lgbtfest fic: Learn as you go (Dean/OMC, PG-13)
Title: Learn as you go
Author: marinarusalka
Characters/pairings: John, Dean/OMC
Rating PG-13, mostly for language
Warnings: None, really, but Dean is 16 in the story, so don't click if the very concept offends you.
Summary: Sometimes, it's a bad idea to come home early.
AN: Written for the lgbtfest, prompt #770: John finds out that one or both of his sons is gay/bi. How does he react? Thanks to brynwulf and innie_darling for their mad beta-reading skillz.
"Dad, stop! Now!"
The combination of the words and the unexpected -- possibly unprecedented -- snap of command in Dean's voice stopped John short in his tracks. He stood there frozen, one fist still back for a second blow, and fought to get his ragged breathing under control. After a few seconds, he felt Dean's hand on his elbow, firmly pushing down. He let his arm drop, uncurled his fingers with an effort and took a step backward, away from the skinny kid he'd just knocked flat on his ass.
Even with the spiky blue hair and the nose ring, it took John a moment to recognize the guy. Mike or Marc or something like that, the one who worked at that small vintage music store in Aquebogue, north of the marina. Dean had been hanging out there every chance he got for the past few months, which probably explained the recent appearance of "London Calling" in the Impala's tape box.
John could deal with the music. What he couldn't deal with was coming home early from an afternoon of research to find the blue-haired kid with his hand down Dean's pants on the living room couch.
Just thinking about it made John's hand clench back into a fist. He didn't say a word, but something must've shown in his eyes, because Mike-or-Marc scrambled to his feet and took and took a couple of shaky steps toward the door. John waited for him to bolt, but the kid stopped, one hand still pressed against his bleeding mouth, and aimed a questioning look at Dean, who made frantic shooing motions with his hands. That proved to be the final motivation Mike-or-Marc needed to sprint for the door. John resisted the impulse to follow, and turned to look at his son instead.
Dean backed up a little and folded his arms defensively across his chest, holding John's gaze with hooded, wary eyes. The hard-voiced confidence of his earlier outburst had apparently deserted him. He looked awkward and young, with his hair all mussed and his shirt untucked and--
"Zip yourself up," John growled.
Dean's face flushed bright red. He ducked his head and hunched forward a little, hands not quite steady as he did up his fly.
"You gonna hit me too?" he muttered without looking up.
"What? No." The question was unexpected enough to startle John out of the worst depths of his anger. Outside of sparring, he'd never laid a hand on Dean. "Why the hell would I hit you?"
Dean's shoulders lifted about an inch, then slumped down again. "Why'd you hit Matt?"
John was trying to sputter out a coherent answer to that when the boys' bedroom door creaked open.
"Dean?" Sammy stood in the doorway, clutching his Walkman in one hand. "Hi, Dad. What's going on?"
It was a little startling to see how quickly Dean's face and posture snapped back to a convincing approximation of his usual swaggering manner. "Nothing. Do your homework, twerp."
"I'm done already." Sam's face scrunched into a suspicious frown that seemed to be becoming a permanent feature lately. "Did Matt leave? I thought you guys were going to get pizza or something."
John's fading anger flared back to life again. Sam was talking as if Matt being in he house was an ordinary occurrence. The thought of that blue-haired freak pawing at Dean was bad enough. That he'd been doing it with Sammy right there in the next room...
"Come outside with me, Dean." He did his best to keep his voice even, but the looks on the boys' faces suggested that he didn't quite succeed. Sam looked as if he was about to start demanding explanations, but Dean waved him back and followed John to the kitchen and out the back door.
The back yard was a tiny square patch of overgrown yellowed grass, as shabby and ill-kept as the house itself. There was an ancient motorboat rusting near the fence, and a rickety teak bench near the door. Some friends of Caleb's had let John use the place while investigating a haunted light house a couple of miles down the coast. The haunting turned out to be a bust, but the owners were willing to let them stay on until the end of the school year. John had thought it would be a nice, quiet place to settle for a while. Good for the boys.
Clearly, he hadn't been paying enough attention.
He looked at Dean, who'd sunk into a dejected slump on the bench, and felt a stab of guilt for not having asked the most important question before now.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," Dean muttered, sounding utterly miserable. "You didn't have to hit Matt. Not like it's his fault."
"Like hell it isn't. You're sixteen, for fuck's sake, and he's-- he's--" John stumbled to an awkward silence, because now that he thought about it, he had no clue how old Matt was. Sure as hell older than sixteen, anyhow.
"He's nineteen," Dean said, "and I don't see what that has to do with anything."
"You don't see..." John closed his eyes for a moment and pinched the bridge of his nose. "You do realize there's laws against that sort of thing, right?"
Dean's disgusted eye-roll would've earned a reprimand on any other occasion, but this time John was just relieved to see it. Surely, the kid had to be okay if he could still give his old man attitude like that. "Yeah, 'cause we're such upstanding law-abiding citizens all the time."
"That's not the point."
"What is, then?"
"The point is..." John took a deep breath. "If he made you do anything you didn't want to do--"
"He didn't!" Dean sprang to his feet. "Look, I made the first move, okay? Weeks ago. Because I really, really wanted to. And..." He paused, bit his lip, and stood up very stiff and straight, almost at attention. "He's not the first guy I've messed around with. I like guys."
"No, you don't," John blurted out, a split second before the sheer idiocy of his own words caught up to him. "I mean, what's the deal with all those girls, then?" Because there had definitely been girls since Dean hit puberty. An insane number of girls, in fact, some of them at least as old as Matt.
Dean scuffed one foot against the dead grass. "I like girls, too."
"You do."
"Yes, sir. Sam says it works that way sometimes."
Jesus fucking Christ. "You've talked to Sam about it?"
Dean shrugged. "Not exactly a big crowd of people around I can talk to."
The words, and the resigned way Dean spoke them, felt like a punch to the gut. How desperate did Dean have to be, to resort to talking about his sex life with his twelve-year-old brother? And yet, not desperate enough to talk to John. And now the kid was standing there all wary and tense, as if braced for an attack.
As well he might, considering John had busted in and started swinging less than five minutes ago. Fuck.
In the back of his mind, John could hear his old drill instructor's gravelly bark, as sharp and deafening now as it had been over twenty years ago in Parris Island. "Do you want to be a MARINE, or do you want to be a FAGGOT?"
It hadn't been a rhetorical question. In those first few weeks at basic training, John had lost count of how many times he'd had to shout the answer at the top of his lungs while squeezing out yet another pushup on trembling arms. "Sir, this recruit wants to be a Marine, Sir!"
The distinction seemed kind of meaningless in-country six months later, when he and Deacon used to regularly jack each other off behind the latrines, desperate for a touch from any hand other than their own. And it became even more meaningless in Saigon, where uniformed GIs openly cruised each other in the rooftop bars on Tu Do Street while bombs lit up the horizon like fireworks. Still, no matter how much John had seen, it was hard to completely let go of that early lesson. A faggot or a Marine. Never both.
Except that Dean wasn't a Marine. Or a faggot, dammit. Dean was no one's soldier but John's, no one's son but John's, and had always made it clear that he needed no one's approval but John's. Which meant that if he was standing there with fear in his eyes, it was no one's fault but John's.
"Dean." John could feel his face creasing into a frown even as he spoke, and made an effort to smooth out his expression. "I'm not mad at you, all right?"
Dean's posture didn't relax. "Yes, sir."
"I mean it. I'll be honest with you: this isn't how I wanted to find out, and it sure as hell isn't what I wanted to find out. But you're my son. There's no conditions attached to that."
Dean's face went pink again. He bit his lip and dipped his head a little, still mainaining his posure as if his life depended on it.
"I don't want to disappoint you," he said quiety.
"You didn't." John took a step forward. "Come here." Dean didn't move, so after a moment, John took another step and gripped Dean's shoulder to pull him into a hug. It was awkward at first, but after a few seconds Dean blew out a long, shaky breath and relaxed minutely in John's arms.
"I won't say there isn't any way you could disappoint me," John told him. "But this isn't it."
They stood there for a minute or so, and John was just starting to think that maybe it was safe to declare the moment over when Dean went all tense again and pulled away.
"Dad?"
"Yes?"
"I think..."
John waited for the end of the sentence, but Dean seemed to have trouble getting it out.
"What is it, son?"
Dean took a deep breath and spit the words out all in one breath. "Ithinkyoushouldapologize."
John felt a bit taken aback, not so much by the demand itself as by the fact that Dean actually voiced it. It wasn't Dean's style to demand apologies or hold grudges. Then again, maybe this was a sign of how important this was to the boy. John squared his shoulders.
"I'm sorry, Dean."
"Thanks, Dad." Dean's exasperated voice and accompanying eye-roll were both disturbingly Sammyish. "But I don't mean to me."
"Huh?" John blinked. "Then what do-- oh. Right."
* * * * *
The music store was empty when John walked it, which was a relief. He marched straight toward the cash register at the back, ignoring the racks of vinyl record albums in faded paper sleeves lined up on either side of him, the psychedelic posters on the walls, and the opening chords of "Satisfaction" jangling from a speaker somewhere in the back.
Matt was behind the counter with his back to the register, sorting through a box of cassette tapes. He turned around when John cleared his throat, and froze like a deer in the headlights. His lower lip was swollen and his jaw looked bruised, which made John feel even shittier than he had the day before. Especially since, for all his punk-rocker trappings, Matt was a short, skinny kid, about as dangerous-looking as a puppy in a spiked collar.
"Hi." John resisted the urge to clear his throat again. "Uhm... Matt, right?" He waited for a response, but the boy just stood there, eyes darting nervously from side to side. John decided there was nothing left to do but plow ahead. "Look, I spoke to Dean, and I see now that I reacted badly yesterday. I shouldn't have lost my temper, and I sure as hell shouldn't have hit you, and I apologize."
There, that wasn't so bad. John plastered on a grin and stuck out his hand. Matt blinked at it. In the back, Mick Jagger announced to the world that he tried, and he tried, and he tried. John was just starting to wonder if he'd be required to come up with something else to say, when Matt finally stopped blinking and shifted his weight a little, leaning sideways to look past John's shoulder toward the front of the store.
John tensed. Was there somebody coming up behind him? Would a hole-in-the-wall place like this one actually have a security guard? He took a step back from the counter, put on his best authority-placating smile, and turned toward the window.
The shop was empty. But out on the sidewalk, standing with his nose practically pressed up against the glass, was Dean, whose definition of "wait in the car" seemed to include waiting on the sidewalk across the street from the car. When he saw John and Matt watching, he grinned and gave a quick thumbs-up.
Apparently, that was the reassurance Matt had been waiting for, because he looked considerably less pale when John faced him again. "Apology accepted," he said in a strained voice. John held out his hand, and Matt gave it one half-hearted shake before dropping it as if it was on fire.
"Right. Okay. I'll... I'll be going then." John shoved his hands in his pockets and marched back to the door.
Dean was fidgeting right outside the door when John stepped out.
"Well?" he demanded.
John glowered at him. "It's done. We are never discussing this again," he growled.
"But did he--"
"Dean."
"Yes, sir."
Author: marinarusalka
Characters/pairings: John, Dean/OMC
Rating PG-13, mostly for language
Warnings: None, really, but Dean is 16 in the story, so don't click if the very concept offends you.
Summary: Sometimes, it's a bad idea to come home early.
AN: Written for the lgbtfest, prompt #770: John finds out that one or both of his sons is gay/bi. How does he react? Thanks to brynwulf and innie_darling for their mad beta-reading skillz.
"Dad, stop! Now!"
The combination of the words and the unexpected -- possibly unprecedented -- snap of command in Dean's voice stopped John short in his tracks. He stood there frozen, one fist still back for a second blow, and fought to get his ragged breathing under control. After a few seconds, he felt Dean's hand on his elbow, firmly pushing down. He let his arm drop, uncurled his fingers with an effort and took a step backward, away from the skinny kid he'd just knocked flat on his ass.
Even with the spiky blue hair and the nose ring, it took John a moment to recognize the guy. Mike or Marc or something like that, the one who worked at that small vintage music store in Aquebogue, north of the marina. Dean had been hanging out there every chance he got for the past few months, which probably explained the recent appearance of "London Calling" in the Impala's tape box.
John could deal with the music. What he couldn't deal with was coming home early from an afternoon of research to find the blue-haired kid with his hand down Dean's pants on the living room couch.
Just thinking about it made John's hand clench back into a fist. He didn't say a word, but something must've shown in his eyes, because Mike-or-Marc scrambled to his feet and took and took a couple of shaky steps toward the door. John waited for him to bolt, but the kid stopped, one hand still pressed against his bleeding mouth, and aimed a questioning look at Dean, who made frantic shooing motions with his hands. That proved to be the final motivation Mike-or-Marc needed to sprint for the door. John resisted the impulse to follow, and turned to look at his son instead.
Dean backed up a little and folded his arms defensively across his chest, holding John's gaze with hooded, wary eyes. The hard-voiced confidence of his earlier outburst had apparently deserted him. He looked awkward and young, with his hair all mussed and his shirt untucked and--
"Zip yourself up," John growled.
Dean's face flushed bright red. He ducked his head and hunched forward a little, hands not quite steady as he did up his fly.
"You gonna hit me too?" he muttered without looking up.
"What? No." The question was unexpected enough to startle John out of the worst depths of his anger. Outside of sparring, he'd never laid a hand on Dean. "Why the hell would I hit you?"
Dean's shoulders lifted about an inch, then slumped down again. "Why'd you hit Matt?"
John was trying to sputter out a coherent answer to that when the boys' bedroom door creaked open.
"Dean?" Sammy stood in the doorway, clutching his Walkman in one hand. "Hi, Dad. What's going on?"
It was a little startling to see how quickly Dean's face and posture snapped back to a convincing approximation of his usual swaggering manner. "Nothing. Do your homework, twerp."
"I'm done already." Sam's face scrunched into a suspicious frown that seemed to be becoming a permanent feature lately. "Did Matt leave? I thought you guys were going to get pizza or something."
John's fading anger flared back to life again. Sam was talking as if Matt being in he house was an ordinary occurrence. The thought of that blue-haired freak pawing at Dean was bad enough. That he'd been doing it with Sammy right there in the next room...
"Come outside with me, Dean." He did his best to keep his voice even, but the looks on the boys' faces suggested that he didn't quite succeed. Sam looked as if he was about to start demanding explanations, but Dean waved him back and followed John to the kitchen and out the back door.
The back yard was a tiny square patch of overgrown yellowed grass, as shabby and ill-kept as the house itself. There was an ancient motorboat rusting near the fence, and a rickety teak bench near the door. Some friends of Caleb's had let John use the place while investigating a haunted light house a couple of miles down the coast. The haunting turned out to be a bust, but the owners were willing to let them stay on until the end of the school year. John had thought it would be a nice, quiet place to settle for a while. Good for the boys.
Clearly, he hadn't been paying enough attention.
He looked at Dean, who'd sunk into a dejected slump on the bench, and felt a stab of guilt for not having asked the most important question before now.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," Dean muttered, sounding utterly miserable. "You didn't have to hit Matt. Not like it's his fault."
"Like hell it isn't. You're sixteen, for fuck's sake, and he's-- he's--" John stumbled to an awkward silence, because now that he thought about it, he had no clue how old Matt was. Sure as hell older than sixteen, anyhow.
"He's nineteen," Dean said, "and I don't see what that has to do with anything."
"You don't see..." John closed his eyes for a moment and pinched the bridge of his nose. "You do realize there's laws against that sort of thing, right?"
Dean's disgusted eye-roll would've earned a reprimand on any other occasion, but this time John was just relieved to see it. Surely, the kid had to be okay if he could still give his old man attitude like that. "Yeah, 'cause we're such upstanding law-abiding citizens all the time."
"That's not the point."
"What is, then?"
"The point is..." John took a deep breath. "If he made you do anything you didn't want to do--"
"He didn't!" Dean sprang to his feet. "Look, I made the first move, okay? Weeks ago. Because I really, really wanted to. And..." He paused, bit his lip, and stood up very stiff and straight, almost at attention. "He's not the first guy I've messed around with. I like guys."
"No, you don't," John blurted out, a split second before the sheer idiocy of his own words caught up to him. "I mean, what's the deal with all those girls, then?" Because there had definitely been girls since Dean hit puberty. An insane number of girls, in fact, some of them at least as old as Matt.
Dean scuffed one foot against the dead grass. "I like girls, too."
"You do."
"Yes, sir. Sam says it works that way sometimes."
Jesus fucking Christ. "You've talked to Sam about it?"
Dean shrugged. "Not exactly a big crowd of people around I can talk to."
The words, and the resigned way Dean spoke them, felt like a punch to the gut. How desperate did Dean have to be, to resort to talking about his sex life with his twelve-year-old brother? And yet, not desperate enough to talk to John. And now the kid was standing there all wary and tense, as if braced for an attack.
As well he might, considering John had busted in and started swinging less than five minutes ago. Fuck.
In the back of his mind, John could hear his old drill instructor's gravelly bark, as sharp and deafening now as it had been over twenty years ago in Parris Island. "Do you want to be a MARINE, or do you want to be a FAGGOT?"
It hadn't been a rhetorical question. In those first few weeks at basic training, John had lost count of how many times he'd had to shout the answer at the top of his lungs while squeezing out yet another pushup on trembling arms. "Sir, this recruit wants to be a Marine, Sir!"
The distinction seemed kind of meaningless in-country six months later, when he and Deacon used to regularly jack each other off behind the latrines, desperate for a touch from any hand other than their own. And it became even more meaningless in Saigon, where uniformed GIs openly cruised each other in the rooftop bars on Tu Do Street while bombs lit up the horizon like fireworks. Still, no matter how much John had seen, it was hard to completely let go of that early lesson. A faggot or a Marine. Never both.
Except that Dean wasn't a Marine. Or a faggot, dammit. Dean was no one's soldier but John's, no one's son but John's, and had always made it clear that he needed no one's approval but John's. Which meant that if he was standing there with fear in his eyes, it was no one's fault but John's.
"Dean." John could feel his face creasing into a frown even as he spoke, and made an effort to smooth out his expression. "I'm not mad at you, all right?"
Dean's posture didn't relax. "Yes, sir."
"I mean it. I'll be honest with you: this isn't how I wanted to find out, and it sure as hell isn't what I wanted to find out. But you're my son. There's no conditions attached to that."
Dean's face went pink again. He bit his lip and dipped his head a little, still mainaining his posure as if his life depended on it.
"I don't want to disappoint you," he said quiety.
"You didn't." John took a step forward. "Come here." Dean didn't move, so after a moment, John took another step and gripped Dean's shoulder to pull him into a hug. It was awkward at first, but after a few seconds Dean blew out a long, shaky breath and relaxed minutely in John's arms.
"I won't say there isn't any way you could disappoint me," John told him. "But this isn't it."
They stood there for a minute or so, and John was just starting to think that maybe it was safe to declare the moment over when Dean went all tense again and pulled away.
"Dad?"
"Yes?"
"I think..."
John waited for the end of the sentence, but Dean seemed to have trouble getting it out.
"What is it, son?"
Dean took a deep breath and spit the words out all in one breath. "Ithinkyoushouldapologize."
John felt a bit taken aback, not so much by the demand itself as by the fact that Dean actually voiced it. It wasn't Dean's style to demand apologies or hold grudges. Then again, maybe this was a sign of how important this was to the boy. John squared his shoulders.
"I'm sorry, Dean."
"Thanks, Dad." Dean's exasperated voice and accompanying eye-roll were both disturbingly Sammyish. "But I don't mean to me."
"Huh?" John blinked. "Then what do-- oh. Right."
* * * * *
The music store was empty when John walked it, which was a relief. He marched straight toward the cash register at the back, ignoring the racks of vinyl record albums in faded paper sleeves lined up on either side of him, the psychedelic posters on the walls, and the opening chords of "Satisfaction" jangling from a speaker somewhere in the back.
Matt was behind the counter with his back to the register, sorting through a box of cassette tapes. He turned around when John cleared his throat, and froze like a deer in the headlights. His lower lip was swollen and his jaw looked bruised, which made John feel even shittier than he had the day before. Especially since, for all his punk-rocker trappings, Matt was a short, skinny kid, about as dangerous-looking as a puppy in a spiked collar.
"Hi." John resisted the urge to clear his throat again. "Uhm... Matt, right?" He waited for a response, but the boy just stood there, eyes darting nervously from side to side. John decided there was nothing left to do but plow ahead. "Look, I spoke to Dean, and I see now that I reacted badly yesterday. I shouldn't have lost my temper, and I sure as hell shouldn't have hit you, and I apologize."
There, that wasn't so bad. John plastered on a grin and stuck out his hand. Matt blinked at it. In the back, Mick Jagger announced to the world that he tried, and he tried, and he tried. John was just starting to wonder if he'd be required to come up with something else to say, when Matt finally stopped blinking and shifted his weight a little, leaning sideways to look past John's shoulder toward the front of the store.
John tensed. Was there somebody coming up behind him? Would a hole-in-the-wall place like this one actually have a security guard? He took a step back from the counter, put on his best authority-placating smile, and turned toward the window.
The shop was empty. But out on the sidewalk, standing with his nose practically pressed up against the glass, was Dean, whose definition of "wait in the car" seemed to include waiting on the sidewalk across the street from the car. When he saw John and Matt watching, he grinned and gave a quick thumbs-up.
Apparently, that was the reassurance Matt had been waiting for, because he looked considerably less pale when John faced him again. "Apology accepted," he said in a strained voice. John held out his hand, and Matt gave it one half-hearted shake before dropping it as if it was on fire.
"Right. Okay. I'll... I'll be going then." John shoved his hands in his pockets and marched back to the door.
Dean was fidgeting right outside the door when John stepped out.
"Well?" he demanded.
John glowered at him. "It's done. We are never discussing this again," he growled.
"But did he--"
"Dean."
"Yes, sir."