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It’s 2005, and John Winchester is missing, and Dean Winchester is an asshole.
But what else is new?
True, Sam doesn’t need - or want - to be here for this. Dean is a more than capable hunter, and his little brother who hasn’t so much as looked under a bed for a fake monster in the past few years probably won’t be of much help catching a real one.
But Dean didn't really bring Sam here for help with hunting monsters.
Dad’s motel room is old and dusty, with half his shit left behind in it, his jacket included. He grabs it where it’s hanging by the door and pulls it on before he’s even fully entered the room, ignoring Sam’s wrinkled nose of disgust at him.
Sue him, he’s fucking disgusting and tired and his dad could be fucking dead, but he’s not touching that thought with a ten foot pole. Sam can march his judgy ass back to Stanford for all Dean cares - and if Sam has his way, he probably will.
Sam has the luxury of detaching himself from his family, but Dean doesn’t really know how to do that. If he even wants to.
He pulls the jacket around him. Dad owes him this much, at least, for all the shit he’s put him through. And if he’s gone - not dead, just gone - then it’s on Dean to start filling his shoes anyways. Might as well start with this.
___________________
“Guess they’re fighting again,” Sam says to the car at large after the hunt for his phone in the back seat. It’s a five hour drive to Jody’s from the bunker, and as much as Dean (and Sam, if he’s willing to admit it) have a nostalgic fondness for road trips, these long drives are getting harder to make, especially with Cas and Jack in the car.
Not that Dean minds Cas’s presence beside him in the passenger seat in the slightest.
He might have told Cas to go wait for them in the front seat while Sam was still in the shower to ensure it. Cas had been a bit miffed at having to wait in the stifling garage by himself for upwards of twenty minutes, but Dean felt his sacrifice was well worth it.
He got to sit next to Cas for five hours after all.
And the look on Sam’s face when he realized he had been usurped and left with the responsibility to entertain Jack had been its own gift. The kid was as fidgety as Dean (and now Cas with his newfound humanity), and often demanded music, and stories, and games, and anything remotely entertaining that could pass the long hours by.
Sometimes he’d look out the window while music blasted from the speakers and narrate his daydreams, big eyes picturing them playing out across the flat Kansas plains.
But today he had wanted to take advantage of sitting next to Sam in the car since it so rarely happened, and they had only been all of forty five minutes into the trip before Sam had broken out his phone to play videos for him and Jack to watch.
The phone had been tragically lost to the depths of the car after a stop for snacks and gas, and Sam had been too tall to search for it, and Cas’s strict “no unbuckling” rule prevented Jack from trying to find it himself.
They had been energized and loud at the start of the trip, Dean calling out out-of-state license plates as he saw them, Cas keeping a tally of who was winning between Dean and Jack, Sam telling stories and narrating texts with Eileen, Jack humming along to the music - a mix of classic rock and top 100 that Dean had made for him. Every so often Dean would reach over to poke Cas in the side just to watch the way Cas would whirl around to look at him. It was a habit of Dean’s, to reach out and poke and prod, and while he was sure it must have been annoying, this constant piece of him saying “look at me, look at me, look at me,” demanding Cas’s attention, Cas always seemed more than willing - happy, even - to turn to Dean and just. Look at him. Head on and direct, seeing into the very fabric of Dean’s bones like he wanted to cradle them close.
It was hard reminding himself that Cas actually did want to cradle his bones close, gather up the whole of him and hold him. It was hard reminding himself that it was okay to be held. Harder still to remind himself that this was something they were allowed.
They drove across unremarkable land, loud and uproarious like that for hours, conversation and bickering carrying them down the highways, Dean reaching out to Cas, to grasp at him in some nebulously incomprehensible way. To do… something. Something beyond thought.
And as he got closer to Cas and still didn’t know what he was after, he gave up and poked at him.
Such is life.
They had fallen into a lull a few hours in, the car quieting with the apparent loss of Sam’s phone. Jack had set bleary eyes onto the highway just beyond his window, and Sam had spread out as much as he could (which wasn’t very much) to doze off. That nebulous feeling had begun to eat at Dean again, and he had again reached out to do… something, and Cas had caught his hand, midair, and arranged their hands so they held each other, fingers interwoven.
And there that feeling settled, with Cas looking at him, staring into the bones of him and not turning away, smiling something small and private and heart-crackingly open.
They had driven like that for all of thirty minutes before Sam got the Warning Text from Alex.
The tone had startled them all into wakefulness, all except for Dean - who felt like he’d been dancing on a live wire with his hand in Cas’s. No one else seemed to understand what a revelation this was, not even Cas, who stretched his limbs outwards like a preening cat, rolling his neck.
Trust Cas to be normal about holding hands with the guy he was in love with.
Or maybe not - Cas had stared at their joined hands with no small amount of fascination, flexing his hand in Dean’s to watch the play of muscles there, had let out a small huff of breath when Dean squeezed his hand right back.
Sam’s announcement, however, undercut the truly momentous feelings Dean (and probably Cas) had been having.
Typical.
“Again?” Dean groans.
“Who’s fighting?” Jack asks.
“Jody and Claire.”
“Maybe they’ll have resolved things by the time we arrive?” Cas says.
Dean snorts. “Fat chance.” He meets Jack’s eyes in the mirror. “It’ll all blow over by your birthday Kiddo.”
“I know!” Jack chirps.
“Hold onto that optimism buddy,” Dean says quietly. Cas squeezes his hand again, and Dean revels.
___________________
The shouting is audible as soon as they turn onto the street.
“Told you,” Dean tells Cas.
They must hear the Impala pulling into the driveway, because Claire is stomping out the front door when Dean kills the engine.
She’s cut her hair since Dean’s seen her last, so that it’s bobbed around her ears, choppy and uneven. Like she’d taken a knife to it herself. Her eyes are red and her face blotchy, and she pauses to glare at them from the porch.
The hair isn’t what's startling about her. It’s the oversized brown leather jacket she’s swathed in, the sleeves uncuffed so that her hands just barely peek out from, that ends at the middle of her thighs. It looks like a piece of armor on her. It looks like a blanket on her. It looks startling like a mirror to Dean, who knows that jacket well.
She stomps past them, marching towards the back of the house. Jody emerges from the house to replace her on the porch. “Hey guys!” she calls, a drop of manic joy in her voice.
Cas reaches her first, ignorant of her false cheer. Or maybe just apathetic to it. “How is she?” he asks. Jody deflates a little, but accepts the hugs Sam and Dean offer her.
“She just needs time to cook,” she says. “She’ll feel better tomorrow, if the whole thing hasn’t blown over by then.” She turns to Jack, who's still hesitating at the base of the porch. “And how are you kiddo?” She says, all wide smiles and forced cheer for the kid, who accepts it with all the grace of a toddler. “C’mon in, I got food out for y’all, we can catch up and you,” she looks at Sam, “Can tell me all about this girlfriend of yours.
_
__________________
It’s dusk when Dean wanders back outside, the sky fading shades of amber lighting the front of Jody’s house golden. He’d meant to go looking for Claire, but she’s sitting on the front steps just ahead of him.
He sits beside her on the creaky steps.
“What was it this time?”
“None of your business,” she snaps.
He purses his lips and looks at her, and she deflates. “She wants me to get a job.”
“Is that so bad?”
She glares at him.
He raises his hands in surrender.
She sighs, and turns her attention back to the yard. The sun makes the green yard look yellow, and insects float over the grass in patches.
“My dad never really told us he loved us,” Dean says suddenly, and it’s some unknown instinct that tells him Claire is going to run away from the conversation. God knows it's what he would’ve done at her age. “No, stay with me,” he says, tugging on her jacket - leather and too big on her. She looks like a little kid in it, and he’s willing to bet that’s half of why she’s wearing it.
She’s got a knife jammed in every hiding place she can think of, but she’s still just a kid in Dean’s old jacket.
She resettles, but shifts on the porch grumpily.
“He didn’t really say it,” Dean says. “But he did. He…” he trails off, maybe overly wistful, but serviceable enough to sell the bit.
Claire huffs. Her cropped hair flops alongside her ears. “He…?” she prompts, and her voice says she's annoyed that she cares enough to ask, and Dean knows he’s got her.
“He’d annoy us,” Dean says. “When he was in a good mood, he’d reach over and just,” he pokes Claire in the side, and she bats him away. Dean makes a show of shaking his hand. “Ow,” he says, cradling his hand like it’s been gravely injured.
“Shuddup,” she says, a little muffled from her attempts to dampen a grin, and clearly annoyed that she has to.
“He’d poke us, or tug at our hair - especially Sam’s - and he’d insult us. He’d start these stupid arguments about shit we liked, and that’d set Sam off. I mean,” Dean chuckles, “he’d say something about Indiana Jones being stupid, and Sam’d make up this whole fuckin Ted Talk about how great Indy is, and they’d go at it for hours, and pick it back up the next day.”
“Shit dad,” Claire says.
Dean hums, but elbows her for appearances sake.
“Took years to figure out what he was doing,” Dean continues. He knows Claire’s listening, but he stays looking out past the yard and not at her so she doesn’t run away. “He couldn’t say that he wanted to talk to us, or hear about our day or shit like that, so he’d reach out to - to make us laugh, or get us to start a conversation. He’d insult the shit we liked so that we’d defend it, cause that was the only way he knew to get us to talk about what we liked. Course,” Dean says, “that meant that I just started hiding everything I was into from him, cause it just felt like he was insulting me .”
“My point,” Dean says, still not looking at Claire, but he can feel her tensing up, feel the sound of the leather jacket shifting. “Is that you got a - a mom in there who’s willing to actually say she loves you, instead of hiding from it like a- like a coward,” he all but spits the end, fear and righteous anger swirling in him. If his father had a grave he’d probably spit on the dirt and spend hours by the gravestone. As it is, he can only talk shit about John to this young woman who’s kinda his kid while she wears the man’s old jacket.
She doesn’t even know it was John’s.
“I already had a mom,” She snaps.
“Yeah,” Dean doesn’t give an inch. “And now you got two. S’more than me and Sam ever got.”
“Well that’s not fucking fair," she complains, and Dean knows it's more about his argument than the circumstances. He doesn't hold it against her.
“Maybe,” Dean allows. “But you think you’re being fair to Jody right now?”
Claire rolls her eyes, and somehow she does it with her whole body. “You do all that shit too,” she challenges, raising her chin at him and demanding eye contact - and when he looks at her her eyes are narrowed and lined with black eyeliner, and a strand of her hair is caught on her lip. She looks like a kid trying to play with the adults. Something about that jacket does that to a person.
“Yeah,” Dean agrees. “Guess I do. But I’m working on saying it more.” He looks at her, really looks at her, and where he would’ve cowered at her age she meets him head on. “You should too.”
She bites on the inside of her cheek. “She’s not so bad, I guess,” she mumbles, crossing her arms and looking away.
Dean bites down a grin. “Good enough,” and he wraps an arm around her shoulders. He rubs a hand on his arm, tries to put as much of the good shit - the love, the support, the things that are still too big to say - into that jacket for her. He hopes she feels it.
They watch the amber dull out, a navy gray overtaking it as night begins to settle around them.
“Marlene’s leaving,” she says.
Dean looks at her. “Your girlfriend, right?”
Claire nods tightly.“She wants to go hunting. ‘Find herself,’” Claire mocks. She looks down and swallows. “Without me,” she adds.
“Dick move,” Dean sympathizes, and Claire elbows him.
“Yeah,” she croaks. She gathers herself some and glares at Dean. “If you ask me if I want to talk about it…”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Dean says, and waits. He hasn’t always been the best with kids, hardly ever knows what to say - but damn if this kid doesn’t remind him of himself.
“She just- ugh!” Claire growls. She shoves Dean’s arm off of her so she can run her hand through her hair. “I said I’d go with her, and she’s all, ‘No, stay here, don’t wanna be your fuckin’ problem, you don’t actually want my bullshit,’ and - fuck does she know?” She heaves. “She’s off being a goddamned martyr for nothing on some self-sacrificial bullshit, and I’m just - stuck here?”
“Dick move,” Dean repeats, and she looks at him like she’s only just remembering he’s there. She nods grimly.
“The biggest,” she says.
“And Jody wants you to get a job,” Dean says.
Claire sighs. “Yeah.” There are crickets chirping nearby, and they wash over the two of them like a balm. “Which means she knows I’m not hunting."
Dean frowns. “I thought she was on the level about you and hunting?”
“She is. I just - I had gone hunting with Marlene a little. Got used to it.” She shrugs. Rubs at her face and grimaces at the smudges of makeup that have smeared on her hand. “I don’t-” she grits her teeth. “Dunno how to head out by myself I guess. And everybody fucking knows it.”
Dean licks his lip. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s a fucking bitch of a thing.” And god, wasn’t it just? Wasn’t it all so heavier alone? The strain of saving the world, one ghost at a time, didn’t it weigh him down? How many times had he almost called Dad, Bobby, Sam, anyone in the damned phone book when he was twenty-three and alone and so, so achingly terrified of who he was without a person to measure himself up against? How many times had he tried to find anything, anything in the world, to drown himself in, to become another person in, a person who had other people to lean on? How many fights did he start just to hide from it all?
How many times has he hurt people just to feel a little less shitty?
Too fucking many.
“Doesn’t mean you gotta yell at Jody,” he says.
“I know,” Claire grumbles. She pulls the jacket closer around her. “She just -”
“Wants to take care of you,” Dean finishes. “Might as well let her try.”
Claire grumbles.
“Yeah, that’s a bitch too,” Dean says, and it startles a laugh out of her.
“So.” Dean nods at her. “The jacket?”
She wrinkles her nose at him. “What, you wanna have a heart to heart?”
“We’ve been having a heart to heart.” She looks at him like he’s given her a spoon to kill a vampire with. Dean rolls his eyes. “Sue me, I’m old. I’m entitled.”
She huffs. “It’s just a jacket.” But she hugs it around her body, like it’d shield her from him, any taunts he’d make, any barbs he’d throw. But he has none of that to give.
It used to smell like his dad’s aftershave. What did it smell like now?
“It’s… nice,” she says, haltingly. It’s more than he would’ve done at her age. “It’s just..” she twiddles with the cuffs. “Safe,” she says. Then, more characteristically, she adds on, “Fuck you,” for good measure.
Dean pretends to think she’s just talking about the jacket. Just a piece of immaterial clothing, and not that it’s the fact that it was his that makes it safe. Cause if it was just the jacket, she wouldn’t have been so damned embarrassed to say it.
Even with his shitty dad, it had meant safety for him. It had meant warmth, it had meant… it had meant that he wasn't fucking alone. That someone he cared about was at his back.
So he doesn’t say, “If you need anything, you let me know and I’m on it.” He doesn’t say, “I’m glad I can give that to you.” He doesn’t say, “You’re lucky enough to get two moms, but I’m lucky enough to get you as a kid,” cause she isn’t, really. She's just a kid that he knows (legal adult or not) that is maybe a little too much like him in his old jacket. She’s just a kid that is kinda sorta Cas’s kid, and it’s been well established by now that Cas and Dean are a forever kinda deal (however much Dean needs reminding that loving Cas, brazenly and publicly and vocally, with real actual words and not meaningful gestures and small touches is okay, and maybe even good) which means that Claire actually maybe is Dean’s kinda sorta kid by conjunction.
He just says, “It’s a good jacket.”
She eyes him warily, her blue eyes so uncannily similar to Jimmy Novak’s - and in a weird way like his, the same haunted shadows and angles of mistrust - and yet nothing like Cas’s. “You want it back?”
“Nah,” he says, “Suits you better’n it ever did me,” and damn if it isn’t the truth. It just makes her look like more of what she is - a kid with family looking out for her. A kid with a kinda sorta dad who loves her.
It had only ever made him look like a kid eagerly waiting, eagerly chasing some kind of phantom approval.
She settles into it, and bumps her shoulder against his. “You’re not so bad, I guess,” she says.
He wraps his arm back around her shoulder and chuckles a little. “You too, kiddo.”
___________________
It's 2020, and Claire is sneaking into Dean’s room. The celebration for Cas's rescue from the Empty is in full swing, and it’s mostly because of the spiked punch - she was feigning innocence, but Claire had seen Donna pouring tequila into the punch like they were at a trashy high school prom - that she’s doing this, but the last few months had been shit with Cas dead and Dean moping all over the place like a loon and damnit if she wasn’t entitled to this.
She's been in here before, just last night when everyone was eating dinner. The excitement of actually getting Cas back had exhausted everyone, especially Claire, who had exerted so much energy in pretending to not care, and then finally sobbing in Cas’s arms when he had looked at her.
The embarrassment of that was also costly.
She had snuck away from the dinner table, but everyone had been too busy trying to summon the energy to lift their forks to their mouths to really notice.
She just wanted a quick look around, just to case the place, but when she had stumbled into Dean’s room the urge to fuck with something was too strong to ignore.
So she wandered around, looking for something to do, something to hide, opening cabinets and drawers for inane things to weaponize.
She mostly just found empty bottles of alcohol.
She had all but given up on finding anything of much use - all of her ideas were too exhausting to even think about, and there really wasn’t anything simple enough that she could think of - when she glanced into the closet.
She hadn’t let herself think about it then, but her tequila addled brain had led her straight here, and if she was dumb enough to get this far she was dumb enough to see it through.
The jacket she had seen was still there, hung up beside a sheer mountain of flannel shirts. There really wasn't anything spectacular about it, she just - wanted it. The same way she liked to steal Jody’s oversized sweatshirts, and the same way she didn’t look at that impulse too clearly.
It just looked. Big. Comfy. Safe.
It looked like that feeling, the one she got when Dean had hugged her after the werewolf fiasco, when he had sat with her and let her cry and yell when he told her Cas had died, when he had hugged her when they arrived to get Cas back but didn’t even know if it would work, when, after she had stepped away from Cas, she had walked directly into Dean and hugged him.
She doesn’t really wanna analyze that though.
She snatches the jacket off its hanger and darts out of Dean’s room, running to the room she’s been using, getting lost only once and giggling from the high of getting away with something.
She stumbles into her room, grabbing at her duffle and stuffing the jacket in, pulling shirts and jeans overtop it to hide it from view, and then kicks the duffle under her bed for extra protection. She nods to herself in satisfaction at a crime well committed, pushing her hair out of her face.
She should get back to the party. She needs to be more than just tipsy if she’s gonna successfully Not Think About this.
She can wear the jacket later.