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Fifty-three.
Dean runs his fingers over his scars in the bunker bathroom mirror, surrounded on all sides by a miserably utilitarian brick. Up his stomach, over white gashes left by hellhounds. His legs and their healed-over bullet wounds. There’s too many small ones to count, and certainly too many to remember how they all happened. The red handprint on his shoulder is from being resurrected, but the scratch beneath it could be anything.
He traces the valleys of his face, lines etched under his eyes and beside his mouth. They’re deep for his age, fifty-three.
A year older than Dad, when he died. Dean’s been thinking about this for days now. He hasn’t spoken to Sam for two at least.
Dean blinks at himself, at fine lines and thick skin, traces the stubble on his jaw with a thumb. He turns slowly under the light, hoping to catch a glimpse of something he recognises. He looks older than Dad did at the same age, and it’s probably stress. He sees the hair on his back, a dusty hay-brown where it used to be golden, when Dad pressed his own hand against it and smiled– look at you, all grown up. He’s half expecting Dad to show up even now.
Every morning, Dean wakes up and waits for the door to open, waits for a gruff low voice to tell him that hunt almost killed me, and sorry I’m home late, boys. Twenty-seven years late and risen from the grave, but Dean finds himself holding his breath all the same.
Twenty-seven years, there’s another number. Dean’s officially lived longer without Dad than with him. He closes his eyes and turns around, pulling his shirt back on and his jeans back up. There’s no hand to find his shoulders and whiskey-sour breath on his neck.
His bowlegs trip him up on the way out of the bathroom, stumbling forward and catching himself just before he pitches over. Sam’s in the hallway, his heavy eye bags and hollow cheeks overflowing with concern. “You were in there for half an hour,” he tries quietly.
“Yeah,” Dean shrugs. His voice is so out of use that it burns in his throat. He narrows his eyes to cast them at Sam, purses his lips as if to say I don’t want to talk.
Later, he might feel bad for isolating Sam in their own home, communicating only in bitter glances and monosyllabic replies for days on end. There’s a twinge of guilt in his chest, but even that is passed down from their father.
Dean’s made from a lump of clay shaped by a long-dead god, one that he can still see the fingerprints of all over his skin. He still bows his head in deference when he walks into a motel, he’s still moved to a passion like prayer with the scent of Marlboro Golds.
He trudges past Sam to their door; the front door only in function due to its location in a basement. Dad’s old jacket lives on a cold silver hook there, screwed tightly into the concrete wall. The air smells empty, there’s no ageing wallpaper or water damage, and the wet grass outside doesn’t make it through the concrete. It’s only fitting how colourless their permanent dwelling is, and how little it feels like a home. Sometimes Dean sleeps in the car, if it’s warm enough.
The brown leather is soft in his hands from age except for the cracked seams made by decades of bent arms and shoulders. He holds it up in front of him, worn hands like a clothes-hanger, creating the outline of the body that lived in it once. A hunter is cursed to never stop chasing ghosts.
Dean can almost see him there, between the empty leather shoulders, somewhere in the middle of Georgia or Kentucky, on the tail-end of a fresh haircut that feels fuzzy in Dean’s hands and kind of makes his head look like a sleeping dog. He can see a ringed hand offering something to hold onto, if he really tries.
His eyes are already stinging when he takes the collar to his nose and inhales deeply.
It smells like nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Not a hint of smoke and aftershave and sweat, not a gasp of life.
And why shouldn’t it? It’s been twenty-seven years.
Dean gropes the fabric from the bottom, scrunching the lower hem up to the shoulders and forming something like a wrinkly pillow. It folds unevenly, Dean notes, a squarish shape holding firm somewhere.
Upon further inspection, his silver-coloured rings catching on the seams of the lining, Dean locates the thing in a pocket, solid and cold. His fingers run across its surface, aluminum gone slightly rough, dipped beyond Dean’s reach in the thin lines of engraving.
He places his thumb on the cap as he pulls it out; Dad’s flask. Like the jacket, it should be Dean’s flask. It’s not, despite being full of Dean’s whiskey.
The fluorescent hallway light strokes his skin with an unfamiliar hand. Dean shields himself with the jacket, and it’s still a little wider than he’ll ever be.
“I’m going out,” he calls, at a speaking volume that feels like a harsh scream to his own ears, on the off-chance Sam might hear him.
Trudging up the stairs is a great effort, his knee joints slide slowly like a stuck door, the pain of engaging his muscles ripples through his calves and thighs.
As soon as the door opens, the tears come. It’s swift enough to take Dean by surprise, no gap between a shaking discomfort and a torrential, snotty facial downpour. His forefinger and thumb unscrew the flask cap and he takes a deep drink, trying not to think about how Dad’s lips had been there once, and he used to smile and pass the thing to Dean, and Dean would cough because he was god-awful at holding his liquor.
He falls to his knees in the damp emerald grass, soaking through his jeans. He puts his arms down on his elbows and the leather doesn’t sponge water the same way, though it’s certainly picking up dirt. His head falls into his chest, between his shoulders. There’s no one around for miles to witness his…what is this?
More booze. It’s warm in his throat. He remembers the first time he put his hands on Dad’s hairy thighs, the way he could only get half his cock in his mouth before he gagged, the way his spine tingled when the latter happened, and the way it thrilled him. Dean had long come to terms with what they’d had back then. He’d long run out of shame and remorse, now he was just homesick.
Maybe details were lost in nostalgia, but Dean couldn’t help but remember him fondly. Everything with Dad was real. It meant something. Here Dean is, a dog sniffing around his old master’s grave, whimpering and collapsing on the ground. An old stray dog himself, who never stopped aching for someone to follow.
I want to go home, his mind rings out, a clear and childish note. I want to go home. He says it out loud through the snot escaping down the back of his throat, he rolls onto his side and begs the world to hear him.
“Please,” he whispers, shoulders shaking, wet dirt streaking his red face. “I just…I just want to go home.”
Dean uses the flask as a pacifier of sorts, pouring whiskey into his body to combat the need to hurl.
Home is a thousand motels and as many secret nights, it’s a knowing smile caught over a bowl of cereal. Home is a body that’s younger and brighter, feeding on Dad’s elusive praise more so than any meal. It’s in passion– the disgust and anger of a young Sam that’s all but faded to a resigned misery as he grows older too.
He’s hurting you, Dean, Sam used to plead with him, begging his brother to see reason. And so he was. But so did Sam, albeit in other ways. Dean’s certain that real love is an act of perseverance. The perfect kiss is a mouthful of venom, swallowed without a hint of struggle.
“I need you,” he whispers to the grass. The grey sky observes him detachedly. “I miss you,” he tries, and is met only with the sound of wind.
Dean’s a widow, in some sick way, wrapped in this workwear shroud and clawing endlessly after the past. His second love is beyond precious, a blood link as sacred as Dad was, but Sam has never demanded obedience from him. It wasn’t Sam’s guiding hands that taught him how to walk and hunt, how to experience mind-numbing pleasure and soul-rearing pain. They’re equal in their perpetual homelessness, settling the vacancy of their bodies in each other’s arms.
They’re going to die together in a grey basement, when they finally tire of running in circles. And maybe Dean will have his family back then, assuming either of them have a shot at heaven.
The wet, cold grass feels like just-showered hair on his face, with the gritty addition of dirt. His lips are around the flask despite it now being empty.
Dean takes a loud sniff of air through his nose, quickly blinking lashes stuck together with tears. He’s too goddamned old to be doing this, to be picking this scab open again for the millionth time in a row.
Dean pushes himself up on his hands, the ground slippery on his palms, forearm muscles tightening under the pressure. Sitting up, he tucks the flask back into the jacket’s pocket. It’s time to go back inside, Dean concedes. Sam’s waiting.