The Road So Far

[August 2013 - 4 Months Pregnant - Bunker Library, still - Old vases make good barf buckets]

I closed Sam’s book with a slam that was a bit harder than I’d meant to and Dean looked over at me.

“I can’t do this!” I cried, thoroughly frustrated. “Nothing in here talks about demon-fathered babies. There’s no ‘Cambion Parents’ support group. I’m alone in this.”

“You don’t have to do it alone,” Dean said, “Sam and I are here and we’re not going anywhere.”

“For now,” I sniped back, unable to control my tone any longer apparently.

“What about when some banshee starts killing off high school kids? Or another harvest god wants their annual offering? Are you guys just going to quit hunting and help me raise a kid who may or may not grow up with demonic powers?”

I was being unreasonable and I knew it, but for some reason I couldn’t stop myself from saying the anxious part out loud. I wiped away the tears with the back of my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said, sniffling, “I just, I didn’t know where else to go.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me, ever,” Dean smiled and wiped the last tear from my cheek with his thumb, “We’ll dig through the archives and figure out what we’re dealing with. Hopefully, it’s nothing at all.”

“Nothing? Are you prepared to raise a baby? Because I’m definitely not. The best case scenario is that we wind up with another mouth to feed, a tiny, vulnerable one. The worst case scenario…”

I let my voice trail off. I didn’t want to think about the worst case.

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, maybe Cas will have some info on this.”

Suddenly the smell of bacon wafted into the room. Out of nowhere, my stomach flipped over inside me, and I grabbed the container closest to me and puked. This vase was probably a hundred years old, at least, and now it was my barf bucket. Sam walked in carrying a plate piled high with eggs and bacon. I retched in the vase again as Dean stood and shoved Sam out of the room.

“The smell, Sam, don’t bring that back in here!” he cried.

I started crying again, hugging the large vase to my chest and resting my forehead on the lip of it. Dean came back and pulled a bandana out of his pocket, handing it to me as he stood next to my chair. I took it and wiped my mouth.

“I can’t do this, Dean,” I sobbed, “Give me ghosts or demons, hell give me leviathans, anything that I can fight. I can’t do this.”

“I’m not gonna lie and say this will be easy,” he said, rubbing my back again, “But I’ll be right here with you, and so will Sam.”

“You gonna handle this morning sickness for me then?” I asked, more sarcastically than I truly meant. Dean took it in stride.

“I swear that if I could, I would take it for you. Come on, let’s get back to these books and see what we can find.”

“But the vase…” I released it from my chest and looked down. That was a mistake. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my head away before the smell hit my nose. I felt the weight lift out of my hands as Dean took it.

“Don’t worry about the vase,” he said, “See if you can find anything in the books.”

I dutifully opened the book closest to me and flipped through the pages. This one seemed to be about South American folklore, a lot of the names looked Portuguese. Since I can’t speak Portuguese, I closed it and chose another from the stack. This one was printed in English, but the dialect was old, and the spelling was inconsistent. It reminded me of reading Chaucer in high school.

“Sorry, Kate,” Sam came back in, empty-handed this time, “I didn’t realize.”

“That’s ok, neither did I,” I said. “It just came over me.”

“Any luck?”

“Not so far, I wish we could just use Google, but I already tried that before I got here.”

Dean reappeared, the vase looked shiny and slick in his hands. He put it back on the pedestal I had pulled it from and sat at the table across from me and Sam. I closed the English book and pushed it away from me.

“What about Cas?” I asked. “He’s got healing powers, maybe he can just–”

I waved my hands over my stomach “--this whole situation away.”

Sam and Dean looked at each other, a whole conversation passing silently between them. Dean cleared his throat.

“I tried calling Cas,” he said, “No answer.”

“And even if he did answer,” Sam continued, “there’s a very real chance you could wind up collateral damage if he finds out it’s a possible Cambion.”

I sighed. So much for that idea.

“There is one other option,” I said slowly, “Going out of state.”

Both boys looked up at me and I could tell from the look in their eyes, they had been thinking the same thing.

“Unless, the demon will be expecting that,” Sam said. “It gave Dean up way too easy, a Google translated exorcism shouldn’t have worked on the first try. What did it say to you, Kate? Before you went upstairs?”

I rubbed my eyes. My memory of the interaction was still a little fuzzy from passing out.

“‘It looks like I left you a little present, Kate.’”

The boys looked at each other.

“The bastard knew what he was doing,” Dean growled.

“Or he could sense something about her,” Sam suggested.

“I could change my appearance and use a fake name.”

“Or they find you and keep you god-knows-where until…”

Dean didn’t finish that thought when he saw my eyes widen.

“Isn’t there a pill option? That you can get in the mail?” Sam asked.

I shook my head. “I’m too far along for it or I would have tried that.”

Dean looked hurt, he tried to hide it but I saw his face before he turned away.

I sighed, again, “I would have told you, Dean, at some point.”

“I know,” he said, “In another time, I would’ve been really happy to have a baby with you.”

That line nearly broke me. Fourteen words that so succinctly summed up a hunter’s life.

“We should call Jody,” Sam said, and both Dean and I looked at him.

“Jody Mills?”

“Yeah, I mean, she’s a hunter and a sheriff–”

“And she’s a woman.” I finished.

Sam shrugged, “Well, yeah. If anything, she’ll probably know options.”

“I don’t like it,” said Dean, “If more people know that increases the risk of word getting out in the pit of a freaky new Cambion.”

I saw the worry in his eyes and squeezed his hand.

“Anything we do has risk,” I said, “calling Jody is on the lower end.”

Dean nodded and Sam got up to leave the room with his phone. Running a hand through his hair, Dean stood and paced. His energy frantic. It was calming for me, in a weird way, I’d be the one pacing right now if I was doing this alone. Outsourcing some of the anxiety legitimately helped.

“Dean, Jody will have ideas,” I tried calm his mind.

He kept pacing. It was his turn to freak out. As long as it was only one of us freaking out at a time, we might be able to manage this.

“You can’t know that. If Professor Google over there couldn’t find anything, what is Jody going to know? I need to go for a drive.”

Before he could head for the door, I stood up and grabbed his wrist. His muscles were tight, he was very much on-edge.

“Something else is bothering you,” I said, “What is it?”

Dean took a breath then hung his head and turned back to me. The tension in his forearm melted and he let it go slack.

“Nothing, I’m just worried about the risk.”

“We could find someone…unofficial to terminate the pregnancy–”

“No.”

“What?” I stared at him. “You just said–”

“I mean, I won’t let you do some back alley procedure either. Those are risky even under good circumstances, who knows what it would be like with this?”

I backed up into my chair, pulling him by the wrist down into his own.

“Worrying about the future just makes the present miserable. Let’s focus on what we can do right now. How do you eat an elephant?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Med-rare with A1?”

I playfully punched his arm.

“No, one bite at a time. There’s a thousand books here, one of them has to have some information we can use, and if not, Sam will get ideas from Jody.”

“It’s gonna be a minute before we get that,” Sam said, appearing in the doorway. “I didn’t want to say anything over the phone so I asked her to come here. She’s a couple days out.”

“But she’s coming?” Dean asked.

Sam nodded, “Yeah, she’s coming.”

He relaxed at that and looked at me.

“One bite at a time?”

“One bite at a time.”

---

Several days later, we were all at the table, surrounded by even more books from the Men of Letters library, when Jody arrived. The boys got up to hug her, I didn’t know her as well, we’d only run into each other in passing. I knew her reputation, obviously, and the boys vouching for her was more than enough.

“Kate, right?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Come here,” she opened her arms and I leaned in for a hug, “It’s good to have another woman in the room.”

She stiffened and pulled away from me, looking towards the table. It wasn’t the books that caught her gaze, it was my plate of stale crackers and can of ginger ale. Jody looked from the plate to me. An unspoken question written across her face. I nodded.

“You better sit down,” I said.

After Jody was settled at the table, with a cold soda courtesy of Sam, the mood was grim.

“I take it you didn’t bring me here just to say you’re pregnant,” she said, “There’s something else, something from our line of work.”

Dean gave a half smile and scratched his chin.

“Right as always, Jody. It’s mine and,” he looked at me, “I was possessed when it happened.”

Jody sat still for a long moment, the information processing.

“How–”

Dean pulled the neck of his shirt down to reveal the damaged tattoo.

“Ah. So, what do you want to do?”

“Open to ideas,” I said, “I’m too far gone for the pill.”

Jody pulled out her phone.

“No signal. Sam, what’s the Wi-Fi password?”

Sam’s face flushed.

“Sam?”

“It’s ‘dean winchester cries his way through sex’, all lowercase, no spaces.”

Jody squinted at him in disapproval, but I noticed she typed it in anyway.

“How many weeks are you Kate?” she asked, keeping her eyes on her phone as she scrolled.

“Sixteen, yesterday.”

“Yeah, definitely too late for the pills. I’m looking at out-of-state options since you’re into your second trimester.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes, each of us working our own little piece. Sam was buried in books on demons, Dean was anxiously over-cleaning one of his guns, and I was trying very hard not to puke. After a little while of copying things down off her phone, Jody tore off a piece of paper with some phone numbers.

“Here, these are some of the clinics in a four-hundred-mile radius. You call half and I’ll call the other half, we need to see what their waitlists look like.”

Right. Only a few clinics nationwide took patients after twelve weeks, of course there would be waiting lists.

“Hi, I’m calling about my daughter,” I heard Jody say as she walked away, “she’s sixteen weeks, about how long until we can get an appointment?”

Dean’s hands stopped moving when he heard the word “daughter” and he shot me a smile. Jody was good people.

The clinics on my list turned out to be a bust, none of them actually took second trimester patients. As Jody worked through her list in the other room, I tried to focus on research but Dean was making it difficult. He’d moved on from anxiously cleaning his gun to anxiously attempting to anticipate my every need. This included not letting me carry anything. If I stood up to replace a book on the shelf, he was there taking it from my hands to put it back. If I shifted my weight in my chair, he’d bring over a cushion and fluff it before sticking it behind me. The final straw was when he insisted on holding a cup for me while I attempted to take a sip.

“Dean stop!” I slammed down the book I’d been reading on the table.

He looked at me like I’d just kicked his puppy.

“I’m sorry for yelling,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose and taking a deep breath. “I am frustrated because I feel inadequate and incompetent when you take things from me or do things for me without asking if that’s what I need.”

“I’m just trying to—“

“I know you’re trying, I need you to just ask me before you try. You trust me to have your six when we’re on a hunt, can you trust me on what I can or can’t do?”

His face softened. I knew comparing it to a hunt would help. That’s all these boys know from how John raised them. Unlearning his traumatized Boomer coping mechanisms would be a long road for both of them.

“Yeah,” Dean slid his arms around my waist, “I trust you on both counts.”