SPN FIC - That Old-Time Rock and Roll
For dodger_winslow and saberivojo -- because they said, "Do eet." And because I owe them big.
June, 1996. He lay for a long time listening to the murmur of the battered table radio, to the station he'd turned on a while ago in search of a weather report.
CHARACTERS: John, Dean (17), Sam (13)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2474 words
THAT OLD-TIME ROCK AND ROLL
By Carol Davis
Twenty minutes in the shower. Three bars of motel soap, each of them half the size of his palm and none of them capable of producing a decent lather. A scrubdown with thin white washcloths until they were filthy.
Enough hot water to float a barge. Thank God it had stayed hot.
He was clean, more or less. Rubbed pink in a lot of places and angrily red in a few. Aside from the scratches and the scrapes and the bruises, he looked…normal. At least, as normal as he ever looked.
But he hadn't gotten rid of the smell.
Once upon a time, Mary had lain beside him, nose twitching, breathing in little woofs that said You smell of gasoline, and grease, and motor oil. Of old tires and well-used metal, of exertion and stress and plain honest hard work, and to be honest, babe, it's not doing a whole lot to turn me on. He'd showered then, too: scrubbed himself raw, scraped the dirt from beneath his nails, cleaned between his toes, behind his ears; hell, between his butt cheeks and around and behind and beneath the family jewels. Clean, dammit - what do you want from me?
What do you want from me?
That had just been gasoline, sweat, grease.
Back then, he hadn't smelled of death.
It seemed perverse to him, sometimes, that no one was complaining any more. That he could carry on him (as much as he might scrub) the blood and bile and gore of the things he'd killed, and no one made that little woof. No one's nose twitched.
No one, any more.
John shifted his head a little and stopped looking up at the stained and pitted popcorn ceiling and looked instead at his sons, the two of them sprawled fast asleep on top of the covers on the other bed, arguing even in sleep the stress and indignity of sharing. He won't lay friggin' STILL, Dad. How come a sleeping bag's big enough when he's all zipped in but he can't stop…
He won't stop FARTING, Dad. Can you smell him? They can probably smell him in IDAHO.
You see this? He got me right in the face. Is there one other person on this earth who flails around like that?
"Floor's available," he'd told them. Always told them. Woke up half the time to find one of them huddled on the dirty carpet, wrapped in a sheet or a bedspread, still scowling, still outraged. Once upon a time, he thought, they'd found solace in each other, in a way that made it unclear who was comforting whom. These days, all they did was bicker. Looking for new solid ground, he supposed. Both of them trying to grow up. Be separate.
Yes, he could smell the offending fart-cloud, though who was guilty of it he didn't know and didn't much care. Could smell the unique ripeness of teenage boy, the tang of scraps of Chinese food clinging to the containers they hadn't bothered to throw out. Something that said wet dog but couldn't be.
A little bit of mildew. A little bit of the sourness of old cigarette smoke.
She'd be flinging windows open, he thought. If she'd caved to coming in here in the first place.
He lay for a long time listening to the murmur of the battered table radio, to the station he'd turned on a while ago in search of a weather report. They'd gone to nighttime programming, it seemed like - probably pre-recorded, nobody alive over there except maybe a guard or a janitor. Maybe a half-asleep grunt, charged with making sure there was no dead air, no glitch in the equipment that would result in a long, unbroken silence.
Your home for classic rock! the station ID had said, followed by a couple of notes of something unidentifiable.
"It bother you?" he'd asked her, during those first few weeks, that time of finding solid ground together, when he'd switched on the radio to act as a lullaby, provide something familiar he could cling to while he tried to rearrange himself into Husband. Into The Only Family She Has. She'd told him no, and he didn't - couldn't - bother to pursue it with an Are you sure? because if she wasn't, he needed not to know that. He needed to lose himself, just that little bit, in long wails and guitar riffs and drum solos, and if that raucous murmur bothered her, he needed her to deal with that and let him be.
Just that little bit.
He'd been no stranger to sex, to fumbling and groping, elbows inadvertently jammed into tender places, to head butts and limbs falling asleep and fingers in the eye. No stranger, either, to sleeping near someone else: listening to snores and mutters and the occasional shriek or sob, the soundtrack of someone else's dreams and nightmares. But the sharing was new. The nestling close, the mutual comfort.
So hard. We thought that was hard.
"Could you not hog the covers? Could you not do that? I wake up and I'm hanging out in the breeze."
"I can't help it."
"You have to help it. I wake up freezing. Jesus."
"Wear pajamas."
"You want me to wear pajamas."
They bought a bigger blanket. King-sized, for a double bed. Figured it out together - the rhythm of it, the give-and-take, all of it with music, sometimes loud, sometimes soft. BOC was playing when she told him about Dean. And right after it…
He closed his eyes for a moment. Shut out the sharp, deep shadows of the motel room, edged in amber from the parking lot lights that the cheap drapes couldn't hope to block.
Saw the shadow of her dancing barefoot in the kitchen, belly not yet any rounder than it had ever been but a glow like nothing he'd ever seen in her eyes as she grasped his arms and swayed him back and forth and sang in a wild falsetto, "You're the one that I want, oo-oo-oo-oo, the one that I want…"
This was nothing she would want. This room, this life.
But he'd long since passed the point of no return. Had long since passed the point where there was another choice he could make.
He lay in the dark listening to Ozzie and Styx and AC/DC; to the music of his sons snoring and muttering and snorting in their sleep.
Listened to himself breathing, slowly, evenly, trying to find sleep and failing.
"You haven't said anything for a long time."
"About what?"
Lifting his hands to his face. Inhaling. The smell of gas and grease and sweat still there, still lingering. Shifting his face to tell her: I stink.
"I guess I'm used to it," she said.
"So -?"
Her moving into his arms. Something moving between them: the baby, rearranging himself in tight quarters. And it was remarkable, wasn't it, that the aroma of fresh coffee sent her flying to the bathroom, but the smell of him didn't.
"I guess you can get used to just about anything."
Smiling. Looking up at him with that light in her eyes.
Styx had been playing the night she woke him, told him "John, we need to go," and he blinked and said, "Go where?" Didn't understand for a long, slow drift of time that his son had decided to bust out of confinement, to make his messy, red-faced, screaming, indignant arrival in the middle of an ice storm.
Styx was playing as he tried to figure out what to do next, how to handle this new shift in their bedrock, how to move from Husband to Husband And Father, and he had groped for his clothes listening to the bright lilt of Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me…
And Styx was playing as he grappled with sleep in the broken dark of a motel room, volume turned low, its fight for domination lost to the rumble and rattle and chirp and snort and snuffle coming from the other bed.
His boys.
They turned to him in puzzlement in the morning, when he started the car and pointed it not in the direction he'd told them they were going, but north, instead, up the spine of New York State. "Changed my mind," he said, and when they tried for clarification he shrugged and shook his head and put on the face that said Stop and turned up the volume on the tape player, turned up the volume of the crackling, distorted sound of his music, the thing - the only thing - he had brought with him all along the road from Son to Husband to Father to Warrior.
It was the only crutch he had to lean on: at least, the only one that would not damage him.
He said nothing until after he'd pulled off the highway, after he'd gone another couple of miles, after he'd found the car a place to rest in the middle of a massive, crowded parking lot. After he'd led his boys down a narrow concrete path to a window, laid down a credit card and came away from it with three tickets. He led Sam and Dean back to the car then, opened the trunk and pulled out a blanket, the sack of snacks he'd bought at a mini-mart nearby, and the old green cooler he'd stuffed with sodas and beers, all of it cans, because the rule was: no glass.
Because he wouldn't answer, the boys followed him dutifully - if frowning - through the gate at which he surrendered the three tickets, up a slight slope and across the lawn to a place with a decent view. When he dropped the blanket to the ground they both scowled at it for a minute, then fell to, spreading it out, looking to him for approval.
He sat down. Stretched out his legs. Turned his face to a sun still a reasonable distance from the horizon.
"I thought -" Dean said.
They'd seen the marquee. His boys. He'd seen them looking at it.
JUNE 10
STYX / KANSAS
The air was rich with evergreen up here. Fresh, warm. When he looked at the toes of his boots, at his hands, at the legs of his jeans, he could see the remnants of yesterday, of death, could smell it clinging to his skin and his hair even though he'd washed it away.
"Can't help it," he'd said once upon a time. "Guess it's what I am."
"Take a load off," he told his boys.
They folded themselves up slowly, took seats on the blanket as if they thought there was some trick to this, that he was testing them, that they'd need on a heartbeat's notice to spring up and run. Maybe, that there was something going on here: something that needed to be tracked down and put out of someone's misery.
"Dad?" Sam said, and good goddamn that boy could look miserable when nobody else was.
What do you want from me? John thought, and it seemed to him that he'd never get to stop asking that question. He reached out, curled the hand around the back of Sam's neck, squeezed. Rubbed the back of Sam's head, down past his shoulders.
Time was when the boy had relaxed into his touch, had turned around with arms outstretched, wanting a hug, wanting to tuck against John's chest, underneath his chin.
"Grit your teeth for a while," he told his son. "This is some good stuff."
Then he looked at Dean. Thought Dean might be smiling, but he wasn't. Then he was. Coy. Eyeing the cooler. When Dean asked, "Can I?" John told him, "Behave yourself."
And Dean said, "Dad. It's -"
"I know," John told him. "I know what it is."
When he reached for Dean, Dean didn't surrender any more than Sam had, but there was something in his eyes. "Can you beat the friggin' timing of this, huh? That this is tonight?" Dean said as he flipped open the cooler and pulled out a beer for himself, one for John, then made a point of handing Sam a Mountain Dew.
"We smell," Sam pointed out in a muttered undercurrent, his revenge for being odd man out.
"I know that too," John told him.
"But we -"
John glanced around, saw no one watching them. This wasn't a crowd that was inclined to be judgmental, anyway. With a small crawl of a grin he popped the top on his beer and passed it to Sam. Counted to five as Sam drank from it, then took it back.
Not far away, someone's radio was playing Come sail away, come sail away…
Evergreen and fresh air. A faint whiff of weed, hinting at sailing away in a manner that didn't involve a boat. A thick, musky fragrance, someone nearby who'd been a little too liberal with their perfume or cologne.
And the three of them, still bearing the remains of the hunt. Of the thing they'd killed.
We thought it was hard then.
He closed his eyes. Gave himself a moment of solitude in the middle of a crowd of strangers. When he opened them, his boys were looking at him, each of them settled into a comfortable position on the blanket. "We're cool," Dean told him, and added with an edge, "Aren't we, Sammy?"
"We -"
"Sam."
"Yeah." Grudging. And then, not so much. "Okay."
Down in the amphitheater, on a stage that seemed to be a couple of miles away, small forms were taking their places with drums, keyboards, guitars. Been a long time, John thought. God…it's been a long time. And he remembered her, in a white summer dress, sitting on a blanket with a cooler and a bag of sandwiches nearby, watching a local band set up on a makeshift stage at the other end of a tight mob of people. Remembered the drift of her hair around her face and the clean smell of her, the stubborn set of her shoulders. Remembered thinking that she was no more prone to surrender than a torqued-up little dog determined to hold its own in a battle with something three times its size.
Far away, someone was yelping into a mic, stirring up the crowd, and John looked at his boots, his hands, and his boys.
"Don't let me forget this, okay?" he said.
His boys looked at each other. Shrugged in mutual puzzlement, then said almost as one, "Sure."
The rest of the world - the road, the hunt - was an evening's worth of music away. John said nothing more until it was over, until the music had gone back to being a loud, fluttery rasp bellowing out of the car speakers, and a collection of soundtracked memories: of her, of them.
He said nothing.
But he sang.
* * * * *
June, 1996. He lay for a long time listening to the murmur of the battered table radio, to the station he'd turned on a while ago in search of a weather report.
CHARACTERS: John, Dean (17), Sam (13)
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2474 words
THAT OLD-TIME ROCK AND ROLL
By Carol Davis
Twenty minutes in the shower. Three bars of motel soap, each of them half the size of his palm and none of them capable of producing a decent lather. A scrubdown with thin white washcloths until they were filthy.
Enough hot water to float a barge. Thank God it had stayed hot.
He was clean, more or less. Rubbed pink in a lot of places and angrily red in a few. Aside from the scratches and the scrapes and the bruises, he looked…normal. At least, as normal as he ever looked.
But he hadn't gotten rid of the smell.
Once upon a time, Mary had lain beside him, nose twitching, breathing in little woofs that said You smell of gasoline, and grease, and motor oil. Of old tires and well-used metal, of exertion and stress and plain honest hard work, and to be honest, babe, it's not doing a whole lot to turn me on. He'd showered then, too: scrubbed himself raw, scraped the dirt from beneath his nails, cleaned between his toes, behind his ears; hell, between his butt cheeks and around and behind and beneath the family jewels. Clean, dammit - what do you want from me?
What do you want from me?
That had just been gasoline, sweat, grease.
Back then, he hadn't smelled of death.
It seemed perverse to him, sometimes, that no one was complaining any more. That he could carry on him (as much as he might scrub) the blood and bile and gore of the things he'd killed, and no one made that little woof. No one's nose twitched.
No one, any more.
John shifted his head a little and stopped looking up at the stained and pitted popcorn ceiling and looked instead at his sons, the two of them sprawled fast asleep on top of the covers on the other bed, arguing even in sleep the stress and indignity of sharing. He won't lay friggin' STILL, Dad. How come a sleeping bag's big enough when he's all zipped in but he can't stop…
He won't stop FARTING, Dad. Can you smell him? They can probably smell him in IDAHO.
You see this? He got me right in the face. Is there one other person on this earth who flails around like that?
"Floor's available," he'd told them. Always told them. Woke up half the time to find one of them huddled on the dirty carpet, wrapped in a sheet or a bedspread, still scowling, still outraged. Once upon a time, he thought, they'd found solace in each other, in a way that made it unclear who was comforting whom. These days, all they did was bicker. Looking for new solid ground, he supposed. Both of them trying to grow up. Be separate.
Yes, he could smell the offending fart-cloud, though who was guilty of it he didn't know and didn't much care. Could smell the unique ripeness of teenage boy, the tang of scraps of Chinese food clinging to the containers they hadn't bothered to throw out. Something that said wet dog but couldn't be.
A little bit of mildew. A little bit of the sourness of old cigarette smoke.
She'd be flinging windows open, he thought. If she'd caved to coming in here in the first place.
He lay for a long time listening to the murmur of the battered table radio, to the station he'd turned on a while ago in search of a weather report. They'd gone to nighttime programming, it seemed like - probably pre-recorded, nobody alive over there except maybe a guard or a janitor. Maybe a half-asleep grunt, charged with making sure there was no dead air, no glitch in the equipment that would result in a long, unbroken silence.
Your home for classic rock! the station ID had said, followed by a couple of notes of something unidentifiable.
"It bother you?" he'd asked her, during those first few weeks, that time of finding solid ground together, when he'd switched on the radio to act as a lullaby, provide something familiar he could cling to while he tried to rearrange himself into Husband. Into The Only Family She Has. She'd told him no, and he didn't - couldn't - bother to pursue it with an Are you sure? because if she wasn't, he needed not to know that. He needed to lose himself, just that little bit, in long wails and guitar riffs and drum solos, and if that raucous murmur bothered her, he needed her to deal with that and let him be.
Just that little bit.
He'd been no stranger to sex, to fumbling and groping, elbows inadvertently jammed into tender places, to head butts and limbs falling asleep and fingers in the eye. No stranger, either, to sleeping near someone else: listening to snores and mutters and the occasional shriek or sob, the soundtrack of someone else's dreams and nightmares. But the sharing was new. The nestling close, the mutual comfort.
So hard. We thought that was hard.
"Could you not hog the covers? Could you not do that? I wake up and I'm hanging out in the breeze."
"I can't help it."
"You have to help it. I wake up freezing. Jesus."
"Wear pajamas."
"You want me to wear pajamas."
They bought a bigger blanket. King-sized, for a double bed. Figured it out together - the rhythm of it, the give-and-take, all of it with music, sometimes loud, sometimes soft. BOC was playing when she told him about Dean. And right after it…
He closed his eyes for a moment. Shut out the sharp, deep shadows of the motel room, edged in amber from the parking lot lights that the cheap drapes couldn't hope to block.
Saw the shadow of her dancing barefoot in the kitchen, belly not yet any rounder than it had ever been but a glow like nothing he'd ever seen in her eyes as she grasped his arms and swayed him back and forth and sang in a wild falsetto, "You're the one that I want, oo-oo-oo-oo, the one that I want…"
This was nothing she would want. This room, this life.
But he'd long since passed the point of no return. Had long since passed the point where there was another choice he could make.
He lay in the dark listening to Ozzie and Styx and AC/DC; to the music of his sons snoring and muttering and snorting in their sleep.
Listened to himself breathing, slowly, evenly, trying to find sleep and failing.
"You haven't said anything for a long time."
"About what?"
Lifting his hands to his face. Inhaling. The smell of gas and grease and sweat still there, still lingering. Shifting his face to tell her: I stink.
"I guess I'm used to it," she said.
"So -?"
Her moving into his arms. Something moving between them: the baby, rearranging himself in tight quarters. And it was remarkable, wasn't it, that the aroma of fresh coffee sent her flying to the bathroom, but the smell of him didn't.
"I guess you can get used to just about anything."
Smiling. Looking up at him with that light in her eyes.
Styx had been playing the night she woke him, told him "John, we need to go," and he blinked and said, "Go where?" Didn't understand for a long, slow drift of time that his son had decided to bust out of confinement, to make his messy, red-faced, screaming, indignant arrival in the middle of an ice storm.
Styx was playing as he tried to figure out what to do next, how to handle this new shift in their bedrock, how to move from Husband to Husband And Father, and he had groped for his clothes listening to the bright lilt of Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me…
And Styx was playing as he grappled with sleep in the broken dark of a motel room, volume turned low, its fight for domination lost to the rumble and rattle and chirp and snort and snuffle coming from the other bed.
His boys.
They turned to him in puzzlement in the morning, when he started the car and pointed it not in the direction he'd told them they were going, but north, instead, up the spine of New York State. "Changed my mind," he said, and when they tried for clarification he shrugged and shook his head and put on the face that said Stop and turned up the volume on the tape player, turned up the volume of the crackling, distorted sound of his music, the thing - the only thing - he had brought with him all along the road from Son to Husband to Father to Warrior.
It was the only crutch he had to lean on: at least, the only one that would not damage him.
He said nothing until after he'd pulled off the highway, after he'd gone another couple of miles, after he'd found the car a place to rest in the middle of a massive, crowded parking lot. After he'd led his boys down a narrow concrete path to a window, laid down a credit card and came away from it with three tickets. He led Sam and Dean back to the car then, opened the trunk and pulled out a blanket, the sack of snacks he'd bought at a mini-mart nearby, and the old green cooler he'd stuffed with sodas and beers, all of it cans, because the rule was: no glass.
Because he wouldn't answer, the boys followed him dutifully - if frowning - through the gate at which he surrendered the three tickets, up a slight slope and across the lawn to a place with a decent view. When he dropped the blanket to the ground they both scowled at it for a minute, then fell to, spreading it out, looking to him for approval.
He sat down. Stretched out his legs. Turned his face to a sun still a reasonable distance from the horizon.
"I thought -" Dean said.
They'd seen the marquee. His boys. He'd seen them looking at it.
JUNE 10
STYX / KANSAS
The air was rich with evergreen up here. Fresh, warm. When he looked at the toes of his boots, at his hands, at the legs of his jeans, he could see the remnants of yesterday, of death, could smell it clinging to his skin and his hair even though he'd washed it away.
"Can't help it," he'd said once upon a time. "Guess it's what I am."
"Take a load off," he told his boys.
They folded themselves up slowly, took seats on the blanket as if they thought there was some trick to this, that he was testing them, that they'd need on a heartbeat's notice to spring up and run. Maybe, that there was something going on here: something that needed to be tracked down and put out of someone's misery.
"Dad?" Sam said, and good goddamn that boy could look miserable when nobody else was.
What do you want from me? John thought, and it seemed to him that he'd never get to stop asking that question. He reached out, curled the hand around the back of Sam's neck, squeezed. Rubbed the back of Sam's head, down past his shoulders.
Time was when the boy had relaxed into his touch, had turned around with arms outstretched, wanting a hug, wanting to tuck against John's chest, underneath his chin.
"Grit your teeth for a while," he told his son. "This is some good stuff."
Then he looked at Dean. Thought Dean might be smiling, but he wasn't. Then he was. Coy. Eyeing the cooler. When Dean asked, "Can I?" John told him, "Behave yourself."
And Dean said, "Dad. It's -"
"I know," John told him. "I know what it is."
When he reached for Dean, Dean didn't surrender any more than Sam had, but there was something in his eyes. "Can you beat the friggin' timing of this, huh? That this is tonight?" Dean said as he flipped open the cooler and pulled out a beer for himself, one for John, then made a point of handing Sam a Mountain Dew.
"We smell," Sam pointed out in a muttered undercurrent, his revenge for being odd man out.
"I know that too," John told him.
"But we -"
John glanced around, saw no one watching them. This wasn't a crowd that was inclined to be judgmental, anyway. With a small crawl of a grin he popped the top on his beer and passed it to Sam. Counted to five as Sam drank from it, then took it back.
Not far away, someone's radio was playing Come sail away, come sail away…
Evergreen and fresh air. A faint whiff of weed, hinting at sailing away in a manner that didn't involve a boat. A thick, musky fragrance, someone nearby who'd been a little too liberal with their perfume or cologne.
And the three of them, still bearing the remains of the hunt. Of the thing they'd killed.
We thought it was hard then.
He closed his eyes. Gave himself a moment of solitude in the middle of a crowd of strangers. When he opened them, his boys were looking at him, each of them settled into a comfortable position on the blanket. "We're cool," Dean told him, and added with an edge, "Aren't we, Sammy?"
"We -"
"Sam."
"Yeah." Grudging. And then, not so much. "Okay."
Down in the amphitheater, on a stage that seemed to be a couple of miles away, small forms were taking their places with drums, keyboards, guitars. Been a long time, John thought. God…it's been a long time. And he remembered her, in a white summer dress, sitting on a blanket with a cooler and a bag of sandwiches nearby, watching a local band set up on a makeshift stage at the other end of a tight mob of people. Remembered the drift of her hair around her face and the clean smell of her, the stubborn set of her shoulders. Remembered thinking that she was no more prone to surrender than a torqued-up little dog determined to hold its own in a battle with something three times its size.
Far away, someone was yelping into a mic, stirring up the crowd, and John looked at his boots, his hands, and his boys.
"Don't let me forget this, okay?" he said.
His boys looked at each other. Shrugged in mutual puzzlement, then said almost as one, "Sure."
The rest of the world - the road, the hunt - was an evening's worth of music away. John said nothing more until it was over, until the music had gone back to being a loud, fluttery rasp bellowing out of the car speakers, and a collection of soundtracked memories: of her, of them.
He said nothing.
But he sang.
* * * * *