Because I could not stop for Death...
A/N: I'm obsessed. There, I said it. I'm obsessed with that guy, with that show, I can't stop thinking about it. Or writing about it. I was going through some of my ideas and snippets that are hiding somewhere in all the many folders of my computer and I found this. I started this a few months ago and after reading it again I suddenly had the urge to finish it. And so I did.
I'm sure this has been done before, but if it has, I haven't read it. These are two tags to In my time of dying and All hell breaks loose, both from John's POV. It might be the start to an AU that's been bugging me for months now, but they can also stand on their own, for now.
The title, obviously, comes from Emily Dickinson's poem (which I really, REALLY love), and I couldn't think of a better title for a snipped about John's life.
I don't own the guy or anything related to the Supernatural universe. But, boy, if I did....
This hasn't been betaed, yet, I'm posting it now as a surprise for my cyber-twin who usually betas everything I write. Betaed by Twinny who was generous to spend some of the little time she has at the moment on getting rid of way too many commas in this. Thank you so much! Hun, I know you're not exactly a fan of those scenes, but I really hope this isn't too bad to read for you... ;) I hope you are well and you can enjoy it somehow. Love you! *hugs*
_______________
Because I could not stop for Death,
he kindly stopped for me.
The carriage held but just ourselves.
And immortality.
Emily Dickinson
Life
The concept of time had always been difficult to grasp for him.
Back in Nam, time was a constant shift from endless moments stretching like chewing gum stuck to a shoe to flashes of reality changing so fast your mind never had a chance to catch up. One minute you would be dozing off to the sound of mosquitoes buzzing so loudly you could barely hear yourself think, only to jerk awake to people moving, staying low, shouting orders, calling names and listening for answers that never came.
Time was dangerous then, minutes never lasted for sixty seconds and the next night was always exactly a life time away.
Then he came back to the real world and met her. Everything changed; suddenly everything was different, better. Waiting for something-the job to be over for the day, a drink in a bar, the traffic light to change to green-it never scared him, never made him feel anxious or afraid for his life. He settled down; found a place to live and a family to spend his life with. Looking back, later, he would remember those years as the perfect period of his life, the only time in his life when he could spend a whole night sleeping peacefully without having nightmares, without that mind-numbing, ever-present fear of losing it. Losing them.
He was happy, content, right where he had always wanted to be.
Until that fateful night when everything stopped, screeched to a halt with a wordless cry in the middle of the night. Fire, heat, blood dripping from the ceiling… and she was gone. He was left behind with two little boys who would never truly remember what they had lost that night and a taint to his very own soul that he could never get rid of. He became restless again, he lost what little understanding he’d had for the passage of time and watched, detachedly, how days turned into months, years, decades until he couldn’t tell them apart anymore.
The boys grew older and, over the years, he grew numb.
Time became tangible again, if a lot simpler somehow. It could be easily defined by what he was doing at any given moment. Time spent on a hunt. Time spent on the way to or from the hunt, on research, on down-time to heal from injuries. Time he should have spent with the boys but always ended up wasting on something else. He lost track of days and started thinking in monsters. Sometimes he would think about how going after zombies always took longer than burning a corpse to put a ghost to rest. Or how he could ward an entire building against imps in the same time it took him to locate and destroy a black dog. He wasn’t part of time anymore, he existed outside of it, but he didn’t care; he got the job done, no matter how long it took.
Eventually he found a trail-the trail. He found out what he had been hunting all those years, put together a pattern he could trace and started living from day to day again. The waiting started, too, familiar nightmares of being attacked if he ever slowed down long enough to take a rest, shocking him awake at nights. He was back on the battlefield of a war he would never fully understand, and he started tracking, researching, hunting.
And then the demon found them.
It happened so fast he could barely keep track of everything. Their friends were dying, his son was able to see the future and he had to send his kids onto a suicide-mission that should have been his final triumph over the thing that had taken everything from them.
But instead of finally putting an end to it, once and for all, he got himself kidnapped and became a prisoner. Trapped in his own body, floating helplessly somewhere in the background of his own mind while the demon had taken over, he spent daysminutesyears fighting for control. He saw flashes of his boys, heard his own voice talk to them, was forced to watch them being tortured in front of his eyes until it was too much and he finally found his voice.
You shoot me in the heart, son.
He struggled with all his might to hold the demon back, to give his boy the chance to end it all. He didn’t care about time then, didn’t care whether he would have to spend an eternity fighting to hold it back. All he cared about was for the nightmare to finally come to an end.
It never did.
Time moved on, no matter how hard he prayed for it to be over. Pain, agony, the demon getting away, a dark road, arguing-
- there’s a bad moon on the rise -
- and then nothing.
When he woke up in hospital and Sam told him about Dean slipping away from them with every second that passed, with no real chance of surviving, he knew. He knew his own time would be up, soon, even before he and Sam fought about his priorities, about the same selfish obsession. The minute he picked up the chalk and drew the demon’s real name on the floor, he knew he wouldn’t get out of it, even before the thing asked him to sweeten the pot.
And suddenly there wasn’t enough time left, a few minutes at best, no chance to tell them what they needed to know, what he had found out. He was scared, trading his life for his son was the easiest decision he had ever made and still he didn’t want to go, not like this, leaving his children behind, on their own, without someone to protect them. He had never wanted to just roll over and die, to go down without a fight; it was never supposed to end like this.
But he couldn’t stop it. It was either his revenge or Dean’s life; and that wasn’t much of a choice. He met the bastard who had taken his life from him in so many different ways. He gave him the Colt and didn’t fight back when the demon ended what had started so many years ago.
The last thing his eyes ever saw were yellow eyes watching, gleefully, how his knees buckled and he collapsed to the floor, scared shitless, dying and losing a fight he wasn’t prepared to lose. He died without so much as a whimper of protest; and when it was over-supposed to be over-he had to realize:
It wasn’t.
part 02
I'm sure this has been done before, but if it has, I haven't read it. These are two tags to In my time of dying and All hell breaks loose, both from John's POV. It might be the start to an AU that's been bugging me for months now, but they can also stand on their own, for now.
The title, obviously, comes from Emily Dickinson's poem (which I really, REALLY love), and I couldn't think of a better title for a snipped about John's life.
I don't own the guy or anything related to the Supernatural universe. But, boy, if I did....
This hasn't been betaed, yet, I'm posting it now as a surprise for my cyber-twin who usually betas everything I write. Betaed by Twinny who was generous to spend some of the little time she has at the moment on getting rid of way too many commas in this. Thank you so much! Hun, I know you're not exactly a fan of those scenes, but I really hope this isn't too bad to read for you... ;) I hope you are well and you can enjoy it somehow. Love you! *hugs*
_______________
Because I could not stop for Death,
he kindly stopped for me.
The carriage held but just ourselves.
And immortality.
Emily Dickinson
Life
The concept of time had always been difficult to grasp for him.
Back in Nam, time was a constant shift from endless moments stretching like chewing gum stuck to a shoe to flashes of reality changing so fast your mind never had a chance to catch up. One minute you would be dozing off to the sound of mosquitoes buzzing so loudly you could barely hear yourself think, only to jerk awake to people moving, staying low, shouting orders, calling names and listening for answers that never came.
Time was dangerous then, minutes never lasted for sixty seconds and the next night was always exactly a life time away.
Then he came back to the real world and met her. Everything changed; suddenly everything was different, better. Waiting for something-the job to be over for the day, a drink in a bar, the traffic light to change to green-it never scared him, never made him feel anxious or afraid for his life. He settled down; found a place to live and a family to spend his life with. Looking back, later, he would remember those years as the perfect period of his life, the only time in his life when he could spend a whole night sleeping peacefully without having nightmares, without that mind-numbing, ever-present fear of losing it. Losing them.
He was happy, content, right where he had always wanted to be.
Until that fateful night when everything stopped, screeched to a halt with a wordless cry in the middle of the night. Fire, heat, blood dripping from the ceiling… and she was gone. He was left behind with two little boys who would never truly remember what they had lost that night and a taint to his very own soul that he could never get rid of. He became restless again, he lost what little understanding he’d had for the passage of time and watched, detachedly, how days turned into months, years, decades until he couldn’t tell them apart anymore.
The boys grew older and, over the years, he grew numb.
Time became tangible again, if a lot simpler somehow. It could be easily defined by what he was doing at any given moment. Time spent on a hunt. Time spent on the way to or from the hunt, on research, on down-time to heal from injuries. Time he should have spent with the boys but always ended up wasting on something else. He lost track of days and started thinking in monsters. Sometimes he would think about how going after zombies always took longer than burning a corpse to put a ghost to rest. Or how he could ward an entire building against imps in the same time it took him to locate and destroy a black dog. He wasn’t part of time anymore, he existed outside of it, but he didn’t care; he got the job done, no matter how long it took.
Eventually he found a trail-the trail. He found out what he had been hunting all those years, put together a pattern he could trace and started living from day to day again. The waiting started, too, familiar nightmares of being attacked if he ever slowed down long enough to take a rest, shocking him awake at nights. He was back on the battlefield of a war he would never fully understand, and he started tracking, researching, hunting.
And then the demon found them.
It happened so fast he could barely keep track of everything. Their friends were dying, his son was able to see the future and he had to send his kids onto a suicide-mission that should have been his final triumph over the thing that had taken everything from them.
But instead of finally putting an end to it, once and for all, he got himself kidnapped and became a prisoner. Trapped in his own body, floating helplessly somewhere in the background of his own mind while the demon had taken over, he spent daysminutesyears fighting for control. He saw flashes of his boys, heard his own voice talk to them, was forced to watch them being tortured in front of his eyes until it was too much and he finally found his voice.
You shoot me in the heart, son.
He struggled with all his might to hold the demon back, to give his boy the chance to end it all. He didn’t care about time then, didn’t care whether he would have to spend an eternity fighting to hold it back. All he cared about was for the nightmare to finally come to an end.
It never did.
Time moved on, no matter how hard he prayed for it to be over. Pain, agony, the demon getting away, a dark road, arguing-
- there’s a bad moon on the rise -
- and then nothing.
When he woke up in hospital and Sam told him about Dean slipping away from them with every second that passed, with no real chance of surviving, he knew. He knew his own time would be up, soon, even before he and Sam fought about his priorities, about the same selfish obsession. The minute he picked up the chalk and drew the demon’s real name on the floor, he knew he wouldn’t get out of it, even before the thing asked him to sweeten the pot.
And suddenly there wasn’t enough time left, a few minutes at best, no chance to tell them what they needed to know, what he had found out. He was scared, trading his life for his son was the easiest decision he had ever made and still he didn’t want to go, not like this, leaving his children behind, on their own, without someone to protect them. He had never wanted to just roll over and die, to go down without a fight; it was never supposed to end like this.
But he couldn’t stop it. It was either his revenge or Dean’s life; and that wasn’t much of a choice. He met the bastard who had taken his life from him in so many different ways. He gave him the Colt and didn’t fight back when the demon ended what had started so many years ago.
The last thing his eyes ever saw were yellow eyes watching, gleefully, how his knees buckled and he collapsed to the floor, scared shitless, dying and losing a fight he wasn’t prepared to lose. He died without so much as a whimper of protest; and when it was over-supposed to be over-he had to realize:
It wasn’t.
part 02