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spnmysteryyearsGo here for Part IV.
Dean suppresses a shiver and goes back to the couch to watch television.
He’s just considering getting more cookies while a muted jewelry commercial plays out in pantomime on the television screen when he hears the slamming of a car door. Telling himself it’s just early parishioners, he hastens to the kitchen door to peer out the side window at the rectory driveway.
It’s empty, and though he’d expected it, it still makes him feel cold and empty.
Straining his eyes through the white veil of snow, he can just make out a bundled figure hurrying toward the church.
He shakes his head. Why anyone would come out on a night like this just for church…
He goes back to It’s a Wonderful Life.
A few minutes later, Dean’s attention is drawn from Jimmy Stewart’s frantic search of the savings and loan by another car door. He tells himself not to get up, not to go look.
The kitchen door window reveals another early bird hurrying toward the church’s double doors.
Then he sees something really strange—lights, moving at waist-height, disembodied. Automatically, he starts to flip through a mental catalogue of evil creatures that might use lights to lure their prey. Squinting harder, he tries to see how many of the lights there are.
Which is when he remembers the luminaria he and Sammy had made, just as a bundled figure bending in the sporadic illumination of a snow-besieged streetlight proves his theory.
Jimmy Stewart’s troubles are forgotten as he watches one and then another and then more parishioners arrive at the church early to line the sidewalks with glowing white bags. The lights are hardly visible from where he stands, no more than thirty yards away, and as he watches, more than one bag flutters onto its side, its light dimming and then going out altogether.
Still, the people appear undaunted by the fearsome weather, working patiently despite the cold, the screaming wind, the stinging snow, the improbability of these little lights doing any good at all to cut through the darkness.
Dean doesn’t understand it, and it makes him feel funny, like he should know what it means and can’t figure it out.
More cars come, more parishioners, and eventually the sidewalk and walkway and steps are lined with faltering lights almost lost in the blowing snow.
People walk up the aisle between those fragile little fires and into the church doors, which open wide to welcome them, spilling warm yellow light, mysterious—maybe magical, like the pastor said—out into the dark night.
The light doesn’t go far, but it brings them in.
Eventually, even the latecomers are hurried inside, and still he watches, betting with himself which of the candles will be the last to go out. Dean finds himself rooting for this one and then that as one by one the tiny lights disappear.
But all is not dark.
The windows of the church glow unevenly, as if there’s a fire burning inside.
Candlelight, he guesses.
And though the storm is howling around the eaves, juddering the kitchen door in its jamb, Dean can hear the voices of the faithful singing.
He can’t seem to leave his place at the door, though his stocking feet are cold on the tile floor and his breath is fogging the panes of glass in the door window.
Dean doesn’t know how long he’s stood there when he hears the familiar strains of a Christmas carol he’s heard in a hundred rest area bathrooms and convenience store aisles and coming from passing car radios on those rare occasions when they’ve been in some warmer climate for Christmas.
Joy to the world, the Lord is come,
Let earth receive her king.
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven and heav’n and nature sing.
He can’t really hear the words, of course, but he knows them by heart though he can’t remember ever learning them, and he catches himself humming along as the song swells into a second verse.
As it reaches the end of the third refrain, the muted light of the church windows suddenly goes out, and it’s like something has swallowed the little building whole.
One second it was there, joyous noise pouring from it, and the next it was gone, blinking out like an afterthought of light.
Just as suddenly, a brilliant light breaks out from every window, blazing golden against the intensity of storm still raging, and all at once there’s the ringing of bells, big and small, deep and high, not only from the church across the way but from other places further out.
He cracks the door open despite the freezing wind, listens with his eyes wide to the sound, like the entire town, maybe even the whole state, is celebrating.
Dean shivers, and not just from the cold. All of these people as one, raising this sound like it will somehow help them, somehow keep off evil.
He closes the door and shivers again against the loneliness that fills him.
He feels small and alone in a world that he can’t quite grasp, and a fierce need to see his father strangles a sound out of him even as he hurries back to the living room to throw himself on the sofa and turn on the television, hoping for respite.
There’s a bell ringing there, too.
Snarling, almost throwing the remote before he regains control of himself, Dean leaps off the couch and by reflex heads for the front window, hoping to maybe lose himself in the swirling darkness of the snow.
The bells have finally subsided, and he can hear car engines starting up, doors slamming, the happy chatter of people going home to a Christmas house.
He hates them.
He hates them.
They don’t understand what the world is really about, what’s actually out there in the darkness stalking them, following them home, waiting for a chance to take away all that happy laughter, all that stupid assurance that the world makes sense the way they think it does.
Arms crossed, feet frozen, eyes unfixed on anything but his inner misery, Dean breathes out to blur the window pane and grits his teeth.
He should go to bed.
The last car leaves the parking lot with a low toot of its horn, and he knows Pastor Jim will be back inside soon, knows he can’t stomach more of the minister’s comforting words.
Knows he should just give it up and go to bed.
Dean turns away from the window determined to do just that when a different sound catches his attention.
A low growl nothing like the insidious wind of the storm, which whines at a higher pitch than the constant drone he thinks he can make out over the moaning in the eaves.
His heart throttles into his throat and he chokes on his own breath, shaking off a sudden prickling of hot tears. He’s being dumb. There’s no reason to think…
A single light comes slowly into sight, shuddering uncertainly as the car that follows it skids in the slippery snow.
No mistaking that black hulk for anything but his father’s car.
Dean’s at the kitchen door in a heartbeat, is halfway out of it when the wet snow penetrates his pant cuff and he feels the stuff sliding inside his sock.
Shoes.
He needs shoes.
Impatient and afraid that he’s seeing things now, Dean hurries up the stairs as quickly as he can without waking Sam—in case…just in case, you never know, maybe it’s not their dad, or maybe he’s hurt, or it’s someone who’s driving his car back, or…—and finds his shoes, grabs his jacket from the chair where he’s been hanging it.
He’s back downstairs, sliding into his boots, not bothering to lace them up, not stopping to pull up the zipper on his coat as he flings open the door again and races outside, slip-sliding on the deep snow, down the two porch steps, across the driveway, up the lawn, snow drifting here to mid-thigh, heart thrumming blood in his ears as he struggles toward the shadow that hunches near the side door of the church in a spot that Dean knows in daylight hours is reserved for the handicapped.
“Dad?” He calls out when he’s twenty feet away.
“Dad?”
No answer but the low idle of the big engine.
“Dad?”
Fear now, icy and breath-stealing, stabs through him.
He reaches the driver’s side door, but the window is caked with road slush, and he can’t see inside.
“Dad?”
He’s not sure even he can hear his voice over the raving of the wind.
The engine shuts off and the one working headlight goes out. The only light now is anemic, spilling from the near windows of the church, and even as his breath stutters in his throat, those start to go out too, one by one, from the back of the church nearest the street toward the front where Dean knows the altar must be.
Beside him, the door creaks open and a familiar boot appears and then Dean’s staring up into the haggard, unshaven face of his father.
In the uncertain light, his father’s face looks cut from the darkness, one eye hidden, cheek bisected by shadow. Dean can’t tell if his father’s been hurt.
Then his father says, “Dean,” and gathers him up in a snow-wet embrace, and the smell of leather is in his nose, and other smells, equally familiar—gunpowder and sweat and old blood—and he’s shaking and trying really hard not to cry.
“Sammy’s okay,” he mumbles into the rough stubble of his father’s cheek.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he nods against his father’s shoulder. “Yeah, I’m good.”
“Let’s go see your brother.”
He lets go of Dean long enough to open the back door and grab a bag, and then his hand is broad on Dean’s back, and Dean swears he can feel the heat and weight of it even through his jacket.
The snow isn’t nearly as hard to wade through back the way he’d come.
In the kitchen, Dean inspects his father as best he can without giving away what he’s doing. His dad looks tired and somehow older, but there aren’t any visible injuries.
Dad puts his jacket over the back of a kitchen chair and then pulls it around to sit down and unlace his boots.
Dean kicks his own off and puts them on the rubber mat kept near the door for that purpose, drapes his wet coat over another chair. He’ll have to wipe up the wet mess in a minute.
“Have you been good for Pastor Jim?” Dad asks, standing up and turning toward the living room.
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s my boy,” he answers, ruffling Dean’s hair. Then, “It’s getting long.”
“Sammy’s is longer.”
His father laughs a little at that, just a huff of breath, really, but it warms Dean to the belly.
He leads his father up the stairs to the door of their room and eases it open. “Sammy,” he whispers.
He can feel the heat of his father at his back, just behind him.
“Sammy, wake up. Dad’s here. It’s Christmas.”
“Dad?”
Sammy sounds even younger than he is. He sits up, eyes squinting blearily in the light from the open door.
“Dad!” His voice shifts to delight when he realizes that their father is actually standing there.
He scrambles out of bed and launches himself at their father, who sweeps him up in a tight hug, one big hand against the back of Sammy’s head, the other wrapped around his waist.
“Your hair is long,” he says when he puts his younger son down.
“I gotta get it cut,” Sammy declares, like it’s something their father was silly not to think of himself.
“You been good for Pastor Jim, sport?”
“Yeah!”
Dad gives Dean a questioning look.
“He has. He even helped bake cookies for the parish ladies,” Dean explains.
“That’s good. That’s real good, Sammy.”
“And how about you? You been helping out?”
“Dean made luminarimums,” Sammy says. “I helped,” he adds, beaming with pride.
Another look from Dad.
“Little candles in white paper bags. For the sidewalks and stuff.”
Dad nods a little abstractedly, hand still stroking through Sammy’s long hair.
“I take it you’re feeling better,” he asks, crouching down to look into Sammy’s smiling face.
“Yeah. I took some medicine and I’m fine. Just got some sniffles.”
“A nurse came to look at him when we first go here,” Dean adds, expecting that his father will be wondering about the medicine. “She’s a friend of Pastor Jim’s. She won’t tell anyone.”
His father’s face darkens, his mouth thins, but he nods.
Dean swallows nervously.
“You did good, son,” he says, still looking at Sam.
Then he rises, pats Sammy on the back, and says, “Back to bed. You’ve got some sleeping to do before Christmas can really start.”
“Awwwww.”
“Sam.”
Sam goes to bed reluctantly, fat pout on his lower lip, and Dad tucks him in and then ushers Dean out into the hallway, closing the door behind him.
“We usually leave it open a little, for the light.”
Dad frowns.
“When Sam was sick, it was easier to check on him that way.” This isn’t strictly true—truth is, Dean kind of liked the light, too, and Sammy slept better with it on—but it seems to placate Dad, and he opens the door again a crack.
“You should be in bed, too.”
“I know. I was just waiting for Pastor Jim to come in from the church.”
“Midnight service?”
“Yeah.”
“Glad I missed it.”
Dean thinks about that. About the music and the candlelight and the ringing of bells. About how small he’d felt, how alone.
He wants to say, “I wish you hadn’t,” but he can’t. He’s in enough trouble, probably, as it is. And besides, Dad’s here now.
“Let’s see what we can scramble up in the kitchen. I’m starving.”
With an ease of familiarity that comes of long acquaintance, Dad finds eggs and milk and salt and pepper and butter and bread and frying pan and sets out to make himself and Dean a late night meal.
Partway through the cooking, Pastor Jim comes in, shaking snow off his coat, stomping it off his boots.
“I thought I saw that monster car of yours out there. Hard to tell with all the snow on it, though.”
“Yeah, this is a hell of a storm,” Dad answers, moving eggs around the pan.
“Hope you don’t mind I helped myself to some supper.”
“My house is yours, John, you know that.”
“And I’m grateful,” Dad answers, voice graver and harder than it had just been before.
Dean’s stomach twists nervously. Here it comes.
“I can never repay you for taking my boys in, Jim. They mean more to me than anything. You know that. But if there’s ever anything you need, you say the word and I’ll take care of it for you.”
Dean scans his father’s face, trying to find the real meaning there.
Pastor Jim seems to get to it first. “Come to church tomorrow morning, John.”
Dad’s laugh isn’t really a laugh as he turns his focus back to the eggs. “Anything but that,” he mutters, shaking his head.
“Then promise me you’ll do a better job letting your boys know where you are.”
Dean sucks in a breath and wants to sink under the table as his father turns to glance at Pastor Jim’s face, set in hard lines itself, and then sweeps over Dean’s.
Whatever his father sees there, it seems to take all the anger out of him. His shoulders slump and the spatula clatters against the edge of the pan. His eyes drop to the table top a few inches from Dean’s hands, which are flat against its wood surface like he’s holding on to a tilting world.
“I’m sorry,” Dad says, and Dean knows it’s for him, him only, not Pastor Jim.
“It’s okay,” Dean says, “You—“
“It’s not okay, son. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I promise.”
Dean nods, swallows hard, blinks away sudden heat in his eyes.
“Got enough for another stomach?” Jim asks, changing the subject with a brusque good cheer that dispels some of the tension in the room.
“Sure.” Jim sets the table while Dean pours himself some milk—the men are having bottled beer—and Dad dishes up the food.
“Sam alright?” Jim asks.
John nods around a mouthful of eggs.
“Sleeping,” Dean explains, getting up to retrieve the toast that’s just popped.
They eat in easy silence for a few minutes before Dad says, unprompted, “I got the son of a bitch, but it was hard going.”
Dean’s food is immediately forgotten, eyes riveted on his father’s face.
Jim keeps eating like werewolf hunting is a typical topic of conversation at his kitchen table.
“You have to track it far?”
“Guy was a woodsman. Got bit by a wild one up across the Canadian border somewhere. Felt sorry for ‘im. If he hadn’t wandered into a little north woods community, he might’ve lived out there himself for years before anyone figured it out. He loved it in the woods. Damn shame.”
Dean understands that werewolves are always people some of the time, but he’s surprised anyway to hear sympathy in his father’s voice. Usually, there’s no room at all to feel sorry for the monsters.
“You okay?”
There’s something odd about the way the pastor says it, like it means something Dean can’t understand. He feels left out all of a sudden.
“Yeah.”
It’s short, though, and there’s a warning Dean has heard before in the way his father says it.
Apparently, Jim hears it, too.
“How about cookies to finish things off? I’ve got more than I know what to do with. I swear these parish ladies are trying to make me look like Santa Claus or something.”
It’s a lame joke, but they all laugh at it like it’s not. The cookies are just as good as Dean remembers, having made a serious dent in the tin set aside for him and Sam.
“How many of these have you and Sammy eaten?” Dad asks like he’s read Dean’s mind.
Dean tries not to squirm under his father’s mock-stern gaze. It’d probably turn stern for real if he answered truthfully.
“Some,” he fudges.
“Uh-huh,” Dad says, skepticism evident.
The wide and genuine yawn Dean looses next shifts the subject safely off the topic of cookie consumption.
“Get to bed, Dean-o. Don’t want to spoil Christmas.”
“Yes, sir,” he says, getting up to put his plate and cup in the sink.
“I’ll take care of the dishes,” Jim offers, rising and stretching.
“I’ll do ‘em,” Dad counters, no room for argument in his tone.
Dean brushes his teeth to the clink of dishes in a sudsy sink.
“’night, Dean,” Dad says as Dean settles into the top bunk. Dean’s at eye level with his father here, can see the dark bags under his father’s eyes, the way his lips are dragged down at each corner.
“’night, Dad.”
As his father turns to leave, Dean is suddenly filled with a roaring fear that he won’t be there in the morning when Dean and Sam wake up. Before he can think it through, he’s saying, “Hey, Dad?”
“Yeah?”
His father comes partway across the room again. The door, mostly open, pours light across his father’s shoulder, casting his face half in shadow, half in light.
“Are you staying?”
Dean hears his father’s breath hitch, irritation or impatience, maybe, and he rushes ahead.
“I just mean…are you staying a little while? Or are you leaving us here? Or are we going back to Michigan together?”
Dad comes up beside him again, sets his hand on Dean’s knee. He’s not really looking at Dean. His eyes seem to see something that’s not in the room with them.
“I’m not going anywhere, Dean. Not for a long time. When we leave here, we’ll leave here together, as a family. Okay?”
“Okay.” It comes out small, a little shaky, too, and Dean bites his lower lip and wishes it weren’t so bright in the room. He can feel the heat prickling in his eyes, knows he’s about to cry.
He doesn’t want to cry. He won’t cry.
His father expels a harsh breath and then touches Dean’s cheek.
It’s so unexpected that Dean opens his eyes, and what he sees there has to be a trick of the light, has to be because Dad is a Winchester, and Winchesters don’t cry, not when they’re bleeding and hurt, not when their world is coming apart, not when nothing goes right for long stretches of time and the road is their only sure thing.
But there it is, a single line of glimmering light, brighter than the darkness of his stubble-dark cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” his father whispers, so softly that Dean thinks he might have been imagining it.
“I’m so sorry,” he says again.
Dad’s hand rests, fingers spread, on Dean’s chest, bunching and releasing the blankets as he whispers.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Dean answers, his own voice tiny and tight. He puts his hand on his father’s, stilling its convulsive movement. “It’s okay.”
“Is it Christmas yet?” A voice says from the region of Dad’s knees.
Dean lets Dad’s hand go even as Dad steps a little back from the bunk to take in his younger son’s face.
Dean leans over the bunk to see Sammy staring up at them with sleepy eyes.
“Yeah, Sammy, it is. It is Christmas,” their father says.
“Can we open presents now?”
Dean can’t help but smile back at his brother, who’s wearing an excited grin that takes up most of his chubby face.
“I think we already got the best present ever, don’t you, Sammy?”
Sammy’s face wrinkles with confusion. “Cookies?” He says it like that answer is extremely unlikely.
Dad laughs.
“No, Sammy. What else did you get on Christmas morning?”
And because he’s that smart, he gets it. “You!”
But Dad shakes his head. “Nope, tiger, not just me. Family. Family’s the best present at Christmas.”
Sammy considers that a second, eyes roving from Dad’s to Dean’s face and back again.
“Do we get other presents, too?” he asks hopefully.
Dad laughs. “Yeah, I think we can manage that, sport. Now get some sleep. You, too, Dean.”
Dean sighs back against his pillow and lets his father pull the covers up under his chin.
“I love you,” Dad says in his low, tired voice.
“I love you, too, Dad.” Dad’s answering nod is jerky and he ducks down before Dean can make out the expression on his face.
“I love you, Sammy,” Dad says, but softly. Sammy’s already asleep again.
As Dad goes out this time, Dean lets his eyes close, tracing his father’s progress by the narrowing band of orange behind his eyelids.
When it’s just a sliver, Dean starts humming “Joy to the World,” and the song follows him into his Christmas dreams.
*****
Go here for Part the Last.
Peace,
SW
Dean suppresses a shiver and goes back to the couch to watch television.
He’s just considering getting more cookies while a muted jewelry commercial plays out in pantomime on the television screen when he hears the slamming of a car door. Telling himself it’s just early parishioners, he hastens to the kitchen door to peer out the side window at the rectory driveway.
It’s empty, and though he’d expected it, it still makes him feel cold and empty.
Straining his eyes through the white veil of snow, he can just make out a bundled figure hurrying toward the church.
He shakes his head. Why anyone would come out on a night like this just for church…
He goes back to It’s a Wonderful Life.
A few minutes later, Dean’s attention is drawn from Jimmy Stewart’s frantic search of the savings and loan by another car door. He tells himself not to get up, not to go look.
The kitchen door window reveals another early bird hurrying toward the church’s double doors.
Then he sees something really strange—lights, moving at waist-height, disembodied. Automatically, he starts to flip through a mental catalogue of evil creatures that might use lights to lure their prey. Squinting harder, he tries to see how many of the lights there are.
Which is when he remembers the luminaria he and Sammy had made, just as a bundled figure bending in the sporadic illumination of a snow-besieged streetlight proves his theory.
Jimmy Stewart’s troubles are forgotten as he watches one and then another and then more parishioners arrive at the church early to line the sidewalks with glowing white bags. The lights are hardly visible from where he stands, no more than thirty yards away, and as he watches, more than one bag flutters onto its side, its light dimming and then going out altogether.
Still, the people appear undaunted by the fearsome weather, working patiently despite the cold, the screaming wind, the stinging snow, the improbability of these little lights doing any good at all to cut through the darkness.
Dean doesn’t understand it, and it makes him feel funny, like he should know what it means and can’t figure it out.
More cars come, more parishioners, and eventually the sidewalk and walkway and steps are lined with faltering lights almost lost in the blowing snow.
People walk up the aisle between those fragile little fires and into the church doors, which open wide to welcome them, spilling warm yellow light, mysterious—maybe magical, like the pastor said—out into the dark night.
The light doesn’t go far, but it brings them in.
Eventually, even the latecomers are hurried inside, and still he watches, betting with himself which of the candles will be the last to go out. Dean finds himself rooting for this one and then that as one by one the tiny lights disappear.
But all is not dark.
The windows of the church glow unevenly, as if there’s a fire burning inside.
Candlelight, he guesses.
And though the storm is howling around the eaves, juddering the kitchen door in its jamb, Dean can hear the voices of the faithful singing.
He can’t seem to leave his place at the door, though his stocking feet are cold on the tile floor and his breath is fogging the panes of glass in the door window.
Dean doesn’t know how long he’s stood there when he hears the familiar strains of a Christmas carol he’s heard in a hundred rest area bathrooms and convenience store aisles and coming from passing car radios on those rare occasions when they’ve been in some warmer climate for Christmas.
Joy to the world, the Lord is come,
Let earth receive her king.
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven and heav’n and nature sing.
He can’t really hear the words, of course, but he knows them by heart though he can’t remember ever learning them, and he catches himself humming along as the song swells into a second verse.
As it reaches the end of the third refrain, the muted light of the church windows suddenly goes out, and it’s like something has swallowed the little building whole.
One second it was there, joyous noise pouring from it, and the next it was gone, blinking out like an afterthought of light.
Just as suddenly, a brilliant light breaks out from every window, blazing golden against the intensity of storm still raging, and all at once there’s the ringing of bells, big and small, deep and high, not only from the church across the way but from other places further out.
He cracks the door open despite the freezing wind, listens with his eyes wide to the sound, like the entire town, maybe even the whole state, is celebrating.
Dean shivers, and not just from the cold. All of these people as one, raising this sound like it will somehow help them, somehow keep off evil.
He closes the door and shivers again against the loneliness that fills him.
He feels small and alone in a world that he can’t quite grasp, and a fierce need to see his father strangles a sound out of him even as he hurries back to the living room to throw himself on the sofa and turn on the television, hoping for respite.
There’s a bell ringing there, too.
Snarling, almost throwing the remote before he regains control of himself, Dean leaps off the couch and by reflex heads for the front window, hoping to maybe lose himself in the swirling darkness of the snow.
The bells have finally subsided, and he can hear car engines starting up, doors slamming, the happy chatter of people going home to a Christmas house.
He hates them.
He hates them.
They don’t understand what the world is really about, what’s actually out there in the darkness stalking them, following them home, waiting for a chance to take away all that happy laughter, all that stupid assurance that the world makes sense the way they think it does.
Arms crossed, feet frozen, eyes unfixed on anything but his inner misery, Dean breathes out to blur the window pane and grits his teeth.
He should go to bed.
The last car leaves the parking lot with a low toot of its horn, and he knows Pastor Jim will be back inside soon, knows he can’t stomach more of the minister’s comforting words.
Knows he should just give it up and go to bed.
Dean turns away from the window determined to do just that when a different sound catches his attention.
A low growl nothing like the insidious wind of the storm, which whines at a higher pitch than the constant drone he thinks he can make out over the moaning in the eaves.
His heart throttles into his throat and he chokes on his own breath, shaking off a sudden prickling of hot tears. He’s being dumb. There’s no reason to think…
A single light comes slowly into sight, shuddering uncertainly as the car that follows it skids in the slippery snow.
No mistaking that black hulk for anything but his father’s car.
Dean’s at the kitchen door in a heartbeat, is halfway out of it when the wet snow penetrates his pant cuff and he feels the stuff sliding inside his sock.
Shoes.
He needs shoes.
Impatient and afraid that he’s seeing things now, Dean hurries up the stairs as quickly as he can without waking Sam—in case…just in case, you never know, maybe it’s not their dad, or maybe he’s hurt, or it’s someone who’s driving his car back, or…—and finds his shoes, grabs his jacket from the chair where he’s been hanging it.
He’s back downstairs, sliding into his boots, not bothering to lace them up, not stopping to pull up the zipper on his coat as he flings open the door again and races outside, slip-sliding on the deep snow, down the two porch steps, across the driveway, up the lawn, snow drifting here to mid-thigh, heart thrumming blood in his ears as he struggles toward the shadow that hunches near the side door of the church in a spot that Dean knows in daylight hours is reserved for the handicapped.
“Dad?” He calls out when he’s twenty feet away.
“Dad?”
No answer but the low idle of the big engine.
“Dad?”
Fear now, icy and breath-stealing, stabs through him.
He reaches the driver’s side door, but the window is caked with road slush, and he can’t see inside.
“Dad?”
He’s not sure even he can hear his voice over the raving of the wind.
The engine shuts off and the one working headlight goes out. The only light now is anemic, spilling from the near windows of the church, and even as his breath stutters in his throat, those start to go out too, one by one, from the back of the church nearest the street toward the front where Dean knows the altar must be.
Beside him, the door creaks open and a familiar boot appears and then Dean’s staring up into the haggard, unshaven face of his father.
In the uncertain light, his father’s face looks cut from the darkness, one eye hidden, cheek bisected by shadow. Dean can’t tell if his father’s been hurt.
Then his father says, “Dean,” and gathers him up in a snow-wet embrace, and the smell of leather is in his nose, and other smells, equally familiar—gunpowder and sweat and old blood—and he’s shaking and trying really hard not to cry.
“Sammy’s okay,” he mumbles into the rough stubble of his father’s cheek.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he nods against his father’s shoulder. “Yeah, I’m good.”
“Let’s go see your brother.”
He lets go of Dean long enough to open the back door and grab a bag, and then his hand is broad on Dean’s back, and Dean swears he can feel the heat and weight of it even through his jacket.
The snow isn’t nearly as hard to wade through back the way he’d come.
In the kitchen, Dean inspects his father as best he can without giving away what he’s doing. His dad looks tired and somehow older, but there aren’t any visible injuries.
Dad puts his jacket over the back of a kitchen chair and then pulls it around to sit down and unlace his boots.
Dean kicks his own off and puts them on the rubber mat kept near the door for that purpose, drapes his wet coat over another chair. He’ll have to wipe up the wet mess in a minute.
“Have you been good for Pastor Jim?” Dad asks, standing up and turning toward the living room.
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s my boy,” he answers, ruffling Dean’s hair. Then, “It’s getting long.”
“Sammy’s is longer.”
His father laughs a little at that, just a huff of breath, really, but it warms Dean to the belly.
He leads his father up the stairs to the door of their room and eases it open. “Sammy,” he whispers.
He can feel the heat of his father at his back, just behind him.
“Sammy, wake up. Dad’s here. It’s Christmas.”
“Dad?”
Sammy sounds even younger than he is. He sits up, eyes squinting blearily in the light from the open door.
“Dad!” His voice shifts to delight when he realizes that their father is actually standing there.
He scrambles out of bed and launches himself at their father, who sweeps him up in a tight hug, one big hand against the back of Sammy’s head, the other wrapped around his waist.
“Your hair is long,” he says when he puts his younger son down.
“I gotta get it cut,” Sammy declares, like it’s something their father was silly not to think of himself.
“You been good for Pastor Jim, sport?”
“Yeah!”
Dad gives Dean a questioning look.
“He has. He even helped bake cookies for the parish ladies,” Dean explains.
“That’s good. That’s real good, Sammy.”
“And how about you? You been helping out?”
“Dean made luminarimums,” Sammy says. “I helped,” he adds, beaming with pride.
Another look from Dad.
“Little candles in white paper bags. For the sidewalks and stuff.”
Dad nods a little abstractedly, hand still stroking through Sammy’s long hair.
“I take it you’re feeling better,” he asks, crouching down to look into Sammy’s smiling face.
“Yeah. I took some medicine and I’m fine. Just got some sniffles.”
“A nurse came to look at him when we first go here,” Dean adds, expecting that his father will be wondering about the medicine. “She’s a friend of Pastor Jim’s. She won’t tell anyone.”
His father’s face darkens, his mouth thins, but he nods.
Dean swallows nervously.
“You did good, son,” he says, still looking at Sam.
Then he rises, pats Sammy on the back, and says, “Back to bed. You’ve got some sleeping to do before Christmas can really start.”
“Awwwww.”
“Sam.”
Sam goes to bed reluctantly, fat pout on his lower lip, and Dad tucks him in and then ushers Dean out into the hallway, closing the door behind him.
“We usually leave it open a little, for the light.”
Dad frowns.
“When Sam was sick, it was easier to check on him that way.” This isn’t strictly true—truth is, Dean kind of liked the light, too, and Sammy slept better with it on—but it seems to placate Dad, and he opens the door again a crack.
“You should be in bed, too.”
“I know. I was just waiting for Pastor Jim to come in from the church.”
“Midnight service?”
“Yeah.”
“Glad I missed it.”
Dean thinks about that. About the music and the candlelight and the ringing of bells. About how small he’d felt, how alone.
He wants to say, “I wish you hadn’t,” but he can’t. He’s in enough trouble, probably, as it is. And besides, Dad’s here now.
“Let’s see what we can scramble up in the kitchen. I’m starving.”
With an ease of familiarity that comes of long acquaintance, Dad finds eggs and milk and salt and pepper and butter and bread and frying pan and sets out to make himself and Dean a late night meal.
Partway through the cooking, Pastor Jim comes in, shaking snow off his coat, stomping it off his boots.
“I thought I saw that monster car of yours out there. Hard to tell with all the snow on it, though.”
“Yeah, this is a hell of a storm,” Dad answers, moving eggs around the pan.
“Hope you don’t mind I helped myself to some supper.”
“My house is yours, John, you know that.”
“And I’m grateful,” Dad answers, voice graver and harder than it had just been before.
Dean’s stomach twists nervously. Here it comes.
“I can never repay you for taking my boys in, Jim. They mean more to me than anything. You know that. But if there’s ever anything you need, you say the word and I’ll take care of it for you.”
Dean scans his father’s face, trying to find the real meaning there.
Pastor Jim seems to get to it first. “Come to church tomorrow morning, John.”
Dad’s laugh isn’t really a laugh as he turns his focus back to the eggs. “Anything but that,” he mutters, shaking his head.
“Then promise me you’ll do a better job letting your boys know where you are.”
Dean sucks in a breath and wants to sink under the table as his father turns to glance at Pastor Jim’s face, set in hard lines itself, and then sweeps over Dean’s.
Whatever his father sees there, it seems to take all the anger out of him. His shoulders slump and the spatula clatters against the edge of the pan. His eyes drop to the table top a few inches from Dean’s hands, which are flat against its wood surface like he’s holding on to a tilting world.
“I’m sorry,” Dad says, and Dean knows it’s for him, him only, not Pastor Jim.
“It’s okay,” Dean says, “You—“
“It’s not okay, son. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I promise.”
Dean nods, swallows hard, blinks away sudden heat in his eyes.
“Got enough for another stomach?” Jim asks, changing the subject with a brusque good cheer that dispels some of the tension in the room.
“Sure.” Jim sets the table while Dean pours himself some milk—the men are having bottled beer—and Dad dishes up the food.
“Sam alright?” Jim asks.
John nods around a mouthful of eggs.
“Sleeping,” Dean explains, getting up to retrieve the toast that’s just popped.
They eat in easy silence for a few minutes before Dad says, unprompted, “I got the son of a bitch, but it was hard going.”
Dean’s food is immediately forgotten, eyes riveted on his father’s face.
Jim keeps eating like werewolf hunting is a typical topic of conversation at his kitchen table.
“You have to track it far?”
“Guy was a woodsman. Got bit by a wild one up across the Canadian border somewhere. Felt sorry for ‘im. If he hadn’t wandered into a little north woods community, he might’ve lived out there himself for years before anyone figured it out. He loved it in the woods. Damn shame.”
Dean understands that werewolves are always people some of the time, but he’s surprised anyway to hear sympathy in his father’s voice. Usually, there’s no room at all to feel sorry for the monsters.
“You okay?”
There’s something odd about the way the pastor says it, like it means something Dean can’t understand. He feels left out all of a sudden.
“Yeah.”
It’s short, though, and there’s a warning Dean has heard before in the way his father says it.
Apparently, Jim hears it, too.
“How about cookies to finish things off? I’ve got more than I know what to do with. I swear these parish ladies are trying to make me look like Santa Claus or something.”
It’s a lame joke, but they all laugh at it like it’s not. The cookies are just as good as Dean remembers, having made a serious dent in the tin set aside for him and Sam.
“How many of these have you and Sammy eaten?” Dad asks like he’s read Dean’s mind.
Dean tries not to squirm under his father’s mock-stern gaze. It’d probably turn stern for real if he answered truthfully.
“Some,” he fudges.
“Uh-huh,” Dad says, skepticism evident.
The wide and genuine yawn Dean looses next shifts the subject safely off the topic of cookie consumption.
“Get to bed, Dean-o. Don’t want to spoil Christmas.”
“Yes, sir,” he says, getting up to put his plate and cup in the sink.
“I’ll take care of the dishes,” Jim offers, rising and stretching.
“I’ll do ‘em,” Dad counters, no room for argument in his tone.
Dean brushes his teeth to the clink of dishes in a sudsy sink.
“’night, Dean,” Dad says as Dean settles into the top bunk. Dean’s at eye level with his father here, can see the dark bags under his father’s eyes, the way his lips are dragged down at each corner.
“’night, Dad.”
As his father turns to leave, Dean is suddenly filled with a roaring fear that he won’t be there in the morning when Dean and Sam wake up. Before he can think it through, he’s saying, “Hey, Dad?”
“Yeah?”
His father comes partway across the room again. The door, mostly open, pours light across his father’s shoulder, casting his face half in shadow, half in light.
“Are you staying?”
Dean hears his father’s breath hitch, irritation or impatience, maybe, and he rushes ahead.
“I just mean…are you staying a little while? Or are you leaving us here? Or are we going back to Michigan together?”
Dad comes up beside him again, sets his hand on Dean’s knee. He’s not really looking at Dean. His eyes seem to see something that’s not in the room with them.
“I’m not going anywhere, Dean. Not for a long time. When we leave here, we’ll leave here together, as a family. Okay?”
“Okay.” It comes out small, a little shaky, too, and Dean bites his lower lip and wishes it weren’t so bright in the room. He can feel the heat prickling in his eyes, knows he’s about to cry.
He doesn’t want to cry. He won’t cry.
His father expels a harsh breath and then touches Dean’s cheek.
It’s so unexpected that Dean opens his eyes, and what he sees there has to be a trick of the light, has to be because Dad is a Winchester, and Winchesters don’t cry, not when they’re bleeding and hurt, not when their world is coming apart, not when nothing goes right for long stretches of time and the road is their only sure thing.
But there it is, a single line of glimmering light, brighter than the darkness of his stubble-dark cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” his father whispers, so softly that Dean thinks he might have been imagining it.
“I’m so sorry,” he says again.
Dad’s hand rests, fingers spread, on Dean’s chest, bunching and releasing the blankets as he whispers.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Dean answers, his own voice tiny and tight. He puts his hand on his father’s, stilling its convulsive movement. “It’s okay.”
“Is it Christmas yet?” A voice says from the region of Dad’s knees.
Dean lets Dad’s hand go even as Dad steps a little back from the bunk to take in his younger son’s face.
Dean leans over the bunk to see Sammy staring up at them with sleepy eyes.
“Yeah, Sammy, it is. It is Christmas,” their father says.
“Can we open presents now?”
Dean can’t help but smile back at his brother, who’s wearing an excited grin that takes up most of his chubby face.
“I think we already got the best present ever, don’t you, Sammy?”
Sammy’s face wrinkles with confusion. “Cookies?” He says it like that answer is extremely unlikely.
Dad laughs.
“No, Sammy. What else did you get on Christmas morning?”
And because he’s that smart, he gets it. “You!”
But Dad shakes his head. “Nope, tiger, not just me. Family. Family’s the best present at Christmas.”
Sammy considers that a second, eyes roving from Dad’s to Dean’s face and back again.
“Do we get other presents, too?” he asks hopefully.
Dad laughs. “Yeah, I think we can manage that, sport. Now get some sleep. You, too, Dean.”
Dean sighs back against his pillow and lets his father pull the covers up under his chin.
“I love you,” Dad says in his low, tired voice.
“I love you, too, Dad.” Dad’s answering nod is jerky and he ducks down before Dean can make out the expression on his face.
“I love you, Sammy,” Dad says, but softly. Sammy’s already asleep again.
As Dad goes out this time, Dean lets his eyes close, tracing his father’s progress by the narrowing band of orange behind his eyelids.
When it’s just a sliver, Dean starts humming “Joy to the World,” and the song follows him into his Christmas dreams.
*****
Go here for Part the Last.
Peace,
SW
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Date: 2009-12-09 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-10 01:06 am (UTC)