SPN FIC - If Only In My Dreams
You asked for it! So...have some angst. Christmas 1990.
Characters: John, Dean (age 11), Sam (age 8), OFC
Pairings: none
Rating: PG, for language
Spoilers: none
Length: 2853 words
Disclaimer: I don't own the sandbox. I have that tattooed on my forehead.
They stood as silent as a couple of JC Penney mannequins, still holding onto their duffels, Sam as if he didn’t want a stranger touching his stuff, Dean unsure whether putting the bag down was what he was expected to do. At Bobby’s, at Jim’s, he would have put it down. Would have been a lot less twitchy than this.
If Only In My Dreams
By Carol Davis
“Why are we here?” Sam asked. “Whose house is this?”
John glanced at his son in the rearview mirror as he shut off the throaty rumble of the Impala’s big engine. The silence that was left behind made him feel as if the three of them were sitting inside a snow globe.
“A friend,” he said.
“What friend?”
Dean nudged his brother hard enough to make him wince. “Quit with the questions, Sammy. What difference does it make whose house it is?”
“Are we staying here?” Sam demanded.
It was a small place, built before the turn of the century, back when people didn’t accumulate stuff: clothing, furniture, books, videotapes, knick-knacks. Back when a family of six or seven or eight could make do with a few hundred square feet of space. And no heat, John thought with a humorless smile. A fireplace, a big coal-burning stove, a heated brick tucked under the covers to warm the bed up before you crawled into it. Yup, those were the days.
Up until a few hours ago, the place had been haunted by the spirit of somebody who’d been alive when wintertime meant frost on the inside walls.
Haunted as all-freaking-get-out.
“Yes,” John said. “We’re staying here. Grab your bag.”
It wasn’t haunted any more.
Dean popped the lock on his door and shoved it open, fighting against the wind. He got Sam moving - had to, because Sam would have sat there half the night asking variations of the same three questions. The two of them hustled through the blowing snow between the driveway and the tiny porch, each toting a frayed duffel containing everything they’d need to see them through a couple of days. Once they hit the porch they waited for John, wanting him to take the lead, because this was nothing they were used to.
He didn’t have to ring the bell. He’d barely hit the bottom step when the door opened.
Her name was Nancy. Nancy Knight. And God, this was a bad idea. But it was the only option he had. The roads were a nightmare of snow and sleet and zero visibility, there wasn’t a motel within three or four miles, and even if he’d been able to guide the Impala like an eight-cylinder icebreaker through the storm to find one, he didn’t have the money to pay for a room. He thought the boys might have five or ten dollars between them, pretty much the same as what was lingering in his wallet, but that was nowhere near enough.
They’d spent the night in the car more times than he wanted to remember, but that’d been in warmer places than this.
And not on Christmas Eve.
Nancy ushered them into the house, making small comments about the cold, and closed the heavy door firmly behind them. She’d tidied up since this afternoon, John saw - gotten rid of the broken lamp, vacuumed the dirt from her scattered collection of African violets out of the pale carpet. She’d even fixed the Christmas tree, made it look festive again.
The spirit of Evan McEwan had been no big fan of Christmas trees.
“Do you guys like hot chocolate?” she asked the boys.
They stood as silent as a couple of JC Penney mannequins, still holding onto their duffels, Sam as if he didn’t want a stranger touching his stuff, Dean unsure whether putting the bag down was what he was expected to do. At Bobby’s, at Jim’s, he would have put it down. Would have been a lot less twitchy than this.
Hell, John himself would have been a lot less twitchy than this.
She’d given him a mug of coffee when he came back to the house to tell her Evan McEwan had been disposed of. It’d been one serious bitch of a job, opening up that grave - if it hadn’t been for the mild weather that’d lasted up until a few days ago, the ground would’ve been harder than poured concrete and he’d have had no chance of digging down to McEwan’s sort-of-final resting place. By the time he finished he was filthy and drenched with sweat.
He should have retrieved the boys then. Gone back to the movie theater where he’d left them with a few bucks and instructions to sneak in and out of the rest room so they could sit through a couple of showings of Home Alone without buying more than one ticket apiece. If he’d done that, they could have hit the road, beat the storm - although where they would have gone, he didn’t know. Bobby’s, maybe, if the gas held out long enough.
That would have been one spectacular Christmas, driving straight through to Bobby’s.
But it was out of the question now, because instead of pulling the boys out of the theater before the sun went down, he’d gone back to Nancy Knight’s to tell her she had no need to worry any more, that Evan McEwan wouldn’t be coming back to ruin her Christmas. She’d given him coffee and let him drape his button-up flannel over the kitchen radiator to dry it. He washed his face and hands, felt a little more human. Ate some of the coffee cake she sliced up and put on a plate decorated with little Christmas wreaths.
The kitchen was warm, cozy. Smelled good.
He sat at her table and ate coffee cake topped with pecans and made the mistake of telling her he had two boys to go to, that they’d need to be hitting the road soon.
“But the storm…” she said.
She put the TV on to prove to him that going anywhere after dark was six kinds of stupid. They were forecasting heavy ice, high winds, drifting snow. “You’ll end up in a ditch,” she said. “You really should stay in town.”
He said nothing about the money, but somehow she knew.
“Stay,” she said.
So here they were, the three of them, flushed with cold and carrying matching well-worn duffel bags of clothes and toothbrushes and odds and ends, the three vagrant Winchesters, trapped here by snow and circumstance. They stood in her narrow hallway, silent as statues, until she ushered them on in, told the boys they could put their things down, take their coats off, that they were welcome and she was glad to meet them.
Sam’s eyes went to the Christmas tree, thick and full, wound with strings of lights and glittering with glass balls and tinsel. Gifts were piled beneath it, a bounty of mysteries like something out of a children’s picture book.
That stuff hadn’t been there this afternoon. There’d been nothing under the tree then.
She gave them plates of stew for dinner. The boys ate slowly, mindful of their manners, Sam somewhat less so than Dean until Dean kicked him under the table. They spoke only when she spoke to them, and even then only a few words. After dinner she gave them cookies and permission to turn on the TV.
There was no guest room: what had originally been a second bedroom was now an office. He was welcome to use the couch, she told him, and she produced a mountain of pillows and blankets the boys could use to produce makeshift beds on the floor.
She seemed apologetic.
“This is…” John said, rubbing the back of his neck. “This is kind. Thank you.”
The boys were engrossed in a Twilight Zone marathon when she beckoned John into the kitchen. For coffee, she said, but that wasn’t the reason. She kept her back to him for more time than she needed to while she poured the coffee, fussing with the pot and the mugs, setting out sugar and milk she knew he wasn’t going to use.
“I don’t know how to say this,” she said when she finally turned around, holding one of the mugs like a barrier between them.
He raised a brow.
“The things under the tree… I work with… God, there’s no way to do this.” She shook her head and gnawed so hard at her lower lip he thought it might start to bleed. He didn’t want to see it do that; she’d been roughed up enough by Evan McEwan. “I work with at-risk kids,” she said rapidly. “The packages under the tree are toys and games. Boy stuff. I left the girl stuff upstairs. See… From what you said…I just got the idea that…Santa might not be showing up. Now, I know it’s none of my business. It’s truly none of my business, and you can write me off as a nosy, meddling bitch if you like and I wouldn’t blame you for it. I know what pride is. I gave up a lot of it trying to find somebody to help me. I thought I was losing my mind. There’s a ghost in my house? I thought I was completely bonkers.”
“No,” John said.
“What I mean is -“ She cut herself off. “What are you saying ‘no’ to?”
“That you’re bonkers.”
She huffed out a breath. “Maybe I am. I don’t know. If you want to tell your children that you bought those things, those toys…”
“They’ll know I didn’t buy them.”
“You’re not a good enough liar?”
“I’m a spectacular liar.”
“Do they know what you were doing all day? Why you weren’t with them?”
John reached out and took the other mug. “Dean does. Sam doesn’t know. He’s…just a little boy.”
“Tell him you were shopping. Tell him…tell him you hooked up with Santa.”
“I -“
Nancy gestured to silence him. “I think you saved my life. Please. I don’t know what to do that’s enough of a thank you.”
“You don’t need to do anything.”
He could hear the wind whistling up under the eaves. It was a mean bitch of a night, would get worse before it got better.
Had he been someone else, he would have let her thank him. Let the boys fall heavily asleep, then made his way soundlessly up the stairs to her room. It was what she was offering: with the dinner, the coffee, the couch, the Christmas gifts. That they would never see each other again after tomorrow didn’t matter. Wouldn’t matter, had he been someone else.
“I lost my wife,” he said quietly.
She’d seen the ring on his finger. She acknowledged it now with a nod. “I’m sorry.”
“We move around a lot. There’s really not room in the car for…all of that stuff under the tree. We’d end up having to leave it somewhere.”
He couldn’t let himself be insulted. Couldn’t work up a good head of anger because she was offering him charity. Offering to take care of his children in a way that he’d screwed up. Offering to be something he wasn’t. There was no point in being angry at her for that. It had been his choice, all of it: to leave Lawrence, to abandon the garage, their home, people who knew them and would have helped him get through this in some traditional way. It had been his choice to gather up his children and carry them down this path, to places where they’d have nothing, could dream of little.
He could build this into some life lesson for Dean and Sam, he supposed. Have them help her bring all those gifts to wherever she gave them out. Let them see that there were kids worse off than they were.
But God, that was a stretch.
His kids had no home, no mother, a duffel bag of belongings apiece. The backseat of an old car and miles of empty road.
“Dean likes cars,” he said in a rough rasp. “Model kits. Sammy likes puzzles.”
“That’s an Impala that you’ve got?”
He nodded, made himself take a slug of coffee.
“They have a hell of a trunk. My dad had one when I was a kid.”
“It’s not that. More of a question of -“
“Not tying yourself down?”
His legs were tired: the kind of creeping weariness that kept surprising him, making him wonder if he hadn’t lost track of time somehow and had become an old man without noticing. It was the cold, he thought. Unearthing what was left of Evan McEwan with the wind sweeping raw around him. The cold, the dampness, the isolation of what he was doing. Digging up the dead on Christmas Eve. It made him feel like something out of a story Dickens hadn’t dared to publish.
And it was all his own fault. Had he been someone else, they’d be in Lawrence now. There’d be gifts under a tree that he had chosen, had wrapped himself. Maybe with a little help, because for the life of him he couldn’t make paper lie flat, couldn’t tie a bow.
He was a man of questionable talents, he thought.
Nancy Knight reached out and rested a hand against his cheek.
She wasn’t a beautiful woman. Attractive enough, but not beautiful. If he had not left Lawrence behind, they would never have met.
If he had not left Lawrence, she might not be alive now.
“I’m going to bed,” she said, then turned and put her mug in the sink. “Let the boys watch TV as long as they like. And…whatever you decide about the gifts is fine. I don’t want to insult you, John. I just… I can’t not be grateful.”
She walked away from him then. He stood in the kitchen listening to the staircase creak as she went up to her room.
He put his mug in the sink beside hers, then walked into the living room and sat down on the couch. The boys both turned to look at him, waiting for him to say something. When after a couple of minutes John hadn’t said anything at all, Dean picked up the remote and turned off the TV, got up off the floor and sat on the couch close to his father. Sam, who was never much for being left behind, sat on John’s other side. His gaze flicked from John to the gifts under the tree.
“Lot of stuff, huh, kiddo?” John said.
“Whose is it?” Sam asked.
John smiled absently, tucked an arm around Sam and pulled him in close. “Need to figure that out in the morning.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
“How long are we staying here?” Dean asked.
“We’ll figure that out in the morning too. Time to get some sleep.”
They used the pillows and blankets to make a nest on the floor big enough for all three of them - the couch wasn’t quite long enough, anyway, and he would have spent the whole night with his knees drawn up. This way he’d be warmer. Not contorted.
He had the boys wash up a little and brush their teeth. They put on pajamas that were clean but had seen better days.
It took him a moment to realize, after he had switched off the lamp, that the Christmas tree lights were still on.
“It’s pretty,” Sam said softly.
So he left them on, and crawled into their cocoon of blankets on Nancy Knight’s living room floor.
“It’s ten after eight,” Dean commented.
With a soft huff of breath John groped for the remote and turned the TV back on. Huddled close together, they watched Ed Wynn make a pitch for the angels.
“Does that lady have kids?” Sam asked. “Is that who the presents are for?”
You could look pride in the face sometimes, face it down like a stranger, or an old friend. Swallow it like broken glass.
You could tell yourself you made the right choice, the only choice…and then refuse to accept that there was a battalion of problems following along in its wake like ducklings hustling after their mother.
You could refuse the kindness of strangers and end up the poorer for it.
Smiling in a way that had nothing at all to do with humor, John sat up and inched a little closer to the tree. None of the packages underneath it was labeled. They were a variety of shapes, all wrapped in bright foil paper, tied up with ribbons that were curled into bows. Mary had been able to fix things up like that. She had never seen the wrapping as a chore. She’d done it with music playing, her hair pulled back into a rubber band to keep it out of her face.
The TV played a commercial for Mercedes. Showed a couple in their pajamas grinning out the window at a new car with a big red bow on top.
You could drown yourself with What Ifs.
He had made the choice, the only one he could live with. But there were others trailing in its wake.
That wouldn’t change any time soon.
It might not change, ever.
With Sam watching him curiously from his burrow among the blankets, John took one of the packages into his lap.
“No, Sammy,” he said quietly. “That’s not who they’re for.”