SPN FIC - Blue Christmas
Number 19! Christmas 2002. With thanks to my buddy Linda in Minnesota, who filled me in about lutefisk. I figured if anybody would actually eat fish soaked in lye, it'd be Dean.
Characters: John, Dean, Sam (by phone), Pastor Jim, OFCs (the Lundquists)
Pairings: none
Rating: PG, for language
Spoilers: none
Length: 2262 words
Disclaimer: Still just playing.
And that was a little too much. Dean put down the rolled-up shirt he’d been about to stuff into his duffel and folded his arms over his chest. Dad was looking in the other direction, but that didn’t matter. It was easier to defy him when he wasn’t looking, anyway. “Why?” Dean said. “Because I’m five? No dice, Dad. You can play whatever card you want, and I’m still not leaving you alone on Christmas. Not gonna happen. I don’t care if we stay here, or if we go somewhere else. But I’m not leavin’ you alone. End of story.” He picked up the shirt, crammed it into the bag, then added, “And if you sneak off, I will hunt your ass down.”
Blue Christmas
By Carol Davis
They made it all the way to Des Moines before Dad balked.
“You go on,” he told Dean. “Jim’s expecting you.”
He was sitting on the side of his bed, still in his sweats and t-shirt, beaten down by exhaustion in a way Dean hadn’t seen in years. He wasn’t making eye contact, and would probably get ugly if Dean tried to force it.
“I’m not going alone,” Dean said firmly.
“Mrs. Lundquist’s waiting for you. You’re the only one who’ll eat that goddamn fish concoction she makes.”
“The lutefisk? That’s good stuff.”
“There is no way on this earth that fish soaked in lye is good stuff.” Dad’s head drooped a little more, and he propped it on his hand. “You go. I’ll -“
“We’ll stay here, then.”
“You’ll do as you’re told.”
And that was a little too much. Dean put down the rolled-up shirt he’d been about to stuff into his duffel and folded his arms over his chest. Dad was looking in the other direction, but that didn’t matter. It was easier to defy him when he wasn’t looking, anyway. “Why?” Dean said. “Because I’m five? No dice, Dad. You can play whatever card you want, and I’m still not leaving you alone on Christmas. Not gonna happen. I don’t care if we stay here, or if we go somewhere else. But I’m not leavin’ you alone. End of story.” He picked up the shirt, crammed it into the bag, then added, “And if you sneak off, I will hunt your ass down.”
“Fine,” Dad said.
They pulled into Blue Earth a little after noon.
As in, just into Blue Earth: about fifty yards past the Town Limits sign. Dad steered his truck off onto the shoulder, cut the engine, and sat there, staring off at nothing.
Dean let him do that for about ten minutes, then walked up to the truck and rapped on the driver’s window with his ring. When Dad glanced enough in his direction for Dean to be included in his peripheral vision, Dean displayed his cell phone. “Gonna call for help,” he said. “Truck’s gonna be surrounded. I’ll tell ‘em to pelt you with goddamn lutefisk.”
“Back off,” Dad said without opening the window.
“The hell I will. You’re coming. Pastor Jim’ll leave you alone if I ask him to.”
That turned Dad’s head the rest of the way. “What planet do you live on, boy? Jim’ll take that as a dare, and you fucking well know it.”
“Then drive the fucking truck.”
Dad glared at him. The rage in his expression was nearly enough to melt the snow off the sides of the road.
Dean walked back to the Impala, got into the driver’s seat, and waited. After another ten minutes, Dad started up the truck.
“The three of you act like there’s some kind of honor in being pigheaded,” Jim Murphy said.
He pushed back in his desk chair, making the thing squeal like a cat stuck with a barbeque fork. It’d probably been built, Dean figured, around the same time as the church. Fifteen or sixteen centuries ago.
Dean made a point of ignoring him and roamed around Jim’s office, pretending to examine the shelves of books Jim kept on public display. The others - the ones that would have been of some genuine interest - were in the locked room in the church basement, along with Jim’s cache of weapons. Not that Dean spent all that much time dicking around with books anyway. That was Sammy’s gig.
The kid was on Christmas break now: said so on the Stanford website. Where Sam was, what he was doing, Dean had no idea.
“He’s fine,” Jim said.
“Who?”
“Winston Churchill,” Jim sighed.
“Dude’s kinda dead, isn’t he? Unless you conjured him up.” Smirking, Dean dropped down onto the battered couch that lined the wall opposite Jim’s desk and stretched his legs out in front of him. After a minute of pretending not to have a clue what Jim was talking about, he said offhandedly, “What, ‘d you talk to him or something?”
“Caroline did. We figured he wouldn’t hang up on her.”
“She sendin’ him some lutefisk?”
“She said he sounded good. Enthusiastic. He likes his classes.”
“Well, hoo-ya for him.”
“Dean.”
“What do you want me to say? That I’m tickled right out my ass that he’s having fun being College Boy?”
“That’s a good start.”
Dean stared at the ceiling for a while, forearms lying on his belly. Jim went back to scribbling notes on the yellow legal pad he used for drafting his sermons. He hadn’t let on what this one was about; the usual holiday Marshmallow Fluff about loving one another, more than likely. Kindness towards one’s fellow man.
“We coulda…done something,” Dean muttered. “Set up shop out there.”
Jim kept his head down and went on writing.
“Rent an apartment or something. Coulda been close by. Hunt, still, but have a place to go back to. Nothing says Sammy couldn’t have lived with us. I guess he wanted that whole freshman thing, live in the dorm and all that. Get to know some people, get drunk off his ass at keggers or whatever it is they do. But we coulda been…”
His voice trailed off. He didn’t intend it to; it just seemed to wander away from him.
“You took down the hazard tape,” Dean quipped.
“Jim makes me time things carefully,” Mrs. Lundquist told him. “It really messes up the Christmas service to have the thousand-yard toxic-fumes perimeter still in effect.” Smiling, she stretched up to kiss his cheek, then went back to her cookie dough. “I had the windows open most of the day yesterday. We’re back to just smelling like cleaning products now. By tomorrow it won’t be too bad.”
“Nothing like a house that smells like lye to let you know you’re alive.”
“How are you, sweetie?”
“I’m good.”
“And your dad?”
“Got him cuffed to the bed so he can’t wander off.” He grinned at her, the kind of “Who, me? I didn’t do nothin’” expression he’d handed her pretty often as a kid. The worst it’d ever earned him was a light swat on the side of the head. “You making those sugar cookies, too? The ones with the sprinkles? I like those.”
“You have no shame, do you?”
“If it gets me sugar cookies, I am shame-free, Mrs. L.”
“Caroline.”
Dean thought that over for a minute, watching her lay out snowman-shaped dough on a baking sheet. “If it’s all the same to you,” he said quietly, “I’d kind of like to stick with ‘Mrs. Lundquist.’ Makes it…you know. Seem like some things don’t change.”
“Of course,” she said.
“You called him, huh? Sammy.”
“I did.”
“That’s good.”
After the cookie sheet had been tucked into the oven, she poured him a mug of coffee and sat him down on a barstool at the divider between the kitchen and what the Lundquists called the TV room. “It’s never easy, Dean. When Emmy left for college I cried for two weeks. It’s not an easy thing for a parent to handle. You feel like you can’t keep them safe any more. Your dad’s not feeling anything we all don’t feel. He’s…a little more intractable about it, is all.”
“Kind of a difference between Em and Sam.”
“You mean no one’s likely to roofie him?”
Dean snorted softly and sipped pensively at his coffee. “Kinda wish somebody would. Might be the only way he’d get any action.”
“Dean.”
“What,” he protested. “It’s true.”
That got him a swat on the side of the head.
Emily Lundquist’s kid looked like a troll.
Seriously, like one of those little bug-eyed dolls with the wild hair Sammy had had a collection of when he was four. It - he? she? - stared at him suspiciously, then opened its mouth and let a long line of milky drool run out and down its chin.
“Why do they do that?” he asked when Emily came back.
“Do what?”
“Leak.”
The bug-eyed troll kid had Emily’s full attention for a minute while she wiped its chin off, then stripped off its snowsuit. That left it in a pair of red cord pants and a candy-cane-patterned shirt. A girl, he thought, although he wasn’t willing to lay any money on that. Little kids got all kinds of fashion crimes inflicted on them, and candy canes was not the least of it.
“What’s its name?” he asked, and realized as he said it that maybe his choice of wording was unfortunate.
Sure enough. “’It’?” Emily frowned.
“The munchkin.”
“Louisa.”
“Oh. Girl, then.”
“God, Dean,” Emily sighed.
People started to roll in for the service around six-thirty. Dean could see the headlights from the house - a lot of them, he thought.
“You’re welcome to come,” Jim told him.
Dean had gun parts spread out on the table in front of him. He’d spent a chunk of the afternoon cleaning and inspecting weapons: some from the collection in the trunk of the Impala, some from the lockbox in Dad’s truck. They were laid out on an old tablecloth that, in the event of unexpected visitors, could be gathered up and stashed out of sight in the pantry in a matter of seconds.
“Yeah?” he said. “They singing that thing from Titanic again?”
“They are.”
“Yeah. Then, no thanks.”
After Jim had left, Dean spent fifteen or twenty minutes finishing his chore, reassembled anything that needed it, then packed the weapons into the two duffels he’d used to smuggle them into the house. By the time the kitchen had been returned to its ordinary appearance, the Blue Christmas service was well underway.
Nobody was singing “My Heart Will Go On” in the house.
Dad was slouched on the couch in the living room, an open PBR in hand, staring at the TV. “Dude,” Dean said to him. “Wheel of Fortune? Seriously?”
“Guy just won a boat.”
Shaking his head, Dean reached for the TV guide and sat down at the other end of the couch. He scanned the listings for a minute, then offered, “There’s football.”
“Hmm.”
They sat through Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy, and two episodes of Cops. Neither one of them said a word. Jim came back midway through the second Cops, glanced in at them, and went on into his study. He didn’t say anything either. America’s Most Wanted had kicked in when Dad started to snore wetly, his head resting on his right shoulder in a way that was guaranteed to make his neck hurt like a bitch when he woke up.
AMW wasn’t quite over when Dean switched off the TV. Leaving his father to go on snoring, he retrieved the duffels from the kitchen and took them out to the driveway alongside the house where the Impala and Dad’s truck sat gleaming in the moonlight. It took him a few minutes to tuck the weapons back in where they belonged.
The lights were on over at the Lundquists’. The air smelled faintly of lye.
He didn’t have a clue what Sam might be doing. He could guess what Sam probably wasn’t doing: getting laid was pretty high on the list. Kid was surrounded by hot college chicks, and he was probably studying or some damn thing. Didn’t much matter that they were on Christmas break - he’d study then, too, to get a leg up on…whatever.
There was chicken in the fridge, left over from dinner. Dean pulled off a couple of chunks, sat at the table and ate it absently.
Got himself a beer and drank that without any more attention than he’d given the chicken.
That Louise was one homely rugrat, he mused. Not cute, like Sammy’d been.
The phone rang five times and he was thinking he’d settle for voicemail when Sam’s voice said, “Yeah.”
“Hey, Sammy.”
“Yeah. What?”
“You gonna be obnoxious about this?”
“No.”
Jury was still out on that. Sam’s voice was tense, guarded, restrained. “Mrs. L says hi,” Dean offered.
“She said that when I talked to her two days ago.”
“So…you… You need anything? Money? Something.”
“No. I don’t need any money.”
“Could send you some lutefisk.”
Sam snorted softly. “No thanks.”
“Pickled herring?”
“You’re in Blue Earth. On Blue Christmas.”
“Yeah. Well.”
“Is…he there too?”
“Sleeping.”
But he wasn’t. He was sitting at the end of the couch, slouched back, eyes closed, face impassive. Dean was sitting on the middle cushion, his cell phone held to the ear closest to his father.
“You gonna take a bunch of those bullshit courses?” Dean said. “Hang gliding? They give credit for that now.”
“Not at Stanford.”
“Fuck that, then.”
There was a moment of silence at the other end. Then Sam said, “I have to go. There’s - I’m supposed to meet some people.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m already late.”
“Girl people?”
“I have to go, Dean. It’s -“
“Have a good Christmas, Sam.”
“Yeah. You…you too.”
Dad got up from the couch as Dean flipped the phone shut. He stood in the middle of the living room for a minute, rubbing at the back of his neck with one hand. Then he started to move toward the stairs.
“You going?” Dean asked him.
Dad’s head moved, neither a yes nor a no.
“There’s that place,” Dean said. “The one near Cedar Gorge. Where they’ve got those rum balls?”
“You’ll miss the lutefisk.”
“Whatever,” Dean said.
They pulled back out onto the road a little before midnight.