Title: Right on the Wrong Side of it all
Rating: PG (for Language)
Characters: Dean, Sam
Spoilers: Season Two, up to and including "Croatoan".
Disclaimer: Borrowed without asking, returned without damage.
Author's Notes: A character sketch of Dean in Season Two, leading up to the events in "Croatoan". Feedback is love, as is constructive criticism. Title from Seether's "Remedy".
There's a cliff that the rest of the world is poised on top of and then there's the fucked-up precipice life gave the Winchesters: dangling out over the abyss, crumbling beneath their feet, and Dean finds it ironic that not even Sam can see how close to falling he really is. He quit paying attention in high-school English long before the discussion on metaphors, but he understands analogies and he knows that his fingernails are torn ragged and bloody, the muscles in his arms shudder with the effort, his feet scrabble unsuccessfully in a constant search for purchase.
He finds it equally ironic that the weight dragging him down – his promise to his father, the burden of his father's secret – is the same weight pinning him against the cliff-face.
What Sam will never understand, what Dean will never tell him, is this: he wants to fall.
He wants for this to be over.
It's not about peace; Dean's not stupid enough to believe that he's earned it. That he deserves it. It's about silence, about release, about removing the weight from his shoulders and the dread in his heart and letting the void swallow him whole.
And he almost had it. The oblivion, the nothingness. The words were on his lips when the Reaper's eyes flared golden and it was taken away from him in the same breath as his father's life.
He mourns this loss as much as he does his father's.
More, some days.
But he promised Dad and he promised Sam, and fuck if Dean's own words aren't the biggest burden of all.
So he hides it when he can and he takes a crowbar to the body of the Impala when he can't. His aim is more accurate, his fists more furious, hies blows more deadly. He tells Sam and he tries to tell himself that it's not some whacked-out suicidal tendency that has him waiting that heartbeat longer than necessary to take the shot; that turns his face in the other direction and propels him off the curb in spite of the roaring in his ears, that keeps him awake at night with a blade in his hand, running the tip along the soft flesh of his inner arm, over and over, never quite breaking the skin but leaving a thin red line that's still there in the morning. That it doesn't count if he spends long hours sitting motionless with a Remington in his lap, because he doesn't put the gun to his temple and he doesn't pull the fucking trigger.
Sam's got two-thirds of an Ivy League education. Sam believes him only because he wants to believe him, because even Dean can see that believing him is easier than the alternative. But because he's Sam, he has to push it a little too – pick at the scab, dab salt in the wound. Sam forces the words out of him, crisis by heartache by crack in his soulThe pain of saying them aloud, Dean thinks, is more than he can reasonably be expected to bear.
Standing in Bobby's junkyard, spanner in one hand and ratchet in the other. Dad gave his life for me. How am I supposed to live with that?
By the side of the road winding through another nameless state Forrest. What's dead should stay dead but I'm not and it's not natural, Sam, and look what's come of it. How I am supposed to live with that?
Words. Words, words. All he's got but not enough, not ever enough to explain it. Dad was supposed to go out fighting, not on his knees in front of the damn thing. How am I supposed to live with that?
Tell me, Sam.
Tell me.
Tell me how I'm supposed to live with it.
Tell me what you could possibly say to make that all right.
He tears the words out of the dark part of his soul and Sam nods earnestly, emotionally, but he doesn't get it. He'll never get it. Dean's his brother and Dean's carried him his entire life, and he doesn't understand that it's his weight tipping Dean over the edge of the precipice. Dean knows this, accepts it. It's the natural order of things.
So fuck if it ain't all kinds of ironic, then, that when that final weight lands on his shoulders and sends him into freefall, when his brother is sitting before him with a hand clamped over his poisoned wound and Dean gives up because he no longer has the reserves necessary to fight itit comes wearing Sammy's face.