SPN FIC - Five Days in the Blue Room (Part 2 of 2)
This is for liliaeth, who requested wee!Dean ending up In The System -- but instead of dealing with the Foster Parents From Hell, finds himself (and Sam) in the care of some genuinely nice people ... and then has a decision to make.
Part 1 is here.
They were already in trouble. Had been since yesterday.
CHARACTERS: Dean (age 9), Sam (age 5), John, OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 9668 words
FIVE DAYS IN THE BLUE ROOM
By Carol Davis
He'd told Dad, one time, that Sam was a gigantic jerk because he had fun playing with empty cardboard boxes.
"You did the same thing," Dad told him.
"Did not."
Dad smiled a little bit, like he thought something was funny. "Had a great big one I brought home from the garage. We drew pictures all over it and you used it as a fort. Cut some holes in it for windows. Couple of nights, you insisted on sleeping in the thing."
He had never slept in a dumb box.
"You're makin' that up," he told Dad.
"Believe what you want," Dad had told him. "But you wore a bowl on your head for a helmet, told me and your mother that you were a soldier and that was your fort, and you had to stay in there to protect it from the 'emanies'. Couldn't get you out of there for love nor money."
"That's…I did not."
"Whatever," Dad had said.
When Dean looked over at Sam, out in the sunshine of the Burnses' back yard, Sam had begun to carry some bricks over into the sandpile. There were maybe a hundred of them, neatly stacked up near the back door, waiting for Uncle Paul to get started on the project he'd told Dean about, the building of a little wall that would run in a half-circle at one end of the yard to form a garden for Aunt Emily to grow fancy flowers in. The sand (which wasn't real sand, like at the beach; it was more like sandy dirt) would be part of that project too, when Uncle Paul got around to it. For now, all the stuff was just sitting there, collecting cobwebs and bird poop.
"Hey," Dean said.
"I can move 'em," Sam told him. "I'm buildin' a bridge."
"Did you ask?"
"I don't gotta ask. Aunt Emily said I could play, and I'm not hurtin' nothing."
That much was true. The bricks were just sitting in a pile. When Sam was all done with his building, they could put the bricks back by the door.
"You can play too," Sam offered.
Dean nodded, but he wasn't much in the mood for playing. He was in the mood for what Uncle Bobby called "pondering."
Sitting on the rope swing, drifting slowly back and forth with the toes of his new sneakers trailing against the ground, he tried to figure out what Dad would do when he got back to the apartment house and found nobody there. Regular people would call the police. That's what people did on TV, and he was more than sure that Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul would do that, if somebody in their family was missing. One of their sons, for instance.
But Dad's relationship with the police was "iffy."
He could ask the neighbors, but his relationship with them was pretty iffy too.
Maybe the police had left him a note. That one cop, the nice one who'd thought Mrs. Robbie was their grandmother, had said they'd take care of letting Dad know where his kids were. They wouldn't have left a cop there at the apartment house, because they needed to do important stuff, like be on stakeout and do drug busts and chase bank robbers, so they would have had to leave a note, or ask a neighbor to fill Dad in.
They would do that, wouldn't they? Leave a note for the missing father of those boys, for when he came back, saying to call the police station.
Saying "You can have them back."
Unless they found the gun.
Unless they waited for Dad to come back, then threw him in jail for having kids in a house with a loaded shotgun.
For not paying his bills.
Maybe for that time he broke the window at the gas station.
"Deeeeeeeeean," Sam said. "You gotta come be the driver. I gotta drive the dump truck, and you drive this other one."
"It's a front loader."
"Why?"
"Because the thing that scoops stuff up is in the front."
"Why don't they call it a scooper?"
"Because they don't."
"That's dumb."
You think empty boxes are cool, Dean thought. And you pick up garbage out of the street. So don't go calling things dumb.
"DEAN," Sam said.
There was no point in telling Sam he was bossy. It was two hundred percent true, but every time Dean had tried to tell Sam about it, Sam had shouted "Is NOT!!" at him until Dean gave up. Which made it a darn good thing Sam wasn't in school yet. No teacher was gonna let him get away with even a little bit of what he got away with with Dean. If he started yelling in a classroom, they'd slap him right into a Time Out.
They'd get Dad in there and tell him Sam was a brat.
But Uncle Bobby said there was this thing called Picking Your Battles. It meant not using up all your energy fighting about little things. It meant waiting until something gigantic came along, a thing that was worth fighting for.
Uncle Bobby also said Keeping The Peace was a good thing.
So Dean spent a long time helping Sam haul bricks over to the sandpile and lining them up so they made a flat, smooth road.
"A BRIDGE," Sam said.
"Okay, a bridge."
Then Sam spotted the hose.
"You gotta ask," Dean told him.
"No I don't. Aunt Emily said I could do anything."
"She said you could play."
"I gotta have water. For under the bridge. That's playing. There's gotta be water under the bridge."
"Maybe it's an overpass."
"What?"
"Where the road goes over another road."
"It's a BRIDGE."
Way, way back in his mind, Dean could remember the hose in their yard in Lawrence. He remembered Mom spending a long time planting some flowers along the side of the house so their yard would look pretty. "They need water," she'd said, and Dean had watched her unroll the hose and turn on the water.
He'd wanted to help, so later on, when the dirt looked very dry, he carefully unrolled the hose, just the way she'd done it, and turned on the water.
He remembered a lot of mud, and flowers lying on their sides, all broken.
The water had come on very fast, very hard, and even though he'd tried to give each plant only a little bit of a drink, the hose had made big puddles. Then it jumped out of his hands and sprayed water in through the window of the lady next door.
He'd been little then, younger than Sam was now. Now, he knew how to turn on the water and how to make sure the spray came out at the strength he wanted. But Sam didn't: he was pretty sure of that. Pretty sure there was a huge opportunity here for Sam to create a mess.
"I'm gonna ask," he told Sam firmly.
"We don't gotta ask about water in the sink."
"Yes we do."
"Do NOT."
"Remember that time you turned on the water in the tub, and it overflowed all over the bathroom?"
"That was the tub."
"No water."
"Yes," Sam said.
"I'm older, and I said, no water."
Sam pondered that for a while. Then his eyes got narrow and he said, "I hate you."
Like that would accomplish anything.
"I don't care," Dean told him. "I'm older and I said no water, and if you turn on the hose without anybody helping you, I'm gonna kick your butt."
"Aunt Emily won't let you."
"Watch me."
Uncle Bobby wouldn't be happy, Dean thought a minute later. Neither would Dad. Pastor Jim would probably say, "Sam, let's think about what we did," and talk to Sam in his quiet church voice until Sam shut up, but Pastor Jim wasn't here right now. Neither was Dad, or Uncle Bobby, which was a good thing, because Sam started howling like a tornado siren.
"STOP IT," Dean told him.
This town didn't have tornado sirens, not that Dean had seen, anyway - but they didn't need to spend money to buy any. They could just haul Sam up to the roof of a tall building and disagree with him until he started yelling.
"You FREAK!" Dean shouted at him. "Cut that OUT!"
It took Aunt Emily about half a day to quiet Sam down.
"I hate you," Sam announced after Aunt Emily had given him two Kleenexes and a juice box, and had gone into the other room where she couldn't hear him. "You called me a freak. You're not s'posed to call me stuff like that."
"You call me that."
"Do not."
"Do too."
"Boys," Aunt Emily said.
She made them go to separate rooms: Sam up to their bedroom to look at a big picture book on dinosaurs and fossils, and Dean to the living room. Dean figured at first that she was either going to make him sit there on the couch and do the Let's think about what we did thing, or she was going to make him sit through some soap opera or a stupid game show or something. But she didn't do either one. She did sit him down on the couch, but instead of turning on the TV she sat down beside him and put her hand on his shoulder.
"It's like a rerun," she said, and she smiled, but in a weird kind of way that made it seem like she didn't really find anything funny. "You and Sam. You're my boys, Adam and Christopher, all over again."
"We are?" Dean said.
"The peacemaker, and the Entitled One."
"He's not like that all the time."
"Oh, I know. And he probably wasn't like that before he learned how to play the You're Not The Boss Of Me card."
"Yeah. He wasn't."
Maybe it was because Dad was with them more often then. Back when Sam was a baby, Dad had never gone off anywhere for more than a few hours.
"He might be scared," Dean suggested.
"He might be."
Sam could probably remember that night - the night the monster came after him. When it might have killed him, if Dad hadn't come running into the motel room at just the right time, because Dean hadn't shot it and killed it right away, the very first second he saw it.
Sam could be scared of lots of things.
"I'm older," Dean said. "I'm s'posed to look after him."
Gently, Aunt Emily got him up from the couch and walked him into the front hallway, where there was a tall mirror hanging near the front door. She nudged Dean until he was standing in front of it, then stood behind him with her hands on his shoulders.
"What do you see?" she asked him.
He shrugged. "Just me."
"Do you want to know what I see?" When he didn't answer with anything more than another shrug, she told him, "I see a boy who might be a little scared, too. And that's nothing to be ashamed of. You're in a strange place, with strange people, and you don't know when your dad's coming back. You don't know what will happen when he does."
Or if he doesn't, Dean thought.
Aunt Emily moved in a little closer and rested her head against Dean's. "Nobody gets any guarantees," she told him. "We don't know from one day to the next what's going to happen to us. People die sometimes. People get sick. People don't turn out to be what you thought they were. But I'll promise you something."
"What?" Dean muttered.
"As long as you're here, whether that's for a few days or for a much longer time, Uncle Paul and I are going to take care of you and Sam as best we can. We're not going to leave you alone. And if a big decision needs to be made, we'll either make it for you, or we'll help you make it. So you don't need to be The Boss Of Sam. Okay?"
"Okay," he whispered.
Then she turned him around and kissed him on the forehead. "Good enough," she said.
~~~~~~~~
That night, he dreamed that he heard a jiggly, noisy rumble. It wasn't much of a sound, at first, but it got louder and louder and closer and closer until it was a terrible roar, one that made him clamp his hands over his ears and start running.
TORNADO!
"Sammy!" he screamed. "Sammy! Sammy! You have to yell! You have to warn everybody! Yell, Sammy, yell!"
It came closer and closer, until the roar was all around him. He remembered what Dad had told him, that you couldn't outrun a tornado; if you weren't in a car and you couldn't drive away, you had to find a safe place to hide, someplace solid and sturdy.
With SAM.
He had to save Sam, but Sam was nowhere around, no matter where he looked, no matter how fast he ran.
"SAMMY!!!!"
Then the roar was THERE.
And it wasn't a tornado.
It was Dad, behind the wheel of the Impala.
~~~~~~~~
He knew the sound of that car. Even if his eyes were shut, even if there were a million other cars on the road, he could pick it out - and that wasn't strange at all, no more strange than recognizing your dad's voice, or your mom's.
It was like that TV show he he'd seen a while ago, where they said a mother penguin and her baby could pick out each other's voices even if there were a million other penguins making noise at the same time.
Some things, you just know.
And he kind of knew in his gut that he hadn't heard that sound for a long time.
He tried to tell himself that maybe Dad had come by in the night - that maybe Dad had been back in town for a while, and had decided that maybe Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul could do a decent enough job looking after his boys, so Dad could go do what he needed to do and not worry about them. But he would swing by at night, after his work was finished, just to see how things looked.
At the same time, Dean knew none of that was true, because he hadn't heard the car.
Not awake, not asleep.
Dad had left town a week ago. He hadn't told Dean what this particular job was about (he didn't, very often, unless it was something simple, like a ghost), but he did say it would only take a couple of days. Three or four, tops.
And it had been a week.
So Dad could be dead somewhere. Or hurt bad.
You're supposed to call Pastor Jim. Or Uncle Bobby. You're supposed to call and tell them, Dad said he'd be back in a couple days, and it's been a whole week. You're supposed to tell them that, because even if you and Sammy are safe, Dad might not be, and Uncle Bobby or Pastor Jim could go looking for him.
If Dad had been dead for all that time, Uncle Bobby or Pastor Jim showing up wouldn't make much difference.
But at least they'd know.
And if he was hurt, they could help him.
Should've called them right away. You should've. You should've told that cop NO, and called Pastor Jim.
Uncle Paul found Dean lying on his bed, face burrowed into the covers. Maybe they'd been calling him, for dinner or something, and maybe they hadn't; he hadn't paid much attention to anything all day, other than listening for the sound of the car.
Uncle Paul sat down on the bed beside him and patted Dean on the back.
"Tough day?" he asked.
Dean shook his head into the covers.
Nobody he knew would just sit there like that. They might ask him a question - "Are you sick?" or "What did you break?" - but nobody would just sit there and not say anything for a while, not even Pastor Jim. When Dean finally turned over onto his back, out of curiosity and not much else, Uncle Paul raised an eyebrow and asked him, "Something we can fix?"
Dean shook his head.
"You sure?"
Dean tried again, but this time his head didn't want to cooperate.
"I was s'posed to call," he mumbled, and before Uncle Paul could say anything back, he blurted, "I'm supposed to call if anything goes wrong. There's a number under the phone and I'm supposed to use it but I didn't because he's gonna be mad and I didn't want him to get mad. I didn't want to mess things up again."
"And you think you messed things up?"
"I did. I know I did."
Half an hour later he was in the car with Uncle Paul.
It didn't take them long to get into the apartment. The door was locked (by the police, more than likely, Uncle Paul said; they'd probably called the landlord and made him come over with a key), but there was another key hidden in a notch behind the woodwork. It was Dad's key, and Dad had made the notch. Nobody knew about it but Dad and Dean. And now, Uncle Paul.
For a moment, as Uncle Paul unlocked the door, Dean was afraid that they'd come all the way over here for nothing - that the little piece of paper with the phone numbers written on it would be gone.
Or that Dad would be in the apartment.
That Dad had come home a few days ago, hurt really bad, and had died in there all by himself, because nobody was there to help him.
Neither one of those things was true. Dad wasn't there, but the piece of paper was.
"Are you s'posed to tell the police?" Dean asked, as Uncle Paul stood there looking at the piece of paper.
"Is this a crime?" Uncle Paul asked.
"I don't know."
Uncle Paul looked all around the apartment. He didn't say what he was thinking; he was like Dad in that way, able to think a lot of things and not let on what any of it was. He looked in each one of the rooms, but he didn't open the closet doors, or the cupboards.
He didn't open the closet where the shotgun was.
"This man is a minister, you said? This Jim Murphy?" he asked finally.
"A pastor," Dean said. "Is that the same thing?"
"More or less. And he's - where?"
"Minnesota."
"And this Singer guy?"
"South Dakota."
"Seems like your father has friends in some pretty far-flung places."
"I guess."
"Which one do you want me to call?"
They'd take him away, Dean thought. Pastor Jim and Uncle Bobby - either one of them, if they showed up, they'd take him and Sammy away from the Burnses. Away from that nice clean blue room and the books and toys and the sandpile and the burgers and juice boxes.
Away from the people who bought him and Sammy new clothes and kissed them good night.
Uncle Bobby's place was cool, with all the old cars; when he wasn't busy, sometimes he'd show Dean what was broken and how to fix it. And he was sort of a good cook, when he felt like bothering with it. He never grilled burgers, but he could make some killer scrambled eggs and bacon.
Pastor Jim's housekeeper was a good cook, too.
But they didn't have a sandpile, and a bunch of old bricks.
They didn't have a nice new VCR and a whole shelf of cool movies.
It smelled in here, Dean thought. It was halfway clean, so it was better than some of the places he and Dad and Sammy had stayed in, but everything smelled old. If he laid on his stomach on the couch and stuck his nose in the cushions, he could smell old socks.
And those people across the street were nuts.
He mumbled something that Uncle Paul didn't understand. Uncle Paul asked him "What?" and he tried to say it again, but he started to feel that every single thing he could chose to say would make a bigger mess of things.
Uncle Paul didn't yell. He just looked kind of sad.
"I don't know what to decide," Dean told him.
"Come on, then," Uncle Paul said. "We'll go home."
~~~~~~~~
They were talking downstairs. Dean could hear the soft sound of their voices coming up through the heater vent, but he couldn't make out what they were saying.
They'd given him and Sammy meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gravy for supper. Sam ate two servings, but to Dean it tasted like mush, like nothing. That was his brain, he knew: Aunt Emily was a very good cook, and meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gravy was the best kind of dinner ever, but there was too much going on.
Too many things to think about.
"If I was a T-Rex," Sam told him, "I could stomp all the buildings. I could stomp cars and busses and nobody could stop me."
You could stomp me, Dean thought.
Things might be easier then.
Aunt Emily came upstairs after a while, with two glasses of milk and some cookies. She sat in a chair by her son Adam's old desk and listened to Sam yap about T-Rexes and brontosauruses and how one time somebody had showed him a rock and told him it was a fossil of dinosaur poop and she nodded and smiled and said, "That's pretty amazing," as if she actually thought it was.
Her sons had lived in this room.
Right here, in this very room.
They didn't have to worry about their dad getting ripped up by some monster. They just had to worry, did he sell enough insurance to pay his bills.
They didn't have to worry about their mom dying in a fire.
Sam just kept right on talking, but Aunt Emily got up from the chair and sat down beside Dean on his bed. She put her arm around him and held him and told him close to his ear that it was all going to be okay.
Then she rocked him back and forth, like he was a little kid.
"I love my dad," he said into her shoulder.
"I know you do, honey," she told him. "I know you do."
~~~~~~~~
He woke up a little bit, feeling the warm touch of a hand on his shoulder. Not Aunt Emily; it was a different touch than that.
Uncle Paul, then.
He'd crawled into bed before Sam even had his pajamas on. It was still early, early enough that normally he would think I'm not a baby and would protest needing to turn the lights out, but every bit of his body was worn out.
Wish you could STOMP me, he thought as he burrowed deep under the covers.
Wish this could STOP.
The hand didn't move. It just laid there, solid and warm. It made him think of that little cat he'd found in the woods a million years ago, the one Pastor Jim had adopted - the way that cat liked to curl up close to him, because he was warm - but this wasn't a cat. Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul didn't have a cat, because Aunt Emily had allergies.
It was just a hand.
Then, from far away, he heard Sammy's voice say, "Daddy?"
No. Uncle Paul.
But the voice that said, "Hey, dude," wasn't Uncle Paul's.
Dreaming.
The bed jiggled and bounced, and Sammy's voice shrieked, "DADDY!" close enough to Dean's head to make his ears hurt. A second later, Sam started jabbering about trucks and bridges and dinosaurs and meat loaf and the voice that wasn't Uncle Paul's chuckled softly and said, "All right, all right, slow down, there."
DAD.
Dean squirmed around onto his back - tough to do with Sam crawling all over the bed - and looked up at his father. Nobody had turned on any lights in the room, so all there was was some light from outside, and from out in the hall. Just enough to see that Dad wasn't all torn up, or dying. He looked kind of tired, was all.
Not mad.
"She died, Dad," Dean muttered. "Mrs. Robbie, she died."
"I know."
"We were gonna go for a walk. She said we were gonna go down to the store and get a popsicle, but we only got to the sidewalk, and she fell down. I did what you told me, Dad - I touched her neck for her pulse. But I think she died right away."
The picture was there in his mind then: Mrs. Robbie lying on the sidewalk with her hair all messed up and her tongue sticking out a little.
And nobody sad about it except that policeman.
"I wished I could help her," Dean said.
Dad scooped Sam over into his lap. He was probably wishing Sam would quiet down, and Sam did, all of a sudden. Then Dad closed his eyes for a second, and breathed out a long sigh. "Sometimes there's nothing you can do," he said after a minute. "Hurts like hell, but there's nothing you can do about it."
"We could stay here, Dad," Sam said. "They got another bedroom. Or you could stay in here. I can sleep with Dean."
Dad grinned at that.
But, God, Sammy was a gigantic dumbass.
"Gimme a couple minutes," Dad said. He got up from Dean's bed with Sam in his arms, and carried Sam over to his own bed. "Got some things to work out. Go on back to sleep if you want. I think we might be good here 'til morning."
"Then are you goin' away again?" Sam asked.
"No," Dad said. "Not for a while. We've - we'll figure something out. Might head up to Jim's for a while."
"But it's nice here."
"You go on back to sleep now, son. We'll see about things in the morning."
"Daaaaad."
"Sammy. You go back to sleep, you hear me?"
Sam didn't want to do that any more than he wanted to be forced to eat nothing but broccoli for the rest of his life, but he got back under the covers and pulled them up to his chin. "I'm sleepin'," he said.
"That's awesome," Dad told him.
A minute later, Dean could hear voices downstairs: the deep rumble of Dad's voice, and the softer sound of Aunt Emily's and Uncle Paul's. Super-hearing would have been a good thing, he thought for a moment, then decided against it, because there was such a thing as knowing too much.
Having to make too many decisions.
Don't want to be a grownup. Not EVER.
He crept out of bed, though, and when Dad came back upstairs, Dean met him out in the hallway.
"I'm sorry, Dad," he said.
There was enough light out there in the hall for him to see Dad's face. "Things could've gone better, Deano," he said after a minute, though it seemed like he was talking to somebody else as much as he was talking to Dean, which was weird, because there was nobody there but the two of them. "They definitely could've gone better. Hell, the whole last ten years could've gone better, and that's as much my fault as anybody else's."
Then he was quiet. Looking around, a little bit, at Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul's house.
"Are you okay, Dad?" Dean asked.
"Am now."
"They bought us stuff. Some clothes and stuff."
"That was nice of them."
"Can we take it with us?"
"Yeah," Dad said. "Gonna pay 'em back for it, and the food. No reason they need to be out some money -"
He didn't say it, but it was there. When you're not their kids.
For a while, Dean wondered how long they were going to stand there. It was the middle of the night, after all.
Maybe it was being in Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul's house that made him say it. If they'd been in the apartment, or the car, or almost anywhere else, he wouldn't have said it, because he was supposed to be responsible. He was supposed to be Dad's second in command, the older one, the one who could take care of Sammy.
But here, in this house, he felt like a kid.
"I got scared, Dad," he said softly.
Dad didn't say anything forever. Then he smiled, and it was like that weird, not-funny smile that Aunt Emily had when she was talking about things not turning out the way you thought they would.
"Yeah," Dad said.
He put his hand on Dean's shoulder, and steered him back toward that blue bedroom.
"Let's get some sleep," he said.
* * * * *
Part 1 is here.
They were already in trouble. Had been since yesterday.
CHARACTERS: Dean (age 9), Sam (age 5), John, OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 9668 words
FIVE DAYS IN THE BLUE ROOM
By Carol Davis
He'd told Dad, one time, that Sam was a gigantic jerk because he had fun playing with empty cardboard boxes.
"You did the same thing," Dad told him.
"Did not."
Dad smiled a little bit, like he thought something was funny. "Had a great big one I brought home from the garage. We drew pictures all over it and you used it as a fort. Cut some holes in it for windows. Couple of nights, you insisted on sleeping in the thing."
He had never slept in a dumb box.
"You're makin' that up," he told Dad.
"Believe what you want," Dad had told him. "But you wore a bowl on your head for a helmet, told me and your mother that you were a soldier and that was your fort, and you had to stay in there to protect it from the 'emanies'. Couldn't get you out of there for love nor money."
"That's…I did not."
"Whatever," Dad had said.
When Dean looked over at Sam, out in the sunshine of the Burnses' back yard, Sam had begun to carry some bricks over into the sandpile. There were maybe a hundred of them, neatly stacked up near the back door, waiting for Uncle Paul to get started on the project he'd told Dean about, the building of a little wall that would run in a half-circle at one end of the yard to form a garden for Aunt Emily to grow fancy flowers in. The sand (which wasn't real sand, like at the beach; it was more like sandy dirt) would be part of that project too, when Uncle Paul got around to it. For now, all the stuff was just sitting there, collecting cobwebs and bird poop.
"Hey," Dean said.
"I can move 'em," Sam told him. "I'm buildin' a bridge."
"Did you ask?"
"I don't gotta ask. Aunt Emily said I could play, and I'm not hurtin' nothing."
That much was true. The bricks were just sitting in a pile. When Sam was all done with his building, they could put the bricks back by the door.
"You can play too," Sam offered.
Dean nodded, but he wasn't much in the mood for playing. He was in the mood for what Uncle Bobby called "pondering."
Sitting on the rope swing, drifting slowly back and forth with the toes of his new sneakers trailing against the ground, he tried to figure out what Dad would do when he got back to the apartment house and found nobody there. Regular people would call the police. That's what people did on TV, and he was more than sure that Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul would do that, if somebody in their family was missing. One of their sons, for instance.
But Dad's relationship with the police was "iffy."
He could ask the neighbors, but his relationship with them was pretty iffy too.
Maybe the police had left him a note. That one cop, the nice one who'd thought Mrs. Robbie was their grandmother, had said they'd take care of letting Dad know where his kids were. They wouldn't have left a cop there at the apartment house, because they needed to do important stuff, like be on stakeout and do drug busts and chase bank robbers, so they would have had to leave a note, or ask a neighbor to fill Dad in.
They would do that, wouldn't they? Leave a note for the missing father of those boys, for when he came back, saying to call the police station.
Saying "You can have them back."
Unless they found the gun.
Unless they waited for Dad to come back, then threw him in jail for having kids in a house with a loaded shotgun.
For not paying his bills.
Maybe for that time he broke the window at the gas station.
"Deeeeeeeeean," Sam said. "You gotta come be the driver. I gotta drive the dump truck, and you drive this other one."
"It's a front loader."
"Why?"
"Because the thing that scoops stuff up is in the front."
"Why don't they call it a scooper?"
"Because they don't."
"That's dumb."
You think empty boxes are cool, Dean thought. And you pick up garbage out of the street. So don't go calling things dumb.
"DEAN," Sam said.
There was no point in telling Sam he was bossy. It was two hundred percent true, but every time Dean had tried to tell Sam about it, Sam had shouted "Is NOT!!" at him until Dean gave up. Which made it a darn good thing Sam wasn't in school yet. No teacher was gonna let him get away with even a little bit of what he got away with with Dean. If he started yelling in a classroom, they'd slap him right into a Time Out.
They'd get Dad in there and tell him Sam was a brat.
But Uncle Bobby said there was this thing called Picking Your Battles. It meant not using up all your energy fighting about little things. It meant waiting until something gigantic came along, a thing that was worth fighting for.
Uncle Bobby also said Keeping The Peace was a good thing.
So Dean spent a long time helping Sam haul bricks over to the sandpile and lining them up so they made a flat, smooth road.
"A BRIDGE," Sam said.
"Okay, a bridge."
Then Sam spotted the hose.
"You gotta ask," Dean told him.
"No I don't. Aunt Emily said I could do anything."
"She said you could play."
"I gotta have water. For under the bridge. That's playing. There's gotta be water under the bridge."
"Maybe it's an overpass."
"What?"
"Where the road goes over another road."
"It's a BRIDGE."
Way, way back in his mind, Dean could remember the hose in their yard in Lawrence. He remembered Mom spending a long time planting some flowers along the side of the house so their yard would look pretty. "They need water," she'd said, and Dean had watched her unroll the hose and turn on the water.
He'd wanted to help, so later on, when the dirt looked very dry, he carefully unrolled the hose, just the way she'd done it, and turned on the water.
He remembered a lot of mud, and flowers lying on their sides, all broken.
The water had come on very fast, very hard, and even though he'd tried to give each plant only a little bit of a drink, the hose had made big puddles. Then it jumped out of his hands and sprayed water in through the window of the lady next door.
He'd been little then, younger than Sam was now. Now, he knew how to turn on the water and how to make sure the spray came out at the strength he wanted. But Sam didn't: he was pretty sure of that. Pretty sure there was a huge opportunity here for Sam to create a mess.
"I'm gonna ask," he told Sam firmly.
"We don't gotta ask about water in the sink."
"Yes we do."
"Do NOT."
"Remember that time you turned on the water in the tub, and it overflowed all over the bathroom?"
"That was the tub."
"No water."
"Yes," Sam said.
"I'm older, and I said, no water."
Sam pondered that for a while. Then his eyes got narrow and he said, "I hate you."
Like that would accomplish anything.
"I don't care," Dean told him. "I'm older and I said no water, and if you turn on the hose without anybody helping you, I'm gonna kick your butt."
"Aunt Emily won't let you."
"Watch me."
Uncle Bobby wouldn't be happy, Dean thought a minute later. Neither would Dad. Pastor Jim would probably say, "Sam, let's think about what we did," and talk to Sam in his quiet church voice until Sam shut up, but Pastor Jim wasn't here right now. Neither was Dad, or Uncle Bobby, which was a good thing, because Sam started howling like a tornado siren.
"STOP IT," Dean told him.
This town didn't have tornado sirens, not that Dean had seen, anyway - but they didn't need to spend money to buy any. They could just haul Sam up to the roof of a tall building and disagree with him until he started yelling.
"You FREAK!" Dean shouted at him. "Cut that OUT!"
It took Aunt Emily about half a day to quiet Sam down.
"I hate you," Sam announced after Aunt Emily had given him two Kleenexes and a juice box, and had gone into the other room where she couldn't hear him. "You called me a freak. You're not s'posed to call me stuff like that."
"You call me that."
"Do not."
"Do too."
"Boys," Aunt Emily said.
She made them go to separate rooms: Sam up to their bedroom to look at a big picture book on dinosaurs and fossils, and Dean to the living room. Dean figured at first that she was either going to make him sit there on the couch and do the Let's think about what we did thing, or she was going to make him sit through some soap opera or a stupid game show or something. But she didn't do either one. She did sit him down on the couch, but instead of turning on the TV she sat down beside him and put her hand on his shoulder.
"It's like a rerun," she said, and she smiled, but in a weird kind of way that made it seem like she didn't really find anything funny. "You and Sam. You're my boys, Adam and Christopher, all over again."
"We are?" Dean said.
"The peacemaker, and the Entitled One."
"He's not like that all the time."
"Oh, I know. And he probably wasn't like that before he learned how to play the You're Not The Boss Of Me card."
"Yeah. He wasn't."
Maybe it was because Dad was with them more often then. Back when Sam was a baby, Dad had never gone off anywhere for more than a few hours.
"He might be scared," Dean suggested.
"He might be."
Sam could probably remember that night - the night the monster came after him. When it might have killed him, if Dad hadn't come running into the motel room at just the right time, because Dean hadn't shot it and killed it right away, the very first second he saw it.
Sam could be scared of lots of things.
"I'm older," Dean said. "I'm s'posed to look after him."
Gently, Aunt Emily got him up from the couch and walked him into the front hallway, where there was a tall mirror hanging near the front door. She nudged Dean until he was standing in front of it, then stood behind him with her hands on his shoulders.
"What do you see?" she asked him.
He shrugged. "Just me."
"Do you want to know what I see?" When he didn't answer with anything more than another shrug, she told him, "I see a boy who might be a little scared, too. And that's nothing to be ashamed of. You're in a strange place, with strange people, and you don't know when your dad's coming back. You don't know what will happen when he does."
Or if he doesn't, Dean thought.
Aunt Emily moved in a little closer and rested her head against Dean's. "Nobody gets any guarantees," she told him. "We don't know from one day to the next what's going to happen to us. People die sometimes. People get sick. People don't turn out to be what you thought they were. But I'll promise you something."
"What?" Dean muttered.
"As long as you're here, whether that's for a few days or for a much longer time, Uncle Paul and I are going to take care of you and Sam as best we can. We're not going to leave you alone. And if a big decision needs to be made, we'll either make it for you, or we'll help you make it. So you don't need to be The Boss Of Sam. Okay?"
"Okay," he whispered.
Then she turned him around and kissed him on the forehead. "Good enough," she said.
~~~~~~~~
That night, he dreamed that he heard a jiggly, noisy rumble. It wasn't much of a sound, at first, but it got louder and louder and closer and closer until it was a terrible roar, one that made him clamp his hands over his ears and start running.
TORNADO!
"Sammy!" he screamed. "Sammy! Sammy! You have to yell! You have to warn everybody! Yell, Sammy, yell!"
It came closer and closer, until the roar was all around him. He remembered what Dad had told him, that you couldn't outrun a tornado; if you weren't in a car and you couldn't drive away, you had to find a safe place to hide, someplace solid and sturdy.
With SAM.
He had to save Sam, but Sam was nowhere around, no matter where he looked, no matter how fast he ran.
"SAMMY!!!!"
Then the roar was THERE.
And it wasn't a tornado.
It was Dad, behind the wheel of the Impala.
~~~~~~~~
He knew the sound of that car. Even if his eyes were shut, even if there were a million other cars on the road, he could pick it out - and that wasn't strange at all, no more strange than recognizing your dad's voice, or your mom's.
It was like that TV show he he'd seen a while ago, where they said a mother penguin and her baby could pick out each other's voices even if there were a million other penguins making noise at the same time.
Some things, you just know.
And he kind of knew in his gut that he hadn't heard that sound for a long time.
He tried to tell himself that maybe Dad had come by in the night - that maybe Dad had been back in town for a while, and had decided that maybe Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul could do a decent enough job looking after his boys, so Dad could go do what he needed to do and not worry about them. But he would swing by at night, after his work was finished, just to see how things looked.
At the same time, Dean knew none of that was true, because he hadn't heard the car.
Not awake, not asleep.
Dad had left town a week ago. He hadn't told Dean what this particular job was about (he didn't, very often, unless it was something simple, like a ghost), but he did say it would only take a couple of days. Three or four, tops.
And it had been a week.
So Dad could be dead somewhere. Or hurt bad.
You're supposed to call Pastor Jim. Or Uncle Bobby. You're supposed to call and tell them, Dad said he'd be back in a couple days, and it's been a whole week. You're supposed to tell them that, because even if you and Sammy are safe, Dad might not be, and Uncle Bobby or Pastor Jim could go looking for him.
If Dad had been dead for all that time, Uncle Bobby or Pastor Jim showing up wouldn't make much difference.
But at least they'd know.
And if he was hurt, they could help him.
Should've called them right away. You should've. You should've told that cop NO, and called Pastor Jim.
Uncle Paul found Dean lying on his bed, face burrowed into the covers. Maybe they'd been calling him, for dinner or something, and maybe they hadn't; he hadn't paid much attention to anything all day, other than listening for the sound of the car.
Uncle Paul sat down on the bed beside him and patted Dean on the back.
"Tough day?" he asked.
Dean shook his head into the covers.
Nobody he knew would just sit there like that. They might ask him a question - "Are you sick?" or "What did you break?" - but nobody would just sit there and not say anything for a while, not even Pastor Jim. When Dean finally turned over onto his back, out of curiosity and not much else, Uncle Paul raised an eyebrow and asked him, "Something we can fix?"
Dean shook his head.
"You sure?"
Dean tried again, but this time his head didn't want to cooperate.
"I was s'posed to call," he mumbled, and before Uncle Paul could say anything back, he blurted, "I'm supposed to call if anything goes wrong. There's a number under the phone and I'm supposed to use it but I didn't because he's gonna be mad and I didn't want him to get mad. I didn't want to mess things up again."
"And you think you messed things up?"
"I did. I know I did."
Half an hour later he was in the car with Uncle Paul.
It didn't take them long to get into the apartment. The door was locked (by the police, more than likely, Uncle Paul said; they'd probably called the landlord and made him come over with a key), but there was another key hidden in a notch behind the woodwork. It was Dad's key, and Dad had made the notch. Nobody knew about it but Dad and Dean. And now, Uncle Paul.
For a moment, as Uncle Paul unlocked the door, Dean was afraid that they'd come all the way over here for nothing - that the little piece of paper with the phone numbers written on it would be gone.
Or that Dad would be in the apartment.
That Dad had come home a few days ago, hurt really bad, and had died in there all by himself, because nobody was there to help him.
Neither one of those things was true. Dad wasn't there, but the piece of paper was.
"Are you s'posed to tell the police?" Dean asked, as Uncle Paul stood there looking at the piece of paper.
"Is this a crime?" Uncle Paul asked.
"I don't know."
Uncle Paul looked all around the apartment. He didn't say what he was thinking; he was like Dad in that way, able to think a lot of things and not let on what any of it was. He looked in each one of the rooms, but he didn't open the closet doors, or the cupboards.
He didn't open the closet where the shotgun was.
"This man is a minister, you said? This Jim Murphy?" he asked finally.
"A pastor," Dean said. "Is that the same thing?"
"More or less. And he's - where?"
"Minnesota."
"And this Singer guy?"
"South Dakota."
"Seems like your father has friends in some pretty far-flung places."
"I guess."
"Which one do you want me to call?"
They'd take him away, Dean thought. Pastor Jim and Uncle Bobby - either one of them, if they showed up, they'd take him and Sammy away from the Burnses. Away from that nice clean blue room and the books and toys and the sandpile and the burgers and juice boxes.
Away from the people who bought him and Sammy new clothes and kissed them good night.
Uncle Bobby's place was cool, with all the old cars; when he wasn't busy, sometimes he'd show Dean what was broken and how to fix it. And he was sort of a good cook, when he felt like bothering with it. He never grilled burgers, but he could make some killer scrambled eggs and bacon.
Pastor Jim's housekeeper was a good cook, too.
But they didn't have a sandpile, and a bunch of old bricks.
They didn't have a nice new VCR and a whole shelf of cool movies.
It smelled in here, Dean thought. It was halfway clean, so it was better than some of the places he and Dad and Sammy had stayed in, but everything smelled old. If he laid on his stomach on the couch and stuck his nose in the cushions, he could smell old socks.
And those people across the street were nuts.
He mumbled something that Uncle Paul didn't understand. Uncle Paul asked him "What?" and he tried to say it again, but he started to feel that every single thing he could chose to say would make a bigger mess of things.
Uncle Paul didn't yell. He just looked kind of sad.
"I don't know what to decide," Dean told him.
"Come on, then," Uncle Paul said. "We'll go home."
~~~~~~~~
They were talking downstairs. Dean could hear the soft sound of their voices coming up through the heater vent, but he couldn't make out what they were saying.
They'd given him and Sammy meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gravy for supper. Sam ate two servings, but to Dean it tasted like mush, like nothing. That was his brain, he knew: Aunt Emily was a very good cook, and meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gravy was the best kind of dinner ever, but there was too much going on.
Too many things to think about.
"If I was a T-Rex," Sam told him, "I could stomp all the buildings. I could stomp cars and busses and nobody could stop me."
You could stomp me, Dean thought.
Things might be easier then.
Aunt Emily came upstairs after a while, with two glasses of milk and some cookies. She sat in a chair by her son Adam's old desk and listened to Sam yap about T-Rexes and brontosauruses and how one time somebody had showed him a rock and told him it was a fossil of dinosaur poop and she nodded and smiled and said, "That's pretty amazing," as if she actually thought it was.
Her sons had lived in this room.
Right here, in this very room.
They didn't have to worry about their dad getting ripped up by some monster. They just had to worry, did he sell enough insurance to pay his bills.
They didn't have to worry about their mom dying in a fire.
Sam just kept right on talking, but Aunt Emily got up from the chair and sat down beside Dean on his bed. She put her arm around him and held him and told him close to his ear that it was all going to be okay.
Then she rocked him back and forth, like he was a little kid.
"I love my dad," he said into her shoulder.
"I know you do, honey," she told him. "I know you do."
~~~~~~~~
He woke up a little bit, feeling the warm touch of a hand on his shoulder. Not Aunt Emily; it was a different touch than that.
Uncle Paul, then.
He'd crawled into bed before Sam even had his pajamas on. It was still early, early enough that normally he would think I'm not a baby and would protest needing to turn the lights out, but every bit of his body was worn out.
Wish you could STOMP me, he thought as he burrowed deep under the covers.
Wish this could STOP.
The hand didn't move. It just laid there, solid and warm. It made him think of that little cat he'd found in the woods a million years ago, the one Pastor Jim had adopted - the way that cat liked to curl up close to him, because he was warm - but this wasn't a cat. Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul didn't have a cat, because Aunt Emily had allergies.
It was just a hand.
Then, from far away, he heard Sammy's voice say, "Daddy?"
No. Uncle Paul.
But the voice that said, "Hey, dude," wasn't Uncle Paul's.
Dreaming.
The bed jiggled and bounced, and Sammy's voice shrieked, "DADDY!" close enough to Dean's head to make his ears hurt. A second later, Sam started jabbering about trucks and bridges and dinosaurs and meat loaf and the voice that wasn't Uncle Paul's chuckled softly and said, "All right, all right, slow down, there."
DAD.
Dean squirmed around onto his back - tough to do with Sam crawling all over the bed - and looked up at his father. Nobody had turned on any lights in the room, so all there was was some light from outside, and from out in the hall. Just enough to see that Dad wasn't all torn up, or dying. He looked kind of tired, was all.
Not mad.
"She died, Dad," Dean muttered. "Mrs. Robbie, she died."
"I know."
"We were gonna go for a walk. She said we were gonna go down to the store and get a popsicle, but we only got to the sidewalk, and she fell down. I did what you told me, Dad - I touched her neck for her pulse. But I think she died right away."
The picture was there in his mind then: Mrs. Robbie lying on the sidewalk with her hair all messed up and her tongue sticking out a little.
And nobody sad about it except that policeman.
"I wished I could help her," Dean said.
Dad scooped Sam over into his lap. He was probably wishing Sam would quiet down, and Sam did, all of a sudden. Then Dad closed his eyes for a second, and breathed out a long sigh. "Sometimes there's nothing you can do," he said after a minute. "Hurts like hell, but there's nothing you can do about it."
"We could stay here, Dad," Sam said. "They got another bedroom. Or you could stay in here. I can sleep with Dean."
Dad grinned at that.
But, God, Sammy was a gigantic dumbass.
"Gimme a couple minutes," Dad said. He got up from Dean's bed with Sam in his arms, and carried Sam over to his own bed. "Got some things to work out. Go on back to sleep if you want. I think we might be good here 'til morning."
"Then are you goin' away again?" Sam asked.
"No," Dad said. "Not for a while. We've - we'll figure something out. Might head up to Jim's for a while."
"But it's nice here."
"You go on back to sleep now, son. We'll see about things in the morning."
"Daaaaad."
"Sammy. You go back to sleep, you hear me?"
Sam didn't want to do that any more than he wanted to be forced to eat nothing but broccoli for the rest of his life, but he got back under the covers and pulled them up to his chin. "I'm sleepin'," he said.
"That's awesome," Dad told him.
A minute later, Dean could hear voices downstairs: the deep rumble of Dad's voice, and the softer sound of Aunt Emily's and Uncle Paul's. Super-hearing would have been a good thing, he thought for a moment, then decided against it, because there was such a thing as knowing too much.
Having to make too many decisions.
Don't want to be a grownup. Not EVER.
He crept out of bed, though, and when Dad came back upstairs, Dean met him out in the hallway.
"I'm sorry, Dad," he said.
There was enough light out there in the hall for him to see Dad's face. "Things could've gone better, Deano," he said after a minute, though it seemed like he was talking to somebody else as much as he was talking to Dean, which was weird, because there was nobody there but the two of them. "They definitely could've gone better. Hell, the whole last ten years could've gone better, and that's as much my fault as anybody else's."
Then he was quiet. Looking around, a little bit, at Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul's house.
"Are you okay, Dad?" Dean asked.
"Am now."
"They bought us stuff. Some clothes and stuff."
"That was nice of them."
"Can we take it with us?"
"Yeah," Dad said. "Gonna pay 'em back for it, and the food. No reason they need to be out some money -"
He didn't say it, but it was there. When you're not their kids.
For a while, Dean wondered how long they were going to stand there. It was the middle of the night, after all.
Maybe it was being in Aunt Emily and Uncle Paul's house that made him say it. If they'd been in the apartment, or the car, or almost anywhere else, he wouldn't have said it, because he was supposed to be responsible. He was supposed to be Dad's second in command, the older one, the one who could take care of Sammy.
But here, in this house, he felt like a kid.
"I got scared, Dad," he said softly.
Dad didn't say anything forever. Then he smiled, and it was like that weird, not-funny smile that Aunt Emily had when she was talking about things not turning out the way you thought they would.
"Yeah," Dad said.
He put his hand on Dean's shoulder, and steered him back toward that blue bedroom.
"Let's get some sleep," he said.
* * * * *