SPN FIC - Left Behind
September of 2002. Sam's been gone a month. There are still plenty of hunts to deal with -- unless you make one wrong step, corkscrew your ankle, and the hunt goes on without you.
CHARACTERS: Dean, OMC (Uncle Joe)
GENRE: Gen (Outsider POV)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2170 words
"Son," he says firmly. "You haul your carcass on over here and eat some dinner. I'm gonna set a ten-hour limit on moping."
LEFT BEHIND
By Carol Davis
This boy.
John Winchester's son. Brown-haired and tall, loud and brash and funny when he and his father got here two days ago. Ready to take on the world and anything it might dish out. Then a single step went wrong, he corkscrewed an ankle, wrecked his ability to walk at any pace faster than a hobble, and the hunt went on without him. Left him curled on his side on a sleeping bag in front of the fire, without a word to say to anybody outside of a muttered "yes" or "no."
Dean, his name is.
He ought to feel sorry for the boy, Joe supposes, because he was there once: full of piss and vinegar.
He doesn't, though.
Can't.
"You want dinner?" he asks, when he's grown tired of inching his way through the tattered Raymond Chandler paperback he found propping up a wobbly table. A glance at the boy tells him nothing, because all he can see is the back of a flannel button-up, jeans gone a little thin in the butt, an ear, the boy's scalp showing through a haircut that got a little too ambitious. The boy doesn't flinch, or shift, or stir. Just lies there, staring into the fire.
Rather than play along with that game, Joe maneuvers eighty-year-old bones up out of the chair and shuffles off toward the kitchen. It's not much of a trip - the whole place isn't more than six hundred square feet, if it's that - but the cold and the damp don't offer any lubrication for a body that saw its best days half a century ago.
Those sons of bitches couldn't manage to hole up in Arizona? he thinks, like lyrics laid on top of a sigh. California? New Mexico?
Ah, those were some good times. Tucumcari, back in the day.
The cabin might be drafty, might lack commonplace comforts like phone service and cable TV (Jacuzzi tub, Joe thinks; now, there's a gift from the gods), but the kitchen's well stocked and the stove works just fine. A few minutes' worth of dicing and blending and frying and he's got a skillet full of sizzling beef hash ready to set out at the table. Surely, he thinks as he allows himself another glance into the other room, the aroma will draw the boy's attention. He's got to be hungry, hasn't eaten anything since yesterday.
He's punishing himself for that damn ankle.
No, Joe thinks. That's not it. At least, not all of it.
"Son," he says firmly. "You haul your carcass on over here and eat some dinner. I'm gonna set a ten-hour limit on moping."
As he might have guessed, he gets no response.
"Dean."
"I'm not hungry."
Well, that's something: a string of three words. Better than Joe's gotten out of him all day, up 'til now.
Two plates find their way to the table. Two mugs for coffee - one of them suffering from a less than diligent scrubbing after its last use, but Joe can't find better in the cupboard - and two batches of cutlery. He doles out hearty servings of the hash, pours coffee, sets the skillet back on the stove, and settles himself into a chair.
"Come on, son," he says.
He never had children. Was married for only a little while. But he's had dogs and cats, sometimes both at once, some of them with skittish temperaments, some of them fat and lazy. He knows how to coax. How to lure and tease and persuade. Hitting the right notes with his voice is like climbing back onto a bike.
A couple of hours ago, he saw the shoulders underneath that plaid flannel button-up hitch a single time.
He's never had children, but he knows when someone's trying hard not to cry.
"It's not an indulgence," he says, easy and conversational, as if he's talking to someone already seated at the table. "Just giving your body something to work with. Healing that ankle - you want to give it some fuel. Speed things up a little. What do you say you give an old relic something to look at other than that god-awful picture on the wall?"
There's no way that boy's not hungry.
A good quarter of Joe's meal is gone before Dean appears at the table. He doesn't sit, at first; chooses instead to loom over the empty chair, like he's pondering whether to about-face and go back to the fire, or maybe use the chair as a weapon.
Not on Joe. The one he's intent on continuing to hammer is himself.
That's been going on for a while.
The joie de vivre, two days ago? Purely for show. A performance, put on for the benefit of strangers.
"I make a mean batch of hash, you know," Joe says, addressing Dean's untouched plate.
Slowly, resigning himself to the meal, Dean scrapes the chair out away from the table and sinks down onto it. His face is drawn, tired, a little pale. It's a safe bet he didn't sleep much last night, and he's both starving and dehydrated. In the time it takes Dean to completely settle into his place at the table, Joe's gone to the kitchen and drawn him a big glass of water. "Drink that," he says as he sets it in front of the boy. "And let's call a time out on the drama. Nobody's here but you and me, and I'm not well known for telling tales out of school."
He doesn't tell tales, but he's heard a few. The John Winchester Story is one that's made its way through the hunting community, mostly told with anger, or frustration (occasionally, a bit of sympathy, or bewilderment), and Dean's history travels along with it, like the stapled updates Joe used to tuck into the backs of his law books, back when he owned law books.
Back when he had an occupation. An office. A home.
At any rate, he knows the story. Winchester lost his wife. The boy lost his mother. And a month ago, the third wheel came off the rickety contraption they call a life.
"Give it time," Joe says quietly.
The boy's face sets hard.
He eats, though. Small bites at first - of course, he's determined not to like what Joe's given him - then larger ones, with less time in between. He drinks half of the water after giving it a lot of sidelong looks. Doesn't bother with the coffee. When he's finished, nothing left on his plate but a smudge of grease, he lets his fork droop its way back to the tabletop and sits slumped in his chair as if his bones are slowly turning to rubber.
"You ever call him?" Joe asks.
Storm clouds come up fast. Dean's hands lie in his lap, out of sight below the plane of the table, but it's a good bet they're tightening up into fists.
I'm none of your fucking business, mister.
There were boys sitting on the far side of the table, back in the day.
Angry, violent young men.
There's nothing in Dean Winchester's eyes that Joe hasn't seen a thousand times before, from the boys who sat on the far side of a lot of different tables, in half a dozen different cities. A few of them desperately wanted help, at the same time they fought with every last breath against receiving it. Most of them were determined to greet anything that looked like compassion with the same vitriol they'd received all their lives.
It hurts to remember a couple of them, mostly because he suspects he's the only one who ever mourns their passing.
"Those two loose cannons, out there in the woods with your father?" Joe proposes.
Dean stares at his empty plate.
"They're my cousin's daughter's boys," Joe says. "They call me Uncle Joe, but I'm no one's uncle. On the best of days they couldn't manage to scare up half an ounce of interest in me, except that I'm the only one they know who can wield a book to any good effect."
A frown draws Dean's eyebrows together, for exactly the reason Joe anticipated: the boy's parsing that out.
Joe could have said They don't give a shit about me, except I'm the only person they know who can research worth a damn.
But he didn't.
Fancy verbiage completely aside, the statement's not quite true. Those two loose cannons pounded a guy at a roadhouse outside of Tulsa the summer before last, simply because the guy had elbowed Joe out of the way. The blood they share with Joe is pretty diluted, but he's still their family, and family matters in this business. Perhaps that's because most of the people in this business have had a loved one or two (or a dozen) torn away from them; maybe it's another reason entirely. Either way, every hunter Joe has ever met will defend the members of his pride right down to his last breath.
That's an interesting comparison with the rest of humanity, some of whom will bash a baby to death against a wall and think nothing of it.
Careful to hold back anything Dean might interpret as…well, anything, Joe once again pushes up from his chair and makes his way into the kitchen. As before, the ingredients he needs for what he's got in mind are all there; he made sure they would be, three days ago, at the supermarket down at the foot of the mountain. There's no microwave here, but that's just as well - the slow, even heat of the gas flame produces a better result, and he's smiling as he carries the biggest mug the cabin has to offer back to the table and sets it in front of Dean.
Dean's response is predictable.
The hell is this?
"Take it back in there," Joe says, nodding toward the other room. "We'll sit and enjoy the fire. I could stand the warmth. There's a layer of permafrost making its way through my ass."
Dean's response to that is predictable, too.
Long ago, before law school, before that long parade of angry boys in jumpsuits and shackles, before the awakening, before this long run of motels and empty cabins and blood and screams in the night, a man named Butler - a gentle giant of an Alabama-born black man, with big, soft paws and the biggest heart Joe's ever encountered - that man taught Joe how to cook. How to soothe the most anguished of spirits with food and drink. They spent most of their time overseas well back behind the lines, generally not far from the medics' tent, healing with food and kindness.
They weren't whole, he and Butler.
Sometimes, though, you can pour a lot out of a half-empty cup.
These days, you can make hot chocolate with a handful of gritty powder poured out of a foil envelope. Blend it with water, nuke it in the microwave, and you get something that's hot and sweet, if nothing else.
Jimmy Butler had a different recipe, when the ingredients were available.
Whole milk, mixed with a bit of half-and-half, heated slowly over a gas flame. Unsweetened cocoa, some sugar, boiling water, a pinch of salt. A good dollop of vanilla extract. Whipped cream swirled on top.
Something shifts across Dean's face.
She made something like that for him, Joe thinks. The mother he lost.
"You come on, now," he says, and gestures toward the other room. "Humor the old man. We've got a while to wait. There's a chess board in a drawer in there. Anybody's guess whether all the pieces are there, but we can make do."
"I don't play chess," Dean mutters.
"Then it's your lucky day. I'm in the mood to teach you."
So many, Joe thinks. So damn many: behind the lines of battle, in France, in '44 and '45. On the other side of a table, behind walls of iron bars, shackled to rings bolted to the floor.
So many frightened young men.
So many lost.
"With any luck," he says softly, "Roy and Walt won't screw things up beyond redemption. They're good hunters. They just -"
"They're assholes," Dean replies.
"There's that."
The boy - John Winchester's son - sits staring at the steadily melting swirl of whipped cream for a good long minute. His shoulders are still set tight, and there's still a knot between his eyebrows.
This boy, Joe thinks.
He's got no enemy quite as formidable as himself.
Eventually, some of those young men looked up. Met Joe's gaze. Asked him, without saying a single word, what he was honestly willing to give them. If the rope he said he could throw would hold their weight. Most of the time, their expressions didn't soften - but the degree of their surrender was always visible in their eyes.
It's visible now, in Dean's.
"Bring your cocoa," Joe says softly, and aims his old bones toward the other room.
He's not surprised to hear the scrape of Dean's chair against the floor.
* * * * *
CHARACTERS: Dean, OMC (Uncle Joe)
GENRE: Gen (Outsider POV)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2170 words
"Son," he says firmly. "You haul your carcass on over here and eat some dinner. I'm gonna set a ten-hour limit on moping."
LEFT BEHIND
By Carol Davis
This boy.
John Winchester's son. Brown-haired and tall, loud and brash and funny when he and his father got here two days ago. Ready to take on the world and anything it might dish out. Then a single step went wrong, he corkscrewed an ankle, wrecked his ability to walk at any pace faster than a hobble, and the hunt went on without him. Left him curled on his side on a sleeping bag in front of the fire, without a word to say to anybody outside of a muttered "yes" or "no."
Dean, his name is.
He ought to feel sorry for the boy, Joe supposes, because he was there once: full of piss and vinegar.
He doesn't, though.
Can't.
"You want dinner?" he asks, when he's grown tired of inching his way through the tattered Raymond Chandler paperback he found propping up a wobbly table. A glance at the boy tells him nothing, because all he can see is the back of a flannel button-up, jeans gone a little thin in the butt, an ear, the boy's scalp showing through a haircut that got a little too ambitious. The boy doesn't flinch, or shift, or stir. Just lies there, staring into the fire.
Rather than play along with that game, Joe maneuvers eighty-year-old bones up out of the chair and shuffles off toward the kitchen. It's not much of a trip - the whole place isn't more than six hundred square feet, if it's that - but the cold and the damp don't offer any lubrication for a body that saw its best days half a century ago.
Those sons of bitches couldn't manage to hole up in Arizona? he thinks, like lyrics laid on top of a sigh. California? New Mexico?
Ah, those were some good times. Tucumcari, back in the day.
The cabin might be drafty, might lack commonplace comforts like phone service and cable TV (Jacuzzi tub, Joe thinks; now, there's a gift from the gods), but the kitchen's well stocked and the stove works just fine. A few minutes' worth of dicing and blending and frying and he's got a skillet full of sizzling beef hash ready to set out at the table. Surely, he thinks as he allows himself another glance into the other room, the aroma will draw the boy's attention. He's got to be hungry, hasn't eaten anything since yesterday.
He's punishing himself for that damn ankle.
No, Joe thinks. That's not it. At least, not all of it.
"Son," he says firmly. "You haul your carcass on over here and eat some dinner. I'm gonna set a ten-hour limit on moping."
As he might have guessed, he gets no response.
"Dean."
"I'm not hungry."
Well, that's something: a string of three words. Better than Joe's gotten out of him all day, up 'til now.
Two plates find their way to the table. Two mugs for coffee - one of them suffering from a less than diligent scrubbing after its last use, but Joe can't find better in the cupboard - and two batches of cutlery. He doles out hearty servings of the hash, pours coffee, sets the skillet back on the stove, and settles himself into a chair.
"Come on, son," he says.
He never had children. Was married for only a little while. But he's had dogs and cats, sometimes both at once, some of them with skittish temperaments, some of them fat and lazy. He knows how to coax. How to lure and tease and persuade. Hitting the right notes with his voice is like climbing back onto a bike.
A couple of hours ago, he saw the shoulders underneath that plaid flannel button-up hitch a single time.
He's never had children, but he knows when someone's trying hard not to cry.
"It's not an indulgence," he says, easy and conversational, as if he's talking to someone already seated at the table. "Just giving your body something to work with. Healing that ankle - you want to give it some fuel. Speed things up a little. What do you say you give an old relic something to look at other than that god-awful picture on the wall?"
There's no way that boy's not hungry.
A good quarter of Joe's meal is gone before Dean appears at the table. He doesn't sit, at first; chooses instead to loom over the empty chair, like he's pondering whether to about-face and go back to the fire, or maybe use the chair as a weapon.
Not on Joe. The one he's intent on continuing to hammer is himself.
That's been going on for a while.
The joie de vivre, two days ago? Purely for show. A performance, put on for the benefit of strangers.
"I make a mean batch of hash, you know," Joe says, addressing Dean's untouched plate.
Slowly, resigning himself to the meal, Dean scrapes the chair out away from the table and sinks down onto it. His face is drawn, tired, a little pale. It's a safe bet he didn't sleep much last night, and he's both starving and dehydrated. In the time it takes Dean to completely settle into his place at the table, Joe's gone to the kitchen and drawn him a big glass of water. "Drink that," he says as he sets it in front of the boy. "And let's call a time out on the drama. Nobody's here but you and me, and I'm not well known for telling tales out of school."
He doesn't tell tales, but he's heard a few. The John Winchester Story is one that's made its way through the hunting community, mostly told with anger, or frustration (occasionally, a bit of sympathy, or bewilderment), and Dean's history travels along with it, like the stapled updates Joe used to tuck into the backs of his law books, back when he owned law books.
Back when he had an occupation. An office. A home.
At any rate, he knows the story. Winchester lost his wife. The boy lost his mother. And a month ago, the third wheel came off the rickety contraption they call a life.
"Give it time," Joe says quietly.
The boy's face sets hard.
He eats, though. Small bites at first - of course, he's determined not to like what Joe's given him - then larger ones, with less time in between. He drinks half of the water after giving it a lot of sidelong looks. Doesn't bother with the coffee. When he's finished, nothing left on his plate but a smudge of grease, he lets his fork droop its way back to the tabletop and sits slumped in his chair as if his bones are slowly turning to rubber.
"You ever call him?" Joe asks.
Storm clouds come up fast. Dean's hands lie in his lap, out of sight below the plane of the table, but it's a good bet they're tightening up into fists.
I'm none of your fucking business, mister.
There were boys sitting on the far side of the table, back in the day.
Angry, violent young men.
There's nothing in Dean Winchester's eyes that Joe hasn't seen a thousand times before, from the boys who sat on the far side of a lot of different tables, in half a dozen different cities. A few of them desperately wanted help, at the same time they fought with every last breath against receiving it. Most of them were determined to greet anything that looked like compassion with the same vitriol they'd received all their lives.
It hurts to remember a couple of them, mostly because he suspects he's the only one who ever mourns their passing.
"Those two loose cannons, out there in the woods with your father?" Joe proposes.
Dean stares at his empty plate.
"They're my cousin's daughter's boys," Joe says. "They call me Uncle Joe, but I'm no one's uncle. On the best of days they couldn't manage to scare up half an ounce of interest in me, except that I'm the only one they know who can wield a book to any good effect."
A frown draws Dean's eyebrows together, for exactly the reason Joe anticipated: the boy's parsing that out.
Joe could have said They don't give a shit about me, except I'm the only person they know who can research worth a damn.
But he didn't.
Fancy verbiage completely aside, the statement's not quite true. Those two loose cannons pounded a guy at a roadhouse outside of Tulsa the summer before last, simply because the guy had elbowed Joe out of the way. The blood they share with Joe is pretty diluted, but he's still their family, and family matters in this business. Perhaps that's because most of the people in this business have had a loved one or two (or a dozen) torn away from them; maybe it's another reason entirely. Either way, every hunter Joe has ever met will defend the members of his pride right down to his last breath.
That's an interesting comparison with the rest of humanity, some of whom will bash a baby to death against a wall and think nothing of it.
Careful to hold back anything Dean might interpret as…well, anything, Joe once again pushes up from his chair and makes his way into the kitchen. As before, the ingredients he needs for what he's got in mind are all there; he made sure they would be, three days ago, at the supermarket down at the foot of the mountain. There's no microwave here, but that's just as well - the slow, even heat of the gas flame produces a better result, and he's smiling as he carries the biggest mug the cabin has to offer back to the table and sets it in front of Dean.
Dean's response is predictable.
The hell is this?
"Take it back in there," Joe says, nodding toward the other room. "We'll sit and enjoy the fire. I could stand the warmth. There's a layer of permafrost making its way through my ass."
Dean's response to that is predictable, too.
Long ago, before law school, before that long parade of angry boys in jumpsuits and shackles, before the awakening, before this long run of motels and empty cabins and blood and screams in the night, a man named Butler - a gentle giant of an Alabama-born black man, with big, soft paws and the biggest heart Joe's ever encountered - that man taught Joe how to cook. How to soothe the most anguished of spirits with food and drink. They spent most of their time overseas well back behind the lines, generally not far from the medics' tent, healing with food and kindness.
They weren't whole, he and Butler.
Sometimes, though, you can pour a lot out of a half-empty cup.
These days, you can make hot chocolate with a handful of gritty powder poured out of a foil envelope. Blend it with water, nuke it in the microwave, and you get something that's hot and sweet, if nothing else.
Jimmy Butler had a different recipe, when the ingredients were available.
Whole milk, mixed with a bit of half-and-half, heated slowly over a gas flame. Unsweetened cocoa, some sugar, boiling water, a pinch of salt. A good dollop of vanilla extract. Whipped cream swirled on top.
Something shifts across Dean's face.
She made something like that for him, Joe thinks. The mother he lost.
"You come on, now," he says, and gestures toward the other room. "Humor the old man. We've got a while to wait. There's a chess board in a drawer in there. Anybody's guess whether all the pieces are there, but we can make do."
"I don't play chess," Dean mutters.
"Then it's your lucky day. I'm in the mood to teach you."
So many, Joe thinks. So damn many: behind the lines of battle, in France, in '44 and '45. On the other side of a table, behind walls of iron bars, shackled to rings bolted to the floor.
So many frightened young men.
So many lost.
"With any luck," he says softly, "Roy and Walt won't screw things up beyond redemption. They're good hunters. They just -"
"They're assholes," Dean replies.
"There's that."
The boy - John Winchester's son - sits staring at the steadily melting swirl of whipped cream for a good long minute. His shoulders are still set tight, and there's still a knot between his eyebrows.
This boy, Joe thinks.
He's got no enemy quite as formidable as himself.
Eventually, some of those young men looked up. Met Joe's gaze. Asked him, without saying a single word, what he was honestly willing to give them. If the rope he said he could throw would hold their weight. Most of the time, their expressions didn't soften - but the degree of their surrender was always visible in their eyes.
It's visible now, in Dean's.
"Bring your cocoa," Joe says softly, and aims his old bones toward the other room.
He's not surprised to hear the scrape of Dean's chair against the floor.
* * * * *