gwendolyngrace (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gwendolyngrace) wrote2008-06-26 07:06 pm
gwendolyngrace) wrote2008-06-26 07:06 pm
Entry tags:
Fifty Percent: Part Four
Fic title: Fifty Percent
Author name:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gwendolyngrace
Artist name:sazzlette
Genre: (rps, wincest, het, gen) Gen / Het
Pairing: John/OFC
Rating: R
Word Count: 46,450, Posted in 5 1/2 parts
Warnings/Spoilers: (if applicable) Told in two eras: 2007 and 1989. The 2007 storyline is set between “Bad Day at Black Rock” and “Sin City”; the flashback sequence references “Something Wicked.”
Summary: While cleaning out John’s storage locker, Sam finds an envelope from his father addressed to someone from their past. Dean objects to delivering it, but Sam happens upon a hunt that takes them practically to her doorstep. Could they be demons released when the Gate opened? In 1989, shortly after the shtriga hunt, the Winchesters settle in small-town Ohio while John figures out whether or not he can keep hunting. Beverly Kirkland, the children’s librarian, meets the boys and their father. After a chance encounter with John, she reluctantly grows closer to him, all the while wondering what it is about the family that doesn’t quite add up….
Author’s Notes: So many things about this, but I don’t want to give stuff away. Right. Well, first off, I had this in my head long before “Supernatural: Rising Son” came out, and before I found out that Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Mary-Louise Parker were a couple (and then they broke up before I finished drafting this). The idea came up while I was writing Trost und Freude for a holiday exchange - but takes place *before* that in the Wee!chester timeline. I’m very grateful tosazzlette for her art of awesome (10 sketches, count'em OMG! - AND a music mix!), etakyma for her unfailing willingness to read what I’ve written and tell me how to fix it, july_july_july for her incredibly insightful beta-reading, and Wikipedia for lots of helpful information, ranging from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles collectibles to the names of Kansas Governors to facts (and missing information) about our MOTW.
Link to fic: Part One, Part Two, Part Three-A, Part Three-B, Part Four, Part Five
Back to Part Three-b
~*~THEN~*~
John must have felt especially guilty about their argument, because when he came over the next night, he made it up to her in no uncertain terms. Then he asked when her next day off from the library was.
“Why are you asking?” she said, only half-suspicious.
“It’s about time for me to change the oil in the Impala. Thought I’d work on yours at the same time.”
“Joint oil change? Why John, how romantic,” she teased.
“I’m just saying,” he said sheepishly, “it’s just as easy to service both cars on the same day.”
“Mm-hmm.” She lazed against his shoulder. “Hey, I meant to ask you…what are your Thanksgiving plans?”
John shrugged. “Sweetheart, I don’t know what I’m doing next week, let alone end of the month. Usually we get Boston Market or something. Can’t see trying to do a whole bird in that postage stamp of an oven. Even if I could cook.”
“You could—”
“No,” John said. It wasn’t gruff, or snappish, but it was decidedly final. “Like I said, Dean is already pretty sure something’s up. I told him to ask you for that ride.”
Beverly levered herself onto her elbow. “But why should that be such a signal, John? I mean…it’s not like I’m a stranger.”
“They’re used to relying on me or no one,” John told her. Again, though the statement was spoken mildly, there was a brusqueness that warned against pressing the subject.
“I suppose.” She leaned over to plant a kiss, but just as he threaded his fingers through her hair, his pager went off.
“Mmph,” John complained, disentangling himself. “I have to get that.”
“You’re on call for the garage?” she surmised.
“Sorry,” he muttered. He fumbled for his jeans and pulled the pager off the belt clip. It glowed green and beeped again. “Use your phone?” he requested.
“Yeah, sure.” She rolled across the bed for the phone on its cradle. “Here,” she said, handing it over.
John dialed and identified himself. There was a long pause while the person he’d called held a one-sided conversation. “Yeah, hang on a second,” John said crisply. He covered the handset and motioned to Beverly for pen and paper. She nodded, pulled out a pad from her bedside table, and clicked the light on for him. While she collected his clothes, he scribbled several notes, grunting, and then repeated back the address. Beverly smirked at his spelling—he automatically used NATO phonetics.
“Okay. It’ll be…about 25 minutes.” He hung up and gave her a hangdog look. “Sorry. I gotta go.”
“No problem,” Beverly said, showing him his clothes. He kissed her gratefully and dressed efficiently.
“So…when are you off next?” he asked. “You didn’t say.”
“Oh…Wednesday,” she said, distracted. She put on her robe to walk downstairs with him.
“Damn. I can’t Wednesday.”
“It’s all right, John.”
“Look, I’ll—”
“Call me?” Beverly finished for him. “Okay.” He kissed her again and slid out the door.
But he didn’t call. Sam and Dean didn’t come in for over a week. When they did show up again, Dean only said that their dad had been really busy and he’d told them to skip the after school program so the bus could take them straight home.
“How’s school?” she asked. Dean looked about to say something flip, but instead he told her, in no uncertain terms, that his teacher had it in for him.
“Why’s that?”
“We had this spelling bee an’ she disqualified me even though I spelled everything right. She hates it when I spell things the cool way,” Dean explained.
“The cool way?” she asked.
Sam looked up and supplied the answer. “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta….”
“Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India,” Dean joined in.
“Okay, okay, I get it,” Beverly said. “You know, I think I know just the books for you,” she added, inspiration striking. She went and got The King’s Fifth, Kim, and several books from the Men at Arms series.
Dean leafed through the books on arms and armaments first. “Cool,” he breathed. He picked up Kim. “What’s this about?” he frowned at the volume.
“It’s about a young man who lived in India and became a spy,” she said nonchalantly. She helped several other students with their selections while Dean casually opened the hardcover classic. Neil Phillips sat with Dean for a bit and they talked in whispers. Dean even showed Neil one of the illustrated plates and muttered something about the kind of rifle one of the soldiers was holding.
A little while later, Dean looked at his watch. “Aw, crap! C’mon, Sammy, we gotta go. Dad said to be out front by 4:30.” While he got his bag together, he said a hurried goodbye to Neil with a promise to see him in school.
Sam held up a finger and read to the end of the paragraph. “Okay,” he said, slamming the book on its bookmark and tossing the book into his backpack.
“Dean!” Beverly called to him. He stopped in his tracks and turned back. She pointed to the book still in his hand. He looked at it and after a moment’s debate, snatched Sam’s backpack off his shoulder.
“Sammy, gimme your library card.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause I want it.” Dean fished around while Sam tried ineffectually to retrieve his pack. Dean found the card and zipped up the pouch. “Go wait for Dad,” he told Sam, tossing the backpack, which Sam caught. “I’ll be right there.” He came back to the counter, handing over the book and his brother’s library card.
“Have you…thought about your Christmas list yet?” Beverly asked in an effort for small talk, wisely choosing not to call attention to the seminal event of Dean borrowing a book.
Dean shrugged. “Oh, Dad’ll get us some clothes. I think Sam wants some Ninja Turtle thing.”
“But how about you, Dean? Is there something you want?” She didn’t bother to talk about Santa; it was clear he didn’t believe, and ten was too old for most kids, anyway. Especially with another friend sitting close enough to overhear.
“Well, honestly, if I had a Walkman, I could listen to our tapes even when I’m not in the car,” he confided. “But they’re expensive, aren’t they?”
“They can be,” Beverly agreed. “You’d better get going, if your father’s waiting.”
It occurred to her that Dean’s willingness to supply information spoke volumes. Perhaps she was making progress. If nothing else, she had some inside intelligence to give John. Her cynical side told her perhaps Dean meant for her to pass the ideas along, but that didn’t really matter. Somehow she suspected that with all John had going on, the boys’ Christmas presents were the last things on his mind. It wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet. But a plan was forming slowly in her mind, something she could do for all of them. She’d have to be careful about floating it past John. Between his pride and his secretive nature, it would be difficult to bring about.
His left arm was in a sling when she saw him a few days later. His face was swollen on the left and his left eye looked like someone had rubbed it with a cheese grater.
“Oh my God, what happened?” she asked.
John shook his head gingerly. “Just a bar fight. It’s nothing.”
“This happened in MacArthur’s?”
“No.” He tried to smile, winced, and touched the tip of his tongue to the split in the corner of his bottom lip. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Are you—I mean, are you going to charge the other guy with assault, at least?”
John looked at her as if she didn’t understand the basics of male interaction. “No need,” he said finally. “He was just…passing through. Long gone—by the time he could move again, after I’d kicked his ass.”
“When did this happen, though? There wasn’t anything on the news—”
“Oh, I’m not surprised.” He dismissed her protest. “Look, I said don’t worry about it.” He reached into his bag and pulled out some of Sam’s borrowed books. “Came to return these and do a little work of my own.”
“Where are the boys?”
“They’ll be here soon,” he said cryptically. “I wanted to talk to you alone for a minute.”
“Okay….” Beverly sensed bad news.
“Dean will barely put down the book he took out the other day,” John said. “I got home from my…from work, and he was on the couch completely engrossed.”
Beverly grinned widely. “That’s great! Isn’t it?” she asked, because John didn’t look overjoyed.
He nodded slowly, as if it hurt to move his head. “It’s great, don’t get me wrong.”
“Wait—you’re not happy he found something he likes to read?”
“No—I’m glad. What I’m not glad about is that I keep having to take it away just so he’ll do his chores.”
“Well, John, you’re not the first parent who had to compete with gripping fiction.”
John grunted at her attempt to inject humor. “Yeah, well, I know you want to get his mind moving in the right direction—and believe me, he could use some hustle-up on his other schoolwork—but I rely on Dean to help me out. His homework takes him long enough—I don’t need him taking off on flights of…fantasy…when it’s Sam’s bath time.”
Beverly cocked her head. “John. You’re not making any sense. Dean’s only ten. You make it sound like he’s doing something wrong—no wonder he worries about your good opinion of him. You should be encouraging—”
He backed up a step as if she’d slapped him. “Don’t tell me how to raise my boys,” he said dangerously.
“I’m not telling you what to do,” Beverly said through clenched teeth, “except to keep your voice down in my library,” she added, unable to resist making the dig. “I’m just pointing out that Dean’s reading skills, his thirst for learning, could use some spark.”
“Dean’s interest in learning is peachy, provided it’s something he wants to learn.” John dropped his head, cringing again. “I know,” he said more gently, “I know it seems backward.” He looked beyond her, wouldn’t meet her eye. Beverly couldn’t look away from the angry red and dark purple bruising around his eye, down the left side of his jaw. “Dean’s plenty smart, and he does just fine when he—what’s the word you teachers like to use—applies himself.”
Beverly didn’t rise to the bait or point out that she wasn’t a teacher. She opened her palm in a gesture to tell him to continue.
“Dean…Dean’s motivation is not like other kids’. When Mary—” he swallowed—”When Mary died, Dean didn’t talk afterward. Not for a long time; not at all at first, and then not more than a few words. What brought him back, what gave him a sense of purpose, was taking care of Sam. So sue me, I’ve used that. We all get by a little easier that way. Now, Sam can take care of some things for himself, but he’s still really young. And you might have noticed he’s a pretty…willful kid.”
Beverly remained stone-faced.
John sighed. He closed his eyes and took a moment to compose himself before continuing more calmly. “I give Dean plenty of time to slack off, when it won’t interfere with his chores or our schedule as a family. He can do what he wants when he’s older. But for a little while longer, I need him focused. I don’t need him deciding when he can shrug off his responsibilities.”
Beverly held his gaze for a moment. “Really?” she said when he didn’t say anything, either. “Christ, John, would Dean really be so worried about losing your interest or attention or whatever if you just gave it to him on his terms for a bit, instead of always using him for what you need?”
John stared at her. “That’s not what I meant—”
“I know it’s not. But it’s what you said,” she retorted. Finally John hung his head. She opened her drawer for her purse. “Come on, let’s get some coffee,” she said, “and you can tell me what’s really going on.”
John shook his head, but held his ground this time. “No, they should get here soon. I need to wait for them.”
“You said that before—what does that mean?”
John’s mouth twitched and he grunted in discomfort. “Urban orienteering,” he said. “But—later? Maybe dinner? It’s been a while since we had what you’d call a date.”
“I’m done here at six,” she said. Something was bothering him, that was sure, and it wasn’t the fact that Dean was reading Kipling.
Dean and Sam came in about half an hour later, pink-cheeked and a little sweaty. They ignored the children’s section, going instead to Reference where their father had retreated. A few minutes later they came back toward her, looking intensely pleased with themselves.
“You two look like you’ve had an adventure,” she commented.
“Boy, did we ever!” Sam said excitedly. “Dad blindfolded us an’ drove around for a while and then he let us out of the car an’—”
“Sammy,” Dean interrupted sternly.
“No, Dean, I want to hear. Go on, Sam, what were you saying?”
Sam looked nervously at his brother. At Beverly’s encouraging nod, he continued. “Um. Well, he let us out and took our blindfolds off, an’ he tol’ us to figure out where the libarry was from where we were.”
“I see,” she said, aware that a little disapproval was creeping into her tone, next to the confusion. “How far away were you from here?” she asked.
“Only about a mile,” Dean answered hastily. “Dad does that kinda stuff for us sometimes. Like when we go on hikes or when he takes us camping. It’s like being in Scouts.”
“S’better than Scouts,” Sam said, “‘cause Scouts hafta wear stupid uniforms.”
“Right,” Dean agreed. He looked proud, as if he’d taught Sam that scouting was inferior to their dad’s training.
Beverly could see the logic in a scouting troop of two, especially as John always seemed to be scraping by. Neither boy had seemed distraught or even mildly put out because of John’s methods of exercise. If they’d been in a big city, or if the boys were younger, she might have objected, tried to tell them how dangerous their idea of fun was.
But then, come to think of it, it was a lot less dangerous than hanging around on the basketball courts trying drugs. It was healthier than sitting at home watching TV. A court probably wouldn’t understand the nuances, certainly wouldn’t see John as anything other than the labels he fit into: Vietnam veteran, widower, blue-collar worker, borderline alcoholic, obsessive-compulsive control freak. And if she called the cops on him, something warned her, they’d just pack up and run.
Like they’d run from Oklahoma.
Like they’d run from Wisconsin.
And there was no point being the cause of upheaval in their lives. Not when she had the opportunity to influence them toward stability.
“Hey, Dean,” she asked to change the subject, “Your dad says you’re really enjoying Kim.”
Dean chewed his lip. “Yeah. Kinda got sucked into it,” he mumbled.
“Well, that can happen sometimes,” she said gently. “The nice thing about a book is you can always put it down. It’ll still be there later.”
“It’ll take a while, though,” he sighed, “‘cause I’m s’posed to wait ‘til after we’re done with everything else. But that’s okay. We can read a little at night before Lights Out,” Dean volunteered. “Sammy’n’me’re readin’ it together,” he continued to explain quite confidently in response to her cocked eyebrow. “Well, I mean, I’m readin’ the good parts to him.”
“That’s great!” Beverly said with a big smile. “Well, when you do finish it, there’s more Kipling where that came from.”
“More what?”
Beverly blinked. “Rudyard Kipling, Dean. The author.”
“Oh,” Dean said, though it was clear that authorship or an author’s talent meant nothing to him. Only the story mattered.
“He wrote The Jungle Books, too,” she explained.
That earned a wrinkled nose. “Sam likes Baloo, but I think the monkeys have the best song.”
Beverly nodded. The transition didn’t shock her. “Well, Kipling wrote the story on which the animated film is based. Anyway, let me know when you’re ready for more.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said, sadly noncommittal. It was obvious that he was humoring her now.
John returned a while later and they left. His wink (with his uninjured eye) served as the only promise that he’d see her that evening.
He called the library at 5:30. “So, should I pick you up? At home or at work?”
“Oh—no, let’s just meet wherever—your pick.”
“Okay. Uh…Andolino’s,” he said after a moment’s hesitation.
It was the best Italian in the area. “Are you sure?” It was also fairly expensive.
“Yeah. I had a good week.”
“John, you’re the only person I know who can call getting beaten to a pulp a good week.”
“What? Oh,” he said, sounding distracted, and then chuckled. “What can I say? I’ve got a hard head. I’ll call in a reservation—see you there at 18:30?”
“Okay.” Beverly hung up, overjoyed that Judith didn’t work on Sundays.
Over her seafood scampi and his scallops Fra Diavolo, she pitched the proposal that had been on her mind since she’d suggested Thanksgiving together. “Look—I know you’ll probably hate this idea, but… hear me out, okay?”
John scrunched up his face infinitesimally to allow her to continue.
“I asked Dean recently what he wanted for Christmas, and if you all had plans. He said you boys usually stay pretty low-key.”
“Yeah,” John said guardedly.
“Well, I usually get invited to my in-laws, but—I hate it,” she confided. With a deep breath, she plunged on very quickly, “What do you say you let me give you all a full-bore Christmas? I mean everything: Tree, turkey and trimmings, even a fire in my living room. The boys can wake up on Christmas morning with stockings and presents and the whole deal.”
John didn’t say anything right away. Oddly, it gave Beverly hope; she’d expected to be cut off and shut down before she could even throw in the crackling fire and cozy images of stockings. Silence meant John was actually thinking about it.
“I don’t want Dean to worry about…I mean, we’re not even friends as far as he knows.”
“If you say so,” Beverly said dubiously. She had a higher opinion of Dean’s observation skills than John, but if he wanted to live in denial, so be it. “I thought—well, maybe you could tell him ahead of time, so he’s reassured that it’s just for the holiday.”
John put down his fork (he’d been having a little trouble eating one-handed). “Let me think about it,” he said.
That was amazing progress, as far as she was concerned, so she was happy to agree. She didn’t mention it again all night.
It only occurred to her later that John never quite explained what had been eating him earlier, either.
~*~NOW~*~
When Dean pulled up to the Krispy Kreme in Toledo, there was still a police forensic team crawling around. Sam was all for coming back later, but Dean reached across him for the cigar box and pulled out two IDs. He flicked the card with Sam’s picture into Sam’s lap.
“Let’s go,” he said briskly.
“Too many cops,” Sam pointed out, as if Dean were five.
“Nah, they’re distracted. C’mon, Sammy.” He opened his door. “Live a little,” he offered as a parting shot, then climbed out. Sam closed his eyes in a silent prayer, but followed a moment later.
Dean took a quick survey of the officers and made a direct line for the cutest brunette of the bunch. She looked about four years older than him, but in Sam’s experience, age wasn’t nearly as important to Dean as other attributes—like a firm butt, a thin hourglass figure, a slightly naughty, flirtatious demeanor, and of course, that she be breathing.
Sam sauntered over to where Dean and the lady cop had approached each other across the police tape cordoning off the scene. Not surprisingly, they were deep in conversation. Dean’s FBI act had been, if anything, improved by his exposure to the real deal. It was a little sickening.
“Carolyn,” Dean was saying, “what my partner and I need from you all is access to the security tapes” He pointed up at the lens mounted on a nearby streetlamp. Can you tell me who can approve that?”
Carolyn sized up Sam as he arrived behind Dean. Immediately, she began speaking to him, instead of his brother. “I was just explaining to your partner that Deputy Chief Markowitz is running this investigation, and he’s currently at the coroner’s office. I can’t let you into the crime scene without his authorization.”
Dean opened his mouth to suggest she call Markowitz, but Sam nodded. “That’s all right, actually,” he said with a subtle brush against Dean’s arm to tell him he’d take point. “Can you give us directions to the ME’s office?”
“Sure,” she said. She looked stunned—and pleased—that Sam hadn’t tried to pull rank or whip out his dick for a pissing contest. “Give me one second, okay?”
“Okay,” Sam said charmingly. They waited while she walked back to her team, spoke to them for a minute, and then crossed to the side of the lot where their van was parked. When she came back, she had a piece of paper with the address and a little hand-drawn map.
“Here you go. Deputy Chief Markowitz should be there for at least another hour.”
“Great. Thanks,” Sam said. He flipped the page over. She’d written her number on it.
“We need those tapes,” Dean said as they walked to the car, “and how the hell are we gonna get in to the morgue when it’s full of cops, Sammy?”
“Dean. We’ll wait a couple hours and then go in. I think if we can look at the body, we can search it for—”
“Residue from possession, right,” Dean jumped in. “Hey, don’t most human forms of magic…doesn’t the person have to have some connection? Like a hex bag or something?”
“Yeah.”
“So we should check his personal affects, too.”
“Yeah. But first, let’s find the library.” He pulled out the map.
“Sure thing, Hermione,” Dean cracked, pulling out of the Krispy Kreme.
“Huh?” Sam squinted at his brother. “Dude, you know you get no points for calling me a name out of a kids’ book.”
They found the library to kill a couple hours. Sam checked some resources for likely spells that affected the spirits of suicides. He pulled up a number of sources. On impulse, he looked up some of the Mesopotamian books that had been on Lauren’s bookshelf. The lore from the ancient culture was difficult to parse, but he found a couple books on their religion and mythology. He switched to the library catalog and looked up the books he’d found, plus a couple of the more common resources on European witchcraft. The library had some, but not all, so he jotted down the call numbers and logged off.
Dean, meanwhile, had made himself busy with the back newspapers. By the time Sam returned with arms full of books to copy, Dean had a stack of printed microfiche.
“Guess what happened five years ago, Sammy?” he prompted.
“Suicide?” Sam guessed.
“Death by cop, and guess where?”
“Where the Krispy Kreme is now?” Sam said.
“Yahtzee,” Dean replied.
“Great,” Sam said, rolling his eyes. “Okay, well, take a book, start copying.”
They changed into suits in the men’s room after lunch and went on to the coroner’s office. A few minutes later, Dean had bluffed their way in and they were opening the slab with Gareth Barker on it.
“Man, I’m tired of corpses,” Sam said through a sigh. “Okay, GSWs to the chest, but no sulfur—that rules out demons for sure, Dean.”
“Yeah. Sam,” Dean said, pointing under the body’s arm. “That’s a weird spot for a tat, isn’t it?”
Sam bent down to peer at the mark. “Wait, it’s a pentagon,” he said. “Five points, look.” He rolled the corpse up and nodded at Dean so that Dean would lift the arm. The five dots were laid out in a perfect five-sided box. Inside the box were seven little triangles, all pointing in the same direction.
“Here we go again with five,” Dean said. “What the hell is up with that? And what’s that stuff in the middle?”
“I dunno,” Sam said. “But I’ve seen that other symbol before. Hang on, I think I have a way to find out. Uh… Watch the entrance, okay? I wanna get some stuff from the car.”
“Okay,” Dean agreed. To his credit, although he bugged his eyes out like Sam was completely nuts, he didn’t argue.
Sam went back outside and grabbed up the ingredients for a summoning spell. If he could summon the spirit—either of Barker or of whoever had possessed him—it might give them a solid lead, something they were sorely lacking at the moment.
He brought the duffel of equipment back with him. When he started unpacking, Dean looked over the scene. “You’re summoning Barker?”
“Yeah,” Sam said.
“Sammy.”
“Got a better plan?” Sam barked. “Because I don’t feel like waiting another two days while this thing decides to possess someone else.”
“Okay, Sam, okay,” Dean backed off, “I’m not objecting. I just…it’s broad daylight.”
“Yeah, which is why I need you to cover the door, Dean,” Sam said testily.
Dean moved away. He was silent until Sam finished setting up (Spongebob side down and candles arrayed on the nearby tables). “Are you feeling okay?”
“Apart from this job being one string of dead ends, yeah, I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Dean said, like he didn’t believe it, but wasn’t going to push. He leaned on the doorjamb where he could see out the window to the hallway beyond.
Sam read the incantation. Though it had been a while since he had summoned Father Gregory, the ritual went smoothly for him, even in the daylight. Within thirty seconds, light around Barker coalesced into a spectral image.
“Where am I?” the spirit asked.
“We’ll get to that,” Sam assured it hastily. “Mr. Barker, it’s very important that you concentrate. Do you remember anything about the last week?”
“I..,uh…I was at the bar,” he stammered.
“Okay, good,” Sam said, “then what?”
“I dunno, uh…I…there was this guy.”
“What did he look like? Did he start speaking, maybe in a foreign language?”
“No. It’s hard to…where am I?” he said. “Is that…is that…. Oh, God, am I dead?”
“Gareth, stay with me,” Sam coaxed, stepping between Gareth and his earthly remains. “Just a little while longer, okay, a few more questions, and you can move on. I promise.” He held out his hands in a capitulating gesture. “What bar were you at?”
“Uh…L-Lowell’s. Lowell’s Tavern.”
Sam looked at Dean incredulously.
“Isn’t that the bar that David Owen disappeared from?” Dean verified.
“Yeah, and the one Lauren Kennedy came to,” Sam confirmed. “Gareth…what happened with the guy? Did he speak to you, did he knock you out?”
“I…think maybe he roofied me,” Gareth said. “I don’t remember leaving the bar.”
“Okay, what did he look like? Did he tell you his name?”
“Name? Uh…Mike. No, Mark. No…Malcolm. I think. Something like that.”
“Great,” Dean observed. “Sam, wrap it up, dude, this is weird.” He kept glancing into the hallway nervously.
“Hey, I’m the dead guy, here!” Gareth said. He seemed to be getting used to the idea. Unfortunately, that meant he started shimmering around the edges.
“Wait, wait, wait, Gareth, man, don’t go yet!” Sam cried hastily. “Stay with us, Gareth. Is there anything else you can tell us?”
“Well…. I think I kinda went away for a while. I was watching this guy for a few days…. I didn’t feel hungry or anything. But then it felt like…there was someone else with me. And he said…he said we had to get away, away from the man we were watching. He said if we did something…violent, that we’d be released. I don’t remember anything else until…” he looked at Sam in horror, “was I shot?”
Sam nodded slowly, clenching his jaw with a pained expression. “You…you killed two people, then charged a cop,” he told Gareth, “but we think you weren’t in control of yourself.”
“Yeah, Gareth, did you feel like someone or something was in there with you?” Dean asked, using his version of Dad’s Marine voice. “Y’know, forcing you aside, doing what it wanted to do?”
“Uh..,yeah,” Gareth said. He flickered. “Yeah, it did feel like that.” His edges glowed brighter. “And—Namru,” Gareth said.
“Namru?” Dean parroted. “Namru? What the hell does that mean?”
Sam shrugged and started to ask, but Gareth flickered again, and began to shine white. He broke up in a stream of light.
“Gareth! Gareth—wait!” Sam held out his hands, but it was too late. He hadn’t even gotten to the part about the tattoo. Gareth was gone.
~*~THEN~*~
John floored Beverly completely by agreeing to bring Sam and Dean over to her house for Christmas. Less surprisingly, he had a lot of parameters.
“I don’t want you going crazy with presents,” he said as they sat in front of her fire over a late-night drink—beer for him and wine for her. “They get one major gift every year from Santa—well, at least, Sammy still thinks it’s Santa—so I mean it, Bev—you’ll be doing enough already.”
“Fair enough,” she allowed, because honestly she hadn’t been planning a disproportionately generous Christmas. “Let me help out with that Santa present, at least.”
John hesitated. “Tell you what. You can help…if you’re willing to go to the mall.”
“Deal.”
“Good. I hate malls.”
“Spoken like a red-blooded American man. Now, what about stockings?”
He cast his eyes upward in exasperation. “Nothing over five bucks,” he ruled, “and avoid a lot of candy. Dean would eat junk food all the time if you let him, and Sammy gets too hyper after more than a candy bar.”
“No problem.”
“We can put the boys in the guest room at the end of the hall,” he continued next, “and I’ll put my gear in the other one.”
Beverly grinned knowingly, but didn’t object. It was up to John where he slept and she understood he was most nervous about maintaining a fiction for the boys. She imagined he might have a bit of a hang-up about performing, with his sons in the house, too. But she didn’t dare tease him about that.
“I’ll have to get a tree this year, dig out the old ornaments,” she thought aloud instead. “Would it help or hurt if I invited all three of you to trim the tree?”
John pulled his chin. “Help, maybe. Yeah. They’d like it.”
“And I was thinking, then the invitation to stay over won’t seem unprecedented.”
“Good point.” He paused, and in the glow of the fire, she could see him ticking down his mental list. “Oh—dinner,” he said when he got to it. “First, don’t be afraid to make the boys help—they’re used to it and it’ll seem less like a vacation for them.”
“If you say so,” she said, shrugging.
“Second…Dean doesn’t eat peas and Sam hates…basically any form of vegetable.”
“Is there one he hates least?” she asked, shifting away from him to sip her wine.
“Yeah—peas.” He laughed and she barely avoided snorting her wine. “But I think that’s just because Dean hates ‘em.”
“Well, I’ll figure something out. What about green bean casserole?”
“That’s the stuff with the onion rings?”
“Yep.”
“Theoretically it should work,” he mused.
“Okay. Any other dietary restrictions?”
“No, they’ll make do. Oh—pie.”
“What about it?”
“The more the better.”
“Don’t worry. There will be pie. Pumpkin, apple, and mincemeat.”
As December went on, though, John’s anxiety over Christmas grew. He hid it well, but when they came to help set up the tree, he barely looked at her, focusing instead on the boys. Understandably, she thought: He would want a happy memory of his children as they hung ornaments. He lifted Sam onto his shoulders to put the star on the top branch, and when Sam climbed down, and John twisted toward the living room couch, his eye caught Beverly’s. And she saw that the spark his boys had lit there faded when he saw her. It wasn’t that he didn’t care for her, but she recognized the echo of loss that still carried aftershocks six years later. He had turned, not expecting to see Mary; nonetheless he was taken aback when the woman in his sight had brown hair and didn’t bear his wife’s face. His smile had faltered—only for a moment—but when he put it back on again, there was a hint of forced mirth. Still, it was an unexpected gap in the armor she had come to recognize, a crack in John’s veneer of self-discipline.
After that, Beverly continued with the motions right up to Christmas, but in the back of her mind, she did some hard thinking. As wonderful as it was to see Sam and Dean savoring their textbook holiday, she wasn’t doing it just for them. John enjoyed it vicariously through his boys, but she could tell as he bedded them down in the guest room on Christmas Eve, as they shared eggnog by her fire, as Christmas morning dawned and the boys ripped into their presents, that John would rather have been alone with them, not putting up a pretense of pleasure to salve his loneliness—or someone else’s. She barely slept the next night, realizing how her well-meant suggestion had turned to something so painful that he was barely holding himself together.
So she was prepared when he came over on December 26th to apologize for not being as appreciative as he should have been.
“Dean really loves the Walkman,” he told her.
“Yes, he’d said he wanted one.”
“He did?” John frowned. “Spying at the library?”
Beverly grinned. “Not really. I asked what he wanted; he told me. Remember that he didn’t have any idea he was snitching on himself,” she told him, even though she suspected he had known exactly that. “Actually, that’s what gave me the idea.”
“Oh,” John said, surprise in his voice, as if putting the pieces together.
“Coffee?” she suggested, leading him to the kitchen. “And there’s leftover pie.”
“Yeah, great,” he agreed.
She brewed a pot of fresh coffee and warmed up the pie in the microwave. He sat at her table, supposedly watching, but really thinking so hard that she could hear him even when she stuck her head in the fridge for the cream. When she sat down and slid the slice of apple pie across the table in front of his hands, he stared at it for a moment. Then he leaned his forehead into his palm and began to cry.
It was so utterly unlike anything she ever expected out of John Ephraim Winchester that it took Beverly a full minute to decide how to respond. She got up, silently moved beside him, and gently put her arms around his shoulders. She feared he might push her away—prepared to jump back, if he did—but he turned his head into her stomach and clutched her around the waist. She stroked his hair, still not saying anything, for another couple minutes before he drew a ragged, steadying breath and let up the pressure against her back. She let him withdraw, handed him a couple napkins, and artfully turned away to wipe off her sweater. She swiped and fussed over the pilling wool until she could hear that he had composed himself.
“Sorry,” he said. His voice was hoarse, though he hadn’t sobbed aloud at all.
“It’s okay,” she told him very softly.
“I don’t know where that came from,” he claimed.
“Don’t you?” Beverly resisted the urge to smile. “I think I do. But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”
“I just…. Christmas was—perfect. Too perfect, really.”
“Mm-hm,” she said, and thought, Here it comes.
“I’ve kept asking myself for the past six years why I have to drag the boys all over the country. Most people—they lose a loved one, they start over, you know? I mean, I’m never—I could have settled the boys with someone…someone they’d look at as a mother. I could have left them somewhere safe.”
Beverly didn’t understand that, but she said nothing and let him talk out whatever confession he needed to make. He spoke as if the words were being ripped from him, like it hurt to speak them.
“But there’s nowhere safe, nowhere they’ll be protected, except with me. And I’ve been so afraid of—losing someone else—putting someone else in danger, because of us—I haven’t ever…allowed myself to get in close. Until now.” He looked up, eyes red and a little puffy from the tears. It occurred to Beverly that just last week, there had still been a yellowish tint to the skin around the left one, but now it was whole again, apart from a tiny scar like a vertical crow’s foot.
She still didn’t know what to say, though, so she just nodded once. It seemed to be the permission he was looking for to continue.
“And I thought…. I allowed myself to think…maybe something was pushing me here. Maybe there’s a reason we stayed here so long.”
“Four months?” Beverly was shocked into saying.
John nodded solemnly. “For us, that’s a lot.” He said with a little embarrassment, “Dean and I have had some…issues to work out. But he—I think he’s ready again.”
“Ready?”
“For me to get back to work,” John told her. “And it’s true for me, too, Beverly. I—I didn’t mean to get in this close. I’m sorry.”
Beverly took a sip of coffee—now more than cool enough to drink, and bordering on tepid. “I don’t understand what you mean by all that, John, but the sorry part? That I’ve been waiting for.”
“You have?” John looked aghast. “How long?”
“Since yesterday,” Beverly admitted, “No, actually—before that. Probably since you brought Dean and Sam to trim the tree.”
“Why didn’t you…?” John shook his head and took a gulp of coffee.
“Well, I think I was denying it as much as you—not necessarily believing the signs. I think I may have been hoping you’d get past it by the holiday.”
John shook his head again, regretfully. “Made it worse.”
“Yeah, I’d noticed,” Beverly said, hoping it didn’t sound bitter. “But hey, for what it’s worth, John, it was a good run. Honestly, I’d never figured you’d be good for more than a brief fling, anyway.”
John let out a laugh and crinkled his eyes at her gratefully. “Good to know where I stand,” he said with amusement. He looked down and saw the pie as if he’d forgotten it was there. “God, I ruined your—”
“No, you didn’t. I didn’t do Christmas for me, or even for you. I did it for Dean and Sam.”
John smiled sadly, closed-lipped. “Thank you.”
Beverly thought about the jacket she’d bought him, putting Dean’s and Sam’s names on the package and telling Sammy so he would feel better about having something for his father. So, maybe she hadn’t done it all for them, maybe some of it was for John. She thought about her secret wish that John would look at her the way Tom had, would decide to stay for longer than a few hours, or even overnight. Okay, she’d done it for herself, too. But she’d known even then that it was a fantasy, and that the conversation they were having now had been waiting in the wings since the day he’d walked into the library. Anyway, what John needed to hear this moment was that it wasn’t about them, and that was more important than her slightly mixed-up feelings, motivations, and reactions. He’d never asked her to fall in love.
“Besides, I still don’t really want to try filling Mary’s shoes,” she lied. “Even if you thought I could. I’d be flattered, by the way,” she added earnestly, “but I think we both know I’m not Mom material.”
“Huh,” John muttered, which could have meant anything.
“So…does this mean the Winchesters are hitting the open, if snowy, road?” she surmised.
A pained look passed over John’s face. He laced his fingers and twisted them back and forth. “Well. That’s kind of a problem. See, Dean’s birthday—it’s not until the end of January. And for once, we’ve been somewhere long enough that he’s got friends—friends who want him to have a birthday party.”
Beverly shrugged. “Parties are pretty important to kids.”
John grimaced. “Not Dean. He couldn’t care less, usually, long as Sammy an’ me are around. And there’s cake.”
“I guess I’m not seeing the problem, then, if he doesn’t want a party.”
“No—he does.” He cupped his left hand in his right and twisted his wedding ring absently. “If I pull us out of here, well, we can be settled in somewhere else before school starts again. But if I do that—you gotta understand, Dean would never complain. Not in a million years. But he’d take it the wrong way.”
“Okay…” Beverly said slowly. “I still don’t get it.”
John sighed. “Dean, he—well, he screwed the pooch last summer. I blame myself, but the point is that he knows I was plenty pissed at him at the time. Remember how I said he’s terrified I’ll disown him for messing up?”
Beverly nodded.
“Well, that’s why. I’ve been trying to prove to him that we’re okay. But I pull him out without his birthday—”
“Oh, I see. He’ll decide you are mad at him, punishing him deliberately.”
“Exactly.” He rubbed his forehead as if the dilemma gave him a headache.
“Well, don’t you think you should just tell him you’re not mad at him anymore?”
John swallowed. He shook his head.
“You are still mad at him,” she said angrily. “Christ, John, he’s just a kid. Whatever he did or didn’t do, you can’t still blame him for it.”
“I don’t,” he said, sounding hoarse. “I blame myself. But there was a lesson and Dean had to learn it,” he insisted.
“You’re impossible.”
“So I’ve heard,” he said ruefully. “But…I’ve been thinking about what you said. About letting Dean have something on his own terms? He wants this. He won’t say it, but he wants it. And I want to give it to him.”
“Well, then…stay, anyway. Don’t let breaking up with me chase you out of town.”
“No, I have to move on.” He scrubbed his face. “There’s no work here—I’ve pretty much tapped the area for the time being.” His elbows came to rest on the table and he leaned his cheek on one hand.
“The garage—”
“I’m not talking about the garage.”
“Oh, your research?”
John nodded, thumb against his lower lip. He sipped the coffee and made a face.
“Here, let me warm that up,” she said, taking the mug back to the microwave. Thirty seconds later, she brought it back and nuked her own cup. She realized it was no use. They’d pulled up stakes before and they would undoubtedly do it again, despite her urging. “Well, how about President’s Day? That’s winter break. Just as easy to transfer then.”
John considered that, but Beverly could tell when he rejected the idea. “It’s a good time to move them, I agree. But I can’t stay. Bev, I wondered… I mean, I know you keep saying you don’t want kids. But… you know them. They like you. I’m sure it’s too much to ask, but—”
“You want me to take care of Sam and Dean for a month and a half so you can bug out and live the life of an itinerant bachelor?”
John blinked. Beverly regretted stating the situation so baldly. It was clear he’d taken himself way out of his comfort zone to even ask, and she’d mocked him as her own defense mechanism. She could see him take the insult on the chin, though, and he nodded as if to acknowledge the fairness of her shot. “No. I… nevermind,” he said abashedly, sliding out of the chair in retreat.
“John,” she called. He froze, but didn’t turn around. “I’ll do it.”
Continued....
Author name:
gwendolyngraceArtist name:
sazzletteGenre: (rps, wincest, het, gen) Gen / Het
Pairing: John/OFC
Rating: R
Word Count: 46,450, Posted in 5 1/2 parts
Warnings/Spoilers: (if applicable) Told in two eras: 2007 and 1989. The 2007 storyline is set between “Bad Day at Black Rock” and “Sin City”; the flashback sequence references “Something Wicked.”
Summary: While cleaning out John’s storage locker, Sam finds an envelope from his father addressed to someone from their past. Dean objects to delivering it, but Sam happens upon a hunt that takes them practically to her doorstep. Could they be demons released when the Gate opened? In 1989, shortly after the shtriga hunt, the Winchesters settle in small-town Ohio while John figures out whether or not he can keep hunting. Beverly Kirkland, the children’s librarian, meets the boys and their father. After a chance encounter with John, she reluctantly grows closer to him, all the while wondering what it is about the family that doesn’t quite add up….
Author’s Notes: So many things about this, but I don’t want to give stuff away. Right. Well, first off, I had this in my head long before “Supernatural: Rising Son” came out, and before I found out that Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Mary-Louise Parker were a couple (and then they broke up before I finished drafting this). The idea came up while I was writing Trost und Freude for a holiday exchange - but takes place *before* that in the Wee!chester timeline. I’m very grateful to
sazzlette for her art of awesome (10 sketches, count'em OMG! - AND a music mix!), etakyma for her unfailing willingness to read what I’ve written and tell me how to fix it, july_july_july for her incredibly insightful beta-reading, and Wikipedia for lots of helpful information, ranging from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles collectibles to the names of Kansas Governors to facts (and missing information) about our MOTW. Link to fic: Part One, Part Two, Part Three-A, Part Three-B, Part Four, Part Five
Back to Part Three-b
~*~THEN~*~
John must have felt especially guilty about their argument, because when he came over the next night, he made it up to her in no uncertain terms. Then he asked when her next day off from the library was.
“Why are you asking?” she said, only half-suspicious.
“It’s about time for me to change the oil in the Impala. Thought I’d work on yours at the same time.”
“Joint oil change? Why John, how romantic,” she teased.
“I’m just saying,” he said sheepishly, “it’s just as easy to service both cars on the same day.”
“Mm-hmm.” She lazed against his shoulder. “Hey, I meant to ask you…what are your Thanksgiving plans?”
John shrugged. “Sweetheart, I don’t know what I’m doing next week, let alone end of the month. Usually we get Boston Market or something. Can’t see trying to do a whole bird in that postage stamp of an oven. Even if I could cook.”
“You could—”
“No,” John said. It wasn’t gruff, or snappish, but it was decidedly final. “Like I said, Dean is already pretty sure something’s up. I told him to ask you for that ride.”
Beverly levered herself onto her elbow. “But why should that be such a signal, John? I mean…it’s not like I’m a stranger.”
“They’re used to relying on me or no one,” John told her. Again, though the statement was spoken mildly, there was a brusqueness that warned against pressing the subject.
“I suppose.” She leaned over to plant a kiss, but just as he threaded his fingers through her hair, his pager went off.
“Mmph,” John complained, disentangling himself. “I have to get that.”
“You’re on call for the garage?” she surmised.
“Sorry,” he muttered. He fumbled for his jeans and pulled the pager off the belt clip. It glowed green and beeped again. “Use your phone?” he requested.
“Yeah, sure.” She rolled across the bed for the phone on its cradle. “Here,” she said, handing it over.
John dialed and identified himself. There was a long pause while the person he’d called held a one-sided conversation. “Yeah, hang on a second,” John said crisply. He covered the handset and motioned to Beverly for pen and paper. She nodded, pulled out a pad from her bedside table, and clicked the light on for him. While she collected his clothes, he scribbled several notes, grunting, and then repeated back the address. Beverly smirked at his spelling—he automatically used NATO phonetics.
“Okay. It’ll be…about 25 minutes.” He hung up and gave her a hangdog look. “Sorry. I gotta go.”
“No problem,” Beverly said, showing him his clothes. He kissed her gratefully and dressed efficiently.
“So…when are you off next?” he asked. “You didn’t say.”
“Oh…Wednesday,” she said, distracted. She put on her robe to walk downstairs with him.
“Damn. I can’t Wednesday.”
“It’s all right, John.”
“Look, I’ll—”
“Call me?” Beverly finished for him. “Okay.” He kissed her again and slid out the door.
But he didn’t call. Sam and Dean didn’t come in for over a week. When they did show up again, Dean only said that their dad had been really busy and he’d told them to skip the after school program so the bus could take them straight home.
“How’s school?” she asked. Dean looked about to say something flip, but instead he told her, in no uncertain terms, that his teacher had it in for him.
“Why’s that?”
“We had this spelling bee an’ she disqualified me even though I spelled everything right. She hates it when I spell things the cool way,” Dean explained.
“The cool way?” she asked.
Sam looked up and supplied the answer. “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta….”
“Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India,” Dean joined in.
“Okay, okay, I get it,” Beverly said. “You know, I think I know just the books for you,” she added, inspiration striking. She went and got The King’s Fifth, Kim, and several books from the Men at Arms series.
Dean leafed through the books on arms and armaments first. “Cool,” he breathed. He picked up Kim. “What’s this about?” he frowned at the volume.
“It’s about a young man who lived in India and became a spy,” she said nonchalantly. She helped several other students with their selections while Dean casually opened the hardcover classic. Neil Phillips sat with Dean for a bit and they talked in whispers. Dean even showed Neil one of the illustrated plates and muttered something about the kind of rifle one of the soldiers was holding.
A little while later, Dean looked at his watch. “Aw, crap! C’mon, Sammy, we gotta go. Dad said to be out front by 4:30.” While he got his bag together, he said a hurried goodbye to Neil with a promise to see him in school.
Sam held up a finger and read to the end of the paragraph. “Okay,” he said, slamming the book on its bookmark and tossing the book into his backpack.
“Dean!” Beverly called to him. He stopped in his tracks and turned back. She pointed to the book still in his hand. He looked at it and after a moment’s debate, snatched Sam’s backpack off his shoulder.
“Sammy, gimme your library card.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause I want it.” Dean fished around while Sam tried ineffectually to retrieve his pack. Dean found the card and zipped up the pouch. “Go wait for Dad,” he told Sam, tossing the backpack, which Sam caught. “I’ll be right there.” He came back to the counter, handing over the book and his brother’s library card.
“Have you…thought about your Christmas list yet?” Beverly asked in an effort for small talk, wisely choosing not to call attention to the seminal event of Dean borrowing a book.
Dean shrugged. “Oh, Dad’ll get us some clothes. I think Sam wants some Ninja Turtle thing.”
“But how about you, Dean? Is there something you want?” She didn’t bother to talk about Santa; it was clear he didn’t believe, and ten was too old for most kids, anyway. Especially with another friend sitting close enough to overhear.
“Well, honestly, if I had a Walkman, I could listen to our tapes even when I’m not in the car,” he confided. “But they’re expensive, aren’t they?”
“They can be,” Beverly agreed. “You’d better get going, if your father’s waiting.”
It occurred to her that Dean’s willingness to supply information spoke volumes. Perhaps she was making progress. If nothing else, she had some inside intelligence to give John. Her cynical side told her perhaps Dean meant for her to pass the ideas along, but that didn’t really matter. Somehow she suspected that with all John had going on, the boys’ Christmas presents were the last things on his mind. It wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet. But a plan was forming slowly in her mind, something she could do for all of them. She’d have to be careful about floating it past John. Between his pride and his secretive nature, it would be difficult to bring about.
His left arm was in a sling when she saw him a few days later. His face was swollen on the left and his left eye looked like someone had rubbed it with a cheese grater.
“Oh my God, what happened?” she asked.
John shook his head gingerly. “Just a bar fight. It’s nothing.”
“This happened in MacArthur’s?”
“No.” He tried to smile, winced, and touched the tip of his tongue to the split in the corner of his bottom lip. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Are you—I mean, are you going to charge the other guy with assault, at least?”
John looked at her as if she didn’t understand the basics of male interaction. “No need,” he said finally. “He was just…passing through. Long gone—by the time he could move again, after I’d kicked his ass.”
“When did this happen, though? There wasn’t anything on the news—”
“Oh, I’m not surprised.” He dismissed her protest. “Look, I said don’t worry about it.” He reached into his bag and pulled out some of Sam’s borrowed books. “Came to return these and do a little work of my own.”
“Where are the boys?”
“They’ll be here soon,” he said cryptically. “I wanted to talk to you alone for a minute.”
“Okay….” Beverly sensed bad news.
“Dean will barely put down the book he took out the other day,” John said. “I got home from my…from work, and he was on the couch completely engrossed.”
Beverly grinned widely. “That’s great! Isn’t it?” she asked, because John didn’t look overjoyed.
He nodded slowly, as if it hurt to move his head. “It’s great, don’t get me wrong.”
“Wait—you’re not happy he found something he likes to read?”
“No—I’m glad. What I’m not glad about is that I keep having to take it away just so he’ll do his chores.”
“Well, John, you’re not the first parent who had to compete with gripping fiction.”
John grunted at her attempt to inject humor. “Yeah, well, I know you want to get his mind moving in the right direction—and believe me, he could use some hustle-up on his other schoolwork—but I rely on Dean to help me out. His homework takes him long enough—I don’t need him taking off on flights of…fantasy…when it’s Sam’s bath time.”
Beverly cocked her head. “John. You’re not making any sense. Dean’s only ten. You make it sound like he’s doing something wrong—no wonder he worries about your good opinion of him. You should be encouraging—”
He backed up a step as if she’d slapped him. “Don’t tell me how to raise my boys,” he said dangerously.
“I’m not telling you what to do,” Beverly said through clenched teeth, “except to keep your voice down in my library,” she added, unable to resist making the dig. “I’m just pointing out that Dean’s reading skills, his thirst for learning, could use some spark.”
“Dean’s interest in learning is peachy, provided it’s something he wants to learn.” John dropped his head, cringing again. “I know,” he said more gently, “I know it seems backward.” He looked beyond her, wouldn’t meet her eye. Beverly couldn’t look away from the angry red and dark purple bruising around his eye, down the left side of his jaw. “Dean’s plenty smart, and he does just fine when he—what’s the word you teachers like to use—applies himself.”
Beverly didn’t rise to the bait or point out that she wasn’t a teacher. She opened her palm in a gesture to tell him to continue.
“Dean…Dean’s motivation is not like other kids’. When Mary—” he swallowed—”When Mary died, Dean didn’t talk afterward. Not for a long time; not at all at first, and then not more than a few words. What brought him back, what gave him a sense of purpose, was taking care of Sam. So sue me, I’ve used that. We all get by a little easier that way. Now, Sam can take care of some things for himself, but he’s still really young. And you might have noticed he’s a pretty…willful kid.”
Beverly remained stone-faced.
John sighed. He closed his eyes and took a moment to compose himself before continuing more calmly. “I give Dean plenty of time to slack off, when it won’t interfere with his chores or our schedule as a family. He can do what he wants when he’s older. But for a little while longer, I need him focused. I don’t need him deciding when he can shrug off his responsibilities.”
Beverly held his gaze for a moment. “Really?” she said when he didn’t say anything, either. “Christ, John, would Dean really be so worried about losing your interest or attention or whatever if you just gave it to him on his terms for a bit, instead of always using him for what you need?”
John stared at her. “That’s not what I meant—”
“I know it’s not. But it’s what you said,” she retorted. Finally John hung his head. She opened her drawer for her purse. “Come on, let’s get some coffee,” she said, “and you can tell me what’s really going on.”
John shook his head, but held his ground this time. “No, they should get here soon. I need to wait for them.”
“You said that before—what does that mean?”
John’s mouth twitched and he grunted in discomfort. “Urban orienteering,” he said. “But—later? Maybe dinner? It’s been a while since we had what you’d call a date.”
“I’m done here at six,” she said. Something was bothering him, that was sure, and it wasn’t the fact that Dean was reading Kipling.
Dean and Sam came in about half an hour later, pink-cheeked and a little sweaty. They ignored the children’s section, going instead to Reference where their father had retreated. A few minutes later they came back toward her, looking intensely pleased with themselves.
“You two look like you’ve had an adventure,” she commented.
“Boy, did we ever!” Sam said excitedly. “Dad blindfolded us an’ drove around for a while and then he let us out of the car an’—”
“Sammy,” Dean interrupted sternly.
“No, Dean, I want to hear. Go on, Sam, what were you saying?”
Sam looked nervously at his brother. At Beverly’s encouraging nod, he continued. “Um. Well, he let us out and took our blindfolds off, an’ he tol’ us to figure out where the libarry was from where we were.”
“I see,” she said, aware that a little disapproval was creeping into her tone, next to the confusion. “How far away were you from here?” she asked.
“Only about a mile,” Dean answered hastily. “Dad does that kinda stuff for us sometimes. Like when we go on hikes or when he takes us camping. It’s like being in Scouts.”
“S’better than Scouts,” Sam said, “‘cause Scouts hafta wear stupid uniforms.”
“Right,” Dean agreed. He looked proud, as if he’d taught Sam that scouting was inferior to their dad’s training.
Beverly could see the logic in a scouting troop of two, especially as John always seemed to be scraping by. Neither boy had seemed distraught or even mildly put out because of John’s methods of exercise. If they’d been in a big city, or if the boys were younger, she might have objected, tried to tell them how dangerous their idea of fun was.
But then, come to think of it, it was a lot less dangerous than hanging around on the basketball courts trying drugs. It was healthier than sitting at home watching TV. A court probably wouldn’t understand the nuances, certainly wouldn’t see John as anything other than the labels he fit into: Vietnam veteran, widower, blue-collar worker, borderline alcoholic, obsessive-compulsive control freak. And if she called the cops on him, something warned her, they’d just pack up and run.
Like they’d run from Oklahoma.
Like they’d run from Wisconsin.
And there was no point being the cause of upheaval in their lives. Not when she had the opportunity to influence them toward stability.
“Hey, Dean,” she asked to change the subject, “Your dad says you’re really enjoying Kim.”
Dean chewed his lip. “Yeah. Kinda got sucked into it,” he mumbled.
“Well, that can happen sometimes,” she said gently. “The nice thing about a book is you can always put it down. It’ll still be there later.”
“It’ll take a while, though,” he sighed, “‘cause I’m s’posed to wait ‘til after we’re done with everything else. But that’s okay. We can read a little at night before Lights Out,” Dean volunteered. “Sammy’n’me’re readin’ it together,” he continued to explain quite confidently in response to her cocked eyebrow. “Well, I mean, I’m readin’ the good parts to him.”
“That’s great!” Beverly said with a big smile. “Well, when you do finish it, there’s more Kipling where that came from.”
“More what?”
Beverly blinked. “Rudyard Kipling, Dean. The author.”
“Oh,” Dean said, though it was clear that authorship or an author’s talent meant nothing to him. Only the story mattered.
“He wrote The Jungle Books, too,” she explained.
That earned a wrinkled nose. “Sam likes Baloo, but I think the monkeys have the best song.”
Beverly nodded. The transition didn’t shock her. “Well, Kipling wrote the story on which the animated film is based. Anyway, let me know when you’re ready for more.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said, sadly noncommittal. It was obvious that he was humoring her now.
John returned a while later and they left. His wink (with his uninjured eye) served as the only promise that he’d see her that evening.
He called the library at 5:30. “So, should I pick you up? At home or at work?”
“Oh—no, let’s just meet wherever—your pick.”
“Okay. Uh…Andolino’s,” he said after a moment’s hesitation.
It was the best Italian in the area. “Are you sure?” It was also fairly expensive.
“Yeah. I had a good week.”
“John, you’re the only person I know who can call getting beaten to a pulp a good week.”
“What? Oh,” he said, sounding distracted, and then chuckled. “What can I say? I’ve got a hard head. I’ll call in a reservation—see you there at 18:30?”
“Okay.” Beverly hung up, overjoyed that Judith didn’t work on Sundays.
Over her seafood scampi and his scallops Fra Diavolo, she pitched the proposal that had been on her mind since she’d suggested Thanksgiving together. “Look—I know you’ll probably hate this idea, but… hear me out, okay?”
John scrunched up his face infinitesimally to allow her to continue.
“I asked Dean recently what he wanted for Christmas, and if you all had plans. He said you boys usually stay pretty low-key.”
“Yeah,” John said guardedly.
“Well, I usually get invited to my in-laws, but—I hate it,” she confided. With a deep breath, she plunged on very quickly, “What do you say you let me give you all a full-bore Christmas? I mean everything: Tree, turkey and trimmings, even a fire in my living room. The boys can wake up on Christmas morning with stockings and presents and the whole deal.”
John didn’t say anything right away. Oddly, it gave Beverly hope; she’d expected to be cut off and shut down before she could even throw in the crackling fire and cozy images of stockings. Silence meant John was actually thinking about it.
“I don’t want Dean to worry about…I mean, we’re not even friends as far as he knows.”
“If you say so,” Beverly said dubiously. She had a higher opinion of Dean’s observation skills than John, but if he wanted to live in denial, so be it. “I thought—well, maybe you could tell him ahead of time, so he’s reassured that it’s just for the holiday.”
John put down his fork (he’d been having a little trouble eating one-handed). “Let me think about it,” he said.
That was amazing progress, as far as she was concerned, so she was happy to agree. She didn’t mention it again all night.
It only occurred to her later that John never quite explained what had been eating him earlier, either.
~*~NOW~*~
When Dean pulled up to the Krispy Kreme in Toledo, there was still a police forensic team crawling around. Sam was all for coming back later, but Dean reached across him for the cigar box and pulled out two IDs. He flicked the card with Sam’s picture into Sam’s lap.
“Let’s go,” he said briskly.
“Too many cops,” Sam pointed out, as if Dean were five.
“Nah, they’re distracted. C’mon, Sammy.” He opened his door. “Live a little,” he offered as a parting shot, then climbed out. Sam closed his eyes in a silent prayer, but followed a moment later.
Dean took a quick survey of the officers and made a direct line for the cutest brunette of the bunch. She looked about four years older than him, but in Sam’s experience, age wasn’t nearly as important to Dean as other attributes—like a firm butt, a thin hourglass figure, a slightly naughty, flirtatious demeanor, and of course, that she be breathing.
Sam sauntered over to where Dean and the lady cop had approached each other across the police tape cordoning off the scene. Not surprisingly, they were deep in conversation. Dean’s FBI act had been, if anything, improved by his exposure to the real deal. It was a little sickening.
“Carolyn,” Dean was saying, “what my partner and I need from you all is access to the security tapes” He pointed up at the lens mounted on a nearby streetlamp. Can you tell me who can approve that?”
Carolyn sized up Sam as he arrived behind Dean. Immediately, she began speaking to him, instead of his brother. “I was just explaining to your partner that Deputy Chief Markowitz is running this investigation, and he’s currently at the coroner’s office. I can’t let you into the crime scene without his authorization.”
Dean opened his mouth to suggest she call Markowitz, but Sam nodded. “That’s all right, actually,” he said with a subtle brush against Dean’s arm to tell him he’d take point. “Can you give us directions to the ME’s office?”
“Sure,” she said. She looked stunned—and pleased—that Sam hadn’t tried to pull rank or whip out his dick for a pissing contest. “Give me one second, okay?”
“Okay,” Sam said charmingly. They waited while she walked back to her team, spoke to them for a minute, and then crossed to the side of the lot where their van was parked. When she came back, she had a piece of paper with the address and a little hand-drawn map.
“Here you go. Deputy Chief Markowitz should be there for at least another hour.”
“Great. Thanks,” Sam said. He flipped the page over. She’d written her number on it.
“We need those tapes,” Dean said as they walked to the car, “and how the hell are we gonna get in to the morgue when it’s full of cops, Sammy?”
“Dean. We’ll wait a couple hours and then go in. I think if we can look at the body, we can search it for—”
“Residue from possession, right,” Dean jumped in. “Hey, don’t most human forms of magic…doesn’t the person have to have some connection? Like a hex bag or something?”
“Yeah.”
“So we should check his personal affects, too.”
“Yeah. But first, let’s find the library.” He pulled out the map.
“Sure thing, Hermione,” Dean cracked, pulling out of the Krispy Kreme.
“Huh?” Sam squinted at his brother. “Dude, you know you get no points for calling me a name out of a kids’ book.”
They found the library to kill a couple hours. Sam checked some resources for likely spells that affected the spirits of suicides. He pulled up a number of sources. On impulse, he looked up some of the Mesopotamian books that had been on Lauren’s bookshelf. The lore from the ancient culture was difficult to parse, but he found a couple books on their religion and mythology. He switched to the library catalog and looked up the books he’d found, plus a couple of the more common resources on European witchcraft. The library had some, but not all, so he jotted down the call numbers and logged off.
Dean, meanwhile, had made himself busy with the back newspapers. By the time Sam returned with arms full of books to copy, Dean had a stack of printed microfiche.
“Guess what happened five years ago, Sammy?” he prompted.
“Suicide?” Sam guessed.
“Death by cop, and guess where?”
“Where the Krispy Kreme is now?” Sam said.
“Yahtzee,” Dean replied.
“Great,” Sam said, rolling his eyes. “Okay, well, take a book, start copying.”
They changed into suits in the men’s room after lunch and went on to the coroner’s office. A few minutes later, Dean had bluffed their way in and they were opening the slab with Gareth Barker on it.
“Man, I’m tired of corpses,” Sam said through a sigh. “Okay, GSWs to the chest, but no sulfur—that rules out demons for sure, Dean.”
“Yeah. Sam,” Dean said, pointing under the body’s arm. “That’s a weird spot for a tat, isn’t it?”
Sam bent down to peer at the mark. “Wait, it’s a pentagon,” he said. “Five points, look.” He rolled the corpse up and nodded at Dean so that Dean would lift the arm. The five dots were laid out in a perfect five-sided box. Inside the box were seven little triangles, all pointing in the same direction.
“Here we go again with five,” Dean said. “What the hell is up with that? And what’s that stuff in the middle?”
“I dunno,” Sam said. “But I’ve seen that other symbol before. Hang on, I think I have a way to find out. Uh… Watch the entrance, okay? I wanna get some stuff from the car.”
“Okay,” Dean agreed. To his credit, although he bugged his eyes out like Sam was completely nuts, he didn’t argue.
Sam went back outside and grabbed up the ingredients for a summoning spell. If he could summon the spirit—either of Barker or of whoever had possessed him—it might give them a solid lead, something they were sorely lacking at the moment.
He brought the duffel of equipment back with him. When he started unpacking, Dean looked over the scene. “You’re summoning Barker?”
“Yeah,” Sam said.
“Sammy.”
“Got a better plan?” Sam barked. “Because I don’t feel like waiting another two days while this thing decides to possess someone else.”
“Okay, Sam, okay,” Dean backed off, “I’m not objecting. I just…it’s broad daylight.”
“Yeah, which is why I need you to cover the door, Dean,” Sam said testily.
Dean moved away. He was silent until Sam finished setting up (Spongebob side down and candles arrayed on the nearby tables). “Are you feeling okay?”
“Apart from this job being one string of dead ends, yeah, I’m fine.”
“Okay,” Dean said, like he didn’t believe it, but wasn’t going to push. He leaned on the doorjamb where he could see out the window to the hallway beyond.
Sam read the incantation. Though it had been a while since he had summoned Father Gregory, the ritual went smoothly for him, even in the daylight. Within thirty seconds, light around Barker coalesced into a spectral image.
“Where am I?” the spirit asked.
“We’ll get to that,” Sam assured it hastily. “Mr. Barker, it’s very important that you concentrate. Do you remember anything about the last week?”
“I..,uh…I was at the bar,” he stammered.
“Okay, good,” Sam said, “then what?”
“I dunno, uh…I…there was this guy.”
“What did he look like? Did he start speaking, maybe in a foreign language?”
“No. It’s hard to…where am I?” he said. “Is that…is that…. Oh, God, am I dead?”
“Gareth, stay with me,” Sam coaxed, stepping between Gareth and his earthly remains. “Just a little while longer, okay, a few more questions, and you can move on. I promise.” He held out his hands in a capitulating gesture. “What bar were you at?”
“Uh…L-Lowell’s. Lowell’s Tavern.”
Sam looked at Dean incredulously.
“Isn’t that the bar that David Owen disappeared from?” Dean verified.
“Yeah, and the one Lauren Kennedy came to,” Sam confirmed. “Gareth…what happened with the guy? Did he speak to you, did he knock you out?”
“I…think maybe he roofied me,” Gareth said. “I don’t remember leaving the bar.”
“Okay, what did he look like? Did he tell you his name?”
“Name? Uh…Mike. No, Mark. No…Malcolm. I think. Something like that.”
“Great,” Dean observed. “Sam, wrap it up, dude, this is weird.” He kept glancing into the hallway nervously.
“Hey, I’m the dead guy, here!” Gareth said. He seemed to be getting used to the idea. Unfortunately, that meant he started shimmering around the edges.
“Wait, wait, wait, Gareth, man, don’t go yet!” Sam cried hastily. “Stay with us, Gareth. Is there anything else you can tell us?”
“Well…. I think I kinda went away for a while. I was watching this guy for a few days…. I didn’t feel hungry or anything. But then it felt like…there was someone else with me. And he said…he said we had to get away, away from the man we were watching. He said if we did something…violent, that we’d be released. I don’t remember anything else until…” he looked at Sam in horror, “was I shot?”
Sam nodded slowly, clenching his jaw with a pained expression. “You…you killed two people, then charged a cop,” he told Gareth, “but we think you weren’t in control of yourself.”
“Yeah, Gareth, did you feel like someone or something was in there with you?” Dean asked, using his version of Dad’s Marine voice. “Y’know, forcing you aside, doing what it wanted to do?”
“Uh..,yeah,” Gareth said. He flickered. “Yeah, it did feel like that.” His edges glowed brighter. “And—Namru,” Gareth said.
“Namru?” Dean parroted. “Namru? What the hell does that mean?”
Sam shrugged and started to ask, but Gareth flickered again, and began to shine white. He broke up in a stream of light.
“Gareth! Gareth—wait!” Sam held out his hands, but it was too late. He hadn’t even gotten to the part about the tattoo. Gareth was gone.
~*~THEN~*~
John floored Beverly completely by agreeing to bring Sam and Dean over to her house for Christmas. Less surprisingly, he had a lot of parameters.
“I don’t want you going crazy with presents,” he said as they sat in front of her fire over a late-night drink—beer for him and wine for her. “They get one major gift every year from Santa—well, at least, Sammy still thinks it’s Santa—so I mean it, Bev—you’ll be doing enough already.”
“Fair enough,” she allowed, because honestly she hadn’t been planning a disproportionately generous Christmas. “Let me help out with that Santa present, at least.”
John hesitated. “Tell you what. You can help…if you’re willing to go to the mall.”
“Deal.”
“Good. I hate malls.”
“Spoken like a red-blooded American man. Now, what about stockings?”
He cast his eyes upward in exasperation. “Nothing over five bucks,” he ruled, “and avoid a lot of candy. Dean would eat junk food all the time if you let him, and Sammy gets too hyper after more than a candy bar.”
“No problem.”
“We can put the boys in the guest room at the end of the hall,” he continued next, “and I’ll put my gear in the other one.”
Beverly grinned knowingly, but didn’t object. It was up to John where he slept and she understood he was most nervous about maintaining a fiction for the boys. She imagined he might have a bit of a hang-up about performing, with his sons in the house, too. But she didn’t dare tease him about that.
“I’ll have to get a tree this year, dig out the old ornaments,” she thought aloud instead. “Would it help or hurt if I invited all three of you to trim the tree?”
John pulled his chin. “Help, maybe. Yeah. They’d like it.”
“And I was thinking, then the invitation to stay over won’t seem unprecedented.”
“Good point.” He paused, and in the glow of the fire, she could see him ticking down his mental list. “Oh—dinner,” he said when he got to it. “First, don’t be afraid to make the boys help—they’re used to it and it’ll seem less like a vacation for them.”
“If you say so,” she said, shrugging.
“Second…Dean doesn’t eat peas and Sam hates…basically any form of vegetable.”
“Is there one he hates least?” she asked, shifting away from him to sip her wine.
“Yeah—peas.” He laughed and she barely avoided snorting her wine. “But I think that’s just because Dean hates ‘em.”
“Well, I’ll figure something out. What about green bean casserole?”
“That’s the stuff with the onion rings?”
“Yep.”
“Theoretically it should work,” he mused.
“Okay. Any other dietary restrictions?”
“No, they’ll make do. Oh—pie.”
“What about it?”
“The more the better.”
“Don’t worry. There will be pie. Pumpkin, apple, and mincemeat.”
As December went on, though, John’s anxiety over Christmas grew. He hid it well, but when they came to help set up the tree, he barely looked at her, focusing instead on the boys. Understandably, she thought: He would want a happy memory of his children as they hung ornaments. He lifted Sam onto his shoulders to put the star on the top branch, and when Sam climbed down, and John twisted toward the living room couch, his eye caught Beverly’s. And she saw that the spark his boys had lit there faded when he saw her. It wasn’t that he didn’t care for her, but she recognized the echo of loss that still carried aftershocks six years later. He had turned, not expecting to see Mary; nonetheless he was taken aback when the woman in his sight had brown hair and didn’t bear his wife’s face. His smile had faltered—only for a moment—but when he put it back on again, there was a hint of forced mirth. Still, it was an unexpected gap in the armor she had come to recognize, a crack in John’s veneer of self-discipline.
After that, Beverly continued with the motions right up to Christmas, but in the back of her mind, she did some hard thinking. As wonderful as it was to see Sam and Dean savoring their textbook holiday, she wasn’t doing it just for them. John enjoyed it vicariously through his boys, but she could tell as he bedded them down in the guest room on Christmas Eve, as they shared eggnog by her fire, as Christmas morning dawned and the boys ripped into their presents, that John would rather have been alone with them, not putting up a pretense of pleasure to salve his loneliness—or someone else’s. She barely slept the next night, realizing how her well-meant suggestion had turned to something so painful that he was barely holding himself together.
So she was prepared when he came over on December 26th to apologize for not being as appreciative as he should have been.
“Dean really loves the Walkman,” he told her.
“Yes, he’d said he wanted one.”
“He did?” John frowned. “Spying at the library?”
Beverly grinned. “Not really. I asked what he wanted; he told me. Remember that he didn’t have any idea he was snitching on himself,” she told him, even though she suspected he had known exactly that. “Actually, that’s what gave me the idea.”
“Oh,” John said, surprise in his voice, as if putting the pieces together.
“Coffee?” she suggested, leading him to the kitchen. “And there’s leftover pie.”
“Yeah, great,” he agreed.
She brewed a pot of fresh coffee and warmed up the pie in the microwave. He sat at her table, supposedly watching, but really thinking so hard that she could hear him even when she stuck her head in the fridge for the cream. When she sat down and slid the slice of apple pie across the table in front of his hands, he stared at it for a moment. Then he leaned his forehead into his palm and began to cry.
It was so utterly unlike anything she ever expected out of John Ephraim Winchester that it took Beverly a full minute to decide how to respond. She got up, silently moved beside him, and gently put her arms around his shoulders. She feared he might push her away—prepared to jump back, if he did—but he turned his head into her stomach and clutched her around the waist. She stroked his hair, still not saying anything, for another couple minutes before he drew a ragged, steadying breath and let up the pressure against her back. She let him withdraw, handed him a couple napkins, and artfully turned away to wipe off her sweater. She swiped and fussed over the pilling wool until she could hear that he had composed himself.
“Sorry,” he said. His voice was hoarse, though he hadn’t sobbed aloud at all.
“It’s okay,” she told him very softly.
“I don’t know where that came from,” he claimed.
“Don’t you?” Beverly resisted the urge to smile. “I think I do. But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”
“I just…. Christmas was—perfect. Too perfect, really.”
“Mm-hm,” she said, and thought, Here it comes.
“I’ve kept asking myself for the past six years why I have to drag the boys all over the country. Most people—they lose a loved one, they start over, you know? I mean, I’m never—I could have settled the boys with someone…someone they’d look at as a mother. I could have left them somewhere safe.”
Beverly didn’t understand that, but she said nothing and let him talk out whatever confession he needed to make. He spoke as if the words were being ripped from him, like it hurt to speak them.
“But there’s nowhere safe, nowhere they’ll be protected, except with me. And I’ve been so afraid of—losing someone else—putting someone else in danger, because of us—I haven’t ever…allowed myself to get in close. Until now.” He looked up, eyes red and a little puffy from the tears. It occurred to Beverly that just last week, there had still been a yellowish tint to the skin around the left one, but now it was whole again, apart from a tiny scar like a vertical crow’s foot.
She still didn’t know what to say, though, so she just nodded once. It seemed to be the permission he was looking for to continue.
“And I thought…. I allowed myself to think…maybe something was pushing me here. Maybe there’s a reason we stayed here so long.”
“Four months?” Beverly was shocked into saying.
John nodded solemnly. “For us, that’s a lot.” He said with a little embarrassment, “Dean and I have had some…issues to work out. But he—I think he’s ready again.”
“Ready?”
“For me to get back to work,” John told her. “And it’s true for me, too, Beverly. I—I didn’t mean to get in this close. I’m sorry.”
Beverly took a sip of coffee—now more than cool enough to drink, and bordering on tepid. “I don’t understand what you mean by all that, John, but the sorry part? That I’ve been waiting for.”
“You have?” John looked aghast. “How long?”
“Since yesterday,” Beverly admitted, “No, actually—before that. Probably since you brought Dean and Sam to trim the tree.”
“Why didn’t you…?” John shook his head and took a gulp of coffee.
“Well, I think I was denying it as much as you—not necessarily believing the signs. I think I may have been hoping you’d get past it by the holiday.”
John shook his head again, regretfully. “Made it worse.”
“Yeah, I’d noticed,” Beverly said, hoping it didn’t sound bitter. “But hey, for what it’s worth, John, it was a good run. Honestly, I’d never figured you’d be good for more than a brief fling, anyway.”
John let out a laugh and crinkled his eyes at her gratefully. “Good to know where I stand,” he said with amusement. He looked down and saw the pie as if he’d forgotten it was there. “God, I ruined your—”
“No, you didn’t. I didn’t do Christmas for me, or even for you. I did it for Dean and Sam.”
John smiled sadly, closed-lipped. “Thank you.”
Beverly thought about the jacket she’d bought him, putting Dean’s and Sam’s names on the package and telling Sammy so he would feel better about having something for his father. So, maybe she hadn’t done it all for them, maybe some of it was for John. She thought about her secret wish that John would look at her the way Tom had, would decide to stay for longer than a few hours, or even overnight. Okay, she’d done it for herself, too. But she’d known even then that it was a fantasy, and that the conversation they were having now had been waiting in the wings since the day he’d walked into the library. Anyway, what John needed to hear this moment was that it wasn’t about them, and that was more important than her slightly mixed-up feelings, motivations, and reactions. He’d never asked her to fall in love.
“Besides, I still don’t really want to try filling Mary’s shoes,” she lied. “Even if you thought I could. I’d be flattered, by the way,” she added earnestly, “but I think we both know I’m not Mom material.”
“Huh,” John muttered, which could have meant anything.
“So…does this mean the Winchesters are hitting the open, if snowy, road?” she surmised.
A pained look passed over John’s face. He laced his fingers and twisted them back and forth. “Well. That’s kind of a problem. See, Dean’s birthday—it’s not until the end of January. And for once, we’ve been somewhere long enough that he’s got friends—friends who want him to have a birthday party.”
Beverly shrugged. “Parties are pretty important to kids.”
John grimaced. “Not Dean. He couldn’t care less, usually, long as Sammy an’ me are around. And there’s cake.”
“I guess I’m not seeing the problem, then, if he doesn’t want a party.”
“No—he does.” He cupped his left hand in his right and twisted his wedding ring absently. “If I pull us out of here, well, we can be settled in somewhere else before school starts again. But if I do that—you gotta understand, Dean would never complain. Not in a million years. But he’d take it the wrong way.”
“Okay…” Beverly said slowly. “I still don’t get it.”
John sighed. “Dean, he—well, he screwed the pooch last summer. I blame myself, but the point is that he knows I was plenty pissed at him at the time. Remember how I said he’s terrified I’ll disown him for messing up?”
Beverly nodded.
“Well, that’s why. I’ve been trying to prove to him that we’re okay. But I pull him out without his birthday—”
“Oh, I see. He’ll decide you are mad at him, punishing him deliberately.”
“Exactly.” He rubbed his forehead as if the dilemma gave him a headache.
“Well, don’t you think you should just tell him you’re not mad at him anymore?”
John swallowed. He shook his head.
“You are still mad at him,” she said angrily. “Christ, John, he’s just a kid. Whatever he did or didn’t do, you can’t still blame him for it.”
“I don’t,” he said, sounding hoarse. “I blame myself. But there was a lesson and Dean had to learn it,” he insisted.
“You’re impossible.”
“So I’ve heard,” he said ruefully. “But…I’ve been thinking about what you said. About letting Dean have something on his own terms? He wants this. He won’t say it, but he wants it. And I want to give it to him.”
“Well, then…stay, anyway. Don’t let breaking up with me chase you out of town.”
“No, I have to move on.” He scrubbed his face. “There’s no work here—I’ve pretty much tapped the area for the time being.” His elbows came to rest on the table and he leaned his cheek on one hand.
“The garage—”
“I’m not talking about the garage.”
“Oh, your research?”
John nodded, thumb against his lower lip. He sipped the coffee and made a face.
“Here, let me warm that up,” she said, taking the mug back to the microwave. Thirty seconds later, she brought it back and nuked her own cup. She realized it was no use. They’d pulled up stakes before and they would undoubtedly do it again, despite her urging. “Well, how about President’s Day? That’s winter break. Just as easy to transfer then.”
John considered that, but Beverly could tell when he rejected the idea. “It’s a good time to move them, I agree. But I can’t stay. Bev, I wondered… I mean, I know you keep saying you don’t want kids. But… you know them. They like you. I’m sure it’s too much to ask, but—”
“You want me to take care of Sam and Dean for a month and a half so you can bug out and live the life of an itinerant bachelor?”
John blinked. Beverly regretted stating the situation so baldly. It was clear he’d taken himself way out of his comfort zone to even ask, and she’d mocked him as her own defense mechanism. She could see him take the insult on the chin, though, and he nodded as if to acknowledge the fairness of her shot. “No. I… nevermind,” he said abashedly, sliding out of the chair in retreat.
“John,” she called. He froze, but didn’t turn around. “I’ll do it.”
Continued....
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Seriously. This is what I'd imagine a movie-length SPN to be like. The characterisations are so spot-on, I'm seeing it play like a film in my head. Dean and Sam's brotherly interactions are captured absolutely perfect, that funny sort of tension that underlies everything they do, the give and take, the teamwork, the awkwardness and the casual affection - it blows my mind. *How* did you do this so perfectly?
And John. Oh, my dog, I love John. You've created him precisely as I imagine, flawed and screwed up and bottled so tight it's a wonder he doesn't just explode in a spray of suds ... but a good man, withal, well-meaning in his however-cockeyed intentions, and devoted to his sons.
Beverly? Is so effortlessly real I feel like I already know her. I forget she's not something instrinsic to the show. And somehow you've made the view from her eyes seem effortless and realistic and utterly amazing. Her psychology and her observations of John and the boys (and her fears for the boys, initially) are perfect.
Yeah. I'm lovin' this an awful lot. Plus ending up friggin' chatting with Gareth the ghost? LOL, was just the sort of off-kilter thing we'd expect Show to give us.
Heh. I am a happy reader. And if I don't manage another long comment in the chapters to follow, know that I'm raving internally with every single page. You? Are amazing. And this so definitely goes to mems.
On with the show! :-)
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Also, wow, what a compliment! Like I said, the more I found out about the family Winchester in "TuF", the more I knew I had to write the story of Beverly. But my main angst has been, all along, how people would react to the presence of a woman like her - like what she represents - in John's (and the boys') lives. So I let Dean have that reaction for the audience, and I think that worked.
As for talking to Gareth... I realized I needed some fast exposition or they would never get a handle on the case. But talking to him? That was pure channeling of Dead Like Me / Pushing Daisies.
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Also, I don't know Dead Like Me/PushingDaisies, but whatever you did, it worked awesomely! Hee! Again, marvelous tale and I'm SO glad you wrote it! It makes the haitus seem just a leetle bit shorter. :-)
Cheers ~
Erin
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And I loved the interactions between the Weechesters and her as well as John and her. Speaking off, young Sam and Dean rang very true for that timeframe.
The present-tense gave us a lovely case-file as well. All around great fun.
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And yay - another thing I always worry about is the balance between the case and the characters, so it's great to hear that it offered drama and mystery as well as Wee!chester cuteness (except, without being too cute, I hope).
So glad you liked it!
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Anyway, as I got to the bottom of this page, I saw my buddy
Thank-you for sharing this. It's been more than a pleasure to read.
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Wow. Thank you so much - I know it's a success when the spouse is ignored, but even the dogs? Damn.
Since I see you've left an equally complimentary comment next chapter, I'll stick with Thank you so much! here and skip on over to reply in more detail there.