SPN Fic: Family 1/1 (R)
Apr. 18th, 2007 05:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gilascaveTitle: Family
Author: James
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Word Count: ~2700
Spoilers: up through Shadows, Season One
Disclaimer: not mine, no profit made
Summary: John knows what his sons do.
The first time was the summer Sam was fifteen. They were living in a mobile home park on the edge of Fairfield. John let the boys share the tiny bedroom in the back while he took the fold-out couch; he was gone half the time anyhow, so it didn't really matter to him where he slept.
But the trailer park was mostly old people and folks with little kids. The oldest besides his two boys was twelve, and John knew he'd done some stupid things in his life but raising his boys that wrong surely wasn't among them.
It didn't really matter all that much. Hell, they were just boys, stuck there together, sharing a room not much bigger than a closet.
John didn't know exactly what they did and didn't want to, but he wasn't blind and he remembered being fifteen. He really didn't care if Sam and Dean fooled around a little. They both knew enough to try to keep it a secret, and he never let on that he knew.
Hell, he'd jerked off once in the same room as his cousin, with Ricky in his own bed doing the same. Most boys did something like it growing up.
He also knew they kept on the whole time they lived in that trailer park, and maybe it was a little bit of why he finally pulled up stakes and headed back out on the road. The next place they stopped was a tiny town in Illinois, small enough to spot strangers ten seconds after they reached the county line.
It didn't take long for Dean to hook up with a pretty girl with long brown hair and a chest that John felt old and dirty for even thinking about. The fact she was the first one who so much as smiled at Dean, exactly ten minutes after they'd arrived, gave John a private chuckle. Sam took a little longer, but a few weeks later he saw Sam going around with a studious looking black-haired girl and John tried not to be an asshole about interrupting the 'study sessions.'
He did make sure there were condoms in the bathroom, because god knew he wasn't going to ask for trouble. He remembered being fifteen, and nineteen, and being incredibly stupid about girls.
~~~
He wasn't quite sure if his boys ever did anything again until Sam was seventeen.
While in Illinois, Dean dated about a dozen girls, as far as John could count, and Sam had a regular girl for nearly the entire time they were there. Not the first, study-partner girl, but another one. Nothing serious, John knew, because Sam hadn't really argued with him about moving on. He knew the reason for that -- the small town's high school was small, underfunded, and the teachers more or less all together knew about half of what Sam had already learned on his own. The constant bitching about the state of the library clinched it, and when John told them to pack, Sam did so without more than a token argument.
The next school was more Sam's speed. He took to his classes like a starving man, and for months there wasn't even a girl at all. John watched as Dean tried his best to hook his brother up, younger sisters of every girl he could find to bring home. There was even one girl of Dean's who brought her little brother, and Sam had slammed the door in Dean's face and they didn't talk for a week.
One night not long after, John got home just after midnight from a supply run across state lines that he'd expected to take until morning. He'd walked in, silently from habit, and heard unmistakable sounds from his oldest's boy's room. He'd debated knocking on the door and giving them both heart-attacks, playing the stern father -- but hell, Dean was twenty-one and John really didn't care if he'd brought a girl home.
He was halfway down the hallway when he heard his youngest's boy's voice. Coming from Dean's room, and saying Dean's name.
He'd stood in the hallway for uncounted long minutes, thinking... thinking a lot of things. Dean had brought a girl home and they were sharing. Dean had brought a couple girls home and....
But the only sound he heard were his two boys, so he crept down the hallway to the kitchen and sat down at the table.
A hour before sunrise the only conclusion he'd been able to reach that was maybe Sam liked boys and didn't know the first thing about getting one. He knew Dean had taught Sam how to kiss -- practising on pillows and the backs of their hands and on one very memorable occasion with John walking in on them, on each other. John remembered standing there, raising one eyebrow and waiting for either of them to say a word. Sam had been thirteen, looking like he wanted to die and sink into the floorboards while Dean had tried to look cocky and blase at the same time.
It was possible -- likely, even, that Sam might ask his brother about sex, about sex with other boys specifically. John wouldn't have expected any explanations to go this far, but... they were both still boys, still young enough for hormones to overpower any higher brain function. That on top of what he knew they'd done back at the trailer park, and...well, maybe it made sense. Maybe it was excusable. Maybe--
He told himself he wouldn't think about it, act like he didn't know a damn thing, and he'd keep an eye on them for awhile... just in case.
The boys were awkward around him after that -- but they were awkward around each other, too. John never said a word, and soon enough he hauled them both on a hunt and in the middle of a firefight with a ghost from the Civil War his boys stopped acting like they couldn't deal with breathing the same air and started acting like the same boys he'd raised to hunt. He'd glanced over at one point, seen them standing back to back, searching the room for the next sign of attack.
For a second John had simply stared, and thought about the warm, heavy weight of a partner beside him. Decades -- a lifetime ago, Freddy Miller and a war with only people to fight, and the solid reassurance of knowing your back was covered.
He'd nodded to himself, grateful to see he'd given that to his boys. It would make them stronger, better hunters. More likely to survive. Then the ghost had attacked again and through the shooting and the screaming and the flying pitchforks, he'd lost track of everything else but the hunt.
~~~
He knew they didn't do anything after that, and he'd kept as close an eye on them as he could without letting them know he was looking. He worried a little when Dean didn't seem to have a girlfriend after that night, but John might have been keeping him a little busy -- taking Dean with him on every hunt he could find, glad to leave Sam home when his youngest asked, pretending it was all about not interrupting Sam's schoolwork.
Maybe he was all too happy to keep his boys away from each other -- give them some space, some time to let things get back to normal. Then school had ended and Sam had dropped his fucking bombshell and John hadn't stopped shouting until Sam was gone.
He knew Dean drove Sam to the bus station, knew it at the time even, knew exactly where the thousand dollars from the emergency stash went. Three days after Sam left, John had been able to admit that it wasn't the worst mistake he'd ever made; but it came damn near close.
He'd taken himself and Dean to Jim's for awhile, distracting himself with research and studying up on esoteric rituals and telling himself that Sam would change his mind once he saw how hard it could be, being alone and living among people who didn't have a clue just how dangerous the world could be.
Late July, Jim had finally kicked him in the ass and told him to get the hell out -- go on a hunt and get himself killed or go see his boy. John had argued, had no intention of doing any such thing. Sam was a grown man now, or so he wanted everyone to believe, and he'd made his choice. He could live with it.
But Jim had just kicked his ass again, threatening to do it literally, and told him to take a good look at his other son. What he saw, stopped him.
John had never really seen Dean heartbroken before. They'd left a lot of places and a lot of people behind, and every once in a while was a girl that John suspected Dean might have wanted to hang onto. He'd moped a couple times when he'd been younger, but mostly he just reminisced then moved on to the next.
Looking at his son -- a good look for the first time all summer -- John realised that Dean hadn't ever left anyone behind that he'd loved. He'd packed up and taken them away, driving south, then west, then they'd both sat outside the run-down motel where Sam was living until the semester started.
Dean hadn't said a word, never once took John up on his suggestions to go speak to him. John couldn't make himself do it -- but Dean...there was no reason why Dean couldn't go and see him, spend a couple days while John took off and pretended to be busy elsewhere.
But Dean had just watched until they saw Sam coming home -- he was working at a coffee shop, and from the look of things he was pulling extra shifts. John found that he wasn't really surprised at his youngest's determination, felt a stab of pride that Sam was sticking to his guns to make things work. They watched as Sam went into the motel room he'd rented, and John had asked again if Dean wanted--
Dean had just shaken his head, sharp and quick, and had asked if they could go now.
Neither of them talked about Sam after that, not until September when a job in Davis got them close enough it just seemed the thing to do. Drive through Palo Alto and check up on him, see he was doing okay now that school had begun.
Dean stayed behind at their motel, refusing to go. He didn't ask how Sam was, if he looked healthy, happy, or anything. John told him anyway -- started to until he saw the way his son's eyes were straining with the effort to hold everything back.
John drove them to another hunt, eastward to Mississippi. He didn't go back again until Dean was hunting alone, and John could slip through town and check on Sam without Dean knowing.
Three years later none of it seemed to matter. Dean had apparently come to terms with his brother's leaving, he'd gone back to smiling at every pretty face that turned his head -- and lord, there was a lot of head turning. By the time Dean was twenty-five they were each hunting on their own practically all the time, only meeting up once in a awhile, and John had no way of knowing just how many girls Dean had. He didn't much care, he only noted that the names changed every week or so -- a new one for every town, and sometimes, when John was lying in bed waiting for sleep, he wondered just how things might have been if Mary were alive.
Would Dean be married, or would he be just as free with the ladies? Would he have a steady girl..a steady job, coming home for Christmas and Easter, Sam doing the some and all of them as happy a family as normal could make them? Those nights he fell asleep after lying awake too long, and he wondered if there was anything he should have done, anything he could have done, to make his sons' lives better.
Usually after nights like those he'd end up heading through Palo Alto, checking on Sam, mentioning it casually the next time he saw Dean. Dean never said much, but he listened when John said he'd looked good, that he'd been carrying too many books, that one of the professors had told him Sam was one of the best students he'd had.
John hadn't known what to do about the heart-ache he could still see Dean trying to hide. He'd ended up doing nothing.
~~~
The last time was in the middle of a hunt, searching for the damn gun that would destroy the son of a bitch that had taken Mary from them. Good to see his boys again, better still to talk to Sam after far too many years. John had been gratified to see how what kind of man Sam had turned into -- Mary would have been proud, would have forgiven him all his sins to see her sons as the fine young men they were.
John had wanted to say so much to both Sam and Dean. He knew what was coming, knew the fight they were getting into the thick of. Kept telling himself it was a mistake to let his boys come with him instead of keeping them elsewhere, keeping them safe.
But mostly he was glad they were here, that for one more time he could have someone hunting with him. He'd gone out to do a quick scrying, see if there was anything else he could possibly do to prepare them for what they were going to be facing. He'd been on his way back to the motel room, had his key in his hand and halfway to the doorknob when he'd heard it. Sounds he hadn't heard in years, but the memories slammed into him like it had been yesterday.
Sam's voice, crying out his brother's name. Dean's voice, a low rumble with words John couldn't make out. Quick, frantic noises as though they knew John would return soon -- and it was on the tip of his tongue to shout out, slam open the door and ask what the hell they were doing.
He had his hand on the door before he stopped himself.
Remembered how close his boys stood beside each other. How Dean had sided with his brother against John.
How for the first time in four years, Dean's eyes hadn't held the pain that only now John realised he recognised. He'd seen it for years in the mirror, reflected out of losing the woman he'd loved.
His hand fell and John stepped away from the door. A second later he walked away, heart and stomach alternating with cold icy clenched, and burning hot emotion. He walked until he reached a bar, half a block away, and he went inside and sat, nursing far fewer drinks than he would have expected.
He didn't think about all the mistakes he'd made. Didn't think about how he'd raised his boys, kept them away from normal folks and normal life, even kept them away from the other hunters until they'd had only each other to rely on.
He didn't think about how, as boys, they'd stood beside each other and fought like they'd been honed together with the same steel. He didn't think about reasons, or rationales, or the history that said it all made perfect sense that growing up fighting side by side would lead to more.
He didn't think about the look in his son's eyes when Dean's heart seemed to shine damn near out of them just because Sam was there. He didn't think about all the times he'd seen the same sort of look in Sam's.
As he drank his whiskey and didn't think about right, or wrong, or heaven or hell, John thought about the day, so long ago, that he'd placed his infant son into his older boy's arms. Sent him screaming from the room, sent him running to safety when all John had eyes for was his wife, hideously, horribly trapped on the ceiling, burned alive in a demon's fire.
It might have been the demon's work. It might have been his own. All John could think, as he waited for his boys to finish, was that he wished to god he had his own lover back again.
the end
Author: James
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Word Count: ~2700
Spoilers: up through Shadows, Season One
Disclaimer: not mine, no profit made
Summary: John knows what his sons do.
The first time was the summer Sam was fifteen. They were living in a mobile home park on the edge of Fairfield. John let the boys share the tiny bedroom in the back while he took the fold-out couch; he was gone half the time anyhow, so it didn't really matter to him where he slept.
But the trailer park was mostly old people and folks with little kids. The oldest besides his two boys was twelve, and John knew he'd done some stupid things in his life but raising his boys that wrong surely wasn't among them.
It didn't really matter all that much. Hell, they were just boys, stuck there together, sharing a room not much bigger than a closet.
John didn't know exactly what they did and didn't want to, but he wasn't blind and he remembered being fifteen. He really didn't care if Sam and Dean fooled around a little. They both knew enough to try to keep it a secret, and he never let on that he knew.
Hell, he'd jerked off once in the same room as his cousin, with Ricky in his own bed doing the same. Most boys did something like it growing up.
He also knew they kept on the whole time they lived in that trailer park, and maybe it was a little bit of why he finally pulled up stakes and headed back out on the road. The next place they stopped was a tiny town in Illinois, small enough to spot strangers ten seconds after they reached the county line.
It didn't take long for Dean to hook up with a pretty girl with long brown hair and a chest that John felt old and dirty for even thinking about. The fact she was the first one who so much as smiled at Dean, exactly ten minutes after they'd arrived, gave John a private chuckle. Sam took a little longer, but a few weeks later he saw Sam going around with a studious looking black-haired girl and John tried not to be an asshole about interrupting the 'study sessions.'
He did make sure there were condoms in the bathroom, because god knew he wasn't going to ask for trouble. He remembered being fifteen, and nineteen, and being incredibly stupid about girls.
~~~
He wasn't quite sure if his boys ever did anything again until Sam was seventeen.
While in Illinois, Dean dated about a dozen girls, as far as John could count, and Sam had a regular girl for nearly the entire time they were there. Not the first, study-partner girl, but another one. Nothing serious, John knew, because Sam hadn't really argued with him about moving on. He knew the reason for that -- the small town's high school was small, underfunded, and the teachers more or less all together knew about half of what Sam had already learned on his own. The constant bitching about the state of the library clinched it, and when John told them to pack, Sam did so without more than a token argument.
The next school was more Sam's speed. He took to his classes like a starving man, and for months there wasn't even a girl at all. John watched as Dean tried his best to hook his brother up, younger sisters of every girl he could find to bring home. There was even one girl of Dean's who brought her little brother, and Sam had slammed the door in Dean's face and they didn't talk for a week.
One night not long after, John got home just after midnight from a supply run across state lines that he'd expected to take until morning. He'd walked in, silently from habit, and heard unmistakable sounds from his oldest's boy's room. He'd debated knocking on the door and giving them both heart-attacks, playing the stern father -- but hell, Dean was twenty-one and John really didn't care if he'd brought a girl home.
He was halfway down the hallway when he heard his youngest's boy's voice. Coming from Dean's room, and saying Dean's name.
He'd stood in the hallway for uncounted long minutes, thinking... thinking a lot of things. Dean had brought a girl home and they were sharing. Dean had brought a couple girls home and....
But the only sound he heard were his two boys, so he crept down the hallway to the kitchen and sat down at the table.
A hour before sunrise the only conclusion he'd been able to reach that was maybe Sam liked boys and didn't know the first thing about getting one. He knew Dean had taught Sam how to kiss -- practising on pillows and the backs of their hands and on one very memorable occasion with John walking in on them, on each other. John remembered standing there, raising one eyebrow and waiting for either of them to say a word. Sam had been thirteen, looking like he wanted to die and sink into the floorboards while Dean had tried to look cocky and blase at the same time.
It was possible -- likely, even, that Sam might ask his brother about sex, about sex with other boys specifically. John wouldn't have expected any explanations to go this far, but... they were both still boys, still young enough for hormones to overpower any higher brain function. That on top of what he knew they'd done back at the trailer park, and...well, maybe it made sense. Maybe it was excusable. Maybe--
He told himself he wouldn't think about it, act like he didn't know a damn thing, and he'd keep an eye on them for awhile... just in case.
The boys were awkward around him after that -- but they were awkward around each other, too. John never said a word, and soon enough he hauled them both on a hunt and in the middle of a firefight with a ghost from the Civil War his boys stopped acting like they couldn't deal with breathing the same air and started acting like the same boys he'd raised to hunt. He'd glanced over at one point, seen them standing back to back, searching the room for the next sign of attack.
For a second John had simply stared, and thought about the warm, heavy weight of a partner beside him. Decades -- a lifetime ago, Freddy Miller and a war with only people to fight, and the solid reassurance of knowing your back was covered.
He'd nodded to himself, grateful to see he'd given that to his boys. It would make them stronger, better hunters. More likely to survive. Then the ghost had attacked again and through the shooting and the screaming and the flying pitchforks, he'd lost track of everything else but the hunt.
~~~
He knew they didn't do anything after that, and he'd kept as close an eye on them as he could without letting them know he was looking. He worried a little when Dean didn't seem to have a girlfriend after that night, but John might have been keeping him a little busy -- taking Dean with him on every hunt he could find, glad to leave Sam home when his youngest asked, pretending it was all about not interrupting Sam's schoolwork.
Maybe he was all too happy to keep his boys away from each other -- give them some space, some time to let things get back to normal. Then school had ended and Sam had dropped his fucking bombshell and John hadn't stopped shouting until Sam was gone.
He knew Dean drove Sam to the bus station, knew it at the time even, knew exactly where the thousand dollars from the emergency stash went. Three days after Sam left, John had been able to admit that it wasn't the worst mistake he'd ever made; but it came damn near close.
He'd taken himself and Dean to Jim's for awhile, distracting himself with research and studying up on esoteric rituals and telling himself that Sam would change his mind once he saw how hard it could be, being alone and living among people who didn't have a clue just how dangerous the world could be.
Late July, Jim had finally kicked him in the ass and told him to get the hell out -- go on a hunt and get himself killed or go see his boy. John had argued, had no intention of doing any such thing. Sam was a grown man now, or so he wanted everyone to believe, and he'd made his choice. He could live with it.
But Jim had just kicked his ass again, threatening to do it literally, and told him to take a good look at his other son. What he saw, stopped him.
John had never really seen Dean heartbroken before. They'd left a lot of places and a lot of people behind, and every once in a while was a girl that John suspected Dean might have wanted to hang onto. He'd moped a couple times when he'd been younger, but mostly he just reminisced then moved on to the next.
Looking at his son -- a good look for the first time all summer -- John realised that Dean hadn't ever left anyone behind that he'd loved. He'd packed up and taken them away, driving south, then west, then they'd both sat outside the run-down motel where Sam was living until the semester started.
Dean hadn't said a word, never once took John up on his suggestions to go speak to him. John couldn't make himself do it -- but Dean...there was no reason why Dean couldn't go and see him, spend a couple days while John took off and pretended to be busy elsewhere.
But Dean had just watched until they saw Sam coming home -- he was working at a coffee shop, and from the look of things he was pulling extra shifts. John found that he wasn't really surprised at his youngest's determination, felt a stab of pride that Sam was sticking to his guns to make things work. They watched as Sam went into the motel room he'd rented, and John had asked again if Dean wanted--
Dean had just shaken his head, sharp and quick, and had asked if they could go now.
Neither of them talked about Sam after that, not until September when a job in Davis got them close enough it just seemed the thing to do. Drive through Palo Alto and check up on him, see he was doing okay now that school had begun.
Dean stayed behind at their motel, refusing to go. He didn't ask how Sam was, if he looked healthy, happy, or anything. John told him anyway -- started to until he saw the way his son's eyes were straining with the effort to hold everything back.
John drove them to another hunt, eastward to Mississippi. He didn't go back again until Dean was hunting alone, and John could slip through town and check on Sam without Dean knowing.
Three years later none of it seemed to matter. Dean had apparently come to terms with his brother's leaving, he'd gone back to smiling at every pretty face that turned his head -- and lord, there was a lot of head turning. By the time Dean was twenty-five they were each hunting on their own practically all the time, only meeting up once in a awhile, and John had no way of knowing just how many girls Dean had. He didn't much care, he only noted that the names changed every week or so -- a new one for every town, and sometimes, when John was lying in bed waiting for sleep, he wondered just how things might have been if Mary were alive.
Would Dean be married, or would he be just as free with the ladies? Would he have a steady girl..a steady job, coming home for Christmas and Easter, Sam doing the some and all of them as happy a family as normal could make them? Those nights he fell asleep after lying awake too long, and he wondered if there was anything he should have done, anything he could have done, to make his sons' lives better.
Usually after nights like those he'd end up heading through Palo Alto, checking on Sam, mentioning it casually the next time he saw Dean. Dean never said much, but he listened when John said he'd looked good, that he'd been carrying too many books, that one of the professors had told him Sam was one of the best students he'd had.
John hadn't known what to do about the heart-ache he could still see Dean trying to hide. He'd ended up doing nothing.
~~~
The last time was in the middle of a hunt, searching for the damn gun that would destroy the son of a bitch that had taken Mary from them. Good to see his boys again, better still to talk to Sam after far too many years. John had been gratified to see how what kind of man Sam had turned into -- Mary would have been proud, would have forgiven him all his sins to see her sons as the fine young men they were.
John had wanted to say so much to both Sam and Dean. He knew what was coming, knew the fight they were getting into the thick of. Kept telling himself it was a mistake to let his boys come with him instead of keeping them elsewhere, keeping them safe.
But mostly he was glad they were here, that for one more time he could have someone hunting with him. He'd gone out to do a quick scrying, see if there was anything else he could possibly do to prepare them for what they were going to be facing. He'd been on his way back to the motel room, had his key in his hand and halfway to the doorknob when he'd heard it. Sounds he hadn't heard in years, but the memories slammed into him like it had been yesterday.
Sam's voice, crying out his brother's name. Dean's voice, a low rumble with words John couldn't make out. Quick, frantic noises as though they knew John would return soon -- and it was on the tip of his tongue to shout out, slam open the door and ask what the hell they were doing.
He had his hand on the door before he stopped himself.
Remembered how close his boys stood beside each other. How Dean had sided with his brother against John.
How for the first time in four years, Dean's eyes hadn't held the pain that only now John realised he recognised. He'd seen it for years in the mirror, reflected out of losing the woman he'd loved.
His hand fell and John stepped away from the door. A second later he walked away, heart and stomach alternating with cold icy clenched, and burning hot emotion. He walked until he reached a bar, half a block away, and he went inside and sat, nursing far fewer drinks than he would have expected.
He didn't think about all the mistakes he'd made. Didn't think about how he'd raised his boys, kept them away from normal folks and normal life, even kept them away from the other hunters until they'd had only each other to rely on.
He didn't think about how, as boys, they'd stood beside each other and fought like they'd been honed together with the same steel. He didn't think about reasons, or rationales, or the history that said it all made perfect sense that growing up fighting side by side would lead to more.
He didn't think about the look in his son's eyes when Dean's heart seemed to shine damn near out of them just because Sam was there. He didn't think about all the times he'd seen the same sort of look in Sam's.
As he drank his whiskey and didn't think about right, or wrong, or heaven or hell, John thought about the day, so long ago, that he'd placed his infant son into his older boy's arms. Sent him screaming from the room, sent him running to safety when all John had eyes for was his wife, hideously, horribly trapped on the ceiling, burned alive in a demon's fire.
It might have been the demon's work. It might have been his own. All John could think, as he waited for his boys to finish, was that he wished to god he had his own lover back again.
the end