Fic: got a secret for you (cut your angel in two) (Supernatural; R - AU John)
Title: got a secret for you (cut your angel in two)
Characters/Pairing: John, background wee!chesters
Rating: R
Genre: Gen
Word count: 941
Warnings/Spoilers: no spoilers
Note: For pyrebi , who wanted John and “not with a bang.” And then I listened to Pavement’s “No Life Singed Her” and this fell out of my brain. Apparently “not with a bang” actually means “with a lot of really big bangs.” There's also maybe an allusion to an action by The Comedian in Watchmen.
Summary: AU. “Hey, Winnie, you even make it out of the jungle?”
There’s the same horrible roaring sound in his head and the only time it’s quiet is never. Somewhere in the background he can hear Sgt. Pomiecko laughing. Guy thought he was the funniest fuckin’ guy in creation. “You ever even make it out of the jungle, Winnie?” the Pomiecko in his head asks, sniggering.
He knows the caseworker knows. He can see it in her eyes, the revulsion and the judgment, the way she keeps herself bodily between him and the boys and darts away from direct eye contact.
He also knows she knows she can’t do anything, too, ‘cause there’s a little hopelessness in the lines around her eyes along with the cakey powder. She can think him a monster all she wants, but truth is, the boys don’t have marks on ‘em, aren’t suffering, don’t need for nothing.
Then again, John isn’t sure what the hell he’s gonna do with them. It’s been three years and he’s still at a loss. They stayed with Mike and Kate for a while, and he knows he should’ve just let them take the boys like they wanted to, offered to. But something made him stick together and fuck if he knows that it was.
Truth be told, he hadn’t expected the boys to make it out at all (they’d’a been better off, he thinks). He thought the fire blazing into the hallway would be enough that no firefighter was gonna go try and be the big fuckin’ hero to go after the little boys that-oh, god!-were still inside. He was pretty sure his panicked clawing at the backs of the people who dragged him out had sold it. But then some young gun saw and bought the panicking father, strapped on an oxygen tank and dived right on in. Next thing John knew he was sitting in the back of an ambulance on the way to Memorial, talking in a fatherly, soothing voice to a scared four-year-old who had no idea what was going on.
Hey, Winnie, how you feelin’ tonight?
One of the things that helps drown out the laughing and the roaring in his head is the picture of sitting there in that ambulance with Dean, the kid’s face obscured by an oxygen mask except for wide green eyes and a soot-smudged forehead. It reminded him so strong of the same scene with some little VC kid his company pulled half-dead out of a bombed orphanage that he had to look away. He doesn’t think about the little squeak Dean let out, the way he scrambled to grab John’s hand for some kind of contact, the way the paramedic spoke in a soft, soothing tone to lay back, everything’s okay, good boy.
He watches the caseworker debating the merits of a yellow sun versus an orange sun with three-year-old Sammy. She’s smiling, being supportive of his choice of orange-“you can see it better,” he says-but her smile looks like it belongs on a dead person who didn’t get the joke.
You feelin’ all right, my man Winnie, ‘cause you lookin’ like shit on a shingle…
The caseworker gets up and gestures for John to follow her out into the hall. Dean, twitchy, protective little Dean, slides right into her vacated seat and all but wraps himself around Sammy. John notices the little thrill that shudders up the seven-year-old’s spine from the leftover warmth of the chair. It’s the same look he gets when he finds a Matchbox car some careless child with normal parents left behind.
She has a file in her hand, that ugly cadet blue color with the dark gray typewriter names along the tab, and she uses it to gesture while she speaks. “They’re wonderful boys, Mr. Winchester,” she says. He nods. “I have my concerns, but Dean is doing well enough in school-better than I might expect, actually, given the, er, circumstances. His teacher has recommended him for a special program the district offers for gifted children, but the file says you turned it down.”
“We won’t be here next year,” John says simply. He doesn’t try to charm this woman, just watches through the window in the door. Sam pushes his first drawing away and carefully surveys his color choices for a new picture on a clean sheet of paper. Dean watches and advises, pointing out this crayon or that one, mouth moving a mile a minute.
“Oh,” the woman says, and John looks back at her. She’s a little mousy thing, middle-aged and haggard, wearing a pink polyester suit a decade out of date and a scarf around her neck.
There was a cartoon John watched once, where a boy chased by a dog chases a cat. It was supposed to be cute, an amusing little animation for children, but John feels like that boy and he feels sick. There’s this ball inside his head that spins and spins so his thoughts don’t go any particular direction when they hurtle around and ricochet off each other. So he’s just running headlong after something and he doesn’t know what, and he’s got something with snapping jaws right there on his heels.
Maybe it’s Tuyen, that whore Pomiecko kept around and told him to get rid of when they got their orders to pull out. “Never pulled out in my life!” the sergeant had laughed. “I don’t care. Shoot her-or you’re clever with C-4, Winnie, fuckin’ figure it out.”
And maybe it’s Mary, the look on her face before boom time.
What he knows is there was a second of silence in his head when Pomiecko and that growling thing shut up.