SPN FIC - Elizabeth
This is ... just 'cause I wanted to write it. And a couple of you asked for it. It's from my Future 'verse, February 2009, after Dean's gotten out of the deal. In short: Dean meets Lizzie.
But…hell. She was kinda cute. About two years old, maybe, dressed in pink pants and red sneakers and a long-sleeved shirt that had Care Bears and little hearts on it. She kept peeking at him, then disappearing, like it was a game, with a big grin on her face.
Characters: Dean, OFCs (Morgan and Lizzie)
Pairings: none
Rating: PG, for language
Spoilers: none
Length: 2203 words
Disclaimer: Kripke's boys, my girls, but who's counting? No money happening either way.
Elizabeth
By Carol Davis
Beat it, you freakin' little ankle biter, Dean wanted to say - and yes, out loud, because if life were a video game called Shitty Mood, he would have reached Level 12, and by rights bells and whistles should be going off.
He and Sam had been in town eleven days now and had made no progress whatsoever toward finding (let alone eliminating) the thing that had killed four residents of a run-down apartment complex: the Bluebird Towers, which wasn't painted blue and didn't have any freakin' towers, so go figure. They'd interviewed and scanned and searched and interviewed some more and had come up with zip-zilch-zero, so Sam had decided this morning to lock himself inside the local library to do more digging into the town's history. Wasn't coming out, he said, until he found something.
Dean had been willing to help. Eager to help. But after 45 minutes, Sam had told him to get lost.
Which was just as well. Didn't take two of them to sit there and find more nothing. But the way Sam had told him to get out? There was no call for that.
No call for making that fish-faced librarian stare at him aaaaaaaall the way out the front door.
No thank you sir.
Scowling, he grabbed what he needed from the pharmacy department shelf: Ace bandages, hydrogen peroxide, gauze, ibuprofen. The first aid kit was a mess after Biloxi - the kind of a mess that would have had Dad kicking their butts for letting it get that way, and again for letting it stay that way for almost two weeks.
It wasn't like he couldn't do research. He could freakin' read. It was the library's fault that they had exactly squat that was useful. And it was the town's fault that they stuck a sign that said Library on something that was no more than a bookmobile minus the wheels.
Useless. Abso-friggin'-useless.
So, let Sam sit in there and pretend he could find gold nuggets if he sifted through enough sand. He was stubborn enough to stay locked up in the damn library for weeks. If Dean sent food in to him, he'd stay for months.
Hell, he could pretty much grow old in there.
The townies could tell stories about him. Who's that weird man, Mommy? Oh, no one knows his name, sweetie. He's been sitting there since February of 2009, looking through all the books. They stuck a tube in him in 2012 so he doesn't even need to get up to go to the bathroom.
Hell, maybe he'd find something. Everybody had their own particular skills - Sam called it a "skill set," which was like calling a cashier a sales associate, just a bunch of useless college crap - and part of Sam's "skill set" was sitting stonelike in one place for three or four months, going through old newspapers and surfing the freaking Internet.
Which, fine. Dean could do something more useful. Like shop. And then…
Something.
Yeah. Something.
There was a cute little brunette at the Customer Service desk. With any luck her shift would end sometime reasonably soon.
Meanwhile…shop. Refill the first aid kit, pick up some new socks and underwear and stuff. Trolling along with his cart, Dean ticked down a mental list and tossed a box of Snoopy Band-aids into the basket.
For Sam. Because it would make Sam pull the bitchface, which was amusing when Dean made him do it. Not so much when he was just being a total pain in the ass.
Like that kid.
She was peeking at him around the corner, one little hand curled around the edge of an end-cap shelf.
Grinning at him.
Beat it, you…
But…hell. She was kinda cute. About two years old, maybe, dressed in pink pants and red sneakers and a long-sleeved shirt that had Care Bears and little hearts on it. She kept peeking at him, then disappearing, like it was a game, with a big grin on her face.
Sam had done that kind of stuff, a long time ago. In some other lifetime, it seemed like. He'd gotten the basics of Hide and Seek, but not the fine points: if Dean took more than fifteen seconds to find him, he'd come busting out of wherever he was and grin and giggle.
Funny how, back then, that'd been fun.
The little girl disappeared again, and he heard pattering footsteps in the next aisle over as he looked for a big tube of generic Neosporin. A flash of pink in his peripheral vision made him look down toward the far end of the row, where a little stripe of pink corduroy pants was visible between the shelves and a cardboard display of Flintstone vitamins. He found the Neosporin, absently checked the price - yeah, a quarter of the cost of the name-brand stuff - and laid it in the cart.
Back then, when Sammy would hide behind the bathroom door or in a kitchen cupboard or under the bed, neither one of them had really had a handle on what it was that Dad did when he wasn't around. Neither one of them had really understood that there were bad things everywhere, bad things that wanted to hurt people. Back then, their whole world had been each other. And it was fun. Worrisome, sometimes, when it was dark and Dad hadn't come back yet - but, mostly, it was fun.
A small hand slid around the corner of the vitamin display.
Dean waited for the giggle.
But before it came, a guy in jeans and a heavy jacket walked around the corner and scooped the little girl up into his arms. "Whatcha doin', Booboocake?" he teased, and the little girl flung her arms around his neck and laughed down into his collar. When he saw Dean looking, he nodded an acknowledgment, then walked away, murmuring into the little girl's ear and snuffling into it with his nose like a dog.
From the next aisle over, Dean could hear voices: the guy's, and a woman's, accompanied by the child's laughter.
Yeah. That had been a long time ago, when Sammy had laughed like that.
He was pushing the cart down the long aisle toward Hardware when footsteps began to patter along behind him. He was moving past a display of microwaves when the little girl came dancing up to him and beamed a smile up at him, her fingers trailing against the metal rods of the shopping cart. "Hey," Dean told her quietly. "You better go back to your mom and dad, squirt." She didn't respond with anything more than a grin, so he turned to look for her parents.
Her mom was standing a couple of paces back.
"Dean," she said. "I thought that was you."
His mind rolled back a couple of years, to a week in the Adirondacks, a nix, and a collection of locals who hadn't liked him a whole lot.
This particular local had liked him, but he'd never been sure how much.
"Morgan," he replied. Then he put the pieces together: the little girl, the guy. The finished puzzle made him feel even less content than he'd been a minute ago. Producing what he hoped was a cordial expression wasn't a cakewalk. "What's - you live here now?"
She shook her head as she came closer. "Case."
Case?
"We heard you and Sam were here, and not having much luck. Figured we owed you for showing up at the Lodge." Her expression shifted a little. "Barging in where you weren't needed. You know. Tit for tat."
"We -"
"Can handle it. Sure."
The little girl circled around him and stared up at him, still grinning. Dean could feel his feathers ruffling.
"Boo," Morgan said. "This is Mommy's friend Dean."
Friend seemed like an exaggeration; in fact, it leaned heavily toward the bullshit end of the spectrum. But there was no more point in giving her the upper hand now than there'd been a couple of years ago. The Donahues enjoyed yanking his chain so much it made him think they were all somehow related to Sam.
"Her name is 'Boo'?" he said.
"Yes. I named her after Boo Radley, in To Kill a Mockingbird. God, Dean. Her name is Elizabeth."
"Sam's the one with the psychic powers."
"Oh. Right. You just kill things."
Partly to play along, and partly so he didn't have to go on looking at her - because, as had always been the case when he was dealing with one of the Donahues, he felt outmanned and outgunned - he crouched down so that he and Elizabeth were eye to eye. He expected her to go on grinning, or maybe to duck shyly behind her mother, but she did neither.
She moved closer to him, flung her arms around his neck, and kissed his cheek. She hung on long enough for him to pick up the scent of baby shampoo in her hair.
Though he couldn't have said why, he stood up with Elizabeth in his arms, her head tucked against his shoulder.
"So that's -" Dean began, nodding in the direction from which they'd all come. "That's her dad?"
Morgan glanced over her shoulder, then shook her head. "That's my brother. Aidan. Remem… Oh. You didn't meet him then, did you."
"Then who's -"
She paused, then told him, "Ari."
Ari.
He remembered Sam pointing to a name, one in a list of many, printed in small type in a year-end issue of People magazine. Remembered Sam asking, "Is that -?" and telling Sam yes, yeah, probably. Remembered intending to write a note, make a phone call, something…and then being caught up in whatever case they'd been on, hitting the road soon after, the magazine and the name and the phone call forgotten.
"I'm sorry," he said, and meant it as much as he'd ever meant anything in his life.
"Yeah," she murmured, and looked down at the floor.
"So you…you came down here to bust into our case, and you brought your baby? That makes this like, what, Hunters: The Next Generation? Like when they thought it'd be a good idea to have families on the starship Enterprise? She know how to shoot?"
His tone was mild - sort of. He could hear undertones in it that weren't accusations; then again, maybe they were.
Maybe they meant Why don't you stay home? Have a life? Keep this baby away from this crap?
All Morgan did was sigh. Then she moved toward him, and he thought she intended to take Elizabeth away from him; instead, she simply stroked the little girl's hair.
As if he was Elizabeth's dad, and his holding her was fine with everybody.
"I couldn't leave her behind," Morgan said after a minute.
"So you -"
She said again, more firmly, "I couldn't leave her behind."
He almost didn't hear her add, "Lily's here too. We take turns watching her. I didn't figure on taking her anywhere near the apartment house," because his mind was suddenly full of his father's voice: worn down to the sharp edges of exhaustion, frustrated, and stubborn. Always stubborn. Not leaving my kids, Murphy. Just fucking forget it. With you, or with anybody.
Not the same situation as this…and yet, it was.
Elizabeth tipped her head back and peered at him curiously, then ran the tip of her finger along the line of a scar that beard stubble did an okay job of camouflaging unless you were as close to it as she was. "Ouch," she said, a little mournful.
"You should go back to your mom," he mumbled.
He shifted her weight, intending to hand her over to Morgan, but she tightened her grip, hugging him close.
It made him remember Carmen, the figment of his imagination, saying, We could have our own family.
Made him remember dreamwalking with Sam and seeing Lisa Braeden in a way that stuck with him much more clearly than a normal dream would have: telling him they had a little while together, alone, before they'd need to go get Ben.
Go get their son.
Who wasn't their son.
Wasn't…
"I gotta get going," he said. "Gotta check in with Sam."
Morgan seemed to know that was a bunch of bull, but she reached out and took her little girl, twisting her around so Elizabeth could twine her legs around Morgan's waist. "We're at the Firefly," she said. "Down the road half a mile or so. Call. We can have dinner - order in some pizza or Chinese or something, and go over this together."
Dean shrugged. Tried for dismissive and got…less than that. "Yeah. Whatever."
"So you'll call?"
He could still feel Elizabeth's warmth, the weight of her in his arms. She squirmed around in her mother's arms then and grinned at him in a way that made him want desperately for her to smile like that for the rest of her life.
For the rest of his.
"Say 'bye to Dean," Morgan prompted.
The little girl did. Chirped a soft singsong to him, accompanied by that grin.
But it didn't sound like 'bye. It sounded like hi.
It sounded like hello.