SPN FIC - Fifty
Yo,
caffienekitty! You win. Here's Number Fifty.
Characters: John and Dean
Pairings: none
Length: 1941 words
Spoilers: none
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Man, I do love playing with Kripke's boys. Even for free.
Shaking his head, John pulled on a pair of jeans and shuffled out to the kitchen. Dean was nowhere in sight, but in addition to getting the coffee going, he’d put a clean plate bearing two jelly donuts on the table. To the left of the plate lay the morning paper, folded open with a small article circled in red marker. To the right of the plate lay a bright yellow envelope and a long, narrow box wrapped in paper with a pattern of pale blue bunny rabbits.
Fifty
By Carol Davis
The one-of-a-kind aroma of fresh coffee lulled John out of a sleep he would much rather have stayed lost in. He’d dropped off sometime after three in the morning, and didn’t figure it could be much past nine now, judging by the slant of sunlight through the bedroom’s single narrow window.
Still…coffee.
He’d had his first cup when he was, what, eleven or twelve. It’d tasted foul to him then, bitter and unappealing. A far distant second to a nice cold Coke. He hadn’t tried again until he was sixteen and trying to look cool. Sophisticated. Adult.
His first cup of good coffee came when he was 23.
She made it for him.
Mary.
No matter what brand she was working with, she could turn out a cup of coffee that never failed to make him grin like a sleepy cat.
Could’ve been that her coffee was as bad as almost everyone else’s, and he was simply bewitched. He’d allow for that. Either way, most mornings she’d made sure to get up ahead of him and get the coffee going so that that aroma would lure him awake, get his eyes open, get him jump-started for a day at the garage.
The stuff that was brewing now wasn’t likely to taste like Mary’s. Dean meant well, and he certainly gave it his best effort, but damn if the kid didn’t consistently turn out a concoction that tasted like cat piss stirred into motor oil.
Shaking his head, John pulled on a pair of jeans and shuffled out to the kitchen. Dean was nowhere in sight, but in addition to getting the coffee going, he’d put a clean plate bearing two jelly donuts on the table. To the left of the plate lay the morning paper, folded open with a small article circled in red marker. To the right of the plate lay a bright yellow envelope and a long, narrow box wrapped in paper with a pattern of pale blue bunny rabbits.
John waited until he’d gulped down half a cup of coffee - which, to his relief, was actually identifiable as coffee - and taken a big bite of donut before he sat down and opened the envelope. The card inside bore a picture of a beaming Fred Flintstone and the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD! Inside, under the message HAVE A YABBA DABBA DAY, was a scrawled “D.”
After another bite of donut, he pulled the paper off the box.
The necktie inside made him jam his eyes shut against its orange, lime green, and taxicab yellow striped and polka-dotted splendor.
When his retinas had stopped flashing, he put the lid back on the box and retreated to the bathroom to wash up. Where Dean had gone, he wasn’t sure, but his absence in the morning was nothing unusual; he’d been doing odd jobs for several of their neighbors to pick up extra cash. And to get himself out of the apartment. Which was fine - it let Dean get some fresh air and a little interaction with people who weren’t hunters, and it left John alone.
Sam would have prodded him, he suspected: done a lot of yapping about not dwelling on things, about seeing the advantages in what he had.
Or maybe Sam wouldn’t have said anything at all.
John leaned for a moment against the kitchen counter, sipping another cup of coffee. It was later than he’d thought, almost eleven. Sunlight flooded into the kitchen through the pair of tall windows and made him look outside, take in the raw blue of the sky. He hadn’t seen much daylight in the past couple of weeks; he’d spent almost every night hunting, every day sleeping and researching. This day, though - God, it looked good. Looked normal.
He shrugged into a denim jacket, dropped his keys into the pocket, and ventured out, drawing in deep lungfuls of air as he reached the sidewalk. There were a couple of cars parked at the convenience store on the other corner. A black kid younger than Dean was leaning against one of them, smoking and talking on a cell phone. He hiked a brow at John as John crossed the street, and John gave him a nod that meant nothing other than an acknowledgment of the kid’s presence.
The kid was the only person around. John walked on down the street that T-stemmed away from the store and the house, passing only a pair of squirrels and a cat contentedly licking something off the pavement. Walking in the warmth of the sun felt good; it lay easily against his shoulders and back, soothing away the aching tightness that had been nagging at him for the best part of a week, the result of a long night spent outside in a cold drizzle. The three-block length of the street, with its slight up- and then downslope, took him out of sight of the convenience store and left him feeling that he might well be the only living thing on two legs as he walked up the short incline into the small park the locals called simply “the playground.”
He’d taken the boys to any number of places like this when they were small. Let them play on the swings, the teeter-totter, the monkey bars.
In a place much like this, a long time ago, Dean had killed a rabid fox, and cried about it later when he thought he was alone.
Leaves had begun to come down off the trees, and they crunched beneath John’s boots as he wandered through the park, hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket, eyes half-shut against the brilliance of the sun. The dull, white-noise hum of traffic on the interstate droned at him through the trees, really the only sound there was other than his own footfalls. He crossed the basketball court, idly noting its clean, fresh paint, and kept going as far as the chain-link fence that separated the park from the steep slope falling into the ravine to the east of it. A rattle and rustle in the trees overhead suggested more squirrels were around. John looked until he found one and made a noise with his tongue that made the animal stop, startled, to gape at him. They stared each other down for a moment, then the squirrel ran on its way, leaving John to lean against the fence and gaze down into the ravine.
He’d been there for ten or fifteen minutes when crunching in the leaves made him turn his head just enough to catch Dean in his peripheral vision.
“Something down there?” Dean asked when he got close enough to speak without raising his voice.
John shook his head.
Dean came closer, rested his butt against the fence, folded his arms across his chest and turned his face to the sun, eyes closed.
“A tie?” John said.
Dean grinned lazily and didn’t open his eyes. “Decided to go traditional.”
“Traditional.”
“Hmm.”
“You could use that thing to scare babies.”
“Kinda liked the colors, myself. Cheerful.”
“Good,” John said. “You wear it, then.”
“I might.”
“Your recordkeeping’s a little off, too. Birthday’s the day after tomorrow.”
Dean turned around and rested his arms along the top of the fence. Something down at the bottom of the ravine caught his eye and held it for a moment. “Yeah, I know,” he said finally. “Figured you might bail.”
“There’s a job. Out west.”
“Figured.”
“Donuts were good.”
Dean’s head dipped in a nod. “Had one.”
“One?”
“Four,” Dean allowed.
“Thanks for saving me a couple.”
“So, you gonna go?”
John followed Dean’s sight line to the bottom of the ravine but found nothing of interest except the glimmer of sunlight on water. “Later on.”
“You want me to stick around here? Or -“
“Up to you.”
What Dean had been looking at finally presented itself: a black-and-brown dog, slowly picking its way up the slope. They both watched it as it made its way through the underbrush. When it spotted them, its eyes narrowed and it altered its path to head sideways, moving away from them to the north.
“You gonna stay there a while?” Dean asked after a minute.
“Not sure.”
“I could go. Do some checking. Gotta be some jobs out that way.”
“Probably.”
“We could go now. Won’t take long to load everything up. We can grab some snacks at the store, be on the road before noon.” Dean glanced at his father, then focused on the street that led back to the convenience store. “Can probably make it…out west…by day after tomorrow, if we go straight through.”
“I imagine.”
“Okay, then.”
Dean pushed himself away from the fence and took a step toward the entrance to the park, then stopped, frowning at John.
“You go on ahead,” John told him. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Dean accepted that and set off toward the street, walking loose-limbed and easy, not a care in the world. John watched him go, saw in him the child who’d killed the fox in a place like this on that autumn morning a lot of years ago, the child who’d cried because he’d taken an animal’s life. Saw in him the echo of Mary, who’d moved around the kitchen barefoot and graceful, pale hair hanging like sunlight over her shoulders as she put their breakfast together.
Saw in him the echo of Sam, the chubby baby turned tall, gangling young man, the son he’d raised to walk away.
John righted himself away from the fence and rapidly crossed the fallen leaves, the new-painted basketball court, the whispering silence of the playground, and caught up with his son at the foot of the incline where it joined the street. Dean gave him a mild, questioning look that John answered with a crooked smile.
“Got to stop on the way,” John said. “Get some decent coffee for the road.”
“I made coffee.”
“Makes excellent drain cleaner. Not one of your more marketable skills, son.”
Dean scowled in silence - a little too theatrically for it to be a reflection of how he really felt - as they walked back to the apartment. They were almost there when he said quietly, “You could maybe - you know. Talk to Sam.”
“No. He wants his life.”
“It’s your birthday. Maybe he wouldn’t bitch too much.”
John took another couple of steps, then shook his head. “He made himself clear. I won’t treat him like a child.”
When they reached the intersection Dean tipped his head toward the convenience store. “Gonna grab some stuff. I’ll be up in a minute.” That said, they headed apart, Dean toward the store, John toward the apartment.
Then Dean offered quietly, “Dad?”
John stopped, turned to look at him.
“Yabba dabba do,” Dean said.
A moment later John climbed the stairs alone, toward the lingering aroma of coffee and a plate of donut crumbs, the grinning face of Fred Flintstone and the world’s ugliest tie.
To gather his few belongings into a pair of duffel bags, so he could leave this place as he’d left so many places like it, leaving nothing behind but discarded newspapers, an empty donut bag, traces of himself as ephemeral as the smell of coffee.
When he reached the top, he turned and looked back down but could see nothing of the store except a small section of blank wall, its white paint grayed with dirt and time. He stared at it for a moment, then fished for his keys, unlocked the apartment door and went inside.
To gather what little he needed.
And to wait for his son.