Title: Shakes and Butterflies

Disclaimer: Not mine, don’t sue. Lyrics are Sherwood’s ‘Alley Cat’. Also not mine.

Summary: Innocence and Feathers ’verse oneshot, so read the others first. John’s POV on meeting Dean, losing Dean and what came in between. John/Dean, Sam/Dean unrelated slash.

Feedback: Is love.

A/N: So yes. I’m going to write a sequel to Eyes Locked in Downcast Love soon, but here’s something that’s been cooking in my brain for a while.

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‘Through the day I’ll prepare for the fight with a fever on a Saturday night, ’cause this is giving me the shakes and butterflies.’

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They were destined to snake through each other’s lives, entwined yet separate, and John knew that when he saw Dean walking down the sundrenched street, staring straight ahead, arms swinging. Turning heads as always. Dean was exceptionally stunning and John just stopped and stared.

The first time John saw Dean he was a mess of a person, traumatized and incredibly strong willed. He said: I ain’t gonna let no doctor lock me away. No way. That shit’s for the crazies. Man, thanks for paying my way. Dean spoke like someone unused to kindness, yet with the inflection of a boy who expected to be paid for. He spoke like someone who would make a meal out of repaying you.

He did. He did he did he did. Everything Dean did, he did it in full, because he wasn’t a person who liked being in debt to another human being. John could relate to that – but he felt strangely like he owed this boy something, though it was a mystery to him what it could be or why this was.

Falling asleep against him on that jumpy bus; Dean murmured in his sleep, the noises that John would come to know so well, the sounds of a nightmare. Much later, when John asked what Dean did for a living, he shook his head and smiled. I love dancing and I’m good, too. I make a really pretty girl. You know how I’m ugly now? When I’m a girl, I’m not. It’s just... I never know. When to be a girl.

It intrigued John, how Dean talked about himself like that when to be a boy and when to be a girl, like it was his choice. It made John nervous, fluttery inside like a young boy, to be so close to someone so themselves. Even if it was all a front and Dean’s main problem, as it came to light, was not being able to pick a self to be.

Yet Dean moved like a waterfall, completely natural. He rolled his hips, held his arms over his head and glanced over his shoulder at John, glossy pink lips caught in a candy smile. He winked. He danced whether he was on stage or in a supermarket; his whole body was strung together as tightly as a violin, but he could move like he had no bones.

He was never ashamed of his dancing, but he was ashamed of his suicide attempt – he never spoke of his feelings towards it, however John knew that Dean was angered by his inability to follow through, to do the dirty deed and die. Dean had warped ideas of success and failure, a successful night was one when he made a lot of money, when twenty or more guys slapped his ass sore and called him sugar, when he looked enough like a girl not to feel like himself.

That was how Dean measured success. He measured it in shot glasses, in how shitfaced he could get without ending up hogtied and raped like a bitch. Cheerfulness hitched in Dean’s voice when he said that. It stuttered and tried to sound real and John pretended to believe that getting hurt like that really didn’t bother Dean beyond the darn inconvenience of the event.

A failure was what Dean saw himself as, the sum of his parts was failure. It was a lack of pride. He went through phases of wanting to die and John sometimes suspected that his entire life was just one long attempt to end his own suffering. Dean needlessly and knowingly put himself into dangerous situations, day after day. When he wasn’t stripping his second skin off for slathering perverts he was disappearing and sleeping under the stars or shovelling pills and booze down his neck. On a good day, on his best days, Dean would describe himself as numb with a happy smile on his face. Numb meant nothing was hurting right then.

John never understood why Dean was such a mess. He alluded to being a street kid, a runaway, to his parents being terrible in some unspeakable way and John hated them for screwing up such a beautiful boy. Dean could have been someone, once upon a very long time ago, but now all he was good for was subservience and getting smashed.

His ugly depression was manic and uncontrollable. Sometimes he would bang on John’s door with both fists and scream at him. I know. I know you’re spying on me, you fucking psycho, I’m going to call the cops on your ass, just watch me. And there was the time he painted his room red because he became fixated on the colour, with the idea of feeling safe.

Other times, Dean would lie in his bed for days at a time, unable to move, barely managing the effort it took to breathe. He told John he had a sleepy sickness and that he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Those days, when he had his sleepy sickness, Dean suffered all his nightmares alone, and his screams echoed through the house, though no one in a dump like that bothered to check if someone was being murdered or just having a bad dream.

Some nights when he knew his lovely, strange neighbour wasn’t working; John went to knock on Dean’s door and could hear him talking to himself, trying out different voices like he was putting on a play. He would sing like his life was a musical and when he opened the door he was dressed up to the nines, his cheeks powdered pink, lips red, eyes expanded with mascara and eyeliner. He obsessed over his freckles, caking on foundation to cover them, saying they made him look ugly. He lifted up his dresses, pinched his stomach hard and complained of carrying extra weight from only being able to afford cheap burgers, then didn’t eat until he blacked out.

Dean had sex with strangers, but never for money because he was through with whoring, through and through, pay’s no good and you just get used up. When he and John went out for drinks, Dean would take some mystery medication and drink too much; then he’d flirt with another guy all night and end up in the bathroom for twenty minutes, come out looking flushed and hungry for more. He was always hungry.

He paid John with sex. Paid him for being kind, for hanging around, for helping him find work and a doctor and an apartment – Dean got on his knees and offered and what kind of fool would have said no? Since Mary, John had been lonely. It was a lifetime of loneliness, a steady downward slide into being the kind of man who got stabbed for his wallet because he looked like a drunk. Back in the good old days, the angelic days, he had been looking forward to being a family man, to raising babies with a woman who smiled like sunshine.

When Dean danced in his long blue dress, with blonde curls falling all over the place, John knew what was coming. He smiled encouragingly, felt proud to know such a creature, someone who was full of poison but managed to play the part of an innocent, virgin white beauty. John believed that Dean couldn’t be saved, but he could be taken care of, like someone who was very, very ill and destined to die, Dean could be made comfortable.

You care about me, don’t you? Dean asked gently one late night or early morning, the sky black outside the window.

Sure... sure. John fumbled with his zipper, cursing his nerves. Why be nervous? He knew Dean. This boy was built for pleasure. He was made to take whatever was thrown at him. Dean was Venus.

He lay on the bed and spread himself open. Then do it. Just fuck me. Don’t pussy around about it. Dean always seemed ready to offer himself. He was pliable, empty of anything and ready for something to come and made him whole. John knew he couldn’t be that unspoken thing, he could only make himself feel better. Dean lay underneath him and didn’t make a sound, didn’t pretend to enjoy it like a whore. He gritted his teeth and sobbed tearlessly, like he was taking John’s pain into his own body.

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‘And if you don’t stop running you can never breathe when everything you want is everything you see. But when it comes to decision, baby, him or me, well I hope you can feel the need.’

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Sam. Now John owed that little bastard nothing. He knew a meal ticket when he saw one and that fresh outta nowhere moron was exactly that. He was no one, but he had something about him that made people love him. Like Dean. John knew as soon as he saw them together that he’d made a mistake introducing them. Sam fell for Dean’s obvious beauty and Dean... well, who wouldn’t be smitten by someone professing their love so messily, like a child? Dean adored mess. He kept his room in a state of total disarray because when he began cleaning he worked his fingers bloody trying to clean his endlessly dirty life.

Dean was damaged goods and, for some reason, even when Sam found this out he was head over heels. He blathered on about how much he loved Dean, his eyes shining with that disgusting innocence that made John want to punch him. He saw everything as if it was lovely and wonderful, and John hadn’t had that ability for more than twenty years, maybe longer.

Maybe it was just that some people were born with rose tinted eyes and some people were born to see the god’s honest truth. John made a fast buck out of anyone who walked his way, except Dean who was useful and too crazy to be screwed over. He never made that much money anyway. Though he managed to put up a good front of sanity – as much as was required for his line of work – his unpredictable mental state meant he took too much time off. If there was one thing John didn’t have to worry about it was Dean making enough money to leave town. Nope, Dean was a lifer, just like John. He was stuck in the sleazy quagmire forever.

And then Sam showed up with his lack of talent and high hopes. You’re one of ten million, John told him, but nothing got him down. Sam was one of those irritating people who survived and got by on their own merits, all sweetness and light. He had a lucky streak that negated what a complete hick he was, it made people think he was cute when he was actually mentally challenged. John was still sharp, under all the alcohol he drank to keep things steady, and he could tell what Dean apparently couldn’t. Sam was an idiot.

But Dean fell for him anyway, even if he wouldn’t admit it. He fell slowly, not like Sam with his schoolboy crush, but he fell all the same.

And the further he fell, the harder John tried to keep him.

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‘What makes you an alley cat scratching me? You dig deep with your nails and flash your teeth and run off to where your next big meal could be.’

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Betrayed, John felt betrayed when he realized that he had lost Dean to Sam. It hurt, and not much hurt him. Of course he loved Dean; they had been in each other’s pockets for a year and a half. But the first time he realized how much he loved Dean was when he let him go.

He let the boy go, watched Sam sweep him off his feet and take him out of harm’s way. John didn’t know whether he was the harm or not, but it didn’t matter. It was the lifestyle, the way they lived each day starving, that was killing Dean, that and the darkness that was rotting him from the inside, making him insane. He wondered if Sam would be patient with Dean’s babbling, with his mood swings and all the questions without answers. He forced himself not to think of Dean as a stupid whore who would go wherever the grass looked greenest, and it felt like a real achievement not to think the worst of someone for once. It got John wondering once more if he would ever be the kind of person he used to be, the one Mary loved.

He doubted it.

But, then again, he also doubted he’d ever hear from Dean again. He was wrong. His boy – Sam’s boy now – called him with desperation and madness making his voice raw. I’m being good, honest I am. Sam thinks I’m beautiful. Isn’t that screwed up? He really believes that, like all the way through him. I need to see you. I want you to come. Will you come? You know me. You’ll find me, won’t you? I’m in the dark. John would always go to Dean, through any amount of real or imaginary darkness, but he didn’t. Dean needed him to stay out of this, no matter what he said. He needed to accept his love and learn to live with someone as honest and adoring as Sam. So John made up some shit about a big project, when actually his life was a vacuum of nothingness, and Dean muttered sadly and they disconnected.

John lay on his bed and breathed. The next call was better, Dean sounded happier, lighter, and he wondered if Sam was buying it. Did he really believe that someone like Dean, as broken as Dean was, could be cured? John hoped it was true all the same, and then had a few drinks and told himself Sam had rubbed off on him. Sam rubbed off on just about everyone he came into contact with. He and Dean shared a strange, elusive kind of magnetism.

It was worth a lot of money, that sort of thing. Money that John didn’t give a crap about, not at that moment, although he thought he would probably regret his generous attitude later.

The next time John saw Dean, he had changed. He was nearly a different person. But no less beautiful – it was just that now he belonged not to the shadows, but to the sunlight.

John just stopped and stared.

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End

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