spnmysteryyears | #3-10 FIC: "What Candles May Be Held" PG-13

Title: "What Candles May Be Held"
Author: SylvanWitch
Rating: PG-13
Category: Angst, Pre-Series
Summary: This is how John, Dean, and Sam spend November 2, 2003.
Author's Notes: Written for the third challenge here. My prompt was: "Dean spends the day cleaning out a den of ghouls[...]. John spends it drinking [...]. Sam spends it in jail." Thanks for the great prompts and the wonderful fic this community generates. I'm proud to be among all of you fabulous writers! The title is taken from Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth."
Disclaimer: If they were mine, they might spend a little more time together.

Someone lights a cigarette and the flame catches in the murky amber of the dirty shot-glass he’s just refilled with bourbon.

He watches the way the waves of light resonate and roll, a tiny tempest mocking the furious firestorm that breaks across his eyes every time he closes them.

He swallows the fire, feeling it burn its way down his throat, spread across his belly, mellowing the other, more insistent pain.

He cannot resist looking at the ceiling, seeing there not the shadow-shapes of sepia watermarks and a stray Jack of Hearts or Queen of Diamonds but an image in negative of what’s left of his life in the form of Mary’s ghost, forever catching fire.

Part of him wishes she were still up there, just so he could say to her face, “I’m sorry I failed you.”

He tells the bartender to leave the bottle and waits for the jukebox to drown out the shrieking only he can hear.

*****

It’s a nest, and he knows better than to go after it alone, but though he’s never been long on symbolism, there are still days that matter.

Christmas when they were kids.

His brother’s birthday.

What brings him here now, elbow-deep in intestines, is the same thing that always lights him up in early November.

The machete makes a satisfying, wet snick as he hacks through the ghoul’s larynx and watches it choke on a scream, blood spurting out in arcs that slow even as the lights fade in its eyes and it slumps earthward, an apocalypse in slow motion.

Another ghoul moves to take its place, and Dean barely registers its face, fangs gory with black flesh, blood between its teeth, before he’s slicing and dicing, humming “Master of Puppets” under his breath as he goes about his business.

His face is hot and sticky where he’s been caught in blow-back, his hands slick with ichor. He’s stepping in something that squishes audibly, and the stench makes his tongue flutter against the roof of his mouth, makes him have to swallow and breathe shallowly through his nose.

Two more and he’s done, so he slows down, takes his time. The first rushes him, and Dean sees it means to go past him, something he’s not going to have. He brings the machete around in a wide arc, blackened blade dripping, and catches it across its middle, hearing the tearing of flesh under its grunt.

It rounds on him, claws slashing, furious growl distorting its already ugly features, and Dean smiles, says, “What’s the matter, sweetheart?” and moves the blade in a lazy motion that opens the creature from shoulder to hip in a diagonal line of blooming blood and fester.

He laughs a little, until the stink catches him and he has to gag, fighting to stay upright and see through the tears that retching always brings.

The other is on him before he can stand upright again, inhumanly strong arms wrapping around him, crushing his chest and trapping his arms at his sides.

It lifts him off the ground, hugging, just hugging, an awful parody of intimacy that will kill him in minutes if he can’t get free.

Dean tosses his head hard back, driving his crown into the creature’s face again and again, but it only grunts and growls and tightens its grip.

The second, though staggering with blood loss, swipes at him with one clawed hand, and he jerks back reflexively, struggling to take a breath, trying to get out of the compass of its weak swing.

It grazes him, ripping open his shirt and raising a long, thin line of blood down his chest to his navel.

Wild with the need to breathe and afraid now, Dean kicks viciously at the legs of his captor and catches a lucky break, getting it in the knee so that it loses its balance a little, opening enough for Dean to get it once more in the face and break free.

He’s dropped the machete in his efforts to free himself, has only an eight-inch blade he carries for backup, but it does the trick. Dean doesn’t take time to catch his breath, spins in a crouch and comes up underneath the thing, driving the knife into its throat and up, until when it looses its last scream he can see it, silver in the low light of the half-moon, gleaming.

He kicks back, catching the final beast as it tried to come at him from behind, and when he’s freed the blade, he turns to close in on it.

It’s on its back, using its elbows and feet to push itself away, a strange back-stroke. There’s a mewling sound coming from its mouth, and in its eyes Dean sees that it understands what comes next: death, hard and cold and absolute.

He crouches beside it, kneels on its wrist so it can’t take a last shot at him, and smiles as he weaves the knife in a hypnotic figure eight before the creature's frightened eyes.

Then he plunges it through the thing’s throat, pinning it to the ground as it gurgles and gasps through its last few breaths.

Later, adrenaline letdown making his legs shake, he lights up the pile of them in an open grave someone left lying around, stepping back to let the greasy grey smoke billow past him into the sky.

He follows it upward, glances at the stars, tries not to wonder where his brother is right now or consider how his father is probably spending the night. With the November moon making skeletons of the trees, Dean lets the gore seep into his skin and tries not to think of another fire, one far more infernal and permanent than this that keeps him warm.

*****

Sam’s first thought, tequila-tinged and unclear, is that his father is going to kill him.

The wash of liberation that weakens his knees when he realizes a minute later that Dad is never going to know about this makes him sit down hard on the metal bench fastened to the holding cell wall. He jostles the inmate next to him, giggles when he realizes he’s an inmate now, too, and then sobers on considering that he’s going to have to pee in front of all of these people.

Some of whom look like they’re just waiting for the chance to see that part of Sam.

Sam imagines Dean in this situation and tries to channel his brother when a cop comes to lead him to a hard chair by a scarred metal desk to take his statement about the night’s events.

It’s not like he hasn’t been questioned by the police before. There was the chem. lab fire in tenth grade, the after-hours “accident” that was really the result of tossed salt ending up in the wrong beaker. Wasn’t his fault the poltergeist showed up there, of all places.

Then there was the time that he and Dean had rushed Dad to the hospital and taken the car, on their father’s orders, to the nearest all-night car wash to clean the rear upholstery while he was admitted for surgery. Naturally, that had been when the cops pulled in for a coffee break across the street and just had to hassle the kids with the hot car.

Hassle became harassment became—almost—hauling them in when the officers caught sight of the sticky black spatter in the back seat.

Dean had fast-talked his way out of that one, Sam recalls, wondering now about his brother’s ability to make people believe him when all the evidence suggests that he’s lying through his even white teeth.

Sam gets fixated for a minute on an image of Dean laughing, one of those rare occasions on which he and his brother were sharing a joke that Sam was not the butt of, so it takes him a little longer than it should for him to focus on the question the cop is asking him.

Shaking his head—and then regretting it bitterly when the room tilts and reels around him—Sam gives his name, address, occupation—college student—honest with everything, up front, nothing to hide about himself now, except for the knife collection under his bed and the salt lines and runes around the window and door frame of his dorm room, and maybe the way he can explain the laws about gun ownership in thirty-six states without breaking a sweat or missing a beat.

Thankfully, the officer doesn’t seem to care about any of that, just that Sam—stupid Sam—was picked up stumbling back to his room, singing at the top of his lungs at two o’clock in the morning, disturbing the peace with several of his new best buds, the guys he’d met just a couple of months ago at orientation.

And god, really, was it only two months and change?

Staggered by the way time moves, Sam loses the thread of discussion again and has to be directed back to it by the cop, whose patient face, lined and shadowed by years on the job, suggests that Sam is hardly the first—or even the first thousandth—drunken college kid he’s booked for drunk and disorderly.

They’d gone to the beach for a bonfire, Sam explains, and then his mind wanders again as the cop takes down the details, because the Winchesters weren’t the camping sort. Any fire they set wasn’t exactly the kind you’d roast marshmallows over, and s’mores were right out of the question when they were going to smell like burning bones once done.

There wasn’t anything remotely romantic about that kind of graveside fire.

The other kind of fire Sam patently refuses to think about, bringing himself with some effort back to the immediate moment and explaining that he was really, really sorry for being loud.

Yes, they’d had a car.

No, they hadn’t driven back from the beach, not wanting to drive under the influence, officer.

Sam makes his eyes round, lets in the earnestness he used to save for late English papers when he’d been dragged on yet another weekend hunt.

The cop isn’t buying, but Sam feels better for trying some of his own brand of the patent Winchester remedy for getting out of jail free.

Sam sees Tyler and Eddie getting put through the same paces at two other battered desks by two equally bored-looking boys in blue.

Unlike his friends, though, he isn’t biding his time until an influential father or an expensive lawyer shows up and makes this all go away. He’d stood at the pay phone for a solid five minutes, finger hovering over the last digit in Dean’s cell number. Then he’d asked to be taken back to the drunk tank.

Still, in his mind’s eye he sees Dean swagger in, smile on his face, exuding innocence like a subliminal wave that got strangers to trust him with things like information and their daughters. One vision leads to the next, and unbidden, John Winchester appears at the Stanford substation to pick up his youngest. Dad’d walk in with a big kids-these-days smile. He’d spread his hands in the universal gesture for “What are you going to do? They have to make their own mistakes,” and lay on the charm, and Sam would probably get popped with a warning to confine his singing to shower from now on.

The vision of his father dissipates as the cop says, “We’re done here. You’ll be held until your arraignment tomorrow morning. You’ll get a public defender.”

Sam nods, wondering why the cop is bothering to explain this at all.

Then, “You sure there’s not someone you can call, kid? Bail’s not much on a misdemeanor.”

Sam hesitates, thinking of Dean, of Dad, knowing that they’d come if he needed them. Then he remembers why it was that he was drinking so hard, what the bonfire kicked up in him, just where his Dad might be on this night, and what Dean would say if he knew how Sam spent it.

He shakes his head.

It’s time for a new Winchester tradition, he guesses. He’ll go it solo.

“I’m okay,” he says.

And it’s true.

Peace,
SW