On The Twelfth Of Never
Rating: G, Gen
Characters: Dean, Sammy, John, Bobby
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchester dolls for the purposes of general amusement. Sorry about the holes!
Word Count: 3,930
A/N: Door 12 in my
SPN Advent CalendarCompanion piece to a scene in:
Ten Green BottlesInspired by:
Twas the Night Before Christmas (Banner elements from Project Gutenberg’s eText of a
1912 edition). Title from:
The Twelfth of Never.
Also, possibly the only story in the Advent Calendar that is really Christmassy. I blame those darned carollers outside my window last night!
Setting: Lawrence County, SD. December, 1990
Summary: ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through Bobby’s house…
It possibly was Dean’s fault, racing a motorbike really, really fast around Uncle Bobby’s yard with Sammy hanging on like the monkey Dean often said he was, and making excited noises into his neck. ‘Monkey-monkey-monkey. One banana, two banana, three banana, four,’ Dean thought to himself with a snort as he zoomed them right under the ‘Singer’s Auto Salvage’ sign leaving an awesome cloud of dust behind them. And yeah, if anyone was keeping count it probably was Dean who was the first to scream, ‘Yahoooooooooooo!’
But you couldn’t blame him.
Sammy had been quiet ever since Fort Douglas. It had been months, but he still wasn’t back to his normal annoying little self. Dean was worried that he’d never recover from what the shtriga had done to him. It was all Dean’s fault, and Sammy didn’t remember a thing. That if anything, made Dean feel even worse.
And that monster was out there somewhere and Dean couldn’t do anything about that.
So, Dean did what he did best. He fixed broken things, and he didn’t let his little brother out of his sight.
‘Dean! Sammy!’
Dad. ‘Fuck.’ Maybe he should have saved the joyride till after Dad had left on his next hunt?
‘Here. Now!’
Yup. Maybe so.
Trouble.
Uncle Bobby almost landed in it too, until he threatened to shoot Dad for being, ‘A danged idjut who should know what kids in general, and Winchester kids in particular can get up to when left unsupervised.’
Dean, who was hiding behind the swing door in the kitchen eavesdropping on their argument, didn’t know whether he should be insulted for being called a kid, or thankful that they happened to be staying with the one person in the world capable of going head-to-head with John Winchester in a fight.
Unfortunately even Bobby Singer wasn’t awesome enough to prevent what happened to Dean next.
Grounded. That was Dean’s second-least favourite phrase. Right behind, ‘I’m sorry; we’ve just run out of pie. Have a nice day.’
Grounded in his, or rather their, room for a week! All he’d done was fix one of the many wrecks Bobby had lying rusting into the ground. And he’d fixed it good. Dean was sure it never went that fast way back in history. He couldn’t work out why Dad wasn’t proud of him for having rebuilt it almost from scratch. Uncle Bobby had said it was a remarkable demonstration of mechanical genius. Even Sammy said it was cool, and he’d loved how fast it went.
In the end, remembering how hard Dad had hugged Sammy when he yanked him off the back of the Indian, Dean worked out that Dad was still worried about Sammy too.
But? Being grounded at his age? Totally not cool.
What the heck was he going to do for a whole week?
‘It’s not fair!’ Sammy complained, from his position on the floor building some kind of tower with boring wooden blocks. ‘I was riding too! And you’d even let me drive earlier.’
All true. Although the figures of eight that Sammy had inscribed in the dirt with the bike’s wheels had been a lot wonkier than Dean’s.
‘Duh!’ Dean threw one of his dirty socks at his brother.
‘Gross!’ Sammy batted it away under the bed where it joined many others of its kind busily building an increasingly smelly woollen colony.
‘If Dad knew you did more than sit behind me on the pillion, you’d be stuck in here too. Forever!’
‘I am in here,’ Sammy pointed out obviously.
‘Yeah, but not by choice.’ Which was the crux of the matter. If Dean had chosen to be in his room right then, that would have been fine. Being condemned here? That was a whole other story. Dad was mean.
‘A week, Sammy? What am I going to do for a whole week?’
‘No.’ Sammy corrected. ‘What are we going to do?’
Two hours in that room…
Oooh!
‘Monopoly!’ Awesome! ‘Hey! Hand over all that money, Sammy. I’m the bank!’ Huh. Had to watch him every single second, or he’d try to pull something. Dean was on to his tricks.
After another small battle Dean had possession of the car too. Hah! Sammy could whine all he wanted, but he was going to have to be the stupid hat whether he liked it or not.
One day in that room, and Dean was on his way to being a multi-millionaire. He just needed to work out a way to print more money, because Sammy was being a bitch and insisting that pencil I.O.U.’s from “The Awesome Bank Of Dean Winchester (The First)” were not legal tender. Brothers.
Two days in that room, and Uncle Bobby’s battered Monopoly set got boring fast. Even after Dean carefully renamed all the squares more creatively with an indelible pen. It turns out that there are only so many times that you can say, ‘I want to put another hotel on King Tutankhamen’s ass,’ before it stops being funny-Four times for Sammy, and thirteen for Dean (okay, it was twelve, but he wasn’t going to admit to Sammy that Tut’s, now very lucrative, royal ass was wearing thin.)
Three days in that room, no sign of freedom. Dad might be off in Arizona in the middle of his hunt, but he’d left strict instructions. Uncle Bobby obviously didn’t agree with them, but he was sticking with them. Damn it.
Three days in that room, and Dean was only let out for piss breaks.
He made sure he drank a lot of water.
Four days, and it was ten steps along the east wall, six steps and four big toes along the south wall, and eighteen along the west because of that giant wardrobe smack in the middle. From Dean’s bed it was pretty much one flying leap to Sammy’s, or one leap and two steps and he was anywhere else in his domain.
He mostly saved the leaps for scaring Sammy in the middle of the night. Heh. Never, ever, failed. Sucker.
Five days, and Dean was wondering about that wardrobe. It had all these incredibly detailed carvings on. Sammy had dug the magnifying glass out of his chemistry set, and there were tiny trees, and what Sammy said must be fauns and centaurs, and there was even a really cool looking lion, and they all looked so lifelik…
Chemistry set…
Six days, and Uncle Bobby had been mostly okay about the explosion.
He had made Dean clean up the mess though.
Seven days, and Dean got caught half way across the kitchen floor this close to the fridge.
Bobby apparently didn’t believe that the door to their room had accidentally swung open and that Dean had been woken by a ‘mysterious noise from downstairs, right outside the kitchen, how weird is that?’ and that he had to come down and make sure it wasn’t something evil, didn’t he?
Right. Not one of Dean’s best excuses, but it was the middle of the night, and he was really bored, and really hungry, so what if Uncle Bobby’s eagle eyes saw right through it?
And what the heck happened to Sammy being lookout on the stairs anyway? Dean was sure he’d wandered off to pet one of the dogs. Animal-loving traitor.
Eight days-yeah Dad had ordered (damned cell phones meant he got properly debriefed on everything right after it happened) an extension of the punishment. Five extra days for that totally accidental fireball, so Dean was stuck doing twelve fucking days time leading up to Christmas.
And no, that wasn’t funny or festively ironic, whatever Sammy the Christmas nerd might say about it.
Eight days, and King Tut, and everything else that was driving Dean crazy, had been tossed out the window.
Everything, except Sammy.
Nine days, and the twelfth day really was never going to fucking come!
Nine days, and Sammy wouldn’t shut up with all the questions about Dad, and why he had to work at Christmas time, all the time really. And why did he have to sell things at night?
It was only sensible to use his old handkerchief-What? It was mostly clean!-as a gag while Dean tried to come up with a halfway reasonable sounding list of glow-in-the-dark products that Dad was offering a holiday deal on.
Ten days, and Sammy had spat out the gag and he was still talking… asking. Dean wondered if he could talk under water. He was tempted to find out, but he had a feeling Uncle Bobby would object.
Besides, Sammy always splashed half the bathwater out every night when he played battleship, and Dean didn’t need another mess to clean up.
Eleven days, and Dean finally gave in and used the old parental standby. Big Red - a.k.a. Santa Claus.
Luckily there was a reason Santa was still popular. Kids were so fucking gullible.
Dean spent a few minutes wishing Santa was real, because he’d totally saved Dean from snapping and telling Sammy the truth, and then Dad would have killed him, and Sammy probably would have been sad, and not had a merry Christmas at all.
Eleven days, and five hours, and Dean was kind of sick of questions about Santa Claus, and who named the reindeer, and what did they like to eat?
Eating…
Eleven days, and seven hours…
'Deeeeeean!'
Fuck. Dean had thought that getting Sammy to use every crayon in the pack to draw all the reindeer, and their names, and whatever the fuck he thought they’d like to eat on the wall opposite that wardrobe would keep him occupied for at least another two hours.
Damn kids had no attention spans these days.
Huh. Dean had never noticed before how many cracks there were in the ceiling of 'their' room at Uncle Bobby's. Dean bet himself that he could count all of them.
One, two, three... twenty-one...Wow! Number thirty-three was huge… Ooops… that was a new one. Who knew those chemicals were that powerful? … thirty-eight… forty-two…
Dean was pretty hungry. He wondered what Uncle Bobby was making for dinner, because...
'Dean!'
Huh? 'What, Sammy?'
Sammy wriggled impatiently on the bed, kicking a vital cornerstone of Dean's careful barricade of pillows out of place and causing the whole comfortable wall to crumble and tumble onto the dusty floor.
'Hey! What the fuck did you do that for?'
'I didn't do anything!' Sammy protested, now deliberately kicking out at Dean, before he rolled quickly off the bed and ran out the door snickering.
'Gonna get you!' Dean screamed, and charged forth to war once more…
Fuck.
Uncle Bobby was standing there, floury apron and all. One hand was firm around Sammy’s collar, the other was holding a tray full of awesome treats. Uncle Bobby might have agreed that Dad had a right to mete out punishment to his own kids, but that never meant he wasn’t going to go through his cookbook and make his own feelings felt through his recently instigated room service menu.
‘I thought we had a deal? Dean didn’t stage any more midnight raids of my kitchen, and you two were going to tough it out together?’ he finished pointedly.
Um. Yeah.
Dean looked at Sammy.
Sammy looked shamefaced. Yes, technically, he could go wherever he wanted to, but he’d stuck it out in there with Dean almost a whole eleven days now.
‘Only one more day to go,’ Sammy mouthed.
‘All for one, and one for all!’ Dean yelled, punching his fist towards the ceiling. Until the twelfth of never, my ass. Fuck it! They were going to wait Dad out.
If his other hand happened to wander to that tempting tray and he pinched one of Grandma Singer’s Bourbon balls, well no one was going to tell Dad a thing when he got home.
Eleven days, and nine hours and counting…
'Dean!'
It sounded almost the same as all the other Dean's his brother had been uttering all day, every day, but there was a tiny, but significant difference. This “Dean” clearly demanded more.
'What?' he asked warily. This could be bad.
'Tell me a story.'
'Aaa…stttory?' Dean stuttered. Very bad.
'A Christmas story, like you used to when I was little.’
And Dean was afraid. Very, very, afraid. Justifiably so. Because back then? He'd had picture books Sammy had dragged him down to borrow from whatever local library there was in whatever small town they happened to be in at the time. And yeah, Sammy had had his own library card at age four, and Dean had one at age eight, but only because Sammy had insisted on it so they were exactly the same.
This was Dean’s fault. Distracting Sammy from asking about Dad. Distracting him with fucking Santa Claus! If only he’d known it would lead to this, he might have followed the Monopoly set out the window three days ago. Surely the two-storey fall would have hurt less than this Christmas horror?
Once upon a time, that Dean wished now had never happened, Sammy had pointed to the pictures, Dean had read the words, and Sammy had corrected him if he thought he was getting it wrong.
Dean hadn't really had to do anything, but be there for Sammy. And once Sammy started reading for himself, it was only ever something they did rarely, and... oh yeah... at Christmastime.
Damn it.
Here they were, confined by Dad to their "barracks," with no reading matter other than their school textbooks, which even Sammy only dragged out in the dead of night when he thought Dean wasn't watching.
They were stuck in their room, and Dean had nothing to cheat off. There was no way Uncle Bobby’s library had any Christmas books hidden away on a top shelf next to “Spot, the Dog” or “Where the wild things are.” And even if it turned out Uncle Bobby had a secret interest in children’s literature, Dean still had one day of his sentence left to serve. If he made a break for the library now he was going to be stuck sitting in this dusty room forever, or at least until he was due to finish high school.
‘Dean?’
Dean stayed strong.
‘Deaaaan?’
Really strong. No, not the eyes!
Fuck it. Sammy wanted a Christmas story? Dean would tell him one, just as soon as he could remember enough bits to cobble something together.
'Uh, okay, Sammy. This is the awesomest Christmas story that's never been told.'
'Uh huh,' Sammy said doubtfully as he curled up next to Dean to listen.
'A long time ago, in a galaxy...'
'Bethlehem!' Sammy corrected.
Dean held up his hand. 'Am I telling my story, or are you?'
Sammy seemed to be considering the question for a while. So Dean just got on with it.
'A long time ago, in a galaxy ... just like this one-amazingly like this one, so amazingly like this one, it was almost exactly the same, okay?’
Sammy nodded.
Dean ignored the dubious nature of the nod.
‘And in this galaxy, which was called the Alpha Beta Pie Galaxy, it was …’
Sammy muttered something under his breath.
‘What? Of course that was its name! They really liked pie and… oh, you like the name but not the…?’
Dean shook his head; he’d never understand the little geek.
‘Fine!’
‘Twas the night before Christmas in the Alpha Beta Pie Galaxy, and all through the … Cherry Pie Motel … the only thing stirring was the mice and the rats down in the basement because everyone else had gone to bed early to wait for Santa Claus.
But outside the motel, there was this wino, and all he wanted for Christmas
was two new front teeth because he’d lost his real ones in a bad bar fight in … uh … King David’s city. And he needed those teeth because:
a) Ewwwww…
b) Someone at the Shelter was going to kill some fat geese and cook them for all the homeless people for Christmas dinner. No, you’ve never had goose, Sammy, but I think they’re like giant noisy chickens. Colonel Sanders should have fried them instead; they must have really enormous drumsticks!
Oh, and he had a hat too. No, not the Colonel, though he probably did have a hat, I mean the wino had a hat, and he kept begging for pennies so he could have himself a merry little Christmas if you know what I mean.’
Dean nudged his brother and winked.
‘And in this galaxy there were lots of gay people who were in a cult, and they wanted to make the Y… fuck …. I know it’s something about swimming that begins with Y… Yogi bear? No… Yoda! That’s it they wanted to make Yoda swim against the tide and be gay! Cos after they converted Yoda they said all his troubles would be miles away. They were lying though because what they were really doing was stealing all Yoda’s money that he got from the Star Wars films, and they, that’s the gay people, are you paying attention, Sammy? Okay the gay cult people ran miles away from Yoda with all his money, and then they had a gay old time!
So Yoda was broke, and he decided to make a star out of tin foil and hang it on a high bough, which means a really tall tree, so it would act like a Bat signal for Santa. Kind of cool idea, huh? A bit like ET phoning home, but Yoda was better at fighting.
Then Santa totally caught sight of the signal all the way from the North Pole, and he came dashing through the snow in a cheap imported one horsepower-don’t forget to buy American, Sammy!- convertible and he was singing, “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way!”
Santa had a bit too much to drink, Sammy, cos otherwise he’d know he wasn’t supposed to drink and drive. No, Coke’s okay, Sammy.
Anyway Santa was drink driving through the snow, and because he was drunk and rushing to get Yoda, he ran into a kid with a drum, which went pa rum pum pum pum. Or it did, until Santa crashed into them. Then I guess it went BOOOOOOM! And the kid must have gone splat! Which was kind of sad because the kid was a rich kid and he was bringing his finest gifts to some little match girls who were starring on a reality TV show to make money, and now they haven’t got anything. So, the match girls had to get another job as Christmas carollers in Walmart, and they’re the ones we saw last week singing, “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”
‘You still with me, Sammy? Good.’
‘Santa’s reindeer were like cats and they had bells, silver bells, silver bells-silver’s good for lots of things, remember that will you, Sammy?-the reindeer had silver bells around their necks so you could hear them coming, “Ding dong ding... dong!”
So, Santa was on a deadline for Christmas and he still hadn’t got to Yoda, so he had to flee the scene of the crime, and he left the dead rich kid in the snow, but because he was Santa he took the kid’s presents with him in his sack.
And Santa got Yoda and uh… dropped Yoda off at his parent’s place, and then Santa went home to his garage where he decked the walls with balls of holly, singing, ‘Fa la la la la, la la la la.’ Then because it was Christmas Eve already, he donned his gay apparel, but Santa wasn’t in a cult like the people who were out to get Yoda. This time gay just means his red costume, okay? And costumes don’t make people gay, ‘cos Batman’s not gay. Got it?
Then Santa went away in a manger, which doesn’t sound Korean, but it must be because I never heard of a car called that. And he had no crib for his bed; which means the manger… Fuck it! I don’t care about tradition. Let’s call it a car, okay? His car didn’t have a back seat to sleep in because it wasn’t American.
Anyway, Santa has a whole world to get around in one night, so every couple of hours the law says he has to stop and have a break. So then Santa has a little nap in the driver’s seat, and all the reindeer sleep outside…’
‘What? What about Rudolf? Oh…’
‘All the reindeer slept outside, except for Rudolf who slept in the passenger seat to keep warm so his red nose would go away and the other reindeer at reindeer school would stop laughing at him outside the lockers in the deer stables where they kept all their really important Christmas textbooks and … memos from Santa.
And though it was really cold, and snowy on their journey, Santa and all his reindeer kept singing, “It’s the season to be jolly…”
‘What? ‘Tis? What is it with everything having to begin with T anyway?’
Sammy crossed his arms. He looked as if he was about to stage a mutiny, so Dean pulled Uncle Bobby’s tray of food a little closer.
‘Okay.’
‘They sang, “Tis the season to be jolly,” and ”Ding dong merrily on high. God rest ye merry gentlemen,
let nothing you destroy.” And so, when Good King W… William looked out
on the feast of Stephen and he saw that
the snow was deep and crisp because the snowplows hadn’t been down the King’s street yet. And as Santa and his reindeer flew through the night sky when it was clear at midnight, they could see forests, and their fences, and a fountain, and a chick called Agnes, and some sheep and shepherds and probably some sheep dogs, and there was pudding made with figs, and lots of cheerful cups, and three kings with weird gifts… yeah … and three ships sailing into port on Christmas Day in the morning.
And because Santa and his reindeer had travelled all around the world all night, it was Christmas Day! And so they had a party to celebrate their day off. And there were some golden harps, and lots more holly, and ivy, but not the poison kind, so that was okay, and everyone one who was anyone at the North Pole came. Which meant, Santa, and Rudolf, and … uh … Dasher, and Dancer, and Prancer, and … um … Vixen … fuck … and ... and … and … Comet, and Cupid, and Dummy, and Trixie.’
‘Phew! Glad I got those right, Sammy.’
‘And Mrs Santa who’d been off getting sparkly Christmas trees painted on her nails stood up on top of Santa’s dinner table and looked around at Santa, and the reindeer, and all the tired elves and she sang, “Sleigh bells ring, are you listening…”
‘Sammy? Are you listening?’
Dean looked down at Sammy curled up next to him, happily and soundly asleep, and yeah, maybe that possibly was Dean’s fault, even if he was a totally awesome storyteller who also kind of needed a nap now too…
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through Bobby’s house
Not a creature was stirring…
For further Christmas stories and graphics see my:
SPN Advent Calendar