FIC: Somewhere There's a Bluer Sky (PG-esque, adult themes)
Ever since I started working here we've had a television on this floor, on which I watched about a zillion sporting events, last season of Lost, and, lately, the last few episodes of Supernatural (because seriously, screw waiting till I get home. we have a television; I have a lunch break). This week that television is gone. And I mean, I knew it was coming. We're all laid off in July, they moved all the sports editors off this floor a while ago, and the chairs disappeared last week. But seriously, they couldn't have waited one more week?
Anyway. It feels like forever since I've posted a story, even though I posted a few back in January after Yuletide. But then, there was a time when if I didn't post a story at least every month I felt like something was wrong. So yeah, here's one now.
Somewhere There's a Bluer Sky
Supernatural. 3600 words. PG-13. Bobby, Sam, Dean, past Bobby/John. Spoilers up to Everybody Loves a Clown.
Dean's got blood on his hands again, dull crimson and rust lining the cracks of his palms, but it's an honest bloody, the bloody of hammering and bolting and sanding, and it hurts less than... just less. Dean's still here, and tearing the world apart over why isn't changing anything. And if there are other things festering in the back of his mind, for right now they can stay there. He's almost smiling, almost, as he heads back inside again, lingering outside an open doorway when he hears a soft sound from inside.
"Sam?" he says, but it's Bobby, sitting on a crate with his back to the door and holding a picture in both hands.
"Move along," Bobby says softly, and it's as much an order as anything Dean's ever heard. He moves along but he doesn't forget what Bobby looked like, hunched and broken, and wonders if this time he and Sam have asked too much of him.
:::
It's just been him and Sam, since it happened. Him and Sam against the world; hell, sometimes him and Sam against one another. Just him and Sam now, and the father whose sacrifice haunts Dean's every waking moment. But there are three people living in the house right now and Dean's attention slowly turns to the third, and maybe he and Sam aren't the only ones who are grieving.
When it comes down to it, Dean doesn't know all that much about Bobby Singer. He thinks he should, since he and Sam practically grew up around this place, but Dean only knows him in the context of hunter, as the man who helped teach him how to pronounce Latin and rebuild an engine, and not much deeper than that.
He never thought about it much before but he wonders now just what haunts him, and not in the salt-and-burn sense. Dean's been a hunter long enough to know that every damn one of them is haunted by something. His father might've known, but even if he was still around to tell anyone he wouldn't've breathed a word.
There are a whole lot of things his father never said.
Dean might not know Bobby well enough but he knows Bobby's place, for whatever that's worth, and it's not just proximity that brings them to it after everything goes down. Hell, he and Sam explored damn near every inch of it when they were kids, including all the places they were told not to go when Bobby and his father were too busy to keep an eye on them.
They both have the scars to prove it, but as his dad always says... always said... boys will be boys.
Bobby's salvage yard was like a second home for all of them, and everywhere he goes in it now reminds him of his father. Maybe that's why he feels compelled to stick around at the same time as he's desperate to get on the road as soon and as fast as he can go.
:::
Dean doesn't cry. It's not that he won't, or that he can't, it's that he doesn't. He feels like maybe he's done enough of that already these past couple of weeks, and he hasn't got any god damn tears left for this anymore.
"She's looking good," says Sam, leaving fingerprints in the dust on the Impala's hood, little smudges to mark his presence.
"She's got a long way to go," says Dean, wiping his hands on a rag and surveying his handiwork. Considering his little setback she's in pretty good shape, but sometimes he still feels that same itch in his shoulders and the back of his head, wants to do it all over again. There are still moments, in between the aching, that he really, really hates his father.
"Yeah, well, so do a lot of things," says Sam. Dean mouths it along with him, word for word, until Sam frowns and changes the subject. "You seen Bobby?"
"Leave him be, Sam." The driver's side looks like shit but Dean's leaving it for now, damage out in the open where anyone can see.
"I was just going to ask him if he needed anything in town." Dean doesn't need to look at him to know what kind of look Sam is giving him, like he wonders if he should speak to Dean in calm soothing tones. "We haven't seen much of him."
"I don't bite, jerkoff," says Dean, giving the driver's side door something that's more of a tap than a kick as he rounds the car. Maybe tears aren't the only thing he's run out of. "Just leave him alone, he's got things on his mind."
"You mean he's trying to get away from us for a little while."
"Can you blame him, you whiny bitch?" says Dean. "I'd be sick of you too, if I weren't so good at ignoring you. You taking the mom-mobile into the city? Pick up some steaks while you're there. I'm starving."
"Now who's the whiny bitch?" says Sam, leaving another handprint on the hood. Guy's lucky Dean's still only halfway through the job. "Anything else, your highness?"
"And some beer," says Dean, and now the grin comes out.
Sam gives him a mocking salute, and it reminds him so much of how Sam would've been around Dad once that he feels a physical ache. His smile freezes but Sam doesn't seem to notice, or if he does he's figured out not to say anything.
Why did he do it? Dean suddenly wants to ask him in a moment of weakness. Why did he do it, Sammy? Why did he fucking do it, and how did I not know? Because he knows his father just about as well as he knows himself, and he never saw it coming.
He doesn't ask, though, and Sam doesn't say anything else as he backs away a few steps then turns and goes round the front of the house.
:::
He spends an evening throwing rocks at an old beater halfway back in the lot, windows long since shattered and body in such bad shape Dean doesn't feel a lick of guilt for breaking the remaining glass, chipping the remaining paint. Sam's tucked away in the library with a book that Dean would swear Sam'd come all over if he wasn't worried about the pages sticking together, and Dean's got a case of beer and a long night ahead of him.
That one's for disappearing, he thinks, as a rock skitters off into the gravel. This one's for the Colt. This one's for your soul, you absolute bastard.
He doesn't quit till the beer's almost gone, till the moon's high in the sky and just a little fuzzy around the edges. He only realizes Bobby's out there too once he's on his way back, close enough to have heard just about everything Dean did and far enough away that it's clear he didn't want to get involved.
Another day Dean might've gone over, said something, but another day Bobby wouldn't have been sitting on the hood of the shell of an old pickup and looking up at the stars. He's got something in his hand that he's tossing up in the air and catching again, but before Dean can make it out Bobby tucks it away safely in his pocket and reaches for his drink.
Dean finishes his last beer as he stands there watching him, and once he's done he quietly goes back inside the house again, leaving Bobby to his thoughts.
:::
"We can take off if you want," says Dean casually when Bobby comes to check on his progress, sliding out from under the car and squinting up against the bright sun. It's the first time Dean's seen him in a couple of days.
"In what?" says Bobby. He doesn't even need to look at the unfinished car to make his point.
"We could get a place in the city," says Dean, "come out here days to finish this thing up. If you want the place to yourself again."
"Don't be an idiot, Dean," says Bobby. "What kind of sense would that even make, you boys paying for a place you don't need and wasting time you don't need to?"
"I just thought--"
"Sounds like you don't have a thought in your head worth telling right now," interrupted Bobby. "I'm not going to throw you boys out."
Dean doesn't need to point out that Bobby's been avoiding them. Everyone knows what everyone else is up to, at least on the surface.
"You didn't ask for this."
"None of us asked for this," says Bobby. For any of it, and neither of them need a laundry list of all the things that happened lately that nobody asked for. "If you're feeling guilty about imposing, though, I can give you a whole list of things that need doing around this place."
"Give it to Sam," says Dean, accepting the answer easily because he really doesn't want to go, and they both know it. "Keep him busy."
He doesn't say it's so that Sam will quit asking him things he doesn't want to talk about already, but Bobby knows the both of them well enough to know.
"I'll set him to work in the library," he says, giving Dean a nod. "That place hasn't been cleaned in a decade."
"Careful," says Dean. "You'll come back one day to find it alphabetized and cross-referenced."
Bobby grunts and nods his head, and if he's anything like Dean, letting Sam loose in there'd mean he'd never find anything again. "The kitchen then," he says. "He can alphabetize my soup all he likes."
"He just might," says Dean, scrubbing a dead bug off the passenger-side door with his rag. "Might even cook."
"God help us all," mutters Bobby, and the topic of leaving is officially dropped.
They don't talk about John Winchester, but then just because Bobby speaks plain doesn't mean he says everything that comes into his head. Some things don't need to be said.
:::
"Dean, I just wanted to say--"
"I wish you wouldn't," says Dean, stopping Sam with his expression before he stops him with his voice.
"I was just--"
"No, Sammy," says Dean, and wipes his honey-sticky fingers on Sam's shirt. "There's no talking at breakfast."
"There's no talking at breakfast?"
"No talking at breakfast," confirms Dean, and sticks half a piece of toast in his mouth to keep from doing just that.
"What about lunch and dinner?"
"No talking at mealtimes," says Dean, spraying him with crumbs.
"And this is in addition to no talking when you're working on the car, no talking when you're watching the game, and no talking while Bobby's around?"
"And no talking during porn," Dean adds, brushing crumbs off his shirt and leaving them on Sam's. "Though that one better go without saying."
"So that leaves, what, talking while we're sleeping?"
"You can talk in your sleep all you like," says Dean, and slaps him on the shoulder on his way out the door.
:::
Rain's been coming down for about twelve hours now, thick and sloppy, and Sam picks a fight with Dean over nothing, nothing at all, but Dean takes the bait and feels like he's been itching for it.
"You boys need to get your damn fool selves out from underfoot," says Bobby, and separates them just as efficiently as their father always had, shooting orders at one, then the other.
Lots of hunters have those same military instincts, whether they have a military background or not. It's just one more thing Bobby and his dad have... had... in common, one more thing they probably talked about in those early days at Bobby's place, nights spent up together long after Sam and Dean were put to bed. It's a whole lot of time Dean doesn't know the first thing about.
Bobby sets up a game of chess on the kitchen table that's obviously for Sam, and since he's stuck indoors for the duration Dean finds himself wandering into the so-called library, book on shelves and piled up everywhere they fit. Dean paws through them with a lot more care than most people'd give him credit for. He's even read a fair number, though it's been a while and the details are fuzzy.
There's one, though, there's one he remembers that his dad picked up in Kansas City one year when Dean was still in school, said it was something Bobby'd been wanting for a while. He knows it's got to be here somewhere, remembers clearer than ever the look on Bobby's face when his dad had casually handed it over.
He doesn't need it for anything, he's just thinking about it and suddenly he wants to see it again, wants to connect something physical with a memory of his father. They've never kept much, just what they can fit in the car, and the Impala's not exactly the kind of memory that Dean needs right now.
He finds it on a high shelf, dusted and taken care of, a few pages marked with scraps of paper with illegible notes on them. Bobby can read his own handwriting but damned if anyone else can. The cover is the same brown leather Dean remembers even if it smells different, less musty and more like sweat and motor oil, and he flips the book open, scans the flyleaf.
Happy July, Bobby. The boys miss you. John.
It's a weird thing to inscribe a book with, if you ask Dean, but then his dad could be a pretty obscure guy when he needed to be, and a hunter often did.
Christmas is in December, and Bobby's birthday is in March.
And then he finds others, books he remembers from growing up that he doesn't think can be found a whole lot of places. And maybe Bobby just has his own copies, but you can't replicate a juice stain like that and Dean thinks it's a lot more likely that this is where a whole lot of things he remembers ended up. If there are books in here, maybe up in the attic he'll find his old baseball glove, Sammy's old clothes, an album of photos that his dad got tired of lugging around everywhere in the trunk of the car.
He doesn't wonder why his father kept them, he knows they've got to have stashes of things here and there, the detritus of life, but he wonders a little why Bobby did.
:::
Dean sees it when they're getting ready to head over to the Ted Smithson's place to pick up some old beater that he was about ready to pay Bobby to get off his lawn. Worn almost smooth from years of handling, Dean still recognizes the keychain from Williamson Auto in Wichita, where his dad always went for parts. After all, he's been seeing it his whole life. Bobby curls his hand around it when he sees Dean looking, but it's a little late for that.
It doesn't take much of an intuitive leap to know it's what he saw flashing in the moonlight that night he spotted Bobby out on the pickup.
:::
It's Sam who finally starts it, haltingly saying something about dad over beef stew and biscuits in Bobby's cramped kitchen. Something in Dean's gut clenches and he doesn't want to hear it, but he knows it's time, even as he knows the gnawing, searing guilt that's been eating up his insides won't be a part of this conversation.
"You remember that time all four of us went out into the Black Hills?" Sam says around a mouthful of food, not quite looking up to meet anyone's eyes.
Dean grunts but Bobby speaks up after an awkward pause where no one's sure what's going to happen next. "You couldn't have been more than twelve then, Sam."
"Thirteen, just turned," says Sam, sopping up some gravy. "It was the summer before we moved to Tulsa for Dean's senior year."
They stare at their food while they talk, but they talk, and Dean just listens, shoveling food in his mouth like he's afraid he'll do something else with it if he doesn't.
"Could hardly keep up with you boys already," says Bobby. "What was it we were hunting?"
"The Dzunukwa," says Sam instantly, warming to the conversation now that he's got it going. "Dad figured it would be a good one for Dean and I to work on together, nothing that was likely to get the jump on us. Afterwards I remember you and him, you stayed back at the campfire when Dean and I jumped off that cliff into the lake. Nearly froze our behinds off."
"Idiots," says Bobby, but there's a hint of fondness creeping in. "Dean told us you fell in when a coyote loped by a little too close."
"Yeah, well, you think we were going to tell Dad we were off jumping off cliffs into strange lakes?"
"He would've tanned your hides," says Bobby, "I can tell you that for sure."
Sam chuckles and nods his head, and even if he still doesn't quite look up, he's smiling now. "If not for that, then for the fact that Dean swiped half a bottle of his whiskey."
"Don't remember that part," says Bobby, shaking his head. "Musta turned in by then or something."
Or something, Dean thinks, and all the while they're talking he watches Bobby and wonders what he does remember about that trip.
:::
Dean recognizes the picture when he finds it sitting on top of a stack of books in the storage room he'd spotted Bobby in a couple of weeks ago, the same fold at the corner, the same blurred and almost illegible writing on the back. He's about nine in it, Sammy five and grinning like a lunatic, missing one of his front teeth.
And behind the both of them is his dad, smiling like he doesn't know one day he's going to give up his soul to save his son.
:::
Sam lost the coin toss and is doing the washing up when Dean finds Bobby in that same storage room again. The picture might not be in his hands but it's sitting pretty plainly close by. This time Bobby doesn't tell him to go away, and this time Dean doesn't.
"You weren't there, when we... took care of Dad," he says carefully, but even wrapping it in those innocuous terms is a punch to the gut. Taking care of him is the one thing Dean didn't do this time.
"That was yours," says Bobby, running a hand over his face and making an obvious effort not to meet Dean's eyes. For once, his face isn't hiding anything at all.
"You loved him," says Dean, putting words to something that's been brewing for days.
"You wouldn't understand," says Bobby and he gets up like he's going to leave this conversation behind, but he pauses without quite making it out the door, leaning against the doorframe like it's all that's keeping him upright.
"Maybe not," he admits, but only because Dean's never really loved anyone who wasn't family, not really. He's seen his father and brother - hell, and too many other people, too - lose someone they love, and he never wants to choose to feel like that. Losing his father is bad enough. He thinks losing Sam might just kill him.
"Hunting's lonely," says Bobby. "It's a lonely way of life. Sometimes you just want to make it... not."
"Look, I don't need to--" says Dean, and pushes restless hands through his hair. "I knew he was with people, after Mom, I just didn't know...."
"He was a hard man to love," says Bobby. "And he was a hard man not to."
Dean has to chuckle, genuine understanding of that if nothing else. "Yeah, I know all about that," he says, but it's different with Bobby. It's different because Bobby chose... and his dad chose... and Dean just isn't quite sure what to make of that. "It's none of my business."
"He didn't want you to know," says Bobby. "Hell, half the time there wasn't anything to know."
The things that Dean's okay with now - and he is, even if it all feels a little distant and surreal - he sure as hell wouldn't have been okay with at sixteen or twenty. If he were his dad, he wouldn't have told him either.
"Glad I got to see him one last time before he went," Bobby adds after a minute, softer, almost too quiet for Dean's ears. "Would hate to have lost him in the middle of one of our fights."
Dean's pretty sure Sam's having thoughts a lot like that. And Dean, Dean's feelings on the subject are still just too damn complicated for him to put into words yet, so he doesn't even try.
"When I get to looking, I might have some things of his to pass on," says Bobby, then a moment later all of it's gone from his face like it never happened and he's looking like he always looks. Friendly, concerned, wise. Not anything like heartbroken.
But now that he knows, and now that Bobby knows he knows, Dean's not sure they can entirely go back. He's not sure he would've wanted to even if they could.
"You were always family, Bobby," he says finally, and claps his hand on Bobby's shoulder and hopes that's enough.
But then, what could be?
Anyway. It feels like forever since I've posted a story, even though I posted a few back in January after Yuletide. But then, there was a time when if I didn't post a story at least every month I felt like something was wrong. So yeah, here's one now.
Somewhere There's a Bluer Sky
Supernatural. 3600 words. PG-13. Bobby, Sam, Dean, past Bobby/John. Spoilers up to Everybody Loves a Clown.
Dean's got blood on his hands again, dull crimson and rust lining the cracks of his palms, but it's an honest bloody, the bloody of hammering and bolting and sanding, and it hurts less than... just less. Dean's still here, and tearing the world apart over why isn't changing anything. And if there are other things festering in the back of his mind, for right now they can stay there. He's almost smiling, almost, as he heads back inside again, lingering outside an open doorway when he hears a soft sound from inside.
"Sam?" he says, but it's Bobby, sitting on a crate with his back to the door and holding a picture in both hands.
"Move along," Bobby says softly, and it's as much an order as anything Dean's ever heard. He moves along but he doesn't forget what Bobby looked like, hunched and broken, and wonders if this time he and Sam have asked too much of him.
:::
It's just been him and Sam, since it happened. Him and Sam against the world; hell, sometimes him and Sam against one another. Just him and Sam now, and the father whose sacrifice haunts Dean's every waking moment. But there are three people living in the house right now and Dean's attention slowly turns to the third, and maybe he and Sam aren't the only ones who are grieving.
When it comes down to it, Dean doesn't know all that much about Bobby Singer. He thinks he should, since he and Sam practically grew up around this place, but Dean only knows him in the context of hunter, as the man who helped teach him how to pronounce Latin and rebuild an engine, and not much deeper than that.
He never thought about it much before but he wonders now just what haunts him, and not in the salt-and-burn sense. Dean's been a hunter long enough to know that every damn one of them is haunted by something. His father might've known, but even if he was still around to tell anyone he wouldn't've breathed a word.
There are a whole lot of things his father never said.
Dean might not know Bobby well enough but he knows Bobby's place, for whatever that's worth, and it's not just proximity that brings them to it after everything goes down. Hell, he and Sam explored damn near every inch of it when they were kids, including all the places they were told not to go when Bobby and his father were too busy to keep an eye on them.
They both have the scars to prove it, but as his dad always says... always said... boys will be boys.
Bobby's salvage yard was like a second home for all of them, and everywhere he goes in it now reminds him of his father. Maybe that's why he feels compelled to stick around at the same time as he's desperate to get on the road as soon and as fast as he can go.
:::
Dean doesn't cry. It's not that he won't, or that he can't, it's that he doesn't. He feels like maybe he's done enough of that already these past couple of weeks, and he hasn't got any god damn tears left for this anymore.
"She's looking good," says Sam, leaving fingerprints in the dust on the Impala's hood, little smudges to mark his presence.
"She's got a long way to go," says Dean, wiping his hands on a rag and surveying his handiwork. Considering his little setback she's in pretty good shape, but sometimes he still feels that same itch in his shoulders and the back of his head, wants to do it all over again. There are still moments, in between the aching, that he really, really hates his father.
"Yeah, well, so do a lot of things," says Sam. Dean mouths it along with him, word for word, until Sam frowns and changes the subject. "You seen Bobby?"
"Leave him be, Sam." The driver's side looks like shit but Dean's leaving it for now, damage out in the open where anyone can see.
"I was just going to ask him if he needed anything in town." Dean doesn't need to look at him to know what kind of look Sam is giving him, like he wonders if he should speak to Dean in calm soothing tones. "We haven't seen much of him."
"I don't bite, jerkoff," says Dean, giving the driver's side door something that's more of a tap than a kick as he rounds the car. Maybe tears aren't the only thing he's run out of. "Just leave him alone, he's got things on his mind."
"You mean he's trying to get away from us for a little while."
"Can you blame him, you whiny bitch?" says Dean. "I'd be sick of you too, if I weren't so good at ignoring you. You taking the mom-mobile into the city? Pick up some steaks while you're there. I'm starving."
"Now who's the whiny bitch?" says Sam, leaving another handprint on the hood. Guy's lucky Dean's still only halfway through the job. "Anything else, your highness?"
"And some beer," says Dean, and now the grin comes out.
Sam gives him a mocking salute, and it reminds him so much of how Sam would've been around Dad once that he feels a physical ache. His smile freezes but Sam doesn't seem to notice, or if he does he's figured out not to say anything.
Why did he do it? Dean suddenly wants to ask him in a moment of weakness. Why did he do it, Sammy? Why did he fucking do it, and how did I not know? Because he knows his father just about as well as he knows himself, and he never saw it coming.
He doesn't ask, though, and Sam doesn't say anything else as he backs away a few steps then turns and goes round the front of the house.
:::
He spends an evening throwing rocks at an old beater halfway back in the lot, windows long since shattered and body in such bad shape Dean doesn't feel a lick of guilt for breaking the remaining glass, chipping the remaining paint. Sam's tucked away in the library with a book that Dean would swear Sam'd come all over if he wasn't worried about the pages sticking together, and Dean's got a case of beer and a long night ahead of him.
That one's for disappearing, he thinks, as a rock skitters off into the gravel. This one's for the Colt. This one's for your soul, you absolute bastard.
He doesn't quit till the beer's almost gone, till the moon's high in the sky and just a little fuzzy around the edges. He only realizes Bobby's out there too once he's on his way back, close enough to have heard just about everything Dean did and far enough away that it's clear he didn't want to get involved.
Another day Dean might've gone over, said something, but another day Bobby wouldn't have been sitting on the hood of the shell of an old pickup and looking up at the stars. He's got something in his hand that he's tossing up in the air and catching again, but before Dean can make it out Bobby tucks it away safely in his pocket and reaches for his drink.
Dean finishes his last beer as he stands there watching him, and once he's done he quietly goes back inside the house again, leaving Bobby to his thoughts.
:::
"We can take off if you want," says Dean casually when Bobby comes to check on his progress, sliding out from under the car and squinting up against the bright sun. It's the first time Dean's seen him in a couple of days.
"In what?" says Bobby. He doesn't even need to look at the unfinished car to make his point.
"We could get a place in the city," says Dean, "come out here days to finish this thing up. If you want the place to yourself again."
"Don't be an idiot, Dean," says Bobby. "What kind of sense would that even make, you boys paying for a place you don't need and wasting time you don't need to?"
"I just thought--"
"Sounds like you don't have a thought in your head worth telling right now," interrupted Bobby. "I'm not going to throw you boys out."
Dean doesn't need to point out that Bobby's been avoiding them. Everyone knows what everyone else is up to, at least on the surface.
"You didn't ask for this."
"None of us asked for this," says Bobby. For any of it, and neither of them need a laundry list of all the things that happened lately that nobody asked for. "If you're feeling guilty about imposing, though, I can give you a whole list of things that need doing around this place."
"Give it to Sam," says Dean, accepting the answer easily because he really doesn't want to go, and they both know it. "Keep him busy."
He doesn't say it's so that Sam will quit asking him things he doesn't want to talk about already, but Bobby knows the both of them well enough to know.
"I'll set him to work in the library," he says, giving Dean a nod. "That place hasn't been cleaned in a decade."
"Careful," says Dean. "You'll come back one day to find it alphabetized and cross-referenced."
Bobby grunts and nods his head, and if he's anything like Dean, letting Sam loose in there'd mean he'd never find anything again. "The kitchen then," he says. "He can alphabetize my soup all he likes."
"He just might," says Dean, scrubbing a dead bug off the passenger-side door with his rag. "Might even cook."
"God help us all," mutters Bobby, and the topic of leaving is officially dropped.
They don't talk about John Winchester, but then just because Bobby speaks plain doesn't mean he says everything that comes into his head. Some things don't need to be said.
:::
"Dean, I just wanted to say--"
"I wish you wouldn't," says Dean, stopping Sam with his expression before he stops him with his voice.
"I was just--"
"No, Sammy," says Dean, and wipes his honey-sticky fingers on Sam's shirt. "There's no talking at breakfast."
"There's no talking at breakfast?"
"No talking at breakfast," confirms Dean, and sticks half a piece of toast in his mouth to keep from doing just that.
"What about lunch and dinner?"
"No talking at mealtimes," says Dean, spraying him with crumbs.
"And this is in addition to no talking when you're working on the car, no talking when you're watching the game, and no talking while Bobby's around?"
"And no talking during porn," Dean adds, brushing crumbs off his shirt and leaving them on Sam's. "Though that one better go without saying."
"So that leaves, what, talking while we're sleeping?"
"You can talk in your sleep all you like," says Dean, and slaps him on the shoulder on his way out the door.
:::
Rain's been coming down for about twelve hours now, thick and sloppy, and Sam picks a fight with Dean over nothing, nothing at all, but Dean takes the bait and feels like he's been itching for it.
"You boys need to get your damn fool selves out from underfoot," says Bobby, and separates them just as efficiently as their father always had, shooting orders at one, then the other.
Lots of hunters have those same military instincts, whether they have a military background or not. It's just one more thing Bobby and his dad have... had... in common, one more thing they probably talked about in those early days at Bobby's place, nights spent up together long after Sam and Dean were put to bed. It's a whole lot of time Dean doesn't know the first thing about.
Bobby sets up a game of chess on the kitchen table that's obviously for Sam, and since he's stuck indoors for the duration Dean finds himself wandering into the so-called library, book on shelves and piled up everywhere they fit. Dean paws through them with a lot more care than most people'd give him credit for. He's even read a fair number, though it's been a while and the details are fuzzy.
There's one, though, there's one he remembers that his dad picked up in Kansas City one year when Dean was still in school, said it was something Bobby'd been wanting for a while. He knows it's got to be here somewhere, remembers clearer than ever the look on Bobby's face when his dad had casually handed it over.
He doesn't need it for anything, he's just thinking about it and suddenly he wants to see it again, wants to connect something physical with a memory of his father. They've never kept much, just what they can fit in the car, and the Impala's not exactly the kind of memory that Dean needs right now.
He finds it on a high shelf, dusted and taken care of, a few pages marked with scraps of paper with illegible notes on them. Bobby can read his own handwriting but damned if anyone else can. The cover is the same brown leather Dean remembers even if it smells different, less musty and more like sweat and motor oil, and he flips the book open, scans the flyleaf.
Happy July, Bobby. The boys miss you. John.
It's a weird thing to inscribe a book with, if you ask Dean, but then his dad could be a pretty obscure guy when he needed to be, and a hunter often did.
Christmas is in December, and Bobby's birthday is in March.
And then he finds others, books he remembers from growing up that he doesn't think can be found a whole lot of places. And maybe Bobby just has his own copies, but you can't replicate a juice stain like that and Dean thinks it's a lot more likely that this is where a whole lot of things he remembers ended up. If there are books in here, maybe up in the attic he'll find his old baseball glove, Sammy's old clothes, an album of photos that his dad got tired of lugging around everywhere in the trunk of the car.
He doesn't wonder why his father kept them, he knows they've got to have stashes of things here and there, the detritus of life, but he wonders a little why Bobby did.
:::
Dean sees it when they're getting ready to head over to the Ted Smithson's place to pick up some old beater that he was about ready to pay Bobby to get off his lawn. Worn almost smooth from years of handling, Dean still recognizes the keychain from Williamson Auto in Wichita, where his dad always went for parts. After all, he's been seeing it his whole life. Bobby curls his hand around it when he sees Dean looking, but it's a little late for that.
It doesn't take much of an intuitive leap to know it's what he saw flashing in the moonlight that night he spotted Bobby out on the pickup.
:::
It's Sam who finally starts it, haltingly saying something about dad over beef stew and biscuits in Bobby's cramped kitchen. Something in Dean's gut clenches and he doesn't want to hear it, but he knows it's time, even as he knows the gnawing, searing guilt that's been eating up his insides won't be a part of this conversation.
"You remember that time all four of us went out into the Black Hills?" Sam says around a mouthful of food, not quite looking up to meet anyone's eyes.
Dean grunts but Bobby speaks up after an awkward pause where no one's sure what's going to happen next. "You couldn't have been more than twelve then, Sam."
"Thirteen, just turned," says Sam, sopping up some gravy. "It was the summer before we moved to Tulsa for Dean's senior year."
They stare at their food while they talk, but they talk, and Dean just listens, shoveling food in his mouth like he's afraid he'll do something else with it if he doesn't.
"Could hardly keep up with you boys already," says Bobby. "What was it we were hunting?"
"The Dzunukwa," says Sam instantly, warming to the conversation now that he's got it going. "Dad figured it would be a good one for Dean and I to work on together, nothing that was likely to get the jump on us. Afterwards I remember you and him, you stayed back at the campfire when Dean and I jumped off that cliff into the lake. Nearly froze our behinds off."
"Idiots," says Bobby, but there's a hint of fondness creeping in. "Dean told us you fell in when a coyote loped by a little too close."
"Yeah, well, you think we were going to tell Dad we were off jumping off cliffs into strange lakes?"
"He would've tanned your hides," says Bobby, "I can tell you that for sure."
Sam chuckles and nods his head, and even if he still doesn't quite look up, he's smiling now. "If not for that, then for the fact that Dean swiped half a bottle of his whiskey."
"Don't remember that part," says Bobby, shaking his head. "Musta turned in by then or something."
Or something, Dean thinks, and all the while they're talking he watches Bobby and wonders what he does remember about that trip.
:::
Dean recognizes the picture when he finds it sitting on top of a stack of books in the storage room he'd spotted Bobby in a couple of weeks ago, the same fold at the corner, the same blurred and almost illegible writing on the back. He's about nine in it, Sammy five and grinning like a lunatic, missing one of his front teeth.
And behind the both of them is his dad, smiling like he doesn't know one day he's going to give up his soul to save his son.
:::
Sam lost the coin toss and is doing the washing up when Dean finds Bobby in that same storage room again. The picture might not be in his hands but it's sitting pretty plainly close by. This time Bobby doesn't tell him to go away, and this time Dean doesn't.
"You weren't there, when we... took care of Dad," he says carefully, but even wrapping it in those innocuous terms is a punch to the gut. Taking care of him is the one thing Dean didn't do this time.
"That was yours," says Bobby, running a hand over his face and making an obvious effort not to meet Dean's eyes. For once, his face isn't hiding anything at all.
"You loved him," says Dean, putting words to something that's been brewing for days.
"You wouldn't understand," says Bobby and he gets up like he's going to leave this conversation behind, but he pauses without quite making it out the door, leaning against the doorframe like it's all that's keeping him upright.
"Maybe not," he admits, but only because Dean's never really loved anyone who wasn't family, not really. He's seen his father and brother - hell, and too many other people, too - lose someone they love, and he never wants to choose to feel like that. Losing his father is bad enough. He thinks losing Sam might just kill him.
"Hunting's lonely," says Bobby. "It's a lonely way of life. Sometimes you just want to make it... not."
"Look, I don't need to--" says Dean, and pushes restless hands through his hair. "I knew he was with people, after Mom, I just didn't know...."
"He was a hard man to love," says Bobby. "And he was a hard man not to."
Dean has to chuckle, genuine understanding of that if nothing else. "Yeah, I know all about that," he says, but it's different with Bobby. It's different because Bobby chose... and his dad chose... and Dean just isn't quite sure what to make of that. "It's none of my business."
"He didn't want you to know," says Bobby. "Hell, half the time there wasn't anything to know."
The things that Dean's okay with now - and he is, even if it all feels a little distant and surreal - he sure as hell wouldn't have been okay with at sixteen or twenty. If he were his dad, he wouldn't have told him either.
"Glad I got to see him one last time before he went," Bobby adds after a minute, softer, almost too quiet for Dean's ears. "Would hate to have lost him in the middle of one of our fights."
Dean's pretty sure Sam's having thoughts a lot like that. And Dean, Dean's feelings on the subject are still just too damn complicated for him to put into words yet, so he doesn't even try.
"When I get to looking, I might have some things of his to pass on," says Bobby, then a moment later all of it's gone from his face like it never happened and he's looking like he always looks. Friendly, concerned, wise. Not anything like heartbroken.
But now that he knows, and now that Bobby knows he knows, Dean's not sure they can entirely go back. He's not sure he would've wanted to even if they could.
"You were always family, Bobby," he says finally, and claps his hand on Bobby's shoulder and hopes that's enough.
But then, what could be?