SPN Fic: 4 Times ... Run (Gen, Pre-Series)
Title: Four Times the Winchesters Had to Move (And Once They Didn't): Run
Author: Dodger Winslow
Genre: Gen, Pre-series
Rating: R for language
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while ...
Author's Note: This is the first part (of 5) of a dramatically re-worked version of the story originally written for lilacsigil in the spn_summerfic fic exchange. She wanted something about John dealing with his kids and domestic stuff while hunting, and something involving female law enforcement (canon or OC) interacting with any Winchester, Four Times the Winchesters Had to Move (And Once They Didn't) is the story I came up for her to address those prompts. The original version can be found in the spn_summerfic comm. This version, on the other hand, is dramatically different in many ways from the original, particularly in the articulations of 2 (See Me. Know Me. Remember Me.) and 3 (Failure is Not an Option), and to large degree, 5 (The Teacher's Lounge Coffee Klatch). The original did not have titles for the sections because they did not beg for them. This version does, and is equally broken out to read more as 5 stories tied together in the end than as one story segmented into 5 parts.
Summary (Run): Pulling a chair out from under the cheap-ass wood veneer desk, John stationed himself in front of the door until morning. He didn’t know if a double barrel load of buckshot tearing a twelve gauge hole at center mass would make a dead thing deader, or if it would just piss the damned thing off; but if whatever was out there tried to come through the door after his boys, he was going to find out.
A/N: This is an expansion of a drabble I wrote eons ago when I first entered SPN fandom called Run. That drabble set up a situation from an outsider POV that I always wanted to explore in more detail. This gave me the opportunity to do so.
Four Times the Winchesters Had to Move (And Once They Didn’t)
-1-
Run.
John thought he heard something in the middle of the night: the quiet thud of weight falling against the motel room door, small scratches of something trying to get in. His eyes popped open; his heart began to pound. Untangling himself from the little-boy sprawl of his son’s outflung arms and legs, he slipped out of bed and peered out the peephole to the parking lot beyond. He couldn’t see any more or less than what he’d seen the last time he checked. The lot was still virtually empty; the Impala, still parked in the same slot it had occupied for the last two weeks.
He wasn’t really sure what to do, so he didn’t do much of anything. It made him feel a little safer to double up the salt lines across the threshold and window sills, so he did. Figuring it couldn’t hurt anything, he muttered a few of the incantations he’d found last week in the library, then threw in a verse or two of The Lord’s Prayer just for good measure.
He thought about calling Jim, but decided against it. He had to learn to do this on his own sooner or later. If he used Jim for a crutch much longer, he was going to forget how to walk on his own altogether. He just had to get his head right, remember that thumps and bumps in the night were part of the gig. Wind rustling through the trees, small animals scratching around doors and windows … every damn sound didn’t mean the end of the world. They weren’t all boogie men creeping in for the kill.
He must have looked out the peephole half a dozen times over the next hour or so, but there wasn’t anything out there. Nothing he could see, at least. He checked on the boys again, found the same thing he’d found the last thirty times he’d checked on them. Sammy was sound asleep and drooling. Dean’s eyes were closed, but they popped open the moment John touched him, the same way they’d popped open the last thirty times John touched him. He needed to stop bothering the kid, but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t make himself stop reaching out just to make sure Dean was still there, make sure Dean was real.
"Hey, bud," John whispered, smiling as much as he could despite the grapefruit-sized wad of pure panic lodged in his throat between his chin and his Adam’s apple. "How you doin?"
Dean didn’t answer. He just waited, watching John intently, looking to him for some kind of sign that everything was okay, that nothing was wrong, that it was safe for him to close his eyes again because the world wasn’t going to come to an end the moment he stopped looking.
Something scratched at the door again. The sound was so soft it could have been a tree branch brushing against a window pane. But it wasn’t.
Dean’s gaze jumped to the door. He stared at it with ferociously specific attention, waiting for it to do something. Spontaneously combust maybe. When nothing happened, he turned his attention back to John, went back to waiting. Watching. Trusting.
"Just the wind, son," John lied. "Nothing to worry about, okay?"
Dean nodded, believing John even when he didn’t believe him.
John reached out, brushed the hair back from his son’s eyes. He smiled again, hoping it looked a little less desperate than it felt, before re-crossing the room to look out the peephole again. He still couldn’t see anything, but he was sure there was something there now. He didn’t know what it was, but he could smell it. He could feel it.
Pulling a chair out from under the cheap-ass wood veneer desk, John stationed himself in front of the door until morning. He didn’t know if a double barrel load of buckshot tearing a twelve gauge hole at center mass would make a dead thing deader, or if it would just piss the damned thing off; but if whatever was out there tried to come through the door after his boys, he was going to find out.
The night lasted three lifetimes plus an eternity. By the time the sun broke over the horizon to stain the sky pink with coming day, every muscle in his body was knotted to cramps of tension and flat-out fear. He waited until the worst of the parking lot’s shadows had been chased back to their holes before he rousted Dean out of bed, packed everything they owned in one duffel and a diaper bag. Popping a binky in Sammy’s mouth to keep him quiet, John picked the baby up out of a drawer Dean had pulled out the night before to make a poor man’s crib and wrapped him in a blanket one of Jim’s parishioners had donated to their little lost cause. When the kid looked more like a wooly caterpillar than he did a Winchester, John handed him off to Dean.
Dean took his little brother without a word, held him tight up against his chest, but carefully, too, just like Mary’d taught him.
Mary …
John dropped to one knee, met his four-year-old’s ancient eyes with as much nothing-to-it calm as he could muster. "Okay, bud," he said, his voice little more than a whisper. "I’m not sure what we’re going to find out there, but we need to be ready for anything, okay?"
Dean nodded.
"When I open the door," John went on, "I want you to stay behind me. Keep Sammy up close to you, just like you’re doing now, but stay behind me. You’re doing perfect now, so I want you to keep doing it just like that, okay? But stay behind me, Dean. That’s important. Keep my body between you and the outside until I say different, okay? Do you understand?"
Dean nodded again.
"Good boy. When I get the door open, if I see anything I don’t like, I’m going to tell you to run. If I tell you that, I want you to run, okay? Run as fast as you can, straight to the Impala." He pulled the keys out of his pocket, put them in Dean’s hand and folded his son’s pudgy fingers closed over them. "Unlock the door and get in, then lock the door behind you. Don’t look around. Don’t look behind you. Just get in the car and lock the door. That’s your whole job on this one, okay, bud? Run to the Impala, unlock the door, get in, lock the door behind you. Got it?"
Dean nodded a third time.
"Good boy," John said. "You’re a good boy, Dean." A sudden rush of panic tried to push its way up into his eyes, so John reached out, put a hand behind his son’s neck and pulled him in close. He could feel Dean trembling against him, could feel the warmth of Sammy’s small body pressed between them. "As fast as you can, Dean," he said, the faint scent of dirty diapers mixing with the sweet clean of Dean’s hair. "Don’t wait for me. I need you to protect Sammy on this one. You’re in charge of Sammy, so you worry about him and let me worry about me, okay?"
He felt Dean nod this time.
"Good boy," he said again. He kissed the top of Dean’s head, lowered his face enough so his mouth was right by Dean’s ear when he whispered, "You’re a good boy, Dean. A good soldier. I love you, bud. I’m proud of you."
He stood abruptly, turned away from his trembling son to crack the shotgun and check its load again. The stink of rotting blood tainted the air heavy. The stench had grown stronger with every hour as the endless night wore its way to dawn, and he could hear the buzz of flies on the other side of the door. He struggled to remember what kind of things Jim had said carried the smell of death around inside them like a terminal case of bad breath as he clicked the twelve gauge back together again, seated the butt securely against his hip and put one hand on the doorknob. He hadn’t heard any scratching for several hours, but there was still something out there, he was sure of it.
John took a moment to glance around the motel room one last time, make sure he’d gotten everything that mattered. The weapons. His research. What few toys the boys had. The salt. They were all packed in the duffel slung across his back, or heavy in the diaper bag that hung off his shoulder like an old lady’s purse. He drew several deep breaths, braced himself for whatever was on the other side of the door before looking down at Dean and smiling. "You ready?"
Dean nodded.
"Good man," John said. "And remember: no waiting for me. If I tell you to run, you take your brother, and go. Don’t look back, Dean. Just go, okay?"
Dean nodded.
"I know I can count on you, bud," John said. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, "Don’t be scared, Dean. Everything’s going to be okay. This is all just a precaution. It’s better to be safe than sorry."
Dean crowded in a little closer, pressed a little tighter to the back of John’s leg.
"Okay," John said more to himself than to Dean. "Enough of the chit-chat, ladies. Let’s do it to it." He peered out the peephole again. It was light enough outside now to put anything that couldn’t tolerate sunlight on the bench. According to Jim, that alone evened out the odds considerably. Whatever was left, he had to face it eventually, so it might as well be now. Here. On his terms instead of theirs.
His terms being a wing, a prayer and enough adrenaline amping through his system to re-animate a three-day-dead elephant as he stepped out into God knows what with nothing but a twelve-gauge and his own body to protect a babe-in-arms and the terrorized four-year-old cowering at his back.
Taking one last, bracing breath, John threw the deadbolt and pulled the door open.
There was a body leaning against the door jam. It fell against his legs, heavy and stiff and cold. It scared the crap out of him … scared him enough he came within a hair’s breadth of discharged the twelve gauge on reflex. "Son of a bitch." Kicking the body off, John stepped back and damned near when ass-over-teakettle when he ran into Dean.
Dean stumbled back a couple of steps, and John put down an instinctive hand to steady him. It wasn’t necessary. Even with both hands full of little brother, he’d already re-established his balance, was rock steady on his feet and ready to take off like a bat-out-of-hell at a single word. His eyes were fixed on John’s face, his attention so singularly focused on doing his one job right that he didn’t seem to have noticed anything else, including the body sprawled in an awkward tangle of limbs and blood on the cement walkway outside.
John took his small blessings where he could get them. Stepping more fully between his son and the near-gutted man drawing flies like a dead dog, he did what he could to block Dean’s view before he could get a good look at something he didn’t need to see. When Dean tried to jockey positions to re-establish his throughline to the Impala, John said, "Stay behind me, son."
Dean obeyed without question or hesitation.
John studied the man sprawled at his feet for several seconds, noting a hundred details that didn’t matter and half a dozen that did. The guy was cut to shit. He’d been dead for at least a couple of hours, maybe more. The stink of rot was coming from him, as was the droning buzz of flies. One of his arms was flung out to the side. The hand was covered in blood; the fingertips, raw and tattered. The other arm was curled in close to his belly. There was a slip of paper crumpled in his hand.
Dean shifted anxiously. "Dad?" he whispered more quietly than a fall breeze sighing through dead leaves. Dad. That was the only word Dean had uttered in the three months since Mary’s murder, and he’d only said that one on a handful of occasions.
"I said stay behind me, Dean." His tone was more terse than he’d intended it to be. Dean flinched, and John hated himself for it.
He scanned the parking lot, checked the choke of brush near the far dumpster, then studied the access road and the highway beyond it. Nothing. No one. The scream of panic running up and down his spine eased off a little. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Keeping the twelve gauge at the ready, he knelt beside the body and checked the neck for a pulse. He could tell by the stink and the flies that the guy was long gone, but it seemed like the right thing to do, so he did it.
The body was cold; the skin, already starting to go waxy. Fingers trembling a little as he did so, John tilted the dead man’s head enough to get a good look at his face. His eyes were open, glassy. John waved off a fly tiptoeing its way across a grey-green iris with a sharp gesture, then took a moment to memorize the unfamiliar features, burn them into his memory like a brand that would never heal. It wasn’t anybody he recognized, wasn’t anybody he’d ever met before. The rush of relief he felt at the realization shamed him with how strong it was, with how much it felt like joy rather than just a lack of grief.
He felt his gorge rise and swallowed it back with an effort. He’d seen more than his share of dead men in his time-dead men he cared about, dead men he’d shared rat-holes in the jungle and MREs in the rain with-but this was different. He’d listened to this one die: not screaming in a hail of sapper fire from the bush or in the aftermath of a mine detonating underfoot, not whispering Hail Marys or Our Fathers or trying to gurgle out a last message for his girl, or his mother, or his best friend before he went under and blinked off; but rather sitting in silence on the other side of two inches of hollow-core metal, marinating in his own blood while he scratched his fingernails to bloody nubs on the wrong fucking door in the vain hope that the selfish son of a bitch on the other side would do something more than just sit there and listen to him die.
John swallowed again, tried (and failed) not to imagine the hopeless despair of bleeding out in the darkness, dying minute by endless minute only inches away from another human being who could have picked up a fucking phone and dialed 9-1-1 but didn’t.
Jesus Christ. What the fuck had he done? How much was he willing to sacrifice to the insanity of this world-turned-inside-out that made him see monsters under the bed, made him fear demons in the dark and unnamed evils on the other side of the door so much that he couldn’t even pick up a phone for fear of what might answer his call for help in the guise of a cop, or a paramedic, only to reveal itself as one of the nightmares that haunted him all night, every night?
The slip of paper crumpled in the dead man’s hand caught John’s attention again. He worked it out from under fingers already stiff with the onset of rigor, then flattened it enough to read the three lines scrawled there in a hurried hand:
John Winchester
Motel 8 on Highway 36
Room 162
Every muscle in John body cramped back to a full-on panic. His heart tried to crawl up his throat and choke him as he scrambled back to his feet, scanned the grounds again with frantic speed to verify he hadn’t missed anything, verify there wasn’t some kind of boogie man creeping up on him in the blush of a new dawn.
The parking lot was still empty. He was still alone except for the terrified boy trembling at his back and the sleepy baby sucking on his binky in rhythmic, satisfied pulls.
He was already half way back inside the room he could at least fortify with salt and sigils and prayers when he realized there was something else under the dead man’s outstretched hand. He dropped one hand to the top of Dean’s head, said, "Close your eyes, son," before nudging the hand carefully aside with his boot.
There was one word scrawled on the cement sidewalk. It was written in the dying man’s own blood. It said, simply, run.
So they ran.
Go to: 2) See Me. Know Me. Remember Me.