SPN FIC - Love Means
Yessirree, ANOTHER one.
Characters: John, Dean
Pairings: none
Length: 1,965 words
Rating: pretty much G
Spoilers: "Route 666"
Work-suitable rating: ohhhh, Deaaaan...
This would be for anybody who doesn't think John's an irredeemable bastard.
Her name was Cassie, and when Dean told her the truth, she freaked.
There weren’t a lot of possible explanations. Dean’s mother had been dead for going on twenty years. While they both mourned the loss of her in a bone-deep way nearly every day of their lives, Mary being gone was old news. And Sam was fine. In the middle of final exams, the end of his first year at Stanford.
Neither one of them really gave much of a rat’s ass about anybody else.
Love Means
By Carol Davis
“Dean,” John said.
He got no response. At least, no words. Dean simply nodded an acknowledgment, picked up his duffel and moved toward the door.
“Son.”
Dean stopped, duffel dangling by its strap from his left hand.
“Something you want to talk about?”
He looked over his shoulder just enough to catch John in his peripheral vision. Shrugged. Shook his head.
“Go on, then. I need to take a whiz. Be right out.”
Dean hesitated, then grasped the knob and pulled the door open. He shut the door behind him, leaving John alone.
For the second time in his life - and it was no less painful for his father than the first - Dean had simply stopped talking.
They were maybe twenty miles outside of Dayton when John steered the truck into the lumpy parking lot of a place that advertised Down Home Family Dining. He picked a parking space that had a couple of empty slots on either side of it, shut the engine off, and waited for Dean to pull the Impala in alongside. The truck’s windows were cranked down halfway, as was the driver’s-side window on the car, but John could hear nothing from inside the Impala. No road music, no talk radio, no nothing.
With a small shake of his head John went on inside the diner, smiled at the hostess, and in reply to her chipper “One?” said, “Not sure if my son’s joining me or not. Make it two.”
She gave him a booth and two menus.
He asked for a hot roast beef sandwich with fries and coffee.
And Dean sat in the car.
“Be right back,” he told the hostess as he passed her little podium. He could smell hot rolls, coffee, French fries. Caught a glimpse of a steak going by, dripping juice, the best-looking chunk of meat he’d seen in months. Good food here, then. That was a draw.
He stood next to the car and said quietly, “You need to eat something.”
Dean shook his head. Not argumentative. Not hungry.
“Dean.”
No response at all this time. Dean’s head was tipped back; he was staring at the visor. Would likely go on staring at it until goddamn Doomsday.
“Not a request, Dean. Move your ass.”
The last time Dean had stopped talking, he was four years old. Then, it was not at all ridiculous for his father to order food for him. Now it just looked crazy. He would not make eye contact with the hostess or the waitress - both of them good-looking women - and when he was asked “What can I get for ya?” he simply stared at the menu.
“Bowl of soup,” John told the waitress. That had worked the first time; it would work now.
Soup and crackers, as if he was four.
They were a couple hundred miles short of Ottumwa when John’s reservoir of energy tapped out. He’d slept reasonably well the night before - would have slept better if he hadn’t known Dean was wide awake and staring at the bathroom door all night - but enough was too much, and trying to drive another couple hundred miles just wasn’t reasonable. He found a motel, paid for a double room with a card that said Harold Reasoner on it, and toted his duffel inside.
He was more than a little inclined to let Dean sleep in the car.
The motel had a coffee shop alongside the lobby. John got himself a ham sandwich, a slab of cake and some coffee and carried it back to the room. Set it out on the scuffed table and sat down to eat. Dean, who had taken advantage of the door that John hadn’t pulled all the way shut on his way out to the coffee shop, was lying on his side on the bed closest to the bathroom.
John finished his sandwich and cake, then said, “Dean, for Christ’s sake.”
Dean didn’t move.
There weren’t a lot of possible explanations. Dean’s mother had been dead for going on twenty years. While they both mourned the loss of her in a bone-deep way nearly every day of their lives, Mary being gone was old news. And Sam was fine. In the middle of final exams, the end of his first year at Stanford.
Neither one of them really gave much of a rat’s ass about anybody else.
“Do you want dinner?” John asked.
“No,” Dean whispered.
Well, that was a start. It was like a runner tripping over his own shoelaces half a step from the starting block, but it was something.
“You sick?”
Dean’s head moved a little. No.
And then, out of nowhere, John saw himself sitting in the front seat of his first car alongside Margie Packer. Seventeen years old, both of them, on their third date. She was slumped against the passenger door, arms clamped solidly over her chest, staring at the glove box. Did I do something? Head shake - no. Did I say something? No. Are you sick or something? No. Then what the hell’s the matter?
He’d ended up telling her to get the hell out of his car. Which got results: she burst into tears.
He figured Dean wasn’t likely to burst into tears, but the unending silence was no better. In a way, sobbing would have been better, because it would have meant Dean had completely lost his marbles.
As it was, he only seemed to have lost half of them.
When the coffee had gone cold, John sat on his bed, a couple of pillows between his back and the headboard, flipped on the TV and sat through the second half of Flight of the Phoenix. When that was over, he walked back to the coffee shop and bought himself an ice cream sundae. He got back to the room to discover that Dean had shut himself up in the bathroom. No water running; he was just in there by himself. Silent.
Sam would have been able to talk him out of this…whatever it was. Or nag him out of it, or distract him out of it, or…something.
John looked at the phone for the best part of ten minutes.
The ice cream was pretty much melted by the time he started eating it, but it still tasted good. Almost crossly he thought that if he’d been following the Father of the Year handbook to the letter, his dessert would have tasted like melted drywall.
But Christ on a crutch, Dean was an adult.
“Dean?” he said loudly enough to be heard on the far side of the bathroom door. “Come out of there.”
No response.
“Dean.”
The door drifted open as if some shift in gravity had tilted it inward. Dean, minus his boots and with water dripping from his hairline, sank against the doorframe as if without the aid of woodwork, he’d be on the floor.
“Running out of patience with this,” John said. “Gonna give you two options. Explain, and I’ll see about sympathizing with you over whatever in long-suffering hell is wrong with you. That, or drop the whole thing. Because we’ve got a job in Ottumwa, we’re gonna be there tomorrow, and I’ll be dipped in shit if I’m gonna try to work with you acting like something off a goddamned soap opera.”
Dean made a good, long study of the ceiling light fixture, then muttered, “’S nothing.”
“You’re going for the ‘drop it’ option, then.”
“Guess so.”
“You want some ice cream?”
Dean heaved a sigh that he seemed to have hauled up from about two hundred feet underground. “No. Thanks.”
“There a girl involved in all this drama?”
Dean’s head jerked sideways.
So.
“What’s her name?” John asked.
“Doesn’t matter.”
The last time a girl hadn’t mattered - except that it had, with door slamming, dish banging, and enough sullen sulking to last John for the next several millennia - was a decade ago. Hell, even all of that was a more palatable option than all this moping. Turning the handle of the ice cream spoon between his fingers, John sifted back through the events of the last few weeks, searching for someone Dean might have connected with.
The search parameters covered a pretty wide range. Dean was 23, but the mysterious “she” could have been anywhere from sixteen to sixty.
That made him grimace.
“Cassie,” Dean mumbled.
“What?”
“Her name’s Cassie.”
“And she…what?”
Dean sat on the edge of his bed and clasped his hands between his knees. His hair was growing in a little bit, and sitting there in his socks, he looked a lot younger than 23. He looked like the little boy who had peered up at John to ask, “Daddy? When’re we going home?” “I thought there might’ve…you know. Been something.”
“And there wasn’t?”
“She…no.”
He looked over at his father and tried to dredge up a smile. Something in his head was telling him to buck up, be an adult, move on; that was as obvious as if the words were playing out of the TV speakers. That Dean’s relationship with this Cassie amounted to more than “thought there might’ve been something” was also as plain as the garish green stripes of the motel room’s wallpaper. Far as Dean was concerned, there was something.
Was, had been, all past tense.
“I’m sorry. Dean.”
“Yeah,” Dean said, and his voice broke halfway through that small sound.
“It’s - our lives are what they are.”
“I know.”
Before John could say anything more, Dean reached down to retrieve his discarded boots and pulled them back on. He was halfway to the door when he said over his shoulder, “Going for a walk. Ice cream, maybe.”
John found him out in the parking lot an hour later, leaning against the Impala, staring up into the dark swath of the night sky. The lights were dim enough out here in the boonies that the sky was a deep, pure black, sprinkled with stars.
“You want to go back?” John asked.
“No, Dad.”
“You sure?”
“She doesn’t want me to come back.”
Again, John asked his son, “You sure?”
“She said. Called me some names. It wasn’t good.”
“There’ll be another time.”
Dean looked him square in the eye. He’d been crying; even in the faint light of the parking lot John could see the fallout of the past hour. “This life -“ he started, then stopped.
“I wouldn’t have picked it, Dean. You know that.”
“Yeah.”
“We can go back. After Ottumwa. If you think there’s a way to make things right with this girl. I’m not gonna tell you you can’t make a life for yourself. If it’s the right choice. If you think she’s the right one.”
“She’s…not.”
“All right, then.”
He was grown, this boy of John’s. As tall as his father, broad-shouldered and strong. Didn’t flinch in the face of things that would have scared the living hell out of nine-tenths of the male population, reduced them to pants-wetting babies. He could fix engines everybody else had given up on, was a helluva shot with a dozen different kinds of weapons. He’d seen more blood in his life than any E.R. doctor you could name and it didn’t get to him.
He was grown, this boy of Mary’s.
But his face, there in the darkness of a motel parking lot outside of Geneseo, Illinois, still asked, “Daddy? When’re we going home?”
Silently, John put his arms around his son and pulled him in, let Dean’s head rest on his shoulder. Dean’s breathing hitched once, hard, then steadied, and he let his father hold him, comfort him.
“I’m sorry, son,” John said after a minute.
Dean shifted back and swiped at his eyes with his fingers. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I know.”
Characters: John, Dean
Pairings: none
Length: 1,965 words
Rating: pretty much G
Spoilers: "Route 666"
Work-suitable rating: ohhhh, Deaaaan...
This would be for anybody who doesn't think John's an irredeemable bastard.
Her name was Cassie, and when Dean told her the truth, she freaked.
There weren’t a lot of possible explanations. Dean’s mother had been dead for going on twenty years. While they both mourned the loss of her in a bone-deep way nearly every day of their lives, Mary being gone was old news. And Sam was fine. In the middle of final exams, the end of his first year at Stanford.
Neither one of them really gave much of a rat’s ass about anybody else.
Love Means
By Carol Davis
“Dean,” John said.
He got no response. At least, no words. Dean simply nodded an acknowledgment, picked up his duffel and moved toward the door.
“Son.”
Dean stopped, duffel dangling by its strap from his left hand.
“Something you want to talk about?”
He looked over his shoulder just enough to catch John in his peripheral vision. Shrugged. Shook his head.
“Go on, then. I need to take a whiz. Be right out.”
Dean hesitated, then grasped the knob and pulled the door open. He shut the door behind him, leaving John alone.
For the second time in his life - and it was no less painful for his father than the first - Dean had simply stopped talking.
They were maybe twenty miles outside of Dayton when John steered the truck into the lumpy parking lot of a place that advertised Down Home Family Dining. He picked a parking space that had a couple of empty slots on either side of it, shut the engine off, and waited for Dean to pull the Impala in alongside. The truck’s windows were cranked down halfway, as was the driver’s-side window on the car, but John could hear nothing from inside the Impala. No road music, no talk radio, no nothing.
With a small shake of his head John went on inside the diner, smiled at the hostess, and in reply to her chipper “One?” said, “Not sure if my son’s joining me or not. Make it two.”
She gave him a booth and two menus.
He asked for a hot roast beef sandwich with fries and coffee.
And Dean sat in the car.
“Be right back,” he told the hostess as he passed her little podium. He could smell hot rolls, coffee, French fries. Caught a glimpse of a steak going by, dripping juice, the best-looking chunk of meat he’d seen in months. Good food here, then. That was a draw.
He stood next to the car and said quietly, “You need to eat something.”
Dean shook his head. Not argumentative. Not hungry.
“Dean.”
No response at all this time. Dean’s head was tipped back; he was staring at the visor. Would likely go on staring at it until goddamn Doomsday.
“Not a request, Dean. Move your ass.”
The last time Dean had stopped talking, he was four years old. Then, it was not at all ridiculous for his father to order food for him. Now it just looked crazy. He would not make eye contact with the hostess or the waitress - both of them good-looking women - and when he was asked “What can I get for ya?” he simply stared at the menu.
“Bowl of soup,” John told the waitress. That had worked the first time; it would work now.
Soup and crackers, as if he was four.
They were a couple hundred miles short of Ottumwa when John’s reservoir of energy tapped out. He’d slept reasonably well the night before - would have slept better if he hadn’t known Dean was wide awake and staring at the bathroom door all night - but enough was too much, and trying to drive another couple hundred miles just wasn’t reasonable. He found a motel, paid for a double room with a card that said Harold Reasoner on it, and toted his duffel inside.
He was more than a little inclined to let Dean sleep in the car.
The motel had a coffee shop alongside the lobby. John got himself a ham sandwich, a slab of cake and some coffee and carried it back to the room. Set it out on the scuffed table and sat down to eat. Dean, who had taken advantage of the door that John hadn’t pulled all the way shut on his way out to the coffee shop, was lying on his side on the bed closest to the bathroom.
John finished his sandwich and cake, then said, “Dean, for Christ’s sake.”
Dean didn’t move.
There weren’t a lot of possible explanations. Dean’s mother had been dead for going on twenty years. While they both mourned the loss of her in a bone-deep way nearly every day of their lives, Mary being gone was old news. And Sam was fine. In the middle of final exams, the end of his first year at Stanford.
Neither one of them really gave much of a rat’s ass about anybody else.
“Do you want dinner?” John asked.
“No,” Dean whispered.
Well, that was a start. It was like a runner tripping over his own shoelaces half a step from the starting block, but it was something.
“You sick?”
Dean’s head moved a little. No.
And then, out of nowhere, John saw himself sitting in the front seat of his first car alongside Margie Packer. Seventeen years old, both of them, on their third date. She was slumped against the passenger door, arms clamped solidly over her chest, staring at the glove box. Did I do something? Head shake - no. Did I say something? No. Are you sick or something? No. Then what the hell’s the matter?
He’d ended up telling her to get the hell out of his car. Which got results: she burst into tears.
He figured Dean wasn’t likely to burst into tears, but the unending silence was no better. In a way, sobbing would have been better, because it would have meant Dean had completely lost his marbles.
As it was, he only seemed to have lost half of them.
When the coffee had gone cold, John sat on his bed, a couple of pillows between his back and the headboard, flipped on the TV and sat through the second half of Flight of the Phoenix. When that was over, he walked back to the coffee shop and bought himself an ice cream sundae. He got back to the room to discover that Dean had shut himself up in the bathroom. No water running; he was just in there by himself. Silent.
Sam would have been able to talk him out of this…whatever it was. Or nag him out of it, or distract him out of it, or…something.
John looked at the phone for the best part of ten minutes.
The ice cream was pretty much melted by the time he started eating it, but it still tasted good. Almost crossly he thought that if he’d been following the Father of the Year handbook to the letter, his dessert would have tasted like melted drywall.
But Christ on a crutch, Dean was an adult.
“Dean?” he said loudly enough to be heard on the far side of the bathroom door. “Come out of there.”
No response.
“Dean.”
The door drifted open as if some shift in gravity had tilted it inward. Dean, minus his boots and with water dripping from his hairline, sank against the doorframe as if without the aid of woodwork, he’d be on the floor.
“Running out of patience with this,” John said. “Gonna give you two options. Explain, and I’ll see about sympathizing with you over whatever in long-suffering hell is wrong with you. That, or drop the whole thing. Because we’ve got a job in Ottumwa, we’re gonna be there tomorrow, and I’ll be dipped in shit if I’m gonna try to work with you acting like something off a goddamned soap opera.”
Dean made a good, long study of the ceiling light fixture, then muttered, “’S nothing.”
“You’re going for the ‘drop it’ option, then.”
“Guess so.”
“You want some ice cream?”
Dean heaved a sigh that he seemed to have hauled up from about two hundred feet underground. “No. Thanks.”
“There a girl involved in all this drama?”
Dean’s head jerked sideways.
So.
“What’s her name?” John asked.
“Doesn’t matter.”
The last time a girl hadn’t mattered - except that it had, with door slamming, dish banging, and enough sullen sulking to last John for the next several millennia - was a decade ago. Hell, even all of that was a more palatable option than all this moping. Turning the handle of the ice cream spoon between his fingers, John sifted back through the events of the last few weeks, searching for someone Dean might have connected with.
The search parameters covered a pretty wide range. Dean was 23, but the mysterious “she” could have been anywhere from sixteen to sixty.
That made him grimace.
“Cassie,” Dean mumbled.
“What?”
“Her name’s Cassie.”
“And she…what?”
Dean sat on the edge of his bed and clasped his hands between his knees. His hair was growing in a little bit, and sitting there in his socks, he looked a lot younger than 23. He looked like the little boy who had peered up at John to ask, “Daddy? When’re we going home?” “I thought there might’ve…you know. Been something.”
“And there wasn’t?”
“She…no.”
He looked over at his father and tried to dredge up a smile. Something in his head was telling him to buck up, be an adult, move on; that was as obvious as if the words were playing out of the TV speakers. That Dean’s relationship with this Cassie amounted to more than “thought there might’ve been something” was also as plain as the garish green stripes of the motel room’s wallpaper. Far as Dean was concerned, there was something.
Was, had been, all past tense.
“I’m sorry. Dean.”
“Yeah,” Dean said, and his voice broke halfway through that small sound.
“It’s - our lives are what they are.”
“I know.”
Before John could say anything more, Dean reached down to retrieve his discarded boots and pulled them back on. He was halfway to the door when he said over his shoulder, “Going for a walk. Ice cream, maybe.”
John found him out in the parking lot an hour later, leaning against the Impala, staring up into the dark swath of the night sky. The lights were dim enough out here in the boonies that the sky was a deep, pure black, sprinkled with stars.
“You want to go back?” John asked.
“No, Dad.”
“You sure?”
“She doesn’t want me to come back.”
Again, John asked his son, “You sure?”
“She said. Called me some names. It wasn’t good.”
“There’ll be another time.”
Dean looked him square in the eye. He’d been crying; even in the faint light of the parking lot John could see the fallout of the past hour. “This life -“ he started, then stopped.
“I wouldn’t have picked it, Dean. You know that.”
“Yeah.”
“We can go back. After Ottumwa. If you think there’s a way to make things right with this girl. I’m not gonna tell you you can’t make a life for yourself. If it’s the right choice. If you think she’s the right one.”
“She’s…not.”
“All right, then.”
He was grown, this boy of John’s. As tall as his father, broad-shouldered and strong. Didn’t flinch in the face of things that would have scared the living hell out of nine-tenths of the male population, reduced them to pants-wetting babies. He could fix engines everybody else had given up on, was a helluva shot with a dozen different kinds of weapons. He’d seen more blood in his life than any E.R. doctor you could name and it didn’t get to him.
He was grown, this boy of Mary’s.
But his face, there in the darkness of a motel parking lot outside of Geneseo, Illinois, still asked, “Daddy? When’re we going home?”
Silently, John put his arms around his son and pulled him in, let Dean’s head rest on his shoulder. Dean’s breathing hitched once, hard, then steadied, and he let his father hold him, comfort him.
“I’m sorry, son,” John said after a minute.
Dean shifted back and swiped at his eyes with his fingers. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I know.”