SPN Fic: We Were Like Family Once (3/4, Gen, PG13, Pre-Series)

[dodger_winslow]

Title: We Were Like Family Once (3/4)
Author: Dodger Winslow
Challenge: family_secret Family Secerets: The Winchester Screts Challenge
Prompt: Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence.
Word Count: 28,100
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series
Rating: PG13 for language
Spoilers: up to Born Under a Bad Sign
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while.

Summary: John felt something give inside him. It broke unexpectedly, like a bone that had held up for so long under such constant, overwhelming pressure he’d gotten accustomed to the ache of it, grown numb to the fear it would eventually shatter and leave him a cripple unable to walk, to stand, to do anything at all except break right along with it.

Part 3

He spent weeks getting to know them. Not all at once, but spread out over several months. He stayed in Nebraska until he was relatively certain Ellen and her daughter weren’t in any immediate danger. Jo took to him like a puppy to a chew toy, crawling all over him every time he showed up, asking him a thousand questions, telling him stories she made up for his benefit and then regaling him with knock-knock jokes that would have put Sam to spastications of glee when he was her age.

For the most part, he tried not to get too attached. Tried not to let her win him over too much, tried not to let her charm him in all the ways little girls were good at charming grown men on whom they developed crushes.

He had about as much luck with that as he had not falling for Mary the first time he saw her, or not growing fonder of Ellen than he should have as they sat and talked about kids and life and hunting. It was the first time since Mary died he could recall being comfortable around a woman who wasn’t Missouri or Kate. The first time he could sit and relax, the first time he could smile at a joke cracked at his expense or be amused at the ways she played him to suit her own ends.

There was a palpable tension to the room when Bill was there, but John did his best not to show it, not to make it too clear how little he could forget what he knew about this thing, how uncomfortable he was whenever the conversations turned personal to even the smallest degree if it was around to hear. He caught a look now and again - usually cast when it didn’t think he was paying attention - that made John think it might have mistaken his wariness for an indication he felt an inappropriate affection for another man’s wife.

John played to that assumption, touching Ellen more often than he should have - more often than he even really wanted to - just to give it something to worry about other than what John might be learning about its habits, its schedules, what motivated it, what might make it vulnerable. Were their places reversed, another man’s affections manifesting themselves as a hand against Mary’s back, or a look that lasted too long when she was turned away, or even one that held on too long when their eyes met; he would have put a little aggression to the air, backed the new player off by marking his territory in a way a rival would recognize but that wouldn’t have pissed Mary off for being marked as his.

It didn’t respond that way. To the contrary, it seemed to give ground when John touched its wife, when he leaned too close to speak to her, when he put his hands on her in ways a woman might see as friendship but another man wouldn’t mistake as such. In some ways, it was almost as if it wanted to give him room to feel what he felt, room to express things he had no right to express.

There was a part of John that speculated it was ceding that ground under the assumption Ellen would distract John from his habitually wary vigilance; but there was another part of him that thought it ceded the ground out of some kind of generosity of spirit, out of some form of gentle compassion it possessed that allowed it to give John some space to need something he didn’t have, trusting Ellen enough to draw lines where they needed to be drawn so it felt no need to impose barriers and mark territories in a way normal men invariably did.

It bothered John to see those kinds of traits in the thing that called itself Bill Harvelle. It bothered him to view this monster as something capable of empathy, able to set aside its own needs to consider the needs of someone else, particularly a stranger, and at the expense of aspects of the male ego that John, himself, wouldn’t have set aside in deference to another man’s pain. Another man’s loss.

But as much as he knew it saw what John was doing exactly the way John intended it to see it, John also knew Ellen didn’t. She was fully aware of how she’d slipped inside his walls, how much he’d come to care for her despite his best intention not to; but she didn’t mistake it for something it wasn’t.

There was too much intensity in his voice the few times they discussed Mary for Ellen to miss how much pain he was still in; too much grief in the way he spoke about things that were gone for him now - things he wouldn’t ever find again, and didn’t care to even look for - for her to fail to understand what Mary had been to him, and what she would always would be. Regardless of what anyone else might think, Ellen understood exactly how much he’d lost in losing Mary and how much no one, including her, would ever be someone he could look to as capable of taking Mary’s place in even the smallest of ways.

And because she understood that about him, she took his lingering looks or small touches as borderline inappropriate intimacies from a man so cut off from his own emotional depths he no longer remembered where the boundaries were supposed to be, could no longer sense when something was a little too much, or not quite enough.

It wasn’t an accurate read of why he did what he did, but it was accurate to the deeper complexities of a relationship that hit him fast and hard with how much it came to mean to him long before he realized he’d gotten in deeper than he should have ever allowed himself to fall. Ellen might not know the stricter truth of why his hands occasionally crossed lines they shouldn’t have crossed, or why the looks he gave her might have said something different to another woman than what they said to her; but she did understand what he felt for her. And more importantly, what he didn’t. What he couldn’t have felt for her, even if he’d wanted to. And not because she was married, but more because he was, and always would be. In his heart. In his mind. In his soul.

She understood that in a way Bill never would; and because she did, she never called him on the things he did that he probably should have been called on. And he expected that of her once he got to know her at all. He expected her to be generous with him, to give him leniency where he might need it, to offer him comfort in ways he could accept comfort rarely offered and even more rarely accepted.

But he didn’t expect it of Bill. And he didn’t like it from Bill. He recognized it as a danger he was a fool to allow to exist; but even knowing that, he let it happen. He let Bill offer him a shelter that might turn to a death trap when he least expected it; that might ambush him when he was least prepared to defend against it; that might gut him when he was most vulnerable to being eviscerated, both spiritually and physically, by something he’d spent the better part of ten years shunning for exactly that reason.

Because it made him vulnerable in ways he wouldn’t otherwise be vulnerable. Made him willing to ignore things he wouldn’t otherwise ignore. Made him almost desperate to disbelieve things he wouldn’t otherwise have disbelieved.

Almost, but not quite.

He spent the next six months limiting his hunting excursions to locations that allowed him to drop in on the Roadhouse before or after. Sometimes both. Sometimes for days. He stopped whenever he was in the area and sometimes when he wasn’t, exploring the dynamics of a situation half created and half organic, letting them get to know him just enough to make them feel as if the exchange was reciprocal, letting him get to know them just enough to feel like the reciprocity was something he controlled rather than letting it control him.

He let them think what he wanted was to make friends, to become part of a community; when what he really wanted was to figure out what in the fuck was going on: why his research all checked out no matter how many times he ran the numbers, why his conclusions all stayed rock solid despite the fact that the more he got to know him, the less Bill Harvelle seemed like he could be what John knew he actually was.

He didn’t suffer much pronoun confusion any more, and John let himself think that was okay. He let himself justify not being able to view Bill as an "it" now even when he tried because that was the only way he could work his way deep enough into Bill’s confidence to identify his vulnerabilities, to identify where he could be hurt when he was hit so if it came to that, John could protect Ellen, protect Jo, protect Sam and Dean by protecting himself.

But even in the justification of it, John could sense the danger of what he was doing. He could feel it in his bones how wrong it was to let Bill become not only a man in his eyes, but also a friend, a brother-in-arms in the fight against the darkness of shadows in the night. He could feel what a trap he was creating for himself by seeing Bill as the man with the warm, welcoming grin who called himself the owner of Harvelle’s Roadhouse; the father who lived to make his little tow-headed daughter squeal with delight as he swung her around by the legs, or dangled her upside down just for the fun of it; the husband of Ellen - strong, fierce, smart Ellen - who loved him as deeply and as intensely as John had once loved Mary.

But despite the danger of it, despite the knowing of how wrong it was to let this happen at all let alone what a fool he was to let it keep happening, let it go on, let it become normal, let it become needed … he did.

He did, and things changed. He found a place he’d lost, and he became friends with a man he knew better than to befriend. And he did it because Bill changed, too. He didn’t change in his own eyes, of his family’s; but he changed in John’s. He became something different than a thing, became someone who couldn’t have done the things the research said he’d done, who couldn’t do the things the research said he’d do again.

That wasn’t Bill Harvelle. It wasn’t the man John knew, wasn’t the monster Bill had never been.

Perhaps more than anything, it was Ellen’s devotion to Bill that changed him in John’s eyes, that made the danger of him so much harder to see, so much harder to remember it still existed. No matter what the research said, no matter what his conclusions told him; he couldn’t wrap around the idea that Ellen Harvelle would love, marry, bed and have a child with anything like what John knew Bill Harvelle to be.

He wouldn’t wrap around it.

It made no sense in his head. He couldn’t find a place for it in the way his world worked. So he didn’t. He gave up, let it slide, let himself fall into familiar patterns, let himself slide down a slippery slope until he learned to be content in with the charade of being like family now. He and Ellen and Jo and Bill … Bill the man, not Bill the monster. A family born of self-aware illusion, a family destined for blood.

*

He’d known them for almost ten months when Ellen starting putting pressure on him to bring the boys around; to introduce Sam and Dean to Bill, to Jo; to let his sons share in the companionship of knowing there were other people in the world who understood things didn’t always work the way they were supposed to work. John put her off under the auspice of not wanting to expose his sons to the rougher elements of the hunting crowd, but she didn’t buy it. Not really. She knew him too well by then, knew the way he thought, knew the way he felt things he’d never admit he felt.

She was hurt he wouldn’t share the boys when she and Bill were so willing to share Jo. She felt betrayed by what she perceived as distrust on his part; at least in part because that’s exactly what it was: distrust.

But not distrust of her. And not even of Bill, really. More distrust of himself. More distrust of what he might be willing to compromise to make his sons part of this thing he was feeling for the first time in ten years. To let Dean, in particular, feel the comfort of this sense of home his son had known once and missed more for having known it than Sam ever would, never having known the feel of it to know what he was missing.

John would have liked to tell her as much. He would have liked to explain his reasoning, explain his fears of letting the boys touch something they’d suffer for having touched if it ever got ripped away, if something went wrong, when something went wrong.

He would have liked to try and make her understand how much he’d become willing to suffer the wound if it ever came - how much he was willing to take the hit if Bill ever proved out to be what John had always known he could be - but how much he couldn’t do the same to his sons. How much he couldn’t take that risk for them, couldn’t expose them to that level of loss again. How much he couldn’t allow the possibility of Dean taking a second hit when the first one so nearly destroyed him. How much he couldn’t allow Sam to take the first hit, not knowing what he knew about his son, and knowing how much a loss like this now might break Sam as badly as Mary’s loss had broken Dean all those years ago.

But as much as he wanted to tell Ellen his reasons for doing what he felt he had to do, he didn’t because he couldn’t afford to. Telling her the things he knew, the things he feared - admitting why he spent as much time at the Roadhouse as he did, especially in those first months, but still refused to reciprocate to their generosity by involving his kids in the relationship - was something he couldn’t do, a confession he couldn’t ever afford to make.

No matter how he explained it, she wouldn’t understand. And even if she did, she wouldn’t accept it. At best, he’d be ostracized so completely from the Roadhouse he’d never get close enough to Harvelle again to do what he still might have to do. At worst … well, at worst, he didn’t want to consider it. Because he knew what he would have done to anyone who represented a threat like that to Mary, no matter who they were, no matter what he felt about them outside the context of the threat they represented.

All of which was part and parcel to why he wasn’t willing to let Ellen meet his boys, why he wasn’t willing to let any of them meet his boys. It made him nervous as hell to know anybody from the Roadhouse even knew his boys existed, let alone where they lived, or what ages they were, or any other damn detail about them, like that Dean might trust a woman more than he should, or Sammy might be vulnerable to someone who presented themselves in an intellectual capacity … someone like a teacher, or just an expert in one of the hundreds of subjects in which he was interested. Those were the sort of details John had spent a lifetime keeping out of the pool of public information, so it bothered him like sand in a jockstrap to know there was a whole network of people who not only knew all about what happened to Mary, but also pretty much everything he’d done since then, and how he’d done it.

But as much as those things worried him, they were milk already spilt. He could worry about them all he wanted, but the reality was none of them were ever going to unspill themselves to a previous state of being. But knowing this information network existed did give him the advantage of counter-programming against it in the future. It gave him a way to keep his sons off the their grid from this point on as effectively as he’d managed to keep them off the mainframe grid for the vast majority of their short lives.

Those were his reasons for coming here, but not bringing the boys with him. Those were his reasons for spending so much time here, but not telling his sons the Harvelles even existed. Those were the reasons he said no every time Ellen brought the subject up, the reasons he told her it wasn’t the right time, it wasn’t something he was comfortable with, it wasn’t something he was going to do. Those were the reasons he told himself, and he believed them because he wanted to.

The same way he wanted to believe every precaution he took was nothing more than just a precaution.

After months and months of asking and being refused, Ellen got tired of playing footsie with the truth and just asked him, straight up, what his feeble trouble was. It was the third time in less than twenty-four hours she’d brought it up, and John snapped under the pressure, told her it was none of her fucking business and she could either get off his ass about it or she could kiss his ass, her choice.

She refused to talk to him for the rest of his stay. She ignored him like the plague, got up and walked out of the room every time he walked in. She wouldn’t talk to him on the phone when he called three days later to apologize for the way he said it, if not what he actually said. Bill told John he’d give her the message, said he’d pretty it up a little, sugar coat it in all the ways that worked when he got on her bad side; but when John showed up at the Roadhouse almost two weeks later, Ellen still wasn’t talking to him.

He was hunting in the area is what he told them. Or rather, what he told Bill after Ellen left the room when she saw him walk in the door.

"I thought you were going to talk to her," he said to Bill as she walked away, hurt more than he wanted to admit, angrier than he felt he had any right to be.

"Yeah," Bill told him. "I did. But she’s pissed, John. Really pissed."

"So how long do I have to put up with this shit?" he asked. Mary’d never punished him like this. At the worst, she’d stomp off in a huff, turn a cold shoulder to him in bed when he tried to snuggle up, tell her he was sorry, even if he wasn’t wrong. She’d decorated the master bathroom in purple posies once just to piss him off; but she’d never just shut him down, never just turned away from him like she didn’t give a rat’s ass whether he lived or died.

"As long as she’s pissed would be my guess," Bill told him.

"And how long is that?"

Bill shrugged. "Not sure. You’ve already got me beat by a week and six days. You’re evidently very talented at pissing people off. Or at least at pissing her off."

"Great." John glared at the door through which she’d retreated. "Just fucking peachy."

Harvelle leaned across the bar, grabbed a bottle of Jamisons off a shelf. "I never have bought you that drink I promised the night we met," he said. "How’s right now sound to you?"

John shook his head, angry enough to leave, hurt enough he didn’t want to. "No. I’ll stick with coffee."

Bill just looked at him. "Are you serious?" he asked finally.

John sighed. "I should just go," he said.

"You just got here."

"Yeah. Well, clearly that wasn’t the best choice I’ve made this week. I thought she’d be over it by now. Guess I should have called first. Sent flowers or something." He shook his head, rubbed a hand across his eyes. "What a crock of shit."

"I thought you were hunting," Bill ventured.

John glanced at him, then looked away. His gut was cramping up. He felt like he was losing something here, and he didn’t want to let it go. "I was," he lied. "I just … I thought …" He let what he was going to say trail off, fall to silence. "I should just go," he repeated finally.

"You should sit down and let me buy you a drink," Bill informed him. "Stick around for a couple of days. At the very least, give her overnight to warm up."

"She’s had better than two weeks," John pointed out. "What good’s one more night going to do?"

"She’s just making her point. Trust me, she misses you as much as you miss her."

"I don’t miss her." His tone was a little too harsh, a little too defensive. "I just … I just don’t want hard feelings between us."

"Mmmm hmmm," Bill said. "Well, you probably shouldn’t have told her to kiss your ass then."

"Yeah," John agreed tiredly. "Probably not." He reached out, slapped the bar lightly a couple of times. "All right. If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is. Tell her to call me when she gets over herself. Until then, I’ll stay away."

"You’re going to give me a real complex here, Winchester," Bill said as John turned to leave.

"What? Why?"

Bill grinned. His expression was patient, understanding when he asked, "Is Ellen the only reason you come around here?" Then, without giving John a chance to answer, he added, "You’re not dating my wife or something, are you? Because if you are, that’s probably something I should know, don’t you think?"

John felt his skin go hot, felt the muscles of his neck bunch up in anger, in embarrassment. "What the hell’s that supposed to mean?" he demanded like he didn’t know exactly what it meant.

"It’s supposed to mean I know the two of you are friends. And I understand that you miss her. But Ellen’s not your only friend here, John. And she’s not the only reason for you to stick around, to sit down and relax, to let yourself be someplace for yourself rather than running off just because she’s being a pissy little bitch."

John studied the other man for several seconds before he said, "Did you just call your wife a pissy little bitch?"

"You narc me out, and I’ll deny it," Bill said easily. "Now how ’bout that drink?" He lifted the bottle in his hand, shook it a little.

John sighed, rubbed at his eyes again then said, "Sure. Why not."

It turned out to be an incredibly stupid move on his part, trading in his coffee mug for a shot glass. Until that night, he’d never so much as touched a drink at the Roadhouse; but by the time the evening crowd started trickling in, he and Bill had been talking for hours and at least one of them was well on his way to full-out, fall-down drunk.

One of them who wasn’t Bill.

Which wasn’t to say John was anywhere close to actually falling down. To the contrary, the more he drank, the more he wanted to drink. It had been a while since he’d indulged enough alcohol to dull the edge of Mary in his mind, but he hadn’t forgotten how, and it felt good, felt liberating.

He drank half a dozen hunters under the table for being fools enough to try and keep up, then regaled the ones left standing (or sitting) with a grand saga about a pack of werewolves nesting in the shadow of George Washington’s impressive granite nose in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The accounting he gave of Bobby’s role in the grand scheme of things was less than two percent true, and it would likely get him peppered with buckshot the next time they met; but it made his audience laugh down to the man, every one of them knowing Bobby well enough to appreciate a good yarn spun at his expense.

Once John put the heavily embellished werewolf saga to bed, he waxed eloquently on for over an hour about what a huge fucking disappointment vampires turned out to be. Toothy twats the lot of them, he told his more-or-less attentive acolytes. A bunch of pansies you could put down with little more than a flick of a machete, Daniel Elkins and his holier-than-thou pretensions to the contrary.

By the time last call had made its third round and the last drunk hunter had been poured into someone else’s truck for transport, John was in the mood to throw down, so he told Bill he had to see a man about a horse, then went looking for Ellen to tell her exactly what he thought about her ignoring him all night like he wasn’t even there. When he found her in a back room, he cornered her with the intention to call her on her bullshit and got decked for his trouble. She had a hell of a left hook on her, and she wasn’t afraid to use it, especially not on him, and especially not when he was so far out of line he was a freaking circle.

He laughed it off, telling Bill later she hit like a girl, but the truth of it was he’d rarely been hit harder, and he’d never been hurt more with a single shot … a shot that wasn’t the left hook she threw so much as it was what she said afterwards, while he was lying flat on his back, blinking up at her, asking what in the hell that was for to a response of "Fuck you, John. And fuck those precious boys of yours, too."

He would have liked to bounce back to his feet, tell her how little her opinion mattered to him either on the subject of his worth or the worth of his precious boys; but he didn’t. Instead, he just laid there on the floor in the dark, staring at the ceiling until Bill wandered by and saw him, offered a hand and pulled him back to his feet.

He told Bill he’d tripped in the dark on his way back from the can. He could tell Bill knew he was full of shit even then; but Harvelle didn’t challenge the story, didn’t ask John if he’d gotten decked for being a general pain-in-ass or for not taking no as an answer to a proposition he’d not have made sober.

Bill likely took the encounter as the latter. He no doubt assumed John cornered Ellen in the back room with sex on his mind; no doubt assumed John had finally put Ellen in an awkward enough position she decided to back him off the hard way.

And John never corrected that mis-assumption. He never told Bill he wouldn’t have done something like that even if he’d wanted Ellen, which he didn’t. Instead, he just let Bill go on thinking whatever he already thought. He even implied as much later that night, crawling deeper into the bottle as the night wore on, looking to get his ass kicked again, looking for someone to punish him for being who he was, for doing the kind of things he felt he had to do.

But Bill wasn’t the punishing kind. He just smiled tolerantly, told John he was more worried about John’s jaw than he ever would be about Ellen’s virtue, then laughed for five minutes when John said that was the fucking truth of it, because Ellen’s virtue had the best left hook he’d ever seen.

Or not seen, as the case turned out to be.

Ten hours later, Bill was telling John through the worst hangover John had ever had that he’d really hurt Ellen’s feelings when he told her to get off his ass about bringing the boys around. He told John all she wanted to do was help him out with some of that God-awful weight he carried around like a cross nailed to his back; all she was trying to say was that his boys were welcome here, and they’d be safe if he brought him, so he could if he wanted to.

John listened like a man being beaten as Bill stepped off his normal, easy-going congeniality to point out Ellen didn’t deserve to be told to go piss up a rope for giving a damn about some loud-mouth blow-hard and his invisible kids. John nodded his agreement to the sentiment, grateful he already looked like he’d washed down an Ebola pill with the hair of the dog Bill brought him to keep his head from splitting open; because if he hadn’t, the bloodshot red of his eyes might have given up how hard this was for him, how much it hurt, how much he was dying a little inside every time he came here and sat down to dinner with them instead of his boys, lying the Harvelles into mistaking him for one of them, mistaking him for family rather than the demon that comes in the night to pin the love of your life to a ceiling and gut your future in a rush of blood and fire.

Even though Bill did everything short of begging to keep him from going, John left the Roadhouse behind before he was really sober enough to drive. He pulled off the highway fifty miles down the road and heaved everything in his system up onto a gravel lot in a picnic area two spindly trees short of being open prairie.

He made it home seven hours later and had to pass a whole battery of Dean’s "how many fingers am I holding up?" tests before his fifteen-year-old would give up on the idea of dragging him to the ER by his heels, admitting him against his will if that’s what it took. Once he’d cleared the hurdle of Dean, he crawled into bed, still fully clothed, and slept the rest of his drunk off, and then slept another twenty-four just for good measure.

There was just enough father left in him to register when the boys left for school, when they came home again; but he let them fend for themselves on dinner, something they’d been doing for three days prior while he was gone, before he dragged his drunk ass back home like something that crawled out of a grave after being left for dead to rot as dead things do.

Whatever Dean made, it smelled good, but not good enough to convince him to abandon the dark refuge of his room, the hushed quiet of the boys going about their lives like church mice charged with letting the cat in a room down the hall sleep himself back to sane. Somewhere along the line, someone - Dean, he assumed - had stripped him out clothes that must have smelled like the inside of a bottle and a picnic parking lot in Nebraska, leaving him in boxers and a t-shirt. Not exactly clean, but less than utterly filthy, which was more than enough as far as he was concerned.

He’d been awake for hours but was still in bed - still lying in the dark, his eyes open but his mind wiped blank - when Dean slipped through the door, shut it behind him with a quiet click so it wouldn’t disturbed him if he was still asleep. Crossing the room like a whisper through silence, Dean fell to a crouch beside the bed, met his old man’s bloodshot eyes on their own level. "Hey." His voice was trying for casual, but the timbre of it was such a study in raw concern it made John feel like ten times the punk-ass bitch he’d already proven himself to be. "How you doing? You okay?"

"Yeah," John managed, marshalling himself to the task of growing the fuck up. "I’m fine. Just tired is all. Think I might have caught something. The flu, maybe."

He wasn’t expecting his fifteen-year-old to reach out, put the back of one hand against his forehead like Mary used to do to Dean when he was five. John flinched at the contact and Dean snatched his hand back, feeling like he’d done something wrong, or something inappropriate, at least.

"What the hell was that?’ John asked.

Dean shrugged awkwardly. "You don’t feel like you have a fever," he offered.

John laughed a little, then said, "Thank you, Doctor Mom."

For a moment, Dean looked embarrassed as hell. Then, slowly, his expression eased to a chagrinned grin. "Sorry," he said.

"’T’s okay," John replied. "I always thought you’d make a great nurse."

Dean rolled his eyes, made a disgusted sound. He was still embarrassed, but no longer afraid he’d come off like a punk bitch in his dad’s eyes. The momentary sense of shame that flashed through his expression was gone now, the push of teasing defusing his insecurities so they wouldn’t start ticking later, start counting him down to an eventual detonation capable of gutting that boy with self loathing the way shrapnel gutted a soldier to the agony of a peritoneal bleed.

Dean could, and did, stand up to the kind of peer pressure that would break most boys his age without ever even feeling it; but he was his own harshest critic when it came to how his dad perceived him. He took every word John said to heart, took every flicker of his dad’s expression as if it was unspoken commentary on the man he wanted to be, the man he was trying to be. There were times the burden of that unwavering scrutiny nearly crushed John with the responsibility it demanded he live up to every moment of every day at the cost of his son’s perception of his own worth; and it was those times John almost resented Dean for looking to him so completely as a yardstick of measure against which to judge himself.

But there were other times - times like now - when Dean looking to him the way he did gave John the strength to get up and just keep going. Just keep walking. Just keep crawling, if that’s all he could manage until he found the strength, the balance, to get to his feet again and stand up like a man. Times the way that boy saw himself in the reflection of his old man - the way that boy suffered the daily hell of his own fire-and-brimstone judgement in the eyes of a man who always saw him the same way, as his only salvation in a world looking to destroy them all - was the only reason John could find to go on when he’d been kicked too hard, or kicked one too many times in too short a period of time.

Or kicked only once, not so hard even, but kicked where he lived, where he feared, where he’d managed to protect himself for ten years only to throw wide the doors of the cathedral at the wrong damn time with the wrong damn people under the wrong damn circumstances.

There were only two people in the world who could walk him through surviving that kind of stupidity. One was Jim Murphy. The other was his fifteen-year-old son.

"I said I was fine, didn’t I?" John said with just enough censure to his tone to remind Dean who the dad was, who the son was. "I’m just catching a little extra shut-eye is all, so get the hell out of here and let me get back to it."

Dean watched him through the lie, reading far more in his father’s expression than any kid should ever be able to read. "Anything I can do?" he asked finally, refusing to be sent away the only way Dean ever refused anything: by standing strong and letting his dad wear himself out trying to push a kid who simply would not be pushed.

"Not unless you’ve beaten Sam to that medical degree he’s so hell-bent on getting."

"It’s law this week," Dean said. "Will probably be nuclear physics next week."

John nodded, tried to keep his expression neutral when he said, "Why don’t you go quiz him on ions, or eons, or whatever the hell it is nuclear physicists need to know?"

"Dad - "

John felt something give inside him. It broke unexpectedly, like a bone that had held up for so long under such constant, overwhelming pressure he’d gotten accustomed to the ache of it, grown numb to the fear it would eventually shatter and leave him a cripple unable to walk, to stand, to do anything at all except break right along with it.

He pushed out of bed, knocking Dean off balance with his hip as he started for the bathroom in hopes he could get there before the initial numb that protected the fight or flight response gave way to sensation. Sensation that would take away his other options, that would leave him nothing but the inevitability of a killing fall his fifteen-year-old didn’t need to watch happen.

He didn’t make it, fell to his knees before he’d gotten even half way there.

Dean was beside him in a heartbeat. He put one hand on John’s back, the other wrapping itself around John’s biceps. "Dad? You okay?"

"I’m fine," John whispered. His throat was clenched so tight he could barely breathe, let alone speak. His shoulders were starting to shake, and his body was pulling in on itself, curling up into a fetal ball that was a text-book demonstration of instinct over-riding free will. "Just got dizzy. I’m fine, Dean. Go check on your brother."

Dean stayed with him, kept holding on to him, not letting go for a moment.

"Go, Dean," John pleaded. "Please go, son."

Dean stayed with him.

When John broke, he broke back ten years, broke back to the genesis of every fault line life had shattered through a man Mary once made whole.

He hadn’t cried in front of Dean for years. It had taken a while for him to get control of himself after Mary’s murder, but once he did, he’d learned to time his breakdowns so they started when Dean wasn’t around and finished before his watchful son figured out what was going on.

But he cried in front of him now.

He cried in harsh, gasping shatters that tried to split him down the middle, tried to fracture him to rubble, tried to kill him right there on the bedroom floor, curled up on his knees, his face burning against the low shag of the room’s wool carpet while his fifteen-year-old held onto him with a grip so tight his fingers would leave bruises behind on whatever was left when this eventually passed.

"I’m sorry, Dean," he whispered when he could. He reached out in the darkness, one hand closing on Dean’s leg, holding on in an effort to lie to his son, tell him he was okay now, tell him he could go and John would be fine. "I’m sorry."

"It’s okay, Dad. I’m right here."

"Go check on Sammy," he said. "Make sure he’s okay."

"Sam’s fine," Dean said.

"Go, Dean. I need you to go, okay?"

"No," Dean said. "It’s not okay. I’m staying here with you, so just deal with it."

"Come on, bud. Cut me a break here, will you? I already feel enough like a pantywaist bitch as it is. Don’t make it worse by sitting here watching your old man fall apart. Just give me a minute to get my shit together, pull my big pants on and start acting like a man instead of blubbering like a little girl who lost her kitty."

"That’s crap and you know it." Dean’s tone was indisputable. "The job’s hard. Sometimes it just gets to you. There’s no shame in that, Dad. No shame at all."

He’d said that to Dean so many times; told him there was no shame to crying over losing someone you loved, no shame in screaming your ass off when something inside you got busted up or broken as long as the screaming made the pain a little easier to bear. But even having said it to his son more times than he could count, hearing it back from that same son shamed him. John held tighter to Dean’s leg, whispered, "Who’s the dad here again?"

"You are. But I’m staying anyway. You can bitch about it all you want, but I’m still staying."

And he did. He stayed.

It took John over an hour to make it to his feet again, to stagger into the bathroom and shut the door behind him; shut the door between them, locking Dean on the outside, locking himself on the inside. He went down voluntarily this time instead of falling. Curled up on the floor next to the crapper, the cool tile a comfort against his skin as he lay there breathing, just breathing, he did what he had to do to make it through something he hadn’t seen coming even though, in retrospect, he should have.

He had no idea how long he lay there, how much time passed before he finally stirred, crawled to his feet to lean against the counter and stare himself down in a reflection that made him look almost the wreck he felt. When he had the strength to do it, he stripped off his shirt; filled the sink with water; washed his face, his neck, his chest. The reflection changed a little, started rebuilding a façade behind which he could hide.

When he pulled the tee-shirt back over his head and left the bathroom, he wasn’t surprised to find Dean still sitting in the dark, still waiting for him to come back. He was sitting cross-legged on Mary’s side of the bed, slouched casually against the headboard as he watched John’s every move like the judge, jury and executioner.

John dropped to the edge of the bed, offered Dean an apologetic smile. "Hey," he said. His voice was rough with the residual damage of so much emotion abrading it raw in the release of it. "Sorry about that. Must have been one of those girl flues. You know the ones … make you cry like a bitch and give you a taste for those choco-latte crappuccino things?"

"Yeah," Dean agreed quietly. "Must have been."

"On the positive side of the ledger though, those things usually only last a couple of hours, and it seems to have run its course. I’m feeling much better now, so you can take a break from the worried hen routine and resume being a pain-in the-ass teenager again."

"I’m never a pain in the ass," Dean said. "You must have me confused with Sammy."

John lifted an eyebrow at him. "Really? So it wasn’t you who got deten- "

"You’re not really going to ride me about that right now, are you?" Dean interrupted.

John smiled a little, rubbed a hand across his eyes before swinging both legs up to join Dean in sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard. "No. Guess not. Wouldn’t really be fair, would it?"

"Got that right," Dean agreed.

They sat for several minutes in silence before Dean asked, "So … you going to tell me about the hunt?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I’m the dad. I am, however, going to remind you it’s almost one o’clock in the morning, and you have school tomorrow."

"Fuck school," Dean said.

"Hey. Mouth."

"Fuck that, too," Dean said.

That surprised John a little. Dean didn’t usually rebel in such an open fashion. He was far more subtle than Sammy would ever be, far more careful to restrict his comments to ones that didn’t cross lines of respect, that didn’t force John to quell the disrespect inherent to the words themselves before negotiating on the subject of contention between them.

And because he was so much more careful about maintaining those lines, John was more willing to let him breach them without consequence on occasion. He didn’t afford such amnesty often, didn’t allow it to become something Dean could count on; but he was willing to let things pass he couldn’t afford to let pass with Sam.

If he let Sam tell him to fuck off the way Dean just did, Sam would take that as a foothold to a new relationship between them. Letting Dean get by with it, on the other hand, was nothing more than granting a leniency to speak his mind, something Dean didn’t often ask, which made John more inclined to grant it the few times he did.

Pulling his knees up to serve as armrests for the forearms he draped across them, John let his head fall back against the wall as he said, "Yeah, I suppose you’ve got a point." Then, just to remind Dean it was a limited time offer, he added, "Permission to speak freely, son. But talk fast, ’cause you’re on the clock."

Sam was only ten; but even so, having gotten by with telling his dad to fuck off for calling him on profanity, he would have told John he could also fuck his presumption to offer permission for the right of free speech granted to every citizen by the constitution of the United States of America. And then he would have reminded John they were father and son, not CO and soldier; so he could go fuck himself on that kind of thing, too.

But Dean would do neither. Dean would accept it the way John offered it, which is exactly what he did.

"I’m not a kid any more," Dean said. "You can talk to me about stuff. You should talk to me about stuff. It isn’t healthy for you to keep it all bottled up inside."

John turned his head just slightly, regarded Dean out of the corner of one eye. The room was dark as hell, but his eyes were well adjusted to the dim, and he could see Dean watching him, too, waiting for him to say something.

"A little too much?" Dean asked when he didn’t respond.

"A little," John agreed.

"Sounded better in my head. A little less Days of Our Lives."

"I was thinking Marcus Welby," John noted.

"Only because you’re older than rocks."

"And don’t sit around on my ass watching soap operas," John returned.

Dean smiled a little. "Either way, point’s valid. You’ve told me a hundred times not to keep everything inside, or I’ll pop. So forget I said "bottled up" and just pretend I said keeping it all under wraps. Or tied up in the dark. Or whatever I should have said instead of "bottled up." And pretend I didn’t say it wasn’t healthy so much as I said you’ll fuck yourself in the head if you keep doing it."

"That’s you," John said. "This is me."

"And we’re different how?" Dean challenged.

John laughed quietly. "Not in as many ways as I’d like," he admitted.

Dean didn’t fall for the distraction of luring him to protest their commonalties being a bad thing rather than a good one. John could keep Sammy busy for months by throwing shit up he wouldn’t be able to resist arguing. It was the one advantage he had over that boy: being able to count on his inability to just let something pass because it wasn’t on-task for the mission at hand to argue it.

Sam lived to argue, but Dean wasn’t distractible that way. Once he locked onto a mission, it was almost impossible to jar the boy off-strategy, even when the bait used was one about which he felt so passionately he would argue it into the ground under different circumstances. And it wasn’t because he was fifteen, either. It was simply because he was Dean. He’d been that way since he was five. He might have even been that way before, but that was a time John couldn’t really remember any more.

A time when he didn’t hurt. A time when the pressure didn’t exist. A time when he didn’t feel so dead inside that trying to feel alive again was more pain than one man could endure without breaking in ways that drove his fifteen-year-old to tell him to fuck off, he might be the dad, but he wasn’t the one in charge any more.

"Then you admit it," Dean insisted. "Valid point."

"Yes, son," John conceded. "Valid point."

"So tell me about the hunt then."

"And yet, even so, the answer’s still no."

"Why?" Dean demanded.

"Because it is, Dean." John said quietly.

Dean sighed. It was the kind of heavy, frustrated sigh John normally earned from Sammy. "Well talk to me about something," he said finally.

"How ’bout that detention you got last week?" John suggested.

Dean didn’t have to sigh again to get across the depth of his frustration. "I thought you weren’t going to ride me about that right now," he reminded John. Then he let himself be distracted, not because he actually was, but rather because he wasn’t the type to hold on to the wheel longer than his dad was willing to let him drive. "Besides which, the guy totally deserved it. I should have taken his head clean off at the shoulders instead of just giving him a little something to remember me by."

"How little?"

"A black eye. Maybe a boo-boo on the back of his fat head."

"What’d he do?"

"He was being a punk-ass bitch."

"In what way?"

Dean snorted. "He shoved some kid in his locker and locked him in. The guy’s a nerdy twerp and a total dweeb, but he’s also claustrophobic as hell and everybody knows it. So he’s in there, shrieking like somebody’s skinning him alive; and this jackass is just standing there, laughing his ass off like he thinks it’s just hysterical he’s got this poor kid locked in a metal box, so freaked out he’s shrieking his head off. So I gave the punk-ass bitch something to laugh about. And don’t even try to tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing, because you would have. You totally would have."

"Yeah," John agreed. "I probably would have. So why’d you get a detention for being a standup guy?"

"Because you can only be a standup guy at this punk-ass school if you can do it without throwing a punch, I guess. He got detention, too, though, so at least there’s that."

"Same penalty, you standing up for some kid and him locking a kid in his locker?"

"Well … not the same penalty exactly," Dean admitted with a small smile. "I spent my detention in the gym, playing basketball." When John lifted an eyebrow at that, Dean’s smile got a little wider. "Not all teachers are deaf, dumb and blind," he clarified.

"Good to hear," John said. "So did you win?"

Dean rolled his eyes. "I was playing with myself, Dad. Of course I won. I always win when I’m playing with myself."

"Hmmm," John said. And then he waited.

It took about three seconds for Dean to realize why his dad had hmmmed him; but when he did, he blushed seven shades of red and laughed in horrified embarrassment he wouldn’t have felt if he’d been the one to imply as much instead of his dad.

"Geeze, Dad," he protested, grinning at John in a way that made him feel safe his fifteen-year-old was still a kid sometimes, if not always. "Get your mind out of the gutter, dude. I was talking about basketball."

"Oh," John allowed. "Well, either way, if you don’t win when you’re playing alone, you must be doing something wrong."

Dean shook his head, laughing again. "It is so wrong for us to be having a conversation like this."

"About basketball?" John asked.

"Yeah, Dad. About basketball."

They sat for several minutes in companionable silence before Dean ventured, "So … was it a shape-shifter or something? Somebody who didn’t know what they were?"

John put his head back against the wall again, stared up at the ceiling as he listened to the sound of his own heart beating, listened to the sound his blood pulsing through his veins in a way that could be considered tangible proof he wasn’t actually dead no matter what he felt, no matter what he wanted to believe. "Yeah," he said finally. "Something like that."

Dean nodded wisely. "That’s always hard," he said.

"Yeah," John agreed. "It is."

Dean let him sit for a minute, gave him ample opportunity to expand on the subject on his own before he prompted, "But not much you can do about it, right? I mean, protecting people has to come first. The good of the many and all that."

John looked sideways at him again. "The good of the many?" he repeated.

"Yeah. Outweighs the good of the one. Or something like that, anyway."

"Are you quoting Star Trek at me son?" John asked.

Dean snorted in disgust. "No. I’m just saying you can’t let somebody hurt other people even if they aren’t doing it deliberately. Even if they don’t know what they’re doing. The relevant issue is that they’re doing it, right? That people are getting hurt - or worse- and you’re the one who can stop it. Right? Which if the person is a good person underneath what they don’t know they’re doing, then that’s what they’d want you to do anyway, right?"

"I’d go along with that," John said quietly.

"So … was this person your friend or something?" Dean asked. "Or was it just somebody you feel sorry for because … I don’t know, whatever. Like they left family behind or something? Or they were just a good person otherwise, so you didn’t want to have to kill that part of them to kill the other part?"

"Yeah," John said again. "Something like that."

"But you still had to do what you had to do, Dad. You didn’t really have much choice, if he was hurting people. If it was hurting people, even if he wasn’t. Right?"

"Can’t argue with you on that one, son," John said.

Dean studied him for a long moment in the low light. "Are you telling me the truth about any of this?" he demanded suddenly. "Or are you just placating me so I’ll leave you alone and let you go back to sleep?"

John smiled a little. "Something like that," he said without looking at Dean.

Dean sighed. "Fine. Whatever, bitch. I have school tomorrow." He leaned forward to stand up on the bed, to leave John to his own devices.

John reached out, grabbed him by the arm. "Don’t go yet, Dean. Stay here with me for a while."

Dean sank back to the bed slowly. "Okay," he agreed. His voice was a little hesitant, like he wasn’t quite sure how to follow up on that.

John patted his arm, then let him go again.

"So … you want to talk about something?" Dean asked after several seconds of silence.

"Sure," John agreed, but he didn’t offer a topic for discussion.

"Anything in particular?" Dean pressed.

"No. Not really."

"Okay," Dean said. "So … what kind of shape shifter was it?"

"Why don’t you tell me what you and Sammy did this week," John returned.

Dean hesitated again, then asked, "Is that what we’re talking about?"

John turned his head, looked at his son. Meeting the quiet, concerned eyes watching him like he wanted to help but wasn’t sure how to do that, John made no effort to hide the tears burning in his own. "Yeah," he said. "If you don’t mind?"

"Does that help?" Dean asked.

John gave him a small smile. "Yeah. Sometimes it’s the only thing that does."

"Okay," Dean agreed. "Well … we had spaghetti on Tuesday. It was Sammy’s turn to cook, and he was in the mood for Italian; but we were out of garlic toast, so he decided to make cheese toast instead, so if you’re wondering where the toaster went, that’s where, because Sammy may be smart, but he’s evidently not bright enough to figure out you make cheese toast in the toaster oven, not the toaster toaster."

"Sounds like a story," John said.

"If I tell it the way it happened, it’s mostly smoke and laughing; but if I exaggerate a little, it could involve firemen and paramedics. Which version do you want?"

"Give me the firemen and paramedics version," John agreed.

"Okay. And did I forget to mention it also involves Miss November from … uh … Automotive Weekly."

"Automotive Weekly, huh?"

Dean grinned. "Yup. I like that magazine. Has a lot of handy tips for a mechanic who works by himself, for the most part."

"For the whole part would be my assumption on what you mean by that," John said.

"Well, wouldn’t want to shatter any assumptions on your part, so okay, whatever you want to believe there, Dad, you go right ahead and believe it. But anyway, Miss November was the nurse who patched me up after they restarted my heart and gave me a lung transplant."

"Lung transplant, huh?"

"Yeah. It was real touch-and-go there for a while. Mostly touch, but the go’s a very important way to finish up, transplant-wise at least."

John chuckled quietly. "I imagine so. But I thought this was a story about spaghetti and cheese toast."

"I’m getting to it, dude. Just give me a minute."

"Take all the time you need," John said. "And don’t leave out any details."

"Oh, I’m a specialist in details, Dad," Dean assured him. "I can even show you a picture, if you want." He grinned at John, adding, "Big picture, too. About double the size of a normal picture."

"November, you say?"

"Well, I don’t think that’s her real name. If I recall correctly, it was Bambi. Or maybe Buffy. Sometimes I get a little confused on that kind of detail, but they’re not the important ones anyway …"

*
Go to Part 4