original by angstslashhope
Remix Title: Reunion
Remix Author: stephanometra
Original Story: Perennial
Original Author: angstslashhope
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Gen
Summary: Dean's alone, banged up, and broke in California. In the absence of any other options, visiting his Aunty June sounds like a great idea.
Warnings: Mild drug use.
Dean manages six months of hunting on his own before he gets hurt bad enough to need a break. A poltergeist in California drops a table on him, and he goes down hard, fucks up his leg. He manages to dispel the motherfucker in the end-good riddance, asshole-but his ankle swells up almost as big as his thigh, and he has to crawl back to the car.
When he was still out with Dad, that would've been no problem; Dean would keep his foot elevated in the backseat, Dad would drive, and by the time they made it to the next gig Dean'd be good to go. And Sammy-
Well. If Sammy were still around, he'd be happy to get a chance to ride shotgun for once, even if looking daggers at Dad across the front seat isn't nearly as fun as glowering into the rearview.
The motel declines his card when he tries to book a few extra days to recuperate, which is just great. There's cash enough to eat for a few days, fill up the Impala's tank, but he's got nowhere to stay and nowhere to go and no way of making money until he's healed up enough to navigate a pool hall.
Plus his ankle really, really hurts.
He pops one of the precious few Demerol he's got in his first-aid stash and clears his shit out of the motel room, limping ridiculously and knowing he'll really regret it as soon as the painkiller wears off. Then he climbs into the Impala, sitting down heavily in the driver's seat, and tries to figure out what the fuck he's going to do.
They don't have any contacts in California, not really. Dad bought a gun from a guy in Arizona once, but Dean can't get there on a tank and a half of gas. He'd go to Palo Alto, except that he's pretty damn sure Sam doesn't want to see him, not after the last visit, when Sam had caught Dean tailing him to class, called him a pathetic voyeur, and told him to get gone.
Voyeur. Yeah, like Dean was getting a big thrill out of seeing how neat and pleasant Sam's life was without him. Like Dean's heart hadn't fucking ached that a few hundred miles and a few thousand prep-school retards had managed to make Sam happier than Dean ever had. Like hell did Sam get to call him a goddamn voyeur just because he wanted to make sure that Sam was safe.
Anyway.
He's pretty much settled on driving to the beach and bedding down in the car for a few days when he remembers that terrible week when he was eight, when he almost died from fever and dehydration before Dad got the bright idea to go visit his sister, the aunt Dean never knew he had-the aunt that Dad hasn't mentioned since.
In the complete absence of any other options, visiting Aunty June sounds like a great idea.
-
He doesn't remember exactly where she lives, only that it's upstate some and just far enough away from the ocean that you can't smell the salt in the air anymore. He hops on the 101, heads north.
He gets a lucky break when he stops in Santa Rosa to take a piss: some guy taps him on the shoulder in the parking lot after he overhears Dean asking the clerk if there's a hippie place nearby.
"I heard inside, man-you're looking for the co-op west of town?"
"You know the place?" Dean asks, leaning on the car, willing his ankle to shut the fuck up.
"Hell yeah, my son went to school with the kid whose mama runs the place. Cute girl."
Dean doesn't bother to ask whether he means Dean's aunt or cousin, just takes the directions and drives off.
-
She opens the door before he gets the chance to knock, and she is looking past him at the car when she says, "Which one are you?"
"Ma'am?" Dean's left leg is seizing up from the drive-he never would have guessed pedaling with the wrong foot would be so hard on his legs, but he's positively aching from it-and from carrying all his weight as he limped across the yard, and the pain in his right is almost unbearable.
"I think you're probably Dean. Recognize the freckles." June pauses, cocks an eyebrow at him. "Surprised you remembered how to get here, sick as you were the last time."
He looks at her, steady and level. "Wasn't hard. Aren't that many places around like this anymore."
"Yeah, that's what your daddy said." She opens the door wide and steps around him, shoring up his right side so he can hobble into the house.
She helps him to the kitchen, sets him in one of the chairs at the kitchen table and pulls another around so he can prop up his ankle. Then she busies herself making tea, even though he assures her that he won't drink it.
"It's good for you," she says, sliding the mug in front of him, and smiles a little when he rolls his eyes, but wraps his hands around it anyway.
They look at each other solemnly for a minute or two.
"How's Aster?" he eventually asks, talking just to fill the empty air.
"She's fine. In grad school, at Cal."
Dean thinks of the couple times he's been through Berkeley. Smirks. "She like it there?"
"Well enough." She stirs honey into her tea, hums with pleasure when she takes a small sip.
"Of course she does."
June points her spoon at him in clear threat. "Don't start with me, kid."
They lapse back into silence. Dean shifts his leg, whines involuntarily at the pain in his ankle and then grimaces at June's look of concern.
"Shit, I'll get you some ice for that." She jumps up and starts rummaging in the freezer. "The hell were you doing, anyway?"
Dean panics a little on the inside. He's got so little experience lying to family, but he doesn't know how much she knows, how much Dad told her. "Hunting," he says, terse and a little gruff, the way Dad says it when he's trying to cut off any further questions.
"Yeah? Where?"
"Uh." Fuck, of course it wouldn't work on her. For all he knows, she taught Dad that tone. "Down near Santa Cruz."
"Hm." She passes him an ice pack, her posture screaming skepticism. "Didn't think there was much to hunt down that way."
There isn't now. "You'd be surprised."
"And you drove three hours on-" she pauses and looks down at his swollen, bruised ankle "-what's either a really fucking bad sprain, or possibly a hairline fracture. Why? Your hunting buddies too good to take you to the doctor?"
Dean thinks of Sam living distant and comfortable in his shoebox of a dorm room in Palo Alto, of his father's truck burning asphalt. "No buddies. Just me." Most of the time, anyway.
June sits back in her chair, looks at him levelly, and then then shrugs. "Ain't like any kind of hunting trip I ever heard of," she says, and Dean relaxes a little.
"Yeah, I get that a lot."
-
She puts him up in Aster's bedroom, doses him with pot for the pain. She doesn't seem to mind that he just showed up and expected her to take him in, and her husband-well, he's not her husband, and neither is the other guy who sleeps in her bed, but he sure as hell acts like he is-may not remember Dean as the kid who spent a week throwing up on his couch, but he seems willing enough to be nice to a cripple, especially one who's young enough and related close enough that there's little to no chance of June sleeping with him.
Dean hates guys like that.
She doesn't ask Dean any questions he doesn't want to answer except when they're high, sitting out on the deck blowing sugar-hot smoke into the trellis.
"So where's that brother of yours?" she ventures one night after she lights up their second joint, passing it over.
"Gone," he says, and stoned or not, he can't keep the pain from his voice. "He's...gone."
"Dead?"
"No, he's just." Dean takes a hit and waves his hand through the smoke as he exhales. "Gone. Went to college."
June whistles low. "Bet your daddy didn't like that one."
And Dean bristles at that, because it sounds like she's saying that Dad didn't do right by them, and that's just, well, not it at all. "He'd've been fine with it, but-"
"Oh, hush, kid; I'm not saying he's a bad father. He managed to bring you two up on his own, didn't he, and that's more than I could've done." She glances pensively up at the arbor, wisteria hanging heavy and sweet on the vine. "Johnny just always did hate being the one left behind."
-
Dean is sitting in the sun room playing poker with Bell-he has no idea what to call Bell and Mason; he supposes they qualify as his uncles even if there's nothing particularly uncle-y about them except for the loud, enthusiastic sex they have with June on a nightly basis, and man, the things it says about Dean that listening to that doesn't bother him much-when he hears the roar of an engine outside.
"The hell?" he asks. "Thought you people didn't approve of anything with a decent engine in it."
Bell grins. "That's Aster's car, man. Go see it, it'll probably blow your mind."
Dean rolls his eyes; his mind is reasonably unblowable, as far as he knows. But he picks up the crutches and hobbles to the door anyway, because he hasn't had a reason to leave the house in the four days he's been in residence, and he's getting a little antsy.
Aster nearly runs into him on her way to the kitchen. "Who are you?" she asks, shaking magenta hair out of her eyes as she looks him up and down, smiling an invitation that it's only a little bit weird to see coming from his cousin.
"Uh, Dean Winchester," he says, leaning hard on one of his crutches so he can reach out to shake her hand.
Her eyes get wide. "Dean? My cousin Dean? That's so awesome!" She leans to the side, looks around him. "Where's Sam?"
"He's not here." Dean clears his throat. "So your da-I mean, uh, Bell said your car would blow my mind."
"You dig cars?"
He makes an incredulous sound. "You saw my girl out there, didn't you?"
"Ain't much girly about the '67, dude." She grins. "Just wait until you see mine."
Her girl, it turns out, is a flawlessly restored '72 Stingray, and Dean's glad for the crutches, because she's so gorgeous it honestly makes him a little weak at the knees. "Jesus, she's beautiful."
"I know, right?" Then she pops the hood with a flourish.
"You." His jaw works soundlessly, trying to remember how to form words. "You drive a '72 Corvette."
Aster grins. "Uh-huh."
"That you've outfitted for fuckin' biodiesel."
"Wouldn't be driving it otherwise. Shit, man, you know how inefficient and filthy these old engines are."
Mournfully, he groans, "What is the world coming to?"
-
Aster joins Dean and June out on the deck to smoke that evening, folding herself into one of the wooden rockers and curling up with a book that looks scarily academic. It turns out that she's studying chemical engineering, not some random hippie shit like Dean assumed, and she spends so many hours in the lab that she only rarely has the time to drive the scant fifty miles from Berkeley.
The biodiesel Stingray, in addition to being the brain-breakingest thing that Dean has ever seen in his life, was actually part of a paper she co-authored, something highly technical about an improvement in fuel injectors for diesel engines. She laughs when she tells him that was mostly just for fun; her primary research is in ethanol production. She wants to change the world.
Dean honestly has a hard time hearing a single damn word she says, because she makes him miss Sam so much.
He offers to move to the living room, let her bunk in her own room, but she turns him down and falls asleep on the couch before he and June are even finished up outside. On his halting way up to the bedroom, he stops and brushes her hair out of her face.
June watches him do it, her gaze frank and assessing.
"What?" he asks.
She shrugs. "Nothing, kid. Get some sleep."
-
By Sunday afternoon, when Aster goes back to school, Dean's ankle is healed enough to take his weight. Still looks like shit, streaked black and yellow with bruises, but he feels confident enough to limp around the house without the crutches.
"Think I'll head out tomorrow," he says over dinner.
"Will you," June says, reaching for the salad.
"Yeah, I've got somewhere to be." There are a few days until his scheduled rendezvous with Dad-whom Dean hasn't called, because a sprained ankle isn't important enough to bother him over when he's on a case-and he figures he can take it easy on the drive out to Pastor Jim's place if he leaves early.
Mason clears his throat. "Well, we wouldn't want to keep you from going where you're going," he says, ignoring the filthy look he gets from June.
-
She helps him pack up the car even though he insists he can handle it, and as soon as he's ready to go, she hands him a package wrapped in brown paper.
"What's this?" he asks, feeling the slight crush of the paper in his hand as he tosses it onto the passenger seat.
"Call it a tradition," June says, and then she holds out her hand. "Now give me your phone."
Dean shrugs and hands it over.
Jude Winchester, it says when she gives it back.
"I put Aster's cell in, too, in case you need anything in the city."
He closes the phone and slowly slides it into his pocket. "Did you," he asks, and then stops, considering. "Were you glad to see us, last time?"
"Dean, I gave up on ever seeing your daddy again the summer I turned nineteen."
His heart stutters, twists in his chest. "Oh."
"But," she continues, "I was glad he needed me, then." She smiles, wise and a little sad, and for the first time all week, Dean thinks she looks old. It honestly makes him a little uncomfortable.
He covers by giving her his cockiest grin. "You're glad I got sick? Man, June, you're a bitch." He laughs a little, even though it's not funny.
June blinks, comes back to herself a bit, and that strange, wistful expression gives way to a smirk. She reaches into the car to smack his arm.
"Smartass," she says. She takes a step back, turning to go back into the house, and calls over her shoulder, "Tell your daddy hey, alright?"
"Yeah," Dean calls back. He can do that.
He thinks about that look on her face as he drives out of town and all the way down the 101, but then he turns onto I-80 and the rhythm of the road takes over, Motörhead on the radio and the sound of the Impala's tires eating pavement lulling him into the kind of headspace that'll let him kill a few hundred miles by dinnertime.
-
Dean's leg starts bothering him hardcore when he's about a hundred miles out of Salt Lake City, which he takes as a sign that it's time to call it a night.
He pulls into some small town off the interstate, finds a pool hall and manages to hustle enough for some dinner and the next tank of gas. He buys the guy a beer, after, because it's Utah and everyone's just so fucking nice that he feels obligated. A girl makes friendly eyes at him from the other side of the bar; the prospect of a warm bed, a shower, and-most importantly-a decent breakfast is tempting, but she looks a little like Aster minus the pink hair, and anyway, the last Mormon chick Dean banged ended up going batshit on him.
He says his goodbyes and hops back on the highway until he hits a rest area. The orange light from the xenon lamps is obnoxious, sure, but he's on his own and it's best to stay someplace well-lit.
There's a blanket crumpled in the backseat for eventualities such as this; April in the mountains is still cold enough that he needs it. He pulls off his boots, wincing as he jostles his still-tender ankle, and settles in for the night. On impulse, he grabs June's care package from the front seat.
It's nondescript, just butcher paper wrapped around some stuff, taped shut on the ends. He sets it on his chest, tears into it.
At the top there's a tin of peppermint tea-he doesn't open it, but he doesn't have to; he remembers it from the last squashy parcel June pressed on them. Dad tried to force a cup of it on him once when Dean had a sore throat and did an honest-to-God spit take after taking a sip to show Dean that it was alright. There's a bag of granola, a cat's-eye shell on a string that Dean distantly remembers seeing Aster wear when they were kids. An ounce of pot, double-bagged, which makes him smile.
And nestled in the bottom: a few wrinkled twenties paperclipped around a photograph.
The picture's gone soft and sepia-tinged with age, but Dean recognizes his dad's slouch, the line of his jaw, and the pretty, fresh-faced girl with her arm around John's shoulders. Johnny and Jude, it says on the back in smudged, faded pencil, and 1966 under that in crisp new ink.
Dean looks at that picture for a long time, and it takes even longer for him to fall asleep, curled into his jacket, the blanket folded up under his head.
-
He figures he'll ask Dad about the picture when they meet up at Jim's, but Dad calls when Dean's two hundred miles out to tell him that he won't be able to make it. Rough job in South Carolina, he says.
Dean stops by Blue Earth for a few days anyway, sharpens his blades and loads up on silver and consecrated rounds. He sits out with Jim on the rectory's front porch in the evenings, drinking and talking shop.
Jim gives him shit about his ankle, and Dean gives Jim shit for giving him shit.
"You're a priest, man, you're supposed to be above petty mockery of innocent houseguests," Dean says, and Jim just laughs and gets up to grab them each another beer.
"How'd you manage that leg on your own, anyway?" he asks when he comes back, holding out a bottle. "It's what, two weeks since Santa Cruz, and it still looks like hell. Can only imagine what it was like when you first got it."
Dean takes the beer, cracks it open with his ring. "Wasn't on my own, actually. Stayed with Dad's sister out near Santa Rosa."
Jim stops his bottle halfway to his lips, surprised, and says, "I didn't know John had a sister."
Privately, Dean thinks that John doesn't really know, either. "Yeah. My Aunt June."
-
He tosses the mint tea, eats the granola. The weed lasts a couple of months-working on his own, he doesn't get a lot of chances to unwind-and he gives the talisman to a girl who was attacked by a witch, because she needs it more than he does.
The photograph goes in the glove box, and he never says a word to his father about it.
Remix Author: stephanometra
Original Story: Perennial
Original Author: angstslashhope
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Gen
Summary: Dean's alone, banged up, and broke in California. In the absence of any other options, visiting his Aunty June sounds like a great idea.
Warnings: Mild drug use.
Dean manages six months of hunting on his own before he gets hurt bad enough to need a break. A poltergeist in California drops a table on him, and he goes down hard, fucks up his leg. He manages to dispel the motherfucker in the end-good riddance, asshole-but his ankle swells up almost as big as his thigh, and he has to crawl back to the car.
When he was still out with Dad, that would've been no problem; Dean would keep his foot elevated in the backseat, Dad would drive, and by the time they made it to the next gig Dean'd be good to go. And Sammy-
Well. If Sammy were still around, he'd be happy to get a chance to ride shotgun for once, even if looking daggers at Dad across the front seat isn't nearly as fun as glowering into the rearview.
The motel declines his card when he tries to book a few extra days to recuperate, which is just great. There's cash enough to eat for a few days, fill up the Impala's tank, but he's got nowhere to stay and nowhere to go and no way of making money until he's healed up enough to navigate a pool hall.
Plus his ankle really, really hurts.
He pops one of the precious few Demerol he's got in his first-aid stash and clears his shit out of the motel room, limping ridiculously and knowing he'll really regret it as soon as the painkiller wears off. Then he climbs into the Impala, sitting down heavily in the driver's seat, and tries to figure out what the fuck he's going to do.
They don't have any contacts in California, not really. Dad bought a gun from a guy in Arizona once, but Dean can't get there on a tank and a half of gas. He'd go to Palo Alto, except that he's pretty damn sure Sam doesn't want to see him, not after the last visit, when Sam had caught Dean tailing him to class, called him a pathetic voyeur, and told him to get gone.
Voyeur. Yeah, like Dean was getting a big thrill out of seeing how neat and pleasant Sam's life was without him. Like Dean's heart hadn't fucking ached that a few hundred miles and a few thousand prep-school retards had managed to make Sam happier than Dean ever had. Like hell did Sam get to call him a goddamn voyeur just because he wanted to make sure that Sam was safe.
Anyway.
He's pretty much settled on driving to the beach and bedding down in the car for a few days when he remembers that terrible week when he was eight, when he almost died from fever and dehydration before Dad got the bright idea to go visit his sister, the aunt Dean never knew he had-the aunt that Dad hasn't mentioned since.
In the complete absence of any other options, visiting Aunty June sounds like a great idea.
-
He doesn't remember exactly where she lives, only that it's upstate some and just far enough away from the ocean that you can't smell the salt in the air anymore. He hops on the 101, heads north.
He gets a lucky break when he stops in Santa Rosa to take a piss: some guy taps him on the shoulder in the parking lot after he overhears Dean asking the clerk if there's a hippie place nearby.
"I heard inside, man-you're looking for the co-op west of town?"
"You know the place?" Dean asks, leaning on the car, willing his ankle to shut the fuck up.
"Hell yeah, my son went to school with the kid whose mama runs the place. Cute girl."
Dean doesn't bother to ask whether he means Dean's aunt or cousin, just takes the directions and drives off.
-
She opens the door before he gets the chance to knock, and she is looking past him at the car when she says, "Which one are you?"
"Ma'am?" Dean's left leg is seizing up from the drive-he never would have guessed pedaling with the wrong foot would be so hard on his legs, but he's positively aching from it-and from carrying all his weight as he limped across the yard, and the pain in his right is almost unbearable.
"I think you're probably Dean. Recognize the freckles." June pauses, cocks an eyebrow at him. "Surprised you remembered how to get here, sick as you were the last time."
He looks at her, steady and level. "Wasn't hard. Aren't that many places around like this anymore."
"Yeah, that's what your daddy said." She opens the door wide and steps around him, shoring up his right side so he can hobble into the house.
She helps him to the kitchen, sets him in one of the chairs at the kitchen table and pulls another around so he can prop up his ankle. Then she busies herself making tea, even though he assures her that he won't drink it.
"It's good for you," she says, sliding the mug in front of him, and smiles a little when he rolls his eyes, but wraps his hands around it anyway.
They look at each other solemnly for a minute or two.
"How's Aster?" he eventually asks, talking just to fill the empty air.
"She's fine. In grad school, at Cal."
Dean thinks of the couple times he's been through Berkeley. Smirks. "She like it there?"
"Well enough." She stirs honey into her tea, hums with pleasure when she takes a small sip.
"Of course she does."
June points her spoon at him in clear threat. "Don't start with me, kid."
They lapse back into silence. Dean shifts his leg, whines involuntarily at the pain in his ankle and then grimaces at June's look of concern.
"Shit, I'll get you some ice for that." She jumps up and starts rummaging in the freezer. "The hell were you doing, anyway?"
Dean panics a little on the inside. He's got so little experience lying to family, but he doesn't know how much she knows, how much Dad told her. "Hunting," he says, terse and a little gruff, the way Dad says it when he's trying to cut off any further questions.
"Yeah? Where?"
"Uh." Fuck, of course it wouldn't work on her. For all he knows, she taught Dad that tone. "Down near Santa Cruz."
"Hm." She passes him an ice pack, her posture screaming skepticism. "Didn't think there was much to hunt down that way."
There isn't now. "You'd be surprised."
"And you drove three hours on-" she pauses and looks down at his swollen, bruised ankle "-what's either a really fucking bad sprain, or possibly a hairline fracture. Why? Your hunting buddies too good to take you to the doctor?"
Dean thinks of Sam living distant and comfortable in his shoebox of a dorm room in Palo Alto, of his father's truck burning asphalt. "No buddies. Just me." Most of the time, anyway.
June sits back in her chair, looks at him levelly, and then then shrugs. "Ain't like any kind of hunting trip I ever heard of," she says, and Dean relaxes a little.
"Yeah, I get that a lot."
-
She puts him up in Aster's bedroom, doses him with pot for the pain. She doesn't seem to mind that he just showed up and expected her to take him in, and her husband-well, he's not her husband, and neither is the other guy who sleeps in her bed, but he sure as hell acts like he is-may not remember Dean as the kid who spent a week throwing up on his couch, but he seems willing enough to be nice to a cripple, especially one who's young enough and related close enough that there's little to no chance of June sleeping with him.
Dean hates guys like that.
She doesn't ask Dean any questions he doesn't want to answer except when they're high, sitting out on the deck blowing sugar-hot smoke into the trellis.
"So where's that brother of yours?" she ventures one night after she lights up their second joint, passing it over.
"Gone," he says, and stoned or not, he can't keep the pain from his voice. "He's...gone."
"Dead?"
"No, he's just." Dean takes a hit and waves his hand through the smoke as he exhales. "Gone. Went to college."
June whistles low. "Bet your daddy didn't like that one."
And Dean bristles at that, because it sounds like she's saying that Dad didn't do right by them, and that's just, well, not it at all. "He'd've been fine with it, but-"
"Oh, hush, kid; I'm not saying he's a bad father. He managed to bring you two up on his own, didn't he, and that's more than I could've done." She glances pensively up at the arbor, wisteria hanging heavy and sweet on the vine. "Johnny just always did hate being the one left behind."
-
Dean is sitting in the sun room playing poker with Bell-he has no idea what to call Bell and Mason; he supposes they qualify as his uncles even if there's nothing particularly uncle-y about them except for the loud, enthusiastic sex they have with June on a nightly basis, and man, the things it says about Dean that listening to that doesn't bother him much-when he hears the roar of an engine outside.
"The hell?" he asks. "Thought you people didn't approve of anything with a decent engine in it."
Bell grins. "That's Aster's car, man. Go see it, it'll probably blow your mind."
Dean rolls his eyes; his mind is reasonably unblowable, as far as he knows. But he picks up the crutches and hobbles to the door anyway, because he hasn't had a reason to leave the house in the four days he's been in residence, and he's getting a little antsy.
Aster nearly runs into him on her way to the kitchen. "Who are you?" she asks, shaking magenta hair out of her eyes as she looks him up and down, smiling an invitation that it's only a little bit weird to see coming from his cousin.
"Uh, Dean Winchester," he says, leaning hard on one of his crutches so he can reach out to shake her hand.
Her eyes get wide. "Dean? My cousin Dean? That's so awesome!" She leans to the side, looks around him. "Where's Sam?"
"He's not here." Dean clears his throat. "So your da-I mean, uh, Bell said your car would blow my mind."
"You dig cars?"
He makes an incredulous sound. "You saw my girl out there, didn't you?"
"Ain't much girly about the '67, dude." She grins. "Just wait until you see mine."
Her girl, it turns out, is a flawlessly restored '72 Stingray, and Dean's glad for the crutches, because she's so gorgeous it honestly makes him a little weak at the knees. "Jesus, she's beautiful."
"I know, right?" Then she pops the hood with a flourish.
"You." His jaw works soundlessly, trying to remember how to form words. "You drive a '72 Corvette."
Aster grins. "Uh-huh."
"That you've outfitted for fuckin' biodiesel."
"Wouldn't be driving it otherwise. Shit, man, you know how inefficient and filthy these old engines are."
Mournfully, he groans, "What is the world coming to?"
-
Aster joins Dean and June out on the deck to smoke that evening, folding herself into one of the wooden rockers and curling up with a book that looks scarily academic. It turns out that she's studying chemical engineering, not some random hippie shit like Dean assumed, and she spends so many hours in the lab that she only rarely has the time to drive the scant fifty miles from Berkeley.
The biodiesel Stingray, in addition to being the brain-breakingest thing that Dean has ever seen in his life, was actually part of a paper she co-authored, something highly technical about an improvement in fuel injectors for diesel engines. She laughs when she tells him that was mostly just for fun; her primary research is in ethanol production. She wants to change the world.
Dean honestly has a hard time hearing a single damn word she says, because she makes him miss Sam so much.
He offers to move to the living room, let her bunk in her own room, but she turns him down and falls asleep on the couch before he and June are even finished up outside. On his halting way up to the bedroom, he stops and brushes her hair out of her face.
June watches him do it, her gaze frank and assessing.
"What?" he asks.
She shrugs. "Nothing, kid. Get some sleep."
-
By Sunday afternoon, when Aster goes back to school, Dean's ankle is healed enough to take his weight. Still looks like shit, streaked black and yellow with bruises, but he feels confident enough to limp around the house without the crutches.
"Think I'll head out tomorrow," he says over dinner.
"Will you," June says, reaching for the salad.
"Yeah, I've got somewhere to be." There are a few days until his scheduled rendezvous with Dad-whom Dean hasn't called, because a sprained ankle isn't important enough to bother him over when he's on a case-and he figures he can take it easy on the drive out to Pastor Jim's place if he leaves early.
Mason clears his throat. "Well, we wouldn't want to keep you from going where you're going," he says, ignoring the filthy look he gets from June.
-
She helps him pack up the car even though he insists he can handle it, and as soon as he's ready to go, she hands him a package wrapped in brown paper.
"What's this?" he asks, feeling the slight crush of the paper in his hand as he tosses it onto the passenger seat.
"Call it a tradition," June says, and then she holds out her hand. "Now give me your phone."
Dean shrugs and hands it over.
Jude Winchester, it says when she gives it back.
"I put Aster's cell in, too, in case you need anything in the city."
He closes the phone and slowly slides it into his pocket. "Did you," he asks, and then stops, considering. "Were you glad to see us, last time?"
"Dean, I gave up on ever seeing your daddy again the summer I turned nineteen."
His heart stutters, twists in his chest. "Oh."
"But," she continues, "I was glad he needed me, then." She smiles, wise and a little sad, and for the first time all week, Dean thinks she looks old. It honestly makes him a little uncomfortable.
He covers by giving her his cockiest grin. "You're glad I got sick? Man, June, you're a bitch." He laughs a little, even though it's not funny.
June blinks, comes back to herself a bit, and that strange, wistful expression gives way to a smirk. She reaches into the car to smack his arm.
"Smartass," she says. She takes a step back, turning to go back into the house, and calls over her shoulder, "Tell your daddy hey, alright?"
"Yeah," Dean calls back. He can do that.
He thinks about that look on her face as he drives out of town and all the way down the 101, but then he turns onto I-80 and the rhythm of the road takes over, Motörhead on the radio and the sound of the Impala's tires eating pavement lulling him into the kind of headspace that'll let him kill a few hundred miles by dinnertime.
-
Dean's leg starts bothering him hardcore when he's about a hundred miles out of Salt Lake City, which he takes as a sign that it's time to call it a night.
He pulls into some small town off the interstate, finds a pool hall and manages to hustle enough for some dinner and the next tank of gas. He buys the guy a beer, after, because it's Utah and everyone's just so fucking nice that he feels obligated. A girl makes friendly eyes at him from the other side of the bar; the prospect of a warm bed, a shower, and-most importantly-a decent breakfast is tempting, but she looks a little like Aster minus the pink hair, and anyway, the last Mormon chick Dean banged ended up going batshit on him.
He says his goodbyes and hops back on the highway until he hits a rest area. The orange light from the xenon lamps is obnoxious, sure, but he's on his own and it's best to stay someplace well-lit.
There's a blanket crumpled in the backseat for eventualities such as this; April in the mountains is still cold enough that he needs it. He pulls off his boots, wincing as he jostles his still-tender ankle, and settles in for the night. On impulse, he grabs June's care package from the front seat.
It's nondescript, just butcher paper wrapped around some stuff, taped shut on the ends. He sets it on his chest, tears into it.
At the top there's a tin of peppermint tea-he doesn't open it, but he doesn't have to; he remembers it from the last squashy parcel June pressed on them. Dad tried to force a cup of it on him once when Dean had a sore throat and did an honest-to-God spit take after taking a sip to show Dean that it was alright. There's a bag of granola, a cat's-eye shell on a string that Dean distantly remembers seeing Aster wear when they were kids. An ounce of pot, double-bagged, which makes him smile.
And nestled in the bottom: a few wrinkled twenties paperclipped around a photograph.
The picture's gone soft and sepia-tinged with age, but Dean recognizes his dad's slouch, the line of his jaw, and the pretty, fresh-faced girl with her arm around John's shoulders. Johnny and Jude, it says on the back in smudged, faded pencil, and 1966 under that in crisp new ink.
Dean looks at that picture for a long time, and it takes even longer for him to fall asleep, curled into his jacket, the blanket folded up under his head.
-
He figures he'll ask Dad about the picture when they meet up at Jim's, but Dad calls when Dean's two hundred miles out to tell him that he won't be able to make it. Rough job in South Carolina, he says.
Dean stops by Blue Earth for a few days anyway, sharpens his blades and loads up on silver and consecrated rounds. He sits out with Jim on the rectory's front porch in the evenings, drinking and talking shop.
Jim gives him shit about his ankle, and Dean gives Jim shit for giving him shit.
"You're a priest, man, you're supposed to be above petty mockery of innocent houseguests," Dean says, and Jim just laughs and gets up to grab them each another beer.
"How'd you manage that leg on your own, anyway?" he asks when he comes back, holding out a bottle. "It's what, two weeks since Santa Cruz, and it still looks like hell. Can only imagine what it was like when you first got it."
Dean takes the beer, cracks it open with his ring. "Wasn't on my own, actually. Stayed with Dad's sister out near Santa Rosa."
Jim stops his bottle halfway to his lips, surprised, and says, "I didn't know John had a sister."
Privately, Dean thinks that John doesn't really know, either. "Yeah. My Aunt June."
-
He tosses the mint tea, eats the granola. The weed lasts a couple of months-working on his own, he doesn't get a lot of chances to unwind-and he gives the talisman to a girl who was attacked by a witch, because she needs it more than he does.
The photograph goes in the glove box, and he never says a word to his father about it.