WHO Lucas Mitchell Winchester & Dean Winchester WHATYOU'RE MY FATHER?!?!?! WHEN Saturday late in the afternoon WHERE Dean's house WARNINGS Language, lies, and hurt feels STATUS Closed | Complete doc
Lucas was angry, but more than that, he was hurt. His whole world had gotten turned upside down because of a secret so big he'd never consider it even possible. He and his dad had been through so much and it was all a lie? His whole being was firmly rooted in being Lucas Mitchell, son of Cameron Mitchell, and that was just a load of crap because his dad wasn't Cameron Mitchell. Cameron Mitchell was a liar, and so was his best friend.
After shouting at his fake father the worst he'd ever done, after he'd said some of the meanest, nastiest things he could think of, Lucas tore out of the house and sped off in his truck towards Dean's house. Dean, who was someone who'd been in his life for a long time now because of a chance meeting, was just as big a faker as Cameron Mitchell because not only had that meeting probably not been an accident, but also Dean Winchester was apparently his actual father. It explained a lot of things that he really wasn't comfortable with examining too closely, so Lucas focused on being mad as hell as he pulled into the driveway.
He slammed his car door shut and made his way to the front door of the house. He didn't even bother with the doorbell, just flung open the screen door and started pounding on the heavy wood door. "YOU'D BETTER OPEN UP YOU FUCKING LIAR!" he screamed, anger definitely apparent. Lucas didn't even care if Dean had gotten a heads up. He was pissed and Dean was going to hear it from him.
Things were actually going pretty well for Dean these days. He had a girl, even if things were a little complicated, and a pretty good life. He'd settled down since rolling into town and it was a life like he wished he could have had a long time ago. Things hadn't gone his way when he'd been younger and he'd had to spend a lot of years away but he was back and it felt like home.
He hadn't really been anticipating his home being disturbed by a kid railing on his door like he was out for murder and if he hadn't recognized Lucas' voice he'd have been worried about his past coming to haunt him. As it was, he was just confused, and it showed on his face when he threw the door open.
"Dude. What the hell are you raging about? Quit trying to bash my door in."
Lucas was even madder at how confused Dean looked. That was some Grade A Bull as far as he was concerned, which was saying a lot because he was usually super trusting. Especially of Dean. He never yelled at Dean, always went to him when he'd gotten into a fight with his dad - no, his fake lying dad, he corrected himself - and now everything was just a mess and it was all Dean's fault. "No!" he replied as he pushed his way into the house. For as mad as he was, Lucas mostly just wanted to be able to literally shove Dean out of the way at least once.
"You're a damn liar that's what. Or is there another Dean Winchester," the name spat like it was some kind of curse, "who gave up a baby son 18 years ago in Madison?" Lucas' tone said exactly what he thought about the likelihood of that being the truth. "Tell me the truth. For once in your drunk, miserable, selfish life. Tell me!" The last two words were all but screamed in Dean's face, and the anger was all Lucas could hold on to so that he wouldn't start crying.
Oh. Well. That wasn't how Dean would have imagined this whole thing going. He hadn't thought of it going any way at all. The whole thing was a long time ago and a part of a man he really wasn't anymore, the top of a big pile of things he regretted in his life. Dean sighed, and took a step back, letting Lucas into the house.
"Okay. Come on and have a drink." This was going to be a drinking conversation if anything was. There was no way that Dean could just stare his young friend, his own kid, in the face and tell him how everything had gone down without a little bit of liquid courage and something to ease the way it still hurt. He was happy now, as happy as he'd ever been anyway and he was pretty sure it was as happy as he was capable of being, but the memories of when he'd been not a lot older than Lucas was now still stung as though they were fresh. Everything still haunted him and it was good reason that he'd left Madison back then, with the baby in the arms of a guy who he'd known straight away would provide him with a better life than Dean could ever hope to.
Coming back, he'd known he'd been right and Lucas had grown up to be someone he never could have created. He wasn't that good.
Lucas' anger fizzled a bit when Dean just accepted that this was happening. He didn't try to deny it, which was both good and bad. On the one hand, at least he wasn't taking him for a fool. On the other, it meant their whole friendship was some kind of lie, tainted by this huge secret. He'd tried so hard and he'd cared so much, but maybe that had all been for nothing.
"And you'll tell me the truth," he repeated, still mad but much more subdued. He didn't move until Dean agreed, but then he followed the older man into the living room and sat in the very far corner of the couch, wedged in small as he could make himself. Lucas accepted the glass when it was handed to him. He looked at it for a moment, hoped maybe it would prove that this was all a bad dream. It wasn't though, so he downed the whole glass in one go, coughing because of how bad it burned. It didn't help, though. He'd wanted it to help.
Lucas looked at Dean, upset more than anything now, as he waited for the story.
"Don't need a drink to lie to you, kid," Dean pointed out gruffly. He'd been doing it the whole time they'd known each other. He'd lied about a lot of things, but keeping the secret from him was a huge one. One he definitely didn't think he'd ever have to deal with.
He poured a couple of drinks quietly, a lot more for him than for Lucas before sitting, pointedly keeping the same distance between them he always would. They'd been friends until now and nothing more, and that was about the depth of the relationship Dean felt. He wasn't going to change just because the secret was out there, just because Lucas suddenly knew what their relationship really was. Dean wasn't his father, not really. Not in the way Cameron Mitchell was. That guy was good to him and he'd put in all the work. All Dean had done was get with a girl and screw up. Maybe it wasn't so simple, it never was, but that was what he told himself at any rate. Telling himself that made it easier to walk away from his family.
Family was everything to him, always had been.
"So he told you?" There was no accusation, no anger, just an assumption of truth. There was no other way for Lucas to know.
Lucas just rolled his eyes uncharitably. Dean had lied to him drunk or sober, happy or sad, so it clearly didn't really matter. Dean could just lie as easily as he breathed and that was shitty. What was also shitty was how Lucas had found out.
"No." His reply was curt and he had every intention of keeping it that way, but he couldn't because he was still so mad about it. "No, apparently you both were determined to lie to me about it for the rest of your lives." Lucas scoffed and set his now empty glass on the table. "No, I had to find out looking for my birth certificate for my college application. Except instead of seeing my mom and dad's names? I saw yours and a woman I never even heard of." And one that he, frankly, didn't remember, because he'd been so focused on it being very plainly written out that his father was Dean Winchester.
"So I asked him and when he wouldn't tell me what happened, said it was your story to tell, I yelled at him and now I'm here. Yelling at you to tell me what the fuck happened because not telling me? You guys are a bunch of selfish assholes, okay? Like the worst people I have ever met in my life. And that's including that bitch who ruined Santa for Riley." It was a lot of cursing, far more than he'd ever said in his whole life before now. But that's what Winchesters did. They cursed and they drank and they didn't give a flying fuck about anyone but themselves.
"Okay, I get that you're pissed right now." Dean couldn't blame him. He would be too. If their positions were reversed even a little bit, he'd be a lot angrier than Lucas was. He wouldn't be sitting there choking on a drink and demanding answers; he'd be doing a lot worse because he wouldn't be able to accept answers. "But you need to cool it a little. I'll tell you about everything but you're going to actually hear what I'm saying because I'm not going to repeat myself."
He said that kind of thing a lot, but this time Dean really meant it. He really wasn't going to tell the story more than once. He didn't want to bring that pain back into his life and more than that he didn't want Lucas to have to hear it more than the one time. He was a good kid and Dean wanted to let him keep being that. He wanted to let the kid keep believing that there was good in the world when Dean had lived through a lot and knew that wasn't true at all. That was why the Mitchells had been a better fit for the baby than Dean ever would have been. One of a lot of reasons, and Lucas proved each and every one just by existing the way he was.
"And you've got to decide right now how much you want to know because if you want it all, it's not good and you're not going to get whatever you're looking for out of it." He wasn't going to suddenly start pretending like he could be the kid's father, that was for damn sure.
"Whatever." Lucas bit out. He didn't like being this angry, didn't want to be this angry all the time, either. His whole world had come crashing down around him and he needed the truth, so that meant he did as he was told and pressed his lips together in a fine line. He couldn't help but be petty and mean at the coddling he was getting because it was some real bullshit.
"You went this long without parenting me, so quit stalling and just tell me already, would you?" It felt like some kind of out of body experience, like he was just a spectator as someone with his face and voice was going off on all the people he cared about the most. Every word he said, he knew it was wrong, that it was mean and petty and selfish, that he was crossing every line imaginable. There was no stopping him. How could anything stop a train that had run off its tracks? He was hurtling down a steep, slippery slope and there was no hope of stopping before there was some big, fiery crash.
Caring about him and parenting him were two very different things, but Dean didn't bother pointing it out. Lucas was in no state to be getting into dumb technicalities. So he just took a long sip of his drink, nearly finishing it so he topped it off again before actually saying anything. That. That was stalling.
"Your mom, your...the woman who gave birth to you," that was an important distinction. The woman who had actually raised him was his real mom as far as Dean was concerned, "was named Robin. She was great. We really got each other, you know? And so she winds up knocked up and we think yeah. We can do it. We're young and dumb and in love and we think sure, let's start a family. So I guess that's something you've got to know, kid. We didn't not want you or anything like that. We did. We were stoked about having you." Dean had always wanted to have a family, to be able to have kids of his own and watch them grow up, teach them to drive and throw a punch and whatever but after losing her, he couldn't do that anymore. He couldn't do it alone. He needed someone to balance him.
"We even got to have you for a couple weeks. Two. And a day. Almost to the hour." The exact moment of Lucas' birth and his mother's death were the times Dean was going to remember until he died. The best and worst seconds of his life.
Lucas was half convinced he was going to have to snap at Dean again, but thankfully he didn't have to because the story came out, slow as it was. For him, the distinction of biology versus choice didn't matter. His father and mother were the people who'd come together and literally combined their genetic material to create him. The people who'd raised him weren't those people anymore and he wanted to be mad about that, wanted to decry any familial relationship to them because they weren't his real family. No, his real family had abandoned him to strangers.
It didn't really leave a great taste in his mouth, truthfully.
The story Dean started to tell wasn't the one he'd expected. It almost made him want to accuse Dean of lying to him again, but no matter how mad he was, Lucas knew there was no point in lying now so he just frowned. It sounded like a love story or something, the kind of story that gets a happy ending.
"You had a shitty way of showing that you wanted me," he said, unable to keep that part from spilling out. Whatever happened two weeks and one day later, Lucas really wanted to not care at all. "What happened? She decided she didn't want a baby and left? So you decided to abandon me too? With strangers? Did you even know the Mitchells?" He needed something if he was going to still be angry.
There were tears with the anger in Dean's eyes as he looked at Lucas sharply. "Nuh uh. No. You don't get to make that kind of assumption about her. She loved you more than anyone's ever loved anyone. She loved you so freaking much she died holding you."
It had been the scariest thing Dean had ever seen, coming home to find a wailing baby halfway on top of his girlfriend's lifeless body. It had been some kind of miracle Lucas hadn't been thrown across the room or smothered. It was still the worst thing he'd ever seen and he'd spent a lot of years seeing a lot of bad to try to wash it away. He couldn't wash away the guilt of knowing that he should have been with her, that he never should have left her even for the hour or so that he had. Lucas was right to call him selfish, he was now and he had been then; he'd been itching to get out and she'd assured him it would all be fine, that he should just go down to the diner and grab a cup of coffee, then a couple of burgers to go and they'd try leaving Lucas in the other room for a few hours of just being together when he got back. It was supposed to have ended well.
She wasn't supposed to die probably minutes after he'd left, no one there to call an ambulance that might have been able to save her.
"She had that...what do you call it. The blood pressure thing while she was pregnant. The hospital said she was okay and sent us home a couple days after you came along. But...I wasn't there. She had a seizure, her heart stopped, and I wasn't there to help either of you. So yeah. I had to give you to her brother because he was going to be able to really take care you when I couldn't even take care of me."
"What-" Lucas was horrified at the thought of his mother dying while he was in her arms. It wasn't fair, not at all, that his mom had died when he'd been so young, that Dean hadn't been there to stop it or protect them. To save their family. He shot up at the mention that Cam was his uncle. His mom's brother. That meant he was going to have to apologize about that, too. He'd have to apologize about a lot of things but he was still mad.
"You could have, though. You should have! You didn't have to give me up! We could've still been a family, you could've still loved me." Lucas knew he was crying now, but he didn't care. He didn't even have the memory of his mom, couldn't have at least bonded with his dad through their shared pain. Instead, he got handed off to someone else and sure, it was a relative, someone who'd love him, but the Mitchells weren't his mother and father.
"You abandoned me because you what? Felt guilty? Couldn't look at me without seeing her? Well that's bullshit because you've been my friend for how many years now, huh? Guess your guilt only lasted so long, is that it? Why didn't you just stay away from me? Why did you have to make it worse? It's cause what? I can feed myself and I'm not dependent on your or something? That's why you're in my life now? Why you came back?"
"I left you because I could not take care of you," Dean said firmly. The reasons why he couldn't didn't matter. Everything he'd done had been for Lucas' own good. "And I didn't come back to town looking for you. I know I gave up any right to you the day I left in the first place and that's always been something that I've had to deal with. I didn't come back even meaning to stay."
He'd only ever meant to pass through, hadn't even thought about catching a look at his kid while he was here. He wondered about Lucas, sure, always had and there'd been a couple of phone calls over the years during which Cameron had been nice enough to tell him how he was doing but only in Dean's weakest moments, the times when he'd struggled the hardest and just needed to know there was something, anything good out in the world. Even if Lucas didn't remember who he was, Dean had always still loved him, but that wasn't going to make anything better right now.
"But yeah, okay. I wound up staying because of you. Because I can't be a parent to you but you wanted to be friends not knowing a single damn thing about me. Because your dad raised you better than I could have and you're a good kid. So I figured yeah, If that's how I got you in my life again, that's more than I deserve. I wasn't looking for you to ever know."
"Did you even try?" Lucas felt every bit of the pain of being just handed off like he meant nothing, because that was definitely what hurt the most. He'd survived his mom dying twice, which sucked a lot to think about, and now he was having to deal with both of his fathers lying to him for his whole life. That was just a load of crap and no one deserved to be treated the way he'd been.
"You aren't supposed to lie to the people you love. You aren't supposed to just give up on your family. I still would've been a good kid if you had kept me!" Lucas knew, objectively, that it wasn't true, that Dean couldn't have provided the same life he'd gotten with the Mitchells, but he didn't want to admit that maybe Dean had done the right thing to just leave him. A thought struck him, then, and he found a new target for his anger. "Does Lena know? Did you tell her?" How many people had known that he wasn't a Mitchell, that he was actually Dean Winchester's unwanted son.
"Do you care if I tried or not?" Dean snapped. He had tried, a couple of days, but in his grief it had been too much and he hadn't been enough. He'd just fumbled around and barely kept the baby alive with Cameron's help on the regular. He'd held on as tightly as anyone could, had never wanted to give up his son But he'd done what he'd thought was best and it had definitely turned out to be in the kid's best interests in the end. He knew he'd made the right choice.
He did have to pause when Lucas asked if Lena knew. There was no right answer to that and so he did just go with the truth and wound up shaking his head. "No one but me and your dad know." There were probably some people who had been around town eighteen years ago who might have realized that the Mitchells suddenly had a baby, but they'd agreed to never tell anyone and with the adoptive mother dead for several years now, the pair were the only ones left with the knowledge. "There's a lot about me Lena still doesn't know."
That didn't stop Dean from wanting to marry her. It had taken him this long to feel like that again and he wasn't going to spoil it by telling her he'd had to give up his son as an infant.
Lucas did kind of want to know the answer, but even though Dean hadn't answered the question specifically, he sort of had. That honestly made it worse and Lucas just sort of shook his head and turned away from his father. So he'd tried and decided he couldn't do it and just abandoned him. It hurt, all of it hurt, and he just wanted it to stop hurting.
"So I'm just some dirty secret. Got it." He angrily wiped his eyes and nose before he turned back to Dean. "You don't have to worry about me telling her. Or anyone." At best, he'd tell Riley because he couldn't not tell her, but he was scared to do that, too. He just looked absolutely exhausted and sad and a little bit disgusted. "I know exactly what I am now." Something to be ashamed of, clearly.
"No." Dean didn't think he'd ever protested something so quickly in his life. "You don't. Because you're too busy being pissed off to really get what I'm saying to you here." Or to ask the right questions to get the right answers, but that was just as much on Dean. "And I get it. You've got every right to be pissed off and every reason to hate me. But everything I did was for you and there's nothing you can say or do that's going to make me feel worse than I already do about leaving you behind. And you're not going to change the fact that I've loved you since the second I laid eyes on you."
Even just born, covered in blood and whatever else, Lucas had been the most beautiful child Dean could have ever imagined and it was only because he loved him so hard that he'd been able to give the baby away in the first place. Knowing that he'd be better off with someone else, would have a better life somewhere else, it still hadn't been an easy decision. In a long list of hard things he'd had to do, that was still the hardest.
"And I get that it doesn't change anything for you. So you tell me what you want here. You want to keep up this friends thing or are we done?" Dean playing father to him wasn't an option. He'd lost that chance.
He just shook his head. "Whatever helps you sleep at night," Lucas replied, just brushing it all off. He couldn't believe that what Dean was saying was true. It just made it all so much worse because clearly Dean didn't want to be his dad, didn't want to be what he was. Right now, Lucas definitely understood that because he wanted nothing more than to actually be Cameron Mitchell's son again.
"You don't want to be my dad, fine. I don't want to be your kid or your friend or have anything to do with you. I don't want you messaging me or keeping tabs on me or anything. You gave me up. Now it's time for me to return the favor." Lucas knew even as he said it that he'd regret it, but he didn't care. He just wanted to hurt Dean as badly as he'd been hurt. "You can talk to Cam, though. I'm never talking to him again, either." Literally, but neither of them knew that just yet.
That wasn’t what he was saying but Lucas wasn’t listening to what he was saying. And If Dean was sure of anything it was that he had absolutely no place to try making the argument. He loved the kid, always would, but not like he wanted him to. The relationship they could have wasn’t what he expected and Dean wasn’t going to try to be something he wasn’t to the kid.
And if Lucas didn’t want anything, then as much as it broke Dean’s heart, that was his call.
“Alright.” He didn’t have to be happy about it, though. “Then you know where the door is.” Lucas had every right to walk out of Dean’s life the same way as had been done to him. Dean just poured himself another drink, enough that it had to be clear he was about to drown his feelings.
For a very brief moment, Lucas could see the way he wanted things to unfold. He wanted Dean to say he was sorry, that he'd come to his senses and of course he wanted Lucas to be his son. They'd get to live happily ever after and be a family with Lena, making up for all the lost time. That just wasn't possible, though. It was never going to be possible because that wasn't who Dean was or what he wanted and it sucked, but whatever. Lucas knew he couldn't do anything more than what he'd already done.
Lucas just looked devastated for a moment before he just shook his head. "Fine." It was barely a whisper as he moved across the room and back the way he came. If Dean wanted him to be the one to walk out this time, then fine. He would and he wouldn't look back. He didn't care if Dean drank himself to death from the pain because that was his choice, those were the consequences to him not wanting to be a dad. So he didn't look back, didn't falter for even a moment as he walked out of the house and climbed into his truck. He needed to see his girlfriend. She loved him, even if no one else did.