to build a home

holding on

A rainy, empty road, lit only by streetlights that flare at the windows of Dean's car, setting fire to the water droplets collected on each pane, flitting past the window in a constant, silent, banality. It's cold in the way only late fall seems able to be; Dean's fingertips and toes are numb, turning white, the rest of him a comfortable enough temperature, for the time being. It only serves to add to the confusion drenching his insides.

The streetlights flitting in and out of view as the Impala cruises past them are reflected in the water on the road; the only sounds are the car's wheels gliding through the rain-slick streets, the thumping pitter-patter of rain on the roof, the scrape of windshield wipers, Dean's breathing, and, rather appropriately, he considers, the muted sound of Pink Floyd's Hey You oozing out the car radio at low volume.

"I can't believe I let you talk me into this," He sighs, frowning, gripping tighter at the wheel in an unfamiliar kind of nervous anticipation. Grief and anxiety twist in dull, throbbing pains at his insides.

Lost. Dean feels lost, again, and is doomed, he thinks, to feel this way forever.

"I'm your mother. You have to do what I say."

Mary's reasoning is sound, though it doesn't make Dean feel any kind of better.

He presses his lips together and glances up at the sky, an odd kind of green-black colour.

It's been raining a weird amount—two weeks of what feels like torrential downpour, and it seems kind of appropriate. They're driving to the synagogue Jimmy went to for twenty-three years, and then, Mary tells Dean, will be proceeding to the cemetery.

Dean doesn't know what to expect—he's only been to two funerals before, and neither of these were Jewish ceremonies.

"You're sure you know the way?" Mary asks. Dean takes a steadying breath.

"I can remember. I was at Cas's bar mitzvah," He replies shortly, words clipped, but his mother only rolls her eyes.

"Last I checked, Dean, you were thirteen and couldn't drive, back then. Are you sure you know the way?"

Dean doesn't reply.

Jimmy is—was, fuck, was—a good man. Warm and kind and awkward and like a second father to Dean when his parents had been fighting late into the night, and then, even more so, when John had been crushed in a burning building that had collapsed before he could get out in time. Everyone else Dean had turned to for comfort had said that these were the perils of firefighting. Only Jimmy had held Dean close and told him it was okay to be sad and okay to be angry and okay to be confused about losing his father.

That was Jimmy, that was what he did—always validating every fibre of other people's lives. He'd chosen his profession well: psychiatrist. Normally Dean hated them, the lot of them, for being so damn useless at helping out his younger brother, Sammy. But Jimmy was different. Jimmy was good.

Dean had begged Jimmy to take Sam on instead of all those hopeless shrinks and therapists who'd put his brother on a cocktail of other drugs and spoke in clipped, alien sentences. Jimmy had only frowned and smiled—at the same time, as he always did—eyes sad, telling Dean that it would be a conflict of interests, and totally unethical. He knew Sammy personally, he reasoned. He couldn't treat him.

And it'd hardly have mattered, anyway—Sam couldn't speak to anyone, not about what happened. He could hardly stand to speak about everything to Dean, let alone to some stranger in a pantsuit and horn-rimmed glasses with a master's from Yale.

No, Jimmy was different to all of them. Truly worthy of the name counsellor, Jimmy had treated everything with kindness and questioned everything he encountered and rebuked Dean so gently Dean had hardly known it was happening.