SPN Fic: To Everything A Season (Pt 1/4)
Okay, y'all. Here's the story I've been promising that's gonna get me lynched in the long run. Because it is too long to post in one chunk, I'm going to post it in two, which means you SHOULDN'T want to lynch me after this first part ... hopefully. So put away your ropes and your pitchforks and your torches for the time being at least, and try to remember that I am a good person at heart, and you shouldn't want to hurt me just because I write something that makes you want to hurt me. Really, you shouldn't.
Cogitate on that while you're reading this and I'm awaiting response from my wonderful, wonderful, wonderful beta
phantomas on whether or not I can weasle out of the probability of a lynching to just a high possibility of a lynching by doing something she will probably tell me I can't do, which if she does, I will know is right, but I will haunt her for telling me after I'm dead and gone, haning from the nearby rafters with the villiagers putting my tootsie's to the flames for doing what I'm pretty sure she's going to tell me I should do. Cause I know the difference between wimping out and not wimping out, but I fear the rope and pitchforks, too; and sometimes you've got to look out for yourself, with the villiagers have you outnumbered, several hundred to one. :D
Special thanks to my wonderful beta
phantomas for all her sage advice and catching of authorial statements trying to masquarade as John thoughts. And for making me rethink the whole Dean sex thing, because, like, we can't have Dean sex in a story about John, now can we? (Ha! NOW who's gonna get lynched ... *g*)
Title: To Everything A Season
Author:
dodger_winslow
Challenge: Firsts Chart: First Memory
Genre: Gen (some het, not graphic), FutureFic
Word Count: 18,500 (total)
Pairings/Characters: John/OFC, Dean/OFC, Sam/OFC (hey, did I mention it was Future Fic?)
Rating: R (just to be safe)
Warnings: Language, sexual situations (not graphic)
Spoilers: Oh yeah. Everything S1
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.
Timeline Note: Set seven years after the events of Devil's Trap. John, Dean and Sam all survived the crash to hunt down and destroy the Demon. For Sam, life goes on. For Dean, life stalls. For John, life has no more meaning, and he begins to self destruct.
Summary: A little piece of good advice: Never hunt a wendigo when you're drunk.
Author's Note: Because I had to split the story in two to accomodate LJ's character limit on posts, the character mix of the piece overall is not reflected by this first part. Sam and Dean both figure MUCH more prominently in the second part, although certainly, you would have to consider John the primary focus of the piece overall. But don't despair that Sam and Dean won't appear ... their futures are just as important to me as John's. ;-)
To Everything a Season
A little piece of good advice: Never hunt a wendigo when you’re drunk.
*
He walked into the café because it had red checkered curtains. He had no idea why that mattered, but it seemed to. Maybe it was just because the color caught his eye. Or maybe it was that they reminded him of something. Whatever it was, that’s why he walked through the door: the red checkered curtains. It was cool inside, and a woman with a pretty smile told him to take a seat anywhere, which is why he stayed.
There were maybe twenty people in the place, all told; and every one of those twenty sets of eyes followed him from the front door to a booth near the kitchen in the back. Several kept watch over him even well after he’d settled to the slick red vinyl; a slow, cautious process that turned out, in the end, to be as much a controlled collapse as it was a settling in. Whether they were curious, suspicious, or simply leery of anyone they didn’t recognize from their own local gene pool, he couldn’t tell; but it was clear every one of them knew him for what he was: a stranger.
Small towns. Gotta love em.
An older man beckoned the smiling woman to join him behind the register near the front door. They consulted in whispers, the topic of discussion almost certainly him, a conclusion he came to by virtue of the consistency with which one or the other of them glanced across the café in his direction. They alternated watches, one glance every thirty seconds or so: First him, then her, then him, then her ….
Considering how he looked (like hell), he supposed their vaguely judgmental interest wasn’t so far out of line. Or maybe it was how he smelled (like smoke) that put them on the alert. Either way, still damned rude, by his yardstick of measure.
When she finally came over to his table, she didn’t even make a pretense of taking his order. He liked that. Seemed honest to him.
"Are you okay?" she asked instead.
He lost some time. How much, he wasn’t sure. One minute, she was standing there with a tentative smile, asking him if he was okay. The next minute, there were at least five people clustered around his table, and she was sitting beside him in the booth, her hands doing things to his belly that a good girl wouldn’t do without an engagement ring, first. Or at least a date. Or maybe a medical degree.
When she noticed him watching her, she smiled again. It wasn’t a real smile as much as a "welcome back to the world, don’t throw up on me, please" smile; but he liked it. Again, the honesty thing played to her favor.
She was still smiling when she tried to kill him, pressing three fingers into his side, low and deep and near his hipbone as she asked, rather stupidly in his opinion, "Does this hurt?"
He lost some more time. How much, he wasn’t sure.
When he found himself again, it was in realizing slowly, groggily, that her hands were part of the dull, throbbing ache that originated somewhere in the vicinity of his lower right gut and radiated out to every nerve in his entire fucking body. She was still talking to him. Or talking around him. Or talking about him. One of those three; he wasn’t sure which.
He blinked in an effort to define her, and she responded by swimming into a soft-edged clarity like a camera lens twisting into focus, the indistinct blur of her solidifying to a tangibility of bloody white blouse and anxious green eyes. The realization that he’d never closed his eyes between losing her and finding her again worried him a little. Worried him that there might not be any film in his camera any longer; that he was just a bodiless lens staring off into the distance, unblinking and unrecording and busted all to fuck, bleeding out in his gut.
She seemed to have some kind of sense about when she was being watched; she noticed the change in his focus almost before he’d finished making it. She’d been talking to some guy in a uniform - cop? paramedic? ice cream vendor? - as she squeezed out of the booth to make room for a replacement, but she stopped mid-sentence to address herself directly to him when she realized he’d come back from the land of lost time.
She asked him a question. He had absolutely no idea what it was. She asked him another. He didn’t get that one, either. She seemed very real to him in the way her eyes met his, in the way her gaze tried to reach into him and hold on, keep him from falling away again; but her words existed as little more than nonsensical jumbles of sound without meaning, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, confusing, and disturbing, and more than a little frightening in how her eyes told him she was speaking to him, but his ears had no idea what she could be saying.
It took several minutes for her to ask one he finally understood: "What’s your name?"
He understood that one. Why he understood it and not the others, he had no idea; but that’s the way it worked out. Unfortunately, his understanding of it was more theoretical than you-should-answer-me, at least in part because her voice was slurring to the consistency of viscous liquid as it wheeled lazy circles around his brain. Despite his inability to answer her, she must have seen something that looked like comprehension in his eyes because she asked it again, "What’s your name?" and then a third time, "Can you tell me your name?"
He blinked, but that was as much as he could manage.
She gave up and picked something else to ask. "Can you hear me? Can you understand what I’m saying?"
He knew the answer to both of those: Yes and no, respectively. He tried to tell her as much, but apparently, he didn’t say what he was thinking out loud, because she asked him again, "Can you hear me? Can you understand me?" She waited a moment, then went back to the first question he’d responded to as if it was something more meaningful than a random scramble of consonants and vowels, "What’s your name? Can you tell me your name?"
While she quizzed him like a third grader trying to fathom the intricacies of Mandarin Chinese, the guy in the uniform - he was a paramedic, definitely a paramedic … or a meter maid of some sort, it was really hard to fucking tell - explained to the group of men clustered around his table (at least eight of them, now … hell, that was half the café’s indigenous population, wasn’t it?) exactly what the plan was for removing him from the café booth and laying him out on the floor.
Flat on the floor was no big step for a high roller, but out of the booth was an assload easier said than done. About the time eight sets of hands started groping around on his body for places to dig in, he realized this was not something he wanted them to do, and although he wasn’t sure what he said, he must have said that one out loud, because every single one of those hands lifted off him at exactly the same moment. It was as if he’d suddenly gotten a little too hot to touch, or as if they thought leaving their hands on him for one second longer might result in pain and bloodshed and death.
Which, thinking about it, might not have been too far off what he actually said.
Out loud.
To them.
The woman who was still quizzing him about his name, and whether or not he could understand her, laughed. He had to appreciate her sense of the absurd, because he found it rather funny himself that all eight men - none of whom even had a nosebleed, let alone half a dozen gut wounds that were bleeding all over their shirts and pants and hands - took one synchronized step back from the threat of a man who couldn’t even keep himself focused long enough to answer a woman who wanted nothing more than to ask him his fucking name.
They stepped forward again because she told them to; but their hands, to a man, were more cautious in how they went about looking for a grip to the task of lifting him out of the narrow booth to settle him on the no-wax linoleum floor. Despite their new, somewhat self-serving attention to hand position and pressure, it still hurt like the bitch of all bitches when they lifted him off the blood-slick vinyl and into air that turned to ice against his skin.
Every place they touched was a detonation in the mind-numbing constancy of pain to which he had almost become accustomed. It was like being beaten with eight baseball bats, or burned with eight really, big-ass lighters, all held to his skin for no better reason than pure meanness. The sounds that tore through him were barely human, but they were in motion now, and determined to finish the task at hand.
They got him free of the booth, but when they tried to lay him down on the floor, he began choking on his own blood - coughing, retching, wheezing, drowning - so the paramedic-or-whatever redirected them in mid-descent to a new destination of a nearby wall, a vertical surface against which they carefully propped him, stabilized him, and left him to die.
By the time they stepped away, he would have given almost anything just to die, or to lose more time, just a little more time, he didn’t care how much.
But his body was past that now, and his mind was too busy shutting itself down to wander away and explore the nether reaches of the ether. The woman was asking him his name again, her tone terse with the effort of trying to sound soothing, harsh with the intensity of trying to reach him through the world of distance that had crawled into the six inches between them. Her hands were cool water on his skin instead of fire. She seemed to be trying to smooth the palsy of agony trembling through him back to a constancy he could endure, but his mind had already started to fail, going black in patches, his senses losing traction in what they perceived, his body shutting down in random misfires of inappropriate sensation and muscular spastication.
She held on to him with the desperation of her questions: "What is your name? Can you tell me you name? Do you remember your name? What is your name?"
"I think my name is John," he whispered. He had no idea where the answer came from, it just came. He heard it in the sound of someone’s voice calling him: John. John. Wake up, John. John.
It was a woman’s voice, but he didn’t recognize it. But then again, he didn’t recognize his own voice, either. When he spoke, it was like hearing a stranger talk out of his mouth.
John. Wake up, John. John. John.
"I think my name is John," he said again, just because, well, he could; and because it seemed like a moment of momentous occasion - a man’s first words, spoken in a stranger’s voice - that ought be marked somehow. A ceremonial gesture of sorts.
Considering the circumstances, mindless repetition was the best he could come up with.
"John," she said. And she smiled.
And he lost more time.
*
He woke up in a hospital.
He knew that’s where he was by the really clean way he smelled, and the really crappy way everything else smelled. The woman from the café was there with him, sitting in a chair beside his bed, wearing a pink blouse and reading a magazine.
It seemed odd he would remember her when he couldn’t remember himself.
It seemed even odder he would remember what she was wearing before: a white shirt, clean, soft, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, sexual in a casual way, casual in a sexual way. Someone you might actually know, or want to know.
She must have felt him watching her again, because she looked up, caught him red handed. Setting her magazine aside, she smiled. She did that a lot, it seemed. Smiling. It must be a good world where she lived. A better one than he remembered.
Or perhaps more accurately, a better one than the one he felt like he remembered, even though he didn’t really. At least, not in any detail. It was more of nebulous place in his head than an actual memory: dark and smoky and filled with things that go bump in the night before they eat your stupid, drunk ass.
Huh.
Funny he should remember being a drunk. Maybe that was important somehow … more important than who he really was.
Or maybe it was just somebody’s idea of a cute lotto game to play with the small, numbered balls inside his head. Shake the cage and see where they fall. Total crapshoot on which memories come up, and which ones don’t.
Memory 16: You once had a huge black dog who was uglier than sin and had glowing red eyes. Or you killed a dog like that. Or maybe you dreamed about a dog like that. Saw it in a movie or something. Anyway, huge black dog with glowing red eyes: You get to remember that.
But who you are? Nope, that one didn’t come up today, sorry. Thanks for playing though. Please try again tomorrow.
Fuck it. He wasn’t much for games in the first place, and the nebulous place in his head had a feel to it he wasn’t sure he wanted to remember. It seemed cold to him, if such a thing could seem cold. And lonely, perhaps. Grey in the way it existed as a mental no-man’s land, devoid of any marker by which to chart his way back; and equally grey in how constant it seemed, how much the same from one moment to the next, passing time becoming irrelevant, the whole of it becoming not so much a sum of the parts as the sum of one part, repeated in a continuous loop of sameness. Grey sameness.
This was the sense he had of the world he couldn’t remember. The life, or lack thereof, that he’d lost in the smoke and cold of a place within him so indistinct as to defy him to clarify it beyond the nothingness it was. What few glints of tangibility he could perceive disintegrating when he tried to focus on them. And the harder he tried, the less clear they became. The less tangible. The less corporeal.
He felt like a ghost inside his own body. Like whatever he had been no longer existed in any tangible form that could be touched, felt, remembered, retrieved.
When he reached back to find something he could touch, what he remembered was her. The soft white of her blouse against his skin as she dropped into the booth beside him when he started to list. The way her blouse turned red, soaking up his blood as he watched, fascinated, and she called for help, her voice sharp with concern for a man she didn’t know. The insistent pressure of her voice asking for his name, the gentleness of her hands as they tried to sooth and comfort without touching his wounds. The way she leaned in close, trying to bring him back to himself, trying to hold him there, to keep him there, to keep him alive, to keep him engaged, to keep him breathing.
These were the memories he could find when he looked for something tangible, something by which it orient himself to where he was now, and how he got here: her blouse, her skin, her voice, her compassion.
And red checkered curtains.
"John."
A woman’s voice on his name. He thought it was inside his head at first. A memory, maybe. Something more; something less. He tried to go to it, but found himself back with her, hearing her voice on his name, a voice he recognized by its compassion, a voice he remembered from her talking to him in the café, in the ambulance, in the ER, and finally in this room while he slipped in and out of awareness, eyes closed as his mind surfaced and sank, surfaced and sank, surfaced and sank.
"John" she said again, pulling him back from wherever it was he’d wandered inside his own head. He cast about to find her, his eyes grinding as they moved in their sockets, balls of fluid and pressure seated in sand. They burned like fire. He blinked, then blinked again. The cool of his eyelids soothed them, softening the agitation of the room’s harsh light.
"John."
He forced his eyes back open with an effort, struggling to keep them that way, working to find her in the glare of the room, then working to focus on her, to see her. She smiled again when he succeeded. Yeah, definitely a good girl from a good world.
"Hello, John." she said. "It’s good to see you awake."
"Am I awake?" he whispered.
She thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t. The room around them was so indistinct it seemed a dream. He couldn’t access most of his senses. They seemed deadened somehow, sleeping or comatose.
"Well, your eyes are open," she said. "That’s usually a good sign."
When she touched him, patting his hand in a comforting gesture, the feel of her fingertips against his skin sparked a memory, visceral and clear and so intense it almost knocked him back to the grey place from whence he’d just come. His senses all came online at once. The pain in every corner of his body woke up like a single sensation, rising through him, climbing his bones, ripping through organs and muscles like a hungry predator trying to take him out.
"Mary," he whispered as a monitor to his left , until now dutifully vigilant but otherwise unobtrusive, began to scream like Sammy with colic.
Whoever Sammy was. Whoever Mary was.
A swarm of people he didn’t know descended on him like locust to the spring crop. Poking and prodding and talking over one another in a jumbled chaos of words and sounds and sensations, they asked him questions he couldn’t answer, then punished his confusion by escalating the motion around him until he felt he was caught in an undertow, being dragged down into icy darkness, a place where he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear.
"I think my name is John," he muttered thickly, hoping it would appease them, hoping it would be enough to make them leave.
Someone slid a needle into his arm. He found that redundant, given how many other tubes were sticking out of his arms, his hands, his left foot, his groin …
The demerol hit him like a mac truck. Though he didn’t know exactly why, he felt an intimacy to that sensation that bespoke personal experience. He had a tangible sense of what followed the impact of a mac truck against the passenger side of a Chevy Impala: glass and sound and shatter and pain and pain and pain and then nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
The demerol was like a mac truck in that regard. It hit his system amid the glass and sound and shatter and pain of whatever Mary meant inside his head, and then there was nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
*
Dean watched the stars in silence, the hood of the Impala still warm beneath him but the glass of the windshield already taking on the chill of the cool, night air. She was wearing his jacket like she had so many times before, wrapped up in her own arms as if it wasn’t quite enough against the chill of the night when both of them knew what it wasn’t enough against was the memory of what they used to be.
"I appreciate you coming here with me," he said, sipping at his beer, trying to remember she wasn’t his. "I’m not sure why I called. I just … I don’t know. Selfish, I guess."
She was leaning against the driver’s side door, watching the same stars, seeing them in a very different light.
"You sounded upset."
"I do that some times. Works better than having that balanced tone to your voice like the world isn’t trying to gut you and leave you for dead." He took another sip of beer. "Did you tell him where you were going? That it was me you were meeting?"
"No."
Dean nodded. "Yeah. Didn’t figure you would."
"He wouldn’t understand," she said simply.
Dean grunted. "Selfish bastard."
She smiled, then asked him, because she knew he wouldn’t bring it up on his own, "Is it your father?"
Dean laughed. It was a bitter sound. It made him seem older than he was; harder than the tempered steel she knew him to be.
"Isn’t it always?"
"What’s he done now?"
Dean shrugged a little. "Took off again."
"And that’s bad, how?"
He smiled, appreciating how well she took the pain he brought to her doorstep for no other reason than that she still loved him enough to keep the porch light burning. He couldn’t go inside any more, wouldn’t go inside any more, but she would still meet him in the dark outside when he called, walking beyond the illuminated world of her life and back into the deep black of his, where he stood, far more often than she would ever know, watching her live a life he couldn’t give her.
He wouldn’t give her.
She’d crawled into the Impala like she wasn’t married. Let him drive her away like the man who trusted her back in their house didn’t matter.
He knew better than to believe as much, but that she offered it was more mercy than he deserved. She didn’t need what he had been to her any more. But he needed what she had been to him. A refuge from his life. A safe place to stand out of the wind, if only for a couple of hours, and whisper secrets to her that he couldn’t tell anyone else, that he wouldn’t tell anyone else.
She deserved more than him, and she had it. But still, she was here, shivering slightly in the night air, wearing his jacket and smelling like someone he could have loved if he were man enough to step away from the shadow in which he chose to live.
"Dean?" she prompted quietly.
"I think he may be dead."
Her eyes narrowed, considering it. "Why do you say that?"
"Just a feeling."
"Have you said anything to Sam?"
"Yeah. Told him his wife is a fucking bitch."
"Dean." The gentle reproach in her voice made him want to remind her he wasn’t one of her children. Made him want to kiss her, want to fuck her. He missed the feel of her body in his hands. Missed the sound of his name on her lips, moaned in that bone-deep whisper that hit him at the base of his spine, that drove him over the edge into the sweet abyss of her, blissful silence for even just a passing moment. Relief from who he was, from how he lived. A handful of seconds when he could exist within her, protected from knowing everything she needed that he couldn’t be.
That he’d chosen not to be.
He took another draw of beer. It was bitter against the sweet memory of her. Salt to protect him from hurting her again, as he’d hurt her so many times in the past before she finally gave up on him, before she finally let his father have him. "What? She is. You don’t think so?"
But she wouldn’t play his games. It was why he needed her: because she wouldn’t play his games, and she wouldn’t let him play them either. "How long has he been gone?" she asked gently.
The mother tone again. It made him close his eyes, made him pull inside where she couldn’t reach him, where she couldn’t remind him of everything he’d never have. "We had a fight. I thought he was just taking some time to cool down, but it’s more than that. I don’t think he’s coming back."
She didn’t say anything, but he knew what she was thinking.
And just like that, he was done. It was something he couldn’t control, something that destroyed them because he couldn’t control it, because he wouldn’t control it, when the way she answered him trespassed on sacred ground. "I should get you back," he said, finishing his beer in one swallow as he slid off the Impala’s hood to stand in front of her, smiling an apology for who he would always be. "Wouldn’t want the little man to worry."
"How long until you tell Sam?"
He shrugged. "A while. I’ll try and find him myself, first. If he’s drunk himself into a gutter somewhere, it’ll be easier if Sam never knows it."
"It isn’t fair, you always taking the weight of him, never giving any to Sam to bear."
Dean flashed her a grin. "Nothing about my life is fair, El. It never has been, and that’s the way I like it. I’ll drive you home, now. It’s getting late. Your kids need kissing, and your husband deserves better than to worry."
She nodded, turning away to hide tears she didn’t want him to see. He dropped her off at her car. She drove home, tucked her children in and made love to her husband, then listened as he snored beside her in the darkness.
The man she married was a good man. He was an honest man, a gentle man. He was the father of her children, and someone she loved for everything he was.
But it was everything he wasn’t that still filled her with bittersweet regret when she remembered cheap motel rooms and unexplained scars, the taste of beer on Dean’s lips and the whisper of his half-lies behind his teeth. The look in his eyes as he fucked her, urgent, needing her, wanting her to need him, sometimes with an intensity so sharp, so spontaneous, so consuming they couldn’t wait for the next motel, pulling over to the side of the road or down some side road he saw in the dark, fumbling, groping, the feel of his leather jacket rolled up behind her neck, the slick of the Impala’s leather back seat against the small of her back.
The pain of him, the pleasure of him. The fire of his body turning to ice if she said the wrong thing, the need of him turning to anger if she criticized the wrong man in his defense.
It was times like this, awake while her husband slept, that the texture of his hands on her body haunted her. Times the outrageous lies he told to explain the ripping, breaking, puncturing blasphemies committed to the otherwise near-perfection of his body made her ache just to hear them again, whispers in the dark, lies told to protect her from darker truths.
Times when the memory of him calling for his mother in his sleep still made her cry.
Even now, knowing it would mean no home to call her own, no future to count on beyond today, no friends who weren’t his brother, no children to make them whole and no chance of ever changing him from the scarred man he was to the gentle man he should have been, there were still so many times she missed him. Yearned for him. Prayed for him. Wept for him.
He’d loved her once; of that, she was absolutely certain. And sometimes, like tonight, when he called her back to him, the sound of his voice cracking over the phone line with the strain of trying so hard not ask her, ask her to come to him, to meet him, to be his refuge from the storm, to be his truth by telling her husband lies; when he let her see him need her; when he let her feel him want her; she thought maybe he still did.
Love her.
But as much as he might have loved her once, as much as he might love her still, the simple truth remained what it had always been: He loved his father more.
*
When John woke up again, she was still there. Or there again, more likely, unless she was in the habit of taking several changes of clothes wherever she went; which, given the screwed up way of thinking women had, wasn’t entirely out of the question, though less probable than unlikely, he supposed.
The shirt she wore today was neither pink nor white, but rather a light green with small swirls of some other color that probably went by the name of forest meadow or some such nonsense. More worthy of notice, in his mind at least, was the lacy, frilly shit that lay flat against her skin just below the hollow of her throat, the sweet spot that used to drive Mary crazy when he kissed her there.
That was his favorite place on a woman. The sweet spot. Well, okay, his second favorite place. Maybe his fourth favorite.
When glanced up from her book and caught him watching her this time, she laughed at him in a way that made him blush. "What?" he managed, his voice coarse enough to sand soft wood to a fine finish.
"You’re out for sixteen days, and the first thing you do when you wake up is stare there?"
It wasn’t what she said that made him smile, it was the way she said it. Incredulous, like it was the most unpredictable thing she’d ever seen. The smile felt unfamiliar on his face. It hurt, his lips cracked and dry and, he was almost certain, tragically out of shape for any activity that required more of them than the flexibility required to wrap around the neck of a bottle and suck himself down into oblivion.
"Hey," he rasped, speaking even though it hurt to do so. "Men are predictable. It’s you gals who have the market cornered on being inscrutable." It came out a little slurred, but more or less intelligible. Intelligible enough to make her laugh again at least.
"Inscrutable, huh? I don’t think I’ve ever been called that before."
"Not many outside a Charlie Chan movie have."
She laughed a third time, and that’s when he realized he had a skill. Making her laugh. It seemed like a good skill to have.
"So, John." She leaned forward in her chair, giving him a better view of her green frilly shit - a circumstance that felt anything but unintentional. "Is that the kind of movies you like? Mysteries? Comedies? A little bit of both?"
"I like your shirt," he said, letting his eyes stray just enough to put his point to a point. Talking was getting easier as he practiced, the words taking less effort to expel with every one he spoke.
"Thank you. But that wasn’t the question."
"Ah. Sorry. Got distracted. What was the question again?"
"What kind of movies do you like?"
"I have no idea," he said. And he didn’t.
"That’s okay." The way she excused his failure made him wonder if it actually was okay, or if she was up to something a couple of steps more nefarious than it seemed. "Danny said you might have a little bit of trouble remembering at first."
Danny. Danny. Who the fuck was Danny? The name meant nothing to him. He cast about in his head, trying to find it and failing while he watched her track his progress at the effort in a way he assumed she wouldn’t realize he noticed.
"And Danny would be?" he prompted finally.
"Oh. Sorry. Dr. Compton. I used to baby sit him when he was a kid, so I get to call him Danny if I want."
"My doctor’s name is Danny?"
"Well, Daniel James, if you look at the fancy certificates in his fru-fru office. But if you’ve ever cleaned green shit off his ass, then yeah, his name is Danny."
"Great. Good to know."
"Small town," she said, shrugging. "Gotta love em."
"So … what’s your name?"
"Oh. Sorry. Julie." She held out her hand like she was used to shaking hands in conjunction with introductions.
He liked that about her, too.
Moving his arms slightly to remind her of how many tubes were needled into his skin, he said, "I’d shake, but I’m a little tied up at the moment,"
"Oh, yeah. Forgot. I’ve gotten kind of used to seeing them there. Sixteen days, you know."
What she said registered this time, and it was his turn to be incredulous. "Sixteen days? I’ve been out for sixteen days?"
"You’re lucky you aren’t six feet under," she said. "I don’t know what you got yourself into, but whatever it was, it didn’t want you walking away from it. What’d you do? Surprise a bear with her cubs or something? Or a cougar, maybe?"
He looked at her blankly. "I have no idea."
"Danny said those," she lifted her chin slightly in the direction of his torso, "are claw marks, but they don’t look like anything he’s ever seen before. And given that we’re the closest civilized point - if you can call us that - to the heart of the Ochoco, he’s seen his fair share of claw marks over the years."
She went on for a awhile, talking about Danny, talking about the Ochoco - which he finally figured out, by virtue of context, must be the name of some nearby forest or wildlife preserve or national park or something - talking about the extent and nature of his injuries, commenting on his scars, a few of which were in places she really didn’t have any business looking until she knew him a lot better than she did.
It became clear though, after just a few minutes of listening to her riff, that she knew him far better than he knew himself. She knew he was a drinker, and not the kind that kept it to football games and major holidays. She knew he’d been shot more than once, that he’d been in some kind of major concussive accident in the past decade, and that he’d served in the Marine corps at some point, as a sniper, evidently … something she learned from a tattoo rather than tea leaves, as he suggested might be the case.
As she told him about himself, he realized she was watching him.
Not watching him like he found himself watching her, but more watching him like she was evaluating his responses to every word she said, like she was judging him competent or incompetent, like maybe she was Danny’s little spy on the wall, and whatever he said to her was going straight to Doctor Danny with his fancy certificates in his fru-fru office.
"So, you work for Danny?" he asked suddenly, interrupting her mid-sentence.
"Oh, hell no. Danny’s my little brother. Sorry. Probably should have said that up front, but I thought you’d surmised as much from the ‘wiping green shit off his ass’ comment, or you would have pursued it."
"Surmised that he was your brother just because you babysat him?"
"Something like that." She gave him a beat, then added, "If you were paying attention, of course."
"I was paying enough attention to surmise he wasn’t your husband," John said.
She lifted an eyebrow. "I’m not sure you should be surmising that. Maybe I rob cradles. We gals can be like that, inscrutable and prone to younger men. It is the twenty first century, after all." Her tone was coy, teasing. Its lack of artifice eased the sense of distrust that had begun pressuring the base of his spine.
"No ring," he said. "And no tan mark. We men notice things like that. Rings and frilly shit … both pretty high on the things to notice list."
"I’m flattered," she said.
"As I meant you to be. So we’re finished then?"
Her eyes narrowed marginally. "Finished?"
"With the testing. Or would you like me to count to ten backwards for you? Or maybe I could recite my ABCs? Tell you the names of the fifty states?"
A slyness sparked in her eyes that he actually liked much better than anything he’d yet seen of her, and he’d seen a fair amount about her that he liked. It wasn’t the caution of the challenge, or the guilt of the caught, or the defense of the conniving. Rather, it was just a general slyness. An "I knew you’d catch on soon or later, sure took you long enough" kind of slyness, and it went a long way to soothing the sense that he was being judged in a way he resented being judged.
"You could tell me who the President is," she allowed.
"I have no idea," he lied.
"Who won the World Series?"
"That was the forty-niners, wasn’t it?"
She smiled in spite of herself. "Then I guess we are done."
"Did I pass?"
"You did pretty well the first half. Not so much so the last half, but I’ll try not to hold that against you." He opened his mouth to comment, but she cut him off with, "Uh uh. Don’t even go there, John."
It was his turn to laugh this time. Like the smile, it felt unfamiliar, awkward, as if he was badly out of practice. But it also felt good. Very, very good.
"Sorry," he allowed disingenuously, not saying what he was going to say, which is exactly what she thought he was going to say. "Just trying to improve my score a bit."
"I’m sure you were."
"So you are a nurse then?"
"Nah. Just the cheap help. The hospital runs a little short on staff now and then, and Danny needed someone to keep an eye on you until you were lucid again. Since I’m nosey by nature and he knows it, we figured we’d kill two birds with one stone, which makes me your friendly local ICU Chief of Staff and Cognitive Disorders Diagnostics Specialist as well as your waitress."
He lifted an eyebrow, and she shrugged, saying, "Small towns."
"Gotta love ’em," he finished for her.
When she smiled at him this time, he realized he hadn’t really seen her smile until now. Not her smile. The other expressions were public communications: polite, amiable and genuine in their own disingenuous way. But this smile … this one was something else. It started in her eyes, and spread through her features like an infection. The way she looked at him was different now, and if he hadn’t been looking at her the same way, he might have blushed again, but he didn’t.
"Exactly," she said, and he found the smile had infected her tone as well.
*
Julie visited him every day after that, sitting with him for hours at a time, talking about everything and nothing, finding out what little he did remember, trying to help him excavate that which he didn’t.
She was there the first time he realized how badly he needed a drink. She was there the first time he noticed the wedding ring on his finger, and the first time he had a panic attack at the smell of smoke in his room, a smell that drove him to such an extreme response he split three separate stitchings open before she convinced him it was nothing more than Bryan Heyes burning leaves in his yard.
She was there when he took his first steps in more than two weeks and still there when, more than a month after he’d staggered into her father’s café looking for a place to die, he was walking laps around the place as if it was his own private health club.
He didn’t remember anything before the day they met, and didn’t remember much about that day except her. When she pushed him for specifics, he found he remembered her soft white blouse and thinking what a damned shame it was to ruin something so delicate and pure by bleeding out in her arms as if he deserved more than the fate of a guttered drunk put under in a pauper’s grave.
He remembered red, checkered curtains and the comforting familiarity of watching them glow warm in a flood of afternoon sunshine. The memory gave him a sense of home he couldn’t remember, but he could feel; a sense of belonging he knew he didn’t deserve, but he equally knew he’d once had.
And he remembered a hell of a lot of pain. Gutting, tearing pain. The kind of pain that can kill a man without any help from blood loss or infection. The kind of pain that made him wish it over and done with, and the kind he occasionally found impossible to believe he’d endured and it wasn’t. Over and done with, that is.
Beyond that, most of what he knew were things she told him. That he’d threatened half of the town’s chamber of commerce with evisceration if they touched him. That he’d almost died twice in a thirty block ambulance ride. That he’d held a conversation none of them could follow with someone he called Mary, and that he responded to Danny’s initial examination of his wounds with ferocious bursts of profanity in textbook perfect Latin, a language no one in town spoke and no one but Danny understood (Danny went to medical school).
That they found four knives strapped to his body or sewn into his clothes, and thirteen tattoos in a variety of locations: one USMC sniper corps insignia on his right biceps (Danny’s dad was a Navy man, but he recognized a corps tattoo when he saw one), seven different Tibetan sigils, each located in direct relation to one of his seven chakras (Danny believed alternative medicine offered advantages over pharmaceutical options for chronic pain relief), and five more symbols branded into his body rather than inked there, each relevant to a different ancient religious or pagan practice, three of them located on major pressure points that regulated blood flow, mental acuity and pain control (Danny had a DSL connection and way too much time on his hands).
Though John remembered nothing of any of these things, he did remember smelling like the inside of a whiskey bottle, or at least what the inside of a whiskey bottle would smell like if you were fool enough to drop a match in it while you were still inside, wallowing in the dregs of a two day drunk. They never did figure out where that smell of smoke came from; or what the origin of the viscous grey crap caked like ash into the weave of his pants was; or what species of animal left the kind of claw marks that made a patchwork quilt out of his side and belly … a quilt Danny stitched back together nice and neat, leaving him with a dozen more scars than he already had and without a gall bladder that he really didn’t need anyway, as far as he could tell.
Julie was right in saying he was lucky he didn’t end the day six feet under, but it was more than just whatever cut him to shreds out in the Ochoco that posed lethal enough threat to keep him in ICU for more than two weeks, and in the hospital for almost a month after that.
The first time John remembered talking to him, Doctor Danny - who looked as young as his nickname implied (a nickname he only let his sister use … something he told John the first, second and third time they spoke before he finally just gave up and let him use it), but who was actually respectably enough aged to have several years of experience in addition to the impressive collection of diplomas on his office wall - informed John in no uncertain terms that he’d been riding the fast train to hell for far longer than whatever drunk left him wandering, bleeding and reeking of smoke, on the street in front of their father’s café.
By the measure of half a dozen tests run without his permission while he was comatose, recovering from a completely unrelated mauling - small towns, gotta love ’em - he’d put some impressively serious strain on a number of his internal organs by trying to pickle them the hard way, in his own body fluids. When they found him - or perhaps, more accurately, when he found them - he and his liver weren’t on speaking terms any more, and his kidneys weren’t far behind. More than that, he had a pancreas bent on punishing him for every sin ever committed, and a gut that was almost as much of a bloody mess on the inside as it was on the outside.
They made good progress on most of those issues by letting him sweat out the DTs while he was either comatose or too whacked out on pain meds to care; but they could make more, or so Danny assured him, if he had some kind of family history to use as reference, or some old medical records to explain the worst of the more traumatic scarring that seemed to imply that whatever ripped him up a month ago, it wasn’t the first such thing he’d encountered.
Nor, for that matter, the most pissed off.
John cogitated on that for some time, and was still, to some degree, cogitating on it. Medical records. Family history. He would have liked to have had both for reasons more personal that handing them over to Doctor Danny; but unfortunately, he had neither. Or at least, he had neither one that he could recall. Or relate. Or reference.
Danny mentioned once that he had connections in the Portland police department who could run his prints through military records in search of a match, a name, an identity; but the mere mention of police put John to such a deep sense of agitation and dread that he demurred without explaining why, and Danny didn’t bring it up again.
Small towns; gotta love ’em.
In deference to fears John didn’t need to tell him for Danny to understand, they worked around his lack of records, his lack of family history. Danny ran more tests without his permission, then prescribed a boatload of medications to counter damage done. The wonders of modern pharmacology these days: apparently a guy could screw his body for years, then make it mostly better by popping a few pills an hour, every hour, for the rest of his fucking life.
In the long run though, small price to pay for large failures of character.
By the time John had recovered enough from the mauling to be released back into the general population, he was learning to live his life rather drown it in Jack and bourbon. Because he didn’t have a life or a home to go back to - or at least not one he could remember, or one he was willing to pursue down roads that required more than local contacts to navigate - Julie and Danny and half the fucking town took it on as their own personal cause to help him build one. Here. Amongst them like he’d been one of them forever, rather than some drunk who walked out of the Ochoco and into a local café, a blood-soaked stranger in a whiskey-soaked body, looking for a place to die.
After they’d made a cursory search of the surrounding area and discovered no one looking for a man of his general description, and after Danny made it seem as if all the official channels had been explored without any result of worth to consider, they made his new life official by christening him with a new name: John Bearman. It was Julie’s idea, and he liked it better than the second runner up, which was obscene and Danny’s suggestion - payback, he had to assume, for his steadfast refusal to call him by any other name than Doctor Danny, which was beginning to catch on around town, and was something Doctor Danny didn’t think was nearly as funny as the rest of them did.
Or at least, that’s the way Danny played it, all the while offering free medical advice, and writing off a fortune in hospital bills, and getting John a job as a cook in his dad’s café, and trying to set John up with his sister without actually looking like that’s what he was trying to do.
So that’s who John became. John Bearman. John Bearman: amnesiac, recovering drunk, possible absentee husband, fire phobic, profaner in dead languages and general all-round fucked up guy.
But he was also John Bearman: friend of Danny, pet project of Julie, favorite topic of conversation at chamber of commerce meetings, cook at the local café with red checkered curtains, survivor of grizzly, puma or sasquatch attack (depending on who you asked) and the new guy in town who couldn’t tell you what he was doing this time last year, but who’d be the first to step up and lend a hand if you needed help with something he knew how to do.
And they were always discovering new things he knew how to do … besides curse in Latin and describe evisceration protocols in disturbing detail.
All in all, John considered it a dramatically unfair trade the town was making, swapping their friendship and generosity and willingness to accept him as one of their own for nothing more than a dying drunk learning to live again, wearing the ring of a woman he couldn’t remember and the scars of battles he could have waged as easily against the greater good as in defense of it. But that was the deal they seemed to want to make, so he did everything he could to honor his side of the bargain as best he knew how, which included turning away from the periodic urge to drink himself grey after waking in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke and the sound of a baby crying, or to a whispering of evil in his head as a child begged for mercy in a voice he could never hear well enough to recognize but that still gutted him as it gasped in such pain, in such need, in such blind belief that he could do something he knew he couldn’t do.
As the days and weeks passed, John Bearman settled into a life constructed as if it had been his from the very beginning. And although he’d like to think otherwise, as any reasonable man would, it never quite escaped him that, even though he couldn’t remember who he was before now or how he got here in the state he was in, this second chance was probably a hell of a lot more than he really deserved.
*
Go To Part 2