Fic: Half a heart without you
Half a heart without you, Sam/Dean, Jo hitting on girl!John, 3k
My belated fic for spn-j2-xmas for cityphonelines
John was tired and cold and had woken up in a ditch...but he also had a full tank of gas, some unused cards, and a promise to Sammy he'd be back by Christmas.
Any hunter would be a little thrown if he found himself cursed into a woman, but to John Winchester, if nothing was falling off or bloody he was good to go.
But this case had left him with an even stronger conviction that witches were bad news. He'd been especially hard on luck these days, that much was evident judging by the way his jeans now hung on the new curve of his hips, how his manly pecs had become supple, and how he had a complete lack of facial hair despite how he'd been sporting full beard just that morning. He was tired and cold and had woken up in a ditch...but he also had a full tank of gas, some unused credit cards, and a promise to Sammy he'd be back by Christmas.
His smaller feet kept tripping him up as he stumbled the half mile to where his car sat, partially wrecked but drivable, behind a tree. And two miles down the highway, he found a payphone rusting next to a minimart at the corner of Bumfuck and Nowhere Street
His nimble lady fingers made it easy to reach between the seat to find some dimes to slip in the coin slot, and as the phone rang he breathed a sigh of relief. He just needed to check in with his boys, get back to the motel and regroup.
The front desk answered after the fifth ring. "Happy Holidays, Comfort Inn."
"Hi--" Then John froze. His voice had surprised him, not its normal manly bass, but instead escaping his lips like the solitary note of a swallow's song. He cleared his throat and soldiered on. "Room 215 please?"
"That room is currently unoccupied," came the chirpy reply.
"What?" John barked. "But what about the two boys who were staying there with their father? Juan Pistola?"
"Mr. Pistola and his boys checked out yesterday, I'm sorry to say."
Checked out...that was another word for 'kicked out,' John knew, probably because the fake card had run out. There was no other reason that his boys wouldn't wait where he'd told them to.
"Dammit."
"Ma'am?" said the man and John nearly smashed the phone back into the receiver. He white knuckled it and managed to ask if there was a note that had been left, but of course there hadn't been.
"Merry Christmas," the clerk said uncertainly into the silence, but John was already hanging up the phone.
Then a second idea struck him. He slid his last coinage into the frozen slot, a handful of nickles covered in who knew what, and prayed that Sam and Dean had followed the obvious protocol and left a message at the Roadhouse. It wasn't far from Lincoln and he'd drilled into them the number of the place in case he went missing, or worse, was killed in the line of duty. Nevermind that he hadn't set foot in the place in years, nevermind how he was dreading talking to Ellen right now.
A girl answered the phone, thankfully. Young Jo from the sound of it, who was probably in her late teens by now. She was Sam's age.
"'Yello?" she said. It sounded like she was snapping gum into the phone.
John heard Ellen scolding her. "Joanna, you answer the phone like a grown up."
Jo sighed down the receiver and tried again. "Hello, Roadhouse."
"Hello, this is John. John Winchester."
"I don’t know any Jane Winchester," Jo said.
John ignored this, trying not to think about anything but the fact that he needed to track down his sons.
"Do you have any word from my sons? Sam and Dean?"
"Well, all messages left with me are on the message board. You can come in if you want, but I'm not going around giving out that kind of information to who knows who over the phone. No offense meant, ma'am, I'm sure you're real nice, but you know how it is."
Ellen's voice was just audible in the background. "Joanna, are you sassing customers?"
Jo sighed gustily again. "Our special is the St. Nicholasaffle Waffle. We hope to see you in here soon."
The phone went dead in John's cold hand and a flurry of snow battered the dirty glass of the phone booth. He felt the beginnings of a headache.
So John gunned it out of Lincoln, which wasn't necessarily on the agenda. But the possibility of a message from his boys was the only way to figure out where they were staying, short of knocking on each motel door in the city. That was his backup plan.
The roads were icy, the fields on either side thick with snow. The job had sure gone sideways, he thought, but finding his sons was all he could focus on for the time being. He ignored the problem of his...ah...physical changes. When this was over and done with, he would drag his ass to some shaman type and beg for all the help he could get, but for now he had a promise to keep. It was the least he could do.
When he parked in front of the Roadhouse, it was 7 p.m. He trudged up the steps, thinking only of finding his boys and having a hot meal after the lonely drive.
The blast of hot air and the sound of holiday cheer was welcome. It was Christmas Eve. He made straight for the bar, glad not to see Ellen, whom he hadn't talked to in almost five years.
"What can I do you for?" purred a familiar voice.
John frowned at Jo. "Where's the damn message board."
"Oh," Jo breathed, color rising in her cheeks. "A woman on a mission, huh?"
John took a step back, face going red to match. "Now hang on a second," he said, deeply unsettled by the tone of her voice and implications therein.
"It's over there," Jo told him, gesturing to the back of the room with a dishrag. "You want a good time, you know where I’ll be." She winked at him and then slid off to serve a woman down the bar.
John shook his head. This had not been the best week for him, but the message board, a corkboard covered in myriad notes and scraps of paper, was within sight and he nearly ran to it. A few old timers stood to let him pass, removing their hats and nodding welcome. John rolled his eyes and scanned the board for the message he was praying was there.
Hank, I'm staying in the same room as last time. - Tom...Silver bullets for sale. Contact me at the following number with your order....There are now 17 buns in the bakery. Proceed with caution. - M John scanned the scraps of paper -- most of the messages in code -- to find the one he knew had to be there.
And there it was. John - Contact Sam and Dean at the following #.John ripped the note from the board and went to yank the old wall phone off its receiver, ignoring the way Jo was still giving him -- or rather, his ample bosom barely hidden under his leather jacket-- bedroom eyes.
The phone rang and rang and John squeezed his eyes shut, breath held.
"Hi?" came a familiar, hesitant voice.
"Sammy." John breathed in relief. "Where are you?"
"Uh..." said Sam.
"Son, what's your location?"
"Who's asking?" Sam said after a pause, deeply suspicious. John sighed. He'd taught them well, that was for sure.
"Your father," he growled, although it came out two octaves too high and quite pretty. "Now give me the name of your motel."
There was an even longer pause.
"I've been turned into a woman," John explained impatiently. "You know what-- just put your brother on the phone."
He wasn't surprised at the answering click of the dial tone.
He hung up the phone as well. Jo must have noticed his distress, because she called over, "Care for a drink, cowgirl?" flipping a soda in her hand and smiling her most winning, underage smile.
"Good grief," John Winchester said for what he suspected wouldn’t be the last time, and accepted the soda and sat at the bar. "Give me the yellow pages."
As Jo placed the phone book in front of him, a weathered hand slapped a dirty five dollar bill on the bar next to John. John looked up into the face of a debonair man with a scar along his right cheek and a friendly smile.
"Buy you a real drink, darling?" he offered and John glared at him.
"I am a married woman, you should be ashamed of yourself," he told him. With that, he opened the yellow pages and began calling every motel in the greater Lincoln area.
"Who the hell was that?"
Sam replaced motel phone receiver slowly, feeling somewhat unsettled. "Some chick pretending to be dad."
Dean stared at him.
"I know," Sam said, shaking his head. "And it was weird, dude, she sounded real insistent."
Dean flopped onto the bed and got comfortable, leaning against the headboard with his hands behind his neck. His biceps strained at his black t-shirt sleeves and he looked almost smug when he said, "Probably some witch or something, trying to track us down. I'll tell you, Sammy, in this line of work, all kinds of folks'll come after us, you gotta learn to deal with it."
“Right,” Sam said.
"You have people on your tail, that’s a good thing." Dean gave him a crooked smile. "That's how you know you're badass."
Sam muttered, "Yeah, great life."
He finished pulling on his jacket and lacing up his boots. When he glanced up, he caught Dean giving him an unreadable look, the kind that sent shivers all the way down to Sam’s toes. It was the 25th of December, halfway through his junior year of high school, and he and Dean were basically stranded in middle America with little money and no car. Sam had the overwhelming conviction that he did not need this shit right now.
He held Dean’s gaze, steady, until Dean looked away.
Dean cleared his throat, swinging his legs off the bed. "We going to breakfast or what?"
Christmas in Lincoln took the cake, or so Dean declared happily as they ambled down the street. He liked the snow piled up at the edge of the sidewalk and the way Sam almost slipped on black ice when crossing the road. At his prompting, Sam had to agree that the icicle they witnessed dropping like a steel blade from the roof of the diner was pretty awesome.
Sam did not especially like cold weather, and had wanted to spend Christmas somewhere tropical like Florida, or dry and deserty like Las Vegas in the billboards that staked their way along Route 66, but here they were.
The diner was dead. It was the sort of morning people usually spent with their families.
Sam imagined the waitress looked at him with pity when she seated them, but it’s possible he was imagining it.
“Here are your menus,” she said. “This morning we have our Holiday Special -- two eggs, a blueberry short stack, and a side of hash browns.”
“Two of those,” Dean said, ordering without asking whether Sam wanted pancakes this morning. “And one coffee, black.”
The waitress took back the unopened menus, and turned to Sam. “Anything to drink for you, sweetie?”
“Orange juice,” Sam said.
“He’s a growing boy,” Dean said with the vague hint of a leer.
Sam rolled his eyes. “Thank you,” he told the waitress like an apology, and kicked Dean under the table when he caught his brother watching her walk away. “Dude, why do you do that?”
Dean blinked at him, innocent as anything. “Do what?”
Hit on ladies that were old enough to be their mom. “Be socially reprehensible,” he said out loud.
“Aw, is little Sammy embarrassed?” Dean cooed.
“No, I’m just stopping you from embarrassing yourself,” Sam shot back. “There’s a subtle difference, one that I don’t expect you to understand. Also, coffee comes black, why feel the need to specify?”
Dean shrugged and sat back, one arm slung over the seatback. Sam watched him, the sounds of the kitchen and the rush of cars on the street the only sounds between them until Dean looked over. “Hey, what’s that in your pocket?”
Sam hadn’t realized he was touching it again, the package. “Nothing.”
“That the same ‘nothing’ you’ve been messing with since this morning?”
Sam folded his hands on the table and looked out the window, watching a small bird walk around on a tree branch.
“Ok,” Dean said slowly, and dropped the subject, sipping his coffee and staring out the window too. But it was a goodnatured silence. He seemed to be ignoring Sam’s terrible mood.
When the food came, his brother slathered butter onto his pancakes, emptied half the syrup onto them, and cut into the stack in a practiced way that reminded Sam of a hunter carefully flaying flesh from bone. These were careful hands, ones that had learned to wield weapons. Gentle hands that had a way of smoothing over the back of Sam’s neck when he was sick. It twisted up Sam’s stomach, looking at them.
“You gonna eat those?” Dean asked, and Sam had one split second to secure his hash browns to his plate. Dean wasn’t the only one who was good with a knife.
Breakfast did wonders for Sam’s sense of well-being, as did the promise a warmer day when he saw the sun come out from behind a cloud.
“Seriously, dude,” Dean said, and Sam realized he was doing it again, hand in his hoodie pocket. “What are you carrying around with you being all weird about?”
Sam hesitated. He felt really lame now, despite having thought about this for a week.
He shrugged though, and put the present on the tabletop between them.
It wasn’t wrapped, just folded up in a paper bag from a gas station. Dean put his hand in and came out with a smooth piece of obsidian.
He studied it, touched it. Sam knew he was tracing the design Sam had etched into it.
“For protection,” Sam explained. “To keep in your pocket or whatever.”
Dean looked at it in wonder almost. “Sam...I love it.”
Sam took a second to memorize the expression on his brother’s face, before shrugging it off, abruptly standing from the table. It wasn’t a big deal.
“Ok, let’s go,” he said, and salvaged three crumpled five dollar bills from his pocket and flattened them onto the table with the cream dish. Before this gets any worse, Sam wanted to say.
Dean straightened in his seat. “Hey, Sam come on--”
Outside he stuck his hands in his pockets to steel himself against the frigid air, and Dean fell into step beside him.They took the long way home, down the a main shopping street, past the small snowy park, under a bridge where they had to avoid cracked puddles of ice with suspended gum wrappers and leaves. Guys came down here to skate, Sam knew, when it was warm enough.
“Hey, wait up,” Dean said, who was now a full four inches shorter than Sam and sometimes had to take two strides to Sam’s one. “I got you something too, you know.”
Sam slowed to a halt when Dean tugged on his jacket sleeve. Dean leaned a shoulder on the tagged wall of the bridge to take out his wallet. Sam thought maybe he was going to give him a twenty or something, but he pulled out a white card and handed it to Sam..
Sam looked down at it. It was a rectangle of cardstock. Dean had written boxes in a row across the bottom and the words “V-Card” in a lovely cursive.
“It’s your V-Card,” Dean explained, strangely earnest as he leaned in to point. “See? Every time you pass a milestone, you get a sticker--”
“All of them are blank,” Sam said, even the one that said Frenching. He added, “Asshole.”
But he was grinning, and when he looked at Dean he saw that his eyes were dancing.
“We can start small if you want,” Dean said, batting his eyes up at Sam. Sam caught his breath.
“Asshole--” he said again, and pressed him against the wall.
Dean’s mouth opened warm and pliant under his own and Sam thought, huh and yes. Dean’s fingers twined through Sam’s hair and pressed cold under his jacket, hesitantly at first.
When they pulled apart, Dean socked him on the shoulder color high in his cheeks. “Merry fucking Christmas Sammy.”
It suddenly didn’t matter that things were shitty, that Sam was scared half the time and struggling to stay in school despite a rocky homelife. It didn’t matter that he and Dean were alone for the holidays, their dad who knew where, hurt or worse. It was just him and Dean and no one else. Dean looked at Sam over his shoulder as they walked on as if to say, just the way I like it.
Sam ran to catch up. Best Christmas ever.
Epilogue
When Sam opened the motel room door that evening, John saw he was still in his boxers, like maybe he’d only just gotten out of bed for the day. If this is what his boys were up to when he was gone, John needed to review the importance of daily training and rising at the buttcrack of dawn.
“Um, can I help you?” Sam said, guarded.
“Son,” John said. “I have something to tell you and your brother.”
Sam kept his eyes fixed on John, calling over his shoulder, “Dean, a lady’s at the door for us…”
Dean was there a few moments later, similarly shirtless and rumpled. He raised an appreciative eyebrow. “How may I help you?”
John took a steadying breath with his eyes clamped shut. "So help me..."
My belated fic for spn-j2-xmas for cityphonelines
John was tired and cold and had woken up in a ditch...but he also had a full tank of gas, some unused cards, and a promise to Sammy he'd be back by Christmas.
Any hunter would be a little thrown if he found himself cursed into a woman, but to John Winchester, if nothing was falling off or bloody he was good to go.
But this case had left him with an even stronger conviction that witches were bad news. He'd been especially hard on luck these days, that much was evident judging by the way his jeans now hung on the new curve of his hips, how his manly pecs had become supple, and how he had a complete lack of facial hair despite how he'd been sporting full beard just that morning. He was tired and cold and had woken up in a ditch...but he also had a full tank of gas, some unused credit cards, and a promise to Sammy he'd be back by Christmas.
His smaller feet kept tripping him up as he stumbled the half mile to where his car sat, partially wrecked but drivable, behind a tree. And two miles down the highway, he found a payphone rusting next to a minimart at the corner of Bumfuck and Nowhere Street
His nimble lady fingers made it easy to reach between the seat to find some dimes to slip in the coin slot, and as the phone rang he breathed a sigh of relief. He just needed to check in with his boys, get back to the motel and regroup.
The front desk answered after the fifth ring. "Happy Holidays, Comfort Inn."
"Hi--" Then John froze. His voice had surprised him, not its normal manly bass, but instead escaping his lips like the solitary note of a swallow's song. He cleared his throat and soldiered on. "Room 215 please?"
"That room is currently unoccupied," came the chirpy reply.
"What?" John barked. "But what about the two boys who were staying there with their father? Juan Pistola?"
"Mr. Pistola and his boys checked out yesterday, I'm sorry to say."
Checked out...that was another word for 'kicked out,' John knew, probably because the fake card had run out. There was no other reason that his boys wouldn't wait where he'd told them to.
"Dammit."
"Ma'am?" said the man and John nearly smashed the phone back into the receiver. He white knuckled it and managed to ask if there was a note that had been left, but of course there hadn't been.
"Merry Christmas," the clerk said uncertainly into the silence, but John was already hanging up the phone.
Then a second idea struck him. He slid his last coinage into the frozen slot, a handful of nickles covered in who knew what, and prayed that Sam and Dean had followed the obvious protocol and left a message at the Roadhouse. It wasn't far from Lincoln and he'd drilled into them the number of the place in case he went missing, or worse, was killed in the line of duty. Nevermind that he hadn't set foot in the place in years, nevermind how he was dreading talking to Ellen right now.
A girl answered the phone, thankfully. Young Jo from the sound of it, who was probably in her late teens by now. She was Sam's age.
"'Yello?" she said. It sounded like she was snapping gum into the phone.
John heard Ellen scolding her. "Joanna, you answer the phone like a grown up."
Jo sighed down the receiver and tried again. "Hello, Roadhouse."
"Hello, this is John. John Winchester."
"I don’t know any Jane Winchester," Jo said.
John ignored this, trying not to think about anything but the fact that he needed to track down his sons.
"Do you have any word from my sons? Sam and Dean?"
"Well, all messages left with me are on the message board. You can come in if you want, but I'm not going around giving out that kind of information to who knows who over the phone. No offense meant, ma'am, I'm sure you're real nice, but you know how it is."
Ellen's voice was just audible in the background. "Joanna, are you sassing customers?"
Jo sighed gustily again. "Our special is the St. Nicholasaffle Waffle. We hope to see you in here soon."
The phone went dead in John's cold hand and a flurry of snow battered the dirty glass of the phone booth. He felt the beginnings of a headache.
So John gunned it out of Lincoln, which wasn't necessarily on the agenda. But the possibility of a message from his boys was the only way to figure out where they were staying, short of knocking on each motel door in the city. That was his backup plan.
The roads were icy, the fields on either side thick with snow. The job had sure gone sideways, he thought, but finding his sons was all he could focus on for the time being. He ignored the problem of his...ah...physical changes. When this was over and done with, he would drag his ass to some shaman type and beg for all the help he could get, but for now he had a promise to keep. It was the least he could do.
When he parked in front of the Roadhouse, it was 7 p.m. He trudged up the steps, thinking only of finding his boys and having a hot meal after the lonely drive.
The blast of hot air and the sound of holiday cheer was welcome. It was Christmas Eve. He made straight for the bar, glad not to see Ellen, whom he hadn't talked to in almost five years.
"What can I do you for?" purred a familiar voice.
John frowned at Jo. "Where's the damn message board."
"Oh," Jo breathed, color rising in her cheeks. "A woman on a mission, huh?"
John took a step back, face going red to match. "Now hang on a second," he said, deeply unsettled by the tone of her voice and implications therein.
"It's over there," Jo told him, gesturing to the back of the room with a dishrag. "You want a good time, you know where I’ll be." She winked at him and then slid off to serve a woman down the bar.
John shook his head. This had not been the best week for him, but the message board, a corkboard covered in myriad notes and scraps of paper, was within sight and he nearly ran to it. A few old timers stood to let him pass, removing their hats and nodding welcome. John rolled his eyes and scanned the board for the message he was praying was there.
Hank, I'm staying in the same room as last time. - Tom...Silver bullets for sale. Contact me at the following number with your order....There are now 17 buns in the bakery. Proceed with caution. - M John scanned the scraps of paper -- most of the messages in code -- to find the one he knew had to be there.
And there it was. John - Contact Sam and Dean at the following #.John ripped the note from the board and went to yank the old wall phone off its receiver, ignoring the way Jo was still giving him -- or rather, his ample bosom barely hidden under his leather jacket-- bedroom eyes.
The phone rang and rang and John squeezed his eyes shut, breath held.
"Hi?" came a familiar, hesitant voice.
"Sammy." John breathed in relief. "Where are you?"
"Uh..." said Sam.
"Son, what's your location?"
"Who's asking?" Sam said after a pause, deeply suspicious. John sighed. He'd taught them well, that was for sure.
"Your father," he growled, although it came out two octaves too high and quite pretty. "Now give me the name of your motel."
There was an even longer pause.
"I've been turned into a woman," John explained impatiently. "You know what-- just put your brother on the phone."
He wasn't surprised at the answering click of the dial tone.
He hung up the phone as well. Jo must have noticed his distress, because she called over, "Care for a drink, cowgirl?" flipping a soda in her hand and smiling her most winning, underage smile.
"Good grief," John Winchester said for what he suspected wouldn’t be the last time, and accepted the soda and sat at the bar. "Give me the yellow pages."
As Jo placed the phone book in front of him, a weathered hand slapped a dirty five dollar bill on the bar next to John. John looked up into the face of a debonair man with a scar along his right cheek and a friendly smile.
"Buy you a real drink, darling?" he offered and John glared at him.
"I am a married woman, you should be ashamed of yourself," he told him. With that, he opened the yellow pages and began calling every motel in the greater Lincoln area.
"Who the hell was that?"
Sam replaced motel phone receiver slowly, feeling somewhat unsettled. "Some chick pretending to be dad."
Dean stared at him.
"I know," Sam said, shaking his head. "And it was weird, dude, she sounded real insistent."
Dean flopped onto the bed and got comfortable, leaning against the headboard with his hands behind his neck. His biceps strained at his black t-shirt sleeves and he looked almost smug when he said, "Probably some witch or something, trying to track us down. I'll tell you, Sammy, in this line of work, all kinds of folks'll come after us, you gotta learn to deal with it."
“Right,” Sam said.
"You have people on your tail, that’s a good thing." Dean gave him a crooked smile. "That's how you know you're badass."
Sam muttered, "Yeah, great life."
He finished pulling on his jacket and lacing up his boots. When he glanced up, he caught Dean giving him an unreadable look, the kind that sent shivers all the way down to Sam’s toes. It was the 25th of December, halfway through his junior year of high school, and he and Dean were basically stranded in middle America with little money and no car. Sam had the overwhelming conviction that he did not need this shit right now.
He held Dean’s gaze, steady, until Dean looked away.
Dean cleared his throat, swinging his legs off the bed. "We going to breakfast or what?"
Christmas in Lincoln took the cake, or so Dean declared happily as they ambled down the street. He liked the snow piled up at the edge of the sidewalk and the way Sam almost slipped on black ice when crossing the road. At his prompting, Sam had to agree that the icicle they witnessed dropping like a steel blade from the roof of the diner was pretty awesome.
Sam did not especially like cold weather, and had wanted to spend Christmas somewhere tropical like Florida, or dry and deserty like Las Vegas in the billboards that staked their way along Route 66, but here they were.
The diner was dead. It was the sort of morning people usually spent with their families.
Sam imagined the waitress looked at him with pity when she seated them, but it’s possible he was imagining it.
“Here are your menus,” she said. “This morning we have our Holiday Special -- two eggs, a blueberry short stack, and a side of hash browns.”
“Two of those,” Dean said, ordering without asking whether Sam wanted pancakes this morning. “And one coffee, black.”
The waitress took back the unopened menus, and turned to Sam. “Anything to drink for you, sweetie?”
“Orange juice,” Sam said.
“He’s a growing boy,” Dean said with the vague hint of a leer.
Sam rolled his eyes. “Thank you,” he told the waitress like an apology, and kicked Dean under the table when he caught his brother watching her walk away. “Dude, why do you do that?”
Dean blinked at him, innocent as anything. “Do what?”
Hit on ladies that were old enough to be their mom. “Be socially reprehensible,” he said out loud.
“Aw, is little Sammy embarrassed?” Dean cooed.
“No, I’m just stopping you from embarrassing yourself,” Sam shot back. “There’s a subtle difference, one that I don’t expect you to understand. Also, coffee comes black, why feel the need to specify?”
Dean shrugged and sat back, one arm slung over the seatback. Sam watched him, the sounds of the kitchen and the rush of cars on the street the only sounds between them until Dean looked over. “Hey, what’s that in your pocket?”
Sam hadn’t realized he was touching it again, the package. “Nothing.”
“That the same ‘nothing’ you’ve been messing with since this morning?”
Sam folded his hands on the table and looked out the window, watching a small bird walk around on a tree branch.
“Ok,” Dean said slowly, and dropped the subject, sipping his coffee and staring out the window too. But it was a goodnatured silence. He seemed to be ignoring Sam’s terrible mood.
When the food came, his brother slathered butter onto his pancakes, emptied half the syrup onto them, and cut into the stack in a practiced way that reminded Sam of a hunter carefully flaying flesh from bone. These were careful hands, ones that had learned to wield weapons. Gentle hands that had a way of smoothing over the back of Sam’s neck when he was sick. It twisted up Sam’s stomach, looking at them.
“You gonna eat those?” Dean asked, and Sam had one split second to secure his hash browns to his plate. Dean wasn’t the only one who was good with a knife.
Breakfast did wonders for Sam’s sense of well-being, as did the promise a warmer day when he saw the sun come out from behind a cloud.
“Seriously, dude,” Dean said, and Sam realized he was doing it again, hand in his hoodie pocket. “What are you carrying around with you being all weird about?”
Sam hesitated. He felt really lame now, despite having thought about this for a week.
He shrugged though, and put the present on the tabletop between them.
It wasn’t wrapped, just folded up in a paper bag from a gas station. Dean put his hand in and came out with a smooth piece of obsidian.
He studied it, touched it. Sam knew he was tracing the design Sam had etched into it.
“For protection,” Sam explained. “To keep in your pocket or whatever.”
Dean looked at it in wonder almost. “Sam...I love it.”
Sam took a second to memorize the expression on his brother’s face, before shrugging it off, abruptly standing from the table. It wasn’t a big deal.
“Ok, let’s go,” he said, and salvaged three crumpled five dollar bills from his pocket and flattened them onto the table with the cream dish. Before this gets any worse, Sam wanted to say.
Dean straightened in his seat. “Hey, Sam come on--”
Outside he stuck his hands in his pockets to steel himself against the frigid air, and Dean fell into step beside him.They took the long way home, down the a main shopping street, past the small snowy park, under a bridge where they had to avoid cracked puddles of ice with suspended gum wrappers and leaves. Guys came down here to skate, Sam knew, when it was warm enough.
“Hey, wait up,” Dean said, who was now a full four inches shorter than Sam and sometimes had to take two strides to Sam’s one. “I got you something too, you know.”
Sam slowed to a halt when Dean tugged on his jacket sleeve. Dean leaned a shoulder on the tagged wall of the bridge to take out his wallet. Sam thought maybe he was going to give him a twenty or something, but he pulled out a white card and handed it to Sam..
Sam looked down at it. It was a rectangle of cardstock. Dean had written boxes in a row across the bottom and the words “V-Card” in a lovely cursive.
“It’s your V-Card,” Dean explained, strangely earnest as he leaned in to point. “See? Every time you pass a milestone, you get a sticker--”
“All of them are blank,” Sam said, even the one that said Frenching. He added, “Asshole.”
But he was grinning, and when he looked at Dean he saw that his eyes were dancing.
“We can start small if you want,” Dean said, batting his eyes up at Sam. Sam caught his breath.
“Asshole--” he said again, and pressed him against the wall.
Dean’s mouth opened warm and pliant under his own and Sam thought, huh and yes. Dean’s fingers twined through Sam’s hair and pressed cold under his jacket, hesitantly at first.
When they pulled apart, Dean socked him on the shoulder color high in his cheeks. “Merry fucking Christmas Sammy.”
It suddenly didn’t matter that things were shitty, that Sam was scared half the time and struggling to stay in school despite a rocky homelife. It didn’t matter that he and Dean were alone for the holidays, their dad who knew where, hurt or worse. It was just him and Dean and no one else. Dean looked at Sam over his shoulder as they walked on as if to say, just the way I like it.
Sam ran to catch up. Best Christmas ever.
Epilogue
When Sam opened the motel room door that evening, John saw he was still in his boxers, like maybe he’d only just gotten out of bed for the day. If this is what his boys were up to when he was gone, John needed to review the importance of daily training and rising at the buttcrack of dawn.
“Um, can I help you?” Sam said, guarded.
“Son,” John said. “I have something to tell you and your brother.”
Sam kept his eyes fixed on John, calling over his shoulder, “Dean, a lady’s at the door for us…”
Dean was there a few moments later, similarly shirtless and rumpled. He raised an appreciative eyebrow. “How may I help you?”
John took a steadying breath with his eyes clamped shut. "So help me..."