Supernatural: Six of One (8/8)
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Chapter 22: Tell You a Little Story
And here they were, Sam and Sam, sitting in the front seat of the Impala like old times that never were. Dean drove gently, as if aware the car had seen bad times, and talked to it all the way home to his driveway. There was a battered old gray Japanese car in the driveway, but Dean just pulled on up behind it. He killed the engine and turned to face his brother with a simple happy sigh. "God, I missed this," he said.
"So did I," Sam told him. Dean took that as his exit line, opening the door and putting one foot out on the tar before Sam could stop him. "Wait." He had a bit of Dean's sleeve between his fingers. "I got something I need to talk about first."
"You gotta do it in the car?" Dean asked, smirking. But he slid back in and pulled the door shut.
Sam sat in the passenger seat, the sun slanting over his shoulder, and looked at his hands. He was still wearing the silver ring on his right hand; he never took that off. He wasn't sure he could get it over his knuckles consistently, so it stayed on. He didn't know how to start.
Dean asked, "Are our auras going to commune for a little bit, or you got something to say, Dean?"
"Please don't call me that," said Sam, but Dean wasn't really listening. "So, I was wondering," he went on, and on impulse he reached out and tugged gently at the pendant around Dean's neck, "whether that thing I gave you was any good against the visions you used to get." Sam waited for the answer on tenterhooks.
Dean blinked, cocked his head, and blinked again. "Oh," he said. "That's what those are."
HIs fear confirmed, Sam faced the windshield and swallowed hard.
"They were different," Dean continued. "For one thing, no headache. And, I don't know, I guess I thought they were hallucinations or flashbacks or something. Like they shoulda locked me up in a loony bin," he added, chuckling.
It wasn't the pleased kind of chuckle; the little lines around his mouth showed apprehension. Sam asked the windshield, "So you never -- I mean, you were okay with them?"
Dean tapped on the steering wheel rhythmically, beating out a drumline Sam did not know. He did it for a good few minutes, while Sam remembered that was one way Dean worked out how to say something difficult. But when he finally did open his mouth, Dean only said, "I been handling it."
"Handling it like handling it, or handling it like totally pretending it wasn't scaring the crap out of you."
"Aw, dude, I got enough in my life scares the crap outta me I don't need some leftover visions screwing me up too."
Sam went on alert. "Did you see something? What's going on?"
"No," Dean said, making a puff of air with his mouth as if to blow all Sam's anxiety away. "Nothing unnatural. All that stuff is over, you know that. Just ordinary life stuff. That's plenty."
Sam did not know what he meant. He sat there afraid, paralyzed, and suddenly it was like being at Four Corners all over again, with the demon standing tall and all of the circle ready to flee. "Life is pretty frightening," Sam agreed.
"Yeah." Dean squinted out the side window: clearly not something he wanted to talk about, or anyway not the first thing after two years' absence. Sam wanted to ask him a million questions about his life, like how Dean Winchester of all the people on the planet had managed to get married -- hell, stay married. But the questions would only be delay, and Sam had delayed long enough. It was terrifying to start, like standing on the edge of a cliff.
He sat there in the car, sun streaming in over his right shoulder and glinting off the metal of the dash and the day bright and temperate. There was traffic in the background and the butt-ugly car further up in the driveway and an apartment building and a life, and a thirty-two year old man sitting in the driver's seat thinking he was twenty-seven. Sam said to the glove box, "I need to take you someplace. You're not going to like it." He turned before Dean could quip at him, and grabbed him around the wrist. Under his hand, he could feel Dean's warm skin, the serious muscle he still had. Of course: he worked with his hands.
It had become nearly routine, considering all the work Sam had done with the specials. He blurted out the incantation before Dean could ask him what was going on. The last words of it, Dean recited with him unconsciously, nodding vaguely as if it were a children's rhyme: "I went to Missouri and I learned the truth --"
They weren't in the Impala any more. But it wasn't the same as Sam had seen the last time; it was drab, plain, just undressed stone and dimness. The personal hells -- flames, iceberg, twister, hospital waiting room -- were gone. The people sat, still, waiting for their fates.
"Where the hell are we?" Dean rasped, spinning awkwardly, brows low. Sam had to stagger to keep their hands joined. Dean was a lot more agile in spirit format, and taller too. He had olive skin and a pointy nose and didn't look exhausted at all. Dean laughed suddenly: "Holy shit, man, you look like me."
Sam looked down. He was wearing the pendant around his neck, and in his short sleeves he could see freckles all the way down his forearms. "You are a handsome devil," Sam mumbled.
He tugged Dean along down the rows. He did not even stop for Alice, if she was there at all. He went straight in, three across and two down.
Dean did not seem to recognize him till they stood right there in front. John Winchester saw them approach and did the same thing he'd done before: stood up from the rock he'd been sitting on, and backed up two steps. He held his right arm to his side and frowned idly into the middle distance. Sam felt Dean's arm come tense under his hand slowly, like the sun rising. His voice wavered: "Dad."
Dad played stone-face. He was very good at it.
Dean got over the shock in a moment, and was stepping forward to do something about it even as Sam pulled him back. "No, dude, that isn't how it works here."
"Well how the fuck should it work? We gotta get him out of there." Sam winced away from Dean's rage.
He pulled the journal out of his waistband, handed it to Dean and repositioned himself so he had a grip on Dean's neck without breaking skin contact. They had to be here together, for this one. "There's a word of unbinding in there somewhere, I know there is."
Dean held the book in his hands, pale. "A what?"
"I asked an oracle," Sam told both father and brother. "You can't break a deal with a demon till the demon is dead. And then you need a word of unbinding."
The smile on Dad's face was sardonic, disinterested. "Hadn't heard that one yet. I guess an old dog like yourself can learn a few new tricks."
Sam had a whole speech he'd been rehearsing in his head, but then he saw Dean's hands trembling as he flipped through the front pages of the book. "We killed the demon two days ago, Dad. We did it. It's over. We can break your deal."
"Two days ago? What the hell are you talking about? What the hell is he talking about, Dad?" Dean asked. The pages stilled in his hands. Sam squeezed his neck and opened his mouth to explain, while Dad put his left hand over his right. While they all stood there, he yanked his broken arm straight with a horrible groan. The brothers as one jerked in misery.
"Come back tomorrow," Dad panted, "and I'll do it again. I'll let you break my other arm, if you want." And oh, that was the real John Winchester smile, that bulletproof grin with the deep furrows hiding his dimples. "You just don't get it. I would have done anything to keep my boys safe. You don't have kids. You wouldn't understand."
Sam had nothing to say to that. Under his arm, Dean stirred. "Yes I would," he rasped.
"Do your worst," said John.
"Did you find it?" Sam muttered. He nudged Dean, and the journal's pages wafted. There wasn't any point trying to argue with a ghost, and if Dean could think straight he would know it. There wasn't a whole person there, just a fragment -- just the determination and the endurance and the parts of him even death couldn't budge.
Dean grabbed a fistful of Sam's shirt and they leaned together, chests heaving hard.
"Is this it?" Sam asked, pointing to the page. "Can we let him go now?"
Dean looked at him, stricken, and looked again at Dad. Dad had gone back to ignoring them.
"Like yelling down a well," Dean muttered, and his face crumpled.
Sam laughed, bitter or relieved he didn't know. "You can still yell at me."
Dean's shoulders deflated, and he let go of Sam's shirt to put his finger on the words he was reading. "Right there all along," he said to himself, and then louder, so everyone would hear, "Disperse equals exsolvatur, exsolvantur. Keds size 12."
A thousand exhalations seemed to rise around him, mist, a last humid breath. Sam held onto his brother and felt Dean miserably grab back. Dad looked over his shoulder with an expression of surprise, at a reaper the living could not ever see, and faded into nothingness.
The entire cavern was empty. Every captive heard that word of unmaking, and was unmade.
"I don't think you had to say that part about the Keds," Sam said weakly, and wiped his face. Dean was shocky, a little greenish as if he might throw up or pass out.
He stared at the rock where Dad had been sitting and asked, "Sammy, what the hell is going on?"
And that meant the very last thing on the list was done, and it really was over, and it was time for Sam to face the consequences. "In a second, Dean," he said, and recited the charm that brought them both back to their bodies in the Impala.
Chapter 23: Hide and Seek
And here they are, Sam and Dean, sitting in the front seat of the Impala like old times. Sam smells like his clothes have been worn by every homeless guy in the lower 48 and his eyes are red as if he hasn't slept. They're leaning together, Sam's arm heavy across Dean's back. The sun slants over Sam's right shoulder and pours into his lap and he's wearing the silver ring Dean hasn't thought about in -- oh. A bomb goes off inside his head.
Here is Dean, right where he's always been, a gold band on the ring finger of his left hand. He remembers having it sized, when he came into some cash from poker, so it would fit him properly. He remembers thinking of himself as Sam when he did that. Carefully, Dean swings open the car door and climbs out, flexing his bum knee automatically. He paces the ten steps up the driveway just like he always does, and unlocks the door with his key. The key breaks off in the lock as he turns it.
The door swings open, slow. Sam has said something, behind him, has come out of the car and is standing somewhere back there. Dean carries the broken head of the key into the house, perplexed, and sets it next to the mail on the kitchen counter. Safely inside, Dean finds both his knees are going bum on him, and he wilts to the kitchen floor like a tire that's popped its air valve. He sits on the floor, legs akimbo and hands pooled in his lap, and stares at this kitchen that belongs to somebody named Sam.
"You're early," calls Jo, from the other room, and then stops suddenly, hairbrush in hand, and looks at him on the floor. "Oh, honey," and she huddles next to him, "are you okay? Is it the leg?"
"It's not the leg," says Sam. Dean has forgotten and left the door open, and Sam must be in it. Jo raises her head all the way up -- of course, Sammy is tall -- and her fear is naked. Sam adds, "It's all over."
Jo grabs Dean's shoulders, nails digging into his skin, and then slaps him lightly on the cheek, frowning. "Is he okay? What did you do?" Jo asks, and Dean has no idea what she is talking about. She stands up, out of his range of vision, and he realizes she is talking to Sam.
"We said the word of unbinding," Sam says. He hasn't come any closer. "The spell on him ended."
Dean cannot stand up and he cannot turn around. They are literally talking behind his back and all he can do is sit there and count the linoleum squares between here and the bedroom. (There are twelve.) Some murmurs, high-pitched and then answered by a lower one, don't resolve into words. There are footsteps, two or three, and then something warm against his back. Dean inhales and smells Sam's sweat and the age of his clothes while Sam is tugging at Dean's legs, first one and then the other. He is very gentle with the right leg.
And then Dean is in the air, the room whirling around him, all the weight of him mashed to one side as Sam lifts him up. There is a hard grip behind his knees and another around his shoulder. The dizziness overcomes him and he turns his head away. Sam's chin is against his temple. With those long legs of Sam's, it's only a few steps to the living room. As he is setting Dean down, Sam says quietly, "I carried you into the hospital, do you remember?"
Dean does not remember. Sam arranges his limbs on the couch into something vaguely civilized, and then sits himself: they are side by side, like people waiting at a doctor's office. Jo is standing nearby, phone in one hand, telling her boss she has to take a sick day. She hangs up and tucks her empty hands in her armpits, as if she wants to reach out and touch him and doesn't dare. They look like ghosts, both of them.
"How long did it last?" For some reason, this is the only question he can think of to ask. He feels kind of like Jello, when it's sitting in the fridge and you can tell it's got a skin on top of it, but you don't want to move the cup in case it hasn't set all the way through and the slightest tremor makes it split through the middle like a flawed gem. He realizes he is, in fact, wobbling where he sits, and stills the trembling in his hands by force of will.
The answer is pretty slow in coming. Jo wipes her eyes, pretending that's not what she's doing. Sam plays with the silver ring on his hand. "About two -- two and a half years," Sam says. And immediately, "I didn't think it would be that long."
Dean is wondering silently how long would have been just long enough and Sam can't help himself. He has always been the talker.
"You were hurt so bad, Dean." Sam is hoarse. "It was so bad."
The leg. Of course. Dean goes over it in his head, trying to find a transition point. But there wouldn't be one, would there? Yesterday he remembered all his life as Sam and today it is all a muddle of when and where and who. Anyway, as Sam has pointed out, there are parts of it he doesn't remember at all.
"He wasn't going to kill you," Sam says. They are hyperventilating side by side. "That was the deal he made with Dad. He banged your head against the wall so hard it broke through the wallboard, and he said You know that won't kill him. He had you by the ankle and held you upside down and shook you, like he was trying to get the change out of your pockets. Like you were a ketchup jar and he wanted something to go with his fries. He banged you against the wall and I heard your leg snap and you cried out and he shook you again and I knew it wouldn't kill you."
Jo's knees fail on her too, and she sits suddenly on the floor. She is in Dean's line of vision, slumping, ashen. She looks like she is about to scream.
Sam can't stop now. His voice cracks up and he soldiers on anyway, hands still by his sides like they don't belong to him. "Shani -- I guess you don't remember her. We were talking to her mom. She was the first special we found without any visions, you know? The first one we didn't get led by the nose to. I guess he was jealous or something. He took over her mom."
"He wouldn't kill me," Dean repeats, low.
"He didn't need to." Sam suddenly leans forward so his face is in his knees and wraps his arms around his head, as if someone were attacking him that moment. Dean is not even conscious of his hand coming up to rest on Sam's back until it is there. "I would have done anything, man. Anything. He had me against the wall and you cried out just like before and if he'd asked me to be his right hand man in evil, I would have said yes. I want to say I was playing him to give you time to recover, but the truth is I would have said yes. If Shani hadn't come home and fought him, I would have gone over to him just to spare you."
The hand on Sam's back curls into a fist. Dean can feel the upsurge of ferocity. "Don't you fucking dare, Sammy," he says, and that feels real, familiar. "Don't you fucking dare."
"You were always gonna be there," Sam sniffles. "I was never gonna be able to convince you to stay away. You were never gonna stop trying to save me." He pauses. Dean feels the tremors that run through his back, and then they disappear and Sam says, "So I made you stop."
Dean feels himself turning to stone where he sits. Jo pushes up into his space, pressing her hip in between his knees till his legs come apart and she is against him, grabbing his body, talking into his cold ear. "I'm sorry," she babbles, whispering, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't know." The hand that is not a fist on Sam's back comes automatically around her body. That is what a husband is supposed to do for his wife. She drips hot tears on his neck and his cheeks are cold slabs of meat and his chest heaves and his head spins, like he wants to run away but he doesn't know where to.
Sam is out from under Dean's fist and across the room, looking out the back window, wiping snot on his sleeve. He says, "I made you into Sam because it's not Sam's job to sacrifice himself for the family. That's Dean's job. And I've been out hunting for two years and I killed the demon with the yellow eyes and I -- finished the job."
Dean finds his limbs stiff but unstable, as if he's been frozen in place for hours, waiting out a predator. He flexes his left hand two or three times while with his right he disentangles himself from Jo. He stands up slowly and leaves her behind on the couch. Deep breaths do not warm his body and he stands there paralyzed, waiting for Sam to turn around so he can hit him or shout at him or do something. Sam does not turn around.
"Jo only knew a little about it," he says, dull, like a tape player running out of battery. "It was that or leave you with strangers. She was just supposed to play along, just till you were off crutches, and then I thought you'd go back to college."
Behind him, Dean can hear Jo crying, not the big theatrical kind, just a little leaky. "I knew who you really were," she says. "I never thought you were him. I knew who you were." She chokes in a breath and tries to say something else, and then gives up and just cries. Dean can't go and comfort her.
"Dad had a secret," Sam says softly. He runs a finger over the window frame, chalk dust sticking to his skin, and turns suddenly to face Dean. He is very close, radiating body heat. His face is sharp, pugnacious, itching for a fight. Sam looms in, using his bulk as a weapon in a way he never did before, and makes Dean bend his neck back to maintain eye contact. Sam says, "Dean would have to save Sammy or kill him. Well, Sammy got saved: I hid him in your body. Nobody ever found him there. Dean is the one did the saving: I took your name, and your car, and your goddamn silver ring," he rips at it on his finger, but it won't come off, just jams against the knuckle till Sam draws blood, "and your crazy reckless personality. When the history books are written -- not that they ever will be -- they'll say that Dean Winchester rounded up fourteen luck-children and went out and hunted down that demon and killed him."
Watching him rant is sort of -- a familiar pattern. Dean has waited through Sam's anxious, self-important speeches before. He lets Sam peter out and blurts the first thing that is on his tongue: "So, d'you want, like, a parade?" And sarcasm is warming, a comfort, another old part of him falling back into place. "You want a brass band? Congratulations, man, you saved the world." Sam is hiding his face, turning away, pacing out the confines of the room as if this is his house, as if he has a right to be here. Dean hardens his voice against that presumption.
"What do you want out of me, thanks? Thank you for trying to squash me into your idea of a life, thank you for scrambling my brains like you're shaking up a can of whipped cream, thank you for making me a paranoid freak, thank you for making it so every time I say hello to my wife, my wife --" and he points one hard finger at Jo on the couch and she is sitting there pleading with her dark eyes, not saying a word, "--I'm lying to her, and she's lying back to me because she knew it all along --"
Sam doesn't deny a word. He just paces across the end of the room, waiting, waiting.
"-- And finally you get around to wandering back here, and you don't even have the grace to leave me like this, you undo it all so I'll know I got fucked? Where is your head at, Sammy?" He ends in a roar. He does not even realize he has been raising his voice till the walls echo the last word back to him.
In the abrupt silence, a high-pitched cry breaks out in the next room. Betty, of course. Dean stomps out of the living room and ignores Jo at his heels and scoops the baby up into his arms. She has just begun to discover favoritism, and wants Daddy all the time. Dean tries not to use that against Jo, when they are fighting. Betty is only half-awake, startled by his shouting more than anything else, and wails a couple of times into his neck before quieting. Jo has her hand on Betty's back, soothing her with some kind of low phrases, while Dean wraps himself around the baby and absorbs the warmth of her sweaty body. Sam is in the doorway.
Sam is in the doorway to their bedroom, his and Jo's, staring poleaxed at Betty like he had no idea she exists. Dean rotates so his body is in between the doorway and the baby. He has never defended himself against his brother like this before. He has never needed to, before.
Chapter 24: Freebird
Sam woke up in the dark in a room he did not know. There was something touching his face. He lay desperately still, thinking backwards, and finally came to the memory of bunking down in Dean and Jo's living room, on their cheap couch. His feet hung off the end. There was something touching his face.
That thing moved gently over his cheek and to his temple, then up to his forehead to trace the lines there. Sam felt the shadow of something hovering above his eye. The pressure on his skin traced down his nose and tickled each of his moles and found the lines next to his mouth. He waited, eyes closed, and after a minute the sensation withdrew. Only then was it safe to look.
Dean was sitting on the floor next to him, of course. He had pulled his hand back far enough that he could lie and say he was just going to shake his brother awake. Sam didn't make him lie, just lay there and looked him over. They looked each other over. It was a long silence.
"Where you been, man?" Dean whispered. Sam had been answering questions all evening long, dully or angrily or with halting guilt, and asking his fair share too, but that one hadn't come up yet.
"Everywhere. I saw New York City. I got beat up in Montana. I saved -- you remember Ava? -- I found her and we saved her. I gave her back her engagement ring." Betty was crawling on the floor by Dean's scarred knee, grasping at his clothes as she practiced standing up by herself. She blabbed to her father, random words and noises. "Where have you been?"
Dean hung his head, like he didn't want to answer. His face was mobile, like a flight of birds changing direction all together. He'd grown older in the time Sam had been away. "Here, for the last year and a half. I got a job. I was gonna finish college for you, but Betty kind of scuttled that plan. I have legit credit cards, that I pay every month. Man, I pay taxes. I got all the normal you ever wanted."
Betty clapped a hand against her father's shoulder and laughed as Dean curled a hand around her automatically. Sam stared at her, at the row of teeth gleaming in her jaw as she smiled, at the wisps of curling ash blonde on her head. Sam realized after a moment that he had never seen photos of Dean from when he had been a baby. Probably they had all been destroyed in the fire, or left behind, like a million other things. Sam asked, "Do you want it?"
"You can't have her," Dean said instantly, and did that thing again that he had done earlier, twisting his body away as if to shield Betty from violence.
Raising himself up on one elbow, Sam put out a placating hand. "That's not -- she's your daughter for crying out loud, Dean. I would never --"
Dean lowered his head till his chin was resting on the crown of Betty's head. His breath was fast, his voice implacable like a heavy engine. "There are a lot of things I didn't think you would do."
And that was -- well, it was true. Sam did not deny it, and Dean did not pursue it; it just hung in the room between them like a clothesline or a leash. Sam sat up, tossing the blanket off himself. He put his feet down on the floor and it was cold, Dean was sitting there on the cold floor like he didn't notice it. Sam pulled the blanket back up and wrapped it around Dean's shoulders, so it encompassed him and Betty both. "There's something I don't think you understand," Sam said at last. "I'm not like you. I can't just handle any situation that comes my way. I'm weak, and you're not."
Dean stirred, as if to protest, and Sam talked over him: "I know I am. When it all came down, when we gathered to summon him and kill him dead at last, I fell apart. That's why he picked us, I think -- why I was the special one and you weren't. I was vulnerable. But, at the end, when that demon was looking into me and trying to find my weakness, you know what he found instead? He found that part of you I'd borrowed, and the Dean in me pulled me together and I could fight. And because I could do it, all the other specials around me followed my lead and we won. We won, Dean. You and me both."
No response from Dean: he sat there with his head hung low, shoulders tense. Sam stared at the back of his neck.
"I knew it was a shitty thing to do and I did it anyway. I didn't realize you'd get the visions, and stuff. But you were lying there unconscious in the hospital, and he could have broken your neck, Dean. He could have peeled you like a grape and if it didn't kill you he could keep getting his jollies as long as he liked. I was looking ahead at all the things he could do to you, and I just. I couldn't take it." Sam shuddered and crossed his arms. "I couldn't go to ground; you'd just come after me. I couldn't argue you out of trying to protect me. At least this way, when I left, I left a little bit of myself behind for you."
Betty was quiet in Dean's arms, her ear against his chest. With his head down and his eyes screwed shut, it was impossible to tell what he was thinking or what he would do next. Sam sat on the couch and let the midnight quiet settle in the room and after a minute or two he could just hear the noise of Dean's tears: the hitching breaths, a sniffle here and there. He would never admit to it outright, so Sam just rested his palm on the back of Dean's neck and let him cry by himself, sitting on the floor in his underwear, while Betty twined her fat fingers in the thong of his pendant. She was slowly falling back to sleep to the rhythm of her father's unvoiced sobbing.
"Go back to bed." Sam said, after it seemed like the worst of it was over. He squeezed Dean's neck, nudged him on the shoulder. "It's too confusing to talk about now."
Dean gave the biggest snort in the world, inhaling gallons of snot. "Will you be here in the morning?" he asked, wiping his face with one hand. He put no inflection into the question, as if he only wanted to plan ahead, whatever the answer would be.
Sam found himself shy, afraid. "If you want," he said slowly. "If you'll let me stay."
"Don't go yet," Dean said, his back to Sam.
Sam said: "I won't. I'll stay. I'll do whatever you want."
***
Dean wakes up about six, a good half-hour before dawn. He is wrapped around a warm body. He is wrapped around his wife, the woman who has been calling him the wrong name for two and a half years on purpose. The second he becomes conscious of who she is, he tenses, and realizes Jo has been lying there awake and tense just like him.
"Morning," he mumbles. He lifts his head for a look at the crib, but Betty is playing by herself, whapping something floppy against her own noggin. "She's good for a little while yet."
Bodies talk one way, while their owners are thinking another. He's hard against her warm butt and she has an ankle hooked around his calf. She reaches out carefully and takes up his hand from where it has been resting on her waist, and laces her fingers into it.
Dean has rough hands, from the work and the industrial soap. She hates his hands. Her skin is two or three shades paler than his own. He smells her hair and watches her look at their fingers and slowly becomes conscious of the fact that someone is frying bacon. Someone is in the kitchen, frying bacon -- Sam.
"You want breakfast?" Dean asks, and starts to unpeel himself from their close formation.
"Don't go -- don't go," Jo whispers, like it's too shameful to say out loud. She tugs on his hand as he is sitting up, finds his other hand and grabs that too. She rolls and is lying on her back beside him, watching as she draws her knees apart. She is flushed and with her hair in disarray. She pulls one of his hands down and rests it on a breast, horrible longing on her face.
The easy thing would be to fall into her, do what she wants, smooth over the gaping difference between yesterday and today with some nooky and pretend like they can go on as they have been. They have always used sex to fix an argument; that's how they got Betty after all; and Sam in the kitchen has plenty of experience at selective deafness. Dean looks at her chin wobbling, and the easy thing yanks at him hard. He turns over and crawls up her body, resting his hips on hers and pressing their foreheads together. She can tell he wants her; she is a beautiful woman in her underwear, after all. He kisses her and she is starving for it, her tongue in his mouth like the first time, back when he couldn't walk unaided and she had ashes in her hair. He pushes stray locks off her forehead. She's got one hand down the back of his boxers.
He pulls back and she has her teeth in his lower lip so he has to lift his head for her to let it go. He just looks at her for a long time, and she is looking back at him so desperately naked. "Hi," he tells her. "My name's Dean. What's yours?"
That Look comes over her face: confusion, pity, fear. "Jo," she chokes out. "I'm your wife."
Dean breathes out through his nose and watches the tiny hairs on her cheek stir. "You're not married to some guy named Sam?"
"No," she gulps, and draws him in close with her elbows around his ribs. She mashes their bodies together so he can feel her chest like a bellows. She kisses his neck, his pulse, his collarbone. "I'm married to you, you idiot."
Dean does not know what to say to that. He sweeps his hand across her forehead again, gold band through her golden hair. They lie together like that, not moving, for a little while. Her thighs press against his flanks and she toes the back of one of his knees.
"Okay," he says. He smells her hair, and he smells coffee. "Sam's gonna eat all the bacon."
"Let him," Jo whispers, and clutches tighter.
"I like bacon," he protests, and flexes muscle against her. He lifts them both up, till they're sitting together, still close. He likes the feel of her forehead against his temple. She definitely likes it, making that unbelievably hot noise in her throat that she does.
He feels her inhale sharply against him, and he turns to see what it is: Betty is standing in her crib, offering them the thing she has been playing with. It is a triangular slice of buttered toast. Her hair is a tangle of lint and melted butter. "Oh, man, you did not!" Dean calls, and Sam asks from the other room,
"What? Don't you eat breakfast any more?"
This is finally enough to get both parents out of bed and moving. Jo drags on a pair of sweat pants while Dean confiscates the toast. They bump into each other, crossing the room at the end of the bed, and she pinches him, playful, on the waist.
"Take this messy child of yours," he humphs, and hands over Betty. "This crap is everywhere. Where are the baby wipes?"
Jo rests the baby on her hip and moistens a washcloth in the bathroom. Dean crosses his arms, pretending to himself that he's cold, and then in a rush he steps out of the bedroom.
Sam is standing at the stove, frying bacon, of course. He is wearing ragged jeans and a shirt that needs washing and no shoes, and he still looks vaguely naked without any hair like that. While Dean stands there, Sam raises his head and they see each other, both alive and only ten feet apart. They are practically in the same room.
"Hey," says Sam, tentatively. "Does Jo like it extra crispy too?"
Dean clears his throat and finds his voice. "Yeah." Desperate for a joke, he retreats to the bedroom and takes up the triangle of toast. He brandishes it at Sam, and thinks about smacking him with it, while Sam smiles sheepishly.
"She was awake, man. I figured, better to keep her happy and let you all sleep."
There is a certain misguided logic in that, so Dean just tosses the toast into the sink, and pulls eggs out of the fridge.
Sam stands there like an oak tree, big and awkward. He tells the pan, "She really is in love with you. She has been for years. I didn't think you'd --"
He stops. Dean is not ready to think. He finds something for his hands to do, and pours himself some of the coffee Sam has made.
"If you want to yell at me, that would be good." Sam clears his throat and rearranges strips of bacon in the pan. "It was a pretty awful thing to do."
Dean is not ready to think. Jo trundles in, Betty grasping her hands and taking heavy thumping toe-steps.
It's sort of like being stabbed in the chest with it, or like he's suddenly transported back to the day Betty was born. He can hardly breathe at the idea of that little girl belonging to him, being his responsibility. He sets down his coffee before he shakes it all out of the mug and holds out his hands for her to walk to. Jo has the oddest look on her face as she lets go of Betty and lets her pace shakily across the kitchen floor. The sun is low in the sky still, and the whole room is orange with it, the little girl fat and robust and stomping her way into the safe circle of her father's arms. He sweeps her up into the sky and she shrieks laughter.
Sam has pulled the pan off the heat and is watching. Dean can feel him watching, his desperation for everything to be all right after all. It is easy to pretend everything is all right. Jo is right there, expectant, full of hope. He shudders and closes his eyes, while Betty laughs and laughs and bangs him on the head with her meaty paws.
"S-- Dean, if you don't want to be married to me," Jo says slowly. "I mean, say so."
The sound of early traffic outside, the last crackles of the hot bacon in the pan. Dean opens his eyes. "I don't know," he says, and that is the truth so he says it twice: "I don't know." The silence that ensues is heavy, scary. Dean fills it up with the everyday stuff: "So how was the couch?"
"You need a new one," Sam says, and puts his back to the room again. He cracks eggs into the pan and they sizzle, yolks swimming. "The one you have smells like somebody puked in it, and it isn't long enough to fit me."
"You think you're gonna be sleeping on it a while?"
Sam stands there, tongue-tied. "I --"
Dean is tongue-tied too. "Cause. You could. For a while. If you wanted."
"Yeah," Sam says. He tends the eggs. Dean drinks his coffee and pours a cup for Jo and Betty starts wiggling in his arm, wanting to get down.
"I was thinking," Dean says suddenly, like the thought will skitter away from him if he doesn't get it out of his mouth fast enough. "About the hunting thing."
Jo tenses up, waiting for him to look at her. There's something hard in his chest, restrictive like tape on broken ribs. He puts the baby down to crawl around on the floor. But she likes walking, and she takes several awkward steps towards her mother before bouncing down on her behind.
He doesn't know what everyone expects him to say. "I liked hunting," he says, mostly to himself, to hear it and find out whether it still fits. "I was good at it. It was -- cool."
"You want to try it again?" Jo asks, and it's not with that passive expectation, but a challenge, a dare, the excitement of it in a colleague.
They all stay still for a minute in the sunny kitchen, just letting that challenge hang in the air between them. Sam is at the stove and Dean beside him and Jo in the chair and the baby on the floor. Sam is biting his lip, like he's thinking about crying again, because this household hasn't had enough of the freaking waterworks over the past day.
"Sure," Dean says at last, like he does it all the time, like she's just asked him whether she should pick up a sixpack on the way home. "I could do that."
"Only if you want to," warns Sam, high-strung as always.
Dean snatches a strip of bacon out of the pan, and stuffs it in his mouth. Jo cracks up, choking on her coffee. "You think you can make me do anything I don't want to?" he asks, with his mouth full.
"No," Sam laughs, and even though it's a lie it sounds pretty good. "No I don't think I can."
"Damn straight," says Dean, and goes to put some pants on.
***
END (3/07)
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8
Notes: Whew! Hurray! Many thanks to my cheerleading crew, especially cofax7, whom I used as a logic-soundingboard throughout.