fic: contusio varians, 3 -- SPN
This one sort of took off! I had about 1,000 words in my unending doc of bits of the year at the Braeden's, and when I went to polish off the ending somehow it ran away from me and doubled in size.
contusio varians: a bruise which waxes and wanes according to an unknown cycle
-3-
Three weeks after Dean shows up Lisa is ordered -- with a smile, but it's still an order -- over to Lilah Bradford's house for a girl's night out. The assembled group of neighborhood women lasts through fifteen minutes of catching up before they start in on her.
"The guy at your house. This is The Dean we're talking about, right?" Lilah takes the lead, fanning herself dramatically. "The one who showed up at Ben's birthday party a couple years back?"
Lisa shifts in her seat on Lilah's couch, then leans forward to pour herself more wine. Back when she'd first spilled the details of her wild weekend with The Dean, she'd done it knowing she'd never see him again. He hadn't been real, not to her friends, not even to her, any more than she'd been real to him. He'd been a fun story, a flashing grin and a muscular thigh and a smattering of intriguing scars under her hands. That and a really hot car.
As far as she could tell, only thing left unchanged was the car. And even the car, Dean had let slip, had been rebuilt.
"Yeah," Lisa says. "But--"
Shirin from two doors down passes around a container of homemade cookies and grins. "He still got that leather jacket?"
"Yeah." She doesn't want to talk about Dean. Doesn't know how to explain that he'd spent most of the first three days asleep, or his stutter of embarrassment when she'd asked if he wanted to stay for awhile. The week it had taken her to notice that he wasn't leaving the house unless she or Ben invited him out. The absent way he had of massaging his wrists and the back of his neck, like the bones there rubbed together wrong. The fact that he hadn't once made anything approaching a pass at her. How she wasn't sure whether to be disappointed or relieved.
When I imagine myself happy, he'd said. Now that he was here, hadn't traded himself to an archangel, wasn't dead, he wouldn't explain what he'd meant. She wasn't even sure he knew. I shouldn't have laid that on you, he'd said last time she'd tried to bring it up.
"And the ass?" Lilah adds.
"Yeah. But it's not like that," Lisa settles on, finally.
God, she'd all but encouraged this. After he'd left two years ago they'd teased her mercilessly and because she couldn't talk about everything else that had happened she'd let them, lamenting that the time just wasn't right for a reprise of her weekend of bliss. It wasn't that she liked being the center of the neighborhood gossip, but what was she supposed to say? That Dean and his brother had torched some kind of monster who'd snatched her son? Annie, the only adult who'd been taken, had fled the neighborhood a week later. And Karen, Katie's mom, had refused to talk about it afterwards.
Lilah and the others regard her as something of a mildly scandalous bohemian, almost entirely due to the fact that she makes her living running a yoga studio and had a kid out of wedlock. Cicero is still pretty conservative in that particularly midwestern kind of way. Despite growing up here, raising her son here, attending PTA meetings and soccer games and hosting neighborhood cookouts, she’s never quite been one of them. She left this place in the dust and then came back a mother and most of the other women in the neighborhood think she’s crazy for either the leaving or the returning. Maybe both.
She’s in the kitchen opening another bottle of wine -- wishing for something stronger -- when Karen catches her and leans over Lilah’s counter, hunched in conspiracy.
“Does this, you know, him being back -- Dean -- does this mean it’s...” Karen’s wide-eyed and skimming along the surface of jittery, not quite there yet, but working on it. She lowers her voice even more. “Dean back, doesn’t mean it’s back. Right?”
It takes Lisa a moment to follow. “No, no, there’s nothing to worry about,” she says when she catches on. “The changeling, it’s still dead. It’s not coming back.”
Narrowly averted Armageddon had a funny way of eclipsing the things she’d thought of as dangerous before. As far as Lisa knows, only she and Dean and some guy in North Dakota who calls Dean every couple of days even know how close it came. Lisa doesn’t quite know why she even believes it, it’s all so beyond the scope of her experience; but the look on Dean’s face, the way his eyes had blanked out when he’d told her the bare bones, had been enough.
“Oh,” Karen says, deflating. Lisa grabs a juice glass from Lilah’s cabinet and pours out a slug of pinot noir, hands it over. Karen gives her a watery smile and raises the glass in salute before downing it like a shot. “So... if he’s not here for, for that, why’s he staying with you? I mean--” Karen breaks off, like she’s just now realizing that maybe everyone prying into Lisa’s private life tonight might be just slightly awkward. But Indiana politeness only goes so far. “I ran into Sid at Meijer’s. Guess he’s talked to Dean a couple of times over the fence. Says Deans seems a little... off. I’m just, you know. Worried. About you and Ben.”
Lisa knows she means it, and Karen’s the only other single mom on the block, so she bites back whatever defensive, sarcastic retort that wants to come bubbling up before it has a chance to form. She can’t be honest with anyone else, and she can’t really tell Karen everything, but she can trust her with a little. With part of the truth.
"He saved Ben's life. Saved Katie's life, saved Annie and all those other kids. And he told me the truth about it, about the changeling.” It’s still coming out defensive to Lisa’s own ears, too much like she feels she has to explain, but how do you explain without the parts about Lucifer and vessels and magic portals to hell and the end of everything? “He’s... had a tough year. Least I can do is give him a place to stay until he's back on his feet."
Now that she's sure the monsters under the bed weren’t back, Karen allows a little wry humor to surface. “So you two aren’t...”
Lisa laughed, because she had no idea what else to do. “No. Not, you know. Right now.”
“You mean not yet.”
“Maybe,” Lisa said.
By the time she walked the four houses back home it was after ten and she was well on her way to stumbling with wine, drunker than she’d been in recent memory. But it was okay, because Ben was at her mom and dad’s in Indianapolis for a minor league baseball game and she didn’t have to drive and the house wouldn’t be dark because Dean would be awake because after that first week Dean didn’t seem to sleep much. It was something she hadn’t asked him about yet, but she would. At some point. At some point she would.
He wasn't the man she'd met in a seedy bar ten years ago, though she'd caught quicksilver glimpses of him in the curl of his mouth when he thought something was funny, but that curl was all he gave because so far Dean didn’t laugh. He was quiet now in ways she'd never have imagined of that kid back then. But she wasn't the same person she'd been then, either.
She gets the front door open on her third try and steps carefully over the salt line and doesn’t disturb the devil’s trap she knows is under the rug but it all takes a lot more concentration than normal, and this drives giggles to her surface. When she looks up Dean’s standing in the hall leading from the living room, a shotgun in one hand and what looks like a mismatched pair of socks in the other.
“What monster do those work against?” Lisa manages to get out.
Dean just stares at her, lowers the shotgun. “What?”
“I know about iron and silver and salt and lamb’s blood, but what do you repel with socks?”
He looks down at the two white socks dangling in his hand -- she can tell they’re not from the same pair from years of doing Ben’s laundry -- and huffs out something as close to a laugh as she’s heard him come. A long way off from the real thing, but a start.
“It’s a joke, Dean,” she says when he seems to struggle with a response.
“I know that,” he says, a little peevish, but at least there’s something there. “It wasn’t a very funny joke.”
“I live with a fifth grader, give me a break. Just wait, soon you too will have your sense of humor entirely destroyed.”
It’s the wrong thing to say and she’s had too much wine to quite know why. Dean’s still looking down at the socks in his hand, then his eyes flick to the gun. “My sense of humor left awhile ago,” he says, and she can tell he’s trying hard to joke back but she doesn’t think he is. Joking. “Lemme just...” He waves the gun she knows he keeps under his bed, secured in a battered locker in deference to her kid, and disappears back down the hall towards the guest room. So she follows him.
His bed is military neat and covered in two piles: unruly yet-to-be-matched socks and a line of rolled up sock balls, like pill bugs on the march. The top drawer to the dresser is open and she can just see more precise rolls that she thinks are tee-shirts from the fabric. She’s never known anyone who rolls their tee-shirts, but it’s a compact storage method, she’ll give him that. Maybe she should have him teach Ben. The closet door is open and there are a couple of his jackets and over shirts inside and a bunch of empty hangers. Two army-green canvas duffles deflated and kicked to the corner underneath.
She hadn’t thought to ask whether he needed clothes, hadn’t noticed that judging by what she can see he was probably wearing the same six tee-shirts and... four long-sleeve over shirts. He certainly had enough socks though. What was it with the males of the species and socks, anyway? Ben was going through a phase where he wore two pairs at a time with his sneakers.
Dean drops the shotgun onto the bed and the socks on the pile and stands there with his hands on his hips like she’d ruined his sock-folding rhythm. She hadn’t really been in here since that first night but it is her house so she curls up in the armchair in the corner and watches as he starts back in on the pile.
After a few minutes Dean shifts to perch cross-legged on the bed, back to the headboard. It’s relaxing, watching his hands work. The gradual shrinking of the chaotic pile, the growing battalion of carefully matched socks, the steady in and out of Dean’s breathing. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask her about Lilah’s party, though he probably will in the morning if she doesn’t bring it up first. If there’s one thing she hasn’t figured out how to deal with besides his tightly-wound grief, it’s these silences, and she’s not so sure they’re not intertwined. But tonight it’s easier because she doesn’t want to talk about the party and Karen’s fear and all the assumptions. What she wants to do is kiss him, maybe, but she doesn’t, and that’s probably just the wine talking anyway.
The overhead light’s still on when she comes awake, twisted around awkward in the chair. There’s a fleece throw from the hall closet wrapped around her and when she unfolds herself, half-blind and parched, it slides to the carpet. She straightens up and scrubs at her eyes, gritty and gummed together with old mascara, ugh.
Dean’s dead still with sleep on top of the bedspread. Half-propped in the pillows against the headboard, the army of balled up socks scattered around his bare ankles where they stick out from the cuffs of his jeans, one of his hands curled loose against his chest. The shotgun is still there within reach and she thinks about moving it someplace safer. Thinks about rousing him enough to get him to lie down, but her dad was a cop once and she knows better.
So instead she picks up the throw and leaves it on the end of the bed where he can grab it if he wakes in the night. Turns off the light, closes his door, and heads to her bathroom to brush the stale wine taste away. When she sees the time she almost laughs: it’s only just after midnight. She tries to imagine explaining this to Lilah and the others, falling asleep watching The Dean meticulously folding his pile of socks.
A real neighborhood scandal, right here.
-4-
contusio varians: a bruise which waxes and wanes according to an unknown cycle
-3-
Three weeks after Dean shows up Lisa is ordered -- with a smile, but it's still an order -- over to Lilah Bradford's house for a girl's night out. The assembled group of neighborhood women lasts through fifteen minutes of catching up before they start in on her.
"The guy at your house. This is The Dean we're talking about, right?" Lilah takes the lead, fanning herself dramatically. "The one who showed up at Ben's birthday party a couple years back?"
Lisa shifts in her seat on Lilah's couch, then leans forward to pour herself more wine. Back when she'd first spilled the details of her wild weekend with The Dean, she'd done it knowing she'd never see him again. He hadn't been real, not to her friends, not even to her, any more than she'd been real to him. He'd been a fun story, a flashing grin and a muscular thigh and a smattering of intriguing scars under her hands. That and a really hot car.
As far as she could tell, only thing left unchanged was the car. And even the car, Dean had let slip, had been rebuilt.
"Yeah," Lisa says. "But--"
Shirin from two doors down passes around a container of homemade cookies and grins. "He still got that leather jacket?"
"Yeah." She doesn't want to talk about Dean. Doesn't know how to explain that he'd spent most of the first three days asleep, or his stutter of embarrassment when she'd asked if he wanted to stay for awhile. The week it had taken her to notice that he wasn't leaving the house unless she or Ben invited him out. The absent way he had of massaging his wrists and the back of his neck, like the bones there rubbed together wrong. The fact that he hadn't once made anything approaching a pass at her. How she wasn't sure whether to be disappointed or relieved.
When I imagine myself happy, he'd said. Now that he was here, hadn't traded himself to an archangel, wasn't dead, he wouldn't explain what he'd meant. She wasn't even sure he knew. I shouldn't have laid that on you, he'd said last time she'd tried to bring it up.
"And the ass?" Lilah adds.
"Yeah. But it's not like that," Lisa settles on, finally.
God, she'd all but encouraged this. After he'd left two years ago they'd teased her mercilessly and because she couldn't talk about everything else that had happened she'd let them, lamenting that the time just wasn't right for a reprise of her weekend of bliss. It wasn't that she liked being the center of the neighborhood gossip, but what was she supposed to say? That Dean and his brother had torched some kind of monster who'd snatched her son? Annie, the only adult who'd been taken, had fled the neighborhood a week later. And Karen, Katie's mom, had refused to talk about it afterwards.
Lilah and the others regard her as something of a mildly scandalous bohemian, almost entirely due to the fact that she makes her living running a yoga studio and had a kid out of wedlock. Cicero is still pretty conservative in that particularly midwestern kind of way. Despite growing up here, raising her son here, attending PTA meetings and soccer games and hosting neighborhood cookouts, she’s never quite been one of them. She left this place in the dust and then came back a mother and most of the other women in the neighborhood think she’s crazy for either the leaving or the returning. Maybe both.
She’s in the kitchen opening another bottle of wine -- wishing for something stronger -- when Karen catches her and leans over Lilah’s counter, hunched in conspiracy.
“Does this, you know, him being back -- Dean -- does this mean it’s...” Karen’s wide-eyed and skimming along the surface of jittery, not quite there yet, but working on it. She lowers her voice even more. “Dean back, doesn’t mean it’s back. Right?”
It takes Lisa a moment to follow. “No, no, there’s nothing to worry about,” she says when she catches on. “The changeling, it’s still dead. It’s not coming back.”
Narrowly averted Armageddon had a funny way of eclipsing the things she’d thought of as dangerous before. As far as Lisa knows, only she and Dean and some guy in North Dakota who calls Dean every couple of days even know how close it came. Lisa doesn’t quite know why she even believes it, it’s all so beyond the scope of her experience; but the look on Dean’s face, the way his eyes had blanked out when he’d told her the bare bones, had been enough.
“Oh,” Karen says, deflating. Lisa grabs a juice glass from Lilah’s cabinet and pours out a slug of pinot noir, hands it over. Karen gives her a watery smile and raises the glass in salute before downing it like a shot. “So... if he’s not here for, for that, why’s he staying with you? I mean--” Karen breaks off, like she’s just now realizing that maybe everyone prying into Lisa’s private life tonight might be just slightly awkward. But Indiana politeness only goes so far. “I ran into Sid at Meijer’s. Guess he’s talked to Dean a couple of times over the fence. Says Deans seems a little... off. I’m just, you know. Worried. About you and Ben.”
Lisa knows she means it, and Karen’s the only other single mom on the block, so she bites back whatever defensive, sarcastic retort that wants to come bubbling up before it has a chance to form. She can’t be honest with anyone else, and she can’t really tell Karen everything, but she can trust her with a little. With part of the truth.
"He saved Ben's life. Saved Katie's life, saved Annie and all those other kids. And he told me the truth about it, about the changeling.” It’s still coming out defensive to Lisa’s own ears, too much like she feels she has to explain, but how do you explain without the parts about Lucifer and vessels and magic portals to hell and the end of everything? “He’s... had a tough year. Least I can do is give him a place to stay until he's back on his feet."
Now that she's sure the monsters under the bed weren’t back, Karen allows a little wry humor to surface. “So you two aren’t...”
Lisa laughed, because she had no idea what else to do. “No. Not, you know. Right now.”
“You mean not yet.”
“Maybe,” Lisa said.
By the time she walked the four houses back home it was after ten and she was well on her way to stumbling with wine, drunker than she’d been in recent memory. But it was okay, because Ben was at her mom and dad’s in Indianapolis for a minor league baseball game and she didn’t have to drive and the house wouldn’t be dark because Dean would be awake because after that first week Dean didn’t seem to sleep much. It was something she hadn’t asked him about yet, but she would. At some point. At some point she would.
He wasn't the man she'd met in a seedy bar ten years ago, though she'd caught quicksilver glimpses of him in the curl of his mouth when he thought something was funny, but that curl was all he gave because so far Dean didn’t laugh. He was quiet now in ways she'd never have imagined of that kid back then. But she wasn't the same person she'd been then, either.
She gets the front door open on her third try and steps carefully over the salt line and doesn’t disturb the devil’s trap she knows is under the rug but it all takes a lot more concentration than normal, and this drives giggles to her surface. When she looks up Dean’s standing in the hall leading from the living room, a shotgun in one hand and what looks like a mismatched pair of socks in the other.
“What monster do those work against?” Lisa manages to get out.
Dean just stares at her, lowers the shotgun. “What?”
“I know about iron and silver and salt and lamb’s blood, but what do you repel with socks?”
He looks down at the two white socks dangling in his hand -- she can tell they’re not from the same pair from years of doing Ben’s laundry -- and huffs out something as close to a laugh as she’s heard him come. A long way off from the real thing, but a start.
“It’s a joke, Dean,” she says when he seems to struggle with a response.
“I know that,” he says, a little peevish, but at least there’s something there. “It wasn’t a very funny joke.”
“I live with a fifth grader, give me a break. Just wait, soon you too will have your sense of humor entirely destroyed.”
It’s the wrong thing to say and she’s had too much wine to quite know why. Dean’s still looking down at the socks in his hand, then his eyes flick to the gun. “My sense of humor left awhile ago,” he says, and she can tell he’s trying hard to joke back but she doesn’t think he is. Joking. “Lemme just...” He waves the gun she knows he keeps under his bed, secured in a battered locker in deference to her kid, and disappears back down the hall towards the guest room. So she follows him.
His bed is military neat and covered in two piles: unruly yet-to-be-matched socks and a line of rolled up sock balls, like pill bugs on the march. The top drawer to the dresser is open and she can just see more precise rolls that she thinks are tee-shirts from the fabric. She’s never known anyone who rolls their tee-shirts, but it’s a compact storage method, she’ll give him that. Maybe she should have him teach Ben. The closet door is open and there are a couple of his jackets and over shirts inside and a bunch of empty hangers. Two army-green canvas duffles deflated and kicked to the corner underneath.
She hadn’t thought to ask whether he needed clothes, hadn’t noticed that judging by what she can see he was probably wearing the same six tee-shirts and... four long-sleeve over shirts. He certainly had enough socks though. What was it with the males of the species and socks, anyway? Ben was going through a phase where he wore two pairs at a time with his sneakers.
Dean drops the shotgun onto the bed and the socks on the pile and stands there with his hands on his hips like she’d ruined his sock-folding rhythm. She hadn’t really been in here since that first night but it is her house so she curls up in the armchair in the corner and watches as he starts back in on the pile.
After a few minutes Dean shifts to perch cross-legged on the bed, back to the headboard. It’s relaxing, watching his hands work. The gradual shrinking of the chaotic pile, the growing battalion of carefully matched socks, the steady in and out of Dean’s breathing. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask her about Lilah’s party, though he probably will in the morning if she doesn’t bring it up first. If there’s one thing she hasn’t figured out how to deal with besides his tightly-wound grief, it’s these silences, and she’s not so sure they’re not intertwined. But tonight it’s easier because she doesn’t want to talk about the party and Karen’s fear and all the assumptions. What she wants to do is kiss him, maybe, but she doesn’t, and that’s probably just the wine talking anyway.
The overhead light’s still on when she comes awake, twisted around awkward in the chair. There’s a fleece throw from the hall closet wrapped around her and when she unfolds herself, half-blind and parched, it slides to the carpet. She straightens up and scrubs at her eyes, gritty and gummed together with old mascara, ugh.
Dean’s dead still with sleep on top of the bedspread. Half-propped in the pillows against the headboard, the army of balled up socks scattered around his bare ankles where they stick out from the cuffs of his jeans, one of his hands curled loose against his chest. The shotgun is still there within reach and she thinks about moving it someplace safer. Thinks about rousing him enough to get him to lie down, but her dad was a cop once and she knows better.
So instead she picks up the throw and leaves it on the end of the bed where he can grab it if he wakes in the night. Turns off the light, closes his door, and heads to her bathroom to brush the stale wine taste away. When she sees the time she almost laughs: it’s only just after midnight. She tries to imagine explaining this to Lilah and the others, falling asleep watching The Dean meticulously folding his pile of socks.
A real neighborhood scandal, right here.
-4-