SPN FIC - How Bright We Shine
For those of you who wanted a little hope, a little sweetness, a little romance, for poor!woobie!Dean. This is from my little future-verse (see Wishing Only Wounds the Heart for more). Call it a brand-new subgenre: Wal-mart!fic.
Characters: Dean, OFC (Morgan Donahue), with a bit of Sam
Pairings: none (meaning, no sex)
Length: 2872 words
Rating: PG, for language
Spoilers: none
Disclaimer: Morgan's mine. But Kripke owns the whole planet, and therefore, all the money.
Another glance in her direction. “It’s okay. It’s… I never thought it was gonna be anything.”
But he did. Even though all she could see of him was the left side of his face, that much of him said he’d thought “it” was gonna be everything.
How Bright We Shine
By Carol Davis
Eighty-nine people walked past her before she heard the familiar voice of the Impala. Every one of them made her think that this was the worst possible place on the planet to attempt to talk to Dean: the parking lot of a Wal-mart in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Well, maybe not the worst place. Anyplace that had ever shown up on Dirty Jobs ranked a little lower.
But still.
Some of the eighty-nine were employees, dressed in their khakis and navy blue shirts. You had to admire the optimism behind that move: figuring a change from red shirts to navy blue would subliminally convince customers they were shopping in a classier place. Like dressing Dean in a suit and tie would make him a stockbroker.
Some of the eighty-nine came and went in groups: some couples, some moms with kids. A few of them were eating, and a stupid number of them were talking on cell phones.
No, Paul, I said they don’t have it.
And Gina? God, I told her I wasn’t gonna go, but… What? Oh my God, that bitch.
Fifteen minutes. Okay? Bye. I love you.
Okay. Bye. I love you.
Seconds later, she heard the car. There was no mistaking the sound: the loud, chugging, ain’t-got-no-stinking-muffler roar of it. From behind her sunglasses she scanned the parking lot until she found it. Sam was driving, a position that must have taken him some serious negotiating to accomplish; from what Sam had told her, in the fifteen years Dean had owned the car, he had only ceded driving privileges to someone else when he was completely and inarguably unable to sit upright and put pressure on the gas pedal. Today Sam had needed to be behind the wheel - that, or be able to bully Dean into parking in a spot that would guarantee they’d walk past her on their way into the store.
She didn’t get up from the bench; she waited for them to come to her.
Dean walked right on past and didn’t stop until Sam reached out, grabbed a handful of Dean’s jacket, and yanked him back.
“What the fuck, man?” Dean blurted.
That went over well with the mom in the yellow t-shirt pushing a cartful of kids past the Aqua Fina machine.
It took him a moment to notice Morgan. When he did, his mouth moved silently, like someone had muted his audio.
“I’ll be in the store,” Sam said.
He stuck his hands in his pockets and strode away before Dean could threaten to kick his ass. That left Dean on his own, squinting against the sun and working the muscles around his mouth. He looked like someone who’d been violently thrown out of a sound sleep.
“What’re you doing here?” he asked finally, still squinting.
“Excellent to see you too,” Morgan replied.
He looked around, at everything but her. The water machine. The rack of wilted and dying plants. The stack of plastic splasher pools leaning against the front wall of the store. The painted lines of the crosswalk.
“Were you going to call me back?” she asked quietly.
Air bled out of him and his shoulders slumped. She felt a pang of regret then, because it was unfair to blindside him like this, to show up in a place where she had no business being, expecting to continue a conversation he’d thought was finished.
Of course he’d thought it was finished. And if he could convince himself that walking away from her now wasn’t the shittiest thing he could possibly do, it would be finished. And no wonder: I need to talk to you about something had pushed all his buttons.
He sat down at the other end of the bench in a way that said he hadn’t slept much - if at all - the night before. “Are…” he began, and then his voice trailed off.
“This was kind of a crappy thing to do.”
Dean shot a glance at her, then resumed studying the toes of his boots.
“I was trying to get you to stop talking about the fish,” Morgan went on. “You weren’t even taking a breath.”
He tipped his head back, rested it against the wall behind the bench.
“Dean?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s something -“
“You pregnant?”
“What? No.”
That made him turn his head. He studied her carefully, head to toe, for a minute, frowning as if he was afraid she was lying. Or that he was afraid she wasn’t. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he went back to studying the sky. “So you… Okay. I get it. It’s…whatever.”
“You get what?”
Another glance in her direction. “It’s okay. It’s… I never thought it was gonna be anything.”
But he did. Even though all she could see of him was the left side of his face, that much of him said he’d thought “it” was gonna be everything.
“Dean,” she said. “It’s not that.”
“Not what?” He tried to keep his voice level and almost got there.
“I haven’t - there’s no one else.”
Fifteen hours ago, she had said to him, “We need to talk about something.” As soon as the words were out, she knew she’d made a mistake; there was barely more than a beat of silence before he said rapidly, “I gotta go. Sam and me - he’s in the car. Gotta go kick some harpy ass. I’ll call you tomorrow. Tell you how it went.” He hadn’t even finished the “went” when he hung up. Her attempts to call him back went straight to voicemail.
An hour later, Sam had called her back. Asked her what in the world Dean was so freaked about. Why Dean’s mood had gone from dipshit to sullen in twelve-point-six seconds. He’d accepted that it would be unfair to for her offer him an explanation without offering it first to Dean. So here they were. Outside of a Wal‑mart in Hershey, the air around them full of drifts of chocolate and hot asphalt and diesel fumes and donuts.
“What, then?” Dean demanded.
I’m not fucking with you, she wanted to say, but didn’t. “It’s…it’s about Lizzie.”
Oh, good. There was a worse choice of something to say than I need to talk to you about something. Hearing Lizzie’s name scared him. His mouth formed the word What? and stayed open a little. He didn’t want the answer. Didn’t want it at all.
“She’s all right,” Morgan told him.
“Would you stop this? Just say it. Christ, you make me crazier than Sam.”
“Good to know.”
“Morgan.”
She watched three teenagers walk past, one of them wrestling with the shrink-wrap on a CD. “They had Show and Tell in her class the other day.”
Before she could say anything else, Dean pushed himself to his feet. “You know what? I’m going.”
“Dean -“
“You drove all the way here from the freaking Adirondacks to tell me about Show and Tell.”
“Yeah,” she sniped. “I did.”
Muttering, he set off toward the entrance of the store. He was inside, stalking past a chubby, gray-haired woman who chirped, “Welcome to Wal-mart!” at him and got a surly look for her trouble, by the time Morgan caught up with him. Without saying anything Morgan seized his arm and steered him into the small space between shelves of folded jeans and a round rack of polo shirts.
“Go ahead,” she hissed. “Make a scene.”
“You’re a freaking lunatic, you know that? I thought your sister was the certified nut job in your family, but I think you both got the loony gene.”
“Well, then, hello, pot.”
“What?”
“If you’d listen.”
“I did listen. They had Show and Tell.”
“She brought her baseball caps.”
That took a little of the steam out of him. Lizzie’s baseball caps - six of them, in a variety of colors - were gifts from him. One each from six different major league teams, mailed to her from (or near) the team’s home city. Some of them had been packaged with Matchbox cars - some new, some bought at yard sales - and a couple had come separately. Each of them had been carefully nested in pink tissue paper, his one concession to the fact that Elizabeth Rae was a little girl.
“Yeah?” Dean muttered.
“Yeah.”
“Well… Okay.”
“Dean -“ She had to stop, take a deep breath. This wasn’t I’m pregnant or I found somebody else. It was bigger, because it was Lizzie. Morgan gnawed at her lower lip for a moment, then hauled in another breath and said, “When the teacher asked how she’d gotten them, she said her dad sent them.”
Again, Dean’s mouth formed the word What?
“I saw the mother of one of her classmates in the market. She congratulated me on - well, she took a look at my hand and didn’t find a ring, so she couldn’t say ‘married.’ She didn’t know what to say. Her daughter told her Lizzie’s mom got married and Lizzie had a new daddy. So there we were in the market and she’s all set to say, ‘Way to go, you actually married somebody this time,’ except…not.” To break away from the puzzlement in Dean’s eyes, she reached out to straighten one of the polo shirts on its hanger. “When I asked Liz about it, she said, isn’t a daddy somebody who loves you and loves your mommy? She told the other kids her dad travels a lot and he likes baseball but what he really loves is to go out by the boathouse and shoot hoops with her uncle Sam but uncle Sam always wins because he’s seven feet tall.”
Dean was silent for a long while. Then he managed, “We’re in the freaking Wal-mart, Morgan.”
“Do you love her, Dean?”
“What the hell kind of a question is that?”
“It’s a question that means I’m her mom and her dad died before she was born. She’s got a real uncle and grandparents and an aunt and an entire class full of friends, two cats and a dog, a stuffed fish and six baseball caps. Answer me: do you love her?”
“Do you want me not to?”
A woman with a purse half the size of the Impala pushed in close to them and began spinning the rack of shirts. Frustrated, Dean took Morgan by the arm and set off in search of a different spot to stand. The two of them ended up surrounded by candles, lamps and suitcases.
“How can you even ask me that?” he said quietly.
“She wants a dad, Dean.”
“That’s not my decision. I think it’s yours.”
“No. She doesn’t want Mommy to have a husband. At least not right now. She’s in the middle of Lizzie World. She wants a dad.”
“Because I sent her stuff in the mail?”
“Because you sit on her bed and read to her. Because you take her out in the boat.”
Her memory offered her a dozen snapshots, taken over a long stretch of time: Dean crouched beside Liz, his fingers painstakingly working loose a knot in the laces of her sneakers; tossing her over his shoulder as she giggled madly, then talking to her feet; gently cleaning a scraped knee and applying the appropriate Snoopy bandage; sitting beside her in front of the TV, patiently listening to her explain the plot of a Princess Barbie DVD.
“I’m not asking you for a commitment to me,” Morgan said. “I know what your life is. I can’t ask you to stay in one place like my dad has. You and Sam - your work is everywhere. But Lizzie needs a constant.”
“You can -“
“It’s been almost seven years since Ari died. I don’t know that I’ll find someone like him again. I don’t want to put Liz on hold till - if - that happens. Besides - she’s already made her decision. She wants you.”
Dean was looking a foot to her right, at packages of potpourri.
“If you can’t say yes to her, Dean, I think you should walk away.”
“She needs somebody who’s there all the time.”
“None of us is there all the time. She’s used to that.”
“You want me to say ‘till death do us part’ to a kid.”
“Yes. I do.”
He picked up one of the packages and fingered the brown ribbon that held it closed. It took him a long time to put it back on the shelf. “I did that the first time she put her arms around me,” he whispered. “I love her, Morg, you know that.”
“Then you want to be her dad?”
His gaze shifted again, to something down the aisle, behind her. She turned to find Sam standing near a stack of floor lamps, holding several packages of socks and underwear. With a nod - an admission of “okay, so you’re not done yet” - he walked off into the towel aisle.
“My life is…it’s all screwed up,” Dean said.
“I could take a poll. We’re in Wal-mart. There probably aren’t more than four people in here who aren’t screwed up somehow.”
“If we try Sears, it’ll be better?”
He grinned. It was so very Dean. “Try Lord & Taylor if you want,” she told him, and his expression shifted, said he didn’t know the name. “People talk about me in the market, Dean. They don’t know what the deal is with my family, but they know something’s bass-ackwards. The way we all come and go.”
“That’s what you get for sticking around.”
“I’m not asking you to be something different. I’m not asking you to move in. All I want is for Liz to be able to rely on you.”
Dean sighed softly. “That’s -“
“Exactly what you give to Sam. I need you to give that much to her. Or break it off.”
He didn’t answer. His gaze wandered back and forth. He folded his arms across his chest and slid the toe of one boot back and forth across the scuffed linoleum floor. After a couple of minutes of that, he told her, “Tell Sam I’ll be back in a while. Can you get something to eat in the snack bar? Or something. I’ll be back.”
Then he disappeared.
He came back an hour and ten minutes later to find Morgan and Sam sitting in the snack bar, each nursing a cup of soda. With an odd look on his face, Dean slid onto the seat next to Sam, across the table from Morgan, and produced a cellophane bag of Hershey’s Kisses.
“We got this harpy to chase,” he announced.
Sam huffed at him. “That can wait. We can make it to the Lodge by dinnertime, and you can -“
“Harpy, Sam. Possible dead people.” He made no allowance at all for the live people sitting at the tables nearby. Not that any of them paid him any attention.
“So that’s it?” Sam asked.
“Not your problem, Sam.” Dean pushed the bag of chocolates across the table to Morgan. “You like those, right?”
She raised a brow. “And I’m deeply moved by your romanticism.”
“We’re in the goddamn Wal-mart, Morgan.”
As if she were leaving a table at the most expensive restaurant on Park Avenue, Morgan got up, brushed crumbs off her jeans, and walked out of the snack bar. When Dean joined her near the bench she’d been sitting on when the Winchesters arrived, she turned to him and said, “Now we’re not in the goddamn Wal-mart.”
“And you left Sam with the candy. You know how long that’s gonna last?”
“My daughter has very questionable taste in men.”
“Your daughter’s taste in men rocks.”
“If I asked you never to set foot in New York State again, would you do it?”
“There’s several states you could ask me never to set foot in again and I’d do it.”
“If you hurt her, ever -“
Dean reached out and took her elbows in the palms of his hands, then tugged her toward him until they were toe to toe. “That’s not what you mean. Say what you mean.”
“That is what I mean.”
His voice dropped to a husky whisper. “I can’t promise.”
“I don’t want you to promise.”
“You said you did.”
“I want -“
He leaned forward the rest of the way and touched his lips to hers. “You make me crazier than Sam,” he murmured. “Can’t ever get you to shut up.”
“And you do?” Morgan said stubbornly.
“See?” He kissed her again, moving his hands to join at the small of her back. He let it linger for a while, smiling a little when someone passing behind him whistled. When he finally drew back enough to see her face, he said somberly, “Can’t promise.”
“I know.”
One more time he leaned in close, so that his lips were close to her ear. Softly, so that it was little more than a breath, he whispered, “Love you.”
Morgan pressed herself against him and held on.
“That why you came?” Dean murmured.
She nodded.
“Huh,” Dean mused, then, slowly, broke into a smile that she felt rather than saw. “Then you know what?”
“What?”
“Screw the fuckin’ harpy,” he said. “Damn thing can wait.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Wishing Only Wounds the Heart (which takes place 11 years later) is here.