Fireworks
Many, many thanks to all the wonderful people that reviewed the other half of this coda. As I 'feared', I couldn't let this awesome episode pass by without giving Dean's side of the coin as well. Hope you like it. As always, awesome beta work by jackfan2 . All remaining mistakes are there because, as an endangered species, they should be protect ;o)
Fireworks
Dean closed the door of the motel room. He had the car keys in his hand, duffel pack on his shoulder. Every intention in the world of getting in the car and keep going as if nothing had happen.
As if he hadn't just said to Sam 'I give up'. As if God hadn't just told them to 'Fuck off!'
Instead, he finds himself walking down the road. It takes awhile for his mind to catch up on what his feet are doing. And when it does, he's not even aware where he is anymore.
Apparently, he hasn't been aware of much his whole damn life.
So much damn ugliness in the world, so many monsters and evil creatures preying on the innocent, attacking those who aren't even aware that monsters exist...
... that- that Dean has known his whole life. He knew that there were things that could get past dad and locked doors and pin mom to the ceiling and make her burn; he knew that there were things that got past him and sneak into his brother's room to drain the life out of him; he knew ghosts, werewolves, wendigos, shapeshifters, thought-forms, skinwalkers, zombies, witches, demons, angels-
He had fought so hard to keep evil and bad things outside that he had completely missed the bad things closer to him.
Dean's feet hit gravel and he stops only because of the sound shift. There is a lake in front of him, moonlight planting strings of silver across the still waters.
The end of the road.
These past years, especially since returning from Hell, Dean has felt that he had reached his end of the road too many times already. But it's always a trick of the light, an illusion. There is always one more sharp turn, one more stretch of road, one more dead end to meet.
Eventually, one stops believing in ever reaching the end of the road. Stops hoping that peace will ever come. There will never be any peace and rest for Dean Winchester. That part he had figured out fairly early on.
The rest... it's hard to be sure exactly where the line between being comprehensive and supportive ends and you begin being just plain dumb.
It took him a long time to realize that dad wasn't perfect. Especially when it was something that John had never tried to hide from him. In that, at least, he was honest. Dean just didn't want to see.
He had refused to remember all the nights that mom spent crying alone in the her room, dad either watching TV downstairs or not at home at all; he'd refused to remember the yelling and discussions that came right after being told that he was going to be a big brother...
Dean had refused to see that, after mom's death, while she ascended to an impossibly high pedestal in his father's memories, Dean took her place in dealing with the brunt of John's flaws. He'd taken dad's place too.
He was Sam's mom; he was Sam's dad. He was everything but his big brother.
And it showed in Sam's happy memories. It showed Dean exactly where he graded in terms of importance for his independent and rebellious brother.
Mom was right. Well, not her memory version that cut off the crusts off his PB and J and called him her little angel; the Zachariah version, the one trying to rip his heart out with her words. But no matter how much it'd hurt to hear her voice saying it, she had been right about one thing.
When everyone around you, when everyone you love, treats you like you're nothing but a piece of coal then there's probably something they're seeing that you can't. Maybe you should just let yourself burn.
For a long time, dad used to break things and get piss drunk when he looked at Dean. Just look. It didn't happen when Dean failed some target practice, or when he brought home some bad grade. Dean would just catch his dad staring at him with some distant and sad look in his eyes. Whenever Dean asked what was wrong, John would just storm out and never answer.
It took Dean a long time and finding a stack of mom's pictures to realize that what was setting John off was his hair. Whenever it grew past his ears, Dean's hair would become lighter and start to curl. Just like mom's.
It was the last time he went more than a month without a haircut.
The gravel feels softer than it should when Dean's legs fold on themselves and he lands on his ass by the river shore. There is no artificial light there, no car noises, no other human around. It feels like he's dropped off the face of the world, dropped off existence.
Dean looks up, half expecting to see the same sideways sky that covered Heaven. Maybe Joshua lied to him and they're back in the Matrix, back to oblivioness inside their private Garden. Only black sky greats him though, the regular endless dark of outer space where all the light that you can see is that of things that have been dead for a very long time.
Maybe this is all that there is. Maybe they are all already dead, just going through the motions because they refuse to believe that the game is already over. This game was over even before it started.
God has left the stadium and this was their final strike. Game over. Time to get off the pitcher's mound and pass the ball to someone else.
The fact that there is no one else to pick it up should feel more disturbing than it actually does.
The boots come off on their own. Dean figures he forgot to lace them before he left the room. He had other things on his mind other than footwear.
The jacket, he drops not because it's hot -the calendar says it's spring already, but it's still chilly enough to call this winter- but because he wants to feel the cold. Dean wants to feel something.
The water is cold, but it's only his skin that registers it. The information never reaches Dean's brain.
He taught Sam how to swim when his brother was five. Dad was away, chasing down some lead he'd gotten on mom's killer, and the two of them were alone in Jacksonville, Florida.
The motel had a pool and enough people around for no one to notice two kids playing in it all day long. They had stuck to the little kids, shallow end until Dean decided that it was time Sam learned how to swim. He decided to do it the same way dad had done to him.
Dean took Sam's hand and jumped off the deepest end with his brother. Sink or swim, John had preached.
Sam almost died.
John never knew.
That had happened two months before the Shriga fuck-up. And like everything else that he'd done that had hurt Sam, Dean had never forgiven himself.
He had never forgotten.
Dean had tried his best but his best had never been good enough.
Sam was right. Dean had experienced the love of a mother, he had had a taste of normal, brief as it had been. Sam... Sam had never had any of that.
What he had had was a brother that kept trying to recreate a feeling and life style he barely remember. And like all cheap imitations, Dean had failed.
The numbness that sets over Dean's body seems to fit with the numbness he's been feeling for so long now. He can't see the shore line anymore, he can't see the point anymore. He doesn't even remember getting inside the water.
Blackness above and blackness below, both as dark and endless as the darkness he feels inside. The moon is nothing more than a dot of light in the sky, the light at the end of the tunnel. Or maybe it's Zachariah looking for him again.
Dean floats in the cold water when his legs can't keep on kicking. He's not afraid to drown. To be swallowed by the lake's waters would mean dying and there is not one being above and bellow that will ever allow him that.
Death is too easy. Death is not an option for them any longer. It had stopped being one a long time ago.
In the silence of the lake, the first whistle of something being fired into the air is clear and close as if whispered in his ears. The explosion of lights that follows is almost blinding.
Fireworks.
Dean has always loved fireworks. He loved that Sam shared that love with him.
Blossoming lights of blue and red, starburst of yellow and white, crescent spirals of green and purple. Someone is firing fireworks now. In the middle of the lake. In the middle of night.
It's not even the 4th of July yet. This year, it might not even happen. But that doesn't matter now. Light is raining down on him and Dean can feel something at last. It's a bittersweet memory of looking into Sammy's glowing face and feeling that he'd done something right. That he had put that light in his brother's eyes, that smile on his face.
Why couldn't Sam's Heaven haven been more about their victories together, rather than the ones Sam had achieved alone?
How pathetic is it that Dean can't think of a single occasion in his life that he's accomplished something for himself?
His memories were about making mom and Sammy smile, about comforting her when dad screwed up. If he couldn't have a happy memory
of his own and if others couldn't bring themselves to have a good one of him, what else was left?
"Hey! What the hell are you doing?"
The voice comes out of nowhere and it breaks the spell of light and color that had been filling the black of the sky. Dean startles and loses the unconscious control that was keeping his body afloat. Up turns to down, sideways turns to everything else and water rushes into his lungs like shoppers on sales day.
It takes him a bit to realize that, although still soaking wet, Dean's no longer in the water. He can still hear it, slapping against the side of something, he can feel his body being rocked from side to side.
It feels like the most smoothing thing he's experienced in decades. Like being rocked to sleep by a caring mother.
"Hey! Buddy! Come on, no falling asleep!"
Dean forces his eyes open but the view is as black with his eyelids up as it is with them down. The fireworks are gone, color replaced by the infinite black.
There's no one there. Maybe he's imagining voices now too, alongside with every achievement and good thing that he thought he'd manage to accomplish his whole life.
"Hey! Hey," the voice persists, with the added inconvenient of a hand shaking his shoulder off its socket. "Hey! Is there someone I can call to come and get you?"
Dean blinks and finally the bodiless voice materializes in front of his eyes in the shape of a man around his sixties, grey beard and long white hair. Dean can't help himself. He cracks up laughing. It's an eerie sound that has little to do with joy.
"Oh... that's... that's pretty original," Dean stutters through chattering teeth. "Man... that's up there with Alanis Morissete and Morgan Freeman... real classy."
The old man looks at him oddly, one hand reaching out to touch Dean's forehead. He frowns, withdraws his hand and pulls the frayed black beanie in his head back and forth, like he's scratching his brain.
"Maybe I should just take you to the hospital," the old man concludes. "Either you've never made any sense all your life, or it's the cold water muddling your judgment," he says scratching his beard. "Either way, it's way over my head."
Dean shakes his head. He can tell that he's on a boat now. The rocking surface almost tumbles over when he puts his elbows down and forces his body up. His feet are still dangling from the side of the fiberglass boat and he can't even feel his toes anymore.
None of that matters, though, because he is done with being jerked around like this.
"Really? This the best you could come up with? An old man with long beard in a fisherman's boat? And you're gonna stand there and pretend that I'm wrong? That I'm crazy? Why bother?"
The old man grabs his beard, looking kind of offended at Dean's tone. "It's not a fisherman's boat... I don't even own a fishing rod. I'm a chemist, not a fisherman," the man explains, pointing to the back of the boat where a large box filled with several paper tubes rests. "I was trying out some new explosives combinations when I see an idiot floating around in this freezing water... you, young man, are the first thing I've fished out of the water in years."
Despite the cold, Dean can feel himself blush. It was easy to forget that not everything revolved around him and his screwed up life. Outside the apocalypse, outside Michael's wooing and Lucifer's stalking, there is a whole world of people, just trying to live their lives.
"So, again... is there someone I can call to pick you up?"
Dean shakes his head.
Castiel flapped his wings and disappeared to lick his wounds after the revelation that his Father didn't give a damn and Sam... the last thing Dean wanted right now was to ask anything from Sam.
"Mind if I give you a hand?" He asks the old man. "I mean... you saved my life... it's the least I can do to pay you back," Dean offers, eyes low, nose dripping water. He looks pathetic, he's well aware of that, but right now, if only for a couple of minutes, he just wants to be the anonymous guy on an anonymous boat helping out a stranger.
The fireworks are just the icing on the chocolate cake.
The old man looks at him deeply, probably trying to figure the odds of Dean being crazy and kill him as soon as he turns his back. Dean tries to look as innocent as he can, even if the last time he actually felt it was when he was four. He still believed that one hug could fix anything then. Mom had made him believe that.
"Here, put this around yourself," the man says gruffly, handing a heavy blanket to Dean. "Can't help out if you freeze to death."
Dean wraps himself in the brown blanket. It smells of cinnamon and dirt. It's an oddly comforting mixture. "Thanks."
After that, the work is surprisingly easy and organic. Familiar. All Dean has to do his fire up the different tubes, while the old man sits back and takes notes.
He has no idea how much time goes by, but his clothes are dry by the time the last colorful lights die out in the black sky.
"Well, that was it... last pipe," the old man announces with a sigh. "What did you think?"
Dean takes a deep breath, surprised at how light that feels. His ears are ringing from the repeated explosions and his eyes are burning from staring into the shimmering lights for too long, but he's less numb, less buried under too many despairing thoughts.
"I think that you're one hell of a pyrotechnic," Dean says with appreciation. He has no idea what kind of explosives the man used in his mixtures, but those had been some of the most beautiful and elaborate fireworks he had ever seen.
The old man giggles, a light sound that makes him look younger, brighter. "Well, some like creating stuff; some like blowing up stuff... I guess I found the perfect way to do both."
"Best of two worlds, hum?" Dean agrees with a knowing smile.
It's easy to miss the bright details in the middle of all the dark stuff. Ash was happy in Heaven. So was Pamela. Sam, even though with memories that burned a hole in Dean's heart, Sam was happy too. And Dean... he guesses that he could do worse than a 4th of July night, burning down a field with stolen fireworks and watching his little brother dancing under the stars of the exploding lights.
"Best of everything," the other man says, firing up the boat's engine.
"You sure there's no one I can call to pick you up?" The old man asks as they near the shore. "It's at least a five mile trek to the nearest town and I don't see-"
He stops himself when they both see the black car that comes to a stop near the side of the road. Even from a distance, Dean can recognize the tall frame of his brother, as he exits the car and walks to the shore, framed by the bright lights of the Impala.
"You know him?"
Dean nods. It surprises him a bit that Sam came after him. Usually, it's Dean who has to chase his brother, like a lost puppy. Like a chain, anchoring him down.
"You don't look very happy to see him," the old man whispers after looking at Dean's face. "He the reason why you were taking a midnight swim in the middle of nowhere?"
Dean takes a breath. Was everything that he'd learned about Sam in their stroll through Heaven that much of a novelty that it had driven him to the middle of a freezing lake?
Sam's independent streak was not only something not new, it was something that Dean had always respected, nurtured, even envied in his brother. So, was it that much of a surprise for him to see that the realization of those moments of independence were the best of Sam's memories?
Or was it the fact that their trip to Heaven had driven home the point that their road lead only to one place now? That it was no longer about their free will, but about their willingness to send the whole world to hell because of Dean's stubborn streak? That, like Sam, Dean had realized that his decisions, no matter how good intentioned, would always end up hurting someone?
Dean doesn't answer the old man, choosing instead to take off the warm blanket and fold it, carefully setting it on the bench beside him.
The old man nods, turning the engine down to a lazy thrust. "Mind if I leave you here? The shore's riddle with sand banks... don't wanna risk getting stuck."
The shore is close enough that Dean can see the worried expression in Sam's face, even in the dark. His hands are stuffed inside his pockets, fisted.
"Yeah... no problem," Dean lets out, standing up, ready to jump back into the water. "Thank you for the..." Dean starts, lack of words translating into a nervous hand raking his short hair. "... everything, I guess."
The old man winks at him. "No problem, son... it was nice to have some company."
On the shore, Sam's figure takes one hand out his pocket and stares at it, puzzled. And then Dean can't see him anymore, water surrounding his vision from every side. It's a short swim, but he's freezing cold when he reaches the shore and his feet touch the round pebbles again.
Sam's there, jeans soaking wet. He went inside the water to grab Dean, forgetting to take out his boots.
"Dude... that's gonna suck to get dry again," Dean lets out with a wet cough.
Sam stares down, looking as confused as worried. He doesn't say a word, even though Dean knows he's dying to rip him a new one for this stunt.
Instead, Sam just drags him back to the car in silence and opens the trunk, producing a blanket not that different from the one the old man on the boat had.
Dean accepts it in silence, not sure what he can say that won't result in a explosion from his brother. To be fair, an explosion would be good now.
"Were you trying to kill yourself?" Sam finally says, his voice shaking.
Dean peaks from behind the blanket, dropping it from his head where his hair stands in every direction. He's half expecting to see anger in his brother's eyes, disappointment. Instead, it's tears that greet him.
"Because..." Sam goes on with a nervous sniff. "Because I... I can't do this without you Dean. I can't-"
"Sam-" Dean tries to break in. No matter how he felt when he left that motel room, no matter how numb he feels, the sight of Sam's face washed in fat tears is something that Dean has never, will never be able to ignore.
"No! Hear me out... I know that I was a selfish prick my whole life, so this can't be a surprise for you, Dean. I need you. I need you beside me... I always try to do things on my own, prove to myself that I can achieve as much on my own as I can with you, but... I can't do this alone... not this Dean..."
Dean takes one step forward. He wants to hug Sam, he wants the contact, but he can't make himself cross those final inches.
Things are still too raw, too fresh. And this is not something that they can do together. Not this.
His hand freezes midway in between then, never finishing its trip. Dean's eyes land on Sam's jacket pocket instead. There's a black, burned hole in there.
"What happen?"
Sam looks down, hand fishing Dean's amulet from his pocket. "I... I know you don't want it anymore, but... I couldn't leave it there, in the trash," Sam says with a sigh. "And just now... I'd swear it-"
The golden metal, usually dull and rusty, is still glowing, like cooling iron after staying too long in the fire.
Dean does an about turn, gravel flying from under his feet as he races to the shoreline. The boat, the old man, they've been swallowed by the dark and he can't see either anymore.
Dean shakes his head. Smiles. "You son of a bitch."
The end