sn:/forest for the trees
Dec. 9th, 2006 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eighth_horizonSalvation AU. Gen, 6221 words, PG. It takes Charlie a few months after the events of Disinterment to run out of coping mechanisms, and when she finally does, her father can yell and yell, but one word from Sam is the end of the world.
Forest For The Trees
(c)2006 b stearns
_____________
Too alarming now to talk about
Take your pictures down and shake it out
Truth or consequence, say it aloud
Use that evidence, race it around...
–Foo Fighters, My Hero
-|-
February, 2030
Sam heard Dean’s truck pull up and went to stand by the door. He liked watching Dean get kids out of vehicles. Dean was so doting. Seatbelts and carseats and childlocks, and hey wait until I let you out. Sam remembered being the one on the receiving end of it to some extent.
When Dean had called and said he was bringing Charlie and dropping her off for time with Sam in particular, Sam had been fine with it but had wondered what was up. Dean had responded with a very enigmatic wait until you see her.
Sam had imagined inappropriate applications of hair dye or maybe a run-in with a self-styled haircut. Charlie had, after all, used a set of Sharpies at the age of four to ‘put makeup on’. It had taken awhile for the ink to fade. The tone of Dean’s voice was less she’s going to be the death of me than I’m going to kill her, though.
It was a Friday night and Allie was at the movies with friends, Mary was at a slumber party and Leigh was out shopping with Sarah. Each girl got a trip out with one or both parents for one-on-one time and a chance to spend allowance. Sam thought having the house to himself for once would be cool, but mostly he was bored and had resorted to flipping channels.
He watched Charlie fling herself out of the truck and slam the door. She was a lifelong stomper and a slammer of doors, and it was never hard to guess what mood she was in. She was going to be ten in a month but was already flirting with preteen moodiness. She turned her back to her father as he passed her, refusing to look at him, and Sam heard Dean say get your ass inside. Now.
Sam opened the door as Dean approached and took in the look of warning on his face. It was possible to love someone so much that you couldn’t always stand them, and that defined the arguments his brother and niece spent so much time engaging in. They were two peas in a pod. Watching them made Sam understand why John had driven him so crazy as a kid, why his fights with his father had been so unremittingly emotional to the point of near violence. Dean had wanted so badly to be a perfect reflection of John, and Sam had been born to that role without wanting it.
Having a sibling would do wonders for Charlie.
She continued to stand in the driveway.
“Gonna kill her, Sam,” Dean said in a voice low enough for only Sam to hear. “We tried the rational talking thing, and reminding her that everything is okay. She doesn’t hear it. We’re not getting through. I’ve been yelling at her since I had to get her from school at noon, Dani’s yelled at her, the kid doesn’t care. I’m done yelling.”
“What’s going on?” Sam said, glancing between Dean’s face and Charlie’s small, stiff back.
“She’s been suspended from school for a week,” Dean said. He turned and raised his voice. “Now, Charlie. Now.”
She hesitated just long enough to make sure her disobedience was obvious. Then she walked quickly to the door, arms folded, face set.
Sporting a black eye and a decent scrape on one cheek.
Sam nodded and stepped away from the door. “C’mon in.” He closed the door behind them and watched Charlie walk away to sit stiffly on the couch, never making eye contact with him.
Christo trotted out and went straight to Dean, tail waving, taking a distracted patting as if it was much more.
“Tell your uncle what you were doing,” Dean said to Charlie.
Charlie was silent. Sam waited. There was more than an argument over a fight at school going on, he could feel it, and he’d been asked to interfere...but not yet.
“Your ass is going to be as black and blue as your face if you don’t straighten up,” Dean said, and what would have sounded like generic parental anger to any outsider was anguish-laced frustration to Sam.
“I got in a fight,” Charlie said without turning.
“And then what,” Dean said heavily.
“I won,” she said with a toss of her head.
“Charlie!” Dean shouted, startling even himself.
“I told them to shut up or the bone stealer would come!” Charlie yelled, rising and stomping toward the kitchen. “The bone stealer comes and takes your bones and puts you in a box in the closet and it’s true and I saw it!”
She disappeared into the kitchen. Christo headed for the stairs. Loud noises still made him nervous.
When Sam looked at Dean again, Dean was already looking at him. Dean had a way of blanking his expression but had never learned to blank his eyes; they smoldered while he tried not to crack.
“There’s a hole all the way through the cafeteria wall and into a hallway where she sent a chair,” Dean said. “Nobody got hurt but there are nine or ten kids freaking out about how the chair went all by itself. She won’t tell anybody what started it. But she’ll tell you. On Monday I gotta start looking for another school because no way do kids get over stuff like that.”
Sam nodded, not necessarily in agreement, just encouraging Dean to go on.
“She’ll talk to you,” Dean said. “I’m all out of patience and all I’m gonna do now is make it worse. She’s not like the rest of the girls, she doesn’t come with a rational talking option.”
“And when they pitch fits, nothing goes flying, you mean,” Sam said. “Leave her here for the weekend, calm down, you and Dani go do something together. I’ll talk to her, but you might not like everything I do.”
Dean shook his head. “I don’t wanna know,” he said. He was struggling not to get more emotional than he already was and Sam nodded again. “You two have something with each other that I don’t always get, so, whatever it is, just...I don’t know what to do. She’s gonna get all...she’ll get away from us.”
Sam looked at him for a moment, watched him stare at the doorway to the kitchen. “Be good if someone reminded you occasionally that everything is okay,” he said softly. “You believe it?”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Shut up, Sam.”
“Yeah, okay,” Sam said, clapping him on one shoulder. “Go on. I got this one.”
Dean nodded and let himself out. Sam watched him go, watched him get in his truck and sit there with his forehead on the steering wheel for a long moment.
Sam left the window before sympathy could get the better of him.
He leaned against the kitchen doorway and watched Charlie rifle through the pantry for a snack. He wondered if she realized that she was straightening things as she went, lining things up by size and bringing them even with the edges of the shelves. He had seen Mary do it when she was nervous, just a hint of OCD to deal with what troubled her. It was a quiet way of exerting control over something in a world that seemed bent on taking it away.
Her curls were pulled back into a loose ponytail. Sam reflected again that she was a shade tall for her age, not as tall as Allie had been at nine or ten but still sprouting a little ahead of her class. She was slender yet sturdily built and for just an instant, Sam thought again of the afternoon that Dean had moved out during the divorce. Just a flash of twenty-something Charlie in the rocking chair that her own father had rocked her in. He knew what she would look like but not who she would be. How they helped her handle this episode in her life would probably determine it.
Sam had always wondered if Dean realized what his unrelenting stoicism silently demanded of the people around him. He unwittingly set a bar that caused the children in his life to look on him with awe and attempt to emulate him. He never would have imposed the same emotional restrictions on Charlie, he encouraged her to say what she felt within the boundaries of tact, to hug and be hugged, to let things out. Sam still felt a knee jerk urge to live up to Dean, the idea of Dean, his ability to say it’s no big deal to anything whether he felt that way or not.
And Sam was an adult and knew better.
Sam also ascribed to the fear-is-weakness school of thought because he was wired that way after the life he’d led. Fear got you killed.
Charlie had every right at her age and for a while longer to believe that her father was invincible. Puberty came along and divested most kids of that idea. Charlie had had her nose shoved right into the ugly truth of how quickly and easily she could lose him. Having the danger be mundane - a car accident, a fall - could have been enough of a blow, but the danger had not followed rules, had gone so far as to demonstrate that the idea of safe was ludicrous.
Dean had failed to save himself from something that Charlie had driven off on her own.
Then he had nearly died.
Sam had the luxury of looking on as an observer and knowing that Dean tended to channel fear into aggression. Charlie was developing the same tendency but with a child’s lack of restraint and nowhere to channel it to. The added twist of a power that was triggered by excessive emotion meant Dean was not overreacting to the situation.
All her gods were fallible.
Sam wanted to crouch down and say poor baby, I’m so sorry, everything will be okay but it was too late.
“Charlie,” he said.
She glanced at him, all small pale bruised face and recrimination. “You don’t have any Doritos.”
“Why were you fighting?” Sam said.
“It’s no big deal,” she said, still straightening shelves.
Sam sighed but made sure it stayed inaudible. “When people hit each other on purpose, it’s a big deal. Chairs through walls is a big deal.”
“Not my problem if no one else can handle it,” she said. “Now maybe they’ll shut up like they should have in the first place.”
“You’re always responsible for your own actions, no matter what anyone else does,” Sam said, trying to keep it level.
“I don’t have to listen to you,” Charlie said, voice dropping in anger. “Mom and dad are tired of yelling at me so dad brought me over here to get you to yell at me. You don’t even understand.”
Here we go, Sam thought. Now we’re getting somewhere. She’d been progressively irascible over the last month or so, and this was how she handled her parents. She got them to focus on her immediate behavior and warn her to watch her mouth. “How do you know?” he said.
She turned to him, eyes flat with the beginnings of real frustration and uncertainty. “You’re just jealous that all you get are stupid headaches and see things you can’t do anything about,” she said in a chilling singsong.
Sam was too on to her to even bother feeling annoyance over the jibe, even though it was a shock to have her treat him like that. If she could drive him off or distract him then she wouldn’t have to try and sort her thoughts and feelings for just that much longer.
One of the barstools by the counter spun around and glided across the floor to her, legs scraping, spinning back around until the back rested gently against the wall beside her. It was not a show of power.
Charlie blinked at him in open shock, startled into forgetting to maintain her ruse.
Sam didn’t smile at her.
“How did you do that?” she said, voice small, looking maybe all of five again, wonder and dread and - worst of all - need in her face.
“I learned to control it,” Sam said softly. “If I try and use it when I’m upset, I can’t control it at all.”
“But that’s what it’s for,” Charlie said, a note of desperation creeping in. “It’s for protecting. It’s for hitting, and...it’s for killing bad things.”
Of all the things Sam had been expecting to hear, that wasn’t it. No wonder she had refused to talk.
Jesus Christ.
It took so much effort just to stand there and purposely land the final blow to try and break her down.
“That’s not what it’s for,” he said coldly. “That’s not how a Winchester handles things. I’m disappointed, Charlie.”
Charlie froze, face suddenly blank and drained with hurt. She made one small, final attempt at locking down, but hurt was hurt and she hadn’t known much of it in her life, thank God, and when tears finally spilled over, her face crumpled and she ran to Sam.
He swung her up and wrapped his arms around her, and by the time he’d settled her on his lap on the couch she had her hands clenched into fists and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes, sobbing loudly. There was no hint of overwrought drama, just huge and honest wails of heartbroken, exhausted fear. She leaned against his chest, little body tense, finally sobbing silently on a single breath and unable to stop long enough to pull air back in. Sam sat her up and gave her a little shake to break the cycle. She’d done that as a toddler, cried so long and hard that she got stuck or began to gag. She had cried so rarely that it was as if she stored it all up and then tried to do too much at once.
She pulled in a long, whooping breath and then sobbed words at him without uncovering her face.
“Don’t you be mad at me!”
“I’m not,” Sam said. “I’m not mad, Yeah-Yeah.”
Dean could yell and yell, but disappointment from Sam was too much to bear.
“I didn’t kill it,” she sobbed. “I could have and I didn’t and it came here and maybe it has friends who will come and if I don’t practice it will come put us all on and wear us.”
Sam stood with her against his chest and carried her into the bathroom, and used a cool damp washcloth to wipe her face and bring her back around a little. He sat her on the closed lid of the toilet and then sat on the edge of the tub and said, “Can you listen to me a little, now?”
She nodded, breath still hitching, cloth clutched against the side of her feverish little face. He handed her a handful of toilet paper so she could blow her nose.
“You helped me find him,” he said. “You did everything you could. You don’t need to protect anybody, there won’t be any others, and we’re all safe right now. You did a good job, and your job is done.”
“But - “
“There won’t be any others,” Sam said again. “Me and your dad thought you should be a little older before I tried to teach you how to control it when you move things. But you’re ready now. If you keep using it when you don’t mean to or you try to use it only to harm, something awful will happen sooner or later. The other kids were afraid of you today, weren’t they.”
She nodded a little.
“And you liked it just a little,” he said, softer. “Didn’t you.”
She nodded again and with it more tears spilled down her face.
“I can help you, sweetheart,” he said. “But you have to listen, and no more fighting. You’ll feel better when you don’t fight, and we can all help you not be so scared. Okay?”
She nodded.
“You’re a good girl, Charlie,” Sam said, making sure she was looking him right in the eye. “You’re a good girl and a brave girl, and there’s a right way to do this. You don’t have to watch out anymore. Let me watch out for awhile, okay?”
She crawled back into his arms, and before he got back to the couch with her, she was asleep.
There was so much work to do, but she had not gotten too far away.
He took her shoes off and smoothed her now-loose hair back off her sweaty forehead and made sure not to hold her too tight so that she could cool down a little.
He imagined that Dean had been very like this as a little boy, shouldering whatever he could and pretending it was all fine right up until he broke. His own little-brother vantage had not afforded him this view as a child.
“Please be little just a while longer,” Sam whispered to her. “Be our little girl, just a while longer.”
Things were far from fixed but they were a long way toward better.
-|-
Sam was in the middle of making dinner when Sarah walked in the kitchen. She watched him for a moment, thinking maybe he’d heard them come in but was waiting for them to announce themselves. She could tell by the set of his shoulders and the way he was handling objects - a wooden spoon, the salt shaker, a hand towel - that his thoughts were elsewhere. He used the handle of the wooden spoon to find his place in a recipe book lying open on the counter.
“Smells good,” she said from a foot away, and he actually startled even though she’d come into the kitchen still wearing her flats, click click click. That was not something he’d have done prior to the Kelley incident.
She was proud of herself for referring to it in her head as the Kelley incident even though the real feeling was one long, wordless howl of denial.
“Hey,” Sam said, and bear-hugged her. They were a family of huggers, but this was excessive even for Sam, and Sarah made an oomph sound as he lifted her off her feet.
“How’s it going, big guy?” she said, hugging back, struggling for air. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Yeah, everything’s okay. You guys have fun?”
“Yep,” Sarah said. One of her shoes slipped off and clacked to the floor. “She found switchplates that are cute and ‘less grouchy’.”
Leigh had been insisting that the old light switch plates in her room and the upstairs bathroom were ‘tired’ and that they complained. Since they were the only switches she used with any regularity, she had requested new ones.
“Good,” he said, setting her down gently. “I’ll swap them out after dinner. Charlie’s here.”
Sarah tilted her head at him, waiting for the rest of it, looping her arms around his waist.
“She’s, uh...” Sam shrugged.
“Finally talking?” Sarah said.
“Almost,” Sam said. “She’s a little unglued and it’s more than just what happened. She’ll be here for the weekend.”
He gave her an abbreviated rundown about chairs in walls and Dean at the end of his rope and Charlie convincing herself that she was to blame for what had transpired at the house.
Leigh came in the kitchen and placed a hand on each parent’s back. “Everybody all okay in here?” she said.
“Of course,” Sam said. “I missed you, though.”
“We have to do something about your separation issues, dad,” Leigh said. “I’ll set the table.”
“There’s -“ Sarah began.
“Four,” Leigh said. “Those are Charlie’s shoes by the couch.” She drifted away.
“I like that kid,” Sam said.
“What a relief!” Sarah said. “There was a no-return policy. What can we do for Charlie? You guys need some more time alone?”
“Maybe,” Sam said. “If she fights, it could get messy. She doesn’t necessarily mean to throw stuff, and that’s part of the problem. She’s not ready for a lot of things.”
“Like the kind of guilt and anger she’s stacking away,” she said. “Poor kid. And what you’re not saying is that the normal, rebellious, out of control teenager stuff that might come later could be really bad if you don’t help keep it all together now.”
Sam had already thought about Charlie’s temper and her lack of discernable remorse in wreaking a little destruction, and how easily that all became habit when emotional maturity hadn’t set in. Sam thought about his own temper and what might have happened if he’d had powers at ten but no older brother.
Still, he hated to admit that he was worried about any of their kids using any power for all the wrong reasons. They were not perfect little angels with pure thoughts. They were human and unsettled and likely flirting with PTSD, also known as a Winchester’s default setting.
“Okay,” Sarah said, patting his chest. She recognized his hesitation and let him off the hook. “I get it. Dani and Dean yelled and hollered but all you have to do is look at her a certain way and it’s the end of the world.”
Sam pulled back a little to look at her. “Hey!”
“Forest for the trees,” Sarah said, clapping him on the shoulders before stealing his spoon and moving off to stir the pan on the stove. “She idolizes Dean, but she has a perfectly normal father-daughter relationship with him. Ever notice how she never sasses you? And how you’re the only one she doesn’t?”
Sam thought about the menace in that little girl’s voice a couple of hours earlier in that very kitchen, but he knew what it was about.
“She doesn’t try and manipulate you, or make you part of her pecking order,” Sarah said, careful not to look at him. “Yours might be the only voice she hears in all this. And sure, she’s only ten, but her powers don’t care and her parent’s ways of dealing with their own stress won’t necessarily work for her.”
Sam wrinkled his nose briefly in amusement, remembering Dean calling him Zenmaster Sam as an insult. “She’s not a miniature version of Dean,” he agreed. “If she was, then I could just take her out and let her kill something.”
Sarah grinned. He could see it by the edge of jaw that was visible from his vantage point.
“Try and remember that she’s surrounded with people who love her and can help her,” Sarah said. “With all the things that happened to you and Dean, with mostly only each other as support, you shouldn’t have turned out fine, but you did. That should tell you something.”
Sam got a box of rice down from one of the upper shelves of the pantry and set it on the counter. “I’m gonna wake her up so we can get some food in her,” he said.
Sarah stuck her foot out to try and trip him as he passed.
Charlie awoke reluctantly, and once awake was disgruntled. It spoke volumes to Sam and Sarah, because while she certainly had her moments, it was unusual for her to be genuinely grouchy and unwilling to be cajoled out of it. She had acted out, and then passed a moment of necessary hysteria, and her last bastion of protection was to be out of sorts and not try to hide it. Leigh, for once, did not jabber at the table or attempt to reach her customary shared-brain status with her agemate. She sensed that it would not help.
Sam started to clear the dishes and Sarah stopped him, glancing at Charlie. Sam nodded and kissed Leigh on top of her head before holding a hand out for Charlie. Charlie remained slumped in her chair at the table for a moment, but not for the same reason that she’d stood in the driveway with her back to her father. She was just weary. She didn’t ask him why, or where they were going. She simply slipped her hand in his and went along.
They left the house and drove. He was not going to try and distract her with games or a movie or any other cheerful activity. It would be like slapping a colorful bandaid on a snakebite and hoping the poison would just go away. They had all been trying to alternate distraction and discussion with the girls with mixed results.
The last time he had taken off with her alone, he had pushed her into accessing something she hadn’t been aware of, had forced her to use it, had dropped her into a situation most adults could not have handled. Still, she got into the car without hesitation and buckled herself in.
“You know what’s coming, right?” Sam said. “This is the part where I ask you what really happened at school.”
Allie might have shrugged; Mary would have bitten her lip; Leigh would have frowned and tucked her legs into the seat with her. Charlie, though, sighed. It was an altogether far too adult sound. “It’s not like someone said one dumb thing to me and then I had a big fit,” she said. “There’s a couple of kids at school, and they saw dad on the news, and said their parents thought dad was the one who really killed those people and he faked being grabbed so that the police wouldn’t think it was him.”
Normal kid stuff and stupid as hell.
“Why didn’t you talk to a teacher, or one of us?” Sam said even though he already knew the answer.
“I don’t tattle,” Charlie said. “I can take care of myself.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Sam said. “I forgot. Chairs though walls is the best way to do that.”
He saw her lower lip protrude just a little and watched her fold her arms, feelings already scrubbed raw.
“How many times did you tell them to shut up and go away?” Sam said.
“A million,” Charlie said. “I tried to talk it out. But it just made it worse. It’s not fair - I saw it. Even if I hadn’t, it’s not right to let someone talk about my dad.”
“I know,” Sam said.
“I had to make them stop,” she said. “I was really angry but I didn’t do anything to them for a long time. Then it was like, I couldn’t stop, they didn’t say anything different but it was like when you fill and fill a water balloon too full. And my hands just kind of suddenly came up and hit them in their stupid faces, and then I figure one hit and a lot of hitting all cost the same, so I kept hitting. It was hard for them to hit me back because of the classes we took, but there were three of them, stupid Jeremy and his stupid friends.”
All Sam could think about for a moment was how much he adored her. “That’s how you got the black eye,” he said.
“It hurt,” she said. “But mostly it just made me madder, and that’s when the chair happened. I didn’t cry or run or anything, I just sort of felt....like I was so angry that it made my head full. There were a lot of chairs.”
Sam nodded. She was capable of both finesse and brute strength, so there was an internal dial somewhere. That could help.
“How old were you when you could move things?” Charlie said. “And, Sam? How come we’re able to do things no one else can?”
“Twenty three,” Sam said. “But I was part of a...generation that activated at a certain age. It’s not the same for you. I don’t know exactly why we’re like we are.” That last was just a bit of a lie, one that would rest for awhile and rightly so. “But you don’t have to learn to handle it by trial and error like I did. It’ll be like the classes but mostly in your head. I want you to be very careful not to try to move anything unless we’re working together.”
“What about when I get so mad?” she said, and her tone changed. Sam glanced at her and found her running her fingers along the shoulder strap of her seatbelt.
“We can work on that too,” Sam said. “There are a lot of good ways to calm down that don’t mean you can’t express how you feel. The way you feel is normal, Charlie. It’s not bad, or wrong. It just needs to be something you can control.”
“I don’t want to hurt the baby,” she said in a very small voice.
Sam gripped the steering wheel in both hands. Were Winchesters just built to flog themselves? “Did anybody say that to you?” he said, careful to keep his tone steady and offhand. If anyone had said such a thing to her, even Dean or Dani in a moment of worried anger, so help him, he would -
“No,” Charlie said. “I just think about how if I make things happen and don’t know when or where - “
“That won’t happen,” Sam said. “We’ll work on it. You’ll be as quick a learner as you are with guns.”
“I want to be a sister,” Charlie said. “Me and Allie talked about how important is it to be a good sister, and the baby will need me.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, feeling a small knot of apprehension loosen. “The baby will need you, a lot. Are you worried about things changing now that you’ll be a sister?”
“I was, a little,” she said. “But....mom and dad....I mean, you love Allie and Mary and Leigh all the same but different because they’re different, and you love me too and it’s okay. It’s really weird, and I have to get used to stuff. But. I’m kind of hard to ignore, Sam.”
Sam made an appreciative sound. “I noticed. Listen, we’re gonna get some hot chocolate, so do you want whipped cream on it?”
“There’s no point otherwise,” she said.
They went through a Starbucks and then strolled along back to the car hand in hand.
When she was settled in again, Sam didn’t move to start the car. “I owe you an apology,” he said.
Charlie was looking out the windshield, but her eyebrows quirked and she seemed genuinely confused. “For what?”
“For what happened the night we found your dad,” Sam said, turning a little to face her. “I scared you even more than you already were. I used you and made you use your power to find him, and you didn’t even know that you could do that. I was scared too and I didn’t put you first. I couldn’t figure out how else to find him, and I was afraid that we’d never see him again. But that’s not an excuse. I should have tried to find another way. What I did had a good outcome but it was still the wrong thing to do.”
She just looked at him for a long moment, small hands wrapped around her cup.
“I put you in a position where you ended up having to defend yourself,” he said. "I left you alone in the car.”
“If you hadn’t taken me with, how were you going to find him?” Charlie said.
“I don’t know,” Sam said.
“Maybe if I’d been at your house instead I could have been the one to shoot it when it came in wearing my dad,” she said in a near approximation of the voice she’d used on him earlier in the kitchen. “That would have been much less scary.”
Sometimes she frightened him a little.
“Dad was really mad,” Charlie said in the resulting silence.
“I know,” Sam said.
“I asked him not to be,” Charlie said, watching several people pass the car. She took a sip of hot chocolate. “I would like to see a thousand monsters rather than not see my dad again.”
“Me too,” Sam said. He was finding himself reduced to two-word sentences.
“So I’m not mad,” she said.
“Maybe a little,” Sam said. “I was pretty mean to you.”
“I was pretty mean to you earlier,” she said. “Are we even?”
Sam shook his head. “I have to make it up to you.”
“My birthday is next month,” Charlie said with a trace of audible glee.
“This has to be separate,” Sam said. “Say, ‘Sam, you’re an asshole’.”
Her mouth dropped open a little. “No,” she said, glee shifting down the spectrum to aversion.
“Please,” Sam said, resting his temple against the steering wheel so he could give her an exaggerated pout.
“Someone’s always hollering at me not to swear, and now you want me to,” Charlie said.
“You get a free pass until we get home,” Sam said. “Go on. ‘Sam, you asshole’.”
Her brows drew together and she narrowed her eyes a little, mouth scrunching into a visible attempt to stop herself from laughing. She looked far too much like Dean right then, and Sam snickered.
“Can I have a pony instead?” Charlie said.
“C’mon, I can’t sleep ever again until you do it,” Sam said.
Charlie sighed again, but the very end of it tapered off into a giggle. “Sam, you’re an asshole.”
Sam threw his head back and laughed. It was as much relief as it was the hilarity of hearing epithets in such a cute little voice, said with such aplomb. He stuck his hand out for her to shake. “Okay, now we’re even.”
She shook his hand. “Good.”
Without letting go, Sam added, “And if you feel like maybe you’re getting mad or something’s bugging you, you talk to your mom and dad and me and aunt Sarah first. And no powers unless we’re working on it together.”
“I know,” Charlie said. “But what if something else comes to get us?”
“I doubt it,” Sam said. “But, you know what? If something does? We’ll stick together and keep each other safe.”
She seemed to relax a little. He’d said the magic words again.
They were quiet on the way home, sipping cocoa.
When they got back, Charlie asked to call home.
Sam and Sarah left her alone but hovered within earshot, and they both heard her say hi, it’s me. Before she could get a response she added daddy I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it and then she burst into tears. Sam looked at the ceiling and blinked hard to keep his eyes clear; Sarah covered her mouth briefly. There were a few quiet, hitched sobs and the occasional uh-huh and then I love you too and then she put the phone down and walked out of the kitchen wiping her eyes. “He wants to talk to you,” she said, then broke into sobs again. Sam picked her up and let her cry, and Sarah went to get the phone.
“I’m coming to get her,” Dean said.
“Wait, hold on,” Sarah said. “She’s okay, let her cry it out here, let things settle. You knew Sam would get through to her. That’s why she’s here.”
She could practically hear Dean struggle on the other end of the line.
“Seems counterintuitive, but I think a little time apart will help,” Sarah said. “She really is okay. She’s got to vent, and sometimes it’s different venting in front of...another member of your family than a parent.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dean said. “Fine.”
“She’ll be a whole different kid by the time you see her on Sunday,” Sarah said. “We’ve already beaten her at least twice where the bruises won’t show. Just make sure she wears long sleeves in public for awhile.”
“All right, all right,” Dean said, but he didn’t sound as troubled. “It’s just...hard to hear her cry. Even if it’s good that she finally will.”
Sarah wanted to agree but didn’t need to, so she said, “Occupational hazard. Makes you feel like you’d do anything to stop it.”
Dean was silent for a moment. “Making her change schools and be the new kid is gonna stress her out even more, but I can’t let her be the one everybody whispers about and stares at. If only one or two kids had seen it, I’d -“
“Just think about it for now,” Sarah said, watching Sam pace the livingroom with Charlie cradled against one shoulder. “Maybe let her go back and see what happens. You can always move her later or wait until the end of the year. Give her a chance to handle it.”
Dean sighed.
“Tell you what,” Sarah said. “It hasn’t happened in a little while, but at the first sign of more teenage grouchiness, Allie is yours.”
“Deal,” Dean said. “Keep the bail fund paid up, we might need it.”
“Deal,” Sarah said. “She called you all on her own, by the way,” she added, meaning the apology. “That was her idea.”
“She’s a good kid,” Dean said. He cleared his throat and Sarah knew he was getting mushy over his little girl again. “Okay, well. We’ll see you on Sunday.”
-|-
Charlie slept between her aunt and uncle that night, warmly surrounded. She wandered down the hall in the early hours to snuggle in with Allie, who tucked her in close and safe.
-|-
Forest For The Trees
(c)2006 b stearns
_____________
Too alarming now to talk about
Take your pictures down and shake it out
Truth or consequence, say it aloud
Use that evidence, race it around...
–Foo Fighters, My Hero
-|-
February, 2030
Sam heard Dean’s truck pull up and went to stand by the door. He liked watching Dean get kids out of vehicles. Dean was so doting. Seatbelts and carseats and childlocks, and hey wait until I let you out. Sam remembered being the one on the receiving end of it to some extent.
When Dean had called and said he was bringing Charlie and dropping her off for time with Sam in particular, Sam had been fine with it but had wondered what was up. Dean had responded with a very enigmatic wait until you see her.
Sam had imagined inappropriate applications of hair dye or maybe a run-in with a self-styled haircut. Charlie had, after all, used a set of Sharpies at the age of four to ‘put makeup on’. It had taken awhile for the ink to fade. The tone of Dean’s voice was less she’s going to be the death of me than I’m going to kill her, though.
It was a Friday night and Allie was at the movies with friends, Mary was at a slumber party and Leigh was out shopping with Sarah. Each girl got a trip out with one or both parents for one-on-one time and a chance to spend allowance. Sam thought having the house to himself for once would be cool, but mostly he was bored and had resorted to flipping channels.
He watched Charlie fling herself out of the truck and slam the door. She was a lifelong stomper and a slammer of doors, and it was never hard to guess what mood she was in. She was going to be ten in a month but was already flirting with preteen moodiness. She turned her back to her father as he passed her, refusing to look at him, and Sam heard Dean say get your ass inside. Now.
Sam opened the door as Dean approached and took in the look of warning on his face. It was possible to love someone so much that you couldn’t always stand them, and that defined the arguments his brother and niece spent so much time engaging in. They were two peas in a pod. Watching them made Sam understand why John had driven him so crazy as a kid, why his fights with his father had been so unremittingly emotional to the point of near violence. Dean had wanted so badly to be a perfect reflection of John, and Sam had been born to that role without wanting it.
Having a sibling would do wonders for Charlie.
She continued to stand in the driveway.
“Gonna kill her, Sam,” Dean said in a voice low enough for only Sam to hear. “We tried the rational talking thing, and reminding her that everything is okay. She doesn’t hear it. We’re not getting through. I’ve been yelling at her since I had to get her from school at noon, Dani’s yelled at her, the kid doesn’t care. I’m done yelling.”
“What’s going on?” Sam said, glancing between Dean’s face and Charlie’s small, stiff back.
“She’s been suspended from school for a week,” Dean said. He turned and raised his voice. “Now, Charlie. Now.”
She hesitated just long enough to make sure her disobedience was obvious. Then she walked quickly to the door, arms folded, face set.
Sporting a black eye and a decent scrape on one cheek.
Sam nodded and stepped away from the door. “C’mon in.” He closed the door behind them and watched Charlie walk away to sit stiffly on the couch, never making eye contact with him.
Christo trotted out and went straight to Dean, tail waving, taking a distracted patting as if it was much more.
“Tell your uncle what you were doing,” Dean said to Charlie.
Charlie was silent. Sam waited. There was more than an argument over a fight at school going on, he could feel it, and he’d been asked to interfere...but not yet.
“Your ass is going to be as black and blue as your face if you don’t straighten up,” Dean said, and what would have sounded like generic parental anger to any outsider was anguish-laced frustration to Sam.
“I got in a fight,” Charlie said without turning.
“And then what,” Dean said heavily.
“I won,” she said with a toss of her head.
“Charlie!” Dean shouted, startling even himself.
“I told them to shut up or the bone stealer would come!” Charlie yelled, rising and stomping toward the kitchen. “The bone stealer comes and takes your bones and puts you in a box in the closet and it’s true and I saw it!”
She disappeared into the kitchen. Christo headed for the stairs. Loud noises still made him nervous.
When Sam looked at Dean again, Dean was already looking at him. Dean had a way of blanking his expression but had never learned to blank his eyes; they smoldered while he tried not to crack.
“There’s a hole all the way through the cafeteria wall and into a hallway where she sent a chair,” Dean said. “Nobody got hurt but there are nine or ten kids freaking out about how the chair went all by itself. She won’t tell anybody what started it. But she’ll tell you. On Monday I gotta start looking for another school because no way do kids get over stuff like that.”
Sam nodded, not necessarily in agreement, just encouraging Dean to go on.
“She’ll talk to you,” Dean said. “I’m all out of patience and all I’m gonna do now is make it worse. She’s not like the rest of the girls, she doesn’t come with a rational talking option.”
“And when they pitch fits, nothing goes flying, you mean,” Sam said. “Leave her here for the weekend, calm down, you and Dani go do something together. I’ll talk to her, but you might not like everything I do.”
Dean shook his head. “I don’t wanna know,” he said. He was struggling not to get more emotional than he already was and Sam nodded again. “You two have something with each other that I don’t always get, so, whatever it is, just...I don’t know what to do. She’s gonna get all...she’ll get away from us.”
Sam looked at him for a moment, watched him stare at the doorway to the kitchen. “Be good if someone reminded you occasionally that everything is okay,” he said softly. “You believe it?”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Shut up, Sam.”
“Yeah, okay,” Sam said, clapping him on one shoulder. “Go on. I got this one.”
Dean nodded and let himself out. Sam watched him go, watched him get in his truck and sit there with his forehead on the steering wheel for a long moment.
Sam left the window before sympathy could get the better of him.
He leaned against the kitchen doorway and watched Charlie rifle through the pantry for a snack. He wondered if she realized that she was straightening things as she went, lining things up by size and bringing them even with the edges of the shelves. He had seen Mary do it when she was nervous, just a hint of OCD to deal with what troubled her. It was a quiet way of exerting control over something in a world that seemed bent on taking it away.
Her curls were pulled back into a loose ponytail. Sam reflected again that she was a shade tall for her age, not as tall as Allie had been at nine or ten but still sprouting a little ahead of her class. She was slender yet sturdily built and for just an instant, Sam thought again of the afternoon that Dean had moved out during the divorce. Just a flash of twenty-something Charlie in the rocking chair that her own father had rocked her in. He knew what she would look like but not who she would be. How they helped her handle this episode in her life would probably determine it.
Sam had always wondered if Dean realized what his unrelenting stoicism silently demanded of the people around him. He unwittingly set a bar that caused the children in his life to look on him with awe and attempt to emulate him. He never would have imposed the same emotional restrictions on Charlie, he encouraged her to say what she felt within the boundaries of tact, to hug and be hugged, to let things out. Sam still felt a knee jerk urge to live up to Dean, the idea of Dean, his ability to say it’s no big deal to anything whether he felt that way or not.
And Sam was an adult and knew better.
Sam also ascribed to the fear-is-weakness school of thought because he was wired that way after the life he’d led. Fear got you killed.
Charlie had every right at her age and for a while longer to believe that her father was invincible. Puberty came along and divested most kids of that idea. Charlie had had her nose shoved right into the ugly truth of how quickly and easily she could lose him. Having the danger be mundane - a car accident, a fall - could have been enough of a blow, but the danger had not followed rules, had gone so far as to demonstrate that the idea of safe was ludicrous.
Dean had failed to save himself from something that Charlie had driven off on her own.
Then he had nearly died.
Sam had the luxury of looking on as an observer and knowing that Dean tended to channel fear into aggression. Charlie was developing the same tendency but with a child’s lack of restraint and nowhere to channel it to. The added twist of a power that was triggered by excessive emotion meant Dean was not overreacting to the situation.
All her gods were fallible.
Sam wanted to crouch down and say poor baby, I’m so sorry, everything will be okay but it was too late.
“Charlie,” he said.
She glanced at him, all small pale bruised face and recrimination. “You don’t have any Doritos.”
“Why were you fighting?” Sam said.
“It’s no big deal,” she said, still straightening shelves.
Sam sighed but made sure it stayed inaudible. “When people hit each other on purpose, it’s a big deal. Chairs through walls is a big deal.”
“Not my problem if no one else can handle it,” she said. “Now maybe they’ll shut up like they should have in the first place.”
“You’re always responsible for your own actions, no matter what anyone else does,” Sam said, trying to keep it level.
“I don’t have to listen to you,” Charlie said, voice dropping in anger. “Mom and dad are tired of yelling at me so dad brought me over here to get you to yell at me. You don’t even understand.”
Here we go, Sam thought. Now we’re getting somewhere. She’d been progressively irascible over the last month or so, and this was how she handled her parents. She got them to focus on her immediate behavior and warn her to watch her mouth. “How do you know?” he said.
She turned to him, eyes flat with the beginnings of real frustration and uncertainty. “You’re just jealous that all you get are stupid headaches and see things you can’t do anything about,” she said in a chilling singsong.
Sam was too on to her to even bother feeling annoyance over the jibe, even though it was a shock to have her treat him like that. If she could drive him off or distract him then she wouldn’t have to try and sort her thoughts and feelings for just that much longer.
One of the barstools by the counter spun around and glided across the floor to her, legs scraping, spinning back around until the back rested gently against the wall beside her. It was not a show of power.
Charlie blinked at him in open shock, startled into forgetting to maintain her ruse.
Sam didn’t smile at her.
“How did you do that?” she said, voice small, looking maybe all of five again, wonder and dread and - worst of all - need in her face.
“I learned to control it,” Sam said softly. “If I try and use it when I’m upset, I can’t control it at all.”
“But that’s what it’s for,” Charlie said, a note of desperation creeping in. “It’s for protecting. It’s for hitting, and...it’s for killing bad things.”
Of all the things Sam had been expecting to hear, that wasn’t it. No wonder she had refused to talk.
Jesus Christ.
It took so much effort just to stand there and purposely land the final blow to try and break her down.
“That’s not what it’s for,” he said coldly. “That’s not how a Winchester handles things. I’m disappointed, Charlie.”
Charlie froze, face suddenly blank and drained with hurt. She made one small, final attempt at locking down, but hurt was hurt and she hadn’t known much of it in her life, thank God, and when tears finally spilled over, her face crumpled and she ran to Sam.
He swung her up and wrapped his arms around her, and by the time he’d settled her on his lap on the couch she had her hands clenched into fists and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes, sobbing loudly. There was no hint of overwrought drama, just huge and honest wails of heartbroken, exhausted fear. She leaned against his chest, little body tense, finally sobbing silently on a single breath and unable to stop long enough to pull air back in. Sam sat her up and gave her a little shake to break the cycle. She’d done that as a toddler, cried so long and hard that she got stuck or began to gag. She had cried so rarely that it was as if she stored it all up and then tried to do too much at once.
She pulled in a long, whooping breath and then sobbed words at him without uncovering her face.
“Don’t you be mad at me!”
“I’m not,” Sam said. “I’m not mad, Yeah-Yeah.”
Dean could yell and yell, but disappointment from Sam was too much to bear.
“I didn’t kill it,” she sobbed. “I could have and I didn’t and it came here and maybe it has friends who will come and if I don’t practice it will come put us all on and wear us.”
Sam stood with her against his chest and carried her into the bathroom, and used a cool damp washcloth to wipe her face and bring her back around a little. He sat her on the closed lid of the toilet and then sat on the edge of the tub and said, “Can you listen to me a little, now?”
She nodded, breath still hitching, cloth clutched against the side of her feverish little face. He handed her a handful of toilet paper so she could blow her nose.
“You helped me find him,” he said. “You did everything you could. You don’t need to protect anybody, there won’t be any others, and we’re all safe right now. You did a good job, and your job is done.”
“But - “
“There won’t be any others,” Sam said again. “Me and your dad thought you should be a little older before I tried to teach you how to control it when you move things. But you’re ready now. If you keep using it when you don’t mean to or you try to use it only to harm, something awful will happen sooner or later. The other kids were afraid of you today, weren’t they.”
She nodded a little.
“And you liked it just a little,” he said, softer. “Didn’t you.”
She nodded again and with it more tears spilled down her face.
“I can help you, sweetheart,” he said. “But you have to listen, and no more fighting. You’ll feel better when you don’t fight, and we can all help you not be so scared. Okay?”
She nodded.
“You’re a good girl, Charlie,” Sam said, making sure she was looking him right in the eye. “You’re a good girl and a brave girl, and there’s a right way to do this. You don’t have to watch out anymore. Let me watch out for awhile, okay?”
She crawled back into his arms, and before he got back to the couch with her, she was asleep.
There was so much work to do, but she had not gotten too far away.
He took her shoes off and smoothed her now-loose hair back off her sweaty forehead and made sure not to hold her too tight so that she could cool down a little.
He imagined that Dean had been very like this as a little boy, shouldering whatever he could and pretending it was all fine right up until he broke. His own little-brother vantage had not afforded him this view as a child.
“Please be little just a while longer,” Sam whispered to her. “Be our little girl, just a while longer.”
Things were far from fixed but they were a long way toward better.
-|-
Sam was in the middle of making dinner when Sarah walked in the kitchen. She watched him for a moment, thinking maybe he’d heard them come in but was waiting for them to announce themselves. She could tell by the set of his shoulders and the way he was handling objects - a wooden spoon, the salt shaker, a hand towel - that his thoughts were elsewhere. He used the handle of the wooden spoon to find his place in a recipe book lying open on the counter.
“Smells good,” she said from a foot away, and he actually startled even though she’d come into the kitchen still wearing her flats, click click click. That was not something he’d have done prior to the Kelley incident.
She was proud of herself for referring to it in her head as the Kelley incident even though the real feeling was one long, wordless howl of denial.
“Hey,” Sam said, and bear-hugged her. They were a family of huggers, but this was excessive even for Sam, and Sarah made an oomph sound as he lifted her off her feet.
“How’s it going, big guy?” she said, hugging back, struggling for air. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Yeah, everything’s okay. You guys have fun?”
“Yep,” Sarah said. One of her shoes slipped off and clacked to the floor. “She found switchplates that are cute and ‘less grouchy’.”
Leigh had been insisting that the old light switch plates in her room and the upstairs bathroom were ‘tired’ and that they complained. Since they were the only switches she used with any regularity, she had requested new ones.
“Good,” he said, setting her down gently. “I’ll swap them out after dinner. Charlie’s here.”
Sarah tilted her head at him, waiting for the rest of it, looping her arms around his waist.
“She’s, uh...” Sam shrugged.
“Finally talking?” Sarah said.
“Almost,” Sam said. “She’s a little unglued and it’s more than just what happened. She’ll be here for the weekend.”
He gave her an abbreviated rundown about chairs in walls and Dean at the end of his rope and Charlie convincing herself that she was to blame for what had transpired at the house.
Leigh came in the kitchen and placed a hand on each parent’s back. “Everybody all okay in here?” she said.
“Of course,” Sam said. “I missed you, though.”
“We have to do something about your separation issues, dad,” Leigh said. “I’ll set the table.”
“There’s -“ Sarah began.
“Four,” Leigh said. “Those are Charlie’s shoes by the couch.” She drifted away.
“I like that kid,” Sam said.
“What a relief!” Sarah said. “There was a no-return policy. What can we do for Charlie? You guys need some more time alone?”
“Maybe,” Sam said. “If she fights, it could get messy. She doesn’t necessarily mean to throw stuff, and that’s part of the problem. She’s not ready for a lot of things.”
“Like the kind of guilt and anger she’s stacking away,” she said. “Poor kid. And what you’re not saying is that the normal, rebellious, out of control teenager stuff that might come later could be really bad if you don’t help keep it all together now.”
Sam had already thought about Charlie’s temper and her lack of discernable remorse in wreaking a little destruction, and how easily that all became habit when emotional maturity hadn’t set in. Sam thought about his own temper and what might have happened if he’d had powers at ten but no older brother.
Still, he hated to admit that he was worried about any of their kids using any power for all the wrong reasons. They were not perfect little angels with pure thoughts. They were human and unsettled and likely flirting with PTSD, also known as a Winchester’s default setting.
“Okay,” Sarah said, patting his chest. She recognized his hesitation and let him off the hook. “I get it. Dani and Dean yelled and hollered but all you have to do is look at her a certain way and it’s the end of the world.”
Sam pulled back a little to look at her. “Hey!”
“Forest for the trees,” Sarah said, clapping him on the shoulders before stealing his spoon and moving off to stir the pan on the stove. “She idolizes Dean, but she has a perfectly normal father-daughter relationship with him. Ever notice how she never sasses you? And how you’re the only one she doesn’t?”
Sam thought about the menace in that little girl’s voice a couple of hours earlier in that very kitchen, but he knew what it was about.
“She doesn’t try and manipulate you, or make you part of her pecking order,” Sarah said, careful not to look at him. “Yours might be the only voice she hears in all this. And sure, she’s only ten, but her powers don’t care and her parent’s ways of dealing with their own stress won’t necessarily work for her.”
Sam wrinkled his nose briefly in amusement, remembering Dean calling him Zenmaster Sam as an insult. “She’s not a miniature version of Dean,” he agreed. “If she was, then I could just take her out and let her kill something.”
Sarah grinned. He could see it by the edge of jaw that was visible from his vantage point.
“Try and remember that she’s surrounded with people who love her and can help her,” Sarah said. “With all the things that happened to you and Dean, with mostly only each other as support, you shouldn’t have turned out fine, but you did. That should tell you something.”
Sam got a box of rice down from one of the upper shelves of the pantry and set it on the counter. “I’m gonna wake her up so we can get some food in her,” he said.
Sarah stuck her foot out to try and trip him as he passed.
Charlie awoke reluctantly, and once awake was disgruntled. It spoke volumes to Sam and Sarah, because while she certainly had her moments, it was unusual for her to be genuinely grouchy and unwilling to be cajoled out of it. She had acted out, and then passed a moment of necessary hysteria, and her last bastion of protection was to be out of sorts and not try to hide it. Leigh, for once, did not jabber at the table or attempt to reach her customary shared-brain status with her agemate. She sensed that it would not help.
Sam started to clear the dishes and Sarah stopped him, glancing at Charlie. Sam nodded and kissed Leigh on top of her head before holding a hand out for Charlie. Charlie remained slumped in her chair at the table for a moment, but not for the same reason that she’d stood in the driveway with her back to her father. She was just weary. She didn’t ask him why, or where they were going. She simply slipped her hand in his and went along.
They left the house and drove. He was not going to try and distract her with games or a movie or any other cheerful activity. It would be like slapping a colorful bandaid on a snakebite and hoping the poison would just go away. They had all been trying to alternate distraction and discussion with the girls with mixed results.
The last time he had taken off with her alone, he had pushed her into accessing something she hadn’t been aware of, had forced her to use it, had dropped her into a situation most adults could not have handled. Still, she got into the car without hesitation and buckled herself in.
“You know what’s coming, right?” Sam said. “This is the part where I ask you what really happened at school.”
Allie might have shrugged; Mary would have bitten her lip; Leigh would have frowned and tucked her legs into the seat with her. Charlie, though, sighed. It was an altogether far too adult sound. “It’s not like someone said one dumb thing to me and then I had a big fit,” she said. “There’s a couple of kids at school, and they saw dad on the news, and said their parents thought dad was the one who really killed those people and he faked being grabbed so that the police wouldn’t think it was him.”
Normal kid stuff and stupid as hell.
“Why didn’t you talk to a teacher, or one of us?” Sam said even though he already knew the answer.
“I don’t tattle,” Charlie said. “I can take care of myself.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Sam said. “I forgot. Chairs though walls is the best way to do that.”
He saw her lower lip protrude just a little and watched her fold her arms, feelings already scrubbed raw.
“How many times did you tell them to shut up and go away?” Sam said.
“A million,” Charlie said. “I tried to talk it out. But it just made it worse. It’s not fair - I saw it. Even if I hadn’t, it’s not right to let someone talk about my dad.”
“I know,” Sam said.
“I had to make them stop,” she said. “I was really angry but I didn’t do anything to them for a long time. Then it was like, I couldn’t stop, they didn’t say anything different but it was like when you fill and fill a water balloon too full. And my hands just kind of suddenly came up and hit them in their stupid faces, and then I figure one hit and a lot of hitting all cost the same, so I kept hitting. It was hard for them to hit me back because of the classes we took, but there were three of them, stupid Jeremy and his stupid friends.”
All Sam could think about for a moment was how much he adored her. “That’s how you got the black eye,” he said.
“It hurt,” she said. “But mostly it just made me madder, and that’s when the chair happened. I didn’t cry or run or anything, I just sort of felt....like I was so angry that it made my head full. There were a lot of chairs.”
Sam nodded. She was capable of both finesse and brute strength, so there was an internal dial somewhere. That could help.
“How old were you when you could move things?” Charlie said. “And, Sam? How come we’re able to do things no one else can?”
“Twenty three,” Sam said. “But I was part of a...generation that activated at a certain age. It’s not the same for you. I don’t know exactly why we’re like we are.” That last was just a bit of a lie, one that would rest for awhile and rightly so. “But you don’t have to learn to handle it by trial and error like I did. It’ll be like the classes but mostly in your head. I want you to be very careful not to try to move anything unless we’re working together.”
“What about when I get so mad?” she said, and her tone changed. Sam glanced at her and found her running her fingers along the shoulder strap of her seatbelt.
“We can work on that too,” Sam said. “There are a lot of good ways to calm down that don’t mean you can’t express how you feel. The way you feel is normal, Charlie. It’s not bad, or wrong. It just needs to be something you can control.”
“I don’t want to hurt the baby,” she said in a very small voice.
Sam gripped the steering wheel in both hands. Were Winchesters just built to flog themselves? “Did anybody say that to you?” he said, careful to keep his tone steady and offhand. If anyone had said such a thing to her, even Dean or Dani in a moment of worried anger, so help him, he would -
“No,” Charlie said. “I just think about how if I make things happen and don’t know when or where - “
“That won’t happen,” Sam said. “We’ll work on it. You’ll be as quick a learner as you are with guns.”
“I want to be a sister,” Charlie said. “Me and Allie talked about how important is it to be a good sister, and the baby will need me.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, feeling a small knot of apprehension loosen. “The baby will need you, a lot. Are you worried about things changing now that you’ll be a sister?”
“I was, a little,” she said. “But....mom and dad....I mean, you love Allie and Mary and Leigh all the same but different because they’re different, and you love me too and it’s okay. It’s really weird, and I have to get used to stuff. But. I’m kind of hard to ignore, Sam.”
Sam made an appreciative sound. “I noticed. Listen, we’re gonna get some hot chocolate, so do you want whipped cream on it?”
“There’s no point otherwise,” she said.
They went through a Starbucks and then strolled along back to the car hand in hand.
When she was settled in again, Sam didn’t move to start the car. “I owe you an apology,” he said.
Charlie was looking out the windshield, but her eyebrows quirked and she seemed genuinely confused. “For what?”
“For what happened the night we found your dad,” Sam said, turning a little to face her. “I scared you even more than you already were. I used you and made you use your power to find him, and you didn’t even know that you could do that. I was scared too and I didn’t put you first. I couldn’t figure out how else to find him, and I was afraid that we’d never see him again. But that’s not an excuse. I should have tried to find another way. What I did had a good outcome but it was still the wrong thing to do.”
She just looked at him for a long moment, small hands wrapped around her cup.
“I put you in a position where you ended up having to defend yourself,” he said. "I left you alone in the car.”
“If you hadn’t taken me with, how were you going to find him?” Charlie said.
“I don’t know,” Sam said.
“Maybe if I’d been at your house instead I could have been the one to shoot it when it came in wearing my dad,” she said in a near approximation of the voice she’d used on him earlier in the kitchen. “That would have been much less scary.”
Sometimes she frightened him a little.
“Dad was really mad,” Charlie said in the resulting silence.
“I know,” Sam said.
“I asked him not to be,” Charlie said, watching several people pass the car. She took a sip of hot chocolate. “I would like to see a thousand monsters rather than not see my dad again.”
“Me too,” Sam said. He was finding himself reduced to two-word sentences.
“So I’m not mad,” she said.
“Maybe a little,” Sam said. “I was pretty mean to you.”
“I was pretty mean to you earlier,” she said. “Are we even?”
Sam shook his head. “I have to make it up to you.”
“My birthday is next month,” Charlie said with a trace of audible glee.
“This has to be separate,” Sam said. “Say, ‘Sam, you’re an asshole’.”
Her mouth dropped open a little. “No,” she said, glee shifting down the spectrum to aversion.
“Please,” Sam said, resting his temple against the steering wheel so he could give her an exaggerated pout.
“Someone’s always hollering at me not to swear, and now you want me to,” Charlie said.
“You get a free pass until we get home,” Sam said. “Go on. ‘Sam, you asshole’.”
Her brows drew together and she narrowed her eyes a little, mouth scrunching into a visible attempt to stop herself from laughing. She looked far too much like Dean right then, and Sam snickered.
“Can I have a pony instead?” Charlie said.
“C’mon, I can’t sleep ever again until you do it,” Sam said.
Charlie sighed again, but the very end of it tapered off into a giggle. “Sam, you’re an asshole.”
Sam threw his head back and laughed. It was as much relief as it was the hilarity of hearing epithets in such a cute little voice, said with such aplomb. He stuck his hand out for her to shake. “Okay, now we’re even.”
She shook his hand. “Good.”
Without letting go, Sam added, “And if you feel like maybe you’re getting mad or something’s bugging you, you talk to your mom and dad and me and aunt Sarah first. And no powers unless we’re working on it together.”
“I know,” Charlie said. “But what if something else comes to get us?”
“I doubt it,” Sam said. “But, you know what? If something does? We’ll stick together and keep each other safe.”
She seemed to relax a little. He’d said the magic words again.
They were quiet on the way home, sipping cocoa.
When they got back, Charlie asked to call home.
Sam and Sarah left her alone but hovered within earshot, and they both heard her say hi, it’s me. Before she could get a response she added daddy I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it and then she burst into tears. Sam looked at the ceiling and blinked hard to keep his eyes clear; Sarah covered her mouth briefly. There were a few quiet, hitched sobs and the occasional uh-huh and then I love you too and then she put the phone down and walked out of the kitchen wiping her eyes. “He wants to talk to you,” she said, then broke into sobs again. Sam picked her up and let her cry, and Sarah went to get the phone.
“I’m coming to get her,” Dean said.
“Wait, hold on,” Sarah said. “She’s okay, let her cry it out here, let things settle. You knew Sam would get through to her. That’s why she’s here.”
She could practically hear Dean struggle on the other end of the line.
“Seems counterintuitive, but I think a little time apart will help,” Sarah said. “She really is okay. She’s got to vent, and sometimes it’s different venting in front of...another member of your family than a parent.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dean said. “Fine.”
“She’ll be a whole different kid by the time you see her on Sunday,” Sarah said. “We’ve already beaten her at least twice where the bruises won’t show. Just make sure she wears long sleeves in public for awhile.”
“All right, all right,” Dean said, but he didn’t sound as troubled. “It’s just...hard to hear her cry. Even if it’s good that she finally will.”
Sarah wanted to agree but didn’t need to, so she said, “Occupational hazard. Makes you feel like you’d do anything to stop it.”
Dean was silent for a moment. “Making her change schools and be the new kid is gonna stress her out even more, but I can’t let her be the one everybody whispers about and stares at. If only one or two kids had seen it, I’d -“
“Just think about it for now,” Sarah said, watching Sam pace the livingroom with Charlie cradled against one shoulder. “Maybe let her go back and see what happens. You can always move her later or wait until the end of the year. Give her a chance to handle it.”
Dean sighed.
“Tell you what,” Sarah said. “It hasn’t happened in a little while, but at the first sign of more teenage grouchiness, Allie is yours.”
“Deal,” Dean said. “Keep the bail fund paid up, we might need it.”
“Deal,” Sarah said. “She called you all on her own, by the way,” she added, meaning the apology. “That was her idea.”
“She’s a good kid,” Dean said. He cleared his throat and Sarah knew he was getting mushy over his little girl again. “Okay, well. We’ll see you on Sunday.”
-|-
Charlie slept between her aunt and uncle that night, warmly surrounded. She wandered down the hall in the early hours to snuggle in with Allie, who tucked her in close and safe.
-|-
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Date: 2006-12-09 08:29 am (UTC):D
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Date: 2006-12-09 08:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-09 08:47 am (UTC)Damn, that's a nice way to wrap up a week.
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Date: 2006-12-09 08:56 am (UTC)I have TEARS!
Oh Charlie...
But I have to say, I think we need more Dean/Charlie quality time... Especially with the baby coming (and I'm thinking that like theres a real baby) so um yeah...
::sniffs::
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Date: 2006-12-09 12:05 pm (UTC)Poor Daddy!Dean *hugs him* and uncle Sam rocks :D
thanks!
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Date: 2006-12-09 12:57 pm (UTC)Dean had failed to save himself from something that Charlie had driven off on her own.
Then he had nearly died.
All her gods were fallible.
Then you put me together with Sam and Charli in the car.
Then you broke me again with the phone call to Dean and Dean wanting to come get her because he couldn't stand her being in pain.
Loved how Sarah talked him through it though. I love what you've done with Dean and Sarah's relationship. While Dean is the one that can usually get through to Sam's girls, and Sam is the one who can get through to Dean's, Sarah is the one who can get through to both Sam and Dean. Wonderful dynamic!
And I just adore Sam's relationship with Charlie. And I loved how he showed his power as a 'no big deal' sort of thing.
I guess what I love so much about your writing is the truth to it. As a parent, I know it's not all sunshine and smiles. But you really capture the realness to everyone's relationships and I adore that!
Oh, and Leigh with the light switches...teehee! Girl, I love your brain.
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Date: 2006-12-09 01:11 pm (UTC)She never sasses you.
she idolizes her father but she adores Sam, in kind of a reverse (mirror) of the way Dean adores him. the emotional stuff is never to much for Sam to face down when Dean just can't look.
And PK! HEE! I love that. I'm so glad you popped that in there, that Sam may not be as strong as Charlie with it but he's definitely go the control.
Because there's some part of Charlie that loves being a (currently) only child, but I can only imagine that at times she wanted to be part of that whole unruly brood of Sam's, to know there can be more than one and loved just the same.
This is lovely, lovely funny (Sam, you're an asshole. \o/
Yay for the Uncle Sammy points.
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Date: 2006-12-09 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-09 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-09 03:03 pm (UTC)*snuggles this 'verse*
i could stay here forever and ever
so glad she found her outlet in sam. and sarah is still teh bestest. and dean is still dean.
*gives you cake*
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Date: 2006-12-09 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-09 04:00 pm (UTC)And you got the whole kids/parents/parenting thing just perfectly. No parent likes to hear their child cry and it kills us when we can't do anything about it.
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Date: 2006-12-09 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-09 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-09 04:42 pm (UTC)The whole piece was awesome and yummy Uncle Sammy good. But my favorite part?:
Leigh came in the kitchen and placed a hand on each parent’s back. “Everybody all okay in here?” she said.
“Of course,” Sam said. “I missed you, though.”
“We have to do something about your separation issues, dad,” Leigh said. “I’ll set the table.”
“There’s -“ Sarah began.
“Four,” Leigh said. “Those are Charlie’s shoes by the couch.” She drifted away.
“I like that kid,” Sam said.
“What a relief!” Sarah said. “There was a no-return policy.
Hee! And lightswitches! I love them all SO MUCH!!! *hugs and hugs and hugs*
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Date: 2006-12-09 04:53 pm (UTC)I can just imagine Dean so pissed off but under it *terrifiec* because his daughter has this ferocious power that she can't really control and she's a *little kid* so control isn't a big part of her make-up right now, anyway...
I love how they love their parents but their *uncles* can get to them in ways the parent can't.
Good, good, good stuff.
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Date: 2006-12-09 05:15 pm (UTC)Her worry that she might hurt the baby? Meep!
I loved all the things everyone else has already mentioned, so I'll just close by saying that on top of all that, all that makes me cry and smile through the tears ... your Sarah rocks! Love her dialogue!
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Date: 2006-12-09 06:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-09 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-09 07:58 pm (UTC)must be smoke or something... dust? an eyelash?
Definitely.not.moisture.from.tears.
Not at all.
*winks*
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Date: 2006-12-09 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-10 01:01 am (UTC)*loves*
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Date: 2006-12-10 02:51 am (UTC)oh, wait.. maybe that's my crush on sam.
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Date: 2006-12-10 03:22 am (UTC)Your characterizations are flawless. I just want to snoogle Charlie and pet Dean and give Sam and Sarah huge hugs.
Dude. Awesome.
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Date: 2006-12-10 05:05 am (UTC)Just all-around lovely writing here.
Favorite lines:
Sam thought having the house to himself for once would be cool, but mostly he was bored and had resorted to flipping channels.
*g* The curse of parenting. You finally get time alone, and sometimes you just have no clue what to do.
Dean had wanted so badly to be a perfect reflection of John, and Sam had been born to that role without wanting it.
Ooh, that’s good. True, and nicely written.
Christo trotted out and went straight to Dean, tail waving, taking a distracted patting as if it was much more.
That’s such a doggy reaction.*g*
“I told them to shut up or the bone stealer would come!”
*winces* Oh dear. Poor Charlie’s come a wee bit unhinged.
She had cried so rarely that it was as if she stored it all up and then tried to do too much at once.
Aww, poor thing. And this makes me think of Dean, and how he tries to hold it all in.
“I didn’t kill it,” she sobbed. “I could have and I didn’t and it came here and maybe it has friends who will come and if I don’t practice it will come put us all on and wear us.”
Oh, Charlie. *hugs her*
He took her shoes off and smoothed her now-loose hair back off her sweaty forehead and made sure not to hold her too tight so that she could cool down a little.
I love this little detail, because kids do get like this after they’ve cried really hard.
“Please be little just a while longer,” Sam whispered to her. “Be our little girl, just a while longer.”
Oh, Sam. He’s breaking my heart here.
“Everybody all okay in here?” she said.
“Of course,” Sam said. “I missed you, though.”
“We have to do something about your separation issues, dad,” Leigh said.
*g*
They were human and unsettled and likely flirting with PTSD, also known as a Winchester’s default setting.
Ain’t that the truth.
“Try and remember that she’s surrounded with people who love her and can help her,” Sarah said. “With all the things that happened to you and Dean, with mostly only each other as support, you shouldn’t have turned out fine, but you did. That should tell you something.”
Sarah’s so wise. :)
“I don’t want to hurt the baby,” she said in a very small voice.
Poor, worried Charlie. The fact that she’s worried bodes well, though.
It’s really weird, and I have to get used to stuff. But. I’m kind of hard to ignore, Sam.”
LOL!
Charlie slept between her aunt and uncle that night, warmly surrounded. She wandered down the hall in the early hours to snuggle in with Allie, who tucked her in close and safe.
Great, snuggly warm ending. :)
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Date: 2006-12-11 06:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-11 03:14 pm (UTC)You captured that parental fear of Dean's so perfectly.
When Sam was finally able to break through Charlie's shell, priceless. I actually have an ache in my heart reading this.
Sarah is the tie that holds this whole family together.
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Date: 2006-12-12 07:38 pm (UTC)*makes fluttery hand gestures*
Just...ohh. Poor Charlie made me cry. I love how the idea of Sam being mad or disappointed in her was the end of her world, because that's how much she worships and adores her Uncle Sammy. Dean being so fed up and so worried and not knowing what to do anymore. Just...
*clutches heart*
I want to move into this 'verse and stay there forever.
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Date: 2007-12-20 09:05 pm (UTC)