Summary:
Post Swan Song. Dean finally puts the Impala into storage and encounters Sam's things one last time...
Author note:
This was for a fic prompt from the Sam to my Dean, Agelade (AKA L on LJ and Tumblr). Her actual prompt went like this:
"post swan-song. pre beginning of season 6. Dean's summer of Lisa
He's left the car in the garage under a tarp and all his hunting stuff and everything sam owned (not much) are in the trunk. I mentioned he couldn't just pretend sam hadn't existed, so he brought the pencil case into the house and displayed it on the mantel, but did he talk to lisa about it? did he pretend it didn't exist? did he contemplate burning it as the closest thing to a hunter's funeral sam would ever get?"
For those of you who don't know, Agelade and I collaborate on a 'verse. The pencil box in question first appears in my story "Boogeyman," so for all the deets on it, you could read that (if you haven't), but you don't have to have read that story or Agelade's Lustraverse (where the pencil box re-appears) to understand Dean's pain...
"One More Miracle"
Sam's gone.
It took six weeks of heavy drinking before Dean could think those words in his head and not break something.
And it wasn't because he necessarily felt the need to stop breaking things-it was mostly because he had started to run out of his own stuff to break, and pretty soon Lisa and Ben were going to find out what a bad, bad idea it had been to take in a stray rabid dog that night he showed up out half stunned with grief and denial 72 hours after Sam took a swan dive into a cage of eternity.
It was six weeks until Dean could finally, of his own free will, get the Impala into the garage, off the street. Six weeks before he could pull the needle out of the vein, give it up, let Sam's words-his last request- settle to the bottom of the emptiness in his heart. He was with Lisa and Ben, but was it a good thing that Sam had given him the direction? Because Dean drove over 400 miles before he made up his mind to keep the promise, and Lisa and Ben hadn't been the first place he'd have gone if he had been given the okay to choose a destination. Any place with a short pier, a shoddy bridge, a nice, really sturdy retaining wall was instinctively higher on the list. Because Dean didn't know how to do this...this going on thing. Funny how that worked out, that he had spent most of his life without a home, always "moving on" and yet, now, that was the most impossible task in front of him.
Screw you, Sam. Always a pain in my ass.
He tried to make the feeling stay, the anger, because anger was so much easier to act on and process, but it had been six weeks and he had finally forced himself to dry out. Just enough, she had asked. Just to try and Dean had given her that because otherwise he'd be kicking himself out and he already had a goddamn promise to keep to his little brother...
...Who's in hell. Forever.
Dean pulled the sawed off holding the arsenal cover in place, let it slam home. The trunk didn't have all the weapons, of course. Dean was suicidal every other ten minute stretch, but he wasn't an idiot. There was a shotgun in Lisa's closet, one in the coat room on the first floor. He still kept at least three knives on himself at all times, including his .45 which had to stay under his pillow at night, but that was all part of a completely rational side of his brain that said being stationary might attract things like one of those neon purple bug zappers. He had to be prepared to zap because if he was going to die it was going to be a solo act-he couldn't risk the danger to Lisa and Ben.
How did normal people live without the barest preparation for a supernatural incursion?
Dean didn't know, but Lisa had taken some persuasion to okay the weaponry in the house. She gave in, of course. Probably because the drunk, suicidal guy with a trunk full of guns had insisted...
Dean remembered the first couple weeks in bits in pieces. Why Lisa didn't just call the cops and haul him away, he didn't know. But she didn't. And now he was compromising with death, trying not to break things, and shaking with the need for a drink.
Because now he was awake and aware, fully aware, that Sam was gone, and there was nothing good about going on, no matter how much soft-edged rainbow crap Hallmark tried to smear over it. There was nothing good about looking at Sam's duffel, right there, as if he'd just left to maybe grab coffee. There was nothing healing about the idea of touching those things that had been his little brother's if his brother would never be back to claim them. There was no "closure" in the act of looking at those shirts even if he and Sam had spent years wearing each other's clothes. There was no peace in holding those well-worn books Sam still insisted on dragging around after all this time. These things were orphans, now. The one person who cared about them had left them. Abandoned them forever. Dean had no responsibility to give them purpose when he was in the exact same boat as...
...David Copperfield.
That was the title of the first book he pulled out. His arm and hand had done it without him realizing what was going on until it was too late, until it was in his hand and he was looking at the title.
Jesus Christ, you still had this?
Because Dean had fished it out of Sam's bag when he was ten, once, after something really really bad had happened and Sam had been catatonic. Seeing it again was a slap in the face even as it tugged painfully at his heart.
It was a reminder of all the warnings. The warnings that scary, evil shit were out to keep his brother and that he should have done everything differently if he had really wanted to save the kid. Reverse every goddamn decision because nothing had been right if it had come to this.
But Dean just didn't know how to not fuck up, okay? He was an idiot. He was just a battering ram with a gun and a whole lot of fuses that were all set on a hairpin trigger attached to the name Sam.
And now there was nothing left of Sam except this old duffel, these worn clothes and books. He took his favorite weapons with him into the cage, for all the good they were not going to do him there. And everything in this bag now was so nondescript it could have belonged to any guy who had no home. Even the books, which had been like a permanent fixture with the kid, looked like they could have come from any used bookstore, and might have, actually.
Dean could just leave this bag here, in the trunk. He could convince himself there was nothing in it that could hurt him because he was extremely good at lying, even to himself.
So he dropped the bag and put his hand on the trunk to slam it home one last time...
But something slid out.
At that second Dean wished that whatever cosmic forces governed the universe had a face he could punch. A heart he could shoot. Something he could break...
It was a carved wooden box. Beautiful. The design had been taken from a picture of old Winchester stock from a 19th century rifle-fluid, almost leaflike scrolls curled around the corners. And in the middle, in bold relief, "SAM WINCHESTER."
Dean stared at it. His chest hurt. It fucking hurt so much. He remembered the hours he spent on the damn thing, scrutinizing the xeroxed page with the image he had (hello?) gone to the library to get, marking the wood with pencil, carving it with shop tools and then just the sharp tip of his pocketknife. It had taken two weeks of work and hiding in the bathroom and outside convenience stores and collected moments of privacy to finish. His masterpiece.
He remembered Sam's face the morning he opened the plain brown bag probably expecting maybe a candybar for his 10th birthday and getting this instead. Sam's eyes, all glistening and unbelieving and impressed. Grateful. Best present ever, he had said. Kept the damn thing through one catastrophe after another, one state to the next. He left Dad and Dean but he had taken the wooden pencilbox with him to college, kept it even after, and one time, a few years ago, he told Dean in some other moment of glistening eyes that it had literally saved his life...
Saved his life. A fucking miracle.
For what?
Dean picked it up. It clinked because Sam still kept pencils and pens in it, that nerd...
He wanted to break it because why? Why keep it now? It was like all the other stuff, he told himself. It had no more meaning than a shirt Sam would never wear, a book he'd never read...
But Dean was crying now, and he knew he couldn't lie himself past this one. It was all that was left of a bond between them that should never have been broken. That he should never have let break. Because once upon a time they even had a heaven together. An actual heaven and yeah, the fucking place existed and they should have been so excited about that, that someday there was going to be rest from all this shit, but Dean went and fucked even that up. Because Dean had issues and he had hair triggers and all he wanted was a life and death of repeats of Sam's face, his eyes, saying "this is the best gift ever." And so Dean did what he always did. He screwed it up.
He screwed it up so badly.
And now, holding the only surviving thing that even proved that Sam had lived, Dean can't hold anything back.
He'd go back to that heaven, even if Sam's happiest memories were of some stupid girl's thanksgiving. Even if he wanted to relive running away from home. Dean would so gladly go back there. If he could do it all over, he'd have made fucking popcorn and watched Sam be happy. He'd have carved the fucking roast beast. He'd have traded out his memories of mom and peanut butter sandwiches for Sam's goddamn dog.
Because Sam would have been there. They'd have been there together forever. And now, Dean would never see Sam again in this life or the next or whatever. And it was too much. Too fucking much.
He bent over the trunk. He clutched the pencil box in both hands. He held it to his chest as if through it he could somehow hear Sam. Feel his presence.
But there was nothing. There was just nothing. Sam took all of Sam away from him and the rest of the world to save it. Dean was collateral damage and nothing else. Forever.
"Sammy..."
He said it out loud. Let that hurt punish him. Let the realization and the loss work him over good. Remind himself that Sam wouldn't have done this fucking thing if Dean had said no. And Dean had screwed up a lot. Had made every wrong decision. But this one he could have done right.
Because the world didn't deserve Sam, and yeah, neither did he, but he was a brother and he was entitled...
And now he was an orphan.
An orphan with a box of memories and nothing more.
Later, when Lisa noticed the pencil box on the mantel she said it was beautiful, but she must have guessed or had some women's intuition or whatever because she didn't say anything else about it.
But she was right. Dean remembered that smile, those glistening eyes. "Dean, it saved my life."
Beautiful.
In the end, Dean couldn't bring himself to burn it in Sam's place. It wouldn't even have been symbolic as closure because Dean knew how he sucked at letting go anyway.
He didn't believe in a benevolent deity even if circumstances forced him to at least believe there was a god. He didn't think that he even deserved it, but Sam did, okay. Sam deserved something. So he'd keep it. Let it remind him of Sam every day, give him a nice, good sock in the gut. But secretly, so secretly, Dean hoped...
He hoped it had one miracle left.
FIN