Sunlight brought a new day. 

 

Metal clanged as the heat bore into his skin, nestling there and yet not filling him with warmth. Not the way she had. Sweat formed on a furrowed brow, frustration tight and echoing through every muscle that worked beneath the underside of Baby inside a stupid, random storage unit with the door open to allow air in. Although his actions were alike most times when someone in his life died - this time there was a difference.

 

Allie was gone.

 

Bobby was gone.

 

Everyone was gone.

 

The remains left were him and Sam. They weren’t even fucking close to Dick, still seemingly miles away from any sort of a solution. He had tried not to think about it, tried to push on despite the growing pain whenever he talked or ate or fucking breathed. Every simple act felt like a grand gesture of energy and the exhaustion? Just grief. Overwhelming grief.

 

He had plans with her, for her, of her. The first time where being a coward didn’t feel like the best option. Dispose of the Leviathans and Dick, then take a drive to a hill and set a blanket down. Let her watch the sunset and the stars without needing to worry over the next bad guy, hunt, or apocalypse. Let her breathe a real breath and watch her chest give way to a normal moment with a man that fucking loved her. The blonde-haired beauty would never have to worry again because he’d be there, and he’d protect her, and he’d do anything to give her a peaceful life - even if that meant walking away from the family business.

 

There’d been a lot of ideas in his head of what the moment would be like; what he would do but instead of some grand gesture, or maybe a date, he knew her. He knew what she’d like because they’d been connected so long. No matter how much the ribbon frayed it stayed. Now it was severed and the hole inside of him was unfillable. The void from all of his fucking work. Work and death and pushing! Pushing to save people and hunt things and work himself to the bone for someone else left him empty and rageful! No one fucking helped like Allie! No one understood him like her and she died in his arms in the backseat of his fucking car! The car that housed them! That rode with them while they sang shitty karaoke together and flirted and bickered and yelled at each other and gave small glances through the rearview mirror! Every piece of him was connected to her and by her!

 

Frank Devereaux’s words lived inside of him and they were all that he had to abide by but he was so fucking tired. He had to keep pushing for Sam and that meant working on the car like every other time someone vanished.

 

 

Decide to be fine till the end of the week.

Make yourself smile because you're alive and that's your job.

And do it again the next week

Do it right, with a smile,

or don't do it.

 

 

Yeah, that had worked originally. Frank’s words lifted Dean temporarily back into his father’s mindset of ‘do the job.’ regardless of anything else, the job came first. Soldier on the front lines. In fact, smiling through the worst shit on earth actually worked for a few months, and smiling when you don’t mean it… eventually, that smile stays, even though your heart is a rotting corpse.

 

For years he had abated his own need in favour of the job. Sure he had sex, and ate, drank, smoked… He was well-fed and yet entirely unfulfilled. Constantly going through the motion without any real semblance of happiness, of comfort. John had beaten the idea of "Watch out for Sammy. Look out for your little brother, boy!" into him for so long that even as a child, Dean had no sense of prioritizing himself.

 

In fact, the one time that he had, John practically hit him senseless. He’d left Sam alone for just a few minutes, only to find Sam gone when he returned. Well, it appeared that John had belted him so hard that evening that all semblance of self-care left his tiny, minor body. From then on all that mattered was Sam, or anyone else close to him that needed to be protected, Allie included.

 

Now Frank’s words felt like a mockery. He wouldn’t even try to smile. Not for a damn, wasted second. For once he’d fuckin’ mourn. He’d mourn for so long and so deep that the inner parts of him would crack until nothing was left. Just a husk of a man who once knew what it was like to laugh with someone and feel that they enjoyed hearing him do it, so much so that they’d continue on until he couldn’t breathe anymore until he was hunched over with his hands on his knees and nearly having an asthma attack from pure joy. Pure joy, and it was lost.

 

Calloused hands ripped pieces of bent metal from Baby. The most recent hunt had left her bottom fucked, not that he could drive her much anymore anyway, lest he be found by Dick Roman. Still. He needed something to do to keep him halfway sane so he snuck off and went on a little form of stress relief , unbeknownst to Sam. That had turned out like shit. At least he had something to keep his hands busy, not that it helped any with his heart.

 

Burying her had been a lesson in resentment. Yes, resentment. Dean resented Allie for saving him, for performing her usual self-sacrifice. Hadn’t she learned the first fucking time? Idiotic woman just throwing her life away as if it meant nothing as if they didn’t need her around just to wake up in the morning and get out of bed. He knew that reality well enough from his time in Lisa’s arms. How cold to be surrounded by someone, and yet not held. Allie was always the ‘right person, wrong time’. That was what he consistently told himself. Wrong time. Soon, but not yet. ‘Still things to do’, ‘we have a job’, ‘the family business’, ‘I can’t lose her’. The greatest hits of an overplayed record that spun endlessly across their time together.

A hunter's funeral held no merit for Alice. No, he'd keep her under the ground until the day that some sort of magic spell rose her from the dead. He'd come back from unfortunate circumstances so much that it had to be possible. Even if the reality was against her wishes. They burned Bobby and found out that he had stuck around, maybe keeping her six feet under just outside of Sioux Falls would enable another coming, another reality, another love. God! Fuck! Nothing worked out right. The longer he thought about it, the worse it was. His younger self had taken her for granted. His idiocracy had lost her. Just minutes before her death he cursed her out and lectured her internally for leaving his side. How stupid, how fucking recklessly hopeless could one man be? His one job in life and Dean fucked it up more times than he could count on both hands. He'd lost everyone at least once. The casualties were climbing and no one else could speak to them but him. Jo, Ellen, Bobby, Allie... They were the harshest but not even close to the grand total, just the permanent losses.

 

So, he tore the metal from Baby's underside until his hands began to bleed. The metal scraped into his palms and forearms but truly Dean felt nothing. Physical pain held no true meaning. It faded beneath everything else, all the crap that swirled below the surface of his exterior.

 

The sudden sound of a squeak had his ears perked, his face contorting into that of confusion. The noise was quiet, barely audible but he swore...

 

The elder Winchester made another move, careful to keep the action equal to his last. There it was again! That small, slight sound of something... unintended. No part of a vehicle made such a manufactured noise, and so, Dean stuck his slightly gored hand up into the sheared hollow of Baby's remains. He could feel the thin carpeting of her floor, just a tiny patch. That was definitely the worst part of her damage. The space resided right underneath the driver's seat, perfectly hidden unless sitting at just the right placement...

Something rolled around over the material as Dean's probing continued. Finally, he grew frustrated with attempting to find the source and rolled out from under the Impala before taking a long, excessive drink of his beer, wrapping a clean rag around his bloodied hand, and thrusting open the back door to take a better look. He sank down to his knees, flashlight held between his lips in an effort to free his hands while forest eyes focused intently to find the intrusive object under the seat.

Yellow plastic gleamed below the object came with another squeak and Dean's eyes widened at the sight of it in his hand.

The duck wore a leather jacket and aviators. Tattoos were drawn across its plastic body, his tattoos. A cigarette hung limply out of the fucking duck's beak and for a moment Dean just stared at the small plastic piece of past love until his jaw tightened, lip twitching at the sight of such an old memory.

Before the Leviathans, Before the apocalypse, before Lisa and Ben...

Sure things had gone wrong back then but they still had semblances of friendship and normalcy. He remembered the moment well, so well that her face swept through the back of his eyelids and Dean had to clench his hand against the leather of the back bench seat to stabilize himself.

 

 

"I'm not getting rid of it. His name is Duckie Dean. Get used to it."

" I'm gonna bring him everywhere."

 

 

It seemed she had made good on that promise. For years the damn thing had been riding with them and they didn't even know it. At the time he'd been so... disgusted by the tiny imitation of him. Yet now, looking at it, his lips trembled. A calloused thumb ran over the smooth yellow of the toy's wing. The tattoos looked perfect, just like the real thing. The time his girl must have spent on them just to make sure they were accurate...

His hand squeezed the arcade win until it let out a long groan in his hand, pressing into the cut on his palm until the cloth around it became tainted with his blood. Alls. Her voice was in his head like a siren song, calling out to him in his weakest moment as tears began to fall down his cheeks and onto his neck, dripping to the carpeting in his beautiful car. She'd once sat there. She laid there. She slept there. When Sam was around, the backseat was Allie's. It was her room on cold nights and her solace on long trips. Her library, her concert, her fucking stand-up routine when she was feeling particularly energetic. Every part of him was from the woman that he loved and now he couldn't get away from the sound of her, the love of her and what she provided for him that he took for granted for years.

 

So much so that when they buried her, he signed her makeshift cross with A.W, Alice Winchester. The name he would have offered, had he ever been given the chance. Yet God had cut him down once again. God had made Dean into Joseph, or perhaps any of the other righteous men, only to cut him down in every way possible.

 

The memories could only serve temporarily and they certainly didn't aid in the way his face changed to a melancholy grimace while he crouched in his car and cried over the woman he loved, the woman he so desperately cared for and no longer had around to help him stay above water. Allie. Fuck. Nothing on earth could ever hurt so fucking much as the idea of never witnessing her face in his rearview mirror again, her open flirting at diners that they frequented together, her warm body beside his on nights when he felt empty. He was empty. All that he fucking was, was empty! No matter how much shit he shoved into himself.

 

It was over for him. That much was for sure. So much so that if Sam wasn't around, Dean would take a shotgun and put it in his mouth. Let his 'purpose' spew across that storage unit and lay it in crimson. Grief compounded with his rat-on-a-wheel lifestyle could only go on for so long. Sam needed him, though. And the least he could do was put Dick on the pavement over the loss of his family. Every Leviathan on earth be damned, Dean was going to paint the town red, no, black, with his rage and mourning.