"At Break of Day, R (language), Gen
Title: At Break of Day
Author: SylvanWitch
Rating: R (language, adult themes)
Category: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Summary: For Dean, there are only last times now.
Author's notes: This is my Sweet Charity fic for the lovely chocca2 , who bought me for the Sweet Charity auction. She requested "angsty Dean. Maybe set before the deal is due, end of season three... struggling in true Winchester fashion. His feelings, main-pain bottled up to a point he's just not himself anymore." And she wanted Sam to offer comfort. I hope this is what you had in mind, hon! Thank you again for giving me the opportunity to write it! Also, the title is taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet 29, which begins, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," and is one of my favorites.
John Winchester had taught Dean the basics about women.
Always wear a condom.
Never give her your real name.
Check her for demonic signs and make sure she has a heartbeat.
Over the years, Dean had added a few rules of his own.
He never went to her place if she had a roommate (unless he’d met said roommate and she was hot, too).
He never stayed the night.
He never fucked girls named Mary.
So it’s a measure of just how drunk Dean is that he’s lying flat on his back between the taut thighs of a girl who he thinks might be called Mary- or maybe Marion or Mary Anne…it’s pretty fuzzy-and she’s screaming, “Dean, oh, Dean!” at the top of her voice.
Between screams, Dean is pretty sure he can hear someone making popcorn in the kitchen…someone he hasn’t met.
Panic rolls the length of his body in an icy wave as he considers whether or not he’s wearing a condom, and a second wave follows it until he reasons that she couldn’t possibly have that much lung capacity and not be breathing.
Too late, he realizes that his fear has left him flaccid.
It’s the sudden silence that gives it away.
He opens his eyes to squint up through doubled vision, trying to focus enough on her face to tell if she’s got the pitying look of a long-time party girl who’s had her fair share of whiskey dicks or if she’s sporting the same look girls wear when he forgets to warn them that he’s about to come down their throats.
No idea. Blessedly, the lights are down, so he’s spared any more attempts at deciphering the subtle unspoken language of his would-be lover.
Instead, he brazens it out, putting on his best sated, lazy smile and saying, “Hey, sweetheart, you were great. Give me twenty and we’ll go again.”
At least, it’s what he means to say.
But at the very moment he was going to let her off easy…or get her off by hand-whatever-it strikes Dean that this might be the last time he’s ever in a strange bed with a strange woman looming over him in the dark.
The last time sweaty thighs clutch his, tickling where they brush the hair on his legs.
The last time the scent of someone else’s fabric softener fills his nostrils while he catches his breath.
His life has become a catalogue of counterfeit endings. Every time he thinks he’s done, he finds another opportunity to put away a memory he’ll never have again.
The ice is back, racing its way toward his heart, which clutches and stutters so that Dean swears it might stop altogether. Given that he has some experience with that sensation, this worries him, and all at once he wants nothing more than to get out from under this girl whose name might be Mary and get the hell home-into the car, back to the motel, hoping that Sam’s asleep so he can listen to his brother’s steady breathing, an experience rarer these days than a werewolf on the crescent moon and more precious than the silver that they use to put it down.
Because Sam doesn’t sleep much.
Dean knows his brother sits vigil, that some part of Sam distrusts the calendar they’ve both been keeping since Wyoming.
And it kills Dean that the one thing he could always count on-except for those years when he couldn’t-was Sam’s steady presence in the next bed.
Something about that sense of Sam-well, something about that and the knife edge he feels through the pillow against the edge of his ear-helps him sleep even when the fear gets too big.
Without thinking, Dean pushes the girl off of him, staggers to his feet. The room swoops and sways around him and he has a terrible moment of wondering if he’s going to vomit before he manages to swallow back the bile and say, “I’ve gotta go.”
Her sharp intake of breath suggests she’s going to protest, but Dean’s already at the light switch, which he finds by feel, flipping it on to search out his clothes.
He rescues his knife from just under the bed frame on “his” side, where he always puts it, doesn’t care that there’s accusation and alarm sharing space on her flushed face. Let her think he’s a killer. Maybe it’ll keep her from bringing men like him home.
Even the tattoo peeping out from the edge of the sheet where she’s clutching it to her breasts doesn’t make him want to come back to bed.
Urgent now, needing clean, cold air and space, Dean bolts from the room, down the hall and past the startled roommate-a guy in grey sweats wearing a Celtics tee-shirt and clutching a plastic bowl of popcorn-and only just manages not to break into a run before he gets to the apartment door.
He doesn’t even try not to race once the door closes behind him, and he’s down the concrete stairs and out to the car in an instant, barely breathing until he’s behind her wheel, scent of leather and sweat in his nose, eyes watering from running through the freezing air.
A second measure of his drunkenness comes to him as he’s pulling into the motel parking lot. Not only doesn’t he remember the drive back, but he can’t figure out how the radio station got tuned to easy listening classics.
He runs a shaking hand over the Impala’s dashboard, apologetic and embarrassed, though he’ll never admit to either, not even to an inanimate object. Then he pushes himself out of the car and stumbles toward room 11, only to have to turn back and hip the driver’s side door shut when he realizes the light’s still on inside.
Three tries with the key and no luck. Cursing under his breath, Dean has a minute to wish Sam weren’t, in fact, asleep, aware that he isn’t thinking straight, that he’s really fucking messed up even as the handle turns under his fingers and Sam is standing there giving him the pissed, half-asleep grimace Dean used to try to get out of Sam whenever he could.
Now he’s sorry. Sorrier than he can say. And he’s crying, breath hitching in his throat, bile rising up.
He shoves past Sam with a sound more animal than human, makes it to the bathroom and thanks a god he doesn’t believe in that the toilet seat is already up because he can’t stop the sounds or the sluice of foul fluid that pours out of him in wave after wretched wave.
Sometime between the fifth and sixth long heave, he feels a weight against his back, heat even through the leather, and he doesn’t need to hear Sam saying, “Hey, Dean, take it easy,” to know his brother’s there.
He’s sick with sobbing, great cramping gusts coming up his throat with the last of his stomach contents, sick with grief at what he’s leaving Sam, sick with anger at what his father left him-guilt and fear and a sense of failure he’s never shaken, not since Wisconsin, god, not since he was a little fucking kid who shouldn’t have had to care about monsters, much less become one in the name of saving innocents.
“Sam,” he chokes out at last, the dry heaves leaving him spent, slumped against the wall, his head up against the toilet paper, slowly unrolling it in furling white waves on the dirty tile floor of the dive they’re calling home these days.
“I’m here,” is all Sam says, but it’s enough for now. Dean can’t even begin to repair the damage he’s done here.
How will Sam ever see him the same now that he knows what his brother really is: useless and wasted and already lost.
Except for his ragged breath and the simple susurrus of Sam’s hand rubbing circles on the leather, it’s silent in the bathroom. It stinks, too, and Dean wants to get up, splash water on his face, smash the mirror so he doesn’t have to see what Sam must-someone sold, someone too weak to walk the world alone, selfish enough to sacrifice so that Sam himself can suffer his brother’s loss instead.
He wants to sleep for a week and wake up before Wyoming, before the burning times that concentrated their lives into these desperate moments, maybe before he was ever born, into a dark void where he floats without volition, utterly at peace with decisions that aren’t his to make.
Drunk and sick and sore, feeling old in ways he’ll never actually be, Dean gets up onto his knees and tries to rise.
Sam’s hand is strong at his elbow, and his brother still says nothing, letting Dean lean on the sink, letting him take his time, rinse his mouth, wipe away the tear stains with a damp cloth.
Finally, Sam puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder. Still, Dean won’t look up, won’t look at himself, see in Sam’s reflection what he must look like.
“Dean. Tell me.”
He shakes his head at the chipped, stained yellow of the basin, tosses the towel to one side, turns toward the door, dropping his shoulder until Sam lets his hand slip away.
Out into the room, which smells of old cigarettes and new despair, Dean makes it four steps before he has to stop. He can feel something like a strange hand fisting in his gut, and he can’t decide if he’s going to puke again or cry, can’t tell which he’ll mind more.
He wonders, if he coughs up his guts and dies right there, will the deal be forfeit? Even hellhounds can’t want such rotten meat.
Dean gets out a rough sound, half bark, all bite, pissed at himself. What a sorry excuse he’s become, standing here almost dead on his feet, still drunk despite the way his body tried to turn itself inside out, his little brother a shadow behind him, hesitant and hurt.
“I’m sorry,” he says, but it doesn’t mean anything. He’d do it again, he guesses. He’d give up himself for Sam, couldn’t stop it if he wanted to, which he doesn’t. Sam’s heard it-and the lie behind it-before.
“Me, too,” Sam answers, and this response, at least, is new. “You can talk to me, Dean. You don’t need to do this kind of shit. It’s stupid.”
Sorrow. Dean hears it, heavy in Sam’s suddenly old voice, sorrow and the same fear that still makes cold inroads into Dean’s chest.
“I love you.”
These words that should be familiar feel different somehow. Dean reflects it might be the last time he hears them and he brings his head up.
Sam is standing with the window at his back, and through the crack in the curtain, Dean can see light just making its way to them from the rising sun.
Somewhere down the road a ways, a dog barks. A second answers, higher and further off.
Dean meets Sam’s eyes.
“You, too,” he says. But Sam already knows.
He tries a smile, weary, and Sam nods mostly to himself.
“Get some sleep. You look like five miles of bad road.”
It’s a cliché they’ve used before, since they know from bad roads, been on more of them than they can possibly remember. Dean finds it comforting, suddenly sure he’ll hear them again, too, before he goes.
He sits on the edge of the bed to unlace his boots, and the sun under the curtain snakes across the back of his hand, gilding the hair there, leaving the lines in shadow. He’s got a scar in the seam between his thumb and forefinger put there by an angry spirit in some house they cleared long ago.
Dean considers it for a moment, unable to take his eyes from it, from the way it’s remade in the light of a new day.
He’ll have a few more of these before he goes, he vows. He’ll take some evil out of the world before it takes him.
Gathering who he is, what is left to him now-body, at the very least, and brother-Dean gives Sam a real smile, tired at the edges but all he’s got.
Sam returns it, lets out a sigh, barely audible against the birds just now making noise in the trees behind the motel, kicks off his own shoes and heads for the bed furthest from the door.
Despite the exhaustion he feels weighing him into the mattress, Dean waits until Sam’s breathing evens out into the long, slow sound of deep sleep before he wraps a hand around his knife handle and lets his own eyes close.
Peace,
SW