FIC - What Now? Part 2/?
Oct. 28th, 2011 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verucasalt123
title: What Now? 2/?
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.
A/N: Thank you for all the wonderful feedback on chapter one. Here’s the next part of the story. I have a feeling that this might be going on for a while so please be patient with me.
Finally, Sam got the baby settled down and they both got a couple hours of desperately needed sleep. Jay woke him with the sun, though, hungry again but not fussy, thank goodness. Sam wasn’t sure when exactly the nickname had been born, he guessed he just thought James was too formal and he didn’t really like Jim or Jimmy, so Jay it was. He balanced the boy on one hip while he mixed a bottle then settled onto the ratty brown Goodwill sofa he’d picked up one week when he’d gotten some overtime pay.
Since the weather had been nice for the past month or two, Sam started taking Jay to the park on Sunday afternoons and letting him show off his new sitting up and belly-crawling skills in the grass. One of the moms he met there, who had three kids, chuckled as she watched Sam unwrap a bottle from one of those chemical heat-packs you can get at the drugstore. “First baby, huh?” she asked.
“Um, yeah. I didn’t have any experience with babies before him, so I’m kind of winging it”, he replied with an embarrassed tone. “Are the heat-packs bad?”
The woman smiled at him reassuringly and said, “No, they’re not bad. But I’ll tell you a secret.” She leaned in close and stage-whispered, “You can give them a bottle at room temp, they don’t really have to be heated. It’s true. You can also just wash the bottles in your sink, they don’t have to be sterilized in boiling water. And when Ellie drops her pacifier”, nodding toward her toddler, “I just wipe it off on my shirt sleeve and stick it back in her mouth. By the time you get to baby number three, you learn that all those things in the baby books are nice, but not really necessary.”
Sam gave her a grateful look and thanked her for the advice. “It’s just that I don’t really have anyone else to ask about these things, it’s just me and Jay, so the books are all I’ve got.”
“Hey, look at how you and I grew up. Yeah, it’s great that babies are safer and more comfortable with carseats and bottle-warmers and those sanitizing wipes they have for the grocery store carts, but some of it is a bit over the top. I think it’s kind of a racket, you know, people selling books to first-time parents, scaring them half to death with worst-case-scenario. You learn to relax after a while, believe me.”
“Thanks”, Sam responded with a genuine smile. “I do the best I can but sometimes…”
The as-yet-un-introduced woman cut him off there. “You just said all there is. You do the best you can. Nobody’s perfect all the time, but you love your kids, you put all your effort into keeping them safe, so what else can you do?”
Experience definitely counted when it came to parenting, Sam had learned. He was exceptionally grateful for this stranger’s reassurance, and he’d taken her words to heart.
Snapping himself back to the moment, he realized that Jay had drained his bottle. Remembering what he had coming later in the day, he settled his son into the playpen he’d picked up at a yard sale a month ago and went about the task of making his apartment look presentable. He put clean sheets and pillowcases on his bed, (ok, so technically it wasn’t a bed, just a mattress on the floor), intending to let Dean sleep there tonight if he didn’t turn around and walk right back out as soon as he arrived. That wasn’t going to happen, Sam told himself, Dean would at least stay the night, surely. Sam could sleep on the sofa and he’d move Jay’s bassinet into the living room for the inevitable middle of the night demand for food and comfort. He’d meant to get a crib, but the bassinet was still plenty big enough for the baby, and he wasn’t able to push himself up yet, so Sam figured he had a little more time. Not much, though. He continued the tasks in front of him on auto-pilot – wiping down the counters in the small galley kitchen, sweeping the wood floors and scrubbing every surface in the tiny bathroom.
He at least wanted Dean to know that he kept the baby in a place that was neat and clean, even if he still felt like he had no fucking clue how to be a father, even if he still felt like everything he did was just a guess.
Popping his head back into the living room, he saw Jay contentedly shaking his little stuffed dog, the one that had a rattle inside it so it made kind of a ringing sound when it was moved around. It was his favorite toy, by far, not that he had a whole lot of toys.
It seemed like time was dragging by at an excruciatingly slow pace. In the middle of the afternoon, Sam’s phone rang.
“Hey.” God, he hoped he didn’t sound as pathetic as he felt.
“I’m about half an hour out from your place, I think. You all right?” Dean’s voice was everything Sam remembered – calm, assuring, totally in control.
“Yeah, I – yeah, I’m okay, Dean, thanks for doing this.”
Dean chuckled, that little laugh that he used to deflect serious emotional conversations. “What else would I do, Sam? See you soon.”
All of a sudden, the passing of time shifted into fast-forward. He changed the baby’s diaper, got him into the one firsthand, store-bought outfit he owned, and there was a knock on the door.
Sam had debated how to handle this moment, and decided on the the most direct method. He rested Jay on his hip, his left arm curling the baby into his side, and reached his right hand out to open the door.
Just the sight of his brother’s face after all this time nearly brought him to tears. Since it was summer, he didn’t have the familiar leather jacket on, but he was the same as Sam remembered him, dressed in jeans, boots, and an ancient t-shirt with a faded Motorhead logo on it. He wanted to put his arms around Dean and hug him, but he couldn’t. First of all, because one of his arms was currently occupied, and secondly, because Dean was standing there staring at him like he was a space alien, or Bigfoot, or something else he knew for sure did not exist.
Clearing his throat, he moved back a step. “Please come in, Dean, thank you, God, thank you for coming.” He was losing the battle against the tears welling up in his eyes.
Dean walked into the apartment, and Sam shut the door, locking both deadbolts behind him. Still staring, Dean finally opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again as if he wasn’t really sure what to say. But he tried again. “So, uh…whose baby is that?”
“He’s mine, Dean. His name is James Caleb, but I just call him Jay.”
“Guess we’ve got more catching up to do than I thought, Sam. Honestly, I was afraid you were sick or…sorry, I know this sounds bad, I thought maybe drugs or something. This”, he gestured toward the baby, “is definitely not what I expected.”
“I know, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I thought I could handle it on my own, but I’m just so tired and I never know if what I’m doing is right, and I’m afraid sometimes that I might lose my job or get evicted and end up homeless and then how would I take care of him, and I get so scared, Dean, so scared, and you know, you know about babies, because you raised me just about on your own, and…” at this point Sam’s tears were flowing freely and he realized he was babbling and probably very nearly incoherent.
“All right, man, all right, just calm down and help me figure out what’s going on here, okay?”
Sam put his best effort into getting his emotions back under some semblance of control and gestured toward the couch. They sat down, Sam shifting Jay into his lap, and Dean asked him to start from the beginning.
By the time Sam had explained how he ended up on his own with a baby, with only a few brief questions thrown in by Dean, he’d calmed down significantly, grounded just by the presence of his older brother. But the truth was still out there, the reason why he’d called Dean in the first place. “I’ve managed to hold it together, mostly, until now, but I’m so tired, Dean. I’m just so tired and I’m scared all the time and I don’t know what to do.” The next sentence took every bit of his pride, but he’d already come this far, and there was no point in pretending. “I just don’t think I can keep this up by myself. I need help.”
Dean nodded his head and reached out to touch his brother’s arm in an attempt to be supportive and assuring. His own eyes were glossing over with tears by now, realizing that his baby brother had been shouldering this own his own for so long. “If I had called you on your birthday, I might have found out about all this sooner. I’m sorry I didn’t.
“I didn’t call you on your birthday, either. I was kind of caught up in Jay being born and having to sign a bunch of stupid hospital paperwork.”
“Are you…”
“Yeah. He was born on January 24th”, Sam replied with a small grin.
“Can I hold him?”
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Date: 2011-10-29 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-29 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-29 01:42 am (UTC)I love how calm Dean is being!
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Date: 2011-10-29 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-29 04:48 am (UTC)Of course Dean dropped everything and came! Cannot wait for more!
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Date: 2011-10-29 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-29 07:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-29 02:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-29 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-29 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-30 04:31 pm (UTC)