My Fic: Long Distance Call (SPN, Gen)
Three years after Mary dies, John rents a small apartment in a multiplex. Sam is not old enough for John to stay away overnight but John makes liberal use of his landlady’s kind heart and offers of babysitting to fit in as much research and learning as he can between day jobs. When their Dad stays out late they both sleep on the landlady's couch, curled together under a blanket until John quietly takes them back upstairs. The landlady is nice and gives them Coca-Cola and cookies. She sleeps in her recliner in the living room with the TV flickering in the dark until John returns.
In the very late evenings, the TV plays old shows and for some reason Sammy is fascinated by them. That night, the show is about a boy who is very close to his grandmother. After she dies, he starts talking to her on a toy phone. The boy’s father is horrified when he realizes that the dead grandmother is talking to her grandson - and that she wants her grandson to join her in death. Dean cannot remember clearly how it ends - he started drowsing after the last commercial break, but he remembers the father running in from the backyard...something about the boy having drowned. The father grabs the toy phone and begs his mother not to take his son.
A few days later as their Dad is downstairs in the laundry room with the laundry, Dean is watching Sammy. The door is latched but open slightly so he can call out for Dad if something goes wrong. They don’t have a TV so Dean spends his time looking out the window and counting cars. He hears Sammy talking softly in the kitchen and looks up to see him standing on a chair talking on the yellow wall-phone. Dean didn’t hear it ring and when he asks who called, Sam looks scared and hangs up and won’t say.
This repeats over several days - the phone never rings, Sam's voice is too low to be overheard and he won’t talk about the phone calls. Dean once grabbed the phone from Sam (who started wailing and that brought Dad running).There was no sound at the other end. It takes a few more days (and bribes of extra cookies that Dean secretly stashes from their daily landlady visits) for Dean to get Sam to tell: he is talking to their mother. Their dead mother. And she is, according to three year old Sam, talking back to him.
Dean freaks and yells at Sammy, who again starts crying. This time Dad is not satisfied with Dean's explanation (‘he stubbed his toe’ can only be used so many times). But for some reason Dean cannot find the words to tell his dad: Sammy's talking to our Mom on the phone but I don’t think it’s Mom.....he doesn’t know what it is on the other end of the phone - his world does not have the words for what he fears it may be. He is seven and he knows that Santa is real - just that he doesn't come to see them every year. The Easter Bunny never stops at their house either - but not because he doesn’t exist. And he knows that something scary happened to his Mom and their Dad won’t talk about it. But it has them running and it has Dad angry and sometimes his Dad drinks a lot and cries.
So no, he doesn’t know if this is real, but Sam seems to think it is and Dean listens carefully when Sammy repeats the conversations and hears echoes of things his mother said or things she did when Dean was little. And Dean is not certain if these are things that he has told Sam and Sam is just remembering or whether it really is their dead mother talking to Sam on the phone. But he does know this: he is afraid his mother wants to take Sammy away with her because she must be very lonely where she is. Just as he knows that it is his own fault that his mother won’t talk to him and that hurts him more than his fear. But in the end, the fear wins out and while he knows it is wrong to want to keep Sammy more than he wants to let him go to their Mom, he smashes the ugly, yellow phone anyway. They have to move then because, as kind as the landlady is, they don’t have the money to pay for both the phone and the wall (it was so very hard to pull it away from the wall, but he stood on the chair and then used his weight to pull on the phone and it came down, but so did part of the wall). And even if his Dad is angry (more at Dean’s refusal to explain why he broke the phone than him actually breaking the phone, at least that’s what Dad keeps saying) it is not like Dean has much of a choice: the real reason Dean can never tell his Dad that Mommy was talking to Sam and wanted to take Sammy home with her is his other fear: that perhaps his Dad would have said yes. And Dean cannot bear the thought of being left behind.
Every 4th of July the Sci-Fi channel has a Twilight Zone marathon. This year's marathon gave me a story idea. It is based on this episode