First part of the songfic that got out of hand! This is the answer to a prompt from DeanWinchesterPresents requesting fic written to Breaking Benjamin's Without You. This will be Dean/Castiel. Actually this song screams out for it almost as much as the last request did. It also doubles up as another post Swan Song response, because I don't like that Cas went back upstairs and I don't think that this automatically means that Dean's fixed now. Does that make me bad?
Disclaimer: Neither song nor show are mine. I'm merely borrowing them and I will give them back when I'm good and done. It could take a while but eventually I'll return them almost as good as new.
Without You.
Search for the answers I knew all along
I lost myself, we all fall down
Dean Winchester has never been much of a man to stay in one place at any given time. He has always been happier on the road and whether that be on the road alone, with his family or with his friends, it has always been home to him. He has always known this, knows that those who understand even the smallest part of him understand it too even if they never want to admit to it.
Even with that certain fact Dean made a promise to his brother, the kind of promise that he cannot go back upon because it was effectively Sam's dying wish. Dean promised to find Lisa and try to live a normal life and that is exactly what he is trying to do. He has given up the life of a hunter, has even gone so far as to box up the weapons that would normally live in the trunk of the Impala and put them somewhere out of sight and out of mind. The house is warded in such a way that he cannot see them and anything that might remind of his former life has been cut off and cut out.
Dean wants to forget. He wants to forget his loss, his pain, his past. He wants to hide from the memory of what Sam became with Lucifer in control of his body. He wants to hide from the memories of Hell and the months of agony at knowing that he is in part responsible for the apocalypse that nearly was. He wants to forget himself.
So he stays with Lisa. He tries to find joy in life and in living in a way that he has never been able to before. He tries to find work and make friends that are all his own and all new and he cannot help but know, deep down, that this is not the way that things are meant to be for him.
He knows that this is not the life that he should have because there is no one here who understands, not even Lisa can. No one has seen the terrible things he has. No one knows the primal fear that fills a man on a full moon when hunting a werewolf. No one has seen the deep pits of Hell and experienced that special hospitality reserved for hunters. All of these people have lived their 'apple pie' lives, and though they are not perfect, they are a great deal better than the life that has been his.
They have experienced things that he has never been able to, they have had security, they have been able to keep their dreams and a measure of innocence. They do not wake in the night screaming for mercy, or for death. They do not cry out to a brother rotting in a cage with trapped archangels and they do not feel unutterable sorrow and emptiness in the place where a lowly angel once stood.
Dean feels all of that, he experiences all of that, because that has been his lot in this world and in this universe. He has experienced all of this because he is a hunter and they are mere broken shells of men who do not know how to function in a world of naive sceptics and laws that cannot be bent. He is a man pulled from Hell so that he could become the vessel for an archangel. He is the one who could have handed the world to the Heavens or to Hell. He is the man who stood side by side with angel and demon and told two of the most powerful creatures in the world 'no more'.
Dean has gone up against pagan gods, against the creatures that exist in people's nightmares and children's tales. He has gone up against legends and impossibilities and he has stood firm in their path. He defeated them.
So he cannot understand why this normal life scares him so. He cannot understand why he does not want to embrace it as Sam says that he should. He cannot understand why Lisa has been so willing to open her home and her life to him and he cannot understand why he wishes that this could have been him and Cas rather than the way that it is.
He misses the angel. It takes him months to realise that this is what is missing in his new life. The unexpected calls and the gruff incomprehension of the needs of humans. The quiet flap of wings too great and too brilliant to be perceived by his eyes and the comfort of knowing that the being who pulled him out of Hell, the one who turned his back on Heaven for Dean, is there to help him.
Instead he goes through the nights mostly alone, mostly afraid, and needing that understanding that only another being who has seen Hell can give. He tries to explain it to Lisa one day while Ben is at baseball and fails miserably at it because there are no words to describe the unimaginable horrors that Hell can inflict upon a soul. The wounds that can be created but never healed, not even with the touch of an angel. He knows that though she tries, she can never understand and that is when it strikes him the hardest that this can never be his life. This is never what he was meant to be.
He is lost here, in this place where his memories of his past tie him to the fear of one day revisiting it. He is alone, living with a woman he hardly really knows and her son who treats him with wary friendship now that he is older. He has no ties with his old life, Bobby is hunting on his own and respects Dean's need for normalcy, Sam is in Hell and Castiel ran back off up to Heaven the first chance that he got.
He thinks that maybe he should call Bobby, that maybe he should put an end to the entire charade that he has going here with Lisa. He does not. Instead he smiles an empty smile and laughs a dead laugh and exists as the man that Sam wanted him to become.
It does not mean that he is not still broken.
Never the wiser of what I've become
Alone I stand a broken man