Castiel left on a Thursday, though Dean couldn't sense a change until one entire day after. He wasn't what some would call numb, either – he left everything to his person in a filmy and a subtle suspense, as if his brain couldn't quite detect its absence of usual equilibrium so soon. Dean supposed, bitterly and after the fact, that he had grown too used to complacency; something he must have mistook for happiness.
Still, Saturday came and Dean awoke on the left side of his mattress, eyes creaking open to a dark morning through closed curtains, and for the first time since Castiel shut the door he felt something strong and uncomfortable enough to punch the breath out of his lungs.
Castiel had betrayed him. Dean sat up with the revelation; cradled it close in his chest and hopped out of bed with it, staring along the expanse of the apartment with wide eyes. Castiel had betrayed him, and he still woke up on his half of the bed – no, no, – what used to be his half when it was shared, and he faced the way that, two weeks ago, would have left him staring at Castiel's form, eyes open and aimed at him, while the other man lay there composed.
Castiel had betrayed him, and he couldn't bring himself to react to it? He lived amoung his objects without complaint or notice? Quickly, still in his bed clothes, Dean turned around and shoved Castiel's books off the kitchen counter, the rug, dresser, and bedside counter; set them on one side of the table he didn't use, like the man couldn't do any worse things if only Dean could easily keep a vigil on his belongings.
Still that wasn't enough. Hands flexing, fingers rubbing against each other uneasily, he started forward around the flat: The shoes by the door; a tan overcoat; spare razor; toothbrush, and favored soap all got crammed and balled up together, shoved in the bottom drawer of his wardrobe where dirty vials and rusted memories once sat.
Dean was just about to strip the bed, rub it down with bleach and lye until it smelt as it did coming straight from the factory. Until he couldn't smell Castiel's hair on the pillows, smoke in the threads; the harmless, sweet tang of sweat that came with well-worn objects, different than day clothes because nothing extraneous ever happened in them, or at least not anything bad. It was a relaxed taste – personal; too personal considering what had happened.
Dean stepped back from the bed, arms partway raised to protect himself, before remembering that Castiel wasn't really here, and he turned around instead, mouth shut and clamped over with his hand.
Because this wasn't ending a partnership – as business or as friends – it wasn't even like a divorce or the breaking up of a romantic affair. Castiel was a man – they both were. And that made it utterly, exclusively worse.
As much as he hated to admit it, Castiel was more than what most people were in his esteem – no matter what sex. He wasn't innocuous and he wasn't invisible. He wasn't even nothing because half the apartment was a reminder of him and every thought of him gave way to some feeling, if only disgust or regret or fear.
Dean was a bit too experienced and at least prepared if Castiel planned to do him in with any physical violence. Not to mention that, bound to Crowley as they both were, Castiel was better off to avoid him and let him get rid of – or attempt to off – Lucifer. No, Castiel wouldn't touch him, not in that manner.
But that said nothing of his reputation.
It wouldn't be difficult for rumors to start up – stories of some sort. Benny had already mentioned to him that his tolerance and exposure had diminished impressively, and that was true. Bars and clubs never held the same interest for him as they did a year before – the Capitol Hotel ruined that in some measure, Castiel's reluctance to visit such places in another. He knew the fact that he wasn't in a basement or the back of some restaurant every Saturday wouldn't offend anyone; the guests he vaguely knew from those places didn't miss him or notice his absence except for some occasional emotionless remark, a, "Hey, whatever did happen to Winchester?" before going back to less mindful concerns. But if something slipped, if some reason of absence was passed around, all knowing and anonymous – they would swallow it up, and Dean's life would be finished. Acceptance was gone for his sort, anyway, even amoung the partying crowd. That sort of thing had been sucked back into the top crust lifestyle, and even then things were far too serious nowadays for queer romantics – for the pining Oscar Wilde sorts.
But still, he stepped away from the bed: That he would not touch. It was the damn principle of the thing. If Castiel had a presence in his mind he wouldn't give his possessions the time of day. It was his bed first, after all.
So he turned away from the bed, stripped out of his pajamas, back still to the darkened windows. His drawers had Castiel's clothes in them, too, but he could partially convince himself that they were part of his own collection – their sizes were similar enough.
He dressed mechanically in gray trousers and a slate vest, and forewent breakfast in his own apartment to get out as soon as possible. He locked the door after himself and didn't make eye contact with the other tenants who passed him on the stairwell like smudges fading into the bleakly painted background. Outside, September was a dreadful promise of the winter coming all too quickly. Dry wind swirled past his body, making his eyes water but thankfully expelling the imagined prying gazes from his back. With the out of doors comparison he saw that his room had been nearly too stuffy to bear, and he resolved to get away from such a place.
He started to walk.
xxxx
In the absence of anyone Dean's wandering escalated tremendously. If he wasn't in work, at least. For so long he'd had other, more troubling things to occupy his time. But with Crowley's distance until spring and Castiel's mess he had found himself occupied with economic troubles and foreign affairs – things he found in the newspaper. It was almost an exotic experience, a vacation; to be worried about the same things everyone else was worried about, like making the rent or not.
At work he was unfocused. He never nodded off but fell into a faltering state of unconscious movements. It was excusable behavior; most jobs were terribly routine. He had gotten off lucky, in fact, all things considered. He stripped car parts for scrap metal and worked on hooking up harnessing belts into the heavy engines for removal; or digging out the minute and precious pieces of copper wiring and putting them into buckets. He left his jacket and hat on a rack in the back room, and left his pocket watch at home due to the lack of trust he had for his co-workers. He could approximate the time by how black his hands were getting as he dug them into oiled machine parts; soon it was hard to distinguish any other smell on himself other than that and perhaps gasoline.
The rest of the machine shop was dense with smoke and mist – clogged with the exposed, monstrous arms of machines, pulling, dissecting, cleaning, repairing. His job was also special in that he saw nearly every model of car from the inside – learned the layout of each in a hands-on way, of how things fit together and worked or, in most cases, didn't. He'd been partially interested in looking into books on manufacturing and engineering; by this point he supposed he had more than enough field experience, and it left him with a rather large vocabulary of machinery and automobile terms. Though most of the manuals he took from work or began to borrow from nearby libraries were dry enough to bore even Sam to tears, it had a possible beneficial impact – a bit of an edge in automobile related trades – firing was a quick and easy process these days, anyway. The thought of being without a job totally settled into the floor of Dean's thoughts, never quite leaving him alone. It was best to be valuable in any way he could think of, and if he enjoyed cars genuinely then, why not? It was better than whatever any of Castiel's books would have given him, if he could bring himself to do more than give them a glance out of the corner of his eyes these days.
He kept on with his business and settled into some sort of introverted streak – he had hardly made note of who neighbored with him in his apartment, a strange and somewhat awful habit, since he had always gotten cordial greetings whenever he passed a person by in the staircase, especially since the building had started to turn out those quiet bachelor for large families who would take a cramped flat to being out on the street. He forced himself to start to care about these people who shared his roof, his walls – soon he was the only person living by themselves, now, he discovered. Of course he hadn't always been by himself.
Well, maybe.
And that reserved friendliness came in handy once in a while. After a few weeks of tossing around in bed he figured it was time to wash his bed sheets, hygiene the selling factor in this instance. For the longest time he had all his clothes washed at the Novak's tailor shop, but now he was forced to use the machine stored in the basement once again – much older and much more pitiful by comparison. They also didn't have a dryer, so his next door neighbor, some exhausted mother named Mrs. Delphino, offered him her clothesline outside her window, when she saw his pile of clothes dripping water down the corridor.
Some nights he'd get so bored, cooped up with quiet, friendly strangers and tired from work that he would go out and find a juice joint to settle into for a few hours. They weren't anything special, though within a week of doing that he found himself in the presence of old friends – or well, people that knew him. It made him realize how little he had gone out, in the pitful of time between Sam and Jess's departure and now. Even if he went in more for the washed down ale and some background music to drink to, it was nice to have the noise of others to wash over him; brushing his back and nudging his arm and leaning on his shoulder all night, familiar and warm without getting personal. He liked that – he maybe needed it to go on.
Drinking did have the somewhat unfortunate habit of having him wake up late, or take too long getting ready as he stumbled through headaches and pains as he drank what he was used to from ages ago instead what he should take in now. He'd been reprimanded for tardiness once or twice, and perhaps that should have been argument enough to stop , but it merely spurred Dean on to further, later nights where he would complain and rouse other grievances about the worldly injustice of coming to shift at six minutes past instead of at the hour. It was too terrible to conceive, he'd say, partially to the group who had gathered nearby, partly into his cup, it wasn't as if the entire industry was marking down wages per hour every few months, or anything like that. Most of the patrons and fleeting friends agreed with everything that came out of his mouth, which seemed to do more for his pride than anything else, but certainly his own esteem could use some extra fortification, especially with the idea that any day now someone would appear with a pansy rumor or something even more nefarious, if possible.
So he fell into a whole new kind of rut, and from the beginning of September to the near-end of November nothing important happened.
It was the 26th – a Tuesday when, doing a habitual check of his mail slot in the lobby, he found a letter addressed to him in his brother's handwriting. The weight that smashed into him upon discovery was of a different air. He couldn't figure out if it was from the rushed hint of Sam's scrawl or the fact that this envelope was much thinner than normal. It could have been the odd, nearly supernatural premonition he half swore he would get sometimes whenever Sam was concerned; a sense of something monumental occurring. But in any case he doubled up the stairs in a hurry; thumb continuously smoothing over the stamp of his note to reaffirm that it hadn't been lost from his grip.
He unlocked his door, threw the rest of the mail onto the counter while he pulled the knob shut again. He tore through the opening neatly and settled onto the bed, not bothering to kick off his shoes or hang his hat up or any of that nonsense.
He hadn't been mistaken – the letter was short. Only a page, written on cheaper stationary than normal, and with a pencil instead of Sam's typical preference for ink. The header was 'To Dean'; normal enough, the letters still slanted to suggest a bad writing surface or a short time to take a message. His eyes tried to scan the entire note at once before he forced himself to absorb the first sentence. 'By the time you read this,' Sam wrote, typically foreboding and unnecessarily formal, 'I've already been made a Father.'
The words were complete gibberish to Dean.
He counted – twelve words – he checked the date – November 16th. He managed to look over the introduction a handful of times; disjointed and blurred and removed from any reality he had ever known. He skipped down to the next paragraph, hoping his brother had thought to make things in clearer words for him there.
'It's a boy – Jess had guessed right. Born perfectly healthy on the fifteenth of this month, 10:48 pm – I waited for the doctor to finish getting a blood sample and for Jess to go to sleep before I could sit down and write this. It's just past two in the morning, now. We'll be able to leave by Tuesday or so; just about everything went fine. We're all okay.'
Now just who was okay in this situation – Dean flipped the letter over – nothing there. The scope of Sam's message was starting to trickle into his brain like a frigid stream, but he clung to the reminder of the letter with defeatist, half abandoned hope that this was all a misunderstanding.
Hearing about Jess's pregnancy in April had put him into an awful mood. After all, he wouldn't be there to watch her and his brother pull themselves together; his brother was completely left alone without any advice to this sort of thing. Even if Dean himself never had a child, he'd been around several – the most prominent being Sam himself. The idea of being helpless and across the country and unable to do anything made him angry and sick. He had only managed to calm down because Jess still had plenty of time before the delivery. Sam had spent copious amounts of time and paper waxing on and on about his wife's stomach and doctor visits and frugal, well-invested plans they made for a family of three together in Venice, but there was a difference, a remarkable one at that, between buying a carriage and a christening gown and actually having a child.
But it wasn't a burden; Dean refused to treat it as such. He just couldn't believe he wasn't there. He wondered if his brother kept the letter brief because he too had been holding out hope that Dean would appear in California right when he could be needed again, and at the failings of that Sam suddenly found he didn't have time for him anymore. It was ridiculous, but it still hurt, and he trailed off on that line of thinking anyway as he read the remaining words:
'The thing you might be wondering is his name. Jess and I talked about a few and I listed off some of our suggestions to you in September, I think.' Dean faintly remembered names like Madison or John or something along those lines. Dean had responded back that John would be the most appropriate, unless Jess had someone in her family she wanted to honor. 'We settled on James,' Sam seemed to slow down and write his son's name fairly carefully, amidst all the borderline chicken scratch. 'Perhaps it's not the most original name, I'll say that, but it fits well with Winchester, and Jess had a grandfather in Jersey by that name – someone who raised her more than her parents ever did – and moreover, it's his now. In that same vein we decided James's middle name to be after yours. I can't imagine a name like James Dean catching on like that – Jess says he looks more like a Jimmy, anyway, but you can decide that for yourself when you see him.
'James Dean Winchester. It's odd to write that down, now. Even more that I can't tell you to your face, that you aren't here. But don't go blaming yourself for that – you will anyways, but you shouldn't. Don't think that you were wrong for sending Jess and I out here, either. Two years ago this was something I wouldn't even dream about; maybe by spring with you with us I can finally wake up a bit. Jess and I miss you, and hope this finds you well.' Sam signed his name in scribbling cursive at the bottom of the note, and that was it. No codes, nothing hidden under the stamp or traced lightly into the paper. It all just was: Sam and Jess were now Sam and Jess and James, and they had given their son his name – not their Father's, his, in a precious honorific.
Dean felt sick to his stomach.
The first concept that came to him when he read the word James was another James he knew – admittedly there were several – but the one he knew the most brutally was a young man he had manipulated back in the springtime for Crowley, trying to squeeze any information he had on Ruby, only to toss him to men even worse than he was.
He wondered, frantically, if James Mondale was still in the city, unscarred, functioning, alive, even – he didn't have a shred of an idea – until now, he didn't even care. But now his name was tied up in Sam's life and it wouldn't leave as easily, maybe it would always remain, sticking into the undercurrent of his focus every time he called out for Sam's own son. It sent a violent shudder through him, and when he came back from the spasm, he recognized that old, almost welcome feeling of fire in the pit of his gut. He could only blame himself; wonder ferociously how he had let this happen at all. Originally he would have never needed to do that sort of thing and he never would have met James. If it wasn't for Castiel, he though furiously, standing at the rush of indignant energy – if it wasn't for – he spotted the stacks of books on the table; the ones that weren't his; the invaders into the one piece of possible solace he had left and suddenly without a thought he struck them off the counter with a hard swipe of his hand, Sam's letter crinkling in his fist.
Fitzgerald joined Forster and Chekhov on the floor. Cracked spines of poetry lay on top of the novels and the magazines; all beloved components of Castiel's collection except that Castiel wasn't here, and neither was Sam. He only had himself now, Dean knew, and that wasn't nearly enough.
He crammed the letter into his vest and walked to the door, getting out and slamming it roughly behind him, not bothering with the lock because maybe tonight the goddamn tailor or thieves or anyone would come in and take all those books and clothes and tobacco scent far, far away from where he slept and passed so many unbearable hours.
xxxx
Dean awoke in darkness, many hours later, his tongue rotting in the back of his mouth. He staggered to his feet and seemed to have left his brain on the pillow for some moments; it returned pounding, spots against his eyes. There was a clock ticking on the bedside table but it took ages for him to catch what the hands and numbers were displaying – Two eighteen. Now.
Morning or afternoon? He stumbled through clothes, the books that were tumbled over – his apartment was ruined to the point where he wondered if someone had broken in and scavenged through it when he had passed out. No more, he morosely promised himself; he couldn't afford to black out completely all the time, and on a week day, too. He wearily gripped the fabrics of the curtains, tearing them open an inch.
It was dark out, raining. The buildings were dripping into the streets. He stared blindly at the skyline and was rewarded with a rumbling of thunder in the distance, too low and far out to aggravate his head, thank god.
He glanced down, saw people on the street. Children, mothers, a vendor on the corner selling fruits. His hands clenched around the curtains.
It was still Wednesday – or Thursday, if it had been at its worst – but it wasn't the weekend, or Friday, or – or a day where he wasn't supposed to be working.
"Shit,"
Dean inched backward, lost his footing, and tumbled onto the floor, in pain with a cationic mental state to match. He rolled onto his side and tried not to throw up.
Last night had been… bad. He let the memories lap into focus again: Sam's letter, the depression, rage to compensate. He smashed Castiel's books to the floor and stormed out, found one of his holes and a few bottles to crawl into. His gaze couldn't focus and he wondered if maybe all the homemade booze made him part blind. He wondered if he could waste away on the floor for a while – for so long that his brother would get tired of waiting and come over during Christmas break one year and pick him up off the floor and take him far, far away, where he wouldn't have to wash blood off his hands every morning and wouldn't listen to anyone except himself and maybe, in California, the sky was a little less blue, and it wouldn't make him want to heave out everything he had inside onto the pavement every single damn time he looked up and found himself throbbing with something that had to be loneliness.
Maybe he started to cry, or cough, he couldn't focus enough on himself as he let himself waste away on the wood. He wasn't going back there, back to the garage. They wouldn't pay him for the few days he came in anyway, and even if they could, he wouldn't take the words management would lash out to him. He couldn't look his own piss-poor reflection in the eye, how could he even drag himself out there, out to his workers, his boss, stand there and apologize because he couldn't hold himself together anymore, he just couldn't?
In the midst of the Depression Dean had lost his job. He stilled and let that sink in, springing with it another pounding headache, another wish to pass on and to not feel a damn thing. He let the reality overcome him; he could end up homeless, maybe, and too close to luxury for the last few years that would cripple him even more. Maybe he'd get some type of fever and waste away on the streets, succumb back into sticking needles into his forearms and the crooks of his elbows because he wouldn't see anyone who would tell him no. He sighed, feeling his lungs rattle against his bones. He had lost his job.
Still, it attacked him with less ferocity than the loss of some other, past things.
xxxx
There was still gambling.
On days where he couldn't bring himself to get up and look for proper work, he promised himself to stop at a bar or a club somewhere and play men in cards or some crafty little game the establishment provided otherwise. He tried to refrain from drinking too much then, only to keep his mind sharp. He could pull in twenty, thirty dollars a week on that stint if he tried, and dip into his savings to cover the rent every month. It was a temporary thing, he told himself, all through December and far into January. He let himself recede further; the little dens he spent his time were no longer friendly – they were his workplace now, and he had resigned to grabbing bottles for the nights that he stayed in, thumbing through Sam's letters or some car manuals or nothing at all, letting his eyes fall onto the splattering of Castiel's books on the ground, a bruise from that night sore and unfading. He tried to pick up the books, once, telling himself that he'd have to call on the other to get the damned things out of his apartment – but when he plucked up the corner of an opened, downturned novel he saw a hawk's feather float out of its marked page – still crisp and clean like someone's fingers carefully combed through the bristles every time they stuck their hands on the object.
Dean let the book drop from his hands again, covering the feather and crushing it into the ground. He didn't have the heart to pick anything of Castiel's up again.
Sometime in early December he had gotten a spot in a clothing factory – something for holiday demands he was sure. His job was moving the packaged coats and jackets, ties, gloves, socks, and shirts from the completed piles at the foot of sewing tables and bringing them to the cars and trucks across the factory floor. The room was always densely populated, loud, but persistently cold with the thin windows, and the work floor was always punctuated by coughs and sneezes. Most of the seamstresses were friendly to him, but he passed too many desks too quickly, and couldn't really bring himself into talking to anyone. Sometime after the New Year's he was let go, anyway, with only a little extra salary added to his severely diminished savings pile.
After that the silence crept in; infiltrating his ears with white noise, blocking out any thoughts. It was getting harder to sleep at night and more than once he found himself alone on the streets, hands shoved tightly into his pockets as he wandered down this lonely road to another, staring at the golden windows of apartments, hearing his own footsteps and apathetically fantasizing that he'd get pneumonia from this sooner or later.
It was almost February when he found himself standing, swaying, under a streetlight. The neighborhood looked household but he couldn't read the sign across the way, and with the accumulating snow dusting the road and his shoulders and the window ledges he wasn't totally sure he wasn't imagining the familiarity.
More pressing than that, however, was that it was nine o' clock and there was a grocer who still had his lights on. He crossed the street, leaving footprints in his wake, and peered into the frosted glass, curious about what he might see.
There was a clerk, his age or so, talking with a woman that also seemed vaguely familiar. Figuring it was none of his business, he started to pass on, digging around for his cigarette case and popping it open. There was a single one left, cradled in the elastic case and velvet. Dean left it there, looking guiltily back at the store behind him. He had smoked two before coming up this far; he knew he wasn't going to make it home without another pack safely tucked away.
He sighed; going back and pushing the door open quietly. There were no bells or chimes to alert the pair on the other side of the store, and Dean supposed they didn't know he had come in.
Past the wilted produce, the canned selections of fruits and vegetables, razors, and pulp magazines, there was a large wall of differing packs and loose tobacco. He glanced through them disinterestedly, finding some particular brand of Camels he preferred. As he moved towards the clerk he picked up shreds of conversation.
"…Visiting my Mother's, so once you finish up here we can go back home," Dean paused between aisles, wondering if he ought to buy anything else. He rarely went outside for errands anymore, eating in little cafes or delis instead of at home.
"You know he might get killed one day if he ain't careful." He figured that he might need paper, some more ink – Sam's letters were somewhat brief now, which was something he always apologized for, what with being tired and rushed with Jimmy, not to mention the evening college classes he had started taking in hopes of working for a firm in town.
"It's who he is…" Dean made attempts to accept his reasoning at face value, but couldn't help but look at their past letters to one another and feel an absence. "…Respect me,"
"– Agreed then you wouldn't come here," The man sounded annoyed, Dean thought, coming a little back more to reality. A fight with his wife, perhaps – he was staring at canned fruits; peaches and pineapples. He settled on the latter and peered down several other isles, finding the paper slightly overpriced and the ink a shade of indigo he hated, so he strode up to the front of the store.
"Excuse me," he went. The woman side-eyed him a moment, looked back to the grocer.
"Shop's closed," the man said. His tie was loosened, some strands of his hair stuck out from the way he had slicked it. He was shorter and broader and looked rubbed worn and tempered with the knowledge of it.
"Then you ought to lock the door and turn the lights out, unless you want people coming in," Dean said, handing over the can and cigarettes to the counter.
"Just let him buy those, Charlie please," the woman said, her voice easy again. Dean knew he had heard her voice before – somewhere, a while ago. It was definitely one that wasn't too memorable. Out of the corner of his vision he saw she had placed a hand on the grocer's forearm, leaning closer to him over the counter that he stood behind. She still had on her hat and outdoor coat, leaving the rest of her thoroughly obstructed from Dean. He guessed they had to be married, and yet Dean was sure he had never been to this corner store, or at least had never seen the woman here in the past.
Charlie morosely did what the woman said, wrapping up the purchase in a small paper bag. "That's twenty-one,"
"You can see a picture for twenty-five," Dean muttered, reaching into his pocket.
"Stuff out of season's expensive, even if it's canned," He dropped the coins into the cash register and shut it again. "Now can you get the hell out of my store?"
"Charlie," the woman warned.
"What, you said we'd leave soon as I finished. I'm sure he gets it," The crass implication made Dean frown a bit; not that there was anything wrong with implications of that sort, but he said it in a sneering, disrespectful way that made him want to spit or cuss at the man if it wasn't for the woman there, embarrassed enough at the man for Dean to cause her any more grief.
"Yeah, thanks," he tossed out. He turned to the woman. "You take care now," She blinked, recognizing him as something more than a stranger but nothing more specific than that. He walked out of the store again, silent as he came in.
On the street he looked over this shoulder and continued to peer in at the couple, though their backs were facing the window. The woman, small, made a domineering pose and seemed to get the upper hand in some sort of argument. A moment later she softened, and hefted her weight up, placing her hands firm on the countertop as she reached over and kissed the man, and that struck Dean at his core as completely wrong; so much that he almost dropped his grocery bag and spent a moment fumbling with it, looking up to see that she had dashed out of the store and had put herself in front of him.
"Can I help you?" Dean asked, straightening again.
"I just wanted to apologize for… for that man back in the store. He gets very impatient sometimes." The grocer got out from his station and stalked further back into the shop until Dean could no longer see him.
"He your husband?"
"Well, anyway," she said, as if answering Dean's question. "Just, sorry for asking this but – am I imagining things or do we know one another? Ever since I heard your voice I wondered. Can I ask for your name?"
He shifted in the snow. "Dean Winchester," he said. The woman transformed at his name; shrank a bit. She had on a blue pillbox hat that was trimmed with fur. Suddenly her head seemed to shrink under it, and that ferocious shyness was the thing that charged Dean's memory, filling it with the correct and terrible answer.
"You're Nicole Milligan," Dean said slowly, confirming it to himself. She shrank further. "You're Adam's wife."
Mrs. Milligan was smallish and stout, she always had been. And although her image never fit in with the era's concept of a sought after society girl she was captivating – a mild range of stunning, especially with how you could see the curve of her waistline even through her coats, or her chasing eyes piercing through the brims and veils of her hats. For all the effortless looks, though, she had never garnered much attention from anybody. If she had been grown a few inches more cheerful or woeful, perhaps then others could recall a name to her looks. Dean had only seen her a handful of times, and she was pleasant for politeness's sake, but that was all to her in the way of hospitality and personality
for those she didn't know particularly well. The impression hadn't changed even after Dean began to visit Adam and his family more, and that had been months ago; the color of the Milligan's apartment faded from his memory at the same rate as his half-brother's wife, which was why he hadn't been able to recall her immediately.
Faintly, he remembered her and Adam's wedding. It had been about two years after he and Sam had come into the City – she and Adam were frightfully young; Sam had been just nineteen, and though he couldn't quite remember how old Adam was, it was obviously younger than that. She had been gorgeous then, probably, made up like brides are. He and Sam were given a picture of the newlywed couple, and it had been placed on mantles or side tables or in cupboards, but when Sam and Jess moved Sam had taken the photo with him, and Dean was left without even a cursory glance to keep his memory less fogged.
"Well?" Dean asked roughly. "Don't you think you ought to say something?"
Mrs. Milligan chanced a look back to the store, then seemed to think better of it and merely adjusted her posture. "I'm sure that you've seen enough to draw your own conclusions." She started walking; opposite of the way Dean had come.
"Where are you going?" Dean followed in step behind her, foot prints marking the snow.
"I'm going home," she said, words garbled as she kept her voice at a normal volume and didn't bother to turn back to Dean.
"What about poor Charlie back there? No time for him?"
"Well, you can understand that getting found out by your husband's half brother could make a wet blanket out of things. Catherine can't stay with a sitter forever, anyway.
"Aren't you fickle," Mrs. Milligan paused mid-stride.
"If you're going to be a rat and tell my husband, Mr. Winchester," she muttered icily, "Do it and spare the comments to me." The show of callous esteem made Dean raise his eyebrows at her back, and he stepped next to her.
He should have been ashamed for not just going and telling Adam about her own wife's disloyalty – if the same thing had happened to Sam his reaction would have been at a reflex's pace. And yet he did not move – away from Mrs. Milligan nor anywhere else. The street was a private void around them. It was easy to be brave under such a black, January night. Dean knew firsthand the sort of jobs that could be committed in an atmosphere that left a god's eyes blind from above.
"You know your apartment's back in Fort Hamilton," They were in Flatbush now, he thought, judging by how long he had been walking.
"That was months ago," she said, still not meeting Dean's eye.
"You moved?"
"To Prospect. If you're walking me home you'll have to take the Culver Line with me." It was past nine o' clock and he hadn't seen anyone else on the road since before he walked into the corner store. He was stuck in the conundrum of informing Adam and protecting his lying wife from any other hazard until she got home. Courtesy was the oddest thing, sometimes. Mrs. Milligan's heels sunk slightly into the slush as she picked up her pace again, and he followed with the notion that she might just be planning on running away now that she'd been found out. He could feel a sneer on his face.
"And if I'm just trying to take you to your husband?"
"He's not home," They crossed an empty street together, Dean's hand curled around the paper bag from the store.
"How can you be sure?" he said. Her shoulders slumped for a second.
"Because Adam's never home."
Dean sucked on his cheek, though he wasn't about to be swayed, even if Adam was out doing something, he couldn't have been with another woman, it wasn't in his nature, and absence alone didn't inspire excuses for what Mrs. Milligan was doing. "I guess that explains how you can make time for some other guy all the way down here," he offered, finally.
"I wasn't trying to get noticed." She wrapped her hands tight around the neck of her fur jacket. Her leather gloves were tight and shiny. "Now what are you doing up here?"
"Walking," For the first time she smiled. It wasn't a pretty one. Her teeth were sharply clamped together and her lips parted, seemingly against her own will.
"Well at least have some creativity when you lie to someone!"
"That's true. Nothing else to do, really,"
"Except staying in your apartment. Not freezing to death." Dean's heel caught a scraping of ice as he stepped; not enough to lose his balance but it refueled his hatred of winter effortlessly as he slid. Snow continued to fall and ball up and crunch underfoot. It sat, mostly unmelted on the shoulders of their coats; wetting Dean's hair and Mrs. Milligan's hat.
Distracted by the weather Dean's tone went mild. "Can you tell me why you do it?"
"What, specifically?"
"Is there something about Adam, I mean. Going with someone else like that is good entertainment but,"
"– But when it's happening to you?" she finished, "Or to your brother, I guess,"
"You're acting different, you know," Dean supplied, squinting. "I'm used to you just – standing around. But you're hardly like that, now."
She shrugged in her coat. "All this sinning work gives me some extra confidence." She frowned. "Adam doesn't notice what you've seen in a minute, you know." She didn't talk for another block; Dean thought she might not again. She still looked straight ahead, and it wasn't until she announced that they had reached the train station at Church Avenue that the silence was broken momentarily, and they sat in the car for some minutes next to one another; watching workers and sleepy, well dressed passengers on either end of themselves.
They emerged on Bergen Street and walked southeast for another block before she said, abruptly, "It's loneliness, I guess." Dean, who had one of his new cigarettes halfway to his mouth grunted in surprise at hearing her voice. He turned and saw her slumped over again, huddled and freezing. She looked burdened by surroundings. Dean could excuse his loneliness for calm or drink it away but she apparently could not. There was an ache in her steps, and her head hung low now. "It's hard not having anyone to talk to."
"No friends?" Dean asked, examining his cigarette and trying not to become sympathetic.
"Well they're all much too busy for me. I had some workmates but I don't – I was fired, we don't keep in touch."
"Yeah, well, that's something the two of us have in common."
"There are days where I'm positive I don't talk at all. Days disappear when you're just there, not doing anything, not taking it in." After a moment she muttered snidely, "I'm only telling you this because you're as good as a stranger, you won't care." Dean ignored her tenor, puffing up a small cloud of smoke into the frigid air instead.
"What about that grocer you picked up?"
"He's just a lover. I can't talk to him without him thinking I'm crazy, kicking me out. Besides, he gives me my groceries cheap."
"So if you're not with him because you think you're going to run off with him to Mexico –"
She grunted out a pseudo laugh. "Mr. Winchester, no one cheats on their husbands so that someone else will carry them off to Mexico. That's a dumb cliché with no basis in the real world. Much more likely that you just get… tired of each other, or it ends in some bloody awful mess and it goes to the papers."
"Then why bother?"
"Have you ever been with a… well, a person who couldn't give you what you needed? The money, the time, the attention, the memories?" Dean blinked, slowly. Most of his relationships had ended more or less on the mutual thought that they had never set out to mean anything in the first place. He had rarely had the chance to leave someone because they weren't fulfilling enough. Maybe Cassie, though he attributed that more to the lack of foresight, immaturity. And Castiel?
Castiel had always had time for him, he supposed. Any short falling with him was one of loyalty and – well if he didn't betray him with Crowley it was best to assume he would have broken his trust later on for another twisted opinion of justice. And anyway Mrs. Milligan was certainly not asking for his opinion on men. Castiel didn't count, not in any way.
After all, Mrs. Milligan had been married for years; still young, but even at that age there had to have been some experience garnered. And despite her wedding band and apartment and a child she had found the convenience of solitude enough to stalk out and find renewed, illegal happiness. And what had Castiel given him, anyways? Two years and some memories: Books on the floor of his flat that weren't his; a feather, some smoke, and items he could lie and say that he owned. If he staved off being so offended for his brother you'd think that Castiel's treachery – in the boring domestic sense – would no longer get a rise from him, but he knew he had been leaning away from Mrs. Milligan ever since they started speaking.
"Can Adam not afford to get you new heels every other week now? Is that it?"
"Oh!" She threw her hat onto the icy ground. "I don't care about that!" She was almost shouting, too mad to care much; Dean didn't feel like stopping her, either. "I could be living in a mansion on the coast of Jersey and I wouldn't give a damn about it either way, not if he died trying to get me there."
"But it's okay to go with some other guy behind his back?"
"Well, we're all not perfect loyalists, are we? I'd hold your tongue, considering what you do in your spare time."
"What was that?" Dean narrowed his eyes, but Mrs. Milligan had gone cool and flaky again, and looked the other way in defense, wrapping her arms around her.
"It doesn't matter, tell him if you want – I mean if you can even get hold of him. I hardly see him, speak even less and we have the same address."
Perhaps he did owe it to his own flesh and blood to try a little harder to warn him, but Nicole – she was almost too clever, too aloof. Her words were starting to turn his stomach, especially because she was hardly a ridiculous person to say something she knew wasn't true. Instead he turned around and picked up the blue hat, dusting off the frost it had landed in carefully. "Don't see much of anyone these days, like you." It was nearly an admission of defeat.
"Thank-you," she muttered, placing the hat on her head again, the source of her gratefulness vague.
"Is he… spending too much time working?"
"If you count fawning over that old scratch Lucifer all hours of the day. He's like a bodyguard now. High-ranking. And sure, we ain't starving, but only in the physical sense. Catherine sees more of the landlord than she does her own Father; can't say it's any different for me. He's changed, you know. Being exposed to thugs like that – it got to him. I go to Charlie because he's still a good man, or at least a happy one, despite those dumb arguments. There's no old memories for me to compare side by side. There's nothing of him to miss; he's not like Adam in every way that counts, and what I need is… someone who isn't my husband."
"Why don't you get a divorce?" She cocked her head, then smiled in a shy, typical way.
"Oh, I know you're not the marrying type, but it's not easy like that. And I couldn't leave him, anyway. He would bring a drug ring into our own apartment building and I know I'd hardly do a thing about it."
"Why not?"
She tucked her gloved fist under her chin. "Because when we got married," she said, rather slowly, "There was a promise we kept to one another. And maybe it's half cracked already, sure; I'm just acting out the last broken pieces so I can sleep at night. But nevertheless, I married that man for a reason, even if he's a different one now. For the sake of Adam's ghost I'll be there, until someone shoots him dead. I'm not his girlfriend or his neighbor; I'm his wife. You know the crazy work he does; you must know his Mother's sick," Dean nodded. "He'd kill anyone for her, and, really, you think some fresh air is going to make her healthy again? If there's any part of Adam that's still so good it'll die with his Mother, and you know I still won't leave him after that. If I'm not a faithful wife I can be a steady, sure thing. If all we have is common decency then that's what I'm using to hold this thing together till the end."
It was such a logical thing to say Dean nearly deemed it heartless. If Mrs. Milligan got an insurance fortune out of the ploy he could guiltlessly call it such. But instead he went, "And what happens to you, when that happens?"
She glanced over at him, eyes pricking. "Why are you so curious about my fate, Mr. Winchester?" Dean leveled her look.
"Because your story reminds me of someone else's and I'd like to know how it ends." Nicole bit her lip; she looked giddy, glancing up at the starless sky.
"Well, it's going to end bloody – nothing to do about that. Unless God himself comes by with a miracle, Adam is going to get shot or drowned or drugged and there's no sense trying to talk him out of it when all his friends are in that suicide pact and he hardly speaks to me.
"But as for me. Well, I'll put him in the ground and get some peace, I hope. I'll know I stuck with something until I couldn't no more, and I did all I could do for someone I'm not too sure if I really love now anyway. Then I suppose I'll… go back to Connecticut where my brother is, try to get a romantic ending in a much less romantic setting. But once he's done, I'm done, and there's nothing to do about it." She pointed towards one of the apartment buildings, slightly reddish in color. "That's it." She seemed too tired to increase her ambling speed to the stoop, however.
"You won't be sad?"
"Oh, I probably will. But he's not dead yet, so until then I'll waste time feeling sad for myself."
"You seem to be doing fine with that, then,"
"Self-pity always comes back in vogue, I've found," she said, carefully going up the steps. She fished a key out of her pocket and opened the door. "Now, would you like to come in, search for Adam and see if he's been hiding under the bed this whole time?" Dean looked up at the apartment windows; all except for two were dark.
"I think I'll believe you," he said, slowly. "It might be for the best – we can't officially meet on friendly terms, anyhow." He couldn't be sure if Adam would need something from him – information, perhaps – but he hadn't really possessed anything noteworthy except for that elusive final job he had.
"I want to say he misses the times when you'd call on us," she said, the light from the hall illuminating the road and casting her into shadow. "But I don't know if he even misses me."
"I think he does," Dean hoped he was saying the right thing. "Adam is a good kid."
"He can be," Nicole replied neutrally, softly. Her power had bled out in the same way the lamp behind her tried to illuminate the night and failed, only doing a lazy stretch in a small periphery to show it was still, however ineffectually, operating. Dean started to step away and she started to close the door.
"You know," Dean said abruptly, "You could say I thought the worst of you not an hour ago." Nicole paused. He still didn't think highly of her. But despite that she had made her crimes seem negligible to the other problems she was preoccupied with, and it had made something like adultery become less significant.
"We're more than our actions, you know." She drummed her fingers on the doorframe. "Sometimes it's just about context." Dean could no longer see her face, though he knew that she stared down at him from the aperture, a blank figure in a curved coat, eyes piercing. "I'm glad you walked me home, Dean. Goodnight."
xxxx
Dean didn't go home after that: No, he refused to. But the northern parts of Brooklyn weren't so well memorized in his mind; he had no idea where to get a drink, nor even if he wanted one. There was hardly anything open or noteworthy up around here, except for maybe one thing.
By the time Dean had entered Greenpoint, had started to see those singular curved brownstones, he was convinced he was just a moment away from dying; hands frozen, ears blood flushed and sore, toes too numb to walk on. Inside he burned with a determination to talk with someone he knew. Not a bar mate, not a wise young wife, but a friend. Just a friend.
The lights on the second floor of Benny's apartment building were alight like a beacon for Dean himself, and he nearly laughed with relief, hobbling up the steps buried in snow. He rang the bell once, twice for good measure, and was set to go a third time because of the cold when he saw a shadow slid down through the frosted glass.
It wasn't Benny's, but the door opened nonetheless and he was beckoned inside after a quick up and down look by some woman in a red dress and wool stockings. "'Nother late one, huh?" she said, lighting a cigarette and closing the door behind Dean. She was pale and thin and Dean was tempted to tell her that only the offensively rich or behind-the-time farmgirls in the middle west dared to be flappers anymore, but his eye caught her long dangle of pearls and he figured that Benny was throwing some sort of party or, more likely, Benny had invited over this person and that for a drink and they had gotten another dozen in tow. The woman slinked back up the stairs and Dean fumbled out of his coat and hat – hung them up at the coat rack in the lobby so Benny's furniture wouldn't get waterlogged – and followed her to the door.
There clearly was a party going on – thirty people if not more. It was something of a miracle how they all fit in such a small space. If he was underdressed no one noticed or cared, and he quickly spotted Benny around a group of men and women sitting in the four armchairs and perching on the sides. "Dean?" He looked happy and surprised to see him, and waved him over, though it was too crowded to do anything than stand some feet closer to the congregation. "Did someone invite you?"
"No, I… I had to talk to you about something," A few people glanced at him, and what were they thinking? Making rude judgments about flakes and friends who needed favors, that's what he would have been thinking, and he shivered from the frost stuck in the lining of his jacket and the cold gazes of those in attendance. "It's important," he reiterated. Just then someone new stumbled in from the entrance, a man with a bowtie and a large fur coat that needed two others to help take off. He immediately attracted a crowd like Dean could not and a wave of people at the couches stood up, obscuring Benny from view. When the other didn't appear at his side a few minutes later, Dean assumed he was busy with other guests and retreated towards the back of the room.
It was such an odd thing to see so many people in Benny's apartment – not because Dean had never seen it before, or because he didn't already know that his friend habitually invited others over for a night. He just had no concept that they could be over at any time, especially when he, specifically, wanted to be in solitude with the other. Being by himself so often as of late, it was hard to imagine a world where others were constantly seeing, talking, being with their friends. He was bothered by his selfishness, and in retaliation grabbed a flute of something much more lethal than champagne, eyes falling on that same woman who had let him inside in the first place.
She was tall, a bit of a sneak. He could see the strap of her slip peeking out from a shoulder, where a slice of skin between the fabric of her dress and shawl had been made. She either made such a display intentionally or didn't particularly care that it had ended that way. "I'm Dean," he began, waltzing up to her, reaching for her hand. She took it without looking. "I wanted to thank you, for letting me in."
"Violet," she replied, airily. "Oh, you looked absolutely frozen outside," she continued after staring at Dean hard for a few moments. She had a toothpick with a little olive that she pushed around lazily with her finger, watching it toss from inside her empty glass. "Get me a new one, will you? Oh, thanks!" Dean hardly moved to get back to the drink table. She set her empty glass down at the window ledge, and glanced at the city lights far beyond and away. "Charming party, isn't it? Cozy, rather."
"I can't say," Dean said, even if the jubilant attitude the place now possessed made him turn raw and morose in retaliation. "I just got here."
"You do know Benny?" she asked, taking his arm. They didn't so much as stroll through the flat as elbow and shift past the crowd and through them. He saw two couples attempting a waltz and only succeeding in knocking around the furniture that hadn't been pushed to the edges of the room. Perhaps that was how Benny procured such aged looking pieces.
"We're friends," he had finished his drink, saw a bottle of Schnapps and reached out his glass for a moment, letting someone pour the drink in. He downed it immediately for the effects – he found the flavor abhorrent and too reminiscent of Crowley – they had gone into the kitchen anyway, and the woman broke away towards a stretch of countertop, where pieces of sweating shrimp and bread and cheese were placed, half gone and mostly forgotten. "And you?"
"Benny's a friendly guy," She picked up one of the shrimp, sniffed it, and popped it in her mouth. Then another. "I'm just the downstairs neighbor."
"Lucky him! So you don't mind the company he keeps?"
"So long as I'm invited and," She shook her half drained glass at him. "He always has the nicest things… It's a shame he's moving, you know." She opened up Benny's icebox and made a child-like noise, apparently at finding yet another bottle of spirits.
"Moving?" Dean opened the bottle for the both of them and drank. The heat in his throat would last longer now, he noted with some happiness.
"Well it's just talk. I haven't bothered to ask him. But I've seen one of his beds get hauled away, and some of his carpets and even some of his bottles! The better ones, probably. It's all very discreet. But you're his friend, what do you think?"
Dean thought Benny was talking his advice very seriously, but instead just shrugged his shoulders and drank more. He might have even appeared thoughtful, for Violet seemed rather rapt at his pause. But that may have been asking for too much. The woman in front of him seemed to be too important for any other creature to walk in and disturb her. She twisted a pale hand around her pearls as she watched him; her form and face so feminine that she appeared more as a sprite to him. He didn't know why he didn't realize it before when she opened the door for him. But now, slanted against the kitchen counter, almost drunk that he couldn't get to such deep thoughts as reading people, he decided that he liked her. If not her than her carelessness. It was refreshing to see someone halfway interested in the world and apathetic ultimately to things that weren't hers and visible. Lately he'd spent too long caring too much, and it made him wish for just some years ago where he would have gone with someone like her, and they both would have used each other and left without feeling a twitch of remorse or sadness at the loss.
"I think he thought he's been in the city long enough," Dean found himself saying. He refilled his glass and she precariously held a slice of cheese, making a show of putting it on some bread. "Maybe he'll boat down to Jersey –"
"Oh no, not there!" Dean laughed rather hard at that, Violet followed.
"Or maybe just Florida."
"Or Mexico,"
"No man really wants to go to Mexico," he said, forgetting quickly where that statement had come from. "California?"
"Wonderful wine there," she sighed dreamily at the thought. "It must be soon. I can't imagine he'll be here in May. That's no time left at all, really."
"What's the date now?"
"The twenty-fourth." Dean smiled down at her, laughed again. He felt like he was seeing and feeling on a lag, but the mind had eluded his body with grace, and propped up like he was he was sure no one could tell the difference anyway.
Violet leaned close to him. He smelt perfume; something with roses and tempered with lavender or just detergent. "What's so funny?"
"Would you believe," he said, reaching for the bottle and failing, "That it's my birthday today?"
"Happy birthday!" she cried out, flinging her arms up and dropping some of her drink on the floor. She pretended not to notice and instead filled their glasses up, the sizable bottle nearly half empty now, tempting Dean to just go ahead and finish it with the woman. "How old? Not over twenty-five, right?"
"Twenty-eight, actually."
"Well you're nearly old then, aren't you? I'm glad you came today, even if you didn't realize till just now. Tell me you've something planned?"
"Just stay here, I guess," he was slurring a bit.
"No, no. It doesn't count if you came before you realized." She shook his arm and nearly caused them to fall over. "Well, you don't have work tomorrow do you?" He shook his head. "Good. Me neither. That means I just can't let you back out in the cold until morning," she smiled, giggled a little.
"But I'll have to sleep off this oncoming headache somehow,"
"Oh damn, me too." She fell back against the counter, next to Dean. "I guess if we can slip downstairs in an hour we'll just sleep it off together." Dean laughed again.
"Of course," he said, in a way that wasn't an answer. He was nearly positive that wasn't a sound idea in the slightest but, then, Violet glanced his way and her eyes, her lips, her hair – she was unmistakably a woman, a trendy, wealthy one at that. And not a stitch of blue on her. She was so unlike Castiel he thought he ought to kiss her just for that. Perhaps he had said that out loud, too, for she seemed to grow closer, and crane her neck up expectantly for him.
Benny came in, tugged on his arm. He hadn't heard him and even now the act of moving through the apartment was making him look hard at the floor. He didn't say goodbye to Violet and he knew she wouldn't miss him. It was a relief.
Benny sat him in the guest bedroom on a sofa facing the window. Dean heard a grumbling, hazy voice that he didn't understand. "What?"
"I said that I'm here to talk if you want to talk now," Dean blinked blearily up at him and cocked his head. "Oh, goddamn it. I leave you alone for not even an hour and you're so drunk you can't see straight." Dean slowly smiled up at him. "You're not going anywhere. And don't walk off with Violet or anyone, you hear me?" He leaned down and put his hands on Dean's shoulders: Warm, large, stiff weights on his body. He thought of Castiel and in the context of Benny was disgusted, then ignored the other for a moment and found himself distraught like he was before he had gotten a drink. "Dean?" Benny called him back, but he didn't quite feel like looking at him now, found that his daydream was more preferable, despite the ache it caused. Another shake and he stared again at what was really there. "Dean, are you sick?"
"In more ways than one," he said or thought. He reached a hand out, meaning to catch Benny's cheek but instead it rested at his throat. He looked worried. "Remember… remember last time?"
"Yes, what about it?" Benny could have been humoring him but he didn't stop to think on such things.
"Well I'm worse off than when I left," he said. "It's all not so good anymore, see…" Did he say much else; go on moaning intelligibly or not? He could only recall glancing down at his lap and the lights going out.
xxxx
He woke up, sluggish and unwilling, with the aftertaste of vomit in his mouth – or maybe the spirits that had since gone sour. His brain seemed to slip and slide through his skull, and he felt the creased lines of his suit hugging him as he lay on some bed – small and not as soft as his own. His shoes were still on.
Opening his eyes he saw it was actually just a couch. The sun was up but the window he looked out of was facing west, anyway, and it just made him wince a little.
He either dozed again or closed his eyes for a very long time. He could hear someone talking in some rooms over, and that made his head rattle worse. His eyes flickered open again as he thought – what about his job? He remembered he didn't have one just as he began to sit up in a panic. He felt a haze of vertigo wash over him before he had slumped fully onto the back of the couch, now sitting, feet hitting the floor with a loud thud. He wondered if Violet heard that below.
"You're not dead," Benny said from behind him. He groaned, twisting his fists into his sockets, feeling his pulse beat out violently through his skull. "That stuff from the kitchen probably could have blinded you, just so you know."
"Thanks," he muttered, unable to move. He wanted to lie down in a bathhouse somewhere and never get out, after being offered half the aspirin in the world. It was like any other time Benny held a party, really.
A few minutes later he was given some medicine and orange juice. He fought to keep it down, succeeded, and groaned in his seat again, covering his eyes. "Didn't do anything embarrassing last night, did I?" He wasn't sure where Benny was, if he was in the room at all. He felt something on the couch shift and realized he was just leaning on the back of it.
"A few guys nearly started swinging over one thing or another; some chairs got broken. Nothing too awful."
"And me?"
"Well, what do you remember?"
"Some girl, the drinks. Maybe I got dramatic over something to you, did I say much?"
"You weren't doing well, you said. Amoung other things."
"Like…?"
"Well I think you were trying to go into detail. You mentioned your brother and some friend guy you hated and something about books. I let you talk it out and tried to get you to lie down."
"Oh." Dean waited for Benny to make a joke; his heart thumped against his throat – some friend, of course. Of course. "Nothing detrimental?"
"Well you only said it to me; you know I hardly care about what people do in their spare time." So Benny either knew something or not, Dean thought. Either way he couldn't ask without revealing himself, and either way Benny didn't seem to care about it – he never really did, after all. He knew too much of the world; he spent ages in Greece, after all. It was a relief. "You did mention Adam, I think. Milligan came up at least."
"Before coming here last night, I saw his wife. She's cheating on him, you know."
"Are you going to tell him?"
"Oh, I don't know – why bother? It's his wife. They're heaped in problems and it seems they keep civil because they know shit about the other. It might be best to just not bother at all…" He swallowed uncomfortably. "She's smart, anyway. Too smart to really care about the morality of the thing. And I guess Adam's been working too hard, you know, in a bad sort of way. I don't want to be responsible for some god-awful crime of passion or anything."
"You think Adam would do that sort of thing?"
"Who knows? I don't talk to him. Don't talk to anyone these days," He still had his hands over his eyes, feeling sickly, though the worst of it had passed and the aspirin was doing its job. He recognized hunger but was felt too uneasy to hold anything down. He knew Benny was watching him; obviously concerned but aware that bringing attention to his problems would lead them nowhere, due to dignity and Dean's silly sort of conversation rules.
Finally he said, "Married life can get rather strange," It was meant to be a joke, but Dean groaned in response, partly from his head and partly from disgust.
"Ugh, how could anyone get married? Stay with the same person for the rest of their life?"
"You and Sam manage just fine," Benny supplied. "Though he's taken, from what I've heard. And anyway I hear that marriage is a pretty popular route of life. Hard to believe but most people don't like living alone."
"Alone." The word sent a chill down Dean's spine and he shifted on the couch. He took his hands away from his face and looked out of the guest room window. He spotted the harmless smokestacks, the buildings, the postage stamp-sized windows of the apartments across the way, some lit up with moving figures in them, offering up brief glimpses at confined parameters. He'd known Benny for years – he knew what he did for work, some of his friends, a hundred travelling tales; he knew he was a good man, a good friend, possibly the best one he'd ever had – but even if they were to never leave one another's side, he'd never know every thought he had, their lives would never be so similar that it could have been considered the same one. No matter how in sync he and his brother were, there were always disagreements, rough edges that brushed up and hurt and ground away and broke off. You couldn't be someone else like that, and watching a woman pull on a fur overcoat – a man two floors below tinkering on what looked like an upright piano for a wife or a mistress – a pair of children hopping across the floor – it made him wonder how much of Castiel had been shown to him. If he knew him at all, really.
Not like it mattered.
"There was no one after Andrea, was there?" Dean muttered. He felt his hands unconsciously curl into fists.
"No," Benny said in a sigh. "Never could be, I guess. After an heiress well, you can't really go up from there," Dean's face fell into the same faulty smirk he was sure adorned Benny's expression.
"What's it like then, you know, being alone?"
"Don't sell yourself out, Dean. I'm single, not trapped in solitary confinement." Dean glanced over his shoulder, met Benny's gaze. His friend gestured out the window Dean had been watching. "There's… people, everywhere. Friends. Associates. Family, if you're lucky."
"But you don't come home to anyone, I mean. You don't wait for someone to get back."
"Not unless you're having a party, I suppose."
"And it's… it's good, right? Not having to worry about being around someone all the time." Dean caught a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye and let his head drift back to the wide building from the window. The man who had been playing piano let the woman sit down with him, poking at the keys while he continued his melody. They were either talking or singing; it was hard to tell at the distance, especially with the windows closed to keep out the freezing air. "It's easy being like that. We're all a little alone, I guess."
He heard the floor creak as Benny shifted his stance; his hands still wrapped around the back of the couch. "Betrayal is a damn good reason to want to become a hermit, I'll give you that. Except for one problem."
"Yeah?"
"You're you." Dean glanced up again, saw Benny's face peering down.
"How's that go?"
"You're a people person in any way that word means, no doubt about it. You'd make friends with the whole world if you could – provided you had a good mood on you and most of them had a bit of an attitude adjustment. The solitary, brooding figure is cool in a movie, or in a book, but in they're not the life of the party – they're not you, either."
"But you are?" Benny shrugged.
"We both travel a lot. You less in the last few years but, I'd say that you saw a lot more people on open road than if you'd been out at sea." Dean didn't say anything in response. "Humans were meant to get paired off – or, at least, have a few friends. You can try to not talk to anyone if you want but you'd miss it too much."
"And you don't?"
"Oh, I talk plenty. I'm just a little more conservative with who I'm talking to." Benny clapped Dean on the shoulder. "Come on, try to stand up and I'll call you a cab. You probably want to get home now." He heard his footsteps fade into the hall, down the corridor, and away.
With the sun shining weakly through the glass, Dean kept his eyes glued to the apartment building across the street – and the rest of the westward glance through Brooklyn, across the horizon, not even daring to blink. "I think home's a lot farther than a car ride," he said out loud, but, then, no one was around to hear him.
xxxx
A/N: Babies are these odd creatures and I can't deal with them – my personal opinion is that Sam would not be moved enough to name a child after his own Father. His James doesn't become some weird alternate version of the celebrity James Dean because that's dumb for nine different reasons at least. I think at this point I'm just going to name any child in this story after characters Misha Collins has played, so, Jimmy it is. Nothing much factual here to report – the Culver Line is an old subway route that first opened in 1919, and Dean is an impressively sad drunk, but this is not new information to anyone.