Title: Winchesters They Have Known
Author: Still Waters
Fandom: Supernatural
Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural. Just playing, with love and respect to those who brought these characters to life.
Summary: A series of outside POVs on the Winchester brothers by episodic characters remembering Sam and Dean in light of the newscasts in 7x06. Open to requests.
Notes: I have to admit, this chapter was a bit of a surprise. I had planned on writing 5x17's Pastor Gideon down the road, and was going to do 1x19's Sarah Blake next, but then giacinta's review of Fr. Reynolds' chapter mentioned Roy Le Grange and how the blind faith healer "probably did get a peek at the shining interior light of the brothers' souls." I had never considered writing a chapter on "Faith", but I loved the idea and the challenge behind how a blind person would "see" Sam and Dean. A lot of the brothers' relationship is in visuals – looks, touches, and actions. But there is so much in their voices – their words, tone, and emotional shared history - that, combined with an ability to "see into someone's heart" could paint an equally clear picture of who they were and what they meant to one another. Upon rewatching "Faith", I found that Roy Le Grange is actually a very sympathetic character – as Sam and Dean discovered during the episode, Roy truly believed in God and the healing he was doing – he never knew that his wife was using black magic, and when she died, he would have lost his healing ability without ever knowing why - that it was because of something she had done. I really enjoyed exploring his character and potential future and "seeing" the boys through him. So, thank you giacinta for the recommendation! Quoted dialogue from the episode does not belong to me. Thank you for reading. I truly appreciate your support.
1x12 (Faith) – Rev. Roy Le Grange, Nebraskan Faith Healer
The last six years of Roy Le Grange's life had been marked by loss: his wife, his healing gift, most of his congregation in the wake of a fraud investigation, his health. The cancer came back about a year after Sue Ann's death and without her, there was no miracle – just long years of tests, treatments, and false remissions until it finally spread through every major thoracic organ and into his brain. Hospice workers filled his home with hospital beds, oxygen, and morphine as hope for life was lost to hope for a good death and Roy began a new series of losses: appetite, weight, color, circulation, lengths of consciousness. The hospice team strove to honor his life and routines, but he hadn't been able to bear anyone but Sue Ann reading him the news, so the aides compromised, turning on the TV every morning instead. It was there, in the muddy twilight of morphine and a body slowly shutting down, that Roy recognized the names in that morning's news report; names tied into the one thing Roy hadn't lost – his faith.
Faith in the Lord.
And the healing of Dean Winchester.
Roy didn't need to see the news to know something was wrong, just as he hadn't needed to physically visualize Sam and Dean to know who they were. The sound of recorded gunfire underlying the newscaster's litany of death and criminal charges was disturbing, but it was the brothers' voices that were the most frightening. Older and deeper, yes, but the weariness Roy would have both understood and expected replaced instead by a cold, barren sharpness. And it wasn't just the tone that was wrong, it was the words - threats to the people they planned to harm next coming from the supposed mouth of the young man who had wanted Roy to heal strangers over him.
Roy had never felt as close to God as he had in that time following his cancer miracle and subsequent healing ability. He felt blessed beyond measure to be able to assist the Lord in His work and, despite the skeptics that flocked to his services as frequently as the faithful, there was only truth in his routine opening words – "It is the Lord who does the healing here, friends; the Lord who guides me in choosing who to heal by helping me see into people's hearts."
He was a trained minister and counselor, with a natural, moderate gift to see to the heart of others; yet he had never seen people so clearly until he was blind.
Amazing Grace indeed.
Roy had a feeling the service that day was going to be different, and while Dean's muttered comment about people's wallets was not uncommon from the atheists and agnostics who got past security, Roy felt a stirring in his own heart at the voice. He knew that Dean's chagrined apology was more for getting caught than for what he actually said, but Roy still laughed it off with a joke about blind men's hearing. He would have moved right on with the service, but the familiar press of directed focus was growing, his attention pulled to Dean like a divining rod. When Roy asked the young man his name, he had to pause for a moment after the reluctant, "Dean" that responded. Because in that one syllable, Roy heard not only Dean's voice, but the entirety of God's prewritten story for him. He repeated Dean's name and nodded thoughtfully. Yes, it was beautifully appropriate. Some of the Bible's greatest miracles were witnessed by its greatest nonbelievers.
When he called Dean up to the stage, the young man surprised him with a hedged, "no, it's okay." Followed immediately by an incredulous, "what are you doing?" that came from Dean's right, a new voice laden with fear and love.
This was certainly a first for Roy. Despite reluctantly admitting that he came to be healed, Dean continued to refuse that very healing, telling Roy, "maybe you should pick someone else."
Roy didn't yet understand that he was hearing more than selflessness and skepticism in those words. But he did know that he couldn't see anyone else's heart in the room over Dean's supernova. And if it was just Roy who was choosing who to heal, maybe he could've moved on, but there was a much greater power in play, one he reminded Dean of with a half-laughed, "I didn't pick you, Dean, the Lord did."
There was another reluctant pause under the surrounding congregation's clapping laughter before the voice at Dean's side rose through it once again - hopeful, excited, desperate, as he pushed Dean to "get up there!"
Dean's boots were heavy on the stage as he slowly trudged up to Roy; a man going to his execution rather than his salvation. And Roy began to see that the voice of the younger man whose side Dean had just left was the only reason Dean was tolerating any of this. A fact Dean confirmed when he told Roy, voice low and honest, "Look, no disrespect, but I'm not exactly a believer."
Roy would have known that had he been deaf as well as blind – it was impossible not to feel the uncomfortable disbelief rolling off of Dean in waves, choking the air around them. Yet there was also a hint of respect in those words, a tiny seed of belief and catechism buried so deeply that Dean couldn't even acknowledge it anymore, let alone nurture it; a seed planted many years ago and long since tested.
Time for it to bloom.
"You will be, son, you will be," Roy smiled. While it was true that not everyone immediately believed in God's existence after a miracle, and Dean would likely be one to question it every way a man possibly could, Roy strongly felt that it would be a beginning; the first step on a long road only the Lord knew, for a spiritual reassessment and awakening at some later time. He took comfort in his response to Dean, words meant to soothe the young man, but Dean surprised him once again. Roy felt Dean's grimace tighten the air around them, heard the slight shift of fabric as he physically pulled back – and realized that Dean hadn't taken the words as the comfort they were intended to be.
He had taken them as a threat.
Roy felt Dean shy back further, muscles tensing when the preacher laid hands on him, his head turning slightly back to the congregation - no doubt to the young man that had been at his side - as if the hands attached to that other voice belonged to one of the very few that he trusted and allowed to touch him; a privilege denied most others, judging by the coiled response under Roy's hand, with trained force.
When Dean collapsed to the stage with the healing's completion, that second young voice rose up again from the crowd, the "Dean!" sharp, breathy, worried, with a shaky undercurrent of hope. Roy heard the young man rush up to the stage to Dean's side, his command for Dean to "say something!" urgent, desperate, the guilt of someone who may have gotten a loved one hurt warring with a mix of practiced assessment and a hint of a familiar need - validation. Roy smiled as the voice coalesced into a name deep in his own heart: Sam. The biblical prophet who heard the voice of God as a child, now the quietly faithful brother of a vocal nonbeliever. And with that second name, with the two of them both on the stage so close, Roy finally saw why Dean's heart had nearly blinded a sightless man.
He hadn't been seeing one heart, he'd been seeing two. Dean's heart was so bright because it was more than just Dean; it was Dean and Sam, one inseparable soul.
A brilliance mirrored in the brother born to be at his side.
Roy hadn't been surprised when Dean came to the house soon after the healing, "trying to make sense of what happened." He had expected it – a man who relied on the logic of what he saw needed more than just one miracle to change a lifetime of habits. Dean's "hmmm" to Sue Ann's statement that a miracle had occurred was as quietly skeptical as ever, and the conversation predictably skirted an outright discussion of faith and moved to assessing questions about when the miracles began, as if they were a symptom of some greater disease. Roy gladly told Dean his story - about the cancer, their prayers, the coma and waking up blessed with both his own health and the gift to heal others. He could still feel Dean's disbelief, but the young man listened respectfully, as if part of him acknowledged the comfort Roy found in his faith even as Dean personally looked for ways to disprove it.
Then came Dean's final question, his selflessness at the service now clearly just a fraction of what had been going on under the surface. Because his "Why me? Out of all the sick people, why save me?" was a heartbreaking tangle of emotion - confusion threaded with weariness and an even deeper hurt. Hurt that he'd been chosen.
A survivor's guilt.
Roy paused, his own confusion rolling. When he woke to find himself able to heal others, he had immediately seen it as a gift, a blessing. He was honored and humbled to be chosen by God. But Dean…Dean was skittish, hurt, almost angry….. his disbelief not so much in the healing ability of Roy or God, but in why anyone would choose to save him.
And there it was.
It wasn't humility that Dean had shown before he was healed…..it was an honest belief that he wasn't important, that he didn't matter, and thus would never be worth saving. And Roy couldn't believe how he could possibly feel that way; how Dean could think he didn't matter, when both heavenly and human voices shouted his very worth.
Roy tempered his shock to a gentle reiteration of his words at the service. "Well, like I said before, the Lord guides me. I looked into your heart and you just stood out from all the rest."
There was that uncomfortable pause again, a young man unaccustomed to the spotlight, who had never seen himself as anything special even as the Lord Himself did. "What'd you see in my heart?" Dean asked, voice wavering with tightly controlled emotion – the continued confusion now hitched with a subtle breath of fear.
Roy would never be as blind as that boy was right then. How could Dean not see it? Not feel it? How could he think he meant nothing when the Lord's plan shone so strongly in his soul? When his inherent goodness overtook his lack of self-worth as he wished for people he didn't even know to be saved instead of him? When his and Sam's hearts flared so brilliantly on that stage together? But most of all, how could he not hear his importance in Sam's voice - in the love, worry, joy, loyalty, and adoration that were directed from little to big brother? How could Dean not see what a blind stranger saw immediately? That Sam's faith was in more than just God – that it was in Dean, the brother who was worth everything.
Worth saving.
Roy smiled gently as he pared his answer down to the Lord's words. "A young man with an important purpose, a job to do. And it isn't finished."
A young man with a brother who loved and needed him just as much as the Heavenly Father that Dean denied did.
Roy never forgot those words. As the years passed and the news became disturbingly apocalyptic, he often found himself thinking of Sam and Dean; somehow knowing that they were at the heart of the world's ending, just as surely as he knew whose side they were on.
So when he heard the news that morning six years later, he did what he had always done since his blindness. He listened to the voices, to the words, and sought out the heart he had seen so brilliantly years before. He may have lost his healing gift, but Roy could still see deeper than most. The voices on the television were as empty as they were saturated with malice, the words threatening and wrong from the open book he had met, the young man whose words and tone were never able to hide his true heart. Roy moved past the shuddering wrongness, looked deeper….and saw darkness.
But he didn't despair.
He smiled.
Because the news was wrong.
It wasn't Dean's voice. Or Sam's. Because Roy had looked into the voices' hearts and found only darkness; couldn't see a heart because there was no heart. No Sam, no Dean, no single, radiant brotherhood.
Roy sighed, relief sweeping through his chilled body. The Devil had many guises, many tricks and soldiers to deploy against those meant to do God's work. So if those abominations on the news were here, it was to try and stop the true Sam and Dean, which meant that they were still on this Earth, the Lord's plan for them still in motion.
Roy smiled softly. Yes, the Lord truly had blessed him in many ways – with a lifelong faith in His goodness, and a small part in ensuring that he left a darkening world with the continued light of hope.
With Sam and Dean's heart.
