A/N: No doubt this is as schmoopy as it felt last night when I was writing it, but who cares? It's my AU and I can do what I want. Enjoy and please review!
Thunder rumbles and lightning crashes outside, rattling the window and lighting the bedroom in a sudden bright flash, gone just as fast. The momentary absence of the storm's temper plunges the room once again into the dense darkness of a night without moon. The bed is rumpled, the sheets tangled and strewn where Dean threw them off to go hunt up a flashlight and check on the horses, and Sam. Remington sits upright in bed, staring out the window—or rather into it, as all she can see is the reflection of her own pale face due to the blackness beyond. Then the lightning flashes again and she is momentarily blinded by what the meteorologists are—or were, before the power went out—calling the worst storm this region has seen in 50 years.
It's a fine night their son has chosen to be born.
The clash and recede of the storm echoes the comings and goings of the contractions, though they are as yet small twinges, still far apart but getting closer. She grits her teeth through this one, the sharpest yet, feeling the hard mound of her belly tighten and the baby toss restlessly in response. When it's gone she releases her sweaty clutch on the sheets, resting a hand over the baby in commiseration.
Dean had disappeared downstairs half an hour ago, leaving her with a smacking kiss and a firm order to go back to sleep. He was up with the first crack of lightning within five miles, to make sure the gates were latched, the horses well fed in case they became stranded, and Sam was safe from the clutches of whatever nightmares might have grasped him in the wake of the earth-rattling sound. The power and the phone lines had both gone out sometime earlier in the evening, and they'd laughed and eaten dinner by candlelight. She'd made spaghetti and Dean had joked and wheedled his way out of dish duty on the grounds that he couldn't see a thing.
He has no idea she's in labor.
The backache had started early that afternoon, but some part of her aching had become common in the last couple months and Rem thought nothing of it. When the ache hadn't let up after her nap she began to suspect, but the insistent twinges and cramps that had wakened her with Dean made her sure.
Remington had promised herself, months ago, that she wasn't going to be one of those women who panicked and rushed to the hospital with the first contraction. Therefore, she'd decided she couldn't tell Dean until her labor had progressed to a certain point. During the last month or so, he'd become a complete basket case, watching her constantly with wary, petrified eyes, practically jumping out of his skin every time she stretched. She knew he'd manhandle her into the Impala the second she so much as grimaced, with no regard to practicality. First babies took time, she'd heard over and over, and she intended to be sensible about it.
Well, she's paying for her glibness now. The pains are ten minutes apart and the hospital is 30 miles away through what looks to be hell's fury unleashed on earth. Sam is asleep, and Dean is out doing whatever the hell, wrestling the weather and God Himself, oblivious of her distress.
Shit.
Her inner stream of profanities is halted by the blessed sound of the screen door banging shut downstairs. She hears a muffled thump, like Dean has run into the hutch, then she sends up a fervent prayer of thanks with the creak of the third stair as he continues on.
Dean enters the room, soaked to the skin, shaking his head like a wet dog and flinging little droplets of water in every direction. He glances up, amused at himself, and a frown creases his forehead as he sees she's awake.
"Hey, what are you doing up? The storm wake you?" He kicks off his wet boots at the door, stripping off his socks and sending them to rest with a wet splat just shy of the hamper. "Everything's fine, horses are a little spooked, but I got 'em settled, and Sam…" He trails off, realizing she hasn't said a single word.
"Rem?"
On cue, a contraction rolls through her, and she twists the sheets again with one sweaty hand while the other remains on the rigid roundness of her belly. As it abates, she looks up, meets Dean's gaze.
Reality is dawning, and she can clearly see the whites of his eyes, and though the green is shadowed in the dark she can tell they are as terrified as her own. His breath comes fast and hard, as if he's just run a mile through the storm outside, instead of climbed a few stairs.
She tries to smile, almost manages it. "It seems your son is as impatient as his father."
"But you still—two weeks—I can't—" She can see the struggle, the battle he wages to keep himself from flying apart. He inhales sharply, hands tangling then gripping the short, dripping spikes of his hair with almost painful ferocity.
"Okay. Okay," he repeats, steadier. "Baby time, okay."
His eyes are still more than half wild, but the fear is tightly controlled.
"I left the bag downst—" She begins.
He's suddenly flying back out the door, skidding on the wet floor, trailing a breathless exclamation of "Sammy" behind him. She hears the pounding of running feet, a crash, and the muted sound of Dean's panicked voice rousing his brother from his position on the couch. The sounds repeat in reverse order and Dean is back in an instant.
"Sam's starting the car. The bag is in the kitchen. Has your water broken? Should you change? The checklist!" He is all action, manic bursts of speed and demands.
While Dean tears around the room like a miniature version of the storm outside, she rises and moves into the bathroom to change from her pajamas. She carefully gathers her toothbrush, shampoo, avoiding meeting her own desperate expression in the mirror, listening to the somehow soothing soundtrack of Dean yelling things like where's the damn iPod and we don't have any peanut m&ms.
"Rem?" He appears suddenly at the bathroom door, takes her small toiletry case from her and leads her to sit on the bed again, where he slides socks and shoes onto her chilly feet. He urges her to stand and slips his own raincoat over her shoulders, zipping it up painstakingly over her belly and pulling the hood over her hair. That done, he pulls her determinedly towards the door.
"Dean."
He glances sharply around. "What is it? Another contraction already? How far apart?"
He looks so worried and utterly out of his element that she smiles for real this time, lifts a hand to his beautiful, impossibly dear face.
"No, baby. I think you might need some shoes. No shoes, no shirt, no service, Ace."
"Oh." He blinks, surprised, then proceeds to stuff his discarded boots back on, not bothering with socks. With his hair sticking up in wild tufts and his shoes on the wrong feet, she is struck by such incredible love for him. Her husband, the father of her child. Panicked idiot.
He rearranges his shoes with a frustrated noise, bolts back up. "There. Let's go."
Dean tows her out of the room, where they meet Sam on the stairs. He seems a little steadier than her husband, although he's a bit white around the gills as well. Sam smiles nervously at her and reaches a gentle hand to slow Dean before he jerks her arm out of socket.
The brothers grip her elbows all the way down to the car, where she is deposited in the back seat. Dean climbs in beside her while Sam takes the wheel with white knuckles, and they peel out of the gravel drive.
Dean is more afraid now than ever before in his life. Nothing, not a multitude of monsters or Lucifer or even hell, has ever shaken him this badly. He can scarcely remember anything from the car ride, save a few distinct sensations—Rem's tight grip on his hand, Sam's hazel eyes in the rearview mirror, the crack and rumble of thunder as the Impala swerved slightly on wet asphalt.
The drive to Caldwell County Hospital had taken a little over an hour, and Rem's contractions had progressed to seven minutes apart. They'd arrived in a squeal of tires, parked in a fire zone, and rushed inside to discover that baby Winchester was still hours from arrival. Dean was pushed into a chair by his infuriatingly calm wife, and Sam was sent to park the car.
Now, nine hours later, he sits in the same chair, but Rem is no longer the picture of serenity she was earlier. Her hair, pulled sloppily on top of her head by his own clumsy fingers, is damp with sweat around the temples, and her face holds a thin sheen of it. Her lips turn white with the effort not to cry out as she rides out another contraction—now only a minute from the last—and she clenches hard on his hand.
She lets out a long groan as the pain recedes again, and he glares at the doctor, who is focused on Rem and ignores him.
He'd thought he'd been prepared for this. He'd read the books, watched the frankly disgusting videos Rem had seemed both fascinated and horrified by. But nothing had prepared him for how hard this was. Rem had been a trooper through the whole thing, laughing and joking with the nurses through the first few hours, then still making easy conversation with him in between contractions as they'd intensified. Even during that horrible time around the seventh hour when she'd yelled that it was his fault, that he was never to touch her again or she'd castrate him, he was amazed and awed by her strength.
And now, finally, the doctor says its time to push. Rem, sweating and red-faced with the exception of the dark circles under her eyes, does as she says, crying out in pain and frustration. He returns her grip on his hand, though he's stopped feeling his fingers hours ago. She's a mess and he's never seen anything like her, and he stoops next to her, yelling encouragement without understanding the words and kissing her hair, her hand, her cheek.
Rem pushes again. "You fucking bastard!" She half-screams.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I love you," Dean half-laughs back.
And then there's the sharp crack of an infant's cry, and hell, the kid's got a set of lungs on him. The doctor lifts a tiny, squirming bundle and he can see for himself that he has a son.
His son is here.
Rem has collapsed back against the pillows, exhausted, but now she lifts her head, tears tracing tracks down her face, blue eyes wide and already in love with the small life they've created together.
He understands exactly. As the baby, still wailing, is placed against his wife's body he feels as though he might scale a mountain and die of a heart attack in the same moment. The wetness on his face matches Rem's, and he's laughing and crying and kissing her simultaneously.
He lays a slightly unsteady hand across his baby's back, overcome. He's so tiny—normal at six and a half pounds—but Dean could practically hold him in the palm of one hand.
He has no idea why he was so afraid of this. This is good, this is right. He can't imagine not having this tiny person shake him to his very soul.
The love he feels is staggering, and it knocks the breath right out of him.
He's a father.
Reverently, he leans over until his forehead is matched to Rem's. For a brief second they lock eyes before both go back to watching their son.
He breathes it like a prayer against her temple, "Thank you."
Sam's right leg is asleep, and the drooping of his eyelids hints that the rest of him is about to follow. The maternity waiting room is empty, except for one nurse at the reception desk. The chairs are slightly more comfortable than most hospital furniture, covered with green vinyl the color of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream. The room's frosty temperature continues the theme.
He shivers in clothes that dried hours ago and chews woodenly on the granola bar he retrieved from the vending machine.
Dean's kid sure is taking his time about it.
They've been at the hospital ten hours, and from what he's heard, contractions take time to build and a lot of women don't even recognize they're in labor for hours. Judging from the way Rem kept rubbing her back earlier today—or is it yesterday now?—she's probably been in labor for up to 20 hours.
He grimaces.
He wishes someone would come out and give him an update. Hell, at this point he'd take a smoke signal or a damn flare. This has always been the part he hates most about hospitals—the waiting, the helplessness.
As if to appease him for all the countless times he's been made to wait before, the double doors are flung open with such exuberance to send them banging into the wall. Sam jolts upright, neck aching from the sudden movement.
It is his brother, and yet not.
The wheat-gold hair—sticking up in wild disarray—the green eyes, the straight, sharp nose, the well-carved mouth, are all as familiar to him as his own face, but the expression they hold is not. Dean looks battered and exhausted, but he moves with the wired jumpiness of someone still riding an adrenaline high. His eyes are wild, almost savage, as though he's been through some enormous ordeal or life-threatening accident, and isn't quite sure he's come out of it alive yet. There is a rawness to him that fairly hurts Sam's eyes to look at.
But it's the joy that nearly blinds him.
His brother isn't smiling, but the left corner of his mouth dips up and down like he wants to. His face and the set of the long body are haggard, but it's a good kind of haggard, and it makes Sam happy to see it.
Dean makes his way to Sam's seat with the loose stride of a man who can't quite feel his own motions. Sam stands, and they only stare at each other a moment, unsure.
Dean blinks, seems to remember himself. "A boy. Healthy. They're both healthy and fine."
At that, whatever reserve of strength or will or miracle that has been holding him up seems to desert him, and his shoulders sag and his face goes blank like Sam knows it does when he's drained beyond normal human endurance.
"God." It's a sharp exhalation, an appeal and a reproach both, and Dean takes one short step and drops his head onto Sam's shoulder.
Sam is frozen, shocked by this rarely exposed side of his brother. He isn't quite sure what to do, but his brother's defenselessness seems to demand something. Dean's forehead rests, not gently, but not uncomfortably, on his collarbone. His shoulder aches a little from where their bones clanged on impact.
Bone of my bone, blood of my blood.
Their small circle of family is a little larger now.
He lifts a hand to rest in the curve of Dean's shoulder, curling around the back of his neck.
"Brother." Sam's voice is rusty and hoarse with disuse, but Dean hears him fine. He feels the warmth of Dean's breathless laugh against his shirt, and feels his own silent reply quiver in his chest.
Dean pulls back on the laugh, his cheeks and the tips of his ears slightly reddened in embarrassment.
Sam smiles and removes his hand.
Dean coughs and here, finally, is that face-splitting, half-bewildered grin of a new father.
"Do you," his voice is just the tiniest bit unsteady, "want to meet your nephew?"
Sam finds that he does.
His son sleeps in the bassinet beside his slumbering mother, oblivious of the scrutinizing, adoring gazes of his father and uncle.
The baby is swaddled in a blue blanket, with a matching cap on his head and socks on his hands and feet. His face is scrunched in sleep, and he smacks his little pink mouth as they watch, tongue emerging. His skin is still red from the effort of being born and his face is just the slightest bit puffy.
Dean tugs the sock off one of his son's hands. The little digits uncurl at his urging and grasp tight around the fingertip he offers.
He glances up, finds Sam watching with a fascinated and stunned expression. Dean's smile is small and private. His brother is already half besotted with the baby, just like the rest of them.
"Hey, kiddo, this is your Uncle Sam." He jiggles his finger, shaking the tiny hand, glances back at his brother. "Sam, Jonathan Kincaid Winchester."
Samuel Jonathan Winchester makes a small sound in the back of his throat and reaches out a finger to skim the soft cheek of his nephew, who remains unimpressed with any emotional upheaval around him.
"We're gonna call him Caid, not because—well," Dean stumbles. "Dad—we, um, want him to make his own life, without the burden of carrying someone else's memory."
Sam nods. "It's a good name."
Dean flushes and looks pleased. "Yeah, well, Rem and her books."
Rem herself is collapsed, crumpled across the bed with the sheets. Her hair is wet from her recent shower and pulled into a loose braid down her back. Dean sits on the edge of her bed, so the bassinet sits at his knees and one hand hovers over his wife and his son respectively.
Sam clears his throat. "I didn't expect—that is, should he be this small?"
Dean huffs in amusement, forgetting that only hours ago he was asking the same thing.
"Doc says he's fine, weighed in at 6lbs. 7oz. Pretty good considering he's two weeks early. Rem says he's a giant, and I guess she would know." His mouth quirks.
An answering smile flickers on Sam's face.
"So I guess you're not having any more, then?"
"Oh, we are. She just doesn't know it yet." Dean's hand rests gently across his son's stomach. "I think I'll just enjoy this one for now."
Caid chooses that moment to make his presence known, squirming and waving his small fists, accompanied by small grunting noises. His tongue peeks out as he moves his head side to side, dislodging the blue cap. Under the hat is a head full of darkish fuzz, and a pair of tiny shell ears.
Dean tugs the cap back in place as his son blinks his eyes open.
Sliding a hand under Caid's head, Dean lifts the baby with wary ease, settling him gingerly in the crook of his arm. The eyes that peer owlishly at him are the dark blue of a newborn, but Rem thinks they will turn green in time, like his own.
He is so earth-shatteringly happy he doesn't know how he's still upright.
He notices Sam observing and lifts a questioning brow.
"Want to hold him?"
Sam looks startled at the suggestion, but takes a deep breath and nods.
"I'm gonna—the chair—can't drop him," He stutters out and falls into the single chair nervously.
Dean stands and motions Sam to hold out his arms. He does, a little stiffly, and Caid is transferred from father to uncle with the care of a nuclear bomb.
The baby seems even tinier next to Sam's long arms and wide shoulders, but he wiggles comfortably for a moment then goes lax against Sam's chest. Dean grins, watching the terrified and hopeful expression on his brother's face.
"He likes you," Dean states, just as Caid lets out a tinny wail.
Sam jumps, clutching the baby tight to his chest in response. His face is panicked, and his eyes beg Dean to take his child. Dean obliges.
"It's okay, Sam, you didn't do anything wrong. He's probably just hungry."
Sam relaxes a little.
On cue, Rem jerks awake, reaching for Caid before she's even half vertical. Dean surrenders his son to the mysteries of breastfeeding, and turns so he's sitting hip to hip with Remington.
Sam almost rises, sits again. "Should I—"
Rem, fixing a blanket over her body, shakes her head. "I'm decent enough, Sam. You'll see it plenty at home."
Sam slumps back into the chair, and when Dean looks over several minutes later, he's dead asleep, with his head tilted over on his right shoulder.
"He'll get a crick like that," Dean mutters, moves to shove a small pillow under his brother's cheek.
Sam thus situated, Dean settles back on the bed beside his wife, dropping an arm around her shoulders and peering down at his son's face. Caid, lulled by a full belly, has dropped back into sleep with the ease of an infant. Rem deposits him in her lap while she covers herself.
The hospital lights are bright to his gritty, tired eyes, and his exhaustion goes bone deep. He can see Rem feels the same. But the tiredness is a good one, the kind that comes after a long, hard day's work and eases a man into a peaceful sleep, unplagued by the demons of past, present, or future.
He breathes deep, content with the feel the woman he loves leaning boneless and soft on his shoulder, and the sight of the child they've made sighing and yawning against her. His brother sleeps the righteous, undisturbed sleep of a small child two feet to his right.
Everything he loves in the world is close enough to touch. Dean closes his eyes and feels his soul settle into its rightful place.