SPN FIC - Pilgrim
This is a little early for Thanksgiving, but I don't figure anyone will object. Have some Wee!Chesters, some angst, and an outsider POV.
Characters: Dean (age 9), Sam (age 5), OFC, OMC
Pairings: none
Length: 2940 words
Rating: G
Spoilers: none
Disclaimer: just playing, as usual
Sam got up from the glider and moved silently into place beside the older boy, who clasped Sam's hand in his own. "You made him cry," the older boy told Colleen.
Pilgrim
By Carol Davis
“Coll?” Dave said. “There’s a kid out on the porch having a hissy fit.”
He had a beer in his hand; when she turned around to look at him he took a long sip from it and leaned against the doorframe. His expression was a lot like the bachelor stew he liked to make by throwing all the leftovers from the fridge into a pot: a little “What’s up with that?” stirred into some wry amusement with maybe half a cup of “Whatever it is, I want to watch.”
“What kid?” Colleen asked.
“Don’t know. There’s two, actually. One of ‘em looks like he might be one of yours. The other one’s older. Eight or nine, maybe.”
“And they’re on the porch?”
Dave nodded and took another slug of his beer. “The older one asked for you.”
“So you left them on the porch.”
“They wouldn’t come in.”
Her legs protested when she pushed herself up out of the crouch she’d been in for the last twenty minutes. “Why -“
“I asked, babe. The older one said no. Said they’d wait out there.”
She stood alongside the pedestal sink for a moment, paintbrush in hand. The supposedly odorless paint had started giving her a headache, so taking a break was no hardship. Still, an interruption of any kind wasn’t going to contribute to getting the bathroom finished today. Or this weekend. Or ever. She handed the brush to Dave as she nudged past him into the hallway, pensively ignoring his cheerful, “You sure you want to give me this?”
As she made her way downstairs, he called after her, “So…you want me to paint?”
“No painting,” she called back. “Just hold the brush. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Sure you will.”
Of course she would. Because the kid - kids - on the porch had to be selling candy bars. Or wanted to rake leaves to make a few bucks.
“Hissy fit”? That was just Dave being…Dave.
Colleen pulled the door open.
There were indeed two kids out there. The older one was standing midway between the door and the steps leading down to the front walk, his back to the door, arms folded across his chest, one foot tapping impatiently against the scuffed wood of the porch floor. The younger child was sitting on the glider, pushing with his sneakered toes against the floor to make the glider move back and forth. She recognized him when he turned to peer at her.
“Sam?” she said, frowning. “What -“
That made the older one turn around. He’d come down a few notches from “hissy fit,” if indeed he’d been having one when Dave answered the door, but he did still look like a small human storm cloud.
Sam got up from the glider and moved silently into place beside the older boy, who clasped Sam’s hand in his own.
“You made him cry,” the older boy told Colleen.
Sam snuffled loudly to punctuate that. His eyes were puffy and red, and his cheeks were blotchy, although that might have been from the damp, cold, late-November weather. As Colleen smiled at him, his nose dribbled a little, and he reached up with a fist to smudge it clean. His gaze drifted from her face to the porch floor, and he snuffled again as he studied the doormat under Colleen’s feet. Unsure what else to do, Colleen fished in the pocket of her jeans for a tissue and offered it to Sam with an assurance that it was clean. Before Sam could respond, though, the older boy took the tissue out of her hand, held it to Sam’s nose and instructed, “Blow.”
Then he gave her a narrow, accusatory look.
A gust of wind made her shiver; her paint-spattered t-shirt was no protection from a day that wouldn’t even hit fifty degrees. “It’s cold out here,” she told the boys. “Come on inside.”
She expected the older boy to protest again, but he didn’t. He thought the invitation over for a moment, then nodded dismissively and nudged Sam through the doorway ahead of him.
Dave was standing on the staircase landing, minus both the can of beer and the paintbrush. He raised a brow at her as she steered the boys into the living room but didn’t move to come down, waiting instead for her to clue him in on what was happening. When Colleen shook her head and said with a gesture that she wanted to handle this on her own, he nodded and disappeared upstairs.
“Would you like something to drink?” she offered. “Soda, or juice?”
“No thank you,” the older boy said.
“All right, then. Maybe -“
He cut her off. “Sammy, go sit down.” And he indicated the couch, as if he owned the place. Sam looked at him unhappily for a moment, then shuffled away and sat down quietly, gnawing at his lower lip.
“You’re Sam’s brother, I take it,” Colleen said.
“I’m Dean.”
“Do you want to tell me what the problem is?”
“I told you. You made him cry.”
Colleen ran a hand through her hair, grimacing at the feel of dried paint at her temple. “How could I do that? I haven’t seen Sam since yesterday afternoon when school let out.”
Completely uninvited, Dean walked down the little hallway into the kitchen. Still perplexed enough to avoid being annoyed, Colleen followed him. He stood next to the fridge regarding her in silence for a moment, then said, “Why do you have to have that stupid party?”
“Party?” It took her a second to catch up. “The Thanksgiving lunch?”
“Yeah.”
“We have it every year.”
Scowling, Dean reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded-up sheet of yellow paper: one of the invitations she’d sent home with the kindergarteners a couple of days ago. “It says moms and dads are supposed to come.”
“If they’d like to.”
Dean glanced in the direction of the living room, although he couldn’t see it, or Sam, from where he was standing. “We don’t have a mom.”
“Yes. I knew that. I’m very sorry.”
“Our dad works.”
His tone was growing progressively more accusatory and intolerant. His eyes explained what he didn’t bother saying: that he and Sam didn’t have a relative or friend who could substitute for absent parents. “We don’t have a mom,” he told her again.
“I understand that, Dean. There are a couple of children who won’t have -“
“He doesn’t get it.”
“What?”
Again, the glance toward the living room. “He doesn’t get why we don’t have a mom. She died when he was real little.”
“I’m sorry, honey.”
That was the wrong move: the endearment. Any endearment would have fallen flat, she realized as he stood a step back, crushing the yellow paper in his fist. He might have accepted it - if grudgingly - from someone older, more grandmotherly, maybe, but from Sam’s 28-year-old teacher it seemed to be a slap in the face. He was trying to be grown up, trying to be cool and in charge. He was nobody’s honey.
“He said all the other kids are gonna have moms and dads there,” he pressed.
The Thanksgiving lunch had been a tradition at Kennedy Elementary since long before it became Kennedy Elementary. As far as Colleen knew, the only major snafu in forty years’ worth of lunches had been the year all the milk had soured.
And the year Kenny Moskowitz upchucked all over Liesl Patterson.
Nobody had ever complained about a child having no family members who could attend. And certainly there’d been a few over the years whose mothers and fathers had both been working, or sick, or simply didn’t want to eat lunch with thirty little kids.
Certainly there’d been some children who’d eaten lunch alone.
Dean waited for her to say something. Clearly he wasn’t interested in hearing about tradition, or the needs of the many versus the needs of the one. All he was interested in was Sam.
Suddenly, he made her think of The Princess Bride. “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
“I’m sorry he was upset,” she said.
“He cried.” Dean fell silent then, looking around the kitchen, taking in every detail, right down to the potholders hanging on magnetized hooks on the side of the fridge. It took him a long while to put together something else to say, and when he did, the effect Sam’s tears had had on him was written all over his face. “He asked our dad, but Dad has to work,” he told Colleen, trying to make it sound offhanded. “Sammy threw this whole huge fit about it. About a stupid party. Our dad has to work.”
For a moment, the tough-guy mask slipped. Looking at anything and everything but her, he fought back the look of disappointment and failure that crept onto his face and tried to hold his mouth in a hard line.
“My dad missed a lot of things at my school because of his job,” Colleen said. “I understand.”
“No you don’t.”
“I do, Dean.”
He stared at her fiercely. “You didn’t hear him. He cried.”
“No one meant for that to happen. You know that.”
“I don’t know it. You and your stupid party. Why do they have to do that? Have some dumb party.”
Like a cornered animal, he was going to try to run if she pushed too hard. If she came toward him, tried to touch him, said anything that nudged him in the wrong direction. His taking a bite out of her didn’t seem impossible, although he’d be doing it with words and not his teeth.
The way he struggled made her think a lot of bites had been taken out of him over the years.
To give him a chance to cool down, she leaned against the edge of the counter and looked slightly away from him, out the window that provided a view of the back yard and its row of now-leafless trees. The headache that had started to sprout upstairs in the bathroom got a slightly tighter grip on her neck and the back of her head, and the kitchen began to feel uncomfortably chilly.
Back in high school, when she’d first thought about teaching, she’d had a vision of a small group of children with bright and eager faces greeting her each day with a singsong “Good morning, Ms. Dobson!”
She’d thought none of them would ever cry.
That none of them would try to keep her from catching a glimpse of a bruise that didn’t come from natural clumsiness or a fall off a bike.
That none of them would ever have the stunned look of being caught in the middle of parental warfare.
That none of them would have a life that was so full of holes that a party invitation would create the need for this kind of a confrontation.
“I’m sorry, Dean,” she said quietly. “No one meant to hurt Sam.”
He seemed to be losing a little bit of steam - maybe because he’d realized he was pushing things a little too far by being this grossly impolite to an adult.
But…no. The truth was in his eyes, as much as he tried to conceal it: he was losing ground because he’d decided all of this was accomplishing nothing. All his bluster hadn’t done a thing to change the situation for Sam. Head lowered, he tried to move past Colleen, to return to the living room so he could retrieve Sam and go home. But she reached out and lightly rested a hand on his arm.
“Are you…fourth grade? Mrs. Terrio’s class?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Since you’re just down the hall - maybe you’d like to come to the party? I can work things out with Mrs. Terrio.”
“Why would I want to go to some dumb party with a bunch of little kids and their moms?”
“Because you’re Sam’s go-to guy?”
Dean stared away from her, at the carpet runner in the hallway.
“I think Sam might like it if you came,” Colleen went on. “And you wouldn’t miss much time in class.”
The staircase creaked with the weight of someone coming down: Dave, accompanied by a clicking and shuffling that meant Jasper was right behind him. Colleen glanced into the hallway behind her and saw the two of them, man and dog, head for the living room. Smiling absently, she turned back to Dean, whose shoulders were bunched up in a way that looked uncomfortable.
“I’d like you to come. It’s not all moms. There are some grandparents.”
“But no kids.”
“You could start a trend.”
Dean shook his head. When Colleen leaned in a little closer to ask silently for an explanation, he muttered, “It says bring something to share. I don’t know how to…cook stuff. Like cupcakes. I don’t know how to do that.”
“Could you bring a bag of cookies? From the store.”
“I guess.”
“That’d be fine, then.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll call Mrs. Terrio later on. And you can let your dad know that you’ll go in his place.”
“Yeah, I guess.” And that was apparently as far as he wanted to take it. He crammed the crumpled invitation into his pocket as he ducked away from her and made his way to the living room, where Dave was sitting on the couch beside Sam, demonstrating - to Sam’s obvious delight - Jasper’s ability to balance a ball on his nose.
“Look, Dean!” the smaller boy giggled, then asked Dave, “Can I do it?”
“Sammy,” Dean said. “We gotta go now.”
“But Mr. Koslowski said I could -“
“We can’t. We have to go home.”
Sam’s chin began to quiver. Tears filled his eyes as he looked from his brother to the dog to Dave and back again. “I don’t never get to do nothing,” he moaned.
Dean maneuvered around the dog to take Sam by the hand. When he attempted to lever Sam up off the couch, Sam drooped back and turned into dead weight. “Sam!” Dean grunted. “Knock it off. You know we have to go home, before -“
“I don’t wanna.”
Dave slid a hand around behind Sam’s back to urge him onto his feet. “Maybe another time, big guy. Come on: don’t give the bro a hard time.”
Wearing a world-class pout, Sam slid off the couch and scuttled around Colleen and his brother, aiming for the front door. His small hand gripped the knob and he yanked the door open, announcing over his shoulder, “I don’t get to do nothing.”
Then he went out onto the porch, banging the door shut behind him as hard as he could manage.
“I’m sorry,” Dean said quietly to Colleen and Dave.
Grinning, though there wasn’t a lot of humor behind it, Dave reached out to ruffle his hair. “No big deal. Got three brothers of my own. Every one of ‘em’s a major pain in the ass.” He ignored Colleen’s raised eyebrow and gave Jasper the same ruffling he’d just given Dean. “But you love ‘em anyway, you know? When you’re not wanting to kick their butts halfway down the block.”
Dean shuffled his feet and said to the floor, “Yeah. I guess.”
He and Jasper studied each other for a moment before Dean shrugged again and headed for the door. He stopped in the entryway and offered Colleen a fleeting smile that seemed more like another apology than anything else.
“I’ll see you on Wednesday, then,” Colleen offered.
“Yeah. I -“
“Guess,” she filled in.
“My dad’s taking a nap.”
“And he doesn’t know you’re here, is that it?”
“I gotta go,” Dean said firmly, reaching for the doorhandle. Something seemed to rattle him as he pulled the door open, and he had to struggle to fight it off. “Sammy likes you,” he told Colleen. “He says you’re a good teacher.”
“Tell Sam I appreciate that.”
“He just…he doesn’t get it. About…”
He turned to gaze up at her. For a moment his face was full of longing; then it became guarded and almost blank again.
Colleen smiled at him and patted his shoulder. “I’ll see you Wednesday.”
“Okay,” he murmured.
“Dean? You’re a good brother. And I’m sure Sam thinks so too.”
He was gone before she could say anything else.
Colleen pressed the door shut, watching through the small windowpane at eye level as the boys set off down the sidewalk, Dean holding firmly onto Sam’s smaller hand. When they were out of sight she wandered into the living room and sank down onto the couch, almost hip-to-hip with Dave. Jasper dropped his chin onto her knee, and, absently, she dug her fingers into his warm fur.
“You okay?” Dave asked.
“I feel like -“ She let the thought trail off.
“Ferocious little dude, isn’t he?”
“Sam drew this picture the other day. I told them to draw their families. And Sam’s - if you went by scale, he figures Dean is about eleven feet tall.”
“Seems like he is.”
They were silent for a while, both of them lavishing attention on a very willing Jasper. Finally, the dog lay down with his chin resting on Dave’s right foot, his tail gently thumping against the carpet.
“You gonna finish the bathroom?” Dave asked.
Rather than answer him, Colleen got up from the couch, returned to the front door and stared out the windowpane at the street. Dave joined her there, slid his arms around her waist, and rested his chin on her shoulder.
“Maybe later,” she told him.