cained | 👻🎈🤡🥧

( there are certain chapters of dean's life that he's never properly put to rest, left buried for years, always on the verge of having them come back to haunt him. (others will haunt him until the day he dies; torturing souls in hell isn't something you just get over, though it's certainly gotten easier to compartmentalize as the years have passed.) he's made more mistakes than he can count, has mountains full of regrets, carries all that baggage with him every day. so it seems inevitable that the ghosts of his past will one day need salt and burning like everything else — and when it comes to his past relationships, well. he's burned those bridges, but never the memories. he's never let himself forget, or forgive, because it serves as a reminder that he isn't built for being a couple. he scarcely ever thinks he deserves happiness at all, in whatever form it might take.

that, and healthy communication has never been one of dean's strong suits, so to find himself having a conversation about his exes with bev is ... new. it's not like talking with sam, who knows him better than he knows himself, but dean has to admit she's just as good at calling him out on his bullshit. she can tell almost as well as his brother when he's holding something back, when something's bothering him — when there's something he doesn't want to talk about without a little gentle nudging. because, sometimes, he needs to talk about things, but he's always been too proud to have those conversations. with sam, they usually turn into arguments, dean always playing the big brother card and sam inevitably relenting until they blow up at each other. (admittedly, they've gotten better at talking to each other, being more honest, but there's still a decade or so of baggage they've never even touched because neither of them wants to dig up old trauma if they can avoid it.)

but bev hasn't been there for most of his life, is coming into it at a relatively good time. she's an outsider, so of course he feels like he owes her at least a little bit of context. he can be mad at sam all he likes for opening this particular can of worms, but, in a way, it's a little like ripping off a bandaid. he was gonna have to air this out eventually — he's heard the horror stories of bev's marriage; she deserves to hear about the only other serious relationship he's ever had in his life, deserves to know why this, them, might not work. why it's gonna be hard work if they really want to try. but he thinks he might be willing to if, after everything, she's still all in.

they're sharing drinks in one of the library's nooks late one evening, sam having retired to his own room for the night. he's not even sure how they got to this particular subject — how three words (who was she?) have unearthed the bones of something he buried a long time ago — just that there's no real backing out of it now. he considers saying none of your business, but it doesn't quite feel right. he respects her enough to tell her the truth. )

Lisa. ( he hasn't said her name since he threatened to break sam's nose if he ever mentioned her or ben again. hasn't said it since the last time he last saw her, lying in that hospital bed, ben scared and confused at her side. he remembers asking cas for a favor, how much it ate him up inside to know he had to let her go, and that was the only way to do it. he had to keep her safe, and that meant cutting himself out of her life entirely. out of her memory. i'm dean. i'm the guy who hit you. sometimes he wonders if their life did get back to normal after that. sometimes he wonders how they're doing. but he can't afford to let himself dwell too long on it, or go chasing after what could have been. ) Her name was Lisa. We were together for about a year. It wasn't ... a good time for me.

( he takes a sip of whiskey. he hasn't even told mary most of this story. even as he tells it, he's staring mostly at the whiskey in his glass, and there's a vulnerability to his voice that might come as a surprise. )

Sam was in Hell, trapped with Michael and Lucifer. Every night I'd have nightmares, wake up screaming, must've drank myself half to death a dozen times at the beginning, but she stuck with me through all of it and I did my best to keep her safe. Her and her boy, Ben. ( something nostalgic, melancholy, settles into the curve of his mouth. ) I loved that kid. Taught him everything I could. Got a job working construction, tried to — be normal. For a while, it was like living a Dolly Parton song. I found some kinda balance. I might've even been happy for a stretch. ( he huffs dryly. ) As happy as a guy can get when he knows his brother's being tortured in the Pit the whole time. ( he takes a breath, exhales slowly. ) But I made a promise to Sam I'd quit the life, that I'd get out if I could. That whole year I kept that promise and it was almost good. The thing is, the life never really lets you quit for long. Eventually, it caught up to us.

( he finally glances over to bev, trying to gauge her reaction. there's clearly more to the story by the way he looks at her, eyes heavy with sorrow, but he's leaving it up to her if she wants to hear the rest. winchesters don't get happy endings. )

[ They'd met a little over a year ago, almost exactly to the week (and some change). It's surreal to look back and barely recognise the life she'd been trapped in, then; to look back at the woman she thought she was (or rather the woman she'd had to become to survive). It's even more surreal to look back on the long stretch of years between her stints in Derry and find they've gone hazy in hindsight, like she's watching a film, someone with her face going through motions she can feel like a phantom limb. Still a part of her, but not like it used to be. To reconcile the two halves of who you are — before and after something you can never walk back from — takes time. They both know that. And it's not always straightforward, either.

Even now, sitting here with Dean almost in a mirror to their first conversation in her oppressive townhouse, it had felt like a strange sense of deja vu. (She's getting used to that, being blindsided by memories and feeling them slot into place.) But now, unlike then, when Dean looks at her, she doesn't look away. When their hands brush, she laces her fingers with his instead of jerking back. Yeah, it's funny how much can change in a year. What more ten or twenty-seven? But you don't just forget what came before. Each touch comes imbued with an older memory — Dean knows that about her, always careful not to startle or push. And Beverly knows that that care must come from somewhere, because what is that particular brand of attention but a kind of devotion? It's not new to him, she can feel that from how he is with her; just rusty, maybe.

So it doesn't take much for her to notice and wonder. Of course. Who was she? It's not meant to be prying. They've learnt, over the months, to meet in the middle, talk, especially when that's all they have when so much of their time is spent apart. And for two people wary of opening up for dozens of completely fucking understandable reasons, they're easing into being surprisingly good at it. Then again, when shapeshifters and alien killer clowns are the ice breakers, are mundane truths really so scary?

Yes. Hell yes.

But she asks, soft as can be, and Dean — answers. She doesn't interrupt, even when he drops his gaze from her; just listens, her own whiskey glass balanced on her knee and eyes steady on his profile, the wistful cadence of his voice, the twist of something bittersweet. And bit by bit, she understands why: A year, half of it spent mourning his brother (which, holy shit, that's another story altogether), somehow doing the impossible by living a life never guaranteed for people like him — and one taken for granted by others. Something quiet. Routine. Normal. (The kind she ran away from.) She almost can't imagine it and neither, it seems, can he; that's part of the tragedy, too.

She knew they might brush up against something like this someday — not sensitive, maybe, but scarred over. Dean's endured a lot of shit. She knows that, too. His experiences are likely what made him so patient, supportive, in the months they reconnected while she was struggling. She's a lot steadier these days, the biggest weights lifted with killing It and breaking free of her ex-husband's iron grip, but the immediate aftermath was... messy. Ugly. She was somehow the most liberated she'd ever been and still felt like she was trying to swim out of the deepest trenches of the ocean. Having someone stick it out with you, like she had with he Losers and Dean — she worked hard to breach the surface, but she knows she couldn't have done it alone either.

Even just hearing the start of this story, she's glad he wasn't, either.

Beverly smiles when he looks at her, meeting the weight of his gaze with a gentle upturn at the corners of her mouth; encouraging more than anything else. She thinks about making a quip to put him at ease (now I'm catching up, too) but she knows it's the wrong time and place. Instead, she shifts to face him better, knees almost brushing in the narrow gap between their chairs. ]

I get that, [ she says softly, with an almost wry kind of sympathy. ] I got twenty-seven years before my past came to bite me in the ass. [ It was also the kick in the ass she needed to turn things around. But that's neither here nor there. Bev shakes her head a little, dismissing that train of thought for them both: This isn't about her. ] You don't have to tell me, you know. If you wanna keep this just for you, it's okay. It just...

[ She tips her head a little, catching his eye, holding steady without pushing. ]

It feels like you haven't really talked about them before. Lisa and Ben. [ She doesn't ask why. She can guess. ] If you feel up to it, I'm all ears.

( the corner of his mouth twitches upward briefly; he appreciates the out she gives him, but for once he doesn't feel like he needs to take it. there's a reason they work, why he and lisa hadn't. why they couldn't, all things considered. if he'd come back into her life now would things have been different? probably. looking back on it all, trying to make a relationship work in the wake of the literal apocalypse ... it was doomed to fail, no matter how hard they tried. the stakes were still too high. which isn't to say there aren't stakes now, or that things haven't gone horribly wrong, shaken their faith in this whole thing — but crowley isn't the threat he used to be, there's no angel war, no bloodthirsty leviathan, no tablets or demonic marks to worry about. lucifer is dealt with, even if they wound up at a government blacksite for two months for their trouble. it's strange to think that, at least as far as winchester-level bad is concerned, things have been relatively good recently. it's given dean a chance with bev so rare he'd be an idiot to look the gift horse the mouth, despite every fiber of his being trying to tell him there must be a catch to all of this.

he thought the same about lisa once. too good to be true. (what woman in her right mind would put up with his deeply depressed, alcoholic ass and still call it the best year of her life?) too good to keep. (i can't. ask for something. i know what i want. but i can't have it — not how you live.) turns out he was right about one of those things.

he takes a slow sip from his glass, savoring the burn on the way down. )

We tried to make it work after Sam came back. I mean, it's not exactly like he dragged me back into the life kicking and screaming, but I had my reservations at first. I didn't want to lose them just like that, you know? Dad was always drilling into us "hunting is life, you can't have connections" — I thought if I ditched the domesticity, I'd have to ditch them too. ( he shakes he head with a short huff tinged with something almost like amusement. ) You know what she told me? To cut the shit, basically. That if there was some rule saying it had to be either/or, we should break it. To come when I could, as long as it was in one piece. ( and isn't that what he an bev are doing? breaking that rule. not playing by some rule of either/or. only this time maybe it's actually working. he throws back the rest of his glass, pours another. ) It almost worked. Hell, if things hadn't been so fucked up, maybe it would have. But Sam didn't have a soul, Crowley had my grandfather by the short and curlies, Cas was in league with Crowley trying to get the upperhand on Raphael in some angelic pissfight. So Lisa and Ben ...

( he inhales, tries to decide how detailed this next part should be. it's hard to explain everything that lead up to lisa and ben getting taken; worse to think about the lengths he'd gone to get them back, to get them out of that abandoned warehouse crowley had them in. carrying lisa bleeding out in his arms, shouting at ben to point and shoot, hating how much he sounded like his dad, hating himself for ever dragging them into his life. he's still not sure he's ever forgiven himself for everything that happened, even if they don't remember a damn thing. )

Well, let's just say they got caught in the crossfire in a bad way. Crowley wasn't so nice back then, though I'd still hesitate to call him nice now. ( a demon is a demon, but at least crowley has some shred of humanity in him from that botched final trial. and, well, this is the hardest part, isn't it? the reason he hasn't spoken of either of them in six years. another sip of whiskey, to steel himself. ) He had one of his cronies posses Lisa. It got ugly during the exorcism. She almost didn't make it. If Cas hadn't healed her ... But that's not the only thing he did. ( he stares into his glass, remembers the look on lisa's face when she woke up with no memory of who he was, why he was standing in the doorway, remembers how his heart broke having to walk away from them for good. his throat tightens; he drags his bottom lip between his teeth in an attempt to hold back the emotion threatening to break his voice. ) They think I'm the guy who hit them. Car accident. It was the only way to make sure they'd be safe.

[ In so many ways, the life Dean's talking about sounds like a different time; and in just as many, nothing about it has really changed. She doesn't know who he was then and even when he fills in the blanks of a story that never seems to slow down, she doesn't think she'll ever really know who he used to be — all she knows is the man sitting in front of her now, the one who's survived every worst thing the world's thrown at him and still managed to find moments of something good. (Even if it couldn't last.) She hates to know it, hates to hear it, the way he felt like compromise wasn't an option. But that's what being young was like, wasn't it? Black and white. Either/or. Raise the stakes with the apocalypse and you've got an impossible decision to make. She can't possibly understand it all, but she can listen and try.

Lisa telling him to cut the shit makes her smile. Beverly's under no illusions of what this road could hold for her and Dean, and she's sure Lisa felt the same too and thought it was worth it, anyway — just like Bev does. She likes the sound of her, appreciates the grit it took to hold on. Like recognises like. So when Dean relays the obstacles and the cost, of course she feels that pang of sympathy; and then a distant horror on the heels of it when he says she was possessed by a demon and almost lost her life in the process. It's one thing to have to choose between two lives and another to have one ripped away from you, to force the choice in the worst way possible — and maybe there's a warning here, maybe it should scare her (and maybe it does, just a little, because she's human and she's faced pure evil once before). But mostly, she feels heartache. ]

Jesus, Dean. [ Her voice is soft, hushed. He'd loved Lisa, that much is clear. Beverly doesn't think she's ever known a romantic love like that, but what she feels for the Losers is close; she knows how gutting it is when you can't keep the people you love safe. You'd do anything to do it.

But she's not sure she knows exactly what he's implying here. They think I'm the guy who hit them. She feels like she's missing a piece and isn't sure if this old wound's too raw for her to ask for it. But it could be cathartic, too. Her brows knit and she ventures gently, ] What was the only way? What did Cas do?

[ What did you ask him to do? Whatever it was, it's clearly something that pains him to this day. ]

( he can't look at her and say it. he doesn't want to have to say it at all, but — he thinks maybe it'll be easier to finally let this go if he does. to face what he did, because it was the only option he had at the time. better for all of them. he swallows hard, desperately trying to hold back the tears threatening to spill over. how many times had he cried in middle of the night, lisa holding him like he wasn't some horribly broken, mangled thing? bev's never seen him this close to the edge; it scares him, almost, to be this vulnerable, but how many times has he listened to her on the other end of the line late at night after a particularly horrible dream? they've always been there for each other. now is no different. he only wishes he had the courage to reach over and take her hand. instead, he grips his glass tighter, his jaw setting. )

He made them forget. ( not just the demons. not just the past year. ) He made them forget everything. The demons, our year together, me showing up out of the blue on Ben's birthday, the day we met. Everything. If they even knew me, they'd never stop being in danger.

( his brow tenses; a single wet streaks runs hot down his cheek and he sniffs, dragging a hand over his face in an attempt to regain some composure. but his voice is still thick, rough with years of guilt and grief. he should have done more to protect them. or maybe he never should have kept his promise to sam, never should have shown up on their doorstep with the weight of his immeasurable loss and all the rest of his fucking baggage. but he did keep that promise; he got out, and for what? to find some shred of love in a pile of misery and despair only to have to lose that too.

he's silent for a long moment, like he's still contemplating what to say. but there isn't much left. just: ) I did what I had to do. Better to leave them as a stranger than have them hate me.

( he remembers the look in ben's eyes before cas wiped everything away, the disgust and the betrayal, the things he never had to say: how could you do this to us? this is all your fault, dean. ben had trusted him and dean had nearly gotten them killed. there's no reason they should have had to live with that, so dean took it from them, has carried the burden of everything they had and everything he ruined ever since.

i'm glad your life can get back to normal now. he hopes, somewhere, they're happy without him. )

𝙱𝙴𝚅𝙴𝚁𝙻𝚈 𝙼𝙰𝚁𝚂𝙷

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( •̀ .̫ •́ )✧

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