Author's Note: Spoilers for S2 onwards for all my fellow newbabies.
She made sense.
It wasn't that he liked her more than people, but that she was just... well, yes, actually, he liked her better than people. People broke. Cars broke, too. But people broke and you couldn't fix them. And you couldn't change them if they didn't want to be changed, and you couldn't stop them from changing if they did. Cars never died, or left, or hurt like people did, and that, to Dean, made them better.
But more than that, the Impala was his life. She was his home, more than anywhere else had ever been. She was the mother he'd lost, the one who'd seen his tears and smiles and heard twenty years of whispered conversations and angry shouts. She was the lover who'd never stuck with him when she'd learned of his darkness and weakness, when she'd heard him wake from a nightmare he never talked about.
He and Sam had slept together on the back seat as kids – Dean wrapped around his little brother protectively, although he said it was for convenience – while their dad slept on the front. Occasionally when John wasn't there, they still curled up together in the back seat, even though they didn't really need to. Sometimes they needed the warmth, but mostly they were just lonely or scared, and neither of them would admit it out loud. But when Sammy's tiny body finally relaxed against him, the leather creaking under them, Dean slept better. And when Sam's head fell on his shoulder or lap on the fifth hour of a drive, he saw his dad's eyes glance at them in the rear view mirror, sad and old and smiling. Or when Dad handed Sam the map and Dean reclined in the back, poking Sam in the head with his socked toes until he snapped and climbed over the backrest to get revenge, both laughing until John joined in.
And now, Sam's hair left greasy marks on the passenger side window more often than not, even though Dean made him clean it every time. His ridiculous spider legs almost touched the glove compartment, even though Dean had tweaked things a few inches after she'd been totaled. After Dad.
He rebuilt her, then, and although he'd never admit it, he rebuilt himself with her. It wasn't just to keep busy, like he'd told Bobby and Sam. And he figured that they were probably smart enough to see that, but they were also smart enough to never mention it. They let him go, and more than once he saw Bobby hold Sam back with a hand on his forearm and a shake of his head. On the third day he had never been more grateful for Bobby, because that was the first time he cried.
He sat in the torn up front seat, the leather split, and regarded the dash. It was unrecognisable – all the glass shattered and gone, the wheel and gear-shift bent, glove compartment jammed permanently open, empty. Then he felt the blood. It scratched against the pads of his fingers on the wheel, flaked off against them like glitter. His throat tightened as he ran a hand along the dash, noticing every drop, every smear. A sob tore itself out of his throat and he threw himself back against the chair, back of his hand to his mouth as though it could jam the noise back in. He wasn't going to do this. Not now. Not ever, if he could avoid it.
It burned, but he managed a few deep breaths against his hand. It was shaking and he leaned back and kicked the dash hard enough that he heard a crack. He was fairly certain that it was the dash, but he wouldn't bet against a broken ankle just yet. He grit his teeth in pain and it felt good. The tears that were threatening gave up, disappearing into his eyelashes without falling. He started work.
But then the cover came off, more whole than he'd actually expected for all the damage, and there it was. A tiny blue rectangular block. A piece of Lego. The plastic hadn't melted or faded despite all these years in the vents and the sun. It wasn't cracked or warped. It was just... there.
He snapped. Dad was dead, and this fucking toy, this tiny goddamned fucking piece of plastic was untouched. Unharmed, unbroken, un-gone, and Dean didn't even have the strength to throw it. Didn't have the strength to do anything about it, so he just let himself fall. His shirt snagged painfully on a piece of metal somewhere, stinging his back only half as badly as the tears stung his eyes.
It took him weeks, but eventually she was whole again, and the emptiness in his gut felt like just maybe it wouldn't be empty forever. Maybe the gnawing pain in his throat every night would fade like a bad cough.
The last thing Dean did was pull the Lego out of the pocket it had been in for three weeks. He sniffed, ran his thumb over one of the smooth sides, and sitting down behind the wheel for the first time since that night, leaned over and pushed it through the vent like he had more than twenty years ago.
Chuck hadn't been wrong, not even a little, as much as he hated to admit that his life was described in those goddamned books. Like he wrote, even when Dean built her from the ground up, he kept all the parts of her that made her unique, that made her theirs.
Not even that, they made her his, and that was more than he'd ever had.
Her blemishes did make her beautiful, and he thought that if he could believe it about a car, then maybe he could fool himself into believing it about himself, too. Maybe his past had made him something other than hard and hateful, broken and unfixable. Maybe one day he'd get better.
It hadn't worked yet, and he was fairly certain it never would, but he did it anyway. It was the closest thing to hope he had.