SPN FIC - Hide and Seek
dodger_winslow throws down a hell of a gauntlet. Hope this is up to your standards, bud. Merry Christmas.
Characters: John, Dean (age 6), Sam (age 2), OMCs
Pairings: none
Spoilers: none
Rating: PG, for language
Length: 3373 words
Disclaimer: Kripke, as always, owns the whole sandbox. We just play.
Two years and fifty-two days after it killed Mary, it came calling.
Hide and Seek
By Carol Davis
Two years and fifty-two days after it killed Mary, it came calling.
To taunt him.
To let him know it wasn’t finished.
For three nights running he heard the whispers, just as he’d heard them in the beginning, back in Lawrence. Hissing his name. Or someone’s name.
It was the wind, he told himself. Whispering along loose shingles and rain gutters, through dead leaves and scattered scraps of paper. Only the wind, making bare tree limbs creak and shiver. Pressing against the walls and making the windowpanes rattle.
Only the wind.
He lay in bed, silent, listening, three nights running.
It made a sound: aaaaaaahhhh. His name, minus the consonants. Or simply an expression of satisfaction.
You son of a bitch! he wanted to scream. Show yourself!
Three nights running he slipped out of bed and paced, silent as a cat, feeling wrong, unprotected, in sweatpants and a t-shirt, his feet and arms and head bare. For moments that slid by slippery as oil he felt the need for boots, uniform, helmet, rifle. Barely breathing, he moved from room to room, muscles tense, nerves raw. It was there: he knew that as surely as he knew his children lay sleeping in the crib beside his bed.
Mary, help me, slithered through his mind. But which Mary he was praying to was a question.
If they could see him now - the people who’d known him, respected him, back in Lawrence - they’d have him locked solidly away in a padded room. He wondered, in the fleeting way that ideas come to the exhausted, whether that might be a good thing.
Two years and fifty-two days, daylight and darkness, empty hours beyond counting.
There seemed to be nothing left of his life, not really. Missouri and Caleb and the others had laid so much in front of him, called it fact, called it reality…but in the depth of night, when no one stood beside him to say You’ve found the right path, he found it easier to believe he’d gone insane.
Three times, gray light pushed away the hissing darkness of night and he stood looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. Hair pushed askew, unshaven, eyes at half-mast, t-shirt rumpled and sweat-stained, he looked like something even the babbling homeless who bumped into him on the sidewalk would reject. Three times, he stripped off rumpled clothing and climbed into the shower to let steaming water scour away some of what the night had done to him. He drank coffee, ate a little cereal and toast, brushed his teeth, tried to seem human. Tried to seem like Daddy.
They’d shoved him down this path - Missouri and Caleb and the others.
Toward…what?
The thing that had killed Mary? But what was that?
It was all real, they told him. The ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night. All real.
For three days running, nothing seemed real.
Not the snow, not the clanging of the Salvation Army bell over the familiar red kettle, not the splatter of tires running through slush. Not the colorful flyers that fell out of the Sunday paper: the paper he read now not to see what was happening around town, whether taxes would be going up, what movie might be worth spending a few dollars to see. Now he read to see who had died, and how. He pushed aside the comics section, let Dean take it to read hesitantly aloud to Sammy. He’d started to forget what the inside of a movie theater looked like.
He knew it was almost Christmas. The school had sent Dean home for the holidays with a picture he’d made of a Christmas tree: red and green craft paper with pieces of ribbon glued to it. And a cheerful note, a reminder that classes would start up again on January 2. That made for a few days of peace; Dean hated leaving Sam behind every morning, and would go to school only with the promise that John and Sammy would be waiting outside for him when the day’s final bell rang.
So his children would be here, together, for almost two weeks. He supposed that was a gift of sorts. But the apartment was undecorated. No tree, no colored lights. Dean had looked at him quizzically a number of times but had said nothing.
Mary would have had the place decorated the day after Thanksgiving.
Mary would…
And that was part of the problem.
He’d gotten by, three years running, without doing anything much about Thanksgiving. He bought takeout turkey and mashed potatoes for the three of them, and that seemed to make Dean happy…at least as much as Dean was ever happy. Christmas was another story. Mary had been in her glory at Christmas, and the memory of that, plus a lot of relentless advertising on TV and at school, turned the Yuletide into something Dean couldn’t ignore. For Sammy, he said: the decorations and gifts, along with more turkey and mashed potatoes, were for Sam.
Because Sammy still believed, he said.
In Santa Claus? In something.
They had nothing left over from last year: no tree, no lights, no ornaments. It would all have to be bought new.
And John would buy it, because if he had to hear Dean say one more time, “It’s okay, Daddy,” he would put a gun in his mouth.
Then you’d win, wouldn’t you, you son of a bitch?
He turned the sound off on the TV and listened; when Dean asked what he was doing, he said he thought there might be a leak somewhere. It was a waste of time: there were no whispers, no murmurs of anyone’s name. Never in the daylight. After a few minutes he surrendered and let the boys go back to enjoying their cartoons.
“Dad?” Dean said after a while. “There’s no stuff for lunch.”
Maybe there was nothing to hear. Ever.
“Dad?”
He turned to his son feeling like one of the walking dead. He felt…hollow, like one of Sam’s stuffed animals turned sentient. “Okay,” he said quietly.
“Do you want some juice?”
Dean couldn’t brew coffee, or produce a bottle of Jack. Juice was the best he could do. “That would be good,” John told him. When Dean carefully placed a blue plastic cup into his hands, he managed a smile that felt genuine and said, “Thank you, bud.”
“Sammy would like if you watch cartoons with us.”
“He would, would he?”
Sam caught the mention of his name and turned to John with a beaming, all-purpose grin. He was snuggled under a blanket at the end of the couch, a corner of the blanket clutched against his cheek. John was still drinking his juice when Sam snuffled loudly and wiped at his suddenly dribbling nose with the blanket.
Frowning, John crouched down alongside the couch and listened to Sam’s breathing. “You got a cold, bud?”
“Yeah,” Sam said agreeably, and sneezed, as if additional evidence had been called for.
“He could want soup for lunch,” Dean offered. “Mrs. Buxton says when you’re sick, you’re s’posed to eat chicken soup.”
“I’ve heard that,” John replied.
Securing chicken soup seemed on the same order of difficulty as getting hold of a handful of plutonium. For a moment, he had to wrestle his mind into remembering what chicken soup was. He had a vague memory of his mother standing beside the stove, stirring a potful of Campbell’s chicken noodle. Campbell’s, and baloney sandwiches. The lunch of champions.
He was tasting baloney as he sank down into the apartment’s single upholstered chair, one that had been pounded into being comfortable by God knew how many backsides before his. He dozed off before he’d been sitting there five minutes, listening to the goofy soundtrack of whatever oddball cartoon it was that his kids were watching.
They didn’t show the good stuff any more, he thought fleetingly. The Roadrunner, Taz, Daffy Duck.
He felt something being tucked around him but didn’t stir.
Baloney and cheese.
Daffy Duck.
A red felt cowboy hat trimmed in white, with a white cord that cinched together under his chin.
“Daddy?” Dean said softly.
His arms and legs felt like oversaturated clay. He forced his eyes open, blinked because they were dry and scratchy.
“I can go to the store if you want. I’m big now.”
Store?
“Time is it?” John murmured.
“Time to have lunch. Sammy’s very hungry.”
John squinted toward the couch. Sam seemed to be making do with a little thumb a la mode. Either way - and turning far enough to see the clock in the kitchen made John’s neck shriek in protest - it was almost two. Past time for lunch.
“Stay with your brother,” John said. “I’ll go.”
Disappointment slid across Dean’s face, but he nodded.
“Another time, bud,” John told him. “It’s cold out. I’ll be right back.”
The store was across the street and a few doors down, a little hole-in-the-wall place that said Carlson’s News and Groceries over the door. The prices were higher than they’d be at a supermarket, but they had a decent stock of the basics. John made a quick tour of the aisles, picking up milk and crackers, a loaf of bread and some peanut butter.
The soup section was a disappointment: no Campbell’s chicken noodle.
“Might have some in the back,” the clerk told him. “Hold on a sec.”
John piled his groceries on the counter, added a Batman comic book he spotted on the rack, and waited for the clerk to come back.
On his way back to the apartment, he stopped to look at something that seemed to be a long scratch on the driver’s door of the Impala and turned out to be road salt.
He was gone from the apartment maybe fifteen minutes. “Okay, who’s hungry?” he called out as he unlocked the door.
No one answered him.
“Boys?” he said.
The couch was empty, save for Sam’s blanket. The blanket Dean had wrapped around John as he napped lay on the floor alongside the chair.
“Dean?” John forced out. “Sammy?”
The TV was still on.
John flung his groceries onto the couch and scrambled from room to room. There wasn’t much ground to cover: the bedroom, the bathroom, one closet.
His children were gone.
They must have followed him to the store, he thought. Still calling their names, he ran back down the stairs and out onto the street, looked right, looked left. No one was in sight, no one at all. The clerk turned to look at him, startled, when John burst into the store. “Did my boys come in here?” John demanded. “Just now?”
The clerk shook his head. “No. Just Mrs. Dubrowski.” He nodded at the gray-haired woman near the dairy cooler. “If -“
John didn’t hear the rest. He crossed the street in three steps, bent to look into the car. It was as empty as it had been when he’d stopped to look at the scratch that wasn’t one.
No one responded to his pounding on the door of the first-floor front apartment. He tried the knob, found the door locked, remembered the elderly couple who lived there telling him that they were off to their son’s for the holidays.
The pounding alerted the tenant of the rear apartment: a man who drew caricatures out on the street on the weekends. “What’s wrong?” he asked, standing in the gap of his half-open door.
“My kids. Did they come down… Are they with you?”
“Sam and Dean? No. What’s -“
John didn’t hear the rest of that, either. He took the stairs two at a time, burst back into the apartment and repeated his search. This time he looked under the bed, behind the couch.
They were gone.
“Jesus, help me,” he moaned, not really aware of what he was saying.
Fifteen minutes. He’d been out of the apartment fifteen minutes. He’d locked the door behind him. No one could have come in without the boys’ cooperation in opening the door, and Dean knew better. John had drilled him a hundred times, taught him a password, told him never to admit anyone even if he thought he knew them. He was a smart kid: John tried to trip him up a few times, and he never fell for it.
He would never have opened the door.
And there was a salt line across the threshold. It was scattered now, but no matter.
Police, his mind said. Call the police.
But he’d called them for nothing, not one thing since the fire. The cops back in Lawrence were suspicious of him, had called him a “person of interest” for weeks after the fire, and for all he knew they still did. For all he knew he was on a watch list that would follow him wherever he went, and if he called in and said his kids were missing…
“DEAN!” he called out.
And something hissed.
Something whispered.
It had to be the TV. Had to be. With a shaking hand he grabbed the remote and shut the thing off.
…aaaaaaahhhhh…
“John?” It was the guy from downstairs, the caricaturist, standing in the open doorway. “What’s going on?”
He wanted to say nothing. Wanted to handle this himself. Didn’t want to see sympathy on anyone’s face.
Didn’t want to see suspicion there.
“Did you hear something?” John asked him.
“What kind of something?”
…aaaahhhh…
“That,” John said.
The caricaturist tilted his head and listened, then quirked a grin. “That? It’s the wind. Did you look down in the basement?”
“No.”
Bert, he thought. The guy’s name was Bert.
That noise wasn’t the wind.
Maybe it is, and I just…
Two years. Two years and fifty-two days of reading old books. Talking to people he would have shunned if Mary had not been taken from him. Searching old newspapers, microfiche, walking through graveyards looking at headstones.
I don’t know what’s real any more.
“I’ve lost my kids,” he said, and the anguish in his voice made Bert wince.
Bert seemed to know he didn’t want the cops - not that they’d do much of anything anyway, for kids who’d only been gone a few minutes. He was an odd bird, skinny and pale, with patchy red hair that stuck out from his head in every possible direction. A couple of weeks after the Winchesters moved in, he’d done a drawing of Sam and Dean that John still had lying on top of his dresser.
“They can’t be far,” he said.
John rested a hand against the wall to steady himself and looked around. At the blankets, at the blue plastic cup Dean had given him, at the breakfast dishes, all carefully washed, lying to dry on a dishtowel laid out on the countertop.
His six-year-old had washed the dishes.
His six-year-old who was gone.
“Sit down, John,” Bert said. “Sit down, and take a breath. I’ll look. They’re not far. They’re kids. Playing a game with you, probably.”
He stood there, smiling kindly, until John sat on the beat-up chair. Then he carefully, methodically, looked in all the places John had checked: the bedroom, the bathroom, the closet. Under the bed. Then he checked the cupboard beneath the sink, the only one large enough to accommodate a child. Sammy had crawled in there once. His giggle had given him away.
Mary, John thought desperately.
He heard Bert knock on the door of the back apartment, heard him exchange a few words with the couple who lived there.
Heard him go down the stairs.
The wind. It’s the wind.
It’s got my kids.
Bert came back up, stood in the doorway, beckoned to him. If he noticed the mess of salt on the threshold, he made no sign. When John frowned Bert beckoned again.
He followed Bert down the stairs and down the hallway leading to Bert’s apartment. There, in the nook between Bert’s door and the door leading to the basement, was a small trap door leading to the empty space under the stairs to the second floor.
Bert glanced at it, then raised a brow at John.
Something in John’s head said Yes.
John crouched in front of the trap door and tested it with a palm resting flat against its scuffed surface. It didn’t give, even with some pressure. The two hook-and-eye fasteners that normally held it in place were undone, but it wouldn’t give.
“Dean?” he said quietly. “Dean, it’s Dad.”
Please.
He glanced over his shoulder at Bert, who was giving him a little space, standing in the open doorway of his own apartment.
They were playing a game. Playing a game, but Dean knew better than to open a door without knowing who was on the other side.
John dropped his voice, and sang softly at the trapdoor, “Take me toooo…funkytowwwnnnn…”
Nothing happened for a moment.
Game. Playing a game. Busting my chops for…
Something shifted on the other side of the trapdoor.
“It’s okay, bud,” John said. “It’s me.”
He almost bit off his lower lip when the trap slid open. The ceiling light in front of Bert’s doorway was enough to let him see his children in the space underneath the stairs. He would have crawled in there with them, had there been room; as it was, he had to wait for them to crawl out and into his arms. He clung to them then, tightly enough that Sammy squeaked in dismay.
“Told you,” Bert said with a note of amusement. “Hide-and-go-seek.”
“Yeah,” John said. “I guess.”
“You okay, then?”
John nodded and started to move to his feet. Smiling, Bert returned the nod and went back inside his apartment. After the door was closed, John turned Dean to face him.
The look on Dean’s face made his breath catch in his throat.
“You told me, Daddy,” Dean said.
“I - I told you what, bud?”
“To hide.”
“I did?”
Dean nodded solemnly. “There wasn’t noplace good in the apartment. So I made Sammy come down here.”
“What for, Dean?”
“The man.”
He couldn’t voice the word, had to settle for mouthing it. Man?
“Sammy heard him. He was outside. He wanted to come in. You said not to ever let strangers in.” Dean’s chin quivered once, and he stilled it resolutely. “You said not to let nobody in, but he was by the window. Sammy heard him.”
John looked down at Sam, whose round face was smudged with dust and cobwebs. Sam beamed up at him and sneezed.
“Let’s go upstairs,” John said.
“What about the man?”
“He’s gone.”
Dean questioned that only for a moment, then got himself up off the floor. He waited until John had gotten up, gathering Sam up with him in the process, then led the way upstairs, his small hand trailing along the wall as he climbed. When they were safely back inside the apartment and Sam was settled back on the couch with his blanket, John re-laid the salt line. He stood up to find Dean lining up the discarded groceries on the kitchen counter.
“Will he come back?” Dean asked somberly.
John closed his eyes for a moment and listened, trying to still his own breathing, make himself calm, watchful, patient. Heard nothing but the wind pressing against the windowpanes and water running through the pipes.
Heard nothing, because right now there was nothing to hear. But there would be.
Two years and fifty-two days ago, the son of a bitch had taken Mary.
And it had come back.
It had let him wander around in a grief-stricken fog: poring through old books, talking to psychics, crawling farther and farther away from the life he had known. Let him ignore who he was in favor of his bereavement for two years and fifty-two days. For all that time, the fucker had known something John had forgotten. Had seen something in him he had let go of. The soldier. The hunter. The man.
After two years and fifty-two days, it had come back. And it had issued him a challenge.
“Not if I can help it,” John told his son.