SPN FIC - Mr. Winchester Goes to Washington
By popular request: the next installment in the Sam/Connie story (introduced in Improperly Socialized, where the teen!chesters attended her 16th birthday party). Christmastime, 2034, when "older and wiser" isn't some rusty old aphorism, it's the truth.
CHARACTERS: Sam and Connie Dulay (OFC)
GENRE: Het
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2405 words
MR. WINCHESTER GOES TO WASHINGTON
By Carol Davis
There, she thinks. There?
But the truth of it is, she thinks he's changed his mind. The day is mild for December, the sidewalks and streets are clear but there's enough snow lingering on the grass to be picturesque, and the sun is out. For December, it's a beautiful day, so the monument has gathered its nice-weather crowd, with maybe a few extra who want to pay their respects for Christmas. A lot of them are men, of course, men remembering comrades or brothers or fathers, and a lot of them could be Sam Winchester but aren't, a truth which turns itself into: He changed his mind.
She's not surprised.
They've been talking for a couple of months now, mostly late at night, after her girls have gone to bed, a time that seems to push down some of the barriers that still exist between them, some of the We can't seem to get this right, so why bother trying. They both want to get it right, like they did back in Scranton, back in high school, but "older and wiser" isn't some rusty old aphorism, it's the truth.
Truth. That's what stands between them.
"I know," she told him, back before Thanksgiving.
"What?" he said. "You know what?"
Four hundred miles lay between them, but it was late at night. Dark. Hushed. His voice so clear that he might as well have been there in the room.
"Becky called me," she said. "Your friend Becky. From St. Louis."
"What?"
"She called me."
"Why would she call you?" Guarded. Guarded, then.
"She saw my name on the 'Net. As a candidate, last summer. A year ago. She wanted to know if I was the Connie Dulay who knew someone named Sam, back in Scranton. If I was the Connie that Sam used to talk about." Silence at the other end, so she went on, "I told her yes. And she told me, if anyone approached me, if anyone… She said the Sam I knew was the Sam I should trust. That the rest of it was…complicated."
"She told you that."
"Yes."
More silence. He was silent for a long time. Then he sighed.
"Is it complicated, Sam?"
"No," he said. "It's simple."
He asked her, once, if there was any chance her phone was tapped. When she finished believing that he was kidding (a span of time that was maybe four seconds, no more), she told him, "I'm small potatoes, Sam. I'm a flake in a box of instant mashed potatoes. I'm not on anybody's radar. Trust me. No one would bother."
"You'd be surprised," he said.
Becky Warren told her this: Believe what he tells you, as absurd as it sounds. Believe him, because it's Sam.
"She said you could explain it all in three words."
"That's -"
"Sam?"
"Yeah."
"Three words?"
You shouldn't have anything to do with him, because if some tabloid hack digs up the fact that you knew him, it could shit all over your career is a lot more than three words. You have children is three, but they're the wrong three - although that particular truth, which is both very small and inconceivably enormous, is the tree from which a lot of other truths, like acorns, grow.
There's a lot of truth about Sam, some of which Becky Warren told her and some of which she unearthed on her own. Yes, he did the things he's been accused of. Yes, he's guilty.
Listen to the WHY, Becky said.
She hung up thinking there would be no need to listen. There'd be nothing to listen to. No one was ever going to call her, bring that particular piece of her past back out into the light.
But they did. He did.
Three words.
She walks the length of the monument, glancing now and then at the names etched deep into smooth black granite, nodding an Excuse me to the people she needs to step around. Half a dozen times she takes a closer look, peers anxiously into the face of a man, thinking There. Each time she thinks it her heart patters a little and she remembers Scranton, remembers high school, remembers a tall, gangly boy with shaggy hair and a fondness for hooded sweatshirts.
Meeting here was his idea. He explained it by reminding her that his father had served over there, in the war that wasn't a war, but she knew even as he was saying it that that wasn't the real reason - or at least, not all of it. He wanted to meet outdoors so he could change his mind. So he wouldn't be trapped at a restaurant table or, God forbid, in her house. So he could turn on his heel any time the feeling that This is wrong won the skirmish between need and common sense, between wishing and truth, between then and now.
So she could do the same thing.
There's a breeze that's mild for December, but it pricks at her ears and her nose and a couple of times she has to fish a tissue out of her coat pocket to wipe a dribble. Back then, back in Scranton, her nose was crimson all winter, every winter. Sam came too late and left too early to hear anyone call her Rudolph, and even if he had, he might not have done anything about it other than scowl - but afterwards, when she retrofit her memories to make high school a little less damaging, a little less grievous, she imagined him standing at her side, defending her from barbed, witless comedy by his presence alone.
The truth?
Complicated, Becky Warren told her.
Truth: He defended her from nothing. He was just…Sam.
Even now, even in winter, there are flowers along the path she walks, bouquets large and small, some withered, pinched by the cold, others vibrant and fresh. There are stuffed animals and boots and letters and cards. Photographs propped between smooth, cold granite and the lumpy earth. She knows no one who served over there, no one who was lost, no one who came back; there are a couple of degrees of separation between her and the 58,000 names on that wall. Between her and the people who are standing here not out of curiosity but out of grief. Some sense of failure, maybe. Some need to believe in small truths and to ignore larger ones.
She'll make the entire loop, she thinks. If he's not here, she'll walk the full length of the wall, then back down the other side, and from there go back home. If nothing else, it's exercise, out in the fresh air, on a nice day.
If he changed his mind, maybe that's good.
Maybe it's…
Complicated.
"Sam?" she said into the phone.
Three words. It all comes down to three words.
She has children now. As does he: a son, sixteen years old, the age she and Sam were during that spring he spent in Scranton. His son is his life, he says, the one thing he is determined to do right. To try to do right, he amends, because children will find a way to tell you that you screwed them up, whether you did or you didn't. They tiptoed around the rest of it - the marriages, his and hers. The feeling of There must have been something I could have done. That I didn't do. My expectations were too high. It was all my fault.
"Complicated," he muttered.
"No," she said. "Simple. There was no way to hammer out the dents."
But why start, she thinks. Why do it all over again?
Why do that?
Because. Because I want…
It's the cold that makes her nose run, that makes her keep fishing out a handful of tissues and honking into them with a vehemence that everywhere else makes people turn to look. Here, it attracts no attention at all. Here, sadness is allowed. Allowed to exist, allowed its own little box into which the rest of the world will not intrude. Not mourning, she thinks but doesn't say aloud. Just cold.
Just…
She's close to the end of the wall. She'll do this, she thinks - turn the corner and then walk home, because he's changed his mind. He might be somewhere in Washington and he might not. He might be somewhere nearby, or somewhere in the city, or maybe he never even got into the car, and that might be the right choice. It's complicated, he's complicated, and maybe that's the wrong thing to add to the mix. Right now. Or ever.
She can make her own decisions. Has, for most of her life. But maybe she'll let him make this one for her. Let him end this before it really starts, the way he did when they were in high school, when he said, "I have to go."
"Can I see you?" he asked her, over the phone.
Here. In this place. Outdoors, where there's open space and the chance to run.
"Did you?" she asked him.
"Did I what?"
"Do those things."
She already knew the answer. Knew it from Becky, although why she should trust Becky Warren still hasn't stopped being a question. Becky seemed to know that, seemed not to let it bother her, and said only, "Believe him."
"Yes," he told her.
And it gave her pause, as they say in stories. Made her think, Uhhhhh. It's not parking in a tow-away zone he's accused of, although for all she knows that might be part of the list too, somewhere down near the bottom. The word didn't echo; it just hung there in space for a moment then was gone, but it seemed to bounce around in her head like a racquetball, gaining its own kind of power. Yes? she thought and for a moment she wanted to laugh, break right out into big, gasping guffaws. I'm sorry, "Yes"? Are you fucking kidding me?
He was such a nice guy, they say sometimes. About serial killers. Or mad bombers. About people who just snap.
Sam, she thought, never "just snapped." Sam…
"Do you want to hang up?" he asked her.
"No," she said.
"Are you sure? Because I can do that. I won't call back. If that's what you want."
She has children. They're twelve years old. They need her. Need stability and common sense and rules and…granite. They need granite, she thinks, but not this kind. Not long rows of names that have no connection to her, or her girls, or her life.
"Tell me the three words, Sam," she said into the phone.
"I can go."
"Sam."
He whispered them. Let them into her life more gently than they were let into his, and that small disturbance of air was full of regret and pain. An apology. And something more.
Maybe he's changed his mind. That might be the right move, for both of them.
But it's not, it's NOT, and she stops, turns, looks back at the ground she's covered, at the people peering through bright sunlight at that long, long run of black granite, some of them curious, some of them broken, standing slump-shouldered and lost at a time of year that's supposed to be full of joy and harmony and generosity of spirit. She squints, because she didn't think to find sunglasses, and can't find the right face among all those she's passed, can't find anyone who seems right, who might have just arrived, who might be trying to locate a red-haired girl he left behind in Scranton thirty-five years ago.
He's not here.
He changed his mind.
She shares their grief then: all those people who've come here to try to connect with something lost, something that was taken away, something that's been reduced to a name etched into a long, dark wall or a voice on the phone in the middle of the night. The emptiness of it pulls hard, makes her remember what it was like to be a child, to give in to simply sitting down and crying - and maybe that would be allowed here. Maybe no one would notice. Maybe they'd sit down and cry with her. But Sam asked her to come here so she could run if she needed to. He gave her that.
She can run. She does. Takes one quick step, then another, a few more.
There's someone in her path as she rounds the end of the monument.
Someone tall and broad-shouldered, wrapped in a warm, dark coat from which protrudes the hood of a thick gray sweatshirt. Someone who almost steps aside but then doesn't, who blocks her path sturdily and efficiently, who grasps her arms in his hands and looks down into her face. Someone who says, softly, in that murmur she's come to know so very well, "Hey."
And she thinks on a gasp of breath, Oh God.
He said three words, that night when she asked: Monsters are real. Which might be truth, but it's only one truth among many. Three small words in a world of possible combinations. Three small words in a world in which Doubt is the thing she has always hated most.
"Do you want me to go?" he asked her that night on the phone.
"No," she told him. "No."
"Hey," she says now, shuddering, but only because it's cold, it's December, mild for December, but there are still tiny teeth in that wind and her head and her hands are bare, unprotected. She should have thought of those things, she realizes, should have dressed the way she tells the girls to dress, and she grins sheepishly when she recognizes that she did what they do, that she dressed for him, not the weather.
But they're on the leeward side of the wall.
Maybe that means something.
Again, quietly, she says, "Hey," tipping her head back because he was tall all those years ago but he's taller now, and the handful of tissues slips unnoticed from her grasp as she slides into his embrace, into arms that have grown stronger and much, much more protective over the years. As she smiles up into his face and admits one more truth, one that, yes, exists for both of them and might, after all this time, lead to something good, something enduring, something with no dents that need to be pounded out.
"I missed you," they say, together.
* * * * *