SPN FIC - Connections
Rolling merrily along! Hope Verse, March 2024.
She was wiring the phone into his TV, for God's sake. Which was kind of remarkable, when he gave himself a second to think about it, because Jo Harvelle had never impressed him as being any kind of an electronics wizard. But these new things, she said, were "user friendly." In order to sell 'em to the general population, they had to be easy to hook up.
Characters: Bobby, Jo, Dean
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG, for language
Spoilers: none
Length: 2259 words
CONNECTIONS
By Carol Davis
"Sit down, and stop your fussing," Jo said crossly. "I've been almost an hour hooking this thing up, and I am not gonna pull it back out."
Bobby stayed where he was, giving no more quarter to his aching back than he did to Jo. Damn if people didn't keep reminding him he was 76 years old - hell, even the bathroom mirror belonged to that club - but he'd be dipped if he was going to surrender to that kind of nonsense. This was his house and his belongings Jo was messing with. Being past 70 didn't mean you ought to give up making decisions in your own house.
"Been talking to people on the phone without looking at 'em my whole life," he told her. "No reason to start now."
"Maybe we should take the phone out, then. You could make do with two tin cans and a string. Or smoke signals."
"Don't you get smart with me, missy. I don't remember invitin' you to show up."
Jo held her ground.
"Got a shotgun handy, there," Bobby said.
"Go right ahead. Chase me all the way into town with it if you want to."
"Don't test your luck, Joanna Harvelle."
To Bobby's dismay, Jo simply snorted at him and went back to tinkering. She was turned away from him, mostly, but he could tell she was keeping an eye on him. As if he needed watching. As if he hadn't lived on his own since…
Well. For long enough.
And it wasn't as if he was alone. He had neighbors. Talked to 'em on a pretty regular basis. The junkyard was still open for business, and Tom Hadley's boy Jerry did a good job of handling the paperwork. Customers came and went, same as they always had. Not a lot of days went by when Bobby didn't talk to somebody. Or a bunch of somebodies.
Still, being out here didn't feel the same as it used to.
Maybe Jo had a point.
Or maybe she was just messing with his stuff.
Rather than let her keep watching him, he went into the kitchen, intending to get himself a cup of coffee. He had the mug in his hand before he decided maybe he shouldn't. His stomach didn't like the acid any more, and his nerves didn't like the caffeine. He allowed himself one cup a day just on general principles, but more than that was asking for trouble. For that matter, almost everything liquid gave him grief these days. Except water.
Holy water, all of it. Just…because.
"You all right?" Jo called from the other room. "I almost have this done. Don't wander off."
Wander off? Sure. Like he was a dog, or a two-year-old.
"When you plannin' to leave, did you say?" he called back.
She didn't answer.
"Could make do with one of those little ones," he said, meaning the cell phone he'd gotten for Christmas two years ago. It was all the fault of the Japanese, he figured - the people who'd made a national industry out of making things as small as they could manage, and then some. And that was all right if you were somebody trying to fit your whole life into a goddamn purse, but what was the point of a phone with buttons so tiny your fingers pushed three of 'em at once? Back when he was a kid, he thought, a phone was a phone. It was a solid, substantial thing with a dial, and all it did was make calls. There was one of 'em up in the attic. It'd been hooked up down here in the kitchen up 'til a few years ago, when one of these people who decided they knew how to set up his house better than he did had pulled it out and said it was junk. Ditto with his old TV, and his toaster, and the computer they said was configured all wrong.
"Can you make out anything on a screen that's an inch wide?" Jo asked.
She was wiring the phone into his TV, for God's sake. Which was kind of remarkable, when he gave himself a second to think about it, because Jo Harvelle had never impressed him as being any kind of an electronics wizard. But these new things, she said, were "user friendly." In order to sell 'em to the general population, they had to be easy to hook up.
Could've done it himself. If he'd thought he needed the damn thing in the first place.
"It's done," Jo said.
Bobby turned to look at her through the kitchen doorway. "You expecting me to applaud? You'll be waiting a while."
"Come sit down."
"Nobody I need to call. Call your mother, if you feel a need to use the godforsaken thing."
"Just come sit down. I know how to use a shotgun, too, you know."
He stood there in the kitchen with the empty mug in his hand, just on general principles, because it didn't do to cave in too quick, and never had. Didn't do to let them think they had the right to boss him around in his own house - or anywhere else, for that matter. He'd been hunting before any of 'em had popped out of the chute, and he'd go on hunting, as best as he could manage, until they put him in the ground. In between hunts, he'd run the junkyard. Which still had his name on it. As did the deed to this house.
"Bobby," Jo said.
"Call your mother."
"I talked to her this morning. Are you gonna come sit down?"
For a second - and he almost missed it - she was that little girl in pigtails who'd brought him sandwiches and beer back at the Roadhouse. Back when her daddy was alive. She was a funny little thing then, full of talk about dogs. Loved to show him pictures of different breeds. He'd thought maybe she'd go to veterinary school when the time came, find something to do that'd let her take care of animals. If her daddy hadn't died, or at least hadn't died the way he did, or when he did, maybe she'd have done that. Instead, she was taking care of him.
Still liked to talk about dogs, sometimes. She'd brought him the one that was sleeping in the sun outside the back door.
With a sigh he put down the mug and returned to the living room. Sat himself down - slowly, and with considerable creaking - in the chair that faced the TV.
"Who we callin'?" he asked, one eyebrow arched.
"You'll see."
She picked up the little handheld contraption and pushed a couple of buttons. A few seconds went by, then the TV twinked on.
Showed him a room he thought he recognized.
And Dean Winchester.
"Shoulda known," Bobby groaned. "You went through all this so I can have me a wide-screen view of him?"
"Good to see you, too," Dean said.
"It works, then?" Jo asked.
"Seems to," Dean confirmed.
Jo handed the remote to Bobby and tipped a nod to Dean. "I'll be outside. You boys have a nice visit."
She was gone before Bobby could protest. He studied the remote with a sour frown for a moment, then grimaced at the TV, which gave him Dean Winchester in full life-size glory. "What're we supposed to do now?" he grunted. "Talk about the weather? It's sunny. Chance of thunderstorms after dark."
"Nah," Dean said. "Wanted to show you something."
"Seen everything you got, boy. Patched up most of it."
There might as well have been yellow feathers hanging out of Dean's mouth. He had some kind of a trump card to play, that was obvious; and given the Winchesters' history of surprising Bobby with things he could really have lived without seeing, or hearing, or needing to fix, Bobby was half inclined to get up out of the chair and join the dog out in the back for a good long nap in the sun. He would have gone ahead and done it except that shifting his weight sent a jab of pain through his hip.
Dean backed up a little bit and turned to talk to somebody Bobby couldn't see. Dean himself moved off-camera for a second, and when he came back, he had something in his arms, all wrapped up in a blanket.
Ah. So she'd had the baby, then.
"Lot of trouble for this," Bobby said. "Could've e-mailed me a picture."
"Thought you might want to meet him," Dean replied.
"Somethin' you hatched? Picture'd do just fine."
Something Bobby couldn't quite interpret settled onto Dean's face. He looked straight at Bobby for a second, then he moved the blanket away from the baby's face. Cute little thing, Bobby thought. Dark hair, like Morgan's. And Dean had said "him," so it was a boy. Dean had himself a son.
"His name's Robert," Dean said.
"What, now?"
"Robert. After you, you dumbass."
Things slowed right down to a crawl then. Might've been only a few seconds that passed. Might've been a minute or two. Through all of it, Dean kept looking straight at him, and so did the baby. Bobby knew enough about babies to understand that this new one didn't see much other than shapes, but either way…
"Oh," he said.
The baby reached a hand toward him. Almost like he was waving.
"Oh," Bobby said again.
Time pretty much stopped dead still.
"That okay?" Dean asked.
From out back, Bobby could hear Jo talking singsong to the dog. She'd probably let it off its chain so she could chase it around the yard.
Maybe he'd ask her to stick around a while.
Robert.
"He…he all right?" he asked Dean.
"He's fine. He's perfect."
Nobody much thought it was a good idea for Bobby to drive any more, not after that little incident outside of Jasper a couple years back. He still had a license, in case of emergencies, but making any kind of a long haul was pretty much out of the question.
Jo had a car, though. Nice comfortable one.
"You comin' down this way anytime soon?" Bobby asked, trying to sound businesslike. Like he was asking about a hunt.
"Not sure. Why?"
"Got some new books. Thought you and Sam might want to take a look."
The corner of Dean's mouth quirked up. "Books, huh?"
"Ain't that what I said?"
"Can you fit 'em in the trunk of Jo's car?"
Bobby turned to look into the kitchen. The angle was wrong for him to see out the back door, but he could still hear Jo chasing the dog around. Or vice versa. "Probably could," he said.
The baby grinned at him.
Looked kinda like Sam, a little bit. With Morgan's hair. And Dean's grabby hands. A little bit of John, around the eyes.
And Bobby's name.
"Gonna run up a bitch of a bill, usin' this thing," Bobby said, with a little more of a rasp than he planned on.
"So - you coming up here?"
Like she'd heard all that, Jo came back in through the back door. She had the dog with her, and its nails snicked against the kitchen floor as the two of them crossed the room. Bobby looked over at her, and saw by the look on her face that she knew exactly why there'd been such an almighty rush to hook up this videophone thing. Why she'd had to drive all the way over here from her mom's place on a sunny day at the end of March with an expensive present that was way too late to be for Christmas and way too early for his birthday.
He felt outnumbered, for a minute.
With any luck, this new one would be on his team and not theirs. Could be a Singer as much as he was a Winchester, or a Donahue.
"What do you think?" Jo asked. "Worth the trouble?"
He was a little bit of a thing, this new Robert. Good-sized for a newborn, yeah, but still small and vulnerable. Didn't know a thing about the kind of world he'd been born into. About the things his mama and daddy would need to protect him from. It made Bobby's heart break, for a long span of seconds - that this little one would need to find out exactly what the world was like.
But, he thought, the world had dogs. And big patches of sunlight.
"Yeah," he said to Jo.
Then he pushed himself up out of the chair. When Jo raised a brow at him, he said, "Gonna go throw some stuff in a bag. You got gas?"
She nodded, and grinned, then beckoned to the dog and led it back outside.
Bobby turned to look at the TV. At the camera, mounted just above the screen.
Dean smiled at him, from more than a thousand miles away. He was a good kid, Dean. Always had been. A pain in the ass, but a good kid. And now he had himself a son.
That he wanted to share.
"Be there day after tomorrow," Bobby said. "That okay?"
"We'll be here."
Slowly, Bobby lifted the remote. Took a good long look at his namesake. Closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Pressed the button that said END.
When he opened his eyes, the TV screen was blank.
So he laid the remote on the table alongside his chair and, feeling a good deal less than 76 aching years old, went off to pack his bag.
~~~~~~~~~~~~