Your Sorrow for Another Coin - Chapter Two
Your Sorrow for Another Coin
Chapter Two: The lilac wind where no one goes
Word Count: 5876
Pairing: John/OFC, Dean/OFC (Het)
Overall Rating: NC-17 (This chapter: PG-13)
Feedback: Absolutely. Concrit is always welcome.
Disclaimer: The Winchester boys aren't mine but I'd make Dean wear his boots all of the time if they were.
Spoilers/Warnings: None for the series.
A/N: This story was inspired by last year's spn_xx summer challenge - prompt #149, Spelling by Margaret Atwood - and is my response to the This Woman's Work challenge on spn_het_love.
Beta(s): As always, embroiderama is the calm yin to my angsty yang, katelennon is the best damn cheerleader a girl can have, and quirkies helped me immeasurably with characterization and last minute edits. Everything that rocks about this is because of them. The mistakes? Those are all me.
Summary: Winchesters always needed protecting, from themselves as much as anything else - so maybe it was no surprise that Mama added all that thyme and basil and oregano into spaghetti sauce every time a Winchester crossed their doorstep.
Chapters:
Chapter One / Chapter Two / Chapter Three / Chapter Four / Chapter Five
They were sitting in the dark, listening to crickets and the steady tick of the clock.
Alice had curled up in the corner of the couch, arms tucked around her legs as tight as she could make herself without turning to stone. Dean’s head was lolling against the back cushion, his arms flung out on either side of his body and legs stretching out to the floor. Even unfolded like a rag doll, his muscles were tense and Alice watched the sheen of his eyes staring up into the ceiling. He would blink whenever she breathed too loud, looking at her once when the clock struck two and a sharp sob wormed its way out like Alice was a rotten apple.
There was just enough light filtering in through the curtains to make shadows of Dean’s profile, blurring into nothing but shapes the longer Alice stared at him. She tried to focus on his breathing, as slow and steady as Mama’s grandfather clock, and pour herself out like she was spreading roots underneath the old oak tree; resting her cheek on her arm and closing her eyes. But the only pictures being sent to her were ones that made Alice’s heart beat off-key against her rib cage, keeping time to a cascade of rock salt pellets scattering across the floor and John’s chest slowing down while Mama rocked him back and forth in her arms.
Her eyes flung open when the scratch of wood against wood matched her mama’s screams and Alice sucked in a breath. Two shiny spots focused on her and Dean brought a finger up to his mouth the same way he used to do when they were little and they were sneaking Sam outside to catch frogs with them when Sam was supposed to be taking a nap. Alice nodded, twisting her head just enough to see into the kitchen.
“Shit,” John hissed, watching Mama thread a needle. He swallowed before kicking back a tumbler, closing his eyes while Mama leaned over, and Alice’s shoulders jerked right along with his when the needle poked through skin. “That was close,” John added, pouring more whiskey into his glass.
Mama didn’t say anything but her eyes were soft when she looked up at John and Alice bit her knuckles to keep from screaming, wishing she had more than a tumbler full of John Winchester’s whiskey because a ring of bruises shaped like fingers curled around Mama’s neck; every slender blemish topped off with a red ruby bright enough to glisten in the light. The same color peeked out of five puckered gashes on John’s arm, being sewn closed with the same tiny stitches that Mama used to embroider charm bags.
John slammed another tumbler of whiskey, his skin white when Mama tied off the first row stitches. His eyes blew themselves wide when she started threading the needle again, mouth slack and hanging open like he was nothing more than an empty shell. The only reason John Winchester was moving when the glass fell out of his hand and rolled onto the floor was because his body was sliding down the chair to meet it there.
Mama just cocked her head and licked her thumb, pressing it down on John's forehead like she was a crow girl and even Alice could feel the tendril connecting Mama into the earth for all that Jane Meeks was sitting in a rickety kitchen chair with a needle in one hand and purple splotches on her throat from whatever had sliced up her man. Alice's thumbs twitched when John's body snapped straight and he started blinking and it was her turn to put a finger to her lips when Dean gasped.
The muscles in John’s neck clenched when Mama started sewing up the second cut, another hiss and a swallow of whiskey keeping his ass plastered to the chair while Mama’s hand made quick work; Mama hummed, calm like a lullaby, and John didn’t even move by the time the needle was making a third pass up his arm.
There was more power in her mama's right pinkie than Alice had in her entire body and no amount of wishing and walking bare foot was ever changing that. Her spit couldn't even wash dirt off of her forearm whenever Alice leaned against the bus window on the way to school and watched the grass waving in the wind.
“How do we explain this to the kids?” John asked finally, his growl turning into sandpaper from the whiskey. “They think we went to the movies.”
Alice’s eyes flickered towards Dean. His left hand was clenching in and out of a fist, lying wrist up to the ceiling, and she didn’t blame him for the way his glittering eyes narrowed into slits because his papa was being an ass; trying to hide the truth from boys overflowing with the things that went bump in the night, howling in basements and digging their way out of the ground when the crone’s moon was hiding behind the stars. She’d take back the stories for them herself if she could, even if it meant growing up without Dean pulling on her ponytails or Sam spinning with her in the pasture until they both fell down dizzy.
“All three of them are hunter’s children,” Mama said. Her laugh was gentle and she pushed red curls away from her face, elbow resting on the table. “Are you planning on wearing long-sleeved shirts just to cover up your bandages?” Chair legs scraped across the floor as Mama headed towards the sink. “I’ve got no intention of wearing a scarf in the middle of April,” she added, looking at John over her shoulder.
He flashed Mama the smile that had made Alice's knees go weak for two years running but he didn't say anything until Mama was opening up one of salve jars, the one without comfrey because John's cuts were too deep no matter how neatly they were sewn shut.
"Jesus, Jane. That smells like something crawled up a horse and died."
"I'm not making you drink anything this time, am I?" Mama said, lightly dabbing the ointment directly onto the stitches. "My mama used to say that you could always judge a salve’s power by how awful it smelled.” She grinned. “Unless you accidentally added in something that was poisonous."
It wasn't true at all. Her mama usually put in a neutral essential oil that wouldn’t hurt the healing properties of the herbs so that her salves would smell nice but it made John laugh and duck his mouth down to Mama's with a deep chuckle that settled in Alice's belly, heat spreading down her legs as her cheeks flushed.
“You almost done?”
“I will be if you stop kissing me,” Mama answered. She pulled back, wiping her hands on a towel and grabbing some gauze out of her first aid basket. John watched her fingers while Mama worked, an old ghost staring out of his eyes when he suddenly leaned over and poured another tumbler full of whiskey. Mama was singing under her breath again, a whispering melody that burst through Alice like a gust of rain-drenched air, and John’s mouth quirked up when Mama was finished.
John picked up a cotton ball and poured out some hydrogen peroxide on it from the bottle sitting in front of them, squeezing the excess out on one of Mama’s red spots. Even sitting in the living room, Alice could see the infection bubbling out from the wound. Mama’s cheek muscles tightened when John moved on to the second cut but all she did was grimace and hand John the same jar of ointment she had used on his arm.
As soon as Mama flipped the lid down on her basket, Alice scrunched her eyes closed and Dean let loose with a snore that would have rattled the rafters if they were in the attic. She had to bite the inside of her cheek just to keep from laughing because the second snore that ripped across the living room would have been enough to break the Dalai Lama, let alone some girl who still couldn’t keep from chasing butterflies when she was out weeding in the garden.
“That’s a surefire way for your boy to get a crick in his neck.”
The stairs started squeaking and John laughed, his voice muffled by the stairwell. “Last time I tried to wake him up for breakfast, Dean pulled a knife on me.”
There was something in the way that he said it that made Alice’s throat swell - and she wasn’t sure if it was pride or if it was something else, another ghost trapped in a laugh because remembering that the Winchester boys were soldiers before they were anything else throbbed in places where people should never hurt. Alice guessed that it was both because it hurt even more knowing that their papa was the one who made them that way, turned his sons into boys who couldn’t even sleep easy, and she was just a girl sitting on the outside watching the whole thing.
Even her mama’s tiny sigh as they turned onto the landing couldn’t dull the ache.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Alice uncurled just enough to slip out a leg and touch Dean’s thigh with her toe, a nudge that probably would have gotten her foot lopped off if he had actually been sleeping and there was a knife hidden somewhere in the couch. He might as well have been stone, the muscles in his thigh wound up tighter than a rubber band airplane.
“You okay, Dean?” she whispered.
The only thing coming out of him was breath, tattered like the ribbons Alice always tied onto the old oak as soon as the dust from the Impala turning onto the county road had cleared, and she sat up; kneeling close and touching his shoulder. Dean flinched when her fingertips lightly brushed the cotton, a frown she could see in the shadows when Alice pulled her hand away. She wanted to say something but Alice Meeks wasn’t good with words that could heal just like she wasn’t good at reading omens in the wind or even keeping a goldfish in a bowl without killing it somehow.
It wasn’t enough but all she could do was watch.
“Your mom’s all banged up ’cause of me. I shoulda been the one hunting with my dad.” His voice cracked and Dean was suddenly tugging his t-shirt up over his head. He kept it bunched in a fist, balanced on his knee while he stared Alice down with grit teeth like he was trying to force her to look away first. There were three scars running across his belly, white and fresh and shiny in the light coming through the crack between the curtains, and Alice couldn’t keep herself from touching them when her hands twitched all on their own; tracing the uneven stitches and the furrowed skin, warmer than the rest of him.
“What happened?”
“Fucked up.” Dean looked down at her hand and that should have been enough to make her stop but Alice wasn’t about to, even if it was just her fingers on his belly. That didn’t keep his eyes from going as wide as his papa’s and Alice hoped he wasn’t about to start sliding off the couch because there was no way in hell she could ground him before Dean’s face hit blue shag. “Sammy and I were doing some recon training in Minnesota. Just some stupid exercise I set up in the woods while Dad was researching a case.”
“And there was something out there?” Alice spread her hand across the scars. “Like a monster?” No animal in her own woods had a spread like that, except for the black bears and maybe the wolves - but they never came close enough to do any harm, even when the chickens were full grown and ready to eat.
“More like a wildcat.” Dean shook his head. “Damn thing got me in the gut before I could get a slice in.” He stretched his arms, the muscles in his abdomen shifting underneath her palm. “Sam managed to get me back to where we were staying and had me halfway patched up before Dad got there.” He sucked in a breath and Alice lowered her head, seeing the whole thing play out between the blood seeping through Dean’s fingers and the way the needle would shake with Sam biting his lip hard enough to keep steady. “But Dad hasn’t let me hunt since.”
“Maybe he was just letting you heal up?” It came out half-words and half-yawn and suddenly Alice was staring up at him from underneath heavy eyelids, covering her mouth when she yawned a second time. “Or maybe tonight your papa needed something that only Mama could do.”
Dean snorted, licking his thumb and pressing it hard between Alice’s eyes. “Doesn’t look too hard,” he said.
“That’s ‘cause it’s harder than it looks.” Alice rubbed the slick spot on her forehead. “And I’m not ever gonna be able to do it.” The clock struck a half hour mark right when she said it, the universe laughing because it had just let Alice Meeks know that she was only going to figure out one secret in her life - and it had nothing to do with spit being just as powerful as blood. The only thing that chime was telling her was that she should just pack up and go to bed.
She stretched out across the cushions instead, surprising herself when she rested the back of her head on Dean’s thigh. Alice guessed that it surprised him, too; the way his body came off the couch before Dean settled back against the old afghan. But he was laughing, soft like his papa did before he kissed Mama.
“Dean?” Alice waited until she could see the reflection off of his eyes. “What happened to the cat?”
“The cat?”
“The one that got you in the gut.”
“Killed it before it could turn on Sam.”
Alice couldn’t say anything after that, just stared up into the glint where his eyes were until his head fell backwards and he was snoring for real. It was worse than when Dean was pretending and Alice wondered how she was going to fall asleep, with her fingers jerking all over the place and a murmur in her head telling her that any boy who could kill a wild cat with nothing but a knife was destined to be a hunter as sure as the moon sang to the tide and there wasn’t a power in the earth or the wind that could stop it.
It was the knife Alice kept seeing when her eyelids fluttered closed, stuck through a spine right up to the hilt while blood spilled over a man’s hand, but a metal vise had her throat clamped shut. There was a warning shout trapped in her belly that wasn’t coming out, no matter how much she ripped herself apart to set it free.
The next thing Alice knew, Sam was laughing loud enough to make her eyes open and chanting something about her sitting in a tree with Dean; dancing just out of Dean’s reach until Sam got to the word marriage and his older brother launched himself off the couch screaming about how little Sammy Winchester wasn’t reaching the age of thirteen. Alice rolled right onto the floor, landing on her ass and pulling her dress down as quickly as she could when she caught both of them sneaking a peek at her underwear.
Dean grunted and Sam turned bright red and Alice knew she was never living down the fact that she wore panties covered with little kittens.
Alice didn’t have much honor left to defend after that but she wasn’t holding anything back when Dean laughed and told her that she smacked like a chick. Alice was rolling around with them right there in the middle of the carpet when Mama popped in from the kitchen to let them know breakfast was ready, hollering at the top of her lungs about how Dean was taking it back and kicking her legs whenever Sam tried to pin her with his.
It was their own damn fault, teaching Alice Meeks how to hold her own against boys and how to hold her knuckles for the perfect noogie.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The bruises around Mama’s neck had already started going yellow around the edges but there were still deep purple stripes in the middle of each one.
Alice bit her lip and tried not to stare when they were passing a huge pot of oatmeal around the table but that didn’t keep her eyes flickering between Mama’s red scabs and the bandage John wasn’t even trying to hide, sitting at the table in a white tank top like Papa used to wear during the summer.
Even Sam made her feel like a stupid kid, slurping down spoonfuls of oatmeal covered in brown sugar and milk and grabbing handfuls of bacon off the platter without even batting an eye when he saw his papa’s bandage - like his papa showed up sporting one every morning the same way John Winchester wore that leather jacket of his when it was snowing outside. There was nothing to do but follow Sam’s example, mechanically chewing on a piece of toast and swallowing it down as best she could with a glass full of milk, and she would have been fine if the light coming through the window hadn’t made a shine where clear liquid from the infection was seeping through John’s bandage.
And Alice still would have been fine if she wasn’t the one sitting next to him, close enough to smell the wound rot lurking underneath the sweet flowers Mama had picked that morning and set in the middle of the table. Shutting her eyes only made it worse, the smell mixing up with pictures of white puckered skin around crimson gashes pounding through her veins and curdling the milk in her tummy.
Alice didn’t even excuse herself, just pushed back her chair and ran to the bathroom as fast as her bare feet would take her. Mama was there when Alice slammed to her knees, whispering about how it was all going to be alright and rubbing her back until the only thing coming up Alice’s throat was bile that stunk enough to keep her dry heaving and she would have started vomiting up her intestines if the cool hand on her belly hadn’t stopped the spasms after Alice sucked in another breath.
“I’m sorry.” Alice sat back on her heels, closing the lid on the toilet bowl, and wiped her eyes. The only thing worse than puking was the crying that came along with it but that didn’t keep Mama from pulling Alice into a hug. Alice gagged when something sour wafted off of Mama’s neck and she tilted her head up to look into Mama’s eyes. “It just smells so bad, Mama.”
“What smells bad, Sweet Pea?”
“Your cuts.” She swallowed and lowered her head when Mama frowned at her. Sam’s face was swimming past her mama’s shoulder and Alice wanted to crawl in on herself because a hunter’s kid should be able keep her mouth shut and not even think about what might have happened. A hunter’s kid should be able to make it through oatmeal and toast without throwing up and without asking questions because fighting and bleeding and nearly dying was as real as breakfast. She shook her head sharply. “The ones from last night,” Alice added. “They stink something awful.”
There was a deep sniff and suddenly Mama was lifting Alice’s face with soft fingers on her chin and planting a kiss on her forehead like she was five before standing up. Mama pushed past Sam but she didn’t turn down the hall fast enough, something dark in her eyes that made Alice start getting up to follow her - but Sam blocked the doorway, kneeling down next to her with a glass of water.
“Dad says you gotta sip it slow,” he said.
Sam shifted to sit cross-legged when Alice snatched the glass out of his hand. It was bad enough that Sam was the one they sent to take care of her and Alice sure as hell didn’t need some kid who got bitch pissy playing a board game telling her how to drink a goddamn glass of water. Alice drained the glass in one draw, slamming it down onto the floor and staring into Sam’s face with a hard smile.
And Alice figured she was lucky that it wasn’t Dean sitting there with her because Sam had the grace not to make fun of her when her stomach groaned and the coil twisting inside her belly had Alice back on her knees. Sam just handed her a towel when she leaned back against the wall and flashed her a smile that should have seared the nerves on the back of her eyes.
“If you thought the underwear stuff was bad, you better take a shower before Dean sees the puke in your hair.”
“Why do you Winchesters think you’re being charming when you’re really just a bunch of jackasses?” Alice made like she was poking Sam’s knee with her toe and he swatted at her foot when she pulled it back.
“We’ve got special skills, Sweet Pea.” Dean grinned down at her, leaning against the doorjamb with his arms folded across his chest. “They’re not as cool as spitting on someone but we get by.” She glared at him when Sam helped her stand but Dean just licked his thumb and pushed down on her nose. He cocked his head. “Jesus Christ, Alice. It’s just puke. Sam gakked a couple of months ago when Dad was showing him a dead ‘shifter. His hand slipped into some goo and he didn’t stop throwing up until we got him out of the sewer.”
“And Dean keeled over and puked hamburgers and a chocolate shake all over Dad’s shoes when he made his first kill,” Sam added.
“Who the hell told you that, Geek Boy?”
“You gonna call Dad on being a liar?”
Dean snorted and smacked Sam on the back of his shaggy head but that didn’t keep either of them from laughing. They both grabbed an arm and dragged Alice into the hall and Sam was still laughing even when her hair brushed his hand. He groaned and turned back into the bathroom to wash off the puke and Dean yanked her back when Alice tried to run down the hall.
He wasn’t laughing at all and Alice shivered when his fingers touched the bare skin on her upper arm, tracing the tiny half-moons her nails had left there the night before while his jaw clenched. Dean’s breath was a hiss when his eyes focused on the bite marks around one of her knuckles, gasping once like he was a kid on a playground getting sucker-punched for the first time before letting Alice’s hand drop back to her side.
“There’s gotta be something we can do where you aren’t gonna end up getting hurt,” Dean said softly. He sighed deeply, eyebrows arching up underneath his bangs as his mouth quirked up to the right and suddenly Alice was smiling up at him because there wasn’t anything to do but smile back when Dean Winchester looked at you like that. “If I ask your mom about taking you to the movies, is she gonna make you sew charm bags? ‘Cause hanging out with a girl doing a home economics project in the middle of Batman Forever is gonna suck.”
“You sure you wanna hang out with a girl who pukes in her hair?”
“I’m not taking you anywhere until you get a shower. I’m drawing the line at hanging out with a girl who stinks.” He smirked at her.
“Jackass.”
Dean chuckled and jammed his hands into his jean pockets, bumping into her shoulder before turning on his heel and walking back towards the kitchen. He was humming that stupid Metallica song that he loved so much, the one about never never land and monsters under the bed - a fitting lullaby for a boy whose mama was thrown up on a ceiling and gutted like a fish. Alice wiped at her eyes and her head was full of dandelion fuzz, listening to Dean’s voice dip down into the lower registers, but she didn’t realize that she had said his name until Dean stopped and looked at her over his shoulder, the smirk giving way to something else when she padded after him and tugged on a sleeve.
Alice hitched up on her toes and Sam Winchester was the only reason she didn’t kiss Dean’s cheek right then and there, bursting into the hallway and demanding to go with them to the movies.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
John Winchester never stayed in one place too long, wandering back roads like an old storm crow getting chased by lightning.
Mama always joked about how he was a better weather vane than the metal one on the house, that you could track the direction of the rising wind based on the way he said good morning over coffee and figure out whether John and his boys were staying for two days or three if you watched how much sugar John poured into the cup.
But the Winchesters were still sitting around the kitchen table come Monday morning, John glaring at her mama over coffee while his sons shoveled biscuits and gravy into their mouths like they were starving. It didn’t matter how hard he frowned at her; after those cuts of his went hot with bloody puss, there was no way that Mama was about to let John Winchester out of her sight until the wounds had healed.
“The world’s out there waiting for you,” Mama said. She sipped her tea slowly, a laugh in her voice that didn’t make it to her eyes. “But you’ll have a better chance making it across the state line when you’re not risking septicemia.”
John narrowed his eyes, hard little stones sitting above a grimace, and stared Mama down while he clenched the fist sitting next to his coffee cup. She stared right back, the muscles working in her jaw as she stirred more cream into her tea. It wasn’t a secret, the way that John Winchester’s hunt was fueled by vengeance more than it was fueled by anything else, and even folks passing through Mama’s store could tell you the legend of a man who drove through the heart country with two motherless boys and a trail of dead monsters in his wake.
Jane Meeks wasn’t part of that legend, the widowed woman raising her daughter in a different story, but that never kept her from loving the man who was. Watching them turn away from each other made Alice’s throat hurt as much as watching Sam and Dean grab sausage links off the platter, all greasy fingers and milk on their upper lips and both of them daring Alice to do it with the same grins on their face. But the way John was frowning at Mama, they would be gone before dinnertime.
“I’m gonna be late for school,” Alice said, pushing her chair back from the table.
Alice grabbed her backpack from the hall and stumbled out the door, running down to the county road without even saying goodbye. The bus crested the hill as Alice shot out past the bushes and she kept her head low no matter how loud Sam was calling her name until she was walking down the aisle towards a seat in the back, sliding behind Barbara Jean and pasting a grin on her face. Sam’s long legs and wild hair danced in Alice’s peripheral vision, chasing the bus until she turned to wave goodbye.
“He’s a cutie.” Barbara Jean nudged Alice’s elbow. “But don’t you think you’re robbing the cradle?”
Alice snorted. “You study for Mr. Bryant’s test yet?”
Barbara Jean giggled and shook her head, launching into a story about how Timmy Edwards from Science class could make a girl squirm with nothing but his hand hitting all the right places on the outside of her clothes. She wasn’t about to tell Barbara Jean that Dean Winchester could do that just by bumping a girl’s knee or brushing tiny cuts with his fingers. Alice leaned her cheek against the window, the glass cool against her skin, and smiled - but her cheeks still ached when Miss Smits started making Monday morning announcements in home room.
Alice could have cared less about the bake sale for band camp but it was something she could pretend to be focusing on when Barbara Jean began asking Alice questions about her weekend. And Barbara Jean was still trying to weasel out answers when they both walked out the front doors of the school, laughing when something big and black stopped Alice dead in her tracks.
The damn car wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, stretched out right next to the curb.
Sam was hanging out of the passenger window, waving at her like a lunatic and screaming her name, but Dean was leaning against the retaining wall near the main sidewalk with his arms folded across his chest. Barbara Jean snickered and excused herself, telling Alice she needed to spend some time alone with her new boyfriend before Ginny Phelps moved in for the kill. The head cheerleader was actually standing next to Dean, tugging down on the edge of her top and showing more cleavage than was probably allowed in the dress code, and Dean didn’t even try to hide his grin.
Alice grit her teeth when Ginny laughed, looking up at Dean from underneath her eyelashes. The only thing worse than being stuck in the back seat of the Winchesters’ car listening to Ginny chatter on about being the queen of every girl who shook a pom-pom at Shelton High was watching Dean flirt with Ginny on the way home from school.
It was bad enough that he had already sweet talked Ginny Phelps into her mama’s shed the last time the Winchesters had showed up on the Meeks’ doorstep. Alice Meeks wasn’t going to watch it happen all over again just because Dean Winchester had less sense than a gnat when there was a girl showing off her tits. She had no problem slapping him silly if that’s what it took to keep him out of Ginny’s white daisy dukes.
And it wasn’t because she was jealous or anything.
Boys sparked with girls all the time, riding towards the push and the pull of the tide because there was nothing like that rush of the waves breaking against the shore. Alice enjoyed the ride the same as everyone else, letting Chuck Trelawny get his hands up her shirt underneath the bleachers during a baseball game. It probably would have gone farther than that, her nipples crinkled against his palms, but a flashlight and a shout made them both scatter and run.
Dean was lucky she didn’t have a flashlight of her own because Alice would have chucked it at Dean’s head the second he started laughing at whatever Ginny was saying. She couldn’t get that much distance with her back pack. Alice sucked in a breath and started walking.
“You like taking your own sweet time, don’t you?” Dean drawled as soon as Alice was in earshot. He pushed off the wall without giving Ginny Phelps a backwards glance, walking past her to grab the strap on Alice’s backpack. He slid it down her arm and slung it over his shoulder easier than Running Bear could pull back a bow.
“I didn’t know there’d be a welcoming party,” Alice shot back. “And I didn’t wanna interrupt your conversation.”
“Jenna was trying to get back into your mom’s shed tonight.” The damn boy was smirking at her. “Jealous?”
“Why the hell would I be jealous of Ginny Phelps?” she snapped, as sharp as the way their parents watched each other over cups of tea and coffee.
Dean shrugged his shoulders. “Beats me, Sweet Pea,” he said, opening up the back door and pushing her backpack inside. “But I don’t understand why you’re looking at me like I cut off your arm or something instead of thanking me for taking time out of my busy schedule just to pick you up.”
Alice slammed the door, leaning onto the front seat to rest her chin on her hands - one elbow touching Dean’s shoulder and the other one touching Sam’s. Dean looked at her, waggling his eyebrows because he knew she was going to forgive him. Dean Winchester could walk into a room and have everyone smiling no matter the half-assed things he said, overflowing with the charm of a trickster caught up in that grin even when Dean was spouting crap that made her want to throttle him.
“Because taking time out of your busy schedule just to pick me up when you could be sitting around burping the alphabet and making fun of Sam is a real sacrifice.” Alice rolled her eyes.
Sam snorted, ducking when Dean’s hand shot out to smack his head, and rested his elbow against the window. The engine roared into high gear, scattering the group of kids walking in front of the car like tadpoles swimming away from a rock, but Ginny Phelps was still standing near the retaining wall staring at the car so hard Alice was surprised the paint hadn’t started to peel.
The whole school was going to be calling her ‘Sweet Pea’ once Ginny got past wanting to skin Alice Meeks alive.
But some people never knew when they were the lucky ones, being able to spend a couple of hours in a shed and walk away when you were done without losing a thing that really mattered; that getting angry watching some boy you screwed drive away with the girl whose mama talked to trees was nothing compared to watching the dust spit up into the air when that car turned onto the county road and Sam was waving at you frantically through the back window.
There weren’t enough paper cranes in the world to change it, to make it so Dean could always pick her up from school with Sam hanging out of the car, flailing his arms like a spastic when he saw her. They would always be the ones blowing away when it was time and Alice would always be the one left behind.
Not even Mama could make a Winchester stay once the wind turned the weather vane.
Chapter Three
A/N:
The title of this chapter is a lyric from the song “Every New Leaf Over” by Jeffrey Foucault.