SPN FIC - Hale-Bopp
There was something in the sky, some years back -- something that was (at least partly) responsible for the deaths of thirty-nine people. Thirty-nine dead, thanks to the whims of a madman ... when John had spent two weeks of blood, sweat and tears to save just one.
Two hours ago, John had been behind the wheel of his truck, letting the road unspool behind him. Headed home. To what passed for home.
CHARACTERS: John, Dean, Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2194 words
HALE-BOPP
By Carol Davis
Two hours ago, the only thing he'd heard was the engine of his truck. The hum of tires riding smooth asphalt. The rush of air caressing good Detroit steel.
Not:
"I don't care. It's a bunch of crap."
"Could you stop being such a dick? For once?"
"Could you kiss my ass?"
"It's a friggin' trip to - Sam?? God DAMN it."
Banging cabinet doors. The slam of a bigger door. Bedroom, probably.
Underlying all of it, the television. The falsely solemn voice of a local-station news anchor, talking about the robbery of a local convenience store. Debate over a parking ordinance. A music festival coming up on the weekend.
The day had been mild - unusually so for the end of March - but the temperature had dropped pretty fast come dusk, faster once full dark had fallen. The yard was cold enough now to make John wish for a jacket, but wanting one and venturing into that battleground inside the house to get one were two different propositions.
"Dad?" Dean's voice said from behind him.
Close the damn door, he thought.
The mild day had offered a chance for Dean to wash and detail his birthday gift of a couple of months back - that was obvious from the lingering little puddles on the ground around the Impala. It likely had also been an excuse to leave the back door of their little borrowed house and a couple of windows open all day. Mid-sixties, lots of sunshine, light breeze. A serious taste of spring with the promise of summer.
A good day, for some people.
The low wooden stoop outside the open door creaked when Dean put his weight on it. John didn't turn; he didn't feel like acknowledging the house or either one of his bickering kids, but he could tell when Dean got close enough for him to speak without raising his voice much above a murmur.
"Close the door," he said.
"Yeah," Dean said, as dismissive as John had ever heard him sound (meaning, not all that much), then asked, "You want something? Burger? Scrambled eggs?"
"Not now."
Dean let that lie. He didn't sound like he was in a Determined to Speak My Piece kind of mood; more likely, he'd come out so they could enjoy a little Ain't Nature Grand time together. Clean, fresh air, sky clear enough that a sprinkling of stars was visible.
They'd done that together, in another life: look at the stars.
"You good?" Dean asked.
Cold.
Tired. Hungry. Thirsty. Shoulder hurts like a son of a bitch. Need to piss.
Two hours ago John had been behind the wheel of his truck, letting the road unspool behind him. Headed home. To what passed for home.
"Don't need you to hold my hand, if that's what you mean."
He heard Dean exhale something that wasn't quite a sigh. He reminded himself, holding back a further response, that the kid was just trying to help. That Dean had spent most of his life doing that - trying to help - but his track record, the level of success he'd hit, was for the most part no better than his high school transcripts.
"Just need some downtime," John told him.
There'd been a sheet of paper lying on the kitchen table when John walked in. Bright yellow, meant to catch the eye. His eye, in particular, being that it'd been left right there in plain sight, just inside the door John preferred to use, and it had information on it in a typeface big enough big enough to be readable from fifty paces down the road. Permission slip for a school trip in a couple of weeks, over to Connecticut.
To see Shakespeare, of all the damn things.
Shakespeare brought back memories of high school, of trying to muddle his way through Romeo and Juliet, of the artsy-fartsy movie he'd gone to see with a girl (not Mary, though he could no longer remember what her name had been) because she'd insisted, and which he'd found interesting only because there was nudity, and sword-fighting.
He'd thought the yellow paper was a joke.
Right up until he saw the look on Sam's face.
"Not gonna be here then," he told Sam.
Predictably, Sam's expression got stormier. Threatened high winds, lightning, hail. Flooding of low-lying areas.
"He'll get over it," Dean offered now.
More than likely, Sam would. Outwardly, at least, and right up until the next intolerable thing happened. He stored up offenses more efficiently (and, apparently, more permanently) than anyone John had ever met who wasn't female. Tell the kid no, and it was instantly etched in stone, held at the ready for a time when Sam would figure he needed some serious ammunition, and then he'd haul it out all at once, enough firepower to level a small village.
John let out the same kind of a breath Dean had a minute ago.
Not a sigh, but close enough.
"I could -" Dean began.
John glanced over at him, standing alongside the battered picnic table that was John's current perch. There was just enough light bleeding out from the house for him to see most of the nuances of Dean's expression.
Just trying to help.
Trying to make it all work.
Dean's gaze wasn't directed at his father. He was looking at the sky.
At the thing that was plainly visible up there, some distance above the crest of the trees that lay along the horizon: that little bit of nothing that'd had the whole planet excited for months now. From here, it was nothing more than a smudge, no bigger than John's thumbnail. From here, it looked as if it was standing dead still, holding a permanent position in the sky, which wasn't true at all; it was clipping along at tens of thousands of miles an hour, according to the TV news. It had a tail forty million miles long, but from here, it looked like nothing.
Nothing at all.
John took a deep breath.
Good sweet Christ, that shoulder hurt.
His touching the shoulder, doing anything to it other than a light scratching, as if he'd been nailed there by a mosquito, was likely to bring on another round of solicitousness from Dean - and what John wanted badly to do right now wasn't a light scratching, it was more like kneading, probing, determining whether the soreness, the bone-deep ache, could be defeated by a good hot shower, or whether it would demand some chemical intervention. The shoulder hadn't popped out of the socket, not quite, but it had wanted to - had been as determined to do that as Sam had been determined to scowl his way into a bus trip to Connecticut.
Come to think of it, his neck was in need of some attention, too, and his lower back.
And his head.
Hot bath, maybe. Long soak in the tub. Some duct tape slapped on over the overflow drain so he could fill the tub up a couple inches deeper. Half an hour, maybe forty minutes' worth of wet heat, aimed at everything he'd hunched and contorted while he was driving so he could protect that wrenched shoulder from further insult.
"Dad?" Dean said.
Not a kid any more, John thought as he looked at the boy full on. Eighteen years old.
"Yeah," he said quietly.
The offer lay there between them, as solid and real as if Dean had carried it out of the house on a plate and set it down on the scarred, cold wood of the picnic table. Tell me what you need and I'll make it happen.
Say what you want to say and I'll listen.
"Saved one," John told him after a minute.
"Yeah?"
"Got there too late for the first three, but I saved one. And it's over. Put that son of a bitch to bed."
"That's good."
"Yeah."
Time was - long ago - that the two of them had sat out in the yard, side by side in a pair of cheap matching lawn chairs, sometimes wrapped in blankets, sometimes warm enough in t-shirts and jeans, staring up at the sky. Looking for shooting stars. Studying the pockmarked surface of the moon. Watching the slow, steady crawl of an eclipse.
There'd been a time when John had figured someday he'd do that with both of them, both of his boys.
Seemed like these days there wasn't much the three of them could do together - nothing that Dean wouldn't mark as lame, or that wouldn't piss Sam off.
Inside the house, the TV was still droning.
Almost two weeks' worth of work, John thought. Research, interviewing witnesses. Driving. Digging. He'd done it on his own because Sam had flat out refused to help, and leaving him here with Dean had seemed like the simplest solution, not to mention the one that would generate the most peace and quiet. It hadn't been the easiest route to take, not by a long shot - but it wasn't as if he'd never tackled anything on his own before, or that it wouldn't happen again.
Still, he'd thought that maybe someday…
Maybe it would be the three of them. Together.
Not now, though. Not right now, so for better or worse, he'd done it alone. Got the job done. Saved one.
While that little smudge of nothing in the sky had taken down thirty-nine.
Heaven's Gate, they called themselves. Figured they'd find their way to glory by hopping on board the mother ship cruising along in the comet's tail.
Bunch of gullible nutjobs, but…
Thirty-nine.
Thirty-nine people.
And he'd worked for almost two weeks, sleeping and eating only enough to get by, leaving his boys to handle everything else on their own, to save one.
It had been featured in the news reports all day; he'd heard it half a dozen times on the radio in the truck, and had seen it on the TV a little while ago. Thirty-nine people, all dressed in black, all wearing brand-new Nikes, purple cloths covering their faces, armbands on their shirts calling them members of the Away Team.
They got away, all right.
All thirty-nine of 'em.
"I'm gonna make you some soup," Dean said firmly. "You look like shit on toast."
John looked at him, took in the determined set to Dean's expression. "Soup's not gonna fix it."
"It's - shit," Dean blurted. "It's a friggin' bus trip to Stratford. I told him I'd kick his ass if he doesn't lay off. If you don't want soup, I'll make you eggs and toast. You look like crap, Dad. I wanted to -" He cut himself off, but the rest of it was there on his face: I wanted to help. You should've let me help. There was surprisingly little anger in it, nothing like the self-righteous thunderheads Sam could put together like he'd flipped a switch; on Dean it was more pure disappointment, a kind of resigned, weary sadness, the kind that if he didn't beat it back would undermine everything he said he wanted to be, the day he made his choice, the day he walked out of a school building for the last time.
"There a girl involved in this?" John asked him.
"What?"
"The hell's your brother want to go to a Shakespeare festival for?"
"I guess," Dean shrugged. "I don't know."
Shaking his head - as much as the screaming shoulder would allow for - John slid his attention back to that thing in the sky.
Wasn't the comet, he told himself.
Those thirty-nine were dead because of a monster wearing a human face.
The kind he had no business taking down.
He grimaced as he set his feet on the ground and stood up from the worn-out picnic table. He swayed just a little, because of a leg gone half to sleep, but it was enough to drag Dean toward him with a hand outstretched to hold him in place if he started to fall.
The kid was worried. Scared.
"Nothing," John told him. "Need some sleep, is all."
There was no sign of Sam when they walked back into the house, no sound in there other than the mutter of the television, gone on from the news to the Tonight Show, where Leno too was talking about those thirty-nine, about how they'd wanted Scotty to beam them up. Dean went to it in a few quick steps and hit the button to turn it off as John pulled the door shut behind him, then turned to pull down the open window.
The house was quiet, then, except for the rattling hum of the refrigerator.
"You sure you don't want -" Dean said as he came back to the kitchen.
Persistent little bastard.
Had been ever since he was old enough to string a sentence together.
The shoulder hurt like blue blazing hell, but John pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down on it.
"Eggs?" Dean asked him.
There'd been a time, John thought.
"That'll do," he said.
And he caught the smile that flickered across Dean's face as he turned away to do that one small thing that would help.
* * * * *
Two hours ago, John had been behind the wheel of his truck, letting the road unspool behind him. Headed home. To what passed for home.
CHARACTERS: John, Dean, Sam
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2194 words
HALE-BOPP
By Carol Davis
Two hours ago, the only thing he'd heard was the engine of his truck. The hum of tires riding smooth asphalt. The rush of air caressing good Detroit steel.
Not:
"I don't care. It's a bunch of crap."
"Could you stop being such a dick? For once?"
"Could you kiss my ass?"
"It's a friggin' trip to - Sam?? God DAMN it."
Banging cabinet doors. The slam of a bigger door. Bedroom, probably.
Underlying all of it, the television. The falsely solemn voice of a local-station news anchor, talking about the robbery of a local convenience store. Debate over a parking ordinance. A music festival coming up on the weekend.
The day had been mild - unusually so for the end of March - but the temperature had dropped pretty fast come dusk, faster once full dark had fallen. The yard was cold enough now to make John wish for a jacket, but wanting one and venturing into that battleground inside the house to get one were two different propositions.
"Dad?" Dean's voice said from behind him.
Close the damn door, he thought.
The mild day had offered a chance for Dean to wash and detail his birthday gift of a couple of months back - that was obvious from the lingering little puddles on the ground around the Impala. It likely had also been an excuse to leave the back door of their little borrowed house and a couple of windows open all day. Mid-sixties, lots of sunshine, light breeze. A serious taste of spring with the promise of summer.
A good day, for some people.
The low wooden stoop outside the open door creaked when Dean put his weight on it. John didn't turn; he didn't feel like acknowledging the house or either one of his bickering kids, but he could tell when Dean got close enough for him to speak without raising his voice much above a murmur.
"Close the door," he said.
"Yeah," Dean said, as dismissive as John had ever heard him sound (meaning, not all that much), then asked, "You want something? Burger? Scrambled eggs?"
"Not now."
Dean let that lie. He didn't sound like he was in a Determined to Speak My Piece kind of mood; more likely, he'd come out so they could enjoy a little Ain't Nature Grand time together. Clean, fresh air, sky clear enough that a sprinkling of stars was visible.
They'd done that together, in another life: look at the stars.
"You good?" Dean asked.
Cold.
Tired. Hungry. Thirsty. Shoulder hurts like a son of a bitch. Need to piss.
Two hours ago John had been behind the wheel of his truck, letting the road unspool behind him. Headed home. To what passed for home.
"Don't need you to hold my hand, if that's what you mean."
He heard Dean exhale something that wasn't quite a sigh. He reminded himself, holding back a further response, that the kid was just trying to help. That Dean had spent most of his life doing that - trying to help - but his track record, the level of success he'd hit, was for the most part no better than his high school transcripts.
"Just need some downtime," John told him.
There'd been a sheet of paper lying on the kitchen table when John walked in. Bright yellow, meant to catch the eye. His eye, in particular, being that it'd been left right there in plain sight, just inside the door John preferred to use, and it had information on it in a typeface big enough big enough to be readable from fifty paces down the road. Permission slip for a school trip in a couple of weeks, over to Connecticut.
To see Shakespeare, of all the damn things.
Shakespeare brought back memories of high school, of trying to muddle his way through Romeo and Juliet, of the artsy-fartsy movie he'd gone to see with a girl (not Mary, though he could no longer remember what her name had been) because she'd insisted, and which he'd found interesting only because there was nudity, and sword-fighting.
He'd thought the yellow paper was a joke.
Right up until he saw the look on Sam's face.
"Not gonna be here then," he told Sam.
Predictably, Sam's expression got stormier. Threatened high winds, lightning, hail. Flooding of low-lying areas.
"He'll get over it," Dean offered now.
More than likely, Sam would. Outwardly, at least, and right up until the next intolerable thing happened. He stored up offenses more efficiently (and, apparently, more permanently) than anyone John had ever met who wasn't female. Tell the kid no, and it was instantly etched in stone, held at the ready for a time when Sam would figure he needed some serious ammunition, and then he'd haul it out all at once, enough firepower to level a small village.
John let out the same kind of a breath Dean had a minute ago.
Not a sigh, but close enough.
"I could -" Dean began.
John glanced over at him, standing alongside the battered picnic table that was John's current perch. There was just enough light bleeding out from the house for him to see most of the nuances of Dean's expression.
Just trying to help.
Trying to make it all work.
Dean's gaze wasn't directed at his father. He was looking at the sky.
At the thing that was plainly visible up there, some distance above the crest of the trees that lay along the horizon: that little bit of nothing that'd had the whole planet excited for months now. From here, it was nothing more than a smudge, no bigger than John's thumbnail. From here, it looked as if it was standing dead still, holding a permanent position in the sky, which wasn't true at all; it was clipping along at tens of thousands of miles an hour, according to the TV news. It had a tail forty million miles long, but from here, it looked like nothing.
Nothing at all.
John took a deep breath.
Good sweet Christ, that shoulder hurt.
His touching the shoulder, doing anything to it other than a light scratching, as if he'd been nailed there by a mosquito, was likely to bring on another round of solicitousness from Dean - and what John wanted badly to do right now wasn't a light scratching, it was more like kneading, probing, determining whether the soreness, the bone-deep ache, could be defeated by a good hot shower, or whether it would demand some chemical intervention. The shoulder hadn't popped out of the socket, not quite, but it had wanted to - had been as determined to do that as Sam had been determined to scowl his way into a bus trip to Connecticut.
Come to think of it, his neck was in need of some attention, too, and his lower back.
And his head.
Hot bath, maybe. Long soak in the tub. Some duct tape slapped on over the overflow drain so he could fill the tub up a couple inches deeper. Half an hour, maybe forty minutes' worth of wet heat, aimed at everything he'd hunched and contorted while he was driving so he could protect that wrenched shoulder from further insult.
"Dad?" Dean said.
Not a kid any more, John thought as he looked at the boy full on. Eighteen years old.
"Yeah," he said quietly.
The offer lay there between them, as solid and real as if Dean had carried it out of the house on a plate and set it down on the scarred, cold wood of the picnic table. Tell me what you need and I'll make it happen.
Say what you want to say and I'll listen.
"Saved one," John told him after a minute.
"Yeah?"
"Got there too late for the first three, but I saved one. And it's over. Put that son of a bitch to bed."
"That's good."
"Yeah."
Time was - long ago - that the two of them had sat out in the yard, side by side in a pair of cheap matching lawn chairs, sometimes wrapped in blankets, sometimes warm enough in t-shirts and jeans, staring up at the sky. Looking for shooting stars. Studying the pockmarked surface of the moon. Watching the slow, steady crawl of an eclipse.
There'd been a time when John had figured someday he'd do that with both of them, both of his boys.
Seemed like these days there wasn't much the three of them could do together - nothing that Dean wouldn't mark as lame, or that wouldn't piss Sam off.
Inside the house, the TV was still droning.
Almost two weeks' worth of work, John thought. Research, interviewing witnesses. Driving. Digging. He'd done it on his own because Sam had flat out refused to help, and leaving him here with Dean had seemed like the simplest solution, not to mention the one that would generate the most peace and quiet. It hadn't been the easiest route to take, not by a long shot - but it wasn't as if he'd never tackled anything on his own before, or that it wouldn't happen again.
Still, he'd thought that maybe someday…
Maybe it would be the three of them. Together.
Not now, though. Not right now, so for better or worse, he'd done it alone. Got the job done. Saved one.
While that little smudge of nothing in the sky had taken down thirty-nine.
Heaven's Gate, they called themselves. Figured they'd find their way to glory by hopping on board the mother ship cruising along in the comet's tail.
Bunch of gullible nutjobs, but…
Thirty-nine.
Thirty-nine people.
And he'd worked for almost two weeks, sleeping and eating only enough to get by, leaving his boys to handle everything else on their own, to save one.
It had been featured in the news reports all day; he'd heard it half a dozen times on the radio in the truck, and had seen it on the TV a little while ago. Thirty-nine people, all dressed in black, all wearing brand-new Nikes, purple cloths covering their faces, armbands on their shirts calling them members of the Away Team.
They got away, all right.
All thirty-nine of 'em.
"I'm gonna make you some soup," Dean said firmly. "You look like shit on toast."
John looked at him, took in the determined set to Dean's expression. "Soup's not gonna fix it."
"It's - shit," Dean blurted. "It's a friggin' bus trip to Stratford. I told him I'd kick his ass if he doesn't lay off. If you don't want soup, I'll make you eggs and toast. You look like crap, Dad. I wanted to -" He cut himself off, but the rest of it was there on his face: I wanted to help. You should've let me help. There was surprisingly little anger in it, nothing like the self-righteous thunderheads Sam could put together like he'd flipped a switch; on Dean it was more pure disappointment, a kind of resigned, weary sadness, the kind that if he didn't beat it back would undermine everything he said he wanted to be, the day he made his choice, the day he walked out of a school building for the last time.
"There a girl involved in this?" John asked him.
"What?"
"The hell's your brother want to go to a Shakespeare festival for?"
"I guess," Dean shrugged. "I don't know."
Shaking his head - as much as the screaming shoulder would allow for - John slid his attention back to that thing in the sky.
Wasn't the comet, he told himself.
Those thirty-nine were dead because of a monster wearing a human face.
The kind he had no business taking down.
He grimaced as he set his feet on the ground and stood up from the worn-out picnic table. He swayed just a little, because of a leg gone half to sleep, but it was enough to drag Dean toward him with a hand outstretched to hold him in place if he started to fall.
The kid was worried. Scared.
"Nothing," John told him. "Need some sleep, is all."
There was no sign of Sam when they walked back into the house, no sound in there other than the mutter of the television, gone on from the news to the Tonight Show, where Leno too was talking about those thirty-nine, about how they'd wanted Scotty to beam them up. Dean went to it in a few quick steps and hit the button to turn it off as John pulled the door shut behind him, then turned to pull down the open window.
The house was quiet, then, except for the rattling hum of the refrigerator.
"You sure you don't want -" Dean said as he came back to the kitchen.
Persistent little bastard.
Had been ever since he was old enough to string a sentence together.
The shoulder hurt like blue blazing hell, but John pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down on it.
"Eggs?" Dean asked him.
There'd been a time, John thought.
"That'll do," he said.
And he caught the smile that flickered across Dean's face as he turned away to do that one small thing that would help.
* * * * *