FIC: You'd Better Go in Disguise
It’s 3 am. The motel room looks like shit, strewn with take-out boxes, photocopies of old maps and microfiche printouts from the local library. You’re trying to listen to an interview from a few weeks ago, but the tape recorder’s rewind button keeps getting jammed and you pretty much loose your shit on it and whip it across the room into the bathroom door. You swear like the Marines taught you to good, and throw a chair after the tape recorder to keep it company. Fuck it. That old kook Jasper Evans didn’t know shit anyways.
This pretty much saps all the energy out of you, so you sink to the floor and sit there, listlessly pick up whatever happens to be right next to you on the carpet. You stare at it, a map of one of those old ghost towns out in Saint Anthony’s Wilderness, and all your hate and exhaustion and desperation tumble out of your eyes and your curled lips and your trembling hands onto the creased paper.
There’ve been a lot of moments like this these past three months. Doesn’t make it any easier. Doesn’t change anything either. You’ll break down like this a million times over if it means eventually you’ll find your son.
It’s not like it was with Mary. You’ve stopped drinking entirely. You are focused and alert and keeping in shape and eating three square meals a day, although you take no pleasure in it.
Sometimes you think about giving up and that makes you want to drink like nothing else. Because if it’s over, you can. Because if you’ve given up then you hate yourself so much that you don’t even want to think or feel or be fucking conscious. And then you remember what you’ll have to do when you wake up the next morning, hung over, wishing you were dead. You’ll have to call Sam. Tell him his brother is gone, that you sent him out there into the woods all alone and he never came back. The irony is so bitter and vile you can taste it. You thought the one place your boys were safe was with you.
The map has been crumpled into a ball inside your tight fist. You release it and watch it roll clumsily onto the floor.
If you don’t find Dean, everything is lost.
The fear paralyses you, and you sit there like someone doing a piss-poor job of meditating, looking at all the worthless research you’ve done. Hours of digging through church basements and musty town hall archives, little cassette tapes filled with interviews recounting local folk tales and rumors-but mostly the senile ramblings of old-timers who no one takes any heed of anymore. And you have nothing to show for it.
You aren’t sure how long you sit there in a soul-cracking trance, but it’s broken by the ringing of your cell phone. A number you don’t recognize.
You clear your throat of phlegm and self-loathing and flip the phone open. “Winchester.”
“This is Harrisburg Hospital,” a woman says, and you stop breathing entirely. “We may have a young man you know-“
You shove your feet into your boots, fumble with your coat. Pray that you aren’t dreaming again. “Gimmie fifteen minutes. What floor’s he on?”
They make you sign in at the front desk of the ICU. Your signature is a goddamn mess. Like you’ve got the DT’s or something. Part of you wants to hack through the place with a fucking machete, like you’re back in the jungle, chopping your way through mangroves and stubborn palm fronds. But you’re scared of what you’ll find on the other side even more than you were back then.
The ICU. Intensive, it’s all too damn intensive.
“He’s your son?” The nurse asks. You nod, putting the cap back on the pen like it’s really important to you for some reason.
“He’s in bad shape right now. But he’s going to be fine.” Her hand curls around your bicep, guides you over to his room. “We’ve been monitoring his heart rate. It’s been a little erratic,” she says, opening the door.
You are not prepared for this.
Dean is asleep under his crisp white hospital sheets, and you can almost believe he’s been lying here this whole time, like Rip Van Winkle, growing this ridiculously thick beard. But the bright red scratches across his forehead and up and down his arms shatter your short-lived fantasy. They, along with the leathery tan, blistered fingers, bruised chest and thinned frame tell the true story, punctuated by all your horrible mistakes.
“You can stay with him until he wakes up if you’d like.”
“How long has he been like this?” you ask her, not sure how ‘asleep’ he really is. Not sure you want to know.
“Oh, he was awake when the hikers brought him in. Pretty out of sorts, but conscious. He’s been in and out ever since. You know...”
You nod and pull up a chair. The nurse pats your hand and leaves you there with your bedraggled son, and not a clue what to do for him.
When he wakes up a few hours later, you tell him he’s safe, but he doesn’t believe you.
“ ‘S not real. No way out… tried…” he rasps, voice rusty from disuse like a bike left out too long in the rain. He sounds resigned, certain.
Suddenly you realize you aren’t the only one who’s been going nuts trying to save Dean. For these three long months, he’s been trying to save himself too. There’s something sickly comforting about that.
A few days later Dean’s strong enough to walk, and you ask him if he’s ready to blow this popsicle stand. He nods and you gently unhook him from his IV and wait while he changes into the jeans and t-shirt you brought him. When he lets you back in the room, it’s clear his Levi’s are now a couple sizes too big, and while he looks a hell of a lot healthier than he did a few days ago, it feels like a part of him is still lost somewhere, behind that rough beard, those eyes that shine bright and don’t focus on anything for longer than a few seconds and the skin that’s now thicker than you ever thought possible.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he says.
You warn him about the mess as you jiggle the motel room key. He looks at you like someone pretending to understand a foreign language, and you feel like an asshole. He’s been sleeping in the fucking woods for the past three months. Like he gives a shit how clean your motel room is.
“Home sweet home,” you mumble, gathering some stray folders and notes off the bed. Dean grabs a stack of research from the night table and flips through it.
He looks up at you wide-eyed, asks carefully, “You were still-”
“You bet your ass,” you tell him. He never needs to know how close you were to giving up, and you thank the powers above that you’ll never know if you would have.
Dean squints at you like he’s not seeing you properly. “Thank you,” he says.
You shake your head. “Hell of a job I did.”
“You tried. Still counts.”
“’Course I tried… son.” You can’t bring yourself to call him kiddo. Not when he’s standing there looking like fucking Robinson Crusoe. Suddenly you feel sick to your stomach.
Dean nods and tosses the stack of papers into the trash. He scratches at his beard and heads for the bathroom. “Been dyin’ for a hot shower,” he explains.
No kidding.
For about an hour, you listen to sounds of muffled ecstasy as hot steam seeps out from under the bathroom door, and it makes you smile like you haven’t since the day you drove into Harrisburg. You clean up a little and flip through the phonebook for a good steakhouse.
A few minutes after the shower’s shut off, the sink starts to run. You hear Dean hiss, “Fuck!” and you dart to the door, images of his body hooked to IVs and heart monitors still much too fresh in your memory.
The door isn’t locked.
“Dean?”
He’s okay. He’s standing in front of the sink with a towel around his waist, a razor clenched tight in his hand, and shaving cream all over his face. But his neck is bleeding where a chunk of beard used to be.
“You forget how to shave already?”
Dean frowns down at his hands, lifts the one holding the razor up like it’s evidence in a murder trial or something, and stares at it with contempt as it begins to quake from the simple effort of holding up the small object.
“We did bounce you out of there a little early,” you tell him, pressing a facecloth to the gash in his neck. Dean huffs through his nose and takes the job over. He glares up at himself in the mirror, and you meet his eyes there.
“I hate it,” he says deliberately. It’s the angriest he’s sounded since he woke up.
“’S’okay. Let me,” you tell him, patting him on the back.
You rinse the razor in the sink and sit Dean down on the toilet. He stares at your chest, the shower curtain, the tiles on the floor, and he doesn’t flinch once.
It’s a trust so overwhelming it’s absurd. And as you rake the razor carefully over your son’s skin, you try to pin down when the hell you earned it. Absolutely nothing comes to mind.
When you’re finished you give Dean’s cheek a soft slap and he makes his way back to the sink where he rinses off remnants of shaving cream. He looks at himself in the mirror again, and this time he isn’t angry.
His hand drags on his lips a little, water dripping from his face onto the Formica counter-top. Quietly, he’s surprised. Surprised to see himself.
“I’m not… I’m b-b-back?” he asks, like it’s the first time he’s really thought about it as a possibility. His clean shaven face seems so transparent. He looks at you like you’ve just appeared to him in a clearing with a hand outstretched and a path behind you. He’s tired and relieved and ready to follow you anywhere. Was it just the beard hiding that?
You squeeze his arm and his eyebrows crumple a little. He twists around and presses his face into your shoulder before you can tell if he’s crying.
You hold him tight.
“Yeah,” you whisper. “You’re back, kiddo.”
This pretty much saps all the energy out of you, so you sink to the floor and sit there, listlessly pick up whatever happens to be right next to you on the carpet. You stare at it, a map of one of those old ghost towns out in Saint Anthony’s Wilderness, and all your hate and exhaustion and desperation tumble out of your eyes and your curled lips and your trembling hands onto the creased paper.
There’ve been a lot of moments like this these past three months. Doesn’t make it any easier. Doesn’t change anything either. You’ll break down like this a million times over if it means eventually you’ll find your son.
It’s not like it was with Mary. You’ve stopped drinking entirely. You are focused and alert and keeping in shape and eating three square meals a day, although you take no pleasure in it.
Sometimes you think about giving up and that makes you want to drink like nothing else. Because if it’s over, you can. Because if you’ve given up then you hate yourself so much that you don’t even want to think or feel or be fucking conscious. And then you remember what you’ll have to do when you wake up the next morning, hung over, wishing you were dead. You’ll have to call Sam. Tell him his brother is gone, that you sent him out there into the woods all alone and he never came back. The irony is so bitter and vile you can taste it. You thought the one place your boys were safe was with you.
The map has been crumpled into a ball inside your tight fist. You release it and watch it roll clumsily onto the floor.
If you don’t find Dean, everything is lost.
The fear paralyses you, and you sit there like someone doing a piss-poor job of meditating, looking at all the worthless research you’ve done. Hours of digging through church basements and musty town hall archives, little cassette tapes filled with interviews recounting local folk tales and rumors-but mostly the senile ramblings of old-timers who no one takes any heed of anymore. And you have nothing to show for it.
You aren’t sure how long you sit there in a soul-cracking trance, but it’s broken by the ringing of your cell phone. A number you don’t recognize.
You clear your throat of phlegm and self-loathing and flip the phone open. “Winchester.”
“This is Harrisburg Hospital,” a woman says, and you stop breathing entirely. “We may have a young man you know-“
You shove your feet into your boots, fumble with your coat. Pray that you aren’t dreaming again. “Gimmie fifteen minutes. What floor’s he on?”
They make you sign in at the front desk of the ICU. Your signature is a goddamn mess. Like you’ve got the DT’s or something. Part of you wants to hack through the place with a fucking machete, like you’re back in the jungle, chopping your way through mangroves and stubborn palm fronds. But you’re scared of what you’ll find on the other side even more than you were back then.
The ICU. Intensive, it’s all too damn intensive.
“He’s your son?” The nurse asks. You nod, putting the cap back on the pen like it’s really important to you for some reason.
“He’s in bad shape right now. But he’s going to be fine.” Her hand curls around your bicep, guides you over to his room. “We’ve been monitoring his heart rate. It’s been a little erratic,” she says, opening the door.
You are not prepared for this.
Dean is asleep under his crisp white hospital sheets, and you can almost believe he’s been lying here this whole time, like Rip Van Winkle, growing this ridiculously thick beard. But the bright red scratches across his forehead and up and down his arms shatter your short-lived fantasy. They, along with the leathery tan, blistered fingers, bruised chest and thinned frame tell the true story, punctuated by all your horrible mistakes.
“You can stay with him until he wakes up if you’d like.”
“How long has he been like this?” you ask her, not sure how ‘asleep’ he really is. Not sure you want to know.
“Oh, he was awake when the hikers brought him in. Pretty out of sorts, but conscious. He’s been in and out ever since. You know...”
You nod and pull up a chair. The nurse pats your hand and leaves you there with your bedraggled son, and not a clue what to do for him.
When he wakes up a few hours later, you tell him he’s safe, but he doesn’t believe you.
“ ‘S not real. No way out… tried…” he rasps, voice rusty from disuse like a bike left out too long in the rain. He sounds resigned, certain.
Suddenly you realize you aren’t the only one who’s been going nuts trying to save Dean. For these three long months, he’s been trying to save himself too. There’s something sickly comforting about that.
A few days later Dean’s strong enough to walk, and you ask him if he’s ready to blow this popsicle stand. He nods and you gently unhook him from his IV and wait while he changes into the jeans and t-shirt you brought him. When he lets you back in the room, it’s clear his Levi’s are now a couple sizes too big, and while he looks a hell of a lot healthier than he did a few days ago, it feels like a part of him is still lost somewhere, behind that rough beard, those eyes that shine bright and don’t focus on anything for longer than a few seconds and the skin that’s now thicker than you ever thought possible.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he says.
You warn him about the mess as you jiggle the motel room key. He looks at you like someone pretending to understand a foreign language, and you feel like an asshole. He’s been sleeping in the fucking woods for the past three months. Like he gives a shit how clean your motel room is.
“Home sweet home,” you mumble, gathering some stray folders and notes off the bed. Dean grabs a stack of research from the night table and flips through it.
He looks up at you wide-eyed, asks carefully, “You were still-”
“You bet your ass,” you tell him. He never needs to know how close you were to giving up, and you thank the powers above that you’ll never know if you would have.
Dean squints at you like he’s not seeing you properly. “Thank you,” he says.
You shake your head. “Hell of a job I did.”
“You tried. Still counts.”
“’Course I tried… son.” You can’t bring yourself to call him kiddo. Not when he’s standing there looking like fucking Robinson Crusoe. Suddenly you feel sick to your stomach.
Dean nods and tosses the stack of papers into the trash. He scratches at his beard and heads for the bathroom. “Been dyin’ for a hot shower,” he explains.
No kidding.
For about an hour, you listen to sounds of muffled ecstasy as hot steam seeps out from under the bathroom door, and it makes you smile like you haven’t since the day you drove into Harrisburg. You clean up a little and flip through the phonebook for a good steakhouse.
A few minutes after the shower’s shut off, the sink starts to run. You hear Dean hiss, “Fuck!” and you dart to the door, images of his body hooked to IVs and heart monitors still much too fresh in your memory.
The door isn’t locked.
“Dean?”
He’s okay. He’s standing in front of the sink with a towel around his waist, a razor clenched tight in his hand, and shaving cream all over his face. But his neck is bleeding where a chunk of beard used to be.
“You forget how to shave already?”
Dean frowns down at his hands, lifts the one holding the razor up like it’s evidence in a murder trial or something, and stares at it with contempt as it begins to quake from the simple effort of holding up the small object.
“We did bounce you out of there a little early,” you tell him, pressing a facecloth to the gash in his neck. Dean huffs through his nose and takes the job over. He glares up at himself in the mirror, and you meet his eyes there.
“I hate it,” he says deliberately. It’s the angriest he’s sounded since he woke up.
“’S’okay. Let me,” you tell him, patting him on the back.
You rinse the razor in the sink and sit Dean down on the toilet. He stares at your chest, the shower curtain, the tiles on the floor, and he doesn’t flinch once.
It’s a trust so overwhelming it’s absurd. And as you rake the razor carefully over your son’s skin, you try to pin down when the hell you earned it. Absolutely nothing comes to mind.
When you’re finished you give Dean’s cheek a soft slap and he makes his way back to the sink where he rinses off remnants of shaving cream. He looks at himself in the mirror again, and this time he isn’t angry.
His hand drags on his lips a little, water dripping from his face onto the Formica counter-top. Quietly, he’s surprised. Surprised to see himself.
“I’m not… I’m b-b-back?” he asks, like it’s the first time he’s really thought about it as a possibility. His clean shaven face seems so transparent. He looks at you like you’ve just appeared to him in a clearing with a hand outstretched and a path behind you. He’s tired and relieved and ready to follow you anywhere. Was it just the beard hiding that?
You squeeze his arm and his eyebrows crumple a little. He twists around and presses his face into your shoulder before you can tell if he’s crying.
You hold him tight.
“Yeah,” you whisper. “You’re back, kiddo.”