SPN FIC - Younger (part 1)
More Wee!Chesters. (Yay.) This one follows up on "Teeth and Claws" - and it won't do much do help anybody like John better than they already do. Me, personally…I think he's a good man who went off the rails. Loved his boys desperately, and they love him (and hate him at the same time). And I love that I get to play with all of them (while making no cash, but cash is [sometimes] overrated).
This isn’t going well at all. Nervously Sam turns the knob and eases the door open so he can see into the living room. Neither Dad nor Dean is looking in his direction; they’re staring at each other, and it’s amazing to Sam that Dean has the balls to stare at Dad like that. He’s asking to get grounded until he’s ninety. Not that he gets to go much of anyplace anyway.
Length: 6,000 words
Pairings: None
Rating: PG for a little bit of language
Spoilers: none
Younger
By Carol Davis
Sometimes Sam thinks - beyond a reasonable doubt, like they say on the cop shows on TV - that Dean hates him.
Sam is still a kid. A little boy. He hates when adults say that about him, but it’s true. But even though he’s a kid, Dad has taught him to keep quiet and listen when people talk (and when they don’t), so he’s a pretty good judge of what people are thinking.
And he’s pretty sure Dean hates him.
Sometimes.
Like now, for instance.
***
He didn’t mean to get Dean into trouble - never does, really. He’s not one of those kids who think it’s fun to set their brothers and sisters up and then go off somewhere and laugh when the boom gets dropped. In fact, he thinks that’s a pretty skanky thing to do, because when you’re family you’re supposed to look out for each other, the way Dean does for him, even though Dean bitches about it sometimes.
It happened because he was bored. He’d finished his homework, and there was nothing on TV. Dad and Dean were outside messing with the car because it was one of those freak warm days Dad called “a January thaw” and they could be out there without jackets, crawling around under the car. Sam had zero interest in crawling around under the car, or poking in the engine. He’d tried getting Dad and Dean to do something else, but they had to do…something…so the Impala would run right.
He looked through his comic books, but he’d already read them all.
He could hear Dad and Dean through the open window. They were having a good time out there, messing with the car.
Maybe Dean had something worth reading. A new comic he was holding back because he wanted to finish reading it before he passed it on to Sam.
Sam got down on his knees and stuck his hand in between the mattress and the box springs of Dean’s bed, Dean’s favorite hiding place for stuff because he could reach it during the night. Just comics and his car magazines, mostly. No dangerous stuff since the time he’d cut his hand open on the knife he’d hidden in there. There wasn’t much under the mattress right now; most of Dean’s magazines were stacked up on the bottom shelf of the night table.
Sam’s fingers snagged something, stuck way back in. His arm almost wasn’t long enough to reach, but he got hold of it by shoving his whole shoulder between the mattress and the box springs. It was a magazine, one Sam hadn’t seen before.
With a naked girl on the front.
He’d seen a couple of Playboys - Jimmy Todd at school always had one smashed up in his backpack. The girls on the covers of those weren’t all-the-way naked, just mostly. And this wasn’t a Playboy. This girl was all-the-way naked, and she didn’t look happy.
Frowning, Sam shifted around and sat down on the floor between his bed and Dean’s with the magazine in his lap. The inside pages had pictures of more naked girls, and naked men, too. None of them looked happy. In a way, they looked like they were constipated and trying really hard to crap.
Even though Sam was just a kid, he knew that wasn’t what they were doing.
One of the pictures made no sense to him at all. He turned the magazine upside down and sideways and squinted at it and it still made no sense. Puzzled enough to get completely lost in trying to figure it out, he climbed up onto Dean’s bed and sat cross-legged with the magazine laying open in front of his knees.
That was when Dad showed up in the doorway.
***
The doors here are cheesy - “hollow core,” Dad calls them. So even though the bedroom door is closed, Sam can hear what’s going on in the living room. Out where Dad is winding up to tear Dean a new one.
“I want you to tell me,” Dad is saying, “what part of your brain told you it was all right to give that crap to your nine-year-old brother.”
“I didn’t give it to him,” Dean says.
“So…what? He conjured it up? It appeared out of thin air?”
Dean insists, “I didn’t give it to him.”
“Where did you get it?”
Dean doesn’t answer.
“I asked you a question,” Dad says. “And you have about three seconds to answer me.”
“I found it.”
“You found it. Found it where?”
“In the trash.”
“Downstairs?”
He shouldn’t have gone poking around in Dean’s stuff, Sam figures. Shouldn’t have, because there’s no way this is going to have a happy ending.
Dad and Dean have been fighting all the time lately, and mostly over nothing. Over Dean’s “attitude,” Dad says. Dean’s never cared much about school, but he’s always done his homework and been respectful to his teachers. This year, though - way back since school started in September - he’s been crabby and rude and will do his homework only after he’s complained about it at least four times.
Sam wishes there was somebody he could talk to about this, somebody who could help him figure out a way to cheer Dean up. But there’s nobody. They haven’t seen Pastor Jim in months, and Sam isn’t allowed to make long-distance calls.
There’s Ms. Grace, but Sam figures if he tells a teacher about Dean’s problems, Dean will go from zero to ballistic in about two seconds.
She’s nice, though. Ms. Grace. She has blonde hair like Mom and a soft voice and she’s always willing to listen. There’s not much Sam can say to her about his life - or Dean’s - because Dad has told him you don’t tell family business to strangers. Sam could argue that Ms. Grace isn’t a stranger, she’s his teacher, but in Dad’s mind that’s the worst kind of a stranger: the kind who’d go running to Social Services if she had a clue what Dad does instead of having a real job. So Sam asks her for more information about the homework assignment even when he understands it perfectly. Asks her about foreign countries, because she’s been to Mexico and France and even to Switzerland. Asks her about stores and movies and TV shows and restaurants.
He likes to ask her things, because she doesn’t act like “go ballistic” is something she could do. She has blue eyes and a nice smile and one time she gave him a hug.
There’s no hugging going on in the living room.
“I didn’t give it to him, Dad,” Dean says, and this time he’s almost whining.
Dad hates whining.
“But you brought it in the house.”
“Dad…”
“Do you understand -“ Dad stops, and in a way the silence is scarier than the tone of his voice. “He’s nine years old, Dean.”
“I said I didn’t give it to him!”
This isn’t going well at all. Nervously Sam turns the knob and eases the door open so he can see into the living room. Neither Dad nor Dean is looking in his direction; they’re staring at each other, and it’s amazing to Sam that Dean has the balls to stare at Dad like that. He’s asking to get grounded until he’s ninety. Not that he gets to go much of anyplace anyway.
“You’ve got no business looking at it either,” Dad says.
Dean just blinks at him.
“You know this stuff is -“
Dad’s got the magazine rolled up in his hand and he looks like he wants to smack Dean in the head with it. They’ve been fighting the last couple of weeks about food and TV shows and why Dad picked this town to squat in when even the people who live here all the time don’t like it and how Dad always waits until the freaking worst possible moment and then yanks them out of wherever they’ve been living. They fight about weather and about Dad’s cooking and Dean’s cooking and how to do laundry. They fight about hunting and why Dean isn’t allowed to go on hunts without having to wait in the car. They pretty much fight about everything except the car.
When Dean isn’t fighting with Dad, he’s in the bathroom with the door locked.
“This stuff is trash,” Dad tells him.
And Dean stares at him. Then Dean lifts an eyebrow. “I’ll go burn it,” he says.
“You’re done with it.”
“You aren’t gonna listen to me, are you?”
“Dean -“
Dean gets up from where he’s been sitting on the couch and takes a step toward the kitchen. His hands are in his pockets and Sam can tell both of them are fists. He doesn’t dare make a fist at Dad, or in front of Dad, not out in the open. He turns away and he’s going to go to the kitchen. For a minute Sam thinks he’s caving, like he used to. When he was Dad’s “good soldier.” Something’s happened to Dean lately and Sam has no idea what it is, but it’s made a mess out of that whole “good soldier” thing. Dean hasn’t been anybody’s good anything for months.
But Dean doesn’t cave. “If you ever listened to me, I think I’d shit,” he says. Then he turns around. He’s mad enough, Sam can tell, that he’s lost track of what he’s saying. Or maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he’s been storing this stuff up for a long time. “I have to walk Sam to school every single day. I have to walk him back home from school. I have to keep an eye on him all day and all night when you’re off on a hunt. I’m tied to him like he’s my frigging Siamese twin,” he snaps. He hauls in a breath, then goes on, “There’s a party on Friday but nobody invited me to it because everybody thinks I’m a freak. Forget about being able to ask a girl to go with me.”
“And that’s my fault,” Dad challenges him.
“Yeah, it’s your fault,” Dean blurts. “Every time I try to make a friend in one of these shithole towns you make us stay in, you pack us up and drag us somewhere else. Between that and having to be the stinking babysitter my whole life, I figure I probably am a freak. So yeah, Dad, I sit by myself and look at porn. What the hell difference does it make?”
“You watch your mouth,” Dad says with heat in his voice. He’s put up with Dean’s sass so far, which is pretty much a miracle, but the clock is ticking.
What Dean says then isn’t loud, but Sam can hear him, hear the sneer in it. “If you’re so worried about what Sam does or sees or thinks, why don’t you stay with him instead of disappearing all the time? You’re his father, why don’t you act like it? You gave him a gun. I just gave him -“
Dad drops the magazine on the floor. His left hand shoots out and grabs Dean by the shirt and spins him around. His right hand draws back.
Sam’s breath gets stuck in his throat.
Dad’s hand cocks back and Sam can see the energy building up in it. Dad’s got a powerhouse of a right hook and it’s aimed right at Dean.
Dean’s eyes get big and time seems to hold still.
For forever, it holds still.
Then Dad lets go of Dean’s shirt and the energy in his right arm kind of fades away. If he had let that hand fly, he would have knocked Dean halfway across the room. Instead, he says, “Go to bed. Now. I’m done talking to you.”
He isn’t done, all three of them know that. But he’s done for now.
***
The conclusion is here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/3513.html#cutid1