seeing him and Sam settled down with families of their own was part of the normal life she'd wanted to give them. The normal life she'd wanted to have.
Failure aches through his bones, thick and hot, arthritic. He works his jaw against it. Dismisses it, and tries to help her understand. "Nah, I'm better off." He keeps going before she can argue. "Sam's good at making room for other stuff, other people. Me, I can care about somebody--doesn't matter how much--but push comes to shove, and the job always wins." They're coming up on the tail of some little green hybrid thing. Dean checks his speed again, checks his mirrors, signals and sails past and pulls cleanly back into the right lane. "So they're better off without me, too," he concludes.
5. / 1.
When they finally find Sam, he's in rough shape.
"It's not even that bad," he says. His voice is torn up from screaming, but it's also doing that upbeat, hopeful thing it does when he's floored, like if he's polite and helpful enough the universe'll help him out in return and start making sense. With his wide, glassy eyes fixed on where Mom's hog-tying the Brit, he even musters up a goddamn reassuring smile. "I've had worse!"
Forcing his own scraped-up fingers to cooperate long enough to pick the lock on Sam's bloody, scorch-marked chains, Dean wills him to shut the hell up.
***
Cas is leaving again.
"It's my fault Lucifer is out of the Cage," he says, standing there at the foot of the stairs full of noble regret and stupid self-sacrifice. "I'm responsible for whatever evil he does while free. I have to find him."
Dean wants to tell him to just let the bastard go. Not forever, obviously--Dean's way past trying to kid himself that he and his might not end up cleaning up every rotten piece of evil filth the underworld has to spew out into the world--but for now. For now, they're all settling into the new normal; it's as good an excuse as any for Cas to take a breather, stick around. Just for now. A week, maybe. A damn day.
He claps his hand to Cas's shoulder and says, "Be careful, man."
Mom's at the table, poking doubtfully at the laptop. After watching Cas disappear up the stairs and out the door, Dean turns and joins her, spends the afternoon showing her how to find potential hunts on the internet.
***
Dean gets his first beer of the day a little after ten in the morning. He's drained the neck by the time he gets back to the library table, where Mom's gaze lingers on the bottle in his hand and Sam is suddenly paying really close attention to his set of crumbling old appendices.
Dean gets his third beer of the day with lunch. "You want one?" he asks the room, staring into the fridge, and it takes Sam a beat to say, "Sure." Mom opts for water.
Dean's forgotten how many he's had by the time he turns in. He says his goodnights--squeezes Sam's shoulder, kisses Mom's cheek--before going to the fridge and snagging one more off the shelf. He has trouble drifting off without a nightcap.
***
"I just want you to be happy."
Her face is so full of love and sadness and hope. Dean swallows the lump in his throat. "I am, Mom."
She closes her eyes. When she opens them, they're shining with unshed tears, and she's smiling. She reaches out to cup his face gently in her palms. "Then I am, too."
*~*~*
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comments.)
Rating: gen.
No warnings apply.
Thanks to
akamarykate for the beta.
FIVE LIES DEAN TELLS HIS MOTHER (AND ONE LIE SHE TELLS HIM) by Jayne L.
1.
"How did you and Sammy start hunting?"
Dean looks at his mom--his mom--walking beside him on the road's shoulder. Her fair hair and white nightgown catch the moonlight like the shreds of fog that hang low in the ditches; if she weren't wearing his jacket--practically drowning in it, too-broad shoulders slumped halfway down her arms, too-long sleeves rolled and bunched sloppily at her wrists--he'd think she was a Woman In White.
Her bare feet are careful but steady on the grassy verge. Not for the first time, Dean wishes he'd taken his phone with him when he left to kill Amara: he's equal parts itchy about Sam and Cas thinking he's dead, and worried about Mom slicing her freshly-resurrected feet open on a piece of dirty roadside litter while they look for something to hotwire. Her gait hitches every now and then when she steps wrong on a piece of gravel, but she doesn't make a noise of complaint. She's focused on where she puts her feet, her expression one of calm concentration.
With that question, and the resolutely casual way she asked, it looks like a poker face.
Dean wishes like hell he could've told her he and Sam were anything other than hunters. Tax adjusters, electricians. Fucking milkmen. He's never been able to bury the way she looked when she was young: swearing that her kids wouldn't be raised in the life; devastated when she found out they'd been raised in it anyway. He's happy she's here--for this, for her, to have come out of the long, deep swamp of crap that was the Mark and the Darkness, he's fucking thrilled--but he hates that her second chance at life means she has to find out, again, that all her good intentions the first time around meant jack shit.
"The demon that killed you wasn't exactly subtle," he begins, careful. "Dad knew something was out there, and when he found out what it was--"
"John, too?" And it turns out Mom's poker face is terrible: vicious unhappiness cracks right through her calm. "Your father started hunting because of how I died?"
Something coils up under Dean's sternum, high and tight. "It's not your fault--"
She's already shaking her head. "I didn't want you boys to know about any of this." She sounds bitter. She sounds angry and defeated. "I didn't want you to have to worry about any of it. I wanted you to be safe, to have normal lives--"
"Not knowing about what's out there wouldn't have kept us safe."
"I know, honey, but--"
"No, Mom--" The thing in Dean's chest winds up and up, anxious and sad, and he swings around to block her path, stopping her short. "Sammy and me, we didn't grow up easy. I'm not gonna lie to you and say we did. And I'm sorry as hell that you weren't there to see it, to help us through. We--" Needed you, he almost says, but he swallows it. He knows how it feels not to have been where you were needed. "We missed you. But Mom, look at me. We grew up." She softens at that, finally, the tense lines of self-reproach starting to ease away from her eyes and mouth as she looks up at him.
Up at him. Dean's dizzied by a sudden memory of wrapping his skinny little-kid arms around her knees and burying his face in her apron--it smelled like flour, like sweetness and spices, like goodness--before craning his neck so he could see that face beaming down at him. He finds himself smiling, awestruck all over again at the fact of her, here. Alive. He uses it. "Sammy really grew up, he's got like four inches on me, he's a friggin' Sasquatch," he says, and it surprises a broken chuckle out of her.
Stepping aside, Dean gestures for her to start walking again; they move on, Dean's boots clomping on the empty road, Mary's feet rustling the grass. "Not to brag or anything," he adds eventually, focused on the nighttime horizon, "but we've actually saved the world once or twice. If we weren't hunters--if we hadn't been brought up the way we were..." He shrugs, resolutely casual. "Dad did right by us."
Mom doesn't say anything, just keeps minding her steps.
After a while, she drifts closer and loops her arm through his, tucks her warm hand into the bend of his elbow.
The knot in Dean's chest loosens.
2.
"What is he?"
Cas is staring at him like he's the second coming, and yeah, okay, next time Dean heads out to die for the cause, he's definitely bringing his phone so he can give everybody the heads up when he lives through it. But Mary's hand is tight under Dean's, still gripping the stock of her pistol, finger still stretched over the trigger guard tensed to curl under and pull, so Dean just sends up a prayer (Not now, Cas, there's so much she doesn't know yet, I'll explain everything later--) and keeps pressure on her wrist, making sure the gun stays aimed at the floor. "He's an angel."
Her hand twitches. Her eyes widen, darting to Dean before returning to Cas, sizing him up anew. For all that she's surprised, her voice is steady when she asks, "And how does an angel get involved in my sons' lives?"
Dean feels Cas's gaze boring a hole in the side of his head. He hopes like hell he got the message. "It's kind of a long story--"
"Then give me the Reader's Digest version."
--and Dean's catapulted back to when he was three, four years old. He used to run his hands back and forth over the year's-worth of Reader's Digests stuffed into the basket beside the big armchair in the den, just to feel the riffling pages under his palms. It's been decades since he last spared half a thought to Reader's fucking Digest, but the name of it--in his mother's voice--cuts through him, a swathe of warm memory. His palms tickle with it.
It's not the first time he's had this kind of shit bubble up on him since his mom came back. He shakes it off. "Okay. Okay, I, uh, got myself into some trouble a while back, and Cas--" Dean's lip curls, wry. "--Cas pulled my ass out of the fire. And then he stuck around, helped Sam and me save the world a couple times."
Her hand's relaxed now: the gun hangs loose at her side, doesn't have to be held down. Dean chances letting go of her wrist as Mary turns her full attention to him, curious and concerned. "Must've been pretty bad trouble, for an angel to step in."
He forces a shrug; tries to make it look careless. "It was a long time ago." Her mouth firms, but Dean shakes his head as he backs away. "It doesn't matter. What matters is, Cas has helped us through a lot. He's family now. A bullet wouldn't hurt him much, but it's the principle of the thing."
She watches him, considering. His mom, face upturned and searching. Dean feels like the worst kind of amateur in an interrogation, ready to blab out something, anything, to fill the silence. Somehow, he holds his tongue.
"When you were little," she says finally, "I used to tell you angels were watching over you. I guess I was right." And she smiles. It's small, and there's a tightness around her eyes that says she knows he's not telling her everything. But she smiles and Dean's a kid again, so damn thankful to see it because it means things are gonna be okay. "Sorry about the gunpoint," she continues, turning her smile to Cas. "My reflexes kicked in."
Cas, the dry bastard, barely flickers a glance Dean's way. "It's hardly the first time someone in your family has threatened me with a weapon. Your reflexes must be hereditary."
And that's it. Introductions made; questions shelved. They get back to figuring out what the fuck's happened to Sam.
Later, though, Dean turns from putting the last dinner dish into the drying rack to find Cas hovering in the door to the kitchen, watching him with soft eyes. Dean overplays his startle. "Dammit, Cas--"
Cas takes three long strides across the room, and then Dean's being hugged. He hugs back because, hell, by now he was supposed to be dead and gone for good, torn into pieces too small to be worth Billie's time; he's man enough to admit that this, Cas warm and solid and hugging him fiercely, is better.
"I missed you," Cas says, his chin digging into Dean's shoulder.
Dean chuckles into his hair. "C'mon, man, you only thought I was dead for like a day."
Cas's arms tighten around him. His fingers flex where they're spread on Dean's back. "I missed you," he repeats.
Dean lets himself be held.
When Cas finally steps back, one of his hands idles on Dean's elbow. Dean knows what he's going to say before he opens his mouth. "Why didn't you tell your mother the truth about how we met?"
"I did." It comes out a bit too quickly, a little defensive. Dean turns to the counter and picks up the dishtowel, busies himself with folding it. "I was in trouble, you pulled me out of it."
"That's not the whole truth."
"She asked for the Reader's Digest version." He doesn't have to look to know that Cas is watching him the way he always does when Dean tries to skirt an issue: patient and plain and too damn perceptive. "She doesn't need to know the whole truth. I don't--" The end of the sentence jams up in his throat, crawling there hot and guilty: --want her to know. He doesn't think he can say it. After a second, he turns back to Cas, but can't quite raise his eyes any higher than the wrinkled lapel of his coat. "Don't tell her I went to Hell, Cas, okay? Just--don't."
It's a long moment before Cas says quietly, "All right."
Dean lets out his breath.
3.
They're hip-deep in mouldering MoL spellbooks, trying to find a locating spell to punch through the nuclear-grade warding hiding Sam, when Mary huffs out a half-laugh. "The Men of Letters," she says when Dean looks up. "When I was really little, they used to contact my parents with jobs every now and then. From what your grandparents said, they were all fussy librarians who didn't like to get their hands dirty." With a wondering glance at the bunker arching around them, she shakes her head. "I can't believe you boys got mixed up with them."
Dean huffs out a chuckle of his own. "Yeah, you and me both."
"So how did you?"
"Oh, well." He clears his throat. "Uh. We're legacies."
She grins widely, as if he's joking. When Dean doesn't laugh, her expression twists into sheer incredulity. "What? How? Those snobs wouldn't let a hunter's kids into their hallowed halls, and your father was a civilian."
"Dad was." Dean looks back down at the book in front of him. He flips a page. "His dad wasn't."
"His dad was a mechanic! John said he would've been unemployable after the war if Everett hadn't taught him everything he knew about fixing engines!"
"Not Everett. Henry."
There's a hard silence from across the table. Then: "Let me guess: another long story?"
"Grandpa Everett was Grandma Millie's second husband." After they met Henry, when they were on a hunt in the right part of Illinois, Sam took a side trip to the county records office one slow afternoon and found out that Everett flouted the conventions of the day by taking Millie's name when they married. Dean can't exactly blame the guy. He sure as hell wouldn't want to spend his whole life answering to the name Everett Chubbs.
Sighing, he pushes his book away and slumps back in his chair, scrubbing his hands over his tired eyes. "If it helps, Dad didn't even know the Men of Letters existed, and neither did we until...three years ago? Four? They've been pretty much extinct since the early sixties."
Mom stares at the books spread across the tabletop, faintly stunned. "I can't believe I married a Man of Letters. That's some coincidence."
Dean thinks about Heaven's vessel-breeding programme; the Cupid that made his parents fall in love. Biting down on long-curdled resentment, he bobs his head in a slow nod. "Sure is."
4.
Sam's cellphone turns on, its GPS along with it. It's a trap--obviously, it's a trap--but it's also a lead. The only one they've got.
Cas is already on the road; Dean texts him to meet up in Holdrege, then he and Mom load up the car and roll out.
They've been driving for maybe ten minutes--Dean's just settled into cruising speed on Route 281--when Mary reaches for the radio knob and starts fiddling. She wheels through static and talk before she hits a clear signal: some godawful electronic garbage. Inexplicably, that's where she stops, her hand freezing on the tuner. Dean's about to invoke driver-picks-the-music just to get the damn noise turned off when she says, "This is the Impala."
Dean slants her a look.
"We went to the garage and there it was," she explains, an odd smile pulling at her mouth, "and it was the most normal thing in the world. I didn't even think about how long it's been." She twists the radio dial 'til it clicks, killing the so-called music, then settles back in her seat. "I can't believe it's still roadworthy."
"Dad gave me the keys when I turned eighteen," Dean tells her, ignoring the skepticism in her voice. He gives the wheel a surreptitious, reassuring pat. "Been keeping her up ever since."
"You have?" Her odd-cornered smile turns broad and easy. "You've done an amazing job, honey," she says, and in the heart of his usual firm pride in his baby, Dean feels something new unfurl, something small and warm and shy.
"The family car," Mom muses. Her gaze travels around the interior before landing on him again, thoughtful. "Have you or Sam ever..."
Dean waits. When the sentence does nothing but hang, he prompts, "Have we ever what?"
"Have you ever thought about settling down?" Dean doesn't know what she sees on his face, but whatever it is makes her try immediately to backpedal. "Sorry, sweetheart, if I'm being too much of a 'mom'--"
"No, it's okay." He says it kneejerk: he doesn't want her to feel like she shouldn't have asked. But his shoulders tighten up, and a muscle ticks in his jaw as he starts biting down on things he doesn't think he should say. Things he knows will make her regret asking. "I mean, it's--I don't--"
"You don't have to--"
"No, Mom, I just--"
"Really, it's none of my--"
"We both tried it." He says it firmly, and Mom subsides. In the sudden quiet, Dean orders his thoughts. "Sam had this girlfriend in college--"
"Sammy went to college?"
Dean grins at her flat-out delight. "Yeah, Sammy went to college. Giant nerd got himself a full ride to Stanford. Found a real nice girl there--Jess--but, uh." He clears his throat to cover the abrupt disappearance of his grin. "When that didn't work out, he got back on the road with me. Then a few years later, there was Amelia. I never met her, but the way he talked about her--" He stares at the road, at the point far in the distance where the blacktop pins the horizon, and thinks he probably should've stopped with Jess. "I think she was good for him," he manages.
In his periphery Mom's smiling, small and genuine, if wistful. Her left hand's curved over the lip of the bench seat; her thumb smooths absently over the vinyl. "And you?"
"There was--" Dean darts a glance at the speedometer and eases up on the accelerator: his lead foot got heavier when he wasn't paying attention. "I lived with this woman and her kid for a while. Lisa, and Ben. She and I, we had a thing for a little while, and then after--uh, later on, when I was in a rough spot, they took me in. Let me stay as long as I needed."
"Do you still see them?"
Dean's hands are white on the wheel, holding her steady. He clears his throat again. "No."
"What happened?"
"Job kept getting in the way."
They ride in silence for a few beats, the car swaying beneath them.
Softly, Mom says, "I'm sorry, honey," and Dean knows--he knows--that seeing him and Sam settled down with families of their own was part of the normal life she'd wanted to give them. The normal life she'd wanted to have.
Failure aches through his bones, thick and hot, arthritic. He works his jaw against it. Dismisses it, and tries to help her understand. "Nah, I'm better off." He keeps going before she can argue. "Sam's good at making room for other stuff, other people. Me, I can care about somebody--doesn't matter how much--but push comes to shove, and the job always wins." They're coming up on the tail of some little green hybrid thing. Dean checks his speed again, checks his mirrors, signals and sails past and pulls cleanly back into the right lane. "So they're better off without me, too," he concludes.
5. / 1.
When they finally find Sam, he's in rough shape.
"It's not even that bad," he says. His voice is torn up from screaming, but it's also doing that upbeat, hopeful thing it does when he's floored, like if he's polite and helpful enough the universe'll help him out in return and start making sense. With his wide, glassy eyes fixed on where Mom's hog-tying the Brit, he even musters up a goddamn reassuring smile. "I've had worse!"
Forcing his own scraped-up fingers to cooperate long enough to pick the lock on Sam's bloody, scorch-marked chains, Dean wills him to shut the hell up.
***
Cas is leaving again.
"It's my fault Lucifer is out of the Cage," he says, standing there at the foot of the stairs full of noble regret and stupid self-sacrifice. "I'm responsible for whatever evil he does while free. I have to find him."
Dean wants to tell him to just let the bastard go. Not forever, obviously--Dean's way past trying to kid himself that he and his might not end up cleaning up every rotten piece of evil filth the underworld has to spew out into the world--but for now. For now, they're all settling into the new normal; it's as good an excuse as any for Cas to take a breather, stick around. Just for now. A week, maybe. A damn day.
He claps his hand to Cas's shoulder and says, "Be careful, man."
Mom's at the table, poking doubtfully at the laptop. After watching Cas disappear up the stairs and out the door, Dean turns and joins her, spends the afternoon showing her how to find potential hunts on the internet.
***
Dean gets his first beer of the day a little after ten in the morning. He's drained the neck by the time he gets back to the library table, where Mom's gaze lingers on the bottle in his hand and Sam is suddenly paying really close attention to his set of crumbling old appendices.
Dean gets his third beer of the day with lunch. "You want one?" he asks the room, staring into the fridge, and it takes Sam a beat to say, "Sure." Mom opts for water.
Dean's forgotten how many he's had by the time he turns in. He says his goodnights--squeezes Sam's shoulder, kisses Mom's cheek--before going to the fridge and snagging one more off the shelf. He has trouble drifting off without a nightcap.
***
"I just want you to be happy."
Her face is so full of love and sadness and hope. Dean swallows the lump in his throat. "I am, Mom."
She closes her eyes. When she opens them, they're shining with unshed tears, and she's smiling. She reaches out to cup his face gently in her palms. "Then I am, too."
*~*~*
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