SPN Fic: To Everything A Season (Pt 15/?) (Gen, R, FutureFic)
See? I'm trying to be a good girl ...
Title: To Everything A Season (Part 15/?)
Author:
dodger_winslow
Challenge: Firsts Chart: First Memory
Genre: Gen (some het, not graphic), FutureFic
Word Count: 163,000 (total)
Pairings/Characters: John/OFC, Dean/OFC, Sam/OFC (hey, did I mention it was Future Fic?)
Rating: R
Warnings: Language, sexual situations (not graphic)
Spoilers: Oh yeah. Everything S1
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.
Timeline Note: Set seven years after the events of Devil's Trap. John, Dean and Sam all survived the crash to hunt down and destroy the Demon. For Sam, life goes on. For Dean, life stalls. For John, life has no more meaning, and he begins to self destruct.
Summary: A little piece of good advice: Never hunt a wendigo when you're drunk.
Part 15
Ten minutes later, Danny stepped outside, pulling the door shut behind him. Sarah was already out of the car, walking up the driveway. He met her at the midpoint, turning her off her intended course with a simple, "Walk with me."
She changed directions without objecting, fell in at his side, matched his stride as they walked for blocks without speaking, without touching. When they were far enough away from the house for him to relax - for him to feel he could let his guard down without risking an intrusion from one of John’s sons, or from Julie - Danny picked a curb and sat.
Sarah settled gracefully to the cement beside him, extending both legs out into the street, crossing her feet at the ankles. The day was dying, dusk just starting to settle in around them in that lazy, hazy way it had when Summer was turning to Fall, but in no hurry to get the job done. A light wind whispered through the trees, speaking in the rustle of leaves against one another, as unpredictable in when it showed up as it was in when it left again.
His skin was still cold; his blood pressure, still unacceptably erratic. He knew he was probably as pale as a dead fish, but his wife made no comment to that effect, willing to allow him his lies on subjects that didn’t really matter. "What’d you do with Sammy?" he asked after several minutes of just listening to the breeze in the trees.
"Pam came over. They were playing Chinese checkers when I left."
"How’s she doing?"
"Oh, you know Pam. Days of Our Lives has nothing on her colorful life."
"Cute," he said.
"She’s got a new boyfriend, you know. Wears a leather jacket and drives a Harley."
"John will love that," Danny said, playing along.
"Ohhhh. You mean how’s Sammy." Her tone reeked of disingenuous, as if she only now realized who he might be asking after. The way she smiled at him was gentle, teasing, coaxing; but the determination in her eyes was tempered steel. "Sammy’s fine. We talked about hippopotami, and she told me all about her impending vegetable debut."
"She’s the carrot."
"So I hear. And you suck, by the way, for telling her a pumpkin’s not a vegetable."
"I didn’t tell her that. She told me that. And she’s right, it isn’t."
"Uh huh."
She didn’t sound like she believed him, but the truth in her eyes made it clear she didn’t give a flying fuck who told what to whom as long as he talked to her about something. "I thought I told you not to come," he obliged, picking something, anything.
She looped her arms through the crook of his elbow, laid her head against his biceps. "Did you?"
He looked down at her for a moment, then went back to staring at the house across the street. Anne Cannick lived there. He’d delivered all three of her children. Two of them were holy terrors on wheels. The third wasn’t quite that bad, but he was still in diapers so there was plenty of time to catch up.
"They promised me you’d train better when I bought you," he noted.
"Bought me, huh? Hope you got a deal."
"You were on sale," he said. "I think I know why now."
She smiled in the growing dark. "Get what you pay for."
"Truer words."
Continuing to hold onto his biceps with one hand, she slipped the other down the inside of his arm, took his hand, wove her fingers through his. "Nice night," she said, staring at Anne’s split-level across the street for no other reason than it was where he was looking.
He grunted.
"Eloquent," she observed drily.
He grunted again.
The mindless panic of earlier had faded to near nothing now, driven off by Sarah’s willingness to stand it with him over the phone, talking him through it without ever really knowing where he was or what he was fighting against. He was unfair to her like that: calling out of nowhere; expecting her to carry his full weight for however long it took to find his feet again; taking for granted that she could do it - would do it - even without understanding anything about how or why he’d come to a point of implosion without any warning given.
But though the intensity - the immediacy - of his need for her was tempered by the passage of time now, it wasn’t something that existed only in the past. He’d stayed in Sammy’s room, sitting on the edge of Sammy’s bed, existing in a state of ferociously maintained mental stasis for the eternity of ten minutes it took for her to get to him because the sound of her voice may have saved him; but in the bigger picture, it was little more than a band-aid applied to a moral evisceration.
She’d given him back his feet, but he still had no balance, no capacity to stand without her there to hold him up. The sound of her car pulling into the driveway was the kind of relief that gives men heart attacks, betraying them into thinking they’ve survived the detonation two steps before they’re actually clear of the blast zone.
He made it to her so they could walk together only because he had no other choice. He didn’t think about what would have happened if she’d believed his lies about who needed her more to the end of staying with Sammy rather than coming to him. He didn’t think about it because he couldn’t think about it, because he didn’t have to think about it.
She never believed his lies.
It was the one piece of irrefutable proof he had that her God existed. The one piece of irrefutable proof he’d ever found on any subject that didn’t fail him no matter how hard he pushed, no matter how often he tested, no matter how much he increased the weight he trusted to it over the years as they passed.
Now, sitting beside her in the cool breeze of the gathering dusk, he was finding a place of constancy again. The calm of her nearness infected him, inoculating him against the kind of virulence that could turn a man’s deepest beliefs into his greatest insecurities.
But even as the panic receded and he found himself hunkered down at his wife’s side in the survivor’s camp, tangible evidence of his emotional tsunami remained, devastation left in the wake of catastrophic waters gone. Things he’d never given even passing consideration as anything more than fanciful imaginings by people creating moral analogies for the sake of entertaining a mass audience were real to him now, and the collateral damage of such a dramatic change of perspective was nearly as comprehensive to his state of mind as it was incalculable.
When his coping mechanisms failed under the external pressure of reality re-defining itself in spite of his insistence it stand consistent until he deigned to spare it the attention it required; the collapse laid him bare, left him vulnerable to thoughts and images that couldn’t be flushed away or bleached clean. The dark realities inherent to those thoughts were branded into him now, part of who he was, part of the way he had no choice but to view the world.
The images tormented him, the concepts they illustrated haunting him to the bone: Demons who eviscerate and ignite women in their own homes; who can possess a man like John to the end of nearly killing his own son.
They became realities living in his head, showing themselves to him in continuous loops. Things he hadn’t been able to even imagine before resonated inside him now, burned into his memories forever by waves of acid fear the like of which marries emotional trauma to psychological experience in an indelible bond, irrevocably and inextricably intertwining them through Mother Nature’s designed intention to teach life-and-death lessons to the primal brain in ways it won’t ever forget. The survival instinct turned against higher intellect; biology dictating psychology by blessing an arranged marriage born in hell and smelted by high emotions that forever damns the union in the name of post-traumatic recall, creating synergistic memories incapable of resolving themselves to the civilized end of a psychotherapeutic divorce.
It was a daunting concept to consider; one Danny couldn’t push out of the settling turmoil of his thoughts. After spending the past six years immersed in the subject to the end of educating himself to a course of treatment for John’s headcrackers, he knew too much about the physiology of memory formation and recall to think the dynamics of emotional trauma as they relate to memory wouldn’t apply to him as much as they did to John.
"So," Sarah said, breaking the stretch of extended silence between them. She was watching him with an expectancy that bordered on demand.
Danny cleared his throat. He glanced down, flicked her a half-smile, then went back to watching Ann’s house. The shadows in the yard seemed misshapen and grotesque. The inconsistent wind felt vaguely sinister in how it fingered through the trees in quiet rustles. His world was different now. He couldn’t pretend any longer it hadn’t changed.
"What? I don’t even rate a grunt this time?"
"I cleared my throat," he pointed out.
"Is that a promotion or a demotion?"
"Higher up the gastro-intestinal tract at least," he allowed.
"Guess that depends on which end you’re looking at it from."
He smiled, but didn’t pursue her invitation to engage.
His head hurt. He wondered passingly if it had anything to do with too much stress and too little sleep, or if it was symptomatic of the lethal attentions of some ill-tempered dark entity slipping in through his ear when he wasn’t paying attention to use his brain stem like a straw for sucking spinal fluid into another dimension.
Or if maybe it was just the residual fallout from a blood pressure spike that would have done John proud.
Rubbing slow circles on one temple with three fingers, Danny concentrated on stilling the scatter of random thoughts playing ping pong inside his skull. They defied his attempts to quell them; twisting, morphing, growing darker and more threatening when he pissed all over their fun and games by being dismissive of subjects befitting slaughterhouse zombie video games and the SciFi channel to focus on presumably more earnest contemplation on the potential veracity of supernatural phenomenon.
As the wry musings of cheap-horror-flick fare gave way to morbid speculations he couldn’t shrug off when he tried; things he would have laughed at yesterday became at once real and unreal today. Among the vicious shadow-shapes of a thousand monsters he only half remembered from Mythology 101 and campfire stories was something he attributed to the wendigo Sam blamed for the deep, guttering mutilations torn through John’s gut six years ago.
His memory of those horrific wounds drew a picture in his imagination of the kind of creature capable of inflicting that kind of damage. The net said wendigos derived their power from eating human flesh; said they stripped it off the bones of their prey while it was still alive, kicking, screaming, bleeding, suffusing the meat with adrenaline that accumulated to the creature’s end goal of virtual immortality.
Imagining such a fate for John made Danny sick. Imagining John pursuing such a fate - deliberately putting himself in this kind of monster’s path and daring it to come for him - made him even sicker.
"How long are we going to sit here before you talk to me?" Sarah asked.
He smiled at her again, but said nothing.
She squeezed his hand a little. "Danny?"
"Popcorn," he said.
It was their safe word, a joke between them since they first shifted from friends to lovers almost fifteen years ago. She’d informed him one day it wasn’t her fucking job to read his mind to know what he was thinking; that when he said no and meant yes it wasn’t her fault for not being able to see the misdirection in his fucked up way of being.
He told her no always meant no because all the date rape literature said so.
She hit him. Hard. Harder than she meant to. He tripped backwards over a chair and broke his wrist on the way down to his ass on the kitchen floor.
When she signed his cast later that night with the same red sharpie he’d spent the better part of the evening using to write "I will never joke about date rape again" one thousand times on the more intimate portions of her anatomy she was willing to let him near with a red sharpie and his wickedly deviant sense of humor, she wrote simply "POPCORN."
He waited three weeks to ask her what it meant. That’s how long it took for him to exhaust every possible theory (and a few impossible ones) as to why she’d write that particular word on his cast and nothing more. When he finally gave up and demanded an explanation, she responded by reminding him of the night they met, as if he might need reminding of a night he’d never forget as long as he lived.
She was sitting on a bench outside a movie theater, soaked to the skin from an unexpected rainstorm already come and gone, when he wandered up and bought two tickets instead of one for the movie he came to see. He handed her the extra ticket without ever speaking to her first - without bothering to ask if she had any interest in the movie, or in him, or in any combination thereof - and said she’d better get a move on or they’d miss the coming attractions. She just looked at him for a moment, then told him to fuck off and die, flicking the ticket back at him in such a way it landed in a puddle at his feet.
He took her response as encouragement to use his remaining ticket to buy admission only so far as the concession stand, where he got the biggest tub of popcorn they had and took it back outside, putting it between them when he sat beside her on the bench. He offered to share, and she responded by telling him to fuck off and die a second time; so he spent almost an hour flicking white fluffs of air and eviscerated corn kernels her direction until both of them were killing themselves not to laugh at how many pieces of popcorn were stuck in her wet, bedraggled hair because she was trying so hard to ignore him she wouldn’t reach up and brush them off under the auspices that doing so would only reward his behavior by acknowledging he existed and had managed to get her attention.
They were friends for over a year before either one of them found out the other detested popcorn with a white hot hatred, and the only reason either of them ate it that night was to have an excuse to spend the time it took in the eating with who was helping them eat it. They were friends for over four years and lovers for two days short of three months; his cast was still a pristine white except for the word POPCORN written in red ink over the pulse point and she still wore the fading, supposedly-permanent, red ink of his contrition on her skin under her clothes when she told him she was sitting on that bench because the man she went to the movies with the night before had raped her later in his car on an isolated stretch of road known as the local lover’s lane; and all she’d thought about from that moment on was killing herself, but she wasn’t sure how to go about doing it, or if God would ever forgive her for being so stupid as to get herself raped by a man she trusted or so weak as to take her own life in the aftermath of such unforgivable stupidity.
"Popcorn," she said to him as they stood in the middle of a kitchen that would be the first place he ever fucked her after they were married, every bone in his body trembling at the thought of someone hurting her that way, at the thought of her God letting someone hurt her that way. "That’s your safe word, Danny. Popcorn. Popcorn means no. Don’t ever tell me popcorn and mean yes."
Sighing as she sat on the cool curb beside him, Sarah rested her face against his biceps again, leaning into him and holding tighter to his hand as she said, "You suck."
But she let him have his way for a little while longer.
His mind returned to circling the concept of demons and demonic possession, trying to make sense of it or dispel it, wanting to do both, able to do neither. An image of John standing in his own house kept nosing its way into thoughts, animating itself to a horror movie whenever it caught him unawares, showing Danny a younger version of his best friend watching his wife, the mother of his children, pinned against the ceiling, bleeding, burning.
No matter how hard he tried, Danny couldn’t shake free of those images looping in his head. He couldn’t evict them from living there; couldn’t keep them from setting up residence and haunting him the same way the whine of a flat-line tone still haunted him to such a cold sweat on random nights it woke not only him, but Sarah, too.
The tangible memory of John panicking at the smell of smoke gave the images in his head depth, weight, resonance. John’s terror made them more real than even Sam’s calm recitation had, terrifyingly so if only in their capacity to so deeply traumatize a man who otherwise seemed impervious to the normalcy of fear.
Danny tightened his grip on Sarah’s hand. He took comfort just from the nearness of her. Just from the smell of her, the warmth of her, the love of her. She was stroking the inside of his arm, her fingers running from elbow to wrist, from elbow to wrist. The soothing repetition of that caress did more to save him than every prayer ever uttered.
"You okay?" she asked when the expiration date on his popcorn passed to the end of putting his state of mind back to the table for discussion.
He nodded. He could feel the weight of her watching him, feel the exposure of her reading his every secret, seeing things he could hide from anyone else - even Julie - but never from her, even when he wanted to, even when he needed to. He tried to ignore it by watching the grotesque shadows in Anne’s yard grow as the sun finished sinking below the horizon. Disturbing and eerie in a way he hadn’t noticed until tonight, he still preferred them to the melange of amorphous images squirreling through his mind, churning his gut like rotted meat as they looked for stray moments of inattention to remind him of things he couldn’t forget.
The world was different now than it had been only this morning. It was darker, colder. In an effort to warm it again, to light it back to daylight from the rapidly growing dusk it had become, he kept revisiting his conversation with Sam, trying to find a rational space in his head for what the younger man told him.
He kept trying to wrap some kind of reasonable explanation around the idea of demons who eviscerate women in their own homes, pin them to their own ceilings, incinerate them in front of those who love them. Kept trying to conjure up some form of logical interpretation to demons possessing a man of John’s fiercely independent character to the end of nearly killing a son he loves the way John loved Dean.
"Danny?"
Her voice startled him, and he flinched. When she winced at the small twitch of movement, he realized just how tightly he was holding her hand and let her go, rubbing his hand across his eyes, down his face, scrubbing at his mouth, then along his jaw and down his throat. "Sorry," he muttered.
Mom and Jess were murdered by a Demon. The dispassionate calm of Sam’s voice clashed with the horrific weight of his words. They were pinned to the ceiling, eviscerated and burned alive.
Danny couldn’t find room in his reality for that. He kept trying, and he kept failing. It didn’t fit no matter how he turned it, how he bent it, how he shoved it in and fuck the consequences of whatever else got crushed as a result. He needed desperately to find a way to either believe or disbelieve this, but it wouldn’t allow him the luxury of such a black and white response. He believed Sam, but he needed to disbelieve what Sam told him. And he couldn’t. He tried, but he couldn’t.
You’re a smart guy. An educated man. Surely you don’t believe in that kind of crap, right?
It seemed so obvious: what to believe, what to disbelieve. Applying every protocol of his medical training to the science of it, he found the expected answers in those evaluations, and those answers should have given him comfort. But they didn’t. Something much deeper inside him - something much more elemental to who he was than anything so transient as an education - told him what Sam said was real. It was truth. It was the way the world worked.
And that scared him.
"Why do you believe in God, Sarah?" he asked suddenly, his voice quiet, almost a whisper in the growing dark of coming night.
Her hand slipped into his again. She held on to him, trying to speak to him in just the pressure of her fingertips against his skin. He looked at her, clarifying it wasn’t a rhetorical question.
She frowned, but answered, saying, "Faith." And then, after a beat, she added, "And fear, I suppose."
"Fear?"
"The world’s a scary place. We need someone merciful and all powerful to watch over us, to protect us."
"So because we need Him, He exists?" Danny shook his head, not liking her answer, not believing it, not believing she believed it.
"No, Danny. Because we need Him, we believe He exists." Her tone was gentle with him. It handled him like fragile China already broken and only a hair’s breath from falling apart. "He exists because He does. Whether or not we chose to believe something that is doesn’t really matter to the existence of that which is, does it?"
"Ah," he said, nodding. "Tricky line."
"Not so much. More logical than tricky."
"Logical?"
"Sure. It makes sense in all the rational ways. If I don’t believe in you, you still exist, don’t you? So why should He be any different?"
Danny smiled a little. "The whole God thing springs to mind," he said. "Unless, of course, you’re saying I’m God, too; which now that you mention it, you might have a point."
"Existential much?" she quipped.
He laughed his appreciation for her response. "Hey, you’re the one asking if I only exist because I believe I do. Or because you believe I do."
"I wasn’t posing a question there, Danny. I was positing a biological parallel to your metaphysical inquiry."
"Deep," he said.
"And tricky," she agreed.
It helped talking to her. His head hurt less. The roil of commotion inside his skull had settled to a less agitated state. "So what if you stop believing?"
"You get hit by lightening."
"Seems kind of harsh."
Sarah shrugged. "That’s what you get for calling Him a mother fucker of a son of a bitch at least twice a day for twenty years. Bill like that adds up."
"Oh. So you’re saying I, personally, get hit by lightening."
"Yup."
"If you stop believing."
"Yup."
He looked at her out of the corner of one eye. "Why me when you’re the non-believer?"
"Because I have a savings account with Him. You have a high-interest credit card."
He laughed again. "So the only reason I’m still around is because you’re a signatory on my loan?"
"Yuuuuup."
"Thanks. I appreciate that."
"No problem. Although I prefer to think of it as overdraft protection."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning pay your own damn bills. I’m just here for the occasional rainy day."
"Ah." He nodded. Then after a long moment, noted, "Been raining like a bitch lately."
"So it seems."
He didn’t say anything for several minutes. Then, without warning, he asked, "What if I start believing? What happens then?"
"Other than a run on long underwear in the hell commissary?" she asked.
"Other than that," he agreed.
She studied him with a critical eye that read him far too effectively.
"Didn’t mean to be tricky," he said after a beat. "Just pondering one of those ‘what if I win the lottery’ things you wonder about to pass the time of day when you’re bored. Or in surgery."
"Faith has never really been your problem, Danny," she said.
He lifted an eyebrow. "I have a problem?"
"More of an attitude really."
"I thought you liked my attitude."
"I do. Not so sure God is always of the same opinion."
"Fuck Him if He can’t take a joke," Danny said.
"See? That’s what I mean."
"What you mean how?"
"Why you get struck by lightening if I stop believing."
"What? I didn’t call Him a mother fucker of a son of a bitch."
Sarah shook her head, smiling as she leaned into his arm again, held on tighter to the grip she had on his hand. Silence stretched between them. The dark of the night was complete enough now that every street light on the block was lit.
"Tell me what you’re thinking," she said near his ear after several minutes of just sitting together in the wash of halogen illumination from above.
"Thinking about my attitude," he answered. "And my credit card balance."
"How’s that working out for you?"
He shrugged.
"You thinking about changing it?" she pressed.
"My attitude? Fuck, no. Thinking about running up the credit card balance a little though."
"How so?"
"Not sure I should tell you. Might bump me into an overdraft, and I wouldn’t want you to send your legbreakers after me."
"No worries, I’ll take it out in trade. What are you thinking about charging?"
"Little cash advance on faith."
"You don’t need a line of credit on your faith, Danny."
"Sometimes I think I do."
"Trust me," she said. "What you lack in humility and political correctness, you make up for in faith. And you lack a lot in humility and political correctness."
"Everyone’s a critic." Then, almost as if he wasn’t saying anything other than passing a casual observation, he added, "Getting late. Bet Sammy’s ready to start munching on the furniture right about now."
"You are so wrong if you think either one of us is going anywhere until you tell me why you called," Sarah returned calmly.
"Just needed to hear your voice."
"Is that why you asked if I still believe in God?"
"Always a good idea to send out a ping for verification every once in a while. Make sure the whole world hasn’t changed up on me."
"What’s changed on you, Danny?"
He looked away from her, looked anywhere but her.
"Danny?"
He shook his head, squeezed her hand in a way that didn’t threaten the integrity of her circulation this time. His gaze settled back to Ann’s house and stayed there.
"Danny."
"Don’t." His throat was tight. He had to push just to get the response through.
"Don’t what?"
"Just don’t."
She waited for a while, then said a third time: "Danny."
"I said don’t." His tone was sharp. She flinched a little in surprise.
He wanted to apologize, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. He was afraid to say anything to her right now; afraid if he so much as opened his mouth, he’d give in to her unique capacity to open him, to reveal him.
The safest thing for him to do was stand up and walk her back to her car. That would have been the right choice to make, the one most likely to protect her the way he protected others from what they didn’t need to know.
"Just … don’t," he said again instead. "Please."
She didn’t say anything. She was waiting for him to popcorn her, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. It shamed him to know how simple it would be to protect her from knowing these truths that were eating him alive; shamed him to know it was as simple as saying a single word he couldn’t force himself to say.
"Don’t you dare popcorn me again," she warned in a quiet voice.
He laughed: a sharp, bitter bark of desperation. She protected him from even that, taking the weight of his failure on as if she’d made the choice to deny him this recourse rather than reading his struggle and choosing to offer absolution by denying him the choice to sin against her.
She didn’t say anything else, she just waited. Her silence was fire on his skin. It burned him, scarred him. He found himself needing the sound of her voice again; needing it like he needed air in his lungs or blood in his veins. He held out against it as long as he could before giving in, speaking to her just for the relief of hearing her speak to him.
"I’m scared," he admitted.
"Because?"
"World’s a fucked up place." His voice was like sandpaper. He cleared his throat again, wouldn’t look at her even though he could still feel her looking at him.
She wanted more than he was giving her. She told him as much by saying nothing, giving him only a single word’s relief in the sound of her voice when she knew how much he wanted more. She was offering a trade, promising more of what he wanted if he cooperated by giving her more of what he didn’t want to give.
He closed his eyes, cursing himself for calling her, cursing himself for failing her in putting her here where he could so easily fail her simply by giving in to what he needed. He should have protected her from this, protected her from his own ability to fail her by telling her everything Sam told him.
She was the only refuge he’d ever been able to accept; the only quiet place in the storm of a life that would have otherwise overwhelmed him long ago. And in allowing her to be that refuge, he’d failed her to the end of needing her the way he needed her now.
Needing to tell her things she needed not to know. Needing to tell her those things more than he needed to protect her from knowing them.
"And?" Sarah prompted when he didn’t elaborate.
"And nothing. You asked what I was thinking. That’s what I was thinking: The world’s a really fucked up place, and it scares me sometimes."
He clung to that answer, prayed she’d take it so he wouldn’t fail her to the eventuality of a more honest one. She stared at him, watched him, waited for him. He forced himself to look at her, forced himself to smile.
She saw the lie in his eyes and let him off the hook anyway.
The pressure of her hand eased as she accepted his answer as truth even knowing it wasn’t. She could see how close he was to breaking to her will; but she let him off the hook anyway, letting him stand where he was trying to stand, letting him hold on to his secrets as if his secrets were ever really secrets to her.
"Better than the alternative," she said.
"What alternative?"
"Exactly."
"Profound," he managed.
"I’m like that."
They sat in silence a while longer. Relieved of the pressure of her insisting he change her world forever, his need for the sound of her voice eased. The fear he’d say something he couldn’t unsay backed away and let him breathe, let him relax, let him return to a place of unguarded quiet where he was vulnerable if she decided to change her mind and open him.
It was risky trusting her. She was perfectly capable of ambushing him, and he knew it. There was nothing Sarah wouldn’t do if she felt he needed it. No promise she wouldn’t break, no perceived mercy she wouldn’t revoke. It was how he’d survived all these years: her willingness to play dirty when he wouldn’t let her play fair without costing him things he couldn’t pay.
"Any particular reason you’re thinking that?" she asked after some time.
"No."
"Just a random passing fancy?"
"No particular fancy," he said. "More all the fancies in general."
"Dogpile on Danny day?"
"Not really."
"Just God being a mother fucker of a son of a bitch again?"
He laughed, another small burst of sound that rang harsh in the quiet dark. "No," he said, his voice breaking a little on the admission. "Not this time."
That surprised her. "Really?"
"Really."
"That must be a little disconcerting."
"More than you can imagine."
"Is John any better?"
"No worse."
"That’s something at least."
"Something," he agreed.
"How’s Julie?"
"Stubborn."
Sarah laughed at the irony of that. "Stubborn, huh? Who’da thunk? How are you?"
"Better now."
"Than?"
"Than when I called."
"Why did you call?"
It was her last shot, her last offer to let him change his mind. "To hear your voice," he said, holding his lines. "I just wanted to hear your voice, Sarah. That’s all. Just hear your voice."
"That’s kind of maudlin of you."
"I’m a maudlin kind of guy."
"Yeah. You and Niccolo."
"Good company at least."
"If you buy that whole ‘end justifies the means’ thing, I suppose. The whole weight of the world doesn’t have to ride on just your back, you know."
"I know."
"Do you?" she pressed.
"Yes."
"Then share some of it, Danny."
"I am sharing it."
"With who?"
"With you." He put his arm around her shoulders, pulled her in closer. The dark was warm and velvet, edged with just the tang of an Indian summer breeze to chill her arms to gooseflesh when it blew. She shivered once. He tightened his arm protectively. She snuggled up against him, put her face against his chest.
"Why are you scared?" she asked.
He opened his mouth to tell her, but caught himself before he spoke and closed it again without answering. "So, so tricky," he said after a beat.
"Me and Nic are tight, too."
"I think you may have taught Nic the ropes."
"If I had, you’d be a lot better at this sharing thing than you are."
"Can’t be good at everything."
"There’s that humility thing I was talking about."
"A lack of humility would be ‘you can’t be good at everything like I am,’ wouldn’t it?"
"You are a serious pain in the ass, Danny."
He shrugged, smiling at her. "At least I’m good at it …"
She gave him three full beats before she said, "Go ahead and say it."
"… like pretty much everything else," he finished. They sat together on the curb for several more minutes before he pushed to a stand, then held down a hand to help her to her feet.
She glanced at his hand without taking it. "Is that your idea of a hint?"
"Time for you to go home to Sammy."
"I’m not very good at taking hints. Especially not when they’re so subtle."
He didn’t answer, just stood there, his hand extended, waiting for her to take it. When she finally did, he pulled her to her feet. Because she didn’t make him wait as long as she could have, he slipped his arms around her, held her for a minute before he let her go again. "Walk with me," he said.
She sighed, but didn’t argue. They walked back to her car without speaking. He opened the door for her and closed it again once she was inside. Leaning down just enough to see her through the open window, he said, "Thank you."
"For what?"
"For being Sarah."
"I’m good at that," she said.
He touched her face with two fingers, then stepped back from the car.
"Danny?"
He leaned down, met her eyes through the open window again.
"Don’t be scared. It’ll be okay."
He nodded.
"I’ve got a pretty hefty balance in that savings account," she added, "so you overdraft on it all you want. Drain it dry if it helps you."
He nodded again.
"I’ve got all the voice you need," she said. "Call me if it hits you again."
"I will."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
She studied him for a long moment, then said, "Break your promises, go to hell."
"They know me there," he returned.
"I’m serious, Danny."
"I promise," he said again.
She started the car and backed out of the driveway. She was the Red Cross, and he was the disaster area dying for want of emergency relief. She restocked his stores for him, gave him shelter and succor and warmth. She rebuilt his levies and helped him batten down the hatches in the event another storm tried to make landfall without warning. She left him stronger than she found him with promises to return if the need for her arose.
She was hope in the darkness, and she stayed with him even as she drove away.
He watched her to the end of the street before turning back to the house and walking up the driveway through the thick of the dark, listening to the inconsistent wind talk with the trees. He was stronger now. More balanced. Though his mind still ached with the pressure of knowing things he didn’t want to know, they seemed less overwhelming somehow, less frightening, less able to break him if he couldn’t force them into rational shapes and spaces.
Don't be scared, Danny, her voice said to him from inside his bones where she lived. It will be okay.
He stopped at the door, closed his eyes and listened to her speak. Although it had taken him years to learn how to let her see how much he needed her, she would never understand how deeply she affected him, or how much he depended on her to be there when his own resources failed him.
He hadn’t said it because it wasn’t something you could say to someone; but she was wrong to think he’d still exist if she didn’t believe in him. God might, but he wouldn’t.
Before her, he’d been a hollow shell filled with empty. Since her, he was still a hollow shell filled with empty; but the empty resonated with something it didn’t otherwise have: the simple salvation of the sound of her voice. It was times like these - when his world tipped to the side in an effort to finish off what it started a lifetime ago when he was seven, and she was gone, and that was all that mattered - that Sarah’s voice was the only thing that pulled him through.
*
Sam watched through the bay window as Danny met his wife in the driveway and steered her away from the house. They walked down the street, side by side but never touching.
"Fuck, I’m tired," Dean said from behind him.
"How long has it been since you slept?"
"I think I slept when I was twelve."
Sam turned back, studied him. Dean looked like hell. He was half way to growing a beard, and his eyes were glassy with exhaustion so far past tired they weren’t even in the same ZIP code any more. "Why don’t you crash for a while?" Sam suggested as if he hadn’t already suggested it half a dozen times already.
Dean glanced down the hallway, scratching at his jaw. "How long you think he’s going to be out?" Just the fact that Dean was considering it spoke to how far down the road of already gone he was.
"Doesn’t really matter, does it? He’s done talking for the night, so you might as well pack it in."
Dean snorted. "Bullshit. If we’re here when he gets back, he’ll sit down and talk. He’s just a control freak who thinks he’s the boss of me. Well, news flash, Doctor Danny: I haven’t had a bedtime since I was six, so fuck you and the horse you rode in on."
Sam’s smile deepened.
"What?" Dean demanded.
"Just thinking how many times you’ve crawled up my ass for saying the exact same thing about Dad."
"That isn’t what you used to say," Dean groused. "You used to say Dad was a …" he hesitated, then smiled a little, "… a control freak who thought he was the boss of you. So it was totally different. Not the same thing at all."
"I see your point," Sam agreed, smiling, too.
Slumping deeper into the couch, Dean dropped his head back to the cushions again. He closed his eyes as he asked, "So what do you think of Danny’s whole ‘show me the wound’ idea? You think he can pull something like that off without fucking Dad up permanently?"
"If anybody can, it’s Danny," Sam said.
"Not what I asked."
Sam shrugged a little. "I don’t know," he admitted reluctantly. "I guess I’m not real wild about the idea of putting Dad through what happened this morning again; but I see Danny’s point. You know Dad doesn’t stop picking at a scab even when he hits bone. So if you can’t hide it from him, maybe the best way is pulling it off clean under controlled circumstances."
Dean snorted. "Yeah. Because everybody knows shooting someone in the head under controlled circumstances is much less lethal than shooting them in the head under uncontrolled ones."
"What do you want me to say, Dean?"
"Don’t really want you to say anything, Sammy. Just pointing out the obvious: Fucked if we do, fucked if we don’t."
"Very productive thing to point out."
"Not trying to be productive. Trying to figure out the lesser of two evils. That’s never productive. At best, it’s less than catastrophically destructive."
"Aren’t you just a ray of sunshine," Sam noted.
Dean opened one eye to look at him. "Tuesday," he said.
"Tuesday what?"
"Tuesday is the last time I slept. So stick that ray of sunshine up your ass and bite me, bitch."
Sam sighed. Wandering away from the window, he sank back into the chair in which he’d spent most of the afternoon and evening. "I don’t know what the right thing to do is," he said. "Or what the lesser of two evils is. But I do know how Danny feels about Dad, and how Julie feels about him. So whatever Danny’s suggesting, I know it’s the thing he thinks has the best chance of working."
Dean closed his eye again. "Not questioning his commitment. But pouring salt right in an open wound like that? Sounds more like something you do to kill a pissed off spirit than anything a doctor should be prescribing for a man whose stubborn streak is trying to tear his brain to kibble.
"I mean, come on .. after what happened when Dad saw me? If he went down like that just seeing me, what do you think remembering what happened to mom is going to do to him? It’s going to fuck him to the bone, Sammy. You know it is. And I just can’t see that being anything that ends good. It sounds more like shooting him in the head after I’ve spent the better part of the last fifteen years chasing his drunk ass around trying to keep him from shooting himself in the head. Or hunting a wendigo when he’s drunk. Or any of a thousand other things he’s tried to do to stop the merry-go-round so he can get off."
"If Danny’s right, we may not have much of a choice. Julie’s less than a month away from having that baby. If watching Danny born is going to break Dad anyway …"
Dean opened his eye again. "Dude, how long has it been since you slept?"
Sam frowned. "What?"
"You said ‘watching Danny born.’ " Dean grinned. "Danny’s a little big to be trying to pass through the birth canal, don’t you think?"
"Little Danny, Dean. As in, the baby."
Dean’s one open eye blinked in surprise. "Dad’s naming his kid Danny?"
"Yee-eah." Sam watched his brother struggle to absorb that. He gave him a second, then said, "You didn’t get a chance to talk to Dad before all this happened; but I did. He told me all about Danny: how he feels about him; how much he makes this big thing out of naming the baby Danny being all Julie’s idea, but it’s really his. They’re more than just friends. They’re more like … I don’t know … you and me."
Dean snorted. "Hey, you won’t catch me naming my kid Geek. And you didn’t name your kid Awesome, so he obviously wasn’t named after me."
"Cute," Sam said. "All I’m saying is they’re close. More like brothers than friends. And there’s part of me that thinks that makes Danny the most qualified guy in the room to decide what’s best for Dad. Especially considering he’s Dad’s doctor, too."
Dean sighed. Stretching his legs out in front of himself, he said, "I know there’s a bigger picture to consider here, but right now, getting Dad up and running sounds like the best course of action to me. And anything Danny suggests that doesn’t sound a hell of a lot like that - or exactly like that, if possible - makes me think he isn’t qualified to be Dad’s doctor, even if he is his best friend. I mean, it may not be the ultimate endgame, but you can’t worry about the whole nest when you’ve already got a vampire gum-deep in your ass. You’ve got to worry about the one bleeding you dry first. Then you take care of the nest."
When Sam didn’t respond, Dean prompted, "You think I’m wrong?"
"I think when it comes to vampires, you’re the guy I’d trust because you’re the expert," Sam said after a long moment.
Dean frowned. "You saying you think Danny knows Dad better than I do?"
"That’s not the point, Dean. I think Danny knows what he’s doing. I know how important Dad is to him, and I know Dad trusts him. If Dad were awake, I think he’d want to do whatever Danny thinks is best. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?"
"It’s a small town, Sam," Dean said quietly. "Danny’s a small town doctor."
"Yeah? So? What’s your point?"
"My point is it’s a small town," Dean repeated.
Sam shook his head. "Danny’s here because this is his home, not because he can’t make it somewhere else."
"You sure about that?"
"Yeah. I am. I saw the scars, Dean. That wendigo just about tore Dad inside out. The only reason he’s still walking around is because Danny’s a hell of a lot better doctor than his whole ‘John survived because John refused to die’ schtick might lead you to believe."
"Hmmm." Dean said.
"I’m serious."
"I know you are. I am, too. Dad’s life here may not be perfect, but at least he’s got one." Dean opened both eyes then, fixing them on Sam in a level gaze that was stark with pain, with guilt. "Not too put to fine a point on it, but we couldn’t give him that. All we gave him was a death wish. At least here, he wants to live."
"From what Danny says, it’s not much of a life."
"Compared to what he’s lived the past thirty years, you think this," Dean gestured to the house around them, "is nothing? You think she," he waved vaguely in the direction of the bedroom at the end of the hall, "is nothing?"
"I think there’s more to it. Things we don’t know about."
"Yeah, well if Mr. I’m Taking Another Break would get his ass back in here and fill us in on the whole big, deep, dark ‘there’s more to it than you realize’ conspiracy, I might feel differently. But right now, all I’ve got to go on is what I see; which, as much as I hate to admit it, is a hell of a lot more than Dad’s ever had before. More than he’s ever let himself have. So how bad could this ‘things we don’t know about’ shit be, Sam? How bad would it have to be before it was bad enough to not be a good trade for the way he’s lived since Mom died?"
Sam didn’t answer.
"That wasn’t a rhetorical question," Dean prompted after a beat. "Other people say ‘it’s worse than you can imagine’ without having any idea how bad I can imagine, let alone what the three of us have gone through and called it the good times. But you were here. You talked to Dad before I broke him. You said he seemed happy. If he’s anything short of suicidal, that has to be a good trade for what he had with us, doesn’t it?"
"First, you didn’t break him -" Sam started.
"Fuck that," Dean interrupted tersely. "We’re not talking about that, we’re talking about this, so stick to the point."
"And second," Sam went on, and then he paused, let several long seconds pass by before he finally shrugged in frustration. "I don’t know, Dean. I just keep coming back to it being Danny’s call. He’s the doctor. He’s the one who’s been around Dad for the last six years. If he thinks this is the way to go, I don’t think we know enough about it to say differently."
"That’s crap. We know things about Dad he’ll never know. Hell, I know things about Dad you’ll never know. And from my perspective - and I don’t give a shit what you think on that, by the way: I know him better than anyone else, and you’re just lying to make your point if you try and say different - the most important thing to know about him is that his wife is eight months pregnant, and he’s got a kid, what? Four? Five? That’s a life. He’s got a life, Sammy. And I don’t know what kind of ‘there are things you don’t know about’ things are going on to fuck up the whole Mayberry RFD thing he’s got going here, but how could they possibly make this life worse than what he was living in every shit hole dive and drunk tank between here and Phoenix?"
"Danny thinks it’s a ticking bomb," Sam said quietly.
"At least it’s still ticking," Dean argued. "The last life Dad had blew up in his face more than thirty years ago, and it’s been killing him every since, tearing him apart, burning him alive. Still ticking sounds good to me a this point. Truthfully, it sounds a lot better than I thought he’d ever get." Then, suddenly, like he’d burned all his fuel off in one long, impassioned spiel about what a great life his dad was living without him, Dean announced, "Holy fuck, I’m tired," and closed his eyes again, draping one arm across them as he dropped his head back to the cushions. "I’m so tired I can’t even see straight any more, let alone think straight."
"Hey, I know, why don’t you stay up a little while longer?" Sam said. "Maybe go run around the block a couple of times? Do some jumping jacks?"
Dean grunted. "Jumping jack this, Lawyer Boy," he said without bothering to illustrate his implied obscenity with an applicable, anatomically-relevant gesture. "What’s Danny doing out there anyway? Does it look like he’s coming back in any time soon, or should we just turn on a Kevin Costner movie and settle in for the Holy-God-is-this-ever-going-to-end long haul?"
"He’s not out there any more," Sam said. "Or at least, not anywhere I can see. He went for a walk with someone. His wife, I think."
Dean lifted his arm, opened one eye again to look at Sam. "His wife?"
"I think," Sam repeated. "Not sure. I’ve never met her."
"What the hell is his wife doing here? Is Dad the local freak show or something? Should we be charging admission to cover the cost of his medical bills?"
Sam just looked at him.
"What?" Dean demanded. "If he’s going to be a prick, I can be a prick, too. Is anything obvious to me at this point. Pffft."
Sam just shook his head. "I think he called her, asked her to come over. He might not come off that way, but I think he and Sarah are pretty religious people. Or spiritual, at least. He might be having more trouble accepting the truth of how Mom died than he’s letting on. Demons are the part of the whole God thing that’s supposed to be science fiction."
Dean snorted, put his arm back across his eyes. "Horror," he corrected. Then said, "And huh. Who would have anticipated that happening?"
"It isn’t that I didn’t anticipate it giving him trouble," Sam said in response to the criticism Dean fell just short of actually putting into so many words. "But he needed to know."
"No, he didn’t. Not right now. It was a stupid thing to tell him."
"Mom didn’t just die, Dean. The way she died has everything to do with the way Dad is, both before all this shit happened and now. Not giving Danny at least some idea of how much bigger Dad’s memories are than just a house fire is like asking him to perform brain surgery with his hands tied. It isn’t fair to him; and it would have been damned dangerous - if not fatal - to Dad."
"Mom didn’t just die?" Dean said like he was shocked to hear as much. "Really, Sam? She didn’t just, like … die? Man, I never knew."
"Oh fuck you. You know exactly what I’m trying to say."
"It’s not the point, Sam," Dean said, dropping the sarcasm and returning his voice to its normal, if exhausted, tone. "The point is you fucked with his whole sense of reality … especially if he’s some kind of bible thumper. You don’t tell a man everything he’s ever known about swimming is wrong right before you throw him in the deep end of the ocean and say hey, dude, swim. At least, you don’t unless you want to drown his stupid ass, and Dad right along with him."
Dean was shifted his position as he spoke, placing the heels of his boots on the carpet shoulder-width apart, forming a tripod of stability with his hips. The balance he established that way was one requiring very little, if any, attention to maintain. It was as close as Dean was every likely to come to fluffing his pillow before he laid his head down to go to sleep.
"They’ve got a spare room in the back," Sam said.
"Nah, I’m good here. I’m just going to close my eyes for a couple of minutes. If I fall asleep, roust me when he’s done chatting up the little woman."
"Sure," Sam said. "If you fall asleep."
Dean snorted, but didn’t answer. Within three minutes, his breathing had slowed, deepened. Within five, it had fallen to a soft snore.
Sam waited several more minutes to let Dean sink far enough below the surface of his own awareness so the simple sound of movement wouldn’t disturb him, then stood. When Dean didn’t respond with even the smallest flicker of awareness, Sam left him in the living room to walk to the door at the end of the hall.
*