SPN FIC - I Saw Mommy Kissing Dean-a-Claus
Getting close to the finish line! Happy Christmas Eve, you guys -- and Merry Christmas to those who are ahead of the International Date Line.
Christmas 2001. (And to answer the question before you ask it: if Sam was in his senior year at Stanford in October 2005, he entered as a freshman in the fall of 2002. Therefore: still with Dean and John in December 2001. Forget how old he was. Kripke made a mistake. I'm fudging my way around it.)
Characters: Dean, Sam, OFC
Pairings: implied Dean/OFC
Spoilers: none
Rating: PG, for language
Length: 2580 words
Disclaimer: He miight FIU occasionally, but Kripke owns all.
“What are you, the Magic of Christmas police? Panties. Unknot. Sam.” Dean dug his keys out of his jeans pocket, grabbed his coat and shrugged into it. “And you’re gonna tell me that’s the latest in elf wear?” he scoffed, nodding at Sam’s Christmas sweater: green on the bottom, white on the top, with rows of Christmas trees running through both colors.
I Saw Mommy Kissing Dean-a-Claus
By Carol Davis
Jeans. Boots. And a red Henley. That was apparently it.
“Ho ho ho,” Sam said.
Dean turned, impatient. “What?”
“I think they had in mind…you know. A traditional Santa?”
“Dude,” Dean said witheringly. “I’m not driving all the way across town dressed like freakin’ Santa Claus.”
“So you’re going to walk in there dressed like that, change into the Santa outfit, and figure the kids won’t make the connection?”
“What are you, the Magic of Christmas police? Panties. Unknot. Sam.” Dean dug his keys out of his jeans pocket, grabbed his coat and shrugged into it. “And you’re gonna tell me that’s the latest in elf wear?” he scoffed, nodding at Sam’s Christmas sweater: green on the bottom, white on the top, with rows of Christmas trees running through both colors.
“They didn’t specify what I should wear.”
“Oh yeah they did.”
The smirk on Dean’s face was never a good sign. “What?” Sam asked.
Dean reached into his duffel and came out with a Santa-ish red and white hat trimmed with little gold bells. “Here ya go, bro. Wear it in good health.”
Could have been a lot worse, Sam thought.
Which meant it was indeed going to get worse. A lot worse. There might be no end to the worseness.
“Ho ho ho,” Dean said.
“There you go. Go on up there.”
Someone had propped an extension ladder against the back wall of the house: one that, when fully opened up, would reach a little beyond the bottom lip of the roof.
“I’m not -“ Sam sputtered.
“Yeah. Make some noise. Kinda…generic reindeer noise. But wait a little bit. Gotta get changed,” Dean said, completely poker-faced.
“Generic reindeer noise.”
“Yeah. Go for it. Release your inner thespian geek.”
“Why do I have to go up on the roof?” Before Dean could reply, Sam amended, “Why does anybody have to go up on the roof? Besides…crawling around on the roof of a women’s shelter? Somebody’s gonna call the cops on me, Dean.”
“No they won’t. Jeannie’s got that all covered.”
“Are you sure?”
“Dude. Please.”
“There’s a lot of snow up there, Dean.”
“Yeah. Watch that.”
“While you do what?”
Dean groaned loudly. “Clothes?”
“Where?”
“Garage. Around in the back.”
“We’re gonna end up in jail, Dean. We’re gonna end up in jail, and Dad is gonna kill both of us. Or leave us there.”
“I told you, Sam. Jeannie’s got it covered.” When that didn’t sway Sam to his point of view, Dean thumped his brother on the back and grinned, “Think of the kids, man. You gotta go the extra mile for the kids.”
“The kids will do just fine without me crawling around on the roof.”
“Sam.”
Yeah. This was shaping up well. “All right,” Sam muttered.
He could have laid money on it: the sheer lethal death trappyness of the roof. The snow was of exactly the right consistency to prevent any traction whatsoever.
Of course, he could have gotten back down off the roof. That would have been the sensible plan. Except it would have prompted soft murmurings of “wusssssy wusssssy wussssy” during the night. For every night he spent with Dean for the rest of their natural lives.
He had Dad’s training to thank for the fact that he could stay on the roof at all, though that was little comfort. In fact, it made him wish - and not for the first time - that his father had thought foster care was a good plan.
Foster care couldn’t possibly be worse than this.
And what the hell was a “generic reindeer noise,” anyway?
A soft whistle cut through the night.
Dean.
Sam had been brought up by John Winchester - aided and abetted by his little clone Dean. Often surrounded by hunters who made Dad look friendly.
The one thing the bunch of them could do to a shining, sterling level was cuss.
Sam knew a lot of cussing. It was lyrical, and interesting, in an odd way. Smiling, he directed all of it at Dean.
Dean in his freaking Santa suit.
The top half of it, anyway. The bottom half was still jeans and boots.
He found Jeannie in the kitchen. Her eyes got very wide when she saw him. “My God,” she whispered. “What happened?”
He remembered it in a vague way that he supposed went along with a massive - and more than likely fatal - concussion. Slipping. Sliding. Grabbing at slick snow that was icy enough to abrade the skin off his palms. Pausing for an instant at the edge of the roof, thinking that maybe he could defy gravity and simply float back up. Or down. Or sideways. Then the moment ended and he plunged through space. Rebounded off something and landed face down in the snow.
Every inch of him hurt. Every fucking inch.
“Are you all right?” Jeannie whispered.
And my God, if that wasn’t the world’s stupidest question. Sam produced a smile he supposed made him look like a serial killer and hissed, “Where is my brother?”
“He’s in my office. Sam -“
He would have gone barging in there. Seized Dean and pounded him into…into…
He had no idea where Jeannie’s office was.
Jeannie took him by the arm and led him into something that turned out to be a bathroom. She dropped the lid on the toilet and sat him down, then pushed the door shut and flipped on the light. Light that bored into his brain like a high-speed drill. Sam cringed and jammed his eyes shut and listened to Jeannie make little sympathetic noises.
She had very warm little hands. Must have had nursing training of some kind, or maybe she was just gentle by nature. Either way, she got him cleaned up in a way that didn’t send him through the ceiling, leaving a Wyle E. Coyote cutout shape to mark his passage. Then she handed him a couple of Tylenol and a cup of water. Dad had a thing about them not taking medication for “minor injuries,” but really? The hell with that. Sam gulped the pills down, drank all the water, and offered Jeannie a smile that didn’t torture his facial muscles too much.
Someone rapped at the bathroom door.
If it was Dean, Sam fully intended to rip off his arms and legs. Those kids could just deal with a bleeding Santa torso.
It wasn’t Dean. It was another woman, who murmured something at Jeannie, then caught a glimpse of Sam and made the Oh my God face.
Gonna end up in jail, Sam thought.
Gonna kill him.
Jeannie made little murmured suggestions about the ER, just in case, just to be sure, but Sam waved her off. If Tylenol was on Dad’s no-can-do list, the emergency room was at the top of it in big bold red letters. Winchester’s the name, near-death experiences’re my game, he thought, and smirked. That pulled something that made him wince.
Off in the distance - in another room, probably, but it seemed like voices inside his head, because, seriously? If he wasn’t crazy, he was headed there on the express bus - someone was singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
On the fourth day of Christmas, he thought, my stupid brother gave to me
Four broken ribs
Three scalp lacs
Two black eyes
One punctured lung
And my brother Dean’s head on a spike
“Do you want to lie down?” Jeannie asked. “There’s a couch in my office.”
Office. “Yeah,” Sam said. “Let’s do that.”
She guided him down a short hallway, holding gingerly onto his arm like he was blind. When they got to a door marked J. Cunningham she reached ahead to turn the knob, then steered him carefully inside.
“Dude,” Dean blurted. “The hell?”
Jeannie, for some reason, was no longer there. Maybe she figured Dean could take care of him from here on out.
Maybe she didn’t want to witness the bloodshed.
Sam found the couch by groping his way across the room, sat down with his head ringing like an entire carillon of church bells, leaned back into the cushions, rested his hands on his thighs, and closed his eyes. “Do not speak to me,” he told Dean.
Dean was obediently silent for about forty seconds. Then he said in a tone that sounded more bewildered than anything else, “God, man, I told you to be careful.”
The couch shifted a little: Dean sitting down beside him.
Within strangling distance.
“Fuck, man, I’m sorry,” Dean said.
“For what?” Sam sighed.
“Are you hurt bad?”
“Define ‘bad’.”
“Broken stuff.”
“No. Nothing’s broken.” Sam sighed again. “I think my clothes cover up most of the bruises.” He peeled his eyes open to find Dean peering at him with genuine concern. “How bad do I look?” he asked, remembering where they were and why they’d come.
“Your ear’s all red, and you’ve got a big scrape there.” Dean pointed to Sam’s jawline. “Plus the hands.”
He was looking at Sam from beneath a Santa hat. From above Santa’s snowy white beard.
Sam snorted out a laugh that made his chest hurt. “I can’t go out there like this, man. Those kids…the last thing they need is to see me all messed up like this.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll just stay in here. Have Jeannie help you hand out the presents.”
Dean thought that over for a minute. Then he said decisively, “Switch.”
“What?”
He was already pulling off Santa’s red coat. “Pull the hat down over your ear. The beard’ll cover up the scrape. And the gloves’ll cover up your hands. Come on. Gimme the ugly sweater.”
Jeannie came back a few minutes later with Sam’s bell-laden cap in her hands. “This was out on the lawn,” she said, mildly surprised at the Winchester brothers’ transformation. Grinning, Dean took the cap from her, tugged it onto his head, and wiggled it in a way that made the bells dance. He and Jeannie smirked at each other in a way that had only one interpretation.
“They’re ready,” she told Sam. “If you are.”
The kids were great. There were seven of them, all young enough to believe in Santa - and to buy that he was some really tall dude in jeans.
Jeannie and the shelter’s volunteers had put together a mother lode of gifts, each wrapped and tagged and tucked into a mammoth, white-fuzzy-trimmed red sack that looked lovingly handmade. Jeannie (with some wheezing associated with the weight of the thing) turned the sack over to Sam in the kitchen.
“Dude,” Dean said. “Go for it.”
He couldn’t not go for it. He burst into the shelter’s big living room with a hearty “Ho ho ho!” that actually sounded genuine and very Claus-like.
“Santa!” a couple of the kids squealed.
They’d made a place for him near the fire: a big overstuffed chair that he settled into with enormous relief that the Tylenol had kicked in.
They came to him one by one, four girls and three boys, eyes wide with wonder. Sam didn’t ask them if they’d been good. Behind the glow, behind the awe, they had that shell-shocked look of not knowing where they were or how they’d gotten there. Sam knew it well. With Dean’s help he passed out gift after gift, occasionally catching the eye of the mothers who were seated around the room, each family group in its own small, cozy spot.
No one had told him at what point in the proceedings he was supposed to bow out and return to his sleigh. After all the gifts were distributed, he supposed; but when they’d all been handed out he looked to Dean for a clue and got only a crooked grin in return. The moms and the kids seemed not to know either.
And it wasn’t like he had anyplace else to be.
One of the moms brought him a cup of hot cocoa and some cookies that sent one of the kids into a fit of giggles. Under his watchful eye the little ones opened their gifts with squeals of delight: dolls and games and trucks and puzzles. Warm sweaters and mittens. One of the moms began to cry quietly, face half-hidden by her hand, and two of the others went to comfort her.
When the cocoa and cookies were gone, Sam figured it was time for Santa to hit the road. Or the sky. Or something.
“Ho ho ho!” he boomed as he got up from the big chair.
He found Dean and Jeannie out in the kitchen, making out next to the microwave.
“Seriously,” he said.
They grinned at him without a shred of chagrin. Jeannie went on grinning, a little more foolishly, while Dean went into her office to retrieve his coat and Sam’s. When he returned to the kitchen, Sam seized his arm and propelled him out the back door. After he’d made sure none of the children was watching from a window, he shoved Dean into the garage and began stripping off the Santa gear.
“You never stop, do you?” he groaned.
“What? Dude, it’s Christmas.”
“Is that why you agreed to do this? You get your present later on?”
“Well…” Dean said.
“I fell off the roof so you could get laid?”
Dean gave him an affronted look. “For the kids, man. We did it for the kids.”
“I fell off the roof. You got your tonsils massaged.”
“I could -“
“Don’t even start.”
They were in the car - which Dean had parked a couple of blocks away - before Sam said anything more. Slumped in the passenger seat, trying to ignore the aches and twinges that the cold night air had reawakened, he sighed, “You can’t ever do anything the normal way, can you?”
“Normal’s overrated, Sammy. Very overrated.”
“Huh,” Sam grunted.
Then he waited.
Dean didn’t start the car.
“We sitting here all night?” Sam asked. “You waiting for the real Santa to show up?”
“Already did.” Dean reached under the seat and produced a brightly wrapped-and-ribboned package that he held out to Sam. “Merry Christmas, bro.”
“What is it?”
“Unwrapping is generally recommended.”
There was a cell phone inside. Brand new, still in the shrinkwrap.
“It’s cool,” Dean said. “Does a bunch of different stuff. Jeannie’s got one. Said she really likes it. Figured you might get some use out of it.”
“I…thanks, man.”
Dean started the car then, nudging the gas pedal gently a couple of times until the idle evened out. Sam could see the “Gotta work on that” flicker behind his expression. “Sorry about the roof,” Dean said without quite looking at Sam, and there was an unusual amount of embarrassment in his voice. “Didn’t know it was that slippery.”
“I’ll live.”
“The kids were cool, huh?”
“Very.” Sam looked down at the torn-away paper and ribbons in his lap, at the phone, bits of evidence of his brother’s heart. “Look…if you want to drop me off at home and come back - Dad’ll be home in a while. I can figure out the phone. Watch some TV.”
“Nah. The kids’ve seen me. Let ‘em get another look, they’ll start wondering.”
“Especially if you’re groping people in the kitchen.”
“Gonna see Jeannie tomorrow. For…you know. Eggnog.”
“Is that what they call it now?” Sam asked dryly.
Dean grinned at him. Glanced at the phone, then winked at his brother. “Ho ho ho,” he said, and shifted the Impala into gear.