SPN Fic: 4 Times ... Failure is Not an Option (Gen, Pre-Series, + Pastor Jim)

[dodger_winslow]

Title: Four Times the Winchesters Had to Move (And Once They Didn't): Failure is Not an Option
Author: Dodger Winslow
Genre: Gen, Pre-series
Rating: R for language
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while ...

Summary (Failure is Not an Option): John turned around, handed his nine mil back before he left the car. Sammy balked. "What’s this for?" he asked, his voice shaking. "Take it," John said. Ordered. "Kill anyone who comes up to the car. No exceptions." He handed over the keys and his phone, too; dug out all the cash he had on him and put it in Sammy’s hand, held on for a second too long, then let go and turned away. "Stay here. Lock the doors behind me. If I’m not back in ten minutes, call Jim and do whatever he tells you to do."

Four Times Times the Winchesters Had to Move (and Once They Didn't)
1) Run
2) See Me. Know Me. Remember Me.


-3-

Failure Is Not an Option.

Something buzzed, woke John up out of sound sleep. He batted at the bedside table awkwardly, found the phone with a blind grope and fumbled with it for several seconds before the muzz in his brain let go of enough wattage to figure out how to open the damn thing up. "Yeah," he grunted. "What? Better be good."

"It’s Jim. Where are the boys?"

The tone of Jim Murphy’s voice woke John more effectively than a bucket of ice water in the pants. He sat up, his mind scrambling, his heart racing. "School," he said, grabbing the nine mil from under his pillow and shoving it into the back of his jeans as he rolled out of bed and strode across the room. "Why?" Looking out the window, he studied the empty street, scanned the empty lawns. It was noon, maybe a little later. The sunshine outside was bright enough to scar a man’s retinas for life.

"Go get them and leave," Jim said. "Don’t stop for anything. Don’t go anyplace you’ve ever been before, and call me when you get there. I’ll have an exit strategy set up for you by then, but you need to get out of there now."

John was already moving, already throwing a scatter of weapons and research into his duffel before heading to the boys’ room to grab their emergency packs. "What is it? What am I facing?"

"Two men. One’s six four, maybe two seventy, red hair, big nose. The other’s black, wears his hair long, has a scar from his left eyebrow to his chin. Both of them are dangerous as hell, but don’t kill them unless you have to."

"Hunters?" John demanded tersely.

"Yes. I don’t know how close they are; but they’re good, so be careful."

"What the fuck are they after me for?"

"They’re not after you. They’re after Sammy."

The words hit John like a sledgehammer to the gut. They stopped him cold, made it impossible to breathe for a moment. "Sammy?" he whispered. "They know about Sammy?"

"Yes," Jim said.

"How?"

"I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter."

"Doesn’t matter?" John’s hand started to shake. The room tried to blank out around him, but he blinked it back to a focus with an effort.

"Stick with me, John," Jim said. His voice was calm, but firm. "You don’t have time to worry about anything but getting yourself and the boys clear."

"Are you tapped?" John asked. Then, "Does anybody else know?"

"Go dark," Jim told him in lieu of an answer. "Get off the grid. They know your aliases, so don’t use your cards. When you find someplace safe, call me, and we’ll figure the rest out from there." Then, to address John’s question, he added, "I checked my line, and it’s clean. Once you shake them, it won’t paint you again to contact me. Now move."

John was already out the door and half way to the Impala. "Does anyone else know?" he asked again.

Jim hesitated. "I’m working on it," he said. The phone clicked dead in John’s ear.

He found the red head loitering out back of Sammy’s school; the black man, crouched in a cluster of shadows in the school boiler room. He killed them both, took every weapon they had and left their bodies in a dumpster down the block. But not before the red head managed to sink a K-bar between his ribs. Not before his partner got in a couple of bone-breaking body shots that made it hard for John to breathe without coughing himself to his knees.

By the time he’d disposed of the bodies and made it back to the school office to pull Sammy out of class, he’d lost enough blood to make walking a straight line a serious challenge. He came dangerously close to taking a header in the parking lot on the way back to the Impala, but Sammy was too busy bitching about missing some fucking test or another to notice.

Sammy’s preoccupation with his own world didn’t last as long as John hoped it would. Somewhere between his school and Dean’s, he figured out something was up, and his fears about getting a zero on his math quiz or missing soccer practice went jarringly AWOL. By the time they pulled into the Junior High parking lot, Sammy was sitting in the backseat still as a stone, watching John’s reflection in the rearview with an expression that was just short of scared shitless.

John turned around, handed his nine mil back before he left the car.

Sammy balked. "What’s this for?" he asked, his voice shaking.

"Take it," John said. Ordered. "Kill anyone who comes up to the car. No exceptions." He handed over the keys and his phone, too; dug out all the cash he had on him and put it in Sammy’s hand, held on for a second too long, then let go and turned away. "Stay here. Lock the doors behind me. If I’m not back in ten minutes, call Jim and do whatever he tells you to do."

"Dad?" Sammy whispered.

"You’ll be okay, Sammy," John said without looking at him. "Just do what you’re told and everything will be fine."

He left Sammy crying in the back seat; made it to the office and got to a counter he could lean on before his knees gave out completely. The school secretary took one look at him and decided he was an unparalleled piece of shit. He paid her generosity back by flashing his best "fuck you" smile and telling her to get his kid for him, pronto.

She called Dean to the office on the intercom, then went on about her business; but she never let him out of her sight, kept a wary eye on him like she half expected him to sprout flowers out his ass at any moment. He would have been happy to oblige, but it was as much as he could do just to stay on his feet while he waited.

"What the fuck’s taking so long?" he demanded after more than five minutes of side-eyed glances and cold, disapproving silence. Blood was soaking through his jacket. His sleeve was wet from elbow to cuff, so he clamped his arm a little tighter to his ribs, kept the pressure on despite the fact that doing so made the office go a little too bright, a little too hot, a little too close.

"His classroom’s quite a walk," she said. "And please, Mister Winchester. Your language."

He would have told her to kiss his ass, but he didn’t have the strength. "Yeah," he grunted instead. "Right. Sorry." One of his knees tried to buckle on him again. He slipped a little against the counter; caught himself before he fell, but paid the price from teeth to toes. The curse he hissed wasn’t quite as much under his breath as he intended, but the secretary didn’t bitchslap him over it this time. Instead, she cocked her head to one side, looked at him a little more closely than she had before.

Gritting his teeth against the pain, he avoided her eyes and did what he could to play the unsteadiness off as nothing more serious than the hangover from hell with a chaser of the hair of the dog. It wasn’t too hard an act to sell: he’d been hunting for three days straight and hadn’t showered, shaved or slept in that time but for the two hours he’d gotten in before Jim’s phone call woke him.

"Are you okay, Mister Winchester?" she asked.

He swallowed carefully, looked up and offered her a lazy grin. "Fucking peachy," he said. "You?"

She didn’t ask him anything more.

When Dean finally rounded the corner at the end of the hall, he was playing his "what the hell does the principal want with me?" stroll to the nines. He didn’t see John until he reached the office and opened the door; but once he did, his attitude changed like sunshine to snow. He made it to the counter in two long strides. "Dad?" he said, his voice calm, but his eyes a study in full-on panic.

"Need you at home," John said.

"Yeah," Dean agreed too quickly. "Sure. Absolutely. Let’s hit it."

He had a hundred pounds on Dean, maybe more; but the kid walked him out of the school and back to the Impala like it was no big deal, like the weight he took on to keep John from collapsing to the sidewalk with every step was nothing more than an inconvenience, if even that. He would have loaded John into the passenger seat and taken the wheel himself if he could have gotten by with it; but John pulled rank when he tried, demoted him back to shotgun with a single glance. For a moment, Dean looked like he was going to argue, but then he didn’t.

He just didn’t.

Sammy popped the locks from the inside, and Dean eased John into the driver’s seat like a longshoreman handling fine china. His expression twitched when he caught a glimpse of the blood-saturated jacket trapped between John’s arm and ribs, when he saw the dark stain seeping down the thigh of John’s jeans; but he didn’t say anything, just focused on the job at hand.

"You good?" he asked when he had John settled securely in place

John gave a small nod. "Yeah. Go." Licking his lips, he closed his eyes in anticipation of the worst, but Dean pressed the car door back to the jam with infinite care, then circled to the passenger side and slid in, closing his own door just as carefully.

"Good boy," John murmured. It was as much appreciation as it was approval.

"You sure you don’t want me to drive?" Dean asked.

"I’m sure," John returned without opening is eyes.

The kid was already a man in so many ways, but he was still only thirteen. Even if their friend, the pissy-faced secretary, wasn’t watching out an office window, he couldn’t pass the Impala off to someone who was barely tall enough to keep his foot on the gas without losing his view through the front windshield.

He wanted to, but he couldn’t.

"Is everything okay, Dean?" Sammy asked. His voice was so tremulous he sounded like somebody else’s kid altogether.

"Yeah, Spaz," Dean answered, never taking his eyes off John. "Everything’s peachy."

John forced his eyes open. "Keys, Sammy," he said, trying to ignore the tremor in his hand as he took them over his shoulder, then cranked the Impala to life and pulled out of the school parking lot.

"Do you want your gun back, too?" Sammy asked once they were on main street, headed out of town.

John flicked a glance at the rearview, then said to Dean, "Get the nine mil from your brother. Stow it out of sight, but within reach, safety off." His voice was damned near coarse enough to prove out the secretary’s wrong-headed assumptions about him, so he cleared it, tried to sound more definitive and a little less drunk when he said, "Then buckle in … both of you. Keep your eyes open, and your mouths shut."

Dean leaned over the seatback between them, took the gun Sammy handed him. "He gave me money, too," Sammy half-whispered. "And his phone."

"You’re in charge of those," Dean said. "Put your seatbelt on."

Once Dean was belted in himself, John spoke without taking his eyes off the road. He offered only what his son needed to know if push came to shove, or bad went to worse "We’re officially off the grid. Cash only-there’s a couple thousand in the false wall of the trunk if you need it. No credit cards at all, not even bogies. Nothing that can be traced."

"What about the phone?" Dean asked.

"It’s encrypted and safe. No one has the number but Jim and Bobby. We get separated, stick to the back roads. Don’t stop anywhere with security cams. Assume the worst: consider that the best-case scenario."

Dean nodded. "Why would we get separated?" he asked. "What’s going on?"

John shook the questions off with a small motion of his head. "Don’t talk; listen. Something happens to me, call Jim. You can’t get Jim, call Bobby. But no one else, Dean. Do you understand me? Don’t reach out to anybody but Jim or Bobby, even if it means you’re on your own." He did look at Dean then, gave him enough eye contact to make sure he understood the difference between this and everything else he’d been told. "You clear on that? Two contacts. Period. The rest of the world is dark to you until I say otherwise. That means cops, doctors, people you know, people you don’t."

"Yes, sir," Dean acknowledged quietly. "I understand. Better my back to the wall than to someone I can’t trust."

"Damn straight."

"Where are we going, Dad?" Sammy asked from the backseat.

"Not right now, Sammy." John turned his attention back to the road.

"Why not?"

"Because we’re on need-to-know until I tell you otherwise. Radio silence, all ears up. Eyes open, mouths shut. You know the drill."

"But-"

"No buts."

The ruling was definitive enough to shut even Sammy down. The car fell to an uneasy silence that held until they were well clear of the city limits.

"Okay, Dad," Dean said suddenly. "We’re clear now. Time to pull over and let me drive."

When John shook the suggestion off, Dean laid into him like a linebacker on steroids. He made it clear he was done taking orders; done with drills and protocols and letting John dismiss him with a simple head shake or warn him off with the look that meant "not now, and not later either." Dean didn’t go off the reservation much; but when he did, it was never pretty. The kid didn’t know from halfway. He was merciless, ferocious, unrelenting in a way only Dean could be unrelenting as he read his old man the riot act in every language under the sun.

Because he was smart and focused, he kept his demands to three: that John pull over, that John give up the wheel, that John let him check out whatever was going on with all that freaking blood to see how bad things really were before he bled out right there and traumatized poor Sammy for life.

John tried to shut him down twice, and failed. He would have had better luck trying to put Pandora back in her box. The kid was a force of nature once he got his head set to a course of action. Jim Murphy attributed that particular quirk of Dean’s personality to him; he attributed it to Mary. But either way, once Dean got started, he would (and did) pull every dirty trick in the book-and a few that weren’t in the book-in an all-out blitzkrieg of no-holds-barred emotional warfare that never let up until he’d won the skirmish, the battle, and the war.

"Failure is not an option," by way of "There is no try, only do."

Still rattled by being left in a school parking lot with a nine mil and a license to kill, Sammy didn’t step in and join the fray right away. He let Dean have a little one-on-one time to get the job done without him; but once it became clear that John could hold his own in a one-front war, Sammy went on the offensive, too. Pulling out an impressive arsenal of arguments embellished and supported by an equally impressive arsenal of exhausting detail, he set to flanking John like a pro, herding him straight into an inevitable crossfire with the kind of precise military acumen Sammy liked to pretend he didn’t possess just to piss John off, or to prove a point, or both.

After more than twenty minutes of being double teamed out the ass, they had him pretty well cornered up and were taking shots from every point of access, all of those shots focused on the same objective. With first Dean, and then Sammy, and then Dean again, asking, begging, pleading, badgering, bullying him to pull over, to stop, to let one or the other of them check his side, to tell them what happened, to quit treating them like children, to stop being a jackass and just pull over already, to show Dean the respect of … to give Sammy one good reason why …

It was all he could do to keep from losing it; all he could do not to put them both down hard just to buy himself a second’s relief from their constant badgering.

But he didn’t. He just didn’t.

For the first thirty-odd minutes of their double-team tango, John stuck to his intention to weather the storm, to wait them out until one or the other of them realized that, as stubborn as either of them could be, he was the original model, and it didn’t get more hard-headed than that. He responded to every new volley of incoming with whatever comforting lies he could come up with on short notice; alternating between placation and misdirection, between white lies and outright whoppers. That worked until Sammy got frustrated enough to start challenging those lies instead of just rolling his eyes at them, or snorting, or showing some other form of familiar disrespect that had become his SOP over the last year or so. Once Sammy jumped ship on the most fundamental axiom of "don’t call your dad a liar to his face," John started losing ground fast, so he changed strategies, defaulted to a less taxing tactic of no response at all.

His last line of defense with either boy was always silence (an effective punishment for Dean; a necessary discipline to keep a leash on his temper with Sammy), and he fell back to that last stand bastion now, letting his silence speak for him because if he hadn’t, if he’d kept answering the same questions over and over again ad nauseum, he would have eventually lost this battle of wills and given in. Pulled over. Let his thirteen-year-old start dicking around with the only thing that stood between all of them and one hell of a long fall into fire and brimstone.

And that wasn’t something he could afford to do.

Beyond the obvious of scaring his boys witless with an up-close and personal view of what a motivated hunter with a sharp knife could accomplish before getting his head twisted to a sharp one-eighty, John couldn’t take the risk of letting Dean (or anybody else) screw around with his make-shift field dressing … which was one hell of a generous interpretation of what he’d done with his jacket to the end of soaking up more blood than any one man could afford to lose in a single sitting. But while granted, stuffing flannel and ducked canvas directly into the wound itself probably wasn’t the most sanitary solution to bleeding out behind your kid’s middle school, it was an expedient one, and it worked. Or if not worked precisely, it at least succeeded in the short run, holding the devil at bay long enough to get his boys clear of the kill zone before he went down for the count.

Once he got his sons locked down someplace safe, he’d consider upgrading his battlefield stuff-and-go to an option that was less likely to kill him with infection. But for right now, bleeding out was the problem-at-hand, and direct pressure was the solution he had. Short sighted or not, the un-interrupted pressure of blood-saturated material glued to, and in, and around, and against the sticky mess of his skin was the only thing keeping him in the game, and he had to stay in the game himself if he was going to affect the outcome for anyone else.

Not that it didn’t hurt like hellfire-on-a-biscuit, because it did. It hurt enough to qualify as a bona fide walking nightmare, in fact. But as much as it hurt now, just the idea of letting someone peel the stanching clot of material and blood out of his gut to get a look-see at the damage gave John the cold squabs.

"Did you hear me, Dad?" Sammy demanded. "Are you even listening to me?"

John’s lifted his dull gaze to the reflection in the rearview. "I’m listening," he lied.

Despite the fact that his boys never once let up on their campaign of badger-Dad-into-submission, he held out for better than a hundred miles before time succeeded where they hadn’t. Blood loss and God-knows-what-else had already degraded his ability to focus from serious to critical to seriously critical when his mind started losing traction on him for no apparent reason. Every time it happened, all capacity for conscious thought went offline without warning. His awareness foundered in a morass of nothingness while his brain spun like bald tires on black ice until it grabbed Earth again, threw his thoughts back into gear so he could blink off the fugue that gripped him and course-correct the Impala’s trajectory, keep her from weaving down the road in dangerous undulations from shoulder to centerline and back again. More than once, he startled awake to the sudden resistance of Dean’s hand on the steering wheel, taking control from the passenger seat to keep them from skidding off the road or stabilizing the Impala long enough to get her back in her own lane where she belonged.

"You need to pull over and let me drive, Dad," Dean said every time it happened.

And every time it happened, Sammy agreed with a "Yeah, Dad, you’re going to get us all killed if you don’t pull over and let Dean drive," or something of similar ilk.

"Sammy." The sharp tone of Dean’s reprimand was always the same, and it never accomplished a fucking thing, any more than John’s reprimands ever did when they were aimed at Sammy, as compared to Dean. The reprimand did, however, always precede a second engagement from Dean: some kind of cajoling attempt to reason him through it that was designed to wash away the bitter residue of being ordered around by one son and told he was an irresponsible jackass by the other.

"Come on, Dad," Dean would wheedle gently. "You don’t want to ding up the Impala, do you? Scar her up like some cheap Volkswagen beetlebug that isn’t worth the effort of buffing back to a shine? It’s time to pull over and let me drive, okay? You really need to pull over and let me drive now."

John was pretty sure it was their version of Good Cop, Bad Cop; played more along the lines of Good Soldier, Mouthy Pain-in-the-Ass. They did a good job with their respective roles, but the over-all picture gave them up: the pattern repeated itself too many times for him to buy it as anything other than something they’d worked out during the gaps of dull between his stretches of hyper-awareness.

Not bad for a couple of amateur guerilla grifters, though. A better-than-respectable go at hoodwinking their old man into doing something he needed to do, but he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. So he didn’t.

They got another fifty miles under the tires before the threat of crossing the centerline at an inopportune moment, or of attracting a cop’s unwanted attention with his increasingly erratic driving, forced John to give in and pull off the road. Or maybe "pull off the road" wasn’t as strictly accurate as drive off the road and into a ditch, cursing like a profanity professor and whining like a little bitch when the steering wheel slammed into his side with enough force to put him down harder than a gutted deer.

He wasn’t sure whether he actually passed out or not; had no idea how long it took Dean to get the car out of the ditch, or how he managed to do it. But by the time they were back on the road again, Sammy was in the front seat with them, holding onto his hand with a ferociously tight grip and talking non-stop about God-knows-what like he was testing a new theory about a continuous stream of words no one but Sammy could possibly follow making the best tether to keep an almost-gone man viable: keep him engaged, keep him breathing, keep him alive.

And the kid was not wrong.

Trying to listen to the words Sammy murmured directly into his ear like they were supposed to mean something, trying to focus on his nine-year-old’s masters dissertation on who-gives-a-shit randomosity, was the only thing that kept him conscious. He couldn’t keep track of anything else; couldn’t keep his eyes open for more than a couple of seconds at a time, couldn’t offer anything more useful than random grunts and periodic whines to help Dean navigate his way back down a twisty mountain road John had taken off the paved asphalt for the same reason Dean was abandoning it: because it went nowhere on the planet that any sane person might actually want to go.

It was a major fuck-up to head back the way they’d just come; and he tried to tell Dean as much-tried to get his point across that distance in a random direction was the objective here, not backtracking to someplace they’d already been-but he failed. Or maybe he didn’t fail so much as Dean simply ignored him. Ignored his objections, ignored his advice, ignored his explicit directions to get at least another hundred miles under the tires before they stopped for gas, food, or medical supplies … all offered up in the form of random grunts and periodic whines.

As far as John could make out, Sammy was detailing the ins and outs of South American politics when the Impala rolled to a less-than-elegant stop behind some dump of a roadside motel they’d passed God knows how long ago. He would have objected to that, too; but somewhere along the line, he’d finally figured out that nothing he had to say mattered to Dean any longer. His good soldier had finally staged a coup de gras, and he wasn’t taking requests-or orders-from the deposed regime.

At least the kid had enough sense to pull the Impala around back and park it behind a dumpster. Blocking both the plates and the shape of the car from the road was the minimum he could do to protect them from exposure, the most simplistic countermeasure he could deploy to the end of keeping whoever might be tracking them from realizing they’d made the catastrophic error of stopping to bed down right in the middle of enemy territory.

Fuckin ROTC jerk-off cherries and their God-damned by-the-book naivete didn’t have any business calling the game incountry. It was no wonder so many of the little fucks got themselves fragged before they were even half-way through their virgin tour.

John mumbled something about parking in the back being a good choice, about Dean being a good boy, if a crappy listener; but he couldn’t get that point across either … or if he did, Dean ignored it as thoroughly as he had the rest.

They were going to have to have a serious de-brief about the chain of command once this FUBAR clusterfuck was over. The kid had guts and the kind of constitution you wanted at your back even if it was green as spring; but he was one piss-poor excuse of a soldier when it came to keeping his eye on the mission objective, when it came to protecting that mission objective at all costs, including both collateral damage and unit casualties that fell within the range of acceptable losses.

When Dean opened the door and started to get out, John panicked. Fear rose through him like a napalm bloom as he reached out, grabbed Dean’s arm and held on. "No, Dean. Don’t," he ordered, begged, pleaded; choking on his own blood with the effort it took to speak. "Stay with your brother. Stay with Sammy."

Dean pulled free of John’s clutching fingers carefully, gently. "Sammy’s right here, Dad," he said. Then, "I’ll be right back, I promise."

"No." John made another grab for Dean’s sleeve and missed. "No, Dean. Stay with Sammy. Protect Sammy."

"It’s okay, Dad. I’m right here." Sammy squeezed his hand like a bean counter working a turnip for blood. "I’m right here, and I’m fine. See? You don’t have to worry about me. I’m okay, Dad. I’m fine."

Sammy launched into a detailed explanation of the more grievous inconsistencies of transporter technology while Dean scouted the motel for options. He found some hooker working out of one of the rooms and paid her a twenty to check them in, then give him a hand getting John inside. She proved out about as much help a nothing, dropping John on the bed like a sack of half-conscious potatoes and shoving off while Dean had his hands full with the weapons duffel.

The less-than-gentle landing felt like a fall from near-orbit. John curled into himself, coughing blood into a grey-white pillow as Sammy crawled up on the mattress beside him and put his head down on that same dingy pillow. Snuggling in as close as he could get, Sammy grabbed hold of his hand again and started up a new one-sided conversation about God-knows-what (South American transporters, maybe?) while Dean stepped outside for better reception, leaving the door open between them as he dialed John’s cell to the tune of ten familiar tones.

"John?" Jim Murphy’s voice was so loud John could hear it from the bed. "What the fuck took you so long?"

The echo of Jim’s voice on the other end of the line cut John loose. He slipped away while Dean short-coursed the situation to Jim in a full-tilt, tight-pitched half panic and woke up three days later in a cabin somewhere north of Blue Earth, Minnesota. Fading to conscious at the casual, lollygaging pace of a thick fog burning off by mid-day, the first thing he felt was pain, and the second was the weight of Dean’s arms and upper body sprawled across his ankles, effectively pinning him to the bed. It was, no doubt, Dean’s way of making sure he didn’t try to get up and go anywhere without them.

John smiled through the soft-focus swirl of half-awareness. The kid was smart, and he knew his old man well enough to plan for the obvious.

Blinking slowly, his brain still wrapped in cotton candy wisps of sticky he recognized as fallout from either morphine or Demerol, John worked his way through the technical ins and outs of shortening his point of focus from the thirteen-year-old sleeping slumped over in a chair at the foot of his bed to the kid-sized lump curled into a fetal ball on the mattress beside him. Snoring like a badly muffled buzzsaw, Sammy slept the sleep of the dead, his head wedged into John’s left armpit and both knees pulled up tight to his own chest like he was trying to present the smallest target possible, or perhaps just get warm in the chill of a killing cold. Eyes red and puffy from crying and fingers pressure white where they still clutched John’s hand in a possessive death grip, he was the very illustration of a Sammy variation on a Dean theme, putting his own flesh and blood to the task of keeping John Winchester on as short a leash as humanly possible.

"Welcome back, John," Jim said quietly. "About time you shagged ass out of Neverwhere to put in an appearance at your own bedside vigil."

Though his voice was little more than the rustle of a breeze in the jungle dark, Jim’s greeting cut a double-wide trail through the Mekong mists of John’s personal mental incountry. He latched onto the salvage op’s lead and followed it back out willingly, satisfied to let Jim take point while he struggled just to keep pace.

Crouched beside the bed in a posture more suited to an incountry Marine waiting out a sapper patrol than some hell-and-brimstone pastor waiting out his best friend’s latest dance with an oft-frustrated reaper, Jim gave him all the time he needed to work his way through the disorienting dislocation of sedation and pain, to find his way out of the thick of the bush so he could focus in from the dark of there to the light of here, from the cold of there to the warm of here, from the alone of there to the no-longer-alone of here. Once he’d accomplished a rudimentary awareness, qualifying himself to actual conscious thought above and beyond the random wanderings of a mind trapped between awake and asleep, John stopped to rest, dropped pack and let himself concentrate on just breathing. Jim waited out the delay patiently, giving him several more minutes to adjust to the change of mental status, to re-orient himself to The World enough to figure out what was going on, and why.

"You with me?" Jim asked only when he was sure John was ready to answer.

John grunted.

"You remember what happened?"

John grunted again. Along with growing awareness came not only pain and memory, but also fear. He could feel it pulsing in his gut like a half-spoken threat, contained there only by his inability to act on the same drives that made his sons feel a need to physically restrain him from indulging the worst of his often self-destructive instincts.

He needed to ask, but he couldn’t, so Jim didn’t make him. "Door’s closed," he said quietly. "Your six is clean, and no one else knows."

"Sure?" John croaked out with an effort that nearly knocked him unconscious again. Dean shifted at the sound of his voice, but settled again without waking. Sammy never even twitched.

"Yes," Jim said definitively. "I’m sure." Then, after a long moment of silence, he added, "I made sure, John. Personally. You can breathe now. It’s over. He’s safe. You’re all safe."

"How?" John managed.

"Doesn’t matter. A door was open, so I closed it. Sealed it. Buried it." Jim looked down, stared at his own hands clasped together almost as if in prayer. "Burned it," he finished in a voice so quiet it wasn’t even a sound so much as simply a silence disturbed.

"Demon?" John whispered.

Jim shook his head. "Human," he said. Then, like a benediction, he added, "Hunter. Someone I knew. Someone who thought he knew me." There was damnation in his eyes when he said it. The shadow of another life was as dark in his expression as the stain of unseen blood was fresh on his hands.

As much as the confession damned Jim, so that much did it save John. He felt something inside him let go; closed his eyes and released a slow, agonizing breath to the peaceful still of the room around him. His body began to tremble as the panic inside him broke up like ice in the slow dawn of a spring thaw.

Jim watched in silence for almost a minute before he leaned in, laid one hand on John’s wrist and let the weight of simple contact speak where words couldn’t.

He never told his boys why he was crying when they woke, just as he never told Jim Murphy that, in the aftermath of Mary’s murder, faith in a brother was the only faith he could hold onto, and the only sacred truth he’d ever known.

Go to 4) The Lost Myth of Normal