There is a simplicity to existence in Purgatory. Stripped down to your barest self in a place with neither heat nor cold, there is no hunger in Purgatory, and no desire. There is no need to sleep, no exhaustion save mental, or perhaps emotional. There is alive and there is dead. There is the path, and there are obstacles. It's filthy in Purgatory, and it's pure.
There was no time, in Purgatory, to think of what Dean looked like to anyone else. How anyone would perceive him. There was no time to think of what he had left behind on Earth. Stopping to think would give death an opening. He had a promise to fulfill. In a way, it was Dean's life's work distilled down to its purest form.
Then he'd burst back into the world, and hunger and pain and tiredness and desire had surged back into his body like a flood.
He thinks of Benny. That first time, topside. The hot bristle of his beard pressed into Dean's skin, the way he'd said, "I'm just so damn hungry."
He shivers, holds his arms closer. He wonders if the orc with the wood grill would let Dean have a turkey leg even though Dean's with the Followers of the Moon.
"Well, I dunno about you guys, but after watching a guy get melted out of this dimension by a bangin' fairy damsel, I'm kinda feeling like Thai food and beer. Like, a lot of beer," says Charlie, who runs a gloved hand over her face, staring out at the gradually emptying campground with a thousand yard stare. Dean’s stomach rumbles sympathetically.
"I'd kill a guy for takeout and beer," Dean says honestly.
"Come back to my place," Charlie says, and punches Dean on the arm, then sing-songs, "I've got the LOTR extended editions..."
"As appealing as twelve solid hours of orcs and elves sounds after twelve solid hours of orcs and elves," Sam says, "I think I'm calling it a night."
"What, you sure?" Dean raises his eyebrows. "Arwen. Liv Tyler, that's a good distraction if I ever heard one." Sam's mouth twists.
"C'mon," he says. "Galadriel. But no, I'm—I'm beat, man. Go have fun or whatever, I'll catch you in the morning."
"Seriously?"
Sam just fixes him with a look, then gestures for him to hand over the keys. Dean surrenders, tossing them to Sam.
"Don't forget the Battle of Kingdoms tomorrow, Queensguard," Charlie hollers to Sam's back as he walks away. "I've got armor for you! Bright and early!"
"As you wish, Highness," Sam hollers right back. Charlie grins, the Queen appeased.
"Sorry about him," Dean says, following Charlie over the trampled grass back to the lot where her yellow Gremlin is parked. His civilian clothes are tucked under his arm. "Guess he's still moping."
"Uh-huh. And whose fault is that?" Charlie looks amused as he tries to fold his legs into the passenger side.
"Hey, he had a chance to go after that girl of his, he decided not to," Dean says. And yeah, maybe he feels a little bit like a shithead for messing things up with Sam and Amelia, but what was he supposed to do? Sam was out to kill Benny. Like he wasn't usually president of the monsters are people, too club. "You gotta give up a lot of shit for the job," he adds. He swallows around the lump rising in his throat. Now Benny, that's got him feeling real guilty. The guy just sounded so happy to hear from him every time Dean called. Like he had nothing better to do than wait around for Dean. And Dean just cut him off, just like that, after everything. Sam doesn't even know the whole truth of it. If he knew… Dean doesn't know what would happen if he knew. "Sam knows where his priorities are."
"You make it sound like you're in the mob or something," Charlie snorts.
"I wish. Those guys get paid," says Dean. Charlie winces.
"Mmm. Tough break. So there's no secret society of wealthy suits funding the hunting operation, then."
"Woulda solved, like, fifty percent of my problems if there were."
"So how do you…?"
Dean looks at her sidelong. He knows how very arrested she'd be if she weren't too smart to get caught, so he figures he can trust her. "Lotta credit fraud, to be honest."
She giggles, because she and Dean are the same kind of insane, apparently. "Classic."
"Yeah. That and betting. Hustling pool. Not so many people who carry that much cash on 'em these days, though. And, uh, you know. Sometimes you clear out a vamp nest, and then you clear out their wallets after."
"Wow… video games really are like real life," she says. Dean snorts.
"It'd be nice if ghosts actually dropped gold coins and shit when you iced 'em."
"How'd you guys even get into all this stuff?"
"Family business," Dean says simply. He's gonna need a few more beers in him before he gives her the full story. Lucky for him, she looks at him with interest, but doesn't push for details, and on top of that, she insists on paying for the food and the beer. Dean compensates for the insult to his masculinity by carrying the two twelve-packs over his shoulders up the stairs to Charlie's apartment.
He doesn't remember her old place that well—there was kind of a lot going on at the time, and a lot going on since then, but it looks like she's pretty well settled in here. There's a whole cabinet full of gaming consoles tucked under the TV, the walls and the furniture an assault of bright, cheerful colors.
"Not that I'm not grateful," Dean says, setting the beers down on the counter and popping her fridge open to put them away while Charlie digs through the takeout bag for her curry. "But I'm surprised you wanna hang out. Thought after last time all you wanted was a restraining order."
"Yeah, well…" Charlie sets her food down on the coffee table and starts setting up the movie. "You save a girl's life twice, she starts to thinking maybe she owes you dinner and a movie. Also, despite the, y'know, ever-present threat of horrible icky death… it was kinda cool. Going on an adventure, getting the girl…" Charlie grins at him. Dean ducks his head, hiding his smile while he looks for a bottle opener. "When I saw you guys, I was sure I was gonna have to burn this identity. It's such a relief to know I'm not gonna have to move my books and make all new friends again. Which, like—we're cool, beeteedubs, but don't think I'm over that one yet."
A glance at one of her bookshelves raises Dean's eyebrows. He can see all the Tolkien books, and he spots some Batman comics he recognizes from killing time in the library while watching Sam when they were growing up. He'd love to spend a couple hours looking through them all, but he fights the urge.
"You've got the same paperbacks Bobby did," Dean says, eyes lingering on the careworn copy of The Hobbit tucked into the middle row, front and center. He sets his beer down and goes to have a closer look. The spine is cracked and nearly illegible, but he can still pick it out. He spent enough time reading it over the years. All those books are just ash now, Dean thinks. He reaches out with one finger to pull it out.
"Don't—" Charlie says, and Dean freezes, pulling his hand back. "Uh—sorry, that's one's—it's pretty old, I'm afraid the pages'll fall out."
"Got it," Dean says. When he looks back at her, she's fiddling with the throw on the couch, eyes downcast.
"That one was my mom's," she says after a moment. Dean gets that too. Subject dropped.
"Who's Bobby?" Charlie asks quietly when Dean takes his spot across from her on the couch.
"Family," Dean says. "He died before we met you."
"Oh. Sorry."
"Don't be. You helped us take down Dick Roman," Dean says, and nudges her knee with his foot. She's stripped out of her leather jerkin and her boots, but she's still wearing the undershirt and leggings from her costume—sorry, garb, Charlie was very specific on that point. Dean probably ought to change back into his regular clothes, but there is something about watching Lord of the Rings while wearing chainmail that makes the nerd-center of his brain light up.
The food is great. Free food always tastes better, of course. In Purgatory, liberated from hunger, he'd had a chance to unlearn his instinct to load up whenever the opportunity presented itself because he was never sure when his luck or his money would run out. His first day back, driving a stolen truck down to Louisiana, he forgot to eat for a day and a half before he remembered what the gnawing feeling in his gut was. That first burger he ate like a lion on the Discovery channel would a zebra, lapping up ketchup and grease as it trickled down his aching arm. Benny was still trapped in there, of course. He was practically writhing inside him, the glow of his soul showing bright and pink through Dean's skin, just hidden under the dirty sleeve of his flannel. Could he have felt that?
Dean chugs the rest of his beer.
The extended version of Fellowship is apparently so big they had to put it on two discs, and while Charlie changes them over, Dean uses her bathroom to change back into jeans and a t-shirt. When he emerges, she's in an oversized shirt and a pair of Batman pajama pants he is deeply envious of.
He's doing okay chowing down on pad thai and and shooting the shit with her, pointing out each other’s favorite parts, or new parts that Dean hasn't seen yet, up until about the point where Gandalf falls in his fight with the Balrog. Then there's an uncomfortable moment where he's remembering the portal, Cas's hand clasped in his, the slip of it through Dean's sweaty fingers. Gandalf will return, he knows. So did Cas. He's still trying to sort out how he feels about it. It's a blur in his head, a scream of wind, a scrape of rock against his palm, a look of weary resignation on Cas's face.
A few weeks ago, Cas sat on a dingy motel bed and told him he wanted to die. Dean hasn't even had a chance to talk to him about it since then. Cas has been cagey and hard to read, and Dean's been too chickenshit to pray, even though he spent a year in Purgatory praying to Cas nightly, even when he had nothing left to say. When he ran out of pleas for Cas's safety, for his own, for Cas to hang tight because Dean was coming for him, whatever it took, Dean just talked about nothing. He talked about TV shows he was missing out on, and he talked about stuff he was gonna do with Cas when they made it out together. He talked about late night movies, and mini-golf, and roadside barbecue stands. He talked about how worried sick he was about Sam, about how Sam was probably a wreck without Dean or Cas to look out for him. Yeah, that one was a real kick in the head.
And the whole time he'd been doing that, Cas had been trying to stay away, because he didn't want to be saved. Because he didn't think he deserved it. It's like some kind of cosmic joke at Dean's expense.
He's startled out of his spiraling thoughts when Charlie sighs wistfully. He refocuses on the screen. Galadriel is staring into Frodo's eyes, glittering and intense. She's about to go nuclear on him, and when she does Charlie bites her lip in excitement, then mouths along when Cate Blanchett bellows, All shall love me and despair! She breaks out into a full body shiver.
"Man, Galadriel is like, scary hot."
"You and Sam, man," Dean says. "I mean, scary I get, but..." Dean likes Samwise the best as far as characters go, but he's always been an Arwen guy. Dark hair, blue eyes, gorgeous but also kind of a badass, loyal to a fault. What's not to like? Dean would drop whatever he was doing to watch her and Strider when they did those TV marathons of the movies.
"She's hot because she's kinda scary," Charlie says. "Like, she could kill you in a second if she wanted to. But she doesn't want to, and she's strong enough to control it—that's the hot part."
Dean considers the point. He pulls a face, conceding, because now that she's spelling it out like that, he definitely gets it. He'd be lying to himself if he said it had never occurred to him that Benny could have drained him dry without breaking a sweat, probably dozens of times. A couple of times Dean might even have let him, though Benny was too good a guy to have gone for it.
He's just a little surprised Charlie would be into that. She's not messed up like Dean is. And Galadriel, she's got her scary moment, but she's not really a monster. She's kind of untouchable. Statuesque. But Dean remembers that fairy chick Charlie was about to get it on with, so maybe that's her thing too.
"Galadriel's like… emblematic of the age-old paradox of do I want her or do I want to be her," Charlie says.
Dean nods along and keeps watching the movie, but the gears in his head are whirring loudly. Age-old? That's a thing? Enough of a thing that gay people are supposed to just know about it? Like, Dean's not—like, obviously some pretty unignorable stuff has happened to him the last year or so, but he's not gay. Or at least not all the way gay, because it's not like he was faking it with all those girls, he's just got, you know, some exceptions. Benny's not gay either, he had a girl he was with before he got turned. He had a grandkid. But Dean had seen the vamp that turned him, how he was awful pretty for a guy, and Dean thought he understood why Benny might've gone for that, even if Dean wouldn't have. It wasn't a huge leap. Dean decides not to consider what that says about him.
And yeah, some of the guys Dean had thought he was looking up to when he was younger he was actually maybe, just a little bit, somewhere in the back of his head, looking to hook up with, but he'd thought that was just his personal kind of brain damage. And okay, maybe he'd tried dressing like the women he was attracted to, when he was trying to be a woman, but that was just because he didn't really have any other guidelines for how to do it. Right?
"Okay, like—stop me if this is dumb as shit—"
"Oh boy, okay. We're doing this," Charlie says, and turns to face him, settling her hands on her curled-up feet expectantly. That makes him feel put on the spot, but he barrels forward anyway.
"I thought like… I mean, you're not—but, I thought girly girls, y'know, lipstick lesbians or whatever wanted the really butchy girls. And like, the other way around. Is that not how it works?"
Dean sneaks a glance at Charlie. She's looking at him like he just told her he took a dump in her shoes or something.
"Ignoring the fact that you just said the words 'lipstick lesbian,' and the fact that apparently you think I qualify," Charlie says, "What?"
"I mean, I guess your—y'know, your Moondoor character's kind of a badass, chainmail, sword, whole deal, so I got why all the fair maidens were checking you out, but you're not like that outside the game." Dean feels like he's digging the hole deeper and deeper, but it's too deep for him to climb out now. "Not that you're not a badass!"
Charlie stares at a spot on the floor, blinking, hands spread. Dean takes that as his cue to shut up and let her formulate a response.
"Okay. Okay, I have like—there's enough material in there for an entire Gender Studies course, and I don't have time to—to unpack all of that, but. Wow."
"Don't hurt yourself," Dean says, face burning. "Just—just forget I said anything."
"Dude—like, sure butch-for-femme relationships are a thing, sometimes that's true, but that's not true for everybody. It's not like someone has to be the girl and someone has to be the guy. And that's not really what being butch is anyway! That's… kind of the point."
"Right. Got it." He has not got it. "That was—that was stupid, and, you know, it makes sense. Like, if I were a chick, I'd wanna be a chick I thought was hot," he says before he can stop himself. "Hypothetically," he adds, when Charlie looks at him oddly. "But… I dunno, if you date people you wanna be like, don't you just get jealous or feel… like, not good enough?"
"I guess that can happen," Charlie says slowly, still looking at him oddly. "Not all the time."
"Right, sure," Dean says. A few moments later, he fires back with, "But like, what if someone wants to be the girl? Or the guy? Or whatever."
He can't figure out Charlie's expression at all, and that makes him nervous, so he just keeps drinking and fiddling with the label on his beer bottle while she answers, "That's… fine. If that's what they want. It's not what everyone wants, necessarily, but that's… definitely okay. If it is. And I think… we're talking about two different things here, maybe?"
"Oh." He goes quiet. He isn't sure if he's relieved when Charlie lets him.
And he's not trying to, but as the movie keeps playing, and he's watching Boromir swear fealty to Aragorn, calling him my brother, my captain, my king, his mind drifts right back to Benny, because Benny had called him brother. Benny had done a lot of things. But he'd never looked at Dean like he was a woman, never treated him like one. And Dean definitely wasn't one anymore, but he thinks now that maybe he'd kinda been thinking of it as playing one without realizing it, until now. He's only got so much experience in that area, and he'd spent most of it just letting guys do shit to him because they looked at him and saw a woman. But Benny wasn't just an anonymous guy who thought he was some slutty barfly. He was Benny. Dean doesn't make a lot of friends, living the way he does, and Benny had gone and moved himself up in the ranks as one of the closest he's had.
Boromir's gone still, his face slack. Aragorn cradles him and lays a solemn kiss on Boromir's brow. Dean wipes his eyes, covering up the wet sound of his sniffling by opening another beer and knocking it back.
"I'm surprised you like these movies so much," Dean says. "I mean. There's only, like, two chicks in 'em. Three," he corrects, remembering Eowyn.
"If I only liked stuff with a lot of women in it, I wouldn't have much left to get into," Charlie says, switching the disc over to The Two Towers. "Lord of the Rings makes up for it by being deeply homoerotic."
Dean sputters. "What? No it's not."
Charlie looks at him, once again, like he's won the award for World's Stupidest Dumbass.
"It's not! They're—I mean, war buddies, it's a thing, guys can be, you know, close and not—" He breaks off, because the argument's sounding weak even to himself. It's hard to argue about sacred manly bonds forged in the heat of combat when Dean's still trying to forget about his super manly war buddy sticking his tongue in his— "Whatever, sure, Lord of the Rings is gay as hell. All they do is explore each others' hobbit holes. You win."
Charlie has to take a minute to stop rolling with laughter before she hits play again. And, okay, maybe Dean's smiling along. He thought maybe she'd be mad at him, but apparently not.
"You may joke," Charlie says, and nudges his knee with her toe before she tucks them back up under herself. "But that's kind of why LARPing is so fun." She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. "It's fun to take whatever it is you like about your favorite stuff… like Lord of the Rings," Charlie says, lifting her eyebrows at him. "And put your own stamp on it. Cause people like us, we don't really get to be the big damn heroes super often." Dean looks at her sharply, fighting off a sweat until she elaborates and it doesn't sound quite so much like she means 'the two of us.' "Like, a lot of Moondoor's players are queer."
For the first time in years he thinks about his introduction to LARPers, those dudes at the convention who were pretending to be him and Sam. They were just a couple of guys that wanted to be the heroes. Dean hadn't really thought about the, y'know, the gay thing being part of that. And he guesses he gets that too, even if he resented their envy at the time. That was all he wanted from this job when he was growing up, after all. He'd cast his father as the hero, and Dean had wanted nothing more than to be one too, to be like him, to be what John wanted him to be. But being a hero, being like his father, was fundamentally incompatible with letting a vampire—
Dean smothers a frustrated noise, trying to focus on the damn movie. Him and Benny, that was never gonna work out. Not long term. Sam was never gonna go for it, and Sam would always have to come first. And Jesus fuck, he really sounds like a girl now, because what did he think, he and Benny were gonna go steady? They fucked a handful of times. That was it. It's not like Benny was in love with him. Christ.
He wishes he could be like Charlie, a little bit. Which should seem silly, because here's Charlie telling him the same thing those nerdy little gay dudes had, about how green his grass looks from the other side. But Charlie's her own kind of brave, the kind of brave Dean's never been able to be, because she knows herself. She talks so confidently about her experiences, and she hadn't even known how to flirt with a guy, as if she'd just skipped over the part of growing up where she had to pretend she wanted to. Dean has no idea how anyone could be so damn sure about it.
"How'd you know you were—" Dean starts, and his face grows hot, because if Charlie thought he was ignorant before, she's probably on the verge of kicking him out of her apartment now.
But she doesn't look at him like he's a brainless idiot this time. She just smiles and wobbles her head playfully at him. "A friend of Sappho?
Dean shrugs, gesturing vaguely. "Sure."
"You want the PSA or the truth?"
It's Dean's turn to look at her like she's stupid. Of course he wants the fucking truth. "You're not gonna hurt my feelings."
Charlie sets her second beer down on the counter and walks over to the fridge to fish out another, popping it open and downing a third of it before she settles back down. "Okay, so—I mean, I guess the accepted story is supposed to go, 'I always knew I was different.' But I really didn't. I guess I was kind of a nerdy, dorky little kid, but you know, kids are just kind of like that until someone tells them they're not supposed to be."
Dean nods along. He remembers when the switch flipped for Sam, when he got to be old enough that John decided he wasn't supposed to be babied anymore. Dean had been the one to spill the beans about their dad's real job, but there had been a childish sort of wish behind the admission even then. Dad's a superhero. Dad's going to protect us. In the end, it had been harder for Dean to let go of the idea of Sam as a child that needed protection than it had been for John. Some days he still couldn't let it go.
"I was normal," Charlie says, "and then something… something big happened, and my life changed pretty, um, pretty drastically, and suddenly I wasn't normal anymore. I was sad and angry and I couldn't—nobody else seemed to get it. There wasn't really anyone I could talk to. Nobody that wasn't, like, a state-mandated therapist." Charlie snorts, smiling sadly.
And shit, Dean gets that one too. The number of social workers and school guidance counselors he had to throw off his scent over the years, he definitely gets it. He pats her foot, and her nose crinkles up at the cold. His hand is still kind of wet from the condensation on his fourth beer. He wipes it off on the leg of her pajamas, and she kicks him ineffectually.
"I was, like, twelve, thirteen, and I hadn't ever actually liked someone like that before, but when you're an angry girl, and you don't wear the clothes people think you're supposed to, and you're not interested in the things you're supposed to like, and you're not nice to boys the way they think you're supposed to be, people… decide things. About what you're like, what you—what you are. Who you are." She taps her fingers on the side of her bottle, eyes distant. "Like, kids would call me a lesbo, and I don't think I even actually knew what that was. I'd never heard that word before. But I knew they thought it was something bad."
"You've got choices," Charlie says, "when people decide something about you, you know, you can… pretend they're wrong, try to prove them wrong, or... you can just give up and let them think whatever they want. Like, I eventually figured out they were right. Because there was this girl—Gabriela—and, she was uh, my roommate. Was my roommate. At the—the place I was living. Uh, this kinda. Group home?"
Dean blinks. "You too?"
Charlie frowns. "You knew a Gabriela?"
"No, no, the other thing, the. I was, uh. When I was sixteen. A group home. In New York. Just for like, two months, but."
Charlie's face softens. "Oh. I was in Kansas, but—Problems Buddies!" She puts out a fist, clearly angling for a bump. Dean huffs a laugh and fulfills her request.
"But yeah, she, uh. She liked anime, and we'd stay up too late in the TV room with whatever we could get from the Blockbuster, until we got in trouble for that. And then we started staying up late sleeping over in each others' beds, reading comics under the covers with a flashlight. And then, uh. Well. Y'know." Charlie bites her lip, resting her head on the side of the couch. The movie plays on, totally forgotten. "Until people found out, and then I was Our Lady of Not Allowed At That Group Home Anymore," Charlie says, laughing awkwardly. "So, yeah, I figured out, you know, if they're right about me, then like. I can either try really hard to prove them wrong, or I can just say, you know what? Frack you. I am a big dykey lesbo from Planet Gay, and anyone who doesn't like that can suck it."
That startles a big laugh out of Dean, and he feels like a dick for a second before Charlie starts laughing along with him.
"Hell yeah," he says.
He looks at Charlie, then, really looks at her. He really can't believe how much they have in common. There's part of him, the big brother part, that really just wants her to make good on her promise never to see him again, because he knows how much danger she's in just being around him. He knows she's strong, much stronger than she looks. He also knows she shouldn't have to be.
The other part of him, the selfish part, wishes he could stick around, because he's never had someone to talk to who seemed like she'd honestly get it. He cut Benny off. Cas is in the wind. Bobby's dead. And Sam… Dean doesn't know. Maybe Sam would understand, maybe he's not giving the kid enough credit, he ought to know better than anyone how it was for them, growing up. But maybe his closeness is what makes it harder. Maybe Dean's still stinging from the knowledge that Sam had been so ready to let him go.
If Dean didn't have this job, these responsibilities, if he weren't a legally dead former star of America's Most Wanted, maybe he could stick around. Maybe he and Charlie could be real friends. He could get himself an honest, tax-paying job and go LARP on weekends. And maybe it wouldn't be like it had been with Lisa, where he was drowning in grief, and drowning the grief in booze, only half-present, not allowed to tell the few friends he'd made the truth. Maybe if he'd had a friend like Charlie around, he could really have been the person he'd been trying to be. Maybe even someone better than that.
"Did you know Viggo really broke his toe there?" Charlie points at the screen. Aragorn falls to his knees, roaring. "That was a real scream of pain."
"I did," Dean blurts out, before he can stop. "Um. Break up with someone. You were right. Before."
Charlie stops and faces him, the picture of nonchalance. "Okay," she says. "What happened?"
Dean laughs unsteadily, running his fingers back through his hair. He chews on the inside of his cheeks. "A lot. A lot happened. I dunno if we really broke up, we weren't really… together, but, I, uh. I did break it off. He, uh. His name's Benny. He's a vampire."
"Oh," Charlie says, her eyes going round. "Well... shit."
Dean's fist clenches and unclenches. He taps his fingers on the arm of the couch. He can't quite look at her. "Hah, uh. Yeah."
"I take it he's like, a good vampire? Like Angel?"
Dean scoffs. "No! Angel's a tool."
Charlie winces. "Like Spike?"
"I'm not Buffy the goddamn Vampire Slayer," Dean grumbles.
"That's too bad," Charlie says. "Always kinda wanted to be Willow. So," she says, clapping her hands together. "How'd you meet this good guy vamp?"
Dean sighs. "Purgatory."
"The one in Miami?"
"Purgatory Purgatory," Dean says, head in hands. "The Biblical Purgatory. Nothing but monsters roaming around killing each other. Got stuck there for a year taking out Dick Roman. Benny helped me and… helped me get out, so he hopped a ride to the surface. I was… helping him get his un-life together, off and on, but. Y'know. Vampire. Hunters and vampires, we don't really…" Dean shrugs. "So yeah."
Charlie's jaw is hanging just the slightest bit open. Which, y'know, is fair.
"No offense," she says, "but you guys have, like, the worst life."
"Yeah, pretty much," Dean says. "Sam, he really didn't trust Benny. Some bad shit went down, some people ended up dead. Not Benny's fault. But I kinda had to make a choice. And. Yeah. There it is." Dean wishes he had something stronger than beer, but he's gonna have to make do.
"Breakup with a bodycount," Charlie says, whistling low. "That's pretty bad." Dean lets out a weak laugh.
"Wouldn't be the first. Which, uh, maybe that's a sign from God or whoever that I gotta quit gettin' involved with people."
"You're really not clearing up my assumption that you're the Slayer," Charlie says. She reaches across to take his hand and gives it a squeeze. She waits until he squeezes back to release him. "And it was just the vampire thing Sam had a problem with?"
It takes Dean a second to get what she means. "Oh. No, it wasn't like—you don't have anything to worry about from Sam."
"Wasn't worrying about me, but that's good to know."
Dean groans, setting his beer down so he can scrub his fingers through his hair. "Sam doesn't know it was—like that. I didn't—he doesn't know. I'm pretty sure. I mean, I haven't told him."
Charlie hums, and draws her knees up to her chin. "Tell me if I'm wrong, but… was this your first time with a...?"
"A monster?"
Charlie punches him in the shoulder. "A guy, you fool of a Took."
"Yeah," Dean says instinctually, then wonders if he's being dishonest. "Well. Sorta. I mean, I guess I thought the other… stuff, that didn't really count." He shrugs, feeling stupid.
"Okay, Pip, you're gonna have to break that one down for me. What counts?"
Dean huffs, equal parts embarrassed and frustrated. He's used to feeling stupid, but this whole conversation has him feeling like he's got about as much common sense as a box of rocks.
"You don't wanna hear about this."
"I mean, you don't have to get into specifics or anything but…"
"I fooled around with—a guy. There was one guy. But it wasn't really. I didn't take it serious. I didn't think he was serious. We were—I was young, I guess. But that's… That's just an excuse, I know, I'm not a complete idiot, okay?"
"I didn't say you were," Charlie says, hands up in surrender.
"And the other guys, that didn't count because I wasn't a guy when that happened, so it's not like—it was different, that was a whole different thing," he says, words tumbling out of him before he can think to stop himself. He doesn't realize what he's said until he catches Charlie puzzling at him.
"Dean… you, okay, you don't have to answer but—"
"No, no, I don't mean—" Charlie stops, looking at Dean with large, expectant eyes. Dean gnaws on his lip, trying to make sense of it all for someone who isn't him. It's never been easy, but it's even harder buzzed. "There was a witch a couple years back, I got hit with a spell. I was stuck as a chick for a month. Some—some stuff happened."
"'Stuck as a chick'," Charlie repeats, puzzling. "What, like Ranma 1/2?"
"Like what?"
"Nothing. Anime, never mind. So—okay, so a witch—forcefemmed you."
Dean coughs around a mouthful of beer.
"And you… had sexytimes with…"
"Yeah."
"How many…?"
"I dunno," Dean mutters. His whole head feels like it's burning, and it's not just the alcohol. "Maybe—maybe six."
He hears Charlie take a gulp of her drink next to him.
"Dean... am I your only gay friend?"
Dean doesn't mean to sound so pathetic when he says, "You wanna be friends?"
He misses whatever motions result in Charlie's arms squeezing around his ribcage, her chin digging into the meat of his shoulder. When he looks down, it's just a mop of red hair.
"Yeah, stupid. You're technically the oldest friend I've got in meatspace."
Dean puts down his drink and maneuvers so that his arm is draped over Charlie's back, and that leaves it so she can tuck her head under his chin. After a minute of getting his breathing under control, enjoying it while trying not to be a total chick-flick about it, he asks, "The fuck is meatspace?"
"IRL," Charlie says, muffled by his shirt. "Not on the internet."
"How do you make friends on the internet? You don't even really know who those people are."
"For the most part, yeah," Charlie says. "That has its good points, though. You know. For people like us."
Dean doesn't know if she means people who kill monsters or… the other thing. Maybe it doesn't matter. After a while, she falls asleep against his side, and Dean stays there in the dark while the screen tells him to insert disc two, unable to bring himself to move her. He texts Sam to tell him not to wait up, and when Charlie stirs he sends her off to her bed and tries to sleep with his legs dangling over the armrest of her couch.
They meet up with Sam at a diner for breakfast. Charlie invites a couple of her other LARP friends, who are both cosplay enthusiasts and incensed about trying to outfit a guy as big as Sam on such short notice. Sam endures the attention with nobility and humor, letting them measure him and paint his face in Charlie's tent once they arrive at the parkgrounds. He even joins Dean in the charge once they've suited up for the Battle of Kingdoms. It's been a while since either of them let loose and just did something goofy for no other reason than fun. All in all, Dean would have to call it a pretty good day.
He takes pity on his brother and doesn't take Charlie up on her invitation to the afterparty, though. As much as he likes hanging out with Charlie, he thinks he and Sam have both hit their limit on social activities with nerdy strangers. Before they go, she demands they take a group photo with Dean's phone. She texts it to herself immediately.
"There," she says. "Now that I've got your number, I can always find you."
Dean narrows his eyes at her. She narrows hers right back. Knowing Charlie, she might mean that literally. He decides he's okay with it.
"Keep it secret," Dean says, and winks. "Keep it safe." Charlie's nose scrunches up, and she sticks her tongue out at him, and then they're on their way.
The ride back to the motel is comfortably quiet. Now that it's quieter, of course, there's nothing standing between Dean and his thoughts.
He's been drunker, but he definitely spilled a little more of his guts than he would have if he'd indulged a little less. That's probably true of Charlie, too, because she'd been keeping pace with him, and she's built like a hummingbird. He doesn't know how he should feel about it. It's kind of a relief, just having most of it out there. Not all of it, because Charlie would have needed a week and three times the booze to get the extended edition of Dean's bullshit. He sort of feels like he's just jumped out of a plane, and he's sailing along with his parachute, but he's not sure where he's gonna land yet. Or if he's gonna break something doing it.
All that to say, some things Charlie said shook some shit in his head loose. Stuff he hasn't thought about in years.
He'd been nine or so, he thinks, cause Dad's still real tall in his memory, and that was the year Sam stopped wanting to hold Dean's hand and follow him around. He remembers that Sam was off chasing a dog around the yard instead of trying to copy everything Dean did like usual. The dog belonged to some old military buddy of their dad's, and the house and the yard must've been his too. The guy had a shooting range out back, and Dean was practicing just like Dad told him to.
The visit ended early, because Dad's buddy told Dean he was holding the pistol wrong, limp-wristed, like a faggot, and Dad punched his lights out. Dean had been scared, because Dad was spitting mad, cursing at his friend and grabbing Dean's hand in a vice grip when he stalked away to gather their things and go. Sam cried in the car, because he wanted to keep playing with the dog, and Dean shrank himself up in the backseat, staring at the back of Dad's head while he sped away to find them somewhere else to stay.
But after they'd been on the road a few minutes, and Dad had calmed down, he said, "He had no right talking to you like that."
And that had stood out to him, because Dad was usually the one telling Dean when he messed up. Sometimes Dean's grip really wasn't firm enough. Sometimes he wasn't hitting as many marks as he ought to. Sometimes his stance was all wrong and his focus wasn't where he needed it to be and Dad would say, You're gonna get someone killed shooting like that. Do it again. And Dean said, Yes, sir, and did it again. Every once in a while, Dean's work would be up to snuff in John's eyes, and that would earn him a tight nod, and a Good. A Good meant Dad could leave Dean and Sam alone long enough to do his job the way he needed to. But that was rare, and in a few months would come the business with the shtriga, and Dean would never be good again.
But this wasn't like any of those times. This was just a dad standing up for his son. Dean had known, in some nebulous way, that John's job was to protect the world from bad guys. He hadn't necessarily thought of himself as being part of the world John protected.
At the time, Dean had felt, for the first time since he could remember, maybe for the first time since the fire, that his father really loved him. More than half of his short lifetime had passed since his mother died, and really, John had been gone just as often as he was home even in those hazy childhood days, before he put Sammy in Dean's little arms and told him it was time to be a man. But the rare, really good times, Dean can remember Dad coming home from work with a smile and scooping Dean up, big and strong and steady, and Mom would be smiling too, instead of sitting on the back porch with a line creasing her forehead while she chainsmoked.
And it was true that Dean had no real idea what a faggot was yet, but he thought it must have been the worst thing you could be, if it made Dad hit his friend. You were supposed to hurt monsters, not people. Whatever it was, it was a big enough deal to break that rule. They certainly never stayed at his house again after that. Dean can't even remember the guy's name.
He's never told anyone about it. Dad never brought it up again, not directly. But he realizes, on a subconscious level, he never really forgot. Some part of him's always been braced for the fallout if anyone ever looked at him like Dad's old buddy did and saw whatever it was he saw. Even Dad.
He thinks about it when he's scrubbing red facepaint off his face in the shower, and he thinks about it lying down and staring at the shadows drawn across the ceiling when he's trying to sleep. He's still thinking about it when they stop for gas and breakfast at a Gas 'n Sip on their way out of town. Sam hands him a cup of coffee and sets a bag of granola bars and a banana on the seat between them. When Dean doesn't say anything right away, Sam waves his hand in front of Dean's face, like he's snapping him out of a trance.
"You doin' okay? I thought you'd be…"
"What?"
"I dunno. Seemed like you had a good time nerding out with Charlie the last couple days. Thought it might cheer you up a little more." Sam peels the banana, and bites off about half of it in one go.
"I'm fine," Dean says, and sips his coffee. It's still too hot, and it burns his tongue.
"Miss her already?" Sam has a pouty little smile, like he's two seconds away from calling Dean 'adowable'. "What'd you do during your sleepover? Braid each others hair, talk about boys?"
"Charlie's gay," Dean barks, and drinks more of his coffee. It just tastes like ash now.
"I know! I was kidding! Jeez, sorry," Sam says, and almost looks contrite as Dean starts up the car and takes them back out on the road.
They've been driving in near-silence for a little while when Dean can't help but ask Sam if he remembers Dad's old friend, the one with the dog and the yard and the shooting range. It's a few minutes of back and forth, narrowing it down, trying to remember the year, the state, enough for Sam to figure out who he means.
"Oh… shit, the name's right on the tip of my tongue, it was—the dog's name was Rosie, I remember that," Sam says.
"Of course you only remember the dog," Dean mutters.
"Wasn't his name Lance? Or something like that?"
"No," Dean says, and it all comes back. "No, he was a Lance Corporal. Lance Corporal Jackson. Dad called him Jax."
"Yeah!" Sam looks excited to have solved the puzzle, but his enthusiasm fades when Dean keeps his eyes on the road, stonefaced. "What makes you bring him up? Been a long time."
"I dunno, just thought about it for the first time in a while. Wasn't sure if you remembered him too. You were pretty young."
"Yeah, no, I… Yeah, I remember." Sam's knee bounces by the dashboard. He leans back in his seat, running his hand back through his hair. "Dad really went off on me, that one time. At his place. I remember."
"What? When was that?"
"The last time we stayed with him. That was probably… I dunno, '88?"
"When did Dad yell at you? I don't remember that."
Sam sighs, one impulse short of rolling his eyes. "Yeah, why would you."
"Don't be like that," Dean says.
"I don't know what I did to piss him off. I don't remember that much anymore, I was five. I think I threw a tantrum about not being able to stay and play with the dog, and I guess that pissed him off, cause he drove straight to Pastor Jim's and dumped my ass there for a week."
"Shit," Dean says, glancing over at him. Sam's face is stormy, now, his shoulders hunched. "I forgot that part." Sam doesn't answer, just shrugs his enormous shoulders and shrinks down a little more.
Dean has to take a few minutes to work up the nerve to speak again. "It wasn't your fault Dad was mad," he says. "It was Jax, he did something to piss him off. That's why we left early."
"Oh." Sam doesn't look comforted by this fact.
"He, uh," Dean says, his throat sticking. "He called me a fag."
"What?" Sam turns sharply. Dean keeps his eyes trained on the road.
"Yeah. During target practice. Dad gave him a black eye over it."
"Jesus. Okay, well. I guess he was right to make us leave."
"Yeah." Something Sam remembered is sticking in his craw, though. "After that, when he dropped you at Pastor Jim's. I think that was the first time Dad took me on a hunt."
"...What?"
"I, uh. I forgot that part. But yeah. He started teaching me how to drive on that trip, too."
"You were nine."
"Yeah, well." Dean taps his fingers on the steering wheel, feeling jittery. He doesn't like this conversation. He's not particularly enjoying the direction it took. He regrets ever bringing it up. "I had to learn sooner or later. If he got hurt, he'd need a getaway driver."
"Jesus." Sam scrubs his hand over his mouth, chewing at a hangnail. "I thought he left me alone to punish me."
Dean can't bring himself to say what he's thinking.
He hates himself for bringing it up. He could have just gone on being grateful. Would that have been so bad? And he had been. He'd been so grateful. His father had loved him enough to teach him how to be a man, so no one would ever speak to him that way again. What a gift.
He could still be grateful, if he really tried. John was just a man from a different era trying to make sure his son didn't attract the wrong kind of attention. He was protecting Dean. He was doing his best. And so what if his best isn't what you'd expect of a father nowadays? Maybe if he'd been allowed to live, he could've become that kind of father. He never got the chance.
Dean got the chance, and he still didn't do any better. So what right does he have to be ungrateful?