The Greatest Man I Never Knew
Title: The Greatest Man I Never Knew
Rating: R
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Gen
Characters: Dean, Adult!Ben, Lisa, Sam, OMC
Wordcount: 6030
Warnings: Violence, language, character death
Disclaimer: Kripke has pretty toys and was nice enough to let me play with them. Not mine, not mine, not mine.
Summary: Ben convinces Dean he didn't need to be perfect. It was enough that he was Dean.
A/N: Written to fill a wish by mobiusklein at spn_rambleon, An adult Ben finally catches up with Dean but not to yell at him but to say that he understands and that he and his mom are A-OK. Gen or het. Also fills "group support" on my hc_bingo card. Multifill FTW. Title is taken from a Reba McEntire song of the same name.
Mad love to my girl, brandythebeta, who found a decent fic buried under a thousand words of poorly-written extraneous crap.
This is the end of the story. The reader may feel as if this is a cheap way to begin, but this isn't about the reader. Besides, a fan who thinks the worst that can happen is for the story to end has not been paying attention.
There were many places this story could have finished. A funeral pyre in South Dakota would have been a nice choice, and the author could have titled it something tasteless, like "Blaze of Glory". Dean would have hated that, not so much for the overwrought imagery but for using Bon Jovi as his last impression here on earth.
Another option was having the boys drive the Impala off into the sunset. Not a bad choice at all, actually. Satisfying to the readers, and Dean has this whole not-so-secret inner cowboy fetish which makes it both believable and as close to a happy ending as most people can picture. Sam wouldn't have liked it much though. He is too practical to think the story really ends there, and in this case he’s right.
So. Do you want to see where the story really ends? Then read on.
There's a bar off I-170, and it's so in the middle of no where that the directions say to take a left where the old Yates barn used to be. It's shabby enough to be comfortable and it hasn't been painted since the Carter administration, but it's got the owner behind the bar, the best jukebox in two hundred miles and the beer is as cold as the devil's heart. A sleek car, old and well-cared for, pulled into the dirt parking lot. There ought to be more cars here even at this time of night, and he checked the address written on a scrap of paper just to be sure. Yep. Right place.
Dean looked up from his cards when the door opened, checked the new guy out and dismissed him in a glance. Just as he was about to call, he looked back with the nagging feeling that the guy looked… familiar. Or as if he ought to be familiar. Young, maybe a few years younger than Dean himself, dark hair, dark eyes, pale freckled face. If clothes were a fashion statement, his would be saying 'redneck hard at work'; the shotgun loosely held under one elbow was merely an exclamation point. Since this was a hunter's bar, he fit right in.
Dean went back to his game. "I call. Let's get this over with, Charlie. I've got three ladies and you've got a customer."
The bartender scowled at the hand Dean threw onto the table. "Aw, shit," he muttered, pushing his chair back. "I nearly had you that time."
"You keep telling yourself that, sweet cheeks. Another beer while you're up."
The bartender took his place behind the bar and nodded at the newcomer while cracking open another beer. The boy slid a piece of paper across the scarred wooden counter. The barman nearly dropped the bottle, and set it on the counter so that he could better hold the paper between trembling fingers. Then he nodded.
"What'll it be?"
"Bottle of Jack, two glasses."
The barman produced these items, and after a long moment looked up at the boy. His grizzled face was almost tender. "Take care of him, kid. Break it gentle, like. He, uh, he means a lot to us."
Unless the bartender was using the royal pronoun, which the kid doubted, it seemed out of place in the dead space filled only by the sound of Dean shuffling cards. The barman caught his look around the bar, empty expect for the three of them, and spoke gruffly. "Everybody cleared out once I put out the word tonight's the night. They couldn't watch something like this. It'll just be me."
The kid hesitated. "You're sure? I could always leave. No harm, no foul."
"No. He deserves better. Someone needs to send the poor guy on."
The kid leaned forward, curiosity getting the better of him. "One thing. How can he drink?"
"No idea. Maybe he's just that damned stubborn."
The first thing the kid did was to head for the jukebox. He fed twenty dollars into it, and took his time picking his selections. Ozzy, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Deep Purple, Styx… all the greats. He went back to the bar, fetched the bottle and glasses, and only then did he approach Dean.
"Hey," he said, slightly nervous. Dean examined him with a cool look. Okay, maybe more than slightly. Hell, this was Dean Winchester. Friend and foe to the angels themselves, made numerous deals with demons and lived to tell the tale, averted the apocalypse. Any hunter would be nervous. The kid cleared his throat and, to keep his hands busy, opened the bottle and poured them both a measure.
"I don't do autographs, buddy."
The kid ignored this and slid the other glass closer to Dean. He picked his up and thought a moment. "To family."
Dean reached out and picked his glass up. "Yeah. To family."
They tossed back half of the whiskey with a quick movement and a deep breath, in identical gestures. The kid noticed this, and couldn't decide if it was disturbing or cool.
Dean rocked back lazily in his chair, sipped at his drink. The kid took a deep breath and stepped over the edge. "I've been looking for you a long time. My name's Ben."
The chair's legs thudded onto the wooden floor. This part, at least, Ben had anticipated, and he reached into his jacket pocket for an envelope. "Who put you up to this, kid? Was it that chick from Omaha?" Dean asked as Ben flipped through a pile of photos. "Tell her for me, it isn't funny. No means no, and if she can"t-"
Ben set a photo on the table. "This is me and Mom, high school graduation, about ten years ago. Well… bit more than that."
Dean picked the photo up with an air that was two parts skepticism to one part anger. After a moment, he said, "All right. You have my attention. Now talk."
:: ::
I don't remember you. Let's get that settled right now. I mean, there are times when I think, maybe… but no. Not really. And I've been looking for you for so long now that I don't know whether it's memory or just my imagination.
Even that day in the hospital, when you said you'd caused the wreck, I can see you standing there just at the door of my Mom's room, but it was just some guy. It's the one memory that I know, for sure, is you, but you were just some guy. Hell, does that make any sense? Probably not.
I'm not sure who you got to wipe our memories, just that he can't have been human. Don't get me wrong, he did good work. He left a few things out on the job, though, things a human would have thought of.
We had so much salt in the house. Mom found a shotgun in the closet and freaked out. It wasn't her gun, no one she knew had guns, so why was it there? She put it in the trash outside, and I went out and got it after she went to sleep that night. I still don't know why I did that.
Things started to settle down and feel normal after a couple weeks. I went back to school, Mom went back to work. Life went on, only this time I had a shotgun underneath my mattress. There's a bonus for you: I started making my own bed finally, so Mom wouldn't find it.
Have you ever gotten that, "and this is where I came in" feeling? For me, it wasn't Mom's boyfriend being dead or even the shotgun. I went over to a buddy's house - Eric, I don't know if you remember him. Anyway, it was raining like hell and the plan was to play video games, but we were kind of bored with all his games. So we were sort of tooling around and there's this one game, Dance Central, where you have to dance along with the game and right in the middle of the song it tells you to freestyle while it takes pictures. Kind of lame, but funny. And we're looking through all the pictures of us doing our most dorky moves or, worse, trying to be cool, and having a good laugh at what idiots we looked like, and then there's this guy in the pictures. Like, an old guy. Old enough to be dating my Mom, say.
Yeah, you see where this is going. Bet you forgot that game.
It should have been creepy as hell. Here's this guy, about our parents' age, and neither of us know who he is and he's laying down his best moves and being a raging dork just like one of us kids. Being sort of cool. You could see us trying to copy him, or cracking up on the floor at the things he was doing.
It was only a few pictures. Maybe five. Eric and I both agreed it was probably just some pizza dude, but I uploaded the pictures to my computer before it occurred to him to delete them. I may have been a kid, but I wasn't a stupid kid. No pizza guy would take time out to joke around with me like that.
Mom went all out the Christmas I was fifteen, but she does that every year. Do you remember? Tree, presents, stockings - hell, everyone does those. Mom makes her own eggnog, and it's got a kick like a Dallas cheerleader. Mom goes caroling. She makes sappy look cute. And the day after Christmas she puts on her Elvis Christmas CD and goes through the house humming off-key, not to take down the decorations - those stay up until New Years - but to sort through everything useful we own and give what we don't want or use to charity. My job was to mostly stay out of her way and not let her catch me in the eggnog.
I was way too old to watch Rudolph for the three hundredth time and you can guess what Mom would be like if I'd asked to go to a friend's house on what she considered Day Two of Christmas. She started getting this itchy look in her eye, like I was about three minutes from being given something constructive to do, so I sat down in front of her bookshelf and acted fascinated at the prospect of broadening my horizons. I have no idea why she bought it, Mom reads all girly stuff like self-help and healthy cookbooks and romance so it was a pretty lame effort on my part. But she went off to declare her seasonal war on the hall closet, and this one book caught my eye. I don't remember the title or the author but there was this hot chick in leather on the cover, brandishing a knife. It was about this woman who fights vampires and werewolves while finding true love and realizing her own worth as a person, which is still way girly but hey… hot chick on the cover.
I flipped open the first couple of pages and right there on the title page someone had written, Dude, seriously? Forget that my mom doesn't say 'dude', it wasn't even close to her handwriting. Sharp, all capital letters, masculine. I flipped the pages real quick and saw there were more, same handwriting.
I went through that book over and over, until it got so I had every scribble in the margin memorized and could go straight to it automatically. There weren't all that many, but buried in with the You've got to be kidding me and CRAP with big arrows drawn toward the offending parts were other things. Whoever it was being so critical of this book didn't object that the book was stupid - which it sort of was - but that it had gotten things wrong.
In one scene halfway through, the protagonist, Lainesse Devereaux, fights off a vengeful ghost with holy water and prayer. Scratched in the margins so emphatically that you could see the impression on the next pages were two words: SALT. Morons.
I thought it then and you’re thinking it now… ah ha. You remember all that salt in the house when we got home from the car wreck? So did I.
:: ::
Ben noticed that their glasses were empty and he refilled them. Dean tipped his drink at him in thanks and sipped slowly, thinking.
"So you're telling me that you found me with nothing but a photo, salt, a shotgun and a book I'd written in?" He chuckled in spite of himself. "Not bad, kid. Not too bad at all."
Ben flushed a little and took a drink quickly, as if he felt blushing weren't something grown men were supposed to do. "Not exactly. That just sort of put me on the trail."
:: ::
I took that book with me everywhere. The cover fell off pretty quick, since it was only a paperback. When that happened I took out all the pages that you'd written on, laminated them and stuck them in a three-ring binder. My first hunter's journal.
It's funny, but I thought at the time I was a walking encyclopedia of lore. Teenagers think they know everything. But no matter how much I thought I knew, I kept finding out more. There was this old book I found at a bookshop. Not one of these chain megastore deals, this place only sold literature and I think the most recent book they had was an autographed copy of The Fountainhead. I mowed lawns all summer to buy that book. It had all this stuff about demons in it, and at the time I thought it had to be a bunch of crap. I mean, ghosts, sure, maybe even vampires, but demons? It had a drawing of a symbol said to repel demons from buildings, or trap them. It looked a little familiar.
I went out to the garage and there, right over the door where you'd have to look up to see it, was the same symbol carved into the frame. I still wasn't sure who you were, but it felt like you were standing right there with me, saying, Good eye, kid.
It felt good.
You know what else felt good? That symbol was proof you were watching out for us.
Right after that I waited for a time when Mom wasn't in the house and I pulled out that shotgun from under my bed and cracked it open. It was loaded, all right, but the rounds were filled with salt. Finding that, right there, was as good as feeling your hand clap me on the shoulder.
Looking at those rounds full of salt, I knew I hadn't been serious about supernatural stuff. Not really. I just read a lot. I hadn't done anything to protect the house or Mom - you had.
:: ::
If there was anything to be said about forty years in hell and four rounds with a hooker from Texas, it was that neither had left Dean with any delusions. Hero-worship from civilians he could understand. Hunters ought to know that sometimes you just got lucky. "You got all this from salt rounds and a devil's trap?" he asked with a cynical quirk to his lips.
"Sure, I'm just being a starry-eyed kid. You must've forgot the shotgun was in the closet. Someone else doodled something cool in the door above the garage." Dean opened his mouth and shut it again, and Ben's eyes crinkled with humor. "Yeah, dude, that totally makes so much more sense than my version."
:: ::
I'd like to say that was the day I decided to grow up. It isn't. I was in high school, and when you're taking notes in your biology class it's a little hard to convince yourself werewolves exist. I had friends, football, Mom on my case about the SATs. Girls. Video games. Girls.
I fell in love for the first time. She was beautiful. Still is. Spotted her on the way home from my job at a burger joint, and I knew I had to have her. '69 Dodge Charger, 8-cylinder, hemi under the hood, reinforced suspension, painted black, custom interior. Admit it, you're jealous. Just a little. Hell no, you can't take her for a spin. That's my girl you're talking about. Tell you what, we'll trade keys and… That's what I thought.
It wasn't just girls, cars and homework though. I didn't grow up, but I made a better effort. Mom would have freaked if she’d found that gun or heard I'd been handling one, so I still kept that as well-hidden as I could, but I picked up one hell of a knife collection. Brass, silver, iron, blessed, even practiced with throwing knives and got to where I could hit a target if it held still exactly ten feet away. I hid salt around the house mostly, and I buried salt lines around the house. Got better at Latin. Reinforced the doorways and window frames with iron and told Mom I just wanted to try my hand at carpentry. Picking up where you left off.
Something happened, that summer before my senior year. I still don't have any idea exactly what, but I like to think I played my part and I played it well. For some punk kid, that is.
It was muggy as hell that summer. Thunderstorms all over the place, lightning even struck some cows out standing in fields. So much for being the teenager who knew everything.
I had just gotten off work that night. The parking lot was all dark and empty except for my car, because I'd closed the place up that night. I threw my backpack into the back seat and heard footsteps. Maybe it was instinct. All those years listening to you. I reached in like I had forgotten my keys in my bag and slipped an iron knife down the front of my pants, my hands shaking so bad I'm lucky I didn't cut something important.
"Hey, kid, you got a light?"
I'm still hanging into the car through the driver's window and I take a quick look out the back of the car at this guy walking up and… his eyes, man. His eyes were all wrong.
"Sure, dude. One sec."
I waited until he was close enough, taking that time to actually get my damned keys out and into my other hand, and then I stood, drew, and nailed him in the gut. He fell, and I didn't stick around to see if iron really worked. I lit out of there like I'd just stolen Boss Hogg's hat, tires peeling and everything, and didn't stop for anything until I got home, not even red lights. No one stopped me. I never saw another car, and considering it wasn't that late the empty roads creeped me right the hell out.
I called Mom on the way and told her not to answer the door or go anywhere until I got there. She must have listened, because she was standing in the living room when I pulled up. I killed the engine and bolted for the house, not even shutting the car door. Hell, I could jump-start her tomorrow, once I'd figured out what the hell was going on.
"Ben, what's wrong?"
I splashed some holy water at her, which annoyed her a bit but nothing else. You should have seen the look on her face when I got the shotgun from under my bed, though. I'd made up a few more salt rounds myself, though I wasn't even sure they'd fire. I grabbed them too and kicked myself for not having taken the gun more seriously before then. You'd left that gun for a reason, and I hadn't listened. I went around the house shutting off all the lights. Mom followed me, giving me a verbal reaming the likes of which I had never had before or since. I ignored her. My head was too full of all the things you must have been thinking for me not listening about the shotgun.
My bright idea was to go to the big living room window and wait in the dark, the better to see anything coming up on the house. I stopped dead in my tracks as soon as I entered the living room. Didn't need to go looking for them. Three men were standing just outside the window, just outside the salt line. I wished I'd put the salt line further out from the house.
"Benjamin Isaac Braeden, you put that gun down right this instant and look at me when I'm-"
"Mom! Please, be quiet!"
She looked past me, out the window, and went quiet, like a mouse finally spotting the snake. "I'm calling the police."
I didn't bother to argue. I was busy trying to figure out how to chamber a round, and I figured I knew what she was going to say next.
"Line's dead. Ben, the line's dead."
Knew it.
:: ::
Dean rubbed slowly at his face with both hands. It was all coming back to him now, down through the years, burning through the alcohol and the shame. He'd been there, that summer. Driven like a bat out of hell, engine roaring through the sticky green haze of the summer countryside. Sam filling salt rounds in the seat next to him, yelling at him to slow down. He'd gotten there too late anyway. Not by more than an hour or so, but too late. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
The images of that summer night, never all that vivid through the panic, faded into random collections of fire, blood, black eyes. Meg, laughing and laughing.
"I'm sorry, Ben. I should have been there," he said in a voice like velvet scraping over gravel.
Ben gave him an odd look, a mix of understanding and puzzlement. "You don't get it. You were there all along."
:: ::
I was trying to find a comfortable stance with the gun up on my shoulder, trying to look everywhere at once, scared spitless that maybe I'd messed up the salt lines or the iron - thinking to myself, Please, dude, don't let me have messed it up too badly, don't let me have missed something important you wrote. I didn't want my mom to panic though. For one, she's my mom, and for two, I was doing enough of that for the both of us.
"Mom, look at me. Look at me." I met her eyes a lot more calmly than I felt. "There's a bag behind the bookshelf. Get it, it's got salt in it. The fireplace poker is made of iron, get that too. Make a circle of salt on the floor and we'll both get in the middle of it."
"Ben, I don't-"
"Please, Mom."
She was scared, but she did it. We both stood in that circle, me damn near peeing my pants and holding the gun all wrong and waiting for the worst. They stayed outside though. Never moved. I must have done something right.
It couldn't have been more than three or four hours later, though it felt like forever, when there was a huge explosion down the road. The blast rattled the windows and the fireball lit the night sky in orange and red. The salt and iron must have held, but Mom went over our circle again with the bag. The men outside the window left, and I saw others on the lawn. I can only guess they'd all been around the house where we couldn't see. But they left. We stayed in that circle all night anyways. Mom finally fell asleep curled up on the floor near dawn; I didn't move until it was full morning and I could see people driving down the road, just as if nothing had happened.
The news said it was a gas explosion at the school. They didn't really say what a bunch of my classmates were doing inside at night, in the summer. Sort of implied it was a prank gone wrong, incoming seniors, high spirits, and left it at that.
Mom asked me just once, while we were sweeping up salt the next afternoon. I told her what I knew about demons and salt and iron, and I told her about the demon in the parking lot. She sat down on the couch heavily and looked like she wanted to cry, but she didn't. Mom's a lot braver than she looks. She pulled me down next to her, which was as close as she could get to having me in her lap, and hugged me tight and said she was proud of me. It was embarrassing and sort of awesome.
I wrote you a note afterward. You saved us. Thanks. I stuck it in the journal between the pages of that book you'd scribbled on. All in all, it was the best I could do.
I looked into the explosion during the funerals. Eric's dad said he'd checked on him before going to bed around midnight, and Eric had been sound asleep. Following up on this, I went into Eric's room - told his dad I just wanted some time alone to remember him. The window was up and I found powder on the sill. Smelled like rotten eggs.
Hannah McGretty, who I dated for about a minute my freshman year, was pretty much the same story. Becky Simpson was off work at eleven from her job at the bowling alley and never made it home. Her dad was on his way to go find her.
All of them were taken a couple hours after I'd gotten home, as best I could figure. My gut said this meant they were after me and only took people I knew after I'd gotten away. That was kind of narcissistic even for a teenager, so I assumed it was wrong.
About a week later, I was back at work. Mom wasn't happy about it; she wanted to move out of town entirely. I pointed out her job, and that our house was proven safe. Looking back, Mom was right and I was stupid. We should have hauled ass, but then I'd think about leaving behind that symbol carved into the garage door and I couldn't do it. It was just one link into the only man who'd ever tried to protect me, but it felt too much like driving away from the only father figure I'd ever known.
Yeah, lame. I buy the drinks, you shut your piehole.
Anyway. Back at work. So it's a week later and this guy comes in. Tall guy. Really tall. Beat all to hell, but not recently. The bruises have gone all green and yellow, which means they've been healing, and he's got a nasty cut over his eye that's pretty well scabbed over. Like that. He just wants a soda and he's looking at me while I get it. Serious, like, and… I don’t know, upset. Almost got the feeling he was going to start crying. I hand him his soda while keeping my other hand in my pocket on a knife.
"Can you do something for me?" he asked.
"Listen, dude, I'm flattered but I'm not interested. Health spa's down the road on your left."
He laughed then, and the feeling that he was going to full-on bawl any second eased up. Or maybe more like he was going to bawl anyway, but he'd be laughing at the same time. Whichever. I don't spend a lot of time analyzing other guy's feelings.
"Don't ever forget the name 'Dean'. Just do that for me, okay, kid?"
It was a few minutes before that sank in. I ran out into the parking lot but he'd already left. I did fix the note I'd left you in my journal. Now it said, Thanks, Dean.
:: ::
Ben swirled the last of the whiskey in the bottle. Enough for two more glasses, so he topped up their drinks. Dean accepted this and fell back to examining Ben, who bore it a little nervously.
Dean pointed with his glass. "Where'd you get that scar by your eye?"
"Werewolf. Gulfport, Mississippi."
Dean nodded at a rip in Ben's jacket. Ben answered promptly, "Black dog, two weeks ago. Klamath Falls, Oregon. Been meaning to get it fixed."
"Ever been possessed?"
"No, sir." Ben pulled up his sleeve to show off a tattoo on his bicep. "Read it in a book, about two brothers named Sam and Dean."
"One of these days, Chuck and I are going to have a man-to-man talk about that."
Clarity comes in little moments, and Dean was having one of them now. Ben's tale was told; the boy and the bartender waited expectantly for him to fill in the missing pieces on his own.
"I'm dead, aren't I." It wasn't a question.
"Yes, sir. You died in an explosion the summer before my senior year."
"Crap. I knew I'd been at this bar too long. Why didn't Sam salt and burn the corpse?"
"He did. Unfortunately, you've sort of left remains pretty much throughout the whole country."
The barman pointed at a spot on the wall near the jukebox. A brown stain could just be made out.
"Oh, come on, Charlie! You know better," Dean objected.
The barman shrugged. "It'd just mean you'd go somewhere else if I cleaned it up. Hell, Dean, how many places you bled in your time? You liked it here and you were good for business."
"A haunted bar for hunters. I'm haunting a bar for hunters. Is this Chuck's idea of funny?"
Charlie took his chin from his hands and used a rag to wipe down the bar, more to have something to look at besides Dean than from a sudden desire for cleanliness in his bar. "You were no trouble. So long as the beer was cold, the music loud and you had a pretty girl to wink at, you were never any trouble. I certainly didn't care. Hunters detour for hours to hear you talk. Dean Winchester. I dunno, I guess everyone thought you'd earned a good long vacation."
"Leave the lingering spirit alone as long as he's happy? Great plan. Can't possibly see how it could go wrong."
Charlie gave a dispirited nod. "Yeah. That's why I asked Ben here to come in."
Dean swirled his drink as if he could read the answer to everything in the amber depths, then took a swallow. Ben heard all the things he was not saying. You can't follow someone so closely for so long without picking up a lot. "Sam's outside. He's got the Impala with him. He wanted to be here, but he said it had to be me. I've looked for you for so long, wanted to talk to you, really talk. And … you know…"
Ben didn't finish. He didn't have to. Neither man needed a moment of touching sincerity, complete with therapeutic tears and a group hug, to understand a simple, basic truth of Dean's life. He'd spent his life doing anything for Sam, except letting him go. "Well, let's finish our drinks first and you can fill me in. How's your mom?"
Ben hesitated. "She died last year. She said to tell you, if I ever caught up with you, that it's never too late to have a beer and catch up on all the memories you took, and that you kind of owe her that."
"Makes having been at a bar for the last ten years even more awkward. And Sam?"
"Married a hunter. She kicked his ass for walking in on her hunt, he asked to buy her a drink to make up for it. Kids. They hunt, and in between he writes books on lore. He's doing okay."
"Bobby?"
"Died five years ago. Said you had no reason to bitch, as you didn't have a wife waiting who remembered you being twenty years younger and forty pounds lighter."
Dean worked on his drink a little more, and it did not escape his notice that it was almost gone. "How about you, Ben? You seem suspiciously well-adjusted."
Ben smiled easily and tossed back the rest of his drink. "I killed the thing that got Eric. You know how many people I've saved this year? I've been doing this since I graduated. Add all that up." He toyed with his empty glass a moment and set it down on the table to pull a scrap of old paper out of his pocket. "Following you, learning from you - you've made me who I am. You and Mom. Here. Been wanting to give you this for years."
You saved us. Thanks, Dean.
:: ::
Dean stepped outside the bar and breathed in the air. It was so late at night that it was early morning. And there was his baby, black and sleek, with Sammy leaning up against her.
"You look like shit. The years were not kind, man."
Sam swiped at his eyes with his jacket sleeve. "First time we see each other in more than ten years, and that's what you've got to say? Jerk."
"Bitch."
"Dick."
"Baby. No emo moments, all right?" Dean walked to the driver's side and paused. "Dammit. I'm going to have to let you drive, aren't I?"
The car pulled out of the parking lot and Dean looked back at Charlie and Ben. The boy was holding Dean's old shotgun, and the barman was wiping his eyes with his cleaning rag.
"I think I might have actually done something right, Sammy." The music sank into Dean's awareness and he stared at the radio. "What the hell, Sam. Bon Jovi? Change that shit."
"Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole."
"You've been waiting how many years to say that? Savor it while it lasts. Asshole." Dean rubbed at the stubble on his chin, a question nagging at his mind. "Tell me something, Sam. You never once tried to bring me back?"
"Are you kidding?" Sam almost laughed and then he sobered up. Sometimes Dean really needed to hear the obvious. "God came down from His mountain and yea verily, He spake unto the multitudes: 'Leave him alone. Dean's done enough - he makes his own choices now.'"
"Since when do you listen to God?"
"Never. Drove myself insane trying to whore my soul out to anyone who wanted it, even went looking for a hoodoo doctor to see if you could be a revenant. God finally told me that it wasn't happening, and I could either accept that and go live my life or die within a year from something sexually embarrassing. I was considering the sexually embarrassing option when I got a right-hook from an Italian girl half my size." Sam flipped through the collection of cassettes he kept in the middle of the seat. "Led Zeppelin IV, side one. Quit complaining."
They rode in comfortable silence as the miles fell away behind them. Sam stole a glance at the first rays of the rising sun hitting his brother's face while Dean tapped out air drums on the dashboard. He smiled and turned his eyes back to the road. The next time he looked over, Dean was gone.
Rating: R
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Gen
Characters: Dean, Adult!Ben, Lisa, Sam, OMC
Wordcount: 6030
Warnings: Violence, language, character death
Disclaimer: Kripke has pretty toys and was nice enough to let me play with them. Not mine, not mine, not mine.
Summary: Ben convinces Dean he didn't need to be perfect. It was enough that he was Dean.
A/N: Written to fill a wish by mobiusklein at spn_rambleon, An adult Ben finally catches up with Dean but not to yell at him but to say that he understands and that he and his mom are A-OK. Gen or het. Also fills "group support" on my hc_bingo card. Multifill FTW. Title is taken from a Reba McEntire song of the same name.
Mad love to my girl, brandythebeta, who found a decent fic buried under a thousand words of poorly-written extraneous crap.
This is the end of the story. The reader may feel as if this is a cheap way to begin, but this isn't about the reader. Besides, a fan who thinks the worst that can happen is for the story to end has not been paying attention.
There were many places this story could have finished. A funeral pyre in South Dakota would have been a nice choice, and the author could have titled it something tasteless, like "Blaze of Glory". Dean would have hated that, not so much for the overwrought imagery but for using Bon Jovi as his last impression here on earth.
Another option was having the boys drive the Impala off into the sunset. Not a bad choice at all, actually. Satisfying to the readers, and Dean has this whole not-so-secret inner cowboy fetish which makes it both believable and as close to a happy ending as most people can picture. Sam wouldn't have liked it much though. He is too practical to think the story really ends there, and in this case he’s right.
So. Do you want to see where the story really ends? Then read on.
There's a bar off I-170, and it's so in the middle of no where that the directions say to take a left where the old Yates barn used to be. It's shabby enough to be comfortable and it hasn't been painted since the Carter administration, but it's got the owner behind the bar, the best jukebox in two hundred miles and the beer is as cold as the devil's heart. A sleek car, old and well-cared for, pulled into the dirt parking lot. There ought to be more cars here even at this time of night, and he checked the address written on a scrap of paper just to be sure. Yep. Right place.
Dean looked up from his cards when the door opened, checked the new guy out and dismissed him in a glance. Just as he was about to call, he looked back with the nagging feeling that the guy looked… familiar. Or as if he ought to be familiar. Young, maybe a few years younger than Dean himself, dark hair, dark eyes, pale freckled face. If clothes were a fashion statement, his would be saying 'redneck hard at work'; the shotgun loosely held under one elbow was merely an exclamation point. Since this was a hunter's bar, he fit right in.
Dean went back to his game. "I call. Let's get this over with, Charlie. I've got three ladies and you've got a customer."
The bartender scowled at the hand Dean threw onto the table. "Aw, shit," he muttered, pushing his chair back. "I nearly had you that time."
"You keep telling yourself that, sweet cheeks. Another beer while you're up."
The bartender took his place behind the bar and nodded at the newcomer while cracking open another beer. The boy slid a piece of paper across the scarred wooden counter. The barman nearly dropped the bottle, and set it on the counter so that he could better hold the paper between trembling fingers. Then he nodded.
"What'll it be?"
"Bottle of Jack, two glasses."
The barman produced these items, and after a long moment looked up at the boy. His grizzled face was almost tender. "Take care of him, kid. Break it gentle, like. He, uh, he means a lot to us."
Unless the bartender was using the royal pronoun, which the kid doubted, it seemed out of place in the dead space filled only by the sound of Dean shuffling cards. The barman caught his look around the bar, empty expect for the three of them, and spoke gruffly. "Everybody cleared out once I put out the word tonight's the night. They couldn't watch something like this. It'll just be me."
The kid hesitated. "You're sure? I could always leave. No harm, no foul."
"No. He deserves better. Someone needs to send the poor guy on."
The kid leaned forward, curiosity getting the better of him. "One thing. How can he drink?"
"No idea. Maybe he's just that damned stubborn."
The first thing the kid did was to head for the jukebox. He fed twenty dollars into it, and took his time picking his selections. Ozzy, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Deep Purple, Styx… all the greats. He went back to the bar, fetched the bottle and glasses, and only then did he approach Dean.
"Hey," he said, slightly nervous. Dean examined him with a cool look. Okay, maybe more than slightly. Hell, this was Dean Winchester. Friend and foe to the angels themselves, made numerous deals with demons and lived to tell the tale, averted the apocalypse. Any hunter would be nervous. The kid cleared his throat and, to keep his hands busy, opened the bottle and poured them both a measure.
"I don't do autographs, buddy."
The kid ignored this and slid the other glass closer to Dean. He picked his up and thought a moment. "To family."
Dean reached out and picked his glass up. "Yeah. To family."
They tossed back half of the whiskey with a quick movement and a deep breath, in identical gestures. The kid noticed this, and couldn't decide if it was disturbing or cool.
Dean rocked back lazily in his chair, sipped at his drink. The kid took a deep breath and stepped over the edge. "I've been looking for you a long time. My name's Ben."
The chair's legs thudded onto the wooden floor. This part, at least, Ben had anticipated, and he reached into his jacket pocket for an envelope. "Who put you up to this, kid? Was it that chick from Omaha?" Dean asked as Ben flipped through a pile of photos. "Tell her for me, it isn't funny. No means no, and if she can"t-"
Ben set a photo on the table. "This is me and Mom, high school graduation, about ten years ago. Well… bit more than that."
Dean picked the photo up with an air that was two parts skepticism to one part anger. After a moment, he said, "All right. You have my attention. Now talk."
:: ::
I don't remember you. Let's get that settled right now. I mean, there are times when I think, maybe… but no. Not really. And I've been looking for you for so long now that I don't know whether it's memory or just my imagination.
Even that day in the hospital, when you said you'd caused the wreck, I can see you standing there just at the door of my Mom's room, but it was just some guy. It's the one memory that I know, for sure, is you, but you were just some guy. Hell, does that make any sense? Probably not.
I'm not sure who you got to wipe our memories, just that he can't have been human. Don't get me wrong, he did good work. He left a few things out on the job, though, things a human would have thought of.
We had so much salt in the house. Mom found a shotgun in the closet and freaked out. It wasn't her gun, no one she knew had guns, so why was it there? She put it in the trash outside, and I went out and got it after she went to sleep that night. I still don't know why I did that.
Things started to settle down and feel normal after a couple weeks. I went back to school, Mom went back to work. Life went on, only this time I had a shotgun underneath my mattress. There's a bonus for you: I started making my own bed finally, so Mom wouldn't find it.
Have you ever gotten that, "and this is where I came in" feeling? For me, it wasn't Mom's boyfriend being dead or even the shotgun. I went over to a buddy's house - Eric, I don't know if you remember him. Anyway, it was raining like hell and the plan was to play video games, but we were kind of bored with all his games. So we were sort of tooling around and there's this one game, Dance Central, where you have to dance along with the game and right in the middle of the song it tells you to freestyle while it takes pictures. Kind of lame, but funny. And we're looking through all the pictures of us doing our most dorky moves or, worse, trying to be cool, and having a good laugh at what idiots we looked like, and then there's this guy in the pictures. Like, an old guy. Old enough to be dating my Mom, say.
Yeah, you see where this is going. Bet you forgot that game.
It should have been creepy as hell. Here's this guy, about our parents' age, and neither of us know who he is and he's laying down his best moves and being a raging dork just like one of us kids. Being sort of cool. You could see us trying to copy him, or cracking up on the floor at the things he was doing.
It was only a few pictures. Maybe five. Eric and I both agreed it was probably just some pizza dude, but I uploaded the pictures to my computer before it occurred to him to delete them. I may have been a kid, but I wasn't a stupid kid. No pizza guy would take time out to joke around with me like that.
Mom went all out the Christmas I was fifteen, but she does that every year. Do you remember? Tree, presents, stockings - hell, everyone does those. Mom makes her own eggnog, and it's got a kick like a Dallas cheerleader. Mom goes caroling. She makes sappy look cute. And the day after Christmas she puts on her Elvis Christmas CD and goes through the house humming off-key, not to take down the decorations - those stay up until New Years - but to sort through everything useful we own and give what we don't want or use to charity. My job was to mostly stay out of her way and not let her catch me in the eggnog.
I was way too old to watch Rudolph for the three hundredth time and you can guess what Mom would be like if I'd asked to go to a friend's house on what she considered Day Two of Christmas. She started getting this itchy look in her eye, like I was about three minutes from being given something constructive to do, so I sat down in front of her bookshelf and acted fascinated at the prospect of broadening my horizons. I have no idea why she bought it, Mom reads all girly stuff like self-help and healthy cookbooks and romance so it was a pretty lame effort on my part. But she went off to declare her seasonal war on the hall closet, and this one book caught my eye. I don't remember the title or the author but there was this hot chick in leather on the cover, brandishing a knife. It was about this woman who fights vampires and werewolves while finding true love and realizing her own worth as a person, which is still way girly but hey… hot chick on the cover.
I flipped open the first couple of pages and right there on the title page someone had written, Dude, seriously? Forget that my mom doesn't say 'dude', it wasn't even close to her handwriting. Sharp, all capital letters, masculine. I flipped the pages real quick and saw there were more, same handwriting.
I went through that book over and over, until it got so I had every scribble in the margin memorized and could go straight to it automatically. There weren't all that many, but buried in with the You've got to be kidding me and CRAP with big arrows drawn toward the offending parts were other things. Whoever it was being so critical of this book didn't object that the book was stupid - which it sort of was - but that it had gotten things wrong.
In one scene halfway through, the protagonist, Lainesse Devereaux, fights off a vengeful ghost with holy water and prayer. Scratched in the margins so emphatically that you could see the impression on the next pages were two words: SALT. Morons.
I thought it then and you’re thinking it now… ah ha. You remember all that salt in the house when we got home from the car wreck? So did I.
:: ::
Ben noticed that their glasses were empty and he refilled them. Dean tipped his drink at him in thanks and sipped slowly, thinking.
"So you're telling me that you found me with nothing but a photo, salt, a shotgun and a book I'd written in?" He chuckled in spite of himself. "Not bad, kid. Not too bad at all."
Ben flushed a little and took a drink quickly, as if he felt blushing weren't something grown men were supposed to do. "Not exactly. That just sort of put me on the trail."
:: ::
I took that book with me everywhere. The cover fell off pretty quick, since it was only a paperback. When that happened I took out all the pages that you'd written on, laminated them and stuck them in a three-ring binder. My first hunter's journal.
It's funny, but I thought at the time I was a walking encyclopedia of lore. Teenagers think they know everything. But no matter how much I thought I knew, I kept finding out more. There was this old book I found at a bookshop. Not one of these chain megastore deals, this place only sold literature and I think the most recent book they had was an autographed copy of The Fountainhead. I mowed lawns all summer to buy that book. It had all this stuff about demons in it, and at the time I thought it had to be a bunch of crap. I mean, ghosts, sure, maybe even vampires, but demons? It had a drawing of a symbol said to repel demons from buildings, or trap them. It looked a little familiar.
I went out to the garage and there, right over the door where you'd have to look up to see it, was the same symbol carved into the frame. I still wasn't sure who you were, but it felt like you were standing right there with me, saying, Good eye, kid.
It felt good.
You know what else felt good? That symbol was proof you were watching out for us.
Right after that I waited for a time when Mom wasn't in the house and I pulled out that shotgun from under my bed and cracked it open. It was loaded, all right, but the rounds were filled with salt. Finding that, right there, was as good as feeling your hand clap me on the shoulder.
Looking at those rounds full of salt, I knew I hadn't been serious about supernatural stuff. Not really. I just read a lot. I hadn't done anything to protect the house or Mom - you had.
:: ::
If there was anything to be said about forty years in hell and four rounds with a hooker from Texas, it was that neither had left Dean with any delusions. Hero-worship from civilians he could understand. Hunters ought to know that sometimes you just got lucky. "You got all this from salt rounds and a devil's trap?" he asked with a cynical quirk to his lips.
"Sure, I'm just being a starry-eyed kid. You must've forgot the shotgun was in the closet. Someone else doodled something cool in the door above the garage." Dean opened his mouth and shut it again, and Ben's eyes crinkled with humor. "Yeah, dude, that totally makes so much more sense than my version."
:: ::
I'd like to say that was the day I decided to grow up. It isn't. I was in high school, and when you're taking notes in your biology class it's a little hard to convince yourself werewolves exist. I had friends, football, Mom on my case about the SATs. Girls. Video games. Girls.
I fell in love for the first time. She was beautiful. Still is. Spotted her on the way home from my job at a burger joint, and I knew I had to have her. '69 Dodge Charger, 8-cylinder, hemi under the hood, reinforced suspension, painted black, custom interior. Admit it, you're jealous. Just a little. Hell no, you can't take her for a spin. That's my girl you're talking about. Tell you what, we'll trade keys and… That's what I thought.
It wasn't just girls, cars and homework though. I didn't grow up, but I made a better effort. Mom would have freaked if she’d found that gun or heard I'd been handling one, so I still kept that as well-hidden as I could, but I picked up one hell of a knife collection. Brass, silver, iron, blessed, even practiced with throwing knives and got to where I could hit a target if it held still exactly ten feet away. I hid salt around the house mostly, and I buried salt lines around the house. Got better at Latin. Reinforced the doorways and window frames with iron and told Mom I just wanted to try my hand at carpentry. Picking up where you left off.
Something happened, that summer before my senior year. I still don't have any idea exactly what, but I like to think I played my part and I played it well. For some punk kid, that is.
It was muggy as hell that summer. Thunderstorms all over the place, lightning even struck some cows out standing in fields. So much for being the teenager who knew everything.
I had just gotten off work that night. The parking lot was all dark and empty except for my car, because I'd closed the place up that night. I threw my backpack into the back seat and heard footsteps. Maybe it was instinct. All those years listening to you. I reached in like I had forgotten my keys in my bag and slipped an iron knife down the front of my pants, my hands shaking so bad I'm lucky I didn't cut something important.
"Hey, kid, you got a light?"
I'm still hanging into the car through the driver's window and I take a quick look out the back of the car at this guy walking up and… his eyes, man. His eyes were all wrong.
"Sure, dude. One sec."
I waited until he was close enough, taking that time to actually get my damned keys out and into my other hand, and then I stood, drew, and nailed him in the gut. He fell, and I didn't stick around to see if iron really worked. I lit out of there like I'd just stolen Boss Hogg's hat, tires peeling and everything, and didn't stop for anything until I got home, not even red lights. No one stopped me. I never saw another car, and considering it wasn't that late the empty roads creeped me right the hell out.
I called Mom on the way and told her not to answer the door or go anywhere until I got there. She must have listened, because she was standing in the living room when I pulled up. I killed the engine and bolted for the house, not even shutting the car door. Hell, I could jump-start her tomorrow, once I'd figured out what the hell was going on.
"Ben, what's wrong?"
I splashed some holy water at her, which annoyed her a bit but nothing else. You should have seen the look on her face when I got the shotgun from under my bed, though. I'd made up a few more salt rounds myself, though I wasn't even sure they'd fire. I grabbed them too and kicked myself for not having taken the gun more seriously before then. You'd left that gun for a reason, and I hadn't listened. I went around the house shutting off all the lights. Mom followed me, giving me a verbal reaming the likes of which I had never had before or since. I ignored her. My head was too full of all the things you must have been thinking for me not listening about the shotgun.
My bright idea was to go to the big living room window and wait in the dark, the better to see anything coming up on the house. I stopped dead in my tracks as soon as I entered the living room. Didn't need to go looking for them. Three men were standing just outside the window, just outside the salt line. I wished I'd put the salt line further out from the house.
"Benjamin Isaac Braeden, you put that gun down right this instant and look at me when I'm-"
"Mom! Please, be quiet!"
She looked past me, out the window, and went quiet, like a mouse finally spotting the snake. "I'm calling the police."
I didn't bother to argue. I was busy trying to figure out how to chamber a round, and I figured I knew what she was going to say next.
"Line's dead. Ben, the line's dead."
Knew it.
:: ::
Dean rubbed slowly at his face with both hands. It was all coming back to him now, down through the years, burning through the alcohol and the shame. He'd been there, that summer. Driven like a bat out of hell, engine roaring through the sticky green haze of the summer countryside. Sam filling salt rounds in the seat next to him, yelling at him to slow down. He'd gotten there too late anyway. Not by more than an hour or so, but too late. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
The images of that summer night, never all that vivid through the panic, faded into random collections of fire, blood, black eyes. Meg, laughing and laughing.
"I'm sorry, Ben. I should have been there," he said in a voice like velvet scraping over gravel.
Ben gave him an odd look, a mix of understanding and puzzlement. "You don't get it. You were there all along."
:: ::
I was trying to find a comfortable stance with the gun up on my shoulder, trying to look everywhere at once, scared spitless that maybe I'd messed up the salt lines or the iron - thinking to myself, Please, dude, don't let me have messed it up too badly, don't let me have missed something important you wrote. I didn't want my mom to panic though. For one, she's my mom, and for two, I was doing enough of that for the both of us.
"Mom, look at me. Look at me." I met her eyes a lot more calmly than I felt. "There's a bag behind the bookshelf. Get it, it's got salt in it. The fireplace poker is made of iron, get that too. Make a circle of salt on the floor and we'll both get in the middle of it."
"Ben, I don't-"
"Please, Mom."
She was scared, but she did it. We both stood in that circle, me damn near peeing my pants and holding the gun all wrong and waiting for the worst. They stayed outside though. Never moved. I must have done something right.
It couldn't have been more than three or four hours later, though it felt like forever, when there was a huge explosion down the road. The blast rattled the windows and the fireball lit the night sky in orange and red. The salt and iron must have held, but Mom went over our circle again with the bag. The men outside the window left, and I saw others on the lawn. I can only guess they'd all been around the house where we couldn't see. But they left. We stayed in that circle all night anyways. Mom finally fell asleep curled up on the floor near dawn; I didn't move until it was full morning and I could see people driving down the road, just as if nothing had happened.
The news said it was a gas explosion at the school. They didn't really say what a bunch of my classmates were doing inside at night, in the summer. Sort of implied it was a prank gone wrong, incoming seniors, high spirits, and left it at that.
Mom asked me just once, while we were sweeping up salt the next afternoon. I told her what I knew about demons and salt and iron, and I told her about the demon in the parking lot. She sat down on the couch heavily and looked like she wanted to cry, but she didn't. Mom's a lot braver than she looks. She pulled me down next to her, which was as close as she could get to having me in her lap, and hugged me tight and said she was proud of me. It was embarrassing and sort of awesome.
I wrote you a note afterward. You saved us. Thanks. I stuck it in the journal between the pages of that book you'd scribbled on. All in all, it was the best I could do.
I looked into the explosion during the funerals. Eric's dad said he'd checked on him before going to bed around midnight, and Eric had been sound asleep. Following up on this, I went into Eric's room - told his dad I just wanted some time alone to remember him. The window was up and I found powder on the sill. Smelled like rotten eggs.
Hannah McGretty, who I dated for about a minute my freshman year, was pretty much the same story. Becky Simpson was off work at eleven from her job at the bowling alley and never made it home. Her dad was on his way to go find her.
All of them were taken a couple hours after I'd gotten home, as best I could figure. My gut said this meant they were after me and only took people I knew after I'd gotten away. That was kind of narcissistic even for a teenager, so I assumed it was wrong.
About a week later, I was back at work. Mom wasn't happy about it; she wanted to move out of town entirely. I pointed out her job, and that our house was proven safe. Looking back, Mom was right and I was stupid. We should have hauled ass, but then I'd think about leaving behind that symbol carved into the garage door and I couldn't do it. It was just one link into the only man who'd ever tried to protect me, but it felt too much like driving away from the only father figure I'd ever known.
Yeah, lame. I buy the drinks, you shut your piehole.
Anyway. Back at work. So it's a week later and this guy comes in. Tall guy. Really tall. Beat all to hell, but not recently. The bruises have gone all green and yellow, which means they've been healing, and he's got a nasty cut over his eye that's pretty well scabbed over. Like that. He just wants a soda and he's looking at me while I get it. Serious, like, and… I don’t know, upset. Almost got the feeling he was going to start crying. I hand him his soda while keeping my other hand in my pocket on a knife.
"Can you do something for me?" he asked.
"Listen, dude, I'm flattered but I'm not interested. Health spa's down the road on your left."
He laughed then, and the feeling that he was going to full-on bawl any second eased up. Or maybe more like he was going to bawl anyway, but he'd be laughing at the same time. Whichever. I don't spend a lot of time analyzing other guy's feelings.
"Don't ever forget the name 'Dean'. Just do that for me, okay, kid?"
It was a few minutes before that sank in. I ran out into the parking lot but he'd already left. I did fix the note I'd left you in my journal. Now it said, Thanks, Dean.
:: ::
Ben swirled the last of the whiskey in the bottle. Enough for two more glasses, so he topped up their drinks. Dean accepted this and fell back to examining Ben, who bore it a little nervously.
Dean pointed with his glass. "Where'd you get that scar by your eye?"
"Werewolf. Gulfport, Mississippi."
Dean nodded at a rip in Ben's jacket. Ben answered promptly, "Black dog, two weeks ago. Klamath Falls, Oregon. Been meaning to get it fixed."
"Ever been possessed?"
"No, sir." Ben pulled up his sleeve to show off a tattoo on his bicep. "Read it in a book, about two brothers named Sam and Dean."
"One of these days, Chuck and I are going to have a man-to-man talk about that."
Clarity comes in little moments, and Dean was having one of them now. Ben's tale was told; the boy and the bartender waited expectantly for him to fill in the missing pieces on his own.
"I'm dead, aren't I." It wasn't a question.
"Yes, sir. You died in an explosion the summer before my senior year."
"Crap. I knew I'd been at this bar too long. Why didn't Sam salt and burn the corpse?"
"He did. Unfortunately, you've sort of left remains pretty much throughout the whole country."
The barman pointed at a spot on the wall near the jukebox. A brown stain could just be made out.
"Oh, come on, Charlie! You know better," Dean objected.
The barman shrugged. "It'd just mean you'd go somewhere else if I cleaned it up. Hell, Dean, how many places you bled in your time? You liked it here and you were good for business."
"A haunted bar for hunters. I'm haunting a bar for hunters. Is this Chuck's idea of funny?"
Charlie took his chin from his hands and used a rag to wipe down the bar, more to have something to look at besides Dean than from a sudden desire for cleanliness in his bar. "You were no trouble. So long as the beer was cold, the music loud and you had a pretty girl to wink at, you were never any trouble. I certainly didn't care. Hunters detour for hours to hear you talk. Dean Winchester. I dunno, I guess everyone thought you'd earned a good long vacation."
"Leave the lingering spirit alone as long as he's happy? Great plan. Can't possibly see how it could go wrong."
Charlie gave a dispirited nod. "Yeah. That's why I asked Ben here to come in."
Dean swirled his drink as if he could read the answer to everything in the amber depths, then took a swallow. Ben heard all the things he was not saying. You can't follow someone so closely for so long without picking up a lot. "Sam's outside. He's got the Impala with him. He wanted to be here, but he said it had to be me. I've looked for you for so long, wanted to talk to you, really talk. And … you know…"
Ben didn't finish. He didn't have to. Neither man needed a moment of touching sincerity, complete with therapeutic tears and a group hug, to understand a simple, basic truth of Dean's life. He'd spent his life doing anything for Sam, except letting him go. "Well, let's finish our drinks first and you can fill me in. How's your mom?"
Ben hesitated. "She died last year. She said to tell you, if I ever caught up with you, that it's never too late to have a beer and catch up on all the memories you took, and that you kind of owe her that."
"Makes having been at a bar for the last ten years even more awkward. And Sam?"
"Married a hunter. She kicked his ass for walking in on her hunt, he asked to buy her a drink to make up for it. Kids. They hunt, and in between he writes books on lore. He's doing okay."
"Bobby?"
"Died five years ago. Said you had no reason to bitch, as you didn't have a wife waiting who remembered you being twenty years younger and forty pounds lighter."
Dean worked on his drink a little more, and it did not escape his notice that it was almost gone. "How about you, Ben? You seem suspiciously well-adjusted."
Ben smiled easily and tossed back the rest of his drink. "I killed the thing that got Eric. You know how many people I've saved this year? I've been doing this since I graduated. Add all that up." He toyed with his empty glass a moment and set it down on the table to pull a scrap of old paper out of his pocket. "Following you, learning from you - you've made me who I am. You and Mom. Here. Been wanting to give you this for years."
You saved us. Thanks, Dean.
:: ::
Dean stepped outside the bar and breathed in the air. It was so late at night that it was early morning. And there was his baby, black and sleek, with Sammy leaning up against her.
"You look like shit. The years were not kind, man."
Sam swiped at his eyes with his jacket sleeve. "First time we see each other in more than ten years, and that's what you've got to say? Jerk."
"Bitch."
"Dick."
"Baby. No emo moments, all right?" Dean walked to the driver's side and paused. "Dammit. I'm going to have to let you drive, aren't I?"
The car pulled out of the parking lot and Dean looked back at Charlie and Ben. The boy was holding Dean's old shotgun, and the barman was wiping his eyes with his cleaning rag.
"I think I might have actually done something right, Sammy." The music sank into Dean's awareness and he stared at the radio. "What the hell, Sam. Bon Jovi? Change that shit."
"Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole."
"You've been waiting how many years to say that? Savor it while it lasts. Asshole." Dean rubbed at the stubble on his chin, a question nagging at his mind. "Tell me something, Sam. You never once tried to bring me back?"
"Are you kidding?" Sam almost laughed and then he sobered up. Sometimes Dean really needed to hear the obvious. "God came down from His mountain and yea verily, He spake unto the multitudes: 'Leave him alone. Dean's done enough - he makes his own choices now.'"
"Since when do you listen to God?"
"Never. Drove myself insane trying to whore my soul out to anyone who wanted it, even went looking for a hoodoo doctor to see if you could be a revenant. God finally told me that it wasn't happening, and I could either accept that and go live my life or die within a year from something sexually embarrassing. I was considering the sexually embarrassing option when I got a right-hook from an Italian girl half my size." Sam flipped through the collection of cassettes he kept in the middle of the seat. "Led Zeppelin IV, side one. Quit complaining."
They rode in comfortable silence as the miles fell away behind them. Sam stole a glance at the first rays of the rising sun hitting his brother's face while Dean tapped out air drums on the dashboard. He smiled and turned his eyes back to the road. The next time he looked over, Dean was gone.