Chapter 5 of Afternoon Snacks
(ao3)
Dean gets a text that night, around two. Wakes up to Cas reaching over him to get the phone off his nightstand, because he knowsw that the bright flare of the screen will wake Dean anyway but he wants to let Dean keep resting unless it’s urgent; the human half of their thing can fall back asleep a lot quicker if he doesn’t have to peer at the electric glow of the screen.
“Emma sent ‘Yeah, okay’.” Cas holds up the phone and Dean reaches for it, dragging himself up. Not necessary, maybe, but he wants to see for himself.
That’s really all it says. Just. Yeah, okay. She likes texting, though she doesn’t with him often. In his darker moments he thinks that she prefers the impersonal nature of it. The distance from him it allows her.
But. Doesn’t matter now. She said yeah, and she really can only be talking about one thing. He backs out of the conversation and opens up a new one, a group text to Benny and Charlie, Jody, Sam. Easter dinner Sunday, you in?
Charlie’s a night owl and Benny’s actually a vampire and Jody works night shifts these days; he gets various degrees of assent from everyone within minutes. In the group thread. Another text pops up from Sam, separate, private. Really?
Emma said she’s cool with it.
No response. He’s not expecting one.
***
He begs, though he doesn’t mean to. Emma has been living on good old plain Earth for two months now. In that time, she has never once set foot inside a store. Not the thrift store for clothes, not a Dairy Queen, not a Target or a Walmart or even a diner. And she sure as hell has not gone to the mall. The closest she’s come to capitalism has been the commercials and ads on the internet, plus that one really disastrous haircut in a tiny strip-mall salon.
But when he starts making a list, sitting quietly at the kitchen counter, she comes and sits next to him. Watches the list form in pencil in his blocky handwriting over the rim of her mug. It’s filled with tea, not coffee. Coffee is too bitter and milk is too sweet, but chai with a little sugar – she’ll drink that.
“You, uh. You wanna come with?” He doesn’t look up at her, in case this is a morning where eye contact makes her skittish. Dean taps the word spiral ham on the list with the tip of his pencil. He’ll never admit to searching Google for typical Easter dinner foods. “Gotta go back to the store, get everything if we wanna make dinner tomorrow.”
And then he does look up, because. Because it’s been two months and he loves her too much to think he should let her hide in the bunker forever. It’s her choice, not his, he won’t – can’t – force anything, but. He wants her to be able to go outside without being terrified, interact with other people. Run to the grocery store if they’re all gone on a hunt and she gets hungry.
Oh, hell, there’s something else to worry about. Granted that they’ve cut down on hunting a lot since bringing her home, and granted that he always makes sure they leave a full fridge and pantry behind, but now he’s gonna be extra paranoid about her running out of food when they’re out hunting bad guys. (It’s hard, these days, to say ‘monsters’ without a blade of guilt in his gut).
He’d had that experience a few too many times, at an age younger than she was now. And if Emma ever has to resort to any of the shit he used to have to do to keep him and Sammy fed –
The pencil cracks in his hands, startling them both, but to his surprise Emma doesn’t flee.
She jumps into a crouch on the chair’s seat, knife in hand, gaze darting around for a threat before she tracks the sound to the pieces of broken wood in his hand, but she doesn’t disappear and that’s so much progress that pride in her pushes past any other crap feeling that might want to distract him.
“Sorry,” Dean sighs, dropping the pieces of ex-pencil onto the table. His list is mostly done anyway.
Oh. Maybe it isn’t right for her to come with him if he’s also going to be getting her Easter stuff along with everyone else’s? But she’s seventeen, she knows it’s not coming from the Easter bunny, and she can tell him if he grabs something she doesn’t like as much as he thought she did in their impromptu taste test.
Emma acknowledges the apology with a nod, but it still takes a couple minutes for her to relax back into actually sitting on the chair. Dean pushes his list over to her and tries, he does, he tries not to plead with his eyes or any muscle in his face, but he knows he begs her anyway because she smiles, just a tiny curl in the corner of her mouth. Only for a second. All the more precious for that.
He doesn’t have the right to ask her for a damn thing, but she doesn’t. Right now she doesn’t look like she minds so much?
“Pecans?” She says it ‘pick-AHN’, like some heathen, and he shudders.
“Pecan pie. Gotta have dessert,” and she’s totally laughing at him, amusement sparkling in her eyes though her mouth doesn’t twitch. His life is lousy with only kinda nominally human folks who all have poker faces and only show their smiles in their eyes, but – much to his past self’s surprise, he’s sure – he wouldn’t change it for the world.
Emma does bite into her lip, then, gaze dropping to the list. She runs her finger down the items, and he knows she finds him too loud, too much, so he does his best to sit still and quiet while she thinks. He’s gotten a lot of practice lately.
“Now?” Dean was about to launch into a description of the grocery store, but maybe she’s seen them enough in her self-guided internet and T.V. education. Her question brings him up short and he looks at the clock.
Eleven in the morning on the Saturday before Easter Sunday. Fuck, the store is gonna be a disaster.
But waiting isn’t gonna improve it any, and if they go at a time she’ll be more comfortable, late at night when most of the shoppers are asleep, then they might not get everything. “Up to you. It’ll be crowded today, going right now. We can wait until later tonight.”
Yeah. That. He doesn’t care if they don’t get every item on the list, he can make do, but he’s not pushing her into a crowded fucking SuperTarget the day before Easter. “Or you can wait. Come with another time, when it’s quieter.”
“I want to go. Later.” The statement seems to surprise her almost as much as it does him, but she nods and Dean nods back and it’s settled.
***
This is a bad idea.
He’s been thinking about how bad of an idea it is all their hour-long drive into a town big enough to have a big grocery store that’ll be open late. He’s not bringing her into Wally World if he can help it, but even so. This is a bad idea.
Emma’s been quiet in the passenger seat. She’s not huddling by the door, just. Curled up, yawning as she scrolls through something on the tablet Sam got her. At first glance you’d think she’s just a fucking normal teenager. At first glance you might even think she’s actually relaxed.
Hell, she might be. Fuck if he knows. She wouldn’t be the first Winchester to feel safer in Baby than anywhere else.
He’s pretty sure she’s the first Winchester – or Campbell – with her own set of fangs, other than his brief vampire stint. And maybe he should feel horror at that, but the only feeling Dean can scrounge up is a horrible, selfish gladness that she has the innate weapons to defend herself, so he can’t even act like it bothers him. Would tell her in a heartbeat to rip the throat out of any guy, any person who tried to hurt her.
This thing. It’s different, with her, with Sam. He raised Sam and he damn well knows it, always thought he was as much of a parent to Sam as a sibling. And maybe, in some ways, sure. But this?
There aren’t words for this. Dean might have been filling a parent’s shoes with Sam, might have raised him, but he is actually Emma’s parent, and the difference is more profound than he thought possible.
Fortunately they’re coming up on a brightly lit sign and a mostly-empty parking lot, so he doesn’t have to try to find the words, now. Just gratitude that relatively few people go to the 24-hour grocer at two am on Sundays, even Easter Sundays.
There’s a parking spot, right up near the front, safely away from the other cars in the lot. Both of them sit quiet for a second, staring at the big lit entrance, after he’s turned Baby’s engine off. But Emma’s never yet been inclined to stillness that Dean’s seen, and she undoes her seatbelt first. Dean follows, the familiar motions of opening the door and getting out of his car a balm to his nerves, which haven’t settled any now that they’re actually here. He’s got his list in one pocket and a wallet full of Charlie-fixed credit cards in the other, and as much as Dean might want to haul ass back to Lebanon, Emma’s here. Emma’s standing next to the Impala, and he can see disquiet in every line of her body but she’s not running, not ducking back into the car.
If she can be brave enough to try something new and unfamiliar, he can damn well be brave enough to guide her through it.
He starts marching toward the only open entrance, and Emma attaches to his side like a shadow. She gets closer the closer they come to the store, until she’s all but walking on top of him, in his space yet never colliding with him or getting in his way. Amazon speed and reflexes come in handy.
Course, they get a weird look from the only cashier on duty, but he doesn’t think Emma notices so Dean tries not to, either.
He turns to grab a cart and she’s just – standing. There in the entrance, lit by too-bright florescence, and frozen in place. Dean doesn’t breathe, really, for a minute; he’s tensing in time with her, getting ready to follow her back to the car or – something, because the only times Emma is still is when she’s fuckin’ terrified.
Her head turns to him, jerky and slow; her eyes are huge, wide and round and white-edged.
It’s a lot of space. It’s a lot of color and a lotta noise, even this late, even to his senses – there’s the soft radio playing on the speakers and the low hum of the refrigeration cases and the sound of distant carts rolling along the linoleum.
Yeah. Bad idea.
But just as he’s about to reach out to her, she closes her eyes. Shudders. Turns to face forward again, blinking, and takes a step forward. He gets it now; she can’t follow him in here, not into an unknown place with unknown dangers, neither her inhuman nature nor two years in purgatory will let her stay behind him when she doesn’t know what’s around any corner.
She can go with him, though, and his insides ache a little more. Cause fuck, yeah, yeah it’s just a grocery store, there probably isn’t anything in here that can actually hurt her, but she doesn’t know that. Not where it matters, in her gut.
He follows her, pushing the cart until he’s just a step behind her and to the side. Fuck trying to even get their list right now; the store’s 24 hours, it’ll be open all night. Right now – “Left,” he says, and she turns with him.
They make a steady circuit of the store, going up and down every aisle. Every so often Emma will stop and breathe deep, maybe close her eyes for a moment, because the light and the abundance of food is overwhelming (and yeah, there’s another fuck-it-why-didn’t-you-think-of-that-Dean moment, because he could have predicted that taking a kid with severe Issues With Food into a damn grocery store was gonna be stressful for her, if he’d thought about it for half a second).
But she doesn’t leave, she doesn’t disappear on him, she doesn’t run out or away. They end up back at the front, and the clerk has probably seen a hell of a lot weirder than people taking a walking tour of the store in his time because now he barely looks up as they pass the checkout stands.
“List.” It isn’t a question. Dean thinks about protesting, about saying they can go home, but he’s not gonna invalidate her courage like that. He digs out the list and hands it over.
She looks it over, then heads back into the aisles, and he follows.
***
They ended up skipping the baskets, but Baby’s backseat is full of food and candy and nobody had a meltdown or ended up dead, so Dean’s going to count it as a win. Emma takes charge of returning the cart to the cart stand in the parking lot while Dean loads the last couple of bags into the car.
(He’d have liked to get everyone a basket, in theory. In practice they had both stopped and stared at the aggressively pastel monstrosities left in the seasonal aisle, and by silent mutual agreement moved to the next item on the list without even picking one up.)
When both of them are in the Impala with the doors shut and locked, Emma lets out one small, quiet breath, as if she’d held the tension in her the entire time they’d been in the store. She’s not relaxed now, not how she looked on the way in (illusion or not), but she’s not awfully still and controlled, either. She slumps against the door and leans her temple against the cool window, one leg pulling up beneath her.
“Hey.” He doesn’t start the car, not just yet; Emma’s head barely moves, a tilt to let her see him out of the corner of her eye, but she’s listening. And this is awkward and he doesn’t know how to do it, sure as hell never had it done to him, but – “You, uh. Did good in there.”
Dean can see her lips twitch, and her voice is desert-dry when she says, “It’s just a grocery store,” because they both know how very untrue that is.
“You did good,” he repeats, evenly, not looking away from her, and this time she ducks her head. Emma doesn’t respond, but she does reach out her hand and squeeze his, once. So quickly he nearly could convince himself she didn’t, but the – that. The willingness to reach out and touch him, that is precious and new and he has to clear his throat a couple times before he can focus on turning the engine over and getting them on the road to home.
