And This Constant Forward Motion is Their Home: Part 4
They do go back, the next day. Sam thinks the girl is being possessed Dean thinks it's a bad idea, and so does Sam, but they don't have any other plans so. Exorcism it is.
The old man lets them in without even asking what they want, but Sam notices the shot gun set by the corner of the doorway. The old woman is sitting in the same chair as yesterday, and she stares at them with sharp eyes when they come in. Both Sam and Dean feel huge in the small room, awkward. Sam looks at Dean and then to the woman, making a move to shake her hand. She doesn't reciprocate. So instead Sam wipes his clammy hands on his jeans and gestures for Dean to get out the holy water.
"We, uh..." Sam looks back at the man who is standing in the doorway. "We're going to try and exorcise her." But again neither of them say anything, so Sam opens the bible.
--
“DEUS, cui próprium est miseréri semper et párcere: súscipe deprecatiónem nostram; ut hunc fámulum tuum, quem (hanc fámulam tuam, quam) delictórum caténa constríngit, miserátio tuæ pietátis cleménter absólvat.
DÓMINE sancte, Pater omnípotens, ætérne Deus, Pater Dómini nostri Jesu Christi, qui illum réfugam tyránnum et apóstatam gehénnae ígnibus deputásti, quique Unigénitum tuum in hunc mundum misísti, ut illum rugiéntem contéret: velóciter atténdem accélera, ut erípias hóminem ad imáginem et similitúdinem tuam creátum, a ruína et dæmónio meridiáno. Da, Dómine, terrórem tuum super béstiam-“
--
The first thing Dean sees happen is the girl bows off the bed, her body arching to an obscene angle, and she makes this sound, like every bit of breath in her is being sucked out real fast, and real hard. Then, something hits him hard in the chest, he feels like he’s making friendly with an explosion, and he opens his eyes just in time to see Sam fly across the room with him. They hit opposite walls, and Dean goes through a table before he gets there. Both the man and the woman seem fine, are still standing. They are both staring at the girl who is suddenly sitting up in her bed.
Someone yells- Dean’s head is still ringing from the blast of whatever-the-hell and he’s pretty sure he didn’t make it through that flight without some kind of an injury. He tries to stand and stumbles, Sam’s name falling thick and slow and automatic from his lips, his eyes searching for his brother.
His eyes meet Sam's, silent assessment tells him Sam isn’t too injured and that everything is fine for the most part. And then Sam goes down, his widening eyes on Dean’s until they roll back in his head, and Dean doesn’t know what the hell he’s supposed to do just then, so he falls back on instinct and his whole world shrinks to the size of his brother.
In less than a second flat Dean’s got his gun out and he’s ready to take down every motherfucker in this room, sure that someone has just cast on his brother and that this whole thing was just a trap from the beginning or some ridiculous shit, but damn if he knows what he’s supposed to be shooting at.
Everyone else looks about at helpless as he feels, and they’re mostly too preoccupied with the fact that their girl is making sounds and breathing and blinking again to notice that Sam is on his knees, his eyes falling shut and he’s taking a nosedive. It’s the second time this week Dean catches Sam just a little too late, but this time it’s not the corner of a diner table or even a vision that puts his brother on his knees. Sam is unconscious and he’s fever hot, and his body jerks in Dean’s arms, but Dean doesn’t know what the hell did this to him, so he has nothing to take down, nothing to fight, and he feels so goddamn useless.
He shakes Sam once, slaps messily at his face a couple of times, and he knows he’s yelling at the boy to wake up and that his back is wide open for whatever these people have in store for him, but he can’t help any of that right now.
“Sam! C’mon, Sammy, don’t do this to me right now. Wake up Sam! Damnit!”
Someone’s hand lands on his shoulder and squeezes. Dean’s vision takes on blurred tones, and he realizes he probably has a concussion or something from his trip across the room. He tries to look behind him and hold Sammy close to him at the same time, but his arms are going numb, and he feels like every bit of strength in him is draining out into the floor.
He can’t remember letting the old woman take Sam from him, but he spends the next indistinguishable hours of his life trying to keep himself awake, crouched in a chair beside the bed Sam is in, wondering how in the hell all of this went so wrong.
--
Sam doesn’t wake up. He doesn’t move, he doesn’t make any sounds, and Dean is hard pressed to keep himself from checking if the kid is even fucking breathing every three minutes.
He isn’t sure exactly which part of the house they’re in right now. There’s a bathroom connected to their room, and that’s about as far as he’s gotten in the past days, however many of them there have been.
He’s so far lost on time that he isn’t sure if he’s been here for three days or a week and a half. He knows the sun has come and gone several times, but there’s no clock in this room and he doesn’t ask.
One night a cot shows up on the other side of the room, and Dean’s not even sure when they brought it in, but he never makes use of it. The chair is closer.
They bring him food. It takes him a couple of nights there to figure out that these people probably aren’t going to kill him, so he starts eating after that sweet little revelation.
They bring spicy foods that make his nose buzz and his eyes water, that make him sweat and dream of the desert. And they feed Sam thin broths, propping his head up and waiting until he takes some of it down. Dean stands beside the bed the whole time, feeling numb with uselessness, and finally one day he asks if he can be the one to feed Sam. He doesn’t know why he feels like he needs to ask, but from then on whenever they bring him food, Sam’s broth is an extra cup on the side of his tray.
Mostly it’s the old woman that comes into the room. She stares hard at him and his brother for a minute and crosses them both and herself before she leaves the room, and sometimes she mutters something in a different language that Dean never quite catches the whole of. There’s Spanish, mostly, and some Latin that sounds vaguely familiar, but he never puts much effort into deciphering her broken prayers.
But once it’s the girl that brings him the food. Dean is drifting over into the edge of sleep, losing his white knuckled grip on consciousness, his eyes falling shut on the scene of Sam’s stillness. When he hears the door open, he jerks awake and has his hand on his holster before his eyes are all the way open.
The girl- he never learned her name- is standing in the doorway holding a tray of food for him. And she looks terrified. Dean stares at her for a minute, waiting for her to decide he’s not a monster, wondering why she looks like she’s about to drop the tray and bolt, when he realizes ten seconds too late that he still has his hand on his very visible gun, and he probably looks like he’s about ready to do someone some damage.
He loosens his death grip on his Colt slowly and holds his hands up so she can see them, licking his dry lips so he can try to speak for the first time in days.
Her eyes are more golden than they are brown, and for some reason that really surprises him. It’s the first time he’s ever seen her when she’s not lying on a bed playing corpse, and he makes the connection that she was in Sam’s place just days ago. That whatever had her is what has Sam.
He clears his throat twice but his voice comes out like road rash anyway.
“Hey- it’s- it’s okay. I’m sorry about that- I’m just- a little jumpy.” He tries to smile but it feels more like his cheek is being cracked up the middle and it doesn’t seem to reassure her any, so he gives up on that right away.
He looks back at Sam once and lifts himself out of his chair, tries not to move too fast, cause she still looks like she’s about to bolt. Dean’s reminded a little of trying to keep a baby horse from panicking on him.
He wipes his suddenly sweaty palms on his jeans and takes the tray from her. That seems to wake her up a little and she fists and un-fists her hands at her sides several times, looking between him and his brother.
Dean sets the tray on the chair and turns back to her, catches her staring at his holster again.
“Look,” He says, “I’m not gonna hurt you, I swear. I just wanna find out if you know anything about what’s wrong with my brother. If- if you can help him at all.”
She stares at him for a minute, and finally her shoulders relax and her eyes move from his gun to his eyes. She bites her lip and her bare feet pad quietly over to Sam’s bed.
Dean watches with held breath as she stares at Sam for several minutes, and he can’t understand the tears that come suddenly and clump her eyelashes together and wet her cheeks. She brushes her hand over Sam’s brow and presses it to the length of Sam’s cheek. Dean is just about to say something when she steps back, looks over at him and shakes her head. He doesn’t know what the fuck that is supposed to mean and she runs out of the room while he is still trying to decide if she knows something.
Without thinking too much about it, Dean fists his hands in his hair and then sends the tray of food flying with one frustrated yell and a well-aimed fist. It hits the wall opposite Sam’s bed and ends up a scattered mess of broken white china and wet looking foods. He feels sorry for a minute, but he’s shaking too damned hard to make any move to clean it up and suddenly he’s barely got enough energy left in him to crawl into the bed beside Sam, and fist his hand in his brother’s shirt before he’s asleep.
--
July 3, 1869
My mother announced she was retiring today. It was in the middle of Congo Square, after she had danced. She called on the spirits one last time and then she told her followers that she was retiring. I am the next in line to be Vodou Queen. My mother thinks I will be great one day.
--
Dean dreams that he's swingin' at shadows, at the dark all around him, trying so damn hard to hit something that he nearly knocks himself on his ass.
--
Dean remembers when they were still kids- Sam was maybe twelve and Dean sixteen- and Dad had dropped them off at this abandoned house one of his contacts had told him about. He'd left them with forty bucks and their own duffel full of shotguns and salt to go hunt a swamp creature three counties over.
Dean- why can't we just have one home for a little while? Sam hadn't said it to be mean, and he knew why. He and Dean had talked about that plenty of times. And it always ended in a fight. Sam wanted out of this life. And Dean was angry at Sam for even thinking about leaving his family behind, for betraying them like that. It was never because he just wanted to keep hunting.
He loved hunting, sure he did. But if they were gonna get out of it, it had to be the three of them. Nothin' else. And Dean knew for a fact that Dad was never gonna give this up, obsessed as he was. So that left him in the middle, hoping maybe Sam would grow out of this hate for their life and would wanna stick around.
He wanted Sam to be happy. That was what he wanted out of his life. That had never changed. And Sam wanted a home. So Dean looked around at the pathetic excuse for a one story house and picked a project. He would fix the stairs leading up to the porch. They'd be here for a couple of weeks, probably, before Dad got back. So he could fix the porch, and maybe that spot in the roof that needed patching.
Didn't matter if they would have to leave it behind later. While they were there, they could at least pretend for a while that it was their home.
--
It’s got to be about the second week he’s been there by the time slipping in and out of sleep isn’t enough to keep him occupied or deliriously unaware of the passing of time. The second week of Sam lying there, comatose, of this family taking care of him because he doesn’t know where else to go or what to do and he’s so damn sure that girl knows something that he’s afraid to leave, Dean decides he needs something a little stronger to keep himself from going postal-status ape shit on whatever’s in front of him.
He remembers maybe seeing a bar about two blocks down from the house and he passes by the old man sitting at the kitchen table on his way out the door. Milky eyes find Dean’s without so much as blinking and the old man raises his glass, nods once. Dean stares for a minute and feels the guilty burn of bile at the back of his throat.
He closes the door quietly on his way out.
--
He’s not strong enough to endure this. To hold himself or anyone else together. There is not enough in him to keep his family alive and together, and as far as he knows there never has been.
So he orders a scotch and tries to make himself invisible in a dark shadowy corner of the bar.
--
Dean’s always had a soft spot for bar fights. Something about them, about the stick of the counter on his fingertips as he curls them into fists, about the magnetic pull of Sam at his back, too many guys on either side of them. It’s classic, and it feels good, like this is something he can win, like there won’t be a single complication in the connection of fist to jaw, in the crack, the way his teeth jargrindgrit together, or in the journey to the floor and back up on his feet again. The way the blood tastes in his mouth, the way his feet slide against the floor, steady and solid until he gets a good one right in the kisser and his whole world’s knocked sideways for seconds. It's all the same moves, every time, 1 step, 2. He knows what to expect, and it doesn't really matter if he wins or not, cause it feels good, the pattern.
He loves the feeling of before, the way he can feel everything in him pulled taut, ready to spring and break, the tension of the bar- without any pretense that maybe this could be resolved with words because nobody comes to this kind of a bar to talk anything out. They come in here to break something, to break themselves into pieces and take somebody else out with them. Because it’s so much easier to put something back together when you can see all of the pieces laid out on the floor, instead of searching for the cracks of it while it’s still together.
So most of the time there’s this quiet right before, this sizing up of what’s on its way the way only men with violence on the mind can. And then everything erupts into the disjointed sounds of shattered glass and scattered yells and the jukebox playing on in the background.
But this time he doesn’t have Sam at his back and there’s no feeling of bright and pure pleasure at the thought of taking this asshole in front of him down. There’s no thrill that he’s about to go to blows with someone twice his size, no excitement for the challenge. This time all he really wants to do is see blood and hear someone hurt.
--
The bar is this gritty, dark hole in the wall with red and white and green flags painted on the walls and Christmas lights strung up in the window. There’s seven other guys and two women all parked in there, each nursing their own brand of poison. Dean knows he’s the only person in this bar that doesn’t know everyone else by their first name, and he gets the stare a stranger deserves when he walks in.
The bartender winks at him and serves him his drink on the house, and he sits there for an hour and a half trying to get drunk and realizing that his alcohol tolerance is probably at an unhealthy high for being twenty seven years old.
She is some curvy woman in her early twenties with this wild dark hair and these full lips and legs about a mile long. She moves like she can dance, and Dean thinks about how long it would take him to get her out from behind that bar and into the back and have her skirt up around her hips, her head hung back and her throat exposed long and open for him. He considers it for a minute, but he can’t make himself interested.
But that don’t stop him from enjoyin’ the view. So yeah, maybe he stares a little, but it ain’t like she ain’t lookin’ back. Of course, small town like this, that’s enough to make him fair game, and he could keep his head down, but he ain’t exactly trying to avoid trouble at this point.
Two huge guys come out from the back at the perfect time and both of them glare at him, catch his eyes on the girl. “Hey little sister, is this bastard bothering you?”
“Now you boys leave him alone. He didn’t do nothin’ and he’s the one helped out little Evangeline down the way.”
Dean’s stool scrapes the floor as he pushes it back, ignoring the girl, and he sets his drink on the bar. C’mon, you assholes. The words are on the tip of his tongue, but he knows these boys don’t need another push, because the taste of violence about to happen is intoxicating him, heavy in the air, and Dean knows right then that he didn’t come down here to get drunk off of booze.
He doesn’t really remember what happens from that point on to when he’s on his back minutes later. He’s guessing the guys who seemed like the girl’s brothers at the time didn’t listen to whatever she was tellin’ them, and he knows he took down at least three other guys before one got a hit on him.
But that sure as hell doesn’t seem to matter right now, cause he’s got all kinds of blood in his mouth, his teeth are rattling in his gums and feeling a little loose, and the whole damn world is wavering every which way every time he tries to move. His ears are ringing and he’s pretty sure he’s just landed on his back cause his vision is coming back in white spots and his lungs hurt like he’s got the air knocked out of him, and he’s pretty sure he has because right now, breathing is an issue too.
He sucks in breath and tries to lift his head to see the damage done, but he can’t bring himself to get that far, so instead he just lets his head thunk back down to the ground as he waits for his world to steady.
He starts to hear people around him in waves of sound, tunneled, and the first one he recognizes is the bartender, can tell from the smell of her and the thick rivulets of her hair brushing his cheek as she bends over him. He feels soft hands on his jaw, his neck, and he can hear her yelling at someone, but he can’t understand any of it.
--
He wakes up back at the house where Sam is. The sun is streaming in through the curtains, too damn bright, and his eyes crack with sleep sand as he tries to open them.
First he tries to sit up. And that’s a load of bullshit idea because, oh yeah, those are some very bruised ribs right there. Then he tries to talk, and the only thing that comes out is this garbled groan that sets his throat on fire. He can tell now that both his right eye and jaw are swollen, and that his lip is busted at least twice. He’s probably been out a couple of days.
He turns his head and can see Sam’s bed near enough to his own, can see the rise of Sam’s shoulder and the rest of his arm, just barely on the bed.
After that, he has no other reason to stay awake.
The old man lets them in without even asking what they want, but Sam notices the shot gun set by the corner of the doorway. The old woman is sitting in the same chair as yesterday, and she stares at them with sharp eyes when they come in. Both Sam and Dean feel huge in the small room, awkward. Sam looks at Dean and then to the woman, making a move to shake her hand. She doesn't reciprocate. So instead Sam wipes his clammy hands on his jeans and gestures for Dean to get out the holy water.
"We, uh..." Sam looks back at the man who is standing in the doorway. "We're going to try and exorcise her." But again neither of them say anything, so Sam opens the bible.
--
“DEUS, cui próprium est miseréri semper et párcere: súscipe deprecatiónem nostram; ut hunc fámulum tuum, quem (hanc fámulam tuam, quam) delictórum caténa constríngit, miserátio tuæ pietátis cleménter absólvat.
DÓMINE sancte, Pater omnípotens, ætérne Deus, Pater Dómini nostri Jesu Christi, qui illum réfugam tyránnum et apóstatam gehénnae ígnibus deputásti, quique Unigénitum tuum in hunc mundum misísti, ut illum rugiéntem contéret: velóciter atténdem accélera, ut erípias hóminem ad imáginem et similitúdinem tuam creátum, a ruína et dæmónio meridiáno. Da, Dómine, terrórem tuum super béstiam-“
--
The first thing Dean sees happen is the girl bows off the bed, her body arching to an obscene angle, and she makes this sound, like every bit of breath in her is being sucked out real fast, and real hard. Then, something hits him hard in the chest, he feels like he’s making friendly with an explosion, and he opens his eyes just in time to see Sam fly across the room with him. They hit opposite walls, and Dean goes through a table before he gets there. Both the man and the woman seem fine, are still standing. They are both staring at the girl who is suddenly sitting up in her bed.
Someone yells- Dean’s head is still ringing from the blast of whatever-the-hell and he’s pretty sure he didn’t make it through that flight without some kind of an injury. He tries to stand and stumbles, Sam’s name falling thick and slow and automatic from his lips, his eyes searching for his brother.
His eyes meet Sam's, silent assessment tells him Sam isn’t too injured and that everything is fine for the most part. And then Sam goes down, his widening eyes on Dean’s until they roll back in his head, and Dean doesn’t know what the hell he’s supposed to do just then, so he falls back on instinct and his whole world shrinks to the size of his brother.
In less than a second flat Dean’s got his gun out and he’s ready to take down every motherfucker in this room, sure that someone has just cast on his brother and that this whole thing was just a trap from the beginning or some ridiculous shit, but damn if he knows what he’s supposed to be shooting at.
Everyone else looks about at helpless as he feels, and they’re mostly too preoccupied with the fact that their girl is making sounds and breathing and blinking again to notice that Sam is on his knees, his eyes falling shut and he’s taking a nosedive. It’s the second time this week Dean catches Sam just a little too late, but this time it’s not the corner of a diner table or even a vision that puts his brother on his knees. Sam is unconscious and he’s fever hot, and his body jerks in Dean’s arms, but Dean doesn’t know what the hell did this to him, so he has nothing to take down, nothing to fight, and he feels so goddamn useless.
He shakes Sam once, slaps messily at his face a couple of times, and he knows he’s yelling at the boy to wake up and that his back is wide open for whatever these people have in store for him, but he can’t help any of that right now.
“Sam! C’mon, Sammy, don’t do this to me right now. Wake up Sam! Damnit!”
Someone’s hand lands on his shoulder and squeezes. Dean’s vision takes on blurred tones, and he realizes he probably has a concussion or something from his trip across the room. He tries to look behind him and hold Sammy close to him at the same time, but his arms are going numb, and he feels like every bit of strength in him is draining out into the floor.
He can’t remember letting the old woman take Sam from him, but he spends the next indistinguishable hours of his life trying to keep himself awake, crouched in a chair beside the bed Sam is in, wondering how in the hell all of this went so wrong.
--
Sam doesn’t wake up. He doesn’t move, he doesn’t make any sounds, and Dean is hard pressed to keep himself from checking if the kid is even fucking breathing every three minutes.
He isn’t sure exactly which part of the house they’re in right now. There’s a bathroom connected to their room, and that’s about as far as he’s gotten in the past days, however many of them there have been.
He’s so far lost on time that he isn’t sure if he’s been here for three days or a week and a half. He knows the sun has come and gone several times, but there’s no clock in this room and he doesn’t ask.
One night a cot shows up on the other side of the room, and Dean’s not even sure when they brought it in, but he never makes use of it. The chair is closer.
They bring him food. It takes him a couple of nights there to figure out that these people probably aren’t going to kill him, so he starts eating after that sweet little revelation.
They bring spicy foods that make his nose buzz and his eyes water, that make him sweat and dream of the desert. And they feed Sam thin broths, propping his head up and waiting until he takes some of it down. Dean stands beside the bed the whole time, feeling numb with uselessness, and finally one day he asks if he can be the one to feed Sam. He doesn’t know why he feels like he needs to ask, but from then on whenever they bring him food, Sam’s broth is an extra cup on the side of his tray.
Mostly it’s the old woman that comes into the room. She stares hard at him and his brother for a minute and crosses them both and herself before she leaves the room, and sometimes she mutters something in a different language that Dean never quite catches the whole of. There’s Spanish, mostly, and some Latin that sounds vaguely familiar, but he never puts much effort into deciphering her broken prayers.
But once it’s the girl that brings him the food. Dean is drifting over into the edge of sleep, losing his white knuckled grip on consciousness, his eyes falling shut on the scene of Sam’s stillness. When he hears the door open, he jerks awake and has his hand on his holster before his eyes are all the way open.
The girl- he never learned her name- is standing in the doorway holding a tray of food for him. And she looks terrified. Dean stares at her for a minute, waiting for her to decide he’s not a monster, wondering why she looks like she’s about to drop the tray and bolt, when he realizes ten seconds too late that he still has his hand on his very visible gun, and he probably looks like he’s about ready to do someone some damage.
He loosens his death grip on his Colt slowly and holds his hands up so she can see them, licking his dry lips so he can try to speak for the first time in days.
Her eyes are more golden than they are brown, and for some reason that really surprises him. It’s the first time he’s ever seen her when she’s not lying on a bed playing corpse, and he makes the connection that she was in Sam’s place just days ago. That whatever had her is what has Sam.
He clears his throat twice but his voice comes out like road rash anyway.
“Hey- it’s- it’s okay. I’m sorry about that- I’m just- a little jumpy.” He tries to smile but it feels more like his cheek is being cracked up the middle and it doesn’t seem to reassure her any, so he gives up on that right away.
He looks back at Sam once and lifts himself out of his chair, tries not to move too fast, cause she still looks like she’s about to bolt. Dean’s reminded a little of trying to keep a baby horse from panicking on him.
He wipes his suddenly sweaty palms on his jeans and takes the tray from her. That seems to wake her up a little and she fists and un-fists her hands at her sides several times, looking between him and his brother.
Dean sets the tray on the chair and turns back to her, catches her staring at his holster again.
“Look,” He says, “I’m not gonna hurt you, I swear. I just wanna find out if you know anything about what’s wrong with my brother. If- if you can help him at all.”
She stares at him for a minute, and finally her shoulders relax and her eyes move from his gun to his eyes. She bites her lip and her bare feet pad quietly over to Sam’s bed.
Dean watches with held breath as she stares at Sam for several minutes, and he can’t understand the tears that come suddenly and clump her eyelashes together and wet her cheeks. She brushes her hand over Sam’s brow and presses it to the length of Sam’s cheek. Dean is just about to say something when she steps back, looks over at him and shakes her head. He doesn’t know what the fuck that is supposed to mean and she runs out of the room while he is still trying to decide if she knows something.
Without thinking too much about it, Dean fists his hands in his hair and then sends the tray of food flying with one frustrated yell and a well-aimed fist. It hits the wall opposite Sam’s bed and ends up a scattered mess of broken white china and wet looking foods. He feels sorry for a minute, but he’s shaking too damned hard to make any move to clean it up and suddenly he’s barely got enough energy left in him to crawl into the bed beside Sam, and fist his hand in his brother’s shirt before he’s asleep.
--
July 3, 1869
My mother announced she was retiring today. It was in the middle of Congo Square, after she had danced. She called on the spirits one last time and then she told her followers that she was retiring. I am the next in line to be Vodou Queen. My mother thinks I will be great one day.
--
Dean dreams that he's swingin' at shadows, at the dark all around him, trying so damn hard to hit something that he nearly knocks himself on his ass.
--
Dean remembers when they were still kids- Sam was maybe twelve and Dean sixteen- and Dad had dropped them off at this abandoned house one of his contacts had told him about. He'd left them with forty bucks and their own duffel full of shotguns and salt to go hunt a swamp creature three counties over.
Dean- why can't we just have one home for a little while? Sam hadn't said it to be mean, and he knew why. He and Dean had talked about that plenty of times. And it always ended in a fight. Sam wanted out of this life. And Dean was angry at Sam for even thinking about leaving his family behind, for betraying them like that. It was never because he just wanted to keep hunting.
He loved hunting, sure he did. But if they were gonna get out of it, it had to be the three of them. Nothin' else. And Dean knew for a fact that Dad was never gonna give this up, obsessed as he was. So that left him in the middle, hoping maybe Sam would grow out of this hate for their life and would wanna stick around.
He wanted Sam to be happy. That was what he wanted out of his life. That had never changed. And Sam wanted a home. So Dean looked around at the pathetic excuse for a one story house and picked a project. He would fix the stairs leading up to the porch. They'd be here for a couple of weeks, probably, before Dad got back. So he could fix the porch, and maybe that spot in the roof that needed patching.
Didn't matter if they would have to leave it behind later. While they were there, they could at least pretend for a while that it was their home.
--
It’s got to be about the second week he’s been there by the time slipping in and out of sleep isn’t enough to keep him occupied or deliriously unaware of the passing of time. The second week of Sam lying there, comatose, of this family taking care of him because he doesn’t know where else to go or what to do and he’s so damn sure that girl knows something that he’s afraid to leave, Dean decides he needs something a little stronger to keep himself from going postal-status ape shit on whatever’s in front of him.
He remembers maybe seeing a bar about two blocks down from the house and he passes by the old man sitting at the kitchen table on his way out the door. Milky eyes find Dean’s without so much as blinking and the old man raises his glass, nods once. Dean stares for a minute and feels the guilty burn of bile at the back of his throat.
He closes the door quietly on his way out.
--
He’s not strong enough to endure this. To hold himself or anyone else together. There is not enough in him to keep his family alive and together, and as far as he knows there never has been.
So he orders a scotch and tries to make himself invisible in a dark shadowy corner of the bar.
--
Dean’s always had a soft spot for bar fights. Something about them, about the stick of the counter on his fingertips as he curls them into fists, about the magnetic pull of Sam at his back, too many guys on either side of them. It’s classic, and it feels good, like this is something he can win, like there won’t be a single complication in the connection of fist to jaw, in the crack, the way his teeth jargrindgrit together, or in the journey to the floor and back up on his feet again. The way the blood tastes in his mouth, the way his feet slide against the floor, steady and solid until he gets a good one right in the kisser and his whole world’s knocked sideways for seconds. It's all the same moves, every time, 1 step, 2. He knows what to expect, and it doesn't really matter if he wins or not, cause it feels good, the pattern.
He loves the feeling of before, the way he can feel everything in him pulled taut, ready to spring and break, the tension of the bar- without any pretense that maybe this could be resolved with words because nobody comes to this kind of a bar to talk anything out. They come in here to break something, to break themselves into pieces and take somebody else out with them. Because it’s so much easier to put something back together when you can see all of the pieces laid out on the floor, instead of searching for the cracks of it while it’s still together.
So most of the time there’s this quiet right before, this sizing up of what’s on its way the way only men with violence on the mind can. And then everything erupts into the disjointed sounds of shattered glass and scattered yells and the jukebox playing on in the background.
But this time he doesn’t have Sam at his back and there’s no feeling of bright and pure pleasure at the thought of taking this asshole in front of him down. There’s no thrill that he’s about to go to blows with someone twice his size, no excitement for the challenge. This time all he really wants to do is see blood and hear someone hurt.
--
The bar is this gritty, dark hole in the wall with red and white and green flags painted on the walls and Christmas lights strung up in the window. There’s seven other guys and two women all parked in there, each nursing their own brand of poison. Dean knows he’s the only person in this bar that doesn’t know everyone else by their first name, and he gets the stare a stranger deserves when he walks in.
The bartender winks at him and serves him his drink on the house, and he sits there for an hour and a half trying to get drunk and realizing that his alcohol tolerance is probably at an unhealthy high for being twenty seven years old.
She is some curvy woman in her early twenties with this wild dark hair and these full lips and legs about a mile long. She moves like she can dance, and Dean thinks about how long it would take him to get her out from behind that bar and into the back and have her skirt up around her hips, her head hung back and her throat exposed long and open for him. He considers it for a minute, but he can’t make himself interested.
But that don’t stop him from enjoyin’ the view. So yeah, maybe he stares a little, but it ain’t like she ain’t lookin’ back. Of course, small town like this, that’s enough to make him fair game, and he could keep his head down, but he ain’t exactly trying to avoid trouble at this point.
Two huge guys come out from the back at the perfect time and both of them glare at him, catch his eyes on the girl. “Hey little sister, is this bastard bothering you?”
“Now you boys leave him alone. He didn’t do nothin’ and he’s the one helped out little Evangeline down the way.”
Dean’s stool scrapes the floor as he pushes it back, ignoring the girl, and he sets his drink on the bar. C’mon, you assholes. The words are on the tip of his tongue, but he knows these boys don’t need another push, because the taste of violence about to happen is intoxicating him, heavy in the air, and Dean knows right then that he didn’t come down here to get drunk off of booze.
He doesn’t really remember what happens from that point on to when he’s on his back minutes later. He’s guessing the guys who seemed like the girl’s brothers at the time didn’t listen to whatever she was tellin’ them, and he knows he took down at least three other guys before one got a hit on him.
But that sure as hell doesn’t seem to matter right now, cause he’s got all kinds of blood in his mouth, his teeth are rattling in his gums and feeling a little loose, and the whole damn world is wavering every which way every time he tries to move. His ears are ringing and he’s pretty sure he’s just landed on his back cause his vision is coming back in white spots and his lungs hurt like he’s got the air knocked out of him, and he’s pretty sure he has because right now, breathing is an issue too.
He sucks in breath and tries to lift his head to see the damage done, but he can’t bring himself to get that far, so instead he just lets his head thunk back down to the ground as he waits for his world to steady.
He starts to hear people around him in waves of sound, tunneled, and the first one he recognizes is the bartender, can tell from the smell of her and the thick rivulets of her hair brushing his cheek as she bends over him. He feels soft hands on his jaw, his neck, and he can hear her yelling at someone, but he can’t understand any of it.
--
He wakes up back at the house where Sam is. The sun is streaming in through the curtains, too damn bright, and his eyes crack with sleep sand as he tries to open them.
First he tries to sit up. And that’s a load of bullshit idea because, oh yeah, those are some very bruised ribs right there. Then he tries to talk, and the only thing that comes out is this garbled groan that sets his throat on fire. He can tell now that both his right eye and jaw are swollen, and that his lip is busted at least twice. He’s probably been out a couple of days.
He turns his head and can see Sam’s bed near enough to his own, can see the rise of Sam’s shoulder and the rest of his arm, just barely on the bed.
After that, he has no other reason to stay awake.