Chapter Text
Dean huffs and jumps up from the couch, unable to watch Charlie and Gilda mooning at each other for another second. “Guys, I’m gonna go home.”
“Hey, no, stay…” Charlie pleads, grabbing his hand and pulling him back. “We’ll behave, I promise.”
“It’s not that. I’ve got to be up early to clean. Sam is coming into town tomorrow and I don’t want to listen to him bitching about the place.”
It’s not exactly a lie. It’s kinder than the truth.
During the drive home, his hands shift between white-knuckling and smoothing over Baby's wheel in apology. He’s not angry, he’s just…jaded, his baby brother’s voice supplies in his head. And, yeah, Dean might have to agree. But he’ll never give Sammy the satisfaction.
It’s not that he’s not happy for Charlie. He’s happy for both of them, even if he does think this whole soulmates thing is just a romanticized version of mind control. The rational part of his brain rejects the idea that he belongs to one person and when he finds them it will be like magic, that everything will just fall into place.
Okay, maybe it’s not that rational considering he has seen it happen more times than he would care to admit. Still, as an EMT, he’s also seen it go wrong in the worst ways, ending his shift covered in blood and piss and shit when soulmates go sideways. Who wouldn’t be jaded after seeing the things that people who are supposed to be made for each other can do to each other when they see no other way out?
One call he has never been able to get out of his mind floats up to the surface.
A young woman with a gun in her hand which hung limply at her side, stumbling out onto the lawn on shaking legs, blonde hair spattered with brain matter and skull fragments, her clothes soaked in her soulmate’s blood from where she held him in her arms. When they asked her why, all she would say over and over is that he never shut up. Every time she tried to leave, all he had to do was say something. Anything. And she would stay.
So she waited until he was sleeping and crept up beside him and pulled the trigger.
With his Winchester luck, Dean’s soulmate would be some psychotic bastard. He prays he’ll never meet them.
Despite setting two alarms, Dean still wakes up late and, after the quickest shower of his life, ends up rushing around in the hour he has left until Sam arrives. He throws too many clothes in the washer and has to return later to rebalance the damn thing when it starts trying to run away in the middle of the spin cycle. In the kitchen, he manages to get every last dish and utensil stuffed into the dishwasher. He’s just running the swiffer over the floor when he hears Sam knock.
He takes one last look around. The place is far from spotless, but at least it’s clean enough that he’s not going to spend the morning listening to his brother bitching about it. Just as the knocking intensifies, he opens the door with a grin at Sam’s irritation. “Faster and harder is only something I respond to in bed, little brother.”
“Gross, Dean.”
“Come here,” Dean says, pulling Sam inside and wrapping his arms around him.
Sam kicks his foot out behind him, pushing the door closed, one long arm draped around Dean’s back. “I missed you.”
“Well, maybe you should come see me more often.”
“It’s not like you couldn’t come see me…”
“Sammy,” Dean groans, not really wanting to get into the same old discussion yet again, “I just don’t have the time. You know that. My job-”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Jess at her parents’ place?”
Sam glances at him warily and nods.
The son of a bitch met his soulmate in his freshman year of college because of course he did. It happened right in the middle of a lecture on the first day of class because of course it did. The professor called on Jess and when he first heard her voice, Sam knew. The hopeless romantic even had the courtesy to write her a letter and give her the option to meet him later. No expectations. She was hooked before she ever even heard his voice.
“Come on, Sam. You know I love Jess.”
“I do, I just know how you feel about soulmates.”
“Can we just have one visit where we don’t talk about it? Please…” Dean says, practically begging, as he takes Sam’s bag and leads him to the spare bedroom.
“Yeah. Sure.”
It’s not like it’s a big secret. His friends know how he feels, they simply seem unable to sympathize. Especially the ones who have found their soulmate. They’re total goners. Dean has found it’s easier to simply say nothing rather than face the united front they make in defense of the bane of his existence. Secretly, he thinks that if any of them had ever had to clean some poor soulmate’s bodily fluids-and not the fun kind-out of their hair and skin they might understand just a little.
“We’re going out to the Roadhouse tonight to meet up with Charlie and Gilda.”
“Man, I miss Charlie,” Sam says, taking his bag at the door and tossing it on the bed. “What’s Gilda like?”
“She’s…perfect for Charlie.”
“Damn, Dean, admitting that had to hurt…”
“Shut your cakehole.”
Dean parks Baby out on the edge of the parking lot not caring about the walk. That will be future Dean’s problem.
Sam climbs out and scoffs at him, gesturing at the mostly empty lot. “Really, Dean?”
Ignoring him, he pockets his keys and starts walking, concluding that Sam is a whiny bitch. It’s not really that far. Not when you’re sober anyway. He pulls the door open and the sound of someone singing karaoke badly pours out of the building, assaulting their ears. When they step inside and close the door, he sees that it’s Gilda at the mic. He feels terrible for a moment until he sees Charlie standing right in front of the stage dancing and reveling in her soulmate’s voice.
Dean spots their usual corner booth, empty. Cracked shells crunch under his boots, releasing the scent of stale peanuts as he crosses the room and slips into one of the vinyl seats, letting Samsquatch sit on the outside. By the time Gilda’s song ends and Charlie sees them, they already have a pitcher in the middle of the table surrounded by frosted mugs and a shot lined up for each of them.
“Sammy!” Charlie calls out, running across the room and throwing herself in his arms. “OMG you haven’t met Gilda!”
Inevitably, the conversation immediately turns to soulmates and they’re sharing the stories of how they met the one, which means that Dean gets to hear both stories all over again.
Just his luck.
Charlie and Gilda had met while LARPing at some medieval renaissance type thing that sounds like it might actually be fun, but Dean will never admit it. To his limited understanding, Charlie was playing the queen of her kingdom and Gilda, in what they have come to learn is her way, had chosen to go against the norm and play a fairy, unaligned with any of the kingdoms. Without any protection, she was captured by a rival and when Charlie heard about it, she came to free her. Of course, one word from her mouth and Gilda knew. And then Charlie knew. They moved in together right away and have been living blissfully and driving Dean insane ever since.
He knows they’re happy and in love. Sam too. But he also knows most soulmates, even the ones who go on to destroy each other, start out just like this. They tell everyone around them the first thing their soulmate said, sharing the story of how they met. But somewhere along the way, for those unlucky few, it breaks and it’s never quite the same even if they manage not to maim or murder each other.
Dean has seen it time and time again.
“Earth to Dean?” Sam says, jabbing his elbow into his ribs.
“Fuck, Sammy! What was that for?”
“You weren’t even listening.”
“I don’t think a cracked rib is an appropriate penalty,” he says, rubbing his side. “Besides, I’ve heard all this already.”
“Would it kill you to hear it again?”
“When you’ve seen what I’ve seen…”
“Here we go again…”
“No. You know what? I’m done trying to explain.” Dean pushes Sam out of the booth and stumbles out behind him. “I’m going home.”
“Dean…”
“Alone.” he says, slapping money down on the table for a cab.
He tells Jo to put their drinks on his tab as he walks out.
By the time he walks through his front door, his phone is lighting up with messages from Charlie and Sam. Out of courtesy, he messages back that he’s home, switching his phone to silent as he falls into his bed still dressed except for his boots.
Some time later he wakes to the sound of Sam loosing a rare string of curses as he trips over one or both boots while shuffling down the hall, followed by the soft rapping of his knuckles against the door. Dean ignores him and falls back into sleep.
A lot of people in his line of work have nightmares about the job, the people they fail to save. The people they never have a chance to save. Dean is no exception, and he wakes again, this time in a sweat, his heart thundering in his chest. Before he glances at his phone, the faint light already filling in the shadows in his room tells him there’s no point in trying to go back to sleep.
He drags himself out of bed, showers, and starts cooking breakfast as an apology for last night.
With the scent of bacon already filling the house, he reaches to grab the eggs out of the fridge, his hand freezing and unfurling a sheet of paper clipped to the door with a magnet. He glances down to Charlie’s chaotic handwriting scrawled across the bottom of the page.
Dean, I found this site and at first I thought
it might only make things worse, but after
tonight I’m thinking that it might help. At
least I hope so.
Love you.
He reads over the words on the page, realizing that it’s some kind of anti-soulmates thing. Dean has heard of these groups before but they’re often no less zealous than the pro-soulmates groups, just the opposite side of the same deranged coin. For a moment, he considers trashing the thing but leaves it and goes back to his cooking.
“Dean?” Sam calls out from the hallway before he steps through the kitchen door.
Without turning, Dean says, “Sorry about last night, Sammy. It’s been a tough week, but I shouldn’t take it out on you.”
“I get it. You’ve heard about how Jess and I met, what? A dozen times? And I’m sure you’ve heard about Charlie and Gilda just as many. And not having met your…”
“I’m going to stop you right there,” Dean says, cutting Sam off before he lets his anger derail his attempt to apologize. “I have heard all the ‘you’ll change your mind when it happens to you’ bullshit. I mean, yeah, you’re probably right. The point is, I don’t want to fight about it anymore.”
“Okay.”
Over a calm and peaceful breakfast, Dean texts Charlie with a heartfelt apology and a promise to make an attempt at being more tolerant in the future. It’s the best he can offer, and she seems eager to accept it.
After cleaning up the kitchen, he and Sam spend the rest of the morning catching up on their lives, not that Dean has much to report. At least not that Sam wants to hear about. Neither his personal nor professional lives are up for discussion. Sam never wants to hear about his sexual exploits and Dean refuses to talk about the things he sees on the job.
Save it for his therapist…
By afternoon, they decide to scrap their plans to go out that night and end up ordering pizza and lounging on the couch in t-shirts and sweats, taking turns picking what to watch just like they used to do when they were kids and Dean had become both mother and father to Sam.
After literally backing into each other in a diner parking lot, John Winchester and Mary Campbell hated each other at first sight. Jumping out of their cars to survey the damage, they both broke into the shortest-lived yelling match in history. And that was it for them. It was Dean’s favorite bedtime story until a tragic house fire took his mother and destroyed his father, leaving Dean to take care of his baby brother.
He did the best he could when their father was too drunk to take care of them. When they were older and John spent most of his time passed out in the gutter somewhere neglecting his children in favor of drinking away his own pain, Dean raised Sam, dropping out of school and working his ass off to make sure he had everything he needed.
And it had paid off.
Sam worked just as hard and earned himself a scholarship to Stanford. Dean never said as much, but he was damn proud of his baby brother and all the sacrifices were worth it, but he never should have been forced to make them.
So, yeah, even if he would do it all over again, Dean is jaded…