Roses in December
God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
~ J. M. Barrie
Chapter 1 The Reflection of Whiskey
Cicero, Indiana 2010
Dean Winchester sat alone in the small living room, a single lamp casting a pool of light from an occasional table on the other side, leaving the rest in varying shades of darkness.
He was a big man; tall, broad-shouldered, heavy muscles gained from a lifetime of use, never seeing the shiny, torturous-looking equipment of a gym. The closest he'd ever gotten to working out was in the boxing gyms, back street places filled with hard-faced men, a pervasive sour-sweat smell. He'd learned to fight in the canvas rings; learned to hit the leather bags hanging from the ceiling, his hands taped as his father had taught him where and how and how hard, taught him about balance and weight and distance and reflex.
Short dark hair showed blondish highlights in the stray edges of light from the lamp as he hunched in the armchair. The hand that held the half-full glass of whiskey was battered, knuckles broken and lumpy, a couple of fingers not quite straight, old, white scars and calluses making an interesting landscape over the skin. A labourer's hand, maybe, or a fighter's.
He stared at the bottle on the table absently, already feeling the soothing amnesia it contained, coursing through his system as the whiskey filled his stomach. Grief backed away reluctantly, the nightmarish images that had woken him and brought him downstairs flickered and faded. Medicinal, he thought, looking at the bottle. Just fucking medicinal.
Leaning back in the chair as his muscles began to uknot, he swallowed another mouthful, feeling it rush down his throat and warm his belly, and finally he could close his eyes without terror, watching random coloured patterns against the black of the inside of his eyelids, feeling a detached kind of peace, the only kind he could get now, artificial but still a relief.
2010 had been a cluster-fuck of a year. But he thought that for bad years, 2008 was still in the lead by a nose. And to be honest, '06 and '07 had been pretty fucking horrible too. He rubbed a hand tiredly over his face, fingers brushing over skin that was almost clean shaven, almost all the time now. He'd liked the previous century better.
"You know you're a hunter when you can't remember a single goddamned good year, and every year keeps getting worse and worse!" Ellen had raised her glass and swayed as she sat in the chair, tossing back the contents to the sound of rueful laughter around her. The roadhouse. Bobby and Ash, Ellen and Jo and Sam and him, getting drunk on New Year's eve and all of 'em, he thought, wishing they were in any other line of business, their eyes haunted behind the smiles.
And here he was, sitting in Lisa's clean and tidy living room, drinking whiskey bought with money honestly earned, no blood or dirt or oil under his fingernails, no stink of gun-oil or solvent rising invisibly from his clothes. Out of the life. In suburbia with a truck full of construction tools, a pretty woman sleeping upstairs in the bed they shared, a kid in the next room, and nothing to worry about except the leak in the corner of the roof that would get worse with the next big snowfall.
No friends.
No purpose.
No meaning.
No brother.
He shifted away from those thoughts, a well-practised double-clutch through the gears back to neutral territory. The nights were too long here, no matter how tired he was when he got into that shared bed, he would be up three or four hours later, awake, panting, sweating, stomach competing with his neck and shoulders for the most painful knots and he would end up down here, sitting and drinking and seeing out the rest of the dark hours in the silence of the house and the street and his own restless mind.
You got what you asked for, Dean. No paradise. No hell. Just more of the same.
Cas' words echoed in his head. I didn't ask for this, he thought bitterly. I didn't ask for being left with nothing. Having it all taken away. Fucked if he'd be saving the world the next time it needed it when he all got for his blood and pain was a life he couldn't feel and everyone he loved gone.
I mean it, Dean. What would you rather have? Peace or freedom?
Neither. Peace was sucking everything he was proud of, everything that meant anything to him, out of him. The normal life, the life he'd wanted and dreamed of and craved was taking who he was and burying it and he could feel that loss every day and every night. How long would it be before he stopped being vigilant about the protection that surrounded this house? How long would it take before he started to watch a little more TV, drink a little more each night, stop thinking, stop being Dean Winchester and start to become someone else, something else?
And freedom … freedom was a lie. He wasn't free to do anything. He was trapped like a bug in honey, struggling against losing himself, struggling against his grief, struggling against the absolute certainty that Sam was being ripped to shreds in the depths of Hell and there wasn't one fucking thing he could do about it.
He glanced at the stairs. The woman sleeping upstairs was a good woman. She was caring and decent and he thought she loved him, god knew why. He knew that. But even when he wanted to, he couldn't turn the feelings he had for her into anything more. He couldn't even tell her who he was, right down inside, where he lived. He could be with her, and protect them, and try to look after them but that was all. And he knew it wasn't enough. Not enough to make this life bearable.
He finished the whiskey and poured more into his glass, picking it up and leaning back.
His father had done that, he thought. Had screwed him and Sam up so much that a normal life was completely out of reach, impossible, unattainable. Had pounded into them the reality of the underside of the world so deeply, so inextricably, that he couldn't relax, couldn't just forget about it.
He protected you, a voice whispered in his mind, protected you and trained you to protect others.
And what had that gotten him? A lifetime of pain and no hope for anything else?
What else is there?
He couldn't quite make out whose voice that was, whispering against his thoughts, but he was starting to get irritated by it.
You were a hero, Dean; you risked your life so that other people could live. You fought the monsters and the angels and the demons and the ghosts that linger on, angry and impotent, so that people can live normal lives. Why did you ever think that kind of life would let you be normal? Normal is unaware, ignorant, naïve. You were a hunter in the dark and you were never unaware of the dangers.
No. He never was. He tried to pretend he could live without it, but he couldn't. Zachariah had been right about that.
It wasn't all bad. The way you felt about yourself, the things that you could do, the things that you did do … those are the things that are slipping away now, here in the peace of a little house, a little street, a little town. Those are things that got you up in the morning and kept you going through the watches of the night.
He swallowed another mouthful of whiskey, relishing the burn down his throat. Maybe it hadn't been all bad. Maybe this was worse, feeling safe but useless. Feeling like a bit actor in a bad play, not knowing his lines or where he was supposed to be standing, ignored mostly by the people around who did know their place in a life of normality, who looked into his eyes and saw his confusion and shook their heads at him.
Don't you remember the djinn's poison dream, Dean? Don't you remember who you were in that dream? Some guy who worked at a garage, some guy who didn't know his brother, didn't even get on with him? Some guy who gambled and drank and stole and lied? You didn't have a purpose, growing up in that normal life. You didn't have a channel for the things that were buried deep inside, the things that you can do and be. You were the smart kid who didn't see the point in exerting yourself because it all came too easy.
He frowned, shifting restlessly in the chair. Had that been true?
Of course it was true, the djinn looked inside of you and took what it found there, it didn't make up the details – you did. And you knew.
He'd wanted to stay there, god, he'd wanted so much to stay there with his family and safety and yet even there, he'd seen the girl. Seen the djinn. Hunted it down. And the man who'd done those things hadn't been the man who'd grown up in that life.
No.
Wasn't he allowed to have peace? Was that God's plan for him, to be a drifter, to have no home, no one to hold him, no one to care if he died alone?
There's peace … and there's peace. There's contentment and satisfaction in doing what you were born to do. There's acceptance and love in understanding yourself, in finding someone who can share that understanding. There's strength in being yourself, not lying, not pretending, not standing in the middle of a crowd and thinking that, in time, if you kill enough of yourself, you might eventually blend in.
He closed his eyes. He'd lost those things. Lost them all for good in the last six months. He couldn't see a way forward and he couldn't find a way back. Ahead lay years of … this. Out of place, out of his depth, but not alone. If he walked away from it …
He shook his head impatiently. He'd promised his brother. Promised him to find normality and a family and a life that he'd said over and over that he wanted. He wasn't walking away from that promise. It was the only thing left he could do for Sam, was to keep that promise.
Do you remember playing cards with Jim, in the summer time when the big storms rumbled and the light flickered on the very edge of the horizon? Do you remember frozen-cold mornings in the woods, following Bobby soundlessly over the stiff, white grass, reading the tells of every living thing that had passed that way before you? Do you remember the howl of the werewolf and the biting acrid smell of smoke, racing down a mountainside, outrunning the fire and the monster? Do you remember a beautiful fall morning, in the narrow wood behind the old house that Caleb had been renting, the sky that piercing …