Supernatural Fic: Freaks and Monsters (3/3)
And the last part ...
Title: Freaks and Monsters (Part 3 of 3)
Author:
dodger_winslow
Challenge: Firsts Chart: First Kiss
Rating: R for language and mature themes (take that seriously)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series
Parings/Characters: No pairings. John, Dean and Sammy are the focus
Word Count: 24,000 (total)
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.
Summary: And in that way of doing things, there’s a need to sit with the monster you hunt, to look it in the eyes in full reach of its capacity to maim you, to slaughter you; and to see it turn. To see it be that which you already know it to be. To see it with your own eyes, in a way you cannot later deny yourself, when the acid of conscience finds you as it always does, seeking avenues to erode deeds done in service of good to atrocities committed by sin of hubris to believe yourself worthy to the role of judge, jury and executioner.
Part 3
John rang the doorbell, listening to the expensive clang as it echoed through the house on the other side of the door. It had been dark for less than an hour. There was going to be a moon tonight, but it wasn’t up yet. He’d unscrewed the porch light several hours ago so the shadows on the porch would work to his advantage.
The man who answered wasn’t far off John’s size: a little taller, a little broader through the chest, but less seasoned to the compact bulk of a man who worked for his muscle rather than paying for it with a credit card twice a week.
The moment he saw John, his expression changed. There was little doubt he knew exactly who John was. That worked out nicely, because John knew exactly who he was, too; but it never hurt to make absolutely sure.
"Hi," John said with a neighborly smile. "I’m John Winchester."
"I know who you are," Laney’s father said. "You and that bitch boy of yours."
It was the wrong thing to say.
*
John leaned against the grillwork of the Impala, picking his teeth and waiting for the piece of shit at his feet to wake up. The construction site was abandoned this time of night, and far enough away from the road or any other form of civilized inhabitation to suit what he had in mind.
The moon was up now, giving him plenty of light to work by; but he kept the Impala’s headlights on anyway, in part because it was a psychological advantage to be the backlit shadow between the glare of two blinding lights, and in part because lighting up the immediate surroundings made the dark beyond them seem far more desolate by contrast, while playing nicely to the assumption they were so far out as to be secluded beyond any reasonable hope of two-footing it back to civilization.
Not that he was above hunting on the run. To the contrary, on the right night, a little high-stakes hide and seek could be the poor man’s version of Survivor - a game at which he excelled. But tonight, there were still enough bird-bat mementos stitched into his back to dampen his enthusiasm for the prospect of any kind of chase at all, much the same way that bitch of a ruptured trapezius put the idea of hand-to-hand dancing on his avoid-if-possible list.
To that end, he had a .45 tucked chill and metal against the small of his back, and a .380 in the ankle holster on his left leg. More along the lines of stealthy, there was a gutting knife belted to one hip, and he always kept a double-edged throwing knife in a sheath that was spine-stitched between the inside lining and outside shell of his jacket, just in case the urge to pick his teeth in an intimidating manner struck him.
Because it wasn’t in his nature to leave home without them; and because he was still, in many ways, the same overgrown Boy Scout he’d once been, and thus always prepared (in addition to thrifty, reverent, and more-or-less trustworthy), there were enough armaments in the trunk of the Impala to mobilize a small mob of kangaroos into a fair semblance of a Navy SEAL team. (Not being Marines, the actual non-armament elements of the unit being interchangeable with pretty much anything that possessed a good kick and a pocket to carry the ammo in, being the point there.)
So all in all, he was just about as concerned that the man who was only now beginning to stir on the dry hardpack in front of him might actually leverage his credit-card fitness into any kind of viable resistance as that man likely was that his thirteen year old daughter might leverage her little girl resources into any kind of viable resistance.
John was a big believer in tit for tat.
Laney’s father came to slowly, groaning, pushing in futility against the ground for several minutes before he made it to his hands and knees, and finally, his feet.
"Hell of a glass jaw you’ve got there, Dale," John said conversationally.
Dale Swiggart staggered. He swayed drunkenly, reeling three steps to the right. Lifting one hand to shield himself against the intrusive burn of the Impala’s high beams, he squinted past it, trying to find John among the shadows burned black by the contrast between light and dark.
"Who the fuck are you?"
"I’m that bitch boy’s father. You can call me John, if you like."
"Winchester." Swiggart said the name like an oath. His eyes narrowed in a show of belligerence utterly un-warranted, given that he was still alive, and more-or-less in one piece.
"Ah, now. Don’t be like that, Dale. I’m trying to be neighborly here. Offer you a chance to get to know me."
"Fuck you."
"No thanks. I hear you get enough from your daughter for the both of us."
Swiggart swayed again, but it was all for show this time. He’d regained his balance now and was looking for ways to stack the deck even though the hand was already dealt. Some men were stupid like that. They thought themselves above the cards.
They were always wrong.
Swiggart coughed. He tried to look frightened - something he was yet smart enough to be. He swayed again, looking more like a man at a concert than someone still suffering from the application of John Winchester’s unique ability to put most monsters down with one hand, a necessity in this case, with one trapezius bird-bat bit to shit.
Watching the show, John wondered passingly how long amateur night was going to last before it got itself cancelled with prejudice. His shoulder ached like a mother, and the cool night air wasn’t helping any.
"Can you turn off those fucking lights?" Swiggart asked in a tone that was pure petulant demand.
"Sure I can," John answered, but he didn’t move from his lean against the Impala.
"Well?" Swiggart demanded after a long beat.
"I can," John allowed. "Didn’t say I would."
"Cute. What is this, some mobster movie or something? You take me out into the desert and whack me because your punk kid fucks my girl into the hospital?"
"Not really the desert, Dale," John said, letting the rest of his assumption stand uncontested just to mess with his head.
"You can call me Swiggart," Swiggart informed him irritably.
"I can," John agreed.
"What the fuck do you want, Winchester?" Swiggart demanded.
"Just thought we’d get to know each other a little bit, Dale. Seems our kids have become somewhat of an item. My boy’s experimenting with his wings. Some day he’s going to be a flyer, but for right now, he’s just testing the winds a bit."
"Well your flyer fucked my little girl." Swiggart’s voice was poison. He enjoyed using it, mistaking his own verbal piss for acid. "Fucked her up the ass, then fucked her in the head so bad she had to cut herself just to take the pain."
"The boy’s a scoundrel," John said. Then, conversationally, he asked, "So how often do you fuck her, Dale? If you don’t mind me asking, of course."
He minded enough to blow himself up to a fair impersonation of moral outrage and begin to rail like the wounded party he wasn’t, his voice cracking with the effort of making it sound like the truth. The effort was wasted on John.
"You’ve got some nerve, Winchester. Where do you get off asking me something like that? How dare you fucking ask me that. How dare you even think about asking me that!"
"What? Too personal? Okay then, how ’bout, How old was she when you first started fucking her, Dale?"
Swiggart glared at him. His eyes had become accustomed to the Impala’s unblinking illumination. He was getting very close to putting his first bet to the felt.
"Just generally speaking," John said. "Ballpark. I know things like that can be hard to keep track of, so you don’t have to pinpoint it to the day, the hour, the minute."
"You have no idea what you’re talking about."
"Don’t I?"
"No."
John straightened from his lean against the Impala. He took three steps forward and decked Swiggart with a hard right hook. Too arrogant to see it coming, the man hit the ground like a boneless sack of potatoes.
John went back to leaning on the car. "Don’t much care for being lied to, Dale," he said.
It took Swiggart several minutes to recover his scattered senses. As they began to return, he struggled himself to one knee and one foot, unaware how easy it was to see his intention to launch in a simple choice of posture. He glanced around, only now looking to his surroundings, only now beginning to realize how much trouble he was actually in.
"Where the hell am I?" he demanded, touching his jaw tenderly.
"I like to call it purgatory," John said. "If you’re not a religious man, Dale, that’s kind of like a waiting room between hell and not-hell. A quiet place for you to sit and consider your sinful ways."
"Fuck you," Dale said again.
John smiled. "We’re already past that part of the conversation, Dale. We’re up to your sinful ways now. Try to keep pace, will you?"
"Look, I don’t know what you want from me …" Swiggart’s tone had shifted to conciliatory, another tell of intention it would take a blind man not to notice. John adjusted his weight minimally, his almost imperceptible change of posture reflecting assessments of angle, trajectory and intent to the end of judging exactly how little he could move and still avoid Swiggart’s forward rush entirely.
" … but I’m just --" Swiggart launched himself at John, rocketing up from the ground and forward as if he expected his intentions to be utterly unanticipated.
John slid easily to one side, letting the attacking man slam into the Impala’s metal grillwork headfirst. It dented the metal a little. It dented Dale’s head more.
"That’s gonna leave a mark," John said. He reached down, ran one finger along the slightest of bends in the grillwork. "And it’s gonna cost you, Dale. Nobody hurts my baby without paying the bill."
John put a precisely placed kick into Swiggart’s belly. The force of it lifted him off the ground and rolled him back to settle in almost the same place he’d crouched before the charge.
"I’ll collect the interest later," John said.
He watched Swiggart lie belly up on the hardpack, pulled around the spasm in his gut as he rolled from side to side, coughing, breathing, coughing some more. He settled on one side, facing John. There was blood on his lips. His eyes had a glaze to them as he spit it out on the ground.
"No need to get up, Dale. You just lie there and relax. It could be a long night, and you might as well get the rest while you can."
That sparked a flicker of fear to Swiggart’s eyes. John enjoyed it more than he should have.
"So back to our conversation. What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, I remember. Your sinful ways. Lets explore that a bit, shall we? Shine a little light in that dark closet of yours just to see where the shadows fall."
"You’re insane," Swiggart said, his arms wrapped around his gut, his clothes dusted grey with the grit of the hardpack on which he’d been rolling.
"You should be so lucky, Dale. You really should be so lucky. So tell me: Where do you like to fuck her? Not anatomically speaking, of course - that’s kind of personal, don’t you think? - but more locationally speaking. Somewhere in your house, I assume? Her bedroom? Or do you take her into your bedroom? Into the bed you share with her mother?"
"You’re sick," Swiggart returned.
"Speaking of her mother," John went on as if he hadn’t heard, "where is the little woman during all this? I haven’t met her yet. Do you find her as sweetly fuckable as you do her daughter?"
Swiggart didn’t answer. He just glared, posturing his outrage in a way that might have been, out of context, a convincing indicator that he found these suggestions as abhorrent and reprehensible as an innocent man might. John had no doubt Swiggart was outraged, but his outrage was in being called to answer for that which he took as his inalienable right.
His inalienable right to fuck anything that couldn’t fight back.
"What? No answer? Come on, Dale. We’re both men here. You can tell me. Does she know all about you and daddy’s little girl, or do you coordinate your dates with PTA meetings and choir practice?"
"I’m going to kill you," Dale said grimly. Wiping blood away from his mouth, he struggled once again to his feet. The sway of him was more genuine now. Not as much misdirective artifice as it was a testimony to the Impala grillwork branded on his scalp, and the imprint of John’s boot in his gut.
John laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. "Are you now. You have an interesting perspective on things, I’ll give you that."
"Well wrap around this perspective, Winchester. I filed statutory rape charges against your son today. Anything happens to me, the cops will know right where to look."
"Dale, Dale, Dale," John said, escalating Swiggart’s irritation by a factor of ten with his insistence on the repetitive use of name so easily turned to insulting inflection. "Did I not tell you how I feel about lying?"
"I’m not lying," Swiggart lied.
"Sure you are. And you’re doing it badly. If you’re going to make a claim like that, at least watch enough cop shows to know the difference between filing charges and swearing out a complaint."
"Filed charges, swore out a complaint, whatever. Point is, the cops know what your kid’s been doing to my daughter, and they’re going to put him away for it. More importantly, something happens to me out here, and they’ll be on your doorstep so fast you won’t know what hit you." He smirked at John, mistaking himself to be holding the hole care of all hole cards. "They’ll know it was you. They’ll lock you up and throw away the key. You’d be a fool to do anything to me with the cops looking right at you as the only guy with a reason to kill me."
"You’d be amazed how much of a fool I can be," John said quietly.
Swiggart laughed harshly. "You can’t bluff me, Winchester. I can see right through your line of bullshit. Now why don’t you just cut the crap and take me back home?"
It was a bit like hunting a werewolf. It would be so much easier - knowing as you always do, what they are, that they are -- to just put them to a salt and burn and be done with it. But there’s a code of ethics in the game of hunting. A way of doing things that is studied and right as compared to a way of doing them that opens the hunter to the same evil as poisons those he puts to the match in the name of good and evil.
And in that way of doing things, there’s a need to sit with the monster you hunt, to look it in the eyes in full reach of its capacity to maim you, to slaughter you; and to see it turn. To see it be that which you already know it to be. To see it with your own eyes, in a way you cannot later deny yourself, when the acid of conscience finds you as it always does, seeking avenues to erode deeds done in service of good to atrocities committed by sin of hubris to believe yourself worthy to the role of judge, jury and executioner.
If a hunter is to live with himself after the hunt, he must see the monster as the monster it is before he puts it to its fate. Any shadow of doubt left unaddressed -- even if that shadow is not true doubt, but rather merely the absence of undeniable verification of the obvious -- dooms the hunter to the eventual fate of becoming that which he hunts.
Evil begets evil. The catalyst of insemination required for such births to breach into being from those who were once as you and I is less the capacity to commit the unthinkable than it is the willingness to do so. And in that willingness to commit the unthinkable, even in the name of good rather than evil, it all too often becomes those who hunt evil without the proper rituals to protect against the contagion of its virulent communicability that fall prey to begetting in themselves the image of those they prey upon before seeing, for themselves, that which cannot be denied.
At least, that’s the way it works according to Pastor Jim.
John Winchester, on the other hand, was more of a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later kind of guy. There were times he simply wasn’t willing to expend the effort it took to bait something into the open when he could see it so clearly in the dark.
Perhaps that portended his own eventual doom; but if it did, then so be it; because the way he had it figured, everything in life was a balance. And the tipping point for the balance between lie-in-wait and kick-ass-and-take-names would always be different for pastors than it would be for Marines.
Leaning forward just enough to accommodate the action, John pulled the .45 from the small of his back. He held it loosely, easily, almost haphazardly in his hand as he brought it around his body and into Swiggart’s line of sight.
The effect was electric. Swiggart gasped, taking an involuntary step back as his expression twisted to a far more concerned state of rest against his features.
John smiled. This was more the reaction he was looking to see. Examining the well-oiled weapon with lazy detachment in the refracted light of the Impala’s high beams, he said, almost casually, "Do you really think I’m bluffing here, Dale? Do you really think you’re going home tonight? Or any other night, for that matter?"
"What do you want from me?" Swiggart asked cautiously, watching the reflective gun metal with the mesmerized gaze of a mouse being seduced by the lazy undulations of a coiling cobra.
"The truth would be nice," John said easily. "Or if you can’t manage that, a better class of lie."
"I’m not lying to you," Swiggart insisted.
John let the .45 slide to a rest on his thigh, a persistent and visible threat to captivate Swiggart’s every attention. "That’s really not what I had in mind. Something a little closer to the truth is where I was going. Perhaps a limited acknowledgment of responsibility. ‘I fuck my daughter, but she wants it’ would be one way to go. Or ‘I fuck my daughter, but only on the weekend.’ That kind of thing. Taking your actions on as your own. Accepting the weight of them, even if you feel a need to soften their edges a bit to do so."
"What did your son tell you about me, Winchester?" Swiggart’s distress seemed genuine now. He was starting to feel the pressure. "What did he say I was doing to her?"
"My boy didn’t tell me a thing about you, Dale. All he’s ever talked about is your daughter."
"Whatever he said, it’s a lie. I’m not a monster. I wouldn’t do something like that to my own daughter."
"But you would to someone else’s daughter?"
"Please …"
"It that how she sounds, Dale? Please, daddy? Please?"
For some time, Swiggart didn’t answer. He licked his lips nervously, his eyes spending more time on the .45 than they did trying to sell his story.
"Okay," he said finally. "Let’s start over here, okay?"
"Sure, Dale. We’ve got all night, if that’s what it takes to feel our way through the darkness to the truth. And I’m an easy guy to get along with, for the most part. So where would you like to start, Dale?"
"My daughter. She’s a good girl, but she has … she has some problems. It’s hard to admit something like that about your little girl, but it’s true. She’s had them for a while now. Several years, in fact. We got her counseling a few years back, got her some help, and we thought she’d gotten better. She seemed so much better. But then she started seeing your son. I guess he approached her, right?"
John didn’t respond. He just let the man talk. Swiggart took his silence as encouragement and continued.
"She likes your son, and she wanted him to like her. So she did the things she thought would make him like her. I want to be clear here. I’m not blaming your son for this. He’s just a boy, like we were both boys once. And when you’re that age, you don’t always think things through. If a girl says she wants to do something, then hell yeah, what boy is going to refuse that, am I right? Would you have said no to a girl at that age, John? I know I wouldn’t have. I would have thought I’d died and gone to heaven."
A flicker of anger licked at the base of John’s spine. For a single, passing moment, he considered hurting this man. Really hurting him. He let the urge pass, let it sink back inside him so he could lock it back in the places he kept secured while he was working. There was no place for emotion in the hunt. That’s how good men died; by letting their emotions take the reigns and ride them right into the blind where evil always takes the draw. This wasn’t about revenge, it was about retribution. There was a difference, and that difference had to be protected at all costs.
"But I’m not talking about a son here, John. I’m talking about my daughter. My little girl. My sweet, little girl. After she tried to kill herself, she told me what they’ve been doing. What she’s been letting him do to her. And it’s some pretty twisted shit, John. I don’t think it serves either of us to talk about the details, but it wasn’t just one time, and it wasn’t the kind of thing that a girl who doesn’t have problems lets a boy do to her. Even if she likes him. Even if she wants him to like her."
He stopped, studying John for a long moment before asking, "Are you with me here, John? Do you understand what I’m trying to say?"
"I’m listening," John allowed.
"Good." Swiggart smiled a little, like he thought they were buddies now. "Good. So when she told me about these things, I’ll admit it, I got mad. I got really mad. You have to understand, this is my little girl, here, John. And here she is, lying in a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of her because some boy made her do such humiliating things with him that she wanted to kill herself just to get away from it. To get away from him.
"So I’ll admit it. My first instinct was to come after your boy and kill him myself. I was so angry, all I really wanted to do was punish him for what he’d done to my little girl. But I started thinking about it, and I started to realize how unfair it would be to just blame your son for this. I know what it’s like to be a boy that age. We both do, right?"
Again, he waited for John to answer, trying to enlist him to his cause. Again, John just let him keep talking.
"I’m sure you do," Swiggart answered for him after a long beat. "I remember the way the girls were then. Get you all worked up, then try to close their legs on you at the last second. And I guess that’s pretty much what Laney did to your boy. Got him used to her being a certain way with him, then tried to change directions on him without any warning. And that doesn’t work when your blood’s up, am I right? It can be hard to stop, even if you know you should. Even if you want to. And she said that’s what happened, and I believe her, John. She told me the truth on the rest of it, so I don’t see why she’d lie about that."
"I’m sure she wouldn’t," John said quietly.
"We had the doctors check, John. There’s proof of what your boy’s been doing. That’s why I filed those charges. Because I was so angry about it, and the proof was right there, right there in black and white."
John nodded as if he understood. And he did. This was what he’d been waiting for, what he needed. He had it now, but he let the man talk because the more he said, the easier it would be. Dean would want to know some day, so John let the man have his chance to say everything he wanted to say.
"But my girl, Laney - my sweet, sweet little girl - she told me she didn’t want me to hurt him. She told me it was her fault, too; and she told me how sorry he was that it went so far, and how sorry he was to have made her feel like such a freak that she wanted to kill herself just to get away from him."
"He even visited her in the hospital," Swiggart went on. "Trying to make amends for what he did. He wanted to tell her how sorry he was, once he figured out how much he’d hurt her; and how he’d never do something like that again. How it was just his blood being up, and how sorry he was that he let it happen.
"So while I was looking for your boy’s hide at first, I’ve calmed down now, and I understand more what happened. And how much of it was actually Laney’s fault, not your boy’s. How much she tempted him into what he did. How much he probably would never have done those things if she hadn’t tempted him into doing them that first time, just because she wanted him to like her."
He was shifting into making is case now. Shifting gears into closing his deal. "So I guess that leaves you and me with some choices to make, John. Your son is facing rape charges, and this …" he gestured vaguely around the empty darkness, "… well this isn’t exactly legal, what you’ve done here.
"Not that I don’t understand it, I do. I realize the boy lied to you, and you were acting in good faith. I know you thought you were protecting my daughter, and I’ve got a lot of respect for that, John. I really do. The world needs more men like you, willing to go the distance to protect a child who’s being hurt, and I owe you for being willing to do that for my daughter, I really do.
"But now, I think we need to figure out a way to fix all this. A way where you and I can forget about the lies our children told us and go back to our lives the way they were instead of you going to jail and me either dying here," again, he gestured around the construction site, a more theatrical gesture this time, a sweep of one arm to indicate the vast unsuitability of this place as somewhere to murder an innocent man, "or facing a trial where everything my daughter has allowed to be done to her will become a matter of public record.
"Neither one of us wants that, do we, John? Neither one of us wants our child’s life to be ruined, right? So I guess what I’m saying is this: I’ll agree to drop the charges against your boy and forget about this whole matter. In return, you agree to keep your son away from my girl. It’s as simple as that, John. This can all be over right here. We can shake hands and forget about it. Go back to our own beds and get a good night’s sleep, knowing this is all taken care of, and there won’t be any lives ruined because two kids tried to play adult games and then lied about it when they got caught."
"You finished?" John asked after a beat of silence.
"I’m just trying to figure a way around this, John. You and I are both grown men, here. There’s no need to take this any farther than it’s already gone. You just tell me you’ll keep your son away from my daughter, and we can work it out from there."
"No, Dale. I don’t think that we can." John pushed up off the Impala, taking three steps forward to place the muzzle of his .45 flush against Swiggart’s left temple and say very calmly, very quietly, "You have once chance here, so answer carefully: Does your wife know what you’re doing to that girl?"
Swiggart stood stock still, frozen in place.
"Time’s a ticking," John said.
"She’s …" he started.
"Don’t lie to me," John warned.
Swiggart closed his eyes, then opened them again. "She knows," he said in a whisper.
"She’s a part of it then?" John demanded.
Swiggart’s chin was trembling. "Are you going to kill me?"
"You’ve got one chance at absolution here, Dale. If you’ve never told the truth in your whole miserable life, you can make a small bit of difference here by telling it now. Is she a part of what you’re doing to your daughter?"
"No," Swiggart breathed. "She knows, but she’s not a part of it. She just looks away."
John stared into the other man’s eyes for a three beat before he nodded, satisfied. "Good thing you did there, Dale. Telling the truth. Saved your wife’s life. You be sure and tell them that when you get there."
And then he pulled the trigger.
*
The house was dark and quiet when John pulled the Impala into the garage and turned the engine off. He sat in the car’s cool interior for almost ten minutes, just sitting. Not thinking, not planning, not even re-hashing the night’s events in his head. Just sitting. His shoulder ached with a white hot fire, protesting so much activity when it was so obviously damaged in a way that begged rest and recovery, not digging and carrying and burning and more digging.
When he’d spent as much time sitting as he needed, he went inside, washing his hands in the kitchen sink and changing into clean clothes he’d draped over a chair before he left. Because it was smarter to be safe than sorry, he folded up his shirt and took it back out to the Impala, stashing it under the false floorboard in the trunk’s weapons locker for disposal some other time, when he was in some other state, killing some other monster.
He spent another twenty minutes in the kitchen, drinking bourbon and staring at nothing before he headed for his bedroom, walking down the hall without turning on a light. Sammy’s door was closed. Dean’s wasn’t.
John stood in the doorway for almost a minute, just watching his son in the darkness, wondering how much pain one child could take until they shattered under the pressure of it and became something irretrievably broken by the inadequacies of people they trusted to protect them. How many scars could a child take before they chose pain over pleasure just so the world wouldn’t betray them one more time by rewarding hope with suffering and love with misery.
"You awake?" he asked finally, his voice low so he wouldn’t wake Sammy.
"Yes," Dean said.
"We’ll be moving in a couple of weeks. That will give you time to say a proper goodbye."
"Okay."
He started to turn away then, but Dean’s voice stopped him. "Dad?"
"Yeah, son."
For a long moment, Dean didn’t say anything. Then he drew a breath as if to speak, but still said nothing.
John slipped through the doorway and walked across the room to crouch at his son’s bedside. "What is it, Dean?"
"I just … I didn’t know what to do."
"You did the right thing."
"I didn’t do anything."
John reached out, put one hand along his son’s neck, his thumb near Dean’s ear, his fingers reaching almost around to his spine. "You did fine."
"I wasn’t sure. I thought … but I wasn’t sure."
"I made sure," John assured him.
"Then …?"
"Go to sleep, Dean."
John patted his son on the shoulder and started to rise. Dean grabbed at him, catching his arm, holding on.
"Dad."
John could see the tears glistening in his son’s eyes even in the dark. It hurt a bit that the only reason they were there was because Dean didn’t think he’d be able to see them.
"Dad."
"It’s all right, son," he said almost without thinking.
The whisper of sound that escaped his son broke John Winchester’s heart. Dean hadn’t cried in front of him since he was seven. He was trying not to do it now, but the darkness was working against his ability to hide the things he didn’t want his dad to see.
"It’s all right," John said again.
He stayed by Dean’s side until his breathing quit gasping through him, until the pressure of Dean’s fingers against his forearm eased from something desperate to something almost embarrassed.
"You okay?" he asked finally.
Dean let go of him, wiping one arm across his face before nodding.
"Can’t hear your head rattle, son," John said. "And it’s too dark in here to see much beyond the end of my nose."
Dean laughed a little at the lie of it. "Goodnight, Dad," he said.
"Goodnight, son." He leaned over to kiss the top of Dean’s head as he stood to leave. It was a hell of a concession and somewhat of an embarrassment to them both, but he let it stand without the mitigation of a smart-ass comment.
As the darkness worked against Dean’s capacity to hide, so did it work against his father’s. And that worked, in its own way, to balance the world to their favor.
-finis-