Sabbatical March 1996--SPN 3/3 (Complete)
Title: Sabbatical, March 1996
Author: borgmama1of5
Summary: A hunt gone bad, and John is faced with an untenable situation.
Wordcount: 11,200
Genre: h/c, Teen!chesters (John, Dean, Sam)
Rating: PG13
Beta: Cheerleader extraordinaire, sandymg
Disclaimer: If they were mine, I would have given them a happier childhood
(All parts linked)
Part 1:
http://borgmama1of5.livejournal.com/48905.html
Part 2:
http://borgmama1of5.livejournal.com/49336.html
Part 3
The second surgery takes another four excruciating hours. Sam refuses to go to school and the two of them sit in the watery green waiting area in tense silence. John wonders what Sam said to convince Dean to do this. Maybe he just asked.
The doctor comes out and lets out a tired, small smile. John exhales and wonders absurdly if he’s really been holding his breath all this time. Sam rises and starts asking a thousand questions, like bullets flying out of a machine gun. John meets the doctor’s glazed eyes over his son’s head.
Professional to the core, every answer is given with hedging and stipulations and never once does the doctor say Dean will walk again. Sam looks up at him with a hopeful grin. Perhaps he heard something between the doctor’s words. Or maybe it’s just the optimism of youth.
“Dean’s gonna be okay,” Sam announces.
John nods yes, feels himself the worst kind of coward for not saying the words back. Sammy needs to hear John say it. He forces his voice smooth. “Yeah, he will.”
John returns to work and the routine of their lives resumes with Sam visiting Dean after school and John coming by after work. They test Dean the next day and the results are the same. Nothing has changed.
John remains calm upon hearing this. He tells his oldest son that it’s early and to give it time. Inside he is quaking and wants to curl up in a corner and hold on to himself and rock until the terror subsides. Because this was their last chance. And he can’t think about what happens next.
When Sam is asleep that night, John goes over the two-drink limit he’s set himself. John thinks of just how long he’ll need to work in the garage to pay off these two surgeries if Dean doesn’t get better and they can’t leave. Lives he won’t help. Hunts he won’t do. Evil that will walk free.
Dean’s asked again for John to return to work. Not to the garage but to hunting. Made the same damn argument about people dying because John is stuck here. Dean says that he’d only have to be a ward of the state for ten months anyway, until he turns eighteen. But John knows, beyond a doubt, that he’d not only lose one son. Sam would never forgive him. And truth be told, what would be left of John if this came to pass?
The next day passes in the daily routine of tire rotations and fluid checks and oil changes. He replaces a carburetor and a fan belt and a toasted starter. At seven o’clock he washes his hands and heads to the hospital.
The laughter hits him first. Because it’s a sound he hasn’t heard in forever. Dean’s deep, throaty chuckle followed by Sammy’s higher cackle.
“Dad …” they both say at once the second his presence is felt.
“Boys.”
They look at each other. “Wanna tell him?” Sammy asks, eyes bright.
John knows. Can see it in Sam’s dancing body and Dean’s face, his eyes. God, he hasn’t seen them alive like this since the accident.
“I felt my legs. I moved my toes.”
Tears flood John’s eyes and he tries to blink them away, stay strong, but screw it, he rushes to the bed and it doesn’t matter if they see him crying. Dean looks uncertain for a moment, shifts back, but then he sinks into John’s arms and grips him tight and John hears a barely whispered “Daddy” against his cheek. He pulls away to spot Sam watching them, his own eyes glimmering.
“Told you he’d be okay.”
John laughs. An honest sound that surprises them all. “Yeah, Sammy. You did.”
_________________
Dean and John are told to expect a lengthy rehab time, and are warned that there’s no guarantee of complete recovery. But Dean is taking that toe movement to heart and has settled on nothing less than dancing his way out of the hospital.
It’s been nearly a month now since that catastrophic hunt. John doesn’t think he’s spent a month without hunting something since he busted his leg two years ago. Or held down a ‘normal’ job that long, either. Now that he’s not on constant crisis mode, it’s unsettling. There’s still stuff out there, people getting hurt other families being destroyed and he’s not taking care of it.
Some nights he finds himself doing research anyway to keep track of what he’s not doing. When it’s feasible, he hands off possible cases to a couple of hunters he knows are up for taking leads.
It gnaws at him to be stopped cold.
But Dean needs him.
Not that John is doing anything for him. It’s the therapists working with Dean that matter, persuading nerves and muscles to function again. And there’s been progress, finally. Dean is able to move his legs a little bit more almost daily. Everyone’s a lot more positive that they just have to get Dean’s body to a cascade point where everything clicks back together.
Though nobody says Dean will make a full recovery. That question is always answered with “It’s possible.” Never, “He will.”
Dean is working his butt off, John knows it. He’s stopped in for visits a couple of times and caught the therapists telling Dean to take it easy, he can’t push the pace his body is setting, he’ll only delay the healing.
Dean’s face is always subdued when John sees him, unless Sam is there, too. With Sam he jokes and snarks and threatens to jump out of bed and kick Sam’s ass.
Tuesday night when he comes home from the garage John is exhausted. He does better on the days when he has a challenging repair to do. Today, he had too much thinking time while he was doing oil changes all day. Last night’s research turned up what John is sure is a werewolf two states over, and he can’t find anyone able to go after it. Tomorrow night is the full moon. If he left now …
He heads to the apartment for a fast shower, ends up drinking two beers and trying one more time to find a hunter to take out the werewolf. It’s eight o’clock before he realizes it, and visiting hours are over already. Sam answers the phone in Dean’s room, and John tells him to just come down to the main entrance where he’s parked.
“Dad!” As Sam gets in the car John thinks if that cliché about ‘if looks could kill’ was true, well, he would be such a roasted corpse there’d be nothing left to salt and burn.
“How can you just not bother seeing Dean tonight?”
“Your brother doesn’t need me to babysit him.”
Sam tightens his lips but he doesn’t say anything more. When he gets out by the apartment, though, he slams the Impala door hard enough to actually shake the car. Which is a disrespect John is going to have to address.
Sam runs up the stairs, unlocks the door with his own key, and starts for the bedroom, but even exhausted, John manages to catch Sam’s shoulder before he can disappear.
John turns Sam around with more force than necessary and pushes him down to the couch, then positions himself as a barricade.
“We. Are going to talk.”
Sam snorts and mutters under his breath.
“Repeat that for me.”
Sam does look at him now, anger, hurt, and defiance seething around him. Of course Sam chooses to go with the one John won’t tolerate.
“I said, you talk and I have to listen.”
“That’s enough!” A month’s worth of frustration and anxiety land squarely on Sam. “You. Don’t have any right in criticizing what I’m doing for your brother! You should have been with us on that hunt! If there’d been a third person there it never would have gone down that way! Dean was a helluva a hunter at your age, but it’s too much of an inconvenience for you to bother watching your brother’s back. So he got hurt. And we’re stayin’ here. Under our real names so he can get the care he needs to get better. And if other people get hurt because I’m stuck here, well, that’s too bad, isn’t it? Because Sam Winchester can’t be bothered. It’s not like we run a family auto shop and if you don’t want to be a mechanic like your old man, it’s no big deal because there are other mechanics to do the job you don’t want. We don’t get a choice because we are some of the few who know what the job is.
“So don’t you sit there and accuse me of neglecting Dean. I’m staying with him. And turning my back on the rest of the people I should be protecting. Because you pitched a fit about going that night and your brother went along with you.”
Sam’s face is zombie white, eyes watering, and John knows he went too far. But he is sick and tired of being judged by Sam’s impossible standards.
At that moment, John cannot stand himself. “Go to your room,” he orders.
And then John drinks Jack Daniels until he temporarily disappears.
He feels like shit in the morning. Not just physically, although the hangover is a bitch. John knows the guilt trip he laid on Sam was an attempt to redirect his own guilt over Dean getting hurt on John’s watch.
He needs to apologize, and makes an effort when Sam comes out for breakfast.
“Want some eggs, Sammy?”
Sam ignores him, pours himself a bowl of generic cornflakes and milk, and disappears back into the bedroom.
John really fucked this up. He forces himself to eat the eggs while trying to figure out what to say to Sam. He is pretty sure ‘I’m sorry’ won’t be enough, but he might as well start with that. But when he goes to Sam’s room, the kid and his backpack are gone.
John stews all morning. Fortunately, there’s a complicated transmission repair that takes all his concentration for the afternoon. He stops and gets another pizza to bring to the boys. He still doesn’t know what he’s going to say to Sam, but he figures he has a little more time. He’ll bring it up on the car ride home. Admit he was out of line. Sam being there wouldn’t have mattered and probably would only have gotten him hurt, too.
But Dean ambushes John when he walks into the room. Doesn’t even notice the peace offering.
“Why the hell did you say that to Sam?”
John is used to flaring nostrils and blazing eyes from Sam. Getting them from Dean is a surreal feeling, and not in a good-dream way.
As John steps forward to put the pizza down on the bedside tray, Sam moves away from Dean’s side until he is half-behind the head of the bed. Swollen eyes, red nose, Sam has been crying.
John is ready to say ‘I was wrong’ but he waits a beat too long.
“That was a fucked-up thing to tell him, Dad! Only thing that woulda happened if Sam’d been there is he woulda gotten hurt too!”
Hadn’t John come to that very thought? But Dean furiously attacking him skews John’s response.
“If we’d have had a third man there, the ghost wouldn’t have been able to overpower us.”
“Third man! Sam’s still a kid!”
John has the restraint not to say ‘You were a hunter at thirteen, Dean,’ but just barely. Though what he does say isn’t any better.
“Are you questioning my judgment, Dean?” John’s not yelling now, his tone is razor sharp.
Their eyes are locked, and John feels another wave of wrongness to be staring down Dean. Who does everything John asks and more. Who is in a fucking hospital bed paralyzed because John turned him into a hunter instead of letting him be a kid.
John knows he can outlast Dean’s deadly glare, but he realizes the only thing that will do is break Dean. He takes a breath and forces out, in the same steely voice as before, “I was wrong to say that. Sam wouldn’t have helped. Could have gotten hurt, too.”
His sons drop their eyes simultaneously. John takes a deep breath and tries to diffuse the emotions in the room.
“I brought you pizza. Gonna eat it?” As John opens the box, Sam edges back to Dean’s side and snags a slice to hand to Dean. Sam gives John a look no child should ever have to give a parent before taking a vegetable swathed slice for himself and silently taking a bite.
Half the pizza is left but both boys have stopped eating. John eats only one piece, that’s all his stomach can handle at this point.
“How did the hunt get screwed up, Dad?”
Fuck. Dean’s taking a page from Sam’s playbook now, going for the jugular without warning.
“Do we have to talk about a goddamn hunt we did a fucking month ago right now, Dean?”
Dean meets John’s glare with equal intensity.
“Yeah, Dad, I think we do.”
John runs a hand over his face. He’s so tired he can barely remember yesterday, much less four weeks ago.
“I don’t know, Dean. We knew there were two ghosts, we talked about the possibility we’d run into both of ‘em … I don’t know what the hell happened, Dean, okay? They got the drop on us and kicked the shit out of both of us! The goddamned cabinet could have fallen on me just as easy as you!” He is so exhausted. “Hell, I don’t even know if we took care of ‘em. I haven’t gone back to check.”
Dean’s eyes are taking up half his face at the end of John’s tirade. “What?! You said … I thought it was done. You don’t know if they’re gone?”
“I haven’t had time to go back.” John doesn’t say ‘I couldn’t bear to go back in where you were reduced to half a man.’
“Dad--!”
“Dean!” Sam cuts off the start of Dean’s explosion. “Dad’s been taking care of you. That’s more important!”
It’s the Apocalypse, John thinks. Sam is defending him.
“Dad …”
“Enough, Dean! It’s over, okay? I’m done saving everybody’s family but my own! I couldn’t save Mary, couldn’t save you … hell, I just …” John stops. Realizes what he just said, feels a weird sense of emptiness and relief and failure.
Neither boy says anything. Dean is stricken, horrified at what John has said. Sam … Sam looks stunned as well, but there is an oddly hopeful cast to his face.
“Look, Dean, I’m really tired, okay? Working at the garage is taking it out of your old man. Want me to leave the pizza?”
Dean twitches his head ‘no.’
“Sam, okay if we go now?”
“Uh, yeah, sure Dad. You gonna be okay, Dean?”
A headshake.
“G’nite, Dean. See you … tomorrow.”
Sam doesn’t say a word for the entire ride home. Which in John’s fucked up existence is the closest to ‘apology accepted’ as he can hope to get.
_____________
John knows the boys have been talking about him when he gets to the hospital the next night, but he ignores the guarded look from Sam and the wrecked expression on Dean and asks about therapy and the progress Dean’s made and stays determinedly neutral with every comment.
There actually is good news tonight, too - the physical therapist has told Dean his rehabilitation is moving along to the point where she is taking him down to the PT room tomorrow to start using the equipment.
Dean doesn’t tell him this, however. Sam had gotten there before she’d left, overheard, and eagerly relays the news to John.
“Good work, son.” John claps a hand on Dean’s shoulder, but Dean is in that non-reactive mode again.
John listens to Sam chatter, offering ‘uh-huhs’ and nodding at random intervals. Dean appears to be in a similar mental state. John is pretty sure neither of them can repeat anything Sam has said for the last forty-five minutes.
It shouldn’t be so damn hard to fall asleep when he’s so exhausted.
_________________
John settles into a fog of existing. Garage, hospital, unconsciousness, wake, repeat. The unconscious part becomes harder to achieve without some alcohol - several beers or a few shots, John mixes it up as the only part of his routine that varies. Dean is doing better, they’ve got him pedaling some kind of cycle.
John knows Dean is working hard to get himself back, but the evening visits are awkward between the two of them. John misses the snark, he misses his son’s smile. He looks at John like John is a stranger. Only Sam can get a grin or wisecrack out of Dean.
That’s not true, though, John realizes when Dean jokes with the nurse who comes in while John is there. It’s John’s presence that is weighing Dean down.
The disconnect between grubbing all day in dirty engines and knowing that he should be out there fighting monsters is becoming an iron weight in John’s chest. The entire rhythm of John’s life is off-kilter, staying stationary, worrying about paying the rent and buying groceries strictly with the meager paycheck he’s making.
Sam, of course, thrives in this rooted existence, even though his life appears to consist only of school and seeing Dean in the hospital.
Dean gives daily progress reports as though every increment of movement is a failure because Dean still is not mobile. John is too tired to refute Dean’s perception. John knows Sam can get Dean to see the headway being made, so John absents himself from the discussion.
The full moon is approaching again, and John is staring at his phone. There still is no other hunter close enough to go after the werewolf that killed two more people last month. How many this month? The full moon is Saturday. If he left tomorrow he would have three days to find it. He hasn’t missed a day at the garage, surely Frank would let him have a few days off …
John’s fingers close around his beer. Sam is certainly old enough to manage without Dean actually in the same apartment, just till John can take care of this one hunt. And Dean will understand, hell, Dean wanted John to go back to hunting weeks ago.
He thinks for a moment that this is a more irrevocable decision than the one he made years ago, to go after the evil that killed Mary. Or maybe it is just that he has to make the choice again, that he is recommitting himself and his boys to the hunt. Except, he’s not involving Dean or Sam in this. This is his choice alone.
John stands and begins packing his duffle for a job for the first time in three months.
He feels alive again.
At the hospital, about to enter Dean’s room, he has a moment’s second thought. Then he walks in and Sam greets him with excitement.
“Dad! The therapist said she’s gonna let Dean try standing on his own tomorrow!”
“That’s great news.”
“Dad?”
Damned if Sam can’t tell he’s not gonna like what John says next. There is no way to make Sam take this well, so John doesn’t even try.
“I’m going to Kentucky tomorrow.”
Sam stares, wordless for a moment.
“What is it, Dad?” Dean asks, meeting John’s eyes squarely for the first time in weeks.
“Werewolf. Found its pattern last month, weren’t any hunters close enough to go after it. Killed two people. Figure I can get it and get back in four days.”
“You can’t…”
“He has to, Sammy. Otherwise more people are gonna die.”
Dean’s acceptance of John’s words shifts John back into equilibrium.
“You ought to be able to handle yourself for a few days, Sam. And Dean is getting the help he needs being here.”
“But …”
“Nothing to discuss, Sam, I’m leaving as soon as I drop you off at school in the morning. You can manage the bus till I get back.”
Dean’s approval of John’s decision takes the backbone out of Sam’s disagreement. He looks between Dean and John, biting his lower lip, but stays silent.
His eyes are anything but accepting, though.
____________________
John is gone for eight days.
He makes it to Owensboro, Kentucky, in fifteen hours, mapping out his strategy the whole way. He is damn pleased with himself when he catches the werewolf on Saturday just as it is heading out to find prey, and when he takes it down without even getting a scratch, John figures that for a sign he is doing the right thing.
As he is leaving Sunday morning, he overhears a couple of cops in the diner discussing a gruesome murder that happened in the next county. He’s got time, he thinks, and he discreetly eavesdrops until he’s pretty sure it’s another one of his cases.
The decision to detour should have been harder, he thinks, even as he eases the Impala to the off ramp and the road that will lead to this new hunt. It’s an angry spirit. Suddenly awakened and on a killing spree. The boys are waiting. For a moment he’s taken back to his time in the service. Was simple, then. Orders came down the chain of command. His superiors made the decisions and he didn’t have to concern himself with their rightness. But now. The choice is his.
He is choosing to save the lives of people he will never meet. And his boys? Well, his boys are safe at the moment.
It goes about as well as could be expected. But more importantly, it’s done. He got spoiled, he thinks, by doing salt-and-burns with Dean, where one of them digs and the other keeps lookout. Still, by Winchester standards his blood loss and bruises are minor.
It’s four in the afternoon when he pulls up to the apartment. Sam will be with Dean. John grabs a fast shower before heading to the garage to tell Lefty he’s sorry his sister’s family emergency took longer than he expected, and he’ll be back tomorrow. After Lefty gives him some grief he agrees to let John come back to work. John’s next stop is the hospital, where he figures he can tell Dean the hunt was successful while Sam glowers.
When John enters Dean’s room Sam is perched on the empty bed. Dean is sitting in the chair John usually occupies. The animated smile on Sam’s face vanishes as he jumps off the bed and walks right up to accuse John to his face.
“You said four days.”
“It took longer. I called, left a message.”
“You missed it.”
John doesn’t follow. “What?”
“Sam, it’s okay.” Dean cuts Sam off before he has a chance to turn nuclear. “Got something to show you, Dad.”
The suppressed emotion in Dean’s voice commands John’s complete attention, and he turns to see Dean leverage himself to a standing position, and then, using a cane John hadn’t noticed, slide his feet one after another until he has walked over to stand in front of John.
John blinks against the tears stinging his eyes and can’t even react for a moment. Then his arms spontaneously wrap around Dean without any kind of conscious thought behind the movement, and it’s fucking hard to breathe.
“Dad! You’re choking me!” Dean half-laughs as he straightens himself out from under the smothering hug.
“When …?” John’s voice trails off. He is reeling from how desperately he needed Dean back as Dean.
“Four days ago,” Sam answers. “If you’d of come home when you said, you would have seen it.” The reproof is heavy, but John lets it go.
Dean works his way back to the chair. Every step comes with such effort that John feels his own muscles tremble. But his boy is walking. The sheer force of that thought makes him stumble slightly and he leans his hip against Dean’s empty bed.
“How’d it go?” Dean asks. Of course. Sam looks on, curious despite himself.
John smiles. His face feels odd at the too-seldom-used muscle movement. “Just fine.”
“You saw it? Killed the werewolf?” Dean’s voice is slightly awed. John knew Dean was itching to hunt another werewolf. He’s sort of star-struck over this creature. It reminds John how young Dean is. “Yeah. I saw it. I killed it.”
“What was the second job?”
“Angry spirit in Belvediere. Was haunting an apartment above a laundromat.”
Both boys chuckle. An achingly welcome sound. “Told you doing laundry is a health hazard,” Dean quips.
Sam snorts in return, but he’s smiling and Dean is gonna be all right. John feels like himself again.
He looks at his watch. There is enough time before visiting hours are up. “Hey. You guys up for pizza?”
He gets two enthusiastic ‘hell yeahs.’
On the drive to the pizzeria the tension leaves him for the first time since this ordeal started. Yet even as he relaxes in relief, he thinks about what Dean almost lost - what John almost lost. Sam as well. John can’t let everything Dean went through be for nothing. But what can he change? They all know the truth. It’s ugly and violent and evil.
And it never, ever stops.
Their family, this business. It’s not about choices. Dean already knows this, John realizes with a swell of pride. And Sam will realize it, too, one day. Perhaps it will take a sabbatical like this to get him there, although John prays it’ll be for a different reason.
The blinking red neon sign breaks his thoughts and he goes inside to order the half-and-half pie. His boys are waiting. And tonight, he won’t be disappointing them.