eighth_horizon | sn:/there won't be any confusion

Part of the Salvation AU. The littlest Winchester is six months old and it's making the adults a little trigger happy. 3382 words, PG for language. References to Disinterment.

There Won’t Be Any Confusion
©2007 b stearns
Part of the Salvation AU. The littlest Winchester is six months old and it's making the adults a little trigger happy. PG for language. References to Disinterment.
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“Samuel John Winchester,” John said.

He held the six-month-old on his lap, balancing the little boy so that they were facing each other. He could wrap his hands around that little chest, but he could also tell how solid he was. He smiled while the boy grabbed at his shirt and swivelled his head around to keep track of everything that was going on.

“All you guys have done is confuse yourselves,” he said to Dean, who sat across from him in the living room in Sam’s favorite chair. “Two Sams.”

“Why?” Dean said. “We live in different houses.”

“Dunno why you bother,” John said.

Dean smirked. “Girls need a lot of bathroom space. And, if you haven’t noticed, we have a hell of a lot of girls around.”

John nodded appreciatively.

“‘sides, we call him Sam-John,” Dean said. “Somehow, it doesn’t come out sounding like Billy-Bob. There won’t be any confusion about who I’m yelling at.”

Sam-John sneezed, flailing his little arms in reaction. John patted his back. “He looks a lot like you did at this age.”

Dean hummed, pleased. “Careful,” he said. “He likes to ambush people with big open-mouth slobbery baby-kisses.”

That wasn’t all he did. Sam had never had a little boy, had never changed a little boy’s diaper, and did not consider what Dean and John knew from experience. The very first time Sam had changed Sam-John’s diaper, Sam-John nailed him right in the forehead. Dean had finally ended up on his back in the hallway, crying with laughter. It had been the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Ever.

Dean took a moment to take in the sight of his father holding his son. His father, salt-and-pepper hair and beard , lined mouth and eyes, looking his age but without the weariness he’d had for so many years. His boy, hazel eyes and thick chestnut hair, small for his age but already trying to crawl. He was a good-natured, quiet boy, content to occupy himself with whatever was near him.

It should have driven him to mushiness like few things could. Instead, it frightened him. He very vaguely remembered Sam telling him years and years earlier about a nightmare, about a life where John had been lost to the demon that had haunted their lives.

There was no way he was this lucky.

Sam-John was six months old to the day, if they had to go by the day he’d actually been born and not the day he’d been due. Another little boy in the family turning six months old in early November.

They had not ignored the second day of the month; they never would. They had saved the gathering for a later date, that was all.

The entire family was gathered for one last ritual, one final six month birthday, to make certain there would be no continuation of the feud between the Winchesters and most of demonkind. The evidence against it was almost overwhelming. Nothing had happened, not even a suggestion of trouble, from Allie to Charlie. But complacence had never been one of Dean’s strong suits. Even John, of all people, had tried to convince him that the world - that part of the world - had moved on.

That should be all you need, Sam had told him more than once. After all we had to do to convince him we’d killed it, after all we’ve done since to wipe out anything demonic, you can’t let it go.

Dean had accused him of getting soft and letting his guard down, even though he got Sam’s point. It was just...there was no way they were getting away without losing anyone or anything else.

He’d told Dani flat out that it was tradition, that was all, there was no chance anything was going to happen. She’d given him a look and told him to stop the tough act, because he was too old for it. He had given in and said I’m worried, and for that she had held him and said we will make sure it never happens again.

Nobody was looking at him like he was nuts, though, no matter what Sam said.

The girls were ecstatic to have everybody together, even on a school night. Allie was the only one among them who knew exactly why everyone was there; she didn’t comment, though, or make a point to share meaningful glances with anyone. Nobody pulled her aside and said hey, nothing’s going to happen because they’d be bullshitting her. Avoiding that was more important than reassuring her. She’d distracted Mary, Leigh and Charlie while Dean and John laid a salt line around the entire house so that they wouldn’t be pelted with questions.

While Dean propped a huge bag of rock salt against one corner of the house and thought about seeding it as close against the foundation as possible to keep from killing Sarah’s carefully plotted landscaping, John approached and tossed a pair of work gloves to him.

“Never thought I’d meet anybody as paranoid as me,” John said.

Dean straightened abruptly with exasperation, digging in his jacket pocket for his knife. “You and Sam get more alike every day.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” John said.

“You’d better.”

Christo came to the back fence - the new and improved back fence that Dean and Sam had put up within weeks of Kelley getting into the back yard too easily - and snuffled as he tried to jam his nose between the boards.

“Look,” Dean said, slitting the top of the bag open, “you think I don’t get it? I’m still not taking any chances with any of these kids after everything that’s happened. It’s a lot harder for any of the smaller bastards to get back out of hell than it used to be. Doesn’t mean they never will.” He took a double handful of salt and began spreading it, watching out of the corner of his eye as John did the same. “If anybody was gonna come for any of our kids for the same reason they came after Sam, they’d’ve already done it.”

John paused. “What’s that mean?”

“Exactly what you think it does, dad,” Dean said, reaching in for more salt. “Azazel would have come after all four if he was still around, or anybody like him who was still thinking about war. But I can’t risk it.”

They moved the bag and spread salt for several minutes in silence until John said, “You boys ever gonna tell me what’s going on?”

Dean grinned. “Not much to tell,” he said. “You can ask the girls, if you want to know what they can do. Charlie would love to tell just about anybody. But first rule of being a Winchester is ‘don’t talk about being a Winchester’.”

“Apparently not even to other Winchesters,” John said.

Dean straightened again. The thing with Kelley. His father was bringing up the whole thing with Kelley yet again.“How many times do you want me to apologize for that? No way we were gonna call you over that. We didn’t even know what was going on until it was pretty much over.”

“You called a lockdown,” John said. “You should have let me help. I’ll bust your ass over that for the rest of my life if I have to, until I get through.”

Dean sighed and stood looking at the ground for a moment, scratching the back of his neck.

That had been one hell of a conversation to have. John had found out just after Bobby had, when the whole thing had shown up on the goddamn national news. How the hell was Dean supposed to figure it would get that big? Christ. Sure it had been weird, but most of it wasn’t supposed to have been released, like the details about how fresh the skeletons were. It hadn’t become a circus or anything, luckily, and the press didn’t follow him around like a rock star, but they’d tried hard for soundbites for a couple of days.

Mr. Winchester, when did you first realize this was serious?

When there was an M&M’s shortage. What the hell kind of question is that?

No one thought it was a good idea to let him talk to the press anyway.

His boss and Sam had been mainly responsible for keeping the press off him. He never actually forgot how formidable Sam could be, but he needed a refresher course every so often.

Bobby had called and been pretty damn mad. John had not called. He had shown up, as mad and scared as Dean had ever seen him in that quiet, scary way that had made even Sam button it up as a kid. He had been home from Sam’s for a day, napping pretty much against his will. He never heard the door, and Dani had told him later that John had hugged her and asked her if she was okay and then made a beeline for Dean. Dean remembered callused hands cradling his head and a dip in the bed when someone sat down, and the solid-safe-warm-familiar scent of his father. John had kissed his forehead and said, stubborn.

They’d all sat around the table at Sam’s while the kids were still at school. Most of the story came out, something Dean had not been willing to participate in before then. He and Sam left out the part about Charlie by silent agreement. There would never be a place and time where they could possibly explain that. It was easier to leave it open, by just skimming over that part. It wasn’t important how Dean had been found, only that he was found. It was bad enough for Dani to know that Charlie had been there.

You can’t let me hear things about you on the news, John had said. Not again.

Well, he’d had a point there. Calling him after it was over had just gone by the wayside, that was all.

As for the part about letting him help, Dean had two reasons for not trying to find John during the middle of it. One, John flipped out at the possibility of anything endangering his grandkids. Flipped out in ways that Dean and Sam were not familiar with. Their demon-hunting bear of a father had been much warier about letting his boys get in harm’s way since Azazel’s death, but he’d become furiously protective since the first grandkid had come along.

Two, Dean had called him for help in the past - the distant past, true - and not received a response. He couldn’t bring himself to risk that again.

“Look, dad,” Dean said, still looking at the ground. Beauty bark: the stuff never went out of style. “I probably need you more now than I ever have. It doesn’t mean I wanna pull you into everything. It was a freak occurrence. It’s all smooth sailing from here on out, okay?”

John laughed. “You should have been born with brown eyes,” he said.

Christo understood to leave the salt alone and not to dig for it when Dean and John reached the back yard. They covered it loosely with bark and Dean reminded the dog to leave it. As a reward, he spent a few minutes throwing a ball for the dog while John leaned against the house and watched.

“That’s a pretty good dog you got,” John said.

“Christo, get grandpa,” Dean said, patting John’s shoulder.

Christo abandoned the ball and ran to John, skidding to a stop just short of him and beginning to slap at the sides of his shins with his front paws, hopping from one front foot to the other.

Dean laughed. That just never got old.

Dinner was not the chaos it should have been even though the girls vied nonstop like usual for their grandfather’s attention. Sam-John sat in his high chair and picked over the banana slices on the tray between spoonfuls of rice cereal. He watched his family with wide eyes, listening to the chatter and automatically seeking out the faces of his parents and sister every so often. He grinned every time Sam tapped his shoulder or grabbed his foot.

They watched an old Disney movie that everyone, including John, had seen maybe forty times. But it was like comfort food or a favorite song and satisfied something in all of them. Leigh and Mary shared lap time with their grandfather and Charlie sat next to him on the sofa with her legs crossed primly at the knee because she was older now. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and jogged Allie with one foot, since she was on the floor between his feet.

Sam-John went down at nine in his own crib next to the sofa while John tucked the girls in. Charlie bunked with Allie and they both gave him knowing stares. Allie because she knew full well what was going on and Charlie because she felt she should. Neither girl said a thing, though, at least not to the adults. After lights-out, there would be whispering that would stay between them and not go very far because Allie understood that too much knowledge could be as bad as none at all.

When he was sure the kids were all asleep - even Charlie, who was good at faking it - Sam got a stepstool out of the garage. He and Dean taped Devil’s Traps to the ceilings in the living room and kitchen. They salted the windows and doors downstairs.

It was, in its own way, a lockdown.

Dean did not mention that he’d been thinking there was no reason to believe this was it. Nothing in the dark would give up after some six month deadline.

The adults sat around the dining room table and had coffee, talking quietly, catching up, carefully avoiding any reference to why they were there. The surface reason, anyway. The real reason underpinning the gathering was love and a need to be close.

“Since you’re insisting on going in to work in the morning,” Dean said to Dani, “why don’t you go up to bed?”

“I’m not tough enough to stay up all night and go into work the next day?” Dani said.

“Not since you were about twenty-five,” Dean said.

“Ow,” Dani said with a sigh. “You’re going to work in the morning. Sam is going in. I have a million things to do. I’ll snooze later if I can’t hack it.”

No one acknowledged the guns on the table or the rifle propped in the doorway. There was no reason to. Dani had become as comfortable with them as everyone else.

They played cards for a long while, Whist and Rummy and Napalm. Somewhere after eleven it began to rain hard enough to be audible in the house. They didn’t worry about the salt line because it was well under the eaves. Dean made fresh coffee and Christo stopped prowling the house and settled under the table with a heavy sigh, ears twitching occasionally.

Nothing was going to happen and they all knew it. Even Dean had to admit nothing was going to be stupid enough to take on the entire family in full preparation mode.

“Who wants to play Truth or Dare?” Dean said, bracing his hands on the edge of the kitchen sink and looking out the window into the back yard.

“Nobody with an inch of sense while you’re in earshot,” John said. A round of smirks answered him from the rest of the table.

Dean threw a look over his shoulder at his father. So when the lights flickered, John was the one who saw the startled fear in his son’s eyes first.

They were all up from the table without even realizing it. Christo reacted to the sudden motion by scrambling to his feet with a low whuff, claws scattering on the tile. Dean came out of the kitchen low and fast, then paused in the living room, looking between the crib and the stairs.

Nobody said a word. Coincidence didn’t happen to them and so their first assumption was danger. They listened, hard, and there was nothing but the sound of the rain and Christo panting. The dog didn’t seem to sense anything; he was just reacting to all the anxiety in the room.

There was a thud somewhere under their feet, and the lights flickered again briefly before going out.

Sam made a hushing noise, aimed at everyone in the room but particularly Dean, because even a glimpse of his back in the dark screamed of panic. Guns tucked away, he and John went opposite directions through the house, Sarah with Sam up the stairs and John with Dani toward the study, checking windows. Dean stayed at the crib, hyperalert, hand on the butt of his gun. Sam-John didn’t even stir.

The EMF meter on the dining room table stayed silent.

So did the one they kept upstairs.

A quick check of the upstairs rooms found all the girls asleep. Sam checked the windows, the sigils they were carved with, the neighborhood beyond.

The streetlights were out, too.

He heaved a relieved sigh and closed his eyes. There was nothing he could sense, nothing in the house or in any room, just their fear. He met Sarah in the hallway and wrapped his arms around her and hugged her clear of the floor, whispering in her ear.

They came back down the stairs the same way they’d gone up, quick and quiet. “Hey, hey,” Sam said in a stage whisper. “You guys.”

John and Dani came back out of the study. Dean didn’t move.

“The noise,” Sam said. “It was one of the underground transformers. The whole area’s out, streetlights too. That’s all it is. That’s it. It’s okay, we’re okay.”

He was babbling a little and didn’t care because really, relief was something he would never get enough of. No matter how long he lived.

John and Sam and Sarah tucked their guns away and Dean didn’t move; it was Dani who realized first that it was because he couldn’t. He was shaking so hard that he couldn’t let go of the edge of the crib’s railing. She reached him first and ran a hand down his arm to his hand, gripping it without asking for anything in return. Sam snapped his fingers and told Christo to find Allie and the dog took off up the stairs. He would bark if anything was wrong up there, if it was all nothing but a false alarm preceding something worse.

John put a hand on the back of Dean’s neck and held on, leaning over the crib beside him to look at Sam-John. “Safe,” he said. “Dean. We’re safe.”

He did, after all, know how to tell the difference better than anybody by then.

Dean turned toward Dani and enveloped her. She held on, and so did John, and the baby slept on, blissfully unaware of a cycle long broken.

The power came back on at three.

Dani fell asleep on the sofa at three-thirty.

Dean’s watch alarm went off at four while he was sitting at the table with Sam and John, but he didn’t get Charlie or Dani up so that they could go. There were things more important than work or school, right then.

Sam-John awoke at four-thirty, hoping for breakfast, and Dani snapped awake and grouched about being late until she remembered all of what had happened. Then she shrugged and went to grab coffee and whip up something for the baby. Dean grinned and said nothing.

Half an hour after that, he walked into the living room to ask his dad what he wanted to eat, and found him asleep on the sofa. Sound asleep, with Sam-John equally asleep with a full tummy on his grandfather’s broad chest.

Dean leaned against the doorway and stared, afraid to so much as blink even when the colors all blurred together. Sarah came to see what was going on a moment later and didn’t comment, just vanished again. She returned with a camera and took several pictures without the flash, checking them to make sure they’d turned out just so. Then she caressed the back of Dean’s neck with fingertips and wandered away again.

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