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It’s the first place he and Miracle live in when they move out of the bunker. The one that Rowena had gifted him, that he’d never bothered to tell Dean about. He’d never thought they’d have the occasion to need it or use it. There was a lot about his dealings with Rowena he hadn’t shared with his brother, but that’s all water under a very large bridge.
The house is nothing fancy or special, just a nice place with Rowena style witchy furnishings. Not really his jam, but hey, it’s free and he doesn’t have to think about it. He can imagine what Dean would think if he saw them sleeping in the enormous canopy bed with the deep burgundy fussy draperies. Miracle seems to love the velvet bedspread, but of course the hair situation is out of control. It gives him something small to worry about, to not have to think about why he’s there, and who’s missing—who should be there with him.
He knows he told Dean it was okay to go. He knew that meant he was promising to try his best to have a life. And that’s why he’s here and not holed up in the bunker, hiding away from the whole world like he really wants to. Miracle gets him out of the house, running her up and down the quiet suburban street twice a day is a good routine for both of them. Running past the graveyard that covers the two-block spread directly across from his place always makes him think of Dean. Not just because he’s dead, but that they’d spent so much of their lives together in various graveyards, usually digging people up, occasionally burying them. At least this last time, he’d done the right thing and had a hunter’s funeral for Dean, he didn’t bury him like he had when his deal had come up and he’d been taken down to Hell. He let him go, like he’d promised. It was the hardest thing he’s ever done.
The graveyard is quiet and well-taken care of, there’s usually at least one gardener or groundskeeper mowing or weeding, and at least a funeral a day taking place, especially during the pandemic. He’s kind of glad Dean got to miss that awfulness, but if he’s honest, being locked down alone for a few weeks in this new house had been really hard. He’d spent a lot of time looking out the front window across the street to the graveyard. The half-height wrought iron fence was nicely painted with sharp spikes at the top of each post. He’s glad he doesn’t have to climb over it to dig up someone’s grave. None of that bullshit, not any more.
After a few weeks of watching the graveyard, all day every day, and usually well into the night, he gets to know the rhythms of the place. He knows when the morning crew comes in and unlocks the main gate. He knows when the service gate is locked at night by the afternoon crew. The long black funeral home limousines and hearses with their headlights on, flash through his front window as they move slowly along the well maintained roads in the graveyard.
Just as he’s gotten used to the normal tempo of the daily funerals, he notices a substantial increase, probably due to the new excess of deaths from Covid. It sucks thinking about all that pain and loss happening all at once. It makes him wish Dean was here with him, to joke about it and get him to do something else besides obsessing about masses of people he doesn’t know dying all day every day and some of them getting planted across the street. When he starts thinking about losing Dean like he had, so brutal and sudden and completely stupid it gets him spiraling into really dark places. It’s not good.
Of course that’s when he starts seeing them, the pale walkers roaming between the headstones at dusk, in and out of the glow of the streetlights. They’re not really people that are walking, after a lifetime of dealing with the supernatural, he’s pretty sure they’re restless spirits of some sort. All those people hearing goodbyes from their families via iPads held by nurses in all the protective gear. Not a good death, not a lot of closure going on, plenty of unfinished business, and in his experience, that means ghosts. He searches through all of the witchy paraphernalia in Rowena’s house and all the books he’d scanned from the bunker library. Turns out there’s something he can do that doesn’t involve digging people up and doing the good old salt and burn.
Once he knows that he has something that will help, it seems like a no-brainer to apply for a job working at the graveyard, It becomes a daily thing, treating the newly dug graves with what he comes to think of as a ghost preventing calming potion. It’s easy to do, the other guys on the crew never notice the glowing purple drops soaking into the freshly turned earth. But hey, the stuff works. There’s less and less spirit activity going on, the place just feels more settled. Even Miracle notices the change, she’s less jumpy and spooked when they go on their morning and evening runs. It’s an easy potion to make, so he anonymously puts the word out on the online hunter’s network.
After a week or so of this work, he thinks of how Dean would have reacted, he’d have been so excited about this ghost prevention potion, especially the part about not having to break their backs digging up graves all the time. They’d both been complaining about how hard that was getting. Sure, it was a damn good excuse for excessive demands for back rubs and all that usually followed. The first month on the job is good for him, really good, he gets to be outside all day, works with some nice folks who he wishes he could hang out with. Thanks to Covid, that’s not a thing at the moment, but they set up a group text chat thing and it’s fun getting to know a completely new set of people.
Dean would be proud of him for figuring out how to help, for moving and trying to start over. He feels this is true at a very deep level, maybe even soul level or whatever. Their connection didn’t end just because Dean died, he feels it every day, in just about every moment. He can still feel the weight of his brother’s hand on his chest, telling him that he’d always be with him, right here.
It’s not much of a life, but the whole rest of the world is pretty much locked down, so he takes it one day at a time. When he misses Dean the most, he goes and sits in Baby in the garage. Sometimes he even ends up sleeping in the front seat, Miracle curled up on the bench seat with him. Those are the nights he dreams Dean the clearest, he wakes up in the morning feeling refreshed deep inside, like he’s had long conversations with Dean, or just held him all night like he used to in their bed in the bunker.
It’s not much of a life, but it’s not nothing, and it’s the one he’s living.