House of Mirrors (Gen, PG-13)
Title: House of Mirrors
Rating: PG-13
Category: Gen oneshot
Word Count: 2545
Characters: Dean-centric, with Sam, John, and OCs
Warning: My attempts at rhyming.
Spoilers: Only if you know what you’re looking for. If you can’t find them, they won’t find you.
Author’s Notes: Written for prompt 7: Nature vs. Nurture for the
psych_30 challenge.
Disclaimer: The following characters and situations are used without permission of the creators, owners, and further affiliates of the Warner Bros television show, Supernatural, to whom they rightly belong. I claim only what is mine, and I make no money off what is theirs.
Nature vs. Nurture-the combination of an individual’s genetic constitution (nature) and the environmental conditions to which he or she is exposed (nurture). The interplay of these forces produces physical and mental characteristics that make each human being different from another. In many cases, it is not readily apparent which of these effects is the more important in producing a particular characteristic
- - - - -
“You there, my boy. Yes, you right next to the animal toys. Might I tell you a tale? Of when you might’ve been a very diff’rent young male? I can show you what might have just been, if life’s events had gotten under your skin.”
He hears the woman’s voice, and even though it’s quiet and muffled, it cuts through the fog of noise anyway, and he lifts his head in her direction. The sun is setting beyond the carnival tents, and the pink stuffed bears’ faces appear skeletal and malicious in the crawling shadows. There are distant screams from the rides, the multi-layered hum of the crowd pushing against him, the soft crunch of Sam eating, but this woman’s voice slices through them all.
“Stay here,” Dean says to Sam, who looks up from his caramel apple in confusion.
“Dea-” Sam begins, even though his mouth is sticky with caramel and dotted with nuts. He licks his lips and starts to rise to his feet in protest.
“I’ll be right back. Just wait.” He crosses the space between the candy booth and the woman, who’s standing in the doorway of her purple and orange striped tent as if she’s been waiting all day. Just waiting for him.
He moves closer, and she smiles as if some great secret should be passing between them.
“There’s nothing to fear and so much to see,” she says, and her voice is surprisingly light and feminine instead of the aged crackle he expected. “ ‘Cause it’s just a simple lady. Just ole little me.”
Instead of responding, he follows her into the tent, making sure to duck his head to avoid hitting the flaps that move slowly in the warm August winds. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside, and he smells urine and stale cloth. There’s something musty-something forgotten-about this place, and he wonders what he is doing here.
“You said you had something to show me?” he says, as she sits down on a rickety chair and turns on a battery powered light by her feet. She’s wearing multiple layers of ragged clothing, yet she does not appear flustered in the evening’s heat.
“Wait, wait, you son of John, and then your lives we will look upon. Who made you what you are today? Life’s weight or what your blood has to say?”
He remains standing as she looks up at him quizzically. Strings of gray fly away from her temples, and her wrinkled lips twist into an eager smile.
“Sit, sit,” she says and gestures to a chair across from her that was not there when he first arrived. He shakes his head and tries to convince himself that maybe he just didn’t notice it in poorly lit area.
She makes him uncomfortable, and he can feel a forming mustache of perspiration and a single bead of sweat working its way along his spine. But, he sits, slides his hands across his pockets and down to his knees, and feels the bulge of car keys and a switchblade.
“Give me your hands,” she tells him, and when he looks up and meets her eyes, there is something there that he can’t quite name, but trusts nonetheless. Slowly, he holds out his hands, so that his dirty palms face the ground and their scarred backs face her.
She wraps her own hands around his, and her thumbs are soft and warm on the backs of his hands. He can feel her fingers running along the creases of his palm as if searching.
Her eyes close, and he watches her face twitch in the suffocating silence. Then she presses her fingers in deep and curls them up into the callused flesh of his hands. The tent fades away to the midnight memories of what could have been, but what is not.
He’s falling suddenly, and when he tries to catch himself, the air turns cold, and a baby cries.
Me, he thinks.
And she says, “Yes.”
- - - - -
When he moved away from his last foster home, he began to search for his biological father. Dean Winchester, the only child of his young parents, had been sent into the state’s care when he was four years old following his mother’s death and his father’s loss of everything in a tragic fire. Bouncing from foster home to foster home, Dean had always been too afraid to look for his birth father for fear that his foster parents would find him ungrateful. While he had never been abused or treated cruelly with these other parents, he always worried that their kindness-much like his mother’s love-would be taken away from him overnight.
So, he waited until he moved into an apartment above a fishing store overlooking the city’s docks to start writing letters to the address he remembered from all those years ago. As the years passed, no letters in response came back to him, and he began to have dreams of a young man with dark hair who spoke of fierce ghosts and fast cars. Worried about his own mental sanity and wondering if he inherited such a trait from his family, Dean wrote again to his father.
Dad, he began. I know I’ve written you letters before. I don’t even know if you get them. But, I’m alone, and I’m living on my own, and there’s things I need to know. I don’t know who to ask. So, whatever you’re doing, if you could write me. Please. I need your help, Dad.
He sealed the envelope, and then he clasped his hands and brought his fingers to the top of his nose. When he choked back tears, he thought he saw that same dark-haired man smiling at him. Dean didn’t have the heart to tell him to leave.
- - - - -
He was always overprotective of his younger sister. It was the family joke that Dean was far more protective than Dad himself when it came to the men that could date Emily. So, it was no surprise to anyone that Dean’s jogging route changed from the college campus to the area near her downtown apartment when she moved.
One balmy summer night while making his final lap past her apartment, he had just paused to spit out a bug that had flown into his mouth when there was a woman’s scream. His head snapped upward to look to the building. He did not need to hear the voice again to know that it belonged to his sister.
After bolting through the apartment complex and breaking her door off its hinges, he found Emily pinned to the ground. A man in black clothing knelt above her with one hand clamped on her mouth and the other trying to undo the button of her jeans.
Dean yelled an angry curse to cause the attacker to look up just in time to meet a swift punch to the face. The two men scuffled and danced until the intruder fled with his broken nose cradled between his fingers.
From where Dean sagged against the doorway, he asked, “You okay, little sister?” He fought to catch his breath as he wiped blood from the corner of his mouth where the other man split his lip.
In response, his dark-haired sister gave a thumbs-up on both of her hands and said nothing more.
- - - - -
The fire was spreading quickly, and by the time the fire department arrived, it was deemed to be out of control. Next to the fire truck, Dean looked up at the blazing home and snatched his hat from where he had temporarily set it on the ground. One of his friends, who he had worked with for over five years, grabbed him by the arm and tried to stop him.
“It’s too dangerous! You could get killed! It’s not worth it! Dean-”
“I have to do this!” Dean yelled back over the roar of the flames and the cries of the parents who were standing next to the ambulance. “Their daughter is still in there! I have to find her!” Forcefully, he wrenched his arm away and ran into the house.
The heat was instantly suffocating, and his natural instinct to flee was overpowering; he had to remind himself to continue. In the back of his mind, he wondered what kind of hell he had so voluntarily entered.
He hurried through each room of the house as falling debris exploded in orange sparks around him. Just as he entered what appeared to be a bedroom, he heard a faint voice say, “Help me.”
He looked up and there, pined to the ceiling, a young blonde girl bled and burned. Scrambling onto the flaming bed, he pulled her down from the ceiling, and even through his gloves, her skin felt hotter than the fire itself.
“I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” he whispered, although he was fairly certain she could not hear him. He pulled her tightly to his chest, and the top of her head came to rest below his chin on his collarbone.
Then he ran without looking back.
Outside, where the ambulances waited with silent red lights flashing into the darkness, he laid her on a stretcher as her parents hurried up to her. Their words and tears of thanks were blurs he could not understand. He thought he felt his friends slapping him on the shoulder for a “job well done,” but he did not notice them.
Dazed, he wandered away beyond the cluster of trucks and ambulances. He grabbed the trunk of a tree in one hand and vomited his last meal onto the ground. The grass glowed orange in the fire’s light. Finally, unable to stand no more, he dropped to his knees and rested his head against the cool bark of the tree as if in prayer. As he cried, he thought of another woman who had been killed in the same bizarre accident-pinned to the ceiling as such. The other woman who had died was the same one who had married him three years ago.
- - - - -
At their mother’s funeral, Sam was the one who delivered her eulogy. Sam, who was always better with words despite the way his hands shook as he read the sentences in memory of their mother, had managed to put together the tribute even though his busy schedule consumed most of his life. Listening to Sam’s wavering voice that paused for moments when he had to collect himself, Dean bowed his head and thought back on all the memories he had of his mother that the people in the church would never see.
In the end, it had been cancer that had gotten her. He still didn’t know what he hated more: the cancer itself or the doctors who were unable to stop it. But, at least her suffering was over, at least there would be no more hospital visits, and at least there would be no more painful sighs from her as she tried to fight back the pain racking her body. At least there was that much.
After the ceremony when the relatives and friends gathered in the basement of the church to drink and eat and talk too quietly, Sam broke down next to one of the tables. Even his fiancée was unable to console him as his emotional gates came crashing down to leave him as a sobbing mess slumped against a wall for support.
While the onlookers raised their hands to their mouths and murmured their “poor boy” and “too much stress,” worries, their dad approached Dean and wrapped his hand around his arm. Leaning close enough for Dean to smell the alcohol on his breath, John whispered in a husky tone, “Take your brother outside. Now, Dean, go.”
So, gently taking Sam by the shoulders, Dean led him outside to stand beneath the clustered trees. Broken and exhausted, Sam sagged against Dean wearily.
With his younger brother wrapped in his arms, Dean looked up at the church where his mother’s body lay inside. Even though he saw no fire around them, he still smelled the faint scent of smoke, and he found himself waiting for his father to run towards them from the building and gather him up into his arms.
Then Sam sighed against Dean’s shoulder and said, “I wish she would have been here longer.”
Dean paused before answering and when he did, his words had been reduced to mere hushed syllables, “I think she was here longer than she should have been.”
- - - - -
When Dean opens his eyes to see that he has arrived back in the tent, the old woman is smiling at him, and her hands are curled together like sleeping kittens in her lap. He stares at her before he blinks and rubs his face.
“What…What was that?” he asks hesitantly, fearing the answer she may give him.
“What could have been.”
He rises to his feet a little uneasily, and something lurches in his stomach as he does so. “I-look-no. That’s a nice trick, but this is me,” he tells her, bringing a hand to his chest.
She tilts her head and smiles up at him. “Have you been in the house of mirrors?”
“What?” he asks, but his voice comes out as a rasp.
“Have you been in the house of mirrors?” she repeats. “It’s such a fascinating place, my dear. So many reflections, but only one is true. So many distortions, but only one…is you.”
Pausing just long enough to shake his head in bewildered confusion, he says, “I just…I need to find my brother.” He exits the tent on clumsy feet, and the orange flaps snap shut behind him.
Still seated, the old woman begins to run her fingers through her hair idly. “There’s a theory that men, they will whisper and preach. To their minds, they will keep, and to students, they teach.” The gray hairs fall out and float to the ground in soft wisps. “It talks about life and how it shapes men, how it changes the way they might have been, and how it might be in your heart or your head through which life you’ll be led. Or, instead by the people you meet and the cities you walk on wide, sweeping streets.”
The gray hairs drop away to reveal lustrous golden waves and blue eyes twinkle where old ones once stared. She starts to shed her ragged clothing to reveal a white, silk nightgown as she stands to her feet. “But, your true ways would never have been changed through the lives that were done.”
A bright light begins to shine on the opposite side of the tent after the clothes have fallen away to reveal a beautiful woman with flowing blonde hair and blue eyes. Slowly, she begins to walk to the light and looks longingly over her shoulder to the flap in the tent where he left. She sighs, bites her lower lip, and as she begins to fade away into the light, she whispers, “Because you, dear Dean, you always, despite it all, would have still been my boy, my baby, my son.”
End