SPN Fic: 4 Times ... See Me. Know Me. Remember Me. (Gen, Mrs. Jessup)
Title: Four Times the Winchesters Had to Move (And Once They Didn't): See Me. Know Me. Remember Me.
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 +2 for the Mrs. Jessup Trilogy+2 (and for those of you who recall the post awhile back, the one that made me cry myself ... damn John and his tragic self.)
Summary (See Me. Know Me. Remember Me.): A fucking teacher. Who the hell makes a friend out of a fucking teacher? But Dean did. He started out slow, made a few tentative passes to check out the lay of the land; but once he committed himself to the mission objective, he waded in full bore, stormed the beachhead with an eye on taking the flag for his own. Kid went from balking at the idea of taking her an apple after a promising Parent’s Day conference to launching a full scale invasion that would have done MacArthur proud.
Four Times the Winchesters Had to Move (And Once They Didn’t)
1) Run
-2-
See Me. Know Me. Remember Me.
The cop was too damn smart for him. She didn’t know what, exactly, he was doing wrong; but she knew he was doing something wrong. Her instincts had that much pegged from the moment she saw him.
She’d pulled him over for nothing more insidious than a busted out tail light (werewolves will do that on occasion), and he’d answered every question she asked with more truth than lies, done everything she told him to do without flipping her an ounce of attitude. And it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. By the time she finished running him for outstanding warrants, she had her sights set on getting a look inside the Impala’s trunk.
Given the givens, that wasn’t really something he could afford to let her do.
She made it a suggestion the first time. He said something about being on a tight schedule, not really having time to play hide-and-seek in a dark trunk, even with a pretty girl like her. He’d hoped it would come off as charming. It was probably a sign of how out of practice he was at a game he had no desire to play anymore that whatever passed as charm back when he was putting his foot in his mouth with Mary to the end of getting her in the sack on their first date anyway made the object of his advance this time give him a look that could cook a man’s liver right through his skin.
Although, if push came to shove, he’d have to admit that what he’d hoped would come off as charming that first day with Mary had earned him much the same kind of look; so perhaps it wasn’t out-of-practice so much as it was simply a skill he’d never possessed in any capacity except a capacity that could be trumped by impressing Mary with how hard his head was, and where he was willing to put it in the name of protecting a pretty girl in a pink bikini from the damned near busted eye socket he took in her stead.
The second time the cops said she wanted to look in his trunk, it came off as much more of an order. Almost a threat, even. Her tone put his back up; and as charming as he evidently wasn’t when he took his best shot at tactical flirting, he was about twice that lacking in tact and/or judgement when someone put him on the defensive for no good reason beyond some kind of bitch complex that must have gotten issued along with that shiny badge of hers.
Unless you considered carting a naked dead guy around in the trunk a good reason … which he didn’t, given that she didn’t know a damn thing about that naked dead guy or whatever else she thought he was doing that he wasn’t.
But in his own defense, when he asked her, "What’s got your panties in such a twist about looking in my trunk, darlin?" he wasn’t trying to charm her, he was trying to warn her off. He knew he had the moral high ground here; and he wasn’t afraid to use it, wasn’t afraid to wield righteous indignation like a club on behalf of pinched civil rights even if it did make him come off like some kind of peace-pushing Democrat who’d hit his self image high notes mudded up at Woodstock.
Unfortunately, she was just about as swayed by righteous indignation as he would have been; which was to say, not at all. And evidently, she didn’t have much of an ideological issue with putting her boot on the neck of a man’s civil rights, either. Under the right circumstances, they might have gotten along famously.
To bad these were far from the right circumstances.
The third time she told him to open his trunk, it wasn’t almost a threat, it was a threat. Direct. To the point. And just about as legal as him having more guns in his trunk than the state militia. Open the trunk, or go to jail. Given that she didn’t have jack shit for probable cause, and she couldn’t do a damn thing to him or his car without it unless he granted his permission (which-naked dead guy in the trunk-he wasn’t about to do); he told her to kiss his ass.
Things went downhill from there.
All told, he spent more than two hours standing on the side of the road, leaning against her cruiser and smoking cigarette after cigarette while they danced through God-knows-how-many rounds of the Probable Cause Threats and Kiss My Ass Responses Drinking Song before she got an armed-robbery-in-progress call and had to throw in the towel, let him drive away with nothing more than a ticket for the tail light, her without ever getting that look in the trunk she was so all-fired determined to get.
He paid for it though. From that day on, he was her personal pet project. She did everything she could to make his life a living hell … or as much of a living hell as one pissed-off cop can make out of the life of someone who exorcises demons and kills evil fucks for a living.
It had a certain irony to it: her getting such a burr up her ass about him being the big bad who was out and about, stealing hearts the hard way and leaving the bodies behind in shreds. The irony, of course, being that it was the naked dead guy in his trunk who’d been pumping up her precinct’s death stats for damned near a year now. He’d spent months tracking the collateral damage through half a dozen lunar cycles to narrow down the killing fields so he could catch the guy in the act, stop the carnage five minutes too late for one more dead girl by putting three silver bullets in the sick fuck’s brainpan. All of which made the irony all that much more ironic: that it was all over but a good salted weenie roast and the fat lady’s serenade when she lit him up, pulled him over on the tail light beef that just kept giving. And giving. And giving.
Giving for three months and change, her shadowing his every move, haunting him more effectively than any of the spirits he’d put to a match for less. At first, it was just an annoyance; but as she got better acquainted with his hunting patterns and ditch tactics, she got harder and harder to shake, and he started finding her in his rearview more and more often.
That got damned old, damned fast, particularly when it meant stepping off something he already had in his sights for a takedown. On the back of one busted tail light, he went from an unsung hero doing good deeds for God and country on the sly under cloak of night and shadows, to suspect number one in a series of grisly murders that stopped as soon as she started tailing him everywhere he went.
Talk about ironic.
Hell, he had to quit hunting altogether those last few weeks before they finally moved. He had three more potential targets within easy drive distance; but he ended up sitting on the sidelines with his thumb up his ass instead of checking them out because every time he turned around, she was sitting in a café across the street, or buying cigarettes behind him in a convenience store, or following the Impala down a back alley in an unmarked car that was more likely her own personal vehicle than a state-financed ride.
He tried everything he could think of to back her off, and nothing worked. He even swore out a harassment complaint against her at one point, claiming they’d had an ugly break-up, and she was using the job to stalk him silly; but it didn’t do any good. If anything, that one might have even worked against him, made her more determined to be his new best shadow instead of less. Just his luck to catch the eye of the one cop in town who was more concerned with putting bad guys behind bars than she was with covering her own ass from official inquiry and censure.
Once it became clear he couldn’t bluff her, bully her, or shake her with any degree of consistency when he had places to be and monsters to kill, he didn’t have much choice but to put the hunting on hold or end up cooling his heels in county lockup … or worse. If he’d had half an ounce of sense in his whole body, he would have nipped the whole clusterfuck in the bud by skipping town the same night he skinned by with nothing more than a ticket for transporting dead bodies across state lines with a broken tail light, but he didn’t.
He didn’t because he couldn’t.
And he couldn’t because, by the time he actually bagged the naked-dead-guy-in-the-trunk-cum-werewolf he’d been tracking since early summer, Dean was already hip-deep in second grade and just starting to find his feet again. The kid had been quiet for so long. He hadn’t talked for months after Mary’s murder. Then, when he finally did start talking again, he wouldn’t talk much, and he wouldn’t talk to anyone who wasn’t John or Sammy or Jim. The kid was AWOL inside his own skin, hiding so deep inside the shadows of his mind that even John couldn’t coax him out for more than short stretches of time, and only then if there was no one else around but the three other people on the short list of who Dean considered family.
So when that teacher started to reach him? When some stranger he hadn’t even met yet managed to worm her way inside the broken shell of little boy Dean had become since Mary’s murder and come back out holding the hand of a kid who at least resembled his son in the days before silence became the only voice Dean was willing to use?
He couldn’t take Dean away from that. He couldn’t break the connection the two of them were forging, couldn’t bear to tear Dean away from the only friend he’d made in over two years.
A fucking teacher.
Who the hell makes a friend out of a fucking teacher?
But Dean did. He started out slow, made a few tentative passes to check out the lay of the land; but once he committed himself to the mission objective, he waded in full bore, stormed the beachhead with an eye on taking the flag for his own. Kid went from balking at the idea of taking her an apple after a promising Parent’s Day conference to launching a full scale invasion that would have done MacArthur proud.
The first serious volley was a doozey. It involved chocolate-chip cookies and flirting. The second volley was the one that really got to him, though. It was of the grab-your-balls-and-jump variety, and was so dramatically out of character for his painfully introverted son that John never did know what prompted it. Evidently, Dean just up and decided to eat lunch with her one day, so he did.
Seven years old, and he has the guts to walk right up to a teacher and sit down like he owns the place.
Where in the hell his son got those cajones, John would never know. Teachers had intimidated the piss out of him at Dean’s age, and not much had changed on that front in twenty-some-odd years. Dean, on the other hand, at seven years old and as fragile as a walking glass man, not only had the sand to make the initial approach, he had the stick-to-itiveness to make their "lunch date" a daily ritual, the same way he made pretty much everything that mattered to him a ritual.
And he did it all on his own. He never said boo to John about what he had planned, or how he planned to go about doing it. By the time he let it slip that he was courting an older woman every day at lunch, the kid already had his routine down pat. It took a little cajoling to get the inside story on his play book; but he finally gave it up, filled John in on all the details. He was proud as hell, sitting cross-legged on the couch and leaning in close so already-dead-asleep Sammy wouldn’t overhear while he outlined his strategy, detailed his thinking on every step from start to finish.
He’d said the most important thing to do, especially that first time, was to wait until he was sure she was settled in. Timing was everything, he’d informed John seriously, so you had to be patient. You had to wait until she had her lunch spread out in front of her, wait until she’d opened her milk carton and started peeling her orange. That was the best time to go, he’d said, his eyes shining with more enthusiasm than John had seen there since before. Once she started peeling her orange, she was set for the rest of the lunch hour, so that was always his Go Code.
And once he had his Go Code, the rest was as easy as taking candy from the Coast Guard. He’d get up and walk right over, make sure he approached her straight on and walked like he meant it, not like some punk who wanted something, or who wasn’t sure what he wanted. And then he’d just sit down beside her, as simple as that. He wouldn’t wait for her to invite him, because she might not. And he wouldn’t announce what he was going to do before he did it, because she might tell him he couldn’t. He’d just sit down, like that was the only option, so there it was.
And then he’d start talking. It didn’t really matter about what, but it was usually best, he told John, if it had something to do with what they’d been studying that week. That way, he said, he could show her he was smart about something he knew she’d be interested in. And he’d be showing that he listened to her, too, because he’d picked a topic she’d already talked about. And while he was talking about whatever it was he’d picked to talk about, he’d open up his own sack and start chowing down on his peanut butter and peanut butter sandwich, because once he was already eating, then there really wasn’t any sense in telling him he couldn’t eat with her, because they already were.
So that was it, he’d informed John confidently. That was all there was to it: just wait for your Go Code, then Go.
Clearly, Dean was far better at the whole charm game than his old man was.
From what John could gather, they talked about pretty much everything under the sun on their lunch dates that wasn’t Classified Eyes Only or Mary. He told her a lot about Sammy, in particular. Probably shared much more about John himself than John wanted to know. Told her a chunk-and-a-half about Jim, too: that they’d lived with him in Blue Earth for awhile, that he’d taken Dean to Lake Michigan all by himself once, not for any particular reason, but just because Jim was the only person on the planet who could get Dean to take more than five paces away from his old man and little brother without imploding. And he told her what they ate for dinner, evidently; and all about the Impala … something John figured out when she made some kind of crack about the kind of man who drives a muscle car long before she ever saw what kind of car he drove.
But more than the specifics of what Dean told her, the relevant thing was, he told her something. He talked to her. And he didn’t talk to her because he had to. He talked to her because he wanted to.
He wanted to tell her things. He wanted to impress her with the right answers when she called on him in class, wanted to offer up extra tidbits on any subject they studied just to prove he knew his stuff and could contribute to the conversation. He wanted to ace every test so she’d remember who he was (because in Dean World, perfection in any endeavor was both an expression of love and a measure of its return in kind); and he wanted to bake her chocolate-God-damned-chip cookies, even though he came within an ace of punking out on the delivery phase at the last minute.
That was before he started looking for Go Codes, but after she’d passed enough of his preliminary tests to warrant a more serious effort at contact than simple fruit, so they spent the whole weekend working their asses off to come up with a dozen specimens of the sugar-rich variety that didn’t look like bait for a garbage demon and wouldn’t kill whoever had the balls to try and eat them. (They only managed seven.) After all that effort though, it took some fast talking on his part to convince Dean it would be a punk-ass bitch thing to do to leave those seven hard-earned, precious cookies home for Sammy just because some thoughtless jackass said something that made him start worrying she might think he was some kind of suck-up (last time he was ever going to make an Eddie Haskell joke to the kid) or worse, someone who thought he was all that and a bag of chocolate-God-damned-chip cookies (Dean came up with that one all on his own).
In the end, Dean manned up and took the cookies in, bought himself some serious cookie points with his carefully rehearsed schpeil about chocolate being the way to a woman’s heart.
John waited outside the door while the delivery was in progress, eavesdropping from the hallway just to see how it went. He was damned near as nervous as Dean was that day, half scared out of his mind that he might have advised his son poorly on a subject he wasn’t really qualified to speak to any more, afraid he might have screwed up Dean’s chances to do this his own way simply by offering a casual suggestion that Dean took the way he took any suggestion John offered: like it was a mandate, an order, the word of God that must be considered sacrosanct once it was uttered in ways that nothing a man with John Winchester’s propensity to act/speak first and think second should ever be taken.
But that was the way Dean always took it-like the word of God-and once he’d latched onto the idea that maybe he should do something more than just hand his teacher the cookies and say "Here," he wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let John get by with saying it was just a joke, he didn’t mean it, he hadn’t really thought it through before suggesting a seven-year-old should make a crack to his teacher that might get a thirty-year-old decked if John’s track record in that department held true.
Which it usually did.
So he was sweating bullets in the hallway when Dean told his teacher that those cookies were his way of sucking up because he was hoping to get a good grade on his report card, and he’d heard chocolate was the quickest way to a teacher’s heart. And he literally stopped breathing when Dean added something John had deliberately changed out from his original suggestion in hopes of avoiding the kind of thing Mary had always told him he excelled at: pissing off every woman in the room by confusing condescending and sexist remarks with charm because he thought they were funny when they usually weren’t. So when Dean added that the whole "quickest way to the heart" thing would be especially true if the teacher was a woman, John held his breath, said a silent prayer that his son’s devotion to the accuracy of mimicking his old man wouldn’t screw the boy on something this important just because his template was flawed in ways he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see.
He didn’t know if he’d ever been as relieved as he was when Dean’s teacher laughed at Dean’s sincere delivery in exactly the way Dean wanted her to. Certainly, he’d never loved a teacher the way he loved Mrs. Jessup right at the moment: loved her for laughing at Dean’s joke instead of treating him like a freak for repeating something he’d heard from a father who was doing his best, but who didn’t always say the right thing, or make the right choices, particularly when he was talking to a kid who played monkey-see, monkey-do like his very soul depended on getting every detail right.
And John loved that damned teacher of Dean’s the whole year. Not loved her the way he loved Mary. Just loved her because she made Dean feel right. Made Dean feel there. Made Dean feel alive.
Made Dean feel the way Mary used to make him feel.
It was hard work keeping up with all the ways Dean wanted to express his devotion to a woman he was terrified might forget him from one day to the next, he was that fucking convinced he was unmemorable, unworthy of notice, invisible; but even with all the extra dinosaur-eating-habits study and spelling flash cards and cookie-dough-slaughtering marathons; the return on their investment was still diamonds on the dollar. Mrs. Jessup made more progress with Dean in four months than he’d made in over two years just by being attentive to Dean’s efforts to connect; by being interested in what he so desperately wanted to share and kind about the self conscious and awkward ways he sometimes chose to share it.
Which was why John couldn’t skip town the day after some cop came within a hair’s breadth of catching him red-handed with a naked dead guy in the trunk. Because there was no way in hell John was going to let anything or anybody get in the way of what was going on between Dean and his teacher. Not his hunting schedule. Not his own fears and insecurities about how much influence Mrs. Jessup started to wield over how his emotionally fragile son perceived a world that wasn’t what any second grade teacher took it to be. And not some overly enthusiastic, nosey-ass cop with the wrong idea about who John Winchester was, and what he was doing driving down a back road in the middle of the night with a busted out taillight.
He wasn’t going to let her take that away from Dean-take it away from either of them-so they stayed.
They stayed for four months after that first fucking ticket, and he did everything he could to keep from getting his ass thrown in the pokey while his kid finished out the second grade with a teacher who’d somehow found a way to reach Dean inside the brittle, empty silence he’d pulled over his head like nothingness was the only answer he could come up with to the terrifying riddle of how his world had changed overnight, and why.
By the time the school year was over, Dean was talking again. He was interacting with the world, and showing an interest in things that weren’t restricted to Sammy or Sammy or Sammy.
They left town the same week summer vacation started. He hated to go even then, but it was the right time to make a break, and he wasn’t sure that damn cop hadn’t finally gotten her hands on something in his trash that would buy him twenty-to-life in maximum security lockdown if they stayed.
So they moved.
Dean took the news without blinking. He never said a word about it: never once complained that he wasn’t ready to go yet, or that it wasn’t fair, or even that he wished it was different, or that he’d miss her when they were gone.
It would have been easier on John if he had.
They dropped by his teacher’s house to say goodbye on the way out of town. They didn’t stay long, and Dean didn’t say much; but he damn near broke them all by holding onto her neck too long, then whispering something in her ear that John never did hear.
And then he just turned and walked away. Never looked back.
The expression on Mrs. Jessup’s face as she watched his son walk away was something John was never going to forget. It was the first time since Mary was murdered that he saw someone else look at Dean and see the same kid he saw every night, kneeling by the bed to say Sammy’s prayers with him, folding his hands together to help his little brother ask God to look after someone Sammy’d never even known, but Dean was never going to forget knowing, was never going to forget losing.
The fragile kid. The unbreakable kid. The silent kid. The screaming kid.
His kid. Mary’s kid.
Walking down the sidewalk to the Impala waiting by the curb, his back turned on her to make a clean break of something that might have killed him if he’d tried to do it any other way, Dean left that place a different kid than he’d been when he arrived. His teacher watched him all the way to the street, then she looked at John and smiled a smile that looked so much like Mary’s that it almost killed him, too.
He wanted to say something to her that would at least begin to touch on what she’d meant to Dean, but he didn’t have the words. He wanted to thank her, wanted to tell her she was a God-send and that Mary would have loved her as much as Dean did; but he didn’t have the right words for that either. So he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything for so long, in fact, that it got awkward; him just standing there, looking at her with tears in his eyes as his kid walked away like they both weren’t dying a little inside at the leaving.
"November second is the day it happened," John told her finally. "The day she died."
It was the first time he’d ever told anybody who wasn’t Jim something like that. Something so personal. Something so private. But for some reason he couldn’t quite articulate, he wanted her to know. He needed her to know.
Needed her to see them. Needed her to notice them. Needed her to remember them.
Needed her to know them.
John looked away when she started to respond, shook his head once to indicate that she’d break him if she spoke, so she didn’t.
She let him speak instead.
"Thank you," John said finally, knowing it wasn’t enough, but also knowing it was all he could give. "For …" He shook his head again, turned his back on her abruptly to make a clean break of something that might have killed him if he’d tried to do it any other way.
He left that place a different man than he’d been when he arrived. He could feel Dean’s teacher watch him all the way to the street, but he never turned around, just drove away without so much as a backward glance.
Go to 3) Failure is Not an Option
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 +2 for the Mrs. Jessup Trilogy+2 (and for those of you who recall the post awhile back, the one that made me cry myself ... damn John and his tragic self.)
Summary (See Me. Know Me. Remember Me.): A fucking teacher. Who the hell makes a friend out of a fucking teacher? But Dean did. He started out slow, made a few tentative passes to check out the lay of the land; but once he committed himself to the mission objective, he waded in full bore, stormed the beachhead with an eye on taking the flag for his own. Kid went from balking at the idea of taking her an apple after a promising Parent’s Day conference to launching a full scale invasion that would have done MacArthur proud.
Four Times the Winchesters Had to Move (And Once They Didn’t)
1) Run
-2-
See Me. Know Me. Remember Me.
The cop was too damn smart for him. She didn’t know what, exactly, he was doing wrong; but she knew he was doing something wrong. Her instincts had that much pegged from the moment she saw him.
She’d pulled him over for nothing more insidious than a busted out tail light (werewolves will do that on occasion), and he’d answered every question she asked with more truth than lies, done everything she told him to do without flipping her an ounce of attitude. And it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. By the time she finished running him for outstanding warrants, she had her sights set on getting a look inside the Impala’s trunk.
Given the givens, that wasn’t really something he could afford to let her do.
She made it a suggestion the first time. He said something about being on a tight schedule, not really having time to play hide-and-seek in a dark trunk, even with a pretty girl like her. He’d hoped it would come off as charming. It was probably a sign of how out of practice he was at a game he had no desire to play anymore that whatever passed as charm back when he was putting his foot in his mouth with Mary to the end of getting her in the sack on their first date anyway made the object of his advance this time give him a look that could cook a man’s liver right through his skin.
Although, if push came to shove, he’d have to admit that what he’d hoped would come off as charming that first day with Mary had earned him much the same kind of look; so perhaps it wasn’t out-of-practice so much as it was simply a skill he’d never possessed in any capacity except a capacity that could be trumped by impressing Mary with how hard his head was, and where he was willing to put it in the name of protecting a pretty girl in a pink bikini from the damned near busted eye socket he took in her stead.
The second time the cops said she wanted to look in his trunk, it came off as much more of an order. Almost a threat, even. Her tone put his back up; and as charming as he evidently wasn’t when he took his best shot at tactical flirting, he was about twice that lacking in tact and/or judgement when someone put him on the defensive for no good reason beyond some kind of bitch complex that must have gotten issued along with that shiny badge of hers.
Unless you considered carting a naked dead guy around in the trunk a good reason … which he didn’t, given that she didn’t know a damn thing about that naked dead guy or whatever else she thought he was doing that he wasn’t.
But in his own defense, when he asked her, "What’s got your panties in such a twist about looking in my trunk, darlin?" he wasn’t trying to charm her, he was trying to warn her off. He knew he had the moral high ground here; and he wasn’t afraid to use it, wasn’t afraid to wield righteous indignation like a club on behalf of pinched civil rights even if it did make him come off like some kind of peace-pushing Democrat who’d hit his self image high notes mudded up at Woodstock.
Unfortunately, she was just about as swayed by righteous indignation as he would have been; which was to say, not at all. And evidently, she didn’t have much of an ideological issue with putting her boot on the neck of a man’s civil rights, either. Under the right circumstances, they might have gotten along famously.
To bad these were far from the right circumstances.
The third time she told him to open his trunk, it wasn’t almost a threat, it was a threat. Direct. To the point. And just about as legal as him having more guns in his trunk than the state militia. Open the trunk, or go to jail. Given that she didn’t have jack shit for probable cause, and she couldn’t do a damn thing to him or his car without it unless he granted his permission (which-naked dead guy in the trunk-he wasn’t about to do); he told her to kiss his ass.
Things went downhill from there.
All told, he spent more than two hours standing on the side of the road, leaning against her cruiser and smoking cigarette after cigarette while they danced through God-knows-how-many rounds of the Probable Cause Threats and Kiss My Ass Responses Drinking Song before she got an armed-robbery-in-progress call and had to throw in the towel, let him drive away with nothing more than a ticket for the tail light, her without ever getting that look in the trunk she was so all-fired determined to get.
He paid for it though. From that day on, he was her personal pet project. She did everything she could to make his life a living hell … or as much of a living hell as one pissed-off cop can make out of the life of someone who exorcises demons and kills evil fucks for a living.
It had a certain irony to it: her getting such a burr up her ass about him being the big bad who was out and about, stealing hearts the hard way and leaving the bodies behind in shreds. The irony, of course, being that it was the naked dead guy in his trunk who’d been pumping up her precinct’s death stats for damned near a year now. He’d spent months tracking the collateral damage through half a dozen lunar cycles to narrow down the killing fields so he could catch the guy in the act, stop the carnage five minutes too late for one more dead girl by putting three silver bullets in the sick fuck’s brainpan. All of which made the irony all that much more ironic: that it was all over but a good salted weenie roast and the fat lady’s serenade when she lit him up, pulled him over on the tail light beef that just kept giving. And giving. And giving.
Giving for three months and change, her shadowing his every move, haunting him more effectively than any of the spirits he’d put to a match for less. At first, it was just an annoyance; but as she got better acquainted with his hunting patterns and ditch tactics, she got harder and harder to shake, and he started finding her in his rearview more and more often.
That got damned old, damned fast, particularly when it meant stepping off something he already had in his sights for a takedown. On the back of one busted tail light, he went from an unsung hero doing good deeds for God and country on the sly under cloak of night and shadows, to suspect number one in a series of grisly murders that stopped as soon as she started tailing him everywhere he went.
Talk about ironic.
Hell, he had to quit hunting altogether those last few weeks before they finally moved. He had three more potential targets within easy drive distance; but he ended up sitting on the sidelines with his thumb up his ass instead of checking them out because every time he turned around, she was sitting in a café across the street, or buying cigarettes behind him in a convenience store, or following the Impala down a back alley in an unmarked car that was more likely her own personal vehicle than a state-financed ride.
He tried everything he could think of to back her off, and nothing worked. He even swore out a harassment complaint against her at one point, claiming they’d had an ugly break-up, and she was using the job to stalk him silly; but it didn’t do any good. If anything, that one might have even worked against him, made her more determined to be his new best shadow instead of less. Just his luck to catch the eye of the one cop in town who was more concerned with putting bad guys behind bars than she was with covering her own ass from official inquiry and censure.
Once it became clear he couldn’t bluff her, bully her, or shake her with any degree of consistency when he had places to be and monsters to kill, he didn’t have much choice but to put the hunting on hold or end up cooling his heels in county lockup … or worse. If he’d had half an ounce of sense in his whole body, he would have nipped the whole clusterfuck in the bud by skipping town the same night he skinned by with nothing more than a ticket for transporting dead bodies across state lines with a broken tail light, but he didn’t.
He didn’t because he couldn’t.
And he couldn’t because, by the time he actually bagged the naked-dead-guy-in-the-trunk-cum-werewolf he’d been tracking since early summer, Dean was already hip-deep in second grade and just starting to find his feet again. The kid had been quiet for so long. He hadn’t talked for months after Mary’s murder. Then, when he finally did start talking again, he wouldn’t talk much, and he wouldn’t talk to anyone who wasn’t John or Sammy or Jim. The kid was AWOL inside his own skin, hiding so deep inside the shadows of his mind that even John couldn’t coax him out for more than short stretches of time, and only then if there was no one else around but the three other people on the short list of who Dean considered family.
So when that teacher started to reach him? When some stranger he hadn’t even met yet managed to worm her way inside the broken shell of little boy Dean had become since Mary’s murder and come back out holding the hand of a kid who at least resembled his son in the days before silence became the only voice Dean was willing to use?
He couldn’t take Dean away from that. He couldn’t break the connection the two of them were forging, couldn’t bear to tear Dean away from the only friend he’d made in over two years.
A fucking teacher.
Who the hell makes a friend out of a fucking teacher?
But Dean did. He started out slow, made a few tentative passes to check out the lay of the land; but once he committed himself to the mission objective, he waded in full bore, stormed the beachhead with an eye on taking the flag for his own. Kid went from balking at the idea of taking her an apple after a promising Parent’s Day conference to launching a full scale invasion that would have done MacArthur proud.
The first serious volley was a doozey. It involved chocolate-chip cookies and flirting. The second volley was the one that really got to him, though. It was of the grab-your-balls-and-jump variety, and was so dramatically out of character for his painfully introverted son that John never did know what prompted it. Evidently, Dean just up and decided to eat lunch with her one day, so he did.
Seven years old, and he has the guts to walk right up to a teacher and sit down like he owns the place.
Where in the hell his son got those cajones, John would never know. Teachers had intimidated the piss out of him at Dean’s age, and not much had changed on that front in twenty-some-odd years. Dean, on the other hand, at seven years old and as fragile as a walking glass man, not only had the sand to make the initial approach, he had the stick-to-itiveness to make their "lunch date" a daily ritual, the same way he made pretty much everything that mattered to him a ritual.
And he did it all on his own. He never said boo to John about what he had planned, or how he planned to go about doing it. By the time he let it slip that he was courting an older woman every day at lunch, the kid already had his routine down pat. It took a little cajoling to get the inside story on his play book; but he finally gave it up, filled John in on all the details. He was proud as hell, sitting cross-legged on the couch and leaning in close so already-dead-asleep Sammy wouldn’t overhear while he outlined his strategy, detailed his thinking on every step from start to finish.
He’d said the most important thing to do, especially that first time, was to wait until he was sure she was settled in. Timing was everything, he’d informed John seriously, so you had to be patient. You had to wait until she had her lunch spread out in front of her, wait until she’d opened her milk carton and started peeling her orange. That was the best time to go, he’d said, his eyes shining with more enthusiasm than John had seen there since before. Once she started peeling her orange, she was set for the rest of the lunch hour, so that was always his Go Code.
And once he had his Go Code, the rest was as easy as taking candy from the Coast Guard. He’d get up and walk right over, make sure he approached her straight on and walked like he meant it, not like some punk who wanted something, or who wasn’t sure what he wanted. And then he’d just sit down beside her, as simple as that. He wouldn’t wait for her to invite him, because she might not. And he wouldn’t announce what he was going to do before he did it, because she might tell him he couldn’t. He’d just sit down, like that was the only option, so there it was.
And then he’d start talking. It didn’t really matter about what, but it was usually best, he told John, if it had something to do with what they’d been studying that week. That way, he said, he could show her he was smart about something he knew she’d be interested in. And he’d be showing that he listened to her, too, because he’d picked a topic she’d already talked about. And while he was talking about whatever it was he’d picked to talk about, he’d open up his own sack and start chowing down on his peanut butter and peanut butter sandwich, because once he was already eating, then there really wasn’t any sense in telling him he couldn’t eat with her, because they already were.
So that was it, he’d informed John confidently. That was all there was to it: just wait for your Go Code, then Go.
Clearly, Dean was far better at the whole charm game than his old man was.
From what John could gather, they talked about pretty much everything under the sun on their lunch dates that wasn’t Classified Eyes Only or Mary. He told her a lot about Sammy, in particular. Probably shared much more about John himself than John wanted to know. Told her a chunk-and-a-half about Jim, too: that they’d lived with him in Blue Earth for awhile, that he’d taken Dean to Lake Michigan all by himself once, not for any particular reason, but just because Jim was the only person on the planet who could get Dean to take more than five paces away from his old man and little brother without imploding. And he told her what they ate for dinner, evidently; and all about the Impala … something John figured out when she made some kind of crack about the kind of man who drives a muscle car long before she ever saw what kind of car he drove.
But more than the specifics of what Dean told her, the relevant thing was, he told her something. He talked to her. And he didn’t talk to her because he had to. He talked to her because he wanted to.
He wanted to tell her things. He wanted to impress her with the right answers when she called on him in class, wanted to offer up extra tidbits on any subject they studied just to prove he knew his stuff and could contribute to the conversation. He wanted to ace every test so she’d remember who he was (because in Dean World, perfection in any endeavor was both an expression of love and a measure of its return in kind); and he wanted to bake her chocolate-God-damned-chip cookies, even though he came within an ace of punking out on the delivery phase at the last minute.
That was before he started looking for Go Codes, but after she’d passed enough of his preliminary tests to warrant a more serious effort at contact than simple fruit, so they spent the whole weekend working their asses off to come up with a dozen specimens of the sugar-rich variety that didn’t look like bait for a garbage demon and wouldn’t kill whoever had the balls to try and eat them. (They only managed seven.) After all that effort though, it took some fast talking on his part to convince Dean it would be a punk-ass bitch thing to do to leave those seven hard-earned, precious cookies home for Sammy just because some thoughtless jackass said something that made him start worrying she might think he was some kind of suck-up (last time he was ever going to make an Eddie Haskell joke to the kid) or worse, someone who thought he was all that and a bag of chocolate-God-damned-chip cookies (Dean came up with that one all on his own).
In the end, Dean manned up and took the cookies in, bought himself some serious cookie points with his carefully rehearsed schpeil about chocolate being the way to a woman’s heart.
John waited outside the door while the delivery was in progress, eavesdropping from the hallway just to see how it went. He was damned near as nervous as Dean was that day, half scared out of his mind that he might have advised his son poorly on a subject he wasn’t really qualified to speak to any more, afraid he might have screwed up Dean’s chances to do this his own way simply by offering a casual suggestion that Dean took the way he took any suggestion John offered: like it was a mandate, an order, the word of God that must be considered sacrosanct once it was uttered in ways that nothing a man with John Winchester’s propensity to act/speak first and think second should ever be taken.
But that was the way Dean always took it-like the word of God-and once he’d latched onto the idea that maybe he should do something more than just hand his teacher the cookies and say "Here," he wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let John get by with saying it was just a joke, he didn’t mean it, he hadn’t really thought it through before suggesting a seven-year-old should make a crack to his teacher that might get a thirty-year-old decked if John’s track record in that department held true.
Which it usually did.
So he was sweating bullets in the hallway when Dean told his teacher that those cookies were his way of sucking up because he was hoping to get a good grade on his report card, and he’d heard chocolate was the quickest way to a teacher’s heart. And he literally stopped breathing when Dean added something John had deliberately changed out from his original suggestion in hopes of avoiding the kind of thing Mary had always told him he excelled at: pissing off every woman in the room by confusing condescending and sexist remarks with charm because he thought they were funny when they usually weren’t. So when Dean added that the whole "quickest way to the heart" thing would be especially true if the teacher was a woman, John held his breath, said a silent prayer that his son’s devotion to the accuracy of mimicking his old man wouldn’t screw the boy on something this important just because his template was flawed in ways he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see.
He didn’t know if he’d ever been as relieved as he was when Dean’s teacher laughed at Dean’s sincere delivery in exactly the way Dean wanted her to. Certainly, he’d never loved a teacher the way he loved Mrs. Jessup right at the moment: loved her for laughing at Dean’s joke instead of treating him like a freak for repeating something he’d heard from a father who was doing his best, but who didn’t always say the right thing, or make the right choices, particularly when he was talking to a kid who played monkey-see, monkey-do like his very soul depended on getting every detail right.
And John loved that damned teacher of Dean’s the whole year. Not loved her the way he loved Mary. Just loved her because she made Dean feel right. Made Dean feel there. Made Dean feel alive.
Made Dean feel the way Mary used to make him feel.
It was hard work keeping up with all the ways Dean wanted to express his devotion to a woman he was terrified might forget him from one day to the next, he was that fucking convinced he was unmemorable, unworthy of notice, invisible; but even with all the extra dinosaur-eating-habits study and spelling flash cards and cookie-dough-slaughtering marathons; the return on their investment was still diamonds on the dollar. Mrs. Jessup made more progress with Dean in four months than he’d made in over two years just by being attentive to Dean’s efforts to connect; by being interested in what he so desperately wanted to share and kind about the self conscious and awkward ways he sometimes chose to share it.
Which was why John couldn’t skip town the day after some cop came within a hair’s breadth of catching him red-handed with a naked dead guy in the trunk. Because there was no way in hell John was going to let anything or anybody get in the way of what was going on between Dean and his teacher. Not his hunting schedule. Not his own fears and insecurities about how much influence Mrs. Jessup started to wield over how his emotionally fragile son perceived a world that wasn’t what any second grade teacher took it to be. And not some overly enthusiastic, nosey-ass cop with the wrong idea about who John Winchester was, and what he was doing driving down a back road in the middle of the night with a busted out taillight.
He wasn’t going to let her take that away from Dean-take it away from either of them-so they stayed.
They stayed for four months after that first fucking ticket, and he did everything he could to keep from getting his ass thrown in the pokey while his kid finished out the second grade with a teacher who’d somehow found a way to reach Dean inside the brittle, empty silence he’d pulled over his head like nothingness was the only answer he could come up with to the terrifying riddle of how his world had changed overnight, and why.
By the time the school year was over, Dean was talking again. He was interacting with the world, and showing an interest in things that weren’t restricted to Sammy or Sammy or Sammy.
They left town the same week summer vacation started. He hated to go even then, but it was the right time to make a break, and he wasn’t sure that damn cop hadn’t finally gotten her hands on something in his trash that would buy him twenty-to-life in maximum security lockdown if they stayed.
So they moved.
Dean took the news without blinking. He never said a word about it: never once complained that he wasn’t ready to go yet, or that it wasn’t fair, or even that he wished it was different, or that he’d miss her when they were gone.
It would have been easier on John if he had.
They dropped by his teacher’s house to say goodbye on the way out of town. They didn’t stay long, and Dean didn’t say much; but he damn near broke them all by holding onto her neck too long, then whispering something in her ear that John never did hear.
And then he just turned and walked away. Never looked back.
The expression on Mrs. Jessup’s face as she watched his son walk away was something John was never going to forget. It was the first time since Mary was murdered that he saw someone else look at Dean and see the same kid he saw every night, kneeling by the bed to say Sammy’s prayers with him, folding his hands together to help his little brother ask God to look after someone Sammy’d never even known, but Dean was never going to forget knowing, was never going to forget losing.
The fragile kid. The unbreakable kid. The silent kid. The screaming kid.
His kid. Mary’s kid.
Walking down the sidewalk to the Impala waiting by the curb, his back turned on her to make a clean break of something that might have killed him if he’d tried to do it any other way, Dean left that place a different kid than he’d been when he arrived. His teacher watched him all the way to the street, then she looked at John and smiled a smile that looked so much like Mary’s that it almost killed him, too.
He wanted to say something to her that would at least begin to touch on what she’d meant to Dean, but he didn’t have the words. He wanted to thank her, wanted to tell her she was a God-send and that Mary would have loved her as much as Dean did; but he didn’t have the right words for that either. So he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything for so long, in fact, that it got awkward; him just standing there, looking at her with tears in his eyes as his kid walked away like they both weren’t dying a little inside at the leaving.
"November second is the day it happened," John told her finally. "The day she died."
It was the first time he’d ever told anybody who wasn’t Jim something like that. Something so personal. Something so private. But for some reason he couldn’t quite articulate, he wanted her to know. He needed her to know.
Needed her to see them. Needed her to notice them. Needed her to remember them.
Needed her to know them.
John looked away when she started to respond, shook his head once to indicate that she’d break him if she spoke, so she didn’t.
She let him speak instead.
"Thank you," John said finally, knowing it wasn’t enough, but also knowing it was all he could give. "For …" He shook his head again, turned his back on her abruptly to make a clean break of something that might have killed him if he’d tried to do it any other way.
He left that place a different man than he’d been when he arrived. He could feel Dean’s teacher watch him all the way to the street, but he never turned around, just drove away without so much as a backward glance.
Go to 3) Failure is Not an Option