Title: Sea of Sand
Fandom: SPN
Author: relli86
Rating: PG, mild language
Words: 1,936
Spoilers: None
Characters/Pairings: Gen, preseries, John POV with wee!Dean
Summary: John tells Dean about the human kind of evil.
Disclaimer: Sadly, I do not own Supernatural or the Winchesters, no matter how much I may want to.
Author's Note: A hundred thank yous to gwendolyngrace for the awesome and quick beta.
John sat at the lopsided kitchen table in the rented rundown house, unable to sleep and doing the next best thing. His weapons were stretched out in front of him on the table, and he took great care with each, cleaning them with a beat-up rag made from a t-shirt Sam had outgrown. From what John could tell, it had once featured some sort of dinosaur, probably a raptor, on its front. He could still make out the claws and snarling mouth, but the green was faded away and the rest of the shirt was now stained by grease and powder, making it more black than blue.
It was just past five and the sky was still dark, unrelenting. The boys wouldn't be up for a few more hours. John was grateful for that. He wasn't quite prepared for another day of Lucky Charms and "Transformers" and why, Daddy, why.
At two years old, Sammy was a bundle of non-stop energy. He followed Dean around constantly, and when he got bored with that, he'd tag along with John, hyperactive like he'd somehow got his hands on the sugar that John knew better than to give to him. Sometimes, John was just too tired, stretched too thin, to be able to keep up.
A door creaked down the hall, and John just about kicked himself. He really brought these sorts of things on himself, tempting fate like that. He could hear soft, hesitant steps make their way towards him. The old hardwood floor wasn't creaking from the strain of bouncing or skipping, so John knew it was Dean, trying his best to be quiet, still, not quite there.
His oldest came into the kitchen, his head peeking inside first before the rest of his body followed. He was wearing one of John's old t-shirts, the red made orange from a bleach incident gone wrong. It reached past his ankles; John was amazed the kid hadn't tripped over it yet. His hair was sweaty, plastered to his forehead. Despite the early hour, his eyes were mostly alert and stared at John questioningly. One arm was behind his back, the other hung at his side. John knew that look, knew it was connected to whatever Dean was holding behind his back. Christ, he needed a cup of coffee first.
With Dean, it was never the easy questions. The questions themselves may be few and far between, but they were always the ones John struggled to answer or would do his best to avoid. Dean looked at him with blind faith in his eyes, and sometimes he felt like he was in quicksand, sinking a little each second, not enough to be noticeable on a small scale, and just waiting for the day his boys realized he was making things up as they went along, grasping for purchase as the sand sifted through his fingers.
Deciding against the coffee – this early in the morning with less than two hours of sleep it would just make John jittery and Dean needed stillness – John placed the gun back on the table and nodded in greeting. "Mornin', kiddo."
Dean accepted the unspoken invitation to advance and came to stand beside John, taking in the weapons on the table. He remained silent by John's side, chewing on his bottom lip.
"You're up early," John commented, waiting for some kind of verbal response.
But Dean just shrugged, looking at his feet. John could see little dirty toenails peeking out from under the shirt, a reminder that Dean's sneakers were too small and holey and socks just seemed to freakin' vanish.
"Couldn't sleep?" John tried again.
The shrug made a return appearance and John sighed, looked longingly at the 8mm on the table. It really needed to be cleaned; he could do it in his sleep – provided, of course, that he could sleep. No luck there.
Fingers replaced the lip in Dean's teeth as he bit his nails uncertainly.
"What's wrong?"
Dean removed his finger, opened his mouth, shut it again. Looked up at John, back at his feet. John got the feeling he was watching a tennis match with only one player.
The sensation was familiar, imprinted on John's mind by months of endless silence, shrugs and stares instead of words. He remembered how Dean just seemed to sink into himself, like he thought he could make his body disappear along with his voice. John would reach out and touch him, almost surprised at the solidity of his slight bones and afraid to touch too lightly or for too long, like he'd break under the strain, crumble to pieces, and just blow away.
It had taken a while before Dean started to talk again. First, there were whispered words to Sammy, then to John. Full-blown sentences followed, but sometimes he reverted, like now, and John couldn't let it slide. He grabbed Dean's chin lightly, forced the kid to look at him. "You tell me what's going on, Dean."
Dean bit the inside of his lip, and John wondered how many nervous tics his kid had.
But John had used that voice and Dean responded as he'd been trained.
He brought his arm out from behind his back, and John could see a newspaper clutched tightly in his hand. He figured it was Weekly World News orthe National Enquirer, some kind of cheap tabloid that featured articles about women giving birth to aliens or 100-pound babies.
John wasn't particularly surprised. Over the past few months, Dean had been trying to read everything he got his hands on. To be honest, it was more John making Dean read, but the result was the same. The kid was six now and still hadn't been to kindergarten. When September had come around the last time, in some town John couldn't remember, enrolling Dean in school had been the last thing on his mind. Mary's loss had been too fresh, was too fresh, would always be too fresh, and John couldn't imagine giving his kid over to perky teacher types with their rainbows and bunnies and marshmallow paste. Not to mention that Dean hadn't even been talking back then; he probably would've been held behind anyway.
And as much as it killed him to even ask it, if Dean were at school, what would he do with Sammy?
So John had tried in his own way between hunts to give Dean the education he was missing. He already knew how to tie a figure eight knot, so shoelaces were no problem. The alphabet and writing had been next. When the As and Hs and Xs on Sammy's coloring books had been legible to John, he'd moved on to reading. If things went as John planned, Dean would be able to skip kindergarten altogether – transcripts, along with IDs, he'd learned, could be faked easily – and would be back on track with the rest of the kids his age. Besides, finding someone to watch a two-year-old would be difficult enough without throwing another kid into the mix. There was also the issue of payment, yet another thing John was working on. At least first grade was all-day, no anxious teachers to ask Dean where his dad was at noon on a Wednesday.
And Dean was doing it: slowly and not that easily, he was learning to read. He could read to Sammy now, out of the books with more pictures than words, but it was reading.
And apparently, he could now read newspapers.
"What's it say?" John asked, as Dean held the newspaper out to him.
Dean didn't respond so John took it, flattened out the paper in his hands. It wasn't a tabloid like he'd expected, but the St. Paul Truth. It seemed like every city had the same names for their newspapers. The Truth, Guardian, Times, Sun, an endless list on replay in John's head of towns he'd been in but could barely remember. Ask him what he was hunting, how he killed it, and that was a different story. But the banalities of daily life? They were lost to him.
He didn't really understand why they chose those names anyway. It was just false advertising. What it should really say was Fucked Up Shit Happens Here or Reading This Will Make You Want to Cut Your Wrists or Avoid Like the Plague If You Want to Trust People.
The first thing that hit John was the headline near the top and the picture that accompanied it. A man, in his forties probably, was being pushed into a police car outside of a suburban home. The headline read, "Man Kills Wife, Three Kids" and John resisted the urge to scream at the unfairness of it all.
"What was he?" Dean asked, his voice small and questioning.
John remained still, focusing on breathing and wondering how the hell to explain the fucked up people in the world to a six-year-old.
"He was human, Dean," John said, after several minutes of Dean staring and John avoiding his eye.
Dean's forehead crinkled, his eyebrows drawn inward. He stared at the paper in John's hand, not understanding. "But . . . but," he tried to resist this new knowledge, articulate his confusion, but he was six years old and he and words had never been on the best of terms.
John ran a hand down his face, cupped his chin and rubbed at his stubble. "There are some people who just aren't right. People who may look like me or Bobby or even Pastor Jim, but are just as evil and bad as demons. This man," John said, pointing to the picture, "was one of those people."
Dean's big green eyes bore into John's, wide and confused. "One of the kids," he said, "was younger than Sammy. Why would he do that?"
John shook his head, putting a hand on Dean's shoulder. "I don't know, Dean. No one can really explain it or understand it. People aren't like demons. Most of the time, there's no real reason or motive, not one that makes sense anyway."
Dean sighed, deep and bone weary, and shook his head. "They were his family," he whispered, leaning into John's touch.
John pulled him closer, wrapped an arm around his small shoulders, felt the bones of his back through the thin t-shirt, felt his fragility. His hand covered all of Dean's shoulder; his fingers branched out across his tiny chest. He wanted to pull him close, meld him into his body, throw a protective shield around him, a cloak of invisibility – anything to hide him from the world that had already hurt him so much.
Dean cocooned inward, dropping his head to John's shoulder and burrowing like he hadn't done since Mary.
John knew he had more questions: How do I know, Dad? How can you tell? What do I do if one of them gets me? But John couldn't answer them, not right now, not when Dean was there, terrified. John could protect him because he was there too, standing between the world and the quiet little boy he would give his life for without a second thought, without hesitation, without regret.
He tightened his grip and Dean let him. John's arms engulfed his trembling body and he wished, foolishly, that he could just keep him there, forever.
But before long, Dean would pull away and John would let him go and the guns on the table would help him do his job.
For now, he held on, held tight like a drowning man in a sea of sand: couldn't give in, couldn't get out, his anchor a little boy who turned to dust in his hands.