I Guess We Know the Score
Title: I Guess We Know the Score
Rating: R
Wordcount: 2000
Disclaimer: Not my boys. Kripke is the one who started hurting them.
Warnings: Language (duh) and teenage prostitution. Nothing graphic though.
Summary: Sometimes Dad doesn't leave them nearly enough money. Sammy gets hungry, Dean doesn't know any other way out.
Written for the awesome hoodie_time Writing Between the Lines Challenge for Prompt 25 by gatorgrrrl
Also, I'm counting this as a fill for Don't Ask Don't Tell for my angst_bingo card.
*THEN*
“Another week at least,” Dad says through the phone.
Dean grips the phone harder. “A week?” He thinks his voice sounds calm, but he can’t really tell through the angry static in his head.
“I know, son. It can’t be helped. I’m sorry.” Sorry. He’s always sorry. “Keep an eye on things. Look out for Sammy. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Yes, sir.” The words scrape across Dean’s tongue.
Dad hangs up and Dean forces his fingers to relax. He can feel Sam’s eyes burning into the back of his head.
He sets the phone down carefully, doesn’t look at Sam.
“How long this time?” Sam asks in a hard voice. Dean thinks Sam’s too young to be so cynical.
He turns. Sees Sam looking at him from the far bed, TV remote resting on his thigh. “Another week,” he says. “At least.”
Sam nods, a muscle knotting in his jaw as he turns back towards the TV.
Two days later, they run out of money. Even the reserves Dean keeps stuffed inside his duffel are gone.
*NOW*
There have been five victims so far. Call girls, crack whores, one escort. Found in seedy back alleys in various states of undress, giant knives sticking out of their bellies.
The police are downright giddy, looking for their very own Jack the Ripper, the papers going crazy in their attempt to outbid each other, playing some fucked up game of Pin the Tail on the Serial Killer and Dean should have figured it out right there.
Should have figured out that the mere thought of working in a town with a vengeful spirit, jonesing for the blood of hookers should have him running in the opposite direction yesterday, but somehow his brain doesn’t make the connection.
Not like he’s still doing it and not like he ever thought of himself as a hooker in the first place - hello? No three layers of crumbling makeup, no cheap, platinum blonde hair extensions, no red leather boots, no cunt, not a hooker, thank you very much.
Carry Mason. Alison Taylor. Maria Chavez. Sandy Brunner. Tanya Tisdale.
Their faces have been staring down at Dean from their newspaper cutouts up on the motel room wall for several days now, but somehow he only makes the connection once he’s on the floor, holding his guts together with his blood soaked hands, John staring down at him in shock.
Okay, so maybe occasionally giving head for money does count as prostitution.
*THEN*
Dean has to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Sleep deprivation and low blood sugar shoot right up to his brain and have him trying to suppress a hysterical giggle.
“G’night,” he tells his brother, tucks the sheets tightly around the eleven year old. “I’ll think of something. Promise we’ll have some chow tomorrow.”
They’ve been living off of one peanut butter char for a couple of days now. It’s getting ridiculous, what with school being on break and soup kitchens deemed a potential threat by Dad.
And Sammy who can be scary adult and cynical at times slips into his old, comfortable role of little boy who knows nothing of the evils of the real world and falls asleep with a content sigh, fully trusting that his big brother will take care of it, completely unaware that Dean is currently holyfuckpleaseIdon’twannadothisagain freaking out.
Forcing to control his breathing against the rising bile in his throat, Dean squeezes his head through the neck of one of Sammy’s t-shirts. It clings tightly around his chest and upper arms and the hem rides up over his belly button and it kinda makes Dean feel sick to his stomach that he knows what to dress like when he wants to go out and pick up middle aged pedophiles.
*NOW*
Dean pushes back against the black haze that’s clogging up his senses. He tries to shift his weight and a sharp pain shoots across his belly.
Trying to breathe through the pain, he slowly runs heavy, tingly fingers over a throbbing, welted wound that stretches from his left hipbone all the way up to just below his ribs, covered in a neat line of meticulous stitches.
A hand clamps down on Dean’s fingers and John’s deep gravelly voice tells him to stop.
Dean forces his heavy lids to crack open.
The room is dark and smells of a sickening mix of blood, sweat and antiseptic. John is standing right over his bed, eyes trained on the angry, red wound, fingers still wound tightly around Dean’s hand on his stitches.
“Wha’ happened?” Deans rasps when John just keeps staring at him with that unreadable look in his eyes. It makes Dean feel uncomfortable like hell, being scrutinized like that. Being weighed and measured and found wanting.
John’s free hand makes a quick skittish motion over his scrubby, unshaven jaw in the uneasy tick Dean himself has been doing for as long as he can remember.
“Our hooker killing spirit decided to have a go at you.”
Oh.
Fuck.
*THEN*
Dean hopes he can still do this. It’s been some time since he’s had to, but he figures he still has enough of a baby face to turn on some blue balled trucker with a thing for little boys.
He’s finally buzzed off his girly, blonde locks, but he just can’t bring himself to care if it’ll give the guys he is about to blow less to grab onto. Too freakin’ bad. Should have come along last year, before that old dude with the mutton chops damn near yanked off half his scalp.
Five minutes later Dean is rattling off his price list to a drunk, overweight Alice Cooper wanna-be, what with the glittery bracelets and the greasy black hair that he keeps shucking into his face. Says his name is Armand. Yeah, right.
“Pretty eyes you got there,” he slurs. Dean wonders if ‘Armand’ will even remember where his twenty bucks disappeared off to in the morning.
He yanks his chin free from the black manicured fingernails and reminds him that eye contact costs extra.
Dean is glad to hear the sad, disappointed sigh. Having to see the guys’ distorted faces so isn’t worth the extra cash.
*NOW*
Dean’s eyes lock with John’s for a minute. He sees the unspoken question as clearly as if John had said the actual words.
Dean’s mouth opens, closes, doesn’t really come up with anything that could possibly explain this.
Explain why the spirit of Howard Mallard who has made the killing of sex workers his mission in life and death decided to jump Dean and try to cut him open with his own Bowie knife.
John turns away from Dean’s bed and busies himself with the medi kit that’s still lying open on his own pillow. Dean follows the methodical movements. It’s strangely mesmerizing. Like cleaning a gun.
“He knew we were getting close,” John mutters, doesn’t even turn around to pretend to be looking Dean in the eye this time. Dean is pretty much fine with that. “Sometimes a spirit will just lash out at the next best person, when it gets desperate. Don’t matter if you fit the profile.”
That. That’s the explanation Dean was looking for. Still feels empty and wrong and pointless though.
*THEN*
The moment his knees hit the pavement Dean forces his mind out of the situation. Go to his happy place or some shit. Pity, his brain doesn’t really get the idea of happy place, though.
Dean remembers the first time he had to do this.
Stumbling into a dark alley after some sweaty, bulky guy who’d at least had the decency to buy him a drink first. No idea what he was doing, his throat closing up and gagging with both the unfamiliar whiskey churning in his belly and the immediate protest against the guy’s dick shoved way too deep way too quickly.
He’s better at that now. Knows how to loosen up the tight muscles, when to work with his tongue; keep his teeth out of the way. He wonders what the teachers who tell him he just doesn’t apply himself would say if they could see him like this. Here, he’s top of his class.
Most of the times he even manages to hold back on the puking until after he’s done licking clean the last customer.
Maybe he should put ‘giving head’ on his resume once Dad figures he’s old enough to get an actual job.
*NOW*
“I torched the motherfucker,” John finally turns around and his hands are wringing and his eyes are bloodshot and bright with unshed tears. “No need to worry, okay?”
Dean feels a quick reflexive smile twitch across his face because that’s his default reaction to anything remotely serious. Especially serious as in ‘my dad just found out I used to be a whore’. He nods mutely. John knows. He knows and he’s trying to go along with Dean’s secret, but he knowsknowspitiesknows.
John sniffs, he honest to God sniffs and all of a sudden Dean is filled to the brim with a blinding rage that has his heart thumping away in his throat in an erratic rhythm and his fingers violently gathering up the bloody sheets in his cramping fists and there is a very real possibility that he’ll be sick and rip out his stitches and bleed to death right here on top of his filthy, blood covered sheets.
Dean is the one who was left no other out than to throw out the last bits of his already shattered innocence and suck cock when he was little more than a kid and John is the one who’s standing around crying over it? Fuck that shit.
Going without food for days, not doing any schoolwork because the rickety tables were needed for weapons cleaning, losing any hope at all to ever grow into a halfway decent person with a normal life. There were countless sacrifices over the years and most of them Dean didn’t mind too much, but this ain’t one of them. This one is all on Dad.
John goes out of his way to keep his watery eyes trained on the wall above Dean’s pillow when he pushes a plastic bottle and some pills in Dean’s hands. Dean can tell that John is bursting with the effort it takes to stay silent and Dean wants to scream.
He wants John to ask why on earth that spirit decided to lump his son together with a bunch of cheap hookers, so Dean can tell him.
Because you left us to fucking starve, Dad. You never left enough money and I had no idea when you were gonna be back and we were so goddamn hungry. So your perfect little soldier turned into nothing more than a toothless crack whore for the night.
How’s that for a reason?
John doesn’t ask him to explain though.
*THEN*
Dean imagines Sammy’s delighted smile when he’ll see the fresh toast and Spaghetti-O’s and the pile of chocolate bars in the morning. The image takes his mind off of the vile taste in his mouth and the painful cramps that are wrecking through his guts while he’s spewing thick strings of bile and cum into the rusty toilet of a rundown Burger King.
Sammy will accept that money just magically appears every once in a while after you’ve found every last stack empty and Dad will shrug and congratulate himself on leaving the exact right amount of cash yet again and that’ll be that.
Sometimes Dean wonders if he’s kidding himself and they both know what’s really going on. There’s no way they both have their heads that far up their respective asses.
Sometimes he wonders if this is just his designated role in their screwed up little family dynamic.
Dad, the absentee, bigger than life superhero.
Sam, cute little puppy who needs to be pampered and taken care of and kept happy at all costs.
Dean, nursemaid and cock sucking whore.
Doesn’t that sound nice?