HAVING A BALL
Chapter 36
"How can you be so sure, when I'm not?" Dean gave up any pretence of lugging the lion, his chest feeling tight with shame and despair – what he'd wanted most of all was for Castiel to tell him that God had given him superhuman endurance in the face of all the crap that would or could be thrown at him, so he wouldn't falter and go Dungeon Master again.
"You got the chance for some payback, Dean. And you took it, and yes, you liked it, just like I did because unfortunately, while nobody deserves to get turned into a vampire or snacked on by a ghoul, innocent people and nice people are not the same thing. But since then, have you had the opportunity to go Dark Side again and whup some ass?"
"Yeah…"
"And did you take it?"
"No, but –"
"But nothin'. Someone once said that you aren't defined by your abilities, but by your choices. You could have, but you wouldn't. You wanted to, but you didn't. Fortunately the Good Lord gave us human folk free will, and free will is all about making choices. I don't deserve any medals for it, 'cause it's what I shoulda done in the first place anyways, but I can look myself in the mirror every morning because I walked away more times than I gave in and put the boot in. You're not a monster, Dean, and you're not some wicked irredeemable guy who should be whipped or beaten or jailed for fifty years; if you were, you'd have taken every opportunity to get revenge on your account – I got revenge on my own account, but somethin' tells me that what really happened was that you were eventually lured into it by some pretty potent persuasion."
Oh yeah, Alistair loved to slice chunks out of me with his knife, but he was even better at slicing me with his words and he knew it, that's why I was his go-to guy for kicks and giggles for thirty years…
"…and that you 'n' Sam are clashing because of your different ways of dealing with it…"
Dean tuned back in and corrected, "It's not about what I did – well, yeah it is in part, but…there's a lot going on right now, most of it's bad, most of it's gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets bet – hell, who am I kidding, before it goes worse still – and me and Sam…I feel like we're in one of those melodramatic daytime soaps, y'know, 'Days of our lives' or something, like my character's storyline is to file for divorce for 'irreconcilable differences'."
"Are they irreconcilable?" It was a blunt question.
"Me and Sam used to get so much hassle at school, from the teachers," Dean spoke quietly, reflectively. "They always used to be going on about how we needed to develop an 'age-appropriate' relationship, about how 'normal' brothers preferred to be with their own peer group and not a sibling four years younger or older. I never got that for years, until I discovered girls –"
"And also discovered what a pain a little sister – or brother – could be hanging around, spying on you trying to unhook Melinda Markow's bra in the summerhouse and going around telling everyone you were kissing Julie on Monday and Suzy on Tuesday."
Joe recited a litany, but his voice was soft and his eyes bright, and Dean knew that Joe would have given probably anything, including his soul, to have had his little sister Mary Briddon alive these past forty-odd years.
"Yeah, girls. Man talk about a Revelation. Anyway, me and Sam have spent ninety percent of our lives being right next to each other, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-sixty-five days a year. I never realised until…I nearly got ganked by this djinn… that in normal families siblings grow up and grow apart and get married and have kids and maybe see each other on birthdays and holidays. It's not normal for a thirty year old guy to be so used to sleeping only four feet away from his little brother that he can't sleep alone because he can't sleep at all when he can't hear anyone else breathing."
"And you resent that, and him, now?" Joe asked before meaningfully holding up his end of the bed sheet.
Obediently, Dean tightened his hold on his end, though he didn't move for a moment. "No, never that, but…it's not even that he's having sex with Ruby…I've not exactly been a humanist in my choices of female company either – there was this succubus once that was amazing…" and Angel Anna, who was also amazing… "it's just that every time we seem to open our mouths to each other these days we end up…"
"Having a difference of opinion?" Joe interjected.
"Oh yeah…a 'free and frank discussion', an 'exchange of opposing views'. Somehow we always seem to end up having…what's the euphemism? 'We had words'. We always seem to be having 'words'."
"About everything and nothing," Joe acknowledged. "Went through a real sticky patch with my wife for a while after Mary was killed – we couldn't agree on anything except that each other was just 'impossible' – but considering some of the torrid times we'd gone through as hunters it wasn't a particularly traumatic period in our lives in any other way than we just couldn't seem to agree on anything and deciding what to have for breakfast turned into a fight."
"That's where I'm coming from. We fight, I get angry, I switch to silent running 'cause I'm afraid of saying something I won't regret, and getting into an actual fight I won't hold back from – I'm sure Sam feels exactly the same way. At the time my anger is sharp and honed, like a knife, but trying to describe the actual argument…the details always seem as fuzzy and messy as candyfloss. You know, those couples who put 'irreconcilable differences' on the divorce petition because they couldn't for the life of either of them tell you why they've decided each other is impossible."
"I've been there, close enough at any rate…" Joe admitted. "Everything is so clearly wrong you can see it inside your head but what the real problem is…it's so nebulous you just can't articulate it."
"That's as good a description as any."
"Maybe you'll just have to agree to disagree. We're all different, even brothers and sisters born to the same parents." Joe advised, reiterating his earlier 'apples on the same tree' point.
"I guess…after all the years and all the mileage, we are different, and in the end that's what it comes down to. I remember reading somewhere once, 'different enough to be childish, foolish enough to say it, and prideful enough not to let it go.' In the end, we both revert to type and the carousel of argument goes round and round."
"Then I guess one of you will just have to risk jumpin' off and stoppin' the ride."
Dean snorted. "Sam…"
Was right there, looking down at them - at Dean - from the first floor balcony, holding one end of something enveloped in a large garishly pink silk bed sheet. As was too often the case these days, his face was a mystery Dean couldn't decipher and which gave no clues as to how long he'd been there, looking and listening. Dean had been so focussed on manhandling Super-Tiddles that Lenore and her entire vampire nest could have sauntered up behind him while he was panting and heaving and working up a sweat.
Concluded in Chapter 37…
© 2009, The Cat's Whiskers
Author's Note: the 'different' quote was by fanfiction writer Jael Lynn, from her story in The Sentinel fandom, Auld Lang Syne. It can, I believe, be found at Cascade Library story archive.