Supernatural Fic: Like Riding a Bike
Title: Like Riding a Bike
Author:
dodger_winslow
Challenge: SPN500 Blindside
Character: John
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Faith
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.
Summary: Sam don't know John. (Or: Some things you never forget how to do).
Okay, I have no idea what it is about what
phantomas says that sparks me to revisions that work from concepts that aren't hitting me on my bells, but whatever it is, she's done it again. So this is the version of this ficlet I would have liked to post last night. Not significant changes in terms of content, but significant to the way it reads, IMO.
Like Riding a Bike
Five dead children and John Winchester is no closer to the demon than he was a week ago. He hasn’t slept in almost three days. He hasn’t showered in over a week. The desk clerk gives him a look as he signs the register that - coming from a man who works the nightshift in some crap ass motel in the middle of nowhere - is twice the insult it might otherwise be.
Room fourteen smells almost as bad as he does, the stench of mildew rotting between cracked shower tiles and under water damaged carpet vying for bragging rights with the stench of burned flesh and stale sweat that still suffuses his hair and clothing. Tired well past the point of caring, he nonetheless takes the time to lock the door behind him and salt the threshold and windowsills before dropping his duffel of weapons onto one bed and himself onto the other.
He is already hip deep and sinking fast in a thick pudding of oblivion when his cell buzzes him to a momentary startled wakefulness. Vibrating against his chest from the inside pocket of a jacket he hasn’t bothered to take off, it demands attention in the way only a pitiless, electronic device can demand attention from a man so far past wasted he’d have to sleep for a week to trade up to drop-dead exhaustion.
It stops ringing before he realizes he hasn’t answered it; and when it falls silent, he forgets it was ever even ringing.
Twelve hours later, he wakes to the splitting headache of a man who’s slept face down in a musty bedspread, legs dangling off the edge of the bed and feet still weighted down by boots covered in mud and blood and the burned remains of a pentagram’s worth of sacrificial toddlers. Stinking with the tragedy of grieving parents and his own fruitless pursuit of a demon not his true quarry, he sits up and rubs at the dry burn of his eyes, at the coarse stubble of his half-beard, at the every-which-way of his greasy hair.
He’s a dead man granted undeserved reprieve. The aches and pains of his body fade, leaving in their wake the aches and pains of his mind.
The remembered sound of tears he, himself, can no longer shed drives him to his duffel and the bottle of scotch he keeps there to wash away the grief of fractured families he cannot save. A stiff shot in a half dirty, chipped glass is small comfort for large failures, so he drinks two and pours himself a third before checking his cell phone for messages.
He’s missed three calls, all of them from Sam, but there’s only one message in his voicemail. Entering his retrieval code when prompted, he wonders exactly when it was that he traded the capacity to cry for children burned beyond recognition for cheap alcohol and regrets over time wasted pursuing a demon who torches five-year-olds in warehouses rather than one who slaughters women in their own homes.
Sam speaks to him over the cell. His voice is awkward and strained in a way Sam’s voice is never awkward or strained. "Hey, Dad. It’s Sam. You probably won’t even get this, but … " John takes a good slug of whiskey. It burns in his mouth, down his throat, in the twenty-hour empty of his belly. "…uh … it’s Dean. He’s sick, and the doctors say there’s nothing they can do."
When the glass slips from his fingers, it shatters against the corner of the nightstand. Cheap alcohol and regrets become an implosion of impact from every direction he never sees coming.
It’s only later that he realizes he hasn’t forgotten how to cry after all.