SPN Fic: To Everything A Season (Pt 3/4, Gen/Het, R)
Title: To Everything A Season (Part 3)
Author:
dodger_winslow
Challenge: Firsts Chart: First Memory
Genre: Gen (some het, not graphic), FutureFic
Word Count: 34,000 (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.
To Everything A Season (Part 3 of 4)
Dean hunted for his father for three months. He covered most of the country and every contact his father had ever made. He spent the fourth month in Nebraska, helping a small farming community stranded in the big flat nothing of open prairie rid itself of a demon infestation that had boosted their crime rate from one murder in two hundred and seventeen years to twelve murders, seventeen beatings and five rapes in just six weeks.
He didn’t intend to get stuck there for so long, but when he passed through on the way to some other place his dad almost certainly wasn’t, he saw so many sets of frightened eyes watching him like he might be the next thing to hurt them he found himself asking questions he knew better than to ask. When he started hearing symptoms he recognized and realized just how far out of his depth their local pastor was, he just couldn’t justify leaving the poor guy with a bag of rock salt, a few relevant exorcisms texts and a copy of Devil Traps for Dummies.
Something in the way the man looked at him when he suggested there might be a demon infestation afoot - half way between the despair of lost faith and the terror of faith betrayed - reminded Dean of how much Pastor Jim must have had more important things to do than help a widower with two young sons find his feet again after having his whole world ripped apart by something so far beyond his capacity to figure it out alone that he had no chance unless someone made his need their priority, no matter what else they might have wanted or needed for themselves at the time. So despite his need to keep going, he stopped, made this man’s need his own, made this town’s problem his.
It only took a little over a week to purge the entire town and teach them how to protect themselves against re-infestation. By the time he left, Reverend Don was damned near a master at putting black smoke in spiritual FedExes to be returned to sender down under, and Dean felt a sense of satisfaction in the end result that had been missing from his life for quite a while. He was still smiling, feeling somewhat invincible and nodding in time to Metallica lamenting the woes of the Unforgiven, when a state trooper lit him up, and he pulled over, muttering something about no good deed going unpunished.
Though he passed the trooper a perfectly valid fake ID without making a single smart-ass comment about corn nutrition growing Nebraska troopers to a six-foot-six average, and he smiled his most inoffensive smile while trying to look the part of some poor schmuck who wasn’t speeding out of any lack of appreciation for the importance of law an order in today’s society, but rather merely because he just wasn’t paying quite enough attention to how hard his foot was pushing on the accelerator of this fine and powerful car, the trooper still asked him to step out of the vehicle, which Dean did, sighing at the inevitability of it turning out to be just one of those days.
He didn’t realize he was in trouble until the trooper had him by the collar of his jacket and was dragging him into a cornfield only half a dozen yards away, and by the time he actually saw the guy’s jet black eyes, he was already so fucked up there was no chance he was walking away from this one even with the good Lord and Roy LaGrange on his side. He’d lost track of where the blows were even coming from when they suddenly stopped, the smell of gunpowder hanging heavy in the still air as the local sheriff re-holstered his weapon after killing one of his own for the sake of a man he’d only met a week ago.
The demon jumped meatsuits on the serving of his eviction notice, but it was a testament to how well Dean had done his job that the sheriff knew what to do, so all Dean actually lost was any memory of the time between the state trooper’s eyes bleeding black and Reverend Don talking to him in the hospital, this voice quiet, gentle, caring as he told Dean everything was going to be okay, and that he didn’t need to worry, that he hadn’t hurt anyone, that the demon was gone and wouldn’t be turning anyone else’s eyes black … not in THIS century, at least.
He spent the next three weeks in the hospital, visited every day by at least one member of the community, bringing him flowers, bringing him magazines, bringing him the kind of home cooked food that could turn a boy fat and lazy if he hung around Nebraska too long without spending time in a hayfield, working off what the women of the state could put on without even breaking a sweat.
He called Sam a couple of times to lie to Garrison about the view in the Yukon, but never told them where he was, or that he’d just about bought the farm in a way that would have made a great joke if only he could have shared it without Sam flying across the country in a panic to tell him how fucking stupid it was to hunt this kind of shit without backup, even though he had no intention of serving as that backup, and even though he knew full well that if Dean hadn’t done exactly what got him pulled into a cornfield for doing, there would still be a whole town full of people living their own hometown version of hell in Nebraska … something neither he nor Dean would have let go on, even if they could, so Sam could just shut his yap about it and deal.
If Dean had ever told him that joke, which he knew better than to do, so he didn’t.
When he finally got back on the road again, he was nosing the mid-month mark of five months away from whatever home Sam and Garrison represented to him and feeling the need for a little payback, so he began toggling between the hunt for his dad and a return to hunting in general. Without either Sam or Dad to back him, it was twice as dangerous as it had been in the old days, but at least there was some satisfaction to be had in good people helped and bad things killed; and that was all that kept him going in the hunt for a man who was either dead or who really didn’t want to be found and knew exactly how to make that happen.
He’d been on the road for eight months straight when he began to question why it was he was still looking. It wasn’t something that happened all at once; it was more of a gradual fall off that happened over time. But the longer he looked, the less he remembered why; and there were times when he was hunting, or when he was so tired of hunting that he wasn’t sure he could face even one more bad-ass fugly mother fucker down to the end of him or it, that he forgot everything except the fact that this wasn’t what he wanted any more, and it hadn’t been for a very long time.
The first time he forgot to move on after a job was in Oklahoma. It was shtriga, and a mother who never knew how grateful she should be. He stayed in her world for two weeks after he made it a safer place for them, enjoying the simplicity of waking up with someone in his bed, of spending an afternoon wrestling with children on the lawn. He didn’t hunt at all during that time, and he only thought of his father once.
The next time he forgot was in Boulder, Colorado. There were a total of three women there over the span of twelve days. None of them had kids, and he didn’t remember any of their names for more time than it took to inoculate them against his charms and move on. But what seemed important in his mind was that there wasn’t any monster there at all. He just stopped because it looked like a nice place to stay when he was driving through.
And it was.
He’d all but given up on ever finding his dad when he forgot the job for the last time. He’d been back home for less than a week, restless and full of the kind of nervous energy that usually got him in trouble with the law.
He stopped for a drink at a bar less than two miles from Sam’s house, planning to fortify himself against the cold war ramifications of showing up uninvited to his own brother’s surprise birthday party - surprise, Meredith - with some cock and bull story about lucky happenstance when the truth of the matter was Sam asked him to come because Sam liked surprises about as much as their dad did - which was to say, not at all - but Meredith was throwing him a surprise birthday party anyway, knowing how he felt, and just simply not caring.
He was three drinks into the fortification process when he ran into somebody he liked. Because she asked - and because he was already a little bit drunk - he told her, in rather specific detail, just how much he was looking forward to spending the night with his pissed off baby brother and Sam’s fucking bitch of a wife. She suggested he spend the night with her instead.
When he woke up in the morning, he realized he didn’t want to leave. So he didn’t.
He spent more time with her than he’d ever spent with one woman before. He got used to the idea of waking up in a place he recognized, to a woman whose name he didn’t have to struggle to remember.
When he told her he’d take her out to dinner, he enjoyed not having to apologize later on the phone for standing her up, trying to explain - without actually telling her what he really did for a living or scaring her out of her complacent view of the way the world worked - how taking on a raicho alone was dangerous enough, but taking one on alone and drunk was suicide, which was why he didn’t show up, and why he hadn’t even bothered to call, because about the time they were supposed to be having cocktails and flirting their way into a good night’s sex, he was up to his ass in blood and bird shit, doing his damnedest to keep from getting beaked to death by some thunderbird-looking mother fucker who didn’t take kindly to his nest being put to fire by someone who then fell out of the fucking tree and broke his fucking leg, he was that fucking drunk, leaving Dean in the nest alone, to deal or not deal with whatever papa raicho decided to do about uninvited home invaders fucking up his digs.
Because truthfully? That’s a hard one to sell, even if she already knows about raichoes, and realizes his dad is exactly that irresponsible, which of course, she wouldn’t, unless he’d been stupid enough to actually tell her the truth about his life, and his dad, which he wasn’t that stupid, because he’d done that before, and it didn’t really work out the way he thought it would.
Either time.
So he enjoyed that - not having to apologize for every promise he made he couldn’t keep because it was a full time job trying to interfere with his drunk-ass dad’s intentions to suicide by monster on one kamikaze quest or another. And he enjoyed not having to disappear in the middle of the night to bond his dad out of the drunk tank for less supernatural reasons like he spit on a cop, or he pissed on a wall inside the bar rather than in the alley outside.
He enjoyed not making her wake up alone in her bed, thinking he’d skated on her to avoid the awkward morning-after thing. He enjoyed not having anyone call him in the middle of the night, saying get your ass out of bed and come pick me up. Or in the middle of dinner. Or in the middle of sex. Or in the middle of pretty much anything she wanted to do that he didn’t, which made it seem like he was punking out on her by saying he had to go bail his dad out of jail, or pick his dad up in a town three hundred miles away, or keep his dad from going after a singa with a fucking squirt gun full of holy water, because he was just that drunk, and just that fucking irresponsible.
And just that looking to get himself dead.
For all those reasons, and for a thousand others, Dean enjoyed spending time with her. He got used to spending time with her. And the more time he spent with her, the more time he wanted to spend with her. She became something he missed when he wasn’t with her. Someone he wanted when he bothered to give any thought to what he wanted. Someone he needed when he bothered to give any thought to what he needed.
Which he found himself doing more of: Bothering to think about what he wanted, bothering to think about what he needed.
So even though standing his brother up on his birthday so he could fuck some woman he only just met was a really shitty way to start a relationship, it seemed to work out pretty well, him waking up with her and knowing what her name was and actually not giving a shit that her cat was sleeping with its ass in his face because fuck if that woman he was watching didn’t look just ridiculously beautiful, lying there in not a damn thing but the skin God gave her (because He did sometimes toss a bone to them who spoke Latin to demons on His behalf, evidently). And him still hearing the ring of her laughter in his head from when he was putting moves on her in his half-assed drunk state that shouldn’t have been making her laugh as much as they should have made her moan; but she was laughing anyway, which made him start laughing, too, which might have been why he remembered her name when he woke up, because she laughed at him and with him and through him while they spent the night doing something that started out as fucking but turned into something else entirely by the time he actually had her moaning, and whispering his name, and telling him what she needed and how and why and fuck if it didn’t all turn out to be him.
Just him.
So when she opened up one eye because she could feel him watching her, he figured that was the time to give her a Winchester smile and maybe fuck her once more for good measure before he got dressed and showed up twelve hours late to Sammy’s party, which he did, the fucking her part at least, only to find it wasn’t fucking at all this time, and she wasn’t laughing, and neither was he because what was going on between them this time wasn’t funny in any way, shape or form; and when it was finished, and she was pressed against him with her perfect skin, trembling; and he was trying to remember how to breathe, holding on to her like he thought losing this moment might be the worst thing that could ever happen, ever, he realized then, at that moment, that he didn’t want to leave.
He didn’t want to leave.
He didn’t want to leave because what he was feeling right now, right at this moment, was something he hadn’t ever felt before, but something he’d always wanted to feel, like maybe this was home, and he shouldn’t leave because this is where he belonged.
Here.
With her.
Her and that fucking cat.
Which is why he stayed. And stayed. And stayed.
They’d been sleeping together for nearly two months before he ever even introduced her to Sam, and for another two before he let Sam talk him into showing her off to the family, which they couldn’t do, evidently, by just showing up and saying hi and leaving again; but which had to be some big formal dinner, like it was a holiday or something, with him and Sam in monkey suits, and Garrison looking damned near that uncomfortable in a junior monkey suit, but still wearing it without a single complaint, according to Sam at least, because he was just that excited to finally meet Uncle Dean’s girl.
Sam got a big kick out of her telling the story, over dinner, of how she and Dean met. Everything she said was a lie, but her lies were far more entertaining than the truth, and Meredith bought the whole intricate fabrication hook, line and sinker.
It was like selling Garrison on stories of the Yukon, only the girl version, which meant no blood, werewolves or superheroes with overgrown sideburns and self healing knuckles.
Sam grinned at Dean across the table. Because she’d answered his cell when Sam called in half a panic because Dean never showed up for his party, he knew everything she was saying was a lie, and he loved it. Loved that she would lie about it. Loved that she would lie about it knowing Sam would have to know she was lying about it.
Dean tried to ignore Sam grinning at him, but his brother could be really hard to ignore at times, so he just shrugged, a little embarrassed that he was embarrassed by how much it mattered to him that Sam really liked her this much. Not just kind of liked her, polite and assuming she’d be someone else next month; but stupid-grin liked her, understanding she wasn’t ever going to be anyone else, even though Dean hadn’t told him that, because he evidently didn’t need to tell him, it was that obvious to Sam she was different.
That he was different with her.
Sammy was still grinning, and Dean was still trying to pretend it didn’t matter while Meredith handed out ridiculously ornate desserts on ridiculously ornate plates when Garrison reached for his cake and knocked a glass of wine into her lap, turning an ivory silk blouse to a burgundy mess. She laughed at the horrified look on his face, and told him he’d done her a big favor because she thought dirty white was a really stupid color for a girl shirt anyway, didn’t he agree?
Her name was Mary; and Dean married her seven months later, Sam standing up as his best man, Garrison giving him the ring to put on her finger, Meredith actually smiling from a front pew in a chapel that didn’t combust even though Dean had to stand at the alter and swear to keep his cleaving to one woman from this day forth, letting no man put asunder, ’till death do they part.
And his dad, nowhere to be found.
*
John took his wedding ring off a year to the day after he met her. It took three hours and some serious lubrication, but it finally slipped free. He held it in the palm of one hand for several minutes, just looking at it, then put it in a drawer and pushed the drawer closed.
The first time he made a serious pass at her, she caught it, but they ended up sleeping in front of the TV because it had been so long since he’d tried to leverage a pass into scoring position he lost his nerve at the last minute, so they watched movies instead, as if that had been the plan all along. When he fumbled just short of the goal line, she called time out by telling him she’d picked up a couple DVDs at the new Blockbuster across the street from the hospital, just in case. In case what? he’d asked her. She just smiled and put the movie in.
It was Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum. That was when he knew he loved her.
It only took him a week to toss another pass her direction. She had good hands; and this time, he didn’t fumble either.
He called her Mary while they were making love. It embarrassed him, but it didn’t seem to bother her in any way she couldn’t compensate for by taking it out on him in teasing. The second time he made love to her, he called her Susan, and told her it was just to change things up a bit.
The way she laughed nearly did him in. That was when he knew she loved him, too.
*
Dean started his first real job the same day his nephew started third grade. He’d been in training to learn the rules for 20 weeks. He’d been in training to do the job for more than 30 years.
He wasn’t supposed to go inside the first time they responded to a three alarm fire. He did, and people lived because of it. They gave him a commendation, a medal, and a three-day suspension they marked as a reprimand in his permanent file. They told him to "watch it." He did his best to look like he took it very seriously.
He spent those three days at home with Mary, trying to imagine the reality of a life he’d never thought he could have. They talked about buying a house and having children, and he told her things about himself she didn’t know. She told him she knew a lot more about him than he would have ever guessed, which was something he’d already guessed, although he never told her as much, even though he knew she might have guessed.
They watched porn in the afternoon and tried a few things neither of them had ever tried before - which for Dean, took some doing - and then they talked about what would happen if he went inside a building some time when he wasn’t supposed to and never came out again. She smiled when he told her he’d try not to do that, but he couldn’t promise it wouldn’t happen; and she said she’d married the man he was, which included his inability to save himself at the cost of someone else as well as the fact that she knew there really wasn’t anything in their entire porn-a-thon that he hadn’t already tried at least once, even though he told her there were several.
When they let him come back to work, the way the Fire Chief chewed his ass out and told him it was the right way or the highway reminded him of his dad. It was the first time he’d thought of John in almost a year.
*
John was in the delivery room when his third child was born. Though it seemed vaguely familiar to him, he didn’t know why, just as he didn’t know why he wanted to name their daughter what it seemed so important to name her.
He was sitting at a table in the doctor’s lounge (which served double duty as Danny’s office), drinking coffee and trying not to disturb the cobwebs in his mind by digging amongst them in search of things no longer relevant to his life when Danny joined him, flipping a cigar his direction as he settled into a chair and grinned at John over his own coffee.
"That kind of shit will scar you for life, Johnny," he said congenially. "If anybody ever tries to tell you different, there’re either a pervert or a liar."
John smiled. He picked up the cigar, turned it between his fingertips several times, and finally shoved it between his teeth, unlit. "What? You didn’t see this coming two years back, the first time she told you she’d be willing to babysit me, free of charge?"
"Nope. Honestly didn’t. Figured you for a dead man back then. Didn’t think, in my wildest dreams, you’d be putting something in my sister I was going to have to take back out." He shook his head, chuckling. "I have got to get another full time doctor interested in living around these parts if the two of you are going to keep fucking to the end of having babies. It is simply not appropriate for a man to see that much of his sister. This keeps up, it’s going to make holiday dinners really awkward."
"Small towns," John said philosophically. "Gotta love em. So how’s she doing?"
"She’s doing great. I’ve never seen her so damn happy. I keep trying to tell her you are not her type, but she’s just too hard headed to listen. Must get that from dad."
"Yeah. That must be it."
Danny took another drink of coffee, watching John without looking like he was watching him. "So," he said finally.
"Yeah," John said. "I have no fucking idea, so don’t even ask."
"Ah, I have to ask, John. You know I’m the curious type."
John shook his head. He chewed on the end of the cigar, staring off into the distance while he tapped one thumb on the table near his coffee.
"I were a betting man, I’d say you’ve done it before," Danny said finally.
"Don’t say that to me," John returned quietly.
"Always been part of the risk. Julie knows that. She’s not the going-in-blind type."
John glanced at his brother-in-law, expression tensing as he asked, "You didn’t say anything to her …?"
"I’m talking to you, John, not her," Danny returned. "But I wouldn’t put a plug nickel on your chances that she didn’t see the same thing I did. Women aren’t like you and me. Little bit of pain makes them notice more, not less. Lot of pain makes ’em remember every damn thing they’ve seen since they hit grade school."
John nodded. He took the cigar out of his mouth and set it on the table, then took a long draw of coffee, staring at a wall rather than the man sitting across the table, watching him.
"Just flashes," he said after a long beat of silence. "Nothing I can put my finger on. Nothing concrete, nothing I can pin down."
"What’s it feel like?"
"Feels like the end of my world, Danny." He rubbed a hand across his mouth, shifting his gaze to the eyes of the best friend he'd ever known. "Feels like the end of the whole, fucking world."
Danny leaned forward, his elbows resting themselves on the table, his body resting his weight on those elbows as he closed the distance between them. "That isn’t what it is," he said. "Nothing you can tell me - nothing you can tell her - changes anything about your life unless you want it to."
"Nice sentiment; but it’s crap and you know it. You have no idea who I was before. You have no idea what I might have done."
"I don’t have to know who you were then. I know who you are now."
"Do you? Cause I sure as fuck don’t."
"Yeah, I do. You’re an ass who insists on calling me Doctor Danny despite the fact I’ve asked you a hundred times not to. You’re some brainiac who speaks Latin better than the Pope does - and more colorfully, too - and an ex-marine who’s got more scars on him than anybody I’ve ever seen who wasn’t being cut up in cadaver class. But you’re also the father of my sister’s kid, and someone I’ve told more shit to than I’ve told my damn wife. I know exactly who you are, John Bearman. And the fact that you rolled in here, ninety eight percent dead from both intention and circumstances, doesn’t change any of that."
"Maybe it should."
"And maybe you should kiss my ass."
John’s lips twitched to a small smile. "That would be wrong, wouldn’t it? Cheating on your sister so soon after she’s gone through eleven hours of labor to bring my kid into the world?"
"Damn straight it would be. And the feel of your scraggly-ass whiskers while you were puckering up would no doubt scar any damn part of me not already irrevocably fucked up by seeing as much of my big sister as I saw today. But if that’s what it takes to make you pull your head out of your ass and realize this isn’t all about you, John; and you’re not alone in this no matter how damned right it might feel to you to think you are, then hell, lay it on me, Big Fella. I’ll take a hit for the team. I’m just that kind of guy."
"Sara know that about you?" John asked drily.
"Quit trying to change the subject and tell me what I want to know. If you can’t put your finger on anything in specific, then tell me what it felt like. Tell me what you think it might have been."
"I think I had a son," John said. "And I think his name might have been Dean."
"Dean," Danny repeated.
"Yeah."
"That’s pretty specific for nothing concrete."
"That’s what I remember. Dean. That and …." His face twisted, and he couldn’t say what he intended to say out loud. Something detonated inside him. It threw him to his feet and pushed him out of the doctor’s lounge into the hospital proper. Striding down the long main corridor, he hit the front doors with the palm of his hands so hard it jarred him to the elbows when they swung open to let him pass.
He lost track of where he was and didn’t find himself again until he realized he was crouched by the side of his car, gasping air in huge gulps that tore through him like sobs, holding on to his head as if it was trying to come apart in his hands, eyes clenched so tightly closed that all he could see were explosions of color and light bursting across the black tapestry of his mind.
"Just breathe, John. It’s all right. Relax. Just breathe for me."
It was only when he heard Danny’s voice that he realized he wasn’t alone in this sudden horror of a world gone wrong. He grabbed for the sound in desperation and found an arm, a sleeve, clutching at them like a drowning man thrown a lifeline as he became aware of the pressure of Danny’s hands on his shoulder, hanging on to him, holding him steady on the edge of an abyss he couldn’t see, but he could feel.
"Danny," John gasped.
"I’m right here, John. Just breathe, okay? In and out. No big step, you’ve been doing it all your life. In and out. In and out."
"Oh, shit. Oh, shit."
"Just breathe, John. Try to relax."
It took what seemed like forever for the sense of utter and absolute dislocation of everything that existed to ease. He slid out of his crouch to fall to his ass on the parking tarmac, leaning his back against the car door, his knees pulling themselves up to his chest, almost touching his shoulders, his head dropping between them as his hands folded together across the back of his neck.
"Oh, shit," he breathed, staring at asphalt, listening to the thunder of his own pulse in the claustrophobic confines of his skull. "Oh, shit, Danny. Oh, shit."
It took another eternity and a half for him to find a sense of equilibrium that allowed him to realize Danny was sitting right beside him, leaning up against the car, too; one hand on John’s shoulder just to remind him he wasn’t alone. When his breathing finally slowed to a more normal cadence, he pulled his head up from between his knees and let it fall back against the car door, staring up into the blue expanse of sky above them, squinting his eyes against the painful bright of the sky.
He felt himself crying and had no idea why. Tears burned against his skin, tracking down his face, into his beard, into his ears, down his neck, soaking into his collar.
"How you doing there, John?" Danny asked after several minutes of silence.
"Ah, I’m doing great, Danny. How ’bout you?"
"Doing all right. Doing all right."
They sat there for several more minutes, side by side, saying nothing, just breathing. John wiped at his eyes, then stretched one leg out before him, settling it flat against the asphalt to relieve the cramp of pain knotting into his knee. "Fuck," he said finally. "Well that was fun."
"Yeah," Danny agreed. "A real barrel of laughs." He didn’t ask anything, waiting for John to bring it up.
"Fire," John said suddenly. "I remember Dean, and I remember fire."
"All right." Danny didn’t press for more, asking instead, "You want to go back inside?"
"No. Let’s stay here for a little bit. Just let me catch my breath, okay?"
"Long as you need," Danny agreed.
John nodded. He closed his eyes, tried to concentrate on regulating a hundred different body functions all screaming bloody murder at the same time. He started crying again, tears squeezing out from between his eyelids, running down his face. He didn’t make any sound, didn’t require any extra air to support the emotion, it was just as if he’d sprung a leak and didn’t have the caulk to patch it.
"He was begging me to save him," John said after almost ten minutes of utter silence. "Begging me not to let it kill him. But I think I did. I think I let it kill him."
"The fire?" Danny asked quietly.
John nodded.
"All right. Anything else?"
"No. Just the fire. Oh, sweet mother of God …" He pulled his arms back around his head, pulled his knee back to his chest, trying to fold himself into nothing, trying to hide from it as it hit him again, as it pulled him under.
"Try to step back from it, John," Danny was saying. "Try to let it go now, okay? Just step back. Turn away. Close your eyes. Whatever you’ve got to do to let it go."
"Dean," John whispered, his voice breaking.
"Let me have your arm, John."
He could feel Danny pulling on his wrist. He let him have it, barely feeling the pressure of the needle going in.
"What are you doing?" he asked dully.
"Just something to help calm you down. Alice, go get a chair. I want to get him back inside."
"Fuck that, Danny," John breathed. "I don’t need a wheelchair. Just let me get my bearings, will you?"
"Sure, John. No rush. Just relax. Take your time."
John could already feel the crushing pressure in his body beginning to ease. It became less of a task to breathe, to form a thought, or an intention. He opened his eyes and blinked the world back into focus around him. Two of Danny’s staffers were there along side them, watching him like they thought he might split to an open wound at any moment. He knew both of them by sight, and Danny’s gal Friday Alice wasn’t either of them … she must have gone to get the wheelchair despite his protest to the contrary.
"Is there anyone still inside with my wife?" he asked wryly.
The tension in Danny’s expression eased. He almost smiled, saying, "Ah, hell, you know Julie. She’s probably down in the nurse’s lounge paying ping pong or something."
Alice was coming at them across the parking lot, pushing a wheelchair in front of her. "I am not riding in that thing, Doctor Danny," John informed his brother-in-law as she rattled closer.
"You don’t have to ride in it if you can walk," Danny agreed.
"I can walk," John assured him. "Just give me a hand up, will you?"
Both hands stabilizing him at the elbow, Danny helped John struggle to his feet. He swayed there for a moment, almost losing his balance entirely before finding a stability that gave him the confidence to shrug Danny’s support away.
"I’m good. I’m good," he said, trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince anyone else.
"Do you think you can make it inside?" Danny asked.
"Hell, yeah. Which way is inside?"
They walked across the parking lot slowly, every step making John more secure in his balance, more confident in his perception of reality. By the time they reached the glass doors, he was moving well enough for Danny to dismiss the others with a wordless gesture that, loosely translated, meant go away now.
Danny walked with him to a couch near where they’d been sitting at the table. John sank into it gratefully, feeling the effects of the sedative in how heavy his limbs were, in how slowly the world tracked when he turned his head.
"What the hell did you give me?" John asked.
"Don’t worry, it’s the good stuff. How do you feel?"
"Like somebody pumped me full of slow-mo," John said.
"That’s good, John. That’s good. You’re probably going to go to sleep for a couple of hours. Just relax and enjoy the nap. Julie’s resting now anyway, so it’ll be a couple of hours before you can get in to see her anyway."
"I think I lost my son, Danny," John said. He lifted his eyes with an effort, searched out his brother-in-law’s face in the growing haze of the room around him. "I think I let the fire kill him."
"Try not to worry about that right now, okay? Just close your eyes and let it go."
"He was begging me," John whispered. "Begging me not to let it kill him."
"Close your eyes, John. Close your eyes and get a little sleep."
He closed his eyes, asking, "Is Mary all right?"
"Yeah, John. She’s fine. Just let it go for a while, okay? Try and get some sleep."
"Sleep," John muttered.
"There you go. I’ll wake you up in a couple of hours, okay?"
"Yeah. I wanna see Sammy," John said. His words were slurred, indistinct. "Sammy’s okay, right? The fire didn’t hurt him?"
"Samantha’s fine," Denny assured him. "You can see her when you wake up. Her and Julie both."
"Good. Okay. When I wake up."
He slipped away, falling into a quiet that rocked him to the gentle beat of a steady heart. He slept for almost six hours before Danny finally woke him with a hand to the forearm that snapped John’s eyes open like a hunter who only slept with half his brain shut down at any given time.
"Is Julie okay?" he asked before he was fully aware.
"Yeah. Julie’s fine. She’s in with the baby. I thought you might want to go see them now."
"Hell, yeah, I want to see them." He pushed to his feet, swayed a bit, then steadied. "Julie’s okay though, right? No complications? Nothing she’s not going to tell me because she doesn’t want me to worry?"
"Nothing more than the fact that she’s Julie, which you seem to be okay with or you probably wouldn’t have married her."
"Watch it there, Doctor Danny," John warned with a grin. "You’re walking awful close to the line there, talking about my wife that way."
"She was my sister before she was your wife," Danny pointed out.
"Yeah," John returned, "But she picked me."
"Like I said, nothing wrong with her except that she’s Julie."
Together, the two men walked down the hall to the maternity ward. In such a small hospital, there were only three rooms allocated to that end, and all three of them were full on this particular day.
"Try not to scare Sammy when you first see her," Danny said, reaching out to open the door to her room. "First impressions can be important."
John laid a hand on Danny’s arm, arresting the motion before it finished itself. "You didn’t tell her about … about before, right?"
"She just had a baby, John. She’s been sleeping since you left the delivery room."
"So you didn’t tell her then?"
"No. I didn’t tell her."
"And you’re not going to, right?"
Danny hesitated.
"My wife, Danny," John said quietly. "I’ll tell her when I’m ready."
"What are you going to tell her?"
"That I might have had a son once." His eyes clouded, darkened. "I don’t remember much … nothing specific really, but I think his name might have been Dean."
"That’s all you’re going to tell her?" Danny asked carefully.
"That’s all I really remember. But this isn’t the time. Right now, it’s about her, and about Sammy. They’re my life now. Whatever I had before … I don’t want it intruding on our time. Not today, okay? You on board for that?"
Danny nodded. "Yeah. Sure, John. I’m on board for that. This is about you and Julie and Sammy. That’s the way it should be."
John smiled at him. "Good. Thanks. I owe you one."
"Quit calling me Doctor Danny, and we’ll call it even," Danny said.
"Sure. Whatever you want, Doctor Danny. Now let’s go in and meet my kid, shall we? And try not to scare her with that ugly mug of yours, will you? First impressions can be important, and I don’t want Sammy’s first impression of the world to be that her uncle is the fugliest fella in three counties."
"Yeah, I’ll do my best there, Johnny."
"I hate it when you call me that," John said as Danny opened the door.
"Do you really?" Danny returned innocently.
"Yeah, I do. But don’t let it worry you too much; I think I may be getting used to it."
*