sn:/the real meaning of fear

[eighth_horizon]

The Real Meaning of Fear
(Subtitle: Five Times Dean’s Daughter Scared the Hell Out Of Him)
(c)2006 b stearns

Salvation AU, because it won’t shut up. Five drabbles about Dean and Charlie.
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I.

She’s running through her uncle’s house with the rest of the kids, barely two, hands out for balance. She’s been told a thousand times not to go near the stairs by herself and there she goes anyway, making a dash for them as soon as she thinks the adults won’t notice. She makes it five stairs up and then loses her balance just as her father comes back around the corner, before her aunt can get there in time. She tumbles down the hardwood stairs and slams her head on the floor at the bottom with a thud that sounds like the end of the world to her father. She's quiet just before he gets there, and it feels like an eternity of time while she lays there without making any sound, and he doesn’t realize that she’s pulling in as much air as possible so that she can...

...howl, finally, as he picks her up, and it’s right in his ear but it’s the best music he’s ever heard. She gets a goose egg and a popsicle and another reminder about why stairs are bad. What matters to her is the popsicle and the head-rubbing.

II.

She’s three and it’s his first week with her alone after the divorce. He picks her up from daycare and takes her straight to the park with snacks. She’s got an apple slice in one small pudgy hand and is running from one slide to the next, laughing at the other kids. He was going to put her in one of the swings as soon as he repositioned everything in his pack - all the work he’s brought home for later when she’s in bed. His attention leaves her for an instant, just a second, and when he looks up again she’s run straight to the bushes bordering the parking lot. She’s stuffing white berries into her mouth as fast as they’ll go.

She kicks and screams when he tries to get a shaking finger down her throat, and the way she cries and gasps for air once she’s thrown up makes him want to cry, too.

When they tell him in the ER that she threw it all up and didn’t actually ingest anything, that she’s safe, his knees buckle and it’s Sam who catches him and promises not to tell Dani what happened. It’s Sam who goes to the playground later after dark and pulls all the poisonous berry bushes up and chucks them in a dumpster.

III.

Dean’s the one who demanded that Charlie take swimming lessons at seven, and he and Dani take turns bringing her to the lessons. She takes to it like a water rat, and it’s a bitch to get her out of the pool at the end of each session. His apartment complex has a pool, and if it could have been open during the winter she’d have gone then too. She can hold her breath for more than a minute, and barks when she dog-paddles. He tosses pennies for her to dive to the bottom to get when he’s not in there with her, and if the sun is out he slathers copious amounts of waterproof suntan lotion on her because she’s not quite as fair skinned as he is but still burns easily.

He knows she can swim. He knows she can hold her breath a long time. He forgets all of that when he glances up and she’s floating facedown and motionless.

She doesn’t answer when he yells for her, doesn’t move. When he dives in and grabs her and she splutters an indignant daddy I’m trying to beat my record, he kisses her and treads water with her held against his chest until she pats his shoulders and says he’s silly.

Then he dunks her for scaring him.

IV.

When he calls Sam first and admits he can’t find her, that he went to pick her up from school and she’s just not there, it’s Sam who reminds him that Mary’s taken ‘walks’. Mary at four and five took walks and caused absolute, widespread terror. Sam tells him they’re on the way and Dean calls Dani and Jason to see if there’s a chance in hell that they picked her up for something that he’s forgotten about. They haven’t, but they’re breaking their necks to get there. He doesn’t call the police quite yet because Sam’s right, dammit, Charlie thinks she owns the world.

His five year old daughter is not where she’s supposed to be. His adorable, strawberry blonde, fearless slice of his soul is missing. He’s already searched the school grounds and asked everybody inside when they last saw her, and they know she walked out at the same time she always did, that she was never out there by herself. Kids and parents are still milling, the last bus has gone, and he can’t catch a glimpse of that little curly head or her bright green backpack.

He’s faced rawheads, and real vampires, and zombies. Poltergeists, and gun-toting people-hunters, and demons. They all pale in comparison to not knowing where Charlie is or whether she’s okay.

He has faced reapers, but it’s that little girl that will be the death of him.

When he drives around the block, scanning sidewalks and driveways, mind whirling with the possibilities of child snatchers and pedophiles and joyriders that might run her down, he glances into the park he usually takes her to.

She is on the monkey bars.

I just thought I’d meet you here, she said. We always go to the park on Fridays, daddy.

When he doesn’t say anything for so long, when he just sits on the end of one of the slides and hugs her harder than she likes, she doesn’t squirm. When he’s so quiet like this, she’s learned to wait.

V.

They’re fighting again - that kid’s got a mouth on her that rivals even Sam’s in his teen years, and Charlie’s only eight. Everything’s an argument, dammit, she can’t do the simplest thing without arguing. It’s a school night and it’s time for bed, no ‘just one more show’, no ‘let me finish this chapter’, it’s lights out right now. The kid never wants to sleep, she just goes until she drops. It’s the same argument every school night that Dean has her. She accuses him of being mean, spicing it with mom lets me and Uncle Jason lets me and he knows she’s lying.

He resorts to threats, he knows he sounds just like his own father and he doesn’t care. He’s too close to shouting at her this once, he’s pointing at her room and demanding that she get her ass in bed, and the look on her face is murder bordered with freckles.

So when every lock in the apartment - the doors, the windows, his briefcase, his filing cabinets - snap shut with a scatter of metallic noise that rushes through the place, he realizes what’s happening. He doesn’t want to, he hopes for a magnetic storm or any other explanation but he’s just never been good at lying to himself. He sweeps her up into his arms so she can’t see the fear on his face, before it can sink in that things have not skipped a generation, before she can ask what happened.

He chants over and over in his mind that she is not Max.

She is not Max.

She is his baby.

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