Things She Carries
Title: Things She Carries
Author: shangrilada (Kira)
Word Count: 2,395
Summary: Christa is pregnant with twins, and it's making her think about how many people she already is (and how many more she can stand to carry.)
Author's Note: Nothing much to say on this one!
Christa comes to group with Sam, always, and even though most of the therapists don't she's not the only one. Sam's buddy Ryan has Lydia with him (Christa likes Lydia, knows her husband from medical school, but she gets a lot of her patients after the decide they don't want to put up with the touchy feely crap Lydia pushes on them so sometimes she looks at Ryan and imagines how she would smack him around a little like she does her Sammy) and Rafael, one of the youngest kids, couldn't be more than sixteen, God, kid, has Geraldine, who Christa doesn't know well but they've had some friendly chit chat during the social half hour at the end of the meeting and she's a mom, so that's cool, but she wears too much makeup and Christa has an unreasonable amount of prejudice about that for reasons she can't identify. Maybe she should see Lydia and have the explanation hugged out of her.
They sit with their boys, rub their backs through their times to talk, do some conversations with Michael (group leader, nice guy, unfortunate name) on behalf of their patients. Christa doesn't do that. She waits by the door and tries not to listen too much to everyone's stories. Mostly, she's here for sisterly reasons more than psychiatric-there are cookies in the corner and damn if she's leaving Sam alone in a room full of shaky people nibbling them-but her degree gets her through the door, so she'll take it, and yeah, if Sam starts crying too hard somewhere in the meeting she'll know to gather him up in the car right after and then ruthlessly grab it out of him on her couch the next day. But mostly she keeps to herself, thinks about her slightly pregnant (people who say you can't be a little pregnant have clearly never expected twins, who, after Christa's terrified herself looking up women twice her height about to tip over in the last couple of weeks, she is very aware still feel more like little goldfish than babies) belly and her her even slightlier marriage and if she double booked her haircut and her 10 o'clock appointment tomorrow and is there a new episode of House on tonight and goddamn why don't more people find Foreman attractive.
But sometimes someone in her goddamn Sammy's group, this goddamn group for male survivors of sexual assault, will say something like “You know therapist is just the-rapist with a space in it,” and she wants to kick him in the back of the head. She just really does.
**
Sam's at the hospital today for a post-surgery checkup. He's a handful of months out of his heart transplant, doing great, but ever since Cas took off a few weeks ago he's been having a tough time, which maybe explains why Dean comes in grumbling that they gave him a psychiatric evaluation and made his Sammy cry.
“I'm pretty sure it's standard procedure,” she says. She's looking at a permission slip for a field trip, trying to decide if she's going to let her peanut allergy girl go. It's a zoo and twenty-five kids who hate her guts, and neither of them can get work off to chaperone. Times like these, she unfairly (not to mention implausibly) wishes for a third parent in the form or Sam or maybe, hey, how about that fucking angel. Maybe Matt can go with Kylie. But he's allergic to peanuts too. She's been looking at the slip for a while.
“Yeah, well, why can't you do it.”
“I'm biased,” she says. “I don't even get to write the prescriptions.” He knows this.
Which doesn't explain why he says, “What?”
“He's my brother-in-law, I live with him, I'm not allowed to have duty of care. My partner writes them.”
“My duty of care.”
“I know, honey, but you don't have a fancy prescription pad.”
“I totally do, I forged one when I was six-fucking-teen.”
“Come kiss me.”
He does, lingering. “Long day?”
“Did you know therapist has the same letters as the-rapist?” It's been a few days. She can't stop thinking it.
He pauses, then says just, “That's unfortunate.”
“Yeah.” There's not really more to say, he's right.
It's still fucked up. (What's maybe more fucked up is that she never noticed.)
“Where's Ky?” she says.
He pauses, refrigerator door halfway open. “I thought you were on pick-up today.”
“Motherfuck.”
“Hey, it's okay. They'll just take her to supervision, I'll go get her now.”
“Fuck. I'm sorry.”
“Come with me?”
“Someone should stay with Sam.” It occurs to her she has no idea where the fuck he is, and that maybe she is a really shitty doctor. She gets like this sometimes. It'll stop.
“He's up with Jess.”
“Oh. That's good.”
“Come with me, baby.”
So she does. She rubs her stomach when she straps the seatbelt over it and thinks about them squished in, cuddling each other. She doesn't know the sexes yet, too early, but she thinks girls, at least one. Almost all of her patients are girls, and that should terrify her, but it just doesn't anymore, and she doesn't know if that's good or bad.
“She made him cry,” he says, after some quiet.
“The hospital therapist?”
“Yeah. She poked him all around and why haven't you been doing that and you're on too much medication and do you try more talk therapy.”
“I do so much goddamn talk therapy.” And yet she has a reputation-one she doesn't mind all that much, to be honest-of being a pill-pusher. It's called stabilization, assholes, and do you want to compare suicide rates in their patients? Christa's lost two, ever. This is a horrible way to measure things, especially when one of your non-suicides is a hundred and fifty-odd years and when your damn husband is Dean.
“You're the best thing that ever happened to him and you know it. Better than Jess. Maybe not as much as Kylie.”
“Not better than Jess.”
“You're hotter.”
“I'm not even. And how about you?”
“I am pretty attractive.”
“Nah, ugly. And I meant things that happened to him.”
“I didn't happen to him,” he says. “I was just...you know. His ground. I was his first damn word.”
She wonders what the twins' will be. She would really like 'Ky.' (She would also like Ky not to be pissed at her for goddamn forgetting her, so she doesn't need to have a degree to psychoanalyze that shit.)
“So it was shitty?” she says.
“She just made it sound like nothing he does is any good, when like...I mean, proof is in the pudding.” This is her expression. He learned it from her. It makes her as happy as her damn diamond, as dinner when she gets home, as soft lips on her collarbone.
“Who was it?”
“What?”
“The therapist. Her name.”
“Oh. Uhhhh Mitchell something? Some old person name. Brenda. Beatrice. Something.”
Fuck. “Barbara.”
“That's it.”
Yeeeah. “It's not about Sam. It's about me.”
“What is?”
“Why she was being mean to him.”
“What do you mean?”
Goddamn it. Goddamn being Sam's sister when she should be his doctor. Goddamn being a person. “I slept with her boyfriend in med school.”
**
There are things Christa's has never told Dean. Some of them are significant and some of them are not.
She's never told him she used to shove her fingers down her throat in college. She's never told him that it doesn't matter how damn short you are, staying under ninety pounds is not easy. She pushes her food around her plate and watches the numbers on the scale creep up as each week goes by and she cries that she is what the fuck kind of mother really because this is the weight of her goddamn children, this is Kylie falling asleep on her chest, why can she not fucking tolerate it when it's wrapped around her stomach, how fast will she lose this baby weight.
She's never told him she doesn't like grapefruit because it makes her teeth feel slimy. She's never told him that she can sing all of “I Am the Walrus” backwards.
She's never told him in college, between chugging red cups full of straight tequila to make the throwing up a little easier, she'd put whatever guy she could find in her mouth. She's never told her that her only criterion was that they he be black. She's never told Dean how afraid she used to be (maybe still is) of white men, of how there was some mythical crime in their head that they could do to her that a black man somehow could not.
There's a few things he doesn't know. He doesn't know how she paid her way through college. He doesn't know why she got into the field she did. He doesn't know her (black) father was coming into her room and shoving his fingers in her from the time she was two years old.
It's so stupid that this is where it starts to break open, sitting in the car with her husband and watching her lives come together like a crash.
**
Dean takes it like a joke, which in a way it is, and they go get Kylie who grumbles that they “ABANDONED me, I could have DIED you know,” and she and her stepdaddy make themselves laugh all the way back to their house coming up with ways Kylie could have died in after-school supervision. They're mostly getting hit my freak falling chairs and sudden wendigo attacks. Christa thinks about peanut-butter hands and kidnappers and is mostly quiet.
Sam's back from Jess when they get home, and Christa can tell Dean's immediately nervous about that because it means Sam was alone and Sam isn't doing so well. Christa wants him, wants to debrief him post-appointment and post-visit, apologize for the damn hospital shrink, but Dean gets to him first because he's got legs as long as Christa's whole body or some shit.
“Yo, Samalot.”
Sam waves the remote at the TV. “Where is the mercy! Where is the justice!”
“What?”
“Angelo should get a bye, he was so sick! He had to have a doctor come and give him an antibiotic shot! And here he is getting second fucking place. JUSTICE, Dean!”
“Second place isn't so bad. I'm the second-place Winchester, it doesn't suck.”
Sam grabs Dean around the knees and muffles an “MMPHH” into them and Dean plops down on the couch next to him.
“What season is this anyway?” he says.
“Whatever's on.”
“I recorded like eight episodes of Barefoot Contessa for you and like six Best Thing I Ever Ates.”
“I'm saving them for Cas,” Sam says, and Dean (very wisely) doesn't say anything, just plays with Sam's hair and drops a kiss on his forehead when Sam mumbles some Enochian on his way to sleep.
He comes into the kitchen and takes Kylie's discarded rain boots of the floor, sets them by the door. “Someone's going to break an ankle on your shoes one day, bot.”
Kylie scoops up TB, Sammy's hypo-allergenic and hyper-social Abyssinian as he runs into the kitchen and nuzzles him under her chin. “I was leaving them for TB to drink.” His name is technically Tree Beard (Dean's choice, fucking geek) but Sam shortened it because Sam's entire life is a lung disease and he thought it was appropriate.
“What's homework tonight?” he asks Kylie.
“SPELLING.”
“Gross.”
“Seriously.”
“Don't computers do that now?”
“They fucking well better, that's what I say.”
“How do you spell 'fucking'?”
“F-U-C-K-I-N-G.”
“How about 'pie'?”
“P-I.”
“E.”
“Oh okay.”
“How about 'Mom'?”
“M-O-M, duh.”
“'Sammy'?
“S-A-M-M-Y. Easy.”
“You officially know the only four words you need to survive. Homework completed.”
“Yesssss.”
Christa clamps her fingers over the top of Dean's ear on her way to the fridge. “What am I making tonight, professor?”
“Do the stir fry thing. With broccoli. I'll do dessert.”
“Fucking Mom Sammy Pie!” Kylie says.
“...All right. I'm gonna figure out something called Fucking Mom Sammy Pie, apparently.”
It's an allergy-free mud pie with metric tons of confectioner's sugar, turns out. Kylie licks the plate and Sammy smiles and muses about Jessica and Dean picks frosting out of Kylie's dreadlocks and Christa steadily, deliberately, eats her entire piece.
Dean collects the dishes and whispers, “Good job,” in her her ear.
And then she knows-then she's really fucking sure, maybe for the first time-that he loves her.
That he knows how.
That someone can.
**
(Funny story-about that way Christa paid her way through college? She eventually tells Dean about a year later, when he makes some hilarious comment about there aren't any girls as hot as her in porn. She digs out the copy of the magazine she saved, he pretends to kick her out to examine it on his own. She pretends not to mentally measure the circumference of twenty-two-year-old Christa's tiny thighs, tiny waist.)
(She wakes up a few mornings later and the magazine isn't where she left it.)
(And the worst case, the fucking worst case scenario, is that her rape survivor brother in law patient found the damn thing, because goddamn it he's going to be triggered and he is going to break away from her and he will break away from her and she won't be able to help him and she will have ruined fucking everything she she never should have told Dean she never should have gotten close to anyone and she should never have tried to be a person and a doctor and an anything, and a wife, and a sister.)
(And then she walks in on Sam and Cas in their bed, curled up, eating waffles, looking through the magazine.)
(Giggling.)
(They look up at her and laugh, and Christa grabs it away and smacks them with it and Sam keeps giggling, head tucked under Castiel's chin.)
Author: shangrilada (Kira)
Word Count: 2,395
Summary: Christa is pregnant with twins, and it's making her think about how many people she already is (and how many more she can stand to carry.)
Author's Note: Nothing much to say on this one!
Christa comes to group with Sam, always, and even though most of the therapists don't she's not the only one. Sam's buddy Ryan has Lydia with him (Christa likes Lydia, knows her husband from medical school, but she gets a lot of her patients after the decide they don't want to put up with the touchy feely crap Lydia pushes on them so sometimes she looks at Ryan and imagines how she would smack him around a little like she does her Sammy) and Rafael, one of the youngest kids, couldn't be more than sixteen, God, kid, has Geraldine, who Christa doesn't know well but they've had some friendly chit chat during the social half hour at the end of the meeting and she's a mom, so that's cool, but she wears too much makeup and Christa has an unreasonable amount of prejudice about that for reasons she can't identify. Maybe she should see Lydia and have the explanation hugged out of her.
They sit with their boys, rub their backs through their times to talk, do some conversations with Michael (group leader, nice guy, unfortunate name) on behalf of their patients. Christa doesn't do that. She waits by the door and tries not to listen too much to everyone's stories. Mostly, she's here for sisterly reasons more than psychiatric-there are cookies in the corner and damn if she's leaving Sam alone in a room full of shaky people nibbling them-but her degree gets her through the door, so she'll take it, and yeah, if Sam starts crying too hard somewhere in the meeting she'll know to gather him up in the car right after and then ruthlessly grab it out of him on her couch the next day. But mostly she keeps to herself, thinks about her slightly pregnant (people who say you can't be a little pregnant have clearly never expected twins, who, after Christa's terrified herself looking up women twice her height about to tip over in the last couple of weeks, she is very aware still feel more like little goldfish than babies) belly and her her even slightlier marriage and if she double booked her haircut and her 10 o'clock appointment tomorrow and is there a new episode of House on tonight and goddamn why don't more people find Foreman attractive.
But sometimes someone in her goddamn Sammy's group, this goddamn group for male survivors of sexual assault, will say something like “You know therapist is just the-rapist with a space in it,” and she wants to kick him in the back of the head. She just really does.
**
Sam's at the hospital today for a post-surgery checkup. He's a handful of months out of his heart transplant, doing great, but ever since Cas took off a few weeks ago he's been having a tough time, which maybe explains why Dean comes in grumbling that they gave him a psychiatric evaluation and made his Sammy cry.
“I'm pretty sure it's standard procedure,” she says. She's looking at a permission slip for a field trip, trying to decide if she's going to let her peanut allergy girl go. It's a zoo and twenty-five kids who hate her guts, and neither of them can get work off to chaperone. Times like these, she unfairly (not to mention implausibly) wishes for a third parent in the form or Sam or maybe, hey, how about that fucking angel. Maybe Matt can go with Kylie. But he's allergic to peanuts too. She's been looking at the slip for a while.
“Yeah, well, why can't you do it.”
“I'm biased,” she says. “I don't even get to write the prescriptions.” He knows this.
Which doesn't explain why he says, “What?”
“He's my brother-in-law, I live with him, I'm not allowed to have duty of care. My partner writes them.”
“My duty of care.”
“I know, honey, but you don't have a fancy prescription pad.”
“I totally do, I forged one when I was six-fucking-teen.”
“Come kiss me.”
He does, lingering. “Long day?”
“Did you know therapist has the same letters as the-rapist?” It's been a few days. She can't stop thinking it.
He pauses, then says just, “That's unfortunate.”
“Yeah.” There's not really more to say, he's right.
It's still fucked up. (What's maybe more fucked up is that she never noticed.)
“Where's Ky?” she says.
He pauses, refrigerator door halfway open. “I thought you were on pick-up today.”
“Motherfuck.”
“Hey, it's okay. They'll just take her to supervision, I'll go get her now.”
“Fuck. I'm sorry.”
“Come with me?”
“Someone should stay with Sam.” It occurs to her she has no idea where the fuck he is, and that maybe she is a really shitty doctor. She gets like this sometimes. It'll stop.
“He's up with Jess.”
“Oh. That's good.”
“Come with me, baby.”
So she does. She rubs her stomach when she straps the seatbelt over it and thinks about them squished in, cuddling each other. She doesn't know the sexes yet, too early, but she thinks girls, at least one. Almost all of her patients are girls, and that should terrify her, but it just doesn't anymore, and she doesn't know if that's good or bad.
“She made him cry,” he says, after some quiet.
“The hospital therapist?”
“Yeah. She poked him all around and why haven't you been doing that and you're on too much medication and do you try more talk therapy.”
“I do so much goddamn talk therapy.” And yet she has a reputation-one she doesn't mind all that much, to be honest-of being a pill-pusher. It's called stabilization, assholes, and do you want to compare suicide rates in their patients? Christa's lost two, ever. This is a horrible way to measure things, especially when one of your non-suicides is a hundred and fifty-odd years and when your damn husband is Dean.
“You're the best thing that ever happened to him and you know it. Better than Jess. Maybe not as much as Kylie.”
“Not better than Jess.”
“You're hotter.”
“I'm not even. And how about you?”
“I am pretty attractive.”
“Nah, ugly. And I meant things that happened to him.”
“I didn't happen to him,” he says. “I was just...you know. His ground. I was his first damn word.”
She wonders what the twins' will be. She would really like 'Ky.' (She would also like Ky not to be pissed at her for goddamn forgetting her, so she doesn't need to have a degree to psychoanalyze that shit.)
“So it was shitty?” she says.
“She just made it sound like nothing he does is any good, when like...I mean, proof is in the pudding.” This is her expression. He learned it from her. It makes her as happy as her damn diamond, as dinner when she gets home, as soft lips on her collarbone.
“Who was it?”
“What?”
“The therapist. Her name.”
“Oh. Uhhhh Mitchell something? Some old person name. Brenda. Beatrice. Something.”
Fuck. “Barbara.”
“That's it.”
Yeeeah. “It's not about Sam. It's about me.”
“What is?”
“Why she was being mean to him.”
“What do you mean?”
Goddamn it. Goddamn being Sam's sister when she should be his doctor. Goddamn being a person. “I slept with her boyfriend in med school.”
**
There are things Christa's has never told Dean. Some of them are significant and some of them are not.
She's never told him she used to shove her fingers down her throat in college. She's never told him that it doesn't matter how damn short you are, staying under ninety pounds is not easy. She pushes her food around her plate and watches the numbers on the scale creep up as each week goes by and she cries that she is what the fuck kind of mother really because this is the weight of her goddamn children, this is Kylie falling asleep on her chest, why can she not fucking tolerate it when it's wrapped around her stomach, how fast will she lose this baby weight.
She's never told him she doesn't like grapefruit because it makes her teeth feel slimy. She's never told him that she can sing all of “I Am the Walrus” backwards.
She's never told him in college, between chugging red cups full of straight tequila to make the throwing up a little easier, she'd put whatever guy she could find in her mouth. She's never told her that her only criterion was that they he be black. She's never told Dean how afraid she used to be (maybe still is) of white men, of how there was some mythical crime in their head that they could do to her that a black man somehow could not.
There's a few things he doesn't know. He doesn't know how she paid her way through college. He doesn't know why she got into the field she did. He doesn't know her (black) father was coming into her room and shoving his fingers in her from the time she was two years old.
It's so stupid that this is where it starts to break open, sitting in the car with her husband and watching her lives come together like a crash.
**
Dean takes it like a joke, which in a way it is, and they go get Kylie who grumbles that they “ABANDONED me, I could have DIED you know,” and she and her stepdaddy make themselves laugh all the way back to their house coming up with ways Kylie could have died in after-school supervision. They're mostly getting hit my freak falling chairs and sudden wendigo attacks. Christa thinks about peanut-butter hands and kidnappers and is mostly quiet.
Sam's back from Jess when they get home, and Christa can tell Dean's immediately nervous about that because it means Sam was alone and Sam isn't doing so well. Christa wants him, wants to debrief him post-appointment and post-visit, apologize for the damn hospital shrink, but Dean gets to him first because he's got legs as long as Christa's whole body or some shit.
“Yo, Samalot.”
Sam waves the remote at the TV. “Where is the mercy! Where is the justice!”
“What?”
“Angelo should get a bye, he was so sick! He had to have a doctor come and give him an antibiotic shot! And here he is getting second fucking place. JUSTICE, Dean!”
“Second place isn't so bad. I'm the second-place Winchester, it doesn't suck.”
Sam grabs Dean around the knees and muffles an “MMPHH” into them and Dean plops down on the couch next to him.
“What season is this anyway?” he says.
“Whatever's on.”
“I recorded like eight episodes of Barefoot Contessa for you and like six Best Thing I Ever Ates.”
“I'm saving them for Cas,” Sam says, and Dean (very wisely) doesn't say anything, just plays with Sam's hair and drops a kiss on his forehead when Sam mumbles some Enochian on his way to sleep.
He comes into the kitchen and takes Kylie's discarded rain boots of the floor, sets them by the door. “Someone's going to break an ankle on your shoes one day, bot.”
Kylie scoops up TB, Sammy's hypo-allergenic and hyper-social Abyssinian as he runs into the kitchen and nuzzles him under her chin. “I was leaving them for TB to drink.” His name is technically Tree Beard (Dean's choice, fucking geek) but Sam shortened it because Sam's entire life is a lung disease and he thought it was appropriate.
“What's homework tonight?” he asks Kylie.
“SPELLING.”
“Gross.”
“Seriously.”
“Don't computers do that now?”
“They fucking well better, that's what I say.”
“How do you spell 'fucking'?”
“F-U-C-K-I-N-G.”
“How about 'pie'?”
“P-I.”
“E.”
“Oh okay.”
“How about 'Mom'?”
“M-O-M, duh.”
“'Sammy'?
“S-A-M-M-Y. Easy.”
“You officially know the only four words you need to survive. Homework completed.”
“Yesssss.”
Christa clamps her fingers over the top of Dean's ear on her way to the fridge. “What am I making tonight, professor?”
“Do the stir fry thing. With broccoli. I'll do dessert.”
“Fucking Mom Sammy Pie!” Kylie says.
“...All right. I'm gonna figure out something called Fucking Mom Sammy Pie, apparently.”
It's an allergy-free mud pie with metric tons of confectioner's sugar, turns out. Kylie licks the plate and Sammy smiles and muses about Jessica and Dean picks frosting out of Kylie's dreadlocks and Christa steadily, deliberately, eats her entire piece.
Dean collects the dishes and whispers, “Good job,” in her her ear.
And then she knows-then she's really fucking sure, maybe for the first time-that he loves her.
That he knows how.
That someone can.
**
(Funny story-about that way Christa paid her way through college? She eventually tells Dean about a year later, when he makes some hilarious comment about there aren't any girls as hot as her in porn. She digs out the copy of the magazine she saved, he pretends to kick her out to examine it on his own. She pretends not to mentally measure the circumference of twenty-two-year-old Christa's tiny thighs, tiny waist.)
(She wakes up a few mornings later and the magazine isn't where she left it.)
(And the worst case, the fucking worst case scenario, is that her rape survivor brother in law patient found the damn thing, because goddamn it he's going to be triggered and he is going to break away from her and he will break away from her and she won't be able to help him and she will have ruined fucking everything she she never should have told Dean she never should have gotten close to anyone and she should never have tried to be a person and a doctor and an anything, and a wife, and a sister.)
(And then she walks in on Sam and Cas in their bed, curled up, eating waffles, looking through the magazine.)
(Giggling.)
(They look up at her and laugh, and Christa grabs it away and smacks them with it and Sam keeps giggling, head tucked under Castiel's chin.)