A/N: This is a sequel, to two earlier works: 'we foresee the Mercy (that's been shown my young limbs) and This is my excevation (and today is Kumran), which are both one-shots. You probably need to read those to understand this fic.

Also, while I planed this as Gen, my muse is playing up so it may become slash or at least pre-slash (but not wincest) but i'll let you know if it does happen. in any case no complaints cause you've been warned.

spoilers for 5.22

Disclaimer: I own nothing: Title comes from lyrics of a song Lump Sum by Bon Iver. Poem by philip larkin.

Sold My Red Horse (for a venture home.)

So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd

Leaves me flushed and stirred,

Like Then she undid her dress

Or Take that you bastard;

Surely I can, if he did?

And that helps me to stay.

philip Larkin, Poetry of Departures

Prolog

When he arrives he almost turns around and leaves again.

The house is so warm, a lit up in the dusk of an ordinary suburban street, a basketball hoop above the garage door and an umbrella stand next to the welcome mat.

And there, juxtaposed against this is Dean; face still painted with violet and violence. Boots dusty from the miles he's come and leather jacket slung around shoulders slumped with loss and wariness and the numb feeling of being alive.

Lisa, doesn't deserve this. Doesn't deserve the leftovers of a man she barely knows intruding into the life she's built here. Ben doesn't deserve to see what's become of his hero.

He knocks anyway.

He'd like to say, that he does it for Sammy, because he made him promise. Because it's the last promise he'll ever make Sam and he needs to keep it otherwise he'll go crazy. It's true enough, but it's not the whole truth. For two years now Dean's been running and hiding and saying no and staying alive. For two years now Dean's been living the systematic destruction of his world and sometimes he's had no one, not even Sam or Castiel or Bobby. Sometimes he's been holding himself and everything else together with nothing more than stale prayers and bullets.

And now it's over, and the world hasn't actually ended but Dean's world still kind of has. Now Castiel's gone back to Heaven and Bobby's gone back to the junkyard and Sam…fuck, Dean can't even think it.

And…twelve years ago Lisa had been sex and escapism when Sam and John had been fighting. Three years ago she'd been if only when Dean had only had a year and couldn't afford dreams.

Dean wants this, wants Lisa and Ben and he has for a long time. Maybe not as much as he wants Sam and the road, but Dean can't have those anymore and maybe he can have this.

And it isn't entirely fair but Dean's tired of other's needs and saving people.

So he knocks anyway.

Dean is kind of useless at normal.

Lisa is patient but firm.

He learns.

The first time he tries to cook he sets off the fire alarm, the shrill warning annoying as he scrapes the charred remains of bacon into the sink. For the next week he is restricted to toast duty (on a pre-set timer) and his eventual return to the kitchen is under strict supervision.

He's also managed to break the vacuum cleaner, twice. There are, Lisa explains painstakingly, certain things that can overload the motor if sucked up. He needs to remove these items before he begins.

Just because there is a special on at the supermarket, doesn't mean he should by four loafs of bread either, because it will go stale before they can eat it all. Dean was surprised with that one. When he was young it would have been a decent bargain; in a family where they're a two growing boys who can't cook and a father was often away. Sandwiches had been a staple of Dean's childhood. But, Lisa now tells him; green bits of mold should not simply be cut from the edible portion of the slice. The loaf is simply thrown away.

It's a new existence, one of neighborhood lunches and afterschool activities. Where he has dates he marks on a calendar and when Ben has problems at school it actually matters because they're still going to be here in month.

It's hard and very foreign and Dean is kind of useless at normal.

But he learns.

Sometimes Dean still catches glimpses of his old life.

An unexplained death in the paper, a series of confusing events on the news. A phone call from Bobby, apologetically asking the details of a monster he once encountered, or the exact phasing of some exoticism Castiel taught him.

Dean still drives the impala, because he can't bear to lock her away in some storage unit and let the dust gather and the memories feaster.

And sometimes he talks to Bobby, or finds some sign hidden from the unknowing world, and his hands tighten on the wheel, white knuckles and vibrating mullet rock. Sometimes the road stretches out beyond the local seven/eleven or Ben's school and Dean can almost taste the miles.

And then he goes home and kisses Lisa on the cheek and helps Ben with his homework. Then he goes home and tucks the desire and all the never-can-bes away again.

He never wants less, but he does less frequently. Dean has made promises, not just to Sam, not just that final weighing oath. Dean has promised Lisa and Ben and himself.

And no, maybe it's not the life he would have picked, thirteen years ago, five years ago. Maybe there is always that tiny unhealing place in the corner of his mind.

But…he's not just here because of promises and duty; he doesn't stay because Sam wanted him to.

Dean is alive and this is how he lives.

When Dean first meet Ben he had been eight years old and fairly certain in his reasoning that Dean actually hung the sky.

When Dean wanders back into their lives three years later, eleven year old Ben takes it in stride, accepting Dean's new permanent placement into his world.

It isn't really until he hits puberty -a graceless stretch of limbs and overblown testosterone- that Dean becomes a questionable source of authority. Something foreign, neither mother nor biological father, with a history unknown and unexplained.

It is also around this time that Ben becomes obsessed with idea of Sam.

Dean never speaks of Sam, of the aborted apocalypse and the endless Fall into the center of the underworld. Ben himself has vague recollections of someone tall and dark with slanted, kind hazel eyes. At the time he'd been too caught up with Dean and their shared adventure to notice particularly, the fleeting presence of Sam.

But it's been years since then and now Ben is vocal about the things Lisa knows better than to talk of. Ben questions what happened to Dean and why he turned up bloody and bruised on their doorstep. Why Dean sometimes stares through him when he rolls his eyes or drawls some sarcastic comment.

There are also, Ben notes, no pictures of Sam in their house. At least not one taken after the age of six months, like the one folded into Dean's wallet of the whole Winchester family. Sam is both a beloved and untouchable subject for Dean and Ben doesn't understand.

It comes to a head in May, 2013, when Dean's kind of caught up in his own head space (because Sam would be 30 if he hadn't saved the world three years ago), and Ben is fourteen and kind of angry all the time. Ben knows why he and his mother can't own all of him.

Ben says, "How'd he die" sudden and demanding and they both know who he's taking about.

Dean goes still. Not like he's angry, or horrified. It's a kind of breathlessness, brought on by a thousand answers of which none are close enough. He remembers the Hole and the moment his brother's eyes returned. He never saw the complete decent, the moment Sam blew out of existence, burned out by the grace and fury of Lucifer's Fall.

"There was a war." He settles for "And Sam…he ended it."

Ben frowns at him, as though sensing the incompleteness of the answer. There are things Dean can't explain and there are things he won't. Sam is a little of both.

"He went to Stanford you know." Ben's best friend's brother just started there and for the last month he's had a Cardinal flag on his wall. "Got a scholarship. Full ride and everything."

Dean swallows, because it's hard to talk about this without remembering Stull, but Sam is more than his death, however righteous and terrible it was.

It's time, that Dean remembered that.

Lisa never touches the hand-print. Not when she taps his arm for attention, or rubs his shoulder in comfort.

Not when they're twisted up in sheets and sweat and reaching, wanting every part of the other.

It's so very deliberate; the thing is the most prominent of all his scars, seared red flesh, unmistakably male. Her eyes had skidded over it the first night she'd pulled him inside, half shattered with grief. She folded him into bed in nothing but his boxes without even asking why he was there.

For a moment though, her hand had lingered over that mark. Then she looked at his face and pulled back and she'd never tried to touch it since

It's a bit like their relationship: Dean never explains and Lisa never asks and he doesn't quite no if that's because she's afraid of the answer or just that he won't give it.

It's been six years.

Six years of regular working hours and birthdays and Christmases. Six years of ignoring the strange things in the dark, of choosing over and over Lisa and Ben and being a family.

It's been six years and then he appears like some long expected thing when Dean hadn't even known he'd been waiting.

It's night. There are no clouds, only stars cold and dead a million years hanging overhead. The sky does not show the future, only things already gone. It's May, of course May because these things are circular and Dean's in the garage scraping over a small problem in the Impala, she's getting very old now and needs more help than ever.

It's night and it's May and Dean's skin has been itching for hours and then the streetlight that's never worked roars to life across the street.

"Dean."

The problem, with not knowing he's been waiting, is that he's invested himself here. Chosen here so many times it's almost engraved. So that even now, breathless with want and hope and Finally, he's also thinking of Lisa's work dinner on Tuesday and Ben's graduation in five weeks.

he says, "I need your help."

The moment fractures and stills. A hundred different futures rippling and changing and waiting.

And Dean replies "Okay" because it's the only answer he could ever give.