Target Practice
Six months after Sam left for Stanford, Dean is still trying to put the pieces of his life back together. His father is not helping.
John is a first rate and original character for a TV series, and I love him for that. He is also a first rate bastard and worse father and I hate him for that.
Dean adjusted the sights on the Smith and Wesson MP-15 and took aim again. The beer bottle exploded, 200 yards away. The trigger was light and he squeezed off three rounds when he only meant one. He'd work on that, maybe adjust the spring there tonight, or he'd be stuck someday with people dead around him or some mean nasty coming at him and no ammo left.
High and left still. He tweaked the sight again.
Another couple rounds, dead center, and the beer bottle didn't so much explode as just blink out of existence. If hit correctly glass beer bottles were excellent targets for refining your aim. Anything less than perfect and they shattered into a million pieces, easily visible at this distance as a puff of brown glass being turned back into sand. Hit just right, and the bullet punched right through the glass and out the other side, and only the residual energy of the bullet's shockwave through the air flipped it off the fence.
Dean aimed again and blew another couple beer bottles into their next life. He rubbed at the sting of gunpowder in his nose, and blinked it out of his eyes. He rubbed the rifle down a couple times with an oily rag, making sure it wasn't hot before he put it away. Carefully, in its own foam-lined case. The MP-15 was one of their most expensive weapons, bought the hard way with cash money earned by two strong-backed boys, young men, hauling load after wheelbarrow load of wet concrete for three twelve hour days in ninety plus heat. No way was it going to be tossed in the trunk to rattle around with the rest of the gear, throwing the sights further and further off with every pothole and too sharp curve in the road.
He snapped the case closed. No more thinking about the MP-15. No thinking about the hours with the guys after an honest day's work, propped up on sawhorses and tailgates, muscles aching, head spinning already from knocking back three beers after hours in the sun and no food since the packed lunch six hours ago. No thinking about the easy camaraderie of men who accepted him as one of them, when all he had to do to prove himself to them was do the work, not complain, and show up on time the next morning. No thinking about the automatic quick questioning glance seventeen year old Sam had given his big brother when one of the guys had pulled out a joint to pass around. Dean had granted permission with barely a flicker of his eyelid and crooked corner of his lips, then waved it past when his own turn came around. Demon possession by altered brain chemistry was less of a risk than getting hauled over by the cops on their drive home at this point and one of them had to keep their wits.
No thinking at all about the laughter from the other men as Sam turned red and choking as the weed made his lungs burn and eyes water. They slapped Sam on the back, rough-housing him with an arm around his neck that never threatened to turn into a choke hold, but nevertheless served to remind him of his youth amongst his elders, despite his height easily topping everyone there. A dominance tactic, disguised as humour. And Sam took it, easily, automatically, as he pushed them off, knowing instinctively this was how men worked and communicated together. Words were nearly meaningless, but it was communication just the same. You're all right, kid.
Dean placed a dozen more bottles on the fence, and walked back, counting off sixty paces this time.
Sam hadn't felt the throbbing pressure in his head and the sudden heaviness in his limbs as his autonomic nervous system shifted into kill mode, then the thumping of his heart in his chest as his conscious mind fought back for control. Light-headed, he knew Sam was in no danger, either from the joint or the men teasing him.
Dizzy, sick with reaction at nothing, Dean knew there was something wrong with him. But he didn't know what, and he didn't know how to fix it.
The Glock pistol picked off the bottles nearly as fast as the automatic rifle, three shattered into dust, three disappearing. Okay. Not perfect. He set up three more bottles, reset the holed ones. He didn't have an unlimited number of bottles after all, no matter how hard he tried. Same thing again, three gone and three visibly destroyed, but those three that had been broken by the previous round. In their weakened state, barely held together by their paper labels, even the cleanest shot sent pieces flying in every direction.
If he had half a brain he would put on safety glasses.
Or he could just stop shooting glass and get some ordinary targets.
Beer came in tin cans as well, and either version worked as well as the other at producing the mind-numbing not-thinking that was the whole point of the exercise.
Like not thinking about how the foreman of that construction site had shaken hands with Dean and Sam equally at the end of the third day, as he handed over their pay, and with something like regret and told them they were welcome to come back. Whenever. In his manner was the promise of no questions about why they had to have cash, or why they had to move on when they had to move on. Like not thinking about how his father had taken the five hundred dollars from their hands without so much as a thank you or well done, folded it into his own back pocket, grabbed a coat and told them to lock up after he'd gone.
Like how Dean had taken the hundred dollars he'd held back from his father and, after telling Sam to lock up behind him, gone down the corner store for a flat of beer, groceries for the morning and picked up two joints from the greasy dealer leaning on his car in the parking stall closest to the door but outside the security camera's range. The pimply kid had nearly had a stroke watching Dean come across the pavement towards him, some gut level instinct warning him of big fish little fish danger. When Dean grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and the idiot nearly pissed his pants, Dean forced his face into some semblance of innocence and normality, stuffing down whatever had been there before, and pulled out a twenty to reassure him of his intentions.
There were things that teenage boys had to know how to do, and like it was another training exercise, Dean showed Sam how to smoke a joint without embarrassing himself, and if they were reduced to a laughing giggling mess in short order, sides aching, neither able to stand, pretending they were safe and ordinary behind locked doors, sigils over their beds and salt streaking everywhere, Dean counted it a good day.
Dean repeated the exercise with several different pistols, setting up bottles and shooting them down, and eventually the noise ringing in his ears and the jarring vibration up and down his arm, aching concentration between eye and hand, did what it was supposed to and sent the thinking part of his brain into whipped submission.
And then before he knew it, he was out of beer bottles.
It had taken him a week to collect that many.
His father stood behind him, and Dean didn't know when he'd made the five hundred yard trek through the field behind the motel to the little grove of trees Dean was using for target practice. He hadn't heard a thing.
His father looked at Dean with an expression he couldn't identify, but couldn't look at for very long either. He started packing the weapons back into the athletic bag for the walk back.
"You can go see him, you know," John said quietly. "I'm going to go check out something in Montrose…"
"No, sir," Dean said. "He left both of us."
"You made quite a mess of things."
Dean looked at the shards of glass everywhere piled around the fence, and then turned swiftly back at his father, suddenly suspecting double meanings. Of Sam? John's expression was bland.
"Yes, sir."
John picked up the case of the MP-15, and walked back to the motel. Dean threw the weight of the bag with the other weapons over his shoulders, and followed him.
end.