SPN FIC - Give and Goodbye
Time to get the weekend's festivities underway!
This one's a small experiment: written as if it's being told to a friend, or a reporter, or...anyone you like. Kate Guenther, according to the Journal entries that were an online feature of the Season 1 DVD's, is the wife of Mike Guenther, who co-owned the Lawrence garage with John. After the fire, John and the boys stayed with the Guenthers, who eventually came to suggest (rather strongly) that he needed help. Of the head-shrinking kind. So he bailed, and thus the saga of Winchesters-on-the-road began.
Several people (hi, LeeLust) said they wanted to see more of the Winchesters from someone else's POV. So...here you go.
More fic coming throughout the weekend, so keep checking in!
Characters: John, Dean, and Sam; Mike and Kate Guenther
Pairings: none
Length: 2092 words
Rating: G
Spoilers: up through IMTOD
Disclaimer: Yeah. I don't own nothin'. No cash happening here.
Give and Goodbye:
From Conversations with Kate Bishop Guenther of Lawrence, Kansas
By Carol Davis
We got this little note in the mail. A little piece of paper, folded in half, in one of those white envelopes that comes in a box of a hundred. It was postmarked in Lawrence, but there wasn’t any return address. The note said, “John Winchester has passed.”
* * * * *
I forget how it was that Mike met John. He wasn’t from Lawrence. Indiana, I think, because I remember him saying something about Hoosiers. He was just there one day when I went over to meet Mike for lunch, and they were talking about John maybe coming to work at the garage. I think he’d worked at a garage when he was a kid, before he went into the service, and he was talented that way. He wasn’t much of a people person - he’d get into moods where he didn’t want to talk, he just wanted to get his work done and go home. And he didn’t like being second-guessed. I guess that comes from being in the service: when they tell you to do something, you do it.
But old Charlie Lynch - he owned the garage back then - he thought John was a good kid and he deserved a chance. Charlie lost a nephew in Vietnam and he always had a soft spot for anybody who’d been in the service. He thought they deserved a little extra because of what they’d done. So he gave John the job, and when he got ready to retire, he talked to Mike and John about buying out the business. They were both still just kids, really: Mike was thirty, and John was a little bit younger. But he trusted them. Charlie. Thought they could make a go of it.
I remember the day they changed the sign. Took down the one that said Lynch’s and put up a new one that said G&W Auto Repair. Guenther and Winchester, with Mike’s name first, because he’d been there longer.
John’s boy, the older one, said it looked like the root beer sign. You know, A&W. He wanted to know if they were gonna sell root beer. Dean, his name was. He was a funny little guy. Very serious. If he didn’t know you, he’d stick out his hand and say his name was Dean Michael Winchester, like he was running for Congress or something.
Their other boy came along after G&W’d been running for a few months. You’d think maybe they would have wanted a girl, so they’d have one of each, but the whole bunch of them were set on it being a boy. I don’t know that Mary even had ultrasound before they started saying the baby’s name was Sam. Although I guess Samantha would have worked.
And John - you never saw anybody dote on kids the way he did on those two boys. He was so proud of his sons. Thought the sun rose and set on them. Mike would come home and tell me he knew every breath those kids took because John told him all about it.
I always think it was a blessing that the boys made it out of that fire. It was bad enough for John, losing Mary, but if he’d lost either one of those kids, or God forbid both of them, I think he would have - well, he pretty much went off the deep end anyway, but I think it would have been ten times worse. I think he would have - well, no, that’s a bad thing to think about somebody.
We took them in, after the fire.
There were some relatives who wanted John to come there, and bring the boys, but John said no to all that. Starting on the morning after the fire, he kept going back to the house, and he couldn’t have gone on doing that if he’d been staying out of town. Sometimes he’d just stand there, on the lawn or out on the sidewalk, and stare at it. He went inside, too, with the insurance people and the police and sometimes by himself. There were some things in there that were salvageable, but all of it had that awful smoky smell. Anything that smelled of smoke, he wouldn’t bring it anywhere near the boys. But he kept picking through things.
A couple weeks after it happened, he said something to Mike about Mary being on the ceiling. Said he went into Sammy’s nursery because he heard her scream from in there, and she was up on the ceiling.
No, we didn’t think he was crazy. Not…you know…crazy.
He certainly wasn’t crazy before the fire. Stubborn, and he’d go into moods sometimes, when things weren’t going his way. And like I said, he was in Vietnam, so God knows what he saw over there. He never spoke about it in front of me, but I’m sure there were some things that he would have been better off not seeing. But I don’t think he had flashbacks, nothing like that. I think it just made him… What’s the word? Pensive. Even so, I’m sure you couldn’t find one person in Lawrence who’d say John was anything but normal. He let Mike do the glad-handing and the actual promotion and whatnot, but as far as running the business, keeping track of things, thinking up new ways to find customers, he was good at that.
Actually, I think all he had to do to bring in customers was sit Dean out front. John started teaching him how to tinker with things, and he was so damn cute. I know they had half a dozen women customers who’d get their oil changed more than they needed to, so they could sit there and watch Dean. Four years old, and he knew how to flirt even then.
All right, all right, they were watching John too. You say anything to Mike and I’ll haunt you in your sleep, but I always figured if they put a picture of John in the ads, they’d get every woman in eastern Kansas coming to that garage.
But about the fire. We thought - well, being through something like that, and then not sleeping much, I’m sure your mind does funny things. It’s a terrible shock. Maybe he saw… Well, if the fire was burning really fast and hot, and she was… You know. Burning. I’m sure his mind couldn’t accept something like that. It’s just a blessing he thought to grab Sammy and get him out of that room. He said what happened was, he took Sammy out and gave him to Dean and said, “Take your brother outside.” Then he tried to go back in to get Mary, but it was too late.
There were people who said, and I never thought this myself, not for a second, that maybe John killed Mary and set the fire to cover things up. I guess people do that - you read it in People magazine sometimes.
And I guess you never really know what goes on in someone’s home, in their relationship, unless you’re there.
But John? No. There was no chance of that, ever.
No. No chance.
People said it more and more after he took the boys and disappeared. They said, why else would he run? But the police closed the case. They couldn’t find any way to charge him with anything. They couldn’t find any explanation for the fire at all. The arson people went over that house with a fine-tooth comb and they didn’t find anything. They said it started in the ceiling, and they decided it was bad wiring. But you know how people are. They didn’t like that John took off and ran.
We didn’t like it much, either. We got up that one morning and he was gone. He’d gotten up in the night and took the boys and left. That was the last we saw of him.
* * * * *
No. There was one more time.
It was a few months before we got the note. Mike said a couple of men showed up at the garage, asking questions about John. They said they were police, but there was something about the way they acted that made him not believe that. He went along with the whole thing, figured maybe watching too much Law & Order made him think police should be something different. That night, when we were eating dinner, he said he knew who they were. It was John’s boys, Dean and Sam. He said the way they talked, they didn’t know much about the fire. You’d think the simple thing would be to ask John, but maybe they couldn’t do that for whatever reason.
He said he had to give it some thought, but even after twenty years he knew Dean. Said Dean was changed, like you’d be if you went through something terrible, but something about the way Dean said goodbye - Mike says he’ll lay money that’s who it was.
Then that night he saw John.
He wasn’t so convinced about that, at first. He thought because he was thinking about the boys, and the fire, that when he saw this man in dark clothes standing a ways down from the garage, looking at it, he jumped to conclusions.
I know he was right, because I saw John too. I was going to the market, and this black truck passed me by. I only got a glimpse of the driver, and I guess you could say I jumped to conclusions too, but this was before I talked to Mike.
So I… Well, I feel a little foolish admitting this. I forgot all about the market. I drove over to their old house.
And their car was there. The old black Impala.
There’s someone new that lives there now, of course. A single mom with two kids. I parked down the street and sat there for a while, looking at the house. Right up until I started to feel foolish, like some stalker. There wasn’t anything unusual about their being there at all; I’ve gone back to my old house, from when I was growing up, a couple of times. And it wasn’t like I really had anything to say to the boys. So after a few minutes I left. Forgot all about the groceries, just went home. Then when Mike got back he told me what’d happened at the garage.
I feel bad about all of it, even though it’s been all these years. I feel like there’s something more we could have done for John, but he wouldn’t have it. He had those old books, kept coming back with more, and he started going to palm readers and fortune tellers. He lost his grip on things. Ended up selling his share of the business to Mike. Wanted to outright give it to him, but Mike told him no, to get a grip.
But it ended up, John did walk right away from it.
* * * * *
I don’t know who sent the note. Maybe it was one of the boys. We don’t have a clue where they are.
And, you know, there’s been more trouble: a friend of mine who used to live here in the neighborhood called from St. Louis to wish me happy birthday. We got to talking and one thing led to another, and I said we thought the Winchesters had been in town, that the boys had come by the garage to talk to Mike. And she said that wasn’t possible. It’d been in the papers in St. Louis that Dean had murdered somebody and kidnapped a girl, and the police killed him. She wasn’t sure about the exact date, but it was months before Mike talked to the boys.
So we don’t know what’s going on. We talked about it for a while, Mike and I, and we decided to just let it lie. John didn’t want our help, didn’t want us to be part of his life, or the boys’ lives, and that’s the way we left it.
Pretty much.
We don’t know if he’s really dead. We’re not sure how to go about finding out. And we don’t know what happened to Dean.
Maybe it’s best to just leave it alone.
But to get a note like that - it made me wish things were different. We cared about John, and Mary, and the boys.
We did. We truly did.
This one's a small experiment: written as if it's being told to a friend, or a reporter, or...anyone you like. Kate Guenther, according to the Journal entries that were an online feature of the Season 1 DVD's, is the wife of Mike Guenther, who co-owned the Lawrence garage with John. After the fire, John and the boys stayed with the Guenthers, who eventually came to suggest (rather strongly) that he needed help. Of the head-shrinking kind. So he bailed, and thus the saga of Winchesters-on-the-road began.
Several people (hi, LeeLust) said they wanted to see more of the Winchesters from someone else's POV. So...here you go.
More fic coming throughout the weekend, so keep checking in!
Characters: John, Dean, and Sam; Mike and Kate Guenther
Pairings: none
Length: 2092 words
Rating: G
Spoilers: up through IMTOD
Disclaimer: Yeah. I don't own nothin'. No cash happening here.
Give and Goodbye:
From Conversations with Kate Bishop Guenther of Lawrence, Kansas
By Carol Davis
We got this little note in the mail. A little piece of paper, folded in half, in one of those white envelopes that comes in a box of a hundred. It was postmarked in Lawrence, but there wasn’t any return address. The note said, “John Winchester has passed.”
* * * * *
I forget how it was that Mike met John. He wasn’t from Lawrence. Indiana, I think, because I remember him saying something about Hoosiers. He was just there one day when I went over to meet Mike for lunch, and they were talking about John maybe coming to work at the garage. I think he’d worked at a garage when he was a kid, before he went into the service, and he was talented that way. He wasn’t much of a people person - he’d get into moods where he didn’t want to talk, he just wanted to get his work done and go home. And he didn’t like being second-guessed. I guess that comes from being in the service: when they tell you to do something, you do it.
But old Charlie Lynch - he owned the garage back then - he thought John was a good kid and he deserved a chance. Charlie lost a nephew in Vietnam and he always had a soft spot for anybody who’d been in the service. He thought they deserved a little extra because of what they’d done. So he gave John the job, and when he got ready to retire, he talked to Mike and John about buying out the business. They were both still just kids, really: Mike was thirty, and John was a little bit younger. But he trusted them. Charlie. Thought they could make a go of it.
I remember the day they changed the sign. Took down the one that said Lynch’s and put up a new one that said G&W Auto Repair. Guenther and Winchester, with Mike’s name first, because he’d been there longer.
John’s boy, the older one, said it looked like the root beer sign. You know, A&W. He wanted to know if they were gonna sell root beer. Dean, his name was. He was a funny little guy. Very serious. If he didn’t know you, he’d stick out his hand and say his name was Dean Michael Winchester, like he was running for Congress or something.
Their other boy came along after G&W’d been running for a few months. You’d think maybe they would have wanted a girl, so they’d have one of each, but the whole bunch of them were set on it being a boy. I don’t know that Mary even had ultrasound before they started saying the baby’s name was Sam. Although I guess Samantha would have worked.
And John - you never saw anybody dote on kids the way he did on those two boys. He was so proud of his sons. Thought the sun rose and set on them. Mike would come home and tell me he knew every breath those kids took because John told him all about it.
I always think it was a blessing that the boys made it out of that fire. It was bad enough for John, losing Mary, but if he’d lost either one of those kids, or God forbid both of them, I think he would have - well, he pretty much went off the deep end anyway, but I think it would have been ten times worse. I think he would have - well, no, that’s a bad thing to think about somebody.
We took them in, after the fire.
There were some relatives who wanted John to come there, and bring the boys, but John said no to all that. Starting on the morning after the fire, he kept going back to the house, and he couldn’t have gone on doing that if he’d been staying out of town. Sometimes he’d just stand there, on the lawn or out on the sidewalk, and stare at it. He went inside, too, with the insurance people and the police and sometimes by himself. There were some things in there that were salvageable, but all of it had that awful smoky smell. Anything that smelled of smoke, he wouldn’t bring it anywhere near the boys. But he kept picking through things.
A couple weeks after it happened, he said something to Mike about Mary being on the ceiling. Said he went into Sammy’s nursery because he heard her scream from in there, and she was up on the ceiling.
No, we didn’t think he was crazy. Not…you know…crazy.
He certainly wasn’t crazy before the fire. Stubborn, and he’d go into moods sometimes, when things weren’t going his way. And like I said, he was in Vietnam, so God knows what he saw over there. He never spoke about it in front of me, but I’m sure there were some things that he would have been better off not seeing. But I don’t think he had flashbacks, nothing like that. I think it just made him… What’s the word? Pensive. Even so, I’m sure you couldn’t find one person in Lawrence who’d say John was anything but normal. He let Mike do the glad-handing and the actual promotion and whatnot, but as far as running the business, keeping track of things, thinking up new ways to find customers, he was good at that.
Actually, I think all he had to do to bring in customers was sit Dean out front. John started teaching him how to tinker with things, and he was so damn cute. I know they had half a dozen women customers who’d get their oil changed more than they needed to, so they could sit there and watch Dean. Four years old, and he knew how to flirt even then.
All right, all right, they were watching John too. You say anything to Mike and I’ll haunt you in your sleep, but I always figured if they put a picture of John in the ads, they’d get every woman in eastern Kansas coming to that garage.
But about the fire. We thought - well, being through something like that, and then not sleeping much, I’m sure your mind does funny things. It’s a terrible shock. Maybe he saw… Well, if the fire was burning really fast and hot, and she was… You know. Burning. I’m sure his mind couldn’t accept something like that. It’s just a blessing he thought to grab Sammy and get him out of that room. He said what happened was, he took Sammy out and gave him to Dean and said, “Take your brother outside.” Then he tried to go back in to get Mary, but it was too late.
There were people who said, and I never thought this myself, not for a second, that maybe John killed Mary and set the fire to cover things up. I guess people do that - you read it in People magazine sometimes.
And I guess you never really know what goes on in someone’s home, in their relationship, unless you’re there.
But John? No. There was no chance of that, ever.
No. No chance.
People said it more and more after he took the boys and disappeared. They said, why else would he run? But the police closed the case. They couldn’t find any way to charge him with anything. They couldn’t find any explanation for the fire at all. The arson people went over that house with a fine-tooth comb and they didn’t find anything. They said it started in the ceiling, and they decided it was bad wiring. But you know how people are. They didn’t like that John took off and ran.
We didn’t like it much, either. We got up that one morning and he was gone. He’d gotten up in the night and took the boys and left. That was the last we saw of him.
* * * * *
No. There was one more time.
It was a few months before we got the note. Mike said a couple of men showed up at the garage, asking questions about John. They said they were police, but there was something about the way they acted that made him not believe that. He went along with the whole thing, figured maybe watching too much Law & Order made him think police should be something different. That night, when we were eating dinner, he said he knew who they were. It was John’s boys, Dean and Sam. He said the way they talked, they didn’t know much about the fire. You’d think the simple thing would be to ask John, but maybe they couldn’t do that for whatever reason.
He said he had to give it some thought, but even after twenty years he knew Dean. Said Dean was changed, like you’d be if you went through something terrible, but something about the way Dean said goodbye - Mike says he’ll lay money that’s who it was.
Then that night he saw John.
He wasn’t so convinced about that, at first. He thought because he was thinking about the boys, and the fire, that when he saw this man in dark clothes standing a ways down from the garage, looking at it, he jumped to conclusions.
I know he was right, because I saw John too. I was going to the market, and this black truck passed me by. I only got a glimpse of the driver, and I guess you could say I jumped to conclusions too, but this was before I talked to Mike.
So I… Well, I feel a little foolish admitting this. I forgot all about the market. I drove over to their old house.
And their car was there. The old black Impala.
There’s someone new that lives there now, of course. A single mom with two kids. I parked down the street and sat there for a while, looking at the house. Right up until I started to feel foolish, like some stalker. There wasn’t anything unusual about their being there at all; I’ve gone back to my old house, from when I was growing up, a couple of times. And it wasn’t like I really had anything to say to the boys. So after a few minutes I left. Forgot all about the groceries, just went home. Then when Mike got back he told me what’d happened at the garage.
I feel bad about all of it, even though it’s been all these years. I feel like there’s something more we could have done for John, but he wouldn’t have it. He had those old books, kept coming back with more, and he started going to palm readers and fortune tellers. He lost his grip on things. Ended up selling his share of the business to Mike. Wanted to outright give it to him, but Mike told him no, to get a grip.
But it ended up, John did walk right away from it.
* * * * *
I don’t know who sent the note. Maybe it was one of the boys. We don’t have a clue where they are.
And, you know, there’s been more trouble: a friend of mine who used to live here in the neighborhood called from St. Louis to wish me happy birthday. We got to talking and one thing led to another, and I said we thought the Winchesters had been in town, that the boys had come by the garage to talk to Mike. And she said that wasn’t possible. It’d been in the papers in St. Louis that Dean had murdered somebody and kidnapped a girl, and the police killed him. She wasn’t sure about the exact date, but it was months before Mike talked to the boys.
So we don’t know what’s going on. We talked about it for a while, Mike and I, and we decided to just let it lie. John didn’t want our help, didn’t want us to be part of his life, or the boys’ lives, and that’s the way we left it.
Pretty much.
We don’t know if he’s really dead. We’re not sure how to go about finding out. And we don’t know what happened to Dean.
Maybe it’s best to just leave it alone.
But to get a note like that - it made me wish things were different. We cared about John, and Mary, and the boys.
We did. We truly did.