OOC: DVD Commentary for giveandforgive

[dudeimbatman]

Muse: Dean Winchester
Fandom: Supernatural
Gift recipient: Matthew Davis dude_imawesome
Prompt: 5.1 Teach

Set in matthew!PTA!Dean verse. Matthew is used with permission. [This is written in Matthew!Verse or more properly (in Dean’s journal)known as ‘Go Brooke Yourself’ verse. It’s basically the Kids Are Alright with Brooke Davis switched out for Lisa and Matthew switched out for Ben. Matthew is four and he *is* Dean’s son, although at the time this was written, Matthew didn’t know that. Dean did]

Brooke was in the house working on new designs and Dean was outside spending some time with Matthew and the medium sized, black and white dog named Hendrix that he’d gotten for Christmas. [Brooke let Dean get Matthew the dog for Christmas. Hendrix was Peyton’s influence] The Impala was sitting in the driveway, shiny from the wash Dean had given her earlier. [This whole piece is basically based on the idea of Dean teaching Matthew some of the important things about being a Winchester. There are things that are sacred to them and he needs to know this, even if he doesn’t really know he’s a Winchester yet]

“Come here,” Dean said to Matthew, walking over to the Impala. He unlocked the driver’s side door and let Matthew slide in, over to the passenger seat then he got into the driver’s seat. He turned the ignition halfway so that the radio came on. He grabbed the shoe box full of tapes and picked one, put it in the cassette player but kept the volume low. It was Kansas, one of his Dad’s favorite bands.[I love/think it’s so sad that most of Dean’s things/likes/etc are really John’s but I love using that. It connects all the Winchesters together so well.] His fingertips bumped over the tops of the cassettes, stopping at one. He pulled it out and held it up to Matthew.

“See this one?” he handed it to Matthew who held it with a reverence that he’d picked up somehow from seeing it in Dean’s hand for a moment. The little boy nodded in answer.

“This one, we don’t ever play,” Dean told him. [Okay, I unabashedly—and she knows this—stole this from Emma who writes fullonobiwan. Emma taught me how to write Dean and Sam so there are many similarities in my Dean’s background and hers. In my—her—Winchester mythology, Mary really gets set up almost like a saint. (In reflection, I’ve always thought if there were anyway for Mary to come back, it’d be really hard for her to live up to the image the Winchesters have built of her. They’ve made her so much more than a person) This is sort of a reflection of that. Mary has her own theme song but it’s almost sacrilegious to play it. In my head, John bought the tape shortly after Mary died, probably in a truck stop or gas station. It got put in the box of tapes but it’s never even been unwrapped from it’s plastic wrapper. On Mary’s birthday and on November 2, or really any time that Mary is really on Dean’s mind, he goes out there and picks the tape up and just holds it. He never, ever intends on playing the song. Where my Sam says when he dies, break the damn tape out and play it at the funeral. He never names the tape because he doesn’t have to. He just says ‘when I die, play the damn song’. Dean has a fit at that but y’know it’s Dean. He has a fit about a lot of things. ]

“Why not?” Matthew asked, eyes wide like he was about to be told some sacred secret.

“It’s called Stairway to Heaven and it’s probably Zeppelin’s greatest piece. It’s about a lady who’s in Heaven and she’s up there, turning everything to gold, making everything perfect. The rest of her family is still here, on Earth,” Dean explained the song, perhaps letting his own situation imprint a little on it. [Perhaps? Maybe a lot. I had a longer bit written out here explaining that the family goes on through their lives always looking to this golden perfect place and yet always unable to get there but I cut it because I thought it was a little too heavy for Dean to be explaining to a four year old]“When my Mom died, Dad kinda let this song be hers. We don’t ever play it ‘cause it’s hers and it’s sorta how we remember her.”

“She’s an angel now?” Matthew asked.

Dean half grinned and nodded. He dug out John’s journal and got a picture of John and Mary out to show to Matthew. “She was always an angel…but yeah. She’s an angel now.”[This reinforces that idea that Mary is more than a person. She’s been made into a saint, a reason and a mission.]

He put the tape, the picture and the journal back then looked at Matthew hard. The little boy was a little quiet. “You doin’ okay?”[Really, Dean is sort of pushing his feelings off on Matthew here. He needs to stop, reassess and make sure he’s doing alright as well]

Matthew nodded earnestly and grinned. That made Dean grin and continue on with his ‘lesson’.

“Alright. This is my seat. Even when Sam is driving, it’s still my seat.[This is like the Impala is always Dean’s. I had little fan girl squees when Dean was the one that picked out the Impala in the episode ‘In The Beginning. I was like YES! She’s been Dean’s since before he was born] It used to be my Dad’s and he was sitting right here in this seat when he proposed to my Mom,”[I’ve always thought all the important things in Winchester life happened in or with The Impala so I really loved Kripke when john proposed to Mary there. I loved that the Impala was there for ‘the deal’ and Dean often tries to tell me he was conceived in the backseat of the Impala. I tell him to shut his piehole. He doesn’t listen to me] Dean told the little boy. “Now where you’re sitting, that’s Sam’s place. When he was real little he rode in a basket in that seat. When he got older he’d sit in the backseat and sometimes me and him would play soldiers back there. Set up battalions of those green and brown army men and let ‘em go to war. Now he's a giant and he's too big for the backseat so that's his seat again.”[Again, I love the idea of the Impala really being the only ‘home’ Dean and Sam have ever known. I love cycles and synchronicity so I like the idea that Sam grew up in the backseat of the Impala. The cycle and the synchronicity gets completed a bit further down when Dean gets around to teaching Matthew about the backseat…and no not *that* way]

They both turned and looked in the backseat; Matthew on his knees, his stomach pressed against the back of the seat, Dean half turned, right arm hooked over the seat back.

“It’s dirty,” Matthew said.

“Nah, I’ve scrubbed it so much I don’t think it can get any cleaner,” Dean responded. “Sammich was about five when he spilled grape juice back there. We weren’t supposed to have purple grape juice in the back seat but the lady next door had given him one of those juice boxes and he’d snuck it into the backseat. Dad about blew a gasket-“

“What’s a gasket?” Matthew interrupted.

“Part to a car that if you blow it’ll literally shoot up to sky. I’ll show you those later,” Dean answered. “Anyway, Dad was pissed and Sammy was in tears ‘cause no one wanted Dad to take off his belt and whoop you. So I told him I did. He leaned me over the back of the car and spanked me good. I never cried ‘cause Sammy was in the backseat bawling his eyes out. Stain never came out.” [This is a wee!chester’s story that came out in prompt once for my Sam. Dean always protects Sam from everything, to the point that he would take swats for Sam. Dean does things/goes through things so that Sam doesn’t have to. Much like any parent would. This incident isn’t any different and likely not isolated. I’m a sap, we’re all aware of this, but I love the idea that Dean is getting swats so Sam doesn’t have to but Sam is doing the crying, so Dean doesn’t have to. It also takes away things that the boys are recalcitrant to do and gives them to the one that’s more willing. IE Dean doesn’t mind pain as much while Sam doesn’t mind crying as much so in a way, Sam is saving Dean from something too. I also really like the idea of there being a physical record of that as well. The boys don’t have a lot of ‘things’ from their childhood so I like to tie things into the Impala if I can.]

“What’s the other one?” Matthew asked, pointing to a brownish stain on the passenger side of the backseat.

“One time Sam got hurt really bad and I had to put him in the backseat until I could save him.”

Matthew looked at him, surprise on his face turning to awe. “So that’s Sam’s blood?”[I so think of Lady Macbeth here except I think there’s a part of Dean that wouldn’t want to get that blood stain out. He’d want it left as a reminder of the one time he failed—in his mind—to keep him on the straight and narrow, protecting Sam. At the same time, every time he looks in the backseat, it’s got to kill him to have that reminder of when Sam was dead. You can argue that Dean would have put down a blanket but I don’t think he was in the right frame of mind to consider that. He just wanted to get Sam back somewhere safe.]

“Yeah,” Dean answered. It’d be a few years before he could tell Matthew what really happened so that he could appreciate the sacredness of that blood stain.

“Cool,” Matthew grinned. Dean chuckled in response. In a few years, he’d show Matthew the false trunk in the Impala but for now he was showing him just a few of the important things about being a Winchester.

“Okay, Little Dude, we’re gonna change the Impala’s oil,” Dean said as he slipped out of the car. He grabbed a couple of bottles of oil out of the trunk and an aluminum roasting pan he’d bought for that purpose. He popped the hood on the Impala then walked around and picked Matthew up. He sat him down on the edge of the car so he could look at the engine. He pointed out things like the carburetor cap, the air filter and the cylinders on the engine. He pulled the dipstick out and wiped it across the hem of his tee shirt, showing Matthew how it was dirty and low. [This part of the piece is what I started with and then Dean piped up and reminded me that there are a lot of things about the Impala that he needed to teach Matthew so I had to work through everything to get to this. I think changing oil is a pretty common thing for fathers to teach their sons but of course because this is the Impala, it’s special. I also think Dean is aware that this needs to be special because he neglected to teach Sam all of these things until he’d made his deal. He won’t make that mistake with Matthew and eventually, once Sam is dead, the Impala will go to Matthew in this verse. He’ll need to know how to keep her running because by that point, she’s going to be really old. Obviously in the tv show we see that the Impala isn’t just a car. She’s a Winchester as much as Sam or Dean. She’s also the Winchester that has the greatest chance of survival. Dean likes that and he refuses to believe that there is ever a time she’ll be in Bobby’s salvage yard.]

“Now we have to get under the car and drain the old oil out,” Dean said as he put Matthew back on his feet and walked around to sit down on the ground. He laid down and grabbed the frame of the car and pulled himself underneath the car. “Get under here,” he told the little boy. [Because Dean isn’t big on passivity. He likes to get right into things and he wants Matthew to get right into it with him.]

Matthew giggled and mimicked Dean, pulling himself under the car until he was lying shoulder to shoulder with him.[It’s probably sap me again but I love the image of Dean and a little boy lying on the ground underneath the Impala shoulder to shoulder. Dean doesn’t talk down to kids. He treats them like equals and I think that’s why historically we see him getting along really well with them even though he doesn’t know that many of them] Dean showed him how to unscrew the valve and catch all the oil in the pan. Once that was done, they slid out from underneath the Impala and walked back around to the front of the car. He showed him how the oil was a golden color when they poured it in and how to gauge how much was in it. When the oil was changed, Dean changed the air filter and closed the hood.

“Only one thing left to do,” Dean told him.

“Wash our hands?” Matthew asked, holding up his grimy, oily hands.[Matthew’s mom is Brooke Davis so of course he’d think about getting/keeping clean. Dean has yet to corrupt him on that. Yet]

“Okay, two more things,” Dean chuckled. He looked at the houses on both sides of Brooke’s and the ones across the street. “Which neighbor does your mom like the least?”[Because if he did everything by the book, he wouldn’t be Dean. He invariably teaches Matthew things that Brooke doesn’t really want him to learn. Not to mention, Dean isn’t EPA’s best friend]

Matthew pointed to the house to the left of them. “Her. She says ugly things about Mom.”

Dean grinned in response and picked up the half full roasting pan. “Okay, follow me and this is secret guy stuff. We don’t tell anyone else,”[Dean is always teaching Matthew things to say or do and then realizing ‘oh shit, Brooke’s going to kill me—like that with twins, Matthew doesn’t have to pick one or the other. He gets both—so to cover up, he tells Matthew it’s secret guy stuff. It makes Matthew feel special because while he has uncles, he’s never had a dad to be in a secret club with and it keeps Dean out of the doghouse for about five minutes until he does something to put himself in there] he said as the crossed over to the neighbor’s yard, oil pan in both hands. He paused, checked out to make sure no one was watching and poured the oil in the flower bed, making sure he spread it around evenly. Matthew giggled as he watched Dean. Once the pan was crumpled up and put in the trash can, he picked Matthew up, oily hands and all.

“Now we go wash our hands,” Dean told him.

“When do we get to change oil again?” Matthew asked.[Of course he’s really wanting to know when they get to do more guy things]

“In three thousand miles,” Dean responded. “Probably in another month or so.” [I tried to think about how many miles the boys have to drive every month and it’s kind of staggering. Also, I know a lot of people wait until 5,000 to change oil. Dean wouldn’t, not with his baby]

“Awesome,” Matthew declared, grinning from ear to ear. When Dean opened the door, Matthew wiggled out of his arms and ran toward Brooke’s office.

“Mooooooom! Dean told me why the Impala is dirty!”[And here comes some of that corruption. Matthew has forgotten about washing up because he’s excited to tell Brooke everything Dean taught him and of course being a four year old boy, blood is still on his mind]