lunabee34 | SPN fic-- Death: a Triptych

Pairing: Ellen/Dean
Rating: Adult
Spoilers through season finale
842 words

This is a collection of three vignettes--one from Sam's perspective, one from Dean's, and one from John's. Somehow, they ended up being ALL ABOUT DEAN. Go figure. *g*

Death: a Triptych

1

Sometimes Sam thinks he remembers what happened to him after he died. It’s there in his peripheral vision, in the variegated color behind his eyelids when he blinks. It’s underneath the beating of his heart in the weighted darkness of night when he cannot sleep.

They need some time to plan, the four of them. Time to plan, time to rest, time to reconfigure the mission. Sam thinks Bobby is glad to have them, even if he’s given over his own bed to Ellen in favor of the pullout couch.

Once Sam dreams of light—glaring and nearly painful in its intensity. When he wakes, he sees the room washed over in green and red, like he’s looked too long at the edges of the sun. Dean is awake on the air mattress under the window.

“Dean,” Sam says, his voice swaddled in sleep. “Dean.”

Dean sits next to Sam on the bed, urges him down into an uncomfortable arc and then runs his fingers down the curve of Sam’s spine. The skin there is discolored, raised, but it does not open and it does not bleed under his brother’s hands. Dean splays a palm over the place where Jake stabbed him.

“I can feel your heart beating, Sammy,” he says. Sam uncoils, and when he looks, Dean’s face is brilliant, blinding, brighter than the light Sam once saw receding.

2

“Lot of good people died in there, and I got to live. Lucky me.” When he’s counting the cracks in Bobby’s ceiling, Dean hears Ellen’s words. He didn’t look at her face when she said them, didn’t want to see it then; as she’d spoken, he’d felt the words in his mouth as if they were his own.

Even now, Dean doesn’t know what exactly Ash was to her, what any of those hunters were to her. Friends, formers lovers, business, maybe something like a son. He watches Ellen move stiffly through the rooms of Bobby’s place, her steps measured like each costs her. He watches her hands curled around a coffee mug, a whiskey bottle, a cell phone that doesn’t ring.

In the evenings, Bobby and Sam hole up in the kitchen, bookends for the stack of research on the table between them. Dean knows what they’re looking for, what they’re hoping to find. He and Ellen sit on the back porch, Dean twisting the lid off El Sol after El Sol with the hem of his T-shirt.

Tonight, they don’t talk. The crickets are obnoxious, the unrelenting white noise of summer in the country. A dog barks down the road a ways, and then everything goes so quiet Dean can hear Ellen swallow, can hear the soft sound her lips make when she lowers her beer.

Ellen’s fingers are callused, a bracelet of warmth around Dean’s wrist when she pulls him into her space, when she kisses him. Dean doesn’t back away and he doesn’t try to make her explain. Instead, he cups her breast through the fabric of her button-down and he keeps kissing her, slow and deep and strong, as her nipple hardens in his palm.

Ellen is not desperate or hurried when she works Dean’s zipper open, when she reaches inside. She brings him off slow and gentle, his hand between her legs moving to the same rhythm. She gasps when she comes, and then all Dean can hear is the music of crickets, and underneath the faint rustle of Sam or Bobby turning a page.

3

After he escapes, in those brief moments before he moves on to Something Else, Somewhere Else, John forgets what hell is like. He feels its terror, its monstrous, aching perversity as a truth that can never be erased, but he can no longer recall the particulars of its pain and its loneliness.

John can see through clear to the bones of his boys now, can fathom them in a way he never could while living. Dean’s love is like a pilot light, an unwavering blue flame that illuminates him, that drives him. This boy of his is all edges, broken places and sharp corners that hurt John to see. He is ashamed to acknowledge how much of that destruction he can take credit for. Dean’s soul, the one that bitch called tarnished, sticks in Dean’s chest like a silver round.

Sam. John can see the potential for darkness in him, how it easy it might be for Sam to give in, to embrace his anger and his fear. Much of Sam is shadowed, the deep purple and green of slow-healing bruises. But John can also see great kindness and great joy in his youngest son. That joy takes the shape of his brother’s grin and a stretch of road winding away and over the horizon.

When he wrestles that demon to the ground, for once John is not thinking of Mary—his beautiful bride, her twice swollen belly, her body overcome in flame—but only of his sons, of Sam and of Dean.