SPN fic: Concerning Winchesters
Genre: all over the map
Characters: Dean, Sam
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,200
Summary: Childhood to old age - a collection of random snippets from the Winchesters' lives. Things I've jotted down that will not otherwise see the light of day.
Concerning Winchesters
“You made a promise,” Sam said, cross-legged on the cot in Bobby’s panic room. As it turned out, Detox 2.0 was even more wacky fun than the first go-round. “A couple years ago, remember?”
In the doorway, Dean paused and turned, one hand on the heavy handle and the other on the frame.
“You promised you’d put me down if I ever became something I wasn’t.”
“Why you gotta keep bringing that up?” Dean sighed. “You were drunk. And weepy. The whole thing was just embarrassing.”
“And that voicemail,” Sam went on tonelessly.
That earned him a guarded: “What about it?”
“For a second, in the church, I thought you were finally going to do it.”
“What, kill you?” Dean demanded.
Confessions were meant to be whispered, not shouted. Very quietly, Sam said, “I hoped you would.”
Dean’s eyes fixed coldly on Bobby’s pinup poster. “Forget it, Sam,” he said, twisting away. “You get to live with this now, just like the rest of us.”
He dragged the door shut behind him.
::
Dean went to hell. Sam was the one who never came back.
::
Robert Steven Singer III never had children himself, but he was Uncle Bobby twice over, which he figured ought to count for something.
“Easy now, honey,” he said soothingly, pushing the little girl’s blond curls out of her face. “Let me see what we got here.”
The kid’s crying slowed to choked, angry hiccups, and she moved her hands away from her knee. A two-inch gash was oozing beads of dark blood, and there was dirt and gravel smeared and ground into it.
Bobby sighed. “Your daddy’s going to kill me.”
He could hear it already: What was she doing in the salvage yard, man? We said no Becky in the salvage yard-it’s a jungle of freaking stitches waiting to happen! Jesus, Bobby, weren’t you watching her?
“Don’t touch it,” Becky whined, curling in on herself again. Bobby knelt in the gravel next to her and carefully slid one arm behind her knees and the other around her back. She clung instinctively, and with an effort he got to his feet. Damn, his back wasn’t what it used to be.
In the house, he sat her down on the kitchen counter next to the sink, and he pulled down a First Aid kit. She was going to need stitches and a tetanus shot, but first things first. “We’re going to clean this up a little bit.”
Red-faced and still sniffling, Becky shook her head hard.
“Yeah, we are,” Bobby said firmly. He pried one of her hands loose from her shorts and set it on his shoulder. “Squeeze as hard as it hurts, okay?”
As it turned out, Dean didn’t kill him. But he didn’t give him that bottle of thanks-for-babysitting Maker’s Mark, either.
::
Dean’s daughter never understood why he used to press two fingers to her forehead when he told her, “Go to sleep, kiddo.” Or why he chuckled when he did it.
::
Only once in their five year road trip did Sam and Dean have to choose between sharing a bed and sleeping in the car. They picked the option with air conditioning, and they spent a half hour shoving and kicking and yanking at the blankets. They were big guys; there wasn’t really a way to fit without somebody’s elbow in somebody’s ribs.
They were almost settled when Sam realized he’d ended up on the right side, and if he slept like he was used to, he’d roll onto the carpet. “Dude. Why do you get the left side?”
“Because,” Dean groaned, eyes closed, “I’m the driver.”
::
To the great consternation of the universe at large, the woman Dean married was a former debutante and Kappa Delta whose family home was a Garden District mansion. Maria’s daddy was rich, her mama was good-looking, and her grandma had three divorces and won them all.
It kind of surprised Dean too, that foreign country his wife grew up in. So he never stopped calling her “princess” and “your worshipfulness” and other things that walked the line between teasing and scathing. In return she called him a scruffy-looking nerf herder, and Sam jumped in with the “Who’s scruffy-looking?” if he got the chance.
One night Dean told her that if she couldn’t handle the hunt, she should just run back to daddy and designer labels, princess.
Her lip curled, and she shot back, “And leave you with the mortgage, my little househusband?”
Dean stormed out to the Impala, and Sam spent the next hour helping Maria with the dishes and pretending not to notice she was crying. Eventually he tugged the dishrag out of her hands and said, “You know why he says that crap, don’t you?”
She sighed, leaning back against the counter. “The same reason he used to call you ‘college boy.’”
::
“This tastes like ass,” Sam said, frowning at the limp lettuce of his burger.
Grumpy and sleep-deprived, Dean rolled his eyes on the other side of the table. “Like you know what ass tastes like.”
Sam raised an eyebrow and made a moue. “I was drunk and missed.”
::
“Tell you a story, Sammy,” Meg breathed in his ear. “Once upon a time, hellhounds tore your brother to shreds.”
“Get off me.”
“Hush. They tore him to ribbons and dragged him down to serve his time. And we hacked and burned and made him scream until he liked it, and then we made him one of us.”
“Bitch.”
“He was a prodigy with a straight razor. Came a time we could give him anyone, and he’d break them and laugh about it after.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Doubt it. He’d have gutted you, too, you know. God, if we’d had you to put in front him?” And she laughed, trailing a finger down his cheek. “I could have sold tickets.”
She was right; he didn’t kill her. He did something worse.
::
“Your father loved you.”
It was rock solid true. Years later, Dean realized it was also a lame fucking excuse.
::
After the siren, Sam kind of figured he should keep his mouth shut. When you’ve coughed up the most private, twisted, damning thing you could think of, just talking about it might dredge up even uglier things from cesspits you didn’t know were in you.
Things like, “You dumped this guilt on me and then left me alone, and sometimes I want to take a shovel to your smug face.”
“You’ve always been standing between me and my way out.”
“You made me live without you, and now you want me to be the little brother you left? Fuck you.”
Besides, it was the siren talking.
::
Authority figures never cared for Dean Winchester. The mouth was too smart, the posture too aggressive, and the smirk was outright offensive. Female cops in particular tended to take one look at him and assume he belonged in handcuffs (for one reason or another). He was also a gluttonous fornicator with a penchant for lying, cheating, and stealing. He broke the fun commandments and ignored all the rest.
Not long before the apocalypse, an angel fell for him. Funny ole world, innit?
::
The metal was cool under his hands, and next to him Ruby’s eyes burned with pride. Sam slammed the trunk shut with a thunderous rumble, but the screaming woman in scrubs couldn’t be muted. “No!” her voice billowed up and filled the air around him, loud enough to pop his eardrums. “Please, no. Sam!” And he was on his knees, fingers clamped over his ears and blood seeping in rivulets over his knuckles.
It was an old nightmare.
“Parrain.” Sam’s niece was four and frightened, and her voice was clearer than the screams. The insistent tug at his wrist woke him fully. “Parrain!”
Lightning flashed through the windows, and Sam yanked his arm away. “Becky.” She shouldn’t touch him, he thought wildly. Her tiny fingers would come away bloody.
“The thunder,” she murmured.
“It’s okay,” he said automatically. “It can’t hurt you, sweetheart.”
Dean’s little girl had enormous hazel eyes, and they looked at Sam like he’d never done anything less than noble in his life. “Please, can I stay in here?”
He gave her a hand into bed, and she tucked herself under his arm with perfect trust.
::
The summer of 1988, Sam talked all way from Oxford, Mississippi to the Alabama border. When are we going to get there? Can we stop for candy? What’s in that book? Dad, Dean’s touching me. Dad. Dad. Daaaad.
Just outside of Meridian, Dean pulled out the duct tape. Rip, tear, slap, and-
“Mmmrf!” Sammy wailed.
“I fixed him,” Dean announced.
::
Bobby was twelve hours in the ground when Dean lost it.
He was out in Bobby’s garage at three in the morning, work light hooked up and blazing harshly. He didn’t put any dents in the trunk of the Charger, but he did start tearing down rows of wrenches and power tools. Metal on concrete and metal on metal, crash, slam, screech -
Sam heard and came running. “Whoa, Dean, what the hell?”
“His whole life,” Dean panted, whipping a hammer through a window with a crash of glass, “it’s freaks and evil and the fucking apocalypse, and a drunk driver is what gets him? Some idiot teenager who can’t hold her Natty Lite?”
“Dean, calm down."
Wrong thing to say. Dean spun on his heel and threw a messy punch at Sam. But Sam was already in his space, catching it on the shoulder and powering through it. He grabbed Dean in a grappler’s hold, pinning his arms to his sides.
“What the fuck is that, Sam?” Dean said, fingers closing viselike around Sam’s arms. “I don’t even-I don’t even…”
“I know, man. I know.” Sam held steady. Let Dean squeeze as hard as it hurt.
::
“Killed your mother-your mother gone-your mother on the ceiling-your mother, your mother, your mother.” When John Winchester did best by his kids, it was in memory of how Mary lived and in brief forgetfulness of how she died. Naturally this trend managed to escape that single-minded bastard for twenty-two years.
He cottoned on right there at the end, though. Much good it did them all.
::
Dean’s wife hid a ruined shirt in a corner of her closet, and every now and then she brought it out and ran her thumb over its buttons like each one was a Medal of Honor. It was blue striped cotton, soft with use, and the bullet hole was stitched messily closed. No amount of Tide could erase the purple-brown spread of blood.
“You kept Sam’s fucked-up shirt?” Dean said when he found it, giving her an odd look.
“It’s a… reminder,” Maria said, frowning at the wrongness of the word she’d settled for.
“Yeah,” he said, troubled. “Okay.”
The shapeshifter had been aiming for her, and Sam had made a barrier of his body. Dean never could make peace with anyone other than him taking a bullet for his family.
A few years later, Maria learned what it felt like to kill a human being. It wasn’t wrong, she told herself. Grace Wandell’s dead daddy didn’t give her the right to come after Sam with cable ties, knives, and rohypnol. Still, it was a long time before Maria could stop dreaming of the kick of the pistol in her hands or the way Grace fell to her knees and smiled in bemusement.
When the nightmares stopped, Maria snipped the buttons off the blue shirt and gave them to her daughter to decorate a picture frame. The usable bits of the fucked-up reminder were cut up for rags; the rest was pitched. She didn’t need it anymore. Love, just like blood, will always stain.
::
“You believe in monsters?” the detective said scathingly.
Sam understood her suspicion, given the weird questions he’d been asking about maimed bodies and claw marks. Plus, the way he heard it, she’d been working homicide a little longer than the department considered healthy. People like that saw enough to make paranoia perfectly reasonable.
So he looked past the gun she held in his face, and he met her narrowed eyes. “Don’t you?”
::
It was freaks and outcasts who saved the world. It was scared boys and men with bloody hands.
“Suck on that, Satan,” Dean liked to say.
::
In his later years, Dean’s left shoulder stiffened up like a bitch, and hearing loss set in early due to all the mullet rock and gunfire. He’d fractured ribs so often that his bones spent half the year as a weathervane. Gray started in his beard at the chin, then turned his hair salt and pepper.
Sam, the lucky bastard, got the distinguished wings at his temples. He also got a bad back and the kind of arthritis in his hands that made doctors wince in sympathy. His sight went faster than Dean’s, and in the last few years his slouch leaned toward a stoop.
“We should’ve died young and left hot-ass corpses,” Dean grumbled every now and then.
In the chair on the porch next to him, Sam always smiled and said, “Shut up.”
Characters: Dean, Sam
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,200
Summary: Childhood to old age - a collection of random snippets from the Winchesters' lives. Things I've jotted down that will not otherwise see the light of day.
Concerning Winchesters
“You made a promise,” Sam said, cross-legged on the cot in Bobby’s panic room. As it turned out, Detox 2.0 was even more wacky fun than the first go-round. “A couple years ago, remember?”
In the doorway, Dean paused and turned, one hand on the heavy handle and the other on the frame.
“You promised you’d put me down if I ever became something I wasn’t.”
“Why you gotta keep bringing that up?” Dean sighed. “You were drunk. And weepy. The whole thing was just embarrassing.”
“And that voicemail,” Sam went on tonelessly.
That earned him a guarded: “What about it?”
“For a second, in the church, I thought you were finally going to do it.”
“What, kill you?” Dean demanded.
Confessions were meant to be whispered, not shouted. Very quietly, Sam said, “I hoped you would.”
Dean’s eyes fixed coldly on Bobby’s pinup poster. “Forget it, Sam,” he said, twisting away. “You get to live with this now, just like the rest of us.”
He dragged the door shut behind him.
::
Dean went to hell. Sam was the one who never came back.
::
Robert Steven Singer III never had children himself, but he was Uncle Bobby twice over, which he figured ought to count for something.
“Easy now, honey,” he said soothingly, pushing the little girl’s blond curls out of her face. “Let me see what we got here.”
The kid’s crying slowed to choked, angry hiccups, and she moved her hands away from her knee. A two-inch gash was oozing beads of dark blood, and there was dirt and gravel smeared and ground into it.
Bobby sighed. “Your daddy’s going to kill me.”
He could hear it already: What was she doing in the salvage yard, man? We said no Becky in the salvage yard-it’s a jungle of freaking stitches waiting to happen! Jesus, Bobby, weren’t you watching her?
“Don’t touch it,” Becky whined, curling in on herself again. Bobby knelt in the gravel next to her and carefully slid one arm behind her knees and the other around her back. She clung instinctively, and with an effort he got to his feet. Damn, his back wasn’t what it used to be.
In the house, he sat her down on the kitchen counter next to the sink, and he pulled down a First Aid kit. She was going to need stitches and a tetanus shot, but first things first. “We’re going to clean this up a little bit.”
Red-faced and still sniffling, Becky shook her head hard.
“Yeah, we are,” Bobby said firmly. He pried one of her hands loose from her shorts and set it on his shoulder. “Squeeze as hard as it hurts, okay?”
As it turned out, Dean didn’t kill him. But he didn’t give him that bottle of thanks-for-babysitting Maker’s Mark, either.
::
Dean’s daughter never understood why he used to press two fingers to her forehead when he told her, “Go to sleep, kiddo.” Or why he chuckled when he did it.
::
Only once in their five year road trip did Sam and Dean have to choose between sharing a bed and sleeping in the car. They picked the option with air conditioning, and they spent a half hour shoving and kicking and yanking at the blankets. They were big guys; there wasn’t really a way to fit without somebody’s elbow in somebody’s ribs.
They were almost settled when Sam realized he’d ended up on the right side, and if he slept like he was used to, he’d roll onto the carpet. “Dude. Why do you get the left side?”
“Because,” Dean groaned, eyes closed, “I’m the driver.”
::
To the great consternation of the universe at large, the woman Dean married was a former debutante and Kappa Delta whose family home was a Garden District mansion. Maria’s daddy was rich, her mama was good-looking, and her grandma had three divorces and won them all.
It kind of surprised Dean too, that foreign country his wife grew up in. So he never stopped calling her “princess” and “your worshipfulness” and other things that walked the line between teasing and scathing. In return she called him a scruffy-looking nerf herder, and Sam jumped in with the “Who’s scruffy-looking?” if he got the chance.
One night Dean told her that if she couldn’t handle the hunt, she should just run back to daddy and designer labels, princess.
Her lip curled, and she shot back, “And leave you with the mortgage, my little househusband?”
Dean stormed out to the Impala, and Sam spent the next hour helping Maria with the dishes and pretending not to notice she was crying. Eventually he tugged the dishrag out of her hands and said, “You know why he says that crap, don’t you?”
She sighed, leaning back against the counter. “The same reason he used to call you ‘college boy.’”
::
“This tastes like ass,” Sam said, frowning at the limp lettuce of his burger.
Grumpy and sleep-deprived, Dean rolled his eyes on the other side of the table. “Like you know what ass tastes like.”
Sam raised an eyebrow and made a moue. “I was drunk and missed.”
::
“Tell you a story, Sammy,” Meg breathed in his ear. “Once upon a time, hellhounds tore your brother to shreds.”
“Get off me.”
“Hush. They tore him to ribbons and dragged him down to serve his time. And we hacked and burned and made him scream until he liked it, and then we made him one of us.”
“Bitch.”
“He was a prodigy with a straight razor. Came a time we could give him anyone, and he’d break them and laugh about it after.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Doubt it. He’d have gutted you, too, you know. God, if we’d had you to put in front him?” And she laughed, trailing a finger down his cheek. “I could have sold tickets.”
She was right; he didn’t kill her. He did something worse.
::
“Your father loved you.”
It was rock solid true. Years later, Dean realized it was also a lame fucking excuse.
::
After the siren, Sam kind of figured he should keep his mouth shut. When you’ve coughed up the most private, twisted, damning thing you could think of, just talking about it might dredge up even uglier things from cesspits you didn’t know were in you.
Things like, “You dumped this guilt on me and then left me alone, and sometimes I want to take a shovel to your smug face.”
“You’ve always been standing between me and my way out.”
“You made me live without you, and now you want me to be the little brother you left? Fuck you.”
Besides, it was the siren talking.
::
Authority figures never cared for Dean Winchester. The mouth was too smart, the posture too aggressive, and the smirk was outright offensive. Female cops in particular tended to take one look at him and assume he belonged in handcuffs (for one reason or another). He was also a gluttonous fornicator with a penchant for lying, cheating, and stealing. He broke the fun commandments and ignored all the rest.
Not long before the apocalypse, an angel fell for him. Funny ole world, innit?
::
The metal was cool under his hands, and next to him Ruby’s eyes burned with pride. Sam slammed the trunk shut with a thunderous rumble, but the screaming woman in scrubs couldn’t be muted. “No!” her voice billowed up and filled the air around him, loud enough to pop his eardrums. “Please, no. Sam!” And he was on his knees, fingers clamped over his ears and blood seeping in rivulets over his knuckles.
It was an old nightmare.
“Parrain.” Sam’s niece was four and frightened, and her voice was clearer than the screams. The insistent tug at his wrist woke him fully. “Parrain!”
Lightning flashed through the windows, and Sam yanked his arm away. “Becky.” She shouldn’t touch him, he thought wildly. Her tiny fingers would come away bloody.
“The thunder,” she murmured.
“It’s okay,” he said automatically. “It can’t hurt you, sweetheart.”
Dean’s little girl had enormous hazel eyes, and they looked at Sam like he’d never done anything less than noble in his life. “Please, can I stay in here?”
He gave her a hand into bed, and she tucked herself under his arm with perfect trust.
::
The summer of 1988, Sam talked all way from Oxford, Mississippi to the Alabama border. When are we going to get there? Can we stop for candy? What’s in that book? Dad, Dean’s touching me. Dad. Dad. Daaaad.
Just outside of Meridian, Dean pulled out the duct tape. Rip, tear, slap, and-
“Mmmrf!” Sammy wailed.
“I fixed him,” Dean announced.
::
Bobby was twelve hours in the ground when Dean lost it.
He was out in Bobby’s garage at three in the morning, work light hooked up and blazing harshly. He didn’t put any dents in the trunk of the Charger, but he did start tearing down rows of wrenches and power tools. Metal on concrete and metal on metal, crash, slam, screech -
Sam heard and came running. “Whoa, Dean, what the hell?”
“His whole life,” Dean panted, whipping a hammer through a window with a crash of glass, “it’s freaks and evil and the fucking apocalypse, and a drunk driver is what gets him? Some idiot teenager who can’t hold her Natty Lite?”
“Dean, calm down."
Wrong thing to say. Dean spun on his heel and threw a messy punch at Sam. But Sam was already in his space, catching it on the shoulder and powering through it. He grabbed Dean in a grappler’s hold, pinning his arms to his sides.
“What the fuck is that, Sam?” Dean said, fingers closing viselike around Sam’s arms. “I don’t even-I don’t even…”
“I know, man. I know.” Sam held steady. Let Dean squeeze as hard as it hurt.
::
“Killed your mother-your mother gone-your mother on the ceiling-your mother, your mother, your mother.” When John Winchester did best by his kids, it was in memory of how Mary lived and in brief forgetfulness of how she died. Naturally this trend managed to escape that single-minded bastard for twenty-two years.
He cottoned on right there at the end, though. Much good it did them all.
::
Dean’s wife hid a ruined shirt in a corner of her closet, and every now and then she brought it out and ran her thumb over its buttons like each one was a Medal of Honor. It was blue striped cotton, soft with use, and the bullet hole was stitched messily closed. No amount of Tide could erase the purple-brown spread of blood.
“You kept Sam’s fucked-up shirt?” Dean said when he found it, giving her an odd look.
“It’s a… reminder,” Maria said, frowning at the wrongness of the word she’d settled for.
“Yeah,” he said, troubled. “Okay.”
The shapeshifter had been aiming for her, and Sam had made a barrier of his body. Dean never could make peace with anyone other than him taking a bullet for his family.
A few years later, Maria learned what it felt like to kill a human being. It wasn’t wrong, she told herself. Grace Wandell’s dead daddy didn’t give her the right to come after Sam with cable ties, knives, and rohypnol. Still, it was a long time before Maria could stop dreaming of the kick of the pistol in her hands or the way Grace fell to her knees and smiled in bemusement.
When the nightmares stopped, Maria snipped the buttons off the blue shirt and gave them to her daughter to decorate a picture frame. The usable bits of the fucked-up reminder were cut up for rags; the rest was pitched. She didn’t need it anymore. Love, just like blood, will always stain.
::
“You believe in monsters?” the detective said scathingly.
Sam understood her suspicion, given the weird questions he’d been asking about maimed bodies and claw marks. Plus, the way he heard it, she’d been working homicide a little longer than the department considered healthy. People like that saw enough to make paranoia perfectly reasonable.
So he looked past the gun she held in his face, and he met her narrowed eyes. “Don’t you?”
::
It was freaks and outcasts who saved the world. It was scared boys and men with bloody hands.
“Suck on that, Satan,” Dean liked to say.
::
In his later years, Dean’s left shoulder stiffened up like a bitch, and hearing loss set in early due to all the mullet rock and gunfire. He’d fractured ribs so often that his bones spent half the year as a weathervane. Gray started in his beard at the chin, then turned his hair salt and pepper.
Sam, the lucky bastard, got the distinguished wings at his temples. He also got a bad back and the kind of arthritis in his hands that made doctors wince in sympathy. His sight went faster than Dean’s, and in the last few years his slouch leaned toward a stoop.
“We should’ve died young and left hot-ass corpses,” Dean grumbled every now and then.
In the chair on the porch next to him, Sam always smiled and said, “Shut up.”