SPN Fic: The Grass Assassin
Title: The Grass Assassin
Author:
dodger_winslow
Challenge: Firsts Chart: First Words
Genre: Gen, pre-series
Rating: PG
Pairings: None
Characters: Pastor Jim, Dean, John
Spoilers/Warnings: None
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.
Summary: Everything is a choice, Dean. You can chose to destroy, or you can chose not to destroy.
The Grass Assassin
Dean was killing the lawn with a stick. He’d jabbed a dozen holes in the unoffending turf and was bent on jabbing dozens more, working his way along the church’s walkway like the spreading of death was his mission in life.
Jim had been watching the boy for some time. He’d watch the jabbing ritual start with small pokes at a frog that was hopping along the sidewalk. Another child might have killed the creature, but Dean wasn’t another child. He pestered it a bit, agitated it into some impressive jumps made to the end of avoiding him, but when the time came to finish the game or start another, this child didn’t possess what it took to shove a sharp stick through a defenseless creature, just to see it die.
So he turned his anger on the lawn. And the lawn was paying the price.
"You suppose it’s dead yet?" Jim asked quietly from where he stood.
Dean jumped, guilty to be caught in his grass assassinating ways. He quit jabbing at the lawn immediately, changing the stick’s mission to a much less lethal game of search and explore.
Jim didn’t buy the bait and switch routine for a single moment. "I’d like to talk to you for a minute, Dean," he said. "If you don’t mind?"
Dean still hadn’t looked at him. He was working the stick through the church’s lush green grass, drawing shallow furrows in the earth now rather than jabbing it with the rage of a child denied.
"Do you mind?" Jim pressed gently.
Dean shrugged, indifferent.
"Good." Jim stepped up, dropped his hand to Dean’s shoulder. The boy shrugged out from under it before the gesture settled. "Let’s go back inside then, shall we?"
Dean began jabbing the ground again with his stick.
"Please?" Jim asked after a beat.
Dean threw his stick, spinning it out into the middle of the church lawn like something that had offended him merely by existing, then turned and walked into the church, leaving Jim to follow him or not.
Jim waited for almost ten minutes before he did. It was a calculated amount of time … something he counted out in his head until he was sure Dean would have moved on to a new way of expressing the anger boiling just beneath his skin.
He found Dean in the dimly lit sanctuary, sitting at the end of a pew, killing a hymn book with a pencil. He’d jabbed a dozen holes in the unoffending pages and was bent on jabbing dozens more, working his way through it like spreading destruction was his mission in life.
Jim walked down the aisle to take a seat in the pew behind him. Though the footfalls of his approach registered on Dean’s posture almost from the sanctuary doorway, the boy’s destruction of the hymn book didn’t slow even when Jim took his seat. If anything, it become more measured, more deliberate, more of a statement made than a sin believed unobserved.
It was a punishment of sorts: a price to be paid for making Dean return to a place he’d only just left behind. Jim watched the boy for over an hour, letting him decimate the book in his hands, page by page, hymn by hymn.
"It’s unfair, isn’t it?" Jim said suddenly.
Again, Dean jumped, having lost track of the fact that Jim was still behind him, guilty to be caught destroying the hymn book when he’d forgotten that as much was his intent to not only do, but to be observed doing.
"And the unfairness of it makes you angry."
Dean thrust to his feet. Leaving the destroyed hymn book behind on the pew, he walked down three rows, took another seat, and started in on another book.
"Your father’s angry, too," Jim told the boy quietly. "And hurt. He thinks it’s unfair, too. He doesn’t understand how God could do this to him. How God could do this to you."
Dean changed from the hymn book to the pew itself. He jammed the pencil into the red, velveteen seat cover over and over again, leaving holes in it like he’d left holes the grass outside.
"I wish I could tell you why God let this happen, Dean," Jim went on. "But I can’t. I don’t think anyone can. It isn’t fair. And it isn’t right. Your mother was a wonderful person. I don’t know why God let this happen to her."
Dean turned then. He stared directly at Jim, his little-boy eyes small pools of anger and pain, burning from the tainted innocence of his little-boy face.
Jim stood then, walked slowly down the aisle to the pew in which Dean sat. Dean twisted to follow his approach, the accusation in those little-boy eyes never once leaving Jim, not even for one, single moment.
Jim crouched beside the pew, putting himself on Dean’s level, putting himself where the boy could see him eye to eye. He held one hand out, palm up, so Dean could see the frog nestled there, the frog Dean had pestered to irritable agitation, but had ultimately chosen to spare from the lethal expressions of his boundless, little-boy anger.
"Everything is a choice, Dean," Jim said quietly. "You can chose to destroy, or you can chose not to destroy."
Dean didn’t look at the frog. He just continued to stare at Jim, waiting.
"All of God’s creatures are vulnerable," Jim went on after a moment. "All of us can be so easily destroyed by something that isn’t fair, that makes no sense, that we didn’t deserve, that we don’t understand. Sometimes that happens, Dean. Sometimes that happens because the boy with the stick isn’t you."
Dean looked down at the frog, then back up again at Jim.
"You father needs you," Jim said quietly. "You’re the only one who can help him now."
Dean shook his head once, denying it.
"Yes," Jim corrected. "You. Not God. Not me. Not Sammy. Just you." Jim reached out, laid one hand against Dean’s cold, pale cheek. "I know you don’t want to talk yet, son," he said gently. "I know how angry you are. How hurt. But your daddy needs you. He needs you; you’re the only one who can help him."
Dean held his hands out, cupped, a silent request for a transfer of custody for the frog. Gently, Jim urged the small creature out of his hand and into Dean’s.
Dean carried it out of the church like some small treasure, putting it back in the grass very near where he’d originally found it. When the frog was once again safe on the lawn here it belonged, Dean returned to the church, this time, of his own volition. He walked past Jim standing at the doorway to the sanctuary, and down the long hall to Jim’s office. The door there was still closed. Dean opened it and went in.
The room was dark, quiet. He could hear his father breathing from all the way across the room. Cautiously, Dean threaded his way through stacks of religious texts and chairs and other sundry items that stood between the door and the couch in the far corner
John was lying on his side on the couch, covered with a blanket, his head resting on a pillow that depicted the seven deadly sins. He hadn’t moved since Dean left him there to poke holes in the grass outside.
"Hey, bud," John said quietly.
Dean climbed onto the couch, wriggling and pushing and pulling both John and the blanket until he was once again situated where he’d been before he left, snuggled deep in his daddy’s arms, his back pressed tight against John’ chest and belly, his arms holding onto John’s arms, pulling them around him like the safety harness in a carnival ride.
Laying his head back on John’s biceps, using his father’s arm as a pillow, he said, "Don’t worry, Daddy. Everything will be okay."
They were the same words John has spoken to him two hours ago. The same words that drove Dean out of his father’s arms and out of the small sanctuary of Jim’s office and out of the church itself, on to the church’s lawn, into the grass where he found a stick and tried to murder a frog he couldn’t, in the end, bring himself to murder.
John put his face into his son’s hair, smelling it, breathing of it, remembering in it everything he equated with home. With Mary. With life.
"Yeah, Dean," John whispered against his son’s skull. "Everything will be okay."
Outside the pastor’s small office, down a long hallway and standing in the doorway of a sanctuary that held no answers for a man and a child betrayed by everything they had ever believed as truth, Jim bowed his head in prayer to a God he would never understand, but who he saw in the merciful spirit of a broken child.
-finis
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