rivers_bend

Title: Can't let it go and can't get through.
Words: ~700
Rating: G
Genre: SPN gen, Bobby, Sam, Dean
A/N: for fannishliss who said, maybe it's from Bobby's pov and he's turning over a table to tighten a leg and finds a whole string of DWs, in response to Like the Tides of My Life. This is a sequel to that fic (though it makes sense without it).



Bobby Singer doesn't believe in burning his bridges, but John Winchester apparently has no such compunctions. "I don't ever need to hear from you again," he said, and he meant it. Bobby will miss the boys most of all, but it was sharing his thoughts on the way John was raising them that'd led to the trouble to begin with.

He watches them drive away, Dean's head next to John's shoulder and Sam invisible in the back seat—lying down, probably, given John had dragged the boys out of bed to put them in the car and teenagers need their sleep. Bobby can't help but worry about Sam, who has more of his own mind than John understands. It's all too easy to see Sam snapping someday, and John saying something in reply that will be hard to come back from.

There are dishes in the sink, and Bobby does them before heading upstairs to try and sleep. It's a fitful night.

The next day Bobby gets a call from an old army buddy who needs his help. The way one thing leads to another, it's three months before Bobby goes back into the room he's thought of as John's boys' room for nearly a decade. Sheets still trail onto the floor where John packed the boys up so quickly, and there's a copy of Catcher in the Rye--Central High School stamped inside the cover--abandoned next to Sam's bed.

While he's gathering up the bedding to put in the wash, Bobby notices that the table between the beds is wobbly on its legs. It's a rainy day, good for mending furniture, so once the washing's on, he comes back up and gets it, tucking the book under his arm while he's at it. No way of knowing which of the probably thousands of "Central" high schools in the country it might belong to, so he'll add it to his small collection of novels.

If it weren't just old and run-down, the little table might be mistaken for an antique. Bobby has no idea of its provenance, beyond that he's had it for years, and he's pretty sure it came to him from a yard sale. About two feet square, the top has carved edges: roses on a vine. The legs are spindly and attached with screws rather than dovetailed into the table's design, hence the tendency to get wobbly.

What Bobby sees when he turns the table over hits him in the chest. There, on the tabletop's unvarnished underside, over and over, in pencil, ballpoint, marker pen, and even once in what looks like Bobby's fountain pen, are the initials DW followed by dates.

Sometimes Dean clearly marked every day of a visit, others he just used an inclusive date to cover a week or more. It breaks Bobby's heart to see it. Every time the boys stayed in that room, from the second time John brought them around, when Dean was nine years old.

Cursing John Winchester's stubborn ass, Bobby goes to fetch the screwdriver, and a pot of clear varnish. The marks in pencil are already starting to fade, and Bobby feels the need to preserve them. Dean Winchester was here, they say. And though the boys' visits are marked in Bobby's journal, he cherishes this hidden reminder that Dean wanted a record, too.

Once it's dry, Bobby carries the table back upstairs and sets it between the twin beds that he's remade with the sheets the boys had always slept on. He squares it to the wall and sets the lamp back on top. And then, feeling sentimental, but deciding not to chide himself for it, he goes back down and fetches Catcher in the Rye, and lays it next to the lamp.

He doubts he'll see Sam and Dean again, and if he does, the chances of either of them wanting to read the book are slim to none, but it makes him feel better. Besides, there are plenty of books downstairs; his shelves hardly needed one more.

When he's done, Bobby shuts the door.

It will be four years before he opens it again.
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