SPN FIC - If the Fates Allow (Christmas) - Part 2 of 2
Part 1 is here.
IF THE FATES ALLOW (CHRISTMAS)
By Carol Davis
(Conclusion)
She asked the same of Castiel. She didn't really expect an answer - certainly not an honest one - and Dean doesn't, either. Rather than give him something less than the truth, she moves toward the open doorway. Stands with her back to it and extends a hand to her son.
"Come," she tries, one more time.
After a last, small gesture, beckoning him to follow her, she walks away from the rank confines of the motel room, away from the smell of old sweat and Chinese food and the rhythmic clank of the heating unit under the window. Away from the cardboard Christmas tree and the absence of gifts. Away from the place that is not home.
The motel room door is supposed to swing shut on its own but it doesn't; it remains open, a bridge between dream and reality, between night and something that looks like daylight. It remains open so that Dean can give in to her request, if he chooses. Without looking back she walks out of the motel room onto the wide veranda of a house on an unnamable shore, the house she's lived in alone for a long, unbreaking stretch of time. Two and a half years, by human reckoning. Much longer than that, by hers.
Time passes differently in dreams, she thinks. That's true here, too.
Beyond a wide band of dunes and sea grass, maybe a hundred yards away, a gentle surf breaks onto wet sand. If this were a real place, gulls would be swooping low, crying out to each other before plunging into the rhythmic pulse of the water. But this isn't real, and she hasn't heard a gull in…well, ever, really.
This isn't a real place. There's nothing alive here.
Except her son, dressed in gray sweatpants and a stretched-out, faded black t-shirt, standing behind her in the open doorway.
"Where -" Dean begins.
"I don't know," she says. When she turns to look at him, the gun is dangling from his hand the way he used to dangle his teddy, the ratty, one-eared thing that was - when it was in better shape - a gift from John's father. His grip tightens for a moment, then slackens again, but it's still possible that he can snap to if he needs to. He's a hunter, after all. The son of a hunter. The grandson, great-grandson, great-great-grandson. And so on.
Forever and ever, amen.
That was not what she wanted.
"This is where I -" she tells him, and stops. She can't say live. What she does isn't living.
He squints at her, his face becoming sulky and displeased, the look he used to give her when she'd refuse his need for another cookie. For as much as he's seen in his life - and his death - this is nothing he can fit into any category he understands, or thinks he does.
"Is this Heaven?" he proposes.
"Maybe. I don't know."
He's silent for a moment, looking around, piling up some equilibrium for himself. Good, she thinks. Away from the motel room, from Sam - he can manage.
"'Cause that's kind of funny," he says after a minute. "Heaven looks kinda like South Carolina. Tourism people'd piss themselves." He smirks, pleased with himself for handling the situation the way he likes to handle almost everything - like a character in a movie, all smooth moves and smartass remarks. Where he got that from, she doesn't know. He may have gotten a little of it from John, but not all of it. Television, maybe. He loved television, even as a baby, when his wide elfin eyes would track the movement on the screen, no more understanding of it than a dog.
"This is where they put me," she says.
"Where who put you?"
"I don't know."
"Gee. You're just full of useful information, aren't you?"
"I'm sorry. I'll try to do better."
That makes him snort a little. He looks around, takes a better look at the veranda, the steps down onto the sand, the sea grass. He mumbles something about it all being passable, then reaches out to touch one of the posts that hold up the veranda's roof. "Feels real," he announces, thumbnail prodding the wood, teasing at a splinter. "Lotta attention to detail."
"Dean -"
He smirks again and hums a couple of bars of something. "Got it wrong, though. Remember that dumbass song? 'Almost heaven, West Virginia…'"
She does remember. Her lips curve.
"Do me a favor," Dean says. "Don't sing John fucking Denver to me. What do you want?"
"I want to help you."
"Then let me go back to bed. All right? Just let me go back to sleep."
"To the nightmares?"
He moves abruptly, turns his gaze away. All she can see is his profile, the set of his jaw, the way his eyes narrow. She wants nothing more than to go to him again, to hold him, comfort him, tell him she's sorry for the way this all turned out. That when she said yes to Azazel she was eighteen years old and didn't bother trying to see past the end of her own nose. That when she said yes to Azazel her head was spinning, the whole world was spinning, much too fast for her to grab on, get a handhold. I didn't understand, she wants to say. I didn't know what he was. What he meant. I didn't know. But she can't say any of that. Can't plead ignorance as if it will erase what happened.
Dean grimaces at her, a sharp sliver of a look, then pads barefoot past her, down the two steps to the sand. He shuffles his feet in it for a moment, testing it, before he begins to stride away from the house in the direction of the water. What looks like water, anyway. It's…off, somehow. All of this is off, in a way she's never been able to explain.
She's walked the beach a thousand times since she - well, you could say "woke up here," and that would be as accurate as anything else she's tried - and she hasn't yet been able to figure out how far it extends. She's walked for what seems like hours.
Days, once.
There's no hunger here, no thirst. No exhaustion. She suspects she could walk for centuries and there'd be no end to that beach.
When she reaches the water Dean is standing ankle-deep in the surf. The cuffs of his sweatpants are wet. Or something like wet. His face is wet, too, but not from the surf. "I don't know what they want from me," he says without really looking at her. "I keep asking, and none of 'em will tell me. I don't know what the hell they think I am. Or what I can do." The hand that's not holding the gun curls and uncurls a couple of times as foamy water laps over his feet. "They act like it all rests on my head. I'm not anybody's fucking savior. I couldn't even save Sam."
"The battle's not over yet."
"I'm one guy," he blurts. "What do they want from me? What did he want from me?"
He means John, of course.
She's not sure how, but she knows a good deal of what happened after she died. How John - without knowing her history, without knowing what she wrote in her journals at night, or how she'd managed to bring about her own death - had become what she'd walked away from, how he'd thrust the boys down that path as well. She knows about the motels and the isolated cabins and the blood and the pain and the terrible, endless loneliness.
She has no idea how, but she knows. Maybe it's part of her punishment.
Dean peers at her, his mouth clamped into a tight line. "All I ever wanted -" he grinds out. "I never signed up for any of this."
But he did. They all did.
"You're stronger than you know," she says.
"That what they're trying to do? See how much they can pile on me before I break?" He squints down at the gun and shifts it in his grasp, as if he intends to pitch it out over the water. As if that would change something.
"We all break, Dean."
"Did it happen? What I saw?"
She raises a brow, asks silently for specifics.
"He killed Dad. That yellow-eyed bastard. That's what I saw, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"You made a deal with him to get Dad back."
"Yes."
"He killed your parents."
"Yes."
"That was all real."
"Yes."
"Is this Heaven?" he rasps.
She hesitates a little too long. "Is it?" he demands, his voice cracking.
"Dean -"
He sweeps a look around, and yes, the gun is ready, and he's ready to use it. "Then where's Dad?"
"He's not here, Dean."
"What is this place?"
This is not what I wanted, she thinks.
Then she reaches out to her son. Takes the gun from his trembling and unresisting hand and tucks it into the waistband of her jeans, at the small of her back, the way her father taught her. When that's done she looks up into Dean's eyes, into the face that's torn with disappointment and fear and regret and not a little despair.
"Where's Dad?" he whispers. "Why isn't he here?"
"I don't know."
"He…he went into the light. He did. I saw it."
She hasn't seen John since the night she died. She supposes there's a reason for that, one that has to do with deals. John made one, too: for Dean, although she knows that that's the simple answer, the easy out. Why John did what he did is as multi-layered as her own agreement, so maybe he's in a place all his own, like this one. She has no idea, and she didn't ask Castiel. He probably wouldn't have answered the question if she had.
"The sons of bitches," Dean says bitterly, clenching his empty fists the way he did as a small boy. For all his fury, he never looked mighty then, and he doesn't now. "Then why?" he sputters after a minute. "What's all that shit about redemption? He saved people. He did good things."
"I know."
"He got out of Hell. Is he…no place? Nowhere? He's supposed to be with you. Why is he not with you?"
"I don't know."
"Then why did you bring me here? You couldn't just let me sleep?"
She doesn't need to answer; he knows the answer. His mouth opens, ready to unleash a string of vitriol, but all the good curses involve blasphemy and there's no point in using God's name as a hammer when it's God you're angry with. Railing at God doesn't accomplish much, either - His hide is pretty thick, she's discovered. That, too, is different from what she'd always supposed.
"We all seem to have a problem with letting things be," she sighs. "All of us. Your father. Me. You." After a breath, she adds, "Sam."
"I can't save Sam. He - when I was gone, he -"
"I know."
"He's got demon blood in him."
"I know."
"What am I supposed to do? What am I -"
Slowly, he sinks down onto the sand and wraps his arms around his head. He did that, too, as a little boy, as if he thought it would mean the world couldn't see him. He shakes as if he's being buffeted by a strong wind, as if he's cold beyond all hope of ever again being warm. With the gun a hard lump against the small of her back she shifts down to her knees, then to a seat in the sand and gathers him into her arms. Whether she is who she seems to be no longer seems to matter to him; he huddles against her and begins to sob like he did when he was very small and his little boy's heart was broken.
Maybe it's hours that they sit there; maybe it's years. Time passes differently here, the way it does in dreams.
She hushes him for a while, croons to him softly, wordlessly, stroking his hair and his cheek and his back as the surf laps rhythmically against them.
After a while, she sings. The way she used to.
He settles after a while, eyes closed, head on her shoulder. "You're stronger than you know," she murmurs close to his ear.
His head shifts a little. Back and forth.
"You are."
"Can't save the world," he whispers.
"You don't have to."
"Then what do they want from me?" he pleads. "What do they want?"
She sings to him for long, long hours, no rhyme or reason to any of it. The songs drift into her mind like leaves floating down from a tree in the autumn, and as they come to her, she sings them. She did that a long time ago, back in the house in Lawrence: sang as she went about her day, sang with him in her arms, dancing from kitchen to living room, up the stairs, down the stairs. As he grew a little older he would parrot her, chirping out his interpretation of the words, grinning and giggling as if he'd mastered something marvelous.
"I dot you, bay," he would squeal. "I dot you to wear my rin."
There's never much to sing about in this place, where nothing's real, nothing's alive.
Nothing except her son.
After a while the light dims a little, although the sun doesn't set here, ever. She hasn't seen night since she left Lawrence. One eye on the horizon, she strokes Dean's hair with a light touch, runs a finger along the curve of his ear. He's perfect, she thinks: her boy, her son.
His head shifts and he looks into her eyes. "I want to stay," he says.
She knew it would come to that.
"With you," he says. "Please let me stay with you."
The first time, she left him. This time, he will have to leave her. "You can't," she whispers.
"I won't go back."
"You have to."
"I don't."
"Yes," she says, with more pain in that one word than anything else she's ever said. "You do."
"But I don't know what I'm supposed to do."
She smiles at him with a hand flattened against his cheek. "The same thing you've always done. The thing you've done so well."
"What? What thing?"
"Love Sam," she says. "That's all you have to do."
* * * * *
She walks him as far as the veranda; he has to go the rest of the way himself. He stops on the threshold and looks back. Drinks her in for a minute. Stores the sight of her in a place he can reach; if God's grace touches him, that will always be true.
"Will we -" he begins, then stops.
"I love you," she says.
"I know."
Whether he honestly believes it's her, or that she's simply something his mind conjured up in the middle of the night, he doesn't say. Maybe it doesn't make any difference. They've been together for a while, in some form or other, and maybe that's all that counts. "I love you too," he stammers, then he strides through the doorway into the gloom of that room, the dismal place in which he and Sam chose to spend their Christmas. He's barely passed the threshold when the door swings slowly but irreversibly shut.
Castiel is standing on the veranda when she turns away.
"Thank you," he says.
She considers him for a moment, realizing that Dean's gun is still tucked into the waistband of her pants.
Then it isn't.
"I did what you wanted," she says, half a question and half not.
"He'll remember," Castiel replies.
"And if it hurts him?"
He cocks his head a little to one side and regards her curiously. "Isn't that something you say? Pain is a way of knowing you're alive?"
"I'm not alive, Castiel."
He always looks sad. Like an old dog. When he smiles, it's full of melancholy. He smiles now, with nothing like humor. "You're more alive than you know, Mary. Some part of you will always be alive."
"In my children."
"Something like that."
Then, without warning, he's gone, and she's alone on the veranda.
She doesn't move for a moment, because she understands the whole length and breadth of melancholy. She has to stand where she is, eyes half-closed, letting the artificial breeze off the water flutter her hair away from her face. She can still feel Dean, a phantom presence she can't quite dare hope will endure. He walked away from her this time, and all she could send with him was a prayer that he will remember who he is.
And what that means.
When she opens her eyes, there's something new on the veranda: a white-painted, cast-iron bathtub brimming with foam and smelling of lavender. She moves toward it, a woman walking hesitantly through a dream, and dips her fingers into the water. It's warm. Pleasantly so. It will stay warm for… God knows how long.
Years, maybe.
Her fingers are struggling with the buttons of the cotton shirt when something a long way down the beach catches her eye.
Someone.
A long way down the beach.
"I know," Castiel's voice whispers, like something adrift on the breeze. "I may not understand, but I know."
* * * * *
Comments are welcomed.
IF THE FATES ALLOW (CHRISTMAS)
By Carol Davis
(Conclusion)
She asked the same of Castiel. She didn't really expect an answer - certainly not an honest one - and Dean doesn't, either. Rather than give him something less than the truth, she moves toward the open doorway. Stands with her back to it and extends a hand to her son.
"Come," she tries, one more time.
After a last, small gesture, beckoning him to follow her, she walks away from the rank confines of the motel room, away from the smell of old sweat and Chinese food and the rhythmic clank of the heating unit under the window. Away from the cardboard Christmas tree and the absence of gifts. Away from the place that is not home.
The motel room door is supposed to swing shut on its own but it doesn't; it remains open, a bridge between dream and reality, between night and something that looks like daylight. It remains open so that Dean can give in to her request, if he chooses. Without looking back she walks out of the motel room onto the wide veranda of a house on an unnamable shore, the house she's lived in alone for a long, unbreaking stretch of time. Two and a half years, by human reckoning. Much longer than that, by hers.
Time passes differently in dreams, she thinks. That's true here, too.
Beyond a wide band of dunes and sea grass, maybe a hundred yards away, a gentle surf breaks onto wet sand. If this were a real place, gulls would be swooping low, crying out to each other before plunging into the rhythmic pulse of the water. But this isn't real, and she hasn't heard a gull in…well, ever, really.
This isn't a real place. There's nothing alive here.
Except her son, dressed in gray sweatpants and a stretched-out, faded black t-shirt, standing behind her in the open doorway.
"Where -" Dean begins.
"I don't know," she says. When she turns to look at him, the gun is dangling from his hand the way he used to dangle his teddy, the ratty, one-eared thing that was - when it was in better shape - a gift from John's father. His grip tightens for a moment, then slackens again, but it's still possible that he can snap to if he needs to. He's a hunter, after all. The son of a hunter. The grandson, great-grandson, great-great-grandson. And so on.
Forever and ever, amen.
That was not what she wanted.
"This is where I -" she tells him, and stops. She can't say live. What she does isn't living.
He squints at her, his face becoming sulky and displeased, the look he used to give her when she'd refuse his need for another cookie. For as much as he's seen in his life - and his death - this is nothing he can fit into any category he understands, or thinks he does.
"Is this Heaven?" he proposes.
"Maybe. I don't know."
He's silent for a moment, looking around, piling up some equilibrium for himself. Good, she thinks. Away from the motel room, from Sam - he can manage.
"'Cause that's kind of funny," he says after a minute. "Heaven looks kinda like South Carolina. Tourism people'd piss themselves." He smirks, pleased with himself for handling the situation the way he likes to handle almost everything - like a character in a movie, all smooth moves and smartass remarks. Where he got that from, she doesn't know. He may have gotten a little of it from John, but not all of it. Television, maybe. He loved television, even as a baby, when his wide elfin eyes would track the movement on the screen, no more understanding of it than a dog.
"This is where they put me," she says.
"Where who put you?"
"I don't know."
"Gee. You're just full of useful information, aren't you?"
"I'm sorry. I'll try to do better."
That makes him snort a little. He looks around, takes a better look at the veranda, the steps down onto the sand, the sea grass. He mumbles something about it all being passable, then reaches out to touch one of the posts that hold up the veranda's roof. "Feels real," he announces, thumbnail prodding the wood, teasing at a splinter. "Lotta attention to detail."
"Dean -"
He smirks again and hums a couple of bars of something. "Got it wrong, though. Remember that dumbass song? 'Almost heaven, West Virginia…'"
She does remember. Her lips curve.
"Do me a favor," Dean says. "Don't sing John fucking Denver to me. What do you want?"
"I want to help you."
"Then let me go back to bed. All right? Just let me go back to sleep."
"To the nightmares?"
He moves abruptly, turns his gaze away. All she can see is his profile, the set of his jaw, the way his eyes narrow. She wants nothing more than to go to him again, to hold him, comfort him, tell him she's sorry for the way this all turned out. That when she said yes to Azazel she was eighteen years old and didn't bother trying to see past the end of her own nose. That when she said yes to Azazel her head was spinning, the whole world was spinning, much too fast for her to grab on, get a handhold. I didn't understand, she wants to say. I didn't know what he was. What he meant. I didn't know. But she can't say any of that. Can't plead ignorance as if it will erase what happened.
Dean grimaces at her, a sharp sliver of a look, then pads barefoot past her, down the two steps to the sand. He shuffles his feet in it for a moment, testing it, before he begins to stride away from the house in the direction of the water. What looks like water, anyway. It's…off, somehow. All of this is off, in a way she's never been able to explain.
She's walked the beach a thousand times since she - well, you could say "woke up here," and that would be as accurate as anything else she's tried - and she hasn't yet been able to figure out how far it extends. She's walked for what seems like hours.
Days, once.
There's no hunger here, no thirst. No exhaustion. She suspects she could walk for centuries and there'd be no end to that beach.
When she reaches the water Dean is standing ankle-deep in the surf. The cuffs of his sweatpants are wet. Or something like wet. His face is wet, too, but not from the surf. "I don't know what they want from me," he says without really looking at her. "I keep asking, and none of 'em will tell me. I don't know what the hell they think I am. Or what I can do." The hand that's not holding the gun curls and uncurls a couple of times as foamy water laps over his feet. "They act like it all rests on my head. I'm not anybody's fucking savior. I couldn't even save Sam."
"The battle's not over yet."
"I'm one guy," he blurts. "What do they want from me? What did he want from me?"
He means John, of course.
She's not sure how, but she knows a good deal of what happened after she died. How John - without knowing her history, without knowing what she wrote in her journals at night, or how she'd managed to bring about her own death - had become what she'd walked away from, how he'd thrust the boys down that path as well. She knows about the motels and the isolated cabins and the blood and the pain and the terrible, endless loneliness.
She has no idea how, but she knows. Maybe it's part of her punishment.
Dean peers at her, his mouth clamped into a tight line. "All I ever wanted -" he grinds out. "I never signed up for any of this."
But he did. They all did.
"You're stronger than you know," she says.
"That what they're trying to do? See how much they can pile on me before I break?" He squints down at the gun and shifts it in his grasp, as if he intends to pitch it out over the water. As if that would change something.
"We all break, Dean."
"Did it happen? What I saw?"
She raises a brow, asks silently for specifics.
"He killed Dad. That yellow-eyed bastard. That's what I saw, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"You made a deal with him to get Dad back."
"Yes."
"He killed your parents."
"Yes."
"That was all real."
"Yes."
"Is this Heaven?" he rasps.
She hesitates a little too long. "Is it?" he demands, his voice cracking.
"Dean -"
He sweeps a look around, and yes, the gun is ready, and he's ready to use it. "Then where's Dad?"
"He's not here, Dean."
"What is this place?"
This is not what I wanted, she thinks.
Then she reaches out to her son. Takes the gun from his trembling and unresisting hand and tucks it into the waistband of her jeans, at the small of her back, the way her father taught her. When that's done she looks up into Dean's eyes, into the face that's torn with disappointment and fear and regret and not a little despair.
"Where's Dad?" he whispers. "Why isn't he here?"
"I don't know."
"He…he went into the light. He did. I saw it."
She hasn't seen John since the night she died. She supposes there's a reason for that, one that has to do with deals. John made one, too: for Dean, although she knows that that's the simple answer, the easy out. Why John did what he did is as multi-layered as her own agreement, so maybe he's in a place all his own, like this one. She has no idea, and she didn't ask Castiel. He probably wouldn't have answered the question if she had.
"The sons of bitches," Dean says bitterly, clenching his empty fists the way he did as a small boy. For all his fury, he never looked mighty then, and he doesn't now. "Then why?" he sputters after a minute. "What's all that shit about redemption? He saved people. He did good things."
"I know."
"He got out of Hell. Is he…no place? Nowhere? He's supposed to be with you. Why is he not with you?"
"I don't know."
"Then why did you bring me here? You couldn't just let me sleep?"
She doesn't need to answer; he knows the answer. His mouth opens, ready to unleash a string of vitriol, but all the good curses involve blasphemy and there's no point in using God's name as a hammer when it's God you're angry with. Railing at God doesn't accomplish much, either - His hide is pretty thick, she's discovered. That, too, is different from what she'd always supposed.
"We all seem to have a problem with letting things be," she sighs. "All of us. Your father. Me. You." After a breath, she adds, "Sam."
"I can't save Sam. He - when I was gone, he -"
"I know."
"He's got demon blood in him."
"I know."
"What am I supposed to do? What am I -"
Slowly, he sinks down onto the sand and wraps his arms around his head. He did that, too, as a little boy, as if he thought it would mean the world couldn't see him. He shakes as if he's being buffeted by a strong wind, as if he's cold beyond all hope of ever again being warm. With the gun a hard lump against the small of her back she shifts down to her knees, then to a seat in the sand and gathers him into her arms. Whether she is who she seems to be no longer seems to matter to him; he huddles against her and begins to sob like he did when he was very small and his little boy's heart was broken.
Maybe it's hours that they sit there; maybe it's years. Time passes differently here, the way it does in dreams.
She hushes him for a while, croons to him softly, wordlessly, stroking his hair and his cheek and his back as the surf laps rhythmically against them.
After a while, she sings. The way she used to.
He settles after a while, eyes closed, head on her shoulder. "You're stronger than you know," she murmurs close to his ear.
His head shifts a little. Back and forth.
"You are."
"Can't save the world," he whispers.
"You don't have to."
"Then what do they want from me?" he pleads. "What do they want?"
She sings to him for long, long hours, no rhyme or reason to any of it. The songs drift into her mind like leaves floating down from a tree in the autumn, and as they come to her, she sings them. She did that a long time ago, back in the house in Lawrence: sang as she went about her day, sang with him in her arms, dancing from kitchen to living room, up the stairs, down the stairs. As he grew a little older he would parrot her, chirping out his interpretation of the words, grinning and giggling as if he'd mastered something marvelous.
"I dot you, bay," he would squeal. "I dot you to wear my rin."
There's never much to sing about in this place, where nothing's real, nothing's alive.
Nothing except her son.
After a while the light dims a little, although the sun doesn't set here, ever. She hasn't seen night since she left Lawrence. One eye on the horizon, she strokes Dean's hair with a light touch, runs a finger along the curve of his ear. He's perfect, she thinks: her boy, her son.
His head shifts and he looks into her eyes. "I want to stay," he says.
She knew it would come to that.
"With you," he says. "Please let me stay with you."
The first time, she left him. This time, he will have to leave her. "You can't," she whispers.
"I won't go back."
"You have to."
"I don't."
"Yes," she says, with more pain in that one word than anything else she's ever said. "You do."
"But I don't know what I'm supposed to do."
She smiles at him with a hand flattened against his cheek. "The same thing you've always done. The thing you've done so well."
"What? What thing?"
"Love Sam," she says. "That's all you have to do."
* * * * *
She walks him as far as the veranda; he has to go the rest of the way himself. He stops on the threshold and looks back. Drinks her in for a minute. Stores the sight of her in a place he can reach; if God's grace touches him, that will always be true.
"Will we -" he begins, then stops.
"I love you," she says.
"I know."
Whether he honestly believes it's her, or that she's simply something his mind conjured up in the middle of the night, he doesn't say. Maybe it doesn't make any difference. They've been together for a while, in some form or other, and maybe that's all that counts. "I love you too," he stammers, then he strides through the doorway into the gloom of that room, the dismal place in which he and Sam chose to spend their Christmas. He's barely passed the threshold when the door swings slowly but irreversibly shut.
Castiel is standing on the veranda when she turns away.
"Thank you," he says.
She considers him for a moment, realizing that Dean's gun is still tucked into the waistband of her pants.
Then it isn't.
"I did what you wanted," she says, half a question and half not.
"He'll remember," Castiel replies.
"And if it hurts him?"
He cocks his head a little to one side and regards her curiously. "Isn't that something you say? Pain is a way of knowing you're alive?"
"I'm not alive, Castiel."
He always looks sad. Like an old dog. When he smiles, it's full of melancholy. He smiles now, with nothing like humor. "You're more alive than you know, Mary. Some part of you will always be alive."
"In my children."
"Something like that."
Then, without warning, he's gone, and she's alone on the veranda.
She doesn't move for a moment, because she understands the whole length and breadth of melancholy. She has to stand where she is, eyes half-closed, letting the artificial breeze off the water flutter her hair away from her face. She can still feel Dean, a phantom presence she can't quite dare hope will endure. He walked away from her this time, and all she could send with him was a prayer that he will remember who he is.
And what that means.
When she opens her eyes, there's something new on the veranda: a white-painted, cast-iron bathtub brimming with foam and smelling of lavender. She moves toward it, a woman walking hesitantly through a dream, and dips her fingers into the water. It's warm. Pleasantly so. It will stay warm for… God knows how long.
Years, maybe.
Her fingers are struggling with the buttons of the cotton shirt when something a long way down the beach catches her eye.
Someone.
A long way down the beach.
"I know," Castiel's voice whispers, like something adrift on the breeze. "I may not understand, but I know."
* * * * *
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