Dean froze, panting, as the anger abated, tears streaming down his face. He stared at his precious baby, his pretty girl, and the crowbar slipped harmlessly from his fingers.
“I’m a better man,” he whispered. “I’m a better man. I will always be a better man than you,” he said softly, sinking to his knees, his hand pressed against the Impala’s fender.
The studio was destroyed. Crates and totes and boxes lay empty, contents scattered. He didn’t remember doing that. And his baby…
“Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” he whispered, patting her fender. “I’ll fix you, I swear. I swear it.” He pressed his forehead to the cold metal for a moment.
Calmness was settling in him. A peace, a serenity - the guilt, the worthlessness - it was slipping away, as Dean grasped onto the realization that he wasn’t to blame. It wasn’t all his fault. The things that had happened, his childhood - it wasn’t his fault.
It wasn’t his fault.
His eyes drifted to the scaffold, and the covered canvas behind it, and he was on his feet and moving again, digging through boxes, pulling out tubes of paint and brushes, his big palette, setting everything on the workbench, then he walked under the scaffold, popping the wheel brakes and pushing it to the side.
Dean stood at the foot of the painting, staring up at the white sheet covering it, and with a deep breath, he steeled himself, gathered the fabric in his fist and pulled, a shower of dust making him cough as the fabric slipped away from the painting.
His eyes swept over it. The black suit, the backwards blue tie, the trenchcoat -
And then he was moving, shoving the scaffold back into place, squeezing paint tubes, adding colors to his palette, pleased to find so many of his paints still in serviceable condition.
He pulled out the turntable, and the crate of records; made a stack of vinyls on the record player; Houses of the Holy, Dark Side of the Moon, Master of Puppets, Leftoverture, Zep II, Zep IV, The Grand Illusion; he jacked the volume, grabbed brushes and his palette, climbed the scaffold and lost himself.
Dean painted, painted with everything in him, painted like he hadn’t in years, surrounded by his music and the smell of linseed oil and turpentine.
He painted Cas’s face, capturing the stern glare in the Polaroids still pinned to the side of the canvas, but adding the laugh lines and crow’s feet he had now. He set up his jigsaw and cut fancy Italian porcelain plates into triangular shards and attached them over Cas’s head. He attached an old neon sign to the canvas, running the wires down behind, and plugged it in, the red and blue glow adding another element to the painting.
He worked for hours, worked after all the records had played, and as dawn sent her first rays of morning through the glass windows of the big doors, he pushed the scaffold away again, sinking to the floor in a heap of paint-stained exhaustion.
