this is the way we plan our escape.

[thepurpleswitch]

Less daddy!Dean, more angstymanguilt!Dean. Yay.

Title and job from "Dear Blackbird," by Jane Springer (saddest poem I've read in a very long time omg). Um, 14A for language. Angsty manguilt makes Dean swear a lot. Also 14A because there's no Alex inna church. SORRY JO.

The rest of the thing.


so come, hail & damnation

At the roadhouse, Jo is setting up a trick shot at the pool table. She has Lorelai on one hip and her cue on the other. Lorelai is playing with Jo's long, pretty hair.

"You seriously want a double kidnapping on your list of warrants?" Jo asks Dean.

"Nobody knows we have them," Dean says, leaning against the wall, keeping his weight off his injured leg. He watches Sam on the far side of the roadhouse, cutting up Alex's grilled cheese the way she likes it. Dean taps the butt of his cue on the floor, fidgety. "They're presumed dead in the fire, their bodies mysteriously vaporized or whatever. We split as soon as we realised Emily Cabot's family was--untrustworthy."

She laughs and Lorelai laughs too. "What tipped you off--the pentacle wreath on the front door, or the permanent summoning circle in the rose garden?"

"Something like that," Dean says. "You going to take your shot or what?"

Jo sinks her trick without even shifting her grip on Lorelai. "You going to take yours?" she says with a cocky grin.

Lorelai starts sucking on Jo's hair. Dean smiles back. "Sure thing, buttercup."

He limps to the table and lines up his shot, pulling his cue back. A hand lands on his shoulder just as he's pulling the trigger and he misses miserably.

Jo laughs as Dean jabs his cue back into Sam's stomach.

"Ow," Sam says.

"Thanks a lot, Sam," Dean says. "I've got fifty bucks on this, you know."

Jo says to Sam, "You'd think he'd learn, losing money every day for a month."

"Excuse me?" Sam says. "Every day? Dean--"

"Knock, knock," Lorelai says, wrapping a spit-slick lock of Jo's hair around her finger.

"Who's there?" Jo says.

"A turtle," Lorelai says.

"A turtle who?" Jo says.

"A turtle who's thirsty!" Lorelai says, and bursts into laughter. Jo laughs too.

Dean grins fondly at them and Sam frowns. "Do you want a burger?" he asks Dean.

"What? No, thanks," Dean says without looking at him. "I am taking that shot over," he says to Jo. "I shouldn't have to suffer for my brother's stupidity."

Jo laughs harder, shaking her head. "Oh yes, you should," she says.

Sam walks away, back to where Ellen is pouring more ketchup on Alex's plate. Dean calls after him, "If you're taking orders, I wouldn't mind a beer, Sammy!"

"Knock, knock!" Lorelai says.

A month ago, the girls were chasing each other through a Burger King playground, shoeless, while Sam and Dean talked about how to track demon cats. Lorelai had barbecue sauce from her chicken nuggets smeared all over her face like war paint. She tackled Alex in the ball pit, her victory scream piercing and long.

"God, they're little monsters," Sam said, smiling. He looked over at Dean and wanted to touch the back of his neck, so he did.

"We can't anymore," Dean said.

Sam said, "What?" and his fingers caught in the collar of Dean's coat.

"If we're keeping them," Dean said. He moved out of Sam's reach.

"Dean," Sam said, frowning, catching on.

"No, Sam," Dean said. "Not with them." He rubbed his hand over his face. "If they're staying, we have to stop."

Sam stared and shook his head. He walked to the cubbyholes where the girls had shoved their shoes.

"Alex, Lorelai, time to go," he called.

Lorelai groaned unhappily and Alex ran out of the exit tunnel right into Dean's legs. She grabbed him around the knees and grinned up at him. Sam watched as Dean patted her on the head, ran his thumb over her forehead.

"I got away!" she said.

"You sure did, peanut," Dean said.

"I can't find my shoes," Lorelai said to Sam angrily, tugging on his sleeve. He looked down at her and tried to smile.

"We'll find them," he said.

"You're liable to break your face, you frown any harder," Ellen says, coming out of the kitchen with Sam's burger and fries.

Sam laughs hollowly and grimly eats the pickle garnish off his plate.

Ellen shakes her head at him and crouches down beside Alex. "You finished, honey?"

Alex pulls her plate close and shakes her head. "No, Miz Ellen," she says. She eats more fries, carefully dipping half of each one in ketchup before eating it.

Ellen says, "I can't quite decide whose idea 'Miz Ellen' was."

"Dean didn't know what would be appropriate," Sam says. "He doesn't think it's proper for kids to call grown-ups by just their first names." He smiles, despite himself.

Ellen sits down and props her elbows on the little table. "Your brother has an odd sense of what's proper about things for a boy who was raised on the road," she says. "Probably he gets it from your mama, 'cause I sure don't remember John being overly fussed about calling anybody anything but their name."

Sam picks up his burger. He doesn't really want to talk about his father or Dean's misplaced decorum.

Ellen watches Sam and Alex eat quietly for a while. She pours another puddle of ketchup for Alex and says, "Ash thinks he might have something for you boys back in Kentucky. Another scarecrow, he says."

Dean stumbled in at two in the morning on the third day, the leg of his jeans torn to shreds, blood filling his boot, a bloody coffee can in his hand.

Sam was waiting up, reading St. Thomas More by orange lamplight. Alex and Lorelai were small lumps under the thin motel blanket on the other bed.

"Dean!" Sam whispered fiercely, and dropped his book.

After a nearly-silent argument, they locked themselves in the tiny bathroom to clean up Dean's wound.

"I can really do this myself," Dean said quietly, and hissed as Sam poured alcohol and holy water into the deep gouges on his shin.

"Okay, sure," Sam said, wincing at the sight of bright white bone, and kept working.

In the morning, Dean showed Sam the cait sith's purple, misshapen heart. "You convinced it's dead now?" he asked. "I've been doing this on my own just a little bit longer and better than you, Sammy, and--"

"Yeah," Sam said. He closed the coffee can before Lorelai could jump high enough to see inside it. "Okay. Fine. Let's leave."

"I want to see the kitty in the can!" Lorelai said.

Dean couldn't drive with his leg as it was, so he stretched it out on the back seat, joking, "At least it's the same one as the broken knee, eh?"

"Right," Sam said tightly, buckling Lorelai and Alex into the front.

After the first hour of driving, Dean knew where they were going. He was faintly relieved.

"I don't want to leave them here while we go on this job," Sam says. "I don't think it's safe."

"You don't think they're safe with Ellen?" Dean asks, incredulous.

"It's not Ellen I'm worried about," Sam says. "But she's a busy woman, she's got a business to run, she can't--"

"Jo would not to do anything to hurt the girls," Dean says impatiently.

"Oh no, she's the picture of trailer park competence," Sam says. "Baby on one hip, pool cue on the other!"

"What the hell is your problem?" Dean asks.

Sam stares at him for a minute, grim-faced and pale. He nods, like he's made a decision, and says, "Do you want to be with her?"

It takes Dean a moment to gather the wits to say, "What the fuck?"

Sam waves his arms around. "I'm not blind, Dean, you've been all over her since we got here--"

"The hell I have! She's a good friend, she's good with the girls--"

"Exactly!" Sam stabs a finger into Dean's face like his point has been made for him. "She's good with the girls, she's normal--"

"Yeah, right, a knife-toting underage barmaid whose father was killed by our father, that's completely normal--"

"--normal-er, then! And she's not underage--"

"She's too young to be working in a goddamn bar, Sam--"

"She's barely younger than me! Take it up with her mother!"

"I don't want to take it up with anybody! Jesus fancy Christ." Dean limps to the far end of their room and back. He asks, obviously forcing his voice to be calm, "Why are you suddenly so concerned about me hooking up with Jo? We've known her for three years and you never seemed to care before."

Sam deflates. He shrugs and glances at the door. "You said we had to stop, because of the girls," he says in a low voice.

Dean laughs abruptly. "So--you think I'm going to go get them a mom first time we stop for five minutes?"

Sam frowns and takes a deep breath, but Dean cuts him off, "Why would I do that? You're a great mom, Sammy. The best."

"Fuck you, Dean," Sam says, and leaves.

In the gravel parking lot outside the roadhouse, Sam lifted Alex and Lorelai out of the car as Ash and the Harvelles came out onto the shaded porch.

Sam gripped Dean's arm and shoulder and helped him out of his seat, despite Dean whispering, "Get off me, Sam."

"Hello there, Winchesters," Ellen said. "Who's that you've got with you?"

"Hey, Ellen," Sam said, holding the girl's hands. "This is Alex and Lorelai."

Dean leaned against the car next to them and said, "Girls, this is Miz Ellen, and Miss Jo, and Mister Ash."

"Hi," Alex said.

"That man has funny hair," Lorelai said, pointing. Sam pressed her hand down and said, "It's not polite to point."

"Kids, well, all right," Ash said nervously, and retreated to his room.

Jo had a wide grin on her face and crouched down to hug both girls at once. "They are adorable," she said to Dean.

"I can't take any of the original credit for that," Dean said, "but I did save their lives."

Ellen smiled indulgently at them, until she noticed Dean's bandaged leg. "Get on inside, all of you," she sighed. "Dean, I'll cook you up something to put on that. Was it a wendigo or a spirit bear?"

"Nope, cait sith," Dean said proudly, limping after her as she went inside.

"I guess you're hurt too?" Ellen called to Sam over her shoulder.

"No, ma'am," Sam said. "I was with the girls."

Jo laughed--Sam couldn't help thinking she was laughing at him--and picked up Lorelai. "You're too precious," she said.

"I love your hair," Lorelai said. Jo smiled and took her inside.

Sam picked Alex up. He shook his head at Jo's back, and Alex leaned her head on his shoulder. She said, "I don't like Miss Jo's hair."

On the first night of staking out the abandoned field, Sam sits a careful three feet from Dean on the side of the road and doesn't speak. They haven't spoken since they left the roadhouse two days ago. They drove and ate and slept in the same routine they'd known for years before the girls, only silently this time: like they were each going on this hunt alone.

The sun sets late, salmon pink and burnt orange. A light breeze blows chaff across the highway and into the fields. There's no scarecrow in sight, but Ash told them there's definitely something here, at this deserted corn farm, something pulling cars off the road and into ditches full of murky water.

"You called at seven, right?" Sam asks at ten o'clock, when the summer heat has finally started dissipating.

Dean doesn't stop scanning up and down the road. "Yeah," he says. "They're fine."

"Who'd you talk to?" Sam says.

Dean rolls his eyes. "Ellen," he says.

Sam nods and scrapes at the roadside dirt with his flashlight. "They're sleeping all right?" he says.

"Yeah."

"And eating their vegetables?" Sam pauses, and adds, "She is feeding them vegetables?"

"Maybe you should call, you're so worried about it," Dean says.

Sam huffs and crosses his arms tightly.

Ten minutes later, his eyes starting to hurt from staring into the darkness, he says, "I just don't--"

"They'd figure it out, Sam," Dean says roughly. "They ain't stupid, and they're only little yet. We keep them, then we've got a responsibility to raise them right, and you and me--Jesus Christ." He shakes his head.

"I--" Sam says.

"What kind of example is that?" Dean asks, voice hard. He sounds like Dad. Sam looks over at him, and in the dark he looks like he's listening to Dad ask him that question: guilty, shamed, resigned.

"Dean--" Sam says, and they hear a hushed rustling and rattle in the field behind them.

Sam jumps up and automatically grasps Dean's arm to help him stand. There's nothing in the field. The wild-growing grass and wheat sways gently, ghostly grey in the dark.

Sam turns in a circle, and sees a ragged shape climbing out of the ditch a dozen yards away, next to the Impala. A stick-like hand scratches at the fender.

"Oh shit," Sam says, and Dean turns to look.

"You son of a bitch!" he shouts, and raises his shotgun.

"Dean, no! You'll hit the car!" Sam says. He flips open the cap on his bottle of holy water as he runs to the car.

The scarecrow pulls itself up, hanging onto the side of the car. Approaching, Sam hears the wind ask hopefully, "Blackbird?"

"No," he says, stopping short. "No, it's not Blackbird."

The scarecrow sinks down to the ground, on its ragged knees, but doesn't disappear back into the ditch. Weeds wind round its body and limbs and obscure its rotted seedbag head.

"When will you come back?" the wind asks, and the scarecrow slumps further.

Sam sees crow feathers peeking from its seams, and from the moldy holes in its overcoat.

"I'm sorry," Sam says, and he couldn't explain the compulsion.

"When?" the wind sighs, quietly, sadly, receding.

He hears the shotgun cock beside him, and Dean says, "Never."

Ellen gave them the room over the roadhouse garage: two double beds with no table between them.

"Team hunters always sleep in here," she said with finality.

"Looks great," Sam said.

Dean grunted and took the bed closest to the window.

A wide, soft mattress was dragged up from the basement for the girls and heaped with blankets and pillows. They made a fort that first afternoon, while Ellen spread herbal muck on Dean's wounds and Sam told her how they found the girls.

Alex and Lorelai will remember that afternoon: Alex will remember it as the first time she was happy after her house burned down; Lorelai will remember it as the first time she realised her new dads fought monsters, for real.

"I think it's the best example," Sam says on the third hour of the drive back to the roadhouse.

"Shut up, Sam," Dean says.

"No," Sam says. "I think what kids need, especially kids who get raised like this, like we did, I think what they need is to see good people, strong people, who care about each other. I don't think it matters--"

"I think it matters, and that ought to be enough for you to shut the hell up," Dean says.

Sam shakes his head. "I don't think you do--I think you think Dad did."

"Shut the fuck up about Dad," Dean says. "I don't want him in this conversation."

"How the hell are we supposed to talk about raising kids and hunting without talking about Dad?" Sam says.

"For starters, I don't give a rat's ass how we're supposed to talk about it, 'cause I don't want to fucking talk about it at all," Dean says. "And lastly, it ain't Dad's fault we're fucked up like this, so don't bring him into it."

"Fine," Sam says. He drives in rigid silence until they cross into Indiana.

Dean sighs and says, "Let's stop for waffles at that place you like, by the interchange."

Sam looks over at Dean. "I don't want a half life," he says abruptly, stubbornly. "I don't want it to be you or the girls. I want everything. I want to be happy."

Dean looks away. His hand wraps around the door handle threateningly.

"We're going seventy miles an hour, Dean," Sam says.

"Then maybe you should keep your eyes on the goddamn road," Dean says. "My car ain't suffered enough for one day, getting mauled by some clinically depressed scarecrow or whatever the fuck it was?"

Sam looks back out at the highway, night retreating ahead as dawn breaks behind them.

"You're a bitch, you know that," Dean says quietly.

Sam smiles. "Yep," he says.

He hits the gas a little harder. He misses his girls, now that he's got his brother back.

End.

---

Bye.