Objects in the Rearview Mirror
Title: Objects in the Rearview Mirror
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3600
Disclaimer: Not my boys. Just following in Kripke's footsteps and hurting them a little.
Summary: Dean is down with the fever from hell and lets something slip he never meant for John to find out. (Rated for language and possibly real, possibly completely imagined child abuse)
Neurotic A/N: So I'm visiting my parents at the moment (who moved to China of all places...) and this is the kind of weird tangent my brain goes off on when it's on a too long flight, dealing with the idea of seeing my folks again and listening to Meat Loaf. I still don't know what to think of this one, but I figured I might as well post it.
“You pull a stunt like that again, the two of us are gonna dance, you got me?”
The two of us are gonna dance.
Seven words, meant as a joke, maybe a small slap down, just to make sure his son knew that he better not make a habit of going on a hunt hiding a 103.5° fever and collapsing in a half dug grave, brain fried six ways from Sunday.
John turns around, offering a refilled coffee mug full of whiskey and crashed Tylenol - the Winchester version of cough syrup - and a small smile to soften the blow to his son’s ego and in the two seconds he had his back turned, everything’s been screwed to hell.
Dean isn’t slouched against the kitchen table anymore, the soggy ice pack he’s reluctantly been pressing against his temple dropped on the floor. His shoulders are trembling, his fists clenching, unclenching, neck and jaw so overwrought with tension that he’ll probably pop a vein if he keeps it up. It’s his eyes that make chills run up and down John’s spine, though. Wide with fear. Fever bright. Big and childlike, green almost gone behind the black; pupils shot to hell.
It makes John question his whiskey/Tylenol remedy. Especially the second dose, because clearly Dean doesn’t need any more alcohol in his system to screw with his haywire emotions.
“Dean?”
Dean’s eyes skitter over the empty bottle of Jack on the counter, the window, the door; settle on John’s hands with the mug, everything about his posture screaming run.
“You…no, Dad, please…” he breathes in a harsh whisper.
John looks over his shoulder, checking for some sort of threat behind him, back at Dean, tries to make sense of why the fuck his kid’s eyes would ever look at him like that. Dean’s had some pretty weird reactions to painkillers before, sure, but he’s usually okay with children’s medication and hard liquor. The combo tends to make him drowsy, not acid-trip-gone-bad delirious. But he’s still staring like that and John isn’t even trying to be particularly intimidating here and just fuck, he hates it when he’s lost like that.
A prank, shoots through is head. That must be it. Some weird, half-assed attempt at freshmen humor that John has told him a million times to outgrow and that makes perfect sense to his muddled brain right now.
“Snap out of it” he tells the kid. “This ain’t funny, you hear me?”
John takes a step towards Dean, Dean stumbles two steps back until his back hits the far wall and the fear turns to barely contained panic. His eyes close and his breathing gets even shallower.
Alright, possibly not a prank then, because John told him to snap out of it and the sky will turn green and oceans will freeze before Dean just up and decides to keep up his act when he was told to drop it.
John puts his whiskey mug on the counter with a loud clunck and he hears a quiet plea from the other side of the room.
“C’mon Dad, you don’t wanna do this again.”
“Son, look at me?” he tries to turn it into a request, rather than an order, but God knows he’s never been good at asking for anything.
Dean's eyes snap open, regardless.
John takes another step towards his son, which in the crammed motel room basically means closing the distance between them. Dean tries to push himself further into the greenish flowery wall paper. John figures if there’s an actual way of creating a human/wall hybrid, Dean is on the verge of discovering it. Fucking fever screwing with the kid’s head. John wonders if there’s a way to salt and burn germs.
“Hey, it’s alright” he tries for the voice he’s seen people on TV use when talking to cornered animals and mentally deranged patients. “Just me, okay?”
John isn’t really sure how that is supposed to be comforting when ‘just him’ is obviously what’s got Dean spooked in the first place. It’s doing something, though, ‘cause Dean looks him over appraisingly, watches his open, slightly raised palms for a second, eyes the whiskey on the counter again, before settling on a spot on the door above John’s shoulder.
“You’re…” his voice comes out raspy and painful and he has to clear his throat before he tries again. “You’re not gonna..?”
“Not gonna what?” John prompts when Dean clamps his mouth shut and starts working his fingernails into a tear in the wallpaper.
Dean looks at him like he’s being an idiot, like John should obviously know what Dean is asking about, without making him say the words out loud, but John’s completely lost.
Dean’s eyes fall back to the floor and his voice again comes as a rough whisper.
“Hurt me,” he finishes, raising eyes that look absurdly hopeful at the prospect of not being hurt by his father.
“What?” John snaps, making Dean flinch and draw up his left shoulder. He tries to continue in a calmer voice. “Wha..? No, ‘course I’m not gonna hurt you.”
“But…you said…I mean…” John tries to remember the last time he saw the kid nervous enough to stutter and comes up empty. “You said we were-“
The two of us are gonna dance.
“Dean, that was a joke, kid” John tries to explain, swiping a nervous hand over his scrubby chin.
He watches his son turn this new information over in his head, until his lips form a silent ‘Oh’. Dean’s ears flush bright red, matching the feverish tinge of his cheeks. He’s not moving away from the wall, though. “Right. ‘cause you’re not…and you don’t…anymore and…”
For a second John is overcome with the almost overwhelming urge to wrap his arms around Dean and hug the crap outa his kid, except they haven’t been that kind of family for a really long time and it'd be weird and awkward and emasculating. Instead he takes a step back and Dean heaves a sigh of relief at the added space between them.
“Dean, what’s wrong?” John fishes around in his head for some more or less plausible theory. Because no way in hell is this just a fever hallucination thing. “You ditch some voodoo girl a couple towns over?”
Dean shakes his head, whispering an urgent “no, sir”, eyes focusing on John’s hands again.
“Then what the fuck’s going on?”
“Nothin’. Sorry. Sir.”
Dean’s arms are wrapped around his middle now, looking half his twenty-four years at best, bloodshot, glassy eyes glued to the floor, short hair flat and wet against his forehead. And John still has no clue what on earth is going on here.
“Son, you’re scaring me” he half laughs, half sobs.
Dean makes a bitter, disbelieving sound in the back of his throat, like he’s about to deliver some patented Dean smart-ass comment about how absurd that sounds given their situation, but stops himself last minute, dropping his eyes again and mumbling “sorry”.
“Quit apologizing, already.” John congratulates himself for actually managing to sound gentle. “Tell me what kinda shit got to you here.”
This time Dean doesn’t quite hold back the humorless chuckle. John waits for an explanation that doesn’t come. How’s he gonna get the kid to talk to him? Neither of them are great communicators at the best of times and this is pretty fucking far from that. It’d be easier if they were camped out somewhere on a back road, sharing a bottle or two on the hood of the Impala, tongues lose and tempers eased from the alcohol. John actually throws a glance back at the abandoned cup on the counter and wonders briefly whether normal parents tend to make plans for getting their children drunk to make them talk about their irrational fears of said parents ‘hurting them’.
Dean catches his stray glance and when he finally decides to speak again, it’s about as helpful as anything he’s said before.
“Sorry,” he mumbles again, words slurring together, trembling slightly with the effort of staying upright. “I didn’t mean to bring it up, I…it’s the…” he points to his sweaty forehead. “and the…” pointing to the whiskey mug on the counter. “Sorry.”
Dean takes a tentative step towards the bathroom. John doesn’t miss how he almost crashes into the kitchen table in his attempt to keep as much distance between them as possible.
“Dean, stay.”
Dean’s feet stop moving. He looks vaguely annoyed, frowning down at the floor, like he himself had little choice in the matter of stopping.
“Sit.”
Dean slumps down on the frayed green and yellow comforter of his bed.
“You need something to drink?” John asks, more as a ways of filling the threatening silence than anything else. He doesn’t wait for Dean’s silent nod, before he makes his way into the bathroom to take a ridiculously long amount of time to fill a glass with tab water.
Fingering the cell phone in his pocket, John has half a mind to call Bobby Singer and ask for advice. The man always had a way of getting Dean on levels John never managed. Maybe the old mechanic could offer some sort of insight as to how an innocent comment about domestic violence would lead to…this.
Sure, he’s never exactly won any schmoopy, cuddly father of the year mugs and he’ll be the first to admit - if only to himself - that he sometimes crossed the line. He raised his boys to have a healthy respect for his right hand; not like he had a whole lot of options, raisings two kids on the road. But he can still count on one hand the times he actually lost it and popped Dean in the mouth and anyway, nothing he did ever came even close to inspiring the kind of fear he just saw. Fired up by fever and whiskey or not.
Calling Singer would be admitting defeat though and he’s not about to do that, so he snatches the glass off the counter and puts it on the nightstand for Dean to take.
Dean waits until John’s fingers have completely left the glass before he reaches out and knocks back the entire thing in one quick gulp. John takes the glass once it’s been placed back on the nightstand, refills it and slumps down on his own bed, facing his son.
“So?” he asks, spreading his arms wide, waiting for an explanation.
Dean blinks sheepishly, eyeing him with distrust. At least the fear’s been dialed back some.
“So?” he asks back, apparently expecting John to have his fever hallucinations completely figured out.
“So, what’s with the sudden idea that I’m tryin’ to hurt you?” John finally supplies.
“I uhm…” Dean seems completely thrown by the question. He finally answers, pointing to his sweaty temple again. “Fever, y’know? Flashback. Sorry, I really didn’t mean to bring it up.”
“Flashback? Flashback to what?”
Dean draws in a shaky breath like he’s getting ready to answer, then stops and grabs the refilled cup from the nightstand. He stares down into the coppery liquid for so long, John’d usually be getting on his case for drifting off.
Finally he answers in one harsh whisper, words tumbling over each other in a rush to get it over with. “Flashback to when you’d come home in the middle of the night, completely shitfaced ‘n knock me across the room, okay?”
John’s insides cramp together like he’s just been punched, his head reels with confusion and, “What?”
Dean’s hands hastily clench around his glass, shaking so badly from fear or fever, John can’t tell. Water is sloshing over the cup and dropping onto the filthy carpet.
“What?” John repeats, because really, it’s the only word rolling around in his head right now.
“Don’t make me say it again,” Dean whispers, a painful, reflexive smile twitches across his face. “This ain’t exactly my favorite topic of conversation, y’know?”
“I don’t…what the fuck?” John growls, confusion and worry finally getting the better of him and coming out as anger. More water gets spilled on the floor when Dean twitches nervously at the outburst. “Sorry. Kid, I’m sorry,” John quickly trains his voice back into a concerned grumble that doesn’t even begin to hide his own fear of whatever this is. “Just gimme something to work with here. I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Drawing in a long, shaky breath, Dean slowly raises glassy, bloodshot eyes to meet his father’s. “I’m talking about…” his words are slow and heavy with fever and emotion and he’s swaying with the effort it seems to take to not just collapse right now. “Wait, you…you serious?”
John leans forwards slightly, Dean doesn’t lean back this time. “Son, I have no idea what this fever’s doing to your head, but I can promise you I never came home drunk and knocked you across the room.” He’s sure on the second part at least.
“Wow,” Dean huffs, taking a quick sip of his water. “That’s some bitch of a blackout. I mean…you never said anything ‘bout it once you’d slept it off. Always figured we were pretending it didn’t happen.”
It takes all the limited restraint John’s got to stay on his own bed and not crush the kid against his chest and tell him to snap out of his crazy nightmare world.
“Dean,” he tries again. He could just tell him to lie down and sleep until this fucked up fever isn’t messing with his head anymore, but something primal and desperate inside of John keeps screaming at him that he can’t let his kid fall asleep, thinking his own father wants to hurt him, so he keeps going. “Dean-o, I know this feels real right now but you gotta believe me kid, I never did anything to hurt you.”
Dean shoots him a long, passive look, before his eyes drop and focus on the glass in his hands again. “Sure you didn’t,” he sighs, voice low and resigned. “Nothing ever happened. ’m fine. Just…I need to sleep, okay?”
Maybe it’s the tone in his son’s voice, or it’s the words themselves, or maybe even the record amount of thought John has just given to the possibility of being a goddamn drunk child abuser, but all of a sudden, he is assaulted by a flood of memories crashing into his mind from every which direction. Memories of stumbling rage and blinding fury and bloody knuckles and really, if he’s capable of waking up cuffed in a cell for bar fights he can’t remember, then isn’t it also possible that he beat the shit out of his own kid and came out of it with not a single memory intact?
The next thing John knows is he’s emptying the meager contents of his stomach into the trashcan that’s magically appeared in front of his face. Long after the last remnants of his coffee soaked, half digested breakfast burrito have slid down the thin plastic covering, his entire body keeps convulsing in violent heaves, almost like if he just tries hard enough he can get rid of the terrifying, shameful thing that just maybe lives inside of him.
Even after the dry heaving has stopped, he keeps himself hunched over, trembling arms damn near crushing the plastic can in his hands.
“Dad?” Dean’s soft whisper crashes into him like a punch and John forces himself to uncurl enough to look up at the blurry image of his son (who’s still here. Why is he still here? Why didn’t he leave years ago? How can he even stand to be in the same room with a monster like that?). “Dad, look, I really thought you remembered,” in one coltish motion, he pushes the glass he’s been holding on to for the last minutes into John’s hand, making sure their fingers touch for a brief second before he scoots back to the safety of his own bed. Still, John can feel the heat radiating off of the kid. The glass is slick with cold sweat. “I didn’t mean to bring back any memories, okay? I’m so-“
“Don’t you-“ John’s thunderous bark probably has Dean flinching again, but he can’t be sure. The entire room has turned into dull splotches of color behind his veil of unshed tears. “Don’t you dare apologize for what I did to you!”
God, he doesn’t even know what it is he did.
“Dean, please,” he’s not really surprised when his words come out in a choked sob. “Please, you gotta tell me what happened.”
He can hear Dean clear his throat and when he finally answers it’s a lot closer to his usual gruff, unaffected drawl. John’s absurdly thankful for that. “Some fucked up shit, that’s what happened.”
Of course, Dean getting back to normal also means the defenses are coming back up, so John has about two seconds left to get any sort of helpful answers.
“That’s not good enough. I need to know-“
“No you don’t,” Dean interrupts him, voice still tired and his words slow, but to anyone who doesn’t have the questionable luck of being a Winchester, there’d be no trace of his earlier quiver. “You don’t need to know, ‘cause it wasn’t you.” John desperately rubs at his eyes to stop the ever heavier tears from falling. “Wasn’t you, okay? You…you don’t even remember. Didn’t happen all that often, anyway. Hell, I know I can be a mean drunk and I never lost anyone the way you lost Mom and…‘n ya didn’t know what you were doin’, okay? You were usually cryin’ by the end of it and…it wasn’t you,” he ends abruptly, like he suddenly realized he was rambling and his father is a straight answers kind of guy.
John wants to punch something. And throw it against a wall. Preferably something expensive that would make a lot of noise. And he wants to scream and yell until his lungs give out and at the very least he wants a fucking drink. All the things he’ll never be able to do again without feeling sick to his stomach.
“How…how often did..?”
“I dunno,” Dean shuts him down and scrambles to get under his sheets, too tired or sick or weary of this conversation to bother with getting out of his jeans or over shirt or boots. John’s two seconds for getting answers are officially over. “Not like I kept a fucking diary about it or somethin’.”
John scrapes a trembling hand over his jaw again, staring at the lump of blankets on the other bed. He needs to say so many things, but in the end the only thing he can do is take another shaky breath when his heart skips a beat in shock.
“Jesus, is that why-“
“No.”
Dean’s answer is certain, but he can’t possibly know what he’s denying. Mostly ‘cause John himself doesn’t even know what he’s asking.
Is that why you always do what I tell you to? Is that why you always panicked when Sammy and I had a go at each other?
Whatever it is, the answer is apparently no.
John spends the rest of the night sitting silent vigil, watching Dean’s heavy fever sleep. He doesn’t know if he expected it or not, but there are no nightmares, no tossing and turning, no mumbling or screaming. He looks pale and overall like hell, but if John didn’t know better he’d say this was no different from any other time Dean was sick. When Dean was little more than a baby. When their world was still right. Or John’s world. He’s not sure how Dean’s world could have been anywhere close to right in years.
Dean sleeps for the better part of the next day and still, John can’t bring himself to get up and take his eyes off the form on the bed. He doesn’t feel like he can eat without throwing up, anyway. He does want that whiskey cup that’s still sitting on the counter, needs it with an ache deep in his bones, but he’s not going to drink anything. Ever again.
Dean’s fever breaks sometime in the late evening and John realizes that in all the tearful, confused blubbering he did last night, he never even managed to come up with so much as an apology.
Dean’s brow furrows when he brings it up. Says he has no idea what John’s talking about, says he doesn’t remember a thing after collapsing in the grave, says whatever he said it must have been the fever talking.
John tries to insist on talking this out and gets stonewalled again (“c’mon, Dad, think about it. Do you think Sammy would’ve kept quiet about that for twenty freaking years? Don’t ya think I would’ve dumped your ass a long time ago? I got some sense of self preservation, y’know?”).
John knows he shouldn’t believe it. His son is too good a con man to be trusted on this.
But Dean is offering him a gift here and it might be selfish to take it, but his arguments aren’t completely invalid. Sam would have thrown ‘you beat Dean on a regular basis’ into his repertoire of reasons why John was a sucky father. Dean would have left at least after his brother was out of the picture. It’s just enough to let John cling to the hope that it was all just an awful night with some freak delusions that never needs to be thought of again.
“Right,” he allows, not even trying to meet the kid’s eyes. “Glad it was just the fever. You had me spooked there for a moment.”
Dean laughs his quiet, shaky laugh. “Yeah. Sorry ’bout that.”