More Than One Iron
Stanford-era fic: How Dean broke his leg and why he finally did earn his GED. Featuring Dean, John, Pastor Jim, and Sam's shadow.
Includes compound fractures, absent brothers, and assorted family angst, but I promise, this is the happy dippy version, in which I celebrate Dean's awesomeness. *Forehead smack.*
The hunt had been a train wreck from the beginning.
They were looking into the deaths of five young men, all right around twenty years old. Dean would have said, "Just like Sam," but they didn't use the S word anymore, not since he'd decided he had no more interest in the family.
Most especially, one didn't mention to Dad that maybe his anger at Sam was clouding his judgement on the case.
A search of the autopsy files rapidly turned up a link between the victims: A certain symbol, drawn in black ink on each man's chest. It only took a brief computer search to find an explanation: The killer was another young man, murdering his most gifted peers and using a black ritual to claim their talents as his own. At that revelation, Dad's face, never happy to begin with, turned cold and bleak as a glacier, and he stalked out of the motel room, keys in hand. It took a week to identify and track down the witch, and all that time Dad didn't say a word except to ask if Dean was finished yet.
"Find him yet?" Dad asked, as Dean returned to the room on the eighth day of the hunt. While Dean had been out hunting their boy witch, Dad had been busy with... Something. On the phone, scribbling over his journal, at the library. Dean hadn't dared to ask what he was doing.
This time, Dean had good news. "Three of the victims were last seen in the same bar, but no one remembered them leaving with anyone. So I've got a plan to draw him out."
That evening, Dean headed to the bar where three out of the five victims had last been seen, and made straight for the pool table. Dean had dispensed with his usual leather jacket and stubble, shaving cleanly and putting on his newest button-down shirt. Instead of hustling, Dean played to win from the very first shot. Rather than playing drunk, he nursed a single beer. Between shots, he tossed the cue from one hand to another deftly, advertising his dexterity.
By the end of his fourth match, Dean had run out of opponents. He'd also collected sixty-five dollars, four openly admiring women, and one interested stare from the back of the bar.
Cheerfully, he racked his cue, picked up his beer, and took a seat. His not-so-subtle watcher continued to watch, so as soon as he could, Dean finished the beer, paid, and left.
As Dean had expected, the man followed him. Either the guy wasn't their killer, or none of the men he'd murdered had passed on any talent at sneaking around, because he was pretty damned obvious to Dean. John fell into place behind the stranger, who seemed to have no idea he was being tailed. All three men walked east for almost four blocks before Dean turned into an alleyway, still ignoring his followers.
The watcher was indeed a killer, and his previous successes had made him arrogant. The moment they were out of sight, the stranger rushed Dean. At the first shift in his enemy's stride, Dean spun around, gun drawn. Unfortunately for him, the killer's ritual had worked just fine, and he literally had the strength of six men.
Before Dean could even pull the trigger, the enemy was within arm's reach. Dean's alertness had startled him, but he didn't freeze. He simply grabbed Dean and tossed him out of the way. Dean arced like a football, and the killer, apparently deciding Dean was too dangerous to hunt, sprinted back toward the alley entrance.
He never saw John lurking behind a trash can at the alley mouth, not until John's knife was stuck eight inches deep in his chest.
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." John quoted flatly. Without looking up, he added, "You all right there, Dean?" He paused. "Dean?"
"Um," was all Dean said in reply.
Finally John Winchester looked, to see his eldest son sprawled at the bottom of a concrete stairway, looking at the jagged white bone protruding from his leg.
Dean was never entirely clear on what happened afterward. Dad removed the corpse and left him in place, he was sure of that. But how Dad had moved the literal dead weight out of the alley, cleaned up the blood, and completely hid the body, all before he slipped fully into shock, Dean could not imagine.
There was an ambulance, and drugs, and the next thing he properly remembered, he was fighting his way out of a fog of drugs to find his leg in traction.
Surgery, they told him. A titanium pin, holding his shinbone together. The hands on the clock jumped forward when he blinked, and as the jumps slowed down, his leg moved from vague discomfort to sharp, burning pain. Dad was there, for a while, Dean was sure of it.
"You hang in there, Dean. You're gonna be fine. Just do what they tell you. I'll be back, I… There's something I need to find out."
When the clock on the wall finally decided to stop jumping, Dad's fingers were printed on his shoulder, and the scent of motor oil and herbs hung in the air, but Dad himself was gone.
*********************
It was Dean's fourth day in the hospital that Pastor Jim called, inviting him to stay, as soon as he was healed enough to travel the three hundred or so miles.
Dean wasn't exactly overwhelmed with other options.
Dad came back the day before he was scheduled to be released. He was as grim and silent as ever, but the scary bleakness had faded from his eyes. "Jim call you?" was all he offered.
"Yeah."
"Figure we'll take the car there, and I'll bum a ride back here for my truck."
"Sure."
Dean could not remember a longer three hundred miles in his life. Not the twelve-hour drive from D.C. up to Hartford in a blizzard. Not when Sam was teething. Not even the trip away from from the first girl Sam ever kissed, when the lip-curling silent sulk filled the car louder than screaming.
No, that had been bad, but this trip, riding fresh out of the hospital in a full-leg cast was shaping up to beat them all.
Dean could stand, now, on crutches, but staying vertical for more than half a minute or so worsened the swelling to the point that he thought the cast might actually explode. Which meant he couldn't possibly sit on a car seat like a normal human being.
Dad had found or stolen several pillows, and he built a nest for Dean's leg. Then he laid a towel on top, and packed it with about five pounds of ice. It kept the swelling down, but even with the extra padding, every bump in the road seemed to grind the healing bone edges against one another. Dad kept the needle steady at seventy-two, just where the shocks worked the best, but it was still rough.
Before they'd driven very far, however, Dean's stomach began competing with his leg for attention. The combination of morphine and antibiotics had caused Dean several bouts of vomiting while still in the hospital, and, he soon learned, riding while lying flat on the backseat was the quickest possible recipe for car sickness.
Forty-seven miles, that was all, before they had to stop. And having Dad yank open the back door, then yank his upper body out of the car and hold up his shoulders while he puked onto the asphalt, leg still enthroned on pillows on the seat? That, Dean decided, might possibly compete with the day after his sixteenth birthday for sheer humiliation.
When he was done, Dad scowled at nothing in particular. "This ain't gonna work, is it."
Dean curled back into the car and put a hand over his face. He did not reply.
"Next exit's seven miles. You up for that?"
"Sure," Dean replied, not bothering to uncover his face.
Generous doses of Dramamine on top of painkillers ensured that Dean slept deeply though most of the trip, and they arrived in Blue Earth about eleven o'clock the next morning. Dean had eaten next to nothing the entire trip, and the drugs had left his mind so sluggish he could barely figure out which end of the crutches to point at the ground. But somehow he found himself settled on Jim's couch, leg propped on pillows and TV remote in hand. He stared at the blank screen dully until at last his eyes drifted shut.
Two weeks later, he was lying on that same couch, propped up with pillows and chatting with the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of Jim's parishioners. She leaned over to retrieve a pillow that had slipped off the couch, and her green sweater stretched…interestingly.
Dean's eyes twinkled as she tucked the pillow back under him. "You know, Cindi," he began.
Which was when a book slammed into his shoulder.
"Hey! Watch the merchandise!" Dean yelled.
"I've got a project for you, Dean."
"A job?" Dean asked, eyes darting to Cindi.
"This one's a little different. Cindi, I think your parents are ready to leave."
Cindi bounced off, both making Dean envious and reminding him of how long since he'd last touched a woman who wasn't nursing him. He grabbed the book, a slim glossy softcover.
"GED prep? Come on, you know a shotgun's the only cred I need."
"It's good for a man to have more than one iron in the fire. Call it rent."
"School? Really? That's," he hesitated. "That's Sammy's thing."
"Try that on someone who didn't see you reading to him. When you were six."
"I can't drive, you know."
"You don't have to take any classes, just study and take the tests. There's a testing center just up the street, as it happens. I stopped by today, and your injury shouldn't be a problem, now that you're doing a bit better. They can arrange furniture so you'll be comfortable, and it's ground level."
Dean opened his mouth to protest.
"You should take the reading test first. The guy who put together a cleansing ritual from a barely legible copy of Roger Bacon's translations will have no trouble reading a few sample documents."
"Yeah, most people can read."
"Dean, you'd be amazed how many people out there can barely read a street sign. It'll be easy."
Dean tried to voice an objection. Jim just continued talking over him.
"Next, you'll take the science test. After all, you fixed my shotgun and my cellphone the other day."
"It was just a bad battery," Dean muttered.
"AND," Jim used his pulpit voice, quelling further argument. "And, your father told me about the weather tracking you helped him with. Of course, you know enough first aid to be a paramedic, so you've got biology in the bag."
Dean lay back against his cushion, eyes wide.
"Math, I saw you helping Curt with his homework last Tuesday. Did a great job of explaining, and you were pretty drugged up then, too. There are a few topics you might have to practice, but I've got plenty of books, and other help if you need."
Dean threw up his hands. "Fine! It's not like I've got anything better to do, anyway."
Jim smiled, finally. "Good. We're leaving for your first testing appointment in twenty minutes. Need a snack or anything first?"
*********************
Dean had to go to the testing center four more times, and he wasn't ready for Social Studies or Math until after the cast came off and he began walking again. As soon as he could run, Dad called with a job in Iowa, and the Impala roared out on to the freeway for the first time in almost three months.
The glove compartment bore its usual complement of fake IDs and false papers. But in the bottom of the trunk, beneath the false bottom, under the layers of weapons, covered with a second partition was a different sort of document.
High School Equivalency Certificate
State of Minnesota
Dean Winchester
Includes compound fractures, absent brothers, and assorted family angst, but I promise, this is the happy dippy version, in which I celebrate Dean's awesomeness. *Forehead smack.*
The hunt had been a train wreck from the beginning.
They were looking into the deaths of five young men, all right around twenty years old. Dean would have said, "Just like Sam," but they didn't use the S word anymore, not since he'd decided he had no more interest in the family.
Most especially, one didn't mention to Dad that maybe his anger at Sam was clouding his judgement on the case.
A search of the autopsy files rapidly turned up a link between the victims: A certain symbol, drawn in black ink on each man's chest. It only took a brief computer search to find an explanation: The killer was another young man, murdering his most gifted peers and using a black ritual to claim their talents as his own. At that revelation, Dad's face, never happy to begin with, turned cold and bleak as a glacier, and he stalked out of the motel room, keys in hand. It took a week to identify and track down the witch, and all that time Dad didn't say a word except to ask if Dean was finished yet.
"Find him yet?" Dad asked, as Dean returned to the room on the eighth day of the hunt. While Dean had been out hunting their boy witch, Dad had been busy with... Something. On the phone, scribbling over his journal, at the library. Dean hadn't dared to ask what he was doing.
This time, Dean had good news. "Three of the victims were last seen in the same bar, but no one remembered them leaving with anyone. So I've got a plan to draw him out."
That evening, Dean headed to the bar where three out of the five victims had last been seen, and made straight for the pool table. Dean had dispensed with his usual leather jacket and stubble, shaving cleanly and putting on his newest button-down shirt. Instead of hustling, Dean played to win from the very first shot. Rather than playing drunk, he nursed a single beer. Between shots, he tossed the cue from one hand to another deftly, advertising his dexterity.
By the end of his fourth match, Dean had run out of opponents. He'd also collected sixty-five dollars, four openly admiring women, and one interested stare from the back of the bar.
Cheerfully, he racked his cue, picked up his beer, and took a seat. His not-so-subtle watcher continued to watch, so as soon as he could, Dean finished the beer, paid, and left.
As Dean had expected, the man followed him. Either the guy wasn't their killer, or none of the men he'd murdered had passed on any talent at sneaking around, because he was pretty damned obvious to Dean. John fell into place behind the stranger, who seemed to have no idea he was being tailed. All three men walked east for almost four blocks before Dean turned into an alleyway, still ignoring his followers.
The watcher was indeed a killer, and his previous successes had made him arrogant. The moment they were out of sight, the stranger rushed Dean. At the first shift in his enemy's stride, Dean spun around, gun drawn. Unfortunately for him, the killer's ritual had worked just fine, and he literally had the strength of six men.
Before Dean could even pull the trigger, the enemy was within arm's reach. Dean's alertness had startled him, but he didn't freeze. He simply grabbed Dean and tossed him out of the way. Dean arced like a football, and the killer, apparently deciding Dean was too dangerous to hunt, sprinted back toward the alley entrance.
He never saw John lurking behind a trash can at the alley mouth, not until John's knife was stuck eight inches deep in his chest.
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." John quoted flatly. Without looking up, he added, "You all right there, Dean?" He paused. "Dean?"
"Um," was all Dean said in reply.
Finally John Winchester looked, to see his eldest son sprawled at the bottom of a concrete stairway, looking at the jagged white bone protruding from his leg.
Dean was never entirely clear on what happened afterward. Dad removed the corpse and left him in place, he was sure of that. But how Dad had moved the literal dead weight out of the alley, cleaned up the blood, and completely hid the body, all before he slipped fully into shock, Dean could not imagine.
There was an ambulance, and drugs, and the next thing he properly remembered, he was fighting his way out of a fog of drugs to find his leg in traction.
Surgery, they told him. A titanium pin, holding his shinbone together. The hands on the clock jumped forward when he blinked, and as the jumps slowed down, his leg moved from vague discomfort to sharp, burning pain. Dad was there, for a while, Dean was sure of it.
"You hang in there, Dean. You're gonna be fine. Just do what they tell you. I'll be back, I… There's something I need to find out."
When the clock on the wall finally decided to stop jumping, Dad's fingers were printed on his shoulder, and the scent of motor oil and herbs hung in the air, but Dad himself was gone.
*********************
It was Dean's fourth day in the hospital that Pastor Jim called, inviting him to stay, as soon as he was healed enough to travel the three hundred or so miles.
Dean wasn't exactly overwhelmed with other options.
Dad came back the day before he was scheduled to be released. He was as grim and silent as ever, but the scary bleakness had faded from his eyes. "Jim call you?" was all he offered.
"Yeah."
"Figure we'll take the car there, and I'll bum a ride back here for my truck."
"Sure."
Dean could not remember a longer three hundred miles in his life. Not the twelve-hour drive from D.C. up to Hartford in a blizzard. Not when Sam was teething. Not even the trip away from from the first girl Sam ever kissed, when the lip-curling silent sulk filled the car louder than screaming.
No, that had been bad, but this trip, riding fresh out of the hospital in a full-leg cast was shaping up to beat them all.
Dean could stand, now, on crutches, but staying vertical for more than half a minute or so worsened the swelling to the point that he thought the cast might actually explode. Which meant he couldn't possibly sit on a car seat like a normal human being.
Dad had found or stolen several pillows, and he built a nest for Dean's leg. Then he laid a towel on top, and packed it with about five pounds of ice. It kept the swelling down, but even with the extra padding, every bump in the road seemed to grind the healing bone edges against one another. Dad kept the needle steady at seventy-two, just where the shocks worked the best, but it was still rough.
Before they'd driven very far, however, Dean's stomach began competing with his leg for attention. The combination of morphine and antibiotics had caused Dean several bouts of vomiting while still in the hospital, and, he soon learned, riding while lying flat on the backseat was the quickest possible recipe for car sickness.
Forty-seven miles, that was all, before they had to stop. And having Dad yank open the back door, then yank his upper body out of the car and hold up his shoulders while he puked onto the asphalt, leg still enthroned on pillows on the seat? That, Dean decided, might possibly compete with the day after his sixteenth birthday for sheer humiliation.
When he was done, Dad scowled at nothing in particular. "This ain't gonna work, is it."
Dean curled back into the car and put a hand over his face. He did not reply.
"Next exit's seven miles. You up for that?"
"Sure," Dean replied, not bothering to uncover his face.
Generous doses of Dramamine on top of painkillers ensured that Dean slept deeply though most of the trip, and they arrived in Blue Earth about eleven o'clock the next morning. Dean had eaten next to nothing the entire trip, and the drugs had left his mind so sluggish he could barely figure out which end of the crutches to point at the ground. But somehow he found himself settled on Jim's couch, leg propped on pillows and TV remote in hand. He stared at the blank screen dully until at last his eyes drifted shut.
Two weeks later, he was lying on that same couch, propped up with pillows and chatting with the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of Jim's parishioners. She leaned over to retrieve a pillow that had slipped off the couch, and her green sweater stretched…interestingly.
Dean's eyes twinkled as she tucked the pillow back under him. "You know, Cindi," he began.
Which was when a book slammed into his shoulder.
"Hey! Watch the merchandise!" Dean yelled.
"I've got a project for you, Dean."
"A job?" Dean asked, eyes darting to Cindi.
"This one's a little different. Cindi, I think your parents are ready to leave."
Cindi bounced off, both making Dean envious and reminding him of how long since he'd last touched a woman who wasn't nursing him. He grabbed the book, a slim glossy softcover.
"GED prep? Come on, you know a shotgun's the only cred I need."
"It's good for a man to have more than one iron in the fire. Call it rent."
"School? Really? That's," he hesitated. "That's Sammy's thing."
"Try that on someone who didn't see you reading to him. When you were six."
"I can't drive, you know."
"You don't have to take any classes, just study and take the tests. There's a testing center just up the street, as it happens. I stopped by today, and your injury shouldn't be a problem, now that you're doing a bit better. They can arrange furniture so you'll be comfortable, and it's ground level."
Dean opened his mouth to protest.
"You should take the reading test first. The guy who put together a cleansing ritual from a barely legible copy of Roger Bacon's translations will have no trouble reading a few sample documents."
"Yeah, most people can read."
"Dean, you'd be amazed how many people out there can barely read a street sign. It'll be easy."
Dean tried to voice an objection. Jim just continued talking over him.
"Next, you'll take the science test. After all, you fixed my shotgun and my cellphone the other day."
"It was just a bad battery," Dean muttered.
"AND," Jim used his pulpit voice, quelling further argument. "And, your father told me about the weather tracking you helped him with. Of course, you know enough first aid to be a paramedic, so you've got biology in the bag."
Dean lay back against his cushion, eyes wide.
"Math, I saw you helping Curt with his homework last Tuesday. Did a great job of explaining, and you were pretty drugged up then, too. There are a few topics you might have to practice, but I've got plenty of books, and other help if you need."
Dean threw up his hands. "Fine! It's not like I've got anything better to do, anyway."
Jim smiled, finally. "Good. We're leaving for your first testing appointment in twenty minutes. Need a snack or anything first?"
*********************
Dean had to go to the testing center four more times, and he wasn't ready for Social Studies or Math until after the cast came off and he began walking again. As soon as he could run, Dad called with a job in Iowa, and the Impala roared out on to the freeway for the first time in almost three months.
The glove compartment bore its usual complement of fake IDs and false papers. But in the bottom of the trunk, beneath the false bottom, under the layers of weapons, covered with a second partition was a different sort of document.
High School Equivalency Certificate
State of Minnesota
Dean Winchester