SPN Fic: No Shame. No Shame at All. (Gen, PG-13, Pre-Series)
Okay. Y'all are awesome. Thanks so much for the input on titles. I appreciate everyone who voted, and everyone who PMed me so many enlightening and thought-provoking notes on why they chose as they chose. I'm still not 100% sure this is the title that will stick for the long haul (I love the edit post feature), but for right now, this is the one I'm going with. I would like to ask one more favor though. I'm going to post an exit poll at the end of the story. Please take a second to hit a ticky box for me on your way out the door. Thanks!
Title: No Shame. No Shame at All.
Author: Dodger Winslow
Genre: Gen, Pre-series
Rating: PG-13 for language
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while ...
A/N: This is a stand alone story. It is, however, also an outsider perspective piece that takes place during the events of Failure is Not an Option. If you want to know what is really going on, as compared to what Mrs. Petersen thinks is going on, you might want to read that one, too ... the order of reading being determined by whether or not you want to experience this story the way Mrs. Petersen does, or the way John and Dean do. (Just for the sake of clarification: this is actually the piece that INSPIRED me to write Failure. I wrote this first, I just posted it second ... significantly more polished than the first version, but still very much the same story it was originally written to be.)
Summary: He thought he was a real James Dean, that one did. All arrogance and attitude; all belligerence and braggadocio. Thirteen years old and already hell-bent for leather down the road his father paved by example. It would take a minor miracle to keep him from ending up in the gutter by the time he was twenty. Or dead. Or in prison.
No Shame. No Shame at All.
Mrs. Petersen looked up at the smell of whiskey.
He was standing in front of the admin desk across the room, looking like he belonged in a gutter somewhere. Or perhaps more accurately, looking like he might have come from a gutter somewhere-like he might have slept there, like he might have lived there. His coat was filthy, as were his jeans. He hadn’t shaved in God knows how long, and he stank of garbage and sweat layered atop cheap whiskey and something she couldn’t quite identify … was pretty certain she didn’t want to identify.
There were bruises on the side of his face and neck. His lip was split, and a smattering of cuts peppered his skin from hairline to collar. Most were crusted over to dry, raw scabs, but a few were fresh and bleeding. He looked like he’d taken a tumble in the parking lot: tripped on a line in the sidewalk or stumbled over a shadow or a blade of uprooted grass.
Perhaps she should have felt compassion for him, but she didn’t. She’d seen too many fathers bourboning their sons lives to inadequacy, seen too many mothers wine coolering their daughters futures to domestic squalor to feel any compassion at all for someone who showed up at their child’s school in the condition this man was in.
"I’m here to pick up my boy," he said, leaning into the counter as he spoke. He sounded as drunk as he looked. His voice was the texture of burlap, grinding out of him like sandpaper on unfinished cement.
She smiled thinly, wondering which lucky boy held the winning ticket in this particular parental lotto. "And your son’s name?"
"Winchester," he grunted. He closed his eyes for a moment, too drunk to keep them open in the room’s bright light. "Dean Winchester."
Of course. Dean Winchester. She should have known. He was a predictable fit for the truculent thirteen-year-old who’d been nothing but trouble from the day he arrived. There was a strong family resemblance, too, now that she knew to look for it … a resemblance made all that much stronger by a vaguely belligerent sense of entitlement he wore as naturally as his own skin. Please and thank yous were beyond the purview of his own self interest, just as a simple failure to antagonize for the sake of antagonizing was beyond the purview of his son’s.
Because she was in the middle of something when he announced he’d come to shame a child in front of his classmates, and because he was standing on the other side of the counter like a man asleep on his feet-asleep being a euphemism in this case-she finished stuffing the staff’s mailboxes with the morning memos before turning to her computer to look up the Winchester boy’s class schedule.
She was scrolling through screen after screen of gold type when Dean’s father opened his eyes again. He blinked several times to accomplish a bleary-eyed focus, then said, "Hurry every chance you get. Don’t have all fucking day to dick around while you stand around sorting papers."
She didn’t answer for a full three count and half a dozen more screens. When she did, she looked up first, fixed him with a cold, level, condemning gaze before saying, "I’m sorry, Mister Winchester, but we don’t allow that kind of language here. I’m going to have to ask you to refrain from using profanity until you leave school grounds."
He laughed quietly. It was the low rumble of vocal cords steeped in a hundred and eighty proof as a matter of course. His eyelids continued to fly at half mast and lazy, but his teeth were much whiter than she expected them to be when he bared them her direction: more of a challenge than a smile.
"Absolutely, ma’am. Happy to oblige. Now call my fucking son for me. Pronto."
Despite his laggard’s slouch against the counter and the nearly congenial tone in which he offered his slightly slurred response, he didn’t look drunk now so much as loosely dangerous, didn’t look shiftless so much as disquietously combative. Because she’d had her share of experience with dangerous drunks over the years, both on the professional front and the personal one, she didn’t challenge him again. Rather, she placated him by turning her attention back to the computer screen, locating his son’s third period class assignment and calling on the intercom to request that he be sent to the office immediately.
By the time she was finished, Winchester’s eyes had slipped shut again. He was leaning more heavily into the counter than he had before, his dark head bowed now, his filthy forehead nearly touching the cool, beige formica. Leaving him to the stupor into which he’d sunk, she began her morning filing as if she didn’t have better things to do than keep an eye on a half conscious boozer until his belligerent son arrived and she could shoo them on their way.
"Thank you," he said quietly.
The sound of his voice surprised her: not only the words he spoke, but also the hushed, almost penitent tone in which he spoke them. He sounded tired; he looked exhausted. His eyes were still closed; his head, still bowed; but the line of his shoulders had softened out of the agitated tension that had warned her that pressing him ran the risk of detonating a mean drunk dangerously sober.
Something about him seemed changed somehow. The hard, callused hand he’d laid flat to the counter trembled a little, the worn, gold wedding band on his ring finger glinting small splinters of mid-morning sunlight and overhead florescents off its well-polished smooth. The stink of garbage and whiskey still clung to him like an indictment, but the compassion she’d not felt earlier showed up in a rush that nearly overwhelmed her for a moment. It lifted the pall of resentment wrapped around her, drove her so far as to actually open her mouth to ask if he was okay, if he needed help, if there was something wrong or something she could do … then she didn’t. She just didn’t.
It shouldn’t have taken Dean more than a couple of minutes to make it from his classroom to the office, but they were going on seven when his father stirred, lifted his head away from the counter to ask, "What the fuck is taking so long?" He looked paler now than when he’d first arrived. Or maybe it was just a trick of the light. The florescent overheads could make a healthy kid look like a three-days-in-the-grave corpse on any given day … something a number of the smarter students had learned to leverage to their advantage when seeking sick leave to the end of skipping math class.
"Mister Robart’s room is quite a walk," she lied without really knowing why. Then, forgetting her own intention to minimize their need to interact by letting his profanity stand unchallenged for as long as it took to be rid of him, she added, "And please, Mister Winchester. Your language."
He blinked at her like he wasn’t quite sure what she meant, stared at her for several more seconds before his gaze finally flicked away, flicked down. "Yeah," he muttered. "Okay. Right. Sorry." Again, he sounded more tired than drunk. "Which direction …?" He was shifting positions against the counter as he spoke, turning his body just enough to get a better view out the office’s glass half walls to the locker-lined hallway beyond when his elbow slipped, when one of his knees buckled. He would have fallen but for the startling slap of his palm against the countertop, the quiet clink of his wedding ring a metallic contrast to the sticky friction of flesh against formica catching his weight long enough for the failed knee to recover.
He made a quiet, sick sound deep in his chest, hissed something ferocious through the grit of clenched teeth. His tone identified the small string of unintelligible words as a curse, but they sounded more like Latin … like some kind of Latin exhortation to profanation, if she remembered her catechism classes correctly, which she really didn’t. She cocked her head to one side, watching him struggle through what was clearly pain, but uncertain if it was the pain of a hangover or something else, something more, something worse.
Something much worse.
"Mister Winchester?" she ventured carefully.
He grunted, but didn’t answer; avoided her gaze when she tried to make eye contact, but not like he was shamed; rather, like he was … hiding. She’d seen enough of both over the years-both shame and hiding-to know the difference, and Dean’s father was definitely hiding.
"Are you okay, Mister Winchester?" she pressed.
For a moment, he didn’t answer her. Didn’t move. Didn’t look up. Didn’t do anything. Then slowly, almost lazily, he lifted his head and smiled. Grinned. "Fucking peachy, darlin," he said, slurring his words again as he spoke. "You?"
Any concern she might have felt for him blanched to a bitter dry. She turned away, furious to have been sucked in by his little melodrama, outraged to have been duped into believing, even if only for a moment, the best of someone who deserved only the worst, if even that.
They didn’t speak again.
It was another three minutes before Dean Winchester finally turned the corner at the far end of the main hallway. He strolled past a row of lockers in that casual, arrogant way he had of walking, meeting her gaze through the wall of windows and flashing an insolent grin he no doubt thought was charming.
Or perhaps he knew it was infuriating and simply didn’t care.
He thought he was a real James Dean, that one did. All arrogance and attitude; all belligerence and braggadocio. Thirteen years old and already hell-bent for leather down the road his father paved by example. It would take a minor miracle to keep him from ending up in the gutter by the time he was twenty. Or dead. Or in prison.
His strolling swagger got more pronounced as he neared the office. It became almost a strut: the kind of thing boys that age thought made them look like men. He was showing off for her, making sure she saw how important he was in his own mind, if not in anyone else’s.
He hadn’t seen his father yet. He wouldn’t until he actually opened the door and stepped inside.
Dean opened the door and stepped inside. And he changed.
The transformation was as startling as it was comprehensive: a detonation of difference that hit his posture, his stride, his expression all at the same time. The second he saw the back of his father’s filthy, tattered jacket, the bubble of exaggerated self importance imploded. Arrogance sloughed away like dead skin. Belligerence and attitude shattered like a fine spun web of crystal charade, leaving behind only shadows and echoes of the boy he had been only moments before to reveal the entirely new boy he had only just become.
"Dad."
Dean lurched forward, his voice raw with panic, his eyes, more so and to a deeper degree. He reached the counter in two long strides, caught his father’s arm at the elbow as if he expected the man to fall simply by virtue of the fact that he was there.
Winchester’s eyes had fallen closed again, but he reacted to the pressure of his son’s hand like a blow. "Fuck." He grabbed at Dean’s shirt, caught a fistful of cloth and held on like his life depended on it. "Arm. Dean. Arm."
Dean released his father’s elbow immediately, and Winchester sagged, leaned into both his son and the counter like the weight of his own body had suddenly become too much to bear.
"Dad?" Dean said again. His voice was quieter this time; his eyes, the unresolved terror of a five-year-old watching his own personal Superman take a header down a flight of stairs. But there was no shame in Dean’s posture … no shame at all. There was no denial in how close he stood to a man who’s stench alone would have driven any other kid in the school to mortified tears, no effort to distance himself from a father who’d stumbled into his school like a bum off the street, tattered and filthy and drunk.
"Give me a minute," Winchester muttered.
And his son obeyed. He didn’t agree. Didn’t concede. Didn’t capitulate. He obeyed, standing still and silent at his father’s side until that father stirred out of his near catatonic stupor, eyes opening in a slow struggle of slow blinks to a hard won focus. His lips twisted, tried to smile but managed only the pained self loathing of a man used to failing a child to the kind of shame Dean Winchester did not show.
"Hey," he said. He swallowed with an effort, straightened a bit from the counter like he was trying to stand, but was too dizzy to manage it.
"You okay?" Dean asked, his tone pinched with anxiety.
"Yeah. Fucking peachy." Winchester closed his eyes, opened them slowly. Licked his lips before he said, "Need you at home."
"Yeah. Sure. Absolutely."
"Give me a hand. Other side."
"I’m not sure you’re fit to drive, Mister Winchester," Mrs. Petersen said before she realized she was going to. Then, when he looked at her, she added almost apologetically, "Perhaps I should call a cab?"
Dean’s expression tightened with resentment. Anger. Outrage. But again, no shame … no shame at all. "Perhaps you should just mind your own fucking business," he suggested fiercely.
"Hey." His father’s voice was hard; his tone, stern. When Dean flicked him a sideways glance, he said simply, "Mouth."
And that was it: all that was said, all that needed to be said. Dean ducked his head, looked away, looked to the side. "Sorry," he muttered, anything but sorry.
He stepped away from the counter for a moment as if he was walking away, then came back, eased in close to his father again, but on the left this time, rather than the right. The adjustment would have seemed an unintended happenstance but for the way father’s body accommodated it as a shared intention: a subtle choreography of do-sa-do and allemande left performed by mutual, if unspoken, accord.
She frowned, and Winchester offered up a deferential smile that was only half as convincing as his son’s unconvincing contrition. "Lost an argument with gravity in your lot," he explained. "Cracked a wing, but didn’t do any permanent damage … nothing a little fresh air won’t blow clean." He glanced at Dean. "Let’s hit it, son."
When he pushed off the counter, his knee tried to buckle again. Dean caught him, steadied him. Winchester regained his balance, and they worked their way to the door. With his father listing badly to one side, Dean stepped in closer, took on more of his father’s awkwardly balanced weight. Winchester let him. He leaned into his son-sagged into him-as if he was either too drunk or too tired to stand on his own.
"We have a school nurse," she offered on impulse … again without meaning to until it was already done. "I’m sure she wouldn’t mind taking a look."
Dean glanced up in surprise.
"Well … it was our parking lot after all," she allowed a little sheepishly.
Dean looked to his father for guidance. The flicker of hope in his eyes was heartbreaking. For just a moment, he was a child offered a lifeline of potential salvation in the open ocean of a watching his father drown one step at a time.
"I’m fine," his father grunted. "Get the door, Dean."
And just that quickly, the hope in Dean Winchester’s eyes died. His expression slipped, and he looked down again. Looked away. He opened the office door, his slender shoulders tight with exertion as he tried to help his father through a door half again too small for the both of them.
"Dean …" she said although she had no idea what she intended to say next. "Dean … let me help you." She stepped out from behind the counter, but he stopped her with a single word.
"No."
She hesitated, uncertain for a moment, then took another step in their direction.
"No," Dean said again, looking up this time, looking right at her. "I’ve got it, Mrs. Petersen. I’m fine … we’re fine … but thanks anyway."
It surprised her that the strutting, insolent rebel-without-a-cause who rolled into town less than three months ago and managed two detentions by the end of his first week actually knew her name. It surprised her more that he used it. It surprised her most that he thanked her … that he looked her square in the eyes like a respectful young man and thanked her. Not for helping him. But for wanting to help him. For trying to help him.
Dean and his father made it through the door without incident. When they were on the other side, Dean stood looking at her as it closed between them. She wanted to say something to him, but he was gone long before he turned away to leave.
She watched them go, Dean Winchester and his father walking down the hall side-by-side, their bodies pressed so close together it was difficult to tell where the boy ended and the man began. Dean took on more of his father’s weight with every step until, by the time they reached the main entrance, he was carrying his father in ways no child should ever have to do. His strolling swagger had become a shadow exposed to light. There was no longer even the memory of it in the guarded, protective gait he measured out by the yardstick of what his father could manage without falling to an awkward, punishing stumble.
A drunk stumble. Or something more. Something worse.
She watched them make their way to a classic muscle car parked catiwompas in the fire lane just beyond the main driveway’s curb. There was another child inside: a younger boy in the backseat who looked frightened, who looked terrified. When Dean tried to lead his father to the passenger side of the car, his father balked, overruled him with a look she could read from a hundred yards away. He changed directions, walked them to the driver’s side instead, opened the door and helped his father settle in behind the wheel like he was handling precious cargo so fragile it might shatter at the slightest jostle. His younger brother hovered over the operation, ineffectual, distraught, a frantic observer flitting about in darts and jitters.
She needed to call the police.
Those children had no business riding around in a car with someone so drunk, or so hung over, that he couldn’t walk without his thirteen-year-old bearing the brunt of the burden. If he’d fallen in the parking lot, then it was their responsibility to see that he got the medical attention he required. If she let him leave without verifying he wasn’t seriously injured, they could sue the school, sue the city …
She reached out, picked up the phone as Dean closed the driver’s side door of his father’s car like he was trying to ease out of a child’s nursery without waking the baby in the process. Her fingers were dialing when he crossed behind the trunk of the car and stopped, looking straight at her with eyes that knew exactly what she was doing, and why.
Her fingers stilled, leaving the number only half dialed.
He thought he was a real James Dean, that one. All fragility and pain and need wrapped in a leather jacket, wearing the whole world like a cross upon his shoulders, so tough the shell of his rebellion would hold up under all but the most intense of scrutinies.
All but the most intense of scrutinies.
Staring at her across the distance between them, his expression was that of neither a man nor a boy, but rather of a thirteen-year-old caught squarely in between. There was no insolence in him now. There was no swagger, no arrogance, no rebellion. There was only a heartbreaking flicker of hope, desperate eyes searching the waters for a lifeline and finding only ocean, a son asking for something he already knew she wasn’t going to give him: a father, flawed as he might be, to hold onto rather than the cold comfort of three squares and a bed in juvy hall.
She remembered the tremble in Winchester’s hard, callused hand against the formica counter, his wedding band glinting a warm, burnished gold against the dark of his dirty skin. She remembered the twist of cold, tearing panic that fractured Dean’s expression as he lurched toward a man who should have shamed him, but didn’t.
When she replaced the phone in its cradle without completing the call, the lines of tension in Dean’s face eased to a slow, grateful smile. Thank you. His father’s voice. His voice. He nodded, lifted a hand only inches from his thigh and waved at her from below his waist like he was afraid she might see him, like he was afraid she might understand him. He turned back to the car before she had a chance to respond in kind; strode to the passenger side door like a boy trying to be a man and slipped inside, closing it as gently behind himself as he’d closed his father’s door a few moments before.
They pulled out of the parking lot like any other car driven by any other parent. She watched them until they turned a corner and were gone. Perhaps she shouldn’t have felt compassion for them but she did. Compassion. And Hope. But no shame … no shame at all.
-finis-
__________________________________
And here's your exit poll:
Poll The Exit Poll
Title: No Shame. No Shame at All.
Author: Dodger Winslow
Genre: Gen, Pre-series
Rating: PG-13 for language
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while ...
A/N: This is a stand alone story. It is, however, also an outsider perspective piece that takes place during the events of Failure is Not an Option. If you want to know what is really going on, as compared to what Mrs. Petersen thinks is going on, you might want to read that one, too ... the order of reading being determined by whether or not you want to experience this story the way Mrs. Petersen does, or the way John and Dean do. (Just for the sake of clarification: this is actually the piece that INSPIRED me to write Failure. I wrote this first, I just posted it second ... significantly more polished than the first version, but still very much the same story it was originally written to be.)
Summary: He thought he was a real James Dean, that one did. All arrogance and attitude; all belligerence and braggadocio. Thirteen years old and already hell-bent for leather down the road his father paved by example. It would take a minor miracle to keep him from ending up in the gutter by the time he was twenty. Or dead. Or in prison.
No Shame. No Shame at All.
Mrs. Petersen looked up at the smell of whiskey.
He was standing in front of the admin desk across the room, looking like he belonged in a gutter somewhere. Or perhaps more accurately, looking like he might have come from a gutter somewhere-like he might have slept there, like he might have lived there. His coat was filthy, as were his jeans. He hadn’t shaved in God knows how long, and he stank of garbage and sweat layered atop cheap whiskey and something she couldn’t quite identify … was pretty certain she didn’t want to identify.
There were bruises on the side of his face and neck. His lip was split, and a smattering of cuts peppered his skin from hairline to collar. Most were crusted over to dry, raw scabs, but a few were fresh and bleeding. He looked like he’d taken a tumble in the parking lot: tripped on a line in the sidewalk or stumbled over a shadow or a blade of uprooted grass.
Perhaps she should have felt compassion for him, but she didn’t. She’d seen too many fathers bourboning their sons lives to inadequacy, seen too many mothers wine coolering their daughters futures to domestic squalor to feel any compassion at all for someone who showed up at their child’s school in the condition this man was in.
"I’m here to pick up my boy," he said, leaning into the counter as he spoke. He sounded as drunk as he looked. His voice was the texture of burlap, grinding out of him like sandpaper on unfinished cement.
She smiled thinly, wondering which lucky boy held the winning ticket in this particular parental lotto. "And your son’s name?"
"Winchester," he grunted. He closed his eyes for a moment, too drunk to keep them open in the room’s bright light. "Dean Winchester."
Of course. Dean Winchester. She should have known. He was a predictable fit for the truculent thirteen-year-old who’d been nothing but trouble from the day he arrived. There was a strong family resemblance, too, now that she knew to look for it … a resemblance made all that much stronger by a vaguely belligerent sense of entitlement he wore as naturally as his own skin. Please and thank yous were beyond the purview of his own self interest, just as a simple failure to antagonize for the sake of antagonizing was beyond the purview of his son’s.
Because she was in the middle of something when he announced he’d come to shame a child in front of his classmates, and because he was standing on the other side of the counter like a man asleep on his feet-asleep being a euphemism in this case-she finished stuffing the staff’s mailboxes with the morning memos before turning to her computer to look up the Winchester boy’s class schedule.
She was scrolling through screen after screen of gold type when Dean’s father opened his eyes again. He blinked several times to accomplish a bleary-eyed focus, then said, "Hurry every chance you get. Don’t have all fucking day to dick around while you stand around sorting papers."
She didn’t answer for a full three count and half a dozen more screens. When she did, she looked up first, fixed him with a cold, level, condemning gaze before saying, "I’m sorry, Mister Winchester, but we don’t allow that kind of language here. I’m going to have to ask you to refrain from using profanity until you leave school grounds."
He laughed quietly. It was the low rumble of vocal cords steeped in a hundred and eighty proof as a matter of course. His eyelids continued to fly at half mast and lazy, but his teeth were much whiter than she expected them to be when he bared them her direction: more of a challenge than a smile.
"Absolutely, ma’am. Happy to oblige. Now call my fucking son for me. Pronto."
Despite his laggard’s slouch against the counter and the nearly congenial tone in which he offered his slightly slurred response, he didn’t look drunk now so much as loosely dangerous, didn’t look shiftless so much as disquietously combative. Because she’d had her share of experience with dangerous drunks over the years, both on the professional front and the personal one, she didn’t challenge him again. Rather, she placated him by turning her attention back to the computer screen, locating his son’s third period class assignment and calling on the intercom to request that he be sent to the office immediately.
By the time she was finished, Winchester’s eyes had slipped shut again. He was leaning more heavily into the counter than he had before, his dark head bowed now, his filthy forehead nearly touching the cool, beige formica. Leaving him to the stupor into which he’d sunk, she began her morning filing as if she didn’t have better things to do than keep an eye on a half conscious boozer until his belligerent son arrived and she could shoo them on their way.
"Thank you," he said quietly.
The sound of his voice surprised her: not only the words he spoke, but also the hushed, almost penitent tone in which he spoke them. He sounded tired; he looked exhausted. His eyes were still closed; his head, still bowed; but the line of his shoulders had softened out of the agitated tension that had warned her that pressing him ran the risk of detonating a mean drunk dangerously sober.
Something about him seemed changed somehow. The hard, callused hand he’d laid flat to the counter trembled a little, the worn, gold wedding band on his ring finger glinting small splinters of mid-morning sunlight and overhead florescents off its well-polished smooth. The stink of garbage and whiskey still clung to him like an indictment, but the compassion she’d not felt earlier showed up in a rush that nearly overwhelmed her for a moment. It lifted the pall of resentment wrapped around her, drove her so far as to actually open her mouth to ask if he was okay, if he needed help, if there was something wrong or something she could do … then she didn’t. She just didn’t.
It shouldn’t have taken Dean more than a couple of minutes to make it from his classroom to the office, but they were going on seven when his father stirred, lifted his head away from the counter to ask, "What the fuck is taking so long?" He looked paler now than when he’d first arrived. Or maybe it was just a trick of the light. The florescent overheads could make a healthy kid look like a three-days-in-the-grave corpse on any given day … something a number of the smarter students had learned to leverage to their advantage when seeking sick leave to the end of skipping math class.
"Mister Robart’s room is quite a walk," she lied without really knowing why. Then, forgetting her own intention to minimize their need to interact by letting his profanity stand unchallenged for as long as it took to be rid of him, she added, "And please, Mister Winchester. Your language."
He blinked at her like he wasn’t quite sure what she meant, stared at her for several more seconds before his gaze finally flicked away, flicked down. "Yeah," he muttered. "Okay. Right. Sorry." Again, he sounded more tired than drunk. "Which direction …?" He was shifting positions against the counter as he spoke, turning his body just enough to get a better view out the office’s glass half walls to the locker-lined hallway beyond when his elbow slipped, when one of his knees buckled. He would have fallen but for the startling slap of his palm against the countertop, the quiet clink of his wedding ring a metallic contrast to the sticky friction of flesh against formica catching his weight long enough for the failed knee to recover.
He made a quiet, sick sound deep in his chest, hissed something ferocious through the grit of clenched teeth. His tone identified the small string of unintelligible words as a curse, but they sounded more like Latin … like some kind of Latin exhortation to profanation, if she remembered her catechism classes correctly, which she really didn’t. She cocked her head to one side, watching him struggle through what was clearly pain, but uncertain if it was the pain of a hangover or something else, something more, something worse.
Something much worse.
"Mister Winchester?" she ventured carefully.
He grunted, but didn’t answer; avoided her gaze when she tried to make eye contact, but not like he was shamed; rather, like he was … hiding. She’d seen enough of both over the years-both shame and hiding-to know the difference, and Dean’s father was definitely hiding.
"Are you okay, Mister Winchester?" she pressed.
For a moment, he didn’t answer her. Didn’t move. Didn’t look up. Didn’t do anything. Then slowly, almost lazily, he lifted his head and smiled. Grinned. "Fucking peachy, darlin," he said, slurring his words again as he spoke. "You?"
Any concern she might have felt for him blanched to a bitter dry. She turned away, furious to have been sucked in by his little melodrama, outraged to have been duped into believing, even if only for a moment, the best of someone who deserved only the worst, if even that.
They didn’t speak again.
It was another three minutes before Dean Winchester finally turned the corner at the far end of the main hallway. He strolled past a row of lockers in that casual, arrogant way he had of walking, meeting her gaze through the wall of windows and flashing an insolent grin he no doubt thought was charming.
Or perhaps he knew it was infuriating and simply didn’t care.
He thought he was a real James Dean, that one did. All arrogance and attitude; all belligerence and braggadocio. Thirteen years old and already hell-bent for leather down the road his father paved by example. It would take a minor miracle to keep him from ending up in the gutter by the time he was twenty. Or dead. Or in prison.
His strolling swagger got more pronounced as he neared the office. It became almost a strut: the kind of thing boys that age thought made them look like men. He was showing off for her, making sure she saw how important he was in his own mind, if not in anyone else’s.
He hadn’t seen his father yet. He wouldn’t until he actually opened the door and stepped inside.
Dean opened the door and stepped inside. And he changed.
The transformation was as startling as it was comprehensive: a detonation of difference that hit his posture, his stride, his expression all at the same time. The second he saw the back of his father’s filthy, tattered jacket, the bubble of exaggerated self importance imploded. Arrogance sloughed away like dead skin. Belligerence and attitude shattered like a fine spun web of crystal charade, leaving behind only shadows and echoes of the boy he had been only moments before to reveal the entirely new boy he had only just become.
"Dad."
Dean lurched forward, his voice raw with panic, his eyes, more so and to a deeper degree. He reached the counter in two long strides, caught his father’s arm at the elbow as if he expected the man to fall simply by virtue of the fact that he was there.
Winchester’s eyes had fallen closed again, but he reacted to the pressure of his son’s hand like a blow. "Fuck." He grabbed at Dean’s shirt, caught a fistful of cloth and held on like his life depended on it. "Arm. Dean. Arm."
Dean released his father’s elbow immediately, and Winchester sagged, leaned into both his son and the counter like the weight of his own body had suddenly become too much to bear.
"Dad?" Dean said again. His voice was quieter this time; his eyes, the unresolved terror of a five-year-old watching his own personal Superman take a header down a flight of stairs. But there was no shame in Dean’s posture … no shame at all. There was no denial in how close he stood to a man who’s stench alone would have driven any other kid in the school to mortified tears, no effort to distance himself from a father who’d stumbled into his school like a bum off the street, tattered and filthy and drunk.
"Give me a minute," Winchester muttered.
And his son obeyed. He didn’t agree. Didn’t concede. Didn’t capitulate. He obeyed, standing still and silent at his father’s side until that father stirred out of his near catatonic stupor, eyes opening in a slow struggle of slow blinks to a hard won focus. His lips twisted, tried to smile but managed only the pained self loathing of a man used to failing a child to the kind of shame Dean Winchester did not show.
"Hey," he said. He swallowed with an effort, straightened a bit from the counter like he was trying to stand, but was too dizzy to manage it.
"You okay?" Dean asked, his tone pinched with anxiety.
"Yeah. Fucking peachy." Winchester closed his eyes, opened them slowly. Licked his lips before he said, "Need you at home."
"Yeah. Sure. Absolutely."
"Give me a hand. Other side."
"I’m not sure you’re fit to drive, Mister Winchester," Mrs. Petersen said before she realized she was going to. Then, when he looked at her, she added almost apologetically, "Perhaps I should call a cab?"
Dean’s expression tightened with resentment. Anger. Outrage. But again, no shame … no shame at all. "Perhaps you should just mind your own fucking business," he suggested fiercely.
"Hey." His father’s voice was hard; his tone, stern. When Dean flicked him a sideways glance, he said simply, "Mouth."
And that was it: all that was said, all that needed to be said. Dean ducked his head, looked away, looked to the side. "Sorry," he muttered, anything but sorry.
He stepped away from the counter for a moment as if he was walking away, then came back, eased in close to his father again, but on the left this time, rather than the right. The adjustment would have seemed an unintended happenstance but for the way father’s body accommodated it as a shared intention: a subtle choreography of do-sa-do and allemande left performed by mutual, if unspoken, accord.
She frowned, and Winchester offered up a deferential smile that was only half as convincing as his son’s unconvincing contrition. "Lost an argument with gravity in your lot," he explained. "Cracked a wing, but didn’t do any permanent damage … nothing a little fresh air won’t blow clean." He glanced at Dean. "Let’s hit it, son."
When he pushed off the counter, his knee tried to buckle again. Dean caught him, steadied him. Winchester regained his balance, and they worked their way to the door. With his father listing badly to one side, Dean stepped in closer, took on more of his father’s awkwardly balanced weight. Winchester let him. He leaned into his son-sagged into him-as if he was either too drunk or too tired to stand on his own.
"We have a school nurse," she offered on impulse … again without meaning to until it was already done. "I’m sure she wouldn’t mind taking a look."
Dean glanced up in surprise.
"Well … it was our parking lot after all," she allowed a little sheepishly.
Dean looked to his father for guidance. The flicker of hope in his eyes was heartbreaking. For just a moment, he was a child offered a lifeline of potential salvation in the open ocean of a watching his father drown one step at a time.
"I’m fine," his father grunted. "Get the door, Dean."
And just that quickly, the hope in Dean Winchester’s eyes died. His expression slipped, and he looked down again. Looked away. He opened the office door, his slender shoulders tight with exertion as he tried to help his father through a door half again too small for the both of them.
"Dean …" she said although she had no idea what she intended to say next. "Dean … let me help you." She stepped out from behind the counter, but he stopped her with a single word.
"No."
She hesitated, uncertain for a moment, then took another step in their direction.
"No," Dean said again, looking up this time, looking right at her. "I’ve got it, Mrs. Petersen. I’m fine … we’re fine … but thanks anyway."
It surprised her that the strutting, insolent rebel-without-a-cause who rolled into town less than three months ago and managed two detentions by the end of his first week actually knew her name. It surprised her more that he used it. It surprised her most that he thanked her … that he looked her square in the eyes like a respectful young man and thanked her. Not for helping him. But for wanting to help him. For trying to help him.
Dean and his father made it through the door without incident. When they were on the other side, Dean stood looking at her as it closed between them. She wanted to say something to him, but he was gone long before he turned away to leave.
She watched them go, Dean Winchester and his father walking down the hall side-by-side, their bodies pressed so close together it was difficult to tell where the boy ended and the man began. Dean took on more of his father’s weight with every step until, by the time they reached the main entrance, he was carrying his father in ways no child should ever have to do. His strolling swagger had become a shadow exposed to light. There was no longer even the memory of it in the guarded, protective gait he measured out by the yardstick of what his father could manage without falling to an awkward, punishing stumble.
A drunk stumble. Or something more. Something worse.
She watched them make their way to a classic muscle car parked catiwompas in the fire lane just beyond the main driveway’s curb. There was another child inside: a younger boy in the backseat who looked frightened, who looked terrified. When Dean tried to lead his father to the passenger side of the car, his father balked, overruled him with a look she could read from a hundred yards away. He changed directions, walked them to the driver’s side instead, opened the door and helped his father settle in behind the wheel like he was handling precious cargo so fragile it might shatter at the slightest jostle. His younger brother hovered over the operation, ineffectual, distraught, a frantic observer flitting about in darts and jitters.
She needed to call the police.
Those children had no business riding around in a car with someone so drunk, or so hung over, that he couldn’t walk without his thirteen-year-old bearing the brunt of the burden. If he’d fallen in the parking lot, then it was their responsibility to see that he got the medical attention he required. If she let him leave without verifying he wasn’t seriously injured, they could sue the school, sue the city …
She reached out, picked up the phone as Dean closed the driver’s side door of his father’s car like he was trying to ease out of a child’s nursery without waking the baby in the process. Her fingers were dialing when he crossed behind the trunk of the car and stopped, looking straight at her with eyes that knew exactly what she was doing, and why.
Her fingers stilled, leaving the number only half dialed.
He thought he was a real James Dean, that one. All fragility and pain and need wrapped in a leather jacket, wearing the whole world like a cross upon his shoulders, so tough the shell of his rebellion would hold up under all but the most intense of scrutinies.
All but the most intense of scrutinies.
Staring at her across the distance between them, his expression was that of neither a man nor a boy, but rather of a thirteen-year-old caught squarely in between. There was no insolence in him now. There was no swagger, no arrogance, no rebellion. There was only a heartbreaking flicker of hope, desperate eyes searching the waters for a lifeline and finding only ocean, a son asking for something he already knew she wasn’t going to give him: a father, flawed as he might be, to hold onto rather than the cold comfort of three squares and a bed in juvy hall.
She remembered the tremble in Winchester’s hard, callused hand against the formica counter, his wedding band glinting a warm, burnished gold against the dark of his dirty skin. She remembered the twist of cold, tearing panic that fractured Dean’s expression as he lurched toward a man who should have shamed him, but didn’t.
When she replaced the phone in its cradle without completing the call, the lines of tension in Dean’s face eased to a slow, grateful smile. Thank you. His father’s voice. His voice. He nodded, lifted a hand only inches from his thigh and waved at her from below his waist like he was afraid she might see him, like he was afraid she might understand him. He turned back to the car before she had a chance to respond in kind; strode to the passenger side door like a boy trying to be a man and slipped inside, closing it as gently behind himself as he’d closed his father’s door a few moments before.
They pulled out of the parking lot like any other car driven by any other parent. She watched them until they turned a corner and were gone. Perhaps she shouldn’t have felt compassion for them but she did. Compassion. And Hope. But no shame … no shame at all.
-finis-
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