Disclaimer: Supernatural isn't mine.
Warning: This chapter references a lot of stuff that happened during the first half of season 6.
A/N: To those of you who noticed, yes the chapter title is a reference to the movie, "I Don't Know how She Does It" (yYknow, the one with the busy working mom who runs around in high heels all the freakin' time? Anyways...)
I guess you could say, Dean Winchester is Sarah Jessica Parker... Or not. But seriously, I thought the chapter title was pretty on the mark, because Dean has a lot of stuff going on in his life at this point.
There is one quote from the show in here. Lisa says it.
Read, enjoy, review! :)
He begins to ask himself things no man should have to ask.
He begins to lose faith in something that has been right for so long.
He begins to think that his brother is a monster.
It's coming down to this one thing- this balance that is not so balanced and he's slipping.
How many more talks can they have before Lisa realizes he's danger? She's been with him a year and sure, he felt close to human, but he can't block off his old life when he's living it all over again, now.
There is Dean: lover, brother, surrogate father, hunter, criminal- and it's not so simple when each role takes from him and some roles are from different breeds all together.
He searching for the overlap, because he wants to be all of these things, but it keeps coming back to one simple thing.
He's no good.
Think of it like this.
He know what grief does to a person- that has been, after all, his whole life in one miserable, gnarled wiring of brain activity.
Because it's as if his actions are driven by loss and loss and only loss. He has ganked before, murder really, and seen the horrible messes left in his wake; dead families (maybe even worse is when one person survives, alone and broken), a gored monster that of course looks human, and the heavy resurfacing of hollowness.
He seeks these things out, the things no one should ever see, like he needs them because this is what he knows- side by side death.
When you live in a world colored by black and blue, red, the guts of the whole world burning, who do you cling to?
Sam is made up of a million things.
To be technical about it, Sam would be intelligence, height, wry (so subtle, always sharp) humor, rare smiles, and hunter's instincts.
To see Sam in the light of the only person who knows him, is to be by his side for a lifetime- Dean has watched over him, has tracked his movements, breathes in the space around Sam, for every second he has to give (creepy though that may sound, it's plain unavoidable).
So Dean knows Sam.
The addiction to empathy, the need to reach out to people and feel their pain, even though Sam has enough of his own to tide him over until the last person on earth stops breathing. The sparseness of possessions, roaming for all of his life and rarely finding a physical, material thing he wants, and so far it is just a laptop that fills this slot. The movements- hands, always hands, awkwardly sprawled all over the place, whole arm movements and maybe yawning is the thing that seems to take up all of Sam (because it is not just inhaling, but twisting his head and moving his arm, and stretching like a tree shaking out leaves).
To be emotional about it, Sam is everything.
Let's say he's on the move.
The car is ready, Sam's car is ready (and this might be one of the strangest parts his life now. Seriously, it's all… shiny and gas efficient.), and they take route across country.
There are baby shifters and plagues and tween vampire romances.
It's a nuthouse like it's always been and the pressure is on.
To save that kid and to question this man and then everything is going haywire.
Because Sam says it is okay to torture a kid for info and he's part of the hunting family neither of them knew existed before (not to mention the boss is zombie gramps) and Sam just doesn't care.
The jobs are turning stranger and the rules don't apply anymore and the monsters are breeding, spreading out like choking vines.
Then Dean's turned and for a while, that is that.
Bright lights, buzzing skin- like a hangover with an execution order at the end.
So he tries not to think beyond, don't eat.
But he's losing things all over again- Sam's here, but not ever really here, and anyways, he's got the Campbell family now.
Dean wonders how he could have been dumb enough to think he could have anything.
And that's when he knows he has to say goodbye to Lisa. Because she was his sweetest lapse and she doesn't deserve any of this. But closure, he'll give to her.
So he tries to make his last human decision.
All this pumping blood though. He can smell it.
Of all the sideways crap hitting the ceiling, at least a vampire cure is in there. Dean is now de-monstered and he doesn't have to worry about dying until the next time things go wrong.
But, it's a bitter thing, because he walked right up to the woman he loves and the kid he loves when he was a monster. And these the sorts of things he feared. Because it's hard enough to block out the world of evil from them, but it's nigh impossible when he doesn't know which side it will come from. This time, it was him.
Line them all up. Every person- soul, human, ghost, demon (because it all whittles down to the same thing, at first).
So you breathe, at least once and maybe a trillion times from there, and that makes you human.
Not to be a nancy about it, but this is a kind of an important point- humanity. Because this is the word that makes the line. What to hunt, what to kill. When human stops being human, you burn them alive.
It's the big names up here- God, Angels, King of Hell, and then everyone else- so it's easy to forget. But, he's the decider. He makes up the futures of a lot of people.
He's the one that draws the line in the sand and says what monster is. So, he guesses, the questions he should ask himself at some point (now is that time), are these:
Where does it start?
When does it end?
He doesn't know Sam.
The worry is that he never did. Because Sam is tainted, wrong by mistakes and wrong by loss of control. It' horrible, Sam's history laid out like facts, but this? Sam does not seem the same as the Sam before.
This Sam smiled when Dean got his death warrant.
This Sam is cold.
A monster is a monster is a monster and there are so many out there.
He's learning things he never needed to know and he's seeing the gruesome practice of monsters growing.
Alpha, Mother of All, and the place where they all come from.
There never was an end in sight, but it seems now that survival of the fittest is truly cutting humans out.
Maybe he really is just fighting the natural order of all things, because fate (from the beginning with reapers and angels and prophecies), the dug up brother who came out of Hell wrong, Death and death- they're all against him.
So it is stacking up, and when even your own flesh and blood isn't human anymore…
What's the point?
It snuck up on Dean.
And he knows maybe it's that he overestimated their boundaries, or maybe it's the rotting pull of his truest self (Because he doesn't think he should be near them. But it's so hard to leave.), or maybe it's not over and he just has try again and again until something gives.
Because he's got a family now. He made the promise and found something outside of his brother and running and killing. And it's all pulling at him, giving him choices. Fight for family, for what's right, for everything. And he thinks maybe this is it.
He's going to hold onto everything. It'll be messy. It'll always be messy. But he wants this.
"Me and Ben can't be in this with you. I'm sorry."
Something gives.
Sam's been lying to him.
It's been this crawling time of defect as everything has turned against reality.
Because Sam has been smiling at death and raising guns at the innocent and staring at people like a slaughterer. Because, to Sam, it's not about the righteousness of hunting and the small slivers of salvation you can give. It's just a simple, base instinct to turn tables and watch the carnage.
But it's okay. Because he knows now. This isn't Sam.