Dead Gods: Prologue
Warning: Brief suicide ideation and a failed suicide attempt in this chapter.
Dean is three weeks into life post-Sam when he finally manages to get the gun into his mouth.
He hasn’t been sober since he showed up on Lisa’s doorstep, getting all up and cozy with Jack, Jim, and Jose, John Winchester style, as soon as he parked the Impala in her driveway. Half a week in, he finds a full bottle of Xanax in the Impala’s first aid kit; it is over a year expired, and he doesn’t know where it came from, but the pills work just fine when he washes down three a day with a fifth of whiskey. It makes him sleep more than he wants to, keeps him deep down unconscious where he dreams of fire and blood and Sammy, falling. But it also keeps him calm and easy around Lisa and Ben when he does manage to wake up, keeps the panic of life without Sam from rising to the surface, keeps him from succumbing to the need to scream until his throat is raw and bleeding.
Because it isn’t that Sam is dead. Dead would be better, dead would be preferable. Dead would mean Dean would see Sam again one day up in the attic, their go-straight-to-heaven-do-not-pass-go card having no expiration date, and all. Dead would mean he could mourn and grieve and then move on, have an apple pie life or not, hunt or not, wouldn’t matter because he’d see Sam again. But no, Sam is trapped with two pissed off archangels and a half brother they failed to save twice, locked up in a cage designed to hold the devil himself. He is probably suffering right now, if not on the rack, then in a lake of fire or in suffocating darkness or in some kind of horrific agony Dean can’t imagine, suffering and screaming for eternity in a place Dean will never be able to reach.
And here Dean is alive, breathing, with a soft pillow under his head and a woman who is letting him stumble around her life, not complaining about all of the emotional baggage he’s dragging along with him, only asking that he not drink in front of Ben. He gets to eat and sleep and not suffer in a world without Sam, a world that just rolls on being fucked up and miserable, unaware of what was sacrificed so it could live.
The horror of it all hangs on him in a thick, miasmic cloud, haunting him awake and asleep. He does his best to bury it when he’s around Lisa or Ben, even though he sees what he must look like reflected in their eyes. He tries to stay out of their way as much as possible, though they always seem to be right there, being gentle and pleasant and normal, an ever present reminder of the promise he had made to Sam. Why would Sam make him do this to them? What can Dean even bring to their lives other than danger and misery?
And then one night he struggles awake from yet another dream of watching Sam topple into the black abyss of the Pit, and he’s done, no more, can’t take another minute of it.
To Hell with his promise.
He stumbles downstairs, across the back yard and into the garage where the car has been sitting idle for three weeks, a hollow shell of memories that Dean can’t even look at.
The garage is dark except for the spill of streetlight through the open side door. It gives him just enough light to find the Impala, to get the door open. He climbs into the front seat, into the cocoon of leather and home and Sam. The 1911 is in the glove compartment where he had left it. He sits on the passenger side where Sam used to ride, pressed into the corner where the seat meets the door, and goes calm and still, relieved to see the end in sight.
The gun is loaded and familiar in his hand. A tiny sliver of orange street light gleams on the barrel, and he sits there for the longest time, forever maybe, staring at that little gleam of light, just sort of existing, empty and comfortable with the idea of ending it all, promises be damned.
Time passes; birds start singing, the street light goes off, and gentle gray morning light spills though the side door in its place. Dean leans his head against the window and listens to the neighborhood come alive with the sounds of dogs barking and car doors slamming and the neighbors next door screaming at each other across their house. The front door of Lisa’s house slams, the engine of her CRV turns over; he listens as she backs it out of the driveway, her brakes screeching a little. Dean wishes he could feel bad that he will never get to fix them for her.
And it’s like that’s what he’s been waiting for, for them to leave so they won’t hear the gunshot. He feels nothing but peace as he raises the gun and gets the barrel between his teeth, presses it hard against the roof of his mouth. It’s cold and metallic and oily against the flat of his tongue, and if he can just squeeze the trigger, it can be over, he can stop being alive.
Seconds pass, then minutes. Saliva pools under his tongue. Tears well out of the corners of his eyes, slide down his cheeks. His arm gets heavy, begins to shake; the gun becomes a lead weight in his hand.
He doesn’t squeeze the trigger.
Something rises inside of him, survival instinct maybe, or guilt - no, panic, a blare of emotional static. It rips through him in a wave, surges up and out, and Dean is suddenly dropping the gun. It clatters into the floorboard as he scrambles sideways, nearly wrenching the door handle off in his attempt to get out of the car.
He spills out head first, tumbling onto the hard concrete of the garage floor, scraping up his palms like he's seven years old and falling off his bike. The garage is spinning around him, his stomach is twisting and churning, acid burns at the back of his throat. Dean slumps back against the back door, solid against his back, legs akimbo, clutching his head in hands. His heart is racing, his breathing coming in panicked little pants. This is awful; this is Hell. This is a thousand times worse than the rack, even worse than getting off of the rack and picking up the knife, and he can’t even find a way to make it end.
He can’t break his promise to Sam.
“Dean?”
Dean snaps his head up.
Ben is standing in the open doorway, backpack over one shoulder, thumb tucked under the strap. He’s blurry, one Ben doubling over the other, but Dean can still see how wide his eyes are, how round and shocked.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” His words slur badly; he sounds as drunk and strung out on Xanax as he actually is, and his mouth tastes like gun metal.
“Mom said I could take the bus today.” He takes a step further into the garage, and the focus of Dean’s panic shifts, because, God, no, Ben can’t see him like this. “Are you okay?”
Dean shakes his head, holds one hand out defensively. “Don’t, Ben. Stay there.”
The double image of Ben moves in closer, his black Chucks scraping on the concrete. “You should get up.”
Dean shakes his head. “No, Ben-“
“Yes. You’re going to freak Mom out, and she might make you leave,” Ben says, like it’s the worst thing he can possibly imagine. “Get up. Please.”
“Ben,” Dean says, dropping his head back against the door of the Impala and closing his eyes. He feels like he is going to spin right off the earth. “You don’t understand.”
“Grown-ups always say that like it makes what they’re doing okay when it’s not.” His voice is trembling, like he’s holding back tears. “This is wrong, and you know it. I don’t know why it is, but you do, so get up and stop being a little bitch.”
The profanity is like ice water across Dean’s face. He looks up at Ben, standing not two feet away, fists clenched at his side in anger, tears pooling in his eyes.
Dean swallows around a lump in his throat, shame sinking into every cell of his body and expanding; it seems like there is more of it in his veins than blood. He nods again, helpless to do anything other than what Ben says.
“Yeah. Okay.”
Dean gets his feet under him, tries to push up, but he stumbles sideways and ends up back on his ass.
“Shit,” he mutters. The garage is whirling around him now, around and around and around, and his gorge is rising, and Jesus, he’s already embarrassed to high heaven, and the last thing he needs is to do is vomit up the last twelve hours of alcohol churning in his stomach in front of the kid.
“Here,” Ben says, and puts his hand on Dean’s arm to help him up.
The vertigo, the nausea, they roll back like the ocean receding from the shore. His double vision snaps back unto one clean line, and calm rolls over him, smothering him. It’s like being under water, body moving slowly along some unseen current, all quiet and peaceful and pliable.
This time Dean does get to his feet, a hand on Ben’s shoulder to stabilize himself. Ben’s eyes are huge, his eyelashes wet as he looks up at Dean with concern. With fear.
Dean hadn’t thought he could feel any worse. He was wrong.
“I’m okay, Ben.” He runs his hand over Ben’s hair, a reflexive act of comfort he used to give Sam when he was little. “I’m okay.”
He starts moving, determined to stay upright in front of Ben; he can’t let Ben see this get any worse. He’s a little wobbly and the world spins around him, but he manages to keep himself upright all the way back into the house. Ben is on his heels the whole time, as if there’s anything he can do for Dean if he falls on his ass again, and hovers in the guestroom doorway while Dean climbs into bed, dirty jeans and scraped palms and all.
Dean throws his arm over his face, the whiskey and Xanax and exhaustion of grief making his body heavy, trying to tug him down into sleep. “Go to school, Ben. I’ll be okay.”
Ben doesn’t reply, doesn’t move; Dean can almost feel the weight of his gaze all but boring into his soul.
Dean lifts his arm; Ben is still hovering in the doorway. “Ben, go.”
Ben nods, dropping his eyes and hunching his shoulder. “Okay,” Ben says, and Dean hears his footsteps retreat down the hall.
He can’t keep his eyes open after that, asleep before he hears the front door close. He dreams, of course, he always dreams, dreams of standing in the rose garden with Sam’s body in that skeezy white suit and Lucifer looking out of his eyes, telling him, no, bragging that Sam says yes in Detroit-
“It’s okay. It’s okay. I promise, it’s okay,” someone says from a blooming rose bush to his left, and Lucifer-wearing-Sam dissolves into darkness.
Dean surfaces long enough to roll onto his side, brushing away the hand on his arm, and then he’s dreaming again, this time of fire and the fetid heat of Hell, of the winged things screaming out their joy above him, of the smell of brimstone and misery and blood. He dreams of Sam on the rack and his own hand carving into his flesh, slicing and cutting, dragging out the agony, his screams-
“Wake up,” someone is saying from behind the wall of blades and hooks and branding irons. “You’re dreaming. Come on, Dean, please. Just wake up.”
Dean doesn’t surface again, but there is blackness for a while before he dreams about Stull Cemetery again, and the glare of the afternoon sun and the biting agony of Sam’s fist on his face and Baby at his back, of watching Bobby die and Castiel implode, and worse, Sam saying I got him, and-
He jerks awake, drenched in sweat and breathing hard. Warm yellow sunlight is spilling through the slats of the blinds. His mouth is dry and sour, his head is pounding mercilessly. The chirping of birds outside and the low level hum of the refrigerator downstairs are white noise in the silence of the house.
Dean rolls over, onto his back and stares at the ceiling. The ceiling fan is spinning lazily above him, ghosting cool air over his damp skin, and the familiar sound of another person’s breathing is soothing -
He sits up, the knife under his pillow already in his hand, ready to defend himself even though he’s not sure he wants to be alive, and looks down, towards the end of the bed to see a dark head bent over a Gameboy.
Dean’s panic recedes, and he slips the knife back under the pillow. It’s Ben, sitting on the floor near the foot of the bed, playing video games on silent and decidedly not in school.
Dean glances at the clock on the nightstand. It’s quarter after one.
"Damn it, Ben. You didn't go to school."
Ben ducks his head down in an action that will soon become very familiar to Dean, one of Ben’s tells when he has done something he knows he shouldn’t have. "I was afraid to leave you alone. You kept making noises in your sleep every time I tried to leave."
Dean can't think of anything to say to that, because the humiliation of knowing a ten year old kid has been babysitting him all day is a kick in the gut.
And then Ben looks up at him, and his eyes are hazel green and he's got a smattering of freckles across his nose and he’s wearing that same mulish expression John used to wear when no meant no and there was no amount of arguing or whining that he and Sam could do to change that. "I'll tell mom myself when she gets home.”
Dean forgets to breathe for a moment as he stares at Ben. He thought that Sam had made him promise to live the apple pie life with Lisa and Ben because that’s what Sam had wanted, that’s what he had equated to happiness, but now, sitting here with a spitting image of himself at the foot of his bed, daring him to tell him he had done something wrong, he realizes that Sam had seen what Dean is seeing. This kid is his kid, he knows it in his gut, his, and when Sam had made him promise to come here, Sam had known it, too.
Dean is stunned and he's horrified and deep down fucking ashamed because Sam had sent him to live with his son, and he had nearly put a bullet in his brain at the exact time that Ben was passing the garage on the way to the bus.
So this is rock bottom. He thought he had seen rock bottom before, back when he had almost said yes to Michael, but no, this is what it really is, having so little will to live that he would risk letting his own kid find him with his brains splattered all over the car.
Dean sits up, swings his legs over the edge of the bed, rubs his eyes. His head throbs in protest, but he ignores it; a hangover is hardly enough penance for his near suicide.
“Yeah, well, I guess you better enjoy what’s left of your freedom then.” Dean pauses, considers. “She grounds you, right?”
Ben eyes him a minute, like Dean has grown two heads. “Yeah. What else would she do?”
Dad used to make him and Sam do pushups or clean all the guns for a month straight, but clearly grounding seems to be the effective punishment in these parts if Ben can’t seem to imagine any other kind.
Dean shrugs. “Dunno man.”
“She’ll probably take away my Gameboy.” Ben sighs forlornly. “And TV, too. She’s going to be so mad.”
And Lisa isn’t just mad, Lisa is furious. She takes away the Gameboy and the TV as predicted, and sends Ben up to his room until dinner. Then she turns on Dean, arms crossed, a set expression on her face, and Dean knows that she’s ready to throw him out.
“Dean, I can’t let you-“
“I know,” he says, cutting her off. “I’ll go. But-“
He takes the bottle of Xanax from the pocket of his flannel. She looks from him to the pills and back again, her expression sliding from angry to confused to scared.
“Please take them, Lis. I don’t know what else to do.”
Her hand comes up slowly, like she’s afraid Dean might snatch his hand back. She wraps her fingers around the bottle and takes the bottle from him, the tips of her fingers grazing his.
She reads the label, and her eyes go wide. “Xanax, Dean? With the amount you’ve been drinking-“
He hunches his shoulders and hangs his head, doing a fair impression of Ben. “Yeah. I know.”
He expects her to yell at him, to have a go at him for drug abuse or the example he’s setting for Ben or something, but all she does is stare at him for a long time before she says, “What else do you have?”
She goes with him to the garage where he digs out the first aid kit out of the trunk and hands over all the meds he has - generic Vicodin, Lortab, a couple of amoxycilin rattling around in a Percocet bottle, even the ibuprofen. Then he sits at the kitchen table, the heels of his palms pressed into his eyes while she dumps anything that needs a doctor’s prescription down the garbage disposal and runs it for a solid five minutes.
When Ben is allowed back downstairs for dinner, he takes one look at Dean’s hangdog expression and asks, “Did you get grounded, too?”
“Yes,” Lisa says in a stern mom voice, setting a bowl of mashed potatoes between them. “Now eat. Both of you.”
Ben just shrugs and starts eating, taking it all - the grounding, Lisa’s anger, Dean’s mortifying breakdown in the garage - like a man, which is what Dean should have been doing all along instead of trying to eat his gun. Right then and there he decides he’s going to do what Sam sent him there to do and takes the first bite of real food he has had in days while sitting across the table from his son.
But to Dean’s great shame, hitting rock bottom isn’t enough to stop him from drinking, and it comes nowhere near to healing the Sam-shaped hole in his heart, but it’s enough to get him kicking towards the surface. He cuts back on the hard liquor, avoids anything stronger than ibuprofen, and gets his shit together enough to get a job. He fixes Lisa’s brakes and takes out the trash, teaches Ben about carburetors and socket wrenches, and eventually kisses Lisa in the laundry room one night, crowding her up against the washing machine during the spin cycle. He lets himself integrate into their life even as he starts hunting down demonology books, determined to find a way to save Sam between baseball games and the occasional night out with their neighbor, Sid. Every now and then, he even feels a pale shadow of what someone might call happiness if it weren’t sitting right next to the dark, black pit where Sam used to be.
Sometimes, though, when Ben is doing his homework or helping Dean fix up the old truck he bought because driving the Impala hurts too much or is just sitting there playing on his Gameboy, he wonders why, if Ben is his son, Zachariah went through all the trouble of resurrecting Adam. He could have come at Ben, could have given Lisa cancer or removed her lungs and forced a terrified ten-year-old to say yes, but he hadn’t. It bothers him for a moment, makes him wonder, but then Ben looks up at him and grins or scowls or asks him if everything is okay, and Dean shrugs it off, lets it go, because Ben has dodged an angel shaped bullet, and he shouldn’t be looking the gift horse in the mouth.
It’s only later that Dean learns that he should have pried open the horse’s mouth and counted every damned tooth.
Next: Dead Gods: One
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