SPN Fic: "Patchwork" - Sam/OFC, Dean - Rated R/NC17
OKAY. So father's day was on Sunday--I'm posting this now. This is for poisontaster, who is sappy. *loves*
Title: Patchwork
Author: femmenerd
Characters/Pairing: Sam/OFC, Sam and Dean.
Rating: Hard R.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit, don't sue.
Summary: Future. Goes AU early S2 SPN. Follows the “events” of my story Straight Line but can, I think, be read on its own. Written for poisontaster for Sweet Charity. Look, this is full-on Sam as baby!daddy, yep. BLAME ERIN. Sam didn’t realize that it would be so physical for him, this happening to her. He tries to tell Meghan, but the words don’t come out right...So instead Sam tells her every story from his childhood that he can, and it helps that she already knows Dean. The gaps though-they weigh on him.
Author's Note: Beta read by the incomparable mona1347 (all remaining errors, however, are mine alone). Also audienced at various points by a number of helpful people, which makes it seem more “important” than it is, but thanks are due to: flipmontigirl, onelittlesleep, miss_begonia, kittyzams, coiledsoul, and girlguidejones. onelittlesleep especially said (paraphrasing): “Lucia, there needs to be more GIRL,” and so there was.
Word Count: 4500.
*****
The day Meghan decided to keep the baby-even though she had no idea where Sam was or if he was ever coming back-she started working on a quilt for this unexpected new person she was welcoming into her life. She’d never been particularly good at sewing but what the hell. All her life she’d had plans, not complicated ones: her favorite thing as a little girl was reading, so she became a librarian; she loved her family, her town, so she moved home after grad school, bought her old babysitter’s house. She figured she could do this too, piece by piece.
*****
Sam quits hunting after he finds out Meghan’s pregnant-after he comes back from what she comes to call his “pilgrimage” and what he refers to as “the freak-out that brought me back.” He adjusts his permanent address the two miles down the road from Dean and Bobby’s to Meghan’s place, hauling his duffel bag out of the cab of his truck and lugging it past the morning glories brightening her front door.
He also asks her to marry him-flustered and without a ring, but full of earnest good intentions.
She turns him down, laughing wryly at first and shaking her curly, brown head until the scrunched-up wrinkles on Sam’s forehead give her pause. “You said you wanted to ‘know me,’” she says then, cupping his face with one hand while the other soothes unruly cowlicks in his road-tangled hair. “Why don’t we do that first?”
“All right,” he sighs. “I’ll ask you again later.”
She just smiles and says, “Maybe I’ll ask you later.” The subject’s closed.
*
Two days later, Sam grudgingly admits to himself that she was right. He came back here to tell her he was sorry-to ask her, like the teenager he never got to be, to go steady. He was going to tell her everything, and beg for absolution and a second chance. The demon was dead, but so was his father; Sam hoped he could find some semblance of the right timing with something at least.
What he found on his arrival was a woman with her own agenda, brimming with new life, who hadn’t broken down without him-since he’d never really been there before-but was miraculously willing to let him tiptoe into her life.
******
Meghan went on a date with herself to the bookstore and bought two books: “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and “the Beginner’s Guide to Quilting.” Oh, and a trashy magazine for reading in the tub. Then she went home, lit candles and soaked until she had prune-feet, staring down at her still-flat stomach, light-headed and awed.
It was hard going; she didn’t know what she was doing. Meghan pulled out more stitches than she left in, at first.
*****
Dean’s the first person Sam tells-Dean’s the only person he has to tell, really.
They’re tipping back beers in their favored al fresco drinking spot since they (Dean) settled here-the back of a decrepit, red Ford truck that looks like it’s been parked in Bobby’s back lot since before either Sam or Dean was born. Crickets chirp insistently as tall grass grows into the rusted wheel wells, none of which contain tires. Sam’s slowly, meticulously tearing the label off the bottle in his left hand and staring up at the stars overhead, mentally listing off the names of constellations one by one. Dean’s already on brewsky number three, burping enthusiastically and busying himself pegging pebbles into the dark and laughing.
“Why doesn’t Bobby haul this thing away?” Sam asks conversationally.
“I dunno. Think maybe he lost his cherry in it or something,” Dean snorts.
“That why you wipe the Impala down with a lace hanky every Sunday?” Sam shoots back, his general, electrified state of jumpiness amping up the trash in his talk.
Dean stops throwing rocks and gives Sam a slow, serious look. “I pray for your soul she didn’t hear that,” Dean says, his face meandering into a grin. “Besides, first time I got laid was in your bed, not the car.”
“Dean!” Sam exclaims automatically, despite the incredible not-surprising-ness of this revelation.
“Hey dude, your room was cleaner.”
With an exaggerated huff (like a laugh, like I love you, you dumbass), Sam knocks Dean on the shoulder with one outstretched palm. Dean fluidly, drunkenly flows with the impact, like he was expecting it. Because, of course, he was.
They recede back into silence after that for a bit, until Sam, clearing his throat, goes for it. “Hey, Dean?” Sam starts, deciding he’s ready for it all to be real.
“Yeah?”
One breath, two. Long, then short. “Meghan’s pregnant. She’s having-I mean, we’re having-a baby.”
Dean raises one eyebrow into a curve that Sam can see even in the dark. “Yeah man, I know,” he says, low. “I, ah, live here,” Dean continues, by way of explanation.
“Right, of course,” Sam says, feeling dazed, his tongue heavy in his mouth.
Dean coughs, sounding sober all of a sudden. “And I, uh, took her to her first...” He waves his arm around in the air expressively. “...doctor’s appointment. You know, for woman parts.”
“Gynecologist.”
“Yeah, that.”
“You did,” Sam says, and blinks, not sure if he’s putting a question mark at the end of the phrase or not. Some kind of emotion is buzzing around in his head. Guilt? Confusion?
Sam tries anger on for size. “Wait, you knew about this and you didn’t call me?” he spits, feeling his shoulders hunch up.
Dean is annoyingly calm. “She told me not to.”
“Yeah, but-” Sam sputters.
“Yeah, but-I knew you’d come back eventually, Sammy.” Dean takes a breath, staring intently into his beer before looking up at Sam with pleading eyes. “And that kid’s gonna be a Winchester.”
Sam lets that sentence sink in. Eventually, he forms his mouth around the word, “Thanks,” and means it.
Dean nods a few times-an anemic head-bang-and changes the subject. “So you bailing on the bachelor pad then? Gonna sleep on her couch instead of ours?”
“Not sleeping on the couch.” Sam pauses for dramatic effect. “You do know where babies come from right, Dean?”
“Shaddup,” his brother says, smiling big, and Sam’s pendulum shifts a little further towards, “It’s going to be okay.”
*
Sam doesn’t remember the last time he was in a medical facility when it wasn’t an emergency, when someone he loved wasn’t bleeding or sick. In the doctor’s office with Meghan now, he feels over-large and out of place in the sterile, white room, his boots making dusty imprints on the clean floors. The receptionists and nurses in the waiting room know her from a lifetime of check-ups and booster shots; they gossip and shoot sly looks at Sam, causing him, against his will, to go hot around the collar-red in the face just like in sex ed class when he was fourteen. That was in Alabama-yes, he thinks so.
Sam holds Meghan’s hand during the ultrasound-all beeps and procedures until the murky, alien-looking image appears on the screen: proof. Something rushes though him. Adrenaline maybe. Wonder.
Then he looks into her face-shining eyes, rounded cheeks-and wishes she didn’t have to know that anything evil could share the same world with them, with this moment. Maybe not the demon that used to singularly plague his life, but the others that are out there still, whether he chases after them or not.
So they go home and tape up the first “baby photos” on the fridge, and against his better judgment, Sam doesn’t come clean yet.
*****
Once she got the hang of it, Meghan started ransacking the closets of everyone she knew, searching for old shirts and skirts and PJs in colors that would work together. She wanted a piece of everyone she cared about in there. Her mom laughed and opened up the attic, her smile uncreasing the wrinkles on her forehead that furled when Meghan knew she was worrying about her poor, unwed, knocked up daughter. Her brothers offered up smelly, old socks as a joke. When she showed up at Bobby’s though with her old, brown Volvo in perfect working order, Dean didn’t laugh. He gave her a flannel button-down-too big for him, and said, “Here, this was our dad’s.”
*****
The intimacies of living with a woman are different now than they were when Sam was a kid-when he and Jess were playing house-thrilling at the importance of signing a lease in their own names and then eating nothing but chicken wings from the freezer and pop tarts during finals week. Back then having a “normal” home was something Sam was stubbornly trying to believe in, even as the sinewy cords between him and his family tugged at his gut. Now Sam’s family lives in bittersweet memory, and also down the road: fixing cars during the week, flirting with girls at town potlucks and getting rides home with his buddies from the bar when he’s had a few too many and opts to leave the Impala in the parking lot.
(Dean’s always there.)
Sam’s family also lives in the impending future, in this adult responsibility waiting in Meghan’s womb, nestled between their bodies at night. Her body, which only gets more familiar to him as it changes and grows. His body, which is finally able to stay still.
It’s different.
Maybe it’s because Meghan is not Jess. She’s also not an amalgamated icon of Woman either, like the vague mental images of softness and strength that Sam longed for those years on the road with Dean and tried to block out when he was hunting alone. She has a middle name-Rose-and a history, much of which lives in this very town. She has brothers and friendly ex-boyfriends nearly as tall as Sam who don’t mess with him because she quietly wouldn’t stand for it. And because, on the whole, they’re pretty nice guys who don’t even mind being beaten at pool by Dean every other night of the week. She has a college degree and a master’s in library science and hordes of small children who check out picture books from her every week and are probably learning about the birds and bees because of her “condition.”
Maybe it’s because he’d entirely given up on even hoping for this.
*****
Meghan used to have this boxer short collection culled from the wardrobes of various ex-boyfriends. Usually, she ended up with them because she’d borrow a pair for sleep clothes and eventually, there would be complaints that she’d stretched out the elastic with her ass. “A decent price to pay for the chance to see this up close and personal,” she’d joke. She didn’t cut scraps from any of those other guys’ underwear though-just this one pair of blue and white patterned ones that Sam left behind when he took off on the road.
After he comes back for good, she randomly buys him a three pack of cotton briefs. “That’s what you do when you really love someone-buy them boring underwear-so I’ll be expecting you to go maternity-bra shopping in a couple months.”
“You love me?” he says, looking down at her with wide, blinky, hazel eyes and more question mark in his tone than necessary. Standing more than a foot taller than her with light scatterings of premature grey in his dark hair, Sam looks little-boy lost there for a second. Until he backs her into a wall and kisses her in a way that reminds Meghan exactly how she ended up in the market for nursing lingerie in the first place. Reminds her why she’s willing to take a chance on this, on him.
*****
Sam gets a job working construction for a friend of Bobby’s. He still keeps books for the shop and helps with research when Dean goes out on the odd hunt.
The work is familiar from those summers in Palo Alto. It’s simple but feels metaphorical-building things up instead of tearing them down. Sam starts pitching in every month with Meghan’s mortgage, yet still doesn’t ask for his name on the deed.
But he parks his truck next to her Volvo every night. He tries to learn how to cook, uses her shampoo, and no longer bangs his head on the door frame out back like he always did when he was an occasional visitor; now Sam remembers to duck.
This isn’t the “normal” Sam ever planned for, and parts of it-the job, with its daily sweat and profound lack of books-might not be what he envisions for forever, but it’s now and it’s him taking care of her-of them-the best he can with the resources available. Like painting a devil’s trap over the space designated for the crib he’s building from a kit. Sam tells Meghan it’s an ancient symbol of protection he learned about in an elective class at Stanford. She shakes her head and stares up quizzically, one hand on her hip and the other wrapped around a mug of Tummy Mint.
“You should really go back to school, you big nerd,” she says affectionately, like he isn’t messing with the yellow and blue decorating scheme in the nursery.
“I will,” Sam answers, “after the baby comes.”
*
Amidst this domesticity, there’s the way she wants him. Wants Sam’s head in her lap when she’s watching movies or TV-her belly’s not too big for that yet, but it’s there, and Sam finds it oddly comforting-stroking her fingertips absently around the shell of his ear until he shivers in the mid-summer heat. Wants his head between her legs sometimes more than once per day. The taste of her, familiar on his tongue. So much wetter for him than ever before, she’s almost embarrassed, which seems out of character for the sweetly brazen girl who took him home from a bar one night, bedraggled as he was then. It endears her to him, makes his cock jump.
“Fuck me, Daddy,” she whispers at night, chortling because it’s no longer just a kink.
“You’re glad you weren’t here when I was puking my guts out every other hour and cursing your name,” she says later, as he’s drifting off.
“No, I’m not,” Sam mutters and falls head first into sleep.
*****
Meghan stops working on the quilt quite so much for awhile. She had so much more time when Sam was gone wanderlusting or whatever he was doing. Now she’s adjusting to having him around all the time, to all the inexplicable quirks she didn’t know about when he was just the new mechanic’s hot brother, the one who blew in and out of town.
The main exercise she’s getting (that’s not sex) is walking the dog-she should probably be doing pregnancy yoga or something, but that’s not her kind of thing. One day, when she’s scooping up dog shit from the neighbor’s yard into a plastic baggy, Sam yells from the porch, “Wait, Meg, don’t touch that! I think it’s...bad.”
She laughs and waves him off. “That’s with cats, Sam. We don’t have a cat.”
Sam’s still somewhat of a mystery, but he’s trying. He really is.
*****
Meghan starts showing in August, when it’s hotter than hell and everything’s moving slower, especially the two of them when they’re alone together, caught in this perpetual daydream of waiting-trying to figure out who each other are before there’s someone else to consider. Hiding out in the air conditioned bedroom from the sticky, muggy air outside and the mothers and aunts and well-wishers who want to do nothing but try and suss out the sex of the baby and stare up at Sam like he’s a possibly suspicious, denim-encased mountain of a sperm donor. They lie in bed on Saturday afternoons, sun streaming through the curtains, talking alternately like they’re on a first date or old friends catching up. Touching like they can coax each others’ secrets out.
Sam realizes that this body of hers that he’d already learned how to heat up and turn on has secrets he can’t even begin to fathom. It’s doing things-making a person in there-and Sam feels like if he just keeps his hands on her as much as possible, it’ll cement that he’s really a part of that.
His hands, summer-dark on freckled skin where it’s stretching tighter, tracing over translucent veins through his newly-positioned callouses. His hands, making her come so he can watch her better, unselfconscious as she cries out. His hands, holding on for dear life.
Sam didn’t realize that it would be so physical for him, this happening to her. He tries to tell Meghan, but the words don’t come out right. You’re beautiful like this, when they’re clothed, when he leans down to kiss the back of her neck. Do you like me inside you? Did I do this? when they’re fucking, when he’s retracing his steps. It doesn’t begin to cover it.
So instead Sam tells her every story from his childhood that he can, and it helps that she already knows Dean. The gaps though-they weigh on him.
*****
Meghan has four brothers, two parents, about a dozen aunts and uncles, grandparents and roughly a million cousins. With so many pieces to consider, she opts for a pretty complicated patchwork pattern, biting off possibly more than she can chew. Sam has less family-just Dean as far as she knows-so she uses denim from an old pair of his jeans as a background/base. So he’ll be well represented, you know.
*****
Meghan takes it very badly when she finds out. Sam had meant to tell her in some normal way (as if that were possible), but of course that’s not how it happens.
It’s early October and the days are getting shorter, colder, and Meghan’s belly, naturally, rounder. Sam goes to sleep slightly chilly under the flannel sheets, his arm wrapped protectively around her body, like he always does now.
He wakes up sweating, mind filled with blood and screaming, so much screaming. He responds the only way he can think of-jets out of bed and starts frantically salting the doorframes and windows, spilling thick crystals all over the carpet, knocking over knickknacks and candles and books.
After a particularly loud crash, Meghan comes rushing out into the living room, hair corkscrewing sleep-wild, looking like an ornery, nighty-clad Botticelli. “What the hell are you doing?” she squawks.
“I-” And Sam feels ridiculous. Freaked the fuck out, and ridiculous. Words start flowing mish-mash out of his mouth, danger and you have to believe me-I’m not crazy.
“You had a bad dream,” she says, rubbing her eyes.
“Yes!” Sam hears himself yell, “but you don’t understand-my dreams come true.”
It all starts pouring out of him then in one hot stream: demons and his dad, visions and violence.
“Jesus,” is all Meghan says at first, sucking on her teeth vehemently. Then she tells him to go.
*****
The house feels empty as soon as Sam’s gone-even before the engine sounds of his truck have faded out. Meghan buries herself in the couch cushions, wraps herself up in the incomplete quilt and gets stuck by a pin.
*****
Bobby’s couch is still lumpy, and already Sam’s not used to sleeping alone. So he doesn’t sleep, hardly, not for three days in a row. Sullen, not sure if he’s angry at himself or the world. “She thinks I’m insane,” he raves at his brother, then shuts up for hours when he convinces Dean to drive by Meghan’s and check on things. “She’s insane,” he mutters later, when Dean comes back, shrugging his shoulders.
Increasingly delirious, Sam decides that she does believe him, and it’s the prospect of a psychic, mutant child that’s freaked her out. (At least his mom didn’t know that’s what she was getting. And John didn’t know what was out there waiting in the dark before Mary had the boys.)
“That’s retarded,” Dean says of this proclamation, and throws Sam in the shower bodily, waiting with arms crossed by the bathroom door until Sam comes out. “We’re going out.”
*
At the bar, Sam’s jumpy, convinced that everyone is looking at him. Which they are because he looks like shit, days of beard and agony cloaking his face. Three separate guys come up and offer to buy Sam a beer, clapping their hands on his back with variations of, “Hormones! I feel you, man.”
It’s surreal.
Sam’s so busy being caught up in the weirdness of it all that he doesn’t even notice at first when Meghan walks in the door as swiftly and purposefully as a seven-months-pregnant woman can.
“You haven’t called,” she accuses, hitching herself up onto a bar stool with difficulty. Then, “We had a fight, Sam. That happens.”
“But-” he stammers, looking at her and thinking of her old life, of the other men who could’ve made her happy. Then, “The smoke in here! It’s bad for the baby! Meg, you need to get out of here right now.”
“Come home with me,” she says tiredly, eyes wet.
“Yes, please,” Dean shouts over his shoulder. “Get him out of my hair.”
“You!” Sam points at his brother, stumbling backwards after Meghan.
On the walk to the parking lot, two paces between them, she says, “Never lie to me again,” and closes the gap.
*
Sam never told any of the women before her about Jess, about his mom-not directly anyway. If they didn’t know about the hunting, there was no need to, and if they did, he could pretend it was what he’d always chosen for himself, the way Dean used to do.
He tells Meghan now, in gasps and sobs.
“I’m so sorry,” she croons, holding his head like a child. “We’re going to be okay though,” she says softly, once Sam’s stopped his monologue.
“You don’t know that,” he whispers.
“She does,” Meghan answers, rubbing her stomach in a circular motion.
“She? I thought we weren’t going to find out!” Sam says, stunned.
“Yeah, I know, but I figured-she’s your daughter, and it might help.”
*****
When winter comes, Meghan starts getting frantic again about finishing the quilt. Dean’s spending more and more time over at their place. Which is good because he can cook better than Sam, and the three of them are pretty much always pigging out. At this point, she eats almost as much as they do in their regular, non-beached-whale states.
Through a mouthful of macaroni and cheese, Meghan says to Sam, “You could learn a thing or two from your brother.”
Dean scoffs. “Dude, he already has. How do you think he got you?”
*****
The dream doesn’t come back; Sam figures maybe it was fluke. Still, he hangs more charms around the house-less messy than salt.
“You’re nesting,” Meghan says around a delicate bite of chocolate cake.
“I’m being cautious.”
“You’re nesting,” she repeats with a smile, and shuffles off to the kitchen for more snacks.
He’s just trying to make the world safer for his daughter. It’s something Sam hasn’t figured out all of the logistics of, but he knows he has to do.
*****
Two weeks past her due date, and Meghan’s long since finished the quilt. Everything’s ready, except their little girl apparently.
The Internet, Sam tells her, says that sex will help.
“I can hardly move!” she exclaims. It’s not much of a deterrent, but she didn’t really mean it to be.
Sam fucks her deep and slow, spooning from behind. Biting at her neck until she dissolves. Groaning in her ear pornographically about the fullness of her tits, the heat of her cunt around his cock, and sweetly, how he loves her.
*****
The snow starts pounding down in the middle of the night. And nature, it seems, really is a power stronger than any other, because Meghan goes into labor right after the radio announcer says that all roads are blocked off.
Sam runs into the living room and shakes the hell out of Dean, who was passed out on the couch. “Fuck, man, fuck. This can’t be happening.”
Dean looks up blearily and shakes Sam right back. “Get a grip, dude. We’ve dealt with far worse than this.”
Sam’s still pacing and swearing hours later when Meghan’s contractions are coming every two and half minutes by Dean’s stop watch.
“Sam!” she screams, “Either get with the program and stop freaking out or get the hell out of the room.”
“Seriously, Sammy,” Dean says through gritted teeth from his kneeling position at the foot of the bed. Sam goes still, staring at Dean with his sleeves rolled up and his game face on, and realizes that there really isn’t anything his brother wouldn’t do for him.
There’s screaming, there’s blood, and Sam has never been more terrified in his life.
And when he looks down at his daughter, marveling at the way she fits in the crook of his forearm, Sam thinks about his dreams, and how sometimes they come true.
*****
The quilt gets tattered from years of use. Meghan repatches it patiently, adding scraps of sundresses outgrown and the non-mud-stained parts of overalls worn out in the knees; sewing them together with shiny swatches of the tie Sam bought for his first day teaching and the suit Dean wore to his wedding and then promptly ruined salting and burning the bones of an angry spirit with Sam after the reception.
Life goes on.
*****
Title: Patchwork
Author: femmenerd
Characters/Pairing: Sam/OFC, Sam and Dean.
Rating: Hard R.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit, don't sue.
Summary: Future. Goes AU early S2 SPN. Follows the “events” of my story Straight Line but can, I think, be read on its own. Written for poisontaster for Sweet Charity. Look, this is full-on Sam as baby!daddy, yep. BLAME ERIN. Sam didn’t realize that it would be so physical for him, this happening to her. He tries to tell Meghan, but the words don’t come out right...So instead Sam tells her every story from his childhood that he can, and it helps that she already knows Dean. The gaps though-they weigh on him.
Author's Note: Beta read by the incomparable mona1347 (all remaining errors, however, are mine alone). Also audienced at various points by a number of helpful people, which makes it seem more “important” than it is, but thanks are due to: flipmontigirl, onelittlesleep, miss_begonia, kittyzams, coiledsoul, and girlguidejones. onelittlesleep especially said (paraphrasing): “Lucia, there needs to be more GIRL,” and so there was.
Word Count: 4500.
*****
The day Meghan decided to keep the baby-even though she had no idea where Sam was or if he was ever coming back-she started working on a quilt for this unexpected new person she was welcoming into her life. She’d never been particularly good at sewing but what the hell. All her life she’d had plans, not complicated ones: her favorite thing as a little girl was reading, so she became a librarian; she loved her family, her town, so she moved home after grad school, bought her old babysitter’s house. She figured she could do this too, piece by piece.
*****
Sam quits hunting after he finds out Meghan’s pregnant-after he comes back from what she comes to call his “pilgrimage” and what he refers to as “the freak-out that brought me back.” He adjusts his permanent address the two miles down the road from Dean and Bobby’s to Meghan’s place, hauling his duffel bag out of the cab of his truck and lugging it past the morning glories brightening her front door.
He also asks her to marry him-flustered and without a ring, but full of earnest good intentions.
She turns him down, laughing wryly at first and shaking her curly, brown head until the scrunched-up wrinkles on Sam’s forehead give her pause. “You said you wanted to ‘know me,’” she says then, cupping his face with one hand while the other soothes unruly cowlicks in his road-tangled hair. “Why don’t we do that first?”
“All right,” he sighs. “I’ll ask you again later.”
She just smiles and says, “Maybe I’ll ask you later.” The subject’s closed.
*
Two days later, Sam grudgingly admits to himself that she was right. He came back here to tell her he was sorry-to ask her, like the teenager he never got to be, to go steady. He was going to tell her everything, and beg for absolution and a second chance. The demon was dead, but so was his father; Sam hoped he could find some semblance of the right timing with something at least.
What he found on his arrival was a woman with her own agenda, brimming with new life, who hadn’t broken down without him-since he’d never really been there before-but was miraculously willing to let him tiptoe into her life.
******
Meghan went on a date with herself to the bookstore and bought two books: “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and “the Beginner’s Guide to Quilting.” Oh, and a trashy magazine for reading in the tub. Then she went home, lit candles and soaked until she had prune-feet, staring down at her still-flat stomach, light-headed and awed.
It was hard going; she didn’t know what she was doing. Meghan pulled out more stitches than she left in, at first.
*****
Dean’s the first person Sam tells-Dean’s the only person he has to tell, really.
They’re tipping back beers in their favored al fresco drinking spot since they (Dean) settled here-the back of a decrepit, red Ford truck that looks like it’s been parked in Bobby’s back lot since before either Sam or Dean was born. Crickets chirp insistently as tall grass grows into the rusted wheel wells, none of which contain tires. Sam’s slowly, meticulously tearing the label off the bottle in his left hand and staring up at the stars overhead, mentally listing off the names of constellations one by one. Dean’s already on brewsky number three, burping enthusiastically and busying himself pegging pebbles into the dark and laughing.
“Why doesn’t Bobby haul this thing away?” Sam asks conversationally.
“I dunno. Think maybe he lost his cherry in it or something,” Dean snorts.
“That why you wipe the Impala down with a lace hanky every Sunday?” Sam shoots back, his general, electrified state of jumpiness amping up the trash in his talk.
Dean stops throwing rocks and gives Sam a slow, serious look. “I pray for your soul she didn’t hear that,” Dean says, his face meandering into a grin. “Besides, first time I got laid was in your bed, not the car.”
“Dean!” Sam exclaims automatically, despite the incredible not-surprising-ness of this revelation.
“Hey dude, your room was cleaner.”
With an exaggerated huff (like a laugh, like I love you, you dumbass), Sam knocks Dean on the shoulder with one outstretched palm. Dean fluidly, drunkenly flows with the impact, like he was expecting it. Because, of course, he was.
They recede back into silence after that for a bit, until Sam, clearing his throat, goes for it. “Hey, Dean?” Sam starts, deciding he’s ready for it all to be real.
“Yeah?”
One breath, two. Long, then short. “Meghan’s pregnant. She’s having-I mean, we’re having-a baby.”
Dean raises one eyebrow into a curve that Sam can see even in the dark. “Yeah man, I know,” he says, low. “I, ah, live here,” Dean continues, by way of explanation.
“Right, of course,” Sam says, feeling dazed, his tongue heavy in his mouth.
Dean coughs, sounding sober all of a sudden. “And I, uh, took her to her first...” He waves his arm around in the air expressively. “...doctor’s appointment. You know, for woman parts.”
“Gynecologist.”
“Yeah, that.”
“You did,” Sam says, and blinks, not sure if he’s putting a question mark at the end of the phrase or not. Some kind of emotion is buzzing around in his head. Guilt? Confusion?
Sam tries anger on for size. “Wait, you knew about this and you didn’t call me?” he spits, feeling his shoulders hunch up.
Dean is annoyingly calm. “She told me not to.”
“Yeah, but-” Sam sputters.
“Yeah, but-I knew you’d come back eventually, Sammy.” Dean takes a breath, staring intently into his beer before looking up at Sam with pleading eyes. “And that kid’s gonna be a Winchester.”
Sam lets that sentence sink in. Eventually, he forms his mouth around the word, “Thanks,” and means it.
Dean nods a few times-an anemic head-bang-and changes the subject. “So you bailing on the bachelor pad then? Gonna sleep on her couch instead of ours?”
“Not sleeping on the couch.” Sam pauses for dramatic effect. “You do know where babies come from right, Dean?”
“Shaddup,” his brother says, smiling big, and Sam’s pendulum shifts a little further towards, “It’s going to be okay.”
*
Sam doesn’t remember the last time he was in a medical facility when it wasn’t an emergency, when someone he loved wasn’t bleeding or sick. In the doctor’s office with Meghan now, he feels over-large and out of place in the sterile, white room, his boots making dusty imprints on the clean floors. The receptionists and nurses in the waiting room know her from a lifetime of check-ups and booster shots; they gossip and shoot sly looks at Sam, causing him, against his will, to go hot around the collar-red in the face just like in sex ed class when he was fourteen. That was in Alabama-yes, he thinks so.
Sam holds Meghan’s hand during the ultrasound-all beeps and procedures until the murky, alien-looking image appears on the screen: proof. Something rushes though him. Adrenaline maybe. Wonder.
Then he looks into her face-shining eyes, rounded cheeks-and wishes she didn’t have to know that anything evil could share the same world with them, with this moment. Maybe not the demon that used to singularly plague his life, but the others that are out there still, whether he chases after them or not.
So they go home and tape up the first “baby photos” on the fridge, and against his better judgment, Sam doesn’t come clean yet.
*****
Once she got the hang of it, Meghan started ransacking the closets of everyone she knew, searching for old shirts and skirts and PJs in colors that would work together. She wanted a piece of everyone she cared about in there. Her mom laughed and opened up the attic, her smile uncreasing the wrinkles on her forehead that furled when Meghan knew she was worrying about her poor, unwed, knocked up daughter. Her brothers offered up smelly, old socks as a joke. When she showed up at Bobby’s though with her old, brown Volvo in perfect working order, Dean didn’t laugh. He gave her a flannel button-down-too big for him, and said, “Here, this was our dad’s.”
*****
The intimacies of living with a woman are different now than they were when Sam was a kid-when he and Jess were playing house-thrilling at the importance of signing a lease in their own names and then eating nothing but chicken wings from the freezer and pop tarts during finals week. Back then having a “normal” home was something Sam was stubbornly trying to believe in, even as the sinewy cords between him and his family tugged at his gut. Now Sam’s family lives in bittersweet memory, and also down the road: fixing cars during the week, flirting with girls at town potlucks and getting rides home with his buddies from the bar when he’s had a few too many and opts to leave the Impala in the parking lot.
(Dean’s always there.)
Sam’s family also lives in the impending future, in this adult responsibility waiting in Meghan’s womb, nestled between their bodies at night. Her body, which only gets more familiar to him as it changes and grows. His body, which is finally able to stay still.
It’s different.
Maybe it’s because Meghan is not Jess. She’s also not an amalgamated icon of Woman either, like the vague mental images of softness and strength that Sam longed for those years on the road with Dean and tried to block out when he was hunting alone. She has a middle name-Rose-and a history, much of which lives in this very town. She has brothers and friendly ex-boyfriends nearly as tall as Sam who don’t mess with him because she quietly wouldn’t stand for it. And because, on the whole, they’re pretty nice guys who don’t even mind being beaten at pool by Dean every other night of the week. She has a college degree and a master’s in library science and hordes of small children who check out picture books from her every week and are probably learning about the birds and bees because of her “condition.”
Maybe it’s because he’d entirely given up on even hoping for this.
*****
Meghan used to have this boxer short collection culled from the wardrobes of various ex-boyfriends. Usually, she ended up with them because she’d borrow a pair for sleep clothes and eventually, there would be complaints that she’d stretched out the elastic with her ass. “A decent price to pay for the chance to see this up close and personal,” she’d joke. She didn’t cut scraps from any of those other guys’ underwear though-just this one pair of blue and white patterned ones that Sam left behind when he took off on the road.
After he comes back for good, she randomly buys him a three pack of cotton briefs. “That’s what you do when you really love someone-buy them boring underwear-so I’ll be expecting you to go maternity-bra shopping in a couple months.”
“You love me?” he says, looking down at her with wide, blinky, hazel eyes and more question mark in his tone than necessary. Standing more than a foot taller than her with light scatterings of premature grey in his dark hair, Sam looks little-boy lost there for a second. Until he backs her into a wall and kisses her in a way that reminds Meghan exactly how she ended up in the market for nursing lingerie in the first place. Reminds her why she’s willing to take a chance on this, on him.
*****
Sam gets a job working construction for a friend of Bobby’s. He still keeps books for the shop and helps with research when Dean goes out on the odd hunt.
The work is familiar from those summers in Palo Alto. It’s simple but feels metaphorical-building things up instead of tearing them down. Sam starts pitching in every month with Meghan’s mortgage, yet still doesn’t ask for his name on the deed.
But he parks his truck next to her Volvo every night. He tries to learn how to cook, uses her shampoo, and no longer bangs his head on the door frame out back like he always did when he was an occasional visitor; now Sam remembers to duck.
This isn’t the “normal” Sam ever planned for, and parts of it-the job, with its daily sweat and profound lack of books-might not be what he envisions for forever, but it’s now and it’s him taking care of her-of them-the best he can with the resources available. Like painting a devil’s trap over the space designated for the crib he’s building from a kit. Sam tells Meghan it’s an ancient symbol of protection he learned about in an elective class at Stanford. She shakes her head and stares up quizzically, one hand on her hip and the other wrapped around a mug of Tummy Mint.
“You should really go back to school, you big nerd,” she says affectionately, like he isn’t messing with the yellow and blue decorating scheme in the nursery.
“I will,” Sam answers, “after the baby comes.”
*
Amidst this domesticity, there’s the way she wants him. Wants Sam’s head in her lap when she’s watching movies or TV-her belly’s not too big for that yet, but it’s there, and Sam finds it oddly comforting-stroking her fingertips absently around the shell of his ear until he shivers in the mid-summer heat. Wants his head between her legs sometimes more than once per day. The taste of her, familiar on his tongue. So much wetter for him than ever before, she’s almost embarrassed, which seems out of character for the sweetly brazen girl who took him home from a bar one night, bedraggled as he was then. It endears her to him, makes his cock jump.
“Fuck me, Daddy,” she whispers at night, chortling because it’s no longer just a kink.
“You’re glad you weren’t here when I was puking my guts out every other hour and cursing your name,” she says later, as he’s drifting off.
“No, I’m not,” Sam mutters and falls head first into sleep.
*****
Meghan stops working on the quilt quite so much for awhile. She had so much more time when Sam was gone wanderlusting or whatever he was doing. Now she’s adjusting to having him around all the time, to all the inexplicable quirks she didn’t know about when he was just the new mechanic’s hot brother, the one who blew in and out of town.
The main exercise she’s getting (that’s not sex) is walking the dog-she should probably be doing pregnancy yoga or something, but that’s not her kind of thing. One day, when she’s scooping up dog shit from the neighbor’s yard into a plastic baggy, Sam yells from the porch, “Wait, Meg, don’t touch that! I think it’s...bad.”
She laughs and waves him off. “That’s with cats, Sam. We don’t have a cat.”
Sam’s still somewhat of a mystery, but he’s trying. He really is.
*****
Meghan starts showing in August, when it’s hotter than hell and everything’s moving slower, especially the two of them when they’re alone together, caught in this perpetual daydream of waiting-trying to figure out who each other are before there’s someone else to consider. Hiding out in the air conditioned bedroom from the sticky, muggy air outside and the mothers and aunts and well-wishers who want to do nothing but try and suss out the sex of the baby and stare up at Sam like he’s a possibly suspicious, denim-encased mountain of a sperm donor. They lie in bed on Saturday afternoons, sun streaming through the curtains, talking alternately like they’re on a first date or old friends catching up. Touching like they can coax each others’ secrets out.
Sam realizes that this body of hers that he’d already learned how to heat up and turn on has secrets he can’t even begin to fathom. It’s doing things-making a person in there-and Sam feels like if he just keeps his hands on her as much as possible, it’ll cement that he’s really a part of that.
His hands, summer-dark on freckled skin where it’s stretching tighter, tracing over translucent veins through his newly-positioned callouses. His hands, making her come so he can watch her better, unselfconscious as she cries out. His hands, holding on for dear life.
Sam didn’t realize that it would be so physical for him, this happening to her. He tries to tell Meghan, but the words don’t come out right. You’re beautiful like this, when they’re clothed, when he leans down to kiss the back of her neck. Do you like me inside you? Did I do this? when they’re fucking, when he’s retracing his steps. It doesn’t begin to cover it.
So instead Sam tells her every story from his childhood that he can, and it helps that she already knows Dean. The gaps though-they weigh on him.
*****
Meghan has four brothers, two parents, about a dozen aunts and uncles, grandparents and roughly a million cousins. With so many pieces to consider, she opts for a pretty complicated patchwork pattern, biting off possibly more than she can chew. Sam has less family-just Dean as far as she knows-so she uses denim from an old pair of his jeans as a background/base. So he’ll be well represented, you know.
*****
Meghan takes it very badly when she finds out. Sam had meant to tell her in some normal way (as if that were possible), but of course that’s not how it happens.
It’s early October and the days are getting shorter, colder, and Meghan’s belly, naturally, rounder. Sam goes to sleep slightly chilly under the flannel sheets, his arm wrapped protectively around her body, like he always does now.
He wakes up sweating, mind filled with blood and screaming, so much screaming. He responds the only way he can think of-jets out of bed and starts frantically salting the doorframes and windows, spilling thick crystals all over the carpet, knocking over knickknacks and candles and books.
After a particularly loud crash, Meghan comes rushing out into the living room, hair corkscrewing sleep-wild, looking like an ornery, nighty-clad Botticelli. “What the hell are you doing?” she squawks.
“I-” And Sam feels ridiculous. Freaked the fuck out, and ridiculous. Words start flowing mish-mash out of his mouth, danger and you have to believe me-I’m not crazy.
“You had a bad dream,” she says, rubbing her eyes.
“Yes!” Sam hears himself yell, “but you don’t understand-my dreams come true.”
It all starts pouring out of him then in one hot stream: demons and his dad, visions and violence.
“Jesus,” is all Meghan says at first, sucking on her teeth vehemently. Then she tells him to go.
*****
The house feels empty as soon as Sam’s gone-even before the engine sounds of his truck have faded out. Meghan buries herself in the couch cushions, wraps herself up in the incomplete quilt and gets stuck by a pin.
*****
Bobby’s couch is still lumpy, and already Sam’s not used to sleeping alone. So he doesn’t sleep, hardly, not for three days in a row. Sullen, not sure if he’s angry at himself or the world. “She thinks I’m insane,” he raves at his brother, then shuts up for hours when he convinces Dean to drive by Meghan’s and check on things. “She’s insane,” he mutters later, when Dean comes back, shrugging his shoulders.
Increasingly delirious, Sam decides that she does believe him, and it’s the prospect of a psychic, mutant child that’s freaked her out. (At least his mom didn’t know that’s what she was getting. And John didn’t know what was out there waiting in the dark before Mary had the boys.)
“That’s retarded,” Dean says of this proclamation, and throws Sam in the shower bodily, waiting with arms crossed by the bathroom door until Sam comes out. “We’re going out.”
*
At the bar, Sam’s jumpy, convinced that everyone is looking at him. Which they are because he looks like shit, days of beard and agony cloaking his face. Three separate guys come up and offer to buy Sam a beer, clapping their hands on his back with variations of, “Hormones! I feel you, man.”
It’s surreal.
Sam’s so busy being caught up in the weirdness of it all that he doesn’t even notice at first when Meghan walks in the door as swiftly and purposefully as a seven-months-pregnant woman can.
“You haven’t called,” she accuses, hitching herself up onto a bar stool with difficulty. Then, “We had a fight, Sam. That happens.”
“But-” he stammers, looking at her and thinking of her old life, of the other men who could’ve made her happy. Then, “The smoke in here! It’s bad for the baby! Meg, you need to get out of here right now.”
“Come home with me,” she says tiredly, eyes wet.
“Yes, please,” Dean shouts over his shoulder. “Get him out of my hair.”
“You!” Sam points at his brother, stumbling backwards after Meghan.
On the walk to the parking lot, two paces between them, she says, “Never lie to me again,” and closes the gap.
*
Sam never told any of the women before her about Jess, about his mom-not directly anyway. If they didn’t know about the hunting, there was no need to, and if they did, he could pretend it was what he’d always chosen for himself, the way Dean used to do.
He tells Meghan now, in gasps and sobs.
“I’m so sorry,” she croons, holding his head like a child. “We’re going to be okay though,” she says softly, once Sam’s stopped his monologue.
“You don’t know that,” he whispers.
“She does,” Meghan answers, rubbing her stomach in a circular motion.
“She? I thought we weren’t going to find out!” Sam says, stunned.
“Yeah, I know, but I figured-she’s your daughter, and it might help.”
*****
When winter comes, Meghan starts getting frantic again about finishing the quilt. Dean’s spending more and more time over at their place. Which is good because he can cook better than Sam, and the three of them are pretty much always pigging out. At this point, she eats almost as much as they do in their regular, non-beached-whale states.
Through a mouthful of macaroni and cheese, Meghan says to Sam, “You could learn a thing or two from your brother.”
Dean scoffs. “Dude, he already has. How do you think he got you?”
*****
The dream doesn’t come back; Sam figures maybe it was fluke. Still, he hangs more charms around the house-less messy than salt.
“You’re nesting,” Meghan says around a delicate bite of chocolate cake.
“I’m being cautious.”
“You’re nesting,” she repeats with a smile, and shuffles off to the kitchen for more snacks.
He’s just trying to make the world safer for his daughter. It’s something Sam hasn’t figured out all of the logistics of, but he knows he has to do.
*****
Two weeks past her due date, and Meghan’s long since finished the quilt. Everything’s ready, except their little girl apparently.
The Internet, Sam tells her, says that sex will help.
“I can hardly move!” she exclaims. It’s not much of a deterrent, but she didn’t really mean it to be.
Sam fucks her deep and slow, spooning from behind. Biting at her neck until she dissolves. Groaning in her ear pornographically about the fullness of her tits, the heat of her cunt around his cock, and sweetly, how he loves her.
*****
The snow starts pounding down in the middle of the night. And nature, it seems, really is a power stronger than any other, because Meghan goes into labor right after the radio announcer says that all roads are blocked off.
Sam runs into the living room and shakes the hell out of Dean, who was passed out on the couch. “Fuck, man, fuck. This can’t be happening.”
Dean looks up blearily and shakes Sam right back. “Get a grip, dude. We’ve dealt with far worse than this.”
Sam’s still pacing and swearing hours later when Meghan’s contractions are coming every two and half minutes by Dean’s stop watch.
“Sam!” she screams, “Either get with the program and stop freaking out or get the hell out of the room.”
“Seriously, Sammy,” Dean says through gritted teeth from his kneeling position at the foot of the bed. Sam goes still, staring at Dean with his sleeves rolled up and his game face on, and realizes that there really isn’t anything his brother wouldn’t do for him.
There’s screaming, there’s blood, and Sam has never been more terrified in his life.
And when he looks down at his daughter, marveling at the way she fits in the crook of his forearm, Sam thinks about his dreams, and how sometimes they come true.
*****
The quilt gets tattered from years of use. Meghan repatches it patiently, adding scraps of sundresses outgrown and the non-mud-stained parts of overalls worn out in the knees; sewing them together with shiny swatches of the tie Sam bought for his first day teaching and the suit Dean wore to his wedding and then promptly ruined salting and burning the bones of an angry spirit with Sam after the reception.
Life goes on.
*****