Fic: Life on Earth - Part 9/? [SPN]
TITLE: "Life on Earth" - Part 9/?
AUTHOR: Nansense
RATING: This part R for swearing and adult themes
PAIRINGS: Dean/Castiel, Dean/Lisa
SPOILERS: All of Season 5, and Season 6... kinda?
SUMMARY: With Lucifer dead, Sam in the ground and the world effectively saved, Dean has forsaken hunting and everyone associated with it to settle into a life of domestic bliss with Lisa and her son, Ben. The only ghosts left for Dean to lay to rest are his own, but they are plenteous indeed, and some of them don't go down without a fight.
DISCLAIMER: Supernatural and all associated content is, sadly, owned by others much more fortunate and creative than I. Up yours, Kripke.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: So, there's this Jeff Buckley song, "I Know We Could Be So Happy, Baby (If We Wanted to Be)" that has been my inspiration for a lot of this story--especially the line, "We were two cripples dancing". In a lot of SPN fic, Cas is frequently portrayed as the sage, wise one to Dean's emotional cripple (for the record, I actually cringe at that word, but I'm kind of quoting Jeff, here), but I actually hold tight to the idea that they would probably be evenly-matched in their pig-headedness and lack of experience dealing with emotional issues (especially Cas). That seems like far more of a good time to me, anyway. So if my interpretation of Cas seems to fly in the face of some of the other fic out there, that's why. In the meantime, I wouldn't discourage listening to that song while reading this.
Life on Earth (Pt. 9/?) by Nansense
I am not a thief.
If the words are a barb, Dean spends an endless stretch of days swimming around with it caught in his lip, hooked, though not marked for life because that was already true before. He misses work, he stops bothering with his morning runs and enjoys feeling his body go to shit like it’s his penance, a new brand of hair shirt. He certainly doesn’t let himself near the places where he might have to socialize with actual people, and even his interactions with Lisa and Ben shrivel like leather in the sun. No shrink is required to tell him that he’s in a funk, just one Manhattan and a box of tissues away from a Carrie fucking Bradshaw moment. Whereas when Cas first swept back into town Dean resisted the impulse to let his life grind to a halt, he now gives in to the urge, prepared to hole up, indefinitely if necessary, in the basement of Lisa’s house. While he might have preferred an attic for its symbolic appropriateness, the basement is dark and quiet and cool, mere steps away from the beer fridge besides. There is only so much he’s got to work with; it’s either this or he leaves altogether, gets back on the road and drives towards he knows not what. Cas, maybe. If Cas were around.
Dean doesn’t think that he has fucked off permanently-although why he’d assume such a thing now, when Cas has nothing if not a legitimate reason to make himself scarce-but whether from embarrassment or to avoid further temptation, he resists any of Dean’s attempts to summon him back. He leaves long, rambling messages on Castiel’s old mobile until the mailbox is full, says his name until the syllables run together and begin to sound like something new altogether. Once or twice, Dean even prays, knowing for sure this time that his answer will be more silence. There are still, of course, dreams, as beautiful and explosive as ever, and some nights Dean wakes up alone and so excruciatingly hard that he hears himself saying Cas before the sound has passed his lips. The hand he wraps around himself feels good, but too big and calloused and familiar to pretend it’s anyone’s but his own. He doesn’t wonder whether the dreams are divine visitation-they’re not. Even his most erotic imaginings seem hollow compared to what it was like to have Cas with him in his head, hands and lips and teeth drawing pleasure out of shared consciousness.
He thinks, or assumes, that Lisa knows. Maybe not the details, because not even in Dean’s line of work is it typical to have gay crises about angels, but at the very least she probably gets the gist of it: When your significant other moves into the basement in order to take up drinking and moping full time, he’s probably on the way out. In a very un-Lisa way, she has chosen not to confront him about it, but made it perfectly clear that he has no place in her family until he’s willing to have a conversation like an adult. Fair point, that. As far as Dean is concerned, it’s an overly-generous move, but the one thing he is not is in a position to argue. Nor is he in a position to decide anything.
Except for weekends, Dean usually creeps upstairs after Lisa has gone to work and Ben, to school. He showers, jerks off, pretends to think about shaving or combing his hair into some semblance of non-hobo, and considers himself lucky if whatever breakfast he drums up consists of more than one food group, and that food group isn’t alcohol. Usually, though sometimes not until after it’s too late, Dean catches himself tiptoeing around as he goes about his business, as though he doesn’t want to disturb the people who live here.
According to the radio, it’s a Thursday. Naked, Dean stands in front of the dresser in his old room, trying to decide whether clothes are necessary for the busy day of Cas-obsessing that lies ahead of him. One hand sifts through the drawer for a pair of clean boxers and, realizing that he’s running a bit low, it occurs to Dean that even lovesick depressives need to do laundry every so often. He was probably more responsible about keeping up with these day-to-say tasks when he was dirt poor and always on the road with Sammy. The system he has going in the basement is too simple not to be flawed: garbage in one bag, laundry in the other. He’s been stuffing the worn t-shirts and underwear away, usually conscious enough to not wear the same thing for too long of a stretch, hiding the evidence of his existence like an animal obscuring proof of where it sleeps in the forest. It’s stupid, but somehow Dean imagines that if he can just make Lisa forget that he’s even alive, the decision will be made for him.
As if.
Despite being lost in his thoughts, Dean isn’t so rusty that he doesn’t hear the faint creak of floorboards from behind him, a familiar sound whenever anyone steps into the master bedroom. That it isn’t louder tells Dean that the person in the room with him is trying not to be heard. No one speaks, and Dean doesn’t turn. Conveniently, his hand is still buried in the underwear drawer, one of several locations where he keeps a loaded gun at the ready, just in case, and also to prove that some habits die hard. He makes a grab for the gun and whirls around.
Ben inhales sharply when he finds himself staring at the business end of a loaded Glock and a very exposed Dean Winchester, but, to his credit, doesn’t panic. For several seconds Dean is too surprised to register that he should probably stop pointing the gun at his stepson, and only lowers his arm when Ben’s confused voice reconnects him with the land of the not-insane.
“Ben, what the hell?” he asks, sounding startled in spite of himself as he fumbles to exchange the gun for a pair of boxers. In two years, he and Ben have had enough accidental encounters in the bathroom that Dean isn't really embarrassed by the kid seeing his junk, but nevertheless he attempts to dress himself at a slightly increased pace than normal. “Why aren’t you at school, man?”
“The same reason you aren’t at work,” Ben snarks back, still a bit shell-shocked from being threatened with a weapon before noon. “If you get a free pass for being depressed, why can’t I?”
“You’re depressed?” Dean asks, furrowing his brow. “Since when?”
“No, dumbass,” Ben answers with a roll of the eyes. He sounds so much like Sam did at that age that Dean can’t even get after him for cussing. “You are.”
This statement makes Dean uncomfortable. Lowering his eyes, he goes about trying to find a t-shirt in the dresser so that they can either carry on or end this conversation with Dean halfway to respectable-looking-if one doesn’t count his messy hair and stubble that is approaching playoff-beard territory.
“I haven’t been feeling great,” Dean acknowledges, stumbling over to the closet for a pair of jeans. As he slides them on, wondering if it’s just his imagination that the waistband feels a bit tighter after a couple weeks’ inactivity, he has to admit that it feels pretty good to be wearing actual clothes again.
“You haven’t been feeling great?” demands Ben, stepping a little further into the bedroom. His face is expressive in a very adult way, considering that he hasn’t even lost all of his baby fat yet. “Dude, do you have any idea how messed up my mom has been lately? You’re hiding downstairs like you’re getting ready for the next world war, while she’s going completely mental-and you know she never doesn’t just tell someone off. I’m not allowed to talk to you, so I had to skip school just to tell you that you’re seriously messed up. You’re being a dick.”
Oh god, Dean hates how intelligent Ben is sometimes. “Ben, listen,” he says, for some reason putting his hands up like he’s expecting to have to fight the kid off. If Dean’s mom were still alive, he totally would have kicked the shit out of someone for treating her like how he was treating Lisa. “I’m not going to tell you that you’re too young to understand, even though you kinda are, but some stuff has been going on with me lately that’s hard to-”
“God, I don’t care!” Ben explodes. Dean catches Ben clenching his fists in a sure sign that he’s trying really hard not to start punching something. The boy’s eyes are furious green and wet with tears he’s trying to hold back, and the ache in Dean’s gut intensifies a millionfold. “Just stop hurting my mom, okay? Figure your shit out or go!”
Dean takes a step back, both mentally and literally. If he’s having surround-sound, hi-def flashbacks to almost every fight Sam had with their dad over the years, he can’t help it. The one argument Sam always came back to was that hunting-both the act and the lifestyle-was tearing their family apart, while John countered that it was Sam’s desire to leave that was causing a rift. Whether or not he realised it, Dean had promised himself he would never let that kind of thing happen, if he ever managed to settle down; so far he thinks he’s done a pretty good job of it, choosing a family over the supernatural. It’s uncanny, though, how that life manages to track him down, no matter where he is-no matter how happy or untouchable he likes to think a fresh start makes him, if there is even such a thing as fresh starts.
He says to Ben, “I really wish I could say that it was that simple, but it’s not. You know there was a whole other life before I came here, and it weren’t exactly working at McDonald’s while I saved up for college.”
“The hunting and stuff, right?” Ben asks.
He and Dean haven’t talked much about what almost happened to Ben and the other children in the neighbourhood when Ben was eight, but Dean, in an effort not to patronize the kid, has told him a small amount of the truth, enough so that he doesn’t have to be vague when he talks about his past. The stuff about Sammy and the apocalypse, though-Dean left all that out of the bedtime stories, even from Lisa. They know his brother was killed, and it was messed up, but that’s about it.
Reluctantly, Dean nods. “Yeah, it’s about that.”
Ben presses on, unmindful of Dean’s visible unease. Either that, or he doesn’t give a shit. “Is this because of that guy who showed up at the house a few weeks ago? The weird one?”
Curiously, Dean notices something about Ben that he has in common with all the other people Dean’s ever loved in his life: he doesn’t back away from challenge, that flash in his eyes that just dares Dean to lie to his face, lie to himself. Dean swallows, reluctant, but eventually nods.
“Yeah, that was Cas,” he tells Ben. “He was a... a friend. From before. We have a lot of... unfinished business.”
Much to Dean’s dismay, Ben’s left eye gives a little twitch. The tic sends a wash of sadness through him; he recognizes immediately the look of a little kid who just knows that the other shoe is about to drop and someone is going to leave. With less bluster, Ben asks, “And what, does he want you to leave? To go back?”
“Not exactly.”
Dean runs a hand through his hair, and desperately wishes he could be drinking a beer right now. They should probably discuss this stuff in more neutral territory than the bedroom Dean might no longer share with Lisa. This is a kitchen table conversation, he thinks.
“Let’s go downstairs,” he suggests.
To his surprise, Ben agrees. Dean knows that by the time they reach the kitchen, the tension will have diffused just enough for Ben to collect himself, and for Dean to form an idea of what to say. When he was still a hunter, people constantly used to accuse him of not caring about anything or anyone, like the biggest monster out there was Dean’s apathy. That wasn’t remotely true then, and it certainly isn’t now: Dean cares so much that he sometimes feels winded by it. It’s possible that he has more riding on other people than anyone he ever told not to form attachments.
While Dean pours them both glasses of water from the pitcher in the fridge, Ben waits patiently at the table for him to begin speaking. Dean stays silent until he has arranged himself in the seat across from the boy, and arranged his face into something not broken and confused and so fucking scared it’s almost laughable.
“Do you remember my brother? Sam?” Dean asks, not quite looking Ben in the eye.
“Sort of,” Ben says, shrugging. “He wasn’t around as much as you when me and those kids got taken away. But I remember he was nice, and really tall.”
“He was definitely both those things,” Dean agrees. With the hint of a smile, he tells Ben, “I used to call him Sasquatch, he was so big. You might not be able to understand this because you don’t have any brothers or sisters, but a lot of the time we never seemed to know whether to beat the shit out of each other and never speak again, or just spend the rest of our lives together driving around and living out of crappy motels.”
“You told me you used to do both of those things,” Ben points out, screwing up his face as he tries to remember everything Dean told him about Sam, years ago. “You’re still sad about him dying.”
“Yeah,” Dean huffs. “Thanks for the understatement of the year, buddy.”
“What does any of that have to do with me and my mom, though?” he asks, cutting straight to the point in that way that kids never seem to grow out of, until they figure out that people are much happier hearing lies and never being asked hard questions. Unless, of course, they’re nerds with wings, in which case they never learn.
Awkwardly, Dean kind of takes his point. He doesn’t really see what Sam has to do with his current anxiety, either, which is not so much confusion about how he feels for Cas, or how he feels about Lisa and Ben, but how one thing could possibly cancel out the other. But he feels like if he keeps talking, it’ll all connect eventually. Either that, or Ben will decide that Dean is a complete sociopath.
“Sam didn’t really die,” says Dean, slowly. “At the risk of having to explain way more than we could possibly have time for, my brother and I tried to stop the Devil from destroying the world, a couple years back.” Ben blinks, and Dean rushes out, “I know, I know. It sounds crazy. But just trust me when I say that some major stuff went down.”
“Did you... win?” Ben asks tentatively. At Dean’s look of, “Duh,” he adds, “Jeez, sorry. How was I supposed to know?”
“We managed to stop Lucifer from fuc-from messing everything up. But Sammy, he didn’t... He didn’t make it.” Dean pauses, considering to which extent it’s acceptable to blow Ben’s mind with this conversation. “Currently he’s in a place I don’t know if your mom would want me to tell you about.”
“Tell me,” orders Ben, sitting up straighter in his chair. He takes a fast drink of water in the way Dean knows he does when he’s nervous and trying not to show it.
“Christ. Okay. Well... Hell, basically. My brother went to Hell. With the Devil.” Dean breathes out once, and decides to try that again, with more coherence. “My brother threw the Devil back into Hell, and jumped in after him to make sure he didn’t crawl back out again.” Swallowing, he follows suit in taking a sip of water. He wants it to be a beer, or a bottle of scotch, oh, so badly.
Ben narrows his eyes slightly, not because he’s angry at Dean, but because he’s obviously thinking at a hundred light years per second in order to make all of the pieces fit in this fucked-up puzzle. “So, the Devil and Hell are real.”
Dean nods, unable to believe that Ben is just taking it all in like he’s trying to figure out discrete mathematics for his early admission into Yale.
“Does that mean...” He stops, and cocks his head at Dean, waiting for him to finish the thought.
“Yep,” Dean sighs, sort of hating himself for introducing Ben to the truth in the least dynamic way possible. They could be discussing the existence of Santa Claus. Lisa has raised Ben in resolute atheism, so Dean is a little impressed that Ben’s mind is simply shifting to accommodate the new information as though Dean is reading out baseball scores. “Heaven, God, angels... all real. Just like monsters.”
Hesitantly, Dean reaches across the table to touch Ben’s wrist, both to check that he isn’t privately freaking out, and to make sure he pays attention to what Dean says next. “I don’t want you to start contradicting everything your mom has taught you to believe... or not believe... about God. I think it wouldn’t be stupid if you kept believing those things. God might be real, but He’s not like the dude with the beard and the white robes like the Jones’ down the street would like us to believe. As far as I can tell, He’s just some guy in charge of Heaven who don’t like to get involved much. And He’s been known to mess up from time to time.”
“Okay,” says Ben, and Dean could hug him for remaining so composed. Not surprisingly, the kid is full of questions. Dean’s going to have to be careful that this doesn’t backfire on him horribly. “What are angels like? Have you met one?”
“Yeah,” Dean answers, feeling like he’s going to regret bringing any of this up any second.
“What are they like?”
Dean snorts in laugher. “Total douchebags, man.” He pauses, and feels a slow curl of warmth unravel in his chest as he thinks of Castiel, and how much he wishes Ben could know the whole truth of it. “But sometimes... sometimes they’re just awesome.”
It takes about a quarter of a second for Ben to connect the dots. “That guy, Cas. He’s an angel, isn’t he?”
Hesitating again, Dean can’t really see any point in lying to Ben at this juncture. A sure sign that Dean is in over his head is that he actually wants to tell Ben the full extent of all that Cas is, both as an individual, and to Dean. But, no. “Yes.”
“Dude.” The way Ben says it makes Dean want to chuckle again. Clearly he’s a little star-struck at having had one of the Heavenly Host in his house. “I’d bet he’s not at all how people picture angels.”
“You’re not wrong,” Dean agrees. “Most angels don’t really look like normal people, but Castiel is... special. He’s hard to get rid of. He’s saved my life more times than I can count, and from places you can’t even imagine. I’ve done probably everything humanly possible to piss him off-” Dean pauses, because that should probably be in the present tense, “-but he always has my back. God isn’t someone I have much time for, but Cas... I trust him with my life. He and Sammy and Bobby, I’d trust with anything. Cas more so, sometimes.”
Maybe Lisa has mentioned Bobby to Ben at some point in the last couple of weeks; Ben’s face doesn’t register incomprehension to the full extent. “Bobby is...”
“Bobby’s like my second dad,” says Dean, and he hears how his tone changes, becoming nostalgic and warm. “My own father wasn’t around much, and there were times that Bobby pretty much raised Sam and I. He was with us right until the end.” He feels a pang of guilt at having dropped the ball on calling Bobby, again. He was supposed to visit soon.
“He’s not dead too, is he?”
“Nah,” sighed Dean. “He’s around, in South Dakota. Maybe you’ll meet him someday.”
He thinks that the conversation could slowly be winding to a close, without much damage to Dean personally, and he begins to rise from the table to sneak over to the fridge for a beer. It’s early, but Christ, does he ever need it; but he realizes how stupid it was to assume that any discussion about Heaven or Hell could end so easily, when Ben sucks in a breath to wind up for Round 2. Dean sits back down without a word, expecting a thousand more questions about the nature of God and the afterlife. He isn’t prepared for Ben to pursue another other tack altogether.
“You never talk about Bobby or Cas,” he observes, a critical light glinting in his eyes. His facial expression doesn’t really suggest curiosity in either of these individuals, but rather in Dean’s relationship to them. “They sound like they’re your family, and you’ve never even mentioned ‘em until now. What’s with that?”
“They aren’t really my family,” says Dean, though the moment the words leave his mouth he feels how wrong that is, how unfair. The one time that he reminded Bobby of this fact, he’d regretted it for weeks. He’s surprised that any part of him still carries around an idea that is so shamefully false. Ben doesn’t hesitate to latch on to that.
“Maybe I’m just a kid,” Ben says, with a note of cautiousness in his voice, “but I thought that family is just another word for the people who stand by you, even when they shouldn’t, or you don’t want them to.”
He breaks eye contact with Dean to draw patterns on the tabletop with the condensation from his water glass, suddenly shy, but Dean is grateful to be released from his gaze and his accountability, even for a second. It occurs to him that he needs to look into how seriously fucking easy it is for certain people to work their fingers up underneath his guilt complex and pull, exposing the parts of Dean he’d really rather not show the world. Most dogs don’t even put their tail between their legs as fast as Dean Winchester.
Looking up again at Dean, Ben says, “I don’t know my real dad, so he isn’t family. You’re my family, and Bobby and Cas and Sam are yours.” A hint of coldness creeps into his eyes that Dean does not like one bit. “But you left ‘em, and now you wanna leave mom and me.”
At this, something fully snaps in his head. Dean recoils and pushes himself away from the table so violently that he almost topples the chair to the floor. Ironically, his cell phone chooses that moment to ring, buzzing across the countertop and blasting out the CCR song he set as Bobby’s ringtone. Dean ignores it and makes for the nearest exit. It’s an immature thing to do, he knows, especially with Ben’s face gone shocked and apologetic at him, but he can’t ignore his body’s knee-jerk instinct to flee the area, not even to offer comfort and assurance to his stepson. Holymotherfuckingchristshitfuck, he thinks in a rush, and just like that he’s scrabbling with the latch of the patio door, hands shaking, and hurling himself onto the back porch. The unexpected chill of the overcast day makes him cringe in surprise.
The sound of Ben’s footsteps are close behind him, the boy’s worried voice breaking through as he says, “Dean? Dean, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-”
Dean has to stop and catch his breath at the far end of the deck, hovering near the stairs as he folds nearly double and rests his elbows on his knees, sucking air in gulps through his mouth. He feels like he’s having a panic attack, chest tight and uncomfortable, oxygen seeming not to reach his lungs quickly enough, face tingling-and yeah, maybe he is actually having a panic attack. He’s never experienced one before, but Sam used to get them so often as a kid that Dean would recognize the symptoms anywhere. He should be trying to calm himself down with breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth, but the notion that something as simple as a statement of fact could launch him into this kind of fit makes the anxiety grow even stronger.
“Dean?” Ben asks again, sounding more scared now. In a horrifying moment of clarity, Dean hears him say, brokenly, “Dad, are you okay?” A small hand touches his back, grasping at his t-shirt, warm and firm.
“Come here,” Dean forces out, knowing that he’s crying in the messiest way possible, not tidy and respectable like Marlon Brando-type crying. In the Supernatural books, Chuck always described his Dean's moments of weakness as stoic and pulled-together, maybe with an appearance from a single, manly tear; but there’s no stoicism here, just red eyes and a runny nose and the type of heavy, gasping breaths that always get edited out of movies. It must look ridiculous, and Dean berates himself for probably scaring the shit out of the kid who is supposed to look to him for strength.
When Ben sidles closer, cautious, Dean pulls him into a rough hug and holds on until his body’s tremors ease, which is not a short amount of time. Ben doesn’t tense up or squirm; he just hugs Dean back through the whole thing. On the days that Dean feels honest enough with himself to admit that John Winchester wasn’t always a great dad, he knows there is a lot more to fatherhood than always looking composed or in control. What feels messed up is that he is neither composed nor in control at this moment, in addition to being a shitty dad who’s been thinking a lot about leaving. But if what Ben says is true, and he knows it is, Dean isn’t that great of an adopted son to Bobby, either, and Sammy being in Hell kind of throws him out of the running for Brother of the Year. He doesn’t quite know how Castiel fits into that little family unit, but he’s pretty sure he fucked up there, too.
“Fuck,” he says, figuring there’s no harm in swearing to top it all off. Pressing himself away from Ben, but keeping one hand fixed to his shoulder, Dean wipes his eyes on the back of one forearm. “I’m so glad I don’t have to tell you that I’m not normally this pathetic,” he jokes, trying to shift some of the attention away from himself.
It doesn’t work. Ben looks up at him from beneath his lashes, for all intents and purposes seeming more embarrassed by Dean’s meltdown than Dean himself. That isn’t much of a surprise: the first time Dean saw his own father cry, the prevailing instinct had been of wanting to leave the room.
“Listen,” Dean tells him, giving Ben’s arm a squeeze. “I’m sorry. What you said… it was harsh, but it wasn’t wrong. You just hit a nerve.” No shit.
“Uh, yeah,” answers Ben, flushing. “I don’t know why I said it.”
“You said it because it needed saying,” sighs Dean.
He goes to sit down on the porch steps, relieved that Ben chooses to join him. From the kitchen, Dean’s phone takes up its insistent ringing once more, “Bad Moon Rising” piercing the late-morning air. Bobby, again. Dean wonders if it’s a sign of something, but has a feeling that going to take the call now would be even worse than answering the phone on the first date.
Beside him, Ben’s knees jostle up and down nervously, and at about the same time they both notice that Dean is doing the same thing. Ben stills himself, but not without a small smile. “Why’d you leave ‘em, if it still bothers you?” he asks.
Dean makes a long, slow exhalation, realizing that if he’d thought of that exact question a bit earlier, he might have managed to avoid a significant portion of this conversation. In point of fact, he’d probably be on a beach somewhere with Cas, or tangled up in hotel sheets together.
Eventually, he comes up with a response. “Before Sammy died, he more or less made me promise that I would give up hunting if something happened to him. Sam knew how I felt about you and your mom-he called it the ‘apple pie’ life. He just wanted me to be happy with a family of my own, and I guess I owed it to both of us to have that. Otherwise I would have just run myself into the ground trying to figure out how to bring him back, which had caused nothing but misery for us in the past.” Dean smiles at Ben, wistfully. “Sometimes it isn’t a good thing when family refuses to give up on you.”
“I don’t get it,” Ben says, and even though there's at least one thing Ben can't outsmart him over, Dean is too tired to gloat. Pity that Dean doesn’t really understand any of this, either, so maybe the joke’s on him. “Why would Sam tell you to leave the family you had?”
“I guess neither of us was thinkin’ that clearly,” Dean says. “But I probably would have told him to do the same thing. It’s nothin’ personal to Bobby or anyone else-they just came attached to a lifestyle Sammy and I were never able to escape. Maybe he just wanted me to want something different after he was gone, I don’t know.” Pausing again to consider the full truth of it, he adds, “I also wasn’t sure how to go on seeing Bobby and Cas without thinking of Sam. It probably would have been easier if we’d all grieved together, but my only thought at the time was to get the Hell out of Dodge and keep my promise.”
“Even if you might have been happier if you didn’t.”
“Even then.”
“You maybe make too many promises,” observes Ben.
Later, Dean sends Ben back to school in the hopes that he will make third period and not come under fire from his teachers and his mom, but for the time being they remain out on the back porch, sitting in unhurried silence that is punctuated only by the occasional repeat call from Bobby. Dean doesn’t have the heart to answer just yet, because he feels that the moment he does, it will be time to make a decision. Christ, it was almost easier ticking off the days until the hounds dragged him into Hell; at least then he felt less like he was sending someone else to the block in his place.
The moment a new ringtone drifts out from the kitchen, the opening riff of “Hey Angel”, Dean’s heart almost stops, and then immediately begins pounding hard enough to make his chest hurt. Cas. Still, he doesn’t get up from the stairs. Ben glances over at him, correctly guessing, from his look, who the call is from, but at Dean’s outward lack of reaction he doesn’t move, either.
Intuitively, he understands why he and Ben aren’t talking about this anymore; the point is pretty clear, if painful, to both of them. The ugly reality of Dean’s promises is that they can rarely be kept, no matter how good or honest or desperate his intentions. Ben is beginning to realize this, and doesn’t appear too optimistic that a happy ending is in store for everyone. Even though he seems to be giving Dean his blessing to make the decision, he doesn’t look at all thrilled about it. The sooner Dean leaves the porch to go back inside, the sooner the choice will be made, quick like an axe coming down to sever the diseased limb of a tree, though even a final strike can be carefully measured and filled with regret.
Dean has a feeling they both know what’s coming; the hunter will never not be a part him, any less than Sam or Bobby-or Cas. He sees that now and isn’t sure if he can un-see it. It looks more and more likely that Dean might have to leave Ben’s life the way he entered it, and go back to living his own. He shivers, but not from the cold, and his fingers are warm and careful where they come to rest over Ben’s.
Chapter Ten