BREATHE: CHAPTER 2
John hadn't felt this utterly shattered since the night Mary died.
"No," he corrected himself, "sin-since the day after. Waking up wi' two lil' kids. No home. No wife." He sniffled loudly, rubbed his sleeve across the skin between his lip and nose, and tipped whiskey down his throat. "Tha's when i' really hit."
He lifted the bottle, toasting himself solemnly for his honesty, and drank.
He held the last mouthful of whiskey, savoring the flavor and the burn as he stared, bleary-eyed, at his son.
The form under the blankets hadn't moved. Not while John fell apart beside him, bawling like a toddler who just had his favorite toy stolen. Not while the caring father in John broke through the guilt and despair long enough to wipe up the vomit pooling beneath his son's face, or when he lifted Dean's head to slide a pillow under it, nor when he piled every blanket he could find over the boy, hiding from sight the evidence of his own brutality.
Of his failure.
"Shtartin' t' worry me, kid," he slurred, but the bottle of Jack was empty, and somehow John's body had turned to lead. Not stone, he thought. Not that cold.
"He'll wake up purty shoon," John reassured himself. He absent mindedly raised the bottle to his lips, frowning when he found it empty. "Fuck."
It took an immense amount of effort to push himself up from the chair, but he managed it, then stood swaying, one hand pressing into the counter of the room's kitchenette, the empty bottle dangling, forgotten, from the other.
John dropped his chin to his chest, closing his eyes against the spinning in his head. When it stopped, he looked around him, trying to remember what he was doing.
He noticed the whiskey bottle in his fist, smiled, raised it to his lips, and frowned. "Oh, yeah," he mumbled, dropping the now offensive object into the sink, " 's gettin' a beer."
The counter supported his drunken efforts to make his way to the small refrigerator.
He squinted against harsh white light to examine the contents, finally grunting in disgust as he removed a water bottle. He held it close to his face, examining it with a scowl. "Oughta be vodka," he mumbled.
He nearly fell attempting to twist the cap off the bottle, and had to lean his hips against the counter. He drained the container, grimacing as he swiped a sleeve across his wet mouth.
His eyes were drawn to his son's unmoving form, and tears misted his vision. He lurched back to the fridge, nearly falling when he jerked the door open.
He bent, swaying, to extract a new bottle. "Jus' water," he explained to no one at all. " 's all we got lef' in here. Jus' water."
He staggered backwards for two steps before he managed to force his body forward, intent on reaching Dean.
Somehow he kept veering to the right, and no amount of fierce grimacing nor irritated growling could correct his trajectory.
So focused was he on his task that he grunted in surprise as his lower limbs struck the edge of one of the beds, knocking his feet from beneath him and tipping him onto it.
The water bottle fell from his hand, rolling across the floor until it came to rest against the shrouded form he had been so determined to reach.
The mattress seemed to wrap around him, and John made a half-hearted attempt at shaking it off before succumbing to the sensory lullaby and sliding into alcohol-poisoned sleep.
He awoke to a headache. Thankfully not the bounced-off-a-wall-by-an-angry-ghost kind; this was more irritating than painful.
He sat up, feeling the tilt and shift of reality that meant he wasn't sober yet. Not stuporously drunk, but most definitely far from sober.
John rubbed a hand over his face, grimacing at the combined discomforts of stubble and a chalky mouth.
There seemed to be an impossibly long stretch of stained carpeting between himself and the kitchenette.
A pile of blankets lay in a half-circle on the floor, and John squinted at them. "Dean," he rasped, memory blinding him, and struggled to get to his feet.
A widened stance wasn't quite enough to compensate for his absent equilibrium, and he found himself sitting heavily on the bed. He waited a minute, elbows on his knees, palms cradling his face, before trying again. This time he managed to stay up, but made the involuntary discovery that it helped to walk.
His bladder suggested that they amble over to the bathroom, and John agreed.
He fell against the door, only then realizing that the sound he'd been ignoring was running water.
"Mus' be takin' a shower," he informed himself, waving a limp hand towards the blankets formerly occupied by his son.
John pressed his forehead into the crack where door met frame. "Dean," he called, but his voice refused to rise, and he knew he hadn't been heard. He fumbled with the doorknob, nearly falling into the small space as the handle unexpectedly turned under his hand.
He'd assumed it would be locked.
He slid along the wall until he was able to snag the shower curtain. "Dean," he rasped, "you need some-"
His vocal folds locked at the sight of his son flinching away from him, pressing one discolored shoulder into the corner while raising the other protectively to an equally colorful cheek.
The eye closest to John - Dean's right - was swollen nearly shut.
John was not aware that his mouth hung open as the fog draped over his brain abruptly lifted, gaze taking in Dean's injuries, the hunter in him automatically cataloging in preparation for administering aide.
The black and purple that are hallmarks of deep tissue bruising covered his boy's back from shoulder to-
Dean's pelvic bones were turned into the wall, granting John a full view of the havoc he had wrecked on the young man's lower back, buttocks, and thighs.
John's eyes followed the pattern of hemorrhage, nausea washing over him coldly as he realized that it ended at the backs of his son's knees.
Worse still was the realization that the dark canvas was decorated with streaks and slashes of red, the abstract artwork of a confirmed sadist.
"Jesus," the father breathed, dropping the curtain as he stumbled back, thoughts kaleidoscoping frantically. He sorted through them, desperate to find the one that would begin the tortuous process of reparation.
"I...I'll get you some pain-killers." It was the best he could come up with, and he hoped it would do.
Dean emerged from the bathroom with a towel fisted loosely around his waist, catching John in a paralytic state of indecision.
Dean froze in place, dropping his eyes.
"I-I couldn't find them at first," John lied, unwilling to admit that he'd been afraid to repeat his earlier intrusion. He held his fist out. "The pain-killers, I mean."
Dean didn't react, and John took an eager step forward. "They're the good ones," he explained, as if offering a special treat to a young child.
Still Dean failed to respond, and John stuttered forward, unease replacing eagerness. He cleared his throat softly. "Take them, Dean."
He hadn't meant to make it a command, but as his son's arm reluctantly rose, he realized that it must have sounded that way.
Dean's palm stopped inches from John's own, and the father allowed the medication to drop gently onto the cupped surface. He offered a water bottle with the other hand.
Dean stood for a moment, one heavy-lidded eye locked on the round, white tablets resting against his skin. He blinked, flicking his gaze from the pills to the plastic bottle to the hand holding his towel in place, then back to the pills.
Slowly the palm rose until the edge rested against his lower lip, tipping the narcotics into his barely open mouth. The hand then moved, leaden and dull, as if of its own accord, drawing closer to the proffered beverage.
When it had traversed half the necessary distance, it stopped, suspended in the open space between the two men, waiting.
The analgesics dissolved bitterly against Dean's tongue.
John's brow furrowed, and he tilted the lower half of the bottle towards his son, an impatient gesture of "take it!"
Still Dean stood, waiting.
John studied this new puzzle, determined to solve it. Took in the single visible iris, obscured by dark lashes. The forced closure of the dominant eye. The bruising along the right cheek counter-balanced by that on the left jaw.
He noted with some surprise the breadth of Dean's shoulders, the definition in his chest and arms. Ignoring the geographic purpling over the right side of the torso, he chose instead to observe the thick abdominal muscles and sharply demarcated pelvic bones.
He's not a boy, the hunter noted, and the father visibly cringed.
The ragged, overly-bleached motel towel sagged loosely against pale skin, and the knuckles of the fist that gripped it were a strained white.
Understanding snapped John's eyes up, and he hurriedly twisted the cap from the container before pushing the now damp plastic into the lax palm still suspended before him.
Without looking at him, Dean raised the bottle to his lips, tilted his head back, and drank until it was empty.
He lowered his arm and stood limply, waiting.
The inaction evoked an image in John's mind of a tow-headed boy, recently rendered motherless and mute, moving only when directed to do so.
Involuntarily scanning that well-developed torso once more, "Why did you-" spilled past John's lips before he choked the words back, knowing that "let me do this to you?" would sound, not like the shocked incredulity he felt, but like an accusation, placing blame on the victim. Blame that belonged to John, and John alone.
"Why don't you go lie down?" he amended, and stepped aside, inviting the man that he hoped would still call him 'Dad' to pass.
Dean moved with the shuffling steps of a shackled prisoner: hesitant, uncoordinated, as if this body was new to him and he was not yet sure that he could trust it. He paused when he reached the narrow alley between the two beds, head down, shoulders hunched.
John's brows furrowed once again as he contemplated this behavior, scrutinizing each bed before turning his attention to the source of his confusion, hoping that the direction of Dean's gaze would give some clue as to what had halted the boy-grown man, he corrected himself-in his tracks.
Dean's head was bowed, lashes lowered, seemingly memorizing the stains in the carpeting at his feet.
John crossed to him, intending to inspect that area himself.
He stopped just behind Dean's left shoulder, and realized that the younger man was trembling.
John backed away, shaken.
He moved to the pile of bedding on the floor, and leaned down to retrieve the pillow as well as a blanket. "You can take whichever bed you want," he offered over his shoulder, gifting the other man with the safety of distance and a turned back.
He waited, consciously ticking off seconds in his head. He reached thirty, and still had not heard his son move.
He turned with forced languor to make his way to the bed closest to the bathroom-the one that he typically forced Dean to occupy, as he himself preferred to place his body between his son and the outer door.
"You can take this one," he suggested.
Dean turned, still visibly shaking, and lifted a knee onto the bed.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa! Lose the towel first, Dean! It's soaking wet!"
At the first barked syllables, Dean had flinched, then frozen in place. Now he straightened, offending limb returning to the floor a step behind its partner.
The towel dropped to the carpet.
Dean reverted to immobility.
John was once again confronted with irrefutable evidence that the son that he had whipped like a child just hours ago was most definitely an adult.
He tossed the pillow into the center of the bed. "Face down. Put that under your hips." He winced at the commanding tone he had unconsciously adopted.
His jaw dropped in morbid fascination as a whole body shudder worked its way through the man before him, and Dean's traumatic silence ended with a barely audible, "Dad...please...I can't."
John blanched as he realized where Dean's mind had gone. What his consistently obedient son was undoubtedly remembering from another incident that John swore he'd never repeat.
"No, not...I just meant…" he gestured lamely at the younger man's groin. "That thing practically needs its own room." He tried to force a laugh. Dean's hands moved to shield his genitalia from view. "I just..I mean...It's what I gotta do if I'm forced to sleep on my stomach...you know, because of an injury…to make that position more comfortable."
Quit talking, John, and he ground his teeth, disgusted with himself.
He closed his eyes, breathing in deeply through his nose, holding it through several heart beats, struggling to clear his mind.
The breath was released in a trenchant sigh, and John felt every second of his age, each brand left by his many failures.
"Please, Dean...just rest, okay? However and wherever you can-" he choked on the words, forced himself to continue, "-you can get comfortable...and rest. I'm going to get some supplies...food...maybe some ice, for an ice bath...to cut down on the swelling."
Skirting wide around the well-built man that John now realized was merely housing a terrified child, the defeated father made his escape.