SPN Fic: Rosary
Title: Rosary
Characters: Lisa, Dean, Ben
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG-13, for a dash of language and the warning below.
Word-count: 2559
Spoilers: Set in the missing year between S5 and S6; no real spoilers, but you'd need to have finished S5.
WARNING: Implied suicidal ideation.
Summary: It's not like she thought everything was normal again. She just wasn't expecting -- this.
Notes: A happy birthday to the lovely nwspaprtaxis!
She's vacuuming the floor when she finds it.
It's an afternoon in early September, the time of year when she's still determined to act like a responsible parent and homeowner - and today that means finally paying attention to the fine gray tint the carpets are picking up and the sticky patches on the kitchen floor where people have spilled their juice without bothering to wipe it up. Once she's installed Dean in the kitchen with a mop, a bucket, and careful instructions, she drags out the new vacuum cleaner it's taken her just three months to learn how to hate, and attacks the upstairs floors. Swearing at the stupid machine and jutting her hip into the handle to shove it across the carpet (see if she takes her dad's advice on vacuum cleaners again: Consumer Reports or no Consumer Reports, the thing still weighs about half a ton and barely sucks up the top layer of lint), she pushes underneath the bed, and hears the dull clunk.
When she switches off the vacuum cleaner, she can make out a gentle sloshing noise, and bemused annoyance ratchets up a notch into unease. Praying it's not a bottle of liquor she's about to find stashed under his side of the bed, she drops to her knees.
A Mason jar full of water lies on its side just under the bed, luminous drops leaking around the rim and dripping silently into the pale fibers beneath, already marking a dark quarter-sized spot on the dusty carpet. There's a string of beads swaying back and forth on the miniature waves inside the jar - and she feels the worry replaced by a baffled relief, because even if keeping holy water stowed under the bed isn't normal, at least she isn't looking at AA meetings in the near future. She's about to laugh at herself when she sees the distorted shape through the glass. The object ripples as the water continues to splash, beads shifting on the tide, but she doesn't need a clear look to recognize it.
Her first thought is that it's a damn good thing Ben is still in school, because what's going to happen next is just the latest in the long line of things she never wanted him to see. The next thought is he promised - and at some point, she is going to have to stop letting him break his word.
Dean's back is to her when she steps carefully down the stairs and up to the kitchen doorway. He's bent over the sink, shoulders working under the loose gray T-shirt as he wrings out the mop, whipping the floppy fibers the way a dog shakes itself after rolling in a puddle. She can't see his face, but his body is intent on the task, bending into the work as though he's got nothing to do but make sure that mop is perfectly wrung, ready to clean the floor inch by inch until it's worn smooth as glass. She doesn't want to interrupt his speechless concentration - she knows by now how that can be a bad idea - so she just stands there, waiting until he finally turns around.
She doesn't miss the quick 'o' of his mouth, or the way he shifts his grip on the mop so it's directed slightly outward in a subtle defensive move he can't seem to turn off. He blushes as he lets the tool fall awkwardly to his side, shifts from one bare foot to the other. The island's between them, so he can't see what she's holding, but she can tell from the quick lowering of his brows he knows something's wrong.
He doesn't say anything, though. Dean doesn't, as a rule. Not these days.
She lifts it - surprised, still, at how heavy it really is - and places it in the middle of the countertop, dark and ugly and unmistakable next to the sunny pink spray bottle of Mountain Berry Windex. It stares up at the two of them, silent and obscene. Watching his mouth harden and his eyes retreat on themselves, she feels the sickness in her gut deepen, fear and rage mixing together like chemicals you're meant to keep separate. She thinks she might choke on the fumes.
“When were you going to mention that?” she hears herself asking. It's as good a place as any to start, right in the middle of the laundry list of wrong they've got laid out in front of them. The shrug of his shoulders is the only answer she needs. Of course he wasn't going to say anything.
“I thought we agreed, Dean. The guns stay outside. They stay locked up.” He's staring at the Windex bottle like somebody's written the answer to life in the middle of the hazard warnings. “They don't go under the bed,” she goes on, words slow and simple as though she's talking to a child, “where they could go off. Where Ben could find them.”
She refuses to consider the possibility he might decide to use the thing. And as for the thought that the gun might be for him, not for the monsters - nope, not touching that one with safety gloves and a hazmat suit.
The tiny, uncontrollable leap of his Adam's apple is the only indication he's even hearing anything she says. It's as though somebody's pressed the pause button, caught him on hold in the moment. If the other times it's happened are any indication, he needs someone else to push play for him. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and reaches.
“Why?”
The word hangs in the air, inadequate in the broken sunlight. It's not thawing the carbonite. Dean's still a mannequin in gym pants, holding the mop loosely at his side as he stares mutely at the countertop, his eyes wide and fixed and empty. If she'd just come in, she might think he was lost in an exceptionally boring daydream, for all the emotion that's registering on his face.
She opts for direct orders. Those seem to work on Dean. She's learning, slowly.
“Answer me, Dean.”
He bites his lip, says tonelessly, “I'm sorry.”
She shakes her head impatiently. “Never mind. Just answer the question. Why do you have a gun hidden under the bed?”
“I was trying to keep you safe,” he says, a shade of defensiveness creeping into his voice.
“Safe,” she repeats, tasting the sarcasm thick and bitter around the word. “By keeping a loaded firearm under my bed while I slept?”
“I'm sorry,” he says, slipping back out of sight behind the empty eyes. He's the mop man again, silent and rapt and wrung out.
She's said all along she isn't up to this. She's lost, stumbling knee-deep through the shocking, crude reality of it, sick to her stomach with saying things every day that nobody's supposed to have to say. Semester of Psych 101, way too much angst-ridden fiction when she was about sixteen, and with that she's supposed to guess at the right way to keep the balance between life and death steady for a guy who can't even breathe for himself some mornings? She can feel the false steps cluttered around her like land mines planted in the smooth, unassuming kitchen floor, just waiting for her stupid feet to dash in and brush up against them.
Somebody must have an answer to all of this: procedures and tests and assurances written out in neat print in some book. They could pull it out and read off the magic words, take control and push all the wrecked pieces back into place again, like some sort of chiropractor for souls. But all she can do is watch Dean stand there and erase himself, and think how she just doesn't know. Because some days seem like real life, with stubborn vacuum cleaners and stripes of sunshine across the dish-rack - and then there's a sawed-off under her heel. Then she's picturing her kid with an accidental hole ripped through his head, and she's staring at an alien stranded in her kitchen, trapped so far from reality that she's not even sure they see the same spectrum in the sunlight slatting through the blinds.
Anyone who expects her to be able to handle this isn't just insane. Selfish bastard, actually, is the term that springs to mind.
She watches the selfish bastard shrink in on himself, clutching at her mop for dear life, and she wants to cry.
But Ben is her kid, and she gets ready to count, to tick off minutes until she gives up and makes the damn phone call she should have made months ago (she looked up the number one night soon after he came; it's written on an overfolded paper in her dresser drawer and by now she's probably got it memorized). She's bracing against the rush of guilt that's kept her back all this time, hating herself for it, when Dean finally licks his lips and takes a breath.
Then says nothing.
Lisa waits, recognizing the hesitation - that initial clipping of the mental sutures always clamping his mouth shut on whatever he has blocked up inside him. She knows it's a signal that there's something he needs to say and he's willing to try to say it, a silent request for patience as he works his way towards speech. It's as though he has to take it in steps - first making certain his lungs still work, then trying his mouth a few times to be sure it moves the way he needs it to - like stopping to rest on the way up the stairs. His hand clenches unconsciously on the mop handle, fingers settling into an absent-minded, impulsive rhythm as the lift and fall of his shoulders quickens.
“Just say it, Dean.”
He closes his eyes.
“It's just salt.”
She was prepared for another apology, for another piece of the huge mystery puzzle that's labeled Sam, May '10, even for excuses (though she's noticed Dean isn't much inclined to defend any of his actions these days). Not for salt, though, and she wonders for a minute if they've been having the same conversation.
“Excuse me?”
“The gun. No shells, just salt. It wouldn't hurt you or Ben.” His eyes open and find her, as though her face is the only thing in the kitchen that he can really see, the only sight he can let himself rest on without having to look away. “I didn't want to upset you,” he says carefully.
“Your way of not upsetting me is to leave a gun under the bed for me to find?” she asks, disbelieving. “Dean, you could have just said something.”
But even as she says it, she knows why he didn't. Because he's already asked too much of her, and he knows. Knows it as well as she does, and even if he needs everything she's offered so badly he can't afford to refuse it, there's no way in hell he's going to ask for anything more. So he hides what he can, sleepwalks his way through what he can't, and does his best to let her pretend he isn't there at all.
She knows the game, because for the past few weeks she's been playing along.
If she's not careful, she's going to get way too good at it. Good enough to walk blind through her whole life; good enough to watch him fade until there's nothing left but a papier-mâché man creeping noiselessly through her house, barefoot and hollow. Good enough to end up in a hospital some day with the number still flaking to pieces in her pocket.
Time to find a new game before they both get too tired to try.
She takes a deep breath, feeling her naked toes nudge at the edge of the buried mines. Then, hell with it all, she steps forward to the cluttered countertop.
“Show me.”
It takes her reaching out and grabbing him before he responds. It takes her holding him by the wrist and leading him to the counter, clearing the dust rags and Mr. Clean bottles away to make room for the little red cylinders that tumble out when he finally cracks the gun in half with gradually steadying hands. It takes a hundred separate patient questions, what and how and who and why, which he answers slowly in a voice that sounds less and less like a pre-recorded message, his face solemn with concentration as he spills salt into her waiting palm. It takes an hour of carefully unloading and disassembling the weapon, her fingers clumsy and uncertain despite his calm instructions, a heap of greasy paper towels growing on the countertop beside the can of Pledge.
When it's whole again in her hands, heavy and warm, all he says is, “Please.”
And she nods, because it's all he needs to say.
Together they climb the stairs, crouch beside the bed to tuck the gun back into the shadows beside the still water, and brush the trailing covers back into place. They're still kneeling there on the carpet, breathing in the sunbaked dust the stupid vacuum never had a prayer of cleaning away, when Ben's bus pulls up outside.
Straightening up from Dean's slightly dampened shoulder, she wipes salt from her face with a greasy hand, and glances at Dean's own black-streaked fingers, folded loosely across the tops of his knees.
“Wash up for dinner?” she suggests, and he follows her gaze.
“All right,” he agrees, scrubbing idly at the dark stains.
“What do you say to pizza?”
“Mostly nothing. I prefer to eat it.”
“Good. So do I.”
The land mines are still out there, of course - she's not fool enough to think anything else, even as she watches the stubborn grease rinse down the drain and Dean's exhaustion-tinged eyes crinkle into a half-smile. One of these days, she's going to stumble over one of them, and, frankly, she's got no clue whether they'll make it out in one piece when that happens. But they've managed to skirt around them for today, and Lisa knows neither of them can ask for any more than that.
For now, she can order pizza and listen to Ben complaining about his science project and direct Dean as he stows the scattered cleaning supplies in the cupboard above the refrigerator. She can watch the two of them venture out into the tiny front lawn after supper's over, armed with a glass jar and Ben's old plastic flashlight and a pair of special caterpillar-catching gloves made out of sandwich bags (because both of them, for reasons she can't quite understand, turn out to be unaccountably squeamish at the idea of touching caterpillars with their bare hands). She can hear them laughing when one half of the two-man hunting party trips over a slippery garden hose, and for a fleeting moment she can't distinguish Dean's voice from Ben's.
They're still stumbling blind through a minefield that could be who knows how long, but right now she doesn't care. She's just glad that they're blundering together.
She doesn't want to ask for anything more.