"We're all in the car. I'm sitting in the driver's seat, dad's sitting shotgun. But there aren't any shotguns. There's no monsters. There's no hunting. There's none of that. It's just… He's teaching me how to drive. And I'm not little like I was when he actually taught me how to drive. I'm 16, and he's helping me get my learner's permit." –Dean, 11x04 "Baby"
In the Lurch
1989
"Dean. Come here, son."
Dean's head snapped up at his father's voice and he immediately abandoned his homework on the dining table, hurrying to the sofa where his father lay. "Yes, sir? Do you need fresh bandages? Another drink?"
John waved him off. "No. Stand up straight a minute."
Dean's hands immediately clapped to his sides, his heels coming together and chin lifting. John looked him up and down, seeming to take his measure. At the table, Sammy ignored both of them as he practiced his shaky penmanship.
John nodded once and surprised Dean by saying, "I think you're tall enough now that it's about time I taught you how to drive."
Dean's eyes nearly popped out of his head as he felt excitement welling within him. His father never looked more in control, more awesome, than when he was behind the wheel of the beautiful Chevy that was their only consistent home. Well, except when he had a gun in his hands, taking down a monster, but Dean had been helping with that for years. To finally be allowed to drive their most precious possession felt like a rite of passage.
"Don't you mean old enough to drive?" Sammy corrected, not looking up from his work. Dean could just about smack him for ruining the moment.
"No, smart aleck, I mean tall enough," their dad drawled back. "If you can reach the pedals, you can learn." He raised a hasty finger to forestall Dean's enthusiasm. "This doesn't mean you get to drive all the time. This is only for in case of emergencies." John lowered his voice a touch on the last word, sliding his eyes over to glance at the oblivious Sammy.
Dean sobered, instantly taking his meaning. Emergencies meant hunts gone wrong, times when his dad was too badly injured to drive himself and Dean back to their motel or a hospital. They had been lucky thus far, but obviously this last hunt had been too close a call and John wasn't going to risk it again.
Dean nodded earnestly. "I understand."
"Good. Let's go."
The boy's mouth fell open. "Right now? But you're hurt!" he protested, moving to push his father back down onto the couch as John slowly levered himself up.
"Stop that," John ordered, pushing his hands away. "Yes, now. There won't be time later. I've got another job needs doing soon as I'm up to it. And there's a high school right up the road here with a nice big parking lot that should be empty this time of night. Let's go."
"Yes, sir." Dean let his excitement at learning to drive overcome his worry for his father, since worry wouldn't stop John Winchester from doing what he'd set his mind to, anyway. He hurried to throw on his coat and push his feet into his sneakers, waiting at the front door before John had even stood up straight.
"Let's go, Sammy. That means you too."
"But Dad, I still have to write five more lines," Sammy protested and Dean rolled his eyes at his nerd brother. The kid was only in first grade and already acting like his entire future was on the line.
"There'll be time for that later tonight. We won't be gone long," John replied, gathering his wallet, keys, and boots. Dean frowned but remained silent as John winced when he bent to lace them. "And you can't stay home alone while your brother and I are out."
Dean didn't bother to mention how he had sometimes stayed home without John when he was Sammy's age, and with a toddler in his care, no less. That was totally different.
Sammy sighed dramatically but dropped his pencil and slumped over to his shoes. Dean handed him his coat and the three trundled out to the waiting Impala. A mile down the road, John pulled into the vacant high school parking lot and turned off the engine. He gestured for Dean to get out and go around to the driver side door as he slid across the bench seat to the passenger side. Dean pulled open the heavy door with both hands and climbed in, leaning far out again to close the door. He scooted as far forward on the seat as possible and found his legs just long enough for his toes to brush the pedals.
"We can move the seat up a bit," John offered, reaching beneath to pull the lever and not quite stifling a groan as he jerked forward. Dean eyed him with concern before glancing back at Sammy. The kid didn't seem too upset by his father's injury, clearly having bought whatever story they'd sold him this time. A car dropped on him at the garage. He fell off a ladder. He got hit by a drunk driver. Never drink and drive, boys.
"All right, first thing, check your mirrors," John instructed.
Dean fiddled with the rearview mirror, quickly discovering there was no angle at which he could both see into it and see the road behind it.
"Never mind. We'll just work on the basics for now," John diverted. "Put the keys in the ignition, press down on the brake, and turn them."
"Which one's the brake?" Dean asked, looking down at the pedals at his feet.
"Brake's on the left, gas on the right."
"Brake left, gas right," Dean repeated to himself, following his father's instructions exactly and reveling at the roar of the Impala's engine rumbling to life.
"Now, with your foot still on the brake, shift the gear into drive. You can see the letters on the dash. Park, R for reverse, N for neutral, D for drive, L for low."
"What's low mean?" Dean asked.
"Don't worry about that for now. That'll come later," John replied. "Just shift it into drive and take your foot off the brake."
Dean pulled the lever down until the little arrow pointed to D and lifted his foot from the brake, immediately slamming it back down when the car rolled forward an inch.
John grunted at the lurch and Sammy threw himself forward into the back of the front seat. "The car will move by itself very slowly when it's in drive, without you pushing the gas," John informed him belatedly. "Why don't you practice just driving straight forward without touching the gas?"
Dean slowly let his foot up off of the brake again, heart pumping adrenaline as the car slowly began moving forward.
"We're all going to die!" Sammy wailed from the back seat.
"Hush, you," John admonished without heat and Sammy giggled. He seemed to have gotten over his previous surliness, enjoying the change in routine and impromptu family time.
Dean drove down the long row of empty parking spaces, both hands clutched white-knuckled around the big steering wheel he could barely see over.
"Stay straight," John reminded as the car started veering toward the right. Dean jerked the wheel sharply to the left, overcorrecting. At the snail's pace they crawled forward, it didn't make much difference. "Most cars will pull to the side one way or the other while you drive. You have to make constant, small corrections with the wheel as you're driving to keep it straight," John advised. "All right, try turning left up here at the end of the row."
The car slowed even more as Dean carefully turned the steering wheel, wavering through a wide left turn.
"All right, good. That was decent," John commented. "Now we're gonna practice accelerating. Very, very slowly, with just the tip of your big toe, push down on the gas pedal until the speedometer says 15. Then gently push the brake to ease to a stop."
Dean practiced accelerating and breaking for a few minutes, Sammy flailing dramatically with each lurch that rocked the car back and forth. After a few turns around the large parking lot, John told him to shift back into P and turn off the engine. Dean waited with trepidation for his father's verdict.
John nodded. "Not bad, for a first try."
oOoOo
1997
oOoOo
Dean grunted under his father's dead weight as he and Sam hefted him into the Impala's back seat. Burden lifted, Dean fought not to collapse against the side of the car, one hand pressed tightly to his aching head.
"Maybe we should get him to a hospital," Sam suggested nervously, making sure John's feet were safely inside before closing the back door.
"No, he'll be fine," Dean replied. "He just got knocked out. I can patch him up when we get back to the room."
"You need to be checked out too," Sam told him, peering closely at his brother's unevenly dilated eyes.
"Just a concussion." He waved his little brother away, taking one staggering step and falling to his knees.
"Dean!" Sam hurried to help him up, steadying him with a firm grip on his arm.
Dean grinned at him. "It's your lucky day, Sammy. Time for your first driving lesson!"
Sam's mouth fell open as Dean handed over the keys. "But…I don't know how to drive!"
"Yeah, that's why it's called a lesson," Dean rejoined. "Would you rather just wait here a few hours until I can see straight again and hope that Dad doesn't bleed out in the meantime?"
Sam's mouth tightened into a grim line but he refrained from further comment as he helped Dean into the passenger seat and rounded the hood to the driver's side.
"This is so illegal," he muttered as he pulled his door shut and fumbled the keys into the ignition.
"Yeah, 'cause driving underage is totally the problem here," Dean replied with a backwards jerk of his thumb which could have indicated their father passed out and bleeding in the back seat or the arsenal of questionably legal weapons in their trunk.
"Al Capone was arrested for tax evasion," Sam retorted.
"Good thing we're not mob bosses, then," Dean said. "All right, you've watched me and Dad do this a billion times. Push the brake, turn the keys, shift to drive. Oh, check your mirrors first."
Sam gave a cursory glance to the side and rearview mirrors, too nervous to really care about the minute adjustments needed. He turned the key in the ignition, the roar of the powerful engine rumbling to life a familiar and comforting sound. He jerked the gearshift down into drive and lifted his foot off the brake.
"All right, now just press the gas slowly and stay inside the lines," Dean advised. "Easy as pie. Hey, get your left foot off the brake."
"But it's easier and it'll be faster to brake if I keep one foot on each," Sam protested.
"Maybe, but then you'll end up pressing both and riding the brakes and burning out the engine and all kinds of bad things. You'll get used to using just one eventually."
They jerked to a rough stop at the end of the forest maintenance road where it met the county highway. Fortunately, there were few, if any, other cars out at this time of night, or Dean might have reconsidered driving even with the concussion that made his head swim.
"Turn left. Go as slow as you need. Don't drive us over the other edge of the road."
The car lurched and bumped over the gravel shoulder, through the opposing traffic lane and their own and onto the opposite shoulder before Sam jerked it back onto the lane, Dean muttering a curse at the rough motions. The big lumbering beast seemed to fight Sam's orders; he had no idea how Dean always made it look so effortless, like the car was driving itself.
His older brother answered as if he could read the thoughts written on Sam's tense face. "You gotta establish your dominance first, show her who's boss. Then you let her loose. She knows what she's doing."
"Really?"
Dean laughed. "No, man, it's just practice."
Sam privately disagreed.
"You know, we wouldn't be in this mess right now if Dad had just taught me to drive already," he complained, bringing the speedometer up to a daring 25 miles per hour as the car wobbled in its lane.
"You weren't old enough. Technically, you're still not old enough," Dean answered, twisting back to check on their unconscious father at the reminder.
"I'm a lot older than you were when he taught you," Sam retorted.
"That was for emergencies."
"Yeah? And what do you call this?"
Dean hesitated. "An unfortunate and unforeseeable accident. Both of us aren't usually too hurt to drive at the same time. Pay attention to the road." Sam grumbled to himself, keeping a tight grip on the wheel as his foot unevenly pressed the gas and let off again. The erratic rocking was doing absolutely no favors for Dean's concussion-induced nausea and he closed his eyes, swallowing hard. "Anyway, you were too short to drive before now."
"I'm taller than you were when you learned!" Sam snapped back. The chubby twelve-year-old had disappeared, shooting up into a long-limbed, lanky teenager when Sam hit his first major growth spurt. He was now nearly nose-to-nose with Dean and still had another likely growth spurt in him. Dean wasn't sure how he felt about that.
"Yeah, you are," he agreed with a small smile. "Watch out that curve ahead."
Sam took his foot off the gas pedal entirely, allowing the car to slow to a crawl as he shakily guided it through the wide bend in the highway. Better to take three hours getting home than to drive off the side of the road and get them all killed, he figured. Dean watched carefully, ready to grab the wheel if needed.
Both boys were grateful for the nearly empty parking lot once they finally arrived back at their roadside motel, as Sam pulled in well over the line and bumped the cement parking block before coming to an abrupt stop. They sat motionless for a minute, a little disbelieving that they had managed to make it back in one piece.
Sam turned to Dean, grinning as excitement began to win out over the tension of the last nerve-wracking hour. "How'd I do?"
Dean grinned back. "Not bad for a first try," he answered, and passed out.
oOo
End. Please review and let me know what you thought. Thanks for reading!