Not officially part of the birthday-verse.
A couple of folks expressed some interest in a story wherein the birthday-verse Dean and Sam meet up again with John. There is such an animal, but I am dissatisfied with it, always have been; it doesn't match up sufficiently well with the verse canon, skewed as it admittedly is. I wrote it ages upon ages ago, but it's what stalled me; I could never quite see my way through it.
So, heavily caveated, here's Dean's 13th birthday. Except maybe not. *shrug* Will not make even a lick of sense if you aren't familiar with both Under a Haystack and the various birthday-verse/little!Dean stories. It also isn't really what the requesters had in mind, but it's -- well, something. Hope you enjoy. EB
Thirteen
The snow has come late, but heavily, as if making up for lost time. Falling so thickly that Sam can’t see more than a foot beyond the window, the wipers straining to fight the increasing burden.
He spares a moment to be thankful he listened to Melanie a few days ago.
“Now,” she’d said as levelly as if she were explaining algebra to Dean, “is not the time to go screwing around in that hotrod. Take the Expedition. If it snows, it’ll be safer.”
She’s right, it is, and larger and warmer, too. And if her hand touched her belly while she said it, if that was a reminder of the increase in the stakes these days, well, he can’t fault her for playing any card she has.
“You okay?” he asks, glancing to the right. Dean slumps in the passenger seat, staring at the substantially reduced view outside the vehicle. He doesn’t look at Sam. Just shrugs.
“Fine.”
Sam sets his jaw and thinks about the road, about the snow, about driving them home to safety. It’s not a time to think about the rest, but putting it aside isn’t working. This is supposed to be a good time, time he’s taken Dean out of school for a trip that’s just them, birthday stuff, bonding crap. Except bonding with Dean these days is like trying to make two identical poles of a magnet stick together; they mutually repel each other, and there’s no way to get them to align.
He’d thought the trip would help. And they’ve been successful; they’re Winchesters, after all. They’ve accomplished what they set out to do, at least on paper. But nothing has been the same since August, and even before that Sam’s felt Dean sidling away, puberty descending and transforming a boy into a sullen, monosyllabic teenager, turning guileless green eyes into something shifty.
The only thing to stir Dean these days is Mel. And Sam’s belly cramps with weird sadness when he thinks about that, about how scared he was to say, Dean, Melanie’s pregnant, we’re going to have a baby, and how floored he’d been at Dean’s inarticulate joy. Dean loves this bump of a child, is as gallant and adoring of Mel now as he is silent and prickly with Sam.
The baby is, Sam thinks, maybe the only thing holding them all together right now. Pretty heavy burden for a fetus, one still three months from arriving.
He looks again at Dean, sees his fingers tapping restlessly on his carelessly splayed thighs. He’s as anxious as Sam to get home again, see with his own eyes that she’s okay after a week on her own, that the bump is fine. Doesn’t matter they’ve talked to her on the phone every day. Dean, like Sam, wants to be sure.
“She’s okay,” Sam says softly. “Stop worrying.”
“Not worried,” Dean mutters. His hands stop moving, clasped tightly together. “Whatever.”
He’s got no one to blame for this frostiness but himself. How long would he have gone on prevaricating, had it not been for Mel’s pregnancy? Just a hunting trip, honey. Nah, didn’t bag much. This? Yeah, tripped on a log when I went to take a whiz in the middle of the night. Clumsy, yeah, I’ll be more careful next time.
But the baby’s changed all that. And it would have been bad enough, facing Mel’s disbelief, hurt, shock, anger, without feeling the bake of Dean’s righteous glower while he stumblingly explained the truth. The truth: Melanie, the babies in our family aren’t safe. Maybe this one will be different, but I wasn’t, and this is my child, our child, mixed blood I guess you’d say, and we have to be careful.
He’s gone from being terrified she’d want a divorce, to wondering if that wasn’t what they needed after all. Because under the anger is hurt, hurt that he hadn’t told her the truth until circumstances forced him into it, hurt that he hadn’t trusted her with it. And she’s right, because he hadn’t. He hasn’t trusted anyone, not in a long time, not with Dean to watch out for and then Mel, playing his game of normalcy and nine-to-five and baseball leagues and hockey and dinner at seven. Hasn’t trusted himself not to fuck things up.
Dean and Mel are on one side, and Sam is on the other, and the baby is somewhere between them. The baby that could have the same abilities Sam has, the ones he’s fought tooth and nail for two years now, done his best to ignore and sublimate and outright refuse. Until the visions are too sharp for him to deny, until one or another sends him on a trip like the one they’re returning from now, ice and blood and the white gleam of snow on cold metal.
They’ve saved a little town from a creature that ate their children, and now they’re going home to salvage what they can. What he can. And he thinks, dully, that he’s the only one who’s been fooled by this nice, comfy, normal existence. Dean’s been practicing, Dean’s the one who took the killing shot, Dean and his diligence at the dojo, the rigorous practice at the shooting range, the distance he now feels with his classmates.
Dean is DEAN, more and more, and Sam isn’t sure he can take that.
The snow backs off a little inside the city, and by the time they hit their street it’s down to scattered flakes, melting fast on the windshield.
“That was good work,” Sam says slowly. “You know that, right? You were great out there. A natural.”
Dean says nothing, lips twitching once but never opening.
“Happy birthday,” Sam whispers.
There are no lights on the first floor of the house. Just the bedroom upstairs, window glowing golden in the darkness. Sam parks the Expedition in the drive, barely stopping before Dean is climbing out, wordless and accusing in that heavy silence.
Sam sits for a moment, gathering himself, and later he thinks that that’s why it hit him then, and not before. When his guard came down, almost too late. Smoke fills his nostrils, invisible unreal odor, and his head snaps back, bouncing off the headrest.
There’s a scream, no no NOOO, and hands on his arms, Dean’s urgent voice gone cracked and high, as if his new adolescent deepness was reversed, making him sound like a boy again.
“Sam? SAM?”
Sam blinks tears from his eyes and looks at Dean’s snow-white face. The driver’s-side door is open, and he’s half-out of the truck, leaning heavily into Dean’s strong grasp.
“Mel,” Sam gasps, and slings himself forward. “Find Mel.”
The sullen look is gone from Dean’s face: he looks painfully young, shocked, slip-sliding in Sam’s wake as he lumbers into the house. “MELANIE!” he bellows. There is no reply.
He thunders up the stairs, Dean at his heels. The bedroom door is open, the bedroom he shares with his wife, and he sobs, “Mel,” and skids to a halt and sees her, sees the dark form by the bed silhouetted by the lamplight, dark and man-shaped and turning glowing yellow eyes in his direction.
“Call it a pre-emptive strike,” the demon whispers, while Sam’s wife screams and slides up the wall like a bizarrely inverted sailor slewing with the angle of a ship caught in high seas.
“NO,” Sam screams, and Dean draws a breath behind him, warbles “Mom” in a high, terrible voice.
“I don’t fucking think so,” says a voice behind them both, and there is the flash of light, the powerful discharge of a weapon at close range. The yellow-eyed thing by the bed collapses into black, a cloud of murky evil like a brief, polluted blizzard, and vanishes, and Mel thuds onto the bed, already curled around her curving belly.
Her uncut belly, no blood, Sam’s frantic questing hands find nothing but smooth taut skin, and he gathers her up in his arms, hears her sudden whoop of terror.
Dean sags onto the bed next to them, but although his hand is touching them, clinging to Sam’s jacket, his eyes are fixed not on his sister-in-law, but the door to the bedroom.
Sam looks, and swallows.
Standing there with the shotgun loose and easy in his grip, a crooked, shaky smile on his lips.
“Hello, boys,” John Winchester says softly.
~~~~~~~~~~
So, heavily caveated, here's Dean's 13th birthday. Except maybe not. *shrug* Will not make even a lick of sense if you aren't familiar with both Under a Haystack and the various birthday-verse/little!Dean stories. It also isn't really what the requesters had in mind, but it's -- well, something. Hope you enjoy. EB
Thirteen
The snow has come late, but heavily, as if making up for lost time. Falling so thickly that Sam can’t see more than a foot beyond the window, the wipers straining to fight the increasing burden.
He spares a moment to be thankful he listened to Melanie a few days ago.
“Now,” she’d said as levelly as if she were explaining algebra to Dean, “is not the time to go screwing around in that hotrod. Take the Expedition. If it snows, it’ll be safer.”
She’s right, it is, and larger and warmer, too. And if her hand touched her belly while she said it, if that was a reminder of the increase in the stakes these days, well, he can’t fault her for playing any card she has.
“You okay?” he asks, glancing to the right. Dean slumps in the passenger seat, staring at the substantially reduced view outside the vehicle. He doesn’t look at Sam. Just shrugs.
“Fine.”
Sam sets his jaw and thinks about the road, about the snow, about driving them home to safety. It’s not a time to think about the rest, but putting it aside isn’t working. This is supposed to be a good time, time he’s taken Dean out of school for a trip that’s just them, birthday stuff, bonding crap. Except bonding with Dean these days is like trying to make two identical poles of a magnet stick together; they mutually repel each other, and there’s no way to get them to align.
He’d thought the trip would help. And they’ve been successful; they’re Winchesters, after all. They’ve accomplished what they set out to do, at least on paper. But nothing has been the same since August, and even before that Sam’s felt Dean sidling away, puberty descending and transforming a boy into a sullen, monosyllabic teenager, turning guileless green eyes into something shifty.
The only thing to stir Dean these days is Mel. And Sam’s belly cramps with weird sadness when he thinks about that, about how scared he was to say, Dean, Melanie’s pregnant, we’re going to have a baby, and how floored he’d been at Dean’s inarticulate joy. Dean loves this bump of a child, is as gallant and adoring of Mel now as he is silent and prickly with Sam.
The baby is, Sam thinks, maybe the only thing holding them all together right now. Pretty heavy burden for a fetus, one still three months from arriving.
He looks again at Dean, sees his fingers tapping restlessly on his carelessly splayed thighs. He’s as anxious as Sam to get home again, see with his own eyes that she’s okay after a week on her own, that the bump is fine. Doesn’t matter they’ve talked to her on the phone every day. Dean, like Sam, wants to be sure.
“She’s okay,” Sam says softly. “Stop worrying.”
“Not worried,” Dean mutters. His hands stop moving, clasped tightly together. “Whatever.”
He’s got no one to blame for this frostiness but himself. How long would he have gone on prevaricating, had it not been for Mel’s pregnancy? Just a hunting trip, honey. Nah, didn’t bag much. This? Yeah, tripped on a log when I went to take a whiz in the middle of the night. Clumsy, yeah, I’ll be more careful next time.
But the baby’s changed all that. And it would have been bad enough, facing Mel’s disbelief, hurt, shock, anger, without feeling the bake of Dean’s righteous glower while he stumblingly explained the truth. The truth: Melanie, the babies in our family aren’t safe. Maybe this one will be different, but I wasn’t, and this is my child, our child, mixed blood I guess you’d say, and we have to be careful.
He’s gone from being terrified she’d want a divorce, to wondering if that wasn’t what they needed after all. Because under the anger is hurt, hurt that he hadn’t told her the truth until circumstances forced him into it, hurt that he hadn’t trusted her with it. And she’s right, because he hadn’t. He hasn’t trusted anyone, not in a long time, not with Dean to watch out for and then Mel, playing his game of normalcy and nine-to-five and baseball leagues and hockey and dinner at seven. Hasn’t trusted himself not to fuck things up.
Dean and Mel are on one side, and Sam is on the other, and the baby is somewhere between them. The baby that could have the same abilities Sam has, the ones he’s fought tooth and nail for two years now, done his best to ignore and sublimate and outright refuse. Until the visions are too sharp for him to deny, until one or another sends him on a trip like the one they’re returning from now, ice and blood and the white gleam of snow on cold metal.
They’ve saved a little town from a creature that ate their children, and now they’re going home to salvage what they can. What he can. And he thinks, dully, that he’s the only one who’s been fooled by this nice, comfy, normal existence. Dean’s been practicing, Dean’s the one who took the killing shot, Dean and his diligence at the dojo, the rigorous practice at the shooting range, the distance he now feels with his classmates.
Dean is DEAN, more and more, and Sam isn’t sure he can take that.
The snow backs off a little inside the city, and by the time they hit their street it’s down to scattered flakes, melting fast on the windshield.
“That was good work,” Sam says slowly. “You know that, right? You were great out there. A natural.”
Dean says nothing, lips twitching once but never opening.
“Happy birthday,” Sam whispers.
There are no lights on the first floor of the house. Just the bedroom upstairs, window glowing golden in the darkness. Sam parks the Expedition in the drive, barely stopping before Dean is climbing out, wordless and accusing in that heavy silence.
Sam sits for a moment, gathering himself, and later he thinks that that’s why it hit him then, and not before. When his guard came down, almost too late. Smoke fills his nostrils, invisible unreal odor, and his head snaps back, bouncing off the headrest.
There’s a scream, no no NOOO, and hands on his arms, Dean’s urgent voice gone cracked and high, as if his new adolescent deepness was reversed, making him sound like a boy again.
“Sam? SAM?”
Sam blinks tears from his eyes and looks at Dean’s snow-white face. The driver’s-side door is open, and he’s half-out of the truck, leaning heavily into Dean’s strong grasp.
“Mel,” Sam gasps, and slings himself forward. “Find Mel.”
The sullen look is gone from Dean’s face: he looks painfully young, shocked, slip-sliding in Sam’s wake as he lumbers into the house. “MELANIE!” he bellows. There is no reply.
He thunders up the stairs, Dean at his heels. The bedroom door is open, the bedroom he shares with his wife, and he sobs, “Mel,” and skids to a halt and sees her, sees the dark form by the bed silhouetted by the lamplight, dark and man-shaped and turning glowing yellow eyes in his direction.
“Call it a pre-emptive strike,” the demon whispers, while Sam’s wife screams and slides up the wall like a bizarrely inverted sailor slewing with the angle of a ship caught in high seas.
“NO,” Sam screams, and Dean draws a breath behind him, warbles “Mom” in a high, terrible voice.
“I don’t fucking think so,” says a voice behind them both, and there is the flash of light, the powerful discharge of a weapon at close range. The yellow-eyed thing by the bed collapses into black, a cloud of murky evil like a brief, polluted blizzard, and vanishes, and Mel thuds onto the bed, already curled around her curving belly.
Her uncut belly, no blood, Sam’s frantic questing hands find nothing but smooth taut skin, and he gathers her up in his arms, hears her sudden whoop of terror.
Dean sags onto the bed next to them, but although his hand is touching them, clinging to Sam’s jacket, his eyes are fixed not on his sister-in-law, but the door to the bedroom.
Sam looks, and swallows.
Standing there with the shotgun loose and easy in his grip, a crooked, shaky smile on his lips.
“Hello, boys,” John Winchester says softly.
~~~~~~~~~~