SPN FIC - Sins of Omission
Time for a look at Bloody Mary.
If Sam had noticed the blood on Dean’s face, he hadn’t said anything about it. Maybe he was too busy blaming himself for what had happened to Jessica.
Characters: Dean, Sam, John
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG
Spoilers: just for the episode
Length: 1954 words
SINS OF OMISSION
By Carol Davis
Blood.
Clumped in his eyelashes. Dried in the furrows alongside his nose. Smeared on his cheeks and his chin, dotting his shirt.
Dean stared at himself in the bathroom mirror, then looked down at the sink. He was leaning against the vanity as heavily as if he’d run out of strength and needed it to hold him up, keep him from sliding to the floor. The sink, too, was stained with blood that he’d washed off his hands.
He’d left Sam to deal with Charlie, explain to her that everything was all right now, that she could come out of her huddle on the bed and look around the room. He’d blurted something about needing to go to the bathroom, too much coffee, too much time in the car, and left Sam and Charlie out there to commiserate with each other - the two people who had secrets that had killed someone. Sort of. Who blamed themselves for those deaths, at least.
If Sam had noticed the blood on Dean’s face, he hadn’t said anything about it. Maybe he was too busy blaming himself for what had happened to Jessica.
Maybe he was too busy being Sam.
Dean could hear them talking; the thin, hollow-core door was no barrier to that.
With a hand that trembled a lot more than he wanted it to, Dean turned the tap back on and half-filled the sink with warm water. He dipped his head and splashed water onto his face, felt soothed, a little, by the warmth. When he finally lifted his head to look in the mirror, most of the blood was gone.
Most, but not all.
* * * * *
“Dean.”
“Dad?”
He’s barely awake. Fuzz surrounds his brain. His eyes are stuck shut and there’s a taste in his mouth like he’s been licking the Impala’s engine.
Heh, he thinks. He loves the car, but not that much.
“Dean,” Dad barks. “Are you awake?”
“Uh…yuh. Yes, sir.”
“We were wrong, son. It’s not tomorrow. It’s today.”
That makes no sense whatsoever. Dean struggles to a sit, holding the little phone to his ear. Cell phones were just not made for times like this, when your hands feel like they belong to somebody else. Like you’re manipulating one of those remote-surgery things. Or that construction whosis Sigourney Weaver kicked ass with in Aliens.
“Can you get there?” Dad says, and there’s a different tone in his voice now. Maybe it was there all along - Dean is way too semi-conscious and hung over to decide - but it’s taking over the ship now. Forcing a mutiny in somebody who almost never sounds emotional.
The fuck? Dean thinks. Dad sounds scared. “Get -“ he mumbles. “What?”
“Dean. You’re closer. You need to go back to the house, son. We might already be out of time.”
House?
“Hurry, son.”
And that’s it. Dad’s gone. Hung up, leaving Dean holding that little bitty phone and trying to puzzle out what the hell Dad was talking about. He glances over at the other bed, at Sam, sound asleep, sprawled on his belly, arms flung out to either side.
It hits him then.
The house.
That kid. The one Sam pointed out the other day when Dean picked him up from school. The one who’s the only living relative of somebody who got way too into the black arts back when one of those pre-Lincoln guys was sitting in the White House. The guy wanted some pull, wanted to be top dog. Wanted it to be his ass that was in the old D-of-C butter tub. Trouble was, things went left when they should’ve gone right, and the family ended up with a hoodoo curse on their heads and their butts nowhere near any butter tubs.
Dean stumbles out of bed, gropes for jeans and boots. His shirts and socks are already on; he didn’t have the energy to take them off before he crashed. He fumbles in his weapons duffle for the right gun and a couple odds and ends that he jams into his pockets.
His head feels like a jack o’lantern. Hollow, and slimy.
But he gets it, he gets it, and the tone that was in Dad’s voice pushes him on, blows the fuzz out of his head like a stiff wind. Dad went off yesterday, aiming to find a couple people who knew the family, who knew things were weird, could maybe fill in some blank spots. He’d be back in a couple days, he said. Dean and Sam could go ahead and kick back a little. For Sam, that meant focusing on school. For Dean, it meant a night out.
Well, Dean took it to mean a night out.
He leaves Sam behind, leaves him sleeping, because Sam will bitch for half an hour if Dean wakes him up. He’ll drag his feet and complain about Dad screwing things up and announce that he’s got some test coming up and he needs his rest so he can do his best work.
He leaves Sam behind, runs for the car, goes peeling out of the parking lot.
There’s nobody on the road at this hour. He’s cautious, but not very; the cops aren’t much of a presence here.
He’s a couple miles from the house when the engine coughs and sputters. That baffles him until he glances at the gas gauge.
The needle’s twitching on E.
“Noooooo,” he moans. “Don’t do this now, don’t do this.” But she does, she gives it up and rolls to a stop and of course they’re nowhere near a gas station. He pounds the wheel a couple of times, slams the dash for good measure, then flings the door open and tumbles out of the car.
He starts to run.
A couple miles, that’s nothing, that’s a cakewalk, but halfway through it a stitch tears through him and he has to clench his teeth to keep going through the pain. His feet pound against the rutted surface of the road, the goddamn road that’s got no gas station, got no nothing, and the pain in his side is so bad that tears start rolling down his cheeks. Finally, finally, the house is there ahead of him and he aims for it, thunders up the steps, grabbing for the gun.
The front door’s wide open.
He barrels on in, not giving much thought to why the door is wide open at four-thirty in the morning, and finds the kid on the living room floor, sprawled on his belly, like Sam, arms flung out, but he’s not sleeping.
There’s blood on the rug on either side of him.
Not much of it.
Because his heart stopped beating almost right away. Stopped pumping blood.
Dean’s legs go limp and he sits down on the rug maybe ten feet away from the kid. Everything else goes limp too, like a house of cards going down. He droops against bent knees, the hand holding the gun lies useless on the floor, and he lets the stitch in his side throb mostly unnoticed.
It stops, after a while.
A while after that, Dad walks in the front door. Dean can tell it’s him without looking.
He stands there, silent, for a minute.
Then he says, quietly, “Let’s go, son.”
Dean looks up at him. The angle’s pretty much the same as it was when he was four. Dad looks huge from that angle.
It’s over, Dad says. The kid was the last living relative. There’s nobody else to take revenge on now, so it’s over. Dad leaves everything the way it is, leaves the kid lying on the floor in a sticky puddle of blood, leaves the door open, guides Dean through the doorway so neither of them is touching anything.
Dad rests a hand on Dean’s shoulder for a moment when they reach the truck. “Where’s the car?” he asks. His face is nothing but shadows.
Dean tips his head. That way.
The car. The car he’s always wanted. The car Dad entrusted him with a few months ago.
Make sure the tank’s topped off, Dad always says. The kind of roads we travel, there’s not always a gas station. Not always time to find one. So you keep the tank full. You’ll be glad of it, more times than you can count.
He meant to fill it.
Last night.
Meant to swing by the gas station a mile down from the motel. The one next to the motel’s closed from midnight to six in the morning.
He meant to do it. First thing. Before breakfast, even. Didn’t really mean to let the tank get anywhere near empty. He meant to fill it a bunch of times, but there was always something else: drop Sam off at school. Pick Sam up from school. It’d be one thing if he was actually working the job and might need to be somewhere on short notice. But the only job he’s been working lately is minding Sam. He hoped things would be different when he turned eighteen, that that would be the charm, the instant elevation to Hunter, but all it got him was the car. Not that that’s nothing, but he wanted the job, too.
Dad’s face is nothing but shadows.
“Didn’t want anybody to see me pull up,” Dean says, and feels the lie hanging there between him and Dad.
Dad nods, glances back at the house. “Sonofabitch,” he mutters, and it’s a sigh, an admission of guilt. Of weariness. His shoulders have drooped. He hasn’t slept much, the last few nights. Wanted to get this all taken care of. Dean heard him: turning pages of books, talking on the phone.
Either way, it’s done now.
“Boy’s been dead a couple of hours, from the look of it,” Dad says.
Since before he made the call to Dean. Long before. Whether he’s saying it to excuse himself, or Dean, or both of them, Dean isn’t sure. A couple of hours ago, Dean was still at the bar. Eating peanuts and drinking beer. There was a girl, a waitress - he laid on the charm pretty thick, and the answer was no from start to finish, but there’s always some fun to be had just in trying.
He was drinking beer while that kid inside the house, the one Sam pointed out at school the other day, was taking his last breath.
Not my fault, he thinks, but that’s wrong.
Nothing I could have done, he thinks, and that’s wrong too.
He gets it now: why his gift was the car and not the job.
“I’m sorry,” he says softly.
Dad rubs at the back of his neck, trying to work out the kinks. Maybe just for something to do. His face moves a little. Maybe it’s a smile and maybe it’s just a twitch; it’s too dark to tell.
“You coming back now?” Dean asks him.
“In a while.”
That’s good: Dean can go get gas. Lug a couple gallons of it to the Impala, then take her to the gas station that’s open and fill the tank.
He gets it, now.
Wanting isn’t enough. Maybe it never will be.
* * * * *
“Dude,” Sam said through the thin wood of the bathroom door. “Seriously. Are you conscious?”
Dean lifted his head and peered at himself in the mirror. The blood was pretty much gone - off his face, anyway; the water in the sink was a pale pink and there were spots on the vanity.
It wasn’t his fault, what happened a couple hundred miles from here, when he was eighteen years old.
It wasn’t his fault, but he owned it anyway.
Apparently, Blood Mary agreed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~