What with one thing and another, Dean Winchester had not yet had the opportunity to celebrate the Christmas season in his own home. Last year, everything had been tense because of Hades. This year ....this year, he had his own home, he had peace for the foreseeable future, and he had a baby son as an excuse to indulge in all things seasonal. All right, so it was still technically November, but only for a couple of days. Jo had lost the battle over waiting for December first, as evidenced by the sight of the bags of decorations they had just returned from buying.

With Bertie on one hip, cooing happily at a random bauble dangling from her fingers, she was watching her husband sort through their bounty in amusement. "I don't think we have enough house to put all this up in, baby."

"We'll make room!" Dean insisted, as he sorted their booty into piles, which only he seemed to understand the logic of. One pile was for Christmas tree decorations - which he was planning on chopping down himself, the old fashioned way. Another pile was for window decorations, another for outside, inside and so it went. He had even splurged on cookie cutters and baking supplies, intending on making at least ten different kinds of cookies, whether they could eat them all of not. "I haven't had a real Christmas since I was three," he told her, though she must have already known that. He'd only been a month or so away from his fourth Christmas when the yellow-eyed demon had killed his mother, and his world had been shattered. "Hey! What about Hanukkah' Rufus celebrates that, doesn't he?"

"Maybe we should stick with just one set of traditions this year, and work on getting it right for us before we start bringing in other traditions," she suggested in amusement. It was impossible to wipe the grin off her face; Dean, who was normally so capable, had devolved into a small child in the face of so much seasonal sparkle, and it was utterly adorable. "I'd offer to help with whatever's going on here, but I think it's in a completely different language. Isn't it, Bertie-boots?" she added to the infant in her arms. "Daddy's gone all whole new world on us!"

"Christmas is all about sparkly!" Dean insisted, not really worried about how tacky all this stuff might be. By the time he was through, the house was likely to look more like a flashing neon sign than anything else. "I was thinking maybe we could enter a contest for best decorated Christmas house. What do you think, eh?" he asked, holding up an extremely tacky-looking inflatable Frosty the Snowman, a silly grin on Dean's face.

"Really?" Jo couldn't help laughing as he showed off the snowman inflatable, deeply charmed by this side of her husband. Ellen was going to mother him even more than usual if she got even a glimpse of this. "Baby, if that's what you want, that's what we'll do," she promised him. "It's gonna take days to get all this up, you know."

Dean tossed the inflatable in the pile that included other inflatables, without so much as a shrug. "What else have I got to do with my time?" he asked, not really wanting an answer for that. Now that they had a tenuous peace going between Heaven and Hell and Olympus, hunting had returned to the almost mundane rash of occasional monster hunts. "Have you heard from Sammy yet' He was taking Becky out on her first hunt."

"They were supposed to be heading down the sewers this morning." Jo shrugged, one shoulder rising and falling as she dangled a new bauble in front of Bertie for the baby's enjoyment. "He'll call, even if it's only for a couple of minutes. He knows we worry. And if he doesn't call, you can bother Ayden into using her uber-sight to find him and scare him into calling us." She grinned at Dean, and bit down a laugh as the bauble was suddenly pulled from her fingers and thrown with unerring accuracy at his head.

"What the -" Dean broke off as the bauble boinked off his head and drew his attention, but as soon as he realized it had been Sam who'd thrown it and not Jo, he chuckled. "That kid's got an arm. He's gonna make one hell of a ..." He broke off as he realized Sam - or rather, Bertie - would never grow up to be a baseball player, but then you never knew. Maybe he'd play for the Yankees one day. Dean shook the cobwebs from his head. Wishful thinking. "I don't envy him. Rugarus are nasty mofos. I hope he knows what he's doing. Personally, I'd have started with ghosts. Learn the basics and work your way up."

"No, the Rugaru was apparently his first hunt with you," Jo corrected him laughingly. "This is one of those liquid shifter things. That's why Ellen was complaining that her oil spray had disappeared." She bent, setting Bertie down on the floor with his father as the baby boy giggled happily, and kissed Dean's temple. "I'm making coffee," she told him. "Want some?"

"Wait ....my first hunt with Sam ....Bertie ....whatever ....was a Rugaru" That's nuts. Why the hell would I do that?" He'd thought he'd heard Sam mention one, but he must have misheard or misunderstood him. Of course, it wouldn't be the first or last time that had happened. "Is the Pope Catholic?" he replied to her question. Duh. Did he ever turn down a cup of coffee when it was offered" Or a beer, for that matter. "You are gonna be a hell of a ball player someday, kid," Dean promised his son quietly, handing him a plastic ornament of some kind to toy with.

"You're asking me to explain you to yourself again," she called over her shoulder at him as she slipped into the kitchen, leaving the door open as she flipped the coffee pot on, belatedly checking to make sure it was loaded up. "He says it was a disaster, but that you were really proud of him. Sounds like it was the first time you said that when it came to monsters and such - it stuck with him." Bertie grinned gummily up at his father, waving the ornament as he looked around at all the piles of sparkly temptation on the floor.

He shrugged, muttering quietly to himself. "Well, someone has to do it." He frowned as he looked at his son. "I am promising you right now, kid. No Rugarus. Not until you're old enough to drink your first beer." And that was that. Of course, Dean knew they had changed the future several times already, as none of it was set in stone, no matter what Sam said. Sam had changed his own future as soon as he and Hope had hopped back to the past, but though nothing could really be done to change Sam's past, at least, Dean could learn from it.

"So I guess we're hosting Christmas here this year, huh?" she asked over her shoulder, not wanting to disturb his bonding with their son but pretty sure she was going to need the answer to that question sooner rather than later. Cooking for their large family was going to be a challenge, but she doubted she'd be doing it alone. "Or are we gonna take over Ellen's kitchen and leave Bobby with the washing up?"

"Uh ..." was Dean's intelligently thoughtful reply. He didn't really know and hadn't thought about it much. All he knew was that he'd hadn't had a proper Christmas since he was almost too young to remember it, and even though it might not mean anything to little Bertie yet, he wasn't cheating his own children out of it, like he'd been. His father had been so obsessed with finding his wife's killer that Christmas had always been forgotten - year after year after year. "What do you mean' Like turkey and all the trimmings?"

"Yeah, like turkey and all the trimmings," she assured him, leaning in the doorway with a bright smile on her face. "Are you forgetting that you married a woman who can actually cook more than burgers?" She laid a hand on her hip as she smiled at him, enjoying the sight of Dean and their baby son, surrounded by the tacky sparkle that was Christmas in a nutshell.

"Did you know Chinese places are usually open on Christmas? Sam and I had this tradition - every Christmas we'd scope out the best Chinese buffet in town, and that's where we'd have Christmas dinner. I'm pretty sure Sam hated it, but he'd do it for me," Dean said, getting lost in his memories if only for a moment, while dangling a Snoopy ornament in front of the little boy who was supposed to be his brother's namesake, if not for time travel.

"So, go find one," Dean told her, turning his gaze to the little boy curled up peacefully on the floor nearby. His gaze softened, never tiring of that view or of the fact that he was a father. "Jo, do you ever worry about Sam?" he asked, referring to that same little boy, but the one who'd come to them from the future.

She sighed softly, reaching out to spill her fingers through Dean's hair as they talked. "Not so much now as I did before," she admitted quietly. "He's more open now. He talks to us when he needs to. But after Hope went forward ....he was so lost. I don't think he knows just how much he needs Becky. The way I need you."

He smiled at the affection in her caress, reassured with just the touch of her hand. "I'm not sure how to be a good father to him. I mean, we didn't really raise him. I'd never take him to hunt a rugaru the first time around. He has memories of us that haven't happened yet and probably never will. It's like we're his parents, but we're not really. I guess maybe that's how Bobby and Ellen feel, too. They have us back, but I'm not the Dean they knew and they don't remember you."

"So don't be a father to him," she suggested. Herself, she'd had no choice but to be a mother to Sam as soon as he had arrived. He'd set her into that place in his heart and mind, despite how close they were in years, and she would never leave it. "Be a friend, the way Bobby is a friend to you. Look out for him, don't smother him. Let him talk, let him rant, let him do what he needs to do to feel close to you. He needs you, Dean. He needs the man he grew up believing in, and you are that man, even if you don't believe it."

"It sounds like I was a dick as a father, just like I was a dick as a brother," Dean said. "I don't wanna be like my dad, you know" I don't wanna give my son a gun for his sixth birthday and expect him to learn how to shoot it. I don't wanna take him to hunt a rugaru and scold him when he wets his pants. I don't wanna ignore him when he wakes up screaming from a nightmare or crying because he ..." He trailed off, realizing he was listing all the ways in which his father had failed, not him. Not yet. Even in Sam's past, he hadn't been like John Winchester.

Jo let him trail off, one brow raised above a slightly sardonic smile. "Right," she drawled. "You're such a dick as a dad, you took him to his first professional ball game when he was ten years old. You're such a dick, you set aside one day a week when it was just you and him after Hope was born. Only a dick would start a breakfast tradition that is going to last decades, or teach him how to care for his car perfectly. And he would only have come back in time to save the life of a complete dick." She held his gaze for a long moment. "Want me to go on?"

"No, I get your point," Dean replied, taking another swallow of his coffee before it got cold. He'd never thought much about whether or not he'd make a good father; he'd never had the time to consider it, but now that Hades was dead, and they were starting a family, he had to think about it. He let the subject go, though he still had his doubts. "So, are we making this a religious celebration or not?" he asked, knowing that Christmas was traditionally a religious holiday, but that it also had pagan origins and was quickly becoming more of a cultural thing.

"Can't have Christmas without carols," she mused, still drawing her fingers through his hair. "Seeing as the last time we walked into a church, we got overwhelmed by the walking dead, I'm thinking we give services a miss."

"Silent Night and all that?" he mused aloud, unsure how he felt about religion these days, knowing it was mostly a mix of truth and mythology. He didn't really want to get into a theological debate about the historical accuracy of the New Testament, but that was in part what he was asking. "My parents weren't very religious, but my mom believed in angels. She used to pray with me when she tucked me in at night. She always recited that Guardian Angel prayer with me. Lot of good it did, huh?"

"It wasn't meant for you," Jo told him gently, understanding that even better now she was a mother herself. "It was for her, to comfort her. It's a wish that protecting her baby boy didn't fall totally on her shoulders, because she didn't feel like she could do it alone." But was it Mary Winchester she was talking about, or herself" Jo, too, prayed when she put Bertie to sleep, and she knew better than most how pointless it was to pray to a God that wasn't listening.

To Dean's credit, he knew Jo well enough to know she wasn't just talking about Mary Winchester, anymore than he was talking about John. He touched his fingers to her cheek to turn her face to his. "You're not alone, Jo. You're never gonna be alone in anything, not so long as I'm alive - and Brian and Sam and Becky and Bobby and Ellen and Ayden and Ares," he reminded her. It was quite a list of names, far longer than those they'd left behind in their own world. They were never alone, not even in this, never again.

She smiled, tilting her cheek into the gentle caress of his hand as she met his gaze. "I know I'm not alone," she promised him. "It's just ....he's so small and helpless and ....I still sometimes feel like that awkward kid who couldn't even make a sandwich. And now I'm married, and a mom, and ....it seems so big. It seems like too much, and not enough, all at the same time. You know?"

"Yeah, I know," Dean replied, understanding all of that a little too well. It was a big responsibility raising children, especially when you'd spent so many years just trying to survive and take care of yourself. "We'll learn how to be parents together," he promised her, that soft smile still on his face. There was no denying the fact that Dean Winchester had mellowed, and the reason for it was staring him right in the face.

"And make more, so if we screw this one up, we can try again," she teased, leaning down to kiss him with giggling lips. They both knew that their eldest was going to turn out just fine. As she kissed him, though, an insistent sound made itself known, making her draw back in amusement. "Baby ....your pants are singing to me again."

"I don't think Sam is too screwed up, is he?" Dean asked, as if their grown son was any indication of their future parenting skills. Anything else he might have said was cut off by her kiss, distracting them both from the conversation. "Hm?" he mumbled, distractedly, before realizing his cell phone was going off in his jeans pocket. "You want something inside them to sing to you later?" he teased, as he fished inside his jeans pocket for his phone. "Speak of the devil," he murmured, seeing as the caller was coming up as Sam.

"Define later," she laughed, kissing the tip of his nose. Glancing down at the phone, she grinned. "Cock-blocked by your baby boy, you must be so proud." Snickering, she rose to her feet, leaning down to lift Bertie up from his less-than-comfortable napping position.

Dean flipped his phone open - yes, he was still carrying a flip phone - a smirk on his face as he answered. "Kirk to Bridge," he told the caller.

Jo spluttered, laughing loudly at Dean's greeting to his son. "Baby, if you're going for capable and sexy, should have been Picard," she told her husband, gently jostling the baby she had just woken by accident.

"Picard was bald!" Dean argued, blinking as he heard a voice on the other end of the phone trying to get his attention. "Sorry. Your mother is questioning my choice of Starship Captain," he explained, though it seemed self-explanatory enough. There was a short pause from Dean while he was presumably listening to Sam's voice on the other end. "Uh, yeah ....Hang on. She's right here." Dean drew the phone away from his head for a moment and turned to Jo. "It's Sam. He wants me to put him on speakerphone."

"But the accent, Dean." Jo laughed again, swaying to settle Bertie against her shoulder as he put their adult son on speaker. "Hey, little man, what?s up?" No matter what happened, Sam was always going to be "little man" to a mother no more than six years his senior.

"You're the one who insists!" she laughed, brushing a kiss to his cheek. "C'mon, I gotta put him down before I drop him." As much as she loved Bertie, he was something of a dead weight when he was relaxed. She had no idea how they were going to cope when Hope showed up in a few years.

"Not for us! For them!" Dean insisted, even as he set his coffee cup on the table and got to his feet to take their son from her arms. "Here, let me," he told her. For all his abrasive obnoxiousness, he really did love his wife and son more than words could say and it showed in the gentleness with which he took the boy in his arms and touched a kiss to his forehead. "Come on, little man. Time for a nap."

"Oh, so you don't want to be a grandpa, then?" she teased, more than happy to hand Bertie off to his father. With her arms tingling now the weight was gone, her smile softened as she watched Dean. Poor father, my ass.

"Yeah, of course, I do, but don't you think it'll be weird if they have them before we do' Besides, Becky is only, what, nineteen or something" And they should enjoy being married for a little while first," Dean explained his point of view, as he led the way toward the nursery with Bertie propped against a shoulder.

"If it makes you feel better, I don't think even Sam could plant a baby in her until she's ready for it," Jo assured him, following him up the stairs at an easy pace. "That girl strikes me as having unfinished business that needs to be out of the way before they go that far."

"Unfinished business?" Dean echoed, furrowing his brows as they started up the stairs. "What kind of unfinished business?" he asked curiously. While he thought he was a pretty good judge of character, his gut instincts were nothing compared to his wife's.

"I'm not sure," she admitted thoughtfully. "But there's got to be a reason why the Men of Letters would happily put off her full initiation and inclusion in that bunker of theirs and let Sam train her instead. Doesn't that feel like it has an ulterior motive of some kind?"

"I don't know. I never thought about it much," he told her honestly as they stepped into the nursery. The conversation about Becky was then temporarily delayed while Dean tucked their firstborn son in for a nap. There was no story or prayers of any kind, but he did give brush another kiss against his cheek before he laid him down and tucked his favorite stuffed animal in beside him before covering him with a blanket and creeping from the room.

She waited in the hall, watching as he settled their baby to sleep. A part of her was still a little disbelieving that they'd actually managed to make a baby at all, and yet, watching Dean with Bertie, she couldn't be happier about it. She knew for a fact that their children would never be anything less than loved. "You are such a DILF."

"Well, I guess that's better than a FILF," he replied with a chuckle as he pulled the door closed, leaving it open just a little. Unlike his own home growing up, there were plenty of wards in place to keep their son safe from any possible threat, supernatural or otherwise. "I guess that makes you a MILF," he said, circling his arms around her to draw her close.

Drawn into the circle of his arms, she slid her own about his waist, grinning as she looked up at him. "If I'm a MILF," she said thoughtfully, "does that mean I need to get breast implants, wear too much make up, and start wearing heels and mini-skirts around the house?"

"No, I love you just the way you are," he assured her, before setting out to prove that fact in a way that would leave no doubt in her mind. Even if Bertie only napped for an hour, it would be an hour well spent in his parents' opinion.

Who would have thought that the Winchesters would ever manage to carve out a slice of domestic bliss together? Yet here they were, with a grown son engaged, and an infant in the house, enjoying the hard-won peace with the normality that so much of the world took for granted. Perhaps married with children wasn't too much and not enough all at once. Perhaps, for the first time, what they had was all they needed. Just enough.