SPN FIC - Bad Roads and No Happy Endings
I got to thinking about this fic last night, and decided to re-post it this morning because… well, because it's on my mind. I wrote it back around February of 2007, originally as a flashback in JOURNEY; it became a free-standing thing after one of my betas convinced me that it killed the pacing in the novel. It didn't get much attention when I first posted it - I think both because I didn't have much of an audience back then, and what audience I did have wasn't at all keen on Het.
The backstory is this: John and the boys lived for almost a year in a trailer park outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, around the time Dean was turning 15. During that time, Dean had a romance (eventually, with benefits) with a 19-year-old girl named Katie. When John found out, the Winchesters hit the road. Again.
Anyway, here it is. I liked it very much when I first wrote it. Then (influenced by the lack of attention it got, and by a number of other things) I didn't like it. But when I re-read it this morning, I felt like I hit on a whole spectrum of things about Dean that are still true. At its core, it's *not* a story about Dean and a woman; it's about Dean's relationship with himself.
See what you think.
(Obviously, it includes mention of two kids sleeping together, but it's not at all explicit.)
On the fourth day people started looking at him funny. His t-shirt was streaked with ketchup from that unfortunate French fry incident near Fort Dodge. His hair, unwashed for four days, stuck up and out in odd directions. And, oh yeah…maybe Mr. and Mrs. Small Town didn't appreciate having Metallica cranked up to eardrum-bursting levels.
CHARACTERS: Dean, OFC
GENRE: Het
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2400 words
BAD ROADS AND NO HAPPY ENDINGS
By Carol Davis
Sam had been gone for four days.
Dad had been gone for three.
Operating under the principle that Dad didn't give a flying shit whether Dean stayed put or not, Dean gulped down a couple of strawberry Pop Tarts and hit the road. He drove aimlessly for a couple of days, up through Missouri and into Iowa, stopping only to gas up the Impala and use the rest room, grabbing some snacks when he went in to pay for the gas.
He gave Kansas - all of it - a wide berth.
It was late August in the Midwest, hot and muggy as hell. Sweat ran down his back into his underwear, tickled the middle of his chest. When he got out of the car on the third day to hit the gas pump, he looked as if someone had soaked him with a hose. That combined with the scruffy beard that was coming in and the fact that he hadn't changed clothes since he left Joplin made him a sight to behold. And smell, he supposed.
He slept in the back seat, no blanket necessary, head pillowed on a wadded-up beach towel Sam had insisted on buying umpty-ump years ago.
Yessir, life on the road with no one to answer to, every man's dream.
On the fourth day people started looking at him funny. His t-shirt was streaked with ketchup from that unfortunate French fry incident near Fort Dodge. His hair, unwashed for four days, stuck up and out in odd directions. And, oh yeah…maybe Mr. and Mrs. Small Town didn't appreciate having Metallica cranked up to eardrum-bursting levels.
In the rest room, he squinted at himself in the mirror and decided that maybe those people had a point. He and Sammy might well've been raised by wolves, but they were wolves who did laundry and took showers.
Yeah. Him and Sammy.
He found a motel close to the I-80 where they agreed to let him in the door. Four minutes and a phony credit card later he had a room at the end of the row, a single, $42 a night, a price that outraged the hell out of him because this was East Buttfuck, Iowa and this place was most definitely not the damn Hilton.
It did have hot water, which was a wild irony because the air conditioner was on the fritz and the temperature in his colossal single room had to be in the mid-90s. A hot shower was the last thing he wanted.
Well, maybe not the last thing.
Ten minutes of finessing the faucets produced a stream of water cool enough to stand under. A couple of bars of something generically labeled Fine Facial Soap and about a billion gallons of water later, he was squeaky clean. Shaving would have to wait, because he hadn't brought a razor and the motel was a haul and a half from anyplace that sold them.
The clean clothes in his duffel reeked of the cheap floral-scented dryer sheets Sam had bought by mistake a couple weeks ago. Dean put them on and sat on the bed for a minute sniffing himself, wondering which was worse, four-day-old sweat or flower-scented chemicals. Then he swung himself around, stretched out with pillows piled up behind his back, and switched on the TV. Surfed up the dial. Surfed down the dial.
Thursday afternoon in godfreakinforsaken Iowa.
There was just no way he was actually going to sleep here.
After an hour and twelve minutes he stuffed his dirty clothes into the duffel, pulled on his boots, and hit the road again.
~~~~~~~~
This freedom shit really left a lot to be desired.
He crossed the Iowa-Nebraska line well before dark. They'd spent a lot of time in Nebraska, him and Dad and Sam, which was curious, since you wouldn't figure there was a lot of supernatural crap going on in the nation's heartland. Maybe there was and maybe there wasn't, but what the place did seem to have was an abundance of hunters. Dean could spot one from a mile off and knew well enough to avoid them - given that Dad had managed to piss off God knew how many of them, and they seemed like a bunch who let word get around.
Which made the matter of finding a bar to have a few quiet drinks in a little more complicated. He passed through Lincoln around sundown and kept going a ways, half an hour or so. After rejecting a bunch of possibilities he spotted a place that didn't seem too hunter-friendly, with a motel conveniently located nearby.
Not too crowded inside. Early yet. Content for the moment, he found a seat at the bar and told the bartender, "Beer."
That was good for a start.
He looked around as he sipped the beer, sighing when it seemed like everybody here was with somebody.
Yeah. Early.
But there was a brunette with a sweet little ass working the far end of the bar. Her stretchy white t-shirt showed him the line of her bra in the back; down below she had on denim cutoffs - not Daisy Dukes, but short. Her dark hair was pulled into a ponytail that bounced when she moved.
Okay, beautiful, turn around.
She did.
And his beer came within a jiggle of slopping out of the glass all over his clean jeans.
She spotted him a half-second later and stood there gaping at him. They could have had a surprise-off, the two of them, and it would have been a photo finish. She did a fabulous deer-in-the-headlights for a minute, then squeezed around behind the substantial bulk of the other bartender and came up close to Dean.
"My God," she said.
He said wonderfully impressive things, things to make her chuckle and smile and hell, hop right over the bar to grab him, but none of them came out of his mouth. He could feel his mouth moving, a little, then a lot, and suspected he looked like a fish.
Seven years ago - seven freaking years ago, Dad had hauled them out of that trailer park. Two days later he caught Dean trying to make a call from a phone booth and ripped the metal handset cord right out of the phone.
"Katie," Dean murmured, and she didn't hear that either, because of the music.
She was twenty-six now, yeah, twenty-six, because her birthday was in July and this was August. Nobody was ever going to chase her down the road wanting her to be the next Victoria's Secret supermodel, but she had eyes that were like…every piece of bad poetry he could think of. And every piece of bad poetry he could write, which was two, both laboriously laid out on notebook paper he swiped from Sam.
She leaned closer, close enough to say, "How are you?" without yelling.
"I'm good."
My life sucks out loud, he wanted to say. My brother bailed and my father won't talk to me.
"Where are you living now?"
"In my car." When she made a face at that - didn't think she'd heard him right - he said, "Joplin."
"Sam? How's Sam?"
"He's good."
She didn't ask about Dad.
Twenty-six meant he had to look at her hand. No ring, but a band of white skin around her finger that meant she'd taken one off.
"I'll hear about it if I talk for too long," she told him. "Are you here for a while?"
At five after two in the morning she met him in the parking lot. He was waiting alongside the Impala, one hip resting on the driver's door, nursing a beer that he set down on the hood as she came closer. She stopped a couple of paces away and looked at the car, frowning a little at it, then at him.
"He gave it to me," Dean said.
Katie had a car too, a beat-up white Honda with a replacement passenger door that was primer-coat gray. Compared to the Impala, he figured, it was a pigeon dancing with a peacock. She must have thought so, too, because she got into the Impala with him. They sat there for a while, watching the last few patrons of the bar, the other bartender, and three waitresses get into their cars and leave.
"It was probably for the best," she said when the last of the cars was gone.
Dean reached out to touch her hand, curl his fingers around it. Her skin was a little dry and chafed. "I'm not fifteen now."
"I have -"
"A husband?"
"A little girl."
A bullet of fear went through him. "Not -?"
"She's two."
"Where's her dad?"
"We're separated."
"I'm not fifteen now," he said again.
She took him home. He stood by quietly while she unlocked the kitchen door, then followed her inside, through the kitchen and down the narrow hallway that divided the bedrooms. Hers was the room on the end. Once the door was closed, she turned on a lamp and toed off her shoes.
There were pictures on her dresser: her grandmother - the one she'd lived with in the trailer park, and, Dean guessed, still did - and the little girl. No pictures of the husband. With an odd little smile she pulled open the top drawer of the dresser and rooted around in the stuff inside it. "I found these a few months ago," she told him, holding out a thin strip of paper. "I didn't know I still had them."
Pictures from the photo booth at the mall. Four of them, black and white. Him and Katie, laughing, Katie perched on his lap. He'd had a boner the whole time.
"I wanted to say goodbye. I tried to call you. Dad - it was a rotten thing he did."
"He was just looking out for you."
That wasn't what he wanted to hear from her. "Don't defend him, okay? He could have at least let me say goodbye."
"You can say it now."
His first time had been with someone else, but his second time had been with her. Between then and now there'd been a bunch of others. One-nighters, mostly. It didn't seem sensible to start anything up with any of them, partly because common sense told him Dad would just yank him away again.
Dad hadn't had anybody since Mom, nobody special, nobody he'd consider staying in one place for. Maybe he felt like that'd be a betrayal. Maybe he was too damned obsessed with finding that…whatever it was, to let himself imagine he could be happy again. Maybe "happy" without finding the thing that'd killed Mom wasn't possible.
Maybe "happy" without Mom wasn't possible.
Katie turned off the lamp and they got out of their clothes like there was nothing going on, like they were just getting ready for bed. Like this was home - and that was true, for her. Dean let his mind drift for a minute, imagining himself working nearby, coming home in the evening for supper with her and her grandmother and the little girl. She was cute, the little girl. He'd be her stepfather. And that was fine, because he liked kids. Liked the way they smiled and laughed.
He could barely remember Sam at two - Sam, who was taller than Dean now.
Sam, who was in California.
He slid into bed and tried to remember how it was with Katie, what she had liked, what she'd taught him to do. He'd been nervous as hell then, almost every time, because of his father and her grandmother and Sam, who was nosy and had a big mouth. Meant no harm, but would let things slip and apologize when it was too late.
It was gentle and tender, being with Katie now. Sweet and lingering, like they had all the time in the world.
Before sunrise she nudged him awake and asked him to go. Said it wasn't right for the little girl to find him there, because - like Sam - she would let things slip. The situation with the ex - almost ex - wasn't good, and if he found out Katie was sleeping with someone, he'd haul her to court and claim she was an unfit mother. She was going to have that dangling over her head for a long time, she said. Until she got married again.
The next night she met him at the motel next to the bar for a little while. Pretended to go home first, then doubled back.
The third night she didn't show up at the bar.
He'd been rehearsing all afternoon. Put on clean jeans and a new shirt he went into Lincoln to buy, used real shampoo to wash his hair, shaved so his face was smooth even though it made him look like a teenager. Even cleaned under his nails.
"Katie," he said to the mirror, "I want to marry you."
And crap on a stick, he looked like he was still fifteen years old. She wasn't going to believe he could be her husband, be a stepfather to the little girl.
But he'd do it anyway. Ask her.
When she didn't show up at the bar he got into the Impala and drove out to her house. The Honda was there, parked out front. Behind it was another car, and as Dean tried to figure out whose it might be he heard the yelling.
They were out back, Katie and some guy, calling each other names. She had a kid's red plastic baseball bat in her hands. When Dean came around the side of the house the guy spotted him and stopped yelling. "Who the fuck is that?" he demanded.
"Dean," she'd say. "That's Dean."
But she didn't. She looked at him, looked right at him, and told the guy, "I don't know."
He stood there for a minute, feeling like something had sucked all the air right off the planet. Katie and the guy started yelling at each other again, and she swung the plastic bat at him, missing by a mile. Neither one of them noticed when Dean turned around and walked away.
"I love you, Katie," he'd said to the mirror. "I want to marry you."
As he drove away, back toward Joplin, he told himself he was being an ass. Letting his dick do his thinking for him.
He would not meet Cassie for another two years. And that whole thing, too, would be a mistake.
* * * * *
The backstory is this: John and the boys lived for almost a year in a trailer park outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, around the time Dean was turning 15. During that time, Dean had a romance (eventually, with benefits) with a 19-year-old girl named Katie. When John found out, the Winchesters hit the road. Again.
Anyway, here it is. I liked it very much when I first wrote it. Then (influenced by the lack of attention it got, and by a number of other things) I didn't like it. But when I re-read it this morning, I felt like I hit on a whole spectrum of things about Dean that are still true. At its core, it's *not* a story about Dean and a woman; it's about Dean's relationship with himself.
See what you think.
(Obviously, it includes mention of two kids sleeping together, but it's not at all explicit.)
On the fourth day people started looking at him funny. His t-shirt was streaked with ketchup from that unfortunate French fry incident near Fort Dodge. His hair, unwashed for four days, stuck up and out in odd directions. And, oh yeah…maybe Mr. and Mrs. Small Town didn't appreciate having Metallica cranked up to eardrum-bursting levels.
CHARACTERS: Dean, OFC
GENRE: Het
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 2400 words
BAD ROADS AND NO HAPPY ENDINGS
By Carol Davis
Sam had been gone for four days.
Dad had been gone for three.
Operating under the principle that Dad didn't give a flying shit whether Dean stayed put or not, Dean gulped down a couple of strawberry Pop Tarts and hit the road. He drove aimlessly for a couple of days, up through Missouri and into Iowa, stopping only to gas up the Impala and use the rest room, grabbing some snacks when he went in to pay for the gas.
He gave Kansas - all of it - a wide berth.
It was late August in the Midwest, hot and muggy as hell. Sweat ran down his back into his underwear, tickled the middle of his chest. When he got out of the car on the third day to hit the gas pump, he looked as if someone had soaked him with a hose. That combined with the scruffy beard that was coming in and the fact that he hadn't changed clothes since he left Joplin made him a sight to behold. And smell, he supposed.
He slept in the back seat, no blanket necessary, head pillowed on a wadded-up beach towel Sam had insisted on buying umpty-ump years ago.
Yessir, life on the road with no one to answer to, every man's dream.
On the fourth day people started looking at him funny. His t-shirt was streaked with ketchup from that unfortunate French fry incident near Fort Dodge. His hair, unwashed for four days, stuck up and out in odd directions. And, oh yeah…maybe Mr. and Mrs. Small Town didn't appreciate having Metallica cranked up to eardrum-bursting levels.
In the rest room, he squinted at himself in the mirror and decided that maybe those people had a point. He and Sammy might well've been raised by wolves, but they were wolves who did laundry and took showers.
Yeah. Him and Sammy.
He found a motel close to the I-80 where they agreed to let him in the door. Four minutes and a phony credit card later he had a room at the end of the row, a single, $42 a night, a price that outraged the hell out of him because this was East Buttfuck, Iowa and this place was most definitely not the damn Hilton.
It did have hot water, which was a wild irony because the air conditioner was on the fritz and the temperature in his colossal single room had to be in the mid-90s. A hot shower was the last thing he wanted.
Well, maybe not the last thing.
Ten minutes of finessing the faucets produced a stream of water cool enough to stand under. A couple of bars of something generically labeled Fine Facial Soap and about a billion gallons of water later, he was squeaky clean. Shaving would have to wait, because he hadn't brought a razor and the motel was a haul and a half from anyplace that sold them.
The clean clothes in his duffel reeked of the cheap floral-scented dryer sheets Sam had bought by mistake a couple weeks ago. Dean put them on and sat on the bed for a minute sniffing himself, wondering which was worse, four-day-old sweat or flower-scented chemicals. Then he swung himself around, stretched out with pillows piled up behind his back, and switched on the TV. Surfed up the dial. Surfed down the dial.
Thursday afternoon in godfreakinforsaken Iowa.
There was just no way he was actually going to sleep here.
After an hour and twelve minutes he stuffed his dirty clothes into the duffel, pulled on his boots, and hit the road again.
~~~~~~~~
This freedom shit really left a lot to be desired.
He crossed the Iowa-Nebraska line well before dark. They'd spent a lot of time in Nebraska, him and Dad and Sam, which was curious, since you wouldn't figure there was a lot of supernatural crap going on in the nation's heartland. Maybe there was and maybe there wasn't, but what the place did seem to have was an abundance of hunters. Dean could spot one from a mile off and knew well enough to avoid them - given that Dad had managed to piss off God knew how many of them, and they seemed like a bunch who let word get around.
Which made the matter of finding a bar to have a few quiet drinks in a little more complicated. He passed through Lincoln around sundown and kept going a ways, half an hour or so. After rejecting a bunch of possibilities he spotted a place that didn't seem too hunter-friendly, with a motel conveniently located nearby.
Not too crowded inside. Early yet. Content for the moment, he found a seat at the bar and told the bartender, "Beer."
That was good for a start.
He looked around as he sipped the beer, sighing when it seemed like everybody here was with somebody.
Yeah. Early.
But there was a brunette with a sweet little ass working the far end of the bar. Her stretchy white t-shirt showed him the line of her bra in the back; down below she had on denim cutoffs - not Daisy Dukes, but short. Her dark hair was pulled into a ponytail that bounced when she moved.
Okay, beautiful, turn around.
She did.
And his beer came within a jiggle of slopping out of the glass all over his clean jeans.
She spotted him a half-second later and stood there gaping at him. They could have had a surprise-off, the two of them, and it would have been a photo finish. She did a fabulous deer-in-the-headlights for a minute, then squeezed around behind the substantial bulk of the other bartender and came up close to Dean.
"My God," she said.
He said wonderfully impressive things, things to make her chuckle and smile and hell, hop right over the bar to grab him, but none of them came out of his mouth. He could feel his mouth moving, a little, then a lot, and suspected he looked like a fish.
Seven years ago - seven freaking years ago, Dad had hauled them out of that trailer park. Two days later he caught Dean trying to make a call from a phone booth and ripped the metal handset cord right out of the phone.
"Katie," Dean murmured, and she didn't hear that either, because of the music.
She was twenty-six now, yeah, twenty-six, because her birthday was in July and this was August. Nobody was ever going to chase her down the road wanting her to be the next Victoria's Secret supermodel, but she had eyes that were like…every piece of bad poetry he could think of. And every piece of bad poetry he could write, which was two, both laboriously laid out on notebook paper he swiped from Sam.
She leaned closer, close enough to say, "How are you?" without yelling.
"I'm good."
My life sucks out loud, he wanted to say. My brother bailed and my father won't talk to me.
"Where are you living now?"
"In my car." When she made a face at that - didn't think she'd heard him right - he said, "Joplin."
"Sam? How's Sam?"
"He's good."
She didn't ask about Dad.
Twenty-six meant he had to look at her hand. No ring, but a band of white skin around her finger that meant she'd taken one off.
"I'll hear about it if I talk for too long," she told him. "Are you here for a while?"
At five after two in the morning she met him in the parking lot. He was waiting alongside the Impala, one hip resting on the driver's door, nursing a beer that he set down on the hood as she came closer. She stopped a couple of paces away and looked at the car, frowning a little at it, then at him.
"He gave it to me," Dean said.
Katie had a car too, a beat-up white Honda with a replacement passenger door that was primer-coat gray. Compared to the Impala, he figured, it was a pigeon dancing with a peacock. She must have thought so, too, because she got into the Impala with him. They sat there for a while, watching the last few patrons of the bar, the other bartender, and three waitresses get into their cars and leave.
"It was probably for the best," she said when the last of the cars was gone.
Dean reached out to touch her hand, curl his fingers around it. Her skin was a little dry and chafed. "I'm not fifteen now."
"I have -"
"A husband?"
"A little girl."
A bullet of fear went through him. "Not -?"
"She's two."
"Where's her dad?"
"We're separated."
"I'm not fifteen now," he said again.
She took him home. He stood by quietly while she unlocked the kitchen door, then followed her inside, through the kitchen and down the narrow hallway that divided the bedrooms. Hers was the room on the end. Once the door was closed, she turned on a lamp and toed off her shoes.
There were pictures on her dresser: her grandmother - the one she'd lived with in the trailer park, and, Dean guessed, still did - and the little girl. No pictures of the husband. With an odd little smile she pulled open the top drawer of the dresser and rooted around in the stuff inside it. "I found these a few months ago," she told him, holding out a thin strip of paper. "I didn't know I still had them."
Pictures from the photo booth at the mall. Four of them, black and white. Him and Katie, laughing, Katie perched on his lap. He'd had a boner the whole time.
"I wanted to say goodbye. I tried to call you. Dad - it was a rotten thing he did."
"He was just looking out for you."
That wasn't what he wanted to hear from her. "Don't defend him, okay? He could have at least let me say goodbye."
"You can say it now."
His first time had been with someone else, but his second time had been with her. Between then and now there'd been a bunch of others. One-nighters, mostly. It didn't seem sensible to start anything up with any of them, partly because common sense told him Dad would just yank him away again.
Dad hadn't had anybody since Mom, nobody special, nobody he'd consider staying in one place for. Maybe he felt like that'd be a betrayal. Maybe he was too damned obsessed with finding that…whatever it was, to let himself imagine he could be happy again. Maybe "happy" without finding the thing that'd killed Mom wasn't possible.
Maybe "happy" without Mom wasn't possible.
Katie turned off the lamp and they got out of their clothes like there was nothing going on, like they were just getting ready for bed. Like this was home - and that was true, for her. Dean let his mind drift for a minute, imagining himself working nearby, coming home in the evening for supper with her and her grandmother and the little girl. She was cute, the little girl. He'd be her stepfather. And that was fine, because he liked kids. Liked the way they smiled and laughed.
He could barely remember Sam at two - Sam, who was taller than Dean now.
Sam, who was in California.
He slid into bed and tried to remember how it was with Katie, what she had liked, what she'd taught him to do. He'd been nervous as hell then, almost every time, because of his father and her grandmother and Sam, who was nosy and had a big mouth. Meant no harm, but would let things slip and apologize when it was too late.
It was gentle and tender, being with Katie now. Sweet and lingering, like they had all the time in the world.
Before sunrise she nudged him awake and asked him to go. Said it wasn't right for the little girl to find him there, because - like Sam - she would let things slip. The situation with the ex - almost ex - wasn't good, and if he found out Katie was sleeping with someone, he'd haul her to court and claim she was an unfit mother. She was going to have that dangling over her head for a long time, she said. Until she got married again.
The next night she met him at the motel next to the bar for a little while. Pretended to go home first, then doubled back.
The third night she didn't show up at the bar.
He'd been rehearsing all afternoon. Put on clean jeans and a new shirt he went into Lincoln to buy, used real shampoo to wash his hair, shaved so his face was smooth even though it made him look like a teenager. Even cleaned under his nails.
"Katie," he said to the mirror, "I want to marry you."
And crap on a stick, he looked like he was still fifteen years old. She wasn't going to believe he could be her husband, be a stepfather to the little girl.
But he'd do it anyway. Ask her.
When she didn't show up at the bar he got into the Impala and drove out to her house. The Honda was there, parked out front. Behind it was another car, and as Dean tried to figure out whose it might be he heard the yelling.
They were out back, Katie and some guy, calling each other names. She had a kid's red plastic baseball bat in her hands. When Dean came around the side of the house the guy spotted him and stopped yelling. "Who the fuck is that?" he demanded.
"Dean," she'd say. "That's Dean."
But she didn't. She looked at him, looked right at him, and told the guy, "I don't know."
He stood there for a minute, feeling like something had sucked all the air right off the planet. Katie and the guy started yelling at each other again, and she swung the plastic bat at him, missing by a mile. Neither one of them noticed when Dean turned around and walked away.
"I love you, Katie," he'd said to the mirror. "I want to marry you."
As he drove away, back toward Joplin, he told himself he was being an ass. Letting his dick do his thinking for him.
He would not meet Cassie for another two years. And that whole thing, too, would be a mistake.
* * * * *