Fic: Thinking about What a Friend Had Said, PG, 3/3
Thinking about What a Friend had said(3/3)
Warnings: Discussion of death, characters being mean to each other.
Summary: Follows Hoping for Replacement. John attempts to make peace with his eldest sons. Things don't go as he'd planned. John POV
Part 1| Part 2
Thinking about What a Friend had said
Dad, Adam said, voice carefully modulated to carry as little emotion as possible, When are you coming home?
John shut his eyes and put a hand on the wall. He would have sagged against it but couldn’t bring himself to unlock the rigidity of his spine or ease the tension in his muscles. He’d spent too long putting on a positive face for his wife and kids that now, hundreds of miles away from them, he couldn’t make himself acknowledge his own weakness, his exhaustion.
“Soon, son,” he rumbled, and though he couldn’t see Adam’s face he could imagine how pinched it would be, how tight with worry. The way it often was these days. “It won’t be long.”
You should be here, Adam countered, and despite the severity of the tone John felt a surge of pride at the capable young man his son was growing into. Mom needs you here.
John didn’t respond with, “Your mother’s the one who sent me,” for all that it was true. He wasn’t that man anymore, who picked needless fights with his family, who drank and stayed away for days at a time out of spite.
And he hadn’t told Adam his real reason for leaving.
Standing in the little motel room, John could clearly hear the noise of the city through the window. He’d seen the squalor his…Sam and Dean lived in. He didn’t want that for Adam.
“Give me another few days here,” he said, carefully. “I’ll wrap things up and be home as soon as I can. Your mother…she understands.”
Are you…are you in the hospital? Adam’s voice rose slightly, edging toward fear. Did you get sick again?
“Adam,” John said, more sharply than he’d intended, “I’m fine. Everything is okay. I just need to wrap up some business and then I’ll be home. Before you know it. It’s okay, son. Everything’s going to be fine.”
In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to believe his own words.
_______________
Kate hadn’t given him much in the way of instructions about what he was supposed to be doing here. Vague ideas of ‘reconnecting’ and ‘making peace with those boys’ had been tossed around, and like tiny storm clouds they’d followed John to this grimy neighborhood and hovered around his head, threatening but formless. Useless as any sort of guide. John knew that he was floundering, and the sense of helplessness infuriated him. He wasn’t a man built for contrition, and patience has never been one of his virtues.
The wind cut through his long coat and the layers of shirts he wore beneath it. He’d lost weight, lost fat, and he allowed himself a moment of weakness, stopping to shiver on the sidewalk, letting his thoughts wander to his comfortable recliner in his comfortable house, two days’ drive away.
The wind died down and he raised his eyes to his reflection in the nearest shop window. Washer and Dryer Sales and Repair, the letters on the window declared, by appointment only.
He blinked bleary eyes at the phone number. His face in the window looked haggard. Behind him, cars cruised along the road, trailing clouds of white exhaust. The city stank. The people here were worn out. He blinked at his face and for a moment it was his-it was Sam’s, heavy-browed, scarred and bruised, contemptuous. He blinked again and it was Adam’s, his face twisted, and John averted his eyes.
No. This wouldn’t be Adam’s fate. His son deserved better.
But Sam would never be John’s.
He set his course toward the brothers’ apartment building. John guessed it had once been a hotel, maybe in the twenties. Thin walls and heavy brown radiators. Roaches. Always got roaches in the city. Ants in the country, roaches in the city.
The building squatted on the corner of a well-trafficked thoroughfare. The red bricks and lacy stonework remembered a bygone era, but the bars and locks on the front door were planted firmly in the present.
He sat down on the chilly stoop by the front door, and waited. The cold crept quickly beneath his clothes and sank into his bones, his blood. Eating away his vibrancy, growing and spreading, devouring color, light, warmth-
“John.”
For a moment he remembered another voice, a child’s voice. Sam had never called him Dad.
“John.” Deeper this time, edged in frustration. “Hey.”
His eyes sprang open. The world rushed back, dizzying and loud, like a sudden fire. A truck roared by. John exhaled a plume of white.
“Sam,” he said thinly, and looked up. The boy-the man-loomed over him. His size was appalling. Vaguely John recalled a small, strange boy standing in a beige living room, barefoot. He remembered thinking of him as a disappointing runt.
“I said I’d call you,” Sam ground, waving a large, be-gloved hand. “What’s with the creepy stalker bullshit?”
John scowled. Sam looked both better and worse than he had the night before last. The poor light made his eyes dull and skin grey, but the wound on his face was freshly bandaged, and no one could argue that he wasn’t well-fed.
“I can’t stay in town forever,” he said, forcing his voice to remain quiet, even. Sam’s eyes narrowed.
“You’ve been off in happy fairytale land for fifteen years and you don’t have a week to give to the son you abandoned, before you die?”
It was like being punched in the chest. All the air rushed out of his lungs and John stared up at the younger man, stricken.
No emotion passed across Sam’s face. Not the slightest hint of remorse.
He’d seen that look before, on an eight year old boy standing eerily still in a carpeted room for over an hour. Watching his brother play.
“There’s something wrong with you,” John said weakly, struggling to his feet with his hands on his knees.
Sam’s face remained impassive, his shoulders square. Cold and distant as he’d ever been.
For the first time John wondered what it had been like for Dean, growing up with that. Under that watchful stare.
“Go away, John,” Sam instructed. “I’ll call you. But stay away from Dean until I give the word. We clear?”
There was real malice in those words. John grimaced. He’d have preferred to maintain a stoic silence in the face of Sam’s grim disdain, but he suspected that would ruin whatever thin chance he had of seeing Dean and thus making his time away from his family all for nothing.
“I got it,” he gritted, but even that wasn’t enough to satisfy.
“Walk away now,” Sam gestured back the way John had come. “Don’t let me catch you hanging around here again.”
The wind was cold. John wrapped his coat tight around his body, and walked away.
_______________
The phone rang. The display said ‘ADAM.’ He didn’t pick it up.
He sat in the coffee shop and glared vaguely at the counter and his own gnarled hands. The general clatter of dishes and cutlery in the little space was doing nothing for his burgeoning headache.
The winter sun sulked behind a flat sky, but it was well on the way to four o’clock and the light was failing. Traffic had been increasing noticeably for the last half hour. The sidewalks were busier too. A bus stopped and disgorged a crowd of tired bodies. Even shuttered in the coffee shop John could smell the cloud of diesel exhaust the bus expelled as it roared down the road.
Someone opened the door. A bell jingled and cold air swept through the shops’ small space. John tightened his fingers on his mug in instinctive self-defense. The coffee was lukewarm now, though, its heat dispersed into the environment. No good to anybody.
Entropy.
The door shut, bell jangling, and the heat kicked on, sweeping out of the vents like a desert wind. John lifted his head to signal the waitress for a refill, remembered that there wasn’t one, and glanced along the counter for the barista. She was in front of the register, smile firmly in place, taking care of some long-haired kid who smiled back at her shyly.
“…sorry,” he was saying, in a soft voice. “About the other day.”
“Oh, no!” the woman-girl really-returned, all genial cheer. “It’s okay.”
John looked away, curling his fingers around his cup. He fought to keep his lips from skimming back, corpselike, and baring his teeth.
The man at the counter was Dean. He hadn’t noticed, yet, that John was sitting a handful of feet away.
He raised his eyes and fixed his gaze on the colorful handwritten board posted on the opposite wall. He could leave. Leaving might be best. It would certainly be what Sam wanted him to do, and in all likelihood Dean would never notice him slipping out-not if John left right now.
On the other hand, sooner or later his phone would buzz again and it would be Adam on the other end, confused and alone, waiting for news that John didn’t have to give to him. Adam, trying to be strong.
The only thing keeping him here in this cold, dark, misery of a city was a promise to his wife and the inaccessibility of the young man standing eight feet away, smiling shyly at the barista.
John was tired, and he wanted to go home.
He wanted to see his son again.
He slid off his stool and walked a few steps closer to the register.
Dean turned around.
His face went suddenly, sickeningly pale.
“Dad?” he breathed, and it was like a physical blow.
Not John.
Dad.
_______________
The phone did buzz one more time as John settled himself in a booth across from the younger man. He still didn’t pick up. Dean didn’t seem to notice.
His eyes, John noted, seemed slightly out of focus. As he settled in the booth he blinked rapidly, several times, and his hand jerked and sloshed a little coffee onto the table.
“Hey,” John said gently, because he could be gentle now, “Easy. It’s okay.”
“…okay,” Dean echoed hollowly, and John resisted the urge to frown. He was working hard not to remember the day he’d left. The way Dean had looked at him. The way he’d always been.
Not strange and frightening like Sam. But different. Nothing like Adam. Nothing like he’d expected.
There was some similarity to Adam in Dean’s face, true. Some shared features. It was a little unnerving, actually, and John tried not to picture Adam sitting in a booth like this, in a neighborhood like this. It was hard not to, though. Hard not to worry what would become of his son when John was gone. Hard not to…to make the connection.
Dean was tall, but kind of scrawny, and the poor winter light hadn’t done much for his pallid complexion. His hands were dry, webbed in white like frost, and John could see flecks of dark red in the knuckles where they’d cracked and bled. The fingers trembled slightly, though John didn’t know if that was typical or just nerves. Dean’s nails were uneven.
He’d been an odd-looking kid all the years John had known him, and adulthood had afflicted him with strangely feminine features. The fall of nearly chin-length hair didn’t help his appearance any, and John couldn’t help but compare it unfavorably to Adam’s shorter, less unruly style.
In all, Dean looked like someone who would benefit from a hot drink, a solid meal, and a haircut. Christ, why the hell had Kate sent him here? What was he supposed to say to this kid?
“You, uh,” John began, broke off, cleared his throat, and hazarded, “you got tall.”
Dean’s eyes flickered down to his coffee.
“Yeah,” he murmured.
An awkward silence fell. John looked away, then out the window. Traffic was moving slowly but steadily now. Crowds of people just trying to get home.
“Where did-?” Dean blurted, but swallowed the rest of the question. John suppressed a wince.
“You go,” Kate had said, arms folded and expression unyielding, “Make peace with them. Those boys.”
“Adam needs me here,” he’d argued. The light through the kitchen window had been clean and cold.
Morning light.
Now he spread his fingers on the fake-wood surface of the table. The light was too poor for shadows, and the skin of his fingers seemed grey.
“Dean,” he began, “Did Sam tell you I was in town?”
There was a long silence from across the table. Finally Dean said, “I knew. I saw you. I didn’t need him to…to tell me anything.”
“Oh,” John said. “Good. That’s…good.”
“I saw you,” he went on, softly, talking to his coffee. “Before. You were outside. Wearing a scarf.”
“I’ve been in town a couple of days. I was…I guess…getting a feel for the area.”
That wasn’t a lie. He’d walked the roads and some of the alleys nearest his…Sam and Dean’s residence.
“It’s…” he paused, pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He wanted to say something bland, something that wouldn’t give away his actual opinion. “It’s…an inter-a nice area.”
Dean gave the coffee cup a quarter turn. “It’s just a place to be.”
“And you’ve been here for…”
“I stay with Sam,” Dean said softly. “I…for a while now.”
“So, I guess things are okay? With the two of you?”
Dean didn’t answer. He was staring steadily into his coffee as if he expected to find the secrets of the universe in its depths.
Finally, faintly, he breathed four words John had been anticipating since Kate told him on no uncertain terms where exactly he needed to go.
“Was it my fault?”
John clenched his jaw. If it had been Adam asking the question, for any reason, John would have known the answer. No. Of course not. But Dean…wasn’t Adam. And John didn’t have to do any real soul-searching to know that when he walked away all those years ago, at least part of his goal had been to never see either of his sons again.
He looked away; cast his gaze around the coffee shop. A handful of customers at the counter, in booths. Grey people. Tired, worn-down people. John saw himself in them, saw that they were trying to find a little sanctuary, a few moments of peace.
This wasn’t a place designed for the confession of ugly truths.
He said, “No, of course not. I just…had some things to work out.”
Dean’s lips barely moved. “But you never came back.”
John tried on a smile, though he doubted Dean could see it, half-hidden behind his too-long hair. “I thought it might be…harder…if I came back. You were always…strong. I knew you’d be okay.”
This time Dean did look up.
“I knew,” John said. “You’d be okay without me.”
“Dad…”
“You did okay, Dean. You grew up good. I’m…I’m proud of you.”
He wasn’t expecting Dean’s sudden, sharp inhalation, or the way he shot upright in his seat, ramrod straight. His eyes widened and he fixed John with a look that he faintly remembered from afternoons spent nursing hangovers on a sofa in Kansas. The face was older and the eyes looked bruised, but it still flooded John with the same sense of unwanted, creeping shame.
Dean’s lips moved and for a moment John couldn’t make out any words, and his eyes fixed on the strange shapes of lips and teeth and tongue with an abstract fascination.
“…furious,” he heard, faintly, the word barely audible. John strained forward, even as a warning skittered up his spine. Something wrong here. This is sickness.
“Dean?”
“He’d be furious,” Dean said, so softly his lips barely moved. “He wouldn’t be proud of me…”
John felt a wash of cold over his skin. The sense of sickness, of wrong, that made the mentally ill so disturbing to be around.
“Dean?”
Dean’s face had gone very still. His eyes widened, until John could nearly see the whites all the way around his pupils. Dean’s mouth barely moved and the words came out as a harsh whisper.
“He’d tear me a new one. He wouldn’t be proud. He wouldn’t be-”
John half-stood, torn between reaching out and leaning away.
“You’re not my dad,” Dean was whispering stiffly, “You’re not my...not…”
“Dean,” he hazarded, stretching out a hand. Instantly Dean went rigid, eyes locking on John’s face, bright as fire.
“You’re not my dad,” he said, crisp and clear, and was out of his seat and banging through the door before John had really processed what was happening. John sprang after him after a moment of sitting stunned.
He lurched awkwardly through the door, but the crowd outside had grown and already swallowed Dean up. He took a few hesitant steps away from the front of the shop, and then stopped. The cold hit him in a wave. Darkness pressed in on him. Somewhere Adam was sitting by the phone, waiting. Somewhere Kate was finishing up at work, heading out to her car. The time he was supposed to have left with them was slipping away, precious seconds soaked up by this grey and dismal place, like blood into dark earth.
Behind him a bell jangled merrily, and suddenly the barista was standing beside him, bare arms crossed against the cold.
“Did you see where he went?” she demanded, without preamble, and John started. “Did you see?”
“I-no, he just, he moved too fast.”
“Damn!” she swore. “I need to-I have to call his brother.” She was turned halfway toward the shop entrance when he words penetrated John’s confusion.
“Wait,” he blurted, “This has happened before?”
Her look didn’t exactly level him, but it was a near thing. She bustled back inside, John trailing in her wake.
“Is he…I mean is there something…?”
But his words were falling on deaf ears. She was already behind the counter, a scrap of paper in hand, phone pressed to her ear.
“I’m really sorry,” she was saying, “I didn’t know. It wasn’t-no, not like last time. He just kind of…no, he just…mm-hmm. More like that. I think he was pretty upset but-no, not that I saw. Uh-huh. Yes, how did you-yes, he’s still here. Did you want to-okay. Hang on.”
John stared uncomprehending at the phone she held out to him for an instant, before accepting it. The plastic was warm from her hand.
“Sam,” he said.
You’re going to regret this, the other man said flatly.
“I’ll help you find him,” John said immediately.
Silence.
Finally Sam bit out a grudging, Fine, and disconnected. John passed the phone back.
“Do you mind if I wait in one of the booths?” he asked, and her face was carefully blank as she nodded toward the booth nearest the door. John went meekly.
He had the good sense not to ask for a refill on his coffee.
_______________
Sam swept into the shop trailing storm clouds and fury. He strode directly to the barista and spoke to her in soft tones before turning his attention to John.
“Let’s go,” he said.
John slid out of the booth and trailed after him.
The sun was low enough now that it was affecting visibility. Some of the cars on the road already had their lights on. John shoved his hands in his pockets and stretched his legs to keep pace with Sam’s briskly furious stride.
“This has happened before,” John ventured, when they’d walked several blocks and Sam hadn’t uttered a word to him.
“Yes.” Tightly.
“He-does he have an ill-”
“There’s nothing wrong with my brother.” Sam snarled. “He was getting better! He would’ve been fine if you hadn’t stuck your nose in!”
“What?” John rocked back. “How the hell are you going to pin this on me?”
Sam opened his mouth to reply, but was cut off by the sudden buzzing of John’s phone. John fished it out and the display accused him with Adam’s name.
He wasn’t prepared for Sam to snatch it from his hand and lift it to his ear.
“Hello Adam,” he said, voice dripping false sweetness. “Your dad can’t come to the phone right now. He’s a little busy cleaning up another one of his messes.” He paused and John could hear his son’s voice yelling tinnily. Sam’s lips drew back.
“Didn’t he tell you?” And even though John suddenly knew what the next words out of Sam’s mouth were going to be, he still stared in helpless horror, like a man watching a continent collapse into the sea.
“I’m your big brother Sammy Winchester. Don’t tell me Dad never mentioned me?”
And with slow, deliberate malice, he closed the phone and held it out. John took it. Sam leaned forward, face an evil rictus.
“You’d better pray to God we find my brother,” he said.
John’s hands curled into fists, slowly. Sam looked at them and lifted an eyebrow.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said.
The phone didn’t ring again.
It was starting to get dark.
_______________
Their search quickly turned into a nightmare trek through the darkening neighborhood. Grey bled to black, shadows rushing up out of the concrete and engulfing walls, swallowing doorways, windows, people. John’s breath clouded in front of his face. He folded his arms and shoved his hands into his armpits. The chill in his bones wasn’t external, though.
Too many windows looked out at the world like empty eye sockets.
“How do you know he didn’t go home?” he asked once.
Sam said, “Because whenever this happens he forgets he has one.”
John ground his teeth.
He trudged in Sam’s wake. The other man was a looming shadow, a wall in front of him, haloed by streetlights and headlights. Ringed by it, but not illuminated. John felt himself withering in shade. No stars were visible. Endless grey blanketed the sky.
Fifteen years ago, a handful of days before Mary threw him out, he’d been slumped on the sofa nursing his hangover. Mary was off somewhere else in the house, simmering in her ongoing anger and disappointment. His sons were home too, but John couldn’t hear them. They were always like that. Always weirdly quiet. Hunkered together, building some strange little world of their own. John had long ago given up trying to interest either of them in tossing a football around, or playing baseball in the park.
He wasn’t prepared, then, for the moment Dean trotted apparently unaware through the doorway, an instant before his gaze fell on John’s face. Instead of tumbling into the room shrieking and laughing like a normal child, he froze and made a soft noise, almost a gasp.
The eyes he leveled at John were eyes he’d seen every day for the past six years, and yet…
For a moment he had a very clear sense that the thing behind them was not his son. Was something alien, something he would never really understand.
Nausea gripped him, and a rush of cold surged up his spine. Who was this stranger standing in his doorway, disguised as his son? What was looking out at him through wide, faintly accusing eyes?
Then Sam was there, padding up behind his brother, eerily quiet on bare feet. He hardly even glanced at John. He was only there for his brother.
“Dean,” he’d said softly. “Come on.”
Watching his sons leave him behind, with barely a backward glance, had made it so much easier to walk away from them. And to stay away for fifteen years.
Now he was back in the middle of it.
Now Adam knew.
With a few choice words, Sam had destroyed his perfectly constructed life.
_______________
They found Dean around eleven-thirty. He was sitting on the curb between two parked cars, folded over his knees, his arms shielding his head. He didn’t react when Sam shouted, or when Sam jostled him, or even when Sam dragged him to his feet. John watched it all from a distance, feeling vaguely nauseous, disturbed by the sight of something clearly wrong.
“This has happened before,” he said. Sam shot him a flat look.
John could barely feel his hands anymore. He watched Sam manhandle his brother into facing him. They were barely twenty feet away and Sam’s mouth was moving, but the words were inaudible.
“Is he…okay?” John ventured.
Sam didn’t even acknowledge that he’d spoken. He tilted his brother’s head back and peered into his eyes, squinting clinically in the poor light. A truck screamed down the road, bathing them all in horrible radiance. Sam flinched minimally; Dean didn’t react.
When the noise of the engine had rumbled into the distance, Sam tucked his bother under his arm and lurched forward awkwardly, half-dragging Dean along. He didn’t spare John a glance as they shuffled past, and he was left standing alone for a long stunned moment. He stared after them as the cold tightened its fist around him, squeezing inexorably. Something was in his lungs, thick and viscous. The darkness loomed around him, rearing higher than the buildings on either side. Crushing him out of his own life.
He clenched his jaw and hurried after them. Sam’s back was a wavering triangle of grey fading in and out of visibility, except when they passed under a streetlight and were momentarily washed in stark brilliance.
John limped after them on icy feet, but could never seem to catch up.
_______________
Music threaded through the vents in the little apartment. John stood by the sagging sofa and breathed the warm air, his hands empty and loose at his sides. His chest rose and fell shallowly and the air tasted of dust and dry earth.
His phone buzzed and he didn’t answer it. Didn’t even twitch. He knew what it said.
ADAM
ADAM
His son. Perfect and beautiful.
On the other side of the wall he could hear soft shuffling, muffled thuds; the noises of Sam looking after Dean.
John’s fingers twitched faintly, tingling as the blood and warmth flowed back into them.
He vaguely recognized the music rising from the vent near the floor. Jackson Browne.
And when the evening rolls around
I'll go on home and lay my body down
The faintly audible lyrics were momentarily drowned out by Sam’s voice drifting through the wall. John couldn’t make out any of the words, but the tone was soft, bordering on sing-song.
He wasn’t sure Sam actually knew that John was still hanging around. The younger man had lost none of the eerie fixation on his brother that had so disturbed John during the boys’ youth. John’s fierce resistant to Kate’s desire for a second child had stemmed largely out of fear that Adam might somehow transform from the energetic outgoing boy he’d raised into something as frighteningly alien as Sam had ever been.
“You didn’t need to wait.”
John looked up at the sound of Sam’s voice. The man’s gaze was as unflinching as always, and John couldn’t meet it for very long before looking down.
“It’s late,” John said.
And it was. Late enough that John was catching the flash of strange lights at the edges of his vision. He was fighting to stay on his feet.
I'm going to find myself a girl
Who can show me what laughter means
He fixed his eyes on the wall.
“I’m leaving,” he said.
“Yes, you are.”
“I won’t come back.”
There was a long moment of silence. Then quietly Sam said, “It’s better if you don’t.”
A chill swept through John that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air or the vagaries of his failing body. He took a breath that tasted of frost and darkness.
“You’re terrible,” he said to the wall. “You’re both…terrible.”
And suddenly Sam was right next to him, leaning his huge head down to murmur in John’s ear.
“That’s how it is for everyone. Life is just falling down a hole, until you hit the bottom.”
He was standing at the edge of an abyss, and the world was crumbling beneath him. The creature beside him wasn’t a man, but a gap cut into the world, a hollowness negating everything John had struggled to build for himself.
“There it is,” whispered into his ear, “You see it now.”
Cold. Too cold to feel.
“Yes,” he whispered.
He felt himself nudged gently along and without warning he was staring at a door.
“Open the door and walk through it,” said the voice in his ear.
John stretched out a trembling hand, opened the door, and stepped through.
He breathed in musty air. The door shut behind him with a quiet click. He startled, and blinked.
He was standing in the shabby hallway outside of Sam and Dean’s rundown apartment. He stared blankly at the industrial green walls across from him, and had to work hard not to stagger with sudden vertigo. Distantly, he heard music.
are you there
…say a prayer…
He took a deep breath, turned to the right, and walked away from his sons forever.
_______________
He went home.
Adam met him at the door. His face was carefully blank.
He said, “Mom told me. Everything.”
John nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
He really needed a beer.
_______________
_______________
Epilogue
_______________
The coffee was bitter but satisfying. Sam leaned against the counter and watched as his brother sipped from his own mug. Dean’s face was still washed out in the cold morning light. He’d woken up confused, muttering memories of their old life, begging Sam not to shoot their father. Sam was hopeful that coffee would help clear away the cobwebs, and help his brother regain his equilibrium.
He hoped it would, anyway.
“I should quit going out for this stuff,” Dean muttered, glaring half-heartedly into his mug. Sam snorted.
“I don’t really think that’s the problem,” he said.
“My head’s all screwed up. It’s going to take a while to…I mean…” Dean rubbed forcefully at his forehead and the side of his face. He squinted at the floor. “But you said Dad was really here.”
“He was.”
“I thought…it’s just pieces. And…I don’t know. Other things. I thought maybe it was just something I made up.”
“Well. He was here. To see you, mostly.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” Sam paused, because somehow as reassurances went that seemed pretty weak. “It’s…you know it’s gonna be okay, right? It’s okay.”
Dean lifted his head and gave Sam a faint, lopsided smile.
“Because you’re here,” he said, a dry edge to his voice.
“Well. Yeah.”
Dean laughed, and rolled his mug around in his hands.
“I think I’m gonna need more coffee,” he said.
The End
Note: Writing this was interesting and challenging because a) I didn't want to do it from John's POV at all, and b) it was tough to find a way to write him that sort of tried to take his POV yet keep from somehow overly sympathizing with him. I mean I wrote him here to be an asshole, but at the same time his fate sucks. So I was trying to balance those two things. Whether I succeeded or not, I can't say.
Warnings: Discussion of death, characters being mean to each other.
Summary: Follows Hoping for Replacement. John attempts to make peace with his eldest sons. Things don't go as he'd planned. John POV
Part 1| Part 2
Thinking about What a Friend had said
Dad, Adam said, voice carefully modulated to carry as little emotion as possible, When are you coming home?
John shut his eyes and put a hand on the wall. He would have sagged against it but couldn’t bring himself to unlock the rigidity of his spine or ease the tension in his muscles. He’d spent too long putting on a positive face for his wife and kids that now, hundreds of miles away from them, he couldn’t make himself acknowledge his own weakness, his exhaustion.
“Soon, son,” he rumbled, and though he couldn’t see Adam’s face he could imagine how pinched it would be, how tight with worry. The way it often was these days. “It won’t be long.”
You should be here, Adam countered, and despite the severity of the tone John felt a surge of pride at the capable young man his son was growing into. Mom needs you here.
John didn’t respond with, “Your mother’s the one who sent me,” for all that it was true. He wasn’t that man anymore, who picked needless fights with his family, who drank and stayed away for days at a time out of spite.
And he hadn’t told Adam his real reason for leaving.
Standing in the little motel room, John could clearly hear the noise of the city through the window. He’d seen the squalor his…Sam and Dean lived in. He didn’t want that for Adam.
“Give me another few days here,” he said, carefully. “I’ll wrap things up and be home as soon as I can. Your mother…she understands.”
Are you…are you in the hospital? Adam’s voice rose slightly, edging toward fear. Did you get sick again?
“Adam,” John said, more sharply than he’d intended, “I’m fine. Everything is okay. I just need to wrap up some business and then I’ll be home. Before you know it. It’s okay, son. Everything’s going to be fine.”
In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to believe his own words.
_______________
Kate hadn’t given him much in the way of instructions about what he was supposed to be doing here. Vague ideas of ‘reconnecting’ and ‘making peace with those boys’ had been tossed around, and like tiny storm clouds they’d followed John to this grimy neighborhood and hovered around his head, threatening but formless. Useless as any sort of guide. John knew that he was floundering, and the sense of helplessness infuriated him. He wasn’t a man built for contrition, and patience has never been one of his virtues.
The wind cut through his long coat and the layers of shirts he wore beneath it. He’d lost weight, lost fat, and he allowed himself a moment of weakness, stopping to shiver on the sidewalk, letting his thoughts wander to his comfortable recliner in his comfortable house, two days’ drive away.
The wind died down and he raised his eyes to his reflection in the nearest shop window. Washer and Dryer Sales and Repair, the letters on the window declared, by appointment only.
He blinked bleary eyes at the phone number. His face in the window looked haggard. Behind him, cars cruised along the road, trailing clouds of white exhaust. The city stank. The people here were worn out. He blinked at his face and for a moment it was his-it was Sam’s, heavy-browed, scarred and bruised, contemptuous. He blinked again and it was Adam’s, his face twisted, and John averted his eyes.
No. This wouldn’t be Adam’s fate. His son deserved better.
But Sam would never be John’s.
He set his course toward the brothers’ apartment building. John guessed it had once been a hotel, maybe in the twenties. Thin walls and heavy brown radiators. Roaches. Always got roaches in the city. Ants in the country, roaches in the city.
The building squatted on the corner of a well-trafficked thoroughfare. The red bricks and lacy stonework remembered a bygone era, but the bars and locks on the front door were planted firmly in the present.
He sat down on the chilly stoop by the front door, and waited. The cold crept quickly beneath his clothes and sank into his bones, his blood. Eating away his vibrancy, growing and spreading, devouring color, light, warmth-
“John.”
For a moment he remembered another voice, a child’s voice. Sam had never called him Dad.
“John.” Deeper this time, edged in frustration. “Hey.”
His eyes sprang open. The world rushed back, dizzying and loud, like a sudden fire. A truck roared by. John exhaled a plume of white.
“Sam,” he said thinly, and looked up. The boy-the man-loomed over him. His size was appalling. Vaguely John recalled a small, strange boy standing in a beige living room, barefoot. He remembered thinking of him as a disappointing runt.
“I said I’d call you,” Sam ground, waving a large, be-gloved hand. “What’s with the creepy stalker bullshit?”
John scowled. Sam looked both better and worse than he had the night before last. The poor light made his eyes dull and skin grey, but the wound on his face was freshly bandaged, and no one could argue that he wasn’t well-fed.
“I can’t stay in town forever,” he said, forcing his voice to remain quiet, even. Sam’s eyes narrowed.
“You’ve been off in happy fairytale land for fifteen years and you don’t have a week to give to the son you abandoned, before you die?”
It was like being punched in the chest. All the air rushed out of his lungs and John stared up at the younger man, stricken.
No emotion passed across Sam’s face. Not the slightest hint of remorse.
He’d seen that look before, on an eight year old boy standing eerily still in a carpeted room for over an hour. Watching his brother play.
“There’s something wrong with you,” John said weakly, struggling to his feet with his hands on his knees.
Sam’s face remained impassive, his shoulders square. Cold and distant as he’d ever been.
For the first time John wondered what it had been like for Dean, growing up with that. Under that watchful stare.
“Go away, John,” Sam instructed. “I’ll call you. But stay away from Dean until I give the word. We clear?”
There was real malice in those words. John grimaced. He’d have preferred to maintain a stoic silence in the face of Sam’s grim disdain, but he suspected that would ruin whatever thin chance he had of seeing Dean and thus making his time away from his family all for nothing.
“I got it,” he gritted, but even that wasn’t enough to satisfy.
“Walk away now,” Sam gestured back the way John had come. “Don’t let me catch you hanging around here again.”
The wind was cold. John wrapped his coat tight around his body, and walked away.
_______________
The phone rang. The display said ‘ADAM.’ He didn’t pick it up.
He sat in the coffee shop and glared vaguely at the counter and his own gnarled hands. The general clatter of dishes and cutlery in the little space was doing nothing for his burgeoning headache.
The winter sun sulked behind a flat sky, but it was well on the way to four o’clock and the light was failing. Traffic had been increasing noticeably for the last half hour. The sidewalks were busier too. A bus stopped and disgorged a crowd of tired bodies. Even shuttered in the coffee shop John could smell the cloud of diesel exhaust the bus expelled as it roared down the road.
Someone opened the door. A bell jingled and cold air swept through the shops’ small space. John tightened his fingers on his mug in instinctive self-defense. The coffee was lukewarm now, though, its heat dispersed into the environment. No good to anybody.
Entropy.
The door shut, bell jangling, and the heat kicked on, sweeping out of the vents like a desert wind. John lifted his head to signal the waitress for a refill, remembered that there wasn’t one, and glanced along the counter for the barista. She was in front of the register, smile firmly in place, taking care of some long-haired kid who smiled back at her shyly.
“…sorry,” he was saying, in a soft voice. “About the other day.”
“Oh, no!” the woman-girl really-returned, all genial cheer. “It’s okay.”
John looked away, curling his fingers around his cup. He fought to keep his lips from skimming back, corpselike, and baring his teeth.
The man at the counter was Dean. He hadn’t noticed, yet, that John was sitting a handful of feet away.
He raised his eyes and fixed his gaze on the colorful handwritten board posted on the opposite wall. He could leave. Leaving might be best. It would certainly be what Sam wanted him to do, and in all likelihood Dean would never notice him slipping out-not if John left right now.
On the other hand, sooner or later his phone would buzz again and it would be Adam on the other end, confused and alone, waiting for news that John didn’t have to give to him. Adam, trying to be strong.
The only thing keeping him here in this cold, dark, misery of a city was a promise to his wife and the inaccessibility of the young man standing eight feet away, smiling shyly at the barista.
John was tired, and he wanted to go home.
He wanted to see his son again.
He slid off his stool and walked a few steps closer to the register.
Dean turned around.
His face went suddenly, sickeningly pale.
“Dad?” he breathed, and it was like a physical blow.
Not John.
Dad.
_______________
The phone did buzz one more time as John settled himself in a booth across from the younger man. He still didn’t pick up. Dean didn’t seem to notice.
His eyes, John noted, seemed slightly out of focus. As he settled in the booth he blinked rapidly, several times, and his hand jerked and sloshed a little coffee onto the table.
“Hey,” John said gently, because he could be gentle now, “Easy. It’s okay.”
“…okay,” Dean echoed hollowly, and John resisted the urge to frown. He was working hard not to remember the day he’d left. The way Dean had looked at him. The way he’d always been.
Not strange and frightening like Sam. But different. Nothing like Adam. Nothing like he’d expected.
There was some similarity to Adam in Dean’s face, true. Some shared features. It was a little unnerving, actually, and John tried not to picture Adam sitting in a booth like this, in a neighborhood like this. It was hard not to, though. Hard not to worry what would become of his son when John was gone. Hard not to…to make the connection.
Dean was tall, but kind of scrawny, and the poor winter light hadn’t done much for his pallid complexion. His hands were dry, webbed in white like frost, and John could see flecks of dark red in the knuckles where they’d cracked and bled. The fingers trembled slightly, though John didn’t know if that was typical or just nerves. Dean’s nails were uneven.
He’d been an odd-looking kid all the years John had known him, and adulthood had afflicted him with strangely feminine features. The fall of nearly chin-length hair didn’t help his appearance any, and John couldn’t help but compare it unfavorably to Adam’s shorter, less unruly style.
In all, Dean looked like someone who would benefit from a hot drink, a solid meal, and a haircut. Christ, why the hell had Kate sent him here? What was he supposed to say to this kid?
“You, uh,” John began, broke off, cleared his throat, and hazarded, “you got tall.”
Dean’s eyes flickered down to his coffee.
“Yeah,” he murmured.
An awkward silence fell. John looked away, then out the window. Traffic was moving slowly but steadily now. Crowds of people just trying to get home.
“Where did-?” Dean blurted, but swallowed the rest of the question. John suppressed a wince.
“You go,” Kate had said, arms folded and expression unyielding, “Make peace with them. Those boys.”
“Adam needs me here,” he’d argued. The light through the kitchen window had been clean and cold.
Morning light.
Now he spread his fingers on the fake-wood surface of the table. The light was too poor for shadows, and the skin of his fingers seemed grey.
“Dean,” he began, “Did Sam tell you I was in town?”
There was a long silence from across the table. Finally Dean said, “I knew. I saw you. I didn’t need him to…to tell me anything.”
“Oh,” John said. “Good. That’s…good.”
“I saw you,” he went on, softly, talking to his coffee. “Before. You were outside. Wearing a scarf.”
“I’ve been in town a couple of days. I was…I guess…getting a feel for the area.”
That wasn’t a lie. He’d walked the roads and some of the alleys nearest his…Sam and Dean’s residence.
“It’s…” he paused, pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth. He wanted to say something bland, something that wouldn’t give away his actual opinion. “It’s…an inter-a nice area.”
Dean gave the coffee cup a quarter turn. “It’s just a place to be.”
“And you’ve been here for…”
“I stay with Sam,” Dean said softly. “I…for a while now.”
“So, I guess things are okay? With the two of you?”
Dean didn’t answer. He was staring steadily into his coffee as if he expected to find the secrets of the universe in its depths.
Finally, faintly, he breathed four words John had been anticipating since Kate told him on no uncertain terms where exactly he needed to go.
“Was it my fault?”
John clenched his jaw. If it had been Adam asking the question, for any reason, John would have known the answer. No. Of course not. But Dean…wasn’t Adam. And John didn’t have to do any real soul-searching to know that when he walked away all those years ago, at least part of his goal had been to never see either of his sons again.
He looked away; cast his gaze around the coffee shop. A handful of customers at the counter, in booths. Grey people. Tired, worn-down people. John saw himself in them, saw that they were trying to find a little sanctuary, a few moments of peace.
This wasn’t a place designed for the confession of ugly truths.
He said, “No, of course not. I just…had some things to work out.”
Dean’s lips barely moved. “But you never came back.”
John tried on a smile, though he doubted Dean could see it, half-hidden behind his too-long hair. “I thought it might be…harder…if I came back. You were always…strong. I knew you’d be okay.”
This time Dean did look up.
“I knew,” John said. “You’d be okay without me.”
“Dad…”
“You did okay, Dean. You grew up good. I’m…I’m proud of you.”
He wasn’t expecting Dean’s sudden, sharp inhalation, or the way he shot upright in his seat, ramrod straight. His eyes widened and he fixed John with a look that he faintly remembered from afternoons spent nursing hangovers on a sofa in Kansas. The face was older and the eyes looked bruised, but it still flooded John with the same sense of unwanted, creeping shame.
Dean’s lips moved and for a moment John couldn’t make out any words, and his eyes fixed on the strange shapes of lips and teeth and tongue with an abstract fascination.
“…furious,” he heard, faintly, the word barely audible. John strained forward, even as a warning skittered up his spine. Something wrong here. This is sickness.
“Dean?”
“He’d be furious,” Dean said, so softly his lips barely moved. “He wouldn’t be proud of me…”
John felt a wash of cold over his skin. The sense of sickness, of wrong, that made the mentally ill so disturbing to be around.
“Dean?”
Dean’s face had gone very still. His eyes widened, until John could nearly see the whites all the way around his pupils. Dean’s mouth barely moved and the words came out as a harsh whisper.
“He’d tear me a new one. He wouldn’t be proud. He wouldn’t be-”
John half-stood, torn between reaching out and leaning away.
“You’re not my dad,” Dean was whispering stiffly, “You’re not my...not…”
“Dean,” he hazarded, stretching out a hand. Instantly Dean went rigid, eyes locking on John’s face, bright as fire.
“You’re not my dad,” he said, crisp and clear, and was out of his seat and banging through the door before John had really processed what was happening. John sprang after him after a moment of sitting stunned.
He lurched awkwardly through the door, but the crowd outside had grown and already swallowed Dean up. He took a few hesitant steps away from the front of the shop, and then stopped. The cold hit him in a wave. Darkness pressed in on him. Somewhere Adam was sitting by the phone, waiting. Somewhere Kate was finishing up at work, heading out to her car. The time he was supposed to have left with them was slipping away, precious seconds soaked up by this grey and dismal place, like blood into dark earth.
Behind him a bell jangled merrily, and suddenly the barista was standing beside him, bare arms crossed against the cold.
“Did you see where he went?” she demanded, without preamble, and John started. “Did you see?”
“I-no, he just, he moved too fast.”
“Damn!” she swore. “I need to-I have to call his brother.” She was turned halfway toward the shop entrance when he words penetrated John’s confusion.
“Wait,” he blurted, “This has happened before?”
Her look didn’t exactly level him, but it was a near thing. She bustled back inside, John trailing in her wake.
“Is he…I mean is there something…?”
But his words were falling on deaf ears. She was already behind the counter, a scrap of paper in hand, phone pressed to her ear.
“I’m really sorry,” she was saying, “I didn’t know. It wasn’t-no, not like last time. He just kind of…no, he just…mm-hmm. More like that. I think he was pretty upset but-no, not that I saw. Uh-huh. Yes, how did you-yes, he’s still here. Did you want to-okay. Hang on.”
John stared uncomprehending at the phone she held out to him for an instant, before accepting it. The plastic was warm from her hand.
“Sam,” he said.
You’re going to regret this, the other man said flatly.
“I’ll help you find him,” John said immediately.
Silence.
Finally Sam bit out a grudging, Fine, and disconnected. John passed the phone back.
“Do you mind if I wait in one of the booths?” he asked, and her face was carefully blank as she nodded toward the booth nearest the door. John went meekly.
He had the good sense not to ask for a refill on his coffee.
_______________
Sam swept into the shop trailing storm clouds and fury. He strode directly to the barista and spoke to her in soft tones before turning his attention to John.
“Let’s go,” he said.
John slid out of the booth and trailed after him.
The sun was low enough now that it was affecting visibility. Some of the cars on the road already had their lights on. John shoved his hands in his pockets and stretched his legs to keep pace with Sam’s briskly furious stride.
“This has happened before,” John ventured, when they’d walked several blocks and Sam hadn’t uttered a word to him.
“Yes.” Tightly.
“He-does he have an ill-”
“There’s nothing wrong with my brother.” Sam snarled. “He was getting better! He would’ve been fine if you hadn’t stuck your nose in!”
“What?” John rocked back. “How the hell are you going to pin this on me?”
Sam opened his mouth to reply, but was cut off by the sudden buzzing of John’s phone. John fished it out and the display accused him with Adam’s name.
He wasn’t prepared for Sam to snatch it from his hand and lift it to his ear.
“Hello Adam,” he said, voice dripping false sweetness. “Your dad can’t come to the phone right now. He’s a little busy cleaning up another one of his messes.” He paused and John could hear his son’s voice yelling tinnily. Sam’s lips drew back.
“Didn’t he tell you?” And even though John suddenly knew what the next words out of Sam’s mouth were going to be, he still stared in helpless horror, like a man watching a continent collapse into the sea.
“I’m your big brother Sammy Winchester. Don’t tell me Dad never mentioned me?”
And with slow, deliberate malice, he closed the phone and held it out. John took it. Sam leaned forward, face an evil rictus.
“You’d better pray to God we find my brother,” he said.
John’s hands curled into fists, slowly. Sam looked at them and lifted an eyebrow.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said.
The phone didn’t ring again.
It was starting to get dark.
_______________
Their search quickly turned into a nightmare trek through the darkening neighborhood. Grey bled to black, shadows rushing up out of the concrete and engulfing walls, swallowing doorways, windows, people. John’s breath clouded in front of his face. He folded his arms and shoved his hands into his armpits. The chill in his bones wasn’t external, though.
Too many windows looked out at the world like empty eye sockets.
“How do you know he didn’t go home?” he asked once.
Sam said, “Because whenever this happens he forgets he has one.”
John ground his teeth.
He trudged in Sam’s wake. The other man was a looming shadow, a wall in front of him, haloed by streetlights and headlights. Ringed by it, but not illuminated. John felt himself withering in shade. No stars were visible. Endless grey blanketed the sky.
Fifteen years ago, a handful of days before Mary threw him out, he’d been slumped on the sofa nursing his hangover. Mary was off somewhere else in the house, simmering in her ongoing anger and disappointment. His sons were home too, but John couldn’t hear them. They were always like that. Always weirdly quiet. Hunkered together, building some strange little world of their own. John had long ago given up trying to interest either of them in tossing a football around, or playing baseball in the park.
He wasn’t prepared, then, for the moment Dean trotted apparently unaware through the doorway, an instant before his gaze fell on John’s face. Instead of tumbling into the room shrieking and laughing like a normal child, he froze and made a soft noise, almost a gasp.
The eyes he leveled at John were eyes he’d seen every day for the past six years, and yet…
For a moment he had a very clear sense that the thing behind them was not his son. Was something alien, something he would never really understand.
Nausea gripped him, and a rush of cold surged up his spine. Who was this stranger standing in his doorway, disguised as his son? What was looking out at him through wide, faintly accusing eyes?
Then Sam was there, padding up behind his brother, eerily quiet on bare feet. He hardly even glanced at John. He was only there for his brother.
“Dean,” he’d said softly. “Come on.”
Watching his sons leave him behind, with barely a backward glance, had made it so much easier to walk away from them. And to stay away for fifteen years.
Now he was back in the middle of it.
Now Adam knew.
With a few choice words, Sam had destroyed his perfectly constructed life.
_______________
They found Dean around eleven-thirty. He was sitting on the curb between two parked cars, folded over his knees, his arms shielding his head. He didn’t react when Sam shouted, or when Sam jostled him, or even when Sam dragged him to his feet. John watched it all from a distance, feeling vaguely nauseous, disturbed by the sight of something clearly wrong.
“This has happened before,” he said. Sam shot him a flat look.
John could barely feel his hands anymore. He watched Sam manhandle his brother into facing him. They were barely twenty feet away and Sam’s mouth was moving, but the words were inaudible.
“Is he…okay?” John ventured.
Sam didn’t even acknowledge that he’d spoken. He tilted his brother’s head back and peered into his eyes, squinting clinically in the poor light. A truck screamed down the road, bathing them all in horrible radiance. Sam flinched minimally; Dean didn’t react.
When the noise of the engine had rumbled into the distance, Sam tucked his bother under his arm and lurched forward awkwardly, half-dragging Dean along. He didn’t spare John a glance as they shuffled past, and he was left standing alone for a long stunned moment. He stared after them as the cold tightened its fist around him, squeezing inexorably. Something was in his lungs, thick and viscous. The darkness loomed around him, rearing higher than the buildings on either side. Crushing him out of his own life.
He clenched his jaw and hurried after them. Sam’s back was a wavering triangle of grey fading in and out of visibility, except when they passed under a streetlight and were momentarily washed in stark brilliance.
John limped after them on icy feet, but could never seem to catch up.
_______________
Music threaded through the vents in the little apartment. John stood by the sagging sofa and breathed the warm air, his hands empty and loose at his sides. His chest rose and fell shallowly and the air tasted of dust and dry earth.
His phone buzzed and he didn’t answer it. Didn’t even twitch. He knew what it said.
ADAM
ADAM
His son. Perfect and beautiful.
On the other side of the wall he could hear soft shuffling, muffled thuds; the noises of Sam looking after Dean.
John’s fingers twitched faintly, tingling as the blood and warmth flowed back into them.
He vaguely recognized the music rising from the vent near the floor. Jackson Browne.
And when the evening rolls around
I'll go on home and lay my body down
The faintly audible lyrics were momentarily drowned out by Sam’s voice drifting through the wall. John couldn’t make out any of the words, but the tone was soft, bordering on sing-song.
He wasn’t sure Sam actually knew that John was still hanging around. The younger man had lost none of the eerie fixation on his brother that had so disturbed John during the boys’ youth. John’s fierce resistant to Kate’s desire for a second child had stemmed largely out of fear that Adam might somehow transform from the energetic outgoing boy he’d raised into something as frighteningly alien as Sam had ever been.
“You didn’t need to wait.”
John looked up at the sound of Sam’s voice. The man’s gaze was as unflinching as always, and John couldn’t meet it for very long before looking down.
“It’s late,” John said.
And it was. Late enough that John was catching the flash of strange lights at the edges of his vision. He was fighting to stay on his feet.
I'm going to find myself a girl
Who can show me what laughter means
He fixed his eyes on the wall.
“I’m leaving,” he said.
“Yes, you are.”
“I won’t come back.”
There was a long moment of silence. Then quietly Sam said, “It’s better if you don’t.”
A chill swept through John that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air or the vagaries of his failing body. He took a breath that tasted of frost and darkness.
“You’re terrible,” he said to the wall. “You’re both…terrible.”
And suddenly Sam was right next to him, leaning his huge head down to murmur in John’s ear.
“That’s how it is for everyone. Life is just falling down a hole, until you hit the bottom.”
He was standing at the edge of an abyss, and the world was crumbling beneath him. The creature beside him wasn’t a man, but a gap cut into the world, a hollowness negating everything John had struggled to build for himself.
“There it is,” whispered into his ear, “You see it now.”
Cold. Too cold to feel.
“Yes,” he whispered.
He felt himself nudged gently along and without warning he was staring at a door.
“Open the door and walk through it,” said the voice in his ear.
John stretched out a trembling hand, opened the door, and stepped through.
He breathed in musty air. The door shut behind him with a quiet click. He startled, and blinked.
He was standing in the shabby hallway outside of Sam and Dean’s rundown apartment. He stared blankly at the industrial green walls across from him, and had to work hard not to stagger with sudden vertigo. Distantly, he heard music.
are you there
…say a prayer…
He took a deep breath, turned to the right, and walked away from his sons forever.
_______________
He went home.
Adam met him at the door. His face was carefully blank.
He said, “Mom told me. Everything.”
John nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
He really needed a beer.
_______________
_______________
Epilogue
_______________
The coffee was bitter but satisfying. Sam leaned against the counter and watched as his brother sipped from his own mug. Dean’s face was still washed out in the cold morning light. He’d woken up confused, muttering memories of their old life, begging Sam not to shoot their father. Sam was hopeful that coffee would help clear away the cobwebs, and help his brother regain his equilibrium.
He hoped it would, anyway.
“I should quit going out for this stuff,” Dean muttered, glaring half-heartedly into his mug. Sam snorted.
“I don’t really think that’s the problem,” he said.
“My head’s all screwed up. It’s going to take a while to…I mean…” Dean rubbed forcefully at his forehead and the side of his face. He squinted at the floor. “But you said Dad was really here.”
“He was.”
“I thought…it’s just pieces. And…I don’t know. Other things. I thought maybe it was just something I made up.”
“Well. He was here. To see you, mostly.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” Sam paused, because somehow as reassurances went that seemed pretty weak. “It’s…you know it’s gonna be okay, right? It’s okay.”
Dean lifted his head and gave Sam a faint, lopsided smile.
“Because you’re here,” he said, a dry edge to his voice.
“Well. Yeah.”
Dean laughed, and rolled his mug around in his hands.
“I think I’m gonna need more coffee,” he said.
The End
Click to viewNote: Writing this was interesting and challenging because a) I didn't want to do it from John's POV at all, and b) it was tough to find a way to write him that sort of tried to take his POV yet keep from somehow overly sympathizing with him. I mean I wrote him here to be an asshole, but at the same time his fate sucks. So I was trying to balance those two things. Whether I succeeded or not, I can't say.