"Since when does Dean Winchester clean weapons on the front porch?" Chloe watched as Dean looked up from his work and regarded her with a mixture of amusement and concentration.
The sight of gun parts, bore brushes, oil and grease spread around her husband's seated figure had become familiar lately. For the last week, Chloe had come home from long days at the Daily Planet to the sight of her husband sitting in the old, rickety chair on the front stoop, cleaning his wide assortment of firearms. And each time she asked him the same question, he always had a snappy comeback: "Since a fly got into the barrel while I was blowing away this zombie. So don't want bug guts all over my gun."
Today, she noted, Dean was cleaning his favorite sawed off shotgun, stripped down into pieces. Dean continued to wipe the inside of the barrel while he watched her saunter towards the steps, his lips quirked into that all-too-familiar smile that made her melt. The air was thick with the anticipation of Dean's distracting remark.
"Since Sam and I are going to hunt down the spirits haunting that track around the high school."
Chloe walked up the steps cautiously and leaned against the front of the house. She rubbed her distended belly as she scanned the front porch area, where she saw every aspect of their cul-de-sac neighborhood. The other houses, the yards, the kids playing basketball in the street or racing around in life-like toy cars. She knew most of their neighbors had boys, so Dean had assumed that they'd have a boy when Chloe announced she was pregnant.
Fate seemed to have a sense of humor, for it turned out that Chloe was going to have a girl. And as her due date approached, she had noticed Dean's joy turn into something that transcended emotion, was more than just his routine of hunting and working at the local garage. He would be a father, a job that lasted a lifetime, something Chloe suspected he would take very seriously.
"Uh, there isn't anything haunting the high school track," Chloe pointed out with a smile. "Unless you want to consider the teenagers who like to play tonsil hockey under the bleachers."
Dean turned around and glanced at her, his eyes settling on her belly and their child inside. "Coulda' done without the mental picture, Chlo," he grumbled. "Bad enough she might get to that point one day." He began to reassemble his gun with the speed and accuracy of a Marine, a frown on his face to beat the Devil.
Awareness spread through Chloe like wildfire and made her throw her head back and laugh. Dean, the future father of the next generation of Winchesters, was in super protection mode. And just as he took pride in taking care of his brother and his wife, he would risk life and limb to protect his daughter, for as long as he had the capacity to shoot down and wrestle a future boyfriend.
"What the hell are you laughing at?" Dean growled.
"Okay, Cujo, you can stop this," Chloe said, the laughter still in her voice.
"Stop what?"
"The alpha male routine. The neighborhood doesn't care that you can reassemble a rifle in under a minute."
"Twenty-five seconds."
"Whatever. Point is, those neighborhood boys aren't going to be a threat." Chloe maneuvered to the porch swing and sat down on it, letting her feet dangle off the end as it swayed under her weight.
Dean snorted and glared at her. "Are you kidding? They're always going to be a menace! My girl's going to be so freakin' gorgeous that they won't be able to keep their hands off her. And if any one of those freaks so much as lays a finger on her, I swear – "
Chloe chuckled as she reached out to touch her husband's arm. "And here I thought you were going to show her every defense move you knew so that the boys wouldn't be able to catch her."
The scowl turned into a brilliant smile. "Damn straight," he crowed, and leaned over and rubbed Chloe's pregnant stomach. "No girl of mine's ever going to get involved with those 'love em and leave em' types."
She put her hand over his and grinned. "Then she'll definitely need to learn how to outtalk them. Otherwise she might marry one."
"Baby, you know I stopped that the second I met you."
Nodding, she leaned towards Dean and kissed him for a moment. "Yeah, after I knocked you down a peg or two."
"Maybe I enjoy that kind of knocking."
"It was that knocking that got us where we are now."
The sly grin on Dean's face told Chloe he was thinking about a more private kind of knocking and whooped with laughter when he stood up and scooped her into his arms. As she played with his spiky hair, she almost felt sorry for the neighborhood boys. Winchesters and Sullivans were made of stern stuff: together, she bet their girl would be unstoppable.