SPN Fic: Stories Told (Gen, PG, No Pairings, Post No Exit)
Title: Stories Told
Author:
dodger_winslow
Challenge: Paranormal 25: Haunting
Genre: Gen
Word Count: 2,500
Rating: PG 13
Spoilers: Up through No Exit
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.
Summary: Many stories told. Only some to be believed.
Stories Told
John stayed behind when his sons left the Roadhouse. He had to know what Ellen was going to say.
Dean was just starting to heal, and Jo was part of it. Giving him someone younger, more vulnerable, to look after had kicked his protective instincts back into play. Sammy couldn’t be that for Dean any more. They were equals now. Sam had grown out of that role for Dean the same way Dean had grown out of it for his old man.
But Jo was different. Jo was still green enough, still new enough to the game, to be vulnerable. She needed Dean ... needed him enough to force him to be there. She didn’t give him any choice, and Dean needed that. Until he found his feet again, Dean needed someone who could make him play the game for the right reasons rather than the wrong ones. He needed someone to make it matter again.
Jo did that for Dean. She did that.
When Ellen started speaking, John felt himself turning the room cold. It wasn’t an intentional response; just the way things happened when spirits got pissed in the shadow-lives they lived, watching things they could no longer be a part of, feeling things they could no longer communicate, loving people they could no longer help.
"That isn’t the way it happened, Ellen," he said, knowing even as he did so the effort was almost certainly wasted. She couldn’t hear him when he was alive; how could she possibly hear him when he was dead? But he had to try. For Dean’s sake, he had to at least try. "Somewhere deep inside, I know you realize that isn’t the way it went down."
She pulled his letter out of an old, torn envelope. She unfolded it and began to read it aloud. It was something he’d written to help Ellen, not to poison her daughter against Dean more than a decade later. The irony of it was bitter cold in his soul.
"Don’t do this to me, Ellen," he pleaded. "Don’t turn my own words against my son. Dean needs her. I know you don’t want her in the game, and I can understand that. But find another way. Don’t turn her against Dean to keep her safe."
But that was exactly what Ellen was doing. Whether she realized it or not - and he was sure she did, because Ellen was not a stupid woman - she was protecting her daughter at the cost of Jo’s faith in Dean. She considered it a fair trade, no doubt. He’d taken her husband away, so she’d keep her daughter even if it took something away from Dean she had to know he needed right now.
John stepped between Ellen and her daughter, trying to bring the cold with him as he moved. If it worked, neither of them noticed. They were yelling at each other the way he and Sammy used to yell at each other, and they did it through the intangibility of him as easily as he and Sammy had always managed to do it through the tangibility of Dean.
Some things didn’t change. Fathers and sons. Mothers and daughters.
He empathized with Ellen - with what she was feeling, with what she was trying to do - but he couldn’t let her do it. He had to stop her. At the very least, he had to try.
"Ellen." He said it as loud as he could without yelling. Yelling was a waste of energy. It accomplished nothing … something he wished he’d known when he was still alive, and he and Sammy were spending so much of what small time they had left trying to shout one another down about things that didn’t matter. He was only inches in front of her face, staring right into her eyes, trying to reach her on levels he was a pragmatist enough to know weren’t going to work. "Ellen. Stop it. Now. Stop it."
But she didn’t stop. She just kept yelling, talking, reading: killing everything Jo might have been able to do for Dean with every word that passed her lips.
His words. Words he offered as penance because he might not have been able to save her from the tragedy of her husband’s carelessness; but he could at least spare her from knowing how little thought Bill had given to her and Jo when he was making the last reckless decision he was ever going to make.
"I begged him not to do it, Ellen. I begged him. For you. For Jo. He smiled at me and said, I trusty you, Johnny-Boy. Sucker gets me, you take care of Ellen and raise JoAnna Beth right."
Ellen just kept talking. Jo was quiet now, her eyes stricken. It was already too late. Damage that couldn’t be undone was already done. But still, he had to keep trying.
"I followed him in, Ellen," he told her as she broke his son’s best chance at finding himself again. "It was stupid and reckless and something that should have gotten us both killed; but I followed him in because I couldn’t let him go alone. You and he had become my family. I had to back him up, even though I knew what it could cost Sam and Dean to do it. That’s how much I loved him, Ellen. How much I loved you. Please don’t do this to me. Please don’t do this to Dean."
When Ellen finished reading his letter to her daughter, she folded it up and put it back in the envelope he’d stamped and sent more than a dozen years ago. He should have known then that no good deed goes unpunished. He should have understood this one would come back and bite him in the ass some day.
And in some ways, he did. But he’d always thought it would be him paying the bill. He thought he already had paid the bill, in fact, because the moment he mailed the letter, it cost him the rest of what little sense of family he’d managed to re-construct after Mary’s murder. He’d always thought the price tag was losing not only a man he’d grown to love like a brother, but losing Ellen, too; and Jo. Losing what they would have been to Sam and Dean - something he hadn’t been able to force himself to risk yet, knowing how reckless Bill was, how much the hunt boiled his blood to the place where the choices he made depended almost as much on luck and happenstance as they did on skill or planning.
Bill thought he was invincible, and John had always feared it would get him killed. Get them both killed, if John wasn’t careful. So he was careful. And he was cautious, too, keeping Sam and Dean away from the whole Harvell family until he felt he could trust Bill not to risk something neither one of them could afford to lose; and by doing so, ignite the kind of falling out that would hurt Dean as much as it hurt him.
He’d already done that too many times; already had too many falling outs with people Dean was only just beginning to trust. He didn’t see what he was doing to his son until the damage was done: how much he was teaching Dean nobody stayed around, nothing was permanent, he couldn’t afford to bond with anyone who wasn’t his father or his brother. Sammy was too young to take much damage from the choices John made at that stage of the game, but Dean was so fragile, trying so hard to re-connect with the world only to have every new friendship he made torn apart almost as fast as he made them by an old man too stupid to realize what he was doing until it was too late.
But once he saw what he was doing, he tried to stop doing it. He tried to make sure the relationships he forged in the hunting community were the kind that could stand the stresses he was going to put on them before he introduced people to his sons, rather than after; before he let Dean get familiar with them, start to bond with them, begin to think of them as something other than the world full of strangers that had passed in and out of his life since the day his mother was murdered.
So because he wasn’t sure he could trust Bill that way yet, he kept the boys away, left them with Jim when he was hunting, or with others he felt he could trust with their care. He spent time with Ellen and Jo at the Roadhouse before and after their trips; but this time, he played it safe, tried to insulate Dean from becoming collateral damage to adults who couldn’t stick together even though children’s hearts hung in the balance.
"I’m sorry, Jo," Ellen was saying. "But this family has lost enough. I can’t lose you, too. And I won’t lose you to the son of the same man who got your father killed."
It was like having someone shotgun him with rock salt buckshot. The acid of it was that gutting, that destructive to his ability to remain in existence, to stay self aware, to keep living the non-life the Demon sentenced him to as punishment for years of pursuit and aggravation.
"I didn’t get him killed, Ellen," John whispered. "I just couldn’t save him from himself."
But she didn’t care. She believed what she wanted to believe, what she needed to believe. That’s why he wrote the letter in the first place: to give her what she needed to believe about her husband and how he died. To let her believe Bill didn’t give his life up on a reckless whim, to let her believe he didn’t leave his wife and child alone because he simply didn’t care enough to protect himself for their sakes, if not his own.
John gave her that, and in return, she gave him this.
Jo turned and walked out of the roadhouse. She was poisoned against him now; and, by proxy, poisoned against Dean as well. She was going to walk out into the parking lot where Bill and Ellen and he had spent countless nights, drinking and watching the stars, talking about family and honor and loyalty; and she was going to break his son for something his father didn’t even do. And there was nothing John could do about it. Once again, Dean was going to suffer the penalty for a choice his father made, one he’d thought was right at the time he made it, one he would have sworn was the honorable thing to do.
The right thing to do.
The Demon certainly knew his shit. This wasn’t the half-hell John had feared when he struck his deal, watching his sons need him and not being able to do a damned thing to help them. It was worse. It was full-on evisceration hell: fire and brimstone and the agonies of a thousands agonies visited on the head of the sinner without end, without respite, without relief. It was Dante’s inferno times ten, so much worse than he’d ever imagined it could possibly be.
And yet, even so, it was still worth the trade he’d made. Worth watching Dean take a crowbar to the Impala as long as it meant he was still alive to heal, to get better, to have a life of his own someday. Worth watching Sammy believe himself some incarnation of evil destined to serve the Demon’s plan if it meant he still had Dean because Dean was still alive, to be there for him, to help him through it.
But still, it was a hell nearly beyond his capacity to endure, watching the sons he loved suffer for the sins of their father. And now even for the sins their father never committed.
Ellen was leaning against the bar, her head bowed, her hair hanging in such a way that it hid her face from his view. He knew she was crying - a spirit senses the pain of others, feels it themselves in ways he’d never known was possible - but he didn’t really care.
He was so bitter right now, he was glad he didn’t have form or shape or corporeal substance. It was safer this way sometimes. Safer for him. Safer for them. And above all, safer for Dean. Because it was Dean who would have to hunt him if he let the Demon win. Dean who would have to find some way to destroy his father’s spirit even though his bones were already ash if John gave in to the rage this endless hell spawned inside him to the end of being able to affect the corporeal world the way he knew he could if he let himself give in to the madness the Demon assured him would eventually come.
"I’m so sorry, John," Ellen whispered, praying to what she thought was an empty room, "but I had to protect her. I couldn’t lose her, too. You of all people would understand that, wouldn’t you?"
She did know then. He’d thought she did, but it made it so much harder to know for sure. So much harder to know she was acting to save her daughter at the cost of his son. So much harder to know she didn’t speak from a broken heart, but rather from a selfish one.
"No," John said. "I risked leaving my sons alone to try and keep your daughter’s father from getting himself killed." His voice had grown ugly even to his own ears. He could feel the bitterness turning to something else, something harder to fight and harder to control. "I don’t understand, Ellen. And I never will."
"Forgive me," she whispered.
The tavern did turn cold then. The temperature in the whole room dropped a good twenty degrees in seconds. He knew it was him doing it, and he knew how dangerous it was to let himself indulge the anger flowing through him.
He could have moved something now. He could have expressed what he was feeling by shattering a beer mug against the wall, or breaking a chair across the bar. But he didn’t. He didn’t because he wouldn’t, not because he couldn’t.
But he wanted to.
Her eyes went wide as the cold intensified around him, around her. The horror in them was the only satisfaction he was ever going to get. It wasn’t enough, but he enjoyed it in ways that frightened him a little with how vindictive it felt to punish her for choosing her child over his. Standing directly in front of her, he glared into her eyes, hoping she could hear his voice when he spoke.
"No," he said. "I don't forgive you."
The mirror behind the bar cracked. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. She hadn’t heard him, but it didn’t matter. The puff of her own breath crystallizing in the tavern’s cold told her he was there.
And that he knew what she’d done.
He left her then, going back to his sons, the only family he’d ever really had.
-finis-
Read the sequel: Stories Re-Told