Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe
Title: Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe
Rating: PG-13
Words: 2,043
Spoilers: Up to the middle of season 4.
Warnings: Flashbacks, upset, children in significant distress, my inistence that Sam went through a Savage Garden phase.
Summary: De-aged!Dean, early season four, having a tough time of it. Just a little snip of a thing written for my dear nwspaprtaxis, who is awesome.
Neurotic author's notes: This is just a bit of fluffy (er, fluffy but also really not fluffy) brotherliness, to combat my boredom and season eight's Terrible Terrible Winchester Brother Relationship, which has reached a stage where I am honestly nostalgic for the days of season four. At any rate, the title is from the famous rhyme "Monday's Child," and yes, Dean's birthday (January 24, 1979--thanks, Wikipedia!) was, in fact, a Wednesday. The cut text comes from Alice in Wonderland.
Ruby has offered no help. The elusive angel shrugged apologetically. Bobby was stoical but stumped.
Sam, for his part, found it strangely easy to accept that this scrawny, shy five-year-old was really his brother. It still doesn’t make any sense, not really, not by any laws of nature or magic Sam knows, and not in his head, to consider that his brother was ever so small, so quiet, so diminutive, but somehow the idea that the child is his makes perfect
sense.
Dean seems to understand, distantly, that Sam is Sammy, and he asks for Dad precisely three times, in a soft, scared voice, and when Sam dodges the question each time Dean mistakes his discomfort for annoyance and shrinks away quickly. Sam feels bad about this, but he can’t tell Dean where is daddy is, so he’s almost grateful Dean stops asking.
They’re at Bobby’s, Sam and Bobby attempting to work out why Dean is five and how to fix it, Dean keeping to himself. His thumb keeps wandering to his mouth, and he keeps catching himself, wrenching it away, sitting on his hand, and Sam can just barely drudge up a distant memory: Dean, boy, get your thumb out of your mouth. Sam had never
sucked his thumb. He hadn’t needed to be told not to; he’d never had the urge.
Bobby is finding it hard to focus on his research, drawn to tiny, quiet Dean, who seems to recognize him distantly and gives him more than a few soft, shy smiles, which melt Bobby’s heart. Sam, who is still marveling at the fact that his brother is alive and was, until very recently, reasonably whole, is not so charmed. Dean’s silence, his skittishness, the way he watches Sam with his owl eyes, his tiny pink lip caught in his tiny baby teeth-it’s so unreal, and such an urgent, pounding pressure, like everything’s been these days, Figure it out, fix it right now, go, go, go.
Dean is afraid of: Bobby’s dogs, Bobby’s kitchen, Sam’s irritation, Bobby’s sarcasm as directed at Sam, Sam’s frustration as directed at Bobby. When Dean is afraid, he withdraws, folds himself up on Bobby’s couch, picks at his little shoes (Goodwill, just the one pair, because this is temporary), grabs at his ear.
“Doesn’t he ever talk?” Sam snaps from the kitchen table as Bobby pokes at the chicken he’s frying for them.
“He was always a shy boy,” says Bobby, and Sam is about to call bullshit when Bobby adds, “Well, not around you. Around you he was the little comedian. But you’re not you to him, Sam, you’re a stranger, and he’s five years old. Didn’t your daddy ever tell you the kid didn’t really talk right till he was almost seven?”
No, thinks Sam, he didn’t, because he never told me anything, and anyways, Dean always talked my ear off. Or at least let me talk his off.
Dean is made uncomfortable by the chicken, apparently, as he watches Sam eat it with wide eyes, swallowing convulsively, and picks only at his green beans. He sticks his fork in his mashed potatoes and twirls it around, then sets it down, picks it back up when he sees Sam watching. Maneuvers a single bite into his mouth, chews very deliberately. Sam is wondering absently where Dean’s bottomless stomach has gone, but even he doesn’t linger on that one long-Dean didn’t eat like that when they were small, only once he was in his late teens and making his own money, could take Sam out for hamburgers and French fries and milkshakes and then a movie with popcorn and coke and maybe more ice cream if Sam wanted, and sometimes the two of them would eat themselves absolutely sick, but that was all later. For now, Dean is poking at his food, his free hand grasping nervously at his napkin.
Bobby puts Dean to bed not long after, in the cramped little guest room that has belonged to the Winchester brothers since sometime in 1987, where Sam’s Savage Garden poster and periodic table are still pinned up above the bed by the window, where the ticket stubs from Dean’s first ever concert-Aerosmith’s Get a Grip tour, 1994-rest in the nightstand drawer, next to his learner’s permit and Sam’s, his last report card (December 1996), a collection of receipts and little meaningless notes, a cardstock Valentine given to Dean by someone named Jillian sometime in the early nineties, a long-abandoned insurance card for a John H. Kowalski, a rosary, the troubleshooting booklet that had come with the Macintosh John had bought Sam years and years ago, a wooden beaded bracelet Dean had worn around in high school, and a beat-to-hell, warped Polaroid of Sam and Dean in just their tattered shorts, standing on a dock by a lake somewhere in the northeast, probably nine and thirteen, grinning like lunatics. Dean snuggles down easily, and it’s only a few hours after that that Bobby bullies Sam into bed too.
Falling asleep under his periodic table is familiar, but the soft, shallow baby breathes by his side are not, and fill him with a kind of cavernous loneliness he can’t explain. He ends up opening the nightstand drawer, as quietly as he can, fingering the rosary and the bracelet, examining Dean’s final grades (two Bs, three Cs, one D, and he’d scraped those with a job and John dragging him along on just about every hunt, Christ), and he finally drops off to sleep with Dean Winchester’s South Dakota learner’s permit, dated August 1994, in his hands.
:::
Sam’s dreaming about a diner, someplace Pastor Jim used to take him sometimes, and it was mostly old people who went there, and he’s sitting at the counter between Pastor Jim and his dad, with Dean on Dad’s other side, and he and Dean are trying to poke each other behind Dad’s back, and Dean is asking if they can get Coca-Colas and Dad is saying absolutely not, and Sam is expertly poking Dean’s ribs and Dean lets out a miserable, wet snuffling sound that isn’t right at all, and Sam goes to poke his brother again and he’s gone, and so is Pastor Jim, and so is Dad, and he hollers “Daddy!” and nobody answers, and the waitress comes and he tries to ask her if she’s seen his family and she starts making those horrible wet noises too, and then the barstool tilts away from him and Sam’s body is jolting and he’s opening his eyes in the darkness of his and Dean’s room at Bobby’s, and the wet snuffling has turning into actual keening.
It takes him a second to remember-Bobby’s place, Dean, five-and then he’s grasping for the bedside light, squinting at the bed, where Dean is whipping his head back and forth across the pillow, making thin, miserable noises, his body immobile.
“Dean,” he says, and Dean’s answering whimper has him crossing to Dean’s bed, sitting down, trying to shake him awake. Dean jerks away from him, outright yelping this time, and when Sam tries again Dean lets out a strangled noise of such intense misery that Sam draws back, shocked.
Dean whimpers again, manages a high, desperate, “No,” and Sam isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do and then Dean is saying no again, and then this little tiny boy is saying “No, no, no-no-no please,” and just as Sam goes to shake him again he lets out a little truncated scream, and Sam, at this point terrified-because what had happened to scare Dean
this badly?-caught his shoulders just as he sat bolt upright.
“NO!” Dean hollers, twisting in Sam’s grip, and Dean is shaking fiercely in his arms, tears coming down his hot face, and then he’s flailing and kicking and saying “Don’t want to don’t want to don’t want to, Sam, Sam, Sam,” and Sam, at a complete loss, presses tiny Dean to his chest and clings as Dean writhes and sobs and then goes very still and lets
out a high whine. “Sammy?”
“I’m right here, Dean,” he says, and Dean starts crying again, harder than before, shaky and miserable and sobbing, and Sam keeps asking him what’s the matter and telling him it’s okay and Dean keeps sobbing and shaking and saying he doesn’t want to, and Sam’s mind is running wild with horrible possibilities, because Dean is so young, and what could have happened, and why is he so shaky, like his body can’t hold it in-
“Please don’ put me back,” Dean sobs, and then it slides into place in Sam’s brain with horrible clarity. Oh.
Oh.
Dean, you lying idiot, he thinks, pulling his tiny brother up against him, bending low, saying, “Dean, listen to me, okay, listen, you’re not going back. Never ever. Okay? You’re staying here, with me, with Sammy, okay? Dean? With Sammy.”
“I was so bad,” Dean whispers wetly, and Sam doesn’t know what that means but he holds Dean all the tighter.
“No, no, that was a dream,” he says, “that was a dream, and this is real, me right here, Bobby’s house, okay, Dean? You’re staying right here.”
“I was so bad,” Dean wails, “don’t wanna go, don’t wanna.”
“You’re not bad, you don’t have to,” says Sam, but Dean is shaking again, sobs bubbling up from someplace deep inside him, shaking his head and crying in earnest.
“I don’t-I didn’t-it hurted, again and again, I didn’t-I don’t-why-Sammy-Daddy-Daddy! Daddy!”
Dean is howling now, and Sam is clutching him so tightly it probably hurts, rocking back and forth, cradling his head, holding him together. He doesn’t know what Dean is talking about, doesn’t know how to help, but he holds on.
It hurted, again and again, he thinks, and fights the urge to be sick.
“I didn’t want to,” Dean says, pleadingly, and Sam shushes him, says he knows, he believes him, and Dean sniffs and says it again, “I didn’t want to, Daddy, I didn’t, he said I wanted to but I didn’t, I just didn’t-they kept-I didn’t have any skin left, Daddy, and, and, and I didn’t know my name, I forgot my name and he said if I was good he’d tell me my name and he’d let me sleep and, and, and I’d have my skin back, I needed it, because I wasn’t-I was all different pieces. Daddy. I was all different pieces and he said if I was good I’d-he was lying, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
Dean’s babbling is the most terrifying thing Sam has ever heard, and so he tucks the boy closer and shushes him again, and he says, “Dean, Dean, listen to me, just a minute Dean, be quiet and listen,” and Dean stops talking and Sam says and clearly and firmly as he can, “You didn’t do anything wrong, okay? You got tricked. It’s not your fault. You’re a good kid, Dean, you’re the best in the whole world, okay? It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault, Dean, do you hear me, they lied.”
There’s a long, wet silence, and Dean’s small fingers grip Sam’s t-shirt.
“What if they didn’t?” Dean whispers.
“They did,” says Sam, firmly, “Dean, anybody who says you’re no good is lying, okay? Just you remember that. You’re very good. You’re the very best.”
“Sammy,” says Dean, and Sam holds him a little tighter, lets exhaustion pull them both under, and neither of them dream.
Rating: PG-13
Words: 2,043
Spoilers: Up to the middle of season 4.
Warnings: Flashbacks, upset, children in significant distress, my inistence that Sam went through a Savage Garden phase.
Summary: De-aged!Dean, early season four, having a tough time of it. Just a little snip of a thing written for my dear nwspaprtaxis, who is awesome.
Neurotic author's notes: This is just a bit of fluffy (er, fluffy but also really not fluffy) brotherliness, to combat my boredom and season eight's Terrible Terrible Winchester Brother Relationship, which has reached a stage where I am honestly nostalgic for the days of season four. At any rate, the title is from the famous rhyme "Monday's Child," and yes, Dean's birthday (January 24, 1979--thanks, Wikipedia!) was, in fact, a Wednesday. The cut text comes from Alice in Wonderland.
Ruby has offered no help. The elusive angel shrugged apologetically. Bobby was stoical but stumped.
Sam, for his part, found it strangely easy to accept that this scrawny, shy five-year-old was really his brother. It still doesn’t make any sense, not really, not by any laws of nature or magic Sam knows, and not in his head, to consider that his brother was ever so small, so quiet, so diminutive, but somehow the idea that the child is his makes perfect
sense.
Dean seems to understand, distantly, that Sam is Sammy, and he asks for Dad precisely three times, in a soft, scared voice, and when Sam dodges the question each time Dean mistakes his discomfort for annoyance and shrinks away quickly. Sam feels bad about this, but he can’t tell Dean where is daddy is, so he’s almost grateful Dean stops asking.
They’re at Bobby’s, Sam and Bobby attempting to work out why Dean is five and how to fix it, Dean keeping to himself. His thumb keeps wandering to his mouth, and he keeps catching himself, wrenching it away, sitting on his hand, and Sam can just barely drudge up a distant memory: Dean, boy, get your thumb out of your mouth. Sam had never
sucked his thumb. He hadn’t needed to be told not to; he’d never had the urge.
Bobby is finding it hard to focus on his research, drawn to tiny, quiet Dean, who seems to recognize him distantly and gives him more than a few soft, shy smiles, which melt Bobby’s heart. Sam, who is still marveling at the fact that his brother is alive and was, until very recently, reasonably whole, is not so charmed. Dean’s silence, his skittishness, the way he watches Sam with his owl eyes, his tiny pink lip caught in his tiny baby teeth-it’s so unreal, and such an urgent, pounding pressure, like everything’s been these days, Figure it out, fix it right now, go, go, go.
Dean is afraid of: Bobby’s dogs, Bobby’s kitchen, Sam’s irritation, Bobby’s sarcasm as directed at Sam, Sam’s frustration as directed at Bobby. When Dean is afraid, he withdraws, folds himself up on Bobby’s couch, picks at his little shoes (Goodwill, just the one pair, because this is temporary), grabs at his ear.
“Doesn’t he ever talk?” Sam snaps from the kitchen table as Bobby pokes at the chicken he’s frying for them.
“He was always a shy boy,” says Bobby, and Sam is about to call bullshit when Bobby adds, “Well, not around you. Around you he was the little comedian. But you’re not you to him, Sam, you’re a stranger, and he’s five years old. Didn’t your daddy ever tell you the kid didn’t really talk right till he was almost seven?”
No, thinks Sam, he didn’t, because he never told me anything, and anyways, Dean always talked my ear off. Or at least let me talk his off.
Dean is made uncomfortable by the chicken, apparently, as he watches Sam eat it with wide eyes, swallowing convulsively, and picks only at his green beans. He sticks his fork in his mashed potatoes and twirls it around, then sets it down, picks it back up when he sees Sam watching. Maneuvers a single bite into his mouth, chews very deliberately. Sam is wondering absently where Dean’s bottomless stomach has gone, but even he doesn’t linger on that one long-Dean didn’t eat like that when they were small, only once he was in his late teens and making his own money, could take Sam out for hamburgers and French fries and milkshakes and then a movie with popcorn and coke and maybe more ice cream if Sam wanted, and sometimes the two of them would eat themselves absolutely sick, but that was all later. For now, Dean is poking at his food, his free hand grasping nervously at his napkin.
Bobby puts Dean to bed not long after, in the cramped little guest room that has belonged to the Winchester brothers since sometime in 1987, where Sam’s Savage Garden poster and periodic table are still pinned up above the bed by the window, where the ticket stubs from Dean’s first ever concert-Aerosmith’s Get a Grip tour, 1994-rest in the nightstand drawer, next to his learner’s permit and Sam’s, his last report card (December 1996), a collection of receipts and little meaningless notes, a cardstock Valentine given to Dean by someone named Jillian sometime in the early nineties, a long-abandoned insurance card for a John H. Kowalski, a rosary, the troubleshooting booklet that had come with the Macintosh John had bought Sam years and years ago, a wooden beaded bracelet Dean had worn around in high school, and a beat-to-hell, warped Polaroid of Sam and Dean in just their tattered shorts, standing on a dock by a lake somewhere in the northeast, probably nine and thirteen, grinning like lunatics. Dean snuggles down easily, and it’s only a few hours after that that Bobby bullies Sam into bed too.
Falling asleep under his periodic table is familiar, but the soft, shallow baby breathes by his side are not, and fill him with a kind of cavernous loneliness he can’t explain. He ends up opening the nightstand drawer, as quietly as he can, fingering the rosary and the bracelet, examining Dean’s final grades (two Bs, three Cs, one D, and he’d scraped those with a job and John dragging him along on just about every hunt, Christ), and he finally drops off to sleep with Dean Winchester’s South Dakota learner’s permit, dated August 1994, in his hands.
:::
Sam’s dreaming about a diner, someplace Pastor Jim used to take him sometimes, and it was mostly old people who went there, and he’s sitting at the counter between Pastor Jim and his dad, with Dean on Dad’s other side, and he and Dean are trying to poke each other behind Dad’s back, and Dean is asking if they can get Coca-Colas and Dad is saying absolutely not, and Sam is expertly poking Dean’s ribs and Dean lets out a miserable, wet snuffling sound that isn’t right at all, and Sam goes to poke his brother again and he’s gone, and so is Pastor Jim, and so is Dad, and he hollers “Daddy!” and nobody answers, and the waitress comes and he tries to ask her if she’s seen his family and she starts making those horrible wet noises too, and then the barstool tilts away from him and Sam’s body is jolting and he’s opening his eyes in the darkness of his and Dean’s room at Bobby’s, and the wet snuffling has turning into actual keening.
It takes him a second to remember-Bobby’s place, Dean, five-and then he’s grasping for the bedside light, squinting at the bed, where Dean is whipping his head back and forth across the pillow, making thin, miserable noises, his body immobile.
“Dean,” he says, and Dean’s answering whimper has him crossing to Dean’s bed, sitting down, trying to shake him awake. Dean jerks away from him, outright yelping this time, and when Sam tries again Dean lets out a strangled noise of such intense misery that Sam draws back, shocked.
Dean whimpers again, manages a high, desperate, “No,” and Sam isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do and then Dean is saying no again, and then this little tiny boy is saying “No, no, no-no-no please,” and just as Sam goes to shake him again he lets out a little truncated scream, and Sam, at this point terrified-because what had happened to scare Dean
this badly?-caught his shoulders just as he sat bolt upright.
“NO!” Dean hollers, twisting in Sam’s grip, and Dean is shaking fiercely in his arms, tears coming down his hot face, and then he’s flailing and kicking and saying “Don’t want to don’t want to don’t want to, Sam, Sam, Sam,” and Sam, at a complete loss, presses tiny Dean to his chest and clings as Dean writhes and sobs and then goes very still and lets
out a high whine. “Sammy?”
“I’m right here, Dean,” he says, and Dean starts crying again, harder than before, shaky and miserable and sobbing, and Sam keeps asking him what’s the matter and telling him it’s okay and Dean keeps sobbing and shaking and saying he doesn’t want to, and Sam’s mind is running wild with horrible possibilities, because Dean is so young, and what could have happened, and why is he so shaky, like his body can’t hold it in-
“Please don’ put me back,” Dean sobs, and then it slides into place in Sam’s brain with horrible clarity. Oh.
Oh.
Dean, you lying idiot, he thinks, pulling his tiny brother up against him, bending low, saying, “Dean, listen to me, okay, listen, you’re not going back. Never ever. Okay? You’re staying here, with me, with Sammy, okay? Dean? With Sammy.”
“I was so bad,” Dean whispers wetly, and Sam doesn’t know what that means but he holds Dean all the tighter.
“No, no, that was a dream,” he says, “that was a dream, and this is real, me right here, Bobby’s house, okay, Dean? You’re staying right here.”
“I was so bad,” Dean wails, “don’t wanna go, don’t wanna.”
“You’re not bad, you don’t have to,” says Sam, but Dean is shaking again, sobs bubbling up from someplace deep inside him, shaking his head and crying in earnest.
“I don’t-I didn’t-it hurted, again and again, I didn’t-I don’t-why-Sammy-Daddy-Daddy! Daddy!”
Dean is howling now, and Sam is clutching him so tightly it probably hurts, rocking back and forth, cradling his head, holding him together. He doesn’t know what Dean is talking about, doesn’t know how to help, but he holds on.
It hurted, again and again, he thinks, and fights the urge to be sick.
“I didn’t want to,” Dean says, pleadingly, and Sam shushes him, says he knows, he believes him, and Dean sniffs and says it again, “I didn’t want to, Daddy, I didn’t, he said I wanted to but I didn’t, I just didn’t-they kept-I didn’t have any skin left, Daddy, and, and, and I didn’t know my name, I forgot my name and he said if I was good he’d tell me my name and he’d let me sleep and, and, and I’d have my skin back, I needed it, because I wasn’t-I was all different pieces. Daddy. I was all different pieces and he said if I was good I’d-he was lying, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
Dean’s babbling is the most terrifying thing Sam has ever heard, and so he tucks the boy closer and shushes him again, and he says, “Dean, Dean, listen to me, just a minute Dean, be quiet and listen,” and Dean stops talking and Sam says and clearly and firmly as he can, “You didn’t do anything wrong, okay? You got tricked. It’s not your fault. You’re a good kid, Dean, you’re the best in the whole world, okay? It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault, Dean, do you hear me, they lied.”
There’s a long, wet silence, and Dean’s small fingers grip Sam’s t-shirt.
“What if they didn’t?” Dean whispers.
“They did,” says Sam, firmly, “Dean, anybody who says you’re no good is lying, okay? Just you remember that. You’re very good. You’re the very best.”
“Sammy,” says Dean, and Sam holds him a little tighter, lets exhaustion pull them both under, and neither of them dream.