verucasalt123 | FIC

title: What Now? 1/?
pairing: Sam/Dean, Sam/OFC
rating: R/NC-17 eventually
summary: Pre-series. Sam ends up with a baby, and copes as long as he can on his own. Additional chapters will be added as they show up in my brain.

Sam wasn’t exactly sure how they’d ended up where they were, it had all happened so quickly.

So, yeah, the whole Stanford thing hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped. Two years in, his girlfriend Nicole told him she was pregnant and was planning to have an abortion. For about half an hour, he was all right with that. He never planned to have any kind of serious long term thing with this girl, so having a baby with her wasn’t on the top of his wish list. But that half an hour was all he got. He begged her, pleaded, promised her everything under the sun if she would just have the baby, please. He didn’t know where it came from, but it was a sudden instinctual feeling, this baby was his, and whatever this girl he’d been sleeping with for the past few months ended up doing, he couldn’t stand the thought of her having an abortion. Maybe it was the leftover tenderness he felt toward his brother, all the work Dean had put into raising him when they had no mother and a father who was half out of his mind. Maybe he thought he could pay it forward. Maybe he was just selfish and arrogant and used to getting whatever he wanted. Whatever.

When that didn’t work, he resorted to intimidation. Knowing it was wrong didn’t stop him, Sam knew he was good at it, and it worked for a little while. When he felt the girl trying to assert herself, he turned to the last resource he had, and one that he knew would work – money. The offer of money worked even better than his scare tactics, and an agreement was reached.

He filled out the paperwork for federal financial aid, which he didn’t need, because his tuition was already covered by a scholarship, and when he got the money, he gave almost every cent of it to Nicole. The fact that he was pretty much buying this baby crossed his mind, but he pushed it aside, unable to process how horrifically immoral it was. He didn’t care. Sam moved into her apartment, went with her on the bus to all her doctor’s appointments, and stolidly ignored her resentment toward him. He slept on her couch, watched over her like one of those guys in a crazy Lifetime Channel movie, and waited.

The months passed in a blur, and Sam found himself hailing a taxi at 2:30 in the morning in the dead of winter, escorting his ex-girlfriend to the teaching hospital that would accept her Medicaid benefits and watching silently by her bedside as she labored, cursing him out in every possible way, swearing she never wanted to see his face again.

That was fine with Sam. He really didn’t give a shit about the girl anyway.

There was still a chance she could change her mind, though, and that was what he gave a shit about. He wasn’t about to let Nicole back out of their agreement, and he was prepared to do whatever was necessary for him to take possession of his son or daughter (Medicaid wouldn’t pay for a sonogram just to find out the baby’s gender, so he had no idea which it was). It turned out that his worries were unfounded, though, when finally the baby was born, a perfect beautiful boy, and she refused to even look at the child or at Sam, just saying for him to “take it away”. Sam barely registered the concern of the nurses attending the new mother, the hard and angry look on Nicole’s face, the lecture he suffered through from the hospital social worker. All he saw was the baby, the boy who would be his, as he signed document after document and realized, finally, that he had gotten what he wanted. The girl insisted to all the hospital staff that she was willingly giving this baby to “its” father, and she wanted nothing more to do with any of the proceedings.

It was a whole day before he realized that the boy had been born on January 24th. Son of a bitch. Wasn’t that just something.

Sam wasn’t even there when she was discharged from the hospital two days later, figuring she ought to be able to figure out herself how to get a bus or a cab back to her place. He’d already packed the one small bag of his meager belongings and removed it from Nicole’s apartment.

The small amount of money Sam had kept from the federal loan he obtained months ago was used to put down a deposit and a few months of rent on a one-bedroom apartment in a crappy neighborhood. He didn’t bother to register for classes. His education was no longer a priority, hell, it was barely even a blip on his radar when he looked at the baby. He had to pick a name to put on the birth certificate before the left the hospital (how had he forgotten to think of a name?), so he’d settled on James Caleb Winchester. He signed the papers and hustled out the front door with his son swaddled in hospital blankets and a bag full of free samples of pre-mixed formula and diapers.

Facts were facts, though. The money he earned from his construction job barely covered daycare costs and utilities, let alone diapers and food. Sam swallowed his pride and applied for public assistance. It took care of more than half of his daycare fees, made sure the baby could get his vaccinations, and provided him with coupons that the local grocery store accepted in exchange for specific foods like baby formula, cheese, milk and peanut butter. Things could be better, but they could be worse. He did the best he could to keep his son warm when there was no heat, and he lived on the food he got from the grocery coupons. He’d never paid taxes, so it’s not like he was really entitled to the help, but he took it anyway.

Six months passed. James was teething and Sam was up all night trying to comfort him. His work suffered from his lack of sleep, but he soldiered on the best he could.

One night, after eating peanut butter from a jar with a spoon for dinner and pacing the length of his tiny shitty apartment trying to soothe his gassy and teething son as best he could, he folded. If Sam was honest with himself, he had to admit it was surprising that he’d made it this long.

He picked up his phone, and dialed the only number he still had in it. Nothing identifying, just “D”.

A sleepy voice greeted him on the other end of the line. “Sammy?”

“Yeah, Dean, it’s me. I’m so sorry to call in the middle of the night, but…I need help. Please.”

Sam waited to see what kind of reaction he would get, after having disappeared without a word for more than two years. His heart nearly broke at the response.

“Are you in Palo Alto?”

“Yeah, I mean, close, just outside. I have an apartment, uh…”

“Give me the address. I’ll be there tomorrow night.”

And fuck if Sam knew how he was going to explain all this to Dean. But he was clear-headed enough to know that he couldn’t do it on his own anymore. He rattled off the address, and they hung up. There was nothing he could do now but wait for 16 hours, and try to figure out what he was going to say when Dean showed up and saw him there with a son.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cappy712.livejournal.com

I can't wait to see Dean's reaction. Now that will be something. The story is very interesting and I'm looking forward to the next chapter. Thank you for sharing.