britomart_is | Fic: Dictionary for a Dead Language; Prologue

Master Post
Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Epilogue

Prologue.

Excerpted from "Monster: Sam Winchester, the Man and the Myth " by R.T. Lopez, New Cleveland Press, 2021.

Sam Winchester said yes. For all the mystery surrounding the circumstances of Lucifer's final incarnation, that plain fact remains indisputable: Sam Winchester said yes.

Patty Nash, a former Miss Teen Nebraska with gently curling hair and copious, clumped mascara, shakes her head vehemently at his name. "Nuh-uh. No way. Not the guy I knew." She pauses, catching her lower lip between her teeth, eyes unfocused as she revisits a time and place long past. "You know, when I met him I think I knew which end of a gun the scary boom noise came out of, and that was about it." She laughs, displaying the sickly-pink wad of gum bitten down between her back teeth. "The others weren't much better off." Beneath Nash's fingertips on her kitchen table rests a messily handwritten list of her former compatriots. "There were a lot of us then. And we just flocked to him when he turned up. Not like all new sheriff in town. No fuss, no swagger, just, you know, taking the first night watch, correcting your stance when you were firing, just a careful little nudge to get you standing right." She laughs again, rosiness blooming over her high cheekbones. "I might've had a little crush. Just a little."

Nash, now 40, is the only surviving member of a group of civilians-turned-vigilantes who learned to defend their small corner of the world under the tutelage of a capable, intensely private man who called himself Sam. Just Sam. Nash can account for three months of Sam's activities during the pre-Detroit era, and insists that at that time he showed no hint of the darkness that would guide his future actions. She doesn't deny that Winchester was ultimately responsible for the death of millions. "He saved my life. He wasn't—you know, you could tell that everything wasn't all right with him, I kind of figured he might be in trouble with the law. But he saved all our asses a hundred times over, so you don't ask too many questions." Earnest and intent, Nash leans forward over the chipped surface of her formica kitchen table, and the strength of her conviction makes this hard-bitten washed-up beauty queen suddenly, heart-stoppingly beautiful. "He was good."

Ephraim Hale, 62, sits with a loaded shotgun in his lap for the duration of the interview. He drums the fingers of his one remaining hand against the arm of his chair as he speaks. "We knew what the sumbitch done, knew it were his fault Lucifer was walkin' around topside." Hale's encounter with Sam Winchester took place in Missouri some five months after Winchester parted company with Nash's band of civilians, and this meeting was not only intentional, but carefully orchestrated. "Six of us went in there, and I want you to understand we'd all lost somebody. All wanted to get our turn in. It weren't what you'd call clean. Now, time we were done—" Hale stops. "Some of the fellas were taking souvenirs. You get me? What was left where Winchester used to be standing, that weren't nearly—anyway, you get the idea, goddamnit."

Hale clears his throat. His fingers clench on the arm of the chair, and it becomes evident that their constant motion is to hide the shaking of his hand. Hale lost a lot of things in Missouri: his arm, his friends, and his nerve. "Now, uh." He stops, coughs repeatedly to clear his throat. "Well, reckon you know what happened after that." He pauses again. "He came in. Not ashamed to say I pissed myself, any man would." Pause. "Well. You know what happened." The drumming of Hale's fingers quickens. "Five good men splashed all over the walls, Winchester sitting up and coughing up blood, and I'm standing there with my boots full of piss and no idea why my arm's tingling so damn bad."

Hale laughs, then, in a way that would make a reasonable man nervous for his safety. "You know, there were a lot of dead hunters back then. And we all thought, well, they fucked it up. They failed, Winchester killed them before they could kill him." Hale's grin looks like it could crack teeth. "I'm thinkin' now they did kill him, maybe all of them did, every time. And He just kept on bringing him back."

Looking down, perhaps at the ever-present shotgun, perhaps at some vision of the past, Hale's voice grows uncharacteristically quiet. "Kid didn't fight us, not really. I almost think—" A pause again. "He almost seemed glad to see us, even with our guns up in his face." Hale's fingers flex and clench. "Don't think he'd seen a human face in a good long time. Except the Croats."

As Hale continues, still far-off in memory, a dark patch spreads on the front of his pants. The stench of urine floods the room. He doesn't seem to notice. "I'll never forget, long as I live. I was standing there not sure if I was alive or dead, and this kid I just—this kid whose brains were on my boots weren't five minutes earlier—he spits out blood and he looks around at these men who killed him, who've got their guts strewn all over the damn place, and then he looks up at me and he says, 'I'm sorry.'" Hale's shaking hand curls around the stock of his shotgun, and it's clear that this is a man who couldn't fire a gun anymore if his life depended on it. "Think he meant it, too."

James Lee is a slight, handsome 19 year-old who often speaks with his head bowed, as if to duck beneath the radar of the controversy that's followed him for half his life. A wry smile twists his face as he says, "I know nobody believes me. I don't really care. I'm going to keep telling the truth anyway and it doesn't matter if not a single person ever believes me." Lee's words tumble out in a pressured torrent. He stirs the foam on his cappuccino in endless circles.

If Lee's story is true, and not the fanciful invention of a traumatized child, then he is the last human ever to see Sam Winchester alive. The skeptics have good reason to doubt: when the alleged encounter took place, Lee was only ten years old, orphaned and wandering alone in the desolate industrial landscape outside Detroit. "It was all about being hungry at that point," he says. "That and trying to hide. That's how I survived at all, I was quiet and I hid." He sips his coffee delicately, with the air of someone who's spent his formative years constantly under attack either physical or rhetorical. "I think maybe it was the same for him. He was so thin, you know? And he looked tired. He was a hell of a lot bigger target than me and—well, you've heard the stories, too. People after him. The—" Lee pauses, as if pronouncing an obscenity, "—hunters." He sips his drink, then sets it down abruptly, blurting out, "I meant to go south, you know, so it'd be warm? I kept trying to go south but there was no food, and there were Croats everywhere, bridges collapsing, roads washed out, and I just went wherever I could scavenge a meal and sleep under shelter. And food and shelter—I always found them in one direction. Toward Detroit. Like something was pushing that way."

Lee's story—so endlessly dissected in the public search for both insights and falsehoods—hardly needs repeating here, its much-debated details already seared into our collective imaginations. Lee, a terrified and dehydrated ten year-old, stumbling into Winchester's camp in desperation to steal his canteen. Finding himself wrapped in a blanket and eating the lion's share of a roasted squirrel, swimming in an oversized coat. Watching the emaciated Winchester's meticulous routine of pushups and gun-cleaning and marking out sigils on the ground. Bedding down next to him for the night, feeling a little safer for the companionship.

It's the events of the next morning that bring a haunted look to Lee's expressive eyes, even to this day. "It was cold. The warehouse was drafty and I remember there was frost in his hair, and mine too. It crunched when I touched it." Despite his visible discomfort, Lee looks up as he speaks, as though punishing himself with his honesty. "He didn't get out of bed—well, of his sleep sack. He was awake and all, but he just didn't get up. He was talking to himself. Kept saying 'no.' And I figured—y'know, just another adult fucking losing it." Raising his voice, Lee suddenly grows fierce, no trace of meekness left in him. "My father drank himself to death. Couldn't face what was happening to the world outside. And I'd just had it. I thought this guy was gonna save me, and then it looks like he's just losing it, like he's just another—you know, some grownup who's more broken than I am, and I'm just a kid at that point."

Lee pushes his coffee away, to the other edge of the table. "So I walked away." An audible deep breath, then another. "I took his canteen and I ran." Lee forces his gaze up again. "And that's why I have to keep telling the truth. 'Cause I walked away and I'll never know what would've happened if I hadn't."

Shoulders straightening, Lee unfurls from his protective stance and dips a hand into the pocket of his coat—a military-green jacket which, come to think of it, is far too large for Lee's small frame. His clenched fingers proffer a photograph that Lee has never permitted to be reprinted in any magazine, though it is Lee's most compelling evidence that his story is true. The snapshot is faded, yellowed, but clearly visible are two handsome young men with arms slung around each other's shoulders. The men pose in front of a sign welcoming tourists to Foamhenge, the carefully-replicated Styrofoam monument tiny in the background. The man on the right beams, turning his body inward so there's barely a sliver of space between the two. The man on the left looks mildly embarrassed, but the depth of his dimples betrays a certain delight. "This was in the pocket," Lee says. He examines the photo closely, wonderingly. "Look at him smiling like that." He withdraws, tucking the photo carefully back into a pocket like a sacred relic. In a world of lost faith, Lee believes in Sam Winchester's smile. His is a lonely religion.

James Lee walked away from that makeshift campsite on April 30th, 2012. There is no record of the events that followed until two days later, when a man described as tall and handsome, dressed all in white, walked into Detroit and burned the city to the ground.

This was the man who was once Sam Winchester.

After piecing together these accounts of Winchester's last months, the burning question that remains is: why? Why would a man who'd fought his whole life to defend humanity, who fully understood the consequences of his actions, say yes to Lucifer?

Only one man has ever known the answer to that question, and that man died on a cold morning in Detroit. Sam Winchester cannot answer us.

Detroit, 2012.

"Yes."

When Sam was at Stanford, a classmate of his, an extroverted athlete named Garrett who used to gently bully Sam into pickup soccer games, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. An average of nineteen people per year jump off the bridge and into the San Francisco Bay two hundred and fifty feet below them. The fall takes about four seconds. Four seconds, perhaps, take a lot longer. Sam's walked along the bridge at night when the cars are gone—it's a lonely place, standing in the middle with empty road stretching out on either side of you. Even though you can see the city lights, it's like the rest of the world has ceased to exist.

There were sound-bite reasons why Garrett did what he did—a blemished grade-point average, a torn ACL, playing the pronoun game and telling his parents about a girlfriend who was in reality a six foot tall baritone—but in Sam's mind, it all came down to the split second it takes to make the worst mistake of your life, and all the seconds after that when you can't take it back.

Sam never knew Garrett well enough to earn the right of trying to get inside his head, but in quiet moments while flipping a textbook page or loading up a tray full of food, his mind defaulted back to thinking about Garrett on the bridge. Sam wondered what he thought right after he let go, in the long seconds before he hit the water. Maybe he regretted it the moment his fingers left the rail. Maybe he would have taken it back if he could. Maybe he would've given anything to close that swiftly-increasing space between him and the handrail and be back on that lonely bridge. Maybe. But by then Garrett was already falling.

The yes leaves Sam's mouth, and in the very next moment, he remembers. Strawberry ice cream melting down his hand on summer afternoons. The first time he rode a bike, wind rushing past like flying. A casual touch ruffling his hair, easy affection taken for granted. The look on Dean's face when Sam caught him frenching the quarterback in his senior year of high school. Jess, sleepy in the mornings and burrowing under the sheets to escape the sun. The worn-in passenger seat of the Impala. Freckles. Mint toothpaste. Dean singing in the shower. Companionable silence. Going to sleep and knowing he won't wake up alone.

Human life is short and painful and flickers out without fanfare, and that will never change. And it's worth it. Sam remembers now.

The light is very, very bright.

Sam hits the water.

New Wichita, the Former United States of America, 2015.

There's this amiable Chinese lady and this Salvadorian dude running kind of a fusion restaurant out of the back of a former McDonald's. The ball pit in the PlayPlace is full of chickens and there's a guy with a rifle in the takeout window. It's good food, spicy and greasy and perfect for Dean's cast-iron stomach, but since the collapse of the money economy it's been a real pain in the ass to barter for anything. Dean doesn't have much that other people want. Fortunately, Mrs. Zhang gives Dean all their used cooking oil, grateful to have someone to clean it up.

Dean's not as young as he used to be, and he's praying to no one in particular that his back doesn't give out as he drags the heavy buckets of oil across the parking lot and wrangles them into the trunk of the car. He's already cringing in anticipation of the messy, smelly hours he'll have to spend turning oil that still smells like kung pao chicken into usable biofuel, but it's that or give up his baby. So yeah, he'll deal with it.

Karen's house is on the other side of town, and Dean curses a blue streak over the state of the roads as the car bump-thuds its way over broken asphalt. Karen comes out onto her porch when Dean rolls noisily onto the gravel driveway. She squints at him suspiciously and wipes her hands on her apron, which is covered in unidentifiable stains.

"You got it?" Dean asks.

"Yeah, I got it," she says, stone-faced. "Let's see the goods."

Dean grumbles as he wrestles his offerings out of the car: a can of fuel from his last batch, and a battered box of refilled shotgun shells. He opens the box to show it's all there.

Karen inspects her payment and, apparently satisfied, turns on her heel and lets the screen door bang behind her as she disappears into the old farmhouse. She re-emerges with a small cardboard box wrapped in twine. "You be careful with this. Don't you jostle it, drop it, shake it, or leave it near anything hot. You hear me?"

Dean resists the urge to back up a few steps. "Yes'm." He takes the box carefully, half-expecting it to blow up in his face the moment he touches it.

The screen door bangs shut, and the wooden door shortly behind it. Dean hears locks turning. He blows out a breath as he returns to the car, meticulously situating the box on the passenger seat. He glances back at it, reconsiders, puts it in the footwell. Then puts it back on the seat. Thinks about putting a seatbelt on it. Dean starts the car up and hopes for the best.

When he gets back to the house, he pulls right up to the garage workshop to offload his cooking oil. Collects the box delicately from the passenger seat and starts in on the locks on the front door, then has to kick it when it's stuck in the warped frame. The house is quiet, still full of light, though it'll be pitch black when the sun goes down.

Dean sets the box in the middle of the kitchen table and cuts the twine with his knife, slowly pulls back the lid to reveal its contents. He gives a low whistle.

That there is one hell of a cake. The finest soy and carob the black market has to offer, and Karen swore up and down there was real sugar in it—however she got her hands on sugar, Dean doesn't want to know.

Dean clomps down the hallway. At the end of the hall, he knocks on the half-open door out of vestigial politeness. Then he just walks in.

Sam is standing in the middle of the room, looking at the window. Right where Dean left him.

"I'm back." Dean walks around to Sam's front. "I'm back now."

In the silence, Dean can hear a branch tapping at the window, mice skittering in the walls. With a hand on Sam's shoulder, Dean turns him and walks him down the hall. Sam sits when Dean pushes him down. The chair creaks alarmingly—Sam's a skinny fucker these days, not like he used to be, but he's still a big guy. Dean decides to go into town tomorrow and look for furniture to liberate—most of the empty buildings have already been ransacked, furniture burnt for warmth ages ago—but you never know.

Dean sits across from Sam. "So, uh. I couldn't find any of those little candles." He tries to push the cake into Sam's line of sight, but it's hard since Sam isn't looking at anything in particular. "So you should just make a wish. Okay? Just make one anyway." Sam sits and stares.

It's not Dean's wish to make, but he can't help sending out a Jesus, please, fuck anyway.

Dean cuts the cake and pushes a slice toward Sam. He puts a fork in Sam's hand and there, Sam's got it now, brings the fork to his mouth and eats obediently.

"And the baker probably whacked someone for that sugar, so. Y'know. Appreciate it." Dean gets his own mouthful, and, well. If you're expecting chocolate cake it's fucking disgusting. But if you've been eating potatoes and possum and stale Fritos for the last few years, it's pretty awesome.

Sam finishes his cake with a smear of frosting on his upper lip. Dean thumbs it off for him, then impulsively wraps his arms around those unresponsive shoulders and squeezes, nose in Sam's neck. Sam still smells like himself. Dean closes his eyes and, just for a second, he pretends.

He pulls back and looks at Sam. "Anyway." He clears his throat. "Happy birthday."

Sam sits. And stares.

Dean cleans up from the cake, rustling paper and clanking dishes deafening in the quiet house.