Summary: Sam's first year at Stanford, John and Dean spend Christmas hunting on the other side of the country. Neither of them is happy about it. More graves than Christmas presents get opened; John gets irritated; Dean gets hurt.

Author's Note: Loosely connected to one-shots "Things Unsaid" and "Christmas Mishap".

Disclaimer: All things appertaining to the television show Supernatural are not now, have never been, and will never be my property.

THE GAP IN THE CIRCLE

John didn't think much of it, the first three times he glanced up from his research to find Dean watching the cellphone with the same expression he'd tended to wear around sleek muscle cars in the days before John caved in and gave his son the Impala. Probably Dean hoped for a special Christmas call from some girl he'd picked up in the fifty-three hours they'd already been in town.

The fourth time, John looked a little more closely, noticing that the expression on his son's face was less like the way he looked at women and cars now and more like the way he'd sometimes watched that girl he had crushed on his first year in high school – what had her name been? Katy? Kitty? Karen? Shy and pretty and sweet, and Dean had nearly gotten expelled when he kicked some junior's ass for sneering at her father the poverty-stricken local pastor. From what little he'd seen, John was pretty sure the girl had thought Dean was a punk and a bully, but Dean had still looked at her like she was angel and prom queen rolled into one. Sometimes John was actually glad that Dean had switched gears in his sophomore year and started paying attention to a different type of girl, with a rather different goal in mind. Annoying as his son's attitude toward women sometimes got, it was probably for the best that Dean never got honestly smitten any more. Too distracting, too painful when they had to move on.

Which, come to think of it, made it pretty unlikely that he'd sit around hoping some trampy local girl would call him instead of ringing up her.

And while that train of thought was still coming out of Memory Lane, John realized what was going on. Dean was waiting for Sammy to call.

Occasionally, John thought his older son was still an optimist at heart, despite all the reasons the boy had to be one of the world's worst cynics. This was one of those times. If that phone rang, it was a hell of a lot more likely that Katy/Kitty/Karen would be on the other end telling Dean she had a naughty, naughty Christmas present for him than that it would be Sam, wishing his family the Merry Christmas and the Happy New Year that he was presumably having out west. Yet there the kid sat, quiet and still for the first time all day, staring like he was waiting for the Second Coming. Probably didn't even realize he was doing it; probably didn't have any notion that he hadn't so much as twitched a finger in the last half hour.

John wondered briefly if Dean would pick up the phone and make the call himself, after it had failed to ring another couple hundred times. He doubted it. Not after that message he'd heard Dean leaving on Sam's voicemail two weeks before, that casual offer to "swing by" Palo Alto, as if they weren't in Tennessee at the time, and pick him up for Christmas break once he was done with his final exams. Sam had not called back, and chances were that Dean would take the hint.

Eventually.

The ninth time John looked up from his notes, he lost his temper. "Stop watching the damn phone," he growled. "He's not going to call."

Dean jolted out of his stupor, his gaze snapping over to John. After a half-second in which he looked far too young and startled, he pasted on an expression of baffled innocence. "Who's not going to what?"

John was not in the mood to joke, and he let it show. Dean backed down almost instantly, lapsing back into his slump on the edge of the table and opting to stare at the takeout congealing on top of the television. The phone, neglected, remained mute.

The eleventh time John looked up, Dean had rocked his chair back perilously far and sat drumming his fingers on his knee in time to the beat of some inaudible song. He would probably start humming any minute, and John really couldn't take that right now – not when he had a headache the size of Rhode Island from a full day spent interviewing reluctant idiots who were thinking more about their unfinished Christmas shopping than about a handful of mysterious deaths, followed by a night in an unheated library digging through old newspapers and records, all topped off with a cold, tequila-laced morning hunting fruitlessly through one cramped churchyard after another. As far as he was concerned, Newport had too many graves, too many graveyards, and too many morons who'd be better off inflating the first two categories instead of out walking useless little dogs and bleating Merry Christmas at everyone they passed.

Maybe he should be thankful for small favors. His mood had not been improved by Dean's cheerful suggestion at the start of the hunt that their quarry might be the ghost of one of the seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century pirates who had less literally haunted the port in days past. Even scuffling through eight inches of snow for a timeworn tombstone was preferable to figuring out how to deal with someone whose bones were lost under fathoms of sea.

Sure enough, Dean started humming – something repetitive and vaguely Christmas-related, just audible enough to grate on John's last nerve. He was having a pretty crappy Christmas Day himself, much as he hated to admit it even inside his own head. Dean's determination to make up for Sam's absence by being twice as noisy and obnoxious as usual simply made it worse.

"Can you shut the hell up for ten minutes?" he demanded, rustling the creased maps in a pointed attempt to remind Dean that someone was trying to work.

Dean shut up, not counting the loud thud of the chair legs when he let them drop to the carpet, and reached for one of the local history books that John had liberated from the closed library the previous night. Not that there'd be anything useful in the one he was half-heartedly flipping through, but maybe, if John could just concentrate for a few minutes …

Finally, he found the name of the church the dead woman had been married at. Tiny, blurred type on a map from the early twentieth century. A quick cross-reference with a newer map proved his suspicions correct: whoever the bastards in charge of naming things were, they had decided to rename the church. He had its location now, but he continued to seethe as he shoved the extraneous maps aside. If people would just quit with all this damn change, he wouldn't have had to spend the day tromping around in the cold, scraping ice off eighteenth-century tombstones, while Dean scuffed his feet and threw snowballs at inoffensive trees and talked too much and kept screwing his head around to look over his shoulder like he thought something was going to be there. Something that was on the other side of the country, spending Christmas on the beach in southern California with his fratty white-collar roommate and friends.

In retrospect, he probably should have told Dean about Sam's plans for the Christmas break.

Yes, they had both been to Palo Alto more than once to scout around and check out Sam's dorm, Sam's classrooms, Sam's roommate and the people he apparently hung out with, but they didn't talk about it. Even the first time, when they'd both gone alone and run into each other behind the tennis stadium, they'd only discussed the general weirdness of California and what the hell was up with that freaky fountain, not a word about why they were both there. So out of habit, John had kept his mouth shut when he found out about Sam's holiday itinerary.

Now he wished he'd shared. Maybe knowing where Sam was would have kept Dean from twitching toward John's cellphone every time it rang during the past two weeks (hell, maybe he should get the kid a phone of his own, never mind the cost), from alternately chattering and spacing out, from staring at the extravagant Christmas lights like he was remembering how much Sammy had loved them. Yeah, Sammy had gone through a real spirit-of-the-holidays phase: the boys had used to decorate whatever apartment they were in at the time with whatever junk they had on hand … and that one time they'd gotten a real tree, a six-footer, and the boys had managed to knock it over (exactly how, John never had found out) right smack on top of the television, shot as perfect as if they'd planned it. Glass everywhere, and Sammy in tears that turned to laughter when Dean got the tree upright again and attached the television antenna to the top like a demented Christmas star.

He could remember now where that damn tune Dean was humming had come from. Some carol or other that Sammy had learned in third grade and sung ceaselessly around the house until Dean came up with his own lyrics and joined in, louder and, frankly, much more on pitch. Sammy could carry a tune in a bucket, but it tended to slop over. Mary had been like that too. The Christmas right before they got married, they had gone caroling together, and all her bottle-blonde friends had gone into hysterics over her unintentionally creative rendition of "Joy to the World." She'd sung it every Christmas after that, just so they could laugh at the memory.

John shoved his chair back, scraping it violently across the floor. "Found a lead on the grave," he snapped, ducking into the bathroom to take a leak before heading out. "Grab your gear." Dean had his coat on before John even shut the door – but when he came out again, Dean was standing by the table and staring at the phone.

Traffic had lightened considerably since the previous evening (well, of course it had – every damn fool and her little dog too was at home cleaning up scattered wrapping paper or chatting with the grandparents by a nice blazing fire or doing something else warm and eggnog-rife and familial) but they still had to walk several blocks after finding parking. The little church looked vaguely colonial, like hundreds of other buildings in the area, and was mercifully silent and empty.

It was a residential neighborhood: rows of closely-spaced, snow-dusted little houses, even the latest of them built before the '60s. Well over half were still lit, most by bright electrical lights behind drawn curtains, some by flickering hearth fires, and nearly all by some form of decoration, be it the nearly-ubiquitous Christmas tree peeking through some window, or a strand of garish lights draped over a door, or a glowing Santa, snowman, and Rudolph taking up the lion's share of a tiny front yard. A stand of scrawny firs separated the church's grave-filled courtyard from the nearest house – which, John noted with profound relief, was dark. Perhaps they had caught a break at last.

He had to jostle Dean's arm to pull his attention away from the houses across the street, but Dean followed him over the low wall without reacting to John's irritation. "Keep your eyes open," John ordered, scanning the dim, snow-drifted courtyard. "She might turn up here once we disturb her bones, and we know she's not too fond of men in general." The uneven rows of tombstones were rather more overgrown than he would have liked, but with luck, the walls should at least help to hide a little illicit grave-digging from the eyes of curious passers-by. If there were any. Which there probably wouldn't be, since it was, after all, the night of Christmas Day, and this particular street's legion of tacky plastic reindeer were not going to be winning any prizes for America's Best Holiday Display.

"Yes, sir," Dean agreed, prying the yard-long iron rod out of the bag slung over his shoulder. He eyed it a trifle dubiously. "Uh … didn't she kill that guy at St. Mary's by pitching a candlestick at him?"

John flicked on his flashlight and headed toward the wall nearest the church, looking for the older stones. "Your point is?"

"Well, she's a sort of long-range bitch, right? Might be better off with the iron rounds than this."

"In the middle of a crowded city, two streets away from a police station? Great thinking, Dean." John crouched down, knocking snow off a weathered stone, and wondered what kind of insane parent would name their daughter Perseverance.

"We have got to find a better way to throw salt at 'em," Dean muttered, peering into the dark depths of the bag. "Works better than iron, and –"

"Stop yammering and get the salt out if you're going to bitch about the iron." John rammed his shovel into the frozen ground, planted one boot on it and bore down. The ground had thawed since the snow fell, but it was still going to be heavy going. He left the shovel standing upright in the earth in favor of shuffling over the top of the grave, kicking snow and bracken away. "Lay a circle around the grave. If she shows up, I don't want to have to dodge flying candlesticks while digging in this shit."

"Yes, sir." Dean shrugged his pack off, fumbling briefly with his shovel and his weapon. He produced a bag of salt and tried for a moment to open it one-handed while hanging onto the iron rod. Eventually he propped iron and shovel up against the nearest stone cross and wrenched the bag open. "Damn," he said, quietly enough that John barely heard him over the crunch of the snow. "Sure would be faster with another set of hands."

John wrenched his shovel back out of the ground with a lot more force than was strictly necessary. "You aiming to get that done sometime tonight, or do you figure if you whine long enough, she'll off herself out of sheer boredom? Gotta say it sounds damn tempting."

Dean didn't answer, just tipped the bag and started to pour out the salt. He'd passed John, and was heading back around the opposite side of the tombstone, when a tinny, jingly ditty started up somewhere out in the night. Dean straightened, staring over the wall, out across the street. John automatically followed his gaze.

One of the bloated, brightly-lit snowmen in some moron's yard had started to rotate slowly on its neon base. That was where the tune was coming from: the platform covered in flashing, colored lights that made the thing look like a snowman that had just lost a radioactive paintball fight. Mechanical, lighted, singing, dancing Christmas decorations. You just had to hate them. John was turning back to his grave-digging in disgust when he saw that Dean was standing still, looking at the thing, and grinning. He hesitated for an instant, just in case his son had gotten into some bad eggnog and was now showing the first signs of permanent brain damage.

"Sammy used to go crazy for those things," Dean said, and John had no idea whether the sudden cold at the back of his neck was the wind, or an oncoming storm of a different kind. He could feel his temper slipping, as surely as if it were a tangible thing in his cold, tired fingers. "Remember? Hey, did I ever tell you about the time him and me, we wrecked one of those twelve-foot-tall inflatable ones? He was just little, wanted a big Christmas tree like the ones in people's windows –"

John drove his shovel viciously into the ground at the tombstone's base, letting the squeal of metal on stone drown out Dean's words. And right then, all hell broke loose.

Or at least, if not all hell, at least a little bit of it. Part of the bit reserved for John Winchester, maybe. One minute he was letting out a snarling breath that seethed with cold and exhaustion and fury, and then, while he could still see the white swirl of his breath dissipating in his flashlight beam, the snow whipped up in a cold, blasting cyclone and his flashlight went out.

He let the shovel fall from his hands to snatch instead at the iron knife in his belt, and spun around. "Dean, into the circle!" The words were still coming off his tongue when he saw where Dean was standing, gaze bright and wistful and unfocused toward the distant, gyrating snowman. Saw the open bag of salt in Dean's hand, and the gap in the unfinished circle. And he saw her, flickering in the middle of the dark yard by her own unholy light, hair and shawl floating out against the wind.

Dean dodged just a little too late. Some unfortunate bystander's gravestone wrenched itself out of the earth and snow at the gesture of Perseverence Pennywell's dead hand, and cut through the air like a speeding jet. It caught Dean across left arm and side as he dove toward his discarded bag. The impact changed his trajectory, and some statue – the statue of a bloody cherub – met the back of his head with a horribly audible sound.

John had thrown his knife before his son's body even hit the ground. The woman in the tattered gown vanished, whether because of the knife or because she was better at dodging than Dean, he neither knew nor cared. And because he was damn quick on his feet, he reached Dean while his son was still flopping like a gutted fish, stunned instincts trying to roll into a ball around his damaged arm even as his mind fled toward unconsciousness. John got both hands on his son's collar and dragged him across the unfinished salt line with one quick, desperate heave.

He completed the salt circle just as Perseverance rematerialized. Her pale face elongated impossibly, mouth distending in a soundless scream of rage. The nearest tombstones shifted in their snowy nests, grating and groaning. John paid them no heed. He dropped the half-empty sack of salt just inside the circle, and knelt down by his son.

"Wake up, kiddo," he said roughly, gripping Dean's right shoulder. "Open your eyes."

He had to haul Dean back around onto his back before the boy roused properly, to lie blinking up at the dark sky while John bundled up his own coat and stuffed it beneath Dean's head.

"'M fine," Dean muttered groggily in answer to John's third demand. "Fine, just – gimme a – I can –" He tried to sit up. John bore him back down, smacked his cheek lightly to get hold of his wandering attention.

"Don't move," he ordered. "Stay awake. Can you do that?"

He had to repeat it twice before Dean acknowledged him, and he didn't like the way the boy groaned when John felt his arm. But there was hardly time for a careful medical examination with a deranged ghost flickering in and out of sight at the edge of the haphazard circle. He shrugged out of his flannel shirt too, wound that around Dean's upper arm where his sleeve was wettest. "You damn little fool," he rasped. "You keep your mind on the job when we're hunting, you hear me? Not off in bloody California!"

Dean blinked. There was a spattering of something dark on his cheek, dirt or blood or both, and it looked like he'd bitten through his lip on impact. "'S Christmas," he muttered thickly. "Christmas."

"Stay awake," John said again, and lurched back up to his feet.

He dug until his muscles burned with fatigue, and sweat soaked through his remaining shirt to let the winter cold leach away his heat and strength alike. Perseverance had vanished, but the streetlight in front of the church was flickering intermittently, and there was no way he was breaking the circle to drag Dean four blocks back to the truck while the psychotic hag was still out there.

The shovel hit metal sometime after midnight. The bag holding the lighter fluid had fallen close enough to the circle that John could hook it in without doing much more than provoke a sudden, stiff breeze. Salt, lighter fluid, match, and there she was again, right across the salt line from him. She screamed, a high, thin, far-away noise like the echo of an echo, and strained toward him with teeth and clawing fingers, even as gown and shawl and hair and the memory of flesh curled up in black, writhing smoke.

The wind died down, the thing that had been a corpse smoldered on, and across the street, the snowman's ditty started up again. John could recognize it now: that same stupid song Dean had been humming. He tucked the book of matches back into his pocket, left cold and exhausted in the wake of the adrenalin.

"Dean," he said, crouching down next to his son. Dean opened his eyes compliantly, although he didn't quite seem able to focus on John's face. There was dirt in his hair, clumped in his eyelashes too. It must have blown there while John was digging. "You still with me, son?"

"Mmm." Dean's gaze wandered up toward the sky. When John shone a flashlight down at him, checking his eyes, he barely winced.

"Let's get you back to the motel," John said with a fair facsimile of confidence. "And don't even think about puking in my truck, concussion or no concussion."

Dean coughed a little when John hauled him upright, but he seemed able to bear a little of his own weight, staggering along with his good arm over John's shoulders. "Get her?" he rasped.

"Salted and burned," John confirmed briefly. "You doin' all right?"

"Super," Dean said, sounding almost like himself, and a little of the tension in John's chest eased.

Dean was less articulate once John had manhandled him up into the truck, possibly because he was trying not to puke. He dozed off while John was navigating a warren of one-way streets still blocked off from the earlier Christmas Parade, and John eventually had to reach over and shake him back to consciousness. That backfired when he came awake too fast, pitched himself forward onto the dashboard. It got worse when John bundled him back into his seat, and he mumbled, "Sammy called yet?"

And somehow that was the last straw, the last bloody straw on the back of a very tired camel. John's patience snapped as suddenly and sharply as he suspected the bone in his son's arm had, in that instant when a pissy ghost and a flying tombstone got the better of a pair of seasoned hunters because they were distracted. Distracted by memories, bright lights, cheery tunes, and someone who was not there and never would be again.

"He's not going to call, Dean," John snapped. "Just forget about it. He already has."

He heard the brutality in the words too late to pull them back.

The rest of the ride was silent. John stared grimly ahead and gripped the wheel tightly enough to send shooting pains up through his strained hands and wrists. Dean hugged his arm gingerly to his ribs, eyes gazing vaguely out the window. When they reached the motel, he scrambled out of the truck without waiting for John's help, and made it halfway to the door before his knees buckled. Since he let John haul him inside without protest, either he was hurt worse than he was letting on, or he simply wasn't blaming one John E. Winchester for all the ills of the world, even the ones John was harsh enough to speak aloud.

Even the ones that he really was responsible for.

He got Dean onto one of the ratty beds, and prodded at the back of Dean's skull until Dean was swearing audibly, and John himself was reassured that the damage meant, at the worst, a mild concussion. Predictably enough, the arm was more trouble.

The pills he had force-fed Dean finally kicked in, and the boy sank fast toward slumber while John cleaned his hands of blood and bundled himself up in two of his thickest shirts.

"Rock salt," Dean murmured drowsily, just as John finished buttoning his top flannel.

A little alarmed, John leaned over him, resting a hand on the uninjured shoulder. "What? What about salt?"

Dean blinked, smiled a little. "Rock salt. Comes in little cylinders. Betcha we could fit it in a shotgun. Better than a knife … any day …" He yawned and winced, shut his eyes against the glow of the lamps.

"Sure, son," said John, and squeezed his shoulder gently. "You get some rest now. I'll be waking you up later."

Dean turned his head, and his voice drifted up faint and trusting from the pillow. "Wake me up sooner … if he calls? You'll wake me up …"

He was asleep again, forehead still speckled with dirt, a little dried blood still clinging to his lip. The clock on the table said 3:57 AM. Christmas was over, Santa had tossed his lists in the garbage, and the spirit of the season was back in hibernation, so John wasn't going to be winning any halfway-decent-parent points by sitting down carefully on the edge of the bed and watching his son sleep, but he did it anyway.

Next Christmas, he might not even have this.