Your problem, mate, is that nobody hates you more than you do.
Dean's eleven and is sitting in the principal's office. He doesn't care, not really, because Dad's on a hunting trip and he said he'd be back within the week. Detentions and suspensions from a school you're signing out of don't matter, anyway.
Except.
Fag, some kid whose parents drove him to school in a Porsche called Dean. Homo. Dean let go of the boy – Isaac, his name was Isaac, and he liked lacrosse and Harrison Ford and his lips tasted like passionfruit – whose shirt buttons he was fixing.
No, I'm not, he said, quietly, and Porsche laughed.
Prove it.
By the time Dean was done proving it, Isaac's nose was broken in two places and his (blue, blue) eyes were filled with tears. Porsche smiled. Dean smiled back.
Isaac began to cry.
Of course, that's when the teacher came running and saw the blood on Dean's knuckles and Isaac's face. It was a quick trip to the principal's office, after that.
He's in the waiting room now, sitting, just sitting, when he looks down at his hands and sees the bruises forming across his freckled skin. The blood's been washed off, mostly, bar underneath his fingernails. Ten little red crescents stare up at him and Dean can't breathe.
Fag, Porsche had said. Homo.
That was nice, Isaac had smiled at their sleepover last night. Can we do it again?
Prove it, Porsche had laughed.
Dean, Isaac had whispered into the kiss. The first for both of them.
Dean stares down at those ten little red crescents and exhales, suddenly, sharply. When he's finally called into the principal's office, he listens to the lecture silently. Agrees wholeheartedly with what Mr Handley is telling him, because he knows it was wrong and he knows he was wrong and he knows that whatever the small, blackened organ beating inside his ribcage is, it isn't a heart.
That was burned out a long time ago.
Dean's sixteen and the lines are blurred. Their food money is running out fast, and the bar Dean hustled pool at last night won't let him back in. Sam's face is sad and his stomach rumbles and Dean pulls on his tightest pair of jeans, his cleanest jacket, and tells his brother not to wait up.
He loiters outside the nightclub for barely ten minutes before someone walks up to him. A woman. Her hair bleached and her lips stretched and her purse full.
He doesn't know if she's cheating him or if the cost he sets is way overpriced. All he does know is the feel of her under him, her fingernails raking his bare back, the smell and taste of her lipstick and foundation and blush.
When they're done, she hands the money over and pulls him to her in a tight hug. Don't ever let them see you cry, is what she leaves him with, and he makes sure she's gone before heaving his stomach up into the cheap hotel sink. This feeling inside of him, this pressure pushing down on his lungs and his non-existent heart, weighs him down more than the two hundred-dollar bills in his back pocket ever will.
Dean's twenty and hunting with his dad and the victim's brother is the most beautiful man Dean's ever seen. Stubble and fingers and forearms and cheekbones. He holds his breath when the guy opens the door, holds it and holds it and holds it, waiting to wake up, because surely this is a dream?
It isn't, and his dad steps on his toes and scowls get your head outta the clouds, boy before walking inside. Dean follows, mesmerised.
His name is Ethan and he glows from the inside out. Dean barely pays attention to anything he says about his brother, doesn't listen to what he should be taking notes on, because Ethan is talking and his lips and teeth and tongue are perfect and Dean is afraid of what the burnt-out organ inside his chest is telling him.
Of course, it doesn't amount to anything, because turns out it's a family curse and Ethan's dead within a day and Dean should've fucking saved him. If he'd just listened yesterday, listened and took notes like he was supposed to, they would've solved this quicker and Ethan wouldn't be dead and his blood, all that blood, is on Dean's hands.
He doesn't tell his dad this. Acts like it's just another case. Just another life they weren't in time for.
Inside, he's screaming until his voice is gone.
Dean's twenty-two and Sam's gone, has taken what remained of Dean's shrivelled heart with him. Has left a hole the size of the Grand Canyon inside his brother and he doesn't even know it.
Because Dean is a good son. Dean is the good son. Dean follows orders and lies his ass off about what he really feels and locks away all the pain, the guilt, the failure and the questions inside a vault where his heart used to be.
Sam filled the empty spaces and now he's left Dean's hollow.
Dean's twenty-six and dad hasn't been home for a few days and the minute he drops Sam off he knows something is wrong.
Jess is on the ceiling and Sam is yelling and fighting and trying to reach her but Dean won't let him. Later, when they're crashed in a motel room and Sam is pretending not to cry, Dean wonders.
He took Sam away. Jess died when he was gone. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect the dots.
(His brother isn't the only one who doesn't sleep that night.)
Dean's twenty-eight when his brother dies and time stops. He's too late.
Sam falls, as if in slow motion, a marionette without its strings. Too late.
Something aches inside Dean, but it can't be his heart because that disappeared years ago.
Selling his soul is easy. It's not like it's worth much, anyway.
(This time, this time, Dean feels like he's finally doing something right.)
Dean's twenty-nine when an angel resurrects him from Hell. You don't think you deserve to be saved, Castiel says curiously, and Dean barely refrains from countering with a no shit, Sherlock, because really? After those last ten years with a blade in his hand and a grin stretched out over his lips and that emptiness inside him thriving, growing, because he was soulless, heartless, frozen?
He's the furthest from deserving that it's possible to be.
Dean's thirty when he's told that he's the vessel.
He refuses outright, not because it'll probably kill him, not because he wants to make his own destiny and all that crap, not because life as an angel condom would be a fucking nightmare, but because he's Michael's vessel and Michael is the first archangel and that's only one step down from God and Dean?
Dean will never, not in a million years, not if they somehow turned back time and reversed those things he did in the Pit with Alistair, not if he was reborn or purified or any of that other Jesus crap; he will never, never be good enough for this.
He's a screw-up and a high-school drop-out and a dick-bag and a slut and a liar and a thief and a sinner and a demon and a hunter and an empty shell and a big black chasm of nothingness that's eating him up from the inside out.
Dean's thirty-three when Castiel dies for the third time, and it looks like this one's permanent.
When he first picks up the trenchcoat by that lake, he thinks that maybe he'll leave it somewhere. Under a nice tree, maybe, a willow or an oak. Somewhere by the sea. Where you can see the sky. Cas would like that, he thinks.
In the end, though, he doesn't leave the coat anywhere. He carries it around, a heavy weight in the trunk of whatever car they've stolen that week, and it isn't until Emmanuel shows up and Dean gives back the coat does he realise it was his own twisted form of penance.
Dean read, once, that Hercules had carried out twelve labours set by the gods after killing his wife. Twelve impossible tasks to cleanse his soul from the evil he'd committed.
So much more blood is on Dean's hands, and his penance was far from impossible, but he thinks that maybe it's a start.
(Until Cas falls off the knife edge he was so carefully balancing on, and Dean realises his first labour is far from over.)
Dean's thirty-four when he escapes Purgatory.
When he leaves Cas behind.
Sometime in that year of grey, he thought maybe his heart was growing back. (Hearts do that, don't they? They can't stay gone forever.) But he's out and maybe Benny is too but Cas isn't, he couldn't save Cas, and he knows now that once hearts are burnt out of you, they're burnt for good.
Dean's thirty-five when the King of Hell diagnoses him. Your problem, mate, is that nobody hates you more than you do.
He swallows, and thinks of Sam, of Kevin, of Cas, of Benny, of Charlie and Garth and Bobby and Jo and Ellen and Ash and Ethan and Isaac and his dad and all those people he couldn't save.
MY FAULT is stamped in red across every one of his memories. MY FAULT, MY PROBLEM, MY PENANCE.
He hasn't had a heart for too many years to count, now, but he can feel its ghost now, keening, wailing, telling him that it's okay, everything's okay, we can fix this.
He doesn't listen. It's just a ghost, after all. If he could salt and burn himself to be rid of it, he would.
But he can't. (Not yet.)
He has work to do. (Penance to pay.)
Author's Note: Please excuse the shitty writing and try to embrace my intentions behind it. Done in two hours, after being hit over the head with Dean feels in First Born.