Dean diverted his eyes briefly, running over in his mind whether he could talk about what had happened, or not.  He didn’t want his dad to look worse than he did.  It was a rough spot, and John’s way of dealing with genuine fear was to just…not deal with it.  John was most likely the person who taught Dean to run away from things that he didn’t want to deal with.  As the images flooded his mind, he shook his head and furrowed his brow, not wanting to ruin the date night, but needing it off his drunken chest.

“Um…It’s hard to talk about, considering it was the closest I’ve ever come to actually dying.  Like…I could feel it.  I could see it in my dad’s eyes.”, he explained first, scanning her eyes.  He then turned his hands down toward his lap, where their hands sat.

“We were on this hunt.  There were supposed to be six of us, and it ended up just me and Dad.  Dad was insistent on going anyway, because there were kids involved, you know?”, he stopped briefly and took a deep breath, “When we got to the house, there were bodies everywhere.  Some of them were just rotted and gross and others were obviously hunters that had come to these kids rescue…”

“We found the kids, right as the werewolves attacked us.  For a second, it looked like we were winning.  I took out about four of them, but there were more…like a big pack.  Dad left with the kids.  I stayed back to try and fight them off.”

He clenched his jaw, taking a drink as the images of the dead children came into his mind.  John had been forced to kill them, because they had been turned.  Their faces stayed in the back of his mind every day.

“I got ambushed.  And this lady.  She-she started ripping me up, trying to get to my heart while I was alive.  She said she wanted to eat it while it was still beating.  It all happened so fast that I didn’t even realize Dad was killing the kids in the lot, which made her leave me alone…but I was bleeding bad.  I don’t know much else about what happened after that, with them.  I just remember waking up…”

He could feel the pain creeping up into his throat as he broke his sentence.  One of the biggest reasons he came back to Mika so fast after he healed enough to do so, was because he needed to process how John had treated the situation.  It was something he still hadn’t come to terms with, and he fought with the idea that his dad might actually have let him die, if he hadn’t gotten lucky.  He knew John loved him, but John loved the job, and getting things done almost more than his own family.  He blinked, to keep tears from having space in his eyes, and took a deep and shuddered breath.

“Um…I woke up alone.  Some lady had stitched up a few spots that needed it.  Others, she couldn’t stitch because they were bleeding so bad.  She disappeared too, after a while and I wanted to call you…and just…”, he broke off again, now feeling guilty for even bringing it up as his voice cracked, “I just wanted to tell you I was sorry, and just…say ‘I love you’, to make sure you could hear it.   I wanted you to hear my voice, and hear it from me that I was dead.”

He sniffled roughly, fidgeting with her fingers as Jess placed a hand over her mouth behind Mika’s head.

“And I couldn’t find my phone.  Come to find out, Dad was making arrangements.  He didn’t expect me to survive, and abandoned all hope…left me there.  He apologized later…but I couldn’t save those kids.  And I almost died, because Dad’s reckless.  I’m reckless.  I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again…”

He shrugged, letting her know that he was done with the explanation, for now.  There were a few more details, but not details he could muster the energy, or that he wanted to speak out loud, for fear of ruining the night more.