Look Back in Anger Ch. 5
John Winchester used to have a certain set of phrases he'd use over and over on his sons. When they had been tired and didn't want to be pushed any more. When they had complained about having to live on the road. When they had fought with him, or when they had disobeyed his orders and he had punished them for it.
One of them had been, "Someday, when you have kids of your own, you'll understand."
Dean had never bought that excuse. He'd usually responded with a grunt. Or, if he was really angry at the old man, an insistence that he, Dean Winchester, was never having kids. Ever.
Dean had practically raised Sam, and, for a brief moment, he'd been the father figure in Ben's life, too. The weird thing was he was actually pretty good with kids.
But Dean had always figured that said more about his maturity level than his parenting abilities. Hadn't more than one woman told him he was stuck in adolescence and that he should grow up?
The real truth, though, the down-to-the-bone, wake-you-up-at-3 a.m.-truth, was that the idea of having kids of his own had always scared the crap out of him. He'd never been able to put his finger exactly on why, but it had.
"Dean?"
He looked down to find Angela tugging at his pant leg. She was looking up at him expectantly.
"You have to hold my hand. I'm not allowed to cross streets by myself, remember?"
"Right." He reached down and took the child's small hand in his own as they waited for the light to change.
They'd managed to find a parking spot a few blocks away from the University of Minnesota's downtown campus. There was still a bit of early spring bite to the air, but the students milling around had already shed their heavy winter coats in favor of jeans and t-shirts. They all seemed to be enjoying the sunshine.
No, Dean thought ruefully, now he knew why he'd been so scared of having kids that he'd never allowed his mind to even dwell on the possibility.
Having a kid was like ripping your heart out of your chest, giving it legs, and letting it run off without you. All you could do was pray it would always come back to you in one piece.
He glanced down at the brown-haired girl next to him. Angela wasn't biologically related to him. But every time he looked at her it still made his chest ache a bit.
In a strange sort of way they'd been bonded even before she was born. After all, he had been the one her future self had appeared to, demanding his help to keep Jane safe through her pregnancy. And then of course he'd gotten stuck helping Jody with the baby's unscheduled and very much improvised delivery—an experience that still made him cringe when he thought about it.
But he'd been there when Angela had drawn her first breath.
Dean could count on both hands the number of people he'd loved in his life: his parents; Sam; Bobby; Ellen and Jo; Lisa and Ben; Cass and Jane. He'd be the first to admit that wasn't very many for four decades on Earth.
And now he loved Angela, too, with a fierceness that often startled him. He'd held her, fed her, and protected her every day of her life.
When she was a baby there hadn't been much to worry about. Babies generally stay where you put them.
But Angela wasn't a baby anymore. She was a child, who ran and went to school and fell down and talked to angels and did a thousand other things Dean wanted to stop her from doing.
Only he couldn't. Not when she was who she was. All he could do was stand back and hope she would be all right.
"Dean, you're squeezing my hand too hard," she told him gently as they crossed the street, snapping him back to reality.
"Stay close," he cautioned as they walked towards the student union building. "You remember the rules, right?"
"'Don't leave your sight, always leave mom's cell phone on, and always stand with my back to a wall if there is one,'" she recited from memory.
"Good girl."
Dean had only ever been on college campuses when working cases, but this one looked pretty typical. There was a green lawn in front of the student union, and people were lounging around, eating lunch and shooting the breeze.
Right in front of the doors and wrapping around one side of the structure was a big concrete patio. An earnest-looking young man in dreadlocks was collecting signatures for some kind of petition, and a few guys were throwing a football around.
"You're sure Claire is here? Doesn't really look like her scene."
"She is," Angela assured him.
A group of young women in cheerleading uniforms emerged from the building carrying posters and a megaphone. Several of them unrolled the banners and began taping them to the walls. One picked up the megaphone and began to exhort the audience to show support for the baseball team's upcoming home game. Some of the others waved pompoms in the school colors.
Dean grinned. "Great, we're just in time for a pep rally."
Angela gazed up at him with a serious expression. "Don't hit on any of the cheerleaders while I'm gone, Uncle Dean."
"What, me? No, I just appreciate a showing of…school spirit."
"Uh huh." The child was not fooled. "You need to meet a nice hunter lady closer to your own age."
He scowled down at her. "You sound more like your mother every day."
Angela smiled widely. "Thank you. I'll be right back."
"Not out of my sight," he reminded her.
She gave him a quick wave as she trotted off.
"Another pep rally?" Heather complained loudly as she and Claire finally found an open table outside the student union and sat down. "How totally lame! What is it now?"
"Baseball season's starting, I think," Claire supplied.
"It's always some season or other—football, baseball, basketball, hockey…Don't these people have anything better to do with their time?"
Claire poked dispiritedly at the limp lettuce in her sandwich. "I guess not."
"What's got your panties in a bunch?" Heather asked.
Claire pushed her lunch tray away. "I'm just not hungry. And I still can't believe Professor Tessier gave me a C- on that paper! I worked on it all week."
"I told you not to get creative. You should have just picked a boring topic like the rest of us did," Heather said smugly.
"It's a Religious Studies class. I thought the whole point was to study religion."
"Yeah, but I don't think a paper with a title like, 'Angels: Heaven's Messengers or Celestial Fascists?' was ever going to fly. Pun intended."
"Hey, I quoted the Old Testament! At length, too. I mean, read it—all they ever do is smite people, and then smite them again."
"You're a Bio major—what are you doing wasting time with Religious Studies anyway?"
Claire sighed. "I thought it would help raise my GPA. I went to Sunday school for years—I thought this class would be a piece of cake! But we're not learning anything about God or the afterlife. It's all just boring garbage about who nailed which thesis to the door and when they did it!"
Heather stared at her for a long moment. "Wow, honey. You are stressed out! We really need to get you laid."
Claire shot her a frosty look. "No, we don't."
"I'm going to see if Chris has a friend…"
"Don't you dare! That creep Jason was one of Chris' friends, remember? And that turned out so great…"
But Heather already had her cell phone out of her purse and had gleefully skipped out of Claire's reach.
Claire put her head in her hands.
"Hi, Claire."
Startled, she whipped around in her chair to see the little girl standing behind her. The yellow sweater had been traded for a blue one, and her hair was loose instead of braided, but Claire would have known her anywhere.
"Geez! Somebody needs to tie a bell around your neck!"
The child tilted her head. "Why?"
"So you can't sneak up on people!"
"Oh. Sorry."
Claire took a deep breath. "What the hell do you want? Why are you here?"
"You remember me, right? I'm Angela, from…"
"…the day before yesterday, yeah. Some stalker you are. You aren't supposed to take a day off."
"I didn't. My uncles had to take a little side trip. They got a tip on a Wendigo up by Bass Lake. Turned out some other hunters were already on it, though."
Claire frowned. "A Wendigo? Is that like a Winnebago?" She glanced around her impatiently. "Where the hell is Heather?"
"No, it's nothing like a Winnebago." Angela sat down in Heather's vacant chair. "Anyway, while they were gone my mom and I got to hang out and eat pizza and watch movies on Pay-Per-View. It was really cool."
The older girl rubbed her forehead. "Look, I don't know who you are…"
"I've already told you. A couple of times."
"… but I've about had it. I have way too many problems without adding you into the mix." Claire stared hard at the child. "You're some cousin from my dad's side, right? What do you want, closure? Well, let me tell you, you're not going to get any. So beat it."
The little girl frowned. "Didn't you mom tell you who we are? She said she was going to call you…"
Claire looked away. "I've been screening my calls."
"Hey, who's this? Did you give my chair away already, Novak?" Heather walked back to the table with a smile as she dropped her phone back into her purse.
"No, she sort of invited herself. Heather, this is Angela. Angela, this is my roommate, Heather."
The child waved. "Hi."
"Right back at you, cutie pie." The redhead glanced at Claire. "Hey, is this that relative you were telling me about? The one that…"
"Yeah," Claire interrupted before Heather could say anything too revealing. "I guess. Look, kid, it's been surreal, as usual, but I've got a lab in twenty minutes."
She stood up in such a rush that her bag caught a pile of Heather's books on the table. They slid to the concrete floor with a crash.
Claire immediately bent down to pick them up, but Angela had beaten her to it. She piled all the books back into a stack, but lingered on one in particular.
"This is the Malleus Maleficarum." Angela looked up at Heather, her bright blue eyes serious. "Why do you have a copy?"
Heather laughed. "How does a little kid like you know what the Malleus Maleficarum is?"
"I know a little bit about a lot of things." Angela straightened up and handed the books back. "That's a dangerous book."
Claire's roommate tossed her head. "You're been watching too much TV, kid. It's just from the library."
Claire looked from Heather to Angela and back again. She knew there should have been something ridiculous about seeing such a young child challenge an adult. But there was just something about the little girl that made Claire take her seriously.
"Why? What's in it?" Claire asked her friend.
"It's just a reprint of a stupid old book. It's supposed to tell you how witches get their power, and how to hunt them. It's a bunch of B.S." Heather was looking less amused by the second.
"That book really was used to hunt witches, or at least people who were thought to be witches," Angela corrected. "A lot of innocent people died because of that book. And what's worse is that some of what's in there about witches is actually correct. That's why it's dangerous. You should give it back to the library, right away."
Claire regarded her roommate steadily. "It's just for class, right, Heather?"
"Oh my God, I cannot believe how freaked out you two are over a grungy old book! I just needed it for my term paper so I had at least once source that wasn't off the Internet. It's not like I'm going to use it as an instruction manual or anything."
Claire bit her lip.
"Don't worry about it, Angela. It's not a big deal," she finally said.
The little girl looked like she was about to protest, but movement on the other side of the patio caught her attention. Claire looked over, too, but she couldn't see anything past the pompom-waving cheer squad.
"I have to go." Angela reached into her pocket and handed Claire a slip of paper.
"Claire, that's my mom's cell phone number. Would you call me later? Please?"
"Uh, yeah, sure. Whatever."
The child took another step forward and laid a small hand on Claire's arm. Her touch was warm and…familiar, somehow.
"Promise?"
Claire was getting ready to lie, but she found she just couldn't, not with the child's earnest little face looking up at her.
"Yeah. I promise."
"Cool. We'll talk later. Heather, it was nice to meet you. Don't forget to get rid of that book," she called over her shoulder as she scampered off.
"Wow." Heather was quiet for a moment. "That is one odd kid."
Claire shook her head. "You have no idea."
Dean looked directly into the meaty faces of the two security guards in front of him.
"I'm telling you, I've just been sitting here, minding my own business," he said calmly. "It's a beautiful day, the sun is shining. What's the big deal?"
"Sir, if you don't have a student ID we're going to need to see some other form of identification." The larger of the two guards, whose name tag read "Jonesy," folded his arms as he spoke.
"ID, huh? Well sure, if you want…"
Dean was making a show of reaching for his wallet when Angela reappeared, cutting though the throng of cheerleaders and other celebratory students.
"Here I am, Uncle Dean! Sorry it took so long—there was a line." Angela rushed up to him and threw her arms around his waist. She peeped up at the two security guards. "Who are they?" She asked innocently.
"They work here at the university, sweetie," Dean explained, gently patting the child's head. "We were just chatting. Nothing to worry about."
The other guard, nametag "Smythe," looked from Dean to the child skeptically.
"This is your uncle?" He asked Angela.
"Uh huh." Angela gave him her widest grin, the one that showed off her missing tooth.
"And you let her go off by herself?" Jonesy demanded.
Dean had barely opened his mouth when Angela piped up.
"I had to go to the potty," she said shyly, "and he can't come in there. But he's been watching the door the whole time to make sure I was ok, see?"
She pointed through the crowd to a door marked "Ladies."
Dean quickly suppressed a smirk. "If you'd been gone any longer I was going to ask one of those cheerleaders to check up on you," he told the child sternly. He then glanced back at the two security guards. "Kids, right?" He chuckled.
Both men had visibly relaxed at the discovery that Dean was not, in fact, a pervert stalking their yell leaders.
Smythe smiled down at Angela. "What are you doing here on campus, honey?"
"Uncle Dean is showing me around."
"Yeah, class of 2000," Dean lied proudly.
"You should have said so, man," Jonesy told him.
"Well, campus has changed a lot since then. Truth be told, I barely recognize the place," Dean confessed. "But we're a big college family. My little brother? Stanford. And this one's mom?" He pointed to his niece. "UC Berkeley, and then Harvard Medical School."
"Damn," Smythe said respectfully.
"So, you were saying you needed some ID?" Dean reached for his pocket again only to have the guards forestall him.
"No, no, it's cool. Don't worry about it," Jonesy said.
"You sure? I don't want you guys to get in any trouble on our account. I mean, I can see how it looked—single guy of a certain age, cheerleaders…"
"No, you go on and enjoy the rest of your visit now," Smythe encouraged.
"Actually we were about to go have lunch," Dean explained. "I was going to introduce Angela here to her first 'Jucy Lucy.'"
Jonesy smiled. "You're in for a treat, kid. You both have a nice day."
"Right back at you." Dean took Angela's hand and the two of them walked away, casually, slowly, so as not to attract any more attention.
"Kid, you're a Winchester, all right," Dean chuckled when they were safely out of ear shot. "My old man himself couldn't have been any smoother. So, did you learn anything?"
"I think so. I just don't know what it means yet," Angela explained.
"Then we'll talk it out over lunch. I'm starving."
"Uncle Dean? What's a 'Jucy Lucy'? It sounds gross."
Dean grinned. "It's a cheeseburger with the cheese inside the patty, so it gets all melted. Minnesota's contribution to American road food."
Angela looked at him skeptically.
"I promise," Dean vowed. "You're going to love it."