SPN Fic: If It Comes to That (Gen, Bobby & John, H/C, PG-13, Pre-series)
Title: If It Comes to That
Author: Dodger Winslow
Genre: Gen, Pre-series
Word Count: 2800
Prompt: Bobby and John, gen. John is injured on a hunt and Bobby knows that he has to get him back to his boys...
Rating: PG-13 for language
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while ...
Summary: He was not unlike a dog in that regard. On Winchester’s better days, when the world wasn’t riding him like a curse and his own hell-bent-for-leather nature hadn’t led him down the road to ruin to a ride on the next River Stix-bound handbasket, he could be down-right friendly. Chatty even. Damned near charming … if a man poking at your raw spots just to see if you’d twitch was the kind of thing a fella found charming. But on his bad days-be that bad a physical bad or a mental one-he’d like as not bite any hand extended for the purposes of helping in lieu of accepting it as any kind of mercy intended. Not one for trusting, that John Winchester. Nor one for expecting any but the worst from even those he knew best, either.
If It Comes to That
"How you doing back there, John?" Bobby asked quietly.
"I’m fine," John grunted. "Mind your own fucking business and keep walking."
Bobby did as he was told not because he had any particular inclination to obey someone who’d just a’soon piss a man off as speak to him; but rather because, while no one could rightly claim to know John Winchester well enough to see as much, he’d known John Winchester long enough to realize that the more cantankerous the man got, the more likely he was to be on his way down for the count.
He was not unlike a dog in that regard.
On Winchester’s better days, when the world wasn’t riding him like a curse and his own hell-bent-for-leather nature hadn’t led him down the road to ruin to a ride on the next River Stix-bound handbasket, he could be down-right friendly. Chatty even. Damned near charming … if a man poking at your raw spots just to see if you’d twitch was the kind of thing a fella found charming.
But on his bad days-be that bad a physical bad or a mental one-he’d like as not bite any hand extended for the purposes of helping in lieu of accepting it as any kind of mercy intended. Not one for trusting, that John Winchester. Nor one for expecting any but the worst from even those he knew best, either. Ellen had warned Bobby of as much before she put them together over a shot of Jack. She’d said Winchester could be a real pain in the ass when he wanted to be, and that, for the most part, he wanted to be.
Ellen was not often wrong in assessing how much trouble a man could or wanted to be. In this particular instance, she’d not been wrong so much as perhaps a bit generous in her use of "for the most part" … no doubt in deference to her keen sense that not many would give the man a chance if she was wholly truthful about his "for the whole part" jackass, belligerent nature.
John stumbled on the trail behind him, cursed quietly with the kind of passion most men reserved for speakin’ to the almighty in times of physical release or emotional crisis. The stuttering drag of his uneven footsteps stopped, and for a moment, but for the sound of a body crashing to the thick of the undergrowth, Bobby would have sworn he’d fallen. It was only when Bobby took another step, as if his intent was to continue on, that Winchester actually spoke.
"Wait," he said. It was an order, not a request, spoken with the bark of a military man presuming his will upon another he’d forgot was twice as qualified to the war as himself, if not more. "Just wait, Singer. Give me a minute."
So Bobby waited.
Leaning against a nearby tree, he watched in silence as Winchester struggled to catch his breath, chest and back both a-heave like every pull of air was just about as much as he was ever going to accomplish in this world before passing on to the next. The sun was racing for the horizon in the West, and the darkness swarming in from every side in the wake of its retreat was all but set to make the going hard as going was like to get, but Bobby made no comment to that effect. It wouldn’t have done any good anyway. Winchester would have just told him to fuck off. Or to keep walking. Or to mind his own fucking business.
The man was near doubled into himself by the time Bobby asked, "You need a hand?" then cursed himself for his foolishness the moment he let the words slip his lips.
John shook the offer off, as one might expect that he would, but the mere asking of it made him look up, squint at Bobby with eyes that had gone glassy-dull with pain and exhaustion. His gaze had been put to an unsteady focus, the beneficiary of a body’s overdrawn account being called task for the sin of floating checks that no mortal man could cover. It was all he could do just to keep his eyes open; all he could do to swallow down his own gorge before it threw his belly’s contents out onto the forest floor.
Bad sign, as such signs went. He wouldn’t make it much farther. Had another mile in him, tops, and then it would be Bobby going on alone for help, or risking them both to a second attack by dragging another man’s dead weight through the woods like a bucket of bait chumming the billygoat trail behind him.
"My boys," John said. The effort of talking just about did him in, but he held on, made his way through the storm with a saint’s determination to suffer. Wiping at the blood brought up by simply breathing and licking the parch off his lips like a cat working a stick of salted butter, he added, "They’re good kids, good workers," before his voice fell off again, before his breath rattled through him once again in a halting stutter.
He wasn’t done yet, so Bobby kept his peace, let Winchester get it all out without stalling the process by slinging about unnecessary advice the man would just ignore anyway.
"You could do worse, if it comes to that," John went on when he could, his voice straining under a heart-strong mixture of emotion and pure and simple death-put-to-foot. "Little one’s smart. Put you to shame with the way his brain works. Older one’s got more heart than ten. He’ll have your back even if you’ve told him to go. Doesn’t know the word surrender. Doesn’t know how to lose, or how to let a man down even when the man’s proved himself worthy of letting down."
John stopped to breathe again, but he still wasn’t finished, so Bobby still didn’t interrupt. He did watch though: studied Winchester’s particular way of hiding himself in the light of the dying day like a spirit’s earth-bound shadow cast by the dark of the dying night. He was working through the last flicker of his own flame, Winchester was; but even so, his mind was set to another course, his focus fixed on the mission at hand.
His boys.
Bobby’d heard stories enough of those boys, but like most (if not all), he’d never met them for his own. Winchester didn’t bring them around the local haunts. He kept those boys locked down from the awares of even other hunters like treasures fit to steal. There were those who’d floated the notion that his rumored way of dragging them hither and yon from hunt to hunt was nothing more than myth. They put it to a claim that no man could work that way: half-growed toddler in his hip pocket, ten-year-old watching his six with rocksalt and silver.
He’d heard tell more than once, in fact, that Winchester’s sons had died in the fire at their mama’s side. That it was their ghosts haunting John to the recklessness for which he’d become near legend, and that put to peril any hunter fool enough to let himself be dragged along in the wake of someone so bent to revenge that he’d nothing to lose for himself, nor for any other he’d ante to the fire if the hunt called for it.
Bobby’d heard tell of this and more, but as for putting his own money on the matter, he didn’t believe a word of it for a single minute. Didn’t believe it not because he’d ever laid eyes to the boys himself, but rather because he’d seen the leash of them holding Winchester back from the fires of his own inevitable fate, seen their very existence in the proving by watching John pull himself away from something fatal he would have otherwise willingly engaged.
"Jim Murphy," John said, his breath tearing in and out of him like wind through a haunted house. "Preacher up in … in Blue Earth, Minnesota who’ll ante himself to the cause if you need it. His work makes him a lightening rod for the demonic, so they’re not safe with him as a constant. But if you needed a rest. If you needed space …"
And that was as far as Bobby let him go. "Not in the market for kids, Winchester," he interrupted calmly. "If you’ve got your head set to finding them a fall-back plan, then somebody led you astray in thinkin’ it’d be me who took on the task as my own."
The words sounded harsher than he’d meant them to be, but Winchester wasn’t the sort to take no as no unless it came with a bit of blood in the delivery.
Winchester closed his eyes, leaned harder into the tree against which he’d braced himself to stay afoot. "Not asking," he said, his voice tight, grim, hard. "Telling. You get to them if it comes to that. You find ’em and place ’em if you don’t keep ’em; or so help me, God, I will come back and gut you in your sleep." He opened his eyes again, fixed his gaze on Bobby’s to ask, "You understand?"
It was as close as John Winchester was ever going to come to begging. Standing in the thick of it with the day dying a slow death of orange and red around him, his own blood leaking to pools and puddles both on the inside and the out, he made his last stand, digging into the pocket of his jacket and coming back out with a picture that was tattered old by wear and attention, not by age. He held it out-thrust it out-to Bobby, his hand shaking like an old woman with palsy in the space between them. "You’ll find them here, if it comes to that," he said. "Take it. Take it."
But Bobby didn’t take it. "Then let’s see it don’t come to that," he said instead, backtracking on the trail until he was standing side-by-side with a man who glared at him like there’d be blood put to a shedding between them if he still possessed the strength to shed it.
When John pushed the picture at him again, Bobby ignored it by taking his other wrist, pulling it up and wedging his own shoulder under the bigger man’s armpit. Once he was positioned for leverage, he shifted John’s weight away from the tree, pulled him just enough off balance to force even a stubborn jackass into taking the shoulder offered.
For a moment, John resisted his help, did his best to pull away from a man only doing what he had to do to keep from inheriting a couple of kids he’d never so much as met. The rebellion was short-lived, but heart-felt. On the hopeful side of things, however, John didn’t actually bite the hand trying to help him so much as he settled for simply growling at it. Or perhaps more accurately, baring his teeth at it in a threat display that proved him out nothing but a cornered animal drained of what it took to mount a respectable growl of either warning or protest.
But drained or not, Winchester was still far from being broken. He shoved the picture at Bobby again, repeating, "Take it," as if this was the fee he charged for the honor of letting someone save his dumb ass. "Address is on the back," he added with a ragged cough. "Tell Dean you’ve come from Narnia with a message from Yoda, or he’ll fill your hide with rocksalt before you’ve made it past the tree line."
Bobby lifted an eyebrow. "Yoda?" he said.
"He’s ten," John returned snappishly. "But he’ll shoot your ass in a heartbeat if you don’t give him the right clear code; you can count on-" His knees gave without warning. He would have fallen but for the shoulder Bobby’d shoved in place to hold him up. "Fuck." The whisper was more of a moan than an actual utterance. "Jesus God, Mary. Help me."
The picture slipped from his fingers the way consciousness slipped in his eyes. It fluttered a bit on the way to the ground: a blood stained image of John Winchester sitting on the hood of his car, one kid perched on his knee and the other standing guard at his side.
Fuckin Ellen.
Bobby adjusted the bigger man’s weight on his shoulder, bore up under it despite the fact that two hundred and forty some odd pounds of muscle and belligerence was at least two hundred pounds more than any man his age ought be hauling about in the middle of nowhere in the growing dark. Eyes fixed to the picture on the ground at his feet, John’s fingers clenched like a babe-in-arms reaching for his binky. It was a vain effort to reclaim the fallen, a half-conscious expression of a need so deep it would drive him right over the edge and into the dark, pull him down into the very bowels of hell itself to get back what he thought he’d lost.
"Stop your damn fidgeting," Bobby groused as John pulled against his grip like it suited him to fall on his face, if that’s what it took, to reclaim the picture he’d just done his damnedest to give away.
"Picture," John muttered, taking Bobby for either too much fool or too fucking blind to figure out the problem on his own.
"Yeah, yeah. I got your damn picture."
Because John would like as not have killed himself in the doing, Bobby reached down and snatched the picture off the ground himself. It wasn’t as much of a surprise as it should have been that, when he straightened up and tried to hand the damn thing back to John, John refused it, his eyes slipping closed and his words slurring into one another as he muttered, "You find ’em if it comes to that. You do it, or I will haunt your ass to the end of time and then some."
John was already twice as heavy as he looked, and he was getting heavier by the moment as his body lost what little will it had left to fight, so Bobby gave in, stopped arguing and just shoved the damn picture in his pocket. He shifted his grip on John’s wrist and hoisted him back to his feet, set himself to the damn near Herculean task it was going to prove out to be to get this man back to the road and their ride before he bled out on the trail from nowhere much to nowhere in particular.
"You do it," John said again, his voice little more than a mumbling grunt now. "You do it, Bobby. You do it."
"Shut up and walk," Bobby told him.
And Winchester did. He put his focus to the task of keeping his feet in motion, managed to take at least some of his own weight back for almost a mile before he was once again hanging off Bobby’s shoulder like a dead man already gone.
He hadn’t spoken for far too long by the time they reached road, was actually holding onto Bobby’s jacket with his free hand rather than doing his damnedest to push him off by the time Bobby got that sweet ride of his unlocked and John settled into the back seat like a big-ass bag of belligerent, bloody potatoes. The man’s face was grey as ashy soot, and his breathing was the shallow rattle of dry leaves on drier cement. His eyes looked like he was somewhere else altogether. Somewhere far away. Somewhere so far away it was nearly gone.
"What are their names?" Bobby asked a dying man in the cold of full-on night.
Winchester blinked, focused like it cost him all he had left just to do it. "Dean," he whispered, his lips barely moving as he spoke. "Sammy."
"Dean and Sammy," Bobby repeated.
John nodded: a movement that was no true movement at all. Bobby nodded back, put a hand on John’s forearm and squeezed before he pulled himself out of the backseat and crawled into the front, started the Chevy up with one turn of the key and pulled her out onto the blacktop. The hospital wasn’t more than a dozen miles out, but even so, he wasn’t sure John Winchester was going to make it.
He did.
And it didn’t come to that.
But if it had, Bobby would have done what he’d not ever promised that he’d do; not because John Winchester asked him to, but rather because he didn’t have to ask to know that’s what Bobby would do.
Author: Dodger Winslow
Genre: Gen, Pre-series
Word Count: 2800
Prompt: Bobby and John, gen. John is injured on a hunt and Bobby knows that he has to get him back to his boys...
Rating: PG-13 for language
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while ...
Summary: He was not unlike a dog in that regard. On Winchester’s better days, when the world wasn’t riding him like a curse and his own hell-bent-for-leather nature hadn’t led him down the road to ruin to a ride on the next River Stix-bound handbasket, he could be down-right friendly. Chatty even. Damned near charming … if a man poking at your raw spots just to see if you’d twitch was the kind of thing a fella found charming. But on his bad days-be that bad a physical bad or a mental one-he’d like as not bite any hand extended for the purposes of helping in lieu of accepting it as any kind of mercy intended. Not one for trusting, that John Winchester. Nor one for expecting any but the worst from even those he knew best, either.
If It Comes to That
"How you doing back there, John?" Bobby asked quietly.
"I’m fine," John grunted. "Mind your own fucking business and keep walking."
Bobby did as he was told not because he had any particular inclination to obey someone who’d just a’soon piss a man off as speak to him; but rather because, while no one could rightly claim to know John Winchester well enough to see as much, he’d known John Winchester long enough to realize that the more cantankerous the man got, the more likely he was to be on his way down for the count.
He was not unlike a dog in that regard.
On Winchester’s better days, when the world wasn’t riding him like a curse and his own hell-bent-for-leather nature hadn’t led him down the road to ruin to a ride on the next River Stix-bound handbasket, he could be down-right friendly. Chatty even. Damned near charming … if a man poking at your raw spots just to see if you’d twitch was the kind of thing a fella found charming.
But on his bad days-be that bad a physical bad or a mental one-he’d like as not bite any hand extended for the purposes of helping in lieu of accepting it as any kind of mercy intended. Not one for trusting, that John Winchester. Nor one for expecting any but the worst from even those he knew best, either. Ellen had warned Bobby of as much before she put them together over a shot of Jack. She’d said Winchester could be a real pain in the ass when he wanted to be, and that, for the most part, he wanted to be.
Ellen was not often wrong in assessing how much trouble a man could or wanted to be. In this particular instance, she’d not been wrong so much as perhaps a bit generous in her use of "for the most part" … no doubt in deference to her keen sense that not many would give the man a chance if she was wholly truthful about his "for the whole part" jackass, belligerent nature.
John stumbled on the trail behind him, cursed quietly with the kind of passion most men reserved for speakin’ to the almighty in times of physical release or emotional crisis. The stuttering drag of his uneven footsteps stopped, and for a moment, but for the sound of a body crashing to the thick of the undergrowth, Bobby would have sworn he’d fallen. It was only when Bobby took another step, as if his intent was to continue on, that Winchester actually spoke.
"Wait," he said. It was an order, not a request, spoken with the bark of a military man presuming his will upon another he’d forgot was twice as qualified to the war as himself, if not more. "Just wait, Singer. Give me a minute."
So Bobby waited.
Leaning against a nearby tree, he watched in silence as Winchester struggled to catch his breath, chest and back both a-heave like every pull of air was just about as much as he was ever going to accomplish in this world before passing on to the next. The sun was racing for the horizon in the West, and the darkness swarming in from every side in the wake of its retreat was all but set to make the going hard as going was like to get, but Bobby made no comment to that effect. It wouldn’t have done any good anyway. Winchester would have just told him to fuck off. Or to keep walking. Or to mind his own fucking business.
The man was near doubled into himself by the time Bobby asked, "You need a hand?" then cursed himself for his foolishness the moment he let the words slip his lips.
John shook the offer off, as one might expect that he would, but the mere asking of it made him look up, squint at Bobby with eyes that had gone glassy-dull with pain and exhaustion. His gaze had been put to an unsteady focus, the beneficiary of a body’s overdrawn account being called task for the sin of floating checks that no mortal man could cover. It was all he could do just to keep his eyes open; all he could do to swallow down his own gorge before it threw his belly’s contents out onto the forest floor.
Bad sign, as such signs went. He wouldn’t make it much farther. Had another mile in him, tops, and then it would be Bobby going on alone for help, or risking them both to a second attack by dragging another man’s dead weight through the woods like a bucket of bait chumming the billygoat trail behind him.
"My boys," John said. The effort of talking just about did him in, but he held on, made his way through the storm with a saint’s determination to suffer. Wiping at the blood brought up by simply breathing and licking the parch off his lips like a cat working a stick of salted butter, he added, "They’re good kids, good workers," before his voice fell off again, before his breath rattled through him once again in a halting stutter.
He wasn’t done yet, so Bobby kept his peace, let Winchester get it all out without stalling the process by slinging about unnecessary advice the man would just ignore anyway.
"You could do worse, if it comes to that," John went on when he could, his voice straining under a heart-strong mixture of emotion and pure and simple death-put-to-foot. "Little one’s smart. Put you to shame with the way his brain works. Older one’s got more heart than ten. He’ll have your back even if you’ve told him to go. Doesn’t know the word surrender. Doesn’t know how to lose, or how to let a man down even when the man’s proved himself worthy of letting down."
John stopped to breathe again, but he still wasn’t finished, so Bobby still didn’t interrupt. He did watch though: studied Winchester’s particular way of hiding himself in the light of the dying day like a spirit’s earth-bound shadow cast by the dark of the dying night. He was working through the last flicker of his own flame, Winchester was; but even so, his mind was set to another course, his focus fixed on the mission at hand.
His boys.
Bobby’d heard stories enough of those boys, but like most (if not all), he’d never met them for his own. Winchester didn’t bring them around the local haunts. He kept those boys locked down from the awares of even other hunters like treasures fit to steal. There were those who’d floated the notion that his rumored way of dragging them hither and yon from hunt to hunt was nothing more than myth. They put it to a claim that no man could work that way: half-growed toddler in his hip pocket, ten-year-old watching his six with rocksalt and silver.
He’d heard tell more than once, in fact, that Winchester’s sons had died in the fire at their mama’s side. That it was their ghosts haunting John to the recklessness for which he’d become near legend, and that put to peril any hunter fool enough to let himself be dragged along in the wake of someone so bent to revenge that he’d nothing to lose for himself, nor for any other he’d ante to the fire if the hunt called for it.
Bobby’d heard tell of this and more, but as for putting his own money on the matter, he didn’t believe a word of it for a single minute. Didn’t believe it not because he’d ever laid eyes to the boys himself, but rather because he’d seen the leash of them holding Winchester back from the fires of his own inevitable fate, seen their very existence in the proving by watching John pull himself away from something fatal he would have otherwise willingly engaged.
"Jim Murphy," John said, his breath tearing in and out of him like wind through a haunted house. "Preacher up in … in Blue Earth, Minnesota who’ll ante himself to the cause if you need it. His work makes him a lightening rod for the demonic, so they’re not safe with him as a constant. But if you needed a rest. If you needed space …"
And that was as far as Bobby let him go. "Not in the market for kids, Winchester," he interrupted calmly. "If you’ve got your head set to finding them a fall-back plan, then somebody led you astray in thinkin’ it’d be me who took on the task as my own."
The words sounded harsher than he’d meant them to be, but Winchester wasn’t the sort to take no as no unless it came with a bit of blood in the delivery.
Winchester closed his eyes, leaned harder into the tree against which he’d braced himself to stay afoot. "Not asking," he said, his voice tight, grim, hard. "Telling. You get to them if it comes to that. You find ’em and place ’em if you don’t keep ’em; or so help me, God, I will come back and gut you in your sleep." He opened his eyes again, fixed his gaze on Bobby’s to ask, "You understand?"
It was as close as John Winchester was ever going to come to begging. Standing in the thick of it with the day dying a slow death of orange and red around him, his own blood leaking to pools and puddles both on the inside and the out, he made his last stand, digging into the pocket of his jacket and coming back out with a picture that was tattered old by wear and attention, not by age. He held it out-thrust it out-to Bobby, his hand shaking like an old woman with palsy in the space between them. "You’ll find them here, if it comes to that," he said. "Take it. Take it."
But Bobby didn’t take it. "Then let’s see it don’t come to that," he said instead, backtracking on the trail until he was standing side-by-side with a man who glared at him like there’d be blood put to a shedding between them if he still possessed the strength to shed it.
When John pushed the picture at him again, Bobby ignored it by taking his other wrist, pulling it up and wedging his own shoulder under the bigger man’s armpit. Once he was positioned for leverage, he shifted John’s weight away from the tree, pulled him just enough off balance to force even a stubborn jackass into taking the shoulder offered.
For a moment, John resisted his help, did his best to pull away from a man only doing what he had to do to keep from inheriting a couple of kids he’d never so much as met. The rebellion was short-lived, but heart-felt. On the hopeful side of things, however, John didn’t actually bite the hand trying to help him so much as he settled for simply growling at it. Or perhaps more accurately, baring his teeth at it in a threat display that proved him out nothing but a cornered animal drained of what it took to mount a respectable growl of either warning or protest.
But drained or not, Winchester was still far from being broken. He shoved the picture at Bobby again, repeating, "Take it," as if this was the fee he charged for the honor of letting someone save his dumb ass. "Address is on the back," he added with a ragged cough. "Tell Dean you’ve come from Narnia with a message from Yoda, or he’ll fill your hide with rocksalt before you’ve made it past the tree line."
Bobby lifted an eyebrow. "Yoda?" he said.
"He’s ten," John returned snappishly. "But he’ll shoot your ass in a heartbeat if you don’t give him the right clear code; you can count on-" His knees gave without warning. He would have fallen but for the shoulder Bobby’d shoved in place to hold him up. "Fuck." The whisper was more of a moan than an actual utterance. "Jesus God, Mary. Help me."
The picture slipped from his fingers the way consciousness slipped in his eyes. It fluttered a bit on the way to the ground: a blood stained image of John Winchester sitting on the hood of his car, one kid perched on his knee and the other standing guard at his side.
Fuckin Ellen.
Bobby adjusted the bigger man’s weight on his shoulder, bore up under it despite the fact that two hundred and forty some odd pounds of muscle and belligerence was at least two hundred pounds more than any man his age ought be hauling about in the middle of nowhere in the growing dark. Eyes fixed to the picture on the ground at his feet, John’s fingers clenched like a babe-in-arms reaching for his binky. It was a vain effort to reclaim the fallen, a half-conscious expression of a need so deep it would drive him right over the edge and into the dark, pull him down into the very bowels of hell itself to get back what he thought he’d lost.
"Stop your damn fidgeting," Bobby groused as John pulled against his grip like it suited him to fall on his face, if that’s what it took, to reclaim the picture he’d just done his damnedest to give away.
"Picture," John muttered, taking Bobby for either too much fool or too fucking blind to figure out the problem on his own.
"Yeah, yeah. I got your damn picture."
Because John would like as not have killed himself in the doing, Bobby reached down and snatched the picture off the ground himself. It wasn’t as much of a surprise as it should have been that, when he straightened up and tried to hand the damn thing back to John, John refused it, his eyes slipping closed and his words slurring into one another as he muttered, "You find ’em if it comes to that. You do it, or I will haunt your ass to the end of time and then some."
John was already twice as heavy as he looked, and he was getting heavier by the moment as his body lost what little will it had left to fight, so Bobby gave in, stopped arguing and just shoved the damn picture in his pocket. He shifted his grip on John’s wrist and hoisted him back to his feet, set himself to the damn near Herculean task it was going to prove out to be to get this man back to the road and their ride before he bled out on the trail from nowhere much to nowhere in particular.
"You do it," John said again, his voice little more than a mumbling grunt now. "You do it, Bobby. You do it."
"Shut up and walk," Bobby told him.
And Winchester did. He put his focus to the task of keeping his feet in motion, managed to take at least some of his own weight back for almost a mile before he was once again hanging off Bobby’s shoulder like a dead man already gone.
He hadn’t spoken for far too long by the time they reached road, was actually holding onto Bobby’s jacket with his free hand rather than doing his damnedest to push him off by the time Bobby got that sweet ride of his unlocked and John settled into the back seat like a big-ass bag of belligerent, bloody potatoes. The man’s face was grey as ashy soot, and his breathing was the shallow rattle of dry leaves on drier cement. His eyes looked like he was somewhere else altogether. Somewhere far away. Somewhere so far away it was nearly gone.
"What are their names?" Bobby asked a dying man in the cold of full-on night.
Winchester blinked, focused like it cost him all he had left just to do it. "Dean," he whispered, his lips barely moving as he spoke. "Sammy."
"Dean and Sammy," Bobby repeated.
John nodded: a movement that was no true movement at all. Bobby nodded back, put a hand on John’s forearm and squeezed before he pulled himself out of the backseat and crawled into the front, started the Chevy up with one turn of the key and pulled her out onto the blacktop. The hospital wasn’t more than a dozen miles out, but even so, he wasn’t sure John Winchester was going to make it.
He did.
And it didn’t come to that.
But if it had, Bobby would have done what he’d not ever promised that he’d do; not because John Winchester asked him to, but rather because he didn’t have to ask to know that’s what Bobby would do.