Chapter Text
It had stopped raining when John’s truck pulled in, but the mud was still thick and wet, sucking at the tires.
Dean watched the big, black thing lurching towards him from the other side of a bullet-cracked window. Bobby’s living room. Dean didn’t know the story behind the bullet, and now he wondered in a very distant, absent way. Accidental discharge? Angry neighbor? Angry creature, ducking away just in time?
The cracked glass fractured the vision of John’s arrival.
The truck crunched onto gravel, slid past the front window and out of view.
Dean didn’t see his father through the windshield, a beam of loose sunlight lancing through the clouds to flash, blinding, over the glass.
He wondered if his dad had seen him, staring out.
His stomach churned.
Cramps, nausea.
The sense of an empty place in his gut — a space previously filled by his father — was replaced by the feeling of a big ball of ice, sitting heavily. Sitting where a baby might have been.
He looked at Bobby, and the look on his face must have been one of betrayal, because Bobby looked just as miserable as he felt.
“I’m sorry, kid,” said Bobby. “I’m not telling him diddly squat, but he’s your daddy. You can’t be here for this.” He made a helpless gesture at his messy, widowed bachelor pad of a home.
Dean turned back to the window, focused on all the fragile points of glass, the lines crackling out from the center like lightning.
“You should tell him,” said Bobby gently. “Talk to him. Let him take care of you, Dean. It’s his damn job.”
Bobby couldn’t keep the bleakness out of his voice. Dean could hear the hurt in it, and knew it was hurt for him. He could hear the ‘I wish I could do more’ without Bobby having to say it.
“He’ll be mad,” whispered Dean.
His lips felt strange moving, talking. Like he’d eaten something spicy and they were numb and tingly at the same time.
“Dean,” Bobby began, and in his voice was even more bleakness, was something dark and sorrowful and exasperated and miserable at turning Dean out. He was going to say ‘Damn it, Dean, your dad loves you,’ the words already bobbing to the surface in Dean’s mind.
But then came the sound of the truck door slamming shut.
John’s voice followed it.
“Dean!”
Sharp. Touched with some kind of concern… or some kind of wariness.
Summoning him.
Dean wanted to be the kind of person who ran out the back door, or who clung to the couch and had to be dragged out. He wanted to be the kind of person who pointed an accusing finger and said, ‘This happened to me. He did it.’
But he was not that.
Dean was his daddy’s boy, and he’d scarcely heard his name before he was bounding off the couch and out the front door.
John was walking down the gravel from his truck, which was still running, and his face was a dark harrow. He was big, bigger in his cold-weather coat, tall and muddy-booted and with a few days’ of stubble morphing into a dark beard on his face.
His eyes latched onto Dean like two hooks.
Dean flung himself into John’s chest, arms working into the half-open coat to cling to his father. He buried his face in John’s shirt, hitting the wall of size, strength, furnace-heat, that heavy night-creature which had pulsed above him, on top of him. He was already crying.
His heart was going to tear itself in half.
He wanted his dad to be what Bobby had said he was, to do what Bobby had said he should.
‘Let him take care of you. It’s his damn job.’
And he wanted the comfort of the familiar, the haze of the ransacked bed, wanted John’s mouth warm against his neck.
He wanted whatever love his dad had to offer.
John’s arm came around his shoulders, not in comfort but closing on Dean like a steel trap. His fingers dug into Dean’s upper arm, ensuring that his son went nowhere. Not again.
“John,” came Bobby’s greeting, the sound of his feet crunching up the walk.
It was Bobby’s voice that made Dean pull back, sniffle and swiftly wipe his face. Being vulnerable with his father was different from being vulnerable with anyone else… it was a different kind of thing. One he had to hurriedly hide from Bobby’s seeing.
Bobby’s voice was somber, but friendly. Sad. Sharing Dean’s pain, and sharing John’s worry.
And John looked up, and his face was not friendly.
His gaze quickly flashed over Dean — an assessment that didn’t have to be told where he had been, or why — and then it lit coldly upon Bobby.
John told on himself.
The look was all too quick, the hawkish observation of first son and then ‘outsider,’ and seeking in the outsider did he know? Had Dean told him the truth? Had Dean told him the whole truth?
John might have gotten away with the look alone.
But as he gave Bobby that hard stare, his hand rose up to touch the back of Dean’s head, and his fingers ran down the back of his son’s neck in a gentle but possessive gesture. A subtle touch, barely brushing the skin, but in that moment it combined with the blatant hostility in John’s face to present a nightmare image. The touch was too intimate. Thoughtless. Performed in the unconscious manner of the bedroom, of someone accustomed to giving that little touch often.
Dean knew that Bobby’s face had changed, because John’s demeanor changed to reflect it.
The man against him turned as rigid as iron.
John’s free hand touched his hip, near the gun he had worn out to meet them. The gun he had needed to retrieve his son.
Dean knew that Bobby had not brought out a weapon.
He had brought out only Dean. Brought only a child, to deliver back to his father.
Dean kept his face turned into John’s chest, unwilling to look back and see whatever terrible understanding had grown in Bobby’s expression.
A long, awful moment passed.
Then Bobby asked, “What have you been doing with that kid, John?”
His voice was not full of the rage Dean had expected.
No. Anguish came first.
John didn’t answer him, only said to Dean, “Get in the truck,” and as soon as John’s arm released him Dean did what he was told.
Dean practically bolted to the truck.
Eyes blurry, heart in his throat, he clambered up into the passenger seat and buckled himself in, and sat there staring at his white knuckles trembling on his knees.
After about a minute of silence, he forced himself to look up.
His dad stood in the same spot, between Bobby and the truck and the kid in the truck. His hand was still resting on his hip, but he hadn’t drawn. Nor had Bobby stormed back to the house for a shotgun.
Dean could hear nothing of what was said. Could only imagine what the conversation might have been.
Dad could have been lying, Dean thought. His dad was a good liar. A smooth talker when he wanted to be.
Dean had not told Bobby the truth.
Dean would never tell anyone the truth.
If there had ever been a chance of it, that chance died when John turned and began to walk back towards Dean.
Hand dropping away from his gun, back turned without fear, and Bobby standing there. Staring after him. Unmoving.
John got in the car, slammed his door authoritatively shut, and leaned over the back of his seat to look behind as they peeled out.
Bobby’s place faded to nothing behind them.
—
“Did you think I’d be angry?”
They sat in a drivethrough parking lot, next to the highway, rain pouring down and trucks occasionally rushing past in blares of white light through the darkness. Dean chowed down on a burger — his appetite having returned in the long, silent drive into night — and John leaned on the wheel, chin propped in one hand, watching him.
John was nothing but a silhouette with the lights to his back, a shadow shaped like a man, and his voice a low murmur out of darkness.
Dean swallowed.
It was impossible to read his father… and would have been just as impossible if they had been sitting in full sunlight, looking directly into each other’s faces.
He looked down at the remaining few bites of burger, the crumbs of the fries he had devoured. John hadn’t gotten anything for himself but a black coffee. It sat, steaming faintly, on the top of the dashboard between them.
“I don’t know,” he whispered.
He didn’t even know the entire question.
Angry because of the… the mistake? That it had happened at all, that Dean hadn’t been personally responsible enough? Angry because Dean had lied, had snuck out to take care of it on his own?
Angry, maybe, because Dean had called Bobby instead of him?
Angry for what?
Dean thought the answer was probably ‘yes.’ Yes, he had thought Dad would be angry with him.
He always thought Dad was going to be angry with him.
The truth might have shown on Dean’s face. A vulnerable flicker. The precipice of tears threatened, not far away. He didn’t need much prodding to get there.
He was tired, he thought miserably. Cold was creeping into the parked car. He wanted to be wrapped around a hot water bottle again, he wanted… he wanted…
John sat up, leaned against his door and reached out.
Wordlessly he drew Dean to him, and wordlessly Dean melted into him, folding himself gratefully into the warmth of his father’s arms.
He nestled in, closed his eyes, and heard a truck fly by somewhere in the dark. It sounded like he imagined a shooting star would.
John kissed the side of Dean’s neck. He skimmed his knuckles down Dean’s side, slipped under his shirt, and stroked the flat surface of his belly. Down to the very base. Right where the baby had been.
“I’m sorry,” John said.
For a moment he was quiet, they were both quiet.
Then his lips moved on Dean’s neck again, his unshaven chin tickling, making Dean shiver in a way that was at once alien and familiar.
“I would have taken care of it,” said John, and Dean did know if he meant the abortion, or a baby.
—
Sam had a babysitter, and it was another six hours’ drive back to their latest temporary home, and John didn’t make Dean endure a night’s sleep in the truck.
At the hotel, they showered the road off, and then Dean lay on the bed shuddering. Grabbing at the sheets. Grabbing at his father’s head.
The brush of John’s stubble, the hot sweep of his tongue.
Dean was too exhausted for shame. He made sounds he had never made before.
John’s lips zeroed in on Dean’s clit, testing it first with the firm tip of his tongue, and then sealing over top. Closing. Gently pulling. Sucking.
He made Dean come repeatedly, convulsively, in what felt like an unending stream. Dean had no control over what was happening between his legs, and he couldn’t even comprehend it. He didn’t know if he was really coming over and over and over again, or if he was having a single long, purgative orgasm. It felt good. It overwhelmed him. It was an exorcism.
Dean sobbed hysterically, arched his back, felt himself scream. His skin crawled and he tried unconsciously, unthinkingly to writhe off of the bed, but his father held him down by the wrists and licked him until he was nearly catatonic.
At the end Dean could not even scream, could not even clamp his legs around John’s head and cry out.
He could only lay there, body limp, breathing raggedly up at the ceiling as his father’s mouth continued to coax another wave of pleasure out of him.
Dean’s muscles twitched, and a short gasp slipped out between his lips, but that was all.
The pleasure ran up and down his body like a single ripple of electricity. Like the flashing light of a car from the highway, its headlights sweeping across the ceiling, circling, and then gone.
Eventually John gave him one more soft, tongue-touching kiss between the legs, and then came up his body.
Dean’s clit, lips, slit were all melted together, and he had little to no sense of penetration as John first pressed against him. It was all too warmly liquid. Not like real skin, real organs.
He only felt it a few moments later, his soft “Ah!” fading into a moan as the flicker of pain — John pushing inside — met with fresh ecstasy. John’s cock reached into those unmet places, where his tongue hadn’t been able to reach, and Dean’s eyelids fluttered and he whimpered about it.
There was that sucking-wet sound again, the noise between them that was his hungry, half-devoured pussy begging for more.
Dean’s head felt stuffed with cotton, barely conscious.
But his body was still starving.
And John fed it.
The familiar weight came down over him, and Dean wrapped his arms around his father and dozed, thinking dreamy thoughts, listening distantly to the fucking sounds between his legs and John’s panting in his ear.
That empty place…
The empty spot inside of him. It didn’t feel so huge anymore. So cold.
John filled it, kissing Dean’s ear as he came inside. One big, trembling exhale… and then the panting, twitching stillness that followed.
Dean imagined what his insides looked like. Remembered how it had looked before, when he’d first slipped his fingers into the wound John had left between his thighs and inspected the creamy thickness of what remained. Their parts, their fluids, the differences between them all mixed together.
Afterwards John kissed him with absurd, face-stroking tenderness — a tenderness that dazzled Dean almost more than coming and coming and coming had earlier.
“You don’t need to run to anyone else,” John murmured to him.
They kissed. Dean was bold enough to kiss back with parted lips, with his tongue reaching out for his father’s.
“I’m here,” John murmured.
Kissing, stroking, John’s hands down his naked back. Dean breathing John’s own breath back to him. Even after all they had done that night, the ache in him still reared its head. It was the emptiness. It was an insatiable hunger, pleading, that would take only one answer. And Dean knew the answer.
He took his father’s hand, took it down to the flat base of his stomach, to the seat of the empty place.
John willingly, knowingly caressed it. Thumbing tenderly over Dean’s belly button.
“You’ll take care of it?” Dean asked, and it wasn’t just a request, but a question. A scared question.
John kissed his mouth firmly, the way people stamped their love at the wedding altar, with their lips. Declaring their intentions.
“I’ll take care of both of you,” he promised.