SPN FIC - Rock Paper Scissors
Whew. Three in one weekend. This one's for
amothea, who wanted Teen!Chesters of the darkish variety for her part in the PIF meme.
The story ties in with my RANDOM CHANCES (and to some extent, CHICAGO): what happens out in the desert outside of Barstow that brings the Winchesters back to the motel broken and bleeding. In a nutshell: Sam learns to drive. (You're thinking "car"? Nah.) Much Dean whumpage, some John whumpage, and a big fugly creature that dismembers people.
So, walking backwards, aim not true. Drifting too close to the edge of what wasn’t really a path. Sam too focused on the taunting to tell him to watch out, Dad too far ahead, eyes on the prize, hearing the back-and-forth between his boys and not aware of where Dean’s feet were landing, trusting Dean to take care of himself.
Characters: Teen!Dean and Teen!Sam, John
Pairings: none
Length: 3853 words
Spoilers: none
Rating: PG, maybe soft R, for language
Kleenex rating: probably 0, but angst aplenty
Disclaimer: I like to play with Kripke's toys. For no payment 'cept comments, which are better than cookies.
Rock Paper Scissors
By Carol Davis
“Dean?”
A few seconds went by, then: “Dean.”
There wasn’t a chance in hell that Sam would give up, even if all evidence told him Dean was asleep.
Sure enough. “Dean. Hey.”
Dean surrendered and cracked one eye. Something that was half a sigh and half a whispered grunt hissed through his lips.
“I think you should stay awake,” Sam said.
“I don’t have a concussion,” Dean mumbled.
“Are you sure? Your face is all scuffed up, and you’ve got, like, a lump on your -“
“I said I don’t have a fucking concussion.”
Silence.
Which meant Sam was sulking.
Dean hoisted his eyelids to half-mast and peered at Sam across the yard of space that separated them. Score: Sam’s mouth was drawn into an ugly little bow and his arms were clamped across his narrow chest. His duffel and Dean’s were on the ground beside him, unzipped; he’d been prowling through the contents and had dumped a lot of it out onto the dirt.
“Time is it?” Dean sighed.
“One-thirty.” Sam’s gaze flicked to his watch. “Twenty to two.”
Twenty to two. Almost three hours since he’d been dumb enough to walk backwards up an uneven stretch of rock-strewn ground in order to taunt Sam, half a dozen paces behind. Not so much to taunt Sam, really, but to keep an eye on him; the taunting was just a distraction. Sam was fourteen and a half, thought he was thirty, and had developed a bad habit of planting himself where he was and refusing to move if something Dad did pissed him off.
The last couple months, all Dad had to do to piss Sam off was inhale.
So, walking backwards, aim not true. Drifting too close to the edge of what wasn’t really a path. Sam too focused on the taunting to tell him to watch out, Dad too far ahead, eyes on the prize, hearing the back-and-forth between his boys and not aware of where Dean’s feet were landing, trusting Dean to take care of himself.
Then Dean’s feet weren’t landing, he was skidding and bouncing down the slope and when he finally landed he’d left his breath up above and he was making a noise like a cat shoved into a blender. He clamped down on the noise when he saw the look on Dad’s face, which definitely came out of a blender: you’re all right, tell me you’re all right mixed in with sonofabitch, Dean, we’re on the clock here, seasoned with some leftover goddammnit, Sam, just do what you’re told.
He managed to hold everything in, all but a couple of muffled squeals, while Dad got him pried out from between the rocks and moved over to a mostly flat area where he could sit with his back against another rock.
“Shoulder’s out,” Dad told him.
He sat there trying not to move, drawing in breath in little sips, while Dad hunkered beside him and Sam stood his usual half-dozen steps away.
“I can -“ he tried. “Gimme a minute, and I -“
Dad scrubbed a hand through his hair.
“He didn’t watch where he was going,” Sam sniped.
And wasn’t that just perfect. It was bad enough that Sam and Dad were pissed at each other ninety percent of the time; now Sam was going to escalate things to include him. But maybe he had it coming, he thought fleetingly. Payback for all the crap he’d dumped on Sam back when he himself was thirteen, fourteen, wound up way too tight, lashing out at anything that got in his way. Sam hadn’t deserved any of it; back then he was agreeable and helpful. Mostly. So maybe…
Dad pushed himself to his feet and surveyed their surroundings. “Stay here,” he said after a minute.
“No, Dad, I can -“
“I don’t want you going up against that thing at less than a hundred percent.”
“Then put it back in. The shoulder. You -“
“Sam, stay with your brother.”
“What?” Sam said.
“You heard me. Stay here. Right here. Don’t go wandering off. I’ve got to catch up with it before sundown. We’ve got this one chance, before it goes after somebody else. I’m not going to waste it, let somebody else die.”
That was that. End of discussion.
Almost three hours ago.
Three hours meant Dad was either a long way from here, or holed up somewhere nearby, waiting for the thing to show itself. Neither of those options was anything to write poetry about - the first one meant Dad had a long hike ahead of him to get back here after he’d killed the thing, and the second one meant a massively fugly, leather-hided creature that had already dismembered four people was within sniffing distance of Dean and Sam.
At least it was his left shoulder that was out, not his right. But seriously? Fuck Dad for not putting it back in before he took off.
He could do it himself. Dad had done that once, back maybe ten years ago. Wasn’t easy, but it could be done, with a little focus.
Yeah. Grab onto something solid - not Sam; Sam was too likely to move - jerk back to pop the bone all the way out, then roll…
“Dean?” Sam said.
Dean had to squint hard to clear his vision. It took a couple of deep breaths and sitting very, very still to send his stomach back down where it belonged. Yeah, he could put the shoulder back in by himself. They’d hear him screaming in Phoenix.
“Dean?”
“M’okay.”
“You don’t look okay.”
“I said I’m okay.”
That teased the shoulder just enough to make him clamp his teeth together and press his head back against the rock. He jammed his eyes shut tight enough to see flickers of light behind his lids. God dammit, Dad, he thought, then thought it a couple more times, like a mantra. He could see Dad moving away, back up the slope, steps steady and rapid, sure of where he was going and what he’d do when he got there.
Moving faster, with more purpose, now that he’d shaken the weight he’d been pulling behind him.
“I found -“ Sam offered.
Dean made himself look. Four pills lay in Sam’s outstretched palm. Ibuprofen, over-the-counter strength. “That’s all we’ve got?” he whispered.
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I looked.” Sam’s gaze drifted as he frowned.
“Dad doesn’t have anything. The first-aid stuff’s all in there.” Dean tipped his head slightly in the direction of the half-gutted duffel bags. He expected Sam to nod, to accept that - for all its lack of good news - but instead, Sam’s frown deepened. Started to look like the Grand Canyon of frowns. “Dammit, Sam,” Dean groaned. “He wouldn’t take off without leaving us whatever -“
“He wouldn’t?” Sam countered.
Where the hell did you come from? Dean wondered. And why don’t you go the hell back there and gimme back my brother?
Then, Shit. Was I like that?
“It’s not that bad. It’s - he’ll fix it when he gets back.”
“You’re a fucking liar,” Sam announced.
“Sam…”
Something made Dean try to get up. Whether it was so he could pile their stuff back into the duffels, then give Sam a shove uphill in the direction Dad had taken, or to give Sam a good solid slam upside the head, he couldn’t have said. Either way, the movement made his shoulder screech and his head swim wildly. His stomach did an impressive ricochet off the rest of his guts. When he settled back against the rock his chin was trembling like one of those chattering-teeth toys.
The rock was warm. That was a help. Eyes closed, he let the heat seep into his back and slide through his muscles.
Hot for November.
High desert. Maybe it was like this all the time in November.
Maybe…
When he opened his eyes again, Sam was sitting cross-legged on top of a table-sized flat rock. Reading.
Reading…?
“You asshole,” Dean said. “You brought a book on a hunt? When did you think you were gonna have time to read?”
“Now,” Sam said without looking up. Then he did look up. “You want the ibuprofen now?”
“I want morphine now.”
“Yeah. I’ll go get some. No problem. Be back in two days.”
“Screw you, two days. We’re like forty minutes from the motel.”
Something new took over Sam’s face as he climbed down off the rock, found the four pills and opened a bottle of water. It was still there, changing him like one of those weird pictures that turn into something else when you tilt them, as he offered the pills in his palm so Dean could pop them into his mouth like M&Ms then wash them down with a couple of gulps of water.
“What?” Dean asked him.
“Nothing.”
“Sam…”
Sam stared off into the distance. Not sulking. He was gnawing at the inside of his cheek. “The guy. At the motel. The one with the Cadillac?”
“What about him?”
“He’s a doctor.”
“He tell you that?”
“No.” Sam was silent for a moment. “The woman who was with him. I remembered her first, and then him. From Chicago. That time you got the food poisoning? She’s a nurse. She helped us. Don’t you remember? I recognized her by her hair.”
“You’re really freaking weird, you know that?”
“Why is that weird? I remember her. She took care of us. She was nice.”
Dean found the rock with the back of his head and shut his eyes. “So what’s she doing in Barstow?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she’s on vacation.”
“In Barstow?”
Sam didn’t reply. He got up from his crouch in front of Dean and moved away. When Dean squinted at him, he was standing a few yards away, hands shoved into his pockets, looking off into the distance. “We could go,” he said. “Go back to the car. Back to the motel. Ask those people for help.”
“Yeah, right.”
“He’s a doctor, Dean.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
“He could fix your shoulder. Fix it the right way.”
“Dad knows how to fix it the right way.”
“I saw on TV. They’re supposed to take x-rays first and make sure there aren’t any bone fragments in the joint.”
“Ain’t gonna happen, Sam.”
Sam spun around fast enough to make little clouds of dust rise around his boots. “Why?” he demanded.
“Because it’s not.”
“So you’re okay with him maybe wrecking your shoulder.”
“He knows what to do, Sam!”
“Fuck him,” Sam shrieked. “Fuck you, and fuck all of this! Why are we doing this? Why are we out here?”
“You know why.”
“To get the thing that killed Mom? We’re never gonna find the thing that killed Mom. You know that and I know it and he knows it, so why doesn’t anybody admit it? Huh? Why do we keep doing this?”
“We’re trying to help people, Sam.”
“I don’t care about other people!” Sam shrilled, both hands balled up into fists that he jabbed awkwardly into the air. “We don’t know them. Why is it our responsibility to do this stuff? Let somebody else do it! I’m supposed to be in school. I have a test Friday. It’s fifteen percent of my grade.”
The sound of Sam’s voice, the angry vibration it cut through the air, plucked at Dean’s shoulder like it was a guitar string. Calm down, he counseled himself. Don’t tense up. Let it go limp. At the same time, he thought, Not now, Sam. Don’t do this now. Cut me a freaking break, would you? “We’ll be back in a couple days. You won’t miss the test.”
“Why should I miss any test?”
“You little freak, you made us bring you.”
“Because I didn’t want to get left alone again! What was I supposed to do if you didn’t come back? Huh? What did you want me to do?”
Dean’s lips started to form the words Pastor Jim.
“And that would be okay?” Sam demanded. “Sure! I could go around school and tell people, my whole family’s dead. I could go for the sympathy vote. Then when they asked me, wow, Sam, what happened? I could tell them my mom got burned up by some kind of thing that was in our house, and we don’t know what it was but it wasn’t human. And then my dad and my brother got killed out in the desert and torn up into pieces by some other thing, and you know, there wasn’t enough left of any of them to bury because the buzzards and the vultures got them and spread their bones in little pieces all over the fucking goddamn desert.” He gulped in a mouthful of air, snorted a little like an overheated horse, and sputtered on, “That’s a good story. I could bring in a couple of guns and silver bullets and some salt and do Show and Tell.”
He waited then, staring at Dean, hands still clenched in a way that looked painful. When Dean didn’t answer him, he sputtered again, but more softly, then said, “Let’s just go.”
“No, Sam. No. We’re waiting for Dad.”
“You’re almost nineteen.” Sam took a step toward his brother, then another, and squatted down so he was close to eye level with Dean, his face pinched and intense. “You could get a job. Race would give you your job back at the garage. I’m sure he would. We could go there. I could do stuff after school. Walk people’s dogs or something, and shovel sidewalks. Then when I’m sixteen I can work part-time at a store or something. We could do it, Dean. We wouldn’t have enough for a big apartment, but one of those studio things? It would just be for a while. Let’s just go. Please, Dean.”
“And leave Dad out here in the desert?”
Sam grimaced and rubbed at his mouth. “No. We could…after we go back to the motel.”
“We can’t just leave him, Sam.”
“But we can’t live like this, Dean. Something bad’s gonna happen. You know it is.”
Dean shook his head as vehemently as he dared. “Nobody’s gonna leave anybody. Dad’ll fix my shoulder, and I’ll be fine in a few days. We’ll get you back to school for your damn test. Now stop this crazy talk.”
“We can go. We can.”
“Dad needs us, Sammy.”
“No he doesn’t. He never thinks about us. It’ll all about the hunt. That’s all he thinks about.”
“It’s not.”
“Then why did he walk off and leave you like this?”
Why did you, Dad? Dean wondered fleetingly. Given a few more minutes, Sam was going to come up with something like “He’s punishing you for not paying attention to where you were going. For being stupid and losing focus.” But it wasn’t that. They were on the clock with this thing. Come sundown it’d be out of its nest looking for more prey, more food.
It might even get to the motel. The bastard’d be smacking its lips over Mrs. Kellogg, the giant muu-muu’ed woman who ran the place. The way she wheezed from trying to walk fifty feet, she’d never outrun it. Hell, Dad wouldn’t be able to outrun the thing if it set its sights on him and got a little bit of a head start. It was used to dealing with the terrain around here. Could skip right over ground that’d take the Winchesters twice as long to negotiate.
Dean’s gaze dropped to his watch. Time had slipped away from him; it was after three.
Where’d you go, Dad?
“We’re all he’s got, Sam,” he said quietly.
“He’ll still have us. We can have a life, Dean. And he can do what he wants. He can chase things all around the country if he wants to.”
When Dean didn’t answer, Sam sank down onto the dirt and dropped his head into his hands. His book lay forgotten on top of the flat rock.
They were still sitting there when the sun started to settle toward the horizon.
Sundown.
A few more minutes and that fugly-ass killing machine was going to be on the prowl. Looking for meat.
Looking for Dad.
Jaw set, Dean nodded toward the collection of stuff Sam pawed out of the duffels. The hem of an old t-shirt, ragged enough to be long past wearability, hung over the edge of one of the bags. “Take that,” he told Sam. “There another one? Make me a sling. Gotta tie my arm down so it doesn’t move.”
“And then what?” Sam frowned.
“We’re gonna find Dad.”
“He said stay here.”
“So now you’re gonna obey orders? Bullshit. Don’t spin things around just so you can disagree with me. Fix that shirt, Sam. Haul ass.”
“That thing is out there.”
“We’ve got weapons.” Knives, guns, ammo; they’d each been prepared for this hunt. The thing might be as tough-skinned as a lizard, but it had soft spots. Lower belly, under the ears, base of the throat, eye sockets. A killing shot was best, but wounding it enough to cut its speed would work, cripple it so it could be killed. They both knew all of that; Dad had drilled it into them before they left the motel. Knew it like most kids knew how to run a touchdown.
Sam’s face worked silently. The way the light was falling on him, he looked thirty. He wasn’t that, not even half of it, but he was no little kid any more. He’d been a part of the hunt for almost a year now, allowed into it earlier than Dean had been. Dad hadn’t let him make a kill yet - hadn’t let him get into that arena. He’d been stuck watching…but he did watch.
Watched, saw, a lot more than Dean had at fourteen.
The eyes that’d been the last ones to drink in the sight of their mother, whole, warm, alive, had taken in things she never would have wanted him to see.
He sat looking at Dean for what seemed like a long while. There wasn’t much written on his face; he had Dad’s gift for showing the world a blank canvas when he felt like it. After a couple of minutes he shifted and looked toward the setting sun, the growing collection of color at the horizon that left the two of them no options.
Because they were Winchesters, and nobody had ever taught them to enjoy the value of sitting around waiting for something to happen.
“Okay,” Sam said, and stood up slowly, all arms and legs.
Got the t-shirts - there were three of them, one smelly with gun oil - out of the duffels and used them to pin Dean’s arm against his body at shoulder, elbow, and wrist. Packed the rest of their stuff back into the bags, zipped them shut, and slung them over his own shoulders.
Helped Dean pick his way up the slope with a physical strength Dean hadn’t known Sam had in him.
It was Sam who killed the fucker.
It lay there on the ground, sprawled with arms and legs tossed in weird directions, staring upward as if it was surprised as hell that something as puny as Sam Winchester had sold it the farm. Silent, trembling a little, Sam walked up to it, stared back down at it for a moment, then kicked it solidly in the head.
Then he turned back to his brother and his father.
The moon, close to full, gave the three of them enough light to see each other. Dean, crouched close to his father, pulled a small smile up from somewhere and offered it to Sam. “You did good, Sammy,” he murmured.
He wasn’t stupid enough to think Sam would buy that.
Or that Sam was still kid enough to figure his work was done, that Dad and Dean would handle the rest.
“Can you make it?” Dean asked his father. Dad’s head shifted a little, dipped into something that was almost a nod. “Helicopter’d be good right now,” Dean quipped.
Dad smiled, then winced. The thing had caught him good across the torso, a bitch of a gash that ran along under his bottom rib. Its claws had punched a couple of holes into him, and there was a rip close to his ear. “Real good,” he murmured. “See what you can do about that.”
“Gonna need some stitches.”
“Hmm.”
Sam made a small sound that made Dean look at him. His expression offered the word doctor, and he scowled when Dean shook his head.
Carefully, with as much respect for his own injuries as for Dad’s, Dean shifted to his knees, hooked his good arm around Dad’s back, and slowly moved to his feet, lifting Dad along with him. The effort of it made his vision go in and out of focus. “I can walk,” Dad told him, and certainly that was Dad’s intention, walking, even if only out of sheer stubbornness.
Sam was close enough for Dad to reach out and run a hand against his cheek. “Good job, Sammy,” he nodded.
“My name is Sam,” his son told him.
Dad flinched a little, then offered, “Sam.”
Sam said nothing. Something danced across his face, and it was nothing good. Years ago he’d cried at the sight of Dad hurt like this, bleeding, holding himself together with sheer force of will. Now he was looking at both of them, his father and his brother, both of them battered by the hunt, and he certainly wasn’t crying.
For a moment, he didn’t look thirty. He looked sixty.
He looked like, with no more of a nudge than being told there was a poltergeist in St. George they could check into on their way back east, he’d turn his back on his father and his brother and walk himself right into what he thought was a normal life.
Dean shifted his stance, trying to balance his father’s weight, and grunted at the ripple it sent through his shoulder.
Thought, God, Sam, do this for me.
Sam just stood there. Watching. His face again a blank canvas. He looked around, one way, then another, studying the terrain, before he made a decision and pointed off toward the southeast. “That way,” he said. “It’s kind of the long way around, but it’s more even.”
His face said, just for a second, If you fall, I’m not picking you up.
Then he shouldered the duffels - three of them now, his own, Dean’s, and Dad’s - and set off toward the slope he’d pointed out. He’d gone maybe twenty yards when he stopped, looking off into the night. Turned. And returned, slowly and with obvious reluctance, to his family. He slid an arm under Dad’s, tipping Dad’s weight onto himself and off of Dean. Nodded absently in response to Dean’s grateful sigh.
“Thanks, man,” Dean told him.
“Yeah,” Sam replied in a tone that said Whatever. Then he added firmly, leaving no room for argument, “I can drive.”