SPN Fic: The Family Business (Part 1, Gen, PG13, Pre-Series)

[dodger_winslow]

Okay, y'all. I'm very close to posting the next part of Skin Deep, but since this has now been released to be post to my LJ, I'm going to put it up first. This is the pre-series fic that was published in The Brotherhood 8 last year. Just in the "to put your mind at ease" category, I am not re-reading this before I post it, so there is no chance it is going to get suddenly de-railed by me deciding to re-write it at the last moment, thus leaving you hanging in the middle of a story the way I've been a very bad girl about doing lately. Rather, this sucker is already set in type and graven in stone, so I'm just going to post it a piece at a time across the weekend because LJ character limits won't let me put her all up in one go.

Huge thanks to the awesome editors are Pyramids Press for making this a better story by the time it published than it was when I originally sent it your direction. Y'all are a pleasure to work with.

Title: The Family Business (Part 1)
Author: Dodger Winslow
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG-13 for language
Word Count: 45,000
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while ...

Summary:It was at least the hundredth time, this month alone, that Dean had launched into this or that reason, justification or simple bullshit bluff about why it was time-way past time, in fact, if you asked Dean’s opinion on it, which John never had-for him to pop his cherry on the hunt.  It was, however, the first time Dean had actually waylaid him before he even managed to make it to the front door .


The Family Business

It was at least the hundredth time, this month alone, that Dean had launched into this or that reason, justification or simple bullshit bluff about why it was time-way past time, in fact, if you asked Dean’s opinion on it, which John never had-for him to pop his cherry on the hunt. It was, however, the first time Dean had actually waylaid him before he even managed to make it to the front door.

The kid must have been waiting at the window, watching the street for God knows how long so he’d be ready to launch into the whys, hows, and wherefores of Let Me Go With You 101 the moment John hit the tarmac. Three days gone and two more dumbass teenagers dead before he finally managed to put that fucking vetala back in the ground where it belonged, and this was his welcome home party: an ambush in the driveway about something he’d already said no to almost as many times as he’d been asked.

The thrust of Dean’s argument this time seemed to be that he was almost sixteen years old-him being two months past turning fifteen as he was-for Christ’s sake; so was he ever going to actually get to go hunting with John? Or should he just resign himself to dying an old man who’d never salted and burned even one single corpse for the sake of posterity?

"No," John said definitively. And that was the end of it…until he got his key in the front door. When Dean started in again, John lost his heretofore relatively patient patience. "I said no," he snapped. "Now drop it unless you want to end up a dead fifteen-year-old who’s never salted anything more dangerous than popcorn." Shouldering past the flash of disappointment in his son’s eyes, John stepped across the threshold and into the house.

Sammy didn’t even bother to look up from the book he was reading until John tossed the weapons duffel onto the sofa beside him, and even then, the quick glance he offered would have had to work a little harder just to qualify as indifferent. John snorted, shook his head in disgust. Three days gone, and the kid couldn’t stir up enough enthusiasm about seeing his old man to even say hello.

"Don’t strain yourself there, Sammy." John headed to the kitchen for a cold one. He opened the refrigerator and leaned in, studied the near empty shelves with a critical eye. Eggs, lunchmeat, and beer. Damn thing looked more like a box left at the curb on the day after Christmas than it did the primary food stash for two growing boys with four hollow legs between them.

Christ, his life had taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way. This was not how he and Mary had envisioned it more than a decade ago, lying curled up around each other in a tangle of sheets on date night, talking about what it would be like to have kids. About how much fun it would be once they got old enough to toss a ball around, to sit and talk girls and sports with their old man, to spend Saturdays under the hood of an old car, learning the mysteries of the universe in how to tune a carburetor or change out the plugs and points.

The possibility that one of those kids would prove out so indifferent to his dad’s homecoming that he couldn’t put a bookmark to good use hadn’t really come up.

A lot of things hadn’t come up until she was dead and gone, and he was all the boys had left to protect them. A lot of things hadn’t been part of the plans they made before their lives got fucked off the road of good intentions by a demonic bastard who didn’t give a rat’s ass that John and Mary’s firstborn should be fixating on charming his way into some girl’s pants for the first time, not popping his cherry on a hunt; that their fifteen-year-old should be trying to negotiate passing grades for the keys to a car once he got his license, not riding his genetic C.O. like a donkey about being old enough to face the kind of soul-sucking evil even a combat-blooded Marine would give his right nut not to know existed.

John reached into the refrigerator and grabbed a can of off-brand crap beer, twisted it free of the plastic, six-pack necktie. "You run out of money?" he asked, amazed Dean hadn’t copped at least one of those beers while he was gone The kid had a real hard on about killing monsters for fun, but it probably never occurred to him to snitch a beer he hadn’t been offered. Dean was such an aggressive, hardass combat vet in some ways, and such a patient, well-behaved four-year-old in others.

"We’re good. I still had a couple of bucks," Dean lied.

"But we ran out of food," Sammy added on the off-chance his old man wasn’t smart enough to figure it out on his own. John grunted. No brainer the kid would take a break long enough to weigh in on that.

"I’ll leave you a couple more twenties next time," John told Dean, and only Dean. He popped the top on his beer and took a long, healthy swig of flat, bitter swill. It was pretty early to start hitting the bottle-or the can, as the case may be-but he’d earned it. Might only be a couple hours into the day for most men, but he’d put some serious mileage under the hood since the last time his head hit a pillow.

"Dang, Dad," Sammy offered from the peanut gallery he’d made of the couch. "It’s only nine o’clock in the morning."

The words themselves could have been nothing more than Sammy pointing out the obvious, but the judgmental tone defined them as something more: round two in a bitchslapping that started with a cheap shot about running out of food. Had John been less tired than he was, the kid’s brass balls might have pissed him off, but he wasn’t, so they didn’t. Instead, all his pre-teen, pain-in-the-ass know-it-all’s carping bullshit managed to do was wear him down. That was Sammy’s specialty these days. He was turning into a real pro at eroding John to nothing, the infuriating persistence of his same-ole same-ole routine as inevitable in its outcome as water dripping on stone.

John swung the refrigerator door shut, took another swig of beer before he turned to face something his smarter-than-you kid wasn’t smart enough to let him ignore. Sammy was waiting for a response with a neutral expression sold out by the open hostility in his petulant gaze. For someone who’d been raised without a woman in sight since he was too young to even remember the smell of her, the boy could put on a serious bitchface when he wanted to. Package that up with a world-class passion for nagging, and he was going to make some girl a fine fishwife someday. Until then, however, he’d made it his mission in life to be John’s special burden to bear.

"Build you a little house and shove a popsicle stick up your ass, and you’d make a hell of a fine cuckoo clock, son," John said calmly.

Sammy snorted. Though he made no effort to disguise his glaringly obvious disdain, in a rare display of survival instinct, he went back to his book instead of offering anything more on the subject of how tragically substandard John was to the Good Dad benchmark he’d set in his head as the bare minimum standard for being normal.

Being normal.

That was Sammy’s holy grail these days. Nothing too ambitious. Nothing overly ostentatious. Just a little bit of normal spread out across as many days in a row as he could get.

John shook his head, sucked down another slug of bitter hops as he fingered back through time to a place, not all that long ago, when his youngest still thought he could walk on water. Even then, Sammy was like as not to try and tell him exactly how that particular feat might best be accomplished-usually citing a dozen Star Trek case-in-point examples to give his theory the ring of scientific authenticity. But despite all his it’s-not-magic-it’s-science caveats and often in direct conflict to the technobabble theories he spat out like an AK-47 on full automatic, on some fundamental level, until about a year ago, Sammy had still subscribed to the Dean-spawned school of thought that, in a pinch, John Winchester could calm the seas with a word and take a stroll out to the horizon and back if that’s what it took to get the job done.

That was more-or-less the high mark of what he’d ever managed to accomplish with his youngest. With Dean, even at fifteen-going-on-forty-seven, he was still Batman in all the ways that could possibly matter. But when it came to Sammy, his glory days had topped out at convincing the boy that he could occasionally walk on water, even if walking on water wasn’t really all that impressive if you knew the trick to it, which Sammy absolutely did.

Sammy knew the trick to everything.

Or if he didn’t know it, he’d figure it out, and he wouldn’t need any help from his old man to do it, either. Which was why these days, John considered himself on a roll if he got credit for being anything more than just some schmuck who picked up the check when they went out for pizza. Because when the pizza bill wasn’t up for grabs? As far as Sammy was concerned, he was just some drunk-before-noon asshole who didn’t leave enough money to keep them in chips and candy bars while he was gone. Never mind that Sammy had never seen him drunk, only half-dead on his feet and trying to hide it. Never mind that Dean knew exactly where the emergency cash was, but considered it a personal failure to dip into it for anything short of life-or-death circumstances. Never mind any of those things, or half a dozen others, because Sammy knew everything, even when he didn’t.

"So?" Dean prompted after several seconds of silence.

John glanced at him, asked blandly, "So…what? You want to make a crack about the time of day, too?"

It wasn’t fair, and he knew it, but he was feeling pretty fucking unappreciated at the moment, so he said it anyway. And his words did exactly what he knew they’d do. Dean wilted, his half-assed bubble of hope that this pitch would somehow end differently than all the others punctured. Or punctured for the moment, at least, because the respite wouldn’t last long. Somewhere along the line-Jim would no doubt cite something about monkey-see monkey-do right about now-Dean had gotten it into his head that pure persistence would pay off where reason and logic hadn’t. Or logic from his perspective, at least. Logic like "I’m almost sixteen, for Christ’s sake." And "Technically, I’ve been fighting monsters off since I was, what? Freakin’ four? So how’s that so different from actually going on a hunt?"

But it was different. It was different in that John didn’t have any choice about his sons being forced to face that kind of shit in self-defense, but he did have a choice about putting them in the path of danger by intention. This wasn’t a fucking family business, for Christ’s sake. It was a war. And fuck him twelve ways from Sunday, but he wasn’t putting his sons on the front lines of any war unless and until he absolutely had to.

That was his stance here, and he planned to stick to it until the house burned down around him. Because in the long run? He wasn’t going to win this battle, and he knew it. The truth of the matter was as simple as it was inarguable: when it came to hunting, Dean was never going to take "no" for an answer. He might not be much for open rebellion, especially about something as mundane as the details of day-to-day living, but once that boy dug his heels in on something, he was twice as stubborn as John ever dared be.

And he’d dug his heels in on hunting. Their conversations about it were exercises in mutual futility. John stalled; Dean pushed; John stalled some more. But at the end of the day, their negotiations to the inevitability of finding common ground were always held in Dean-speak. And in Dean-speak, "no" was short for "no at this moment," and that answer expired thirty seconds after it was given, re-opening the door to yet another volley of reasons, justifications and simple, bullshit bluffs about why it was way past time he got on with the business of popping his cherry on a hunt.

John took swig of crap-ass beer and sat down at the kitchen table, stretched his legs out in front of him and closed his eyes for a moment, trying and failing to make nice with the headache throbbing like a drumbeat in both temples. Damn, but he was tired. He was so fuckin’ tired his teeth ached. His body was nothing more than a two-hundred-pound coat of raw meat hanging off the rack of his bones, and he still had another full day’s worth of prep work before he could throw in the towel and call it a night.

Upon reflection, he should have known it would end up biting him in the ass to take on that vetala with a draugr hunt less than two weeks out. And in some ways, he did know. Know that no matter how the numbers crunched out in theory, the reality was inevitable that he’d end up right where he was now, standing at the crossroads of Damn Fool and Soft-Headed Schmuck like a double-booked lothario caught with his hand in the wrong fucking cookie jar.

If he’d been half smart about it, he would have left those dumbass kids to the lethal consequences of their fucked up graveyard games. They could deny it all they wanted, but vetalas didn’t re-animate the freshly buried because they got a sudden yen for takeout. They came because they were called, and they satisfied their eternal munchies with the bones and brains of those who woke them. All in all, it wasn’t a bad system for keeping someone from making the same mistake twice.

But as much as they might have brought it on themselves by playing with things they had no business playing with, they were still kids, and levying the death penalty for ignorance and piss-poor judgement was a little harsh, even in his book. Besides which, according to Bobby, haugbuis-the particular brand of draugr he already had booked for pre-emptive relocation when Ellen called him with some sob story about eight kids facing a one hundred percent attrition rate unless he doubled up to prevent it-only screwed with people after its resting place was put to an unsanctified turn. So in theory, he should have had plenty of time to put both revenants down with room to spare.

Yeah. Right. Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

Clearly, John Winchester’s hunting schedule was not a consideration when the mayor and his cronies decided to move up the ground-breaking ceremonies for their pet project. So now, instead of a nine day clearance window? He had two. Forty-eight hours. If he didn’t get to the dig site by, at the very latest, tomorrow night to harvest the haugbui’s mortal remains and re-inter them somewhere else, minus a few vital components, there was going to be a few less Democrats in town come Monday morning.

Not that the idea of weeding out a few overpaid, bleeding-heart liberals was necessarily a bad thing, in and of itself. Under different circumstances, he might have even considered letting the ghouls have at it and God bless. But unfortunately, the last time someone got the bright idea of throwing up a building on this particular site, the carnage didn’t stop at the idiots with the shovels. It lapped over onto the surrounding citizenry, and the endgame casualties hit double digits. Politicians and trust-fund babies were one thing; kids and kittens were something else altogether.

John sighed, took another swallow of bitter beer. You’d think, after three catastrophic groundbreaking massacres, even stretched over a span of hundred and twenty-odd years, they’d get the damn message and just call the place a fuckin’ park.

"Great," John heard Sammy mutter from a room-and-a-half away. "Now he’s drinking in his sleep."

"Shut up, Sammy," Dean said.

John considered seconding that motion for a full nanosecond before he decided to play it as if he simply hadn’t heard. Sometimes ignoring Sammy was not only the best way to keep from snapping the mouthy little punk’s head off, it was the only way.

And truth be told, he was simply too fucking tired to deal with Sammy’s bullshit right now. It didn’t hurt Dean to play referee for a couple of hours, but it might hurt Sammy if he kept pushing until his old man felt a need to start calling fouls and assessing penalty yardage himself.

John took another drink, waited for another petulant, ill-advised dig about what an abnormal, inexcusable alcoholic asshole he was to have a beer in his own kitchen after saving only five kids instead of six because some fifteen-year-old dumbass went back after his sister despite the fact that the girl was already fucking gone and there wasn’t a damn thing anybody could do about it except die with her. Which the stubborn little bastard did, despite John’s best effort to reach him before the vetala ripped his fucking head off.

John’s hand tightened against cold aluminum, crumpling it slightly under the pressure of five fingers trying to close themselves to a fist. He shouldn’t have turned his back on the kid. Shouldn’t have trusted the little bastard to follow orders after he’d already broken ranks twice, trying to go back the way they’d come, trying to play the hero because he was almost sixteen for Christ’s sake, and too God damned close to becoming a man to accept he wasn’t one yet.

And now he never would be.

Thin metal crimped to small mountain ranges of sharp edges and chilly condensation. John concentrated on that-on the metal cold, on the metal wet-as he struggled to clear his mind of things that were going to be there for a very, very, very long time.

"Dad?" Dean ventured quietly. "You okay?"

John grunted but didn’t go so far as to actually answer. His jaw was clenched so tight he wasn’t sure he could have spoken anyway. And if he had, he would have probably said something he’d regret later. Said something in anger that would have betrayed his know-it-all punk-ass kid by telling the little fucker something he didn’t need to know … something neither of his boys needed to know.

So he downed another slug of beer instead; sat there saying nothing, doing nothing, thinking nothing.

It was several minutes before the corded tension vibrating from his fingernails to his hair follicles began to ease up a little. Step off. Cool down. Let it go. Give it up. It took several more to convince his muscles to follow suit, start relaxing into some semblance of ordered repose that might have a chance at passing for casual indifference to the kid he could still feel watching him so hard it hurt. The time passed slowly, like honey on a cold day or blood dripping from the ruined remains of a fifteen-year-old’s tattered throat.

By the time his spine had softened to an exhausted slouch, a familiar buzz was installing itself in the marrow of his bones, and he let it. He focused on the rattle of shapeless noise resonating inside his body, embraced the white chaos of static swarming through him like cicadas looking to hook up in the sweet still of a summer night. The quiet drone filled his mind with memories of Lawrence before the fire, lulled him into the enduring refuge of cool sheets and open windows where the quiet murmur of her voice chased away the restless shift of shadows with whispered intimacies he half remembered and half imagined in a deepening haze of lost dreams and forgotten wishes.

"Dad?"

Dean’s voice was quiet, but close enough to startle him awake with an awkward, painful flinch. John’s eyes popped open. "What?" he demanded in a voice that sounded like he’d run it through a grater and then some.

Dean flinched, too; pulled back a little as he offered quickly, apologetically, "Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you. I just thought…you know…that you might be hungry or something."

John blinked. He looked down at the table, studied a chipped plate heaped with scrambled eggs and fried lunchmeat that hadn’t been there when he’d closed his eyes only moments before. The eggs were crunchy with burn, but readily identifiable. It took a full five seconds, on the other hand, to figure out whether or not the pinkish, liver-colored mass beside them was the source of the God-awful smell wafting through the kitchen like mustard gas on a still day, or if something had died inside the walls and was already three days rotted.

The stench was coming from the shapeless lump of whatever-the-hell-it-was on his plate, he decided finally. Seared pimento loaf, maybe? And something that looked like it might have been braunschweiger once. Maybe. If you had a good imagination. Or a bad one, depending on your perspective. John blinked again, cleared his throat, continued to study the plate and its somewhat disturbing contents without comment.

"Or not, if that doesn’t look edible," Dean said after almost a full minute of silence.

John flicked him a quick glance. "What is it?" he asked, trying not to sound as overtly wary as he knew he probably sounded.

"Just…hash, I guess you’d call it. But if you’d rather go back to sleep or something, that’s fine. I just figured you probably hadn’t eaten yet, and I know you like eggs, so I just thought, you know, but whatever."

John cleared his throat again, pushed himself a little more upright in his chair. Muscles spasmed in the small of his back, knotted up under his shoulder blades, clamped down like a vise around the base of his skull. "Wasn’t sleeping," he lied. "Just resting my eyes for a minute."

Still sitting on the couch in the living room, but watching TV now instead of reading, Sammy snorted. "Yeah. Right. That’s why you were snoring."

"I mean it, Sam," Dean said tersely.

John wasn’t sure what, exactly, Dean meant, but he was sure the statement was a threat. Dean never called his little brother "Sam" unless it was a threat or a warning. So it was definitely a threat. And probably a warning, too.

John looked at his watch and winced. Ten-thirty. Fuck. He had too much work to do to waste time sleeping. He took another slug of beer and regretted it. Somewhere between closing his eyes and opening them again, the can had gone warm in his hand. He made a face, set it back to the table and pushed it away. The only thing worse than flat, bitter, off-brand crap beer was warm, flat, bitter, off-brand crap beer.

"Want me to get you another brewski?" Dean asked.

If it had been any other kid, the offer would have come off as a suck-up. It would have sounded like a bid to buy his way back into the game, start up a new debate about joining a hunt he’d already been told three time he couldn’t join. But it wasn’t any other kid; it was Dean. And it wasn’t a manipulation; it was a genuine, hopeful offer.

"No. I’m fine."

"Maybe you should crash for a while, if you’re not hungry," Dean suggested. "Sammy and I can hold down the fort while you’re out."

"Like we haven’t been holding it down for the last three days already," Sammy muttered in the other room.

"Or Sam can be a little bitch, and I’ll hold down the fort," Dean revised. Another threat; a more specific warning.

John grunted. He looked down at the plate again. Beer excepted, it was the sum total of everything left in the fridge. Dean hadn’t not been hungry since he was twelve, but here he was, anteing up every scrap of food in the house to the sole purpose of sparing his old man the consequences of cheap beer on an empty gut.

"Actually, I am kind of hungry, and this looks pretty good." John picked up a fork, poked at the colorful, shapeless mass on his plate. "Hash, huh? Back in The Day, that word had a completely different meaning."

Dean grinned, slid into a chair across the table. "Well, that’s what I call it anyway. Really just scrambled eggs and fried lunchmeat though. I would have used bacon or sausage or something, but we didn’t have any, so I kind of…made do. I know it doesn’t smell very good, but I think it’ll taste okay. I mean, meat’s meat, right? And what’s not to love about meat?"

Doesn’t smell very good was a hell of an understatement. On a scale of one to ten, Dean’s hash was a full-on twelve in the wrong direction. John was pretty sure he’d eaten worse in his day, but he didn’t know when, and he wasn’t sure why. Poking it with a fork like road kill on a plate wasn’t going to make it any better, though, so John stopped stalling and dug in.

It tasted twice as bad as it smelled. Maybe three times as bad.

Watching anxiously from across table, Dean waited on a verdict like a new bride popping his cherry at the stovetop. John had been a lucky man in that regard with Mary. She was a hell of a good cook long before he ever met her. In all the meals she’d put to the table for him over the years, he’d never once walked away hungry.

Her son, on the other hand, was not a good cook. Even by the forgiving standards of Sammy’s all-inclusive tastebuds, this seared lunchmeat extravaganza was Exhibits A through Z toward proving that Dean Winchester had somehow managed to inherit his dad’s genes on both the cooking and creative mayhem fronts…an unfortunate conflux of skills (and lack thereof) that, when applied to a limited pantry, evidently resulted in gastronomical atrocities like fried pimento-loaf-braunschweiger hash.

"Taste okay?" Dean ventured.

"Better’n a poke in the eye," John allowed. It wasn’t true, but Dean grinned, so it qualified as a lie well spent.

"Wasn’t too sure about the braunschweiger," Dean admitted. "But it was either that or coffee grounds."

"Made the right choice," John told him. It was another lie well spent, buying a second grin and an appreciable softening in Dean’s square-shouldered anxiety. The kid was making himself nuts, worrying that his make-do solution might taste as bad as it smelled. Which it absolutely did not. It tasted much worse.

"You’ll have to give me the recipe sometime," John said between bites. "Then maybe we can braid each other’s hair and paint our toenails a sassy pink."

Dean snorted. He leaned back in a lazy sprawl of limbs that looked far more awkward than it actually was, the muted spark of cocky confidence in his eyes flaring back to full strength as if it hadn’t flickered dim for a moment, anticipating the kind of personal failure John would never let him see in the only reflection by which he judged himself. Hooking one elbow over the back of his chair, he said, "So. About that hunt…"

"What about it?" John asked without looking up.

It wasn’t the response Dean was expecting, and for a moment, he didn’t quite know what to do with it.

John smiled, popped another forkful of God-awful make-do in his mouth and chewed it down. It was pretty obvious Dean hadn’t planned beyond pursuing a go code for his pitch, so finding himself suddenly, inexplicably through an open door he’d expected to be closed, locked, barred and bricked over stole his momentum right out from under him. It took the wind out of his sails and left him standing around with both hands shoved in his pockets, looking a little confused about how he got where he was and what in the hell he was supposed to do next.

Had it been any other subject, John would have helped him out a little with a hint or a nudge in the right direction. But on this particular subject, the kid was on his own.

"Um…what are you going after?" Dean asked in the wake of a full three-beat of dead silence. Then, before John had a chance to answer, he added, "And is it something I can help you with?"

John looked up, watched his son across a table’s worth of distance between them as he took another bite. And another. And a third. He chewed thoughtfully, doing what he could to keep that crap as far away from his tastebuds as teeth and tongue would allow. Pimento loaf and braunschweiger? What in the hell was the kid thinking? Thank God the available options hadn’t been licorice and lime jello.

"Maybe," John said finally. "You just gonna sit there, or are you fetching me a cup of caffeine to wash this down?"

Dean was up and moving before John finished speaking. Over the years, he’d learned his lessons well. By the time he was seven, he knew starting a fresh pot of coffee the moment John hit the door on the backside of a hunt was the only reliable way to delay the inevitable. Wielding John’s caffeine addiction against him like a weapon, Dean had become remarkably adept at staving off John’s post-hunt SOP of a twenty-four-hour crash-and-burn long enough to run through his mother-hen routine from start to finish, looking for undeclared wounds or undisclosed emotional scars or undiscovered any-other-fucking-thing the kid had a knack for ferreting out like a bloodhound on the trail of a wounded coon. He’d learned that lesson early, too: learned his dad was a bit of a negligent jackass when it came to taking care of the damage a hunt inflicted, learned how to do an end run around John’s instinct to hide things by coming off like a lonely kid trying to buy face time to discuss homework, or Batman, or the fucking weather instead of a covert operative digging for intel on what kind of monster John had taken on, and whether or not that monster gave as good as it got.

Dean had already filled a mug with fresh coffee and started back to the table when John suggested, "Get one for yourself, while you’re at it."

Dean hesitated, looking a little startled. He might not swipe beers out of the fridge or smoke cigarettes under cover of darkness, but he’d been drinking coffee by the gallon on the sly for years, and he didn’t think John knew about it. But John did. When it came to his sons, he knew just about everything there was to know, he just didn’t always feel a need to address every infraction of every rule with a fifteen-year-old who limited his rebellions to snitching caffeine, lifting candy bars from the local quick stop, and hiding skin magazines under his mattress. Every kid needed secrets, and Dean didn’t have many, so John let him keep the ones he thought he had.

"Unless you’re planning to swamp it with milk," John added casually. "Or shovel in more sugar than you do coffee. Because if you’re planning to do something like that, then leave it in the pot and spare me the tragedy of having to watch."

Dean’s expression split to a slow grin. "No, sir," he said, squaring his shoulders a bit to match the standard he had in his head of how a man stood, how a man talked, how a man acted. How a man drank his damn coffee. "Black and strong, or not at all."

"Well, don’t just stand there and talk about it, then. Put a little stir in your stumps so you don’t let my caffeine go cold."

Dean grabbed another mug and filled it, then brought them both to the table.

"So about this hunt," John said when Dean was settled in again. "I’ve been thinking it over, and there are a couple of things you can do to help, if you’re up for doing what I need done."

Dean’s eyes shone with excitement. "Yes, sir. I’m absolutely up to doing whatever you need. Whatever it is? I’m your man."

"I could use a hand with the research end of things then. Someone to verify facts for me; do a little digging to see if they can come up with anything I might have missed."

For the third time in as many minutes, John’s words froze Dean to a dead still in his tracks. He didn’t blink, didn’t breathe, didn’t do a damn thing but meet John’s equally steady gaze with the sinking realization that if something sounded too good to be true, it inevitably was…particularly if you were dealing with John Winchester.

Out in the living room, Sammy snorted derisively from the couch. Though both John and Dean heard it, neither of them acknowledged it.

"Research?" Dean said after several long moments of absolute silence.

"Yeah. Research." John took a sip of coffee, kept his eyes on Dean’s as he said, "Research is a big part of the hunt. An important part."

Dean’s jaw clenched. He swallowed hard, dropped his gaze, nodded like this was something he should have expected, even though he obviously hadn’t. "Yes, sir. I know that." His voice was dull, flat. He’d lost all interest in drinking coffee or anything else. He couldn’t hide the disappointment etched into every line of his slumped posture, but he did a good job of trying, keeping his head down and his eyes on own hands to keep the fallout from dashed expectations from showing on his face.

It was the response John expected. He was half hoping for a complaint about ambush tactics, a protest on the grounds of blatant bait-and-switch manipulation, a full-on bitchfit over the simple fact that he was almost sixteen, for Christ’s sake, so it was way past time….

He was hoping for it because that kind of response gave him grounds to take the hunt off the table altogether, but he didn’t expect it. Not from Dean.

Even as a kid, Dean had never been one to lash out when he was disappointed, so it didn’t surprise John that, even under the duress of his old man setting him up just to knock him down, he held his misery close, his frustration closer, his resentment closest of all. At fifteen, Dean showed a man’s maturity and a Marine’s respect for the chain of command. He didn’t question it. He didn’t protest it. He didn’t defy it.

He just obeyed it, even when it wasn’t fair.

That was important on a hunt. It was essential.

"I know it’s not very glamorous," John went on calmly once he was sure Dean wasn’t going to give him an out by throwing a tantrum, or even by trying to guilt him with a show of damage taken by being fool enough not to consider that his father might be fucking with him about something this important. "Probably not what you were hoping for. But that’s what I need on this one, son. Someone to help out with the research."

"What kind of research?’ Dean asked quietly.

"Fact-checking, mostly. The vetala job took longer than I expected. It threw me behind, so if you can cover some of the grunt work I still need to get done-make sure all my I’s are dotted and all my T’s are crossed-it’ll free me up for other things. Like getting some sleep, for example. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m seriously overdrawn in that department, so I’m not in the best shape to go trying to put the smackdown on some pissy ghoul. Not that I can’t do it, because I can. But I’d rather not unless I have to, and you taking the research off my to do list would help."

That wasn’t entirely truthful. While he did need some serious shut-eye before taking this bastard on, he already had the information he needed to put it down. It would be more accurate to say that, on this hunt at least, research was a luxury rather than a necessity. Or maybe not a luxury so much as a failsafe. A back-up. The kind of double- and triple-check protocols that could make the difference between a successful hunter and a permanently empty chair at the dinner table.

But even without the safety net of the redundancies he favored in an effort to keep Mary’s sons from growing up orphans, John didn’t expected this job to be any big step for a high roller. He’d put down enough revenants in the past ten years to top off a small landfill, and for the most part, one reanimated, moldering flesh-muncher was pretty much the same as any other.

So on a scale of one to ten? He had this hunt pegged at about two-and-a-half…which, in and of itself, was as good a reason as any to take a few extra precautions. It was inevitably the easy jobs that got a man killed.

And he’d never hunted a draugr in specific before either, so he couldn’t rule out the possibility of some obscure, bullshit detail jumping up at the last second and trying to bite him in the ass. The wrong pronunciation of an incantation in a language he didn’t speak. A sigil designed to ward off instead of contain. Taking off the head with iron instead of removing the heart with silver. Re-burying the bastard feet-to-the-North instead of face-down, or feet-to-the-East.

There were a thousand different variations on any given theme, and keeping them all straight was more than a bitch, it was a fucking full-time avocation. Add to that the simple reality that culture-specific ghouls were always a little trickier prospects than their pan-cultural cousins-translations got garbled over oceans and centuries; words in one language didn’t always have a true counterpart in another language; when it came to walking dead things, close enough for government work was both a euphemism for playing Russian roulette with a gattling gun and a fool’s epitaph-and a hunt could degrade from no big step to a terminal clusterfuck in one hell of a hurry.

"So what do you say?" John asked, watching Dean closely. "You up for that? You want to do a little research to help your old man out on a hunt?"

"Sure," Dean agreed. His voice was a little too tight, but other than that, he did a good job of sounding like his old man hadn’t just betrayed him. "Just tell me what you’re looking for, and I’ll take it from there."

John nodded. He took a couple more sips of coffee, then said, "Okay. Good." He let several more heartbeats pass before adding, "Because I wouldn’t be comfortable taking you on your first hunt without being sure all our I’s are dotted and our T’s are crossed. Even relatively safe jobs can go pear-shaped on you without much warning, so being a little over-prepared is never a waste of time, especially when you have an FNG in tow."

Dean was more cautious about accepting the words at face value this time. "FNG," he repeated carefully. "You mean Freakin New Guy?"

John chuckled. He forked the last of that hellish hash into his mouth and washed it down with coffee before answering. "I’m not sure freakin is the technical term. But yeah. That’s what I’m mean."

"So, you’re going to let me go on the actual hunt itself, too? After the research?"

Pushing the now empty plate away, John leaned back in his chair, taking the mug of coffee with him. That was one of his favorite things about Dean as a protégé, if not as a son. You could jerk the rug out from under the little bastard once, but he wouldn’t let you do it to him twice. He learned from his mistakes: took the right lessons from bumps and bruises to his ego, as well as his body. And he was a CO’s dream when it came to his learning curve on when and how to alter his choices to avoid courting the same negative outcome twice.

John felt a twinge of guilt and ignored it. Although there were times the father he wanted to be hated himself for developing that personality trait in Dean with lessons that lacked the kind of parental mercy Mary would have kicked his ass for failing to show; there were other times-usually when the sharp smell of smoke reminded him of Mary burning on the ceiling of Sammy’s nursery-that he was grateful he’d spent enough time incountry in another life to see first-hand what the VC did to kids who learned their survival skills at the knee of a merciful CO.

"We’ll see," John allowed noncommittally. "If I like the quality of your research, we’ll at least talk about it."

"Talk about it?" Dean pressed.

So John pushed back. "Or you can just do the research if you need a guarantee signed in blood that this will turn out the way you want it to."

Dean backed off immediately. "I don’t need a guarantee," he said quickly. "Talking about it’s fine."

That was another of his favorite things about Dean. Like Sammy, the kid wasn’t afraid to push his boundaries. Unlike Sammy, he was smart enough-or perhaps just obedient enough-not to cross them once he found them.

"Good, because you don’t have one," John said, his tone a little crosser than he meant it to be. "Hunting’s not a reward. It’s a job…a dangerous job. And you’re not going on a hunt-on any hunt-with me just because you’re a good kid, or because you work hard, or because you help me out with a little research. When you go, if you go, it will be because I think you’re ready. No, scratch that. Because I’m sure you’re ready. But until then?" John leaned forward again, put his elbows on the table and fixed Dean with the kind of gaze he’d used to scare the piss out of kids fresh off a Huey back in The Day. "Until then, you’re not setting foot one inside a kill zone-not as a reward, and not for any other fucking reason either-until I’m satisfied it won’t be you who gets yourself killed. Or who gets me killed."

In a fair fight, that would have been a cheap shot. But nothing about the life they lived was fair, and that included John.

"Yes, sir," Dean said. His voice was remarkably steady considering the look in his eyes that verified the accuracy of a sucker punch kill shot he’d never understand why he’d taken until he was the one on the other side of the table, doing whatever it took to protect his own children from their fanciful notions on war and heroism.

Because there was nothing heroic about war. And there was no room for walking softly on tender territory in a war, either. Not if it meant letting an undisclosed wound pass muster to the possibility of crippling a man out in the bush later, when war was inevitably war and every improperly scarred wound was an opportunity for the enemy to get the upper hand.

The boys thought they were hiding things from him, but they weren’t. He wasn’t blind, and this wasn’t his first rodeo. Even if he hadn’t come home from a hunt eleven months ago and two towns back to find both his sons sleeping in the corner of their room, Dean knotted up in a ball of pure misery and Sammy twisted around him like a ten-year-old trying to be a mother, father, and best friend all rolled up into one; he still would have known Dean would start having nightmares as soon as the prospect of a hunt became real to him: an actionable goal instead of some nebulous future intention. And he knew what those nightmares would be about, too, just because he knew Dean.

The kid was fearless when it came to his own safety, but he was as fragile as blown glass on the subject of either John’s or Sammy’s. From the moment going on a hunt with his old man stepped off the "not gonna happen" bench and started swinging a weighted stick on the "sooner or later" deck, it became inevitable that Dean’s subconscious would start eating him alive. He was terrorized by the idea that he might fuck up and get his old man killed. The mere possibility of it haunted him the way losing one of his boys to his own inadequacy or stupid fucking error had haunted John for a decade.

And John used that insecurity against him. He used it like a cudgel, merciless in how willing he was to beat his own kid back from a line he didn’t want Dean anywhere near, let alone crossing.

Wherever she was, Mary probably hated him for that failure of parental mercy, too, but that was a hit he was willing to take. All’s fair in love and war, and this was both. If Mary had ever been incountry, she would have understood that. If she’d ever seen the kind of slaughter he had, she wouldn’t haunt him in his dreams for doing the things he felt he had to do.

But as much as John would have been willing to beat Dean back from the line between civilian and hunter forever, it wasn’t something he could actually do. As much as he would have used Dean’s greatest fear against him without compunction until the end of time just to keep the boy safe-to keep him out of the game and on the sidelines, or in the stands, or out of the fucking ballpark altogether, if he could manage it, and fuck anybody, including Mary, who thought the less of him for it-he also knew they would eventually reach a point when he had no choice but to step off, had no choice but to let Dean grow into his own or risk crippling him forever.

Facing that reality was what gave him nightmares at night. The possibility that Dean wouldn’t survive the trial-by-fire he’d set for himself as a rite of passage into manhood was what terrorized him under cover of darkness: ate him alive, haunted him in ways that nothing but Mary’s murder had ever haunted him.

But as much as it scared him to let Dean step up to the kind of deadly challenge the boy was determined to take on to prove himself a man, John also understood it was just a matter of time now. It was in Dean’s nature to follow in his father’s footsteps, just as it had been in John’s nature before him. Sooner or later, the boy was going to start hunting. With or without his father’s blessing, with or without his father’s knowledge and/or participation, Dean was eventually going to catch the scent of something evil and try to put it down. His chances of surviving that first hunt-surviving those first few hunts-were much better if John was with him than if he waited for John to leave town before trying to go that road alone.

John knew that was the inevitable endgame here. He’d known it since the beginning; that eventually he’d be down to only one of two choices. Let Dean have his head in a situation where John could control things as much as they could possibly be controlled. OR. Try to wait Dean out and hope for the best.

He’d put his faith in hoping once. He’d put his faith in assuming that whatever was around the next bend in life was something he could manage with nothing more than the tools and skills he had on him at the time.

He wouldn’t ever make that mistake again.

"So you understand what I’m saying, then," John pressed grimly. Mercilessly.

"Yes, sir," Dean said again.

"And you think you’re ready for that? You think you’re ready to protect my back from things that will take me out if you fuck it up?"

"Yes, sir. I’m ready."

John studied Dean’s eyes, looking for doubt, looking for insecurity, looking for any advantage at all he could use to beat this boy back just one more time from a line he couldn’t bear to see either one of his sons cross.

"I won’t fuck it up," Dean added, standing up to and holding his own with John’s profanity this time. It was the secret language of Dean: using his father’s words to say something uniquely his own. "You can trust me, Dad. I’m not going to fuck it up, I promise."

John nodded tightly. He pushed away from the table again, leaned back in his chair to distance himself from the gaze of a four-year-old child staring at him from the face a fifteen-year-old badass. Almost sixteen, for Christ’s sake.

"Okay, then. You do the research up to my specs, and we’ll talk about you going on the hunt itself, too."

This offer was different than the others, and Dean knew it. His eyes lit up like the glitter of the Impala’s high shine in the summer sun.

"Yes, sir," he said, working to keep the enthusiasm in his voice from selling him down the river as some punk kid who was too eager to be trusted, some FNG who was too green to be treated like anything more than sniper bait until he’d put some mileage in on his tour and some death in under his fingernails.

John took another sip of coffee, looked away to spare himself the ache of watching his child bursting with pride at the prospect of putting his life on the line to save people he didn’t know from something they couldn’t even begin to imagine. Something he couldn’t even begin to imagine. Something John didn’t have to imagine.

The scalding heat of raw caffeine pooled in John’s mouth, and he held it there as long as he could take it, letting the pain of fresh coffee and inescapable truth punish him until he had no choice but to relent and swallow it down. The seemingly endless purgatory of eternal waiting was over. The game was on; the die was cast. The future was stretched out before them like a nightmare he couldn’t escape, a destiny he couldn’t avoid. Coffee tracked down his throat like acid. The burn of it was a bitter comfort, and he clung to it in the name of doing everything he could to stave off the memory of a fifteen-year-old kid losing his head in an effort to become the man he would never be.

The darkness of the living room seem a safe haven from Dean’s blinding enthusiasm, but it wasn’t. The flickering light from the TV screen danced across Sammy’s face, creating a continuous motion of shadows and deeper shadows, but it wasn’t enough to hide his expression, wasn’t enough to obscure the resentment that burned in eleven-year-old eyes like hot coffee hoarded to masochistic intent.

The moment their eyes met, Sammy looked away, returned to watching whatever it was he wasn’t watching. John looked away, too, taking another long, slow draw of scaldingly hot coffee in an effort to pretend it didn’t hurt.

*

Go to Part 2 ...