SPN Fic: Skin Deep (Pt 3 of 8ish, Gen, R, Pre-Series)
Yeah. This one is going to end up more than 6 parts long. I can tell you that right now. What I can't tell you is what the final total will be. Not sure yet, so I'm upping it to 8 for right now, but who knows in the end? So just keep that in mind ... when I say Part 3 of 8, I probably mean Part 3 of 10 or something.
Title: Skin Deep (3 of 8ish)
Author: Dodger Winslow
Genre: Gen, Pre-series
Rating: R for language, mature subject matter
Spoilers: Something Wicked, Skin
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while ...
Summary: John tumbled that around in his head for awhile, tried to sort out why in the fuck a shifter would shed one skin for another without changing a damn thing about his original appearance. It didn’t make any more sense now than it had an hour ago. There wasn’t any advantage to it that he could see; and it went against pretty much everything he knew about the species as a whole. Everything he thought he knew, at least. Everything he’d ever read or heard. Things like shapeshifters were predators, monsters, aberrations of the natural order that would eat a man’s liver for the price of the spare change in his pocket. Not things like shapeshifters might turn out to be protective fathers, or terrified kids huddled into themselves at arm’s length, doing everything they could to hide in plain sight.
Part 3
John pulled into a roadside motel and parked a couple hundred yards from the front office. He’d picked the place, in large part, because it was just one step up from a roach plaza on skid row.
A very small step.
They’d been driving for a while now, and they were somewhere in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere. There wasn’t much of a moon to ease up the dark of night, and most of the stars had given their wattage over to an ugly phalanx of grey-black clouds that were looking to make good on a credible threat of imminent rain. There weren’t any lights in the lot itself; and most of the naked bug bulbs screwed in over garish green doors were blown, too. Trash was strewn about like level one landscaping, making it pretty clear the place wasn’t trading off its ambiance to turn a dollar. Far more likely, the rooms rented by the hour, as well as by the day; and as seedy as the damn place looked, even from the highway, the hourlies might well turn out to be the respectable customers. There was an outdoor pool surrounded by a chain link fence that might have qualified the place as a family stop once; but it was a crumbling decrepit of plaster now, filled with rotting refuse rather than water. Looking like the fallback position for three dumpsters that hadn’t been emptied in a month of Sundays, it made the whole place smell worse than the downwind draft of a salt and burn of week-old corpses.
What really appealed to John though was the fact that, despite the vacancy sign declaring its availability with less than four letters up to the task of lighting themselves neon, the place was relatively busy. There were more than two dozen cars in the lot; which, considering the amenities, made a good case for it being the local fuck stop. The benefit of that was twofold: not only would the lion’s share of patrons being highly motivated to mind their own damn business, but the local cops wouldn’t be wasting much drive time on routine patrols.
Both of those aspects were necessities rather than luxuries on his shopping list tonight. It was going to be hard enough to figure out how to handle this mess without having to worry about nosy neighbors or community-minded cops pounding on the door if things got loud or bloody.
Bloodier, he reminded himself grimly.
He’d parked the Impala on the far side of an SUV that looked like there was a suburban housewife somewhere spending the night alone, pulling under a leafy overhang of trees that hadn’t been trimmed any time this decade to keep the car’s interior steeped in a soup of inky shadows. Darkness was his greatest advantage right now. The last thing he needed was for somebody to see him carting an unrelated, half-dressed, torn up, blood-slicked nine-year-old around in his front seat.
The second to the last thing he needed was to actually have that unrelated, half-dressed, torn up, blood-slicked nine-year-old in his front seat; but it was a little late in the game to start thinking ahead now.
John glanced at the kid, studied him for a long moment without speaking. The shifter didn’t say anything either. He hadn’t spoken a word since begging for mercy almost an hour ago. He just stared at John in silence, his eyes dull and lifeless in comparison to the pale, pink flush of a brand new face.
A new face that looked just like the old one.
John tumbled that around in his head for awhile, tried yet again to sort out why in the fuck a shifter would shed one skin for another without changing a damn thing about his original appearance. It didn’t make any more sense now than it had an hour ago. There wasn’t any advantage to it that he could see; and it went against pretty much everything he knew about the species as a whole.
Everything he thought he knew, at least. Everything he’d ever read or heard.
Things like shapeshifters were predators, monsters, aberrations of the natural order that would eat a man’s liver for the price of the spare change in his pocket. Not things like shapeshifters might turn out to be protective fathers, or terrified kids huddled into themselves at arm’s length, doing everything they could to hide in plain sight.
Hiding to protect themselves rather than to ambush anything that happened by.
John ran a hand along his jaw, tried to figure out what in the hell he was doing here, other than the obvious, which was being a sentimental, fucking idiot. He should have killed this thing back in its den. He sure as hell should have killed it after it proved out to be a shifter by slipping its skin right in front of him.
To be perfectly honest, he wasn’t quite sure why he hadn’t. Wasn’t sure what was playing through his head other than the soundtrack of a kid shrieking like he was being skinned alive, or the looped film of a little boy covered in blood, cowering away from him in abject terror.
Or maybe it was the quiet, hopeful desperation of an orphaned son whispering, "Did my dad send you?" that fucked him over to his current state of utterly fucked over.
But whatever it was, he was definitely fucked.
John sighed. He gave his half-beard one more scratch before setting himself to taking on the task at hand. The first order of business had to be the way the kid looked. The way the shifter looked, he reminded himself grimly. But a kid to anybody seeing him from an outsider perspective, which wasn’t good for a man carrying ID that wouldn’t prove out if it was run through any kind of official database.
The shifter’s clothes were a wreck. Totaled. Not only torn to shit, but also soaked through with both blood and the briny stench of the mucus (or placenta, or whatever-the-fuck-it-was) that had slicked him out of his old skin and into his new. So that was first on the to-do list: get the kid cleaned up so he didn’t look like a horror movie exploded all over him.
John had seen a couple of babies born in Nam-Jim had called it proof of life; John considered it more proof of Jim’s God being a sick fuck with a mean-ass sense of humor, bringing helpless babies into a hell like that place, two out of three of them born to women already dead, and the third one to a woman who would be in hours-but he’d never seen anything quite like this before. It was a fucking mess unrivalled in even his extensive experience with fucking messes, and it made the whole car stink almost as bad as that damn pool outside. Worst than that (by far) was the way this shit was soaking into the Impala’s leather seats. Another hour or two and he’d never get the smell out.
He was going to have a hell of a time explaining this one to Dean. It would be a double whammy of piss-poor bad planning as far as his kid was concerned, and that kid would not be wrong in his assessment. He’d have every right to call John on the carpet, demand an accounting for why his girl (somewhere along the line, the Impala had become Dean’s girl instead of John’s) had been subjected to such a degrading humiliation in the first place; not to mention how he’d managed to put himself in a position where he’d be up to his ass in fast talk (if not outright buried in the desert without a grave marker) if he got pulled over for so much as a speeding ticket before he figured out a way to get this mess cleaned up.
Dean wouldn’t call him on the carpet for that because he wasn’t Sammy, but he’d have every right to.
The shifter was watching John as closely as John was watching it.
"The way I see it," John told him, "you’ve got two choices here. You can either stay in the car and wait until I tell you it’s okay to get out, or you can take your chances that you can run faster than I can drive." He gave Cain a moment to think about that, then asked, "So which one is it going to be?"
Cain didn’t answer him. He just sat there, staring at John with flat, listless eyes, saying nothing, doing nothing. John gave him a couple more seconds to ante up to the table, then leaned in, put a little gravel in his tone when he said, "I ask you a question, boy; you’d best answer it."
The threat got a response, if not a productive one. Cain blinked. He pulled a little deeper inside himself, a little farther away from John. His shoulders trembled and his hands balled up into little, pressure-white fists. It was an effective mimic of terror so deep it could infected a frozen rabbit’s spine to motion despite its best intentions to statue up as a last-resort line of defense.
"So which is it going to be?" John asked again.
Cain spoke this time, his voice sounding like it took a tangible effort to whisper, "Is my dad dead?"
"I have no idea," John lied. "And that isn’t an answer to the question I asked you."
"Did you kill him?" Cain pressed.
"If I had, don’t you think I’d have some idea of whether or not he was dead?"
Tears formed in the corner of the shifter’s eyes. It looked enough like genuine despair it was all John could do not to look away.
"Did you kill him?" Cain asked again.
John sighed. "No," he lied again, clipping his tone this time, making it impatient. "I didn’t kill your dad, kid. I already told you, I’m just doing what he paid me to do."
"You swear?" His voice didn’t even clear a whisper this time. It was a puff of breath in the cool night air: a prayer in the darkness, a plea for mercy from the wrong end of a snub nose thirty-eight.
John almost gave in and told the shifter he wasn’t ever going to see his dad again. He almost told him his dad was dead, and they both knew it, so it was time to cut the crap and pony up to the truth; quit denying the obvious and move on.
Almost, but not quite.
"I’ve got nothing to prove to you," he said instead.
Twisting around in his seat, John scanned the parking lot between the Impala and the office a couple hundred yards away. There wasn’t a soul anywhere in sight. As much as the kid looked fucked up enough to get an innocent man strung up without a trial right now, the truth of it was that Cain could probably set himself on fire and run naked down the highway, and no one would even crack a curtain to find out what the ruckus was.
Definitely the kind of place John was looking for.
Definitely the kind of place he might need before the night was over.
"I’m going to check us into this dump, and then we’re going to settle in and wait for your dad to make contact." John turned back to face the shifter, make sure the boy was listening to what he was saying. "I don’t have much patience for games or theatrics, so this is how we’re going to play it. I don’t really give a rat’s ass whether you believe me or not about your dad. That’ll prove out in time; you can apologize to me when he shows up. But until that happens, I do give a rat’s ass about not being seen with you the way you look right now."
It didn’t hurt to admit that, he figured. The shifter would have to be an idiot not to recognize his own advantage here: not only what it was, but how to play it to get John tied up long enough to make good his escape, if not get his captor thrown into Sing Sing for the rest of his natural life.
Or unnatural one, for that matter.
"Once we’re in the room," John went on, "if you want to get cleaned up and strike out on your own, that’s fine by me. More than fine, in fact; I might even pony up a twenty for cab fare just to get rid of you. But for right now? Right now, you’re going to keep your ass inside this car, and you’re going to do it because I tell you to."
He fixed Cain with a cold, dangerous glare. "I am not going to get fucked over for helping your dad out on this one, boy," he said. "I took his money, so I’ll do what I can to hook the two of you up as long as you don’t make it too difficult on me. But that doesn’t include fielding questions from the cops about a bloody kid in my car, so you try and put me in that position, and you are not going to like the way it plays out for you. Do you understand what I’m saying?"
"Yes," Cain whispered.
"Good," John said. "Because if you don’t do exactly what I tell you here, I guarantee you’ll wish you had."
"Okay."
John gave him another moment of scrutiny just to hammer the threat home before opening the car door and stepping out into the parking lot. He took the knife under his thigh with him, slipped it into a sheath at his belt as he stood.
"John?" The boy’s voice was a quaver in the darkness, barely loud enough to reach across the distance between them.
John bent down, met the shifter’s frightened gaze through the open door. "What?"
"You aren’t going to leave me, are you?"
"No."
"You swear?"
John looked away, studied the far end of the parking lot for several seconds before he said, "Stay in the car." He slammed the door and walked to the office like there was no part of him that felt any urge to look back and make sure the kid wasn’t making a break for it. Or worse, following him at a safe distance like a gut-kicked puppy with nowhere else to go and no one else to follow.
*
The motel’s night clerk was so stoned he couldn’t keep both eyes pointed in the same direction from more than three seconds at a stretch. He asked John an assload of questions about nothing, then rambled on for almost five minutes about something John would have had to be stoned himself to follow. It took twice as long to get registered as it should have, and he was several nerves short of a full set by the time he made it back to the Impala.
Cain hadn’t moved a muscle while he was gone. Still hunkered down in his seat, still jammed up against the passenger side door, he watched every move John made as they pulled around to the far end of the lot and parked in shadows again.
John glanced at him, said, "We’re going to get out now. You’re going to walk right beside me; keep my body between you and the office at all times. Do you understand?"
The kid nodded. Dammit. The shapeshifter nodded.
"All right. Let’s go then."
"What’s our story?" Cain asked as John reached out to pop the door open.
John hesitated. "Our story?"
"What am I supposed to say if someone asks?’ Cain clarified. "Did you tell them I’m your son? Did you use my real name, or did you make one up for me? What’s our last name supposed to be? Where are we from? What happened to my mom? Is she dead or are you divorced? Or is that where we’re going, to get back to her?"
John grunted, shook his head. "We don’t have a story," he said.
Cain fidgeted in his seat. "We have to have a story," he reasoned carefully. "We have to be on the same page right from the very beginning. That way I won’t cross you up by not knowing what you’ve already said to somebody."
"I didn’t say anything to anyone about you," John told him. "I didn’t even tell them you exist."
That scared the kid. It threatened him.
Smart kid.
Smart shapeshifter, dammit.
"But what if they see me?" Cain ventured. "We should have a story in case someone sees me, shouldn’t we?"
"No one’s going to see you," John said. "If they do, we’ve got ourselves a problem."
Cain didn’t catch the threat this time. "It’s easier to keep someone believing what they already do than make them believe you again after they think you’re a liar," he pointed out helpfully. "My dad sa-" And then he stopped. Cut himself off right in the middle of a word. "Sorry," he said after a beat. "We can do it however you normally do it. I was just-" He hesitated again, then repeated, "Sorry."
"So that’s what your dad says, huh?" John said, watching the kid pick at half-dried, mucoid crap soaked into his badly-stained jeans. "That not opening the can of worms in the first place is the best strategy? why it’s important to have your stories straight up-front?"
Cain nodded without looking up. "Yeah."
"He ever tell you it’s easier to explain how you leave without a kid if you don’t arrive with one?" John asked.
He didn’t actually mean that one as a threat, but that’s the way the kid took it. He froze in place, stopped picking at his jeans altogether before looking up slowly, going paler than the pale he already was as he fixing John with wide eyes and whispered, "You’re going to leave without me?"
The terror in his voice made John a little sick. It made him want to tell the kid (the shapeshifter) something comforting, so he did. Or at least, he tried to. "Once your dad shows up, you’re not my problem any more."
Cain didn’t get it. "Oh," he said quietly. Then he did get it. "Oh," he said again, more securely this time. Then, "Oh. Okay."
"You done with the questions now?" John asked him. "Because I am. I really, really am."
Cain swallowed hard, nodded. "I’m done," he agreed.
"Okay, then. We’re going to get out, walk straight to room forty-seven, and go inside. Our story is that you don’t exist, so anybody but me sees you, and we’re going to have a big problem. We clear on that?"
Cain nodded again.
"Good. Let’s go."
John got out of the car, left the door open so the kid could follow. Cain crawled across the seat to join him, stayed as close to John as he could without actually touching him as they walked across the lot. He followed John’s instructions to the letter, kept in perfect lockstep the whole way, mimicking John’s every move like they were glued together at the mirror.
It wasn’t until they were actually locked inside the motel room that John relaxed, let his hand fall away from the knife at his belt and let the tension in his shoulders slide down his spine. He glanced at Cain, considered telling him he’d done a good job just to buy a little good will, make things a little easier until he knew for sure what he was going to do, how he was going to proceed from here.
The boy was just settling to a seat on the edge of one of the room’s two beds. "Don’t sit on that," John snapped. The way he barked at the kid scared him. Cain jumped back to his feet like his ass was on fire, took three steps away from John so fast he almost tripped over a chair he didn’t see in his hurry to back up.
"I just meant don’t sit on the bed until you’ve cleaned up a little," John clarified less harshly. Cain nodded, but there was shame in his eyes, guilt in his expression for the sin of being a nightmare of slick mucus and shed skin; a fucked-over mess who deserved to have his head bitten off for the mere presumption of thinking he deserved to sit.
John sighed, rubbed at the headache pounding between his eyes. "Hit the head," he said after a moment. "Get rid of those clothes and get yourself cleaned up. Take a shower if you want."
Cain nodded again, but he didn’t move. He looked small and horrific where he stood in the middle of the room, flannel shirt torn to a ruined tatter and jeans riding low on his hips, heavy with the weight of whatever had sloughed off the lower half of his body while his skin was peeling like a locust’s shell off his arms and chest and face. He watched John in silence, his expression not quite sure what to do, not quite sure how to proceed, or which action (or lack of action) would keep him from getting snapped at again.
"Go on," John said.
Cain shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He looked like he wanted to ask a question, but he didn’t, stopping short of asking something he wasn’t sure he was allowed to ask. And he still didn’t move, still stood in the middle of the room like he was frozen with indecision, caught between two choices he couldn’t decide between, so he defaulted to simply doing nothing.
Stay where he was.
Hide in plain sight.
"What the fuck are you waiting for?" John asked finally.
Cain trembled a little. His voice was quiet, but not a whisper when he admitted, "I’m not sure what you want me to do."
"I want you to go to the head and get yourself cleaned up," John repeated. Cain trembled a little hard, but he still didn’t move. "What?" John demanded. "What about that request is unclear to you, kid? Don’t just stand there and look at me. Ask whatever it is you’re standing there waiting to ask."
"I didn’t think I was supposed to ask questions," Cain pointed out.
It was such a Sammy thing to say it made John want to kick his little ass for him.
Sammy could ask 300 questions about absolutely nothing anybody needed to know, but if John told him just once to put the questions on hold for a while, he’d sit there with his lips pressed into a thin line of little-kid pissed off, refusing to say a fucking thing because his old man was such an asshole he wouldn’t even let him ask a question if he needed to know something. It was patented Sammy. And if the blessed relief of not being asked a stupid-ass question every thirty seconds was such that John didn’t happen to notice his kid was giving him the silent treatment, he’d deliberately misunderstand something, then look at John with that pissy-ass little look of his when John asked why in the hell he didn’t ask for clarification and say, "I didn’t think I was allowed to ask questions."
It made John madder than anything Sammy did … madder by half again than the closest runner-up, which was asking that damn many questions in the first place.
Cain took a step away from him, adding, "I thought you said not to ask questions." His voice was trembling now along with his shoulders. His eyes looked like they wanted to cry but were doing everything they could not to let it happen. "I thought that’s what you said. Isn’t that what you said?" His voice was just a little panicked on the question, just frantic enough to make John feel like a serious jackass for getting irritated at a kid who was clearly trying to do what John told him to do.
He rubbed at his forehead again, looked away to study the dull, grey-green curtains drawn shut across the room’s only windows. "I didn’t say don’t ask questions if you don’t understand something," John said finally. He tried to modulate his tone enough so it didn’t sound like he was being critical. He had no idea whether he succeeded or not. "I just said don’t ask questions about shit you don’t need to know."
"Oh," Cain said. "Okay."
His tone of voice made John look at the kid again, and what he saw there didn’t particularly surprise him. It was clear Cain had no idea how to tell the difference between something he needed to know and something he didn’t need to know, so John tried again, saying, "I just meant that … I’m just saying … ah, fuck it, kid. I don’t know what I meant. Just ask your God damned question, will you?"
Cain hesitated so long John almost gave up and told him to just go ahead and stand there in his fucked-up tatter of a blood-and-mucus fashion statement all night long, if that’s what he wanted to do. "Ask," he urged instead.
"What’s a head?"
The question was so ludicrous it took John a moment to process it. "What?" he said finally.
"A head," Cain repeated. Then clarified, "I don’t know what a head is. You said to hit the head and get cleaned up and take a shower, but I don’t know what a head is. Except, you know, a head." He pointed vaguely at his own head, looking sick, looking scared.
"Do you know what a shower is?" John asked after a long beat of silence.
"Yeah."
"And where do people usually keep their showers?" John asked.
"In the bathroom?" It was as much a question as it was an answer.
John ignored the inflection of insecurity and took it as the latter. "Then that’s probably what a fucking head is, don’t you think? A bathroom, maybe? Where people keep their showers, and where you might want to go to get yourself cleaned up if that’s what I told you to do?"
Cain blinked at him. "Oh," he said finally. "Okay."
If the boy hadn’t looked so damned sincere about not having had a clue what he was getting at until just now, John would have sworn the little bastard was being passive-aggressive with him. As it was, he still suspected it, all appearance of sincerity to the contrary. It was exactly what Sammy would have done: pretended not to understand something obvious just to frustrate him, just to point out the fact that he thought his old man’s explanation was sub-standard and needed a little refinement if he was going to be giving instructions to a ten-year-old with a rule that the ten-year-old couldn’t ask any questions, even if he needed clarification on something.
"Well?" John demanded, frustrated without knowing exactly why. "Doesn’t that make sense?"
"Yeah," Cain said. "I guess."
"And isn’t that something you could have figured out on your own, if you’d just given it a little thought?"
Cain started chewing at his lip. It was a Dean response to having his feet put to the fire when he didn’t know the right answer. "Um … yeah. I guess. Sorry."
"Oh, don’t give me that crap," John snapped. "You’re not a stupid kid, Cain, so don’t pretend that you are. You’re playing dump just to piss me off, and we both know it. Which, by the way, is not a good idea. You do not want to see me pissed off. Trust me on this."
"I’m not trying to piss you off," Cain said quietly.
"Right. Whatever." John actually heard himself say that damn word-whatever-and it frustrated him twice as much as anything else that had yet been said. It was the word Dean used when he was being dismissive: when he wanted to make it clear he didn’t agree with what John was saying, but he wasn’t willing to argue about it any longer either. Whatever. It was as disrespectful as it was infuriating, and it was one of the few things Dean ever said to him that got his hackles up the way Sammy could without even trying. "Just get your ass in the head-sorry, in the bathroom-and get cleaned up."
"I just … I’ve never heard it called that before." Cain explained like he thought he had to.
"And you couldn’t possibly figure it out from the context? Hit the head? You’re trying to tell me you couldn’t have figured out I was talking about the bathroom when I said that?"
"I thought you meant …" Cain started. Then he stopped. He shook his head, looking down at his feet. "Okay," he said, his voice miserable. "Never mind. Sorry. I’ll go get cleaned up now."
"You thought I mean what?" John asked as the kid started to turn away.
Cain shrugged. He wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t meet his eyes. "Nothing," he said. "It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I made you mad. I’m sorry I didn’t figure it out myself."
"I’m not mad," John lied. Cain’s chin was trembling. If he wasn’t about to cry, John had never seen a kid about to cry. "I’m not mad," John tried again, making a more successful bid at sounding like he meant it the second time around.
"Okay," Cain said. "Can I go then?"
"No, you can’t go. Look at me."
Cain looked up. His eyes were dry, but not by much.
"You thought I meant what?" John asked a third time.
Cain’s expression crumpled in on itself. "I thought you wanted me to hit something. You know … hit something-" he made a half-assed gesture with one arm, like he was throwing a roundhouse punch when he wasn’t willing to commit to actually throwing a roundhouse punch "-and then go in the bathroom and take a shower. And I didn’t know what you wanted me to hit. Or why." He looked down again, looked humiliated. "I didn’t realize you meant hit like ‘go there’ or something. I didn’t think of that. I just thought you wanted me to hit something, and I couldn’t figure out what you wanted me to hit. Except a head. You know … like a head." He gestured at his own head again, vaguely, a bare wave of his hand only grudgingly made. "But I didn’t know whose head to hit. So I couldn’t figure out what you meant. I couldn’t figure out what you wanted me to do."
John closed his eyes for a moment, listened to the pulse of the headache pounding in his skull with every beat of his heart.
"I thought that’s what you meant," Cain said. "But I was afraid to ask, because I thought you told me not to ask questions. So I was afraid to ask, but I didn’t know what to hit. But I wasn’t trying to piss you off. I wasn’t. I really wasn’t."
"Okay," John said. He opened his eyes again, tried to remember this damned child standing in front of him struggling not to cry was a monster, a mimic by evolutionary design, a predator capable of putting on one hell of a show to the end of getting close enough to a man to pull his guard down, make sure the first blow he threw was also the last. "Alright. Whatever. The head is the bathroom, Cain. It’s a military term. Now go. Get cleaned up."
Cain nodded. He turned, made his way to the bathroom as quickly as he could without actually running. Once he was inside the room, half-hidden by a door he stood behind like he felt he needed a shield between himself and John, he said, "I’m not stupid, and I wasn’t trying to make you mad. I just didn’t understand what you meant is all."
It could have been a belligerent statement, but it wasn’t. Not really. It was more of an explanation, a bona fide effort to communicate. But even so, a current of outrage ran cool and fast under the words. It was subtle, but still there: just the slightest indication he was offended, that he felt unjustly maligned and insensitively treated, even if he was too scared to say as much outright.
It was yet another pitch-perfect example of patented Sammy: the kid’s feelings were hurt. He wasn’t mad, he was insulted. And just the tiniest bit tragically damaged by the idea that somebody thought he was stupid rather than just improperly briefed on the mission he was unfairly expected to complete like he was a freaking mindreader or something.
"Then ask next time," John said, trying not to sound exasperated.
Cain nodded. He stood behind the door, looking at John like he still had a question to ask and was still afraid to do it.
"Do you have another question?" John prompted finally.
Cain bit at his lip again. "Is it okay to ask one?" he asked like he wasn’t asking a question to get permission to ask a question.
"As long as it isn’t something about your dad, or if I’m going to kill you, or if I’m going to hurt you, or if I’m a pervert, then go ahead and ask it," John said.
Cain bit harder at his lip. "I just … these are the only clothes I’ve got," he said finally. It wasn’t a question; it was an accusation. A tit-for-tat retaliation for being called stupid.
"Let me worry about that. In the mean time, are you hungry or not?"
Cain hesitated, then said, "I’m okay."
"What can you eat?" he asked like the kid has said yes instead of just meaning it.
Cain looked at his feet. "Not meat."
"Pizza?" John suggested helpfully.
Cain shrugged a little. "No meat," he said like he thought maybe John was too stupid to figure that part out. Another retaliation, in all likelihood. Or maybe just a re-iteration of something important to him that he wasn’t sure was being heard.
"But pizza’s okay, as long as there’s no meat," John said, working overtime to keep the impatience out of his tone, to make this a productive inquisition rather than an instinctive head butting contest.
"Yeah. I guess."
"Can you drink Pepsi?"
"I …" he started, then changed his mind, said simply, "Yes."
"You what?" John asked.
"Nothing."
His patience slipped a little catiwompas. "Dammit, kid. You what?"
Cain swallowed hard. "I like root beer," he said far more carefully than Sammy ever would have.
"Okay. Good. Root beer. And pizza without meat. Anything else?"
Cain shook his head.
"Then get cleaned up," John told him. "I’ll go see what I can scrounge up in the line of clothes and food."
Cain took the order as permission to get the hell out of Dodge. He retreated into the small tile room and locked the door behind him.
John waited until he heard the shower running before he slipped outside, checked the exterior of the motel to make sure the bathroom didn’t have a window big enough to crawl through, then retrieved a duffel of clothes he kept in the trunk for the boys before he went back inside. He called a pizza place out of the local yellow pages, ordered a couple of pies for delivery and a two liter bottle of root beer.
He hated root beer, but Sammy and Dean both loved it. Must be a kid thing, he decided; shapeshifter or otherwise.
"How you doing in there?" John called when he got off the phone just to make sure the kid was still where he was supposed to be.
"I’m not done yet," Cain said immediately, defensively.
John smiled a little, shook his head at the familiar feel of that response. Confident Cain was too pre-occupied with his own business to get into anything that would make trouble for him, John left the room again to clean out the Impala. He cranked the room rate on his fraudulent card by trashing half a dozen towels to the task of mopping virtually liquefied flesh off the leather seats and trying to de-gorify the blood-smeared interior.
He did the best he could with what little he had, but it was still going to be necessary to drive like a tea-totaling grandma for a while. Any cop who saw this mess even in the G-rated version would toss his ass in the slam for a month just on general principles. When the Impala was as clean as she was going to get with nothing more than motel towels to work with, John stashed the ruined mop-ups under half the shit in the rarely-emptied dumpster and went back inside.
The shower was still running, and Cain still gave him a too-fast, too-shrill defensive response to his request for a progress report, so John killed some time digging through the boys’ travel duffel, pulling out one of Sammy’s tee-shirts and a pair of old jeans to hold them up and eyeball them for size. They’d be a significantly too big for Cain around the waist, and long enough he’d trip over them every time he took a step; but it was as close to reasonable as he was going to get from this particular shopping bag.
The fact that he had anything even close to the kid’s size was a benefit of knowing his own short-comings. Because his exit strategies weren’t always as well planned out as they could have been, he’d taken to keeping at least a couple changes of clothes for all of them in the car at all times. He might be prone to leaving town in a hurry on occasion, but the Boy Scouts didn’t have anything on him in the "Be Prepared" department. He was prepared out the ass, for pretty much any situation.
Especially the kind he tended to find himself in on a semi-regular basis, which included two growing boys in a car, headed out of town in the middle of the night, with an apartment full of clothes behind them they were never going to see again. He’d been in that situation half a dozen times too many to do anything other than plan for it now, assuming it would happen again sooner or later, even though he always promised Sammy it wouldn’t; because along with the clothes they left behind, there were invariably a dozen or more books Sammy would mourn the way any other kid would mourn his baseball card collection.
John took the clothes to the bathroom, knocked twice on the hollow core door with his knuckles.
"Stay out!" Cain bellowed. The panic in his voice was a dead ringer for Dean when he thought he was about to get busted whipping his skippy to one of the skin magazines he kept not-so-well hidden in he and Sammy’s bathroom. John suppressed a chuckle as Cain added, "I’m not done yet, so stay out, okay?"
"I have some clothes for you," John told him.
"Stay out," Cain repeated. "I’m not ready yet, so just stay out there, and I’ll be there in a minute."
"Take them now for when you are ready," John said.
"I’m not ready," Cain insisted more adamantly. "Stay out until I’m finished. I’ll tell you when I’m done … and I’m not done yet."
"Oh for Christ’s sake, kid. Quit acting like a little girl and open the damn door." All he got for his flash of irritation was silence and the sound of running water. "This door’s about as strong as corrugated cardboard," John pointed out. "If I was looking to come in there and mess with you, this sure as hell wouldn’t stand in my way."
"I didn’t call you a pervert," Cain returned defensively.
"I didn’t say you did. I just said if I was looking to mess with you, this door wouldn’t stop me. So unless you’re looking to piss me off again, quit being a bitch and open the damn door."
He got several more seconds of silence before the lock finally popped, and the door opened just enough for Cain to peer out from behind it. The kid’s eyes were a half-panic of unsure, but his face didn’t look like a horror movie any more. He almost looked like a normal kid.
For a fucking shapeshifter, John reminded himself.
"What do you want?" Cain asked carefully.
"Here. Take these." John held the clothes up where Cain could grab them. "They’ll be a little big, but it’s the best I’ve got."
Cain pulled Sammy’s clothes into the bathroom and looked them over. "They’re gonna be way big," he noted almost critically. "Don’t you have anything smaller?"
John snorted. "I’m not Wal-Mart. Make do."
Cain started to ask him something else, then changed his mind. "Okay," he said instead. Then, almost like he wasn’t sure it was appropriate, he added, "Thanks."
It was a temptation to let the question slip by unasked if the kid didn’t want to know badly enough to actually ask it; but John resisted, saying, "Go ahead and ask what you were going to ask."
"Huh?"
"What you were going to ask," John clarified a little impatiently. "Just a minute ago, when you changed your mind."
Cain hesitated. "Umm … That’s okay. I don’t think I probably need to know. I just … I wondered, is all."
"Wondered what?"
Cain hesitated again.
John sighed. "Are we going to go through this every time you have a question?"
"I just … I don’t want to piss you off again," Cain said.
"Well, you’re pissing me off now. So just ask the fucking question."
Cain winced, but went ahead and asked, "How come you call the bathroom a head?" It wasn’t the question he was going to ask; it was the first thing he could think of to ask instead.
"Military term," John told him.
"You were in the Army?"
John snorted again, more derisively this time. "God, no. I’m a Marine."
"Oh. Okay. Sorry."
"Sorry I’m a Marine?" John asked as Cain started to close the door again. When the boy looked like he wasn’t sure how to answer that, John added, "Is that some kind of crack?" just to let him know it wasn’t a serious question and didn’t require a serious answer.
Cain didn’t get it. Fear flickered in his eyes. He went back to biting at his lip, trying to figure out what he was supposed to say, what he could say without running the risk of pissing John off again.
The response was like a bucket of cold water. It jarred John, made him realize what he was doing, remember who he was doing it with.
Not a kid, but a shapeshifter.
Not one of his sons he was nudging a little to the end of making him think things through, but some monster he was evaluating instead of killing outright because he was a fucking idiot. A monster who was doing a bang-up job of making him forget what it was, making him lose track of the fact that it wasn’t a confused kid who was scared as hell he might say the wrong thing to a hunter standing on the other side of the door so much as it was a talented mimic taking advantage of a man too stupid to do what needed to be done.
Cain blinked up at him from behind the bathroom door.
It was doing it because it could, and he was letting the evil bastard get away with it. Letting the monster get to him. Letting the damn thing convince him it was just a kid, even if it was a shapeshifter, too.
"Um …" Cain ventured, "… no?"
It was going to fuck him in the end. He could feel it already … feel the way the damn thing had gotten under his skin, dug in like a parasite feeding off his greatest weakness-his love for his sons, his drive to protect his sons-until it was going to be the death of him if he let it be.
John stepped back, saying, "Get dressed. Food will be here in five."
"I didn’t mean anything bad," Cain offered quickly. "I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing."
The contrition in his tone sounded so fucking genuine: a kid saying whatever he thought he had to say to keep from getting beaten, to keep from getting killed. To keep from just getting yelled at again in a way he didn’t understand and didn’t quite know how to deal with.
"You didn’t say anything wrong," John told him, his voice hard. "I was teasing you, and I shouldn’t have. My fault, not yours. Get dressed," he said again, turning away.
"Are you still a Marine?" Cain asked cautiously.
John didn’t look at him when he said, "No such thing as an ex-Marine. Anybody who refers to himself that way was never in the Corps in the first place."
"Oh," Cain said. "I didn’t know that."
"No reason you should." He re-zipped Sammy and Dean’s duffel, tossed it onto a chair before glancing back at the shifter, telling him, "Finish up. Food will be here soon."
"Okay. Thanks for the clothes." He still looked like he wanted to ask that question; still looked like he was too scared to do it.
"Was that your question?" John asked. "Why I have kid clothes in my car?"
Cain shifted his weight from one foot to the other again. He didn’t actually nod, but the look in his eyes verified John had just put what he wanted to know on the table for consideration.
"I have sons," John told him matter-of-factly. "Sometimes they travel with me."
"Oh," Cain said again. Then, again, "I didn’t know that."
"No reason you should," John repeated.
"Sometimes I travel with my dad," Cain offered suddenly. He stared at John from behind the mostly-closed door. Tears welled up in his eyes; but they dried out again after a moment, determinedly unshed. "Most of the time," he added. "Almost always." Then, pushing the door back to the jamb before John could answer, he locked it again with a small, metallic click.
Continue to Part 4