SPN Fic: In The Beginning, As It Ends
Okay, here's a fic I wrote for My First Time for Everything Chart. I've found the hardest thing about this whole challenge is finding ways to use the "first" prompts that aren't drop dead gimme obvious, or too fuckin cute for words. Hopefully, I've avoided both of those pitfalls with this ... I sure gave it my best shot.
Originally, I started writing two stories for the same prompt ... First Love. Then they went in DRAMATICALLY different directions, and now neither one of them is the way I intended to articulate the concept. Sheeeesh. Can nothing be easy?
But in the end, this is the one I decided to stick with for that prompt. When I began, I was thinking to tweak the notion of "First Love" off the obvious track by making it about Dean's first love, his mommy. It is only after I wrote the story that I realized Dean's first love wasn't his mommy. Dean's first love was his daddy.
And the story I was writing became a love sonnet on that subject. But oddly enough, it is told, predominantly, through Mary's eyes. And as she related to me this love story of her son for his father, she clued me in on some things about her husband I hadn't earlier known, most startling amongst them that, in so many ways, Dean is his daddy's first love, too.
Yes, it's all tangled up and kinda nebulous in how it all works. No, there's absolutely no Wincest to be had here ... not even the whiff of it. This is pure and simply a father's love for his son, and a son's love for his father.
And in some grander way, my own love for John as a father, and as a damaged man doing the best he can. And even beyond that, my equal love for Dean, in ways that I hope will become clear as you read.
For every time I've tried to touch on the way I see John in fiction, I've always fallen short in that he's never quite forthcoming enough about who he truly is beneath his layers of damage and dysfunction for me to capture him in his entirity, a true reflection of the man I see him to be. So instead, I've had to satisfy myself with snapshotting moments of him ... moments I can only hope to eventually collage into an accurate portrait of the man I see him to be.
But in a collage of moments, there are always holes to be had, gaps in what can be made visible. It was only in writing this piece that I finally realized most of those gaps had to do with Mary, and the only way to truely understand him, was to see him before she was stripped out of his life, and he was left behind, a broken man.
So here's my shot at the challenge "First Love." As anyone who read my previous post knows, this story's a special one for me, and I'm really interested in how it reads to others, so please take the time to tell me what you think, whether it's good, bad or something somewhere in between. Thanks!
Title: In the Beginning, As It Ends
Fandom: Supernatural
Author:
dodger_winslow
Challenge: First Time Chart, First Love
Genre: Gen
Rating: NC-13
Characters: The pre-series Winchesters: John, Mary and Dean.
Warnings: Some language, inuendo and implied sex twixt married folk
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.
Summary: "We’re not a dream," Mary whispered against his neck. "You’re not going to wake up and find everything’s gone."
In the Beginning, As It Ends
Dean woke, shrieking as if his world was coming to an end.
*
Mary woke, her child shrieking as if his world was coming to an end. She was up and half way down the hall before she realized she was even moving. He was sitting bolt upright in bed when she opened his door, tangled in a nest of Scooby Doo sheets, his eyes frozen open in sightless terror, and his hands clenched to fists as his small body quivered with the agony of every muscle in a cramp of paroxysm.
His room was dark without a nightlight - "I’m not a baby anymore, Mom" he’d told her only last week - and she stumbled over half a dozen toys on the floor as she navigated the shadows between the door and the bed in the far corner.
"Dean. Dean. Dean." She put her hands on him, pulling him to her, holding him in the safety of her comforting embrace. It made no difference whatsoever. He continued to shriek, the sound of his terror muffled in the lee of his mother’s shoulder.
"Mary?" John asked from the doorway. In boxers and bare feet, his eyes still bleary from sleep, he was pulling a USMC t-shirt over his head as he spoke.
At the sound of his father’s voice, the shrieking stopped. It wasn’t a gradual drop off, a step down from shrieks to screams to wails to whimpers: It was a sudden and absolute cessation of sound, a startling abruption of terror as if it had been cut off at the source with a knife.
For a moment, the silence was jarring. Then Dean went limp in his mother’s arms and began to sob.
De-tangling his now pliable body from a twist of sweat-cold sheets, Mary lifted him into her lap. She rocked him with a gentle, back-and-forth motion of her whole body, whispering, "It’s all right, Dean. Shhhhhh, baby, shhhhhh. It’s all right." Glancing to her husband, she said, "It’s okay. He just had a dream. Can you check on Sammy?" Then back to Dean, she murmured, "Shhhhhh, baby. It was just a dream. Just a bad dream."
John disappeared for a moment, then reappeared, saying, "That boy could sleep through a hurricane."
"Thank the Lord for small favors," Mary said. "It’s all right, Dean. Shhhhhh, baby. Shhhhhh."
Scratching at one hip, John stepped into his son’s room and stubbed a toe on something that began to sparkle with half a dozen colored lights. He cursed. "God dammit. I told him to pick this shit up after dinner."
"John."
The quiet reproof in her voice was enough to stop the rest of what he’d already opened his mouth to say. "Yeah, yeah," he grumbled instead. "I know, I owe a quarter to the kitty." He limped a little as finished crossing the room to her side.
"A dollar fifty," she corrected with a small smile.
John’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. "A dollar fifty? Man, that inflation really is a bitch."
Her smile deepened. "A dollar seventy-five."
"Bitch doesn’t count," he protested.
"Two dollars," she returned.
He laughed then, dropping to his haunches as he laid one hand on her thigh and rested the other on top of his son’s head. "Okay, okay. You’re worse than the gol darn MPs. Two ‘b’ words, one ‘s’ word and one ‘d’ word. That’s still only a dollar by my count."
"Taking the Lord’s name in vain is a dollar for the first infraction. Ten dollars for the second. And a pony for the third. Shhhhh, baby. It was only a dream. Shhhhh. Shhhhh."
Dean’s sobbing had faded to sniffles now, broken only by an occasional gaspy intake of breath to give up how hard he was trying to not cry in front of his daddy. When it no longer took all his concentration to be a big boy, he whispered between sniffs, "We’re going to get a pony?"
Chuckling, John tousled the hair under his hand. "Hey, Buddy. How you doing there?"
Dean lifted his face out of Mary’s shoulder. Streaked with tears and still showing the effort of trying to be brave, he met John’s eyes and said, "I’m okay now, sir. I just had a bad dream."
"Bad dream, huh?"
"Uh huh." His eyes started to tear up again, but before the threatening flood could overflow and spill onto his cheeks, Dean looked away. He put a fist in each eye and tried to rub them dry.
A single finger under his son's chin was enough to encourage him back to eye-to-eye contact. "Everybody has bad dreams, Buddy. Nothing to be ashamed of there."
"I didn’t mean to cry," Dean said.
"Sometimes I cry when I have bad dreams," John returned. Then teasingly, he added, "And sometimes I cry just so your mama will hold me in her arms and rock me just like that."
"You do not," Dean said.
John smiled. "Oh, yes I do, son. I really, really do."
Mary watched them, smiling. John’s hand had inched up her thigh while he spoke. She knew him too well to think it accidental. "Behave," she said when his fingers shifted again as if to move. They settled, satisfied to hold their ground for the time being.
"I was gonna pick them up after dinner," Dean said, mistaking her admonishment as aimed at him rather than his father. "But I didn’t because … um … because … because ... I can’t remember."
"Bad dream scared it right out of you?" John suggested helpfully.
Dean grinned. "Uh huh," he agreed.
"Hmmmm. That happens to me sometimes, too. Tell you what, we’ll move the deadline to breakfast and call it even, okay?"
"Okay."
"But you are going to pick them up before breakfast, right?’
"Uh huh."
"Because if you can’t keep your floor clean, then we’ll have to put the night light back in."
Dean’s response was immediate: "I don’t need a nightlight."
"That’s what I told your mom," John said. "I told her you were a big boy now, and big boys don’t need no stinking nightlights. But big boys also keep their rooms picked up, don’t they? So if you’ve got all these toys all over your floor …."
"I’ll pick them up. I promise."
"Well that’s good enough for me. Now how ‘bout hitting the rack again, soldier? Cause your mom and me are getting waaaaay too old to be jumping up and down all night like this." He winked at Dean. "Or at least, your mom is."
Dean looked down, avoiding his father’s eyes. It wasn’t the reaction John expected. He frowned, putting a hand to the side of his son’s face as he asked, "What is it, Buddy?"
Dean shrugged. He didn’t look up. John’s hand fell away. His frown deepened, invading his eyes.
"Dean?" Mary prompted. He still didn’t look up. "Do you want to come in and sleep with us?" she asked after a long moment.
"No."
She saw John nod his approval with an almost imperceptible movement of his head. Sometimes, the two of them were so much alike, she had to remind herself Dean was her son, too.
"You know," she said, her lips moving closer to her son's ear as if she was sharing a secret with him, "even big boys sleep with their parents sometimes."
"They do not," Dean returned unequivocally.
John weighed in by blowing a small burst of air through his teeth. When Dean looked at him, he rolled his eyes and said, "Girls."
But Dean didn’t smile. He just stared at John and didn’t say a word.
"Sometimes they don’t understand anything, do they?" John pressed. "At least, not when it comes to guy stuff."
Dean shrugged a little.
"But you and me," John went on, "we know the drill. Bad dreams can be tricky stuff. Always a good idea to debrief after you’ve had one. Talk about it a little. Figure out what put it in your head and how to get it out, right?"
Dean didn’t say a word, but he spoke to John in the way he tried so hard not to look at his mother.
"But debriefings are classified communications," John adjusted easily. "So even though I know you’d probably rather have your mom here for this, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask her to leave." He looked over at Mary seriously. "Sorry, honey, but me and Dean have some guy stuff to talk about now, and girls don’t have clearance to listen in."
Mary raised a single eyebrow. "I don’t have clearance?"
John shrugged. "Sorry. Rules are rules. Can’t break ’em just because you’re the Colonel’s wife."
"Colonel?"
He grinned. "Field commission. Firecopter duty. That’s the fast track these days. With any luck, I’ll be a general by the end of the year."
She looked at him for a full three beat before returning her attention to Dean. "Well, I’ll just leave you two alone then. Wouldn’t want to break any military rules now, would we?"
"Its not your fault you’re a girl, Mom," Dean said.
"Yeah," John agreed, pushing to a stand. "It’s not your fault you’re a girl."
Mary lifted her son off her lap and set him on the edge of his bed. "Are you too much of a big boy to give your mom a kiss?" she asked.
Dean looked at her like it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever been asked. "No," he said, wrapping both arms around her neck to hug her tightly, then letting go and giving her a kiss before settling back to where he was perched on the bed.
She studied him for a long moment, then ran two fingers down the side of his face, tapped him twice on the end of the nose and stood. "Guess I’ll be in the officer’s quarters then."
John laid a hand on her back as she passed. "Keep the home fires burning. I think there are some night maneuvers scheduled for around oh two hundred, and you can bet I won’t be late for that duty call."
"Hmmm. I don’t recall any night maneuvers on the schedule. But then again, I’m just a girl, so there is that."
His hand slid around her waist, pulling her back to him, pulling her close. "There is that." His eyes sparking with humor, he tracked her spine with his fingers through the thin material of her nightgown. His touch drifted lower as he said, "But like Gunny Sergeant Dean says, that’s not really your fault, so we won’t hold it against you. Much."
She reached around to pull his forearm up to a more respectable placement of his hand against her body. "Colonel doesn’t learn to watch his battle lines, and he won’t be having anything held against him for a very long time."
"We'll schedule a staff meeting to discuss that later. But for right now, me and the boy," he tilted his head slightly in Dean’s direction, "have some serious matters to discuss. Boy matters."
"I’ll leave you to it then." She looked at Dean. He was watching them patiently, his expression calm, but serious. "Goodnight, Gunny Sergeant Dean," she said.
"Night, Mom."
John kissed her on the cheek, his lips near her ear when he said, just barely loud enough for her to hear, "Don’t go to sleep. I won’t be long."
She smiled and left them alone.
"So." John turned back to his son. "Let’s get you back in bed there, Deano; and then we’ll talk some turkey." He swung Dean up into the air far higher than necessary before swooping him back down and stuffing him under his covers in one, smooth arc of downward motion.
Sitting down on the bed at his side, John watched his son fidget until he got comfortable. Once Dean was settled, he said, "Okay, son. Give."
Dean looked up, then back down almost immediately. He couldn’t meet his father’s eyes, so he began picking at his bedding.
"Just you and me here," John prompted gently. "Nothing you can say that will make me think any less of you."
He kept picking at his bedding.
"Hey. Look at me when I’m talking to you." The authority in John’s voice was something his son instinctively obeyed. But when he looked up, his lip was trembling. "Talk to me," John instructed. Though his tone was gentle, it was also firm, and there was no mistaking it for anything other than the order it was.
Dean’s eyes filled with tears again. He didn’t say anything for some time. John waited in silence until he did.
"I dreamed about Mommy," he said finally. And then he started to cry.
*
Mary was dozing when her husband slid into bed, spooning up to her to drape one arm across her waist in a familiar and comfortable embrace. The warmth of his breath against the back of her neck was a temptation, but she resisted it, feigning sleep she knew better than to think he’d buy. The hand against her stomach shifted. It brushed her breast almost as if by accident, then settled near her collarbone. She smiled when the heat of his breathing turned to the pressure of his lips, and then the delicate investigations of his tongue.
She let him work for a while, paying off the debt of teaching her son to be a chauvinist, before she asked, "Are you sure you have clearance to be doing that, soldier?"
"Pretty sure." He turned her in his arms, smiling down at her. The sparkle of humor in his eyes, the twist of charm to the way he could look like a little boy and a full grown man at the same time worked the way it always worked. Perfectly. He lived and died by that Winchester charm. It had saved him on more than one occasion, usually when the little boy in him spoke before the grown man in him thought the statement through to its inevitable conclusion.
Not quite ready to let him off the hook yet, she said, "So … are the two of you going to build a clubhouse in the back yard? Put a sign up: No girls allowed?"
His smile was pure seduction when he raised one eyebrow and said, "What fun would that be? Girls are the best part."
"The best part, huh?" she repeated.
"Absolutely."
She gave in to him in the end the way she’d given in to him in the beginning. Sam was part of a plan, but Dean had come as somewhat of a surprise. A wonderful surprise, but a surprise nonetheless. One of those things that makes you think "how did that happen?" And then you remember. And you smile.
She wore him out with her girlish charms, and he did his best to keep up without running too far ahead. He was nearly asleep when it occurred to her to ask, "So what did he dream about?"
"Huh?" John muttered, already sinking through the first layers of too-far-gone.
"What was Dean’s dream about?" she repeated.
The question roused him a bit, and she waited while he searched around the grog of near sleep to find his upstairs brain again and kickstart it back to life. "Oh … that … it was … hmmm … nothing really …."
"John?" she prompted when his voice faded.
He started. His eyes popped open. "What?"
"Nothing, how?"
He looked at her blankly. "Nothing how?" he repeated.
Shifting against him, she put her hand in the center of his chest and her chin in the center of her hand. She watched while he blinked himself awake, waiting for him to smile at her in that lopsided way he had of smiling that admitted he knew he’d done something wrong, he just didn’t have any idea what it was. When they were both on the same page of him needing to pay better attention, she asked again, "What was Dean’s dream about?"
His smile faded. His eyes turned a darker shade of normal. It was the look he got when he had worries about their life he didn’t intend to share. It was his most irksome trait, this irrational need he had to protect her from even the smallest unpleasantries of life. He told her once it was because he loved her, but she’d always been more of a mind to believe it was because he was afraid of losing her.
It bothered her that he felt their happiness was so fragile it could be shattered by anything at all, let alone laid to utter waste by a small disaster the kind of which other families faced every day. She knew it was a reflection of his own life, a fear he’d carried far longer than she’d known him. He’d lost so much, so young, and it bred in him a darkness of irrational belief that he’d somehow deserved as much, a fear that if he’d been a better boy, he could have somehow prevented it.
As if a child of four could have saved his family from the farmhouse fire that destroyed them.
"Oh. That," he said.
"Yes. That," she agreed.
"It was nothing, really," he lied. "Just the kind of dream kids have."
"The kind that wake them up in the middle of the night, shrieking like their world is coming to an end?"
He looked away from her, wouldn’t meet her eyes. "Yeah," he said quietly. "That kind."
She reached up and touched his face. He turned back to her unwillingly. She rewarded his sacrifice with a small kiss, and then a longer one.
"I promise, John," she said, laying her face to his chest again, listening to the slow, steady pulse of his heart. "Nothing is going to happen to me. I’m not going to leave you. I’m not going to die. You don’t have to protect me every moment of every day from every single thing in our lives."
His heart skipped a beat. She heard it as clearly as she heard the lie in his voice when he said, "I’m not trying to protect you."
"Then tell me what Dean’s dream was about."
She wasn’t prepared for the abrupt way he sat up, catching her by the arms and setting her aside before he rose to his feet and crossed to the small bathroom she’d decorated in purple posies despite his protestations that he’d prefer the theme to be ducks. Not cute, yellow ducks swimming around with cute, yellow bills; but rather, the kind of brown and green ducks a man could think about shooting while he was doing his business.
Which was, of course, why the room ended up purple and full of posies.
She considered waiting for him to come back to bed on his own. She considered it for a full minute before standing and following him, stopping in the doorway to watch him run cold water in the sink and splash it on his face. He grabbed a towel and wiped himself dry. Only when he’d drained the sink and replaced the towel on its rack did he look up to meet her eyes in the reflection of the mirror above the sink.
She knew then. Knew why he wouldn’t tell her. Knew why he refused to talk about it. "He dreamed of fire," she said quietly.
John closed his eyes. She walked up behind him, looping her arms around his chest and folding her hands together to place them over his heart. They stood that way for several minutes, both of them barefoot in the bathroom, her face resting against his back, his breathing the slow, measured, discipline of a man who fought his emotional wars with silence and a ferociously unbending will.
He moved finally, taking her hands in his, lifting them to his lips and kissing them before he pulled them apart to escape their embrace. He returned to the bedroom, sliding back into bed without a word. She joined him there, knowing there was nothing she could say to help him, even as she knew anything she said was all he needed to hear.
She nestled up against his side. He dropped an arm around her shoulders, but continued to stare at the ceiling as if it held the secrets of the universe. Or perhaps, the doom of them all.
"It was just a dream, John," she said finally.
He looked down at her and smiled. The lie of it was almost seamless, misrepresented him the way he though she wanted him to be. "I know. Boys dream. It’s what we do."
"I love you, you know," she said.
"Yeah. I do. That’s all part of what we dream." He kissed her. His lips spoke to her with a hunger - a need - far more honest than his smile. She responded in kind, sinking into the candor he offered as passion, knowing it was more sincere than what most could offer under the guise of truth.
When he’d told her as much as he could, in the only way he could, she settled back to his chest, nuzzling in under his chin. He responded by wrapping both arms around her, a protection he didn’t realize he needed to give.
"We’re not a dream," she whispered against his neck. "You’re not going to wake up and find everything’s gone."
She drew a deep breath, smelling in him the memory of the first time they met. He’d hit on her with some ridiculous come-on that might have worked on someone else, given the way he looked in those days, but that should have, by all rights, gotten him slugged. She was sure he’d meant it to be charming, but to any self-respecting woman who didn’t think charm was an adequate substitute for character, and who didn’t really give a rat’s ass what a honey-voiced stranger thought of the cut of her bikini, it was just barely half a step short of offensive.
She’d rolled her eyes and would have walked away, but some drunk beach boy with more gusto than brains spiked a volleyball at the ground, and it came right for her head instead. He didn’t think: He just moved. When it blackened his eye instead of hers, it bought him twenty minutes of first aid and a cup of coffee because he asked.
She never really completely understood why he stepped in front of her that day until four months ago, when he was telling Dean boy-secrets she overheard by standing out of sight and listening in.
"You’ve always got to protect what you love, Buddy," he’d said in the serious tone he reserved for sharing the secrets of the universe with his first born son. "No matter what it costs you, no matter how much it hurts you to do it. That’s the sum total of who we are, you and me. Without the people we love, we’re nothing."
"Like you protect Mommy?" Dean had asked.
"Yeah. Like I protect Mommy. Cause your mommy is more important that I am. She always has been, and she always will be."
"Uh uh," Dean had objected. "Nothing’s more important than you, Daddy."
"She is, Deano," John had assured little Dean in a firm voice. "She’s more important because I love her more than I love me. And I always will. I knew that the first day I met her, and she’s proved me right every single day I’ve known her since."
"Do you love her more than you love me?" Dean had asked.
John laughed at that, even though it nearly made Mary cry. He’d swung Dean up in his arms and flown him around the living room, playing the helicopter game Dean loved so. When Dean grew up, he wanted to be a fireman; but he wanted to have a firecopter instead of a firetruck, so he’d appointed his daddy acting firecopter, but only until he got old enough to buy one for himself.
"What did you tell Dean that day he asked if you loved me more than you loved him?" she asked suddenly.
John frowned at her. "You were eavesdropping on us?" he asked, surprised.
"What? I never saw a ‘No Girls Allowed’ sign. So yes, I was eavesdropping."
"Isn’t that against the rules?" He was teasing her now. A smile played with the corners of his mouth. That expression was the reality of him that had charmed her into a second cup of coffee seven years ago. And then a third.
"Not my rules. Now quit trying to avoid the question and tell me what you told him."
"What if I don’t remember?"
She nudged him in the ribs with her shoulder, and he grunted. "Don’t remember my ass," she said. "You remember everything. I’ll bet you even remember what color bikini I was wearing the day we met."
"Well, yeah. You don’t forget the important stuff like that. But what if I don’t remember what I told Dean about love?"
"Then you’d better make something up." He opened his mouth to say something, but she interrupted, warning, "Something convincing."
The darkness from the mirror was gone now. He was trying to think of something that would make her laugh without earning him another shoulder to the ribs. His eyes were sparkling with the John-ness she fell in love with despite the warnings of her friends, and her own better judgement.
Over the years, she’s learned it was a charm he couldn’t fake if his life depended on it. He could smile his way into your heart without feeling it. He could talk his way into your graces without meaning it. But his eyes couldn’t lie to her. Even if they tried, they never could.
"It would just be so much easier to tell the truth, John," she said as he opened his mouth a second time to answer.
He laughed even though he didn’t mean to. Shaking his head, he said, "Killjoy. Okay, fine, I’ll tell you the truth. I told him I didn’t love anybody more than his mommy, including him or Sammy. And that I didn’t love anybody more than Sammy, including his mommy or him. And that I didn’t love anybody more than him, including Sammy or his mommy. And I told him if anyone ever told him different, they were liars, and he had my permission to kick them as hard as he could, as far up on the leg as he could … at least to the knee and right in the boy place if he could reach it. And the last thing I told him was that even if he never remembered anything else I ever told him, he should remember that. And he promised that he would. He swore to me, on pain of never playing firecopter again."
She studied him for several seconds before she spoke. "You should tell the truth more often, John. It would save you so much grief, and probably get you laid twice as often as you get laid now."
He grinned wickedly. "Can I take that as an invitation?"
She laughed. "Keep it in your boxers, soldier boy. We’ve got a party tomorrow, and Dean is expecting you to be at your firecopter best."
"I’m sure he’d understand. We guys stick together on stuff like that."
"Yes, you do. But we’ve got seven four-year-olds and their parents coming over tomorrow, and I’m not playing party parent all by myself."
John sighed. "I still don’t get that," he said. "Seven four-year-olds and a chocolate cake, all to celebrate Sammy’s six month birthday? What happened to the once-a-year rule? And to inviting the friends of the guest of honor, not the friends of his big brother?"
"Six months is an important milestone," Mary said as if she hadn’t already explained this to him half a dozen times. "And since Sammy doesn’t have any friends of his own yet, this is when we reward Dean for being his best friend and the best big brother a little boy ever had."
John snorted his opinion. "Huh. Sounds like a racket, if you ask me."
"That’s why I didn’t ask you," Mary returned sweetly. She kissed him one last time, then rolled over, giving him her back and a clear answer to any question he might still be entertaining about his invitation. "And John?"
"Yeah?"
"Do me a favor, will you?"
"Anything for you, baby."
She smiled at the tone of his response. It was exactly the same tone he’d used to express an appreciation for her bikini in a way that very nearly got him slugged. "Try not to teach your son any more tactical maneuvers that involve knee-kicking and boy-place busting. He’s already been pink-slipped once by Mrs. Pendleton for biting another boy who dared imply that his daddy could beat you up. It would be such a shame to have to visit him in the pokey when he should be attending elementary school. I have high hopes for that boy, and none of them involve incarceration before the age of six."
"What about after the age of six?"
"You think you’re cute, but you’re not," she said.
"Really? I thought I was. I was sure that’s why you married me."
"I married you because you put your head in front of a volleyball to save me. If not for that, you’d have never gotten to that first cup of coffee."
"All part of my master plan. I paid that guy to get drunk, you know. Cost me a twelve pack of Bud and a black eye to make like a hero, but once I saw you in that pink bikini, I knew it would be worth the price."
"It was green," she teased.
"Bullshit," he countered in a tone that brooked no argument. "It was pink with little white flowers. Don’t argue with a man about a bikini; you will never win."
She laughed. "Goodnight, John."
"Goodnight, Mary."
She was almost asleep when he asked, "Hey, did I tell you what your son taught me tonight?"
She wanted to remind him of the time, but she didn’t. "No, you didn’t."
"He taught me it isn’t called ‘duty call’ any more."
"Duty call?" she repeated, not sure she’d heard him right.
"Yeah. When you go on night maneuvers, he said they don’t call it ‘duty call’ any more."
He was dying to tell her, so she let him, knowing he wasn’t going to let her sleep until he’d shared with her the latest in a long line of "that’s my boy" moments that filled a place in him nothing else had ever been able to touch. She knew how much he loved her, and how much he loved little Sammy, too; but there was something specific about Dean that made him whole. Whole in a way he hadn’t been whole until he held Dean that very first day, seeing in him the little brother he’d lost when he was only four.
That moment healed John in a way she never could. It healed him more than he’d ever let her see that he was broken.
"So what do they call it now?" she asked, knowing it was her role to ask, and loving him for letting her play that role.
"Evidently, they call it ‘booty call’ now. Or at least, that’s what Tommy Hampton told him they call it, and he wanted to know if marines really call their boots booty, because he thinks that’s kind of a baby word, and they should change it, if they do."
*
Lying in his bed, nearly asleep but still struggling to stay awake for fear he’d dream the dream again, Dean heard his daddy laughing. It made him feel safe, made him feel loved. He fell asleep in the warmth of that sound, and years later, long after his daddy was dead and gone, it would still be the one sound that reminded Dean of home.
-finis-