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Emma comes home from school in a grouchy mood. Dean can’t fully discern why, he just knows that she is. It shows in the upset tension in her face and the way her sentences are just a little more clipped than usual, albeit unintentionally. Usually, if something was bothering her, she would have said so on the drive home——she’d been at a friend’s house for the majority of the day——but she’d mostly been quiet. Pensive. Dean had let her have the space to think, hadn’t pressed her to talk if she wasn’t ready.
But it’s getting late, and Dean doesn’t want to see his daughter upset all night, so he tracks her down to a nook in the library where she keeps her growing collection of books. She’s a bookworm, that kid.
Dean knocks on a shelf to get her attention, and Emma lifts her head from some book or another——she’s been really into comics lately——and looks up at Dean as she shifts in the beanbag chair she’s been sitting in. She’s still got that same frown and sad look on her face.
“Yeah?”
Dean takes that acknowledgment as his cue to enter the space and sit down with his back to one of the built in shelves. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”
“Uh,” Emma pulls a contemplative expression as she mulls it over. “Dunno.”
“Alright,” Dean says with a shrug. “What’re you reading?” He points at the graphic novel in Emma’s lap.
“Wolverine.” She holds it up so Dean can see the cover, then sets it back in her lap. “It’s alright.” Dean watches her fiddle with the edges of the pages and absently look over the illustrations. She takes a deep breath before speaking again. “Today is Mother’s Day.”
Shit.
Mother’s Day. It had totally slipped Dean’s mind. He ignores the day most of the time, it reminds him that Mary is dead and he doesn’t have many——if any——good memories associated with it. The best one he can think of is Sammy making a Mother’s Day card for him in second grade because he was the closest thing the kid had to a mom, and that’s fucking depressing.
“Oh,” Dean says, and feels a little dumb for it, but he can’t think of anything else in the moment. Sorry doesn’t begin to cover how he feels that this is something Emma has to deal with. “I’m sorry, kid.”
“No, it’s not——“ she closes her book and sets it on the ground next to her. “I just wish she loved me. She was a bitch, but it’d still be nice, you know? I…” She blinks, like she’s fighting off tears. “I didn’t even really do anything wrong. Usually it’s a good thing if you don’t want to kill your dad.”
And Dean can’t even assure Emma that somewhere down there, her mom really does care, because he knows better. When it came down to it, Emma was a quota, and if she didn’t kill Dean——as far as Amazonian culture was concerned——she wasn’t worth keeping. It’s the kind of thing that makes Dean want to track down Emma’s mom and strangle her.
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t kill me,” Dean says. “And I’ll try,” he clears his throat in an attempt to tamp down the emotion that has lodged itself in there. “I’ll try to love you enough for both of us.”
Dean knows it doesn’t fix anything, that the whole situation is still fucked up, that there’s nothing he can really do. He can’t be Emma’s mother, it’s all he can do to be her father, and he’s fumbling through that as it is, but he’ll be damned if he’s not trying.
Emma laughs, and it’s a little tear-thick, but she’s smiling, a real smile, and that’s all that matters. “Better get busy.”
Challenge accepted.