Red River Love Song Chapter 7

Oct 19, 2009 13:56

I was pretty disappointed at the low number of comments for the last chapter of Red River Love Song. For some reason, that made me what to post another part right away. Don't ask. I know I'm weird. Maybe it's to see if it's time to put this fic on hiatus and go to something else. One shots seemed to please more people that's for sure.

Anyway, here's the reveal chapter where we learn about Dean's past and where he's gone after his decision to leave Sam. A little shorter than usual.

ETA: I'm so sorry I confused everyone by putting up the wrong title and tags. *headdesk* It's fixed now. :D



Chapter 7

On the bluffs above the Missouri and Kansas rivers, the city sat under a blanket of early snow. The brick and clapboard buildings huddled together, a laden sky pressing the last of the Indian summer warmth from their inanimate bones. Thick flakes settled on the shoulders of blank-faced passerbys, their early morning shuffle making them resemble animated snowmen. The turning leaves had dropped their burden at the first sharp frost, only weeks ago, and now they lay mingled in the snowdrifts underfoot. Above it all, Kansas City’s lumber mills belched clouds of smoke into the gloomy air.

The school master turned his collar up around his ears with frozen fingertips and hurried faster through the storm, hating everything around him. Winter’s teeth chewed at the long black overcoat he wore, flipping the edges up against his calves with the sadistic pleasure of a predatory cat. It wasn’t easy to plow ahead in the face of a wind that stung his face and made his eyes water. Snowflakes clumped on his lashes, freezing them together.

It was nearly impossible to see ahead more than a few feet. He stumbled forward, shivering, a fist wrapped around one wide wool lapel. Abruptly, the school house rose through the swirling clouds of white, its square red shape topped by a steeple. The bell inside gave a muffled clang that rolled over the snow-domed rooftops, proclaiming the school master late.

The man grimaced, tugging the heavy front door open. Inside, the wood stove belched a dry warmth into the room that thawed the tip of his nose enough for him to breath without hissing in pain. He stomped his feet and snow fell from his head and shoulders in wet clumps. Rubbing his frozen hands together, he stared at the scene of riot and ruination before him with a hooded gaze.
A spit ball flew past his chin, ricocheting off the chalk board’s surface to leave a wet mark behind.

“Sit down.” The teacher spoke in a deceptively low voice. “Take out your English books, class.”

For minutes chaos continued to reign, the noise of twenty unattended children rising louder before the first one, Clara, a shy girl with golden pigtails, noticed him and gave a quiet gasp.

“Mister Ackles!”

Her exclamation penetrated the surrounding clamor. Faces turned and Dean found himself the center of attention, round eyes taking in his thunderous aspect and the damp puddle forming beneath his soaked shoes.

Ridden hard and put away wet. The thought came unbidden.

His head ached dully, lack of coffee and the spectacles pinching the bridge of his nose equally to blame. He hadn’t expected it to be easy, but this was a damned ball buster. Summer sun warm on his bare skin continued to flourish in his mind’s eye, though he’d spent uncounted months trying to push the remembrance away. Today, the bitter crack of winter clung to him with brutal claws, and he wanted nothing more than the oblivion of forgetfulness even if it meant losing the solace of Sam’s face.

Dean had gone back to the old life, the hated life he left behind in order to preserve Sam’s character. That life was nothing like the gibberish fairy tale he’d woven for Sam’s benefit when they first met; part pathetic child, orphaned in a cruel world, part villainy in the person of Jeff Morgan, who was Brom Bones, older and full of suave charm, to Jensen’s gangly Ichabod Crane in that long ago time.

Served Sam right. No one was expected to tell the truth about their origins in the “Wild West.” Dean had dreamt about that fabled place since boyhood, when his name was Jensen and he was wet behind the ears. The grass-covered, wind-swept plains; the savage Indians that existed in the dime novels he hid under his mattress-they called him another name. He made it up himself, the wild outlaw who fit perfectly between those pages: Dean Winchester.

Pa would have whaled the tar out of him if the dreadfuls had ever been found. The old man owned a dry-goods store, Dean’s Ma an upright pillar of the Baptist Society, and they wanted something better for him. Something better than they had. They envisioned their son as a teacher.

Both were still alive as far as Dean knew. Both, no doubt, pining for the long-lost boy named Jensen, who had fled their influence a year after taking up the profession he’d been forced into by Ma’s badgering and Pa’s boot.

When he changed his name to Dean and lit out, he had no intention of ever returning. Funny how that worked for him. Dean reckoned he would never escape the romantic heart that got him into the whole mess in the first place. He’d given up the wild life for Sam. But he didn’t mind it so much. Loving Sam the way he did, it felt like a solid step in the right direction to save the big galoot from himself. Dean could handle it, though it left him with the two sides of his nature at war.

Little Thomas Haskell suddenly grabbed his friend Michael by the front of the shirt and threw a roundhouse punch that landed square on the other boy’s nose. Dean shrugged off his overcoat and hung it by the door, then turned and snatched the two hellions up by the collars, letting them dangle, toes about the floor.

He straightened to his full height, peering down his nose at them. They wilted under Jensen’s quelling gaze.

“Sit down and preserve a silence,” he ordered. “Or I will be forced to blister your disobedient hides into submission.”

The two miscreants paled. “Yes sir, Mister Ackles, Sir.” they proclaimed in unison.

“Damned straight, you pair of doodle bugs.” The Dean part of him would have his say, it appeared. Were hard tampin’ down the honest nature he’d learned to give free rein to on the frontier, and he would have laughed at the boys astonishment, but for the negative resulting effect. “Now put your asses on that bench,” he growled.

The boys blinked in startled trepidation, perhaps catching a glimpse of someone else behind the placid exterior of their new school master. Someone they hadn’t seen before. They exchanged frightened glances. Until now, the man had preserved an outward appearance of quiet meekness. There was nothing meek about his present expression. It shot a bolt of alarm into their evil little heads.

“We will continue with Mister Twain’s masterpiece, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” Dean instructed, easing down on the torture devise that passed itself off as a chair. “Mahepseba, read for us, please.”

Dean’s collar was choking him. He sat at the square oak desk, ramrod straight, while the day droned on in monotonous routine. Outside the schoolroom’s one window, he watched the sky darkened. Sleet tapped at the murky glass with the fierceness of a scatter gun, pellets of ice for bullets. Dean watched one slippery bead slide from top to bottom in the space of a hundred years.

He shifted restlessly, morning passing to afternoon, impatience gnawing at the bottom of his belly. He had put Jensen Ackles back on like a Sunday suit. But try as he might, the suit no longer fit. Maybe it never had or maybe Dean had just outgrown it. He'd known freedom in the last years, given in to the wildness in his blood. They were hard things to put aside.

The school house clock chimed cumbrously to three. The quiet minions erupted into fiends from hell. Dean breathed a sigh of relief as the last one scampered out into the hush of a snowy afternoon, leaving him alone at last.

He tapped an impatient finger on the leather blotter, musing on the steer who lost his hide for it, and thinking, against his will, of Belle. Another guilt, one almost as heavy as the one for leaving Sam horseless in the vast reaches of injun territory. Leastwise, Sam had a gun and a pair of good, long legs to see him through.

That should have been enough, though Dean’s conscience plagued him so hard, he were always seein’ tall shadows from the corner of his eye, figures fifty yards back, stalking his route home, or picking him up in the morning’s when his head thumped with the consolement of a previous night’s whiskey and he couldn’t think straight. Those were the times he drug Sam from the closet of his memory and fisted the ache of his cock till there was nothing left inside him but the hollow slosh of rotgut.

Dean knocked a fist against his forehead in a temper with his fractious brain. Belle didn’t have no choice as to what her fate was. The mare was in a livery stable on the outskirts of town, her exile as complete as Dean’s. He took her shrunken brown apples on the weekends. She watched him with woeful eyes as she crunched, the droop in her proud neck and silky tail conveying all her despair. Dean had seen a mustang pine away for the open range once. Belle’s gaze reminded him of that. There was a patient rebuke deep within her soulful eyes when she looked at him.

He took her for rides now and then. It was all he could manage. The temptation of her girth between his thighs was near on the same as when he put a hand to hisself, full of sweet, mocking pleasure that tore his bones apart and forced the taste of Sam in his mouth. Riding Belle made Dean desperate to get out of the trap he’d put hisself into. His character weren’t strong enough to withstand it, lessen he allowed no more than a time or two each month. So they would lean shoulder to shoulder and snuffled together, recalling the good ole days, while Dean sung her songs ‘bout the red river valley and the cowboy he still loved so true.

A thump at the front of the classroom snagged Dean’s attention from his self pity in time to see Jeffrey Morgan slip in from the darkening gloom outside. The man slapped his snow-thick fedora on a thigh and beamed a dimpled smile Dean’s way.

“Jensen. I supposed I might find you here. Just look at you.” The statement was straightforward enough, but there was a hint of old lust in his eyes. “Have you no life aside from this educational dedication of yours? Come out for a drink with me at the nearest saloon. A little...relaxation is what you require.”

A good ten years older than Dean, the man still managed to make him feel like the untried virgin Morgan had debauched one night after half a bottle of whiskey and a clutch of feverish kisses behind Tucker’s Livery Stable, the smell of hay and horse shit thick in Dean’s head and Morgan thick in his ass. He never touched another man until Sam came along.

“You’ll excuse me if I decline. I’ve more pressing occupations.”
The sentiment felt slimy on Dean’s tongue. It was all he could do to prevent himself from delivering the punishment Morgan so richly deserved. His fists twitched. Dean had been an innocent of eighteen. The bastard left him without a backward glance, Dean’s trousers around his ankles and blood wetting the back of his thighs. He had crawled home and sobbed into the spurious comfort of his pillow, muffling the sound to preserve his parents’ innocence.

“Your motives lack subtlety, Morgan.”

A rich chuckle rumbled unrepentantly in the quiet between them. “Come now, boy. You can’t still blame me for your lack of invention all those years ago. You’re what? Thirty now? But with the same tantalizing aspect of a fallen angel. You delight me.”

Morgan moved closer. Dean found himself unexpectedly on his feet, the screech of chair legs over the flat wooden floor, sharp with alarm. The personas of Jensen and Dean warred in his chest. Jeffrey Dean Morgan was the head of Kansas City’s school supervisory board. As such, he held Dean’s employment in the palm of his manicured hand.

“I give you my promise. I won’t take advantage. Even if you beg me to.” A slyly eager smile accompanied the vow. Deep brown, thickly lashed eyes met Dean’s hypnotized gaze. Morgan was still a handsome man. Until he’d taken Dean’s guileless nature and shattered it, they had gotten along fairly well, almost companions.

“I think you have the wrong idea of me, friend. I am your own personal Lucifer. I will send you straight to Hell if you come one step nearer.”

Dean breathed out, a bit dizzy from attempting to couch his demurral in Jensen-like terms, and being only partially successful at it.

“Well, well. The bitch has some snap left to him. That was quite a threat. I’m very nearly shivering in my boots.” Morgan lifted a hand to his brow in salute. “Perhaps I should give you time to think about your position here, Jensen, and how I might affect it if I chose.”

After a gaze of hatcheted steel, meant to chop Dean down to size, Morgan returned hat to head and vanished out the door. The collapsing day sucked the last light from the heavy sky. It began to snow again.

Dean paced the confines of his prison planning a homicide. He still had his knife, the one that used to ride his boot when he was a desperado. It was tucked in the bottom drawer of the deal dresser at the boarding house where he put down his head at night. A respectable kind of establishment that made Dean’s flesh crawl.

The landlady, a Mrs. Meg, kept her eyes on him, like she thought he might be slippin’ out with her cutlery, no matter how many danged flirty smiles Dean tipped her way. Dean would do it too, if she wasn’t on him like a June bug every time he showed his head. Woman was a clear, clean judge of character. He admired her grit.

The building’s walls trembled. Dean looked up from his plotting. He could hear the howl of the wind rising. The low rumble of the school bell donged as it swayed overhead in the gathering blast. There was a scraping sound, then the hint of a shadow moved past the white whirl pressing in at the window. The hackles on the back of Dean’s neck rose. Danged if he didn’t wish for the knife right then. His fingers itched. He flattened himself against the wall, inching along toward the only door. If it was Morgan come back to gloat, Dean would strangle him with his bare hands.

The thought made him half hard. It would be a pleasure to kill the bastard. The knob was cold under his palm. When he flung the door open, much to Dean’s disappointment, there was no one there. That was his initial reaction, until he took a step forward and stubbed his toe damned hard on a brick. The brick sat there completely out of place, square in the middle of the icy stoop. Dean stared at it. Minutes ticked by before he recognized the crushed shape of Jeffrey Morgan’s fedora under it.

It hadn’t been there long enough to collect a coating of snow. Dean stared at the apparition, mouth agape. He blinked and ran out onto the sidewalk, head jerking wildly right to left, but the blizzard had cut visibility to inches and all he could see was a wall of white. Heart beating unsteadily, Dean snatched the offering up and slammed the door behind him as he rushed inside. It was strangely quiet there after the battering roar of the storm. Dean painted his spine to the supporting wood and watched his hands shake war-drum messages along the brim of the flattened hat.

sam/dean, au, red river love song, western, nc-17

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