SPN FIC - What Child Is This
Still looking for more Christmas fic? Take a look back at Christmas 1983 (and 1982, 1981, 1980, and 1979).
Characters: John, Mary, WeeDean, WeeSam
Pairings: Nothing in the story, but there's John/Mary. Married, you know. :)
Length: 2910 words
Spoilers: none
Rating: PG, for language
Disclaimer: Nope. No money here. Ever.
What Child Is This
By Carol Davis
Last year, no one slept past five in the morning. The bedroom was still dark when the bed began to shift and wiggle, the victim of an assault by Dean, who at not-quite-four had not yet mastered the art of stealth.
Last year, small hands had tugged at John’s arms, his t-shirt.
“Daddy? Daddy.”
Mary was certainly awake. She’d been a light sleeper even before Dean was born.
“What’s goin’ on, bud?”
Dean was boggled beyond the ability to speak. John waited, poker-faced at first, then giving in to a broad grin that made Dean giggle. “Santa, Daddy,” he squealed.
“You mean he got in? I locked all the doors.”
“In the chimley.”
The fact that the house had no fireplace, that the “chimley” was a die-cut, folded and tabbed together piece of cardboard imprinted to look like brick? Not relevant. Dean seized John’s hand with both of his own and hauled. Dragged. Grunted and hauled some more, like the little dog trying to get the Grinch’s mammoth sledful of stuff up the mountain by sheer force of will.
“Dude,” John said. “It’s still dark out.”
“Daddy.”
“Yeah, Daddy,” Mary said softly, her voice rich with amusement. “Don’t be a killjoy.”
Last year.
~~~~~~~~~~~
He awoke drenched in flop sweat, and the thought settled down on him immediately: it’s Christmas. His second thought was Fuck.
The room had begun to pale with gray winter light, enough for him to make out Dean’s plaid-pajama-clad form in the PortaCrib, spooned up against Sam, both of them still and peaceful, both snuffling in their sleep. He turned his head slowly, wary of triggering another fireworks explosion of a headache like the ones that had come a-calling every morning for the past two weeks, stopping when he could see the face of the clock on the night table. 6:51, it said. Almost seven.
They were two days gone from Mike and Kate Guenther’s, left with nowhere to call home. Nowhere they wouldn’t be faced with pity or suspicion, or a witch’s brew of both. The police had closed the case the day before: declared the fire’s cause of origin to be faulty wiring. An electrical short in the ceiling.
“Merry Christmas,” the cop said right before he hung up.
Merry Christmas.
There was nowhere they could go. Nowhere that sympathy and veiled looks and comments whispered around corners wouldn’t be offered along with a bed and three meals a day. The county jail seemed more palatable; if it hadn’t been for the boys, he would have given that a shot. Get shitfaced, mouth off to somebody, get tossed in the drunk tank.
Instead, he’d found a motel out on the main road that had a decent weekly rate. The room was small but cozy and had a kitchenette so he could warm bottles and make soup. So he could feed his children.
So he could put up a five-dollar plastic tree and decorate it with limp red tinsel garland and a dozen Care Bears ornaments. No lights. No music, no lingering aroma of sugar cookies in the air. No heaps of colorful packages. No gifts at all - they were still in the trunk of the car, because there’d been no way to sneak them into the room with Dean being right there, watching, waiting.
Not for Santa.
For his mother.
Slowly, gingerly, John shifted out of bed and pulled on jeans, shirt, shoes. The boys didn’t stir when he eased the door open and crept outside into the snow; when he came back in with his packages, they were still motionless. Cringing at the crinkling of the plastic bags, he set out his collection of hastily gathered gifts and pasted on each one a couple of lopsided 100-for-$2 bows. When that was done he unfurled two red stockings and filled them with Twinkies and candy bars, then hung them from the back of one of the kitchenette chairs.
He turned, finally, to discover Dean watching him somberly, silently.
“Hey, bud,” he said softly.
There was no use in saying Santa had brought any of it. The room had no fireplace, no cardboard chimley. The arrangement on top of and around the kitchenette’s small round table would have marked Santa as one whacked-out sonovabitch. Trying for a smile, John padded over to the PortaCrib and, when Dean crawled into a crouch, lifted his son into his arms and held him close.
Dean squirmed a little and whispered, “Potty,” so John put him down and let him use the bathroom.
They got Sam up together, changed his diaper and fed him half a jar of green paste and some cereal, then sat on the bed with Sam between them and ate bowls of Cap’n Crunch with milk that was about two breaths away from being no good.
The room was cozy. Clean. Didn’t smell of smoke. Got a decent selection of channels on the TV. After he’d stashed the cereal bowls in the sink John picked up the remote and found some cartoons. Dean stretched out on his side on the bed, one eye on the TV, the other on Sam. He’d done nothing more than glance at the tree or what was arranged around it. A basketball, a catcher’s mitt, a soccer ball. A football.
What the fuck did I do? John thought. It’s a goddamn ball-o-rama. The store had other toys, you ass.
Dean moved his shoulder in something that looked like a shrug, then brought his hand to his face and stuck his thumb in his mouth.
~~~~~~~~~~
“What’s this, bud?”
Two years ago: a small boy bearing a sheet of craft paper. As soon as John was settled in the recliner, Dean crawled up onto his lap and displayed his prize: a picture of Santa Claus onto which cotton balls had been carefully glued to form a 3-D beard.
“I made it,” Dean announced.
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who’s the old guy supposed to be?”
Dean’s eyes widened in dismay. “It’s Santa.”
“Yeah? You sure?”
And Dean’s face fell. He began to examine the picture as if he thought he’d gotten it all wrong, that he’d been hoodwinked somehow into decorating a picture of some random guy. When he turned back to John he looked like his sure-thing horse had crapped out in the final stretch and left him holding a useless ticket.
“Dude,” John said. “I’m teasing you.”
Dean was never more like Mary than when he didn’t think something was funny. He wasn’t old enough to get mad - which was a blessing, because on the short list of things John didn’t need was another person shutting doors in his face or answering his attempts at reconciliation with a clipped and razor-sharp “Fine” - but in its own way, the Big Sorrowful Face was worse. “Did you grow that sense of humor under the back porch?” Mary had demanded of him one day. He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but it made its point.
You’re a dick, it said plainly.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” he told Dean. “Daddy can be kind of dumb sometimes.”
“It’s not nice,” Dean replied.
Mary came in then and settled on the couch with one foot tucked underneath her, a cup of tea in hand. She took stock of the situation without anything being said and arched a brow at John. Boy’s got PMS, John considered saying, then remembered how very much he valued his head, which she’d likely take off at the neck and have gold-plated so it would make a nice conversation piece sitting on the end table.
What Dean delivered was enough of a killing blow: he climbed down from his father’s lap and snuggled in beside his mother.
“Tree smells good,” Mary commented.
“Nice,” John agreed.
It was the first one they’d ever picked out with Dean’s help. And thank God for the input of somebody three feet tall: they’d settled on one that would actually fit in the living room without pruning. Dean had helped, too, with the decorating, small fingers gently placing ornaments and hanging tinsel, then with fits of giggles reaching out from John’s arms to settle the wide-skirted angel on top. Only a few gifts lay underneath, even now, because Dean’s curiosity was too big a thing to be contained. Everything else was in the attic under a tarp.
“Daddy?” Dean asked pensively. “Are you a Grinch?”
That took John by surprise. “Why?”
“The Grinch plays tricks on people and makes them sad.”
Mary sipped at her tea and smiled at her husband. “Yes, Daddy,” she echoed. “Are you the Grinch?”
~~~~~~~~~~
It didn’t much matter that they weren’t at Mike and Kate’s. Not the way things had been going. The Guenthers had a tree up, and lights strung outside, all of that; they’d asked John if it might be better to go low-key this year, but he’d told them to go ahead with what they normally did, which he remembered as being pretty subtle. With a tact that was just this side of obvious, Kate had asked for Dean’s help here and there, putting a big stuffed snowman in the entryway, hanging some tinsel on the tree, Scotch-taping Christmas cards around the archway between the living room and the dining room. He did it as if he assumed it would be rude to say no, but without enthusiasm; the moment Kate said they were finished and thanked him for pitching in, he retreated to Sam’s side and sat there silently gnawing on his lower lip.
Anyone else’s house would have been much the same. Forced politeness, an underlying note of We care about you, but you’re sure messing up our Christmas.
That wasn’t a fair assessment, but it wasn’t untrue. John knew without asking that the Guenthers would go ahead with their Christmas now that he and the boys were elsewhere, although they might be turning it down a notch or two.
Business as usual. The garage would be open tomorrow, too, with Mike in charge. Business as usual.
While he and his children had nowhere to go.
Because he had refused to play the part they’d scripted for him. Grieving widower with two motherless little boys.
Victim of a freak electrical fire.
~~~~~~~~~~
“No, no, sweetie, don’t touch that.”
He watched Mary sweep Dean away from the big green candle on the coffee table - the one that had drawn him like a magnet. With a sigh she deposited him on John’s lap, then licked the tips of her thumb and index finger and pinched out the flame.
“After he goes to bed,” John suggested.
“No. It’s just not a good idea at all, any more. I can do without it.”
Three years ago.
Dean was strong, vocal, fast on his feet. A handful. But bright, happy, imaginative. John ruffled his fingers through his son’s soft hair and rested his palm against the curve of Dean’s head. Dean leaned into his touch for a moment, then swiveled to peer into his father’s face.
“What?” John asked.
All Dean would do in response was grin.
~~~~~~~~~~~
“Daddy?” Dean said softly.
“What is it, dude?”
“Do we live here now?”
John looked around, took it all in. The room was no bigger than their old living room. One king-sized bed with a night table on either side. A long, low dresser with six shallow drawers. The round kitchenette table and three chairs. A mini-fridge, a tiny sink, a narrow four-burner stove with an oven barely big enough for a couple of frozen dinners. A bathroom with an undersized tub.
And the things they’d brought in from the Guenthers’: the PortaCrib, a couple of duffel bags of clothes, a big box of diapers, a plastic dishpan half-filled with Sam’s little toys.
Dean had no toys, had asked for none.
His games, his set of Matchbox cars, his G.I. Joe, they were all gone.
And you bought him a football.
John sat down near the head of the bed and crushed pillows together to cushion his back. Sat there for a minute looking at the cartoons on the TV, which made as little sense as if they were being run backwards with a Japanese soundtrack. “Come here, son,” he said to Dean, who took a long look at Sam before obediently crawling across the bed to his father. When he got there John gathered him close and clasped Dean’s head to his chest.
They sat that way for a while, through the rest of the cartoon show and the beginning of a rerun of some comedy show John didn’t recognize. A commercial had come on when Dean’s head began a slow slide; he’d fallen back asleep. Gently, John lay him down against one of the pillows, then stroked his soft, pale hair and kissed him just above the ear.
Sam watched him do all that with big-eyed interest. When John smiled at him he giggled.
~~~~~~~~~~~
“What do you think, little man?” John said in a ho-ho-ho voice. “Santa’s coming!”
Dean burst into giggles and reached for him.
“You want to try?” Mary asked, leaning in close to Dean’s ear. “You want to try and walk to Daddy?”
They “assumed the position” - Dean standing arm’s reach in front of his mother in splay-legged, diaper-padded baby stance, Mary with a hand under each of his armpits. His gaze stayed locked on his father as John moved from his chair to the floor, cross-legged, reaching out, leaving a gap of not quite a yard between his hands and Dean.
Slowly, Mary took her hands away.
Dean wobbled a little and nudged one foot forward. His face assumed the “I’m about to crap out half my body weight” look of concentration he employed at least three times a day, and he leaned toward John like a downhill skier waiting for the starting flag. Then, as if the flag had dropped, he plunged forward, took three massive steps, and dropped into John’s lap.
The crowd, indeed, went wild.
“Fuckin’ A!” John blurted out.
Mary clamped her hand to her mouth and did a remarkably bad job of smothering a loud and distinctly unladylike snort. Her eyebrows said what her mouth didn’t: Fuckin’ A?
“What?” John asked.
“That’s what you say to my child?”
Four years ago.
They’d been given a ridiculously large collection of ornaments that said Baby’s First Christmas, along with bibs and embroidered pillows and greeting cards that said the same thing. It was a marketing bonanza, John thought when Kate Guenther handed them an enormous box wrapped in red and green paper that said, yes, the same damn thing.
They considered leaving ornaments off any part of the tree that Dean could reach, but settled on trying to keep him away from the tree altogether: a fine plan, but one that seemed doomed to failure, given that he could crawl like he’d been shot out of a cannon. One by one the ornaments were relocated to branches higher up, beyond the grasp of tiny hands.
Bows disappeared off the packages beneath the tree after Dean displayed a fondness for finding out how they tasted. The packages themselves stayed, because he hadn’t gotten a handle on how to tear the paper off, and licking the paper didn’t seem to be on his To Do list. The gifts were there now, stacked like building blocks, a crazy number of them.
“You kick butt, little man,” John told his son.
As if to say “Yay, me,” Dean clapped his fat little hands together and grinned.
And that was the smallest bit too much. Overwhelmed, John hugged the baby to his chest and rested his cheek against Dean’s silky hair. His eyes were closed as Mary moved across the small space between them and nestled against his side.
“Thank you,” he managed to say.
Her hand cupped his cheek, thumb stroking his beard-stubbled skin, catching the tear that slipped free. “It’s perfect, isn’t it?” she murmured. “It’s perfect, all of it.”
“Yeah,” he whispered. “It is.”
~~~~~~~~~~~
He jolted awake when the crazy-high volume of a used car ad trumpeted across the room. He’d pinned his arm beneath him by slipping sideways across the pillows when he drifted off, and the pins-and-needles sensation of circulation coming back made him wince loudly enough to wake Dean.
No words; Dean simply stared at him somberly.
“It’s okay,” John told him.
Dean’s hand moved toward his mouth, but John caught it before it got there. It’d taken him and Mary a while to break him of thumb-sucking, and she’d be six kinds of unhappy if John let him fall back into it again. With as much of a smile as he could muster, John scooped Dean up and hugged him tightly, then turned him loose.
“Is it okay?” he asked his son. “If we live here for a while? You and me and Sammy?”
“Guess so,” Dean murmured.
He didn’t ask the rest, but it was in his eyes: Is Mommy coming?
“You and me and Sammy,” John told him. “That okay?”
Dean shifted a little and looked around, taking in the same things his father had examined a while ago - the kitchenette, the plastic tree, the collection of balls. After what seemed like a long time, he nodded.
“Merry Christmas, Dean-o,” John said.
Dean stretched up, circled his arms around his father’s neck and squeezed tight. “Merry Chris’mas, Daddy,” he said.
Characters: John, Mary, WeeDean, WeeSam
Pairings: Nothing in the story, but there's John/Mary. Married, you know. :)
Length: 2910 words
Spoilers: none
Rating: PG, for language
Disclaimer: Nope. No money here. Ever.
What Child Is This
By Carol Davis
Last year, no one slept past five in the morning. The bedroom was still dark when the bed began to shift and wiggle, the victim of an assault by Dean, who at not-quite-four had not yet mastered the art of stealth.
Last year, small hands had tugged at John’s arms, his t-shirt.
“Daddy? Daddy.”
Mary was certainly awake. She’d been a light sleeper even before Dean was born.
“What’s goin’ on, bud?”
Dean was boggled beyond the ability to speak. John waited, poker-faced at first, then giving in to a broad grin that made Dean giggle. “Santa, Daddy,” he squealed.
“You mean he got in? I locked all the doors.”
“In the chimley.”
The fact that the house had no fireplace, that the “chimley” was a die-cut, folded and tabbed together piece of cardboard imprinted to look like brick? Not relevant. Dean seized John’s hand with both of his own and hauled. Dragged. Grunted and hauled some more, like the little dog trying to get the Grinch’s mammoth sledful of stuff up the mountain by sheer force of will.
“Dude,” John said. “It’s still dark out.”
“Daddy.”
“Yeah, Daddy,” Mary said softly, her voice rich with amusement. “Don’t be a killjoy.”
Last year.
~~~~~~~~~~~
He awoke drenched in flop sweat, and the thought settled down on him immediately: it’s Christmas. His second thought was Fuck.
The room had begun to pale with gray winter light, enough for him to make out Dean’s plaid-pajama-clad form in the PortaCrib, spooned up against Sam, both of them still and peaceful, both snuffling in their sleep. He turned his head slowly, wary of triggering another fireworks explosion of a headache like the ones that had come a-calling every morning for the past two weeks, stopping when he could see the face of the clock on the night table. 6:51, it said. Almost seven.
They were two days gone from Mike and Kate Guenther’s, left with nowhere to call home. Nowhere they wouldn’t be faced with pity or suspicion, or a witch’s brew of both. The police had closed the case the day before: declared the fire’s cause of origin to be faulty wiring. An electrical short in the ceiling.
“Merry Christmas,” the cop said right before he hung up.
Merry Christmas.
There was nowhere they could go. Nowhere that sympathy and veiled looks and comments whispered around corners wouldn’t be offered along with a bed and three meals a day. The county jail seemed more palatable; if it hadn’t been for the boys, he would have given that a shot. Get shitfaced, mouth off to somebody, get tossed in the drunk tank.
Instead, he’d found a motel out on the main road that had a decent weekly rate. The room was small but cozy and had a kitchenette so he could warm bottles and make soup. So he could feed his children.
So he could put up a five-dollar plastic tree and decorate it with limp red tinsel garland and a dozen Care Bears ornaments. No lights. No music, no lingering aroma of sugar cookies in the air. No heaps of colorful packages. No gifts at all - they were still in the trunk of the car, because there’d been no way to sneak them into the room with Dean being right there, watching, waiting.
Not for Santa.
For his mother.
Slowly, gingerly, John shifted out of bed and pulled on jeans, shirt, shoes. The boys didn’t stir when he eased the door open and crept outside into the snow; when he came back in with his packages, they were still motionless. Cringing at the crinkling of the plastic bags, he set out his collection of hastily gathered gifts and pasted on each one a couple of lopsided 100-for-$2 bows. When that was done he unfurled two red stockings and filled them with Twinkies and candy bars, then hung them from the back of one of the kitchenette chairs.
He turned, finally, to discover Dean watching him somberly, silently.
“Hey, bud,” he said softly.
There was no use in saying Santa had brought any of it. The room had no fireplace, no cardboard chimley. The arrangement on top of and around the kitchenette’s small round table would have marked Santa as one whacked-out sonovabitch. Trying for a smile, John padded over to the PortaCrib and, when Dean crawled into a crouch, lifted his son into his arms and held him close.
Dean squirmed a little and whispered, “Potty,” so John put him down and let him use the bathroom.
They got Sam up together, changed his diaper and fed him half a jar of green paste and some cereal, then sat on the bed with Sam between them and ate bowls of Cap’n Crunch with milk that was about two breaths away from being no good.
The room was cozy. Clean. Didn’t smell of smoke. Got a decent selection of channels on the TV. After he’d stashed the cereal bowls in the sink John picked up the remote and found some cartoons. Dean stretched out on his side on the bed, one eye on the TV, the other on Sam. He’d done nothing more than glance at the tree or what was arranged around it. A basketball, a catcher’s mitt, a soccer ball. A football.
What the fuck did I do? John thought. It’s a goddamn ball-o-rama. The store had other toys, you ass.
Dean moved his shoulder in something that looked like a shrug, then brought his hand to his face and stuck his thumb in his mouth.
~~~~~~~~~~
“What’s this, bud?”
Two years ago: a small boy bearing a sheet of craft paper. As soon as John was settled in the recliner, Dean crawled up onto his lap and displayed his prize: a picture of Santa Claus onto which cotton balls had been carefully glued to form a 3-D beard.
“I made it,” Dean announced.
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who’s the old guy supposed to be?”
Dean’s eyes widened in dismay. “It’s Santa.”
“Yeah? You sure?”
And Dean’s face fell. He began to examine the picture as if he thought he’d gotten it all wrong, that he’d been hoodwinked somehow into decorating a picture of some random guy. When he turned back to John he looked like his sure-thing horse had crapped out in the final stretch and left him holding a useless ticket.
“Dude,” John said. “I’m teasing you.”
Dean was never more like Mary than when he didn’t think something was funny. He wasn’t old enough to get mad - which was a blessing, because on the short list of things John didn’t need was another person shutting doors in his face or answering his attempts at reconciliation with a clipped and razor-sharp “Fine” - but in its own way, the Big Sorrowful Face was worse. “Did you grow that sense of humor under the back porch?” Mary had demanded of him one day. He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but it made its point.
You’re a dick, it said plainly.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” he told Dean. “Daddy can be kind of dumb sometimes.”
“It’s not nice,” Dean replied.
Mary came in then and settled on the couch with one foot tucked underneath her, a cup of tea in hand. She took stock of the situation without anything being said and arched a brow at John. Boy’s got PMS, John considered saying, then remembered how very much he valued his head, which she’d likely take off at the neck and have gold-plated so it would make a nice conversation piece sitting on the end table.
What Dean delivered was enough of a killing blow: he climbed down from his father’s lap and snuggled in beside his mother.
“Tree smells good,” Mary commented.
“Nice,” John agreed.
It was the first one they’d ever picked out with Dean’s help. And thank God for the input of somebody three feet tall: they’d settled on one that would actually fit in the living room without pruning. Dean had helped, too, with the decorating, small fingers gently placing ornaments and hanging tinsel, then with fits of giggles reaching out from John’s arms to settle the wide-skirted angel on top. Only a few gifts lay underneath, even now, because Dean’s curiosity was too big a thing to be contained. Everything else was in the attic under a tarp.
“Daddy?” Dean asked pensively. “Are you a Grinch?”
That took John by surprise. “Why?”
“The Grinch plays tricks on people and makes them sad.”
Mary sipped at her tea and smiled at her husband. “Yes, Daddy,” she echoed. “Are you the Grinch?”
~~~~~~~~~~
It didn’t much matter that they weren’t at Mike and Kate’s. Not the way things had been going. The Guenthers had a tree up, and lights strung outside, all of that; they’d asked John if it might be better to go low-key this year, but he’d told them to go ahead with what they normally did, which he remembered as being pretty subtle. With a tact that was just this side of obvious, Kate had asked for Dean’s help here and there, putting a big stuffed snowman in the entryway, hanging some tinsel on the tree, Scotch-taping Christmas cards around the archway between the living room and the dining room. He did it as if he assumed it would be rude to say no, but without enthusiasm; the moment Kate said they were finished and thanked him for pitching in, he retreated to Sam’s side and sat there silently gnawing on his lower lip.
Anyone else’s house would have been much the same. Forced politeness, an underlying note of We care about you, but you’re sure messing up our Christmas.
That wasn’t a fair assessment, but it wasn’t untrue. John knew without asking that the Guenthers would go ahead with their Christmas now that he and the boys were elsewhere, although they might be turning it down a notch or two.
Business as usual. The garage would be open tomorrow, too, with Mike in charge. Business as usual.
While he and his children had nowhere to go.
Because he had refused to play the part they’d scripted for him. Grieving widower with two motherless little boys.
Victim of a freak electrical fire.
~~~~~~~~~~
“No, no, sweetie, don’t touch that.”
He watched Mary sweep Dean away from the big green candle on the coffee table - the one that had drawn him like a magnet. With a sigh she deposited him on John’s lap, then licked the tips of her thumb and index finger and pinched out the flame.
“After he goes to bed,” John suggested.
“No. It’s just not a good idea at all, any more. I can do without it.”
Three years ago.
Dean was strong, vocal, fast on his feet. A handful. But bright, happy, imaginative. John ruffled his fingers through his son’s soft hair and rested his palm against the curve of Dean’s head. Dean leaned into his touch for a moment, then swiveled to peer into his father’s face.
“What?” John asked.
All Dean would do in response was grin.
~~~~~~~~~~~
“Daddy?” Dean said softly.
“What is it, dude?”
“Do we live here now?”
John looked around, took it all in. The room was no bigger than their old living room. One king-sized bed with a night table on either side. A long, low dresser with six shallow drawers. The round kitchenette table and three chairs. A mini-fridge, a tiny sink, a narrow four-burner stove with an oven barely big enough for a couple of frozen dinners. A bathroom with an undersized tub.
And the things they’d brought in from the Guenthers’: the PortaCrib, a couple of duffel bags of clothes, a big box of diapers, a plastic dishpan half-filled with Sam’s little toys.
Dean had no toys, had asked for none.
His games, his set of Matchbox cars, his G.I. Joe, they were all gone.
And you bought him a football.
John sat down near the head of the bed and crushed pillows together to cushion his back. Sat there for a minute looking at the cartoons on the TV, which made as little sense as if they were being run backwards with a Japanese soundtrack. “Come here, son,” he said to Dean, who took a long look at Sam before obediently crawling across the bed to his father. When he got there John gathered him close and clasped Dean’s head to his chest.
They sat that way for a while, through the rest of the cartoon show and the beginning of a rerun of some comedy show John didn’t recognize. A commercial had come on when Dean’s head began a slow slide; he’d fallen back asleep. Gently, John lay him down against one of the pillows, then stroked his soft, pale hair and kissed him just above the ear.
Sam watched him do all that with big-eyed interest. When John smiled at him he giggled.
~~~~~~~~~~~
“What do you think, little man?” John said in a ho-ho-ho voice. “Santa’s coming!”
Dean burst into giggles and reached for him.
“You want to try?” Mary asked, leaning in close to Dean’s ear. “You want to try and walk to Daddy?”
They “assumed the position” - Dean standing arm’s reach in front of his mother in splay-legged, diaper-padded baby stance, Mary with a hand under each of his armpits. His gaze stayed locked on his father as John moved from his chair to the floor, cross-legged, reaching out, leaving a gap of not quite a yard between his hands and Dean.
Slowly, Mary took her hands away.
Dean wobbled a little and nudged one foot forward. His face assumed the “I’m about to crap out half my body weight” look of concentration he employed at least three times a day, and he leaned toward John like a downhill skier waiting for the starting flag. Then, as if the flag had dropped, he plunged forward, took three massive steps, and dropped into John’s lap.
The crowd, indeed, went wild.
“Fuckin’ A!” John blurted out.
Mary clamped her hand to her mouth and did a remarkably bad job of smothering a loud and distinctly unladylike snort. Her eyebrows said what her mouth didn’t: Fuckin’ A?
“What?” John asked.
“That’s what you say to my child?”
Four years ago.
They’d been given a ridiculously large collection of ornaments that said Baby’s First Christmas, along with bibs and embroidered pillows and greeting cards that said the same thing. It was a marketing bonanza, John thought when Kate Guenther handed them an enormous box wrapped in red and green paper that said, yes, the same damn thing.
They considered leaving ornaments off any part of the tree that Dean could reach, but settled on trying to keep him away from the tree altogether: a fine plan, but one that seemed doomed to failure, given that he could crawl like he’d been shot out of a cannon. One by one the ornaments were relocated to branches higher up, beyond the grasp of tiny hands.
Bows disappeared off the packages beneath the tree after Dean displayed a fondness for finding out how they tasted. The packages themselves stayed, because he hadn’t gotten a handle on how to tear the paper off, and licking the paper didn’t seem to be on his To Do list. The gifts were there now, stacked like building blocks, a crazy number of them.
“You kick butt, little man,” John told his son.
As if to say “Yay, me,” Dean clapped his fat little hands together and grinned.
And that was the smallest bit too much. Overwhelmed, John hugged the baby to his chest and rested his cheek against Dean’s silky hair. His eyes were closed as Mary moved across the small space between them and nestled against his side.
“Thank you,” he managed to say.
Her hand cupped his cheek, thumb stroking his beard-stubbled skin, catching the tear that slipped free. “It’s perfect, isn’t it?” she murmured. “It’s perfect, all of it.”
“Yeah,” he whispered. “It is.”
~~~~~~~~~~~
He jolted awake when the crazy-high volume of a used car ad trumpeted across the room. He’d pinned his arm beneath him by slipping sideways across the pillows when he drifted off, and the pins-and-needles sensation of circulation coming back made him wince loudly enough to wake Dean.
No words; Dean simply stared at him somberly.
“It’s okay,” John told him.
Dean’s hand moved toward his mouth, but John caught it before it got there. It’d taken him and Mary a while to break him of thumb-sucking, and she’d be six kinds of unhappy if John let him fall back into it again. With as much of a smile as he could muster, John scooped Dean up and hugged him tightly, then turned him loose.
“Is it okay?” he asked his son. “If we live here for a while? You and me and Sammy?”
“Guess so,” Dean murmured.
He didn’t ask the rest, but it was in his eyes: Is Mommy coming?
“You and me and Sammy,” John told him. “That okay?”
Dean shifted a little and looked around, taking in the same things his father had examined a while ago - the kitchenette, the plastic tree, the collection of balls. After what seemed like a long time, he nodded.
“Merry Christmas, Dean-o,” John said.
Dean stretched up, circled his arms around his father’s neck and squeezed tight. “Merry Chris’mas, Daddy,” he said.